Abstract

Juan José's reference to the native Andean peoples is the foundation for criticism of modern ontology. Bautista, like Marx and Dussel, always has as his foundation human life as a principle, a material anthropological starting point, a source of life, and the creator of ontological structures and culturally situated epistemologies. The philosopher is not only an epistemic subject; before that, he is a living, material body—a complex human being. Consequently, his work is not limited to an epistemological intention but also, ultimately, to transforming reality; in the case of liberation philosophers, this transformation involves the reality of the victims. For this, it is necessary to outline the construction of a categorical framework as part of the work of critical philosophical thinking. The manner in which this philosophical thought is expressed in the civilizations of Abya Yala, prior to 1492, is not in the Western way. The fact that the critical thinking of the original civilizations of Abya Yala has not been expressed in the philosophical narrative of the Western tradition does not imply that there was no philosophy of native liberation among our indigenous peoples prior to that time.

Introduction

In 2004, I was in the final semesters of my Philosophy degree at UAM-Iztapalapa. I attended research seminars with Dr. Enrique Dussel, who was the director of my graduation research project that I needed to present in order to graduate. At that time, we were reading Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche, delving into the notion of the will to power to critique modern ontological politics, from a positive power or will to live, that of the people, inspired by the "mandar obedeciendo" of the EZLN. On one occasion, the professor announced in ethics class that he had an academic commitment that would prevent him from attending. To ensure we wouldn't miss the class, Juan José Bautista would take over to teach and clarify any doubts. We had the habit of entering the classroom only when the professor was already present. The university doors have a small window at eye level; I took a quick glance, and there he was, sitting at the corner of the desk, rolling up his shirt sleeves. I opened the door, and we exchanged glances; perhaps he recognized me, or so I thought. It was possible that Dussel had mentioned me, as I was the only one delving into Liberation Ethics. That day, I arrived late and left before the class ended; Dr. Juan José's discourse struck me as profoundly Hegelian. This is how I came to know the “double,” as Pedro Enrique García Ruiz affectionately referred to it.

Dr. Pedro Enrique had developed the first thesis on Dussel's work at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in 1994. By 2004, along with Dussel, he was the director of the research thesis I was writing; no one at UAM had had the audacity to produce any research work on Liberation Philosophy. Ten years later, we were already two. We reconnected at our mentor's 70th anniversary celebration, an event organized by Pedro at the recently opened UACM Del Valle campus. There, among others, were Eduardo Mendieta, Nelson Maldonado, the sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, and, of course, Juan José.

In 2005, with my degree completed, after being rejected from the graduate program in Humanities at UAM-Iztapalapa and with a constant search for meaning in my life project, I found myself bouncing between classrooms at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM, arriving at the place where Professor Enrique Dussel taught. After wandering and asking around, we went down the stairs in search of the Samuel Ramos library reference. We were welcomed by the space of the Cerezo brothers. As we turned right into the hallway leading to the entrance of the Aula Magna of the faculty, we encountered a line of students waiting to enter the class; Juan José was there at the entrance of the room. At UNAM, we found only two people who knew and had read Enrique Dussel’s work seriously; one of them was Juan José and the other was Pedro Enrique. The three of us elbowed and pushed our way through UNAM because we came from a peripheral university in a marginalized area of Mexico City, and Juanjo was also a Bolivian refugee in Mexico since 1988.

In 2005, in Bolivia, the social movement propelled Evo Morales to the presidency, and in Mexico, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation convened, through the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, meetings in the jungle for what would be called the Other Campaign, dissolving the Zapatista National Liberation Front. Throughout that year, we got to know each other; Juan José participated in the graduate group, which only a few of us entered, and through dialogue, we managed to get closer to understanding some of his thoughts. We stopped attending classes when, on July 5 of that year, a second 9mm bullet penetrated the home where I lived. After slipping away from public life to temporarily disorient the state intelligence service, phone calls to family members intensified in search of our whereabouts; months earlier, I had joined the Southern Regional Coordination of the Other Campaign of the EZLN, among the communities in the southern part of Mexico City.

In August 2008, I left for Chiapas with the idea of going into hiding in the mountains, and if I returned, it would be dead. The life plan took an unexpected turn due to circumstances; the academic project began to assert itself based on the realities of life. Two years later, under the guise of graduate students, we gathered again in Dussel’s classes at UNAM; the practical process of mystical detachment in semi-clandestinity in the Mayan lands of the highlands of Chiapas had placed us in a perspective different from the academic one. The future was uncertain; we had no jobs, and urban life felt toxic and violent. Upon returning, we had become nobody, like so many others, without realizing it.

