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Of the Different Human Races (1777) Immanuel Kant The text translated below might easily, but mistakenly, be viewed as little more than a minor rewriting of Kant’s 1775 summer semester course announcement (see above, 41–54) edited for publication in a volume entitled Der Philosoph für die Welt (The philosopher for the world) that featured essays by individuals considered to be among the leading “popular philosophers” of the day. A closer reading of the text shows, however, that it deserves to be read not only for the sake of comparison with views developed in the 1775 course announcement as well as with the later, 1785 and 1788 texts (see below), but also in its own right as indicative of a new stage in the 1770– 1780s development of Kant’s serious interest in formulating a scientifically respectable explanation for the “manifold diversity” (Mannigfaltigkeit) of human forms that culturally aware eighteenth-century Europeans were at the time learning about from the reports of the many “world travelers” then exploring and even circumnavigating the earth, such as Captain James Cook (1728–1779), whose second voyage to the Pacific in the years 1772–1775 was for the educated public of Europe of the time an event of significance comparable for the American and world public of the second half of the twentieth century to the Apollo 11 moon landing of 29 July 1969. Some of the changes that Kant made in the 1775 text for purposes of publication in 1777 are then predictable, but not easily explained. For example, for publication, Kant excised the first paragraph of the course announcement with its somewhat dismissive statement that these investigations resembled more a “useful entertainment than a tiresome activity” and that they should be regarded “more as a game for [the understanding] than a deep investigation” (see above, 45). But did he make this change simply because he was now concerned with attracting the interest of an educated public already reading the publication for which he was writing rather than 55 56 Immanuel Kant prospective fee-paying students, or because he previously wasn’t yet confident himself about his views, but now was? Similarly, Kant does not include in the published version of the announcement the programmatic concluding paragraph—in which, as suggested above in the introduction to the 1775 text, he arguably makes some effort to place his concerns with the subject matter of physical geography and anthropology within the developing critical framework. But did he make this change simply because he no longer, with a different readership in mind, felt the need to justify his interest in these emerging fields of inquiry to his colleagues, some of whom would surely have read his 1775 summer course announcement? Or was he instead, when revising the announcement for publication, no longer clear—or possibly not even concerned—about where these interests might fit within the framework of the developing critical project? The first fourteen paragraphs of the 1777 text do, however, replicate, with only a few minor, mostly editorial, changes, the second-through-fifteenth paragraphs of the course announcement; but Kant did add significant wording to the fourth, sixth, fourteenth, and fifteenth paragraphs of the revised text and the four additional paragraphs at the end, two of which comprise an entirely new, fourth, sub-section. The changes that Kant made to the 1775 course announcement for its publication two years later are then hardly insignificant inasmuch as they both demonstrate his continuing interest in the topic of race throughout the 1770s and the fact that he was more than willing to change the details of his views on the subject when confronted with compelling reasons to do so. These changes are indeed worth cataloging in some detail. For example, in the sentence concluding the fourth, final paragraph of the first section of the text, Kant seems in the 1775 version of the text to be affirming the idea attributed to the French mathematician and philosopher Pierre-Louis Moreau Maupertuis (1698–1759), that it might be possible “to breed from nature a noble stock of human beings in some province or other in whom understanding, diligence, and probity might be heritable.” But in the first of two sentences added to the same paragraph in the 1777 text, he clearly casts doubt on the idea that such mental and moral qualities are natural characteristics than can be developed through controlled breeding —that is, through “the careful elimination of the degenerate births from those that turn...

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