A gondviselésről, világpolgári szemszögből

His lay and scholarly readers have somehow always considered Kant’s smaller historical-philosophical writings to be diversions. Which could be explained several ways. Kant himself somehow seems to have considered them digressions of sorts, at times not even self-imposed ones – his remarks about the conditions of the origin of a Cosmopolitan Aim are well-known –, or considered them leisurely excursions from the world of science into the Gelehrsamkeit (setting the task of the lectures in anthropology for himself while studying at the university). Yet, more importantly, in the introductory pages of his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, Kant himself seems to question the methodological reliability of the very undertaking in which he experiments with elaborating his “favourite notion”. And what has further harmed the reputation of the writings in question is that the reasoning in some of these historicalphilosophical writings argues for Evil (not simply Übel but precisely Böse) in the service of Good (the progress towards a cosmopolitan condition), (even though Kant registered the morally questionable nature of his own argumentation) – with which Kant provoked the resentment of posterity, since the critics of the genre find the main vice of historical-philosophy in precisely this, the justification of Evil. The present paper argues for Kant in that the Denkfigur of Evil turning into Good did not only tempt historical philosophy, but remains a constant temptation for us, and so we cannot shake our vices off by having blamed them on the genre of historical philosophy – and that it is precisely the observations/restrictions concerning methodology that seem to argue that Kant did not think his “favourite idea” could be taken seriously, argue in fact that the excesses of historical philosophy are worth taking into serious consideration.