Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization

Lewis Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000244731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, and the decolonization of justice and normative life. Gordon issues a critique of the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason.

Chapter 1

On Philosophy, in Africana Philosophy

To begin, I would like to declare that this book is not written from the perspective of a philosophy nationalist. By this, I mean that although philosophy often illuminates reality, it is not the sole means of doing so. What is today sometimes called disciplinary and epistemic arrogance is a vice that impedes clear thinking and produces dysfunctional attitudes and a declining relationship with reality. Many considerations, disciplines, and ways of living, affectively and epistemologically, offer much for such an ultimately infinite virtuous task. There is always something to learn from different ways of learning, knowing, expressing, and living. This is not to say that philosophy lacks its moments. Quite a bit of those will inform much of the discussion that will follow, although, to stress, not exclusively so. Let us proceed, then, with some reflections on philosophy from issues posed by it and its creolized hybrid—namely, Africana or African diasporic philosophy—as freedom, justice, and decolonization are central concerns of that area of thought.

The reader may be immediately struck by the expression “creolized hybrid.” “Creolized” in this context refers to bringing at times opposing forces into living mixtures or syntheses.¹ Announcing a creolized element does not reject the possibility of a prior creolized form, however, since, as these reflections will show, I do not presume an initial African “purity.” As the human being is the quintessential creature of metastability—that is, elusive of being pinned down under an essence—the solace of being onto itself, of being out of relations with all others, though often a wish of some philosophers, is a luxury or preemption that is not Africana peoples'. Africa as humanity's birthplace means the upsurge of self-consciousness was, as well, that of a reaching for which our species has its proverbial ongoing journey. There is a poetic irony here, since a well-known prejudice, since the rise of Euromodern worldviews, is that thought was sparked in Asia and matured in Europe; consciousness in Africa was, thus, a supposed import from the Northern East and West. This unfortunate presumption elides the significance of the continent's name in one of its ancient tongues—Mdw Ntr (also known as Medu Neter, the language of Kmt, or ancient Egypt)—which amounts to turning toward the opening of the birthplace or womb of humanity (af-rui-ka, “turning toward the opening of the ka”).² The peculiarly gendered, psychoanalytical significance of subsequent denying or at least forgetting of humanity's primordial womb speaks, proverbially, volumes.³ So, let us turn our attention to some erasure, forgetting, denial, and, as each falls under the weight of critique, remembering.

“Philosophy,” conventional wisdom has it, began in Ancient Greece. A problem with that claim is that an accepted view is not necessarily a correct one. A moment's reflection on the word, its history, and the political circumstances leading to its reception should occasion a long pause. “Greeks,” after all, was the Roman name for the broad range of people who spoke varieties of the Greek language. Most of the people ascribed as such referred to themselves as Hellenes and much of the land of Greece today, including areas of western Turkey, was known as Hellas. Beyond that, Greek-speaking people included northern Africans, western Asians, and southern peoples, of what is later known as Europe. As the presumption among subsequent early Euromodern and later German Enlightenment scholars was that the earliest practice of philosophy was among the ancient Athenians, the term acquired a near sacred association with Hellenic peoples. Understanding that the Hellenes were but one group among other Greek-speaking peoples to have emerged in antiquity reveals the fallacy. It is as if to call English-speaking peoples of the present “English.” The confusion should be evident. A product of Euromodern imagination, with a series of empires laying claim to the coveted metonymic intellectual identity for posterity, Ancient Greeks stand as a supposed “miracle” from which a hitherto “dark” and presumably intellectually-limited shell of humanity fell sway to what eventually became, through Latin, “civilization.”⁴

