I. Introduction

It is still common in discussions regarding the origins of philosophy to hear someone defend the view that philosophy, and by implication rationality, originated in ancient Athens. This view can be easily disputed by simply pointing to other ancient traditions, such as those of India and China, which reveal sophisticated philosophical theories in many of the same areas that Western philosophers are interested in, such as semantics, logic, and ethics. While this is obviously true, in this paper a somewhat different version of the objections, the illusion that rationality begins in Athens will be sketched. I am going to develop a version of this objection, one that is certainly not new or original, but which is a somewhat speculative and sketchy attempt to rethink the history of philosophy, or the history of rationality.

To begin with, however, we need to look at some examples of the view I wish to refute:

In his history of philosophy, Julián Marías writes that a new theoretical attitude, or a ‘new human method emerges in Greece one day, for the first time in history, and since then there is something radically new in the world which makes philosophy possible’. (1941, p. 4)

In a similar vein, Bertrand Russell writes that ‘[n]othing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece’ (1956, p. 25). And again, Hegel in his Philosophy of History, after his discussion of India is happy to announce that ‘[a]mong the Greeks we feel ourselves immediately at home, for we are in the region of Spirit’ (1956, p. 223).

It is not difficult to find many, but of course not all, treatments of the origins of philosophy by Western philosophers such sentiments being expressed, sometimes with surprise that such a thing should have occurred, sometimes as proud realization of their own civilized condition. Somet (2005), in his book L’Afrique dans la Philosphie, quotes a number of similar assertions by noted philosophers:

Heidegger: ‘Philosophy is Greek in its own being.’ ‘Philosophy speaks Greek’ (2005, p. 28).

Husserl: ‘the sudden rise of philosophy is the origin of Europe from the spiritual point of view’ (2005, p. 29).

These are fairly common views about the origins of philosophy, and they have had a particular salience in locating Africa in the history of philosophy. The persistence of this theoretical attitude towards the non-European world, and in particular Africa, has been attributed to the workings of a rather malignant spirit, namely the Ghost of Hegel, haunting the corridors of university departments, as Taiwo has eloquently stated (1998, p. 5). Exorcizing this ghost may very well be the solution to the problem at hand here, the problem of the failure of Western philosophy to take universality seriously. This failure is in part due to the theory, defended by some philosophers and anthropologists such as the early Levy-Bruhl, that there are two types of mind, the rational mind of Greek origin, and the symbolic mind found for the most part in Africa.

Nevertheless, it is Hegel who boldly claims that Africans are incapable of thinking the universal, and as a consequence, they are incapable of reflecting philosophically. This can be disputed in two ways. The first to be found in the works of philosophers such as Kagame, Gyekye and Wiredu amongst many who produce substantive examples of universals in African thought. The second is to suggest that in some cases, a less speculative approach to reasoning may yield important philosophical insights which Hegel might reject as being not ‘universal’. Gyekye, for instance, writes that the Akan language is more ‘materialist’ than English, which I take it to suggest that such a language may succeed in avoiding speculative excesses that European philosophers found to be the mark of universality (1987, pp.165-66). Take for instance the concept of ‘existence’; European philosophers may have been misled by the structure of European languages, precisely by suggesting universalist or non-specific forms of ‘existing’ that led them to a foggy metaphysics. Such metaphysical fog is as a matter of philosophical fact avoided by some African thinkers who, drawing from their respective languages, construe the concept of existence in a far more critical manner, for existence is necessarily concrete, made specific by reference to space and time. Existence outside some specific location, that is, non-localized existence, is a rather mysterious idea, one that is not based on human experience or practice, and for whose understanding we have no grounds; philosophically speaking, it may be best to avoid it. A consequence of this, for instance, is that, in Gyekye’s words, ‘it is more than likely that a thinker using Akan would never have raised the ontological argument’ for the existence of God (1987, p.181). However, this less speculative approach should not be confused, as Hegel seems to do, with a lack of rational capacity or lack of universal concepts; as Gyekye writes, ‘[t]he fact that Akan thinkers generally put their thoughts in concrete terms should not be taken to mean that they lack abstract concepts’ (1987, p.170).

II. Rationality, Abstract Thought, and Philosophy

Whether philosophy was absent before Athens hinges on what we can make of the concepts of rationality and universality, and indeed and most importantly, on what counts as a philosophical thought. In order to proceed with some clarity, let us then begin by offering a very simple and general description of some of the key concepts we are dealing with, namely, rationality, philosophy, and universality.

