
Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers - acsillag
https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant
======
stareatgoats
Someone who does any study of the history of ideas will run into the still
ubiquitous and somewhat self-aggrandizing paradigm in the discipline. In
coarse outline: that rational thinking is something which started with the
Greeks and was carried like a torch through various high-watermarks in western
history, and in essence is one of the things that distinguishes (and elevates)
the west from the rest of the world.

Granted, some tips of the hat have been granted the ancient philosophies of
India, China and the Muslim world, but these are mainly noted as they have
contributed to the forward march of western ideas. The linked article could be
largely interpreted to be in the same vein: i.e. great because it coincides
with a major western thought tradition.

Still, interesting to learn that Ethiopia had a scholarly tradition of which
we have heard very little. Also interesting that enlightenment ideas seem to
have surfaced at approximately the same time, in totally separate places. I
dare say we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not
so at all.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Of course our own history is more important to us than others' (which are
extensively studied in the west as well), and cherry picking and narrative
writing is also an ethical statement: We point to the values of ancient Greek
democracy as our own democracy is in danger. We refer to the thinkers in _our_
past as scientific thinking is questioned today.

Especially when dealing with Greeks (and Romans), it is amazing how much of
what is going on today was established and founded back then (e.g. German law
is based on Roman law, therefore a law professor might look for clues in Roman
values, not in Chinese values).

~~~
stareatgoats
Agree it is only natural to be more preoccupied with a perceived 'own'
history. But (quite commonly I would argue) we tend to use widespread but
shallow perceptions of such a history to push an agenda, which may or may not
be justified. For example, did you know that our current concept of democracy
was seen as abhorrent by the ancient Athenians? They preferred 'sortition', or
representation by lottery in order to avoid the risk of corruption of elected
officials [1].

Can't say that they didn't have a point, and that their warnings have all but
disappeared in intellectual history also points to (if not proves) some
disengagement from actual facts in favor of self-aggrandizement in the
discipline that I hinted at in the parent comment.

I may be a bit unfair to a whole discipline, but this was one of main
takeaways from several years in university level intellectual history. I came
in hoping it would be a detached and inquisitive investigation into the
history of human thought in general. I was disappointed, but I learned a lot,
still.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS9EMvbBq_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS9EMvbBq_U)
(3 minute agitation for sortition, but mentions the ancient Greeks at least)

~~~
WillReplyfFood
The problem with corruption is the attempt to prevent it, instead of managing
it. Sell a % of power but not at a fixed price- sell it in a hidden auction,
call that one taxes, he who invests the most cash into it has the most of the
fixed power percentage. Remove lobbyism to end corruption in the classic sence
- and voila, democracy 2.0.

"If we must have crime, we may as well organize it."

------
eveningcoffee
It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time.

Based on this, Yacob was more secular, rational and humane than European
thinkers at the same time and would feel himself most likely comfortably in
the modern world.

I think it is always important to know if something was worked on
independently in multiple places. I believe that this demonstrates that this
something was bound to happen.

I would not call Amo as an African philosopher though, as he was raised and
educated in Europe. Perhaps an African-European philosopher if you insist to
stress on his origin. I think that he was and was perceived as much European
as his other contemporaries.

~~~
wallace_f
>It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time.

I've heard 'enlightenment ideas' pop up in music and conversation going back
to my teens. I would personally bet that similar ideas (such as 'all men are
created equal,' as is highlighted in the article) had been proposed countless
times in the minds of people long before any enlightenment, or even Christian,
thinker.

The problem is the willingness of people to tolerate such ideas. The fact that
even though in 2018, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see great
civilization and prosperity has been made possible by these ideas, people
don't always want to believe them--and in America one does not need to look
for very long at our legal system, government & politics, and social behaviors
to see this.

Maybe we need another enlightenment, and one more inclusive of the liberties
and freedoms of all people.

------
bhritchie
It's been a few years since I updated it, but I probably still have the only
blog dedicated to Ethiopian philosophy:
[https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/](https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/)

~~~
mlinksva
Thanks! I was just looking at it from a link in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_\(philosopher\))

Do you know whether Yacob's writings have been continuously studied in
Ethiopia or "lost" and then found, and how? I guess the latter since your
"very brief introduction" includes "As Claude Sumner has said, Zera Yacob’s
treatise is “an absolutely original work,” and if philosophy in Ethiopia
starts with Zera Yacob it also ends with [his student] Walda Heywat." I see
from your bibliography there is a 1904 Latin translation of Yacob's work. How
did that come about?

~~~
bhritchie
As far as I can recall, the texts did not get any recognition within Ethiopia
until the last century or so. A manuscript of the texts was originally found
(in a monastery, I believe) and translated by an Italian scholar in the 19th
century, and there were several translations and scholarly works discussions
published over the next few decades. Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of
scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian
scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically
everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some
Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and
argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure.

I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of
that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling.
But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly
account for the sudden emergence.

