Methodological Approaches to Racism in Kant’s Anthropology

It has recently been pointed out by Huaping Lu-Adler that some disagreements between Kant scholars concern how they weigh and prioritize Kant’s texts. One of these disagreements centers on the dispute regarding which of Kant’s writings count as "published." In this paper, we analyze the use of "published" as a methodological demarcation that is used to include or exclude Kant’s racist comments. In doing so, we give specific attention to Kant's writings on Anthropology. One standard approach for choosing which texts best represent Kant’s view suggests that if Kant published something, it is probably his considered position and should, therefore, be prioritized as evidence. This methodological heuristic we call the Historical Stratagem of the Priority Principle. The Priority Principle (Historical Stratagem): 1. There is a clear and distinct demarcation between Kant’s published work and his unpublished work. 2. Kant’s published work should be prioritized as evidence over his unpublished work. 3. Unpublished work, if used at all, should only be used as a supplement to the published work. We can see this kind of supplemental approach in the work of established scholars such as Henry Allison, Kenneth R. Westphal and Paul Guyer. However, different scholars use different demarcation criteria (e.g., publication, authorization, involvement, voice, publicness). In some cases, these criteria are inconsistent and cannot be applied universally because they generate a heterogeneous and non-coextensive set of texts considered "published." Kant’s writings on Anthropology make a perfect case study for this phenomenon of erasing Kant’s racism. On one hand, as Kleingeld and others note, the discussion of race in Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View cuts down the section "On the Character of Races" to only a few paragraphs and the majority of the egregious racism is removed. Because this is the version of Kant’s Anthropology that he authorized for publication, one might hold that Kant, at least in Anthropology, is not a racist. On the other hand, one might argue that Anthropology developed out of the "Rostock manuscript," which itself developed out of Kant’s Anthropology Lectures. Kant’s willingness to present these ideas to students in public lectures (and the learned public on other occasions) suggests that we should consider the lectures, at least in some sense, as his public position. Further, even in the published Anthropology Kant praises Girtanner’s On Kant’s Principle for Natural History (1796). This work itself purports a racial hierarchy in which [Native] Americans are referred to as "a human race which, with regard to abilities and talents, occupies the lowest level, and is even lower than the Negro" and refers to one of Kant’s own published works as evidence. What we propose to do is articulate the various criteria Kant scholars use to demarcate between Kant’s published and unpublished texts as a condition for prioritizing one set over the other. We will use Kant’s racial comments on Anthropology as a case study but this also, as one might expect, has broader implications for methodology in Kant scholarship.