While some of them harbored racial prejudices common to their time, not one of those people would have said “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.”
Hell, of the two people on that list with the least modern outlooks, Lincoln considered Frederick Douglass to be one of the most admirable men of his day, and Jefferson [probably] conducted an interracial romance.
And it’s outright slander to attribute that sort of thinking to Gandhi.
Role-playing games?
“Put down that shiv; let’s settle this with twenty-sided dice.”
It’s been established elsewhere on these boards that I don’t do role-playing games. The categorical imperative forbids it.
Considering that the above quote is from one of Kant’s works on aesthetics, a field which belongs to philosophy, and that his major premise, there is no such as African works of art was wrong even then, I think it gives us all the reason in the world to doubt his philosophy.
I’m surprised to see how many people here think philosophy begins and ends with ethics, the most schoolmarmish of all the subdisciplines of philosophy. No serious person does ethics anymore. Meta-ethics, sure. But the ethicists are all too Laura Schlessingery or, worse, Leon Kass-ish.
Okay, I’ll bite. In what way is ethics “schoolmarmish”? Because frankly I have no idea what that adjective is supposed to mean in this context.
From my point of view, society would not be one whit different if either 1) everyone read Kant, or b) no one read Kant. Perhaps a hijack, but the OP asked if his racist writings would change our opinions of Kant’s philosophy.
What you are stating is not an opinion of Kant’s philosophy – it seems more a dismissal of the social relevance/importance/influence of philosophy as such.
I didn’t ask about society. I asked about each person’s opinion.
IMMANUEL KANT: The chicken, being an autonomous being, chose to cross the road of his own free will.
Per dictionary.com:
Schoolmarm: a female schoolteacher, especially of the old-time country school type, popularly held to be strict and priggish.
How is ethics schoolmarmish? See Leon Kass. And in general, the whole enterprise of ethical philosophy seems to me to be mostly ad hoc ways to justify one’s own preconceptions in ponderous language. (Id.)
For most ethicists, the test of an ethical theory seems to be whether it comes to the correct, pre-existing (and therefore pre-philosophical) conclusions. There are all too few ethical surprises, in the sense that you almost never see someone cogitate “Well, all this time I thought X was immoral. But starting with my ethical premises and tracing them out to their logical conclusions, I see know that X is, in fact, fine.” Or the other way around.
I suppose you could say this actually happens all the time. After all, popular ideas regarding the treatment of women, or people of color, or gays and lesbians have vastly changed. The thing is, I don’t think ethical philosophy had that much to do with that.
But in general, I think most professional philosopher stay away for ethics as such because it seems a little advice column-y. In fact, I think the NYT has (or had) a column called “The Ethicist.” Meta-ethics is seen (rightly, I say) as a worthier pursuit.
Of course, this could all just be my own chauvinism.
I think you are correct. My hijack was uncalled for and I apologize.
The way I see it is, if Kant’s philosophy was actually any good, he’d have been a better person. So yes, his philosophy is suspect. Just like I wouldn’t trust a 200kg person for diet advice, or a Catholic priest for (adult) sex tips, so would I not completely trust the work of a person who couldn’t reason that racism is wrong.
Note that this doesn’t mean that I think we should a priori just reject everything Kant says. Just that we should be more suspect of him than if he was not, himself, immoral. It makes all his insights fall under the “extraordinary claims” category for me (not that I hold Kant in any regard as a philosopher).
And yet, I love Nietzsche. Go figure.
Why? Is the wrongness of racism self evident? Kant, as was said, spent all his life in Koeningsburg. He didn’t know anyone of different races. So, if he wanted to know about the “Negroes of Africa”, his only real source of information about them was what people told him. And so if Hume is saying that there are no blacks who have ever produced anything superior in art or science, does Kant have any reason not to believe him? Does he have any evidence that they have? And it’s not absurd on the face of it to postulate that somewhere, there could exist some race of mentally inferior half men.
If I were going to take a position here, I’d say that it’s not the odiousness of Kant’s remarks that’s at issue: it’s the naivete. The lack of worldliness. If he hasn’t troubled himself (or been able to) to leave his home town ever in his life, but yet is arrogant enough to declaim on a subject he knows nothing about, it calls his judgment on matters of morality & human nature into question.
