Philosophy of Liberation
from 1971
Begin from the person excluded by the system rather than from the thinking subject, because the exclusion is what needs explaining.
- Active
- from 1971
- Where
- Argentina, then Mexico
- Also
- Filosofía de la Liberación
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Latin American
The claim
Philosophy has taken the perspective of the centre and called it universal. Starting instead from the excluded — the poor, the colonised, the one outside the totality — produces different questions and different answers.
What it held
Dussel's argument begins with Levinas and turns it political. Levinas made the face of the other the origin of ethical obligation; Dussel asks who, concretely, that other is in a world organised as it is, and answers: the poor, the indigenous, the person whose exclusion the system requires.
The critique of European philosophy is structural. Descartes' thinking subject, Kant's rational agent, Husserl's transcendental ego — each is presented as universal and each is written from the centre of a world system that began, on Dussel's dating, in 1492. Modernity's other side is coloniality, and the two arrived together.
The method is analectics, distinguished from dialectics: the dialectic works inside a totality, moving through its contradictions, while the analectic listens to the voice that comes from outside the totality altogether and cannot be produced from within it.
The applications are practical — economics read as an ethics of the victim, and a sustained engagement with Marx that treats him as a philosopher of living labour rather than as a system.
Enrique Dussel wrote around fifty books, survived a bomb attack on his house in Argentina, and taught in Mexican exile for the rest of his life.
How it argued
Analectics — beginning from the exteriority of the excluded — combined with historical argument about the world system and close reading of Marx and Levinas.
What it was arguing against
European philosophy's assumption of universality, developmentalist accounts of Latin America, and the reading of modernity as an internal European achievement.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether beginning from the excluded is a method or a commitment. Whether the account of European philosophy is fair to its individual figures.
Common misconceptions
That it is liberation theology in philosophical dress. They are related and distinct: Dussel's project is philosophical, argues from ethical premises rather than scriptural ones, and has a substantial secular following.
How it began
Argentina in the early 1970s, in a group of philosophers reading Levinas and dependency theory together, and then dispersed by the dictatorship.
What became of it
Living, and now central to Latin American philosophy and widely read in decolonial scholarship.
Lasting influence
Decolonial theory, which developed partly out of it. Intercultural philosophy. Its account of 1492 as modernity's founding date has been widely adopted.
Why it still matters
The claim that a philosophy written from a particular position has presented itself as universal is now a standard critical move, and this is one of its most systematic statements.
Put another way
A table set for a meal, and the argument beginning with whoever was not given a chair.
Where to start
The Invention of the Americas. It is historical, concrete, and the philosophy arrives through it.
The surprising bit
A bomb was placed at his house in Mendoza in 1973 and he was expelled from his university, after which he wrote most of his fifty-odd books in Mexico.
In their own words
Philosophy of liberation begins from the other, the one denied by the system.
Modernity is born when Europe is able to pose itself against an other.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Cartesianism
- Influenced
- Modernity-Coloniality School
The verdict
A philosophy built on the observation that the excluded person is not a topic but a starting point.