Erwan Dianteill
Professor of Anthropology
Université Paris Cité
SHS Sorbonne Faculty
Center for Cultural Anthropology CANTHEL
A week before his death (Friday, February 2, 2024), I had the joy of seeing Paulin Hountondji again in Porto-Novo, unfortunately for the last time. We were meeting, Jean-Claude Dossa and myself, to prepare the Gun translation of his most famous work, Sur la « Philosophie africaine », critique de l’ethnophilosophie (1977), Hountondji being extremely keen to show reason at work in all languages, and especially in his mother tongue. Always full of irony, he declared: « They haven’t understood a thing! « What do you mean? « You can’t pronounce the quotation marks ! They understood that I was defending African philosophy, whereas I’m defending the contribution of Africans to philosophy, which is totally different !
These « table talk » remarks (just as there were Luther’s Tischreden) must be taken with the Hountondjian humor we’ve come to know so well, but they nevertheless reveal a fundamental truth of the master’s work, unfortunately often overlooked. Throughout his long career, the African philosopher has always defined himself as an African philosopher, i.e. as someone who contributes to universal science from his own specific culture, without inventing an « other » philosophy that would only apply to his own African community. If Hountondji criticizes « ethnophilosophy », it is not because African (or American or Asian) wisdoms have no value, but because they represent collective values, which are certainly the object of cultural anthropology, but which do not correspond to the personal effort of rationality, which brings the person who engages in it into the sphere of philosophy properly speaking, which can only tend towards universality.
In other words, for Hountondji, philosophy can take as its object questions that particularly concern Africans, without becoming « ethnophilosophy ».
Hountondji’s idea that reason is universal and autonomous from any culture comes from his reading of Husserl, the founding philosopher of phenomenology, on whose work he wrote his thesis in French: L’idée de science dans les Prolégomènes à la logique pure et la première Recherche logique de Husserl. For Husserl, philosophy is « a rigorous science » (1910) : Hountondji will always be faithful to this idea. I would add – and this is my own hypothesis – that this rigor probably also stemmed from his Protestant upbringing, Methodist to be precise. He would accept no compromise on freedom of conscience or freedom of expression, the very condition of possibility for the exercise of philosophical reason. Hountondji was not a man of accommodation or compromise.
This intellectual rigor had its equivalent in the political sphere: Hountondji always defended the universality of human rights, against all forms of relativism, against those who excuse dictatorships for « cultural » reasons.
On the day of our last meeting, the conversation turned to Les savoirs endogènes (1991), a collective volume prefaced by Hountondji. I told him the book was fascinating, to which he replied once again, « They haven’t understood a thing! » I thought he was abusing his sense of humor… But once again, he explained that he didn’t see endogenous knowledge as a substitute for Western science which would be useless, but as a contribution to the science and technology available to humankind. There’s no doubt that Hountondji denounced the economic and intellectual plundering of Africa by European countries, but in no way did he question the validity of the results of science, be it carried out by Europeans or not.
On the contrary, he defended the idea that knowledge produced in Africa could have practical and theoretical value, something that was denied ex ante by « colonial sciences ». Here’s what Hountondji had to say on the subject: « The critical validation of traditional knowledge with a view to its active reappropriation will perhaps lead to reorganizations in the field of constituted knowledge, the extent and scope of which we cannot yet predict. The essential thing, however, is to build bridges, to rebuild the unity of knowledge, or more simply and more profoundly, the unity of man » (Introduction to the book Les savoirs endogènes). We must strive, writes the philosopher, « to test, appreciate and, all in all, discard or validate, in varying proportions, ‘traditional’ knowledge, thus integrating it critically and with all the necessary discernment, into the movement of living research. » (ibid).
The value of endogenous knowledge, in other words, can only be measured by the rational criticism of methods and results, and not a priori, by reversing the stigma invented by the colonizer, as if everything from Africa was necessarily true and everything from outside Africa necessarily false. Colonial epistemology is execrable, but that does not mean that African « traditional » knowledge is always good and useful.
Hountondji was a long-time contemptor of false « ethnophilosophy », and equally suspicious of irrational enthusiasm for « tradition ». He also abhorred false Western universalism, often evolutionist, which claimed to exclude Africans from reason and knowledge, as if Africans were entirely governed by passion and emotion. Finally, let’s leave the last word to our friend, whose Joyful Wisdom can be summed up in these few lines he pronounced at the opening of the famous Porto-Novo symposium in 2002 (La rationalité, une ou plurielle?); a lesson to ponder :
« To think of rationality as a universal requirement, inherent in all cultures beyond their diversity, to recognize competing or complementary models, to critically examine the forms that are dominant today, to put in its place the false universalism that drapes itself in the cloak of the universal, to open up avenues that might enable us to build an ever broader, ever more universal rationality – such was the initial ambition of this symposium. »
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