Achieving Our Humanity

The Idea of the Postracial Future

Emmanuel C. Eze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135774677
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Achieving Our Humanity explores a postracial future through a philosophical analysis of the social, cultural, economic and political experiences of race in the past and what this might mean for our present and, most importantly, our future.

PART I

ARGUING WITH THE PAST

CHAPTER 1

THE MODERN INVENTION OF RACE

THE COGITO

How did the origins of modern philosophy and the science of anthropology provide theoretical grounds for the formation of race as a modern idea? The choice of philosophical figures included in the following discussion—Descartes, Hume, and Kant—is not arbitrary, although they represent an intellectual lineage that takes only indirect interest in, for example, the romantic tendencies represented by Pascal, Rousseau, or Herder. The discussion therefore makes no claims to exhausting all that could be said about philosophy and race in modern philosophy; it hopes to illustrate only the dominant patterns of thought that account for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ beliefs about the varieties of humans, beliefs that underlie many of our present racial practices.

The modern masters of philosophy tenaciously, and extravagantly, investigated the nature of “man.” In 1637, Descartes, in Discourse on Method, established the question concerning l’homme as one whose resolution should determine the foundation, the “first principle,” on the basis of which all of philosophy and science should be reconstructed. In asking “Who am I?” Descartes thought, I am inquiring not only ontologically about what I am constituted of but also epistemologically about what can I know. The metaphysical reflections on the nature of the soul, in the Discourse as in the Meditations, are therefore anthropologico-philosophical exercises, guided by the need to establish, with certainty, the rational essence of the human.

In a carefully composed letter about the Meditations to the faculty of theology in Paris (“those most learned and most illustrious men, the Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology of Paris”), Descartes pleaded:

Gentlemen: My reason for offering you this work is so logical, and after you have learned its plan you will also, I am sure, have so logical a reason to take it under your protection, that I believe nothing will recommend it to you more than a brief statement of what I herein propose to do. I have always thought that the two questions, of God and the soul, were the principal questions among those that should be demonstrated by rational philosophy rather than theology.¹

The requirement that “rational philosophy” demonstrate the principal question of the soul contextualizes the famous “cogito” passage: “I noticed that, during the time I wanted to think that everything was false, it was necessary that I, who thought thus, be something. And noticing that this truth—I think, therefore I am—was so firm and so certain that the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.”² From here onward the question becomes “Who is this ‘I’?,” a question that Descartes discussed with equal gusto:

Examining with attention what I was, I saw that I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world nor any place where I was, but that I could not pretend, on that account, that I did not exist; and that, on the contrary, from the very fact that I thought about doubting the truth of other things, it followed very evidently and very certainly that I existed. On the other hand, had I simply stopped thinking, even if all the rest of what I have ever imagined is true, I would have no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which was merely to think.³

The essence of the human, then, is the capacity to think. Although many of Descartess views about other things (including his proof of God’s existence) have been defeated by subsequent thinkers, his essential definition of “man” as a being whose reason for being is “merely to think” has remained acceptable. Even Pascal, a contemporary and dedicated opponent, conceded that one “can easily conceive of a man without hands, feet, head.… But I cannot conceive of man without thought.”⁴ In our century, Paul Ricoeur writes that Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” is “the reflective foundation of every proposition concerning man.”⁵ From Pascal to Ricoeur, the validity of Descartes’s assertion, in its original form or with subsequent qualifications in response to criticism from figures like Nietzsche, continues to generate conversations that dominate modern and postmodern philosophy.

In Germany, Kant’s Logic reformulated Descartes’s anthropological thesis. Although Kant took more seriously the consideration that cultures may differ in their conception of human subjectivity, so that “I think, therefore I am” is not the only interesting thing that could be said about human nature, in the Logic the question of determining the rational nature of man remained the major focus. Unchanged was the conviction that the most important work for philosophy was the accurate description of the interior and exterior structures of humanity, and how to conserve and improve it. When he classified the field of philosophy into four categories: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? and 4. What is man? Kant remarked that the first question belongs to metaphysics, the second to morality, the third to religion, but all could be reckoned to the fourth, anthropology, because “at bottom … the first three questions relate to the last.”⁶

In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant expressed the view that “the aim of every step in the cultural progress which is man’s education is to assign this knowledge and skill he has acquired to the world’s use. But the most important object in the world to which he can apply them is man.”⁷ The Anthropology was, accordingly, intended to explain the internal and external nature of the “earthly being endowed with reason”; it would be a “systematic treatise comprising our knowledge of man.”⁸

Some have argued that the preoccupation with “man” in the Logic and Anthropology is unrelated to the epistemological, moral, and aesthetic issues that were the focus of the three critical works: the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment (see chapter 4). But the anthropological and epistemological aspects of Kant’s oeuvre are thematically not unconnected. Compare, for example, these passages from the Anthropology and the Critique of Pure Reason—passages that address the central issue of the transcendental unity of human consciousness.

