Kant S Race Theory Forster S Counter and

The Eighteenth Century
Theory and Interpretation
Volume 53 WINTER 2012 Number 4
Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color 393
Sally Hatch Gray
Global Slavery, Old World Bondage, and Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer 413
Adam R. Beach
The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience:Motions of the Soul and the

Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre 432
Daniel Larlham
“I am my master’s servant for hire”: Contract and Identity in

Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers 455
Nathalie Wolfram
Hester Mulso Chapone and the Problem of the Individual Reader 473
Kathryn L. Steele
Raising the Dead: Collecting Women Poets in the Eighteenth Century 492
Michael Genovese
Historical Fundamentalism and Political Mythology in

Jill Lepore’s The Whites of their Eyes 498
Feisal G. Mohamed
Calumny, Culture, Continuity, and Control 504

Alan Kors
Gossip and the Public Sphere 509

Kathryn Temple
Honoring G. E. Bentley Jr. 513

Clint Stevens
Notes on Contributors 518
21577.FM_ECTI_TheoryInterp_53_4.indd 3 9/5/12 10:41 AM

Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter,
and the Metaphysics of Color
Sally Hatch Gray

Mississippi State University
At a key moment in his 1777 travelogue A Voyage Round the World (Reise um
die Welt) describing his adventures aboard Captain Cook’s second exploratory
journey into the Antarctic, the narrative of the young German naturalist, Georg
Forster (1754–94), takes on a decidedly more excited tone. In August 1773, he
and his traveling companions were enjoying the charms of the Society Islands,
when, during a banquet featuring traditional dancing, the atmosphere became
sexually charged. The sailors bribed the women with bits of meat to continue
making seemingly indiscreet dance movements, while the hosts treated the
British officers and Prussian naturalists to a peek into the dancers’ dressing
room. Forster writes:
To complete our entertainment this day, the chief gave orders for performing an-
other heeva, and we were admitted (behind the scenes) to see the ladies dressing
for that purpose. They obtained some strings of beads on this occasion, with which
we took it into our heads to improve upon their ornaments, much to their own
satisfaction. Among the spectators we observed several of the prettiest women of
this country; and one of them was remarkable for the whitest complexion we had
ever seen in all these islands. Her colour resembled that of white wax a little sul-
lied, without having the least appearance of sickness, which that hue commonly
conveys; and her fine black eyes and hair contrasted so well with it, that she was
admired by us all.1
Forster’s excitement helps to relay the intense experience of a special event

which “perfects the joys of the day” as he writes in German, “Um die Freuden
dieses Tages vollkommen zu machen.”2 In this moment, they have not only been
released from the physical hardship of months at sea aboard an eighteenth-
century sailing vessel, but they are taken with “einstimmige Bewunderung” a kind
of “unanimous wonderment,” beyond their immediate reality in their response
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 53, no. 4 Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
21577.TX_ECTI_TheoryInterp_53_4.indd 393 9/5/12 11:20 AM

394 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
to several of the greatest beauties of the land. Forster makes this judgment con-
cerning beauty from the perspective of a naturalist forwarding a new science of
anthropology. Its universality gives this concept of beauty a kind of systematic,
even scientific, necessary status; it acts as evidence for Forster’s work in natu-
ral history. In Forster’s account, beauty is immediately, universally recogniz-
able, another factual observation accompanying such obvious characteristics
as fair skin and dark hair. Forster’s perspective encompasses both a desired
objectivity as a naturalist and a kind of aesthetic sensitivity associated with the
appreciation of beauty in women as in art. As this scene depicts a concept of
universal beauty placed in the context of scientific discovery, it demonstrates
the integral connection between aesthetics and anthropology at their concep-
tual foundation.
This interconnection between aesthetics and anthropology combines discus-
sions concerning definitions of color with respect to early anthropological clas-
sifications and concepts of the beautiful with respect to the female body.3 At
the same time, the rise in interest in colonialism during the enlightenment pe-
riod also contributed to the emergent discussions surrounding a new category
under human “species” for “race” and the reinvention of meanings for gender.
Susanne Zantop discusses the connection of gender and race with respect to co-
lonial fantasies in her 1997 book Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation
in Precolonial Germany. She writes,
Recent studies of British imperialism, such as those by McClintock and Young,

have shown, however, that sexuality plays a crucial role, if not the crucial role in
colonial fantasies. In fact, racial and sexual stereotypes intersect and overlap in the
colonialist imaginary, creating the peculiar dynamics of attraction and repulsion
within colonialist subjectivity identified by Bhabha and others.4
Forster’s Voyage serves as one influential text contributing to German colonial

fantasies as described by Zantop. In particular, Forster’s depiction of rapture
before a fair-skinned, female beauty combines language of skin color, beauty
and the sexual objectification of the female form, and places it in a pre-colonial
exotic setting. Clearly Voyage demonstrates the link between movements in
anthropology, aesthetics, and colonialism. Its language of gender definition in
combination with racial description is hardly unique.
Most notably, Forster’s description of the voyeur’s “einstimmige Bewunde-
rung” mirrors Immanuel Kant’s (1724–04) characterization of aesthetic judg-
ment in his well-received treatise on anthropology entitled Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen
und Erhabenen), published by the Berlin Academy in 1764. There Kant describes
the universal nature of perception of feminine beauty on the part of men. He
explains, “what applies to the somewhat finer taste, as I maintain, that that kind
of beauty, which we have named the pretty figure, is judged quite uniformly

GRAY—THE METAPHYSICS OF COLOR 395
by all men, and that the opinions about it are not so different as one gener-
ally thinks.”5 Feminine beauty will be judged seemingly identically or will be
“ziemlich gleichförmig beurteilt” by all men. Demonstrating the interconnections
between early aesthetics and anthropology, Kant uses his first articulation of a
universal judgment of the beautiful and the sublime, the subject of the Critique
of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), the foundational text for
modern aesthetics, in an anthropological context to distinguish among identi-
fied groupings of peoples. He continues the thought quoted above with, “The
Circassian and Georgian women have always been held exceedingly pretty by
all the Europeans, who travel through their countries.”6 He goes on to say that
some cultures such as the Persians, Turks, and Arabians sought to better them-
selves through the slave trade of fair, whiter women. He then claims that the
Persians were successful in this, and that this proves that the taste for the beau-
tiful, as for the sublime, does not differ significantly among men.
Forster’s heeva scene can be fruitfully interpreted as a performance of aes-
thetic judgment as presented in this early essay by Kant. This shared cultural
perspective evidences similar ideas regarding aesthetics—an emerging meta-
physical philosophy concerning sensate knowledge and beauty—at least
through Kant’s pre-critical period and before his Critique of the Power of Judg-
ment, in two influential works of early anthropology, namely Forster’s Voyage
around the World and Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sub-
lime. This shared belief in the significance of fair skin for beauty in works which
combine aesthetics and anthropology entails an interjection of metaphysical
constructs into empirical science.
While Kant and Forster share a common understanding of the transcen-
dence of beauty at this point, the resulting metaphysics influences their work
in a new empirical science of anthropology differently. This becomes apparent
when the two engage in a fierce debate over the scientific significance of skin
color in the 1780s. Forster, having had first-hand experience of different peo-
ples, and believing that grouping people would have to include studies of cus-
toms and language, itself a very complicated endeavor, took a position against
any theory of race based on skin color.7 Forster appeared to win the debate,
and seemed to have succeeded in muting Kant’s future writings on the topic.
Yet, despite its lack of scientific merit, Kant’s work on a definition of race based
solely on skin color was influential in his day. Indeed, this colonial fantasy, to
use Zantop’s words, of human races based solely on skin color has been woven
into the western consciousness.
Although the concept of persistent categories of human “race” based on
skin color may be part of modern created reality, here the task at hand is to
imagine a world in which the idea itself is not only not assumed, but a world
in which it is held under intense scrutiny and sometimes, as we shall see here,
all-out attack. In his seminal work on the topic, Race: The History of an Idea in the
West (1996), Ivan Hannaford’s ambitious outline from the ancient to the pres-

