by Greg Johnson
Just because most Enlightenment thinkers rejected polygenism and asserted the fundamental (species) equality of humankind, it does not mean that they could not believe consistently in the hierarchical nature of the human races. There were polygenists like Charles White who argued that blacks formed a different race from whites, and Voltaire who took some pleasure lampooning the vanity of the unity of mankind. But the prevailing view was that all races were members of the same human species, as all humans were capable of creating fertile offspring. Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, Kant, and others endorsed this view, and yet they distinctly ranked whites above other races.
Liberals have deliberately employed this view on the species unity of humanity in order to separate, misleadingly, the Enlightenment from any racial connotations. But Linnaeus did rank the races in their behavioral proclivities, and Buffon did argue that all the races descended from an original pair of whites, and that American Indians and Africans were degraded by their respective environmental habitats. De Pauw did say that Africans had been enfeebled in their intelligence and “disfigured” by their environment. Samuel Soemmering did conclude that blacks were intellectually inferior. Peter Camper and John Hunter did rank races in terms of their facial physiognomy. Blumenbach did emphasize the symmetrical balance of Caucasian skull features as the “most perfect.” Nevertheless, in accordance with the evidence collected at the time, all these scholars asserted the fundamental unity of mankind, monogenism, or the idea that all races have a common origin.
Garrett, seemingly unable to accept his own observations “in text after text,” repeats the standard line that Buffon’s and Blumenbach’s views, for example, on “the unity and structural similarity of races” precluded a racial conception. He generally evades racist phrases and arguments from Enlightenment thinkers, such as this one from Blumenbach: “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian because this stock displays the most beautiful race of men.”31 He makes no mention or almost ignores a number of other racialists: Locke, Georges Cuvier, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Diderot, Maupertuis, and Montesquieu.32 In the case of Kant, he says it would be “absurd” to take some “isolated remarks” he made about race as if they stood for his whole work. Kant “distinguished between character, temperament, and race in order to avoid biological determinism” for the sake of the “moral potential of the human race as a whole.”
Actually, Kant, the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment, “produced the most profound raciological thought of the 18th century.” These words come from Earl W. Count’s book This Is Race, cited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in what is a rather good analysis of Kant’s racism showing that it was not marginal but deeply embedded in his philosophy. Eze’s analysis comes in an essay, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology” (1997).33 He argues persuasively that Kant’s writings on race were an intrinsic component of his lectures on anthropology, and that these lectures, subsequently turned into a text, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), were intrinsically connected to his overall philosophy.34 It was Kant who introduced anthropology as a branch of study to the German universities together with the study of geography, and that throughout his career Kant offered 72 courses in anthropology and/or geography, a higher number than his courses in logic, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Although various scholars have shown interest in Kant’s anthropology, they have neglected its relation to Kant’s “pure philosophy.”
For Kant, anthropology and geography were inseparable; geography was the study of the natural conditions of the earth and of man’s physical attributes and location as part of this earth; whereas anthropology was the study of man’s soul, his psychological and moral character, as exhibited in different places on earth. In his geography Kant addressed racial classifications on the basis of physical traits such as skin color; in his anthropology he studied the internal structures of human psychology and the manner in which these internal attributes conditioned humans as moral and rational beings.
Kant believed that human beings were different from other natural beings in their capacity for consciousness and agency. Humans were naturally capable of experiencing themselves as self-reflecting egos capable of acting morally on the basis of their own self-generated norms (beyond the determinism which conditioned all other beings in the universe). It is part of our internal human nature to think and will as persons with moral agency. This uniquely human attribute is what allows humans to transcend the dictates of nature insofar as they are able to articulate norms as commandments for their own actions freed from unconscious physical contingencies and particular customs. As rational beings, humans are capable of creating a realm of ends, and these ends are a priori principles derived not from the study of geography and anthropology but from the internal structures of the mind, transcendental reason. What Kant means by “critical reason” is the ability of humans through the use of their minds to subject everything (bodily desires, empirical reality, and customs) to the judgments of values generated by the mind, such that the mind (reason) is the author of its own moral actions.
