Something new on #Kant and his #racism getting play on twitter. I couldn't abide another without comment. I have a few things to say about Kant's racism and racial theory and the disappointing reactions of scholars (both generally and Zorn in particular). public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/8-2020-8/kant-…
1. Just because Kant was a monogenist and he was arguing against polygenists (Forster, Hume, Voltaire) doesn't mean he wasn't racist or didn't contribute to the foundations of scientific racism.
(This is such a staggeringly bad argument that gets repeated often. Being a monogenist and arguing against polygenists doesn't magically wash every evil away. Also consider basically every racist/racial theory from after the mid 19th-century, which are monogenist.)
Moreover it's not like Kant is arguing against the polygenists for abolitionist or emancipatory reasons. It's to attain a complex of teleological, biological, and cognitive ideals. Kant (or "reason") likes things (like races) to exist for reasons and to be unified.
2. Kant also positions himself against Herder (not just the polygenists), who dismantles the scientific meaningfulness concept of race in his Ideen. (Esp. in Kant's review of the Ideen and the 1785 race essay). Saying Kant's opponents were the *real* racists is a poor argument...
(b/c Kant's origination of the scientific concept of race was *still* historically influential and *guess what* every side can be racist), and also it's unsound. One of Kant's main opponents recognized essential problems with race, and Kant tried to defend the theory.
3. Zorn repeatedly suggests that Kant's theory of race was pitted against Forster — that's just false. Forster wrote his "Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen" in 1786. Kant wrote one essay in response: "Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie" in 1788.
Two other race essays (and the theory of race, itself) preceded in 1785 and 1775, as well as repeated comments on race and statements of his racial theory in notes and drafts from his lectures on physical geography and anthropology. (And the infamous Beobachtungen of 1764)
4. Zorn claims that, for Kant, "all humans have the same potential, yet realize it differently" based on a passage from the 3rd Kritik on the "aesthetic normal idea." The passage has *nothing* to do with human potential. Contrast with Kant's own claims to the contrary:
4a. "[The American is] too indifferent for industry and incapable of any culture[...and] ranks still far below even the Negro, who stands on the lowest of all the other steps that we have named as differences of the races" (ÜGTP, 8:176).
4b. "The American people acquires no culture [nimmt keine Bildung an]. It has no incentives [...The Negro race] acquire[s] culture, but only a culture of slaves. Hindus have incentives [...] as a result they acquire culture to the highest degree, but only in the arts and not...
"in the sciences. They never raise it up to abstract concepts." (V-Anth/Mensch, 25:1187)
4c. Kant claims that the "inner character" (which is the noumenal ground for free action) is "very different" among the races.
"Americans [are] insensitive [...] take on no culture. [...] Negroes take on the culture of servants, but not of the free, and are incapable of leading themselves. Children."
"Indians [...] take on the culture of art, but not of science and enlightenment. Are always students, because they know only compulsion and not justice and freedom."
"White [race]: Contain all incentives of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all predispositions to culture and civilization and can obey as well as rule. They are the only [race] that progresses in perfection."
"Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves, [They] serve only as slaves."
"All races will be wiped out, except for the whites."
"It is not good that [the races] mix. Spaniards in Mexico." (All 4c quotes from Refl 1520, 15:876–78, excuse any hasty-translation infelicities.)
These quotes stand in stark tension with Zorn's bald claim about human potential. Kant emphasizes that the abilities of the races are different & claims they have distinct potentials and roles in the history of the human species. (There are *many* more quotes along these lines.)
I find the chorus knee-jerk reactions — "Kant is actually a universalist!" "Kant actually argued against racism!" "That's not the important bit of Kant!" "The racial theory doesn't infect the core philosophy!" "These are personal views, not philosophy!" — so disappointing.
Why are we so eager to pull out every logical and rhetorical tool to dismiss Kant's racism instead of using those tools to probe uncomfortable, but absolutely pressing, questions regarding the relationship between philosophy and racism?
Why not think about the way in which philosophy (like Kant's) can and does espouse universalism/cosmopolitanism and promote racism/sexism in the same breath (whether explicitly or implicitly)?
Why not think about what it means that the (arguably) most momentous figure in the history of Western thought over the last several centuries also founded the scientific concept of race?
Fig. 1: Philosopher arguing that Kant "wasn't really racist" (pictured)
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