## 1. History



As was noted, the philosophy of liberation belongs to the
"maturity" stage of the "contemporary" period
of the history of Latin American philosophy (Gracia and Vargas 2013;
Gracia 1988-89). As a philosophical movement that engages in the
critical task of recovering what is distinctly "Latin
American" thought, it has sought explicitly to unearth and
rescue Amerindian thought, in its pre-Colombian and post-Conquest
forms, as well as all the different philosophical tendencies and
movements that emerged during the long history of colonialism,
independence and projects of national formation. It is for this reason
that the philosophy of liberation has as one of its goals a critical
historiography of Latin American thought, specifically, and philosophy
*tout court*, in general. Figures such as Enrique Dussel,
Rodolfo Kusch, Arturo Roig, and Leopoldo Zea have articulated their
versions of the philosophy of liberation in terms of a recovery of
earlier stages in the formulation of a project of Latin American
liberation. Yet, the philosophy of liberation as a self-conscious
movement and current, emerged out of a very distinct convergence of
geo-historical, cultural, intellectual and philosophical tendencies,
conflicts and processes.


### 1.1 The Long History



The philosophy of liberation, arguably, began in the late sixties when
Leopoldo Zea and Augusto Salazar Bondy launched a debate with the
question: "Is there a Latin American philosophy?" Whether
the answer was affirmative or negative did not affect the fact that
the movement would have to embark on the long path of the recovery of
Latin American philosophy, at the very least in order to identify
those moments of originality and authentically autochthonous Latin
American thinking. It is for this reason that some philosophers
liberation have argued that there are at least three antecedent
historical stages that serve as the geological subsoil of liberation
philosophy. Following Dussel, they could be sketched as follows
(Dussel 2005: 374-5):



*First Period*. This is the period of the beginning of the
critique of the conquest and the development of a discourse that
engages Amerindian thought. An important inaugural date is 1511 when
Anton de Montesinos critiques the way evangelization is taking
place in the Americas. This is the period when a distinct continental
awareness of the injustice that is being committed against the
indigenous populations of the so-called New World emerges. The debate
between Gines de Sepulveda and Fray Bartolome de
las Casas at Valladolid in 1550 marks the clear emergence of a
liberation discourse and consciousness. In this debate
Sepulveda articulated a moment in the emergent imperial and
colonizing modern consciousness of Europe when he argued that
Amerindians were naturally born slaves and that therefore they were to
be subjugated. Sepulveda questioned the humanity of Amerindians
(Dussel 2007, 2007a; Ruiz Sotelo 2010). In contrast, de las Casas
affirmed the rational humanity of Amerindians, while acknowledging
their distinctiveness. In fact, de las Casas affirms their rationality
and treats appeals to their reason as a theological and evangelical
norm. The only true way for evangelization is the *path* of
rational deliberation and not violent religious usurpation and
imposition.



*Second Period*. This epoch is defined by the process of what
might be called the first emancipation, from 1750 until the end of the
nineteenth century. Defining figures are Benito Diaz de Gamarra, who
published in 1774 his *Elementa Recientioris Philosophiae*,
Carlos de Singuenza y Gongora, and Francisco Xavier
Clavigero, who articulated an anti-colonial and anti-absolutist
political philosophy that launched a critique of the Spanish monarchy.
Some of the notable figures of this epoch include Fray Servando Teresa
de Mier (1763-1827), Manuel M. Moreno (in La Plata, what would
become Argentina, 1778-1811), Simon Rodriguez (in
Venezuela, 1751-1854), Simon Bolivar (1783-1830),
Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), Juan German Roscio
(1763-1821). In the eighteenth century, these thinkers and many
other "*patriotras*" articulated a political
discourse of emancipation from the Spanish crown. They called for
continental independence, as well as the development of a distinct
"American" identity. Because of her blend of poetry,
theological speculation, praise of Amerindian traditions, and nascent
feminist awareness, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651-1695)
should also be considered a contributor to this first discourse
of emancipation and should be included among the figures that define
this epoch.



*Third Period*.This epoch could characterized as a second
moment of emancipation, beginning at the end of the nineteen century
and being bookended with the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Defining
figures are Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930),
whose book *Siete ensayos sobre la realidad peruana* (Seven
Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality) (1968) gave expression to a
new emancipation agenda that is explicitly elaborated in terms of a
dual approach that is attentive to the historical reality of the
Americas, with its indigenous and *criollo* backgrounds. It
launched a critical appropriation of European ideas in the
"Latin American" context. This epoch is defined by the
crises of both development efforts and populisms that were inattentive
to the severe racial, ethnic, and class divisions within the Latin
American nations. It is against this context that Augusto Salazar
Bondy (1925-1974) and Leopoldo Zea (1912-2004) began to
debate the question whether there is a Latin American philosophy. This
third period is defined by the explicit consciousness of economic,
political, social, and cultural dependence, under-development, and
domination (Vallega 2014). It is in this period that the need of a
discourse of liberation begins to be explicitly articulated.


