"Black Africans, from ancient Egypt to all the latter forms of African society, come from a different perspective. African traditions have taken pains to express, instead, the radical oneness of humanity and all that exists, 'from the tiniest clod to the entire universe.'
"A human-centered vision of the world necessarily develops an anthropological ontology, a philosophy of wholeness . Granted, Epictetus , the first century Stoic philosopher, wrote that each man contains god within himself: 'you are a fragment of god; you have a piece of divinity in you.'
In ancient Egypt, however, the human being was precisely, god: human-god, a seamless whole, in effect. That a philosophy of wholeness should take form in the pharaonic 'polis' was altogether natural. For pharaonic society was a grand, organized, universal ensemble embracing the elements (sky, sun, moon, stars, fire, water, earth, vegetation); beings (gods, goddesses, spirits, kings and Queens, viziers, the royal family); administrators of various central, provincial and local government departments (treasury, justice, army, temples); scribes and sundry craftspersons (carpenters, engravers, smelters, cobblers); together with peasants and herders--and the ensemble held for nearly twenty-five centuries of national history. In this system, nothing was completely independent, isolated from the overall pharaonic domain. The sacred and the profane were merely two aspects of a single socio-political reality incorporated by the pharaoh, the god-king.
One Egyptologist has summed up this reality concisely: 'Egyptian society embraces the entire universe: all elements and beings are registered participants, like a single whole, collaborators in a single enterprise.'
P.124-125, AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 B.C. by Theophile Obenga (2004)
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
African philosophy, obenga
"Black Africans, from ancient Egypt to all the latter forms of African society, come from a different perspective. African traditions have taken pains to express, instead, the radical oneness of humanity and all that exists, 'from the tiniest clod to the entire universe.'
"A human-centered vision of the world necessarily develops an anthropological ontology, a philosophy of wholeness . Granted, Epictetus , the first century Stoic philosopher, wrote that each man contains god within himself: 'you are a fragment of god; you have a piece of divinity in you.'
In ancient Egypt, however, the human being was precisely, god: human-god, a seamless whole, in effect. That a philosophy of wholeness should take form in the pharaonic 'polis' was altogether natural. For pharaonic society was a grand, organized, universal ensemble embracing the elements (sky, sun, moon, stars, fire, water, earth, vegetation); beings (gods, goddesses, spirits, kings and Queens, viziers, the royal family); administrators of various central, provincial and local government departments (treasury, justice, army, temples); scribes and sundry craftspersons (carpenters, engravers, smelters, cobblers); together with peasants and herders--and the ensemble held for nearly twenty-five centuries of national history. In this system, nothing was completely independent, isolated from the overall pharaonic domain. The sacred and the profane were merely two aspects of a single socio-political reality incorporated by the pharaoh, the god-king.
One Egyptologist has summed up this reality concisely: 'Egyptian society embraces the entire universe: all elements and beings are registered participants, like a single whole, collaborators in a single enterprise.'
P.124-125, AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 B.C. by Theophile Obenga (2004)