Beyond the debate in the museums, the legacy of colonialism is a monumental wrong in little Europe. Also in the branch of thought. If, as the American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy said, ideas are the things that migrate the most in the world, in philosophy there is a dark gap in the form of a question: was the Enlightenment just a one-way trip, a set of irradiated concepts? from European territories to the rest of the world? Some voices affirm that no, that this story is not complete. From those lands classified as “wild” also came ideas that influenced the Age of Enlightenment.
Philosophy manuals have been explaining for more than 200 years that the Enlightenment began with Descartes, Locke, Newton, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., until reaching the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But long before, Europeans had been “exposed to a plethora of social, scientific and political ideas previously unimaginable,” stated anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow in ‘The Wisdom of Kondiaronk’, an article published in the french newspaper Mediapart in 2019. “The final result of this accumulation of new ideas is what is known as the Enlightenment,” they concluded.
That thesis is reflected since then in works such as The dawn of everythingby Graeber and Wengrow themselves (Ariel, 2022); Black Enlightenment (Ilustración Negra, Duke University Press, 2023; no Spanish edition), by Surya Parekh; Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy. Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (Africa, Asia and the history of philosophy. Racism in the formation of the philosophical canon 1780-1830, New York University Press, 2013; no Spanish edition), by Peter KJ Park.
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This year, it has also been rescued The Hatata Inquiries (The Hatata Investigations; De Gruyter, 2024; without Spanish edition), a work from the 17th century, by the Ethiopians Zara Yaqob and Walda Heywat, with a critical edition. The work includes the ideas of Yaqob, an Ethiopian thinker who in 1667 already advocated the use of reason as a fundamental tool in life, and opposed unequal relationships between humans. He wrote: “All men are equal in the presence of God; and they are all intelligent, since they are his creatures; He did not assign one people to life, another to death, one to mercy, another to judgment. Our reason teaches us that this type of discrimination cannot exist.”
“The problem is that Europe has been too closed in on itself,” Dag Herbjørnsrud, a researcher at the Center for the Global and Comparative History of Ideas in Oslo, explains by phone. But it was not always like this: for centuries the philosophy collected in the West included African or Near Eastern figures, and only after 1780 did thinkers from other continents begin to be excluded. The new philosophical canon—its official history, so to speak—, spread by Hegel, was limited exclusively to Europe. Because? To prevent the idea of pantheism—and the possibility of fueling atheistic theses—from taking root on the European continent, as detailed in his book by the American historian Peter KJ Park.
That of the Ethiopian Yacob is not the oldest known example of this influence, nor the only one. Exposure to different perceptions and visions of the world were already included in the essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580) and in Voyage to the north of Brazil (Journey to the North of Brazil), by Yves d’Évreux (1615). Also in later ones, such as Curious dialogues between the author and a wise-minded savage who has traveledby Baron de Lahontan (1703), or the popular Stories from the Indies (1772), by Raynal and Diderot.
In 1562, in Rouen (France) Montaigne had met with a group of Tupinambas – indigenous people of Brazilian lands -, an experience that he narrates in ‘On Cannibals’, one of the chapters in the first volume of his essays. The French thinker recounts his astonishment at knowing that they lived in a state of acceptable freedom, without hierarchies of command and with the minimum needs covered. And he details, in turn, the impressions of the Tupinambas about France and the strangeness of seeing that strong and armed men submitted to the total “obedience of a little boy (the king) and that they did not choose a better one among themselves for the will send.” They were also shocked to see people living with all kinds of comforts alongside others emaciated by hunger and poverty, and it seemed very strange to them that those who suffered so much injustice “did not grab others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
For its part, the work of Baron Lahontan, Curious dialogues between the author and a wise-minded savage who has traveled, published in The Hague and read carefully both in colonial lands and in old Europe, collects the reflections of the Iroquois Indian chief Kondiaronk – the protagonist of the aforementioned article by Graeber and Wengrow -, a regular in debates at dinners of colonial representatives in the territories of New France (later Canada). Regarding the “true” religion, the Iroquois questioned before the aristocrat that there were “500 or 600 religions, each one different from the others, of which, according to you, only that of the French is good, sacred or true.” And about morality, he asked: “What kind of humans, what kind of creatures must Europeans be, who must be forced to do good, and who only refrain from doing evil for fear of punishment?” .
Freedom, equality and slavery
Beyond the illustrated classics, there are other names to investigate, such as that of the freedman Anton Wilhelm Amo, from the African Gold Coast (today Ghana). After being freed and trained at the University of Jena (Germany), Amo contributed to debates related to freedom by explaining the reality of slavery and warning about its serious moral problem. “They are wonderful counternarratives to official history, very valuable, to which we must pay attention,” explains Dwight K. Lewis Jr., an African-American professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, by phone. Lewis learned about the figure of the African thinker when he asked at his institute, when he was still a student, if in the entire history of philosophy there had never been a black person, to which the professor replied that the name “a certain Master” sounded familiar to him. . “We must rethink, reevaluate and remake certain academic spaces to broaden the bases of philosophical movements,” says Lewis.
“We are all children of the Enlightenment, even when we attack it,” said the French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov. We must delve into the influence of ideas from colonized countries on the Enlightenment movement. And study the weight of the paradoxes of the movement itself, such as proclaiming the equality of all men, leaving aside women and slaves. “The fight for equal rights has been a long road ahead and even today we have not reached the end,” says María José Villaverde, professor of Political Science at the Complutense University of Madrid, author of Tocqueville and the dark side of liberalism (editor Guillermo Escolar, 2022). The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are false, but that they are incomplete, according to Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s time to rescue the missing pieces.
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