Abstract
Enrique Dussel’s Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión seeks to correct the Eurocentric understanding of the history of philosophy, particularly modernity, and to develop an ethics that can play a role in transforming the present economic and political structures that oppress the majority of humanity. In his Ética, Dussel dismisses Husserlian transcendental phenomenology as an inadequate approach to understanding the subject in favor of Heidegger’s concrete Being-in-the-World. Despite the seeming disconnection between Dussel and transcendental phenomenology, I will make use of aspects of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology to criticize Dussel’s theory of modernity, his objection to formalistic ethics, and his approach to economics. I will show that Dussel’s work could profit from explicitly relying upon transcendental phenomenological underpinnings and that without such phenomenological bases, his own work would be imperiled.
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Notes
- 1.
Enrique Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión (Mexico: Editorial Trotta, S.A., 1998), 516.
- 2.
Ibid., 50–51.
- 3.
Ibid., 52, 53, 58–59, 60. In his Política de la Liberación: Historia Mundial y Crítica (Mexico: Editorial Trotta, S.A., 2007), a book that sets the historical stage for discussions of political philosophy to come, Dussel considers other Spanish thinkers who questioned the ethical appropriateness of the conquista, such as Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and Francisco Suárez, 210–227.
- 4.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 60.
- 5.
Ibid., 62, see also 60–61. All translations of texts from Dussel’s Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión are my own.
- 6.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960), 1–3, 6, 10–11, 13, 23–25.
- 7.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 19–20.
- 8.
Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 286.
- 9.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 62.
- 10.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 30–37; see Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 117–124; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 140, 222, 244–247.
- 11.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 60.
- 12.
Ibid., 60, 68.
- 13.
Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 1, 117–124; Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2, 140, 222, 244–247; Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 215–219.
- 14.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 2–3, 5–6; Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1913/24), Part Two: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana, vol. 8, part 2 (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 166.
- 15.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 140.
- 16.
Ibid., 93–106, 129–140, 141, 142–143, 187, 214.
- 17.
Ibid., 182.
- 18.
Ibid., 196; see Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics : Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), 103.
- 19.
Habermas, “Discourse Ethics ,” 103. See also Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 140, 170–171, 197–201.
- 20.
Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. Ullrich Melle, Husserliana, Band XXVIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 139, 241.
- 21.
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1981), 12, 31.
- 22.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 35.
- 23.
Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, Vol. I of Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 245; see also 246–247.
- 24.
Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, ed. Henning Peucker (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 253. All translations of Husserl’s German texts that lack English translations are my own; where there are English translations, they have been utilized.
- 25.
Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 15–17; Habermas, “Discourse Ethics ,” 45–50; Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 246–248, 252–253; Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 56–57, 65, 137, 139–140, 145, 179.
- 26.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 460–461.
- 27.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay, ed. Dermott Moran, “Prolegomena to Pure Logic,” Volume 1: 41.
- 28.
Ibid., 23, 33, 42–43, 51, 64, 67, 102, 106. The normative character of disciplines do not rule out that they might depend on non-normative truths, e.g., know in what being a soldier consists reveals why a soldier ought to be brave, Husserl, Logical Investigations 1:35, 39. On the regional ontologies presupposed by regions of investigation and pertaining to the transcendental ego, see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 62–64, 136–139, 152–157.
- 29.
Maurice Natanson, “Introduction,” Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 21; Maurice Natanson, The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1970), 117.
- 30.
Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 130; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 71. Indeed, Plato is the erotic bird because his assent to essence is actualized through concrete, worldly eros which is not to be ascetically despised under pain of one’s losing anything to say, see Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 126.
- 31.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 202–205.
- 32.
Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000), 47–49; Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” in Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 285–286; Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23, ed. Berndt Goosens, vol. 35 Husserliana (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), see 292–296 on the ultimate justification that Husserl attributes to phenomenology in its relationship to all the other sciences.
- 33.
Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 97–98, 130, 142.
- 34.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 443; see also 439–445.
- 35.
Ibid., 320.
- 36.
Ibid., 324; citation from Karl Marx, The Manuscripts of 1944, I, EB, 549.
- 37.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 315, 439–444, 445, 446–451; Enrique Dussel, La Producción Teórica de Marx: Un Comentario a los Grundrisse (Iztapalapa, México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1985), 6, 138–139, 336–343; Enrique Dussel, El Ültimo Marx (1863–1882) y la Liberación Latinoamericana: Un Comentario a la Tercera y a la Cuarta Redacción de “El Capital” (Iztapalapa, México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1990), 138, 143, 333, 344, 351, 366, 373, 381.
- 38.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 448–449; see Michael Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics : Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 103–104.
- 39.
See Alfred Schutz’s discussions of how ideal types can provide economic explanations of empirical phenomena but they must be adequate to common sense understanding of economic actions , in “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action ,” The Problem of Social Reality, Vol. I of Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 44–47.
- 40.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 449.
- 41.
Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” The Problem of Social Reality, 245–250.
- 42.
Dussel, Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión, 531–532. The italics here are mine.
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Barber, M. (2016). Liberation Ethics and Transcendental Phenomenology. In: Jung, H., Embree, L. (eds) Political Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 84. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2_8
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