kant racist ld

Kantian Anthropology is Racist (A Philosophical Document by Dr. Tommy J. Curry)

NOT MINE NOT MINEKantianism Racist Shell………1-2Race is a Transcendental Category (Can’t be repaired or amended)…….3-4Frontline to Kant’s Racism/Anthropology is not Central to his Moral Philosophy…..5-7Extensions to Kant’s Anthropology is Key to his Moral Philosophy……8-9Kant’s Racism is not typical even of his time….10Frontline to Pauline Kleingold’s “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race”…..11-12

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1. Kantianism is anti-Black racism: This is not about Kant’s personal views of non-European peoples, this is about his transcendental system. Kant’s transcendental philosophy depends on the character and capacity individuals have for moral reasoning. Black people may have value, but they lack moral worth and the character necessary for rational moral thought in Kant’s critical philosophy. Kantianism denies Black, Brown, and Indigenous humanity for white superiority.

Eze—1997 (Emmanuel, Professor of Philosophy @DePaul University, “The Color of Reason” in PostColonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader [Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1997], 103-131

Over and beyond Buffon or Linnaeus, Kant, in his transcendental philosophy (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason), describes ways of orienting oneself geographically in space, mathematically in space and time, and, logically, in the construction of both categories into other sorts of consistent whole. In the Observations on the Feeling o/the Beautiful and Sublime, a work which

ought to be considered as primarily anthropological, Kant shows the theoretic transcendental philosophical position at work when he attempts to work out and establish how a particular (moral) feeling relates to humans generally, and how it differs between men and women, and among different races. For example, "feeling" as itappears in the title of the work refers to a specific refinement of character which is universally properly human: that is, belonging to human nature as such. And we recall that for Kant "human nature" resides in the developmental expression of rational-moral "character." Since it is character that constitutes the specificity of human nature, "human nature proper," then whatever dignity or moral worth the individual" may have is derived from the fact that one has struggled to develop one's character, or one's· humanity, as universal. Kant states:

In order to assign man into a system of living nature, and thus to characterize him, no other alternative is left than this: that he has a character which he himself creates by being capable of perfecting himself after the purposes chosen by himself. Through this, he, as an animal endowed with reason (animale rationabile) can make out of himself a rational animal (animale rationale).

"Character," as the moral formation of personality, seems to be that on which basis humans have worth and dignity,and one consequence of this is that those peoples and "races" to whom Kant assigns minimal or pseudo rational-moral capacity - either because of

their non-"white" skin color (evidence of lack of "true talent") or because of the presence of phlogiston in their blood or both - are seriously naturally or inherently inferior to those who have the "gift" of higher rational attainments, evidence of which is seen in their superior "white" skin color, the absence of phlogiston in their blood, and the superior European civilization While the non-European may have "value," it is not certain that he or she has true "worth." According to Kant:everything has either a value or a worth. What has value has a substitute which can replace it as its equivalent; but whatever is, on the other hand, exalted above all values, and thus lacks an equivalent ... has no merely relative value, that is, a price, but rather an inner worth,. that is dignity ... Hence morality, and humanity, in so far as it is capable of morality, can alone possess dignity.

If non-white peoples lack "true" rational character (Kant believes, for example, that the character of the

Mohr is made up of imagination rather than reason) and therefore lack "true" feeling and moral sense, then they do not have "true" worth, or dignity. The black person, for example, can accordingly be denied full humanity, since full and "true" humanity accrues only to the white European. For Kant European humanity is the humanity par excellence.

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2. The development of Kant’s Practical Philosophy in Towards a Perpetual Peace (1970) entertains genocide. Kantian Cosmopolitanism denies the desirability of racial intermixing, upholds the distinctiveness of the white race, and theorizes from the inevitable extermination of all non-whites.

Robert Bernasconi—2002 (Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, eds. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott [Malden: Blackwell Publishers],

The question arises as to what kind of cosmopolitanism Kant envisaged that would leave the races intact, especially given that each of the races was to a greater or lesser extent assigned a climate or part of the world to which they were best suited. In “Perpetual Peace” Kant had remarked that the desire of every state to dominate the whole world is frustrated by the fact that nature wills it otherwise. The intermixing (Vermischung)of peoples is prevented insofar as linguistic and religious differences remain intact (AA, VIII, p. 367; PW, pp. 113–14).49 Kant said nothing in this place about the fact that on his view nature also does not will mixing the races. Nevertheless, he was aware that through conquest mixing had taken place. Kant’s own model of cosmopolitanism seems to have been focused on trade rather than on conquest or colonialism, but a phrase from note 1,520 of the Reflexionen zur Anthropologie suggests another, more sinister, resolution. Kant wrote: “All races will be extinguished . . . only not that of the Whites” (AA, XV/2, p. 878). Kant, who had presented the races as products of the foresight of nature, and wanted them to retain their integrity, seems to have reversed himself by suggesting that only Whites would survive. It is a scenario opened up perhaps by the knowledge, already available to him, of how non-White civilizations collapsed, by conquest or disease, on contact with Whites. We should beware overdetermining the meaning of Kant’s note, but it suggests that, faced with two ways in which the foresight of Providence that had produced the races might be frustrated, Kant was more ready to contemplate the extinction of all the races except that of the Whites, rather than see the disappearance of all the races through race mixing. Kant himself did not explain how the races apart from the Whites would be extinguished, nor does he repeat this thought elsewhere to the best of my knowledge. Rather than finding an attempted resolution to the problems of reconciling cosmopolitanism with a philosophy of racial inequality, what one finds in Kant is a dead end that, contrary to the impulse governing his idea of a universal history, suggests the destructiveness of human affairs.

This idea of the extinction of whole races would be used a century later to uphold White purity and comfort those who could not imagine a world in which people of all races could live in close contact together in peace. Kant’s note shows that as soon as the idea of race is juxtaposed with the new discipline of a philosophy of history, it invites “solutions” that involve wholesale extermination. The fact that Kant did not solve the problem of how, within the framework of a universal history, cosmopolitanism can be reconciled with a view of White superiority meant that he left to posterity a dangerous legacy. Kant’s note had no historical impact, but he was at very least an articulate spokesman for a framework that had disastrous consequences. One would expect both philosophical and political problems to arise from a view in which all human beings are divided into discrete groups, but where the members of one of the groups alone is in possession of all the qualities and talents necessary to flourish, so that the members of the other groups have no genuine contribution to make. If, as in this case, procreation between the allegedly superior group and any of the other groups leads to a loss of the qualities that distinguish the former group, then matters are much worse. But this was the view that Kant sought to legitimate from a scientific perspective.

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Kant’s belief in Black inferiority is a transcendental grounding of his moral philosophy. He believes that reason itself demands recognizing the racial inferiority of the African such that it gives credence to the transcendental grounding of European reason itself.


Kant's idea of the constitutively anthropological feeling thus derives from hisconception of the reality of "humanity itself," for "feeling" reveals a specific,universal character of the human essence. Kant stated: "I hope that 1 expressthis completely when I say that [the feeling of the sublime] is the feeling of thebeauty and worth of human nature." Accordingly, in his racial classifications,when he writes in the Observations that the "African has no feeling beyond the trifling," Kant, consistent with his earlier doctrines, is implying that the Africanbarely has character, is barely capable of moral action,' and therefore is lesshuman. Kant derived from Hume "proof' for the assignment of this subhumanstatus to "the Negro":

Mr Hume challenges anyone to cite a simple example in which a Negro has showntalents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who aretransported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have beenset free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great inart or science or any other praiseworthy quality; even among the whites somecontinually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earnrespect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between the two races ofman, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in' color.

Although Kant cites Hume as the confirming authority for his view of the black,a careful 'reading shows that Kant, as with Linnaeus' system, considerablyelaborated upon Hume by philosophically elevating Hume's literary andpolitical speculations about "the Negro" and providing these speculations withtranscendental justifications. For example, when Hume argues that "theNegro" was "naturally" inferior to "the White,'~ he does not attempt a transcendental grounding of either "nature" or "human nature," while Kantdoes. "Human nature," for Kant, constitutes the unchanging patterns of specie classesso that racial differences and racial classifications are based a priori onthe reason (Ve~unfi) of the natural scientist .

