The Guiding Idea of Kant's “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”

“Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” – what is the unifying theme or guiding idea of this discipline, which Kant hoped to make into a field of study at the university? In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant mentions an “idea of the whole” (B xliv), and in the Prolegomena he attributes a “soul of the system” to transcendental philosophy (IV: 374). Pragmatic anthropology, however, although it is conceived systematically and as a science (Wissenschaft), is not a philosophical system – it neither belongs to philosophy in a strict sense, nor is it articulated as a system based upon an idea of reason. It is an empirical discipline like physical geography, the science ordered next to it both systematically and pedagogically. Nevertheless the unity and a central idea must be found in order to identify the perspective that explains which material is included and excluded from it.

If we turn to the published Anthropology of 1798, then we find the somewhat enigmatic three-part definition: the pragmatic anthropology concerns what a human being as a freely acting being “makes, can, or ought to make out of himself” (VII: 119). The title “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” obviously does not do justice to the last component, the “ought,” and therefore does not take up the whole thematic.