A Colonial Archive

When I was researching for my master’s thesis, I focused on forgotten European 17th century thinkers, and got hooked on the old prints reading room. The only things you were allowed to take inside were paper and a pencil. The pages of those old books were made of acid free pulp, and their covers of leather, so they were much stronger than newer ones, but still the reverence asked to keep them in shape for future centuries attracted me. Forgotten or not, heretical or not, the remains of that age were still treated like temple treasures. My research reached a dead end, back then, as the prints didn’t answer all my questions. And I had no clue how to find my way in old archives, if they even existed for the material I needed, and I left the historical track in philosophy.

Recently, this past month of May, I repaired my former cluelessness when I entered an archive for the first time, determined to just find some answers about Placide Tempels (1906 -1977) and his Bantu Philosophy that the literature didn’t provide. I was inspired by the work of a cultural historian I had met, which had shown me how historical data can give us an informed view on the complex ideological and intellectual struggles in the end days of colonialism and its aftermath – this type of work should fill the gaps on the book I was researching on.

I research Bantu Philosophy not however as part of colonial history, not from an interest in missiology or religious studies, but to understand its philosophical aim and impact. Among philosophers interested in African philosophy the book is contested – a classic, yes, the source of a long debate on the nature of African philosophy, that too, but ‘real’ philosophy (in itself a suspicious classification) – doubtful. Philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji and Eboussi-Boulaga classified it as ethnophilosophy, one of the many specialized ethnosciences, a part of cultural anthropology more or less, and no constructive philosophy in itself. Ethnophilosophy or not, postcolonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon criticized it as just another contribution to the colonial system, as it focused on the spiritual, not on the material conditions of the colonized. The most seriously argued positive interpretation of Bantu Philosophy has been given by Valentin Mudimbe, who read the work – even if ethnophilosophical – as opening our eyes for what philosophy can be, beyond its too narrow definition in the modern age.

One of the reasons why Tempels himself was never easily taken serious as a philosopher was because he was trained a priest, not an academic philosopher, and his attempt to articulate an African ontology, the ontology of vital force, was considered by many to remain stuck in describing a worldview among others, a cultural thing, not the ultimate logical structure of reality as disciplinary philosophy was supposed to do. I had supposed, after reading all those interpretations, that Tempels maybe was not too serious about the philosophical part of his endeavour, that he had only wanted to improve missionary activity in Africa, and to change the very negative view of African humanity to that end. How wrong I was.

The unending stream of letters that rest in the archive – exchanged between him and befriended intellectuals on his ideas, as well as concerning the spread and publication of his work with more distant contacts (among them several influential phenomenologists of those days) show that Tempels was very much concerned about the philosophical implications of his work, and that contemporary philosophers were also interested in that aspect. His aim was not to present an African worldview, calling it a philosophy, as another culturally interesting object in the world of (colonial) knowledge. He was – on the contrary – convinced that European philosophy was on a dead end road, as it had forgotten a more fundamental understanding of reality as vital force, that appeared present to him in many non-European philosophical systems, among them Daoist philosophy, Native American philosophies, and Bantu philosophy.

Was he right in his view? Did he convince in his attempts to be taken seriously? Did he not overplay his hand by describing – as a foreigner – what indigenous Baluba people told him about their understanding of reality? Was his being part of the colonial system (even though he held a critical view of assimilationist ideas in missionary work) not a too heavy burden on his work all the same? Too many questions, and let me make it clear: it is not my aim to defend Bantu Philosophy or its author before the court of decolonial history. My aim is to dig through the mess that colonial history is, to see how someone followed a strong calling to articulate a new approach in philosophy, how he (mis)understood what he was doing, maybe, and how he was (mis)understood by his contemporaries. My motive: all of this is not finished, of that I am convinced. The past is not over, it is still at work, and we still have to work through it to have a future together, as humans on this earth.

Philosophy curricula rarely include non-European “great thinkers”, and even less take philosophy seriously that has never been owned by individuals with “great” names, but that often was not owned at all, but still practised as the all too human effort to understand life and our place in it, and to guide ourselves while living here, now – in all kinds of societies and ages. To create a fundamental discussion of the standard curricula and their blindness to most human reflection outside that of a few “great men”, can only be done by looking and listening in other places than the all too familiar instruction books of philosophy – in real conversations with real people, and partly also in forgotten letters in a colonial archive.

This Silent Year 2021, or was it 2020?

I have been rather silent here these past years. Just a few blog posts. Many in my mind, as always, conceived sometime during the day doing other things, a few as drafts in my invisible wordpress writing studio, but very little finished and published. Contrary to appearances however, this (two-year-long) year was a very productive year – not in publications, but in investments in projects and – above all – in people. Let me mention some of what excited me and consoled me, and how I hope to develop things from here.

