Barber, Michael. Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. By Michael Barber. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998. Pages, xxiii + 184. Paper, $24. ISBN: 0823217043

Reviewed by: W.S.K. Cameron

Barber’s primary goal is to introduce Enrique Dussel to an English-speaking audience—a task long overdue. Dussel has unquestionably become a major voice in philosophy, theology, and history, yet he has not so far been the subject of a full-length book in English on the entirety of his philosophy. This inattention is ironic given the current philosophical fascination with the Other: such discussions remain hopelessly abstract unless informed by close attention to the particular others of whom we speak, who alone can remind us of the real consequences of our self-(mis)perception. Thankfully, Dussel has not been completely ignored, and thus Barber concludes by addressing three major critiques of Dussel.

The book’s structure is lucid in detail. Barber first introduces the theme of rationality in Emmanuel Levinas. This propaedeutic is essential, for Barber understands Dussel as pursuing an “ethical hermeneutics”—an attempt to make conscious and thereby to discourage philosophy’s tendency to hide, ignore, and betray its Other by reducing it to the same. Levinas’ discovery of the limits of phenomenology in the face of the Other provides a model of the critique of reason for the sake of reason.

The next two chapters trace Dussel’s development. Dussel first attempted a retrieval of the non-dualist Christian-Semitic anthropology on the way to synthesizing Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with natural law ethics—the only way, Dussel then thought, to avoid the climax of modern ethics in Nietzsche’s will to power. Yet Levinas convinced Dussel that Heidegger offered no ethic, but rather an ethically neutral account of the conditions of the possibility of good and evil. Dussel thus adopted and transformed Levinas to expose the Northern and Western tendency to ignore its Other, whether by the political and economic domination initiated by the conquest, or in contemporary theories of development, patterns of cultural understanding, or science. Throughout, Dussel’s goal is not to attack rationality as such, but rather the myth that inspired modernity and rationalized its violence as civilizing force.

Chapter four explores the implications of Dussel’s thought for history, economics, and theology. Countering the typical Eurocentric accounts of modernity as beginning in the self-flattering, intra-European events of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Dussel dates modernity from a worldwide event, the conquest of the Americas, in which the ego cogito’s will to power and violence first manifested itself. Dussel outlines the contemporary fallout through Marxist categories reinterpreted through Levinasian eyes. According to Dussel, Marx is undertaking an ethical hermeneutics of capitalism, i.e. an attempt to explore the source of capital in the forgotten Other of living labor. Finally, Barber shows how Dussel’s ethical hermeneutics precludes any ideological use of theology to support a status quo.

Chapters five and six involve encounters between Dussel and three critics: Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Ofelia Schutte, and Karl-Otto Apel. Cerutti and Schutte charge Dussel with both hubris and self-abasement: his philosophy purports to surpass all prior European and Latin American attempts and yet both lacks its own rational demonstration and is in fact driven by unacknowledged religious commitments; and at the same time Dussel encourages an insufficiently critical acceptance of the Other. On both counts, Barber responds by drawing attention to the Levinasian bases of Dussel’s thought. Karl-Otto Apel, on the other hand, charges Dussel with an uncritical and anachronistic appropriation of Marx; yet he does suggest that Dussel’ s ethical hermeneutics may find a subordinate role within Apel’s own transcendental pragmatics. While contesting both Apel’s interpretation of Dussel on Marx and the suggestion that Apel’s theory could simply subsume Dussel’s, Barber does suggest a “division of philosophical labor in which Dussel and Apel operate with different methodologies for different purposes within a common architectonic” (xxii).

Given the dearth of translations into English (until recently) and the almost oppressively wide scope and volume of Dussel’s work-he holds doctorates in philosophy, theology, and history and has written more than two hundred articles and forty-five books one cannot but be grateful for Barker’s confident, widely-grounded, and developmentally detailed interpretation. Barber is highly sympathetic without being slavish: he takes Dussel to task, for instance, for misinterpreting Kant and critical theory more generally; for failing to bring out the work done by his Levinasian roots; and for a utopian tendency to await the overcoming of all alienation rather than acknowledging the necessity of, e.g., market mechanisms even in a post-revolutionary world.

Moreover Barber covers a lot of ground, marching us through Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas before taking on Dussel, and then addressing major critiques. The outline alone might suggest that Barber has sacrificed either clarity or depth; and indeed in a study of such breadth one can always find some aspects distorted or inadequately explored. When Barber critiques Dussel on philosophical grounds, for instance, he occasionally claims more than his argument can justify. He argues that “it does not seem correct to assert that Aristotle emphasizes the species over the concrete and reduces the individual to no more than a subject/carrier of the universal, especially since Dussel never refutes the most powerful counterevidence to such assertions: namely, Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s theory of the forms” (23). Here Barker’s counterevidence is insufficient and ambiguous: Aristotle did critique aspects of Plato’s theory, but he agreed that knowledge is “of the form and the universal” and thus the individual is, strictly speaking, unknowable except as embodying forms which become known in universals. Barber may be right, after all, but one cannot fairly grasp Dussel’s or Barber’s intent, let alone judge between them, based on such a compressed description.

At other points, Barber’s argument is sound and yet begs further exploration. Against the claim that Dussel is insufficiently attentive to empirical evidence in economics, Barber argues that Dussel’s Levinasian Marx could accept all such evidence available. But Marx seeks the hidden foundation of the empirical phenomena in its Other, living labor, and “no empirical phenomenal facts about the economy can refute this hermeneutical framework, any more than individual historical facts can abolish the decision to interpret history by focusing on the suppressed Other” (146-47). Barber’s point that empirical evidence can neither confirm nor deny this ethical commitment is well taken. But as Barber himself would surely say, that commitment is not irrational, for empirical evidence is not the sole source of knowledge. Consider the “long look along” our experience that Heidegger recommends, or the unforgettable look of suffering addressed to me as an individual: neither is merely subjective, but neither can be trapped in the form of repeatedly observable data.

Yet such critiques, always possible, are virtually always unfair. Regularly, the text invites questions that Barber could have explored in more detail. But his gift for clarity and conciseness has produced an analysis that is virtually always sound and is often insightful; and had he added detail he would have compromised his major task: to write an introduction accessible to an anglophone philosophical and theological community. By both conveying depth and suggesting further depths to plumb, Barber has done everything one could ask, for he both provides an initial orientation and motivates us to explore on our own.