Sobre a "filosofia africana": Crítica da etnofilosofia

African Systems of Thought

by Paulin J. Hountondji, César Sobrinho (translator), Wanderson flor do nascimento (introduction)

Beaucoup d’auteurs africains contemporains restent les prisonniers de la recherche d’une conception du monde, d’une philosophie, résidant dans une âme « africaine », unique pour tout le continent, renvoyant à un passé mythique. Paulin Hountondji montre comment ces étranges constructions conceptuelles ont pu jouer un rôle positif dans la résistance menée par les intellectuels à la domination coloniale : ils répondaient ainsi à la négation de l’opprimé contenue en elle ; réponse cependant ambiguë, ne serait-ce que parce qu’elle était bâtie sur des principes tirés des travaux d’ethnologues européens, le Père Tempels en particulier. Les indépendances ont ouvert une nouvelle période historique ; ces mêmes élaborations philosophiques ont changé de sens : jadis expression d’une certaine résistance anticoloniale, elles sont désormais une idéologie justifiant et renforçant les dominations étatiques contemporaines ; les intellectuels qui les fabriquent ne sont plus que les « griots » des régimes en place. En analysant sans complaisance les œuvres de Nkrumah et celle, entre autres, du Camerounais Towa, du Rwandais Kagamé, Hountondji met à nu et dénonce cette inversion. L’entreprise critique dont ce livre pose les jalons lui apparaît être l’étape nécessaire sur le chemin de « la libération de la créativité théorique » des peuples d’Afrique, de leur participation à part entière au débat intellectuel universel.

Genres: Philosophy, Africa, African Literature, Nonfiction, Western Africa

350 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1983

About the author

Paulin Hountondji is a Beninese philosopher, politician and academic. Since the 1970s he has taught at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, where he is Professor of Philosophy. In the early 1990s he briefly served as Minister of Education and Minister for Culture and Communications in the Government of Benin

Reviews

[Chris brown · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an awful book and I wish I could get my money back. This is nothing more than a collegiate attempt of a colonized mind to give undue and unworthy credit to thieves, rapists, and destroyers for what his ancestors created. Shame on this book.

It only took my 20 pages to realize how horrid this epistle of self-hate and misinformation truly was.

Do not waste you time or money on this

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN AFRICAN PHILOSOPHER ANALYZES THE DEFINITION OF ‘AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY’

Paulin Jidenu Hountondji (1942-2024) was a Beninese philosopher, academic, and politician. He taught Philosophy at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonout for many years. After Benin’s military dictatorship was replaced by democracy, he served as Benin’s Minister of Education from 1992-1994, after which he returned to teaching.

He wrote in the Preface to the second edition (1996) of this 1976 book, “[This book] originally appeared in French twenty years ago; the earliest essay in the collection dates from 1969. The intellectual environment has changed greatly in the ensuing years, during which [the book] has provoked lively debate.” (Pg. vii)

He continues, “That [the book] 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 broader sense. By identifying ethnophilosophy as a defined thought-pattern and a permanent temptation of Africanist discourse, [the book] was a warning, an invitation to exorcise demons too often ignored or hidden… Readers may have welcomed the book’s firm stand against intellectual self-imprisonment and unanimism [i.e., demand for unanimity], 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.” (Pg. viii)

He acknowledges, “I now come to [a] difficulty: the African philosopher would be a self-proclaimed philosopher. My inaugural statement, I must confess, amounted, strictly speaking, in begging the question: How can one admit, in fact, that to be a philosopher it is enough to believe or say that one is so?… Much controversy would have been spared if I had written more cautiously, ‘By “African philosophy” I mean the set of philosophical texts produced (whether orally or in writing) by Africans.’ … I intended only to pose… two unavoidable questions before testing the solidity of the proposed answer: 1. What is the mode of existence of philosophy? Answer: That of a text or set of texts, that of a piece or pieces of explicit discourse. 2. What does ‘African’ mean in the phrase ‘African philosophy’? Answer: Something African is something made by Africans.” (Pg. xii)

