What became of Greek philosophy once the African source was destroyed? Explore with Agozino answers to the African question in Western philosophy.
Researchers have commented on the doctoral dissertation of Karl Marx without realizing that the work was centered on the African question in Western Philosophy [the first sentence of Marx’s dissertation and/or some context and summary of the argument to come].
Teeple summarized the works that appeared dismissive of the dissertation, and importantly assessed Marx’s work as an effort to move beyond Hegel, but Teeple also missed the central point of the dissertation – a homage to African contributions, a homage that may seem strange to some today until we realize that at the time Marx was writing his dissertation, Egyptology was all the rage among European and North American intellectuals, and the tradition continues in dedicated institutions today. The surprise is that many scholars who attempted to interpret the doctoral dissertation of Marx, failed to see that he was using ancient Egypt as the explanatory variable for the collapse of Greek philosophy. Some dismissed the dissertation as the work of a young Marx who was seen to be more of an idealist Hegelian philosopher without awareness that the dissertation was partly a critique of Hegel (Teeple, 1990, Footnote 1).
The research question posed by Marx in the very first sentence of the doctoral dissertation was: What became of Greek philosophy once the African source was destroyed? Marx acknowledged that this question was not completely answered in his doctoral dissertation, but a look at his mature work, such as Capital, Vol. 1, shows that he paid close attention to the African struggle against slavery as a model of the struggle for freedom by all (Agozino, 2014). As he put the Afrocentric question in his dissertation:
“Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. The objective history of philosophy in Greece seems to come to an end with Aristotle, Greek philosophy’s Alexander of Macedon, and even the manly-strong Stoics did not succeed in what the Spartans did accomplish in their temples, the chaining of Athena to Heracles so that she could not flee.” Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, starting with line 1.
The awareness of Marx regarding the concealed contributions of Africa goes to show that when a people are led to attack and destroy the educational institutions where their best thinkers were proud to claim as their Alma maters, the entire culture declines. Also, education is more valuable than militarism for we do not know any major contributors from Sparta, but everyone knows about the Athenian philosophers who were educated in Egypt. Finally, Marx wrote his dissertation as a Young Hegelian, not yet a Marxist, but as a Left Hegelian who was critical of Hegelian dialectics for privileging ideas over people and for falsely asserting that Africa made no contribution to written history. You do not have to be an African to learn from Africans, and you do not have to be a Marxist to learn from Marx.
A Graduate student of African descent responded by email to the above observations by saying to me:
“I did a quick dive into the proposition that African (largely Egyptian) insights were foundational to Greek philosophy. Fascinated by what I have seen so far. Thank you for highlighting this history.”
And a Professor of African descent asked by email for more clarifications as follows:
“Very engaging set of thoughts, brother Biko. As always.
I confess I am a bit unclear about this sentence (though I am most intrigued): “What became of Greek philosophy once the African source was destroyed?” As I am unsure where Marx was going with the sentence that launched his dissertation. For, it seems to me, the whole Western post-Aristotelian intellectual tradition seems hauntingly obsessed with responding to philosophical projects launched by ancient Greek philosophy, especially platonic concerns (ontology, epistemology, ethics).
As to Hegel’s view of Africa as ahistorical: I have searched purposefully among languages in Mozambique for a cognate that would “literally” signify History. Happily, I couldn’t find any word that indicated that ‘history’ is/was a metaphysical concept organizing thought among the Makua, Tsonga, Makonde, Tsau… for instance. I’m tempted to think these people had a far more interesting way to relate to the past than the historical model pursue[d] by Western metaphysics. As such, peoples, names, verbs, not a nouns or adjectives (history/historical), seem to dominate this relationship with the past.
Thanks for your usually deep engagement, bro. Yes, the Igbo call history akuko ihe melu eme, or stories of what took place.
I may be wrong, but Marx was probably reflecting on the future of societies that expel intellectuals like himself. Yes, the western philosophers inherited Greek thoughts, but what happened to the Greeks themselves, apart from Nicos Poulantzas in the 1970s? Why were the Eurocentric philosophers silent on the debts of Greek philosophers to the temples of ancient Egypt that they themselves acknowledged as their alma mater?
By The Philosophy of History, Hegel was referring to written history. Africans, like every culture, have historical consciousness expressed in the epics recited by Griots, the carvings of Sankofa, the monuments and mummies, but Hegel was looking for logocentric evidence of written historical philosophy. Claude Levi-Strauss also inflicted epistemic violence by asserting that only Europeans had written culture, while the natives mimic the anthropologist writing by scratching patterns on the sand, with the exception of Arabs, ancient Mexicans, and ancient Indians, who had writing to a lesser extent.
Derrida gave Hegel and Levi-Strauss a dressing down for suggesting that Europeans are superior to other cultures because only Europeans have a culture of writing, while all others have oral traditions. Not true, given that writing, ecriture, originated in Africa, according to Plato. Not true of any other culture because writing in general can be found in any society capable of naming itself, meaning all societies, according to Derrida, Of Grammatology. To claim that there are cultures that did not possess writing is to assume that some human beings are sub-human and deserved to be subjected to genocide, he warned.
Marx was among the first to connect the dots between what Chancellor Williams later called The Destruction of African Civilization and the decline of Greek philosophy. Aristotle had not written a word until he accompanied his student, Alexander of Macedonia, referred to by Marx, to loot and burn the library at the temple of Delphi. Within four years after the looting, Aristotle came out with 200 books. Yeah, right, mostly plagiarized from ancient papyri that predate the Greeks by thousands of years.
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