{"id":4694,"date":"2024-03-20T02:28:52","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T02:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/20\/paulin-hountondji-revolutionary-african-philosopher-dies-at-81\/"},"modified":"2024-03-20T02:28:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T02:28:52","slug":"paulin-hountondji-revolutionary-african-philosopher-dies-at-81","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/20\/paulin-hountondji-revolutionary-african-philosopher-dies-at-81\/","title":{"rendered":"Paulin Hountondji, Revolutionary African Philosopher, Dies at 81"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"550\" src=\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/03\/18\/multimedia\/18hountondji--04-wqhb\/18hountondji--04-wqhb-facebookJumbo.jpg?fit=1050,550&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Paulin Hountondji, Revolutionary African Philosopher, Dies at 81\" title=\"Paulin Hountondji, Revolutionary African Philosopher, Dies at 81\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Paulin Hountondji, a philosopher from Benin whose critique of colonial-era anthropology helped transform African intellectual life, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Cotonou, Benin\u2019s largest city. He was 81.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His death was confirmed by his son, Herv\u00e9, who did not cite a cause.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">As a young philosophy professor on a continent that was throwing off the colonial grip in the 1960s, Mr. Hountondji (pronounced HUN-ton-djee) rebelled against efforts to force African ways of thinking into the European worldview. Himself steeped in European thought \u2014 he was the first African admitted as a philosophy student at the most prestigious school in France, the \u00c9cole Normale Superieure \u2014 he developed a critique of what he called \u201cethnophilosophy,\u201d a concoction of Europeans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His work has shaped the study of philosophy in Africa ever since. It became a kind of second declaration of independence for Africa \u2014 an intellectual one this time \u2014 in the view of the African philosophers who have followed Mr. Hountondji. It was \u201cvery important and very liberating,\u201d the Columbia University philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne said in an interview.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In his introduction to the book \u201cPaulin Hountondji: Le\u00e7ons de Philosophie Africaine,\u201d by Bado Ndoye (published in 2022 but not yet translated into English), Mr. Diagne called him \u201cthe most influential figure in philosophy in Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A modest man who spent his career teaching in African universities, mostly at Benin\u2019s national university, with brief forays into the turbulent politics of his small West African coastal homeland, Mr. Hountondji knew that there was something amiss in efforts by Europeans to tell Africans how they should think about their place in the universe.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He also knew that the emerging strongman rule of the 1960s, with its enforced groupthink, spelled trouble for the continent. He found the roots of that idea of collective thought \u2014 wrongly considered a natural attribute of Africans \u2014 in the \u201cethnophilosophy\u201d that he so strongly criticized.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Armed with his work on the German phenomenologist <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/husserl\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Edmund Husserl<\/a>, in his late 20s and early 30s Mr. Hountondji undertook to confront head-on \u201cBantu Philosophy,\u201d a book by a Belgian missionary priest, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aequatoria.be\/tempels\/bio.htm\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Placide Tempels<\/a>, that for nearly 30 years had set the tone for African philosophy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">When Father Tempels, an ecclesiastical rebel who lived for decades in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, published \u201cBantu Philosophy\u201d in 1945, it was seen by a first generation of pre-independence African intellectuals as groundbreaking. It purported to restore intellectual dignity to a continent viewed as \u201cprimitive\u201d in the colonialist worldview.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Contrary to European belief that Africans were incapable of abstract thought, Father Tempels suggested that they actually did have a philosophy, a way of seeing themselves in the universe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But in a series of essays beginning in 1969 and collected in the book \u201cAfrican Philosophy: Myth and Reality\u201d (published in 1976 in French and in 1983 in English), Mr. Hountondji set out to demolish the Belgian priest\u2019s work as no more than ethnographic musings that ultimately bolstered colonialism.