It is necessary to rebuild the universal: not as an overhanging model which should apply to all regions of the world, but from their singularity – laterally and not from above.
In highlightUniversalizeis a quote from Senghor, which tells us about the task that pursues, with as much obstinacy as talent, Souleymane Bachir Diagne: “ It is not in the solemn public declarations, so often emphatic, to a hypocritical universality, because incolore, that resides the possibility of the real dialogue between men and cultures ; It is in a patient effort and supported “comprehensive agree” where each people, measuring the pride of being different to the happiness of being together, will make their contribution to the construction of the civilization of the universal ». Denounce the misguided customs of universalism, but not to give up the universal: this is how the ethical and political approach of Sb Diagne.
Leibniz’s influence
His works, at least since his dialogue with Jean-Loup Amselle, are devoted to defining the conditions for the reinvention of the universal. The last two, for one (Ubuntu) shed light on the genesis of his thought, for the other (Universalize) in specify the contours. But, in reality, the major commitments of the philosopher are identifiable from the beginnings of his intellectual life, as evidenced by his interest in Boole and the laws of thought as well as for the truths of reason dear to Leibniz, this same Leibniz who, in a draft of a letter intended for Pierre-le-Grand, writes: “ I am not of these men passionate about their homeland or for any nation, but I work for the usefulness of the whole human race, because I consider heaven as my homeland and all well -intentioned men like my compatriots ». Now, yes, on the philosophy of Sb Diagne, the influences of Mohammad Iqbal or Bergson or Gaston Berger, are often mentioned, as well as that of postcolonial authors (Fanon, Césaire, slipper …), we rarely evoke that of Leibniz. However, in our view, it is the one that most adequately translates the nature of its plea for the universal (to use the title of the beautiful book by Francis Wolff).
This hypothesis is based on the rejection by Leibniz of the Cartesian thesis of the creation of eternal truths. According to the German philosopher, it is necessary to seek the foundation of these in the divine understanding, in the truths of reason or intelligence which he opposes to the truths of feeling: “ I believe that intelligence truths are universal, and that what is true on this is also for angels and for God itself. These eternal truths are the fixed and immutable point on which everything rolls ». THE “ eternal truths “On which Leibniz is speaking do not depend on human judgment: beauty, for example, has a value whose existence does not depend on its effects on human sensitivity. It is a value in itself, that is to say detached from subjective human responses.
Leibniz, as we know, poses, at the same time, the radical singularity of the Monad and the fact that each communicates with the other: all, from their own point of view, express the same world. However, it is by the consideration of the singularity that we can reach a universal which escapes the hegemonic claim of Western universalism. And it is also by refusing the confinement in the singular that we reach the universal. This should not be assigned to its historical conditions of appearance. The fact that the subject and knowledge are located in space and time in no way implies the adoption of a relativistic particularism which would invalidate the very project of a science tending by nature. Should we not want our statements to be valid regardless of their statement conditions,, that is to say without being linked to the people we are ? In other words, valid in all possible worlds, or, at least, in all the states of the same world, namely this world ? As summarizes Sb Diagne, we must “ sing in unison the hymn of science in the singular ».
You have to insist on it, reinvent the universal (title of the introduction to Universalize, but also subtitle of the exhibition at the Quai Branly museum, in 2023, on “ Senghor and the arts ) Go through the deconstruction of his counterfeits.
Deconstruct universalism
In a remarkable book, Markus Messling wonders if we can think of the universal after universalism. The question he poses, be “ What remains of the universalist ideal after its deviation in the colonial adventure ? It is hardly different from that of Immanuel Wallerstein in European universalism. From colonization to the right of interference. Both make the observation of the end of the overhanging form of universalism and seek to consider it as a beginning, a beginning which would lead us to think since the plural of the world, according to the happy formula that Sb Diagne likes to use. We must, therefore, from the perspective recalled by the historian Diphe Chakrabarty, distinguish between the claim of Europe to embody the universal, a claim that he describes as hyperrational, and the rational claim that there is a universality. This approach is also that of Susan Buck-Morss (after Pierre-Franklin Tavares, recalls Sb Diagne) when she describes the Haitian revolution as the moment of switching to a philosophy of European universalist history in a conscience of humanity: the army of freed slaves sings the Marseillaise by walking against the French occupation troops (themselves revolutionary).
