‘Socrates’ By The Thousands?

Résumé 0

[This text is the transcription of Paulin J. Hountondji’s paper for the “‘Actualité’ of African Philosophy” symposium, held at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès and Sciences Po Paris from 15 to 18 January 2024. Here is the abstract he gave for the symposium programme.] This paper is divided into two parts: the first deals with the notion of text and textuality, a notion that surprised many people in the early 1970s when someone said: “I call African philosophy a set of texts”. We will explain the circumstances that made feasible this change in perspective, which made it possible to see, behind what we used to call African philosophy, i.e. the collective system of thought of Africans, the very text that produced this fiction of collective thought, by henceforth reserving for this text, and for other texts of the same level, the appellation “African philosophy”. The second section will examine the status of the oral text, or more precisely, of a certain category of oral texts produced by “wise men”, connoisseurs who are both guardians of tradition and authors, to varying degrees, of more personal thought: Ogotemmêli among the Dogon of the 1940s in present-day Mali, the soothsayer Guèdègbé in the court of the king of Abomey in the 19th century, the storyteller Bâmoro from Kong in the contemporary republic of Côte d’Ivoire, the Muslim preachers of post-colonial Kenya, all illiterate thinkers who have nothing to envy of Socrates, and whose only chance, compared to the tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of thinkers of the same level, is to have been brought into contact with scribes capable of transcribing their thoughts: Marcel Griaule, Bernard Maupoil, Yacouba Konaté, Kai Kresse respectively, just as Socrates was lucky enough to count among his disciples a man with a passion for writing: Plato. We will then examine the role of transcription and the relationship between writing and orality in the development of living thought.