Henry Odera Oruka

Henry Odera Oruka (born June 1, 1944 in the province of Nyanza, Kenya ; † December 9, 1995 in Nairobi ) is one of the great pioneers of modern African philosophy and was best known for his project of Sage-Philosophy ( wisdom philosophy ). In addition to Kwasi Wiredu ( Ghana ) and Paulin J. Hountondji ( Benin ), it was he who opened up new paths for philosophy in Africa , beyond equating traditional thinking, mythologies and proverbs and thus opened up a view of Africa in the 20th century. Century .

Life

Henry Odera Oruka first studied philosophy and natural sciences in Uppsala ( Sweden ) and at Wayne State University in Michigan (USA). In 1970 he did his doctorate on the concept of freedom at Uppsala University. He taught at Nairobi University from 1970 until his death .

Odera Oruka has made a special contribution to the creation of a philosophical infrastructure in Africa: He was co-founder and founding chairman of the Philosophical Institute of the University of Nairobi (1980–1992) and until his death vice-president of the "Inter-African Council for Philosophy" and chairman the "Philosophical Association of Kenya". Odera Oruka was also a member of the executive committee of the FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophy) and the WFSF (World Future Studies Federation). He invited both organizations to the world conference in Nairobi in 1991 and 1995 respectively.

Odera Oruka is one of the few philosophers who have been included in the famous series “Philosophers on Their Own Works” (Vol. 14, No. 1, 1991) by the “International Institute of Philosophy” (Paris). In 1993 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University.

In addition to his philosophical work, Odera Oruka appeared repeatedly as a critic of the Arap Moi regime in Kenya . In many of his articles, e.g. B. “The Philosophy of Liberty” he explicitly dealt with the conditions in Kenya. This brought him house arrest and a publication ban.

On December 9, 1995, he was run over by a truck and fatally injured on one of the main roads in Nairobi. To what extent the accident of this regime-critical thinker was caused by other sources has never been clarified. What is certain is that he was put under pressure in the last time before his death, in all likelihood by the Kenyan government.

philosophy

Odera Oruka began his philosophical work and teaching at the beginning of the 1970s in an atmosphere that was characterized by prejudice and devaluation of African societies, cultures and their carriers. The possibility of original philosophy in Africa was widely denied. Odera Oruka describes how he was confronted in 1971 as a young assistant by the then head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi Rev. Prof. Bishop Stephen Neill, a Briton, with the opinion: “I do not think that logic is really a subject for the African mind. We in the West are familiar with it right from the days of Aristotle. The African mind, I believe, is intuitive, not logical. "[Odera Oruka, (1990), p. 3]

While on the one hand the Africans were denied the ability to think logically or a "coherence of traditional thinking", i. H. On the other hand, negativity and so-called ethnophilosophy tried to counter the devaluations of African culture by positively occupying elements such as intuition or collectivity . Odera Oruka considers this kind of naive escape into the pre-colonial past to be wrong. He decided to fight against the thesis of the unity of African systems of thought, their community and their radical difference from western-rational thinking, which he regards as part of a racist-colonial tradition, without going the way of ethnophilosophy, which in his opinion leads to a dead end and hinders rather than promotes the emergence of an independent philosophical tradition in Africa.

Two central concerns can be identified in Odera Oruka's philosophical work:

• the liberation of philosophy in Africa from ethnological and racist prejudices
• and the restoration of the wisdom dimension of philosophy , which, according to Odera Oruka, has tended to be lost in recent decades.

For Odera Oruka, this wisdom dimension consists above all in the ethical commitment of the philosophers, i. H. in an effort to apply their philosophy to the benefit of the community. The thought that philosophy is not a science in an ivory tower, but must contribute to improving people's living conditions, runs like a red thread through Odera Oruka's work. With the help of philosophy he wanted to combat socio-economic disadvantage, racist mythologies and deceptive appearances.

Wisdom philosophy

His alternative to ethnophilosophy is his project of “Sage-Philosophy” (wisdom philosophy), in which the thinking of African wise men and women (sages) is documented on the basis of a modern concept of philosophy linked to argumentative criticism and subjective concept formation. As part of this project, which also earned him international attention, he tries to make philosophical use of the knowledge of African wise men.

The Wisdom Philosophy project offers Odera Oruka the opportunity to react to the colonial prejudices regarding the inferiority of African cultures or to the myth of the communal thinking of Africans by identifying individual critically thinking individuals within African communities and recording and documenting their views . His project distinguishes itself clearly from attempts to systematize a popular belief and then to present it as a philosophical system. Odera Oruka starts from a clearly defined concept of philosophy, which understands philosophy as a critical-reflexive thought movement that is always tied to individuals.

method

Together with his colleagues he went in search of "sages" (wise men), i. H. Men and women from different village communities who are rooted as deeply as possible in traditional African culture and who are considered wise within their communities. Odera Oruka himself describes a person as "wise" (say) who is very familiar with the cultural views and norms as well as the myths of their community and in this regard is respected by the members of their community and asked for advice. Interviews were conducted with them on philosophically interesting questions. The interviews were conducted in the respective mother tongue and recorded with a recording device and later converted into a written form. Selected interviews that have been translated into English can be found in the volume “Sage Philosophy” (1990). With the conversion of the conversations into writing, the knowledge of traditional African wise men is not only accessible to a larger number of people and thus torn from oblivion, Odera Oruka's project also contributes to an independent history of philosophy in Africa, whose reconstruction is mainly due to the oral tradition that has prevailed for centuries is facing great difficulties.

