Felwine Sarr

 Duke University. Romance Studies. Graduate seminar.

Introductory session

This paper deals with the right to philosophize in Africa. Behind the question of the existence of an African philosophy, opened up at the turn of independence by the controversy over ethnophilosophy, there is in fact a deeper question at play: that of the legitimacy of thinking from Africa, from its own concepts and categories. The course unfolds in three moments: the founding debate on ethnophilosophy; the more general question of philosophising and the contested Western monopoly of Reason; and the contemporary shift, with Norman Ajari and Jean-Godefroy Bidima, towards the plurality of traditions of thought.

1. The debate on the existence of an African philosophy at the turn of independence

The invention of ethnophilosophy goes back to the missionary father Placide Tempels, who published ” La Philosophie bantoue ” in 1945. He postulates that in the Bantu society he studies and describes (Baluba of the Congo), there has always existed a philosophical thought specific to this community, lived and not thought, whose principles he sets himself the task of formulating.

The context of the time was that of colonial ethnology, marked by Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogical and primitive mentality (Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, 1910; II: La mentalité primitive, 1922). Tempels refuted Lévy-Bruhl’s theses. Traditional African societies offered a vision of the world that was not simply a matter of common belief, but of philosophy. It would differ from its Western understanding in that it would not be individual, but collective and unchanging.

It is the conception of a philosophia perennis, a system of stable beliefs, impervious to time and history and which would actuate these societies. The quest is for first and universal ontological principles. The aim is to “find a psychological and cultural basis for rooting the Christian message”.

To be is to be animated by a vital force. Being is force and power, rather than having power. What he possesses is not external to him but is incorporated into him. The muntu, the human being, is alive and strong from his ties to the divinity, to his clan, his family, his descendants, just as he is strong and alive from his heritage and his land, from what it bears and what it produces, from what grows or lives there.

The ontology thus deployed is an ontology of the vital force. Being for the Bantu is vital force. The various ways of designating a human being indicate in a very concrete way the state of his vital force: Mufu (dead), vital force close to zero, and Mfumu (chief), the person whose vital force is at its maximum. He is designated by the power he possesses. The position of chief is a natural state that an institutional position will only confirm.

This is a dynamic ontology where forces interact; they can reinforce each other or annihilate each other. Vital forces are hierarchical: above them is God, followed by the ancestors who founded the clan, the tribe’s deceased, humans, animals and plants. “The white man, a new phenomenon in the Bantu world, is an elder, a vital force surpassing that of the black man”, according to Tempels.

From the existence of the ontological scale ordering the intensities of the vital force follows immediately an ethics which translates directly into a legal code. What is ontologically good is therefore also ethically good, and will then be instituted as what is legally just. The legal order is a reproduction of the natural ontological order. The social order can therefore only be founded on the ontological order. This, according to Tempels, is the very mark of the primitiveness of the Bantus, who in his view have not reached that degree of sophistication of the most evolved societies, which can give themselves a positive law at odds with nature or the philosophical conception of beings.

Alexis Kagame and the extension of the gesture

Alexis Kagamé, a Rwandan priest, undertakes in the tradition of Tempels to reveal the Bantu-Rwandan philosophy of being by examining the grammatical structures of Kinyarwanda (La philosophie bantu rwandaise de l’être et la philosophie bantu comparée). He shares with Tempels the idea of an underlying, unchanging ontology and philosophy. However, there is a clear difference in the objectives of African philosophers: to define themselves and not leave it to Europeans to do so. Tempels, on the other hand, aims to accomplish the civilising mission.

Alexis Kagamé uses language as a space for exploration. He is more nuanced: he talks about philosophical principles, he does not make a system of them. His geographical area is Rwanda, and he does not give in to the generalising temptation of Tempels, who extends his conclusions from the Baluba of the Congo to all Africans. We note in Kagamé a revival of the categories of Aristotelian ontology, to which he attempts to find a correspondence in that of Bantu-Rwanda.

Hountondji’s critique and the invention of the concept of ethnophilosophy

This approach was criticised by Paulin Hountondji, who created the concept of ethnophilosophy, which he borrowed from Kwamé Krumah, the father of Ghanaian independence. He presents it as an “imaginary search for a collective, unchanging philosophy common to all Africans, albeit in unconscious form”.

Hountondji (Sur la philosophie africaine, Éditions CLE, 1980) states that this text by Tempels paved the way for “a set of subsequent analyses aimed at reconstructing, through the interpretation of customs and traditions, proverbs, institutions, and various data from the cultural life of African peoples, a vision of the world, supposedly common to all Africans, removed from history and change and, moreover, specifically African philosophical” (p. 14).

