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Philosophy & Social Criticism Philosophy & Social Criticism http://psc.sagepub.com ‘The black, scabby Brazilian’: Some thoughts on race and early modern philosophy Michael A. Rosenthal Philosophy Social Criticism 2005; 31; 211 DOI: 10.1177/0191453705050608 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/2/211 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Philosophy & Social Criticism can be found at: Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://psc.sagepub.com at CAPES on December 11, 2009 04 Rosenthal (bc/s) 4/3/05 3:18 pm Page 211 Michael A. Rosenthal ‘The black, scabby Brazilian’ Some thoughts on race and early modern philosophy Abstract When Spinoza described his dream of a ‘black, scabby Brazilian’, was the image indicative of a larger pattern of racial discrimination? Should today’s readers regard racist comments and theories in the texts of 17th- and 18th-century philosophers as reflecting the prejudices of their time or as symptomatic of philosophical discourse? This article discusses whether a critical discussion of race is itself a form of racism and whether supposedly minor prejudices are evidence of a deeper social pathology. Given historical hindsight, we may read such discussion of race in early modern philosophy as a sign of the incipient struggle against prejudice, a sign that we can recognize and use in the struggles of our own time. Key words colonialism · the concept of haunting · essentialism · David Hume · Immanuel Kant · racism · Benedict Spinoza Introduction In 1664 Benedict Spinoza received a letter from his friend Pieter Balling, in which the latter, who was grieving from the recent loss of his child, reported that he had experienced strange premonitions of the little boy’s death, such as hearing ‘groans such as he uttered when he was ill and just before he died’, when the boy was still healthy (p. 125).1 Spinoza replied that he doubted the groans were real and that it was possible to imagine the groans ‘more effectively and vividly’ than to hear them in fact. To illustrate the phenomenon, Spinoza recalls a dream he himself had the previous winter: When one morning just at dawn I awoke from a very deep dream, the images which had come to me in the dream were present before my eyes as vividly PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 31 no 2 • pp. 211–221 PSC Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453705050608 Downloaded from http://psc.sagepub.com at CAPES on December 11, 2009 04 Rosenthal (bc/s) 4/3/05 3:18 pm Page 212 212 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (2) as if they had been real things, in particular the image of a black, scabby Brazilian [cujusdam nigri, & scabiosi Brasiliani] whom I had never seen before. This image disappeared for the most part when, to make a diver- sion, I fixed my gaze on a book or some other object; but as soon as I again turned my eyes away from such an object while gazing at nothing in particular, the same image of the same Ethiopian [Æthiopis]2 kept appear- ing with the same vividness again and again until it gradually disappeared from sight. (Letters, pp. 125–6) Spinoza goes on to explain the differences between these two incidents. While his friend’s image arose out of mental causes, specifically the intense emotional identification with his son, Spinoza’s dream image had corporeal causes, more specifically some sort of delirium. In the friend’s case, then, it could be an omen, while his case it could not. While I will return later to Spinoza’s explanation of the mechanism of his dream, and dispute his interpretation of it, right now I want to use it to highlight something of which apparently he was not aware: the obvious racial aspect of the dream. He makes a point of adding the adjective ‘black’ to his description of the man and, lest the reader think he was indicating nationality with the term ‘Brazilian’, the second refer- ence to ‘Ethiopian’ makes it clear that he is not. Moreover, the use of ‘scabby’ emphasizes the ugliness and sickness of the being that appears to frighten him. Just as his friend’s auditory hallucinations of his now dead child’s groans are obviously distressing so also is Spinoza’s visual image of this diseased, black man. Not much has been said of this image in the literature on Spinoza. And that is perhaps not surprising. There does not seem to be much of philosophical significance that rides on the content of the example itself.3 However, recently there has developed a literature that is critical of early modern philosophers and their ideas of race. These critics argue that such apparently ad hoc examples are really symptomatic of a larger pattern of racial discrimination. Some, such as Charles W. Mills in his recent book The Racial Contract, go farther and claim that these texts help produce the racial discrimination that they exemplify. So we arrive at the question of this article: How do (and how ought) modern readers make sense of racist comments and theories in the texts of 17th- and 18th-century philosophers? Some view them as reflecting prejudices of the age, which are not central to the philosophical projects of the thinkers in question. Others argue that they are symptomatic of a funda- mental malady of philosophical discourse. I shall focus on the latter claim and consider two related varieties of it, one that argues that the absence of a critical discussion of race is itself a form of racism, and the other that argues that supposedly minor prejudices are in fact evidence of a racist theory. I shall evaluate these criticisms in light of their historical and philosophical claims and suggest that another approach to the texts is possible. Downloaded from http://psc.sagepub.com at CAPES on December 11, 2009 04 Rosenthal (bc/s) 4/3/05 3:18 pm Page 213 213 Rosenthal: ‘The black, scabby Brazilian’ Part 1 Until now the dominant way of dealing with what we would now term as racist views has been essentially to excuse them. They are minor and do not impact on the philosophically significant works; they reflect assumptions of the time to which everyone was subject. Moreover, the work of the same philosophers has resources that would address these very defects. This certainly could be (and has been) said about Spinoza, but let me give two further examples to illustrate this point. First, the philosopher David Hume added a note to his essay ‘Of National Character’, which appeared in the second edition of his Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1754), which begins as follows: ‘I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation’ (p. 208).4 Those willing to excuse Hume’s racism might point to the following consider- ations. This essay, although Hume worked on it and revised it more than once, seems to be the only place in Hume’s considerable work in which he makes such a statement. And in the essay itself the racism that Hume espouses is not based on a modern theory of inherent biological inferiority but rather exclusively on environmental factors, which he uses to denigrate the morals of many other (mostly southern) nations as well. Perhaps surprisingly, the inferiority of the Negroes does not justify systematic discrimination against them, for elsewhere in the same volume Hume condemns slavery in no uncertain terms.5 Moreover, Hume’s moral philosophy, which is based on a sympathy for others, recognizes that we tend to favor those who are closest to us, and that we must constantly revise our conceptions and expand our circle of concern to those whom we previously did not know or care about. So, while Hume, like many of this time, makes racist comments, the modern reader must balance them against his progressive philosophical and moral system. The work of Immanuel Kant is even more clearly riven by this con- tradiction. On the one hand, Kant’s moral philosophy is characterized by the defense of individual autonomy based on the principle of the categorical imperative, in which an action is judged to be right only if its motive can become a universal law of nature.6 For example, it is wrong to break a promise because, if the motive of doing so (e.g. to benefit oneself or someone else) were to become a law of nature, then the very institution of promising would become meaningless. Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative is even clearer: act so that you treat yourself or others always as an end never merely as a means (p. 38). Slavery, for instance, is immoral according to this formu- lation because the masters are not respecting the autonomous goals of the individual slaves but are treating these people merely as means to Downloaded from http://psc.sagepub.com at CAPES on December 11, 2009 04 Rosenthal (bc/s) 4/3/05 3:18 pm Page 214 214 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (2) their own ends. It hardly seems possible that Kant could be accused of racism. However, Kant, far more than Hume, develops and defends racist ideas in his writings, particularly in those devoted to anthropology and physical geography.
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