[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_26

Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens, 1791

The Enlightenment is so-called because it was a period "enlightened by reason." Within this Era, there are the pillars of Western thought: Kant, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. The untouchables. Anyone who has studied in the philosophical field knows well to what extent these names are cited and repeated in all subsequent currents of thought and with which silk gloves they are still treated. As a student, I felt that Kant was the totemic deity of the faculty: his name was the symbol of an ancient power; it flowed like an energy within everyone's words, and everyone took his writings as sacred texts.

I experienced his figure as a Great Shadow that obscured my view of what was around: all the other thinkers seemed somehow lesser to me. I felt small reading it; I wondered how I, a young woman, would ever understand the reasoning of a genius. I soon discovered that what there was to understand bored me to death.

When I found Maria Lalatta Costerbosa's essay on “Kant and the theory of races,” boredom turned into contempt. Discovering that one of the undisputed divinities of Western thought is also the one that introduced the concept of race ("African Blacks do not naturally possess any feeling higher than stupidity," "The Black is placed at the lowest level among those identified in terms of racial diversity") does not leave anyone indifferent: it hurts, upsets, disappoints.

“Yes, it's impressive,” one of the lectures I talked to told me, “but on the other hand, it was the times that dictated it; no thinker thought differently at the time. We cannot condemn him for this alone; we must look at all the rest." Which rest? He didn't say it but advised me to study Kant better before criticizing him.

What the professor told me wasn't true. His was a convenient answer, which many give in similar situations. Already in the 16th century, thinkers were liberal enough to condemn the slave trade: Domingo de Soto, Martin de Ledesma Valderrama, Fernao de Oliveira, and Bartolomè de Albornoz. A contemporary of Kant, Abbè Raynal, wrote "The History of the Two Indies" in 1770, a criticism of imperialism so sharp that it cost him expulsion from France. His book was burned at the stake in 1778.

Olympe de Gouges was also a contemporary of Kant. And she, like the people listed above, ended up in oblivion. For her, too, the clarity and freedom of her thinking cost her dearly: she was guillotined as an enemy of the French Revolution. French playwright and activist involved in the fight for women's rights, she was also an abolitionist thinker. She wrote in 1788: “The fate of black men has always interested me because of its deplorable lot [...]. They treated those people like brutes, like beings cursed by heaven. But, over the years, I understood that it was force and prejudice that had condemned them to such horrendous slavery, that nature was not to blame, and that everything had depended on the unfair and overbearing interest of the whites”.

Unlike Kant, Olympe de Gouges did not write "all the rest," which is why her gaze on the world was unsuccessful. She only stood against the system of power. A position that has never been included in the podium of the Western enlighten epistemological hierarchy.