///"Re-Fanging the Python" is a series of posts drawn from my undergraduate thesis project, which is a comparative analysis of Akan and Western European Enlightenment ontological assumptions, especially as far as they relate to personhood. More broadly, it is an attempt to move towards a way of doing comparative philosophy that avoids the sterile, quasi-anthropological trappings of an academia that largely recognizes that it is dominated by Western, Euro-Christian modes of thought, but sees the solution as a museum of discourses in appropriately labeled vats (tour guides providing plenty of qualifiers that the museum itself is of course a discursive system while the guests tap on the glass). A sincere engagement with the reality of difference requires the acknowledgement of the real histories, divergences, and struggles constitutive of difference -- and crucially, a serious consideration of the positioning and responsibility of that engagement. What does it mean to do a responsible comparison of European and African thought? I don't think it means maintaining a catalogue of cultural novelty. The patronizing attitude in which the academy refuses real contact (questioning, debating, comparing) with the philosophy of a people who have been and remain under colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, undermines the effective existence of such a philosophy, bleeding the life from it and pinning it to a cork-board with the rest of the samples on their way to the British Museum.
The python is a holy animal across various West African traditional religions, and the slaughter of pythons and defacing of the temples where they were kept was a common tactic among European missionaries. "Re-Fanging the Python" then refers to an attempt to not only acknowledge African philosophy as existing and worthy of study, but actively working towards conditions that allow the exercise of its potency and vitality, something to challenge and be challenged.
Most of the research and preliminary notes and writings for this project was done in Ghana.///
A comparative study of Akan and Euro-Christian personal ontology — the socio-cultural assumptions about the elements that make up a person — cannot be performed in a scholarly void in which it is filed away into a catalogue of anthropological novelty. Though overtly conservative theorists are the most clearly suspect in their relegation of everything outside of western philosophical canon to curiosities and proto-philosophy, the dominant strain of deconstructionist postmodern critical theory in western liberal academia is at least as guilty of defanging the study of philosophy through its multiplicitous reduction of all thought to discursive contingency.
The failure of late 19th Century European linguists to provide a literal translation of the word "philosophy" for the Akan language ("nyansapɛ" was the word devised by Johann Cristaller) is a microcosm of European academia's general failure in the interpretation of African philosophy, and its failure to incorporate African philosophy into a sensible conversation about philosophy in general (a failure for which postmodern philosophers, and many of their postcolonial equivalents, similarly bear responsibility). Cristaller's constructed word derives from "nyansa", wisdom, and "pɛ", affinity; it starts with the Greek construction of "philos" and "sophos" into "lover of wisdom" and attempts to build the same word from Akan pieces. But wisdom for the Greeks and the Akan is not only differentiated in pronunciation, they are different concepts with a different origin. (1) For the Greek thinkers, the divine soul inhabiting the body carried the potential for familiarity with wisdom through careful study and rational consideration, though wisdom remained basically outside of the individual (a Greek thinker is a lover of wisdom, not a possessor of wisdom) as some function of universal basic elements. For the Akan thinker, the person, the people, and their mutual interaction are the basic element in which wisdom resides, and wisdom is something possessed by the human in a way meaningfully separate from the soul (a soul which itself does not have a direct equivalent in the Akan schema of the person). (2)
This distinction points to a difference in ontology, particularly the ontology of a person. It is not necessary to engage to what extent a society's conception of a person's core ontological attributes is primary to or derived from the historical constitution of their society — certainly it is both, and these attributes remain in flux. But without muddling in the question of causation we can nonetheless claim that there is a relation between a society's conception of a person's core ontological attributes and the historical (and contemporary) constitution of that society, and for our purposes ontology will be rhetorically assumed as primary in a perceptual sense, though not in a historical one. The perceptual primacy is a reflection of ontology as the basic assumptions of existence and relation that precede analysis — in this case, the assumption of the Euro-Christian soul or its rough equivalents in Akan personal ontology precedes analysis of what the soul is for and the way it interacts with the world. An understanding of what the soul is for and how it interacts with the world is not responsible for the actions taken in its name (at various levels, individual and social) but in terms of perceptive precedent nonetheless sits prior to the actions. We understand ontology in the same sense; sitting perceptually though not teleologically prior to analysis and understanding. This perception, nearly unconscious in its priority, is not, however, "mere" perception, and does meaningfully interact with actions social and individual. This meaningful interaction is a worthwhile topic of study, and seems a logical starting point in a good faith effort for the comparison of philosophies across cultures.
