Hexis and the Education of Elites in Africa: An Aristotelian Reading

Abstract

This article draws on Aristotle’s distinction between hexis—a stable mental state—and diathesis—an unstabilised mental state subject to change—to offer a critique of elite education in Black Africa. The failure of African elite education does not arise from cognitive poverty, but from the failure to anchor knowledge in being. Aristotle helps us see that knowledge becomes transformative only when it becomes hexis: an integrated disposition oriented towards ethical action.

So long as received or transmitted knowledge remains at the stage of diathesis, it can generate neither intellectual coherence nor social transformation.

As can unfortunately be observed in our educational institutions, education continues to privilege reproduction, imitation and conformity with external norms. It produces an educated elite whose knowledge remains unstable, oscillating between superficial adherence to dominant models and withdrawal into an untheorised local culture.

It is time to leave behind an educational model based on accumulating knowledge and to develop a pedagogy of inner formation, discernment and responsibility. Educating elites does not mean producing specialists crammed with knowledge, but bringing forth subjects capable of inhabiting what they know and acting accordingly. Only then can Africa acquire a strong, rooted and transformative body of thought.

Introduction: the gap between knowledge and action

For several decades, education systems in Black Africa have faced a disturbing paradox. Although enrolment and literacy indicators are improving, the elites they produce struggle to change social reality in a lasting and irreversible way. This gap between knowledge and action—anticipated by Cheikh Hamidou Kane in Ambiguous Adventure—continues to call into question the purpose of Africa’s present education system.

To extend the question raised since the 1960s and illuminate it philosophically, we shall use two Aristotelian concepts describing the operation of the intellect: diathesis, a passing mental disposition, and hexis, a stabilised mental state.

Aristotle’s conceptual contribution

In the Categories and the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes transient qualities of mental activity from consolidated qualities of mental functioning. This opposition casts new light on the causes undermining African education and preventing it from generating coherent and lasting social practices, even as schooling and knowledge of every kind increase across most of the continent.

I. Hexis and disposition: an ontological distinction

In Aristotle’s terminology, diathesis is an accidental quality that changes easily and belongs to a passing state of body or soul. Hexis, by contrast, is an acquired and solid disposition that enables the individual to act according to lasting and constant principles.

Generous impulse and virtue

To illustrate the moral distinction, Aristotle highlights the fundamental difference between an impulse of generosity and virtue. Giving a coin to a beggar or taking part in charitable action, though morally commendable, is not in itself virtue. The former is passing; the latter lasts because it is repeated. A person is not deemed virtuous because of an action lasting a moment or a day, but because of a constant way of acting. Virtue as hexis is therefore a rational disposition to act consistently, whatever the circumstances.

Memorisation and integrated knowledge

Intellectually, Aristotle distinguishes the mere memorisation of knowledge—diathesis—from possession of truly integrated and mastered knowledge—hexis.

A pupil who has just heard a lesson or read an article and can repeat some information cannot yet be said to possess real knowledge. The pupil’s cognitive state remains fragile and transitory, because it depends heavily on immediate memory or temporary attention, which fade with time. Aristotle describes this type of knowledge as diathesis and compares it to a garment put on in some circumstances and removed in others. Knowledge reduced to a garment is not knowledge.

Knowledge stabilised through study and experience

When information acquired through reading has been consolidated by repeated study, reflection and experience, it is no longer a garment but stabilised knowledge: a stable disposition of the rational soul.

It is no longer simply a matter of knowing that something was said about something else, but why and how it was said; how what was read can be connected to other knowledge; and, above all, how it can be used discerningly—or deliberately not used, with knowledge of the reasons. For Aristotle, this is the kind of knowledge that makes the scholar or philosopher an exceptional figure in the city.

II. Education without hexis: critique of the postcolonial African model

Postcolonial African education systems largely inherited a bureaucratic and encyclopaedic model centred on transmitting content and preparing candidates for competitive examinations or tests. This model rests more on passing mental disposition than on hexis.

It produces elites able to recite the principles of the Republic or the nation, good-governance charters and international treaties without embodying them or turning that knowledge into active principles of social practice. Such mentally unincorporated principles turn the learner into an aggregate of knowledge without intellectual or ethical consistency.

Beyond the dilemma in Ambiguous Adventure

The Aristotelian concept of diathesis broadens the scope of the question raised by Hamidou Kane in Ambiguous Adventure. The issue can no longer be reduced to a permanent tension between knowledge and action, being and having, learning and forgetting, cultural conservatism and technical mastery—‘the art of joining wood to wood’—or to the other contradictory pairs that place Samba Diallo before a problematic, or at least inevitably ambiguous, choice.

