Abstract
Eric Voegelin’s writings on the historical development of the concept of race in the early 1930s are important to philosophy today in part because they provide a model upon which scholars can further integrate modern philosophy with the critical philosophy of race. In constructing his history, Voegelin’s methodological orientation depends on the centrality of both Kant’s work and the problem of the mind–body union to the concept of race. This essay asks how one might hold these premises if Kant seems to reject the dominant approach to the mind–body union in the mid-eighteenth century, physical influx, and then go on to publish several essays on race that do not thematize that doctrine in any way. I argue that Kant’s racial union of mind and body cannot be understood as an interaction in space, as his contemporaries had presumed. Rather, the union must be approached as a repetition in time. In this way, Kant’s four racial categories are not merely a part of the mind–body problem, but instead each is a veritable mind–body union. This permits the conclusion that ‘race’, as Kant understood it, is a viable solution to the mind–body problem.
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Notes
Arendt (1966, p. 158).
Recent Anglophone anthologies to overlook Voegelin’s contribution include: Goldberg (1990), Harris (1999), Babbitt and Campbell (1999), Back and Solomos (2000), Bernasconi and Lott (2000), Bernasconi (2001a), Cashmore and Jennings (2001), Boxhill (2001), Ward and Lott (2002), and Valls (2005). An overview of Voegelin’s work is found in Heilke (1990) and Levy (2003).
Voegelin (1998, pp. 89–90).
Voegelin (1997, pp. 19–36).
Voegelin (1998, p. 8).
Voegelin (1998, pp. 78–79).
Voegelin (1998, p. 78); Also see 136–137; 144.
Voegelin (1997, p. 10).
Leibniz (1989, p. 33).
Cf. Ablondi (2008), for example.
Watkins (1998, p. 138).
Watkins (1995).
Yolton (1991, p. 87).
Crivellato and Ribatti (2007).
Yolton (1991, p. 103).
pp. 74–123.
Marat (1773, p. 49).
Meyer and Hierons (1965).
Hatfield (1995, pp. 209–212).
Whitaker and Turgeon (2007).
Zammito (2002, p. 297).
Kant (1967, p. 79).
AA 12: 35 (Whenever possible, references to Kant’s writings cite the volume and page number of the Akademie Ausgabe, as provided in the margins of various translations).
AA 12: 32.
A p. 395. See also Ameriks (2000, Chapter 3)
AA 1: 19; Watkins (2005, pp. 106–108).
Anderson (1982).
AA 2: 438.
AA 8: 176.
(A 8: 99) Pauline Kleingeld (2007) has recently argued that Kant’s racial hierarchy is predicated on moral characteristics, which, as early as 1779, he saw as detachable from “the physical theory of race itself” (579). She argues that although he ‘attached’ and ‘re-attached’ his mental sterotypes throughout his career, he ultimately excluded predispositions of the soul from his concept of race. Curiously, Kleingeld does not support this argument with any evidence from Kant’s essays explicitly addressing race, instead relying on (1) A letter to Johann Jacob Engel where Kant employs the phrase “attached principles of a moral characterisation,” which Kleingeld stipulates to mean ‘detachable moral characteristics’ (579); (2) A sentence in Perpetual Peace that equates American Indians’ military courage to that of mediaevel European knights (589); (3) Kant’s endorsement of Girtanner’s Über das Kantische Prinzip für Naturgeschicte (1796), which, according to Kleingeld, does not mention the moral characteristcs of races aside from a few comments about the laziness of North American savages (590). In a later text, she develops these themes in order to buttress the notion of a Kantian ‘cultural diversity’ (see Kleingeld 2012, Chapter 4; Muthu 2003, Chapters 4 and 5). Kleingeld is right to investigate the questions of separation and unity of minds and bodies in the race context. However, ‘separability’ never simply means that one can discuss the mind without the body or vice versa. A full treatment of this important theme is beyond the scope of this essay, but one would have to start with what Voegelin calls the ‘isolating construction’ to understand what sorts of mind–body ‘separability’ were available to Kant (1998, p. 90). One could then recognize how far Kant is from adopting these rigorous ontological and genealogical separations of mind and body. Despite our best hopes for Kant, to my knowledge, Kant never retreats from his view that minds are shaped by the same processes that race bodies. As I explain below, this is the basis of ‘race’ as the solution to the mind–body problem. Further discussion of Kleingeld’s 2007 argument can be found in Bernasconi (2011). Concerning the importance of Kant’s racial hierarchy to his political thought and cosmopolitanism, see Hedrick (2008).
AA 25:1187.
Carron (2011, p. 111).
AA 2: 441.
AA 15: 377–378.
AA 2: 433.
Mclaughlin (2007).
AA 2: 430.
AA 2: 441.
AA: 2: 430.
AA 2: 430 my emphasis; also see AA 8: 101.
AA 2:442.
AA 8: 174.
AA 8: 174.
AA 2: 443.
AA 2: 225.
Bernasconi (2001b, p. 1).
Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 16).
Voegelin (1998, p. 8).
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Nale, J.E. Kant’s racial mind–body unions. Cont Philos Rev 48, 41–58 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9314-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9314-0