N this introductory chapter, attention will focus ...



The History of African Philosophy

1) Historical Periods

- Drawing on the 4 Western Philosophical Historical periods as a touchstone, African Philosophy flourished in all four, though only in written form in three (Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary). The “Medieval” period was a time of primarily “oral” philosophy

-

- Ancient Philosophy

o In Greece, Philosophy began around 600 BC

o In Egypt, Philosophy began around 3000 BC

- Medieval Philosophy

o In Africa, during this long span of time, philosophy was primarily an oral tradition, meaning it was passed from adepts to initiates, never written down, a kind of secret knowledge and wisdom reserved only for those who were worthy to receive it.

- Modern Philosophy

o In Africa, scholars got their hands on the Medieval Western philosophical texts (St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, etc.) as well as the Modern Western philosophical texts (Descartes) and created their own, unique body of work analyzing and critiquing these Western texts (all of this around the 17th century AD, i.e., the 1600s)

▪ The center of philosophy during this period was Abyssinia, a country which is essentially Ethiopia today

- Contemporary Philosophy

o In Africa, phenomenology of race and hermeneutics thrived as they did in the West (we’ll get into those terms in a moment)

2) Let’s Talk About Egypt

- Egypt is clearly part of Africa, but because it’s situated on the Mediterranean, it’s usually considered part of “Western” philosophy. But why is that? There’s quite a debate about it.

o Some African scholars argue that Egyptian philosophy is African philosophy and should be considered as such

▪ Greeks didn’t settle in Africa until around 333BC but before that (and their influences) for thousands of years Egypt had its own philosophy

- Ancient Egyptian Philosophy and Influences on Greek Philosophy, not the other way around

o The famous historian Herodotus tells us that many of the greatest Greek philosophers traveled to Egypt where they may have actually been influenced by the doctrines they found there:

▪ Thales (arguably the first Greek Presocratic philosopher)

▪ Pythagoras (arguably one of the greatest Greek mathematicians and philosophers of all time)

▪ Plato (goes without saying how famous he is)

- The bias-parallel:

o Medieval philosophy was a fusion of Greek philosophy with the Gospel of Christ. As great as those Medieval scholars were, the problem is that in doing it that way, it makes it seem like the Greeks were just a stepping stone to true philosophy (the Gospel), a latter that can be kicked away once it’s been climbed.

▪ Similarly, because the term “philosophy” is a Greek term, scholars do the same kind of thing with Egyptian philosophy, namely, say that philosophy really started in Greece and what came before was just the preamble to real philosophy.

- - Of ancient Egyptian philosophy, one of the most famous was “The Moral Teachings of Ptah-hotep” dating back to around 2400 BC.

o Thirty-seven principles (for lack of a better word) that justify certain forms of behavior as being moral (Maat).

▪ respect for proper speech, respect for elders and leaders, ritual remembrance, good behavior, absence of arrogance, lack of threats, absence of gossip, pursuit of truth, attainment of justice, generosity, self-control, impartiality, avoidance of hasty speech, masking one’s inner feelings, and good listening skills

• “If you are mighty and powerful then gain respect through knowledge and through your gentleness of speech. Don’t order things except as it is fitting. The one who provokes others gets into trouble. Don’t be haughty lest you be humbled. But also don’t be mute lest you be chided. When you answer one who is fuming, turn your face and control yourself. The flame of the hot- hearted sweeps across everything. But he who steps gently, his path is a paved road. He who is agitated all day has no happy moments, but he who amuses himself all day can’t keep his fortune.”

o Here we have “turn the other cheek” thousands of years before Christ

• “The fool who does not hear [listen, observe, and speak with care and fore- thought], he can do nothing at all. He looks at ignorance and sees knowledge. He looks at harmfulness and sees usefulness. He does everything that one detests and is blamed for it every day. He lives on the thing by which one dies. His food is evil speech [things that are not true]. His sort is known to the officials who say, “There goes a living death every day.” One ignores the things that he does because of his many daily troubles.”

o Here we have “the unexamined life is not worth living” thousands of years before Socrates

- There was also a strong oral tradition of philosophy in Egypt

- We call this “occult philosophy” from the Latin “occultus” meaning “hidden.” The idea being don’t cast pearls before swine, i.e., some knowledge is powerful and shouldn’t fall into the hands of those who are not virtuous or not wise. So a teacher to student, teacher to student, oral tradition began which extended into the medieval period explaining, in part, why not much was written down in that time (not that philosophy wasn’t happening)

- Egypt’s technological innovation was second-to-none in the world.

