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Thu, 23 May 2019 in Revista on line de Política e Gestão Educacional
ALTERITY AND DIALOGICAL RELATIONS: APPROACHES BETWEEN THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENRIQUE DUSSEL AND PAULO FREIRE
ABSTRACT
The text aims to make approximations between the foundations of Enrique Dussel and Paulo Freire. The work from a critical descriptive study based on a qualitative, bibliographical research, intends to cite assumptions that demonstrate, in the author's conception, the making of a more human and liberating education. Education that does not accept the fatalism of the precariousness of the human being exposed to suffering, but that provides a radical action of transformation from a relationship between conditioning and freedom.
Main Text
Initial considerations
From the sociocultural reality, in a context that intends the social transformation, with a view to liberating the conditions of oppression, is that the works of Enrique Dussel and Paulo Freire are approaching. The liberation of the human being is overlapped by the liberation of the world and they compose relations from the conditions of place and time in which the human beings are.
In these conditions, the suffering of the Other must be considered, given a reality in which certain subjects subjugate others, that is, they oppress them, by means of asymmetrical relations of power. What is at stake is the set of human rights of these oppressed subjects, who must be reinvented from processes of their own struggles inserted in their culture, so that they are renewed in the praxis of liberation, thus avoiding being ideologized as mechanisms of oppression.
For Dussel (1995), Latin American culture finds itself outside of history such that it is fundamental to find for it "... a place in World History, starting from its poverty, and thus to discover its hidden reality "(DUSSEL, 1995, p.14).
In this line of reasoning, it is indispensable to promote the universality of human rights based on the struggle processes of each culture. The Philosophy of Liberation is fundamental to think the human rights of Latin American cultures, considering the reality in question, starting from the option for the liberation of the oppressed peoples.
For Dussel (1995), the first experience of the Philosophy of Liberation refers to discovering the oppressive facts that generate the domination in which subjects become lords of others. For the same author, they are the following: I) World plan: center - periphery, from the European expansion in 1492; II) National plan: elites - masses, bourgeoisie, workers and people; III) Erotic plane: human beings; IV) Pedagogical plan: imperial and elitist culture versus peripheral and popular culture; and V) Religious plan: fetishism at all levels.
The Philosophy of Liberation thus becomes a critical current of modernity, such that the latter has its roots in the processes of colonization, anchored, in a second moment, in the capitalist model of civilization, which constitutes itself as an oppressor of different cultures existing outside the European continent.
In this way, the logic of colonization is expressed by an unequal distribution of wealth and by the geopolitical domain of epistemology. For Dussel (2000), this logic consists of the establishment of the hierarchical classification system in all social spheres until the suppression of economies and cultures existing before the arrival of the colonizers, such that their effects are manifested in the criteria of inferiority of the peoples oppressed in Latin America, that is, in the peoples who lost their history.
Likewise, the feeling of inferiority of the oppressed is a recurrent theme in Paulo Freire's work. For the author, the whole relationship of domination and oppression by itself constitutes a form of violence, of disloyalty, in which the oppressor is dehumanized by the excess of power as well as the oppressed by the absence of that same power.
For Freire (1969), for the most part, the attitude of violence is attributed to the oppressed when it is raised against the oppressor, in identifying oppression. Violence is attributed to the oppressed by the oppressor, as a way of disqualifying the former. "Among the undeniable rights that one admits to itself the dominant consciousness has more these: that of defining violence. The one to characterize it. The one to locate it. And if this right assists him exclusively, it will not be in him that he will encounter violence" (FREIRE, 1969, p. 50).
The oppressed, immersed in a situation in which knowledge is aligned with domination, not rare, in its condition that is already peculiar to it by its early walk, cannot discern a differentiated condition to constitute a new relation.
The intentionality of the text, proposed here, is to problematize, from the ideas of Enrique Dussel and Paulo Freire, the hierarchy existing in the conditions of oppression experienced by the Latin American subjects with respect to the culture seeking as emerging alternative to otherness and dialogic relations. From this idea, the issue of human rights is treated as a result of the dialogue between cultures and not as constructed by the oppressor and allowed to the oppressed.
The text is described as follows: The Eurocentric and World-wide paradigm - a discussion is being made on the constitution of culture in Europe and Latin America through oppressive relations; Otherness and dialogical relations - reflection is made on the need to move towards the freedom of the Other in order to achieve its own; Speaking and transforming the world - one understands the importance of the oppressed, in a culture of oppression, learning to speak his word; and The revelation of the Other - to think that the externality of the Other on the anthropological level is, at first, social. After following the final considerations.
The Eurocentric and World-wide paradigm
The Philosophy of Liberation focuses on overcoming the ethnocentrism of human rights, enabling historicization in the process of different cultures. Cultures can be seen as systems in dialogue with others that enable them to change. On the other hand, it is fundamental to ensure that human rights do not become a static Eurocentric product that is not capable of intercultural dialogue with other cultures.
The central point of Dussel thought is the reflection on the need for a liberation of Latin American thought in order to make possible the liberation of the exploited worker. Similarly, for the same author, it is recognized that this thought, still in contemporary times, remains submissive to European philosophy.
When Dussel (2000) refers to the Eurocentric paradigm, he affirms that the phenomenon of modernity3 "[...] is exclusively European, which has developed since the Middle Ages and spreads throughout the world" (DUSSEL, 2000, p 51). This diffusion of the European paradigm, through the processes of colonization, created the idea of independence and supremacy, associated with a set of internal characteristics that Europe had that allowed it to surpass other cultures, mainly for its rationality.
The alternative paradigm, from the world horizon, conceives that "[...] European modernity is not an independent autopoietic, self-referential system, but it is a 'part' of the 'world-system': its center. Modernity, then, is a phenomenon that is becoming globalized "(DUSSEL, 2000, page 52, author highlights).
In these conditions, philosophy must think about the world reality, not from the perspective of the center, which holds the political, economic, scientific or military powers, but beyond these frontiers, that is, to exercise thinking from the periphery, the conditions of the condemned of the land4 or, in the Freirian context, of the ragged ones of the world5.
Dussel (2000) argues that the centrality of Europe in the world-system is not only the result of the internal superiority accumulated in the European Middle Ages over cultures, but also the effect of discovery, conquest, colonization, integration and submission of Amerindian territories, which gave Europe a comparative advantage over the world.
Over the years, Europe has been organizing itself as a civilization capable of conquering the world, and by discovering and extracting the resources of America, it was strengthened and start to become a model for the rest of the world.
At a time when Europe became the model for the rest of the world, subjects in Latin America began to live the duality in which "[...] to be is to seem and to seem is to look alike with the oppressor" (FREIRE, 2004, 32). Under these assumptions it is possible to approximate Freirian ideas that Latin Americans as oppressed, host the oppressor itself, and also, in resemblance to inauthentic beings, as dual beings, hinder their own liberation.
In this context, it is at the moment of discovering as a host of the oppressor that humans can contribute to the action of their own liberation. For this discovery to occur it is imperative to unveil the occult reality, at a given historical and cultural moment, by the exercise of a critical understanding of this reality through a non-neutral educational process.
Freire (2004), when reflecting on the conquest, antidialogical action, attributes to the self, antidialogic, the domination, that which transforms the you into a mere thing, that. Otherwise, in dialogical action, in "co-laboring," the dialogical self is one who knows "[...] that it is exactly what constitutes it. You also know that, consisting of a you - not I -, you who constitute it, in turn, constitute myself, as having in you an you. In this way, the self and the you become, in the dialectic of these constitutive relations, two you who become two I"(FREIRE, 2004, p. 165-166, author highlights).
The radicality of the self, as a recognition of the existential condition, is constituted by looking and listening to the Other, accepting and committing itself to social, historical and cultural diversity, while taking into account the requirement of understanding the value of feelings, of the emotions and desires, as well as the overcoming of insecurities.
This educational process, also, is approached by Dussel (1977a) at a time when the author refers to the Other as distinct, as free pole, not as the Same. Thus, as distinct, the human being, as an educator, has a new project of being a historical subject such that the educator must teach the already acquired from the existential situation of the subject causing the "... arriving creative revolution to be confused with the student's own problematizing invention" (DUSSEL, 1977a, 133). It also reflects that the educator learns at the same time the project of the student, that is, the Same of the Other, the new one that the educator did not know.
In this way, the learner learns the authentic word of the educator, launching his world, his project, in a movement that means the realization itself, but at the same time demands that it be opened to the Other, which was revealed by the educator. The educator learns from the novelty of the project of the Other, since this project originated in a given historical moment and, consequently, the learner learns from the otherness of the educator.
