Rereading the ethnophilosophy-philosophy debate and trying to move beyond it
Felwine Sarr
Duke University. Romance Studies. Graduate seminar.
Session 1
This paper proposes three contemporary re-readings of the ethnophilosophy/philosophy debate: that of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who questions the relationship of African languages to philosophy that of Paulin Hountondji, who revisits his own critique thirty years on; and that of Jean-Godefroy Bidima, who proposes the paradigm of the Crossing. Three ways of not closing the debate, but shifting it.
- The proofreading of Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, after recalling the context of the debate at the time, questions the relationship between African languages and philosophy. His thoughts turn to the challenges posed to cognition by the diversity of languages. Does each language lock us into an irreducible system of thought? Can we simply and purely identify linguistic representations and cognitive representations, as cognitive grammars seem to do?
The question crystallises around the supposed ontological speaking of the Baluba. “Their language is not like ours, they speak so concretely, in words that relate immediately to the things themselves; these peoples speak ontologically” (Tempels quoting one of his colleagues, who he believes expresses the ultimate truth of the Baluba worldview).
The notion of ontological speaking has, according to SBD, two aspects. The first is the assertion of the existence of essentially concrete languages as opposed to languages capable of abstraction. The second is the existence of a philosophy without a philosopher.
The idea of a concrete language takes up the assertions of classical ethnology, those whose errors Tempels wanted to denounce, for example that of Lévy-Bruhl positing that unlike “evolved” languages, which indicate a familiar and rapid use of abstraction, languages in which the “prelogical mentality” expresses itself use processes that are always concrete.
Asserting the existence of a philosophy without a philosopher means that the Bantu carries a collective worldview that expresses itself immediately in the meanings it poses, in its linguistic uses, and whose ultimate subject, which is therefore no one in particular, is the ethnic group. 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 supposed to know because he or she possesses the philosophical language, will be able to make explicit this ultimate foundation of the cultural meanings that the ethnic group unfolds before its gaze, and will thus enable those who do not understand themselves to 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. Thus philosophising is never the affair of a collective, anonymous subject.
Taking up what has been sought in ethnophilosophy
Today, according to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, it is no longer a question of criticizing ethnophilosophy in the name of philosophy, but of seriously taking up again what has sought in the enterprise and strayed into the dead end of an ethnic philosophy.
An example of this can be found in Alexis Kagamé, in an undertaking in philosophy-linguistics that is a project SBD describes as global cognitive anthropology and which asks the following questions: does language determine the logical categories we implement as well as the fundamental notions we have of being, time, etc.? What do we mean by ‘determine’? What about translation, its possibility and its effects?
The time for rereading having come, Hountondji, according to SBD, invites us henceforth to seek in African cultures this “unthought” that, like any other, it conveys, and which it is up to us to read. This means doing justice to an enterprise that has called itself linguistic philosophy. Hence the need for a theoretical reflection with authors such as Herder and Humboldt, and with ethnolinguists such as Sapir, Whorf, Émile Benveniste or Catherine Fuchs.
.Alexis Kagamé showed, two years before É. Benveniste (Catégories de pensée et catégories de langue) set out to demonstrate it in 1958, that Aristotle’s logical categories were merely the linguistic categories of Greek: what Aristotle’s onto-logic presented as a grammar of reasoning in general was merely the grammar of his own language and perhaps of languages of the same family. Catherine Fuchs invites us to go beyond the linguistic relativism of Sapir-Whorf.
Bashir’s conclusion boils down to a formula: language inclines one to think. It inclines without necessity, he says, quoting Leibniz.
- Hountondji’s proofreading
Through an article devoted to the work of anthropologist Marc Augé, who worked on the Alladian, Avikam and Ebrié peoples of Côte d’Ivoire, Hountondji returns to his vision of ethnology and ethnophilosophy, thirty years after the controversy that pitted him against those he referred to as ethnophilosophers.
Hountondji maintains and reiterates his criticism of ethnophilosophy but nevertheless affirms the interest of highlighting the ideo-logic of communities’ collective representations. Marc Augé’s theoretical and empirical approach is cited as an example. He warns against an ever possible drift in ethnology, which consists in misunderstanding its status.
