Reason and Rationality in Eze’s On Reason

Bruce B. Janz
Department of Philosophy
University of Central Florida
4000 Central Florida Blvd.
Orlando, FL 32816-1352
USA
Email: [email protected]

Abstract
The title of Emmanuel Eze’s final, posthumously published book uses the
words “reason” and “rationality” in a manner that might suggest they are in-
terchangeable. I would like to suggest that we not treat them as the same, but
rather tease out a difference in emphasis and reference between the two. In
African philosophy, the problem of reason is really two separate problems,
the first of which I will call the “problem of reason” (that is, the question of
whether there are diverse forms of reason or only one universal form) and the
second the “problem of rationality” (that is, the question of whether everyone
has the capacity to deploy reason past what mimicry or programming makes
possible). Both of these problems are addressed by Eze’s schema for forms
of reason. He identifies several forms, but focuses on “ordinary reason”,
which allows all the other forms to operate. Ordinary reason also makes ra-
tionality possible, that is, the culturally specific yet emergent way of navigat-
ing forms of reason. Reason is necessarily diverse, because its multiple forms
are deployed differently by different rationalities.

1. Distinguishing Reason and Rationality

I will begin by distinguishing reason and rationality. The distinction I make is directed
particularly at clarifying two debates that have existed within African philosophy, and
Eze’s intervention in them, and so need not necessarily be taken as a distinction that
operates at a more general level. In other words, there are doubtless other ways of dis-
tinguishing these concepts, and arguments that might be made for their similarity or
interchangeability in other contexts. But my starting point here is in the question of
use, not intension.
The distinction is as follows: reason is a process and an activity, while rationality is
a property of the person, one that expresses itself through (at least) the processes of
reason. Rationality expresses itself through reason, but reason may not only be the ex-
pression of rationality. Put another way, reason is a necessary but not sufficient condi-
tion for recognizing rationality. We can see that the two are not the same by the fact
that we can imagine one without the other. We might ask, for instance, whether a
chimp exhibits reason on the one hand, and whether it has rationality on the other, and
those two are different questions. The chimp may exhibit means/ends reason in using
an indirect path to acquire food, for instance. Is this the same as rationality? No, al-
though one might be led for other reasons to see the chimp as having rationality as
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4) 297

well. Showing the ability to follow a train of thought or apply processes of inference is
not in itself a guarantee that one has the property of rationality.
One can imagine saying that a computer exhibits and embodies reason in the sense that
it uses processes of deduction or perhaps induction, but one might at the same time
think that it does not have rationality in the sense of a property of a ‘mind’ (and, in-
deed, that might be the problem, the question of whether we want to say the computer
has a mind, is a mind, or rather models a mind, and if so, whether that model ‘has’
properties such as rationality). Conversely, one might ascribe rationality to someone,
but at the same time argue that they are not reasonable, that is, they do not exhibit the
processes or practices of reason.
Now, someone might object that ‘reason’ here is ambiguous. Are we referring to the
ability to ascribe causes to events? Are we talking about the generation of hypotheses?
The ability to compare ideas? The ability to create concepts? The ability to recognize
and draw inferences based on correlations? The ability to make inferences in analo-
gies? Is reason deontological, that is, fundamentally rule-following (so, for instance,
are we referring to the ability to apply Aristotle’s 3 laws of logic, in particular the law
of non-contradiction?), or is it consequentialist, that is, related to efficiently obtaining
desired outcomes (so, for instance, are we using Aristotle’s intellectual virtues –
techne, phronesis, praxis, poeisis? Perhaps even nous?)? 1 This ambiguity is, I believe,
in keeping with the actual deployment of the term in African philosophy and else-
where. In discussions of reason both within and without African philosophy (including
Eze), it is remarkable how fluidly writers move from one sense to another. This is not
necessarily a sign of lack of rigour, but it may be a sign that the term serves different
purposes at different times. It is not one concept, but a kind of ecology of concepts,
not identical, not totally separate, related in complex ways, but without a unified core.
Within African philosophy, the term can move easily from procedure (is there a
unique form of logic?) to assumption (is it reasonable to believe in ancestors?) to
consequence (what is the most reasonable course of action in a particular case?).
It is clear that animals can ascribe causes to events, at least in a limited sense (they
can follow action to a source), and work with signification and reference (there is a
1 The distinction between a deontological approach toward reason and a consequentialist is not the con-
trast between being rule-following and rule-averse. Consequentialism may in fact embrace rules, but the
point is to bring about a desired outcome. The two approaches also differ on the question of why one
should prefer reason to something else. Deontology has a difficult time with this question, without re-
sorting to consequentialism at some point. If we shift our frame back to ethics and ask why anyone
should be good, there are a couple of answers that do not invoke some form of consequentialism. One is
Kant’s – we should be good because it is ‘hard-wired’ into us, that is, the categorical imperative is a
transcendental a priori. The other is Socrates’ – in the Ring of Gyges story, the answer to why we
should be good is that it renders us to be internally well-ordered, that is, it makes us ‘just.’ Neither of
these approaches help much when we move back to the context of reason itself – the first amounts to
saying that we should be reasonable just because we should be reasonable (since for Kant pure reason
itself grounds ethics), and the second posits a metaphysics which itself needs a defense. In the context
of reason, the more usual approaches come from outside of philosophy. Classical economics simply as-
sumes that everyone is reasonable, and the difference in action is accounted for by the difference in op-
portunities and constraints. Evolutionary psychology argues that we are reasonable because evolution
has selected for reason; this again does not answer the question, but simply requires then a theory of
un-reason, that is, why we might not be reasonable at times. As with the economist, it may turn out that
we always were reasonable all along in all our actions, but the researcher was just unaware of the
contextualizing circumstances or motivations. This sort of account of reason as assumed (economists) or
descriptive account (evolutionists) will not help with the problem before us in African philosophy. For
more on deontology and consequentialism in reason, see Samuels et. al.
298 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4)

