by Stephen T. Asma

 

Abstract:

 

Both internalist and externalist metaphors have supported both racist and anti-racist theories. Traditionally, internalism in the form of rationalism regarded the mental aspects of the self as most important, with physical qualities such as race considered incidental. Empiricism tended to give more weight to external traits such as race. However, the positions were reversed after Darwin. Rationalists came to regard the external as the outer expression of an immutable essence, whereas externalists rejected any fixed nature associated with race or other physical characteristics.

 

Full Text : American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32, 1995

 

 

 

 

 

 

PHILOSOPHERS and historians of biology have noticed an interesting tendency in the way we conceptualize organic development. For example, Peter J. Bowler (1983) follows Stephen Jay Gould (1977) in suggesting two basic metaphors around which most evolutionary debate revolves. Gould refers to these conceptual frameworks as "eternal metaphors," suggesting something not only about the perennial nature of these frameworks but also something about the epistemological categories involved when we conceptualize biological phenomena. Simply put, the metaphors consist in framing organic development as an internal" or an external" causal process.

 

In the case of evolutionary theorists, the "external" metaphor has been used to characterize the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection, a process whereby organisms are shaped "from without," so to speak, by a concomitance of environmental pressures. The "internal" metaphor, in this setting, usually takes the shape of orthogenetic and Lamarckian mechanisms of organic development. More contemporary versions of this "internalist" approach might be theories such as that of Stuart A. Kauffman (1993), where the integrity and development of the organism is said to stem directly from "internal" properties of self-organizing matter, rather than from any "external" environmental and ultimately adaptational forces. Theorists like Kauffman argue that the current neo-Darwinian paradigm of natural selection (conceptualized as it is on the "external" metaphor) must be replaced or at least annexed to "internal" mechanisms of biological phenomena.(1)

 

These debates within evolution theory are interesting examples of how explicit research programs can be interwoven with and perhaps rooted in less articulated metaphorical modes of conceptualization. I wish to argue that this basic dichotomy of metaphors runs deeper and has far wider repercussions than the explicitly biological debates over evolutionary mechanisms. Gould (1987) points out, to both the scientist and the historian and philosopher of science, that we must confront these somewhat elusive metaphorical underpinnings if we are to understand the more "literal" aspects of theory construction and application. The sciences are both constrained and made possible by the metaphors embedded in our cultural milieu. As Gould emphasizes, "You may call these visions `philosophy,' or `metaphor,' or `organizing principle,' but one thing they are surely not--they are not simple inductions from observed facts of the natural world" (9).

 

Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (1981) have argued that these irreducible metaphors, largely unrecognized by our philosophical tradition, have everything to do with the ways in which we experience and organize the world.

 

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of

 

which we both think and act, is fundamentally

 

metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern

 

our thought are not just matters of the

 

intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning,

 

down to the most mundane details.

 

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how

 

we get around in the world, and how we relate

 

to other people (287).

 

In the spirit of these thinkers, I wish to explore a specific area in which philosophy and science-based racial theory has been made possible and constrained by metaphorical presuppositions. The discourse of our biological theories is shaped in many ways by deep metaphors, which themselves arise from some little explored interaction between culture and "human nature."(2) These theories, in turn, shape much of our social discourse and a Gordian knot emerges that seems to entangle empirical data, metaphorical presupposition, and even prejudice. The "internal" and "external" metaphors by which we conceptualize organic development, for example, have played a significant role in wide ranging matters of racial theory--and ultimately matters of racial praxis.

 

"Internalism" can be defined, roughly, as a model that treats "agency" as originally, either biologically or metaphysically, "within" the human being. "Externalism" is a model that treats agency as originally "outside" the human being, in the sense of ecological and cultural environment. I will argue that pre-evolutionary internalist metaphors of the self, rather than external metaphors, provided an effective theoretical defense against racism, but after the revolution of transmutation theory a reversal of this relation occurred. After Darwin, external metaphors of growth and self-formation began to provide an important theoretical resistance to racial prejudice, and internal metaphors became increasingly pernicious. Prior to the paradigm shift into Transformation, the internalist metaphor of self worked as an instrument in establishing the autonomous non-empirical soul, the repository of moral dignity. After the onset of evolutionary thinking, the internalist metaphor functioned as a refuge for fixist world-views and an arrant racial essentialism. I will also briefly examine some contemporary racial thinking and attempt to illustrate the continuing presence of internalist and externalist metaphors.

 

THEORIES OF THE SELF

 

The philosophical debate between empiricist and rationalist traditions is, roughly speaking, concerned with the origin of the "inner" sell That is to say, the question of whether one's concepts are innately given or acquired through the senses is a question about the origin and nature of human consciousness. Is the "life of the mind" a product of external stimuli (thereby, more closely related to body) or is it autonomously self-sufficient (a potentially independent substance)? Is the self a contingent product, a primordial given, or a combination of both?

 

These are the basic questions underlying the discourse of traditional empiricist/rationalist debates. In rather subtle but important ways these debates undergird racial theories from the Enlightenment to the present. H. M. Bracken (1973) for example, has argued that "if one is a Cartesian, a defender of mind/ body dualism, it becomes impossible to state a racist position" (83). I will eventually argue that pernicious racial theories and policies have been tacitly and explicitly tied to both sides of the empirical/non-empirical question. And I will try to show how these racist attitudes are grounded in the internal/external metaphor.

 

Descartes's conceptualization of the human soul as an independent entity inside the mechanical body has contributed to the difficult inquiry into freedom and determinism. The agency of the human being flows from one's free non-physical self, and in this sense an autonomous core self" is posited that determines but is not itself determined.(3) In the Cartesian model, the essence of the human being is its thinking and free-choosing soul, and Bracken (1973) suggests that such a model places physical variants like skin color and language in the class of accidents. To be a member of the human species is, on this account, to be in possession of this essential soul, and having such a soul puts one on a level of "moral respect" that animals (according to Descartes) do not enjoy. Apparently, then, a rationalist orientation towards the self--where no physical traits enter into the essence of the human--is inherently less racist because it ignores accidental physical traits such as color. Empiricists, according to this view, reject the idea of an independent internal essence (immune to experience) and, in doing so, run the risk of taking external traits (e.g., skin-color) as essential. Thus, empiricism, Bracken contends, contains a more racist metaphysics.

 

This argument has a certain plausibility. Edward Said (1978), for example, agrees in the contention that the racist stereo-types of "Orientalism" rest upon the presupposition of empiricist theories of self. He suggests that racism is fueled by the empiricist belief "that mind and body were interdependent realities, both determined originally by a given set of geographical, biological, and quasi-historical conditions" (232). And Noam Chomsky (1975) points up the racist tendency towards social manipulation buried in empiricist theory. The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful" (132).

