The African Enlightenment
The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave
 |
| Near Lalibela, in northern Ethiopia, the location of Zera Yacob’s cave |
Beloveds~
Below I share another wonderful gem from my homepage website, Art & Letters Daily. If you like news from all over the globe, and if you like thought provoking articles, reviews of books, and essays, then you must visit this website Arts & Letters Daily.
I love them because they always have some very interesting pieces that deepen my understanding of the many great contributions from people of African descent to humanity. Too often the Euro-centric perspective of academia and contemporary media, act as if philosophy and creative excellence began and was developed in Europe. Even today, the perspective of these two elements, like to volley 'greatness' between Europe and America as to what is established as noteworthy when discussing excellence, power and art.
I've shared great articles, essays and reviews of books on our authors, scientists, political and cultural leaders with my email family. What's unique about this site is that it draws phenomenal material from a wealth of different literary sources. It's not overly technical or academic, but it is for the person that enjoys using their grey matter, and for those that love to read as a path to discovery and acquiring revelations about Life. And there's a great list of international newspapers, and media outlets so you've got a wide range of sources, to help you define what is 'fake news' that Fox or CNN or NBC might be shoving down our throats. Do check it out.
As the US offers time to reflect on Black History Month (laughable) in February, let this offering deepen love of Self, and fortify the bonds of the excellent gifts of the past, that your Life embody in this moment. Your unique qualities are called to respond to the moment. The clarity, open-mindedness, and creative imagination that focuses on great(er) expectations because we KNOW what absolute wholeness feels like, and we sense what it might look like from OUR perspective. And OUR PERSPECTIVE is VALID and worthy of our honoring what our Hearts KNOW.
So we focus not on the antics of clowns, buffoons and ignorant fakers, but on Being the place where the dreams of our imagination, and delightful new possibilities coagulate. Focusing inwardly, we keep our minds on ONE SPOT, OUR IDEAL, and work and watch as IT takes form as new expressions of our living in the flow of unlimited Good in 2018.
And So It IS~
As always, I deeply appreciate any Comments, Feedback or Additions to the topic.
lovu,
Kendke
https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant
This article is written by~
is a historian of ideas and founder of
SGOKI (the Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas) in Oslo. His latest book is
Global Knowledge: Renaissance for a New Enlightenment, forthcoming (2016 original in Norwegian).
The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and
universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism,
secularism, and equality. In fact, no other era compares with the Age
of Enlightenment. Classical Antiquity is inspiring, but a world away
from our modern societies. The Middle Ages was more reasonable than its
reputation, but still medieval. The Renaissance was glorious, but
largely because of its result: the Enlightenment. The Romantic era was a
reaction to the Age of Reason – but the ideals of today’s modern states
are seldom expressed in terms of romanticism and emotion. Immanuel
Kant’s argument in the essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795) that ‘the human
race’ should work for ‘a cosmopolitan constitution’ can be seen as a
precursor for the United Nations.
As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s
Discourse on the Method
(1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume,
Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with
the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in
1793. By the time that Thomas Paine published
The Age of Reason in 1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.
But
what if this story is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in
places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted
me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian
philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.
Yacob
was born on 28 August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside
Axum, the legendary former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he
impressed his teachers, and was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (
siwasiw in Geéz, the local language), poetry and critical thinking (
qiné)
for four years. Then he went to another school to study the Bible for
10 years, learning the teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well
as the country’s mainstream Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been
Christian since the early 4th century, rivalling Armenia as the world’s
oldest Christian nation.)
In the 1620s, a Portuguese Jesuit
convinced King Susenyos to convert to Catholicism, which soon became
Ethiopia’s official religion. Persecution of free thinkers followed
suit, intensifying from 1630. Yacob, who was teaching in the Axum
region, had declared that no religion was more right than any other, and
his enemies brought charges against him to the king.
Yacob fled
at night, taking with him only some gold and the Psalms of David. He
headed south to the region of Shewa, where he came upon the Tekezé
River. There he found an uninhabited area with a ‘beautiful cave’ at the
foot of a valley. Yacob built a fence of stones, and lived in the
wilderness to ‘front only the essential facts of life’, as Henry David
Thoreau was to describe a similar solitary life a couple of centuries
later in
Walden (1854).
For two years, until the death of
the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit,
visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed
his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason,
and that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued
against slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and
combined these views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator,
reasoning that the world’s order makes that the most rational option.
In
short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment
had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian
cave from 1630 to 1632. Yacob’s reason-based philosophy is presented in
his main work,
Hatäta (meaning ‘the enquiry’). The book was
written down in 1667 on the insistence of his student, Walda Heywat, who
himself wrote a more practically oriented
Hatäta. Today, 350
years later, it’s hard to find a copy of Yacob’s book. The only
translation into English was done in 1976, by the Canadian professor and
priest Claude Sumner. He published it as part of a five-volume work on
Ethiopian philosophy, with the far-from-commercial Commercial Printing
Press in Addis Ababa. The book has been translated into German, and last
year into Norwegian, but an English version is still basically
unavailable.
Ethiopia was no stranger to philosophy before Yacob. Around 1510, the
Book of the Wise Philosophers
was translated and adapted in Ethiopia by the Egyptian Abba Mikael. It
is a collection of sayings from the early Greek Pre-Socratics, Plato,
and Aristotle via the neo-Platonic dialogues, and is also influenced by
Arabic philosophy and the Ethiopian discussions. In his
Hatäta,
Yacob criticises his contemporaries for not thinking independently, but
rather accepting the claims of astrologers and soothsayers just because
their predecessors did so. As a contrast, he recommends an enquiry
based on scientific rationality and reason – as every human is born with
intelligence and is of equal worth.
Far away, grappling with
similar questions, was Yacob’s French contemporary Descartes
(1596-1650). A major philosophical difference is that the Catholic
Descartes explicitly denounced ‘infidels’ and atheists, whom he called
‘more arrogant than learned’ in his
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). This perspective is echoed in Locke’s
A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), which concludes that atheists ‘are not at all to be tolerated’. Descartes’s
Meditations
was dedicated to ‘the dean and doctors of the sacred Faculty of
Theology in Paris’, and his premise was ‘to accept by means of faith the
fact that the human soul does not perish with the body, and that God
exists’.
In contrast, Yacob shows a much more agnostic, secular
and enquiring method – which also reflects an openness towards atheistic
thought. Chapter four of the
Hatäta starts with a radical
question: ‘Is everything that is written in the Holy Scriptures true?’
He goes on to point out that all the different religions claim theirs is
the true faith:
Indeed each one says: ‘My faith is
right, and those who believe in another faith believe in falsehood, and
are the enemies of God.’ … As my own faith appears true to me, so does
another one find his own faith true; but truth is one.
In
this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity
of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator.
His discussion of whether or not there is a God is more open-minded than
Descartes’s, and possibly more accessible to modern-day readers, as
when he incorporates
existentialist perspectives:
Who
is it that provided me with an ear to hear, who created me as a
rational being and how have I come into this world? Where do I come
from? Had I lived before the creator of the world, I would have known
the beginning of my life and of the consciousness of myself. Who created
me?
In chapter five, Yacob applies rational
investigation to the different religious laws. He criticises
Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Indian religions equally. For example,
Yacob points out that the Creator in His wisdom has made blood flow
monthly from the womb of women, in order for them to bear children.
Thus, he concludes that the law of Moses, which states that menstruating
women are impure, is against nature and the Creator, since it ‘impedes
marriage and the entire life of a woman, and it spoils the law of mutual
help, prevents the bringing up of children and destroys love’.
In
this way, Yacob includes the perspectives of solidarity, women and
affection in his philosophical argument. And he lived up to these
ideals. After Yacob left the cave, he proposed to a poor maiden named
Hirut, who served a rich family. Yacob argued with her master, who did
not think a servant woman was equal to an educated man, but Yacob
prevailed. When Hirut gladly accepted his proposal, Yacob pointed out
that she should no longer be a servant, but rather his peer, because
‘husband and wife are equal in marriage’.
In contrast to Yacob’s views, Kant wrote a century later in
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(1764): ‘A woman is embarrassed little that she does not possess
certain high insights.’ And in Kant’s lectures on ethics (1760-94) we
read that: ‘The desire of a man for a woman is not directed to her as a
human being, on the contrary, the woman’s humanity is of no concern to
him; and the only object of his desire is her sex.’
Yacob wrote ‘all men are equal’ decades before Locke, the ‘Father of Liberalism’, put pen to paper
Yacob
looked upon the woman in a completely different way, namely as a
philosopher’s intellectual peer. Hirut, he wrote: ‘was not beautiful,
but she was good-natured, intelligent and patient’. Yacob cherished his
wife’s intelligence, and he stressed their mutual and individualistic
love for one another: ‘Since she loved me so, I took the decision in my
heart to please her as much as I could, and I do not think there is
another marriage which is so full of love and blessed as ours.’
Yacob
is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to
slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go
and buy a man as if he were an animal’. That is because all humans are
created equal and with the capacity to reason. Hence, he also puts
forward a universal argument against discrimination based on reason:
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 sort of discrimination cannot exist.
The words
‘all men are equal’ were written decades before Locke (1632-1704), the
‘Father of Liberalism’, put pen to paper (indeed, he was born the same
year that Yacob returned from his cave). But Locke’s social-contract
theory did not apply to all in practice: he was secretary during the
drafting of
The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669),
which gave white men ‘absolute power’ over their African slaves. And he
invested heavily in the English Trans-Atlantic slave trade through the
Royal African Company. In the
Second Treatise (1689), Locke
argues that God gave the world ‘to the use of the industrious and
rational’ – which the philosopher Julie K Ward at Loyola University in
Chicago
argues
can be read as a colonial attack on the right to land of American
Indians. Compared with his philosophical peers, then, Yacob’s philosophy
often reads like the epitome of all the ideals we commonly think of as
enlightened.
Some months after
reading the work of Yacob, I finally got hold of another rare book this
summer: a translation of the collected writings of the philosopher Anton
Amo (
c1703-55), who was born and died in Guinea, today’s
Ghana. For two decades, Amo studied and taught at Germany’s foremost
universities, writing in Latin. His book,
Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana,
bears a subtitle that describes the author: ‘Student. Doctor of
philosophy. Master and lecturer at the universities of Halle,
Wittenberg, Jena. 1727-1747.’ According to the World Library Catalogue,
just a handful of copies, including those in the original Latin, are
available in libraries around the world.
Amo was born a century
after Yacob. He seems to have been kidnapped from the Akan people and
the coastal city of Axim as a young boy, possibly for slavery, before
being brought via Amsterdam to the court of Duke Anton Ulrich of
Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Amo was baptised in 1707, and he received a
very high-standard education, learning Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French,
High and Low German, in addition to probably knowing some of his mother
tongue, Nzema. The great polymath G W Leibniz (1646-1716) frequently
visited Amo’s home in Wolfenbüttel when he was growing up.
Amo
matriculated at the University of Halle in 1727, and became
well-respected in German academic circles of the time, holding lecturing
positions both at the universities of Halle and Jena. In Carl Günther
Ludovici’s 1738 book on the Enlightenment thinker Christian Wolff
(1679-1754) – a follower of Leibniz and a founder of several academic
disciplines in Germany – Amo is described as one of the most prominent
Wolffians. While in the dedicatory preface to Amo’s
On the Impassivity of the Human Mind
(1734), the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried
Kraus, hailed Amo’s compendious knowledge and ‘the praises he received
thanks to his genius’. He also set Amo’s contribution to the German
Enlightenment in a historical context:
In the past, the
veneration given to Africa was enormous, whether for its natural genius,
its appreciation for learning, or its religious organisation. This
continent nurtured the growth of a number of men of great value, whose
genius and assiduousness have made an inestimable contribution to the
knowledge of human affairs.
Kraus stresses ‘the
development of Christian doctrine, how many were its promoters who came
from Africa!’ And he cites intellectuals such as Augustine, Tertullian,
and the Amazigh (Berber) Apuleius as examples. The rector also
underscores the European Renaissance’s African heritage, ‘as the Moors
coming from Africa crossed through Spain, they brought knowledge of the
ancient thinkers, while also bringing much assistance to the development
of letters which were coming out of the darkness little by little’.
Amo wrote of other theologies than the Christian, including the Turks and the ‘heathens’
Such
words from the heart of Germany in the spring of 1733 might make it
easier for us to remember that Amo was not the only African to achieve
success in 18th-century Europe. At the same time, Abraham Petrovich
Gannibal (1696-1781), also kidnapped from sub-Saharan Africa, became the
general of Peter the Great of Russia. Gannibal’s great-grandson became
Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. And the French author
Alexandre Dumas (1802-70) was the grandson of an enslaved African woman,
Louise-Céssette Dumas, and son of a black aristocratic general born on
Haiti.
Neither was Amo alone in bringing diversity or
cosmopolitanism to the University of Halle in the 1720s and ’30s.
Several talented Jewish students studied there and received doctorates.
The Arab teacher Salomon Negri of Damascus and the Indian Soltan Gün
Achmet from Ahmedabad were others who arrived in Halle to study and
teach. Amo himself developed a close relationship with Moses Abraham
Wolff, a Jewish medical student, who was one of the students he
supervised. And in his thesis, Amo wrote explicitly that there were
other theologies than the Christian, including among them the Turks and
the ‘heathens’.
Amo discussed such cosmopolitan issues when he defended his first thesis, the legal dissertation
On the Right of Moors in Europe
in 1729. Amo’s dissertation is not available today. It might be that
the defence was given only orally, or that the text has simply been
lost. But in the Halle weekly paper of November 1729 there is a short
report from his public disputation, which was granted to him so that the
‘argument of the disputation should be appropriate to his situation’.
According to the newspaper report, Amo argued against slavery with
reference to Roman law, tradition and rationality:
Therein
it was not only shown from books and history that the kings of the
Moors were enfeoffed [given freedom in exchange for pledged service] by
the Roman Emperor, and that every one of them had to obtain a royal
patent from him, which Justinian also issued, but it was also
investigated how far the freedom or servitude of Moors bought by
Christians in Europe extends, according to the usual laws.
Did
Amo hold Europe’s first legal disputation against slavery? We can at
least see an enlightened argument for universal suffrage, like the one
Yacob had advanced 100 years earlier. However, such non-discriminatory
perspectives seem to have been lost on the central Enlightenment
thinkers later in the 18th century.
In his
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects
(1753-4), Hume wrote: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general
all the other species of men (for there are four or five different
kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.’ He added: ‘There never
was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor any
individual eminent either in action or speculation.’ Kant (1724-1804)
built on Hume (1711-76), and stressed that the fundamental difference
between blacks and whites ‘appears to be as great in regard to mental
capacities as in colour’, before concluding in
Physical Geography: ‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.’
In
France, the most famous Enlightenment thinker, Voltaire (1694-1778),
not only described Jews in anti-Semitic terms, as when he wrote that
‘they are all of them born with raging fanaticism in their hearts’; in
his
Essay on Universal History (1756), he also wrote that if Africans’ ‘intelligence is not of another species than ours, then it is greatly inferior’ (
fort inférieure). Like Locke, he invested his money in the slave trade.
