Philosophy: Giving it Back its Center

Note: The Miami Institute’s forum on philosophy has been co-curated with Caribbean Philosophical Association President Hanétha Vété-Congolo and AICRE-Philosophy at University of California, Irvine. Continuing the forum, Hanétha Vété-Congolo questions the field’s focus on white European thinkers and its tendency to treat these individuals as particularly ‘great minds.’ Vété-Congolo argues in favor of including in the teaching of philosophy Caribbean and African thinkers and “teaching philosophy—rather than as a study of a great mind or minds—as a long-standing dialogue among interlocutors.” It is a way, Vété-Congolo underscores, “to re-member philosophy, giving it back all of its members, its integrity and purpose to work for the common good and what provides it with its raison d’être, that is, moun, simply because tout moun sé moun—all human persons are human persons because they are human persons.”

When the fate of multiple worlds became more irretrievably intertwined because of colonization, those who perpetrated the latter did not fail to make of philosophy a framing instrument for their enterprise. Suffices to capture, from the acts undertaken by Europe to colonize and enslave, the way the European paradigm built a perception of its environment and apperception within it on the premise of its philosophizing capability. The Cartesian affirmation, “I think, therefore I am” could have well been, “I philosophize, therefore I exist”.

Projecting itself as essentially from the domain of the (thinking) mind and the meta-physical activity that leads to produce thought, this European view set it as supreme and radically opposed to the representation it cast of the Other as essentially corporeal, a body catering for physical activity and making things. Of the two ontological characterizations they established, the African moun—the Creole word for “human person”—whom Europe enslaved was the one tasked by this paradigm to embody that reduction of the self of the Other to the (making) body. Thus, she or he is an insignificant body, rather black, destined to become a corpse that can be pulverized while the European body, white, is meant to transcend its carnal vessel through eternal minded existence. Suffices to seize how physical description, namely that of the body of those called nègre or “black animal,” that is the Africans, constituted the pillar of this Manichean identity inscription. Indeed, for one of the best representatives of European philosophy, Voltaire, the eyes, the nose, the lips, the ears, the hair of the so-called “black animal” as well as the “scope of their intelligence” set them apart prodigiously from other species of mankind. Nature endowed it with few thoughts and certainly an “imperfect reason.” However, having somewhat more ideas than the other animals of its height, the “black animal”—the African, that is—nevertheless was born, lives and dies like these said other animals do. In fact, its corporeal organs command its feeling and thinking faculty that also decrease and perish with it without having imprinted existential markers on the world during its existence. According to this logic then, the European’s thoughts and ideas, then symbolized by their philosophical production, are syllogistically meant to never die thereby testifying to everlasting power and supremacy on the part of the said European. It is therefore to be seized that the Voltairian rationality decrees that the African existence is anchored in materiality likely to disappear from the surface of the earth, and thus, bound to suffer what I would call here demenbrance, that is, the impossibility of being remembered by signs, corporeal or minded. Contrariwise, fixed in the power of their cerebral intellect that produces philosophy, as an existential sign, the European existence becomes celestial immateriality soaring over all things even after death. Death, therefore, does not subjugate the possibility for the European to be the beneficiary subject of remembrance. It is also in this philosophical supremacy posited and meant to create onto the mind an indelible and profound impression about existence and identity that the perpetrators of this paradigm intentioned an absolute epistemological reign discarding inclusion, justice and equity. This was no negligible scheme since what was at stake was existence, as the colonial and enslaving project also mobilized a certain outlook on human existence in that it was determined to define who could rightfully claim humanity and (through) human existence. Who is and who is not.

European philosophy tasked itself with this project of legislating on this definition; never forgetting to found its premises on what it saw as an insurmountable racial gap between the “bearded and blond-hair man,” otherwise called the “white man,” and the nègre—the black animal—supposed to descend from two irretrievably distinct branches, one—the bearded man’s— being superior to the other. More kin to racist ideology, this body of philosophical thoughts constituted an idea structure shaping the way the world and its inhabitants were to be seen for times to come. It certainly was one of the beds in which rested the acts of colonizing and enslaving moun. Consecration for one group and relegation if not erasure (given the demembrance logic) for the other is the order of the vision for the world according to this body of philosophical thoughts.

The entire European thought and philosophical value system rested on a twofold predicate. First, was the conviction that only reason that itself was a function of cognitive capabilities determined humanness and human worth. Second, that non-white body—the ultimate symbol of which was the “black animal” or the nègre—operated outside of objective reason and inside subjective and affective emotion, a paradigm that is the enemy of respectable, validating and controllable philosophical activity due to its anchorage in uncontrollable sensorial, organic sensibility.

The Other being anchored in infra-humanity and their particularity marked in an “imperfect reason,” “stupidity” and limited cognitive ability, it goes without saying that, whether philosophy is thought of like Nietzsche according to whom the task of the philosopher is to understand what the people of their time experience or like Descartes who thinks that philosophy is the mother of all sciences of which only three exist—medicine, mechanics and moral values—, as long as it concerns itself exclusively with the activity of the mind, the said Other is bound to be relegated if not squarely discarded as a-philosophical. There again, I cannot fail underlining the fact that the definition of “philosophy” itself as tied to the mind and the act of thinking, is defined according to European rationality.