Nigerian scholar Abiola Irele (1936-2017) wrote in his Introduction, “The present focus of African reflection, as dictated by the realities of the post-colonial era, has been the immediate and practical issues of ‘development,’ understood as a process of the accommodation of African lives to the demands of modernity. It is especially in this connection that the observed divergence between traditional values in Africa and the Western paradigm that governs the very idea of modernity has come to assume a practical importance and to represent something of a dilemma. For the professional philosopher this dilemma involves primarily a consideration of the relationship between the modes of thought which inform the traditional values and cultural expression of African life on one hand and, on the other, those enshrined in Western philosophy, which historically have shaped the course of Western civilization… The fact that Western civilization has everywhere acquired a hold upon human life in our time gives the theoretical consideration an urgent practical significance in Africa, whether that significance is explicitly recognized by the philosopher or simply lies in the rear of the field of his theoretical activity." (Pg. 9-10)

Hountondji begins this book, “By ‘African philosophy’ I mean … the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves… we are concerned solely with the philosophical intention of the authors. So for us African philosophy is a body of literature whose existence is undeniable…” (Pg. 33)

He states of the mainstream of African philosophy, “its motivations are more complex. The aim is no longer to furnish European settlers and missionaries with an easy access to the black man’s soul, raised to the status of unwitting candidate for ‘civilization’ and Christianization.” (Pg. 38)

He says, “African philosophical literature rests… on a confusion… between the popular (ideological) use and the strict (theoretical) use of the word ‘philosophy.’ According to the first meaning, philosophy is any kind of wisdom… intended to govern the daily practice of a man or a people… But in the stricter sense … one is no more spontaneously a philosopher than one is spontaneously a chemist… since philosophy … is a specific theoretical discipline with its own … methodological rules.” (Pg. 47)

He asserts, "By dint of trying to defend our civilizations at all costs, we have petrified, mummified them. We have betrayed our original cultures by showing them off, offering them as topics of myths for external consumption. In doing so we have unwittingly played Europe’s game---the Europe against which we first claimed we were setting out to defend ourselves. And what do we find at the end of the road? The same subservience, the same display of wretchedness, the same tragic abandonment of thinking by ourselves and for ourselves: slavery.” (Pg. 50) Later, he adds, “today’s African philosophers must reorient their discourse. They must write first and foremost for an African public, no longer a non-African public… to reformulate [problems] freely in its own terms and thus to steep them in the melting pot of African science.” (Pg. 54)

He explains, “What is in question here … is the idea … of ‘African philosophy.’ … whether the word ‘philosophy,’ when qualified by the word ‘African,’ must retain its habitual meaning, or whether the simple addition of an adjective necessarily changes the meaning of the substantive. What is in question, then, is the universality of the word ‘philosophy’ throughout its possible geographical application. My own view is that this universality must be preserved… because these differences of content … refer back to the essential unity of a single discipline, of a single style of inquiry. The present chapter … will attempt to show… that the phrase ‘African philosophy’… has so far been only of mythological exploitation and, second, that it is nevertheless possible to retrieve it and apply it … not to the fiction of a collective system of thought, but to a set of philosophical discourses and texts.” (Pg. 56)

He summarizes, “African philosophy does exist therefore, but in a new sense, as a literature produced by Africans and dealing with philosophical problems.” (Pg. 63) He continues, “we have produced a radically new conception of African philosophy, the criterion now being the geographical origin of the authors rather than an alleged specificity of content… it destroys the dominant mythological conception of Africanness and restores the simple, obvious truth that Africa is above all a continent and the concept of Africa as an empirical, geographical concept and not a metaphysical one.” (Pg. 66) He adds, “African philosophy exists… It is developing objectively in the form of a literature … of which the output remains captive to the unanimist fallacy. Yet, happily, it is possible to detect signs of a new spirit. The liberation of this new spirit is now the necessary precondition of any progress in this field.” (Pg. 69)

He states, “The contention that philosophy is a history and not a system means… that no philosophical doctrine can be regarded as ‘the Truth.’… in this context the absolute is contained in the relative of an infinite, open-ended process… it cannot be a set of definitive, untranscendable propositions but rather the process by which we look for propositions more adequate than others… truth is the very act of looking for truth, of enunciating propositions and trying to justify and found them.” (Pg. 72-73)

