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The Colonial Frame

From Hegel to Lévy-Bruhl the judgement reached beyond philosophy, to history and to logic. Hegel’s Philosophy of History set Africa outside history altogether: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Egypt “does not belong to the African Spirit”, and “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature”. The Americas were not yet anything of their own: “What has taken place in the New World up to the present time is only an echo of the Old World—the expression of a foreign Life; and as a Land of the Future, it has no interest for us here” (tr. Sibree). How African and Latin American thinkers answered is on Philosophy in Africa and Philosophy in Latin America.

The philosophy written in Arabic was claimed back for the Greeks. Ernest Renan, in his lecture L’Islamisme et la science at the Sorbonne in 1883, called it ce grand ensemble philosophique, que l’on a coutume d’appeler arabe, parce qu’il est écrit en arabe, mais qui est en réalité gréco-sassanide. Il serait plus exact de dire grec: this great philosophical whole, usually called Arab because it is written in Arabic, but which is in reality Graeco-Sasanian; it would be more exact to say Greek. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī’s reply is on The Modern Islamic World.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl gave the frame its term. In Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), the mental functions in “lower” societies, he called their mentality prélogique à aussi juste titre que mystique, prelogical with as much right as mystical, and explained the word: la mentalité des sociétés de type inférieur, que j’appelle prélogique, faute d’un nom meilleur … Elle n’est pas antilogique; elle n’est pas non plus alogique. En l’appelant prélogique, je veux seulement dire qu’elle ne s’astreint pas avant tout, comme notre pensée, à s’abstenir de la contradiction. Elle obéit d’abord à la loi de participation: the mentality of societies of the lower type, which I call prelogical for want of a better name, is not antilogical, nor is it alogical; in calling it prelogical I mean only that it does not bind itself above all, as our thought does, to abstain from contradiction; it obeys first the law of participation. In his notebooks, published posthumously in 1949, he moved away from the term; how far is reported differently, from a readiness to give up “prelogical” to a retraction.

The missionary Placide Tempels answered Lévy-Bruhl with Bantu Philosophy (La philosophie bantoue; Paris edition, Présence Africaine, 1949). As Paulin Hountondji reports it, in the English of his African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Tempels set out “to correct a certain image of the black man disseminated by Levy-Bruhl and his school”, and the book “is not addressed to Africans but to Europeans, and particularly to two categories of Europeans: colonials and missionaries”; its last chapter is “Bantu philosophy and our mission to civilize”. The word philosophie was the missionary’s. The debate it opened among African philosophers is on The ethnophilosophy debate.