Amo’s
philosophy is often more theoretical than Yacob’s, but they share an
enlightened perspective of reason, treating all humans alike. His work
is deeply engaged with the issues of his day, as in Amo’s best-known
book,
On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734), which is
built upon a logically deductive method using strict arguments,
seemingly in line with his former juridical dissertation. Here he
grapples with Cartesian dualism, the idea that there is an absolute
difference in substance between mind and body.
At times, Amo seems to oppose Descartes, as the contemporary philosopher Kwasi Wiredu
points out in
A Companion to African Philosophy
(2004), when he writes: ‘Human beings sense material things not with
respect to their mind but with respect to their living and organic
body.’ Wiredu argues that Amo opposed the Cartesian dualism between mind
and body, rather favouring the Akan metaphysics and Nzema language of
his early childhood: that you feel pain with your flesh (
honam), not with your mind (
adwene).
But
at the same time, Amo says that he will both defend and speak against
Descartes’s view (from his Letters, Part I) that the soul (mind) is able
to act and suffer together with the body. Hence, Amo writes: ‘In reply
to these words we caution and dissent: we concede that the mind acts
together with the body by the mediation of a mutual union. But we deny
that it suffers together with the body.’
The examples of Yacob and Amo make it necessary to rethink the Age of Reason
Amo
argues that Descartes’s statements in these matters are contrary to the
French philosopher’s ‘own view’. He concludes his thesis by stating
that we should avoid confusing the things that belong to the body and
the mind. For whatever operates in the mind must be attributed to the
mind alone. Perhaps it is as the philosopher Justin E H Smith at the
University of Paris
points out in
Nature, Human Nature and Human Difference (2015): ‘Far from rejecting Cartesian dualism, on the contrary Amo offers a radicalised version of it.’
But
could it also be that Wiredu and Smith are both right? For example, if
the traditional Akan philosophy and Nzema language had a more precise
Cartesian body-mind distinction than Descartes, a way of thinking that
Amo then brought into European philosophy? It might be too early to
tell, as a critical edition of Amo’s works is still pending publication,
possibly at Oxford University Press.
In Amo’s most thorough work,
The Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately
(1738), he seems to anticipate the later Enlightenment thinker Kant.
The book deals with the intentions of our mind, and with human actions
as natural, rational or in accordance with a norm. In the first chapter,
writing in Latin, Amo argues that ‘everything knowable is either a
thing in itself, or a sensation, or an operation of the mind’.
He
elaborates in the next paragraph, stating that ‘for the sake of which
cognition occurs, is the thing in itself’. And in the following
demonstration: ‘Real learning is cognition of things in themselves. It
thus has the basis of its certainty in the known thing.’ Amo’s original
wording is ‘
Omne cognoscibile aut res ipsa’, using the Latin notion
res ipsa for the ‘thing-in-itself’.
Today, Kant is known for his notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (
das Ding an sich) in
Critique of Pure Reason
(1787) – and his argument that we cannot know the thing beyond our
mental representation of it. Yet it is acknowledged that this was not
the first use of the term in Enlightenment philosophy. As the
Merriam-Webster Dictionary writes on the term thing-in-itself: ‘First
known use: 1739.’ Still, that is two years after Amo’s main work was
turned in at Wittenberg, in 1737.
The examples of these two
Enlightenment philosophers, Yacob and Amo, might make it necessary to
rethink the Age of Reason in the disciplines of philosophy and history
of ideas. Within the discipline of history, new
studies
have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the
Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti
rather than in France. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the ideas
of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803) paved the way for the state’s
independence, new constitution, and the abolition of slavery in 1804.
The historian Laurent Dubois concludes in
Avengers of the New World (2004) that the events in Haiti were ‘the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
were indeed universal’. In a similar vein, one might wonder: will Yacob
and Amo also one day be elevated to the position they deserve among the
philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment?
