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Thesis Hountondji was right: a people’s worldview is not yet philosophy

Khady Sène Fellow
· 7 replies
Society & cultureAfrican & AfricanaH. Odera OrukaPaulin Hountondji#african-philosophy#ethnophilosophy#hountondji#sage-philosophy
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Where it stands

Every year a student in my lycée class asks why we study Descartes and not ‘African philosophy’. I owe them a serious answer, and the most serious one I know is Paulin Hountondji's.

In African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally 1976), Hountondji attacked what he called ethnophilosophy: books like Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy, which reconstructed a collective, implicit ‘philosophy’ of a whole people from their language, proverbs and customs. Hountondji's objection was not that Africans lack philosophy. It was that a collective worldview, attributed to everyone and argued by no one, is anthropology. Philosophy needs named individuals whose arguments can be examined and rejected, a literature in which people disagree.

Thesis: Hountondji was right, and the real history of African philosophy is the history of African philosophers arguing, from Amo and the Ethiopian Hatata (whoever its author was) to Wiredu, Gyekye and Hountondji himself.

I know the objections. Ethnophilosophy was a response to the colonial claim that Africans had no thought at all. Oral traditions contain argument. Odera Oruka's sage philosophy found individual thinkers among people who never wrote. But I think each of these is a refinement of Hountondji's criterion, not a rejection of it.

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7 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Kwame Asante

    For Fellow

    For, with Wiredu's amendment. Wiredu accepted Hountondji's criterion but insisted African philosophers should also do ‘conceptual decolonisation’: test inherited Western concepts by thinking the problem through in their own languages. That uses traditional thought as a resource for individual argument, not as a finished system. I think that's the right synthesis.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Wanjiru Njenga

    For Fellow

    For, through Oruka. His sage philosophy project in Kenya interviewed individual sages and separated folk sages, who repeat communal wisdom, from philosophic sages, who examine it critically and sometimes reject it. That's Hountondji's distinction applied in the field, with a tape recorder. It shows the criterion works without requiring writing.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Against Fellow

    Against, partly. My grandmother recited oríkì for an hour. Those praise-poems contain claims, revisions and disagreements between versions and families. To call them ‘collective’ and therefore not philosophy assumes a picture of orality as anonymous consensus. It isn't. Hountondji's criterion is fine; his application of it treats oral traditions as more uniform than they are.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Khady Sène

      Fellow

      Titilayo, that's a strong point and I accept it. If an oral tradition preserves dissent, then it already meets the criterion in a form Hountondji didn't look for.

      Helpful · 3
  2. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Against Fellow

    Against, as someone who teaches Thomism and the Igbo idea of chi together. Every philosophy rests on a worldview its individual thinkers didn't invent. Aquinas argued, yes, but within a Christian and Aristotelian frame he inherited. Studying the Igbo frame is not anthropology instead of philosophy; it's studying the soil a philosopher stands in. Hountondji risked making African philosophy start from zero.

    Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    Comparative note from Lima: Salazar Bondy and Zea fought the same battle about Latin America at almost the same time. The question ‘is there a philosophy of our people?’ seems to arise wherever philosophy was imported with empire. Hountondji's answer, like Zea's, is that the question itself can be a trap.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Khady Sène

    Fellow

    I'll revise. Hountondji's criterion (argument, individuals, the possibility of rejection) stands. Titilayo and Ikechukwu show it can be met by oral traditions and by thinkers working within an inherited worldview, so the line between ethnophilosophy and philosophy is not between oral and written, or traditional and modern, but between reconstruction and critique.

    Helpful · 3