The Paradox of Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment
Jillian Dorazio
The 2023-24 John S. Whipple Scholar for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Editor’s note: In “The Paradox of Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment,” author Jillian Dorazio discusses the impact of Enlightenment era perspectives on race and how they translate into the Antebellum period. By exploring the various literary works and personages of the era, she reveals the persistence of racial ideals through the 19th Century. Dorazio’s work illuminates how several rhetors across these periods, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Thomas Jefferson, relied on discursive and textual strategies of social constructionism and/or Aristotelian Criticism (i.e. endoxa/mythos, kairos, dissoi logoi) to paint the black race as naturally inferior in a racial hierarchy; by doing so, the author explores the detrimental consequences of this dehumanization: the commodification of the black individual.
Historiography of Racial Ideology
The diversity of humanity has always been as “fascinating as it is perplexing.”1 Throughout the evolution of scientific thought, intellectuals have produced countless theories on the differences of mankind, many of which embodied a hegemonic white, colonial authority that influenced their rhetoric. In recognition of the significance of science’s historiography, George Sarton, a Belgian-American chemist and historian, posited the theory that the history of science conveys a history of “human civilization,” considered from its “highest point of view.” Sarton holds notable authority in this field, as he is widely considered the founder of the history of science. He ultimately suggested that understanding the history of science through the lens of philosophy would “broaden our horizon and sympathy” while simultaneously raising our “intellectual and moral standards” and deepening our “comprehension of men and nature.”2 According to Sarton, studying the intersection of science and race as a historical phenomenon would help to identify how and why humanity has developed broader cultural assumptions on race.
Western Colonialism and Scientific Culture
As a result of a developing colonial narrative in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Western world became, as Amit Prasad (2022) notes, an “embodiment of the ‘scientific culture’ that the non-western ‘other’ [was] argued to be lacking.”3 Prasad explores the discursive strategy of othering the non-western world in an attempt to portray the West as unique. Prasad interprets existing historiography of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century from Herbert Butterfield as “imaginative history” aimed at reinvention. Arguing that Butterfield framed the global development of science as Eurocentric, Prasad posits a “deterrent,” aggressive non-west. As a result, colonialism is cast aside, reframing of the West’s scientific advancements center on words like “discovery,” specifically the discovery of “new worlds.” This reframing also produced a disempowering perspective on non-western agency, creating the assumption that indigenous peoples were ignorant barbarians. Prasad remarks on Johannes Fabian’s point of contradistinction, arguing that this very idea requires “alterity for sustenance in our efforts to assert or understand ourselves.”4 While Prasad does not explicitly discuss the black race, his analysis of the historiography of science as white-washed is critical in understanding the intersection of science and race, as this practice of “othering” effectively demoralized and dehumanized vulnerable populations in popular memory.
According to Ibram X. Kendi (2017), Butterfield’s imaginative history of the non-western world in regards to science and civilization were not unique to the twentieth century; on the contrary, the same discursive practices were being employed by early rhetoricians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Scientific Revolution of the 1600s had led to a “greater intellectual movement” in the subsequent century.This period was known as les Lumières in France, Aufklärung in Germany, Illuminismo in Italy, and the Enlightenment in Great Britain and America. Intellectuals in this era used language as a means of conveying implicit racial ideas; Kendi describes that this “metaphor of light” had a double meaning that referred to both learning and Europeanness, or rather whiteness. Kendi further argues that the Enlightenment era gave “legitimacy” to a long-held racist “partiality” as well as the associations of reason and light with whiteness while ignorance was linked to darkness and blackness.It was quite “convenient,” therefore, when Enlightenment texts, linking properties of science and intellect to race, were being published as Western Europe’s transatlantic trade flourished.5 Furthermore, by the mid-1400s, Kendi notes that Slavic communities that were common targets for slavery had fortified themselves against slave raiders. Paired with an increase in the ‘supply’ of African slaves, this helped paint the image of the ‘natural’ slave not as white, but instead black.6 Kendi provides another example of white partiality and an established connection between scientific progress and the Western world from antislavery activist David Walker in the early nineteenth century. While he emphasized an appeal to blacks in resisting racism, he also claimed that blacks were the most “degraded, wretched, and abject” set of “beings” who had walked the Earth since its conception, repeating the contrast of an “enlightened Europe” and “wretched Africa.” Walker believed that, despite being black himself, Africa had lost its source of learning; instead, it had descended into ignorance as a result of black disobedience to their original maker, God..7