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There is no repairing of Kant’s system. Kant believes that race is a transcendental—they don’t get to revise Kant’s metaphysics in their attempts to win. The same rationality that allows us to intuit the categorical imperative is the same critical philosophy demanding race designation Blackness as inferior.


Kant's classificatory work on race, however, ought to be situated within the context of prior works in the area, such as the descriptions of the "system of nature" that the natural historians Buffon, Linnaeus, and the French doctor Francois Bernier had done in the preceding years. Buffon, for example, had classified races geographically, using principally physical characteristics such as skin color, height, and other bodily features as indices. According to Buffon, there was a common, homogeneous human origin so that the differences in skin and other bodily features were attributable to climatic and environmental factors that caused a single human "specie" to develop different skin and bodily features. In Buffon's view, the concepts of "species" and "genra" applied in racial classifications are merely artificial, for such classes do not exist in nature: "in reality only individuals exist in nature. Kant accepted the geographical classification of races, but he rejected Buffon's idea that "races" were not specie classes - in which case the distinctions would be historical, contingent and ungrounded as logical or metaphysical necessity. According to Kant, the geographical distribution of races is a fact, but the differences among races are permanent and fixed, and transcend climatic or any other environmentalfactors. Race and racial differences are due to original specie- or class-specific variations in "natural endowments" so that there is a natural "germ" (Keim) and "talent" (Anlage) for each (separate) race.

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1. Kant’s anthropology is central to his critical philosophy. The distinctions Kant makes based on race determine the moral capacities and potential of non-whites. The practical morality of Kant is an anthropological question concerning “what man makes of himself” what he/she ought to do.

Eze—1997 (Emmanuel, Professor of Philosophy @DePaul University, “The Color of Reason” in PostColonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader [Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1997], 103-131, 107-108.

The distinction between "what Nature makes of man" and "what man makes of himself' is central to understanding the relationship between Kant's anthropology and geography. While one generates pure (scientific, causal) knowledge of nature, the other generates pragmatic (moral, self-improvement) knowledge of the human. In the study ofthe human, however, both disciplines merge, or rather intersect, since "man" is at once physical (bodily) and spiritual (psychological, moral). Thus, for Kant, "geography" can be either physical or moral. In its physical aspect, geography studies humans in their physical/bodily (for example, "racial," skin-color) varieties, whereas in its moral aspects, geography studies human customs and unreflectively held mores which Kant calls "second nature.” "Anthropology," too, can be either pragmatic or physiological, as it studies humans as moral agents or as part of physical nature. In sum: pragmatic anthropology studies the inner realm of morality, the realm of freedom; physiological anthropology encompasses humans as part of unconscious nature; and geography studies humans both in their empirical (bodily/physical) nature and in their' collective, customary aspects. Or stated otherwise, physical geography studies outer nature and provides knowledge of humans as external bodies: race, color, height, facial characteristics, and so forth, while pragmatic anthropology provides knowledge of the inner, morally conditioned structure of humans (practical philosophy provides moral knowledge and orientation as to what the destiny of human existence and action ought to be). The interrelatedness of geography and anthropology and moral philosophy is evident throughout Kant's lectures. As late as 1764, Kant himself had not separated anthropology from geography and thus included "moral anthropology" under the broader

designation of "moral and political geography." Moral philosophy presupposes physical geography and anthropology, for while the first two observe and provide knowledge of "actual behavior of human beings and formulates the practical and subjective rules which that behavior obeys," moral philosophy seeks to establish "rules of right conduct, that is, what ought to happen.

