African Philosophy and Multicultural Thought
Ananyo Basu
University of Massachusetts at Boston
Professor Huey-Li Li has provided us with a concise history of the debates over African
philosophy and some persuasive reasons for its serious interrogation by, and integration
into, the field of philosophy of education. The essay's conclusions are quite
unimpeachable and should be taken to heart in the community of philosophy at large. I
will discuss some of the specific merits of this essay, raise a couple of points of
concern, and suggest an issue for general consideration.
The present essay promises to accomplish three things at the outset. The first of
these is to provide an examination of the metaphilosophical debates regarding the nature
and existence of African philosophy. Li's account is balanced and, given the constraints
of length, quite adequately representative. Her response to the argument against African
philosophy based on a lack of writing goes beyond most thinkers in pointing out that the
nuanced richness of a dialogic mode of inquiry can be lost in an ossified oral tradition
just as well as in a written one. And, like many other Africanists, she indicates that
conversely there have been oral traditions in Greece, or China (and, I might add, India),
which exhibit a great depth and subtlety of thought. The conclusion that writing is not
indispensable for philosophical inquiry is eminently sensible.
Li's essay questions another set of arguments about the cloudy, superstitious, and
authoritarian style of African intellectual discourse, which, in the eyes of the
so-called professional philosophers, makes the arguments unfit for categorization as
philosophy. In response, Li gives two sorts of reasons. The first points out that African
philosophy is certainly not so dissimilar from the Ancient, Medieval, and even modern
periods of Western philosophy (although it is perhaps distinguishable from contemporary
analytical philosophy). Secondly, Lucius Outlaw and others have argued that philosophy is
necessarily rooted in a social milieu, and indeed a genuine engagement with African
philosophy could potentially provide a powerful corrective to a certain parochialism,
masquerading as universalism, that characterizes canonical Western thought. The
first of these arguments occasions me some concern - indeed, it is of the form made
notorious by Kwasi Wiredu's classic article, "How Not to Compare African
Philosophy."1 In brief,
this runs the danger of reifying the stereotype of the African as simply less evolved.
The second argument is related to the tension between universalism and particularism,
whose resolution is the second stated objective of this essay. The particularist position
holds that it is African culture that determines the specificity of African philosophy.
But as Li points out, since African culture changes so must the philosophy, and in a
colonial context exposure to European ideas has deeply weakened belief in witchcraft and
the like. Thus on Li's view, both the false universalism of the European tradition and
the invented, static, traditionalism of African thought must be challenged. And it is
through a profound, dialectical interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and
culture that we can move forward. I am sympathetic to this position, but I cannot help
feeling that Li has not defended it with sufficient vigor. After all, this form of
compromise with particularism is not new and has been attacked by the likes of Anthony
Appiah and Paulin Hountondji as a devaluing of both the discipline of philosophy and of
the potential of African peoples.
HREF="#fn2">2 After all, what message does it send to say that this
fuzzy stuff here is valuable, since it expresses the African culture it is rooted in, and
so we call it philosophy? On their view this does a disservice, both to the existing
achievements of philosophy and to the present and future Africans doing rigorous and
rational work all around the world who are constructing a true African philosophy.
Arguments can be constructed against this response - but Li does not make them here.
In the following section on postcoloniality, Li identifies, precisely, the
psychological underpinnings of some Africans' desire to have had a recognizable
philosophical tradition of their own. Li uses DuBois's wonderful image of the
double-consciousness of the subaltern to explore this, pointing out clearly the ways in
which culture and identity are constructed within a context of sociopolitical realities
and compulsions. Colonization becomes a veil for the African intellectual. Again I find
the general position here quite plausible. By way of adding a wrinkle, however, I would
like to question whether the situation of the African native is really quite as congruent
to that of the African-American as Li imagines. Appiah, in his book In My Father's
House, makes a persuasive case for considering cultural colonization to have been
restricted to a very small urban elite in Africa. My own experience growing up one
generation after the Raj in India also bears this out. The masses of Third World people
live in thought-worlds not essentially different from those of their ancestors before the
common era. The problem is that these most alienated members of native cultures seek to
be the purveyors of the authentic tradition. If Western training makes them un-African,
and traditional Africans do not do anything that we can call philosophy, then African
philosophy must indeed be in the future.
The conclusion of Li's essay is that the investigation of non-Western traditions can
both cast light on the nature of philosophy, as well as enrich its practice. This is both
sympathetic and sensible, and I hope more of us will come around to this way of thinking.
But let me turn to what is both my principal worry regarding Li's essay, and also my
suggestion as a topic for serious consideration. I feel that this essay has been guilty
of a failing that has plagued the great majority of early European investigators into
African thought, and this is the problem of Unanimism. The term was made popular
by Hountondji and describes the strange and unwarranted assumption that all the
inhabitants of the vast and varied continent of Africa can be supposed to resemble each
other in any salient characteristic of thought or culture. To Hountondji, such a
simplification is clearly ludicrous. I would add that it has some rather nasty
racist-imperialist resonance. After all, even the more bigoted among us have learned not
to say "they all look the same" about people of African descent. And yet all
manner of enlightened and educated folks speak of all Africans being one way or another.
Aside from the political problems, I would suggest that this is an impoverishment of
Philosophy. When we speak in simple Manichean dichotomies about entire traditions, the
results are rarely nuanced or productive. To say that the Germans are analytical while
Indians are mystical is to misrepresent grossly the internal complexity of both
traditions. After all, this picture will exclude the German mystics like Meister Eckhart
and perhaps even Hegel, upon whom their influence is writ large. And it will exclude the
ancient and still popular Nyaya tradition of analysis and argument and the
wonderful tetralemma logical paradoxes of the Madhyamikas, from the tradition of
Indian thought. To speak in terms of an African culture or philosophy is shallow
at best and may be tantamount to chicanery.
Related to this is a more general question regarding difference itself. In our
discourse on difference and the difference it makes, we are always walking a tightrope
between a Scylla of essentialism and a Charybdis of universalism. On the one hand, if
there is no real difference between Ghanaian and Italian minds (as I fervently believe)
then why do we need to pay attention to particularity? If we say that they are indeed
deeply different in so significant a matter as their intellectual traits and world-views,
are we not accepting as reality the worst kind of racist superstition?
If there are specific differences based on accidents of history and geography, they
have not been shown to us either in this essay or generally in the last fifty years of
African philosophy and metaphilosophy. Perhaps we need to consider early work like that
of Alexis Kagame in 1956, who indicates that in the Bantu languages, Descartes's Cogito
and its attendant centuries of perplexity could not even have been stated:The word for
"being" can only be used as a copula.
HREF="#fn3">3 Of course, Hountondji has pointed out that we cannot base
our understanding of a nation's philosophy on the peculiarities of its grammar - no
scrutiny of French grammar will reveal the existentialism of Sartre. There may, however,
be some pertinent differences discoverable along these or other lines, and I hope future
investigators will provide us with a deeper understanding of these kinds of
specificities.
In the meantime, my recommendation would be to be extremely careful about making
sweeping generalizations of any sort. Certain easy expectations of difference may serve
as self-fulfilling prophecies - the Westerner expecting to find mysticism in India will
probably find precisely that. We must wait for African philosophers to reveal their range
of thought and critique, and we must welcome their perspectives into the discourse of
philosophy of education.
1. Kwasi Wiredu, "How Not to Compare
African Philosophy," in Philosophy and an African Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
2. Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992) and Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and
Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
3. Alexis Kagame, le Philosophie Bantou-Rwandaise de
l'Etre (Brussels: Academie Royale de sciences coloniale, 1956).
This essay is a response to