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The role of the ‘plan of nature’

in Kant's account of history from
a philosophical perspective
a
Katerina Deligiorgi
a
Anglia Ruskin University ,
Published online: 03 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Katerina Deligiorgi (2006) The role of the ‘plan of nature’ in Kant's
account of history from a philosophical perspective, British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, 14:3, 451-468, DOI: 10.1080/09608780600794899

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 British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14(3) 2006: 451 – 468

ARTICLE

THE ROLE OF THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT’S

ACCOUNT OF HISTORY FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL
PERSPECTIVE
Katerina Deligiorgi
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Kant’s writings on history amply confirm the centrality he accords to

questions concerning moral progress and the long-term realization of
political imperatives.1 Providing a cohesive account of the historical
dimension of Kant’s thought, however, is no straightforward task. This is
because historically invariant principles of morality and justice have to be
integrated within a narrative of historical development in a way that
accounts both for the realization of the imperatives of pure practical reason
and for the diversity of historical experience. In this paper I examine
Kant’s attempt to resolve this difficulty by postulating the existence of a
‘plan of nature’. As we shall see, despite its centrality to Kant’s treatment
of history, the idea of a ‘plan of nature’ has proved resistant to
interpretation.
The claim that a progressive view of history can be justified by appeal to a
natural plan makes its first appearance in ‘Idea for a Universal History with

1
After a long period of relative neglect, Kant’s writings on history have increasingly been the
subject of considerable attention. The first extensive discussion was by Klaus Weyand, Kants
Geschichtsphilosophie. Ihre Enwicklung und ihr Verhältnis zur Aufklärung (Köln: Universitäts-
Verlag, 1963). The religious significance of Kant’s historical thinking has been emphasized by
Michael Despland in Kant on History and Religion (London and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1973), while a strongly political reading is given by William Galston in Kant
and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). An attempt to
integrate Kant’s writings on history within his larger system is to be found in Otfried Höffe,
Immanuel Kant (München: C.H. Beck, 1983), and especially, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the
Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). However, both Yovel and
Höffe restrict the significance of Kant’s historical thought to its political dimension. This
position has been challenged in a number of more recent studies that argue for the coherence of
the notion of moral progress within Kantian ethics. See Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics
and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988); Monique Castillo, Kant et l’avenir de la Culture
(Paris: PUF, 1990); Sidney Axinn, The Logic of Hope: Extensions of Kant’s View of Religion
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); and Pauline Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschicht-
sphilosophie Kants (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995); see also Kleingeld, ‘Kant,
History, and the Idea of Moral Development’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 16 (1999) No. 1:
59–80.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2006 BSHP
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09608780600794899
 452 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, which Kant published in 1784.2 Kant puts

forward the following hypothesis: in the course of furthering their own
purposes, individual historical agents also promote nature’s ‘purpose’ of
developing humankind’s natural talents or capacities, including the capacity
to reason. The means nature employs to achieve this are social antagonism
and strife. In short, the plan of nature consists in nature’s skilful
exploitation of our disruptive and destructive traits in order to secure the
advancement of the human species. Kant thus proposes that ‘the history of
the human race as a whole be regarded as the fulfilment of a hidden plan of
nature to realize an internally – and, for this purpose also, externally –
perfect political constitution as the only condition under which human
beings can fully develop all their capacities’ (VIII: 27). Drawing on the
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teleological implications of this narrative of human development, Kant

concludes that hope regarding further progress in human affairs on a world
scale is possible.
Kant’s appeal to a natural plan, through which nature promotes a noble
end by often violent means, remains puzzling. Some commentators consider
the very idea of a natural plan to be an unreconstructed remnant of
rationalist metaphysics. Others see it as a dated piece of speculative biology.
Yirmiyahu Yovel, for example, claims that the ‘plan of nature’ has a
‘dogmatic sound’ and that Kant’s historical works ‘appear to transgress the
boundaries of critical reason and commit a ‘‘dogmatic’’ fallacy’.3 The reason
for this, Yovel argues, is that Kant posits a certain form of rationality that is
‘the fruit of a blind contrivance of nature [and] has, as such, no truly
rational support’. This ‘stepbrother of rationality must also be considered
an illegitimate child of nature; for its springing off the natural course as such

2
While the fullest discussion of the ‘plan of nature’ in Kant’s writings is to be found in ‘Idea for
a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, he also makes use of this idea in the
following texts: ‘Conjectural Beginnings of Human History’ (1786), ‘On the Common Saying:
‘‘This May be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice’’’ (1793) [hereafter: ‘Theory and
Practice’], ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1796) [hereafter: ‘Perpetual Peace’], and
‘The Contest of Faculties’ (1798). These essays are usefully gathered together in English
translation in Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In many respects, this volume complements
Lewis White Beck’s earlier Kant on History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), which contains
‘The End of All Things’ (1794). In what follows, all references to Kant’s texts are given to the
volume, indicated by Roman numeral, and the page number of the Akademie edition: Kants
gesammelte Schriften edited by the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, in 29 vols (Berlin
and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1902). References to the Critique of Pure Reason give the page
numbers of both the first and second editions; the translation used is by Norman Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1985). For Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone references are given
both to the Akademie edition and to the English translation by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt
H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960). All other translations are my own.
3
Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, 140, 127. Yovel’s frequent references to the ‘cunning
of nature’ suggest an already Hegelianized reading of Kant’s idea of the ‘plan of nature’. This
expression was originally coined by Eric Weil to suggest a similarity with Hegel’s ‘cunning of
reason’ (List der Vernunft), see Eric Weil, Problèmes Kantiens (Paris: PUF, 1970) 130.
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 453
4
cannot be accounted for in terms of the critical system’. For Yovel, the
problem is that Kant is able to justify his claims about progress in history
only by appealing to a putative natural teleology, and this involves
unwarranted speculation about nature’s intentions. In short, nature is not
presented as a causal system – which, as Kant had argued in the Critique of
Pure Reason, is the only context in which knowledge claims are legitimately
redeemable – but rather as an intentional system that underpins history and
thus allows us to explain particular cases by giving meaning to the totality of
cases. A dismissal of Kant’s use of natural teleology as ‘dogmatic’ and
therefore ‘inexplicable’5 cannot be regarded as satisfactory, however,
because the works in which this concept is employed coincide with the
composition and publication of the major systematic works in which Kant
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set out the key tenets of his critical philosophy.6

In order to overcome this difficulty, some authors, such as Rudolf
Makkreel, have sought to interpret the concept of natural teleology
‘reflectively’, that is, by reconstructing Kant’s claims in light of arguments
he develops in the Critique of Judgement.7 This interpretation requires
invoking the apparatus of Kant’s theory of reflective judgement in order to
provide a ‘critical framework’8 for the thesis of historical progress. What, at
least initially, makes this approach appealing is that, on Kant’s account
reflective judgement is precisely the kind of judgement we use when judging
under conditions of partial ignorance – either when we cannot appeal to an
appropriate concept, as in the case of judgements about beauty, or when we
lack the appropriate intuition, as in the case of nature’s overall design. The
problem facing this interpretation, however, is that while Kant continued
to appeal to a providential concept of nature in works which post-date
the Critique of Judgement, he himself never argued that this idea should be
understood in terms of his theory of reflective judgement. Moreover, he

4
Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, 277.
5
Yovel concludes that ‘from a wider systematic viewpoint the cunning of nature is not fully
integrated in the rest of the system . . . and its very occurrence remains inexplicable’, ibid.
6
The parallel composition of these texts has been shown by Emil Fackenheim in ‘Kant’s
Concept of History’, Kant-Studien, 48 (1956–7) 381–98.
7
Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant; The Hermeneutical Import of the
Critique of Judgement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 130–53. See also Makkreel’s
‘Differentiating Dogmatic, Regulative, and Reflective Approaches to History’, in Proceedings of
the 8th International Kant Congress edited by Hoke Robinson (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1995) 123–38. Makkreel offers the most detailed presentation of this view.
However, similar arguments are to be found in Delbos, La philosophie pratique de Kant, 12, and
Despland, Kant on History, 74. Henry Allison also appears to offer cautious support for this
thesis in his Kant’s Theory of Taste. A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 205ff.
8
Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation, 136. Makkreel introduces his discussion of ‘Idea for
a Universal History’ and ‘Conjectural Beginnings’ by arguing that the ‘first still involves a
speculative use of teleology; the second a mere imaginary, conjectural use’, 131.
 454 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

conspicuously avoids all references to reflective teleological judgement in his

writings on history.
These challenges have prompted others to look for a naturalistic
explanation of Kant’s conception of historical progress. In an important
discussion, Allen Wood has argued that ‘Kant’s philosophy of history is
‘‘naturalistic’’ in that he treats history as a branch of biology’ guided by a
‘philosophical idea that understands historical change as the development of
natural predispositions of the human race as a living species’.9 While it is
true that Kant’s argument about the development of human talents is clad
in a pre-Darwinian language of organic development, it is difficult to see
how ‘biology’, no matter how broadly construed, can offer the key to Kant’s
treatment of history. It quickly leads us to the un-Kantian conclusion that
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the progressive ‘history of freedom’ (VIII: 115) that Kant sets out to
reconstruct is ‘nature again’, that is, naturally determined. To do justice to
Kant’s argument, we need to take into account his insistence that nature
facilitates the political and moral progress of the species without, however,
turning this progress into a natural fact.
In this paper I offer an interpretation of Kant’s argument concerning the
‘plan of nature’, which makes use of the naturalistic elements in his account
without, however, collapsing history into nature. We have already seen that
Kant introduces the plan of nature as a hypothesis to help us understand the
course of history. As Kant himself admits, this is a peculiar form of enquiry,
constructed under conditions of empirical and metaphysical ignorance.10
We cannot know the future, nor can we have insight into the deeper
rationality of the workings of nature. In order to resolve the problem of
ignorance, Kant employs an anthropomorphic conception of nature: he
presents it as an entity with an overriding purpose and a plan to realize this
purpose. I want to suggest, however, that this should be seen as an
‘architectonic’ device whose role is to enable us to consider history as a
unifiable phenomenon. I argue that the actual content of this unifying
concept is fairly modest, consisting of general human characteristics that are

9
Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 208.
Wood claims that the idea of natural development, which, on his account, underpins Kant’s
conception of historical progress, must be understood in terms of ‘principles of reflective
judgement which are only regulative in character’, ibid. Wood’s amalgamation of two
distinctive Kantian doctrines, concerning reflective and regulative use of ideas, adds a further
strain on his naturalistic interpretation. An earlier and more compelling account can be found
in Wood’s ‘Unsociable Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kantian Ethics’, Philosophical
Topics, 19 (1991) 325–51; see also Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft, 122ff. The interpretation
I pursue here draws on Wood’s earlier views about the role of ‘anthropological assumptions’ in
Kant’s thought, but stops short of attributing any determining force to them. I argue that they
are best seen as forming the context for what Kant calls the philosophical ‘attempt’ at
interpreting world history.
10
In ‘Idea for a Universal History’, Kant admits that ‘It is a strange and, at first sight, absurd
proposition to want to compose a history according to an idea of what course the world must
follow if it were to conform to certain rational ends’ (VIII: 29).
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 455

revealed through social interaction in the course of human history. Kant

does not invite us to speculate about the course of history on the basis of his
analysis of these characteristics, but rather asks us to engage in sustained
reflection about what we may hope given what we know about ourselves as
historical agents. In so far as Kant presumes to tell us nothing about hidden
forces that shape human history, I argue that the ‘plan of nature’ is not in
contradiction with Kant’s larger critical project.
Before proceeding further, I want to discuss the wider question that forms
the context for Kant’s historical writings. This is the question whether
nature and freedom can be shown to be reconcilable. Kant asks whether
fragile, selfish and recalcitrant human beings can plausibly be regarded as
capable of forming a rational constitution and coming to live together
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peaceably under laws of freedom. He begins ‘Idea for a Universal History’

