Mugen's Public Library
PHENOMENOLOGY
Fanon on the spiritual catharsis of anti-colonial Resistance & Revolution
Amidst the lasting institutional injustice, codified racism, exploitation of resources and depravity of colonialism, lies a much deeper infringement of human values, a breach of the human spirit. Fanon recognizes that inequality is not only a tangible systematic injustice that affects material distribution and must be remedied, but it also carries with it a metaphysical dimension that inflicts the colonized for generations to come. The build-up of inequality, discrimination, and exploitation creates individuals that internalize their prescribed position in society. To be capable of actualizing our potential is a privilege we rarely give a second thought, but for those living under tyranny, to attempt to actualize their freedoms and capacities is to request permission to do so. This paper will evaluate Fanon’s claim on the restoration of spiritual health and dignity of the colonized through acts of violence, given that the infringement on the autonomy and identity in the colonial subjects' psychological frameworks merits such an act.
The Paradox of Being for My Existentialism Course
Human reality has to hold together both the structures of being and non-being as two parts of the same experiential whole. Sartre’s notion of radical freedom describes the nature of a consciousness that nhilates itself into nothingness as it slips into the past. It is what it is not in that it is void of any substance, any definitive identity we’ve extrapolated from past experiences. While consciousness is grounded in the facticities of its own freedom and the circumstances it faces in the world, it remains more than its body and its function in an environment (Al-Saji 352). It is not what it is, in that consciousness undergoes a perpetual state of self-actualization that continuously transcends itself into the world. Consciousness for Sartre is to “fly out into the world” (Sartre 5). It is the motion of a being through time given that it remains conscious of something in the space outside itself. This notion of Husserlian intentionality rests on the maxim that “all consciousness is consciousness of something”. Consciousness is indivisible yet notably distinct from the world it is relatively conscious of (4). In one sense, it creates a potentialized meaning for the time and place it finds itself in, projects it onto its horizon, and experiences that meaning fall back on itself. In another sense even our internal lives are displaced into the outer world as consciousness becomes void of substance (5). In that respect, “consciousness is purified” (4) and fluid as it transcends the medium of the Self into World and back into the Self, from “naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa” (Sartre 149).
Consciousness, Racialization & Patriarchy for my Existentialism Course
In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, abandoning the “hypothesis of the contents of consciousness” speaks to the recognition of the self-nhiliating nature of consciousness. For Sartre, consciousness is void of any substance, rather than being a container for knowledge and motives. It is characterized by the freedom of being nothing; whereby nothingness “insinuates itself between motives and acts” (122). Motives aren’t held by consciousness, they are the expression of consciousness. The difference is that authenticity is preserved by the unobstructed modality of consciousness. The motive of consciousness cannot be distinguished from the mind that posits it. The motive is contextualized within a network of personal ascriptions meaning and value systems for the importance of the object of the motivation. In addition, the modality of a motive in consciousness traps the motive in an echo chamber of a consciousness that is in-itself rather than for itself. In contrast, when the motive is recognized to be for consciousness and in awareness of the freedom of a nhilating consciousness in conferring substance to motives.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, and Colonialism
Colonialism did far more than enslave and maim its victims' bodies; its principal offense was to infiltrate and pervade the minds of generation after generation of colonized and racialized people. When Fanon argues that colonialism placed the colonized within “two frames of reference” he speaks to the schism within the consciousness of the colonized. Colonization for Fanon creates a division in the identity and meaning-making capabilities of racialized people. The split is between the racial and cultural characteristics that inform Black identity, for example, and the identity of the exemplary white citizen or Black subject that white society expects Blacks to assimilate into. Colonization instigated the motion of modern history, and placed at the bedrock of the modern neo-liberal order the hopes for a white destiny, where white superiority is secured in the antithesis to the racialized inferiority. The only available route for a Black person’s success was through the white institutions that assume a paternal role over Blacks and favor white success.
A familiar strategy of limiting the hodological pathways and instilling these two-frame references is the colonial coercion of the colonized education system. Colonizers often rewrite the colonized’s history to praise the colonizer as the liberator, and scapegoats the colonized ancestors as impediments to their descendent’s own advancement (as opposed to the colonizer). This fragments the racialized students’ identity into a Black face that bears the weight of a truth of Black freedom that conflicts with the more general curriculum that antagonizes any colored face. Black and colonized’ cultures are diminished as infantile versions of the more developed western parent nations. Colored faces are thus taught to strive for whiteness at the expense of striving for their own unique expressions of colored identity. This duality of consciousness becomes the product of a social bad faith, and disadvantages colored peoples in attaining their self-realization as beings for themselves, rather than for a white master.