whole field of zoosemiotics which explores this) but it is not clear that they can apply
abstract rules or create concepts (although such activity may in fact appear in higher
apes and dolphins). They can recognize correlations (which is why training works),
but they probably will not be able to generate hypotheses. Computers, on the other
hand, can apply abstract rules, but may not be able to ascribe causes to events. Neither
may be very good at working with analogies, although if they could they would almost
certainly accomplish that reasoning in a totally different manner, computers by finding
abstract categories and reasoning from them, and animals by working inductively, fo-
cusing on particulars and their multiple modes of relating and referring. Fortunately,
the vagueness in the idea of reason here (and we could likely identify other senses,
particularly if we go outside of philosophy) does not matter, because all of these ex-
amples are kinds of processes. The key distinction here is not between various kinds of
reason, or which kind might be applied to which kind of reasoner, but between reason
and rationality.
Clearly, the having of a property such as rationality is going to be a lot harder to
demonstrate than will the ability to implement reason. It might be analogous to the dis-
tinction between knowing that someone knows a language and recognizing their abil-
ity to use phrases or sentences in that language. At some point, the preponderance of
evidence is going to indicate that someone knows German (for instance), if they use
enough phrases or sentences, but there is never a guarantee.2 It is not just the ability to
use phrases, but to use them appropriately, to be creative with them, to respond to
other speakers of German in a manner that they recognize as appropriate that indicates
that someone knows German. And yet, no amount of interaction with a potential Ger-
man speaker guarantees that they know German, since that entire interaction is com-
prised of phrases and sentences. What is needed is for the listener to bring something
to the task. The already competent German speaker (and we might ask, how do we
know that that person is competent? But we will leave that for now) must recognize a
tipping point, a minimal level at which understanding is recognized. We could see the
Turing test as a form of this problem – under what conditions can we ascribe to a com-
puter its own form of intelligence analogous to human intelligence? Is the evidence of
intelligence that the computer can ‘fool’ a competent human? Searle’s Chinese room
problem also points toward this issue – if a phrase is ‘translated’ in a closed room by
someone who knows no Chinese, but the output is reliably adequate in a finite amount
of time, can we say that the ‘room’ knows Chinese? Can one engage in the processes
of translation without knowing the language, and does engaging in those processes
mean that one does actually know the language?
Now of course, the choice of this example seems to frame the problem in a specific
manner, toward the possibility of multiple forms of rationality. One can be linguisti-
cally competent in some language, and still not understand German, whereas recogniz-
ing rationality might be more like recognizing that there is a language present at all.
On the other hand, to assume that rationality is a two-state affair (either you have it or
2 There was a sketch by the Canadian comedy troupe ‘Kids in the Hall’, about a shop owner who was
asked for directions by a patron. The shop owner said that he could not give the directions, and also that
he did not speak English. A conversation ensued, in which the shop owner seemed to answer the ques-
tions of the patron, at least some of the time, and yet continued to ‘claim’ that he spoke no English, that
he had memorized all the sentences, including ‘Sorry, I don’t know English’, but did not know the lan-
guage. The further the sketch went, the more improbable the man’s claims, and yet it was clear that the
position was still a logical possibility.
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4) 299

