“Nature gave man reason, and the freedom of will based upon reason, and this in itself was a clear indication of nature’s intention as regards his endowment.” - Kant
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Morally, Kant assumed that all 'rational beings' could recognize and follow moral truths, while at the same time banishing all empirical considerations from moral decisions. Only acts motived by duty could be considered moral. Duty connoted the rational recognition of the moral law -- Kant's "categorical imperative" -- which was universal. But while Kant banished all pragmatic considerations from the phenomenological world of moral reason, he could not accomplish the same for all practical reason (of which moral reason is part). In stripping all empirical concerns from moral decisions, Kant risked leaving human life impoverished and meaningless. His answer was a (regulative) idea of progress in history, which ensured that our actions were ultimately meaningful.
Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will's manifestations in the world of phenomena, i.e. human actions, are determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event. History is concerned with giving an account of these phenomena, no matter how deeply concealed their causes may be, and it allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions.
Though actions are individually free and uncoordinated, Kant thought that "on a large scale" human action was intelligible, directed, and progressive: we are collectively directed towards a single goal and we can perceive this goal from our situated consciousness. "Individual men and even entire nations little imagine that, while they are pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in opposition to others, they are unwittingly guided in their advance along a course intended by nature."
Where Kant refered to "nature," he meant the knowledge of neumenal essence of humanity that his first critique placed out of bounds. If his epistemology, which grounds all his work, is not to be contravened, his 'universal' history must have the status of conjecture. Though provisional, the essay enacted a remarkable series of equivalences which aimed to close the gap between individual freedom, Reason (as philosophical explanation), and History (as world peace). Teleology refered to the unfolding of an internal order and the actualization of potential. Nature provided humanity with teleology by endowing it with Reason; the full development of this Reason required world peace. Kant expected the establishment of peaceful relations between nation-states governed by international law. The essay is marked by a sense of closure: history is single, purposeful and ubiquitous, sweeping us into a future of moral maturity we may neither anticipate nor wish. This optimism was grounded, as with all his conclusions, in the universal structure of moral and cognitive reason. A kantian politics tends towards difference-effacing concensus; a foucaultian politics tends towards fragmentation of common space.
For political theorists, the focus is on the political concequences of conceptions of similarity and difference. Kant's universal history collapses all difference, political and metaphysical, into a meta-historical theory of purposeful history. Implicit in the very idea of a “universal” history with a practical intent is the belief that everyone can find meaning in that history, and thus motives for action. Kant did not dismiss the possibility of personal history, if only because he was silent on that subject, he was concerned with providing us with a common project towards which to direct our actions. Written from the perspective of a Prussian pietist, it was no doubt his history, meaningful to him, and its practical significance follows only to the extent that its subjective origins may be transcended into an objectively meaningful story. That is, it is relevent only insofar as the rest of humanity finds themselves in this “universal” history.
To Kant, law and morality were normative, i.e. action-guiding, systems. His theory was further influenced by the assumption that all normative systems were based in the same set of principles grounded in transcendental idealism. Legal and moral norms were isometric and isomorphic. Kant dissolved sociology, which historically had not differenciated itself as an independent science, into philosophy – rendering all questions about human action into philosophical and metaphysical terms. Modern science has for the most part reversed the order, preferring to read philosophical and moral norms as expressions of socialization and material self-interest.
In his commentary on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?, Foucault characterizes modernity as a kind of self-critical ethos directed against meta-narratives that posit universality. Behind such stories are precisely self-interested, subjective perspectives. He glosses a modern version of critique: “In what is given to us as a universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” The objects of this critique are the normative systems that direct human action: “…the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things…and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems…" Thematically this articulation is in keeping with the critique of power sedimented in history as a determinant of action, the myriad of ways in which patterns of thought (and action) are thereby disciplined and normalized.
Kant’s moral and philosophical discussion of norms leaves the lingering suspicion that freedom has been evacated (or at least controled) in precisely the place that Kant’s theoretical philosophy promised to find it (the phenomenological world). Recalling J.M. Bernstein's book on Habermas, perhaps its appropriate to say that Kant is interested in justification, Foucault in meaning. Such "meaning" can be found in a project of self-creation presumably.
