This article interprets Hegel's hierarchical theory of race as an application of his general views about the metaphysics of classification and explanation. We begin by offering a reconstruction of Hegel's hierarchical theory of race based on the critical edition of relevant lecture transcripts: we argue that Hegel's position on race is appropriately classified as racist, that it postulates innate mental deficits of some races, and that it turns racism from an anthropological into a metaphysical doctrine by claiming that the division (...) of humankind into races (at least in the Old World) is not a brute fact, but follows a ‘higher necessity’. We then summarize our interpretation of the relevant metaphysical background to this theory. On our reading, Hegel postulates an essentialist form of explanation that explains given kinds as stages in a teleological, non-temporal process through which the nature of a superordinate kind is realized. We argue that Hegel's views about a hierarchical and necessary division of humankind into races are an application of this model to the case of human diversity, motivated by explanatory considerations and subject to confirmation bias. By way of conclusion, we address two possible attempts to ‘save’ Hegelian philosophy from its racist baggage. (shrink)

This article explores an episode in the reception of Hegel's philosophy of history and historiography of philosophy with reference to the question of the possibility of non-Western philosophy, in particular African philosophy. Section I briefly outlines the contents of the Hatäta Zär'a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship, focusing in particular on the argument of the Ethiopianist and scholar of Semitic languages Carlo Conti Rossini that ‘rationalistic’ philosophy was impossible in Ethiopia. In section II I suggest that a major (...) component of the intellectual background to this notion of the impossibility of philosophy in Africa can be traced to Hegel's philosophy of history. To substantiate this claim I begin by providing an account of the broader historiographical shift between 1780 and 1830, in which Africa and Asia came to be excluded from the history of philosophy, and I suggest that Hegel's philosophy of history was decisive in this process. I examine how Hegel's account of history as the realization and actualization of freedom goes together with the development of cultural production culminating in philosophy, and how both of these processes (if they are really separate processes at all), can be mapped onto particular historical-geographical populations and cultures. I suggest that, even though this was not Hegel's intention, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this served as a cultural justification for political domination: those who are unfree are unfree because they are unthinking (unphilosophical), and those who are unthinking cannot be free. Finally in section III I connect this Hegelian conception to Conti Rossini's work, both his article on the Hatäta and as apologist for Italian imperialism. I conclude by reflecting on what this underexplored connection between Hegel and early twentieth-century theorists of culture might mean for attempts to construct global histories of philosophy. (shrink)

Where exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? Moellendorf helpfully tells us that Hegel's treatment of race begins systematically in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and that he went wrong philosophically in the use of the biological category of race. This is basically correct but requires precisification. This article considers why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological. Race's biological status can be problematized from the standpoint of contemporary biology and from the standpoint of Hegel's system. The textual placement (...) of Hegel's systematic discussion of race in the philosophy of spirit makes clear that Hegel conceived of race in spiritual terms. Hegel took race to be a biospiritual category. Hegel was clearly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race, that there is a plurality of biological human races. He regarded race as a robust natural kind. His preferred list of races includes Caucasians, Negros, Mongolian, Malaysians and Americans. One noteworthy feature of his understanding of race's physical aspect was his focus on the formation of the skull and the face. At the same time, he clearly held that there were other deeper physical differences that accounted for the spiritual differences of race. Hegel was perfectly clear that race has a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He held that that the members of racial groups essentially shared certain fundamental, heritable, moral, intellectual and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race and that these differences were such as to support an objective ranking. This shows that Hegel took the category of race to be the sort of category we today would characterize as ‘racialist’. Hegel's concept of race was the racialist concept of race. (shrink)