N.B: This is extremely long. Do jump until Hinkelammert for a quick read, otherwise, enjoy.

We have seen the first two chapters of Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. The first chapter, concerning a material-universal principle of ethics, established that whoever acts ethically has always and necessarily an orientation towards the unfolding (production, reproduction, and development) of human life. The second chapter concerned itself with the procedural dimension and established discourse as the way in which moral norms acquire validity. Specifically, the principle of universal validity established that to argue normatively (i.e., to argue for norms guiding action), one must accept everyone as equal in dignity and accept that argumentation entails the force of the better argument. These first two principles co-determine each other. On the one hand, one cannot speak of the unfolding of life without seeking validity, and, on the other, the unfolding of life is a necessary aspect of validity; even if a norm has been accepted by all, it must allow for the unfolding of life or else it is not valid in the full sense of the word. Now, some may think that these two aspects are all that is necessary for an ethics of liberation. However, Dussel goes an extra step. These two principles require a third principle concerning the feasibility of the norm that allows for the unfolding of life and that has been accepted by all. Let us take a look into this third chapter on Ethical Feasibility and the ‘Goodness Claim’. 

Recall that Dussel argues that we have a mental capacity he calls “practical reason”. Practical, for Dussel, is everything that deals with normativity; it is opposed to the theoretical which concerns itself with descriptive phenomena (what we may understand as science). For understanding, arguing for, and assessing the universal-material principle, we use practical-material reason. In contrast, when we are discussing so as to attain validity we use practical-formal reason. When we are judging feasibility we use “formal instrumental and strategic reason, with reference to judgements of fact”.¹ We will look closely at what Dussel means by formal instrumental and by strategic reason, but as a preview, formal instrumental reason deals with means-ends, that is calculations of cost-benefit, while strategic reason deals with the methods employed. Nonetheless, one can understand the overall content of this chapter as “describ[ing] the process of the construction of the ethically feasible, where the ‘goodness claim’ is made” given the “demands of ethical feasibility in the concrete and effective fulfillment of the act, taking into account contextual situations and also the consequences”.² 

One can thus see how this chapter is incredibly more situated in reality or in the existing conditions of human life. Dussel assesses three philosophies/philosophers that deal or argue about the existing human reality as a point of departure in ethics. These are (1) The Pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce and Hilary Putnam (with an important side note on Xavier Zubiri), (2) The Functional or Formal ‘System’ of Niklas Luhmann, and (3) The Feasibility of Franz Hinkelammert. The selection of thinkers may seem, to people familiar with them, strange or not cohesive. It is true that the thinkers Dussel engages with in the third chapter do not form a coherent disciplinary tradition. However, each represents a distinct mediation in the realization of ethics. Mediation may be broadly understood as the use of X to realize Y. We use a hammer to put a nail in the wall. The hammer thus mediates our goal of putting a nail in the wall. It would have been interesting to see Dussel engage with Bruno Latour here, who has been incredibly influential on me ––perhaps this will be the topic of another post. Possible incoherence aside, let us dive into this chapter in the same order that Dussel does. Similarly to the second chapter, I do not aim to give a systemic overview of the thinkers. Hence, take lightly what is presented about them here since, in comparison to the thinkers of the second chapter, I am not fully familiar with them. 

The first two sections discuss almost point by point the comments made by Dussel on the thinkers he analyzes. In sum these reveal a picture of Dussel’s theory of the real and how we can confront it to derive judgments of the possible. Such sections may seem, however, redundant at first glance. To get the main gist or idea of the chapter, skip these sections and read from Hinkelammert. If you want a fuller understanding of Dussel’s discussion do read everything. 

Pragmatists (Peirce and Putnam with some Zubiri)

Dussel will discuss two main questions: what is the real and what is the true. These two questions are the basis of a possible analysis or study of the feasible. To study the feasible, what is possible, we must know to delimit what truth entails, but also how we access reality. For example, if I am assessing if it is feasible for me to run 10km, I must know how it is that my judgment can be judged as true, but also how do I know that my understanding of the world (in this case the running route) is correct. 

