Kant and Bernier in an Ethnocentric/Eurocentric World

It is a part of human nature to try to classify, label, and divide the different segments of our lives. Having more classifications means having a better general understanding of the information which is constantly bombarding our senses relating to the social world in which we live. Human beings like simplicity. Being able to internalize aspects of life into categories which form schemas held us to better organize our knowledge of society and makes things simpler for us. Bernier and Kant were some of the first individuals to officially divide human beings up into separate races. Bernier proudly declares his “division of the earth” into four (or five) distinct races; while Kant, similarly, attests to the existence of four separate human races. The majority of their arguments and declarations seem to be based upon observations of physical variations well as their correlation to geographical and environmental differences. As we discussed in class, it is understandable to some degree that upon first being confronted by peoples who appeared so outwardly different from themselves, the Europeans would have wanted to know more about them and to know why such variations existed. But, at the same time, I think that the use of race as a way to categorize physical differences between human beings quickly (perhaps almost instantaneously) became attached to much wider implications. Judgmental undertones make themselves apparent in the writing of both authors, Kant and Bernier. Bernier described the skin tone of those living in the Indies as being akin to a disease writing of “that shade of yellow…that ugly and livid paleness of jaundice.” Additionally, he speaks of the blacks living on the Cape of Good Hope as being “small, thin, dry, ugly…” He compares them to common beasts telling of the way in which they eat carrion “whose entrails they twine round their arms and neck, as one sees here sometimes with our butcher’s dogs, that they may eat them when they want…” Kant’s diction reflects similar biases which are illuminated in his characterization of behavioral attributes of the non-European races. He writes, for example, “Because he [the Negro] is so amply supplied by his motherland, he is also lazy, indolent, and dawdling.” Ethnocentrism and naïve realism highlight both Kant and Bernier’s work. Kant’s conclusion that the lineal root genus of the human race must be the white European further exemplifies these facts. The lack of reflexivity exhibited by these author’s, however, would not have been specific to them as individuals. Eurocentric philosophy dominated the discourse of (Western) Europe for hundreds of years. Even after taking the social context into account, however, I still find the hierarchy that was slowly put into place on the basis of race to be extremely problematic. I wonder if there was any way in which the circumstances could have been altered so as to create a feeling of unity and equality among races rather than the stratified tension that came to be. Do we as humans have the innate tendency to compare ourselves to others? Is it in our nature to strive to create conditions that are the most favorable to us as individuals? Does our own ethnocentrism today still color our perceptions about the society in which we live and continue to dictate our current understanding of the past?