Karen Lee: Hi everyone, I’m Karen.
Natalie Alexander: And I’m Natalie. This is The Next Page, the podcast of the UN Geneva Library & Archives.
Karen Lee: Hi Natalie!
Natalie Alexander: Hi Karen!
Karen Lee: So, we had quite a busy week here at the podcast – we released 2 episodes in the past few days.
Natalie Alexander: Yes indeed! So if you missed it, we released episode 36 on Wednesday, with our own colleagues here in the Library & Archives, Colin Wells and Gudrun Beger who take us on a journey back in time exploring some of the League of Nations archives, in a conversation we called "The World's Most Travelled Document". So, anyone interested in history, please check that one out. But today, we're actually looking at philosophy. We learn from Professor Souleymane Diagne, he is a Senegalese philosopher, an author of several books and also is currently teaching at Columbia University in New York, where he leads their Institute of African Studies and also teaches philosophy.
Karen Lee: Ah yes! He joined us recently for an event here at UN Geneva!
Natalie Alexander: Yes he did, he joined us for a recent event to mark the UN’s 75th anniversary this year, an event called the "Multilateralism of the Future" and it was part of a wider event, so it was a short message, but really fascinating. So, we invited him back for a deeper conversation on his life’s work in philosophy and how this connects to our daily lives and the global issues we’re facing.
Karen Lee: Amazing. I feel that philosophy is often seen as highly academic and just not part of our everyday lives, so I’m really interested to hear more.
Natalie Alexander: Yeah, that was also a thought that I had, and he shares the philosophical concepts that he thinks we really need to bring back, to revive, in order to collectively face our common challenges, so that was really eye-opening for me. And I think also what was really interesting was to hear his views on how diversity in philosophy itself, so not just the common philosophies we know from the west, but also the incredible bridges that connect Islamic, African, and other philosophies throughout history, it's really cool.
Karen Lee: Awesome! As always, we have more resources in our podcast notes, so please don’t forget to browse through them for even more learning. And now, let’s take a listen.
Natalie Alexander: Professor Diagne, thank you so much for joining us on The Next Page.
Professor Souleymane Diagne: It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Natalie Alexander: With pleasure! You're joining us from Columbia University in New York, where you're the Director of the Institute of African Studies, professor of French and of philosophy. But you do have a fascinating journey that began well before your time at the University, would you mind sharing a little more about yourself? How did you come to be interested in philosophy and dedicating your life to studying it, and researching it, and teaching it?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Well, I'm glad you're asking that question. I just finished the manuscript of an autobiography that I wrote, and I revisited my own trajectory. So somehow, I'm going to summarize for you what have finished writing. I’m Senegalese, I did all my studies in Senegal up to the end of high school and this is when I went to France to study there. While I was in Senegal, I saw myself as pursuing a career of an engineer. Actually, the path I was following up to the point when I reached the last year of high school, I was doing math and I saw myself doing math.
I discovered philosophy, obviously when I was a senior in high school and then I fell in love with this with this discipline. So, when I went to France to for my higher education, I was actually hesitating between two paths. One would have led me to the city of Lyon where I was admitted to a school of engineering called Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, or follow this kind of, I would call it an “elite path”, which is going to Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and that would have led me, if successful, to École Normale Supérieure – this important elite school in the French system.
After hesitation, I decided to stay in Paris to go to Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, and this led me to choosing the path of philosophy. I was fortunate enough to be successful for the test that took me to École Normale Supérieure, where I had great, great teachers and so I was very happy with that.
And in a way, I found a way of reconciling my two loves – my love for philosophy and my love for mathematics – when I decided to specialize in the history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. This is what my higher education in France was, and after that I went back home. I decided not to stay in Europe, not to stay in France, but to go back home and teach at the University of Dakar, which is now named the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, and I was there for 20 years.
I created two different curricula that I thought were important. One was a curriculum in logic, of course, and philosophy of science. The other one was in Islamic philosophy, which is not something I had been formally trained in, but that was in a way my family background, so that is what allowed me to be able to hold the position and to create the curriculum. And I'm very happy I trained many students who are now teaching the class.
