The Best of All Possible Histories use of the term “race” by Kant as “das unedle Wort.”12 German thinkers as recently as Leibniz were committed Sinophiles, viewing China as the oldest civilization, endowed with the original language of humanity.13 While Kant’s position would eventually become the mainstream consensus in the mid nineteenth century, biological determinism was still a fringe position in Hegel’s time. Given this context, it is implausible to assume Hegel was simply going with the flow on race. We must regard racism in his Encyclopedia Anthropology as an active choice.14 Another view, espoused by older Hegel scholars such as Peter Hodgson and Duncan Forbes,15 , is to explain Hegel’s Encyclopedia Anthropology as culturally essentialist rather than biologically essentialist, and to then defend that cultural essentialism. This view is supported by the fact that, in Hegel, human beings are historical actors creating the Zeitgeist that in turn, acts on them.16 However, as scholar Jean-Yves Heurtebise points out “the Hegelian principle that natural origins matter less than cultural productions did not prevent Hegel from hierarchizing human cultures at the expense of non-European cultures.”17 Hegel’s philosophy was still, in a real sense, racist, even if he did not attribute cognitive inequality to biological race. Because cultural essentialism is established prior to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it is argued for explicitly in that text. Therefore, the analysis of this first issue will seek to trace its introduction and functional role in the early parts of the text, rather than finding its origins in the philosophy of objective spirit.
3.2
Geographical Basics of History
Hegel’s understanding of race is further clarified in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Most relevant is the section ‘The Geographical Basis of History’ where Hegel gives racial categories a geographical mirror. He is careful to avoid geographic determinism,18 but this section still gives a good impression of Hegel’s particular thoughts on each race. We shall now discus each of his proposed racial categories in 12. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." & (German) Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, trans. Carl Hanser (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002), 120. 13. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." 14. Eric Nelson, "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019). 15. Chu, "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa." 16. Marina Bykova, The Cunning of Reason in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, 2021, Unpublished manuscript. Cited with the author’s permission. 10-11. 17. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." 18. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 79.
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