 

According to empiricist theories of self, the contents of consciousness--the inner life--is in large part conditioned and constituted by the external. In this tradition, the ideas of the soul or mind are simply internal copies of sense impressions. And a constant thread through such empiricism is evidenced by Locke's claim (1959, Ch. 33) that confused minds result from erroneous conflations of impressions. Any interesting epistemology must account not only for our knowledge but for our more abundant ignorance. So, Locke claims that "whole societies of men" are worked into "universal perverseness" because unrelated experiences "of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together" and become confused as one idea (534). This position, which in the case of Locke looks more like an attempt to explain the "backward" thinking of his Tory contemporaries, could later support racial theorists such as the empirically oriented Jeffersonians.

 

The early anthropology of the American Philosophical Society, whose inner circle included such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, centered around whether Indians, Blacks and Whites were members of the same species. The empirically oriented philosophers argued that the races had a common origin but the current "depravity" of colored peoples was a result of poor environment. It was argued that the internal "retrograde souls" of Indians and Blacks were the results of unhealthy external conditions. Rush, for example, stated that "The weakness of the intellects in certain savage and barbarous nations ... is as much the effect of the want of physical influence upon their minds, as a disagreeable colour and figure are of its action upon their bodies" (cited in Boorstin 1948, 86). A post-Darwinian expression of this external model of racial causality can be found in Edward Drinker Cope's (1883) assertion that "every peculiarity of the body has probably some corresponding significance in the mental, and the cause of the former are the remoter causes of the latter" (618).

 

The metaphor of external causation (the environmentalism of empiricist epistemology) did allow theorists to indulge in justifications for prejudice, as Bracken suggests. However, the explanation of racial variations via empirical environmentalism is not in itself inherently pernicious. There is an unquestionably dangerous blunder in arguing from one's environment to one's skin color to one's morally significant mental status, but the externalist metaphor has also been the driving force behind some arguments, such as those of the Jeffersonians, for the fundamental unity of human kind and thereby the moral equality of all races. I will argue that this tradition--focused around the externalist metaphors of agency--contains, in its rejection of essentialism, an anti-racist orientation from Locke through Darwin.

 

In making this point, I wish to be clear that even well-intentioned Jeffersonians, for example, applied their theoretical principles selectively. Jefferson himself conveniently suggested that though Indians are certainly capable of the most refined capacities of our species, Negroes may not be so capable. Thus, a certain theoretical justification for American slavery could remain in place. Obviously, racism screams through the transparent subterfuges of such theories. I am exploring, however, not the individual idiosyncrasies of such historical figures, but the theoretical potentialities for racial discourse, given our chosen metaphor. One of the theoretical potentialities for an externalist causal metaphor about the self is that it can legitimate a moral egalitarianism in the face of racial variation. As Daniel J. Boorstin (1948) points out:

 

From the Jeffersonian point of view, this destined

 

diversification of men was not the outward

 

material counterpart of unique souls. It

 

was rather the varied response to different environments

 

by essentially similar biological

 

units. The mission of any group of men came

 

then not from an inward designation, not from

 

a peculiar spirit of which they were messengers,

 

but from the special opportunities of

 

their environment (107).

 

Such thinking undoubtedly led to "missionary" arrogance that envisioned other races as educable and eventually potential players in the "enlightened" White way, but I wish to argue that at least a seed of benevolence remains in this theoretical system (in the idea of adaptation) whereas no such seed is sustainable in the reverse system.

 

When an externalist, empirically-oriented notion of self became temporalized in the nineteenth century--via Darwinism--it led to the idea that the only difference between the races was the purely accidental environments in which they developed. Given time, any race could adapt to a different set of environmental conditions and take on new external and internal traits. In this sense, evolutionary thinking is an extension of the earlier externalist adaptational models. Thus egalitarians saw a powerful explanation for moral equality in the face of racial variance. Unfortunately, many such theories were still wed to the ancient idea of a hierarchical scala naturae and presupposed that one could "better" the savage (raise him to the "higher" White-level of the ladder) by altering his environment. In spite of the lamentable aspects of racial imperialism manifested in such theories, I wish to point out the all-important character of mutability contained in the externalist empirical conception of self. If race is simply a response to particular external stimuli, then given enough time (and the geological revolution finally convinced us that there is enough time) an environmentally transposed Black population and White population would eventually take on each other's traits. For, if we take Darwinism (an externalist model) seriously, then we must recognize, as a logical outgrowth of such a causal metaphor, that there is no trait that is so essential that it cannot become, in time, accidental (and even non-existent); and there is no trait that is so accidental that it cannot become, in time, essential to a race or species. That is to say, the age-old concepts of essence and accident are exploded.

 

The irony of such an adaptationist position can be morally instructive and even edifying. For, contrary to Bracken's thesis that empirical conceptions of self are inherently more racist, a radically empirical conception (such as Darwinism) denies the pernicious immutable-essence type of thinking to which many non-empirical models of self appeal. A Cartesian model of self is entirely atemporal. If such a position is mixed with prejudice, it becomes an odious framework for thinking racial differences to be eternal and forever fixed. Indeed, such a framework was created amidst certain movements in post-Kantian Romantic philosophy, when internal selves expressed themselves through external characteristics. The full implications for an internal metaphor for race difference will be explored when I eventually turn to "noumenal racism."

 

EVOLUTION & THE INTERNAL/EXTERNAL METAPHORS

 

The central concern that seems to have shaped the nineteenth century discourse on human natural history is whether racial variations were specially created or whether they were developed over time. Naturalists divided roughly into two camps: the polygenists (those who argued for several distinct origins of the races) and the monogenists (those who argued for one origin to all human kinds). Prior to Darwin, the inquiry centered around whether there was one Adam and Eve or many (multiple creations). After Darwin the discourse shifted slightly to inquire into whether the species had one origin with several evolved racial variations, or whether each race constituted its own species, having only very remote connection to others.

 

Polygenist thinking, both before and after Darwin, was oriented by the internal metaphor of the human self. The African descendant, the Native American descendant, and the Caucasian descendant, for example, all represented fixed kinds of diverse entities, taking their diversity from some innately bestowed respective essence. American polygenists, such as Dr. Samuel George Morton, were very popular during the pre-Civil war years because their internalist metaphor left no room for change in the contemporary racial hierarchy. An internal soul, immune from environmental conditions, was said to eternally define the slave from ancient times to the present. John S. Haller (1971) characterizes the polygenist pro-slavery argument as insistent that "the Negro was not only a separate species but was incapable of modification through time." He goes on to further characterize the position of the polygenists:

 

Environmental change, they argued, offered

 

an optimistic palliative but took no cognizance

 

of the fact that the Negro had remained unchanged

 

through centuries of breeding. Not

 

only his inferior physiological characteristics

 

but also his social status as a slave remained

 

unchanged from the time of the Egyptians to

 

the days of slavery in the South. Inferiority

 

was a permanent stain on the race and marked

 

the Negro for slave status (77).

