Scheidell 1

Stephen Scheidell
Dr. Genzo Yamamoto
Enlightenment Modernity and its Discontents
17 December 2009
To struggle against historicism, then, is to try and tell a different history of reason.
-Dipesh Chakrabarty1
Enlightenment Modernity and Heterorationalities
I: Introduction
This paper pushes Chakrabartys challenge a step further. While he attempts to tell a
different history of reason, this paper attempts to tell the different histories as told by various
rationalities.We will explore varied conceptions of the human faculty of rationality growing out
of indigenous cultural contexts, and demonstrate how thinkers within these societies interpret
their culture, society, and their history through the lens of their culturally contingent forms of
rationality.The thesis of this paper is >>>>>>>. The term heterorationalities allows us to refer
to the human faculty of rationality, while simultaneously implying the thesis of the paper
multiple ways of being rationa. Our first task involves seeing how heterorationalities arise. We
will then use this framework to analyze their effects in three examples: Europe in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Arabic thought in the nineteenth century, and the ethos of
Bushido in early twentieth century Japan as described by Inazo Nito.
How will we construct categories for understanding these rationalities without imposing a
rationality of our own? In short, we cannot. We can at best offer a framework that attempts to
understand these rationalities from within. Tha is to say, for such a framework, we will follow

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. p. 236.

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something akin to Chakrabartys anachronism. However, ours will differ insofar as we will
buttress his method with ideas from a variety of writers in order to construct our framework.
Constructing a framework for understanding heterorationalities constitutes the first task
of this exposition. This framework will be built upon the gathered insights from Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Ivan Kireevsky (1806-1856), Pyotr Lavrov (1823-1900), and Nicolai Mikhailovsky
(1842-1904)2 Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash, and Charles Taylor.3 The framework relies
upon these thinkers, not by virtue of finding in them a golden key in their thought. Rather, the
present author relies upon limited resources, yet finds in their writings malleable material for the
framework of seeing heterorationalitie. More importantly, these thinkers all write within the
context of societies responding to, and thus utilizing the language of, the European
enlightenment modernity. Since these writers use many of our categories for their responses, they
allow us to see our own categories through a new lens. When we can see our own categories
through their lenses, these categories inevitably become more malleable.
We will raise this framework upon the challenge set forth by contemporary Bengali postcolonial theorist and historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty. In chapter eight of Provincializing Europe,
Chakrabarty asks, How do we find a home for reason even as we acknowledge the plural ways
of being human?4 This question provides the central provocation of this study, for this study will
suggest that we need not find a home for reason. Rather, we shall see heterorationalitiesmaking
themselves at home within various societies and communities. When thinkers attempt to examine
and evaluate practices without understanding them within the context of their indigenous
rationality, miscommunication and misunderstanding arises.

Primary material for Kireevsky, Lavrov, and Mikhailovsky come from Russian Philosophy volumes I and II.
Names not followed by dates denote contemporary intellectuals.
4
Provincializing Europe. p. 236.
3

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Chakrabarty offers glimpses of this misunderstanding when the European rationality
attempts to force Indian daily life into its own categories of religious/secular, public/private, and
modern/traditional. Chakrabarty finds the European rationality incomplete for the task of
capturing the daily practices of the subcontinent. For instance, peasants lives, including their
politics, are replete with practices that could seem superstitious to the rational and secular
observer. How would history, a rational-secular discipline, understand and represent such
practices?5 We will rephrase the question for our purposes. How can a rational-secular
discipline expand its categories in such a way as to understand practices that it instinctively
considers irrational
In order to begin such a self-expansion, the rational-secular disciplines underlying
rationality must return home. Other heterorationalitie, as we shall see, can root themselves in the
soil of their own cultural context. In contrast, European rationality uprooted itself and traveled
nomadically, for it considered itself universal. Its nomaditravels led to two resultsboth
crucial for this essay. First, cut off from cultural roots, it meanderedmingling with the
indigenous philosophies along its global wanderings. Secondly, it dispatched from itself the
category of an indigenous rationality.6I short, by calling this indigenous rationality universal, the
very concept of an indigenous rationality becomes a paradox at best. We will explore the
connection between European context and European rationality in greater depth in section IV.
Before we can do so, we will finish constructing our framework, without which we have
inadequate categories for this project.
II: Materials for Understanding Heterorationalities

