Rehumanising Human Experience: A Synopsis Of Anyiam-Osigwe’s Treatises

In his thesis on Rehumanising Human Experience, Emmanuel Onyechere Anyiam-Osigwe draws from his ontological averment that man is a manifestation of Divine intelligence. In the view of Anyiam-Osigwe, man, at creation or coming into being, manifest in the perfectly ordered form of divine intelligence.

However, the current social order reflects a perversion of the human psyche. It is a perversion of the human psyche that negates the human essence, the identity in which the human person inheres.

He notes that the all-pervading socio-political disequilibrium which threatens social peace and negates the optimisation of the economic potentials of the social whole is a reflection of the perversion of the human psyche.

In the view of Anyiam-Osigwe, man, in his authentic identity, is supposed to be motivated and guided by the innate super-consciousness of the human essence. In other words, human actions in thought, word and any other form of manifestation ought to derive from the
inherent knowledge of divine laws and principles. It is in this context that his attribute as a manifestation of Divine intelligence is validated. In his view, man in his authentic form has the capacity to apprehend and explore the faculties of the meta-conscious, that dimension in
which the faculties of the ethereal unveils the perfect dictates of divine intelligence.

In other words, there is something that is called the human identity. There is an identity of form and non form in which the human person is identified as human. It is the capacity to live with the right moral conduct and make a sense of it that makes the human being. If man
evolves from and is created in the image and identity of a morally upright and conscious God, in the absolute being of man, in his pristine essence, man ought to be moral and morally conscious.

When man exists with the retention of the attributes of the divine mind, he partakes in the inherent knowledge of the divine and is guided by instructions from the super conscious. In such a human being, he avers, actions are guided by the rational will, the will to do only that which is right or good or rational.

He notes that the contradictions in the manifestation of the human mindset currently, indicate the prevalence of a perverted psyche. Thus, for Anyiam-Osigwe, when the psyche of the individual is perverted and his essence contaminated, he starts to manifest actions and
activities that are inhuman, un-human or abnormal. This corrupted mindset reflects in such propensities as primitive accumulation, crass individualism, greed, possessiveness, disposition to violence, lying, and all other dimensions of immorality. These are all reflection
of the contaminated human psyche.

In the view of Anyiam-Osigwe, it is the perverted mindset that has created governance lapses that engender irreconcilable conflicts and wars in the social order between communities, among communities and between countries. The prevalence of terrorism and the odious
dimension of its manifestation, the threat of a fatalistic world war, the collapse of internal security in nearly all countries globally are all manifestation of the perversion of the human mindset. The dimension of poverty in the third world countries which threatens security, social order and economic wellbeing in these countries with an overlap of refuges crises in the first world all reflects the destructive impact of the contaminated human psyche.

Anyiam-Osigwe argues that the only viable solution to resolving the contradictions that negates the manifestation of the Group Mind in and among states and nations requires that man be rehumanised. The nexus of his thesis is in his perspective that with a mindset that deviates from the attributes of the divine mind, what we present as man is essentially subhuman. In other words, at the point of creation, there are certain attributes by which the human person was positioned as man. Primarily emphatic in these defining attributes of the human person is the prevalence of the rational will driven by a rational mind. To that effect, the perfect human being who is a manifestation of divine intelligence propagates, expresses himself in, and align with, that which is good. The concept of the good, in this context, is not what offers him personal comfort and advantage but that in which is conveyed the objective good of all.

Taken from this perspective, nearly every person in the social order is a corrupted being. To that effect, to re-engender human development in the appropriate compass requires an institutional approach in which the composing individuals of the society have to be re-humanised. This calls for a total reorientation of every individual in the social order for the purpose of imbuing them with the requisite mindset which conveys nobility of character etched in value-laden conduct and propriety as a way of life.

Drawing from the Anyiam-Osigwe paradigm, this path requires reappraising the family and reinventing the family system in its authentic form, revisiting our school curriculum and emphasising the teaching of morality and values. It also requires strengthening the institutions of moral rearmament such as the National Orientation Agency as it is called in Nigeria, among others. It also includes eliminating those phenomena manifestation that induce the compromising of the moral nexus by the individual. In his asking: at what point of hunger will a man sell his vote for a bag of grain, it is clear that Anyiam-Osigwe notes that some human beings might not have the capacity to sustain their moral commitment at a
certain dimension of material pressure.

In summary, his argument is underpinned in the averment that man must reintegrate into his fundamental identity as a manifestation of divine intelligence. This, he argues, calls for an all demanding social engineering process to which humankind and its governance institutions
must subscribe.

Signed

Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation