Consolation Philosophy

I interpret Senghor’s goal as an attempt to show that the human being is an entity constituted by emotion and reason, and that emotion is primordial while reason evolves out of emotion through an internal dialectic of mood in the quest for consciousness through evolutionary time.

The human being as a melancholy being is the entity defined first by emotion, which is fundamental, and secondly by reason, which is a structured intellectual capacity with roots in the nature of the melancholy being as a creature of mood. Mood is an originary intelligence, the basis of feeling, a primordial reason, a proto-mind from which advanced reason, thought, affects and attitudes arise. The conception of mood in the dimension of a proto-mind – and the results that this conception produces for speculative metaphysics – distinguishes my thought-system from the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, for example. In other words, consolation philosophy understands the human being as a unity of emotion and reason, with both aspects of her nature having a real efficacy in the physical world and, therefore, equally important, without the one diminishing the value of the other. Emotion supplies the primal, motivational energy of life while reason structures the realities we embrace by simple faith.

Consolation philosophy is not only a philosophy of life, or meaning in life, but also a system of speculative metaphysics. Therefore, I extended the concept of mood to the external or mind-independent world at the risk of facing the charge of anthropomorphism. What epistemological framework could facilitate the projection of mind into the space of matter in a manner consequential for the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, emotion and reason, joy and sadness, optimism and pessimism? Panpsychism.

The main claim of panpsychism is that mind or mental stuff is ubiquitous in the Universe. Depending on whether one is an idealist or a physicalist, one can either claim that everything is mind, or that mind coexists with matter and is irreducible to matter. In consolation philosophy, mood is a proto-mind, out of which what we discriminate as mind, matter, reason and emotion emerge. Consolationist panpsychism is a kind of neutral monistic stance that leans more towards an idealism rather than a physicalism.

Panpsychism is an underexplored topic in African philosophy. Yet this concept is firmly rooted in traditional African thought. In its simplest form of animism, panpsychism has appealed to traditional societies for ages... The main objection to panpsychism is that it is strange. But panpsychism is no stranger than the idea that our Universe exists eternally, or that an intelligent creator willed it into existence at some point in cosmic history. We have to contend with the idea that something suddenly sprang into existence for a reason we don’t know.

Moodiness, which produces mindedness, is the nature of every existent thing. For a thing to actually exist, I hold that it must attain the fatalistic threshold. According to the consolationist, yearning is the very basis of existence, the impulse that realises the fatalistic threshold. This hypothesis is plausible in the absence of certain knowledge about why the Universe, or anything, exists, and who or what created the Universe.

I will interject here to say that personally as a scientist I reject panpsychism for a whole bunch of reasons beyond strangeness. Now, I don't think that absolutely everything is reducible to the physical (my own long-winded ramblings can be found here : http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/09/this-equation-shows-you-cant-quantify.html), and I'm damn sure I don't know what consciousness (or even mere awareness) actually is. But to suggest that everything is aware seems like an unnecessarily drastic step : just because some non-physical things exist doesn't mean that they all do, and because some things are conscious definitely doesn't mean they all are. I doubt I could rigorously disprove it, and I do think it's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's at all necessary : we don't need to invoke "mind everywhere" just because we don't understand what mind is or how it arises.

The absence of this knowledge is a tragic dimension of existence. A universe where moral evil (the wrong use of free will) and physical evil (natural occurrences like hurricanes that inflict suffering on humans) are real should be regarded as incomplete in the sense of imperfect. The yearning essence of conscious, subconscious and seemingly nonconscious objects indicates perfection as the final goal of the Universe as far as the human intellect is concerned. Yet this perfection of the conscious part of nature and the consummation of the seemingly nonconscious but active part is impossible: experience shows that perfection is a mere wish.

Perfection should be equated with freedom in humans because freedom is the property of the perfect being. To be free is to possess the capacity to always will an ideal or perfect state of affairs that conduce to human happiness. The free being is a perfect being and the perfect being is a free being.

Second interjection : freedom is not a virtue or even desirable without intelligence, responsibility, and wisdom. Being free to do whatever you like is useless if you abuse that freedom. Plato's approach of seeking a moderate ground between freedom and servitude is much more appropriate for us mere mortals; total freedom is only virtuous for a hypothetical divinity with perfect wisdom and responsibility.

Nevertheless, I think I tend to agree with the main conclusion in the article :

Given the impossibility of freedom, I hold that the meaning of existence, from the human standpoint rather than from the standpoint of an omniscient mind, is the realisation of ‘consolation’. While the goal of existence (perfection) is unrealisable, there is meaning (consolation) in existence that is realisable. Consolation is realisable and has been realised in human beings in the moment-to-moment maximisation of the emotion of joy in the life of the melancholy being who defines her intellectual project from an understanding of herself as a being thrown into a world whose purpose she doesn’t know but can only speculate about. Consolation is realisable – and has been realised in nonsentient nature at the micro level of atomic and subatomic impulses in the endless striving for what I speculate as consciousness as a step on the road to perfection.
https://aeon.co/essays/consolation-philosophy-and-the-struggle-of-reason-in-africa