By Douglas Anele

The theme of our philosophical exploration today is very appropriate at this critical time in the history of Nigeria, in particular, and the situation of the world, in general. The April 2011 elections have ended, and there is widespread consensus that the entire process was satisfactory. Of course, there were incidences of electoral malpractices in different parts of the country.

The gruesome murder in some northern states of over ten members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) who were serving as ad hoc staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) after results of the presidential election were announced suggests that politics-with-bitterness remains a serious danger to Nigeria’s quest for sustainable democracy.

At any rate, majority of Nigerians feel that, given INEC’s shambolic preparations for the elections and fear that desperate politicians may use whatever means at their disposal to disrupt the process, the polls were relatively successful in comparison with the previous elections of 2003. But Nigeria still has a long arduous way to go in her evolution to durable democracy.

Since the country became an independent modern state in 1960, bad leadership has been a recurrent problem. Indeed, the situation worsened after the civil war ended in 1970, prompting Chinua Achebe, in his little book, The Trouble with Nigeria, to remark that the fundamental problem of Nigeria is failure of leadership.

In other words, for decades the ruling class, both military and civilian, has been dominated by avaricious and morally bankrupt individuals who appear to see their privileged positions as opportunity for self-enrichment.

Political leaders, instead of being in peace and unity with the people by providing exemplary leadership through selfless service, have repeatedly appropriated the country’s resources to themselves, their family members and cronies. Bomb attacks of selected targets in Abuja by the Islamic fundamentalist sect, Boko Haram, the latest of which led to loss of lives and extensive damage of the United Nations’ office, signpost the fact that terrorism is alive and well in the country.

At the global stage, there is increased violence, war, terrorism, environmental degradation and pollution, economic exploitation of the less privileged, poverty, disease, threat of nuclear arsenal falling into “the wrong hands”, and widening inequalities between the rich and the poor. In many countries, tyranny, oppression, discrimination based on ethnicity, religion and gender, and other forms of “man’s inhumanity to man” are gaining ground.

And although the Cold War between United States and the defunct Soviet Union is formally over, some apostles of apocalyptic vision are already prophesying a gloomy future for humankind. Without a doubt, the history of our species has been a history of ignorance, cruelty and folly: but it is equally a story of man’s capacity to surmount extremely daunting challenges by deploying his intellectual, moral and spiritual powers.

Therefore, although there may be some justification for anticipating the future with trepidation, there are good reasons for optimism that the problems of today provide opportunity for positive transformation of man’s existential condition here on earth. In order to have a solid grasp of the focal point of our analysis, it is expedient at this point to clarify the notion of ‘individual’. Although in logic the term ‘individual’ is construed as any entity that can be named or delineated, in the context of our discourse it refers to a human being.

No one knows precisely the first person to ask the question: “Who am I?” or when the question was asked for the first time. But it is undoubtedly true that human beings in different socio-cultural milieus and historical periods have posed and answered that very question in various ways.

The well-known Socratic dictum, “Man know thyself”, succinctly calls our attention to the importance of critical existential self-auditing or self-examination. Of course, it is impossible to adequately define a human being with one proposition, or to provide an exhaustive enumeration of the attributes that constitute an individual.

Thus, definitions of our species, as homo economicus, homo faber, homo politicus and homo ratio etc. merely capture some activities of human beings, some of which are shared by higher mammals. Generally speaking, there is agreement about the biological features of our species, homo sapiens. Erich Fromm, the philosopher-psychoanalyst, provides a useful framework for understanding the general psychical features which complement the biological attributes of humans. In his book, To Have or To Be?,

Fromm posits that in “the biological evolution of the animal kingdom the human species emerges when two trends in the animal evolution meet. One trend is the ever-decreasing determination of behaviour by instincts…The other trend…is the growth of the brain, particularly the neo-cortex.”

The confluence of minimum determination of behaviour by phylogenetically programmed instincts and larger, more complex brain structure with astronomical number of interneuronal connections means that the human species “is the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination has reached a minimum and the development of the brain a maximum”.

A profound consequence of the above, as Fromm stresses, is that man, having been largely liberated from the rigidity of behaviours imposed by instincts, and while possessing the capacity for self-consciousness, reason and imagination, needs a world-view and object of devotion in order to survive. Without an integrated, linguistically-mediated, picture of the natural and social environments which are encoded in both material and non-material culture, human beings would be utterly confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently, because in that case there will be no relatively permanent experiential focal point that allows one to organise the manifold impressions that impinge on the individual all the time.