THE CONSOLATIONIST MANIFESTO AND THE NEW TESTAMENT FROM AFRICA
ADA AGADA





Abstract Western thinkers and some African thinkers have often wondered whether African philosophers have done enough to elevate African philosophy to a respectable place in world intellectual history. This synthetic and original paper locates this scepticism in the undeniable fact that African philosophy has not developed beyond the foundational level of ethnophilosophy. In this paper the consolationist vision is presented as a philosophical manifesto boldly announcing the dawn of African rationalism and indicating the ambitious scope of the work that awaits African philosophers in a new century that demands a solid world-wide solidarity. In this paper nihilism interpreted in a ‘post-postmodernist’ sense is presented as the link between African philosophy and Western philosophy.

1. INTRODUCTION The Melancholy man is set to dominate the 21st century, whether as the religious fundamentalist, the international terrorist, the technology freak, the wailing musician, the ambitious scientist, the zealous sportsman, the rabble rouser, the tenacious activist, the rogue leader of a rogue nation, etc.

But has any philosophy arisen to illuminate the mind of the Melancholy man? Not before now. All the same, a philosophy has now arisen to interpret the mood of the century. This is the renewal of existentialism in the form we present as consolationism or African existentialism.

Again, these are interesting times in the global village. Terror, social discontent, the noise of battle, mass political anxiety in Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America, the phenomenal resurgence of the emotional man and his comprehensive manipulation and domination of technology: all these identify the computer age as the age of the Melancholy man. Yet philosophy has not responded well to the mood of the century, both in the West and in Africa. As though in complete agreement with Richard Rorty, 1 philosophy in the West today limits itself to the discussion of already exhausted points dug out of the works of the great constructive Western thinkers of the past and happily picks the crumbs that fall through the fingers of science in the tradition enthusiastically described by Wilfrid Sellars and others as “scientifically oriented philosophy”. There is no doubt that science has done very well in finding answers to many problems standing in the way of man’s happiness.

Yet scientific medievalism – as we may call the esoteric mathematicalization of the philosophy of science – is in no position to respond to the mood of the century. Here a different method is needed. The disaster of the African situation is the near total absence of a tradition from which philosophical issues can be dug out for contemporary analysis, however sterile. African philosophical thinkers have wasted precious time shouting out their positions on the existence or non-existence and methodology of African philosophy. Some have tried to systematize the traditional thought of ethnic nationalities without making any impact on the world stage. The veterans of the costly war of identity and justification are today professors without legacies who are bone-weary of the talk about African philosophy. The promise of L. S. Senghor which has endured for decades as a challenge has not been taken to a higher level in the unravelling of an intellectually combustible philosophical system that not only reconciles Africa with the rest of the world but also cements the integrity of African philosophy.

We believe Senghor remains the only African philosophical thinker to present a system of thought original enough to capture the imagination of the world, a system he never pursued ad finem. Recently, however, the work of Prof Asouzu in complementary reflection has rekindled hope for the further development of an African rationalism in search of synthesis: systematic but non-absolutizing metaphysics. For the claim to incorrigibility, though understandable, is a futile and pathetic claim – a point well noted by Nietzsche and his postmodernist followers. Asouzu has argued that the African contribution is important as a missing link in world philosophy. 2 It is in agreeing with Asouzu and in renewing the great existentialist tradition – this time as an African testament – that we present the consolationist manifesto to the century. We present the framework of the metaphysics of terror and the ethics of consolation not with the passion of an incendiary Nietzsche but with the commitment of a Spinoza.

2. Additional Remark We talk with ease about pessimism and optimism, but have we ever paused to imagine that everything we want from life and existence can be extracted from these concepts, that mind and matter can be explained by our discovered unity? Even if we can only claim to make old things new, our position remains that theory and practice subsist and develop in the unity of pessimism and optimism. All abstracting and instantiating take place within, not outside, the unity. The ontological clarification of this claim is the preoccupation of the new testament from Africa. This is consolationist metaphysics. The ramifications and implications of the immanent phenomena of joy and sadness (both concepts being interchangeable with optimism and pessimism) will constitute consolationist ethics. The unity of optimism and pessimism we propose as the Consolation, which may stand for any absolute, from Being to Nothingness and to God. The unity of joy and sadness we propose as Melancholy. Melancholy and consolation are interchangeable terms and can indicate the same thing in the dialectical phases of otu – the mind of man.

