Kant against Kant

The best-known formula of the categorical imperative demands that every human being be treated “always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means”. For Kant everything has either a price or a dignity, and what has dignity cannot be replaced by anything. The same Kant ranked people by the colour of their skin, denied women and servants the vote and defended the death penalty. And towards the end of his life he sharply condemned the way Europeans conquered foreign lands.

To think with Kant against Kant means taking his own principles seriously and examining where he fails to follow them. Whether his prejudices are merely the errors of a man of his time or reach into his philosophy is disputed among scholars. This page does not settle the dispute; it shows it.

In two short essays, On the Different Races of Man (1775/1777) and Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (1785), Kant holds two things. All human beings belong to a single species and probably descend from one stock; there are “no different species of human beings at all”. At the same time he distinguishes four races, mainly by skin colour. He explains their origin by “germs and natural predispositions” that lay ready in the first human stock and developed according to climate (Ak. 2:435, own translation).

He does not stop at classification. As early as 1764, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant, relying on a claim by David Hume, concludes that the difference between Black and white people seems as great in mental capacities as in colour. In 1788 he ranks the inhabitants of America even below Africans, whom he places on the lowest of the other levels. Much of what he said about foreign peoples he knew only at second hand, often from Eurocentric accounts.

There were objections even then. The naturalist Georg Forster, who had taken part in James Cook's second voyage around the world, publicly and vehemently contradicted Kant in 1786. In doing so, however, he considered a separate origin for Africans; in his reply of 1788 Kant held on to the unity of the species. Elsewhere Forster stressed that human nature differs with climate but is on the whole the same.

Kant defends the death penalty for murder and grounds it in the same idea as the formula of dignity. Punishment, he says, may never be imposed merely as a means to some other good, whether for the criminal himself or for society, but only because someone has committed a crime; for a human being may never be used merely as a means to the purposes of others. From this he derives retribution: whoever has murdered must die. Even a people living on an island that decided to disperse would first have to execute the last murderer in its prison.

In 1764 the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria had rejected the death penalty for quiet times. Kant presents him as if he had declared every death penalty illegitimate and calls the argument “sophistry and perversion of right”. Goethe and Hegel were also among the defenders of the death penalty at the time. Whether Kant's argument respects the offender's dignity or contradicts it is a question you can put to this passage.

That Kant made racist and derogatory statements is not in dispute. What follows from this for the rest of his thought is. The philosopher Charles W. Mills sees Kant as one of the central figures in the birth of modern “scientific” racism and accuses scholarship of having long sanitised this side of him. Robert Bernasconi credits Kant with the first scientific definition of race. In the 1990s Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze did much to make philosophers read these texts at all.

Pauline Kleingeld argues that Kant defended a racial hierarchy at least until the end of the 1780s but changed his views markedly in the last decade of his life: in Perpetual Peace he rejects both the hierarchy and colonialism because they are incompatible with the equal rights of all. The philosopher Daniel-Pascal Zorn warns against tearing pointed quotations out of context: many come from a public exchange with Herder and Forster in which Kant, against others, defended the unity of humankind.

Does a principle lose its force when its author violates it? Or does this show precisely what it can do, since it can be turned against its own author? Everyone has to answer that question for themselves.