Antropologia, ciência da natureza humana "por analogia"

Ano: 2010 | Volume: 5 | Número: 3

Autores: J. A. Bonaccini

Palavras-chave: Kant, anthropology, human nature, science, analogy.

Resumo Inglês:

The difficulty some interpreters find to place Kant ́s writings on Anthropology within his system iswell known. There are those who understand the Anthropology as a transcendental science, those who think it isa mere non-systematic and empirical “science”, and even a rapsodic chaos of information on diverse anddisconnected subjects; finally, there are also those who consider the Anthropology as the applied moralphilosophy Kant had promised, either in the preface of the Groundwork, or in the Metaphysics of Morals. On theone hand, Kant had already referred the question for human nature to the Anthropology in the Critique of thepure reason. Nothing appears to be more natural, therefore, than considering the Anthropology as the science ofhuman nature. On the other hand, the problem consists in determining whether and to what extent the criticalphilosophy can approach the concept of “human nature”. A good deal of difficulty comes from lack of clarity andunity with regard to its subject proper. For even if we accept that it must deal with human nature, it is not thatclear in which sense human nature is to be understood from the point of view of “pragmatic anthropology”, norhow human being must be focused on in such an enquiry, whether empirically or not. My aim here is to explainin which sense pragmatic anthropology can be understood as science of human nature. I defend that this ispossible out of a certain principle of analogy. Thus, in the first part I briefly mention some positions of theinterpreters concerning the place and the status of the Anthropology in the critical system and identify aconfusion sometimes is made between the place of the Anthropology within the system and its scientificallyproblematic status. In the second part, based upon Kant ́s Lectures on Anthropology I argue that historically andconceptually Kant ́s Anthropology endeavors to conciliate two different interests, namely, to criticize andreformulate the empirical psychology of the Wolfians and to observe and describe human being individually andcollectivelly in order to offer a notion of human nature which the concepts and principles of its moral theory andits theory of the metaphysical knowledge can in concrete be applied to. In the third part, I defend thatAnthropology considered as a cosmological knowledge reformulates the Humean project of an empirical scienceof human nature as a nearly–empirical science, since it involves as much observation and experience as well asapplication principles. My central thesis is here that the empirical scientific character of antropologicalknowledge is guaranteed by the application of the principle of analogy: what a human being knows intuitively from of himself as a set of first-order predicates functions as starting point for his reflection, out of which he isable to deduce consequences by analogy between himself and other human beings, as a set of second-orderpredicates he applies extensively to others. Thus, the Anthropology could appeal to observation and experiencewithout being arbitrary: my knowledge of myself would be mediated by the knowledge of the others to theextent that I think myself in analogy with other beings that are given to me intuitively; conversely, myknowledge of the others would be mediated at the same time by the knowledge I have from myself, my body, aswell as my mental and moral faculties. My knowledge of human being from the cosmopolitan point of view, ascitizen of the world, then, would be thought and conceived of in analogy with my faculties and habits, with themoral, psychological structure and social politics of my world, with the uses and customs of my community. Ifthis is not scientific knowledge in the strict sense (universal and necessary) as outlined in the first Critique,however, pragmatic antropological knowledge can be understood as a sound talk about humans, to the extent thaton the basis of the principle of analogy a claim at universality and necessity is made which is pragmaticallyverifiable in action.