Categorizing Race and Creating Hierarchies
Theodosius Dobzhansky asserted that the most efficient and effective way oppressors discredit the notion of equality is to show that humans are “innately, genetically” and thus “irremediably diverse and unlike.”8 Here, Dobzhansky stresses this model as a tool of oppressors, rather than prescribing this discrediting of equality himself. Kendi elaborates further on this point, exploring the particular scientific theories that framed the black race as subhuman. Eighty-six years prior, Mississippi Senator and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis confronted Congress over their proposal to fund black education, and British-born planter Edward Long, in his book entitled History of Jamaica, re-awakened the simmering rhetoric of polygenesis. Polygenesis theorized that mankind did not descend from a common ancestor and that different races were of different species. Philosopher John Locke argued that Long’s text suggested an innate resemblance between apes and the black race; later, in the same year, a Scottish judge and philosopher named Lord Kames authored Sketches of the History of Man, which similarly, though with greater force than Long, dismantled a single creation story of monogenesis. Citing Voltaire while dismissing the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, Kames asserted that there was as great a variety of species among men as there were in dogs. As people tried to grapple with the differences between races, polygenesis seemed most scientifically and religiously feasible to many; “how else” could such stark, “glaring” differences be explained, let alone the distinctions between culture, wealth, and freedom that the black and white races embodied?9 Both Dobzhansky and Kendi provide ample historiographical research to support the argument that science, specifically polygenesis in this case, was used as a rhetorical device to dehumanize black populations. Ultimately, the very suggestion that black people were of a different species inherently reduced their humanity.
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1980) claims that the justification for a taxonomic racial separation by “inborn worth” has varied with the “tides of Western history,” but Platonic arguments have consistently relied upon dialectic.10 This framing of ‘human hierarchies’ as “proper and inevitable” was dependent on appeals to reason or to the “nature of the universe.” The arguments constructed from these appeals ultimately became “refurbished for the next round of social institutions,” cycling endlessly. While appeals to reason in justifying slavery differed immensely, Gould states in his assessment of the impact science held over eighteenth and nineteenth century views of race that “we must first recognize the cultural milieu of a society whose leaders and intellectuals did not doubt the propriety of racial thinking – with Indians below whites, and blacks below everybody else.”11 Biological determinism, a fundamental concept that developed as a result of racial taxonomic thinking common to the late eighteenth century, essentially meant that shared behavioral norms, as well as the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—“arise from inherited, inborn distinctions”; in this sense, society is “an accurate reflection of biology.”12 Another relevant source that explores the relationship between dehumanization and race is David Livingstone Smith’s 2020 work On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How To Resist It. Similar to Gould’s ideas, Smith argues that racist thinkers believe each race has an intrinsic value.13 Smith provides ideas on how racial hierarchies became formed over time, specifically categorizing the black race as “bordering on the subhuman,” at the lowest rung on these arbitrary rankings; in contrast, whites positioned themselves at the very top, closest to the divine.14 Smith also hints at a larger concept framing this research paper: dehumanization as a means for commodifying the black race. He writes that the association of black slaves to a “lower species of animal” made it acceptable for white slavers to treat them as their “livestock.” By this logic, it makes sense that support for the practice of slavery by the United States government was ultimately based on an “overpowering practicality.”15 Slavery was interpreted as an essential economic institution for the new nation, and this ideology was reflected in the very rhetoric of the founding. Ultimately, Smith concludes that to dehumanize another is to conceive of them as a subhuman creature.16 This transformation from a person to capital absolutely fits this dehumanization.
