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‘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

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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

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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.

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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 contradiction. 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 formulation because the masters are not respecting the autonomous goals of the individual slaves but are treating these people merely as means to

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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. In a work that predates his most important philosophical achievements, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, written in 1763, in the chapter, ‘On National Character- istics’, he first quotes Hume’s comments as authoritative and then deigns to add some of his own.7 Here is a remarkable passage from this work, in the midst of a subsequent discussion devoted to demonstrating the inferiority of women. Kant first quotes Father Labat’s report that ‘a Negro carpenter, whom he [Labat] 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.”’ Kant then comments, ‘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 quite stupid’ (p. 113). Quite remarkably, in the extensive introduction to this essay, written in 1959, although the trans- lator notes that Kant’s view of women would be considered ‘intolera- bly low’ today, he completely passes over the obvious racial prejudice. It seems that the commentator can ignore these disagreeable parts of the essay because, for one thing, no doubt he did not expect anyone in his audience to be offended, and because, for another, as we see in the case of women, some of whom presumably were in the audience, he assumes that these are the unfortunate intrusion of the prejudices of the age and they should not detract us from discussion of the real philosophical issues, such as the beautiful and sublime.

Part 2

In the meantime, however, the audience has come to include a few people of color who are not so easily distracted from these annoying sentences. Emmanuel C. Eze disputes readings of Kant and Mill that relegate or even ignore these comments altogether as supposedly minor occurrences, products of the time, which should be ignored. He instead tries to show that their racial ideas play a central role in the construc- tion of their properly philosophical systems. Charles W. Mills, in his already well-known book The Racial Contract, builds on Eze’s work (among others) to claim that the dual nature of these philosopher’s writings is not a contradiction but itself constitutes part of a systematic racist program that has endured for centuries. Both argue that what seem to be minor points about race reveal a deeper social pathology that inﬂuences the very core of their philosophical positions.

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In two detailed studies, Eze disputes the reading of Hume and Kant that dismisses the significance of their racist comments. He argues in both cases that the philosophical view is deeply influenced by the racial anthropology. In the case of Hume he points out that the frequent revisions to the damning footnote can only mean ‘that the ideas expressed therein were important to the author and, significantly, to the arguments of “Of National Characters”’ (692). Eze argues that Hume classified the ‘Negro mind’ as inferior – e.g. he deemed it incapable of ‘arts and sciences’ (p. 693) – on the basis of his philosophical psychol- ogy: ‘Hume would not deny all mental, psychological, or cognitive functions to the Negro; he simply insists that in comparison to the white the Negro is naturally endowed with a passive and therefore inferior level of mind’ (p. 694). Eze concludes that Hume’s racist comments are not separate from his mature philosophical system and that the analysis of these so-called national characteristics was central to the development of Hume’s system (p. 698). Eze analyzes Kant’s ideas of race similarly. He notes that Kant con- tinued to write and lecture in physical geography for over 40 years and developed his ideas on race continually over that time (pp. 200–1).8 He argues that Kant did not separate his thinking about race from his properly philosophical writings, but rather used it to develop the idea of ‘man’ at the very center of his moral and political philosophy (p. 213). If blacks lack the full mental capacities of whites, and in particular do not possess the same degree of reason; and if humanity is defined on the basis of rational character; then clearly only whites are truly human, meaning that only they are moral subjects, bearers of political rights, and capable of making fine aesthetic judgments (p. 221). Eze claims that Kant goes beyond a mere empirical classification of race, such as one espoused by Linnaeus, and posits race as a transcendental category (p. 225).9 What this means is that race has become implicit in the moral conception of humanity itself, that is, it defines who can actually become fully human as a goal of moral action. In the case of both philosophers Eze shows that the apparent universal conception of ‘man’ that is central to both their systems ought to be parsed in light of their hierarchical and racist ordering of human types. The ‘European’ is the true form of ‘Man’, and it is essentially impossible for those who are low enough down on the hierarchy that governs the distinction between national characteristics ever to achieve what the others have as their birthright (p. 232). Charles Mills situates these claims about specific philosophers in a larger historical narrative. He reminds us: ‘the golden age of contract theory (1650–1800) overlapped with the growth of a European capi- talism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of exploration that increasingly gave the contract a racial subtext’ (p. 63).10 The social contract, which defended autonomy, equal rights, and freedom, excluded, as we have seen, those who were subject to colonial expansion. Mills

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calls the development of ideas of racial inferiority, and the actions that were justiﬁed on this premise, the ‘Racial Contract’. So if we take into account the racialized conception of humanity, we can see that the racial theories put forward by philosophers were not merely incidental to the subjugation of other peoples but rather instrumental in its accomplish- ment. Mills claims that ‘[t]he Racial Contract is thus the truth of the social contract’ (p. 64). The very silence of modern readers and commentators regarding these racist texts is not a matter of forgetfulness, insensitivity, or the unfortunate result of poor historical training, but itself a constitutive part of the discourse. Both the texts themselves and the modern reading of the texts undermine the supposed egalitarian moral and political ideals they proclaim and serve to bolster a pur- poseful ideological blindness to the reality of racism.