by stating that whatever one’s view on the freedom of the will ‘from a
metaphysical perspective’, human actions are nonetheless determined by
natural laws ‘just like any other natural occurrence’ (VIII: 17). Having thus
brushed aside the metaphysical problem of the compatibility of transcen-
dental freedom and natural causality, which he believes to have resolved in
the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason, he turns his attention to
whether it is possible to discern ‘a law-like course’ in human actions, which,
though causally ordered ‘just like any other natural occurrence’, strike us as
‘tangled and lawless’. On Kant’s formulation of the problem, ‘men are not
like animals in their strivings, obeying mere instinct, nor, however, are they
rational cosmopolitans, acting on an agreed plan’ (VIII: 17). In order to
view history as the domain of realization of rational imperatives, rather than
as the sum total of ‘folly, childish vanity . . . malice and destructiveness’
(VIII: 18), he needs to show that these rational imperatives are compatible
with what is, prima facie, their contrary: namely, the natural imperative of
happiness, which each individual interprets differently and pursues in a
natural environment that is often harsh and resistant to our purposes. It is
this task that the plan of nature is intended to fulfil by showing that self-
seeking and uncooperative agents promote ‘without noticing’ nature’s
purpose. This purpose is, or coincides with, a rational end: the attainment of
universal justice and, more generally, the fulfilment of man’s ‘rational
nature’ (VIII: 21).
In this paper, I distinguish Kant’s argument about political progress and
the attainability of a just political arrangement ‘here on earth’ from his
argument about moral progress and the fulfilment of our destiny as ‘a moral
species’ (VIII: 116). I discuss the problem of political progress in section 1
and the problem of moral progress in section 2. This distinction not only
better enables us to understand the subtlety of Kant’s position; it also allows
us to address an issue that Henry Allison has highlighted in his recent study
of the Critique of Judgement. This is the problem of ‘the complex moral
relationship in which we stand to nature’ when nature is regarded both
as co-operating with our efforts to realize morally required ends and as
 456 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

‘the source of temptations to ignore our duties’.11 In the third and final section
of this paper, I examine how, in the light of the foregoing analysis, we
can interpret Kant’s conception of the tasks of a ‘philosophical’ historian.

1. NATURE IN KANT’S ‘IDEA FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY

WITH A COSMOPOLITAN PURPOSE’

In ‘Idea for a Universal History’ Kant sets out to show that political justice
(Recht) is not an empty ideal but is achievable ‘here on earth’ (VIII: 30).12
The question of whether justice is an historically attainable goal for human
beings emerges with particular urgency because Kant is committed to a
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strictly a-priori conception of the principle of justice. While he is aware of

the practical difficulties of such a project, he believes that he can give a
positive answer to this question on the basis of certain general features of
human behaviour, which he presents in the thesis of ‘unsociable sociability’.
It is this thesis that carries the burden of proof for Kant’s claims regarding
progress in the political sphere. If this interpretation is right, the content of
his claims concerning a plan – or, as he puts it in ‘Perpetual Peace’, a
‘mechanism’ (VIII: 366) – of nature, can be fully captured by the thesis of
unsociable sociability. I want to show that this thesis does not require any
untenable metaphysical commitments. It should be understood as articulat-
ing a claim about human social behaviour, rather than as a claim about a
secret force acting behind our backs.
Kant is concerned with the following problem: how can differently
motivated individuals who pursue a plurality of ends co-exist within a state
that preserves their freedom. Such a state would be one that neither
abolishes nor is threatened by the freedom of its citizens. In ‘The End of All
Things’, Kant describes this as a ‘liberal’ arrangement that is ‘equidistant
from both servitude and lawlessness’ (VIII: 338). The question is whether
such an arrangement is attainable. The key to Kant’s answer lies in the way
he sets out the problem: ‘The greatest problem for the human species, the
solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil
society which can administer justice universally’ (VIII: 22).
11
Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 343–4.
12
All references to ‘justice’ in this section are to the German word Recht. This is notoriously
difficult to translate. Mary Gregor uses ‘Right’ to indicate Kant’s concern with principles of
law, rather than with positive law. While I follow her usage, I also use the more current ‘justice’
or ‘political justice’ to underline the contrast with ‘morality’ and to make clear that I am
discussing what for Kant is a political, rather than a moral, problem: the peaceful coexistence of
differently motivated individuals who pursue a plurality of ends within a political organization
that preserves their freedom. Kant insists on this distinction from the opening pages of his
Rechtslehre, when he states that ‘the concept of justice . . . applies only to the external . . .
relationship of one person to another’ and consequently phrases the universal law of justice as:
‘act externally in such a way that the free use of your will is compatible with the freedom of
everyone according to a universal law’ (VI: 230–1, the emphasis is mine).
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 457

Kant had already argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that a just civil
society is one that allows ‘the greatest possible human freedom in
accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent
with that of all others’ (CPR A 316/B 373). One important consequence of
posing the problem of justice from the perspective of a plurality of co-
existing agents each of whom have an equal claim to freedom is that limits
must be set on the exercise of each agent’s freedom. These limits, Kant
maintains, flow from the concept of right itself, which, in turn, is derived
from the concept of freedom. He makes this more explicit in ‘Theory and
Practice’, where he redefines justice in terms of the reciprocal rights of
coercion that ‘each holds against everyone else’ (VIII: 291). The idea that a
civil constitution is ‘a relationship among free men who are subject to
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coercive laws’ (VIII: 289, emphasis added) is crucial to Kant’s treatment of

