Al-Aqsa Flood, the Racism of Western Philosophical Thought: Philosophy’s Right of Departure

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other resistance factions in the Gaza Strip launched a military operation named “Al-Aqsa Flood.” This military action, undertaken by Hamas, was presented as a response to a series of Israeli attacks and what were described as brutal practices, carried out amid widespread global Zionist support and regional Arab silence.

In response to what they described as Israel’s criminal attacks, a statement of solidarity was issued on November 1, 2023, signed by hundreds of philosophers from North America, Latin America, and Europe. Among the signatories were Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), Étienne Balibar (Kingston University), Donatella Della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore), Nancy Fraser (The New School for Social Research), Eduardo Mendieta (Pennsylvania State University), and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London). In their joint statement, they expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemned what they characterized as the massacre being carried out by Israel in Gaza.

On November 15, 2023, the philosopher Seyla Benhabib[1] responded to the statement condemning Israel, which had been signed by hundreds of philosophers. In an open letter, she described Hamas’s actions as what she called “the pornography of violence” against Israel and argued that Israel should not be regarded as a settler-colonial state.

The following day, November 16, 2023, a statement was issued bearing the signatures of Jürgen Habermas,[2] Rainer Forst,[3] Klaus Günther,[4] and Nicole Deitelhoff.[5] In it, they held Hamas responsible for committing a massacre against the Jewish state and argued that Israel’s military response constituted an act of self-defense and was therefore morally justified.

The questions that may be raised in this context are the following: Why did prominent philosophers, representing the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School, take the initiative to condemn Hamas? How did this condemnation escape the frameworks that were built upon ethical values such as justice, fairness, democracy, and human rights? Furthermore, why is it precisely the Frankfurt School that has taken the lead in the movement to criminalize and condemn Hamas? Is this condemnation an objective position dictated by rationality and the requirements of legitimacy, or is it merely a racist act historically embedded within the structures and positions of Western philosophy? Faced with the Israeli criminal act whose features certain Western philosophical figures attempt to obscure, does philosophy have the right to depart in search of a geography of peace?

These questions seem to compel us to investigate the roots of Western philosophical thought’s self-representation, beginning with its earliest foundational premises. Western historians, when discussing the migration of philosophy, reduced this movement to a central trajectory that did not extend beyond the boundaries of a single continent. In doing so, the elements of Western fullness became absorbed within purely self-referential and elevated images of identity. The West relied on a mythical justification to strip the process of philosophical migration of its interactive dialectical dimension, employing the Greek myth of Prometheus. Prometheus stole the sacred fire/light from Zeus, the supreme god, and bestowed it upon humanity. The West received this divine light, illuminating the skies of knowledge above it while rescuing itself from the darkness beneath. The Christian consciousness identified with this act of giving, reflecting a luminous moment that embodied the spirit of Christian generosity in the universe. Religion thus became a discourse within philosophy—or, more precisely, religion came to reside within the very folds of philosophy.

However, Western religious-philosophical discourse soon rebelled against the values of harmony that had shaped the elements of the Greek cosmos. When Western philosophical discourse demonstrated its epistemological and scientific superiority, a disruption occurred in the relational order between human beings and nature. Consequently, humanity departed from the sphere of cosmic harmony and emerged as a cognitive power that possessed the secrets and resources of nature. Such a sense of superiority was absent from ancient philosophies, which regarded themselves as an element integrated with the natural order and the spirit of the cosmos.

From its beginnings, Western philosophical thought was founded, according to this critique, upon an unethical triad:

1. Exclusion — the exclusion of the civilizational contributions of other peoples;
2. Isolationism — the separation of the geographical West from the other geographies of the world;
3. Subjectivism — the construction of a mythological, religiously and epistemologically elevated self-image.

This Western triad, the argument continues, is what led the world toward wars, killings, famines, epidemics, poverty, torture centers, colonial systems, and the implantation of foreign settler entities within the territories of states possessing legitimate sovereignty under international law.

First: The Philosophical Turn: From Harmony to Violence

1- The Greek Principle of Philosophical Harmony

“It appears that in all cultures the mythical period is characterized by a high esteem for harmony, which is equated with the primordial state of cosmological and social order.”[6] Therefore, Greek, Chinese, and Indian philosophies built their civilizations upon the idea of harmony and concord.

