Notes on Kant on the Contest of the Faculties, Part 2:

The Question Renewed: “Is Humankind Continually Improving?”

I. What do we want to know here?

Prophetic, divinatory, visionary history …

II. How can we know it?

Those who divine the events themselves bring them about: prophets, politicians, clergy

III. A threefold classification of the concept of what one seeks to know for the future:

1. Human race is continually regressing toward the worse (moral terrorism).

(If true, then human would have destroyed itself by now.)
2. Human race is continually progressing toward the better (eudaimonism).
(If true, then humanity would have to be the cause of its own goodness).
3. Human race is at a perpetual standstill (abderitism).
(If true, then humanity would be no better than nonhuman animals).

IV. The problem of progress is not to be resolved immediately through experience

V. The divinatory history of the human race must be nonetheless connected with some
kind of experience
VI. On an event in our time which proves this moral tendency of the human race

The French Revolution as viewed not by the participants but by spectators

VII. A divinatory history of the human race

VIII. On the difficulty of the maxims aimed at the world’s progress toward the better with
regard to their publicity
IX. What will the progress toward the better yield for the human race?
X. In what arrangement alone can the progress toward the better be expected
XI. Conclusion