Can Kant’s man be a woman?

Résumé En

The play on words in the title of this chapter directly points to the gender bias that can unconsciously affect the concept of ‘humanity’ in its effective scope – a bias heightened and made especially acute by the fact that Kant shapes this concept as an ideal of the Enlightenment. Indeed, there is evidence from far more than one text – or perhaps subtext – in Kant’s work that his normative approach towards what humans can and should be (i.e. the approach of a pragmatic anthropology in Kant’s sense of what humans ‘have to make of themselves’) fits women as adequately as it does men. In other words, although the concept of humanity should apply to every human being, its application turns out to be problematic when it comes to such a generic feature as gender. To explore this problem and other related ones, the chapter turns to the difference between the sexes in Kant that makes no difference in terms of duty. The precritical 'Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime' (1764) offers an answer: presenting us with a binary conception of virtue in terms of the difference between the sexes, this text appears to threaten Kant’s later view of humanity as the universal community of humans converging towards a unique ideal. But that duty is perhaps not Kant’s last word, given that ideals have to be realized by concrete individuals. The chapter provides evidence of how prevalent the issue of desire between the sexes is in Kant’s anthropology, thereby supporting the following thesis: this issue of desire is responsible for the highly contrasting ways Kant constructs male and female gender, and as such it is responsible for a theoretical clash between his construction of gender and his concept of humanity.