AFRICAN ART AS PHILOSOPHY: SENGHOR, BERGSON, AND THE IDEA OF NEGRITUDE.

(LÉOPOLD SÉDAR SENGHOR: L’ART AFRICAIN COMME PHILOSOPHIE.) By Souleymane

Bachir Diagne. Translated by Chike Jeffers. Calcutta, India: Seagull Books, 2011. Pp. vii, 210;
bibliography. $25.00 cloth.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne has done generously by Léopold Sédar Senghor. Diagne’s book stands apart,
say, from Janet Vaillant’s Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Harvard
University Press, 1990) and from Wole Soyinka’s two essays “L.S. Senghor and Negritude: J’accuse,
mais, je pardonne” and “Negritude and the Gods of Equity” in his The Burden of Memory, The Muse of
Forgiveness (Oxford University Press, 1999). Vaillant’s book is an extensive biography of Senghor as the
multifaceted yet complicated individual, Senegalese born and French educated, who came to prominence
as an exceptional and accomplished poet, as a philosophical advocate for negritude, and as the political
leader of Senegal’s successful “bloodless revolution” for political independence and eventually its first
president. Soyinka’s essays are culturally and politically critical analyses of Senghor’s poetic sensibilities,
intellectually consistent humanism, and priestly timbre of conciliation. Senghor’s qualities all contribute
problematically to what Soyinka calls the current “creed of forgiveness,” tendered to European humanity,
past and present, for depredations and injustices long wrought on the African continent, in order to gain a
closure that mitigates rather than bolsters justice.

In contrast, Diagne’s book focuses specifically on the details of Senghor as philosophically proffering the
grounds for the notion of negritude, grounds that initially belong to a larger philosophical network, as we
shall see. Still his book does not preclude, in a general way, the issues raised by Vaillant and Soyinka in
their works. Rather it works, say, from the “inside” or the philosophical premises of negritude to
biographical and political implications thereof and not from Senghor’s biographical and political
experiences giving rise and resonance to the sentiments for, or even against, negritude. (A comparable
book to Diagne’s would be Donna V. Jones’ The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude,
Vitalism, and Modernity – Columbia University Press, 2010.) Consequently readers of Diagne’s book
may have an easier time with the penultimate and ultimate chapters, “Convergence” and “Conclusion:
Mixture” respectively, than with the introduction and the first three chapters of it. But Diagne’s first three
“philosophical” chapters are intended to inform the latter two.

The first chapter, “Exile,” examines the well-known prelude, “Black Orpheus,” written by Jean-Paul
Sartre, to Senghor’s edited Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache: de langue française,
introducing “negritude” as an aesthetic literary manifesto akin to Alain Locke’s earlier edited volume The
New Negro. Many well known African intellectuals generally believed that Sartre’s essay would give
both the volume and “negritude” the exposure and liftoff they sought. But they and others thereafter did
not accept the political characterization (being free to be black situated in a racist world) or direction (an
“anti-racist racism” to be negated when incorporated into a broader proletarian struggle) Sartre bestowed
on “negritude.” They too sought a cultural-political expression for negritude, but agreed such an
expression should affirm a heritage, via the production of art, motivating cultural unity and authenticity
among blacks to “shake the world’s foundations.”

But neither theirs nor Sartre’s was Senghor’s aim for “negritude.” African art was not to serve negritude’s
political aims for Senghor. Rather a politics of negritude could arise only if African art reveals the form(s)
by which there is a life and heritage and not if it affirms a life and heritage whose form(s) is the outcome
of what is aesthetically produced. As Diagne puts it, appreciating the form(s) lyrically shaped or
proficiently sculpted by an African artist, for Senghor, “involves [giving] witness to the researching [of] a
real world which exists, not [to the one] poetically devised or [sculpturally] fabricated” (p. 44).
Understanding this point and recognizing the way Senghor comes to it are the subject matter of the next
chapter.
The second chapter, “Rhythms,” is the most complicated of the book. This stems not from Diagne’s
presentation, which is wonderfully clear and cogent throughout. It rather springs from a theme Senghor
wholly embraces, but is not easily conveyed. He identifies African art formally as philosophy. “Art is the
evidence of African philosophy, and we do not attain full comprehension of African art without
understanding the metaphysics from which it proceeds” (pp. 54-55).This identity is initially brought to
life and cognition intuitively as a content of knowledge, but ultimately fulfilled in life and cognition
intuitively as a mode of knowledge, as an alternative way of being aesthetically and epistemically
responsive to what is known and present. Diagne supports Senghor for holding this view about the
importance of intuition and acknowledging its inspiration from Henri Bergson and Pierre Baye-Salzmann.
Most do not. Still what does this view mean?

First, philosophy will be expressed through African art and vice versa, but will do so originally and
finally in intuition. As intuitive, the identity of African art and philosophy is something of which there is
immediate awareness and that is itself immediately evident in and to this awareness. The identity is
never conceptually, discursively, or inferentially justified. Someone is at first immediately aware of
African art, not as “pleasant to look upon,” but as that whose “rhythms” running through it grab you.
Philosophically African art is that whose openness to immediate awareness does not engender being
pleased by what is beautiful, but engenders being grabbed to apprehend aesthetically the vitality of
rhythms coursing through things themselves. For Senghor, rhythms are an enduring liveliness wherein the
being of things comes to be enlivened in the present and in space to the extent it aspires to a future and
disposes of a past. They animate an intuition that illuminates what is sensually incarnate rather than what
is only private in me (pp. 78-79).

Second, but what makes an art (visual, lyrical, and poetic), bound to or focused on rhythms, African,
black, a matter of negritude? Rhythms are, for Senghor, the ontology of traditional African religions. As a
consequence, African art is not primarily a reflection of the ethnicity of the artist or a devotion to the
gods. Rather it makes immediately visible, captured intuitively by artists, the ontology or rhythms which
give cadence to reality’s flowing holism and indivisibility (p. 88). Once it renders the rhythms visible,
Africans themselves become visible, immediately being rendered, via art, “contributors” to a philosophy
expressive of life and to which a philosophy portrayed by political goals is subsidiary.

Ontologically aesthetic value in African art is rhythm, i.e., the intuitive content of African aesthetic
sensibility. But to know intuitively is to engage in a mode of knowledge, taken to be the alternative to
the mode of knowledge prevalent in western philosophy. According to Diagne, this “alternative
knowledge/philosophy (philosophie autre)” to the predominant western brand is regarded by Senghor as
the “philosophy of the other (philosophie de l’autre), i.e., other than European” (p. 103). The analysis of
this “alternative philosophy” as “the philosophy of the other” is the subject matter of Diagne’s third
chapter “Co-naissance,” a French neologism describing “knowledge born” or “knowledge that births” as
this “alternative philosophy.”

Most are familiar with Senghor’s well-known, if not infamous, statement – “Emotion is Negro, as
reason is Hellenic” – which has been subject to innumerable disapprovals. Yet Diagne offers an
insightful interpretation of it, different from prior formulations. According to Diagne, the statement’s
reference is directly about two different art forms (Greek statuary and African plastic art – pp. 69-71),
not about two racially different people, and its meaning is conveyed analogically, not assertively. As he
points out, the aesthetic character of its reference is rarely mentioned in the literature, and the analogical
conveyance of its meaning is never discussed there as well. So to interpret Senghor’s statement without
understanding its reference to two distinct art forms and its analogical meaning is, for Diagne, to fail at
grasping what is taken as the gist of Senghor’s thought.
The statement’s reference notes two distinct art forms, revealing that “emotion or intuition is to African
works of art as reason is to Hellenic statuary” (p. 71). In African art, rhythm is rendered visible and
characterizes the intuitive content of African aesthetic sensibility; in Hellenic statuary, beauty
exemplifies the intellectual content in ancient Greek insight. The statement’s meaning, “emotion is
Negro, as reason is Hellenic,” expressed assertively, is such that ‘emotion’ and ‘reason’ represent
different kinds of epistemic modes, while ‘Negro’ and ‘Hellene’ represent different kinds of people
predicative of these distinct modes respectively. But, expressed analogically, it conveys a resemblance
wherein the modes are as modes different and the people are as people different.

Meant assertively, the differences are differences of the same type, i.e., emotion/Negro and
reason/Hellenic are different modes/different peoples of knowledge/humanity respectively. Meant
analogically, the differences of the same type are themselves compared as different, i.e., as
knowledge/humanity, emotion/Negro and reason/Hellenic are different from each other. Senghor’s
negritude thus emerges, for Diagne, at this analogical level on which the intuitive content, vibrant
rhythms rendered visible in African art, of African aesthetic sensibility and the intuitive mode of
knowledge as alternative not to knowledge per se, but to its discursive/European modes, are “born”
indivisibly. His account of African art is simultaneously his account of the African mode of knowing the
world vitally, never knowing the world primitively (pp. 116, 122-23, & 126). But this neither completes
nor defines in full “negritude.”

“Humanity…is one in its differences” (p. 105) is a claim Senghor would embrace but, for Diagne, it does
not lead Senghor ultimately to a “differentiated theory of human knowledge” for an explanation of
“separate racial identities” (pp. 107 & 190). Like Bergson, intuition is not, for Diagne’s Senghor, just the
content of or the complement to intellectual or discursive knowledge; it is rather that knowledge’s
supplement, all of which grounds art’s continuous and anticipatory identification with, not discrete
and abstract identification of, the being coursing through things (p. 129).

And this ultimately means that the intuitive mode of knowledge is not just the alternative to
discursive/European knowledge, but the alternative aim for knowledge period, i.e., to be in symbiosis
with the vital dimension of the object known. Art is the African avenue to this intuitive mode of
knowing, but this mode of knowing is neither practiced nor obtained at the exclusion of other cultural
avenues of intelligence as long as that aim is in view. “Negritude” thus never forsakes ties to a kind of
humanism affirmed by an intuitive mode of knowledge whose aim is always shared or shareable.

The final two chapters are Diagne’s attempts to show how Senghor’s negritude converged with both “the
accomplishment of African unity and a world truly one, in which differences would be woven together”
(p. 139). But the emphasis on dialogue and communication, e.g., the discursive mode, especially for
politics, in the “Convergence” chapter appears, at first, to undo the emphasis on intuition established in
the previous chapters. Diagne points to Senghor’s move toward “a general cosmology” to avoid this
problem. This move “allows [Senghor] to think about God, about different cultures in their equivalence,
dialogue and convergence at the ‘meeting place of give and take’ (Cesaire’s expression), and about
socialism together” (p. 157).

Inspired by Teilhard de Chardin and Muhammad Iqbal, cosmology refers to one world as both living and
lived and as always moving toward more life and greater unification. It is the ontological condition for
negritude’s convergence with other cultures via communication, with religions, with science, and with a
“humanized” socialist politics, affirming that “Africanity cannot be left out of the cosmic stream of
humanization to which it is ontologically necessary” (p. 163) and intuitively apprehended.

This cosmological embrace has led many to describe and criticize Senghor’s negritude for being apolitical
or silent in the face of colonialism and its culturally corrosive effects for the sake of the mystical.
Diagne’s interpretation demonstrates instead that and why the political character of Senghor’s negritude
must take a strong metaphysical turn. Negritude expresses African artists’ immediate affinity to the living
rhythms of the world and their intuitively shared knowledge of and commitment to the world’s
humanizing expansion. Art makes this affinity, knowledge, and commitment both manifest and incarnate
to African sensibility, thereby rendering Africans themselves immediately aware of and bound to all
which art reveals. Negritude’s political aims are to be mindful of this power of art and to be guided by it.
They should not, for Senghor, lead to forging an art consistent solely with them and to discounting
rhythms art is designed to uncover sensuously.

“Art finds its true meaning as a testament to an ontology of vital forces in an emergent cosmology open to
human action for the purpose of overcoming forms of alienation and gaining access to the freedom of
homo artifex” (p. 187). For Diagne, this claim encapsulates Senghor’s affirmation of Africanity. Diagne
concludes on two points. He defends Senghor for linking African art ontologically to the vitality of the
world’s rhythms and for emphasizing that the intuitive access to this ontology was not linked to a specific
racial difference. But he concedes that currently African art neither requires such a connection nor
requires the intuitive approach to it, since “Africanity is [now] an open question to be ceaselessly
explored” (p. 200). Diagne does not explain this historical distinction satisfactorily. But this is a matter
for a later reflection. Still Diagne’s account and analysis are nonetheless masterful and very much
beneficial to the attention of those attracted to the work of Senghor.

Finally Chike Jeffers has done wonderfully by Diagne with a superb translation of Diagne’s work from
the French. It is indeed a credit to him that, as a whole, the excellence of his translation still resonates,
despite the copious and erroneous editorial changes to his translation without his knowledge and the
publisher’s unwillingness to heed his corrections of them prior to the book’s publication in English.

Frank M. Kirkland
Department of Philosophy
Hunter College (CUNY) &
CUNY Graduate Center