Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I Can one think of a more inauspicious time than now to offer a case for the continuing relevance, the necessity even, of the Enlightenment project to the fortunes of contemporary Africa? What follows is not a defense of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Where that is concerned, the great enterprise does not need my defense. By the same token, those who claim to be defending it in the name of a racial identity or an even more groundless civilizational supremacy originating in one corner of the globe may be mortified by what I have to say. Once we move away from smug affirmations of identities and from the homogenization of diverse historicities, it will become clear that just as sure as humans are zoon dunamikon, mobile animals, like the snail and its shell, their ideas are no less given to migrating. Even when their original discoverers are loathe to share them, it is well-nigh impossible for them to stop their fellow humans from copying, buying, or pilfering those ideas for whatever ends they wish to realize. In this marketplace of ideas only the foolhardy would permit themselves to think that anyone or any group can claim absolute ownership of any idea they have articulated in a form that is no longer opaque to their fellows. It does not require courage to defend the Enlightenment project; all it requires is knowledge and an openness to considering other ways of organizing life and thought. As will become clear, much of the animus towards the Enlightenment project in the African context is traceable to an ignorance of Africa’s relations with it over time, and to witting or unwitting misreadings of its core elements. When this is not the case, it is founded on a dubious identity politics the origins of which are exogenous to the African context and the embrace of which must, perforce, trash or, minimally, deny Africa’s place in the global circuit of ideas and the meritorious contributions of African minds to that circuit through time. There are many reasons for us, contemporary Africans, especially scholars and other intellectuals, to embrace the project. Regardless of how we account for the genealogy and the pedigree of the Enlightenment, I submit that, with all its limitations, a world in which its core elements are in place would be a superior world to the one that we inhabit, and not only in Africa. Does this mean that a world structured by Enlightenment ideals will be a perfect or near-perfect one — whatever that may mean? Absolutely not. Indeed, it is a failure to engage with the complexity of those ideals — and a related eagerness to caricature them in the service of dubious identity-driven politics — that incline many to dismiss or to demonize them. I can only hope that what follows shows this complexity and, as a result, makes it less easy to abandon them. What obstacles have stood, in our day, in the way of the embrace of these ideals? Those obstacles are of recent vintage; they have not always been there. Africa has not always been hostile to the Enlightenment project. Despite the widespread and justifiable indictment of it by antiracist scholars, especially in our day, a responsible perusal of the history of ideas reveals an important distinction between the racialization of the Enlightenment and its historicization. It may be true that the European Enlightenment was conducted by Europeans and principally in Europe, or in a world dominated and framed by Europe. Notwithstanding this acknowledgment, the question is whether the ideas that form the warp and woof of the Enlightenment are, simply for that reason, incorrigibly “European” ideas such that they become invalid for retrieval and adoption in non-European contexts and by non-European thinkers. When scholars write as if ideas come in colors or are indissolubly linked to certain geographies, cultures, or epidermal inheritances one should be suspicious. Doubtless, ideas emerge in certain contexts, yet when all is said and done they really emerge in individual thinkers’ minds, albeit in conversation with others. If this be granted, even if we say that the Enlightenment project and the ideals that it fostered were undiluted emanations from European minds, it is a