Rethinking Prejudice

Andreas Dorschel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351726788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2000. Rethinking Prejudice offers the first philosophical monograph on the concept of prejudice. It takes its start from a study of Enlightenment thought, and pursues the topic to the reassessment of prejudice in contemporary hermeneutics. Yet history of ideas is a means rather than an end in this book. Dorschel analyzes the debates about prejudice from the 17th century onwards in order to shed light upon present concerns. Prejudice is not something peculiar to racists and similarly sinister figures, Dorschel argues; rather, it is an indispensable part of everyone's intellectual repertoire; if relevant phenomena are to be criticized, a genuine moral stance cannot be avoided. This book introduces and explores a topic of wide interest, particularly to those researching within the fields of philosophy, history of ideas, cultural studies, and social and political theory.

Chapter One
On Enlightenment, Especially on its Conclusion that all Prejudices Should be Abandoned

1. What is prejudice? Many European languages represent the phenomenon in question in the same way. Πρόκριμα, praeiudicium, pregiudizio, prejuicio, prejugé, prejudice, Vorurteil: The first part of these words tells us that it is something which comes 'before': to hold a prejudice is to judge ahead of time.¹ A prejudice seems simply to be a premature judgement.

Etymologically, this idea of prejudice as precipitate judgement is correct; but conceptually, it is too wide an idea. For it would make even the most banal errors of judgement into prejudices. If I judge that all doorknobs are coloured gold, because I have seen a single brass doorknob, my judgement is certainly precipitate; but it would seem strange to call it a 'prejudice'.² Prejudices may share an important feature with such trivial mistakes, but at the same time the word clearly suggests something more special. In fact it would not be unreasonable to regard all errors of judgement as in some sense the result of precipitation. Whoever errs, judges about things he does not yet fully understand. He could, we suppose in any case of error, by way of ongoing scrutiny arrive at a correct view. 'Prejudice', however, is not a synonym for mistake. If prejudices are errors, they are errors of a very particular sort.

2. This does not mean that we have begun in the wrong place. The formation of the word is significant. Even if we assume that the meaning of 'prejudice' has changed - as it seems to have done in the age of Enlightenment - that change must have made sense in terms of the word's original meaning. There must have been a reason why that particular word was chosen for that particular new task. So we have been right to start as we have done; but we have to be more precise.

The first part of the English word 'prejudice' and its European equivalents, we have said, tells us that it is something which comes before something else. But before what? Perhaps before we get to know what the prejudice is a judgement about. In prejudice we pass judgement on something before we have actually encountered it. Prejudice, it appears, precedes actual experience; hence it is not based on it. Since it is formed before evidence, it is therefore formed without evidence. Someone who is the victim of his prejudices ('la victime de ses préjugés'), says the author of a radical Enlightenment pamphlet on this subject, du Marsais, has neither experience nor reason ('n'a ni expérience ni raison'). According to this work, the Essai sur les préjugés edited by d'Holbach in 1770, a prejudiced person is the hapless plaything of his own inexperience ('le jouet infortuné de son inexpérience propre').³

The claim that prejudices lack experience raises two questions: Why should experience be so important? And: What follows if prejudices lack experience?

First, why should experience be so important? Experience, in a significant way, always has to be my experience. If someone else reports a certain experience to me, then, strictly speaking, I do not have that experience. It follows that as long as experience forms the basis of my beliefs, I am the author of my beliefs. On the other hand, if I labour under prejudice, it seems that I am not the author of my beliefs. My beliefs are guided by others. Freedom from prejudice, then, is intellectual autonomy, and I have acquired it as soon as I can substantiate every judgement I make by appeal to my own experience. This seems to be the reason for the importance of experience, stressed permanently by du Marsais.⁴

Secondly, what follows if prejudices lack experience? As du Marsais's choice of words (e.g., 'infortuné') indicates, his remarks are not meant as a mere description of prejudice. They are at once an assessment of it. Prejudices, du Marsais suggests, are something we have to dispose of altogether. Being void of first-hand experience, prejudices separate us from reality. ('First hand', in this context, does not state an additional condition. It only makes explicit an implication. For what is merely second hand is, strictly speaking, not an experience at all.) To approach reality would mean, as du Marsais puts it, to cut through the veil of prejudices.⁵

