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Some Issues around the Double Language of Philosophers' Courage in the face of Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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We have never come face to face with ‘Philosophy’, that goddess who was courted, scorned, hated, and betrayed throughout history by those who claimed to represent her - we only come into contact with her officers: philosophers, that is, human beings who exist in an economic context, have religious ideas, support political opinions, find a way through their emotional history, are paid by institutions, fanstasize about a vision of hope, have appetites, can fight, are mad keen to be noticed and recognized and above all frequently make certain types of statements that have claims to validity. So philosophers are not only creatures in history but also historical creatures who interrogate the meaning of the world and particularly their own work. However, one of the tricks of instrumental rationality - if we follow Marx's analysis - is to focus first on the product rather than the producer. This is the basic reason for the fact that a passion for the exegesis of philosophical texts often conceals philosophers’ practices. And this is why - where African philosophers are concerned, and they are not the only ones - people focus first, with benign curiosity, on their books, the theories that they expound and that may provide matter for heated discussion, but questions are hardly ever asked about the stance of African philosophers, in other words, the actual conditions in which their position is created, the particular abilities of African philosophers to achieve their emergence as ‘philosophers’, and their recognition in the international arena. The rhetoric about the acceptance of multi-culturalism argued on the basis of the complexity of present-day societies often hides practices and processes of legitimation that are revealed by their relationship to those two phenomena, economics and the state. The love of little abstractions that philosophy resists in the name of its historical position, the haste with which African philosophers, among others, clamour for recognition from their peers in other cultures are partly intended secretly to conceal their true relationship to money. Not that ‘disinterested’ philosophers ‘in love’ with knowledge do not exist, but we need to recognize that they often fail to say, as Adorno does in Dialectique négative, that ‘philosophy's freedom is simply the ability to allow its non-freedom to be expressed’. The purpose of this article is less to question philosophers’ capacity for knowledge than to urge them to have the courage to proclaim and challenge their non-freedom.
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References
Notes
1. T.W. Adorno (1978), Dialectique négative (Paris: Payot), p. 12.
2. Plato, Lachès, or On Courage, 198a-1993.
3. Ibid., Republic, Book IV, 427e-434d.
4. Ibid., Laws, 436a-432d.
5. Pathé F. Diagne (1981), L'europhilosophie face à la pensée du négro-africain (Dakar: Sankoré).
6. The creation of self-consciousness occurs only through successive recognitions and negations. Here Jean Hyppolite's commentaries on Hegel are required reading.
7. On this point see Molefi Kete Asante (1989), Afrocentricity (Trenton: Africa World Press), p. 39. This ‘Afrocentric' thinker believes that Africans should use only those cultures and symbols that will contribute significantly to their victory. And that Africans in Africa and those who belong to the diaspora ought not to criticize creative black people: ‘We have failed to be critical of the Alvin Aileys in dance, for example, because we felt that we should not criticize blacks who are creative', p. 39. In any event Molefi divides history into two: the history of blacks and the history of the ‘others': ‘our facts are in our history, use them. Their facts are in their history…', p. 42.
8. Godin is right to condemn the claim to create an ‘oral', anonymous philosophy and to call philosophical what is nothing but a world view. But this problem has been resolved in African philosophical debates by the critique of what has been called ethnophilosophy. On this subject see Paulin Hountondji (1978), Sur la philosophie africaine (Paris: Maspéro). It is very strange that Godin repeats the criticism made by Africans themselves since the 1960s of ‘so-called oral philosophy'. Why did he not look at the concept of totality in the works of African academic philosophers, who write books that are sadly unknown to the French audience for philosophy but are promoted - for suspect reasons - in the USA? Godin's classification (Africa in primitive thought!) fits in with the general view of African philosophy in academic circles in the Latin countries of Europe. They see it as an ethnological discourse, unlike their German-language colleagues, who write theses and give lectures about present-day African philosophers rather than oral or ‘primitive thought'. See Christian Neugebauer - lecturer in philosophy in Vienna - (1989), Einführung in die Afrikanische Philosophie (Munich: Afrikanische Hochschulschriften).
