Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830

Chapter 6: Absolute Idealism Reverts to the Kantian Position: Hegel’s Exclusion of Africa and Asia

113 6 Absolute Idealism Reverts to the Kantian Position Hegel’s Exclusion of Africa and Asia History, especially the history of philosophy, is the history of the Spirit, the Spirit of the world, as it apprehends itself. It is not the subjective, but the universal Spirit. —Hegel (1819)1 What this history presents to us is the succession of noble minds, the gallery of heroes of thinking reason, who are through the power of this reason immersed in the essence of things, nature, and mind, in the nature of God; and who have acquired for us the highest treasure, the treasure of the knowledge of reason. —Hegel (1820)2 For us, real philosophy begins in Greece. —Hegel (1829/30)3 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, some German Orientalists saw in their translation projects the opportunity to expand the literary canon.4 For some of them, the writing of history of philosophy presented an opportunity to expand the philosophical canon. Writing the history of philosophy presented Tennemann and Hegel with opportunities as well, but to a contrary end. They (re)wrote 114 Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy the history of philosophy so as to shift their audience’s orientation away from Asia (to sever Germans completely from their Asian roots was not possible) and confer on them the sense of an exclusively Greek and Roman heritage. Hegel’s affinities are well known. In the winter semester of 1825/26, he said to his students, “When we speak of Greece, every educated man, especially we Germans feel at home.”5 This statement was more prescriptive than descriptive since, in Hegel’s time, Germans’ ideas of their roots were divergent and competing. Where does Hegel, the historian of philosophy, fit within the schools of history of philosophy? In fundamental respects, Hegel is of the same school with Ast and Rixner as all three imposed similar a priori schemata—identical in many details—onto the historical data of philosophy. That Hegel agreed more with the disciples of Schelling than with the Kantians is not surprising, but it is definitely surprising that, on the question of Oriental philosophy, Hegel sided with Tennemann. In his lectures on the history of philosophy at the University of Berlin, Hegel presented the Kantian position as his own: Philosophy did not occur in Asia, where political freedom is absent. Philosophy arose only with the historical dawning of self-consciousness . Philosophy first arose in Greece. The previous chapters give the historical background against which Hegel’s statements on Oriental philosophy can be analyzed. We shall see that his statements track very closely to Tennemann’s. Indeed, just like Tennemann, Hegel was eventually compelled to give an extended account of Oriental philosophy (whereas in his earlier history of philosophy courses he dispensed with the Orient swiftly). It should be noted that he gave this account even while he explicitly denied the Orientals a place in the history of philosophy: “The first is Oriental philosophy, but it does not enter into the body of the whole presentation; it is only something preliminary, of which we speak in order to account for why we do not occupy ourselves with it further and what relation it has to thought, to true philosophy.”6 In Chapter 4, I argued that the exclusion of Egypt and Asia from the history of philosophy was justified with anthropological arguments taken from Christoph Meiners. I argued that these justifications are racist in an unambiguously modern sense and that they are consistent with the view that philosophy was developed by Whites through the intellectual capacities innate to their race. This chapter will show that Hegel used these same justifications for excluding Egypt and Asia from the history of philosophy. This fact alone compels a probe of 115 Absolute Idealism Reverts to the Kantian Position Hegel’s thought for racism. How did Hegel comprehend human diversity? Did he have any concrete views of race? If so, what were they? These questions deserve scholarly attention, but few historians and even fewer philosophers have given them their due. The four exceptions are Darrel Moellendorf, Karlheinz Barck, Robert Bernasconi , and Michael H. Hoffheimer; they have pursued the question of racism in Hegel’s thought. In “Racism and Rationality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit” (1992), Moellendorf argues that the notorious Eurocentrism of Hegel’s philosophy of history, with its negative portrayal and judgment of native Americans and...