Antinomies of race: diversity and destiny in Kant

Larrimore's essay reads Kant's pioneering work in the theory of race in the context of his thought as a whole. Kant wrote on race for most of his career; at different stages of his thinking, race assured meaning in human diversity, confirmed the value of a practical-reason-informed understanding of human destiny, and provided a model for the 'pragmatic' knowledge of what 'man can and should make of himself'. 'Race' was invented in 1775 as an advertisement for the new disciplines of geography and anthropology that Kant inaugurated and promoted throughout his career. Giving new meaning to a foreign (French) term associated with animal husbandry, Kant presented the (supposedly) exceptionlessly hereditary traits of race as the first fruit of a truly scientific 'natural history' of humanity. His concerns were not merely classificatory; his four-race schema, modeled on the temperaments, allowed a special status for Whites as at once a race and the transcendence of race (Kant invented 'whiteness' as well as 'race'). The notion of 'race' was refined in essays Kant published in the 1780s, in the same journal as his celebrated essays on Enlightenment and the philosophy of history. It was given a new status, rather than displaced, by the critical turn. Granted a sanction 'similar' to the postulates of pure practical reason, its empirical verification would confirm Kant's whole critical system. Kant's theory of race came into its own in the 1790s, gaining wide acceptance. He relied on familiarity with it (and its lingering association with animal husbandry) in explaining the larger project of the 'pragmatic anthropology' without which he thought human progress impossible. Understanding how the concept of race contributed to Kant's more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns, we gain a better sense of its fateful and enduring attractiveness in subsequent eras.