Yacob and Amo: Africa's Precursors to Locke, Hume and Kant
December 13, 2017 10:47 PM   Subscribe

 
Ethiopian Philosophy - the Treatise Of Zera Yacob
posted by Segundus at 12:51 AM on December 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


I think it’s a tactical error to argue that Yacob or Amo are as good as Descartes, or that they rewrite the history of Enlightenment thought. Why does the bar have to be set so high? Those claims are much easier to reject than the more reasonable one that the amount of attention they deserve is at least greater than zero, which is what they currently get. Probably, the best thing we could do for either of them is make a good clean version of their texts easily available online.

It might be unfair but I perceived a sort of ambivalence in the Aeon piece, which seemed to be saying: these African guys anticipated the enlightened ideas of Hume and Kant - those racist, sexist fucks.
posted by Segundus at 2:07 AM on December 14, 2017 [10 favorites]


'an Ethiopian in a cave' is...an unfortunate collision between clickbait titling and the colonial gaze.
posted by LMGM at 2:37 AM on December 14, 2017 [18 favorites]


But according to the article, he lived in a cave as a hermit in an uninhabited area, and that's where he developed his philosophy. Are you saying this account is incorrect?
posted by sour cream at 5:12 AM on December 14, 2017


It's not about what's correct, it's about what's being emphasized in the description. I.e., it's about the gaze, not the thing being gazed at.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:25 AM on December 14, 2017 [8 favorites]


Well, enemy of the perfect that it may be, the article is of interest and I am grateful that now it has not escaped my gaze.
posted by y2karl at 5:54 AM on December 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


'an Ethiopian in a cave' is...an unfortunate collision between clickbait titling and the colonial gaze.

But according to the article, he lived in a cave as a hermit in an uninhabited area, and that's where he developed his philosophy. Are you saying this account is incorrect?


The title (strongly belied by the content of the article) makes him sound like some kind of primitive.

as a slight aside: Ethiopia's history of cultural and religious interaction is so. damn. cool. It's so old, and has been interacting with the middle east for so long, that it just keeps popping up in history in neat and unexpected ways. Did you know they had a Jewish kingdom? Or that an Ethiopian king provided refuge for the fleeing family of Muhammad?
posted by leotrotsky at 6:57 AM on December 14, 2017 [6 favorites]


Wow! I studied philosophy for my BA and I never ever encountered these philosophers or the fact that so many enlightenment philosophers were active supporters of slavery.

I actually feel lied to.
posted by A hidden well at 6:58 AM on December 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


...or that a church in Ethiopia is reportedly the home of the Ark of the Covenant?

...or that the aforementioned King that provided refuge to the family of Muhammad ruled a kingdom that had been Christian since 325?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:04 AM on December 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


What's astonishing to me is the idea that there is any intellectual life outside of Europe. I mean of course I know that now, I'm not a total cretin, but it still flies in the face of my American education. I'm also surprised that a man from Ghana would live in Europe in the 18th century. Which is crazy; there'd been 100+ years of slave trade by then, which is how Amo ended up in Europe in the first place before being freed and educated. As the article notes there's intellectual commerce between Europe and North Africa and India too. (How about China?)
posted by Nelson at 7:53 AM on December 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wow! I studied philosophy for my BA and I never ever encountered these philosophers

If you consider that even much of the history of Western philosophy is erased from the canon, it's less surprising.
posted by thelonius at 8:08 AM on December 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


> I think it’s a tactical error to argue that Yacob or Amo are as good as Descartes, or that they rewrite the history of Enlightenment thought. Why does the bar have to be set so high?

I entirely agree; the important point is that important thinkers have been ignored and deserve consideration, not "suck it Europe, Africa got there first!!" I'd really like to see a good edition of Zera Yacob, and he should definitely be incorporated into the histories.

Great post; thanks, Panjandrum!
posted by languagehat at 8:34 AM on December 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


I entirely agree; the important point is that important thinkers have been ignored and deserve consideration

Me, too. Especially considering the recent FPP about Reed's mandatory humanities course, in which the opinion was expressed that basically nothing much ever happened in philosophy and religion outside the confines of Western tradition, or, at best, nothing that really survived.
posted by praemunire at 9:58 AM on December 14, 2017


If you consider that even much of the history of Western philosophy is erased from the canon, it's less surprising.

Could you give an example of the types of things you're talking about? Do you mean classical philosophy, medieval, rationalist and empiricist, German idealist, American (transcendentalist, pragmatist), continentalist (existentialist, phenomenologist), who?

Do you mean like in an analytic program where much of the history of philosophy is glossed over?
posted by leotrotsky at 10:01 AM on December 14, 2017


Do you mean like in an analytic program where much of the history of philosophy is glossed over?

