African Philosophy: Myth and Reality PDF
Preview African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
Page i African Philosophy Page ii African Systems of Thought General Editors Charles S. Bird Ivan Karp Contributing Editors Thomas O. Beidelman James Fernandez Luc de Heusch John Middleton Victor Turner Roy Willis Page iii African Philosophy Myth and Reality SECOND EDITION Paulin J. Hountondji Translated by Henri Evans with the collaboration of Jonathan Rée Introduction by Abiola Irele INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis Page iv First published in French 1976 French edition copyright 1976 by François Maspero, Paris First published in English 1983 English edition copyright 1983 by Paulin J. Hountondji Introduction copyright 1983 by Abiola Irele Translation copyright Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd Preface to the second edition copyright © 1996 by Paulin J. Hountondji All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Hountondji, Paulin J., date [Sur la philosophie africaine. English] African philosophy : myth and reality / Paulin J. Hountondji; translated by Henri Evans with the collaboration of Jonathan Rée; introduction by Abiola Irele. — 2nd ed. p. cm. — (African systems of thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 025333229X (cl : alk. paper). — ISBN 0253210968 (pa : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, African. I. Title. II. Series. B5305.H6813 1996 199'.6—dc20 9612249 1 2 3 4 5 01 00 99 98 97 96 Page v CONTENTS Preface to the Second Edition vii Introduction by Abiola Irele 7 Part One: Arguments 1 33 An Alienated Literature 2 47 History of a Myth 3 55 African Philosophy, Myth and Reality 4 71 Philosophy and Its Revolutions Part Two: Analyses 5 111 An African philosopher in Germany in the Eighteenth Century: AntonWilhelm Amo 6 131 The End of 'Nkrumaism' and the (Re)birth of Nkrumah 7 141 The Idea of Philosophy in Nkrumah's Consciencism 8 156 True and False Pluralism Postscript 170 Notes and References 184 Index 219 Page vii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION To the memory of Odera Oruka African Philosophy: Myth and Reality originally appeared in French twenty years ago; the earliest essay in the collection—the first chapter of this book—dates from 1969. The intellectual environment has changed greatly in the ensuing years, during which African Philosophy has provoked lively debate. Within the limits of this preface it would be impossible to respond to all the comments and criticisms it has occasioned. I will therefore save for a future occasion a full explication of how I understand the ideas which I defended at that time and why I still defend them in their essentials. On such an occasion, I will attempt to clarify the premises, tacit or explicit, the demands, and the expectations that, directly or indirectly, motivated the critique of ethnophilosophy presented in African Philosophy. I will also elaborate on what this critique owes to my own philosophical background, especially to my long acquaintance with philosophies of consciousness. In this connection I will explain my attachment to a certain idea of philosophy which, since Plato, demands that it be episteme rather than doxa, science rather than opinion; to Husserl, who identifies in a very technical manner some of the intellectual devices and methods that allow philosophy to become "a rigorous science"; to Descartes's cogito; and to all doctrines that value intellectual responsibility and demand that each affirmation be sustained by a proof or a rational justification. I will discuss what idea of Africa and her destiny, what ambition, what vision of the continent's future, led me to reject the theoretical model of ethnophilosophy as a facile and unacceptable solution. I will explain the role played by the works of Césaire and Fanon, by a certain understanding of Marx (highly influenced, it is true, by Althusser's approach), and by the militant commitment within the democratic movement in Dahomey and in Africa as a whole in shaping this vision. I will need to explain how this criticism of ethnophilosophy broadened into a critique of intellectual Page viii selfimprisonment in general, a critique of the scientific and technological relations of production on a world scale, and finally, a sociology of knowledge in countries of the periphery, entailing an increasing interest in the anthropology of knowledge and issues in the politics of science. 1 In this preface, however, I will limit myself to an effort at clearing up some of the most common misunderstandings regarding the questions raised in the book and its overall conceptual framework. That African Philosophy stimulated such a heated debate was probably due to the highly sensitive nature of the topic. The themes of the book did not concern professional philosophers alone: they also related to ideological and political questions and to cultural issues in the broadest sense. By identifying ethnophilosophy as a defined thoughtpattern and a permanent temptation of Africanist discourse, African Philosophy was a warning, an invitation to exorcise demons too often ignored or hidden. As the Senegalese philosopher Mamoussé Diagne put it, it was, therefore, a sort of psychoanalysis (Diagne 1976). Readers may have welcomed the book's firm stand against intellectual selfimprisonment and unanimism, its insistence on the right to the universal, and its assertion that all cultures, based on their own preoccupations and concerns, have a vocation to invent not only locally viable solutions but also concepts whose validity transcends regional boundaries. Such an agenda was bound to provoke widespread criticism. Yet I am grateful to most of my critics for prompting me to clarify certain ambiguities, refine some notions, and occasionally, deepen the analysis. Remarkably, even when these criticisms appeared to be purely theoretical, they generally carried political implications. Conversely, even when political criticisms resorted to amalgam and denigration instead of honest refutation, they inevitably referred back to theoretical questions that needed to