Africana Thought: Adventist Philosophers Review “Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization” – 1
In a partnership with the Society of Adventist Philosophers, Spectrum will present reflections by SAP scholars on each chapter of Lewis R. Gordon’s Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization this summer. This is part one. (Gordon will be the Londis Lectureship Speaker on the SAP conference this fall.)
Who is a philosopher? What does a philosopher do? Philosopher Lewis R. Gordon explores these questions in the opening chapter of his 2020 book Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. I have always understood philosophy to be the rigorous activity of thinking critically about ideas that continue to shape how we relate to one another and what is real. In short, it is the pursuit of truth by exercising our capacity to reason.
A central aspect of philosophy is evaluating our customary ways of understanding the world to see if they hold water. Thus, philosophers sometimes say counterintuitive, even controversial things, as they try to shake us out of our complacency with the way things are. Still, it is critical to recognize that philosophy is only one among many ways to pursue truth. There is also more than one way to think and to do philosophy. I am thus in agreement with Gordon when he writes that philosophy “should be placed among the plethora of human efforts to understand our relationship to reality” (page 4).
If philosophy refers to rigorous, open-ended thinking; it belongs to everyone and can be done by anyone, not just professional academics. However, according to Gordon, there is a problem with how philosophy is usually taught and understood. Anyone with a cursory familiarity with philosophy in the US and Europe may have heard of great philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Immanuel Kant. Usually, philosophy and theology students are taught explicitly or implicitly that human thinking progressed linearly from ancient Athens to the Age of Enlightenment. This journey of human thought rescued humanity from the dark ages and gave us democracy and science. The standard story about philosophy is, thus, told from a triumphalist perspective that marginalizes other viewpoints and intellectual heritages.
However, if philosophy is the rigorous pursuit of wisdom, would not this story imply that wisdom is absent or lacking outside of where this story is primarily located, namely Europe? This question is not misplaced considering the ink already spilled about the way some of Europe’s greatest philosophers—Hegel, Kant, and John Locke—have developed and promulgated ideas and concepts that either directly or indirectly supported racist, colonialist political projects, slavery, and even genocide. Unfortunately, just like the broader culture, schools of philosophy in the United States and Europe have not fully reckoned with this messy reality.
Indeed, as Gordon points out, the way European philosophers and intellectuals have interpreted history, culture, and politics led to the characterization of European thought and culture as “universal,” representing the “peak of human reason” as opposed to the traditions of the Global South, of people who have been historically colonized and oppressed, and of those who have been marginalized by Europeans. These other perspectives are often characterized in unflattering ways.
There is, thus, a fundamental hypocrisy in the standard story about philosophy. As Gordon writes, “[t]here has been and unfortunately continues to be the use of such reflections also for rationalizations and evasions of human responsibility, not only to each other but also to other aspects of reality” (page 6). While philosophy’s mission has always been the pursuit of truth and justice, it has just as often been wielded to render falsehoods and injustice invisible or worse palatable.
Gordon suggestively points out myriad ways the standard story obscures rather than illuminates humanity’s collective intellectual legacy. For instance, it is often suggested that philosophy began in Ancient Greece. However, historically speaking, the Greek or “Hellenes” refers to highly diverse groups of people, including “northern Africans, western Asians, and southern peoples, of what is later known as Europe” (page 2).
These Greek-speaking folks did not think in an intellectual vacuum. They built on their predecessors and relied on the traditions of the Kushite Empire, among many others. This diversity of influences and cross-fertilization is a testament to the open-minded nature of human thought. The ideas we have inherited often have complicated histories that betray the simplistic characterization of the world as divided between “the West” and “the rest.”
In her viral 2009 TED Talk, Nigerian author and public intellectual Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned about the dangers of adopting a single story or narrative at the expense of others, noting that doing so could dehumanize, perpetuate stereotypes, and create ideological blind spots. Gordon rightly points out that the same risk continues to haunt philosophy and many ideas—such as freedom, truth, and justice—that govern our everyday lives.
What is missing in the standard story of philosophy is the intellectual contributions of people who continue to challenge ways of thinking that marginalize and dehumanize them. Therein lies the significance of what Gordon calls Africana philosophy, of which Gordon’s Black existentialism is an important line. In the subsequent chapters of this book, Gordon explores how customary ways of thinking about truth, justice, and reality have contributed to Black people being thought of as “problems” instead of agents in their own right (page 7).
According to Gordon, Africana philosophy is a tradition of reflection forged by a people “Indigenous to a world that rejects them by virtue of making them into problems” (page 8). Gordon focuses on three related questions central to this tradition:
1) What does it mean to be human?
2) What is freedom?
3) How are justificatory practices justifiable in light of the historic and continued challenges to reason posed by colonialism, enslavement, racism, and cultivated dependency not only as material and political projects but also as intellectual enterprises? (page 7).
The first question is highly relevant to our time as more and more people’s humanity and dignity are called into question by our cantankerous public conversations. Knowing what it means to be human is critical to understanding the nature of freedom. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the surface the reality that there are, in fact, contesting understandings of freedom: what constitutes freedom for one group of people is tyranny to another. The last question strikes at the core of what it means to think in our time. What does it mean to exercise human reason when people are vulnerable to propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories?
I cannot wait to see how Gordon’s arguments unfold in the following chapters, and I look forward to reading the reflections of the other contributors as we proceed, chapter by chapter each week.
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I am grateful for this opportunity to begin this summer’s reading group by reflecting on the opening chapter of Lewis Gordon’s Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. Dr. Gordon is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon (Bloomsbury, 2023); and a pamphlet on Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs entitled “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n’est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
Dr. Gordon will be the Londis and Family Lecturer at this year’s Society of Adventist Philosophers in San Diego. Please click on the following link to learn more: https://societyofadventistphilosophers.org/november-2024
