In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant writes:
Now, I have ranted long and boringly on my contempt for Kant in general, so for me this tidbit just gives me another reason to put him on my time-travel-[del]assassination[/del] murder list. But for those of you inclined to think well of him in other ways: does the above passage (and others like it) lessen your opinion of his philosophy?
Please note that I don’t mean his character, by the way. It’s your opinion of work that interests me.
Why do people think that racism is so bad that it immediately negates any other qualities about a person? This is such a small-minded outlook. Most of the people from Kant’s time also believed that women were second-class citizens whose only real purpose was to cook, clean and bear children. Does that also make every philosopher from before the women’s movement a crackpot? All of these men were products of their time and even the most educated of them still probably subscribed to the popular views of the day when it came to race.
I held Kant in contempt long before I was aware of his racism. Therefore the fact that I judge him to be a racist (or, rather, to have held racist opinions at one point in his life; he later changed his mind in some ways) cannot be seen to be origin of my contempt.
It was fairly common among the intellectual class but certainly not universal. There were some people in the eighteenth century who had a perfectly honest and correct viewpoint concerning the races. For example, John Wesley’s Thoughts on Slavery thoroughly dismantles all notions of white supremacy and all related attempts to justify slavery.
However, to understand why rationalist thinkers like Hume and Kant would say such things you need to put it in the context of the times and understand what they were opposed to. Rival philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau were, at the time, launching broadsides against western civilization. Rousseau promoted the ‘nobel savage’ myth, that people are happier without government, private property, education, and so forth. I’d guess that the Kant quote above was somehow tied in with a response against that idea.
You answered your own question. Somehow, the rest of us manage to manage to study Kant’s philosophy eithout finding terrible coded racism. He did not, as far as I can recall, claim that the categorical imperative applied to everyone except Africans.
Kant was not exactly some terrible monster hunting down philosophy students, even black ones. Frankly, I haven’t heard your rants on Kant, but I don’t much care to. I’ve seen dozens of people complain about him, and I’ve not seen one yet whose criticisms didn’t slap them back in the face if well considered.
I can post a long-winded list of every figure in history who held some racist view, or some other view no thought unpleasant. {Specifically, all of them.) I judge them by their actions to the extent I judge them at all.
I did not say that there was coded racism in Kant’s other writing. Please do not imply that I did, because that is not my position. Nor is it my position that Kant’s racism invalidates his moral philosophy. I cannot – no, scratch that. I decline to assert a position on that issue, because since I already have a strong negative feeling on Kant, my opinion is already colored.
Incidentally, I should have been more specific in the OP and said I had in mind Kant’s moral philosophy as opposed to his epistemology or aesthetics; that was careless of me.
I won’t rant on Kant here. I’ll just say that I think his work on ethics is useless, because it is utterly impractical. I don’t think any ethical system which, if followed, predictably and regularly produces results I’ll deem bad (telling the truth to a prospective murderer about his victim’s location) is pointless. Ethics, it seems to me, has to concern itself with real-world results.
Actually, now that I consider it, your post does not reflect half so badly on Kant as it does on you. It bespeaks a certain fanaticism and bad judgement to publicly declare your contempt for a man long dead whom you never met in any case, and who was perhaps the most rational and complete moral scholar in human history.
Wait, you’re claiming that Kant’s system of moral ethics is impractical?
Good God man! Its practicality is one of the best features. It does not require the minute gradiations of imposible judgements as utilitarianism, while offering a far firmer basis for decision making unlike Virtue ethics. Moreover, it’s definitely related to what humans often do anyway. It managed to be a possible advance of moral philosophy without being a mere passing revolution. It offered the active man and the thinker a tool, oine which wasn’t all that different from our natural inclination.
Furthermore, you’re either implying that racism is inherent in, or that being a racist renders all ideas one has innately bad. I can’t actually decide which one of those implications reflects worse on you. Both are bad logic at its best, and I really, really doubt you’d want your thought approached that way. Nor would I want mine judged so harshly.
