Abstract

Kant thinks of nature in general and human nature in particular as having purposes that promote the purposes of the moral agent. This perspective underlies his brief account of culture as the end of nature in the Critique of Judgment, and hence as the locus of the transition from nature to morality. According to Kant, culture is a purpose in nature as well as an inducement for humans to act as "ends in themselves." At the same time, however, he does not regard culture as a necessary condition for moral progress. The idea of culture accordingly occupies a greater place in Kant's political and historical writings than in his moral theory. ;Given the tendency among scholars to cast Kant's concept of culture in either purely natural or strictly moral terms, thereby placing culture either outside morality or within the sphere of freedom, the aim of this study is to elaborate the distinctively transitional character assigned to culture by Kant and the mediating role it plays in his thought. In pursuit of this objective, this dissertation analyzes Kant's conception of culture, both as it is defined in the Critique of Judgment and as it operates in his political writings. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that Kant's concept of culture is an irreducibly amphibious notion of morality and politics. ;The analysis of the natural and the moral dimensions of the concept of culture in the first two chapters dedicated to Kant's political essays focuses on the elucidation of the definition of culture as the last end of nature and its ramifications, these manifestations are brought under both the culture of skills and the culture of discipline. In the third and final chapter I study how the irreducibly transitional and amphibious character of the concept of culture in Kant's thought makes the purposes of nature refer to a higher goal. The means for the attainment of this goal, human moral perfection, are provided by nature through culture. Culture is not an end in itself but the passage to freedom