Turning Towards the South

The Eurocentric Western cultural universe comes from a long trajectory of historical victories that seems to have come to an end. Europe spent five centuries dominating and teaching the non-European world and finds itself today increasingly in the condition of no longer being able to dominate nor having anything to teach. The drama of the cultural universe that considers itself historically victorious is that it does not want to learn from the cultural universes it has become accustomed to defeat and to teach. In turn, the non-Western cultural universes, be they Eastern (Chinese or Indian), Islamic, African and indigenous or first nation people of the Americas and Oceania, come from trajectories of historical defeats by the Western universe, defeats which, however, varied greatly in time and extent. They have gone through different processes of destruction, disfiguration, acculturation (or more accurately, inculturation or deculturation), but they have survived and today they take on a new confidence, self-esteem, and forward-looking stance from which stems the perception that the defeat is over. What kind of sharing can be expected from these trajectories progressing in opposite direction? Are they meeting and converging in some way or are they missing the possibility of the encounter and heading for confrontations of unknown contours?  

Mismatches and conflicts can be as potentially destructive as encounters and convergences can be potentially and mutually enriching. The deep uncertainty this creates stems from four epochal conditions: interregnum, interruption, transmigration, reflexivity. Drawing upon the thought of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, the term interregnum is a temporal metaphor that points to an ambiguous temporality in which the new society is not yet fully born and the old one has not yet definitively died. It is a time of monsters. The unstable oscillation between strengthening the new and rescuing the old is characteristic of the interregnum. Interruption is a spatial metaphor that suggests the insertion of a rupture or break in the established order that provokes a suspension, be it political, legal or philosophical. Such suspension can be more or less vast and more or less lasting. It is a time of crossroads. Transmigration is a metaphor of an outward-looking movement that evokes the transitoriness of social relations, of contrasts, of identities and of the constant disturbance of linear movements. It is a time of transculturation, to use a concept developed by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz. Finally, deep reflexivity is a metaphor for an inward-looking movement that involves revisiting and revising history. It is a time of roots turning into options and of options turning into roots.

Interregnum, interruption, transmigration and deep reflexivity make possible new types of conflicts as much as new types of encounters, generating unmapped and surprising contingencies and hybridizations. Two main features account for the specificity of the contemporary Zeitgeist. The first one is the apocalyptic character of possible conflicts (e.g., unprecedented social inequality, nuclear war, imminent ecological catastrophe) and the exhilarating nature of possible encounters and convergences (e.g., the World Social Forum, intercultural conversations, religious ecumenisms). The same social and cultural transformations of the last decades that have caused vast conflicts, mismatches and resistances have also generated conditions and opportunities for encounters and convergences of a new type. The second feature lies in a specific questioning of the past that consists in revisiting and revaluating the intellectual heritage before the modern period – more specifically, before modern colonialism and the hierarchies and conflicts among cultural universes it generated. Modern colonialism, starting with its European expansion in the fifteenth century, can thus be viewed as a crucial historical process causing deep wounds upon the defeated and subjugated cultures and populations that last until today. Understandably, revisiting and revaluating the premodern or early modern pasts occurs mostly in the cultural universes that were defeated or humiliated by Eurocentric modernity, but it is equally visible inside the Eurocentric cultural universe. However, in very different ways, colonialism transformed European cultural traditions as much as it transformed the cultural universes it subjugated or sought to subjugate. As underlined by the Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi: 

Colonization distorts relationships, destroys or petrifies institutions, and corrupts men, both colonizers and colonized. To live, the colonized needs to do away with colonization. To become a man, he must do away with the colonized being that he has become. If the European must annihilate the colonizer within himself, the colonized must rise above his colonized being.… For the colonized just as for the colonizer, there is no way out other than a complete end to colonization. The refusal of the colonized cannot be anything but absolute, that is, not only revolt, but a revolution.

Without losing sight of the existence of oppressors and oppressed, and perpetrators and victims, identifying, confronting and healing the colonial wound in all its vastness and depth involves some kind of reciprocal movements. Without the latter, the possibility of sharing and encounter among cultural universes transiting in opposite directions in the same space-time will be missed. 

In this essay, I focus on the conditions that might propitiate sharing and encounter. I start from the idea that the global social injustice caused by modern colonialism, together with modern capitalism and modern patriarchy, was grounded in a cultural, ontological and epistemological universe that exerted itself in systematically and arrogantly ignoring other cultures, ways of being and ways of knowing, ontologies and epistemologies. This led to a massive loss and waste of social experiences and justified the subjugation and elimination of the populations that lived by such cultures and social experiences. Global social injustice was therefore the other side of global cognitive justice. I designate this systematic ignorance by the Western-centric cultural universe as ignorant ignorance to convey the idea that in most cases such ignorance was not aware of itself. It was simply assumed that that there was nothing worth knowing beyond what the Eurocentric universe knew, pretended to know or allowed to be known. In light of this, I will defend that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. In order to move in the direction of cognitive justice I will not engage in any kind of project for a global, complete, universal or unified knowledge. Inspired by the fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, I will rather defend the idea of a learned ignorance (Santos, 2009: 103-125). I will start by briefly identifying the roots of modern cognitive injustice. I will then describe the main dimensions of modern ignorant ignorance and finally expound the outlines of learned ignorance conceived of as a tool to maximise the possibility of sharing and of mutually enriching and transformative encounters. 

