L'anthropologie philosophique chez Kant et Novalis

This article presents a reading of the famous fragment 16 of Novalis’s "Pollen" vis-à-vis Kant’s "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View", two writings published in the same year of 1798. It aims to show that fragment 16 of "Pollen" is in nuce a reformulation of the traditional question of anthropology, which Kant viewed during the same period as reuniting the whole field of philosophy. Kant’s philosophical anthropology remains essentially empirical at base and understands the pragmatic element from the external point of view in relation to the collective existence of human beings. In contrast, Novalis’s philosophical anthropology proposes a transcendental extension of anthropology in which poetry constitutes a legitimate instrument. In short: in both thinkers we are dealing with forms of pragmatic philosophical anthropology, but the path taken by Kant follows a more empirical direction, compared to the new path of Novalis’s anthropology that underscores more the transcendental pole.