 

The polygenist idea of races as originally and essentially distinct was a harbinger of the Nazi ideology. The Nazis rejected monogenism because the idea that all races had a common origin lent itself to the "democratic" contention that Jews, and Blacks and Aryans were essentially "brothers and sisters"--descendants of common parent stock. The polygenist doctrine of eternal divisions between races made it easy to think of the souls of other races (if they had them) as fundamentally "other." Thus no amount of external environmental influence could alter the essence of the Jew or the Asian. George Mosse (1981) points out this Nazi opposition to the monogenist theory that all races evolved from one source. "As National Socialism and the Volkish movement claimed that the German race was perfection incarnate, that its greatness was immutable, the idea of racial evolution and progress had to be rejected" (103). Hitler himself (1971) invokes this theme of eternal racial identity, and rejects the empiricist view of self when he states that:

 

A man can change his language without any

 

trouble--that is, he can use another language;

 

but in his new language he will express the old

 

ideas; his inner nature is not changed. This is

 

best shown by the Jew who can speak a thousand

 

languages and nevertheless remain a Jew.

 

His traits of character have remained the

 

same, whether two thousand years ago as a

 

grain dealer in Ostia, speaking Roman, or

 

whether as a flour profiteer of today, jabbering

 

German with a Jewish accent. It is always the

 

same Jew (312).

 

Polygeny theories clearly rely upon an internal causal metaphor in the sense that racial differences are not open to the determining influences of external environment. Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae (1956), generated an influential taxonomy of homo that included, right along with physical variants like eye-color, a set of defining psychological and moral traits. The Native American is said to be "regitur consuetudine" (governed by customs), the Asian is said to be "avarus, fastuosus, tegitur" and "regitur opinionibus" (greedy, arrogant, covetous and governed by opinions), the African is said to be "vafer, segnis, negligens" and "regitur arbitrio" (crafty, sluggish, negligent and governed by caprice) and the European is unsurprisingly defined as "sanguineous, acutissimus, inventor" and "regitur ritibus" (high spirited, extremely acute, inventive and governed by laws) (21-22). On a polygenist view, these bogus racial differences become even more damaging because they are perceived as absolutes. The variations between the races, which always included mental and moral descriptors, can be thought to be aboriginal and unrelated to historical contingency. Thus the "racial hierarchy"--itself an unfounded and damaging assumption--becomes rigidly fixed, and mobility up or down the chain becomes unimaginable. The understanding of self on such a view is more Cartesian than it is empirical, for racial identity is fixed by fiat, not external environments. The internal soul that is lacking, for Descartes, in the dog and cat, is eventually thought to be lacking (or essentially other) in the African, the Jew and the Indian.

 

John Searle (1976), in contrast to Bracken, Chomsky and Said, noticed the potential racism contained within Cartesian Rationalism. He points out that "once you believe that there are innate human mental structures it is only a short step to argue that the innate mental structures differ from one race to another (1119). This "short step" was in fact taken by Nazi racial theorists, and, I will argue later, the step was facilitated by the internalist metaphor that pervades the intellectual tradition from Kant through Nietzsche.

 

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialist attitudes could find their crudest justifications in origin-theories that claimed non-White races as permanently sub-human. On the polygenist view, God was thought to have created the different races to fit distinctly different environments, but the environments did not cause racial variations-- God caused them. And if God created different humanoid species, the pre-answered question of why" was sure to crop up. When the United States sought to annex the Philippines, Senator Albert Beveridge offered his fellow Senators a possible answer to such a question:

 

God has not been preparing the English

 

speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand

 

years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration.

 

No! He has made us the master organizers

 

of the world to establish system where

 

chaos reigns.... He has made us adepts in government

 

that we may administer government

 

among savage and senile peoples (cited in

 

Hofstadier 1992, 180).

 

The idea of inherent racial virtues and vices is challenged to some extent by the idea of monogenist evolution theory. Many Nazi ideologues saw Darwinian notions of original racial unity as threatening to racial essentialism. Monogeny has the potentiality for recognizing an egalitarian unity underlying environmentally caused variations. However, a monogenist theory of racial evolution does not guarantee a less racist ideology. For example, orthogenetic evolutionists accepted a common racial parent-stock but argued that internal developmental laws of variation destined some races for superiority and some races for inferiority. As evolution progressed, in other words, varying descendants of the common stock began to outstrip one another in the survival game.

 

E. Cope and Alpheus Hyatt, for example, were American orthogenetic evolutionists who argued that internal laws of biological development trapped certain races in evolutionary ruts, so to speak. Bowler (1983) defines "orthogenesis" in a way that clearly situates it within the internalist metaphor. Orthogenesis describes "evolution consistently directed along a single path by forces originating within the organisms themselves. These involuntary trends unfold without reference to the demands of the environment and may even lead to extinction" (7). Cope (1887) employed his concept of accelerated and retarded growth to argue that the African race had a permanently stunted growth pattern. No amount of environmental influence, it was argued, could break the barriers of natural growth tendencies. Thus a monogenist evolutionary paradigm could still justify the prejudice of racial inferiority. Likewise, Hyatt (1866) used orthogenetic evolutionary theory to protect social and moral injustice.

 

The ironic twist that Hyatt brings to the internal mechanism of developmental degeneration is biological "senility" rather than biological retardation. Hyatt argued that whole races can "over-develop" and exist temporarily in a state of evolutionary decline. Just as the internal mechanisms of growth dictate for each individual a pattern of maturation and degeneration-regardless of one's particular environmental milieu--so too the "inferior" races are populations in a state of senility destined for extinction.

 

Darwin's evolution theory is an elegant combination of several causal forces, the most efficacious of which are natural selection and random variation. The mechanism of natural selection is often taken to be the only determining factor in Darwin's theory of organic transformation. Thus, the modern champions of the external metaphor--the adaptationists--frequently claim Darwin as their fountainhead.(4) But Darwin actually balanced the internal and external perspectives by arguing that a dialectic of internal causes (random variation, and laws of growth) and external causes (natural selection) combine to produce organic evolution. In other words, internal variations, propose novel developmental pathways and external environmental pressures dispose the actual adaptive successes.

 

Nonetheless, the scales of such a balance were often weighted more heavily towards the external mechanism of natural selection. The very practical reason for such emphasis lies in the fact that, in Darwin's day, little or nothing could be said regarding the mysterious internal causality of random variation, whereas much empirical evidence could be found for the shaping force of environment. Consequently, though Darwinian theory could accommodate, indeed had to accommodate, the constitutive nature of non-adaptive inherited traits, the greater emphasis fell upon the role of environment.

 

The human races, then, were understood to be populations that had happened to heritably vary in skin-tone, for example, but continued in such variation only because of environmental utility. Thus, in keeping with the externalist model, race was a result of adaptive processes rather than a primordial cause of natural hierarchy.

 

Darwin himself is by no means unblemished by racist presuppositions, but his general orientation is adaptational and his recognition of racial identity is anything but absolute. Note, for example, the point of his argument from the Descent of Man (1955):

 

Nor is the difference slight ... in intellect, between

 

a savage who uses hardly any abstract

 

terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences

 

of this kind between the highest men of

 

the highest races and the lowest savages, are

 

connected by the finest gradations. Therefore

 

it is possible that they might pass and be developed

 

into each other. My object in this chapter

 

is to shew that there is no fundamental difference

 

between man and the higher mammals in

 

their mental faculties (287).

