Kant and Anthropology

Kant's 'Critical' project--Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement--is mandala-like. For, its labyrinthine innovativeness, with no explicitly stated focus, has bred widely divergent interpretations, each claiming primogeniture. The closest Kant comes to a statement of purpose in the body of the works is to explain that he is attempting to answer three questions, 'What can I know?', 'What ought I to do?', and 'What may I hope?', the main topics of each of the Critiques, respectively. In a later work, he finally summarizes the three in the ultimate question, 'What is man?' He classifies this question as 'Anthropology', virtually a neologism at the time, but he has something other in mind than what the term has subsequently come to indicate, an empirical study of e. g. diverse cultures. Rather, he is indicating that his Critical project is attempting a definition of Humanity that is not, as had traditionally been the case, derived from some transcendent premise, e. g. from divine being, natural teleology, etc. As such, Kant is fulfilling the project initiated by the Cartesian premise 'I think', and foreruns further refinements, such as Nietzsche's 'Human All-too-Human" and Heidegger's 'Analytic of Dasein'. Kant's advance from a Particularist definition of Humanity to an Autonomous concept, constitutes not merely an intellectual Evolvement, but an Evolvement in Humanity itself.