View source for Analectical Mode of Reasoning


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"One of Dussel’s distinctive contributions is the notion of an “analectical” mode of reasoning and interacting, a mode which preserves the linkage between dialectics and (a certain kind of) dialogue. As he writes at one point: Analectics designates a method “which begins from the Other as free, as one beyond the system of totality; which begins, then, from the Other’s word, from the revelation of the Other, and which, trusting in the Other’s word, labors, works, serves, and creates.”

Although favoring dialogue, analectics does not end in a bland consensualism but respects the gap or difference (dia) between self and other, between oppressor and oppressed, shunning the temptation of a totalizing synthesis: “I want to develop a philosophy a dialogue as part of a philosophy of liberation of the oppressed, the excommunicated, the excluded, the Other.”

For Dussel, liberation of the oppressed does not involve a brute struggle for power—which would only lead to the replacement of one type of oppression by another. In line with the idea of an “ethical hermeneutics,” his aim is not only to liberate the oppressed and excluded, but also to liberate the oppressor from their desire to oppress—thus ultimately appealing to a latent ethical potential.

It is in this respect that Dussel invokes the example of Bartolemé de las Casas, the Spanish cleric who, at the time of the conquest of the Americas, denounced the violence of the conquistadors, but without endorsing simple counter-violence or the unleashing of totalizing carneage. As he writes in The Invention of the Americas, it was Las Casas who, in traveling in the New World, had a transformative experience: he “underwent tutelage at the hands of the oppressed and learned to admire the beauty, culture, and goodness of the indigenous, the new, the Other.” In a Levinasian sense, Las Casas discovered in the Americas an ethics which is not abstractly imposed but arises from the concrete encounter with the “face” of indigenous peoples; and “out of his love” for them he launched his critique of their oppression, while pleading for a different, “analectical” mode of interaction.
Proceeding to a more general level, the text crisply pinpoints the preconditions of a non-imperialist dialogue applicable to our present time. The idea of such a dialogue, Dussel writes, should not lapse into “the facile optimism of a rationalist, abstract universalism” which merely imposes Eurocentric standards on the rest of the world. At the same, it must steer clear of the quagmire of “irrationality, incommunicability, or incommensurability” which is merely the flip-side of Eurocentrism."
(https://criticaltheorylibrary.blogspot.com/2010/12/who-is-enrique-dussel.html)

[[Category:Intelligence]]
[[Category:Integral Theory]]