Enlightenment rationalism defined humanity as reason yet excluded Black people

Evidence

One of the key factors which prompted Tempels to write Bantu Philosophy was a concern with some of the negative European characterizations of Black people in Africa south of the Sahara and in the Diaspora. In philosophy, condescending attitudes towards Africans by some Europeans are often traced back to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as René Descartes (1596–1650), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), David Hume (1711–1776) and Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), to mention a few. At the time, philosophers believed that reason was an essential element of all human beings, and that to be human was to be rational. It was the reaffirmation of Aristotle’s claim of man as anima rationale. But with Descartes’s famous slogan of cogito ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”), it actually became possible to believe that reason was the engine of human progress and civilization because it was the source of all knowledge, and such knowledge could only be manufactured in one’s head independent of other organs of the body as well as one’s community of the living, the dead and the environment. To this general understanding of a human being, however, there was an exception – Black people. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 124

At the time, philosophers believed that reason was an essential element of all human beings, and that to be human was to be rational. It was the reaffirmation of Aristotle’s claim of man as anima rationale. But with Descartes’s famous slogan of cogito ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”), it actually became possible to believe that reason was the engine of human progress and civilization because it was the source of all knowledge, and such knowledge could only be manufactured in one’s head independent of other organs of the body as well as one’s community of the living, the dead and the environment. To this general understanding of a human being, however, there was an exception – Black people. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 124

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that cogito-based reason severed knowledge from community and environment is the philosophic precondition for Tempels’s communitarian ontology; resonates with critiques of Cartesian individualism in African philosophy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that Descartes’s isolated cogito (knowledge manufactured ‘in one’s head independent of… one’s community of the living, the dead and the environment’) is the direct antithesis of Bantu relational ontology is dense and paradigm-shifting for how one reads both traditions.
• DEFINE: Explains the anima rationale/cogito frame that grounds European philosophical anthropology and its racial exception.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 124