A Theoretical Frame
Only a handful of diehard ideologues would still contend nowadays that the West has the exclusive hold on reason, or that, conversely, " primitive " humanity remains inevitably in the throes of a pre-logical mentality. Strides in cultural anthropology have gradually done away with a tenacious set of prejudices spawned by that form of elementary ethnography which held that Western reason was the only possible model for rationality in general. In addition, since the end of the Second World War, so-called " primitive " peoples have found more and more means of expression. There has been an opening up of the social sciences and of the research fields to numerous new actors who speak, precisely, on behalf of the peoples and cultures which had been previously imprisoned in the highly biaised rhetoric of traditional anthropology. A wider social base in research led to a weakening of eurocentrism, heretofore obliged to admit its arbitrary character and its inability to hold up to the test of public debate.As often happens, however, there was a swift slip to the opposite pole. In reaction to a narrow conception of rationality, there has been the ever-so-often putting into question of the very transcultural value required of rationality by the dual field of theory and practice. In other cases, it has led to the affirmation of various logics, of various self-absorbed modes of thought, which are irreducible to each other. What vanishes then, what becomes not only inexplicable but also unthinkable, is the very possibility to communicate or to converse from one culture to another. This erasing or splintering of rationality leads to an unsustainable relativism. For it so happens in fact, that men do speak among themselves, from one culture to another. Communication exists. Discussion is a daily practice, not only within each constituted human group, but more and more nowadays on a planetary scale. We must thus admit that beyond their individual and collective differences, human relationships presuppose the sharing of a minimal set of rules and principles without which there could be no discourse, no meaningful word.
On the other hand, one must be attentive to the real forms of communication which have been developing nowadays, and to the imbalances that they induce. Through the information highways and the immense web that new technologies have been weaving around the world, what has been spreading and imposing itself in deeds, is still the rationality that was historically construed in the West, with its strengths and its weaknesses, its bright spots and its blind spots: a rationality that engenders not only science and technology, but also an impersonal and devastating logic of profit, and an inequitable political order. Globalization, its current incarnation, is a vector of this uneven rationality. A question is raised : under what conditions might one invent novel forms of globalization, which could be more balanced and balancing, more respectful of the human being, and more conducive to sharing and co-responsibility ?
Furthermore, the very forms of this rationality are today put into question. Beyond the classical partitions between natural, human and social sciences which characterize Western reason, the question arises as to whether the elements of classical culture and thought, taylored to the individual scale (individual responsibility, individual values) are still valid in a world where other entities (national or culturally homogenous groups, or yet masses) take center stage. Human interactions are increasingly based upon cultural differences and compatibilities, rather than upon relationships between individuals sharing the same culture (or cultures which are close to each other), the same value systems, the same cultural or educational classicisms — hence a historical abandonment of classic forms of western rationality, threatened with a desperate withdrawal into the closed universe of the technical and paying the price of a growing incapacity to understand the world.
Within the scientific sector itself, the sector which one might reasonably consider as the very motor of rationality in general, one can no longer be content with recognizing the objectivity and the universality of results, or with studying from within the foundations of this objectivity and this universality. One must go further, and question the current modes of knowledge production, accumulation and management on a planetary scale. One must be attentive to the role which is still played, in the world knowledge economy, by the elites of the South, reduced, more often than it seems, to acting as providers of raw materials, that is, brute data and information, which is immediately exported to Northern laboratories to undergo the necessary theoretical treatment. One must look into how the current structures of knowledge capitalization operate and how this knowledge is redistributed. Once these imbalances are recognized, there will still be the need to invent credible alternatives.
In this framework, the places and modes of traditional knowledge's coexistence with laboratory science must be looked into. One might see the extent to which this knowledge is marginalized, impoverished, deprived of all but mere traces of its former dynamics and powers of assimilation, its development stunted, albeit constituting in the field the only recourse available to a large majority of the population, and even, in certain areas, the last resort of the modern specialist — e.g., the hospital physician who will not hesitate to send back the patients whose ailments they are unable to diagnose. One will see how certain recipes of the " indigenous " pharmacopoeia are no sooner discovered by ethnobotanist research, than they are snatched by the pharmaceutical industry and " patented " for the benefit of the Northern laboratories, which compels to a closer examination of the relationships involved in scientific and technological production at the world scale.
However, all of these questions and any reflection on current conditions of production, management and capitalization of knowledge presuppose a theoretical reflection on the meaning of " science ", and in particular, modern science. One must start by recognizing what was missing in endogenous knowledge, at least at the stage where their development was arrested: the theory of a mathematical structure of the universe, known to influence, in Europe, the transfer to Galileian science. One must thus examine, steering clear of any form of demagogy, the conditions for a critical reappropriation and integration of endogenous knowledge into the thrusts of live research.
To consider rationality as a universal requirement, inherent to all cultures whatever their diversity, to acknowledge its concurrent or complementary models, to examine in a critical light its currently dominant forms, to dislodge the false universals which sport the universal mantle, to open pathways conducive to building, in the long run, a truly universal rationality, are the goals of the international Symposium on philosophy and human sciences to be held in Porto-Novo, Benin, from 18 to 21 Septembre 2002.Paulin J. Hountondji