In these relationships, the teaching process is beyond the simple act of revisiting the previously worked, but in a critical way to understand how the contents were reached and constructed, enabling experiences that open the way to the new, to the creation. Associated with this, the pupil teaches his authentic way of living as a human being to the educator, so that his findings may offer transformative actions to history.
For Enrique Dussel and Paulo Freire, the recognition of otherness, of difference, is a constituent condition of the Self and the Other, which are constituted in the relation, in the intersubjectivity, such that the Self exists only from the Other, making the teaching in this context, becomes an existential commitment. Aligned with this commitment, the next discussion aims to present a reflection on the category’s otherness and dialogical relations.
The otherness and the dialogical relations
Otherness is a fundamental category in the Dusselian context, which is characterized as the "[...] diachronic passage from listening to the other's word to the proper interpretation" (DUSSEL, 1986, p. 208) according to a presupposed ethic in the human being. Dussel asserts himself in the exercise of listening to the Other, through the existential commitment, in which philosophy is to think doubly the word of the Other, injecting it with a new possibility from the critical consciousness of the Self.
For the same author, it is by the existential commitment, by the liberating praxis, by a becoming the world of the Other that it is possible to reach the interpretation, the conceptualization and the verification of its revelation. At that moment, in which one moves towards the liberation of the Other, one reaches oneself.
One must regard the word of the Other as "similar" while retaining the metaphysical distinction which rests on Him as Other, not as identical or unequivocal, but respecting the analogy of revelation. Thus, the history of human liberation is based on relative results, never endings, in such a way that for Dussel the way is to listen to the voice of the poor, the voice of the people, committing themselves to "humility and meekness in the pedagogical learning of the way in which the word of the other, as teacher, traces each day" (DUSSEL, 1986, p. 209).
Dialogue with the equal and different, in which the Other is allowed to be heard, with otherness is a founding presupposition in Freire's work. By the dialogical relation, the subjectivity becomes human subjectivity, that establishes the importance to the Other, dialogue no more based on pure reason, but on the possibility of listening to the subject. A dialogue linked to reality, to historical time, in favor of social responsibility.
The Freirian proposal assumes an epistemic politics, when assigning a resignification to the human beings involved in the educative relation, when the educator in sharing with the learner promote the acceptance of the condition to be educating, to learn from the experience with the others.
The learning for Freire (2004) refers to the right to speak the word and when the human being does it is in the sense that the act of saying the true word is that of transforming the world, overlapped to the movements of action and reflection.
To pronounce and modify the world constitutes the right of every human beings, not as the privilege of some, so that no one should say the true word alone or say to others, but pronounce it in the relation of sharing with the others.
This is the reason for the impossibility of dialogue between those who wish to pronounce the true word and those who do not want it, or "[...] among those who deny others the right to speak their word and those who are denied this right "(FREIRE, 2004, p. 79).
By pronouncing the world, by the true word, human beings transform and humanize the same world, and dialogue becomes a way for subjects to gain meaning as beings.
This approach approximates of the ideas of Ghiggi (2010) when the author argues that among the categories elaborated by Freire, which gain centrality in the revival of popular education, is the dialogue. The same author, taking into consideration the context of popular education, argues that dialogue takes as its starting point the anthropological-cultural framework, which is intimately linked to the life of those who participate in the educational relationship, where the thematic universe, as the world of the culture of the subjects involved, allows the construction of the vocabulary universe.
Through the critical dialogue reality is not understood as abstract and static, but as a concrete and procedural reality of which the learner is part and becomes agent of the transformations. This insertion makes the learner an agent of his actions, of his interests, allowing himself to be authorized as one who reflects on the knowledge worked in this reality. At the moment that the student exercises the act of authorizing himself realizes that he is, directly, breaking with the transmission of knowledge.
It is through dialogue that the desires and motives found in the work become human aspirations and ends. Therefore, the subject is not in this space, as something petrified, but is being, developing and in process. Thus, dialogue takes place in the political dimension of education when, starting from the concrete situation, it rethinks the practice, instituting processes of transformation.