It is this order of thought that is still perpetuated in many of the philosophy departments the present academic world counts. What one is to ultimately comprehend through this systematic practice, structure and perception is that there is no other body of valid critical thought than the European system that can suffer teaching.

Yet, for having spent the last twenty-five years studying it, I can say that it is precisely what was disparaged as “emotion” allied to reason that also brought enslaved Africans to produce critical thought and philosophize even amidst one of the most gruesome attacks against the human kind: enslavement. Emotion here is less an involuntary reflex triggered by uncontrolled agents than it is a sensorial intelligence, a catalyzing force and compelling sign indicating that these enslaved persons, these moun, were sane, coherent having the right reaction vis-à-vis their lived experience and capacity to discern and choose, among the myriad of alternatives, the ones that mattered. They certainly understood and drew on the notion of rationality.

I have to stress that, although I engage with it, my take is not at all an echo to the Senegalese Négritude poet and thinker, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s claim that reason is Hellenic while emotion is more a nègre matter. Saving moun – the human person – from the metaphysical or existential interment scheduled by the body of enslaving acts and thoughts of the enslaving system is at the core of the thinking action performed by these enslaved Africans and their offspring. The very notion of saving moun already signals the conditions of the emergence of this African-produced work-of-the-mind in the American plantation. As the African American philosopher Leonard Harris phrases it, they produced a “philosophy born of struggle.” In that body of thought, moun is the center even as, for these enslaved Africans, the center was falling. It remained the center just as the affirmation, “tout moun sé moun” the Creole phrase that means, “all human persons are human persons because they are human persons.” Not only did they act upon methodology and paradigms; but in addition, they did so impactfully upon the ideas, concepts and values per se predominantly distributed by the enslaving body of ideology. “Tout moun sé moun” founds the Caribbean tradition of thought as confirmed later by many others including the Haitian thinker, Anténor Firmin’s Of the Equality of Human Races, contending Gobineau’s Of the Inequality of Races.

The centralization of European thought today, that is, the fact of teaching, mostly or exclusively, thought produced by Europeans, is one of the ways through which the colonial project of relegation and obliteration is perfected. It is to continue to use philosophy as a humanicide instrument instead of a humanitarian one that assuages humanity’s wounds. It is to recognize that it is an avatar of Voltaire’s ideology.  It is to acquiesce that, indeed, philosophy is restrictively whiteness’s prerogative and affirming that the non-bearded and non-blond hair person carries an a-critical mind barring the production of philosophical thought. It is a truism to underline that, as educators, we have the power to promote or not, implicitly or explicitly, any thought, person or system in an impactful and long-lasting manner. Our power to mold our students’ vision and perception of the world and its diverse peoples also goes without saying. In any case, thanks to new approaches in neurosciences, we seize even better the psychic implications of some communicated knowledge especially when they are proffered in a systematic and unchecked way. This begs the question of the type of knowledge to set forth, and of course, that of ethics, of our responsibility and accountability.

The more the relegating structure remains intact, the more effective is the perennial diffusion of the subliminal discourse that thought and reason do not extend beyond the geographical boundaries of Europe or whiteness.

Teaching Voltaire, to take just this example, without the ethical and deontological balancing point consisting of duly, significantly, meaningfully, responsibly and seriously shedding light on the crude incoherence and racist paradigm of his thought system, amounts to promoting about him a perception holding him in the permanence of greatness. Regardless of the mores of his times, Voltaire was not a great thinker. If greatness is what goes beyond the ordinary, then indeed, he was not great. He versed into the ordinary activity ordinarily done during his times: buying and selling moun, deporting and enslaving them for monetary profit. If, from the moral and intellectual perspective, greatness refers to what is noble and elevated, then per his practice of enslavement, Voltaire was far from being great. Nothing “great” can spring out of anyone or anything such as systems, attacking the integrity of moun, human kind and its humanity.

As a matter of fact, Voltaire was a philosopher and an enslaver. One of his activities consisted indeed in producing philosophical thoughts and the other in bankrolling slave ships—le Congo—to the shores of Africa with the explicit goal of purchasing moun for enslavement in the American colonies for his individual profit. This may have been the practice of the days, but in his capacity as a philosopher, Voltaire had the pretention to speak on behalf of freedom and human kind. Both components of his identity—philosopher and enslaver—stood in solidarity with each other, one feeding the other since Voltaire mobilized his thinking capacity to justify enslavement and produced racist ideology sustaining the colonial and enslaving enterprise.

