Discursive practices in Africa: philosophy and orality
Felwine Sarr
Duke University. Romance Studies. Graduate seminar.
Session 2
Doesn’t the question, writes Mamoussé Diagne, around which so much energy has been expended – that of the existence or non-existence of an African philosophy – come under the heading of badly asked questions? “To debate the existence or non-existence of a philosophy in the context of traditional Africa is in effect to ask a question about cultures whose mode of being and functioning must be rigorously questioned”. How can we think about African cultures and the procedures they use to produce meaning? This is the question that precedes the other: do these modes of being and functioning allow us to characterise them as bearers of philosophy? In fact or potentially, subject to the results of duly established research (MMD, opus quoted, p. 11).
The truly fruitful question, according to Mamoussé Diagne, then becomes: what are the nature, relevance and possibly the limits of the discourses produced by Africans (or by others) on issues concerning their relationship to the world in general and, in particular, to Africa – that of yesterday and today. The problem is no longer whether or not there is such a thing as an African philosophy in the sense of a traditional philosophy, but: what is the task or set of identifiable tasks, according to criteria yet to be defined, that someone who undertakes to philosophise in and about African societies and cultures through their multiform expressions proposes to face, here and now? Mamoussé Diagne adds that this is not to totally deny the relevance of the debate that has polarised much of the African intelligentsia, but to clearly designate its historical boundaries and its issues, some of which can be seen as still relevant today.
It is from this requalification that a shift arises: from the question of the existence of an African philosophy to that of African discursive practices, that is, the way in which African societies have produced, preserved and transmitted meaning. Substituting the notion of discursive practices for that of philosophy entails a fundamental difference in problematic. With Mamoussé Diagne, the aim is to take orality seriously as a specific medium of thought, irreducible to scriptural civilisation, and to question the mechanisms by which African cultural production takes place. With chapter 7 of Afrotopia (Inhabiting One’s Home), the question of self-writing is then raised: how can we avoid the pitfalls of the colonial library and found a knowledge of African cultures based on their own gnoseological criteria?
- Ventriloquism: a problematic logos (Mamoussé Diagne, ” De la philosophie et des philosophies en Afrique Noire “)
In the texts of the African philosophers of the 70s and 80s, we observe a principal disagreement on the conception of what some and others called philosophy. From what philosophy was or was not derived the thesis concluding or not its existence in Africa. Tempels functions as a paradigm of origin, origin understood not in the chronological sense, but in the theoretical and philosophical sense. ” La Philosophie bantoue ” postdates the first major texts of Negritude by ten years.
For the authors of Négritude, it was a question of claiming or rehabilitating traditional African cultures, declared to be the bearers of philosophies. Recourse to the results of ethnology provided a factual basis for the argument. This led their opponents to credit them with a definition of philosophy that tended to confuse its boundaries with that of any culture (Towa, Hountondji).
To these attacks, the proponents of ethnophilosophy respond by accusing their opponents of locking themselves into a Eurocentric definition of philosophy, which moreover makes light of Greek and non-Greek thinkers predating Socrates (Meinrad Hegba).
One criticism is levelled at Hountondji over his definition of philosophy: his subjection to a Husserlian view of what philosophy is. Some of the definitions of philosophy set out in ‘On African Philosophy’, which make it a particular form of scientific literature, are influenced by the legacy of Husserl. They also come under the influence of Althusser’s, when the latter defines philosophy as a theory of theoretical practice in general.
Mamoussé Diagne notes that Hountondji’s opponents seem to have overlooked in their criticisms the double articulation that Hountondji establishes between writing and science on the one hand, and philosophy and science on the other. It can be summed up as follows: for philosophy to exist, science must exist; and for science to exist, writing must exist. Althusser would later denounce his own definition of philosophy as a theorist deviation.
The controversy here takes on the allure of a Hamlet drama: everything happens as if the very existence of Africa and Africans as the home and creators of culture were at stake, as if being were equivalent to philosophising, and not being to not philosophising.
- Orality and Philosophy
It is necessary to return to what has not been mentioned enough in the debate. Philosophy is not thought, but a precise modality of thought in its relation to determined objects; it must be recognised, however, that it exists only insofar as it is expressed in a discourse.
