Zera Yacob and Intellectual traditions; a note on the origins of Africana Philosophy

What should we make of this similarity? Note that it would be anachronistic to describe Zera Yacob’s argument as “Lockean,” for the Second Treatise of Government was published over two decades after Zera Yacob wrote his Hatäta. This points us toward the limits on the usefulness of viewing Zera Yacob and Locke as sharing an early modern world. Consider Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), which explores categories of Roman law, locates the birth of natural rights discourse in the late medieval period, and examines figures like Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes before giving Locke attention in the final chapter. Scholarship like this places Locke in a certain lineage of thought, which shaped him just as much as the political context of his times. Zera Yacob does not stand in that lineage. Indeed, when comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes and Locke, we should remember that Locke read and was influenced by Descartes, learning from his approach to philosophy even while rejecting central views of his. There is a sense in which Locke and Descartes share a modernity that Zera Yacob does not, a point that need not lead us to deny that Zera Yacob is a modern philosopher but rather to say that he inhabits a different modernity. (p. 130)

[W]hile Zera Yacob can be seen as similar to Descartes but must be recognized as outside the lineage leading to and branching out from him, Amo, like Locke, did philosophy in the wake of Descartes and critically responded to his work. (p. 132)

 

What I think this means is that, for Cugoano, as for Zera Yacob, the idea of natural rights is not really embedded within a modern European intellectual tradition. Certain formulations of it may be paradigmatically European, but it is ultimately a concept that transcends cultural boundaries, which also means that one can come up with paradigmatically Fanti formulations of it. Cugoano thus does not fit neatly into the framework of modern Africana philosophy as a form of modern European philosophy into which Amo and Haynes fit. But, of course, neither is he disconnected from the European tradition in the way Zera Yacob is. Cugoano, I believe, represents modern Africana philosophy as a convergence of African and European intellectual trajectories, a hybrid case of radicalizing European thought from within, as with Haynes, while also modernizing African thought through comparing indigenous and foreign viewpoints and using reason to decide what makes the most sense, like Zera Yacob.

I take Cugoano to be, in this way, a model for Africana philosophy going forward. The riches of the Western philosophical tradition must be valued but also made sharper and more liberating through the use of a critical philosophy of race lens. At the same time, there must be constant efforts to transcend the Western framework by rooting Africana philosophy in oral and literary traditions from Africa and the diaspora. In many instances, we may come to a conclusion like Cugoano’s about natural rights: that what we thought of as particularly Western is not and that the cross-cultural recognition of a shared concept may strengthen our sense of commitment to the value at stake. (p. 138)

The quoted passages are all from Chike Jeffers' (2017) "Rights, Race, and the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. This is a text that I assign as required background reading to the session that roughly goes from Las Casas to Cugoano and discusses slavery, mercantile political economy, and rights in my lecture course on the History of Political Theory. This is a required course with enrollments between 500 and 600 students. Jeffers' paper is short and hits the sweet spot because it offers helpful historical context, makes important distinctions, and it explains the ongoing significance of the material discussed. It's also astonishingly brief, and clear. I warmly recommend it. 

 

But as I was preparing my quiz about the text, and so re-reading it, I became uneasy in reflecting on the passages quoted above. To be sure, the underlying idea of what Africana philosophy should be going forward (articulated in final paragraph, but also made available throughout the chapter) strikes me as rather attractive and is not something I am going to challenge here. In fact, in some ways I am going to reinforce Jeffers' main point because I want to suggest that Zera Yacob is much more connected to what Jeffers calls 'the European tradition,' although what I prefer to call the (partially overlapping) 'Abrahamic-Platonic traditions' that also shaped non-trivially Descartes and Locke. What do I have in mind?

 

First, Yacob (1599 – 1692) is, in part, polemicizing against the Jesuits and, now I quote Jeffers, "as “Franğ,” a Ge’ez word that literally means “foreigner.” But note that he uses that word in a way that is interchangeable with “Catholic.”" (p. 131) And, in fact, if you read Zera Yacob’s Hatäta "or “inquiry,” commonly called his Treatise" (p. 128) it's very clear that Yacob was rather acquainted with their teachings (which he largely rejects).+ Now, Descartes was taught by Jesuits at La Flèche. (Descartes was there between 1607-1614.) So, there is a non-trivial sense in which they were exposed to largely the same views. (The Jesuits standardized their curriculum.) Obviously, I am not claiming that they had the same teachers (although Jesuits did move around so it's not wholly impossible they encountered the same people--how cool would that be?), but I would be amazed if the Iberian Jesuits who are his targets did not bring with them ideas shaped by, say, Francisco Suárez's metaphysics and moral/political theory, including his theory of rights. (Suárez was an intellectual celebrity of the age.) Suárez is rather important to Descartes and, as I have noted (here), Suárez also shaped the social contract tradition (including Hobbes and perhaps -- I will not make the case today -- Locke).

