James also demonstrated that the basic ideas of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle came from the Kemetic deep well. Ideas such as the “demiurge,” the “unmoved mover” and the “immortality of the soul” are obviously Kemetic and unlike Greek traditional thought, James continued. The arguments James put forth in this regard are so compelling that when Diop and Obenga turned to the sources of Kemetic thought, they reached the same conclusions evidently without the benefit of James’ work (For a short discussion of James’ ideas see my “In Defense of Civilization” in the Kemetic Voice).

James’ work does, however, raise a few interrelated problems which characterize much of the discussion by the most recent defenders of African Deep Thought. First, he does not make a clear distinction between the deep thought of Kemet and Greek philosophy. Second, he implies that the whole of Greek philosophy was stolen, without convincingly demonstrating the basis of some of the connections he claims. Third, he does not make a distinction between classical Kemetic thought and the later Hermetic corpus which was in part a reaction to foreign intellectual doctrines and in many respects quite different from classical Kemetic thought.

One result of these tendencies is the assumption that because Greeks got the ideas about fire, earth, water and air from their studies in Kemet, that therefore the Kemites established a concept of four basic elements…

Such a reading is even more problematic with concepts like the “Highest Good” and the “Law of Opposites.” These ideas are very Greek but they cannot be explicitly found in the Kemetic texts (at least not in the ones cited), nor in my opinion are they implicit. (I have searched for such statements to no avail.) These concepts may be inferred from the Kemetic teachings, but they were probably incorrect inferences due more to the persistence of the Greek traditional worldview than to any valid African foundations.