Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
aeon.co
aeon.co
Granted, some tips of the hat have been granted the ancient philosophies of India, China and the Muslim world, but these are mainly noted as they have contributed to the forward march of western ideas. The linked article could be largely interpreted to be in the same vein: i.e. great because it coincides with a major western thought tradition.
Still, interesting to learn that Ethiopia had a scholarly tradition of which we have heard very little. Also interesting that enlightenment ideas seem to have surfaced at approximately the same time, in totally separate places. I dare say we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all.
Especially when dealing with Greeks (and Romans), it is amazing how much of what is going on today was established and founded back then (e.g. German law is based on Roman law, therefore a law professor might look for clues in Roman values, not in Chinese values).
Can't say that they didn't have a point, and that their warnings have all but disappeared in intellectual history also points to (if not proves) some disengagement from actual facts in favor of self-aggrandizement in the discipline that I hinted at in the parent comment.
I may be a bit unfair to a whole discipline, but this was one of main takeaways from several years in university level intellectual history. I came in hoping it would be a detached and inquisitive investigation into the history of human thought in general. I was disappointed, but I learned a lot, still.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS9EMvbBq_U (3 minute agitation for sortition, but mentions the ancient Greeks at least)
"If we must have crime, we may as well organize it."
It’s another thing to acknowledge that we can not fully be truth seekers / scholars when we let our preferences adulterate the search of truth
Each main tradition will focus on its own mainline and make some minor reference to others.
Even Korea and Japan while objectively borrowing from China at times will assert their traditions as being quite native.
Marginalized people under a dominant tradition may use a foreign tradition to assert themselves in a society which may otherwise ignore them. For example, you may find Dalits of India use Western philosophical language to overcome indigenous philosophical oppression.
They happened to have laid the foundation for university education in the west, where the industrial revolution took off first.
It doesn’t take much to imagine a world where the industrial revolution happened in China first and we’d all be talking about how everyone considers confuscious the only important philosopher while overlooking Plato and Aristotle.
Hell in a hundred years that could still happen.
That was also what Karl Jaspers claimed in The Origin and Goal of History with regard to earlier intellectual breakthroughs in the first millennium BCE that mark the beginning of most of the world's major religions. He thought the parallel developments in Greece, Palestine, India and China (as well as Persia, though that is now disputed) could not be explained by diffusion, but rather as a single spiritual event that played out independently in multiple locations. He called this event the Achsenzeit (originally translated as "axial period", now more commonly rendered as "axial age").
Based on this, Yacob was more secular, rational and humane than European thinkers at the same time and would feel himself most likely comfortably in the modern world.
I think it is always important to know if something was worked on independently in multiple places. I believe that this demonstrates that this something was bound to happen.
I would not call Amo as an African philosopher though, as he was raised and educated in Europe. Perhaps an African-European philosopher if you insist to stress on his origin. I think that he was and was perceived as much European as his other contemporaries.
I've heard 'enlightenment ideas' pop up in music and conversation going back to my teens. I would personally bet that similar ideas (such as 'all men are created equal,' as is highlighted in the article) had been proposed countless times in the minds of people long before any enlightenment, or even Christian, thinker.
The problem is the willingness of people to tolerate such ideas. The fact that even though in 2018, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see great civilization and prosperity has been made possible by these ideas, people don't always want to believe them--and in America one does not need to look for very long at our legal system, government & politics, and social behaviors to see this.
Maybe we need another enlightenment, and one more inclusive of the liberties and freedoms of all people.
Do you know whether Yacob's writings have been continuously studied in Ethiopia or "lost" and then found, and how? I guess the latter since your "very brief introduction" includes "As Claude Sumner has said, Zera Yacob’s treatise is “an absolutely original work,” and if philosophy in Ethiopia starts with Zera Yacob it also ends with [his student] Walda Heywat." I see from your bibliography there is a 1904 Latin translation of Yacob's work. How did that come about?
I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling. But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly account for the sudden emergence.
Wow, seriously? You know, I was reading this a few weeks ago when it first popped up, and I thought to myself, this smells a bit like an Afrocentrism hoax like 'Aristotle stole Greek philosophy from Africans in the Library of Alexandria who invented it all before him' - I've never seen it mentioned despite the considerable interest it should have, the sources are all ascribed to some very rare book you're told you have no chance of getting your hands on, the claimed views sound impossibly modern/anachronistic with no extremely weird claims thrown in (if you look at forward thinkers like Bentham or Lucretius, despite some extremely prescient arguments like defenses of sodomy, they still have some bizarre beliefs, they don't sound like a NYC liberal)... But I thought it would be rude to be skeptical because it's not like I know much about Ethiopian Christian philosophy so maybe they really did have a Greek tradition which could produce such a philosopher.