Abyssal thinking and monocultures

In my body of work, I have proposed the epistemologies of the South as a set of alternatives to Western-centric dominant epistemologies. The epistemologies of the South belong to a vast family of postcolonial and decolonial studies. They concern the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by modern capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. The vast and vastly diversified field of such experiences I designate as the anti-imperial South. It is an epistemological, non-geographical South, composed of many epistemological souths having in common the fact that they are all knowledges born in struggles against modern domination. They are produced wherever such struggles occur, both in the geographical North and the geographical South. The objective of the epistemologies of the South is to allow the oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and in their own terms, for only thus will they be able to change it according to their own aspirations. The epistemologies of the South are in the antipodes of the epistemologies of the North, but we must be careful not to caricature these as merely mirror images of each other. 

We can describe dominant modern Western thinking as abyssal thinking. It is characterised a radical and radically invisible line that separates the realm of full humanity (what I refer to as the metropolitan zone) from the realm of sub-humanity (what I call the colonial zone and Franz Fanon called the zone of non-being). It is therefore constituted both by an epistemology (how we know what we know) and an ontology (the nature of being). This abyssal line operates by negating the validity, relevance or even existence of the social, epistemic, and cultural experience taking place ‘on the other side of the line’. It has thereby created a massive sociology of absences that encompasses both vast populations and vast bodies of cultures, ways of knowing, and ways of being. The other side of the destruction of populations (genocide) has been the negation of their knowledges, what I have designated as epistemicide. The sociology of absences consists in unilaterally defining what is worth knowing or experiencing. The monopoly of knowledge entails the monopoly of whatever is knowable by the tools of the epistemologies of the North. Beyond the limits of the North’s horizon of knowledge and existence, whatever is unknown is defined as irrelevant or dangerous, or even as non-existent. The ignorance thus produced is an ignorant ignorance because it is inherently deprived of the consciousness of what it ignores. Such an ignorance takes five main forms of what I refer to as monocultures.

First, the monoculture of knowledge and of the rigour of knowledge. This monoculture is the most powerful of all because it helps sustain all the other monocultures. It consists in turning modern science and high culture into the sole criteria for truth and aesthetic quality. Everything that is not recognised or legitimised by the epistemic or aesthetic canon is declared non-existent or irrelevant. This is why hip hop is not philosophy, village sages are not philosophers, slam poetry is not poetry, orature is not attributed the same value as literature, and home-grown sociologists, the organic intellectuals in the poor peripheries of large cities, are not considered to be engaged in ‘proper’ sociology. These forms of aesthetic or philosophical expression are not respected for their intrinsic value and such lack of respect is extended to the social groups that practice them. The terms that define modus operandi of this monoculture include ignorance, illiteracy, handicrafts, superstition, tradition, primitivism, provincialism, obscurantism, brutality, naïveté, and subjective opinion.

Second, the monoculture of linear time rests on the idea that history has a unique and widely accepted meaning and direction. This meaning and direction have been formulated in different ways over the last two hundred years: progress, revolution, modernisation, development, growth, and globalisation. Common to all these formulations is the idea of a centre, the North Atlantic, and the idea that the core countries of the world system are at the cutting edge of time, together with the dominant knowledges, institutions and forms of sociability typical of the core countries. This logic produces non-existence by describing whatever is asymmetrical as backward, according to the temporal norm, vis-à-vis whatever is declared advanced. It is through this logic that Western modernity produces the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous. Anything that diverges or differs from the normative present does not belong to the same historical time. The Latin American indigenous woman who appears in court wearing her pollera is a doubly strange body, because of what she is and of what she is wearing. The peasant or indigenous person’s non-existence takes the form of backwardness, a residuum, something outside of time and space. The production of nonexistence or irrelevance has assumed many names over the past two hundred years, the first being the primitive, closely followed by the traditional, the premodern, the simple, the obsolete, the local, and the underdeveloped.

