On becoming a person and creating the kingdom of ends: evolution and revolution towards freedom

Abstract

The essence and nature of humanity has been defined through a system of comparations and differentiations in which animality and divinity function as modes of qualitative otherness that clarify human’s self-understanding. The identification of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity produces a sense of partial entanglement and ontological overlap between the three modes of being. This cultural background of anthropology remains to a certain extent significantly influential throughout the Western philosophical canon, between Plato and Kant. It hence follows that a formally rigorous and definitive grasping of the essence of the human being seems to be jeopardised. Instead of an accurately real or essential definition, anthropology seems to develop ‘expositions’ and ‘descriptions’ of humanity, although with axiological and normative dimensions. The theoretical question of the essence yields its logical prominence to the rather practical question of existence, as proper existence, the human art of living well, i.e., the human art of full self-actualisation. Thus, Kant’s anthropology constitutes also a renewed Enlightened version of the ethics and politics of cura sui or self-determination.