ent demonstrates the lack of any real conscious idea of race, as we understand
it today, until after the Reformation. Hannaford attributes the invention of the
modern idea of race to a period from 1684 to 1815, when, he argues, major
writers dealt with this idea as an organizing principle.8 He marks the date 1684
as the publication of François Bernier’s “Nouvelle division de la terre par les dif-
ferent espèces ou races qui l’habitent” as a significant moment of a first attempt to
categorize people according to empirical observations rather than seeing them
as Christian versus heathen or human versus monster. Concurrent with efforts
such as that of Captain James Cook to map the globe, came efforts to document
all flora and fauna of the earth. As reports of peoples from the reaches of the
earth returned to a Europe hungry for fantasies of exotic places, attempts were
made to categorize and create a scientific understanding of the human race,
alongside that of all other species. Most famously, the work of naturalist Carl
Linnaeus (1707–78), an attempt to categorize all living things, formed the basis
of the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature and epitomizes the efforts of
the times.
While very useful and comprehensive, Hannaford’s account omits any dis-
cussion of Kant’s significant writings on his own new delineation of race, and
argues that Johann Blumenbach (1752–40), whose work in the new field of an-
thropology would have a lasting effect into the nineteenth century, influenced
Kant’s ideas.9 As Robert Bernasconi shows in “Who Invented the concept of
Race” (2001), the relationship actually goes the other way around.10 Kant did
not get his idea of race based on skin color from Blumenbach; rather, Kant’s
theory influenced Blumenbach’s ideas on the subject. Blumenbach’s career as a
famous anthropologist began in 1775 with his doctoral dissertation, De generis
humani varietate nativa (1776). In that work, Blumenbach relies on the Linnaean
classification term “varietatis” and maintains that no definite lines between
human varieties may be drawn.11 Kant’s first essay on race “On the Different
Races of Man,” (“Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen”), which drew defi-
nite lines between groups and defined specifically the term “race” to be based
exclusively on skin color, was published earlier in 1775, before Blumenbach’s
thesis was completed. Indeed, Blumenbach credits Kant for his race theory in
1779 and mirrors Kant’s language in his Handbuch der Naturgeschichte.12 Ber-
nasconi demonstrates that in “On the Different Races of Man” and with his
subsequent contributions on the subject, Kant made the first articulation which
fixed human races as distinct subcategories within a broader category of spe-
cies. Bernier, for example, had used the term “race” in his classifications, but
did not distinguish it from “species.” Before Kant, argues Bernasconi, no defi-
nite concept for “race” as opposed to “variety” or “species” was established.13
If Kant played a pivotal role in substantiating a modern concept of race based
on skin color, this point is missing in much of the scholarship on the subject.
Unlike much of Kant’s work, his race theory cannot be read as a step toward
the logical foundation for universal human rights, and scholars have grappled

with reconciling some of Kant’s work in anthropology and his ethics.14 If one
studies Kant’s transcendental philosophy apart from his anthropology, it is, in-
deed, difficult to make sense of it. Given that Kant’s categorical moral impera-
tive is expressly universal, that is, all human beings should be treated as means
in themselves and not as a means to an end, scholars have argued that Kant’s
race theory does not follow from his philosophy, that it is not part of it, that it
can be separated from it, and that it must be read in the context of his times.15
It would follow that Kant’s race theory would not need to color discussions of
Kant’s work in transcendental philosophy.
The following elucidation of Kant’s race debate in the 1780s with Forster will
reveal two problems with this argument. First: if Kant’s race theory is merely a
product of its times, where do Forster’s effective scientific and moral arguments
against it come from? Given that Kant’s own enlightenment-aged philosophy
seems to allow for the natural endowments of all human beings, it seems both
Kant’s and Forster’s positions are “products of their times” as they are also prod-
ucts of these two thinkers. The second problem with an intentional omission of
Kant’s race theory is that, as I will argue here, Kant developed his scientific the-
ory and his idea of a teleological nature as presented in his Critique of the Power of
Judgment, at least in part, in order to provide a unifying theoretical basis for his
race theory so that it could withstand the scrutiny of a nascent, markedly mod-
ern, empirical scientific method based on deductive logic, such as that advanced
by Forster.16 Thus, as this discussion will show, an understanding of Kant’s race
theory is integral to an understanding of his idea of nature and of humans in
nature as presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Kant’s scientific theory of nature in this work wears a mask of universal-
ity, under which lies a particular cultural perspective. This mask enables the
propagation of one particularly harmful myth of predetermined “race” as if it
were grounded in natural law. Indeed, although Kant’s cosmopolitanism is rep-
resentative of a particular European perspective, it has long been regarded as
universal, while embedded, inaccurate, and damaging identifications of other
non-Europeans who do not share this perspective have been understood as
unrelated. This attempt here to root out connections between Enlightenment
cosmopolitanism and a “scientific” race theory based on “natural law,” which
had such a powerful, terrible influence in its day and beyond, is not an attempt
to marginalize Kant. As thinkers and students of the history of philosophy, I
suggest we consider instead the whole, unabridged Kant, take his constructs
apart, and use the perspective we gain from this investigation to question the
limitations of our own ideas.17
KANT’S THEORY OF RACE BASED ON SKIN COLOR
Kant lectured in the fields of physical geography and anthropology for twenty-
five years from 1772–97 at the University in Königsberg and published “On

the Different Races of Man” to advertise his popular lectures on physical geog-
raphy. His physical geography sought to study the earth, minerals, the atmo-
sphere, plant and animal life, and included human beings as among creatures
formed by nature. Given that “man” was included in nature, it made sense that
physical geography included physical anthropology. Kant’s physical anthro-
pology encompassed the study of physical attributes of human beings includ-
ing facial characteristics, hair texture and color, and skin color, as well as the
study of cultural practices. Kant believed that both the physical attributes of
people and their cultural practices were closely related to their physical sur-
roundings and geographical location. As Kant defined physical geography—a
broad study of nature including humans in nature—the field included aspects
of his understanding of anthropology, which concentrated on humans as both
part of their natural world and as possessors of a free will. Physical geography
and anthropology were thus interrelated for him. Kant made a distinction be-
tween physical anthropology—“what nature makes of the human being”—and
pragmatic anthropology—“what he [the human being] as a free-acting being
makes of himself, or can and should make of himself.”18 While physical anthro-
pology covered the body, pragmatic anthropology dealt with moral character.
With these sciences, Kant wanted to construct a systematic understanding of
the human being’s place in nature.
With “On the Different Races of Man,” Kant gave the concept of race de-
fined by skin color and geographic location new validity. This essay demon-
strates a profound influence by Count George Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707–88),
whose forty-four volume work, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–
1804), encompassed minerals, birds, epochs, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, and
human beings. In this work Buffon established a rule for defining species as
groups capable of mating to produce fertile offspring. By this definition, all
human beings are of one species. Kant admired the principled nature of this
rule: either the offspring are fertile or they are not. He saw this species cat-
egory as real, as demonstrative of nature’s true workings. He then created a
new scientific classification for the idea of race, as opposed to variety, based
on Buffon’s rule. At the beginning of his first essay on race, Kant makes a
distinction between a “Schuleinteilung,” a school category, and a “Naturein-
teilung,” a natural category, and what he will call a real category for the un-
derstanding. He writes,
The school classification [Schuleinteilung] works from classes [Klassen] based on

similarities, the natural classification [die Natureinteilung], however, works from
groups related by heredity [Stämme], which categorize the animals according to
their relation due to procreation. The one creates a school system for the memory,
the other a natural system for the understanding: the first has only the intention to
categorize plants and animals under a title, the second has the intention to orga-
nize them according to laws.19

For Kant, some classification systems, including those of Aristotle and Lin-
naeus, are natural descriptions which establish mere “Schuleinteilungen” to aid
the memory. These are useful only in that they afford students of natural his-
tory some order with which to study the myriad examples of nature’s creations.
They aid in the learning process, but there is nothing necessary about these
categories. Presumably a scientist could use different characteristics to estab-
lish different classifications which would serve the same purpose. One would
only have to observe or highlight certain physical characteristics to justify the
grouping. On the other hand, Kant believed it possible to create a fixed clas-
sification, “a natural system for the understanding” encompassing necessary
laws, such as Buffon’s law, which establish “Natureinteilungen,” natural classi-
fications. These “Natureinteilungen” are not changeable, rather they are defined
by “unausbleibliche Eigenschaften” or “inevitably inherited characteristics.” Kant
believed that by defining these “Natureinteilungen” as opposed to “Schulein-
teilungen,” one could develop a “Natursystem,” such that it would be possible
to categorize plants and animals according to natural laws. These natural laws
would then evidence the actual structure of nature.
Kant clarifies this distinction between classification according to law and
classification useful only for learning at the end of his second essay on race
called “Definition of a Concept of a Human Race” [“Bestimmung des Begriffs
einer Menschenrace” (1785)]. Here he introduces the concepts of “Nominalgat-
tungen” and “Realgattungen” and distinguishes between “Naturgeschichte” and
“Naturbeschreibung” or between natural history and natural description. “Nomi-
nalgattungen,” literally categories in name only, are only descriptive. They are
the product of the decisions, criteria, and classification systems of the natural
describer, and the result of their establishment is natural description. None of
this is a science according to Kant. It is simply a way of organizing nature for
the memory. “Realgattungen,” literally “real” categories, are based on natural
law, such as Buffon’s law. Kant writes,
Thus, animals whose differences are so great that their very existence depended
on the development of different characteristics could well belong to a “Nominal-
gattung” (in order that they be classified according to their similarities), but never
to a “Realgattung,” in which at least there must be a possibility that their heredity
extends back to one original pair. The discovery of the latter [Realgattung] is the
project of natural history [Naturgeschichte]; while the natural describer [Naturbesch-
reiber] is satisfied with the former. 20
The human species is a “Realgattung,” and according to Kant, there are four
human races that are also “Realgattungen.” Kant’s idea here is that the process
of classifying all humans as being in the same category by recognizing traits
common to all of them, and, at the same time, ignoring those traits which seem
to differentiate them, such as skin color, does not constitute natural science

based on natural law. Kant would call this natural description. According to
the law of nature, and in this case, the law of heredity, a natural historian, in
Kant’s view, must follow a principle and use a “Realgattung” or a real category.
A scientist working from principle, according to Kant, will understand that
there are distinct races.
In Kant’s race theory, certain characteristics are necessarily passed down from
parent to offspring, and these are inevitable [unausbleibliche] characteristics. Thus,
a scientist can establish the category of “species” according to Buffon’s law, and
this category is a “Realgattung.” But a scientist can go further, according to Kant,
and establish another real category under species for race based on his idea of
necessarily inherited characteristics. It is important to understand here that Kant
viewed these necessarily inherited characteristics, like skin color, to be as observ-
able and definable as the existence of fertility in the offspring, and he saw these
characteristics as genetically inevitable. Thus Kant argued that his “race” catego-
ries could be established according to a natural law.
Kant espoused a theory of monogenesis, that is, that there was one original
pair of humans, or several sets of original, identical pairs, which produced
offspring. As the offspring migrated to other parts of the globe, their “Keime,”
or seeds, programmed their adaptation to a new geographical location and
produced characteristics which they would pass on indefinitely to their fu-
ture offspring. Once having programmed the adaptation to a specific envi-
ronment, Kant’s “Keime” do not change again. Kant’s theory allows for only
a limited number of possible variations in “Keime” which mark a limited
number of races. In other words, races are predetermined and fixed. In this
early essay, he allows for one original “Stamm Gattung” which gives birth
to four races. The races are marked by specific, distinguishable skin colors,
including white, red [Kupferrote], black, and olive-yellow. Thus, when Kant
describes animals, as quoted above, “whose differences are so great that their
very existence depended on the development of different characteristics,” he
is referring to the effect of “Keime.” The African’s dark skin is a prime example
of Keime for Kant. He believed that the equator, full of jungles and swamps,
produced a great deal of “Phlogiston” which needed to be removed from the
blood. In pale Europeans, this happens through the lungs, but in this part of
the world, there is too much for the lungs to fully remove, and it needs to be
taken care of through the skin as well. Dark skin is dark because it actually
contains an agent for “dephlogistisieren,” the removal of “Phlogiston,” without
which an African would not be so well adapted to his environment.21 These
kinds of adaptations show, according to Kant, that all humans cannot, accord-
ing to natural law, belong to the same “race.”
Kant carefully distinguishes “necessarily inherited characteristics” which
enable the identification of a race from inherited characteristics which are vari-
able, not necessarily inherited, and which signify only variety within a race.
In “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” (“Über den Gebrauch

teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie,” 1788), Kant writes, “A variety is a

hereditary peculiarity which does not lend itself to classification because it does
not inevitably reproduce itself.” He gives blonde versus brunette hair as an
example of variety within a race. Skin color, on the other hand, is, in Kant’s
view, necessarily inherited. He continues, “But that hereditary peculiarity
which can exist together with another peculiarity is either necessarily heredi-
tary, or it isn’t. In the first case, it determines the character of a race; in the other
case, it determines the character of a variety.”22 Kant believed that, when indi-
viduals of separate races procreate, the inevitably inherited characteristics are
demonstrated in the offspring he named “halbschlächtige Kinder oder Blendlinge
(Mulatten),” or “children exhibiting the inevitably inherited characteristics of
both races.”23 He goes on to explain that blondes and brunettes are not different
races, because a brunette child can come from a blond parent and not exhibit
the hair color of one parent at all.24 Indeed, a clearer understanding of human
genetics would have to wait until the twentieth century, but it appeared to Kant
that skin color was a certainty whereas hair color was not. As a certainty, then,
skin color marked, for Kant, a real category of nature designated through pro-
creation, and thus it marked a race.
FORSTER’S CHALLENGE TO KANT’S RACE THEORY
Georg Forster responded to Kant’s “Determination of a Concept of a Human

