Where does philosophy begin when rationality is denied? Tsenay Serequeberhan’s concept of a lived existence as a means of decolonizing philosophy

Abstract

Tsenay Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics has been crucial to the development of African philosophy. Initially employed as a pathway through the ethno- and professional philosophical debates, scholars have engaged how Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics grapples with one’s own place within a socio-historical world in service of liberation/self-determination. However, this scholarship mainly has focused on his adaptation of Gadamer’s ‘effective-historical consciousness’ for his own concept of heritage. This consequently leaves his concept of a ‘lived existence’ – which is equally crucial – under-examined. This paper probes what a ‘lived existence’ entails and its essentiality when explicating how one even begins to authentically think, which is the groundwork to Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics. This deepens why his concept of heritage matters as a starting point for self-determination. Addressing this lacuna, this article asks, where does philosophy begin and where should it go, particularly when rationality has been historically denied? Serequeberhan’s point of departure to answer this question proposes Heidegger’s concept of thinking itself to arrive at a notion of existence; contrariwise to most African scholars who employ a Sartrean existentialism via Frantz Fanon. As such, this paper gives an in-depth exploration of Serequeberhan’s initial reading of Heidegger, and then unfolds how he appropriates Heidegger to craft his notion of ‘lived existence’. The upshot this is twofold: First, a broader understanding of Serequeberhan’s project, its non-existentialist view of existence; Second, it describes how he specifically tailors his ‘lived existence’ to undergird his hermeneutical approach to heritage as a prescriptive, activist project which dynamically addresses the postcolonial situation.

1. Introduction

Tsenay Serequeberhan is renowned for his hermeneutic approach – either as an ‘African Hermeneutics’ or his concept of ‘heritage’ – as a means for Africans and others living within the postcolonial fallout to find a pathway to self-determination. Critical of past and present African approaches to philosophy, Serequeberhan often concerns his work with the tandem notions of understanding one’s own existence and one’s own historico-cultural situatedness (i.e. an ‘effected-historical consciousness’) as essential components to one’s own self-determination.

Deeply political and personal, Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics have been widely influential throughout philosophy at large, and African(a) philosophy in particular. However, this influence mostly engages his notion of history, heritage, and one’s own situatedness. This comes at the expense of his concept of a ‘lived existence’ as a starting point to genuinely recognizing one’s own effective-historical standpoint and thus one’s own heritage. Throughout my reading of Serequeberhan scholarship, I have rarely seen thinkers engage his notion of existence. ¹

As this article argues, Serequeberhan’s concept of a lived existence is not just as equally important to his work but is essential to understanding his hermeneutics. Therefore, this article will explore Serequeberhan’s understanding of lived existence by addressing the question: Where does philosophy begin and where should it go, particularly when rationality has been historically denied?

In broader terms, it will explore how the historical and ongoing struggles of postcolonial Africa reveal questions about how one begins to think through their own self-understanding, recognizing their own existence on their own terms. In so doing, it reveals the problem of where to even begin philosophizing: where do we begin when considering concepts like personhood and community when the larger (i.e. Western) philosophical tradition has denied or devastated these essential concepts for many throughout its dominance?

Serequeberhan’s appropriation of Heidegger’s relationship between thinking and being to develop his concept of a lived existence provides a pathway to address these questions, and thus will be the focus of my first section. Through this appropriation, my next section will argue Serequeberhan’s view that a lived existence emerges from oneself realizing their own existentiality in and through a world saturated with (post)colonial and imperial residues, pre-colonial legacies via traditional beliefs, and the need for Africans to engage a contemporary, globalized world. I will show how he initially develops this existentiality and, in the next section, will then further examine how Serequeberhan employs it when addressing what he sees as the foundational problems plaguing postcolonial African philosophy. The final section will further Serequeberhan’s notion of a lived existence by demonstrating how its self-aware, activistic nature resolves the question, for Serequeberhan at least, of where philosophy begins and where it should go.

Importantly, I am not concerned with whether Serequeberhan’s appropriations align with extant Heideggerian scholarship. My sole interest is to explore the development of Serequeberhan’s concept of a lived existence, what/how he appropriates from Heidegger, and how this undergirds his larger project. This strategy follows how Serequeberhan (2016, pg. 101) himself engages European philosophy: ‘I am not, furthermore, particularly concerned with ‘understanding a thinker [Marx or Heidegger] in his own terms, but in exploring certain confluences in their thought …what we hope to do is to mold and/or shape “Our Marx” and “Our Heidegger,” so as to press them into service in engaging the contemporary African situation’. ² What I want to do in this article is, in short, see what ‘Serequeberhan’s Heidegger’ looks like and how he employs it. ³

2. The historical denial of ‘reason’ and philosophy

As mentioned above, the fundamental, persistent question throughout Serequeberhan’s writing is best summarized as ‘where does philosophy begin and where should it go?’ I find that this concern propels Serequeberhan’s entire project, and his existential-hermeneutic response to this question reveals the challenges history and temporality present to personhood and community. It is important to remember, though, that Serequeberhan does this as a hermeneuticist and elides from the term ‘phenomenology’ (Olivier 2022, p. 537). This will become important as we see how he appropriates Heidegger below.

Historically, one could argue that what we call contemporary ‘African philosophy’ began in the mid-20^th century. ⁴ However, its emergence has come with existential difficulties concerning what ‘type’ of philosophy it intends to be and what its relationship should be to Western philosophy’s global dominance. These meta-contestations concerning what ‘is’ African philosophy are direct consequences to how the West has historically rejected even the existence of African reason. ⁵ This fundamental problem began with modernity and colonialism, where European thinkers denied that Africans had the base sense of ‘rationality’ or even the necessary self-reflective sense of ‘history’ to even attempt philosophy. ⁶

This denial of intellect – and, by extension, this denial of civilization – often reveals itself through works written by missionaries who sought to evangelize the continent. Here, Fr. Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (2010, original publication 1945) is the exemplar. ⁷ Tempels, amongst other European authors of his era, have been the subject of many critiques across decades and disciplines, and Bernard Matolino (2011, p. 340) best summarizes how Tempels et al. perpetuated, even amplified, the West’s delegitimization of African thought:

Thus, Tempels in keeping with Hume and Levy-Bruhl, actually thinks that Africans are incapable of formulating and maintaining decent thought patterns that are equivalent to Western notions of thought. He concurs with the main claims of the naked version of philosophical racialism that the capacity to think is something that was ordained by nature and naturally denied the African.

This legacy of denial and its consequences continue to haunt African philosophy (and African theology, for that matter). ⁸ Lewis Gordon (2015, p. 49) calls this an ‘epistemic closure’, which has become a common term when describing this denial of African rationality. Benedetta Lanfranchi (2019, p. 189) describes it as ‘this idea of reason [via epistemic closure, which] necessarily forecloses encounters with other historical experiences, and has historically gone hand in hand with the negation of Africans’ and blacks’ humanity on an equal footing with that of western peoples’.

Serequeberhan, for his part, addresses this Eurocentric denial as a primary issue throughout his work, particularly in Contested Memory (2007), which is devoted especially to this topic, and in chapters 2 and 4 within Existence and Heritage (2016). ⁹ What this historic denial reveals are the stakes involved within developing an ‘African philosophy’. Thus, the question of ‘where does philosophy begin and where should it go’ – or rather, when, and where, does one begin to philosophize – is deeply political for Serequeberhan and for other African(a) philosophers. The question itself comes with a contentious, fractured history of denying non-Europeans with even the concept of rationality.

Following Wa Thiong’o Ngugi (1981, p. 3), the question itself is a consequence of the colonized mind, the aftermath of a colonialism’s ‘cultural bomb’, whereby one’s own concept of self is taken away and replaced with a sense of inferiority and dependence upon the colonizer. As we shall see below, reclaiming this sense of self becomes foundational to Serequeberhan’s concept of existence.

Consequentially, where and/or when does one begin philosophizing arises as problem of ‘when does one have the agency to appreciate their own rationality’? ‘When does one shed these denials and delusions and begin to think toward their own standards and self-determination’? For Serequeberhan (2009, pp. 43-45), this necessitates a historical reckoning from within philosophy and how it addresses its subject matter. ¹⁰ Though it is fair and quite typical for Western philosophers to say that we begin philosophy in medias res (in the midst of things), many use it to merely acknowledge the historical-temporal context of their work, only to quickly move on to whatever they actually wanted to explore. Within African philosophy, though, this question of where to begin is persistent: ‘it is not just that we are in medias res, but within who’s in medias res? Who decides when and where we are?’

We will see this as the core problem within the ‘ethnophilosophy’ and ‘professional philosophy’ debate below. ¹¹ However, before we get to that issue, we need to see how Serequeberhan builds his hermeneutical framework to rebuke both sides to provide another pathway for African philosophy. For him, the issue of ‘where to begin’ is part-and-parcel of doing philosophy itself and being in medias res is not a mere recognition of where we are, but also a necessary condition for realizing and acknowledging our own existence. Realizing our own existence, in short, is the core through which we begin to think and, as such, it is also the compass which helps us navigate through our ‘own historicalness’ (Serequeberhan 1994, p. 38).

Thus, in what follows I first will consider the way in which Serequeberhan articulates how a lived existence understands itself in relation to the world (via Heidegger) and how this understanding leads to ‘meditative’ thinking or, by extension, to philosophizing. From this approach, he will eventually develop the concept of a lived existence through the African struggle for self-realization. Recognizing how one comes to their own self-understanding – and consequently knowing how to (hermeneutically) direct it – is imperative to discovering when we begin to philosophize, where philosophy should go, and what we should philosophize about.

3. Heidegger: From thinking to existence

One of Serequeberhan’s (1987) earliest articles, ‘Heidegger and Gadamer: Thinking as “Meditative” and as “Effective-Historical Consciousness,”’ addresses the concerns above through exploring when reflective thought (i.e. philosophizing) begins for a person, and how that ‘when’ is the key historical operator for philosophical thinking. The article reads as a young scholar’s critical dialogue between Heidegger’s understanding notion of ‘meditative thinking’ over and above ‘calculative thinking,’ and how Gadamer develops this further through his hermeneutics. ¹² In short, there is little shaping of ‘our Heidegger’ and ‘our Gadamer’ in this article, but one can see from whence Serequeberhan’s shaping begins. This is important since it shows the origins, if you will, of Serequeberhan’s notion of a lived existence.

It thus will be our primary text and later I will trace its influence throughout Serequeberhan’s oeuvre. One can, in a way, see Serequeberhan ‘working through’ Heidegger in this text, figuring out how Heidegger understands authentic thinking and existence (and where Gadamer surpasses Heidegger). Contrariwise, Serequeberhan does engage Heidegger in later texts, but often in a truncated manner since his is an appropriative application of Heidegger in service to a larger project and never pretends to be a scholarly exegesis of Heidegger. ¹³

That being said, Serequeberhan’s ‘Heidegger and Gadamer’ is solely focused on its titular thinkers. While he eventually sides with Gadamer’s critique (and appropriation) of Heidegger at the end of the article, the text clearly shows the impact Heidegger makes upon Serequeberhan’s notion of thinking’s relationship to existence itself. Interestingly, though, in this text Serequeberhan approaches Heidegger through Discourse on Thinking and What is Called Thinking rather than directly engaging Being in Time, which most Heidegger scholars are wont to do. This note will prove its importance once we begin to unpack what Serequeberhan appropriates and also what he leaves behind.

