Lu-Adler, Huaping. Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere. New York: Oxford University Press 2023, xvi + 401 pp.

Publications on Kant and race have exploded in recent years, and some of us may perhaps be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing new to say on the topic. But Huaping Lu-Adler, in Kant, Race, and Racism – the first English-language book on the subject – has definitely managed to say something new. She achieves this result in part by rejecting several core assumptions shared by many earlier writers, in part by expanding the scope of her investigation beyond that of previous work, and in part by adopting a different perspective on the topic. As she remarks on the last page of her detailed and well-researched study, she seeks to take “the discourse on Kant, race, and racism in a new direction” (358).

Before offering some critical comments on several of Lu-Adler’s key claims, I shall begin with a very brief overview of her book. Kant, Race, and Racism consists of three parts. In Part I (“Reframing the Discourse”), she begins by attacking the position of many earlier authors (myself included) who believe that there is a fundamental contradiction in Kant’s statements about human beings (Chapter 1: “Where is the ‘Contradiction’? – Reconsidering the Place of Race in Kant’s System”). In Chapter 2 (“‘Racism’ in What Sense? – Reconceptualizing Kant’s Relation to Racism”), Lu-Adler shifts attention away from the traditional “individualistic approach” to Kant’s work on race that “revolves around the question of whether, to what extent, or for how long Kant was a racist” (24), focusing instead on his role in the formation of racist ideology. A key aspect of this shift, which I will return to later, involves “trying to understand Kant’s role in the formation of modern racist ideology without judging him in moralistic terms” (30). Part II (“Seeing Race”) begins with a detailed account of how Kant approached race as a Naturforscher, or natural scientist (Chapter 3: “Investigating Nature under the Guidance of Reason – Kant’s Approach to ‘Race’ as a Naturforscher”). Lu-Adler’s main goal here is to integrate Kant’s writing on race with his extensive work in natural philosophy, thereby showing that Kant’s racist views are not mere “private prejudices” (an unfortunate expression that I once used) but rather (as Mark Larrimore has argued) have a “constitutive place” in Kant’s philosophical system. In Chapter 4 (“From Baconian Natural History to Kant’s Racialization of Human Differences – A Study of Philosophizing from Locations of Power”), she charts the influence of Bacon, Boyle, Linnaeus, and Buffon, as well as the “international global data gathering” effort promoted by Bacon (164), on the development of Kant’s theory of race. Part 3 (“A Worldview Transformed by ‘Race’”) examines some of the consequences of Kant’s racism. In Chapter 5 (“What Is Seen Cannot Be Unseen – What Kant Can(not) Tell Us About Racial (Self-)Perceptions”), Lu-Adler discusses two early nineteenth-century German novellas, both of which are set in revolutionary Haiti, and both of which explore “how one perceives oneself and others through the racial lens, sometimes with tragic consequences” (29) – “a lens […] which no one can avoid seeing or being seen through” (247). In Chapter 6 (“Race and the Claim to True Philosophy – Kant and the Formation of an Exclusionary History of Philosophy”), she examines what she believes is a strong connection between Kant’s racism and his conception of the history of philosophy. In the Jäsche Logic, for instance, Kant asserts:

Among all peoples, […] the Greeks first began to philosophize. For they first attempted to cultivate cognitions of reason, not with images as the guiding thread, but in abstracto, while other peoples always sought to make concepts understandable only through images in concreto. Even today there are peoples, like the Chinese and some Indians, who admittedly deal with things that are derived merely from reason, like God, the immortality of the soul, etc., but who nevertheless do not seek to investigate the nature of these things in accordance with concepts and rules in abstracto. (Log 9: 27)

On Lu-Adler’s reading, the Kantian position on where philosophy originated “is not only that Easterners were, in the ancient times, incapable of philosophizing but also that they are so incapable now and forever” (317). And one unfortunate result is “a Western Eurocentric curriculum that still dominates higher education today” (29). Finally, in her “Forward-Looking Conclusion,” she offers some “concrete suggestions about how one can help transform racist culture through teaching” (30), suggestions that stem in part from her conviction that “those of us who research and/or teach Kant have a burden to understand and reckon with the legacies of his raciology” (335).

As noted above, one core assumption shared by many earlier writers on Kant and race that Lu-Adler attacks in Part One of her book is the belief that there is a fundamental contradiction in Kant’s statements about human beings. On the one hand, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals he writes: “a rational nature exists as an end in itself. That is how a human being by necessity represents his own existence” (GMS 4: 429). On the traditional reading, Kant is here asserting the equal worth of all human beings as ends in themselves. But on the other hand, in his Physical Geography he states: “Humanity has its highest degree of perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a somewhat lesser talent. The Negroes are much lower, and lowest of all is part of the American races” (PG 9: 316). This statement, in its assertion of a racial hierarchy, denies that all humans have equal worth, and thus would seem to contradict the first quotation. But Lu-Adler holds, on the contrary, that “the universality of Kant’s moral claims […] is perfectly consistent with racist claims” (34). “Kant’s moral universalism […] cannot be logically contradicted by racism, which concerns individual humans in concreto” (74).

