Fwd: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Can non-Europeans Think?

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: basil ugochukwu
Date: Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 6:34 PM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Can non-Europeans Think?
To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

 

Can non-Europeans think?

What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical 'pedigree'? Hamid Dabashi Last Modified: 15 Jan 2013 11:41

The works of French philosopher Michel Foucault is usually at the forefront of Eurocentric philosophy [AFP]

In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published recently on Al Jazeera, we read: There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China. What immediately strikes the reader when seeing this opening paragraph is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls "philosophy today" - thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe. Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking somewhere between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality. To be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the location of other philosophers worthy of the designation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting next to these eminent European philosophers. The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world ("deep and far", that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives. That goes without saying, for without that confidence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal claim on our epistemic credulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence. Thinkers outside Europe  These are indeed not only eminent philosophers, but the philosophy they practice has the globality of certain degrees of self-conscious confidence without which no thinking can presume universality. The question is rather something else: What about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree, whether they practice their thinking in the European languages they have colonially inherited or else in their own mother tongues - in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, thinkers that have actually earned the dignity of a name, and perhaps even the pedigree of a "public intellectual" not too dissimilar to Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault that in this piece on Al Jazeera are offered as predecessors of Zizek? "Why is European philosophy 'philosophy', but African philosophy 'ethnophilosophy'?" What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to name and designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of "public intellectual" in the age of globalised media? Do the constellation of thinkers from South Asia, exemplified by leading figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, or Akeel Bilgrami, come together to form a nucleus of thinking that is conscious of itself? Would that constellation perhaps merit the word "thinking" in a manner that would qualify one of them - as a South Asian - to the term "philosopher" or "public intellectuals"? Are they "South Asian thinkers" or "thinkers", the way these European thinkers are? Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is "music" (and I am quite sure the great genius even sneezed melodiously) but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of "ethnomusicology"? Is that "ethnos" not also applicable to the philosophical thinking that Indian philosophers practice - so much so that their thinking is more the subject of Western European and North American anthropological fieldwork and investigation? We can turn around and look at Africa. What about thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot p'Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, V.Y. Mudimbe: Would they qualify for the term "philosopher" or "public intellectuals" perhaps, or is that also "ethnophilosophy"? Why is European philosophy "philosophy", but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic - an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History (popularised in Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum [2006]), you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages, but no cage is in sight for white people and their cultures - they just get to stroll through the isles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans, etc, all in a single winding row. The same ethnographic gaze is evident in the encounter with the intellectual disposition of the Arab or Muslim world: Azmi Bishara, Sadeq Jalal Al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Abdallah Laroui, Michel Kilo, Abdolkarim Soroush. The list of prominent thinkers and is endless. In Japan, Kojan Karatani, in Cuba, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, or even in the United States people like Cornel West, whose thinking is not entirely in the European continental tradition - what about them? Where do they fit in? Can they think - is what they do also thinking, philosophical, pertinent, perhaps, or is that also suitable for ethnographic examinations? The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blase. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is "philosophy" and their particular thinking is "thinking", and everything else is - as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying - "dancing". The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America - counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself "the West" but happily no more. The trajectory of contemporary thinking around the globe is not spontaneously conditioned in our own immediate time and disparate locations, but has a much deeper and wider spectrum that goes back to earlier generations of thinkers ranging from José Marti to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, to Aime Cesaire, W.E.B. DuBois, Liang Qichao, Frantz Fanon, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. So the question remains why not the dignity of "philosophy" and whence the anthropological curiosity of "ethnophilosophy"? Let's seek the answer from Europe itself - but from the subaltern of Europe. 'The Intellectuals as a Cosmopolitan Stratum' In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci has a short discussion about Kant's famous phrase in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that is quite critical in our understanding of what it takes for a philosopher to become universally self-conscious, to think of himself as the measure and yardstick of globality. Gramsci's stipulation is critical here - and here is how he begins: Kant's maxim "act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions" is less simple and obvious than it appears at first sight. What is meant by 'similar conditions'? To be sure, and as Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (the editors and translators of the English translation of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks) note, Gramsci here in fact misquotes Kant, and that "similar conditions" does not appear in the original text, where the German philosopher says: "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law." This principle, called "the categorical imperative", is in fact the very foundation of Kantian ethics. So where Kant says "universal law", Gramsci says, "a norm for all men", and then he adds an additional "similar conditions", which is not in the German original. "The world at large, and the Arab and Muslim world in particular, is going through world historic changes - these changes have produced thinkers, poets, artists, and public intellectuals at the centre of their moral and politcial imagination." That misquoting is quite critical here. Gramsci's conclusion is that the reason Kant can say what he says and offer his own behaviour as measure of universal ethics is that "Kant's maxim presupposes a single culture, a single religion, a 'world-wide' conformism... Kant's maxim is connected with his time, with the cosmopolitan enlightenment and the critical conception of the author. In brief, it is linked to the philosophy of the intellectuals as a cosmopolitan stratum". What in effect Gramsci discovers, as a southern Italian suffering in the dungeons of European fascism, is what in Brooklyn we call chutzpah, to think yourself the centre of universe, a self-assuredness that gives the philosopher that certain panache and authority to think in absolutists and grand narrative terms. Therefore the agent is the bearer of the "similar conditions" and indeed their creator. That is, he "must" act according to a "model" which he would like to see diffused among all mankind, according to a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working-or for whose preservation he is "resisting" the forces that threaten its disintegration. It is precisely that self-confidence, that self-consciousness, that audacity to think yourself the agent of history that enables a thinker to think his particular thinking is "Thinking" in universal terms, and his philosophy "Philosophy" and his city square "The Public Space", and thus he a globally recognised Public Intellectual. There is thus a direct and unmitigated structural link between an empire, or an imperial frame of reference, and the presumed universality of a thinker thinking in the bosoms of that empire. As all other people, Europeans are perfectly entitled to their own self-centrism. The imperial hubris that once enabled that Eurocentricism and still produces the infomercials of the sort we read in Al Jazeera for Zizek are the phantom memories of the time that "the West" had assured confidence and a sense of its own universalism and globality, or as Gramsci put it, "to a type of civilisation for whose coming he is working". But that globality is no more - people from every clime and continent are up and about claiming their own cosmopolitan worldliness and with it their innate ability to think beyond the confinements of that Eurocentricism, which to be sure is still entitled to its phantom pleasures of thinking itself the centre of the universe. The Gramscian superimposed "similar conditions" are now emerging in multiple cites of the liberated humanity. The world at large, and the Arab and Muslim world in particular, is going through world historic changes - these changes have produced thinkers, poets, artists, and public intellectuals at the centre of their moral and politcial imagination - all thinking and acting in terms at once domestic to their immediate geography and yet global in its consequences. Compared to those liberating tsunamis now turning the world upside down, cliche-ridden assumption about Europe and its increasingly provincialised philosophical pedigree is a tempest in the cup. Reduced to its own fair share of the humanity at large, and like all other continents and climes, Europe has much to teach the world, but now on a far more leveled and democratic playing field, where its philosophy is European philosophy not "Philosophy", its music European music not "Music", and no infomercial would be necessary to sell its public intellectuals as "Public Intellectuals". Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Among his most recent books is The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com
 