In the article, Serequeberhan (1987, p. 43) primarily focuses on the notion that ‘calculative thought functions within a confined and predetermined area’, an area which has now become dominated by scientific reasoning, whereby ‘science in its everyday practice [is] concerned with the application of routinized methods’. Over and against this form of routinized, scientific-calculative reasoning, Heidegger emphasizes ‘disclosive projection’ whereby ‘meditative thinking’ can occur. Serequeberhan (1987, p. 44) summarizes the connection between the two as ‘the thinking that actualizes concrete possibilities. The ‘meditative’ resolve is the concrete engagement in which possibilities are possibilized or opened up within the confines of a specific situation’. Continuing, Serequeberhan (1987, p. 44) agrees with Heidegger, stating that this is what ‘our modern situation calls for … to open the space of possibilities [that calculative thought] restricts and dominates’. Serequeberhan (1987, pp. 46-48) carries on with his description of Heidegger’s thinking as a critique of the current, scientific-calculative situation in which we find ourselves engaging the world. It is a situation whereby one must be called into questioning the presuppositions upon which we place ourselves within the world, those which occlude us from thinking about the meaning of Being itself and what that entails for our own being.

The distinction Serequeberhan makes between calculative and meditative thought (via Heidegger) will be further explained below. In short, one could say that the distinction between calculative thinking and meditative thinking is that the former is disinterested thinking that races from one aspect of its use of things to the next, while the latter is engaged thinking going back to the things themselves. Yet, for now, our interests lie in how this article reveals the groundwork to understanding what Serequeberhan means by a lived existence.

The initial key which ‘Heidegger and Gadamer’ reveals is that, for Serequeberhan (1987, p. 45), thinking requires a deep and ongoing engagement with the given issue at hand. One cannot passively stand by and ‘read’ or interpret the world, one must absorb its context and problemata through personal involvement. One can see this through Serequeberhan’s emphasis on Heideggerian ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit) as a key to meditative thought, which Serequeberhan treats as deeply related to (and almost synonymous with) meditative thought. Releasement, as it is expressed in this article, is related to meditative thought in that it opens oneself to the possibilities of thought and thinking itself. Most importantly for Serequeberhan (1987, p. 45) is that this process requires action: ‘it is not a form of passivity’ but rather is a ‘disposition in which one’s own subjective inclinations are curtailed; the situation (whatever it be) is allowed to unfold and one puts oneself at the service of this unfolding’.

In short, releasement, as Serequeberhan understands it, is about letting go of seeing the utility of the world or the things within the world itself. It is about letting the world be itself and thus open itself up to you. For example, I must let the world open itself to me before I can understand the things within that world as they ‘are’ in and of themselves, rather than seeing what their ‘use value’ is to me or what their scientific-descriptive properties are. As a disposition, this is a ‘letting go’ of the hyper-technological way in which I calculatedly see the world in my everyday life, and, afterward I can actively engage the world as it is, in all its being.

For Serequeberhan, though, this active engagement departs from typical readings of Heidegger: where most see this as a ‘disinterested reflection,’ he emphasizes the active, service-oriented aspect which releasement inspires. ¹⁴ This is perhaps why he maintains a hermeneutic posture rather than a phenomenological one, with hermeneutics allowing for a stronger, activist temperament and phenomenology being focused (at least in its Heideggerian strain) upon descriptive reflection. It also may be why he chooses to engage Heidegger’s concept of Being and being outside of Being and Time and Heidegger’s other, more phenomenologically oriented works: Here, within the texts Serequeberhan engages, Heidegger’s emphasis is not on existentiality as such, but is on thinking about thinking; Serequeberhan sees the probative value of Heidegger’s reflections as a means to self-realization. Once he moves onto Gadamer, this self-realization becomes embedded in time and history through an ‘effective-historical consciousness,’ and, eventually, embedded through a shared history via the concept of heritage.

Returning to the text, though, one of the primary obstacles to this access or openness, for Serequeberhan via Heidegger, is the way in which ‘calculative’ thought forgets or outright ignores the way in which one’s recognition of their own being in the world, and the horizons and regions in which their existence in that world places them, prevents them from truly thinking or conceptualizing broader than their own line of sight. ¹⁵ This is part and parcel of the everydayness of workaday life and science’s routinized methods and calculative thinking. ¹⁶ Concerning our purposes, though, is the impression this leaves upon Serequeberhan (1987, p. 44), whom appreciates how Heidegger’s distinction between ‘calculative’ and ‘meditative’ thought (via releasement) ‘serves to overcome the stringent limitations put on thought’. Looking ahead, Serequeberhan does not outright say that ethno- and professional philosophers are stuck in calculative thought with no access to meditative thinking à la Heidegger. However, as we shall see, his critique of each does emphasize how their process of thinking – the way in which they philosophize – echoes his appreciation of Heidegger’s critique of the ‘stringent limitations’ calculative thought places upon oneself. In short, even though he does not use the mechanics and terminology from this article, his critique of African philosophy employs these concepts.