After teaching there 20 years, I was invited to join the faculty at Northwestern University, and I taught there for 9 years, being a professor in the Department of Philosophy in the Department of Religion, because my teaching in Islamic philosophy was part of the curriculum at the department of religion. I had also an appointment at the program of African Studies. I insist on my time at Northwestern University because I was fortunate enough to be able to work at the program African Studies and at the Herskovits Library. The Herskovits Library is the greatest library in the world in in African Studies very easily, maybe comparable to the Library of Congress, maybe second to Library of Congress because the Library of Congress obviously has everything. But this was a great time I had at Northwestern University, so it was very difficult for me, after 9 years, to accept the invitation to join the faculty at Columbia University. This was a time when I wanted to join friends that I had at Columbia University. I wanted to be in New York, and I was very happy to join Columbia University in 2008, and this is where I am now.
I'm teaching in the Department of French, but I'm teaching philosophy because it was becoming interdisciplinary. The Department wanted me to come there and represent in a way, both French philosophy – the history of French philosophy – and also African philosophy.
Natalie Alexander: Amazing, a wonderful path.
I'm glad that you mentioned the different philosophies you've encountered over these years, because that was a question I wanted to ask you, and that is diversity in philosophy itself. You mentioned some of your research areas include the history of philosophy, but also Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and art and literature, and also French philosophy. Really, I guess a tapestry of ideas from many cultures and parts of the world. Why is this diversity important to you? And also, do you think to the field of philosophy itself?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Well, I think that being true to the field of philosophy, being true to what philosophy truly is, is to pluralize it. I was trained in a particularly narrow vision of the history of philosophy, which is unfortunately the way in which the history of philosophy is taught and is still taught. Which is to say that, well philosophy started in Greece and as a miracle... So, this idea of a “Greek miracle”, the Greek people being a particular humanity and creating philosophy because of who they were, and then from Greece it was transmitted to the Roman world, and from the Roman world to medieval Latin Christianity and so on and so forth.
So, philosophy was considered to be uniquely European, and to be uniquely the expression of the European destiny, in a way. But even if we narrow it down to just Greek philosophy... Of course, it is absurd to think that philosophy started in Greece. The Greek philosophers themselves never say that philosophy started with them. If you read Plato, he would credit Egypt for many aspects of our philosophy and so on so forth. It is just absurd because philosophy is truly an expression of the humanity of the human being wherever she is, which leads to questions about why there is existence and so on so forth. These are profoundly human questions that define the humanity of the human being. So, it is absurd to consider that had philosophy had a particular location. But even if we narrow down things to just consider Greek philosophy, the transmission of Greek philosophy was not this path that led from Athens, let's say to Rome and from Rome to these European intellectual capitals, Heidelberg or London or Paris. It's not true. Greek philosophy followed as well, a path that led from Athens to Baghdad to Cordoba, Spain – at a time when that region, known as Andalusia was Islamic – to Fez in Morocco or to Timbuktu in the heart of Africa. This is something that is not known at all but in Timbuktu, in the 15th and 16th century, people were being trained in Aristotelian logic. Discussing Aristotelian logic centuries before they saw any Western European man come up on their shores.
So, why is it important? Because if you just take medieval philosophers themselves, they were talking to each other across their religions and their regions. Let's remember that Thomas Aquinas, if we want to choose one particular medieval figure of Latin Christianity, Thomas Aquinas, before he was sanctified by the church and became Saint Thomas had been at one point accused of being a heretic because he was holding statements that were averroistic. That was the accusation. Now how can you read Thomas Aquinas if you do not exactly know this Muslim philosopher, Averroes (whose Arabic name was Ibn Rushd).
So, here is Thomas Aquinas building his own philosophical reflection in conversation with this Muslim philosopher Averroes, and that is what medieval philosophy is.
A braid of histories bringing together Latin Christianity but also Greek Christianity on the present. Inside that, those people are also forgotten when we look at medieval philosophy. These people were in conversation with each other and this is how we should be thinking of the history of philosophy.
We need to restitute to the history of philosophy, its plurality, and we need also to pluralize the languages of philosophy because philosophy has been translated in different languages, and that translation continues. So, for example the translation of Greek philosophy into Arabic was a very important aspect of the history of philosophy because you are translating from a given language into European language with a certain structure, into a Semitic language with a different grammar. So, that in itself is a very important aspect of the history of philosophy.