Eighteenth-Century Rhetors: A Criticism of Social Constructionism
Eighteenth century British America, specifically during the American Revolution, was influenced significantly by Enlightenment thought; the Founding Fathers, remembered as “children” of this movement, admired and reproduced ideologies primarily from England, Scotland, and France.17 The longest lasting legacy of early American Enlightenment thought is the establishment of a democratic society wherein an independent people governed themselves in small communities, dispatching representatives to state and continental assemblies in the hopes of eliminating tyrannical rule (i.e. monarchy).18 Another important element in both thought and achievements of the American Enlightenment was liberty, which is often connected to democracy and freedom in the contemporary imagination of this movement. This is not to be confused with the similar notion of equality, which, during the late eighteenth century, most commonly referred to judicial and sometimes political rights rather than social equality. The ideas and subsequent practices and policies that manifested during the Enlightenment had “profound ramifications” for the future of the nation, especially in considering the incompatibility of slavery with the fundamental principles of equality. While eighteenth century conceptions of equality meant innovation and change in political power, “membership” in this community of citizens worthy of being equals was selective and limited by conflicting assumptions about class and property rights, gender roles, and slavery and racial differences.19 This juxtaposition was evident to many states, but only those that considered slavery as economically unimportant seemed to abolish the system in the decades following the Revolution. States below the Mason-Dixon line could not fully prioritize the principle of equality over the economic institution of black slavery, and arguments discrediting the intelligence and character of black individuals became more “elaborately” articulated post-independence. Spencer (2015) argues that this line of racist thinking may well have become more “entrenched” as a result of the persuasive power of arguments favoring equality; perhaps only this “fully fledged” racism could prevent the extension of equal rights rhetoric to include the black population.20
The following section will focus on three prominent figures of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and offers a brief analysis of the persona each rhetorical figure performed to their audiences, who that imagined audience would be, and how this ideal reception is identifiable through elements such as tone, composition or format, repeated phrasing, and shared cultural assumptions relevant to the mid-late eighteenth century. Through discourse and textual analysis, I deconstruct the assumptions embedded within each rhetor’s text. It is important to note that proslavery and racist ideologies were not uniform. Many racial theories contradicted each other, while remaining influential in grounding later arguments in protecting slavery as a political and economic institution. Regardless of their contrasting appeals to reason, Enlightenment rhetors underpinned their arguments with repetition of what was natural or proven by nature.
Benjamin Franklin
There is a discernible similarity characterizing the personas or ethos of relevant Enlightenment rhetors: their hegemonic authority as white, masculine, well-educated, and upper-class citizens hailing from Western society. Franklin, on top of his other roles, was also well respected as a journalist, having successfully gained partnerships with printers in nearly fifteen different cities in North America by 1748. At the time that his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751) was published, Franklin was representative of the view of most American colonists when it came to notions of tyranny and self-government. Franklin was also, however, a slaveholder. A striking example of white racial partiality comes from Franklin in his Observations. Within this text, Franklin claimed that white colonists were “making this side of [the] Globe reflect a brighter Light,” but acknowledged his partiality to the “complexion” of early America, for “such a partiality is natural to Mankind.”21 He also categorized ethnicities by racial standing, classifying the only true whites as Anglo-Saxons. While there is no way to understand, in a contemporary analysis of his rhetoric, his explicit intentions in separating racial identities, his rhetoric follows a pattern of growing historiography of the late-eighteenth century that would create racial hierarchies, a pervasive concept into the next century.
In considering his qualifications, Franklin presumably sought to be understood by an audience of like-minded individuals who would affirm his beliefs, thus validating his role as an intellectual expert. The composition of his audience can be interpreted by the appeals to mythos, or shared cultural assumptions in his essay. Franklin’s tone in his text, or its general character, is quite serious yet entails optimism for the future of England and its colonies. His argument called for the close cooperation between the two entities, emulating a mutually beneficial, familial relationship. The assumption that his readers shared the same enthusiasm for settling early America, and commonly share a vestige of English heritage, suggests that the main target audience for this essay is the similar persona: an educated, upper-class, white man hailing from the Western world. This is further solidified by his remarks on being partial to the white race, as it felt most natural. Furthermore, Franklin frames the “complexion” of early America to be implicitly white; he also relied on a social constructionism of the white race being innately connected to “light,” intellect, and progress in claiming American colonists sought to make “this side of the globe reflect a brighter light.” This implies that other races, notably the black race, were associated with backwardness, ignorance, and an intellectual “darkness.”
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752 – 1840), a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist, inherited the same characteristics as Franklin while authoring his De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind) in 1775. He studied medicine at the University of Jena and later Göttingen, where he received his M.D. after authoring De generis humani varietate nativa.