### 1.2 The Immediate History



This section discusses the broader social and intellectual context of
the third period indicated above, from which an explicit and nuanced
philosophy of liberation would emerge.



An important part of the origin of the philosophy of liberation as an
autochthonous philosophical movement was rooted in the question of a
distinct or authentic Latin American philosophy. The problem of a
distinct Latin American philosophy has been in gestation at least
since the late nineteen century, when the so-called "generation
of patriarchs" began to ask about a philosophy or thinking from
and for the "Americas" (Beorlegui 2004). This problem took
a distinct shape when Salazar Bondy (1968) re-framed it in terms of
the question as to the actual existence of a Latin American
philosophy. Using existentialist and Marxist categories, Salazar Bondy
gave a negative answer. There is no authentic Latin American
philosophy because the sub-continent has lived and developed under
conditions of mental colonialism, intellectual subordination, and
philosophical dependence. In order to achieve an authentic Latin
American philosophy, Salazar Bondy maintained, the sub-continent had
to achieve its independence and establish its autonomy and
self-determination. These thoughts, and Zea's subsequent
response (1969), set the agenda for a generation. The philosophy of
liberation , so explicitly christened, it could be argued, has gone
through at least the following three stages: constitution and
maturation, persecution and exile, challenges and debates (Dussel
2005; Beorlegui 2004; Cerutti Guldberg 1983 [2006]).



*Constitution and Maturation* (1969-1975). The philosophy
of liberation was explicitly labeled as such at the Second Argentine
National Congress of Philosophy, which was held in Cordoba in 1971
(Dussel 2017). The inaugurating group was conformed by Osvaldo
Ardiles, Alberto Parisini, Juan Carlos Scannone, Julio de Zan, and
Anibal Fornari. But this group took a more formal shape at the
*jornadas* (week long working seminars) of philosophy that were
organized at the Jesuit University, Universidad of San Salvador (where
Pope Francis was educated), in San Miguel, in the outskirts of Buenos
Aires, Argentina. The first *jornada* took place in 1971, and a
second was held later the same year with the title "Latin
American Liberation". A third *jornada* was held in 1973,
at which Salazar Bondy gave a paper titled "Filosofia de
la dominacion y filosofia de la liberacion (Philosophy
of Domination and Philosophy of Liberation" (1973), and Leopoldo
Zea gave a paper titled "*La filosofia latinoamericana
como filosofia de la liberacion* (*Latin American
Philosophy as a Philosophy of Liberation*)" (1973). This
stage comes to a close in 1975 with the First Mexican National
Congress of Philosophy in Morelia, Mexico, with papers by Dussel,
Miro Quesada, Arturo Roig, and Abelardo Villegas. This was an
important meeting because it signaled the launching of the philosophy
liberation as a Latin American philosophical agenda that supersedes
its initial Argentine formulations. A new group of philosophers from
across Latin America entered into the debate: Hugo Assmann, Carlos
Bazan, Arturo Roig,



In 1974 the journal *Revista de Filosofia
Latinoamericana* begins to be edited and published in Buenos
Aires, and goes on to become a major publishing venue for philosophers
of liberation, along with *Stromata*, published at the
University of El Salvador, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which many
of the inaugural essays and quasi-manifestos of the movement were
published.



*Persecution and Exile* (1975-1983). Following the
military lead coup d'etat against Maria Estela
Martinez Peron in March of 1976, there began a period
called the "dirty war," which was in fact a form of
"state terrorism," that included the persecution and
assassination of philosophers affiliated with the nascent movement of
the philosophy of liberation. Due to their persecution, many went into
exile, moving to Canada, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. One of
the consequences of this persecution was that hitherto Argentine
project of a Latin American philosophy of liberation was brought to
other parts of Latin America, making it into a continental project.
However, the Latin American dictatorships of the sixties and the Cold
War in general, had directly influenced internal debates about the
"who" of Latin American philosophy, and consequently had
polarizing and decisive effects for how liberation was understood. The
role of populism and nationalism in defining the task of philosophy
became a litmus test. In 1980, the AFYL (Asociacion Filosofia y
Liberacion [Philosophy and Liberation Association]), was
established in Bogota, Colombia, and it become a major vehicle
for organizing congresses, round tables, and sessions at international
philosophy congresses.



*Challenges and Debates* (1983 to today). With the transition
to democracy and the collapse or defeat of the military dictatorships
in Latin America there began a new stage in the normalization and
maturation of liberation philosophy. Horacio Cerutti Guldberg's
*Filosofia de la liberacion latinoamericana*
(*Philosophy of Latin American Liberation*) (2006) offered the
most comprehensive historical and critical reconstruction of the
movement. In 1988-89, Jorge J.E. Gracia edited a special issue
on "Latin American Philosophy", with a long essay by
Cerutti Guldberg in which a synoptic overview of the movement is
presented. In 1993, Ofelia Schutte published her *Cultural Identity
and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought* in which a
critical confrontation with some key theses of liberation philosophy
is developed. These substantive texts signaled the maturity and
general coherence of the philosophy of liberation, at the very least
as it was perceived by its critics. These works called for
re-articulations and reformulations that made explicit the inner
tensions and divisions within the group of thinkers that had first
given voice to this new current and method of doing philosophy in
Latin America.



These differences and divergences have become increasingly pronounced.
It may now no longer be possible to speak of a "philosophy of
liberation", in the singular. Instead, it may be more
appropriate to speak of "philosoph*ies* of
liberation", in the plural, where what is shared is a set of
overlapping themes among the distinct accounts of what are the
situations and conditions from which liberation is to be sought, and
different philosophical methods and traditions used to articulate
those accounts . To be sure, there remains a substantive core that
holds together the constellation of the philosophy of liberation now
in the middle of its fourth decade of existence. Widely shared
characteristics of the various philosophies of liberation include the
following:


1. An indisputable point of departure for all philosophers liberation
is the consciousness of the economic, social, political and cultural
dependence of Latin America on Europe and the United States.
2. The general affirmation that "philosophy" has to be
practiced from a specific context of both engagement and commitment
within the distinct Latin American historical and geopolitical
situation. The claim is that implicitly or explicitly all
philosophizing is always a form of commitment with an existential
situation. All philosophers of liberation share the conviction that a
philosophy that is worthy of that name is a tool or means of
enlightenment, a theoretical elaboration at the service of a
*praxis* of liberation. The philosophy of liberation is the
twin of a practice of emancipation.
3. All philosophizing is done out of a concrete historical situation.
Yet, this "concrete historical" situation has received
different formulations, which define the different currents within the
philosophy of liberation (see
 section 3,
 below). For now, we can note that the "point of
departure" can be a people, nation, or autochthonous culture; it
can refer to a class or economic group understood along Marxist lines;
it can include a cultural, historical, existential project that
manifests itself in terms of a historical formation or agent.
4. As a critique of putatively colonized thinking and dependent
philosophy, the philosophy of liberation is a metaphilosophy. For this
reason, issues of method are integral to its philosophical agenda. In
tandem with the different "points of departure" for
philosophy that is authentically grounded, different liberation
philosophers argue on behalf of the virtues of one or another
philosophical method or current. Thus, we find some philosophers of
liberation who are "indigenistas", some who at one time or
another were Ricoeuerian, Heideggerian, Levinasian; others who were
Diltheyan, Gadamerian, and Gaosian and/or Ortegian, and some who were
Marxists. The philosophy of liberation, which is critical of European
philosophy, is so from within, immanently, even when some of its
representatives argue from some "analectical" standpoint,
or standpoint of metaphysical "exteriority" to imperial
and totalizing thought. It is thus not surprising that philosophy
"companions" or handbooks to Existentialism,
Phenomenology, Marxism, or to figures such as Martin Heidegger, Karl
Marx, Emmanuel Levinas, include entries on "philosophy of
liberation", or some of its most representative figures.
5. Inasmuch at it is defined by the word "liberation",
all philosophy of liberation is entangled with the project of
sketching an utopia and identifying the "subject" of the
construction of such an utopia. The utopia of liberation entails
either recognizing the suppressed historical subject, or forging a new
one. This liberation or emancipating subject could
be "*el pueblo*", or the proletarian class, or
the popular sectors, made up by the "*pueblo*" now
understood as the destitute and exploited of the nation. For others,
as we will see, this subject is constituted by the nation as it is
embodied in its popular sector. That sector is not understood simply
in terms of class or even cultural identity, but in terms of an
anti-colonial attitude aimed at national sovereignty.



These general and shared characteristics, problems and themes could be
summarized in three observations about the coherence and unity of the
philosophy of liberation.. First, there is a general agreement that
Latin American philosophy must be a philosophy of liberation that aims
at overcoming dependence, domination and subordination. Second, there
is ample disagreement as to the who, what, or how, is this project of
liberation to be undertaken. Third, there is also ample disagreement
as to the "content" or final goal of liberation. In short,
the philosophy of liberation is defined by what many would argue is
integral to all philosophy as such, namely questioning the general
individual existential situation of alienation, the corresponding
project of liberation, and what the utopia of achieved liberation
could and would look like. Philosophers of liberation argue,
nevertheless, that this questioning takes on a universal character
only and precisely because it is taken up from within a specific and
unique existential, historical, and geo-political situation.


## 2. Background



Like all philosophical movements and traditions, the philosophy of
liberation emerged out of both world historical and regional
socio-historical contexts. In terms of the world historical
background, World War II, and in particular the disclosures about the
genocide of the Jews, the Cold War, and the South East Asian wars,
created a world historical stage in which Europe and its intellectual
and moral traditions stood discredited. Whereas before, all things
European were regarded as the standard against which everything would
have to be measured, Europe had become suspect. Latin Americans had to
look elsewhere for inspiration and intellectual guidance.