Natalie Alexander: The UN itself has 6 languages and is very committed to multilingualism, as part of our work and part of our values and our spirit in multilateralism. And so, with thanks to my colleague who actually had watched one of your videos from Cornell University a few years ago, you did a lecture called the “Philosopher as Translator” and how important it is that we understand language is also about concepts and that if we are able to think through another language, we are also able to think through another worldview. What do you think of this in terms of plurality, as you mentioned?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Let me start with something funny, I will say. There is this wonderful science fiction movie Arrival, which was very successful.
Natalie Alexander: I've seen this one!
Professor Souleymane Diagne: This movie? Yes, I'm sure you've seen it! In it, these extraterrestrial people visit us, and we don't know what they want from us, and we send them this wonderful linguist to communicate with them. And the movie is about them actually wanting to teach us their language, not just for the sake of communication, but because their language – the structure of their language – is such that their conception of time is radically different from our own conception of time, where we have a past and then a present, and future. And what they end up teaching this linguist is not just a few aspects of their language, but to think differently about time and to be able actually to live in different times, in a way, so she can see the future in the present, and so on and so forth. So, this is allegorical, and what it expresses is that each language, in a way, is a certain what I have called earlier, “philosophical grammar”, and this is an expression from Nietzsche and a certain perspective on the world. So, philosophy is defined as this particular demanding posture where you do not leave anything unexamined.
Well, why don't we examine also the fact that when we are philosophizing, we are doing that in a particular language, and ask ourselves what the formulation of the problems and questions and methods and procedures that we are using in our philosophical reasoning... what do those methods, etc. owe to the fact that we are speaking a certain language? Would Tarski’s definition of truth be the same if he was not thinking about it in English, but in Arkan language?
So, those are interesting and important questions to raise and looking at the fact that when you speak a certain language, the formulations that you use are deeply connected to that language... dependent on the fact that that is the language that you are speaking. So, what translation adds to that is precisely a test. You are testing your thoughts through translation into another different language and seeing what is the universality of your own thinking, in that case.
If you say, for example, the most important philosophical question is the question of “being”, well okay, every philosopher who has read Parmenides or Heidegger would agree with you. But then you want to step back and think, the reason why I'm saying that is that I'm speaking a language in which when you add “-ing” to the verb “to be”, you go from the verb “to be” to the substantive “being”. You have that same grammatical possibility when you are speaking any of the Indo-European languages.
What happens if I step out of these Indo-European languages and speak another language?
So, translation is again a philosophical test. And we need to be able to examine our philosophical questions and problematics by submitting them to the test of translation, the “test of the foreign”, to use the title of Antoine Berman, this philosopher of translation. The test of the foreign is a good way of examining our thoughts and that formulation.
Natalie Alexander: Absolutely. With even one language itself, depending on our own, biases our own upbringing, our own thoughts, opinions. We can even translate our own language in different ways.
On this topic still of diversity, I wanted to ask you when you are teaching about this diversity and bring it to teach your students. How can we ensure this diversity is taught and discussed and debated, so that we can branch out from, I guess very one-way streets of how we how we see things?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: That's a very important and crucial question because obviously the way in which you change approaches, I mentioned decolonizing the history of philosophy earlier, is by decolonizing the curriculum. How do you translate this into a curriculum?
One could look at what departments in philosophy are doing. Usually, they might want to add to their traditional curriculum a course or a seminar on Islamic philosophy, let’s say, which is already a good thing. But the best way to do things is probably to consider questions or problems or concepts from many different perspectives.
Let's say for example, you look at the concept of religion, philosophically. Well, this is a good time to have that concept accompanied with extracts from many different philosophers coming from many different regions. So, instead of having Western philosophy juxtaposed to Islamic philosophy, juxtaposed to, let's say, Chinese philosophy, you would ask yourself, okay, the concept of a person, what does it mean to be human and what does Islamic philosophy and Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy say about what it means to be human? In other words, you would not juxtapose philosophical traditions, you would put them in conversation with one another around common problems, and common questions, and common concepts.
Natalie Alexander: I really like this idea of not juxtaposing these philosophies, but kind of seeing how they fit into the same puzzle.
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Yes, let's take for example, when you study the so called presocratics, their main question was what is the origin of everything? Heraclitus would say the origin of everything is fire, someone else would say it is water, and so on and so forth. So, if you decide to have a curriculum where you ask the question about the radical origin of everything, and then you bring these presocratics and you bring also African cosmologies, or Chinese cosmologies, because all these cosmologies were precisely about what is the radical origin of everything that exists. That would be a good way of doing things and not juxtaposing them but bringing them together around one single question.
