Abstract
This chapter examines Hegel’s fiercely-debated views on Africa, which have often been viewed not only as Eurocentric but also as racist. Considering the debates within Hegelian scholarship, the chapter situates Hegel’s views within a broader tradition of European thought that has persistently denigrated non-European cultures, resorting even to pseudo-science in this endeavor.
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Notes
- 1.
The most comprehensive indictment of Hegel is Teshale Tibebu’s Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011), hereafter cited as HTW. Tibebu argues that Hegel’s philosophy of history is informed by a “racialized philosophical anthropology” and that its “most profound message” is “its Eurocentrism , its systemic racism .” Indeed, Hegel’s works constitute “the most sophisticated rendering of the Eurocentric paradigm” (HTW, xiii–xiv, xvi). Tibebu sees Western modernity as comprising a positive aspect inasmuch as it produced “prodigious material and cultural progress for some.” But it also has a negative dimension, what Tibebu calls “negative modernity,” which has three pillars: “the American holocaust [of Native Americans], New World slavery, and colonialism ” (HTW, xvi). As such, Hegel was central to the articulation of both dimensions of Western modernity. Tibebu characterizes Eurocentrism as “the self-consciousness of capital accumulation,” and it is founded on “a paradigm of essential difference between the West and the rest…Eurocentrism as Western identity is Western difference.” He traces this notion of identity as constituted by difference, as intrinsically relational, to Hegel’s Science of Logic (HTW, xx). Marxism is not exempt from Tibebu’s censure: “Marxist Eurocentrism follows in the footsteps of Hegel’s Eurocentrism” because it views Western capitalism as progress over other societies. The Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, for example, assigns “historical dynamism” exclusively to Europe (HTW, xxii–xxiii). Overall, then, Tibebu argues that “Eurocentrism in its systematic formulation, structural foundation, and origination is essentially Hegelian” (HTW, xxvii).
- 2.
Sandra Bonetto , “Race and Racism in Hegel: An Analysis,” Minerva, 10 (2006): 15. See also Philip Kain , Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 254; and Brennan , who urges that Hegel “gives an explicit theoretical space to non-western thought,” that he “relativizes Christianity,” and that he lays the foundation in his Philosophy of Right for the foundations of anti-colonial discourse, which “begins by recognizing the other.” Brennan stresses that Hegel “voiced his opposition to slavery for being contrary to the personhood of property, hence destructive of ethical existence” (“HE,” 145–149).
- 3.
See, for example, Ronald Kuykendall, “Hegel and Africa: An Evaluation of the Treatment of Africa in the Philosophy of History,” Journal of Black Studies, 23.4 (1993): 574–577. See also C. A. Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. M. Cook (1955; rpt. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1974), p. 102.
- 4.
It should be noted that, as we shall see, some African and Afro-diasporic scholars have adapted Hegel’s views on Africa to their own purposes. These include Amada Aly Dienge, Babacar Camara, and C.L.R. James.
- 5.
A. Lassissi Odjo , Between the Lines: Africa in Western Spirituality, Philosophy, and Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 2, 121. Hereafter cited as BL.
- 6.
In this context, Timothy Brennan pertinently points to the “upside-down” claim in post-structuralist thought that Western philosophy has privileged the oral over the written, when in fact it has been precisely the machinery of the written, in its clerical, philological, and new critical manifestations that “marks the violence of the west” on the illiterate, oral, and the vulgate, Timothy Brennan , “Hegel, Empire, and Anti-Colonial Thought,” (“HE,” 157–158).
- 7.
Robert Bernasconi , “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 45. Hereafter cited as HAD.
- 8.
Joseph McCarney , “Hegel’s Racism? A Response to Bernasconi ,” Radical Philosophy, 119 (2003): 33. Hereafter cited as RP.
- 9.
For example, Bonetto additionally points out Hegel’s statement that “the slavery of the Negroes is a wholly unjust institution,” and rejected the concept of racial purity (“Race, 13, 17). In short, suggests Bonetto , Hegel’s undoubted Eurocentrism does not amount to racism (“Race, 15). Timothy Brennan urges that some statements of Hegel’s demonstrate cultural relativism and lend theoretical support to the “decentring of Europe ” (“HE,” 154–155).
- 10.
Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, Vol. I (1748; rpt. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1956), pp. 154–159.
- 11.
David Hume , “Of National Characters,” in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 33. Hereafter cited as RE.
- 12.
Meiners ’ influence is treated extensively in Peter K.J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (New York: SUNY Press, 2013). Park suggests that Kantian philosophers such as Tennemann subordinated the empirical-historical record of philosophy to an a priori schema whose principles were derived from Kant (p. 149). Hereafter cited as AHP.
- 13.
I have referred the reader to Eze’s excellent and convenient anthology of these views.
- 14.
