ABSTRACT
I come to this question of permanent catastrophe from my work in existential phenomenology, especially its African diasporic or Africana instantiation. An important element of existential philosophy is the primacy it gives to contingency. The human world is governed by the reality of that which could be otherwise. As a consequence, that which does not occur by accident is often simultaneously that which is not necessary. This leads to an additional view, that the notion of human nature should be abandoned in favor of a human condition. Essence, in other words, is that which is brought into the human world instead of being that which governs it. As a form of phenomenology, this approach raises the question of how one examines phenomena once one has bracketed, parenthesized, or, as I prefer, ontologically suspended one’s naïve presuppositions. Such an act offers the unusual distinction of being able to articulate essence without essentialism. The first is a description while the latter is a prescription, a claim about what must be the way things are beyond the description. As a form of Africana philosophy, the descriptions that follow from this approach take into account a set of imperatives raised by the historical emergence of African diasporic peoples—namely, that something has happened in the modern world with regard to what it means to be human, to be free, and to engage in justificatory practices. The result is to take seriously the human condition under the lived-reality of the organizational practices that created such shifts, and these include colonialism and racism.
