Phenomenology Beyond Eurocentrism: Hountondji and the Promise of the Universal (under advance contract with IUP)

The overarching purpose of this book is to defend a globally inclusive form of philosophy – a field historically associated closely with the European continent. I approach this task by way of an engagement with the phenomenological tradition and its characteristic preoccupation with the possibility of cross-cultural, universal validity. Rather than focus exclusively on the European representatives of this tradition, however, I argue that the phenomenological question of universality can best be addressed when phenomenology is itself given a globally expansive and intercultural sense. This book therefore engages both the Africana and European traditions of phenomenology, drawing on a range of thinkers including Paulin Hountondji, Edmund Husserl, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Derrida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In posing a direct challenge to European phenomenology’s parochial and often explicitly colonial presuppositions, this book maps avenues for a decolonized form of phenomenological thinking which makes good on the enduring appeal of phenomenology’s methodological commitments.

             Going against broadly anti-universalist trends in both critical-phenomenological and decolonial thinking, the central argument put forward in this book is that the decolonization of phenomenology goes beyond questions of embodiment and lived experience which have been so galvanizing to the discipline in recent years. Specifically, I argue on the basis of Paulin J. Hountondji’s work that the most profound resources for a decolonized phenomenological thinking lie with one of its key methods, the method of the “reduction”. It is by way of this foundational demand that the inquirer suspend belief in unascertained cultural presuppositions and biases that phenomenology promises to attain to a form of universal, thinking. Although this method has fallen into philosophical disfavor in recent years, this book argues that it is ripe for a reevaluation. I argue that it is by turning to the Africana tradition of phenomenology that we can see the close, if perhaps unexpected, connection between decolonization and a renewed orientation towards universality. It is on the basis of an engagement with this hitherto under-recognized tradition that the book develops a conception of universality I call “dialogical universality”. The concept of dialogical universality makes a contribution to a range of debates within contemporary Africana and European philosophy regarding the pluralization of the canon, academic decolonization, and the possibility possibilities of affirming a non-Eurocentric form of universal, philosophical reason.

Other Publications

1. “Deconstruction and Epistemic Violence”, Southern Journal of Philosophy 59/2 (June 2021), pp. 100-121.

Abstract. While theorists of epistemic injustice often refer to Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” as an early articulation of the field’s concerns, they have stopped short of engaging deeply with Spivak’s deconstructive take on epistemic violence, and her suggestion that this consists in an attribution of subjectivity to historically marginalized speakers. In redressing this oversight, this paper makes a case for adopting a broader conception of epistemic harm and exclusion than has been acknowledged in the literature: I argue that the presumption that speakers are subjects can precipitate silencing. For in determining the other who speaks as a subject, one forecloses hospitality to an alterity not already understood according to the subject/object distinction central to western metaphysics. This deconstructive intervention thus challenges one of the field’s key assumptions, namely, that epistemic harm consists in a failure to treat speakers as subjects, and consequently that generating a more inclusive dialogical climate depends on restoring marginalized individuals to subject status. Folding Spivak’s deconstructive insight into the remedial project of epistemic justice is therefore far from straightforward; nonetheless, I argue that it is consistent with the literature’s demand for a heightened sensitivity vis-à-vis the ways marginalized others are routinely harmed in epistemic practices.

2. “Empirical-Anthropological Types and Absolute Ideas: Tracking Husserl’s Eurocentrism”, Husserl Studies 38/3 (December 2022), pp. 359-383

Abstract. Husserl has often stood accused Eurocentrism given his disquieting coupling of philosophy as universal science with Europe. And yet, however much this accusation has clouded the appeal of transcendental phenomenology, the nature of this charge remains obscure: whether Husserl’s chauvinism is merely a personal opinion punctuating his writing or is instead closely connected to the methods of phenomenology has been left unexplored. This paper offers itself as a corrective: approaching Husserl’s work from the perspective of Paulin Hountondji’s uptake of it, I look to get a clearer picture of how precisely Eurocentrism afflicts transcendental phenomenology. The overarching aim of doing so is to chart the possibilities for the development of a non-Eurocentric, decolonial phenomenological thinking which exploits the enduring appeal of Husserl’s commitment to presuppositionlessness. The first part of the paper considers the relationship between the phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation, showing that, by Husserl’s own lights, phenomenological science seeks to expel all forms of prejudice. Part two, however, shows that the entrance of Eurocentrism into phenomenology is not simply accidental, in two distinct senses. The first, which takes off from Merleau-Ponty’s (implicit) critique of Husserl, argues that Husserl in his late work is insufficiently attentive to the empirical dimension: Eurocentrism thus stems from the overly transcendental emphases of this project and its inability to engage with concrete human diversity. The second draws on Derrida’s (explicit) critique of Husserl, arguing that it is precisely the admission of concrete historico-cultural facts into phenomenology that compromises the universal by identifying it with the particularities of Europe. I thus show that Eurocentrism does indeed insinuate itself in Husserl’s methods – not, however, in a manner that renders transcendental phenomenology irredeemable. Given the opposition between these two insightful criticisms, however, I argue that the challenge for a decolonial vision of phenomenology is formidable.