▪ Masonry, engineering, chemistry, were all far ahead of what the Greeks were producing at the time

• The claim is that there was no doctrine, only practice, but there is reason to challenge this since the Egyptians fused their theology and mysticism into everything they did

- There is a legend of a sage of immeasurable power, wisdom, and ancient legacy known as “Hermes Trismegistus,” (the Thrice-Blessed). His original name, however, was Egyptian, Theuth (or “Thoth”), the god of wisdom. Some say he was actually a man and we do have many texts written by someone bearing that name. Though the texts themselves date from long after Plato and Aristotle (around 200AD), the ideas are eerily present in many things that Plato and Aristotle were talking about and it opens the possibility that an oral tradition, if not a written tradition, was present in ancient Egypt to supplement their scientific and technical pursuits

Hermeticism is a great example of this:

o Hermeticism, whose origins were clearly Egyptian, supposedly pre-dated Greek philosophy, though that’s a hotly debated point and not to be assumed lightly. By the time it did get written down, however, it was so mixed up with Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine it’s impossible to tell which aspects of it were purely Egyptian

- According to Hermeticism, God made a second God, a Son, the Divine Light/the Divine Mind, who created the heavens and the earth. Once the cosmos was created by this second God, the original God, the Father, wanted someone to share in his joy at his new creation so made a third God, the Cosmic Man, perfect and completely spirit. Cosmic Man looked down upon the world and saw Nature (the Earth) and saw how beautiful it was an fell in love. Nature then beheld Cosmic Man, seeing the divine Light of God radiating inside him, she fell in love with him, as well. They embraced, she wrapped her arms around him, and in so doing, encased him in matter (earth and water), making him a body encasing a soul. Man then became unique in the universe. His soul drives him to know and love God, his body makes him love Nature and thus Man became both a pastor for God and a caretaker of the earth. Through his wisdom, Man was capable of working great wonders, knowing that God bound all things together, he could strip away properties from one earthy substance and change it into another. This is called “transmutation,” all to the point of perfecting the garden of God called Nature. Over time, however, some humans became too enamored with Nature, and gave in to the part of themselves that was base and material and forgot about their divine half. The wisdom and power and magic faded until only a few magi remained, Trismegistus one of the last of his kind, and here he writes to his disciples to pass on this knowledge but also to keep it safe from those who are unworthy. We get the world’s first “occult” philosophy, from the Latin occultus meaning “hidden,” or “kept secret” from those unworthy to know the Truth. He preached temperance and moderation, to care for the soul not the body, to care for nature as the garden of God, and through the power of the mind, one day, upon death of the body, the soul of the virtuous would rise up past the stars and merge with God, becoming God by realizing that within the casing of the body, the soul is God, and God is the soul, one purified substance.

- This doctrine merged perfectly with the chemical and masonry practices of Egypt forging “alchemy,” the precursor to “chemistry” (knowledge of one underlying substance and the ability to change secondary properties to turn one thing into another) from the Egyptian “chem,” meaning “black” or “shadowy” (the hidden or secret art).

- Now turning to the other huge historical epoch, 17th century:

o Abyssinian philosopher of the seventeenth century was a man named Zar’a Ya’aqob (1599–1692)

o “The Treatise of Zar’a Ya’aqob.” In the original Ge’ez language, it is known as the Hatata.

Zar’a Ya’aqob was a religious man who had been educated in the Coptic Christian faith but, as his manuscript indicates, was also familiar with other Christian sects (Catholicism), Islam, Judaism, and Indian religion (Hinduism, Buddhism). Indeed, it was the dilemma of choosing between these conflicting faiths, all meant to worship God, that appears to have been one of the motivating factors in his decision to rely upon his own powers of reasoning or understanding to promote his own personal non- sectarian relationship with that God:

“All men are equal in the presence of God, and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment. Our reason teaches us that this kind of dis- crimination cannot exist in the sight of God. . . . But Moses was sent to teach only the Jews. . . . Why did God reveal his law to one nation, withhold it from another? At this very time Christians say: “God’s doctrine is only found with us”; similarly with the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Indians and the others. Moreover the Christians do not agree among themselves: the Frang [Europeans, Catholics] tell us: “God’s doctrine is not with you, but with us.”

Consequently, Zar’a Ya’aqob tells us, “People took me for a Christian when I was dealing with them; but in my heart I did not believe in anything except in God who created all and conserves all, as he had taught me”

What is philosophically remarkable about this text is the prominence, indeed primacy, it assigns to human reason or understanding as the arbiter, or agency, responsible for what a person decides to accept as true:

“But truth is one. While thinking over this matter, I said: “O my creator, wise among the wise and just among the just, who created me with an intelligence, help me to understand, for men lack wisdom and truthfulness.””

“God indeed has illuminated the heart of man with understanding by which he can see the good and evil, recognize the licit [right] and illicit [wrong], distinguish truth from error.”

“Man aspires to know truth and the hidden things of nature, but this endeavour is difficult and can only be attained with great labour and patience, as Solomon said: “With the help of wisdom I have been at pains to study all that is done under heaven; oh what a weary task God has given mankind to labour at!” Hence people hastily accept what they have heard from their fathers and shy from any [critical] examination.”

“Behold, I have begun an inquiry such as has not been attempted before. You can complete what I have begun so that the people of our country will be- come wise with the help of God and arrive at the science of truth, lest they believe in falsehood, trust in depravity, go from vanity to vanity, that they know the truth and love their brother, lest they quarrel about their empty faith as they have been doing till now.”

But what is of greater philosophical interest is the critical methodology that underlies all of these re®ections, the method- ology that has come to be identi¤ed with the Ge’ez word “hatata.”

