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1 Ordinary Language and African Philosophy
- Indiana University Press
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1 ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY One of the convictions underlying much of this book is that the systematic analysis of ordinary, everyday language usage in non-Western, particularly African, cultures can prove to be of fundamental philosophical value. The methodological inspiration for this kind of analysis derives, most obviously, from ordinary language philosophy as enunciated by anglophone philosophers during the mid–twentieth century. In my own case, how this inspiration came to be transferred to sub-Saharan West Africa is a story that perhaps deserves telling in some detail. In 1970 when I first arrived in Nigeria, of the six federal universities three had departments of philosophy (sometimes paired with religion and religious studies). The existent philosophy syllabi were for the most part explicitly articulated in the British analytic tradition. This was understandable in a country that until recently had been a British colony for roughly sixty years, where universities as components of a ‘modern’ educational system had been inaugurated under colonial auspices, and in an internationally academic discipline in which, apart from phenomenology, the anglophone analytic tradition was, even if beginning to ebb, still supreme. For African students the consequences of such a teaching program were not felicitous. De facto philosophy was presented as an enterprise that was one of the more exclusive domains of Western culture. Its topics and problems were therefore of non-African inspiration, even if another 2 | THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BEAUTIFUL message of the teaching program was that they were things which should have been and should be of interest and concern to all “rational” human beings, wherever they happened to be. Consequently the discipline was perceived and received by students as something that was culturally alien. It became just one more odd subject in which they had to pass examinations in order to obtain the “paper qualifications” that marked successful acquisition of a ‘modern’ education. Even more worrisome was the tacit implication, most obvious by the absence of African course content, that Africa’s indigenous cultural heritage was philosophically insigni ficant. In other words, there had been no philosophers or philosophy in precolonial Africa because its modest intellectual priorities had not encouraged a sufficient level of intellectual development. In fact, in some teaching programs the preferred pedagogical use of Africa’s supposed indigenous patterns of reasoning was to employ them as illustrations of how not to reason. Fortunately I had no disciplinary background in African studies. At the time I was a graduate student in the United States, I doubt that there was a mainstream philosophy department in which it would have been possible to obtain one. If I had such a background, it most probably would have been obtained via training in one of the social sciences (ethnography , anthropology), in which case I could have ended up a social scientist in philosopher’s clothes. So I use the word “fortunately” to acknowledge explicitly my initial professional incompetence for intercultural studies and to indicate how it happened that I had no choice but to be thrown back upon the methodological resources of my mother discipline. What it meant to behave in a rational manner, and to have an intellect that could reason in a rational manner, had long been issues of concern to Western philosophy. When I expressed an interest in reading comparative studies about African cultures, I was referred to a wide variety of primarily anthropological monographs and to comparative, analytically synoptic studies based upon such monographs (Abraham 1962; Banton 1966; Beattie 1966a; Evans-Pritchard 1937; Forde 1954; Jahn 1961; Mbiti 1970; Radin 1927; Tempels 1959; Turner 1967). From these I soon discovered that anthropology itself was anything but a unanimous discipline when it came to discussions of the African intellect and of rationality in the African context. It offered a diverse spectrum of views on these subjects, ranging from those who argued that African conceptual systems were best interpreted as genuinely rational attempts to explain, predict, and control human experience (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Horton 1967), to those who continued to defend a relatively ‘primitive’ view of the African mentality (Beattie 1966a). According to the latter, neither the rational nor the intellectual had reached a noteworthy level of development in such cultures. Their beliefs about the world were therefore formulated primarily on an [54.242.220.142] Project MUSE (2024-04-10 22:15 GMT) ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY | 3 emotive or symbolic (ritualistic, preverbal) basis—mythical stories or patently false causal explanations (even if devoutly...