As part of the ritual to enter Dussel's classes at UNAM at the undergraduate level, it was necessary to arrive several minutes early—half an hour or even an hour—otherwise, it meant sitting on the floor. On that occasion, we arrived with our time measured and couldn't find seats; sitting on the sidewalk had become indifferent to us. Juanjo sent a classmate to get me; he had reserved a desk for me. When I looked up, we found his hand raised; from his seat, he indicated for us to come closer; he cleared some books, and I sat down next to him. We were friends discussing the class. He was very reserved when it came to discussing personal matters. What I know about him comes from conversations in the hallways or cafeterias of the university, as if we were talking among brothers.

We are not familiar with the complete works of Dr. Juan José Bautista; during those years, the only piece we could read from him was the article “From the Ideal Communication Community to the Real Communication Community,” published in the book Debate on Apel's Discourse Ethics: North-South Dialogue from Latin America by Siglo XXI Publishing. We also found an article on Enrique Dussel's page, available for free download, titled “What Does It Mean to Think from Latin America?” Today, his books can be read and shared in PDF format. Despite the current virtual world, we only physically possess the book What Does It Mean to Think “from” Latin America? Towards a Transmodern and Post-Western Rationality, which won the Libertadores Prize in Venezuela in 2015.

We shared our joy for the award at that time, just as he shared his happiness with us when he got married and later when he was often seen arriving late to commitments due to his joyful fatherhood. The edition that took us to UACM in Tezonco on that occasion was from the Bolivarian Government; at home, we read the book carefully, savoring it without haste. By 2018, we had completed our postdoctoral studies, and our activist life had radically transformed with the arrival of fatherhood and the historic democratic triumph of AMLO in the presidency of Mexico.

Some Critical Points

What follows are lines that may be incorrect; however, we share our impressions from the reading “Keys to Interpreting Enrique Dussel’s Critical Thought,” which was published as the Introduction to the book Philosophy of Liberation: An Anthology by Akal Publishing in 2021.

Juan José's Aymara ontology has much in common with the Zapatista Maya ontology; we agree with him on almost all levels—ontological, transontological, metaphysical, mythical, and transcendental. For us, the communal structure of the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala is fundamental. The reference to the indigenous Andean peoples in Juan José's work serves as the foundation for critiquing the ideal community proposed by the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel and modern ontology. This critical conception present in his discourse closely resembles the ontology we experienced among the indigenous peoples in the southern part of Mexico City, that of the rebellious Maya communities of the EZLN, as well as the Tojolabal philosophy that Carlos Lenkersdorf systematized and taught at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM.

In the classroom, we were drawn to two comments he frequently made to spice up the dialogue, that is, to provoke reactions and strengthen the critique of modern ontology he was working on. The first was, “We must not concede anything to modernity, not even the first step”; the other, similar to Carlos Mariátegui, Fausto Reinaga, and Felipe Quispe: “In the Andean world, before 1492, poverty did not exist.” We should clarify that these statements, give or take, were verbalized orally; we have never found them written in any of the few texts we know of him. Some of those who shared the same classes may testify to or deny what we mention. Both assertions, which some considered radical and others arrogant or exaggerated, resonated for us as idealism, extremism, fundamentalism, moralism, and even Kantian puritanism.

First Difficulty. Methodological Clarifications

Regarding the topic of modernity, explicitly in the words expressed upon receiving the X Liberator Prize for Critical Thought in 2014, he states the following:

From the very beginning, we realized that trying to think about our peoples using categories from European or Western thought was an endeavor doomed to failure. Thus, we set out to produce our own categories and concepts thought “from Latin America.” (Bautista 2018, X)

Here, the first methodological difficulty we need to clarify is: are the categories a product of modern philosophy emanating from German idealism, the origin of Western modernity, or not? The answer to this question is outlined a few pages later, in note 8. The position is clarified repeatedly by stating that one concedes to modernity without conceding:

There are many achievements in modernity that are not strictly modern but human; that is, they were not created or produced to dominate, although the oligarchies and empires of the time appropriated them to maintain their dominance. What a project like ours attempts to do is to appropriate these advancements and developments to provide them with a different foundation, one that is oriented toward liberation rather than domination. […] Therefore, to avoid falling into the same traps as modernity, it is essential to distinguish between what is human and what is modern. There are many achievements in modernity that are not modern inventions or creations but have been taken, usurped, or seized from other cultures or civilizations. […] The human and humanity are much more than modernity. We can realize this when we think of modernity from different horizons of meaning. This is what a work like ours attempts to do. (Bautista 2018, 9-10. Note 8)

In conclusion, a category is a product of the human brain that is used as an instrument to shape thought as a fundamental notion, articulated within a framework of categories or mental structures. It is not an exclusive product of modernity or modern rationality, although modern rationality does create its own categorical framework, which, however, is not and cannot be universal due to its own cultural limitations. Rationality in general, as a category, in its simple and abstract purity, without cultural determinations, is universal, as it is a constitutive part of every human being, historically since the origin of Homo sapiens. Thus, rationality and thought structured and systematized through categorical frameworks are not products of modernity, just as the love of wisdom is not exclusive to Greek culture. Therefore, the notion of a categorical framework is not modern but human.

