A Companion to Hegel by Stephen Houlgate & Michael Baur

Author:Stephen Houlgate & Michael Baur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

The Role of Race in History

What Hegel called “the ruling categories of the world” were, as we have seen, categories of the understanding that prove from the perspective of reason to be more properly conceived of as “moments” of his Trinitarian concept of spirit. The relation between these two forms of presentation operates by a kind of doubling of the text that is reminiscent of the way that a first reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit presents the book in the form of a narrative and that it is only on a second reading that its logical or conceptual necessity becomes clear (Bernasconi 1999). Nevertheless, within Hegel’s philosophy of history, the category of race seems not to be fully integrated into the conceptual structure provided by the Trinitarian conception of spirit. Indeed, it seems on occasion that it is race, not spirit, that is a ruling category of the world. This is not far fetched. In a manuscript that seems to be roughly contemporaneous with the first lecture course on the philosophy of history, Hegel acknowledged that questions of racial origins were the concern of understanding, but that questions of race could nevertheless not be excluded from the philosophy of spirit altogether (Hegel 1990).

The initial problem that gave rise to the philosophy of history was how to locate meaning and order in a history that was characterized by the seemingly chaotic rise and fall of peoples. Kant’s answer was to posit a cosmopolitan history. Kant recognized that there was a problem in calling each generation to sacrifice itself for future generations. I have shown how Hegel sought to address that same problem by understanding such sacrifice to be a moment in the process whereby the Trinitarian spirit comes to consciousness of itself. But there was another problem that arose in the context of Kant’s philosophy of history of which Hegel seems to have been less aware than Kant. It arose, for example, in response to Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Kant wrote: “Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been occupied by happy sheep as by happy human beings who merely enjoy themselves?” (Kant 1968: vol. 8, 65–66/Kant 1991:219–220). Similar concerns were expressed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment (Kant 1968:vol. 5, 378/Kant 1987:258). The problem arose from the fact that according to Kant’s own views on race, the non-White races could never participate fully in the final purpose of humanity because only the White race had all the talents (Bernasconi 2002:158). Of course, asking the non-White races to sacrifice themselves for the White race was not a great stretch for a philosopher like Kant, who accepted the institution of slavery as he did throughout the 1780s (Bernasconi 2002:149–152).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.