Ironie? Ja! Schwarze Menschen in Kants Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen

Irony? Yes! Black people in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime · In the first note to On National Characters, Kant writes that these are reasonably correct drawings based on archetypes, which only stand out in a large group and therefore cannot offend anyone. He apologises twice, and probably thought he could get away with it. However, in some of these images in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, we also seem to recognise a real person, Kant, as he approvingly reproduces anti-Black racism: «The negroes of Africa have from nature no feeling which transcends the childish level», or «this chap was quite black from the head to the feet, a clear proof that what he said was stupid» – to name just two. In my essay, I look at them in their aboriginal setting, thereby finding numerous indications, that Kant systematically ironised the two passages about Black people. By abstracting from the character of the human species, the «have from nature no» is already methodically limited, and Kant explicitly suspects indignation behind Rousseau’s analogous saying, «that a woman never becomes anything more than a big child». What «perhaps deserved to be considered» is not considered, following the definition of prejudice. The proof, which cannot be proof, echoes in concentrated form Montesquieu’s famous mockery of slaveholder rhetoric, a point rarely mentioned. If we restore the appropriate ironic framing to these 260-year-old depictions, we might very well view the Kant of 1764 through a different lens.