The regional socio-historical situation was framed, on the one side,
by the Cuban revolution, and the numerous military dictatorships
throughout the Latin American subcontinent, on the other, that took
place as a consequence of the Cold War and the failures of economic
development in Latin America. The Cuban revolution, however, had a
profound impact in the socio-political-cultural imagination throughout
Latin America. In the iconic image of Che Guevara (1928-1967),
the revolution promise a transformation of the Latin American human
being--*el nuevo hombre*--as it also raised the
possibility of political sovereignty for Latin American nations. The
decade of the sixties in Latin American was a time of political
turmoil, but above all of cultural renewal and utopian yearning.



The philosophy of liberation, however, was above all an intellectual
and philosophical response and unquestionably synthesis of a series of
intellectual and cultural movements that had been gestating for a
decade throughout Latin America. The cultural context was so ripe with
proclamations and thinking about "liberation" that if the
philosophy of liberation had not been so named in the late sixties and
early seventies, today we would have wondered whether philosophers had
been abducted from this world and sequestered in some time capsule.
The philosophy of liberation was both necessary and inevitable.



Drawing on the work of Carlos Beorlegui, a historian of Latin American
philosophy, we can say that there are some identifiable
"matrixes", or intellectual sources, from which liberation
philosophy emerged (Beorlegui 2004:
 677-690).[2]
 Here, they will be characterized as follows.



*The Economic Matrix: The Theory of Dependence*. After the end
of World War II, the United States undertook to finance the
"development" of Latin America on the model of
industrialized and capitalist nations. This is what the Alliance for
Progress (1961-1973) aimed to do this by granting loans that
would help economically underdeveloped nations to ascend the ladder of
economic development. This program was guided by the economic theory
called "*desarrollismo*" or
*developmentalism*. Yet, Latin American nations continue to lag
behind both socially and economically.



It is in the face of this failure that a series of economists began to
develop "dependency theory", or the "theory of the
development of underdevelopment", among who were: Theothonio dos
Santos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Falleto, Celso Furtado, and
Anibal Quijano. The core of this theory was that the underdevelopment
of the Latin American nation was not due to endogenous factors, but
rather was a direct consequence of economic dependence on Europe and
the United States. The model of development that reigned during the
fifties and sixties, according to these theorists, had a double
perverse effect: greater capital accumulation in the metropolises and
lending nations, and greater indebtedness and impoverishment in the
so-called underdeveloped nations. The economic underdevelopment of
Latin America was now to be understood in terms of an economic theory
that showed that underdevelopment is not a prior stage in the natural
economic development of nations, but rather an integral dimension of
the international economic order created by colonialism, imperialism,
and neo-imperialism.



*The Religious Matrix: The Theology of Liberation*. The
emergence of Liberation Theology has been amply documented and studied
in the specialized literature. Yet, liberation theology is as much a
phenomenon of global Catholicism as it is a unique Latin American
development. The reforms began with Vatican II (1962-1965) and
the Second Latin American Bishops congregation in Medellin,
Colombia (1968), created the church context for the consolidation of
what was in effect a social movement, namely the
"*communidades de base*" (base communities). The
theology of liberation developed in response to a new understanding of
the church's relationship to the "people" and the
role of the faith in a world of incredible poverty and social
inequality.



The theology of liberation forged a whole new language: the
"preferential option for the poor", the "underside
of history", "the church of the people",
"orthopraxis is prior to orthodoxy" that influenced some
philosophers of liberation. Still, two of the most important
contributions of the theology of liberation to the philosophy of
liberation were the imperative that critical reflection had to emerge
out of committed *praxis*, and the problematization of the
concept of "*el pueblo*". The theology of
liberation may be understood as theological reflection on what
constituted a people, a community of faith. In short, theology of
liberation asks: who is the subject of God's soteriology. Most
noteworthy is that Gustavo Gutierrez published his *Teologia
de la liberacion. Perspectivas (A Theology of Liberation)*
in 1971 in Peru, while Hugo Assmann published his
*Opresion-Liberacion: desafio a los
cristianos* (*Oppression-Liberation: Challenge to
Christians*) the same year in Chile. The Catholic Church also
provided an institutional framework within which some of the work of
philosophers of liberation could be pursued by hosting
"*jornadas*", sponsoring congresses, and providing
teaching opportunities in its affiliated universities for philosophers
of liberation, many who had been expelled from public
universities.



*The Educational Matrix: The Pedagogy of the Oppressed*. In
1970, after nearly two decades of literacy work in the Brazilian
*favelas* and poor sectors of Brazil, Paulo Freire published
his paradigm shifting text *Pedagogia del oprimido*
(*Pedagogy of the Oppressed*) (1970), which was followed in
1972 by his *Education for the Praxis of Liberation*. At the
core of Freire's work were three key ideas: if the people are to
overcome their dependence, they can only do so through their own
agency, by becoming the subject of their own liberation; to become a
subject of one's own liberation means to engage in a process of
*conscientizacao*, or consciousness raising, that
takes place through a pedagogy that rejects the notion of the learner
as a passive receptacle and instead departs from the fundamental
realization that learning is a dynamic process. Two key notions of
Freire's pedagogy of liberation were that (1) teaching requires
listening to the people, and (2) schooling means life, that is,
learning is both indispensable to life and it takes place in the midst
of living. Freire's key phrase
"*conscientizacao*" goes on to be
appropriated by liberation philosophers as their own goal: philosophy
is at the service of the raising of both individual and collective
consciousness.



*The Literary-Artistic Matrix: The Boom and the Muralists*. It
is often forgotten that the sixties were the time of the Latin
American literary Boom. This is the decade when Jose M.
Arguedas, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel
Garcia-Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Juan
Rulfo, Ernesto Sabato published their major works. During this
decade there also emerged a genre that gave expression to the heavy
consciousness of dependence and the spirit of rebellion and quest for
emancipation, namely the *Novelas de Guerrilla*; among which
are Julio de la Vega's *Matias, el apostol
suplente* (1971, Jesus Lara's
*Naucahuazu, Suenos* (1969, Renato Prada
Oropeza's, *Los fundadores del alba* (1969), Gaby Vallejo
de Bolivar's *Los Vulnerables* (1973, Oscar Uzin
Fernandez's, *La oscuridad radiante* (1976). Just
as these writers demonstrated how a distinct Latin American literary
tradition could be forged, the muralists demonstrated how standards of
artistic beauty that celebrated proudly the aesthetic sensibility and
creativity of the continent. The *estetica indigenista*
(*indigeneous aesthetics*) celebrates by muralists like Diego
Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and painters like Frida Kahlo, created a
new iconic representation of the Latin American people that more
ecumenically reflected the continent's *mestizaje*, or
racial mixing and hybridity.



*The Sociological Matrix: The Sociology of Liberation*. The
fifties and sixties, as was already noted, were decades of tremendous
social-economic-political turmoil throughout Latin America. Latin
American industrialization went in tandem with massive urbanization
and de-ruralization. Extensive migrations from the countryside to the
cities gave rise to the shantytowns that are so distinctly visible in
most Latin American metropolises. Sociologist began to address the
unique challenges of de-ruralization and urbanization. In Colombia,
sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, who worked with Colombian peasants,
began to develop what he called a "sociology of
liberation" that meant to address the very unique situation of
the urban and rural poor in contexts in which the state was nearly
absent. Fals Borda studied in particular the ways in which the poor
created their own institutions and norms of social interaction.
Combined with the theory of dependence, the sociology of liberation,
created an interdisciplinary matrix that sought to address the
conditions of systemic inequity, while raising the norm that people
could be the agents of their own liberation.



It is clear that both dependence and liberation were in the lips of
economists, sociologists, theologians, and writers. The philosophy of
liberation gave expression in concepts what was a lived local and
globally interlinked experience.


## 3. Currents



Like existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and
poststructuralism, the philosophy of liberation was never a
homogeneous or monolithic movement. From its inception the philosophy
of liberation was marked by internal tensions, which over time have
become more intense, but that have also led to philosophical
developments that have taken the original theses to new levels of
refinement and theoretical elaboration. Cerutti Guldberg, who has
written the most substantive and comprehensive study of liberation
philosophy, has offered a typology of the internal currents that names
four different currents (Cerutti Guldberg 1983, 1988-9, 2006).
Beorlegui, writing more recently, argues that there are in fact six
currents, though he accepts Cerutti Guldberg's four as being the
core and originating current (Beorlegui 2004: 695-727). These
four currents will now be discussed sequentially.


### 3.1 The Ontologicist



This current is generally associated with Mario Casalla, Carlos
Cullen, Gunther Rodolfo Kush, and Amelia Podetti. According to these
thinkers, a Latin American philosophy of liberation has to begin from
the ontological situation of the American people, which has a distinct
relationship to being. This distinct relationship to being is
expressed in the two forms of the verb "to be" in Spanish:
*ser* (to be) and *estar* (to be in). Authentic Latin
American philosophy begins from the *estar* of the American
people in its own being. At the same time, everything that is either
European or North American has to be rejected as manifestations of a
philosophy of oppression and philosophical hegemony. This new
philosophy that breaks with the past and everything that is allegedly
foreign must break with the "ontological dependence" that
has been suffered by Latin American in different ways. This current
rejects as much European liberalism, as a form of abstract
individualism, and Marxism, as a form of economic and inorganic
collectivism. It calls for a form of populism that is neither
nationalistic nor class oriented. Instead, "*el
pueblo*" is considered as an ontological entity, a community
of fate, and organic unity that is a pure manifestation of a being-in
that assumes distinct cultural characteristics. This
"*pueblo*" is not the nation, but the American
*mestizo* and Amerindian. It is for this reason that Cerutti
Guldberg also refers to this current as a manifestation of
"anti-historicist populism" (Cerutti Guldberg
1988-9: 46).


