More Kant Troubles

Student:

I want to post a passage from Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), one dealing with the character of non-European races.

"If we examine the relation of the sexes in these parts of the world, we find that the European alone has found the secret of decorating with so many flowers the sensual charm of a mighty inclination and of interlacing it with so much morality that he has not only extremely elevated its agreeableness but also made it very decorous. The inhabitant of the Orient is of a very false taste in this respect. Since he has no concept of the morally beautiful which can be united with this impulse, he loses even the worth of the sensuous enjoyment, and his harem is a constant source of unrest. He thrives on all sorts of amorous grotesqueries, among which the imaginary jewel is only the foremost, which he seeks to safeguard above all else, whose whole worth consists only in smashing it, and of which one in our part of the world generally entertains much malicious doubt -- and yet to whose preservation he makes use of very unjust and often loathsome means. Hence there a woman is always in a prison, whether she may be a maid, or have a barbaric, good-for-nothing and always suspicious husband. In the lands of the black, what better can one expect than what is found prevailing, namely the feminine sex in the deepest slavery? A despairing man is always a strict master over anyone weaker, just as with us that man is always a tyrant in the kitchen who outside his own house hardly dares to look anyone in the face. Of course, Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whome he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: "You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad." And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid."

- Immanuel Kant, "Of National Characteristics, so far as they Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"

The gentleman in class who threw out the notion that Kant might have had a hint of racism probably experienced some shock while reading the last line of this passage. I certainly did. It's tough to twist that line and come out with something positive.

Teacher:

I know what you're saying about that last line. My response, though I don't know it to be correct, is this:

Was the shock deliberate? Is that line meant to be taken entirely literally or was it written for rhetorical effect? Was the shock not in fact something which was calculated in advance, intended to provide us with an initial jolt and then a subsequent opportunity to overcome the disturbance through rereading the passage ironically? In other words, is this sentence perhaps a miniature restaging of the Kantian dynamical sublime?

Honestly, it's hard to say. Not that Kant, when it came to race, held nothing but opinions which would be considered perfectly acceptable by today's political standards. But doesn't that final statement seem to come too unexpectedly out of left field? And doesn't it seem especially odd coming from a man who, above almost all things, prided himself on his lack of prejudice. The surprise appearance of the sentence, the effect of "parenthyrsis" (a term the 18th-century German art critic J. J. Winkelmann appropriates from Longinus' On The Sublime) might oblige us to suspend our judgment. Again, we must wonder whether Kant wasn't in fact asking if the reader, after considering all the manifold conditions which go into determining racial and regional character, would nevertheless be hasty enough to dismiss a man's opinion exclusively because of the color of his skin. Everything about the sentence would seem to suggest it is meant by the writer to stand out to us as a schoolbook example of faulty deduction.

Let me repeat, I don't know what the answer to this conundrum is. But the passage of Kant's which you raise for consideration comes from a man who was astoundingly well read, especially when it came to geography and ethnography of his day. The passage in question at once brings to my mind Montaigne's very famous essay about the newly discovered natives of Brazil, called "On The Cannibals." In it Montaigne ventures to argue that when the European and Brazilian cultures are freely compared without bias, it is in fact the Europeans who emerge as the more barbaric. Note how Montaigne clinches his point by ending his essay on a ironic note:

I had a very long talk with one of them; but I had an interpreter who followed my meaning so badly, and who was so hindered by his stupidity in taking in my ideas, that I could get hardly any satisfaction from the man. When I asked him what profit he gained from his superior position among his people (for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king), he told me that it was to march foremost in war. How many men followed him? He pointed to a piece of ground, to signify as many as such a space could hold; it might have been four or five thousand men. Did all his authority expire with the war? He said that this much remained, that when he visited the villages dependent on him, they made paths for him through the underbrush by which he might pass quite comfortably. All this appears to make good enough sense. But what's the use in? These people don't wear breeches.

Which is to say, "This supposed savage seems to speak reasonably enough. Still, who would be foolish enough to lend credence to a man who doesn't wear pants?

How much depends on the kind and degree of inflection we lend to the last line. I will freely admit that here we run into even further trouble, because in fact there is a scholarly debate over the proper translation of these last few sentences. (You can google various translations to see what I mean.) So, if Kant did indeed read Montaigne (and I would be very surprised if didn't) we still don't know how Kant's edition of the Cannibal essay read, (here's where you apply for grant money to fly to Königsberg to search Kant's library), much less how Kant himself read it.

In any case, this vexatious passage only confirms my point: before we hasten to pass judgment on such important issues, and especially when we're dealing with a declared free-thinker and a master stylist of astonishing intellect, we need to examine the evidence very closely. As it stands, the issue is not yet decidable for us.

And for what it's worth, it's just such a highly problematic and deeply disturbing detail which would make an ideal starting place for an essay in the style of Derrida.

From The Library Journal: "Following the death of Paul DeMan and the controversies surrounding the ensuing revelations of his personal life and wartime politics, Derrida delivered a lengthy seminar on the ethics and emotions of friendship. Each session began with the same plaintive refrain from Montaigne's essay on friendship: 'O my friends, there is no friend.'"