And the human faculty primarily responsible for its activation or application is designated by the word amr, which, Sumner tells us, “usually has the meaning of ‘reason’; and, in a descending ratio, of ‘intelligence,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘science,’ ‘thoughts’ and ‘doctrine(s).’ In Zar’a Ya’aqob, reason is presented as a light which sheds clarity on the object it focuses upon. It is God-given, and belongs to all men. It enables them to distinguish truth from falsehood” (Sumner 1978, 107).

Sumner characterizes the role of reason in the hatata overall:

Inquiry and reason are linked up as activity or process together with the intellectual power which is at their source. “The light of reason” . . . is purely philosophical and positive. It is the very means or condition for the application of the inquiry to any specific problem. The hatata presupposes the power of comprehending and inferring, an intellectual activity, the due exercise of the reasoning faculty or of right thinking. Such an activity ac- quires a vital importance in the philosophy of Zar’a Ya’aqob . . . since it permits the discrimination between the results of independent thinking and the lies which are perpetuated among those who accept indiscriminately what has been transmitted to them by the social environment in which they were brought up. It is the light which dispels the darkness that blocks those who are intellectually blind. (Sumner 1978, 104–105)

Yet another African figure of historical importance is the Ghanaian philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703–1765).

This amounted to a critique of slavery, more specifically of the African slave trade. Drawing upon Europe’s proud heritage of the Roman Empire, Amo seems to have argued that Rome was justly famous for eventually awarding all of her population—domestic and “foreign”—Roman citizen- ship. In principle, this made the entire population free and equal citizens of Rome, including those who lived in Africa. Therefore, Amo argued, Europeans were violating their own cultural heritage by enslaving human beings whom their own culture, as both Roman and Christian, had once recognized as free and equal and no different from themselves.

Amo’s second (doctoral) dissertation, which is now to be found in the libraries of a number of universities, was a severe critique of the ‘modern’ French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes is probably best known for his thesis of dualism—that the human being is a composite of a material substance (the body) and an immaterial substance (the mind). Descartes also maintained (which plain commonsense would say is obvi- ous) that the (immaterial) mind experiences physical (bodily) sensations (pain, etc.). Amo suggested this was somehow problematic, inconsistent, or even a contradiction in terms. And, indeed, how two fundamentally different substances could interact became one of the more celebrated weak points of Cartesian philosophy, underscored by Descartes’ having recourse to the lowly pineal gland as the point at which immaterial mind and material body somehow intercommunicated.

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Negritude movement

Capitalism, with its virtues of self-interest and exploitation, could not be happily reconciled with such an essentially humanitarian worldview. In fact, it would destroy it. Theoretical Marxism or communism, which emphasizes class confliict (between capitalists and workers, for example) as a motivating force for social and political change, also did not seem obvi- ously relevant to a population that consisted largely of subsistence farmers. What was needed was a social and political ideology more realistically tai- lored for the African context.

a sample from A Tempest, Amie Cesaire’s reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s classic tale of the slave Caliban and his master, the magus Prospero:

Prospero, you’re a great magician:

You’re an old hand at deception.

And you lied to me so much,

About the world, about myself

That you ended up imposing on me

An image of myself:

Underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent

That’s how you made me see myself!

And I hate that image . . .

But now I know you, you old cancer,

And I also know myself! And I know that one day

My bare fist, just that,

Will be enough to crush your world!

The old world is crumbling down![1]

Cesaire, one of the most influential voices in the negritude movement, attempted to reestablish a firm black identity in the face of post-colonial racism and an increasingly expanding black Diaspora. As I note elsewhere:

What is so intriguing about the aforementioned passage is that this moment of resistance and disruption presupposes a significant period of time in which the image that Prospero purposively constructed and imposed upon his servant had real efficacy and in a very real sense determined how Caliban identified himself. At some point, Prospero…replaced Caliban’s otherwise free, autonomous process of self-determination with an artificially constructed “imago.”[2]

The key to Prospero’s domination over Caliban (and, consequently, the maintaining of his power) relied upon his implanting in Caliban the belief that Caliban was, necessarily,[3] a slave, “undercompetent,” and predetermined as precisely what he was. Obfuscating the contingency of such a belief (as something that Prospero constructed), it was pawned off as timeless necessity, making Caliban self-identify with this false self-image or “imago.”

-----------------------

[1] Amié Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002), 61-62.

[2] Clancy Smith, “Prestidigitation and Racial Oppression: Falsity and the Demystification of Social Manipulation,” Purlieu (vol. 1, issue 2, Spring 2011), p. 62.

[3] The efficacy of the “imago” lies in its manifestation as a belief, proliferated by an authority in a manner akin to Peirce’s insights in “Fixation,” as necessary and timeless. By this I mean the belief (the imago) couldn’t be other than than it and those that come to identify with it come to see themselves as pre-determined as such. If the belief, itself, held even a hint of contingency in its proliferation, it would come laden with the requisite doubt necessary to challenge it and, if needs be, dissolve it through inquiry.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download