Jonathan O. Chimakonam Ezumezu A System of Logic for African Philosophy and Studies Ezumezu Jonathan O. Chimakonam Ezumezu A System of Logic for African Philosophy and Studies Jonathan O. Chimakonam Department of Philosophy University of Calabar Calabar, Nigeria ISBN 978-3-030-11074-1 ISBN 978-3-030-11075-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11075-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933294 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. 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And finally, to my HP Pavilion g6 Notebook computer, 6 years in loyal service without disappointments, this is your last completed book before your scheduled retirement—I don’t know what humans might think about this, but I feel you deserve this dedication. Foreword I read this brilliant and groundbreaking book in the manner the author wanted me to read it: as an exercise of my own self-education. As I imagine it, Jonathan O. Chimakonam’s idea, in having invited me to write the foreword, was to test the type, the limits and the possibilities of a possible dialogue between two scholars, separated by conventional criteria, but converging on similar intellectual disqui- etudes vis-a-vis conventional professional wisdom, and additionally to envisage how much mutual enrichment can be derived from such an exchange. On the one hand, several degrees of separation stand between the two of us; Chimakonam is a Nigerian philosopher, while I am a Portuguese sociologist with philosophical back- ground. Chimakonam deals with the most intricate and complex meanders of pro- fessional philosophy, logic and thought systems, while I have done extensive empirical research in Latin America and Africa with social groups involved in strug- gles against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy and anchor my theoretical and epistemological work on such a sociological experience. Chimakonam’s mother tongue is the Igbo language and he writes in English, while my mother tongue is Portuguese and I write in Portuguese and English. We think and write from different standpoints. While Chimakonam writes on the basis of the extremely painful mem- ory and lived experience of colonialism and the massive epistemicide and genocide committed by it, I write from the standpoint of active solidarity with the people that fought against colonialism and of the immense damage caused by European colo- nialism not only upon the colonised peoples and cultures but also upon the European peoples and cultures. On the other hand, we converge to a large extent on our critique of Eurocentrism and struggle with the task of establishing the conditions under which a post- Eurocentric nonderivative scholarship can emerge. A derivative scholarship is deriv- ative whenever it excels in deconstructive exercises but lacks the creativity and originality necessary to ground new intellectual paradigms. We also converge on the idea that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. From dif- ferent perspectives, we also converge on developing epistemologies of the south, understanding by south not a geographic south (a south populated by so many “little Europes”, to use Edward Said’s catchy term) but rather an epistemic one. vii viii Foreword I have written extensively on the epistemologies of the south, a long journey that started in the mid-1980s with an internal critique of positivism as the dominant epistemological understanding of modern science since the late nineteenth century (1992; 1995; 2007) and evolved toward an external critique of both positivism and anti-positivism and the formulation of the epistemologies of the south, as a learning process focused on the epistemes that throughout the modern era have provided the grounding for the resistance against Western capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy and the epistemologies that legitimated it: the epistemologies of the north (2014, 2018). I consider Chimakonam’s book as the most convincing and powerful formulation of a philosophy of the south that I have read in many years and which emerges from the African historical and existential contexts and cultures. Since we are talking about ancient or pre-colonial thought systems, the idea of emergence must be taken with a grain of salt. It strictly means a more consistent and updated formulation of a given thought system and its expanded credibility before wider publics, beyond the contexts and cultures that originated them. Rooted in other non-Western con- texts and cultures, other philosophies of the south have gained broader attention in recent years, such as Chinese, Indian, indigenous, Islamic philosophies of the south. Moreover, this epistemic impulse has extended to different fields of scholarship, from literary studies to sociology and theology. I have learned a lot from this impressive book. The most salient features of this book are the following. The possibility and nature of African philosophy has been widely discussed since mid-twentieth century. As one might expect, some (the uni- versalists) have taken the position that there is only one, universal philosophy, the one born in Greece, developed in modern Europe and today subscribed to by profes- sional philosophers in the Euro-American world and elsewhere, while others (the relativists) have defended that philosophising, like any other intellectual activity, is a culture-sensitive and context-sensitive activity and that accordingly there is room for an African philosophy as well as for other non-Western philosophies. As hap- pens in other parts of the world, the African philosophers have been divided on this issue. The first position has been criticised for condemning philosophising by African philosophers to a derivative activity, a transliteration or copycat philosophy. In turn, the second position has been criticised for condemning the noble task of philosophising to a cacophony of different ghettoised and incommensurable lucu- brations or ethnophilosophy, all of them unintelligible beyond the confines of their respective contexts. For reasons that I cannot go into in this foreword, Africa is probably the continent in which this divide has been experienced as a dichotomic dilemma with more existential anxiety or perplexity. The most remarkable feature of Chimakonam’s stance is that it confronts this dilemma head on and proves it to be a false one by finding a logical grounding on which original ideas can sprout from, something that has been missing all along and never before done in the field which changes the entire narrative in African philosophy. According to him, African philosophy can dare to be original and creative vis-a-vis the Aristotelian and Platonic tradition without condemning itself to the identity ghetto. African philosophy is context- and culture-sensitive in such a way that makes it an original and creative Foreword ix contribution to the worldwide search for the ultimate meaning of life. Understood in this way, it is a universalisable endeavour like other philosophies stemming from other contexts and cultures. Such a way of conceptualising African philosophy is a very demanding task, and Chimakonam does not shy away from it. According to him, the originality and cre- ativity of a given philosophy are grounded on a specific method and its underlying logic. It is impossible to think of a genuine African philosophy while subscribing to the Aristotelian bivalence logic that underlies Western philosophy. Africa has at its disposal another logic which, however ostracised by the colonialists and Western