### 3.2 The Analectical



This current is associated with Enrique Dussel and Juan Carlos
Scannone. Like the ontologicist, the analectical also presents itself
as a critique of both Eurocentrism and North American neo-colonialism.
It presents itself as a critique of modernity, conceived as a colonial
and imperial ideology that has "*encubierto*" or
concealed what is distinctly Latin American. More generally, however,
the analectical current articulates itself as a metaphysical critique
of the thinking of the totality, of all that is thought in terms of
being, the whole that is postulated as the true. At the same time, it
also argues that philosophy must "depart" or
"locate" itself with reference to both a subject and
object of philosophizing. This subject and object is also
"*el pueblo*", or the people.



In contrast to the ontologicist position, however, the people is not
understood ontologically, but metaphysically, or more precisely
analectically, (derived from "*ana*" or beyond, in
contrast to "*dia*" or through and between). This
strand of the philosophy of liberation aims to overhaul all of
philosophy by subsuming all Western philosophy under the logic of the
thinking of ontology and the dialectical totality that is always
self-referential, from Aristotle and Plato, to Hegel, Marx and
Habermas.



For philosophers in the analectical current, the authentic people is
what is always outside the totality. Its form of being cannot be
determined once and for all. It is at a given time, as it gives
expression to its quest for justice that has left its own legacy and
memory of struggle. However, its continuing quest for justice and the
redress of past sufferings remain undetermined and unaccounted for. If
for the ontologicist current the role of the philosopher is to guide
the people to recognize its own deep and unsuspected wisdom, for the
analectical philosopher the role of philosopher is one that is focused
on being attentive to the clamoring, or "interpellations",
of the people, so that he or she can give voice to their cry for
justice. That said, it must also be noted that both Dussel and
Scannone have moved beyond many of these ideas, as they were first
formulated in the early seventies (Dussel 1998, 2007; Scannone 1990).
To this extent the analectical denomination may be already
anachronistic. While Scannone, remaining faithful to his Levinasian
philosophical commitments, has turned towards the development of
"inter-cultural philosophy", Dussel's critical
engagement with Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas has led him to
develop a more dialectical philosophy of liberation, one which has
made the linguistic and pragmatic turn (Vallega 2014). Furthermore, in
dialogue with Walter Mignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez, Dussel
has been arguing that the philosophy of liberation contributed and is
part of the "decolonial turn" in Latin American philosophy
(see Castro-Gomez, 2011; Dussel 2015; Mignolo, 2011; Mignol and
Walsh 2018; Morana, Dussel, Jauregi, eds. 2008; Allen
and Mendieta, forthcoming).


### 3.3 The Historicist



This current is associated with the work of Horacio Cerutti Guldberg,
Arturo Roig, Arturo Ardao, and Leopoldo Zea. Like the
"problematizing" current (see below), it presents itself
as a critique of the two prior tendencies. These thinkers argue that
it is neither possible nor desirable to set out from some absolute
unsoiled and authentic point of departure. Instead, they argue that we
are always already immersed in a history of ideas, and the task is
thus to think the experience of Latin America from out its distinct
history as it has been already thought. Indeed, a lot of the work the
thinkers in this current have done is to engage in a rigorous
reconstruction of the history of ideas in Latin America, to see their
emergence out of unique process of social transformation, and their
continued dialogue and confrontation across the decades and centuries.
This history of ideas in Latin America has also been presented as part
of the project of political emancipation. It is for this reason that
the historical antecedents of Latin American philosophy cannot be
dismissed, for they are also part of a history of the forging of
political freedom in the subcontinent (Zea 1991).


### 3.4 The Problematicizing



This current is associated with the work of Horacio Cerutti Guldberg,
Jose Severino Croatto, Manuel Ignacio Santos, and Gustavo
Ortiz. Cerutti Guldberg has also argued that Salazar Body and Hugo
Assmann ought to be considered as contributing to this current. For
this group of thinkers, the criteria of philosophy's efficacy or
relevance cannot be authenticity, or how it relates or departs from
some "null" point of enunciation that either responds to
or is an interpellation of some "macro" subject. For this
current, the question is what could constitute a critical reflection,
without fetishes or mystifications, on the demanding crises and
challenges of Latin American social reality. Unlike the ontologizing
and the analectical currents, both the historicizing and the
problematicizing reject all ontological or metaphysical attempts to
fix "*el pueblo*" or what is properly "*Lo
Americano*", (that is, what properly belong to the
"Americas"). Philosophy is caught in the river of history,
it cannot jump out of, or pretend that a "rupture" with
the past can be executed or proclaimed. For this group of thinkers,
the critical issues were twofold. First, how does philosophy respond
to a specific set of historical challenges, without falling pray to
the ideological prejudices that condition that presentation of that
very historical? Second, what is the language that will allow that
philosophical reflection to remain ever vigilant?