the ‘greatest problem’ for the human species. This problem, as we can now
see, is none other than that of the external unification of a plurality of
variously determined wills so that the freedom of each can coexist with the
freedom of everyone else. Motivational variety entails that individuals
cannot be assumed spontaneously to adopt maxims of co-operation; as
Kant has already observed, human beings are not rational cosmopolitans
acting in concert. His solution to this problem is to make a virtue of this
difficulty through the thesis of ‘unsociable sociability’.
The ‘unsocial sociability of men’, Kant explains, is ‘the propensity to
enter into society, which, however, is bound up with thorough-going
resistance that continually threatens to divide this society’ (VIII: 20). He
does not, however, present ‘unsociable sociability’ as a general observation
about human social behaviour, but as an indication of nature’s wisdom. He
claims that nature has implanted in us two contrary tendencies: the
‘inclination to live in society’ (VIII: 20) and the equally strong tendency to
act only in accordance with our own ideas – the tendency ‘to live as an
individual’ – which makes us seek isolation. These two contrasting desires
manifest themselves respectively in co-operative and antagonistic behaviour.
Kant develops this thesis through a series of ‘propositions’, and concludes
that the combination of these two desires gradually leads to the development
of forms of association in which the freedom of all is respected. How does
Kant’s appeal to nature help him to make this last step? One interpretation,
which has many supporters,13 takes its cue from the claim in the ‘First
Proposition’ that ‘All natural capacities (Naturanlagen) in a creature are
destined to unfold at some point completely and in accordance to their end’
(VIII: 18). The peculiarity of human natural capacities is that they develop
in adversity. Therefore, Kant claims, nature plants the seeds of strife and

13
See Weil, Proble`mes Kantiens, 130; Despland, Kant on History, 50 (although in his summing
up of Kant’s conception of history, Despland apparently revises this view, 81); Yovel, Kant and
the Philosophy of History, 164; van der Linden, Kantian Ethics, 158, 190; Paul Guyer, ‘Nature,
Morality and the Possibility of Peace’, Robinson, Proceedings, 51–70.
 458 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

antagonism to help develop our talents, among which he includes reason.

This is interpreted as a thesis about natural development that leads
seamlessly to the development of our reason. As I have already suggested,
such a strong naturalistic reading that takes biology as the answer to Kant’s
question about the possibility of historical progress leads to the erosion of
the distinction between reason and nature that remains vital for Kant even
as he seeks to negotiate a plausible relation between the two. There are
further problems with this interpretation however. While it naturalizes
Kant’s anthropomorphic claims concerning nature’s intentions, it does so at
the cost of attributing to Kant, as Pauline Kleingeld admits, an out-dated
‘pre-Darwinist view of the structure of development and of the nature of
predispositions’.14
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While there is textual evidence that Kant held such a view,15 we should
ask whether a thesis about the development of human talents can plausibly
justify his claims about progress. I do not believe it can. The assumption
seems to be that historical progress follows from the development of our
reason because as our reason develops in the course of history we will come
to realize, at some future point, that living under fair laws that protect the
freedom of all is a desirable aim. On this account, Kant is thought to appeal
to a putative natural teleology in order to provide support for a hope-
oriented teleology of history. Those who favour this interpretation cite in
support Kant’s argument about intelligent devils in ‘Perpetual Peace’.
There, Kant argues that ‘the problem of establishing a state, hard as this
may sound, is soluble even for a nation of devils (if only they possess
understanding)’ (VIII: 366). This argument is taken to show that all that is
required to establish a just civil constitution are self-seeking motives
together with ‘understanding’. This is not what Kant argues, however. If this
were his argument, it would fail for the simple reason that even those who
come to recognize the desirability of a just constitution may yet be too
recalcitrant to adopt it. We may know what is the best thing to do, but still
decline to act to achieve it. What Kant’s argument about intelligent devils in
fact establishes is, first, that a good constitution is not contingent upon
moral improvement, and, second, that even devils can form a state: even a
race of utterly selfish beings propelled solely by self-seeking motives would
find themselves constrained to ‘submit to coercive laws’ (VIII: 366). In what
follows, I want to show that this argument is simply a re-iteration, in more
dramatic terms, of the thesis of unsociable sociability.
The unsociable sociability thesis describes a dynamic model of social
organization. Kant uses this to establish two claims: first, that individuals
find themselves compelled to subject themselves to coercive rules, and,
second, that the rules of social organization are amenable to revision. On the
basis of these two claims he then believes himself entitled to conclude that

14
Kleingeld, ‘Kant, History, and the Idea of Moral Development’, 75.
15
See especially the discussion on the ‘Character of the Species’ in the Anthropology, VII: 322ff.
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 459

justice is an attainable goal. We can reconstruct his argument as follows.

Unlike other animals, human beings order and, to a high degree, create their
material and social environment; this is the claim of Kant’s ‘Third
Proposition’, viz. that ‘man produces everything out of himself’ (VIII: 19).
In working to produce everything from the necessary to the agreeable,
human beings develop capacities that would not have appeared outside the
social context in which they are put to use. In the ‘Fourth Proposition’,
Kant argues that what makes us feel human is precisely our social existence
(VIII: 20). However, because the ends pursued by different individuals are
not always mutually compatible, participation in society does not result in
perfect co-operation. Rather, from the perspective of each of us as
individuals, other human beings are experienced as actual or potential
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hindrances to our own plans. Yet, instead of self-destructing under the

pressure of competing wills, organized societies are able to withstand and
contain the pressures of the antagonistic relations among individuals. This is
because while ‘captivated by unbounded freedom’, we find ourselves forced
by ‘need’ to remain in society and to submit ourselves to its constraints
(VIII: 22). This ‘need’ (Not), which forces us to abandon our beloved
freedom, is none other than that imposed by our desire to pursue our own
ends. Not only do we require assistance in order to carry out our projects,
we pursue ends that already possess a more or less explicit social dimension;
we desire social status, ‘honour, power or property’ (VIII: 21).16 Therefore,
the pursuit of our own ends, which places us in antagonistic and competitive
relations to each other, is also what binds us together.
Let us now consider how the thesis of unsociable sociability can help with
the problem of ‘attaining a civil society which can administer justice
universally’ (VIII: 22). So far, Kant has presented a thesis about human
nature as it manifests itself in society. As he argues in Religion within the
Limits of Reason Alone, ‘human nature can better be known in the civilized
state’ (VI: 29). Kant’s view of socialized individuals and human societies can
be summed up as follows: compelled to be social, individuals find themselves
forced to submit to the coercive rules of organized society. However, since
individuals ceaselessly reconfigure their interests, societies are dynamic
organizations, the rules of which are amenable to revision. This is a very
modest thesis. Nonetheless it suffices for Kant’s purpose, which is to argue
for the attainability of a political arrangement that allows the greatest
possible freedom for all without postulating a nation of co-operative angels,
nor one of unsociable devils, who would need to change radically if they are
to form a state. Kant thus sets himself a twofold challenge: first, to show
that a purely rational conception of justice can have ‘objective, practical
reality’ (VIII: 306), and, second, to show that a political order in which the
freedom of all is preserved is a realizable ideal. To meet this dual challenge
effectively, he cannot rely upon overly demanding premises. Rather, he must

16
See also, ‘Conjectural Beginnings of Human History’, VIII: 112.
 460 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

show that justice is an historically attainable political goal for human beings
living in recognizably human societies. The thesis of ‘unsociable sociability’
allows him to meet this challenge. Kant argues from modest premises
towards an equally modest conclusion about the necessity of social order and
the revizability of its rules. Although he indicates various factors that might
entice self-regarding creatures to orient themselves towards justice, including
a broader conception of their egoistic aims, he does not undertake to show
that a revision of the rules of association between individuals will necessarily
be guided by ideas of justice. He seeks to establish the attainability of justice,
not its inevitability. By showing that justice requires and relies upon coercive
laws, rather than angelic individual motives, Kant believes himself entitled to
claim – and the wording here is highly significant – that the ends of political
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practical reason ‘can be regarded’ (VIII: 27) as realizable.

2. NATURE AND THE MORAL PROGRESS OF THE SPECIES

Kant’s oft-quoted references to the ‘crooked timber’ of mankind notwith-

standing, it is clear from the foregoing account that he does not regard
human nature as an insurmountable obstacle to the imperatives of political
practical reason. The question I want to address in this section is the extent
to which the argument of unsociable sociability, or, conceived more broadly,
Kant’s appeal to nature’s purposes can apply to the question of the moral
progress of humanity. Michael Despland has argued that ‘Kant’s faith in
Nature and in Culture is a faith in the possibility of a progressive
humanization of man and realization of his freedom through wise social
arrangements and historic achievements’.17 I believe that this is broadly

17
Despland, Kant on History, 88. A more emphatic reading of the broader aims of Kant’s
philosophy can be found in Gary Banham’s Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Macmillan:
Basingstoke, 2000). Although Banham does not concern himself with the narrow topic of the ‘plan
of nature’, he does discuss extensively the teleological commitments of Kant’s philosophy as a
whole as seen from the vantage point of the Critique of Judgement. He attributes to Kant the view
that ‘culture’ is ‘the ultimate end of the species and nature as a whole’ and argues that the
purpose of Critical Philosophy as a whole is to establish a peace which will create the
possibility of an ending of the conflicts that arise from a luxuriantly over-grown
culture of skill which has infected the grounds of discipline by introducing extraneous
incentives, Banham,
(Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics, 182–6)
Banham, it seems to me, assimilates political and moral ends in his conception of culture,
while, as I argue here, the two are and must be kept distinct, if we are to make sense of the
different registers of Kant’s appeal to nature with respect to the problem of the realization
of these ends in history as a whole. For this reason, I distinguish the end that concerns
morality, from the end that concerns justice and the establishment of a political organization
that allows its members maximum freedom ‘externally’, that is, without concern for the
motivation of individuals. This distinction is both conceptually and textually tenable and
does not impinge on the separate question relating to the transcendental derivation of
principles of justice; see Wolfgang Kersting, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 461

right as long as we keep in mind, that Kant’s ‘faith in Nature’ is not blind –
it is a position he argues for by bringing to our attention certain general
facts about human sociability – and that it entails no thesis about the
inevitability or historical necessity of the realization of freedom. The links
Kant traces between nature, culture and morality have no necessitating
force; they aim to reinforce the posse of morality, that is, to make a plausible
case for what is within the realm of possibility.
Kant’s account of moral progress is underpinned by a belief in the civilizing
and moralizing effects of social interaction. He argues that, with the
awakening of the desire to pursue social ends, humanity takes its ‘first true
steps out of savagery and towards culture, which consists really in the social
worth of man’ (VIII: 21). The ‘cultivation of taste’ and ‘enlightenment’
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contribute to the development of a capacity for ‘moral [sittliche] discrimina-

tion’, which finally transforms the social union into a ‘moral whole
[moralisches Ganze]’ (ibid.). If we read these claims in conjunction with the
arguments developed more fully in the Anthropology and in the Metaphysics of
Morals, we find that, contra Rousseau, Kant sustains a mainly positive view of
social conventions. He argues that good manners, adopted for the sake of the
sake of appearing to be good, contribute to the ‘external advancement of
morality’ (VII: 244).18 He even goes so far as to suggest that our natural
‘disposition to conceal our real sentiments’ has contributed to good ends, for it
has ‘undoubtedly, not only civilized us, but gradually, in a certain measure,
moralized us’ (CPR A 748/B 776). His most consistent theme, however, is
praise for social virtues such as ‘affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality,
gentleness (in disagreeing without quarrelling)’ (VI: 473), which are seen not
only as good in themselves, but also as having a moralizing effect. This theme is
given special emphasis in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, where
Kant discusses the concept of an ‘ethical commonwealth’:

As far as we can see . . . the sovereignty of the good principle is attainable, so far
as men can work toward it, only through the establishment and spread of a
society in accordance with, and for the sake of, the laws of virtue, a society
whose task it is rationally to impress these laws in all their scope upon the
entire human race.
(VI: 129)

Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984) and more recently Robert B. Pippin
‘Dividing and Deriving in Kant’s Rehctslehre’in Otfried Höffe, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe
der Rechtslehre (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999) 63–85.
18
Although I confine my analysis here to Kant’s writings on philosophical history, in which the
‘plan of nature’ plays a key role, it is worth noting that he also argues for the moralizing role of
culture in the Critique of Judgement, in the context of the ‘culture of discipline’, which ‘consists
in the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires, through which we become unable to
choose ourselves, because held fast by certain natural things’ (V: 432). The role of discipline is
further elaborated in the Lectures on Paedagogy, IX: 449ff.
 462 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

The idea that a virtuous society can be morally enabling reinforces

Kant’s previous claims concerning the moral role of particular forms of
social interaction.19 It is important, however, that we interpret these
claims in conjunction with Kant’s negative argument concerning the
moralizing efforts of what in ‘Theory and Practice’ he calls a ‘paternal
government’ (VIII: 290). The importance placed on sociability has
as its counterpart a warning against the imposition of morality
‘from above’:

woe to the legislator who wishes to establish through force a polity

directed to ethical ends! For in so doing he would not merely achieve the
very opposite of an ethical polity but also undermine his political state and
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make it insecure.
(VI: 131)

Kant’s positive argument concerning the contribution to moral progress

of the cultivation of taste and the spread of enlightenment is
comparatively weak. While he acknowledges the morally enabling role
of certain social and political arrangements, he guards against viewing the
development from civility to morality as a necessary one. Repeatedly he
points out that moral development lags behind the ‘cultivation of
talents, art and taste’ (VIII: 332). Elsewhere, he argues that we are
‘civilised (gesittet)’ but are not ‘moral (sittlich)’, or again that we are
‘cultivated (kultiviert) to a high degree by art and science’ and ‘civilised
(zivilisiert) to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and
proprieties’, but far from being ‘morally mature (moralisiert)’ (V: 433–4,
and VIII: 26).
The cautious tone of the foregoing remarks stems from a deeper tension in
Kant’s view of moral progress that is most clearly in evidence in
‘Conjectural Beginnings of Human History’. Here Kant applies the
arguments used in ‘Idea for a Universal History’ to a more specifically
moral end: nature is invoked in the context of an argument about the
development of ‘man’s capacities as a moral species [sittliche Gattung]’ (VIII:
116). The essay is both a re-working of the story of Genesis and a critical
revision of Rousseau’s account of human development in the Second
Discourse. The premise of the essay is directly opposed to the premise with
which Rousseau opens his Second Discourse, viz. that human nature has
become so deformed that speculation is a necessary aid to the difficult task

19
A case can also be made also for the contribution of political structures to moral development
on the grounds that ‘one can expect autonomy to arise only in a situation in which external
freedom is guaranteed by the law’; see, van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism, 154. For
Kant’s discussion of this idea, see, ‘Perpetual Peace’, VIII: 366, and Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, VI: 131.
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 463
20
of self-knowledge. Kant maintains that our conjectures about the past
need not be ‘mere fabrication’ if they bear on the ‘first beginning of the
history of human actions, insofar as this is produced by nature’ (VIII: 109,
emphasis added). It is the focus on nature, in other words, that makes our
historical conjectures permissible, by giving them some grounding in
experience. As Kant explains, the beginning of history ‘need not be
fabricated, but can be drawn from experience, for we can assume this was
neither better nor worse at the first beginning than what we encounter now’
(VIII: 109). This appeal to the continuity of experience reflects a deeper
conviction that history is ‘legible’ because human nature is fundamentally
unchanging. The assumption of the stability of human nature is a condition
of access to the ‘first beginning’ of history because human nature is not itself
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historical even if it is revealed to us through history. Kant’s account of the

characteristics we display in pursuit of our various projects is intended as a
generalized account of unchanging human characteristics. He does not think
that at some point we might lose our desire for freedom or for human
society, or that we might be born with all our talents fully developed. In the
present context, however, this a-historical assumption is put to historical
use, namely to tell a positive story of the development of reason. To a
degree, this is the already familiar story of how natural challenges provide
the occasion and the context for the development of human capabilities,
including reason. The new element introduced here is Kant’s treatment of
reason. Reason, he claims, is not a tool for survival, or a technical capacity.
Repeating the claim made in the Groundwork concerning the inadequacy of
reason as an instrument for the satisfaction of our needs (VI: 396), he argues
that reason can endanger early man, as it awakens his curiosity, prompting
him to seek out food that his instinct forbids and ‘to broaden his knowledge
of foodstuffs beyond the limits of instinct’ (VIII: 111). This Kantian twist on
the Genesis story, and also on Rousseau’s account of perfectibility, brings to
view a conception of reason as a capacity to estimate, to compare and to
experiment, thanks to which human beings are able to extend their horizon
and go beyond ‘the limits within which all animals are confined’ (VIII: 112).
Kant presents this capacity as crucial to human self-estimation, that is, to
the attainment of the insight that the human species is distinct from ‘animal
society’. This leads to the essentially moral awareness that man should
regard other men as ‘equal partakers of the gifts of nature’ (VIII: 114). Kant
thus draws a parallel between a non-instrumental conception of reason and

20 Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea, and the storms had so disfigured that it
looked less like a god than a wild beast, the human soul, altered in the bosom of
society by a thousand continually renewed causes . . . changed its appearance to the
point of being nearly unrecognizable.
See, ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men’, in Jean-Jacques
Roussseau, The First and Second Discourses, edited by Roger D. Masters (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1964) 91.
 464 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

a non-instrumental conception of our fellow humans. It is this, he argues,

which leads to the final stage of the beginning of human history and man’s
release from ‘nature’s lap’ (ibid.). Man gains a position of equality with all
rational creatures on account of his claim ‘to be an end in himself and to be
estimated as such by all others’ (VIII: 114). Though not yet a fully
articulated system of morality, the awareness that human beings are ends in
themselves is the source of the ‘restrictions which reason would imminently
impose on man’s will with regard to his fellow-men’ (VIII: 114). It thus
inaugurates history.
The contrast with Rousseau’s account is striking: fellow-feeling is not an
inborn trait, but rather the product of a developed rational capacity. It is
this that brings about the emancipation from the ‘leading-strings’ of nature
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and the beginning of history:

Man’s exit from paradise . . . is nothing else but his emergence from the
savagery of a merely animal creature into humanity itself, from the leading-
strings of nature to the guidance of reason, in one word: from the tutelage of
nature into the state of freedom.
(VIII: 115)

It is here, however, that we can see the fault-lines of Kant’s account of moral
development. Human beings are claimed to display both stable natural
characteristics and a developing moral sensibility which, when articulated in
terms of a moral ‘ought’, enables them to view themselves as human, that is,
as ends in themselves. The awareness of this moral ‘ought’, in turn, is both
the product of nature and what releases us from its hold. The problematic
status of this argument is well captured in Emil Fackenheim’s observation
that ‘the conditions which make history possible are themselves quasi-
historical’.21 In other words, leaving nature behind, which is a necessary
condition for beginning the ‘history of freedom’ (VIII: 115), is both a
natural step and a historical project spanning the entirety of human history.
One unwelcome, and rather unconvincing, implication of this is that at one
end of the history of moral development we have (a pre-history of) less-
than-human beings and at the other, the prospect of the emergence of super-
rational beings. Nature is assumed to be at once stable and amenable to
change, in so far as human beings become gradually better able to heed the
call of reason. Kant explicitly invites us to picture history in terms of a
‘conflict between on the one hand, mankind’s endeavour [to realize] its
moral destiny [Bestimmung] and, on the other, its unchanging obedience to
laws implanted in its nature for bringing about a savage and animal
condition’ (VII: 117). This conflict, in turn, is both continual, in so far as our
obedience to the laws implanted in our nature is unchanging, and, at the
same time, amenable to resolution through ‘education into humanity’ so

21
Fackenheim, ‘Kant’s Concept of History’, 388.
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 465

that the fulfillment of our destiny ‘as a moral species . . . no longer conflicts
with that as a natural species’ (VII: 116).
The source of these tensions in Kant’s account is that he seeks both to
provide us with a safe passage from nature to freedom and to hold out an
emancipatory conception of moral freedom that is only realized if nature is
left behind. A stark illustration of the moral imperative of emancipation
from nature can be found already in the early essay on the ‘History and
Physiography of Earthquakes’ of 1756 in which he argues that the misery
and devastation caused by natural phenomena serves to remind us that ‘the
goods of the earth can furnish no satisfaction to our inclination for
happiness’ (I: 460).22 By contrast, he insists, human life has a ‘far nobler
aim’ – an aim that emerges through confrontation with nature and is none
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other than the realization of our moral calling and the attainment of
‘rational self-esteem’ (VIII: 20). The question of nature’s contribution to
moral progress appears to be less tractable than that of its contribution
to political progress. However, if we apply the model we used in relation to
Kant’s thesis of unsociable sociability, we can construe our relation to
nature in the moral context in an analogously dynamic fashion. While in our
moral strivings as a species nature is on our side, so to speak, in the sense
that we are able to work towards the attainment of rational self-esteem, this
work, the work of morality, consists in our emancipation from nature,
which nature assists, in her negative role as a harsh ‘step-mother’, pushing us
away from her.
We are now in a position to identify the source of the ambiguity that on
Allison’s interpretation resides in the concept of the purposiveness of nature
as it applies to our moral endeavours.23 Allison views Kant’s account of our
moral independence from nature as mysteriously connected to the idea of
natural purposiveness. There need be no mystery, however, if we view this
purposiveness negatively as a spur to realize our moral calling. This leaves
us with a sobering prospect on history: if we look to history with our moral
interests foremost in mind, then the appeal to nature provides us with
grounds for hope in so far as reason as a capacity is natural to human
beings. The development of this capacity, however, is something that takes
us away from nature, enabling us to judge nature itself by a value that is not
nature but morality.

22
‘History and Physiography of the Most Remarkable Cases of Earthquake which towards the
End of the Year 1755 shook a great Part of the Earth’ (1756), in Four Neglected Essays by
I. Kant, edited by Stephen Palmquist (Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1994) 2–30.
23
Allison argues that
the sublime provides us with a sense of our allegedly ‘supersensible’ nature and
vocation and, therefore, of our independence of nature. The latter is certainly crucial
for Kant’s understanding of morality, reflecting what I term the ‘Stoic side’ of his
moral theory; but the sense of purposiveness that it involves can no longer be readily
viewed as that of nature, except in an indirect and Pickwickian sense.
(Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 9)
 466 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

3. HISTORY FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

The interpretation pursued so far has established that Kant’s references to a

‘plan of nature’ describe facts about human capacities and human
sociability that are derived from historical observation but are not in
themselves historical facts. However, Kant is not simply interested in
describing in general terms how human affairs have turned out in the past.
He also wants to say something about the future course of history. The aim
of such a progressive construction is to give us ‘hope for better times to
come, without which an earnest desire to do something useful for the
common good would never have inspired the human heart’ (VIII: 309). Yet
Kant also insists that the proposition that history progresses is ‘not just well-
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meant and commendable from a practical perspective, but also, all

unbelievers notwithstanding, tenable from the strictest theoretical perspec-
tive’ (VII: 88). In this final section of the paper, I want to examine the
connection between ‘strict theory’ and the practical need for hope, in order
to clarify the philosophical framework that enables Kant to weave nature
and history together in undertaking what he terms a ‘justification
(Rechtfertigung) of nature – or, better, of providence’ (VIII: 30).
In ‘Contest of Faculties’, Kant ridicules the prophetic claims of rival
theories of history and compares the observation of human affairs to the
observation of planetary motions:

Perhaps the course of human affairs appears so senseless to us, because we

have chosen the wrong standpoint from which to look at it. Seen from the
earth, the planets sometimes move backward, sometimes stand still, or move
forward. From the standpoint of the sun, however, which only reason can
assume, the planets move continually according to the Copernican hypothesis
in an orderly course.
(VII: 83)

Just as there is a wrong perspective in astronomy, (i.e. the ‘Tychonic’

perspective) which leads to ‘absurdity’, so there is a ‘wrong’ perspective in
the philosophical study of history. In the latter case, the mistake consists in
trying to occupy the ‘perspective of providence’ (ibid.), which is unattain-
able for us. The terms of Kant’s argument here are highly reminiscent of the
way he sets out the ‘Copernican hypothesis’ in the Critique of Pure Reason.
There Kant proposes that we take into account the subjective contribution
to our knowledge of external objects. The theoretical perspective of history
he recommends in ‘Contest of Faculties’ is similarly subject-orientated and
consists in taking up the perspective of ‘an intellectual inhabitant of a
sensible world’ (VIII: 335). To be an intellectual inhabitant of the sensible
world means not only to be someone who has both rational interests and
natural inclinations, but also someone who inhabits this world rather than
seeking to take a speculative flight beyond it. It is this idea that shapes
 THE ‘PLAN OF NATURE’ IN KANT 467

Kant’s approach to the question of progress and that holds the key to his
conception of philosophical history.
In his writings on history, Kant undertakes a delicate balancing act: to
present history from the perspective of the ‘most ordinary, though right-
thinking man’ (VIII: 308), but without producing a ‘eudaimonistic’ fiction
(VII: 82) or overstepping his own critical boundaries. For this reason, he
does not propose to look behind or beyond history in order to decipher
providence. He stays strictly within history: philosophical history is ‘only a
thought of what a philosophical mind (which ought at any rate be well-
versed in history) could try out from a different standpoint’ (VIII: 30). The
key difference between empirical and philosophical history is that of
perspective. It is this change in perspective that allows history to be
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considered as a whole, as the history of the species, rather than as the history
of particular peoples at particular periods. Central to this ‘philosophical
attempt to work out a universal world-history’ (VIII: 29) is the idea of a
‘natural plan’, which is used to synthesize the historical manifold. As Kant
argues in ‘Perpetual Peace’, ‘the use of the word nature . . . is more suitable
to the limits of human understanding and more modest’ and it helps us
avoid venturing into the unknowable, having ‘audaciously donned Icarus’s
wings’ (VIII: 362). From a formal-architectonic perspective, then, Kant’s
use of ‘nature’ can be seen as a matter of critical discipline and as a means of
turning our focus away from ambitious and fruitless enquiries into
providence and divine justice. However, there is also a substantive gain in
speaking about nature, for what motivates Kant’s philosophical approach
to history in the first place is precisely the need to show that given certain
facts about human nature progress in political and moral matters is
possible.24
This brings me to my final point about Kant’s ‘justification of nature – or
better of providence’. As I have argued, Kant does not seek to offer his
readers the dubious consolations of a theodicy. In fact, he seeks to steer us
away from such speculative, and on his account, ultimately fruitless
pursuits. Why should he then persist with the employment of the term
‘providence’? The emphasis here should be on the question of justification.
What makes this justification necessary is the problem of hope. Contrary to
what Hannah Arendt has argued, Kant has an agent-centred rather than a
‘contemplative’ perspective on history.25 As we have seen, he argues for a
theoretical perspective that is bound to the practical interests of historical
agents. Lack of hope, or even despair, hinders the pursuit of these interests.
It is to remedy this that Kant seeks to make a case for historical progress.
24
Arguably, Kant believes that unless we entertain a certain view of nature, and hence of
history, not even a super-natural agency could help with the realization of our rational ends. In
‘Perpetual Peace’, he suggests that no theodicy could make good the fact that ‘such a race of
corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all’ (VIII: 380).
25
See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Brighton: The Harvester Press,
1982) 27–54.
 468 KATERINA DELIGIORGI

That is all his ‘justification of providence’ contains. When he entreats us to

be ‘content with providence’ (VIII: 123), what he in effect says is that we
should not become paralysed by the contemplation of historical evil. When
we ‘contemplate the evils which so greatly oppress the human race’, we
should seek to right these wrongs, instead of blaming providence and
resigning ourselves to the ‘malaise’ of despair (VIII: 120). That we should be
content with providence is therefore not a quietistic claim. Rather it is a
reminder of our responsibility in respect of our practical commitments; that
history is something we also make, rather than passively suffer. Of course,
the belief that our actions will bear fruit, or that providence can be justified
according to what reason demands, is difficult to hold onto in our everyday
experience of ‘political evils’ (VII: 93). Kant is aware of this. In ‘Contest of
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Faculties’, he recounts the story of a doctor who remained resolutely

optimistic every time he visited his patients, consoling them with hopes of
imminent recovery, until one day, on asking one of his patients after his
state of health, he receives the reply: ‘I am dying of sheer recovery!’ (VII:
93). The story is instructive with regard to Kant’s own endeavour to
construct a ‘philosophical history’. The doctor’s reassurance of imminent
recovery sounds hollow, because it bears no relation to the state his patients
are in. Similarly an invocation of providence would be empty, if it did not
take into account the ‘facts as we know them’. Kant’s ‘philosophical history’
succeeds in combining modesty with ambition. It is modest because it
presumes to tell us nothing about divine justice; but it is also ambitious
because it offers a ‘justification of providence’ by showing how nature can be
viewed as amenable to our practical rational projects.26

Anglia Ruskin University

26
I am grateful to Gordon Finlayson, Jason Gaiger, Kimberly Hutchings, Meade McCloughan
and the participants in the philosophy seminar at the University of York and the politics
seminar at the University of Edinburgh for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
I am also grateful for the comments offered by the anonymous reader for the British Journal for
the History of Philosophy.