Workshops / meetings

It seems I have been at home the whole time, in more or less severe lockdowns. As if the only outside events were ever so many walks around the block or further, in parks and lanes. Still there were some live events, and because of their rarity they were more exciting and pleasant even. Like that trip to Leuven, in the autumn of 2021 – first time abroad, since february 2020… A mini-conference of the Dutch-Belgian research network Theological Ethics in the inspiring silent buildings of the ETF – the former Jesuit training institute, now the Evangelical Theological Faculty. We discussed new developments in the field, and our views of where we want it to go. It was a good reason to catch up with one of the former students of the Winter Course, who had just returned from a long research trip in Kivu, DRC.

Another inspiring workshop was just this past week at the University of Amsterdam – all distanced and with facemasks – on Derrida. organized by Mary Aude Baronian. Six colleagues discussed how their work was influenced or inspired by Derrida. So no exegesis, but critical extensions or new intellectual appropriations. My talk was titled: ‘From Algeria to Apartheid. Derrida and the Ambiguities of Decolonization’ – for myself an appetizer for the elective course I will teach in spring on Derrida and Africa. So good to get to know new people there and make new connections for the future.

The PhD students

The most wonderful experience these years, however, was to work with a growing group of PhD students – who work on Continental Philosophy, African Philosophy and Philosophy of Race. I am so humbled that they chose me to help them along, give feedback and support. One of them, from Nigeria, came over in this past summer to get introduced to our department and to some research colleagues. I saw most of them online, though. They gave presentations in one the research networks I have been chairing (Theological Ethics and African Intercultural Philosophy), they wrote their proposals and first, second, third chapters, took part in the reading group Critical Philosophy which I organize since several years, and were present in some of the conferences I visited or presented in. This is my thank you for the pleasant and interesting work to them!

Lectures, defenses, conferences

And, strangely enough, this was a very busy time giving lectures. Once, twice, sometimes even three times a month, as the online world made switching continents without visa, airplanes, and tiring planning of trips possible. There were weeks where I was in a PhD defense committee in South Africa as well as in a conference in Nigeria, or where I gave keynotes in the Philippines and Brazil – combinations I would never have been able to do with analogous travel (travel is exciting but also tires me a lot). I got to know new networks of colleagues in all these worlds, I learned so much from being with them, even on ever so many zooms!

Research projects

I have been planning and organizing several research projects which I hope to do the best work for before retirement. I organized and edited two books on African Philosophy, with my colleagues Bolaji Bateye, Louise Müller and Mahmoud Masaeli – now they are under review and we are in a waiting phase, prolongued by the effects of covid on so many people and institutions.

In its active phase is now the Bantu Philosophy project. With all the teaching that goes on continuously, writing and translating (which is my main task) did not progress enough to my taste, but our network of academic collaborators grew, also with honors students, interdisciplinary insights, and several applications for funding.

A third project concerns Indigenous Knowledge Systems. That is still in a phase of exploration, a few colleagues get to read my first project descriptions, want to collaborate in an interview series to map the cleft between ‘colonized’ academia and indigenous knowledge (more to come here!). Writing will come later.

Last but not least – teaching…

There was a lot going on there, revisions of courses, the elective course on 20th century African Political Philosophy, several editions of Diversifying Philosophy – with a few new texts every time, and this year a much valued zoom visit by Tommy J. Curry when students had read his take on article on the Gentrification of CRT. There was more, but let me leave it here. You have an impression now. It was a year of many investments. I hope to reap and harvest with all my valued research partners for years to come!

An independent Thinker – Paulin Hountondji

When going against the grain is one’s natural tendency, living in harmony with one’s surroundings is a challenge. When ‘everybody’ says I should read book X, or see movie Y, the chances are strongest I will not go and read it, or go and see it. Such an almost anarchistic tendency makes learning also difficult, because one is suspicious towards the very phenomenon of the teacher.

So when I was finding my way in this new field of African Philosophy, ever since I read Heinz Kimmerle’s Mazungumzo, in 2003, I had this same tendency to find my way through obscure articles and not-so-well-known books, instead of working my way straightforwardly through the classics of the field – such as the works of Oruka, Wiredu, and Hountondji.

I also had a problem understanding – years ago – why Hountondji had criticized Bantu Philosophy by the missionary Tempels so strongly, as the ‘othering’ undertaking of a colonial mind. Back then I had not yet realized the flaws in the French and English translations of Tempels’ work, nor had I fully understood the context in which African philosophers since the days of Tempels had been working – how much work it had taken to undo the colonial heritage – by criticizing, discussing, dialoguing, which has made many among them the masters of these philosophical arts in our times.

And now, last week, having read so much more, and therefore having become more humble in my opinions, I finally went to listen to a lecture by the teacher of decades – to be a student once more.

It was in Leiden, Pieter Boele van Hensbroek had organized his trip, and the Africa Studies Center was so kind to host the lecture. The topic of the afternoon was religion, politics, the state, the law – all set in the specific history of the Methodist Church in Benin. I heard later that some were surprised that the philosopher who had earlier stressed that African philosophy has a universalist intention, like all philosophy, and should not be seen as local and cultured, now focused so much on such a ‘local’, specific topic, bringing out a religious point at the end, that God can never be finally known by human beings.