 

Despite the disparaging characterization of the "savage" and the obvious allegiance to a racist scala naturae, Darwin here deals a tremendous blow to the internal essentialist form of racism. The external mechanism of natural selection shapes and adapts organisms regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation and even species membership. The differences between organisms, including humans, becomes one of degree rather than kind (see Ch. III of the Descent). This same Darwinian perspective, which took humankind off its Biblical pedestal and connected humans to the animals, also connects (even more so) human races to each other and dethrones Whites from their self-appointed pedestal. After all, it is "possible that they might ass and be developed into each other.(5) From this externalist evolutionary perspective, there is nothing essentially fixed about any race.

 

The Darwinian response to the infamous Biblical question(6) "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23) is, "Yes, in time, he can." To be more precise, his skin (and of course the European's skin) can be changed by external environmental pressures. Thus the path of racism that hinges upon racial immutability is foreclosed.

 

Unfortunately, when this idea remains chained to a scala naturae, the evolutionist can arrogantly proclaim Hottentots or Bantu or Bushmen or what have you, as the "missing links" in the gap between humans and apes. An individual or group of individuals, it was argued, held a semi-fixed position somewhere on the ladder of "racial progress." We now know that the idea of a "ladder of racial progress" is itself a product of prejudice rather than science; but the internalist metaphor of organic causality--with its fixist orientation--can foster such a prejudice to a much greater degree than an externalist metaphor.

 

The external causal metaphor characterizes the individual as a passive and malleable potentiality, ultimately capable of any adaptation that the environment requires. Subsequently, racial differences become only adaptations to environmental differences and racial variations can be ranked in moral value only if environments can be so ranked. Since environments themselves are in transition, the whole value framework can be seen as relative rather than absolute; thus prejudice finds no solid foothold for superior/inferior evaluations. Moreover, the hierarchic "ladder of racial progress" itself finds little grounds for justification when the truly contingent foundation of racial traits is appreciated.

 

If, however, one envisions racial differences as expressions of internal causal mechanisms, then the individual or race can be said to have an "adaptive limit." That is to say, a race that is currently suffering slave-status can be said to have worked-through its adaptive potentialities only to have come up short when compared to the "master" race. Races could be said to be "losers" in the survival game, not because of contingent and repairable circumstances (external model), but because they were inherently (internally) less adaptable--and thereby inferior. "In such a view the world is seen as peopled by a large number of diverse races at various stages of evolution that reflect inner powers of adaptation" (Barzun 1965, 46).

 

One last point needs emphasis before turning to the German tradition of internalism. Darwinian rejection of essentialism is linked with Locke's famous rejection of classical substances. Locke's epistemological and Darwin's metaphysical criticisms of essentialism are important in the history of race theory. Bracken (1973, 1978) argues that the Lockean rejection of classical essentialism (along with the tabula rasa theory) paves the way for a whole tradition of empiricist racism. If one throws out the old "essence" of human beings, he argues, then one can replace it with a new one based upon color or language. I wish to suggest that Bracken has failed to appreciate the crucial lesson in empiricist anti-essentialism.

 

Bracken (1978) quotes the following passage from Locke's Essay to demonstrate that the rejection of classical essentialism results in a new and arbitrary essentialism (based on skin color, for example).

 

Essential and not essential, relate only to our

 

abstract Ideas, and the Names annexed to

 

them... [Putting aside abstract ideas, any] particular

 

Beings, considered barely in themselves,

 

will be found to have all their Qualities

 

equally essential; and everything, in each individual,

 

will be essential to it, or, which is more,

 

nothing at all (Essay III, vi, 5; see Bracken

 

246).

 

Bracken focuses upon the idea that, given such a view, absolutely any trait can be taken as essential, but he misses the crucial point of such a critique. If absolutely everything can be equally essential, then, more to the point as Locke asserts, "nothing at all" can be said to be essential. The whole critique pivots on the idea that a distinction without a difference is no distinction at all. In other words, the empiricist criticism and Darwin's metaphysical criticism of essentialism is not designed to install new and arbitrarily chosen essences and accidents; it is designed to throw out the whole language of essence and accident.

 

The externalist tradition, which sees the self, or the race, or even the species as, in large part, a product of history, rejects in toto the idea of an innate unchanging eidos. Darwinian evolution, for example, replaces the essence with the variable population. And if the entire metaphysical foundation of essentialism is denied, then there is no constraint upon a race regarding what it is and what it can become. This radical egalitarian view is not based on the idea that every human has the same internal essence; it is based upon the idea that no such essence exists.

 

Noumenal Racism

 

We have seen, with the help of Bracken and Chomsky, how a rationalist concept of self seems to preserve a pocket of free agency within the human being, thereby protecting against the manipulative tendencies of racism. I believe, however, that we must under stand Cartesianism as a species of the wide and more fundamental metaphor of internalism, and this internalism becomes increasingly racist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We can follow out the ways in which this deep-rooted internalist metaphor evolved through the intellectual milieu leading up to the racism of "final solution" theory.

 

Nietzsche's (1968) criticism of Darwin highlights the difference between an internal and external causal metaphor.

 

The influence of "external circumstances" is

 

overestimated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent:

 

the essential thing in the life process is

 

precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating

 

force working from within which utilizes

 

and exploits "external circumstances"--The

 

new forms molded from within are not formed

 

with an end in view; but in the struggle of the

 

parts a new form is not left long without being

 

related to a partial usefulness and then, according

 

to its use, develops itself more and

 

more completely (344).

 

He goes on to argue that "the body" and all "organic functions" are expressions of inner "will to power." "There is absolutely no other kind of causality than that of will upon will" (347).

 

Darwinism, according to Nietzsche, fails to appreciate the causal force of the internal will upon all organic traits. The physical body of the individual--its size, its skin-color, cranial dimensions, etc.--are seen to be derivative manifestations of some primordial non-empirical self. This is, of course, a principal presupposition in all physiognomy theories, but a brief foray into German thought in particular reveals the subtle progression from the Cartesian internal model of self to the more dangerous Romantic internal model.

 

Bracken (1973, 1978) suggests that the Cartesian model of concept-acquisition provides a foundation for human freedom because it does not reduce ail mental activity to the empirical model of stimulus-response. Kant seems to have been similarly impressed by this feature of the rationalist tradition, for, when he constructs his critical philosophy, it is with the ultimate aim of marking out the terrain of the autonomous and free inner self. Conceptualizing the self as both phenomenal and noumenal is a way to recognize both the causally determined (and determining) aspects of nature and the radical freedom required for human dignity.

 

Kant recognized that no purely empirical account of human activity could reveal the free self at work behind the causal mechanism, because the understanding (comprised of categories such as causality) could not help but cast the world in terms of a rigid determinism, thus leaving no room for freedom. When our scientific minds are turned upon ourselves, they reveal complex machines, similar in kind to any other physical stimulus-response system. Human freedom, for Kant, is not an object of possible experience, for experience itself (shaped by the categories) precludes such a reality.