Concretely, Dussel sums Peirce’s philosophy (or his interest in it) by stating how, to Peirce, “it is not possible to operate from the immediate, [how] every form of knowledge and action finds itself already determined by the mediation”.³ In other words, to access any phenomena (like a concept, an object, or a being) mediation always happens. To know if a cell has a certain shape we use a microscope. To know how a microscope works we use books. To understand the words in the book we use a shared linguistic horizon. However, of all mediations to Dussel the most interesting or concerning one is Peirce’s “mediation of the theoretical by the practical, from the horizon of the ethical”.⁴ Recall that for Dussel theoretical (and theoretical-reason) is merely the descriptive or scientific, like statistics, chemistry, etc. Practical is the normative, that is whatever guides action. The mediation of the theoretical by the practical thus entails that whatever is merely descriptive is always necessarily mediated by the normative. Hence, “the ethics of liberation has always affirmed, as did Peirce, that logic […], and even ontology, presupposes ethics”.⁵ Thus, for Dussel, the most important aspect of Peirce’s philosophy is the preeminence of ethics as a first philosophy from where everything else is possible, and the importance of mediating phenomena or objects. 

Dussel then proceeds to analyze or summarize Peirce’s theory of truth and how it relates to understanding the ‘real’. Dussel does this because how we come to understand the ‘real’ is what gives ethics primacy over other philosophies. That is, according to Dussel, there is a connection between how we conceive what ‘truth is’ and ethics. Specifically, since Dussel understands the ethical as the unfolding of human life and, importantly, the application of such unfolding as true, then only if one has a ‘correct’ understanding of truth in the full sense of the word one can see ethical primacy over other philosophies.

Peirce thinks, contra Kant, that the thing in itself “is partially knowable in each cognitive act, and fully in the long run” p. 163. Concretely, in his Prolegnomena Kant states: “if we view the objects of the senses as mere appearances, as is fitting, then we thereby admit at the very same time that a thing in itself underlies them, although we are not acquainted with this thing as it may be constituted in itself, but only with its appearance” §32. In simpler words what this means is that, for Kant, whenever we see an object we are not cognizing it in its full mode of being. As humans we can only cognize the object as an appearance. Underneath the appearance or independent of the appearance, so to speak, is the thing in itself.* Returning to Peirce, he believes that the thing-in-itself is available only a little each time we cognize something, but in the long run it becomes fully cognizable. For example, the first time we see a new object we may only see partially what it is. After multiple cognitions, the object becomes fully cognizable because we carry with us the history of multiple partial cognitions. 

According to Dussel’s reading with cognizing in the long run we have “four moments that in the long run ought to become identical: reality = being = truth = intersubjective validity”.⁶ In the words of Peirce: “The opinion that is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real”.⁷ In other words, if a specific opinion was agreed by all (not only now but forever) then that would be the same as truth. For example, if all people always agree that 2 + 2 = 4 then such agreement is true. Since it is true then whatever is represented in it is real, as in it exists independently of us but it is not wholly independent because it has to be known, if we do not know something then it is not known to be real. 

For Dussel truth and validity are not the same, validity refers to intersubjective agreement while truth refers to reference to the real. This is why Dussel here introduces Xavier Zubiri’s theory of truth. Perhaps this is the most complicated moment in the book so do bare with me. Zubiri “makes a distinction among three types of truth”.⁸ The first truth is referred to as ‘real truth’. In the first truth, the brain captures the real by categorizing perception (e.g. looks X or seems Y) and concept (e.g. big or small) which are themselves connected to our language capacity and our being conscious. “The real is not what is knowable, but rather the substantive thing that exists from itself”.⁹ And then, perhaps the most difficult aspect of this first truth: 

The real’ is not independent (second act) of the act of cognition (first act). On the contrary, the act of cognition (of cerebral subjectivity) is what is discovered as independent a posteriori to the real. The real is what is of/from itself (de suyo), a prius captured as what is given before and without relation, inasmuch as real, to the act of cognition.¹⁰

That the real exists is independent from us. Think of an infinite flame. That flame will burn forever whether we cognize it or not. That is reality. However, reality, when observed (so to speak) is imposed upon us through cognition. We do not decide whether or not we will cognize the flame; photons through our retina activate neurons which actualize the image in our brain. Hence, the existence of the flame is independent of us, but once we are with the flame it is imposed upon us. 

