Porto-Novo (Benin), 19-21 September 2002. A conference on ‘The encounter between rationalities’, jointly organized by the Centre Africain des Hautes Etudes, the UNESCO network ‘Paths of Thought’ and the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (ICPHS), took place there on the occasion of its 26th General Meeting. Seventy-two delegates from 33 countries. An ambitious academic programme, which, like all such programmes, we knew quite well we would never be able to cover, had been drawn up in four sections:

In the topic ‘an encounter between rationalities’ I can discern two aspects: a postulate and a problem.

The postulate concerns the existence in the history of different societies and civilizations of rationalities that experts in the various academic disciplines relating to society and humanity, as well as philosophy, will be better able to define than I can. I have preferred to focus on the problem of this encounter of ours and wish to contribute to its clarification some theoretical ideas by way of pointers, or signposts.

Not onlç waçs of behavior are objects of value judgments, but words as well. The term ‘rational’ is such a word: to be rational is good. This is probablç the reason whç, as a reaction to so-called ‘western rationalitç’, people started speaking of manç ‘rationalities’, a claim propounded especiallç bç postmodernists during the past few decades.

Recently I listened to an interesting dinner-table debate between my teenage children about an issue that, to my mind, clearly raised questions closely related to the theme of encounter of rationalities. In a conversation about indigenous Kenyan hairstyles, my son had wanted to know why the Maasai ‘made’ their women folk shave their heads bald while young men stylishly braided their hair into what has become a popular and fashionable African hairstyle, not for men, but for women. My daughter, who is quite a gifted debater, responded that it was just tradition, and tradition never answers to anyone's ‘why’ question, especially when the questioner is an insider who is expected to just practice the norm. My son, in obviously frustrated wonder, then sought to know whether they could ever answer the question if it were asked by an outsider (of the tradition) like himself, to which his sister responded: ‘what makes you ask? I guess every tradition sets its own ways.’ The boy: ‘why can't everyone be left free to do what they feel they like at different times, just like I dress differently for different occasions?’ The girl: ‘You see, you are always reading and shifting your dressing according to the norms you want to conform to. You may not be aware, but you change from one set of norms to another, one when you are at College, and the other when you come home, can't you see?’ The rest of us sat there, choking with the temptation to join in, and suffering the frustration of being denied the chance. I in particular struggled to stay neutral, but I succeeded not only by not joining in, but also by not revealing that I was working on this paper, all the while thinking to myself: ‘this is all about the encounter of rationalities, and the arguments’ turns, back and forth, are all about the relative rationality of ends’. In many respects, and to my amazement, my daughter and son got immersed in debating the merits of the idea of autonomous reason. My amazement was not only about the depth of the cosmopolitan multiculturalism that these teenagers revealed in their debate, it also was about the revealed transient nature of the communities from which people source the points of view on the basis of which they question the rationality of opposing points of view. The topic of encounter of rationalities seemed, at least in the context of this dinnertime debate by teenagers, to be such a natural occurrence to anyone who consciously moves between different social and cultural locations. In this paper, I apply and expand the theoretical concerns raised by the two young people to the assessment of Kant's culture-free moral principles against a communitarian view of the resources of reason.

These notes are inspired by two experiences and their convergence. First a clinical experience that led Françoise Davoine and myself to work over more than twenty-five years as psychoanalysts in the psychiatric hospital with patients diagnosed as mad, psychotic, schizophrenic, etc. The other experience interrogates, year on year, these clinical issues from the work of other clinicians, and also philosophers or writers of literature and poetry, who in their fields come across lessons relating to madness.

The meeting between rationalities is the very core of the psychoanalytic treatment of madness. For we see madness as a field of research in the area of historical, political and natural disasters where the social bond disintegrates, language slips away, the unimaginable happens and tried and tested rationalities fail.

The colonial project has three interrelated facets. It is at once a practice; a body of knowledge; and a technology for mind change, or simply mental engineering. Decolonization is necessarily a negation of the three-in-one character of the colonial process, to produce a third possibility: independence, liberation and social justice. Colonialism as mind-engineering results from colonialism as practice and text but it also aids them. Mind-engineering is directly the result of colonialism as text, for the colonial text is simultaneously a boost to the minds behind colonizing practices and a prison house for the mind of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to the entire process of decolonization. Achebe and Hegel exemplify this.

Taking together place, time and manner, it would be possible to describe the encounter as comprising at least six modes: fragility, temporality, activity, integrity, causality and disparity.

The fact of the underdevelopment of Africa is a direct challenge to the enlightened minds on the continent. Indeed, it is a burden that is borne with a certain amount of shame by those who are more sensitive and capable of deep reflection. They have often asked fundamental questions in frustration and anger, wondering what was wrong with Africa and with the African, seeking to know why Africans seemed incapable of rising above their reputation of being the ‘les damnés de la terre’ (‘the wretched of the earth’). Among the questions about Africa that have troubled such minds are the following:

1. - Why did Africa succumb to slavery like it did?

2. - Why was the enslavement of African peoples on African soil possible?

3. - Why has education failed to produce the kinds of societal changes that should normally have followed?

4. - Why does good governance continue to elude so many African countries, after over 40 years of independence?

5. - Might certain aspects of the African culture be standing in the way of the continent's development?

There are many of us saying and even demanding that research on Africa should be intensified and further increased. Its destiny is linked to the future of Africans’ self-awareness and their radical de-alienation. However, the current direction of some projects gives us cause for constant concern in that the fundamental question they raise is whether what drives them is science or a certain unstated but active ideology.

The editors asked me to contribute to the Benin symposium on the ‘Encounter Between Rationalities’ from the particular perspective of my research experience in ethnomathematics - the study of mathematical ideas and practices as embedded in their cultural contexts.

Hegel is the great denier of the meeting and dialogue between civilizations and, contrary to every idea of hybridization as the very spirit of culture, he carefully undertook a thorough ethnic cleansing of history: from the Greek beginning to the European ending the circle is continuous even when it went through other spiritual universes. They could scarcely have the breadth to confront the movement of Reason carried along by the idea of its goal. So it mattered little to the making of its history that philosophy spoke Syriac then Arabic.

Relativism has been a central topic of philosophical discussion for almost twentyfive hundred years. This is because the very idea of philosophy was a product of Plato's reaction to Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure of all things. The Platonic distinction between mere sophists and true philosophers incorporates the conviction that there is something beyond humanity that sets a standard which human beings are obliged to respect. Plato did his best to make ‘relativist philosophy’ a contradiction in terms.

The philosopher Giulio Preti belongs to that generation of young intellectuals who, in 1930s Italy, called for a profound regeneration of philosophy, arts and culture. Known by the name of ‘critical rationalism’, the movement formed in Milan around the philosopher Antonio Banfi (1886-1957). Luciano Anceschi, Vittorio Sereni, Enzo Paci, Antonia Pozzi, Remo Cantoni, as well as painters like Aligi Sassu and Ernesto Treccani were the young people who, under the banner of an anti-fascism that was at first cultural then openly militant (several of them were thrown into prison by the regime), aroused an intellectual fervour that was the marker of a thorough-going renewal of Italian culture. Journals such as Corrente di vita giovanile attracted eminent figures like Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Elio Vittorini or Carlo Emilio Gadda and linked up with other intellectual groupings, like the circle of hermetic poets in Florence (Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari, Carlo Bo, Oreste Macrì, Alessandro Parronchi) and the painters from the Rome School (Scipione, Guttuso, Mafai, Afro …). Young film-makers like Alberto Lattuada and Luigi Comencini also made their debut with the movement.