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boundary 2 28.1 (2001) 19-73



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Ethics Is the Original Philosophy; or, The Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World:
An Interview with Enrique Dussel

Fernando Gomez
Translated by Fernando Gomez

Some Materials for an Intellectual Biography

FG: How would you describe the historical process of your thinking?

ED: It is a paradoxical process that takes me by surprise. It appears that being of a certain generation in Mendoza, Argentina, would entail specific demands as to where and how to behave and think. Also, ever since I was eight or ten years old, I already felt very close to groups that were extremely engaged in social activities. I see a great coherence in my life and my work in this regard. My first work in sociology in the Department of Philosophy at Mendoza, and this happened already in my second semester, was about the marginal neighborhoods in my county. I would go around the city limits on my bicycle and try to find the neighborhoods of Bolivian immigrants who were arriving in Mendoza to make a living. How could it be that I was so early interested in marginal life, which is the central theme of alterity that I am still thinking about today? That is, between the Dussel in his early teens [End Page 19] and the Dussel of today, I see an impressive continuity. And it is exactly the same with my studies in ethics. I was already studying ethics by the time I was nineteen. I studied ethics for four years. I had a very good foundation very early on thanks to a great professor who, despite his conservative views, was very learned. My doctoral thesis, which I completed in Madrid, is about the notion of the common good, which is ethics and the philosophy of rights, and there I was paradoxically going against Charles de Köning from the position of Jacques Maritain. So, against my teachers, I was already creating my own space, defending democracy in the final years of Perón and the beginning of democracy in Argentina, and also in the middle of the Franco regime, which was then very much against the grain.

FG: Do you wish to differentiate among history, philosophy, and ethics?

ED: Professionally, my philosophical field was, from the very beginning, ethics. My specialization was in ethics. What occurred was that I reached a point at which, thanks to the philosophy of liberation, and also thanks to Emmanuel Levinas, I realized that ethics was the original philosophy. On this point I agree with Charles Peirce and with Karl-Otto Apel. So I have always been a specialist in ethics, and I have been studying ethics for many years in the middle of a generalized lack of interest. Now, all of a sudden, ethics returns with a surprising centrality. It is even fashionable! In the meantime, I have been working on ethical issues for thirty, forty years, and this is what makes my final work a very careful reading on classic authors, which is not the common practice among people who devote themselves entirely to ethics.

FG: In what sense is ethics the original philosophy?

ED: This is so, especially since Levinas, but it is obvious that it is also the case before him, since the origins of Semitic thought. My first book, Pensamiento Semita [Semitic thought], published in 1961, insinuates that in order to deconstruct philosophy, but also to construct it later, it is necessary to start from the practical considerations [informing such an enterprise]. That is to say, where do I situate this author, this thought, this text? Where do I put him in relation to his surrounding practical structures? Aristotle’s slave ethics is not the same as the Sophists’ first critical ethics of slavery. And it is by taking this [contextualization] into account that I am then able to situate the textual circumstance inside its ethico-practical structures. I remember in the seventies, during a congress of philosophy, a Thomist...

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