Understanding African Philosophy

A Cross-cultural Approach to Classical and Contemporary Issues

Richard H. Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135948658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Understanding African Philosophy serves as a critical guide to some of the most important issues in modern African philosophy. Richard Bell introduces readers to the complexity of Africa, the legacy of colonialism, the challenges of post independence Africa, and other recent developments in African Philosophy. Chapters discuss the value of African oral and written texts for philosophy, concepts of negritude, African socialism, and race, as well as current discussions in international development ethics connected to poverty and human suffering. Two chapters are focused on moral issues related to community, justice, and civic responsibility. Bell's sensitivity to and engagement with the complications of cross-cultural understandings help non-African readers connect with African culture and thought.

1.
Understanding Another Culture

We might say “every view has its charm,” but this would be wrong. What is true is that every view is significant for him who sees it so (but that does not mean “sees it as something other than it is”). And in this sense every view is equally significant.

Ludwig Wittgenstein¹

Understanding Others and Ourselves

A central aim of philosophy is to “see something as it is.” If this is achieved, we have a reasonable benchmark for approaching another “thing as it is.” This simple remark of Wittgenstein’s embraces a most fundamental question within philosophy. “A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar,” he once said (PI II, xi, p. 222). The effort to see another’s world “as it is,” a particular aspect of African culture for example, when one is alien to that culture, poses several difficulties. His remark, however, deflects us from thinking that philosophy is just a matter of one’s own perspective, opinion, or point of view. The philosopher cannot say “every view has its charm.” It is not that there are not different points of view. Rather the views we have are significant and meaningful in the manner we come to engage and express what is—the very being of the world and our being in it. If I come to a significant, that is, considered view of the world I inhabit, then I have a starting point for venturing to understand another’s world. In this way there is the possibility of moving toward mutual understanding.

When someone from North America, for example, wants to approach what something is in its significance in an African culture there are obstacles of language, different customs, and perhaps some epistemological differences. Thus in approaching Africa, if we wish to understand the ways in which its people inhabit the world, we must work hard to determine what is significant from the point of view of its people. Understanding anything is always tied to its surroundings, which include language, customs, geography, iconic traditions, and especially the ordinary practices of its people. This applies to understanding features of both my own culture and another’s culture. Cross-cultural understanding is to be discussed not only in terms of large Cultures (with a capital C). In fact most larger units referred to as “cultures,” such as European or Western or African or Chinese, are in fact a multiplicity of local cultures or multicultural in themselves. What may apply to understanding between, say, Africans and non-Africans, may apply equally between local African cultures. This will become clear as we proceed. What is important is awareness of differences between cultures large or small and how understanding may pass between them. Whether understanding is between cultures or within a given culture the difficulties are many, but there are fewer mysteries in this process than philosophers often assume.

Picking up his clues from a lifetime of reading Wittgenstein, Peter Winch understood better than most the difficulties in what became one of the major philosophical debates of the last three to four decades of the twentieth century—the debate called “understanding another culture.” Winch is primarily responsible for setting off this debate with his philosophical colleagues and with social anthropologists in his essay “Understanding a Primitive Society” (1964).² In this essay, discussing E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s description of the Zande poison oracle, Winch raised the specter that however well one might describe the practices of the Zande in their particular surroundings, one may still go away without understanding them. The following concerns followed from Winch’s essay: the degree of access that “Western” thinkers have to the ideas and forms of life in cultures radically different from their own; whether there are common logical, epistemological, and cultural features between cultures that point to a common rationality between cultures, or whether each culture has a particular rationality unique to its thought and life. For a decade this essay drew many into the debate, but it remained largely an “intramural” debate about understanding other cultures from a Western “rational” point of view, although many attracted to the debate were anthropologists who had studied and lived in other cultures.³ By the mid-1970s this specific debate was picked up by African philosophers from West and East Africa who responded to these issues from their own point of view and raised the further question “Is there a distinctively African philosophy?”⁴ There were, of course, predecessors to this question in African philosophical literature that had their own background and history (which we shall explore in chapter 2). But the question about a distinctive “African” philosophy was now being asked against the background of the “Western” debate in its cross-cultural perspective.

Winch was thought to be a “relativist” on the issue of “understanding other cultures,” but this misunderstands his concerns. He clearly stressed the difficulties of cross-cultural comparisons and the indeterminate nature of understanding itself. There are disparate ways in which people express themselves. In this early essay, and thirty-three years later, Winch was to remind us that such cross-cultural understanding was no more difficult than understanding ourselves. “Understanding” is, itself, the primary philosophical difficulty here and not the radical differences between different world views. “It is…misleading,” he writes, “to distinguish in a wholesale way between ‘our own’ and ‘alien’ cultures; parts of ‘our’ culture may be quite alien to one of ‘us’; indeed some parts of it may be more alien than cultural manifestations which are geographically or historically remote.”⁵ Winch is consistent with Wittgenstein in saying:

We shall hope for a description of the alien practices that creates some pattern that we can recognize; we shall also perhaps hope to find some analogies with practices characteristic of our own culture which will give us some landmarks with reference to which we can take our bearings.⁶

In the end, at the center of understanding other human beings, Winch says, is a “practical ‘being in tune’ with others,”⁷ or simply trying to see one another as the human beings we both are, surrounded by the similarities and differences that mark off our respective communities. This is a long way from relativism.

Winch said in beginning his article “Can We Understand Ourselves”—his last before his untimely death—

I was invited to speak on the possibility or otherwise of our understanding foreign cultures. I did not willfully turn my back on the topic, but want to suggest that some at least of the difficulties we see here spring from an inadequate attention to difficulties about how we should speak of “understanding” in relation to our own culture.⁸

So where does Winch leave us? And what can be made of claims to relativism in understanding another culture? What are some “landmarks” from which “we can take our bearings?” Social anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote succinctly:

The truth of the doctrine of cultural relativism is that we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses which connect us to it but through them.⁹

As human beings we can and do understand another culture’s life and practices “well enough,” more or less “as [they are].” We can describe many aspects of another culture’s world and how it is inhabited just as they can describe ours; we can go on to understand them to a degree hindered only by particular limitations in how we understand our own point of view. It is primarily by virtue of the limits we have in “seeing something as it is” in ourselves and our own culture that we are inhibited in understanding another’s world “as it is.”

There is also this simple fact: I am a philosopher approaching and wanting to understand both philosophers in Africa and what is being explicitly called “African” philosophy. I seem to do this “well enough” as Geertz says, and its overall accessibility seems limited only by my diligence and my imagination (or lack of both). I read philosophers from Africa, and other non-Western philosophers, in English and French, and understand and interpret them well enough to colleagues and students. I do not claim to be an African philosopher, but I do claim to understand what they are talking and writing about. I can accept the prohibition placed by some philosophers in Africa that African philosophy must be written by Africans.¹⁰ I would not, however, accept a claim that implied that non-Africans could not understand “philosophical texts (whether oral or written) by Africans.” Philosophy may arise from human language situations anywhere. It will be found wherever there are human beings expressing their deepest concerns, interests, and aspirations and where there is sufficient critical reflection on how best to give expression to those concerns, interests, and aspirations.

The requirement I must adhere to in understanding others’ philosophy is to be attentive to their modes of expression and sort out both how their concerns and interests are expressed—what concepts and categories are used—and then translate those within myself to sufficiently see and understand such concerns in my own human language situation. Winch has said this very well.