not) also frames the problem in a particular manner, and rules out a priori any possi-
bility that rationality is fundamentally diverse, rather than unified. There are some who
insist that rationality is unified because reality is unified, but this stands as more of a
statement of faith than an argument. How is that unified reality understood as unified?
Only through rationality. The question of whether rationality is unified, as we shall see
below, is the very question at stake. I will continue to use the example of a particular
language, recognizing that it does take a provisional stand on the question of the diver-
sity of rationality, because the point I am trying to make is not about the nature of
rationality but the means we have to recognize it.
We might say, then, that while reason is observable and confirmable, rationality is
inferred and dependent on context. Just as one only knows whether someone speaks
German in the context of other German speakers, and in the context of a series of ade-
quate performances which are no guarantee, but add to the evidence of German speak-
ing. We might, in fact, go further and recognize a series of levels of expertise, all of
which are externally pointed to but not guaranteed by performances, but which are in-
ternally experienced as modes of rationality. Hubert Dreyfus details how this operates
in both an intellectual task (chess) and a more obviously embodied task, driving a ve-
hicle (Dreyfus). What he says about bodily expertise as something experienced in lev-
els of competence tied to modes of intentional experience could as well be said about
rationality (and indeed, I would want to make the tie even closer, to recognize that ra-
tionality is tied up with bodily knowledge, and as such is established for the self in a
similar manner as it is established for the outside viewer).
Recognizing rationality, then, is more than recognizing the applications or processes
of reason. It involves linking together instances of reason with contextual cues to indi-
cate a meaningful context. There is, as I have argued to this point, no guarantee that
instances of reason point to the possession of rationality, even with an infinite number
of instances of reason, but there comes a point when other competent rational beings
will be willing to allow a series of instances of reason together with their context to
sufficiently indicate rationality on the part of one whose rationality might have been in
doubt (the ‘tipping point’). It is important to note that since rationality is established
by those who already have it, the context will be one that existing rational beings will
take as determinative. In other words, it is conceivable that someone could be rational
but sufficiently different from others in the existing context that the being’s rationality
would not be recognized. It is also possible that the expressions of rationality, in the
form of reason, could be sufficiently different as to not be recognized by some rational
being.
The point is this: is it possible that difference in rationality might not indicate a lack
of rationality, but merely a difference, and that that difference, properly considered,
might create new forms of rationality? For philosophers trained to think of rationality
as a singular thing, this is heresy. And yet, it is not the first time in history that philos-
ophers have been asked to consider this. During the Middle Ages, philosophy continu-
ally had to contend with the question of the rationality of God, and whether that was
similar in kind to that of humans. Aquinas said it was not, that it was qualitatively dif-
ferent, but that meant that there was another rationality that formed the limit for human
rationality. More importantly, that difference, properly understood, altered the trajec-
tory of human rationality, or was supposed to. Considering the mind of God was sup-
posed to purify the mind of man, in part because God’s mind had been imperfectly
mirrored on the human mind (imago Dei), and in part because some believe that God’s
300 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4)

mind occasionally broke through the structures of human rationality in mystical expe-
rience. Mysticism was not the addition of new knowledge or a new revelation, but
rather the re-ordering of the categories of the mind and the connecting of previously
disparate elements.
Now, the only reason for bringing up the medieval experience is to plant the idea
that difference in rationality might be a productive thing, rather than a problem to be
overcome. I am not suggesting anything about the existence of God or mystical experi-
ences here, merely that philosophy has, at one time in its past, had to deal with the pro-
ductive potential of diverse forms of rationality.
2. Two Problems Disguised as One in African Philosophy
Why is it important to make the distinction between reason and rationality? Because I
believe that in African philosophy, the debate about rationality has actually been two
problems or debates which have often been conflated. We might call the first the prob-
lem of reason, and the second the problem of rationality. In the first case, the question
turns on whether reason, either in its basic structure or in its various forms, is universal
or particular (and for ‘particular’ some would use ‘relative’). What is regarded as ‘uni-
versal’ or ‘particular’ has generally been forms of reason, the starting points of reason,
and the proposed applications of reason. So, for instance, one might wonder whether
logic is in fact universal, or whether it has local, ‘ethno’, strains or iterations that are
not merely forms of some wider sense of logic. Western logic, for instance, has largely
been based on a binary system (true/false); what if logic were based on some other
system, as in some Indian forms of logic? The same might be said of ethics (are
meta-ethical principles localized or not?) or philosophical anthropology (is there a
sense of the ‘person’ that differs in different places?). As well, there has been discus-
sion about whether reason has the same universal starting point (Wiredu argues that it
does, and it is based in common human biology (Wiredu)), or whether it differs in dif-
ferent places (those who regard culture as determinative of human existence, rather
than a secondary fact of existence, will argue this way).
This debate is often traced to Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (Winch),
in which he argued in a Wittgensteinian fashion that reason is irreducibly particular,
that is, related to specific cultural groups (and one might add that a modified version
of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would include language as another condition of such
particularity, and we might imagine other candidates for a conditioning factor). Robin
Horton responded to this by arguing that reason is, in fact, universal, since there is
only one reality, and what differentiates cultures is whether they are ‘open’ or ‘clos-
ed’, that is, whether their processes of reason admit the possibility of non-confirming
or contrary evidence from outside their own frame of reference, or whether they do not
(Horton 1967a, 1967b). He argued that while both were essentially empirical forms of
reason, Western science was an open form of reason, while traditional African thought
was mostly closed. The problem remains a live one – witness the exchange between
Carole Pearce (Pearce) and several critics (Bewaji 1995, Keita, Trompf) in Philosophy
of the Social Sciences, where she argued that there was no African philosophy because
philosophy ought not to properly attend to the conditions of its production or to other
local conditions, and there was nothing past that in African philosophy. And, various
African philosophers have positioned themselves either on the side of the debate.
There are variations on those who take the side that philosophy must be universal.
There are those who say that philosophy must be universal, which implies that it is
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4) 301