Moreover, teaching Voltaire today to moun whose ancestors he goes at great length humaniciding without providing countervailing points is an epistemological crime against the humanity of the said moun. Although I could cite many of the numerous illustrations I could draw from my education within the French system, I dwell on the example of Voltaire here because it is one of the most eloquent illustrations of the aporia displayed by European philosophers of his time reflected in the educative structure. I, the child of Africans deported and enslaved in America, a region that still suffers from the multifaceted aftermaths of this aspect of its history, was taught Voltaire at school with no countervailing point and was made to believe in him, to see him as a model for humanist thought and action. This educative system—the French one—selected one sole dimension of the philosopher’s constituents to erect him in students’ mind, implicitly and explicitly, as effectively upstanding while disregarding intellectual and philosophical propositions made by other groups that also long have considered the human question poignantly. Yet, there is great value in teaching philosophy—rather than as a study of a great mind or minds—as a long-standing dialogue among interlocutors. In this respect, the contemporary Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, reminds us that all cultures, including in predominantly oral societies, engage with their traditions through the means of criticism.

The moral, epistemic and intellectual harm is elevated. It took me years of dense work, practically in isolation, and intellectual growth to grasp the two intellectual scams: Voltaires’ own as a philosopher of freedom and the one perpetrated against me by the educational system, which through teaching his thought with no real critique of his entire facts and his severe defaming of the Other, ended up centering him and anchoring him in the mind of students such as myself, as undoubtedly humanist and therefore, a “great thinker.” This plight of individuals—again, such as myself— enduring this schema, which consists in delving themselves into intense work to attain redress for epistemological injustice, is also shared by the community. For instance, in the early years of the twentieth century, members of the Haitian school of Indigenism among whom Jean-Price Mars was a part, had to work relentlessly to unearth the discarded contribution of their African ancestors to the thought, ideas, cultural practices and knowledge systems of Haiti and the Caribbean generally.

The consequences of this established education paradigm are not manifested solely in the quantity of years, the time, the mental energy, moral and emotional investment stolen from any given person or group for this strenuous extra work to arrive to clarity and decolonized knowledge. They are also inscribed in the way this paradigm deeply inlays the relegating epistemological order to generalize fixed perceptions about people or cultural groups. In 2015, I was sitting on the Curriculum Implementation Committee of my Liberal Arts College to which I was submitting a new course proposal: “Aesthetics in Africa and Europe.” Heavily relying on philosophy, this course examines (thought) principles employed in some West and Central African countries, France and the French Caribbean to produce art. To answer questions the committee members were asking of me, I used the phrases “African philosophy” and “Caribbean philosophy” and articulated a description emphasizing that, in fact, the primary goal of the course was to study the way enslaved Africans and their offspring in the Caribbean reacted to and contradicted some of the European principles of aesthetics that deemed them loathsome to elaborate their own concepts and create art, which is a philosophical statement on the choices they made to independently posit their existence and its modes in the so called New World. Many of the faculty members of the committee were from the sciences and one of the two undergraduate student representatives was a philosophy major. I was pressed with questions and the discussion largely revolved around the ideas of African and Caribbean philosophy until it ended on the philosophy student’s statement affirming that: “Philosophy is, by definition, analytic.” I will not revert to the question of definition and purpose of philosophy here. Rather, I simply want to point out the way epistemic rigidity closes off expansion and inclusion, and relatedly, the ways these notions of African and Caribbean philosophies are invalidated in the process. Of course, this did not prevent my students to engage actively with questions of human existence and art from an African and Caribbean perspective and with thought produced by Caribbean and African thinkers such as Anténor Firmin, Jean Price Mars, Paulette Nardal, Léon Gontran Damas, Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Suzanne Césaire, Cheick Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Frankétienne, Alexis Kagame, Léopold Sedar Senghor, V.Y Mudimbe, Gyekye Kwame, Jean-Godefroy Bidima or Théophile Obenga.

Teaching these philosophical traditions precisely as philosophical traditions—as key figures and schools of thought in philosophy—can help us to stop betraying philosophy, to stop mutilating it by expelling its center—moun. It can only amount to honoring the world’s and humanity’s wholeness and certainly what Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant calls Diversality. It is perhaps even more a way to re-member philosophy, giving it back all of its members, its integrity and purpose to work for the common good and what provides it with its raison d’être, that is, moun, simply because tout moun sé moun—all human persons are human persons because they are human persons.

-Hanétha Vété-Congolo

Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, Maine; Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures; and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and African critical thought, philosophy, literature, culture and orality. Very interdisciplinary and comparative, her works pays particular attention to discourses by women and about women of the Caribbean and, West and Central Africa. She is author of Nous sommes Martiniquaises. Pawòl en bouches de femmes châtaignes : Une pensée existentialiste noire sur la question des femmes (2020), L’interoralité caribéenne: le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne) (2016, 2nd ed), and editor of Le conte d’hier, aujourd’hui : Oralité et modernité (2014), Léon-Gontran Damas : Une Négritude entière (2015) and, The Caribbean Oral Tradition (2016). Her poetry collections, Avoir et Être : Ce que j’Ai, ce que je Suis and Mon parler de Guinée were respectively published with Le chasseur Abstrait in 2009 and L’Harmattan [coll. Poètes des cinq continents] in 2015. Her unpublished collection of poetry Womb of a Woman was Shortlisted for the 2015 Small Axe Literary Competition.