The most localized remark Hountondji made was how the Catholic Basilica in Ouidah is built right across the House where snakes are revered, suggesting that traditional African religion is just as important, if not more important to life as it is, than the imported Christian and Muslim religions. Still he did not focus on the traditions, which might have satisfied the curious Dutch public, always fascinated by an ‘exotic’ story. They got mostly history, and conflict, and a philosophical weighing of interests of humans in society, that should bring us mostly to valuing the law over personal interests.

In the end it was a ‘universal’ weighing of arguments on the occasion of local historical facts – showing his listeners that it was time now to follow him to what is of interest to us all in these times – to not forget that the perseverance of human values takes work, and courage, and persistence of us all.

Now there was a possibility as well have a photo taken with this independent thinker who had helped shape African philosophy by critically discussing its scope and aims, and who carried within him many decades of experience with our world, with reflecting, and with teaching. A student of Wageningen University who had come to listen too was so kind to take it. Here it is.

Paulin Hountondji with members of the Dutch research group African Intercultural Philosophy

African Intercultural Philosophy

This is the name of the newest study group in the framework of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy. This week, on December 12, 2019, it held its first meeting, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The group will meet twice a year and wants to create a collegial, inclusive and friendly meeting place for those working in African Philosophy in the Netherlands in an academic context. Exchanging knowledge and experiences should keep research and teaching in the field in our country on a high level, and expand it from there.

The group aims to make African Intercultural Philosophy visible as an academic field. There is a lot of interest in African Philosophy outside academia in our country, but within, it is still in its first stages – with here and there a course taught, and a researcher working mostly in isolation (locally, though often not internationally).

As our OZSW page says: “The group focuses on the Intercultural Approach in African Philosophy, which has from the start of the academic study of African Philosophy been an important point of departure. It aims to study, discuss and bring African Philosophy further in ways that stress its meaning in and for a globalizing philosophy.” Thus we make clear that we do not view African philosophy as something contained in certain cultures, or which concerns only ‘local’ problems or traditions. African philosophy, on the contrary, offers much to enrich philosophy from other traditions and also a ‘globalizing’ philosophy.

The group hopes to raise consciousness in universities to introduce courses on African Philosophy in their programs, and perhaps even inspire the initialization of a master program for those wanting to specialize in it. It also hopes to increase collaboration in supervising of PhD students, of whom several were present yesterday. It may be a vehicle to organize or inspire conferences and make intercontinental collaborations easier. Attention to the issue of the closedness of Western philosophy (materially through visa and travel problems for philosophers from the African continent, and mentally through exclusionary epistemological frameworks) is not a side issue.

We want to articulate the field as deserving its own programs and conferences, not to be an afterthought in ethnology or ‘general’ philosophy. Finally, we want to exchange research findings, and collaborate in publishing projects. This first meeting Dr Henk Haenen (to our knowledge the second person ever to do a PhD in African Philosophy in the Netherlands) held a presentation on the concept of beauty in the work of Woly Soyinka, a topic which managed to raise in the discussion all the major issues concerning ‘African’ philosophy and African ‘philosophy that makes this field so exciting.

Our call: if you teach African Philosophy or if you research it at an academic level in the Netherlands, then you are invited to join the research group, in order to enrich each other and help this important field grow in depth and outreach. You can reach us through our page which is behind the top-most link in this post.

The occasion of our first meeting called for a photo moment. Not all members could be present this time, so this is only a small part of our group!

African Philosophy in the Netherlands

There is something changing in the Dutch philosophical landscape – for some years mainly at the intersection of public and academic philosophy, now hesitantly in academia, there is a growing interest in African Philosophy. Being among those promoting this change, I wanted for a long time to write a post on this long overdue development. Having attended and contributed to several public and academic events centering on African Philosophy in these past two weeks, let me use their afterglow to highlight some signs of how Dutch interest is developing.

Books: over the past years several interesting titles in African philosophy have been published in Dutch translations, such as a book on Ubuntu by Mogobe Ramose, and the one on Socrates and Orunmila by recently deceased Sophie Oluwole. During her time with the publishing house Ten Have, Renate Schepen helped to introduce these authors to the Dutch audience. Another publisher, Van Tilt, introduced the work of Souleymane Bachir Diagne in a Dutch translation of Pol van de Wiel.

