II. Why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological

One angle from which it is possible to question the idea that Hegel's category of race can be understood to be biological is provided by contemporary biology. It has been observed that, since the mid-twentieth century, no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category (Smith Reference Smith2015). The biological—or, in any case, ‘natural’—credentials of the race concept, although not unquestioned in Hegel's time (see e.g., Herder (Reference Herder, Bernasconi and Lott1784) and Forster (Reference Forster1786)), were more secure then than they are now.Footnote ⁷ It is sometimes said that race today is an obsolete biological category; that race is to biology as phlogiston is to chemistry (Montagu Reference Montagu1962). This would suggest that Hegel went wrong on race in applying a biological category that is obsolete. But philosophers discussing the topic of race in human beings tend to forget that the concept of race has not been expunged from the vocabulary of contemporary biology. The notion is still thought to have application to various non-human biological species such as chimpanzees (Templeton Reference Templeton2013). So, the biological category of race as such is not obsolete. More plausible is the contention that what is obsolete is the idea that the category of biological race applies to human beings. This would suggest that Hegel's fundamental philosophical error in connection with race was applying an otherwise valid biological category to a species (Homo sapiens) to which it cannot be applied. On this view, Hegel's treatment of race as natural shipwrecks against the (putative) biological fact that the human race is not subdivided into biological races. (We will return to this idea below in Section IV.)

The biological status of the category of race can also be problematized from the standpoint of Hegel's system. A quick glance at the location of Hegel's initial systematic discussion of race makes clear that Hegel did not think of race as a biological-rather-than-spiritual category. Its placement in the Philosophy of Spirit (rather than the Philosophy of Nature) indicates that Hegel conceived of race in expressly spiritual (geistig) terms. The fact that the word ‘Rasse’ appears as (what we might call) a philosophically weight-bearing term in the discussion of spirit suggests that Hegel regarded ‘race’ as having an essential mental, spiritual or cultural dimension. Moreover, the specific use Hegel made of ‘Rasse’ makes it clear that he thought of race as a determination of Geist. This can be seen in his characterization of ‘racial variety’ (Rassenverschiedenheit) as an expression of the particularization of the ‘universal planetary life of the natural spirit’ (Enz.: §393; my emphasis).Footnote ⁸ This remark indicates that Hegel took the diversity of the races in humankind—the putative fact that the species is divided into natural races—as an aspect of the life of what he called ‘natural spirit’ (Naturgeist). Hegel thought that human races were ‘natural spirits’, determinate natural ways in which spirit (singular) particularizes itself. Indeed, the precise context in the Encyclopaedia in which Hegel began his discussion of race, namely in the first subdivision (Natural Qualities) of the first division (The Natural Soul) of the first subsection (Anthropology) of the first section (Subjective Spirit) of the Philosophy of Spirit indicates that Hegel thought of race as the most basic ‘natural’ way in which spirit is divided.Footnote ⁹ Hegel seems to have held that, philosophically speaking, spirit was subdivided into races from the start. This may help explain his otherwise puzzling indifference to what he called the merely ‘historical’ (historische) question concerning whether monogenesis (human beings descended from a single pair) or polygenesis (human beings were the result of several local creations) is true (GW 25.1: 33–34). Hegel appears to have been committed to the striking philosophical view that there is no spirit without natural racial differentiation, that spirit is (in this sense) essentially divided into biological or natural races.