Ibid., 237.
We anthropomorphize the European rationality, not because it assumed a life of its own. Indeed, persons holding
their ideas to be universal carried the ideas globally, oftentimes forcefully.
6

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The force of this framework rises from the writings of the Russian philosophers Ivan
Kireevsky, Pyotr Lavrov, and Nicolai Mikhailovsky. First, let us make a few comments on
tendencies in Russian philosophy. The most original work came from the non-academics. These
thinkers were rarely university professors, but rather critics. Sren Kierkegaard, J. S. Mill,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre exemplify the critic-philosopher in the Western
philosophic tradition.7 These Russian thinkers mostly tackled more tangible problemsethics,
political and social philosophy, philosophy of history, and the like. Indeed, the ethical and social
problems of the day rarely left the minds of the most profound Russian thinkers. Kireevsky,
Lavrov, and Mikhailovsky certainly demonstrate this tendency in different forms.
When Kireevsky lived, prevailing view of Russian culture held that Russia had no
culture. Predominant voices that all value in Russian culture was that imported from Europ.
Kireevsky and his colleague Alexei Khomiakov combated this view by arguing that Russian
Orthodox Christianity offered a gift lost in the Western nations. Because Byzantium fell in 1453
and Rome defected8 in 1054, Moscow remained as the last vital center of Christianity. For
Kireevsky and Khomiakov, Russian Orthodoxy infused the culture with a moral conviction that
united the entirety of the human person. This moral conviction embodied, for them, the unique
character of Russian thoughtintegrating historical, emotional, psychical, epistemological,
ontological, political, and ethical speculation into a united thought process. Kireevsky called this
integral cognition.9 It could thus overcome the limits of Western philosophy, which
systematically compartmentalized and elevated syllogistic logic from other human faculties and
concerns. Because Western philosophy came to an impasse though this syllogistic reduction,10
7

Russian Philosophy, vol. I. Preface. p. x.

Writing from the perspective of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Kireevsky and Khomiakov saw the schism as
Roman Catholicism splitting from them.
9
Ibid., 168.
10
This contention carries much more nuance and weight than can be captured in a dependent clause. Eighteen years
after this article, Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) elaborates these limits in The Crisis of Western Philosophy:
8

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and thus in need of a new epistemological basis,11 Russia could offer its unique indigenous
philosophy, which overtly roots itself in the Russian culture, i.e. Russian Orthodoxy.
This last point interests us most. Kireevsky consciously contributed not to Philosophy
proper, but to Russian philosophy, which in turn can contribute to Philosophy proper. This
conscious awareness of contributing to an indigenous philosophy flows directly from his
argument, which bears close resemblance to and inspires this papers thesis Kireevsky suggests
that each cultures indigenous philosophy grows from its religious confessions orientation
toward reason. Philosophy did not arise in Europes Catholic nations because the ecclesial
hierarchy subsumed under itself all access to truthleaving little to no room for speculation.
Protestant countries, in contrast, abandoned hierarchical authority. But since scripture received
no interpretation apart from the readings of individuals, truth required a common basislogic.
Thus, Protestant inspired philosophies mainly remained in the sphere of logical rationality.12
German philosophy, for example, captured Europes philosophy by elevating the formerly
fragmentary activity of understanding (die Vernuft) to the all-encompassing supreme reason (der
Verstand). Orthodoxy, in contradistinction to both Catholic and Protestant confessions, affirms
reason yet does not confuse human speculation with divine revelation. By having set a boundary
between divine revelation on one hand and human reason on the other, the two do not transgress
Against the Positivists. There he walked through the Western philosophical tradition from Descartes to his own day,
rigorously demonstrating that developments up to logical positivism flowed from an emphasis on logical coherence
above all else. He then argues that this emphasis leads to a reduction of all knowledge to an empirical study of the
mind and consciousness. He concludes that philosophy can only proceed by opening to wider sources of knowledge.
Written in 1874, The Crisis nearly predicts the course of philosophy to our present day. In 1901, Edmund Husserl
(1859-1938) wrote the Logical Investigations, which contended that consciousness can only be adequately studied
by examining the objects of which one is consciousness. In doing so, Husserl re-opened philosophy to study all of
experience as it appeared to consciousnessphilosophy qua phenomenology. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
opened phenomenology further with the 1927 publication of Being and Time when he argued that all knowledge
claims originate from persons situated in a given history, culture, community, language, etc. In fact, Heidegger even
brings moods into the conversation of knowledge. All these factors disclose the material by which one makes any
knowledge claims. Now, compare this with Kireevskys claim in 1856 of the need for integral cognition. Kireevsky
seems to anticipate the need for Heideggers project 71 over seventy years in advance.
11
Ibid., 169.
12
Ibid., 177f.

