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

Chapter 8: Concerning the Kantian Principle for Natural History: An Attempt to Treat this Science Philosophically (1796)

Concerning the Kantian Principle for Natural History An Attempt to Treat this Science Philosophically (1796) Christoph Girtanner Christoph Girtanner (1760–1800), who studied medicine at the Georg-AugustUniversit ät (Göttingen) from 1780 to 1783, first established himself as a prolific writer in the natural sciences during several years of travel through Switzerland and France following the completion of his studies and a further period of study in Edinburgh, where he became familiar with the anti-phlogistic chemistry of the Scottish physician John Brown (1735–1788). A couple of years after his returning, in 1787, to Göttingen, he established—without an official connection to the university—his own medical practice; he subsequently published, in 1792, a book popularizing the chemistry of Brown—albeit without giving due credit to Brown. Girtanner is thus frequently recognized now for publications that demonstrate his connection to the Göttingen school of medical research surrounding Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1849), although he seems never to have had any official connection with the university. He was, however, most well-known in his own lifetime as the primary author of an anti-revolutionary seventeen-volume historical chronicle of the French Revolution (Historische Nachrichten und politischen Betrachtungen über die franzözische Revolution [Historical reports and political reflections concerning the French Revolution] [Berlin, 1791–1803]). The selections included below from Girtanner’s Concerning the Kantian Principle for Natural History (Ueber das Kantische Prinzip für die Naturgeschichte [Göttingen, 1796]) are typically viewed as an attempt to synthesize 209 210 Christoph Girtanner Blumenbach’s notion of the “formative drive” (Bildungstrieb) with Kant’s account of the development of distinct races from an original “lineal stem species” (Stammgattung). For the purposes of this volume, the text is of special interest because in it Girtanner liberally cites passages verbatim or with only slight variation from all of the texts by Kant included in these pages as well as passages from the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Further, Kant, in a brief section of his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View entitled “The character of the races,” explicitly states that because “[w]ith regard to this subject . . . Girtanner has presented so beautifully and thoroughly in explanation and further development in his work (in accordance with my principles),” he will, in this section of the work, need “only to make a further remark about family kind [Familienschlag] and the varieties or modifications [Varietäten oder Spielarten] that can be observed in one and the same race” (trans. Robert Louden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 223 [AA 7:320]). Some scholars have, however, raised doubts about the extent to which Kant was really familiar with Girtanner’s work, while Kant’s own comments in the paragraphs preceding and following his reference to ­ Girtanner—especially as presented in the older translation by Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978], 236–37)—concerning, respectively, first, the undesirability of the intermixing of races (because “the intermixture of races [caused by large-scale conquests], which gradually extinguishes their characters, does not seem beneficial to the human race”) and, second, the way in which nature has provided for a sufficient diversity of characters within the same stock (“for example, [within] the white race”) to obviate a need for interbreeding with other races, have only contributed to the controversy over whether Kant, in the final decade of his life, as a consequence of the more complete development of his moral and political philosophy in the 1790s, ever really purged himself entirely of the underlying racism evident in texts of the previous three decades. The page numbers included in brackets below, e.g., [2], indicate the pagination of the original published version, which is reproduced (with the original pagination) in Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 7, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2001). A reprint version of the complete text published in the series Aetas Kantian, vol. 82 (Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1968) is also available. * * * Preface The great Königsberg philosopher has expressed singularly penetrating ideas in three articles concerning the human races that have been 211 Concerning the Kantian Principle in Natural History inserted in various publications. , if they had been subjected to a careful examination, might necessarily have given a totally new direction to the study of natural history. I do not, nevertheless, find that the recent investigators of nature [Naturforscher] have taken notice of these...