The Figure of Being, Figures of Non-being: Towards an African Critique of Western Ontology

Introduction

Since the end of the Renaissance, when Europe began to secularise thought and organise the world rationally, being has become a structuring principle of the political, economic and social order, setting the boundaries of legitimate humanity.

Yet behind the universalist claim of Western ontological discourse there often lies a hierarchical organisation of being. Some attain full ontological dignity—the rational, productive and visible subject—while others are excluded from it or reduced to quasi-existence. Slaves, colonised peoples, women, elderly and disabled people, workers and immigrants appear as figures of non-being: tolerated at the margins or incorporated as labour, but deprived of genuine ontological recognition.

Who has the right to be?

This critique, first formulated with striking force by Frantz Fanon and developed by contemporary thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, Louis Sala-Molins and Giorgio Agamben, rests upon a fundamental question: who has the right to be? Under what conditions is that right granted, recognised, refused or revoked?

Behind the question stands a metaphysical architecture which, while affirming the universality of the human, produces non-being by naming, classifying, evaluating and ranking forms of existence.

The critical path of the essay

This text examines the mechanism of exclusion through several critical moments. It begins with the temptation to suspend time—a quintessentially Western myth—contrasted with African thought, in which being unfolds through continuous tension and a living relationship with the past. It then explores the relationship between economic liberalism and a discriminatory ontology in which only successful subjects deserve full recognition. Finally, it turns to emblematic texts such as the Black Code (1685) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748) to show that this hierarchy of being is not an archaic remnant but a constituent part of Western political modernity.

By bringing together a philosophy of time, a critique of metaphysics and African conceptions of wisdom, the essay seeks to demonstrate that being cannot be assigned, measured or commodified without losing its very essence. It calls for ontology to be reread from its margins—from the figures of non-being—not as deficiencies or omissions, but as revelations of the symbolic violence operating within the dominant conception of being.

1. Suspending time: Western poetics and traditional wisdom

The desire to stop time and make the present eternal appears in Lamartine’s line: ‘O Time, suspend your flight! and you, propitious hours, suspend your course’ (Poetic Meditations, 1820). It stands in counterpoint to the vision of traditional societies, which both perceive the invariance of being through the movement of time and accept time’s effects on body and mind.

Modern Western societies, by contrast, perceive change principally as rupture. They associate youth with virility and reason, and old age with senility, together with every economic quality liberalism expects from youth: productivity, creativity, flexibility and an appetite for risk.

This immanent metaphysics thus turns youth into the functional myth on which the contemporary economy rests—a myth all the more sinister because it enables discrimination among human beings by relegating some to the status of ‘useless mouths’ (Agamben, 1998).

2. Being, activity and exclusion: the logic of economic liberalism

Economic liberalism contains an immanent discriminatory dimension of being because it still rests on a dualist metaphysics: being and appearance, substance and accident, being and nothingness. It therefore readily declares certain social categories useless: elderly and disabled people and women, all reputed to lack the fundamental vitality credited to being. Ethnic minorities—immigrants in Western countries—are treated similarly for the same reasons.

They are presumed empty beings: empty of being, legitimate culture and recognised civilisation; mere appearances of civic beings.

Montesquieu and the hierarchy of humanity

This metaphysical architecture, which makes the ability to ‘be fully’ depend on normative criteria such as reason, strength, production and visibility, appears paradoxically in thinkers regarded as progressive, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Though often celebrated as the theorist of the separation of powers and political moderation, his discussion of the slave trade expresses a deeply hierarchical vision of human beings, justified by supposedly natural criteria.

‘One cannot conceive,’ he says, ‘that God, who is a wise being, should have placed a soul, especially a good soul, in an entirely black body.’ He later adds: ‘It is impossible for us to suppose that these people are men like us’ (The Spirit of the Laws, Book XV, Chapter 5).

Men without souls are not men; they are simulacra of humanity. Can this be doubted when one enters the mind of the Christian God? Montesquieu leaves no doubt: slaves are not ‘men like us’—meaning white men.

Irony or ontological inequality?

Some commentators, including Céline Spector, read Montesquieu’s words as irony intended to denounce the racist prejudices of his time (Spector, 2004). Others, such as Louis Sala-Molins, see in them the philosophical expression of ontological inequality.

In The Black Code, or the Ordeal of Canaan (1987), Sala-Molins stresses that although Montesquieu appears to mock the justifications of slavery, he never truly dismantles their economic or metaphysical foundations. On the contrary, he participates in rationalising exclusion based on body, colour and origin.

An ontology of productivity

Montesquieu’s reasoning follows the same dualist logic later mobilised by modern economic liberalism: an ontology of productivity in which only what enters the circuits of exchange, performance and value creation matters. Being then becomes a function of usefulness: the person who contributes to wealth, performs and produces value is; the person who appears unproductive, inactive or a factor of decline is not, or is less.

