Decolonial and universalism thoughts – release

Know who we are, know what we are holding, think the places and scales of what brings us together … The Condorcet campus is organizing, March 20, 21 and 22, 2025, Three days of debate and meetings on the theme « Universal (s)? ». An event including Liberation is a partner.

The decolonial studies of Latin America and the Caribbean offer a philosophy of history: since the conquest of the Americas in 1492, modernity and coloniality would be inseparable and we would never have been postcolonial. Decolonial studies criticize the universalism of « overhang » and « disembodied » as it has been developed since the 17th century in Europe which ignores or reduced to the object of study the knowledge of colonized societies. But do they win and they for that the West, do they reject any form of universalism, are they locked in identity and relativism?

First of all, the decolonial authors like Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Maria Lugones, Ramon Grosfoguel or Rita Segato, between many others, have a long university formation in social sciences and humanities, in particular Marxist. If since the 1960s, they have denounced, with others, the Eurocentre character of hegemonic social sciences, it is because they have personal experience.

Then in their work with and on the traditions of subordinate thought in Amerindian languages ​​(Nahuatl, Maya, Guarani …) and in Spanish and Portuguese languages, some have given in to the romantic temptation to magnify its irreducible otherness, in an almost anti-universalist and anti-Western movement. But I say « some« And » almost « . Indeed, Anibal Quijano with her resolutely economic approach to socio -cultural heterogeneity, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and her thought of interbreeding, Rita Segato and her criticism of multiculturalism or Dussel with her proposal for interphilosophical dialogue seek more of others from universals.

Here is for example the philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel. He identifies four « Universal problems » May all Homo Sapiens companies arise: « What are real things to behave »? « What is the mystery of human interiority? », « How to think of freedom, the ethical and social world? » And « How to interpret the ultimate foundation of the universe? ». Mythical rational stories work these questions with symbolic and suggestive language. The philosophical rational stories, for their part, do so in univocal language to achieve the conclusive force of the argument. These two types of accounts have their own rationality and most often coexist, one more rooted in the oral and collective tradition, the other more practiced by authors organized in specialized communities practicing writing.

This second form of account is not the only prerogative of ancient Greece and is found in Memphis in Egypt in the third millennium before our era, in China and India in the 6th century BCE or in Mexico in the 15th century, at the time of the European invasion of America. The world hegemony of European philosophy of Hellenistic tradition is only a product of colonial history. According to Enrique Dussel, each story, because it works on problems common to all humans, offers answers to universal validity, which can be discussed by others. Simply, for an argumentative speech to be valid, it must « Give the other arguing symmetrical possibilities to participate in the discussion » (Dussel, 2,009).

Speaking of particular philosophical traditions with universal value, this author recognizes that they are stated by men and women of societies taken in complex and dynamic domination relationships. He starts from this observation to invite today's philosophers to enrich an interphilosophical dialogue « with a view to a Multifinated global philosophy And therefore, transmoder ”.

This is why, rather than rejecting in « block » and caricaturing the decolonial thoughts of Latin America and the Caribbean, we invite to read them in their diversity and their latest formulations to discuss them! The urgency is there, the universalism of « overhang » is no longer dreaming internationally and no longer cement French society internally, it has the bitter taste of a promise of equality not held.

Now on the emergence of invitations that echo the multi -roomism: lateral universalism (Souleymane Bachir Diagne), Cosmopolite (Alain Policar), concrete (Michel Cahen) or minor universalisms (Markus Mesling).