When Dussel (1977a) refers to the concrete levels of Latin American ethics, pedagogical dimension6, he begins by the concrete situation in such a way that he affirms that the way to destroy the "[...] moorings of freedom of the other" (DUSSEL, 1977a, p. 134) is by the exercise of the critical attitude in which a human being calls the Other to recover his personal attitude. In these conditions, approaching the activities of the educator is reflected that this human being becomes a new subject and lives, in advance, the proximity of the "face-to-face"7.
For the same author, in the educational context, the educator must deny the closed totality, since it always establishes new domination, but, in another way, opens it to otherness, such that the passage from alienation to freedom takes place along the path of pedagogical liberation.
Starting from the concrete situation, by the critical attitude, in the exercise of the self-consciousness about the alienation, recognizing, still, to undergo the domination and thinking the oppression and the liberation is that the human beings walk dialectically towards a new project, driven by the word of the Other. In order to reflect on the construction of this new project, the next discussion aims to present a study about pronouncing and transforming the world.
Pronouncing and transforming the world
To return to the initial discussion of the text, the culture of silence8, culture imposed by the dominator, in which the oppressor keeps the oppressed in the condition of the one who does not know his word, has been universalized and established European culture as superior and dominant.
This effect is manifested in a dependent Latin American culture, that is, Latin American culture, economy and politics move from the outside, that is, oppressed, because the external power exerts a will to dominate. For Dussel (1977a), the human being is hidden, oppressed, ontologically dependent.
From these considerations the saying of the true word, in the Freirian conception, refers to the human being, by his own existential condition, as the one who must pronounce and modify the world. It is in this understanding that "the world pronounced, in its turn, becomes problematized to the subjects who make them, to demand of them new words" (FREIRE, 2004, 78, author highlights).
In a democratic practice the right to speak corresponds to the duty to listen, and since listening implies speaking, the duty to listen corresponds to the right, equally, to speak to those who listen. In this way, listening is talking to the humans involved in the relationship, whereas simply speaking would be a way of not listening to them.
In these movements of listening and speaking, it is important to be attentive to the levels of understanding of humans in relation to reality. "To impose upon them our understanding in the name of their liberation is to accept authoritarian solutions as paths of freedom" (FREIRE, 1983, p. 31).
Hence the Dusselian and Freirian proposals understand that assuming the naivete of the subjects demands from the educator the humility necessary to assume the criticality, surpassing the naivete itself. On the contrary, the authoritarian, those educators who deny solidarity in the relationship, especially in the act of being educated by the Other, end up separating the act of teaching from that of learning.
For these educators, it is understood that human beings must be recognized as subjects in the process of the construction of knowledge and not only as beings accommodated to a situation, as well as, to admit that knowledge is beyond a finished, transferred by someone who has acquired it for another who does not already own it. In order to problematize the action of recognizing the Other, in addition to a subject conditioned to a context, the next discussion aims to present a study of the Other, beyond the individual, but as a collective experience.
The reveal of the Other
For Dussel (1977b), the Other presents a notion of historical exteriority, beyond the cosmic or physical exteriority, which reveals itself as unusual, distinct, or even oppressed. Historical exteriority, in general, presents the Other as that which is outside the system and, as such, in its extreme exteriority of the system provokes justice.
In these conditions, the presence of the oppressed defines the end of the good conscience of the oppressor, directing the construction of a more just world. "The other as a face of interpellation, reveal, provocation, only in this case is a person" (DUSSEL, 1977b, p. 50).
Emphasis is placed on the need to reflect that even before considering the uniqueness of the Other there is the built history of a people, the context of this people, their culture. Thus, the Other as oppressed reveals the history of a group of human beings such that it is not possible to describe the experience of closeness as an individual experience, but as an experience of folk history. In the personal-collective experience the face of the Other becomes the "face of a sex, of a generation, of a social class, of a nation, of a cultural group, of an age of history" (DUSSEL, 1977b, p.50).
The human being as Other is the one who represents the center of his own world and even as dominated or oppressed can say the unexpected, the unprecedented, the word that represents the personal-collective experience in his world. While the Other is a free being, but when part of a system becomes functional in relation to a structure.
Dussel (1977b) reflects that at the moment when it is possible to despise the exteriority of the Other as nothingness, ignorance, illiteracy or barbarism, or even as the null, the possibility of the emergence of the history of this people is recalled. For the same author, it is at that moment that the novelty appears, the new systems are created in the metaphysical sense.