This project is concerned with a comparison of the ontological assumptions of West African Akan philosophy to Western European Enlightenment era philosophy (particularly the way in which their respective ontologies provide a basis for conceptions of personhood and the related interpersonal ethics). Also necessary is providing a justification for this cross-cultural comparative analysis according to the criteria of a broader ethics of epistemology. Akan philosophy is perhaps a more specific categorical designation than Western European Enlightenment philosophy, and has an ethnographic tinge to it (not least of all, of course, because of its reference to an African ethnicity), but this is to keep the claims focused and well grounded considering that the wide variety of African ethnicities, religions, and languages have unfortunately little written about their philosophical elements and the Akan stand out as an exception with a range of historical and contemporary sources and philosophers debating its characteristics. (3) The specificity is an attempt to alleviate some of the problems that would come from trying to speak to African philosophy in general (though many of the considerations concerning Akan ontology and personhood do have relevance across Africa). Western European Enlightenment philosophy is, meanwhile, what is more often than not referred to with the term "philosophy", and our engagement with the basic dualist ontology of soul and body (and the secular mirror of a supreme rational mind and body) means that it would have likely been possible to effectively use simply the term "European Philosophy." But this would potentially stir a similar issue to using the broader title "African Philosophy", as the inclusion of the ancient Greek, Levantine, and indeed African (via at least Egypt and the Maghreb) philosophy that so much of European Modern Philosophy understands as so influential to its origins would complicate the question beyond our scope. And since the concern of this paper is a comparative politics with some utility, it is preferable to use the European philosophy coinciding with the demarcation of Europe as a distinct entity, which of course itself coincided with European colonization of the Americas and Africa, and this leaves us with a more manageable range to claim commonalities of ontology.
This project's comparison of Akan and Western Europe Enlightenment (we will call it Euro-Christian or Western European interchangeably with the understanding that it is referring to this historical conception) ontology of the person, with emphasis on the resultant conception of personhood in a society more broadly, is done towards the ends of developing a model for such pragmatic cross-cultural comparisons going forward, which we claim can serve to reinvigorate philosophy as a crucial field that exists for purposes beyond buttressing of its viability in managerial-academia. (4) Our project here widens its trajectory: the difference in Akan and Euro-Christian formulations, merely acknowledged, is quickly absorbed as a minor particularity (5) into the field of academic philosophy (perhaps commendable for acknowledgement of African philosophy as in dialectics with Euro-Christian philosophy, as such acknowledgements tend to be embraced as long as there is no conclusion beyond the mere acknowledgement) bestowed with legitimacy insofar as that legitimacy can be folded away as the product of one discursive method among many. Western academia is afflicted with an autocannibalistic epistemology that is gambling its survival on its own dissection and dissemination into countless subfields, each unable to make a claim without finding itself within a new field and a different department. Philosophy becomes Cultural Studies becomes Race in Cultural Studies becomes Black Experience in Film, each preserved from the question of knowledge by its total embrasure of epistemic contingency, each losing circulation. Bourgeois liberal academia, a managerial edifice concerned primarily with its own propagation, shelters itself efficiently from the real consequences of thought by means of scholastic Bantustans. Those with enough anger towards or interest in the consequences of neocolonialism are unlikely to get near enough a Development Economics class to challenge the assumption of neoliberal economics as natural law. If they do, they are gently laughed away — we recognize that neoliberal economics is but one historically contingent discursive method among many, you are free to dispute it in the Africana or English Department.
