BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

4. THE BODY IN THE CRITIQUE
The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan
meaning may be summed up in the following
questions:
l) What can I know?
2) What ought I to do?
3) What may I hope?
4) What is man?
The first question is answered by metaphysics, the
second by morality, the third by religion, and the
fourth by anthropology. At bottom all this could
be reckoned to be anthropology, because the first
three questions are related to the last.
From Kant’s Logic 1
In this passage Kant defines the task of what he calls a cosmopolitan
[weltbürgerlichen] philosophy through four questions. What can I know?
What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is man? These questions
are said to define metaphysics, ethics, religion and anthropology.
However, the last question stands in a particular position relative to the
others, he claims, because it is more basic than all the rest. Before we can
answer the others, we have to know what man is.
In this second part, I will look at passages from the Critique. More
than any other of his texts, this work relates to the first of the four
questions: ‘What can I know?’ But Kant says that answering this question
presupposes a thorough reflection upon the anthropological question of
what a human being is. The passage also suggests that Kant based his
epistemological enquiries on such reflections, i.e. reflections in the field of
anthropology. Is that really so? And what happens if we take this idea of
the primacy of anthropology seriously? How does it affect our
interpretation of the Critique? In what follows I will attempt to give the
beginning of an answer to this question. That is, my interpretation will be
based on the assumption that Kant’s anthropology is part of the context
1 Ak IX: 25