Meanwhile, “Truth (which is not and can never be, nor be identified with, reality) […] entails an ‘original reference to the reality of the real: it is ratification”.¹¹ Truth then is not, like for Peirce, whatever we agree upon in the end if we had an infinite knowledge. Rather, reality exists independent from us, and truth is our corroborating that reality. For example, that dinosaurs existed is real, independent of us and us knowing it. In fact this was so. For centuries we did not know dinosaurs existed and yet they did. Our knowledge only corroborated the reality of their existence. The truthness of them existing is only a ratification of reality. 

The second truth is that of the truth of a judgement. That is, “the reference to the actuality of the real affirmed as ‘a thing among others’” p.156. Otherwise stated, the reference to the actuality of

[T]he real affirmed as “a thing among others.” A judgement (like “Dinosaurs existed”) is true by reference to the ‘bigger picture’ of reality, so to speak. Zubiri calls the act of relating and expressing the ‘apophantic’ function of thought.¹²

Finally, the third truth is here “concern[ed] then” with “rational truth”.¹³ Since the world is not static but is ever changing, truth here means a dynamic fulfillment, a successful meeting between our projected understanding, our sketch (bosquejo), and the real as it progresses or changes. So, for example, we know something truly when our understanding, for example in the form of a hypothesis, corresponds with the changing reality. Think, for example, of a geographist who lives and only knows of lowlands, that is, places with no mountains. This geographist’s theory would not account for the formation of mountains or the ecosystem within. After some millions of years a mountain appears where the geographer lived. His theory did not account for mountain formation and thus is not real. 

Such is Zubiri’s theory of truth and theory of cognition. Dussel will not actually refer to Zubiri often but one must remember some key insights which argue against Peirce: (1) Truth is actualization of the real, (2) Reality is independent of Knowing, (3) Reality is imposed upon our cognition, (4) Reality changes and thus also what is thought to be true. We now turn to Hilary Putnam.  

Dussel is interested in Putnam’s critique of analytical or positivist philosophers on moral questions. After the first era of pragmatism (the one of Charles S. Peirce), many philosophers disregarded pragmatism for a lack of rigor in argumentation. One such school of philosophy was Analytic philosophy. Interestingly, regarding normativity, “for the analytical or positivist philosophers the normative-ethical statement is a value judgement, and, for that reason, it lacks scientific validity”.¹⁴ That is, given the prominence of rigidity and a positivist outlook, analytic philosophers equated normative statements with value judgements, and “[v]alue judgements […], to the extent that they are not scientific, are not, literally speaking, meaningful, because they are simple expressions of emotion that cannot be classified as either true or false”.¹⁵ Hence, for the analytic philosophers of the time it was not possible to establish a reality of ethics since it could never be true. It is within this debate that Putnam is located. 

Putnam’s response establishes that “because there are real human needs, and not merely desires, that it makes sense to distinguish between better and worse values”, thus giving normativity a possible reality.¹⁶ However, to Putnam needs “do not pre-exist, […] humanity is constantly redesigning itself, and […] we create needs”.¹⁷ This is where Dussel’s “shovel bends back”. While digging within the philosophy of Putnam, Dussel finds a point of impasse; his philosophical shovel digging for useful insights meets a rock that bends the shovel and thus can no longer support Putnam. For Dussel needs are understood through the production, reproduction, and development of life, and hence, needs are only that which, if they did not exist, we would not exist either. As such, a need cannot be created because otherwise we would have died before it existed. As an example Dussel notes how “[e]ating can be done in many ways, and culinary arts […] introduce new foods, fashions, and tastes. But to ‘eat’ is necessary, and the person who does not eat (in the broadest sense, even if the ‘food’ is intravenous fluid) will die. 

Dussel summarizes the differences between pragmatism and the ethics of liberation as follows. 

What is indispensable for the life of the human subject is the ultimate uncircumventable criterion of truth on which ‘one’s shovel buckles’. This is the essential intuition of pragmatism and one with which the ethics of liberation is in agreement, but the ethics of liberation takes it to its ultimate consequences, not for theoretical or academic motives alone but also because the majority of humanity faces the risk of death, from hunger, exclusion, and so on.¹⁸

For Dussel truth is  reference to the real (derived from Zubiri), in relation to the reality of human life (from pragmatism), which is oriented towards the production, reproduction, and development of human life (his own insight). From the pragmatists (and their debate with analytic philosophers of the linguistic turn) Dussel concludes: “access to the real is always linguistically mediated”.¹⁹ That is, while truth is a reference to the real, our way of accessing the real is always, because we are human, mediated by our language. 

