Week 2 Reading Response

The ways in which the human, nature, reason were theorized by Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers are fraught with Cartesian dualisms that feminist, anti-racist, and queer theoretical positions and social movements have taken serious issue with for decades (over two hundred years in the case of feminism). This is due primarily to the fact that Enlightenment thought as the foundation of Western liberal discourses and frameworks that most modern democratic societies are based on violently center the rational individual (Western, white, male, presumably heterosexual) and private property and justify domination and competition as a means to achieve individual freedom even as they assert common notions of liberty and freedom. That said...

1) In "The Idea of Universal History," Kant appears to be searching for a working and what he believes to be inclusive definition of the cosmopolitan "political body of the future" that is first and foremost concerned with "maintaining the whole" (53). He prefaces his idea of cosmopolitanism with the idea of the unity of the continent of Europe as he speaks of the unity of the whole and what he refers to as the necessary competition that drives humans to be all that nature has in store for them. Today, cosmopolitanism is infused with capitalist neoliberal economic and political practices and policies that create unified systems of oppression that are shared worldwide although distinct in their own contexts as well as mutual interest upper-class elites, namely in the U.S. and Europe, as capitalist competition continues to drive and move capital transnationally.

How does Kant's notion of the cosmopolitan stand up to contemporary notions of the cosmopolitan that are dictated by capitalism and capitalist exploitation?

2) Kant offers strong critiques of war in the Idea of Universal History (pp. 47, 48, & 51) because of the debt it generates, the uncertain outcomes, the harm it causes to surrounding states. He asserts that societies should work their way out of political conflict and invest in progress through the cultivation of education; governments, Western in particular, are stunting the growth of their citizens as they take part in expansionism, colonialism, and other forms of domination. This goes well with his assertion that creating a “civil society that can administer universal justice” is the most important challenge to humans (p. 45).

3) In “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” Kant articulates anthropology as a move toward “cognizing the interior and exterior of the human being,” as explained in the anthropological didactic, this fuels the colonizing and problematic argument that he makes throughout all of the readings for today that (some) humans are privileged superior knowers of the world.

At the same time, I found his analysis of the necessity for a (re)cognition of the sensitized experience of life provocative: "There are also many cases where we do not even trust the judgment of our own senses alone” (17). Because the Enlightenment tradition privileges reason and rationality from the mind, it is difficult to cognize the proprioceptive, the affective domains of embodied ways of knowing and experiencing life and the world. Although, Kant is somewhat contradictory in articulating this issue as he continues to privilege human science, and white western androcentric thinking and claims to truth and knowledge, he is cognizant and calling attention to the necessity to understand and be in-tune with the ways in which senses affect how people understand the world. He adds to this idea, in “The Critique of Pure Reason” with the introduction of the concept of intuition. Kant utilizes an analysis of the senses and apperception as ways to claim the relationality of learning and understanding in order to create a contrast to the individualist journey for affirmation and personal gain, a journey that he simultaneously endorses: "For through, the I, as simple presentation, nothing manifold is given; only in intuition, which is distinct from this presentation, can a manifold be given and only through combination can it be through in one consciousness" (179).

The idea of "one consciousness" works well with his concept of the unity of the whole, and setting aside the totalizing voice of it not to mention all of the people who aren't centered in his thought (women, people of color, poor people), in what ways might it be in conversation with human rights discourses today that operate on certain universalist claims to social and political entitlements?