Beauty and modernity: dysmorphia as the face of colonization

Abstract

In the last stage of his thought, the philosopher, professor and friend Enrique Dussel rediscovered — at least formally — aesthetics; this is because not only had Dussel already developed and published some of his reflections on aesthetics, but also because throughout his work he always outlined different ideas corresponding to his aesthetic thought, not only because the nature of philosophy is pluriversal and complex, in terms of the necessary relationship of its multiple instances, but because the humanist thought of the Master, besides being visionary, pointed to the conceptual and vital complexity, which cannot be broken down into isolated categories, so that in his ethics, his politics, his eroticism and his pedagogy, we find germinal categories intrinsic to the aesthetics of liberation - not to mention his Philosophy of Production (1984) which in itself already marks a sensitive panorama, which is recognized in the philosopher of liberation. In addition to highlighting the importance of aesthetics as a fundamental part of his philosophical system, one of the ideas he insisted on in these latest developments and conversations at meetings was that of necessarily reconfiguring an idea that we have long taken for granted, as if it were a matter of starting from it without questioning it; this is the category of beauty, which has been observed since the emergence of his reflections and of which, it can be said, no aesthetics with a critical and liberating pretension would be worth it, if we start from the category of beauty that is imposed on us by modernity.