Race” in 1786 with his “Still More about the Human Races” (“Noch etwas über
Menschenraßen”), which he published in the Teutsche Merkur. Unlike Kant and
most Europeans, Forster had encountered and studied a great variety of cul-
tural groups. Young Forster had accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold
Forster, who had been hired as naturalist aboard Cook’s Resolution, on her cir-
cumnavigation of 1772–75. In their writings, the Forsters did not treat the land
as though it were empty, ready to be colonized, as Mary Louise Pratt describes
a great wealth of travel writers doing in her book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writ-
ing and Transculturation (1992). Instead of erasing the agency and often even
the existence of the inhabitants, the Forsters’ accounts described the people in
detail, their customs and languages.25 The Forsters seemed especially sensitive
not only to the relative beauty of women, but also to their roles in society and
even to injustices committed against them as evidenced by one poignant scene
in which Georg Forster describes the tears and lamentations of young girls in
New Zealand as they are bartered for sex by their men-folk to English sailors
for some trinkets.26 Young Georg Forster sees the depth in the people they en-
counter and does not wish to have his careful observations of them simplified.
Reacting to both Kant’s view of the scientific method and his theory of natu-
ral history, Forster argued against a defining role for skin color in any possible
theory of human races, rejecting Kant’s premise that races could be defined at
all based on the data at hand. If they could be defined, Forster wrote, it would

not be by skin color and geographical location alone. He gave an example of

two individuals who belonged to different races, according to Kant’s classifica-
tion, but who had a similar skin color and who had a child of the same skin
color. He thus presented empirical evidence which countered Kant’s view of
distinct skin color as one of the “inevitably inherited characteristics” which es-
tablished the different races. Forster believed that Kant’s theory was just that,
a mere theory, unsupported by empirical data. Kant refers to the islands of the
South Pacific specifically in establishing his theory of race based on color, using
information he received from travel literature predating Forster’s Voyage around
the World. Forster, having seen islanders of the South Seas himself, asserts with
authority that skin color varies widely within that geographic region and does
not constitute a clear classification system, much less any so essential as the one
Kant proposed. Kant, he maintains, has been misled by inaccurate accounts.
Interestingly, Kant neglected to refer to Forster’s Voyage in “Determination
of a Concept of a Human Race.” It is unlikely that Kant would not have read
Forster’s travel account, as he was an avid reader of travel literature and used
it to support his work in physical geography. Furthermore, Forster’s travel nar-
rative was extremely popular and made him famous in the German speaking
lands. Instead, Kant referenced a travel narrative written by British explorer
Philip Carteret, who sailed across the South Pacific and around the world from
1766 to 1769. Carteret spent less time exploring the South Pacific than did Cook
and covered much less territory. He described most of the islanders he saw
as “black woolly headed Negroes” but some he described as “Indien copper
colour’d,” as on the Mapia Islands, named by Carteret “Joseph Freewills Is-
lands.”27 Kant mentions the “Frevill Eiland” from Carteret’s account, saying that
he evidenced the “wahre gelb” color, or true yellow, one of the four races, but
deduced that most of the peoples living in the South Pacific are actually white,
their skin colored by the sun and wind.28 Incidentally, Carteret did not port at
Tahiti or the Society Islands, and he did not describe beautiful, fair-skinned
women. Kant’s idea that some of the people of the South Pacific Islands are
white did not, it seems, come from Carteret. It could, however, have come from
other unreferenced accounts, including Forster’s narrative, especially given
Forster’s romantic depiction of the beautiful white skin found on the island
quoted above.
At other points along his journey Forster points out the relative beauty of
the women, and, in the end, he remarks that out of all the women they have
seen, European women are the most beautiful. This scale of beauty and cor-
responding whiteness of skin creates a kind of accidental standard that coin-
cides with “advancement” in society for Forster. Thus Forster’s aesthetics here
demonstrate an unintended consequence, a scale by which a society may be
judged. Despite his documentation of this one fair-skinned woman, according
to Forster’s Voyage not all of the inhabitants of the region had light skin, and
some were dark-skinned as Africans. Thus, Forster’s account of the variety of

skin colors in the South Pacific, which not only included more islands than
Carteret’s journal but contained much more detail as well, was simply not use-
ful to Kant’s theory. Forster, not surprisingly, disputed both Carteret’s account
and Kant’s interpretation of it in “Still More about the Human Races,” pointing
out that Carteret only visited a few of the western islands of the South Pacific.
In the end, Forster argues that Kant’s concepts of “Keime” (“seeds” or “germs”)
and “inevitably inherited characteristics” are mere fantasy and that his result-
ing concepts of natural history and the origin of life is unsupportable. Forster
accuses Kant, in short, of selecting data which better supports his theoretical
system rather than taking all the data available and realizing that it does not
actually show any clear definitions of race. Forster believes that Kant is not
using deductive reasoning, and his method, then, is no longer appropriately
empirical.
The crux of the issue between Forster and Kant was their differing concep-
tions of scientific method. Forster adhered to a rigorous empirical process,
whereby any theory must arise out of an expanse of verifiable first-hand ac-
counts, while Kant was interested in establishing principles whereby one could
discover natural laws. For Kant, humans occupied a special place in nature, that
of the only rational being. Thus, he believed that the existence of reason itself in
human beings as a part of nature necessitated that nature be understood as if it
were rational. While Forster surmised the existence of an unknowable, original
life force, or “Kraft,” he did not believe that the data would ever reveal any
definite picture of human origin. Due to the limitations of perspective, Forster
called natural history “eine Wissenschaft für Götter,” or “a science for Gods.”29
Kant rejected this idea that the origins were absolutely unknowable. Science, as
Forster practiced it, was a science for Gods, but reason, for Kant, enabled us to
gain perspective that empirical experience alone denied us. Kant also rejected
the idea of an original force, calling it unnecessary metaphysical speculation.
He believed that, in theory, a scientist could begin to surmise the outlines of a
greater order within nature through the application of both empirical experi-
ence and metaphysical theory. Kant believed that a study of humans would
reveal the outlines of greater order to nature, just as his Critique of Pure Reason
revealed the categories of the understanding. The organization of the human
mind became for him an analogy for understanding the organization of na-
ture itself. Humans possess reason and categories of the understanding and are
creations of nature, thus nature must be understood as if it possessed a broad,
if unknowable, plan. Its plan should be understood as leading to a greater te-
leological end, just as humans ought to progress into free, moral thinkers. For
Kant, the study of empirical data organized under the proper metaphysical
theory would allow the naturalist to ascertain evidence of this plan. The theory
was essential: natural history was to illuminate the connection between reason
and nature. Empirical data could then be used to establish the science from
within this framework.

