O que é a filosofia etíope?

Dividido por duas escolas de pensamento concorrentes, o futuro da investigação filosófica na Etiópia encontra-se numa encruzilhada.

Fasil Merawi

Aeon

Buffet de la Gare em Addis Abeba, Etiópia. Foto de Pascal Maitre/Panos Pictures

"Nasci na terra dos sacerdotes de Aksum", acredita-se que ZeraYacob tenha escrito no século XVII. "Mas sou filho de um pobre fazendeiro do distrito de Aksum." Assim começa o Hatata (palavra ge'ez que significa "investigação") de ZeraYacob, no qual ele documenta sua jornada espiritual em um cenário de intensa controvérsia religiosa. Ele passa a refletir sobre a natureza de Deus e a existência humana, a essência do mal e a base da moralidade. Um segundo Hatata, comumente atribuído a WeldaHeywat, concentra-se em questões de justiça e verdade moral. Esses dois textos curtos estão no centro da filosofia etíope. Eles têm gerado intensa controvérsia por gerações porque sua autenticidade e valor filosófico têm uma influência crucial na própria existência da filosofia etíope e em como ela deve ser praticada.

Existem, grosso modo, dois campos dentro da filosofia etíope atual. A abordagem universalista da filosofia etíope parte da narrativa histórica de que a filosofia é um exercício intelectual refinado que serve de base para o progresso social e a iluminação individual. Essa abordagem vê a filosofia como um diálogo contínuo, em que cada filósofo aprende com o outro para gerar novas ideias. A abordagem universalista baseia-se em um caminho cumulativo e linear que considera a filosofia como tendo início na época dos filósofos pré-socráticos, desenvolvendo-se através das ideias de Sócrates, Platão, Aristóteles e dos demais antigos, passando pela Idade Média e, finalmente, pela era moderna, inaugurada por René Descartes e atualmente dominada pela filosofia continental alemã e francesa.

Outras tradições filosóficas, como as muitas vertentes da filosofia indiana, a filosofia dos astecas, a japonesa e a chinesa, e assim por diante, são, para o universalista, subsumidas sob o rótulo de "filosofia comparativa". O valor das tradições filosóficas não ocidentais deriva do que poderíamos chamar de perspectiva intercultural. Todas as filosofias se preocupam com verdades universais – todas as filosofias podem ser colocadas em diálogo em torno dessa busca universal pelas condições que tornam nossa existência possível e pelas razões que temos para viver da maneira que vivemos. Em geral, a posição universalista não se atenta aos qualificadores de uma tradição: não é a filosofia indiana, asteca ou chinesa que está em questão, mas simplesmente a própria filosofia, a filosofia como tal.

O outro lado chamaremos de africanista. Para a filosofia etíope africanista, a história da filosofia é um processo de exclusão deliberada que consiste principalmente em epistimicídio – o processo sistemático de obliteração do sistema de conhecimento do Outro. Na África, o epistemicídio foi cometido por colonizadores em nome da disseminação dos valores do Iluminismo e da modernidade. A abordagem africanista se vê como a salvadora, especificamente, da história da África e da Etiópia. Ela está engajada na busca por uma filosofia no passado que possa servir de base para o orgulho e o reconhecimento cultural. Desafiando a posição epistêmica e cultural superior que tem sido ocupada pelo Ocidente, os africanistas se veem principalmente como opositores da influência do eurocentrismo. Nas palavras de Bekele Gutema, o que é necessário é "uma compreensão robusta da filosofia que reconheça a existência da filosofia em muitas culturas".

O campo universalista acusa os africanistas de obscurecerem a distinção entre o estudo da cultura e o estudo da filosofia, ao tentar reduzir a filosofia a uma etnofilosofia (isto é, o conjunto de crenças de uma cultura específica, geralmente indígena, que é considerado a expressão das crenças coletadas de todos os membros de uma determinada comunidade e pode ser aplicado ao momento presente sem qualquer alteração). Em resposta, os africanistas veem os universalistas como adoradores da estrutura metafísica eurocêntrica e, assim, perdendo de vista o que significa praticar a filosofia de um ponto de vista especificamente africano, etíope e intercultural.

A questão essencial é esta: a filosofia etíope deve ser praticada de uma perspectiva universalista — considerando, portanto, a filosofia etíope como parte da busca universal pela sabedoria — ou de uma perspectiva africanista que vê a filosofia etíope como um meio de reafirmação cultural?