 

But the moral dimension of human beings assumes the existence of freedom, and, though we can not understand or know this freedom in the strict sense, we must presuppose it. Kant, then, performs a rather sophisticated recreation of Descartes' dualism in the form of a postulated free realm (the noumenal self), which issues forth, unseen, into the phenomenal realm. This noumenal self is a sort of repository of human dignity and provides the foundation for moral worth.

 

As such, the Kantian noumenal self shares the supposed virtues of the Cartesian self. It is not pushed about by external mechanistic forces but is itself an irreducible agent. It can not be manipulated by any alteration of environmental conditions and is thereby immune to social engineering. And it remains entirely unknown to scientific method; no measurements of physical traits, no outward signs, can reveal the internal self Thus, a kind of insurance against racism seems built into the system.

 

It must be admitted that such a "color-blind" model appears promising.(7) But a metaphysical principle such as the noumenal self, which should have remained formal and without content--a bare presupposition--proved too tempting for subsequent philosophers and lost its ability to safe-guard against racism. The greatest virtue of such an internal model of self lies in its complete disconnection with the phenomenal realm, but a self that never manifests itself runs the risk of being an empty place-holder--which was precisely the charge made by the Romantics.

 

Hegel, for example, argued that his new dialectical logic provided the means for uncovering the mysterious noumenal realm that had committed Kant to silence. According to Hegel, the world behind the phenomenal (forever closed off to Kant) was an empty formal presupposition only at the first stage of the dialectic. Eventually, the empty universal concept grows into something particular, something that has specific determinations, specific knowable content.

 

Hegel recognized and appreciated the Kantian problematic (unlike Fichte who simply attempted to dissolve it) in the sense that he accepted prima facie the idea that the mind in some sense receives the "given" of nature. If the mind is confronted with a "given" in experience, then an objective and unexperienced realm must be presupposed as "that which gives." That which "gives" us personal freedom is the noumenal self, and that which "gives" us our experience of Nature is the "thing in itself."

 

Hegel recognized that when the thing in itself is considered the source of our experience, it remains an abstract requirement of the system. But, he argues, this is to remain at the most empty level of consciousness, where we simply assert that a thing exists. As we qualify the thing--number it, measure it, and so forth--the thing itself becomes less and less abstract. When we explain the thing in terms of its essence and its causes, we are tracking the further enrichment of the thing itself Finally, the thing is placed within the content-rich context of purpose and value. For Hegel, the development of our increasing cognition of a thing reflects the increasing manifestation of the thing itself. In this way, the originally unknowable noumena becomes progressively available to us.

 

What all this means for racial thinking is that a theoretical framework is established by which internal essences can manifest themselves in the phenomenal experiential realm. The phenomenal realm is no longer a veil of representation that falsifies the noumenal. The external becomes an expression of the internal. More precisely, the inner becomes the outer. Thus, Hegel's discussion of physiognomy and phrenology in the Phenomenology takes on significance for our exploration of internal and external metaphors.

 

Physiognomy, Hegel claims, links the inner conscious character of the individual to its embodied organic shape in a necessary and "lawful" fashion (342). He claims that the outward shape of the individual "stands as an expression of his own actualization established by the individual himself, it bears the lineaments and forms of his spontaneously active being" (339). One might conclude that if outward forms are different, as in racial variation, then these must reflect differences in one's internal "spontaneously active being." Hegel suggests, for example, that "the individual peculiarity of the language used...is an expression of the inner..." (343-344). External physical traits can be apodictically linked, in this theoretical model, to internally differentiated souls--a "noumenal racism" as it were.

 

Thus a progression can be traced from the Cartesian non-empirical self, through Kant's noumenal self, through the Romantic apotheosis of manifested will, to Nietzsche's criticisms of Darwin.(8) The common thread throughout this progression is the attempt to preserve a notion of self that is free from the determinism of external natural processes. This tradition asserts the autonomy of the individual by conceptualizing it as an "uncaused cause." The whole orientation of the internalist tradition is to deny the self a causal history, for such a history would make it an enslaved "effect" rather than a free agent. That is to say, the self is seen as the cause even of its own representation; the self, immune from external contingencies, causes its physical manifestation and causes history. According to this internalism, if contingent history and physical laws cause the self, then the free agency of the individual is evaporated.

 

After the Darwinian revolution, the empiricist and externalist model has even greater grounds for reversing this relation, for arguing that the self is caused by contingent history and physical laws. Natural selection is the creator of the human intellect and will. Darwin suggests that our "innate ideas," for example, are simply well-entrenched products of our ancestral past.(9) Internalist thinkers are correct in seeing Darwin, then, as a radical opponent.

 

The idea of "race" is, for the externalist tradition, like the wider notion of "self," bound up in the contingent and accidental nature of Darwinian adaptation. Race is an adaptational effect of contingent history. But a noumenal racism, where physical traits and customs are expressions of some internal occult quality, claims that race is a cause of history, not simply an effect.

 

The Nazis argued, for example, that culture itself was merely an expression of race; distinct racial essences produced distinct outward cultural traits.(10) Hitler (1972) proudly summarized his theoretical contribution in the following way: "If I try to gauge my work, I must consider, first of all, that I've contributed, in a world that has forgotten the notion, to the triumph of the idea of the primacy of race" (67).

 

Hitler's dissatisfaction with Darwinian evolution follows Nietzsche's criticism, but Hitler adds the distinctly racial component to the argument, in his discussion of "Race and Culture" in Mein Kampf, he "corrects" the environmentalist theory of development by underscoring the potent internal causes at work. The soil or environment, he contends, no doubt plays some role in influencing human beings, but the same environmental pressures working upon two different races will produce two different results.

 

The low fertility of a living space may spur the

 

one race to the highest achievements; in others

 

it will only be the cause of bitterest poverty

 

and final undernourishment with all its consequences.

 

The inner nature of peoples is always

 

determining for the manner in which outward

 

influences will be effective. What leads the one

 

to starvation trains the other to hard work

 

(289).

 

This "inner nature" of peoples is a private possession--a metaphysical psycho-biological entity--fundamentally immune from economic, social, and geo-political events. The latter simply provide the accidental catalysts for the expression of the former's essential character. The unchanging inner nature of the Aryan, according to this essentialism, does not degenerate of its own accord but only by the "pollution" of other "inherently corrupt" racial blood types.

 

Though the Nazis loved the Darwinian imagery of "struggling for existence" and "victory through strength," they rejected Darwinism on its two foundational points. They denied transmutation on the grounds that it renders race purely accidental (a by-product of adaptation rather than an ultimate cause); and they rejected the role of the externalist mechanism of natural selection as the agent of micro-changes, replacing it with the internal racial essence.(11) Daniel Gasman (1971) persuasively argues that the Nazis' understanding of Darwin came almost entirely through their reading of Ernst Haeckel's work. But Haeckel's writings, which began as orthodox Darwinism, became increasingly Lamarckian in the sense that "internal pseudo-psychic forces" caused organic evolution rather than external natural selection.(12) Thus, Nazi racism does not take its theoretical orientation from Darwinism proper, but from a radically reinterpreted Darwin--where the causal metaphor is internalist rather than externalist.

