Paulin Jidenu Hountondji became famous in Africa, because of his reflections on the scope and content of African philosophy . This disciplinary contestation of how philosophy should be taught and practiced in Africa had its antecedents during the period of anti-colonial resistance. The debate took particular shape in the early period of the liberated nation states from the 1960s onwards, which needed to define and reform the content of their educational system. In the early years, African countries continued to rely heavily on the intellectual frameworks of the former colonial powers.
Hountondji is most known for his fierce critique of anthropological approaches to the African systems of thought that appeared under the label of “African philosophy ”, which had been mainly pursued by colonial and missionary agents from the early twentieth century onwards (AP). His main point of criticism centres on the fact that although these studies professed to aim at a positive appraisal of African intellectual history and local knowledge, in reality, they often projected their own ideological and racialised imaginaries on to the body of thought they meant to describe. Ethnophilosophy , as this approach was labelled by him and by others, relied on the idea that African philosophy was a collective undertaking, built on unanimously-held belief systems, conventions, and values. It was hence conceived as something radically different from philosophy in Europe. Accordingly, the task of the external European observer lied in systematizing this unconscious thought into a coherent “philosophy.” By projecting an image of primitive unanimity , these authors of ethnophilosophical texts misconceived the essential content of philosophical practice, which needs to rely on critical individual analysis and reflection—whether it is practiced in Europe, Africa or elsewhere.
Not only did Hountondji criticise European ethnophilosophy , but also African colleagues who engaged in the emerging discipline, such as the Rwandan priest and philosopher Alexis Kagame (1902–1981). The main scope of his critique was to differentiate philosophy from anthropology , and, methodologically, to set critical analysis apart from descriptive, conventional thinking that runs the risk of leading to particularism and intellectual enclosure. The normative horizon of his definition of African philosophy remains an emancipatory project with a universal scope encompassing humanity as such, where philosophy could serve as an instrument for empowerment and social transformation. This implies that the praxis of African philosophy should be locally rooted in Africa, and engage with a particular set of problems of its time. However, its reflexive capacity needs to extend beyond the borders of the continent, and remain open to knowledge and influences from other cultures and intellectual genealogies (Hountondji 2017). In this sense, we prefer to describe Hountondji as a transcultural philosopher, who is critically engaging with a set of universalisable questions, with a global significance, from a defined location. For this reason, philosophers in general can learn from, and should engage with, his oeuvre, particularly if they are situated in the former metropolitan spaces.
Hountondji’s Life as Intellectual and Politician
Let us briefly recount the corner-stones of Hountondji’s intellectual biography, including his short interlude as a politician. Both mark him as a global thinker with a strong concern for a prosperous African continent. Hountondji was born in Treichville, in the Ivory Coast, in 1942. His family moved back to Dahomey (today Benin), where he received his school education at the Victor Ballot high school in Porto Novo, from which he graduated in 1960. In 1958, the former colony became the Republic of Dahomey, as a self-governed part of the French Union, and, eventually it became independent, in 1960. Hountondji’s subsequent academic formation started in metropolitan France. He moved to Paris, to visit, first, the Henri IV preparatory high school; then he decided to study philosophy at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. His teachers included famous intellectual figures of this time, such as Jacques Derrida , Louis Althusser , Paul Ricoeur and George Canguilhem . Hountondji was exposed to important philosophical currents at this period of political protest and social transformation in the 1960s, including the re-reading of Marx, the birth of the post-structuralist movement and the philosophy of deconstruction, as well as phenomenology and epistemology. Derrida and Ricoeur introduced him to the work of Edmund Husserl , the founder of phenomenology, who defended a conception of philosophy as science , as a discipline marked by rigidity, clarity, and logic (SfM, pp. 4–12). Althusser inspired him to develop a non-dogmatic Marxism , and introduced him to contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault. Hountondji decided to write his Ph.D. thesis on Husserl, focussing on his epistemology, and choosing Paul Ricoeur as his supervisor. During his work on this thesis, which he finished in 1970, he found employment at the University of Besançon as an assistant professor in philosophy, where, above all, he lectured on Husserl. In the year of his thesis defence, Hountondji left for Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) and occupied a chair in philosophy at the University of Lovanium in Kinshasa, and later at the National University of Zaire in Lubumbashi. In 1972, he became the first professor of philosophy at the newly-founded National University of Benin in Cotonou. Fellowships enabled him to pursue his research internationally, visiting the University of Düsseldorf, Germany (1980–1982), the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC (1997–1998), and the W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute at Harvard University (2009–2010). In addition, Hountondji taught as a guest professor in Louisville (USA) and, frequently, in Paris, where he became a programme director at the International College of Philosophy in 1987. He took a break from his duties as professor when he served for a short period as a politician in the first government of the newly founded Republic of Benin, becoming a Minister of Education (1990–1991) and subsequently serving as a Minister of Culture and Communication (1991–1993). In 1994, he returned to his academic life. Hountondji gained his doctorat d’état (habilitation) from the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar for his critical scholarship on African philosophy and anthropology in 1995. His intellectual biography, The Struggle for Meaning. Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy (French text, 1997; English translation , 2002) is partly based on his own review of his academic career, written for this purpose. Although emeritus status was conferred upon him in 2007, Hountondji continues to direct the “African Centre for Advanced Study” in Porto Novo, and has continued to lecture and publish to this day. He also continues to serve as the president of the national education council, a position he was elected to in 2009.
Situating Hountondji’s Oeuvre in an African Intellectual Landscape
Hountondji, situating himself as an African intellectual concerned with the struggle for black liberation, became interested in the intellectual currents that were celebrated during the anti-colonial and postcolonial era, including the literary and political movement, Négritude , propagated by eminent figures such as Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) as well as African Socialism , developed as African versions of Marxism-Leninism by political intellectuals such as Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) and Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972). He warned that these Afrocentric schools of thought should not fall into the same trap of unanimity and cultural essentialism as their Eurocentric counterparts. Although black thought, in this early period of liberation, aimed at refuting the racism inherent in European civilisational and ethnographic narratives, it often duplicated racialised tropes when basing its ideological stance on a presumed African identity.
There are different schools in contemporary African philosophy . For the unfamiliar reader, it might be helpful to situate Hountondji’s work within this intellectual landscape. Therefore, we will briefly introduce his understanding of how philosophy should be practiced, and compare it with approaches that gained prominence. This short excursus does not claim to be in any way comprehensive, but is meant to provide a preliminary insight into the rich diversity within contemporary African philosophy .1
Hountondji, and some of his contemporary philosophers on the continent, such as Kwasi Wiredu, Peter Bodunrin, and Henry Odera Oruka , are generally assigned to the professional school of African philosophy . Wiredu, Bodunrin, and Oruka stem from Anglophone Africa, where contemporary twentieth-century philosophy in general was shaped by the philosophy of language, logic, and analytic approaches. In addition, Oruka studied at the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, with Ingemar Hedenius , who stressed also the social dimension of philosophical concepts. Hountondji, on the other hand, received his education in the French academy, where phenomenology , hermeneutics, post-structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory prevailed—what is now known as “continental philosophy.” Hountondji’s fluency in English allowed him, from early on, to converse with his Anglophone colleagues. He used this intellectual background and these theoretical tools in order to turn to philosophical issues that were perti...