From this point on, it is important, indeed decisive, to consider the type of medium for this discourse. The discussion focused on traditional thought and the various protagonists in the debate did not place sufficient emphasis on the medium through which expression was made.
A thought, whatever it may be, cannot be indifferent to the medium through which it is elaborated. And this goes beyond the particular categories of language in which a group’s vision of the world is expressed. We need to highlight the dependent relationship between thought and the medium, whether written or oral. The medium is not neutral and does not constitute a mere formal envelope, but in return produces a number of effects on the things said as well as on the way they are said.
In Critique of Oral Reason, Benveniste, Foucault and Wittgenstein are summoned to support the thesis that not just anything can be said in just any language. The lexical and syntactic constraints exerted by a particular language are reinforced by the oral fact itself, which imposes a different logic from that which prevails in a scriptural civilisation.
Mamoussé Diagne’s scepticism of Kagame
Mamoussé Diagne is sceptical when people make a half-hearted attempt to establish a system of correspondence between the logics of oral and written language, sometimes down to the last detail. By way of illustration : Alexis Kagamé’s approach in his two works (” La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être ” and ” La philosophie bantu comparée “), in which he attempts to prove that the Bantu-Rwandan metaphysics of being is coextensive with Aristotelian ontology, as it unfolds in the Metaphysics and the Organon.
The project of isolating language in order to extract a people’s entire system of thought seems hardly relevant. If only because the system of representation extends beyond the sphere of discursive facts alone, to manifest itself on levels as diverse as material production, behavioural and cultural practices such as adornment, works of art, etc.
A second criticism is levelled at Kagamé. He is criticised for trying to show that Kinyarwanda contains a latent metaphysics that the philosopher has only to draw out, but more seriously, for insisting on establishing that this metaphysics overlaps with the categories of the Greek language. Aristotelian philosophy is thus posited as the model and referent of Western philosophy, to which Bantu-Rwandan metaphysics is anchored. Kagamé, his eyes fixed on his reference paradigm, attributes his own philosophical options to the Bantu-Rwandan populations.
This criticism of Kagamé’s approach can be extended against any quest for an external model to which African thoughts must resemble at all costs, even if it means injecting the researcher’s philosophical options and biases, especially when one is trying to obtain through such an operation a patent of recognition or human dignity.
Another methodological vice consists in forgetting that the worldviews elaborated by a group are always linked to concrete situations. From both the point of view of modalities and content, it is the challenges that a civilisation has to face and the urgency of the detailed responses that determine the formulas it deems most appropriate. These are dependent on a whole environment that can be so original that their reproduction elsewhere poses theoretical and practical problems that cannot be ignored.
Specifics of speaking and writing
The question of orality was not raised enough, according to Mamoussé Diagne, in the debate. Hountondji raises it by making writing a necessary condition for science and philosophy. Instead of engaging in a substantive debate, his opponents saw in his remarks only a “fetishisation of writing”.
We must then return to the constraints and specificities of the written and spoken word as regards the fixation and transmission of thought and discourse. A civilisation that relies mainly on the spoken word to develop, transmit and preserve its knowledge employs specific strategies: figuration through images and dramatisation. The function of images is to make thought ‘concrete’. The dramatisation process aims, through staging, to convey the meaning of a story so that it is remembered. These two processes have pedagogical and mnemonic virtues that make them operative.
The image is a producer of polysemy, in contrast to classical philosophy, which relied on the precision and stability of definition, and which waged a principal struggle against polysemy and metaphor. The short, concise form of oral discourse takes into account the limits of auditory memory. Written text makes reading reversible. Writing inscribes in the dimension of space what oral discourse unfolds in time. The experienced time of interlocution is irreversible and finds palliation only in repetition.
Reading allows the choice of sequences, meaning and rhythm of incorporation, as well as commentary and silent reflection. In the end, reading is writing a text that is irreducible to the one we are reading. The written text guarantees its own permanence. The oral text too, if it is canonised by the sacred or the political, to the analysis of oral texts and the role of performance, etc.
Conclusion: rethinking the relationship between culture and philosophy
Ethnophilosophy has moved away from the solution by starting from the presupposition that philosophy is a universal fact that Africans had to claim by a “us too” in order to assert their dignity. The diversity of cultures grasped as a fact of experience through their norms of rationality and their value systems should, however, have guarded against these conceptual shifts.
