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Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/critphilrace.4.2.272

2165-8692

John Nale,

Race, Genetics, and Society

There has been no shortage of recent interest in the reality of “race” from those working in Anglo-American philosophy and other fields. One increasingly popular hypothesis states that although races have no objective reality, the idea persists because humans have evolved certain “mental machinery” or innate predispositions to process ethnic groups. This view takes a basic evolutionary assumption—that variations important to our survival are selected for and entrenched in a species—and applies it to racial categories. Since the ability to distinguish between social groupings was presumably important to our ancestors for survival, these theorists argue there has evolved an ability to process “in” and “out” groups, which we call “races.” This story is, in part, intended to explain why so many people still cling to racial identities even though it has been proven time and again that there are no naturally occurring races. Justin E.H. Smith's new book seeks to contextualize, critique, and, in some ways, buttress this hypothesis with an historical perspective. The argument, which he develops over nine chapters, focuses on the early modern period and traces the development of race thinking through to the late eighteenth-century. Through his exceptional scholarship, Smith makes a convincing argument that many of these so-called “innate” tendencies are actually relatively recent inventions, and are thus historically contingent. Smith contends that racial categories are not natural kinds—they are historically constructed—but, moreover, our perception of social groups are no more natural and they too are historically conditioned. Yet, as contingent as these racial categories may be, Smith is equally critical of those authors who see races as mere social constructs and thus easily disposable. As he argues throughout, much of the recent Anglo-American writing on race fails to recognize how race and racism “are deeply embedded in history and require historical research” (4). By reconstructing this history Smith provides a useful complement and critique of recent empirical research into the persistence of racialism and racism.The thrust of the book lies in demonstrating how races are shifting categories that have taken on many meanings and served various functions over the course of recent centuries. The contingency of the race concept and its malleability is demonstrated through Smith's tremendously erudite studies of early modern philosophy and natural history, a subject area in which Smith has an established track record as a Leibniz scholar and historian of the natural sciences. By reading both canonical and relatively minor authors in their historical contexts, Smith argues that the key shift in Europeans' thinking on nature making the race idea possible is the collapse of the idea that each and every human is essentially a metaphysical soul that transcends any local environmental or physical peculiarities, and the subsequent rise of a conception of the human being that studies the species as a natural being and thus something to be classified along with any other animal. This shift occurs across three moments, beginning with the epoch of metaphysical dualism, which Smith argues serves as a kind of barrier to essentialist racial thinking, since dualism separates the essence of the person, the mind, from that that which is inessential, natural, and merely corporeal. This point, made by Eric Voegelin, Martial Gueroult, and others, is reevaluated and supported with new sources and contexts to a convincing effect. Specifically, Smith examines a French Jesuit, Gabriel Daniel, who in 1691 highlights the human-animal division in Descartes's thinking that does not allow for any gradations of race within the human species. With this, historians and philosophers of race can add Daniel's work to others who draw this conclusion from Descartes's dualism, including Buffon and Poullain de la Barre. Second, Smith contends that the dualism of mind and body is subverted by the naturalization of the whole human being, in both psyche and soma. According to Smith, this is the key development that makes racial essentialism possible, and he believes a crucial turning point in this history is Edward Tyson's anatomical study of a chimpanzee in London in 1698. This event set off a series of debates over the possibility of gradations within the species each in a greater or lesser proximity to nonhuman types.This new way of thinking human-ape kinship, Smith believes, is of paramount significance to the development of modern scientific racism, first because it inserts the human species into the broader study of animal species, something Cartesian dualism precluded, since the species was universally defined by a metaphysical res cogitans. Additionally, this new approach, which Smith locates in Linnaeus's work, introduces subgroups into the species, making “humanity” a relative concept that applies to some more than others. Third, Smith demonstrates how the residue of those doctrines that articulate the human being as a rational soul is combined with efforts to naturalize the species and identify it with the body resulting in the introduction of a dichotomy between those defined by reason and those defined by nature, or more accurately, mired in nature. This shift will give rise to the split between those included in rational, philosophical, and historical process and everyone else, a split that we see quite clearly in the works of Kant, Hegel, and many others, but which Smith helps situate in much earlier works.We might recognize the general contours of Smith's governing hypotheses in the works of Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, and, most notably, Eric Voegelin's writing in the 1930s. Nevertheless, Smith's research presents us with a number of important insights gleaned from his own archival studies that should encourage us to rethink some of the current trends in philosophers” study of the histories of race and racism. Most notably, as an established Leibniz scholar with an extensive record of interest in the early modern life sciences, Smith is expertly positioned to take the comprehensive view of “modern philosophy” required to interpret and synthesize the mass of texts from taxonomists, anthropologists, physiologists, and natural historians all of whom see themselves as “philosophers” in the broad sense of that word native to the period. Smith sees no need to segregate a philosopher's “properly philosophical views” from those texts treating seemingly unphilosophical questions, and he is time and again willing to dive into some of the most obscure texts in order to best understand the aims of a philosopher's project. This quality of erudition may be common practice among our contemporary philosophers of early modern Europe, but it is still rare among many of us working under the banner of race theory. This perspective, coupled with Smith's proclivity for the obscure, achieves the overall effect of positioning the rise in racialism and racism at a point much earlier than many may think given a survey of recent literature. For example, it may seem that Buffon's theory of degeneration is an important and quite early innovator of “race”—in fact Voegelin argues he was too early in the History of the Race Idea—but Smith tells us the whole notion of degeneration has a much earlier iteration in the works of John