Leopold Sedar Senghor, or the Hermeneutical Contraction of Western Culture

In the spirit of civilization, Sedar Senghor stresses the political importance of art, but as a cultural function; not in the discursive sense of W.E.B. Du Bois[1], but of the analogical quality of aesthetic reflection as an existential function. Of course, that is only in principle, and requires the adjustment that makes it functional, in a gnoseological rather than a political sense; in a systematization, in which it already loses that analogical specialty, but is organized in a conventional hermeneutics.

This is what religious thought resolves, in its practical principle, organized in a mythological body; by which it represents an understanding of the real in its cosmic dramas, in relation to the specific culture in question. This peculiarity would then be common to all cultures, resolving the projection of the human as real, in its political expression; but also susceptible to distortion, due to the eventual superposition of that political expression, as determination; which would happen with the inevitable development of this expression, at the basis of its existential practice, as a religious one.

The contradiction is not paradoxical but apparent, due to the diachronic nature of the processes of these cultures; differing in this affectation from one to another, with their successive collisions, as they relate to each other. In the case of the West, the problem would not be in its final monotheism, which reflects —but does not determine— that superposition; but would come from the other development of philosophy, also peculiar, as a specialty of its culture.

The problem with this peculiarity would be in the political function, that this philosophical practice acquires; replacing the religious one, with conventions such as power, in an abstractionist hermeneutic, allowing its economic isolation. This would have caused the political overdimension of power, as a problem of that culture, more than in any other; since in the others it would lack this abstract nature, which allows its ideological manipulation, as the center of its ontology.

As an example, Western ontology is always resolved around the problem of Being; to the point of providing the nomenclature for its reflection, from the second generation of physiologism[2]. This is the problem of the Heracliteo-Parmenidean contradiction, from the preoccupation with the real of his first generation; that from Thales of Miletus to Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, dealt with the real as the mythological tradition, as a totality.

Being, however, is not isolable, not even in its individual condition, making this nomenclature problematic; to the point of confusing the early schools of Arab realism, trying to order the Aristotle's determination of the substance; which own condition is simultaneity, even in the other diachronic condition of these determinations. This is nevertheless compatible with quantum exceptionalism, reconciling even Einstein's doubts in a moderate determinism; treating the real no longer in the conventional abstraction of a nature, as an extension, but as a condition of phenomena, in their punctual realization.

In turn, as a body of cosmological reference, mythology had practical and existential sense, not conceptual; organized into representations, similar —as systematic— to that of Aristotle's determination of the substance; whose realism was a contraction to the efficiency of mythology, as opposed to Plato's idealist abstractionism. This will be what affects the Western religious base, conditioning its realistic probabilism with determinism; solved reflexively with its hermeneutical rationalism, no matter if it is eventually and necessarily contradicted by culturalist eruptions, as Romanticism and Irrationalism.

This is what Senghor's contraction with Negritude is about, as probably the final crisis of that tradition; in which he participates, in his parallelism to the hermeneutical emergence of science, like a postmodern physiologism. For this reason, his recognition of the special function of black art lacks the Platonic sense that it has in W.E.B. Du Bois; but allowing a conciliation with its ontological efficiency, by providing the hermeneutical framework it needs in its existentialism. Du Bois is thus the Hegel of black ontology, making it immanentialist, and Cornel West the Heidegger who explains it; Senghor is then the Marx who gives it political scope, from the anthropological sense of the Haitian Jean Prince Mars; all of them in this contraction, which culminates the hermeneutical tradition of the West, in the New Black Thought.

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[1] . Cf: From aesthetic thought in W.E.B. Du Bois and the Harlem Renaissance, in From the Niagara Crossing to the New Black Thought, Kindle 2021.

[2] . Here the problem subjacent is the inability to separate the verb “To be”, as “being” and “be”, like in the romance languages; in which “To be” could mean “to be something” or “to be somewhere” or “in some way”.