Regarding where and when one begins philosophizing, Serequeberhan closely follows Heidegger, noting that philosophizing begins when one realizes themselves as beings – or more exactly, realizes their own existential-experiential nature via their actual being, their ‘being there’ or Dasein. Serequeberhan (1987, pp. 44-48) argues that, after this self-realization, one can begin to actualize their being in the world by opening themselves up to and/or through that world. ¹⁷ Recall above how he (1987, p. 45) reads Heidegger as a call for active participation, to put ‘oneself at the service of this unfolding’. Thus, one’s self-realization, via Dasein, is also a recognition that their existential-experiential nature is always already ongoing, which furthers through one’s engagement with the world. ¹⁸ Dasein’s open, meditative engagement with the world thus creates a world that is more reflexively engaging (and revelatory) than the mechanized and calculative sense of a world which far too often passes as everyday living. ¹⁹

Serequeberhan (1987, p. 47) continues his description of Heidegger’s concept of thinking in relation to Dasein, noting that:

…the ontological character of man as the Da of Sein is such that man is the opening in which the Being of beings is revealed. It is important to note here that, the conception of man as Dasein represents Heidegger's attempt to by-pass and go beyond the subject-object dichotomy which has its origins in modern philosophy. Human self-consciousness is thus understood as being immanent in the totality in which it finds itself. (Emphasis mine)

Dasein thus finds itself being-in-the-world and it is this world which one opens oneself to and fully engages. ²⁰ For Serequeberhan, this engagement opens one to a new sense, or understanding, about their own existence and their relationship to the world (and those within the world). Even if ‘the world,’ in its everydayness, distracts us from understanding our own being and place within that world. If one steps back (Schritt-züruck) and recognizes their own being within and in relation to the world, then one’s openness to this world can provoke a ‘disclosure’ (aletheia) or a revelatory moment where one can have access to truths which were previously obfuscated by the mundanity of everydayness and its calculative thinking. ²¹

Here, one can see an appropriation happening: Serequeberhan’s reading of Heidegger’s notion of thinking leads Serequeberhan to adopt a notion of releasement through meditative thought as a form of disclosing the truth about existence itself; our true relationship to the world, how that relationship becomes distorted through calculative thinking, and how this openness to the world discloses a sense of truth that is always already ahead of us as the world ‘worlds’ (or moves on, persists, or continues). Serequeberhan diverges from Heideggerian scholarship, here, and one can begin to see how this notion of thinking leads him to the compounded notion of a ‘lived’ ‘existence:’ ‘lived,’ here, imparts an active engagement with the world, rather than a modal one. Serequeberhan, contrariwise to typical Heideggerian readings, thus advocates for transformative engagement, which opens the world up to the self, and ‘existence’ imparts a sense of being in the world so as to reflexively, in an activist manner, change the world through what that world has disclosed unto oneself. As we change this world, we move closer towards ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity,’ terms which Serequeberhan interestingly leaves vague except for the notion that they are part of Dasein self-actualizing all its possibilities. ²² Recall again, that Serequeberhan never calls himself, nor says that he is employing, a phenomenology, let alone a ‘Heideggerian phenomenology’. Here, we are seeing the headwaters of what he takes from Heidegger and, if you will, what he is willing to ‘let go’.

Notably, Serequeberhan maintains this view of how thinking unfolds through Dasein in Existence and Heritage (2016, 105):

But because Dasein is the ‘there’ of being, or the lived existence in and through which being shows itself, the human situation and the question of being are intimately intertwined in a privileged manner. For Sein, always and necessarily, is disclosed only in and through the openness (i.e., the lived actuality of human existence) made possible by human involvement in the world of care and concern.

As he continues (Serequeberhan 2016, p. 105) his description, he notes that this involvement with the world, as seen through an analysis of Dasein, ‘is exclusively focused on human life in its everyday ‘concrete’ actuation’, which necessitates ‘a reflection on the lived “average everydayness” of quotidian life’. ²³ However, returning to ‘Heidegger and Gadamer’, written over 25 years earlier, note that Serequeberhan does touch upon our access to truth and understanding in relation to existence, and how he hones in our inaccessibility to truth itself, but it reads as if Serequeberhan is more interested in ‘man’ finding/seeking truth rather than letting it unfold in and through the world. Referencing Heidegger’s essay ‘On the Essence of Truth’, Serequeberhan (1987, p.48) states that ‘resolute “releasement” is the disposition or ‘comportment’ that allows man to disclose beings in their Being, and hence become the avenue for the coming forth of truth. It is the actualization of the possibilities of human Dasein’. ²⁴ As mentioned above, truth, understood as disclosure (aletheia), comes forth to one when they begin to understand their own being, again in relation to Being itself and to being-in-the-world. ²⁵

However, truth is, in many ways, inaccessible and always moving further as the world unfolds, or if you want to, ‘worlds’. For Serequeberhan (1987, p. 48), this is why one must be an active participant, even though releasement is often understood as ‘a letting go’. ²⁶ Contrariwise, Serequeberhan reads this as a means by which one can actively seek truth through meditative thought; by a releasement from the calculative and confining ways in which one engages and describes the world around themself. It is a disposition, then, rather than a mere practice, meaning that it is a mode of living rather than something someone does. As Serequeberhan (1987, p. 48) states:

[Heidegger] indicates that it is only thus that man approaches or goes ‘near to and so at the same time remaining distant from that-which-regions'. This means that by resolute releasement man approaches or approximates ‘that-which regions' where truth abides. Yet man remains at a distance, for the ‘region' or expanse is all around us and thus escapes our reach and cannot be definitely grasped. … The ‘nearness' towards which ‘meditative' thought ‘moves,' however, is like an all encompassing horizon that recedes and presents various vistas and possibilities as one moves on towards it. Understood in this manner, ‘meditative' thought or ‘releasement' is the situation in which man is utilized by the ‘region' for the disclosure of truth. That is to say, ‘moving-into-nearness' is the indwelling releasement of man (ek-sistence) to the ‘region' which for Heidegger constitutes philosophic thinking in its proper vocation. ²⁷

These statements are crucial to understanding Serequeberhan’s work since he is so reliant upon the notion of existence (often restating it as ek-sistence). ²⁸ To my mind, what appeals to Serequeberhan is twofold: First, that truly deep thinking (be it philosophizing, ‘meditative,’ or ‘releasement’) requires engagement with the world itself. It is not passive, and you must come to it. You must open yourself to the world as it itself unfolds to you, and likewise, as you open yourself to your own self-understanding. Second, this form of thinking is not merely thinking itself, it is an actualized existence. One stands out (ek-sistence) from the world around them, they are active agents, they resolutely participate in this world in spite of what may come.