 

If race is the prime cause of all significant historical events, as the Nazis argued, then history must be reinterpreted so that behind every blessing an Aryan should be found, and behind every disaster, a person of color. The internalist metaphor dictates that the "blood" or some noumenal essence within a race expresses itself necessarily and thereby shapes world events.(13) For any such racial theory, be it within Nazi ideology or anti-abolitionist thinking, the practice of claiming all the "good guys" as Aryans must be undertaken. After all, an intelligent, noble, creative, or politically powerful person of color becomes an embarrassing anomaly within such a pernicious hierarchy. Were such tactics not so thoroughly injurious, they would be unbearably funny.

 

Confucius, for example, was argued to have been a closet-Aryan by Dr. John H. Van Evrie. Van Evrie wrote a very popular "justification" for African American slavery in 1870 entitled White Supremacy and Negro Subordination: Or, Negroes a Subordinate Race and (So-Called) Slavery Its Normal Condition. The text included some musings upon the increasingly important question of Chinese immigration, and unsurprisingly Van Evrie argued that the semblance of culture in China was the result of Caucasian blood. Confucius and other renowned Chinese figures, Van Evrie argued, were really Caucasians.

 

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was very influential in the German Volk movement,(14) argued (through a distortion of Kant) that the Kantian noumenal essence could be grasped, not by science, but by a mystical religious meditation. Through this meditation one came to understand the essence of being German, and of course the essence of other races as well.

 

Chamberlain (1968) argued that the essence of being German was two-fold, "referring to physical qualities on the one hand, to intellectual on the other: but fundamentally these two things are really manifestations of the same thing" (517-518). He goes on to suggest that, though outward physical traits are important in race recognition, a more intuitional approach, that "lets us directly feel, without learned proof," can reveal the inner defining racial essence, the essence of race that impresses "its special distinguishing stamp" upon every "anatomical fact" (518).

 

Grasping the internal nature of race, he argued, lead one to see that Christ could not have been Jewish. Quoting the German legal authority Jhering, Chamberlain agreed that there was "in his origin something Aryan in Christ" (213 n.). Once grasped through intuitional meditation, this point could then be argued via the mundane methods of science; for example, arguing that Galilee had been inhabited by non-Jewish tribes and so forth. Chamberlain also managed to believe, through his tortuous logic, that Dante had been an Aryan. "That Dante is Germanic and not a son of the chaos becomes in my opinion so clear from his personality and his work that proof of it is absolutely superfluous" (538 n.).

 

Along the same lines, some German archaeologists did their best to support Hitler's claim that the Ancient Greeks were really Germanic Aryans that had survived some northern catastrophe and developed a high-culture in a southern context.(15) Heinrich Himmler was rather candid about the ways in which history must be reinterpreted according to the "primacy of race." Referring to the state supported propaganda project, he claims:

 

The one and only thing that matters to us, and

 

the thing these people are paid for by the

 

State, is to have ideas of history that

 

strengthen our people in their necessary national

 

pride. In all this troublesome business

 

we are only interested in one thing--to project

 

into the dim and distant past the picture of our

 

nation as we envisage it for the future. Every

 

bit of Tacitus in his Germania is tendentious

 

stuff. Our teaching of German origins has depended

 

for centuries on a falsification. We are

 

entitled to impose one of our own at any time

 

(cited in Arnold 1992).

 

This disturbing historiographic theory is not simply the dismissible ravings of the marginal thinker. Martin Bernal (1993) makes a compelling argument about the way in which Greek history, in particular, has been conceptualized, in all modern mainstream thinking, on a bogus Aryan model. Attitudes towards Egyptian history, according to Bernal, have toggled between a dismissive attitude and one that reinterprets cultured Egyptians as "White."

 

The internalist metaphor of race provides a theoretical bedrock for racialized history. Race, on the post-Darwinian externalist model, is a product or result of the adaptation imperative which drives evolution; race does not cause world events, world events cause race. Consequently, race has no necessary causal relation with cultural achievement. The idea of an internal noumenal racial essence, however, makes racialized history possible because an immutable race will always be active as "agent" but never truly alterable as passive "object." In this sense, the internalist model continues to preserve the autonomy or freedom of the individual or racial group (just as it had in the rationalist notion of self) by framing the race as agent. But when the model embraces occult criteria of internal differentiation, it finds this agency to be the requisite condition for racial responsibility; in other words, one can now blame the race for everything from the shape of its nose to its status as slave. Accordingly, external social, economic and environmental contingencies are irrelevant in an analysis of our slave-ridden history; indeed, social history itself becomes a mere extension of the unfolding of internal causal principles contained within races.

 

The internal Cartesian mind (the free agent), that Bracken (1978) claims to form a "modest conceptual barrier" to racism, evolves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the causally efficacious but dangerously inflexible racial essence. Bracken states that:

 

The "modest conceptual barrier" to racism is

 

provided by the fact that color is not a predicate

 

that can apply to minds, and minds constitute

 

the human essence. Perhaps one could

 

have found a way to distinguish black thoughts

 

from white ones, but it is difficult to conceive

 

how this could have been done without radical

 

alterations to Cartesianism (250).

 

But there were just such alterations to Cartesianism in the course of post-Kantian idealism. And it is not difficult to conceive of how this could have occurred when we reflect on the general manner in which idealists argued that the "natural" side of Descartes' dualism is in some sense a product of "mind." The internal Cartesian self evolves into an entity that expresses itself outwardly and bodes of an internal differentiation. The metaphor of internal agency is preserved throughout and provides the possibility for spurious racial culpability.

 

THE CONTEMPORARY INCARNATION

 

The legacy of internalist and externalist race metaphors is seen in the current debates over intelligence testing, and can be increasingly found again in political discourse concerning social classes. The works of Konrad Lorenz and Arthur Jensen, for example, may be interpreted as contemporary champions of the innate. And Richard Dawkin's theory of "selfish genes," wherein our mental life is said to be caused entirely by our genes, is also a species of contemporary internalism.

 

Contemporary racial theory has obviously become almost entirely biologized, but some of the recent debates have continued to invoke the deep metaphors of internalism and externalism to explain where the determining causes lie--and where the responsibility should be placed. The root metaphors shape the biological discourse.

 

The conclusions that Arthur Jensen draws concerning I.Q. testing can be said to be internalist in orientation. Jensen has argued in a number of works--most notably, Educability and Group Differences (1973)-that lower I.Q. scores in Blacks reflect internal genetic differences between the intellectual abilities of the different races. He even contrasts his own position with the "egalitarian environmentalism" of his critics (8). In claiming that a race's "environment" causes poor performance on such tests, Jensen argues, we inevitably generate wasteful social-programs designed to change the unchangeable. Jensen asks us to contemplate "the massive expenditure of limited resources on misguided, irrelevant and ineffective remedies based upon theories not in accord with reality, and the resultant shattering of false hopes" (21).

