Munyaradzi Mawere
The question about the belief in ‘life in disembodied bodies’ and the ‘world beyond’ is as old as human kind. Due to its philosophical nature, the question has invited and incited serious debates among scientists, metaphysicians and philosophers of religion, but with little progress. In Africa, the complexity of establishing the concrete existence of life in disembodied bodies and the world beyond is predicated by hegemonic Western science’s preoccupation with empiricism and evidence (through laboratory experiments) that render indigenous African beliefs and value systems inexplicable through the standards of expert science. This is further compounded by the attempts by logical positivists of the 1920s that for decades outlawed metaphysics and relegated as nonsense the existence of metaphysical statements, entities and all knowledge systems that cannot be verified through expert science. It is curious however to note that though expert science has failed to resolve this central question, in Africa and in particular Mozambique and Zimbabwe, there are numerous metaphysical belief systems and ‘epistemological thinkings’ pointing to the existence of life in disembodied bodies and the ‘world beyond’. The paper draws on these points of reference, with a view to recast the debate on life in disembodied bodies and the world beyond not necessarily in terms of deliberating their existence, but rather exploring their possible metaphysical nature of existence. In this light, the paper quests to expose in this twilight zone the different angles from which the world beyond and lives in disembodied forms could be understood on the basis of African metaphysics and ‘mystical ways of knowing’. The paper thus contends that the question of disembodied lives and the world beyond can only be best addressed by metaphysics and not expert science.
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