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

Chapter 5: Something More About the Human Races (1786)

Something More About the Human Races (1786) Georg Forster Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754–1794), among all of the authors included in this volume, surely enjoyed the greatest fame during his own lifetime— likely surpassing even that of Kant. Born near Danzig in the Polish province of Royal Prussia, this fame resulted from the fact that at an early age he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798), a prominent German naturalist in his own right, on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific (1772–1775). Then, after conflicts with the voyage’s patron, the Earl of Sandwich, and Captain Cook over the text of what was to be the “official” report of the journey, which the elder Forster had already begun writing, the younger Forster took up the task of writing an unofficial account based loosely upon his father’s journals. The result, published first in an English version, A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4 and 5, 2 vols. (London, 1777), appeared a year later in a German edition prepared by the younger Forster himself (Reise um die Welt während den Jahren 1772 bis 1775 in dem durch den Capitain Cook geführten Schiffe the Resolution unternommen, 2 vols. [Berlin, 1778]). An immediate success, the work established Forster’s reputation in scientific circles as a naturalist and ethnographer and as an exemplary figure in the popular genre of travel literature that flourished throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century. The work is indeed still widely read today and can be easily obtained in many different editions both in German and English, including a recently published scholarly edition, A Voyage Round the World, 2 vols., ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghoff (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000). 143 144 Georg Forster After Forster’s return to continental Europe in the late 1780s, he held a number of different academic positions, including that of professor of natural history both at the Collegium Carolinium in Kassel (1779–1784) and at the Schola Princeps Magni Ducatus Lithuaniac (University of Vilnius) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1784–1787), where he lived at the time of his submission of the article that follows to the prestigious Teutscher Merkur. Throughout this period, Forster engaged in correspondence with leading figures of the German Enlightenment—including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring (1755– 1830). Together with Lichtenberg, he founded and published the Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Literatur (1780–1785). Sömmerring, his closest friend, was also a leading anatomist of the period, whose first important monograph, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mohren vom Europäer (Mainz, 1784; republished the following year with the slightly altered title, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europäer [On the bodily differences between Negroes and Europeans] [Frankfurt und Mainz, 1785]), was widely regarded as authoritative. This work, dedicated to Forster, even includes a quotation on the title page from E. A. W. Zimmermann’s 1778– 1783 Geographical History of Human Beings and the Universally Dispersed Quadrupeds (see above, 73–123). Forster is also widely credited with having inspired a leading figure of the next generation of German naturalists, Alexander Humboldt (1769–1859), who had “accompanied [him] on a hiking trip down the Rhine to the Netherlands and from there by ship to England” after the two had met in Göttingen in 1789. This, then, as further described in a recent, brief account of the friendship, was the event that inspired Humboldt “to the study of the phenomena of nature in relation to each other and their environment” (Ramesh Dutta Dikshit, Geographical Thought: A Contextual History of Ideas, 6th ed. [New Dehli, India: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd., 2006], 43). Forster’s seemingly secure place in the German cultural history of his own lifetime was, however, compromised by events of the 1790s. Frustrated by the lack of support by Polish officials to realize his dream of turning Vilnius into a center for research in the then broadly defined field of natural history, Forster accepted a position as University Librarian in Mainz in 1788. Then, on 21 October 1792, the French revolutionary army gained control of the city, and Forster, two days later, joined others in establishing a Jacobin Club called the Friends of...