EPISTEMOLOGICAL
DUALISM AND THE PRIMAL OTHER
Records
from the upper Palaeolithic period (about 35,000 years ago) indicate that what
differentiated Homo Sapiens from the Neanderthals was the former’s ability to
conceive the existence of a spiritual universe which was metaphorically
speaking. separated from the physical by the thinnest of membranes. The spirit
world, according to the cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, was an
immanent reality “interdigitating” with the material world. (2002:209). The
entire existence of the earliest human beings was shaped by this alternative
reality. “All life, economic, social, and religious, (took) place within and
interacted reciprocally with (this) specific conception of’ the universe”.
(2002:209)
Such
a state of affairs existed universally amongst the human race, to one degree or
another and in one form or another, until the advent of what is 110W called the
European Enlightenment. Descartes himself, whose name is ineradicably linked
with the worldview that was birthed during the Enlightenment, confessed to have
come to his cogito ergo sum through a numinous experience on 10 November 1619
when he had “a day-time vision, and that night three dreams, which revealed to
him, as he thought, his task in life: to unfold a wonderful science.” (Sorel T
1994:xix) And while Descartes visions and dreams over that forty eight hour
period have gone almost completely unnoticed in history what is now called the
‘Cartesian cogito” is feted as one of the most important milestones in the
philosophical journey of the human race. This because his “wonderful
science” has become associated with none other than the modern scientific
project and the so-called objectification of reality.
Descartes’
discovery, of course, was about himself before it was about the universe around
him. In deciding to think about himself in a certain way he also decided to
think about the universe in a certain way. It is this self-understanding that is
at tile heart of the modern scientific project and which, if the journey is to
continue, must encounter once again the forgotten Other. If the primal
understanding of the world was that it was an interdependent whole of which the
spiritual dimension was the most important then the primal understanding of the
self was to do with engagement with this whole. And if the Cartesian
understanding of the universe was that it was a range of disparate objects then
the Cartesian understanding of the self was that it must be disengaged from
these objects. This, in essence, is the difference between primal and modern
understandings of reality.
If
such worldviews are seen as rivals then it must be acknowledged that there has
been little contest — with the march of modernity entire civilizations have
been destroyed. In spite of this the primal worldview continues to make its
presence felt, at least throughout the Southern hemisphere. While scientists and
doctors might have replaced shamans and priests in Europe and tile United States
this has only partially been tile case in other parts of the world, especially
Africa. Here the two perceptions of reality interface and interpenetrate in ways
that continue to confound the average westerner. The propensity for Africans to
traverse the different terrain is linked precisely with their capacity to
engage. partially absorb, and accommodate the Other. Unlike the modern worldview
which by definition disengages from, classifies, and dismisses the Other. Such
open-ness to the novel, argues Horton, has defined the African capacity “to
borrow, re-work and integrate alien ideas (and) has given traditional
cosmologies .. tremendous durability in the face of the immense changes that
tile 20 century has brought to tile African scene.” (Horton in Appiah
1992:127) This accommodative style of African epistemologies, says Horton,
contrasts with the adversarial style of scientific theory where the way in which
change of belief is stimulated is not by novel experience but by rival theory.
Bediako offers the suggestion that a fundamentally different kind of
epistemology is at work here. An African epistemology, he says, lends itself to
“a unified and organic view of the knowledge of truth (avoiding) the
destructive dichotomies in the epistemology (of) the European Enlightenment.”
(1995:103)
The
encounter between these two worldviews amid their respective constructions of
tile self and of reality should be one of the major challenges to contemporary
students of philosophy. Traditionally the study of this encounter has been the
preserve of ethnographers and sociologists (for example Levy-Bruhl and his
followers — such as Durkheirn). In the African context tile philosophical
terrain was opened by Placide Tempels’ pivotal Baum Philosophy in 1953. Since
then many African philosophers have entered the debate. Tempels’ emphasis was
on the ontological unity of all being in African thought — a concept based 00
what has been called “vital participation” and which he dubbed “force
vitale”. While most African philosophers (one exception being Kagame) have
taken issue with Tempels’ identification of “being” with “force” few
have denied his assertion that African ontology valorizes the interconnectedness
of all being. The most articulate of these philosophers has been Alexis Kagame
who set out consciously to test Tempels’ theories in linguistic analysis. In
his monumental La Philosophic Bantu-Rwandaise de l’Etre (1956) he
linguistically analyzes the term ntu which is roughly translated being.
Mudimbe’s summary of Kagame’s conclusion is “that the Bantu equivalent of
to he is strictly and only performed as a copula. It does not express the notion
of existence, and therefore cannot translate tile Cartesian cogito”. (Mudimbe
1985:189, emphasis mine)
This
observation of Mudimbe’s is remarkable. That the Bantu word for being can only
be performed as a copula and that within this schema the Cartesian cogito cannot
be translated is probably the most radical way of stating that the essence of
African ontology, usually adumbrated in the expression “I am because others
are, and because others are I am”, is diametrically opposed to tile Cartesian
schema adumbrated in the expression “I think therefore I am”.
Similarly
the African experience of the transcendent is as pervasive as it is
common-place. The Sotho word for the ancestors — badimu — is a variation of
the Sotho word for God — Modimo. In other words it is the plural form of God.
The one is manifest in the many, and though the one is absent tile many are
present - a phenomenon which Idowu called “diffused monotheism”. Turner and
others have pointed out that it is this “imminent” transcendence that makes
the African approach so different from the Western approach. The fact that this
world is so suffused with the transcendent means that humankind comes to
participate in the transcendent. When this translates into the everyday
experience of “others” we have the possibility of the introduction of the
transcendent into the mundane relationships of everyday life. It is a
transcendence that requires tile presence of an “other” and therefore cannot
be experienced autonomously. Once again this has epistemological implications.
The transcendent Other draws us out of ourselves in a continual search for
meaning and plenitude of being.
The
question must arise how one can make philosophical sense of this ability for so
many people to integrate in their everyday lives such different understandings
of reality. One way is to suggest, as Horton does, that worldviews, whether
primal or modern, function as theoretical constructs that explain, predict, and
control the world as experienced and understood by its inhabitants. The
difference between the two, inter alia, is that one understands reality
animately and the other inanimately. Reality, Horton argues, is never
experienced simply at common sense level, neither in primal nor ill modern
societies. Theories are constructed at various levels of abstraction and
complexity to explain what we experience at the common sense level. Thus
“concepts such as ‘molecules’, ‘atoms’, ‘electron’, and ‘wave’
are the result of a process in which relevant features of certain prototype
phenomena have been abstracted from the irrelevant features” within the realm
of sense experience. In the same way what he calls traditional thought, ‘draws
upon people and their social relations as raw material of its theoretical models
(that is the spiritual world it constructs) and makes use of many dimensions of
human life and neglects others”. (1993:216) Such a functional understanding of
worldviews means that where one is 1101 able adequately to help explain,
predict, or control reality tile other will be used.
Horton,
of course, is following here in the footsteps of Levy-Bruhl and his school who
vas one of tile first to try to understand what he called tile “primitive”
or “savage” mind and to demonstrate that modern and primal ways of thinking
had more in common than was apparently the case.
Another
approach, however, would be to adopt a far more trenchant critique of tile
Cartesian schema and to assert that modernity has brought about tile destruction
of a view of the world and of the self that offers a more truthful understanding
of reality and which tile so-called “savage” mind can better appreciate.
This idea, of course was first mooted by Rousseau, but has been taken forward,
albeit without reference to the primal, by tile process school of philosophy
through scholars such as Whitehead and Hartshorne. Following the contours of
what could be described as this postmodern challenge to tile modern paradigm ill
science, philosophy, and theology would be indicative of the major paradigm
shift that has taken place within modernity and would point in the direction of
its antithesis. Hopper has described this shift as being a movement from the
dominance of Logos (classical logic) to Mythos (rootedness in experience).
(1989:1 16) In science the movement is discernible in the Shift from Newtonian
to Quantum physics in philosophy from rationalism to dynamism and in theology
from dogma to process. The consequence of such a shift has been a recognition of
the open-endedness of the universe, a fundamental unity between the knower and
the known, and open-ness to the divine, in other words the movement is from a
mechanistic to a vitalistic view of the universe. Such a shift, because it is
radically different from the rationalism of modernity, has been described as
“nonrational. (Heisig 1989) Restoring to the non-rational, (that is the
antithesis of the rational), “its own unique and particular frame of
reference” is a project, according to its advocates, that must be embarked
upon. (1989:185) According to Heisig three features of the non-rational need
especially to be rehabilitated, namely the experience of the world around us in
terms of the numinous, tile personification of the “map of the psyche, and the
re-mythologising of our lives by “rereading tile stories we tell of our lives
in the light of archetypal stories which have come to us in our corporate
tradition”. (1989:185)
That all of this adds up to the attempt to rehabilitate essential aspects
of the primal worldview is clear.
If worldviews say as much about the people who own them as they do about
the world around them then the encounter between worldviews must inevitably
direct our gaze toward ourselves as human beings and ask what kind of human
beings we aspire to be. If the instinct simply for mastery and control is seen
to be our purpose in life then Westerners should be grateful for their lot. If,
however, there is any merit in the consciousness of our own vulnerability and
the need for interdependence, in the awareness of the fragility of the universe
and our role as agents in its maintenance, or, indeed, in openness to the
transcendent. then non-Westerners should be grateful for their’s. More
appropriate than either Westerners or non-Westerners being content with their
own lots, however, would be for them equally to recognize the humanity of the
other and, in this recognition, to recognize also the divine.
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