TITLE:
Consciencism, a Philosophy and Ideology for Existential Being in the Technological Age
AUTHORS:
Filip Latkovic
KEYWORDS:
African Humanism, Consciencism, Heidegger, Nkrumah, Technology
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.16 No.2,
May
27,
2026
ABSTRACT: This essay undertakes a re-examination of Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism, not merely as a political ideology of anticolonial resistance, but as a sustained philosophical project that articulates a distinctive mode of Being: Existential Being. Far from a regional or historically-contained discourse, Consciencism presents a syncretic and dialectical account of Existential Being as one that actively reconciles contradictions in material conditions with the transformative influence of the transcendental (but nevertheless within-the-world) mind through what Nkrumah designates as categorical conversion. By retracing the genealogy of this ontological formulation with pre-Socratic and Aristotelian metaphysics, Heideggerian ontology, and African socialism, this essay argues that Consciencism offers a viable philosophical framework for confronting the crisis of Existential Being brought on by the augmentation of technological Enframing. In an era where technological acceleration threatens to displace and subsume the grounds of Man’s Existential Being itself, Nkrumah’s thought enables a renewed interrogation of what it means to be—not as a merely abstract question, but as a concrete and historical condition thoroughly intertwined with the dialectical interplay of material and idealistic conditions of life and its vicissitudes.