Whither African Philosophy

WHITHER AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY? Paulin J. Hountondji. The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa. Translated by John Conteh Morgan, foreword by K. Anthony Appiah. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Research in International Studies. xxiv + 308 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.00. Paper. Paulin J. Hountondji established his reputation through his now famous critique of ethnophilosophy in his first book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983). In his most recent work, Hountondji accomplishes several things. First, as the French subtitle of The Struggle for Meaning (Un Itineraire Africain) indicates more clearly than its English counterpart, this book offers a sketch of his intellectual journey. Second, Hountondji seeks to dispel any lingering notions that he is Eurocentric by arguing that his philosophical practice is rooted in Africa because "Africa must constitute its center, its point of departure, and, where applicable, be its primary beneficiary" (74). A third theme that dominates The Struggle for Meaning is Hountondji's debate with his ethnophilosophical critics. In this regard, his text is not only an astute reflection on the reception history of African Philosophy but also an expansive dialogue in which he reconfigures the debate by placing the critique of ethnophilosophy in a broader context by relating it to the themes and practice of ethnoscience. Finally, the English subtitle hints at Hountondji's other concerns, namely his thoughts on philosophy, culture, and democracy in Africa. Although he touches on these themes throughout the second half of the book and discusses his activism as well as his brief tenure as a member of the government of Benin, his reflections here must be seen as a prolepsis because he promises a future work on the search for democracy in Africa. In the first part of the book, Hountondji argues that his philosophical praxis is a science in the tradition of Edmund Husserl. Hountondji's discovery of Husserl climaxed a philosophical journey that began in high school in his native Benin and continued with his studies under luminaries of twentieth-century French philosophy such as Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Georges Carguilhem, Louis Althusser, Suzanne Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas. If Althusser introduced Hountondji to philosophy as a "theory of science"-a reference to an intellectual procedure that yields conceptual clarity-it is Husserl's intellectual preoccupation with "philosophy as a strict science" that fascinates and structures Hountondji's intellectual vision (11). Indeed, his dissertation, supervised by Ricoeur, explored Husserl's mission to ground philosophy as a science. Husserl, according to Hountondji, rooted his project in the rationalist tradition by claiming "all consciousness is consciousness of something," a position which implied that the researcher would carry out direct observation and description before embarking on explanation and interpretation. Husserl further posited the doctrine of intentionality, a notion which he attributed to Franz Brentano: "Now with this intentionality, this necessary object-directedness, or object-pointedness of consciousness, arises the outright possibility of objective knowledge or the rational" (13). In the opening chapters of The Search for Meaning, Hountondji introduces the reader to Husserl's phenomenology of language through his interpretation of Husserl's Logical Investigations. Hountondji explains, "My ambition was to identify and delimit, within the existing corpus [of Husserl] something like an archeology of science and technology, and apply it critically to Africa" (26). Husserl demonstrated that science is a language event in which the subject plays a central role in constituting meaning. He argued that language and logic are tools of science, which for Husserl, and later for Hountondji, remains "the telos... of thought and of human life in general, the infinite task that gives meaning to humanity's collective existence" (35). …