The Critique of Eurocentric Reason
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 developed a fundamental critique of Eurocentric reason, turning Hegel’s own method against his prejudices.[1] This critique was not anti-rational, but demanded an expanded, plural rationality.
Aníbal Quijano (b. 1930) developed the concept of the “coloniality of power”.[2] but the colonial structures remained: racial hierarchy, Eurocentric culture, dependent economy. “Coloniality” is the dark side of modernity - both arose together in the sixteenth century.
Quijano’s analysis is dialectical: modernity and coloniality constitute one another. Europe could only modernize itself through the exploitation of America. The Enlightenment proclaimed universal human rights while practicing slavery and genocide. This contradiction is not accidental, but structural.[3]
Walter Mignolo (b. 1941) calls for “border thinking” - thought from the borders.[4] The border is not periphery, but an epistemic site. Whoever stands at the border sees both sides, knows several languages, navigates between worlds. Border thinking overcomes the dichotomy of center/periphery.
Mignolo criticizes Hegel’s philosophy of history as “chronopolitics” - the transformation of spatial difference into temporal hierarchy.[5] Other cultures are classified not as different, but as “backward.” The Aztecs are not different from the Spaniards, but “medieval.” This temporalization legitimizes colonial “modernization.”
Santiago Castro-Gómez (b. 1958) analyzes the “hubris of the zero point” - the illusion of a neutral, disembodied, placeless observer.[6] European philosophy claims to speak from nowhere, to be universal. But it speaks from Europe, as a white man, in imperial languages. This particular position is masked as universal.
These critiques employ Hegel’s own method: they expose contradictions, deconstruct false universality, demand concrete rather than abstract reason. Hegel taught that the Absolute realizes itself only through its particularizations. Latin American philosophy shows: a reason that denies its own particularity is not reasonable.[7]
On the critique of Eurocentrism see Walter Mignolo: The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995); Santiago Castro-Gómez & Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.): El giro decolonial (2007). ↩︎
Aníbal Quijano: “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina” in: Edgardo Lander (ed.): La colonialidad del saber (2000). ↩︎
Quijano & Immanuel Wallerstein: “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System” in: International Social Science Journal 134 (1992). ↩︎
Walter Mignolo: Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000). ↩︎
Mignolo: The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011), Ch. 2. ↩︎
Santiago Castro-Gómez: La hybris del punto cero: Ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva Granada (2005). ↩︎
This point is developed by Arturo Andrés Roig: Teoría y crítica del pensamiento latinoamericano (1981). ↩︎