5 Powerful Ways in which a 17th-century Ethiopian Philosopher Can Help You Lead a Better, Wiser Life and Build a Better, More Harmonious World
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Last Week, in celebration of Black joy, Black lives, Black ideas and Black philosophy, I shared with you a post about Zera Yacob. He’s a neglected 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher who I believe can help all of us lead a better and wiser life — and build a better, more enlightened world.
If you haven’t gotten a chance to read that post, then click here to take a look. Yacob truly lived an exemplary life as a philosopher and as a human being, one that truly embodied the ideals of rationality, equality, and justice that we in the West now associate with European Enlightenment —but in a way that goes beyond anything his European peers ever tried.
Zera Yacob is a powerful example of a Black philosopher and role model that can guide and inspire us as we seek to uplift Black thought and experiences and live better lives and create a better world.
With that in mind, I now turn to some further ways that Yacob’s life embodies the philosophical ideals of justice and ethical progress that can guide us in building better lives and a better world.
1. Use Your Own Reason and Heart to Question Harmful and Destructive Parts of Belief Systems
Yacob denounced what he reasoned to be inhumane and harmful aspects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as it was taught and practiced during his time. In his words, we must be on the lookout for any beliefs and belief systems that lead us to “abandoning brotherly love” and that “destroy the law of mutual help” — that is, any beliefs that lead us to treat others as less than us in any way. He expresses a refusal to adhere to any religion that justifies the mistreatment of people based on perceived notions of difference.
Like Yacob, we need to denounce the many inhumane aspects of the belief systems that shape our world, both religious and otherwise. We can take this practice even further by examining how what we actually feel and think for ourselves differs from what dominant belief systems say we should feel and think.
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In his philosophy, Yacob advocates for a guiding ethical principle of harmony- according to which we should live in harmony with the natural world in a way that involves good practices that lead to stability, health, and happiness among all humans and the world.
One of the greatest lessons we can learn from him, then, is to be on the lookout for parts of our belief systems that create discord within ourselves and between ourselves and the world.
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When you feel shame, anger, guilt when things don’t go your way or when you make a mistake, ask yourself: what underlying beliefs about myself and the world are contributing to these negative feelings?
If you feel under attack by thoughts that constantly sap your energy or make you feel disempowered, limit your confidence or otherwise harm you, you owe it to yourself to identify the belief systems that cultivate these thoughts and to undertake the process of consciously getting rid of them.
Once you identify them, you can address them in constructive ways that help you heal and flourish and help you increase harmony within yourself and the world around you.
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We must all work to free ourselves and each other from the incredibly many toxic, destructive, harmful ways of thinking and living that we keep playing out even though we already know they do not really work!
When you use your reason to examine your belief systems in this way, it’s important that we follow Yacob’s example. We need something that goes beyond an unfeeling, disembodied, “merely in the head” reason that simply says words inside your head, so to speak.
Yacob held that the “light of reason” is not found in the head, but in the heart!
In locating the light of reason in our hearts, Yacob helpfully undermines the limiting belief to which many of us in Western culture unconsciously subscribe — that the heart is all about passion, but ultimately unintelligent and irrational (The heart wants what it wants, people say when they want to justify a heartfelt decision that doesn’t seem to make “rational” sense).
For Yacob, the heart is indeed abundant with love and passion, but it’s far from irrational. It is, in fact, precisely through the heart that the light of reason and moral truth manifest themselves.
So when you evaluate your belief systems for anything that is harmful to you or the world, anything that disempowers or ultimately serves to perpetuate discord rather than harmony, listen to your heart. Really, be conscious of it in your chest. Feel your heart in your body and what it’s telling your mind. See what ideas and beliefs cause it pain, which ideas excite it, and what calms it when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
2. Actively Incorporate the Perspective of the Marginalized, Oppressed, and Underrepresented into your Philosophy
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The ethical blindspots that we’ve seen in the European Enlightenment philosophers are ones that Yacob is deeply aware of. These blindspots are plausibly due in large part to the privileged and socially isolated positions those upper-class white men held. None of them interacted with women or non-white on equal terms. Some of them had enough wealth to invest in the slave trade and actively profiting from the exploitation and enslavement of Africans. Their social positions, a result of systemic structures of oppression that privileged them, created blindspots in their thinking about human experience and its moral dimensions —or they were actually restricting their philosophy to only a tiny subset of human experience and only a part of those moral dimensions by falsely subscribing to the unexamined and harmful belief that their affluent European male experience was the universal one.
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By contrast, Yacob, born to a poor farming family and, in adulthood, was forced to live as a hermit in a cave and beg for food while under persecution from Ethiopia’s Catholic monarch who didn’t like how he challenged Christian authority. He taught all over his country and valued his varied interactions with kinds of people. It is this kind of experience that helped him actively advocate for and embody social equality in his philosophy and in his relationships. It is clear that this position gave him greater compassion and clarity than his European counterparts.
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All too often philosophy as we’re familiar with it in the West assumes a mindset like that of European philosophers — a philosophy for and by white adult neurotypical cisgender men. But this is far too impoverished a philosophy, especially for the world we live in today. Indeed, it’s such a philosophy that has perpetuated many of the problems the world is currently facing.
If we are going to genuinely move forward, we need to develop a philosophy that is more like Yacob’s —a philosophy that centers those perspectives that have been neglected for far too long while deliberately decentering the perspectives of those that have done harm for so long.
A philosophy that fully realizes and accounts for the historical conditions that we are to which we are all subject. That recognizes that humans come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. That acknowledges that the experience of women, of developing children, of people of all colors, nationalities, sexualities, and gender identities contributes key parts of the puzzle that we have been missing. With new, better, more inspired solutions that we can all benefit from and that can help to further liberate and empower all of us.
