USA Africa Dialogue Series - ON PHILOSOPHY AND REASONABLENESS

Recently, Toyin Adepoju posted an article by one Dr Agazie titled 'Where Do We Bury You When You Die?'.
When I read this wonderful essay, it moved me on many fronts. The most immediate is that I am now able to finally identify a kindred spirit in my personal and professional fight against rampant irrationality and illogicality in the Nigerian society. I am not assuming that I am the only crusader against these menace; I am simply saying that this is the first powerful article that will come to my notice on an issue I have felt uncomfortable about for so so long.

Second, I now have a document I can recommend to my first year philosophy students on an indigenous, and indeed wasteful, issue that most people, even the educated ones, take for granted in the name of tradition.


Permit me a pedagogical comment. I have been teaching Introduction to Philosophy for some few years now. My strategy for teaching is occasioned by the notoriety Philosophy has acquired over the years as, well, one of the 'useless disciplines' (if not the most 'useless', apart from Classics and maybe history)that has nothing to contribute to personal and national development. Remember Obasanjo's (in)famous statement about useless disciplines and miseducation in Nigeria.


The manner I was taught philosophy which I inadvertently adopted only leads to further obfuscation and perplexity for the students who are already confounded on what impact philosophy will have on their life prospects. However, I got the benefit of a 'reeducation' from a beloved late Professor who understood the dynamics of instructing the students on what philosophy means and how it impacts their lives.


This is what I now teach. I begin with eliciting from the students their preconceived ideas and fears about philosophy: philosophy is esoteric and abstract; philosophers are atheists and therefore will surely go to hell; philosophy does not bake bread; etc. I tell the students to hold these preconceptions at the background of their minds and compare them with what they will get to learn about philosophy. I then go on to confront the professional philosophers' fondness for the standard definition of philosophy as having no definite definition by saying that philosophy over the centuries has acquired two standard conceptions: Philosophy as worldview and Philosophy as critical thinking.


Philosophy as worldview derives from the etymology of the word-philosophia-or the love of wisdom. And that wisdom translates into the comprehensive sets of ideas and beliefs about what we consider to be important about life and existence. At the first level, humans are homo philosophicus-philosophers who don't have the time to philosophise or have lost the requisite curiosity to instigate their inquiry to the humdrum of human existence. At the second level, we critically confront our ideas and beliefs which we all have as a compass to cope with and navigate life and existence but we hardly worry about their intellectual foundation. Socrates said 'an unexamined life is not worth living'.


It is at this second level of conceiving philosophy that I bump into the many accepted and digested or undigested assumptions, ideas and beliefs of the students about themselves, their cultures, their relationship with others or with their society or with the state, and so on. This is the most interesting aspect of the course because I then switch my role from being a teacher to an enlightened questioner or a Socratic interlocutor, probing and interrogating. The issue of burial, marriage and other traditional issues, as well as political issues about justice and questions like 'why must I obey the state', often surface with lots of outcries!

It doesn't take long for the issue about critical thinking to devolve into the idea of reason and reasonableness, and philosophy's significant role in challenging man's favourite natural and cognitive advantage. Yet, like David Hume recognised many years ago, man is more a slave to the passions than to reason! Burials, say, move us much more than driving ourselves to the limit to educate our children. Some of us are familiar with the Yoruba 'owambe' stereotype.

How, for instance, does this unreasonableness interact with the supposed capacity of the informal sector of the economy which is saddled with the task of alleviating the suffering of the people in the hands of a lecherous state?


You begin to see my delight with Dr Agazie's article. It can become a point of debate for the students, a perspective on reasonableness. What is missing now is the balance, a counter-perspective on, maybe, why the 'tradition' of wasteful spending on such matters is necessary and inescapable. Why most of us are beholden to such 'traditions' even in the face of overwhelming evidences.


I await someone on this forum who can help me play the devil's advocate.


Adeshina Afolayan

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

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