Bulwer. Surveying his Anthropometamorphosis from 1650, Smith explains how Bulwer develops an early idea of degeneration wherein the soul, through various cultural practices, alters the body, preventing it from developing the way nature intends. This would suggest that the idea of historical decline, an idea that would come to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth century through authors such as Gobineau or Nietzsche, actually recycles an idea that predates even Buffon by a century. This is one instance of the work's greatest contribution: Smith provides a kind of source book for researchers without his access to, or patience with, the archives, thereby allowing them to trace certain manifestations of racism or theories of race to the point of their historical institution. This makes the book an unequivocal success insofar as it facilitates philosophers' task in conducting the kinds of genealogies necessary to refute or neutralize racist trends in the philosophical discourse.For many philosophers, Smith's chapter on Leibniz will be essential reading. Here Smith develops certain arguments on the question of race in Leibniz's corpus that he initiated in his earlier work, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life. In that work Smith defends Leibniz from Peter Fenves's reading of a 1671 text entitled A Method for Instituting a New, Invincible Militia or Established American Colonies, which Fenves believes strongly implicates Leibniz in the history of racism. This work from Leibniz is notable insofar as it develops a plan to “vacate” Madagascar (or a similar island) and populate it with slaves from all over Africa and the Americas who are then to be trained, as the title of the work states, for the sake of constituting an “invincible” army. Moreover, Leibniz argues that these platoons should be divided by language so as to prevent the slaves from speaking to each other and devising a coordinated resistance or revolt. Smith continues his defense of Leibniz against charges of racism through a more developed and nuanced argument than that found in his earlier book, which, to be fair, never claims to take race or racism as a key theme. The essential question is just how Leibniz can develop a human ontology that insists on the fundamental equality of all members of the species while still allowing for the kind of political subordination and enslavement found in this work from 1671. Smith reconciles the two claims by arguing that the kind of domination Leibniz is advocating here is grounded first in the fact that slaves have not been baptized, and not on account of their being innately inferior, and second, their segregation is not based on anything we would recognize as racial or racist, since Leibniz advocates separating them by language. According to Smith, this makes Leibniz's proposition antithetical to the kinds of practices definitive of the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation colony, since those enterprises depended on a commitment to essential, natural inequalities between human groups. Leibniz, by contrast, holds “a deep commitment to the universal equality of different human groups,” and, “human diversity is something to be studied as a cultural, rather than a natural phenomenon, even if cultural differences are best investigated on the model of natural history” (169). This is to say, Leibniz recognizes no difference between different human groups ability to reason, but he does recognize linguistic differences. Although language plays a key role in his plans to subordinate slaves for an army, that project is neither racial nor racist, on Smith's account, since language is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon.As with the book as a whole, Smith's erudition and mastery of the primary sources makes this chapter essential reading for anyone interested in Leibniz, early modern philosophy, or the histories of race and racism. By way of a concluding remark, I would just briefly pose a question to Smith not only for this chapter, but for the framework of the book as a whole. In Smith's evaluation of various authors, including Leibniz, the measure for their racism is often appraised against a notion “race” as a theory of natural kinds within the species, and “racism” as a doctrine that holds some of those kinds to be naturally inferior. There is certainly no question that this is one type of racism, but one wonders if this definition is not too narrow to fully comprehend the complexity of the debate in modern Europe. Smith's definition is instructive in highlighting, for example, the ways in which Leibniz is not involved in one particular sort of racism, but it leaves open the question of his complicity in other manifestations and practices. If Leibniz approves of a kind of slavery or domination based on religious creed and the absence of a slave's baptized soul, along with the maintenance of this domination by way of a segregation by language, then one is invited to wonder whether or not the transatlantic slave trade also helped itself to these religious ideas and cultural-linguistic practices in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. In fact, historians do tell us that the denial of baptism and linguistic segregation were common practices on the plantation colony and were carried out according to logic eerily similar to that found in Leibniz. For example, much of the debate in the West Indies at the time focused on the question of whether or not slaves could or should be Christianized. As Winthrop Jordan details, the question was framed not in terms of the African's “essential nature” or “race” as Smith seems to understand that word, but more in terms of the inherent dangers of slave revolt among Christianized slaves. This danger stemmed from the very fact that baptized slaves would have to read the bible, and would thus need to learn a common language. Along with Leibniz, these slave owners see the segregation by language as a bulwark against a coordinated slave revolt. Consider for instance this passage delivered to the Committee of Trade and Plantations in 1680 from a gentleman advising against the baptism of slaves in Barbados: As there is a great disproportion of Blacks to Whites they have noe greater Security than the diversity of their Languages as they are brought from several Countries [.] And that in order to their being made Christians It will bee necessary to teach them all English which gives them an opportunity and facility of combining together against their Masters and of destroying them (cited in Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550–1812 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968], 185). Certainly this short review is not the place for a full-scale study of these kinds of passages as they compare to Leibniz's own ideas. It only gives us pause as to how we might dissociate linguistic segregation from racist practices, and whether that distinction is possible or even desirable. Smith could be seen as holding the odd position that this passage from Barbados is not racist, since, like Leibniz, the basis for their segregation and oppression is religious and linguistic, and hence “cultural', rather than “natural” and “racial.” What is certain is that whether and how Leibniz is implicated in the history or racism, historians and philosophers alike will find Smith's book enlightening precisely because his tremendous scholarship and patience with uncountable primary sources helps open precisely these kinds of questions in a rigorous philosophical forum.