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into each others realm. Thus, Orthodoxy guards reason from inappropriate church intervention.14
Orthodoxy leaves room for speculation, but guides it by divine revelation. Kireevsky then
recognizes himself as speaking to Russian philosophy, which grew from the soil of Russian
Orthodoxy.
For our purposes, we take from Kireevsky this concept of an indigenous philosophy and
its general course of development. However, we focus on the indigenous rationality underlying
these philosophies, thereby discovering heterorationalities. Furthermore, we want to explore
more sources for heterorationalities. We want to see the influence of other cultural artifacts on
the resulting indigenous rationality. To flesh out these sources, we will borrow from the work of
Pyotr Lavrov and Nicolai Mikhailovsky
Lavrov and Mikhailovsky represented the Populist movement in 1870s Russia. After the
Nihilists of the sixties reduced the human experience to mechanical materialism,15 Lavrov and
Mikhailovsky rebutted. They saw the inability of an objective method to capture human hopes,
fears, and ideals as a force in history. Although a strong advocate for the central importance of
science for learning, Lavrov thus rejected a reductive scientific method as an adequate guide to
understanding the ebbs and flow of the past.16
As a socio-economic program, the Populists looked to the village commune as the
example and nucleus of Russias instinctive socialism.17 In making this move, they deeply
rooted themselves in Russian history and social structure.18 They added to this a forceful moral
impetus relevant for their day. They held that the intelligentsia had the resources and leisure for

14

Ibid., 197.
Russian Philosophy, vol. II. p. 112.
16
Ibid., 129.
17
Ibid., 111. Term coined by Alexander Herzen (1812-1870).
18
Ibid.
15

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their study only forthe toil and suffering of the peasant masses. The intelligentsia, therefore, were
to repay this debt by devoting their work to the service of the masses.19
Our project will extract two key ideas from Lavrovfirst, the inevitability of a
subjective interpretation of history, and and secondly, his schema for the backdrop of intellectual
patterns. He bases these inclinations and needs in two other sets of nee. He first sets out to
describe the biological and psychical needsthose that flow from the physiology of the human
species. Secondly, from these arise, and follows with those that are varied cultural and social
practices, habits, and norms. These The latter constitute what Pierre Bourdieu calls our
habitus.20 Finally, from the intricate influences of the habitus and the individuals personal
character arise the intellectual inclinations.21This final point is crucial for our objective. If
intellectual patterns do in fact bear the fruit of the soil from which they arise, then will different
soils give rise to distinguishable intellectual inclinations?
Later in his Historical Letters, Lavrov discusses the inevitably subjectivity of historians
interpretations. For example, those whose ideals stress an absolute good will read their past as
preparatory steps toward the age in which society consciously pursues that goal. Therefore,
historians will always see progress in accordance with their own ideals.22 Couple this insightwith
his theory of intellectual inclinations rising from cultural norms. If Lavrov describes these
phenomena correctly, it follows that indigenous soils will grow indigenous rationalities, which in
turn have culturally rooted schemas for interpreting history.
Nicolai Mikhailovsky pushed these multiple progresses a step further. In an examination
of Herbert Spencers ideas of social evolution, Mikhailovsky asked the following. Does social
19

