#kantians

[philosophybits]

The continual repetition of a theme in philosophy is a result of two distinct causes. Either the author has discovered something, but he doesn't yet know himself quite what; and in this sense Kant's writings are rather musical. Or else the author has heard something new, but hasn't understood it properly; and in this sense the Kantians are the greatest musicians of literature.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

[philosophybits]

According to the outmoded Socratic concept of disciples being those who have independently made the spirit of the great master their own spirit, have adapted themselves to it, and, as his spiritual sons, have been named after him, there are probably only a very few Kantians.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

[philosophybits]

The tacitly assumed and real first postulate of all the gospel harmonies of the Kantian evangelists reads as follows: Kant's philosophy must be in agreement with itself.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

[ninjaruski]

About my Kantian Rant

A number of people have reblogged the Kant rant that I posted, and that's awesome. It is important to know the presuppositions of the thinkers whose philosophy has held great sway over the trajectory of western culture and western intellectual thought, especially when the thesis of these thinkers are taken as fundamental to the practice of certain disciplines. We need to know the presuppositions behind people like Kant, Heidegger, Hume, and other "great men of philosophy" in order to discern the way in which racist, sexist, homophobic, and other modes of discrimination are supported and justified within the structure of their systems.

That's fine.

What I would like to caution against is the taking up of the critique to demonstrate or privilege a particular kind of oppressive view held by these thinkers. Put simply, I am cautioning against the tendency to read racism as functioning primarily in the mode of anti-black racism, or the systemic oppression of the people of the African diaspora, that has emerged as a result of the domination of academia by the US/American academy and the racial binary that comes with conversations about race from within the American context. Doing so, with reference to the "great thinkers" is to unintentionally diminish the breadth of the oppressive ideologies that these thinkers' systems were designed to support.

Kant was anti-black, but he wasn't just that: his anthropological account generates a hierarchy, a classification of humans according to race which argued that each non-white race had its own particular deficiency which prevented them from being fully rational, or as rational as Kant's own white, european, male peers. For example, with regards to the totally of peoples generally located in the Indian sub-continent, which Kant generalized as "hindus," he says they:

do have motivating forces but they have a strong degree of passivity (Gelassenheit) and all look like philosophers. Nevertheless they incline greatly towards anger and love. They thus can be educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences. They can never achieve the level of abstract concepts. A great hindustani man is one who has gone far in the art of deception and has much money. The Hindus always stay the way they are, they can never advance, although they began their education much earlier.

Similar commentary is made by Kant with regards to middle eastern, Asian, and NDN peoples. Each race has its own peculiar nature that makes it incapable of rising to the level of the European race. Further, Kant makes specific that not all Europeans are necessarily capable of ascending to the level of the archetypical European subject: the Romany peoples, for example, are excluded from Kant's full rationality by virtue of the way that their rationality is expressed through their culture. Culture, then, is a predictor of rationality and the best culture is produced by the most rational subjects: Europeans.

To this end, critiques of thinkers like Kant must recognize the way in which all non-white cultures and races are taken to be less-than European derived cultures. As Kant was engaged in a project of scientific racism, a taxonomy of humanity, his project is not essentially reducible to mere anti-blackness, nor does it function in the same way as anti-black racism does in our present era. His comments on members of the African-diaspora, or the "negro," should be viewed within the totality of his project of scientific racism, and not as a manifestation of a particular form of discrimination.

We have to realize that Kant is involved in the construction of a system, of the search for human morality and rationality. To this end, Kant needs to provide a structure, a distinction between the kinds of humans such that he can justify the way in which Europe has proceeded in its projects of imperialism and colonialism within his moral theory. Without the distinction between humans, and the privileging of the European subject, Kant's system would immediately condemn the forwards march of European imperialism on the basis of its own moral theory. However, Kant's anthropology enabled him to side-step this critique by offering a theory of why other cultures and races needed the European colonialist and imperialist project in order to become fully rational.

[ninjaruski]

Would you treat us to a rant about Kant?

You had but to ask!

First, I would ask that you read the following articles.

The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology.

Kant and Race

Of the Different Human Races

The first article posits an argument that Kant’s racism (as developed in his anthropology) thoroughly infects his moral theory in such a way as to render it morally bankrupt. The second article is an attempt at a defense of Kant’s moral theory on the grounds that his racism does not reach into his deep moral theory. The third article is an example of Kant’s conversations about race which have generated much controversy and have resulted in questions as to the applicability of Kant’s moral system.

I am skeptical of attempts to defend Kant’s moral theory from the charge of racism, particularly given how the Kantian system is, itself, a search for the grounding principles of human reason. In so far as Kant built engaged in a taxonomy of races in order to discern the differing capacities of morality, his ascription of a limited capacity for rationality and morality to non-white subjects undercuts the project. Either people of color are not human, or less human, as they cannot actualize morality and rationality in their being, or there is no universal morality and rationality. Defenses of Kant, in my view, fail to resolve this complication without denying Kant’s racism or appealing to critiques of scholars who point out this racism.

Kant’s moral theory itself has numerous issues, and there are far more skilled scholars who have gone to work on this. The issue that I have a problem with is his categorical imperative and his concept of the good will. From a racial perspective, if we are to take his statements on Africans as fact, since the African person can only perform his “duty” as a result of “training,” by which Kant intends colonialism and slavery, it follows that the African subject cannot possess a good will. To this end, actions taken by the African person can never proceed from duty, and are thus not moral or good, since the source of moral actions is from adherence to duty without coercion or force. 

Even if we are to ignore the racism in Kant, his moral structure gives us no room to decide between competing duties. Kantians have struggled to defend themselves against this claim for years, however, I have not been satisfied with the solutions (postulation of a ranking of duties or the thought that some duties override others) because they cannot deal with the lived experience of individuals. Sartre has a pretty good critique of Kant’s inability to resolve conflicts using his experience of living in Nazi occupied France as a basis.

More specifically, the concept of the Maxim which underlies the Categorical Imperative means that those Maxims which cannot be universalized are not moral, in a simplified version of Kant’s system. Kantians try to defend this by modifying the categorical imperative to say that we should only act if we could will that every rational person would act in the same way in the same situation. This makes the categorical imperative situational as opposed to universal: we can only have imperatives that apply to certain situations and then disappear once the situation no longer holds. This is antithetical to Kant’s project of looking for universal maxims that hold in every situation.

My biggest contention, and it’s the one that Kantians hate, is the absence of considerations of emotion in Kant’s thought. Kant assumes that our adherence to duty emerges from our rationality which he divorces from our affective states. The affective response that our performance of our duty produces is secondary to the duty itself: a mother who cares for her child out of her affective feeling towards her child is not a moral agent because her actions do not proceed from duty, they proceed from emotion. Emotion cannot be the basis for moral actions.

When I have to teach Kant, I do so with full knowledge of Kant’s racial failings. The three pieces above are always included in any course that I will teach on Kant, much to the dismay of many professors. If I were to exclude Kant’s racial thought from his moral though, I would be colluding in the perpetuation of structures of oppression and the centering of the European/white mind as the ground of rationality.

I will not tell people not to study Kant, but I will ask that they do so with Kant’s racial thought in mind.