Teaching: there are still no lecturers in my country who have a full time position in African philosophy, like there are those who have the same in Ancient Greek philosophy, or Arabic philosophy. That doesn’t mean there are no academics teaching in diverse contexts, who have a name in the field through their publications. Among them are Michael Eze, who teaches in the department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, Pieter Boele van Hensbroek, at Groningen University, and Louise Müller, who is a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kwazulu Natal, and guest researcher at Leiden University. My own Department of Philosophy at the Free University Amsterdam recently added a course to the curriculum called Diversifying Philosophy, which will contain some African Philosophy, and will be taught as of next year. A full course of African Philosophy was taught this school year by two lecturers of Wageningen University (university of life sciences) – an initiative of self-employed researcher, teacher and artist Birgit Boogaard. There are several others who add elements of African philosophy in their courses in Development or Religious Studies.

A network: an initiative has started last year May to bring together all of those who teach African Philosophy in the Netherlands, to promote the field, and benefit from each other’s experiences concerning teaching this special field. A first meeting was held at Radboud University, hosted by Philippe van Haute and Herman Westerink, and plans are in the making to transform the network into a research group in the context provided by the Dutch Research School for Philosophy.

Lectures: these last weeks saw a string of events, made possible by the visit of several African philosophers to the interdisciplinary Nijmegen conference on Intercultural Dialogues.

There was an interesting seminar – in a packed lecture hall – on Knowledge Diversity at Wageningen University featuring Wilfred Lajul from Uganda and Pius Mosima from Cameroon.

Together with the latter I also had the opportunity to speak at a public event on Depression in different cultures at Radboud Reflects, in – again – a packed Lux Theatre. This lively evening with discussion can be watched back here. The national newspaper Trouw had an article related to the event. And Brandpunt+ followed the week after.

Institutional: Here I can only add what is missing, and sometimes counterintuitively. The renowned Leiden African Studies Center has no chair in African Philosophy, or even a lecturer – showing that those studying aspects of things African lack systematic opportunities to either reflect philosophically on their field, or to study the philosophies of the African continent. Another place where one might expect Intercultural, including African, Philosophy is the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, which dedicates itself to programs concerning development. Also here researchers and teachers have nobody in their midst who assures institutionally the dedication to reflection on their field, or philosophical aspects of the projects in the ‘developing world’. Even the young program in Comparative Philosophy in Leiden does not yet have a position dedicated to African Philosophy. There still is much to be done. Maybe Philosophy Departments should start taking the lead here now.

Teaching, Meeting, Decolonizing

A few years ago, I started to write a work-plan, with the aim to see before me what I hoped to be able to do in the years before my retirement. This is weird, to write the (hush hush) word retirement here, in the public sphere, when in many ways (and I will not be the only one) I am feeling younger now then when I was younger biologically. But lets be realistic. Before retirement there are opportunities (such as some, limited, funding for traveling, helping younger (sic) colleagues to write their PhDs, teaching as a regular university teacher) that will be gone after. Even though after retirement other things will be possible, one should do what one can do while in a certain framework.

The plan in question comprised three elements: 1) a research project on spirit ontologies, which grew into a book proposal, which is a book-in-the-process-of-being-written at this moment. 2) another research project, which is still in the process of being realized, on African philosophy and the colonial archive (that is on Placide Tempels – more about that later). 3) some ideas toward decolonizing philosophy teaching. Not just the programs, not just the curricula, but the way we teach it as well. The means should be especially mutual visits, collaborations, and exchanges between academic philosophy teachers. Regarding my expertise and interest, these should be organized primarily between African, African-American and European colleagues. This blog post is on this third element. I am happy that writing the plan seemed, by itself to create effects, and attract ideas, people, and actual opportunities. This has happened with regard to all three elements, and made me convinced that writing down one’s hopes and ideals has a kind of ‘magical’ effect to set things in motion. I recommend it to everone!

The hope to be able to do something towards decolonizing philosophy teaching got its first fulfillment in an invitation to speak on ‘teaching philosophy interculturally‘ at the university of Essex in 2017. Others were the creation of a small network in the Netherlands of academics who want to do the same – a network on which I will write more another time. And while visiting two conferences in Dakar, Senegal in 2017 and 2018, one which was a joint project of Senegalese and American philosophers, I had the privilege to see even more styles of lecturing, of working together, than my visit to Calabar, Nigeria in 2016 had provided me with – as it was that Nigerian visit that had raised the desire to be able to contribute more to this larger movement of decolonizing academia. It may have been the enthusiasm of Jonathan Chimakonam, the organizer of the Nigerian conference that made me think such an exchange would be realizable, despite the many obstacles I perceived, among which access to funding is only a minor one. Chimakonam is very active on this issue, in writing as well as in organizing opportunities for academics. So his article in this new book, Decolonisation, Africanisation and the Philosophy Curriculum I had already read before the book came out.

