Kant's Cosmopolitan History, Introduction
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The question that Kant is edging towards in this introduction is one that remains unresolved and is too often shirked and left unarticulated: to what extent can we plan our future? Should we plan our future? Is planning possible?
In the Cosmopolitan History, Kant begins by discussing the "quantum" unpredictability of human will. As long as we are free agents, the decisions of individuals by definition cannot be examined, predicted or controlled from outside. This is what modern physics has found about the physical world. It is highly predictable statistically, but it does not operate according to absolute Fatwas. When we put a pot on the stove and turn up the heat, there is a tiny but real chance that the water will freeze instead of boil. Of course, this almost never happens. But the closer we get to the atomic level the more statistics and uncertainty apply, until in the realm of quantum physics things operate with a weird logic that utterly defies common sense.
The same is true of individual human beings. We are utterly idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, as we pull back to the sphere of collective human behavior averages average out and universal norms become discernible.
"... what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive, though slow, evolution of its original endowment." (Kant, Cosmopolitan History, p. 249)
Free will is free, and even the free agent himself may not be able to explain or understand what he is doing and why he does it. How much harder, then, for others to say anything for sure about who a given person will marry or where they will die. Even statistical regularities change according to the flow of information that shapes our decision making. For example, when I was young statistics reliably stated that the chances were that I and my siblings would marry someone within a twenty city block radius of where we lived. But the information revolution intervened and I married a central European and my brother married an American. But still, regularity and uncertainty dance to music that may be fast at one time and slow at another, and there is always regularity to the unpredictability of their movement. Kant continues,
"Yet the annual tables of them in the major countries prove that they occur according to laws as stable as [those of] the unstable weather, which we likewise cannot determine in advance, but which, in the large, maintain the growth of plants the flow of rivers, and other natural events in an unbroken uniform course. Individuals and even whole peoples think little on this." (250)
The products of the will are like the weather, then, they can be relied upon in the main, though on the macro level they are utterly unpredictable. Both ignorance and knowledge run deep into the human reality, as deep as our essence. As long as there are a great many wills working in concert dependable behavior emerges, just as it does from quantum phenomena. We can put the pot on the burner, turn on the heat and be fairly certain that the water will boil rather than freeze.
Kant saw, then, that sociology, political science and other social studies are real possibilities, though in his time they were hardly worthy of the name "science" (in my opinion they still have a long way to go). Only when our initial question, "is planning possible?" is answered in the positive and a large consensus of society is willing to act upon that belief, only then will the social sciences be truly scientific.
Kant then proceeds to the crux of both science and religion, faith. We do not know many essentials. We cannot know many essentials. But that is not the same as saying we know nothing about anything important. We can play out our destiny if we have faith. We can come to know and worship God, we come to understand and control nature if and only if we first belief it is possible. Thus we start with faith in providence, in the order and comprehensibility of the universe.
"Each, according to his own inclination, follows his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet each individual and people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal; all work toward furthering it, even if they would set little store by it if they did know it." (250)
Long before the bloody struggles of 20th Century ideology, the battles among communism, Nazism and capitalism, we see the same arguments. Adam Smith had suggested an "invisible hand" that works out the complex interactions of free markets, that orders basically selfish efforts of individuals and companies for the common good. Kant prefers the term "guiding thread," but the logic is the same. Human decisions, tastes, dreams and ambitions all lead toward goals that may not be foreseeable but which are still very real and to some extent predictable, at least in the long view of history.
"Since men in their endeavors behave, on the whole, not just instinctively, like the brutes, nor yet like rational citizens of the world according to some agreed-on plan, no history of man conceived according to a plan seems to be possible, as it might be possible to have such a history of bees or beavers. One cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men's actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice and destructiveness. In the end, one does not know what to think of the human race, so conceited in its gifts. Since the philosopher cannot presuppose any [conscious] individual purpose among men in their great drama, there is no other expedient for him except to try to see if he can discover a natural purpose in this idiotic course of things human. In keeping with this purpose, it might be possible to have a history with a definite natural plan for creatures who have no plan of their own." (Cosmopolitan History, 250)
So this is Kant's definition of what he calls "cosmopolitan history," an enquiry into whether it is possible to come up with a history "with a definite natural plan for creatures who have no plan of their own." Is a cosmopolitan history possible? Can the planless be planned?
Physics in Kant's time saw the world according to its latest high tech device, the clock. Since then modern physics has found that the stuff of nature is essentially formulae and equations. And now, the latest trend is to see it as not so much formulae and equations as algorithms. Everything you can name, from quarks to atoms, galaxies, and living organisms, all act like computer chips calculating and networking with one another. A paper by Richard M. Karp, "The Algorithmic Nature of Scientific Theories, as reported in the New York Times, is a good example. In a recent scientific conference he,
"presented a fundamental explanation for why computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both mathematics and computer science. Algorithms are small but beautiful, Dr. Karp observed. And algorithms are good at describing dynamic processes, while scientific formulas or equations are more suited to static phenomena. Increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes, and computer science, he said, is the systematic study of algorithms. Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes, like protein production, as algorithms. In other words, nature is computing, he said." (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin)
An algorithm is a step by step procedure, in other words, a plan. To my mind this realization of every science that everything important is computable, a recipe, an algorithm, is totally revolutionary. It changes religion. We knew that "in the beginning was the Word, Logos," meant something about what God has to say, but now it means "In the beginning was the Algorithm." Faith is a plan, a struggle, a Jihad, following Kant's "guiding thread." It changes science. The paradigm of science is now algorithms, plans. That is why Kant's Cosmopolitan History should be on everybody's lips. For Kant deals in it with the extent to which human affairs are capable of being planned and the extent to which civilization is survivable without planning. He concludes the introduction like this:
"We wish to see if we can succeed in finding a clue to such a history; we leave it to Nature to produce the man capable of composing it. Thus Nature produced Kepler, who subjected, in an unexpected way, the eccentric paths of the planets to definite laws; and she produced
Kant then goes on to lay out nine theses by which a cosmopolitan history -- and as far as I can see he means not so much a history as a set of agreed points upon which a world media or propaganda machine may support any future world government. We will dive into the first thesis tomorrow.
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