Professor William A. Banner is the 1999 "Excellence at Howard" honoree. The following essay was especially written for this occasion, and published electronically by Howard University Libraries. "Excellence at Howard" recognizes distinguished faculty members for lifelong pursuit of excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service.

       In the middle sixties, I spent a summer of teaching in philosophy at The University of Rhode Island. There was another visitor, from Texas, who offered courses in astronomy. I often encountered him in the corridor as our nine o’clock classes were letting out. One day, as I recall, I asked him how it came about that astronomy was the first science or at least the first of the empirical sciences. He replied without hesitation that all persons everywhere see the stars and are moved by what they see to great wonder and speculation and come somehow to a fixed system of observation. Had the astronomer asked me the same question concerning the priority and universality of philosophy, I would have given essentially the same answer that he gave about astronomy, namely, that in seeing the stars all persons everywhere wonder whether the stars are powers that govern the earth or are themselves the manifestation of a higher primal governance over all things.

Philosophy, one may say, arises with the sense of wonder and quiet perplexity of the stargazer and it is concerned with being and primary causes, and with the chain or catenation of causes and effects in the realm of mutable things. From the side of the personal concerns and perplexities of the stargazer, philosophy arises as reflection on aspiration, duty, mutability, and destiny.

In this brief essay, I wish to speak of the universality of philosophy or philosophizing as a human enterprise and of the significance of this universality for the advancement of inquiry and the unity of mankind. The word philosophy comes to us from the Greeks, who recognized above all the distinctive activity of the mind that is the pursuit of wisdom yielding, as Plato put it, "the vision of all time and all existence." (1) While the word philosophy is Greek in origin, the engagement in matters philosophical is doubtless as old as human existence itself.

II

In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, there is the tale or legend of the witty Thracian housemaid who laughed and jeered in observing that Thales was so preoccupied with the investigation of the heavens that he fell into a well. (2) From this and other anecdotes, (3) there came down the opinion that Thales and other Greeks of his kind were impractical people who left aside the things before them "at /their/ very feet" for the sake of giving attention to the real things, "the things that matter most."(4)

As one does not have to be a Greek to gaze upon the stars, it would be clear that one does not have to be a Greek to give oneself to the pursuit of wisdom. V. Y. Mudimbe, in his recent archaeological and anthropological study, The Invention of Africa, has given attention to the tradition of philosophizing among the Bantu. (5) This is the important but difficult matter of searching out the philosophical ideas or notions that have indeed come to or arisen in the mind of the Bantu and are not simply or chiefly the reflection of the influence of "colonizers and western anthropologists."(6)

Mudimbe cites the work of Placide Tempels (7) and of Alexis Kagame (8) as significant in distinguishing ‘philosophical elements,’ evident or implicit, in the Bantu language and idiom. These elements are, in a sense, constituents of a vision or view of being, in which view there are levels of existence as force or vitality from the mineral to the divine. The divine level is the creating ground of all other things, both what is intelligent and what is lacking in intelligence. As force or vitality, all existing things exert pressure or influence upon all other things so as to strengthen or to weaken those things. Human life has its place within the cosmos or created world, and through love and procreation, life perpetuates itself in lineage and community. (9)

If we follow Mudimbe’s exposition of the thought of the Bantu, it may be said that the ‘philosophical bent’ of the Bantu is akin to that of the Greeks, whatever differences there are between Greece and Zaire, between the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC and Kinshasa. Obviously one cannot make an important point about human life and human rational capability by calling attention to what is ‘philosophic’ in two divergent societies in the long history of the world. The history of culture is so vast and there are not insignificant differences in the dominant ideas and traditions of thought of the many peoples of which we have knowledge. Fortunately, we are no longer detained by invidious contrasts between what is ‘primitive’ and ‘nonprimitive’ or ‘civilized’, contrasts to which Franz Boas addressed himself in his book, The Mind of Primitive Man. (10) Claude Lévi-Strauss, in more recent years in The Savage Mind, has spoken of the "false antimony between logical and prelogical mentality" and has said that the ‘primitive mind,’ "is logical in the same sense as ours" and "proceeds through understanding not affectivity, with the aid of distinctions and oppositions, not by confusion and participation."(11)