But, perhaps, a more ambitious and less alarming term, in a world where glamour dignifies the big illusion that is positive thinking, is the Consolation. Pessimism is a scary word. Yet Schopenhauer has been celebrated, and continues to be celebrated. The thesis of life compulsorily yields pessimism. This is our message. Since we wish to deliver a philosophical, not political, manifesto, from Africa, we will go further still to say that as hard as we have tried we have not succeeded in isolating pessimism from optimism both in thought and in the inter-subjective world of our everyday experience. We always find terror never far from the place where existence has revealed itself as beauty. This is a contingency we lament and this lamentation elevated as a philosophy of life cements our solidarity with the Western existentialist philosophers. We come in the name of Africa, but we are individuals freely speculating about our world, freely yet responsibly.

When Archie Bahm in Metaphysics: An Introduction includes dialectic as a category of existence we are not unduly worried. Reality mocks dualism in the face and dares it to go into the core of things if it can. We need only refer to the magnificent double worlds of Plato and Kant to understand the dilemma of a dualistic concept of reality. Perhaps the dialectical approach tends to be no less problematic and artificial. Yet it accords better with common sense. African thinkers from the inimitable Senghor to Onyeocha and Asouzu have endorsed the dialectical understanding of reality as one consistent with the African experience. We therefore intend to develop the consolationist philosophy along the line and within the circle of a dialectic. This way we create a new thing and make some old things new, speculating with some radicality without repudiating the masters who came before us. Our dialectic is the doctrine of mood, the unity of the Consolation.

We have chosen not to invoke the identity of the collective, as some African thinkers called ethno-philosophers have done in the past, and say “this is what the Idoma people think…” We have chosen not to present cultural norms and mores as philosophy. In the process of staying faithful to individualist inspiration we hope to avoid overstatements and understatements in the name of the tribe. In his October 1961 Oxford speech Senghor said

“… the sense of communion, the gift of myth-making, the gift of rhythm, such are the essential elements of Negritude which you find indelibly stamped on all the works and activities of the black man.”

Senghor was exaggerating when he appointed himself the spokesman not only of his tribe but also of the black race. We can easily forgive the great poet, as easily as we can forgive Nietzsche’s exaggerated description of the character of European nations in his Beyond Good and Evil. For us the tribe itself ceases to be the Idoma tribe, the African tribe: the tribe becomes an idea in the mind, in the environment of thought where we extract and concretize the concept of the tribe of man. This is our solidarity. We are taking consolationism beyond Africa to the place where it must rest as a missing link in world philosophical thinking in general and the existentialist tradition in particular.

3 Our Manifesto
* The African is a man.
* Members of other races are men.
* Man is a being fit for melancholy.
* The 21st century man is a melancholy man ruled by mood.
* The 21st century is a techno-emotive century, not a technological century isolated from mood.
* The mood of the century from north to south and form east to west is the mood of the people.
* The mood of the people is the mood of melancholy.
* The strength of mood in which anxiety subsists is the torture of anxiety.
* The state of the computer age demands a new interpreting philosophy as a doctrine of man.
* Consolationsim is that philosophy.
* Freedom equates happiness.
* Happiness is a mirage.
* Yet the melancholy man is a witness to liberty.
* And the thesis of life compulsorily yields pessimism.
* To deny pessimism is to deny optimism.
* International terrorism in our ordinary everyday existence follows from the multiplication of a basic ontological terror rooted in mood.
* The terror of existence is to be met with a righteous rage.
* This rage is moral, weakened as it is by the immanent sway of fatalism.
* The universe is rational only to the extent that it is a yearning universe.
* Therefore, the universe is a totality of joy and sadness.
* The philosophical unity of optimism and pessimism offers us all that we need to know about reality.
* Fear torments the world.
* Anxiety follows from fear and is the foundation of peace.
* Where there is thought there is despair.
* Despair follows from fear and is the foundation of violence.
* God has been left out of men’s affairs.
* We insist then that this is the core of the consolationist manifesto.
* Pessimism is a valid proposition.
* Optimism is a valid challenge.
* Consequently, fatalism is immanent.

