Paget Henry wrote a review of my book Self-Definition: A Philosophical Inquiry from the Global South and the Global North. I offer here some thoughts that may be of interest to readers of Black Issues in Philosophy.
The history of humanity is propelled by a unified consciousness embedded in the existence of a self that originated out of what the Kmt (ancient Egyptian) thinkers called Nun, which is quasi-material structure that created itself. “Kmt” is the name to which those ancient East Africans referred to their country in Mdw Ntr, their native tongue; “Egypt” is the subsequent name the Greek invaders imposed upon them. I will use “ancient Egypt” as that is the most familiar name for contemporary readers.
This unified consciousness (Nun) is not linguistic but infinite consciousness, which creates linguistic signifiers such as race, sex, and gender, which are the fluid and non-fixed characteristics of the Self. This consciousness in fact creates language and not the other way around.
My book Self-Definition is a systematic defense of this hypothesis. I should now defend this proposition in several stages.
The ancient Egyptians creatively concocted the concept of Nun, a liquid substance that itself is infinite consciousness as the originator of their first god, Atum, who then faces an existential fear of loneliness and was compelled to create other companion gods, who in turn then become the first linguistic signifiers of all those apparent characteristics of the illusory self. At this stage the Self was only an infinite consciousness that became distorted by what we subsequently call race, gender and sex, which at first were absent from the nature of Nun, which is non-linguistic, as Paget Henry would have liked it to be. Henry is right: the Self is pure consciousness and not merely a linguistic signifier, which could create consciousness. This unity of consciousness was first originated by the ancient Egyptian spiritual thinkers. Race, class and gender, from their perspective, are distortions of the Self and not its realization. The linguistic signifiers are second-order diminutions of the Self.
The search for this infinite consciousness is then vigorously pursued by the East Indian sages of the Upanishads. Consider the following passage from this angle:
Where there is separateness, one sees another, smells another, tastes another, knows another. But where there is unity, one without a second, that is the world of Brahman. This is the supreme goal of life, the supreme treasure, the supreme joy. Those who do not seek this supreme goal live on but a fraction of this joy.
Note that this eloquent passage is a search for a unified infinite consciousness for whom the separateness of consciousness must necessarily be transcended so that we can relocate the dwelling place and the cleared field and home of the confused self, further disturbed by the separations of race, gender and sex. The Upanishads despair that the Self is disturbing itself and becoming the source of human suffering because Atman and Brahmin can be unified only in infinite consciousness—that is, if they renounce separateness that is pitting human against human in defense of race, gender, and sex; appearances, although all that there could ever be, is a single Self whose habitat is the cosmos that belongs to no-one but itself, since it created itself out of Nun, as the ancient Egyptians speculated and the Upanishads implicitly affirm.
In Chinese Metaphysical speculations Lao Tzu and Chungtzu also engage themselves through the veil of The Way for Lao Tzu and the notion of the Unbounded Self for Chuangtzu. A passage from Lao Tzu, asserts:
Dao is empty (like a bowl). It may be used but its capacity is never exhausted. It is bottomless, perhaps the ancestor of all things.
Chuangtzu adds:
My life flows between confines, but knowledge has no confines. If we use the confined to follow after the unconfined, there is danger that the flow will cease; and when it ceases, to exercise knowledge is purest danger.
Clearly, Lao Tzu and Chuangtzu are looking for a home for the lost soul. That home is Infinite Consciousness and not the self-confining and bound linguistic subject of modernity. They, too, are looking for Infinite Consciousness and the specific project of hypothesizing that the Self is nothing more than infinite possibilities exactly like the idea of Infinite Consciousness. Nun, the Empty Bowl, and the Unbound Self, are searches for home, a dwelling place for the illusory Self, and infinite expressions of possibilities, by which the Self could define a way of life, an ethics of existence, a morality of being and ways of being human. On this reading, the Self, exactly like infinite consciousness, the ground of being is self-defining.
In early modernity, the religious/spiritual rationalist, Zara Yacob, the Ethiopian African, also joins the metaphysical search through the methodic belief in God and the exercise of Hassasa (looking for) and Hatata (meditation) as he is simultaneously looking for and praying to the Infinite Consciousness whom he thinks dwells in the Human Heart.
All this moves all the way from Ancient Egypt, through the majestic India, past the historic China. Africa, the cradle of the human species, inaugurated the relentless search for the Infinite Consciousness, the cleared field and region of the human.
Henry is right to argue that Self-Definition is an expression of the linguistification of the Self of modernity. I assure him that this is not the Self that I am defending but rather the unbound self, which created language, and not the rich Self of the present moment, which is running loose in what is called identity politics. If anything, I want the Self of the present as defended by Judith Butler among others, to empty their consciousness and look for the Self of ancient Egypt, India, China, and classical Africa, the present relic of ancient Egypt.
The rise of critical race theory and critical gender theory are less ontological arguments for the origin of the self as they are responses to hegemonic ideologies that seek to dissolve the Self to the normative gaze of whiteness and masculinity. These identities are responses to oppression and not ontological grounds of Being.
Teodros Kiros
Teodros Kiros, a specialist in moral philosophy and African philosophy, has been a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University for the past twenty years. He is the producer and host of the internationally acclaimed television program African Ascent. He is also an essayist who has published hundreds of articles in refereed journals and online, a novelist, and an author and editor of seventeen books. He is the winner of the 1999 Michael Harrington Book Award for Self-Construction and the Formation of the Human Values: Truth, Language, and Desire.
