The racial theory of I. Kant in the context of the colonial discourse of the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

The paper deals with analysis of the works of I. Kant from the point how these works fit into the colonial-enlightenment discourse of the late modern period. During a long time, this issue was out of the research attention, because the colonial issue was not considered to be the central aspect of I. Kant's works. The purpose of the study is an attempt to answer the questions, firstly, what place did colonial knowledge occupy in the ontological and epistemological systems of I. Kant, secondly, what was the specificity of Kant's racial theory, and, thirdly, how in Kantian philosophy the relationship between the ideas about the world's wholeness and the fact of the existence of other races was constructed. This author uses the method of historical and cultural contextualization by E. Said, which allows us to correlate Kant's ideas directly with the worldview system that developed in European intellectual thought in the late 18th - early 19th centuries. A special feature of the Kantian racial theory is that, on the one hand, it served as a cognitive strategy for systematizing knowledge about the conquered peoples within the framework of the scientific picture of the world, which was conceived as unified and expedient, on the other hand, it legitimized the domination of Europeans over the colonial population in terms of natural science.