In his answer to Forster, entitled “On the Use of Teleological Principles

in Philosophy,” published in 1788 in the Teutsche Merkur, Kant criticized For-
ster’s empiricism as incapable of reaching the basic assumptions necessary
for natural science. Kant’s critique of Forster and his definition of natural sci-
ence focused on the “Nominalgattung” and “Realgattung” distinction. Forster
was working from the Linnaean classification system, using what Kant called
“Nominalgattungen,” which could only describe, according to Kant, and were
useful for comprehension, but which were not necessary or real. Kant believed
he had established a principle to interpret human characteristics and that rea-
son and empiricism provided the proof of permanent categories, categories
which would not change over time or with new empirical data. Kant argued
that by discovering laws and establishing “Realgattungen,” a natural historian
could demonstrate the actual order of rational nature.
Forster, a stricter empiricist, rejected what he saw as Kant’s theoretical leaps,
accusing him of presupposing a rational system and applying it to natural
history, rather than letting any theory follow deductively from an analysis of
physical evidence. Unless the philosopher is careful and “fest an der Anschauung
klebt,” or “sticks close to the observation of objects in the world,” Forster warns
in “Still More about the Human Races,” he is in danger of building castles in the
air. He writes that in order to avoid “Einseitigkeit” or “one sidedness,” “it must
be important to the philosopher, when he works from experience, that the facts,
from which consequences arise, are correctly understood, because without this
caution any valid deductions will be lost.”30 Forster’s basic argument is that
there is no actual empirical evidence to support the existence of Kant’s “Realgat-
tungen,” and so the race theory that arises out of this false interpretation of the
empirical facts is not valid. It is delusion.
DEFINING A SCIENTIFIC METHOD TO INCLUDE METAPHYSICS
Clearly Forster’s rejection of Kant’s introduction of metaphysics into empirical

science is more in line with modern scientific theory, while Kant’s insistence on
a separate origin for the human species and his race theory are remarkable for
their opposition to it. Kant’s ideas on race and the fixed nature of the species
are part of Kant’s work as a whole. Emmanuel Eze and Christian M. Neuge-
bauer called attention to the damaging nature of Kant’s race theory, but their
critiques did not serve to change the prevailing view that Kant’s race theory is
not embedded in, derivable from, or part of his transcendental philosophy, and
so have generally been dismissed by scholars.31
John H. Zammito and Friedrich Beiser have described how Kant’s race theory
leads him to the concept of teleological principles in nature which are crucial
to his third Critique.32 Yet, they both argue that Kant’s debate with Forster over
race is much less significant than his argument with Herder over original force.
Beiser claims that were it not for the questions concerning the limits of natural

science and the role of teleology, questions which inspired Kant’s third Critique,
Beiser could, in fact, ignore Forster’s essay.33 Beiser does not discuss the issue of
race. Zammito, on the other hand, discusses Kant’s race theory briefly within the
context of his “preformation theory” and his idea of modified “epigenesis.” That
is, Zammito stresses that Kant believed humans were all one species and were
preformed in nature, and he accounts for perceived differences among humans
with his idea that different races arose out of one of four pre-existing possibilities
written into human “Keime.”34 In The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Zam-
mito mentions Forster’s influence on Kant, but, interestingly, neglects to refer
to Forster’s essay in his work more specifically focused on anthropology, Kant,
Herder and the Birth of Anthropology.35 In the end, for both Zammito and Beiser, the
teleology and scientific theory matter, but the fact that these ideas came about for
Kant over a defense of his contested race theory does not.
My reading of this debate between Forster and Kant alongside their respec-
tive work in aesthetics leads me to a different conclusion. While Kant’s gen-
eral goal in speculative philosophy, as presented in his first Critique, had to be
consistent with his race theory, Kant’s third Critique was invested in defending
it from Forster’s empirical attack. The third Critique describes a symbiotic rela-
tionship between scientist and nature, such that the cause of the principles from
which a scientist works is the things in themselves. If things in themselves can
act as a cause of principles, then there is definitely more to nature than what can
be ascertained through mere empiricism.
After responding to Forster’s attack with “On the use of Teleological Prin-
ciples in Philosophy,” Kant wrote the first introduction to his third Critique.
Here he divides philosophy, which he calls “the system of rational cognition
through concepts” into theoretical and practical philosophy.36 The theoretical is
the philosophy of nature and the practical is the philosophy of morals. The theo-
retical is also empirical and the practical “can never contain anything other than
pure principles a priori.”37 This is not new, but then Kant introduces a new con-
cept: the theoretical practical in the philosophy of nature. Practical propositions
“consider freedom under laws,” so how can these propositions concerning free-
dom have a role to play in empirical science? Kant explains that there are some
practical propositions which “belong to the nature of things, only applied to
the way in which they can be generated by us in accordance with a principle,
i.e., their possibility is represented through a voluntary action (which belongs
among natural causes as well).”38 The possibility of these theoretical-practical
principles is represented by the scientist through a voluntary action, such as the
creation of a relation, for example. They must follow laws, but the natural scien-
tist is responsible for making these representations, and there is some freedom
involved with this action. Kant writes,
In a word: all practical propositions that derive that which nature can contain from
the faculty of choice as a cause collectively belong to theoretical philosophy, as

cognition of nature; only those propositions which give the law to freedom are
specifically distinguished from the former in virtue of their content. One can say
of the former that they constitute the practical part of a philosophy of nature, but
the latter alone ground a special practical philosophy.39
In defining the difference between theoretical and practical philosophy, Kant

allows here that there is a practical part of a philosophy of nature, such that a
scientist has some choice to create representations of nature, and this choice acts
as a cause. As defined above, practical propositions are purely a priori proposi-
tions, yet some a priori propositions are a part of a philosophy of nature. They
represent “the possibility of things in accordance with natural laws.” Kant goes
on to explain practical-theoretical propositions in his remark:
Now the possibility of things in accordance with natural laws is essentially distinct
in its principles from that in accordance with laws of freedom. This distinction,
however, does not consist in the fact that in the latter case the cause is placed in a
will, but in the former case outside of the will, in the things themselves. For even
if the will follows no other principles than those by means of which the under-
standing has insight into the possibility of the object in accordance with them,
as mere laws of nature, then the proposition which contains the possibility of the
object through the causality of the faculty of choice may still be called a practical
proposition, yet it is not at all distinct in principle from the theoretical propositions
concerning the nature of things, but must rather derive its own content from the
latter in order to exhibit the representation of an object in reality.40
Here Kant is concerned with practical propositions which are “not at all dis-
tinct in principle from the theoretical propositions concerning the nature of
things.” The distinction is that with these practical propositions of natural
science, the cause is placed, not in the will, but outside the will, in the “things
in themselves.” These propositions derive their content from the nature of
things.
By making space for theoretical practical propositions in natural science,
propositions that are caused by the “things in themselves,” that are not purely
empirical, but that contain a “practical” element, Kant makes a space for his
Realgattungen. His fixed categories of race based on unausbleibliche Eigenschaften
are not grounded in pure empirical evidence; rather, they come about through
the employment of practical propositions of natural science. These propositions
are caused by the things in themselves and are made by the scientist in ac-
cordance to the laws of nature. In other words, here he is creating a scientific
theory capable of countering Forster’s empiricism.