As Eze points out, the writings on race by the major Enlightenment thinkers have either been ignored or dismissed. Yet Kant —to give but one example—devoted the largest part of his career to research and teaching in anthropology and cultural geography . Even the philosophers who have studied Kant’s work , including Heidegger, Cassirer, and Foucault , do not discuss Kant’s theories of race, “Introd.,” RE, pp. 2–3.
- 15.
It should be noted, however, that Hegel had available to him a far greater amount of anthropological material from missionaries and explorers than any of his predecessors. Yet his views of Africa remained rooted in the scientific and philosophical perspectives of his major Enlightenment predecessors (RE, 7).
- 16.
As recently as 1963, the eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper almost replicated Hegel’s words when he remarked: “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness,” “The Rise of Christian Europe,” The Listener 70.1809 (1963): 871. Trevor-Roper is symptomatic of scholarly historians of his time who essentially viewed Africa as having no past and entering into history only when the Europeans arrived. In the 1960s the historiography of imperialism came under widespread scrutiny from both Afrocentric historians such as J.F. Ade Ajayi and proponents of various kinds of literary theory; see J.F. Ade Ajayi, “Colonialism: an Episode in African History,” in Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, Vol. I, ed. L.G. Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). It is worth remembering, however, that imperialism received its first extended critique far earlier in the traditions of Marxism , beginning with Marx’s own characterization in the Communist Manifesto of capitalism as inherently imperialistic, a connection foreshadowed by Hegel. Marchand also points out that critiques of imperialism have a long history and did not suddenly emerge with postcolonial discourse, German Orientalism, pp. 495–498.
- 17.
The views of British imperialists—historians, politicians, businessmen—are well-known. The politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British Consul-General of Egypt Lord Cromer, and other ideologues of empire such as Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston all expatiated upon the superiority of the Europeans to Africans and Orientals. Lord Cromer wrote: “The European is a close reasoner…he is a natural logician … The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand … is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description,” Evelyn Baring Cromer (Earl of), Modern Egypt, Vols. I and II (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. 146. R. Hunt Davies observes that “Nearly every white person…whether pro-colonial or anti-colonial, possessed a stereotyped view of Africa.” He adds that this general outlook toward Africa remained dominant until the second world war, “Interpreting the Colonial Period in African History,” African Affairs, 72.289 (1973): 386. Some of the material in my account draws on his very useful study. Recent scholarship, we might add, has shown that this outlook was shared even by Gandhi; see Ashwin Desai and Goolem Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 30–48.
- 18.
This is well-documented in Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History, trans. K.D. Prithipaul (1994; rpt. London: Routledge, 1997), p. 172. But Hegel is not mentioned in this book.
- 19.
Russell A. Berman , Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 22. Hereafter cited as EE. It would have been instructive to see Berman’s valuable insights illustrated in an engagement with the actual texts of Derrida or Foucault.
- 20.
See also Anne Laura Stoler’s “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire,” which also shows how the connections between Enlightenment and colonialism were complex, (OHPC, 39–62). Similarly, Birgit Tautz , in Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa (Basingstoke, U.K. and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), sees contemporary postcolonial and cultural theory as dominated by a monolithic Self-Other dichotomy which is largely the legacy of Hegel. She views Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History as marked by a fissure in configuring ethnicity , since these lectures bear the traces of older, heterogeneous, eighteenth-century discourses that, for example, apprehended Africa largely through visuality while they perceived China using a textual tradition (3–50). Though Hegel attempted to bring order and unity to the multitude of representations of ethnicity , his text fails to integrate Africa—perceived geographically and in terms of space—into the temporal logic of his historical narrative (16, 25). As such, Hegel effectively replicates perceptions in popular scientific texts and travelogues that see China (and Asia generally) as an inflection of Enlightenment reason and Africa as the absolute Other of reason (29). Nonetheless, Hegel’s lectures yielded the binary framework of Self and Other which served as the paradigm for discussions of race and empire in colonial and postcolonial discourse (14–15).
- 21.
Stephen Howe , “Imperial Histories, Postcolonial Theories,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 164. Hereafter cited as OHPC. Robert Young has also remarked on Hegel’s Eurocentric legacy for historiography ( Young, 1991, p. 2).
- 22.
Michel Foucault , The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 3–5. Hereafter cited as AK.
- 23.
Edward W. Said , The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 78.
- 24.
The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: An Address Before the Societies of Western Reserve College (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann, & Co., 1854), pp. 16–17, 29.
- 25.
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638–1870, Vol. I (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1896), pp. 153–168.
- 26.
Shamoon Zamir reads this engagement as a critique of the widespread adoption of Hegel in the later nineteenth century by the St. Louis Hegelians in support of American nationalism and manifest destiny. Zamir argues that the narrative structure of Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” draws upon the early chapters of the Phenomenology, especially the master -slave dialectic and subsequent sections. Du Bois uniquely resists the idea of a historical teleology under which the particularity of African-American experience can be subsumed; Shamoon Zamir , Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 13, 113–126, 146.
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Habib, M.A.R. (2017). Hegel and Africa. In: Hegel and Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68412-3_4
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