A key contrast in Blumenbach’s identity is his German heritage. His difference in identity and cultural background cannot be understated; while a widely similar social structure ruled Western society in the late eighteenth century, Blumenbach’s ideas were most influential to his German successors in the field of biology. While not an American intellectual figure, Blumenbach closely mirrored the ideas of both Franklin and Thomas Jefferson on race. Regardless of this difference, Blumenbach shares an identity of hegemonic authority: his status as white, educated, and Western bolsters the validity of his rhetoric given the cultural endoxa of late eighteenth century society (i.e. run by and for the white man). Blumenbach is regarded as one of the most influential theorists of human variety in the late eighteenth century. His skill as an author in addition to his knowledge of comparative anatomy bolstered his credibility as an expert. It can be argued that his ideal audience would also share his hegemonic identity, as Blumenbach’s lengthy text is most likely accessible to the upper-class and educated. The most suitable candidates for this criteria, similarly to the case of Benjamin Franklin, would have been other white men who were literate. His title itself, as a doctor of medicine, receiving his M.D at the University of Jenav, echoes the evolving discursive framework within both science and religion: regarding the natural variety of humanity. In his text, there is an explicit series of taxonomic distinction separating racial identity into five broad categories. Blumenbach would be remembered in popular memory for his impact on developing craniological research which would further establish scientific/biological racism.
He begins his racial categorization with “the white color,” placing the race at the top, “such as is that of most European peoples.” At the last and fifth category is the “tawny-black,” seen as the most different and the most “widely separated varieties of mankind.” It is his hypothesis that the varieties in skin color arise from discrepancies in carbon present within one’s body, or one’s location on Earth in relation to countries with increased solar heat. The “unnatural and diseased color” of this last category is also believed to have originated as a result of this difference in climate, seemingly accounting for what Blumenbach describes as a “choleric” or anger-prone temperament of “most inhabitants of tropical countries” where people of color would have made their home.22 Regardless of his faulty scientific claims, Blumenbach’s racial-caste system, which followed in the footsteps of Franklin’s categorizations, would occupy the minds of racial theorists into the next generation, who would argue a natural inferiority of the black race on the basis of anthropology.
The wording of Blumenbach’s rhetoric here is significant, describing a darker complexion as “diseased” or “unnatural” worked to other non-white people; furthermore, his phrasing that black people were the most “widely separated” variety of mankind further distanced the black race from others, and especially the white race. Blumenbach’s terms relied on social constructionism that assumes the natural, healthy complexion of an individual would be light skinned and white. His hypotheses on what accounts for these differences, including the theory that racial differences produce different temperaments, also relied on a mythical shared cultural assumption that white people were more rational and less prone to anger.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was yet another prominent intellectual who shared characteristics of his persona with Blumenbach and Franklin. Jefferson was a proponent of agrarianism and owned slaves. Spencer argues that Jefferson, in his own time and today, remains a model for the “achievements and failings” of the Enlightenment, especially in America..23 For Jefferson and white intellectuals who argued for slavery, power preceded freedom; it is only in this power of hegemonic authority that freedom could be created. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia reasoned that “whether the black of the negro resides in reticular membrane between the skin” or “proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other bodily secretion, the difference is fixed in nature.” In comparing “them” by their faculties of mental fortitude according to criteria such as memory, reason, and imagination, Jefferson claims that “in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior,” and lastly, in imagination, they are “dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” Jefferson claimed that it would be “unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation” – rather considering a comparison “here,” meaning America, “on the same stage with the whites.” In Western society, writes Jefferson, facts are more authentic, and not “apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed.” It is within this context, therefore, on which Jefferson bases his assumptions about black people and their intelligence – acknowledging that each comparison is held to the white standard.
