Is Philosophy Just White Guys J3rk!ng Off? | Philosophy Tube

what up youtube it's your boy ian n drivel the driver lighter so pretty much immanuel kant he's a 19th century philosopher from germany or prussia or some [ __ ] like that apparently he's a big deal wrote a whole bunch of stuff about morality and how to be a good guy but get this brace yourselves turns out he was a massive [ __ ] racist that's right moral philosopher huge racist they're teaching this god of kids here's what he said about native americans the race of the american cannot be educated it has no motivating force for it lacks effect and passion i don't like americans either but you can't say that they are not in love thus they are also not afraid they hardly speak do not caress each other care about nothing and are lazy have you ever met a native american probably not a lot of them in kern expert eh i forgot to mention that little detail turns out this [ __ ] guy never left his hometown in germany here's what he said about black people the race of the match you can't say that word on youtube [ __ ] kids watching this [ __ ] the race of the one could say is completely the opposite of the americans they are full of effect and passion very lively talkative and vain they can be educated well that's nice of you to acknowledge that clearly get in somewhere but only as servants bracket slaves jesus christ humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race clearly not in your case emmanuel can't emanuel can't more like emmanuel no i can't say that word on youtube or i'll get hit with one of these youtube doesn't like it when i tell you guys the truth the uh are born white apart from their genitals and a ring around the navel which are black during the first month blackness spreads across the whole body from these parts what i don't care how much of a famous philosophy you are daddy dribble says he full of [ __ ] mike emmanuel [ __ ] is [Music] so obviously uh first of all i just want to apologize to the entire nation of australia for that atrocious accent and uh any fans of marcus dibble the youtuber who who might be watching the show or dude marcus himself i'm not trying to make fun of him uh i'm sure that he's well i'm not trying to make fun of him anyway and uh there is a point to it which we'll come back to but those quotes from kant one of the most famous philosophers ever are all real we know him now for his moral philosophy but in his own time kant was far more famous for teaching anthropology and geography he wrote and taught those subjects way more than he taught philosophy and in fact he was the first person to teach anthropology at a german speaking university and he was undoubtedly in every way just a massive explicit racist which prompts the obvious question who cares because he's dead why bother learning about cancer racism and that's our first question for today today's video is like meta philosophy philosophy about philosophy but before we dive into the metacommentary let's make sure we know exactly what kant is saying kant's moral philosophy and cancer racism might at first glance appear to be pretty inconsistent i've done videos on his moral philosophy before but short version short almost to the point of distortion can't thought that actions were good or bad not based on their consequences but on whether or not they were done out of a desire to conform to a certain set of rules which is supposed to will be the same rule in different formulations called the categorical imperative what he tried to do was ground morality in logic he tried to find moral laws that were as inescapable as the laws of mathematics he thought that any being with reason should be able to appreciate the categorical imperative and understand that it's the foundation of morality and this appeal to reason is what gives his moral philosophy it's apparent universalism it looks like it applies pretty evenly and solidly to everybody just like the laws of maths are the same for everybody on the other hand though in his anthropological work kant invented an imaginary hierarchy of four races white black yellow and red with white being the highest he spent a lot of time arguing that people of color couldn't be educated to the same levels or were particularly suited for menial labor or slavery that stuff about him saying that black babies are all born white he really did say that as well the idea was that white people were the purest ideal of humanity and only later in a baby's life did they become corrupted by tropical heat or phlogiston or some other pseudo scientific nonsense it should be obvious but it's worth emphasizing that can't said that can't said those things in public in print as a serious academic just without ever asking a single person of color he was just like yeah i don't i don't need to follow up on that that's you know that's that's probably true interestingly kant attempts to justify his made-up hierarchy using something that is supposed to resemble science all that stuff about phlogiston and iron in the blood is an early attempt at scientific racism that's when people use dodgy science like measuring skull shape to invent and organize racial categories from superior to inferior what we now know is that race isn't a biological category at all biologically the taxonomy doesn't make sense it's a political category and it always was but scientific racists will try and find what will pass in the right circles as scientific evidence for a naturally occurring and therefore morally unquestionable racial hierarchy since we discovered evolution and genetics scientific racism has drawn mainly on those scientific racists today will often say that their invented racial hierarchies have a genetic basis but interestingly kant was writing pre-darwin kant died in 1804 an origin of the species wasn't even