Hegel referred explicitly to the ‘spiritual characteristics of the races [Characteristische des Geistigen der Racen]’ (GW 25.1: 35). He held that racial membership bears directly on straightforwardly spiritual traits such as the possession (or non-possession) of an ‘inner impulse [innern Trieb]’ toward culture (GW 25.1: 35), the presence or lack of ‘consciousness of personality [Bewußtsein von Persönlichkeit]’ (GW 25.1: 35), the grasp of the ‘universal’ [das Allgemeine]’ (GW 25.1: 35), and the attainment of ‘individual freedom [individuelle Freiheit]’ (GW 25.2: 612). Hegel contended that these and other spiritual traits are differentially distributed across racial groups. He seems to have assumed that the race to which you belong is very likely to determine your capacity for education and religion, your grasp of the universal, your attainment or non-attainment of true freedom, and so forth. He would likely have said that, if you belong to what he took to be the ‘Negro’ race, you will in all likelihood be immersed in uninterested and indifferent naiveté. You will be exceedingly unlikely to display an inner impulse to culture. Spirit will most probably be ‘entirely dormant’ in you. If, on the other hand, you belong to what he took to be the Caucasian race, it may be possible for you to achieve self-determination and self-development, to produce world-history and enjoy true freedom. Even if Hegel were to allow that there could be exceptional individual Negros who were philosophers (a biographical question about which I am unclear), he surely would have denied that this possibility was open to Negros in general.

A quick qualification. To say that Hegel took the category race to have a ‘spiritual dimension’ is not to say that he took the category to be straightforwardly spiritual. Race differs from straightforwardly spiritual categories which appear later in the system. Take, for example, ‘person’, a category that first appears in subsection A (Right) of Section II (Objective Spirit) of the Philosophy of Spirit (after spirit has placed itself into complete opposition to nature). ‘Person’ is a clear case of a category that is spiritual-and-not-biological. On the other hand, Persönlichkeit—personality—is not altogether free of conditioning by biological race. It is, to the contrary, inflected by race's biology.Footnote ¹⁰ This can be seen in Hegel's view that race figures in the explanation of the degree to which different populations have attained the ‘consciousness of personality’ (Bewußtsein von Persönlichkeit). He held that the reason Negros had not attained this exalted level of consciousness lies in the limitations imposed by the natural determinations—what we today would call the ‘biology’—of their race.

But, if it would be a mistake to say that Hegel's category of race is best understood as a biological-rather-than-spiritual category, it would be no less of a mistake to think it is best understood as spiritual-rather-than-biological. Hegel did not, for example, think of races as identity groups constituted on ethno-linguistic rather than biological grounds (cf. Smith Reference Smith2015). He did not think of race as exclusively cultural. The natural/organic connotations of the word ‘Rasse’ in German (both ordinary and philosophical) were fully present to him. So, we are entitled say that the category of race with which Hegel operated can be thought of as biological, provided we understand it to be a biological category with a spiritual aspect. Race, as found in Hegel could be more precisely characterized as a biospiritual (or biocultural) category—at least in human beings.Footnote ¹¹ Hegel's category of race is philosophically amphibious. It has a life in the domain of nature (from which it was drawn) and in the domain of spirit (in which it unfolds). It straddles the two domains. This is not to say that the distinction between the natural and the spiritual is annulled when it comes to race. Nor is it to deny that there is a conceptual distinction to be made between some natural aspects and some spiritual aspects that are built into Hegel's concept of race. The metaphor is that race stands with one leg on the nature side of that distinction and with the other leg on the spirit side of that distinction. The image of straddling between X and Y preserves the basic distinction between them.Footnote ¹²

III. Hegel on the biology of race

I do not think it overly anachronistic to say that Hegel was at least implicitly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race. That, indeed, is precisely the force of his Enz. §393 use of the term ‘Rassenverschiedenheit’. But about the details of the biology of race Hegel has remarkably little to say. This may reflect the circumstance that his discussion of race falls under the aegis of spirit rather than nature. It may well indicate that he was less interested in the details of what we would regard as the biology of race than we might expect him to be. His dismissal of the polygenesis/monogenesis debate as unphilosophical (GW 25.1: 33–34) appears to indicate that he regarded a detailed understanding of what we would regard as the biology of race to be unnecessary for a grasp of race's spiritual role. Nonetheless, to see where Hegel went wrong on race, we need some understanding of how he conceived of what we would regard as its biology. It will be necessary to piece together this understanding from scattered remarks.

