Interviewer: Today we are honored to welcome Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and French at Columbia University. We will be discussing the decolonization of knowledge, an increasingly vital topic in contemporary thought. Professor Diagne, how do you describe this concept, and why is it so central to your work?
Prof. Diagne: In a general sense, “decolonizing” has become something of a buzzword. The core idea is that while colonialism proper—the political domination of countries by imperial powers—has largely ended, something called “coloniality” remains. Coloniality is the intellectual or epistemological side of colonialism. You can see it in our cultural, intellectual, and academic institutions.
Take my own discipline, philosophy. I was taught philosophy as a history that started in Greece and continued through European antiquity, the Middle Ages, and European modernity. The implication was that the history of philosophy is, quintessentially, European history. This understanding needs to be decolonized. We must reaffirm that philosophy does not have a single location. Even if we look only at Greek philosophy, its transmission concerns the Islamic world just as much as Europe. All human cultures have explored philosophical questions because they have all been exploring their own humanity.
Interviewer: You often say that decolonization is not about abandoning the “universal,” but rebuilding it differently—what you call “lateral universalism.” Could you elaborate on that?
Prof. Diagne: This is a crucial point. We have long lived under “European universalism”—the affirmation that Europe is the center of the world and has a mission to bring universality to everyone else. That discourse has ended. But do we then renounce the idea of universality altogether? My work explores a postcolonial universal.
I use a concept coined by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He spoke of the end of the “overarching” or “vertical” universal—a top-down dictate from Europe. Instead, he proposed a “horizontal” or “lateral” universal. When you eliminate the vertical dimension, all human cultures and languages remain on the same horizontal plane. They are equally valuable and valid. This is why my recent work focuses on the verb “to universalize.” The universal is not a given; it is a practice. It is something that all human cultures must work toward together. It is a continuous, collective effort rather than a pre-existing fact.
Interviewer: In your work, you also revisit Henri Bergson’s ideas on time and “duration.” How does rethinking time affect the production of knowledge?
Prof. Diagne: Bergson is central to my thinking. In his work, he argues that we have lost the true sense of time because we have replaced it with “space” in order to measure it scientifically. When a physics teacher draws a trajectory on a blackboard from point A to point B, they are treating time as an interval of space. Bergson invites us to think of time as “true duration”—the lived human experience of time rather than the serial time measured by clocks. This is vital for decolonization because colonial discourse often claimed that non-Western cultures lacked a rational notion of time or a future tense, labeling them as “primitive” or “static.”
Modernity needed a kind of unification and homogenization of time, much like how the creation of trains required unifying the time measured in Paris with the time in Brittany or Rennes. It is always our social interests and the organization of work that impose a certain measure of time; it has nothing to do with the ‘nature’ of cultures. The colonial discourse fabricated a hierarchy by claiming the West had a rational, geometrical conception of time, while other cultures were trapped in a ‘cyclical’ time, ignoring progress. By doing this, they made ‘progress’ a purely Western concept and portrayed other cultures as static
Interviewer: This brings us to the concept of rationality. You mention Léopold Sédar Senghor’s distinction between “analytical reason” and “participatory reason.” How does this alternative view help globalize knowledge?
Prof. Diagne: It connects directly to Bergson’s distinction between analytical knowledge and intuition. Analytical knowledge separates the knower from the known, dividing reality into parts to master it. Intuition, on the other hand, is an immediate coincidence with the thing known; the knower and the known become one.
As human beings—not just Westerners or people from the Global South—we have both capacities. However, we have seen a “hypertrophy” of our analytical side, while our intuitive side remains underdeveloped. Art is perhaps the best example of this intuitive, living relationship with reality. Senghor called this intuitive side “emotion,” not as a psychological reaction, but as a creative form of connection. It is “participatory” because we move with a reality that is itself in motion. To achieve our full humanity, we need to balance both: the analytical and the intuitive.
Interviewer: Finally, how does this rethink our definition of what it means to be human? You’ve mentioned that defining humans through productivity and efficiency is quite limited.
Prof. Diagne: I find a powerful answer in the Sufi tradition of Islam. In Sufism, being human is not a given; it is a task. We have the responsibility of becoming human—achieving our full potential. This is the idea of the Insan-ı Kamil in Arabic, or Homo Perfectus in Latin. You can also see this in a more secular way through the South African concept of “Ubuntu,” which I translate as “achieving our humanity together.” Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu used this to invite reconciliation after apartheid. It insists that we are not a collection of divided tribes, but a single humanity in progress.
In a world that often feels like a “generalized apartheid” of competing tribes, the lesson of Ubuntu is more important than ever. We must move from being a world of tribes to a fully achieved, collective humanity.