He argues, “‘African philosophy,’ in the sense consecrated by anthropologists, is a huge misconception. There IS no philosophy that would be a system of implicit propositions or beliefs to which all individuals of a given society, past, present and future, would adhere. Such a philosophy… has never existed. The real problem should never have been… to identify the essential themes or the fundamental problematic of African philosophy construed as a spontaneous, unreflective, collective world-view. The real problem … is to find out WHY certain Western authors, followed… by African authors, should … have felt the need to look for such a collective world-view in the secret recesses of the mysterious African soul.” (Pg. 75-76)

He points out, “it is now beginning to be understood that African philosophy … is not a system of tacit beliefs which are accepted, consciously or unconsciously, by all Africans in general or… by all the members of a particular ethnic group of a particular African society… It is now agreed: African philosophy IS African philosophical literature. The only problem, then, is whether …. that long tradition called oral literature should be added to the writings.” (Pg. 101)

This book will interest those studying African philosophy, and how it is defined.

[Raphael Donaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A obra "Sobre a Filosofia Africana" do professor Paulin Hountondji oferece um profundo convite para desconstruirmos um ideal, reforçado por estudiosas/os europeus, de que existe uma única forma de "ser" e de "pensar" africana. Além disso, o livro é um testemunho de que, a partir do rigor científico, do acolhimento ao pensar plural e das críticas ao saber produzido por acadêmicos africanos, é possível sim seguir com um ideal de filosofia africana.

O livro está organizado em duas partes. Na primeira, o autor apresenta um conjunto de críticas rigorosas à lente eurocêntrica da filosofia africana, que frequentemente simplifica e generaliza a diversidade dos pensamentos filosóficos existentes na África. A partir de uma análise ferrenha ao trabalho de Placide Tempels em "A Filosofia Bantu", que propõe uma visão homogeneizadora e muitas vezes romantizada das culturas africanas, tratando crenças e práticas tradicionais como se fossem uma filosofia unificada, Hountondji reforça a necessidade de um discurso filosófico crítico e rigoroso dentro do continente. Ele defende uma abordagem mais analítica e metodológica, que reconhece a complexidade e a variedade das tradições filosóficas africanas.

A segunda parte do livro apresenta uma análise de pensadores a partir dessa perspectiva de uma filosofia plural e analítica, com a intenção de traçar um caminho para a história da filosofia africana.

Filosoficamente, a obra apresenta um confronto entre o universal e o particular, e Hountondji evita uma resolução clara, pois essa é uma tensão que anima o que é considerado filosófico. A fonte do particular é invariavelmente africana, enquanto o universal é ostensivamente definido como ocidental. Essa equação abre a possibilidade de um relativismo evidente que deve ser repudiado. Isso é particularmente verdadeiro devido à dimensão transcendente do pensamento de Hountondji. De fato, a filosofia transcende as limitações do particular.

Como um não filósofo de carteirinha e interessado pelo saber, garanto que o livro não é fácil de ser processado. Porém, em uma era de teorização decolonial, Hountondji é um convite para criarmos pensamentos além do que é pregado como o sujeito normativo.

A seguir, listarei alguns trechos que me chamaram a atenção na obra:
"Um dos mais perversos efeitos do discurso etnofilosófico é que seres humanos de carne são transformados em objetos abstratos de discussão".

"Não se pode deixar de reconhecer que, em algum nível, a própria tradição é plural e sempre oferece um vasto leque de possibilidades, o que por sua vez obriga o indivíduo a sempre se determinar, confrontando-o assim, repetidamente, a uma responsabilidade incontornável".

"Há duas maneiras de se perder: por segregação confinada no particular, ou por diluição no universal". Aimé Césaire.

"Qualquer estrutura, quando considerada independentemente de sua finalidade, nos apresenta seu aspecto estático. Se, em seguida, considerarmos que essa estrutura está destinada a ter um fim, quando estruturalmente orientada para agir ou para ser utilizada em vista de um certo objetivo, nesse caso, ela nos apresentará seu aspecto dinâmico".

"O colonizador civiliza, mas somente com a condição de ele mesmo se reumanizar, de reencontrar a sua alma".

"É necessário tomar partido: todo projeto teórico análogo, toda tentativa de sistematizar a visão de mundo de um povo dominado destina-se necessariamente a um público estrangeiro e visa alimentar um debate ideológico centrado em outro lugar - em outra localização geográfica, nas classes dominantes da sociedade dominadora".

