Peter Adamson considers possible ways forward.
We seem to be living in a time when people are willing to overlook bigotry. Donald Trump looks at a crowd of white supremacists and sees the ‘very fine people’ among them. Trump’s own sexist remarks provoke nothing worse than exasperated sighs among his supporters. Across Europe, the frank racism of far-right parties doesn’t stop people from voting for them as an expression of unhappiness with the government. No doubt genuine racism and sexism play a role here, but it also seems that people who would be horrified to be accused of prejudice themselves are willing to ignore or forgive prejudice in others. The intelligentsia tends to be outraged by this, but I wonder, are we really so much better?
Or rather, I wonder, am I myself so much better? As a historian of philosophy, I devote much of my life to the careful and sympathetic exegesis of thinkers who were, almost to a man (and they were mostly men), outrageous bigots by today’s standards. Nearly everything Aristotle says about women consists of unfavorable comparisons to men. His ‘natural slave’ theory has been a historical bulwark of racism; and it was echoed two millenia later by Immanuel Kant, who was adamantly opposed to interracial marriage, and who claimed that “negroes cannot govern themselves, and can serve only as slaves.”
The usual way philosophers have of dealing with this is akin to many Trump supporters’ attitude towards his misogyny: they don’t really approve of it, but also don’t think it matters so much. Similarily, the argument goes, Aristotle’s views on women or Kant’s ideas on race can be detached from the rest of their teachings, treated as a few unfortunate sentences in the midst of an otherwise valuable body of work. As historians, we usually take great pains to read various passages in light of one another; but here we do the reverse, engaging in a kind of interpretive quarantine by reading the rest of the book as if the (mercifully brief) wince-inducing bits weren’t there at all.
But is their bigotry so easy to contain? [keep reading]