Wrangling over words, he says. He criticises Tempels for the sensational advertising title given to his book. With such a title, one would have expected to see the exhumation of the history of perfectly identifiable African thinkers whose thought would have spanned the century. Instead, the missionary himself has undertaken a synthesis of the collective thought of the Bantu: the interviewee is silenced by the interviewer, who becomes his unavoidable spokesman and claims to express his deepest thoughts better than he does. Hountondji points out that he would not have been so stung if Tempels had entitled his work “Essai d’interprétation de la pensée bantoue” (“Essay on the interpretation of Bantu thought”). He has too demanding an idea of philosophy, he says, to admit that we can philosophise in the place of other people or take refuge behind the lazy idea of a collective philosophy.
.The ideo-logic hypothesis
Marc Augé then poses a question to Hountondji: does he ultimately deny the existence for a given society of a set of representations with relative coherence?
Hountondji admits that one cannot avoid the obvious fact that in any society in general, in any village society in particular, a conception of man and the universe prevails. Does this conception vary, or does it remain fundamentally the same? If it varies, to what do we attribute this variation? If we want to remain rigorous, he argues, we must postpone asking such a general question and set about describing in minute detail, within a limited geographical space, what comes into view.
Marc Augé invites us to reconstitute the ideo-logic which is the logic of the collective representations of societies. This is not the sum of the discourse on a society that the most knowledgeable or well-informed of its members could hold, but the fundamental structure (syntactic logic) of all the discourse possible in a given society, about that society. It is the syntax of society’s theoretical discourse about itself (Marc Augé).
Hountondji finds the theoretical hypothesis of ideo-logic fruitful despite its theoretical difficulties. If, however, it is only a hypothesis, and never a given reality, it would have the status of the Freudian unconscious: that of a collective unconscious that functions as a hidden rationality, never perceived in full but whose perceptible effects would constantly attest to its presence.
This hypothesis, according to Hountondji, puts the most personal discourses, initiatives, and claims in their proper place by showing how, beyond their claim to originality, they are dictated, directly or indirectly, by a pre-personal thought, a set of norms and requirements that are always already there, prior to the subject asserting itself here and now.
The philosopher’s task
The philosopher’s task, Hountondji believes, cannot be limited in Africa to reconstituting the ideo-logic of his society. Rather than claiming a thought-already there, or aping it by presenting it as a credible alternative to what is known in the West as philosophy, he would be better inspired to take note of its intellectual and emotional conditioning, to study it in effect systematically, to become aware of it in order to free himself better.
To conclude, Hountondji believes that for Africans, a better knowledge of their “philosophies”, their traditional systems of thought and the hidden logics that underpin them remains essential today as in the past. It should not, however, lead them to complacency or to the claim of an outdated cultural nationalism, but to greater lucidity in order to face, more wisely, the questions and tasks of the present.
- The Bidima reread: the Crossing
Jean-Godefroy Bidima returns to the ethnophilosophy-philosophy debate. He reports on it in the Que sais-je entitled La philosophie négro-africaine (PUF, 1994), in which he takes stock of the controversy and identifies its main players. Above all, however, he examines the questions and themes addressed by African philosophers over the last forty years, analyses them and reveals their unthought.
Bidima dismisses from the outset two ways of posing the question: the quest for a definition (what is Black African philosophy?) and the assignment of a place (where is it? where does it come from, where is it going?). It analyses the dominant (inaugural) narratives about African philosophy as determined by two burdens: that of announcement and that of proof.
The announcement is the civilising mission, the white man’s burden, an announcement of Reason and its history from which the African is excluded. This led to reactive thinking, thinking about us too, about proof, about identity. Criticism of colonial contempt, he says, has become an obsessive fixation for African philosophers. It was a process of self-blame on the part of the colonised, whose culture and Great Narratives were not supported militarily and technologically. Reactive behaviour oscillated between borrowed language to prove that rationality was universal, and tribal and provincial language to prove that it had not been corrupted by the encounter and had remained authentic.
Then comes the desire to rehabilitate African cultures. All African philosophy written in the last forty years, Bidima argues, bears the mark of these two burdens that have mutually overdetermined each other.
Identity and memory. Narratives about African identity and philosophical specificity are discourses asserting positions, struggling to pick up the pieces of an African memory whose contemporary crisis is linked to the slavery adventure and European colonialism. It’s an approach that refers back to origins, roots and settlement in a place with well-defined boundaries.
The first generations of African philosophers, in their debates on the existence of African philosophy, were concerned with the famous: “what from what”. For this reason, according to Bidima, reflection on the problems of African identity and anchorage has resulted in a poverty of thought about Otherness.
The Crossing paradigm
The narratives of the Identity paradigm made the Crossing paradigm possible. The paradigm of the Traversée does not say what African history is, or philosophy in Africa, but identifies dispositions and contours, and attempts to identify in a history with ironic contours what it means to be involved in an immanence. The traverse, privileging dispositions, will bank on the “what by what”.