Ascending to a more concrete and complex field, it can be understood that modernity itself, as a determined and determining cultural determination, produces a categorical framework based on its ontology; this ontology is always culturally determined and cannot be otherwise, since culture is an unavoidable, necessary, and irreducible determination for the construction of a category. In this regard, in 2018, we wrote:

[…] the construction of a scientific category, in its simple content, is always determined by culture; therefore, the way and method of doing philosophy always have a cultural determination. In the case of Marx and Dussel [as well as Bautista], the way to explain the essence of the phenomena of the world is through a “fundamental and critical framework” determined by the culture to which they belong. The construction of a “conceptual-categorical framework” is a way of doing philosophy that we, as indigenous peoples, can use to explain our philosophy to those who would not be able to understand it otherwise. (Herrera 2021, 173)

Situated, pointed out, and clarified, due to the way we use the notions of "category" and "categorical framework," we can now, with greater precision, understand in its context what it means for Juan José to think from Latin America.

[…] what it means to think ultimately implies “thinking” not from the assumptions that modernity-postmodernity has grounded for five centuries, but from a horizon beyond the categorical framework of modern thought. This implies starting, in the exercise of thinking, from other assumptions, other foundations, other concepts and categories, other conceptions, and other worldviews, so that we can conceive the dimensions of human life “in a different way” than the European-modern-Western being, if we wish to overcome the problems of the present and if we are still capable of imagining and creating a radically different world in which we can all fit. (Bautista 2018, 107)

Second Difficulty. On the Periodization of Critical or Liberation Thought

Regarding the assertion that “in the Andean world before 1492, poverty did not exist,” like the previous one, we have not been able to find an explicit quote, as in the written texts, his words are presented to us with certain strategic prudence. For example, in the following quote, one can perceive the idyllic position of a pure world before contact with the European world; it is a historical periodization that he shares with the entire group of founders of the decolonial turn. This periodization has its origins in the 16th century, as if before this date, the inhabitants of Abya Yala had not engaged in critical liberation thought, since there was no oppression and, therefore, we could not speak of liberation struggles in these peoples until the 16th century with the arrival of Catholic philosophers.

An existential phenomenology of the Latin American could show the contradictory historical movement of its spirit in which we have struggled since the early 19th century until now […] Conversely, the task now would be to show the profound movement that is ascending from the depths of our history at this time, to, through the struggle for recognition of what we were and still are, propel the true movement of the spirit contained in all our processes of liberation, but not only since the 19th century but since the 16th century, which is when we began to be dominated by Euro-Western modernity. (Bautista 2018; 327)

It is clear that the lack of archaeological analysis of the history of Abya Yala before 1492 leads him to idealizations; moreover, it does not provide elements or indications to delve into the material history of the indigenous civilizations of Abya Yala prior to European contact, as for him, Latin American critical thought arises as a reaction to the colonial oppression of modernity. We ask: was there no oppression before 1492, and therefore no struggles for resistance and liberation? We respond categorically: yes, there were. This liberation thought prior to the 16th century cannot be called Latin American, but rather native to Abya Yala; however, this does not make it any less critical. This root is fundamental in the liberation movements of all our America, not just Latin America, which began to take shape and produce before 1492.

The way to express this thought in the civilizations of Abya Yala before 1492 is not in a Western manner; this does not make it better or worse than that of other civilizations in the world; simply, the form is different. On the other hand, the fact that the critical thought of the indigenous civilizations of Abya Yala has not been expressed in the philosophical narrative of the Western tradition does not mean that there is no native liberation philosophy among our indigenous peoples prior to 1492. Thus, in the extremely complex societies, from the decline of the Mayan kingdoms to the Aztec and Inca empires, there was a class division. The working class and the oligarchic class were marked and divided by oppression, inequality, and exclusion of one over the other, characteristics that are present in every empire, as they arise from imperfect human groups that produce imperfect practical systems. Therefore, in the empires of Abya Yala, poverty did not exist as in Europe, but they were not perfect either, as monumental empires required oppression, exclusion, and impoverishment of the working class and the land, locating both subjects of exploitation in the semi-peripheries and peripheries of the political and economic centers of power; there are also autonomous peoples located geostrategically in radical exteriority, dissenting and enemies of the empire. I worked on these hypotheses in my doctoral thesis in 2015, which was finally published in 2023 in book format titled Mayan Philosophy Before the Invasion, which is why Juan José's idealism scandalized me.