By rationality I will mean the human capacity for abstraction and generalization, together with the capacity to produce trains of thought intended to give reasons, to persuade, or to reach conclusions from what is taken to be certain knowledge; in short, a rational person is a person endowed with reason. A key component of what we call rationality is the capacity to produce concepts. Concepts may be described as ensembles of characteristics that describe in the most general terms, in abstraction, some object of thought, be it a physical object, a social one, or a value such as justice, truth, beauty, or number. Philosophy most often focuses on concepts, makes them specific, analyzes them, and builds theories with them. However, concepts are expressed in the form of words, words in general tend to ambiguity, as the same word can express a variety of distinct concepts. Moreover, as Zaslavsky suggests, the absence of specific words to express a concept does not imply the absence of the concept (1999, p.14). Quite often, a practice, such as that of counting, emerges before the word to denote its concept is developed. Many of our abstract concepts emerge first as practices, and only later are they specified, expressed as words, and become themselves objects of reflection. The question then becomes, when does philosophy begin, when the practice is first established, or when the word signifying its concept is coined, or when it becomes the object of theoretical reflection? That is, when does the practice with an implicit use of concepts become explicitly philosophy?

I will take philosophy in Appiah’s sense of answers given to questions that human beings cannot avoid, necessary questions that press on the mind and demand answers. Appiah writes that ‘[a]ll human cultures, simple or complex, large or small, industrial or pre-industrial’ have concepts and beliefs ‘about the central questions of human life; about mind and matter, knowledge and truth, good and bad, right and wrong; about human nature and the universe we inhabit’ (1995, p.3).

These beliefs are spontaneous answers to questions which are felt with a certain urgency on them. They are the fundamental questions about the nature of what exists, the nature of human beings and their place in the universe, and the options and obligations that face us, both as individuals and as social beings. Though all human beings have answers for such questions, not all answers are equally adequate. The spontaneous answers given to them in those conversations that people have had since the most remote antiquity are only the beginning of philosophy, what Appiah calls ‘folk philosophy’. Formal philosophy starts when those answers are developed critically with the methods of logical and conceptual analysis (Appiah 1995, p.4).

How do these questions arise? They arise from human experience, that is, from human intervention in the natural world, and from our social exchanges. Our practical engagement with the natural and social worlds presents us with such unavoidable questions. This may be the moment when, or the process by which, practice becomes explicitly philosophy.

As noted by Appiah, there is of course a difference between the formal approach to such questions, and the approach of what he labels as folk philosophy. Whereas folk philosophy gives spontaneous answers to the urgent questions that arise from human experience, perhaps more ideological or based on the common sense of the age, the formal approach relies on logical rules, principles of conceptual coherence, norms aimed at distinguishing between reliable knowledge and other sorts of beliefs, all of which have been carefully elaborated over the centuries. They have come to constitute what Gramsci calls permanent acquisitions of human culture, that is, ‘the set of abstract tools of thought that have been discovered, purified, refined through the history of philosophy and culture’ (Gramsci 1975, Q 6, §180; p. 826). Without such norms, which emanate from the early origins in spontaneous philosophy and were developed as the need arose for greater clarity and rigour, philosophy, rationality, and the universal would not have become such a substantive presence in our minds as they are today. One could say without exaggeration that, in spite of the doubts that have become commonplace today and which assert themselves with a radical force, universality is the vocation of philosophy. The problem has been that all too often such a vocation has become an obsessive, unreflective, and dogmatic passion, a passion that all too often focuses on false universals, on partiality presented as universality (hence the force of postmodern scepticism).

Although the distinction between folk and formal philosophy is useful, it may not capture the real complexity of the phenomenon we call philosophy. As I have suggested, we may first distinguish between implicit concepts which are contained in practice, explicit concepts as they emerge with language, and the reflection that the linguistic/conceptual form enables, what we may call second-order theorizing. The question, When does philosophy begin? may not have a clear answer, not only because by philosophy we may mean any of the three stages (practical/implicit, explicit, reflective), but mainly because reflection presupposes linguistic form, linguistic form presupposes, and would not exist without, practice that implicitly contains conceptual content. We may conclude that the real inventors of a philosophical concept are those who pioneered a practice that was shaped by an implicit concept. They started a process that led to the highest forms of abstraction we know today, from philosophy to mathematics

Finally, we need to recognize that universality is discovered, or perhaps invented, as are all human artifacts. Like all human artifacts, universality is always in the making; it is a process of human development only in its infancy. Hence, we may enquire into the conditions that developed in the long past that made thinking of universality possible, – three will be discussed, the making of tools, language, and the invention of mathematics; the present circumstances that promise a better understanding of this process, in part because of the developments in various non-canonical schools of philosophy; and the uncertain future of universality.

