Thanks, Giving

On October 3rd, I was honoured to have been invited to speak at a conference celebrating the career of Dr. Ato Sekyi-Otu. In 1990 (if memory serves) I was a precocious fourth year undergraduate at York University. In those days (which I guess are old), students had to get permission from the professor live and in person to take a non-prescribed course for credit. Ato was warm and gracious in hearing my case and agreed to let me enroll in his famous “Marxism and Political Discourse” seminar. It was a must-take class for all the grad-student radicals in the Social and Political Thought Program. It was daunting and demanding: the students were sharp, committed, and engaged. They were not competitive and welcomed me, but it was intimidating to be in a class with MA and PhD students.

And Ato.

He was and is a rare intellect, equally at home in the world of German Idealism, Marxism, literary criticism, and African literature. The range of texts that we covered was extraordinary– from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; from Laclau and Mouffe’s then-infamous Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to early work by Charles Mills, from Aime Cesaire and Paulin Hountondji to the great Ghanian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah.

Ato was the through-line that held it together. His erudition was breathtaking, matched only by his expansive humour and obvious love of teaching. What made him a great teacher was that he risked letting us learn.

When you first start life as a professor, your primary worry is filling the hour and half of class time. Soon, you realise that the easiest way to prevent dead air is to talk incessantly at the students. If you never stop talking, no one can contradict you or expose a gap in your knowledge! But that does not teach anyone anything. The learning happens when the professor stops talking. They might guide, shepherd, re-orient, and question, but the best professor risks letting the students learn. They know– because they have learned– that the learning happens in the moments of quiet reflection and intense interaction between the students.

Ato has retired from teaching, but not from the work of thinking. His latest book: Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays was published this year by Routledge.

Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays

The book consists of five essays: “Is She Not Also a Human Being?,” “Difference and Left Universalism,” “Ethical Communism in African Thought,” “Individualism in Fanon and After,” and “Enigmas and Proverbs.” Together, they are the latest iterations of the major themes of Sekyi-Otu’s thought: the critique of the politics of difference, freeing Fanon from both Marxist and post-colonialist misinterpretation, and the meaning and global significance of African philosophy and literature. The essays have deep roots in Sekyi-Otu’s intellectual history, but assume a new poignancy in contemporary conditions. As a rapacious capitalism continues to consume life-sustaining resources at unsustainable rates, right-wing nationalist atavisms have take control of governments in the Global North and South alike. Sekyi-Otu’s “left universalism” supplies the ethical foundation for a renewed socialist politics, a politics contoured to local conditions, but guided everywhere by universal, humanist values.

What, then, is a specifically “left universalism?” The short answer is that left universalism develops out of an understanding of the histories of resistance of oppressed peoples. That which is of universal value emerges through the particular struggles of different groups. Of most importance is the capacity for self-determination: oppressors deny that the oppressed can determine their own lives; the oppressed prove their humanity by proving their oppressors wrong.

Self determination has a collective and an individual side. Left universalism affirms the capacity of all peoples to collectively shape their societies and govern themselves. It is thus resolutely anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Eurocentric. However, by the same principle, it also affirms the right and capacity of all individuals to grow beyond whatever traditions they are born into, even those traditions given the imprimatur “authentic” by communitarian celebrants of ethnocentric difference. “The left universalist has a problem with a politics of difference allied with communitarian particularism … although the question of the human is indeed the latter’s silent and unavoidable presupposition, it formally evades that question … In so doing, communitarian particularism dispossesses itself of critical resources for reasoned condemnation … of practices and conditions of existence at home and abroad.”(Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 80) There are either universal standards of criticism, which apply anywhere human needs are deprived and life-capacites suppressed, or every culture is just in its own terms, in which case internal structures of oppression with deep roots in any particular history cannot be understood or criticised.

The philosophical key to unlocking the power of Sekyi-Otu’s argument is the distinction between abstract and concrete universals. The Eurocentric versions of humanist values which Sekyi-Otu (following Fanon, and in agreement with post-colonial critics) condemns, are rooted in abstract universal conceptions of humanity. An abstract universal is a concept that is abstracted from particular instances and expressed as a definition or criterion for membership in a set. This process is necessary for all thinking (true particulars are things which cannot be referred to but only pointed out), but becomes politically problematic when applied in an exclusionary way. They are applied in an exclusionary way when practices and one way of realizing general human capacities specific to a given time and place are abstracted from that time and place and asserted as the essence of human being. The definition becomes pernicious and destructive when it allies with political and military power to justify the domination of groups and cultures that do not “measure up” to the definition. In those cases (think of the way in which residential schools were justified as necessary to “civilize” indigenous people in Canada) humanist values really are tools of the agents of oppression.