be identified and examined. The very first sentence of the first essay in African Philosophy has given rise to sharp controversy: "By 'African philosophy' I mean a set of texts, specifically the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves." At least three points have been made against what was perceived by many readers as a "definition" of African philosophy. First, the nationality or geographic origin of the authors is not a sufficient condition for Africanness. It has been suggested that something more is needed: dedication to "the African cause" (Yai 1977). Second, an author's own intention and selfassessment is not sufficient reason for any work to be Page ix labeled as philosophical. Third, and this is the strongest objection, the mention of writing amounts to restricting, quite arbitrarily, the forms of philosophical expression and overlooks the extraordinary richness of oral literature. Some years ago, in reply to this triple criticism, I pointed out the polemical thrust of the incriminating sentence. Though it had the formal structure of a definition, this prefatory declaration was not meant as a definition. It should be read as a counterassertion that was far more important for what it rejected than for its positive content. It aimed at establishing, against the dominant ethnological conception, this very simple equation: African philosophy equals African philosophical literature. That is, the whole of philosophical texts produced by Africans. Rather than a definition, this is "still an external characterization of the object to be defined," with a view to indicating the only possible place where it is likely to be found (Hountondji 1981, 49). By completely putting aside the idea of an implicit, silent, latent philosophy, I meant to value discourse and the history of discourse as being the only possible place where philosophy appears. Writing, at this stage, did not really matter. Writing was still to me a modality of the explicit. The possibility of an oral philosophical literature (a philosophical "orature") was not excluded. It is for this reason that I cited Griaule's Conversations with Ogotemmeli, a few pages later, as a more valuable contribution than Tempels's Bantu Philosophy. The French anthropologist had chosen to transcribe the words of one sage among many. He showed the possibility of a longterm project which would consist of a systematic transcription of such speeches, at least as a starting point of a critical discussion—what my Kenyan colleague the late Odera Oruka 2 would later call "philosophical sagacity"—rather than as a reconstruction of implicit philosophy behind the habits and customs of the host society through a lot of nonverifiable hypotheses which always amount to overinterpreting the facts (Hountondji 1976, 31; Griaule 1965; Oruka 1983, 1990). I returned to this question in the fourth essay and, after comparing the effects of the written and the spoken word, I finally admitted the privilege of writing and its absolute necessity for the development of critical philosophy and scientific culture as a whole. By the same token, I came to qualify my appreciation of Griaule's approach. The problem, indeed, was no longer the same. The perspective in chapter four is not merely descriptive. The preoccupation is practical: What does one do today? Should we, in order to remain ourselves, Page x renounce writing and pretend to ignore what we have long known, deceive ourselves and others as we continue to proclaim the superiority of our oral cultures, write lengthy indictments against writing, in articles which, by their very existence refute in practice what they pretend to say? Or should we take note of the real process of our thinking today, and the role of writing in the development of all research, including research on oral cultures? I totally agree with Anthony Appiah when he states, "Oral traditions have a habit of transmitting only consensus, the accepted view: those who are in intellectual rebellion (and European anthropologists and missionaries have met plenty of these) often have to begin in each generation all over again" (Appiah 1992, 92). African Philosophy did not say otherwise. For all that, it did not deny the importance of oral literature, as some critics understood; neither did it attempt to minimize the heritage of traditional beliefs. The Postscript was, in this regard, quite clear, and I am grateful to Lansana Keita for pointing it out (Keita 1985, 113). One can imagine, however, the ideological context, the extraordinary climate of suspicion, that for many years sustained such debate. A Beninese critic even found the word to describe what he, following many others, considered an unforgivable transgression: "the fetishism of writing" (Dossou 1994). One should have realized by now, nevertheless, that nowhere in African Philosophy is writing valued for its own sake; neither is "orature" considered intrinsically inferior. Having said this, what is it to be an African? Is it belonging to a race, in this case the black race, if we decide to restrict ourselves to black Africa? Should one, to be an African, share in a common culture and adhere to the value system or systems conveyed by this culture? Must one profess a given religious or political credo? Mudimbe and Appiah, as is well known, brilliantly dealt with such questions not long ago (Mudimbe 1988, Appiah 1992). My point of view was similar. One had to free the horizon, reject any definition of an African that would, by implication, restrict or confine him or her in a conceptual, ideological, religious, or political stranglehold and reinforce the illusory belief that some inexorable fate weighs him or her down forever. Frantz Fanon made a strong statement in this regard: "Il ne faut pas essayer de fixer l'homme, puisque son destin est d'être lâché"/"One should not try to restrict a human being, since his fate is to be set loose" (Fanon 1952, 187). To acknowledge Africans' freedom of thought, one had to get rid of all sorts of essentialist and particularist doctrines born of a hundred years of
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