When I took office one year ago, I appealed for 2017 to be a year for peace. Unfortunately - in fundamental ways, the world has gone in reverse. On New Year’s Day 2018, I am not issuing an appeal. I am issuing an alert - a red alert for our world. Conflicts have deepened and new dangers have emerged. Global anxieties about nuclear weapons are the highest since the Cold War . Climate change is moving faster than we are. Inequalities are growing. We see horrific violations of human rights. Nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise. As we begin 2018, I call for unity. I truly believe we can make our world more safe and secure. We can settle conflicts, overcome hatred and defend shared values. (Excerpt from the New Year’s Message of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, December 31, 2017)
In Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (1998/2013), Dussel declares “My ultimate intention is to justify the struggle of victims , of the oppressed, for their liberation” (1998/2013, 56 [57]). In the chapters that follow, I attempt to articulate how Dussel justifies the struggle for liberation by: (a) explaining the main categories of the philosophy of liberation; (b) describing the analectic method; (c) articulating in detail the ethical principles ; and (d) showing how these principles are subsumed in the political and economic fields. The monograph concludes with a discussion of the planetary humanism advanced by the ethics of liberation and its relevance for everyday praxis. This introductory section will summarize the content of each chapter and provide a brief biography of Enrique Dussel .
Summary of the Chapters
Chapter 2, on totality and alterity , defines the two major categories of Dussel’s ontology and metaphysics . It is here that we pay close attention to Dussel’s critical encounter with the works of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas . At first approximation, totality refers to the everyday lifeworld and horizon of comprehension within which we make sense of our lived experience. Since this is an ethics that affirms human life , Dussel is particularly interested in the impact on human life of Western instrumental rationality . For this totalizing ideology justifies European (and later US –NATO) domination of subalternized peoples, a capital system that generates millions of victims , and use of the biosphere as if it were an unlimited resource. The uncritical consciousness generally takes this ideology and the capital system for granted, as though it were natural and inevitable there be those who dominate and those who are dominated. Insofar as one is autonomous and not a mere cog within a totality , however, there is always a possibility that one may awaken from such naivete and call the totalizing system and its institutions and practices into question. Such critical transcendence of the lifeworld is a necessary condition for principled dissent and opens a breach within the totalizing system . This breach constitutes an exterior to the system, the space of alterity from which the victims , and their allies, as autonomous self-conscious beings, may call into question the totality and become protagonists of a liberatory project within the lifeworld . Chapter 2 will discuss in detail the anatomy of the interface between totality and alterity and the concrete expression of this interface in the relationship between modernity and subalternized peoples.
In Chapter 3, on the analectic method, we trace the transition from everyday naive involvement in the world to critical ethical consciousness . We also discuss the impact of Levinas’s work on Dussel’s account of the key moment of this transition: the experience of the face-to-face encounter with victims of the prevailing system whom Dussel refers to as the Other . This experience provides an occasion for us to open ourselves to the revelation of the oppressed Other and thereby see more and more clearly those structural features of the prevailing system that cause the Other’s suffering . At the same time, we also become increasingly aware of our own co-responsibility to critique and ultimately transform the unjust socio-economic order.
In Chapter 4, we discuss three fundamental ethical principles that will provide the compass for the exodic path of victims and their allies out from subjugation, through a period of deconstruction and transformation of the prevailing system , and toward liberation. First, the material ethical principle: we ought to ensure the production, reproduction, and growth of human life in community and in harmony with the earth’s ecosystems. Second, the formal principle : the material principle ought to be pursued through democratic symmetrical deliberative procedures in which all those who may be impacted by any decisions are included. And third, the feasibility principle : whatever we endeavor, in accord with the first two principles, ought to be achievable, given our understanding of the conditions with which we are presently confronted. As we will see in some detail, these three principles mutually condition each other and are subsumed as norms within the political and economic fields.
In Chapter 5, on the ethical dimension of politics, we articulate the subsumption of the ethical principles into norms of critical political rationality . When constituted power of the state and other institutions become corrupt and are no longer obedient to constituents, constituents face the challenge of recuperating their sovereignty and restoring democratic governance. We will examine in detail Dussel’s account of how a politics of liberation engages in struggle to transform corrupt forms of governance into ones that answer obediently to democratic expressions of constituent power .
In Chapter 6, on the ethical dimension of economics , we turn to Dussel’s detailed study of the work of Karl Marx . Dussel interprets Marxism as an ethics of liberation which deploys an analectic method. Dussel argues that living labor , for Marx, retains a certain exeriority to the economic system despite being exploited by capital for private gain. In particular, we focus on alienation of living labor in the form of labor power subsumed by capital. We also discuss the theory of surplus value and how bourgeois economics mystifies capital accumulation as though capital created value out of nothing when in reality this value comes in large part from unpaid (surplus) labor time. We show how, for Dussel, the ethical principles are subsumed as norms of the struggle to overcome the alienation of labor as well as the degradation of the biosphere. The economics of liberation seeks to create an egalitarian economic alternative to capitalism in which production, distribution and disposal of excess value of commodities is communally controlled by freely associated workers.
We will conclude this monograph by discussing the South-South as well as North-South intercultural philosophical dialogue, inspired by the decolonizing efforts of a diversity of liberatory projects. To this end we will examine the idea of a planetary humanism aimed at building a pluriversal transmodern world, a world in which all peoples can live and grow in community, with mutual respect for cultural diversity, and in harmony with Mother Earth.
Biographical Sketch
Enrique Dussel was born in La Paz, a department in the northeast province of Mendoza, Argentina , on December 24, 1934. In a short but essential autobiography published in 1998, “Proceso de análisis e investigación,” (“Process of Analysis and Investigation”), Dussel relates that “La Paz was a poor town. It consisted of just a few blocks of dusty streets. The shacks of the peasants, destitute, gave me forever the experience of the suffering , of the misery, of the difficulty of the people” (1998, 14). During his youth, Dussel engaged in community service as a member of Acción Católica, and later became a cofounder of the University Federation of the West (la Federación Universitaria del Oeste - la FUO), and president of The Center of Philosophy and Letters (El Centro de Filosofía y Letras - CEFYL) (15). In 1954, Dussel was arrested along with o...