Seriosuly, I’m really curious how you could develop such visceral hatred of* Immanuel Kant*. It’s like publicly declaring, “Dammit! Screw that John Locke.” Or perhaps, “What kind of fool really thinks that Sun Tzu was such a great guy anyhow!”
My view on this issue is perhaps weird and self-contradictory, but here it is anyway:
His racism calls him as a philosopher into question. It doesn’t call his philosophy into question.
That is, given his views on race, I’m less likely to take time out of my busy schedule of reading the latest Patrick Rothfuss novel to consider Kant’s views on other important issues. He sounds like an ass, and I don’t want to waste my time reading an ass’s brayings (for the hyperbole-impaired: this is hyperbole.)
However, if I do decide to read his views, it’d be a mistake to judge them as faulty based on his faulty views on race.
This is an important broad principle. Given the enormous amount of information available to me, I need to choose what information to consider; failing to make such a decision is literally impossible. The reputation of the source of information is a very useful criterion, among other criteria–but it’s not the only one. Another important criterion is the quality of other information I’ve considered from the same source.
Kant has a stellar reputation as a philosopher, and that inclines me to read his stuff. The sample you’ve given of his writings inclines me not to read his stuff. (And, of course, my essential laziness inclines me not to read him–but that broad inclination applies to most people who aren’t writing about dragons and werewolves and shit).
But once I do decide to consider a particular set of information, I need to judge it on its merits–especially when we’re talking about information that’s based on reasoning, not facts.
I’m not implying anything, as I have not taken a position on the issue. I try to avoid rhetorical questions, because I find them, if not exactly dishonest, certainly irritating. (I don’t always succeed, by the way.)
Having written that, I would say that racism is sometimes of import in judging a figure’s work, and sometimes not. Let’s imagine, for instance, that Paul Dirac was a racist. (I have no reason to think that he was; I chose him because he’s a reasonably recent scientist who is also dead.) That would have no impact on the meaningfulness of his professional work, because he was a physicst, and his opinions of human diversity have nothing to do with his field. But since Kant was largely concerned with ethics and behavior, his racism or lack thereof may well be important, because racism is not only a highly immoral position, but also one which broad exposure to humanity and honest examination of that which one sees should cure one of. Kant being a racist could be seen as akin to Dirac believing in astrology.
If I had meant that Kant’s racist writings render the rest of his work suspect, I would have done so. But I didn’t. I asked a question. In fact I don’t feel that I should hold an opinion on this issue, because I so disapprove of Kant’s ethics that it renders any answer I could give meaningless. I was soliciting the opinion of persons who do not share my opinion of his ethics.
Seriously, I must wonder that you do not recognize a remark claiming that I plan to assassinate Kant via time-travel as anything but hyperbole. That said, people have passionate feelings about long-dead figures all the time. If I wanted to get punched in the face, all I’d need to do is wander the streets of Memphis calling Jesus Christ a child molester; someone would clean my clock within half an hour.
Skald the Rhymer, you realize that, sadly, views like this were not uncommon among the intellectual elite (and who knows what was in the heads of the common people at that time). Voltaire is as bad as Kant on that subject. And there are probably several more prominent figures.
I doubt any philosopher from more than a century ago shared modern liberal values. Plato thought women were second to men, Aquinas supported slavery, Kant thought black people were inferior. Their work has to be read in the context of the time it was written.
I’m a little confused by the excerpt in the OP. How much of that is what Kant says Hume says, and how much is what Kant himself believes?
I also am somewhat taken aback by Skald’s contempt for Kant.
I’ll just say, I can imagine that I, myself, could easily have been racist if I had lived in a time and place where I never had the opportunity to meet any actual black people, or at least not any who’d had much in the way of education or opportunities. If this is true of Kant, I’m inclined to cut him some slack.
Well, Kant wasn’t a particularly well traveled man.
Let’s keep in mind we’re talking about a man who died in Prussia in 1804, in the same town he was born in 79 years prior. In fact he never went more than a day’s ride away from his home town in the 79 years he was on this earth.