"Porque a Europa nunca esperou de nós, no plano cultural, outra coisa além de oferecer-lhes nossas civilizações como um espetáculo e alienar-nos num diálogo fictício com ela, à revelia dos nossos próprios povos".

"É preciso reaprender a pensar".

"A filosofia é uma história, e não um sistema, um processo essencialmente aberto, uma investigação inquieta e inacabada, não um saber fechado".

"A história não procede por evolução contínua, mas por saltos e sobressaltos, por revoluções sucessivas. De modo que não segue um caminho linear, mas o que se poderia chamar de caminho dialético, em outros termos, ela não tem um aspecto contínuo, mas descontínuo".

"O uso dogmático da razão sem crítica leva apenas a afirmações sem fundamento, às quais se podem opor outras igualmente semelhantes, que conduzem ao ceticismo".

"Não há desenvolvimento das antigas doutrinas em direção às novas, mas sim o envolvimento dos antigos pensamentos pelos novos".

"A ideia é sempre um produto do pensamento humano, um produto da atividade espiritual, inseparável da atividade material, dos indivíduos".

"Deus desconhece o passado e o futuro, que são as formas temporais da ausência".

"Exigir que um pensador se contente em reafirmar as crenças de seu povo ou de seu grupo social é proibi-lo de pensar livremente e condená-lo, a longo prazo, à asfixia intelectual".

"O que importa não é o papel, é o pensamento". Kwame Nkrumah.

"A pluralidade das crenças e escolhas teóricas não impede a adesão a um mesmo ideal político. Para fundamentar essa adesão, basta que ambos os lados tenham interesses comuns a defender, interesses nacionais, no caso da luta anticolonial".

"O tradicionalismo deve ser entendido como a valorização exclusiva de um esquema simplificado, superficial e imaginário da tradição cultural".

"Uma cultura nunca é uma coisa inerente, mas uma invenção perpétua, um debate constante entre pessoas acorrentadas a um mesmo destino e desejosas todas de tornar esse destino o melhor possível. O que precisamos entender é que em nenhuma sociedade todos jamais estão de acordo entre si".

[Manuel Abreu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Landmark text on the problems (and possibilities) of ethnophilosophy. Grapples with a notion of philosophy very rooted in the individual thinker. What does it mean to generate and steward collective bodies of knowledge and how do these traditions square alongside individualist traditions? A joy to read, beautifully argued, maddening to tackle. What is it that A. Kagame said? 'Hountondji?!... But ...he's white!"

[Igor Capelari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Os primeiro ensaios são realmente bons. Gosto da visão insiciva do autor. De qualquer forma, ele não é muito propositivo e, nesse sentido, acaba perdendo muito para o Oruka.

[Harry Rutherford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my book from Benin for the Read The World challenge. I ordered it because I fancied a change from post-colonial fiction, and then regretted it almost immediately; I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about philosophy as a discipline.

Actually, though, I found it interesting and it really did make a nice change. It was first published, as Sur la “philosophie africaine”, in 1976, and is largely framed as a response to earlier works in the field. So it provides an interesting window into a discussion I knew nothing about.

Obviously it’s a narrow window, entirely shaped by Hountondji’s framing, and I don’t have the knowledge to judge how fair and accurate his presentation is. But it still offers an insight into something that would otherwise have passed me by.

The tradition he is arguing with is a kind of ethnological idea of philosophy, where for example, Bantu cultural ideas about death and morality and what have you were investigated, arranged into a system, and then presented as ‘Bantu philosophy’. Hountondji argues that this is not only a misapplication of the word ‘philosophy’ but a damaging one. Rather, ‘African philosophy’ should refer to philosophical works written by Africans; the same thing, in fact, as philosophy from anywhere else.

I was very much predisposed to agree with this argument: so much so that I felt the need to step back every so often and play devil’s advocate. Not because I had any long-standing opinions about African philosophy, of which I was completely ignorant, but because I have a long-standing peeve about the vague, hand-wavy way people use the word ‘philosophy’. It’s rather like ‘poetry’ in that respect.

Still, you can understand the impulse that led people to things like ‘Bantu philosophy’. Given the context of colonialism, there is/was a value in any assertion that Africans are capable of interesting thought that is distinct from that brought by colonialists and worthy of study in its own right.

