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In the eighteenth century, the "human sciences" were created within the philosophy of enlightenment, guided by significant thinkers such as Hume, Smith, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, among others. Human sciences appropriate the model of physics to study subjects from an impartial and aseptic point of view. In this context, sociology, anthropology, philology, and musicology were born.
Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez has called this pretension the hubris of the zero point.1 For the Greeks, the hubris was considered the worst of sins because it supposed the illusion of being able to go beyond the limits of the mortal condition in order to become like the gods. Hubris is therefore synonymous with arrogance.2
From this pretended zero point of observation, the sciences of man built a discourse on history and human nature in which the peoples colonized by Europe appeared at the lowest level of development, while the new science, the market economy, and modern political institutions were presented as the ultimate goal (telos) of the social, cognitive, and moral evolution of humanity.3
In this context, the human sciences serve to describe the individuals outside the zero point. These individuals seek to legitimize and reaffirm the preeminent place in the world of the illustrated thinkers. The "hubris of the zero point" also supposes a separation between the identified superior intellect and the inferior body.
The scientists and enlightened philosophers were convinced that they could acquire an objective point of view. To achieve complete objectivity, the observer should detach himself from any prescientific and metaphysic observation. In doing so, the enlighted philosophers established a dialectic between the barbarism of the American, Asian, and African societies that represented tradition and the civilized European society that represented modernity. From that moment on, the history of Europe became the world's history, and all other cultural voices of humanity were seen as "traditional" or "primitive," and were regarded as outside world history.
This dispositive served as an instrument for the consolidation of an imperial and civilizational project ("the West") that it called to impose its cultural values on other peoples, considering them to be fundamentally superior.5 A dialectic of opposing paradigms of thought was established between the center and peripheral areas. The center was occupied by Western Europe, and the peripheries were associated...