Sekyi-Otu’s ‘left universalism’ accepts this criticism, but warns that the problem with Eurocentric forms of humanism is not that they are universal, but that they are abstract. His response is that we need to build a version of humanism– Fanon’s “new humanism”– which understands the concrete ways in which universal values speak through the particularities of cultures, and in particular, indigenous cultures. (As the title states, Sekyi-Otu’s focus is Africa, but his arguments apply to any indigenous culture and, indeed, to historically subaltern groups like women and demonized sexualities and gender identities). Universal values are not Western exports, as both critics and defenders of Eurocentrism maintain, but implicit in, at the root, and grow from the soil of, every human culture. As concrete universals (a Hegelian term that explains universals as the processes whereby abstractions like “freedom” become historically and socially real) humanist values are the variety of ways in which people everywhere recognize and respond to harm and struggle to alleviate its social causes.

That close, intense love viagra pills canada and protection stems from that intimate setting. A Cheaper Way to Sexual Excitement When the first medicines were produced for http://amerikabulteni.com/2014/10/29/ortadoguda-yeni-kriz-kapida-obama-netanyahu-savasi/ cheap cialis erectile dysfunction, they were available in the market for a very high price. Moreover, order viagra prescription they do this for a living, day in and day out. Ginger: Ginger is very helpful to enhance blood circulation in the entire body including the male http://amerikabulteni.com/2011/12/06/twitters-top-2011-hashtags-egypt-and-tigerblood/ cialis 5 mg genitals.

The roots of this argument lie in Fanon’s critique of colonialism. Sekyi-Otu builds on his earlier, epochal reinterpretation of Fanon in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. There Sekyi-Otu argued that Fanon was neither the high priest of revolutionary violence, not the glorifier of pristine ancient cultures to be restored to their pre-conquest purity, but a resolute defender of “partisan universal values.” Fanon disected the hypocrisy of Western humanists with rare but unforgettable vehemence. “This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil of and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world.”(Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 96) This vehemence has led many interpreters in post-colonial studies to read Fanon as anti-universalist. That is not in fact the case, according to Sekyi-Otu: Fanon is against abstract Eurocentric versions of humanism, precisely because they are neither humanist not universal. There are, however, universal human values, central amongst which is the foundational value of anti-colonial revolution: self-determination. “All the elements of a solution to the great problems of mankind have, at different times, existed in European philosophy.  But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to the… let is reconsider the question of mankind … of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be rehumanized.”(Fanon, 1968, 314) His new humanism– to which Sekyi-Otu’s essays should be understood as a signal contribution– will be created when all the world’s peoples and subaltern groups are free to articulate their human needs in their own voice.

The new humanism will not be a return to a romanticised past. Commenting on the complex role that recovery of traditions despoiled by Arab and European colonialism play in the literary works of Ayi Kwei Armah, Sekyi Oyu insists that looking to the past for redemption does not necessarily invoke “irredentist romanticism.” (Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 271) The desire to return to an unsullied past can be, paradoxically, a demand for a future of as yet unrealized possibilities. Sekyi-Otu calls this misunderstood aspect of Armagh’s peotic-poltiical work “Visionary foundationalism.” (Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 272) Remebrance of the past can recover the value of reciprocity in relationships between humans, the earth, and each other.( Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 271) The return, however, is not going back, but going forward in a collective act of “telepoeisis”: creation of the goals the will redeem a damaged community.(Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 273)

Free recovery of the past is thus an essential moment of the articulation of human values as concrete universals. The roots of this position are found in Fanon, in whom we can hear, Sekyi-Otu argues, “an ideal of individuality more liberating … than the forms mandated by racist culture’s mandatory collectivism. … The idea of individuality is twin with Fanon’s vision of ‘a new humanism.’… Such a humanism would testify to a concrete and truly shareable universal.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 166)  This new, concretely universal humanism will be created as peoples who have been reduced to the status of objects assert their essential subjecthood– their collective capacity to determine their own lives and their individual capacity to shape their existence in accordance with plans of their own.

All human beings are connected to the earth and each other through shared sets of needs. These needs are not– to paraphrase Marx– abstractions inherent in each individual. Rather, they are experienced as concrete requirements that must be satisfied if life is to continue. As such, they are experienced within the real social and cultural contexts of real human lives. Sekyi-Otu defends the “universality of the universalism that speaks in variegated tongues as they convey the ordinary languages of moral and political judgement.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 14) As needs, i.e., as life requirements they are the same and form the foundation of a shared human project: to overcome structural obstacles to comprehensive need-satisfaction like exploitation, alienation, and oppression. As concrete universals, the needs and the resources and relationships that satisfy them are different in their details. Groups need to organize their symbolic life in their own language, there are important dietary differences and rituals surrounding dinner which are not just cosmopolitan colour for tourists but essentially meaningful for some groups. Woman and men both have bodies, but their health care needs differ. Most importantly, all historically dominated people need to organise their own social and political and economic lives as social self-conscious, deliberative political agents. Colonialism denied the humanity of colonised people by denying they could not manage their own affairs– that they were still in their “non-age” as J.S. Mill said of Indians. Colonialism denied that humanity, but it could not destroy it– the proof was in the pudding of anti-colonial revolution.