Noteworthy is Serequeberhan’s (2016, p. 2) significant response to the question of ‘what does it mean to be authentically rational,’ or, moreover, ‘authentically human,’ at the beginning of Existence and Heritage:

As Martin Heidegger has emphatically noted, the root meaning of the word existence – or, as he puts it, ek-sistence – is a process of standing out. It is in an ambient – an expanse cleared, as in a forest clearing, by a concrete historical standing out – that encounters occur. Encounters thus always happen in a space, or a clearing, already established by the standing out of a concrete historical ek-sistence in which Otherness has been nullified or its encounter has been made possible. In this sense, true Otherness – the radically Other – is that actuality (or actualities) which does not originate in the shared standing out that makes possible the space of our existence. The radically Other does not partake of our sociopolitical space of existence, our Sittlichkeit or ethical life. This is an Otherness that has not been leveled off, or not completely, into the sameness of what could otherwise possibly be a risky affront to our lived ek-sistence, our Otherness. Thus, being open to encounters, or to an encounter of Otherness, is risky, but could it also be the true, or root, sense of the ‘authentically human?’ Could it be that this openness to what is dicey is a core aspect of what it means to exist, that is, to stand out – to be human? (Emphasis is mine)

Thus, for Serequeberhan, there is an essential link between ‘authentic’ thinking (or philosophizing as I have summarized it) and existence. There is likewise an essential link within these ideas concerning agency and active participation. ²⁹ From my reading, this concept of existence, which he terms a ‘lived existence,’ remains consistent throughout his work. ³⁰ Here, we can see him building from Heidegger’s thesis about thinking to his own concept concerning the relationship between ‘lived’ and ‘existence’.

Again, it is important (and surprising) that Serequeberhan does this without ever really touching upon Heidegger’s reading of existentialism, or even the exististentials found within Being and Time. Rather than take that route – and I attribute this to his appreciation (and eventual appropriation) of Gadamer – Serequeberhan forges his path through to a lived existence, an ek-sistence: a path which first and foremost questions the nature of thinking itself. Hence, why I chose to frame this article through the question of Where does philosophy begin and where should it go, particularly when rationality has been historically denied? This is exactly where Serequeberhan begins his own journey.

As we shall see with the discussion between ‘ethnophilosophy’ and ‘professional philosophy’ regarding where African philosophy begins, Serequeberhan’s notion of existence is essential: it begins when Africans truly (or perhaps ‘authentically’) recognize their existence within the world. It begins, according to Serequeberhan, when they stand out from their concrete historical worldliness and truly begin to meditatively think by actively opening themselves up to their possibilities in this world. When they act not as passive agents reflecting upon their situation, but as active thinkers opening themselves up to reflective, meditative encounters which may disclose to them a greater sense of self-understanding of being-in-the-world and their own agency.

For Serequeberhan, postcolonialism is in itself a struggle for Africans to bring out their own lived existence. ‘Lived,’ here, is vastly important: Serequeberhan argues that for Africans to fully comprehend (as well as overcome) their colonial past, they must rediscover their pre-colonial traditions but from a resolved, historical (i.e. a ‘worldlyhood’) disposition while also reckoning with their contemporary, politically fraught circumstances with all its postcolonial residues. All of this, taken as a whole, is what he calls Africa’s heritage (Our Heritage, in his own words), and it becomes the prevailing theme throughout his work and engagement with existence via Heidegger. ³¹

It also becomes his critique of Heidegger and why he embraces Gadamer’s hermeneutics, especially the concept of ‘effective-historical consciousness’. Heidegger’s sense of existence holds a resoluteness to the world itself, and to our own deaths. His concept of thinking or philosophizing presses one to constantly question their beliefs and their place within the world (or their worldhood). Fair enough. However, Serequeberhan (1994, p. 15) agrees with Gadamer that Heidegger fails to consider that the historicity of that world matters much more than Heidegger acknowledges. In a sense, Heidegger, like many so-called great thinkers before him, fails to question the world beyond his own Eurocentrism, that he ‘failed to actualize the veracity’ of where and what a lived existence can and should question (Serequeberhan, 1994, p. 4). ³² That the world exists and it puts Dasein into questioning its own existence is one thing, that the world has multivalent histories within which we live and through which we engage others is another:

Thus the hermeneutical effort becomes the site in which tradition is recognized in its autonomy and allowed to disclose itself within the horizon of the present. That is, the ‘effective-historical consciousness' (the present as it arises out of tradition) is open to the past (tradition) and what it has to say. This posture allows the ‘effective-historical consciousness' to recognize its own limitations, that is, its historicity and finitude. In this recognition the past is heard, understood and appropriated. (Serequeberhan, 1987, p. 53, p. 53)

Due to space and time, Serequeberhan’s reading of Gadamer cannot be deeply examined at this moment. ³³ However, I delve further into Serequeberhan’s critique of Heidegger in the concluding section of this article. For now, though, what is important to us is that we see the initial, existential underpinning of Serequeberhan’s hermeneutic project: an active, engaging lived existence which opens itself to the world. An ek-sistence which stands out by actively engaging that world. What I will explore in the next section is how it does so through both one’s own historicity and the world’s own historicity. As we shall see, a lived existence goes hand-in-hand with one’s heritage, and engaging that heritage is from whence we begin to philosophize.

