Epistemological resistances and the search for alternatives to modernity in intellectual history

Abstract

The violence of modernity has led to epistemological resistances around the world and the search for alternative ways of reconstructing philosophy. Among the Frankfurt School and early Kyoto School thinkers, for instance, the problem of modernity is framed as an excess of objective rationality, but among the decolonial thinkers of Latin America, the problem is conceptualized as the very myth of modernity itself that has legitimized the colonization and exclusion of non-Europeans. In the search for alternatives modernities, the Kyoto School and Latin American philosophy agree to a vision of inter-civilizational dialogue, which amounts to an engagement of alterity or differences, whereas with the Frankfurt School, albeit struggles to find consensus on how to overcome modernity, aims to merely preclude the problem of reproducing the impulses toward the domination of oneself and others. Nonetheless, all these paradigms have a theoretical point of convergence: that is, since we are all participants of modernity, we are both victims and executioners of its violence, and thus compelled to negate it. This article will discuss how the violence of modernity is experienced, theorized, and then challenged around different continents in order to make visible not just how the violence of modernity is reproduced in different ways but to force ourselves to engage in self-critique in the pursuit to make explicit our own assumptions that repeats the violence of modernity.