Ethnophilosophy, according to MD, has brought us closer (beyond the recognition that all peoples have a culture) to the need for the precise study of the modalities in which it expresses itself, in particular the symbolic device and the media of communication that articulate its discursive practices.
Here we return to the old distinction between particular and universal. One way of approaching the question would be, starting from the broadest and most universal field – culture – to posit philosophy as a particular and by no means obligatory modality of its expression. The problem is to know whether what we call philosophy is not the name that should be given to the fact of being different for Greek thought, as assumed by a category of thinkers at a given moment in their history. Yet this designation is already insufficient to cover the whole of Greek thought itself; it would therefore be abusive to extend it to the totality of the thinkable, to all periods and all cultures.
- Inhabiting one’s home (Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia)
The exhaustion of technoscientific reason, as well as the civilisational consequences of its impasses (ecological crisis, Anthropocene…), call for new metaphors of the future, a renewal of the sources of imaginaries and thought. The project of epistemic decentring can find fertile and inexhaustible resources in African cultures.
Then comes the question of self-writing. How can we avoid the pitfalls of the colonial library? Articulating a knowledge of African cultures based on their own gnoseological criteria. Wolé Soyinka’s self-apprehension. To those who raise the spectre of essentialism, Soyinka reminds us that Africans did not wait for Europeans to simply know themselves. Moreover, it is an intimate knowledge of a culture that cannot be gained from the outside (Lévi-Strauss).
Raises the status of science in the order of knowledge. Scepticism about the ability of the scientific approach alone to elucidate reality. There are other ways of understanding reality, and ‘Western’ knowledge does not exhaust them all. It is a question of exploring the other possibilities offered by other forms of apprehending reality (cosmogonies, onto-mythologies, epistemologies of the non-logos and the sensible…).
From the point of view of a phenomenology of perception, the world exists only as an object of representation and discourse, of a subject situated at a given moment in an individual and collective history. This subject is dependent on a way of seeing the world. A questioning of what the real is therefore remains to be conducted.
Mamoussé Diagne and the analysis of oral reason
MD (” Critique of Oral Reason “) proceeds to an analysis of oral reason, to highlight its processes, its modes of production, conservation and transmission of knowledge and learning, and to highlight the discursive processes at work at the heart of orality.
Interrogating the various discourses of the oral tradition (proverbs, tales, epic narratives), MD was able to identify the contents of African thought, but also the way in which oral reason was able to preserve and transmit them, in the absence of writing as a medium for preserving and circulating this knowledge.
As time is a threat to any oral civilization, due to the absence of a material archiving medium, it reveals the laws and intellectual processes that organize the living word and its writing (fixation and transmission) in orality, processes irreducible to those found in a scriptural civilization.
Beyond working on the mechanisms that govern the production, archiving and transmission of individual and collective knowledge, MD leads a philosophical reflection on African thoughts and their contents, which leads him, beyond literalness, to explore their unspoken.
For an expanded theory of knowledge
Mamoussé Diagne and Bonaventure Mve-Ondo engage through their work a debate around a theory of knowledge, bounded by the limits of the Western vision of what knowledge is. They highlight the diversity of approaches to reality across civilisations and eras, the plurality of modes of knowledge, and gnoseological and epistemological relativity. The path taken by Western reason is just one of many.
Bonaventure Mve-Ondo argues for a refusal of the exclusivity of the logocentric episteme, and of the arrest of reason by the sole mode of written thought. An episteme that, in his view, must be linked with the onto-mythological one, that is to say, an ontology that has its source in myths and traditional narratives, that is not exclusive to African thought, but that comes from all societies where the vehicle for communicating thought is essentially the living word and not the written word.
Beyond the concern for a better understanding of African social realities, this undertaking, by opening up other avenues of access to knowledge, constitutes a necessary decompartmentalization and broadening of the theory of knowledge.
Thinking from your own contexts
For Wiredu and Mudimbe, in order to escape the scholarly alienation that threatens them, African researchers must take responsibility for thinking about their destiny, by founding a scientific discourse that would emanate from the material life of their socio-political contexts. The act of thinking must be rooted in the present, paying particular attention to its archaeological milieu and to the real trends of societies, as well as to their most concrete expressions.
It is a question of integrating the true complexity of African social formations and assuming them, no longer as calques of Western history, but in their cultural and historical specificity.