Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization by Gordon Lewis R

Author:Gordon, Lewis R. [Gordon, Lewis R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Thoughts on Afropessimism

Afropessimism grew into an influential area of black thought by the second decade of the new millennium. The term “Afropessimism,” as I am using it here, came out of “Afro-pessimism.” The elimination of the hyphen is an important development since it dispels ambiguity and in effect announces a specific mode of thought. Should the hyphen remain, the ambiguity would be between pessimistic people of African descent and philosophical or theoretical pessimism. 1 The conjoined, theoretical term is what proponents of that intellectual movement often have in mind in their diagnosis of what I shall call “the black condition.”

The appeal to a black condition is peculiarly existential, though it is done in this context in ironic ways. Existentialists, after all, as is well known, reject notions of human “nature,” on the grounds that human beings live in a world of possibility, which makes an essentialist notion such as “nature” a matter, at least for such realities, always in the making. 2 In the classic formulation, human reality exists prior to its essence. For each human being, essence is, as it were, an appointment whose actuality is not always fulfilled. Such a task does not mean that human beings lack anchorage. Everyone has to start from somewhere and that or those are conditions of possibility for a human world. Existentialists, thus, often prefer to speak or write of “human condition” or conditions for these reasons. What human beings produce is manifold, but key in every instance is a mode of life, a world, so to speak, in and through which human beings could emerge as human. Human beings thus, for the most part, produce human realities and worlds (whether good or bad). Such realities and worlds offer a network of relations and relationships through which many other things are produced, all of which are constellations of meaning. Again, what comes about could be appreciated or rejected, but either is valuable or not in terms of how meaningful it is for ongoing human projects. There is, thus, also a very pragmatic dimension to this existential portrait of what is also called “human reality.”

Critics of existentialism often reject its human formulation. Heidegger, for instance, in his “Letter on Humanism,” lambasted Sartre for supposedly in effect subordinating Being to a philosophical anthropology with dangers of anthropocentrism. 3 Yet, as I have argued in a variety of writings, a philosophical understanding of culture raises the problem of the conditions through which philosophical reflections become meaningful. 4 Though a human activity, a more radical understanding of culture raises the question of the human being as the producer of an open reality. If the human being is in the making, then “human reality” is never complete and is more the relations in which such thought takes place than a claim about the thought. Additionally, what Heidegger fails to understand is, as Keiji Nishitani reminds us, Being is not all it is cracked up to be, as it also covers over instead of reveal reality. 5 That includes human reality.

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