4. Missing the point: Lived existence over and against ethno- and professional philosophy

Consider Serequeberhan’s The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (1994) as something of a case study where he employs this sense of existence. In sum, the book argues that both the so-called ethnophilosophers and professional philosophers are missing the point: their debate over which direction ‘African philosophy’ should take fails to understand what it means to do philosophy on one’s own terms. Relating back to ‘when and where do we begin to philosophize,’ Serequeberhan (1994, p. 32) finds that both sides lack the basic self-understanding to begin philosophizing. Rather, in opposing ways but arriving at the same place, they merely embody the Eurocentric ideals placed upon them.

As a case study, we should gather a stronger understanding of the debate between ethno- and professional philosophy and why it was (and sometimes still is) problematic to both philosophy and the progress of the African intellectual tradition. After the publication of Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy and, many would argue, John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969), critics began questioning how African thought – its traditions, its rationalities, its cultures – were represented within academia at large.

Looking back on this era, Serequeberhan (1994, pp. 2-3) notes that these types of works seemingly tried to form a means by which one could recover African traditions in the wake of colonialism. However, these recoveries only critically engage these traditions from a Western context, nor do they interrogate how these traditions could help ameliorate the problems arising from postcolonialism. Rather, many focus on ‘civilizing’ Africans; meaning, making them more European, or at least viewed more favourably by Europeans. Indeed, several texts read like they were intended for – and to the advantage of – a Western audience and not actually written for Africans themselves. ³⁴ For example, in The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, Serequeberhan (1994, p. 47) devotes a strong portion of the book critiquing movements such as Leopold Senghor’s Négritude, stating ‘What does Senghor achieve from this model? He simply takes negative Eurocentric descriptions and presents them as positive Negrocentric manifestations of an ontological difference in and for the being of the Negro-African’. Later into his career, Serequeberhan (2003, p. 50) strengthens his critique against Senghor’s Négritude and Africanité, noting that ‘Senghor’s Africanité is a re-inscription of racist myths. … Senghor constructs the being of the Negro out of what Europe belittles and rejects as inferior and defective. … Senghor accepts, authenticates, and celebrates this inferiority’.

This dispute raged before Serequeberhan’s time, especially coming to a head with Paulin Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally published in 1976). Hountondji (1996, p. 45) was the first to dismissively label these prior approaches to African thought as ‘ethnophilosophy,’ arguing that it essentially works against the interests of Africans (note the sarcasm expressed throughout):

What does that mean in this context? Simply that contemporary African philosophy, in as much as it remains an ethnophilosophy, has been built up essentially for a European public. The African ethnophilosopher's discourse is not intended for Africans. It has not been produced for their benefit, and its authors understood that it would be challenged, if at all, not by Africans but by Europe alone. Unless, of course, the West expressed itself through Africans, as it knows so well how to do. In short, the African ethnophilosopher made himself the spokesman of All-Africa facing All-Europe at the imaginary rendezvous of give and take — from which we observe that ‘Africanist' particularism goes hand in glove, objectively, with an abstract universalism, since the African intellectual who adopts it thereby expounds it, over the heads of his own people, in a mythical dialogue with his European colleagues, for the constitution of a ‘civilization of the universal'. (Emphasis Hountondji’s)

Over and against this, Hountondji (1996, pp. 8-10) proposed a different kind of a rigour, ‘professional philosophy,’ which hewed closer to the rational and foundational grounds one sees within ‘traditional’ or ‘typical’ philosophy. ³⁵ That is, a philosophy which concerns itself with established issues of ontology, epistemology, et cetera, and approaches these concerns through a rational and comprehensive framework. Thus, for roughly 60 years (and some would say its legacy remains), ‘African philosophy’ was couched between two opposing charges from within; some thinkers were charged with doing ethnophilosophy and, on the other side, others were charged with doing professional philosophy, which has Eurocentric problems of its own. ³⁶ Professional philosophy namely gathers both its methodologies and its series of questions/issues from the West: ontology, for example, is employed as Western term, with Western assumptions, and with Western problemata attached to it. Thus, there is the question of what hidden, Western presuppositions professional philosophers tacitly accept when they go about their philosophical work? What gets assumed (or subsumed) within professional philosophy?

Serequeberhan argues that these questions reveal how professional philosophy also has an abstract universalism within its operation. He (1994, p. 12) contends that professional philosophers act as if ‘African philosophy is merely a “geographic designation”’ whereby they can ignore the concerns and issues within Africa and can continue on with their next commentary on whichever famous Western philosopher they favour. In short, for Serequeberhan, a professional philosopher only cares about Western philosophical issues – those ‘philosophically legitimate’ questions – and would rather sidestep the historical and intellectual denial of African rationality.

