Exploring Pluriversal Paths Toward Transmodernity: From the Mind-Centered Egolatry of Colonial Modernity to Islam’s Epistemic Decolonization through the Heart
2013; The MIT Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1540-5699
Autores Tópico(s)Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity
ResumoI. INTRODUCTION In his major work Ethics of Liberation (2013), Enrique Dussel's point of departure is a world system of globalized exclusion, which can be placed against his imagining of what he calls Transmodern (xv), i.e., to beyond modernity to a pluraversality of existence. Similarly, according to Sylvia Wynter, The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. (1) If so, then to towards an actual theorization of the human, we must first shatter and expose the of Man (2) as it has been molded into marble, bronze, and the psyche of peoples throughout the world as the normative construction of a universalized Western/white male being. In imagining the human, the images that instantly come to mind are those of this overrepresentation, from global images of a supposed white/blue eyed Jesus, the anthropomorphic rendering of the elderly white bearded Christian God as painted in the Sistine Chapel creating Adam, Michelangelo's David, statues of Christopher Columbus pointing West, Santa Claus and his rosy red cheeks, George Washington's angel-like representation emblazoned atop the rotunda in the United States capitol building, and today, that of the lifestyle branded white male celebrity jet setting across the planet to save children in Africa at one moment, then wearing the latest Giorgio Armani suit at his movie premier the next. While these altruistic images are central to the construction of egology, (3) which sits atop the pyramidal construction of Man, it is primarily on its and ontological basis that I will focus my attention here. To properly understand, and to expose the clay feet of these false gods of what W.E.B. DuBois called religion of whiteness, (4) we must shift the study to focus on what Walter Mignolo terms the of --that is, the and ontological roots of the overrepresentation of a false universal Western Man, rooted in Renaissance and Enlightenment epistemology and ontology. To make this decolonial it is necessary to ally my critique with that of the modernity/coloniality school of thought, to first properly understand the discourses of modernity, and also to privilege epistemologies of the South--which help us in shattering the falsely-universalized conception of Man--in order to towards the transmodern understanding of the Human. In this paper I will follow the line of thought of key decolonial theorists as I attempt to map what I have termed the pyramidal construction of Man, and the inverted pyramid as constructing the Human. Placed together with the pyramid representing the logic of modernity at the top, and the inverted pyramid as representing the logic of coloniality at the bottom, this visualization of these theoretical matrixes will help us in understanding the processes that are necessary to create an epistemic geo-political move (5) to a politics of what Nelson Maldonado-Torres terms, epistemological decolonization. (6) As these pyramids clearly demonstrate, needed is a shift from the ego/ nafs/self at the top or center of Man's onto-epistemological existence, to the ego/ nafs/self being placed in a state of spiritual peace at the bottom of one's existence where the ego/nafs/self is placed last. To make this shift in the geo-politics of knowledge in the context of Islam, I argue that what is needed is a shift away from Descartes and Western moderniy's centering of human consciousness in the mind, to a re-centering of consciousness in the spiritual heart (qalb). This in turn requires a shift back to a Tassawuf (Islamic Sufism) and thus a heart (qalb) centered understanding of Islam in relation to modernity. …
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