A curiosity in my webtraffic stats has brought something to my attention: a recent post on a racialist hate site has lifted the race-related comments of Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Kant that I’ve collected here and posted them in a radically different context …
The following excerpt from ‘Of National Characteristics’ finds Kant in something of a quandary. He recognises merit in the sexist bigotry of a “Negro carpenter,” but can’t bring himself to overlook the fact that the fellow “was quite black from head to foot” …
Kant famously wrote that Hume’s philosophy roused him from a ‘dogmatic slumber’. However, in the following passage from his early work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) Kant, far from being awakened, joins the Scot for a dogmatic lie-in:
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was every found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world …
Similar to his contemporaries, Schopenhauer provided an authoritative pseudo-scientific justification of racism that left no doubt who was at the top of the racial order:
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands …
G.W.F Hegel had an expansive philosophical system that incorporated the entirety of humanity and human history. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t room for Africans:
The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example, God, or Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting. The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state …
John Stuart Mill’s name is virtually synonymous with liberalism. He did, after all, write the book. What, then, do we make of this extract from his 1861 work Considerations on Representative Government?
When proper allowance has been made for geographical exigencies, another more purely moral and social consideration offers itself. Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people …
David Hume was a man respected for his clarity of thought and positive scepticism. His scepticism, however, did not extend to all the prejudices of his time:
I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences …
In response to a recent scandal over the racist and misogynistic comments of a white American talk-show host, respected gender theorist Snoog Dogg (Doggystyle, The Doggfather) dismissed claims that his own philosophical position bears some similarity to the now retired (and disgraced) DJ. Dogg, known for thoughtful ruminations on gender issues For All My Niggaz and Bitches, Bitch Please and I Miss That Bitch, made the following subtle distinctions to MTV in an apparently impassioned phone-in …