The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Latin america otherwise: languages, empires, nations) by Walter D. Mignolo

Author:Walter D. Mignolo [Mignolo, Walter D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Kants' s Conceptual Matrix

Beyond what Kant enunciated in different fields of inquiry (philosophy, ethics, religion, anthropology, geography, aesthetics, and education—e.g., The Contest of the Faculty), there is a recurrent “matrix” of the enunciation that I will attempt to unveil by looking at his Geography in tandem with his Anthropology (as many have already remarked) and with his Philosophy (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason). I claim that Kants' s semiotic apparatus of enunciation that I am outlining here is applicable to the Kantian corpus.

Part 3 of Kants' s Geography is organized—not surprisingly—in four sections and in a very revealing order: Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. Asia is the place of Ancient civilizations, where, a few decades later, Hegel will locate the materialization—to be oxymoronic—of the Spirit. But from where did Kant get the four-partite divisions of the earth masses? Not from the landmasses themselves, unless the Spirit underneath was whispering the landmass names to Kant. Chinese scholars and cartographers could have imagined the world divided in four continents, but for what we know they did not. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with that because the planet was composed of four continents only in the Christian imaginary. The Jesuit father Mathew Ricci introduced Ortelius to the Ming dynasty, in 1582, and since then there have been adaptations and inversions of what continent appeared on the east and the west sides of the map. But this is an unlikely source for Kants' s divisions, as the image of the world that for Kant was “natural” was not necessarily meaningful and “natural” in the Arab-Islamic world, which was divided into seven regions, as reported by Ibn Khaldun and other sources.22 Perhaps at the time Kant was writing the Ortelius type of map was being introduced by the British in South Asia, among the elites of the Mughal Sultanate. The cosmology in the Incanate in Cuzco and the Tlatoanate in the valley was based on a four-partite division of the world, but certainly not in such continental divides.

I have told this story before, both in chapter 5 of The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) and in The Idea of Latin America (2005). The four-partite divisions of the earth prompted by the European invention and appropriation of “America”—and included in the Christian T-in-O map—erased the Incass' “Tawantinsuyu,” the Aztecss' “Anáhuac,” and the Kuna (Indians) “Abya-Yala” (Panama today). All were subsumed under “Indias Occidental/ America,” where the “Viceroyalty of Peru” and “New Spain” were included. The Christian tripartite division of the earth into Asia, Africa, and Europe (in the well-known T-in-O maps of Western Christendom, before the Renaissance), became a world of four continents. Kant was living in a period in which the erasures were forgotten, so the four-partite division of the world was what he knew. On that fiction Kant built his Geography and his Anthropology.23

Now, the distribution of the earth into four parts is not merely descriptive. In the T-in-O map, a hierarchy was clearly established. Since Christendom was located in Europe,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.