First, Hegel took the circumstance that the human species could be objectively subdivided into a small number of well-defined, highly discrete smaller biologically or naturally defined groups that could properly be called ‘Rassen’ to be so obvious as to require no explicit statement. His considered position that natural racial differentiation results in profound spiritual differentiation indicates he took race to be what we would regard as a biologically significant category.

Hegel's preferred list of races is traditional. It includes the group that he, following Blumenbach, called the Caucasian (kaukasische) race (roughly Western Eurasians) (GW 25.1: 232). He also referred to this group as the European (europäische) and Germanic (germanische) race (GW 25.1: 612). He held that this group could be further subdivided into two smaller races, which he called ‘Near Asian’ (Vorder-Asiaten) (roughly Western Eurasians living to the east of Europe) and ‘European’ (Europäer) (roughly Western Eurasians living in Europe) (GW 25.1: 37). His list of races also included the group he variously referred to as the Ethiopian race (die aethiopische), the Negro race (Neger) and the African race (Afrikaner) (roughly, sub-Saharan Africans) (GW 25.1: 232). And it included the group he called the ‘Mongolian race’ (die Mongolische) (‘middle’ and ‘north’ Asians), also called Asian (Asiaten). Hegel appears to have taken this triad to constitute the races that most adequately embody and express the Concept in being fully determinate, that is, in having clearly defined boundaries. He also counted as races the less determinant group he called the ‘Malaysian race’ (malaische) (roughly, Oceanians) and the group he calls the ‘American race’ (die americanische) (roughly Amerindians) (GW 25.1: 232). It is clear that this list of (putative) races is recognizable as a list of races (that is, groups that can plausibly be regarded as races) from a contemporary point of view. Hegel's list corresponds quite well to contemporary commonsense specifications of which groups are races. Nor is this a chance correspondence. This classical way of dividing races, which Hegel takes over from Blumenbach, has helped to shape modern perceptions of race.Footnote ¹³

Hegel thought that the division of the races (at least those of the old world) was necessary rather than contingent (James and Knappik Reference James and Knappik2023: 99, 100, 109, 110). He also presumably thought that the division of the human species into races was ‘complete’ in the sense that every individual human being could be properly counted as a member of exactly one of these five races or, perhaps, as some admixture of the same.

With respect to Hegel's understanding of the physical aspect of race, one noteworthy feature is the following: although Hegel recognized skin colour and hair as visible physical respects in which races differed and although he was undoubtably aware that racial groups were distinguished by a number of additional visible physical features, the specific physical differences on which he focused were differences in the formation of the skull and the face (GW 25.1: 35; 25.2: 608–10).Footnote ¹⁴ In this he followed Blumenbach. This may have been a reflection of the anthropologist's authority. It may also have been that Hegel took such differences to be biologically or naturally more significant than differences of skin colour. In one place he said that ‘the osteological has a relation to the spiritual’ (SG: 610), suggesting that ‘the spiritual’ is prefigured or can be seen in ‘the osteological’. Hegel appears to have thought that the formation of the skull and the face were the most important physical features on the basis of which we distinguish racial groups. This focus may also have been a way of indicating that, biologically (or naturally) speaking, race is more than ‘skin deep’.

From what has been said, it is clear that Hegel attributed to race a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He maintained, for example, that the character of the African race is different from the European race in both physiological (physiologischer) and spiritual (das Geistige) respects (GW 25.2: 611; my emphasis). Hegel operated with the racialist concept of race.Footnote ¹⁵ There was, incidentally, nothing idiosyncratic about this. At the time Hegel wrote, the racialist concept of race was widely taken to be the concept of race. Thus Moellendorf is correct in his assertion that ‘[t]he source of [Hegel's] racism can be traced to the general ideology of the nineteenth century’ (Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf1992). This is not to suggest, however, that Hegel did no more than ‘passively absorb’ the prejudices of his times.Footnote ¹⁶ Bernasconi (Reference Bernasconi and Barnett1998) argues convincingly that Hegel wilfully misconstrues his sources in ways that exaggerated the negative characteristics of Africans. The same point can be made with respect to Hegel's treatment of Blumenbach's view of skulls.Footnote ¹⁷ This behaviour suggests racial ill-will on his part. Racial ill-will is a form of racism.Footnote ¹⁸

