It has been a trend for sometime now, especially among the Thomist philosophers, to associate the philosophical roots of Western thinking decline, ipso facto of moral values also, to the ideas of Descartes. In his book, Memory and Identity, the late Pope John Paul II argued with the way Descartes constructed his philosophy, basing it on the foundation of individual self-awareness, instead of starting (as Aquinas had) with Self-subsistent Being.
In his famous Cogito argument, Descartes gave primacy to individual consciousness, something that found ready following in Occidental ears. Western philosophy thereafter became concerned with what is contained within the ambit of subjectivity, rather than with the Reality that is independent of it. The primacy of the Cogito is an epistemic priority, what Descartes called the “order of discovery”—If I try to doubt everything, the first thing I find I cannot doubt is my own existence.
Descartes was nonetheless clear that such self-awareness leads directly to awareness of God. According to Descartes Cogito, sum ergo Deus est (I am, therefore God exists) is knowing myself immediately, while recognising “my complete dependence on a power infinitely greater than myself. Epistemically I may come first, but ontologically, in the order of reality”, God retains absolute primacy.
But I here want to talk more about how African Völkerwanderung compares to all of this.
The African concept of Ubuntu (one’s being depending on others) is in direct contradiction to the Cogiti. It operates closer to the meaning of life according to Thomists gestalt in recognising objective absolutes. But where the Thomists put more emphasis on Naturalism, Ubuntu is more Positivist, which might have influenced St Augustine’s (who was an Africa in his perspective despite his Roman training) theology.
The concept of Ubuntu believes that human fulfilment can never be achieved in isolation. That there’s no such thing as a strictly private act, because we are closely linked to the bond of our common humanity. Ubuntu understands the meaning of life as an ethical construct that involves treating others as you want them to treat you, caring for those close to you, helping strangers, and generally thinking in long terms. This does not mean Ubuntu does away with self-awareness, as others like to accuse it. Ubuntu propugates ways of subjugating self-awareness into the general good of the community.
To the theists the place of God in Descartes’ philosophy is given short shrift, hence they like to briskly dismiss Cartesian arguments for the primacy of existence of the Deity. Perhaps it could be said that no matter how sincere Descartes’ theistic commitments, his Cartesian argument made it in the end spurious. This then begs the question of correctness of belief and truth of knowing as argued by John Paul II against Cartesian arguments.
To the Thomists the truth of knowing depends on the accurate correspondence of judgement to the way things, are independent of thought. To them Philosophy is there just to clarify and justify the spontaneous certitude of common sense (by common sense I mean our native capacity to know certain fundamentals, immediate, and self-evident aspects of reality that lie open to our senses and intellect), and enlighten conscience (reason making moral judgement, according to St Thomas).
Our age, due to Western influence, is that of logical truth that likes to place the basis of truth in the clarity of ideas or perceptions. It does not refer to the knowability of things outside the intellect, but rather to the clearness of ideas which are already in the mind, and therefore known as states of consciousness. This kind of thinking was, arguably, according to Thomists, brought about by Descartes.
What the Thomists and Ubuntu distrust most about the Cartesian theory is its arbitrary refusal to accept evidence in the only place where it can be found, viz, things (whether we call them monads, or points of force, or energies, is besides the point here) in themselves. The Cartesian subjectivist argument precludes beforehand the possibility of any reasonable answer in the question of meaning of life. The example that’s given wide currency in debasing it is that of likening Cartesian argument to a classical example of a man who asks what numbers make up twelve, while prohibiting you from using 2 times 6, 3 times 4, or 12 times 1.
On the other hand the concept of Ubuntu is clear in such things. Ubuntu, and most African cultures in general, takes for granted the capacity things have of delivering themselves up to the intellect in the act of knowing—their clarity and understandability. It assumes as irrefutably common sense the evidence of things as both their own reason for truth of judgement, and test or criterion. That it believes the nature of things as they present themselves as their evidence of being, and nothing else more is needed.
In his latest book, The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton firmly rejects liberal individualism (the mere assertion that the meaning of life is me)—one of the bastard sprout of Cartesian theory—as nihilistic. “At the point of its supreme triumph, [individualism] is struck empty”, maintains Eagleton using the similar Thomist argument.
