Philosophical Decolonization
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Latin American philosophy after 1945 faced a double challenge: it had to free itself both from the colonial past (Spain/Portugal) and from the neocolonial present (the USA).[1] This double front produced a distinctive philosophical movement that received and transformed Hegel in a specific way.
Leopoldo Zea (1912-2004) of Mexico was the pioneer of philosophical decolonization. His work América como conciencia (1953) posed the fundamental question: Can there be an authentically Latin American philosophy, or is philosophy necessarily universal?[2] Zea argued dialectically: Latin America had to pass through European philosophy in order to find itself.
Zea had studied under José Gaos, a Spanish exile who brought Ortega y Gasset’s historicism to Mexico.[3]
Zea’s reception of Hegel was critical. He confronted Hegel’s notorious claim that America was “the land of the future” - but still immature, still outside history.[4] Zea turned this dialectically: precisely as the “land of the future,” Latin America had to create its own history, not copy European models.
Augusto Salazar Bondy (1925-1974) of Peru radicalized the question in his influential essay ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (1968).[5] His answer was negative: as long as Latin America remained economically dependent and socially oppressed, it could not develop an authentic philosophy. Philosophy in Latin America had so far been only “mimetic” - imitation of European fashions.
Salazar Bondy’s analysis was implicitly Hegelian: consciousness corresponds to being, philosophy reflects social conditions. But he drew revolutionary conclusions: “An authentic philosophy will only become possible once Latin America has completed its liberation.”[6] Philosophy and revolution belong together.
Enrique Dussel (1934) developed the most systematic philosophy of liberation. His monumental work comprises a Filosofía de la Liberación (1977), a five-volume Ética de la Liberación (1998), and numerous historical studies.[7] Dussel combines Hegel, Marx, Levinas, and Latin American experience into an original system.
Dussel’s starting point is “exteriority” - that which lies outside the system.[8] Hegel, Dussel argues, thinks only within totality. But the Other - especially the poor, the excluded - stands outside. From Levinas, Dussel adopts the ethics of the Other, but he politicizes it: the Other is not abstract, but concretely the colonized, the indigenous person, the worker.
Dussel’s “analectic” (from the Greek ana = beyond) aims to go beyond Hegel’s dialectic.[9] Dialectic, he argues, moves within the Same; analectic opens itself to the Other. But paradoxically, Dussel’s method is profoundly Hegelian: he exposes the contradictions of the system and drives toward their overcoming.
On the history of Latin American philosophy see Eduardo Mendieta (ed.): Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (2003); Susana Nuccetelli et al. (eds.): A Companion to Latin American Philosophy (2010). ↩︎
Leopoldo Zea: América como conciencia (Mexico 1953). English translation: The Latin American Mind (1963). ↩︎
On Gaos’s influence see Tzvi Medin: Leopoldo Zea: Ideología, historia y filosofía de América Latina (1992). ↩︎
Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Werke 12, p. 114. Zea discusses this extensively in Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (1988). ↩︎
Augusto Salazar Bondy: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (Mexico 1968). ↩︎
Salazar Bondy, op. cit., p. 89. ↩︎
Enrique Dussel: Philosophy of Liberation (1977); Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (1998). As an introduction: Linda Martín Alcoff & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.): Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (2000). ↩︎
Dussel: Philosophy of Liberation (1985), Ch. 2. He develops this against Hegel’s “totality.” ↩︎
On the “analectical method” see Dussel: Método para una filosofía de la liberación (1974). ↩︎