408 Kant: A Biographywhat "nature makes man," but more importantly to establish the kind of
knowledge needed to understand "what man makes of himself, or should
make of himself as a freely acting being."^92 Indeed, "it is properly prag¬
matic only when it incorporates knowledge of man as a citizen of the
world."^93
While there is much in Kant's discussion of the human race that is
quaint or outright weird, while much of it is dated or just plain false, while
much is of merely historical or perhaps even antiquarian interest, what he
says is interesting because it does provide the empirical background of his
aesthetic, moral, and political views. Even as a summary of Kant's lectures,
it is an imperfect book. All of Kant's major critical works are based on his
lectures, but their arguments go far beyond anything that his students
would have encountered in his lectures. While this is to some extent still
true of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is no longer true of the Anthropology.
Though his historical essays can give us some idea of where he might have
taken his anthropological reflections, we can only imagine what precisely
Kant would have made of this work, had he published it earlier. Roman¬
tics such as Schleiermacher found nothing of any value in it, but this does
not mean that we too should dismiss the work.^94 Kant remained an En¬
lightenment thinker to the end, as becomes clear from the anecdote about
Frederick the Great and Sulzer, which he related at the end of the An¬
thropology. Frederick asked Sulzer, whom he regarded highly, what he
thought of the character of man in general. Sulzer replied: "Since we have
built on the principle (of Rousseau) that man is good by nature, things are
going to get better." The king said: "my dear Sulzer, you do not sufficiently
know this evil race to which we belong." Kant believed that Frederick was
wrong, and that the human race was at the very least not evil through and
through, and much of his work during his last years of writing was meant
to show just that.
The books that appeared after the Anthropology during Kant's lifetime,
namely the Jäsche Logic (1800), the Physical Geography (1802) by Rink,
and the Pedagogy (1803) by Rink, shared the same fate. They were not
considered to be important. Furthermore, though nominally by Kant, they
cannot really be considered his works. They are compilations from his
notes for his lectures taken from various periods. Kant did not really have
a hand in any of them. He had given his papers to others because he knew
that he could no longer accomplish the task of editing them himself. By
the time they appeared, the German philosophical discussion had moved far
"beyond" Kant. They remain marginal and deeply flawed texts that either