Kant, Herder, and the question of philosophical anthropology

This paper responds to a recent resurgence of interest in Kant's anthropological thinking, which challenges the view of his indifferentism or ethical disinterest in some postmodern readings of him. Kant's theory of reflective judgement is, contra readings of its formalism, bound up with his anthropological speculations and philosophy of history. I challenge in particular Gayatri Spivak's deconstruction of Kant, which assumes that the 'native informant' is foreclosed as a condition of possibility of his theory of an autonomous reflective judgement. Reading Kant's anthropological openness against the grain of Spivak's, and also J.G. Herder's defences of anthropological particularity from an aggressive Enlightenment universalism further reveals unexpected dimensions in Kant's treatment of rhetorical figures, anthropomorphism in particular. I aim finally to recover an account of the ways in which rhetorical figures might aid in the articulation of philosophical truth claims, in place of the assumption in postmodernism that truth and figure are antagonistic.