Contemporary decolonial criticism and critical phenomenological thought may be characterized as proceeding from a disenchantment with the philosophical aspiration towards universality. The overarching argument put forward in this dissertation is that there is, to the contrary, an intimate and even necessary connection between the decolonization of philosophy and the affirmation of philosophical universality. By way of an engagement with the Africana tradition of phenomenology – a tradition which culminates in the thought of Paulin J. Hountondji – I make a case for the pertinence of a conception of universality I term “dialogical universality” to debates about pluralizing the canon, academic decolonization, and communication across geographical and cultural frontiers. In the first half of this dissertation, I look at Hountondji’s transformation of the Husserlian project of phenomenology as universal science. Therein I employ a novel comparative methodology I call “reading from the margins”: rather than beginning with Husserl’s thought and interpreting Hountondji’s intellectual output by those lights, I invert the traditional order of reading. That is, I begin with the concerns characteristic of Hountondji’s thinking, and re-interpret Husserlian phenomenology from this perspective. This subtle methodological shift is motivated by decolonial concerns regarding the reification of European thought as pivotal, even when it is considered in dialogue with traditions from the Global South. I thus resist the suggestion – still dominant in the Hountondji scholarship – that his philosophical trajectory is entirely explicable by reference to the European “canon”. On my methodology, the very terms “canon” and “margin” begin to shift in meaning: “reading from the margins” is thus self-destructive in that its ultimate aim is to reconstitute what is considered canonical in the first place. One of the central contributions of my dissertation is, in this sense, methodological in nature: “reading from the margins” is offered in the spirit of an inaugural example of a decolonial approach to the history of philosophy. Beyond suggesting itself as a decolonial framework, “reading from the margins” enables substantive interpretive interventions foreclosed on the standard approach. Within the context of Chapter One, the interpretive upshot of my methodology is to throw into relief a Hountondjean heresy vis-à-vis Husserlian phenomenology. This chapter sets into action the methodology of “reading from the margins” by beginning with an exegetical consideration of Hountondji’s thought on its own terms, focusing on his critique of what he calls ethnophilosophy. The central argument put forward in this chapter is that the critique of ethnophilosophy may be extended to Husserl, insofar as Husserl remains beholden to an ethnophilosophical logic which identifies Europe as the unique site of universal thinking while casting the colonized world in the mold of the particular. It follows that the standard picture whereby Hountondji is simply an heir of the Husserlian project of phenomenological thought must be challenged. This then raises the question: why retain the name “phenomenology” if its founder is subject to such a criticism? Chapter Two answers this questions through an investigation into the relationship between the Husserl’s methods and the entrance of Eurocentrism into his work. This chapter makes two interrelated arguments. First, I follow Hountondji in focusing on the phenomenological method of a reduction that puts out of play all presuppositions as an important resource for developing a decolonized conception of universality. I then, second, explore two different ways of accounting for Husserl’s failure to fully effect the reduction. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty, I first consider the possibility that Husserl’s method is insufficiently empiricist. I then consider Derrida’s criticism of this Merleau-Pontyian view which focuses instead on the way that Husserl is at his most Eurocentric when he is at his most empiricist, i.e., when he abandons the explicitly transcendental orientation of phenomenology. I thus show that Eurocentrism does insinuate itself in Husserl’s methodological framework – not, however, in a manner that renders phenomenology simply irredeemable. Given the opposition between these two insightful criticisms, however, I argue that the challenge for a decolonial version of phenomenology is considerable; for, in order that it avoid Eurocentrism, it would need to both realize phenomenology’s transcendental ambitions and yet remain in contact with concrete, empirical intersubjectivity. One of the issues that arises in considering Merleau-Ponty’s proposal for a more empirical and consequently multicultural form of phenomenology is that it is naïve, within a “post”-colonial context, to assume that non-domineering form of contact between cultures – requisite for philosophical communication with universal aims – is possible. Chapter Three focuses on this problematic by elucidating the arguments made by Césaire and Fanon regarding the incompatibility between colonialism and the aspiration to universality. Beyond making this conceptual argument, this chapter contributes to the scholarship on these thinkers by (i) emphasizing the universalistic dimension of the Négritude tradition and (ii) reconsidering Fanon’s relationship to that tradition of thought. Chapter Three also involves an important feature of the decolonial methodology carried out in this dissertation, since the turn to Césaire and Fanon is motivated by Hountondji’s own construction of his philosophical inheritance. With the conceptual terrain thus laid out, Chapter Four moves on to think through a decolonial, phenomenological conception of universality which I call “dialogical universality”. I develop this notion through a close reading of Fanon and Hountondji and their respective discussions of how the universal emerges within, but is not for that reason vitiated by, particular sites of dialogical exchange. One key intervention made in this chapter is thus to challenge the still commonly presumed opposition between the particular and the universal. Here, I set out the conditions that dialogical settings would have to meet in order to be conducive to the sharing of universalizing insight. Although both Fanon and Hountondji direct our focus to the manner in which the universal is already on the horizon within localized, intra-African debates, an implication of their fallibilistic views of the universal is that such debates eventually be expanded to the trans-cultural. Herein lies the crux of the indissociability claim: I argue that dialogical universality depends upon the in principle inclusion of all particular perspectives. This speaks to the provisionality and revisability of any proposition claiming universal status, for no claim meets this demanding standard so long as there are others who have yet to provide criticism of it in dialogue. I argue that this does not invalidate universality, speaking instead to the endlessness of the debate. Yet Fanon and Hountondji are not equally consistent on this point. In the fifth and final chapter, I argue that it is in Hountondji’s thought that we find the most thoroughgoing commitment to the view that claims demanding universal assent arise within all contexts. Against Fanon’s suspicions regarding the possibility for endogenous systems of knowledge to rise to universal validity—and, indeed, against the pessimism attending these suspicions—Hountondji’s positive valuation of endogenous epistemes provides an important counter and supplement. In doing so, I argue that Hountondji (i) draws on his distinctive interpretation of Césaire, an interpretation at odds with Fanon’s and (ii) enacts a radical version of the phenomenological reduction as a suspension of methodological biases which surreptitiously favor European scientific and philosophical paradigms (a methodological bias to which Fanon falls prey). In so doing, I argue that Hountondji’s work offers a resolution to the dilemma with which Chapter Two concluded: it is attentive at one and the same time to the exigency that universality be developed through encounters with concrete others as well as the demand that whatever is empirically actual at any time not prejudge a sense of what is possible. Hountondji thus maintains the transcendental vector of Husserlian phenomenology in his attempt to break through embedded presuppositions that dictate what can be a source of universal insight. The conclusion brings the various strands of this dissertation together by way of a reflection on the connection between the conception of “dialogical universality,” the method of the reduction, and the decolonial strategy of “reading from the margins” utilized in the dissertation. I show that “reading from the margins”, inasmuch as it is undertaken from the positionality of someone who (like myself) is culturally situated within the European tradition, itself enacts a version of the reduction. This is because it intentionally puts out of play the presumptive favoring of the European canon still perpetuated by a number of comparative approaches. Because the strategy of “reading from the margins” operates to deflate the overblown status of the European philosophical tradition in global philosophical research, it contributes to the production of a more egalitarian conversational space – one of the conditions of dialogical universality. My proposed strategy and the phenomenological method of the reduction are thus shown to be intimately connected to the central concept proposed and defended in this dissertation.

Creator

• De Schryver, Carmen

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-708z-dy32

Subject

• Philosophy

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16144
• etdadmin_upload_915763

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright