马尔相·托瓦

作品

• 1971论当今非洲的哲学问题

  一本小书，拒斥唐普尔斯和卡加梅的民族哲学，认为它们是把集体信念的描述冒充为哲学：哲学始于对传统的批判性考察，而非洲必须掌握欧洲权力所依赖的科学与哲学思维。

• 1971列奥波德·塞达尔·桑戈尔：黑人性还是奴役？

  对桑戈尔黑人性的批判：桑戈尔以非洲的情感对立于欧洲的理性，接受了殖民者对非洲人的形象，并把屈从变成了一种身份；解放的思想应当拒绝奴役，而不是颂扬差异。

立场

Towa is on the map as one of the founding critics of ethnophilosophy and as the most uncompromising critic of Senghor’s Négritude. In the Essay on the Philosophical Problem in Present-Day Africa (1971) he argued that the works of Tempels and Kagame, and those of their African followers, describe the collective beliefs of a people and call them philosophy: they lend European prestige to traditions without examining them, and confirm the view that Africans think only collectively and in myths. Philosophy, by contrast, begins when a tradition is questioned and judged by reason. The domination of Africa by Europe, he held, was no accident: it rested on Europe’s science and technology and the critical thinking behind them – what he called the secret of Europe’s power – and Africa can free itself only by appropriating that secret, which means transforming itself rather than celebrating what it supposedly always was. In Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude or Servitude? (1971) he turned this against Senghor: by opposing African emotion and intuition to European reason, Négritude accepts the colonial image of the African and makes subjection into an identity. Towa did not reject the African past; in L’idée d’une philosophie négro-africaine (1979) he argued that African traditions also contain critical reflection, which philosophy should seek out instead of a collective worldview. Dismas Masolo (1994) and later histories of African philosophy treat him, with Hountondji and Eboussi Boulaga, as part of the core of the critique of ethnophilosophy.

生平与背景

Marcien Towa was born on 5 January 1931 in Cameroon, then under French administration. He studied philosophy in France and returned to the independent republic to teach at the University of Yaoundé, where he spent most of his career. His two books of 1971, published by the Éditions CLÉ in Yaoundé, made him one of the main voices in the debate on African philosophy in the 1970s, together with Paulin Hountondji in Dahomey (later Benin) and Fabien Eboussi Boulaga in Cameroon. In 1979 he published L’idée d’une philosophie négro-africaine; his later work dealt with identity, culture and development, and his thesis on identity and transcendence appeared as a book in 2011. He died on 2 July 2014.

其他主要作品

• Léopold Sédar Senghor : négritude ou servitude ? (1971)
• Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l’Afrique actuelle (1971)
• L’idée d’une philosophie négro-africaine (1979)
• Identité et transcendance (2011)