Em 2022, cheguei à Universidade de Oxford para debater a própria existência da filosofia etíope: existe mesmo algo que possamos chamar de "filosofia etíope"? A conferência fez parte de um interesse renovado pela filosofia etíope, impulsionado pelo interesse generalizado pelos Hatatas. Eu já fui um filósofo africanista que acreditava que os Hatatas de ZeraYacob e WeldaHeywat serviram como base para uma filosofia etíope indígena. Mas, depois de me deparar com as obras da historiadora francesa Anaïs Wion e do político etíope Daniel Kibret, abandonei essa posição. Quanto mais eu examinava os Hatatas, mais eu acreditava que os textos são atormentados por questões de autoria e que o debate sobre seu valor filosófico é movido por ideologia, e não por discussões genuínas sobre o valor da sabedoria filosófica. Não acredito que eles possam servir de base para uma filosofia etíope indígena.

Os defensores dos Hatatas desejam desesperadamente demonstrar a existência de uma forma cartesiana de subjetividade encontrada em solo africano. Acreditam que encontrar um africano que veja o mundo em termos da forma isolada de subjetividade, influenciada pelo Cogito, ergo sum de Descartes ("Penso, logo existo"), equivale a provar a existência de uma filosofia indígena na África. Mas este é um exercício inútil. O verdadeiro objetivo dos Hatatas é alcançar a renovação religiosa por meio da reforma das práticas religiosas existentes – o que nada tem a ver com a intrépida viagem de autodescoberta empreendida pelo francês do século XVII sentado ao lado de sua lareira.

Eu era um etíope que se opunha à própria ideia de uma filosofia etíope baseada unicamente nos Hatatas

There are problems on a textual level as well, such as the many striking similarities between the writing style of ZeraYacob and WeldaHeywat and that of the true author, a 19th-century Catholic missionary named Giusto d’Urbino. ZeraYacob, for instance, describes his wife in almost exactly the same way as D’Urbino describes his maid: the Christian name of both is Werke; their conception of labour and the way in which both detail their journey from Aksum to Gonder are suspiciously similar. But most damning is that the ardent supporters of the Hatatas are Africanists who are motivated by nationalism rather than an attempt to study the philosophical value of the teachings found in the texts.

So in Oxford I found myself in an unusual position: an Ethiopian who stood against the very idea of an Ethiopian philosophy that is solely based on the Hatatas. I was instead a defender of the Western philosophical tradition, entering into a heated debate with the ardent supporters of Pan-Africanism and decolonisation who are trying to provide a political – not philosophical or historical – defence of the Hatatas. For me, the real value of philosophy is not found in the creation of a fictitious past, invented only in order to be wielded against the Western philosophical tradition.

The debate I had with the defenders of the philosophical value of the Hatatas made me realise that, even if the Hatatas cannot serve as the foundation for an indigenous Ethiopian philosophy, there is still, today, a unique position that is occupied by Ethiopian philosophy in the context of the wider development of a philosophical culture on African soil. Until Ethiopian philosophy is able to make sense of the prospects and pitfalls that are a part of its unique position, there will never be progress in developing a socially grounded philosophical practice.

What is the unique position of Ethiopia? As the historian Teshale Tibebu wrote: ‘Ethiopia is a historically antique polity. It is one of the very few places that managed to sustain an unbroken chain of historical civilisation free of foreign “corruption”.’ Since the country has never been colonised, it boasts a history of independence that stretches back to distant antiquity. (The only time it came close to becoming a colony was during the five-year occupation by Mussolini’s troops in the 1930s.) Ethiopia is a nation where there are both written and oral sources of wisdom, which can serve as rich material for philosophical reflection. And it is a state whose history cannot easily be subsumed into the model of the European state, since its trajectory developed in a fascinatingly complex entanglement of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Western and Arabic traditions. All of this means that there is a need to develop a foundation for philosophical analysis that is not only focused on decolonisation.

Hand in hand with the need to develop a conception of Ethiopian philosophy that is cognisant of such complexity, there is also a need to develop an Ethiopian philosophy that is not influenced by government ideology. Ever since modern academic philosophy was introduced in the 1950s, it has had to contend with political pressure. During the Imperial regime, which lasted until 1974, the goal of modernisation dictated the practice of philosophy. After Haile Selassie was overthrown in a coup d’etat and the Derg era began, the inculcation of the basic teachings of Marxism-Leninism gained momentum, and philosophy that strayed from the party line fell drastically out of favour. After the Derg’s legacy government fell in 1991 and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) took its place, philosophy remained a primarily ideological instrument, though the goal now was to take ethnic identity as an organising principle of the Ethiopian federation. The EPRDF aimed to reduce all academic disciplines, including philosophy, to mere tools for realising the motifs of revolutionary and developmental democracy. It was against this background that I myself was introduced to the world of philosophy.

