Existence and Heritage

Tsenay Serequeberhan

Description

In Existence and Heritage, Tsenay Serequeberhan examines what the European philosophical tradition has to offer when encountered from the outsider perspective of postcolonial African thought. He reads Kant in the context of contemporary international relations, finds in Gadamer's work a way of conceiving relations among differing traditions, and explores Heidegger's analysis of existence as it converges with Marx's critique of alienation. In the confluence of these different assessments, Serequeberhan articulates both a need and example of responding to Fanon's call for a new kind of thinking in philosophy. He demonstrates both how continental philosophy can be a useful resource for theorizing Africa's postcolonial condition and how postcolonial thought and African philosophy can provide a new way of approaching and understanding the Western tradition.
Acknowledgments
Preface: The Possible in Philosophy

Introduction: Reflections and Encounters

I. Reflections

1. Decolonization and Philosophy

2. Continental and African Philosophy: Dialogue at a Distance

II. Encounters

3. Post-9/11, Perpetual Peace? A Reading of Immanuel Kant

4. Hermeneutics and Differing Traditions: A Reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer

5. Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and Postcolonial Africa

Conclusion: Frantz Fanon, Thinking as Openness

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophy
• History of philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438457918
• Langue: English

Extrait

Existence and Heritage
SUNY SERIES , P HILOSOPHY AND R ACE
Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors
Existence and Heritage

H ERMENEUTIC E XPLORATIONS IN A FRICAN AND C ONTINENTAL P HILOSOPHY
TSENAY SEREQUEBERHAN
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2015 Tsenay Serequeberhan
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Serequeberhan, Tsenay, 1952–
Existence and heritage : hermeneutic explorations in African and continental philosophy / Tsenay Serequeberhan.
pages cm. — (SUNY series, philosophy and race)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5789-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5791-8 (e-book)
1. Philosophy, African.2. Hermeneutics.3. Africa—Colonization—Philosophy. I. Title. B5315.H36S468 2015 199 .6—dc23 2014042148
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Petros Yohannes and the ideal that inspired his commitment
Those who made our heroic virtues triumph
Long buried will not return today
Will not return today
White, Black, distinction of color
You who exposed the deeds of the Italians
Forever your name will endure
Federation, a time of confusion
You who rejected the foreign flag
Forever your name will be honored
The time of the Dergue, most horrid
He who declared for his country, inexplicably
Strangulated, utterly desiccated
—Lyrics from an Eritrean ballad
(Original in Tigrinya)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: The Possible in Philosophy
Introduction: Reflections and Encounters
I. Reflections
1 Decolonization and Philosophy
2 Continental and African Philosophy: Dialogue at a Distance
II. Encounters
3 Post-9/11, Perpetual Peace? A Reading of Immanuel Kant
4 Hermeneutics and Differing Traditions: A Reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer
5 Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and Postcolonial Africa
Conclusion: Frantz Fanon, Thinking as Openness
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge my wife and friend, Nuhad Jamal, for sharing her critical insights and Barry Hallen for reading an early version of the preface and chapter 2. I thank my sons, Nesim and Awate, for their forbearance in tolerating my many mood swings occasioned by the difficulty of working on most of this book while carrying a full load of teaching. I am grateful to my home institution, Morgan State University, for a sabbatical leave that allowed me to finish and make the book ready for publication with a minimum amount of stress and tribulation.
Preface