 

--
Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

[OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU]

Wonderful.

 Such a piece so dear to my heart requires I say something.

This article is similar to the conclusions I reached after my BA in English and Literature at the University of Benin.

Odun Balogun did teach us about Black/African American aesthetics in our class on literary theory, but the theory curriculum was largely Western.

That experience drove  me to do something different. It motivated me eventually to studying an African ideational system, Ifa, in terms of its use in studying non-African cultures, as demonstrated in my essay "Ifa Divination, Autobiographical Theory and the Letters and Selected Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh".

That vision has also influenced my work on Akan/Gyaman Adinkra and Benin Olokun graphic art, both of which engagements are evident only as blogs and websites at the moment and in the case of Adinkra, an encyclopaedia article, along with other essays on Benin spatial theory, for example, and ongoing work on Fulani and also Hindu-Indidian Sri Vidya epistemology, which I will be bringing out in various media, including books,  in my project on cosmology building.

If the larger world is to achieve the critical mass necessary to assert its own centrality in any field, including that of thought, there is a need for a number of factors to emerge :

There has to be a deliberate effort by a large number of thinkers, within and outside academia,  to conduct scholarship in  a manner that recognises the centrality of that larger world.

I should be able, for example, to place the thought and artistic work of thinkers and creators from these spheres at the centre of my work and speak to the world from that perspective, as I am doing in my current research and creative work on the Nigerian artists  Moyo Okediji and Victor Ekpuk, as evident with the website in process I am developing on my Okediji project  and my videos on Ekpuk-my projects are developed in terms of  a multi-media  framework- website, video, essays, and eventually, books- and the use of the fundamental  online and offline publishing platforms-social networks-Facebook, listserves and document and artistic archives, blogs and websites.

These thinkers need to centralise each other's work in their productions. I believe in a global cognitive reference field, but while thinking with Foucault, I should be able to think with Achebe on Igbo conceptions of pervasive dynamism as in his  "The Igbo World and its Art", with Ayi Kwei Armah on ethics as in his conversation between Densu and Damfo in The Healers, with Hampate Ba on terrestrial and cosmological principles as in Kaidara, with Mazisi Kunene on epistemology and cosmic process in the introduction to Anthem of the Decades, with Madhu Khana and Arji Mookerjee on Yantra hermeneutics and Tantraic hermenutics as in Yantra : The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity and Tantra, with Abhinavagupta on human embodiment of cosmic being, as in his Tantraloka,  and with writers who are not African, Asain or Australian Aborigines, for example, who do fantastic work on  cultural creativity emerging from those contexts, some of this research unreplicated in quality by the originators of these cultures,  such as Amanda Coulson and Jordan Fenton on South Eastern Nigeria Ekpe esoteric orders or its Nsibidi expressive system, or the unparalleled writings of  Susanne Wenger on the Orisa tradition, along with the art of her atelier, her art collaborative, with Mark Dyzckowski on Tantra, with Douglas Renfrew Brooks  on Hindu Sri Vidya cosmology, with Jeffrey Lidke on Sri Vidya epistemology, with Swami Kashman Joo and his allied thinkers on Kashmir Shaivism, to mention aspects of my own interests and  projects  as examples. 