The idea of liberalism came as liberation of the individual from the priesthood of religion, and such black holes in which individual meaning was sucked and destroyed. But the wheel has turned full circle in our epoch. The liberator has become the stiff and airless.
The fact has become apparent that defending the meaning of life with an “asphyxiating dormice” of subjective liberalism is not sustainable, judging by the moral decline of our times. “The idea that I can determine the meaning of my own life is an illusion.” (Terry Eagleton) We are all creatures of the species Homo sapiens that we cannot escape, as argued by the concept of Ubuntu.
Recently Pope Benedict XI added fuel to fire by delivering a hard-hitting speech to the European Union for calling into question the existence of “universal and absolute values” based on natural law. The Thomists and the concept of Ubuntu believe that civil rights too must flow from the given order of nature. St Thomas called this order of nature, which is the same for all men at all times, Natural Law: “the sharing of the rational creature in the eternal law.”
Aristotle, and Greeks in general, on whom the original Egyptian (thus African) influence on their thought was still fresh, espoused the Ubuntu concept that an individual was primarily a member of a group, be it family, household, a village, or a city state. Hence in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote:
For even if good of the community coincides with that of the individual, it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to achieve and preserve that of the community; for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of the individual, to do so in the case of a people or state is something finer and more sublime (p.164)
This might be one of the reasons St Thomas chose to follow Aristotle as compared to Plato’s elitism (To be fare to Plato we’ll have to admit that the idea behind the Republic started as argument for communitarian thinking where the good of the city-state was placed above any single individual. Arguably the pedigree of Occidental thought followed this path to achieve a full-blown individualist philosophy with Thomas Hobbes).
Ubuntu believes that our individuality is already partly decided for us by the group we are born into, hence it maintains umuntu ngumuntu nagabantu (a person is a person through others). It believes that society is more than a sum of individuals, and that being an individual can only be made possibly by a society that recognizes the concept of individuality in the first place. We all have a responsibility of making sure that a good life is lived by all members of the society, not just the few, says Ubuntu, hence it detest elitism.
Ancient cultures, up and above all this, were mostly blatantly sexist, repressively elitists, disgustingly ageist, and overtly racist—Greek lives, for instance, were maintained by the help of slaves, and an underclass of women; to some extent, so was the African societies, with all its talk of Ubuntu. Hence I say it was a good thing when liberalism came, banishing personal prohibitions, political repressions, religious censorship, sexual and racial discrimination. The problem is, once it achieved all that, it felt free to become exhibitionist and narcissist, thus imbibing the poison it was suppose to cure.
Even St Thomas had his short-comings—for one he thought the feudal order of society was a natural one, something that blinded him to its oppressive cruelties. The shadow of Rousseau fell upon him, and everything related to Thomism, including the Roman Catholic Church. Popular thought, under the continued gruff pen of Voltaire, favoured liberal values. Now it is liberaslism that is buckling at its structural faults—the skeletons of Descartes. The boomer liberal intellectuals, of course, still fancy they speak truth to power; while most people feel the liberals have become one of the chief obstacles to the reconstruction of social and political life in the twenty-first century.
Ubuntu is our only hope, because it does not only encapsulate principles of justice and benevolence; it demands that the individual seek to identify with and be an active participant of a society as a whole. The challenge is that those who have been enlightened, largely by liberal values, should make it a point that Ubuntu does not only end on social expectations, as the final determining factor of behaviour. Ubuntu too must give space for individual freedom to challenge any moral and social status quo.
Like Humanism, Ubuntu upholds the importance of human experience—what the Roman church calls “the living tradition”—as foundation for knowledgeable insights. And goes further into acknowledging the importance of convictions. It looks to existing traditional answers for complex moral issues, while allowing enough flexibility for different circumstances and times. To me our epoch is ripe for Ubuntu.
We’ve entered an age that demands serious introspection and self-examination. In the end whether we call it natural law, ubuntu, or human rights, it is time we were serious in making it a primary corner stone for our human civilisation. Protecting human dignity is not only about protecting oneself, or defending the other; it is also about realising our compliance and complacency in the suffering of the other, even at the expense of our cherished comforts and beliefs. It is about emerging out of our comfort zones.
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