This book gathers together fresh views of colleagues who deal with all of its title, not only in theory, but in the classroom, which in many cases, especially in South Africa, involves outside-of-the-classroom confrontations as well. This book gathers academic work in which the personal element is never far away. Personal experiences, personal interventions, color the critical reflections and positive proposals to change philosophy, not just for the benefit of Africa, but globally. Its editor, Edwin Etieyibo, writes in the introduction that is gives a contribution: “to the fields of decolonisation, intercultural and postcolonial studies, as well as an essential resource for the discipline of philosophy, not just in Africa but globally.” What I like about the book is that it offers reflection as well as very practical deliberations on how to organize a decolonized curriculum. Such as the discussion by South African Ernst Wolff on the respective advantages of teaching ‘dedicated’ or ‘integrated’ modules. In other words: should one leave the ‘modern philosophy’ course and all the other courses white as they are, and add a ‘diverse philosophy’ course to let students know there is more to be explored, or should one aim for unwhitening all the regular courses immediately. In a process of change, he defends alternating between the two. Chimakonam also writes on program development and distinguishes, more radically, three possible approaches, intriguingly called plan C (competition), plan B (balance) and plan D (displacement). In my words: should the ‘colonial’ program be replaced with an Africanized one (D), should one let a Western and an African program compete and observe what it does for its students (C), or should one offer Euro-American and African philosophy courses simultaneously, to let students come to their own conclusions or combinations? These proposals stir the reflection that is so much needed.

Very practical and useful is the article by Thaddeus Metz that aims to introduce newcomers to African approaches in philosophy to what’s characteristic and what one could read – ordered by classical course subjects such as political philosophy, epistemology and metaphysics. This is a must-read for any philosopher who is used only to the Western curriculum and thinks African philosophy is just some ‘fun’, ‘exotic’ subject – (s)he will discover on the contrary that all previous, culturally limited, conceptions of what philosophy can be and can do, were wrong. Munamato Chemhuru returns to the decades-old debates on what ‘African’ in ‘African philosophy’ can mean, and shows why this question should be explored once more. He argues that Africanizing the philosophy curriculum is fully consistent with the requirements of philosophy to be a critical discourse. To do so, he will have to reject the false images projected by anthropologizing studies of Africa that make all thought developed on the continent an element of essentialized and traditionalized cultures. “If Africanisation is properly understood as a process that involves putting African epistemology at the core of philosophy in Africa, instead of cultural anthropology, and continuing to accuse Western philosophy for its predicament, then the agenda of Africanisation can be achievable.”

These are just a few of the many topics in the book that interconnect in intriguing ways. To my view this is a must-read for any philosophers interested in curriculum change and development, in decolonizing the classroom, and their philosophy departments along the way. I hope the third element in my work-plan may materialize further in the coming years, and with the help of, among others, this book, and its writers. Let me dream: wouldn’t it be great to have masterclasses for philosophy professors interested in curriculum change and development of new inclusive ways to teach, where some of these African colleagues come to put us all to work, in critical reflection and in learning new styles of teaching. To discover a new wealth of approaches to classical subjects in philosophy, and to critique, in the end, this ordering of what is classical as well.

This post is my reading report of Decolonisation, Africanisation and the Philosophy Curriculum, Edwin Etieyibo (ed.), London & New York: Routledge, 2018. ISBN 978-1-138-57036-8.

Philosophy in the Vineyard

Last winter I found an email in my mailbox with an invitation, out of the blue, to give two lectures in Southern Germany. Near the Bodensee, in a village called Weingarten, which translates as Vineyard. The organisor of a yearly philosophical summer week, Dr. Hälbig, had found my German article of a few years ago on Emanuel Swedenborg. If I wanted to come and speak on him and on Spinoza. The theme of the week was the other side of the Enlightenment. Of course I said yes, especially after a friendly phonecall with Herr Hälbig. Not all of my readers know that I feel verbally more at home in German than in English, as I spent quite some time in with relatives and friends in the country. Still it was a challenge to see if I could also speak as freely for a group of interested people who would not all be versed in philosophy. This past week I was there. Close to the Swiss border, in this very hot summer, in a continental climate.

I had the opportunity to stay there three days, and also hear several German colleagues whom I didn’t know before. Especially two of them, full professors, surprised me the by their truly German style of doing philosophy – which reminded me of my student days at Leiden university, where some of my teachers also knew that style. One of them spoke on Leibniz’s metaphysics, and doing so took the audience on a dizzying ride through metaphysical arguments from the Middle Ages to Immanuel Kant, discussing the problem of freedom. When I also saw an essay he recently published on freedom I was stunned by its exclusively German list of references. Even to discuss positive and negative freedom he didn’t need Isaiah Berlin, but other, German authors. In English language philosophy the opposite is of course also the case, where many great continental thinkers who were mentioned here would not even be known by name.

The other was a Kierkegaard specialist, who took us through the dark moors of protestant existentialist experience of sin, aptly summarized by an elderly lady who attended as ‘Sündensumpf’. While listening my mind kept wandering back to my student days, where for the last time I had been immersed so deeply in North-European and German ways of seeing life through philosophy. And to the very specifically German style of doing philosophy, from which I obviously had removed myself so far that for my bio I had just indicated that I taught philosophy at my university, while all the other speakers had listed, in the right order, their Studies, their PhD, their Habilitation (second research exam after the PhD, neccesary to become a full professor). The exams and titles and positions which I had forgotten to mention, perhaps also because somewhere along the way I must have lost interest in the game of academic hierarchy.