Third, the monoculture of ex natura social classification is based on the naturalisation of differences. It consists in distributing populations according to categories that regard hierarchies as natural. Social classification produces non-existence in the shape of inferiority – insuperable inferiority, because it is natural. The inferior, because insuperably inferior, cannot be a credible alternative to the superior. Racial, sexual, and ableist classifications are among the most salient manifestations of this logic, although a dominant religion or the caste system can also operate as ex natura classifiers. Unlike the relation between capital and labour, social classification is based on attributes that negate the intentionality of social hierarchy. The relation of domination is seen as the consequence, rather than the cause, of this hierarchy, and it may even be considered to impose an obligation on whoever is classified as superior – for example, Kipling’s description of imperialism’s civilising mission as the ‘white man’s burden’ or the categorisation of the man as the ‘breadwinner’. Among the different forms of ex natura classification, race (along with tribal/ethnic and caste-based classifications) and sex have been decisive in enabling the relation between capital and labour to stabilise and spread globally.

Fourth, the monoculture of the dominant scale operates by adopting a given scale which is then used to disqualify the relevance of all other possible scales. In capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal modernity, the dominant scale appears in two different forms: the universal and the global. Abstract universalism is the scale of the entities or realities that prevail regardless of specific contexts. In this monoculture, universal entities take precedence over all other realities that depend on contexts and are therefore considered particular or vernacular. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was generated an instance of abstract universalism. Globalisation is the scale that has acquired unprecedented relevance in various social fields since the 1980s. It is the scale of the entities or realities that extend their scope to the whole globe, thus earning the privilege to designate rival entities or realities as ‘local’ or ‘particular’. For example, as the hamburger or pizza became globalized, feijoada, bolos de bacalhau, acarajé, moamba, paçoca or cachupa were gradually reduced to local specificities and have no place in global food chains. The entities or realities defined as particular or local are captured in scales that render them incapable of being credible alternatives to what exists globally and universally.

Fifth, the monoculture of capitalist productivism holds that infinite economic growth is an unquestionable rational objective which applies both to nature and to human labour. Productive capitalist nature is nature at its maximum fertility in a given production cycle, whereas productive labour is labour that likewise maximises the generation of profit in a given production cycle. According to this logic, when applied to nature non-existence is named as non-productiveness, infertility and sterility; when applied to labour, as sloth, inefficiency, idleness, and domesticity.

These five modes of ignorant ignorance create five forms of non-existence because the realities to which they give shape are present only as obstacles to the realities deemed relevant – scientific, advanced, superior, global or productive realities. They are therefore disqualified parts of totalities which are only ever seen as homogeneous. They are what exists, albeit irretrievably, under disqualified forms of existence.

The epistemologies of the South start by denouncing the existence of the abyssal line and the epistemic and ontological degradation that it involves. It is the precondition to acknowledge the ways of being and the ways of knowing existing on the other side of the line, in the colonial zone. The epistemologies of the South therefore make possible the sociology of emergences. But rather than aiming at any goal claiming complete knowledge – indeed, a most Western-centric modern utopia – the epistemologies of the South seek to deepen the consciousness of the incompleteness of human knowledge. They assume that the epistemic diversity of the world is infinite. Developing the consciousness of such diversity means transitioning from ignorant ignorance to learned ignorance.

Learned ignorance…

My suggestion of the concept of learned ignorance is inspired by the fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. More than a concept, it is an epistemic and ethical stance or disposition to assume ignorance, that is to say, to develop the consciousness of not knowing. In 1440, Nicholas of Cusa published De Docta Ignorantia (1985). In this and in the books that followed, particularly in Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1988), Idiota de Mente and Idiota de Sapienta (1996), Nicholas set the task of showing that ‘to know is to ignore’. The consciousness of ignorance grows as the finitude of human knowledge confronts the incomprehensibility of the infinite. The infinite, be it God, the ‘maximum absolute’, according to Nicholas, or the universe, ‘maximum contracted’, is beyond human comprehension. This, however, does not lead to frustration, since the desire of ignorance is nourished by the infinite search for truth, i.e., for knowledge. 

While absolute truth is not accessible to humans, the infinite search for truth is what best characterises our humanity. The process of knowing is forever incomplete. Only by deepening and expanding knowledge can humans grasp a more precise idea of the inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of absolute truth, thus becoming learnedly ignorant: ‘Therefore, the quiddity of things, which is the truth of beings, is unattainable in its purity; though it is sought by all philosophers, it is found by no one as it is. And the more deeply we are instructed in this ignorance, the closer we approach to truth.’ 

Nicholas of Cusa used the metaphor of the polygon and circle to show the possibilities and limits of human knowledge. The more sides and angles we add to the polygon, the closer it becomes to the circle. If the addition were infinite, the polygon would cease to exist as a polygon. It would become a circle, the negation of the self. In Nicholas’s words: 

For the intellect is to truth as [an inscribed] polygon is to [the inscribing] circle. The more angles the inscribed polygon has the more similar it is to the circle. However, even if the number of its angles is increased ad infinitum, the polygon never becomes equal [to the circle], unless it is resolved into an identity with the circle. Hence, regarding truth, it is evident that we do not know anything other than the following: that we know truth not to be precisely comprehensible as it is. For truth may be likened unto the most absolute necessity (which cannot be either something more or something less than it is), and our intellect may be likened unto possibility. 

