Ethnophilosophy
from 1945
The attempt to describe an African worldview as philosophy, and the long argument about whether that is a rescue or a trap.
- Active
- from 1945
- Where
- Central Africa, and the European academies that published it
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- African
The claim
A culture's language, proverbs and practices contain an implicit philosophy that can be reconstructed. Whether that reconstruction is philosophy or ethnography is the question the field has argued about ever since.
What it held
Tempels was a Belgian missionary in the Congo, and Bantu Philosophy in 1945 argued that Bantu thought rests on a concept of vital force: being is force, forces interact in a hierarchy, and what looks like superstition is a coherent ontology.
The book's reception was complicated from the start. It asserted that Africans had a philosophy, which was contested at the time and was the point. It was also written by a missionary who thought understanding the ontology would make conversion more effective, and it treated an entire language group as holding one view.
The critique came from African philosophers. Hountondji argued that a collective unconscious worldview is precisely not philosophy, which requires named individuals arguing in a literature — and that ethnophilosophy answers the colonial charge by accepting its terms, offering not philosophy but folklore with a promotion. Towa and Wiredu pressed similar objections.
The defence, from Mbiti and others, is that reconstructing a conceptual scheme is a legitimate philosophical activity, done routinely for the Presocratics, and that refusing to do it for Africa applies a standard nobody else meets.
The argument has not concluded, which is why the entry exists.
How it argued
Reconstruction of implicit conceptual schemes from language, proverbs, ritual and practice.
What it was arguing against
The colonial claim that African societies were prelogical, and — in the critics' view — insufficiently against it.
Where it disagreed with itself
The central one: whether a collective worldview can be philosophy. Hountondji's attack is the standard reference and Gyekye's reply is the standard defence.
Common misconceptions
That it is a European imposition only. Alexis Kagame, Mbiti and others were African scholars doing this work on their own traditions, and the critique is not simply of outsiders.
How it began
Tempels in the Congo in 1945, at a moment when asserting that Africans had a philosophy at all was a contested claim.
What became of it
Living, and contested. Later work is far more careful about individual variation and about who is speaking.
Lasting influence
It framed African philosophy's founding debate. Everything in the field since is positioned somewhere relative to it.
Why it still matters
The question of whether an implicit worldview counts as philosophy applies far beyond Africa, and is asked of the Presocratics and of classical China too.
Put another way
A defence lawyer who wins the case by conceding the charge and arguing about the sentence.
Where to start
Hountondji. Read the critique before the thing criticised; it is the better book.
The surprising bit
The founding text of African philosophy as a field was written by a Belgian missionary who hoped that understanding the local metaphysics would make Christian teaching land better.
In their own words
Being is force, force is being.
By African philosophy I mean a set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Philosophic Sagacity
- Influenced
- Negritude Philosophy
The verdict
A book that created a discipline by being wrong in a way worth arguing with for eighty years.