At this point, starting from the principle of the feasibility of ethics and politics of liberation in the periodization and interpretation of history, I find it impossible to agree with my friend, the Bolivian philosopher. I believe that the historical materialism of Liberation Philosophy must be strengthened through archaeological studies of the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala; no more a Liberation Philosophy without us as the primary and fundamental root. Taking into account the material culture of the indigenous civilizations, we can de-fetishize the puritanical version of history and accept the enormous historical burden of reconstructing our past without losing loyalty to tradition, while utilizing critical social sciences to continue advancing in long-duration processes, specifying research techniques and innovating decolonial methods and methodologies for the study of the ancient material history of the peoples that preceded us until 1492.

The two critical and tense difficulties, inherent in a living thought, mentioned above, allow us to advance more securely along the path already traveled, following the traces left by those who came before us and fed off these our lands, continuing the same path opened by Juan José at the forefront. From the decolonial archaeological historical perspective, we establish a point of orientation for the future of the liberation of the victims, a future with critical meaning, given our Latin American reality, a place of enunciation for our peoples that are part of the community block of the oppressed.

Third Difficulty. On the Keys to Interpret the Critical Thought of Enrique Dussel

The introduction to the book Philosophy of Liberation: An Anthology, edited by Akal in 2021, is a posthumous text by Master Juan José Bautista; he could not see it published in his lifetime, as it began to be distributed in bookstores a few months after his passing. However, this work is not so new, as it is Chapter 1 of the award-winning book in Venezuela titled What Does It Mean to Think from Latin America? Towards a Transmodern and Post-Western Rationality. At times, it simplifies statements or changes words, and it also adds some paragraphs that clarify or reinforce the main theses, but it does not modify the content in any way; we have the impression that he attempts to refine the text. It is a "remastered" version (if we may use the metaphor of musical engineering) incorporating the advancements from the research of the last years of his life. The now-called four "interpellations" in that 2016 text are referred to as "difficulties." The themes of these four tensions are: 1) Overcoming ontology and formulating the analectic method; 2) The reading of Marx and the theological critique; 3) The pragmatic turn and the irreducibility of life; 4) World history and the politics of liberation; and a closing section titled "New Tasks. A Return to Economics?"

In the first section, he focuses his analysis on the construction of the analectic method in the context of writing the five volumes of For a Latin American Ethics of Liberation (1970-1975), which we refer to as "small ethics." The analectic method of Liberation Philosophy is formulated from the inspiration derived — for Juan Carlos Scanonne and Enrique Dussel — from Emmanuel Levinas's critique of Heideggerian ontology in the book Totality and Infinity. It draws our attention that Juan José Bautista does not mention Scanonne. The resemantic incorporation of the conception of the "Other," transcending the claustrophobic narrowness of ontological thought, tends from the exteriority — now with the founders of Liberation Philosophy — toward an ethical anthropological or metaphysical practice of alterity. The transition from the "absolutely Other" (Levinas) to the "anthropological alterity of the victim" can be understood using the analectic method; that is, it is the transontological doorway to praxis, the paradigm, and the philosophy of liberation, as exteriority (beyond) of being and interiority (this side) of the ethos.

In the second interpellation, the material contribution of Karl Marx to the Philosophy of Liberation is emphasized, transitioning from the overcoming of the paradigm of consciousness to life as the material content of ethics. The category of the poor is now determined from the categorical framework of the political economy of the German communist philosopher, that is, from the perspective of the people as the plural of the poor, the victim of the capitalist economic system. The contribution of the Philosophy of Liberation to Marxism is the category of exteriority, as a necessary analytical tool to understand the ethical critique of Capital; epistemologically, at the concrete complex level, our critical discourse emerges from Latin America, a place of enunciation of a peripheral cultural reality that was ontologically foreign to Marx. Speaking of the Marx of Dussel, Bautista, as a critical social scientist, precisely expresses the unfolding of his own discourse when he writes:

For Dussel, the left, in its criterionless atheism, has lost contact with the imaginaries of the peoples; religions continue to and will always offer a sense of life, and that sense can never be provided by modern science with all its mathematics and its macro and micro understanding of reality. The sense of life transcends physical matter, touches the innermost aspects of human subjectivity, and constructs the history of the peoples. If philosophy maintains the goal of understanding reality and rising to its level, it must be able to traverse theological analysis, not to remain in it, but to show its specificity, determination, and impact on the configuration of reality as such, by being able to distinguish between theologies of liberation and theologies of domination. (Bautista 2021, 25-6)

In the third interpellation titled "The Pragmatic Turn and the Irremovability of Life," the material principle as living corporality, discovered through the reading of Marx, serves as the foundation for the conception of transmodernity, which does not emerge from modernity but goes beyond it, as an anteriority, rooted in the indigenous cultures of Abya Yala and aimed at a project beyond Euro-North American modernity-postmodernity. The community of material life of the altépetl or ayllu is presented as a model of reality and a concrete condition of possibility, beyond the ideal communication community of Karl Otto-Apel's discourse ethics. Thus, the philosophical passage from the linguistic turn to the pragmatic turn and, from the latter, to the decolonial turn is shown. At this point, we want to highlight the necessary consequence of thinking about the ayllu in a romanticized manner, as a perfect community; while it has historical degrees of concretion concerning Apel's communication community, it is still conceived at an ideal level, that is, without contradiction or concrete historical complexity, in a pure state, in a theoretical abstract manner, as a strategic argument, an important rhetorical tool, but no less idealized for that.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the project to undertake a decolonial turn was formulated, the result of dialogue among intellectuals from the continent, in which Dussel participated actively […] The decolonial intellectual must overcome the paradigm of consciousness and learn to think from the community; this cannot be done by decree; it is necessary to transform the constitution of one’s own subjectivity and to produce a foundation that serves as a basis for the decolonial project. Our indigenous peoples have much to teach us in this regard, as they never thought from the paradigm of consciousness, but maintained a subjectivity grounded in the community, but not in the ideal communication community, rather in the real community of life. Philosophy must do the same to rise to the level of this reality, which is so necessary in the current context. (Bautista 2021, 39-40)

Is it possible for a theoretical framework to be at the level of reality, or will it always remain on the margins of it? If categorization is always a copy of the real, it will never be at the level of reality. There are theoretical productions that hide reality and others that aim to reveal it; the Philosophy of Liberation seeks to be one of the latter and utilizes the findings of critical social sciences as its armed wing, positioning itself in service to them as a critical foundation, given its claim to truth. The theoretical framework is necessary; we locate it at the formal level; however, the content is the concrete complex reality at a material level. The formal theoretical framework claims validity, while the content claims truth. Philosophy conceived as a social science will always remain on the margins of the real facts of concrete reality; even if it aims to be at the same level, the philosophical categorical framework will never be the given reality, but only the formal and rationalized presentation that seeks to explain a phenomenon of reality.

The fourth and final interpellation is about world history and the Politics of Liberation. History is understood as the historicity of every human act; from the perspective of the liberation paradigm, it focuses on the historical constitution of human domination and its possible liberation. The presumption of interpreting history from this paradigm is no longer Western Europe, but the emergence of Homo sapiens, which makes it global, ethical, and political. The significant issue for the Bolivian amauta is the following:

One of the fundamental problems of social science and Latin American philosophy is that they reason and think about Latin America from the worldview that Europe has of us and the world; that is, they do this as if they were Europeans, because they think and reason by presuming the modern conception of history and not from the specific nature of Latin American and world history, which is not the same, because we have another history that we still need to unearth to see ourselves from our own horizon, from what we are in history and not from what Western modernity says we are. (Bautista 2021, 45-6)

Regarding the Politics of Liberation, he spends his last resources trying to move towards serious political action with an honest intention of liberation, based on the processes that are producing it; these must avoid naively starting from the concepts and categories of modern politics, as a new starting point is required that is not one of domination. In the master's view, within the philosophical line of the Politics of Liberation, there are still pending tasks that need to be addressed:

Perhaps the most fundamental theme of this last volume of the Politics of Liberation is precisely the critical construction of institutions, given that in Latin America we have liberation processes that today have transitioned to the realm of critique as a force of opposition to occupy the role of the State and govern. […] One pending topic will remain for future reflections, which is the constitution of a new subject for the new politics; the critical construction of institutions must advance in the reconstruction of another type of intersubjectivity, beyond modern society, from a transmodern community. […] Thus, it will be necessary to start from another type of subjectivity. […] The possibility of its success will depend on our ability to produce new content from the projection of a new humanity. (Bautista 2021, 51-2)

In conclusion. Some aspects to discuss regarding Juan José's reading

In a superficial and decontextualized reading, it may seem that for Juan José Bautista, the function of philosophy is reduced to creating new concepts, playing with words, and, at best, analyzing and critiquing the framework of some theoretical structure, something akin to a literary critique of texts.