only recent and emergent in Africa (Hountondji), or it must be universal but that it in
fact exists in traditional culture (Oruka and others), or that it is universal and in fact
came from Africa in the first place (Afrocentrists), or that it is universal but has differ-
ent cultural expressions, and we cannot get to the universality except through the cul-
tural expressions. On the side of those who see philosophy as particular are ethnophi-
losophers, who want to identify coherent, internally consistent world views within cul-
tures, and linguistic philosophers such as Kagame who see all philosophy as depend-
ent on or necessitated by forms of language, and others.
The key thing to recognize here is that the debate is about whether the processes of
reason are, or must be, the same in all places, or whether they might be shaped by the
conditions of a particular place.
The problem of rationality is a different one. It has to do not with processes but ca-
pabilities and properties. Its crudest formulations came at the end of the Enlighten-
ment, when thinkers such as Hume, Kant, and Hegel argued that Africans were not ca-
pable of having a philosophical life because they did not possess rationality. It was this
conviction that undergirded colonialism. It is seen in incipient form further back than
that, when the inhabitants of new lands were compared with children in need of guard-
ians. But in fact it was worse than that – it was not that they did not yet have a philo-
sophical life, but that it was impossible, apart from some limited forms of mimicry.
Nor was it that they did not exhibit reason – the colonial project could not have suc-
ceeded to the extent that it did if they believed that Africans could not use the pro-
cesses of reason, at least some of the time. Like animals, they could be trained; like
computers, they could be programmed. It was that Africans did not, and could not,
possess rationality.
One way to clarify this is to adapt Chomsky’s distinction between performance and
competence. In this modernist and racist view I have outlined here, it was not just that
Africans did not perform reasonably (that is, it was not that they had access to the
rules of reason but like novices were unable to use them well), they were not compe-
tent (they constitutionally did not have the access to the rules of reason, or at least not
all of them). Poor performance can be corrected through practice, while lack of com-
petence either has to be addressed in another manner (education, if it is possible) or
cannot be addressed at all (and this was the attitude toward Africans, that they could
be trained but not educated). Even regular exhibitions of reason were seen as analo-
gous to someone speaking German using a phrase book – the person has no knowl-
edge of the structure of German, but is just attempting to apply phrases or sounds to a
situation based on a set of instructions.
We can trace the debate through its inversions in people like Senghor and other ad-
vocates of negritude, who argued that rationality was different in Africa but not ab-
sent, and celebrated its emotional and participative nature. It was, in effect, a different
language. We can focus the issue more, away from the question of whether Africans
have rationality in general to whether they have philosophical rationality, that is, the
ability to construct and maintain a philosophical system of ‘their own’, whatever that
may mean. And, it is also important to recognize that, for at least some African philos-
302 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4)