Since it is we who want to understand the Zande category [of magic], it appears that the onus is on us to extend our understanding so as to make room for the Zande category, rather than to insist on seeing it in terms of our own ready-made distinction between science and non-science.¹¹

The key lies with my ability to see and “make room for” the others’ categories and concepts that give expression to their life. I must be prepared to have the concepts as expressed in African life open new imaginative avenues in me and not expect their expressive forms to conform to how I see the world or to such Western categories as I may have. To understand African philosophy I must be prepared to see the world in new ways and appreciate the manner of that seeing. Anthony Giddens noted that “through becoming aware of the dazzling variety of human societies, we can learn better to understand ourselves.”¹² More recently philosopher W. L.van der Merwe said:

[T]here is no neutral ground, no “view from nowhere” in philosophy with regard to cultural differences…. This realisation impels one to enter into dialogue with the traditions of wisdom and thinking of other cultures—not so much in the hope that one will reach a trans-cultural, metaphilosophical consensus, but as a way of acknowledging the particularity of one’s own viewpoint and discovering the cultural contingency of one’s own philosophical presuppositions and allegiancies.¹³

The process of cross-cultural understanding is a reciprocal act whereby I must enter into a real dialogue with the other, and recognize myself as “other” to them. As Geertz said we must “look through the glosses” of the other—through their distinctive concepts, literature, art, and other practices—and hope also to find something of ourselves in them.

Understanding African philosophy—the significant ways in which Africans give expression to the world they inhabit and critically reflect upon that expression—from the point of view of a non-African requires us to establish a specific philosophical procedure that will explore first what it means to “understand” something in our approach to it. This will require that (1) we engage the discussion among African intellectuals about conceptual and critical features of their own self-understanding and its relationship to our own self-understanding. In Winch’s words, we “hope to find some analogies with practices characteristic of our own culture which will give us some landmarks with reference to which we can take our bearings; it is here where cross-cultural understanding becomes a genuine dialogue.”¹⁴ (2) We must listen to Africa’s many voices—the oral narratives and lived-texts of African peoples. And finally, (3) we must attend to the iconic traditions of Africa: its visual art, literature, music, ritual drama, and religious practices and learn to make them somehow our own.¹⁵

A Procedure from an Aesthetic Point of View

“What’s ragged should be left ragged,” Wittgenstein once remarked.¹⁶ This is characteristic of how he thought about the origins of philosophy, that is, the well-springs from which philosophical reflections arise, our ordinary language and life. Stanley Cavell images Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy as follows:

The Philosophical Investigations is a work that begins with a scene of inheritance, the child’s inheritance of language;…. The figure of the child is present in this portrait of civilization more prominently and decisively than in any other work of philosophy I think of (with the exception, if you grant that it is philosophy, of Emile). It discovers or rediscovers childhood for philosophy (The child in us)….¹⁷

In his Philosophical Investigations, having challenged some conventional pictures of how language is said to have meaning, Wittgenstein then provides us with numerous examples of how he sees language to have meaning in the ordinary contexts of life—in its paradigms of use he “rediscovers childhood for philosophy.” Among the central features of meaning is that the words and grammar of a natural language are shared within a culture or form of life of a people; the meaning of concepts depends upon their being shared perceptions and customs among a community of language users.

Winch comments on what he regards as “one of the most remarkable…examples of one of Wittgenstein’s most characteristic argumentative moves [from Sections 286–287 of the Investigations]: a shift of attention away from the object to which a problematic concept is applied toward the person applying the concept.”¹⁸ He goes on to say that

This practice of Wittgenstein’s is not a meaningless tic, but is meant to emphasize that the sense of the concepts we deploy lies not just in the circumstances surrounding what we apply them to but also in the circumstances surrounding us, who so apply them.¹⁹

To make this point even stronger, over halfway through the Investigations Wittgenstein gives us a new, striking metaphor for thinking about the meaning of language. He writes:

We want to say: “When we mean something, it’s like going up to someone, it’s not having a dead picture (of any kind).” We go up to the thing we mean….

Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone. (PI, 455 and 457)

The mutual understanding we would like to achieve in “going up to” another human being may be easily thwarted. If the other person is a stranger we may naturally turn away or talk or dwell only reticently in their company; we may fail to spend enough time or give enough attention to meet “face to face” or “eye to eye.” “Going up to the thing we mean,” involves me in the circumstances related to my approach to it. Lack of attention or interest in the “thing”—another person—Wittgenstein sees as a more important drawback in understanding a stranger than believing they have a different way of thinking or a different “rationality” from our own.

What Wittgenstein wants us to do is probe how we cou...