That's an extreme case, but even in the very non-analytic undergrad program I was in, there was, perhaps largely due to time constraints, just not a lot of coverage of Hellenistic philosophy, Medieval philosophy, Renaissance humanism, of some major figures in modern philosophy such as Spinoza and Leibniz, and pretty much no attention payed to major second-rankers like Malebranche or Schopenhauer, and not really much on Hegel either. My impression of the "canon" was that it's a perfunctory unit on the Pre-Socratics, then Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, then some very brief look at Hellenistic and Medieval philosophy, then the main course, modern philosophy: Descartes, Hume, Kant, maybe some existentialism or Wittgenstein senior year, then you're done.

Very very little Arabic, Chinese, or Indian philosophy (much less African) of course.

Have you looked at the podcast "History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps"? That gives a detailed look at all the stuff that, in my experience, just did not get taught.

YMMV......
posted by thelonius at 11:09 AM on December 14, 2017


We did have some faculty who were really into Medieval philosophy, and St. Augustine was in the survey course, so I guess I am being a little too severe there.
posted by thelonius at 11:11 AM on December 14, 2017


Thanks for this, it's all new to me.
posted by storybored at 11:20 AM on December 14, 2017


There are native North American philosophies as well. Many of which have been discussed here on MetaFilter.

Comparative literature is pretty good for this as you're quickly confronted with how narratives are constructed. I know I say it so often I sound like a broken record, but this broken record is a philosophy too: narratives are constructed by humans. Humans have points of view. Always take into account the point of view and ask questions of it. Quite often what we're taught in white-majority education that has resulted from patriarchal colonialist history, is, yes, in service to the patriarchal colonialism in place.

Check out:
The Invisible Culture - Susan Urmston Philips
"In vain I tried to tell you" and "Now I Know Only So Far" - Dell Hymes
Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong
Postcolonial Representations - Françoise Lionnet
Stories of Women - Elleke Boehmer

To understand why I've brought up orality in parallel to philosophy – Hymes is one of my favorites, emphasis mine:
"Again and again, in coming to know better some of the tellings in the [Pacific Northwest] region by survivors, I come to a sense of a mind working within the framework of a tradition, still wrestling with the nature of figures in the myths and relations among them. Thereby in their tellings carrying tradition further. Exercising a kind of creativity inherent in the tradition, I would argue.

"The traditions themselves, after all, were not closed but open. In principle the way things were was explained in stories. One might not have heard a story explaining this creature or that landscape or some kind of human conduct such as men marrying women and lying to them, but someone else might have. And the stories one knew could be extended or linked in good faith. No one would have thought of himself or herself as an 'author'. One might think of oneself as coming to understand more deeply."
[...]
"If we are to adequately respect and understand such [oral] narratives, we must think in terms of thoughtful, motivated minds, seeking narrative adequate to their experience, surviving and renewing."
[...]
"To say that stories exist only in performance is to say that between performances narrators do not think. That they are prisoners of an audience. That they go about their daily lives, encountering nothing that makes them remember a story. Or think of how a story might or ought to have gone. That the stories they know never pose them problems, from perceived incompleteness to contradictions, with one another or their own experience. That, in short, they have very limited minds. We should be embarrassed to denigrate them so. To do so seems to me intellectually constipated."

Now I Know Only So Far, p.11
posted by fraula at 11:52 AM on December 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


> Hymes is one of my favorites

Mine too! He and Ong are wonderful, essential reading. Jerome Rothenberg is good, too; Technicians of the Sacred and Symposium of the Whole are wide-ranging anthologies that open your eyes to the many traditions of poetry beyond the Euro-American and East Asian ones we're more or less familiar with. (OK, not philosophy, but poetry is its own kind of philosophy...)
posted by languagehat at 12:01 PM on December 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Fraula, you and languagehat both hit the nail on the head as to why I thought this was FPP-able. I don't see the article some sort of post-colonial one-upsmanship of "actually, Africa did it first," so much as a reminder of the complexity of history, particularly the history of human thought. Particularly when dealing with the Enlightenment, there's a built narrative which seems to imply the thinkers of the age were uniquely the product of their time and place. Having someone in place, not entirely disconnected from that historical narrative, but definitely at a remove from Western Europe, espouse similar ideas is a way of opening up the discourse around philosophy and de-privileging European thought as somehow unique and special.

I know that I've had the basic narrative of philosophy (Greeks -> Enlightenment -> Maybe some modern Germans and Brits) hammered into me so many times that it feels natural and unquestioned. And I don't think I'm the only one, reading some of the comments here. So the article, particularly the bit about Amo, was like suddenly finding a new room in a house I'd been living in for while, or a great new restaurant in a neighborhood I thought I knew every corner of. Facts like the works of Yacob and Amo have a way of breaking people out of a mental rut and making them think, "what else have I been missing?"
posted by Panjandrum at 4:16 PM on December 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


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