ophers, the problem of rationality continues, that is, there is a strong sense that within
philosophy, and in the academy in general, Africans are still not seen as rational.3
The rationality debate takes on the character of the earlier example over whether
someone can speak German. Those who do speak the language try to identify creative
and contextually appropriate uses of phrases or sentences (that is, reason), that indicate
a capacity for and proficiency in the language (that is, rationality). The language ex-
ample is an apt one here, because a speaker of one language might be inclined to think
that all rational things are made available through his or her language. It is certainly
something Heidegger thought, that German was the natural heir to Greek, and the
proper philosophical language. The point, though, is that one might think of philoso-
phy as a language, in which case other languages might be other disciplines. In fact,
philosophy might be inclined to think of itself as a fundamental language, the language
of universals, and as such fundamental to other disciplinary languages. Philosophy,
though, comes in dialects. Rationality has attended over time to the conditions of its
production, not just the demands of universalization. Some philosophers insist that the
only concern of philosophy is the universal; I would argue that the universal is always
the concern of philosophy, but it is not the location of philosophy. Philosophy is
dialectic (although not dialectical), in the sense that it speaks in ways that betray its
provenance.
While the problem here may superficially seem to be one of universality or particu-
larity, I would like to suggest that the issue is actually about relative human capacity.
If we accept that reason might be diverse in some manner, that is, forms of reason
might draw on assumptions specific to a culture or place, that in itself does not mean
that rationality is also diverse. However, we might separately want to see rationality as
also diverse. It is also a question about what I call the ‘thought-life’, or the path that a
set of concepts define in a particular place. If, as I argued earlier, rationality is a con-
textually recognized thing that has the processes of reason as necessary but not suffi-
cient conditions, then the question goes deeper than whether one can identify a partic-
ular process or other as reasonable in the manner that might be manifest elsewhere. In
other words, the problem here is not just about universality and particularity, but about
the means one might use to recognize rationality at all. And in fact, the issue goes
deeper yet, to the very humanity of Africans, in a way that the problem of reason does
not.

3. Eze’s Ordinary Reason

Eze’s distinction between reason and rationality neither begins with the definitions I
have laid out, nor from the frame I have used. He speaks of the ‘rational’ to describe
‘occurrences or actions that might be observed in either the natural or social worlds,
but always within reflectively legitimated – not merely naturalistic – frameworks’
(xvi). And ‘rationality’ intends to capture the unifying, focusing product of diverse
reason, called the ‘mind’. Humans ‘make their own minds’ (84). While Eze draws on
anti-Cartesian work such as Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh for this, he
actually wants to refocus the question of the nature of the mind to the question of the
mind’s autonomy in determining the goals it undertakes (83).
3 See, for example, ‘The crucial point to understand here is that these continuators share one thing in
common with their predecessors, namely, the definition of the human being as ‘a rational animal’ must
exclude the African.’ (Bewaji 2003: 406).
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4) 303

Eze’s frame for the problems of reason and rationality is different from mine. I
framed the problem as one of recognition – how do we know reason or rationality
when we see it? Eze frames it as the question of emergence – where does rationality
come from? He does speak of recognizing the emergence of reason in time, but that
points to a prerequisite, for him, for the emergence of reason at all – that we acknowl-
edge its diverse foundations.
This attention to diversity in rationality Eze calls the ‘conceptual vernacular’, which
is ‘the task of philosophical analysis of experience in everyday cultures of everyday
peoples’ (xv). His task is phenomenological without phenomenology’s ‘transcendental
posturings, and the resultant derogation of everyday cultures of the peoples of the
world.’
In a sense, then, Eze responds to my distinction between the problem of reason and
the problem of rationality by particularizing the capacity of rationality and by showing
that reason itself precedes and generates rationality, rather than the other way around,
that is, rather than the idea that rationality must be in place first and then forms of rea-
son are deployed (or, in the case of reason without rationality, we have instinct or
mimicry). In other words, he wants to move the problem of rationality away from the
question of how we might recognize it (and who is equipped to recognize it), and to-
ward the question of how its development and capacities are irreducibly in debt to
particularity, or as he puts it, diversity.
But he does not want to tie this diversity primarily to cultural factors. His first chap-
ter makes this clear. The first chapter is an overview of, as he titles it ‘Varieties of Ra-
tional Experience’, an interesting evocation of William James’ Varieties of Religious
Experience. James’ book can be seen as the same kind of ‘phenomenology without the
transcendental posturing’ as Eze aims for here. The varieties he discusses are
calculative reason (basically scientific reasoning), formal reason (logic), hermeneutical
reason (the grounding of the former two kinds in ontology, or in the question of their
relation to being), empirical reason (not science, but reason based in experience),
phenomenological reason (the relationship of empirical reason to consciousness), and
transcendental reason (phenomenological reason extended to the search for the general
conditions of consciousness). One might be inclined to see a progression of sorts here,
but that inclination should be resisted, as Eze finishes the chapter with a thoroughgo-
ing critique of transcendental reason. In other words, there is no sense that this list of
forms of reason build from less adequate to more adequate, or from more abstract to
more human and engaged. It is merely a list that underscores his position that there are
multiple forms of reason available to anyone, and that this multiplicity cuts across cul-
tural or racial lines. The translation between forms of reason, then, is not analogous to
the translation of languages or cultures; if anything, the analogy goes the other direc-
tion, since reason is always already diverse within humans, and the skills learned from
translating between those forms of reason become useful for other modes of transla-
tion.
He finishes the list off with one more form of reason: ordinary reason. And this is
the form of reason that he wants to trace throughout the book. In other words, he
wants to argue that while all these forms of reason are legitimate and contribute to the
diversity of rationality, they all must be located in ordinary reason. So what is this
form?
In understanding ordinary reason, it is first important to note the way that Eze relates
reason and rationality to each other. Rationality ‘freely appears or comes to itself in
304 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4)