He points out that Tempels’ motivations may at first sight appear generous: to redress a certain image of the Black spread by Lévy-Bruhl and his school, and to show that the latter’s Weltanschauung is not reduced to this famous primitive mentality. But on closer examination, this book is not aimed at Africans, but at a particular category of Europeans: colonialists and missionaries. The objective is the civilising mission stated in the title of chapter 7 of Tempels (Bantu philosophy and our civilising mission).

The Black man continues to be the very opposite of an interlocutor: he is what we are talking about, a voiceless face that we are trying to decipher, between ourselves, an object to be defined and not the subject of a possible discourse. Tempels’ intellectual enterprise aims to facilitate the colonisation and evangelisation of the African continent.

The ethnophilosophical project would later be taken up by African intellectuals – Alexis Kagamé, John Mbiti, Senghor and the authors of negritude – who would bend it in the direction of rehabilitating themselves as human beings and communities and restoring their dignity. Alioune Diop found this text important and set up the Présence Africaine publishing house in 1949, after the Revue Présence Africaine in 1947, to publish the text, which he praised in a preface entitled Niam Paya. In doing so, according to Hountondji, these intellectuals overlooked the colonialist dimension of such an undertaking.

The true subject of philosophy, writes Eboussi Boulaga in La Crise du Muntu, “is the anonymous and eternal ethnic group”. Only the ethnologist, the subject who is supposed to know because he possesses the language of philosophy, will be able to make explicit this ultimate foundation of the cultural meanings that the ethnic group unfolds before his gaze, and will enable those who do not ultimately understand themselves to thus gain access to self-knowledge.

The critique of ethnophilosophy has consisted in reaffirming that philosophising is always a self-conscious act of distancing oneself from what is merely received. So philosophising is never the business of a collective, anonymous subject. To take the whole of culture – myths, magics, cosmogonies, proverbs, wisdoms – as philosophy is seen as an undue dilation of the concept of philosophy.

Responses to criticisms of ethnophilosophy

To the criticisms of Hountondji, Towa, Eboussi Boulaga, respond thinkers such as Meinrad Hegba, Assane Sylla, Pathé Diagne. Critics of ethnophilosophy are accused of taking a Eurocentric view of philosophy. Pathé Diagne calls critics of ethnophilosophy europhilosophers.

The criticism also focuses on their supposed scriptolatry – we will return later with Mamoussé Diagne to the relationship between writing and thought. Hountondji is said to be influenced by an Althusserian and Husserlian vision of philosophy. Norman Ajari points out that Hountondji idealised a certain French historical epistemology (Bachelard, Canguilhem), which he encountered in his training (Normale Sup, Sorbonne). This would explain his normative bias.

For Meinrad Hegba, “all philosophy is the daughter of its ethnos” – a reference to the pre-Socratics – it is inevitably ethnophilosophy. Hountondji and Towa are accused of elitism. The relationship between ethnology and philosophy is complex. How can we take an interdisciplinary look at African societies and their cultural productions? Awareness of the limits of philosophical discourse is at stake here.

2. The question of philosophizing

The West has ascribed to itself the primacy of Reason and the Logos. The West claims the origin and deployment of philosophy. Myth of its origin and of the Greek miracle. Sui generis phenomenon. Beginning of the history of thought in the West. Other forms of thought are in their infancy. Philosophy was born in the East (Oriens) and reached maturity in the West (Deleuze). See Deleuze and Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991.

To this thesis replies Pierre Hadot: “There is never an absolute beginning in the history of thought.” Philosophy and thought cannot be the exclusive property of the West (Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?, Paris, Gallimard, 1995). “Reason is not born; it is there wherever the Human is” (Alassane Ndaw, La Pensée africaine).

Philosophy has declared itself to be the history of the Spirit (according to SBD). There are many issues at stake in this debate for Africa. Access to Reason as a process of rehumanisation. Claiming the existence of an African philosophy or the right to philosophise, in a context of absolute negation of Africans and their cultural productions.

Here we find the particular feeling of a young African trained in philosophy of not being invited to the banquet (Mamoussé Diagne, De la philosophie et des philosophes en Afrique noire, Éditions Karthala). The same sentiment is expressed by the philosopher Catherine Malabou in response to the question of whether it is possible to ignore one’s status as a woman when writing philosophy (evoked by SBD in the introduction to L’Encre des savants, Codesria-Présence Africaine, 2013).

“How can one appropriate without further ado the technical and symbolic protocols of a discourse and a culture of which one has been for centuries the ground zero” (interview published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, April 2010, no. 593, p. 166). “And there is nothing more uncomfortable in the world than waking up on the open sea, in a skiff whose navigation plan you have chosen, let alone its destination” (MD, p. 9, opus quoted above).