AESTHETICS AND RACE
Kant could not adequately defend his race theory on a purely empirical level,
as Forster showed. The evidence did not support it. Convinced, though, that it
was valid, he wrote the Critique of the Power of Judgment, at least in part, in order
to create a teleological philosophy of science that would support it. Kant’s re-
flecting power of judgment is not just about beauty, but also about nature. At
the beginning of the second part, with the “Critique of the Teleological Power
of Judgment” Kant describes the objective purposiveness of nature. The variety
and beauty of nature’s creations cannot be explained through pure causality;
instead, nature must be understood as if it were purposive. He argues, “nature
as a mere mechanism, could have formed itself in a thousand different ways
without hitting precisely upon the unity in accordance with such a rule, and
that it is therefore only outside the concept of nature, not within it, that one
could have even the least ground a priori for hoping to find such a principle.”41
Empirical data will never give Forster all the tools he needs to do natural sci-
ence, because nature itself is not mere mechanism. Principles of metaphysics
must be employed and nature must be understood as if it were purposive.
Kant describes his idea of how we think of nature: “For in the necessity of that
which is purposive and so constituted as if it were intentionally arranged for
our use, but which nevertheless seems to pertain originally to the essence of
things, without any regard to our use, lies the ground for the great admiration
of nature, not outside of us so much as in our own reason.”42 Thus, as Kant ar-
gues in his essays on race, a natural scientist must work from principles. These
principles will be supported empirically, but cannot be pure empiricism. They
must also be grounded in reason and natural law. Nature, therefore, must be
fundamentally purposive, and rational principles are the only way to under-
stand this fact.
In addition to being an impetus for the third Critique, Kant’s race theory
plays a thematic role, as Kant integrates issues of color and natural history into
the aesthetics. In section 17, “On the Ideal of Beauty” (vom Ideale der Schönheit)
of his “Analytic of the Beautiful” (Analytik des Schönen), Kant introduces his
race forms. Here, in a rare passage in the text which deals with human beauty,
Kant describes his concept of a “normal idea” (Normalidee) which comes about,
not purely from a myriad of experience, but rather, in accordance with rules
for judging. It is an aesthetic idea which rests only in the individual doing the
judging. Kant explains,
The normal idea must take its elements for the figure of an animal of a particular
species from experience; but the greatest purposiveness in the construction of the
figure, which would be suitable as a universal standard for the aesthetic judging of
every individual of this species, the image which as it were intentionally grounded
the technique of nature, to which only the species as a whole but not any separate

individual is adequate, lies merely in the idea of the one who does the judging,
which, however, with its proportions, can be represented fully in concreto as an
aesthetic idea in a model image.43
The normal idea cannot be adequate for any one individual, but must represent
the species as a whole. Kant’s view of the separate origins for each species is
consistent here with his division for the normal idea. The normal idea is an
aesthetic idea. It is subjective, and exists in the mind of the one doing the judg-
ing. It is a universal idea as well: each member of the species will come to the
same normal idea. Kant then makes a further delineation for race. The concept
of beauty must be universal in Kant’s view of it, but this normal idea cannot
be universal for all humans, rather “a Negro must necessarily have a different
normal idea of the beauty of a figure than a white, a Chinese person a different
idea from a European. It will be exactly the same with the model of a beautiful
horse or dog (of a certain breed [Race].).”44 The different races will come to their
own “Normalidee” not solely through the process of adding up experiences, but
through a “universal” subjective judgment. That is, an African’s idea of human
beauty will be consistent with that of other Africans, but will not be the same
as a European’s. Thus, it seems rather important to note that here “universal”
can also mean “European,” and that, under consideration, this may not actually
present any contradiction for the work as a whole. After all, Kant, from his per-
spective, was consistent. Kant’s concept of race, including the idea of a separate
origin of the species, the “Keime” which generate the four specific color classes,
and the colors themselves, encompass the human element in this whole picture
of a teleological nature. His theory of a teleological nature, then, is a substan-
tiation of the race theory, which is a goal of the work as a whole. Clearly the
subject of the debate between Forster and Kant, a definition of race, and the
conflicting notions of the role of empiricism in the formulation of such a defini-
tion, is of primary concern to Kant’s third Critique. Given this, Forster’s essay
on race, as it presents an alternate view, deserves notice.
Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, translators of the new Cambridge edition
of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, translate Kant’s word “Race” as “breed”
in the quote above. This is understandable, and would be the best term were
it Herder or Forster or just about anyone else writing the text except Kant.
“Race”, “breed,” and “variety,” were used interchangeably at the time, and the
word “race” has such a loaded meaning in our times. Yet, clearly this loaded
meaning has roots which must include Kant’s new validation of a scientific
classification of race based on skin color. I believe here it is a mistake to change
Kant’s German word “Race” to “breed,” given the efforts Kant made in a series
of essays to define the term, carefully distinguishing it from the other two, and
given the efforts he made towards the creation of a scientific method which
would accommodate the category.

