In this post, I want to raise a worry about Kant and Eurocentrism. As someone who writes about Kant, it’s a worry I’ve been wrestling with for a while, and it has recently made me more sympathetic to certain objections that I used to ignore.
The worry is somewhat subtle, so I want to start by making it clear what I’m not saying. I am not saying that philosophers should stop reading, teaching, or writing about Kant—this is not a call to ‘cancel’ Kant. I believe that Kant was a great philosopher and that we still have much to learn from both his insights and his mistakes. Nor am I saying that Kant scholars are racist. I am honored to be part of the community of Kant scholars—an increasingly diverse, international community. The North American Kant Society (NAKS) in particular is truly exemplary in its attention to issues of inclusiveness (see, e.g., their list of resources for teaching about Kant’s views on race, their recent move to make student membership free, and their use of online tools to make meetings accessible), and I hope that NAKS continues to flourish.
The worry I have is instead about unintended effects of charitable Kant scholarship, including scholarship on aspects of his philosophy that have nothing to do with Eurocentrism or race (though, for excellent recent discussions of Kant on race, see work by Charles Mills, Lucy Allais, Huaping Lu-Adler, and others). Instead, I’m focused on the kind of Kant scholarship I’ve contributed to myself: a search for readings of Kant that avoid as many problems as possible, drawing on a wide range of texts and on conceptual tools from contemporary philosophy. In recent decades, this sort of scholarship has exploded and helps explain why, by some measures, there is more scholarly work on Kant than on any other philosopher. To take one (imperfect) measure: PhilPapers currently counts more than 30,000 articles and books on Kant, significantly more than Plato (~20,000), Hume (~15,000), Aristotle (~13,000), Hegel (~7,700), and Nietzsche (~7,500), and vastly more than all the work PhilPapers counts under the headings of Japanese philosophy (~5,000), African/Africana philosophy (~4,600), Latin American philosophy (~3,800), Indian philosophy (~700), Chinese philosophy (~600), and Indigenous philosophy of the Americas (~400).
Here is what first got me thinking about the unintended effects of the huge body of charitable Kant interpretive work. As happens at many institutions, almost every philosophy major at the University of Washington takes a course on the History of Modern Philosophy. The course focuses on metaphysical and epistemological issues in European philosophy (and so has a misleading title). It is a very rewarding course to teach. Partly due to the limitations of the quarter system, I teach the class using texts from only five authors: René Descartes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. With the first four authors, students typically start out fairly open-minded, and then gradually come to see the philosophical virtues and limitations of their views.
Things are different with Kant, though. Even before I’ve said anything about his views, many students show a level of reverence for him that no other author receives. This attitude persists as we start reading the Prolegomena—they’re much less likely to say “well, that’s just wrong” in response to Kant than in response to any of the other four.
Since I am not an orthodox Kantian, I try to encourage my students to approach Kant with a moderate dose of skepticism. Despite that, students often leave the class with even more Kant reverence than they started with. Why? One significant factor, I’ve realized, is that for most objections my students raise to Kant, I am able to draw on the vast and excellent secondary literature in responding (even though my knowledge of that literature is uneven). The unintentional effect of this is that, to my students, Kant’s views appear unassailable. To be sure, I also draw on what I know of the relevant secondary literature when we discuss the other authors—but there are just very few Descartes or Conway scholars who will defend Descartes’ and Conway’s views to the extent that many Kant scholars will defend Kant’s views. Hume scholarship is closer to Kant scholarship in that respect, but there is not nearly as much of it, and students rarely start with much antecedent reverence for Hume.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with Kant reverence. The problem is comparative: except perhaps for Plato and Aristotle, I see no comparable reverence in my students for any other philosopher or, finally getting to my main point, for any non-European philosophical tradition. And, disturbingly, this is exactly the way that Kant, in his absolute worst moments, would have wanted it—as well as other racist philosophers like Hegel, who believed that genuine philosophy was something produced only by European men (on this point, I’ve benefited from Peter Park’s work on the formation of the modern philosophical canon).
Now, if Kant were vastly better than any other (post-Aristotelian) philosopher, and independently better than, say, the entire Chinese philosophical tradition, this disproportional reverence might be justified. I myself doubt that that’s the case, though I’m not really qualified to make any comparative judgments here. But among the few philosophers who have real depth with both Kant and non-European philosophical traditions, I have yet to hear of even one who would so elevate Kant.
The classroom may be the place where the pattern of disproportionate reverence is most obvious, but it is not the only such place where it appears. In my department, as in many others, there has been near-consensus that having a Kant scholar is important—that is why, in an otherwise proudly untraditional department, I have a job (which, let me be clear, I love). Decades ago, my department used to support both serious research and a significant arrange of offerings in non-European philosophy, but as the faculty who taught those courses left or retired, there was no sense that these research strengths or course offerings had to be preserved (though, I’m happy to say, we have recently started to rebuild those course offerings). From what I know of other large departments, something similar is true there too: having someone who can teach Kant is a must, having someone who can teach (say) Nagarjuna, Mengzi, Africana philosophy, or any area of Indigenous philosophy is a luxury. Almost every academic philosopher I know has some awareness of the huge and rapidly-growing body of charitable Kant scholarship out there, and I strongly suspect that this is a significant factor in why many departments continue to fuel disproportionate Kant reverence.
None of my observations or suspicions here are novel. Ever since I started studying Kant as an undergraduate, I heard people raise worries about the way the history of philosophy is taught, and just shrugged them off. But my repeated experiences in the classroom and in other contexts have led me to think the problem is serious.