Rather than prove those (in)famous Eurocentric philosophers wrong about Africa’s so-called inability to do rational and philosophical thinking on its own terms, the professional philosopher intends to accept this Eurocentrism within their projects, whether they recognize it or not. Concerning professional philosophy’s adoption of Marxist thought, Serequeberhan (1994, p. 103) was especially critical of how it adopted (consciously or not) historical, metaphysical presumptions. For example, Serequeberhan (1994, p. 34) finds that Kwame Nkrumah’s use of Marxism, ‘implicitly universalizes and surreptitiously – without even the semblance of an argument – assumes the historical ground of European modernity: that the ground of ‘scientific socialism’ is the universal ground on which and out of which economic questions as such are posed. Thus, the specific particularity of the African situation is relegated to oblivion’. Going even further, commenting upon Hountondji’s use of Marxist critique, Serequeberhan (1994, p. 39) arrives at the heart of the this obliviated relegation, condemning Hountondji’s approval of Nkrumah’s, and his own adoption of, Marxist thought as:

…nothing more than a futile attempt to square the proverbial circle, since to subscribe to Marx’s thought understood as ‘scientific socialism’ or Marxism-Leninism, one necessarily subscribes to an evolutionary developmental metaphysics of history – historical materialism – that places Africa at the lowest rung of an evolutionary ladder of development and which fulfills its ‘objective’ and singular ‘human’ telos in the historic eventuation of European modernity’. ¶ In such a perspective – given the metaphysical structure and logic of the discourse—one necessarily (good intentions notwithstanding!) subordinates Africa to Europe and ‘solves’ African problems by imposing European developmental ‘formulas,’ contrived and generated out of the singular historic experience of European modernity.

Serequeberhan spends much of The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy critiquing both sides of the debate. His conclusion to these critiques is that both sides ‘share, in contrary ways, a dilapidating Eurocentric metaphysics’ (Serequeberhan, 1994, p. 32, emphasis mine). From this conclusion, though, he argues that the way to break this dilapidating impasse is through a hermeneutics that recognizes its own existence and ‘effective-historical consciousness’.

Sticking with our focus on his sense of a lived existence, though, Serequeberhan summarily finds the entire debate inauthentic – inauthentic to ‘Africa’ and its heritage, and inauthentic to philosophy itself – because each side has failed to understand their own existence on their own terms. ³⁷ This is essentially the theme of the latter half of The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (1994) and, in extensive detail, it is carried over into both Our Heritage (2000) and Existence and Heritage (2016). Throughout, Serequeberhan is especially critical of the ways in which postcolonial nations emerged out of colonialism only to become objects (or, subjugates) to their former colonizers. ³⁸ Though placed in a precarious, and nigh impossible situation by their colonizers, many postcolonial leaders lacked a fundamental of understanding their own existence and their own history articulated within their own terms. ³⁹ Consequently, this maintained the colonial apparatus that ensnared them into a system in which ‘the formerly colonized were thingified’ (Serequeberhan, 2016, p. 113). ⁴⁰

Thingified, here, refers to the postcolonial position within the wider Eurocentric, globalized socio-economic system. ⁴¹ I find, though, that it also correlates to Serequeberhan’s rejection of both sides of the African philosophical debate: each fail to philosophize on their own terms because they fail to recognize and understand their own lived existence. They are merely cogs within the larger, Eurocentric philosophical machine.

I find that, throughout his entire career, Serequeberhan employs the concept of a lived existence to articulate a way Africans (and others) can emerge out of these entrapments. One can clearly see this in his preface to Our Heritage (2000, p.ix.):

Existence is always actualized in a specific and concrete heritage. … Based on this we can say that that which exists is that which stands forth. A heritage, then, is the sedimented layering over time that is, the life of a community-of the actuality of existence, which in ‘standing forth’ does so necessarily in specific and determined ways and thus constitutes a heritage, a certain way of ‘being-in-the-world’. And yet, to this day, most European thinkers write as if their heritage – the way their existence stands forth in being – is, for all that matters, coequal to existence as such! ¶ This book is an attempt to bypass this constricted view and think of the actuality of black existence – African American and African – in terms of a limited number of seminal questions and figures that have marked the character of our heritage, that is, the actuality of our ‘standing forth’.

One of the ways Serequeberhan prefers to show the importance of a lived existence to African philosophy is by illustrating its meaning through those whose stories exemplify such an existence through their participation in the struggle for liberation. For example, in chapter 4 of The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, ‘The Liberation Struggle, Existence and Historicity’ (1994, pp. 87-116) he explores figures like Fanon, amongst others, who embody the concept of a lived existence through their intellectual pursuits and their struggle for liberation. Serequeberhan’s exploration of these key thinkers’ narratives run throughout his works (it is the primary theme of Our Heritage, for example) and therefore it would be unwieldy to cover them all. I have therefore decided to explore the ways in which these narratives function as a whole component within his philosophy rather than to detail how he reads each thinker and ‘weaves’ their narratives together to gather an understanding of struggle as lived existence.

To me, this historical-narrative approach both strongly impacts the reader, giving the term greater contours and depth, whilst also connecting what he means by ‘lived existence' to an ‘effective-historical consciousness’ through presenting a collection of histories which comprises an African Hermeneutics. ⁴² Serequeberhan’s ‘heroes,’ if you will, were the ones who stood out (ek-sistence) and employed their own self-understanding to actively think, to reflect and meditate upon their own historical situation, but, importantly, to act upon it throughout their lives. This is how Serequeberhan, in my opinion, sees and understands a lived existence.

5. Final analysis: Emerging into a lived existence

Let us briefly step back by returning to our question, ‘where does philosophy begin and where should it go?’ For Serequeberhan, following Heidegger, beginning to philosophize requires two things:

First, concerning engaging the world, one cannot be passive but must actively open themselves to the world and to what it reveals. The world must be able to ‘come’ to them as they open themselves to the world as it is. This is a necessary condition for ‘meditative’ thought, a ‘releasement’ from the somnambulist thinking that happens in everyday, calculative ponderance.