The Possible in Philosophy
Then Polemarcus said: Socrates … you must either be stronger than we are, or you must stay … Is there not another alternative, said I, namely that we may persuade you to let us go? Could you, said he, persuade men who do not listen?
—Plato, Politeia (327c)
It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
—James Baldwin 1
I
Philosophy, unlike other disciplines, does not have a specified and preordained field of discourse. This lack of ordination, however, does not mean that it functions in and is sited on a chaotic, nebulous terrain. It only means that philosophic reflection has the totality of what is as the object of its endeavors. These endeavors, furthermore, are always undertaken from within a plurality of bounded intellectual parameters whose varied and noncommensurable discursive norms can never be, once and for all, universally established and/or accepted as such. 2
In pursuing their concerns, philosophers present to each other—and whoever else is willing to listen—persuasive, or what they take to be convincing, arguments. This they do from within the accepted parameters of given philosophic perspectives focused on an interpretative exploration of a situation, in keeping with accepted and established assumptions and “shared presuppositions.” 3 Those engaged in such endeavors try to persuade each other by citing acceptable authors and by articulating arguments they deem convincing. In this, the truths argued for, and upheld, are focused on persuading our partners in dialogue of the veracity of what follows in view of what we both accept to be, or not to be, the case.
Indeed, as Parmenides noted long ago, “Persuasion … attends upon truth.” 4 In other words, in light of the thinkers you appreciate and in view of what you accept, shouldn’t you assess and/or revise, modify, alter, reject, or confirm the attitude(s) that you have maintained thus far? The intent is to persuasively explore “shared presuppositions” in terms of issues and concerns situated in our lived existence. To persuasively explore here means to interpretatively query and render the sense of what is being explored in view of “shared presuppositions,” or prejudices, 5 which are themselves not static but revisable—and indeed constantly revised—effects of this circular interplay, an ongoing interpretative process, assessed in terms of what is in question. 6
It is in this manner, then, that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, long after the end of colonialism and the Cold War—in the era of imperious 7 United States unilateralism, most blatantly manifested in the open-ended war on terror, which is itself a euphemism for the war on the Arab/Islamic world 8 —that we must engage our philosophic reflections. Much has happened in the second half of the twentieth century, and to be relevant, a vital necessity for philosophy, it has to engage its reflections against the backdrop of these “happenings.” For, these “happenings” are the totality of differing and/or contradictory effects that, as a whole, constitute our hybrid and variegated heritage: the effective-past which—in its staying power—effectively structures and actuates the lived historicalness of the present.
This is what Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to as “effective-history,” 9 from whose effects, in and on the present—which is itself the actuality of these effects —arise the issues, concerns, understandings, and so on that animate and provoke our persuasive engagements, in and out of which we consider, and reconsider, how and what we are and have been. It is that about which we agree and/or disagree, and it is also that which we invoke, or make use of, to back up our efforts at swaying each other’s minds. For, in philosophy, as in much else in life, “there isn’t an objective conducting line of tradition” that binds us, permanently, to past choices or situations because “it is always possible to rethink history.” 10
The past shows itself in the acuity of the lived present, by giving us differing vistas of our history “through our scientific discoveries,” 11 situated in our ongoing engagements. In this way, it makes possible, for us, novel understandings of ourselves, by giving us a “better grasp of our identity,” 12 of what we have been and what we possibly can become. It is this circular and circuitous interplay—of the effective-past in the exigencies of the lived present—which makes possible the concerns in and out of which we interpretatively face our future. And it is in terms of these always changing concerns that our interpretative involvements sift, sieve, and query the enduring effects that constitute our historical heritage, out of which we spin the actuality of our existence by projecting (i.e., throwing ahead) into and as the future the possibilities we hope for and struggle to attain. In the non-vicious circularity of this “ ‘circle’ ” 13 —our human situation—this study locates and explores the thematic that concerns it.
II
The title Existence and Heritage is thus focused on the actuality of our worldhistorical situation—that which has endured—since the end of colonialism and the reinsertion of Africa, and the non-European world, into history. This mid-twentieth-century event has marked and oriented all subsequent historical-political developments. For, after the mid-twentieth century our world could no longer be the exclusive domain or “playground” of Europe, 14 given that we , the formerly colonized, had terminated our “plaything” status. Concretely, Dien Bien Phu (1954) and Algeria (1954–1962) saw to this by decisively reaffirming the actuality of human historical existence, beyond the limits of the colonizing West. Reaffirming, that is, the suppressed heritage of the formerly colonized by tangibly reclaiming the lived actuality of human existence exterior to European (i.e., colonial) confines. 15
This “effective-history,” that of the anti-colonial struggles of the last century, is today an integral component of the generic/general inheritance of humanity. Unlike the horrific memories of its antagonist—the colonial depredations of imperious Europe—it does not occasion shame and/or disgust. To give but one example: No sane Italian, today, can recall what the Fascists did in Ethiopia—the use of mustard gas—or Eritrea without feeling shame, disgust, and/or guilt and disassociating himself/herself, as best she/he can, from this barbaric period of his/her country’s history which is, itself, internal to the history of European colonial imperialism.
The heroism of Ethiopia’s patriots—as distinct from the cowardice of Emperor Haile Selassie—on the other hand, and the heroism of the Eritrean ascari who deserted en masse 16 the Fascist colonial army, and the deeds of people like Abrha Deboch, Moges Asgedom, and Zerai