This morning, I typed “Hegel vs. Kant” into the google search machine and was informed that there are “About 13,300,000 results.” I think that’s a pretty solid indicator that the two men represent distinct branches of the philosophic tree. I choose to demonstrate this this way because it’s comprehensible to everyone without the need for a freshmen seminar in 18th-19th Century Germanic philosophy. But I do have to make one additional point, which is that Hegel developed something called Dialectics. You don’t need to understand anything about Dialectics to follow along, except that it’s the father of dialectal materialism, which is an invention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are some very important differences between Dialectics and dialectical materialism but neither of them owes much to Kant.
Someone might get interested in Hegel’s system of philosophy and move from there to the philosophy of Marx and Engels. The latter actually builds on the former, so it’s a natural progression. Skipping from Kant to Marx without spending time on Hegel is going to be a challenge.
So, with these things in mind I present Marc Thiessen’s latest column in the Washington Post on the origins and dangers of Critical Race Theory.
By now, most Americans have heard of critical race theory. But many do not know just how radical or pernicious CRT is — because, as a new study from the American Enterprise Institute shows, the media does not explain its key tenets in its coverage. So I asked one of our nation’s preeminent historians, Princeton University professor Allen C. Guelzo, to explain CRT and why it is so dangerous.
Now, you might be impressed by words like “Princeton professor” and “eminent historian,” but let’s keep a skeptical mind about Prof. Guelzo’s credentials.
Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.
But the critique of reason ended up justifying “ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations — things like race, nationality, class,” he says. Critical theory thus helped spawn totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century such as Marxism and Nazism, which taught that all human relationships are relationships of power between an oppressor class and an oppressed class. For the Marxists, the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, critical race theory teaches that Whites are the oppressors.
I think Roy Edroso put it well when he responded:
I don’t know which of these worthies dropped the ball here but describing [Immanuel Kant’s] The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason as “Being critical of reason” is like describing [Adam Smith’s] Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations as “questioning the wealth of nations.”
In truth, Kant was an Enlightenment thinker who explored the limits of reason, but who was very far from being a critic.
Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act.
Prof. Guelzo appears to argue here that race, nationality and class are opposed to reason and he blames Kant’s “critique of reason” for paving the road to fascism and communism. This is such a bad explanation for the development of philosophy that I think I’ll simply say it’s an embarrassment rather than risk getting into a dreaded seminar. There are certainly problems with the concept of race, and this too applies to theories of “national character” or destiny. And certainly one does not need to accept that endeavoring to understand history through the class prism is the best or only “reasonable” approach. But Kant didn’t put forth a racial theory or argue that peoples are best understood by their country of origin. He also had nothing to do with the dialectical approach that underpins Marxist class theory.
With such a bad beginning, it’s not surprising that the rest of Thiessen’s piece is a mess.
It basically comes down to an argument that proponents of Critical Race Theory use the word “systemic” in “systemic racism” to avoid having to find empirical evidence in favor of the theory.
In CRT, “all White people are instinctively white supremacists,” Guelzo says, adding, “I say ‘instinctively’ because this is not a function of reason.” This is why its advocates talk about “systemic racism” — a CRT term that has crept into our public discourse and has even been embraced by President Biden. “Systemic sounds like systematic, except of course that it isn’t,” Guelzo says. “When you try to find something that is systematic, then you have to go find evidence.” But “systemic implies something so deep and so instinctive that you’re not even conscious of it. … [that] there is an instinctive bias that is built into people of certain colors.”
This is 90 proof intellectual wankery. There are obviously empirical ways to demonstrate subconscious biases. You can use reason to explore non-rational behavior. Moreover, we’re all familiar with unintended consequences, which means a system can have bad but undesired results. We use reason to discover the flaw (evidence) and hopefully to correct it.
Guelzo next misapplies a common logical fallacy.
Because critical theory rejects reason, it cannot be questioned. Under this rubric, Guelzo says, the only purpose of questions is to serve the interests of the oppressive class, and “any answer you come up with, which doesn’t speak in terms of some hidden structure of oppression, can simply be dismissed as part of the structure of oppression.” For example, “if you believe, as the Nazis did, that the Jews are responsible for all political and economic events, then my pointing out that the overwhelming majority of political leaders are not Jews merely shows that I am either a dupe of the Jews or that I’m in on the fix.” Similarly, if you question whether all White people are oppressors, “the questioning itself is an example of how you’re in on the oppression.”
These are examples of “begging the question.” You assert something is true rather than asking if it is true (e.g., God exists, green is the best color, Jews control everything, all whites are racists) and you reject counter evidence. There may be proponents of Critical Race Theory who are guilty of this fallacy, but not simply because they insist that some manifestations of racism are unconscious or sub-rational.
It’s also important to keep in mind that there’s a difference between teaching about European exploration, colonization, slavery and genocide and teaching Critical Race Theory. Even if we accept the premise that CRT argues that “all White people are instinctively white supremacists,” that has nothing to do with teaching about the Atlantic Slave Trade or the many broken treaties to the U.S. government made with Native American tribes. I’d also mention that the last time I checked, the Civil War included two sides of mostly white armies, and only one of those armies was fighting to preserve the legality of race-based human bondage. The history of Jim Crow is also a history of efforts to end Jim Crow, and not just by blacks.