Now, that doesn’t matter for some parts of his philosophy: specifically the epistemology & aesthetics. But I can see how somehow who respected his ethical work might be taken aback by it. Of course, I can also imagine the converse.
Leaving aside the anti-clerical slur (not all priests are pedophiles, guys, really!), I think Mr Dibble was on the money when he brought up advice on sex coming from celibate priests.
It’s a mistake of fact, not of theory. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
I’ve never been to Australia, but I rely on the tales of others as to whether such a place exists and what its denizens are like.
In Kant’s day, ignorance as to the actual nature of Africans was more excusable. Everyone, with reasonably rare exceptions, has sex; visiting sub-saharan Africa would be the experience of relatively few. Many of those (slavers and the like) had a vested interest in lying about the nature of Africans, to make them appear “primitive” and “subhuman” to justify their own depredations. Kant was no doubt an unwitting recepient of this.
Wait, how could Kant reason that racism is wrong? In ethical terms, his philosophy might provide no grounds for regarding negroes as anything other than free-willed ends-in-themselves exactly like other human individuals. So? Be careful not to misread the excerpt in the OP as expressing approval for slavery. Kant was very much against it, I believe.
OTOH, AFAIK, nothing about Kant’s philosophy (which I know only from second-hand summaries) implies or assumes that all human individuals, or all human races or nationalities, are equal in their mental abilities or in their mental heredity, nor in any other qualities that might or might not have a hereditary element.* If A is more intelligent than B – or wiser, or stronger, or kinder, or more honest – it does not alter their mutual ethical duties, except in the sense that it enlarges the scope of A’s duty to do what he can in a given situation. And, Kant had no reason to believe anything but the conventional wisdom that negroes were mentally inferior by heredity to whites. How would he have been exposed to a contradictory opinion? Most white Abolitionists believed that. They saw blacks as equals spiritually, ethically – but not mentally or socially. And I wonder if Kant ever even met a negro in Konigsberg, East Prussia, which city he never, ever left so long as he lived.
Kant was one of the first to try to devise a scientific theory of human races. Perhaps he should have done it more . . . scientifically. But, come on, dude died in 1804, the very concept of the application of scientific study to humans as humans was new, anthropology was too new a discipline to merit the name, psychology would not be conceived of for decades. Nobody takes Freud’s theories seriously any more either, but he does deserve credit for scouting out the territory; and Kant was at least doing something like serious anthropology for his time. Think of a line leading from Kant and some perhaps like-minded contemporaries to the regrettable tradition of scientific racism – and another line, forking off from the first, leading to modern scientific anthropology.
Kant was not, himself, immoral. Doubt he ever wronged a soul in his life. Kant subscribed to the conventional opinion of his society on a point which, in hindsight, appears so utterly wrong, and the wrongness of which has occasioned so much evil in the world, that the very opinion seems tainted was evil. But, in and of itself, the opinion that one race is mentally inferior to another is not evil; it is merely wrong.
Nietzsche is pietzsche! 
I don’t have a strong opinion on this question, but I thought I might pass along a relevant comment from the noted historian Nell Irvin Painter. It’s from an interview with her at HistoryAccess.com, which, I will note, is pretty good. 
Full interview:
http://historyaccess.com/nellirvinpainter.html
Q. You write in one of your essays that “Western knowledge is not to be trusted; everything in it needs careful inspection for insults and blind spots.” I wonder if you could elaborate on that statement. My understanding is, the essence of Western knowledge is careful inspection of all the evidence, critical thinking, so I’m not clear what you’re saying there.
A. Let’s take, for instance, somebody like Kant, who is revered in the United States and especially in France and Germany - gosh, you know, any discussion of anything must start with Kant! But Kant was a misogynist. Kant assumed that people of African descent were almost not people. So what he says about humanity cannot, to my eyes, be taken on face value. That’s what I mean. Just because somebody with a big name like Kant or Nietzsche or Hume wrote it, doesn’t mean that for me it’s all true. So what this boils down to in terms of scholarship is not just looking at the secondary sources but also looking at the primary sources. It means taking the time to get through the material, more time than it might take if I felt that I could believe everything somebody wrote. That would be like reading Ulrich B. Phillips and thinking, “Oh yeah! Columbia University historian…very careful guy…he must be OK!” (Laughs.)
No it isn’t. They all considered there were differences in temperament and mental traits between races, just as Kant did according to that paragraph.
Reported (#58).