3. “Philosophical Universality in Crisis: Hountondji’s Interruption of Phenomenology”, in African Phenomenology: Contributions and Challenges, ed. Abraham Olivier, M. John Lamola and Justin Sands (Albany: SUNY Press, 2023).

Abstract. I explore and defend a decolonial vision of universality that involves a turn to the geographical and disciplinary margins of philosophical thinking. I do so by delineating and setting into action a novel interpretive methodology whereby Edmund Husserl’s thought, and its characteristic commitment to universalistic thinking, is reconceived and transformed by the critical lens provided in Paulin Hountondji’s work. Decolonial criticism is by and large dominated by a “disenchantment” with the universalist aspirations of European philosophy, regarding these as part and parcel of the historical elision of colonized forms of thought. There are, however, a number of decolonial thinkers who question this anti-universalist turn: far from heralding the demise of philosophical universals, the argument goes, the unsettling of European epistemic privilege opens up for the very first time the possibility of a discourse that is truly universalist. The following paper contributes to the decolonial reclamation of the universal by taking up the question of universality as it unfolds in the African phenomenological tradition. This paper proceeds in three sections. The first examines Hountondji’s now famous critique of “ethnophilosophy”, homing in on the ethnophilosophical presumption that Europe is uniquely capable of generating universal insights while African thought remains confined to the particularity of “worldviews”. Section two moves on to tackle the question of whether Hountondji’s critique of ethnophilosophy applies to Husserlian phenomenology. The methodology deployed in this paper enables me to answer in the affirmative, arguing that Husserl reiterates the pernicious bias that Europe has a privileged connection to the universal. The third section, finally, examines the potentialities of Hountondji’s work for the articulation of a phenomenological “universalism” that (i) severs its ties with a single, exclusive territory and (ii) answers to the decolonial interest in futurity in the sense of thinking a universalism that is emphatically new. Staging a dialogue between Hountondji and Nadia Yala Kisukidi around this topic, I conclude by thinking through a radical vision of universalism that requires us to rethink the very method and scope of phenomenology itself.

4. “‘The Giving Birth of a World’: Fanon, Husserl and the Imagination”, Southern Journal of Philosophy 62/1 (2024), pp. 24-44

Abstract. This paper examines the role of the imagination in Fanon’s and Husserl’s work in order to rethink Fanon’s relationship with Husserlian phenomenology. I begin with an investigation of the oft-overlooked ways in which the imagination appears in Wretched of the Earth. Here, I argue that Fanon puts a great deal of stock in the imagination, ultimately calling upon this faculty in order to presage the novel ways of being, thinking and acting which are a recurrent signature of his vision of decolonization. The latter half of the paper then goes on to offer an account of the decisive methodological significance of the imagination within Husserl’s work. Revisiting the methodological infrastructure of phenomenology with Fanonian concerns in mind casts Husserl’s project in a surprising new light, bringing to the fore the revolutionary potential of both the epoché and the method of eidetic variation. For at the core of Husserlian methodology lies a resolve to exceed the limits of our present empirical reality – a leitmotiv of Fanon’s own thinking. I ultimately show that Fanon’s work can thus be imagined as a reactivation, indeed a revolution, inaugurated at the heart of phenomenology and its most basic methodological commitments.

5. Title redacted (under review).

Abstract. This paper offers a reading of some central themes in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time through the lens afforded by the work of María Lugones. Specifically, I examine Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein” as being-in-the-world and the project of “authenticity” from the perspective of Lugones’s account of “multiplicitous selfhood”. Challenging a deeply embedded tendency in comparative philosophy to treat the productions of a marginalized thinker through a more familiar, “canonical” voice, this paper contributes to ongoing conversations about the deployment of comparative methodology in decolonial philosophy by inverting the traditional order of reading. In reading Heidegger through Lugones, and thereby explicitly foregrounding the concerns characteristic of her thinking, I seek to provide an example of what it might mean to approach a “canonical thinker” from the perspective of the “margins” rather than vice versa. I argue that doing so in this instance has significant interpretive consequences that tend to be occluded on a standard comparative approach. In particular, I show that approaching Heidegger’s account of Dasein with Lugones’s concerns in view opens up (i) a decolonial feminist criticism of the Eurocentrism built into Heidegger’s supposedly undifferentiated notion of Dasein and (ii) a novel perspective on Heidegger’s recapitulation - with his account of authenticity - to a vision of unified selfhood. I therefore conclude by arguing that the perspective of the margin offers a decisive advantage: we come to see that, above and beyond ameliorating canonical philosophy by offering important specifications to insufficiently differentiated philosophical accounts, one upshot of placing the “margin” into conversation with the “canon” is that we come to see very clearly those places where a canonical thinker resorts to a privileging of traditional motifs.   