In his four dialogues, Nicholas chooses as interlocutors the philosopher (orator) and the layman (idiota in Latin), an artisan. The dialogues take place in public squares and markets, not in universities or monasteries. The dialogues constitute a devastating critique of scholastic philosophy and its pretension to having an answer for all possible questions and finding them in the books of erudite tradition. Nicholas uses the layman as the spokesperson of his own ideas. Addressing the philosopher (the orator), the layman says: 

This is what I was saying – that you are being led by authority and are deceived. Someone has written the word that you believe. But I tell you that wisdom proclaims [itself] openly in the streets; and its proclamation is that it dwells in the highest places… Perhaps the difference between you and me is the following: you think that you are someone knowledgeable, although you are not; hence, you are haughty. By contrast, I know that I am a layman; hence, I am quite humble. In this respect, perhaps, I am more learned [than you].

Contrary to ignorant ignorance, learned ignorance is an active and demanding exercise that consists in conceiving the unknown not as the opposite of what one knows but as an integral part of what one knows. Knowledge is a human task that only makes sense because there is the unknown. There is no proportionality between the finite human knowledge and the infinite unknown but, as human knowledge advances, the idea of the unknowable – the incomprehensible and ungraspable – becomes more intense in its opacity. In this sense, the more we know the more we know that we don’t know. This consciousness of what is ignored is what most distinctly unites human beings. Different ways of knowing permit us to know differently different areas or dimensions of reality, but all of them are bounded by the unknown that constitutes them. Humans are united not by what they know but by the fact that, no matter how diverse whatever they know, they always face the same limit, the same darkness, the same opacity, the same silence of the incomprehensible unknown. The more they know, the more precise the idea of such incomprehensibility.

Nicholas of Cusa also illustrates how, prior to modern capitalism and colonialism, in the transition from the medieval to the modern period, Western thinking was engaged with other philosophical and cultural traditions in a horizontal fashion as equal partners in a conversation of humankind. Reading Muslim thinkers such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Al-Ghazali, or even Ibn Khaldun, one experiences the same sense of cosmopolitan attitudeI suspect that in a Zeitgeist characterized by different systems of knowledge and cultures transiting in opposite historical paths but sharing the same search for a new equation between roots and options, epistemicides were not committed on the same scale and with the same unilateral cognitive despotism that characterizes Western modernity in the period after the European colonial expansion. 

In the Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae – a response to a vicious critique of De Docta Ignorantia by John Wenck in De Ignota Litteratura – Nicholas draws upon Al-Ghazali to defend learned ignorance. Citing approvingly and praising the elegance of the formulation, Nicholas quotes Al-Ghazali’s reference to God in Metaphysics: 

‘If anyone knows demonstratively the necessary impossibility of his apprehending Him, then he is a knower and an apprehender; for he comes to know that God cannot be grasped by anyone. But if anyone cannot apprehend, and does not know (on the basis of the aforementioned demonstration) that it is necessarily impossible to apprehend God, then he does not know God. And all men are thus ignorant, except for the worthy, the wise, and the prophets – all of whom have profound wisdom.’ Al-Ghazali [said] these things. 

Later in the book he praises Al-Ghazali for his defence of logic as the ‘power of reasoning. Al-Ghazali is thus cited side by side with Socrates, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius. The range of the philosophical dialogues entertained by Nicholas of Cusa is in itself a masterful exercise in learned ignorance.

…and the epistemologies of the South

For the epistemologies of the South, the infinite is the epistemic diversity of the world, and the different, constituent human ways of knowing share the same condition of being finite. Herein lies the dialectical bond between unity and diversity in the domain of human knowledge: infinite diversity is incommensurable with what we can know about it. What unites humankind is the inaccessibility of the full epistemic constitution of the world. According to Carl Jung, this unity is primordial – the unus mundus of the alchemy – and it is traceable in ancestral time from where archetypes emerge. 

The ancestral is the configuration of the common from which diversity developed or unfolded. No system of knowledge can thus claim the monopoly of truth. To claim the monopoly of truth is the utmost exercise in ignorant ignorance as it can only be based on extra-epistemic (political, military, ideological) power. The tragic consequences on this monopoly of truth have thus been both epistemic and political – epistemicide and genocide as the two sides of the same coin. The claim of the monopoly of truth served to legitimise modern capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. 