Harmony resides within existence, bestowing upon it splendor and embracing its elements, thereby imprinting upon it an eternal tranquility. The order of natural harmony strikes musical bells, whose rhythms bring repose to the souls of plants, celestial bodies, human beings, and animals. For, in “the heavenly bodies being large objects in motion, must produce music. The perfection of the celestial world requires that this music be harmonious, it is hidden from our ears only because it is always.”[7] Harmony ignites “Perception of an aesthetic effect through the medium of the senses, for example, the hearing of a set of musical sounds.” – (Perception d’un effet esthétique par l’intermédiaire des sens, par exemple, l’audition d’un ensemble de sons musicaux).[8]

In Greek mythology, Harmonia (Ἁρμονία)[9] is the goddess of harmony, concord, and musical rhythm. The term also signifies “the agreement of sounds,” as sounds, despite their diverse rhythms, embody a harmonious and balanced composition. Harmonia is a symbolic embodiment of a harmonious life, in which moments unfold through the fluidity of speech and action, accompanied by the mellifluous musical tone that inhabits life itself. It represents “the apotheosis of harmony in life which is also displayed in musical euphony.”[10]

Harmonia permeated the worlds of mythical beings (Isis and Osiris…) as well as the worlds of philosophical and intellectual figures (Pythagoras and Plato…). It transformed beauty into musical and poetic melodies. Since ancient civilizations shared the values of cosmic musical harmony, they embodied this principle in their philosophical and epistemological sciences.

After learning from the priests the divine theory of music, Pythagoras began contemplating the laws of harmony in nature. He eventually encountered blacksmiths shaping a piece of metal with their hammers, and his musical sensibility was drawn to the interwoven sounds that rose and fell—some sharp, others deep and resonant. These sounds revealed the musical interval, which reflects the difference in pitch between two tones. This interval, arising from harmonic combinations, was produced by large hammers and smaller tools. The enchantment of consonance and the blending of sounds led Pythagoras to discover the diatonic scale, after he realized that the celestial spheres were moved by musical keys as they revolved.

The celestial spheres move through the heavens, producing sounds whose rhythms correspond to the motion and velocity of each heavenly body. The harmonious music of the spheres grows ever more exalted as a planet recedes farther from the Earth. Pythagoras associated the natural cosmos—or, more precisely, the movements of the seven celestial bodies—with the harmony of musical resonance, demonstrating this relationship through precise mathematical ratios. He maintained that ” Mathematics is the established method by which the Good is made manifest and conserved in its immutability.”[11] From the Pythagorean perspective, the natural cosmos never ceases to dance, sing, and perform celestial melodies ordered according to the language of numbers.

Ancient Greek philosophy grounded its relationship with nature in a contemplative disposition rooted in love and wonder. It listened to the pulse of the cosmos, embracing the unity of its elements and the interconnectedness of its forces. Gazing upon the celestial bodies, it was drawn to their movements, magnitude, and velocity with profound admiration. The Greek intellect became captivated by the majesty and mystery of the universe, identifying itself with the harmony of its elements and the interactive forces governing all existing things—trees, oceans, inanimate matter, animals, and plants alike. And just as the cosmic order proceeds according to precise, rhythmic laws, much like the coordinated functions of the organs of a living body, so too were epistemic and ethical values—such as justice, goodness, peace, happiness, and political order—guided by the dynamic proportions and musical harmony inherent in the natural world.

It is impossible to speak of philosophical harmony in Greek thought without referring to Plato’s conception of justice and its relation to the human soul. The harmony of the soul is the embodiment of justice within the city; in the absence of such justice, corruption spreads, and the political and moral foundations of the polis collapse. The purpose of justice is to secure the highest good for all members of the city; otherwise, the principle of harmony within the soul is disrupted. Such harmony depends upon the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. Justice is the virtue that bestows harmony upon the soul, for it distributes functions throughout the city so that its social classes each fulfill their proper roles, allowing its constituent parts to operate in structural and functional harmony. As Plato argues, “political stability is best achieved when the various parts of a polis each work for the good of the polis as a whole.”[12]

2- The Chaos of Violence in Western Philosophy

As philosophy took root in the geographical and intellectual landscape of the West, both its historical context and its vision of existence and nature underwent a profound transformation. Conflict became the defining motif of the Western philosophical tradition: conflict against nature—”to make ourselves, as it were, the masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes); conflict against humanity—”man is a wolf to man” (Hobbes); cunning and deception—”the end justifies the means” (Machiavelli); power and survival—”the survival of the fittest” (Darwin); the instincts of death and destruction (Freud); and the protection of borders through the distinction between “friend and enemy” (Carl Schmitt).

It was within this intellectual tradition that Saint Augustine (354–430 CE) formulated the theory of the Just War, establishing the moral, religious, and political principles that should govern the resort to war. For this reason, Augustine has often been described as the “father of Just War theory in the West.”[13]

It is true that the idea of just war can be traced to extensions within the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, as well as to ancient civilizations such as those of Babylon, Egypt, India, and China. Yet the approach that introduced a new dimension to the concept of just war is found in the philosophy of Augustine, who adopted a position distinct from that of Socrates and Plato. War, for Augustine, is not the responsibility of individuals but rather the responsibility of the state. This Platonic conception leads to a justification of “the persistence of violence for the sake of organizing the state in a chaotic world”; the concern of Greek philosophers was therefore the violence of the state, aimed at saving the Greek polis from external attacks and the horrors of enslavement. What distinguishes the Augustinian theory of just war, however, is its deep grounding in Christian thought. Consequently, describing Augustine as “the father of the Christian doctrine of just war” is part of an attempt to establish a practical Christian moral justification for the wars that Europe experienced throughout its history. It can therefore be argued that “all Western just war traditions after the fifth century CE, in both their Christian and secular forms, derive their roots not from Plato or Aristotle, nor even from the early Church Fathers, but from Augustine.” The significance and influence that Augustine’s theory of war acquired stem from his ability to fuse philosophical discourse with Judeo-Christian thought within a framework of religious and emotional conviction. This enabled his ideas to penetrate vast religious spheres in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, “no writer contributed more to the development of Christian attitudes toward war, violence, and military service than Saint Augustine.”[14]

Augustine’s thesis begins from the premise that war is a form of divine destiny and a test from God. Despite its brutality, war ultimately produces a greater good that benefits humanity, for it contributes to correcting the courses of human lives and enables the righteous, upon their death, to pass into a better existence. These righteous individuals recognize that they are merely instruments employed by the Creator. As for the wicked who perish in war, they are nothing more than cheap and accursed pieces from which humanity has been relieved. Augustine views all acts through which God engages human beings, “including wars, as manifestations of His love for His human creatures. Accordingly, it follows for Augustine that all men – and particularly righteous men – stand to benefit from war: God, in His providence, constantly uses war to correct and chasten human wrongdoing.”[15]

War, understood as a divine punishment, targets the conduct of transgressors and corrupt officials within the institutions of the state who mismanage public affairs. Accordingly, “The just war is the punishment imposed upon a state and upon its rulers when their behavior is so aggressive or avaricious that it violates even the norms of temporal justice.”[16] Thus, whether war involves individuals, groups, or political entities, it ultimately remains a means of punitive discipline, aimed at transforming a guilty will into a repentant one. And so long as this transition does not cease, and the dispositions of the wicked continue to produce wrongdoing, “the total avoidance of war or its effects is a practical impossibility for all men, including for the righteous.”[17]Therefore, the righteous have no choice but to submit to the will of the City of God, for “wars which arise from human passion cannot harm the eternal well-being of Gid, nor even hurt his saints; for in the trial of their patience, and the chastening of their spirit, and in bearing fatherly correction, they are rather benefited than injured.”[18] These are wars worthy of praise and obedience, because they are infused with divine sanctification. The ruler, therefore, must embrace with a broad and confident heart the conviction that the wars ordained by God are ultimately directed toward the benefit of His righteous servants.

3- Disciplining the Body for the Purposes of War

In Western Christian religious mythology, the relationship is founded upon pain and suffering. The body is shaped in the fire of ritual and forged within a framework of discipline and obedience. The Church and the monastery function as spaces where pain is inscribed upon the body through the exercise of power and coercion. Within these settings, the body is conditioned, and its very essence is formed under punitive clerical constraints, grounded in an Augustinian idea that holds that “instruction is achieved through exposure to affliction.”[19]

The intensification of the drama of suffering represents a form of identification with the sufferings of Christ. The purpose of pain is to cultivate endurance and to instill acceptance of the necessity of self-inflicted violence upon the body, as an attempt to destroy desires, passions, and inclinations, and to subject the soul to divine authority. In this sense, the Christian believer comes to accept the confession of sins and transgressions, prepares to endure torture and punitive punishments, and becomes willing to participate in wars against heretics, unbelievers, and atheists.

Christianity presented its teachings on the basis of the use and justification of violence, the embodiment of obedience, the promulgation of judicial laws, engagement in doctrinal and Crusading wars, and the establishment of the Inquisition. Violence, torture, and killing were thus carried out in the name of God. In this context, it is legitimate to raise, with William D. Barrick, the question: “ Should a Christian be a member of the military?”[20] This question is significant insofar as it concerns the identification of the Christian body with violence—or, more precisely, the unity of violence and the Christian body.

The shaping of the body according to the divine will authorizes its involvement in a succession of bloody wars that reason itself cannot justify. This contributed to Europe’s engagement in a series of religious wars from the sixteenth through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century. During these conflicts, religious and humanitarian moral principles receded, replaced by new religious paradigms founded upon intolerance, the rejection of dialogue and cooperation, and the cultivation of hatred, resentment, vengeance, fanaticism, and persecution.

Behind a religious façade, Europe justified atrocities committed beyond its own borders, in Asia, the Americas, and Africa. It exterminated millions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and committed similar acts of violence across Africa and Asia, while engaging in excessive and systematic practices of violence and torture.

Second: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment as a Veil for Racism

The philosophical values that illuminated Europe’s intellectual horizon were proclaimed as being for humanity and directed toward humanity. Yet humanity itself became alienated under the authority of a violent religious discourse that assumed a secular and rational guise. The West’s new intellectual and political values were thus constructed upon intolerant Christian beliefs and an exclusionary biological conception of race. Colonial violence intensified and expanded beyond the geographical boundaries of the West, manifesting itself in horrific forms of torture, killing, and genocide. Political and social charters concerning human rights were, in this view, only ostensibly humanitarian; beneath their humanitarian appearance lay an intolerant religious orientation that rejected dialogue among civilizations and the culture of difference.