Three periods of African philosophy and their ideological use

Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux, in Philosophies africaines (Présence Africaine, Paris, 2013), points out that generally African philosophy is presented in chronological order and from a historicist perspective. Three stages: it is first ethnophilosophy, then opposition to this ethnophilosophy, and finally only entirely philosophy by focusing on the same issues as Western philosophy (state, civil society, democracy, hermeneutics, art, ontology).

The first two sequences appear at the time of African independence.We then observe an ideological use of the notion of African philosophy for the purposes of emancipation. If the existence of an African philosophy can be demonstrated, then the presence of Reason in Africa will be attested. The humanity and dignity of the black man are at stake (SKG, p. 25). Response to Lévy-Bruhl (prelogical mentality) and Hegel (The Reason of History).

Hence a displacement of the locus of the notion and the stakes of philosophizing in Africa (SKG): to de-situate African philosophy from the history of Western thought. Not just a speculative activity, but a practical reason. What can it bring to African societies? Conception of politics, intelligibility of the present, production of meaning and imaginaries, ideal models.

Gnoseological plurality

Then comes the question of gnoseological plurality: the existence of a plurality of traditions of thought in various cultures – parallel, adjacent, incommensurable, etc. – which configure the thinkable (François Jullien).

It is a question of starting from the postulate of the diversity of modes of approach to reality according to civilisations and periods, of the plurality of modes of knowledge, as well as of gnoseological and epistemological relativity. To think about the plurality of the adventures of human thought, starting from the idea of the equality in principle of the different traditions of thought and taking note of their incommensurability.

This leads us to consider these different traditions of thought from their horizons and the configurations of the thinkable that they propose, as singular adventures of the mind that have developed in parallel and adjacent ways, dependent on the cultures from which they emanate. This means thinking about the diversity of intellectual traditions, avoiding the twin pitfalls of exoticism and ethnocentrism.

3. The debate revisited: Norman Ajari and J. Godefroy Bidima

The issues at stake in the debate on African philosophy in the mid-twentiethᵉ century go beyond the existence or otherwise of a philosophy that can be called African, but rather concern the legitimacy of Africans to think about their situation from their own concepts and categories, to ensure that in their thinking it is their very lives (Norman Ajari, La Dignité ou la mort, La Découverte, Paris, 2019). Such a problem arises in a context shaped by the epistemic violence of coloniality and its enterprise to delegitimise, mummify and even erase vernacular knowledge (NA).

Beyond the debate, Norman Ajari points out that ethnophilosophy has presented itself as a pretext for the development of original theses, outlining the contours of a space of intellectual production far beyond it. When it comes to African philosophy, there is a suspicion of illegitimacy. The formula is viewed with circumspection, suspected of covering up identity-based fundamentalism.

Western, Asian or African philosophy exists whenever there is an activity of conscious recapitulation and reinterpretation, of digestion of a historical framework. Such a philosophy is the product of a philosophical activity of constructing and writing its own history. An African philosophy can emerge from a theoretical activity of recapitulation (NA).

J. Godefroy Bidima on the question of African philosophy

We must avoid the trap of substantialism when talking about Africa. Existence of African philosophies in the plural: multiplicity and plurality. Plurality is linked to African history, which has neither unity of place (Africa, Europe, the Americas) nor unity of time. The multiplicity of scansions of African philosophies must be envisaged not as an excess, but as the place of lack, a space of germination, a field where all possibilities are tried…

Then arises the question of the place of these philosophies. Where are we talking about? Who is speaking (the subject)? What are we talking about (the object)? And the question of specificity: what is African philosophy? Does it have a status of its own, or is it just a branch of the various Western philosophies? The question of definition is insoluble, since there is no definition of philosophy, but rather definitions belonging to particular histories. The definition obeys a concern for clarity and rigour: to know what we are talking about. It also serves to orient and soothe the reader, to calm his anguish and his search for reference points. The aim of the investigation will not be to deal with African philosophy as a state (stasis), but as a process and an act. We will not look at its definition, but at its process of proferation. What it is can only be known by grasping the way in which it was proferated.

The confinement in definition betrays the reflex of academicism in which a definition is imposed on the work (philosophy wants to be a work, an opera), a suffocation and a limitation; whereas in its process of proferation, philosophy opens up to the diversity of determinations. The displacement of problems from definition to the process of proferation implies the multiplication of perspectives, the primacy of the multiple over the one.

Finally comes the question of the indexality of philosophy. It must be articulated to a context, to a place (where does it speak from?). What does it refer to in its discourse? What is it based on? What goal is it aiming at?