The Sentence We Don’t Teach

Most philosophy curricula teach at least one author who wrote, in his own name, that some human beings are less human than others. Almost none teach the sentence. The names are the same in Lagos, Lyon, and Lahore: Aristotle, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Hegel. The student meets the ideas in class and the sentence years later, alone. The first reaction is that he could not have meant it like that. The sentence is set aside; then a second and a third arrive, until ignoring them costs more than reading them.

The omission is a sequence. Authority is built first: the name, the system, the habit of citing until “Kant says” needs no evidence because it is the evidence. Then the sentence arrives with that authority intact and nothing to meet it. No decision is made, which is why it takes.

The sentence has two addressees; the curriculum’s silence serves only one. Hume’s footnote does not merely demote Blacks; it declares that no civilized nation of any other complexion ever existed. One reader is lowered, the other promoted in the same breath, and the promoted reader is never required to notice. The clean edit removes the insult and keeps the compliment, because the compliment lives in the architecture, not the footnote. Two students sit in a seminar. One cites Kant on dignity. The other has read the carpenter and must decide whether to produce it, knowing that if he does he becomes the one who made it about race. The first receives the philosophy free of charge. The second becomes the archivist of the insult. There is a further ugliness when those ranked below the author begin citing him to each other as authority.

We handle this in three ways, all wrong. Silence leaves the architecture untouched. The disclaimer, he was a man of his time, is worse, because it is false. Beattie answered Hume in 1770. Condorcet wrote against slavery in 1781. Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu had refuted the enslavement of Black Muslims by 1615. In 1734, the year Voltaire drafted the Traité de métaphysique, Anton Wilhelm Amo of Axim defended a dissertation at Wittenberg. The time contained the objection. The man declined it. The purge fails for the opposite reason: some of the concepts these authors shaped sit inside the institutions the student still lives under, and a student who cannot read the authors cannot read the institutions. Purging also concedes what it claims to deny, that a thought belongs only to the man who first wrote it down.

The sentences were used. Edward Long argued from Hume’s footnote to defend slavery in 1774. The polygenism Voltaire made respectable served the American defense of slavery in the 1850s. The race Kant fixed became the race of the next century’s science. Hegel’s continent without history was the premise of every civilizing mission, down to Leopold’s promise in 1876 to pierce the darkness of Africa. That is what a footnote does when a syllabus lets it stand as authority. It waits for someone who needs it.

Keep both. Teach the sentence in the same hour as the idea, with its date, and say plainly what he was. He was not stupid; he chose his words, and the sentence came from the same mind as the system. Do not teach them as heroes of thought who happened to hold regrettable views. Teach them as thinkers who conformed to a racist order, were selected by it, and in some cases profited from it directly: Aristotle owned the slaves he theorized; Hume, in 1766, helped his patron buy a plantation in Grenada. Whether the footnotes bought them a quiet conscience I cannot prove, and I believe it anyway. They also produced concepts that later proved useful. The tradition with the most reason to burn its library already showed the posture: Levinas answered Heidegger for a lifetime; Hermann Cohen built on Kant and then claimed Judaism as Kant’s true source; the Israel Philharmonic simply declines to play Wagner. Study everything. Honor nothing on credit.

In a syllabus this means at least three moves. First, locate the racism: footnote or beam? A footnote is not evidence of lesser racism; it is evidence that the system can stand without it. Hume’s can be cut and the Treatise stands. Hegel’s cannot; his philosophy of history needs a continent outside history to give Spirit its starting line. Learning to make that distinction may be the most useful skill a philosophy class can teach about any author. Second, run the author’s own method against him. Where the racism is a lapse, the method exposes it: Hume’s parrot is bad empiricism by Hume’s own standard; a categorical imperative with a racial exception is not categorical. Where the racism is structural, the method reveals that the exclusion is what makes the system move. Third, assign the reply with the work: Beattie with Hume, Amo with Voltaire, Las Casas with Aristotle, Diop with Hegel, in the same week, on the same exam.