If feasible is what we are able to do, we must first answer how we know our capabilities, and to do this we must know our reality. Without answering these two questions (how do we know our limits? And, how do we know reality?) we cannot answer what is possible for us to do within a given system. It follows then that after having answered these questions, Dussel must answer what a human reality or system is. Thus, we now turn to Luhmann’s Functional or Formal System. 

Luhmann Functional or Formal System

Luhmann, a sociologist, provided a theory of how social systems work. As humans, living in a society, we encounter multiple subsystems daily, and society as a whole works as a system. Luhmann challenges that we can understand a society simply by (1) looking at how individuals relate to one another,  (2) by its boundaries, and (3) without accounting for the observer. Rather, Luhmann is interested in a “description of the autopoietic, self-referential social system”.²⁰ In other words, Luhmann offers a theory of a system that reproduces and maintains itself. To be clear, Luhmann “knows that ‘living’ organisms steer the system by self-organized autopoiesis in a  more complex fashion than do mechanical systems”.²¹ That goes to say that a system’s reproduction and maintenance, while carried out by itself, is not the same as a machine that can process input data and output data to produce better long-term sustaining output. 

For Luhmann, each subsystem (economic, political, religious, etc.) is independent from one another because each subsystem has a concrete program in which language delimits what is of interest to that program and what is not. For example, regarding the economic system, “[t]he program of the system is made explicit in the ‘prices’ that self-regulate the instances of payment and economic expectations in general”.²² It is worth noting here that systems, for Luhmann, are closed. As mentioned, they delimit via their language what is part of it and what is not. Whatever else is not within the system is its ‘environment’. As blogger S notes here, “[s]ystems […] are operationally closed but cognitively open. This means that while a system cannot operate outside its boundaries [set by communication], it remains aware of its environment, observing and processing external complexity through the system’s own internal logic”. However, one thing is a system, as a whole, and another a subsystem as the economy. The evolution of systems follows the following process:

The system, in its process of differentiation into subsystems, will autoadapt to the environment though selection, decreasing the complexity of the environment, and increasing its complexity through a process of autopoietic self-organization.²³

In other words, a system, as a whole, will start to develop subsystems (like the economy) that are in charge of a concrete dimension in order to make the totality of everything outside the system less complex, but making everything within it more complex. 

Dussel criticizes such conceptions of the environment. According to Dussel, Luhmann’s system theory is formalist because the real universal needs of humans are merely the environment. Dussel establishes that proceduralists accounts (of ethics, but also of institutions) require a material dimension ––see the first post on the material criterion here. Hence, for Dussel, Luhmann’s theory is deficient in such regard. 

Moving on, consider now how each subsystem (economic, for example) is also, simultaneously, the environment of another system. Whatever is not in the economic subsystem is its environment, within that lies the political; equally so, whatever is not the political is its environment, within that lies the economic. Reality is thus, in this case, the total sum of all (sub)systems in their twofold existence as system and as environment. But, importantly, “Luhmann writes that ‘reality can be treated as sense’; and since ‘sense’ is a moment of the ‘world,’ we have once again [identified] world with reality”.²⁴ Sense is what allows systems to exist, it is the demarcation of what is in and out of the system.  Since reality is a sense, reality delineates what is in and out of a system, and equally so, since sense is part of the Luhmannian ‘world’, reality is equated with world. Hence, similarly to Peirce, Luhmann equates what is known with what exists, which, as we have seen, is problematic for Dussel. 