Besides working towards a general model of such comparative efforts, the purpose of this particular analysis is to find some ground to reconcile elements of the Akan philosophical framework with the Euro-Christian. Not out of a naive humanism that a "mutual understanding" will serve as a resolution to political conflicts, but out of the conviction that a good faith commitment to scholarship cannot both acknowledge the existence and validity of the Akan philosophical framework and simultaneously deny that much can (and must) be salvaged from the Euro-Christian philosophical tradition. There is an odd tendency in the critical theory of western academia (largely postmodern, poststructuralist, etc, not referring so much to the modernist origins) to understand rationality and reason as primarily European concepts complicit in the crimes of European colonialism, without qualifying this claim by reference to the actual philosophies of those peoples who suffered under European colonialism. A cursory glance at various non-European philosophies finds that, though they vary widely from European philosophy and from each other, none are entirely alien. Kwasi Wiredu says, regarding the application of Akan thought to traditional consensual democracy:
"The Ashanti answer is 'Yes, human beings have the ability eventually to cut through their differences to the rock bottom identity of interests.'...the means to that objective is simply rational discussion. Of the capabilities of this means the Ashantis are explicit. 'There is,' they say, 'no problem of human relations that cannot be resolved by dialogue." (6)
Hopefully it is clear to what extent this, divorced from its African context, would be derided in the classroom of western critical theory as naive and perhaps tacitly white supremacist or European chauvinist. The claim here is not that the Akan prioritizing of rational discussion vindicates rationality as such — in fact, we can see many of the limits of rational discourse suggested by critical theorists applying also to the Akan conception of rationality. In presenting the features of Akan consensual democracy Wiredu tends to minimize the role of informal power relations that we can assume would be quite significant, such as the assumption that the formal limitations on the Asantehene's hereditary rulership by means of his council were generally effective in their representative democratic aims. (7) This is in no way grounds for a dismissal of Wiredu's analysis of Akan democracy, as it is entirely understandable that he should begin with the model as it is intended to function, especially to draw to the surface what is wrong in assumptions of the archetypical "African Chieftan" as a crude, shamanistic patriarch instead of occupying a particular position within a developed civil system, and then exploring the workings of that civil system. Neither are we claiming that the Akan and Euro-Christian conception of rationality are necessarily compatible (much of this project is devoted to the ontological foundations of their incompatibility), nor that a particular rationality and the systems of governance based upon it were not instrumental in elements of colonialism and genocide carried out by European powers. But there is, in the desire to dismiss rational discourse and the use of reason as having inherently led to such crimes, a truly chauvinistic strain of deconstructionism that takes for granted the universality of not only European thought but European colonial domination. In an admittedly reductive distillation, the attitude seems to be — "we tried rationality and reason, it did not work, now we know that rationality and reason are on their own naive and can only safely exist in the context of phenomenological deconstruction that makes no positive assertions besides positively asserting that things can be properly qualified into their own discursive modes." Not only does this dismiss non-European modes of thought as implicitly underdeveloped ("How quaint that they still sincerely work in teleology and metanarrative!"), it reduces the bounty of contradictions in Euro-Christian thought to a crude idealism in which the horrors of the colonial era were caused simply by bad ideas. A constructive critique of colonialism and imperialism as phenomena needs to understand Africa as an existing reality to be engaged with on various levels from various angles, in truly integrated conversation with the rest of the world without falling into traps of describing Africa as merely potentiality or tragedy. In philosophy this means studying the basic assumptions present in various African societies and considering them in a context that is not a catalogue of difference but an incorporation of African thought into self-aware epistemological development generally.
(1) This opening note is drawn directly from Kwame Gyekye's opening of his fourth chapter "The Akan conception of philosophy" in African Philosophical Thought (African Philosophical Thought, Gyekye, p. 61)
(2) Akan wisdom can also be an activity performed and something sought after, but for the purpose of this introductory comparison it is helpful to emphasize where that wisdom is primarily located, in this case outside or inside the person. The particulars of Akan wisdom and its related faculties will be explained in Part 2.
(3) There are certainly better documented African philosophies than the Akan's, but the Akan also occupy a position of black, sub-Saharan African that makes the analysis of their philosophy more instrumentally useful for these comparative purposes, both due to more overt difference and historical distance from European philosophy (e.g. relative to Berbers, Egyptians, Ethiopians) and also simply because of the author's greater familiarity with Akan philosophy in particular.
(4) A term described by Lewis Gordon, first in page 9 of his "Disciplinary Decadence"
(5) Perhaps one commendable for acknowledgement of African philosophy as in dialectics with Euro-Christian philosophy, as such acknowledgements tend to be embraced as long as there is no conclusion beyond the mere acknowledgement.
(6) Wiredu, Democracy and Consensus, Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, pg. 306-307
(7) Ibid.