Kant and the Concept of Race

Late Eighteenth-Century Writings

Jon M. Mikkelsen

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438443621, 9781438443614
• eBook ISBN: 9781438443638
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Kant and the Concept of Race features translations of four texts by Immanuel Kant frequently designated his Racenschriften (race essays), in which he develops and defends an early theory of race. Also included are translations of essays by four of Kant's contemporaries—E. A. W. Zimmermann, Georg Forster, Christoph Meiners, and Christoph Girtanner—which illustrate that Kant's interest in the subject of race was part of a larger discussion about human "differences, " one that impacted the development of scientific fields ranging from natural history to physical anthropology to biology.

Of the Different Human Races

An Announcement of Lectures in Physical Geography in the Summer Semester 1775

IMMANUEL KANT

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), commonly regarded as one of the most influential figures of the entire Western philosophical tradition, is most well known for his formulation of what is usually referred to as the “critical philosophy,” in which, briefly characterized, the subjective turn of modernist Cartesian rationalism, challenged by an encounter with Humean skepticism, turns against itself in ways that undermine both the substantiality of the Cartesian cogito and the Cartesian quest for absolute, or metaphysical, certainty in the realm of scientific knowledge. The appearance of the critical philosophy as a significant moment in the development of modern philosophy in the period after the publication of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy in 1642 is thus usually described as having been heralded by the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s first critique, in 1781, but the program was further developed with the publication of two additional critiques, the Critique of Practical Reason, in 1788, and the Critique of the Power of Judgement, in 1790. The best commentators, however, also emphasize that Kant began formulating his critical project in the early 1770s, well before the publication of the first critique, that his understanding of the project itself underwent some revision with the publication of the second and third critiques, and that the critical philosophy cannot be properly understood without an examination of the positive, fundamental principles of Kant’s own “post-critical” systematic philosophy. These principles—as presented in the 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in which Kant attempted to identify the fundamental principles necessary for the construction, or stated in stricter traditional Kantian terminology, the possibility, of a science of nature, and the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals, in which he attempted to identify the fundamental principles necessary for even conceiving the possibility of human freedom—were viewed by Kant as constitutive for the construction of our ideas, respectively, of nature and freedom. Not so clearly resolved, however, in the period following the completion of the three critiques, was how the non-constitutive principle of the formal purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of nature, which Kant identified as self-reflexively regulative for the “aesthetical” and “teleological” uses of the power of judgment (Urteilskraft) investigated in the third critique, could provide a means for “mediating the connection of the domain of the concept of nature with that of the concept of freedom, as regards freedom’s consequences.” This, however, is clearly the claim that Kant does make for this principle in this discussion of it from near the end of the final section of the brief “Introduction” that he published with that work (Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987], 38; AA 5:197) in 1790.

The following text, which Kant first prepared simply as a public announcement for the lecture course in physical geography that he offered during the summer of 1775 at “the Albertina,” or University of Königsberg (where he lectured from 1755 to 1796), thus provides the reader with a unique glimpse into his development during a period of transition when he was beginning to formulate the critical project and moving away from the “popular philosophy” of the time represented by the two works for which he was most well known prior to the publication of the first critique: the 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and the 1766 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. The text below documents, in particular, evidence of Kant’s serious interest during this period both in the development of the science of physical geography, a subject on which he had been lecturing since the mid-1750s, and in the German reception of the work of the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707–1788), who had been the director of the Jardin du roi in Paris and curator of its museum since 1739—and who, beginning in 1749, had begun publishing a monumental series of studies in natural history not completed until after his death, the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Natural history: General and particular), 50 vols. (Paris, 1749–1804). For readers of this volume, however, the text is probably of greatest immediate interest simply for its frank exposition of a theory of race that is both: (1) an extension of views that Kant had previously sketched in the 1764 Observations—but now further developed with reference to some of the leading scientific controversies of the day, including Buffon’s challenge to the then dominant influence of the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), whose Systema naturae (System of nature), first published in 1735, had gained him, prior to the rise of Buffon’s influence, an international reputation as the leading naturalist of the eighteenth century; and (2) a challenge in its own right to the then current polygenecist view of racial differences, that is, the view that different human races had come into existence as a consequence of different local creations—a theoretical alternative championed during this period by contemporaries of Kant’s as prominent as Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), whose Sketches of the History of Man was published in 1774, Edward Long (1734–1813), whose History of Jamaica was also published in the same year, and even the great French Enlightenment satirist, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778).

For us, of course, polygenism is a widely discredited viewpoint thought to have been defended by only a few presumably serious and well-intentioned scientists in the past century, such as the American palaeontologist Carleton Coon (1904–1981), who deemed the view the “multiregional hypothesis,” but more prominently by some of the most notorious racist ideologues of the past two centuries, including the American physician and surgeon Josiah C. Nott (1804–1873), who, together with Henry Hotz, first translated Joseph-Arthur Gobineau’s classic 1853 essay on racial inequality, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An essay on the inequality of races), into English, the German biologist and arguably proto-Nazi philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1910), the American lawyer and eugenecist Madison Grant (1865–1937), and—of the least scientific credibility—Nazi ideologues such as Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892–1974), and Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946). The connection between the various fields of research that Kant brings together in this text may not then be readily apparent to contemporary readers. For Kant’s original readers, however, primarily university students and colleagues in Königsberg, these various fields were clearly connected, and the research interests reflected in this brief statement of his plan for the lectures he would present in the summer of 1775 would no doubt have been regarded as significant for the advancement of both the natural and the human sciences, as then conceived. Indeed, not to be overlooked in reading the announcement is the fact that the final paragraph points to Kant’s budding interest in developing a field of study separate from physical geography—namely, anthropology (but arguably more in the vein of what we would understand to be physical rather than cultural anthropology), a subject on which Kant had also been lecturing since the early 1770s.

Kant’s criticisms of polygenism—for which he is frequently praised—is then unmistakable in the following text, but so, too, is his firm commitment to the view that the human species, although unified in its descent from a common source, is nevertheless divided into four distinct races, including: “(1) the race of whites; (2) the Negro race; (3) the Hunnish race (Mongolish or Kalmuckish); and (4) the Hinduish, or Hindustanish, race” (see below, 47). Further, according to the view presented in this text, the (supposed) distinctiveness of each of these races is primarily the result of a correlatively distinctive, heritable “fittedness,” or “suitability” (Angemessenheit), that it developed at a certain early stage in its formation as a consequence of its adaptation to the climatic conditions in the region where it first long resided. To explain such development, Kant also sketches a view in this text that he continues to develop and modify throughout the next two decades—according to which the “determinate development” of an organic body, whether plant or animal, is based both on distinctive germs (Keime), “when [that] development concerns a particular part <of the plant or animal>” and on what Kant refers to as natural “endowments,” or “predispositions” (Anlagen), which, as described in this test, control such development as “concerns only the size or relationship of the parts among one another,” a view that will hereafter be referred to more simply as “the germs-and-endowments theory.” This recognition of such capacity for change and adaptation within the human species even leads Kant in this text to come very close to defending the idea that nature provides for the production of “new kinds [Arten]” as a consequence of this capacity to adapt to differing environments, a consequence that he also explicitly describes as necessary for the preservation of the species. But the germs-and-endowments theory that Kant sketches in this text also provides him with sufficient grounds for dismissing this proto-Darwinian conception of species transformation and to conclude instead that what appears to us to be “new kinds” is in fact “nothing other than the deviations and races of the same species whose germs and natural endowments have, in the long course of time, only now and then developed in different ways” (see below, 49–50).

The following text thus clearly reveals a Kant for whom the issue of race was a matter of no little significance in the decades prior to the publication of the first critique. When compared, however, to the earlier Observations and some of the later texts by Kant included in this volume, this text is remarkably free of disparaging remarks about the nonwhite races except for its indulgence in a bit of scientific speculation concerning the formation of the physical features of the Negroes (“which explains the thick, turned up nose and thick, fatty lips”) and an alleged “half-extinguished life power” said to be characteristic of the peoples native to the Americas. Kant nevertheless declares near the end of the text—“although,” he says, “without any prejudice on behalf of the presumptiously greater perfection of one color <when compared to> another”—that, among the “present races,” the race “which … the first human lineal stem stock might well have had the greatest similarity” is surely “the <race of> whites” (see below, 54), because they, he simply asserts, have long resided in a temperate climate, which presumably makes them the most adept in adapting to other climates. As is characteristic, however, of all of the texts in which Kant sketches his views on the differences among the various races that he believes to make up the single human species—rather than concluding his course announcement with comments that might be construed as part of a racist project intended to maintain the superiority of this same white race, this text concludes instead with a short paragraph indicating how Kant might have conceived the further development of the field of physical geography as a part of the emerging critical project and, as previously noted, with a call for the development of anthropology to complement the study of physical geography.