 

Jensen's genetic internalism leads him to some disturbing educational recommendations. According to his thinking, since Blacks are inherently and unchangeably less intelligent, educators should not waste their time trying to teach them traditional academic disciplines. Educators are to devise an alternative set of skills for the "large numbers of children who have limited aptitudes for traditional academic achievement" (365). Though Jensen himself is a bit more guarded with his rhetoric, the idea seems to be that we should separate the races in school and teach Whites the glories of abstract thought (because only they can understand it), and Blacks the vocational skills required for productive labor. This highly pernicious brand of racial discrimination seems to be possible exclusively on an internalist model that replaces the earlier metaphysical entity--which was immune from external agency--with genetics.

 

The tension between metaphors is not merely an abstract theoretical issue. Which metaphor one uses when characterizing race, or agency in general, will determine important matters of social praxis. Richard Lewontin (1994), for example, points out recent legal cases in which the somewhat mysterious notion of "genetic rights" enabled biological parents to reclaim children from the families in which they were raised. This case of pragmatic jurisprudence is a manifestation, Lewontin argues, of "the belief in the absolute primacy of the internal over the external..." (31).

 

Critics of genetic determinism, such as Stephen Jay Gould (1974) and Richard Lewontin (1970), have championed a radical externalism in order to maintain a more liberal anti-racist position. Many of their criticisms of Jensen in particular are very powerful.(16) Yet, lamentably, the dichotomous nature of the metaphors seems so entrenched that theories line up wholeheartedly on one side or the other. Radical environmentalists, for example, end up denying absolutely everything and anything that smacks of "human nature." Human beings, conceptualized on an exclusively externalist metaphor, become infinitely malleable pieces of putty--whether it be the agency of natural selection forces shaping our traits, or social-structures determining our inner drives. The goal of preserving freedom, which originally inspires this contemporary environmentalism, ironically seems to slip away the more one denies the virtues of internalism. Internalism and externalism each have virtues which, taken together, cancel out each other's vices.

 

The defining features of these metaphors seem to have a continuity throughout the history of modern racism. The root internalism Columbia College, Chicago that underpins some forms of racism cuts in two directions. If agency is conceptualized internally then freedom or autonomy seems more easily preservable, but such internalism has also led to rather vitriolic forms of racial essentialism. And if pressed too strongly, the innate theories like Jensen's purely "genetic" causation rob the individual of that freedom which formerly seemed the very virtue of internalism.

 

Likewise, the root metaphor of externalism cuts in two directions. If agency is conceptualized upon an externalist model (whether it be empiricism, natural selection, or behaviorism), then the dangers of personal or racial manipulation seem inevitable. Yet, such environmental externalism undercuts the immutable thesis of racial essentialism and avoids the dangers of racial culpability. Again, however, if pressed too strongly, such environmentalism becomes its own particular brand of determinism.

 

The question that philosophers and biologists must continue to ask themselves in the area of racial theory is, To what extent are these deep metaphors shaping the more explicit theoretical possibilities? If we find these deep presuppositions to be too constraining, then is it possible to replace these root metaphors with morally and theoretically healthier metaphors? The metaphors themselves are not statements of observation or theory proper; thus they have no clear-cut neutral objectivity. That is to say, scientific method will not insure their validity. Historically oriented philosophical work, however, can trace the various impacts that issue forth from buried presuppositions and can continue to provide us with a cautionary chronicle of the important relations between metaphor, race theory, and race practice.(17)

 

Received April 29, 1994

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Arnold, B. (1992) "The Past as Propaganda," Archaeology 45. Barzun, J. (1965) Race: A Study in Superstition (New York: Harper & Row). Bernal, M. (1993) "Black Athena: Hostilities to Egypt in the Eighteenth Century." in The Racial Economy

 

of Science, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Boorstin, D. (1948) The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt and Company). Bowler, P. (1983) The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Bracken, H. M. (1973) "Essence, Accident and Race," Hermathena 116,81-96. -- (1978) "Philosophy and Racism," Philosophia 8. Chamberlain, H. S. (1968) Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, trans. by John Lees. 2 Vols. Howard

 

Fertig, Inc. Cope, E. D. (1883) "The Developmental Significance of Human Physiognomy," American Naturalist 17. -- (1887) The Origin of the Fittest: Essays in Evolution (New York: Macmillan). Chomsky, N. (1975) Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon). Darwin, C. (1955) The Descent of Man in the Encyclopedia Britannica Collection. William Benton, Publisher. -- (1987) Charles Darwin's Notebooks 1834-1844, eds. R Barrett, P. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn

 

and S. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Descartes, R. (1988) Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and

 

D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gasman, D. (1971) The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (Macdonald: London and American

 

Elsevier Inc.: New York). Gould, S. J. (1971) "D'Arcy Thompson and the Science of Form," New Literary History, 2. -- (1974) "Racist Arguments and IQ," Natural History Magazine, May issue. -- (1977) "The Eternal Metaphors of Paleontology," Patterns of Evolution, ed. A. Hallam (Amsterdam: Elsevier). -- (1987) Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Haeckel, E. (1902) Gemeinverstadlich Vortage und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwicklungslehre,

 

2nd ed., 2 Vols. (Bonn: Emil Strauss). Haller, J. (1971) Outcasts from Evolution (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Hegel, G. W. F. (1967) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row). Hitler, A. (1971) Mein Kampf, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company). -- (1972) Hitler's Secret Conversations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young). Hofstadter, R. (1992) Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press). Hyatt, A. (1866) "On the Parallelism between the Different Stages in the Individual and Those in the Entire

 

Group of the Molluscous Order Tetrabranchiata," Memoir of the Boston Society of Natural History 1. Jensen, A. (1973) Educability and Group Differences (London: Methuen & Co.). Johnson, M. and G. Lakoff (1981) "Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language," in Philosophical

 

Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. M. Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Kauffman, S. (1991) "Antichaos and Adaptation," Scientific American 265. -- (1993) The Origins of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lerner, R. (1992) Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide (State College, PA: The Pennsylvania

 

State University Press). Lewontin, R. (1970) "Race and Intelligence," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. -- (1994) "Women Versus the Biologists," The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 7, April. Linnaeus (1956) Systema Naturae. A photographic facsimile of the first volume of the tenth edition (1758)

 

(London: Trustees of the British Museum). Locke (1959) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications). Low, A. (1979) Jews in the Eyes of the Germans (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues). Margulis, L. (1981) Symbiosis and Cell Evolution (San Francisco: Freeman). Mosse, G. (1981) The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Schocken Books). Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, ed. W Kauffman (New York: Vintage Books). Popkin, R. (1974) "The Philosophical Bases of Modem Racism," in Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts, eds.

 

C. Walton and J. Anton (Athens: Ohio University Press). Ruse, M. (1993) The Darwinian Paradigm (London and New York: Routledge). Said, E. (1978) Orientalism (New York: Random House). Sauerlander, W (1994) "Un-German Activities," New York Review of Books. Searle, J. (1976) "The Rules of the Language Game," Times Literary Supplement 3887. Spengler, O. (1928) The Decline of the West 2 Vols. (New York: A. Knopf). Van Evrie, J. (1868) White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (New York).

