Out of Africa

Out of Africa:
Philosophy, 'race' and agency

Bob Carter

Social scientists have long grappled with ideas about race. In recent years, discussion on the significance of these ideas - particularly in exploring notions of identity, and the cultural and political options these appear to make available - have penetrated other areas of the humanities. A spate of recent publications signals that it is philosophy's turn to address some of the vexatious issues this discussion raises.* Two such issues are raised by the authors reviewed here: first, the possibility and meaning of African philosophy and its relevance to European traditions of social thought (Wiredu and the two volumes edited by Eze); second, the significance of race concepts to philosophy in general and the development of a distinctively African-American philosophical tradition in particular (Pittman and Outlaw). Although there are some important overlaps between these issues - for example, they both address questions to do with anti-foundationalism, postmodernity, postcolonialism, objectivity, and culture and agency - I propose to consider each in turn.

Kwasi Wiredu's Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective sets out a propitiatory case, insisting that what unifies us is more fundamental than what differentiates us. In a cogently argued chapter, Wiredu rejects the 'facile universalism' of Western Christian missionaries in their dealings with African religions, whilst arguing for the importance of 'judicious claims of universality' (p. 31). These imply that 'contending adults can, in principle, discuss their differences rationally on a basis of equality, whether inside identical cultures or across them.' Wiredu sees the human community as fundamentally united in its activities of knowing and understanding - we all think about more or less the same things - in which communication is not only possible but 'pervasive and intensive'. This makes it possible for human beings to think astride conceptual networks and to access other elements of the world of human thought.

The difficulties of this task are not minimized. Wiredu spends an attentive and careful chapter exploring the complexities of cross-cultural translation of concepts in the human sciences, concluding reasonably that such translation is not impossible but does require a greater degree of conceptual self-consciousness than the translation of natural science concepts. This account draws on his own background in Akan thought (the Akans constitute roughly half of the population of Ghana, with a rich tradition of oral and written philosophy of which the most well-known representative is Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana) and his training in European philosophy, and is a lively demonstration of how a translator respectful of both bodies of thought can bring out common themes and interesting contrasts.

Wiredu is aware that this is not a fashionable position, and that it renders uncertain the role and meaning of African philosophy. In his discussion of the debates in African philosophy between those who see it as 'coterminous with philosophical investigations having a special relevance to Africa' (p. 149) and those of a more universalist outlook he comes down emphatically on the side of the latter. Truth is true, he notes, wherever it comes from.

This points to several conclusions about the role of contemporary African philosophy. First, it is much broader than a concern with traditional African thought. Second, a concern with African thought is an indispensable preparation for cross-cultural evaluations since this requires conceptual clarity at both cultural ends. Third, African philosophy has an important position in the postcolonial world, partly as a challenge to the neglect and disparagement of African thinkers and traditions of thought by Europeans, partly as the basis for what Wiredu terms 'conceptual self-exorcism'. Wiredu regards this as a necessary response to the effects of colonial domination - particularly the distortion of African cultures (through 'long standing blandishments, importunities and outright impositions') and conceptual frameworks - through their 'articulation in the medium of foreign categories of thought'. African philosophy, in his view, is a necessary antidote to the 'involuntary mental de-Africanization' that threatens African thinkers.

This seems to me to jeopardize Wiredu's robust defence of a universalist view of African philosophy and the possibilities of cross-cultural translation, for it hints at a view of culture and thought as symbolically consistent universes of shared meanings. I shall return to an elaboration of this presently, but in Wiredu's case it highlights several tensions to do with the meaning of the term 'African' and the relationship between the ontological status of ideas and their generation by groups and individuals inhabiting specific social and historical locations. How, for example, is cross-cultural translation to be distinguished from the 'entanglement' of 'foreign categories of thought'? How is 'proper African thought', free of colonial encrustations, to be recognized? The term 'European' (or 'Western') could, of course, be substituted for 'African' here and the questions would remain pertinent, because at their basis is a misconceived view of the relationship between ideas and agency, between how we think about the world and what we do with the ideas we come up with. Simply, ideas do not have nationalities or carry passports; human beings do. This is a point Wiredu has made forcefully elsewhere,1 arguing that African philosophy is simply that part of the universal discourse of philosophy that is carried on by Africans; reason is without colour.

The first of Eze's readers, Race and the Enlightenment, illustrates the shortcomings of an approach that does not address this misconception. It is a useful and attractively presented collection, assembling selections from the texts of some key Enlightenment thinkers - Kant, Hegel, Hume all figure here - in an attempt to explore the question of whether or not, and in what ways, race ideas might be a key component in Enlightenment thought. Aligning himself with feminist critics of the patriarchal nature of Enlightenment reason, Eze seeks to demonstrate that the 'Age of Reason' was predicated on the belief that reason could only come to maturity in modern Europe. It therefore consistently described and understood non-Europeans as rationally inferior, discursively casting them as the Other of European reason.

There are several different arguments elided in this account. Certainly the extracts demonstrate the prejudices about Africa and Africans held by European philosophers, from Kant's 'This fellow was quite black ... a clear proof that what he said was stupid', to Hegel's assertion that non-European peoples are less human than Europeans because they are not fully aware of themselves as conscious, historical beings. By and large, these thinkers drew on commonplace ideas about race and colour as a means of classifying and ordering human populations. The question is: what are we to make of this?

Eze has an unequivocal answer. Enlightenment philosophy, he avers, 'was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race' (p. 5). These writings played 'a strong role in articulating Europe's sense not only of its cultural but also racial superiority' (p. 5). They were able to do this because they provided an identifiable scientific and philosophical vocabulary - about 'race', 'progress', 'civilization' and the like - constitutive of an intellectual world-view. With a little Foucauldian jiggery-pokery this becomes a 'universe of discourse' which 'determines ... not only how studies are done, but also what are constituted as objects of scientific, philosophical, or cultural study' (p. 7).

The problem is that beyond the averral, there is an acute shortage of evidence to support these ambitious propositions. From the modest, and I suspect largely accurate, charge that some of the key figures in European philosophy during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notwithstanding their considerable philosophical accomplishments, shared with many of their less cerebral contemporaries uninformed and ignorant views of people of colour, we shift quickly to altogether grander pronouncements about 'popular European perceptions'. In expressing such views, no doubt, Kant, Hume and others gave authority and legitimacy to ideas about race and colour; there can also be little question that such views proved useful to those who wished to defend colonialism, slavery or other exploitative and inequitable social arrangements. This, though, does not amount to a 'codification and institutionalization of European popular perceptions', at least not without a more considered account of the relationship between philosophical ideas and social agency.