What struck me also, upon reflecting, is that there is no such thing as continental philosophy. French philosophy is just as different from German philosophy as Anglo-saxon philosophy is. And I thought further about the debate on the existence of a specifically African philosophy on which I had been reading over the past years. In this debate, the participants often struggle with the claim of European philosophers that their ideas are universal, whereas those of philosophers of other continents were supposed to be local and bound to their specific cultures. Here, in Weingarten, among the vineyards, that suddenly appeared as a non-issue. For everything here was so German, including the appropriation of Kant, who was mentioned in every second sentence, so to speak, and always with the full realization of the very specific historical and cultural context of his philosophy. No, things were even more localized, for, as Germans do – always discussing the differences between their constituent peoples at dinner or at the bar (in this case the closest two – the Frankish and the Swabians), there was no escaping the grounded and situated nature of the philosophy being done. It kind of relieved me. After all we are all in the same boat: Anglo-saxons, French, Swabians, Tamils, Han-Chinese, and Igbos – we all come from our own fields with different animals, foods and fruits, and our own histories of power struggles over them, and the identities we developed while tending to them. And from these very local circumstances somehow in all cases thoughts emerge that may attract others from other fields and languages, making them interlocal, although never universal or global in asimple manner. In this case the fields grew grapes. 

My lectures went well, years of teaching philosophy to non-philosophy students had done their work. The participants liked it that I discussed texts with them and took them along the very personal and existential questions about modernity I have had ever since my early teenage years. And I was relieved all the German idiom I had gathered was still there and helped me to get into a real dialogue with very nice, interested and interesting people, some professional philosophers, others from other professional backgrounds. It was a good experience, to visit my neighbors in their homeland, and sit and philosophize in the vineyard.

The gentle force of translation

In philosophy the 21st century started in 2017. This became clear to me in the days before Christmas, when I had the opportunity to attend the great conference in honor of Souleymane Bachir Diagne at the University Cheich Anta Diop in Dakar. It was there that I saw something of the way ahead for philosophy in the coming age – beyond the need for ‘schools of thought’ of the past century – beyond the melancholic returns to the ‘great thinkers’ and ‘systematic’ philosophy, and beyond the need to split up the field in something called ‘analytic and continental’ thinking.Beyond the self-aggrandizement of philosophies that claimed to end history, to make a radical new start, introduce a new ‘school’, or to even destruct philosophy itself. This new, fresh, orientation I witnessed, had nothing of that – instead it boasted all things modest: doing serious historical work, analyzing the intertwinements of religion, politics, and culture patiently and honestly, and above all: working on translation in the broadest sense – making little known texts and views a bit more well known, introducing ‘marginal’ thinkers and their work to a wider audience – and in all that: shifting the geographies of reason silently but significantly.

And how I liked the way it was thought out and done: to honor a mans achievement in his own country, to do so when he is still years before retirement and may expect time to allow him to inspire others more and bring his unique views into the world. This conference breathed, above all, the atmosphere of intellectual friendship – an atmosphere that spread through all the events and meetings of so many colleagues, students, and relevant others. We were in the ‘francophone’ sphere of the African continent: in a sphere and in a place – opening a space for thought. But English was a conference language too, and mostly well understood. Wolof often served to accomodate the organizational processes of course. And I was lucky to also be able to retreat for a while in my own language, Dutch, with colleagues from NL I only truly got to know in Dakar, as such things go. So, the issue of translation was never far away – especially because the man who was the centre of it all, fondly called Bachir by his friends, embodies the issues of translation in his life story – so to speak. Having moved to ‘the capital’ – Paris – of so many postcolonies for his studies, he later returned to Senegal to strengthen the philosophical world in place through his powers of translation – only to move once more (much later) to another ‘capital’ (New York) – that of American-dominated thought, to translate African and islamic philosophy and make it more accesible to an academic world still very much ignorant to its potential and real contributions to a shared and negotiated understanding of the predicament of the 21st century. Thus also repairing what was worded by Frantz Fanon: “whenever there is a lack of understanding between [the black man] and his fellows in the presence of the white man, there is a lack of judgment.” (Black Skin White Masks)

Translation is never only finding words in another language to transmit what was expressed in the original one, nor just presenting little known thinkers to a wider audience – its most important, philosophical, work is negotiation, one of the central elements of dialogue and working to shared understandings. It is stirring things up almost unnoticed, working towards the growth of knowledge – and against the ideological falsehoods that have blinded many great thinkers. Involved in such negotiation Souleymane Bachir Diagne critically investigates thinkers such as Senghor and Bergson, Iqbal and Thierno Bokar, – meanwhile fearlessly researching how religion and modernization, democratic movements, searches for identity as well as equality, interact, mix, and may be used as ways to open up towards ourselves and each other.

