- Length
- 320 pagesBrill, 1990; reissued by the African Books Collective
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Sage Philosophy
A Kenyan philosopher settled an argument about whether unlettered Africans could philosophise by going to find out. He interviewed rural sages, recorded their reasoning, published them by name, and showed that they disagreed with each other.
- Date
- 1990
- Author
- H. Odera Oruka
- Region
- Kenya
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 13 years
The only major contribution to the African philosophy debate that consists substantially of transcripts, and the only one whose participants are named non-academics.
What the book says
A book that answers a philosophical dispute by going out and doing fieldwork. Oruka had mapped the argument about African philosophy into four trends - ethnophilosophy, which describes a collective worldview; nationalist-ideological philosophy, produced by political leaders; professional philosophy, done by academics in the Western manner; and a fourth he proposed himself, philosophic sagacity. His method was to travel through rural Kenya, find people locally reputed for wisdom, interview them at length in their own languages, and record and publish what they said under their own names. The results are the book's argument. Among the sages he distinguishes two kinds: folk sages, who transmit the accepted wisdom of their community faithfully, and philosophic sages, who examine that wisdom critically, dissent from it, and give reasons - one arguing against the existence of God, another against the customary treatment of women, another disputing what his neighbours took for granted about death. They argue with each other and with him. Whatever else this is, it is not a unanimous collective worldview.
What it argues
That critical individual thought exists independently of literacy, and that the way to establish this is empirical rather than definitional. The distinction between folk sagacity and philosophic sagacity carries the argument: a person who can recite what the community holds is a repository, and a person who can say why the community is wrong about something and defend the claim is doing philosophy, whether or not they write. Oruka is careful about what this does and does not show. He is not claiming the sages produce systems, and he is not claiming their thought is uniquely African; he is claiming that the reasoning is there, that it is individual, and that the debate had been conducted for forty years by people who never checked.
What it answered
Hountondji on the writing criterion, and ethnophilosophy on the collective one - and the method is designed to be fatal to both at once. Against Tempels and Mbiti, the sages disagree with each other and with the supposed consensus, so there is no unanimous worldview to describe. Against Hountondji, they argue and give reasons without writing anything, so the criterion excludes philosophy that is demonstrably occurring.
How it argues
By transcript. Oruka sets out the framework, describes the method, and then prints the interviews - which means the reader encounters the sages' reasoning directly rather than his summary of it. This is what makes the book unusual in this section: it contains philosophy by people who did not write it and would not have called it that, presented without being tidied into a system. The analytical chapters are ordinary academic prose; the interviews are the evidence and the point.
The moment
Kenya in the 1970s and 80s, at the University of Nairobi, in a philosophy department arguing about whether it had a subject. Oruka had studied in Uppsala, was among the founders of professional philosophy in East Africa, and worked in a political climate in which academic independence was not assured. He also worked on global justice, arguing for a right to a human minimum. He was killed by a car in 1995 at fifty-one.
How it travelled
Into the field and, slowly, out of it. Sage philosophy became one of the standard four positions in every account of the African philosophy debate, and the method has been taken up in Ghana, Nigeria and elsewhere. Outside African philosophy the book is little known, and the reissue history has not helped - it has been intermittently hard to obtain, which for a book whose argument depends on its transcripts is a particular loss.
The strongest objection
That the philosopher's presence shapes what he finds. Oruka arrived with questions formed by a European training, asked them of people who had not been asked such things before, and selected as philosophic sages those whose answers were recognisably philosophical by that standard - so the criterion he claimed to be testing may have been operating in the selection. The interviews are also mediated by translation and by editing, and the reader cannot check either. A second objection comes from the other side: if the sages' reasoning is genuinely philosophical, it is not clear why it needed a professional philosopher to identify and publish it, and the arrangement still leaves the academic as the one who confers the title.
Why read it
For the interviews, which are the reason the book exists and are unlike anything else in this section - actual arguments by people whose names would otherwise not appear in a work of philosophy. The framework chapters can be skimmed. It is not easy to obtain, which is worth knowing in advance.
- First printed
- 1990
- First in English
- 1990
- Digitised
- No
The book prints the interviews alongside the analysis, which is why it functions as a source as well as an argument. Oruka's earlier essays setting out the four trends are collected separately.
Written in English; the interviews were conducted in Luo and other Kenyan languages and are printed in translation.
Where it stands
Live. Sage philosophy is a recognised approach with continuing practitioners, and the underlying question - whether philosophy requires writing - has become more interesting rather than less as oral traditions elsewhere have received similar attention.
On quoting this book
In copyright, and quoting a named sage's words from a translated interview raises a further attribution question the section is not placed to settle. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether philosophic sagacity is a genuine fourth category or a subset of what Hountondji would count once written down is argued. Whether the selection method presupposes its conclusion is the standard methodological objection. Whether the sages' thought is representative of anything beyond themselves is a question Oruka mostly declines, which is consistent with his individualism and unsatisfying to those wanting a general claim. And what the project would have become is unknown, since it was cut short.