While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his speculative views about the way in which this progress might have begun and the circumstances surrounding this beginning have been largely neglected. Implicit in such an omission is the assumption that Kant does not say much about the very beginning of human history or that whatever he says is of little philosophical value. This article challenges these assumptions. I reconstruct Kant’s account of the emergence of reason by looking at his various conjectural and more literal remarks about our species’ transition from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings possessing a rudimentary form of rationality. Next, I show how this account fits with Kant’s broader view of humankind’s rational progress and its subsequent stages. By doing so, I elucidate Kant’s guidelines for achieving this progress in the future by unifying them with his regulative view of reason’s past.

虽然康德对人类理性进步的描述已被广泛讨论，但他对这一进步可能开始的方式的推测性观点围绕这一开始的情况在很大程度上被忽视了。这种遗漏中隐含的假设是，康德没有过多地谈论人类历史的开端，或者他所说的任何东西都没有什么哲学价值。本文对这些假设提出了挑战。我通过观察他关于我们这个物种从单纯的非理性动物转变为拥有基本理性形式的原始人类的各种推测和更字面的评论来重建康德对理性出现的描述。接下来，我将展示这个描述如何与康德关于人类理性进步及其后续阶段的更广泛观点相吻合。通过这样做，我通过将康德的指导方针与他对理性过去的调节性观点统一起来，阐明了在未来实现这一进步的指导方针。