Translation, as practiced in Diagne’s work, is a gentle force, and very much needed to open the future to what our varying traditions of knowledge have been trying to discover about humanity. Now that we, in the 21st century, in our ‘post-colonial’ age, are doing the work of realizing the crimes we have done to and suffered from each other – we can finally start to learn differently. Not just reaching for ‘excellence’ in monological ivory towers of reason, but mastering another kind of excellence – the one that consists in the craftmanship of reading (listening!), translating (transferring) insights – in the budding multi-centered system of knowing that is presently being built. This kind of excellence is modest as well as daring, as it knows philosophy is not just about intellectual grasp – but is aiming to acquire such a grasp while working against inequality and injustice, and for wisdom and love.

 

 

To ‘talk religion’ with Placide Tempels

“How ‘to talk religion’? Of religion? Singularly of religion today? How dare we speak of it in the singular without fear and trembling, this very day?”

Derrida 2002. Acts of Religion, p. 42.

This Derrida quote was above the abstract I sent in for the 23rd ISAPS conference, recently held in Vienna. My paper was titled “Bantu Philosophy” and the problem of religion in intercultural philosophy today. Going by the comments and questions after presenting my paper, I think I succeeded to bring some fresh questions to the debates on Bantu Philosophy, the 1945 publication by Placide Tempels, a Franciscan missionary in what then was called the Belgian Congo. Tempels’ book, which first appeared in Dutch and was later translated to French and English, kicked off the many debates on the existence and nature of African philosophy. Is philosophy localized, or universal? Was his presentation of a culturalized ontology a well-meant first attempt at intercultural dialogue, or can it not be taken outside of the colonial context in which Tempels worked? Or could both be true? In my presentation I wanted to go into another matter: Tempels’ attempt to sketch a solution to the loss of religiosity in what he called the age of industrialization – in the colonialized part of Africa where he lived as well as in Europe.

Although he culturalized ontology, Tempels still spoke of religion in the singular – a thing which we nowadays find hard to do, according to Derrida. Now there is much talk of religions, in the plural: we speak of the dialogue of religions, or their confrontation. To talk of religion, in the singular – to ask whether there is any meaning in religion as such, seems an obsolete question. Especially in philosophy. This would imply, namely, to discuss religious anthropology in a transcultural manner: to ask what human beings share in terms of religious desire. Tempels now, did exactly that. For him, ‘Christian doctrine’ was about receiving as a reality ‘the strengthening of life’. For him religion was all about

‘the aspiration towards the strengthening of life, the raising of it, the taking of it into the supernatural, its participation in the constant intensification and internal growth of our life through union, living union, with God.’ (80)

This rather unusual wording of what he saw as the essence of Christian religiosity he derived from his construction of what he saw as ‘Bantu ontology’ – which would be an ontology of ‘vital force’. In his view the people he had come to live amongst in the Congo had understood life, human life, and life in general, as a continuous possibility of intensification or decrease in vital force. Cursing another is meant to decrease his vitality, blessing her or him does the oppositie. Tempels’ initial motive to investigate and describe what he saw as original Bantu culture had sprung from his observation that all missionary work in Africa had actually failed, as European culture was brought over to African peoples in its new, materialistic and spiritually empty version, while religious teachers had never tried to understand the soul of those they aimed to convert, and therefore had not really conversed with them.

In the end however Tempels made an unusual double hermeneutical move – to first interpret what his African interlocutors taught him in terms of a metaphysics of life force, and to secondly reinterpret in its terms the languishing catholic metaphysics of salvation. This made him take Christ as the enhancer of life force per se, and as the counterforce in an age which, he feared, was about to empty the human person (African and European alike) of its soul, seeing progress solely in terms of industrialization and economic expansion. This was not just a hermeneutical circular movement avant Gadamer, as it simultaneously upheld the neo-scholastic claim to metaphysical knowledge of ultimate divine reality. Thus Tempels culturalized and contextualized what was supposed to sustain and transcend the contingent phenomenal world.

In my presentation I asked whether we should see this in the light of his confused non-professional philosophy (Tempels just took the two years of philosophy required in the study for the priesthood), or whether in the end his work contains elements for an answer to Derrida’s question: how to speak of religion without fear and trembling. If it does, perhaps some light can be shed in the discourse which only speaks of religious difference, without seeing how religion should be analyzed in a contextualized manner – as intrinsically related to the political and economic struggles that disturb our present times.

If we follow that road we could see that any philosophical search for truth (post – cultural relativism) has to move through analyses of the political and the economical. In Tempels work we see the beginnings of such a move – where he relates religion (in the singular: be it Christianity or traditional African religiosity) to the historical situation of industrialization and colonization – a situation that advertizes itself as civilization, but Tempels doubts this. He tries the idea whether it might not be better in a sense for Europeans to let themselves be taught by those they allegedly came to civilize.

