ABSTRACT

In this essay I agree that African philosophy has been moving in an upward progression from the era of ethno-philosophy towards the age of syntheses and analyses which coincides with the age of globalization. I present a general outline of the philosophy of the Consolation as a 21st century synthesis and conclude that the future of African philosophy which we tend to postpone indefinitely has come to us in today’s struggle.


Introduction

In the march towards its fullest realization African philosophy has known its defining moments signposted by intense controversies over authenticity, content, context, and methodology, to mention but a few of the issues that created so much angst and dogmatic posturing. So intense have been the intellectual arguments for and against one school of African philosophy or the other that the all-important issue of the fuller realization of African philosophy was unwittingly ignored (Aja 103).


It is not my intention here to stoke up more angst. We have a big task here that intimidates the mind. This is the constructive task of systematizing stray but fertile ideas into a synthetic unity of African and Western philosophies. It seems to me that the time has come for us to shift emphasis from the decolonization of the mind (Ngugi) and focus on the globalization of the African mind in the 21st century as the only answer to Africa’s social, political, and economic woes which continue to sustain the derogatory concept of Afro-pessimism. For there is absolutely no doubt that the globalizing phenomenon will intensify its world-shrinking process in this new century. So unyielding is this phenomenon that Asouzu chooses to embrace it with stoic joy as a natural human tendency, a quest for universal solidarity (167). Although mindful of Wiredu’s call for the Africanization of the language of philosophy as succinctly stated in his essay “The Need for Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy”, I am nevertheless greatly encouraged in my life-imposed task of creating a centripetal focus for my stray thoughts by Njoku who writes with calm intelligence that:

…the variety of philosophical experience arises from the characteristic complexity of the universe…human experience in its rich and varied forms….Ordinary experience can lead to philosophical questions. For example, from the suffering, pain and death of friends and relative [sic], we may begin to wonder about the whole question of human toil, meaning and end of human life…Therefore experiences of a particular lived-world can evoke questions and problems of universal concern (5).

Much has been written about the impact of westernism on the African psyche, negative and positive. Yet a Western-type education is today our proud heritage. Philosophy can spring from the education of a philosopher (Imbo 3). And on the quest for systematicity Asouzu writes:

An advocacy that foresees the eradication of system building in the way philosophy is done hardly shows any good understanding concerning the fundamental nature of human consciousness, which always seeks to grasp reality in a comprehensive systematic absolute future related fashion. This must not be a disadvantage (195).

We are moving ever closer to the synthetic philosophy of consolationism, in one light a globalization of African philosophy which we claim as an ancestral heritage, a tradition in-born, now desirous of a global appeal in the face of an all-conquering phenomenon called globalization in the unstoppable march of human solidarity. Grasped in another perspective consolationism is an existentialization of African philosophy, an idealization of Idoma thought lost in the intensity of one man’s thinking, a subtle transmutation which is perhaps the liberation of communal thinking. Consolationism is a fatalistic philosophy constitutive of the bipolar opposites of pessimism and optimism, the sadness of existence and the joy of being. Whether these themes are alien to African philosophy or whether they reflect the intimate concerns of the African as a human being, is not a question I intend to answer here. With some urgency we make haste to illuminate the mind of the 21st century man who is a melancholy being in search of his consolation in a world we are always tempted to call a technological world but which in fact is a techno-emotive world ruled by man’s mood.


                                                     The March of African Philosophy

Perhaps Aja was thinking of the emerging generation of African philosophers when he called for a plural African philosophy (104). An entire generation of African children is being raised with little or no knowledge at all of their traditional backgrounds, utterly westernized. We are in danger of completely losing our past. Can philosophy save anything vital in that past as the present takes us away quickly into a future the past might never have envisaged? I think an emphasis of the love of the intellect which is a tremendous consolation of man can help us save the character of the African past and sustain it in the globalizing African culture of today and the technological world of the future as an inspiration for all time. By this I mean that mytho-philosophy must give way gradually to pure thought, the black man’s delight in the full exercise of his intellectual powers. In this way the spirit of the past will live when the content of that past is lost. It is against this backdrop that we appreciate the march of African philosophical thought, from the era of the ancient Egyptians to the pre-literate age of sages who philosophized for their communities. It is also against the backdrop of the historical evolution of African thought that we can contain impatience and appreciate the works of those African thinkers Hountondji has labelled ethno-philosophers. It is only natural that mytho-philosophy should constitute the foundation of African philosophy. In the infancy of thought philosophy is veiled by myth. This has been the case in Western, Oriental, and Jewish philosophies. We cannot even begin to give a general outline of consolationism without paying homage to the giants of African philosophy beginning with the nationalist thinkers who located philosophy in political ideology to achieve a practical end. Indeed Senghor might have anticipated certain ideas of consolationism when he highlighted the power of emotion in man’s creation and revision of his personal identity. The great error of Senghor is his uncritical assertion that reason belongs to the epistemological heritage of the West while emotion belongs to the intuitive wisdom of Africa, forgetting that reason is as much an intuition as emotion given our current understanding of consciousness. Yet an error such as Senghor’s was bound to emerge when one person privileged to have a Western education puts forward the immodest claim of reading the mind of an entire community and an entire race and accordingly expressing the philosophy of his community and race. All the same the apostle of Negritude deserves commendation for hammering on the primordial force of emotion which we intend to more fully explore in the dialectic of mood as the foundation of existence.

The ethno-philosophers from Tempels to Oluwole veiled philosophy with myth. The universalists and the hermeneutical thinkers sought to forcefully remove this veil without providing a synthesis in which philosophy could anchor in the absence of the foundation myth was. The work of constructive criticism was left to Asouzu whose concept of complementary reflection must be seen for what it is: a watershed in the march of African philosophy towards the liberation of the idea in Otu - the mind of man. With complementary reflection African philosophy enters its modern and contemporary age. And we cannot deny Asouzu the title of the father of modern African philosophy. Complementary thinking arises from the awareness of the miserable inadequacy of intellectual insularity in the comprehension of reality in its complex totality, an awareness which seeks the expansion of knowledge in the quest for all missing links that culminates in an intelligent emotion, “the joy of being” (159). This is even more so since reality or being is ultimately one and all things have their genesis in this absolute.

The import of things in their genesis is the intellectual liberty that becomes universal solidarity in the mind of man, a heightened consciousness of the ancient origins of ideas sections of humanity are tempted to claim as their own while scornfully excluding other sections making up the whole. The umbrella of complementary reflection is so broad that we can take it into the domain of Western and Jewish philosophies. We have the outstanding example of Baruch Spinoza the complementary thinker. Western philosophy has claimed him as a giant of Western thought, but no critical mind is deceived. Spinoza’s thinking is profoundly Jewish even though he used Western linguistic categories. First and last and always he is a Jew (Gregory v).

A synthetic philosophy, whether in African, Western, or Oriental thought, in the 21st century can only be possible in the perspective of complementarity. In this perspective, taking note of the union of things in their infancy as Asouzu has noted with great perspicacity, all old doctrines are reinvented and stamped with the individual thinker’s originality. A new philosophy then is born, more synthetic than analytic, on the foundation of ancient wisdom. I say ancient because there is an eternal agreement between Western and African philosophies and indeed all other philosophies. The subject matter of philosophy will ever remain man and his struggle with or cooperation with nature. The seeming distancing of analytic philosophy from metaphysics cannot veil the yearning of the mind to grasp things in their ‘genesis’ and experience the ‘joy of being’, to borrow Asouzu’s terms. The mathematical philosopher who is only comfortable with symbols as tools of logic revels in the exercise of his mind, a joy consolidated by his conscious or unconscious awareness of the universal solidarity traceable to the infancy of the world. What does this mean? This means that philosophy, more than any other discipline, is the science and art of the Consolation – the immanent and transcendental principle of reason and emotion rooted in joy and sadness. And since philosophy is the mother of all branches of knowledge – physics, chemistry, literature, biology, mathematics, art, etc; all intellectual and creative endeavours, all pursuits of knowledge – we can boldly say all disciplines are consolations of philosophy. The radical assertion here is that nothing exists in the universe but consolation.

This consolation is validated in everyday life by tragedy or pain which pessimistically affects man’s mood. Consolation expands the possibilities of pleasure and hope for man in such activities as eating, mating, bringing up children, solidarity, the pursuit of knowledge, etc. From Thales to Plato and Aristotle; from Plotinus to St Augustine, Bruno, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Heidegger, and Sartre; from Russell and his fellow mathematical philosophers to Rorty, from Senghor and Nkrumah to Gbadegesin and Asouzu: from the earliest philosopher to the latest philosopher, philosophy has been struggling to more fully unravel the Consolation, regarded at different times as God, the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, Being, and even Nothingness. Whatever man may conceive as the Consolation he has always sought ready-made well simplified consolations in his everyday activity as a way of escaping the terror of life, which ultimately catches up with him in his death. Boethius made a confession similar to this in his The Consolation of Philosophy.

Man’s fear is so great he has created complex systems of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic to reassure himself that things are not as bad as he first thought. Yet all is not well, which ensures that the thesis of life compulsorily yields pessimism. This has been my intuitive insight into African thought, my understanding of the African mind as an African thinker aware of what globalization is doing to the world in its major ramifications, including the horror that is international terrorism. I realized that the phenomena of joy and sadness with their metaphysical and epistemological correlates of optimism and pessimism have not yet been thoroughly investigated in both Western and African philosophies in spite of Spinoza’s work on the origin, power, and nature of emotions, the supreme struggle of Kant to reconcile reason with emotion in morality, the unfairly maligned optimism of Leibniz, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the obscurantist yet monumental emotive existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, Senghor’s worship of emotive vitalism, and Asouzu’s complementary thinking. Senghor had his eyes set on the horizon of consolationism when he wrote about the participatory intuition of the African mind, the African’s sense of communion, his myth-making, and his gift of rhythm.

Like a good student of the philosophy of mind Senghor noticed the ever shrinking chasm separating emotion, a state of the mind, from reason, a power of mind, in the organized unity that is consciousness. Unfortunately, he hastily particularized a universal and proclaimed emotion the exclusive and natural inheritance of the black man.

If things are in solidarity on the basis of their common origin, emotion and intellect are merely two sides of one coin, two expressions of Otu constantly shifting positions and undergoing a metamorphosis of an evolutionary kind with tremendous implication for despair the denizen of thought, morality, the birth of language, liberty in apposite opposition to freedom, and more. In my struggle to better comprehend the consolationist vision of life I have sought to bring together strands of rationalism, intuitivism, idealism, empiricism, vitalism, realism, and transcendentalism into the synthetic unity of consolationism. What we have here is an example of complementary reflection inspired directly by my experience of life, my African heritage, and my Western education. I hope consolationism, like complementary reflection, will amount to a giant leap for African philosophy and world philosophy. Here we are in a technologically advanced century that has ironically seen mood dictating to technology. The terrorist who searches for nuclear weapons to destroy an entire city is a melancholy man. The metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic investigation of the mood of the melancholy man yield consolationism. So with consolationism the melancholy man is born.


                   A Brief General Outline of the Synthetic Philosophy of Consolationism


The Preamble

The dominant immanent problem in the domain of practice providing the justification for a deeper investigation of mood is despair. A French thinker had stated dramatically in the 20th century that suicide – no doubt intellectual suicide more than physical suicide – constituted the most serious philosophical problem (Camus). And yet it is despair that inspires suicide. We want to present despair as the biggest philosophical problem of the 21st century. This polluter of Otu which is the denizen of thought becomes the biggest social, political, and economic problem of our techno-emotive century, standing solidly between man and his apotheosis. Indeed despair is the demon of mood. The fact that it is the denizen of Otu is enough for man to prepare for the embracing of fatalism since perfection is denied man, whether in this time-bound life on earth or in another life hereafter. Perfection is an impossibility and no superman will emerge at the top of the evolutionary ladder at a future date as long as mood exists and thought is possible. Mood is eternal. In this sense consolationism is a pessimistic philosophy. But this is not the whole picture. If tragedy is triumphant, then consolation becomes an absolute necessity. Consolation becomes justice. So in the face of the impossibility of perfection which, in an ethical language, adds up to happiness existence offers us consolation. In the absence of a happiness that can only be conceived in terms of eternal duration for it to be useful at all man has instants of joy to comfort him. In this sense consolationism is an optimistic philosophy. A more realistic descriptive word is fatalistic. But our fatalism is not a Spinozistic determinism in which inviolable laws of nature are invoked to reassure the melancholy being that all is well. All cannot be well as long as consolation is a necessity. The impossibility of our fully comprehending what is wrong and what went wrong with existence is not enough justification to posit the rigidly determined. Our fatalism is only a recognition of inevitability and the endurance of despair in Otu as a permanent nuisance which ensures that joy always follow sadness in man’s affairs and vice versa. In a more technical sense we say that the denial of freedom is not the denial of liberty. Otu though tormented by despair and is unfree acting through the whole man, nevertheless is a witness to liberty. Its moment of joy is a practical proof of its liberty, its knowledge of good and evil.

We have already mentioned Senghor and his struggle to come to grips with the emotional origin of the mind. He was essentially a political philosopher. The problem he sought to tackle has always been a metaphysical problem. He met the universal at the level of the particular and was content stating a half-truth. We intend to meet the universal at the level of the universal, having concluded that the African is a human being before being anything else.

                     The consolationist philosophy works with the following postulates:

The universe is a totality of joy and sadness.

Fear is the father of good and evil.

Despair is the denizen of thought.

Melancholy is the unity of joy and sadness.

God has been left out of man’s worldly affairs.

Pessimism is a valid proposition.

Optimism is a valid response.

Consequently, fatalism is immanent and supreme.


                                       The Metaphysical and Epistemological Outline

A world born in tragedy becomes conscious of its existence as its own consolation the moment mind emerges from mood. Without tragedy there would be no need for being. Without consolation there would be nothing. The world is born in tragedy and is sustained by consolation. Existence imply tragedy. Tragedy imply consolation ab initio. Both imply each other and are held together in mood, the foundation of being. Try as hard as we may we cannot know what the beginning really was, what it looked like. Yet there must be a starting point, when existence became aware of the tragic definition of its seemingly gratuitous nature. The ancient Greeks appealed to the eternity of matter and an eternal order. Aristotle divided matter into earth, water, air, fire and what he called ‘quintessence’. We appeal to mood as our starting point without prejudice to the modern views of physics and the philosophy of physics. Our mood is not energy as physics conceives it. Mood is more basic. If we argue that mood is energy we cannot help but add that the sadness of existence and the joy of being preceded this energy, the activity of mood. Mood is silence in its preconscious state. As an activity it is the power that comes with joy and sadness. As substance it is matter.

There is no nil, otherwise there would be no tragedy. Otu grasps this tragedy through knowledge of the despair that is a part of it. Sartre celebrated what he called nothingness and an unlimited freedom. We do not share his brand of optimism. Nothingness as we understand it is emptiness or non-being. It means there is neither mood nor man, neither the world nor anything in it. But this is not the case. If there was nothingness silence would fill up this nothingness. And silence is unconscious mood. The negative ontological category of non-being corresponds to the ethical category of sadness. Being corresponds with joy. Joy is fullness and sadness is emptiness. Between joy and sadness despair is the difference. When Otu overcomes despair by suppression being is asserted. This is a moment of Otu. We call this moment the optimistic phase of thought. When despair dominates Otu by expansion non-being is asserted. This too is a moment of Otu. We call this moment the pessimistic phase of thought. The universe is contained in these two moments. For Otu only grasps that which already is. It lives through the two moments which encompass it. Therefore existentialist nihilism of the Sartrean kind finds no place in consolationist metaphysics, which seeks to globalize African thought. So existentialist nihilism is suspended alongside postmodernist anarchy while the despair that informs existentialism and postmodernism over which mathematical philosophy plays the ostrich remains eternally valid.

Being is everywhere present but is nowhere eternally substantial. The ancient Greeks waved this terrible irony aside, intoning: Being is, non-being is not. In his monumental work Being and Time it seemed at first that a confident Heidegger was going to demystify being and hold it up for all to see. But being remained elusive for him and man remained less than time, such that the question would be asked whether time manifested itself as the horizon of being (Hidegger 488). The eternal non-substantiality of being revealed in mortality and general change is a cause for philosophical concern. The doctrine of mood rather than an ontology of being is needed here since we seek to show philosophy as nothing more than consolation. In this doctrine of mood God the principle of fatalism is the Consolation. The concept of God endures in the consolationist philosophy because man is a melancholy being, willy-nilly a God-lover. No other concept can take the place of the God-concept. Science in the 21st century cannot because, being a tool of mood, it is less than man. For the satisfaction of mood there is nothing man would not do, positive or negative, in the name of the Consolation. If we sound dogmatic sometimes as if to imply that the Absolute has been found as it is, our philosophy like all other philosophies, must be guilty of covert claims to incorrigibility. But then we have noted already that philosophy – all theory and activity – is the art and science of consolation. God the first witness to liberty is the being that is because it is the Consolation. Man the second witness to liberty is inspired mood. What is true for man is true for God at a much higher level and in a more complete manner. What is true for animated life is true for inanimate life at a lower level in a less complete manner. Mood infects everything and all things, such that there is no perfection anywhere. Hence there is evil in the world not created by God. For evil is a principle in mood, emerging from fear which is Otu's consciousness of its fatalistic existence, of the horror of an eternity of seeking. The God-concept has been condemned in strong terms and rejected by people who cannot be deceived by a feel-good theodicy that tries to absolve God of complicity in the creation of evil since he is conceived as benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. But when we conceive God as the Consolation of the universe this discontent vanishes. Perhaps the terms omnipotent and omniscient will disappear with the old conception of God. It is proper for us to talk about the power and glory of God, the power to conquer despair the denizen of thought and an ever-present in conscious nature and the glory of being the consolation of the universe as the first witness to liberty.

Liberty is the knowledge of good and evil and the consequent ability to go this way or the other. Fear begets both good and evil. There is only one origin in mood. Before fear as primordial consciousness stands the silence of mood. Silence the annihilator of nothingness is the simplest thing possible. Beyond silence there is nothing. Creation is possible as God’s wish going out of him as his will. The creation of the world, its emergence, is a supreme act of optimism. Yet this birth is in mood and because mood is imperfect yearning pessimism followed the will to be. Inspiration proceeds from God the fatalistic principle which is also mood. Joy and sadness are states of mood every thinking thing is conscious of. They inhere in unconscious life waiting for the emergence of mind to burst into conscious life.

It should not be too difficult for us to grasp these ideas. We are not ashamed to be charged with anthropomorphism. Man is eternally linked with God logically as the concept to generate all other concepts and intimately as the Consolation. It is no wonder then that Catholics talk about the imago Dei. Man who is less than time stands in the world and shrinks as he perceives the silence of the universe. In the joy of being lies the road to his redemption. In the sadness of existence lies the road to his destruction. Two principles are active in mood, determining whether the mind exults or grieves. These are identified as despair which we have already indicted and anxiety which was noted not only by the celebrated Western existentialist thinkers but also by a number of African thinkers like Senghor and Asouzu. Anxiety in consolationist terms is a positive integer in mood. It supports good while despair supports evil. That the mind is capable of contemplating evil there is absolutely no doubt. The principle of evil persists in the sadness of existence. Despair opens the door of the mind in its lowest moment, the moment of pessimism, and evil is unleashed outside the world of the mind. On the other hand, anxiety points man in the direction of his consolation – God. Without anxiety man’s humanization of himself in the moody depths of his moody nature is impossible. Anxiety the motivator of conscience is the symbol of man’s possible apotheosis and the foundation of peace. When anxiety falls it becomes despair. When it rises it becomes the love of the intellect. This intellectual love of God is permanent exultation of the triumph of good over evil. As the link between the mind of man and the mind of God it is the purest thing possible. We have cause to believe that Kant was referring to the love of the intellect when he talked about a “good will” as the only thing in the world or out of it that can be called good without further qualification. Self-transcendence is possible only through anxiety.

Optimism and pessimism as expectations of Otu are epistemological correlates of joy and sadness. The knowledge of optimism is coeval with the reality of joy while the knowledge of pessimism is coeval with the reality of sadness.

The consolation which is God is not only man’s object of love and the standard for measuring everlasting peace; it is also an absolute absolutizing factor and value for man. Man does not have to know or see God to consider him the Absolute. It is enough that he yearns. What man yearns for consoles him and that which is the Consolation is absolutely enough for man. The language man creates as an outpouring of despair from the mind vibrates with yearning for consolation. Language serves thought and thought contributes to the healing of despairing man while intellectual love overcomes despair. Can we boast that we have said the truth? If the answer is no or yes, what then is truth? We were doomed from the beginning of our discourse to encounter this question. Rising to the challenge, we say that truth is the empirical fact enriched in thought by the possibility of the ideal. No empirical fact is ever complete because no such fact can actualize the Consolation in man. Man is still a grief-stricken mortal who has to believe in something other than himself to realize any comfort in himself as big as or bigger than his despair. Let us refer to practice to simplify this point.

A man has just heard that his house was demolished by the bulldozers of the city council to create space for a road soon to be constructed. The unlucky man hears that he is to receive a fifteen-million-naira compensation package. He goes to the place where his house used to sit looking bewildered and finds a mass of twisted iron bars, shattered cement blocks, and broken wood. This is the truth, an empirical fact, the consolation of realists. He meets with city council officials and is given a cheque. Overjoyed, he invests the money wisely and becomes twenty times richer than he ever was, rich enough to live a life of luxury. The demolition of his house is an empirical fact. That he received fifteen million naira and that he wisely invested this money and became rich are empirical facts. They are truths, but not eternal truths which must strengthen belief in something as great as or greater than despair. But this lucky man soon realizes that his neighbours are full of envy, that they just cannot celebrate with him. He realizes he has become the target of armed robbers who want to have their illicit share of the fifteen million naira or even claim the entire amount forcefully. He realizes that his status as a wealthy man does not stop him from falling sick or succumbing to ennui which the good things of life increasingly magnify. Before long he realizes that he has to write a will, that he will die and leave all his wealth behind. Tangible truth fails him and he gropes for belief or faith just as technology fails the modern man who seeks consolation after losing a relative in a plane crash. He gropes for eternal truth vis-à-vis the Consolation in his current life and possibly in another life beyond the grave. Certain questions arise to trouble him.

Is that which is a true fact also the truth?

How do I convince myself that my knowledge is even worth my despair since it avails little in the long run?

Is truth relative or absolute?

Who has seen God?

Which testimony is error-proof?

What is the value of illusion in practical and metaphysical terms?

Is faith a rational irrationality, the fatalistic factor absolutizing the possible, taking the bite of cynicism out of every theory of probability - be it scepticism, relativism, agnosticism, etc. – and holding probability up as man’s incomplete knowledge of the Consolation which for man is also the Absolute?

Superstition is truth travestied. It is philosophy in the language of the most fantastic poetry possible. Imagination as the wish of the intellect may wish extravagantly, but its wish remains intelligible in an emotional universe where all that is sought by the totality of being dependent on and encompassed by mood is the Consolation, the power of perpetual creativity, the glory of an internal but externalizing triumph over the impish denizen of thought and the fatality of existence, which is also its tragedy. Conscious being recognizes and puts itself in opposition to despair and confronts its own pessimistic nature. Unconscious being, for example a stone, recognizes despair, but instead of going into opposition it hides inside silence and waits for Otu to emerge. Only intellectual love can conquer despair and transform sadness into joy, pessimism into optimism.

The imaginable is possible and the possible is real as Heidegger noted in his introduction to his Being and Time although in a different context than ours. This is so since the possible can be realized through faith – and faith as the simplification of the operation of fatalism. Whatever we imagine is possible and real to the extent that the thing imagined is intellectually and emotionally related to the Consolation, to the extent that it represents a longing, a wish, for purity, which has been realized only in the glory of God’s love and the power of his conquest of despair. A proposition is valid to the extent that it affirms that every wish is a yearning for the good and beautiful. The wish may be superstitious, but then superstition is truth travestied. No possibility is to be ignored on the excuse that Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ is unknowable because our theory of probability regards the absolute as a complete consolatory existence while the probable is the one-sided revelation of the face of the absolute. Since intellectual love links the highest glory with the least glory the ‘thing-in-itself’ is already known as probable knowledge of the Consolation. The ‘thing-in-itself’ divides itself into two categories, the categories of the probable thing and the absolute thing. We know already and have surely experienced the probable, for mortality and the lesser-than-time is probable. We are probable things vitalized by small everyday consolations like eating, sleeping, waking, mating, and working. The absolute thing is the Consolation hypostatized as God. This is the fatalistic principle whose emotional and intellectual essence runs through the mind of man and through the emotional universe, which is a fatalistic synthesis of the sadness of pessimism and the joy of optimism. If Kant’s celebrated ‘thing-in-itself’ were to reveal itself to us we would be surprised that instead of finding an extraordinary existent with the characteristics of tangible matter we would be blinded, at least temporarily, by the power and glory of God. If we could overcome despair the complete knowledge we seek would be ours to claim, but it would remain yearning, not perfect being. The mere contemplation of this ultimate disappointment is enough to boost despair and increase weariness. Kant was not spared, sharp as his intellect was. He posited the ‘thing-in-itself’ in his pessimistic phase of thought in a similar way that he advanced his ideas of synthetic a priori knowledge in his optimistic phase of thought. Obviously Otu – the mind - is the seat of mood.



                                                                   The Ethical Outline

By now the attentive reader will realize that our preoccupation here will basically be about how to complete the moral act since all acts are moral in origin, therefore in intention. To put it more simply, everyone wants to be happy. Yet we have hinted that happiness is an illusion man cannot ever reach. So in the face of the impossibility of happiness man is consoled by the reality, immediate and remote, of his joy which he wishes to increase over his sadness.

No permanent condition of bliss delights man, a being of melancholy, with substantial happiness. Being is everywhere present but is nowhere eternally substantial. The laughter of a moment only heightens the loss that is soon to come. It is a discernible principle of mood that the man who laughs will also cry, that if he chooses not to cry he can only cover his unhappiness with the dull garment of pretended indifference, coldness, and the various gimmicks of asceticism on one hand or licence on the other hand. It is not determined for the universe to be perfectly structured. Mood is the foundation of being. It is not perfect and can never be perfect. Mood is yearning. Since man is mood and manifests the constitutive unity of mood, perfection is denied him, such that happiness cannot be the goal of his ethical living. The goal of moral life is a more comprehensive witnessing to liberty. The affirmation of good for the working out of the joy of existence is what the good life constitute for man. This is his consolation. Instead of happiness man has consolation to strive after. Happiness is an ideal fit for a perfect universe, not for a yearning universe.

All the consolation man will ever need he can also find in the action derived from his resignation to the futility of ever knowing happiness. His contemplation of the terror of his existence as an insignificant possibility increasingly meaningless as he thinks pessimistically draws the line between despair and intellectual love. Man acts rightly when he overcomes despair in his despair-polluted internal environment. He acts wrongly when he succumbs to despair. For despair projects man’s innate evil while intellectual love affirms man’s innate goodness as we have already noted. When man overcomes despair he not only does great things but he also does good things. Man has a good will and a bad will, both rooted in mood, in his being, in the complex imperfect ever yearning validity. The will of despair is bad and the will of intellectual love is good. But neither the good nor the bad can guarantee man happiness because despair and intellectual love are yearning. Man can realize his consolation within the sphere of his joy and his sadness since these are all he has got. A man who acts in his moment of joy and optimism can do no wrong directly if he acts consciously. All immediate evil is perpetrated as the surrender of despair to its own will in the philosophical moment of pessimism in Otu.

The idea that man cannot be responsible for his action on the basis of determinism is not acceptable. Our fatalism does not consist in man being utterly helpless but indeed in his knowledge of the futility of his existence, the facts of existence which he cannot change but wish he can change (thinking) in retrospect. If man is going to act, and he must act, he does act from a sense of the righteous indignation in protest of the fatality of his existence. Albert Camus referred to this moral indignation as revolt. The melancholy being is a profoundly moral being. He is so designed to pursue the good and do only what is right as a witness to liberty – the knowledge of good. When the melancholy being wills evil he is a moral being acting immorally. To say man does not really know what is good or bad since morality is relative is just like saying man does not enjoy sexual intercourse which is untrue in nearly all men and women. The right action of every individual is that which is propelled out of the internal environment in the short-lived or sustained knowledge that selfishness or self-love is the starting point of all morality and that this burgeoning morality of which everyone is capable is expanded and conferred with goodness with the universalization and concretization, in the external environment, of the action triggered in the internal environment by selfishness. An increasing level of selflessness universalizes the action while completion concretizes it. Selfless action begins its march to moral goodness as a selfish impulse. There is hardly a pure intention as mood is deceptive. Thus morality’s relativism is superficial. Ultimately, our appeal is to duty and duty supports moral absolutism.


                                                             The Aesthetic Outline

Let us tentatively define beauty as simply emotional and intellectual refinement. The scope of beautiful things can then be expanded to include not only objects of art such as painting, poetry, and music but also flowers, furniture, attractive women, handsome men, good persons, etc. This can serve as a preparation for the elucidation of a twenty-first century philosophy of love. The statement that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” tends to support the relativist conception of artistic merit. This problem reproduces itself when a panel of judges sits to decide which particular book or painting wins an award. Is art non-cognitive and biased or does it represent truth and universality? Why do different people hold different views about a work of art? Can an artist’s representation capture his inner transcendental world so well that the beholder of his creation puts himself in the artist’s shoes? Aristotle thought that the artist imposed form on matter while creating that which is to be called beautiful. Benedetto Croce considered the beautiful as an expression of intuition, the image formation within in harmony with the essence of the perceived object. In this case genius separates the great artist from the average artist.

Every beholder of an artistic representation struggles to catch the artist’s vision. But then he imposes his own transcendental vision of existence on whatever he can catch of the artist’s original meaning. He may evoke feelings entirely different from those the artist intends to provoke in him. For instance instead of admiration for a novel of Ben Okri a reader may feel contempt for the very reason that he cannot stand Okri’s ‘spiritual realism’, an artistic attitude dear to the novelist. The reader reacts negatively but he reacts just the same. He reacts because there is a value not created by him which is now before him. His personal reaction will depend on the degree to which the external value enables him to experience the joy of being. Being is a commonality. Ultimately, both the artist and the judge of the artist’s creation are seeking consolation. The knowledge that both are in solidarity in their effort to more fully participate in the joy of existence validates the universality of art. Art, like morality, points men to the Consolation. Art, like philosophy, is the rationality of the emotional. Like mood it subsists in emotion and grows under the guidance of the intellect. The error we keep making is to think that emotion and reason are radically different. Yet they are not. They are one thing put to different uses. Emotion is more intimate with despair than reason. Emotion looks down easily to despair and can inspire evil while reason is emotion evolving upwards towards love, intellectual love. So artistic creations are profound emotional products with a rational character aspiring to the universality of the Consolation. All artists create because they are afraid of the silence of existence practically grasped as the terror of life. Since everyone is beautiful we are all artists. Our acts become artistic products in the domain of morality.

Philosophers in the past noted how aesthetic beauty led one to ethics and metaphysics. If a pretty rose flower could talk it would shout into the face of the woman sniffing it: give me the Consolation! When a man sees a pretty lady with long straight legs and a shapely behind he wants to make love to her but his real and earnest desire is to attain to purity and find God – the consolation of philosophy. A consolationist philosophy of beauty inevitably leads us to the elucidation of a philosophy of love which we hope to undertake someday and which is sure to show us the philosophical poverty and emptiness of feminism and male chauvinism.


                                                           The Political Outline

The political outline is the least systematic formulation in the consolationist philosophy. Our understanding of the doctrine of mood upholds the integrity of democracy and mass participation in the process of governance. The dialogue democracy espouses can soothe the aches of the moody nature and keep discontent away from despair. Despair incubates revolutions. But if mood is content, revolutions and wars will become rare. In being unfree man cannot be happy. In being a witness to liberty man reserves the right to choose the type of government that best assuage his anxiety.


                                               Today the Struggle: Tomorrow the Future

The future we talk about so glibly as if it will never come has come at last. It has come in today’s struggle. The harder the struggle and the more fierce the battle the sweeter the victory (Asouzu 308). We want to see the emergence of consolationism as a victory for African philosophy in the same way that complementary reflection is a victory. Asouzu writes:

…one of the main challenges of African philosophy is rooted in probing into the conditions necessary for conceptualizing reality such that all missing links stay mutually harmonized in universal comprehensive complementary way…this is a challenge to inquire into all forms of assumptions, methodologies, principles and theory formulations as to determine their adequacy and inadequacy towards upholding the co-existence of units in the face of their inherent tendencies towards universality, totality and comprehensiveness…the contributions of African philosophers and African philosophy become more credible if these were to be defined within a more embracing framework as to transcend their localized settings (308).

To Asouzu we can only say, “we have accepted your challenge and have embarked on the struggle.”

It may be that ethno-philosophy has exhausted its potentialities and fulfilled its mandate. We think this to be the case. The 21st century belongs to syntheses and analyses. Yet analytic philosophy can only thrive where there is an accumulation of synthetic thought as the Western experience has shown. There is still much synthetic thinking to be done in African philosophy. For us to have constructive intellectual destruction we must first have original construction. Today is the future. This is our time. We believe that the clarion call of Egbeke Aja for a plural African philosophy deserves an enthusiastic intellectual response from young African thinkers who are just arriving on the scene. No one attempting to build a system or even think in any systematic way can ignore Kant’s metaphysical and epistemological pessimism. But we cannot just sit down to lament the insignificance of our knowledge of transcendent reality where our consolation lies in the face of the transparent inadequacy of the world of our experience. Perhaps this lamentation itself calls for a synthesis. If this is true, then we have responded appropriately with the philosophy of the Consolation. The God that died in Western philosophy has returned to life in African philosophy. When we say God is man’s consolation we also affirm that he lives in African philosophy. When my late granny would tell me, “go with God and may the road protect you”, I knew she was reminding me that God was my consolation.

The outline of the consolationist philosophy presented here is a sketch of the flagship work Existence and Consolation, which has passed through a successful gestation. The book is in the early stage of literary development.

REFERENCES

Aja, Egbeke “African Philosophy: Conception and Problems”. In Nsukka Journal of the Humanities No 10 (1999)

Asouzu, Innocent I. Ibuaru – The Heavy Burden of Philosophy Beyond African Philosophy Berlin, Lit Verlag (2007)

Camus, Albert The Myth of Sisyphus Middle Sex, Penguin Books (1975)

Copleston, Frederick A History of Philosophy 9 Vols. New York, Image Books, Doubleday (1977)

Eze, E.C. (ed) African Philosophy: An Anthology Oxford, Blackwell Publishers (1998)

Heidegger, Martin Being and Time John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson trans. SCM Press Ltd (1962)

Imbo, Samuel Oluoch An Introduction to African Philosophy Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Pub, Inc (1998)

Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason London, Macmillan & Co (1933)

Njoku, Francis O.C. Essays on African Philosophy, Thought & Theology Owerri, Claretian Institute of Philosophy (2002)

Onyewuenyi, Innocent C. The African Origin of Greek Philosophy Nsukka, University of Nigeria Press (1993)

Spinoza, Baruch Ethics Andrew Boyle trans, with Introduction by T.S. Gregory. London, Dent (1910)

Thiong’O, Ngugi wa Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth. N.H, Heinemann (1986)