Feijoo and the Problem of Ethiopian Color

Abstract

A. Owen Aldridge SOMETIMES IN THE HISTORY of ideas, certain authors are associated with major concepts even though these concepts may not be original with them or even particularly significant to the totality of their literary work. A good example is the theory of the influence of climate upon human character, which has been uni­ versally associated with Montesquieu; yet it was not originated by the author of L’Esprit des lois, he did not develop it in any signif­ icant manner, and he actually referred to it only briefly and casual­ ly in his great treatise on government. The concept played a much greater role in the work of the learned Spanish ecclesiastic Benito Geronimo Feijoo (1676-1764). Indeed he was in his Mapa intelectual y cotejo de naciones the very first of all the many authors who discussed this question to distinguish between theory and fact in regard to climate.1 As a result Feijoo rejected the theory that climate has the power of influencing human character. Most of the psychological, biological, and metaphysical concepts treated by the French philosophes in the first half of the eighteenth century are also discussed or touched upon in Feijoo’s Teatro critico, which could just as appropriately have been entitled, like one of the works of Voltaire, a Dictionnaire philosophique. I have chosen Feijoo as the focus of my discussion not because of his preeminence as a writer or thinker, but on the contrary be­ cause he is relatively obscure. Even though he may possibly be classed as the foremost author of eighteenth-century Spain, he was of minimum consequence in the European Enlightenment as a whole. He serves as a better medium for illustrating the history 263 Racism in the Eighteenth Century of an idea than such luminaries as Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Gold­ smith, however, for they are sui generis, less than representative, and their brilliance tends to dazzle the reader or obscure the issue. A further advantage in using Feijoo is that he wrote a self-con­ tained essay, Color etiopico, entirely devoted to the problem of skin color, whereas most of the other writers concerned with the prob­ lem considered it as subsidiary to some other topic of inquiry.2 The question of skin color had been raised by a number of think­ ers, including the members of Montesquieu’s Academy of Bor­ deaux.3 In the year 1741 the Academy offered a prize for the best essay on the subject, and one of the contestants quoted extensive­ ly from the 1739 edition of Feijoo’s Teatro critico* In his essay Color etiopico, which appears in this collection, Feijoo attempted to decide whether blackness is a result of biological structure or climatic conditions—in other words, whether it is caused purely by heredity or by the cumulative effects of environment. This prob­ lem is closely related to a number of other questions debated in the eighteenth century at large and in Feijoo’s works in particular— whether the world is in a state of gradual decay; whether Ameri­ can Indians are a separate race or descendants of Europeans; whether biological species, including plants, animals, and human beings, degenerate when transported from Europe to America; and whether procreation takes place through the continual communi­ cation of fully-formed individuals all formerly contained in the sperm of the first father, Adam, or whether the male sperm and fe­ male egg together contribute to form entirely new beings. Feijoo’s Color etiopico represents an original approach to a sub­ ject of international significance, and it is by no means the prod­ uct of a provincial mind working in isolation. In the following dis­ cussion I shall try to reveal both the development of Feijoo’s thought on skin color and the relationship of his ideas to those of his contemporaries in other literatures. Following his usual practice, Feijoo divided his arguments be­ tween those based on accepted Catholic doctrine and those based on natural reason. At first glance it would seem that there would be no danger to orthodox doctrine in affirming either that the black color of the Ethiopians is "congenito a aquella raza de hombres, 264 Feijoo and the...