Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- CUUK/Cohen ISBN: June , : chapter 11 Kant on civilisation, culture and moralisation Catherine Wilson Kant’s thoughts and convictions about human beings reflected a number of contemporary developments. This chapter will explore the relationship in the Lectures on Anthropology between the title themes and three impor- tant aspects of the wider context of the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in the eighteenth century, namely secularisation, animalism and historical pessimism. Kant was a proponent of secularisation, but he rejected animalism and the historical pessimism that often accompanied it, and his views on these three topics can provide an important perspective on the more recondite elements of his philosophy, including his epistemology and his metaphysics of morals. Although it is the Friedl¨ ander Lectures, either because they offer the most complete record of what Kant was telling his students, or because they demonstrate Kant’s particular engagement with the writings of Rousseau in the mid-s, that are most useful for this purpose, I shall draw on all the Lectures and the Menschenkunde to try to situate Kant within some of the most significant debates and concerns of the second half of the eighteenth century. First, secularisation. The critique of religion in the second half of the century ranged from historical criticism of the Bible and scepticism over the truth of particular doctrines of the Christian religion, the existence of a creator God remaining unquestioned, to a willingness to embrace the radical doctrine that matter was eternal and the powers of nature sufficient to produce all the phenomena. Kant’s private religious beliefs, as opposed to his theology, remain shrouded in mystery, but J. F. Abegg reported that Kant told him in private conversation in that his faith in the The ‘deist’ Herman Samuel Reimarus unleashed the Fragmentenstreit with his ‘Wolfenbuttel Frag- ments’ posthumously and anonymously published as ‘Fragments by an Anonymous Writer’ by Lessing (–). Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were translated into German (, Leipzig), as was Holbach’s Syst` eme de la nature (Frankfurt and Leipzig, ). There followed the Pantheismusstreit beginning in . Lucretius’s atheistic didactic poem De Rerum Natura was read throughout the eighteenth century in many editions and translations and was well known and admired by Kant.