In this point, Jefferson invokes several discursive strategies: first, he manipulates context and timing combined, or dissoi logoi in Aristotelian Criticism. Similar to endoxa or mythos, dissoi logoi can be understood as reality being not only socially constructed or contingent on timing, but also unlikely to be proven as truth in a different cultural context. Jefferson acknowledges this, in that his comparison cannot be applied in Africa. On eloquence and creativity, Jefferson writes: “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” He consequently concludes that, although written as “suspicion only,” black individuals, “whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the “endowments” both of body and mind.24 Ultimately, Jefferson builds on previous scholarship, like the two examples from Franklin and Blumenbach, to contribute to the social construction of the black race as naturally inferior. Notably, the founding father later attempted to rehabilitate his stance on slavery, writing in The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson (1821) that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people,” meaning black slaves, “are to be free.” In the same breath, however, Jefferson, as cited in Kendi, repeated previous rhetoric, writing, “nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”25 With his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson consequently served as the “preeminent American authority on black intellectual inferiority” for the next fifty years, with a pervasive emphasis on nature and natural distinctions between races.26
The three examples above convey similar ideas of hierarchical white supremacy. Each rhetor constructs his argument about natural black inferiority primarily based on observation and their own political authority, rather than external validation or credibility. The compositional tone of each text is not incredibly urgent – there is no sense of something larger at stake or under threat; rather, each rhetor rests on their hegemonic identity and political authority for persuasion. Their assumptions about the inferiority of the black race are more observational than empirical and rest on various hypotheses and theories. Each rhetor mainly seeks to emphasize an arbitrary racial hierarchy, while maintaining an uncertain tone over why the black and white race are intrinsically different. These pieces of Enlightenment text seem to posit ideas on what separates the worth of the black and white races on hypothesis alone. While there was certainly pressure to preserve the institution of slavery for the transatlantic economy, there were not as many factors challenging its existence compared to the successive era. This lack of pressure to more fiercely defend the dehumanization of black individuals is reflected in the more fragmented, hypothetical and observational nature of each rhetor’s text. The next section will contextualize the transition into the early to mid nineteenth century, creating a discernible timeline of evolving literature on natural black inferiority. Nineteenth century proponents of this socially constructed reality upheld its false truth in repeated framing of racial hierarchies in popular culture and academic texts, yet their arguments had to be restructured from their predecessors. While this paper argues for a continuation of certain ideologies throughout historical eras, it also asserts that conditions between the late eighteenth century to the Antebellum period were different and constantly changing over time.
Notes
1. Theodosius G Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality. Foreword by Ward Madden (1973), 67.
2. Amit Prasad, Science Studies Meets Colonialism (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2022), 74-75.
Prasad, Science Studies Meets Colonialism, 79.
3. Prasad, 79.
4. Ibid 85-88.
5. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
(Bold Type Books, 2016), 80-81.
6. Kendi., 23.
7. Kendi, 165-166.
8. Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, 4.
9.Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning, 101.
10.Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Revised and Expanded) (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 20.
11.Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 30-31.
12. Gould, 20.
13. David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 46.
14. Smith, On Inhumanity, 79.
15. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003), 171.
16. Smith, On Inhumanity, 19.
17. Mark G. Spencer, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 6.
18. Spencer, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia, 323.
19. Spencer., 398-399.
20. Spencer, 399-400.
21. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning, 80.
22. Peter J. Kitson et al., Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 8 (London: Routledge, 2020), 147.
23. Spencer, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia, 319.
24. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Viginia (Richmond:1853), 149,-152, 155.
25. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning, 152
26. Kendi.,109.
Bibliography
Dobzhansky, Theodosius G. Genetic Diversity & Human Equality: The Facts & Fallacies in the Explosive Genetics & Education Controversy. New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1973.
Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man (Revised and Expanded). New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2006.
Jefferson Thomas. “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Documenting the American South. Accessed
November 14, 2023. https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html.
Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2017.
Kitson, Peter J., Debbie Lee, Anne K. Mellor, and James Walvin. Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 8. London: Routledge, 2020.
Prasad, Amit. Science Studies Meets Colonialism. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2022.
Smith, David L. On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and how to Resist it. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Spencer, Marc G. The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment: A - H. Vol. 1. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003.
Jillian Dorazio is a senior Communication and History major in the honors program and the first recipient of the Whipple Scholarship, awarded to a student conducting a major research project on any aspect of the history, art, literature, music, or philosophical/scientific thought of the Eighteenth Century. Jillian’s contribution to humanitas is an excerpt from her longer research project, which was awarded this scholarship.