published until 1859 so he was pretty ahead of his time in the field of being a huge racist and i said that flippantly but it's also it's also kind of true he really did invent entirely new and very influential ways of being a massive racist compare kant to uh john stuart mill who's another philosopher who was also a racist but in a subtly different way mill still thought that black people were inferior for instance but he made some noises to the effect that maybe the reason black people hadn't risen to what he saw as the same heights as white people in the society in which he lived was that they had been denied the opportunity mill was a bit more patronizing with his racism he thought that white folks he just needed to need to help the lesser people out that's also why he didn't think that indians should be allowed to run india until british people taught them how to run india properly contrastingly kant said that by their very nature people of color were just essentially inferior with the implication being that no matter what social opportunities they were afforded they could never rise to the same heights in the canteen jargon he was making what's called a transcendental argument an argument that goes beyond the world we see and observe and reaches right into the heart of what makes somebody human or in his mind sub human remember that apparent contradiction between all this racism on the one hand and the universalism of kant's moral philosophy on the other well in his book black rights white wrongs the philosopher charles mills says that kant is resolving this contradiction by secretly applying a concept of sub-humans he does think that all human beings are equally capable of rational consideration and therefore moral worth he just doesn't think that people of color are fully human he did think that there was only one human species he just didn't think that people of color or women were as capable of the kind of rationality and reason that made white men full participants in his moral system kind of like the founding fathers of the united states of america who penned the words all men are created equal but they didn't really mean all men because they built their country on stolen land using slaves and to them and can't these exceptions were just so obvious that they didn't even need to be stated outright and now that we understand this racism we can return to our meta commentary and this question of who cares and personally i just like philosophy and and i'm interested anyway but i recognize that not everyone's as passionate about can't as i am my tastes are very singular is kant simply a product of his time yeah probably to a certain extent but if one of the greatest moral philosophers ever supposedly isn't actually any more moral than a regular guy indeed compared to a regular guy nowadays arguably a good deal less moral then that on its own might tell us something interesting about his whole philosophical system not in the sense that we want to just throw it all out and write him off but in that there's something illuminating in realizing that he genuinely did not see this contradiction i know it just makes me wonder personally like what am i not seeing the other problem with saying that people like that are just a product of their time is that not everyone at that time did things like that and it kind of lets them off the hook a lot of people thought that slavery was okay but you know what the slaves didn't and they said so pretty loudly and often so if other people thought that slavery was all right it wasn't because they didn't know it's because they chose not to listen to that they chose not to know can't we like cut the racism stuff out and just focus on the moral philosophy i mean that's what stood the test of time that's what we're still teaching in schools and universities now that we know as anthropology and geography is just bollocks the answer is not really no because his racism massively informs how his philosophical system is supposed to work a world that is built based on kant's ideas would look very different from a world based on our interpretation of cancer ideas where we're including everybody i mean the point of moral philosophy is to in some sense try and make the world a better place so the precise steps to doing that will look wildly different depending on who we want to still be around in that world charles mills also writes that to try and crowbar the racism and the moral philosophy apart kind of portrays racism as being sub-theoretical or somehow deeper or baser than philosophical ideas which it isn't really one of the reasons i spent so much time explaining khan's hierarchy rather than jumping straight into the magic commentary is to show that racism is a full-blown normative theory in its own right writing it off as just hate which needs love to combat it can be a little bit reductionist it can stop us from understanding it like i did that whole video on uh on transphobia like a month ago because systems of bigotry like that can be understood and that can help us fight but all right let's say you're not interested in all of that sjw you just want the raw analytic philosophy if kant's racism is getting in the way of that well then let's just ditch the can't bit of can't we won't call it kantian philosophy anymore we'll call it canteen inspired philosophy or cantian universal philosophy or a universal categorical imperative ethics that's suitably arcane sounding and yeah yeah i guess we could do that but becoming curious about the limitations in great works of philosophy can actually open us up to new ways of critiquing them for instance can't place a lot of emphasis on the idea of autonomy which isn't like total freedom from everything but giving rules to yourself that's why he thought that morality is so strongly binding on us because we