A Short History of African Philosophy

3. Rationality as Culturally Universal

The debate about the nature of the African intellect marked a kind of watershed in the history of Anglophone African philosophy. It incited the scholarly momentum, the motivation, that led to a coalescing of philosophical discussions, debates, and endeavors in Africa that would result in an autochthonous, independently minded analytic tradition. Many philosophers in the African context felt that religious studies and anthropology were exceeding their disciplinary limits if and when they claimed the right to de¤ne “rationality” in the African cultural context. “Rationality,” as both concept and capacity, constitutes part of the core of philosophy as a discipline, and it was certainly not the case that scholars in these other two disciplines were dependably philosophically literate. In a sense, then, African philosophers were reclaiming their own territory when by both deed and word they reasserted the prerogative of their discipline to de¤ne the “rational” in any culture. The most frequently footnoted critique of Horton’s essay by an African philosopher is Kwasi Wiredu’s “How Not to Compare African Traditional Thought with Western Thought” (1976f). In it Wiredu implies, most importantly , that Horton’s basis for comparison between Africa and the West is problematic. For example, one fundamental issue on which he challenges Horton is the legitimacy of comparing (African) religion with (Western) science, particularly in terms of their respective objectivity—the importance attached to criticism, veri¤cation, falsi¤cation, and the revision of theories designed to explain, predict, or control human experience. Wiredu and others argue that a more realistic basis for comparison would be to contrast the role(s) and evidential and argumentative bases for religion between the two cultures.14 19 3 Rationality as Culturally Universal 14. See, for example, Bodunrin 1975a; Emmet 1972; Pratt 1972; and Skorupski 1967. Wiredu continues by pointing out that science constitutes a very specialized enterprise. Its methods and theories are not things with which the ordinary man in the street is conversant. Yet the majority of African beliefs (which Horton had to reclassify as “theories” in order to justify the basis for his comparison) that Horton chose to compare with scienti¤c theories are things with which the ordinary African is conversant. And it is unrealistic to expect such commonplace beliefs to be the product of or be subject to the rigors of scienti¤c testing and veri¤cation. If anything, the species of African beliefs Horton discussed are of a universal ethnographic order that, Wiredu suggests, is better regarded as “folk” philosophy. These are the sorts of things that anthropologists refer to as the customs and mores of a society. Western culture certainly has its own customs and mores, and these would provide a more suitable basis for a comparison of this type. As generalized, this remains the single, most important, methodological legacy of Wiredu’s contention—that a prerequisite for judicious comparison (s) between African and Western cultures is that the materials selected share suf¤cient attributes in common to constitute a legitimate basis for comparison. In addition to this methodological critique, Wiredu has more recently challenged Horton’s contention that African worldviews generally employ personal rather than impersonal models of causal explanation because of the greater senses of order and security supposedly attributed to the human community compared to the wilderness synonymous with nature, or “the bush” (Wiredu 1995k). He does so on the basis of a cosmological verse from Akan oral literature in which the Creator is said to have created the following in sequence: (1) Order; (2) Knowledge; (3) Death, and so forth, the point being that the Order created was not limited to the domain of the human community but applied to all aspects of creation—animate and inanimate, and that this Order includes a fundamental causal determinism . Another critique of Horton’s position that seems to have had lasting consequences is my “Robin Horton on Critical Philosophy and Traditional Thought” (Hallen 1977). In this essay, I argue that Horton’s assessment of African systems of thought as “closed,” as resistant to change or revision on the basis of critical or re®ective thought, is exaggerated. The article provides ¤rsthand evidence of individuals within Yoruba society who do seem to regard fundamental beliefs with a degree of re®ective objectivity.15 Other published articles contributed to the debate concerning the nature of African “traditional” thought.16 But what becomes of importance A Short History of African Philosophy 20 15. Horton makes important revisions to his original position in Horton 1982. I published...