Within this still vital political argument lies a sophisticated philosophical argument. Sekyi-Otu is not claiming that there are universal values up there in the heavens which all human beings apply to their own circumstances. Rather, his point is that there is no “up there” from which values can be drawn, but rather that the universal is the particular expressed as the basis of evaluative judgement and criticism. Sekyi-Otu explains that this “metaethical principle” “is neither an abstract ideal nor a foreign import … it is homemade, a regular product of our domestic discursive industry … committed to the criticism of unjust acts and relations in everyday life.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 18) This principle is activated every time we resonate with a fellow suffering human being: “It is under the aegis of such an everyday universalism that, upon encountering a victim … of harmful or degrading treatment, an Akan speaker in Ghana voices her outrage with this simple question:  … Is she not also a human being?”(Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 17)  His target here is ethnocentric ethical reasoning which says that all standards are local and the human good is the way things are done around here.

Drawing on the disappointments of African workers and women with the sorry results of post-colonial society (disappointments which he now shares first hand following his move back to Ghana from Canada) Sekyi-Otu warns (as Fanon did earlier) that these arguments too often are nothing more than ideological cover to excuse local ruling classes. Again, he pulls no punches when it comes to assigning ultimate responsibility for African problems to the legacy of colonialism. At the same time, a proper valuation of the humanity of African cultures and peoples demands that people criticise their own traditions– or those who would appropriate them for their own political and economic purposes.

The problem with ethnocentrists of any stripe is that they unwittingly repeat the very Eurocentrism they intend to contest. “To abjure universalism tout court,” Sekyi-Otu argues, “because of imperialist, Eurocentric, and discriminatory auspices of certain versions—as certain Western conscripts to the anti-imperialist cause in common with certain voices from the global South invite us to do, is the last word of the imperial act.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 14) By dividing the world into a Europe that speaks the language of universals, and indigenous cultures and subaltern identities that assert particular values in response, these critics miss the universal logic at the heart of any culture’s values- and thus undervalue it in the process whereby they aim to vindicate it. Here his work resonates with the “liberation ethics” of Enrique Dussel, the life-value philosophy of John McMurtry, and my “materialist ethics.” All concur on this essential point: universal values grow up out of and are embedded in the connections between human beings and the earth and each other. Higher level symbolic expressions grow up out of this soil. Different groups express these universal in their own way: they are the originators, but the orgination is not out of nothing, but from the common ground of life-conditions and life-requirements.

Sekyi-Otu does not confine his arguments to the western philosophical canon. Exemplifying his own claim that the universal is not an abstract “one apart from many” but is always expressed in concretely individual form, he examines in illuminating detail in how the argument between individualists and communitarians has played out in specifically African thought. As both listener to and participant in this conversation, Sekyi-Otu lets African philosophy speak in its own voice. This approach is a refreshing departure from too many anti-Eurocentric criticisms, which attack Eurocentrism using ideas drawn exclusively from the history of European philosophy and launched exclusively from within the halls of European and North American academia. Of all the chapters in the book I learned most from the fourth, in which Sekyi-Otu masterfully combines sympathetic and charitable reading with uncompromising critique of post-colonial African thought. It has failed to solve the main problem that it has with which it has grappled– reconciling space for individual freedom with the recovery of collectivist traditions attacked by colonialism– because it has operated with reified ideas of both community and individuality. Instead of either opposing a Western individualism to an African collectivism, or, conversely, finding in African traditions analogues of Western (possessive) individualism, African philosophers have to re-read, he argues, their own history to find (hopefully) Africacentric but not romanticised alternatives to failed western models of individual and collective life. Again, the universal can only ever be found in particular ways of life.

But Sekyi-Otu is a restless thinker. He wants to understand life from the inside as well as the outside. For this knowledge he turns to post-colonial African literature. This literature has long been dismissed, Sekyi-Otu tells us, for its purportedly superficial social realism, the obviousness of its politics, and the mechanical functionalism of its characters. Against this interpretation, Sekyi-Otu reveals the tensions– psychological as well as political, ethical and well as practical, metaphysical as well as mundane- that structure the best of this literature. In Sekyi-Otu’s re-reading, post-colonial African literature gives voice to the deepest tensions and contradictions of human life. It thus speaks to universal human concerns and ambivalences, but in the particular context of one of the greatest dramas of human liberation yet staged: the struggle to build democratic post-colonial societies. The chapter on post-colonial literature is a fitting conclusion to the book. It exemplifies the ways in which post-colonial African literature exemplifies the ways in which the universal always speaks a particular voice, which is the unifying theme of the five essays.