Debating African Philosophy

Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy

George Hull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429796272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In African countries there has been a surge of intellectual interest in foregrounding ideas and thinkers of African origin—in philosophy as in other disciplines—that have been unjustly ignored or marginalized. African scholars have demonstrated that precolonial African cultures generated ideas and arguments which were at once truly philosophical and distinctively African, and several contemporary African thinkers are now established figures in the philosophical mainstream.

Yet, despite the universality of its themes, relevant contributions from African philosophy have rarely permeated global philosophical debates. Critical intellectual excavation has also tended to prioritize precolonial thought, overlooking more recent sources of home-grown philosophical thinking such as Africa's intellectually rich liberation movements.

This book demonstrates the potential for constructive interchange between currents of thought from African philosophy and other intellectual currents within philosophy. Chapters authored by leading and emerging scholars:

• recover philosophical thinkers and currents of ideas within Africa and about Africa, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary mainstream philosophy;
• foreground the relevance of African theorizing to contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of language, moral/political philosophy, philosophy of race, environmental ethics and the metaphysics of disability;
• make new interventions within on-going debates in African philosophy;
• consider ways in which philosophy can become epistemically inclusive, interrogating the contemporary call for 'decolonization' of philosophy.

Showing how foregrounding Africa—its ideas, thinkers and problems—can help with the project of renewing and improving the discipline of philosophy worldwide, this book will stimulate and challenge everyone with an interest in philosophy, and is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and scholars of African and Africana philosophy.

Part I

Decolonising philosophy

1 Ottobah Cugoano’s place in the history of political philosophy

Slavery and the philosophical canon

Robert Bernasconi

I

At a time when there are calls from around the world for decolonizing the canon, there is an urgent need to clarify the facts about what the thinkers who are served up to students in philosophy classes had to say on such an important issue as the enslavement of Africans, and on how their positions related to their philosophies. Although much of this chapter is devoted to offering examples of the failures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century canonical philosophers to use their authority to speak out on this issue, the thrust of my discussion is to highlight the widespread failure of philosophers today to engage this issue. Even when a canonical philosopher’s support of slavery is well known, as in the case of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, there seems to be little appetite on the part of specialists on these philosophers to mount a sustained investigation of what this means for our understanding of them, as if there was no possibility that the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans was worth the attention of philosophers.

Irrespective of its immense historical importance, the rejection at the end of the eighteenth century by Europeans within Europe of the traditional justifications for slavery would seem worthy of philosophical study in order to better understand how changes in morality take place. It is a striking fact that popular revulsion in England against the slave trade and against slavery did not await, in Robin Blackburn’s phrase, “the approval of philosophers,” but was generated by a small number of former slaves working mainly with clergymen (Blackburn 1998: 36). To be sure, the political task of emancipating the slaves held by European colonists proved an inordinately slow process, but the moral transformation at the popular level, once it began, took place with astonishing speed. One gets an early indication of this by comparing the first and second editions of William Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy. In February 1785, Paley observed in his chapter on slavery that “The great revolution which seems preparing in the Western world, may probably conduce, and who knows, but that it is designed to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny” (Paley 1785: 197). A year later, this sentence was revised to read: “The great revolution which has taken place in the Western world, may probably conduce, and who knows, but that it is designed to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny” (Paley 1786: 197). But Paley was an exception. The most eminent philosophers of the time seem to have missed this seismic event and, perhaps for no better reason than that, philosophers today fail to study it. The canonical philosophers who still provide the models for how we think of moral and political philosophy today turned their backs on the sufferings of Black slaves, and many of the scholars who dedicate themselves to studying those canonical philosophers repeat the same avoidance mechanisms.

It is not anachronistic to complain about the way eighteenth-century philosophers approached the issue of slavery. When Condorcet published his Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres in 1781, he attacked the moralists for remaining silent on the crime of reducing human beings to slaves, albeit he did so anonymously, perhaps thereby compromising the strength of his criticism (Schwartz 1822: 318). A few years earlier, in 1773, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre completed his description of the way slaves were treated in Mauritius by complaining that he was “annoyed that philosophers who fight abuse so courageously mention the slavery of blacks only to make a joke of it” (Wilson 2003: 132–33). He was probably thinking of David Hume’s notorious remark, made in the context of a discussion of Negro slaves and subsequently recycled by Kant, that a Negro might be admired “for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly” (Hume 1987: 208n; Kant, 2011: 58–59). What makes Bernardin de St. Pierre’s observation especially significant for my purposes is that he also offered a diagnosis of why so many philosophers failed to criticize the horrors of the African slave trade at a time when others were doing so. He said that they “avoid the problem by looking to the past.” If, as seems likely, he meant to highlight the way that philosophers frequently, as a matter of course, allow their attention to be drawn to past arguments directed to conditions that no longer pertain, thereby overlooking the contemporary conditions that are staring them in the face, then, as I will show in the second section, that was very much the case with discussions of slavery by a number of prominent philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

If one relied solely on textbooks of political philosophy, one would have no idea that the debate on the abolition of both the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself was one of the most prominent and contentious philosophical debates in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. That debate has been handed over to the historians and, with the notable exception of Glen Doris, they usually ignore the role of canonical philosophers in those debates, although Montesquieu sometimes gets a mention (Doris 2011b). The resulting silence about how canonical philosophers viewed the slave trade might lead one to conclude that they had little to say about it, but this is far from the case. It was a standard philosophical topic throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and often took the form of commentary on previous studies. This seems to have given the philosophical discussion of slavery an inherently conservative tendency, with the result that it was slow to adapt to changes in sentiment.