If societies or social groups are divided as to what truth is, they are united in the search for truth. From the perspective of the epistemologies of the South, such commonality is what grounds the struggles against modern domination. Such struggles often combine different knowledges and ways of knowing. Hence the need for ecologies of knowledges. Knowledges developed by the epistemologies of the North can be a valuable contribution to such ecologies, provided that they forsake the claim of exclusive truth and combine with other knowledges and ways of knowing with the common purpose of strengthening social struggles against oppression and domination. The epistemologies of the South are an epistemic, political, and ethical proposal geared to promote and legitimise the movement or transition from monocultures to ecologies, with the objective of making possible global cognitive justice. The ecologies of knowledges are a precondition for building all the other ecologies. Counter-posed to the five Western-centric monocultures, the five ecologies – of knowledge, time, classification, scale, and production – make up the sociology of emergences and progress through learned ignorance. In light of the epistemic diversity of the world, intercultural translation is often required to facilitate the transition from monocultures to ecologies. 

Ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation

The grounding principle of intercultural translation is that there is no proportionality between any single system of knowledge and the infinite epistemic diversity of the world. This means that no single way of knowing can claim to be closer to the infinite epistemic diversity of the world than any other way of knowing. There may be claims of more advanced in knowledge in a given area and others may claim to be more advanced in other areas. There is no absolute criterion to determine the epistemic advancement of a given system of knowledge except by evaluating it in the context of the areas of collective and interpersonal life most cherished or privileged by the specific knowing community. Indeed, all systems of knowledge are incomplete, but not all of them in the same sense. Some will know more about spirituality, others about physicality; some more about time, others about space; some look backwards to imagine the future while others look forward to imagine the future.

In our vastly interdependent era, most transformative collective actions require intercultural translation. Intercultural translation progresses as the participants coming from different cultures and ways of knowing intensify the consciousness of their own ignorance about other cultures and ways of knowing. And since intercultural translation involves contrasting and comparing among different ways of knowing, the specific way of knowing one is most familiar with is likely to emerge from such comparisons and contrasts in a new and surprising light. Hereby learned ignorance about one’s own system of knowledge will emerge. This means that the ecologies of knowledges aimed at by the intercultural translation are also ecologies of learned ignorances. To view them as learned ignorances emphasises self-reflexiveness, while to view them as learned knowledges emphasises their transformative capabilities in the outside world.

Epistemologies of the South are political and ethical – that is, oriented to promote and strengthen liberating activism against modern modes of domination. Oppressed social groups and their epistemologies are subjugated differently by different monocultures. If resistance occurs in isolation – be it epistemic or political isolation – it is bound to fail, given the historical asymmetry between the combination of the different modes of domination and the fragmentation of the resistance against it. Epistemic cooperation (through ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation) is the precondition for political cooperation (through artisanship of liberating practices). The more angles on the unknown, the more credible and potent the concretely known. The greater the combination of social struggles, the more effective and potentially transformative the resistance. In sum, the ideas grounding the transition from monocultures to ecologies through learned ignorance are as follows:

Paths toward learned ignorance

As a positive stance consisting in the consciousness of not knowing, learned ignorance is both an epistemic and a methodological stance which can be enumerated in some of its key moments or dimensions.

The unknown as God and as the infinite epistemic diversity of the world

For Nicholas of Cusa, God is the apex of the unknown, the absolute Maximum; learned ignorance finds in the incomprehensibility of God the most convincing demonstration of its epistemic and ethical correctness. But any entity endowed with infinitude, be it the universe or truth, is equally the domain of the unknown, thus requiring the same learned ignorance. For the epistemologies of the South, the unknown is the infinite epistemic diversity of the world. God and the epistemic diversity of the world point to different conceptions of the unknown – two different experiences of incomprehensibility, opacity and silence. Different metaphors will be guiding the path of learned ignorance. 

Concerning the unknown as a monotheist God, the metaphor of ascent fits the task of learned ignorance. The early Christians used the idea of the ladder to express their mystic path toward the extreme light (and deep darkness) of God, as in John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent in the sixth century. The same is true of Islamic theologians and mystics, most notably in the case of Sufism and of Al-Ghazali’s conception of the wise reason ascending to the loving reason. Similarly, Ibn Khaldun, while analysing the ‘science of Sufism’, considers the ‘stations’ of Sufi mysticism as forming ‘an ascending order’. 

Concerning the infinite epistemic diversity of the world, the most adequate metaphor to express the progress of learned ignorance is probably the metaphor of the road. While the ladder conveys a vertical movement, the road conveys a horizontal one. Both imply openness, incompleteness, and transcending, but invite different discursive and cooperative practices. Only through intercultural translation will it be possible to address such differences and to identify possible convergences in political and social activism. 

Adding in complexity, the path of learned ignorance concerning the unknown God will be different in different religious and cultural universes. For instance, the process of secularisation that characterised Christianity in the Western cultural universe from the seventeenth century onwards is not present (at least, not in the same way) in other cultures. Any exercise of intercultural translation and ecologies of knowledge concerning the role of religious experience in social struggles against domination must bear this in mind. For instance, in the absence of secularisation, the path of learned ignorance concerning an unknown God will not be different (or totally different) from the one concerning the infinite epistemic (ontological and ethical) diversity of the world. Finding commonality or complementarity between the ladder and the road will be a task for intercultural translators.

Enigma, dispersion and bond

Learned ignorance starts from a primordial enigma. It consists in the undecidability concerning two opposing perceptions: it is as plausible to view life (including human life) as a unity as it is to view it as a diversity. Yet the unity of life manifests itself in diversity and diversity signals an underlying unity. The enigma is present at the epistemological, ontological, and ethical level. Different cultures, societies or eras may privilege one of the options but the other will always linger on the margins or underneath, thus showing that, in the end, the option is arbitrary and the issue remains as undecidable as ever. The enigma is how the infinite epistemic diversity of the world manifests its incomprehensibility and ungraspability in regard to any way of knowing. 

Learned ignorance starts from this enigma to expand and deepen the consciousness of the diversity of ways of knowing, born in struggle against domination or susceptible to being used in struggle. Dispersion expresses the moment or stage in which such partial diversity is grasped. In the last instance, such dispersion is responsible for the fragmentation of the liberating struggles. 

Because the epistemologies of the South are political and aim at strengthening the struggles against domination, learned ignorance is the privileged method to build ecologies of knowledges by exploring what unites the different ways of knowing and the complementarities and convergences that can be found in them so that more effective and potentially more successful combinations of liberating struggles can be designed. This is the epistemic and political movement which signals the transition from dispersion to bond. The bond is the glue that combines diversity with unity and provides direction and meaning to such combinations. The bond is both reasoned and mythical, a kind of ‘warm reason’ that excels in strengthening the will and potential to resist against subjugation, humiliation, and oppression. Evoking Al-Ghazali, it may be said that the bond expresses the movement from wise reason to loving reason, having in mind that love now is directed to all comrades, compañeros, compagnons, camaradas, tovarisch that are on the same side of the struggle against domination, and more than willing to join the struggle. The bond is risk, sacrifice, and celebration, existential experiences that presuppose the warm reason or the sentir-pensar of Orlando Fals Borda (2009) or still the corazonar of Patricio Guerrero Arias (2016).

Recognition before cognition

 Recognition in the sense used here is the specific way learned ignorance transits from enigma to dispersion and to bond. It is an existential and normative pre-understanding of other human beings or human collectives as bearers of knowledge worth knowing as they may enrich the liberating struggles in their own specific ways, including in defining what counts as struggle and as liberation. 

Paradoxically, recognition precedes cognition. Recognition means co-presence before meaning. It has epistemic, ethical, and ontological dimensions. Modern Western domination, especially when exercised by violence and appropriation, has yielded – over the centuries, generation after generation – an unfathomable field of dead and suffering bodies. But it has also given rise to a history of struggles, and of strong utopian will, offering resistance to such unjust destruction and suffering. This historical fate calls for immediate care, including care for the families and social groups most severely affected by the violence against bodies. The immediate and unconditional care for those in need comes first and before any judgment about the political or ethical evaluation of the occurrence. This is another reason why recognition comes before cognition.  

Conjecture and the intensification of intersubjectivity 

Learned ignorance progresses by deepening the understanding that, as absolute truth is unattainable, human knowledge is conjectural. The conjecture is the epistemic quality of something which, while not claiming the truth, is not a lie. The conjecture can only exist in community. As João Maria André emphasises, ‘to conjecture is not to objectivize, and the difference can be traced in the distinction between the prefix ob in ob-jectivize and the prefix cum in con-jecture’. The communitarian and participatory character of conjectural knowledge progresses by expanding the circle of participant subjects rather than by transforming them into objects of someone else’s knowledge. In this sense, it intensifies intersubjectivity, a precondition for the aggregation and combination of wills in any complex struggle against oppression. Learning is therefore co-learning, just as acting is co-acting. Learned ignorance informing conjectural knowledge is at the antipodes of any central religious or secular command.

Learned ignorance and the shadow 

The ideas of light and darkness and the dialectical relations between them are a constant leitmotif in different cultural universes. In both Western and Islamic philosophical tradition light and darkness are the privileged metaphors to express the progress and the limits of human knowledge and understanding. For Nicholas of Cusa, darkness is both the absence of light and the excess of light, and human vision (knowledge) is possible along a continuum without, however, reaching the extreme. As much as the divine unknown must be comprehended as incomprehensible, the full light is only ‘visible’ as darkness, as an invisible light. Similarly, in Islam the parables of light and darkness are abundantly present in the Quran. Al-Ghazali and other Islamic scholars have dealt with the enigma of light both as a scientific phenomenon and as a metaphor for the cognitive and mystic experience. Light is indeed one of the names of God, as well as a term associated with guidance. 

Focusing on the epistemic variant of the light/darkness dialectics, let us consider the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno’s elaborations on the concept of the shadow, one of the most exhilarating creations of the early Western tradition. It is, indeed, another instance, like Nicholas of Cusa and, later on, Baruch Spinoza, of the wayward nature of philosophising in the early period of Western philosophy that faded away in the following centuries. Of course, disobedience, however possible, was exercised at great personal cost. Giordano Bruno was sentenced to death by the Inquisition and burnt at the stake in 1600. In 1582 his De Umbris idearum [On the Shadow of Ideas] was published in Paris. In intentio secunda, he writes: 

The shadows are not darkness. They are rather traces of darkness in the light or traces of light in the darkness. Or they partake of light and darkness. Or they are composed of light and darkness. Or they are a mixture of light and darkness. Or they are indifferent vis-à-vis light and darkness or alien both to light and to darkness. This is due to the fact that truth is not all light or that light may be false or perhaps neither true nor false. It is just a trace of what is true or false. In any case, in our exposition, the shadow is to be considered a trace of light: it partakes of light though not full light. 

In my view, this is the most encompassing and creative formulation of the idea of learned ignorance. 

From fragmented to combined resistance

The specificity of modern domination lies in this: while it is possible to imagine a non-capitalist society with some form of colonialism and patriarchy (indeed, it has existed as an historical fact), it is not possible to imagine a capitalist society free of modern colonialism and modern patriarchy. Therefore, there is no way of overcoming domination without overcoming the fragmentation of the resistance it causes. 

Overcoming fragmentation is one of the central objectives of the epistemologies of the South. However global, the three main modes of modern domination operate differently across time and space and are experienced at the existential level very differently by different social groups. For instance, the experience of colonised African people was and is different from that of indigenous people in the Americas, as much as the experience of colonised Muslim peoples in the Middle East was and is different from that of colonised Muslims in Europe. The same is true of capitalist and patriarchal domination. 

Moreover, a given population may experience all main modes of modern domination or only one or two of them. It may experience them with different intensities. Indeed, some of its members may be oppressors concerning a given mode of domination yet be oppressed in relation to other modes. For the epistemologies of the South, even if the three main modes of domination are equally important, it may be that in a given space-time context resisting one of them may be more urgent than resisting others. It may also be the case that other modes of domination, such as political, religion, and caste, intervene in conjunction with the three main modes of domination. Under these circumstances, it is not always easy to determine who is on the same side of a given struggle, assuming that a specific struggle is easily identifiable. 

Overcoming fragmentation is thus a very demanding task, which, except in the case of extreme social turbulence, tends to be partial and not lasting. Guided by learned ignorance, ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation are the key tools to maximise the possibility of aggregation and combination of social struggles (or an artisanship of practices, as I explain below). 

Any secular or religious central command, deciding in a top-down fashion about the struggles to be fought and how they are to be fought, will always be grounded on ignorant ignorance and are bound to end up in totalitarianisms of different types. This is at the antipodes of the learned ignorance that is the hallmark of the epistemologies of the South.

Artisanship of liberating practices 

The artisanship of practices consists of designing and validating the practices of struggle and resistance carried out according to the premises of the epistemologies of the South. Given the unequal and interlinked ways in which modern modes of domination are articulated, no social struggle, however strong, can succeed if it concentrates only on isolated modes of domination. It is therefore imperative to build combinations between all the different kinds of struggles and resistances. 

The particular way in which they actually occur in practice requires a kind of political work that is similar to artisanal work and artisanship. The artisan does not work with standardised models and never produces two pieces exactly alike. The logic of artisanal construction is not mechanical – it is, rather, repetition-as-creation. Processes, tools, and materials impose some conditions, but they leave leeway for a significant margin of freedom and creativity. The political work underlying the combinations between struggles has many affinities with artisanal work. 

Curiously enough, the layman (the idiota) that Nicholas of Cusa uses to convey his own ideas about knowledge, wisdom and learned ignorance is an artisan whose craft is spoon-making – wooden spoons that he sells in the market. 

Transition to a real utopia

The epistemic differences between the epistemologies of the North and the epistemologies of the South are as decisive as the social, political, and cultural blueprints they make possible. While the epistemologies of the North progress through ignorant ignorance and have tended, in general, to service the interests and powers of modern capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy throughout modern history, the epistemologies of the South progress through learned ignorance. The epistemologies of the South are born in the struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy by those social groups that have suffered most from the systemic injustices caused by these modes of domination. 