“Human beings,” Homo sapiens, have been around for about 220,000— possibly 300,000—years, and evidence of intellectual leaps abound throughout. A fragile species at times facing extinction, what has secured human survival is intelligence with, of course, quite a bit of luck. The idea that our species remained limited until we reached the shores of the Mediterranean Sea is far-fetched. More, a few thousand years of writings before those inscribed in Greek should not be ignored. If they were not the beginning, on whose ideas did ancient Greek-speaking people's reflections rested? The obvious answer is their ancients, and for them, as for those of us today who sift through the past, we should bear in mind that they were both not “us” and “us.” They were not us in the sense of a single line of cultural inheritance; yet they were “us” in that their achievements belong to all of us, to humanity. As the 19th century German philosopher Georges Misch put it: “… the echo [philosophical concerns] awoke in us may just be something that the natural course of human life awakes in every human, quite spontaneously, at one time or another.”⁵ Thus, the following reflection on philosophy, although not from the Hellenic poleis, or city-states, held as much resonance for ancient Athenians as they should for readers of today:

[The seeker of wisdom is the one] whose heart is informed about these things which would be otherwise ignored, the one who is clear-sighted when he [or she] is deep into a problem, the one who is moderate in his [or her] actions, who penetrates ancient writings, whose advice is [sought] to unravel complications, who is really wise, who instructed his [or her] own heart, who stays awake at night as he [or she] looks for the right paths, who surpasses what he [or she] accomplished yesterday, who is wiser than a sage, who brought him [or her] self to wisdom, who asks for advice and sees to it that he [or she] is asked advice. (“Inscription of Antef,” 12th Dynasty, Kmt, 1991–1782 BCE)⁶

Kmt—Ancient Greek name, Aigyptos—is what we know today as Ancient Egypt. Kmt is also known as Kemet, but I prefer simply eliminating the vowels since that is how the word was written in hieratic and hieroglyphs. More than a millennium before the emergence of the Presocratic philosophers (6th century BCE), Antef's reflections offer no doubt about early metaphilosophical reflection. “Metaphilosophy” refers both to reflection on philosophy and philosophy of philosophy. Antef's reference to other “ancient” writings offer additional intellectual resources that, given the conceptual framework of “upper” Kmt being southward in his context, lead us into a world in which the night offered the beauty and wonder from the stars and the journey of human reflection.⁷ As the architect, philosopher, and physician Imhotep, as did subsequently Hor-Djed-Ef, Kagemni, Ptahhotep, and Lady Peseshet, pondered several hundred years earlier, the night sky in Antef's time also stimulated awe and reflection, as it could for those of us today who embrace such an opportunity free of light pollution.

Though the word “philosophy” is often translated as “the love of wisdom,” it represents an important meeting of languages and worlds as the Greek words philia and philo (fondness or devotional love) was conjoined with the transformed word sophia (wisdom), whose origin was more southern than many proponents may prefer. It is from the Mdw Ntr word Sbyt (“wise teachings”). The related word Sba (“to teach” or “to be wise”) was transformed through the ancient Greek tendency to transform the Mdw Ntr “b” to “ph” or, in English, “f.”

The path to such understanding is even more circuitous than discussion would afford here, as the problem of prejudice we are now exploring with regard to philosophy emerges as well with etymology and archaeolinguistics. Ending one's investigations repeatedly in Greek and Latin eventually leads to the false presumption—as found, for instance, in the thought of Martin Heidegger—that thinking began with the emergence of those languages (though he was not particularly kind to Latin).⁸ Lost hopes of the radical difference between Africans, Asians, Europeans, Indigenous peoples of North America and South America, and the Oceania peoples at the biological level as revealed in the theory of natural selection, the commitment to radical anthropological difference moved to linguistic polygenesis, despite logic suggesting linguistic creativity and adaptation from where language had to have begun (that is, among the earliest peoples of Africa).⁹

The people of Kmt and Kush, a country among the Nubians from the south, had many nuanced ways of thinking about concepts such as knowing, learning, and wisdom, ranging from Rkh (to know), to rkht (‘‘accurate knowledge,’’ ‘‘science,’’ in the sense of inquiring into the nature of things [kht]), and good (nfr) judgment (wpt, often transliterated as upi). The word wpt/upi means ‘‘to judge,’’ ‘‘to discern,’’ that is, “to dissect.” (The “w” is pronounced “ou”; the “A” is a guttural “ah” and the “a” is more like “ay.”) The cognate tpsSmt (often transliterated as upset) means “specify.” The word sAt (prudential wisdom) set the stage for sAA (wisdom), which also refers to the wise person (sAA) who also seeks sAw (saiety) through being sAi (wise). To ask if this “satisfies” the reader should, through a pun, reiterate the point.