The unification of these elements into something that affords us yet another humanistic vision of life is our task in the early 21st century. Our struggle will be centred on understanding man in his terror-dominated environment, and this environment or world in an ever expanding relation to ultimate reality – the mythopoeia dream of existence – without offending those people who frown at metaphysical absolutism. After all we saw when we discovered the unity Senghor sought that the Absolute is the Consolation. There is every reason to believe that this mythopoeic dream is at the heart of quantum physics which dissolves all rigid borders and contemplates the yearning dialectical essence of revealed matter. The mystery of this dream accounts for the appeal of matter. Its yearning nature defines the rational in terms of the emotional. Our African existentialism can therefore not be in conflict with modern science. The scientist and the existentialist merely use different dialects of the same language, appropriate to their different circumstances, and sublime for that matter, to capture the vision of reality – the mythopoeic dream of existence. And so the language of both philosopher and scientist increasingly become poetic to the fascination of the poet who is the great creator of hyperboles. This dream is the reality behind myth, superstition, morality, metaphysics, science, and technology, however advanced and sufficient-seeming the last two fields of human engagement. “Science, truly understood, is not the death, but the birth, of mystery, awe and reverence.”3 That this is correct our techno-emotive century has proved beyond doubt. We bear witness to the acts of rich men who buy jets for their mistresses in the name of something called love. Here technology is summoned to glorify an emotion, the great joy. We bear witness to the acts of men called terrorists who plant bombs in crowded buildings and remotely detonate them. Here science and technology is invoked to pacify an emotion, the great sadness.

The task for our consolationist existentialism is to go around this mythopoeic dream, to look around it cautiously, and to the best of our ability determine what it looks like. For this dream is not altogether opaquely transcendental. It has been with mankind in all ages, and lives with us the living generation in the mood of the century. We can find it in the mood of the people. We hope to move around the ultimate reality, constructing our metaphysics and ethics through the various stages of vertical and horizontal thinking. Vertical thinking will take us towards the other-worldly environment while horizontal thinking will bring us down to earth when the ultimate futility of encompassing this dream overwhelms the mind in its pessimistic phase of thought, which phase as we have elsewhere argued is the dominant phase in which Western greats like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and all the postmodernist anti-foundation philosophers did their thinking. As the source of beauty and terror we cannot ignore this reality and pretend all is well either by invoking determinism of all kinds or asserting a Sartrean kind of freedom, one so complete in its logical complacence that its fullness is in fact its emptiness. The bold positing of teleology, determinism, and freedom marks the biggest outburst of emotion in world philosophy and, by extension, human intellectual history. This point has to be noted. Ignoring it gives the wrong impression that philosophy is a profession rather than a vocation. Ignoring it causes us to forget that philosophy, more than any other field of human enquiry, is the science of consolation – more than literature, music, and the fine arts. It is this truth that compels James to reflect with calm incisiveness – still thinking of Spinoza –

The principle of causality... is…but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than…mere arbitrary juxtaposition...4

The emotion at the root of life demands consolation and reason justifies it. The justification for determinism is the justification for the proclamation of absolute freedom and teleology. Therefore philosophers agree. Aristotle, Spinoza, and Sartre: they all agree in the name of consolation. The intellect moulds the world to the taste of a basic feeling. Hume refers to this feeling as sympathy. For Nietzsche it is power. Senghor calls it rhythm. How can philosophers disagree?

As far as our acquaintance with Western philosophy goes, Boethius is the only Western thinker to categorically and unabashedly link philosophy with consolation. And he is absolutely correct. For one reason or the other later Western philosophers did not follow the path Boethius had beaten in the forest of despair. Yet consolationism thrived in the works of even the most detached Western philosophical thinkers long before Kiekegaard and Pascal announced the coming of the philosophical phenomenon called existentialism, notably Locke, Hume, Kant, and Spinoza – in particular Spinoza. For with the directness of Boethius, Spinoza declares:

After experience has taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile... I determined, I say, to inquire whether I might discover and acquire the faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continual supreme happiness. 5

But then the meaning of existence is futility understood fatalistically. And yet the meaning of meaninglessness is consolation. So nihilism has a meaning. This meaning eluded Nietzsche, that most brilliant philosopher of life. But, again, the task of systematizing consolationism was not one for Western philosophy. It was a task reserved for African philosophy. Senghor saw the vision. Asouzu beckoned to it. We are now enlarging the vision of the Consolation for the 21st century.

