The Age of Enlightenment is often highlighted as the epoch where Europeans and the Western world in general emerged from the ‘darkness’ of the Middle Ages and entered into the light of ‘reason’ and ‘science.’

It is an age celebrated as a time that gave the Western world freedom, liberal democracy, universal human rights, reason, and free thinking. By casting off the shackles of the old superstitions and religions, Europeans were able to free themselves from a worldview that was ‘holding them back.’ They replaced a Christian worldview with an atheistic, materialistic, and secular worldview.

The Enlightenment Age philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel are celebrated as liberalism’s great thinkers who lay the foundations for modern western civilisation with a more ‘humanistic’ society where morals and ethics are derived from our ‘reasoning’ and ‘thinking’ instead of a divinely inspired book, i.e., the bible.

In the modern western world’s celebration of these philosophers, there is a hidden aspect that they often tend to gloss over or deliberately neglect to mention. These so-called universal ‘rights of man’ were only for the enlightened white race. They were not for the barbarians and savages, i.e., the colonized peoples. Not until these uncivilised barbarians were willing to rid themselves of their old un-enlightened ways and undergo the same development and progression that the white Europeans had undergone, were they to be invited into the ‘civilised’ world and allowed to enjoy the same freedoms as the white masterclass. 

This is why today, we do not see the same standard of ‘rights’ being applied evenly and justly across the world. Not until the Muslims – and other peoples who uphold traditional ways of life – are willing to abandon their old world views and instead embrace modern western ways of living, i.e., only by giving up following revelation and applying it to their daily lives, will the bombings stop and ‘freedom’ be granted. They must embrace modern western civilisation, liberal democracy, human rights, and secularism as not only superior but also ‘right” and ‘correct,’ i.e., they have to embrace a new modern religion called liberalism.

Not only was the enlightenment age instrumental in forming the modern western conception of ‘freedom,’ it was also the foundation for the systematic scientific racism that is so prevalent today, as well as forming much of the world’s conflicts: from Gaza, to nationalism, to sectarianism, and the rise of the far right and the ‘woke’ left in Europe and the United States.

Kant and Hegel delivered the abstract thought system that became the catalyst for centuries of colonialism; and which, today, has embedded itself into the Western culture’s collective subconscious mind, which legitimises foreign wars and calls for deportation of Muslims.

Immanuel Kant and the Invention of the Biological Race Hierarchy

It is an immense paradox that Immanuel Kant, the founder of modern Western moral philosophy and the categorical imperative, also laid the foundations for racial anthropology and, along with it, the academic justification for colonialism and subjugation of what he deemed ‘inferior’ peoples.

In his lectures, Kant argued that the human race is divided into biological hierarchies. He placed the white European at the very top as the only one possessing the complete faculties of reason, science, and moral autonomy. Other peoples simply lacked the ability of abstract thinking. The non-whites were incapable of understanding the world at the same level as Europeans.

The very bottom is where he placed the African peoples and the indigenous peoples. As he put it, these races were simply incapable of rising above their raw animalistic nature.

This Kantian system of thinking had a profound impact on the worldview of the European thinkers of the time and, consequently, for our modern way of thinking too. The Universal Rights of Man were – in the eyes of the Enlightenment thinkers – beautiful and true, but they were only true for the white race who had proven themselves capable of true enlightenment, i.e., ridding themselves of both premodern ways of thinking and the moral boundaries of religion.

Other peoples could be divided into hierarchies according to their abilities to enter into this new age of enlightenment, but they were, per definition, inferior, due to their racially-bound deficiencies and, thereby, their inability to manage ‘freedom.’

This was a new system of thinking, a completely new way of life. A new religion was being invented, and it was one that was wholly man-made – no appeal to authority of a higher power, only the mind of man. The brain was the new deity, and the enlightenment philosophers became the prophets of this new religion.

Hegel and the ‘Spirit’ of World History

Where Kant based the exclusion of other races from achieving ‘enlightenment’ on the hierarchy of races, Hegel made it contingent on history. He argued that reason – personified in the ‘spirit’ of world history – was always destined to travel from the east to the west. In the west, it would find its final resting place in the hands of Christian (white) Europe.

Hegel recognised that Islam had revolutionised the Orient, that it broke with earlier times of paganistic and superstitious religions, and that it introduced monotheism. He also recognised the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as an important historical figure. He even recognised – to some extent – the important philosophical and scientific contributions of Muslim thinkers of the Middle Ages, as well as how they even had somewhat of an intellectual golden age.

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However, in Hegel’s dialectic system, this was not of utmost importance, because the Muslims had just been a temporary stop for carrying the ‘Spirit’ forward to its predestined final station in Europe. They had simply been temporary middlemen, a postman if you like, guarding the spirit of reason for a short period of time before it would eventually arrive at its final destiny. 

As such, the Muslims guarded and preserved the Greek philosophy but, according to Hegel, they did so without really or fully understanding it, due to their supposedly inferior minds. They did however dutifully deliver it to its rightful owners in Europe, who, because of their superior intellects and higher positions in the race hierarchy, were able to use it correctly. As soon as this task was fulfilled by the Muslims, they had served their purpose, and they were no longer needed.

He believed that the Muslims would no longer play a significant role in history, and the dawn of the new man, the European enlightened thinker, philosopher, and scientist would be the new ruler of the world until the end of history. It was largely due to this arrogant view of the Muslims, that Muslim contribution to academia, philosophy, science, and thinking was erased from the intellectual history of the world and Europe.

‘Manifest Destiny’

Unlike today, the philosophers of old – especially Hegel and Kant – were seen as today’s superstars. They did not just think abstract thoughts. They provided the moral frameworks and concepts that empires needed to justify their exploitation and killings of other peoples. They delivered the moral concepts that the French and British needed to justify their brutality.

If we look at colonialism from an economic lense only, the image is brutal:

Greediness, an obsession with gold, cotton, and power.

Brutal killing and slaughtering of original peoples and natives.

Occupation and annexation of the entire world.

Horror and death for one’s own gain.

But if we look at it from a philosophical perspective, we can paint a picture of a higher moral goal, and with a little bit of spellcasting, we can use language to re-brand the brutal theft and exploitation as a moral and civilisational necessity.

In France, they coined the term ‘Mission civilisatrice’ (civilising mission), which became the backbone of French self-understanding. They had a mission to civilise the un-enlightened peoples.

The Brits had the idea of ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ i.e., it was the white man’s heavy, albeit necessary, burden to govern societies who were unable to catch up with history’s evolutionary train.

Finally, the United States picked up from where Europe left off, carrying on Kant’s and Hegel’s thinking with the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny’: the American idea that the US was divinely selected and poised to spread liberty and democracy from coast to coast and, eventually, to the rest of the world.

German philosophical thinking thereby played an essential role in giving the Brits, the French, and, later on, the Americans the legal and philosophical framework to justify the colonisation, exploitation, and coercion of the entire world into a system of man-made laws that serve the few higher classes of society.

By cloaking the brutality, the invasion, the exploitation, and racism in a colourful new language of ‘philosophy,’ they went from invaders and tyrants to ‘civilisers’ and ‘bringers of freedom and democracy.’

It is no different from the spellcasting being used today. The ‘manifest destiny’ will come full circle when Israel makes its move and tries to replace America as the ruling state of the world.

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