The relationship between race and culture in Enlightenment thought (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject History of Europe - Middle Ages, Early Modern Age, grade: 1,3, University of Göttingen (Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte), language: English, abstract: This paper will revolve around the question of how the concepts of race and culture - encompassing the entirety of human behaviour, social practices, expressive forms and technologies - or civilisation - signifying the former's upscaled and yet more complex version - might be interlinked in the anthropological and philosophical writings of four renowned German scholars: Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Christoph Meiners and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

To this end, the intellectual preconditions for culture and civilisation need to be taken into account as well. All four of these scholars were deliberately chosen not only due to their pioneering contributions to scientific race and cultural theories, but also the controversial, at times perhaps even acrimonious debates they were engaged in with each other.

Scholarly activity of the Enlightenment could be said to have carried the impulse to classify and organise the world around us and even beyond our immediate reach to extremes. However, tied to classification systems of any kind are incongruities and generalisations that do not necessarily, if at all, measure up to reality. Perhaps it is in these generalising descriptions, especially of foreign peoples and cultures, where one's own self-conception surfaces most clearly. In order to gain insight into but a small fraction of the Enlightened mind, the analysis of some of the most influential and remarkable writings about the racial division of humankind could be a useful starting point.