And now you tell me that not only is there no provenance of the original texts more recent than the 1800s, they've actually been debunked as European forgeries, and OP just happened to not see fit to mention these minor little details?!
EDIT: I see this comes up in the comments as well, and his arguments are mostly bluster: 'no one could have forged a genius book like this! Look at all the Enlightenment in there [but obviously it'd be easy for an Italian centuries later to write such a book...] There are peer-reviewed books on this topic! Peer-reviewed!'
The only reason the article seems to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment is because he wrote around the time of Descartes, and on similar themes. But that's not enough of a connection - without a causal interaction between him and the Enlightenment, the timing is just a coincidence.
Other rational and secular philosophers have lived in various times and places (China, ancient Greece, India, etc.). Yacob deserves a place of honor among them, but none of them are part of the Enlightenment.
It's odd how the article tries to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment - it doesn't make logical sense, and so seems more out of the author's desire to see that connection.
... The first argument is that Giusto d'Urbino himself
clearly indicated that the manuscripts are not of his own.
And I do not see any reason why a European thinker of such
caliber produces such a refined philosophical work and at
the end ascribes it to some 'Ethiopian Philosopher' that
never existed. I could not possibly think of any not to
believe Giusto d'Urbino himself who tells us clearly that
he bought the manuscripts.
...
The second argument is linguistic in nature. Here we should
note that Giusto d'Urbino, though he did manage to learn
Ge'ez, was in no position to write such a manuscript. Still
some accept the fact that Giusto d'Urbino could have
dictated his ideas to an Ethiopian scribe who could have
captured his ideas in refined Ge'ez. Yes, even the argument
does not hold true. You see there is a manuscript--Les
Soirees de Carthage de Francois Bourgade. Both Giusto
d'Urbino and his Ethiopian Scribe write this manuscript.
The first part is written by Giusto d'Urbino himself and
the second part by his clerk. A thorough study of these
writings by a prominent instructor of Ge'ez literature at
Addis Ababa University, Alemayehu Moges, has clearly
indicated that, primarily, Giusto d'Urbino's writing in
Ge'ez is full of mistakes. The scribe's writing was found
to be free of errors but the type of languages used by
Giusto d'Urbino scribe and the language of Zara Yacob were
completely different. This clearly shows that neither
Giusto d'Urbino nor his scribe could have possibly been
the author of the manuscript that I strongly insist to be
of Zara Yacob.
[0]: https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-the...
Encourage you guys to read the comments.
All of the highest ideals of the European enlightenment had been conceived by dozens of people all throughout human history. I fail to see what makes Yacob special in this regard. For example:
>He believed in the supremacy of reason
So did Aristotle. So did Socrates. So did most major Greek philosophers.
Also the supremacy of reason was part of the problem with the Athenian school of philosophical thought - Aristotle reasoned the octopus was a stupid animal because it was extremely curious, and he reasoned women had fewer teeth than men did, and he reasoned many things that were flatly wrong. Empericism is what changed the world, with rationalism as a supporting pillar, not pure logic itself divorced from evidence and experiment.
>In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator.
Again, why does this make him special? Socrates was famously made to drink hemlock for his incessant questioning of the gods and the validity of religion.
>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’.
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
-Thomas Jefferson, clause from first draft of the Declaration of Independence, removed due to Southern opposition (note: Jefferson owned a lot of slaves, and kept them his whole life)
Englithenment thinkers did not condone slavery, they were just willing to profit off it. Which is a cowardly and immoral thing to do, but again Yacob's thinking is not unique here.
>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.
'Most successful' here meaning it ended in ethnic cleansing, frequent atrocity (including a castle "built on the bones of children"), and centuries of misery and death that continues to the present day while France....is one of the most prosperous nations on Earth.
At the risk of being reductionist, this article strikes me as being in a similar vein to "Ancient Egyptians were black!". That is, an attempt to elevate a modern minority group to higher prestige by attributing to them historical achievements they didn't really have any part in.
Does everything have to be jammed into the culturewar narrative?
Highlighting the contributions made by philosophers from other cultures is an important part of combating these kinds of narratives.
I seriously doubt you believe that someone has to be on the absolute vanguard of a subject for you to find it interesting.
It would sound less reductionist if you had applied the same characterization to the nebulous, modern fiction of “whiteness” and its invented appeals to Greco-Roman traditions.
Here is a very long Reddit thread in the same vein: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/7o6yau/in_which_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/7jl826/the_afri...
Basically exactly what I thought, it's claptrap using a lot of bad philosophy and bad history to push an afro-centrist narrative for the Enlightenment.
If the shoe was on the other foot, and this was a case of an African invention being attributed elsewhere, I would call that out too. I have no stomach for people who put politics above the truth.
