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Introductory and critical overview of African philosophical hermeneutics
African philosophical hermeneutics has emerged in response to the predicaments of post-colonial African societies. Its central premise is that practical responses have a lot to gain from interpreting people's experience of meaning and the disruption of it. But where does understanding originate from? And what are the possibilities and limitations of interpretation as support for practice?
Suspended in the tension between Africa's traumatic past and people's continuing quest for autonomy, African hermeneutics draws on old traditions, adopted ideas and creative reflection. This results in intense intellectual engagement with history and conflict, translation and human nature, epistemic domination and liberation.
This book explores the role of hermeneutics in African philosophy. By examining its leading thinkers, it offers stimulating perspectives for any reader grappling with interpretation, critique, pluralism, decolonization and politics - in Africa and elsewhere.
Contents
Preface. Approaching African hermeneutics
Chapter 1. Introduction: Hermeneutics as a trend in African philosophy
1. Hermeneutics: a provisional description
2. The place of hermeneutics in African philosophy
2.1. The place of hermeneutics in African philosophy: using Oruka as a point of departure
2.2. The place of hermeneutics in African philosophy: using Nkombe and Smet as a point of departure
2.3. Preliminary conclusions
3. Hermeneutics: an author-based approach
Chapter 2. On the threshold: from cultural philosophemes to African hermeneutics —Theophilus Okere
1. African philosophy: a historic-hermeneutic investigation of the conditions of its possibility
2. What is non-philosophy?
2.1. Culture from the view of ethnophilosophy and its critics
2.2. Culture as a non-philosophical component of European philosophy
3. What is philosophy?
3.1. The conditions of the possibility of philosophy
3.2. From the philosophical crossroads to the possibility of African philosophy
4. How should philosophy and non-philosophy be linked?
4.1. Working on philosophemes
4.2. Towards a traditionalist or a contextualist view of belonging to a culture?
5. Conclusion
Select annotated bibliography
Chapter 3. Interpretation as a resource for political resistance : Serequeberhan between generality and particularity
1. The source: general anthropological claims
2. Philosophy in general
3. All humans and all philosophy
4. African philosophy
4.1. Critique: what is to be avoided
4.2. Advocacy: what is to be pursued
5. Improper African philosophy: self-imposed negation of historicalness in Nkrumah and Senghor
5.1. Nkrumah: pathology of extroverted Euro-normativity
5.2. Senghor: pathology of introverted or internalised Euro-normativity
5.3. On the unintentional servants of European Enlightenment
6. A new start: from horizon to hermeneutic discourse
6.1. Horizon and vocation
6.2. According mediations their due: expanding and transcending the lived horizon
6.3. Tradition
6.4. Actuality and ideality: normativity and liberation
7. From horizon to action
7.1. Original violence with Césaire
7.2. "[Counter-]Violence is no choice" (but a matter of necessity)
7.3. Fusion of horizons and practices of freedom: with Fanon and Cabral
8. Conclusion
Select annotated bibliography
Chapter 4. Critique of African hermeneutic reason : interpretation triggered and oriented by praxis—Okolo Okonda
1. Orientation: praxis, hermeneutics, tradition
2. Praxis, crisis, development
2.1. Crisis
2.2. Development as "revolutionary praxis"?
3. Hermeneutics
3.1. "Every theory of reading presupposes a theory of text and vice versa"
3.2. "Every reading is oriented toward some kind of appropriation/re-taking [reprise]"
3.3. "Every reading and every appropriation is determined by a worldview of the subject who reads and appropriates [or re-takes]"
4. Tradition
4.1. Tradition as text
4.2. Tradition and the difficult balance between the "already there" and the "not yet"
4.3. What is co-extensive with tradition: worldview, ideology, identity
4.4. Provisional conclusion on tradition, worldviews, ideology, and identity
5. Critique of hermeneutic reason: shifting perspectives and complexity as a virtue
6. Ethnophilosophy: contra ... and pro
7. Orality
7.1. Proverbs
7.2. Conclusions on orality
8. Work, critique, and violence
9. Philosophy, singular and universal: the ambition of Okolo's book
10. Conclusion
Select annotated bibliography
Chapter 5. Implicit hermeneutics: origins, constitutions, projects
1. History versus essentialism as a resource for action in the present: Cheikh Anta Diop
1.1. From language, through history, to action
1.2. Aspects of a Diopian hermeneutics
2. Critical traditionalism and contemporary social problems: Sophie Oluwole
2.1. Orality as the core of African philosophy
2.2. Strengths and weaknesses of Oluwole's hermeneutics
3. How truth claims about Africa came to be: V. Y. Mudimbe
3.1. Making truth claims about Africa (and what this is a sign of)
3.2. The variety of Africanist discourses
3.3. Reconstructing invention—archaeology as hermeneutics
4. A hermeneutics of total defeat and the small deviations: Fabien Eboussi Boulaga
4.1. Orientation: philosophy by and for Muntu
4.2. Hermeneutics as a critical unmasking
4.3. Hermeneutics as interpretation of the conditions of self-liberation
4.4. Hermeneutics as transfunctionalisation and self-affirmation
4.5. Conclusion
5. Translation as making humanity together: Souleymane Bachir Diagne
5.1. Point of departure: connecting the foreign and the familiar
5.2. The translator as agent
5.3. Translatio as transfer: transplanting works of art and translatio studii
5.4. Particularity, universalism, and the ethics of translation
5.5. Conclusions and questions
6. Conclusion: a wide perspective on what hermeneutics can do
Select annotated bibliography
Chapter 6. Conclusion: hermeneutics as commitment
1. Hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology
1.1. Understanding, belonging, culture
1.2. Arts of interpretation
1.3. Philosophical hermeneutics
2. Negotiating plurality
2.1. Hermeneutics' two aversions and its founding conviction
2.2. Generality as supposition and the practical commitment of hermeneutics
2.3. Hermeneutic resources: an ethics of listening and diverse "procedures of the spirit"
2.4. Hermeneutic resources: critique and creativity
3. Between familiarity and strangeness
3.1. Familiarity and strangeness: the struggle for orientation
3.2. African philosophy as a compound of familiarity and strangeness
4. Hermeneutics and practice: liberation from what? What for? By whom?
4.1. Hermeneutics as rooted and participating in practice
4.2. Practice and power
4.3. The spectrum of practical engagement
4.4. Understanding the ambiguous practical profile of hermeneutics: ambition and self-restraint
5. Hermeneutics and ethics
6. Hermeneutics among the strategies for liberating the world
Notes
Index
