I'm really excited about today's episode. Because not only is this a first for PhilosophyTube and me, it's
also I think a first for Anglophone YouTube.
We're going to be learning about a philosopher called Zera Yacob, who came up with a lot of the ideas that
we attribute to the European Enlightenment, way before anybody else. So, let's get cracking!
Part 1: The Hatata.
As we go through this, bear in mind that Yacob wrote his main work, the Hatata, in 1667.
Although the events and the ideas it describes, he actually developed earlier than that, in about 1630.
Yacob was born in the Kingdom of Aksum, which was located in what is now called the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
The Hatata is not only a work of philosophy, it's also a work of autobiography.
Yacob describes how he had to flee Aksum when he got in trouble for publicly questioning certain ideas,
and went and lived in a cave on his own for two years where he came up with his philosophy.
The Hatata is explicitly faith oriented.
Yacob says he's not reaaally fully a Christian, although people often took him for one.
But he is definitely religious,
and one of the things he took with him into his cave, was a copy of the Psalms of David.
He writes, "In my heart I did not believe in anything except in God who created all and conserves all."
He talks a lot about prayer, and a lot of his work is about the philosophy of religion.
Yacob says that Heaven must exist, because we were created to seek happiness but are almost never totally satisfied in this life.
Therefore, we must have been created for a perfect life to come.
He also says that an afterlife must exist, because in this life, people don't always get what they deserve;
there must be a hereafter in which moral matters are settled.
He talks about the problem of evil, and reasons that God allows there to be evil and temptation so that we can
become worthy and develop morally.
But he also talks about the need for skepticism and rational inquiry, rather than just believing whatever
people or local traditions tell you, otherwise you'll believe all kinds of nonsense, like astrology and magic,
that were made up by people who wanted money and power out of them.
He mentions that the Europeans colonizing Africa were using their religion to cloak their theft,
as an example of how it's important to think critically about what people tell you.
He observes that everybody says their religion is the correct one and that all others are wrong, and that every
religion has miracle stories that supposedly back it up, which might be why he was religious with
some of the ideas he had to hand, but not really explicitly Christian.
Since he's a believer in God, and in his view, God created nature and humanity,
Yacob tries to derive his ethics from what it seems God created us to naturally want to do.
For instance, he says God created sex, and therefore it can't be wrong to do it.
Monastic celibacy goes against our nature, and since in Yacob's view our nature comes from God,
nobody has to be celibate.
Ditto menstruation, which the law of Moses says is impure, but which Yacob says is part of God's design.
From the same premises, he also argues that polygamy must be bad, since there are roughly equal numbers
of men and women, so he says God must have created us to arrange ourselves in pairs.
But he also says that men and women should be equal in marriage, AND that slavery is bad,
which is a somewhat refreshing point of view when we compare him to some of his European Enlightenment
counterparts, as we'll be seeing shortly.
"All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he
did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment.
Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist in the sight of God, who is perfect in all his works."
Part Two: First-Past-the-Post.
Right off the bat, if you've read any of the European Enlightenment philosophers,
you can see that Yacob beat a lot of them to the punch. That whole bit about miracles and how
every religion has miracle stories that supposedly prove it's true, but they can't all be true so
we need to critically examine miracle stories?
That pre-figures David Hume's essay, "On Miracles", which is still the go-to text on the philosophy of miracles
in British philosophy education certainly, but which Hume wouldn't write for another hundred years.
The idea that God and the afterlife is essential to how we think about morality, is normally attributed to
Immanuel Kant, who wouldn't write it down until 1781.
There are also a lot of parallels here to Descartes' Meditations, which if you've studied philosophy in high school, you've probably read.
Like Descartes famously did, Yacob shuts himself
away, and passes through a period of doubt to try and establish certain knowledge.
There's also something very like Descartes' trademark argument for the existence of God.
The idea is, that God implanted in humans certain ideas that we could only have had, if God exists.
So the fact that we have them, means that it must. Descartes' Meditations were written in 1647.
The Hatata wasn't written until 1667, but the whole "going to the cave" thing and having the ideas, was 1630.
So if we're feeling charitable and assuming Yacob wasn't projecting back any ideas he actually had later,
maybe he beat Descartes to the trademark argument as well.
Or at the very least came up with it independently.
It's also very interesting that Yacob explicitly argues against slavery. The quote, "All men are created equal",
is normally attributed either to the United States Declaration of Independence,
or to the philosopher John Locke, whose work greatly inspired it.