It would seem that human reason anywhere is human reason everywhere. And to talk of human reason is to talk of the capability of one species or kind of being, namely, homo sapiens. In a very real way one may dare to talk of one rational or intellectual community that in its inclusiveness transcends social and political limits, a community to which directly or indirectly all discourse or debate is addressed and in which common ground may obtain and often obtains amid diversity in intellectual beginnings and directions. From the attention to natural events and their causes there derives, within this rational community, the association of persons and groups for the sake of the advancement of empirical science. From the attention to actions and their consequences derives the association of individuals and groups for the promotion (through good policies and good deeds) of humane culture. Philosophy itself is the continual vision of being and order, sustaining both the integrity of scientific inquiry and the good faith of moral effort and social reform.

III

If it is true that human beings are rational animals and that the arts of knowing and doing derive from the rational capability in all persons everywhere, it is at the same time evident that in the movement of time reason has not reigned supreme in human affairs. The advancement of humane culture has not matched the advancement of empirical science and technology. In many societies, including our own, what is rational and humane is very often dwarfed by what is wrongheaded and oppressive. For example, the exercise of reason in social design and oversight is opposed and overthrown through the deliberate corruption of the relation of means to ends in the conduct of the arts or technai upon which the provision of vital goods and services depends. The arts, singly and together, are means for the sake of the end of individual well-being. (12) The art or function of basket weaving pertains to the need of one or more persons for baskets for one use or another, as the art of wheat farming pertains to the need for bread and the art or practice of medicine pertains to the need for the maintenance and restoration of health.

In each of the arts or functions, an individual’s particular need would be met thorough any arrangement, simple or complex, that guarantees access to a good or service. As all claims upon well-being are equal, all devices of distribution would properly support this equality. This would suggest that the community (with all its constituent members) is responsible for what has come to be called fairness (as the assurance to all persons of a fair share of what is needed for living well). (13) On this responsibility as a moral matter economists and others have often been evasive or directly subversive. The evasion or subversion has often been hidden through an appeal to ‘market forces’ or distribution schemes that at bottom allow for or entail the recognition in a society of unequal classes. In this recognition, it is established that those in the lower classes have lesser claims than those higher in the scale or have no claims at all (while the basic needs of persons remain the same). Under any scheme or system of unequal claims and unequal access, the relation of an art or function to its benefaction is subverted. (14)

IV

The concern about the arts and the best human life involves, at bottom, attention to the status of the individual as a person. If, in Immanuel Kant’s statement, a person is to be treated as an end always and never as a means merely, the words ‘community’ and ‘justice’ cannot be used simply to signify how individuals are in fact treated under prevailing custom and law. With respect to word ‘community,’ Martin Buber has drawn the distinction between mere collectivity (Kollektivität), which is the grouping or ‘bunching’ of individuals without regard to their capabilities and purposes, and true community (Gemeinschaft), which is the free association of persons in mutual affirmation and mutual enhancement. (15) It is the sense of one’s own worth that is never an expression or reflection of an artificial ‘identity’ assigned under a collectivity but is rather the whole of what one claims for oneself in a society of equals. This sense of worth and dignity is the root of civilization as humane culture, involving (as reformation or reordering) the continual replacement of old prejudices with new attitudes of fairness, of old tricks with new trusts, of old deceptions with the truth, of old oppressions with new patterns of life.

With respect to ‘justice,’ one thinks of the definition given by Cicero, namely, the "assigning each his own and maintaining with generosity and equity . . . human solidarity . . ."(16) While Cicero was indeed a successful lawyer, he wanted nonetheless to maintain the distinction between what is legal (i.e., what is in force according to the existing statutes) and what is just (i.e., what obtains morally between person and person and ultimately embraces the whole of humanity. (17) Whatever the utility of the regulations of a particular place in keeping the peace and in restraining the recalcitrant, what is just is what the dignity of persons requires as noble and praiseworthy.