Developing this philosophy is a task that is often uncomfortable and hard to do. It requires a commitment to unlearning harmful beliefs in order to make space for nourishing beliefs. But it is something that we owe to ourselves, and to the world around us.
Look to educate yourself about the way people who are different from you experience the world. With an open-mind and open-heart, sincerely work to understand how people with different, races, nationalities, sexualities, gender identities, ages, physical abilities, etc. from your own have different lived experiences. Truly contemplate how spectacular and exciting and complex it is that all of us live in the same world, but we inhabit different realities, often determined by the body in which we happen to exist.
Now, of course, I’m not saying I have all the answers. Far from it. But I am saying that we need to head into a more inclusive and so more enlightened direction in order to find them. Doing so is not easy. But it is worth it.
3. Use Privilege and Power to Treat the Marginalized as Intellectual Peers who Have Something Especially Important to Add to the Conversation
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Following his period of exile, Yacob gained an affluent patron who supported his philosophy and teaching. With this new status and privilege, he was able to marry and his relationship with his wife, Hirut, serves as a powerful example of concrete improvements we need to focus on in order to build a better world.
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Hirut was a servant when she and Yacob fell in love and married. He brought her out of a life of servitude and considered her his complete intellectual, emotional, and spiritual equal. He actively ensured that she was also treated as an equal by others, including by his patron. Thanks to Yacob’s efforts, Hirut was able to escape the oppressive life of a servant and instead was able to pursue her own intellectual development while helping to inform Yacob’s philosophy.
Yacob cherished Hirut’s intelligence and contributions to his philosophical development, writing that their life together was so full of love and blessed” because they valued each other as equals, as intellectual peers who continually taught each other. If Yacob had not advocated for Hirut in this way using his position as a philosopher and teacher, Hirut’s opportunities for development would have remained much smaller. Instead of remaining trapped by an oppressive social position of servitude, Hirut had the opportunity to live a freer life, a more intellectually meaningful life, doing philosophy with her husband as an equal.
If we really want to build a better world, then those who have privilege and power need to both incorporate the perspective marginalized and oppressed people into their way of thinking, and, crucially, take action to help effect change so that those who are marginalized and oppressed can become more liberated, acquire more opportunities, and gain greater fulfillment in life.
There are many ways to do this, but a key one is to actively treat those whose voices are discounted, diminished, and devalued as intellectual peers whose perspectives are central and whose voices should be amplified.
This is not something that you do one time and then are done with. This is something that you should do constantly. Whenever a person’s ideas or position are dismissed, discounted, or devalued as being held because they have a certain gender, race, or nationality, there is an opportunity to speak up for them, to go back to, amplify, and explore what they want to contribute.
To the extent that those with privilege — of any and all forms — actively treat those who are marginalized and oppressed as intellectual peers, we can help combat the structural injustices that devalue their voices.
4. Find Joy, Purpose, and Gratitude in Truly Fighting the Good Fight, in Giving in Ways that Promote Harmony Even through the Tough Times
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Yacob lived an incredibly difficult life full of existential challenges. He endured famine, persecution, and exile. He lived in extreme isolation for years, often having to beg for food and enjoyed few of the physical comforts that we take for granted today. And yet, in his writings, we see that he had the deepest gratitude for life and its many wonders and joys, despite its inevitable hardships. this gratitude and passion for life to teach people how to develop their critical reasoning skills in order to help them figure out better ways to live. He lived his life by giving as best he could and valuing every experience and every person.
Yacob found purpose and happiness in being grateful and appreciative and giving as best he could even in the harshest of times. I believe, and I hope I’ve shown you how we can build a better world by following his example.
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So take the time today (or tomorrow if you can’t today, or the day after) to be grateful, and to take steps toward living as Yacob did.
Even if you feel like you don’t have much or anything to give. Just give a tiny bit. To someone who’s struggling a bit more than you are, perhaps someone who is putting their life on the line fighting the good fight, like a Black Lives Matter activist.
Even if it’s just a couple of dollars for a cup of coffee on your next payday.
If you can't afford to donate money, think of a way you might give some of your time to a worthy cause by volunteering your time or social media platform.
But do it consciously, authentically. Do it in a way that speaks to your heart. In any small way you can, give without expecting anything in return.
You’ll be surprised how bright the light of your heart shines. You’ll be surprised how much joy it can bring you.
All too often, we suffer because we’re overly focused on ourselves, our predicaments, our fears. But by getting outside of ourselves and focusing on serving, on helping, on creating value and making things more harmonious and better for everyone, we are able to find a greater purpose and a deeper joy in life. By doing this, we live according to Yacob’s principle of harmony.
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The only way to find lasting fulfillment for humans is to grow and to give. Happiness lies in growth, in progress. Happiness lies in contribution. In creating greater harmony in ourselves and in the world If you want to be happier, be kinder. So give now. If you do it genuinely, you’ll be glad you did.
Because whatever your beliefs about anything like karma or cosmic justice might be, I bet you can feel, in the light of your heart, that it’s good to give to those who are struggling without asking or expecting anything back. If you do, then I invite you to listen to your heart. Listen to Zera Yacob.
Conclusion
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In this post, I have shared with you some ways in which Zera Yacob, a great but neglected 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher can help you lead a better, wiser life and build a better, more harmonious world.
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A big way in which I suggested you can follow Yacob’s example in order to build a better world is to use the light of reason in your heart. This is, admittedly, something that can be hard to do if you have never taken the time to do it. But it really is possible, and it’s extremely powerful.
To help you get in touch with this light, I have developed a special Tool for Getting in Touch with the Light of Reason in Your Heart that takes you through some ideas and a meditative technique to get in touch with this light.
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Go Now. Don't let the Philosophy remain Mere Words. Take Action and Use it to Shape Your Life and This World!