Natalie Alexander: Amazing. This leads us to I guess what I wanted to ask you next and that is how all of this... how what you learn and teach, and study relates to I guess the problem, the issues we're facing today?
We've just come out of a big week, the last week in the United States, but also a big year for the world with a global pandemic, COVID-19. And of course, really pressing global challenges that we've been facing for quite some years now, the climate crisis, migration... many issues that are global in nature. How does philosophy and its principles seep into our life? Our everyday experience? Or how can we use our understanding to be able to move through these global challenges?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Well, this is a great question actually, because I think that the challenges we are facing now, there are two natural challenges I would call them, and one political challenge. The two natural challenges would be the challenge of the of climate change. Although when I say natural, I'm not denying at all that we human beings are responsible, but this is something which is in the environment, so to say. The other is the pandemic – this virus which is threatening humanity and manifesting our vulnerability. And the political one is the challenge of all these populisms. I mean, the world is today fragmented by this populism, which is just tribalism. The idea of “My tribe first”, “America first” and then demonizing the other – the one who doesn't belong to the tribe, the migrant, the refugee... the one who doesn't have the same religion as myself, who doesn't have the same skin color, etc. And unfortunately, you have many, many political parties whose only program actually is to demonize the other and stir up, so to say, tribal sentiment.
And what is the connection between the three? If I take the pandemic, one thing the virus, the coronavirus, revealed is that for it, the world is one. I mean, the world is just one tiny country for the virus. It traveled across this world overnight. And so, the response we should be having is that yes, indeed we are one single country, we are one single humanity, and have what I would call the politics of our shared humanity in response to that pandemic. In the same way, we need to have the politics of our shared humanity to face climate change.
The fact that we were able to have all these meetings that led to the Paris Agreement – that was great, that was humanity coming together and realizing the fragility of their habitat, and this is a wonderful figure of what universality means.
In the same vein, in a way this is also overcoming the fragmentation into tribes. And thinking anew the concept of humanity and this is what leads me to what I was saying about philosophy. Philosophical ideal is the idea of cosmopolitanism from the Stoics to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu with the concept of “Ubuntu”, being human together. This is the best translation of this Bantu word of “Ubuntu”. So, the old notion of humanism, the old notion of cosmopolitanism, being all of us citizens of the same world, are philosophical concepts that we need to reactivate today, because these are the concepts we have as a response to the challenges we are facing. When it comes to the pandemic, or when it comes to climate change, having the politics of our shared humanity is something that we need, and philosophy itself. I believe philosophers consider themselves to be what Edmund Husserl called the “civil servants of humanity”.
Natalie Alexander: The civil servants of humanity.
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Absolutely, he used that expression.
Natalie Alexander: Amazing. I'll pose this question then to you: How can the civil servants of humanity communicate to us how we can get through this together? Just being human, as you mentioned.
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Well, it can be done. In a way we can see the way in which it works when we take the example, the microcosm of South Africa. I mentioned Ubuntu, this concept that Mandela and Desmond Tutu put to work when they were trying to build a New South Africa. We should be stepping out of politics of tribes. Apartheid was a politics of tribes and fragmentation. The very definition of apartheid before even adding racism to it, was the idea that human cultures are separate, they are just juxtaposed. They follow their own logic and their own path, and they basically do not communicate. So, everybody has to have their own separate path towards their own development. That is the strict definition of apartheid. So, this was a glorification of tribes, and Ubuntu was a way of saying let's just leap out of tribes into our shared humanity and this is what I am transferring to the global world. We are in a world of apartheid today, of global apartheid. I am following the philosophy of French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who in this wonderful book of his, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, ended on the idea of the open society as being the society open to humanity in general.
Ubuntu an open-ended task which is still to be achieved, so humanity is not a state, but a task and that is the fundamental teaching of ubuntu - achieving our humanity together would be the best translation for that, because in achieving you have the idea of a task to be pursued again and again.