We think that ultimate reality is mood. And we are horrified to announce the impossibility of the Nothing, which confirms the eternity of the world. Because reality is mood it is a dream. So we call ultimate reality the mythopoeic dream of existence or simply the Dream. It has the quantum character of yearning and, therefore, elusiveness. The Germans understood this much better than the analytical thinkers of England and America, who seem enamoured of “scientifically oriented philosophy”, as if philosophy is a rigid discipline like engineering or accounting. A great difficulty arises if we try to identify this mythopoeic dream with God or the Absolute. The difficulty arises because this dream is immanent in the universe. Its character of yearning pervades the universe and stretches it from end to end. We tell ourselves we want to know what being is, but we have being in us already. Yet we are never satisfied with this knowledge. Thus we insist that being is everywhere present but is nowhere eternally substantial. As creatures of yearning we are not destined for happiness but for consolation.

Science rightly distrusts the mythopoeic dream as it cannot understand it with its own operational tools which seek against the demand of common sense the denial of mystery, that which amounts to self denial. As existential consolationists we have the patience to enquire into the nature of this dream which is already in us and which pervades the universe. Science itself is coming to grips with the reality that constitutes its foundation. Our advanced technological world has become a techno-emotive world. This techno-emotive world is exemplified by the existing synergy between hi-tech industry and the entertainment industry. The value-laden forces of mood have invaded and conquered the value-neutral territory of science 6. A skilful musician, sportsman, or film star earns much more than the most brilliant technological wizard. Celebrities as symbols of mood are used by car makers to advertise their brands. Certain persons confused about their sex status and sexuality petulantly demand sex-change operations and are taken seriously by skilled surgeons. As trivial as these instances may seem they certainly serve our purpose. The vision of existence must remain a tragic vision.

The vertical analysis of mood, nothing more than speculation around the mythopoeic dream, we label pure metaphysics. The horizontal analysis which is practical thinking away from the Dream we label a philosophy of life. From this philosophy of life we will extract our ethical, aesthetic, and political systems. But after the isolation of elements comes the dynamic integration. Every aspect of consolationism will depend on the other in an uneasy monism, a serrated monism which is perhaps in itself a dualism. Our practical philosophy will frequently answer to our ontology. What we present is an African dialectic. We intend to use the doctrine of mood to proffer solutions to age-old philosophical problems like freedom and determinism, the nature and origin of the mind, the tenacity of consciousness, the possibility of immortality, the reinterpretation of nihilism in its major ramifications, and more, with due respect but not subservience to advances in scientific knowledge. For when all horizontal sciences (man-constructed) are annihilated the science of sciences which is the mythopoeic dream of existence will endure as the yearning of eternity.

4. Our Solidarity We stand in a relation of solidarity with the great Western philosophers, in particular the existentialist thinkers, in the intellectual confrontation with the terror of existence, the very justification of our liberal humanism. We have found in nihilism the philosophical bridge connecting African philosophy with Western philosophy. Nihilism is the reality from which no philosophy can escape. The world seems to exist gratuitously. This is pure terror, the terror Nietzsche tries to ameliorate with his idea of the will to power but which overwhelms him now and again with all the virulent force of pessimism. This is a force too strong for his “gay science”. And so Nietzsche, like the profound visionary that he is, battles his more than accidental misanthropy with his concept of power. For his master-morality properly understood signifies a surrender to the nihilism despair engender, first in the mind and then outside the mind. Man by nature is evil. Whatever may be said in favour of his capacity for goodness, man is at bottom wicked. His terribleness is a principle obedient to the terror of existence rooted in mood. The evil man knows this only too well. So he has no respect for humanity and all civilized values. The individual is as tyrannical as the group, even if he is more vulnerable than the group. Nietzsche knows that man is very bad indeed. Hence, his disgust for civilization and his worship of nihilism which he ironically inverts. The will to power expresses nihilism better than the suppression of this primitive will.

There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s basic submission is correct. The fundamental intuition is sound. However, Nietzsche’s vision is the vision of a nihilist universe. The nihilism that rises explosively from mood and ever more violently expresses itself in the false freedom of the primitive will has its counteracting force in the consolatory existence. We then see operative in mood two metaphysical principles, namely pessimism and optimism, reorganized and understood again as sadness and joy. The meaning of nihilism is consolation. We stand in solidarity with Nietzsche. We extend this solidarity to the great existentialists of the West, from Boethius to Spinoza and from Kant, Kiekegaard, Pascal, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, to Marcel.

