032 - Race & Racism: The Dark Side of the Enlightenment vs. Hegel's Notion of Freedom

The great enlightenment document, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, pronounced that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,  that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  Yet the United States also kept portions of its population enslaved at that time.  How were these ideals and the facts at hand kept compatible?

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has an the answer, “Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery. . .  It took the scientific thought of the Enlightenment to create an enduring racial taxonomy and the 'color-coded, white-over-black' ideology with which we are familiar." 

This episode explores this dark-side of the Enlightenment.  While some statements of Hegel's may be seen as racially insensitive by today's standards, he condemned slavery in the strongest terms and found no rational at all in judging people by how they looked.  "A judgment based on physiognomic expression has accordingly only the value of an immediate judgment, which can just as well be untrue as true.  . . Man is known much less by his outward appearance than by his deeds. (Encyclopaedia, III, §411, Addition).

Support the show