A crucially important spiritual respect in which races differed on Hegel's view was in their capacity to participate in world history (Weltgeschichte), the process through which spirit attains knowledge of its own nature.Footnote ¹⁹ Although this idea is developed much more fully in the lectures on world history, its seeds are fully evident in the Philosophy of Spirit lectures. Thus, for example, Hegel writes:

He tells us that:

And, finally, ‘[t]he Caucasian, European, Germanic, races validates both the substantial and the subjective, the principles of morals and conscience. There concrete freedom exists, the harmony of freedom as content and freedom as formal principle’ (SG :44; LPS: 91).

Hegel rejected the view that the correspondence between the overt physical features of race and spiritual differences of race was contingent. He regarded the correspondence between the two sorts of features as necessary—as in accordance with the concept.Footnote ²⁰ This essentialist understanding of the spiritual dimension of race commits him to the position that the biology of race must include underlying organic structures that would account for these fundamental differences. It is true that Hegel nowhere refers to such structures explicitly. Nor does he characterize them as ‘essences’. But the biological structures his account of race implicitly called for are such that they can be aptly called ‘biological essences’ in as much as they purport to explain for example why a person with a particular skin colour, hair type and skull formation has or is likely to have the spiritual capacity she does. So Hegel appears to have been committed to the view that races have biological essences, even if he did not use the term ‘essence’. This makes him a racialist.

Now, one possible complicating consideration is the following: Hegel said that the origin of the physical and spiritual differences between the races can be traced back—somehow—to differences in the geographical regions of the earth the races inhabited (Enz.: §393; GW 25.2: 231–34, 605–607).Footnote ²¹ I say ‘somehow’ because his discussion leaves obscure the precise nature of the mechanisms connecting the physical and spiritual differences between race to differences in geography. This linkage of race and geography might lead one to wonder whether Hegel could have thought that the differences in the spiritual characteristics between the races were due solely to differences in the geography of the regions in which the races were found. This, in turn, might lead one to ask whether, if members of one racial group R_1, which found itself in a geographical environment E_1, marked by a particular geographic orientation (e.g., north-south), were to be transplanted to a different geographical environment E₂, marked by a different geographic orientation (e.g., east-west), the members of R₁ would come to exhibit spiritual characteristics much like members of the racial group R₂, who inhabited E₂. The view just sketched would amount to a kind of ‘environmental determinism’.Footnote ²² The explanation of the spiritual differences between the races would be ‘situational’ rather than ‘dispositional’. It would lie in the difference in the ‘situations’ (the structure of the geography) in which members of different races found themselves rather than innate biological features internal to those individuals. Geographer and historian Jared Diamond suggests just such an explanation of the differences in the level of material development between racialized groups (Diamond Reference Diamond1997). In this vein, McCarney attributes to Hegel ‘a species of geographical materialism’, holding that Hegel's position could be advanced without assuming ‘any inherent natural, and, hence, any racial, inadequacy’ (McCarney Reference McCarney2000: 144). But reflection on Hegel's overall view makes clear that this was not Hegel's considered position. Confirmation can be found in James and Knappik's observation that Hegel explicitly considered what we might call the ‘natural experiment’ in colonial America in which indigenous Americans and Africans were exposed to European culture and education (James and Knappik Reference James and Knappik2023: 107). As James and Knappik point out, Hegel wrote that the missionaries were not able to ‘bring any drives and excitation into’ the Americans (W: 611), owing to the Americans’ ‘weakness and stupor [Stumpfsinn]’ (W: 823). Forestalling any doubt that Hegel thought spiritual traits were biologically inherited, James and Knappik note that he held that Creoles—a group that exhibited an admixture of American or African and European ‘blood’—were able to reach ‘the higher-feelings of self, the upward-striving to autonomy, independence’ (W: 510), presumably because of the portion of European ‘blood’ they possessed—which is to say: because of their biological ancestry. Hegel's treatment of this case makes clear that he thought that mental traits of the races were biologically inherited, and that this inheritance was invariant in the face of geographical/cultural transposition. It is clear, then, that Hegel thought (or was committed to the idea) that the inner biological constitutions of the different races were very different.