III. Origins of conceptual thinking

In thinking about the origins of philosophy and rational thought, we may do well remembering the following two propositions:

1. 1. ‘What is usually taken as the origin of philosophy, indeed of rational thought, is no more than a phase, which it itself presupposes a long history of conceptions, of conceptualizations and prior formulations’. (Somet 2005, p.17)
   2. ‘But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind’. (Vico 1953, p. 479, § 331)

These modifications of the mind, or what Somet (2005) called ‘conceptions, conceptualizations and prior formulations’ are the product of human activity, or humans solving problems of existence, both regarding their survival and their social lives. The production of universal concepts, and in particular of those concepts that so clearly identify the aspirations of a human project, is to be found in development of ideas, conceptual tools, and attitudes that took place in a millennia long, almost imperceptible, and silent history of the modifications of the mind. These were developments about which few, if any, traces of their existence have been left in the historical record, so they have acquired the condition of what Gramsci called the margins of history. And yet, they were the central actors of a process without which no universality in thinking would be possible. When the great explosions of activity took place in China, India, Babylonia, Egypt, and later Greece, the terrain had been prepared, the foundations had been set by anonymous giants lost in the silent depths of time. So, Russell’s confusion regarding the rise of Greek civilization is a product of our limitations in understanding that silent past. But it is not so silent after all. The unknown Socrates did exist, for reflection clearly took place. The results of that reflection are so widespread that we do not even notice. They are so much part of everyday life that, like the oxygen we breathe, they pass unnoticed. Like oxygen, we notice them only in their absence. I will suffice to point out a few of them, briefly because, although in themselves they give substantive credence to Sonet’s and Vico’s hypotheses, their full development is the work of many specialists in a variety of fields. The philosophical implications of their findings are of considerable interest for us.

a) Tool making

The making of tools develops two important conceptualizations that contribute to universal thinking. First, to make a tool means to modify the structure of an object, such as a rock or a stick, to make it perform a specific function. In other words, tool making involves the development of the capacity to interrelate function and structure in perception and thinking. This may very well be a case of an implicit concept which is not yet clearly identified by a word, but which is nevertheless effective in organizing action^[1]. Furthermore, tool making also involves the planning of an ordered time sequence of actions to be performed in order to achieve a desired structure change. Planning, anticipating, relating cause and effect over sequences of actions, are further elements in rational thinking and hence in possibilities of thinking universally. Finally, the transmission of the acquired knowledge and techniques (master and teachers), and distribution of that knowledge (justice) are further necessary elements in the development of human thinking, and in particular of abstract thinking about order, causality, temporality, and agency (Carbonell 2008; pp. 40- 44). In short, tool making is a practice which exhibits many implicit concepts, concepts that begin as organizers of activity and later become fully-fledged philosophical conceptions at the core of scientific knowledge, pedagogy, and ethics.

b) Language.

Much has been said about the origins of language and about the conditions under which it emerged. Whether arising in the family, as a form of communication to allay fear of separation of babies from mothers (Hrdy 2009, pp.123-4), or in the context of cooperative hunting and gathering (Tomasello 2014 passim), language enabled human beings not only to communicate effectively, but to develop the symbolic mind, a mind capable of representing the world by means of symbols and, ultimately, concepts. This is of crucial importance, for it is this process of linguistic development that enables the translation of perception and experience into symbols, be they markings on a surface or sounds as is the case with the spoken language.^[2]

Moreover, the symbolic mind that develops with the invention of language meant that new, non-immediate and non-vanishing (as perceptions tend to be) forms of representation of the world were now possible. These new representations are much easier to communicate and to store both as common memories, and common purposes understood by all those involved. One interesting result of this new ability, one with rich political, social and scientific implications, is that it enabled humans to compare their respective points of view, their different experiences, and hence they began to understand reality, and to plan activities, from the point of view of all, or objectively. Co-ordination, (hegemony), public knowledge, and understanding the mind of others are the necessary consequences of the linguistic mind.

Two points to be emphasized: first, as Sandra Hrdy puts it, ‘cooperative breeding came before braininess’ (2009, p.176), or more generally, thinking is itself a product of communal living, so that affection and empathy came before reason.

Secondly, language is the first enabler of universal thought, and the tool for further development of such thinking. The inventors of language, then, are the first giants on whose shoulders we stand.

c) Mathematics

In his book The Universe Within, Neil Turok notes that ‘[m]any of the oldest mathematical artifacts are African.’ The oldest one is a ‘baboon’s leg, from a cave in Swaziland, dated to 35,000 B.C.’ (2012, p.8). Markings on this bone suggest that it functioned as a lunar calendar. Archeological research has unearthed other such artifacts with mathematically significant notches engraved on them. One of the most significant pieces of evidence is a bone found in a fishing village in Lake Edward believed to date back 23,000 to 18,000 years BCE. This carved bone is an intriguing artifact whose exact function and meaning is the subject of some debate. It appears, however, that the markings on this bone represent numbers in certain relations; that is, the markings represent a notational and counting system. The notches on this bone are arranged in several columns in such a way that it has led researchers to the conclusion that ‘the bone may have been an artifact of a people who used a number system based on ten, and who were also familiar with prime numbers and the operation of duplication’ (Zaslavsky 1999, p.18).

What were the functions of such numbering systems? Most probably they were related to a lunar calendar; it would appear that this bone is one of the earliest traces of intellectual activity, consisting of a six month’ sequential notation on the basis of a lunar calendar’ (Zaslavsky 1999, p.18).

Such number systems seem to have originated in the practical necessities of economic activity, particularly agriculture. Being able to foretell the characteristics of the seasons, their duration, the coming and going of weather patterns would no doubt have been the practical origins of such intellectual concerns. It is nevertheless important to realize that the intellectual activity involved in the production of calendars and the necessary system of mathematical notations that they required, even if at first they were implicit concepts, established the settings that enabled the production of mathematical concepts and theories. This activity also developed intellectual techniques that lie at the foot of our capacity for universal thought, not only in the sciences such as the astronomical knowledge suggested by the lunar calendar, but in other areas as well, including ethics.

The greater complexity of modern mathematics, or indeed the mathematics of Classical Athens, is not due to differences in the mind, or the inexplicably sudden appearance of a radically new theoretical attitude, for the first time in history, as Marías puts it. Rather, they are the result of the reality that knowledge in general, and mathematics in particular, is a long historical process. Abstract thought is at work early in human history, and it produces the intellectual conditions and the early discoveries, that over the millennia produce modem thought, and modern mathematics in particular. But abstract thought and mathematical thought are there all along. As Zaslavsky notes, anthropologists generally agree on the idea that ‘in the evolution of counting, number was originally conceived in connection with objects to be counted and it was at a much more advanced stage of development … that man conceived of number in the abstract’ (1999, p.15). In our terms, practice informed by implicit concepts becomes itself at a later time the object of reflection, and this marks the emergence of the concept in its explicit form.

The importance of those first attempts over 20,000 years ago produced notational and counting systems that cannot be overstressed. In their still implicit functioning, numerical systems, we may speculate, realize the ability to count objects, be it months or trees, and to measure equivalences in bartering and trade; these abilities require a particular modification of the mind or particular conceptualization without which universal concepts would not be possible. When we number things, or when we trade goods, we necessarily find equivalences of several kinds. In numbering, we find an equivalence between a series of concrete objects, say trees of lunar positions, and a series of abstract objects, an artifact of our own making such as a number system, which may be expressed as notches on a bone or stick.

In trade, the equivalencies that we find are more complex, more substantive. In trading two sorts of goods, we deal with four objects that need to be linked by a series of value equivalences: two specific objects, say nuts and fish, and two abstract ones, or two different numbers, say fifteen and two. Finally, we have to decide on the ground of some further abstract notion of value, that the number of fishes is equivalent to the number of nuts. Although we can do all of this easily (in fact, we are not even aware of all the mental acts required for such a decision) the conceptual apparatus necessary for this simple operation had to be devised first. Abstraction and equivalence are made possible of course by the ability to think symbolically, as was earlier noted. The development of mathematics adds a level of complexity to this ability that enables some of the most important thinking functions of human beings, namely, the ability to distinguish things that appear as similar and find similarities where only difference appears.

IV. Moral Reasoning

Seeing similarity where all appears as different, and difference where there is only apparent similarity is a principle of dialectical reasoning. It is also the foundation of moral reasoning. Not only the main lines of moral reasoning implicitly assume this principle, as does legal practice in subsuming different actions under the same legal principles, but we can see this at work in one of our most important moral concepts, the concept of the person. Our moral failure has all too often been a failure to observe this dialectical principle, and hence the failure to think universally: Kant’s view of the person, and in particular his unwillingness to see the ‘other’, the African body, as a person, is a notorious example of this failure, a failure which is not only intellectual or dialectical, but also a moral one.

To give a brief example of the dialectical thinking that leads to the concept of personhood, let us look briefly at the Akan concept of the person. I draw from the accounts given by Gyekye and Wiredu. Without given many specific details or delving into the metaphysical aspects to this^[3], it will suffice to point to the three aspects of personhood. Two of them are inherited from the father and the mother respectively, and together they are the sum of natural, psychological, and social characteristics that identify particular individuals. Most importantly, they include personality traits and clan affiliation. In brief, these two represent different facets of the person: on the one hand the inclinations and dispositions of an individual; and on the other, the social relations that put the person in a particular social and political order, such as the clan. These are rather concrete and observable in the natural and social worlds we inhabit; they constitute identifiers: they express a set of differences as well as identifications, among individuals.

The third element, the okra, lies outside the natural and social worlds. Understood as the presence of divine principle in human beings, for our purposes it suffices to point out that the okra is independent of natural and social determinants, and hence outside the specificities of body, character, and social relations. This is a remarkable conception, for it puts the okra in the realm of the purely abstract, unobservable world. It is simply the expression of an abstract equivalence: the equal dignity of all persons regardless of the natural and social differences that are the most obvious facts about them. In many ways more elusive than numbers, the person is an abstract universal, yet a fully concrete equivalent that is objectified in core institutions and practices. This original depository of value is also understood in a dynamic manner. It, first of all, involves agency, facilitated by education, and hence a live activity which is measured by the contributions of the individual to the community, a contribution to make life better for all.

We may disagree about the metaphysics of the okra; we may for instance, differ on whether it is a product of natural evolution, and mere artifact of human design, or indeed a ‘spark of Supreme Being’ as Gyekye claims (1987, p.85). In any case, the tools for abstract thought that were earlier noted, particularly the capacity for finding equivalences between specific and abstract objects such as numbers, are a necessary ‘modification of the mind’ (Vico 1953, p.479, § 331) or ‘conceptions, of conceptualizations and prior formulations’ (Somet 2005, p.17) that underpins the ability to think of persons in the abstract, that is, as entities of equal value even though their concrete characteristics are unequal.

One point needs to be clarified, and that is that I am not making any suggestions regarding the ultimate source of ethical life. In particular, at this time I do not take sides with any of the most common approaches to ethics, such as deontology, consequentialism, rationalism or sentimentalism. I will, however, suggest, that, given our position regarding the practical origin of concepts, and of their expressing implicit ideas that emerge in practice and form our experience, it is reasonable to think of ethics as originating in the experience of our encounter with others, and of the complex sentiments that arise in such situations. Let us not forget that, as noted above in reference to Hrdy’s work (2009, p. 14), affection and empathy came before reason. Abstract concepts such as that of the ‘person’ do arise in social relations and practices. The point here is that their discursive expression and philosophical reflection on them necessitates the sort of modifications of the mind, of prior conceptualizations that we see emerge early in the history of humanity, the invention of numbers being just one major step in that process.

The point is not to give an account of the concept of person, but to reiterate the idea that the building blocks of social and ethical life, of our political theories such personhood, community, and the public good, presuppose modes of thinking and prior formulations invented in southern Africa over 20,000 year ago. The history of philosophy, and the history of rational thinking, did not mysteriously emerge one day in Athens. A long, almost imperceptible and silent history produced a long list of ideas, of questions, and of intellectual tools without which philosophy as we do it today, and our current preoccupation with universal ideas would not have been possible.

V. The future

A few words regarding the future of universal thinking may be in order. If universality, as I believe, is a project, an aspiration or, as I said, the vocation of philosophy, then we need to think of it as having a future, one that depends on what we do and how we do it, both in our relations to one another, and our approach to the natural word. We may indeed be searching for another form of our social, an individual humanity, an individualism that is ‘more exacting yet more exalting, one less vulnerable to its self-abrogation’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p. 23) than the alienated individualism enforced by late capitalism.

