Stuart Elden (Editor) - Reading Kant’s Geography

1. Stuart Elden, Reassessing Kant's Geography, Journal of Historical Geography 35:1 (2009): 325.

Reintroducing Kant's Geography

Stuart Elden

One can take the classification of organic and living beings further. Not only does the vegetable kingdom exist for the sake of the animal kingdom (and its increase and diversification) but humans, as rational beings, exist for the sake of others of a different species (race). The latter stand at a higher level of humanity, either simultaneously (as, for instance, Americans and Europeans) or sequentially. If our earth-globe [Erglob] (having once had been dissolved into chaos, but now being organized and regenerating) were to bring forth, by revolutions of the earth differently organized creatures, which, in turn, gave place to others after their destruction, organic nature could be conceived in terms of a sequence of different world epochs, reproducing themselves in different forms, and our earth as an organically formed bodynot one formed merely mechanically.

At the University of Knigsberg Immanuel Kant lectured on a variety of topics, including both philosophical and non-philosophical topics. Spanning his entire teaching career they thus serve as archeological registers of Kant's work chronicling accretions and shifts in thought.

While the anthropology course was worked up in a book by Kant himself, appearing as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View a few years before his death, the lectures on geography had a rather different fate. While both editions had a wide circulation at the time, it is the Rink edition that has been seen as the official one, being reprinted in the Akademie Edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. In the early part of the twentieth century, Erich Adickes attempted to get a new version produced but his suggestion was declined. The first full English translation of Kant's Physical Geography, a translation based on the Rink edition, is due to appear in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation in the near future, in the volume on Natural Scienceover two hundred years since Kant's death.

Why did Kant lecture on geography? Although it became one of his most popular and best attended courses, and this initially for a Privatdozent who existed on student payments, this does not explain things sufficiently. Wilson is valuable in tracking the changing objectives for the geography lectures, suggesting that initially they were purely scientific, that is, to make a more certain knowledge of believable travel accounts, and to make this into a legitimate academic course of study. As Louden notes, therefore, their aim was more than merely scholastic, but rather:

The anthropology and physical geography lectures are thus not primarily intended as further contributions to Kant's critical, transcendental philosophy program [which] was not his only concern. A major portion of Kant's teaching activity was devoted to trying to enlighten his students more about the people and world around them in order that they might live (pragmatically as well as morally) better lives.

For Louden, anthropology and geography are thus intersecting halves of a larger whole. This knowledge of the world, for Kant, was integral to the moral and political life of the citizen. Both geography and anthropology were taught by Kant because of their pragmatic dimension, the way in which this knowledge can guide us in our moral and practical life.

This world-knowledge, this cosmology, is essential to his other writings. Kant suggests that physical geography is about the world as an object of external sense; and anthropology as an object of inner sense. Wilson is therefore clear that the lectures on anthropology must be seen as philosophy:

Kant explicitly argues that the anthropology is a type of cosmopolitan philosophy. It is not a scholastic philosophy, and it is not critical philosophy, but it is a type of philosophy

The twofold field of physical geography and anthropology are viewed cosmologically and pragmatically. In other words, Kant considered these two disciplines, in the way he taught them, to be philosophy, and philosophy that was useful for the world.

These lectures were to serve as a propaedeutic for practical reason, and are a history of the contemporary condition of the earth or geography, in the widest sense. Anthropology and geography are thus crucial to Kant's entire enterprise, through his career and across the so-called pre-critical and critical periods.

The ways these two aspects of Kant's work have been treated has differed dramatically. The