The West has too often justified its colonization policy by invoking its “ civilizing mission In the ignorance of singular cultural forms. This Universalism of overhangaccording to the expression introduced, in 1989, by Michael Walzer, is based on the idea that the doctrines and the laws of the dominant will one day be universally accepted. If this evolutionary presupposition is opposed to the fixity of the differences between groups, characteristic of racism, it obviously does not emancipate ethnocentrism since it makes Europe the civilizational model towards which other societies must stretch.
Conversely, the lateral universal that Maurice Merleau-Ponty evokes, and which Sb Diagne, takes into account reiteration, that is to say, taking into account the singularity that characterizes each experience of the release of oppression. In other words, it is a question of producing in common universal by reiterating it. Sb Diagne insists that the lateral universal is a (multi) lateral practice Before being a statement. This is why he considers (p. 125) that the universal wish is most perfectly reflected in a verb: universalize.
Thinking a universality which, instead of being overhanging, would be lateral or oblique, we acquire it, specifies Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “ through ethnological experience “, Described as” incessant testing of oneself by the other and the other by oneself ». Instead of a universalism based on injunction and which presupposes universality, Sb Diagne offers a critical instrument that premates us against the temptation to make a model (European, in this case) the truth of history, theme also developed by Jack Goody: “ One of the most disturbing myths of the West is to believe that we must distinguish the values of our Judeo-Christian civilization from Eastern values in general and those of Islam in particular ».
The universal as a beginning
However, despite the bright awareness of this usurpation, Sb Diagne rightly considers that the lights do not belong to anyone, and that the universal is not soluble in colonization. Also, it is necessary to resist the story that Europe produces of its own history. There are indeed, according to the title of the book by Mohamed Amer Meziane, which Sb Diagne, “ Empires underground ». And one of the best examples to convince of the undue nature of the European story is that of the history of philosophy.
Far from being, as Hegel proposes, the exclusive affair of Europe, the translatio (the transmission of knowledge), underlines Sb Diagne, “ passed through the Islamic world and through Arabic, which has become the philosophical language of Avicenna in Persia, Averroès, Ibn Tufayl, but also from Maimonides to Andalusia, from Ahmed Baba to Timbuktu (…) She knew other towers and detours that the Athens-Rome-Heidelberg path, having also drawn an Athens-Nichapour, Baghdad, Cordoba, Fez, Timbuktu… (P. 35). There “ Company of philosophers “, As Roger-Pol rightly names it, is not limited to a geography. But the imperial account of European universalism has “ Need recognition, to become a legend, that is to say, “something that must be read, taught, repeated” (P. 29).
It is, we understand it, to ensure that “ The look that Europe walks on the rest of the world from the central position of its universalism has returned to it “, That she knows, as Sartre writes,” the seizure of being seen (P. 112-113). And that in this way she is lucid in the face of the attempts of certain theorists of liberalism to justify by contractualist theory the dispossession of the land: as Charles Mills showed, there was no deliberation, the non-European peoples having been relegated to the status of objects of history, installing at the heart of modernity an ontological racism, “ now outside the community of humans who can bind by a contract those whose humanity has then been denied (P. 142).
Consequently, the cosmopolitical project, which is based on the principle of equal consideration due to each human being, regardless of nationality or belonging to any subgroup of humanity, seems to be the horizon that the human species must assign. Simone Weil, often cited by Sb Diagne saw the sense of cosmopolitanism in the universalization of citizenship. The end of colonialism with its overcoming in cosmopolitanism, comments Sb Diagne, is “ That of the great sharing between the world of civility, where rights can be said universal, and that of subjection (because barbarism), where these rights do not acclimatize, which would justify that one behaves there yourself, although coming from the civilized world, otherwise (P. 52).
Ultimately, as Bruno Perreau writes, taking the notion of appearance To Jean-Luc Nancy, each of us is “ populated by the lives of others and appears on the social scene with them ». In appearance, the simultaneity of the presence of oneself and the other must be understood as an experience of change of scenery. It is hardly distinguished from that of translation, which is well understood, as recalled Sb Diagne, is the act of giving hospitality in his language to what has thought and created in another language. It is a concept, to which Souleymane Bachir Diagne often uses, that ofubuntu. He says that we can only be through others, in a way in cohumanity.
From the experience of cohumanity, it is a question in an exciting interview with Françoise Blum, precisely entitled Ubuntu. Prefaced by Barbara Cassin, the work makes it possible to enter even more in the circumstances which made, for our greatest profit, the child of Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal a man of a “ unparalleled delicacy (B. Cassin) at the same time as one of the most important thinkers of our time.