Second, this engagement, along with its meditative nature and releasement, is not merely a thought exercise but is part and parcel of an actualized existence. If I may condense two Heideggerian ideas, authentically thinking is integrated into ‘authentic being:’ actively thinking in a search for truth to disclose itself is integral to an authentic existence, and vice versa. As Serequeberhan reiterates often: a lived existence is one in which someone stands out (ek-sistence) from the everydayness of world in which they find themselves and, as such, they are active agents who resolutely participate in this world in spite of what may come. ‘Where does philosophy begin,’ therefore begins when one realizes their own being in relation to Being itself and thus opens themselves to the possibility of truth, that is, the possibility of the disclosure of their self-realization. ‘Where should it go,’ therefore, is in search of this truth through actively engaging the world in which one finds themself; for Africans, those in the African diaspora, and others who find themselves in a postcolonial world, their self-realization and active engagement with the world emerges through liberation and self-determination (Serequeberhan 2000, p. 74-76).

Yet notice how quickly Serequeberhan moves from Heideggerian terminology – Dasein, releasement, meditative thought, etc. – toward the term lived existence. With a few exceptions, such as Existence and Heritage (2016) as noted above, the only text in which Serequeberhan fully unpacks the Heideggerian mechanics behind lived existence are in ‘Heidegger and Gadamer’ (1987), one of his earliest articles. Therefore, I find that, although he is clearly indebted to Heidegger, the concept of a lived existence is Serequeberhan’s own. Though it carries a seed of Heideggerian thought within it – and Serequeberhan is quick to note this when introducing the concept – he employs it within his philosophy as a term which moves beyond Heidegger’s original ideas, and he does so in ways which more clearly connect with an ‘effective-historical consciousness’.

Therefore, I will close our examination of Serequeberhan’s lived existence by emphasizing this appropriation and how it gains its own meaning, conceptualization, and importance to philosophy at large. What is important here is noticing the initial foundations to Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics: an active, engaging lived existence which opens itself to the world first through reflective, meditative thought. Though it speaks of existence, it is not an existentialism. An ek-sistence which stands out and actively engages that world does so through a process by which one can see the world as it is, see things unto themselves, and it is from this realization that one can truly participate in changing that world. And again, he typically demonstrates this through exploring key African thinkers and their own historicity and their world’s historicity. ⁴³

Serequeberhan adapts these narratives into a lived existence by noting that each key thinker employs their own ‘effective-historical consciousness’ to engage these histories, and that also of a larger, collective heritage. ⁴⁴ A lived existence goes hand-in-hand with one’s history and one’s heritage, and engaging that heritage is from whence one begins to philosophize. Serequeberhan (2016, pp. 74-75) makes this abundantly clear in the conclusion to Our Heritage (2000, p. 74), when he states: ‘For human existence is always – and necessarily – actualized within the lived heritage of a specific tradition’. He then goes further to state that ‘it is in struggle – out of this recognition – that the imperious proclivities of European expansion have been curtailed. And in this process the formerly enslaved and colonized have carved out for themselves a human heritage’ (Serequeberhan, 2000, p. 75).

Serequeberhan can only get so far with Heidegger’s sense of thinking and worldhood (or being-in-the-world). He can rely upon Heidegger for this notion of an active, self-aware (Dasein-like) existence, but the ‘lived’ part – with its horizonal infusion of histories – is problematic for Heidegger. Again, returning to ‘Heidegger and Gadamer’ (1987), Serequeberhan spends just one section unpacking Heidegger’s thinking as the rest of the text moves through Gadamer’s improvement upon Heidegger. For example, in its closing section Serequeberhan (1987, p. 59) states that ‘Gadamer eloquently presents and makes more comprehensible the philosophic insights articulated by Heidegger’. However, he (2016, p. 59) also thinks that Gadamer ‘tames’ or ‘domesticates’ Heidegger’s ‘concept of thought as “meditative.”’ Recall from our review of thinking above, that Serequeberhan (1987, p. 61) appreciates the ‘“power of action and resolve” [that] are constitutive of “meditative” thought’. Remember that, for Serequeberhan via Heidegger, thinking is not passive, it must have an active engagement with the world. One cannot passively stand by and ‘read’ or interpret the world, one must absorb its context and problemata. Resolving this ‘gap,’ as it were, between Heidegger’s ‘existence’ and Gadamer’s ‘historicity’ is where Serequeberhan finds a means to establish his concept of a lived existence.

Returning to Serequeberhan’s (2016, p. 101) bold statement that we should mold and/or shape ‘“Our Marx” and “Our Heidegger,” so as to press them into service’, I think ‘Serequeberhan’s Heidegger’ is pressed in service to understand how an African philosophy is possible, where it should begin and where it should go. The theory behind how one ‘steps back’ (Schritt-züruck) to understand themselves and think authentically opens Serequeberhan to argue for an existence that not just ‘steps back’ but also steps forward – living within history so as to engage and change it. He does this through articulating the struggles of those who have done this – like Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Amilcar Cabral, and others – and how their existence is a lived one, one in which their struggles existentially and historically defined their lives and the histories which comprise their heritage.

Therefore, what we have explored in this article is the emergence of Serequeberhan’s concept of existence and its relationship to thinking itself. Philosophy, or philosophizing if you will, cannot even begin without understanding existence, for both Serequeberhan and for Heidegger. How each articulates that existence – lived for Serequeberhan, Dasein for Heidegger – reveals much about their own impetus for where philosophy should go. For Heidegger, there are considerable debates concerning this issue, but, for Serequeberhan, it abundantly is clear: it should go towards the struggle. It should go towards a socio-historical engagement with the world in process of liberation, or, rather, in process of giving others opportunities for a lived existence.