actually bind ourselves to it for instance a traditional wedding is a very kantian sort of affair if you get married then you make a promise to your partner that you will love and cherish only them at the exclusion of all others but that's not like a restriction that your partner is like placing you under if you want to enter that sort of monogamous marriage and not everyone does but if you want to then you give that rule to yourself and that's the canteen idea of autonomy not having no rules but choosing the rules and this notion of autonomy has been central to ethical and political theory for hundreds of years but one of the critiques of kant is that that kind of autonomy just isn't available for everybody it's not always an option for a long time at the start of our lives we need people to care for us and set rules and boundaries like my niece has just learned to walk so she can exercise a little bit of autonomy but she still needs other people to set rules for her when we get old we need care too and even in between nobody is completely self-sufficient i couldn't make this video without ben and tim letting me borrow their studio or the people who make my clothes or grow my food and so on i mean this whole show is yeah it's an exercise of my autonomy i get to choose what i create and what i make and so on but i'm also dependent on crowdfunding from all of you any kind of achievement of autonomy is always going to be on the backs of other people who are doing a little bit of supporting work to help you get there and this line of critique comes from feminist scholars because traditionally that kind of care work and supporting work has been done by women so by realizing can't sexism in excluding women's experiences from his whole system we've actually opened up his philosophy to an entirely new line of critique because now we need to decide what are we going to do with the county and notion of autonomy like are we going to keep it are we just going to throw it out we can like modify it what are we going to do oh my gosh there's so much more philosophy that we can do now there's another cluster of reasons why we might want to confront philosopher's problematic views as well and it's to do with being honest with the students in his article how to deal with cancer racism in and out of the classroom phd student victor bundesguerra says that if we don't teach philosophy students this kind of stuff then we are kind of deliberately allowing them to form a false picture of the man that they can't help but imagine behind the words i remember being quite charmed by the figure of kant as he was taught to me always taking a stroll around his hometown at the same time every day i thought ah you know i'm a creature of habit and i appreciate the peace and quiet as well here's a man that i can understand and i probably wouldn't have thought that had i known that during his morning strolls his brain was often full of racist gibberish and that's just me and i'm a white guy i mean to say to a student of color that it doesn't matter that kant was racist or to say it doesn't matter that cecil rhodes whose statue you have to walk past every day to go to class was a massive colonising racist to say to them that doesn't matter it's kind of a little bit brazen in his book blackness visible mills writes there is a feeling not to put to find a point on it but when you get right down to it a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off the impatience or indifference that i have sometimes detected in black students seems to derive in part from their sense that there is something strange in spending a whole course describing the logic of different moral ideals for example without ever mentioning that all of them were systemically violated for blacks there is something strange [Music] is [Music] training that's all well and good and uh there's some interesting stuff in there about why in general it might be fun to examine a philosopher's more problematic beliefs but it doesn't really answer the more specific question of why did i make this video and here we're doing meta meta philosophy it's philosophy about philosophy about philosophy in his book so you've been publicly shamed journalist ron johnson talks a lot about internet call outs and he worries about people getting sucked into the dark pleasure of bullying and i'll confess that in making this call out there was a certain amount of satisfaction in tearing down emmanuel kant one of the greatest philosophers ever and i was just going at him probably as some kind of punishment for him being difficult to read if i'm truly honest when i made this channel i made a promise to myself and has that for some country and autonomy for you that i would never use it to specifically make anyone feel bad and i hope that i've mostly stuck to that promise but since kant is dead i can go all out i can indulge in my dark desire to bully him emmanuel can't you're a miserable racist twit and that's the t i'm gonna write to all of your friends kant i'm gonna email david hume and i'm gonna tell him that you've been really toxic and exclusionary lately and that he shouldn't be friends with you anymore no i'm just kidding i would never do that that would probably really hurt david hume's feelings peter coffin's done a lot of cool work here on youtube about how tearing somebody down can conversely lift you up by making you look better than them and it can also attract a lot of attention too all of which is a kind of social capital which if you know how to do it right you can convert into literal capital like marcus dibble for instance the youtuber who i loosely parodied down on level zero here's an example of somebody who well he's an example of a lot of things but one of them i think it's fair to say is somebody who creates social capital by making call