Kant on Jews and Non-Whites

Kant made disparaging statements about Jews and non-whites
Jeet Heer - National Post - September 15, 2003

For those who cherish the hope of creating a tolerant and cosmopolitan society, the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century stand as heroes in the battle against prejudice and ignorance.

According to the text books, Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Immanuel Kant were born in a Europe still mired in the legacy of medieval irrationalism, where people cowered in fear of clerical and monarchical power. Emboldened by the success of Isaac Newton and other scientists in overturning traditional cosmology, Voltaire and company launched irreverent attacks on the throne and the altar. With their pens as weapons and encyclopedias and textbooks as their megaphones, these scrappy philosophers spread the Enlightenment values of free discussion, separation of church and state and popular sovereignty.

Presented in this way, the Enlightenment seems like one of the most beneficent intellectual movements in human history, but some recent scholars are casting doubt on this conventional view. In his newly released study, German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press), Michael Mack, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues there is a deep affinity between modern anti-Semitism and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest thinker to emerge from the Enlightenment.

In presenting his case for the prosecution, Mack observes that Kant consistently equated Jewish identity with a host of undesirable traits, including superstition, dishonesty, worldliness and even cowardliness.

"Every coward is a liar; Jews for example, not only in business, but also in common life", Kant noted in a lecture on practical philosophy.

Mack is not the only scholar trying to come to terms with the underbelly of the Enlightenment. In a 1997 collection of primary texts entitled Race and the Enlightenment (Blackwell), Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze showed that a belief in white racial superiority was pervasive among Enlightenment thinkers.

"Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites", Kant wrote in his book Physical Geography." The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people."

Given opinions like these, many are now asking: how enlightened was the Enlightenment?

It is a measure of how serious Mack and Eze are in making their case that they focus so much attention on the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, rather than other, less complex thinkers. Most Enlightenment intellectuals were facile popular writers, closer to being journalists than philosophers. This is certainly true of Paine and Voltaire, public intellectuals whose phrase-making ability helped spread ideas far and wide. This was not the case with Kant, who took the ideas of the Enlightenment and pitched them on the highest philosophical level, so that they would achieve the genuine force of abstract truth.

"Immanuel Kant was the paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlightenment", says Paul Guyer in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). "He eradicated the last traces of the medieval world view from modern philosophy, joined the key ideas of earlier rationalism and empiricism into a powerful model of the subjective origins of the fundamental principles of both science and morality, and laid the ground for much in the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Above all, Kant was the philosopher of human autonomy, the view that by the use of our own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without divine support or intervention."

Precisely because of the magnitude of Kant's achievement, scholars have tended to downplay his unwholesome writings on Jews and non-white peoples. Kant's remarks on such subjects are often portrayed as casual and incidental with no real connection to the core of his ideas, which are based on a commitment to universal human equality.

Mack argues, however, that glossing over Kant's anti-Semitism leads to intellectual distortion. By Mack's account, Kant's contempt for the Jews is intimately related to the central themes of his world view, and sheds light on the limits of Enlightenment thinking. According to Mack, all the positive traits of Kantian philosophy (freedom, autonomy, reason) are formed by being contrasted with a negative image of unenlightened humanity, usually taking the form of an anti-Semitic or some other racist caricature. For Kant, motives could only be good if they were not aimed at any material benefit. He saw Judaism as an inherently materialist religion, based upon a quid pro quo between God and His chosen people.

"In order to fully define the formal structures of his philosophy (autonomy, reason, morality and freedom), Kant almost unconsciously fantasized about the Jews as its opposite", Mack notes. "He posited Judaism as an abstract principle that does nothing else but, paradoxically, desire the consumption of material goods".

Of course, Kant did not generate his anti-Semitism out of thin air: As with other figures of the Enlightenment, his mind was furnished by the medieval thinking he intended to refute. Going back to at least the 12th century, European culture had developed a rich and ghastly tableau of imaginary Jews, seen as grasping materialists and as slaves to pedantic legality. These traits, nicely encapsulated in the Shakespearean figure of Shylock, were contrasted with an idealized revision of Christianity committed to otherworldly values and spiritual freedom -- purged of many orthodox doctrines, yet providing the structure for Kant's world view.

Although he claimed to speak for universal human reason, Kant's division of humanity reiterated and reinvigorated the religious and racial hierarchies of the past. In emphasizing Kant's debt to medieval thought, Mack is once again revising the standard picture.

As portrayed in Mack's book, Kant is a pivotal figure in Western thought because he took this earlier religious hostility toward Jews and reformulated it in philosophic language. By showing that the traditional critique of the Jews could be made by an Enlightenment philosopher, Kant set the stage for modern secular anti-Semitism. In the central chapters of his book, Mack argues that what he believes is Kant's fundamental antinomy (free enlightened humanity versus Jews enslaved to materialism) provided the framework for future anti-Semites, notably the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the musician Richard Wagner. Since Wagner in particular was a cultural hero for Adolf Hitler, Kant's own anti-Semitism can be seen as having a far-reaching effect.

By tracing an intellectual genealogy that puts Kant in the family tree of Nazism, historians such as Mack are upturning deeply held notions. Usually, right-wing movements such as national socialism are seen as part of the anti-Enlightenment, the wave of reactionary thought that, since the early 19th century, has used irrational appeals to emotion to combat liberal intellectuals such as Kant. Yet, in defence of Mack's argument, we should recall though Nazism was certainly an eruption of the irrational, it often presented itself as upholding progressive and scientific values. Like Kant, the Nazis drew a contrast between the ideal world they wanted to create and the alleged grubby materialism of their enemy, the Jewish people.

Still, the linkage between the Enlightenment and the evils of the 20th century -- which many will find strained and tenuous -- is only one side of Mack's argument. As he shows in the second half of his book, many Jewish thinkers, ranging from the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to the psychologist Sigmund Freud, used the very freedoms that the Enlightenment created to launch a fundamental critique of the Kantian division between the ideal and material world. The Enlightenment has never just been passively accepted, but has been challenged from an array of perspectives. Whatever the faults of the Enlightenment, it also created the precondition for its own revisions and improvements.

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