Franz Knappik: Racism, Colonialism and The “Undead” in Hegel: The Case of Slavery

Recent Hegel scholarship suggests that there is still much in Hegel’s oeuvre which is ‘living’, in Benedetto Croce’s terms, as opposed to the 
‘dead’ parts in his thought—what we know to be mistaken and is no longer of contemporary interest. Many would include in this latter category also Hegel’s supposedly racist or pro-colonialist views. When acknowledging them at all, commentators tend to put them aside as views in which Hegel just followed the prejudice of his time or that are marginal for his philosophy. As such, we can safely ignore them. Against this prevalent approach, we advance in this talk another way of confronting racist and pro-colonialist elements in Hegel’s philosophy: we submit that they are tightly intertwined with its ‘living’ parts. Rather than being ‘dead’, they are, therefore, ‘undead’ and keep haunting us. As a case study, we examine the remarkably ambivalent attitude he takes toward the contemporary debate about the abolition of slavery in the New World. While he regards slavery as wrong in itself, since humans are entitled to freedom by their very nature, he nevertheless agrees with the anti-abolitionists concerning humans that, on his view, have not yet developed the complex preconditions for life as a free citizen in a modern state. We argue that this ambivalence is directly rooted in Hegel's account of personhood, his famous account of lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit and his mature conception of freedom. We conclude by outlining how this account informs Hegel’s views on the legitimacy of colonialism and of anti-colonial struggles (such as the Haitian revolution) more broadly.
 

(Joint work with Daniel James, University of Düsseldorf.)