In sum, from Luhmann Dussel further criticizes an equation of reality with the world, that is, of the real with the known, and more broadly, the possible with the existing. For Dussel it is of utmost importance that we distinguish that the real is not the known. We can be ignorant to a real existing fact. We now move to the heart of the problem of feasibility, its definition and operationalization.**

The Feasibility of Franz Hinkelammert

We are concerned here with “the question of feasibility, of the concrete conditions or circumstances of its [the ethics of liberation’s] effective possibility.²⁵ To ground the analysis, Dussel again returns to the exploration of reality, now from reading Hinkelammert:

Because the knowing subject is a finite being […] and living ([…] limited by its mortality), all reality opens up as possibilities for action, from a project of life” […] But knowable reality (insofar as it is knowable, but not for now totally known) always transcends our cognitive capacities.²⁶ 

This goes to say that, as humans, we do not possess infinite intelligence, we are constrained into what we know and how we can know it, and (even more so) we are mortal, hence we have limited time to guide action towards the unfolding ––recall the first post here. However, and very importantly, reality is always much more complex than we can understand. It is like we are chasing understanding reality in its totality but it is always escaping from us. We can never know everything. In order to “manage reality, which is partly transcendent, [we] must hypothetically surpass both effectively observed and experimental situations through the medium of universal concepts”.²⁷ We use tools like scientific hypotheses and theorems in order to grasp reality in its evasive form of being. We try to grasp reality not for understanding’s sake, but for a purpose or as mediation. In other words, understanding reality is a goal or an end and fulfilling said goal is either possible or it is not. However, “[w]hen selecting the ends to be realized, there appears the lack of means for their fulfillment as the material determination of every choice”.²⁸*** 

Not all projects or goals, however, are science-oriented or personal. The very fact of life is a project in and of itself, as Hinkelammert establishes: 

To live is a project [an end or a goal] that has its own conditions of possibility and fails if it does not achieve them […] The decision about ends is a decision about the achievement of the project of life of subjects, and it is not exhausted by a formal means-ends relation […] Not all technically conceivable ends and materially realizable means according to a means-ends calculus [of instrumental reason] are also feasible: only that subset of ends that are integrated to a project of life is feasible.²⁹***

With this quote we can transition into the criterion and principle of feasibility.

The Criterion and the Ethical Principle of Feasibility

It may be stated once again that “theoretically, through the scientific instruments of observation, the relationship between human beings and nature is mediated by civilizational development, which establishes the technological conditions of possibility of the constitutions of objects”.³⁰ Hence, it is the level of scientific or descriptive advancement that we have as a community that allows (or restricts) our access to the real. If it were not because of the mapping of the human genome (scientific advancement), and the use of computers to store such data (technological conditions), we would not be able to know that certain genes cause certain conditions. 

“In the same way, practically, the object (the norm, action, institution or the system to be worked) is constituted by certain technological conditions of possibility”.³¹ Technology is thus a condition of possibility both theoretically (for science and description) and practically (for institutions, norms, etc.). It is important to note here that as such Dussel presupposes ––to some extent— a lineal progressive view of history, in that we usually advance forwards and indefinitely. It would be worth asking here, where are we advancing to? Is there a telos of human progress? Even though this is not the point of the chapter, I raise these questions here as personal notes but also as indications of a possible Dusselian ‘blind eye’. Also, I recommend Amy Allen’s The End of Progress here as a thought provoking piece on the consequences of thinking about progress as such.

Another condition of possibility is the economic one. That is because, “natural resources are scarce”, thus we stumble upon the predicament of resource allocation and distribution which is at the core of economics. Ergo, it may be said that economic and technological conditions “constitute conditions of possibility of the feasibility of a practical object to be fulfilled in the near future”.³² This goes to say that our possibility of fulfilling a normative action is delimited by the scarcity of resources and by the capacity of present technology. Taken together, economic and technological boundaries are what Dussel understands as efficacy or formal truth; not to be confused with material truth, as in the unfolding of life. 

Crucially, humans always necessarily emerge from nature and material nature appears “as a medium of being able to fulfill a norm, act, institution, ethical system, and so on”.³³ Everything that allows for our unfolding is from nature through our production. Through labor we carry out multiple processes that allow us to live like agriculture, animal husbandry, including resource extraction, and so on. Nature thus restricts what is possible. This is twofold. On the one hand we cannot technologically do everything from nature, but also ontologically nature (broadly understood, not solely as our productive arena) has certain laws like gravity, the water cycle, etc. Thus, for example, an impossible act would be to demand people to jump 10 meters, but also, an impossible act would be to create drinking water out of helium. 