~~~
gwern
> Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and
> circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the
> original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost
> interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more
> recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are
> authentic, but they remain very obscure.

Wow, seriously? You know, I was reading this a few weeks ago when it first
popped up, and I thought to myself, this smells a bit like an Afrocentrism
hoax like 'Aristotle stole Greek philosophy from Africans in the Library of
Alexandria who invented it all before him' \- I've never seen it mentioned
despite the considerable interest it should have, the sources are all ascribed
to some very rare book you're told you have no chance of getting your hands
on, the claimed views sound impossibly modern/anachronistic with no extremely
weird claims thrown in (if you look at forward thinkers like Bentham or
Lucretius, despite some extremely prescient arguments like defenses of sodomy,
they still have some bizarre beliefs, they don't sound like a NYC liberal)...
But I thought it would be rude to be skeptical because it's not like I know
much about Ethiopian Christian philosophy so maybe they really did have a
Greek tradition which could produce such a philosopher.

And now you tell me that not only is there no provenance of the original texts
more recent than the 1800s, they've actually been debunked as European
forgeries, and OP _just happened_ to not see fit to mention these minor little
details?!

EDIT: I see this comes up in the comments as well, and his arguments are
mostly bluster: 'no one could have forged a genius book like this! Look at all
the Enlightenment in there [but obviously it'd be easy for an Italian
centuries later to write such a book...] There are peer-reviewed books on this
topic! Peer-reviewed!'

------
brighteyes
Yacob was a remarkable thinker, to be sure, but there is no reason to connect
him to the Enlightenment: He didn't influence it, nor was he influenced by it,
as far as we can tell.

The only reason the article seems to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment is
because he wrote around the time of Descartes, and on similar themes. But
that's not enough of a connection - without a causal interaction between him
and the Enlightenment, the timing is just a coincidence.

Other rational and secular philosophers have lived in various times and places
(China, ancient Greece, India, etc.). Yacob deserves a place of honor among
them, but none of them are part of the Enlightenment.

It's odd how the article tries to connect Yacob to the Enlightenment - it
doesn't make logical sense, and so seems more out of the author's desire to
see that connection.

------
barry-cotter
If you read the comments you’ll see that there’s no evidence of Yacob’s
existence prior to the 1800s and Italian scholars came to the conclusion in
the early 20th century the whole thing was a forgery. It might be real but it
would be unwise to base any serious efforts on this without at the least
carbon dating of an original manuscript.

~~~
wahern
I suspect you're overstating the conclusion that it was a forgery. I cannot
see enough context to determine the source, but FWIW,

    
    
      ... The first argument is that Giusto d'Urbino himself
      clearly indicated that the manuscripts are not of his own.
      And I do not see any reason why a European thinker of such
      caliber produces such a refined philosophical work and at
      the end ascribes it to some 'Ethiopian Philosopher' that
      never existed. I could not possibly think of any not to
      believe Giusto d'Urbino himself who tells us clearly that
      he bought the manuscripts.
    
      ...
    
      The second argument is linguistic in nature. Here we should
      note that Giusto d'Urbino, though he did manage to learn
      Ge'ez, was in no position to write such a manuscript. Still
      some accept the fact that Giusto d'Urbino could have
      dictated his ideas to an Ethiopian scribe who could have
      captured his ideas in refined Ge'ez. Yes, even the argument
      does not hold true. You see there is a manuscript--Les
      Soirees de Carthage de Francois Bourgade. Both Giusto
      d'Urbino and his Ethiopian Scribe write this manuscript.
      The first part is written by Giusto d'Urbino himself and
      the second part by his clerk. A thorough study of these
      writings by a prominent instructor of Ge'ez literature at
      Addis Ababa University, Alemayehu Moges, has clearly
      indicated that, primarily, Giusto d'Urbino's writing in
      Ge'ez is full of mistakes. The scribe's writing was found
      to be free of errors but the type of languages used by
      Giusto d'Urbino scribe and the language of Zara Yacob were
      completely different. This clearly shows that neither
      Giusto d'Urbino nor his scribe could have possibly been
      the author of the manuscript that I strongly insist to be
      of Zara Yacob.
    

Excerpt of quotation from Teodros Kiros, "Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human
Heart", pp148-149
([https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots=urDBIoK23z&dq=yacob%20d%E2%80%99Urbino&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q=yacob%20d%E2%80%99Urbino&f=false))

~~~
wahern
Here's a book review which seems to summarize the controversy:
[https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01284505/document](https://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/hal-01284505/document) (The review author advocates forgery.)

------
twouhm
There is also Ibn Khaldûn[0].