My quick survey in the second section of the failure of canonical philosophers to address slavery adequately, even within the framework of the time in which they lived, provides the appropriate context for demonstrating in the third section the radicality of Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, first published in 1787 (Cugoano 1999). Cugoano, who wrote explicitly as “a Native of Africa,” knew what he was talking about at first hand. By his own account, he was captured when he was around 13 years old in what is now Ghana, taken to the West Indies in 1770 as a slave, and after two years brought to England. That was at the time of the Somerset decision delivered by Lord Mansfield, who ruled that a slave owner could not in England exercise dominion over his slaves according to American laws. Two years later, at the age of about 18, Cugoano was freed. One contemporary observer, Scipioni Piattoli, claimed that Cugoano’s book caused a great sensation (Cugoano 2009: 22; see Pierrot 2012). However, there is otherwise little record of its impact beyond Henri Grégoire’s complaint that the book was both unmethodical and repetitious (Grégoire 1788). What Grégoire and many others since failed to see was the striking originality of some of the philosophical arguments found there. My aim here is not to offer an assessment of the place Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments should be given within the historical debate on abolition. Others have sought to do this and it should be said that it is generally agreed that it was the most radical of all the abolitionist tracts (Bogues 2003: 32–46). ¹ My concern is to identify among the arguments that he introduced those that have a special resonance today.

II

The framework of modern political philosophy was established in the seventeenth century by such figures as Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and, of course, Locke, but none of these figures opposed the slave trade, let alone slavery. Indeed, I am not aware of any seventeenth-century text, philosophical or not, that unambiguously attacked the enslavement of Africans with the possible exception of the English puritan Richard Baxter, who insisted that anyone who bought “negroes or other slaves of such as we have just cause to believe did steal them by piracy, or buy them of those that have no power to sell them” had committed a “heinous sin”: “by right the man is his own, and therefore no man else can have just title to him” (Baxter 1677: 73). Nevertheless, Baxter seems to have been more tolerant of those slave owners whose intention was to baptize them. Principled opposition to the institution of slavery was rare, even at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Jameson 1911: 185–87).

What makes the lack of a principled opposition in the seventeenth century to the institution of slavery so remarkable is the fact that one can find voices in the previous century already denouncing slavery. In 1537, Pope Paul III in Sublimis Deus condemned the slavery of “Indians and other peoples,” although this statement was soon largely forgotten and seems to have had little influence (Panzer 1996: 81; Boer 1978: 30–38). In 1576, Jean Bodin argued that slavery was unnatural, but it is telling that Bodin’s contribution receives even today almost no recognition from philosophers (Bodin 2013: 266–317; see Heller 1994). It is also telling that in Bodin’s own time, his view was dismissed because he did not have the majority of authorities behind him and that he lacked the support of Aristotle in particular, whom he had explicitly criticized (Braun 2013: 286–87). Bernardin de St. Pierre said that his contemporaries were looking to the past, and it seems that Bodin’s contemporaries were already doing the same.

The dominant way of justifying slavery throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century was not by appealing to racial differences, if by that we mean an appeal to something like a biological concept of race. That was more characteristic of nineteenth-century debates on slavery in the United States. In the seventeenth century, what we think of as racial differences were aligned to religious differences and more often thought of in those terms: because of the strong convention among both Christians and Muslims that one did not enslave anyone with whom one shared a religion, this significantly narrowed the range of people who could legitimately be enslaved. One can find what is in effect a racial justification of slavery in Immanuel Kant’s 1788 essay “On the Use of Teleological Principles of Philosophy,” but it is worth noting that his purpose in appealing to the arguments of the pro-slavery lobby that Negroes were inherently lazy was to bolster support for his idea that there were races that could be characterized in terms of permanent inheritable characteristics (Kant 2013: 344–45; Bernasconi 2002: 149–52). James Tobin’s Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Colonies was Kant’s source for the claim about their laziness, although it is worth noting that Tobin was so far from espousing the racial justifications of later times that he explicitly denied that anyone had ever “pretended, that the slaves either of the Jews, Greeks, or Romans of old, or the European and African slaves of modern times, were, or are, in way inferior to their masters, except in strength, policy, or good fortune” (Tobin 1785: 141). To be sure, during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a link was increasingly being established in the minds of white people, both in Europe and the Americas, between slavery and Africans (Painter 2010: xi, 42). However, that particular passage was not available to Kant in the extracts he read. From early on, critics of the way Africans were increasingly being singled out for slavery, like Thomas Tryon, tried to break the connection between the two ideas, but it is telling that any knowledge we have of what look like racial arguments for enslaving Africans are known mainly from those who attacked those arguments (Tryon 1684: 114–17; Kitson 2007: 114–21).

The main justification for the enslavement of Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the traditional argument that prisoners captured in war could be enslaved instead of being killed during hostilities. The argument was rehearsed by Hugo Grotius in his The Rights of War and Peace (Grotius 2005), which was first published in 1625 and repeatedly revised and reissued. It contained an extensive discussion of slavery that included a detailed presentation of the ius gentium, the law of the peoples, which detailed the practices of the Greeks and Romans as a kind of justification, albeit one that lacked the authority of the ius naturae, the law of nature. This essentially backward-­looking approach set the parameters of later discussions insofar as Grotius, together with Samuel Pufendorf, who in 1672 responded to him, were widely discussed in the Universities in the eighteenth century, almost always wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• Foreword by Lungisile Ntsebeza
• Introduction
• PART I Decolonising philosophy
• PART II Race, justice, identity
• PART III Moral debates
• PART IV Meta-philosophy
• PART V Comparative perspectives
• Index