Notwithstanding these substantive and often time irreconcilable
differences, the philosophy of liberation has been recognized as an
extremely important and representative philosophical movement that
synthesized and responded to distinctly Latin American intellectual
traditions and historical challenges. In nearly half a century, other
figures have aligned themselves with the movement, even if they were
not part of the founding cohort.



This is the case with Franz Hinkelammert, who was born in Germany in
1931, and was educated in the Free University in Berlin. In 1963, he
emigrated to Latin America, first to Chile and then to Costa Rica,
where along with Hugo Assmann, he funded the Departamento
Ecumenico de Investigaciones (DEI). His original training was
in economics, but over the last four decades he has produced a series
of influential books dealing with the relationship between theology,
economics, and philosophy. His work takes up liberation theology, but
from the perspective of political economy and aims to show that the
theology of liberation's critique of religious idolatry are
matched by Marxism's critique of the fetish of the commodity
form and exploitation. Hinkelammert has also produced a series of
monographs aimed at the critique of neoliberalism. Still, what he has
contributed is what he calls the *Critica de la razon
utopica (Critique of Utopian Reason)* (1984), which is
operative as much in Marxism as it is in liberalism. To counter
unrealizable utopian projects, Hinkelammert introduced the principle
of "*factibilidad*" or feasibility, as criteria for
the evaluation of the ethicalness or morality of any transformative
moral-political project.



Another figure that has contributed to the further refinement of the
philosophy of philosophy, mostly through his students, is the Jesuit
theologian Ignacio Ellacuria, born in 1930 in Viscaya, Spain.
He was a student of Karl Rahner and Xavier Zubiri. He moved to El
Salvador, to teach at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), where he
became rector in 1969, a position he led until 1989 when he was
assassinated by paramilitary forces trained by the United States
military.



Ellacuria worked closely with the Spanish philosopher Zubiri,
whose work aimed to overcome the separation between epistemology and
ontology, knower and known, through the notion of what he called
"sentient intelligence", or "feeling
*logos*". Ellacuria took up Zubiri's
ontological work and transformed it into a philosophy of history.
Reality is historical and thus it is dynamic. Dynamic historical
reality is where subjects are formed, but they are also the ones that
make historical reality transformative because of their
*praxis*, their practical engagement with the world. The
*praxis* of human, however, is also always the expansion of the
horizon of action. *Praxis* gives rise to more possibilities
for engagement historical reality. The *telos* of
*praxis* is thus greater liberty. His incomplete *magnum
opus* *Filosofia de la realidad historica*
(1991) aimed to develop a philosophy of history that celebrated the
"historical intelligence" that is the sediment of praxical
beings taking charge of their historical reality that aims at greater
liberty. It is to be noted that Ellacuria's philosophy of
history and "feeling *logos*" have been most
effectively taken up in Dussel's most recent work on the ethics
and politics of liberation, which is one reason that, as was noted
above, the "analectical" designator may no longer be a
useful denomination for a current that has been influenced so
profoundly by recent developments in Latin American philosophy (Dussel
1998, 2007, 2009, 2017, 2018; Bautista 2014; Grant 2020; Mills
2018).


## 4. Themes and Debates



Philosophical currents have distinct profiles not only because of the
theses that define their methods and approaches, but also because of
the themes and problems that remain their preoccupations despite
changes and the incorporation of new methods and theses. The
philosophy of liberation has since its inception taken up the
following themes.



*The question of populism*. At the heart of the philosophy of
liberation is the problem of the historical subject of liberation.
This problem has been addressed in terms of the idea of the
"*pueblo*" or people. Yet, this has been defined in
a variety of ways: as an ethnocultural historical formation; as a
socio-economic entity; as a cultural entity that transcends both
nations and classes; as what is to be forged through a democratic
political project. The problem of what or who is the
"people" has taken on a new urgency as new forms of
democratic participation have emerged, and as Latin American nations
find themselves more integrated economically and politically due to
hemispheric transformations. The political transformations of the last
decade throughout Latin America, away from revolutionary violence and
towards political participation, have been addressed in terms of the
need to rethink the issues of political representation and
participation.



*The question of the subject*. This problem is the other side
of the question about the historical subject of liberation. What is
the relationship between the individual subject, whether it be
conceive as an epistemic or ethical agent, and their belonging to a
macro-historical subject, where this may be conceived as "*el
pueblo*" that is either a national-cultural unit, or a
transnational, cultural entity, such as the "Americas". As
a chapter in phenomenological-hermeneutical philosophy, the philosophy
liberation has addressed the nature of the particular and distinct
embodied, free, historically located, and dependent subject. The
embodied and historical situatedness of the agent is continuously
addressed from the standpoint of the most deprived and most vulnerable
in the collective historical subject that is always under
question.



 *The Question of Gender/Race*. As in the liberation of
theology, the philosophy of liberation was initially slow to address
the questions of both gender and race, although the later was always a
central theme of Latin American philosophy in general. The issue of
race was addressed in terms of mestizaje, *blanqueamiento*(whitening, i.e. the idea that through racial mixing Blacks would
become White and thus assimilate into the broader society),
indigenity, negritude, and racial mixing in general. Mestizaje,
however, has tended to cover up the distinct role that race has played
in the formation of Latin American identity. The question of gender,
nonetheless, was explicitly addressed by Enrique Dussel as early as
1977 in the third volume of his *Filosofia Etica
Latinoamericana* (Dussel 1977), in which he developed an erotics of
Latin American liberation. In 1980 Dussel published
*Liberacion de la Mujer y Erotica Latinoamericana*,
which is made up of re-edition of the seventh chapter of this third
volume, along with a new text titled "Toward a Metaphysics of
Feminity," which as the title suggests aims to offer a
metaphysical understanding of gender, in which woman is the
"Other" of man. Dussel's metaphysics was critiqued
for being an anachronistic and "machista" ontologization
of Catholic, in particular, and Christian, more generally,
understandings of sex and gender that negated the historical
contingency of gender roles that resulted in a recalcitrant rejection
of sexual difference other than man/woman (Schutte 1993). In the
epilogue to the 1994 edition of *Liberacion de la Mujer y
Erotica Latinoamericana*, Dussel, however, rejected and
critiqued his earlier views, noting that the Latin American feminism
of the sixties was primarily oriented towards a critique of North
American feminism, and that the category of "gender" had
not yet being thoroughly absorbed and appropriated within Latin
American thinking. He also rejected the unintended
"homophobic" dimension of his earlier call for an
"Erotics" of Latin American liberation. Over the last
three decades, in dialogue with Linda Alcoff, Lynda Lange, Maria
Lugones, Ofelia Schutte, and Elina Vuola (Alcoff and Mendieta, eds.
2000), as well as theologians such as Maria Clara Bingemer,
 Ivone Gebara, and Elsa Tamez, philosophers of liberation have
began to address what Lugones has called "the coloniality of
gender" (Lugones 2010). 



*The question of utopia*. As a philosophical movement defined
by the quest for liberation, the philosophy of liberation has had to
always address the question of the role of utopia in energizing
individual and social movements. The question of utopia, however, is
the problem of the collective imaginary that projects goals that will
guide transformative movements. Yet, at the same time, such
transformative imaginaries are criticized because of their lack of
feasibility or operability.



*The question of history*. The significance of history is a
problematic that threads the entire current and tradition of the
philosophy of liberation, not only because "dependency"
and "liberation" are understood as historical issues, but
because the very project of liberation is to be undertaken from within
history. Indeed, even in its most "ontological" and
"analectical" versions, the philosophy of liberation is
always addressing the historical character of human existence.
Collectively, philosophers of liberation affirm that historical
indexicality of freedom, that is, that human freedom cannot be
understood in the abstract, but only against a very specific
historical conditions that are material because they take the form of
socio-political institutions. For philosophers liberation, human
liberty must be embodied and material precisely because it is part of
a dynamic historical reality.



*The question of democracy and social order*. The philosophy of
liberation was defined as much by its resistance to all forms of
authoritarianism as by the persecution that many of its philosophers
suffered at the hands of dictators and authoritarian political
figures. In its early years question of democracy, legitimacy and
legality were subordinate to the metaphysical and ontological
questions of the subject of historical emancipation. However, over the
last two decades, the political future of Latin American has become a
more pressing issue. The quest for national sovereignty and liberation
from Euroamerican imperialism is now framed in terms of ethnoracial
democracies and the greater participation of sectors of the Latin
American people that were either excluded or entirely ignored during
the processes of national independence and national-state formation.
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, philosophers of
liberation think of themselves as contributing to the elaboration of
what has been called "multicultural" democracy, and in
this way, more historically inflected and less
"ontological" notions of "*el pueblo*"
are being embraced and developed.



To close, like most vibrant and still alive currents in world
philosophy, the philosophy of liberation has been contributing to
three key issues that are vital to all philosophy in general, namely:
the question of meaning, i.e., how we produce, reproduce and transmit
historically produced meanings across a variety of semiological and
hermeneutical practices. This is the general question of how humans
continue to communicate across time, even when their basic conditions
of the production of world-views has radically altered. In tandem, the
philosophy of liberation, which began partly as a challenge to a
certain historiography of ideas in Latin America, continues to raise
the question of how we write the history of philosophy, for whom and
for what purposes, in such a way that we surrender to neither
ideological distortions nor naive purisms, neither Eurocentrism
nor thirdworldism. Finally, like all transformative and enduring
philosophical movements, the philosophy of liberation has since its
inception articulated itself as a metaphilosophical reflection, i.e.,
as a philosophy that reflects on its own practice and what merits the
dignity of being called philosophy *tout court* (Vallega
2014).