[0]: [https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-
the...](https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-
theory-400-years-before-adam-smith-did/)

------
angersock
Other than the obvious difference of being done by a hermit in a cave, it
might be interesting to try and logic out where those other philosophers got
more purchase in their own countries than did the subject of the article in
Ethiopia.

------
superquest
The comments section on aeon.co is _very good_.

Encourage you guys to read the comments.

------
oblib
This is a great read. I've not studied philosophy so I won't go there, but I
did really enjoy learning about these two men and their place in the history
of thinkers.

------
j9461701
>In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had
been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from
1630 to 1632.

All of the highest ideals of the European enlightenment had been conceived by
dozens of people all throughout human history. I fail to see what makes Yacob
special in this regard. For example:

>He believed in the supremacy of reason

So did Aristotle. So did Socrates. So did most major Greek philosophers.

Also the supremacy of reason was part of the problem with the Athenian school
of philosophical thought - Aristotle reasoned the octopus was a stupid animal
because it was extremely curious, and he reasoned women had fewer teeth than
men did, and he reasoned many things that were flatly wrong. _Empericism_ is
what changed the world, with rationalism as a supporting pillar, not pure
logic itself divorced from evidence and experiment.

>In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of
religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator.

Again, why does this make him special? Socrates was famously made to drink
hemlock for his incessant questioning of the gods and the validity of
religion.

>Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to
slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy
a man as if he were an animal’.

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred
rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never
offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere
or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical
warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian
King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be
bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that
this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now
exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that
liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has
obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of
one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of
another."

-Thomas Jefferson, clause from first draft of the Declaration of Independence, removed due to Southern opposition (note: Jefferson owned a _lot_ of slaves, and kept them his whole life)

Englithenment thinkers did not condone slavery, they were just willing to
profit off it. Which is a cowardly and immoral thing to do, but again Yacob's
thinking is not unique here.

>Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most
successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty,
equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France.

'Most successful' here meaning it ended in ethnic cleansing, frequent atrocity
(including a castle "built on the bones of children"), and centuries of misery
and death that continues to the present day while France....is one of the most
prosperous nations on Earth.

At the risk of being reductionist, this article strikes me as being in a
similar vein to "Ancient Egyptians were black!". That is, an attempt to
elevate a modern minority group to higher prestige by attributing to them
historical achievements they didn't really have any part in.

~~~
jrs95
Yacob is automatically treated as morally superior _because_ he’s African.
That’s the whole point. It’s not actually about who said what first. That’s
just being used as a pretense for pushing his superiority (and the moral
superiority of people of color in general, which totally goes against the
ideas of individualism Yacob and others talked about).

~~~
angersock
What if it's just an interesting historical fact?

Does everything have to be jammed into the culturewar narrative?

------
nickysielicki
We don't study philosophy simply based on who is first, we study texts because
they are thorough and influential on future philosophical and political
development. We know this because future scholars directly cite them.

Before all the aforementioned authors, it's all but certain that many of these
thoughts were had by unknown people without the ability to archive them in
depth. The Bible alone is evidence of this; for someone to write that denial
of religion deserves death, they must consider religion as a choice in the
first place.

This just feels like someone is shoehorning a narrative that they like.

~~~
dang
This isn't as cheap as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064)
but it's still a shallow dismissal of a straw view of the article. What's
interesting here is not that these guys did or didn't have historical
influence—obviously they didn't, end of story. It's that their ideas were
surprisingly similar to later, more famous thinkers in a place few would have
expected. That easily clears the bar for interest on Hacker News.

When the HN guidelines say the following, it applies to articles as well:
_Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
Rexxar
For some definitions of 'philosopher', the impact of the person on a group is
an essential part of the definition. The first sentence on the french
wikipédia for philosopher
([https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophe](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophe))
is "Un philosophe est une personne dont les écrits ou la parole sont reconnus
par des écoles, groupes, religions, ou académies" => "A philosopher is a
person whose writings or words are recognized by schools, groups, religions,
or academies"

With this definition in mind, it's logical that the concept of "precursor" or
"unknow philosopher/thinker" seems just absurd to some people.

I don't necessarily agree with this definition but we can't really blame
nickysielicki for this very frequent point of view.

------
ryanx435
The palm pilot was years ahead of the iPhone, but it doesn't matter. Apple is
who brought us into the age of mobile devices with the iPhone.

These guys may have had the same ideas before everyone else, but it doesn't
matter. Their effect was minimal and the enlightenment didn't catch on in
Ethiopia.

~~~
dang
Would you please not post shallow dismissals to Hacker News? This is just the
sort of curiosity-killing comment we don't need here, particularly as the
first post to a thread.

Historical material is interesting for plenty of reasons beyond "who won", and
has always been welcome on Hacker News. So are things whose "effect was
minimal", as long as they're interesting.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