Western injustice conceals itself behind a secular, rational mantle that has assumed disturbing dimensions and dramatic forms in its treatment of “seemingly very different peoples, race provided a way to understand and explain these differences.”[21] A reconciliation thus emerged between reason and racism, and “modern philosophical doctrines developed together in a context shaped by conquest, colonialism, and slavery.”[22]

It is true that Western philosophy constructed its grand systems upon ethical values. However, these are values that flourish only within a liberal environment structured around a central triad: reason, secularism, and human rights. From a Western perspective, it is inconceivable that such values could be established outside the framework of the Western philosophical demos, which rests upon sharp metaphysical binaries: the civilized self versus the savage other.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) maintained that civilizations lying beyond the geographical boundaries of the West lacked a social contract capable of legitimizing their political existence. In his view, savagery remained the defining characteristic of a natural condition whose fundamental features were war and violence. Consequently, “for the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.”[23] The structure of the demos, before being an exclusionary political practice, may thus be understood as a religious discourse imbued with intolerance, racism, and the negation of the Other. Such a discourse targets “a wild and racialized space, marked as cursed by a theological blight, an unholy land.”[24] It is directed specifically against “all savages, whether Africans, Native Americans, or other non-European dark-skinned peoples.”[25]

Racist theory and colonial theory are interconnected in terms of their objectives and aims. Racist theory is founded upon the idea of “the systematic doubt concerning the humanity of the other, which through the passage of time is unjustifiably elevated to the status of truth.”[26] Colonial theory, as a dominant epistemological practice and a destructive practice toward all alternative modes of thought, sought by every means to intensify the concept of racism philosophically. In his work Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, David Hume (1711–1776) states: “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.”[27]

It is noteworthy that Hume referred to species rather than racial difference, a distinction that falls within “a more general taxonomic division than race, which does not allow for interbreeding.”[28] On this basis, it can be argued that the racist philosophy advanced by Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Hume, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Baruch Spinoza … “draws such strong differences based on race.”[29]

According to this irrational strategy of racial alignment, which is rooted in an elitist ethnocentric structure, Kant advanced the thesis that the Black Other was inferior to the white human being. Over a period of forty years (1759–1796), Kant addressed the relationship between anthropology and physical geography, enabling him to classify the various human races. He concluded that the white race “possesses within itself all the forces and talents that stimulate” the development of sciences, arts, and knowledge—achievements that qualify it to receive praise and to be worthy of appreciation and respect. Kant classified marginalized peoples according to their supposed dispositions: Africans, he argued, possessed a natural inclination toward accepting slavery, while Native Americans were characterized by an inclination toward laziness, a reluctance to learn, and a lack of affection and love. On the basis of this racial theory, the racist dimension of Enlightenment philosophy maintained that the difference between the white human being and the Black being was profound, both in terms of skin color and intellectual capacities. This difference, according to this view, was attributed to the fact that the inhabitants of Africa lived in “barbarism and slavery in a land which has not furnished them with any integral ingredient of culture.”[30]

We can therefore understand that the Enlightenment philosophy carried with it a discourse that illuminated the darkness of its local context, enlightened its historical trajectory, and radiated values of equality, justice, reason, and truth. Yet, at the same time, it revealed a spirit of hostility toward the Other—the non-European and the non-Christian. This hostility coincided with the rise of Nazism, which came to defend the concept of pure racial blood and to wage a campaign of persecution, torture, killing, and imprisonment against other races.

Before resigning from the university presidency, Heidegger delivered a series of lectures in which he demonstrated that his philosophical thought revolved around the “a positive historical force,”[31] an idea he drew from Nietzsche. This stood in contrast to “there are human beings and human groups (negroes, for instance Xhosa) who have no history.”[32] According to Heidegger, the foundation of human existence is its cultural heritage and intellectual apprehensions as embodied in history. The West attained its level of civilizational transcendence only when it linked blood with civilization, the self with ontology, and connected “relation of human beings to being itself.”[33] In this respect, the Nazi Heidegger converges, at the level of political theorization of racism, with Nietzsche, who “defended both slavery and colonialism and was very pejorative about blacks.”[34] Bernasconi further argues that “Nietzsche advocated the creation of a pure, blonde, European race, through breeding—he was a racial eugenicist.”[35]

Contemporary philosophy has not been distant from this racist tendency. In his book The Law of Peoples, the American philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) reuses the racist legacy inherited from Enlightenment philosophers. He argues that relations of solidarity and cooperation among peoples cannot be built outside a specific political framework—namely, outside the political and social principles of liberal theory. Peoples that stand at a distance from this political orientation can be classified according to Rawls’s categories as either liberal, hierarchical, or outlaw/tyrannical. In this sense, Enlightenment philosophy has betrayed the human legacy with regard to moral universalism, and this betrayal has extended into contemporary philosophy, which has come to carry within it Liberal racism that “was an effective ideological complement to the project of colonial expansion.”[36]

