Resolved: Philosophy Is Racist

Hegel, hapless victim of his own racism.

We suddenly find ourselves in the belly of the beast: an essay explaining why philosophy itself is racist: “Philosophy’s Systemic Racism.”

Or at least it seems to claim to. Then it focuses on Hegel. So that the case, even if made, would appear to be not systemic racism, but individual racism.

But the inconsistencies or confusions of terms do not end there. The author calls “explicitly racist” the postulated view that “Black and Indigenous peoples the world over were savage, inferior and in need of correction by European enlightenment.”

Only one element of that statement implies racism: that black or indigenous people might be “inferior.” Savagery is not genetic; neither is being in need of correction. Yet these are all thrown together, as though one’s culture and one’s system of government were racially determined. An ideal justification for colonialism or indeed slavery, coming from the present author.

Does he go on to make a case that Hegel considered black or indigenous people inferior?

“Hegel certainly was an explicit racist. He believed, for example, that Black Africans were a ‘race of children that remain immersed in a state of naiveté’. He further wrote that Indigenous peoples lived in ‘a condition of savagery and unfreedom’. And in The Philosophy of Right (1821), he argued that there is a ‘right of heroes’ to colonise these people in order to bring them into a progress of European enlightenment.”

Nothing here implies racial inferiority. It implies that their social organization, their government, is inferior. By this logic I would be guilty of anti-black racism for saying the black slaves in the antebellum US South were being held in a state of unfreedom. And if I do not support the government of Michigan, I am an anti-Michigander racist. “Explicitly.”

At the same time that he condemns Hegel for supposedly thinking that indigenous social systems or culture were inferior to European ones, and calls this “racist,” he condemns Rousseau as “racist” for thinking that indigenous social systems or culture were superior to European ones. “Unlike Hegel, however, he thought that he was reading about people leading idyllic lives.” He then condemns Schiller as racist for thinking that European and indigenous cultures simply had characteristic strengths and weaknesses, and could learn from one another through contact.

On this basis, the only possible conclusion, surely, is that “racist” is simply for this author a synonym for “European.” Or, to use the racist term beloved of racial theorists, “white.” 

Berkeley

The Distinguished Bishop of Cloyne Wearing a Silly Hat.

It is incredibly cheeky of me to say so, but I really think Western philosophy has been in a funk since Berkeley. It seems to me Berkeley resolved everything and has never been successfully challenged. Nevertheless, his conclusions have been so difficult for many to swallow that ever since, philosophers have turned on philosophy itself, seeking to deny it in order to deny Berkeley.

As my first-year philosophy professor said, “but we know there are no unicorns.” Struck me as special pleading at the time, and it still does. The real problem with Berkeley, I think, is that he leaves God too prominent. That is intrinsically frightening to anyone with something to hide. 

Hume Wearing an Even Sillier Hat and Playing the Clown.

Therefore, philosophers since Hume have gone after the fundamental premise that reason can lead us to truth. This is the essence of Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche; of the entire Romantic movement, from the 19th century until now; Marx and Freud and Modernism and Post-Modernism too. It gets quite tedious. It has also been an axe hacking sat the root of Western civilization ever since—rejecting reason means rejecting all established order. We have seen great bloodbaths since. 

Kant, Seen from
Above.

But it is all also, surely, self-contradictory. As we mentioned earlier with regard to Hume, to use a rational argument to show that reason cannot be trusted is to show that this argument, too, cannot be trusted. It is self-contradictory.

It is therefore necessary to conclude that reason can be trusted. The basic operations of reason must be understood as essential, eternal elements of the universe as it truly is—the eternal Logos. 

Hegel, on a Good Day.

Which slams us right into the imaginary stone wall of Berkeley. Since then, there has been nothing in the field of ontology, although there have been good social and natural philosophers.

Berkeley says only perceptions exist; there is no independently existing material world to which they refer. Everything subsists in the mind of God. We are all avatars in a cosmic video game. 

Nietzsche in the Old Philosophers' Home, Dying of Syphilis.

Deal with it, already.