However, Bautista, like Marx and Dussel, always places human life as the foundation, as a principle, a material anthropological starting point, a source of life, and a creator of ontological structures and culturally situated epistemologies. Categories are human neural abstractions; their content or reference is reality, meaning they are abstractions or spiritual concrete that emerge from the attempt to make sense of the chaotic reality that phenomenologically presents itself before our epistemological perceptions. The abstraction of concepts and the construction of categories are useful to human thought for ascending to the essence of the problem; on the other hand, ascending to the essence implies understanding the foundation and the simple, necessary, and irreducible categorical framework.

At this level of the naked foundation, the linguistically and rationally insurmountable limit presents itself, which implies a new step in the method, consisting of ascending to the complex concrete reality, but now as a theoretically explained totality, in some way, with defined and delineated emerging concepts; that is, a categorical framework and a certain scientific certainty. Philosophy understood as science from this perspective is a dialectical ascent from phenomenon to essence, from the ontic to the ontological, from the entity to the being; the complementary part of the method is the ascent from being to entity, now theoretically understood. The ultimate reference is the real of reality, that is, the complex concrete. The living subject, being part of life as living corporality, is a source of knowledge, situated within a cultural community of life.

The ethical part of the method is the transontological; that is, the ana-dialectic or analectic method transcends the realm of being and, from the exteriority of non-being, analogously positions itself at the anthropological level, face-to-face with the victim or the praxis of liberation. The anthropological level of liberation ethics is situated in the complex concrete level of reality. In this sense, for us, philosophy does not think philosophy, but rather reality. If we do philosophy this way, it is to transform the reality of the oppressed, of the victims of fetishized systems, guided by the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

If we do not have a clear understanding of this context that we highlight, we may be unjust when reading Juan José's texts and, as escapists, remain at the formal level of concept critique, of books, fictional, without ascending to the real of reality. For us, liberation philosophers, transformation occurs in the praxis of liberation or face-to-face with the victim, as we aim to free ourselves from all systems of oppression, building a path to enter a world where many worlds can fit, an analog factual pluriverse, another possible world.

While Marx, Dussel, and Bautista, in the final stage of their lives, focus on the precision in the use, analysis, discovery, resemanticization, and creation of categories framed within a certain logic of meaning that allows for a rational theoretical understanding of an abstract totality of reality, this does not mean that this way of doing philosophy is the only one; however, it is useful to us, as we have written above, but we consider it necessary to repeat: the construction of co-determining categories understood within a fundamental critical categorical framework is determined by the cultural world of the philosopher; the critique and construction of a categorical framework is a way of doing philosophy, a method that we, as indigenous peoples, can use to explain it to those who will not be able to understand it otherwise, but it is not the only way.

An example of liberation philosophy that is pragmatically written with ethical and political acts, risking life in the praxis of liberation, is provided by the Generalissimo of the Americas, chief of the Liberating Insurgent Army Dr. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, or in our times, by the former military chief of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the late Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. These are examples of philosophy that are not done in the German, Greek, modern, North American, or European manner, but in another way, with another narrative; this does not mean it is better or worse, the only, true, or false; it is simply different in form, while the universal and material content is the life of the victim. For Bautista — and we subscribe to this — the epistemological (theoretical) intention of Dussel:

[…] does not limit itself to copying categories or concepts, but rather attempts to make a problematizing and resemantic incorporation into a new categorical corpus. The reality thought with the previous category is not the same; thus, the epistemic intention inevitably leads to a transformation of the previous content of the concept or category, so that the new content of the concept or category is relevant to the newly thematized reality. (Bautista 2021, 8)

In the following lines of this paragraph, this is where the careless reader may confuse the ultimate goal of the task of someone dedicated to philosophy and escape to the formal level, hiding or feigning ignorance of the anchoring to the suffering corporality of the victim in the real, concrete, and complex reality of every human system, which, by being human, is always imperfect and, therefore, will always have victims and praxis of liberation.

