Comparative philosophy is misleading if taken to be the evaluation of two or more parallel discourses, each self-generated and self-contained. Instead, critique is robustly historical and geographic when it traces the emergence, constitution, entanglement, and articulation of the intellectual formations it takes as its objects of inquiry.

Toni Morrison’s magnificent work, Playing in the Dark, brilliantly illumines the trajectories such a project may take. Morrison has all but made it impossible for one to engage with any serious study of “Great American novelists” such as Poe, Melville, and Hemingway without accounting for the deep Africanist presence — “a real or fabricated Africanist presence … crucial to [American writers’] sense of Americanness” — that precisely determines the formal structures in these novels.

In the same vein, we ought not be able to read Kant, or Hume or Mill without registering the deep and persistent “Africanist presence” in these texts – even when, especially when, such a presence is furiously disavowed. “Africa” is lodged in the deepest interstices of North Atlantic, Asian, Latin-American, Middle Eastern discourses, and, of course, in turn persistently and variously registers their presence.

(Excerpted from Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life)

More from Bernard Williams:

Paul Grice use to say that we “should treat great and dead philosophers as we treat great and living philosophers, as having something to say to us.” That is fine, so long as it is not assumed that what the dead have to say to us is much the same as what the living have to say to us. Unfortunately, this is probably what was being assumed by those who, in the heyday of confidence in what was being called the “analytic history of philosophy,” encouraged us to read something written by Plato “as though it had come out in Mind last month” – an idea which, if it means anything at all, means something that destroys the main philosophical point of reading Plato at all.
(Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”)

The inimitable Bernard Williams:

A question that intrigues me and to which I do not know the answer is the relation between a scientistic view of philosophy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the well-known and highly typical style of many texts in analytic philosophy which seeks precision by total mind control, through issuing continuous and rigid interpretive directions. In a way that will be familiar to any reader of analytic philosophy, and is only too familiar to all of us who perpetrate it, this style tries to remove in advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or to the clinically literal-minded. This activity itself is often rather mournfully equated with the boasted clarity and rigor of analytic philosophy…..

There is no doubt more than one force that tends to encourage this style. One is the teaching of philosophy by eristic argument, which tends to implant in philosophers an intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their most impressive teachers and their most competitive colleagues, which guides their writing by means of constant anticipations of guilt and shame. Another is the requirements of the PhD as an academic exercise, which involves the production of a quite peculiar text, which can be too easily mistaken for a book. There are demands of academic promotion, which can encourage one to make as many published pages as possible out of whatever modest idea one may have.

Now none of these influences is necessarily connected with a scientistic view of philosophy, and many people who go in for this style would certainly and correctly reject any suggestion that they had that view. Indeed, an obvious example of this is a philosopher who perhaps did more than anyone else to encourage this style, G. E. Moore. However, for all that, I do not think that we should reject too quickly the thought that, when scientism is around, this style can be co-opted in the scientistic spirit. It can serve as a mimicry of scrupulous scientific procedures. People can perhaps persuade themselves that if they fuss around enough with qualification and counter-examples, they are conducting the philosophical equivalent of a biochemical protocol.
(Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”)

Contemporary African philosophy has long left behind the cleavage that pitted professional philosophers (that is, those who identified strongly with the disciplinary form it has historically taken in the North Atlantic world) against ethnophilosophers (that is, those who were keen to recuperate the worldviews of precolonial epistemes). This opposition has now been abandoned in favor of the conceptual analysis of key metaphysical, epistemic, or ethical terms that make up the linguistic worldviews of various communal or ethnic groups. Thus, for example, Kwasi Wiredu has analyzed conceptions of the person among the Akan; Dismas Masolo has engaged with Luo notions of time; and Sophie Oluwole has written on Yoruba accounts of rationality. The limning out of the conceptual contours of African languages constitutes a rapprochement of sorts between professional philosophy and ethnophilosophy. If conceptual analysis draws from one of the mainstays of analytic philosophy – namely, ordinary language philosophy –, an attentiveness to the semantic and lexical content of African languages and groups engages with knowledges that were previously thought to be of interest only to ethnophilosophers.

If these developments have come with undoubted gains, they have also wrought distinct losses. For one, conceptual analysis provides a thin account of social reality. What it fails to do is proffer a thick account of the social ontology – histories, structures, contexts, power/ideology, relationships, bodies, habitus – that constitutes and is turn constituted by language. Such a social ontology would have revealed the embeddedness of social groups in history and the entanglement of particular languages in larger webs of structure and meaning.

Conceptual ethno-analysis may thus be misleading in at least two ways. First, it provides a far more singular and absolutist account of meaning than is warranted by the always contested, shifting terrain within which language is used and deployed. The debate between Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye on the Akan concept of the “person” is strikingly revealing of this contestation. But second, conceptual ethno-analysis – insofar as it claims to proffer an account of how certain concepts are understood within particular ethnic groups – may reify these ethnic groups; that is, it may fail to account for their historical, entangled, and often radically protean figurations.