For all of his high rhetoric concerning justice itself, Cicero defended slavery as compatible with the moral pretensions of a republic. In this respect, Cicero reflected the prevailing social views and prejudices of his time. In the history of Rome in the centuries before and after Cicero (in the republic and in the empire), the long career of warfare, the pretensions to hegemony over non-Romans (the provincials), and the abuse of the commons (following the revolt of the Gracchi), -- all of this undermined respect for the equal rights of persons.(18) The idea of the unity and dignity of mankind persisted nonetheless through the strength of the appeal of Stoic and Christian teachings about human brotherhood (and the moral or natural law that is everywhere the same) and the affirmation of natural justice in the Institutes of the emperor Justinian.(19)

The thrust of the appeal to reason and conscience in human affairs has been met again and again by the press of ‘great social forces.’ In the millennium now ending, the world has witnessed, among other things, (1) the rise of the national state, with its pretension to sovereign authority over all persons and all things within its domain and (2) the turbulence of deep rivalries, both within and between the states, concerning land and natural resources and the privileges of dominion and status. To these developments (in Europe and Asia) must be added the singular movement of European adventurers and entrepreneurs, issuing in colonialism, slavery, and the promotion of the social and political fiction of ‘race.’ In the moral response to these ‘social forces’ there has come, in recent centuries, the surge of sentiment and action that has been called the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’ This enthusiasm has embraced a broad agitation for the rights of mankind and has led to the abolition of serfdom and slavery, the defense of the agricultural and industrial worker against exploitation, the liberation of Africa, and the enfranchisement and social equality of women.

V

Fifty-one years ago, following shortly upon the founding of The United Nations, The General Assembly of the new association of states passed and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document says straightforwardly in the Preamble that:

". . . the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and individual rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world . . ."(20)

We have here a simple statement of the idea of human life as one family, one household, to be sustained in its whole extensity by good will and good deeds. The world that is so vast, so variable, and so complex is, nonetheless, brought under one covenant and one agenda concerning common needs and common obligations.

We dare to ask, when we speak of what is attainable as a broad humane culture, whether our language is, as Joseph Conrad has put it, "the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of impenetrable darkness."(21) In thinking about the sphere of things a century ago, Matthew Arnold sought to escape deception in saying, in Dover Beach, that the world " . . . hath neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain . . ."(22) With no less a will than Matthew Arnold to avoid the snares of illusion, we dare indeed to say that the world has all of the things of which the poet despaired, wherever indeed the light of reason and civility prevails over the darkness of ignorance and insolence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Representative Men, stated the dilemma of the modern world and perhaps of human existence at large in his appraisal of the career of Napoleon:

"Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience . . . .He did all that in him lay, to live and thrive without principle . . .Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual or selfish aim will fail."(23)

If Emerson is right, we face today as in the past the choice between the life of reason and conscience and the life of blind passion and self-interest, the one life ultimately to prevail and the other ultimately to fail. Every university as a place of study and reflection must know where it stands on this matter. For historically every university, in its pursuit and preservation of knowledge and in its work of analysis and discussion, has constituted itself as a commonwealth of free and equal partners, governed only by a common deference to truth and civility. To preserve such a commonwealth and to spread its benefits to the greatest number of persons is surely, for this university, the task of today and tomorrow and a thousand years to come.(24)

Washington, DC
September 1999

Footnotes

(1)  Plato, The Republic, 486 A.

(2)  Plato, Theaetetus, 174 A.

(3)  Stilpon of Megara (c. 380-300), when asked about his losses from the looting of his city, is said to have replied that he noticed no one carrying off wisdom. Cf., Seneca, Epistles, IX, 3.

(4)  Cf., Plotinus, Enneads, I, 3, 5.

(5)  V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), especially pp. 135-186.

(6)  Cf., Placide Tempels, Philosophie bantu (Kinshasa, 1979).

(7)  Cf., Alexis Kagame, La Philosophie bantu comparée (Paris, 1976).

(8)  V. Y. Mudimbe, op. cit., p. 77.  

