5 - Transcendental Philosophy and the Problem of History

Summary

Given its essentially narrative form of exposition, the discipline of history is not amongst the components of Kant's revolutionary philosophical attempt to reground knowledge from a transcendental perspective. Yet there is a sense in that history does now come within the purview of philosophy, although it had never been regarded as part of philosophy as long as it remained under the classical aegis of rhetoric and the literary canon. The role that history begins to play in the Kantian enterprise of philosophy is defined by the need to mediate the opposition between the two worlds to which we belong as rational beings and as empirical agents. ‘Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will's manifestations in the world of phenomena – that is, 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. In the same way, we may hope that what strikes us in the actions of individuals as confused and fortuitous may be recognised, in the history of the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man's original capacities’.