Feminismo e Ilustración (XIV Conferencias Aranguren): I. De la razón inerte a la razón meritoria; II. Por una Ilustración multicultural

Abstract

In the first part of this text, we present a reading of the Enlightenment that seeks to identify, among the different conceptualisations of reason displayed by enlightened thinking, the one offering the greatest emancipatory virtualities for feminism. The starting point is an analysis of Hume’s concept of personal identity that exposes its patriarchal bias. Against Hume’s notion of an inert reason we set the train of thought that led Poullain de la Barre to conceive reason as permanent work, or effort. The contribution of this feminist philosopher, an epigone of cartesianism, is liked to the spinozian «conatus» by a line that takes us all the way to Mary Wollstonecraft’s idea of reason as «meriting reason »: a reason that is free of adscriptive privileges in the network of forces in which it operates together with passions, a reason that is endowed with emerging critical value towards the Ancien Régime. In the second part, we argue that the critical- reflexive processes that challenge the legitimacy of institutions in force in a culture are not the monopoly of the Western World. In this sense, the Enlightenment is not an exclusive western property in so far as we can find, in other cultures, «veins of Enlightenment ». As endorsement of this hypothesis, we re-read the work of Maghreb philosopher Al -Yabri, author of Critique of Arab Reason, as a paradigmatic example of how it is possible to carry out a selective appropriation of a culture’s own past on the grounds of the «cultural interpellations» of the present. Under this light, Averroes is reclaimed as a classic of a «planetary modernity», a modernity committed to laicism, and one, moreover, that yields interesting implications for feminism.