The ambitious African philosopher finds herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She has to convince the West that she has something interesting to say about philosophy. She has to insist that African philosophy is not the same as ‘philosophy in Africa’. And by insisting on African philosophy, she stamps her foot hard on the ground and defends the virtue of originality: innovative thinking that’s not subservient to the dominant Western tradition of philosophical thinking and which, at the same time, transcends traditional African thought. The other front of her struggle is Africa. She has to confront a very limited local audience averse to radical creative thinking. Most of her colleagues don’t think that ‘originality’ is possible or even desirable. These are colleagues who studied Western philosophy all through college, and had come to see Western philosophy as the supreme and only universal template of philosophy. [...]
The idea of ‘consolation’ philosophy does not imply an attempt to comfort philosophers. Rather, it suggests a philosophy of life, a project similar to the human-centred philosophical projects of Western existentialists such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gabriel Marcel, Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Emmanuel Levinas and German idealists such as Arthur Schopenhauer. Here I offer a brief presentation of this African philosophical synthesis, which I hope will help to resolve the dilemma eloquently put forward in 1997 by professor of philosophy at Penn State University Robert Bernasconi: ‘Either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt.’ [...]
The human being as a melancholy being is the entity defined first by emotion, which is fundamental, and secondly by reason, which is a structured intellectual capacity with roots in the nature of the melancholy being as a creature of mood. Mood is an originary intelligence, the basis of feeling, a primordial reason, a proto-mind from which advanced reason, thought, affects and attitudes arise. The conception of mood in the dimension of a proto-mind – and the results that this conception produces for speculative metaphysics – distinguishes my thought-system from the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, for example. In other words, consolation philosophy understands the human being as a unity of emotion and reason, with both aspects of her nature having a real efficacy in the physical world and, therefore, equally important, without the one diminishing the value of the other. Emotion supplies the primal, motivational energy of life while reason structures the realities we embrace by simple faith. [...]
Given the impossibility of freedom, I hold that the meaning of existence, from the human standpoint rather than from the standpoint of an omniscient mind, is the realisation of ‘consolation’. While the goal of existence (perfection) is unrealisable, there is meaning (consolation) in existence that is realisable. Consolation is realisable and has been realised in human beings in the moment-to-moment maximisation of the emotion of joy in the life of the melancholy being who defines her intellectual project from an understanding of herself as a being thrown into a world whose purpose she doesn’t know but can only speculate about. Consolation is realisable – and has been realised in nonsentient nature at the micro level of atomic and subatomic impulses in the endless striving for what I speculate as consciousness as a step on the road to perfection.
No comments:
Post a Comment