It’s just not true that our high schools are teaching that “all White people are oppressors.” When we point this out to people like Prof. Guelzo, he just changes the definitions to make his evidence apply, which is precisely what he’s criticizing as “any answer you come up with…can simply be dismissed.” In other words, if you teach that whites have oppressed blacks and Native Americans, you are by definition teaching Critical Race Theory. That’s begging the question.
It’s also wrong.
And just as it’s wrong to say that Critical Race Theory arises in some way from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, it’s also ridiculous to say this:
Critical theory has led to the rise of ideologies that have killed millions. “We have paid severe prices at those moments when people have lost faith in reason and decided to defect to something else,” Guelzo says. “Those are the moments when genocide rears its hideous head.”
By rejecting reason, he argues, critical race theory could provoke a backlash that drives others “into equal, but opposite irrationality” such as “genuine white supremacy. … If your critical race theory is impervious to questioning and evidence, then fine: I will retreat into my critical race theory and it too will be impervious to evidence and the questioning. At which point then the only solution becomes violence.”
If Critical Race Theory has an obvious parent, it is Critical Legal Studies. And, trust me, Critical Legal Studies originated in the 1970s and has not killed millions or caused a genocide. In fact, there’s nothing about CLS that advocates for violence (emphasis mine):
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a theory which states that the law is necessarily intertwined with social issues, particularly stating that the law has inherent social biases. Proponents of CLS believe that the law supports the interests of those who create the law. As such, CLS states that the law supports a power dynamic which favors the historically privileged and disadvantages the historically underprivileged. CLS finds that the wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy. Many in the CLS movement want to overturn the hierarchical structures of modern society and they focus on the law as a tool in achieving this goal.
Here’s what is really happening. A bunch of conservatives are trying to get white people to vote on the basis of their whiteness. To make this happen, they’re arguing that factual information about historic racism is “anti-white” and that schools are teaching white students to hate themselves.
And this essay from Thiessen is a prime example of how they go about making their arguments sound “intellectual.”
This level of analysis would earn you an ‘F’ in a college course on political science or philosophy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t genius as a political strategy. It’s a lethal strategy, and ironically it’s done in the service of fascism, which actually does lead to death in the millions.
Thanks for this. Although it has been many years, one of my Philosophy courses was called Kant and the 19th Century, and we read major works by Kant and Hegel. They were very different, as you note. Kant’s theory of mind paved the way for a lot of what we call cognitive science. Hegel was the theorist who paved the way for the theoretical work of Marx and Engels. Switching from Kant to Hegel was pretty mind-bending from what I remember. Each author’s work amounted to very dense reading. Schopenhauer, was light reading by comparison. He seemed practically nihilistic, and was a bit of an influence on Nietzsche, if I remember correctly. Again, it’s been a while. Kant is so far removed from CRT (as I understand it, and admittedly that is just barely), that it should be a punchline to a joke. Hegel as the better antecedent. It’s also useful that you note how academics who fancy themselves as critics of CRT tend to shift the goal posts when confronted. Sadly, that’s standard academic behavior. I see the same sort of nonsense play out in my specialty area, where the stakes are so far lower. If an academic asks to cross the river with you, treat them like a scorpion. But I digress. Once an academic gets caught with their pants down, they’ll gaslight you. Happens way too often. Whoever is doing that in the service of preventing K-12 students from learning the basic facts about their own history deserves whatever shame can be dished out. Those editors of the mass media of record deserve some shame as well for spreading obvious lies, or silently observing those lies being spread.
Has the right misrepresented CRT? Duh. Was this completely predictable? Also, duh. Did the left do anything to prepare for the backlash? Of course not, we never do. We’ve built an interdependent system between academia and right-wing media. On our side we propose theories not understood outside of the faculty lounge, and Fox news serves them up as red meat. Then, we rend our garments and whine as the approximately 90% of Americans who did not graduate from a major university with a degree in one of the many ologies, become hopelessly confused.
Having thus demonstrated our intellectual superiority over the hoi polloi, we move right on to our next bit of self-harm. Hey, let’s embrace socialism. Let’s shove some more neologisms down everyone’s throat. Let’s get together a snipe hunt for another historical icono we can clasm. Let’s insult every Latin-based language for gendering nouns. Let’s see if we can create some more internal divisions with another heretic hunt, because a B+ in ideological conformity is never enough, we must all get an A.
The academy values correct answers, because life is a series of classes followed by tests to see if you reached the right conclusions. In that paradigm consequences are irrelevant. The real world consequence of CRT is that the teaching of genuine history is now outlawed in a number of states, and under assault in the rest. Losers? The kids we’re supposed to be educating.
The purpose of the left, libs and progs alike, is meant to be the protection of those who cannot protect themselves, the feeding and housing of those who cannot manage it alone, the protection of core human rights to freedom of association, religion, speech etc… I boil it down to a simple question: are there still people living in tents under freeway overpasses not half a mile from my house? There are? Then that is what we exist to fix. Are we accomplishing that? Are we fixing anything?
What are the real world consequences of our political choices? Because it looks an awful lot like we’re alienating suburban voters, Black voters, brown voters, rural voters and working people by allowing universities to define our agenda. And their agenda is not about people living in tents under freeway overpasses.
I really don’t know much about Hegel, but I know plenty about Marc Thiessen, who is one of the most disingenuous, dishonest people writing at the Post, if not THE most dishonest. My dad calls him a shameless bootlicker, which I think understates the fact. In fact, when I see his name I stop reading, because I know 99% of what he has to say is nothing but lies and bad faith arguments.