The Enlightenment which invented - or discovered? - prejudice as a philosophical topic, brought it up mostly to reject it. The elevation of prejudice from an inconspicuous legal term to an epistemological, moral and political cause célèbre was intended to do away with it; this motif lasts from the early to the late stage of this intellectual movement. Bacon's preface to his Instauratio Magna from 1620,⁶ for instance, as well as Poullain de la Barre's treatise on the equality of sexes from 1673 (which, as its subtitle - Où l'on voit l'importance de se défaire des Préjugez' - insinuates and its preface points out, was intended as a case study in a Cartesian treatment of prejudice),⁷ d'Alembert's preliminary discourse to the Encyclopédie from 1751,⁸ du Marsais's essay on prejudice from 1770,⁹ Kant's article on enlightenment from 1783¹⁰ or Condorcet's outline of the human spirit's progress from 1793/ 94¹¹ mention prejudice merely as something from which men, by the use of reason, have to rid themselves. They have to do so completely, these authors urge, for if only some prejudices were eliminated, while others were kept, the result would be inconsistency.¹²

3. Our analysis has revealed three distinct elements of a critical theory of prejudice: Firstly, prejudices lack experience; secondly, the self should be in control of its beliefs, which is the case if these are founded in its own experience; thirdly, therefore prejudices should be abandoned.

The argument may at first appear cogent. But actually the logical nexus is less tight than it seems to be. This is not hard to discern for the second element which is supposed to hold the inference together. The link between experience and cognitive autonomy is not as compelling as has been suggested. Certainly, experience must be my own, in the sense in which this has been asserted. But it does not follow that, conversely, every insight that can properly be called my own has to be derived from experience. Looking for empirical evidence is just one way of checking or examining a question for myself; thinking things through is another way to do this, especially where the matter is not one of observation at all. What I myself have thought can be attributed to me as basis of my insight with no less right than what I have experienced.

The inference is thus rendered invalid by its second element. We are left with three claims whose logical relations need to be re-examined: Firstly, prejudices lack experience; secondly, prejudices signal the absence of intellectual autonomy; thirdly, prejudices must be abandoned. We shall now continue our scrutiny of the second claim (§§ 4-7). The first claim, concerning experience, will be taken up later (§§ 9, 18-34), while the third question, whether prejudices can and should be abandoned altogether, will be with us throughout these investigations (in the present chapter §§ 8, 10-17).

4. The maxim of enlightenment, or of unprejudiced thinking, says Kant, is always to think for yourself.¹³ Prejudice, then, is simply failure to think for oneself, or intellectual lieteronomy.¹⁴ A person fails to think for herself, Kant says, when her understanding is guided by someone else.¹⁵ Consequently, if we want to know what is wrong with prejudice, we merely have to consider what it is not to think for ourselves, or, to have our understanding guided not by ourselves, but by someone else.

We might first suggest that a person does not think for himself, when he takes into account what others think. This cannot be right, however. Understood in this way, thinking for oneself would be neither desirable nor even possible. A self-thinker of this sort would be an incommunicado; but then it is doubtful whether a person could think at all if deprived of communication. We do not wish, nor, it seems, are we capable of doing our thinking alone to the point of not even considering others' views.¹⁶

We ought, at any rate, have some way of distinguishing autonomy from autism. Diderot insists that the eclectic, who is by definition someone who takes the thoughts of others into account, thinks for himself ('penser de luimême'):¹⁷ he thinks for himself what others have thought already, and he is in no way inconsistent in doing so.

5. How else might we interpret the idea that someone fails to think for himself? We might find it more appropriate to say that a person's understanding is guided by another, if he acts on the basis of somebody else's judgement without checking its accuracy himself. The demand that men should purge their minds from any opinion merely adopted rather than examined independently was indeed frequently voiced in Enlightenment quarters. Kant himself suggests this reading. In his essay on enlightenment, he has the unenlightened person explain herself thus: I do not need to think, if only I can pay; others will undertake the annoying business for me.¹⁸ As Rüdiger Bittner points out, the analogy here is with a person who, for instance, pays someone to clean her windows because she doesn't want to do it herself. Just as in this case the person eventually enjoys a clear view without doing a hand's turn herself, so the unenlightened person, according to Kant, avails herself of the results of another's reflections without herself following the train of thoughts that leads there.

Yet here again thinking for oneself seems to be unattractive, if not impossible. Ί hate to prepare my tax return and get an accountant to do it', Bittner says. 'Here indeed I do not need to think if only I can pay. I accept the accountant's judgment without checking its accuracy, and yet I act on this basis, since it is still me, not the accountant, who is declaring my income to the tax authority and who is legally responsible for the declaration. However, saving myself some thought by paying does not seem such a terrible thing in this case'. So one wonders what should be wrong in principle with not thinking for oneself, understood in this way.¹⁹

6. Bittner sketches a third interpretation, formed in response to the failure of the previous one: 'Sure, there is nothing wrong in general with relying on another's judgment. There is something wrong with it in particular instances. Sometimes people give more weight to another's judgment than is warranted in the case at hand. It is all very well to pay somebody for preparing your tax return. It is a mistake to pay somebody for telling you what to do in every situation of life and always to feel bound to that person's orders. This is the sort of mistake that Kant has in mind when he speaks of somebody being guided by another, and it is the sort of mistake that enlightenment is intended to overcome'.²⁰

As Bittner makes clear, however, 'the injunction not to let oneself be guided by another becomes useless on this reading. The injunction now means: Do not put too much weight on others' judgments. This, however, while difficult to do, is trivial to say. We would need to know what the right weight is in any particular case in order to use that rule, and this is just what we do not know'.²¹

As a number of Enlightenment authors have plausibly pointed out, authority is a major source of prejudice.²² Evidently, the third interpretation refers to cases where people rely too heavily on the pronouncements of authorities. One of Kant's contemporaries who made the point in this way was Thomas Reid. In a chapter entitled Of Prejudices, the Causes of Error', Reid set out to illustrate the most influential classification of prejudices, that of Francis Bacon, 'that wonderful genius';²³ referring to what Bacon called the idola tribus, Reid claims it is a defect common to the whole human species that 'Men are prone to be led too much by authority in their opinions'.²⁴ But it is a tautology to call this a defect; there is nothing in the world that one should do 'too heavily' or 'too much'. Μηδέν αγαν teaches us nothing; for how could 'too much' be understood if not as that which goes beyond the proper measure of something.

But by this third interpretation Kant's imperative to think for oneself rather than to have one's understanding guided by another is not only rendered useless. The interpretation actually misrepresents what is going on. The salient point is that there is no way to rely on the pronouncements of an authority except by accepting him as authoritative, i.e., thinking for oneself that he is endowed with the pertinent qualities. (Toland crudely insinuates that a prejudiced person is 'led like a Beast by Authority',²⁵ as if such an idea had ever been heard of among animals.) Of course people make mistakes here as they do in any other sort of reasoning. They rely on authorities who do them harm. They attribute qualities to others that these do not possess. But then their errors are mistakes of reasoning for themselves, not something opposed to it. Relying on authority does not preclude the use of one's own understanding, but is a particular form of it (and, like all other forms, liable to error).

It is sensible to trust many, though not all, tax acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Analytical Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 On Enlightenment, Especially on its Conclusion that all Prejudices Should be Abandoned
• 2 On the Intricate Relation of Prejudice to Experience, and on its Alleged Stupidity
• 3 On the Hermeneutic Vindication of Prejudice, and Why it Does not Succeed
• 4 On the Paradox of Recommending Prejudices, and the Ways in which it can be Circumvented
• 5 On Morality, Sadism, and Related Matters, or How to See that Prejudice is not to be Dispensed with
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects