PHILOSOPHY 224
BRACKEN, “ESSENCE, ACCIDENT AND RACE”
ASSUMPTIONS
• Bracken begins by laying out some operating
assumptions:
1. Racism is endemic to our (western) culture.
2. We are generally interested in mitigating and/or
eliminating racism; for philosophers that requires
consideration of the philosophical sources of racism.
3. Racism is a complex concept, but for purposes of this
discussion we will focus on racism as doctrines or beliefs
articulated to justify oppression of individuals or groups
based on an account of human nature ( which Bracken
here understands as essence) of the oppressed individual
or group.
•
Can you think of an example?
FORMS OF RACISM
• One historical form that racism has taken is the belief
that different forms of linguistic expression highlight
different levels of intellectual ability or character.
• Consider Hume’s remarks on p. 259.
• Debate about ‘Ebonics.’
• A more absolute form is seen in the insistence that nonwhites are intellectually inferior.
• Yet another links non-white racial identity to
environmental degeneracy (people born closer to the
equator are lazy, criminals, etc.)
• Still another links non-whites to lower levels of evolution.
• Finally, we have a specific religious form (Adamic vs.
Non-Adamic peoples).
A RACIST HISTORY
• This typology of racist ideologies allows us to review
the history of philosophy (and the thinking or race
more generally) and locate seminal figures in the
typology.
• Hume advances a general inferiority thesis; Voltaire
denies the ‘climate theory,’ instead advocating an
evolutionary thesis; Berkeley rejected any account
of different natures, but still supported slavery;
somewhat surprisingly, Darwin was an advocate of
the linguistic theory.
A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY
• As Bracken notes, the concept of race as well as the
various forms of racism are a relatively modern invention.
• Earlier theories of human nature (specifically the religious
accounts with which we began the semester) seem to
be relatively free of racism.
• Bracken accounts for this through their universalistic aspirations
(desire for converts).
• It’s no accident, he insists, that we see racist ideology
and racism become prevalent when the new world
opened up for colonization.
• It’s no accident either that racism makes inroads only as
philosophical theories of human nature shift their focus in
the 18th century.
• Bracken claims that a mind/body dualism like Descartes
provides no purchase for racist ideology.
JOHN LOCKE
• Particularly important in this shift, according to Bracken, is the
theory of human nature offered by John Locke (an early
empiricist, predecessor of Berkeley and Hume).
• His doctrine of primary and secondary qualities (real vs. merely
accidental qualities of a substance) is a persisting empiricist
dogma.
• The key point is that we cannot ever exhaust the secondary qualities
of a substance and even if we could, they would not provide us with a
true account of the substance itself.
• The doctrine has far reaching implications: no property can be
ruled essential or unessential. As a result, there are no
properties that would mark the distinctly human from the nonhuman.
• In one way, this view avoids the trap of treating linguistic competence
(for example) as the mark of the fully human. In another way, it limits
the ability of people to definitively include non-whites in the human
community.
LOCKE THE COLONIALIST
• This flexibility in his thinking made Locke an ideal
functionary in Great Britain's colonial administration.
• Locke did in fact justify slavery, not on the basis of
any natural deficiency or lack of development on
the part of non-whites, but as the rightful plunder of
a just war.
• Why just? Because Locke held that undeveloped
land was ‘waste land,’ and could rightfully be
appropriated by anyone who would develop it.
• Those who resisted this appropriation could be justly
captured and enslaved for life.
CONCEPT ACQUISITION
• Without pushing the connection too far, we can perhaps
note a point of proximity between the just acquisition of
slaves, and Locke’s account of how we come to form
concepts.
• This account is a basically empiricist one: on the basis of
repeated experience, we generalize from individual
instances to concepts.
• The key to this account is that once again there is
nothing essential or necessary about this acquisition. It’s
just a natural product of ‘working’ on our experiences.
• Different contexts/forms or ‘work’ produce different concepts.
THE IDEA OF ‘HUMANITY’
• The empiricist model of concept acquisition
has clear implications for an account of
humanity.
• Without oversimplifying, Bracken insists that
this model lends itself to various forms of
manipulation of concepts like ‘human.’
• This manipulation has become increasingly
dominant in our contemporary world, with
humans being refigured as ‘consumers,’
‘customers,’ and even ‘commodities.’
NORMATIVE V. DESCRIPTIVE
• Non-empiricists accounts of human nature have
clear normative consequences.
• If humans are ‘rational animals’ then forms of life that
privilege or emphasize our rationality are clearly morally
preferable to those that don’t.
• A common virtue claimed for empiricistic
approaches is that they are descriptive, not
normative, thus making their claims ‘value-free.’
• However, if you describe a people as inferior (because for
example they lack a monetary system), it makes it easy to
treat them as inferiors.
• Recent examples: The Bell Curve, by Hermstein and Murray;
the journal Mankind Quarterly.
A NEW CARTESIANISM?
• Given these implications of the the empiricist model of
concept acquisition, Bracken considers the
corresponding implications of a rationalist account like
that offered by Descartes.
• What this account seems to show is that even concepts
that are strongly connected to the senses like color
concepts can be developed and employed by those
who lack the corresponding capacity for sense (e.g.,
blind people).
• The key to this account is the recognition of the
qualitative difference of human intelligence, particularly
as revealed in language.
• Alternative accounts (like Kant’s) locate the difference in
freedom.
RADICAL FREEDOM
• In both cases (language acquisition and freedom) the
deck seems stacked against racists ideologies and the
corresponding political repression.
• We can’t without begging the question argue for the
dominance of one linguistic form over another (thus
undercutting linguistic racism).
• The claim that people are autonomous is clearly
inconsistent with the claim that some people are by right
or nature slaves (or defined by consumption, or as
commodities, etc.).
• Of course, history reveals a wealth of such
inconsistencies, and so Bracken is not surprised by the
success of the empiricistic model relative to this
rationalist one.
RACIST SCIENCE
• Propelled by empiricist assumptions, the 19th century
saw an incredible outpouring of racist ‘science.’
• Craniology (an early example of anthropometry:
measurement and accumulation of statistical data
about the distribution of body dimensions in a
population) is a paradigmatic example of such
‘science.’
• Cf., the discussion on pp. 266-7.
• Early linguistic theory was another apt example, as
we’ve already noted (267-8).
THE UPSHOT
• Bracken provides us with a concise summary of his
argument on p. 269. As he indicates there, his essay
proceeds in three steps:
1. The elucidation of the complicity of empiricism with the
advance of racism.
2. His insistence that empiricism's model of concept
acquisition is particularly troublesome (manipulation/denial
of freedom).
3. The cover which the dominance of an empiricist ideal
provides for past and current pseudo-scientific justifications
of racism.