<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"imageblock-wrapper\">\n<figure class=\"img-sz-small css-1189og3 e1g7ppur0\" aria-label=\"media\" role=\"group\"><figcaption data-testid=\"photoviewer-children-caption\" class=\"css-1ybnr6m ewdxa0s0\"><span class=\"css-jevhma e13ogyst0\">In a series of essays collected in the book \u201cAfrican Philosophy: Myth and Reality,\u201d Mr. Hountondji set out to demolish the work of the Belgian missionary priest Placide Tempels, which for decades had set the tone for African philosophy.<\/span><span class=\"css-1u46b97 e1z0qqy90\"><span class=\"css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0\">Credit&#8230;<\/span><span><span aria-hidden=\"false\">Riveneuve<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Whether or not one agreed with Father Tempels\u2019s central thesis \u2014 that for the \u201cBantu,\u201d or African, \u201cbeing\u201d means \u201cpower\u201d \u2014 his whole approach was flawed, Mr. Hountondji argued. Philosophy can\u2019t emanate from a group, he wrote, but must be the responsibility of individual philosophers, an idea influenced by Mr. Hountondji\u2019s knowledge of Husserl.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But that responsibility was absent in Father Tempels\u2019s largely anonymous band of \u201cBantus,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In a memoir, \u201cCombats Pour le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain\u201d (1997), published in English in 2002 as \u201cThe Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa,\u201d Mr. Hountondji rejected \u201cthe construction, as a norm for all Africans, past, present and future, of a form of thinking, a system of beliefs, which could at best only correspond to an already determined stage of the intellectual journey of Black peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">So, Mr. Hountondji wrote, \u201cwhat was thus presented as \u2018Bantu philosophy\u2019 was not really the philosophy of the Bantu, but of Tempels, and engaged only the responsibility of the Belgian missionary, having become, for the occasion, the analyst of the ways and customs of the Bantu.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">These thoughts had the effect of a bomb in African intellectual life. Mr. Hountondji was criticized for elitism, for \u201cEurocentrism\u201d and for rejecting Africa\u2019s oral traditions. But these criticisms soon fell by the wayside, and today his \u201ccritique of ethnophilosophy enjoys canonical status in contemporary African philosophy,\u201d Pascah Mungwini wrote in his 2022 survey, \u201cAfrican Philosophy.\u201d He called it a \u201cphilosophical masterpiece.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">African thinkers had been freed from an immemorial set of beliefs to which European thinkers like Father Tempels, and the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule, had chained them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cWhat the Belgian Franciscan was offering was really a system of collective thought, which was supposedly a positive African attribute,\u201d Mr. Hountondji <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rfi.fr\/fr\/podcasts\/philosophes-d-afrique-penseurs-du-monde\/20220710-paulin-hountondji-la-modernit%C3%A9-d-un-p%C3%A8re-fondateur\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">told Radio France Internationale in a 2022 interview<\/a>. \u201cThis is not the sense of the word \u2018philosophy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Hountondji \u201cwanted the purity of the idea,\u201d Mr. Diagne said. \u201cWhat had to be cleared away was all the picturesque of \u2018anthropology.\u2019\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In the early 1970s, Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy at universities in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country was then \u201cliving under the boot of a general,\u201d <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/09\/08\/world\/mobutu-sese-seko-zairian-ruler-is-dead-in-exile-in-morocco-at-66.html\" title=\"\">Mobutu Sese Seko<\/a>, who used \u201ctraditional \u2018philosophy\u2019 to justify or hide the worst excesses, the most atrocious human rights violations,\u201d Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoir.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Hountondji\u2019s \u201crefusal of the unanimist message\u201d in the Zaire of General Mobutu, as Mr. Diagne put it, echoed his rejection of the missionary Father Tempels, who, like the general, suggested that Africans all spoke with one voice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">These reflections on autocracy and the enforced political support it entails influenced Mr. Hountondji\u2019s reluctant entrance into public life in Benin, where, as a professor at the National University, he had chafed under the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/10\/16\/world\/africa\/mathieu-kerekou-dictator-who-ushered-in-democracy-in-benin-dies-at-82.html\" title=\"\">Gen. Mathieu K\u00e9r\u00e9kou<\/a>. What Mr. Hountondji called General <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/10\/16\/world\/africa\/mathieu-kerekou-dictator-who-ushered-in-democracy-in-benin-dies-at-82.html\" title=\"\">K\u00e9r\u00e9kou<\/a>\u2019s \u201cregime of terror\u201d ended after a 1990 national conference of Benin citizens summoned by the general unexpectedly turned against him.