Part 3

These critiques are a necessary corrective to the distorted view that either ignores the racist theories of early modern philosophers or tries to separate them from the philosophy proper. However, they suffer from several problems of their own. First, their readings of the specific texts do not always seem to estab- lish the larger point they want to make. Eze’s work certainly convinces us that Kant did qualify his understanding of human nature in light of his racial distinctions: for him, to be truly human meant to attain those qualities that Europeans embodied. Indeed, Kant is quite open about the superiority of European civilization. Nonetheless, superiority of one group over another does not necessarily imply that the inferior groups are inhuman. Eze neglects to mention Kant’s theory of human progress through which backward peoples are improved through commerce with more advanced groups.11 Of course, this only seems to further justify colonialism.12 But the point is simply that the moral concept of humanity does not necessarily exclude those whom anthropology deems inferior.13 Hume likewise suggests that race is the product of environmental factors, which might be ameliorated. His stand against slavery would imply that the subjugation of those who are inferior is not justified. And even if Kant does conceive of race as a moral defect it would only put those subject to this defect in a rather large group of immoral beings prone to the same desires and limitations, a group not necessarily defined by race. Second, even if we grant Eze his point, and I think it is a significant one, precisely because of the amazing modern blindness to the racism of the texts, then we might still claim that one could cure the texts of their blight. At best, it seems to me, Eze has demonstrated a contingent relationship between the conception of human nature and

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the hierarchical classification of race. I would argue that Eze conflates the use of Hume’s philosophy to justify racism with the idea that racism is foundational to his thinking. For all that he insists on it, Hume’s racist footnote is inconsistent with the argument of his essay as a whole. Eze shows that Hume uses his philosophy to arrive at his racist conclusion but not that the philosophy necessarily had to arrive at this conclusion. Likewise, it may be the case that Kant denied a transcendent humanity to the African, but his grounds for doing so rest on an empirical infer- ence, which can be questioned. The modern reader ought not to ignore these texts or simply condemn them, but rather attempt to purify the moral concepts of these racial concepts and expand the conception of humanity to include those who had previously been excluded from it. Third, it strikes me that both Eze and Mills either implicitly or explicitly make use of the enlightenment values that they claim are hope- lessly tainted by racism. If they want to argue that the history of racism is wrong precisely because it denies freedom and equality to those who have been subjugated, then they are confirming the point just made – namely, that these concepts could be purged of their racist origins and interpreted in a truly egalitarian fashion.14 Fourth, both critics rely on a common argument against essentialism, which tries to show that claims made in the name of some universal ideal in fact are interpreted (and acted upon) in light of some particular interest that masquerades as universal. Feminists have now long argued that ‘humanity’ really means ‘white male’ and does not include women.15 Critical race theorists, such as Eze and Mills, make the same move in their analyses and argue that ‘humanity’ either excludes non-whites or places them irremediably low on the ladder of development. However, the anti-essentialist arguments, which they proffer as an alternative, suffer from an equally problematic history. In fact, it could be argued that the anthropology of Kant’s great 18th-century critic, Herder, which argued that there was no common origin of humankind, but rather developed the idea of polygenesis into the distinctively romantic view that each people or Volk had its unique culture and destiny, is the forebear of modern oppression and extermi- nation.16 To claim otherwise would be to idealize the history of modern anti-essentialism in the same way as they claim their opponents have done with the history of universalist essentialism.

Part 4

The ﬁrst approach to these texts – to separate the racism from the philosophy – suffers from naïveté at best and is perhaps guilty of promul- gating racism at worst. The second approach – to point out the racism

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inscribed in the heart of the philosophical system – strikes me as anach- ronistic in that it reads these texts from hundreds of years ago and eval- uates them with modern sensibilities. Moreover, in the attempt to criticize the font of ‘universalism’ it tends to smooth out the internal contradic- tions among the various texts. The difﬁculties of both interpretative strategies arise, I think, from a problem at the heart of the history of philosophy itself: the enterprise is historical and yet philosophical. We care about the ideas because they help us to think. As Foucault puts it, we ought to be writing a history of the present. But that does not mean that we simply project our views and values on the past. In fact, it is by respecting their difference, which by deﬁnition must bear some relation to us, that we learn from them. Is there another way to understand these texts, one that does not ignore the racism but one that also recognizes their historical difference and emancipatory potential? Now let us return to text with which we began, Spinoza’s letter. Remember that Spinoza concludes that his friend Balling’s auditory hal- lucination of his child’s groans was indeed an omen of the impending illness, because it was based on an intimate knowledge of the child,17 while his dream of the black, scabby Brazilian was not, because it was the product of physical sickness and delirium. Allow me to suggest that Spinoza came to the wrong conclusion about his own dream. The immediate cause of the dream may indeed have been delirium, but the content of the dream – that is, the frightening image of a colonial native – could not be explained by purely physical causes, but rather by Spinoza’s confused mental awareness of the colonial enterprise itself and the representations of that enterprise in his culture. In a certain sense, then, the dream shows that Spinoza was haunted by race and that his dream was an omen of our future repugnance of racist domination. Indeed, I would argue that the concept of haunting may help us in the interpretation of these problematic texts. To help explain what I mean I will cite an interesting passage from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, a recent book by Avery Gordon:18

If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social ﬁgure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. (p. 8)

The philosophers such as Eze and Mills who point out the almost grotesque obliviousness of prior commentators to the racism of early modern philosophers have done an important service. They demonstrate that behind the rational façade lurks the ghost of the oppressed, which

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haunts these texts. However, what they ignore in their own rush to judgment is the counterdiscourse internal and external to the texts themselves. As we investigate these vanishing traces of the colonialist project in the early modern philosophers we can no longer read them the same way. Indeed, we have the advantage of distance and historical hindsight. Just as Spinoza recognizes and analyzes the suffering of his friend but is unable to see clearly the meaning of his own dream, we can see things in the texts of early moderns of which they were not fully cognizant. Spinoza’s distress at the image of his dream, Hume’s repulsion at the idea of slavery, Kant’s audacious commitment to an enlightenment based on knowledge and freedom, are all signs that speak of their own effort to exorcize their ghosts. Even if they are tainted by subtle or obvious forms of racism these sentiments and ideas are themselves omens of things to come. That is, the very tensions in these texts call upon us to resolve them in our own philosophical endeavors. Those of us living today are no less ‘haunted’, no less historical, no less subject to the prejudices of our age than those philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries were, and our best efforts to understand the world around us will likely be judged to fall short by those who come after.19 Hopefully, in this way, we can understand the racism of these philosophers without excusing it, and without losing sight of their contribution to our efforts to overcome it.

Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

PSC

Notes

I would like to thank the organizers and participants of Grinnell College’s Africana Studies Conference 2002 where this paper was ﬁrst presented. I am also grateful to Arin Hill and Johanna Meehan for conversations on this topic.

1 Benedict Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995). 2 Edwin Curley translates this word as ‘Black’. See The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), vol. 1, p. 353. 3 All commentary I have examined focuses on the importance of the letter in Spinoza’s theory of the imagination and critique of prophecy and does not mention the issue of race. See, for instance: Michèle Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), pp. 5–36; Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 19–23; Henri Laux, Imagination et religion chez Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1993), pp. 141–5; and Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et l’interprétation de l’Écriture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 175–8.

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4 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987). According to Emmanuel C. Eze, in ‘Hume, Race, and Human Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas 61(4) (2000): 691–8, the first edition of the work was published in 1742. The essay in question was written in 1748 and revised first between 1753 and 1754, then again in the final edition, which Hume prepared in 1777. 5 In ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, Hume writes: ‘slavery is in general disadvantageous both to the happiness and the populousness of mankind’, and ‘its place is much better supplied by the practice of hired servants’ (p. 396). 6 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 31. 7 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991[1960]). We find these comments in section IV, ‘Of National Characteristics, so far as they depend upon the distinct feeling of the beautiful and the sublime’. 8 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology’, in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Katherine M. Faull (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), pp. 200–41 9 Still, he notes that given the apparently empirical character of Kant’s views on race, it may be a contradiction to speak of the concept transcendentally. 10 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 11 See ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93–130. In the ‘First Supplement’, section 3, Kant suggests that the ‘spirit of commerce’ will naturally help realize the moral imperative to form a just cosmopolitan constitution between nations (p. 114). 12 Nonetheless, earlier in ‘Perpetual Peace’, Kant criticizes ‘the inhospitable conduct of the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial states’ for ‘the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them)’ (p. 106). 13 On this point, see also Catherine Wilson’s interesting essay: ‘Savagery and the Supersensible: Kant’s Universalism in Historical Context’, History of European Ideas 24: 4–5 (1998): 315–30, especially 321. 14 See, for instance, Mills’s comments on Hobbes: ‘Hobbes remains enough of a racial egalitarian that, while singling out Native Americans for his real- life example, he suggests that without a sovereign even Europeans could descend to their state, and that the absolutist government appropriate for non-whites could also be appropriate for whites’ (p. 66). 15 See Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Phil- osophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 16 This point has been made by such writers as Isaiah Berlin. See his essays ‘The Counter Enlightenment’ and ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, both collected in The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997).

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17 Perhaps something even stronger, as Spinoza writes: ‘And since . . . there must necessarily exist in Thought an idea of the affections of the essence of the son and what follows therefrom, and the father by reason of his union with his son is a part of the said son, the soul of the father must likewise participate in the ideal essence of his son, and in its affections and in what follows therefrom’ (p. 127). 18 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996). 19 I owe this point to Janelle S. Taylor.

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