ABSTRACT

The African mind is generally in search of holistic existence. This quest sometimes appears to be somewhat hampered by the realistic living conditions in most African contexts, thus making it hard for the searching mind to attain its ideals. Nonetheless, the African mind learns to establish poise through substantial understanding. Although tossed between the daily experiential oscillations of the swift shift (move) from cultural amiable values to enigmatic secular tendencies, the African mind becomes enriched with wisdom rediscovered in the wider cultural milieu. Hence, the knowledge from the broader perspective empowers it to introduce needed changes for a positive upsurge in both the individual and society. The thomistic primordial notions of the “Habits of the First Principles” provide a framework for this sagacious embrace and transformation in a world still mutilated by injustice, corruption, intolerance and violence. According to this proposal, the quintessence of truth and integral existence is recaptured by the very nature of these conceptions. In Thomas Aquinas' viewpoint, these habits constitute the “act of being” (actus essendi) human. Because they have two principal aspects, the speculative – in the form of principle of noncontradiction (PNC) – and the practical, namely, synderesis, they name what constitutes the essence of the human person. In other words, the thomistic habits are not only essentially rooted in human nature, they also form the core of human actions. Invariably they redirect individual persons to wise fundamental human option: “to do good and avoid evil,” albeit the contextual cultural varieties. In this paper, I demonstrate that the African mind shares in the wisdom of the rich resources of primitive philosophical notions geared towards individual and societal integral development.