So I think we can perhaps forgive Kant for holding views that are a bit wrong about a people he probably never had any interaction with in his entire life. How many Africans came through Königsberg in the 18th century?
We’re not talking about an American slave owner that had daily interactions with blacks, we’re talking about a German scholar who literally never traveled anywhere in his entire life. In an age before television, mass communications, in an age in which the vast majority of people Kant would ever see, even in the market of his relatively busy town, would be people born in Prussia (but one country in Germany at the time.)
Anyway, if Kant’s system of ethics in any way meaningfully touched on race, his views on race may require us to reevaluate that system of ethics. Based on what I’ve read of Kant it does not really touch upon race at all, it is instead focused on more generalized ethical principles that are quite deliberately an attempt at a universal ethical system. Not a system which makes different evaluations based on race.
Further, if we let things like racism really impact how we look at famous scholars from history then prior to about 1700 it is essentially absolutely impossible to then learn from any person in all of human history. Prior to 1900 it is still the case that probably 95% of the famous scholars were racist.
There’s nothing wrong with saying “look, people were fucked up and held fucked up views back then, but those people still could do stuff that was important and worthy of study and consideration.”
It’s also worth mentioning the information available to Kant in the 18th century.
Here in this time period, let’s say I was just incredibly provincial and lived in some small town in Montana and never left it, in eighty years. Even back when I was born I would have had access to newspapers and periodicals from all over, books at public libraries or that I could order, radio, television, later the internet.
I would, while perhaps never exposed to people of another race, have at least had access to information that wasn’t totally batshit wrong to begin with.
Many of the depictions of native Africans that were made by European colonizers are essentially as far off base from reality as anything could be. They were often filled in with wild conjectures, fantastical tales and lies. Additionally the Europeans exploiting Africans by taking land and slaves weren’t anthropologists trying to study a culture or learn anything about it. To them all they saw were people that wore small bits of clothing, didn’t have many of the modern niceties Europeans had, and certainly didn’t have the sort of complex societies. To the unrefined European eye, they were basically looking at a people they considered to be like animals.
It’s only through years of rigorous study in the 20th century that researchers have found out that hey, there actually were some bonafide African civilizations that were very advanced for there time. Additionally, they found in the oral histories, folk tales, ceremonies, and practices of even the HG Africans that they had more sophisticated and “worthy” civilizations than Europeans of the 18th century would have seen. It takes a certain perspective and philosophical bent to even want to look for that stuff, though.
Kant’s information on African peoples would have essentially come primarily from people who were actively exploiting them, and thus not people who were really interested in trying to understand their civilization or them as human beings.
Arguably the most famous philosopher teaching in the U.S., though he is not an American, today, once said in a seminar, “From Kant to Goebbels, it’s a straight line.”
He wasn’t talking about Kant’s personal views, but the mainline in his philosophy which many consider abhorrent. It has to do with the way the mind relates or does not relate to the real world, the world of naive physics, the world upon which creatures inhabiting different niches act and in which they participate.
I admit I did throw away, metaphorically, all of my Heidegger after learning more how he treated his better, and his teacher, Edmund Husserl – but it might as well be because he was a Nazi pig. Perhaps that too. His philosophy, however, is not always filthy German Nazi shit, but it inhabits the same strain of filthy German philosophical shit since Kant at least. Not related, that I can see, but they might as well be.
[Not intended to slur Germans, just the mainline of their academic philosophical tradition. Frege, for example, he’s OK. There is also brilliant work being done in Germany today and for the past half-century or more, it goes without saying, by those who reject the speculative and Kantian traditions].
When someone spouts something mistaken about a subject they know next to nothing about, is that cause to audit their tax return because they are prone to being mistaken? No. It isn’t relevant except that he was wrong on that subject. As far as the Critique of Pure Reason goes, Russell, Whitehead and Godel came as close to a mathematical proof as possible. You have to accept some axioms are true that cannot be proven as true. From a God fearing moralist point of view, which Kant was, you must accept God and moral authority. P.S.: I think that is what the CofPR meant, I’m not sure.