I came across this interesting if somewhat curious essay by philosopher Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh), prompted by the renaming of the Hume Tower at her university. Professor Chirimuuta tries, rather implausibly I thought, to draw a connection between Hume's naturalism and his racism. She does so by claiming it is difficulty to pin down what naturalism involves (I'm not so sure it is), and suggesting that it is mainly defined by opposition to the supernatural:
The question we contemporary philosophers need to ask ourselves is whether there is a legitimate notion of the “naturalistic worldview” that does not require, for its own self-definition, a contrast with the “superstitious worldview” of the “primitive” other. We need also to ask seriously whether the unreflected notion of what is a naturalistic, and hence intellectually respectable explanation, is still being used to de-legitimise explanations offered by various indigenous peoples concerning events in the natural world, events which include the symptoms of an ever more crushing ecological crisis. Such accounts are still regularly categorised as “spiritualistic”, and with that certain voices are still summarily dismissed, as expressed by the Māori individuals interviewed in this news report of a mass whale beaching.
Supernatural claims are explanatorily otiose, which is why supernatural entities drop out of a methodologically naturalistic conception of the world (i.e., one modeled on the successful empirical sciences). "Primitive" peoples have false views about cause and effect, as do their present-day descendants, like evangelical Christians: are we really not supposed to dismiss these kinds of supernatural-infused views about how the world works?
I was particularly struck by Professor Chirimuuta's reaction to the discovery of the racism of some of the major figures in philosophy:
I had a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, that these two philosophers, Hume and Kant, who I had been encouraged to admire in the course of my philosophical education, would have marked me out as ineligible to participate in their virtual salons. This moment of realisation was more troubling for being a private one. The discovery of these philosophers’ denigration of people like me was one I made independently, since none of my teachers had ever mentioned these texts, nor given me reason to think that my personal sense of disappointment could have much legitimacy or relevance to my education.
I confess I do not quite understand this kind of response, but here I can only report my own experience with prejudices that cut close to home for me. In addition to trafficking in ugly racist tropes, many of the great philosophers were also anti-semites; for example:
“David Hume apparently accepted a polygenetic view of man’s origin, since in his ‘Natural History of Religion’ he made no effort to trace a linear development of man from the ancient Jews to the modern world, and presented practically no historical connection between Judaism and Christianity (which he saw more as emerging from pagan polytheism).” Polygenetic racists, such as Hume..., regarded the differences between European Christians and others as immutable, because they derived from separate ancestry rather than contingent environmental factors.
Kant, too, thought that Jews had immutable traits that made them inferior to Christians....For Kant, this tie rendered Jews “heteronomous” or incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and are therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. Mack, in his 2003 book “German Idealism and the Jew,” wrote that Kant “attempted to remove Christianity’s Judaic foundations” by recasting Christian history as a revolutionary or radical parting from Judaism. Mack noted that Kant, in his “Anthropology,” called the Jews “a nation of cheaters” and depicted them as “a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world.”
I do not feel "betrayed" by this, and I certainly don't think it relevant to my philosophical education; I find it pathetic and embarrassing, a reminder of how parochial and trite even great minds can be. So, too, when I come across Nietzsche's insulting quip (in that work of incipient madness, The Antichrist) that Polish Jews, like the "first Christians," don't "smell good," I don't--despite being descended from Polish Jews--feel alienated or even upset: my reaction is, "how pathetic" that a thinker of his depth and creativity should still traffic in the idiotic prejudices of his milieu. The great philosophers are also "human, all-too-human."
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