Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian ...

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30 Arnold Farrstand a text is to read it in context. Hence, if the Grounding is read within thecontext of the critical philosophy, the tools for a deconstruction of the text areprovided by its context and the tensions within the text.Gates is right to suggest that the Grounding must be deconstructed.However, this deconstruction requires much more than reading the Observationson the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime against the Grounding. It requiresa complete engagement with the critical philosophy. Such an engagementdiscloses some of Kant’s very significant claims about humanity and thepractical role of reason. With this disclosure, deconstruction of the Groundingcan begin. What deconstruction will reveal is not necessarily the inconsistencyof Kant’s moral philosophy or the racist or sexist nature of the categoricalimperative, but rather, it will disclose the disunity between Kant’s theoryand his own feelings about blacks and women. Although the theory is consistentand emancipatory and should apply to all persons, Kant the man hashis own personal and moral problems. Although Kant’s attitude towardpeople of African descent was deplorable, it would be equally deplorable toreject the categorical imperative without first exploring its emancipatorypotential.Notes1 I follow Seyla Benhabib (who draws on Marx) in pointing out this distinction between“critique” and “criticism.” She writes: “Critique refuses to stand outside its object andinstead juxtaposes the immanent, normative self-understanding of its object to thematerial actuality of the object. Criticism privileges an Archimedian standpoint, be itfreedom, or reason and proceeds to show the unfreedom or unreasonableness of theworld when measured against this ideal paradigm” (Critique Norm and Utopia: A Studyof the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 33). Mypurpose in evoking this distinction here is to show that many critics of Kant rejectKant’s moral theory on the basis of an external critique or criticism. However, such aprocedure fails to do justice to the theory and leads to an unnecessary dismissal of thecategorical imperative. This problematic rejection of Kant’s highest moral principle isexacerbated by the fact that there is textual evidence that Kant was a racist and sexist.However, a critique gives us the grounds for rejecting Kant’s racism and sexism whilepreserving what I take to be Kant’s indispensable contribution to moral theory and anyemancipatory philosophy.2 Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious andCultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 51.3 Anderson’s use of the term “species logic” is a bit confusing but need not be. The term“species” can be used to distinguish the human species from other species, and it canbe used to distinguish types within a species. Anderson makes use of the latter functionof the term. However, in racist literature there is a blurring of these two functionsof the term. One may argue that it is to this blurring of the functions of the term“species” that the term “species logic” applies. That is, although the human race is aparticular species, in racist literature there is a hiearchy within the species that almostaccounts for a plurality of species types within a species. Hence, there is the morehuman and the less human.4 Ibid., 51–52.5 Ibid., 52.6 See chapter 2 of Tzvetan Todorov’s On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticismin French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge/London: Harvard UniversityPress, 1994).
Philosophy of Race and the Categorical Imperative 317 See chapter 2 of Cornel West’s Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American RevolutionaryChristianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982).8 Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness, 54.9 Henry Louis Gates, “Talkin’ That Talk,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry LouisGates (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 408.10 Ibid.11 Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities,1995), 68.12 T. C. Williams discusses this debate between H. J. Paton and A. C. R. Duncan in TheConcept of the Categorical Imperative: A Study of the Place of the Categorical Imperative inKant’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).13 See Andrea Austen’s “A Feminist Reconstruction of Bradley’s Ethical Idealism,” IdealisticStudies 26, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1996): 17–28.14 See “Kantian Philosophy,” in G. W. F. Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf andH. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 67–96.15 This antinomy between our intelligible and empirical character is constitutive of humanmoral agency. See section 3 of Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.James W. Ellington (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1993). See also A451/B569 inKant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s,1965).16 Onora O’ Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 156.17 Gordon, Bad Faith, 68.18 Kant, Grounding, 61.19 One possible objection to my thesis in this paper is that the Kantian notion of rationalityexcludes women and nonwhite races. This is true on the basis of Kant’s own racismand sexism. However, it seems to me that Kant’s notion of rationality is itself not wrong.Kant is wrong only to the extent that he thinks that it applies only to white Europeanmales.20 Gordon, Bad Faith, 68–69.21 Ibid., 69.22 Kant. Grounding, 7.23 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 200.24 Ibid., 203.25 Ibid.26 Here I am thinking of the notion of purposiveness that Kant develops in the Critique ofJudgment and in “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History.”27 Bernard Carnois, The Coherence of Kant’s Doctrine of Freedom, trans. David Booth (Chicagoand London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 47.28 Henry Allison makes the important distinction between freedom as spontaneity andfreedom as law governed autonomy in “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant’s Conceptionof the Self,” in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical GermanPhilosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 1995), 11–29.29 Kant, Grounding, 49.30 For a discussion of this notion of a pathological and psychological predisposition, seeHenry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990), 55. See also A534/B562 in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.31 To say that the two sides of consciousness constitute an identity-relation is not to say thatthey are identical to each other. They are quite distinct. However, the individual subjectis the unity of two conflicting feelings, that is, the feeling of necessity (our empiricalcharacter) and the feeling of freedom (our intelligible character). Herein is the Kantiandistinction between theoretical and practical reason.32 Kant, Grounding, 39.33 The criticism of Kantian rationality, universality, and autonomy is quite extensive infeminist philosophy. Much of this criticism has emerged since the publication of Carol
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