Enrique Dussel

Agora

Enrique Dussel

1934–2023

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Modernity began in 1492 by denying the humanity of others, so ethics must start from the victims and their excluded perspective.

Placement

Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy · Latin America & Caribbean · Ethics, Politics & Law, Society & History

Argentine-Mexican philosopher of liberation: modernity began in 1492 with the denial of the Other; ethics starts from the face of the victim – toward a “transmodernity”.

Key ideas

Philosophy of liberation
Exteriority of the Other
Transmodernity

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Influence

Influenced by 9

Bartolomé de las Casas

influenced by
Dussel read Las Casas as the first critic of modernity, who argued from the standpoint of the Indigenous victims of conquest (1492: El encubrimiento del otro, 1992). E. Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del otro (1992); Política de la liberación: Historia mundial y crítica (2007)
Evidence: AI draft
Bartolomé de las Casas › 1484–1566
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

influenced by
In Method for a Philosophy of Liberation (1974), subtitled “analectic overcoming of the Hegelian dialectic”, Dussel took up the late Schelling’s positive philosophy as a first step beyond Hegel towards an exteriority that thought does not produce. E. Dussel, Método para una filosofía de la liberación: superación analéctica de la dialéctica hegeliana (1974); P. González San Martín, Hybris. Revista de Filosofía (2016)
Evidence: AI draft
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling › 1775–1854
Karl Marx

influenced by
Dussel read Marx’s manuscripts closely, finding in living labour an exteriority to capital like the Other of liberation ethics (La producción teórica de Marx, 1985). E. Dussel, La producción teórica de Marx (1985); Hacia un Marx desconocido (1988); El último Marx (1990)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Martin Heidegger

influenced by
Dussel’s early ethics began from Heidegger: Toward a De-struction of the History of Ethics (1973) applied Heidegger’s “destruction” to ethics, and the first volume of his Ethics of Latin American Liberation (1973) starts from the existential understanding of being before breaking with it, with Levinas, as a philosophy of totality. E. Dussel, Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética (1973); Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana I (1973)
Evidence: AI draft
Martin Heidegger › 1889–1976
Emmanuel Levinas

influenced by
Dussel took Levinas’s exteriority of the Other, who breaks the totality, and identified the Other with the poor and colonised of the periphery (Filosofía de la liberación, 1977). E. Dussel, Filosofía de la liberación (1977); E. Levinas, Totalité et infini (1961); SEP “Philosophy of Liberation”
Evidence: AI draft
Emmanuel Levinas › 1906–1995
Paul Ricœur

influenced by
Dussel attended Ricoeur’s courses at the Sorbonne in the 1960s and drew on his hermeneutics of symbols in his early studies of Semitic thought; in 1991 the two debated hermeneutics and liberation. E. Dussel, El humanismo semita (1969); Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty y la filosofía de la liberación (1993); E. Téllez Fabiani, “Ricoeur y Dussel”, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy (2022)
Evidence: AI draft
Paul Ricœur › 1913–2005

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Nezahualcóyotl

influenced by disputed
Dussel read the Nahua tlamatinime, with songs ascribed to Nezahualcóyotl, as a ‘protophilosophy’ following León-Portilla (1492: El encubrimiento del otro, 1992); the attribution of the songs is disputed. E. Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del otro (1992; Eng. The Invention of the Americas, 1995); M. León-Portilla, La filosofía náhuatl (1956); J. Bierhorst (ed.), Cantares Mexicanos (1985)
Evidence: AI draft
Nezahualcóyotl › 1402–1472
Rodolfo Kusch

influenced by
Dussel took up Kusch’s claim that popular and Indigenous thought is a source of philosophy in the philosophy of liberation (Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, 1973). E. Dussel, Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana (1973); R. Kusch, El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (1970)
Evidence: AI draft
Rodolfo Kusch › 1922–1979
Augusto Salazar Bondy

influenced by
Dussel took Salazar Bondy’s thesis that philosophy under domination is inauthentic (¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América?, 1968) as a starting point of liberation philosophy. A. Salazar Bondy, ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (1968); E. Dussel, Filosofía de la liberación (1977); SEP “Philosophy of Liberation”
Evidence: AI draft
Augusto Salazar Bondy › 1925–1974

Influenced 2

Walter Mignolo

influenced
Mignolo built on Dussel’s critique of Eurocentrism and his dating of modernity from 1492 to describe a ‘colonial difference’ that ranks peoples and knowledges (Local Histories/Global Designs, 2000). W. D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (2000); E. Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del otro (1992)
Evidence: AI draft
Walter Mignolo › b. 1941
Brian Burkhart

influenced
Drawing on Enrique Dussel, Burkhart traces the Cartesian ego cogito back to the ego conquiro of the conquest (Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land, 2019). B. Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land (2019); E. Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del otro (1992)
Evidence: AI draft
Brian Burkhart › contemporary

Criticism

Criticizes 4

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

criticised
Dussel read Hegel’s lectures on world history, which leave America and Africa outside history, as expressing the Eurocentric myth of modernity (1492: El encubrimiento del otro, 1992). E. Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del otro (1992), ch. 1; G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, introduction
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Jürgen Habermas

criticised
Dussel objected that Habermas’s discourse ethics presupposes a community of equal participants and forgets those excluded from it – the victims (Ética de la liberación, 1998). E. Dussel, Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (1998); The Underside of Modernity (1996)
Evidence: AI draft
Jürgen Habermas › 1929–2026
Richard Rorty

criticised
In The Underside of Modernity (1996), after their debate in the early 1990s, Dussel objected to Rorty’s pragmatism that its “we” of liberal ironists cannot hear the interpellation of the excluded Other, the starting point of a philosophy of liberation. E. Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation (1996, ed. and tr. E. Mendieta); Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty y la filosofía de la liberación (1993)
Evidence: AI draft
Richard Rorty › 1931–2007
Charles Taylor

criticised
In the same book Dussel discussed Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989), objecting that its history of the modern self is told from Europe alone and omits the conquest of America and the periphery, the “underside” of modernity. E. Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation (1996)
Evidence: AI draft
Charles Taylor › b. 1931

Works

1977Philosophy of Liberation
From the periphery: the totality of the modern world-system is broken open by the Other who suffers its exclusion.

Position

Dussel argued that modernity did not begin with the Renaissance or the Reformation but in 1492, with Europe’s conquest of America and its “covering-over” of the Other. Europe’s self-image as centre required a periphery that it exploited and denied. Drawing on Levinas, he grounded ethics in the exteriority of the Other – the poor, the colonised, women, the victim – who breaks open the closed totality of the system; with Marx he analysed that system’s material injustice. He debated discourse ethics with Karl-Otto Apel and Habermas, insisting on the standpoint of the excluded. Instead of postmodernity he proposed a “transmodernity” in which the cultures of the periphery contribute on their own terms.

Life & context

Enrique Dussel was born in 1934 in La Paz, in Argentina’s Mendoza province. He studied philosophy in Mendoza and Madrid, worked for two years as a carpenter in Nazareth, and took a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne. In 1973 right-wing paramilitaries bombed his house; from 1975 he lived in exile in Mexico, teaching at UNAM and the Metropolitan Autonomous University. He died in Mexico City in 2023.