Diathesis shows that neither term—both supposedly positive—can truly be chosen. In Hamidou Kane’s game, the learner necessarily gains something, but the author suggests that every gain on one side requires a loss on the other. Samba Diallo acquires new knowledge but loses his cultural identity; Demba preserves his identity but that victory permanently denies him access to new knowledge.

The terms of the choice are distorted

Aristotle allows us to see that these rules do not exhaust all the possible alternatives. Through diathesis and hexis, the game can be played differently. Diathesis draws attention to the fact that the terms of the choice are distorted from the outset. Under such conditions, neither Samba Diallo nor Demba can make a conscious choice.

An African may accumulate knowledge within a colonial-type education system without ever becoming a scholar, philosopher or genuine technician. Social practices—the indicators through which identity manifests itself—will not change either, because the knowledge remains merely a garment. In short, the learner will have become neither ‘Other’ nor even ‘hybrid’.

A double deficiency rather than a necessary sacrifice

The Aristotelian concepts of diathesis and hexis fortunately reveal the double deficiency still generated by African education: a deficiency of being and having, thought and conduct, theory and action.

This goes beyond the simple ‘either/or’ dilemma to which a lazy reading of Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure has confined its readers—a reading in which one can easily discern a morality of the ‘necessary sacrifice’ Africans are supposedly required to inflict upon themselves in order to enter the culture of the white man.

III. Rethinking African pedagogy through hexis

Education without hexis encourages parroting and imitation of dominant models without first filtering them through criticism before possibly integrating them into local culture.

The result is an intellectual elite that remains broadly mimetic, constantly oscillating between fascination with dominant Western culture and resistance from a local culture that has not been intellectually explored, yet continues to assert its presence through the challenges it poses to our faculties of judgement.

From full minds to autonomous subjects

The pedagogy Africa needs must place hexis at its centre. The aim is no longer to produce ‘experts’ crammed with general knowledge, but human beings endowed with stable dispositions to think, judge and act autonomously.

Education must no longer be treated as an activity limited to transmitting knowledge. Properly understood, it must be holistic, joining knowledge to concrete practices embedded in contexts of life. Only then does knowledge become hexis and acquire an immanent ethical dimension. A wise person is recognised not only by rigorous thought, but also by the agreement between that intellectual rigour and the way he or she lives in real situations.

Conclusion: Africa does not lack knowledge

We have sought to show that the failure to educate African elites results less from an absence of knowledge than from its failure to become integrated. The sum of knowledge available to them today scarcely falls short of that possessed on other continents. Africans are among those who command the greatest number of international languages. Given the relationship between language and information, it is reasonable to suppose that those who know more languages gain access to more information through them.

Yet the fact that this accumulation of information available in Africa has still not become a factor of social transformation raises a question of principle. We have attempted to answer that question in the field of African pedagogy by borrowing two key concepts from Aristotle.

Stabilising knowledge as ethos

Once again, the crisis in African elite education lies less in a shortage of knowledge than in an inability to stabilise it as lasting dispositions. Aristotle’s distinction between diathesis and hexis reveals this fault line. Far from forming autonomous mental habits capable of guiding action over time, education inherited from the colonial model continues to produce fragile and reversible intellectual postures, often without ethical force or practical coherence.

The gap between knowledge and action, anticipated by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, is rooted in a pedagogy of method and content rather than of consciousness. The educated and often multilingual African elite remains vulnerable to external commands because it has not transformed knowledge into hexis—that is, a habit of judgement, a disposition towards right action and an inner structure of thought.

Making knowledge incarnate

Refounding pedagogy in Africa therefore means leaving a paradigm of accumulating knowledge and entering a logic in which knowledge is embodied. The task is no longer to fill minds, but to educate thinking beings capable of bringing knowledge, being and action into agreement.

The task is immense and urgent. Until African elites integrate knowledge as ethos, inhabit what they know and act accordingly, they will remain external to themselves—unable to transform either themselves or their societies durably through what they know.

Indicative bibliography

Aristotle, Categories, trans. J. Tricot, Vrin, 2008.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. Voilquin, GF Flammarion, 1990.

Pierre Aubenque, Prudence in Aristotle, PUF, 1963.

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Seuil, 1990.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Présence Africaine, 2013.

Joseph Ki-Zerbo, When Will Africa Be?, L’Harmattan, 2003.