A truly African Philosophy

A truly African philosophy

Ada Agada

One evening, sitting on the veranda of my family home with the African sun setting in the western sky and my eyes on the pages of Plato’s Republic, I decided to commit myself to philosophy – African philosophy in particular. I opted out of studying biochemistry at university and started a programme in philosophy and religion. The main objective of consolation philosophy took shape in my undergraduate days: demonstrating the possibility of a thoroughgoing philosophy that comprehensively addresses the emotion-intellect relation while at the same time recasting the question of being (that is, an investigation into what is most fundamental/primordial) in terms of what I call mood. It was not until I began graduate studies that I was able to develop a final thesis of my consolationist project: the Universe has a purpose that the human mind can intuit as the realisation of freedom in the sphere of conscious beings and the perfection of nature in the sphere of nonconscious beings.

Consolation philosophy is not only a philosophy of life, or meaning in life, but also a system of speculative metaphysics. Therefore, I extended the concept of mood to the external or mind-independent world at the risk of facing the charge of anthropomorphism. What epistemological framework could facilitate the projection of mind into the space of matter in a manner consequential for the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, emotion and reason, joy and sadness, optimism and pessimism? Panpsychism.

Panpsychism is an underexplored topic in African philosophy. Yet this concept is firmly rooted in traditional African thought. In its simplest form of animism, panpsychism has appealed to traditional societies for ages. As the proposition that mind is distributed throughout the Universe, panpsychism has appealed to thinkers in every generation, from Ancient Greek philosophers such as Anaxagoras to the contemporary Nigerian philosopher Maduabuchi Dukor. While African philosophers such as Senghor, Ramose and Innocent Asouzu don’t espouse panpsychism directly, their metaphysical works presuppose panpsychism as they are all committed to a complementary and monistic universe in which mind and matter implicate each other. The main objection to panpsychism is that it is strange. But panpsychism is no stranger than the idea that our Universe exists eternally, or that an intelligent creator willed it into existence at some point in cosmic history. We have to contend with the idea that something suddenly sprang into existence for a reason we don’t know.

Consolation metaphysics absorbs the interconnected world espoused by Asouzu and Ramose, in which all aspects of reality cohere and each aspect provides insight into the workings of the whole. The vision of an interconnected universe is in fidelity to the African communitarian and complementary worldview, which regards unity as conducive to the wellbeing of humans, nonhuman animals, vegetative life, and what is regarded as inert nature. For the consolationist, nonliving nature is not inert but active at micro or subatomic levels. This is a reasonable panpsychist assumption: thus I felt justified projecting mood into the external world.

Moodiness, which produces mindedness, is the nature of every existent thing. For a thing to actually exist, I hold that it must attain the fatalistic threshold. According to the consolationist, yearning is the very basis of existence, the impulse that realises the fatalistic threshold. This hypothesis is plausible in the absence of certain knowledge about why the Universe, or anything, exists, and who or what created the Universe. The absence of this knowledge is a tragic dimension of existence. A universe where moral evil (the wrong use of free will) and physical evil (natural occurrences like hurricanes that inflict suffering on humans) are real should be regarded as incomplete in the sense of imperfect. The yearning essence of conscious, subconscious and seemingly nonconscious objects indicates perfection as the final goal of the Universe as far as the human intellect is concerned. Yet this perfection of the conscious part of nature and the consummation of the seemingly nonconscious but active part is impossible: experience shows that perfection is a mere wish.