philosophers, is very much anchored in the African thought systems and in the exis- tential and historical contexts and cultures present on the continent. In an astound- ing intellectual tour de force conducted in the most consistent and rigorous way, Chimakonam offers Ezumezu as the prototype of an African logic, a variant of a trivalence logic. In a subliminal invitation to a decentring exercise, particularly for those whose centre has been built with Greek concepts and terms, the journey into Ezumezu logic abounds in Igbo-African words and concepts. As the argumentation proceeds, it becomes more and more convincing that this logic may indeed be uni- versally used since its contextual and cultural roots do not condition all the possible options it generates. Two additional reasons seem to strengthen this conviction. The first one is that Ezumezu has striking similarities with the logic systems underlying indigenous peoples’ and East Asian or Indian philosophies. The more we know about them, the more evident it becomes that the Aristotelian logic, in spite of its efficiency in many areas of social life, is in its bud as particular as many other non- Western or non-Aristotelian logic systems. Expressed in sociological terms, it is a localism that managed to get globalised in the modern era, thanks not so much to the force of its idea but rather to the idea of force of capitalism and colonialism that found in the Aristotelian logic an instrument well fitted to its expansionary endeavour. The second reason is that in an increasingly polarised world, with unprecedented social inequalities and resilient racial, gender and religious discriminations, in a world seemingly heading for a dystopic future characterised by new feudal castles of opulence surrounded by multitudes of oppressed peoples, the call for third or intermediate values, for context- and culture-sensitive notions of truth/falsehood and for the unending alternation of conjunctive and disjunctive intermediation between polar variables or realities seems to promise a better chance for a demo- cratic and peaceful social life. For these two reasons, the abstract universalism of Western-centric philosophy may be morphing into a monolithic, monocultural par- ticularism that is unwillingly opening the space for the emergence of a bottom-up, cosmopolitan universalism made of the differently universalisable vocations or impulses of many intellectual and philosophical traditions. Upon such a new univer- salism, the aspiration for an intercultural philosophy will have a better chance. In this lies my totally unconditional agreement with Chimakonam. Indeed, I have been claiming that there are epistemologies of the south only because there are epistemologies of the north and as long as the latter insist on being the only valid epistemologies in spite of the growing evidence to the contrary. Along the same x Foreword lines, I have been defending that, rather than focusing exclusively on the task of deconstructing the Western intellectual supremacy (as in the deconstruction brought about by the decolonising studies), we must grant equal attention to the credible presentation of knowledges and epistemologies otherwise (the constructive task undertaken by the call for the epistemologies of the south). As to my self-education, after a deep immersion in the fascinating intellectual landscape offered by this book, I come to the conclusion that I need to dedicate much more work to the methodological and pedagogical dimensions of the episte- mologies of the south and of the social sciences grounded upon them. It is true that in my most recent work, I have dedicated myself to such dimensions (2017, 2018); but in light of Chimakonam’s book, I concede that much more is needed. I dare to say that, as concerns pedagogy, the same applies to Chimakonam. Chapter 11 dedi- cated to the topic reads like the first chapter of a new hopefully upcoming book on Ezumezu pedagogy and curriculum. I think I have given enough reasons to encourage a close reading of this fascinat- ing book. Its readers will eagerly follow the exciting new paths and explore the immense vistas it opens. It will be a demanding task, but the rewards will by far compensate the effort. Professor of Sociology at the Boaventura de Sousa Santos University of Coimbra, Portugal, Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA References Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1992. A discourse on the sciences. Review XV, 1, Winter: 9–47. ———. 1995. Toward a new common sense: Law, science and politics in the paradigmatic transi- tion. New York: Routledge. Second edition titled Toward New Legal Common Sense. London Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. 2007. (ed.) Cognitive justice in a global world: Prudent knowledge for a decent life. Lanham: Lexington. ———. 2014. Epistemologies of the south. Justice against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. Decolonising the University. The challenge of deep cognitive justice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2018. The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of the epistemologies of the south. Durham: Duke University Press. Preface Without method, difference in philosophical thinking cannot be established. Without difference, unity of ideas cannot be asserted. Two variables, A and B, were first dif- ferent before they became similar. No two different though similar variables are identical. Universality is something obtained or created from diversity and not the other way round. In other words, diversity is necessary for universality. It is from the particulars that the universal is created. The idea that philosophy is one big intel- lectual culture tracing its genealogy to ancient Greece, found commonly in Western intellectual history, is false. This falsehood was born in the legacies of Plato and Aristotle. Unfortunately, it is upon these two ancient philosophers that many a Western philosopher has based his thought and is now attempting to impose the same on all other cultures. Alfred North Whitehead has accurately judged the legion after the golden age of Greek philosophy to be footnotes to Plato and, I dare add, to Aristotle. Karl Popper, that unfazed enigma, has also spoken of the spell which Plato has cast on the later gen- eration of Western thinkers. It is not unpremeditated that Western philosophers now build a wall around their thought, refusing to engage or converse with those they regard as outsiders. They do this not out of fear that such might contaminate or dilute the value of their philosophy but for an ingrained bias and motivation to dis- count the humanity and rationality of other peoples. I have called this type of effort “conceptual envelopment”1 which is dangerous and myopic. Soon, without outside interaction, their philosophical canons would become too old for modern life and too outdated to undergird modern policy. This is already happening as philosophy’s value in the Western academy has depreciated to something of a decorative urn. In policy formulation and implementation, the philosopher in the West is isolated farther away from the circle of influence. The conceptual accumulation of Western philosophy is becoming poorer by the day. Indeed, its contemporary actors are still deeply influenced by Plato and Aristotle in 1 See Chimakonam, O. Jonathan. 2015. Conversational philosophy as a new school of thought in African philosophy: a conversation with Bruce Janz on the concept of “philosophical space”. Confluence: Journal of World Philosophies 3: 9–40. xi