NOTES
I would like to thank Robert Bernasconi, Jonathan Hess, and anonymous referees for
helpful comments on previous drafts. I am grateful for funding from a Mississippi State
University HARP grant.
1. Georg Forster, “Reise Um die Welt,” Georg Forsters Werke: Sämtliche Schriften, Tage-
bücher, Briefe II, AV II, 1–464; AV III, 1–455 (Berlin, 1974), AV II, 328–29; Forster, A Voyage
Round the World, I, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, asst. Jennifer Newell (Ho-
nolulu, 2000), 221. Forster wrote the narrative originally in English, publishing it in 1777,
and then feverishly translated it, with some help from Rudolf Erich Raspe, into his native
German by August of that same year. Forster was sensitive to the two different audiences,
and his language differs a bit from one text to the other.
2. Forster, AV II, 328.
3. For a general outline of the combined history of anthropology and aesthetics in the
eighteenth century, see A. Owen Aldridge, “Primitivism in the Eighteenth Century,” Dic-
tionary of the History of Ideas III (New York, 1973–74), 605. Aldridge discusses perceptions
of color with respect to aesthetics and race, mentioning most notably, Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing’s depiction of the Hottentots in his 1766 work on aesthetics, Laokoon oder Über
die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. See also Sander L. Gilman, “The Figure of the Black in
German Aesthetic Theory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1975): 373–96. See also Edmund
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,
ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, 1958). In 1757, Burke introduces ideas of the sublime
as distinct from the beautiful, and makes an essential connection between the color black
and fear. Immanuel Kant’s 1764 essay on the sublime and the beautiful, “Observations on
the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,” (“Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen
und Erhabenen,” Akademieausgabe von Kants Gesammelten Schriften II, [Berlin, 1902], 205–
56) connects the color white with moral goodness in a discussion of human classification.
4. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Ger-
many, 1770–1870 (Durham, 1997). See also Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial
Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992). For a discussion of the genea-
logical connections between sex and race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see
Ladelle McWhorter, “Sex, Race and Biopower: A Foucaultian Geneology,” Hypatia 19, no.
3 (Summer 2004): 38–62.
5. Kant, Beobachtungen, 237, translation mine.
6. Kant, Beobachtungen, 237, translation mine.
7. Forster demonstrated an extraordinary openness toward difference. For a discus-
sion of this and his achievement in understanding modern deductive scientific reason-
ing and what would resemble Karl Popper’s theory of negation, see Dagmar Barnouw,
“Eräugnis: Georg Forster on the Difficulties of Diversity,” Impure Reason: Dialectic of En-
lightenment in Germany, ed. Daniel W. Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit, 1993), 322–43.
8. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C., 1996),
187.
9. Hannaford’s references of Kant’s ideas on race come from Mary J. Gregor’s English
translation of his Anthropology from a Practical Perspective (Anthropologie in pragmatischer
Hinsicht, [1798]). He does not refer to Kant’s two essays specifically on his own new defi-
nition of race, “On the different Races of Men” (“Von den verschiedenen Racen der Men-
schen,” [1775]) and “Definition of Concept of a Human Race” (“Bestimmung des Begriffs
einer Menschenrace,” [1785]), nor does he refer to Kant’s answer to Forster written in 1788,
which began his creation of a scientific method to support his idea of race that could
withstand Forster’s attack, “On the Use of teleological Principles in Philosophy” (“Über
den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie” (1788).

10. Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the En-
lightenment Construction of Race,” Race, ed. Bernasconi (Oxford, 2001), 11–36, 17.
11. Johann Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, trans. Thomas Blendyshe
(London, 1865) (De generis humani varietate nativa [Göttingen, 1776]).
12. Blumenbach, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, (Göttingen, 1825), 22.
13. Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?,” 17.
14. See Susan M. Shell, “Kant’s Conception of a Human Race,” The German Invention
of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany, 2006), 55–72; and Bernasconi, “Kant
as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism,” Philosophers on Race, ed. Julie K. Ward and Tommy
L. Lott (Oxford, 2002), 145–66. Bernasconi argues that Kant’s cosmopolitanism creates
a constant threat that it will be “a universalism for everyone else, while the dominant
group retains its particularism,” (146). My reading is in line with this interpretation. See
also Thomas E. Hill Jr. and Bernard Boxill, “Kant and Race,” Race and Racism, ed. Boxill
(Oxford, 2001), 448–71. See also Larrimore, “Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the
‘Races,’” Civilization and Oppression, ed. Catherine Wilson (Calgary, 1999), 99–125; and
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropol-
ogy,” Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Katherine
M. Faull (Lewisburg, 1995), 200–41.
15. See Hill Jr. and Boxill, “Kant and Race”;and Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant’s second
Thoughts on Race,” The Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 229 (October 2007): 573–92. Kle-
ingeld argues that after 1792 and by 1795, Kant dropped his idea of a hierarchy of races
and his idea of morally inferior races, but did not give up his view of race as a biological
category. Thus, she argues that at this point, in his last few years, Kant’s idea of races is
more in line with his ethical view. Her view represents another argument for marginal-
izing any significance to Kant’s race theory and clearly separating it from his project
in transcendental philosophy. My point here is that the idea of race is embedded in his
scientific theory and his idea of nature as presented in his third Critique, which was pub-
lished in 1790. My reading of his Critique of the Power of Judgment is important not because
I want to prove that Kant was a racist, but because this highly influential text is not gener-
ally read as a scientific theory created, at least in part, to allow for the existence of discrete
races based on skin color. Thus, it is important for those who read this text to unpack how
Kant’s universalism veils an embedded, particular cultural perspective. See also Larri-
more, “Antimonies of Race: Diversity and Destiny in Kant,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, nos.
4–5 (2008): 341–63. Larrimore argues (against Kleingeld) that Kant never abandons his
idea of race, the empirical confirmation of which could act, for Kant, as confirmation of
his critical project as a whole.
16. For a discussion of Kant’s scientific method as compared to advancements made in
biology of his day, see John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago,
1992), 190.
17. This endeavor does not originate here, but is a continuation of work already un-
derway. Bernasconi observes how scholarship has separated out Kant’s race theory from
his transcendental philosophy, and he discusses the importance of understanding the
connections between universalism and racism in works by classical philosophers. He
writes that “studying how the classical works of the history of philosophy connect with
the institutional oppression of their time is the best preparation for questioning the limi-
tations of our own thinking” (“Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism,” [147]). Also,
Charles W. Mills writes “thus, the rethinking, purging, and deracializing of racial liber-
alism should be a priority for us—and in fact the struggles of people of color for racial
equality over the past few hundred years can in large measure be most illuminatingly
seen as just such a project” (“Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123, no. 5 [2008]: 1380–97, 1383).
18. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. by Robert B.
Louden (Cambridge, 2006), 3; “Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht,” Akademieaus-
gabe von Kants Gesammelten Schriften, VII, 117–333, 118.

19. Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen,” Akademieausgabe von Kants
Gesammelten Schriften, II, 447–44, 429, translation mine.
20. Kant, “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace,” Akademieausgabe von Kants
Gesammelten Schriften, VIII, 89–106, 102, translation mine.
21. Kant, “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace,” 102–03.
22. Kant, “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,” trans. Jon Mark
Mikkelsen, Race, ed. Bernasconi, (Oxford, 2001), 37–56, 41; “Über den Gebrauch teleolo-
gischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie,” Akademieausgabe von Kants Gesammelten Schriften,
VIII, 157–184, 165.
23. Kant, “Von den Verschiedenen Racen der Menschen,” 430.
24. Kant, “Von den Verschiedenen Racen der Menschen,” 430.
25. For a discussion of the singularity of Johann Forster’s perspective and open-
mindedness, see Harriet Guest, “Looking at Women: Forster’s Observations in the South
Pacific,” Observations Made during a Voyage round the World by Johann Reinhold Forster, ed.
Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach with a linguistics appendix by Karl H.
Rensch (Honolulu, 1996) XLI–LIV. See also Thomas, “Johann Reinhold Forster and his
Observations,” Observations Made during a Voyage round the World by Johann Reinhold For-
ster, xv–xxii. Johann Forster was very interested in studying language and its origins as a
way to decipher human migrations. For a discussion of Johann Forster’s ideas in context
see John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1994), 160–65.
26. Forster, 121; Reise, 186.
27. Helen Wallis, ed., Carteret’s Voyage Round the World 1766–1769, vol. I (Cambridge,
1965), 172, 200.
28. Kant, “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace,” 92.
29. Forster, “Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen,” AV VIII, 130–156, 132.
30. Forster, “Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen,” 132, translation mine.
31. Christian M. Neugebauer, “The Racism of Hegel and Kant,” Sage Philosophy: Indig-
enous Thinkers and Modern Debate of African Philosophy (Leiden, 1990). Neugebauer points
out some of Kant’s more disturbing statements regarding the ‘proper’ whipping of Afri-
can slaves. Eze argues that race is a transcendental category for Kant. Hill, Jr., and Boxill
defend Kant from this charge, and argue that Kant’s racism may not be derived from his
transcendental philosophy (“Kant and Race”).
32. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, 200; Frederick Beiser, The Fate
of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, (Cambridge, 1987), 154.
33. Beiser, 154.
34. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, 200–201.
35. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, 2002).
36. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Mat-
thews (Cambridge, 2000), 3; Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Urteilskraft, Akademieausgabe
von Kants Gesammelten Schriften, XX, 165–486, 195.
37. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 3; Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Urteilskraft,
195.
38. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 4; Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Urteilskraft, 196.
197.
197.
41. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 234; Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Urteil-
skraft, 360.
skraft, 363–64.
skraft, 233.

44. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 119; Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Ur-
teilskraft, 234. Kant writes, “Wenn nun auf ähnliche Art für diesen mittlern Mann der
mittlere Kopf, für diesen die mittlere Nase u. s. w. gesucht wird, so liegt diese Gestalt der
Normalidee des schönen Mannes in dem Lande, wo diese Vergleichung angestellt wird,
zum Grunde; daher ein Neger nothwendig unter diesen empirischen Bedingungen eine
andere Normalidee der Schönheit der Gestalt haben muß, als ein Weißer, der Chinese
eine andere, als der Europäer. Mit dem Muster eines schönen Pferdes oder Hundes (von
gewisser Race) würde es eben so gehen.”

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ADAM BEACH is an associate professor of English at Ball State University. His

research revolves around the issues of nationalism, colonialism and slavery in
the literature of the long eighteenth century in England, with a particular em-
phasis on the Restoration and early eighteenth century periods. He has most
recently written about literature related to the failed seventeenth-century Eng-
lish colony in Tangier, Morocco and about British writings on slavery in the
non-British world. His current research focuses on British depictions of slavery
in North Africa and the Mediterranean, on the fate of African and European
slaves in the region, and on the best ways to think about comparative slave
institutions in the early modern world.
MICHAEL GENOVESE is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.

He is currently working on a manuscript about how eighteenth-century litera-
ture brought together the rhetoric of sympathy and of economic profit to resist
the rise of individualism. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The
Age of Johnson.
SALLY HATCH GRAY is an assistant professor of German literature and cul-

ture at Mississippi State University. Her research includes work on eighteenth-
century German literature and philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, and
political theory, and European political and social theory. Her current manu-
script is titled “Universal Selves in the Face of the Other: Cross-sections of An-
thropology and Aesthetics in Works by Kant and Forster.”
ALAN CHARLES KORS (B.A., Princeton; M.A. and Ph.D., Harvard) is Henry
Charles Lea Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he
specializes in European intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, with a special research interest in the relationships between orthodox
and heterodox thought in France after 1650. He is the author of several books
and various articles on French intellectual history and was editor-in-chief of the
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2003). He has taught seminars at
the Folger Institute and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the University
of Paris, and he was a Fellow of the Davis Center for Historical Study, at Prince
ton University. He served on the National Council for the Humanities of the
NEH, and he is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 519
DANIEL LARLHAM is a Lecturer at Yale University’s Theater Studies Program.

His scholarly work has appeared in TDR/The Drama Review, Theater (Yale), The-
atre Journal, and Theatre Survey. His research interests include theories of acting,
theatre and philosophy, and South African theatre and performance.
FEISAL G. MOHAMED is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois.

His most recent book is Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Ter-
rorism (Stanford, 2011).
KATHRYN STEELE is a Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. She received

Ph.D. (2008) and M.A. (2003) degrees from Rutgers University and M.A. and
B.A. degrees from the University of Colorado. Her research interests include
literary history and media ecology, with a focus on histories of reading. She is
currently working on a project examining the readers of Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa. She has published on Clarissa and the history of reading in Eighteenth-
Century Fiction.
CLINT STEVENS received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. His scholarship focuses on William Blake and has been published
in The European Romantic Review. He is Assistant Professor of English at Kas-
kaskia College in southern Illinois where he lives on a farm with his wife and
two children.
KATHRYN TEMPLE, J.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Chair of the George-
town University English Department, specializing in eighteenth-century Brit-
ish law, literature, and culture. Her current book project, Loving Justice, takes
up the relationship between poetics, affect, and representations of justice, while
her first book, Scandal Nation, investigated literary scandals created where law,
literature and authorship intersected in eighteenth-century Britain.
NATHALIE WOLFRAM is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale University. Part

of her dissertation, “Novel Play: Gothic Performance and the Making of Eigh-
teenth Century Fiction,” will appear as a chapter in Theater and Ghosts (ed. Mary
Luckhurst, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan). She is currently researching
a project on English toy theater.
The editors wish to thank Nicholas Sawin for assistance in producing this issue.

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The Eighteenth Century

Theory and Interpretation

Volume 53 WINTER 2012 Number 4

The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience:Motions of the Soul and the

“I am my master’s servant for hire”: Contract and Identity in

Historical Fundamentalism and Political Mythology in

Calumny, Culture, Continuity, and Control 504

Gossip and the Public Sphere 509

Honoring G. E. Bentley Jr. 513

Notes on Contributors 518

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Sally Hatch Gray

Forster’s excitement helps to relay the intense experience of a special event

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Recent studies of British imperialism, such as those by McClintock and Young,

Forster’s Voyage serves as one influential text contributing to German colonial

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KANT’S THEORY OF RACE BASED ON SKIN COLOR

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The school classification [Schuleinteilung] works from classes [Klassen] based on

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teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie,” 1788), Kant writes, “A variety is a

FORSTER’S CHALLENGE TO KANT’S RACE THEORY

Georg Forster responded to Kant’s “Determination of a Concept of a Human

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not be by skin color and geographical location alone. He gave an example of

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In his answer to Forster, entitled “On the Use of Teleological Principles

DEFINING A SCIENTIFIC METHOD TO INCLUDE METAPHYSICS

Clearly Forster’s rejection of Kant’s introduction of metaphysics into empirical

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In defining the difference between theoretical and practical philosophy, Kant

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AESTHETICS AND RACE

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ADAM BEACH is an associate professor of English at Ball State University. His

MICHAEL GENOVESE is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.

SALLY HATCH GRAY is an assistant professor of German literature and cul-

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DANIEL LARLHAM is a Lecturer at Yale University’s Theater Studies Program.

FEISAL G. MOHAMED is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois.

KATHRYN STEELE is a Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. She received

NATHALIE WOLFRAM is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale University. Part

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