School
Black existentialism
Overview
Black existentialism or Africana critical theory is a school of thought that "critiques domination and affirms the empowerment of Black people in the world". Although it shares a word with existentialism and that philosophy's concerns with existence and meaning in life, Black existentialism "is predicated on the liberation of all Black people in the world from oppression". Black existentialism may also be seen as method, which allows one to read works by African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison in an existentialist frame, as well as the work of Civil Rights Activists such as Malcolm X and Cornel West. Lewis Gordon argues that Black existentialism is not only existential philosophy produced by Black philosophers but is also thought that addresses the intersection of problems of existence in black contexts.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The worst of all is to satisfy a craving which has not as yet made its appearance, to anticipate it, or--worse still--by the help of stimulants to produce something which looks like a craving, which then is promptly satisfied. Ah, the shame of it! And yet this is exactly what is being done in religion where people are in very truth fooled out of the real meaning of life and helped to waste their lives.
Søren Kierkegaard, Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard
States what Black existentialism is; the author is tied to Black existentialism in the knowledge graph.
Here more metaphysic is called for: The Absolute Reason is now supposed to work under limiting conditions of finitude, of a sensitive and temporal organism. The antecedents of reflective thought are not, therefore, determinations of thought pure and undefiled, but of what thought can do when it stoops to assume the yoke of change and of feeling. I pass by the metaphysical problem left unsolved by this flight into…
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
States what Black existentialism is.
But the true view of the matter is that life, as life, involves the germ of death, and that the finite, being radically self-contradictory, involves its own self-suppression.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
Close in meaning to Black existentialism; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Black existentialism
Related ideas
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- South Africa
- Love
- Harvard University
- Sociology
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Bell hooks
- Malcolm X
- Nihilism
- Paris
- Absurdism
- Racism
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Soul
- Self-determination
- Social alienation
- Philosophical anthropology
- Working class
- Reason
- Ralph Ellison
- Australia
- God
- France
- Cornel West
Place in the tradition
Part of Africana philosophy.