Antinomies of Race:
Diversity and Destiny in Kant
Diversity and Destiny in Kant
This essay reads Kant’s pioneering work in the theory of ‘race’ in the context of his intellectual projects from ‘physical geography’ to ‘pragmatic anthropology’ by way of ethics. In different periods of Kant’s career, ‘race’ assured meaning in human diversity, confirmed the value of a practical reason-informed understanding of human destiny, and provided a model for the ‘pragmatic’ knowledge of what man ‘can and should make of himself’.
The first part of the essay traces ‘race’ as an advertisement for Kant’s new disciplines of physical geography and anthropology in the 1770s. Giving new meaning to a foreign term with strong associations of breeding and husbandry, Kant proposes the supposedly exceptionless hereditary traits of ‘race’ as the first fruit of a truly scientific ‘natural history’ of humanity. His concerns are not merely classificatory; his 4-‘race’ scheme, modeled on the temperaments, allows a special status for ‘whites’ as at once a ‘race’ and a transcendence of ‘race’.
The essay’s second part follows the refinements of the ‘race’ idea in essays Kant wrote in the 1780s and published in the same journal as his essays on enlightenment and the philosophy of history. Given a new status by the critical turn, ‘race’ is offered a sanction ‘similar’ to the postulates of pure practical reason; its empirical verification shows Kant’s whole critical system is no chimera.
The essay’s third part argues that Kant’s theory of ‘race’ came into its own in the 1990s, gaining wide acceptance. Kant relies on familiarity with it (complete with husbandry-like echoes) in explaining the larger project of the ‘pragmatic anthropology’ without which he thought ethics impossible.
Understanding how the concept of ‘race’ interacted with and absorbed more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns for Kant, we gain a better sense of its fateful attractiveness to 19th century thinkers.
The first part of the essay traces ‘race’ as an advertisement for Kant’s new disciplines of physical geography and anthropology in the 1770s. Giving new meaning to a foreign term with strong associations of breeding and husbandry, Kant proposes the supposedly exceptionless hereditary traits of ‘race’ as the first fruit of a truly scientific ‘natural history’ of humanity. His concerns are not merely classificatory; his 4-‘race’ scheme, modeled on the temperaments, allows a special status for ‘whites’ as at once a ‘race’ and a transcendence of ‘race’.
The essay’s second part follows the refinements of the ‘race’ idea in essays Kant wrote in the 1780s and published in the same journal as his essays on enlightenment and the philosophy of history. Given a new status by the critical turn, ‘race’ is offered a sanction ‘similar’ to the postulates of pure practical reason; its empirical verification shows Kant’s whole critical system is no chimera.
The essay’s third part argues that Kant’s theory of ‘race’ came into its own in the 1990s, gaining wide acceptance. Kant relies on familiarity with it (complete with husbandry-like echoes) in explaining the larger project of the ‘pragmatic anthropology’ without which he thought ethics impossible.
Understanding how the concept of ‘race’ interacted with and absorbed more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns for Kant, we gain a better sense of its fateful attractiveness to 19th century thinkers.