We are now in a position to revisit the question posed at the outset of this essay: Did Hegel go wrong in the specific use he made of the category of race, or did he go wrong simply in using the category of race? That Hegel went wrong in the specific use he made of the category is plain. It is well documented that the particular ways in which he characterized the spiritual traits of the groups he called Negros, Mongolians and Americans were straightforwardly and unambiguously racist (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi2000, Reference Bernasconi2003, Reference Bernasconi and Moyar2010; Hoffheimer Reference Hoffheimer2001; Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf1992). But in addition to this, the specific concept of race with which he operated—the racialist concept of race—is itself racist. It counts as racist, first of all, because it is the race concept that social theorists dubbed ‘racist’ in the 1930s, when the term first entered into general circulation. ‘Racism’ was originally a name for this conception of race (Miles Reference Miles1989). Should a more principled reason for labelling it ‘racist’ be sought, one could say that it counts as such because it is essentialist and hierarchical, because it stigmatizes racialized groups deemed inferior, and because it served to legitimate colonialism, slavery and genocide. If that is not enough to make a concept racist, nothing is.

But to say that Hegel went wrong in deploying the specific category of race with which he operated is not, however, to say, as many would maintain today, that his fundamental philosophical error was in operating with the biological category of race as such. It is here that the philosophy of race becomes relevant. To develop this point, I will draw on Hardimon Reference Hardimon2017 in the hope that this can bring some of the philosophical issues concerning where Hegel went wrong on race into a sharper light. In that book I argue that the racialist concept of race (i.e. the category of race with which Hegel operated) should not be identified with the concept of race as such and that it is possible to conceive of biological race in at least two non-racialist ways. To be sure neither of these concepts were available to Hegel and it would be crudely anachronistic to blame him for not using them, but they can nonetheless shed light on where philosophically Hegel went wrong on race.

IV. Two non-racialist biological concepts of race

To begin with, one can conceive of the biological category of race using what I have dubbed the minimalist concept of race. The minimalist concept of race says that a race is a group of human beings

1. (M1) that, as group, is distinguished from other groups of human beings by patterns of visible physical features;

2. (M2) whose members are linked by common ancestry peculiar to members of the group;

3. (M3) that originates from distinctive geographic locations (Hardimon Reference Hardimon2017).

The ‘visible physical features’ referred to in (M1) include skin pigmentation, nose shape and head form. They are innate biological characters that correspond to differences in geographical ancestry and trace back to the distinctive geographic locations from which minimalist races originate.

The minimalist concept of race does not posit a racial essence. It does not say that minimalist races differ with respect to honesty, courage, or intelligence, and so forth. It makes no reference whatsoever to normatively important features. It does not posit a correlation between visible physical features and normatively important traits. It neither ranks races on a scale of inferiority and superiority nor specifies features on the basis of which they could be ranked. It is a non-essentialist and non-hierarchical race concept.

The minimalist concept of race allows that skin pigmentation and other visible physical features can vary as much within a minimalist race as between minimalist races. It also allows that genes can vary as much within a minimalist race as between minimalist races. So, too, it allows that the genetic differences within minimalist races are greater than the genetic differences between them. It recognizes that determining whether a given individual belongs to minimalist race MR₁ or minimalist race MR₂ may be difficult. It allows that a given individual may belong to more than one minimalist race and that the boundaries between minimalist races may be blurry.

The minimalist concept of race is ‘biological’ in the basic sense in that it characterizes its referent in biological terms. The visible physical features that figure in its definition, such as skin pigmentation, nose shape and head form are biological properties. The ancestry referred to in (M2) is biological ancestry. The minimalist concept of race is also ‘biological’ in the more robust sense of being biologically respectable because it can survive the argument from human population genetics (Hardimon Reference Hardimon2017: 65–66). It is compatible with the principles and findings of modern biology.

It is plausible to suppose that there are human groups to which the minimalist concept of race applies. Examples include Western Eurasians (the group formerly known as Caucasians), sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians and Amerindians. Each is an ancestry group that has its own distinctive pattern of visible physical features that corresponds to its geographical origin. Each is what Quayshawn Spencer calls a ‘human continental population’ (Spencer Reference Spencer, Glasgow, Haslanger, Jeffers and Spencer2019). Aboriginal Australians very likely also constitute a minimalist race. Contrary to Hardimon (Reference Hardimon2017), I no longer think that Pacific Islanders constitute a single minimalist race, since this group includes both Melanesians and Polynesians, groups that exhibit markedly different patterns of visible physical features.

The minimalist concept of race represents the barest, most stripped-down characterization of biological race possible. It is a maximally thin, maximally deflationary conception of what it is to be a race. It captures the ‘logical core’ of the ordinary concept of race. It is not itself a scientific race concept (in as much as it is not formulated in scientific terminology) but it has a scientific counterpart, the populationist concept of race. The populationist concept of race says that

The populationist concept of race is a ‘scientization’ of the minimalist concept of race. It ‘scientizes’ the minimalist concept of race using the scientific vocabulary of ‘phenotype’,genetic transmission’, and reproductive isolation. It locates the category of race in the framework of population thinking and identifies reproductive isolation as race's biological basis. It counts as a candidate scientific concept in biology in that: it is formulated in a scientific biological vocabulary; it is framed in terms of an accepted biological outlook (population thinking); it is suitable for deployment in an accepted branch of biological inquiry (ethology, ecology and evolutionary biology); and it presents the scientific ground of the phenomenon it represents (reproductive isolation).

Like the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race does not posit a racial essence. It does not say that populationist races differ with respect to honesty, courage or intelligence, and so forth. It, too, makes no reference whatsoever to normatively important features. It does not posit a correlation between visible physical features and normatively important traits. It neither ranks races on a scale of inferiority and superiority nor specifies features on the basis of which they could be ranked. It, too, is a non-essentialist and non-hierarchical race concept.

Like the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race can survive familiar objections that undercut the empirically refuted racialist concept of race. It, too, can withstand the argument from human population genetics because it, too, does not require that the percentage of genetic variation between minimalist races be larger than the percentage of genetic variation within minimalist races.

Now, the further details of these concepts are not terribly important for our purposes. My point in introducing them is simply to show that there are now biologically respectable ways of conceiving of human beings as exhibiting biological race. If this is correct—and this is the payoff of our excursion from Hegel scholarship to the philosophy of race—then the popular view that Hegel went wrong in his supposition that the human species is subdivided into groups that can properly be called ‘races’ is mistaken.

Hegel's error lay rather in thinking that there is some kind of intrinsic, essential correlation between the outward biological features of human races (for example, bone structures and facial features) and the mental or spiritual properties of members of human races. He went wrong in operating with a racialist concept of race. The racialist concept of race is false.Footnote ²³ The human species is not divided into racialist races; there are no racialist races. It is just a mistake to think that differences in the biology of race account for differences in the possession (or non-possession) of an inner impulse toward culture, the attainment of the consciousness of personality, the degree of awakening as spirit, or the grasp of the ‘universal’ or the attainment of freedom. The biological category of race that is respectable by our lights is not a biospiritual category.Footnote ²⁴ It does not straddle the domains of nature and spirit but, instead, remains firmly within the natural.Footnote ²⁵ Bonetto is quite right to say that ‘[s]imply having a concept of race does not a racist make (Bonetto Reference Bonetto2006). But use of the racialist concept of race does make one a racist.