Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-Century Writings

Chapter 7: Of the Varieties and Deviate Forms of Negroes (1790)

Of the Varieties and Deviate Forms of Negroes (1790) Christoph Meiners Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), although not presently a well-known figure of late eighteenth-century German philosophy, was in fact one of the leading figures on the German philosophical scene of his day. Named Professor of Philosophy (Weltweisheit) in 1772 at the Georg-August-Universität (Göttingen), where he had studied from 1767 to 1770, Meiners, together with his Göttingen colleague Johann Georg Heinrich Feder (1740–1825), was from 1788–1791 responsible for the publication of the Philosophische Bibliothek (available online at www.ub.uni‑bielefeld.de/diglib/aufklaerung/), one of the foremost—and generally anti-Kantian—philosophical journals of the period. From 1788 to 1791, together with another Göttingen colleague, Johann Ludwig Timotheus Spittler (1752–1810), he was also responsible for the publication of the Göttingisches Historisches Magazin, the journal in which the article translated below was published (also available at the website previously cited). Among his many other contributions to the same volume of this journal, there are indeed two in particular that might be of special interest to readers of this volume. The first of these is titled, “On the Nature of the African Negro and the Liberation or Restriction of Blacks Dependent on that Nature” (Ueber die Natur der Afrikanischen Neger, und die davon abhangende Befreyung, oder Einschränkung der Schwarzen), the second, “Historical Reports Concerning the True Circumstances of the Slave Trade, and the Servitude of Negroes in the West Indies” (Historische Nachrichten über die wahre Beschaffenheit des Sclaven-Handels, und der Knechtschaft der Neger in West-Indien). For in these two articles, Meiners offers defenses of slavery that both in tone and conclusion are possibly even more disturbing than the 195 196 Christoph Meiners views expressed in the text reproduced below, in which Meiners writes of the “pleasant prospect that the Europeans can and will contribute to the perfection and happiness of other, less noble peoples not only through their rule and enlightenment but even especially by means of interbreeding with them,” such as the interbreeding—which Meiners calmly and approvingly details—that takes place between slave owners and their slaves on the plantations of the New World (see below, 206). Famous then among his contemporaries as a foremost spokesmen of the “popular philosophy” of the day, scholars now familiar with Meiners’ work are far more likely to know him as one of the leaders of a type of primitive ethnographic research in which authors—drawing only upon the travel reports of individuals who had actually observed native populations in other parts of the world—constructed monumental histories of the history of humankind that only replicated their own ethnocentric prejudices and racial stereotypes. For example, Meiners, in his Grundriß der Geschichte der Menscheit (Outline of the history of humankind) (Lemgo, 1785), divided humankind (das gegenw ärtige Menschengeschlect) into two “primary lineal stems” (Hauptstämme), the Caucasian and the Mongolian, the second of which he described as “not only much weaker in body and spirit, but also much more ill-formed and more devoid of virtue” (nicht nur viel schwächer von Cörper und Geist, sondern auch viel übel gearterter und tugendleerer). Meiners is thus now credited by scholars such as Bruce David Baum (The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity [New York: NYU Press, 2006], 84–94) with having first introduced the term Caucasian into the literature of scientific racism with far greater ideological import than that attributable to the usage first popularized by his Göttingen colleague, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), in the published version of his 1775 Göttingen medical thesis , De generis humani varietate nativa (On the natural varieties of humankind ) (Göttingen, 1775), although Blumenbach’s fame clearly surpassed that of Meiners in the early nineteenth century. Recent scholarship, as noted in a brief but penetrating article on Meiners that appeared in the prominent German weekly newspaper Die Zeit in 1999 (Jörg Schmidt, “Wurzeln des Wahns,” available online at www.zeit.de/1999/18/199918.meiner.neu_.xml), has, however, tended to support the view that it is far easier to find evidence of Meiners’ direct influence upon the foremost racist philosophy of the nineteenth century, that of the Frenchman Joseph-Arthur Gobineau (1816–1882), who cites Meiners explicitly in the first volume of his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An essay on the inequality of the human race) (Paris: Firmin-Didot...