What would change this pattern? I’m not sure. But it surely helps that some Kant scholars (like Huaping Lu-Adler) are drawing more attention to aspects of Kant’s views that should temper our reverence for him. Other Kant scholars have recently focused on pinning down the core assumptions behind Kant’s views, which may facilitate a more clear-eyed assessment of the plausibility of his views (together with Colin McLear, I am currently co-editing a volume of new essays on that theme). It also likely helps that other Kant scholars (including Karl Ameriks, Corey Dyck, Karin de Boer, and Desmond Hogan) have argued that Kant is not nearly as much of an innovator as students often think, by demonstrating how heavily he drew on Rousseau, Wolff, Crusius, and other predecessors.
At the same time, all those efforts still involve devoting a lot of attention to Kant. What might help most, then, would be if more historians of philosophy brought the same sophisticated, charitable, enthusiastic approach to less canonical philosophers (something scholars like Brian Van Norden have been urging for years). To the degree that Kant scholars have credibility in their departments, they can also encourage this trend, prompting their departments to devote resources to hiring scholars of non-European philosophy.
To conclude, I’ll emphasize that I am not suggesting that we do away with students’ or philosophers’ reverence for Kant, or that we reduce the quantity or quality of charitable Kant interpretation. Instead, my suggestion is that we consider how to expand that feeling of reverence to include other figures and traditions. Doing this would help promote the humility and equal respect for other traditions that Kant’s ethics (in its best moments) would seem to demand.
Prof. Marshall wants us not to abolish students’ reverence for Kant but “to expand that feeling of reverence to include other figures and traditions….” I think I see an issue here that Prof. Marshall hasn’t brought into focus. Which is that the widespread “reverence for Kant,” among philosophers and students of philosophy, reflects in good part our sense that Kant draws together the main strands of modern European philosophy, especially rationalism and empiricism, in a way that no other single figure does. So that any effort to build upon the strengths of modern European philosophy will be well advised to build upon Kant (more than, say, on Descartes, or Conway, or Hume, or Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche). This, surely, is the reason why we have the vast and growing “charitable” literature about Kant that Prof. Marshall describes. This is why many philosophers feel that it’s more important to introduce students to Kant than it is to introduce them to Nagarjuna or any other non-western thinker. We (frankly) value the European tradition more than we value (what we know of) non-western traditions. And for modern European philosophy, Kant has the central position that I just described. He “epitomizes” it. As for myself, I have a lot of respect for Kant, but I regard Hegel as at least equally important. Hegel, after all, draws upon and responds to not only the moderns, but also to Greek thought in a much better-informed and deeper way than Kant does. So in that sense Hegel would qualify better than Kant does for the same role that Kant has recently been given in Anglophone philosophy departments. Of course, Hegel gets accused of Eurocentrism more than Kant does, because Hegel writes more about world history than Kant does. But I doubt that Kant is any less guilty than Hegel is, on this score. And I also recognize that Hegel’s expositors, including myself, have not yet made the case for Hegel’s occupying the role in western philosophy that I described, as well as Kant’s expositors have made the case for his playing the central role that they see him as playing. But from where I sit, respect for Kant is appropriate and “reverence” is not. His role as epitomizing modern western philosophy better than any other figure does, is not undisputed. We shouldn’t feel reverence for any philosopher. Rather, we should want to see what we can learn from all of them. What kind of hiring this might entail, is, clearly, a wide-open question, but nothing should be sacred.
Thanks for this note, Robert. I definitely agree with your final point: nothing should be sacred, in the sense of being beyond critical examination. So I wouldn’t want the term “reverence” to be read in that sense (though I now see how it could be).
I also think you’re right in saying that “We (frankly) value the European tradition more than we value (what we know of) non-western traditions” – assuming the “We” refers to Anglophone philosophers as a whole. But I’m questioning whether that Eurocentrism is warranted, especially given its effects on our students, which is surely our main social impact.
You’re not alone in seeing Kant as drawing together the main strands of modern European thought. As a matter of Kant interpretation, I’ll register my disagreement, though. Kant seriously engaged with Descartes, Rousseau, Leibniz, Wolff, and Crusius, but the growing consensus (at least among first Critique scholars) is that his engagement with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume was pretty superficial. For example, Kant just assumes a hylomorphic, faculty-focused framework that would be question-begging against Hume. So I think you’re probably right that Hegel is a better bet as far as someone who really aims to draw together the different strands of European philosophy.
As for whether Hegel deserves more attention, I’ve spent too much time reading Schopenhauer to give him a fair shake. But, if you haven’t read it, I definitely recommend Peter Park’s book, ‘Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy’, which sheds a lot of (unflattering) light on how both Kant and Hegel contributed to our current Eurocentrism.
In any case, thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
Thanks for this detailed response. I didn’t mean to imply that Kant actually did justice to all of his main predecessors. I don’t think he did full justice to Spinoza, either. Only that if we have to name one major figure who is perceived as not belonging either to the rationalists or to the empiricists, but seeking to do justice to both, Kant is probably that major figure. (Given that Hegel isn’t in the running.) As for the great question of whether Anglophone philosophy should give much more attention to non-western traditions, I didn’t try to address that. But in the context merely of the western tradition, it sounds as though you might largely agree with my broad-brush explanation of why we give Kant so much attention?
Yes – I agree that the perception of Kant doing justice to the empiricist and rationalist traditions is part of why he’s given the place he is within the European canon. (It’s puzzling that non-historians within philosophy department are moved by this, though. The “Kant synthesizes both traditions” narrative makes for a nice story, but if Kant had truly demolished empiricism, there probably wouldn’t be so many empiricists in philosophy departments. )
Thanks again for commenting, and for pointing out this other aspect of the situation, which I hadn’t touched on in the post. I appreciate it.