The fact that man can have the idea “I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings living on earth. By this he is a person; and by virtue of his unity of consciousness through all the changes he may undergo, he is one and the same person—that is, a being altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, which we can dispose of as we please. This holds even if he cannot yet say “I”; for he still has it in mind. So any language must think “I” when it speaks in the first person, even if it has no special word to express it. For this power (the ability to think) is understanding.⁹ (Anthropology)

The thought that the representations given in intuition one and all belong to me, is … equivalent to the thought that I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least so unite them.… In other words, only in so far as I can grasp the manifold of the representations in one consciousness, do I call them one and all mine. For otherwise I should have as many-coloured and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious to myself … this principle of the necessary unity of apperception is itself, indeed, an identical, and therefore analytic, proposition [because] through the “I,” as simple representation, nothing manifold is given.… An understanding in which through self-consciousness all the manifold would eo ipso be given would be intuitive; our understanding can only think.¹⁰ (Critique of Pure Reason)

The two passages address, respectively, the nature and the function of the “I” within the human frame. The anthropological definition of “Man’s Inner Self” (Anthropology) is cognitivist; and the epistemological definition of the transcendental consciousness (Critique of Pure Reason) is also anthropological.

For another example: consider the longer passage in the section “On Distinctness and Indistinctness in Consciousness of Our Ideas,” in the Anthropology:

When we can distinguish one object from another in our ideas, we have CLEAR consciousness of them. But if the composition of our ideas is also clear, our consciousness of them is DISTINCT. Only when our ideas are distinct does a collection of them become knowledge. Knowledge, then, implies an ordering in the manifold, since any composition involving consciousness presupposes unity of consciousness and so a rule for the composition. The opposite of a distinct idea is not a confused one but merely an indistinct one. Only composite things can be confused, for in simple things there is neither order nor confusion. So confusion causes indistinctness but does not define it. In any complex idea—and knowledge is always complex (since both intuition and concept are essential to it)—the basis of its distinctness is the order according to which the partial ideas are put together [zusammengesetzt werden], and these give rise to either a mere logical division (once concerned only with the form) into higher and subordinate ideas, or a real division into principal and accessory ideas. It is by this order that knowledge becomes clear. We readily see that, if the power of knowledge in general is to be called understanding (in the most general sense of the term), understanding must include: 1) the power of apprehending given ideas to produce an intuition (attentio); 2) the power of abstracting what is common to several of these to produce a concept (abstractio); and 3) the power of recollecting to produce knowledge of the object (reflexio). If a man has these powers in a pre-eminent degree, he is called a brain; if he has a very limited share of them, a donkey (since he always needs someone else to lead him); but if he possesses originality in using these powers (so that he brings forth from himself what must normally be learned under others’ direction), he is called a genius.¹¹

Without the curiosity represented in the last sentence, Kant’s argument, in substance and schema, is no different from the crucial passages on apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason (B233 and following). In both places distinctions are made between “apprehension,” “abstraction,” and “recollection”; and “apprehension” is treated in the same manner as “perception,” involving imagination, which in turn is different from thought.¹²

Regardless of what one thinks about the thematic unity of Kant’s works, what is of interest to us at the moment is to establish the continuities in the tradition of modern European philosophical reflections on “man.” Though there is a difference between Descartes’s formalistic “I think, therefore I am” and Kant’s “synthetic” version of the doctrine of the subject (this, certainly, is one way to read Kant’s stipulations: the “I” reveals “the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in intuition, without which the thoroughgoing identity of self-consciousness cannot be thought”; and “To know anything … I must … synthetically bring into being a determinate combination of the given manifold, so that the unity of this act is at the same time the unity of consciousness”);¹³ but the similarities between the privileges accorded by both thinkers to the faculty of understanding is quite striking. Whether “thin” and formalistic as in Descartes or “thick” and synthetic as in Kant, the faculty of understanding is advanced by both as the bearer of anthropological identity, as in the assertion: “I am human.” Succinctly, Kant explains:

Man is one of the appearances of the sensible world, and in so far one of the natural causes the causality of which must stand under empirical laws.… Man, however, who knows all the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also throug...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Arguing with the Past
• 1. The Modern Invention of Race
• 2. Hume, Race, and Reason
• 3. Race A Transcendental?
• II. This Past Must Address its Future
• 4. Négritude Der Humanismus Der Anderen Menschen
• 5. Négritude and Modern Africana Philosophy Black Is, Black Ain't
• 6. Achieving Our Humanity
• Postscript: Transcending Race
• Bibliography
• Index