Editing Immanuel Kant (section)

====Racism====
Kant's theory of race and his prejudicial beliefs are among the most contentious areas of recent Kant scholarship.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |title=Kant and the Concept of Race |publisher=State University of New York Press |year=2013 |isbn=978-1438443614 |editor-last=Mikkelsen |editor-first=Jon M. |location=Albany, New York |pages=12–30 |language=English}}</ref><ref name=":1">{{Cite journal |last=Zorn |first=Daniel-Pascal |title=Kant{{mdash}}a Racist? |url=https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/?p=17156 |journal=Public History Weekly |year=2020 |volume=2020 |issue=8 |doi=10.1515/phw-2020-17156 |s2cid=225247836 |issn=2197-6376}}</ref>{{sfn|Kleingeld|2007|pp=573–592}}<!-- <ref>{{Cite journal |last=Kleingeld |first=Pauline |date=October 2007 |title=Kant's Second Thoughts on Race |url=https://philarchive.org/rec/KLEKST |journal=Philosophical Quarterly |volume=57 |issue=229 |pages=573–592 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.498.x}}</ref>--> While few, if any, dispute the overt racism and chauvinism present in his work, a more contested question is the degree to which it degrades or invalidates his other contributions. His most severe critics assert that Kant intentionally manipulated science to support chattel slavery and discrimination.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Eze |first=Emmanuel |chapter=The Color of Reason: the Idea of 'Race' in Kant's Anthropology |date=1997 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/EZETCO |title=Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader |pages=103–140 |editor-last=Eze |editor-first=Emmanuel Chukwudi |publisher=Blackwell |access-date=20 April 2023}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Serequeberhan |first=T. |date=1996 |title=Eurocentrism in Philosophy: the Case of Immanuel Kant |journal=The Philosophical Forum |s2cid=170547963 |language=en}}</ref><ref name=":0" /> Others acknowledge that he lived in an era of immature science, with many erroneous beliefs, some racist, all appearing decades before evolution, molecular genetics, and other sciences that today are taken for granted.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite web |title=The Philosophy Junkie: Immanuel Kant's Racism and Sexism with Professors Lucy Allais and Helga Varden on Apple Podcasts |url=https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/immanuel-kants-racism-and-sexism-with-professors/id1512137924?i=1000496715962 |access-date=20 April 2023 |website=Apple Podcasts |language=en-US}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Geismann |first=Georg |date=1 January 2022 |title=Why Kant Was Not a 'Racist' |url=https://elibrary.duncker-humblot.com/article/69870/why-kant-was-not-a-racist |journal=Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=263–357 |doi=10.3790/jre.30.1.263 |s2cid=255676303 |issn=0944-4610|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend [[racism]]. Philosopher [[Charles W. Mills]] is unequivocal: "Kant is also seen as one of the central figures in the birth of modern 'scientific' racism. Whereas other contributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had offered only 'empirical' (scare-quotes necessary!) observation, Kant produced a full-blown ''theory'' of race."{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=91–112|p=95}}

Using the [[four temperaments]] of ancient Greece, Kant proposed a hierarchy of racial categories including white Europeans, black Africans, and red Native Americans.<ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Kant |first=Immanuel |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34663347 |chapter=On the Different Races of Man |title=Race and the Enlightenment: a reader |publisher=Blackwell |year=1997 |isbn=0-631-20136-X |editor-last=Eze |editor-first=Emmanuel Chukwudi |location=Cambridge, Mass. |pages=38–49 |oclc=34663347 |orig-date=1775, 1777}}</ref> Although he was a proponent of [[scientific racism]] for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European [[colonialism]] in ''[[Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch]]'' (1795).{{sfn|Kleingeld|2007|pp=573–592}}{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=91–112}}<ref name=":2" />{{efn|Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection." He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He states that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, and describes them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too [[Four temperaments|phlegmatic]] for diligence. He said that Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=169–193}}{{sfn|Bowersox|2016}}}} Kant was an opponent of [[miscegenation]], believing that whites would be "degraded" and that "fusing of races" is undesirable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He states that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, nature has here made a law of just the opposite".<ref>Kant ''APPV'' 7:320</ref> Kant was also an anti-Semite, believing that Jews were incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are presented as the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. In his "Anthropology", Kant called the Jews "a nation of cheaters" and portrayed them as "a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world".{{sfn|Shrage|2019}}

Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored.{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=95–97}} [[Robert Bernasconi]] stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". [[Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze]] is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who he believed often glossed over this part of his life and works.{{sfn|Bouie|2018}} Pauline Kleingeld argues that, while Kant "did defend a racial hierarchy until at least the end of the 1780s", his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in ''[[Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch|Perpetual Peace]]'' (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European [[colonialism]], which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework.{{sfn|Kleingeld|2007|pp=573–592}}

While Kant's racist rhetoric is indicative of the state of scholarship and science during the 18th century, German philosopher [[Daniel-Pascal Zorn]] explains the risk of taking period quotations out of context. Many of Kant's most outrageous quotations are from a series of articles from 1777–1788, a public exchange among Kant, Herder, natural scientist [[Georg Forster]], and other scholars prominent in that period.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/861693001 |title=Kant and the Concept of Race: late eighteenth-century writings |date=2013 |others=Jon M. Mikkelsen |isbn=978-1-4619-4312-9 |editor-last=Mikkelsen |editor-first=Jon M. |location=Albany |oclc=861693001 |publisher=State University of New York Press}}</ref>{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|pp=298–301, 343–345}}<ref>cf. Kant, ''DCHR'' 8:91-106</ref> Kant asserts that all races of humankind are of the same species, challenging the position of Forster and others that the races were distinct species. While his commentary is clearly biased at times, certain extreme statements were patterned specifically to paraphrase or counter Forster and other authors.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> By considering the full arc of Kant's scholarship, Zorn notes the progression in both his philosophical and his anthropological works, "with which he argues, against the ''zeitgeist'', for the unity of humanity".<ref name=":1" />