out videos that he then converts into literal capital for his job i'm probably going to be accruing a certain amount of social capital by calling out cancer racism which because i'm a professional youtuber i can convert into literal capital as well truth be told though the reason i made this video is because of something else that mills says in this book in the final chapter he talks about one of his most famous works called the racial contract came out in 1997 hugely influential an important book in political philosophy and he talks about how it was received and how his career has changed since it was released and he says that from 1997 to 2016 the book sold 36 000 copies which by academic standards makes it an absolute best seller on the one hand the impact that something has can't just be reduced to the number of people who see it but on the other hand king hell 36 000 copies that's it for one of the most famous and important philosophy books of the last 20 years 36 i i get 36 000 in a week and that's not me blowing my own troubles look how good i am that's me being suddenly very struck by the responsibility of my position but at the same time i'm outside of academia which means i can do some different things if you're a phd student say and you're a woman of color and you're teaching kant and you go to the head of your department and you say i really want to talk about cancer racism in these lectures you run the risk of being labeled as the one who's always talking about race in her work on complaint scholar sarah ahmed has said that within a system like a university if you bring people's attention to a problem you risk becoming identified with the problem because you get seen as the one who's bringing it up and making everyone tense and that can negatively impact your career but i don't have a career i just have a series of youtube videos so hopefully i can reach a much bigger audience than anyone university can and get philosophy students in a position to confront the meta philosophical questions because philosophy as an institution is really really white speaking to the guardian in 2015 philosopher patrice haynes said that to the best of her knowledge the number of black philosophers in the uk is five not five percent five and i'm pretty sure from my memory that every philosophy teacher i've ever had was white why does that matter well because it means it leads to situations like where john rawls one of the most famous philosophers of justice of the 20th century can spend 40 years his whole career writing about justice and barely mention racial injustice once which you know you've got to admit is a pretty glaring oversight and crucially it's an oversight that only a white person could make only a white philosopher could be like oh yeah racial injustice oh that's the thing that happens you know i just played all forgot about that for like 40 years straight come on it just means that philosophy as an institution is worse because we've jim crowed it we've excluded ideas from outside that might actually help us progress the discipline and by the way that's not to say that if the population of the country is x and people of color then philosophy departments must be x also and therefore racism is magically solved that's how we get tokenism it's about challenging the foundational ideas that is what philosophy is supposed to be about after all mills ends his book by saying that although there has been some improvement over the course of his career the pretensions of philosophy are to illuminate the world factually and normatively to show us what it is like and how it can be improved but the abstraction that is structurally central to the discipline has as a result of its overwhelming demographic whiteness mutated into a lethal cognitive pattern of collective white self-deception and group evasion that inhibit the necessary rethinking long underway in other subjects far from being the queen of the sciences far from being in the vanguard of truth and justice philosophy lags pathetically in the rear of the forces of intellectual inquiry in comparison with the progress being made elsewhere without a new disciplinary willingness to face how seemingly colorless abstraction is really generalization from the white experience the disciplines exclusions both demographic and theoretical can only perpetuate themselves it's going to be a long haul so that's why i think it can be interesting to examine the broader context of a thinker like cat because when you really dive down into the deeper layers of stuff you might find that all sorts of interesting new ideas can open up in front of you that [ __ ] like button if you want more drivel [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 682,610

Rating: 4.9083734 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, kant, charles mills, education, school, university, academia, anthropology, geography

Id: weiz9wbIcGQ

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/twersx]

CONTENT WARNING:
Racism, Hentai

oh boy

[u/saberico]

or: The reason Contrapoints quit academics

[u/Psychedelic_Retard]

my new favourite image

[u/AnalMohawk]

If it is, I've got TONS of ideas for content.

[u/OdaibaBay]

wow he's really pumping it out these days

[u/dread_pirate_hera]

"yes"

[u/SocratiCrystalMethod]

Given the sudden prevalence of content like this:

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-sexist-and-racist-philosophers-might-still-be-admirable

​

I am VERY grateful for Thorn. The irony of Kantians explaining tolerance to the minority people questioning his worth is mind-barfy.

[u/HumaneSquash094]

Damn this philosophy stuff sounds sweet

[u/AuraMire]

As an Australian I didn’t even realise he was going for an Australian accent. I can’t tell if that means he failed terribly or that I have no idea what I sound like.