The intellectual meeting of worlds that historically met in every other respect was not new, and what should be noticed is that throughout such meetings, reflections on what such intellectual work was about immediately followed. Antef, for instance, was reflecting both on philosophy and the philosopher. Later on, in his Symposium, Plato (actual name Aristokles) similarly reflected on the love of wisdom and the difficulty of loving its lover—in that text's case, the young Alcibiades' love of his senior beloved Socrates. Thus, the origins of philosophy on the continent in which humanity evolved—Africa—versus the one that subsequently dominated much of the globe—Europe—are not as distant as many scholars of their subsequent intellectual histories led many, if not most, to believe. Beyond that south-to-north and west-to-east movement, there were, as well, many others in which human beings, as thinking creatures, produced ideas while migrating into every direction. Wherever human beings were afforded sufficient time for reflection, ideas on organization and the makeup of reality followed.

Philosophy, then, should be placed among the plethora of human efforts to understand our relationship to reality, which includes each other, and the subsequent professionalizing of that task into the academically formalized discipline housed in universities today. This distinction offers additional challenges since it is possible for the latter to become so focused that it ceases to offer intellectual contributions beyond the demonstration of skill. The former thus always speaks to humanity (and whatever kinds of beings that could communicate ideas), whereas the latter at times does such, though not always intentionally so.

What philosophers do is also a complicated and fluid matter. Some proponents regard their activity as a battle for truth. In that version, one “wins” through “knocking down” one's “opponents” through demonstrating the “weaknesses” of their arguments. A problem with that model is that it is possible to win arguments, become hegemonic, and yet be wrong. What makes an argument “weak” is at times a component taken to be false because of a system of presuppositions against it such as the notion of the absolute reach and completeness of the language that deems it unintelligible. And what makes one “strong” could be its formal presentation despite its clearly being false. Think of the proofs against motion and time offered by the 5th century BCE philosopher Zeno of Elea. He famously pointed out that one must cross an infinitesimal number of steps before even being able to make a complete step or achieve a whole moment in time. Acknowledging the validity of the form of his arguments, one could simply check one's watch, get up, and walk on one's way to one's appointment. Think also, for example, of the once presumed absolute reach and completeness of Euclidean geometry with its axiom of a straight line as we have now come to realize we live in a world of curved space and more. Or think of the presumed failure of languages without the copula “is.” Truth, from Old English trīewth and trēowth, meaning that in which one should invest one's faith, can be preserved without stating “x is y.”

Another model of philosophy holds metaphors of midwifery, communication, collaboration, collective curiosity—in short, working together to appreciate, hear, see, and understand—and at times, even discover—what we often fail to engage or comprehend. In this version, philosophy is not only a communicative practice but also a social enterprise, contrary to the Cartesian model of self-seclusion, of increasing or unleashing human intellectual potential. In this sense, philosophy is also humanity reaching beyond itself. It is no accident that many of its metaphors, from antiquity to recent times, are about the human struggle to escape prisons and caves of ignorance.

The focus of philosophy in different parts of the world over the ages varied according to the priorities of where it was practiced. Among ancient East Africans, for instance, astronomy, architecture, and medicine offered paths to philosophical reflection, and the complicated negotiation of power among increasingly dense populations of peoples occasioned much reflection on balance, justice, laws, right, and truth. In Kmt, the concept of MAat addressed such themes.¹⁰ Among the Greek-speaking peoples, dikaiosunē was similar.¹¹ In East Asia, similar concerns about learning, order, rule, and respect emerged, especially in Ruism, most known today as Confucianism.¹²

A trend of perfecting or at least imp...