Sapere Aude: Why the Philosophy of Liberation in the 21st Century?

13 Jun, 2021 - 00:06 0 Views
Sapere Aude: Why the Philosophy of Liberation in the 21st Century?

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Mabhena

It is not an exaggeration but an understatement what historian Eric Hobsbawn stated in 2002 that “the 20th Century was the most murderous in recorded history.” The Century was also the time conquest and domination of one by the other in the world was consolidated and oppressions and exploitations of those that Frantz Fanon canonically described as the “wretched of the earth” were naturalised, normalised, structuralised and systematised into the common sense of the history of the world. The oppression and exploitation of black people and their countries, further impoverishment of the poor, oppression of women, abuse of children, punishment of the sick and discrimination of the disabled, exclusion of foreigners and refugees and neglect of the aged have all been some of the violences of the past and the present century.

What the American cartoonist Walt Kelly’s character Pogo said that “we have met the enemy and he is us” is true of the life and work of human beings on earth. Over and above the evil work of enslaving and colonising each other in many genocidal ways human beings have committed the crime of ecocide, which is the murder of the environment through the pollution and corruption of the ecosphere, water, land, soil and air. Thanks to centuries of human conquest and domination of the earth the planet is just about to be inhospitable for human, animal and plant life as climate change that used to be the subject of science fiction has occasioned too much heat and too much cold, and diseases, to threaten the existence on earth for all forms of life.

Because of what sciences and philosophies of conquest and domination have done in the world, through coloniality with its accompanying capitalist politics and economic extractivism we cannot but consider the Philosophy of Liberation. In the monstrous process of amassing and monopolising resources of life and what Achille Mbembe has called the “very forces” of life that include justice, peace and oxygen itself the spirit of conquest and domination, the will to power, has driven men and women to destroy the very last available resource, the planet itself. Science and philosophy combined are trying and failing to save life from toxins, pandemics and endemics that are sure to squeeze life out of the planet.

The desperate and perhaps the last measure to recover what is left for life and its forces in the planet is to do what Immanuel Kant prescribed as, “ Sapere Aude,” which is to “ dare to think” and to master the courage to know and do the right thing under what might be impossible circumstances, dark times.

The Philosophy of Liberation
The academic philosophers, those professionals and intellectuals of philosophy, that earn a living from studying the history of philosophy are content to think, talk and write about philosophy and philosophers of the past. Philosophers of liberation that live, experience and use philosophy as a weapon of liberation have no time to ponder philosophy but the problems of the world. They deploy philosophy as a vocation of liberation and not an academic discipline and an intellectual profession.

They do what Paulo Freire did with the philosophy of education and what Gustavo Gutierrez did with theology as a philosophy of religion, which was to think outside academic disciplinarism and demand the liberation of thought and practice from the trappings of domination and conquest. Freire the Brazilian and Gutierrez the Peruvian were thorough going philosophers of liberation of the Global South that did not ponder philosophy but used the facility of philosophy to trouble domination and ponder liberation. The search for light in dark times and justice under domination makes the line very thin between philosophy and prophecy.

They were not the first or were they the last. Saint Augustine was haunted by the discovery that man had as many masters as he had vices, a slave of sin. In 426 AD the philosopher of Hippo, at the collapse of the Roman Empire saw it to be true that what prevented the coming to pass of the holy and just City of God, not the city of man, was human slavery to evil and sin. He was a philosopher of liberation who condemned the “Libido Dominandi,” the desire to dominate and appetite to conquer was to him the root of all evil. Like the appetite for sexual gratification and pleasure man desires to conquer, overcome and dominate others even by crook and evil itself.

Sir Thomas More, later canonised by the Catholic Church as a saint of Reformism coined the word “Utopia,” a definition of the condition of freedom, peace and justice that liberates man from hell and deliver him to paradise on earth. Beheaded in 1535 by the King he loved and supported until he disagreed with and disapproved of him, King Henry VIII of England, More lived to learn that Utopia cannot come without fundamental revolution in the hearts and ways of human beings that daily work to create dystopia and darkness on earth.

The societies of holiness, justice and peace that Augustine and More imagined were not perfect paradises because they still had slaves and other oppressed but these two philosophers were philosophers of liberation that imagined the recovery of the world from domination, blood and darkness. More, for instance, thought of and worked for a world where human beings were not egotistical, violent, cruel and greedy monsters but egalitarian, altruistic people.

The German nihilist, Friedrich Nietzsche, one that can be called a philosopher of domination, described the “will to power” and celebrated it as an unstoppable appetite for conquest, power and domination. Nietzsche praised the “master race” and expressed his contempt for the conquered, the weak and the dominated of the world that he advised to submit to conquest and domination until they were themselves strong and powerful enough to conquer and dominate. The philosophy of liberation and its philosophers exist because conquest, domination and evil and their philosophers are real. The reality of conquest and domination necessitates the need for a philosophy of liberation, thought-experiments and practices, which work for justice and liberation.

The philosophers of liberation are frequently classified and understood as existentialists because they are troubled by issues of being and existence in a world of conquest and domination of some by others. In the Global South such names as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and the European thinker of the South Jean-Paul Sartre come to mind, as well as the Portuguese legalists and philosopher, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in the present. Philo of Alexandria, in 20BC, who lived in the then Roman province of Egypt opposed racism and slavery when it was still the common sense of the world and was indeed a philosopher of liberation located in the South of the Equator, geographically and philosophically.

Sapere Aude: What is to Philosophise for Liberation?
I have observed it elsewhere that the philosophy of liberation as a province of decoloniality is not just the ‘love of wisdom’ that is a luxury of Eurocentric philosophers in their power and privilege. The philosophy of liberation is essentially the ‘courage of wisdom,’ the fearlessness to think about liberation where love and justice have been prohibited by conquest. Thomas More had to give up the pride and privilege of being a King’s advisor and supporter to insist on the truth of justice until he was beheaded for it. The easy thing for him was to remain a flatterer and sycophant of power and enjoy the spoils but truth and justice were too strong a temptation for him, stronger than the fear of death.

The philosophy of liberation does not begin with belief in old truths but doubt and question of durable dogmas. It begins with stubborn atheism and disbelief of the going truths of power and domination. Edward Said called it the act of thinking and “speaking truth to power” and not the comfortable sycophantic habit of speaking ‘truth’ from power and privilege, supporting conquest and domination for cash or for cause.

Describing the Enlightenment as the philosophy of light out of darkness, not the colonial Enlightenment that bloodied and darkened the world with slavery and colonialism, Immanuel Kant wrote of the philosophy of liberation as the maturity and adulthood of thinking itself, not simplistic opportunism. Kant asserted that the “enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed non-age” and graduation to the maturity and courage of thought. To Kant “laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives” the kids of thought and life that fear to counter-reflect and meta-reflect against conquest and domination, and “it is so comfortable to be a minor.”

So comfortable because what are called thoughts and ideas are given to one and fed to him as dogma, what one has to do is simply sing them out as music to the conquerors and oppressors of the world. In thought and practice, swimming against the tide of conquest and domination, with all the temptations of power and privilege that they offer, and the penalties and punishment that they can levy, is part of philosophising for liberation. It is not just to shine a torch in some dark corner! It is more than “thinking in dark times” that Hannah Arendt canonically described.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS). Contacts: [email protected]

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