Abstract for the Kant in Asia International Conference

at Hong Kong Baptist University

20-23 May 2009

Monique Castillo, “Kant's Notion of Perfectibility: A Condition of World-Citizenship”

Kant's cosmopolitanism has both a political and a cultural meaning.

1) At the political level: it is in the interest of each nation to set up a free confederation of republics, a peace alliance. However, a total peace throughout the world is a mere Idea.

2) At the cultural level, the cosmopolitical citizenship initiates a culture of free circulation both of ideas and of knowledge, so that hospitality may prevail over enmity.

In my lecture, I would like to insist on the importance of the concept of perfectibility in human beings, and take it as the anthropological basis of world-citizenship. Nowadays, the ideas of Progress, of Western world and of Modernity have to face violent attacks, because cosmopolitanism is considered as homogenization of social habits and as reduction of those to a single commercial sub-culture. However, when we think so, we give cosmopolitanism a mere technical meaning, not an ethical meaning. For Kant, the perfectibility of personhood is synonymous with an anthropological solidarity of human mankind, and this is the very condition under which a future cultural world-citizenship is possible.

Back to the Final Programme Schedule