dear chielozona
very compelling thought. it is difficult to compare the "state" of a civilization without risking terrible teleological comparisons, and ferguson wants us to solve this with "coeval" time, coeval modernity. so i'll take the risk for a second, to agree with you that europe coming out of wwII and the holocaust was still up to its ankles in ashes. africa might not be in precisely the same situation; but still from south sudan to the drc etc, there is lots of anguish and retribution to work through, and in the c.a.r. it isn't nearly done yet.
freedom in that world of existential anguish calls for radical emotional drives, which could well explain the massive turn toward the evangelical conversions in the past decade or so.
obviously we can take sisyphus as a trope for despair, rather than endless hope. so, when i went to stay in senegal for a while, after cameroon, it was very clear that the deeply entrenched negative tones of cameroon were not at all the state of senegalese. i asked my friends why--no doubt a naive question, and the answer to a person was, we are muslims, we believe god's hand is in all this. in cameroon, at least the southern and central regions, you would never have gotten that answer. consider a mbembe portrait of autocracy and the cynical laughter--not unlike genet's, compared with the more positive attitudes of people whose actual material lives were marked by much less material goods than the cameroonians.
so, i don't like these broad generalizations very much; but still, existentialism did come out of somewhere; and your argument that that somewhere is a lot like today in much of africa (not to mention in other regions of the world burdened by the injustices of globalizationa) make a super-intriguing case.
quite a bit different from camus's The Plague, written on the heels of the defeat of totalitarian nazis.
but to get much much closer to your vision, it is actually The Fall where we must look. the moral greyness of that novel, the convoluted sense of loss, where culture no longer provides any positivity, and death and suicide haunt the protagonist, guilt over not responding to the cries for help of the drowning. i can easily relate that to haroun's films which speak really directly to our times. consider his film, un homme qui crie--not to mention darratt. nothing is closer to that despair in the face of a universe that doesn't respond than those films, and the former film a really bitter portrait of loss in this age where all the remaining goods of chad are gone to the global owners of the house (the hotel in this case). soyinka would have understood that, i think, in his use of anomy in the early work. and in The Road, his masterpiece. and in Madmen and Specialists, above all. A work truly in tune with those absurdist plays like Godot, or Beckett's other works of "madmen."
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2019 8:49:16 PM
To: 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Buhari on Existentialism
"for africa the word freedom meant something radically different from what it meant for the existentialists. two different sides to the ocean of colonialism." Ken
You are right, Ken. That was Africa of the last century. We are gradually finding ourselves in the same/similar situation that Europeans faced during and after the Second World War, when the moral world they used to know crashed. Many alert Africans are now asking questions that have direct existential and moral/ethical relevance. Who/what am I in the presence of other Africans? What is life if a village could summarily be wiped out by armed men? Are we condemned to be judged by our ethnicity/tribe?
There is a degree to which Sartre's conception of choice could devolve into some form of essentialism. But I find it hard to believe that "what we made ourselves into--could be called essence," because what we make ourselves into is best understood as a process. We create and recreate ourselves. This is where Camus's use of the story of Sisyphus (the guy who was condemned to be rolling a stone up the hill only for it to the damn stone to come crashing down when it nears the top) comes handy. The job of self-creation, or, if you like, of building a society, is a Sisyphean task, an unending one.
The best introduction to Camus's existentialism (he doesn't like the term) is his novel, The Plague. Toward the end of The Plague, while the people are rejoicing that the plague has been defeated, Dr. Rieux reminds the reader that the "plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good." The plague bacillus can lie dormant for years and then come back in unsuspecting moments. And if it comes back, then it is stone-rolling all over again.
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
--we are going back and back to existentialism, 1940s, a long time ago. sartre's notion was that who were really were--what we made ourselves into--could be called essence, and that it came about through our choices. it wasn't pre-given by anything, not genes, nothing physical, etc. there was a worldly context into which we were "thrown," as heidegger said, but we made ourselves by acting, by making choices. that was the basic idea.
camus wasn't particularly interested in these issue. for sartre, once we realize the weight of what our choices and freedom meant, we experienced nausea. for camus, throwing our questions out into the universe, and realizing there were no answers coming back, confronting that condition, gave rise to what he called the absurd, which is embodied in meurseult.
if we were to talk about philosophy since, its so many multiple mutations and preoccupations, we'd never leave the keyboards again
to change the orientation of the discussion, such ideas of existentialism were coexistent with the theatre of the absurd, to which beckett and other post war writers contributed. their preoccupations seem so very distant from those of their african co-temporal thinkers and writers. for africa the word freedom meant something radically different from what it meant for the existentialists.
two different sides to the ocean of colonialism.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chielozona Eze <chieloz@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2019 2:17:59 PM
To: 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Buhari on ExistentialismIf we are looking for the history of the expression "existence precedes essence," we need, of course, to admit that the idea had been in existence in the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. It is, however, Jean-Paul Sartre, who coined and gave it a profound philosophical grounding. This much is clear from his essay, "Existentialism is Humanism." It is actually correct to claim, as Biko has, that "existentialism is the European belief that existence comes before essence" For a short essay like his, it is not necessary to trace a long history of the term he is using. One can comfortably rely on the philosophy of either Sartre or Camus to situate that argument. Indeed, neither of these two philosophers believes in essence. So, they would argue that not only does existence precede essence, there is, indeed, no essence. There is existence. Period. Gabriel Marcel is often called a Christian existentialist because he admits of some form of essence: God. In response to Sartre's denial of God and hope (see his play No Exit), Marcel argues for exactly the opposite. There is God. There is hope. Humans are not hell to other humans.
So, dear O O, you are right that Biko knows how to pontificate. This time around, you seem to have out-pontificated him in your summary dismissal of his reliance on the well-known expression in existentialism.
--On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 12:01 PM 'O O' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
I thought that the double error (logical and historical) implicit in O B's unqualified characterization "Existentialism is the European belief that existence comes before essence") was apparent. Even Gabriel Marcel who coined the term and applied it initially to a particular European who popularized it did not use it dogmatically. All I am saying to O B: Please beware/be aware of the = sign when pontificating.--
to simplify this, nowadays no one believes in essence. "essentialism" is a criticism on student term papers, meaning we are supposed innately determined rather than constructed; constructionism is the dominant belief nowadays.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
From: 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2019 3:38:32 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Buhari on Existentialism--Dear OO,Your response to Oga Biko's characterization of existentialism is a rejection without an explanation. You seem to think that summarizing existentialism as "existence preceding essence" is misleading and accurate. And then you clammed up. What then is an accurate description?
Yes, existentialism differs from Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus to Merleau Ponty. Agozino betrays this unawareness a bit with his reference to an absurd world, which is basic to Camus rather than Sartre or Heidegger. But then, all existentialists take existence as more fundamental than essence. Why is that inaccurate? What perspective are you coming from sir?
Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan
+23480-3928-8429
--On Sunday, January 27, 2019, 2:10:29 AM GMT+1, 'O O' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
"Existentialism is the European belief that existence comes before essence": A statement so misleading, so inaccurate.
On Jan 26, 2019, at 12:52 PM, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--This may interest some:
BUHARI ON EXISTENTIALISM
By Biko Agozino In rationalizing his suspension of the Chief Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court, Presiden...
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