‘We get the impression that these masses want to rise from their alleged lowliness, clothing themselves in the knowledge of their own lore and in their conception of the world; and thus standing before and looking down upon the small group of Westerners […]” (73).

To state, as Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha does in his article in the Encyclopedia Brittanica , that Tempels remained bound to a colonial outlook because he saw Christianity as superior to traditonal African religion is too fast a conclusion to my view. His Christianity did not speak (as traditionally was done in European religious discourse) of salvation of the eternal soul, but of a continuous intensification and internal growth of life through union with God – which to my view is a Christianity which had been transformed through its contact and dialogue with ‘Bantu philosophy’ – with his observation that ‘there is to be found in the depths of the Bantu soul an aspiration, an irresistable allurement towards an infinite strengthening of life.’ (81) This is not just a reformulation of traditional Christian ‘talk of religion’ – it is quite another talk. Of religion, across cultural and theological difference, positioned over against what Tempels saw as the false progress of industrialization and the only materialistic ‘development’ through colonialism.

 

 

Teaching Philosophy Interculturally

I guess that was my longest ‘silence’ ever between two blog posts. And even while there was so much happening in my philosophical life… Now I have to try to catch up a bit, before things will be too far in the past. In Momentum I wrote about experiencing new opportunities of collaboration and exchange on what matters to me in philosophy – and I mentioned one of them: an invitation to the philosophy department of the University of Essex. There, by mid-May me and Tübinger colleague Philipp Thomas, who has great expertise in teaching how to teach philosophy, were welcomed to spend some days for exchange with our Colchester colleagues in what our host, Matt Burch, had named a ‘pedagogy workshop’. A very apt title, as we gathered in different formats around pedagogy -explicitly on our common field: philosophy. We were kindly invited to observe teaching approaches in the newly formed summer program for bachelors students, to participate in a research activity on ‘race and gender’ theory, and to present our own views on philosophy pedagogy amidst an engaged group of Essex-colleagues.

I was invited to speak about ‘teaching philosophy interculturally’,  and my experiences with my new course on intercultural and African philosophy – designed for students in arts, communication and literature at my own university. I started by telling about ‘how I got here’. About my long standing interest in a dialogical approach in teaching, which I first used in the early nineties with the seminary students I taught for four years, being convinced that they should not just acquire knowledge of philosophy, but do so while also practising the art of exchange of ideas with each other and with me, their teacher. On top of that, I was not interested in promoting intellectual discussions only, but more so to create a safe space in which they could express personal commitments to values – so that these could be articulated, scrutinized, affirmed or critiqued – to be prepared, so to speak, for our present day situation of interculturality and pluralism. On the basis of this experience I was assigned the task, at the Free University Amsterdam, to transform service teaching (philosophy for non-philosophy students) from one-directional classical introductions into philosophy – into courses that were tailored to the programs in which they had to function, with more stress on active participation of the students. The actual transformation was of course coming from the teachers who designed and taught the courses – for earth sciences, biomedical sciences, and all the other fields. We involved pedagogy professionals from our teaching expertise center, who were developing a value-dialogue based method of academic teaching. The idea of this approach was that philosophy courses, more than before, would help students from all fields to develop their critical skills, not just intellectually, but also concerning societal, personal and cultural matters. That was twenty years ago. And over the years, developing several dialogical approaches as a service teacher myself (as well as in the philosophy bachelor and master programs), I introduced more and more content into the courses from other places than the obvious European and American ones – teaching, for instance, on the links between diverse African philosophies of communality and individuality and American theories of the social self, or on Foucault’s work on the prison in comparison with that of Angela Davis, using Rwanda’s gacaca courts as an example of new experiments of doing justice in cases of violence on an extreme scale. I was finding my way experimentally, as I didn’t want to close myself in in new – alternative – schools that were already emerging here and there. I showed, in my presentation, how I always make a point of including photos of the philosophers from different continents on my powerpoints, to create an – also visually – inclusive space for the students to learn together.

While I perceived the philosophy department at the University of Essex to be very open to connecting the field to ‘real world issues’, and as having a much more diverse student population than my own department has – my experience teaching students from so different fields as dentistry, cultural anthropology and development studies, theology as well as organization and governance studies – fields which include much more diverse student populations (in many respects) than the discipline of philosophy -, had brought me to this point in time where I could share from what I learned. And I got so many helpful and stimulating questions and responses. It was a great learning experience, and has nourished my hopes to develop further plans for interculturalizing and decolonizing philosophy teaching, together with colleagues from different parts of the globe. I think it is time for philosophy departments to get into this – to think through in a critical manner the efforts for inclusivity and diversity other fields in academia also have made, and also to re-think philosophy’s own role in history – often too close for comfort to the racisms and colonialisms in which European politicians, kings and entrepreneurs, do-gooders as well as researchers, entangled themselves.

Postscript: this was only the first of at least three or four other subjects for blogposts that were waiting too long!