The upshot is that what is often hailed as a methodological maneuver to decolonize African knowledges may end up inventing a deeply reactionary vision of the African future.

Some years ago, I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) workshop on grant writing. The moderator of the workshop asked me what my project was about, and as I started to reply, “My project is on conceptions of the good life in African philosophy…,” he interjected: “Well, Africa is such a big continent. We can’t really speak of African philosophy for such a diverse continent, can we?”

I was sure that the moderator couldn’t possibly have read a single book on African philosophy from cover to cover, so I got to thinking why that response had come so easily, so confidently to his tongue. To put it differently: what does the discovery by a U.S. academic that Africa is not a country say about his views of African philosophy?

Had I said, “My project is on conceptions of the good life in Western philosophy…” I’m quite sure his immediate response wouldn’t have been, “Well, ‘the West’ is such a huge region. We can’t really speak of Western philosophy for such a diverse region, can we?” And yet such a response would have been just as fitting. So why not? Why wasn’t such a response available to him?

Because for this academic — and many others in the United States — “African philosophy” names the doxa of various African “tribes” or “nationalities.” Unlike “Western philosophy,” which he takes to be a distinctive discourse responsive to a discrete set of texts, “African philosophy” is reduced to the identitarian emanations of African “tribal” groups.

Analytic philosophy’s conceit is that it is inherently and necessarily meta-philosophy. It may be instructive to examine the rhetorical ruses by which the field immures itself from self-examination: the assemblage of a canon of hierophants strung together by a theogonic historiography; an idealist epistemology motivated by a will to purity; and an intellectual habitus and style that constructs loutish belligerence as truth-seeking.

Analytic philosophy’s self-conception is conjured from a myth of origin that plots “real philosophy” as a patrilineal succession of fathers — from Plato to Parfit. It isn’t a coincidence that it can conveniently fold this narrative into a curriculum, a syllabus, and a bibliography. This myth of origin also functions to render history closed. If you want one explanation for analytic philosophy’s notorious ahistoricism, look to the myth it has substituted for history. In place of history (or even of historical metaphysics), analytic philosophy is deeply cathected in what I shall call – sincerely, for lack of any better term – a conceptual/logological metaphysics.

By stipulating that introspective psychology is the irreducible starting point of inquiry, analytic philosophy at once legitimates its “epistemology first” doctrine and at the same time declares itself foundational to the disciplines. Judging itself privileged to its intuitions, fantastical thought experiments, and a bleached symbolic mathematical logic, it takes pride in being one of the sciences – or even, to the bemusement of scientists, the first of the sciences – while announcing its contempt for the critical humanities and the critical social sciences.

The desire for and the performance of genius is the jouissance of analytic philosophy. On the one hand, this entails the cultivation of disciples, fanzine academic journals, hero-worshippers, and sycophants. But on the other hand, it also normalizes a brutal hazing of graduate students, a ruthless reputation economy bolstered by cargo cult rankings, and a rebarbative, slashing interactive style.

Philosophy’s imperial claim to thought as such, it should never be forgotten, is a profoundly modern achievement. Its proprietorship of thought has been accomplished in part by designating the “philosopher” as an honorific for any thinker of repute. If we are to refuse philosophy’s sleight of hand in making itself coterminous with all forms of speculative thought, we could begin by listening whenever a thinker spurns the philosophical laurel. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, identified herself as an author (as opposed to a philosopher). Her interpreters have often waved away her refusal of the philosophical mantle as nothing more than mistaken modesty and have vociferously fought for her inclusion in the canon of Proper Philosophical Names. But what if philosophy is not automatically taken to be the only possible sign for thought as such? Albert Camus also famously insisted he wasn’t a philosopher, arguing that he “did not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system.” Camus, in his notebooks, identified himself as an artist rather than a philosopher, writing by way of explanation that he thought “according to words and not according to ideas.” Even if we are now inclined to trouble Camus’s opposition of words to ideas, his designation of philosophy as a specific discourse – one moreover, that has historically made a cult of reason and fetishized the idea over and against language – ought to be taken seriously. Hannah Arendt, for her part, was quick to point out that her work was in “political theory,” not philosophy. Few modern thinkers, of course, have offered as sustained a critique of philosophy’s parochialism as the Caribbean polymath, Sylvia Wynter. Rejecting philosophy as altogether too parochial, Wynter instead conceived of what she was engaged in as contribution to “thought.”

A refusal of philosophy, as Wynter’s thought brilliantly demonstrates, thus cuts deeper than present efforts to provincialize and periodize it. It also demonstrates that speculative thought transgresses the outer limits imposed on it by philosophy.