The Al-Aqsa Flood: The Harshness of German Philosophical Discourse

In the aftermath of the Al-Aqsa Flood, leading figures of the Frankfurt School declared the Palestinian people to be subject to condemnation through direct political statements, in which the authors assumed moral responsibility for their discourse of denunciation. What is striking is that the signatories of the statement belong to the second generation (Habermas) and the third generation (Rainer Forst, Seyla Benhabib, Klaus Günther) of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

Jürgen Habermas, along with Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther, and Nicole Deitelhoff, expressed their explicit condemnation of Hamas. The group of signatories began their political statement by declaring that “The current situation created by Hamas’ extreme atrocity.”[37] Through this opening, the statement presented Israel’s conduct as legitimate and innocent, while reducing the violence, killings, and destruction to a bloody record attributed solely to Hamas. From the outset, the statement adopts a highly intensified and confrontational rhetorical language against Hamas, portraying Israel as the victim of an attack. It ultimately concludes that Israel, within the framework of the legitimate right to self-defense, was compelled to respond against Hamas, thereby rendering its military action morally justified. The statement argues that “The Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back. How this retaliation, which is justified in principle.”[38]

However, the concern troubling the signatories of the statement is why sympathy for Hamas has expanded among official positions, protest movements, and global peace movements. In reality, the statement finds no reasonable justification for this form of declared solidarity; instead, it attempts to convince global public opinion through the idea of antisemitism. It argues that “Israel’s actions in no way justify anti-Semitic reactions.”[39] The world, therefore, must accept Israel’s actions regardless of their magnitude; otherwise, any opposing stance could be classified as antisemitic.

The rhetorical structure of the statement lacked the very values that the philosophical discourse of the Frankfurt School has long defended. The statement abandoned the principles of ethical communication and normative justification, retreating instead into a fanatic political-religious discourse that moves through the shadows of values. The second and third generations defended a politically ambiguous statement, evasive in the management of its positions, and disguised in its defense of a colonial legitimacy governed by power, contempt, and humiliation.

Not far removed from this position, we find the philosopher Seyla Benhabib aligning herself with Habermas and his colleagues’ statement regarding the condemnation of Hamas as an “exterminationist organization, whose Charter endorses the destruction of the State of Israel.”[40] Benhabib likewise adopts the same logic employed in Habermas’s statement—a logic of unethical mockery—by drawing a comparison between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in order to strip Zionism of its racist character. She argues that “Zionism is not a form of racism, though the actions and institutions of the State of Israel towards the Palestinian people of the occupied West Bank, the refugee camps and, of course, Gaza, are discriminatory on the basis of nationality, not color.”[41]

Seyla Benhabib, through her philosophical works, has consistently addressed the question of reconciliation between the framework of human rights and the issue of sovereignty. However, this reconciliation is subjected to theoretical tensions due to an enthusiastic and emotional response toward Israel, thereby undermining any attempt to construct a balanced reconciliation grounded in justice and fairness. Benhabib attempts to exclude Hamas from the sphere of international legitimacy and to place it among the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Through this biased logic, she strips Hamas of the status of a resistance movement and holds it responsible for crimes committed against Israelis.

Within this broader context of the conflict, the following question can be raised: Why did representatives of the Frankfurt School announce a campaign of condemnation against Hamas?

In reality, what concerns the figures of critical philosophy are two issues:

• The first issue is that, at this turning point in the conflict, the resistance demonstrated military intelligence and ethical values toward prisoners, which earned it global sympathy.
• The second issue is that the collective atrocities committed on German soil have confronted Germans with the magnitude of the historical shame that remains attached to them. Therefore, the leading figures of the Frankfurt School attempted to express profound sympathy—not toward all groups that have been subjected to the brutality of violence, but only toward their Zionist product. Germany, accordingly, has a duty to incorporate this product into the German liberal demos, so that it may receive emotional sympathy and legal support protecting its existence. For “It is intolerable that Jews in Germany are once again exposed to threats to life and limb and have to fear physical violence on the streets.”[42]

We are therefore confronted with a philosophical discourse that, to the same extent that it is imbued with the values of the enlightened Western ideal of humanity, also carries within it values directed against the marginalized human being. This dichotomy, which takes the form of a contradiction, remains a defining feature of the international policies pursued by Western politicians and intellectuals. Such policies do not conform to the standards required for constructing a balanced ethical universalism capable of establishing new human relations whose ultimate aim is global peace.

Philosophy has deviated from its humanistic values and objectives, because “the bankruptcy of world politics is essentially the bankruptcy of philosophy.”[43] A new philosophical discourse has emerged, one that justifies exclusion, contempt, hostility, the establishment of torture centers, and the criminalization of gender, race, color, and language. Hostility has thus become a theory based on imaginary representations that reinforce the distinction between a pure Western self and a culturally different and civilizationally rejected Other.