6. “Why Hountondji in Europe? Metaphilosophical Reflections”, forthcoming in Arumaruka: The Journal of Conversational Thinking

Abstract. Taking its cue from Hountondji’s remarks on finding philosophical inspiration in culturally distant contexts, this paper thinks through the abiding relevance of Hountondji’s project for the European philosopher. I argue that the metaphilosophical kernel of Hountondji’s work contains important lessons applicable to present debates within European and more generally Euro-American philosophy regarding philosophical decolonization and the expansion of the canon. Going against a still dominant interpretation of Hountondji’s understanding of philosophy as Eurocentric and overly narrow, I contend that Hountondji’s work in fact offers a route for broadening our sense of what counts as philosophical without falling prey to colonial bias. For Hountondji, this depends upon cultivating the right attitude to the extra-philosophical – one that neither presupposes nor denies its philosophical significance. This self-critical attitude animates Hountondji’s “early” as much as his “late” interventions; a subsidiary argument made in this paper is thus that there is a continuity traversing Hountondji’s philosophical work. But the central aim is to examine and reflect upon the significance of Hountondji’s view, showing that his metaphilosophical vision continues to have profound ramifications not only for the contemporary African philosopher, but for European philosophers like myself.

Works-in-progress

Please feel free to contact me for drafts of works-in-progress.

6. Hountondji’s Metamorphosis of the Phenomenological Reduction

Abstract. In the closing remarks of his lecture, The Metamorphoses of the Phenomenological Reduction, Jacques Taminiaux reiterates his provocative proposal that “the adventure of the reduction in the work of the founders of phenomenology entailed in their wake ever renewed metamorphoses”. Although Taminiaux only names Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas as heirs of the phenomenological tradition, the implication of this claim is clear: the method of the phenomenological reduction as introduced by Husserl is given over to infinite re-workings, critical adaptations and modifications. My argument in this paper is that the Beninois phenomenologist Paulin J. Hountondji gives us a further metamorphosis of Husserl’s central method. What Hountondji brings out is the decolonial significance of the phenomenological reduction: the bracketing of prejudices and presuppositions is to enable the pursuit of universal knowledge beyond the horizon of Eurocentrism. Against the idea that decolonization announces the impossibility of universal reason, the underlying claim here is that decolonization unleashes a universality that is, for the first time, genuinely universal. In this way, Hountondji helps us see the startling relevance of Husserl’s development of a method which aims to, as Husserl puts it, “liberate [the philosopher] from all prejudices.”

7. Against the Civilizing Mission: Césaire and Fanon on the Relationship between Colonialism and Universality

Abstract. What is the relationship between colonialism and universality? According to one influential account, colonialism was premised on a project of universalization. More specifically, this argument tends to focus on the justificatory role played by the civilizing mission, which provided a rationale for colonial exploitation and expansion by reference to Europe’s special task of spreading universality across the globe. The aspiration to universality is thus shown to be troubled if not outright undermined by its entanglement with European colonialism, and the history that paradoxically marked the universal as the proprietary right of white, European “civilization”. This “paradox” or “cognitive dissonance” is sometimes explained away by a deeper collusion between universalism and exclusion – on this view, any claim to the universal bears a more or less covert discriminatory function, and so the invocation of universality as a justificatory premise for European colonial domination is only contradictory on the surface. I suggest a different answer to this question. By drawing on Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, I argue that colonization and a genuine orientation to universality are, to the contrary, constitutively opposed. My intention is not to deny that European colonization involved a claim to universality and utilized this repeatedly to justify its colonial ventures both on the African continent and elsewhere. But it is a further question as to whether the universality invoked by the “civilizing mission” and associated justificatory ideologies in fact made or even could in principle make a coherent case for being a genuine form of universality. I argue that it did not and could not. My claim is that, properly conceived, coloniality and universality are logically incompatible. I thus take exception from recent accounts which have explained the historical link between universality and colonization in terms of a defect intrinsic to the former concept, viz. that it inevitably operates as the assertion of one particularity against others and so cannot but be exclusionary (colonialism thus appears as just one version of a historical drama that any attempted institution of universality will play out). To whatever extent universality involves a plea to be all-embracing – whether that is defined in terms of commonality/generality or true in all situations (my interest is in the latter: universality as a question of validity) – colonialism tends to undermine universality.   I conclude by suggesting that the decolonization of knowledge is therefore a first step towards developing a genuine vision of universality.