Western Philosophy and the Global South: Apropos Dussel’s anti-Cartesian Meditations.

Abstract

This article is a succinct exploration of the critical anti-Cartesian disposition exemplified by the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel (1934-2023), one of the leading voices of the Philosophy of Liberation. The Dusselian disposition is to historicize, “contaminate” and open up the historical field to thus include the Early Modern / colonial period within and against the exclusive frame of continental-European philosophy, or rather the universalist pretensions of the West. Circumscriptions matter: Global South, Third World, Indias Occidentales, Latin America. We are dealing with different names for the spatialization of a series of subordinations denounced by Dussel and others. This article develops one such dissident Latin American perspectivism vis-à-vis René Descartes (1596-1650), one, if not “the” foundational "beginning" of "modern philosophy." We are dealing with a critique of those Eurocentric foundational principles without falling for easy seductions and dilemmas that reach us today. What is the Cartesian problem? Or is it ours? Is Latin America philosophical? Is it Western proper? Is it self-constitutive? The category of the “West” demands a critical interrogation in between geopolitical tensions and myriad popular-culture articulations. We may put Dusselian polemics and protestations vis-à-vis Eurocentrism, also in its hegemonic US-led varieties. The theoretical "dance" of prefixes (anti, post-, de-, pluri-, trans-, inter-) accompanies the big binary modernity/coloniality.