Reason, Race, and the Human Project: Sylvia Wynter, Sociogenesis, and Philosophy in the Americas

This chapter draws on the work of Sylvia Wynter to raise the issue of philosophy’s relation to the colonial encounter. Wynter’s work challenges a core conception of “the human” as the “Man of Reason,” pointing out the ways in which the conceptions of humanity and reason emerging from European modernity are connected to practices of colonialism, slavery, and genocide in ways that are not accidental. Rather than abandoning the concept of the human or of reason altogether, Wynter advocates for their re-articulation in ways that are more genuinely universal. The argument of this chapter is that a promising avenue for theorizing this more universal understanding of reason is as creolizing. A creolizing account of reason emphasizes what José Medina articulates as a kind of productive “friction”—a dynamic interaction that requires difference, rather than seeking to overcome it.