However, the problem is not so much about constructing new concepts and new categories of analysis, but rather about establishing new categorical "frameworks" from which the use of these new concepts and categories makes sense; for this reason, the epistemological problem is much more complex than simply proposing new concepts or new words. […] Therefore, we want to be very emphatic: a thinker does not aspire to interpret authors or theories well or poorly; their problem is to think about reality, and what they aspire to is to construct new contents of concepts or categories that allow for a better understanding of what is happening with the current and present reality, with those dimensions of reality that appear invisible in other categorical frameworks. (Bautista 2021, 8-9)

It gives the impression that the role of the philosopher or thinker is to think about reality and that they cannot or should not go beyond that, for example, to transform it. The philosopher is not only an epistemic subject; before that, they are a living material body, a complex human being. Consequently, their work is not reduced to an epistemological intention, but also, and ultimately, to transforming reality, in the case of liberation philosophers, the reality of the victims. A few paragraphs later, in note 52, he returns to the trace of constructing a categorical framework as part of the labor of the critical thinker's philosophy:

We will need to continue contributing to the construction of a consistent categorical framework “from” which it is possible to critique the claim of universality of philosophy and the Helleno-Euro-American-centric thought in order to contribute to the emergence of a new age of the world: transmodernity. (Bautista 2021, 40)

In the last part of the text on New Tasks. A Return to Economics?, it makes clear the place of enunciation or starting point, the complex concrete level of praxis in relation to the simple abstract theoretical work of philosophical thinking and its purpose, that is, to serve the processes of liberation; this praxis of thinking is just one more action within the processes of liberation, it is not the only task nor even the most important, but it is fundamental.

These new processes are precisely what set the guidelines for this thought; thus, the problems that arise or are produced by the peoples that are in a clear process of liberation are indicating to us what should or deserves to be thought. One of these new problems is related to the definition of new categories with which to think about a new economy that goes beyond not only capitalism but also modern economics. (Bautista 2021, 52)

The last point we want to address revolves around the way Juan José periodizes the work of our master. While we initially agree with him, there are complementary precisions that, in our opinion, are important to point out to avoid falling into misunderstandings that could lead us to imprecisions or ambiguities when reading Dussel's work. We realize that the four interpellations that Juan José presents to our consideration relate to the four moments, turns, or stages in which an apparent "epistemological rupture" occurs in Dussel's theoretical production. The first moment occurs with the critical reading and philosophical dialogue with Levinas, the second with Marx, the third with Karl Otto-Appel, and the last moment is what we call the mature stage of his theoretical production, marked by the publication of Ethics of Liberation in 1998, extending to November 5, 2023.

We must understand that the theoretical changes throughout our master's life involve self-critique, assimilation, subsumption, and overcoming; that is, they have continuity. In this sense, it is not a "rupture," although the term may give us some proximity to his thought. Enrique Dussel, in 2001, in the preface to the book Philosophy of Liberation: An Approach to the Thought of Enrique Dussel, in response to Pedro Enrique regarding ontological rupture (change of foundation) and epistemological rupture (change of method of access to the object of research), writes: "There would be no inconvenience if there were a 'rupture,' if this indicated an evolutionary moment of openness to a new problem" (García 2003, 10). The philosophical discourse can be analyzed by dissecting it into "ruptures," without forgetting that this discourse has as its source the living subjectivity; that is, from the paradigm of liberation, it is the living material subject that cannot be fully objectified as an object of research because it will always retain a degree of exteriority or mystery that escapes all scientific analysis; however, the instrument "rupture" does bring us closer to some type of understanding. Therefore, the master, aware of the limits, guides us toward a deepening of his work:

Asking about the “ruptures” in a philosophical discourse also involves referring to the life of the actor (the philosopher) and their historical motivations, of which the philosophical discourse is an expression. It may be that the non-philosophical motivations—existential, political, social, and biographical—of the philosopher, in their substantive “continuity,” require fundamental corrections to the philosophical discourse that fails to express the novel accumulation of the philosopher's everyday life experiences at certain stages. A philosophical discourse that adequately expresses the motivations of a moment in the philosopher's life may begin to “diverge” from this substantive everyday life and produce a state of discontent in the philosopher's consciousness regarding their philosophical discourse (which no longer expresses the moment of their life’s evolution). Furthermore, the life of the actor, who is not only a philosopher, is partly determined by the historical process, which has its “continuity” and “ruptures”—which are imposed on the philosopher not as inconsequences of their thought but as demands to keep thinking about the evolving reality. (García 2003, 10)

What we mean by this discourse is that, for the analysis of Dussel's work, it is not enough to point out the epistemological and ontological “ruptures,” but also to anchor them to a historical context in relation to a complex human life, which implies the mystery of a mystical life.

