Operating Under the Idea of the Ideal: Aristotle’s Naturalism

Abstract

In his wonderful essay, ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, Kant laid down a challenge (one, for him, with Stoic roots): tell a story of humanity’s ‘history’ under the idea of a certain ideal. Specifically, tell it as a forward looking, trans-generational, process under the conception of the end, the telos, of a world eventually so organized as to acknowledge, and encompass, the realization of the full humanity of each and every human. History not as record but as process: a developmental political progression whose end is a cosmopolitanism, one at once moral and eudaimonic, fulfilling human potential. Kant, while emphasizing the central role of education in furthering this, does not there advocate any particular form of political resolution—whether central world government or global federalism of small scale units (a Foedus Amphictyonum)—nor does he broach questions of how much still further, dynamic, transitioning, or ‘Millian’ experiment, might, or rather should, be sustained within the realization of this universal goal: the degree of instability, of vulnerability to creative risk, of ‘unsocial sociability’, needed by, and for, a still vibrant, still liberal, enlightened humanity.