From eighteenth-century Montesquieu to contemporary neoliberalism, a hierarchical ontology of the subject therefore persists. The right to be—or to be fully recognised—depends on prior conformity with external cultural, economic and biological criteria. Humanity is not given equally to all; it is filtered, conditioned and measured out. It becomes a differential property, an unequal distribution of being.

3. The Black Code: the legal organisation of emptiness of being

The idea of simulacra bearing the appearance of human beings has its source in the Black Code of 1685. Promulgated under Louis XIV to organise slavery legally in the French colonies, this legal arsenal rests upon a paradigm of ‘ontological dehumanisation’ (Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2013).

The slave is defined not as a subject but as movable property, a mere labour force. In the slave, being is displaced into doing. The slave exists only insofar as he or she acts and produces value. The slave is therefore managed, exchanged and even punished without ever being recognised as a being in tension, endowed with freedom, memory and a future.

As Frantz Fanon writes: ‘The slave has no being; he is the object of a master’ (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). By denying the tension proper to being, the Black Code also denies the slave’s temporality: it deprives the slave of history, lineage and transmission. It tears the slave away from the dynamics of being and freezes him or her in the eternity of servitude and silence—a perpetual present without future or memory. The slave becomes a simulacrum of a human being emptied of the human condition.

4. Temporality and the tension of being in traditional societies

Youth is valued today while we forget that it is only a transitory form of the human being. Traditional societies regard such an assumption as a profound inversion of life. For them, the separation between yesterday’s and today’s being, between the former and the present, can only result from an operation of mental classification, not from being itself. Being can be neither old nor young: it simply is.

‘Being is’: an ontological tautology

To say that ‘being is’ is to posit an ontological tautology. In propositional logic, a tautology is a proposition of the form P → P or P ∨ ¬P, which remains true regardless of circumstances. Applied to ontology, this logical structure means that being cannot not be: it is what sustains itself, independently of empirical or temporal qualifications. The expression ‘being is’ states a necessary truth, valid at every time and place, without condition or exception.

It may be symbolised by the proposition ∀x (Being(x) → Being(x)). This formula expresses a necessary self-reference: everything that is, is. It is a trivial logical truth but an ontologically fundamental one. It shows that being, in its essence, escapes accidental temporal categories such as ‘young’ and ‘old’, which belong to becoming rather than to being.

Time as continuous tension

From this perspective, time is not a line that divides being into separate states, but a continuous tension sustaining the subject’s unfolding. The young person, the old person and the adult are merely temporal manifestations of the same being in act. For traditional societies, the fragmentary and sequential—biological age and stages of life—are always reinscribed within an ontological unity. Time does not define being; being gives meaning to time.

This does not mean freezing the present under the authority of the past. It means recognising, as Paul Ricoeur observes, that ‘human time is always articulated through narrative’ (Time and Narrative, 1983), and that every identity forms part of an active temporal continuity. Traditional societies do not confuse the ages of life; they connect them within a dynamic tension of transmission.

5. Wisdom across the whole of life

Traditional cultures, especially African ones, are founded upon distinctions between childhood, adulthood and old age—distinctions, but not ruptures. Childhood, maturity and old age are links within the same ontological tension. Yesterday’s child becomes today’s adult and tomorrow’s sage. From childhood, under the guardianship of elders, everyone is called to become a bearer of knowledge, memory and promise.

Wisdom thus traverses every stratum of life: from education, as transmission of knowledge, through history, as memory, to exemplary action, as performance. It places the human being within a permanent temporal tension from childhood to old age and within every dimension of time: a past that is its source—‘one must have received in order to give’—a present that makes it actual, and a future that renews it. For ‘we receive only in order to give in turn’, and a society that does not know how to give condemns itself to death (Mauss, The Gift, 1925).

Conclusion: ontology as an instrument of power

This journey through tensions of being, mechanisms of exclusion and opposing forms of temporality in the modern West and African traditions has revealed ontology as an instrument of power. Since the end of the Renaissance, the West has elaborated a deeply hierarchical conception of being in which ontological recognition depends upon external criteria: productivity, visibility, rationality and conformity with dominant norms.

Economic liberalism does not break with this metaphysics but inherits its structures. It redefines being as human capital and non-being as a social burden. The slave of the Black Code, the invisible immigrant of modern societies and the elderly person judged useless are contemporary figures of the same ontological erasure.

An African ontology of continuity

Traditional societies—and African cultures in particular—offer instead an ontology of the continuous tension of being that escapes the logic of productivity and utility. They propose a temporality of transmission in which every age of life finds its place through continuity rather than opposition. Where the West separates, classifies and eliminates, traditional societies connect, transmit and recognise. This model is not archaic: it is a living critique of modernity and a proposal for rethinking what it means to be.

By rereading ontology from its margins—from those obscured zones where the dominant gaze produces non-being—it becomes possible to rehabilitate a conception of being freed from economic, racial and biological assignments. Only by listening to those reduced to silence can we understand the true nature of being: not as a fixed essence or full substance, but as relation in tension, transmitted memory and a promise in the making.

Bibliography

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