Kant's Answer to the Question “What Is the Human Being?”

This chapter argues that Kant does not provide an answer to his question "What is a human being?", as long as it is understood as a descriptive question about the essential and defining features of human beings. After introducing the three famous Kantian questions "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant later adds a fourth question, namely "What is the human being?". As will be argued, this question is ultimately aimed not at something like the "essence" of human beings but at what in Kant's time was called the "vocation of the human being". This "vocation" consists in the final ends of humankind, which, according to Kant, are moral. Thus, Kant's fourth question is not so much about what human beings are as about what they ought to be.