Political theory, which rests on the justification of conflict, destruction, killing, criminal acts, and wars, has become morally and intellectually acceptable. In this sense, “universalism, which is nothing but an aggressive imperialism characterized by a dominant strategy in favor of the national interests of the most developed countries.”[44] Unfortunately, “the United Nations is hardly anything more than an agora without a polis.”[45]

Third: Deconstructing Racism and Building Resistance

Philosophy emerged under conditions characterized by freedom, justice, democracy, and rights. It flourishes in environments that allow it to rise and achieve its highest expression, and when it is granted the duty of appreciation and respect, its wings become a refuge for political and ethical values. However, when the conditions necessary for its existence disappear, philosophy departs like a rebellious and angry bird that never considers returning; it leaves in search of a place that can restore its ethical and humanistic radiance.

Are we speaking of the departure of philosophy as a historical inevitability governed by scientific laws, or is philosophy liberated from the constraints of historical dialectics? And if departure is linked to place, can Africa be considered a potential structure for receiving philosophy? Can philosophy find its home on African soil?

An African legend tells of Demane, a simple man who goes into the forest in search of firewood. Before leaving for the forest, he places his sister Demazana in a cave and warns her not to open the door to strangers, because cannibals lurk everywhere. In the evening, when Demane returns, he stands behind the door and sings a coded song, and his sister quickly rushes to open the door.

One day, the cannibal went to a priest seeking help so that he could change his voice and make it sound like Demane’s. The priest advised him to burn his throat with a hot piece of iron. The cannibal returned to Demazana, stood behind the door, and began to sing. Believing that the voice was her brother’s, Demazana opened the door, only for the cannibal to seize her and carry her away to his tribe.[46]

African peoples warn their children against strangers because they slip into homes in disguise, abducting inhabitants, enslaving them, and killing them. They employ deception, cunning, and manipulation; they violate bodies, erase traces, and plunder places. This is what occurred with Western colonial invasion, which violated African thought, culture, language, and human beings. The Western colonizer seized African rationality and exploited its natural resources. It practiced the destruction of the African model and pushed it outside the civilizational order. Faced with the reality of Western conquest of the African human being, we may ask: Has the story of the Demane and Demazana myth died narratively, or does it continue to carry elements of resistance?

The myth did not stop at recounting the remaining details of the story. Instead, it hastened to reveal aspects of African human intelligence. Demazana recognized a strategy that enabled her to scatter ashes along the path so that her brother could find her. The brother followed the trail and discovered his sister bound inside a bag. He quickly freed her and rescued her from the bag, replacing her with a beehive. The cannibal returned, starving with hunger. He opened the bag, only for a swarm of bees to burst out with furious speed, stinging every part of the cannibal’s body.

he myth of resistance among African people crystallized in the form of a critical discourse known as “postcolonialism.” This discourse reveals an unscientific conception held by the West toward the culturally different Other. African philosophical discourse took upon itself the task of exposing the racist assumptions embedded within Western philosophical systems, while at the same time constructing a self-identity by “affirming the universality of its philosophical achievement.”[47] This means that African philosophy was compelled to provide “an exposition of the synonymy between racism and white supremacy through a philosophical critique of a-historical conceptions of racism,”[48] while simultaneously seeking to construct a philosophical discourse outside a historical-anthropological framework, whose aim was to “provide a philosophical account of racism ……………………. throughout the book is that a correct understanding of racism is necessarily historical.”[49]

African philosophical discourse is characterized as a discourse of liberation and resistance: liberation from the grip of Euro-American global domination, and resistance to the grand narratives that historically justify inequality and injustice. The West cannot be understood objectively except through its perception of the Other; therefore, the strategic choice of African philosophy rests on deconstructing the theoretical structure of Western racism, as a philosophy that is “has itself been complicit and continues to be either explicitly or tacitly involved in the construction of the theoretical edifice of racism and racist thinking.”[50]

The stakes of African philosophy lie in confronting and dismantling global racism before constructing a universal ethical discourse. African philosophy holds that engaging in the construction of a philosophical horizon requires beginning with a critical examination of concrete reality, particularly in its dimensions related to resistance, liberation struggles, and local forms of knowledge production. Tsenay Serequeberhan states in his book The Critique of Eurocentrism and the Practice of African Philosophy:[51] “the constructive practice of African philosophy involves the systematic study of indigenous knowledge, covering both practical and theoretical know-how.”[52]

In this way, African philosophy has outlined the three pillars of philosophical practice, which are as follows: Critique of Western ethnophilosophical racism, Critique of local theoretical and practical forms of knowledge, The construction of a philosophical vision.