EDIT: That /r/philosophy thread you linked is trash, and if those posts are indicative of the sort of problem you had with the article (that it's somehow trying to downplay the importance of European thinkers and is somehow pushing an "Afrocentric" narrative) then I'm convinced you're just wrong. Whatever.
Did Ethiopia have a part to play in the development of Western thought? Given his own final question, that seems to be the supposition of the author of the article - '... 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?' But Herbjørnsrud (the author) gives no evidence that either Yacob or Ano influenced European thinking any more than Locke's et al.'s contemporaries. (Quick - before looking them up in the Wikipedia - who was Christian Wolff? Francis Hutcheson? Nicolas Malebranche?) What evidence Herbjørnsrud presents indicates Yacob died in obscurity, unknown to Europeans, and Ano was at best '... one of the most prominent Wolffians.' [See Christian Wolff above.] Yet the author wants to immediately set these two among the luminaries (e.g. Kant) of European thinking.
Is Herbjørnsrud trying to push an Afrocentric narrative? He discusses only two African thinkers in his article, so it's easy to see why the OP might conclude this, but setting that aside, it seems Herbjørnsrud at minimum wants to promote certain Progressive principles, e.g. 'Neither was Amo alone in bringing /diversity/ or /cosmopolitanism/ to the University of Halle in the 1720s and ’30s.' [Emphasis mine.] While this is neither good nor bad, ignoring the undercurrent of Herbjørnsrud's article does nobody favors. (Of course, he wrote, _Global Knowledge: Renaissance for a New Enlightenment_, so what should we expect of Herbjørnsrud?)
True
It's worth pointing out that apart from 'minor issues' such as genociding whites and mixed-race Haitians [2], after the slave rebellion, the former blacks slaves pretty swiftly reinstituted slavery [1]! Dessalines adopted the economic organisation of serfdom. He proclaimed that every citizen would belong to one of two categories, laborer or soldier. Furthermore, he proclaimed the mastery of the state over the individual and consequently ordered that all laborers would be bound to a plantation. To avoid the appearance of slavery, however, Dessalines abolished the ultimate symbol of slavery, the whip. Likewise, the working day was shortened by a third. Dessalines' chief motivator nonetheless was production and to this aim he granted much freedom to the plantations' overseers. Barred from using the whip, many instead turned to lianes, which were thick vines abundant throughout the island, to 'persuade' the 'laborers' to keep working. Dessalines effectively sent the Haitian people back into slavery.
The new ruling class turned out to be the "Affranchi" [1, 3] typically french educated mixed-race Haitians.
The Haitian slave rebellion teaches us a large number of lessons about humanity, most not very palatable.
It's really interesting to note that (as far as I'm aware) no slave rebellion in history did actually seek to abolish slavery. The slaves wanted only to flip who's a slave and how's a slave holder. I conjecture that the real reason for slavery as a mode of labour organisation becoming obsolete is technical progress: slavery became less efficient than industrialised capitalism.
Haiti has been a basket-case ever since. Compare with countries like South-Korea, West Germany, Mainland China and many others which rose from utter basket cases to prosperity in a decade.
[1] Wikipedia, Haitian Revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
[2] Wikipedia, 1804 Haiti massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
[3] Wikipedia, Affranchi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affranchi
Before all the aforementioned authors, it's all but certain that many of these thoughts were had by unknown people without the ability to archive them in depth. The Bible alone is evidence of this; for someone to write that denial of religion deserves death, they must consider religion as a choice in the first place.
This just feels like someone is shoehorning a narrative that they like.
When the HN guidelines say the following, it applies to articles as well: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
I agree with you on this-- it's definitely interesting, but the point you're making here is very different from the thesis of the link. The thesis restatement in the last paragraph of the article makes the case that these authors have high historical relevance in philosophy, and that argument is what I was responding to.
I understand the goal of the guideline, but as a starting point it's unreasonable to expect someone to respond to an argument as it could be rather than as it really is. I think we're on the same page.
With this definition in mind, it's logical that the concept of "precursor" or "unknow philosopher/thinker" seems just absurd to some people.
I don't necessarily agree with this definition but we can't really blame nickysielicki for this very frequent point of view.
And further, intellectual popularity among a philosophers contemporaries and immediate successors. That makes it rather difficult to introduce a new thinker.
These guys may have had the same ideas before everyone else, but it doesn't matter. Their effect was minimal and the enlightenment didn't catch on in Ethiopia.
Historical material is interesting for plenty of reasons beyond "who won", and has always been welcome on Hacker News. So are things whose "effect was minimal", as long as they're interesting.
Also, let's not forget that Steve Jobs had repeateadedly refused to do chemo instead prefering homeopathy; and there's a huge chance the only reason those products are here are due to his highly pumped up ego, rather than the deeply thought-through design.
Or in other words, "Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it".