On Howard Thurman’s Africana Phenomenology of Life

• In Event: Black Political Philosophy and Ecological Justice

Description for Program

Howard Thurman is well known as a thinker with a profound vision of the unity of life. While the ecological dimensions of his thought are well documented, the full scope of his contribution to ecological thought is still too be articulated. I argue that in his book The Search for Common Ground, Thurman articulates a phenomenology of life in response to the racist oppression he faced in the United States. Specifically, I will focus on the chapter entitled “The Search in Common Consciousness.” In this chapter, Thurman uses various examples in which humans communicate with animals as evidence of a general experience of life that any two life forms can share. Thurman uses these instances of oral communication as representative of potential techniques through which the natural inner barriers between species can be transcended. I argue that further development of these techniques constitutes an Africana phenomenology of life which requires the suspension of core disciplinary assertions of Euromodern life sciences such as biology and zoology.

Subfields: Plant and Animal Life, Black Freedom and Ecological Justice

Author

• Darian Spearman, Gonzaga University