Jean-Jacques Rousseau, champion of the Enlightenment, was on a mission to see that young men were protected from their base instincts: “Whatever we may do, a young man’s worst enemy is himself, and this is an enemy we cannot avoid”, he warned …
Therefore, watch carefully over the young man; he can protect himself from all other foes, but it is for you to protect him against himself. Never leave him night or day, or at least share his room; never let him go to bed till he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he wakes …
G.W. F. Hegel had very clear ideas on the educational and intellectual abilities of women. Observe:
Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts. Women may have happy inspirations, taste, elegance, but they have not the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant. The animal corresponds more closely to the character of the man, the plant to that of the woman …
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 …
John Locke is rumoured to have confidently reported the existence of mermaids and seamen. It certainly appears so, according to this section from Book III of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
There are fishes that have wings, and are not strangers to the airy region: and there are some birds that are inhabitants of the water, whose blood is cold as fishes, and their flesh so like in taste that the scrupulous are allowed them on fish-days. There are animals so near of kin both to birds and beasts that they are in the middle between both: amphibious animals link the terrestrial and aquatic together; seals live at land and sea, and porpoises have the warm blood and entrails of a hog; not to mention what is confidently reported of mermaids, or sea-men …
It is widely believed that Pythagoras thought it was a bad idea to eat beans. As all his writings are lost, there is no direct evidence. However, the Pythagoreans by all reports followed the injunction, as Bertrand Russell reported, although he didn’t seem to take it all very seriously:
[Pythagoras] founded a religion on which the the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans. His religion was embodied in a religious order, which, here and there, acquired rule of the state … But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled.
Aristotle had some interesting ideas on the role of the brain:
For the brain, or in creatures without a brain that which corresponds to it, is of all parts of the body the coolest. Therefore, as moisture turned into vapour by the sun’s heat is, when it has ascended to the upper regions, cooled by the coldness of the latter, and becoming condensed, is carried downwards, and turned into water once more; just so the excrementitious evaporation, when carried up by the heat to the region of the brain, is condensed into a ‘phlegm’ (which explains why catarrhs are seen to proceed from the head); while that evaporation which is nutrient and not unwholesome, becoming condensed, descends and cools the hot. The tenuity or narrowness of the veins about the brain itself contributes to its being kept cool, and to its not readily admitting the evaporation …
Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked in his Tractatus that:
4.1122 Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science …
A short quote, but it’s fairly to-the-point kind of text. The Tractatus-era Wittgenstein had a very narrow idea of the role of philosophy …
Friedrich Nietzsche had some interesting ideas about The Origin of the Ears:
Night and music. – The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been; in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight …
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 …
In his 1844 anti-authoritarian critique of Western society, The Ego and His Own, Max Stirner argued that the incest taboo was merely a Christian prejudice that needs to be discarded along with the rest of Christian morality:
Take notice how a “moral man” behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God and throws of Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty, then a moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one’s being allowed to touch is sister as wife also. An whence this shudder? Because he believes in those moral commandments …
Bishop Berkeley was convinced of the medicinal value of tar water. He even wrote a treatise on the matter, a “chain of philosophical reflections that start with tar and end with the Trinityâ€. Of course he did. Then he wrote a poem on tar. He called it:
On Tar
Hail vulgar juice of never-fading pine!
Cheap as thou art, thy virtues are divine …