But Locke wouldn't write his most famous works until about
1689, and the Declaration of Independence wasn't penned until 1776.
It's also worth bearing in mind that neither Locke, nor it must be said the writers of the Declaration of Independence
really meant "all" when they said "all". They both made exceptions for slaves and believed in racial hierarchy.
In fact quite a lot of European Enlightenment philosophers, did. Kant, Mill, Hume, Locke.
Locke's work in particular lent itself very easily, and at times explicitly, to justifying enslavement
and the theft of land and resources that built Europe and America into what they are today.
But here's Yacob!
Ahead of the pack, running out and saying actually no, slavery is bad and racial hierarchy is nonsense.
Which, alright, admittedly is quite a low bar to have to clear,
but one that not all or even many Enlightenment philosophers actually managed to get over.
It's somewhat understandable that Yacob would reach this perspective, given that racism was something he
stood to lose out from, unlike his White European counterparts, who stood to gain an enormous amount
from racism and indeed did gain an enormous amount from it. Materially, anyway.
Locke in particular got rich off slavery, though of course morally speaking, they were impoverished.
How come Yacob isn't credited for having so many of these ideas before anybody else?
Well, part of it is probably the particular story of who went where, who translated what, and brought back
what editions with them, when they came back to Europe.
Part of that story no doubt has to do with the fact that he didn't write it down for about 30 years, and then didn't
have access to the kind of printing and distributing services that European philosophers coming later
would have had.
It's difficult to get a copy of his works in English, even today. In fact I'd like to say a special thank you to
historian Dag Herbjørnsrud, who gave me my copy that I used to write this episode.
But that particular story supervenes on the bigger picture, and part of that bigger picture no doubt includes
racism and the fact that philosophy curricula historically, and often even today, are predominantly White,
which means that the contributions of philosophers of color get misattributed and erased.
I wasn't taught Yacob at university, I had to go looking for him, which is a shame.
And, which is why it's all the more cool, that we can learn about him today. There are people today
who are invested, materially and politically, in this idea of the Enlightenment being a mainly European,
almost exclusively White thing, and that's just not true.
Europe could not be what it is today without the contributions and the labor of people of color,
and people who never even saw Europe at all. And that's just as true philosophically, as it is materially.
Part Three: Analysis and Criticism.
The idea of distancing oneself from a society or a set of ideas in order to critically examine them and not just
accept what we're given at face value, is a very Enlightenment move,
and this is the move that Yacob is making here.
In fact, he literally made that move. He LITERALLY went away from society and lived in a cave.
But he makes a number of other assumptions and moves that might be familiar as well.
Like the later Enlightenment scholars, Yacob has a habit of attributing particular ways of thinking that he happens to be familiar with, to supposedly neutral reason.
For instance, he says that reason tells us, "Worship God your creator and love all men as yourself",
which he presents as a neutral thing that every rational person could understand but,
which leans heavily on, or at least is packaged in the form of, a
Christian...ish? worldview?
Not everybody's reason does tell them to do that, evidently, since there are perfectly reasonable people who do not worship God.
He vindicates much of the Gospel and almost all of the Ten Commandments, so he's relying on the
neutrality of what he calls rational, which is in fact not really neutral.
This is a trap that we've identified before if you've seen my series, "Are You Rational?"
In a similar vein, he seems to assume that God
creates only one type of person with one type of nature.
There's not much of an eye for diversity here. For instance, he thinks that the natural state of
romantic partnerships is one man and one woman, whereas nowadays we know that some people
aren't into that and that's fine.
Not only fine, but undeniably natural, part of the natural variation of the species.
He also says that people have intelligence and rationality and sexual desire by our God-given nature, so it can't
be bad to use those things, but he also says that many people are by nature lazy, and sluggish, and credulous.
They just believe the first thing they're told without critically examining it and that that's bad.
So it seems like he's saying there are some parts of our God-given nature that are higher and better than others,
and it's not really clear how he's composing that hierarchy.
And obviously it goes without saying that if you don't believe in God, a lot of these arguments aren't gonna fly.
All that said though, Yacob concludes, quite open-endedly, with an appeal to the reader:
"I entreat any wise and inquisitive man, who may come after I am dead to add his thoughts to mine.
"Behold, I have begun an inquiry such as has not been attempted before."
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