Kwasi Wiredu,[53] in his work How Not to Compare African Thought with Western Thought, points to the danger of the comparative approach adopted by the West, whereby it compares pre-scientific African thought—grounded in religion and spiritual beliefs—with scientific thought. Through such comparisons, Western thought concludes that African thought, anthropologically speaking, represents the base of the hierarchy of civilizational, scientific, analytical, and technological thinking. This is an intensely colonial and deeply contemptuous view. By contrast, the epistemological and ethical foundation requires beginning from a methodological principle concerned with understanding how different modes of thought operate. Rationality is not absent from traditional forms of thinking. On this basis, Wiredu argues that African oral traditions require critical reconstruction in order to uncover the philosophical dimensions embedded within them. Philosophy cannot be separated from the sociocultural structure of a community. However, “instead of seeing the basic, non-scientific characteristics of African traditional thought as typifying traditional thought in general, Western anthropologists and others besides have mistakenly tended to take them as defining a peculiarly African way of thinking with unfortunate effects.”[54] What the West has failed to recognize—or has deliberately chosen to overlook—is that rationality is not an exclusive characteristic of Western thought, just as superstition and spiritual beliefs are not defining features of African societies.

Fourth: African Ethical Universalism

African philosophy did not construct its discourse upon the symbolism of taking and giving as represented in the myth of Prometheus. African philosophy did not receive the light of divine knowledge, nor did it obtain external epistemic commandments beyond the boundaries of its own cultural framework.

Peoples across the world communicate with one another on the basis of an awareness of difference and the search for what is universally human. The aim of philosophical thinking, therefore, cannot be confined to engaging with local heritage while disregarding contemporary philosophical developments. Within the dialectic of openness, African philosophy has sought to examine the cultures of other peoples in order to draw upon epistemological resources in “areas of logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, areas that were not addressed in their traditional culture… It is only in this way, I believe, that a tradition of modern philosophy can flourish in Africa.”[55]

In reality, the postcolonial philosophical horizon of universality calls for viewing modernity beyond the intolerant anthropological dualism based on the idea of pure reason versus savage reason. This mode of thinking does not concern itself with the presence of universal logical and ethical values. Ethnocentric Western sovereignty, however, allows for the coexistence of contradiction at the level of applying values: a proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time. The organic foundations of universality require logical and ethical harmony between the concept and geographical sovereignty, given that “that certain logical and ethical concerns are necessarily common to all human cultures simply by virtue of the fact that they are human.”[56]

Cultural universality extends into the depth of language, and language is the dwelling place of culture. Discursive communication reveals the value of moral obligation among societies that conform to the principle of respect and concern for the interests of others. This is what Kwasi Wiredu calls “empathetic neutrality.” Discursive interaction establishes a universality of understanding among different cultures. From this interactive perspective, one can distinguish a particular universality manifested in local, contingent norms, traditions, customs, and tastes, and a cultural universality that appears in science, logic, and all fields related to the humanities—whether at the level of intellectual productive capacities or communicative skills.

Cultural universality extends into the depth of language, and language is the dwelling place of culture. Discursive communication reveals the value of moral obligation among communities that adhere to the principle of respect and concern for the interests of others. This is what Kwasi Wiredu calls “empathetic neutrality.” Discursive interaction establishes a universality of understanding among different cultures. From this interactive perspective, one can identify a particular universality manifested in local, contingent norms, traditions, customs, and tastes, and a cultural universality that appears in science, logic, and all fields related to the humanities, whether at the level of intellectual productive capacities or communicative skills.

African philosophy defends universal norms and validity claims beyond geopolitical interests and beyond a theory of contempt, because the misuse of transcultural standards amounts to a misunderstanding of the human dimensions of humanity. Norms become erroneous when they are no longer ethically justified, and error lies within the misguided fragments of an instrumental universality. Western philosophers must recognize that their culture is part of world culture, not the only culture or the superior one, because such a flawed logic cannot construct a balanced universality that respects the cultures of all peoples. What deserves advocacy is collective engagement in a public communicative dialogue among the peoples of the world in order to formulate a shared conception of postcolonial ethical universality. The West’s withdrawal from this collective dialogue among global cultures perpetuates the principle of colonial domination and leads to what the African philosopher Paulin Hountondji[57] calls “theoretical captivity”—meaning that Western theory imprisons the cultures of others, depriving them of their capacity to think and express their own perspectives, while diminishing their participation in the construction of a universal human order.

Hountondji’s thesis is based on the idea of a critical accompaniment of universality. Accordingly, he reconstructs the philosophical debate surrounding the concept of universality by arguing that universality is not an exclusively Western achievement, but rather a global undertaking in which all civilizations and cultures participate. Universality is an unfinished project, dependent upon open discussions among different societies. Therefore, values and norms are neither final nor absolute; rather, they are collective constructions produced through discursive engagement. The fundamental challenge facing moral philosophy lies in the possibility of “building decentralized spaces of discussion devoted to the search for and construction of universal norms at the discursive level.”[58]

Gaza: Toward Global Justice

African political and philosophical consciousness has enabled a critical deconstruction of Western racism through an awareness of its dangers. Alongside this process of deconstruction, it has sought to construct a shared human universality grounded in the values of fairness and justice. This ethical commitment led South Africa to bring a case before the International Court of Justice, challenging what it described as acts of genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

