Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History

Introduction

xi Introduction The tranquility with which [discourses] are accepted must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a construction the rules of which must be known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinized: we must define in what conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them are legitimate; and we must indicate which of them can never be accepted in any circumstances. —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge In this work, I aim to provide a contribution to the critique of Eurocentrism, with focus on the understanding of world history. I immerse myself deeply in the foundational structure of this Eurocentric knowledge production: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophy of world history. I intend to show that this philosophy of world history is based on racist philosophical anthropology. In my book Hegel and Anti-Semitism (Tibebu 2008), I discuss Hegel’s views on Judaism and the Jews. I show his ascription of the inferiority of Jews by embracing the age-old Christian theological anti-Judaism. Moreover, Hegel, like many of his contemporaries, including Kant, saw the Jews as belonging to the Orient, not to the Occident. Just as he saw the Orient as standing at a lower stage of development than the Occident, he depicted the Jews as being inferior to Christian Westerners. He saw Jews as Oriental people stuck in an unchanging recurrence of the same. Despite his contempt for the Jews in Germany, Hegel supported their individual civil rights. The present book, together with my work Hegel and Anti-Semitism, provides an African reading of Hegel.1 1. In his concise introduction to the history of modern racism, the comparative historian George Frederickson identifies “two main forms of modern racism—the color-coded white xii Introduction I come to my reading of Hegel not as a philosopher, which I am not, but as a student of African history. My claim in this work is that there is a direct link between Hegel’s epistemology and his paradigm of world history. The Hegelian epistemological ladder in the development of consciousness discussed in the Phenomenology of Spirit starts from the most abstract sense of consciousness, moves on to the divided consciousness of the understanding, goes further to reach the concrete universal consciousness of reason, and culminates in absolute knowledge (philosophy). For Hegel, such absolute knowledge (philosophy) begins in the West. “Philosophy proper commences in the West. It is in the West that this freedom of self-consciousness first comes forth.” Within the West, he identifies two epochs in the history of philosophy: the Greek and the Teutonic (1995a, 1:99, 101).2 I am not arguing that race constitutes the structural foundation of the Phenomenology . My point rather is that Hegel’s paradigm of world history is the historicization of his theory of the various phases of spirit’s journey to know itself, from immediate sense-certainty to the Absolute Idea. In the Phenomenology, Hegel is highly critical of biological racism, which I discuss in detail in chapter 4. Yet his theory of knowledge systematized in the Phenomenology provides the ground for his later works, including the Encyclopedia, which took overtly racist form. For Hegel, the journey of spirit through sense-certainty, understanding, and reason, ending with absolute knowledge, has its corresponding continental representations as Africa, Asia, and Europe, respectively. Furthermore, Hegel sees races as being embedded in their corresponding continental representations : Africa for the Negro, Asia for the Mongol, and Europe for the Caucasian . He accordingly depicts Africans as people of the senses, Asians as people of the understanding, and Europeans as people of reason. It is this racialized philosophical anthropology that informs Hegel’s philosophy of world history. As Georg Lukács, the greatest Hegelian-Marxist philosopher, put it, “In Hegel, the succession of historical epochs and the patterns in them (most clearly in the hissupremacist variety and the essentialist version of antisemitism” (2002, 46). My two books on Hegel deal with these two main forms of modern racism. 2. For Hegel’s discussion of philosophy, see The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy (1978). See also Tibebu 2008, chap. 2. Introduction xiii tory of philosophy) correspond by methodological necessity to the derivation of logical categories” (1978, 2:108).3 As shown in detail in this work, Hegel justified African enslavement in the Americas, rationalized the...