The African Ontology and Thomistic Personalism - On Assisted Reproductive Technology (II)

The method of knowledge that African cultures emphasize, what Fr. Paul has called “metaphysical experience,” is, in fact, the love that is at the heart of the community and the family.

(Reading time: about 10 minutes.)

Millie Odhiambo, the MP of Suba North and perhaps Kenya’s most prominent proponent of assisted reproductive technology (ART), recently urged that Kenya take up ART.¹ In a press interview just this week, she endorsed ART as a solution for women thinking that they are of diminished worth because they are unable to conceive, women ardently desirous of children to mother and nurture. And yet, despite the noble compassion that motivates her proposal, her “solution” is far worse than the problem that it aims to resolve.

As we saw in the first part of this article, the use of ART reduces the man and the woman to manipulable, biological mechanisms. It does so fundamentally. Regardless of the noble compassion for childless mothers that may motivate recent calls for its adoption, ART redefines the person, insofar as he or she is embodied, as a living machine – and it does so not only objectively, but even in our experience.² In using ART, even if we have noble intentions, we end up experiencing people as things, as mechanisms governed exclusively by biological phenomena: desires, biological actions, etc. While we could explore many possible questions beginning from this starting point,³ the next two articles will focus on the tendency of ART to destroy the African ontology and, consequently, the African cultures built upon it. The present article will expand on the African ontology by demonstrating parallels between it and Thomistic personalism.

In his article, “Towards a Philosophical Method,” Fr. Paul Mimbi suggests that the African’s way of grasping reality differs from the modern Western mode because of its emphasis on a concrete, existential, and historical manner of looking upon man and the world, inextricably related to each other. According to him:

… [Africans] have a kind of immediate cognitive access to reality – a metaphysical experience (rather than “intuition”) … This is the Thomistic notion of ens as primum cognitum – but at the same time, the African experiences not just ens, but co-ens, being with all and with everything. The primum cognitum is co-ens!

This “metaphysical experience,” this immediate vision of being, is possible for every human being. In that sense, it is by no means exclusive to the African worldview. However, African cultures seem to emphasize it as a method of knowing reality, rather than analytical thought, which tends to be reductive in nature.⁴

Nevertheless, this “metaphysical experience” seems to have undergone a resurgence in the West in some philosophical currents of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, such as the Thomistic personalism of thinkers like Dietrich von Hildebrand, St. John Paul II, and David Christopher Schindler, albeit with a marked difference from the African worldview.⁵ Thomistic personalism, like all personalism, finds its foundations in human reason and experience. However, it is indebted to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical and theological anthropology.⁶

Certain parallels can be drawn, for example, between Ubuntu⁷ and Thomistic personalism.

Ubuntu seems to conceive of a “force” or “dynamic energy” residing fundamentally in the heart of each man and woman and that acts as the glue that holds together a community, a force that, ultimately, is a love capable of reaching across the void of death.⁸ It speaks of community as the locus around which life and love are engendered, and affirms that at the heart of the community lies the family.⁹

Likewise, St. John Paul II affirms that it is precisely in and through sexuality that man discovers the deepest meaning of the body and, indeed, his deepest meaning: he exists for another, he is fundamentally open to others and meant for others. Indeed, he is an openness to others.¹⁰ Through the gift of himself that he makes through (but not exclusively through) his sexuality, the human person participates in another, and together, they become a new whole, a unity distinct from the units that form it, that is, the man and the woman.¹¹ Of course, because the sexuality we speak of is the sexuality of a human person, this sexuality can only engender an interpersonal union if the sexual act is a ratification of an unconditional love, expressed in an act of public, irrevocable consent to mutually give and accept one another, that is, matrimonial consent.¹²

Interpreting the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Schindler characterizes love and beauty in terms that show that the interpersonal union of marriage is paradigmatic of all human experience.¹³ In fact, his understanding of love and beauty would imply that Fr. Paul’s “metaphysical experience,” the “concrete, existential” manner of seeing the world that he speaks of, is in fact the experience of beauty, and an act of love.

According to Schindler, beauty is the manifestation of reality in its appearance. Appearances are not bare, empty, superficial. Rather, for the one who sees beauty, reality is present in its appearance, and it is this self-disclosure of reality that the thirst for beauty desires. To desire beauty is to desire to behold reality in its appearance, to behold reality as it reveals itself:

Speaking somewhat metaphorically here, we could say that, whereas the desire for the good is a desire to have the reality itself, beauty is a more gratuitous appetite that allows the reality simply to be, in itself, and accepts what the reality gives or shows of itself. Similarly, while beauty appeals to our intellect, it does not satisfy our desire for understanding, in the way that truth does. The desire for truth is ordered to a grasp of the essence of a thing, which, again, concerns the inner reality beyond mere appearance. But our desire for beauty is an intellectual desire that rests in the appearance itself… The appearance to which the mind relates in beauty, classically understood, is not mere appearance in the sense that it positively excludes the reality, but is rather the appearance of a reality, of something meaningful, even if what is perceived is not rendered into distinct concepts of reason.

Following his lead, we can say metaphorically that truth sees the essence of things. It sees what they are. It sees the “treeness” of the tree, the “dogness” of the dog, the “humanity” of the man. Beauty, however, sees this tree, this dog, this man, this woman, in all their richness. Beauty is concrete, existential. Is this not the “immediate cognitive access to reality” that Fr. Paul speaks of?