In a second step, the interviews were examined for their philosophical relevance. According to the results, Odera Oruka then differentiates the interviewed persons in folk way (folk-sage) and in philosophical way (philosophical sage). According to Odera Oruka, a philosophical sage is characterized by the fact that he does not stop at conveying the traditional knowledge of the community, but subjects it to a critical evaluation, gains distance from it and finds his own well-founded point of view, which also includes a rejection of the traditional principles can flow. Philosophical ways are able to set up new rules and norms and to justify them or to propose alternatives to the generally accepted views and practices. Volksweise, in contrast, are characterized by the fact that they pass on the traditional views without criticism and insofar only take on the function of a mediator. The yardstick for a wisdom statement is that a person who speaks a wise sentence can also be asked to justify it or to apply it in practice.

critic

The philosophy of wisdom project is viewed by a number of philosophers today as a “third path” between ethnophilosophy and philosophy based on the western model. Because both the uncritical transfiguration of the African heritage and the exclusive preoccupation with European concepts miss the problems of Africans. The philosophy of wisdom now offers the opportunity to use the methods of critical reflection of philosophy to make a contribution to overcoming the disappointing reality of life on the African continent by using the great wealth of indigenous knowledge.

But there were and still are a number of objections:

• Dismas Masolo doubts that the statements of the wise are really philosophical and go beyond those of a wise common sense. He is not shown convincingly enough that the insights into life are truly rational and systematic. He applies z. For example, assume that Paul Mbuya Akoko's statements are more of “common sense”. Even if it is rare to find people with intellectual vivacity, they are not yet philosophers. After all, even Socrates did not make philosophers of everyone he spoke to. So a distinction has to be made between an interview and a philosophical dialogue.

• Even Peter Bodunrin not consider the wisdom of philosophy for philosophy in the narrow sense. He notes that it is one thing to show that there are people who are capable of philosophical dialogue - but it is another to show that there are African philosophers in the sense of people who are capable of organized, systematic reflection on the thoughts Beliefs and practices of their people are busy. Bodunrin thinks it is possible that there are individuals who critically question their tradition, but not a “tradition of organized critical reflection”. Such a tradition is in turn the prerequisite for philosophy.

• Lansana Keita criticizes this project as looking backwards: Instead of looking for old traditions, Africa should face the challenges of modernity, including in philosophy.

Ethics draft

Odera Oruka's draft ethics is called "Parental Earth Ethics", which can best be translated as "original world or earth ethics", and emphasizes the interdependence of today's world. Odera Oruka compares this interdependence with that between members of a family, which is essentially connected by the common origin of the members. He chooses this comparison in order to raise awareness that every action has an impact on the rest of the world. Because of this, on a world scale, a nation must not view its well-being as its sole goal, but rather general survival. This results in the obligation for the rich nations to invest in a reserve pool for the poorer nations or their obligation to provide development aid . This is what Odera Oruka calls a parental earth insurance policy. Odera Oruka argues that it is necessary to ensure an equal distribution of the earth's resources. The reality today, however, is that 1/3 of the world's population is starving, while 1/5 consumes more than is necessary for survival or a comfortable life. Odera Oruka describes this phenomenon as overconsumption. In his essay "Ethics of Consumerism" he calls for the limitation of overconsumption in order to ensure the survival of mankind. Overconsumption should be condemned because it deprives some of the living beings from their livelihood, but also harms those who consume more than is good for them in the long term, either through damage to health or the destruction of the environment.

For Odera Oruka, the basic pillar of a new, universal ethic is the principle of global justice . Because an ethics with a claim to universal validity, and this new ethic must lay claim to universal validity, after all, it is about the preservation of the entire world, can only do justice to it if it understands it, justice especially with regard to existential needs to ensure every member of the community. Considerations on a principle of global justice can already be found in the 1970s and especially in Odera Oruka's essay "The Philosophy of Foreign Aid" from 1989. In connection with the question of the legality of Africa's claim to development aid, Odera Oruka differentiates between justice and international and global justice. While international justice is primarily related to the relationship between the individual and government and is tied to a certain territory and its sovereignty, the principle of global justice sets the right to a certain minimum of the standard of living as an absolute.

Odera Oruka's understanding of justice can be understood as a form of distributive justice of the common wealth of the world ("our common wealth", as he emphasizes at one point). The principle of global justice, which aims to secure the human minimum for every human being, precedes and overrides any right to property or territorial sovereignty. This principle presupposes that there is a change from a paradigm of equality to that of responsibility for the other and thus at the same time demands a completely new view of people and the world.

Fonts

• Ethics. Nairobi 1998.
• Practical Philosophy. Nairobi 1997.
• The Philosophy of Liberty. Nairobi 1996.
• Philosophy, Humanity and Ecology. Nairobi 1994.
• Say Philosophy. Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy. Leiden 1990 (Philosophy of History and Culture, Vol 4).
• Trends in contemporary African Philosophy. Nairobi 1990.
• Punishment and Terrorism in Africa. Nairobi 1985.
• Edited with Dismas A. Masolo: Philosophy and Cultures. Nairobi 1983.

literature

• Anke Graness, Kai Kresse (eds.): Sagacious Reasoning. Henry Odera Oruka in memoriam. Frankfurt / M. 1997.
• Franz M. Wimmer (Ed.): Four questions on philosophy in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Vienna 1988.

Web links

• Literature by and about Henry Odera Oruka in the catalog of the German National Library
• Henry Odera Oruka: Fundamental questions of the African "Sage-Philosophy" (pdf; 57 kB)
• Henry Odera Oruka - a philosophical sage (review)
• Niels Weidtmann: Can the written form be missing? African wisdom teachings in intercultural dialogue