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Hountondji was invited to the conference and immediately zeroed in on the central issue, to the displeasure of the general\u2019s subordinates: whether the gathering could decide the country\u2019s future. Mr. Hountondji\u2019s was the \u201conly legitimate and possible solution,\u201d the historian Richard Banegas wrote in \u201cLa D\u00e9mocratie au Pas de Cam\u00e9l\u00e9on\u201d (2003), his political history of Benin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Hountondji\u2019s side won, and Benin became a democracy \u2014 for a time. Mr. Hountondji unexpectedly found himself minister of education in the new government, from 1990 to 1991, and minister of culture and communication from 1991 to 1993.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was unsuited to political life, his son, Herv\u00e9, said in an interview, because \u201cit was out of the question for him to shut himself up in a political party.\u201d Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoir that one day he would develop his thoughts on \u201cthe cynicism, the hypocrisy, the daily lies, which make up daily political life.\u201d He never did.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He went back to teaching at the national university, now the Universit\u00e9 d\u2019Abomey-Calavi, where he was to remain for the rest of his career.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Paulin Jidenu Hountondji was born on April 11, 1942, in Treichville, now part of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, to Paul Hountondji, a pastor in the Methodist Church, and Marguerite (Dovoedo) Hountondji.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He received his baccalaur\u00e9at (the equivalent of a high school diploma) at the Lyc\u00e9e Victor-Ballot, a school where the country\u2019s elite were educated, in Porto-Novo, Benin\u2019s capital. He went on to earn a degree in philosophy from the \u00c9cole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1967 and his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris under <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/ricoeur\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Paul Ricoeur<\/a>, with a thesis on Husserl, in 1970.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">As a student in Paris in the first days of African independence, Mr. Hountondji wrote, he grew disturbed by the willingness of other African students to paper over the crimes of one of the continent\u2019s new heroes, the Guinean dictator <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1984\/03\/28\/obituaries\/guinea-s-president-sekou-toure-dies-in-cleveland-clinic.html\" title=\"\">Sekou Tour\u00e9<\/a>, who was to wind up driving much of his country into exile.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy at the National University of Zaire in 1971 and 1972 before returning to his native Benin. From 1998 until his death he was director of the African Center for Advanced Studies in Porto-Novo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Flore, and his wife, Gr\u00e2ce (Darboux) Hountondji. Two former presidents of Benin spoke at his funeral in Cotonou on March 1.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In later years, Mr. Diagne said, Mr. Hountondji \u201cbelieved he had gone too far in his radicality\u201d in his earlier skepticism of African oral traditions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Yet he remained firm to the end that Europeans should not be doing the thinking for Africans. \u201cThere\u2019s a colonialist point of view that all Africans agree with each other, and have the same way of thinking,\u201d Mr. Hountondji told French radio in 2022. \u201cThe colonialist view is insensitive to the plurality of opinions in an oral civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-798hid etfikam0\">Flore Nobime contributed reporting from Cotonou.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paulin Hountondji, a philosopher from Benin whose critique of colonial-era anthropology helped transform African intellectual life, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Cotonou, Benin\u2019s largest city. He was 81. His death was confirmed by his son, Herv\u00e9, who did not cite a cause. As a young philosophy professor on a continent that was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/03\/18\/multimedia\/18hountondji--04-wqhb\/18hountondji--04-wqhb-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1863,16,8000,7999,8002,8001],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4694"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4696,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4694\/revisions\/4696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}