Isto pressupõe, de forma questionável, que a sabedoria filosófica pode ser transmitida na forma de ditos e provérbios.

When I joined the Department of Philosophy at Addis Ababa University in 2005 as an undergraduate student, I became immersed in an intellectual environment that was deeply under the sway of Continental philosophy while also trying to break away from the Western epistemic structure by introducing an intercultural exchange founded on the study of Ethiopian, African and Eastern philosophical perspectives. I also found the lasting influence of two models of philosophising that were led by Claude Sumner and Messay Kebede.

Kebede was a former chairperson of the Department of Philosophy, which during the Derg period he attempted to guide towards Marxist-Leninism. After the EPRDF regime came to power, he was expelled, along with other university professors, because of his political views. In his works Survival and Modernization (1999) and Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960-1974 (2008), Kebede identified contradictions in modern Ethiopia and the ways in which an alternative conception of societal modernisation could be realised. His view of the Hatatas is instructive: he believed that the texts were authored by Ethiopians, but that ZeraYacob was not himself a genuine philosopher. Instead, ZeraYacob’s aim was to provide a foundation for national unity through criticism of the Church’s teachings.

Foto de Claude Sumner na década de 1960. Cortesia do Archive of the Jesuits in Canada

Sumner, meanwhile, was a Canadian philosopher who lived in Ethiopia for decades. He believed that Ethiopian philosophy expresses itself in three ways. The first is the written sources of Ethiopian philosophy found in the Hatatas. The second is the study of foreign philosophical wisdom that is creatively introduced onto the Ethiopian soil, which Sumner himself pursued in his epic multi-volume study Ethiopian Philosophy (1974-1978). And the third is the oral sources of Ethiopian philosophy, explored by Sumner in his Oromo Wisdom Literature: Proverbs, Collection and Analysis (1995). Ethiopian philosophy, according to him, occupies a unique place in African philosophy since it is made up of both oral and written traditions. (This somewhat questionably assumes that philosophical wisdom can be passed down from one generation into the other in the form of sayings and proverbs.) Sumner was not in the Africanist camp. He did not want to identify with a relativist discourse that loses sight of the interconnections that are found among different conceptions of truth, and he strongly believed in the benefits of a cross-cultural examination of the Hatatas, as well as that of canonical Western philosophers like Descartes and Kant.

After the EPRDF regime came to power in 1991, they closed the Department of Philosophy because it was deemed not to contribute to ‘development’. In 2002, it reopened after faculty members sought to show that philosophy is indeed useful in analysing societal problems, with a curriculum that was heavily influenced by Continental philosophy but which also hosted a creative tension between universalist and Africanist approaches. Perhaps the most prominent universalist philosopher of the time was the late Andreas Esheté, a hugely influential public intellectual who had studied at Yale and was involved in the experiments in federalism that Ethiopians were then undertaking (he later served as the president of Addis Ababa University). Dagnachew Assefa, another universalist, studied at Boston College and believed that the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre could be used to develop an analysis of contemporary Ethiopian problems. Assefa also emphasised the value of philosophy in the public sphere and the usage of philosophical categories to analyse existing predicaments.

The one way of doing philosophy that was not given any attention, by the way, was the analytic tradition. In a nation where the production of knowledge is highly influenced by Marxism and the need to make an actual intervention into existing human relations, no meaningful interest in analytic philosophy developed. This lack of interest can also be explained by the fact that all of the major Ethiopian philosophers, whether universalist or Africanist, were educated in Western universities heavily influenced by Continental philosophy.

Ultimately, the Hatatas – whether or not they can authentically be ascribed to ZeraYacob and WeldaHeywat – occupy a crucial place in the attempt to understand the nature of Ethiopian philosophy for both universalists and Africanists. The universalists see philosophy as a reflection on the human condition, and, if there is philosophical wisdom in the Hatatas, then it needs to be separated from nationalistic sentiments. The Africanists value the role played by the Hatatas in the process of decolonisation and the challenge they pose to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the West.

