Lighting
Paulin Hountondji, the “liberator of the future” philosopher
The funeral of philosopher Paulin Hountondji takes place on March 2, 2024 in Benin, one month after his death.
A major figure in philosophy in Africa, Hountondji was a pioneer.
In a founding text,
On “African philosophy”, critique of ethnophilosophy
, he refused the confinement of African philosophy in a cultural ghetto and placed it on an equal footing with the other philosophies of the world.
He also reflected on the reappropriation of what he calls “
endogenous knowledge
”, that is to say knowledge from African traditions.
Paulin Hountondji was one of the African figures of 20th century philosophy.
© Hountondji family archives
By: Laurent Correau Follow
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Paris, rue d'Ulm, 1970. We can easily imagine this young Dahomean philosopher – his country of origin has not yet taken the name of Benin – poring over works in the library of the École Normale Supérieure, a prestigious French establishment of 'education.
Read the biggest names in philosophy.
And wonder about the place of Africans in this group of great voices.
The last lines of an essay that the 28-year-old published that year say a lot about his state of mind.
Paulin Hountondji returns in this text to the work of Antoine-Guillaume Amo, an African philosopher born in the first years of the 18th century in the future Ghana, but who would shine in German universities.
“
What we regret,”
explains Hountondji,
“is the exclusive belonging of this work, both by its references and by the public for which it is intended, to the scientific history of the West.
Painful loneliness: Amo — need I say it?
— is not responsible for it.
»
For Paulin Hountondji, we must meditate on the lessons of this history and “
progressively create, in our own countries, these structures of dialogue and controversy without which no science is possible
”.
While he presents Amo's ideas and the regrets that his career inspires in him, the young philosopher formulates one of the demands that will subsequently run through his work: the right of African thinkers not to be locked into "
metaphysics Negro
” or “
African wisdom
”.
The freedom to be able to think globally.
“
Requiring a thinker to simply reaffirm the beliefs of his people or his social group,”
he writes,
“is to prohibit him from thinking freely and condemn him, in the long term, to intellectual asphyxiation.
»There is undoubtedly there, even,
“a secret contempt for the non-Western thinker, to whom we subtly prohibit any pretension to the universal, that is to say to the truth, refusing him the right to an authentic research , and only expecting him to manifest, through his words, the particularity of a culture
.
The refusal of the cultural ghetto
From his studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Hountondji embodies an opposite model.
He thinks on a global scale and with the great philosophers of his time.
His 3rd cycle thesis, supervised by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, questions the work of another philosopher, Edmund Husserl on science.
During the defense in June 1970 in Nanterre, the normalien faced, on the jury, two big names in philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas and Suzanne Bachelard.
However, he does not publish: the limits of Amo's extra-African intellectual adventure continue to haunt him.
“
I think I very quickly asked myself a question,”
he confided later,
“that of the public to which I would be entitled.
I was reluctant, as much by temperament as by principle, to write only for a foreign audience, over the shoulders of my compatriots
.
»
The young philosopher decided to take a break from his work on Husserl, to “
work on the margins and, rather than rushing headlong as a specialist in an author or a current of thought, patiently mark out the ground, establish legitimacy and the contours of an intellectual project which was both authentically African and authentically philosophical.
» [1] This markup will be the
Critique of Ethnophilosophy
.
Read also Death in Benin of philosopher Paulin Hountondji at 82
The work was not written in one sitting.
The ideas he developed took shape through meetings and conferences, and the texts gradually came together.
At least two stages deserve to be remembered: in 1967, Hountondji was invited, thanks to Alioune Diop, the founder of the publishing house Présence Africaine, to a conference which took place in Copenhagen on the theme “African humanism-Scandinavian culture ".
He presents a paper entitled “African Wisdom and Modern Philosophy”.
The essential elements of his future critique of ethnophilosophy are already in place.
He also used the term “ethnophilosophy” for the first time in an article in the philosophy journal
Diogenes
in 1970.
On 'African philosophy', critique of ethnophilosophy
was published at the very end of 1976. Its ambition: to break with authors who, following the Belgian priest Placide Tempels, attempted to delimit the domain of African philosophy by limiting it to a form of popular wisdom.
According to these authors, African philosophy is a collective thought which models the individual and not the critical thinking of thinking subjects.
This approach had the merit, at the time, of establishing the existence of an African philosophy and of breaking with a certain number of conceptions of the inter-world wars on the “
primitive mentality
”.