The step taken by South Africa falls within its philosophical vision, one that affirms humanity as such—human beings as human beings—beyond racist frameworks and systems of injustice. Gyekye defends the universality of philosophical ideas on the basis that human beings, regardless of their geographical and cultural affiliations, encounter shared human values. Human nature tends toward the adoption of certain values or their rejection, and the problems addressed by philosophers are problems of human values, because “human problems are, by their very nature, human.”[59] Accordingly, the human commonality is concerned with values that transcend closed local cultural products and embrace dimensions that establish open universal values, such as friendship, happiness, respect, and the avoidance of suffering. “Any human society, for example, that fails to observe an ethic of respect for human life cannot survive as a human society.”[60] Therefore, human nature cannot be invoked to justify or legitimize ethical violations, because universal values are founded upon a fundamental principle: the power of persuasion.

Indeed, South Africa embodied the force of persuasion and argued that Israel had committed acts constituting war crimes. Persuasion, before being expressed through legal texts, is an inner conviction rooted in the force of justice. South Africa experienced a historical reality similar to that experienced by the Palestinian people; therefore, its recourse to the International Court of Justice was not based on geopolitical or economic interests, but rather on the pursuit of overcoming injustice within the spaces of justice.

In this context, Kwame Gyekye attempted to approach the issue through two concepts: “essential universality,” which is based on values inherent in human nature and the essence of humanity. Thus, “essential universality appeals to certain fundamental values of humanity.”[61] The second concept, “contingent universality,” refers to a cultural or institutional value or practice that acquires global significance and status and is adopted by other peoples. Its aim is to disseminate cultural and human values throughout the world, regardless of their geographical or cultural origins. In this sense, contingent universality is “a rationalization or explanation of the dominance of ideas, values, and institutions formulated by certain peoples or cultures in particular historical periods.”[62]

South Africa has exposed the mask of ethnocentric sovereignty, which allows for the acceptance of contradictions in the application of values, whereas an ethical virtue cannot be true and false at the same time. Moral values require a logical and ethical harmony between concepts and geographical sovereignty, on the basis that “certain logical and ethical concerns are necessarily common to all human cultures simply by virtue of the fact that they are human.”[63]

By Way of Conclusion

For a long time, the Western philosophical tradition, in both its racist and violent forms, dominated the intellectual landscape. It reshaped the division of the world according to a new vision based on the principle of “I as the center and the Other as the margin.” To consolidate this racism, it employed symbolic violence aimed at demeaning the cultures of other peoples. This ethically corrupted version was not characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy or the early Asian philosophical traditions.

The pre-Socratic philosophical system had brought together humanity, knowledge, and society within a harmonious note aligned with the spirit of the cosmos, resembling what Heraclitus described as “the strings of the bow.” Eastern philosophy, in turn, moved toward constructing the world through bonds of love and affinity that unite all peoples of the world.

Western racism remained present throughout history, appearing in different historical contexts until it came to be represented as international legitimacy, concealing behind it tendencies toward killing, destruction, torture, and punishment. International legitimacy became a protective shield safeguarding the technically superior white, blond man, granting him licenses to perpetrate injustice and aggression. It began to distribute the mechanisms of racial discrimination generously according to the demands of global power structures. Western Enlightenment philosophy formulated the concept of legitimacy within a geographical framework shaped by an obsession with power. Despite the conceptual and ethical void embedded within this notion, it nevertheless remained a refuge for philosophers seeking to promote values of justice, fairness, democracy, and human rights upon its foundations—yet values measured through racialized standards.

The world is undergoing a new turning point, freeing itself from the authority of power and injustice. The Palestinian people have demonstrated the capacities possessed by Arab intellect in military, technological, and strategic domains—something that intolerant Western philosophical discourses have refused to accept. Instead, they have produced political discourses that constitute threats and accusations against “feelings and convictions deemed antisemitic.”

Philosophy has the right to depart when the conditions for its continuity disappear. For philosophy to depart means that it is searching for a geography of humanity. Philosophy cannot perform corrupt roles that contradict its values and aims. It should have departed long ago, because the follies committed by the West have been devastating. The West was not at an appropriate moment with philosophy. Its reception of philosophy through force contained such cunning and manipulation that it transformed the values of philosophical harmony into a wave of violence, wars, aggressions, genocidal crimes, and exploitation.

It appears that postcolonial African philosophy has recognized a fundamental point: the necessity of dismantling Western racism and exposing its inhuman strategies. This act of deconstruction constitutes one of the mechanisms of cultural liberation. African thought seeks liberation from Western philosophical contempt and from all forms of comparison employed by the West in order to advance its racist and supremacist project.

Today, the African emancipatory philosophical project is working toward constructing an ethically equal universality that transcends religious fanaticism, ideological political discourses, and rigid liberal concepts. In this sense, recourse to the International Court of Justice can be regarded as a step toward a human universality.

In my own view, African geography may be considered to possess the foundations of an ethical universality that make it capable of receiving the journey of philosophical peace—against the dominance of violence and racism emerging from centers of power and injustice.

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