Lu-Adler’s argument here is difficult to summarize and not always easy to follow, but at bottom she claims that Kant’s moral universalism statements occur in his pure moral philosophy, where he is concerned with the “human being qua rational being as such” (18), while his racist statements occur primarily in his physical geography, where he is concerned with “human beings qua spatiotemporally particularized inhabitants on earth” (18). Kant’s various statements about humans, in other words, occur at “different levels of discourse” (18), and what is said about humans at one level does not necessarily apply to what is said about them at another level.

Fair enough … or maybe not. It is certainly true that there exist different levels of discourse in Kant’s philosophy. His pure moral philosophy, for instance, “is built on necessary laws, as a result it cannot be grounded on the particular constitution of a rational being, [such as] the human being” (V-Mo/Mron II 29: 599), whereas his impure moral philosophy is “philosophia moralis applicata, moral anthropology, to which the empirical principles belong” (V-Mo/Mron II 29: 599). But when Kant proclaims in the Groundwork that “a rational nature exists as an end in itself,” he is clearly referring to every human being – and “every other rational being” (GMS 4: 429) as well, including the “rational creatures that inhabit Jupiter or Saturn” (NTH 1: 359) – regardless of their spatiotemporal location. Spatiotemporal location (not to mention biology, psychology, culture, climate, etc.) are all irrelevant when it comes to Kantian moral status. So, the contradiction remains. What Kant asserts about humans in some passages does contradict what he says about them in other passages.

Lu-Adler is particularly critical of the teleological dimension of Kant’s theory of race – namely, his account of “the historical unfolding of humanity’s rational potentials” (75). On her dark interpretation of Kantian teleology, nonwhites essentially have no future: “Kant’s raciology coupled with his teleological view of human history leaves nonwhites with no agential roles to play in his picture of a cosmopolitan future” (277; cf. 17, 66). Here as elsewhere, I believe that she is over-confident in her assessment. On the one hand, yes: Kant does say that some races may “remain behind (zurück bleiben)” (Refl 1471, 15: 650), that “we find peoples (Völcker) who do not appear to progress in the perfection of human nature but have reached a standstill” (V-Anth/Pillau 25: 840), and that some races may even be “exterminated (ausgerottet)” (Refl 1520, 15: 878) and “die out (aussterben)” (V-Anth/Pillau 25: 840). But on the other hand, no: Kant repeatedly describes humanity’s cosmopolitan future as leading to “a peaceful […] community of all peoples on earth (aller Völker auf Erden)” (MS 6: 352; cf. ZeF 8: 357), and he insists that a proper concern for human progress requires that “one not simply consider what may happen with any one Volk, but consider also the spreading over all peoples of the earth (die Verbreitung über alle Völker der Erde), who will gradually come to participate in progress” (SF 7: 89; cf. RGV 6: 94). Whereas my younger, more idealistic self leaned on these latter passages, Lu-Adler clearly prefers the former. At present, however, I despair of finding a clear, coherent Kantian narrative on race. His work on this topic contains a minefield of contradictions, and those who enter this dangerous territory should do so with extreme caution. Various attempts have been (and will continue to be) made to iron out the contradictions: e. g., he changed his mind over time (Pauline Kleingeld has developed the most plausible version of this strategy), he was a consistent racist from the start (Lu-Adler defends a version of this thesis) or he was a consistent moral universalist (the dominant view until recently). But ingenious as these attempts are, I am not quite convinced by any of them.

