to begin, i had no idea of negritude in mind when positing a prioritizing of the humanities over the technological sciences. nor was i thinking that there was some cultural bias that privileged white people or black people in the uses of reason and emotion. for all its anti-white racism, negritude's, or rather, senghor's embrace of these values is profoundly disenabling of black people, and is justifiably viewed as the one aspect of negritude universally to be dismissed as early 20th century junk, to be kind.
my problem is with development as a current concept, grounded in the west's notion that it represents the goal toward which "underdeveloped" societies need to go.
before i am attacked for ignoring human needs, let me take it as a given that the standard of living is not at issue: everyone should be entitled to the standards of a decent life, as a right.
rather it has to do with two things: one is that what gives life value is not ownership of technological devices.
and second, my real point here, the counterintuitive notion that we get to where we want to be--at that place where we can better overcome the obstacles to a good life, and ultimately find the meaning of a good life, when we begin by emphasizing the arts and humanities. not simply because they are nice or enriching, but because they engage us intellectually more fully, and enable us to place our scientific and rational studies in a world that welcomes human beings, and not just bodies.
i began my university studies as a physics and then a math major at MIT. i switched to the humanities in my 3d year, and went on to comparative literature at nyu. i recite this cv so as to claim i am not unfamiliar with the sciences, and am not at all embracing a negritudinal rejection of it as anti-humanist.
what i would like to hear is a new paradigm, which i though moses, you were hinting at by turning to complementarity. but i would prefer a complementarity in which these realms of knowledge are not viewed as disjunctive, but rather truly overlapping, as in the work on quantum that entails philosophy as well as math. or better still, where they are not viewed as separate entities.
i suggest that the heavy emphasis on a certain notion of development and progress, forged in western institutions, has been deleterious over the long run, and that in the long run a fuller and more successful mode of education would begin by reading humanities and arts texts as required in the formative curricula.
better still, i would like a rethinking about what we mean by progress and the price we pay in embracing developmental notions of progress. anthropology went through this rethinking about 80 years ago, and saved its soul as a science. now we need to challenge this dominant ideological normalization of progress as though it were self-evident. i don't know whether your notion of complementarity is intended to do this.
ken
On 11/24/12 3:11 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:
Oga Toyin,
I had a feeling after writing my comments that I had done more to conceal my point than to reveal it. Thanks for calling me out on it. My point is that Kenn's argument seems to reaffirm the problematic view of Negritudist philosophers and intellectuals regarding progress. Their response to and critique of the technological modernity of Europe was to argue that Africans/blacks are different from Europeans and have been conditioned by geography, culture, and socialization to value and express emotion, intuition, and artistic creativity above reason, verifiability, investigation, science, technology, and other markers of progress valued and posited as universal standards by Europeans. My point is that by positing an alternative African standard of progress, one founded not on science and reason but on artistic and humanistic excellence, this Negritudist notion concedes and surrenders the realm of reason, science, and technology to Europe or Euro-America. Why would one do that when one can narrate Africa and Africans as capable of appreciating and producing scientific/technological knowledge and progress, as in fact a center of scientific and technological progress, even if this technological culture may have some distinctly African flavors? Further, I stated that I prefer the revised Negritudist notion that Africa and Europe are not just separate spheres of progress, separated by the dichotomy of science/technology and arts/humanism, but also zones of complementarity that complement each other, together driving human progress. Technological progress cannot be sustained, the argument goes, without humanistic developments, and qualitative societal progress stagnates when a society relies solely on humanistic and artistic pursuits. I prefer this argument but I also recognize that it, too, is problematic in that it leaves intact the Eurocentric claim that technological and scientific progress defined by European notions of reason is a universal or that it should be. The notion of complementarity does not challenge the hegemony of European technological and scientific modernity. I realize that I have not resolved the problem but I didn't set out to do so. I set out to point out the problem I see with Kenn's argument in response to your query, especially the paragraph you quoted admiringly.--
On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:27 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tvade3@gmail.com> wrote:
Oga Moses,
Your English is really big here.
Can you explain, please?
toyin
On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 7:02 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Beautiful words, but for me Kenn's idea in those words comes dangerously close to the highly problematic Negritudist attitude to notions of scientific and technological progress, and their concomitant veneration of alternative cultural and "intuitive" premises of progress, arguments which ultimately serve to unintentionally underscore and reify the equally problematic dichotomous view of progress and lag inherent in the paradigmatic Eurocentric ideas that the Negritudist intellectuals set out to challenge in the first place. I prefer the idea of complementarity, which revisionist rereadings of Negritude, like Messay Kebede's, stress above the idea of a separate cultural baseline of progress for "emotional" African peoples. The idea of complementary, too, has its own blindspots, to be sure, since it does nothing to fundamentally challenge and in fact leaves intact the paradigmatic, universalist claims of Western technicist modernity and the ideas of progress that flow from these claims.
On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 12:22 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <tvade3@gmail.com> wrote:
i really like this-
...or we can imagine that the notion of progress is totally bound up in cultural values disseminated by dominant structures, and that independence means not only resistance to those structures which privilege the way wealth and power are constructed in the global north, but rethinking the received wisdoms that link notions of progress to scientific rationalism.
On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:18 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
or we can imagine that the notion of progress is totally bound up in cultural values disseminated by dominant structures, and that independence means not only resistance to those structures which privilege the way wealth and power are constructed in the global north, but rethinking the received wisdoms that link notions of progress to scientific rationalism.
--
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