history’ (113), and this requires that we ‘recognize this emergence of reason in time in
the form of what we ordinarily call experience.’ (113) What does this mean? It means
that reason must grow from experience. That means that the categories of reason do
not precede experience. Philosophical distinctions such as fact/value, truth/interpreta-
tion, essence/accident are all modes of describing experience, useful in some cases and
in not others. In fact, we could see the beginning of this paper as an exercise in Ezeian
reasoning – I stipulated a distinction between reason and rationality, not one that tran-
scends all particularity but one that would be useful to understanding a set of problems
within African philosophy. Eze follows Rorty in resisting any sort of Platonism. In an
extension of Aristotle, both Eze and Rorty argue that reason is ‘a Darwinian (‘prag-
matic’) biological and historical phenomenon.’ (113-114) Reason is an ‘organic form
of life’, which means that reason is not ‘infused in humans from outside of the biologi-
cal and political conditions of life with others in community.’ (114) In a reversal of the
way philosophers sometimes operate, it is not that we come up with our metaphysics
and epistemology first, and then derive our ethics and our political philosophy once
we have decided what is true about the world. It is, in fact, the reverse – our
metaphysics and epistemology become available within the context of our lived world,
which includes our ethics and our politics.
Does this, as many will suspect, leave us in some form of relativism? Eze argues
that it does not. There is a critical, skeptical aspect to ordinary or vernacular reason.
While various forms of reason will develop ‘rules of thumb’ (Rorty’s phrase) to guide
their judgments, the inevitable ethnocentrism of this approach is not to be dealt with
through abstract universals, but through the creative encounter of those contexts of
reason with each other. The encounter is creative because new rules of thumb, that is,
new forms of reason will have to be developed as new frames of usefulness for that
reason will be developed. ‘There are’, he argues, ‘many universal languages of reason’
(9).
Is Eze, in the end, just advocating a form of Rortyan pragmatism? He does not think
so. He argues that if Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism is taken too far, we may
end up with what Cornel West called the ‘American evasion of philosophy’ (116-117).
But how does one avoid taking it too far? Eze proposes looking to the disquotational
theory of reference, particularly Putnam’s version of it, as a way to avoid ‘these ques-
tions about causality without falling into the problem of a reaction to Platonism nor to
an embrace of Hume’s hyperbolic skepticism’ (117). What Eze sees in disquota-
tionality is the ability ‘to assert something as true by learning the meaning of experi-
enced facts’ (117). So, if one wants to assert ‘Snow is white,’ the condition for that as-
sertion is that one knows what it means to say ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if
snow is white’. The truth of the statement under question is established by ‘dis-quot-
ing’ it, that is, taking it out of the quotation marks by bringing the level of experience
to bear on the statement itself.
Disquotationality, Eze argues, is like improvisation in jazz or sampling as used in
various other musical forms, in the sense that it allows a generation or transformation
of the vernacular or ordinary experiences so that they ‘reveal their particular reasons at
a higher level of universal structures’ (118). It ‘elevates the common and recognizably
mundane in experiences to the highest levels of cognition, where the experiences can
be apprehended in thought and feeling as both subjective and social sources of the
self’ (118). It is here where we can see that Eze’s concern is not to identify forms of
reason, or distinguish reason from unreason, but to account for what happens in per-
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4) 305