 

Second, Yacob is quite clearly evoking Augustine's Confessions at various points. This is not just in virtue of the auto-biographical style, but also in particular details of the narrative (not the least the early sinful behavior and the attraction to various alternative intellectual traditions). One important commonality is the significance of David's Psalms to both. I don't think either can do without an explicit or implicit allusion to Psalms on a single page! (I suspect one can write a PhD about this.) I return to this below. Either way, Descartes' debts to Augustine, and Augustine's Confessions has itself generated a huge scholarly enterprise. In saying this, I don't mean to suggest there are no differences between Descartes or Yacob, but just to point to the fact that they share in an overlapping tradition even if they may be mediated by different sources and contexts. (I don't mean to suggest that Descartes himself was especially shaped by Psalms--I leave that aside, although intrigued to reflect on it.)

 

Third, a good chunk of (what we might call) the philosophy in the Hatäta draws on the Book of Wisdom (which Yacob, as is common, attributes to Salomon). I don't want to make this claim more precise here. But while Yacob is plenty critical of the particularity and some of the laws of Judaism, the Hebraic sources in his text are abundant. This he does share with Hobbes and Locke. I don't mean to suggest that the sources are exclusively Jewish; I would love to know, for example, if Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (with with the Hatäta and the Meditations share non-trivial commonalities) was circulating among the Muslim scholars he encountered and debated. 

 

But it's only if one denies that the Book of Wisdom (which itself is shaped by Hellenistic philosophy) is philosophy or insists that the Hebrew Bible is non-philosophy (as some who are in the grip of  the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens might claim) that this is not part of the overlapping tradition(s). (I have argued against this claim in many digressions, but start here.) In addition, it's quite clear that Yacob identifies with David's enforced exile from court, and perhaps (I put this more tentatively) even the Israelites in the dessert. 

 

So, while it is undoubtedly true that Yacob and Descartes and/or Locke did not share the exact same modernity, I also suspect that in some non-trivial respects they did. It is striking that both politically and religiously the question of religious pluralism and the role of using state authority to impose a single religion dominate France and Ethiopia (and England) in their life-times, including rather dramatic reversals of fortune. I am not especially fond of 'modernity' because it is often inscribed in complex conceptual hierarchies (involving 'feudalism,' civilization vs barbarism, etc.), but it can be useful to point to the symmetry of conditions that these thinkers faced.

 

Does anything hinge on this? Well, I am certainly not the first to note debts of Africana philosophy to Hebraic and Abrahamic sources more broadly. But when in 2019 Peter Adamson (who has collaborated with Jeffers) writes, in the context of Zera Yacob that the "Ethiopian philosophical tradition simultaneously belongs to at least two larger stories: that of philosophy within various Christian traditions of the East, and that of African philosophy," that is factually true, but it effaces the Hebraic contribution to at least the former (and, perhaps the latter--in so far as Hebraic philosophy itself was developed, in part, under African skies). A similar claim can be made "about ancient Egyptian philosophy" (which Adamson goes on to mention) in so far as Philo is a rather signicant presence in it. 

I don't think this is merely a matter of geographic score-keeping. It has important contemporary political salience when 'philosophy' plays a role in identity formation and articulation (as it seems to do within Africana philosophy--that is not a criticism!). That there is also a very clear Hebraic root in Yacob [!] and all the figures discussed in the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy (with perhaps partial exception of Amo) is, thus, non-trivial (if only because the bondage and exodus of Israel resonate within it). It also may facilitate discussion today among Africana philosophers and those philosophers that takes Hebraic sources seriously. This is no small matter given the polarizing effects of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in our world.

 

Including the Hebraic tradition(s) into the narrative may also be epistemically useful if Yacob is right. Because he thinks that when different traditions agree, we are more likely to find truth, whereas their differences reveal their errors--and in religious conflict we de facto always defend error. It's probably more natural to read him as saying that this is so because when traditions agree they latch onto the truth (a thought like this can be found in Montaigne, too). But I'd like to read him Spinozistically as suggesting, and I'd like to argue for this at some point that this is his view, that through dialogue when we find ways to agree, and so live in peace with each other, we instantiate or generate the truth.*

 

 

 

+I am not quoting from any editions because I have only access to rather (manifestly) imperfect translations, and I don't want to rest my case any any matters of detail.

 

*Obviously, this mechanism does not work if the truth is imposed.