The colour of the transcendental deduction

Abstract

ABSTRACT LeBlanc’s article interprets Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) in light of his texts on race. It shows that, when Kant’s less canonical work on race is considered, his racial neutrality in this so-called ‘first critique’ becomes flawed. The first part of LeBlanc’s argumentation suggests that Kant’s monogenetic conception of the human species is compatible with the universalism of the transcendental deduction, and explains how this is largely supported by the fact that Kant himself diminished the importance of his work on race. It is in this broader context that LeBlanc concludes this first section by asserting that the categories of the human understanding, as explained in the transcendental deduction, would be applicable to the whole human species if we followed Kant’s logic. The second part of this paper starts from the Kantian idea that only white European peoples can produce science. It demonstrates that this Kantian idea broadens the function of the transcendental deduction in the first critique with regard to the history of modern science—namely, to give legitimacy to Newton’s science—to exclude non-Whites from the work of science in general. It is thus the juxtaposition of Kant’s analysis of modern European scientific culture on the one hand, and his account of human races on the other, that indicates a possible implicit racism in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The colour of the transcendental deduction in its function of scientific legitimation is thus revealed to be potentially white, although LeBlanc’s article still admits that other interpretive perspectives are reasonable and possible. His conclusion aims to make suggestions about the future of Kant studies in a global context in which postcoloniality can no longer be avoided, and the work of scholars such as Robert Bernasconi and Charles W. Mills, among others, should be taken as crucial.