Vodun: The Fate of Free Will

Mar 29, 2020 Book Review…, News

---

Book: Vodou Cosmology and the Haitian Revolution in the Enlightenment Ideals of Kant and Hegel
Author: Vivaldi Jean-Marie
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Vodou evokes a schizophrenic response among the misinformed. Reactions abound: apprehension, incredulity and vilification. It is not that Vodou struggles for meaning. Vodou has its own particular Ideal. It is primordial sense, it’s very much relatable to the First Cause. Its idealism is never far removed from our own existentialism. Aesthetically, it fashions our will. We are part of a larger cosmological experience sometimes misunderstood in philosophical terms.

Vivaldi Jean-Marie’s treatise eclipses the period of Enlightenment embodied in the works of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel. He contextualizes Vodou and revolution as a singular, deterministic expression.
The Haitian Revolution cannot be divorced from its cosmological bearings, neither can it be removed from Vodou. Jean-Marie explores animism as practiced by the African and the unique experience of enslavement that colors the destiny of the oppressed. Spirits personify the circumstantial exigency of oppression. Haiti’s indigenous ‘Petra’ spirits are fiery, bellicose and responsive to a rebellious cry for freedom. The Rada spirits are soothing and unctuous, a balm, for the fragmentation that slavery has wrought.
Vodou is a rational recourse to circumstance. It is dispensational, teleological, “logically necessary,” and integral to historical determinism and, supposedly Hegelian.
But Hegel, according to Jean-Marie, promotes a version of determinism that invites the enslavement of Africans. Of African spirituality, Hegel writes, “What they conceive of as the power in question is therefore nothing really objective, having a substantial being and different from themselves, but the first thing that comes in their way. This, taken quite indiscriminately, they exalt to the power of a “Genius”; it may be an animal, a tree, a stone, or a wooden figure.”
According to Hegel, only that which is rational is real. Africans’ religious reality, he avers, amounts merely to the idolatry of natural artifacts,” and thus, “African spirituality is tantamount to idolatry” .
“Hegel,” Jean-Marie writes, “surreptitiously reduces enslaved Africans to the material basis of Spirit’s unfolding.”He challenges Hegel, stating that he deliberately excludes any explicit discussion of the intricacies of the Haitian Revolution because of his Protestant-laced bias against Africans and African religious reality. This confined him to viewing Africans and people of African descent in Saint-Domingue as inherently unfit to undertake such a large-scale revolt.
Blinded by prejudice, Eurocentric ideals and the dogma of Protestantism, Hegel willfully ignored his own theory of synthetic unity to the unfolding of history and the will of the Absolute.
“The history of the world presents us with a rational process,” writes Hegel. “Thus, the rational dimension of world history lies in the logical necessity that makes world events a coherent system.”
Hegel speaks of the uniformity in the character of a people and their geographic environment, and that the Old and New Worlds are representations of Spirit’s unfolding, but never was he in favour of black liberation.
In respect to Kant’s Moral Philosophy (that arguably viewed slavery and colonialism as markers of cultural and historical progress), the author argues, that “Vodou adherents’ process of reconciling their individual wills with those of other members of the community is similar to his (Kant’s) strategy as it is laid out in his concepts of obligation and reasonableness.”
In this regard, the possessed (in the ritualistic drama of Vodou) gives themselves up to become an instrument in a social and collective drama,” and, “the adherents fulfill the Enlightenment’s ideals…to guide their social interactions through an experience of freedom which is collective.”
Vodou, or Vodun, as the outlet for collective neurosis through religious practices is defined by its common African heritage shared by mulattos and dark-skinned Haitians in an effort to improve social relations.
Interestingly, Jean-Marie presents marronage through the prism of Jungian Archetypes, writing, “Starting to view the mountains as free places within colonial environment is linked to the secrecy of Vodun cosmology and the elaboration of a common language which articulates collective consciousness among the slaves.”
Dutty Boukman best represented the collective, an emboldened figure within which the fears and desires, aspirations and actions of a people were rooted. “His contribution synthesizes religion, systematic organization and collective trust in the process of the revolution.” The author’s epistemology clearly centers on the phenomenon of the collective, the common ethos among the oppressed.
Jean-Marie’s richly informative work expounds on the full gamut of philosophical enquiry raising perennial questions on ethics, morality, God and fate.
Arguably, Vodou cosmology as played out in the Haitian Revolution offers clues to the pressing question of free will and predestination.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
Vodou Cosmology and the Haitian Revolution in the Enlightenment Ideals of Kant and Hegel by Vivaldi Jean-Marie
Publisher: UWI Press, Mona, Jamaica
ISBN: 978-9766406905
Ratings: Highly recommended

 

---

---