The act of accepting the word of the Other is because it reveals it for no other reason, for it is the result of its pronunciation. "What he reveals to me has no criterion of certainty other than the reality of the other as another" (DUSSEL, 1977b, p. 52-53). From these ideas the act of revealing is exposing oneself and believing is throwing itself into the void.
Freire refers to the context of accepting the word of the Other understanding that as a premise is the action of knowing how to listen, the act of listening, as the permanent availability of the subject who hears the speech of the other. In the Freirian context, the act of listening is associated to humility, which reveals the boundaries of the knowledge and ignorance of the Self. About the educational relations, Freire (2003) emphasizes the need for respect and humility in to the "identity of the pupil, to his person, to his right to be" (FREIRE, 2003, 67).
Such a situation will guarantee the coexistence with the law of differences, without excluding the debate, that is, dialogue on differences. Approaching the affirmed by Dussel, the differences are, exactly, in the contexts lived by the human beings, in their culture, such that the dialogical experience becomes an individual-collective experience.
Thus, experiencing culture as a systematic acquisition of human experience is that subjects create the conditions to become critical subjects, responding to the movements of action-reflection. For Freire (2014), in relation to the cultural identity of the students who arrive the schools, it passes through the cut of social class9.
The cultural identity10 of the pupil announces the reading of the world made by this subject and with which he reaches the school. A reading of the world learned in the conviviality of everyday life, at home, in the neighborhood, in the city with the mark of social class.
With this reading, the student arrives at the school, which, not infrequently, despises these knowledges. For Freire, in this reading, "[...] the child obviously brings his language, she brings its syntax, she brings its semantics. She speaks, after all" (FREIRE, 2014, p. 175).
When the school disregards this cultural identity, in this case the different culture, it is as if the school tries to erase from the memory of the students that language, depriving a behavior, a sense of world perception with which the subject arrives at the doors of it. It is as if the school had a standard identity to follow, dictated by the learned norm, whose ideology does not allow dialogue with the previous knowledge of the student. In this way, it is an impeding factor to consider the connection of what the learner learns in school with what he learns in everyday life.
In day-to-day experiences there is the permanent exercise of world reading which is subsumed by the inability to use a methodology in doing, revealing an authoritarian ideology of the school.
This authoritarianism is centered in the acceptance, on the part of the school, only of the scientific knowledge which is said as instituted and finished. The finished knowledge, for Freire (2014) constitutes an epistemological error in the sense that there is no complete knowledge, because it has historicity and is built during history, neither before or outside it. Another argument that refers to authoritarianism, is that in addition to the school's support for a finished knowledge also considers it pure, in the sense that it must be far from the impurities of popular culture, of possible mistakes.
On the otheFreire is also unfavorable to the preservation of learners' levels of knowledge, reflecting on the possibilities for the student to grow in the process of learning better what he already knows, to learn how to create and produce knowledge that has not yet exist.
It is in this context that the subjects will only progress when they recognize knowledge in the Others, such as knowledge of the popular classes, minorities, differences, still problematizing these concepts formulated in everyday life.
Final considerations
The presuppositions of Enrique Dussel and Paulo Freire reflect on the need to value the cultural identity of human beings, an identity that announces the reading of the world exercised by these subjects, often subsumed by a dominant culture.
The discussion elaborated in the text emphasized the need for respect and understanding of the knowledge of these subjects, which refers to the exercise of a dialogue, as a premise in the need to listen to the Other, letting oneself be taken for their reasons, before elaborating the ideas, that is, to leave something in itself that was said by the Other, the exercise of otherness. Under these conditions, the action-reflection movement allows subjects to recognize themselves differently in the construction of their identities.
It is a collective process that allows human beings to reflect on their possibilities and potentialities, in order to learn better what they already know about their world, learning to create knowledge that promotes the desired actions of social transformations.
Finally, it is reaffirmed the idea of starting from the development of the relations with reality, integrated to the context and associated with a critical conscience is that it makes possible, through the dialogical relation, to understand the human being as the one that humanizes that same reality and, at the same time, how to be an agent in and with the world, in order to become a reconstructor of culture.
ABSTRACT
Main Text
Initial considerations
The Eurocentric and World-wide paradigm
The otherness and the dialogical relations
Pronouncing and transforming the world
The reveal of the Other
Final considerations