More radically, and already mentioned throughout these blog entries, for Dussel the unfolding of human life (reproduction, production, and development) is a material condition that delimits all actions, including the possible ones. Hence, while the above-mentioned frames of possibility spoke of possibility as ‘being able’, the unfolding of life is a frame of possibility from rationality. It would not be possible, for it is irrational, to allow an act that is counter to the unfolding of human life. Or, positively, it is possible, for it is rational, to allow an act that allows for the unfolding of human life. With these three considerations, one could thus establish the criterion of feasibility as follows:  

[Whoever] proposes to carry out or transform a norm, act, institution, and so on, cannot leave out of consideration the conditions of possibility of its objective, material and formal, empirical, technical, economic, political, and so fulfillment, such that the act will be possible taking into account the laws of nature in general, and human laws in particular. It is a matter of choosing the adequate or efficacious mediations for determinate ends. The criterion of abstract truth (theoretical and technical) refers to these ends; its validity is judged by the formal “efficacy” of the compatibility between means and the end, calculated by instrumental-strategic reason.³⁴

Perhaps most of the content of the criterion has been discussed and it is possible that it is very easy to understand. However, I must clarify a few things. When Dussel speaks of ‘human laws’, he is not speaking of legality as a set of positive and negative rules codified in a book (thus, not as in common law or civil law). Rather, Dussel is referring to the unfolding of life as a law of human existence. 

Now, what is the instrumental-strategic reason? Recall that for Dussel when we are judging the material-universal principle (chapter 1) we make use of our material-practical reason. That is, our cognitive faculty of assessing action directed towards the unfolding of life. Similarly, when we discuss the validity (chapter 2) of a norm we use practical-moral reason, reason aimed towards action considering its procedure. Now, when we consider feasibility, taking into account the conditions of impossibility, we use instrumental-strategic reason. Instrumental-strategic reason is concerned with means-ends questions, with “is it efficient to do X?”. However, the criterion does not ask only to do an act that is efficient, but an efficient act that respects other conditions of possibility and human and natural law. “[W]hen what can be done with ‘efficacy’ (technically and economically) determined what is used as the ultimate criterion of theoretical ‘truth’ and ‘validity […], one falls into a formal absolutization […] giving priority to ‘instrumental reason’.³⁵ For example, if we say that it is technologically possible and economically viable (even profitable) to enslave a portion of the population, and we act solely based on instrumentality, we are not acting with feasibility. 

Let us look at different levels of ethical impossibility, possibility, feasibility, or operability. A contradiction from the beginning would not go anywhere. For example, we should do what we should not. Simple. Moreover, what is logical may be not possible empirically. It can be logical to say “we should build a perpetual motion machine”, however, the laws of physics make it empirically (not technologically) not possible. What is empirically possible may be technically impossible, for example, it is empirically possible for humans to travel to another galaxy but technology has not progressed that far. Lastly, whatever is technologically possible may be (because of resources) economically impossible. 

To further clarify instrumental-strategic reason one can see how Dussel explains it: “[T]he end can be achieved exclusively by certain means, chosen by means of calculus used in a specific way”.³⁶ For certain goals only certain means allow its realization. Our cognitive capacity to analyze this but also analyze the above paragraph is instrumental-strategic reason in its epitome. 

Importantly, “its [the norm, institution, etc’s] validity is judged by the formal ‘efficacy’ of the compatibility between means and the end, calculated by instrumental-strategic reason”.³⁷ Hence, while we judge monologically the means and ends through instrumental-strategic reason, we can only say that such judgment is valid following the rules for validity, that is, intersubjective agreement without coercion recognizing all as possessing dignity (Chapter 2). And, in this case, given that there is certain knowledge and specialization required, “[t]he validity reached by these pronouncements of feasibility is achieved within the technological and scientific community”.³⁸ 

Having established this, we can establish The Principle of Ethical Feasibility as follows;: 

[O]ne who ethically performs or decides a norm, action,  institution or systematic ethical system, ought to comply (a) with the conditions of logical and empirical (technical, economic, political, cultural⁺, and so on) feasibility, which is to say, that it is really possible at these levels, going from the frame of the (b) requirements, which are (b1) the ethical-material requirements of practical truth [unfolding of life], and (b2) discursive moral-formal requirements of validity, along a spectrum that goes from (b.i) ethically allowed acts […] to acts that must be done.³⁹ 

To conclude, feasibility is not simply what can be done as having the capacity to do so. Feasibility is a complex analysis of multiple dimensions in which, for Dussel, multiple of our rationalities (as in, multiple forms of rationality) are involved. Hence we would go, to quote Dussel, from:

This hungry human being is begging (1). It is feasible to give alms to the hungry (2). To give the hungry person alms allows the reproduction of this person’s life (3). We have decided it is valid  to give alms to the person (4). We ought to give the person alms (5). 