Recognizing the difficulty posed by the problem of being and suspecting that his own investigation may not fare better than previous attempts at the unmasking of being, Heidegger devotes much space in his masterpiece Being and Time to the justification of the ‘phenomenological’ method as explicated by Husserl which he was ironically to jettison as the philosophy of Dasein made its progress. The confidence with which he poses the ‘neglected’ question of being “in our time” and the hope raised over the certainty of the final apprehension of the mighty problem of being increasingly appears premature as the search goes beyond the horizon of the physically substantial to the environment of the insubstantial mystery, that which we call the mythopoeic dream. Heidegger’s use of bewildering words which renders his already complicated non-conceptual speculation even more complex signifies both an intention to deliberately mystify and a struggle with the difficulty posed by that which is in itself a mystery.

Mercifully, he moves to the more familiar being of man and brilliantly identifies man’s being as care. Here we find Heidegger most interesting. The structure of mood is our focus. Being is everywhere present but is nowhere eternally substantial. It is a mythopoeic dream subject to the principle of yearning. No conceptual thinking, no logical power of thought, can penetrate its moody essence. We can therefore understand the artificial complexity of the speculative systems of Western thinkers from Plato to Hegel. To have tried in the first place to unravel the purpose of a seemingly gratuitous existence was a salute to courage. Not to have tried at all which seemed to Nietzsche and his postmodernist followers the better choice would have amounted to a tame surrender to despair, the denizen of human thought and anything, in general, like human thought. We say being is that which is and you say, but this thing passes away too quickly. You say, is there not more wisdom in Heraclitus or even a Pyrrho than a Parmenides? Any science, then, no matter how compact, that comes in close proximity to being will disintegrate and lose earlier coherence. It is no wonder then that the exact sciences scrupulously avoid transcendental metaphysics and take great pride in being masters of facts – facts whose essences answer to the mythopoeic.

Rather than go in search of being and begin to wonder at the grades of being, at Heidegger’s ready-to-hand, presence-at-hand, and other ontolinguistic subtleties we will pursue the notion of universal existence and give coherence to the sum of things as a yearning totality in the 21st century philosophy of consolationism – the doctrine of mood which we hope will be a major African contribution to existentialism and an enriching of rationalism. For, indeed, the work of speculative philosophy was never completed before the coming of the disillusioned postmodernist and post-structuralist thinkers of the West who celebrated the age of despair. Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, and others did not kill idealism and its totalizing grandeur. The killing of idealism is at once its resurrection. The killing and resurrection of idealism in the speculative philosophy of consolationism was not a task for Western philosophy. It was a task for African philosophy.

If we are claiming consolationism as an intellectual current in contemporary African philosophy, what is the basis, then, for an Afro-European testament for the century in view of our solidarity with the West? Nihilism is the basis for our Afro-European testament. The foundation of our cross-continental solidarity is the universalization of the segmented experience. We conceive this nihilism in a peculiarly African way. For those who may say nihilism is alien to the African experience we insist that the thesis of life compulsorily yields pessimism. We do not see how we can escape from the terror of existence, which the universe and all things constituting it carry, and which is expressed unequivocally in metaphysical or existential evil (e. g., an earthquake) and moral evil (e. g., international terrorism). Yet we reject the isolated nihilist vision because we are convinced nihilism has a meaning. The meaning of nihilism is consolation. The way into existentialism is the dawn of the knowledge of life’s futility and the way out of the nihilism this realization breeds is the affirmation of the consolatory value of life. For instance, man may be a being-towards-death, but he dies clinging to hope.