Centring the larger world of creativity inspires immersion in it, to the same level that it has become traditional to immerse oneself in Western thought or that of scholars working within the Western academy.

Also, centring the larger creative universe will require that thinkers within this universe make the development of theoretical vision a personal mission. A great strength of the Western tradition and of classical traditions in other cultures is the proliferation of thinkers who take seriouskly the absolute necessity, in my view, for everyone to develop a personal philosophy in the Socratic spirit of the examined life. What we now see as the proliferation of Western thinkers and the power of Asian thinkers in the classical traditions, are the demonstration of people sitting down-both literally and figuratively-to think through fundamental questions, adapting   Anthony Appiah's summation of the meaning and process of modern (in my view, Western)  philosophy. 

These thinkers, from Socrates to Foucault etc, resolved to think and generate large scale interpretations of the world for themselves  and publish their conclusions. Along similar lines, I have recently been privileged to encounter the work of Emmanuel Anizoba, who writes from his village in the South East Nigeria and who distributes copies of his books for free. His summations in one of his books on solitude and human self confrontation in relation to meditation is one of the most moving I have ever read.

Another striking example is the effort at the University of Ife to develop an approach to sociology based on classical Yoruba thought.

Note  that the central issue is thinking things through, exploring and creating cognitive worlds  using whatever cognitive or expressive tools that one finds congenial. This has long been achieved at a critical mass by African, Asian and Australian Aborigine  artists, for example, the Soyinkas, the Onabrapkeyas, the Qadris, among others in various verbal, visual, performative, musical and filmic arts-here I reference both Nollywood and examples of African cinema like that of French speaking West Africa as well as Bollywood.

Say something in your own way. Seek out problems that move you and address them in any way that you consider appropriate  and justify your method in the spirit of methodological rigour but also of imaginative expansiveness and creativity.

There is also a need for the ready availability  of the support literature for this kind of expansion. Literature at various levels of sophistication and price range is very easy to get on Western civilisation and its thinkers but African civilisations, not Asian though, and  African thinkers seem to be still  significantly locked within the wall of the  attitude representative of a large segment of Western academic publishing to information- high prices and distribution strategies  that target an elite audience composed largely of the already converted, the academic audience composed of scholars and their students. 

How many books can I buy by and about Mudimbe at a price the average person would spend on a fast food meal? ? How many books by and about Foucault can I buy like that? How many between these two can I easily get second hand, am I likely to find at random in various kinds of bookshop at various prices? The same goes for African art as published in the West which is often available only in glossy, large scale  productions - beautiful, but not targeted at the average person, while for Western artists the choice ranges from children's Ladybird books where I first learnt about Van Gogh and Rembrandt to the sumptuous sophistication of the recent release of Van Gogh's illustrated letters in several volumes, selling at  some hundreds of pounds. 

My experience in England is that most intellectually  rich books books by  and about Africa and to some degree Asia are available largely as high end academic books, while the literature on the Western equivalent is available  in a broader spectrum. Meeting this challenge requires  collaborative effort between writers and publishers, , as shown, for example by the Oxford University Press initiative, Very Short Introductions which tries to reach a broad audience through scholarship by scholarly authorities, scholarship integrating  the most current insights, expressed in the individual voice of the writer, and priced at a relatively  basic level, although this initiative is also Western centred in trying to reach a West/Asia balance it seems to me, but  publish much more on individual Western thinkers, although Oxford UP has impressive  books in other categories,  on Asian thought. 

I dont know how relevant this is for Nigeria and Africa, but I also get the impression that ethnic posturing need to be toned down or eliminated to enable better flow of ideas between people who could help generate this global repositioning  of the larger universe within the world of knowledge. The recent Achebe conflicts have made visible the level of wall building that could be generated between people who experience  no other conflict except disagreement on  issues whose significance  arises from an ethnic centre. We need to move beyond placing such concerns at centre stage  stage and concentrate on larger issues. 

Its a long journey, but everyone, the larger universe and interested Western contributors,  needs to contribute , ideally making it a personal mission to write the larger creative world into points of reference, shaping it into  theoretical vantage points, into centres of cognitive integration, in the world of scholarship. 

Thanks

toyin