 

NOTES

 

(1.) Some examples of internal mechanisms would be the various developmental laws of growth (e.g., correlation of growth law, epigenesis, etc.), also Kauffman's "anti-chaos" (1991), Gould's Bauplane (1971), L. Margulis's "symbiosis" or "autopoeisis" (1981). (2.) It is still more a matter of faith than proof, but I wish to interject my tendencies against a "human nature" account of deep metaphorical structures. Two outstanding reasons compel me to take a more culturally-based approach to the origin of these presuppositions. The first is that, from Kant to the present, countless modes of thinking have been claimed as necessary a priori epistemological categories, only to be shown in the course of time to be contingent culture-bound artifacts. I concede that this argument in no way precludes the possibility of eventually discovering such necessary categories of human thought, but it does sound a cautionary note for our all-too-tempting impulses in this direction. Secondly, and it is an argument of the same ilk, the claim that a given conceptual presupposition is a necessary feature of human cognition has given spurious credence to status quo prejudices. For example, some recent philosophers of science have argued that science necessarily proceeds according to principles of ruthless competition, and I can't help thinking that we have here, in disguised form, an age-old alibi for aggression. But, alas, the entire "nature/nurture" dichotomy is but one example of the clash of internal and external metaphors that I am suggesting must be overcome. (3.) See Descartes's Meditations, where he claims that it is in virtue of our free-will that we "bear in some way the image and likeness of God." He further contends that the free-will "is not restricted in any way" IV, 57). Also see his Passions of the Soul where he states that "the will is so free that it can never be constrained" (Part 1, 360). (4.) Michael Ruse (1993), for example, goes to great pains to secure Darwin within the functionalist or adaptationist camp. He sets up two basic categories for understanding the debates in natural history; formalism and functionalism. Ruse claims that Darwin's natural selection is a purely adaptational mechanism and therefore should be distinguished from the concepts of non-adaptational formalist thinkers like E. Geoffroy, R. Owen and perhaps even S. J. Gould (whom Ruse mistakenly accuses of "transcendentalism" f37). (5.) Consider the transformative influence of environment upon skin coloration alone. Darker skins have significantly lower rates of skin cancer because melanin helps ward off harmful rays. In environments that have higher levels of solar exposure, darker skin will be selected for. Imagine a white-skinned population transplanted to an equatorial region (or, for purposes of irony, imagine them in South Africa). If 14 people out of every 1,000 people born die of skin-cancer (a reasonable figure), then, according to the law of natural selection, it would only take about 800 generations (a geological microsecond) for Whites to become Black. This should give the South African White-supremacist some pause. (6.) R. H. Popkin (1974) relates a eulogy in which the American infatuation with this biblical quote is exemplified. In 1851 the Charleston Medical Journal praised racist anthropologist Samuel G. Morton's contribution "in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race. We believe the time is not far distant, when it will be universally admitted that neither can 'the leopard change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin'" (see Popkin, 147-148). (7.) Kant himself, however, did not appear to be impressed by or aware of this anti-racist dimension in his theory. Popkin (1974) points out passages from Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime where he argues that Negroes "have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling." And, while contemplating the truth or falsity of a particular story, Kant reflects on the story-teller, concluding that "this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid" (cited in Popkin, 159-160). (8.) 1 am not suggesting that these specific philosophers are markedly more racist than others. Indeed, Alfred D. Low (1979) has persuasively argued that Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche were not overtly anti-semitic. My goal is to uncover some of the crucial theoretical moves that provide the "logic" for connecting internal essentialist metaphors (previously unconnected with race) with racial traits. (9.) In his "M" Notebook, Darwin plays with the idea of reinterpreting Plato's notion of innate ideas. Darwin's brother Erasmus reminds him of a passage in the Phaedo where Plato argues that the "necessary ideas" are not empirically derived. Darwin suggests that instead of assuming a pre-existent soul, we might assume the hereditary influence of concepts generated in our pre-human ancestors. "Plato says in Phaedo that our necessary ideas arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience--read monkeys for preexistence" (1987, 551). Ideas, for Darwin, are themselves products of evolution and instead of their standing outside of time and the flux of nature, they are the results of time and the flux of nature. The "necessary ideas" (even the laws of logic) are embedded in our minds because they have been useful in the survival struggle and subsequently transferred down from our progenitors. What was previously thought to be necessary (something that could not be otherwise) is now seen to be contingent (could be otherwise, and probably will be otherwise in the course of evolutionary time). (10.) In the mid 1930s, exhibits of "degenerate art" opened in Germany as "lessons" to the Aryans. Works of art--from Expressionist paintings to Jazz music--were said to be products of degenerate non-Aryan "souls." Indeed, one such exhibit was entitled "Art that did not spring from our soul" (see W. Sauerlander, 1994). (11.) There are some exceptions to the Nazi rejection of natural selection. When Konrad Lorenz was a Nazi, for example, he accepted Darwin's natural selection as the chief cause of development, but annexed this idea to his contention that the "purifying" positive aspects of natural selection had been watered down by our culture's compassion for the weak. He then called for racial hygiene practices in order to undo what civilization had done. Still, his understanding of Darwin's mechanism, at least during this Nazi period, is questionable because he continually appeals to an inner volkish racial drive. For example, he states that "whether we share the fate of the dinosaurs or whether we raise ourselves to a higher level of development, scarcely imaginable by the current organization of our brains, is exclusively a question of biological survival power and the life-will of our Volk" (cited in Lerner, 1993). (12.) See Haeckel's Gemeinverstandic Vortage und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwicklungslehre, Second ed., 2 vols. (Bonn: Emil Strauss, 1902). (13.) Otto Spengler (1928), following the earlier and more obnoxious work of Arthur de Gobineau, made this racial conception of world history popular through his quixotic work The Decline of the West. There he argued that a primordial "will of the race" underpinned historical process. Family politics throughout generations, for example, can be traced to this occult quality, a quality that Spengler openly admits to being unanalyzable by scientific method. He points out that narrowing our "field" of European (particularly German) blood-relations combined with "the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfill the will of the race" (Vol. II, 127). (14.) The "Volk" was supposed to be a mystical transcendental racial essence.

 

George Mosse (198 1) explains that it was thought to be "fused to man's innermost nature, and represented the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk" (4). Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century went through twenty eight editions between its release in 1899 to 1942. The book was, according to Mosse's 1968 Introduction to Chamberlain's work, "a vital part of that German ideology which influenced not only the educated classes but filtered down to the rest of the population as well" (v). (15.) See Bettina Arnold (1992). (16.) The scientific criticisms, as opposed to the moral criticisms, of Gould (1974) and Lewontin (1970) have focused on Jensen's misunderstanding of genetics. Both critics have argued that Jensen misuses the concept of "heritability" when he argues from inheritance within a specific population to differences between two populations. And both critics point out that even if intelligence was genetically based, there is nothing in genetic theory that prevents traits from being drastically altered (improved) by environmental conditions--much as genetically based diabetes is easily altered today by insulin injections. (17.) I wish to thank Professors Leslie Van Marter and John S. Haller, Jr. for comments and criticisms on earlier