To anchoring, she will oppose outgrowth and insist on the blurring of contacts, the pitching of paths, and the infinite openness of history to the possible. The essential thing here is no longer to say what Africa has been (where we come from), but what it is becoming (what it is going through). A thought of mediations, a reflection on translations, the crossing expresses on a temporal level the incompletion of African history.
African philosophies hitherto have been concerned with promoting the having been; now it is a matter of privileging the not yet (Ernst Bloch). Crossing-over-mediation refuses to freeze the movement of multiple thought in categories. Not to define, but to reveal processes of proferation. Not to assign conceptual locations (or pre-conceptual origins), but to find the ways in which this thought is expressed.
The Unthinkings of African Philosophy
Bidima points to the insistence on the question of identity at a time when the continent is facing major challenges. African philosophical discourse has developed writing tics and habits regarding thematic choices: colonialism, slavery, traditions, to which in the meantime the idea of development has been added. Development being an avatar of a very nineteenth-century conception of history, consisting of telling Africans to take part in a progressive (teleological) process in which the West was the locomotive and the model.
A dialectic of recognition and rejection has made the Other, exclusively, the Westerner. Very little work has been done on Asian, Latin American or Jewish philosophies. On the epistemological level, there has been a preponderance of dialogue with ethnology, literature and political anthropology. What African philosophies lack is a reflection on law (punishment, confession, reparation), economics (debt, value, etc.) and psychoanalysis. The voices are predominantly male and elderly. Women and children are absent from the discourse. The body is also absent.
Philosophers love clean concepts and fall, according to Bidima, into the trap of immaculate conception. This is a stylistic failing on the part of authors who do not want to give up the good style and coherence of a discourse that is subject to the control of the subject, and therefore incapable of translating the aporias of reality. Finally, Bidima questions the exclusive relationship of African thinkers to states, to the detriment of civil society in all its components.
Crossing and memory
The idea of traversing combines both the historical possibilities existing in the social fabric and the subjective motivations that drive actors to go elsewhere. Crossing deals with becomings, outgrowths and exuberances; it says what plurals a given history is made of.
She seeks no African essence, but while not overlooking the vicissitudes of history, she reaffirms that this world is far from being an ordo sempiternus rerum. Her relationship to African memory is not one of simple evocation, it falls within the register of elaboration: in other words, this memory is not made with immovable places, it is constituted of inciting places that are in fact indicators.
Call to release within a memory elements not yet accomplished, which are suffering and in transit because exposed to the corrosion of becoming. The logic of identity articulates African memory by finding prestigious figures, glorious places and moments. The crossing makes memory “a framework more than a content, an ever-available stake, a set of strategies, a being-there that is worth less by what it is, than by what we do with it” (Pierre Nora).
Communitarian perspectives (which come from the Americas or the continent) produce massive thinking (equating the problems of Black Americans with those of all Black people) while forgetting that it is not only on learned history, but also on lived history, that memory is based (Maurice Halbwachs).
By traversing, African philosophies broaden their field of the memorable by including in the call structures and expectation horizons of African history: insignificance. For the moment, African historians are busy cementing a monumental history (great empires, great conquerors, political figures). What African historiography lacks is the production of a field of the memorable where these debris of events that also form memory will be admitted.
Perspectives
For Bidima, it is a question of combating a fundamentalist reading of history and the guilt-tripping strategy of Afropessimism, through a disposition towards Utopia as a dynamic approach likely to invent the future. He proposes an artistic reading of reality that would accept the silence of self-reflection, detach the Subject from its identity anchorage, to open it up to a genuine relationship with the other.
Concerning the relationship to time, the spatialising grasp that controls the past in order to better manipulate the future should give way, according to him, to a time of fulgurance or Kairos that allows us to isolate two notions: expectation (an anxiety that lies in wait) and opportunity (the seizure of the moment).
To the triad past / present / future, he opposes the dynamizing couple accomplished / unaccomplished. Both against mythological readings and instrumentalist uses of space and time, Bidima proposes the political apprehension of an unfinished space-time, linked to a promise, replacing the monumentalised space-time of official history.
As far as methodology is concerned, he prefers a fragmentary (micro-logical) approach to reality to the holistic grasp of totalities that the vast majority of African philosophers have practised to date.
Finally, a new approach to the philosophy of language cannot do without relating language to action and creation.