formances of reason, and what is made possible when reason is performed. It is a cre-
ative act – ‘knowing how to linguistically conform to rules allows one the freedom to
generate or reproduce, according to a rule, what is learned from experience in the rules
governing disquotation as such’ (118).
Human reason, then, is always improvisation, and is therefore always creative.
Disquotation ‘refers to the communicative act in which a world of experience comes
universally into view’ and, I might add, not only comes into view but is created as ra-
tional. And it is also a form of translation, in the sense that it is the ability to state what
one meant, or what an experience meant. Eze sees this model as one which sidesteps
‘the Platonism implicit in a strong correspondence theory of truth, but also the echoes
of Platonism in thick realism (e.g., the claim that language ‘tracks’ an extralinguistic
world or ‘hooks’ onto objects)’ (119).
The earlier analogy I used in distinguishing reason and rationality, that of a lan-
guage, thus becomes significant. Reason is not like utterances in a language, it is
founded in language. Eze works from a linguistic model of reason, rather than a psy-
chological one. Is it philosophical? I believe so, in the sense that it accounts for the
production of rationality, and of meaningful worlds. But the specific way that I used
language to frame the reason/rationality distinction turns out to be a red herring, albeit
one that allowed us to see the twin problems within African philosophy. The
quasi-structuralist account, where reason is like parole and rationality is like langue,
ignores the historical structure of the relationship between reason and rationality.
Eze’s account, in the end, is more diachronic than synchronic, and it must be, for it re-
quires that there be a world of experience, with already established practices, to
ground reason, which in turn produces rationality. We do not generate a world ex
nihilo, but rather we always already find ourselves in a world where there are practices
of reason, some of which have risen to the level of the universal, and most of which
could be brought there, if the imperative existed for it.

4. Eze’s Answer to the Problems of Reason and Rationality in

African Philosophy
An example will help here. Suppose you witness a car accident at a street corner. You
decide to wait until the police officer gets there, and the officer asks you to describe
what happened. You have at least four choices of answers (more, of course, are
possible):
1. ‘A two-ton piece of metal came down one vector, and another two ton piece
came down another vector at time T1. They collided, T2, producing a certain
number of kilojoules of energy. That energy had the effect of tearing apart the
metal, in some cases on impact points and in others on pre-existing metal fa-
tigue areas. The trajectories of the metal at T3 can be accounted for by the
event at T2.’ Let’s call this the ‘physics’ account.
2. ‘Car A failed to stop for a stop sign, and car B seemed to be going very fast.’
Let’s call this the ‘legal’ account.
3. ‘I could see the driver of Car A distracted by swatting at something in the ve-
hicle (I’m guessing it was a bee, but I couldn’t see it, obviously).’ Let’s call this
the ‘intentional’ account.
306 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4)

4. ‘God called the person in Car B home (or, the spirits were angry with the
person in car B for having desecrated something sacred).’ Let’s call this the
‘spiritual’ account.
Now, which is the ‘right’ account? Depending on the context they are all at least po-
tentially right. But we have to translate the question that is being asked – ‘what hap-
pened?’, asked by a police officer, probably was meant to elicit the legal account, or
perhaps the intentional account. Notice, though, that all four accounts are forms of re-
alism, in the sense that they all begin from empirical events and none of try to deny the
empirical-ness of the empirical. They may differ on what populates the world (are
there spirits? Do intentions exist, and if so do they matter?), but they are all attempts
to account for empirically available events. These are, I take it, what Putnam has in
mind when he talks about internal realism. They are conceptual frames of reference.
And the first three accounts, at least, we could even see as naturalist accounts, in that
none of them require any extra metaphysical entities (although one might quibble
about intentions).
Notice a couple more things about these accounts. First, they all use formal reason-
ing – none of them necessarily denies the law of non-contradiction or modus ponens.
In other words, they do not differ on the processes of reason. Second, we might think
that the way to proceed would be to just clarify the question, but that in itself does not
reduce the ambiguity. For instance, if the officer says ‘no, what I meant was, who is to
blame?’, we still could get very different answers. Physics account: Matter does what
it does. Blame makes no sense. Legal account: The laws are to blame. If the laws had-
n’t been there, people would have to pay attention at every corner, and these things
wouldn’t happen. The problem is that people trust in this social convention. Inten-
tional account: Nature is to blame. Clearly there was a distraction. Spiritual account:
God/spirits are to blame. The point is that all four of these accounts are at least poten-
tially examples of reason, and they cannot be reduced to each other because each
operates within a different conceptual frame.
And third, we are not talking about disputes of similar types of accounts – we could
have a dispute, for instance, about whether the light really was red or not, between two
witnesses. Those are different forms of legal accounts, and work from the same con-
ceptual frame. Adequacy can be decided from within the frame, using the rules of the
frame. Adequacy between the accounts cannot be decided in the same way – there are
no rules we can appeal to in order to tell, for instance, that the physics account is right
and the intentional account is wrong. In some important sense, they are all at least po-
tentially right at the same time. If one is a thoroughgoing positivist, one might try to
reduce the explanations to the ‘simplest’, or most metaphysically modest, but in doing
so one might also risk the officer’s ire for being uncooperative. In other words, just
because someone might assert or believe in positivism doesn’t make it an adequate so-
lution for these socially situated forms of knowledge. And, disquotationality means
that adding ‘and it’s really true’ to any of these accounts doesn’t materially add any-
thing to the account itself. The key is not the ‘truth’ in some abstract sense, but rather
in understanding both the ordinary events being explained, plus the conceptual frame
being used.
The example to this point has been based on Putnam’s internal realism. What does
Eze add? I believe he adds the move from reason to rationality. In other words, we
have to figure out what the socially appropriate questions are. Which are the concep-
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4) 307