Natalie Alexander: The work continues. On some of the thoughts you mentioned there about economies, markets, politics, but also bringing in technology... In many ways, our world has changed, and technology has been a part of our lives for a long time now, but more so in 2020 with COVID-19 and basically transferring all of our life online from work to other things. We're connected now in all spheres from morning to evening. We are connected through that way, and there are many benefits to that, but perhaps also maybe some consequences as well with the rapid spread of technology. Do you think our humanity is impacted in some way by these things? Or is it bringing humanity closer together?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: I think that these technologies that bring us together are the best and the worst thing at the same time. Why is that? Let's look at the pandemic. You and I are now right now communicating through Zoom, I am teaching my classes through Zoom, and I believe that this is something that is going to stay.
In other words, when we hopefully soon get back into a world without COVID, the fact that we have been communicating through Zoom, especially in higher education, is going to stay. I do not need to travel now to go to be part of a Dissertation Committee, I can do that so easily through Zoom. Many things that I was doing – travelling, etc. – will be done through Zoom. It has truly brought us together and created a community at a time when we need to be socially distancing. At the same time, what we are seeing now, is that the same tool that should be creating community and bringing us together can also tear us apart by being a tool used by tribalism. And the whole discussion right now about Facebook and democracy, how people who are trying to just take any credibility out of democracy are using Facebook, are using fake news. So, like-minded people gather through Facebook and what they're doing is not open themselves to others, but close themselves and create their own tribal language, their own tribal references, and so on so forth and develop out of that language a hate. So, it can go both ways. So, these are questions we have to face. We have all the tools, the technological tools to be one humanity, but those same technological tools can be used to further fragmentation and tribalism at the same time.
Natalie Alexander: You mentioned the concept of being open when we are talking together, as a philosopher can you share with us your tips or your ideas on how we can better listen to each other, so that we can be open? What would you recommend?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: One thing in this case is that we educate ourselves in philosophy, I was going to say. The use of this faculty in us, which is rightly called understanding. You know when philosophers talk about human understanding, they are obviously talking about a cognitive faculty, but that cognitive faculty is also the faculty by which we understand each other. That is something that we share.
So, human understanding is not just understanding the world out there, but also understanding each other because we share it. So, when we educate our understanding, at the same time we educate our own capacity to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes as the saying goes. And this is the whole teaching of philosophy. We have to remember that for one of our many philosophical ancestors, Socrates, that was his whole teaching: well, why don't you now look at things from this one perspective? That is the condition of true rational discussion. That is how we transform the public square where everybody comes with their own understanding, and I'm playing on the different meanings of understanding here. They are capable of listening to somebody else, the capacity to decenter is actually the fundamental condition for the capacity to communicate. And this is why we praise actually, the freedom of expression, which is being a problem right now in France, as you know. The fundamental idea behind freedom of expression was to say that if ideas circulate freely without fear, the best will come out of it.
Natalie Alexander: There we go. So, we of course cannot have a conversation on this podcast without talking about multilateralism and I wanted to ask you is there a role and has there been a role of philosophy in multilateralism? Has it been evident in our history and can you share anything on that?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: I think that I will connect multilateralism in its philosophical meaning with what I just said about the free circulation of ideas. And I believe that multilateralism is the attempt, the open-ended continuous pursuit of the realization of that free circulation of ideas. So, this is what multilateralism is about: realizing that challenges we are facing are challenges that we need to face together as one humanity, and in so doing that you do not have just the powerful and the less powerful – all human voices count, they are all important, equally important. That is the true meaning of multilateralism, and so it is a necessity in the world in which we live. And philosophy can be seen as being precisely about that.
Natalie Alexander: That seems like a great way to end. Thank you so much for sharing with us, Professor Diagne. We like to end with just one final thought from you. We covered a lot of ground today. If there's one thing that you would like for listeners to really remember and take away, what would it be from this conversation?
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Well, let me say that it would be humanism, actually, or to use an African word for it, ubuntu. I think that is the final word. At this time when we have all these concepts circulating about the posthuman, the transhuman, we have to come back to the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human, what it means to share our humanity, and what it means to achieve our humanity together and in reciprocity. “I am because you are”, as one African philosopher, John Beatty, famously translated. Also, Ubuntu is really some fundamental truth, human truth that we should be getting back to and understanding what is happening to us right now – the threat of the pandemic, the threat of climate change, the threat of fragmentation and tribalism under that light.
Natalie Alexander: Ubuntu, being human together. Merci beaucoup Professor Diagne, it's really a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for taking the time.
Professor Souleymane Diagne: Je vous en prie, c’était une plaisir.
Natalie Alexander: Merci!
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