The numbers included in simple brackets below, e.g., [430], indicate the pagination of the text as reproduced in the Akademie edition of Kant’s works (AA 2:429–443), which, however, famously does not clearly distinguish the 1775 course announcement from the 1777 published version of the text; the numbers in parenthesis, e.g., (12), indicate the pagination in the text as reproduced in Immanuel Kant, Werke, vol. 6: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik, ed. Wilhelm Weisschedel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1964), the edition of the text that was consulted most frequently in the preparation of this translation; and the numbers in angle brackets, e.g., <3>, indicate the pagination of the original published version, which is reproduced (with the original pagination) in Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2001).

* * *

1. Of the diversity of races in general

The lecture course I am announcing is to be more a useful entertainment than a tiresome activity; for this reason, the research that accompanies this course announcement will certainly include something for the understanding, but more as a game for it than a deep investigation.

In the animal kingdom, the natural division into species [Gattungen] and kinds [Arten] is based on the common law of reproduction, and the unity of the species is nothing other than the unity of the generative power that is universally in force within a certain manifold diversity [Mannigfaltigkeit] of animals. For this reason, Buffon’s rule that animals that produce fertile young with one another belong to one and the same physical species (no matter how different in form they may be), must—strictly speaking, in distinction from all scholastic <descriptions of> species—be regarded only as a definition of a natural species of animals in general. A scholastic division is based upon classes and divides things up according to similarities, but a natural division is based upon identifying lines of descent [Stämme] that classify the animals according to reproductive relationships. The first of these procures a scholastic system for the memory; the second, a natural system for the understanding. The first has only the intent of bringing the creatures under headings, but the second, of bringing them under laws. <3>

According to this way of thinking, all human beings everywhere on the earth belong to one and the same natural species because they universally produce fertile children with one another, even if we find great differences in their form. From this unity of the natural species, [430] which is tantamount to the unity of its common, effective power of generation [Zeugungskraft], we can adduce only a single natural explanation, namely, that all human beings belong to a single lineal stem stock [Stamm] from which, in spite of their differences, they emerged or (12) at least could have emerged. In the first case, human beings belong not merely to one and the same species but also to one family. In the second case, <human beings are regarded as> similar to one another but not related, and many different local creations must be assumed, a view that needlessly multiplies the number of causes. An animal species that has at the same time a common line of descent is not comprised of different kinds [Arten] (since <being comprised of different kinds> constitutes just the differences of descent); their divergences from one another, when they are heritable, are instead called deviations [Abartungen]. The heritable marks of descent, when they are in accord with their origin, are resemblances [Nachartungen]. If, however, the deviation is no longer capable of producing the original lineal stem stock formation [Stammbildung], it would be called a degeneration [Ausartung].

Among the deviations, that is, the heritable differences of animals that belong to a single line of descent, are those called races. <Races are deviations> preserved invariably over many generations [Zeugungen], both in all transplantations (displacement to other regions) and in interbreeding with other deviations of the same lineal stem stock, that always produce half-breed offspring. Variations [Spielarten] <are also deviations> that, to be sure, preserve invariably the distinguishing difference of their deviation in all transplantations, but they do not necessarily produce half-breeds when they interbreed with others. Those <deviations>, however, which indeed often, but not invariably, resemble one another are called varieties [Varietäten]. Conversely, the deviation that does indeed produce half-breed <offspring> with others, but which gradually dies out through transplantation, may be called a special stock [Schlag].

<Proceeding> in this way, although Negroes and whites are certainly not different kinds of human beings (since they belong to one line of descent), they &l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Introduction: Recent Work on Kant’s Race Theory / The Texts / The Translations
• Chapter 1: Of the Different Human Races: An Announcement for Lectures in Physical Geography in the Summer Semester 1775
• Chapter 2: Of the Different Human Races (1777)
• Chapter 3: From Geographical History of Human Beings and the Universally Dispersed Quadrupeds (1778–1783)
• Chapter 4: Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (1785)
• Chapter 5: Something More About the Human Races (1786)
• Chapter 6: On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (1788)
• Chapter 7: Of the Varieties and Deviate Forms of Negroes (1790)
• Chapter 8: From Concerning the Kantian Principle in Natural History: An Attempt to Treat this Science Philosophically (1796)
• Chronology
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• BackCover