Caliban's Reason and the Future of Afro-Caribbean Philosophy

Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Paget Henry. New York: Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0415926459

Paget Henry, in his book Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, has done an excellent job of excavating what he terms the "implicit philosophizing" carried out in the poeticist and historicist traditions of Caribbean thinkers. His unveiling of Afro-Caribbean philosophy (a Eurocentric tradition) is the revelation of what it is not (unified, autonomous and whole) but also a promise of what it could be (Afro-Creolized thought). Caliban's Reason may therefore be seen as the excavation of the future of Afro-Caribbean philosophy. Afro-Caribbean philosophy is what it is not, and this ontological crisis (essentially an Africana dilemma) makes Caliban's Reason a kind of metatext—a self-reflexive excavation of a nonexistent reality.

Philosophy is, after all, supposedly the most conscious of intellectual endeavors. Purists argue that to philosophize implicitly, is not to philosophize at all. Henry therefore unearths a most horrific find: a fragmented philosophy "marked by deep fissures, wide cleavages, and oppositional constructions of binaries or dualities such as spirit/matter, spirit/history, premodern/modern, poeticism/historicism, race/class. . . conscious of itself primarily in part and only rarely as a whole" (p. 13). But Afro-Caribbean philosophy is, however, a minor discourse, hidden in nonphilosophical discourses. As an "intertextually embedded discursive practice. . . indelibly marked by the forces of an imperial history" (pp. 1-2), it invites a revision of the Western definition of philosophy as an autonomous subject. What Afro-Caribbean philosophy shows is that the discipline of philosophy is neither absolute nor pure but is rather an interdisciplinary discourse whose interrelation with other discourses allow for the inclusion of implicit philosophizing, even while its major task is the examination of particular types of questions.

In Caliban's Reason, Henry finds that Afro-Caribbean philosophy is paradoxically anti-Afro. It is, at best, the least Creolized of Caribbean forms, and its African aspects are the most invisible. This absence encapsulates the onto-existential chaos of Caliban's Reason—the problem of identity, the problem of definition, the problem of essence; for what is Afro-Caribbean philosophy if not Africanized sensibilities in Caribbean intellection? If we presume the original essence of Caliban—"nature without nurture," "senses without the benefit of the mind," "nature divorced from grace," "born to slavery and not to freedom," ¹ then Caliban's Reason is Eurocentric thought—if nothing else, it is "denatured nurture," "mind without the benefit of the senses," "nature misled by grace" and "doomed to freedom by neocolonialism." These are the consequences of the acquisition of Prospero's language and of Caliban's Eurocentric rhetoric: "I shall be wise hereafter," ² for in "achieving wisdom" Caliban experiences a simultaneous unconscious loss of self and acquisition of self-hate. This self-erasure, Henry notes, can be seen in colonization's impact on African discourses: "The devaluation and rejection of their truth claims by Europeans and Euro-educated Africans . . . their hybridization as they absorbed European contents and adopted European languages as media of expression . . . and in addition to Arabic languages, African discourses developed writing capabilities in European languages" (p. 44).

The consequent delegitimizing of African/a thought is paralleled by the implicit philosophizing in Caribbean intellectual tradition. This style of implicit philosophizing (embedded in literary, religious, ideological, and political discourses) coupled with the polarity of historicist and poeticist traditions produce the disunity and fragmentation that makes Afro-Caribbean philosophy "discourses in exile," and renders it "an uninhabited island." Henry's phasing of Caribbean philosophy is a sustained movement away from the spiritual idealism of Africa and is representative of Caliban's "loss of self." It is this "loss of self" that makes the application of traditional African philosophy to Afro-Caribbean intellection difficult. For example, in chapter 2, entitled "C. L. R. James, African, and Afro-Caribbean Philosophy," Henry shows that James's ontology was one that saw history...