But for thinkers like Paulin Hountondji, it does not go far enough.
It does not found a philosophy, but an “ethnophilosophy”.
“
The great challenge, the primary objective of the critique of ethnophilosophy is to liberate the future
,” explains Hountondji in a work which traces his intellectual journey.
It was necessary to remove the intellectual mortgage that constituted for today's African thinker the a priori determination of a system of thought to which he was supposed to adhere under penalty of denying his identity.
It was necessary to show that no doctrine, no form of thought is forbidden and that nothing precludes, on a conceptual level, the freedom of the individual, no more in Africa than elsewhere.
It was necessary to reopen the horizon of possibilities.
On “African philosophy”
refused any premature closure of the intellectual history of black peoples
.”
A universal that remains to be constructed
Since the Copenhagen conference, Hountondji's conviction has been made: we should only compare what is comparable, the principles of wisdom are not a philosophy.
And African philosophy is no different from other philosophies of the world: it cannot be a simple diffuse set of ideas, it must take the form of literature.
“
It was a matter of ensuring,”
writes the philosopher,
“that the Africanness of a philosophy no longer resides in an alleged specificity of the content, but simply in the geographical origin of the authors.
It was a question of broadening the narrow horizon hitherto imposed on African philosophy and of giving this philosophy, now understood as a methodical reflection, the same universal aims as those to which any philosophy in the world claims.
»
Hountondji is also interested in this universal, which according to him remains to be constructed in work common to different cultures.
“
Classic universalism
,” he explained in the podcast recorded in 2022 with RFI, “
was in reality only a watered-down version of Eurocentrism.
It was nothing other than the claim of European, Western civilization to be universal, that is to say, to be valid for all regions and for all societies in the world.
So classical universalism is a form of intellectual fraud.
But, I am simply saying that the right response does not consist of withdrawing, of locking oneself into a relativism which would give up looking for values valid for all countries.
I am simply saying: the universal must be a common construction and all the societies of the world, all the cultures of the world, on the same footing of equality must construct the universal.
»
Hountondji's work also seeks to
"liquidate the unanimous prejudices
" which are sometimes held against African societies and in particular the idea according to which "
in black Africa, as in all so-called primitive or semi-primitive societies, everyone agrees with everyone
.
This unanimity not only caricatures the past, it can lead to making the absence of differences a political model for the present.
For Paulin Hountondji, it is therefore necessary “
against the desire for ideological leveling manifested by those in power, to affirm the virtues of a plural and free discussion
”.
Reconnect with endogenous knowledge
Broadening his subject, the Beninese philosopher also applies to African intellectual productions a notion widely used by the economist Samir Amin, that of “
extroversion
”: the fact of being above all oriented towards the outside and producing for it.
Hountondji believes that the field of ideas is also affected by this form of dependence.
Faced with this extroversion, Paulin Hountondji defends the idea of reappropriation.
Throughout his work, he recommends paying close attention to “endogenous knowledge”.
Traditional African knowledge must be fully taken into account in the development of modern knowledge.
“The critical validation of the traditional with a view to its active reappropriation,”
writes the philosopher, “
will perhaps lead, in the field of established knowledge, to rearrangements of which we cannot foresee, for the moment, neither the extent nor the scope. .
The essential thing, however, is to establish bridges, to reestablish the unity of knowledge, or more simply, more profoundly, the unity of man.
»
What does the Beninese thinker ultimately leave to new generations?
The Senegalese philosopher Bado Ndoye, author of a work on the work of Hountondji, believes that he allowed a
“refoundation
” of African philosophy.
He indeed appeals “
to the sense of responsibility of African philosophers who must consider that even if they have had a rather particular history, even if their humanity has been denied, they are not outside of this humanity and the problems that arise pose to them are the same ones that arise elsewhere.
The future is open and it is open to those who take the trouble to explore it
.”
[1] Paulin Hountondji,
Combats pour le Meaning An African Itinerary
, Cotonou, Éditions du Flamboyant, 1997
To better understand the work of Paulin Hountondji:
Bado Ndoye,
Paulin Hountondji, lessons in African philosophy
, Paris, Riveneuve, 2022
Paulin Hountondji,
Combats pour le Meaning, an African Itinerary
, Cotonou les Editions du Flamboyant, 1997
On rfi.fr, “Paulin Hountondji, the modernity of a founding father”, an episode of the podcast
“Philosophers of Africa, thinkers of the World”
recorded with Paulin Hountondji
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