We, unlike Juan José, historiographically divide the extensive written and published work of Enrique Dussel for study into two periods: that of the young (1961-1992) and that of the mature (1993-2023). The theoretical production of the young Dussel can be divided into three phases: 1) the "humanist" (1961-1969); 2) the "construction of the Philosophy of Liberation" (1970-1976); and 3) the "Marxist" (1977-1992). On the other hand, the publication of Ethics of Liberation in 1998 marks the beginning of the mature work; however, the writing begins in 1993; from this period are volumes I (2007), II (2009), and III (2022) of Politics of Liberation and Aesthetics of Liberation (2024). It is the fruit of a lifetime of accompanying political movements and their processes of struggle and liberation.

Studying the work as a whole and not just the key epistemological moments avoids drawing hasty conclusions or confusing those who attempt to approach the work of our master through the most loyal disciples. For example, when discussing the different ways in which history is approached at various moments in Dussel's theoretical production. In the fourth interpellation, when discussing the interpretation of world political history in volume I of Politics of Liberation, it is written:

Since 2002, after publishing several articles in which he explored the possibility of a critical political philosophy, Dussel began working on the project of Politics of Liberation. After all the previous work, it became clear to him that he needed to start explicitly with history, but no longer as a mere introduction, as in the case of Ethics of Liberation; now it had to be incorporated systematically. (Bautista 2021, 41-2)

The project of Politics of Liberation culminated as a product in three volumes in 2021. In the overall structure of the three volumes, volume I is a world and critical history of political thought; this history or volume I is incorporated as an introduction, just as he did in the mature ethics and in the small ethics, as this necessary historical introduction is characteristic of anything that claims to be liberation philosophy. In 1976, during his exile in Mexico, in the opening lines of point 1. History, the master writes:

Let this short introduction serve as a mere example of a moment in the Philosophy of Liberation, which should always begin by presenting the historical-ideological genesis of what it intends to think, giving precedence to its spatial, global imposition. It is the "historical" or the formative moments of the history of philosophy. Thus, a "de-struction" or "de-construction" of history should slowly begin. (Dussel 2018, 17)

But it is not only since 1976 that history is used as a necessary introduction; even from the small ethics or For a Latin American Ethics of Liberation, the same structure is found, where history is presented as a necessary introduction, as well as in Politics of Liberation and Ethics of Liberation. This is why we cannot agree with Juan José's reading in the following statement when he writes: “In the context of the first ethics, the historical was not positioned as a fundamental part of the architecture of the ethics of liberation” (Bautista 2021, 42).

In the small ethics, or what he calls the first ethics, written in five volumes, volume III begins at a concrete level, after the abstract ascent to the foundation of volume I and the transontological critique of volume II. That is to say, in volume III, it starts with a history of Latin America that situates the regional history or place of enunciation in the horizon of world history. This historical outline is apparently not introductory to the small ethics; that is, it does not appear in volume I, which leads Juan José to indicate that in this ethics history is not a fundamental part. However, this is an error because if we take the small ethics in the abstract, making a temporal cut without contextualizing, it seems that the first ethics lacks a historical introduction. Yet, if we reconstruct the temporal and historical sequence of the research program of the Mendocino philosopher, we will realize that the project does indeed have a historical introductory part; this part was published as a book titled For a De-struction of the History of Ethics I.

At that time, there was the intention to create an ontological ethics, which is why the book For a Destruction of the History of Ethics carries the number "I" at the end of the title and the subsequent volumes II and onward were not published, as the project took a turn upon meeting Juan Carlos Scanonne; this is why the program transforms and advances in its evolutionary impulse towards a transontological ethics from the exteriority of the oppressed. These events of the contingency of facts cause the critique of ethics to take a turn or "rupture"; the continuation of this project is the construction of the abstract theoretical part, but now titled For a Latin American Ethics of Liberation. Contrary to what our friend Juan José thinks, we affirm that Dussel places the historical part in the same architectural position as he does in the mature ethics, provided that the book For a Destruction of Ethics I is considered part of the project of the first ethics.

The historical aspect of volume III of the small ethics is a more regional analysis and can be compared to the writing in the introduction or paragraph 29 of volume III of Politics of Liberation, meaning that the introductory part is world politics. However, upon ascending from that concrete totality, it moves to a new level of concretion. It is here that the historical reconstruction of an essential part determined geopolitically takes place, without losing sight of the advancement of the research program and the moment when this resource becomes visible and necessary. This is why we cannot accept the assertion that in "the first ethics, the historical was not positioned as a fundamental part" (Bautista 2021, 42). This leads us to disagree with the following lines of that paragraph that present themselves as an apodictic conclusion: "The historical acquires explicit relevance starting from the work of 1492. The covering up of the other" (Bautista 2021, 42).