As regards Kant’s allegedly racially motivated claim that philosophy begins with the Greeks, it is difficult to believe that this widespread view began with Kant – who himself was neither a historian of philosophy nor a specialist in ancient Greek thought. Rather, Christoph Meiners – ironically, a staunch empiricist opponent of Kant’s philosophy – appears to be the originator of this view. Lea Cantor writes: “Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) was the first European historian of philosophy to suggest that Thales was the first philosopher” (Cantor 2022, 743). And according to Peter K. J. Park: “Kant’s reasons for the exclusion [of the Orient from the history of philosophy] were ones he got from Meiners, whose influential Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom (History of the Origin, Progress, and Decline of the Sciences in Greece and Rome) appeared in 1781” (Park 2013, xii; cf. 94, 150; see Lu-Adler 2023, 230 n114). We do know, for instance, that Kant had a copy of Meiner’s Geschichte des Ursprungs in his personal library (see Warda 1922, 25). And Kant appears to be referring to Meiner’s position that philosophy began with the Greeks in the following remark to his student Plessing: “I cannot agree with your judgment regarding the great wisdom and insight of the ancient Egyptians, for reasons largely anticipated by Herr Meiners” (Kant to Friedrich Victor Leberecht Plessing, February 3, 1784; Br 10: 363). Here, as also in Kant’s race theory, I think Lu-Adler and others have exaggerated the extent to which Kant is the originator or inventor of the -ism being attacked. Racism does not begin with Kant, nor does Eurocentrism or love of the Greeks. At the same time, however, her repeated emphasis on the strong role that Kant “in virtue of his position in a nexus of power relations and meaning makers” (78; cf. 96, 100, 106) played in the formation both of both modern racial ideology and Eurocentric views about the origins and history of philosophy is well-taken. In other words, even if Meiners is the true source for Kant’s position on the origins of philosophy, it was Kant’s endorsement of this view – coupled with his star status within the philosophical profession – that helped propel it into an unquestioned dogma for so long. And for me, one of the saddest takeaways of Lu-Adler’s book is the realization of how wrong mainstream philosophy and science often are when it comes to making fundamental value judgments, and how uncritically the rest of us have often accepted these judgments.

One key example of Lu-Adler’s desire to expand the scope of previous discussions of Kant and race is to ask how “can Kant’s philosophy still be tapped for antiracism?” (19). She answers this question rather weakly by drawing attention to three subsidiary aspects of Kant’s moral theory – namely, his opacity thesis (our inability to know ourselves – a prominent theme in Onora O’Neill’s work), his doctrine of what Andrew Cureton calls “reasonable hope,” and his conceptions of shame and contempt. But if Kant is wrong about race (and he clearly is), why use his texts as the main weapon to combat racism? Kant scholars who wish to combat racism in the classroom would be well advised to lay their Kant texts aside and instead turn to other Enlightenment authors who offer much more positive depictions of non-Europeans. Lessing, Mendelssohn, Montesquieu, Leibniz, Wolff, Diderot, Lahontan, Forster, Herder: there are plenty to choose from, and while these texts are certainly not problem-free, together they do clearly demonstrate that Kant’s racist views are fortunately not the dominant voice in liberal Enlightenment discussions of race.

As noted earlier, part of Lu-Adler’s rejection of the traditional “individualistic” approach to Kant and race that examines whether, to what extent, and for how long Kant was a racist and her adoption of a position that focuses on his role in the formation of modern racist ideology involves a desire not to judge him “in moralistic terms” (30). For what it is worth, I do not think she succeeds in this goal. Kant, Race, and Racism abounds in moralistic judgments. A very small sample: Kant exhibits “a cold indifference to the atrocities suffered by human beings in concreto” (28). “Kant is evidently more worried about racial slavery’s eventual negative consequences for the European states than he is interested in defending the dignity or freedom of the enslaved” (231). If “Kant came to express some qualms about racial slavery, it was not thanks to any moral epiphany. It was rather that, by the mid-1790s, he could no longer see racial slavery simply as something that facilitated progress” (232). But I will add here that I myself do not regard moralism (making judgments about others’ morality) as a vice, as long as one tries to support one’s judgments with reasoning and evidence – which Lu-Adler does.

The subtitle of Lu-Adler’s book – “Views from Somewhere” – also deserves comment. As she notes, it “indicates an opposition to the idea of objectivity developed in Thomas Nagel’s famous book, The View from Nowhere” (23). Lu-Adler’s claim that philosophers’ choices about “which philosophical issue they single out as important and how they study it […] always comes from a standpoint that is shaped by their histories, social locations, identities, and so on” (344) is well-taken, when read as a factual statement. But what is called for is awareness of and reflection on one’s limited standpoint, coupled with a resolution to try to include the standpoints of others – or what Kant called an adoption of the maxim “to think oneself (in communication with human beings) into the place of every other person” (Anth 7: 228; see also Anth 7: 200, KU 5: 294, Log 9: 57). As a student of Lu-Adler’s remarked in one of her classes: “what is required is a view-from-everywhere approach” (345). The result should lead to more objectivity rather than less. Needless to say, if Kant and other Enlightenment Naturforscher who influenced the development of his racial theory had themselves adhered better to this “unalterable command” of reason (cf. Anth 7: 228), the formation of modern racial ideology would have turned out much differently.

Although I have offered several criticisms of Lu-Adler’s book, I wish to close simply with the recommendation that anyone with serious interests in Kant’s views on race should read this book. Kant, Race, and Racism is the most comprehensive and sophisticated work on this topic with which I am familiar. The author builds on and/or responds critically to a wealth of earlier writing on Kant and race, and readers who follow the details of her arguments will not be unrewarded.^[1]