The age demands a new humanism, a new existentialism – the Consolation. The analytic philosophers have taken philosophy away from the people of the world and perverted the meaning of philosophy, restricting it to their sphere of influence – the academia. We are returning philosophy to the people. Speculation might have given way to analysis in Western philosophy in an age that is re-enacting a reversed medievalism in which philosophy plays the servile handmaid of the sciences, but there is still much speculation bottled up in the African mind. Having never really had our say, the opportunity presents itself now for us to make a vital contribution to world philosophical heritage. This is our time. A new intellectual dawn has come in Africa. We have discovered Senghor’s elusive synthesis. The work of speculative philosophy is not over and synthesis is not out of fashion. For the work of philosophy and construction to be over idealism must die. It gasped on the occasion of the coming of the postmodernist thinkers but did not die. It cannot die because thought is yearning and man seeks eternally to become. The death of idealism is at once its resurrection. Idealism, always alive, even if not very active, in the best of the existentialists, including the non-mathematical Russell, lives on in the philosophy of the Consolation. The occasion for the rebirth and re-launch of 21st century existentialism is the discovery or, perhaps, the rediscovery of the Melancholy man – Unamuno’s man of flesh and bone, Heidegger’s being-towards-death, Sartre’s nauseated man, Senghor’s myth-making man, and Camus’ abandoned man whose passionate appeal is met by the cold silence of the world.

We have filtered socio-political and economic events of the early 21st century through the prism of philosophy in our moments of vision which pedagogy clarifies. True, thought divides the world, dissects and distorts reality, such that truth, like being, becomes elusive. Yet our little triumph is that we have identified the man of the century, the world of the century, and the doctrine of the century. The construction of our immanent philosophy which we think must be supported by a transcendental philosophy has the following as points of departure:

1. The man of the century is the melancholy man.

2. The world of the century is the techno-emotive world.

3. The doctrine of the century is the doctrine of mood.

Philosophy must remain dynamic. For it to remain dynamic creative thinking must thrive. World philosophy can no longer be content with the sterile analysis of past philosophers and the downgrading of philosophy to the lowly status of “handmaid of the sciences”. We cannot be content with this situation for a number of reasons, chief of which are:

A. The fact that Africa has not had its say in world philosophy regardless of the posturing of Onyewuenyi that Greek philosophy has an African origin. 7

B. The emergence of new existential realities which are beyond the competence of scientific speculation and scientifically inclined philosophy.

The desire to secure for Black Africa a place in the sun to the extent that we are talking about the history of philosophy combined with the atavistic recrudescence of the violence and moodiness of the Melancholy man invites us to present a new philosophical manifesto in eternal solidarity with the manifestoes of Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Sartre, the non-mathematical Russell, Unamuno, and others on their way to making existentialism the most important and heartfelt philosophical and intellectual movement of the 20th century and, indeed, of all time.

There certainly is something unique in African philosophy as argued first by Tempels in his Bantu Philosophy, then Senghor, Mbiti, and later the professors now grouped under the label ‘ethno-philosophers’. Yet this is a uniqueness that can be transformed into a universal category through the individualization of that philosophical experience immediately derived from the communal environment in the making of a rational system that looks proudly across the seas and oceans at the Occident and the Orient. If the West and the East have not accorded African philosophy sufficient respect it is because African philosophers have not paid their dues. We have not made any landmark intellectual sacrifice. We have not taken the journey which Occidental and Oriental philosophers have taken in their speculations about the world. We must go beyond Senghor’s celebration of the gift of myth-making or rhythm 8 (which is in fact not peculiar to the African, being a privilege of the Melancholy man) and Nkrumah’s humdrum Marxist ideology. 9 Wiredu has pointed out in his Philosophy and an African Culture that the mode of thinking steeped in proverbs, myths, wise sayings, etc, is not an African peculiarity but a basic pre-scientific mode peculiar to all traditional societies. We agree with him and add that this universalizable uniqueness is the foundation of all rational constructions. It is not a useless uniqueness. It is vital since it links the age of mature rationality with what Heidegger calls Being – the mythopoeic dream of existence, the expansive, yet ultimate principle of yearning. The great struggle of metaphysicians and ontologists from Plato to Hegel has been the insistence – ever correct – that this foundation which explains all advancements but cannot explain its own primitivity must not be ignored. Most of the great idealists of Western philosophy sought a conceptual approach to the understanding of the Dream which carries existence and which is existence itself. The great existentialists tried a combination of the conceptual and non-conceptual. The scientific philosophers of course adopted the scientific method, thinking wrongly that philosophy is a technical affair rather than an unhappy business, that philosophy is a science rather than the science of consolation. Thus Comte in his massive Positive Philosophy and Positive Polity exalts science above religion and metaphysics and proclaims the method of science the method of philosophy. Such conceit leads him predictably to inconsistency of the most ridiculous kind. His rigid science loses its coherence before the Dream and he begins to talk about a certain religion, the “Religion of Humanity”. Russell too finds himself in a similar dilemma. Having glorified mathematics, he realizes at last that the best language that describes the staid order and arrangement of mathematical formulae is the poetic language of Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and L. S. Senghor. Behind the cold formula lurks the longing for beauty, the desire to be comforted.

