Philiminality Philiminality

Since the publication of Conti Rossini’s notes on Tekle Haymanot, an Ethiopian Catholic priest and Rossini’s testimony that made the Hatatas are of Giusto d’Urbino, in 1916, the controversy of authorship over the Hatatas remained hot debate among the Ethiopian as well as the Western scholars. These scholars present their argument from different perspectives, such as Testimony (Rossini 1916, 1920), Calendar (Getachew Haile 2014), Philology (Alemayehu Moges 1969) and Colonial Thesis (Daniel Kibret 2018 and Fasil Merawi 2020). The findings of their research, however, went to diametrically opposite directions. While the perspectives of Testimony and Colonial Thesis favor Giusto d’Urbino as the authentic author of the Hatatas, the argument from Calendar and Philology went to favor Zara Yaqob. These perspectives, however, missed to consider the importance of the cultural history of Ethiopia in providing hints for the ongoing debate on the problem of authorship of the Hatatas. This approach has a crucial importance to understand whether the central issue of the Hatatas has a cultural foundation in Ethiopia or not. The paper finds out that the central issue upon which both Zara Yaqob and Wolde Heywot repeatedly and fiercely criticized and were obsessively concerned is Monasticism (Asceticism), the center of religious, social, cultural and developmental problems of the Ethiopian society, according to them. The paper will show how this central issue of the Hatatas is articulated as existential predicament from the cultural history of the country. Moreover, identifying this central issue of the Hatatas will help us trace the genealogy of the problem. The result of this cultural genealogy makes the Hatatas the product of the dialectical relationship between the inquisitive mind of Zara Yaqob and the established ascetic culture of the country, which, in turn, addresses the problem of authorship.

The seventeenth century philosophical work of Zara Yacob, the Hatata, is the result of both internal and external issues that led to controversies. Zara Yacob as a philosopher exercised the use of logic over the immediate environment and developed an all rounded philosophy arising from his own life and the life of the society he was living in. The contribution of Sumner in introducing the works of Zara Yacob is immense. His huge publications are permanent evidence of his contribution to Ethiopian philosophy. It is he who for the first time translated the works of Zara Yacob into English. Zara Yacob’s Hatata reveals that there are certainly distinctive traditions of philosophical reflections in Ethiopia. There has been doubt about the existence of philosophy in Africa when there is vital evidence that Africa had its own philosophy even in ancient times - the works of Zara Yacob disproved the doubt. Ethiopia as a country is embosomed in Africa, and is a cradle of mankind - in a similar vein there is evidence that suggests that Africa is also the cradle of philosophy and human civilization. There was, and still is, a strong debate regarding the authorship of Hatata; the author of Hatata is no doubt Zara Yacob. His philosophy is original to Ethiopia, the ancient country in the African continent and the ancient country which is the cradle of human beings. The philosophy of Zara Yacob is rational in the sense that all his analysis regarding the existence of God, truth  and his ethics which include vital principles such as the Golden rule, mercy, work, and some of the forbidden practices by man such as killing, stealing, lying, and adultery are all analysed by the philosopher in his work Hatata.

In this talk, Henry Straughan and Michael O'Connor seek to illuminate the philosophical method of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob. In particular, they trace the interaction between reason and grace, and the role of discursive argumentation versus immediate intuition. They draw out Yacob’s method by explicating and examining his discussion of the epistemic significance of disagreement and his distrust of testimony; his argument for the existence of God; his theodical response to the problem of evil; and his practical ethics. In doing so, they suggest that Yacob’s central method of argument is abductive, resting on something like a principle of sufficient reason. They also suggest that for him reason cannot operate without grace–that reason is, in a sense, a movement of grace. They further outline how Yacob’s application of the principle of sufficient reason provides him with ethical guidance. They conclude by considering the connection of the Treatise’s form to its content, and suggest that the biographical material is not merely of historical interest but rather is of central importance. The text’s fragmentary, allusive compression means that we must be careful with our conclusions, but they track Yacob’s trains of thought and movements of style as best we can, re-tracing the jagged path between grace and reason in his footsteps.