Kant's study of anthropology is not peripheral to his critical philosophy. We recall that Kant often summarized his philosophy as the attempt to find answers to the "two things that fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, namely: the starry heavens above and the moral law within." While the "starry heavens above" refers to physical nature, under the causal law (and studied by physics), "the moral law within"is the domain of freedom, of the human individual as a moral entity. For Kant, Newtonian physics had achieved spectacular success in terms of understanding the deterministic laws of physical nature, but philosophy had been unable to establish an equivalent necessary and secure grounding for morality and moral action. Faced with the metaphysical "dogmatism" of the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz) on the one hand and the debilitating skepticism of Hume's empiricism on the other, Kant, against the rationalists, argues that the mathematical model they propose as ideal for metaphysical and moral inquiry is untenable primarily because mathematics studies ideal entities, moving from definitions by purely rational arguments to apodictic conclusions. Metaphysics, K;mt argues, must proceed analytically (especially after Hume's attack on metaphysical dogmatism) in order to clarify what is given indistinctly in empirical experience. "[T]he true method of metaphysics," Kant concludes, "is basically the same as that introduced by Newton into natural science and which had such useful consequences in that field.

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2. Don’t reward the opposing team for not doing actual research on Kantian ethics. Kant’s anthropology is the foundation of his moral philosophy. The literature is clear: you cannot actually apply Kant’s ethical critical philosophy unless you consider his pragmatic anthropology. This does two things: 1)It takes out the idea that they can use Kantianism to speak about actual human conditions and social problems, and 2) it necessitates they answer the shortcomings of Kant’s Anthropological thinking. They can’t avoid this.

Robert Louden—(Professor of Philosophy @ University of Southern Maine, “” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 60-84.

But for me, the major incentive for exploring Kant’s anthropology lectures has always been to get a handle on the mysterious “counterpart of a

metaphysics of morals, the other member of the division of practical philosophy as a whole, . . . moral anthropology” (MdS 6: 217). Students of Kant know all too well about “the first part of morals,” that is, “the metaphysics of morals or metaphysica pura .” This first nonempirical or pure part of morals “is built on necessary laws, as a result it cannot be grounded on the particular constitution of a rational being, [such as] the human being” (Moral Mrongovius II 29: 599; cf. Gr 4: 389). But what about “the second part”; “philosophia moralis applicata, moral anthropology, to which the empirical principles belong” (Moral Mrongovius II 29: 599)? “Moral anthropology,” as the term suggests, “is morality applied to the human

being” (Moral Mrongovius II 29:599).In his writings and lectures on ethics, Kant repeatedly invokes the term “anthropology” when describing this second, empirical part of ethics. Often, as in the previous citations, the favored phrase is “moral anthropology”; sometimes it is “practical anthropology” (Gr 4: 388); and sometimes it is simply “anthropology” (Gr 4: 412; Moral Philosophie Collins 27: 244; Moral Mrongovius I 27: 1398). This frequent employment within the practical philosophy texts and lectures of the term “anthropology” as a shorthand means of conveying what “the other member of the division of practical philosophy as a whole” is about gives readers who turn to the anthropology lectures a thoroughly legitimate expectation that the myriad mysteries of Kant’s philosophia moralis applicata will finally be addressed in some detail. Those who approach these lectures with ethics in mind are inevitably driven by the hope of finally locating a missing link in Kant’s system of practical philosophy, a link that will give his ethics the much needed material content and applicability to human life that critics from Hegel to Max Scheler and extending on to contemporary descendants such as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and many others have claimed is nowhere to be found in Kant.

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3. Kant’s moral philosophy depends on Weltkenntnis (world knowledge). Kant argues that moral philosophy that does not investigate the nature of “human beings around us,” fails to be moral philosophy. Anthropology by Kant’s own admission is key to applying moral philosophy to the real world.

Robert Louden—(Professor of Philosophy @ University of Southern Maine, “” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 60-84, 71-72.

In the Groundwork , Kant emphasizes that “morals needs anthropology for its application to human beings ” (4: 412). “Morals,” which here appears to refer exclusively to the rational, nonempirical part of ethical theory (cf. 4: 388), needs anthropology in part because its a priori laws require a judgment sharpened by experience, partly to distinguish in what cases they are applicable and partly to provide them with entry (Eingang) to the will of the human being and efficacy for his fulfillment of them (Nachdruck zur Aus¨ubung); for the human being is affected by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a practical pure reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in the conduct of his life (4: 389). In other words, human beings need Weltkenntnis in order to make morality work effectively in their own lives. Human beings cannot simply jump unaided into pure ethics; background knowledge of their own empirical situation is a necessary prerequisite. This necessary empirical background for moral judgment has been well described by Barbara Herman in her discussion of “rules of moral salience.” Such rules, she writes, are acquired

as elements in a moral education, [and] they structure an agent’s perception of his situation so that what he perceives is a world with moral features. They enable him to pick out those elements of his circumstances or of his proposed actions that require moral attention. . . . Typically they are acquired in childhood as part of socialization; they provide a practical framework within which people act. . . . The rules of moral salience constitute the structure of moral sensitivity.

An important part of the task of a specifically moral anthropology is thus to contribute to human beings’ “progress of the power of judgment” (cf. KpV 5: 154). This task is carried out in the anthropology lectures through the imparting of Weltkenntnis to listeners .

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Kant’s very notion of reason demands one have moral capacities. There can be no Kantian ethics without the human’s ability to morally improve themselves. As such, the opposing team proposes an ethical system which denies certain races the ability to participate in moral reasoning, confining them to the state of nature and the essence of evil.


There is, then, in Kant, a clear distinction between a raw "state of naturc" and a "state of human nature" which "man ... has now attained ." Indeed, for Kant, if the "state of nature" is a state of evil, it is "human nature," as moral nature, which offers the possibility of the overcoming of evil.50

For Kant human nature, unlike natural nature, is, in essence, a moral naturc, so that what constitutes human nature proper is not, as the ancients may have believed, 'Simply intelligence or reason, but moral reason - the capacity to posit oneself rationally as a moral agent. Humans, in the state of nature, are simply animaIe rationabile; they have to make of themselves animate rationale. The idea and the effort of "making of oneself' is a specifically historical and moral process. Moral capacity means that humans can posit goals and ends in their actions because they make choices.in life, and choices are made in the function of goals. Intimately connected with the idea of moral reason, then, is the capacity for action directed toward self-perfectibility, or the faculty of self improvement. Kant writes that the individual "has a character which he himself creates, because he is capable of perfecting himself according to the purposes which he himself adopts." The "goal" of society and civilization is therefore tied to the destiny of the species: "to affect the perfection of man through cultural progress.

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Kant’s moral philosophy is dependent on his pragmatic anthropology. The state of nature is evil, moral philosophy is only possible when human nature elevates beyond its brutish state.


Humanity is clearly demarcated away from and against the natural state and elevated to a level where it has necessarily to construct in freedom its own culture. For Kant, it is this radical autonomy that defines the worth, the dignity, and therefore the essence of humanity. Pragmatic anthropology as a science has as its object the description of this essential structure of humanity and its subjectivity. Anthropology's task is to understand and describe "the destination of man and the characteristic of his development" as rational, social, and moral subject. Pragmatic anthropology is meant to help "man" understand how to make himself worthy of humanity through combat with the roughness of his state of nature. Kant's anthropological analysis of the "essence of man,'; accordingly, starts not from a study of the notion of a prehistorical or precivilization "primitive" human nature, but rather from the study of the nature of"man" qua civilized. To study animals, one might start with the wild, but when the object of study is the human, one must focus on it in its creative endeavors - that is, in culture and civilization - for ",'civilization does not constitute man's secondary or accidental characteristic, but marks man's 'essential nature, his specific character."

Kant’s practical and moral philosophy is rooted in his understanding of anthropology. There is no separating his scientific investigations into the capacity of the human from his moral theories. Don’t let them reduce this to a historical fact; this is central to Kant’s moral system.


Yet for Kant, human nature, or the knowledge of human nature, does not derive from empirical cultural or historical studies. History and culture are inadequate to understanding human nature because they deal only with the phenomenal, accidental, and changing aspects of "man,'' rather than with the essential and permanent . And "through the work of Rousseau, Kant did grasp the essential element in man: his ethical . . . nature. " Thus, according to Kant, while physical and racial characteristics as aspects of the physical_ .nature are studied or established by ' 'scientific reason , " moral nature, or rational character, which constitutes humanity proper, is the domain of pragmatic anthropology leading to practical/moral philosophy.

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Kant’s anti-Blackness is puzzling even for his time.

Robert Bernasconi—2002 (Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, eds. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott [Malden: Blackwell Publishers], 150).Kant’s anti-Black racism is more puzzling than that of many of his contemporaries because it was not directly put to the service of a defense of slavery, the issue of his day that can most readily be understood as necessitating the development of a racist ideology. There were relatively few voices for or against chattel slavery in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. Sla very presented certain practical problems – should slaves be baptized? Could they be freed by their masters? – which touched on issues central to the organization of a society built on slavery, but, as an institution, such justifications of slavery that existed were not subject to scrutiny, largely because it was not at that time subject to sustained attack. The early opponents of slavery, like Samuel Sewall of Boston in 1700, were isolated and largely ignored. There were discussions of slavery in the standard works of seventeenth-century political philosophy, for example, in Pufendorf and Locke, based on the idea that captives from a just war can be legitimately enslaved. John Locke argued that, because one does not have power over one’s own life, one cannot enslave oneself to anyone else, but one can forfeit one’s life by committing an act that deserves death.21 Locke’s argument also clearly excludes chattel slavery, but there is a strong possibility that it simply did not occur to Locke, who was above all concerned with the rights of Englishmen, that the chattel slavery of Africans needed justification, even though he was well aware of how the system operated and indeed profited from it through his investments.22

Although slave traders did on occasion appeal to the just war theory of enslavement, it is clearly an inadequate model to apply to the chattel slavery of Africans by Europeans, particularly the enslavement of women and their children in perpetuity. At what point it became widely known that application of this argument to enslave Africans was specious is not clear, but in 1735 John Atkins explicitly addressed the argument and exposed it as false.23 Montesquieu was the first philosopher to challenge the use of African slaves by Europeans, but he did so in an ironic fashion so that even in our own century he was not always correctly understood. The dispiriting fact is that philosophers as a group were slow to recognize the evils of the chattel slavery in Africans and that even Kant failed to speak out against it. Kant’s ethics would seem to be a perfect instrument with which to combat chattel slavery. His remarks against serfdom and other forms of slavery leave no doubt that his philosophy provided him with the resources for doing so. And yet he was virtually silent on this topic.

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Answers to Kleingold:

1. Kant’s criticism of colonialism doesn’t change his beliefs about Black inferiority: Pauline Kleingold’s argument assumes that Kant’s political assertions against European colonialism and the taking of land equates to Kant reversing his previous hierarchal stance of Black, Brown, and Indigenous inferiority. Such logic suggests that we must accept that abolitionists who fought against slavery, were not racist despite them believing that Blacks should be deported back to Africa. A political statement about an act is not the same as an anthropological system. Kleingold asks us to believe changing a belief about a practice like slaver is the same as a conceptual formulation of the status of Blacks in the world.

2. Kant’s condemnation of European Colonialism doesn’t affect his Moral Philosophy: Kleingold’s article “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” concedes that “During the 1780s, as he wrote the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, and probably until at least 1792, his disturbing views on race contradicted his own moral universalism” (p.592). Kant’s moral philosophy was written in the 1780’s and was by Kleingold’s own admission racist, it is not enough to assert as the negative team and Kleingold does that Kant reconciled his racist views in his later work on Perpetual Peace simply because he disagrees with colonialism and some forms of slavery. Just because he disagreed with European colonialism in some respects does not mean he reversed his previous stance about Black inferiority.

