Souleymane Bachir Diagne is arguably the leading philosopher and intellectual to have emerged from Senegal since Cheikh Anta Diop. He has been named by Le Nouvel observateur as one of the 50 thinkers of our time.
He took his PhD in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1988 and his field of research includes Boolean algebra of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. He is a professor at New York’s Columbia University and the author of many award-winning books including Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018). In this interview with Nerina Finetto, founder of Women Forum – Women in Science, Professor Diagne talks about the importance of philosophy in creating a better world. Excerpts:
Nerina Finetto: Who is Souleymane Bachir Diagne?
Souleymane Bachir Diagne: I’m a Senegalese philosopher. I’ve taught for 20 years in Senegal and France, and in 2002, I crossed the Atlantic and went to the US, where I taught philosophy, first at Northwestern University in Chicago, and then in New York, where I teach Philosophy and Francophone Studies at Columbia University.
How did you get into philosophy?
When I finished high school and first travelled to France to study I had offers to study engineering but I decided for philosophy.
You had to choose between two completely different paths. What is the relationship between science and philosophy?
In fact, I do not separate them. Let me give you an example, a precise example of my own work. I started working in the field of logic, history of logic and mathematical logic. The author I worked on, George Boole, the British logician and mathematician, actually invented our binary system, the 0 and 1 that we use in the language of our computers. Something that people do not know is that his project was philosophical in the first place; he wanted to make Aristotelian logic more efficient by using the language of Algebra, and in so doing, he created the scientific object that would be called the Algebra of Boole and that is what we are using in our computers. So this interaction between science and philosophy is very important. This is why I believe that the humanities and the so-called exact sciences should never be separated. After all, it is one human mind which needs, at once, scientific procedures and artistic and humanistic values, and these should be together.
What does it mean, being a philosopher in the 21st century?
It’s complicated. What does it mean to be a philosopher? Well, let me answer that question by letting you know what my experience was, and I said I was always between science and philosophy, mathematics and philosophy… The first two books that I published were both in the field of algebra and logic. To be a philosopher may mean to be a philosopher of science, a historian of science, which was what I was. And then I went back to Senegal to teach philosophy and I developed in the Department of Philosophy, a strong curriculum in history, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. But you cannot be a philosopher in the same way you are a natural scientist or a physicist, et cetera. You have to pay attention to what is going on. Your thinking is also one way of intervening; you intervene in the public square, in some respects, and the debates going on around you find an echo in your thinking… The 90s had been years of transition towards democracy, and so the thinking was about African democracies, what does it mean to make these countries democratic, what kind of institutions were to be designed, so this was a very exciting time for someone to think philosophically about the problems facing Africa. Another aspect was also the question of religion. I went back home in the early 1980s, and this was the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, and political Islam as we know it now was very much on the scene, was very much on our screens and our newspapers and so and so forth, and Senegal is a Muslim country, so that was an aspect of the debate as well. Where’s the intellectual and spiritual tradition of Islam, which is not known and of which philosophy is an important part? So I decided, also, in addition to my more technical teaching in philosophy of mathematics, to teach the history of philosophy in the Islam world, and to intervene in some respect on the debate surrounding Islam today. For me, this is what it means to be a philosopher. Not just choose a path, a specialty and work in that specialty narrowly defined, but being ready to go in different ways, to change and to adapt, and take part in discussions about what is going on around you.
Religion and philosophy are considered by many people to be opposite ways of seeing life. Is there a contradiction?
Well, sure, one could say, defining things in these broad brushes, that on the one hand religion is really about faith, and even blind faith. You have to believe in something, you have to believe without evidence, you have to believe in things that you cannot see, that you cannot touch, that are not for your sensible grasping or even for your human understanding, on the one hand. And then you have philosophy, which is based on reason, rationalism, and proof and evidence. So it would be simple to just oppose the two and say that religion is one thing and philosophy is a very different thing. But if you look at the history of religions, you can see how from within religion, there is a need to philosophise. That was the birth of Islamic philosophy, for example. You cannot just decide that everything has been said once and for all by a revealed text. So you can never be in the situation where you say: ‘This ends philosophical questioning and I have the answers now’. You have to build your answers, keep them open, understand how open they are and how open they remain, because it is really, truly, your own human duty to examine. One important Muslim philosopher said ‘he who does not doubt, does not examine, and he who does not examine, doesn’t believe’. This is probably the best single sentence to explain why philosophy is necessary to religion itself and how the connection between the two is really an internal relationship and not an external relationship between two very different things.
You mentioned that as a philosopher, you have to take part in the discussions that take place in the public sphere. Right now, religion is in focus, and not always in a positive way. How do your books participate in the general discussion?
We live in times where, paradoxically, religion is so present in our lives. I mean, if we open our television sets, we see religion everywhere, and many terrible, violent, unbelievable things being done in the name of religion, and at the same time, we are so ignorant about religions in general, because years and years of so-called secularism has made religion something that is not known anymore.
There’s an ignorance of religion… But what it means, also, in particular for Islam, which is probably the religion nowadays associated with violence and everything. It is a terrible thing, and people need to be reminded that this religion was not born yesterday, and it is the religion of one-and-a-half billion people, and it is a spiritual and an intellectual tradition. So there is a need to make that tradition known, primarily for younger Muslims. This is what led me to teach the tradition of philosophy in Islam, and write a book. That book precisely reminds people of this intellectual and spiritual tradition that we call Islam, and it is, de facto, a kind of intervention in the public square to, again, make Islam known primarily to Muslims themselves.
And your books somehow changed the narrative about the history of philosophy, right?
Absolutely. It is important for philosophy, for the discipline of philosophy in general, to sort of decolonise itself, as I would call it, because philosophy has been constructed as a uniquely European phenomenon, and this has happened very recently, actually. Traditionally, historically, philosophers in Greece or in Europe before the contemporary modern times never really thought of themselves as being the unique philosophers that humanity has ever seen; this is something that happened almost around the beginning of colonialism, that Europe defined itself as the heir of Greek philosophy and the continent of philosophy par excellence, and decided that philosophy was really the defining feature of Europe, so African philosophy could not exist, that philosophy could not exist anywhere else outside Europe. So this changed, because the history of philosophy is just not supporting such an idea if you look at who is the heir of Greeks. Many people have been the heirs of the Greeks; Greek philosophy was appropriated by the Islamic world, so you have a tradition of philosophy in Islam that we do not know; this is something that I decided to teach, to let my own students know, because we were a department of philosophy in a Muslim country and we needed to know about that tradition as well, and I mean, human beings are naturally inclined towards philosophy, because human beings, by definition, know that they are mortal, they bury their dead, they look up to the sky, and they ask themselves about the destination of humanity, what it means to be human, what it is be born, what it means to die, and so on and so forth. So philosophical thinking and philosophical wisdom exist everywhere. We have to think about that and reconstruct the history of philosophy in such a way that it ceases to be this uniquely Western history of thought. That is a very important aspect of my work.
What is the most important lesson that your students have to learn?
You know, to just give you my experience, among the class that I teach in my university, Columbia, I have one class on history of philosophy in the Islamic world, where I introduce my students to classical Islamic philosophy, from 9th century to 13th century, and then also modern questions and so on. I also teach a class that I call African Literature in Philosophy, where I look at what is being written in Africa and what are the problems being debated by African intellectuals and philosophers, and I also teach, of course, general history of philosophy and philosophy of logic, as I’ve always done. And when my students have the feeling that they are more of what Islam is, or that they are more aware of Africa in terms of the intellectual production of the continent – Africa not just being a subject of conversation associated with diseases, problems, epidemics and so on and so forth, but what are Africans thinking and writing now, what have they been thinking and also writing – it is not known that, for example, you have a long tradition of written edition in Africa; Africa is generally associated with orality, and people are now discovering all the manuscripts in Timbuktu, for example, that this is not true. And when they become aware of that, when they change their mind about what they thought, or what they thought they knew about the topics that I’m teaching, I think that I have done my job as an educator.
What is life about?
For me, life is about love; in other words, the force of life. I believe in the force of life. If I have to define myself in terms of my philosophy, I would say that I am very much a “vitalist”, in the sense that I believe in the force of life, and I think that the force of life is the same as the force of love; that this world has been created out of love as an open-ended always emerging cosmology; that this world is something that human beings have to invent and reinvent all the time, and that the energy they use, the force they use for that, which is the force of life, is the same as the force of love. So, for me, that is the sort of cosmic significance of love, it is also the personal significance of love. It is because the world itself is a creation of love, and that its movement forward is the movement of love, that our individual lives are always about love.
Thank you so much for this conversation. Bye and ciao.
