THE CONSTRUCTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 545dispositions [Anlagen]’ (1997a: 42). The
phenomenon of ‘race’, however, is polygenetic,
arising in different parts of the world as a result
of the modification of germs and natural disposi-
tions by specific features of climate (temperature
and humidity combined) as well as in response to
a variety of landscape stimuli, such as the abun-
dance (or lack) of flora and fauna, or even the
visual distance to the horizon, which might have
an effect on human sight. In particular, black-
ness, the most significant ‘proof’ of both moral
lassitude and stupidity, occurs because:the drying up [by the hot sun] of the vessels that carry
the blood and serum under the skin brings about the lack
of a beard and the short curly hair. Likewise, because the
sunlight that falls through the surface skin into the dried
up vessels eats up the reticular membrane, there arises
the appearance of black color. (1997c: 61–2)Kant believed it ‘curious’, however, that people
of other ‘races’, particularly the European race,
seemed immune to such genetic transformation,
for ‘The Europeans who live in this hot belt of
the world do not become Negroes after many
generations but rather retain their European
figure and color’ (1997c: 60).
Overlying the effects of climate in Kant’s
schematic are what he called ‘national character-
istics’, which determine a society’s level of
appreciation for the beautiful and the sublime,
the two most elevated aspects of aesthetic sense.
At the top of his national scale are the Germans,
who are able to appreciate both, while those of
French and English heritage are more limited in
their sensibilities, the French tending towards a
sense of the beautiful, the English towards the
sublime (1997b: 50–1). In the same schematic,
while the natives of North America are capable
of a certain nobility that does not equal that of the
Europeans but is valuable in its own right, the
African has ‘by nature no feeling that rises above
the trifling’ (1997b: 55).
Kant’s unequivocal views amount to a compre-
hensive justification for a sense of European moral
superiority that underlies Enlightenment thought.
The world was controlled by the European eye/I,
whose gaze represented the judgement of the civi-
lized mind. Ultimately, for Kant:The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world,
above all the central part, has a more beautiful body,
works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his
passions, more intelligent than any other race of people
in the world. That is why at all points in time these peo-
ples have educated the others and controlled them with
weapons. (1997c: 64)Kant’s views on ‘race’ are not original; as
Livingstone points out, ‘in large measure thespecifics of his teaching were culled from the
conventional German geographical lore of the
day, and from Büsching and Varenius in particu-
lar’ (1992: 114). Kant’s ideas are important,
however, for three reasons. First, as the inaugural
holder of a chair in geography at a European
university, he influenced a large number of
students, and his lectures continued to have
widespread authority for many years, indeed
centuries, after they were presented. The fact that
he was primarily known as one of the foremost
philosophers of his time, and that his writings on
the possibility of human knowledge have
affected western thought at its most profound
level, further enhanced his credibility as a
teacher of geography. Second, as Livingstone
(1992, 1994) also points out, Kant was responsi-
ble for elevating much human knowledge of the
world from the realm of religious faith to that
of scientific knowledge. Over the course of the
next two centuries, while many of the specific
facts of Kant’s scientific explanations were
modified, expanded or discarded, a fundamental
belief in the absolute and scientific verifiability
of racial difference never wavered. In particular,
the belief in the environmental determinism of
human value was to dominate the discipline
of geography well into the twentieth century.
And third, Kant’s work – again, in the company
of most of the influential writers of his
day – provides an imperative for linking ‘race’
and human moral value, thus justifying the most
heinous acts of colonial violence, subjugation
and oppression against people deemed by
European eyes to be inferior beings incapable of
appreciating a better life. Kant’s work was thus
part of a larger intellectual context in which the
classification of human beings, according to a
putative scale of civilization that made the white
more civilized and distant from nature than the
black, justified and played into the interests of
the colonial project (Anderson, 1998a; 2000).
Recent work by cultural geographers shows the
tenacity of Enlightenment racialized knowledge
as intellectual fuel for geography’s emergence
during the late nineteenth century as a leading
international science. Two overwhelming
and intersecting characteristics – its role in
supporting and advancing the European colonial
project, and its intellectual fascination with what
Livingstone (1992) has called ‘climate’s moral
economy’ – dominated nineteenth-century geo-
graphy. A growing number of historical geo-
graphers has documented the role of geography in
the advancement of colonialism (Driver, 1992;
Godlewska and Smith, 1994; Mayhew, 2000:
Chapter 12; Withers, 1997). Mayhew (2000;
227–8) claims that during the late nineteenth3029-ch30.qxd 03-10-02 11:09 AM Page 545