The third Thursday of November every year is World Philosophy Day. This is a day unlike any others celebrated worldwide. We have the world AIDS day, the world mathematics day, world youth day, world environment day, world book day, and even world friend day. The World Philosophy Day isn’t a day that many people all over the world would take cognisance of. And the reason isn’t far-fetched—philosophy is an invisible abstract discipline whose relevance is grossly contested all over the world. Yet, UNESCO recognises its significance with an annual celebration. On its website, the organisation says it recognises the ‘enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual.’ It therefore dedicates and designates the third Thursday of November every year as the day to dwell on its relevance. We join the exclusive club of philosophers all around the world and the rather obscure and almost disappearing Nigerian core, professional or otherwise, to celebrate by way of a ‘philosophical’ reflection on our national question.
Philosophy’s travail in the world today isn’t a strange one or restricted to philosophy alone. That travail is the lot of all the disciplines in the humanities. Religious Study, Classics, History, English, etc.—they are all subjected to the test of relevance. In most cases, that test is that of their supposed place and role in national development. We have no problem with deducing how mathematics, technology, management, and the sciences contribute significantly to the development of a nation. But what can philosophy do? Does philosophy bake bread? Even philosophers do not spare their own vocation! Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, once joked: ‘A philosopher…says again and again “I know that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is nearby. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy”.’
Talking of philosophy as a profession, I am a layman, but I understand what Wittgenstein is saying. Philosophy has always been associated with the esoteric and the absurd. Yet, again as a layman, I have a special sympathy for the philosophical enterprise. While I was searching for a career path as a young boy freshly out of secondary school, I stumbled on Plato’s classic, the Republic. And I read it. That singular experience conditioned my desire not only to indulge my appetite for more reflective learning, but also motivated my single-minded resolve to pursue philosophy as a course of study at the university. I held that resolve until my parents and my entire world at the time managed to persuade me against what they considered my ‘stupidity.’
Plato’s Republic left me with one unforgettable insight, and that is philosophy’s confrontation with the political situation of Athens. Socrates had been murdered. In Plato’s assessment, Athenian politics was no longer a worthy vocation to pursue. What was needed was a philosophical scrutiny that could correct the political anomalies that led to the judicial murder of a good man who intended the good of the political community. And so, Plato came to the famous conclusion that unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers, no political community will know peace or even development. That is a dramatic declaration but its weightiness will become obvious and acceptable when we attempt to bring philosophy home to Nigeria. The pertinent issue, for me, concerns the national question in Nigeria. How does this question challenge philosophers in Nigeria? What do philosophers in Nigeria have to say to the national question?
After 54 years since its founding, the Nigerian state is facing its most traumatic moment in its experience of nation building. The Nigerian state had witnessed so many shocks to its body politic since its inauguration. The most terrible of all these shocks continues to be the Nigerian Civil War. The state has been decimated and inundated with severe crises—presently, its authority is being challenged by insurgents from within and global economic forces from without. All these spell doom for the urgent task of not only providing social salvation for millions of Nigerians who have been waiting for it for 54 years, but also of integrating the various diverse elements into one coherent national entity. This is the gist of the national question. What role is there for philosophy and philosophers in all this?
‘A philosopher of imposing stature doesn’t think in a vacuum,’ says Alfred North Whitehead, the British philosopher. ‘Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or what is not known in the time when he lives.’ Thus, the first challenge Nigeria throws at its philosophers is the crucial task of insinuating themselves into their own national context as a kind of philosophical laboratory that generates issues, problems and concerns. Within the context of the national question, the Nigerian philosophers cannot afford the luxury of playful reflection that borders on the trivial, the abstract and the esoteric. Nigeria is a concrete predicament that must push the philosophers into concrete reflection.
What, for instance, says the Nigerian philosophers about the steady but escalating institutional decay and systemic dysfunction that characterise the Nigerian system? I am a civil servant and a political theorist. I have a perspective on the institutional trouble with Nigeria. I am an insider who has been grappling with our institutional dysfunction and theorising the idea of reform. But what says philosophy? What unique and fundamental idea can the philosophers bring to the understanding of administrative phenomena the same way Max Weber enabled our understanding of the modern state and its bureaucracy? The fundamental challenge for philosophy and philosophers, as I see it, is that of facilitating the reflective process—and an enduring debate—that constantly presses the issue of institutions and values into our national consciousness. Philosophers are glaringly absent in Nigeria’s public sphere. And this is an indictment!
This indictment is to the extent that any discipline, whatsoever their disciplinary boundary and concern, must contribute in a significant manner to the wellbeing of the country within which its practitioners operates. In other words, no discipline—and definitely not the humanities and the social sciences—possess the luxury of speaking to themselves. There should be a moral responsibility to speak to the nation too; to invade the fissures of our national existence and query its theoretical foundations, social formations and forces. It is possible that the invisibility of philosophy is responsible for its unpalatable status in the national scheme of things. And that wasn’t what Plato intended. Philosophy was supposed to be at the centre of political experience because philosophers deal with fundamentals either of existence, the universe or the state and its institutions. The Republic is Plato’s own blueprint for the concrete reconstruction of Athens.
On the other hand, however, the Nigerian nation also owes its intellectuals a duty; essentially, the duty of engaging their intellects for the sake of national development. A nation is the sum total of all its constituent parts, and no part is as critical as the intellectual capital represented by the scholars and teachers and specialists in the art of reflection and strategies. Paying attention to a nation’s intellectual capital, for me, goes beyond our narrow focus on science and technology as the sole motivator for national growth. The reconstruction of Nigeria requires a concert of intellectuals from across the spectrum to instigate a deep rumination on the condition of existence in Nigeria. And the philosophers have a significant role to play in that concert of social transformation and national renewal.
Claude Ake delivered a stinging indictment of Nigeria in the foreward to my 1997 book A prophet is with honour: life & times of Ojetunji Aboyade. For him, the paradox of Nigeria is that it needs heroes, in fact, it yearns for them; yet, it fails to acknowledge their existence and continually derails their efforts. If this national paradox is to burn itself out, then Nigeria must begin to engage its heroes—those intellectuals and philosophers who are as much patriots as the best of the politicians that we have—all in the process of making Nigeria work. It is the World Philosophy Day, according to UNESCO. But are the philosophers ready for their national task? Is Nigeria ready for the philosophers?
