Topics Race

Question At the moment, I'm particularly concerned about the 'personal heresy' in philosophy. Recently, Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, gave a speech in which he quoted several racist statements by key philosophers of Western civilisation. David Hume, for instance believed that "of all the 'breeds' of man, the darkest breed was inferior.."(quote from Mbeki's speech) and it's also believed that Kant believed black people were 'beasts'(again, Mbeki's belief). Whether these quotes are accurate or not, it's indubitable that the milieu in which these philosophers formed their various normative frameworks was a deeply prejudiced one. If philosophy proceeds from deductivism, i.e a set of axioms are laid out, rules of inference determined, and from these various judgements made, is it possible that inherent within western thought is a kind of racial prejudice? And if so, is it possible to account for it, using some kind of 'personal equation' of the kind invoked by Gauss in his work with astronomy?

Accepted:
October 7, 2007

Comments

I'll have to leave the bit about Gauss aside. All I know about the "personal equation" was that astronomers had noticed certain sorts of systematic variations among observers. But there was a different theme in your question that I'd like to address.

A preamble: Yes, Hume, Kant and other western philosophers, no doubt all on this panel included, operate in a mileu that's saddled with various prejudices. I'd add that I'm not aware of any large cultural mileu that's exempt from this sad fact, and Africa, like the west, provides its own set of depressing illustrations. But I'm a bit uncomfortable with using a term like "Western Thought" (or, for that matter, "Eastern Thought" or "African thought" or even "South African thought") as an analytical concept. (I'm uncomfortable for similar reasons when my students write papers with sentences that begin "Society holds that...") As noted, the history of the west embodies a good many prejudices and false ideas. Some of these make their way into political and philosophical thinking. But some of those same ideas are roundly denounced and incisively criticized by thinkers within the very same broad tradition.

This bears on a more general point. Although some philosophers reason from propositions that function more or less explicitly as axioms, that suggests a model of doing philosophy that doesn't seem to me to fit the practice very well. Part of the problem is that this "top down" model simply doesn't capture what goes on in a lot of the best philosophical thinking. Philosophers are sensitive to abstract principles when they seem pertinent, but also to low-level intuitions and to stubborn facts. To borrow a phrase that John Rawls made popular, good philosophy looks for a "reflective equilibrium" among considerations of various sorts and at various levels of abstraction.

But even insofar as some philosophy fits the model you suggest, any philosopher who formulates an explicit axiom and reasons from it can expect that the axiom will become the target of counterarguments and counterexamples. The philosopher's impulse in the face of a sacred cow is to slay it. That's an important part of what keeps the discipline honest.