Philosophers often talk as if it does not make much difference who wrote a piece of philosophy, when, and where, but only whether the arguments it contains are sound. Historians of philosophy should always treat that attitude with suspicion. Philosophical texts about which questions of pseudonymity arise (are they really by the person who claims to have written them?) help to show why, because how they are to be understood is bound up essentially with the question about their authorship and, if they are in fact pseudonymous, what is the purpose behind the apparent deception? The case of the texts attributed to Zera Yacob is a striking example of  where the date and identity of the author matter centrally, whether the texts we have are in fact original, heavily adapted or forged. My talk will try to provide some context. I shall begin by looking at philosophical texts that have been, deliberately or otherwise, attributed to authors who did not write them, such as pseudo-Aristotelian texts, the pseudo-Dionysian corpus, Augustinus Hibernicus, Aethicus Ister, the Epistola Trajani (in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus), the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I shall then focus on one particular comparative example: the famous correspondence of the twelfth-century philosopher, Peter Abelard, and his wife-turned-nun, Heloise (and another set of letters that, more recently, has been claimed as an earlier exchange between the two when they were lovers). Like the Ḥatatā, there has been and remains much debate about the authenticity of these texts, and the parallels and divergences between the two discussions throw light on both.

There are several ways by which to approach the question of the authenticity of Zera Yacub's work. One is philological, by careful attention to the linguistic hints in the manuscripts that the work is not by a native writer of Ge'ez, or that otherwise suggest a later invention or conscious fabrication. Another is so to speak psychobiographical, by close attention to the character of Giusto d'Urbino, particularly as revealed in his correspondence from Ethiopia with the Parisian manuscript collector Antoine d'Abbadie. In a series of articles, Anaïs Wion has compellingly adopted both of these approaches. Less developed in her work is the approach informed by the history of philosophy, to wit: are there Latinate philosophical concepts in Zera Yacub's work, the circulation of which in 17th-century Ethiopia we might have reason to doubt? If there are, three possibilities present themselves. One is that, in spite of our surprise in finding them there, networks of circulation, likely headed up by Portuguese Jesuits, can be discovered that account for their presence. A second possibility is that the appearance of these terms is in part a consequence of lexical choices made by the first translators of the work and adopted in later scholarship. A comparative study of the two most significant translations of the Hatata, B. A. Turaev's Russian translation of 1904 and Enno Littmann's Latin translation of the same year, shows that both authors interpolate terminology that almost certainly comes from their own philosophical educations based on distinctly 19th-century curricula (e.g., Turaev's use of свет разума [“light of reason”] for a Ge'ez term that could be rendered otherwise with far less distinctly Cartesian resonance). A third possibility is that we can account for the presence of these concepts neither as signs of the inclusion of Ethiopia within the broader early modern connected history of Latinate philosophical ideas, nor as artifacts of the translational and scholarly traditions in which Zera Yacub was taken up, but rather as evidence that the work was in fact produced in the 19th century by a learned and deceptive Italian.

This paper discusses the authenticity debate on the Ḥatäta of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat  from the perspective of a historian of philosophy. From this perspective, the case of the Ḥatäta  and the discourses that developed around the manuscripts raise a number of interesting  questions and problems. The most important point is undoubtedly that we are witnessing here  a process of canonization. To a large extent, philosophical work relies on inherited  philosophical-historical narratives, which are deepened and legitimized by each individual work  within the framework of these narratives. The broad European discourse on ancient Greek  philosophy is a striking illustration of such canon forming processes. Based on oral traditions and third-party sources (often written down centuries later), as well as a few fragmentary  snippets, a comprehensive philosophical discourse has developed that would endure even if  it could one day be demonstrated that neither Thales nor Socrates were historical persons.

The paper argues that the debates about the Ḥatäta provide a vivid example of a process of  forming a narrative of the history of philosophy in Africa. On a meta-level and in a comparative  manner – particularly with regard of origin, transmission, and the various translations of one of  the founding texts of European history of philosophy, Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives and Opinions  of Eminent Philosophers, the paper discusses the question of what it means when the  authenticity of a foundational text is suddenly called into question. Moreover, the paper  addresses the particular explosiveness of such debates in the context of reconstructing  philosophical traditions in formerly colonized and still marginalized regions of the world.  Furthermore, ethical questions of scientific practices are raised in view of the asymmetries in  the academy today and the task of decolonizing the history of philosophy.