Whereas if you insist on the narrow definition of philosophy, then there is almost no African philosophical tradition; certainly very little ‘authentically African’ philosophy that precedes or is separate from the stuff brought over by Europeans. That’s just an artefact of an oral society. It’s perfectly possible to do philosophy without writing it down — it was good enough for Socrates — but it doesn’t survive; we only know about Socrates because of Plato.

But things like ‘Bantu philosophy’ are a bad solution to that problem. Firstly, because it perpetuates the idea that Africa is so exotic/primitive/whatever that all our approach to it must be through an ethnographic lens, just as African sculptures end up in a different museum to the Picassos and Modiglianis that they inspired.

One result of that is that it strips away any sense of individual creativity: those African sculptures get labelled with a tribe and a place, and not the name of the individual sculptor. Similarly, ‘folktales’ get stripped down to a simple one-page version based on what the researcher thinks is the kernel, and both the name and the creativity of the individual storyteller get lost. Which of course is pretty much the opposite of how we treat poets, artists and philosophers in our own culture, where if anything we are overly obsessed with the idea of individual genius.

And lastly, the very process of taking a lot of different sources — traditional stories, received opinion, religious ideas — and systematising them into a coherent philosophy is itself pretty dubious. Hountondji argues, I think correctly, that the systematiser is imposing his own ideas far more than he is revealing something which is there already.

All this stuff is no doubt old news to people in the field, but I found it interesting to read about.

In the second half of the book, Hountondji looks at some case studies. I have to admit, I skipped over most of the stuff about Anton-Wilhelm Amo: he’s an interesting figure, an African from what is now Ghana who somehow ended up teaching philosophy in German universities in the 1730s, but his surviving dissertations are minor contributions to the debate between the vitalists and the mechanists; I have no idea what that means, and frankly I don’t care enough about C18th philosophy to try to make sense of it.

But I did read Hountondji’s analyses of Kwame Nkrumah’s thought, which was rather more interesting, not least for some second-hand insight into another set of arguments about which I was ignorant: about class, colonialism, capitalism, Africanism and so on.

[M-AY · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recueil d’articles et de conférences de Paulin Hountondji, penseur et philosophe africain.
Un livre essentiel, malheureusement difficilement trouvable en France (acheté au Bénin mais vu sur Cairn.info), qui invite à sortir de cette vision essentialisée de la “civilisation africaine”, réduite à une pensée collective et unanime, attribuée à tous les peuples africains, intuitive et mythique, constamment opposée au sur-matérialisme et à l’individualisme de LA civilisation occidentale ; une Afrique traditionnelle et immuable, dont les principes de vie seraient acceptés par tous (car l’Homme africain n’aurait pas de vision propre, ne débattrait jamais et ne remettrait jamais rien en question, bien sûr).

Vision malheureusement entretenue par ce que Hountondji qualifie d’“ethnologues” qui, suivant les traces d’un missionnaire belge (Tempels, auteur de La Philosophie bantoue), souhaitant fournir des clés de compréhension aux missionnaires et colons pour civiliser ces “primitifs” en théorisant sur la vision intuitive des Bantous (résumée à toute l’Afrique, sachant que le terme “bantou” est en soi un gros fourre-tout), se sont mis à produire une littérature “philosophique”, destinée à tout le monde sauf aux concernés, dans le but de redorer l’image du continent auprès de leurs homologues occidentaux (tout discours dissident à cette vision étant une trahison à “l’africanité”).

S’ajoute aussi une analyse sur l’œuvre de Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), dont les écrits, souvent interprétés comme un système figé, traduisent une pensée évolutive et non exempte de remises en question de l’auteur, en dépit des réserves sur certaines de ses positions, qui ont pu enfermer l’Afrique dans une vision qui n’est pas étrangère à sa chute.

Un peu moins apprécié l’analyse sur Amo, philosophe d’origine ghanéenne du XVIIIe siècle, mais dont la conclusion est une véritable invitation à l’action… tout comme la vision offerte sur le pluralisme et l’acculturation inhérente à toute société.

Un must-read pour éviter de reproduire des schémas de pensée qui, aujourd’hui encore, enferment et figent les évolutions et les débats autour de la construction d’une philosophie propre au continent africain — y compris dans des discours qui se pensent pourtant émancipateurs.

[John Gillespie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read anything that I've agreed/disagreed with back/forth so much.