However, it was Kant’s estimation that his geographical and anthropological studies gave his moral philosophy an empirical grounding. This grounding consisted in the acquisition of knowledge about human beings “throughout the world,” to use Kant’s words, “from the point of view of the variety of their natural properties and the differences in that feature of the human which is moral in character.”35 Kant was the first thinker to sketch out a geographical and psychological (or anthropological) classification of humans. He classified humans naturally and racially into white (European), yellow (Asians), black (Africans), and red (American Indians). He also classified them psychologically and morally in terms of the mores, customs, and aesthetic feelings held collectively by each of the races. Non-Europeans held unreflective mores and customs devoid of critical examination “because these people,” in the words of Eze, “lack the capacity for development of ‘character,’ and they lack character presumably because they lack adequate self-consciousness and rational will.” Within Kant’s psychological classification, non-Europeans “appear to be incapable of moral maturity because they lack ‘talent,’ which is a ‘gift’ of nature.” Eze quotes Kant: “the difference in natural gifts between various nations cannot be completely explained by means of causal [external, physical, climatic] causes but rather must lie in the [moral] nature of man.” The differences among races are permanent and transcend environmental factors. “The race of the American cannot be educated. It has no motivating force; for it lacks affect and passion . . . They hardly speak, do not caress each other, care about nothing and are lazy.” “The race of the Negroes . . . is completely the opposite of the Americans; they are full of affect and passion, very lively, talkative and vain. They can be educated but only as servants . . .” The Hindus “have a strong degree of passivity and all look like philosophers. They thus can be educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences. They can never arise to the level of abstract concepts . . . The Hindus always stay the way they are, they can never advance, although they began their education much earlier.”
Eze then explains that for Kant only “white” Europeans are educable and capable of progress in the arts and sciences. They are the “ideal model of universal humanity.” In other words, only the European exhibits the distinctly human capacity to behave as a rational creature in terms of “what he himself is willing to make himself” through his own ends. He is the only moral character consciously free to choose his own ends over and above the determinism of external nature and of unreflectively held customs. Eze, a Nigerian-born academic, obviously criticizes Kant’s racism, citing and analyzing additional passages, including ones in which Kant states that non-Europeans lack “true” aesthetic feelings. He claims that Kant transcendentally hypostasized his concept of race simply on the basis of his belief that skin color by itself stands for the presence or absence of the natural �
�gift” of talent and moral “character.” He says that Kant’s sources of information on non-European customs were travel books and stories he heard in Königsberg, which was a bustling international seaport. Yet, this does not mean that he was simply “recycling ethnic stereotypes and prejudices.” Kant was, in Eze’s estimation, seriously proposing an anthropological and a geographical knowledge of the world as the empirical presupposition of his critical philosophy.
With the publication of this paper and others in the same vein, it has become ever harder to designate Kant’s thinking on race as marginal. In “Kant and Race,” Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill not only accept that Kant expressed racist beliefs, but also that Eze was successful “in showing that Kant saw his racial theory as a serious philosophical project.”36 But Hill and Boxill counter that Kant’s philosophy should not be seen to be inherently “infected with racism . . . provided it is suitably supplemented with realistic awareness of the facts about racism and purged from association with certain false empirical beliefs.”
These two liberals, however, think they have no obligation to provide their readers with even one fact countering the ever- growing consensus, most saliently in the fields of medicine and intelligence, that “genetic factors underlie varying responses to medicines observed among different ethnic and racial groups,”37 that “researchers have found significant differences among racial, ethnic and gender groups in the ways they respond to and metabolize drugs, and experience side effects,”38 and that there is a strong genetic component in Black-White-Asian differences in mean IQ.39 They don’t even mention a source in their favor such as Stephen Jay Gould. They take it as a given that no one has seriously challenged the liberal view of race and indeed assume that such a challenge would be racist ipso facto and therefore empirically unacceptable. They then excuse Kant on grounds that the evidence available in his time supported his claims, but that it would be racist today to make his claims for one would be “culpable” of neglecting the evidence that now disproves racial classifications. What evidence?40
They argue further that “racist attitudes are incompatible with Kant’s basic principle of respect for humanity in each person,” and in this vein refer to Kant’s denunciation, in his words, of the “wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils” which afflicted the peoples of the world who experienced the “great injustice of the European powers in their conquests.” But why do liberals always assume that claims about racial differences constitute a call for the conquest and enslavement of non-whites? They forget the 100 million killed in Russia and China, or, conversely, the fact that most Enlightenment racists were opponents of the slave trade.
The ultimate logic of the Hill-Boxill counter-argument is that Kant’s critical philosophy was/is intrinsically incompatible with any racial hierarchies which violate the principles of human freedom and dignity, even if his racism was deeply embedded in his philosophy. But it is not; and it may well be the other way around; Kant’s belief in human perfectibility, the complete development of moral agency and rational freedom, may be seen as intrinsically in favor of a hierarchical way of thinking in terms of which race is the standard-bearer of the ideal of a free and rational humanity.