A abordagem africanista acaba sendo um discurso eurocêntrico antieurocêntrico

In this debate, I believe that the Hatatas provide a space for reflection on the ways in which Ethiopian philosophy can be practised, even if it doesn’t serve as the foundation of that philosophy. There is still a need to make sure that a philosophical analysis of contemporary predicaments is given attention and that the whole idea of an Ethiopian philosophy is not fixated on the idea of texts that may or may not have been written by Ethiopians. As an alternative, following the radical Beninese thinker Paulin Hountondji’s understanding of philosophy as a field of contestation and an active process of construction, we should view Ethiopian philosophy as a field that is still emerging through a dialogue between the hermeneutic, the intercultural, the critical theory and the Indigenous trends. Despite the antiquity of Ethiopia, its philosophy is just getting started.

Attempts have also been made by thinkers like Kebede and Maimire Mennasemay to lay the foundations for the development of a critical Ethiopian social theory, which attempts to move beyond the universalist/Africanist divide. Abandoning his earlier commitments to Marxism, Kebede introduced a new approach that applies philosophical categories to the analysis of issues like modernisation, ethnic politics, education and development. Mennasemay, in his creative engagements with Ethiopian history, has tried to demonstrate the need for Ethiopian political theory to indigenise the universal values ideas of democracy.

As someone who had always been more interested in Continental philosophy, I’ve always been more interested in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger and Jürgen Habermas rather than of a fully formed philosophy from the past – like ZeraYacob’s – that can now be applied as the solution to all of our contemporary problems. I long viewed the idea of an African philosophy and the practice of Ethiopian philosophy from Africanised perspectives with scepticism. I saw it as obsessed with a meta-level discourse that is content to merely engage in a critique of the colonial sciences. As the Congolese philosopher V Y Mudimbe shows, the Africanist approach ends up being an anti-Eurocentric Eurocentric discourse: it is so preoccupied with being anti-Eurocentric that, ironically, it remains Eurocentric, performing a contradiction rather than producing works of philosophy that grapple with our existential predicaments. But I’ve come to see that there are issues with the universalist camp as well. It has not paid enough attention to the lived experience and emancipatory struggles that Ethiopians share with fellow Africans. Since it aims at participating in a universal sense of subjectivity not founded on a proper historical consciousness, it loses sight of our distinct Africanness and the shared horizon within which our common destiny unfolds.

It’s an important feature that many of the discussions and debates about Ethiopian philosophy are led by anthropologists. I take this development with a grain of salt. Because of the nature of anthropology, there is a danger in elevating each and every worldview and system of belief into the status of ‘philosophy’: we could lose sight of what it is that makes some forms of enquiry uniquely philosophical. It is the anthropologist’s goal to understand different worldviews as they function in and of themselves, without regard to their truth or their consequences. But philosophers, to my mind, need to concern themselves with things like truth and coherence. (This tension is reminiscent of the debate between Habermas and Jacques Derrida on the nature of philosophy and texts, in which Derrida argued that works of literature are also materials for a philosophical reflection, and Habermas rejoined that this view would constitute an abandonment of the rational power of reason.) Still, such a form of universalism is the exact thing that the Africanists identify with Eurocentric thinking, and that is why there is a need to develop a conception of Ethiopian philosophy that is cognisant of both Africanness and also a sense of universality.

If Ethiopian philosophy is to make any form of progress, it needs to take part in the discussion of African philosophy as well as the universal quest for knowledge. This cannot be attained through studying only the past or, on the other hand, abandoning history and human values in the name of universality. It is not just the Hatatas but also the analysis of contemporary issues that need to be accommodated into the study of Ethiopian philosophy. At the same time, Ethiopian philosophers shouldn’t blur the distinction between philosophy and anthropology in the name of engaging in a socially grounded philosophical practice.

In the end, the enquiry into the unique position of Ethiopian philosophy tells us that philosophy is a discipline that can be practised in different historical horizons and geographical spaces – while, at the same time, it retains the capacity to illuminate the universal human condition. However it is perceived, philosophy should not be seen as a simple tool of resistance that does not give us the ability to reflect on broader questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, truth and human values.

The problem that Ethiopian philosophy continues to struggle with is that it has been practised under a politicised debate more interested in exposing the racial or colonial undertones that are found in the existing philosophical tradition than in setting the stage for the development of a culture of criticism able to make sense of our predicaments. Any conception of Ethiopian philosophy that has the power to speak to contemporary problems needs to be founded on the recognition that there is an engagement among different philosophical traditions, and that it is through a process of mutation that different ways of doing philosophy assume their current form.

Fasil Merawi é professor assistente do Departamento de Filosofia da Universidade de Addis Abeba, na Etiópia.