tual frames that are appropriate, and when are they appropriate? And how do they link
together, supporting each other or not? What happens under these conditions is that ra-
tionality emerges, which means that we are able to navigate the conceptual frames,
that is, bring intentional consciousness to bear on ordinary events to know how to use
the conceptual frames. Rationality is an emergent property, not of brain states but of
socially sanctioned and historically supported forms of reason. It is therefore different
in different places, but it may also be different in the same place. The key is not to
identify who is and who is not rational (everyone is), but rather to see what new con-
cepts might be made available under emergent practiced expressions of rationality.
This does not mean that there is no ‘better’ and ‘worse’ in reason, or that relativism
reigns. It means that the capacity of rationality does not precede the expressions of
reason, but follows them, and amounts to a creative, localized response to the tensions
and incongruities inherent in recognizing different contexts of reason.
My purpose in separating reason and rationality was to identify two separate prob-
lems within the history of African philosophy. Typically, these problems have led to
very different kinds of debates. The problem of reason has led to the debate over
whether reason is in fact particular or universal. The problem of rationality has led to
the debate over how one recognizes it and who has it. Eze’s answer to both these prob-
lems should now be clear. The problem of reason disappears – reason just is both par-
ticular and universal. In fact, the distinction exists only if we start from an abstracted
version of reason. If we begin from ordinary reason, we find that reason is on a kind of
continuum between the particular and the universal. It is rooted in its place because it
is rooted in experience, but it does not stay tied to that place. It is an articulation of the
requirements of a place. Diverse forms of reason exist for different purposes, and that
diversity is not particularly a function of culture, but of purpose.
The problem of rationality is also answered – rationality never was a quality held in
advance of reason, one that had to be recognized by those who already had it and
which always bore the possibility of mistake. It emerges out of forms of reason, as
they interact, find their possibilities and limits, and serve the needs of a community.
And philosophical rationality then becomes one particular mode of that configuration
of forms of reason, one kind of question one might ask or focus one might have to-
ward reason. It is concept-focused and analytic toward reason, but to the extent that its
analysis loses sight or memory of its origins in ordinary reason, it becomes ‘narcissis-
tic’ and ‘ethnocentric’ (115).
There are questions that can be raised about Eze’s overall account of reason and ra-
tionality. John Pittman wonders whether Eze’s ‘ordinary reason’ is really a ‘single un-
differentiated consistent thing’ (Pittman). If my analysis is correct, Eze is not commit-
ted to ordinary reason being single and undifferentiated. Ifeanyi Menkiti suggests a
question even as he supports Eze’s vision of diverse forms of reason – when there is a
conflict between forms of reason, is there another form of reason that serves as arbiter
(Menkiti)? Again, it seems that Eze’s answer would be that it is not that an arbiter is
needed, but that the combination of forms of reason produces rationality. And I won-
der, as Eze extends his argument to resist ‘extraordinary’ reason, whether in some
cases extraordinary experience (his examples in his final chapter are apartheid in
South Africa and the genocide in Rwanda) does not warrant extraordinary reason in
response, and that such a response need not necessarily be the groundwork for further
irrationality.
308 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2008, 27(4)

As a response to the two longstanding problems in African philosophy that have

been sketched out here I believe Eze offers a new and powerful approach. His commit-
ment to preserving a wide range of forms of reason, and rendering them productive of
rationality, accomplishes his lifelong task of showing the ethnocentrism inherent in
myopic forms of reason in Europe and Africa, and at the same time accomplishes the
equally important task of showing the way to productive dialogue across the borders
of forms of reason.

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