It is quite revealing that an expert like Garrett, and the standard interpreters of the Enlightenment generally, including his highness Doctor Habermas, would ignore Kant’s racial anthropology. A recent essay by Stuart Elden, “Reassessing Kant’s Geography,“ examines the state of this debate, noting that Kant’s geography and anthropology are still glaringly neglected in most newer works on Kant.41 One reason for this, Elden believes, “is that philosophers have, by and large, not known what to make of the works.” I would specify that they don’t know what to make of Kant’s racism in light of the widely accepted view that he was a liberal progenitor of human equality and cosmopolitanism. Even Elden does not know what to make of this racism, though he brings attention to some recent efforts to fully incorporate Kant’s anthropology/geography into his overall philosophy, works by Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics (2000); John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (2002); and Holly Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology (2006).42 Elden pairs off these standard (pro-Enlightenment, pro-Kant) works against the writings of leftist critics who have shown fewer misgivings designating Kant a racist. All of these works are tainted by their unenlightened acceptance of human equality and universalism. They cannot come to terms with a Kant who proposed a critical philosophy only for the European race.
Some of the main points these authors make are: Kant’s anthropology and geography lectures were part of Kant’s critical philosophy, “devoted to trying to enlighten his students more about the people and world around them in order that they might live (pragmatically as well as morally) better lives.”43 The aim of these lectures, says Wilson, on the cultures and geography of the world was “to civilize young students to become ‘citizens of the world.’”44 Kant was a humane teacher who cared for his students and expected them to become cognizant of the world and in this way acquire prudence and wisdom. “Kant explicitly argues that the anthropology is a type of cosmopolitan philosophy,” writes Wilson, intended to educate students to develop their rational powers so they could think for themselves and thus be free to actualize their full human potentiality.45
This sounds very pleasant, yet it is based on the rather naïve, if not forced notion that knowledge of the world and cosmopolitanism, wisdom, and prudence are incompatible with a racial understanding. To the contrary, if Kant’s racial observations were consistent with the available evidence at the time, and if masses of new evidence have accumulated supporting the idea of racial differences, then a critical and worldly philosophy would require us to show understanding towards Kant’s racism, which does not mean one has to accept the subjective impressionistic descriptions Kant uses.
I personally disagree with the ranking of races, even though I think there is substantial evidence showing that the human population can be divided into different racial groups on the basis of genetically based traits. But hiding from students the research of J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, among others, would negate their ability to become free, enlightened thinkers.
Elden addresses the writings of Bernasconi and David Harvey, agreeing with them that Kant’s racial thoughts “cannot simply be excused as a product of his time—trading on contemporary views about racial superiority and the like—because he went out of his way to explicitly theorise race, as a crucial category of human life.”46 He also agrees that Kant’s racism is “deeply problematic” to his cosmopolitanism, and that earlier responses by Kantians to sweep aside his racism as “irrelevant” or “not to be taken seriously” are inadequate. Elden thinks however that scholars like Louden and Wilson have risen to the leftist challenge.
But what we get from Louden is the same supposition that Kant’s philosophy can be made to meet the requirements of humanitarianism and egalitarianism simply by discarding the racist components. This constitutes a confounding of the actual Enlightenment (and the authentic Kant) with our current cultural Marxist wish to eradicate European ethnic identity in the name of a race-mixed globalist order.
Louden even makes the rather doleful argument that Kant’s monogenist view of the races, the idea that all humans originated from a common ancestor, “help us reach our collective destiny.” Kant’s monogenist view is not an adequate way to show that he believed in a common humanity. The monogenist view is not only consistent with the eventual differentiation of this common species into unequal races due to migration to different environments, but it is also the case that Kant specifically rejected Buffon’s claim that racial differences could be reversed with the eventual adaptation of “inferior” races to climates and environments that would induce “superior” traits; Kant insisted that the differences among races were fixed and irreversible regardless of future adaptations to different environmental settings.
Louden’
s additional argument that for Kant all members of the human species could cultivate, civilize, and moralize themselves does not contradict Kant’s view that whites are the model of a universal humanity. After all, what is objectionable to liberals about Kant is his hierarchical ordering of races with whites at the top, which does not exclude other races from moral improvement but merely states that whites have the greatest, rather than the sole, capacity for improvement.
Why have so many otherwise intelligent scholars willfully misled themselves into believing that Enlightenment thinkers were promoters of egalitarianism and a raceless cosmopolitan public sphere? One major reason, implicit in what I have said already, is that Kant has been promoted as the central progenitor of liberal internationalism, the philosopher who articulated in the deepest and highest level the moral grounding for a cosmopolitan order where humanity would cease to be divided along nationalistic lines under the ideal of “world citizenship.” Habermas is the best-known employer of Kant in the name of this ideal, but hardly the only one. Cosmopolitanism is today an academic industry, backed by huge grants, programs, and associations, populated by many dutiful pupils with lucrative careers.