9. Christian Godin (2000), La Totalité, vol. 3, Philosophie (Editions Champ Vallon), p. 103.
10. We should remember all the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘clandestine philosophers' in Europe whose manuscripts, with their quite unorthodox tone, were suppressed for lack of institutional promotion. Detailed research on the classification of these manuscripts is being carried out by Olivier Bloch, Anthony McKenna, and Miguel Benítez, among others. See M. Benitez (1996), La face cachée des Lumières. Recherche sur les manuscrits philosophiques clandestins (Paris: Universitas/ Oxford: Voltaire Foundation).
11. See Roger Pol-Droit (1989), L'oubli de l'Inde, une amnésie philosophique (Paris: PUF).
12. On this point see C. Wolff (1985), Le philosophe-roi et le roi-philosophe (Paris: Vrin).
13. See Roger Pol-Droit (1997), Le culte du néant: le philosophe et le Bouddha (Paris: Seuil).
14. See Habermas (1976), Connaissance et intérêt (Paris: Gallimard).
15. Philosophers such as Bachelard, Louis Lavelle, and Mounier have given an approving welcome to the French translation of ‘Bantu philosophy' by Father Tempels.
16. On this point see Julie Thermes (1989), Essor et déclin de ‘l'affirmative action' (Paris: Editions du CNRS).
17. Y. Mudimbe (1988), The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
18. On this point see Lucius Outlaw (1991), ‘African Philosophy: Deconstructive and Reconstructive Challenges', in Contemporary Philosophy, A Survey, vol. 5, African Philosophy (The Hague: M. Nijhoff).
19. I have already emphasized this in my book (1995), La philosophie négro-africaine (Paris: PUF).
20. This preconstruct is the discourse of money. Community discourse is not designed to destroy the dollar mode of production, rather it attempts to become part of it. ‘Affirmative action … is always a valuable tool to help people become part of the economic system', quoted by Thermes, op. cit., p. 333.
21. Philippe Soulez (1988), ‘Les missions de Bergson ou les paradoxes du philosophe véridique et trompeur', in Les philosophes et la guerre de 14 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes).
22. See Bergson (1972), ‘Mes missions', in Melanges (PUF), pp. 1584-1600.
23. Soulez, op. cit., p. 67. See also Bergson, op. cit., pp. 1242-1302.
24. Ibid., p. 70.
25. Ibid., p. 71.
26. Ibid., p. 68.
27. Ibid., p. 68.
28. P. Legendre, Miroir d'une nation. L'école nationale d'administration (Paris: Mille et une nuits), p. 63.
29. T.W. Adorno (1978), Dialectique négative (Paris: Payot), p. 286.
30. T.W. Adorno (1980), Minima moralia (Paris: Payot), p. 25.
31. G. Simmel (1999), Philosophie de l'argent (Paris: PUF).
32. Ibid., pp. 374 et seq.
33. T.W. Adorno, op. cit., p. 23.
34. To quote here what Merleau-Ponty (1969) says about indirect language, La prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard), p. 67.
35. De Gérando, ‘Rapport historique sur les progrès de la philosophie depuis 1789 et son état actuel. Présenté à l'Empereur, en son Conseil d'Etat, le 20 février 1808', in S. Douailler, C. Mauve, G. Navet, J.C. Pompougnac, P. Vermeren (eds., 1988) La philosophie saisie par l'Etat, petits écrits sur l'enseignement philosophique en France 1789-1900 (Paris: Aubier), p. 68. See also Bruno Poucet (1999), Enseigner la philosophie, Histoire d'une discip line scolaire 1860-1990 (Paris: Editions du CNRS). He recounts how the philosophy textbook by Jacques Chevalier (1943), Leçons de philosophie (Paris, Arthaud) ??: ‘The book starts from the principle that psycho logy and logic became autonomous sciences … However, the book turns into a self-justification of the policies of the government…' (p. 279), which was then Vichy. At the same time ‘Paul Foulquié's book [Traité élémentaire de philosophie, Paris: Editions de l'Ecole, 1943] distances itself from justifying the policies of the French state' (p. 280). This shows how philosophy was on both sides of the fence at a troubled period in the history of France.
36. Léo Strauss (1989), La persécution et l'art d'écrire (Paris: Presses Pocket), p. 58.
37. For the difference between tactics (disruptive moves within the system) and strategies (the penetration characteristic of a system) see M. de Certeau (1990), L'invention du quotidien, 1, Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 57-62.