3. The discovery of Kant’s late 18th century texts and private notebooks demonstrate not only that Kant was personally racist, but dedicated to the scientism of race as part of his cosmopolitanism and liberalism. Kleingold admits she only looks at Kant’s 1790 work, Toward Perpetual Peace

Jon M. Mikkelson—2013 (“Translator’s Introduction,” in Kant and the Concept of Race: Late 18th Century Writings [New York: SUNY Press) 1-40, 3]

Why then an anthology comprised of translations of eight late eighteenth century German texts, including four by Kant? More specifically, why might anyone think that the study of texts such as these, especially those by Kant, could make a contribution to contemporary discussions concerning race theory and the philosophy of biology? For who—half a century, or even a couple of decades ago—would ever have thought of Kant as a major contributor to the formative development of either race theory or the philosophy of biology? For the Kant we knew then was typically presented as a figure who had contributed so much to the development of modern liberal internationalism that it was inconceivable that he could have ever written or uttered comments that could be construed as racist or have even concerned himself with any of the problems of race theory—except, perhaps, in ways that directly contributed to the construction of modern concepts of human rights. Now, however, with new knowledge of the texts by Kant included in this volume and a reexamination of related texts and other source materials, there can be no doubt about the fact that Kant was not only deeply concerned with the analysis of the concept of race but that he gave expression to views both in print and in his private notebooks that are clearly racist not only in tone but also in spirit, if not, necessarily, in ideological intent.

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4. Kleingold’s essay ignores the central point of our Bernasconi’s evidence. The argument is not that Kant did not consider the effects of colonialism and slavery, the issue is while condemning many forms of colonialism and slavery, he deliberately remains silent and conciliatory concerning chattel slavery.

Robert Bernasconi—2002 (Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, eds. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott [Malden: Blackwell Publishers], 150-151).

Kant’s silence on the slave trade in Africans cannot be explained by the fact that German involvement in that trade was less than that of a number of other European countries. Even though Germany was not as intimately involved with the slave trade as some of the other European countries, especially England, Kant was well aware of the intense debate over slavery. Many of the more recent contributions to the travel literature with which he was familiar participated in the debate on one side or the other. Kant’s use of Sprengel’s paraphrase of Tobin’s essay on Ramsay’s discussion of the condition of slaves in the West Indies is a clear case in point. Kant was well aware of the debate on the African slave trade and the conditions under which the slaves wereheld in the Americas. In “Perpetual Peace” he complained about the treatment of the slaves on the Sugar Islands (AA, VIII, p. 359), but this did not lead him to address the question of whether and how slavery might be abolished. Slavery was the institutional racism of that period, which helps to explain why many opponents of slavery nevertheless could not see their way to proposing its immediate abolition. But I am aware of no direct statement by Kant calling for the abolition of either African slavery or the slave trade, even if only in principle. Indeed, the fact that Kant, for example, in his lectures on Physical Geography, confined himself to statements about the best way to whip Moors, leaves one wondering if, like some of his contemporaries, he had apparently failed to see the application of the principle to this particular case (AA, IX, p. 313; RE, p. 61).

When in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant introduced the familiar principle that “every one is born free, since he has not yet committed a crime” (AA, VI, p. 283; PP, p. 432), he provided the basis for attacking chattel slavery. Kant wrote this as part of a brief discussion of the conditions under which it can be said that a man’s wife, child or servant are among that man’s possessions, which he has a right to retrieve if they runaway (AA, VI, p. 284; PP, p. 432). Kant acknowledged in this context that slaves have fewer rights even than servants, but insisted that the children of someone who has become a slave as a result of committing a crime are nevertheless free. This, of course, does not describe the ownership of African slaves and their progeny in North America, as Kant was almost certainly well aware, but it suggests that Kant would have had no place for chattel slavery. Nevertheless, Kant did not explicitly make the connection to the debate already raging in Northern Europe.

5. Turn: Kantian Cosmpolitanism leads to racial extermination. Extend our Bernasconi evidence from the original shell. Kleingold’s work depends on Kantian Cosmopolitianism as the resolution of his racism, our Bernasconi evidence shows this idea empirically lead to genocide and the scientization of white racial purity at the dawn of the 1800’s.

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