Again, these are interesting times in which we find ourselves. The rage of terrorists is matched by the fear of unemployment, the sounds of war, the intoxication of majority democracy, mass social anxiety before and after elections, a phenomenal resurgence of emotion and its comprehensive domination of intellect, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction by pacifists, terrorists, and rogue nations, the increasing loneliness of the urban dweller, the decreasing returns from the orgasm in the age of pornography, the decline of Christianity in Europe and the rise of Islam in the same Europe, the recognition of emotion as an equal partner of reason by the philosophy of psychology – these and other practical developments show that scientific thinking must partner non-scientific speculation in the attempt to understand the 21st century man, the Melancholy man.

We are encouraged to present the consolationist manifesto to the early 21st century in response to the intellectual demand of the moment. We present the manifesto as a tribute to Senghor and other African philosophers who from the beginning saw the shape of coming things. We present our manifesto in solidarity with the existentialist tradition of Europe in particular and world philosophy in general. We offer to the 21st century a metaphysics of terror and a morality of consolation.

Notes
1. See Richard Rorty Consequences of Pragmatism Minneapolis, University of Minnesota (1982) for his anti-foundation stance.
2. See Innocent I. Asouzu. The Heavy Burden of Philosophy beyond African Philosophy Mu¨nster, Lit Verlag (2007). With his methodological principle of complementary reflection Asouzu announces a new dawn in African philosophy. The myth at last gives way to pure thought.
3. Fredric George Donnan, quoted in Noel G. Coley and Vance M. D. Hall (eds) Darwin to Einstein New York, Longman Inc (1980) 215.
4. William James The Dilemma of Determinism. In Maurice Mandelbaum et al (eds) Philosophical Problems 2nd ed New York Macmillan (1967) 432- 443.
5. Benedict Spinoza Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding in Andrew Boyle (tr) Ethics with Introduction by T. S. Gregory London, Dent (1910) 227.
6. As if tired of the slow progress of metaphysics and religion in answering the enduring question of immortality, science has taken over the ‘occult’ problem. See R. M. Perry Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality New York, Universal Publishers (2000). See also Stephen S. Hall Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension Boston, Houghton Mifflin (2003).
7. See Innocent C. Onyewuenyi The African Origin of Greek Philosophy Nsukka, University of Nigeria press (1993) for his Afrocentric position and his radicalization of the ‘ Egypt story’.
8. See L. S. Senghor On African Socialism London, Pall Mall Press (1964) for his philosophy of Negritude.
9. See Kwame Nkrumah Consciencism London, Heinemann (1964).

Further Reading
Agada, Ada Towards the 21st Century Globalization of African Philosophy (2009) http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/agada_consolationism.htm Asouzu, I. I. The Method and Principle of Complementary Reflection in and beyond African Philosophy Lit Verlag Mûnster, New Brunswick, London (2005). Asouzu, I. I. Ibuanyidanda New Complementary Ontology . Beyond World-Immanentism, Ethnocentric Reduction and Impositions Lit Verlag, Mûnster, Zurich, New Brunswick, London (2007). Asouzu, I. I. Ikwa Ogwe. Essential Readings in Complementary Reflection. A Systematic Methodological Approach Saesprint Publishers, Calabar (2007). Eze, E. C. (ed) African Philosophy: An Anthology Oxford, Blackwell(1998). Heidegger, Martin Being and Time John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (eds) Oxford, Blackwell (1962). Hume, David A Treatise of Human Nature L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed) Oxford, Oxford University Press (1988). Imbo, S. O. An Introduction to African Philosophy Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield (1998). Makinde, M. A. “Whither Philosophy in Africa?” < http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriMaki.htm Nietzsche, Fredric The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals Francis Golffing (tr) New York, Doubleday (1956). Unamuno, Miguel de Tragic Sense of Life New York, Dover Publications (1954)