Schindler maintains that, in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, love is the experience of beauty. Aquinas seems to avoid calling love a movement towards the good; instead, he calls it a principle of motion. And because we only move towards what we know, Aquinas thus seems to characterize love as a kind of knowledge or vision, a prior context within which desires and movements towards the good unfold and, indeed, that seems to somehow generate those desires, so that there is a certain union of the lover and beloved. Schindler suggests that love is matter simultaneously of cognition and desire – and this is precisely how Aquinas characterizes our relation to beauty:

The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only; … beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty, so that good means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend.¹⁴

As Schindler concludes, “love is a relation most specifically to beauty; beauty is the proper cause of love.”

Because of the concreteness of the experience of beauty, and because the experience of beauty seems to be what generates our desire for reality as good, we can say with Schindler that the experience of beauty, that is, love, is “the most original and foundational relation between the soul and reality.” To reflect on reality is, in fact, to deepen in the love that is already present between us and reality, the love that is a kind of immediate vision of the real.

Putting together what we have said so far, we see that the love that is at the heart of the community is, in fact, the method of knowledge that African cultures emphasize, what Fr. Paul has called “metaphysical experience”. At the heart of the community is the family born of marriage, and because of the centrality of sexuality in the embodied human person, marriage is the paradigmatic instance of love.

Now, as we have said, ART reduces the person to a living machine, a biological mechanism. For ART, sexuality has no intrinsic value. The sexual organs are just parts of the machine, like any other part. “Interpersonal union” is an empty concept to be scoffed at. Because there is nothing more than matter, sex simply…doesn’t matter. Therefore, ART destroys marriage. It destroys the paradigmatic instance of love. For that reason, ART tends to distort all love, to distort our relationship not only with other people, but with God and the cosmos.

The next part of this short series will expound on this thesis, demonstrating that the metaphysical blindness that ART and similar sexual “innovations”¹⁵ tend to cause is related to the modern Western notion of the person, the disappearance of family and community, and the primacy of wealth accumulation as an aim of man.

1. Waliaula, B. (2023, 18 September). Why Suba North MP wants Bills on reproductive health passed. The Standard. https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/health/health-science/article/2001481725/why-suba-north-mp-wants-bills-on-reproductive-health-passed.

2. Of course, assisted reproductive technology is not alone in redefining the person in this way. Modern contraception, for instance, redefines the person in just this manner.

3. For example, we could consider: What would human subjectivity be if the person is reduced to a living machine? Would it be an epiphenomenon, a mere appearance ultimately reducible to errant electrical signals in the brain? And what of human freedom? If the person is governed by biological phenomena, aren’t all his actions and reactions necessary (that is, caused inexorably by something other than himself) and not free?

4. “Analysis” comes from the Greek terms “ἀνα-” (ána-), meaning “up” and “λύειν” (lúein), meaning “loosen.” We can describe analysis as a “breaking up” of a whole into its parts so as to understand each of them and, consequently, come to a greater understanding of the whole. However, a whole is more than the sum of its parts. There is a unitive principle involved that “stitches” parts into a cohesive whole with a distinct and definite form and purpose. Simply put, a dead dog is undeniably and radically different from a live one – but the same parts are present in both.

5. One of the main differences seems to be the notion of “ancestor”. Loosely speaking, we may say that, in Thomistic personalism, thinkers “wake up” to the value and dignity of the people around them and the world around them. However, in the African worldview, the person sees himself as inextricably linked to people who have come before him, who have died and, yet, still live.

6. Williams, T. D. (2022) (revised edn.). Personalism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/

7. See Odero, R. (2023, 8 September). Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu. The AfroDiscourse, https://theafrodiscourse.substack.com/p/umuntu-ngumuntu-ngabantu.

8. See Odero, R. (2023, 28 July). On the Cult of the Ancestors. The AfroDiscourse, https://theafrodiscourse.substack.com/p/on-the-cult-of-the-ancestors.

9. See Odero, R. (2023, 8 September). Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu. The AfroDiscourse, https://theafrodiscourse.substack.com/p/umuntu-ngumuntu-ngabantu.

10. St. John Paul II (2006) (2^nd ed.) Man and Woman He Created Them. A Theology of the Body. Pauline Books and Media: Boston, MA. Waldstein, M. (trans.). Leonardo Polo also defines the human person as a fundamental openness to other persons and, ultimately, to God. See Sellés, J. F. (2006). Antropología para inconformes. Ediciones Rialp: Madrid.

11. On the relationship of participation to the family, see also Alvira, R. (2002). La participación como alma de familia. In Aparisi, A. and Ballesteros, J. (eds.) (2002). Por un feminismo de la complementariedad: Nuevas perspectivas para la familia y el trabajo. EUNSA: Pamplona. pp. 47-54.

12. See Wojtyła, K. (1993) (revised edn.). Love and Responsibility. Ignatius Press: San Francisco.

13. Schindler, D. C. (2018). Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. Cascade Books: Eugene, OR.

14. Aquinas, T. Summa theologica. I-II, q. 27, a. 1.

15. See footnote 2 above.