* In the subreddit of AskPhilosophy, user heliotach712 gave a helpful simple definition: “If you believe that something exists independently of whether you experience it or think about it or perceive it, you believe this thing is in-itself. […] So the thing-in-itself, in other words, whatever exists independently of our cognitive mediation, independently of space and time (if it exists at all, we can’t know if it does), is something we cannot experience, by definition, it is outside of experience. But it supposedly does cause our perceptions, ie. our perceptions are of a real world, but we never experience the thing-in-itself unmediated by our intuitions and forms of cognition (i.e.. our perception of something is not the same as the thing itself). Or, by example, as another user stated: “Imagine you are wearing rose colored glasses and looking at something. It looks sort of purple to you. However, since you know that your glasses influence your color experiences, you can ask yourself what color the thing is in itself, apart from the way you experience it (due to your glasses)”. See the full thread here.

**Let us take small parentheses which for now will not mean a lot but will become wholly important. To Luhmann “[t]he environment, not the subject, underlies social systems” p. 178. That is, the environment is more important or constitutive of the system than subjects are. The role of subjects within systems and environments are complex in the way they relate to each other, and here another point of departure between Dussel and Luhmann arises. According to Luhmann, when two subjects interact there is a problem of double contingency. I will not go in-depth into double contingency so much as to the consequences stemming from it. The double contingency may be resumed as follows: when two subjects encounter one another the I encounters a You. However, the other person sees themselves as an I and myself as a You. The I, the me, is viewed to myself as a social actor (A). I, however, view the Other as an object of observation  (B) p.179. In the same way, the other views themselves as a social actor (B´), but how they view themselves is not the same as one views them; in other words, how one sees oneself is not how others see us (A´). In and of itself the double contingency is not problematic for Dussel. However, Dussel argues that for Luhmann the difference between B and B’ (or how one view’s oneself and how one is viewed) “does not entail major difficulty” p.179. In contrast, for Dussel, this is a major grounding of ethics. Whereas for Luhmann the encounter of the other is merely an Other “equal to the I, merely ‘there’”, for Dussel the encounter with the Other is “another than the I and never equal” p. 179. We will see later how crucial this moment is for Dussel. I included this so that once we get there we are familiar, we have touched the water with our toes. 

*** Citing Dussel who is in the extract citing Hinkelammert. ⁺ What exactly does Dussel refer to by cultural or political possibility? While he includes these requirements here, he never explicitly states what he means by this.

1. Dussel, E. (2013). Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Duke University Press: Durham, p. 159. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Idem, p. 162. ↩︎
4. Idem, p. 161. ↩︎
5. Idem, p. 162. ↩︎
6. Idem, p. 163. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Idem, p. 164. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Ibid. ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. Idem, p. 165. ↩︎
14. Idem, p. 172. ↩︎
15. Idem, p. 167. ↩︎
16. Idem, p. 171. ↩︎
17. Ibid ↩︎
18. Idem, p. 172. ↩︎
19. Idem, p. 174. ↩︎
20. Idem, p. 175. ↩︎
21. Idem, p. 176. ↩︎
22. Idem, p. 175. ↩︎
23. Idem, p. 178. ↩︎
24. Idem, p. 177. ↩︎
25. Idem, p. 181. ↩︎
26. Idem, p. 182. ↩︎
27. Idem, p. 182-183. ↩︎
28. Idem, p. 183-184. ↩︎
29. Idem, p. 184. ↩︎
30. Idem, p. 186. ↩︎
31. Ibid. ↩︎
32. Ibid. ↩︎
33. Idem, p. 187. ↩︎
34. Idem, p. 188. ↩︎
35. Idem, p. 186. ↩︎
36. Idem, p. 189. ↩︎
37. Idem, p. 188. ↩︎
38. Idem, p. 189-190. ↩︎
39. Idem, p. 192. ↩︎