Teaching both does different work for the two readers. For the promoted reader it shows him the promotion. He learns that the ground he stood on was a claim by a man, and that he had been receiving a compliment as a fact. For the demoted reader it cannot be information; he had the sentence already. What it can be is a transfer. In the seminar as it stands, he is the one who must produce the footnote and pay for producing it. Once the syllabus produces it, with its date and its reply, the institution has become the archivist and he is free to argue. He is also handed an inheritance he was never shown: Amo, Ahmad Baba, Beattie, Diop, Levinas, readers who did exactly this before him and were right. He enters the room holding the answer instead of the insult. An idea tested against its author is his in a way an idea received on authority never is. The racism stays with the man.

The cost of studying one’s own demotion in public remains real and should be named. Exemption is only another segregation; the cost is paid either way. One coherent outcome of the method, after the sentence is taught and the architecture mapped, is the decision to cite these figures less, or differently, or to look elsewhere. That decision is not a failure of the reading. Reading them stays required; citing them does not. The standard list is not only incomplete; it is selectively incomplete. Amo and Ahmad Baba are absent from it because the list was drawn up by the side they answered.

Keeping both without the reading can still fail. Senghor is the example. He read Gobineau and Lévy-Bruhl with open eyes and took from them the claim that emotion is Negro as reason is Greek. He kept both, which was right, and took the beam, which was the mistake. Knowing who you are dealing with is necessary. Knowing where the racism sits is what prevents a reader from inheriting it accidentally.

What follows is not a roster of the guilty. It is five of the most famous, ordered by where the racism sits, from a footnote at the bottom of a page to the foundation of a system. The same reading applies to every tradition’s own classics. The Muqaddima on the Negro nations is not exempt. Neither is the Manusmriti.

Hume. A footnote. In 1753 he wrote that he was apt to suspect Blacks to be naturally inferior to whites, that no civilized nation of any other complexion had ever existed, and that a learned Black man in Jamaica was admired the way a parrot is for speaking a few words plainly. He sharpened the note in 1777 and never withdrew it. It sits at the bottom of a page in the work of the man who taught Europe what an unwarranted inference is.

Voltaire. A declared position. The Essai sur les mœurs (1756) makes Blacks a different species of men, as spaniels differ from greyhounds, with an intelligence he called very inferior; the Traité de métaphysique (1734) had said as much. Three years after the Essai he wrote the maimed slave of Surinam into Candide. Pity for the slave and denial of the human came from the same pen.

Kant. A theory. Three essays (1775, 1785, 1788) fixed the modern concept of race: heritable, unalterable, ranked, whites at the top. In 1764 he had already called a Black carpenter’s remark stupid because the man was black from head to foot. He condemned European conquest in 1795 and never withdrew the essays.

Aristotle. A doctrine inside the system. The Politics holds that some men are slaves by nature, living instruments who share in reason only enough to understand it (I.4–5), and that the peoples of Asia remain in subjection for want of spirit (VII.7). It sits in the theory of the household on which the polis is built and cannot be lifted without touching the rest. Sepúlveda cited it against the Indians at Valladolid in 1550; it was the argument for slavery for two thousand years.

Hegel. The architecture. The lectures on world history (1822–31) place Africa outside history, in the dark mantle of night, and detach Egypt from it; slavery, they say, has made Africans more human and should end only gradually. This cannot be cut. World history is the progress of Spirit, and the progress needs a people who never entered it. Africa is the ground the building stands on.

The order is the lesson. Hume’s footnote can be cut and the Treatise stands; Hegel’s Africa cannot, because world history was built on it. The further in the racism sits, the more of the building the student inherits with it, and the more he has to decide, once the reading is done, how much of it he still wants to live in.

The racist sentence, taught, is the one place in the canon where a student watches a great mind fail by its own standards, and learns what an authority is, a source and not a verdict, and that the idea, once tested, is his to keep or to leave. The usual fear is that the sentence will derail the seminar, that students will fixate on the insult and never reach the metaphysics. Let them. A system that cannot survive an inspection of its foundations has not earned a quiet classroom, and a seminar kept calm by omission is not teaching philosophy; it is running a museum. The philosophers had the nerve to write the sentences down. The curriculum should at least have the nerve to read them out loud.