Hegel’s Eurocentrism
I’ve read many declarations of Eurocentrism; it comes with the territory of being a race scholar steeped in Anglophone philosophy. Still, there are some declarations of Eurocentrism that make even me pause. I found such a passage while thumbing through G.W.F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History.
According to Hegel, “The true theatre of History” is “the temperate zone”—the geographical/regional cradle that Hegel’s academic predecessors associated with “Western Civilization.” But if the temperate zone is the true theatre of History, what should we make of the histories and perspectives of, say, the peoples of Africa that lay outside this zone?
Hegel gives us a detailed, race-conscious answer.
The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality. . . .Another characteristic fact in reference to the Negroes is Slavery. Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value. . . .
At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European World.
This passage is a racist, Eurocentric mess.
Hegel begins by equating the European perspective (is there only one?) with Universality; those perspectives not already colonized and appropriated by Asia or Europe, he contends, fall outside the realm of universal truth. (White normativity? Check!). Hegel then locates most of Africa’s inhabits within the Negro race, and notes that Europeans are enslaving Negroes and selling them to America (Does he mean the Americas—emphasis on the plural? What about the Caribbean?). Having offered a less than half-hearted note of sympathy about the horrors of racialized chattel slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, Hegel directs his readers attention away from these barbarous European driven practices to something “worse.”
What could be worse than foreign nations enslaving you and brutally forcing you from your ancestral homelands? Hegel answers: The condition of those African ancestral homelands. These lands, Hegel argues, house “a slavery quite as absolute” as racialized chattel slavery but worse, because the lands and their race are incapable of attaining a consciousness of human freedom. They are doomed to be natural slaves—no more than human things with “no value.”
So debased are the Negroes of Africa, Hegel continues, that his readers needn’t consider them nor Africa any further: Neither are worthy of the attention of one seeking to understand the direction of History.
Hegel is notoriously difficult to read. But this passage is strikingly clear—and deplorable.