The epistemologies of the North were foundational in defending the idea that the new is to be built against the ruins of the old and on the top of them. Epistemicide was the other side of modern innovation. For the epistemologies of the South, on the contrary, the new is always built with the ruins of the old. The old of the modern period is the current combination of the three main modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – and the fragmentation of the struggles resisting against them. The epistemologies of the North and the constructs they gave rise to (such as, modern science, modern state, and modern law) made possible both the combination among modes of domination and the fragmentation of the resistance against them. This explains why the epistemologies of the South, while opposing the epistemologies of the North, do not reject in principle all the cognitive advancements they made possible. On the contrary, they use them selectively and to the extent that such advancements contribute to the five main ecologies. 

Only through learned ignorance will it be possible to transition to new ways of thinking and only by means of these new will combinations among struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy be attainable. In such combinations lie the hopes for effective liberation. They are the real utopia of our time. 

Citations

This essay builds upon a body of previous work that includes Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 1998: ‘The Fall of the Angelus Novus: Beyond the Modern Game of Roots and Options’, Current Sociology, 46, 2, 81-118; 2002: Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation. London: Butterworths; 2009: ‘A Non-Occidentalist West?: Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 7-8, 103-125; 2014: Epistemologies of the South: justice against epistemicide. Boulder - London: Paradigm Publishers; 2017: ‘The Resilience of Abyssal Exclusions in Our Societies: Toward a Post-Abyssal Law’, Tilburg Law Review, 22, 1-2, 237-258; 2018: The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press; 2020a: ‘A New Vision of Europe: Learning from the Global South’, in Santos, Boaventura de Sousa; Mendes, José Manuel (eds.), Demodiversity: Toward Post-Abyssal Democracies. New York: Routledge, 31-53; 2020b: Toward a New Legal Common Sense. Law, Globalization, and Emancipation - 3rd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2020c: ‘The Alternative to Utopia Is Myopia’, Politics & Society, 48, 4, 567-584; 2021: ‘Postcolonialism, Decoloniality, and Epistemologies of the South’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature; and the edited volume (with Maria Paula Meneses) from 2019: Knowledges Born in the Struggle. Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South. New York /London: Routledge.

The discussion on Nicholas of Cusa relied upon the following works: the work of João Maria André, 1993: ‘O problema da linguagem no pensamento filosófico-teológico de Nicolau de Cusa’, Revista Filosófica de Coimbra, 4 (2), 369-402; 1995; ‘La dimensión simbólica del arte en Nicolás de Cusa’, Anuário Filosófico, (28), 547-582; 2006: ‘Nicolau de Cusa e a Força da Palavra’, Revista Filosófica de Coimbra, 29 3-32; 2016: ‘Relire Descartes à partir de Nicolas de Cues’, Noesis, 26-27, 135-153; 2019: Douta ignorância linguagem e diálogo: o poder e os limites da palavra em Nicolau de Cusa. Coimbra: Coimbra University Press; Nicholas Cusa (1985), On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia). Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press. URL: http://cla.umn.edu/sites/jhopkins/DI-I-12–2000.pdf; Jasper Hopkins’s 1988 book Nicholas of Cusa’s debate with John Wenck. A Translation and an Appraisal of De Ignota Litteratura and Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae. Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 3rd Edition and his 1996 publication Nicolas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge. Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press.

Other works referred to were: Abdul Halim Abdul Karim & Muhammad Ibnur (2008), ‘The Nature and Concept of Light in Islam: Insights from Al-Ghazali's Mishkat al-Anwar and Scientific Theories Pertaining to Light’, Paper presented at the 1st ISTAC International Conference On Islamic Science and the Contemporary World: ‘Islamic Science In Contemporary Education’. Kuala Lumpur, January 2008; Abū Ḥāmid Al-Ghazali (1980), Deliverance from Error. Translated by Richard J. Mccarthy, S. J., as Freedom and Fulfillment. Boston: Twayne; Giordano Bruno (2009 [1582]), Las sombras de las ideas (De umbris idearum). Translation from the Latim by Jordi Raventós. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela; John Climacus (1959), The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore. New York, Harper & Brothers; Orlando Fals Borda (2009), Una sociología sentipensante para América Latina. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores and CLACSO; Franz Fanon (1952), Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil; Antonio Gramsci (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart; Patricio Guerrero Arias (2016), Colonialidad del Saber e Insurgencia de las Sabidurías Otras: Corazonar las Epistemologías Hegemónicas, Como Respuesta de Insurgencia (de)colonial. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar Sede Ecuador; Carl Gustav Jung (1973), Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books; Ibn Khaldun (1980), The Muqaddimah. Translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 3. Princeton, Princeton University Press; Rudyard Kipling (1899), ‘The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands’, The Times (London), February 4, 1899; Nur Kirabaev & Olga Chistyakova (2020), ‘Knowing God in Eastern Christianity and Islamic Tradition: A Comparative Study’, Religions, 11 (675), 1-16; Albert Memmi (1965), The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press; Fernando Ortiz (1973), Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar. Barcelona: Ariel.