The Enlightenment was the age of skepticism. In fact, Vico feared that it was the skepticism that he saw exemplified in Descartes’ method that would lead to the decline of European civilization, and so he tried to arrest the fall by suggesting that since we make history we can really understand it and use this knowledge to avoid the decline of civilization as he knew it. Some of the greatest philosophers of that time, notably Descartes, Hume, and Kant, were skeptical as a way to avoid error. Today however, the very notion of error is itself questioned, even rejected by those who claim that it is all ‘fake news’, or that it is all merely narrative or just ideology.

There is, however, a slowly creeping realization that we need to engage in dialogue with the philosophical traditions that have been marginalized, and some universities offer programmes in world philosophy or comparative philosophy, or courses in Indian, Chinese, Islamic and African philosophy. Furthermore, a trickle of texts from these various traditions appears on syllabi of courses on politics, ethics, and other standard courses in philosophy. This is certainly not nearly enough, meanwhile, the idea that philosophy begins in Athens is far from being dismissed.

Perhaps we could gain some insights from Antonio Gramsci’s writings from his jail cell. With hardly a view of the sun, the land or the sea; with little contact with family and friends, he could not stop thinking universally, but also as an Italian. This is of course to many an oxymoron. But it will be useful to remember Sekyi-Otu’s words from his Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. We may think of this seeming paradox as ‘[a]n invitation to the remembrance of things often kept asunder’ and ‘to take seriously the constraining and enabling power of specific times and places, histories and cultures to shape our epistemic, political and moral horizons’ (2019, p. 12).

One of the most beautiful texts written by Gramsci is a short letter to his son Delio. Since the letter is not dated, we cannot know Delio’s age; but it can be safely assumed that he was between nine and eleven years old. We can imagine Gramsci in his jail cell, in poor health, tired, despondent in his isolation from friends, family, and comrades trying to reach out to his son:

Dear Delio:

I am feeling a little tired and cannot write much. Write to me always and tell me about everything that interests you in school. I think that you like history, as I did when I was your age; because it is about living human beings, about everything regarding them, as many as possible, all the human beings in the world in so far as they unite in society and work and struggle to improve themselves, it cannot but please you more than anything else. Is it not so? Hugs,

Antonio. (Gramsci 1965, p. 895)

In this letter written in a language that young minds can appreciate, Gramsci the pedagogue links three of his most important concepts: Humanism, that is, a history about what humans do, how they live their lives; it is about universality, about all of us; and it is about human agency, the active pursuit of a better life for all; indeed, some of the very foundational ideas that we saw in the dynamic concept of the person in Akan’s ethics. What this means, that is, what constitutes a better, or a more human life, is the question of the future of universality.

What can we say about the future of universality? There have been attempts to imagine some universal principles of social life, such as thought experiments involving a consensus to be reached under ideal conditions, Rawls’ theory of justice comes to mind. What is interesting about such efforts is the recognition that there are forces, social relations, forms of inequality which interfere with the production of a universal consensus. But the ideal theory approach has its limits, in part in that it does not consider with sufficient clarity the very obstacles that the experiment seeks to surmount.

Perhaps Gramsci’s insight here is to be heeded. In a much-quoted note, he writes that objective means ‘universal subjective’ (1975, p.8, §177, 1048; p.11, §17, 1416; 1971, p.445). The precise meaning of this is not very apparent, nor are usual interpretations of it of much help. What we can say however, is that the idea of a universal set of human values and social forms must result from a consensus under certain conditions, a consensus emerging from praxis that, like the first implicit sense of number or relation in ancient times, reveals the possibilities of a renewed humanism, a more demanding and exalting humanism. These ideal conditions are not the imaginary ones, such as an original position of an ideal speech situation, but they must themselves be constructed by a historical struggle. The paradox here, and the source of difficulties, is that the construction presupposes the universal consensus, for otherwise we would be blind, and the universal consensus requires the construction of the right set of conditions.

But the paradox should not stop us, it should not fetter our efforts. In his book on Fanon, Sekyi-Otu made sure to posit universality as something to be defended; now in his latest work, he gives us a long meditation on the African sources of universality. There we find wisdom and hope, and there is optimism for the will.

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