(9)  The efforts of Tempels and Kagame and others in presenting or representing the philosophy of the Bantu as a vision or intuition of reality have been challenged by those writers (F. Crahay, P. Hountondji, and others) who have a stricter and perhaps more ‘academic’ view of philosophy as reflection or criticism about experience. One would observe that these two views of philosophy are not mutually exclusive, the vision of reality necessarily embracing it would seem a theory of truth and criteria of analysis. Cf., V. Y. Mudimbe, op. cit., pp. 154-161.

(10)  Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp.1-75.

(11)  Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966) p. 268. Cf., Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 160-180. Also, James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), pp.262-264.

(12)  Cf., Plato, The Republic, 353 D.

(13)  Cf., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V, iii.   

(14) The evading (and subverting) of the moral matter of distribution is apparent in the emergence of modern industrialism, in the writings (for examples) of Thomas Robert Malthus (An Essay on the Principle of Population, second edition, 1803) and David Ricardo (Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817). Malthus wrote in opposition to William Godwin’s idea of a society based on reason and benevolence (cf., William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Clarendon Press, 1971, pp.13-26, 84-90). Malthus maintained, among other things, that society requires "a class of proprietors and a class of labourers . . . with self-love for the mainspring of the great machine" (op. cit., Cambridge University Press, 1992, p.67). Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V, I, 9. While Aristotle was opposed to democracy as resting upon the sole principle of distribution by equal shares (the equality of birth), he called attention to the injustice or unfairness that is greed, i.e., the taking of more than one’s share vis-à-vis the just claims of others.

(15)  Martin Buber, Zwiesprache, in Das dialogishe Prinzip (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1973), p. 185. Cf. Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia. Translated by R.F.C. Hall (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 129-138.

(16)  Cicero, De Finibus, V, 65.

(17)  Cicero, De Finibus, V, 65.

(18)  Cf., Sallust, The War with Catiline, X, 6. Also, Sallust, The War with Jugurtha, III, 2; XXXI, 1-29. The lot of the provincials improved under the empire, with the recognition of the provincial assembly and with access to citizenship. This was offset, however, by the subjection of both Romans and provincials to the imperial power and to the rule of law (as Lex Regia).

(19)  Justinian, Institutes, I, 1: "The commandments of law are these: live honorably; harm nobody; give everyone his due" (Iuris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere).

(20)  Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Preamble (United Nations Department of Public Information, 1948).

(21)  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Chapter 2.

(22)  Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, lines 33-34.

(23)  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (New York: Marisilio, 1995), pp. 172-172. Cf., Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Part Fourteenth, IX, on the demoralization of Napoleon’s forces in retreat from Moscow toward Smolensk: ". . . they felt that they were miserable wretches who had done much evil, and that expiation had begun." (translated by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin)

(24)  Cf., Christopher Hobhouse, Oxford (London: B.T. Batsford, 1948) p. 116: "For nearly a thousand years . . . Oxford has by its quiet example taught dignity and the love of truth to the youth of England."

Biography of William Augustus Banner

William Augustus Banner was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Nannie Perry and Zacharias Banner.  He was educated at the Walter George Smith School and The Central High School of Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania State University, Yale University, and Harvard University.   In the course of his studies at Harvard University, Dr. Banner was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship by Harvard University.  He taught at Bennett College from 1938 to 1943 and Howard University from 1945 to 1985, where he also received a Doctor of Humane Letters in 1988.  Dr. Banner was a visiting professor at Yale University, Smith College, The University of Rhode Island, The University of Colorado, and The University of Rochester.

Dr. Banner’s main publications are:

Origin and the Tradition of Natural Law Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. The Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 8.

Ethics: an Introduction to Moral Philosophy. New York, Scribner, 1968. 175 p.

Moral Norms and Moral Order:The Philosophy of Human Affairs. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, c1981. 112 p.

The Path of  St. Augustine. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, c1996. xi, 107 p.

Dr. Banner has been married to Beatrice Vera Suggs since 1941.  Their children are Beatrice Anne Banner Beesecker and William Perry Banner, M.D.