Ibid., 142f.
Charles Taylor. Two Theories of Modernity. Alternative Modernities. ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. p. 187.
Examples of these norms would include proper etiquette norms, ways of greetings, general patterns of conduct, etc.
21
Russian Philosophy, vol. II. p. 128.
22
Ibid., 131.
20

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evolution necessarily include evolution of the individual?23 He boldly concluded the two
evolutions to be mutually exclusive24 by comparing the labor of the savage to that of a worker in
a watch factory.25 The savage works to build a homeplanning each step, devising any available
tools, and dreaming of future comforts. In short, the savage integrates all faculties. In contrast,
the factory labor subsumes the factory worker into its machinery. It reduces the varied cognitive
faculties of the laborer to the mechanistic process of constructing but one cog of the watch. Thus
in a sense, the savage evolves all cognitive faculties by continual use, while the member of
evolved society atrophies in all faculties but one mindless, mechanical rhythm.
Our final piece of material comes from the work of Charles Taylor. In his essay Two
Theories of Modernity, Taylor adds the symbolic26 between the habitus of Bourdieu and the
explicit intellectual inclinations as espoused by Mikhailovsky. A partly explicit understanding,
Taylors symbolic represents the sense of understanding a work of art, a ritual, etc.anything
that may be more explicit than social habits, yet more implicit than a statement that can be
submitted to the demands of formal logic.27 He uses the example of practices in a theistic culture.
One may have habitus level beliefs about a deity and explicit formulations of doctrine. Between
these two levels lie beliefs about the relations one has with that deity. These beliefs manifest in
rites and practices.28 Chakrabarty offers good examples of the symbolic in the epilogue of
Provincializing EuropeKenyattas grandfathers magic, Appiahs father offering scotch to their
ancestors, and the saddle-quern in Kosambis kitchen. For Chakrabarty, these rites embody the
fragmentary influences on the present lives and plural ways of living therein.29 Taylor would
23

Ibid., 177.
Ibid., 180.
25
Ibid., 178f.
26
Taylor. Two Theories of Modernity. Alternative Modernities. ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. p. 188.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. p. 243.
24

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interpret these as manifestations of symbolic understanding. They embody, through explicit
practices, the implicit beliefs of these individuals.30
We will expand Taylors symbolic level of understanding to also house and grow
heterorationalities.Indeed, they arise from the habitus, yet underlie the explicit formulations
made. In this way, heterorationalities seize upon cultural and social artifacts as a pool of
resources31 and subsume them, however unconsciously, into that given indigenous rationali. As
differing soils give rise to differing heterorationalities, the latter in turn give rise to an irreducibly
plural and fragmentary present.32
Esteva and Prakash illustrate this with the case of the Health Center built in Oaxaca.33
The natives receiving this gift from the Western world sifted the artifact through their own
rationality, thereby deconstructing the foreign Hospital into indigenous hospitality. The Health
Center became a House for Guests. The act betrayed all West-conceived notions of progress,
advancement, and even that of resistance. Note that the natives by no means rejected and
abandoned the Hospital. Rather, they accepted it into their pool of resources and built from those
materials something organically fluent with their own society.
This case of the Hospital brings to the forefront one of the dynamics of Europes nomadic
rationality. Precisely because it mingles with other indigenous rationalities, it can offer itself to
the latters pool of resources without necessarily dominating and expelling indigenous resources.
That is to say, it can itself become subsumed, rather than subsume. The Hospital-turned-House
for Guests exemplifies this very maneuver. The Oaxacan natives accepted the Hospital qua
building, but resisted the Hospital qua European rationality of health. In short, they accepted the
30

It is worth noting that Mikhailovskys cultural needs and inclinations could be read as lumping the habitus and the
symbolic into one category. For the sake of precision and clarity, we will hereafter adopt Taylors terminology.
31
Ibid., 246.
32
Ibid.
33
Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-modernism. p. 56.

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gift into the soil among their own tools, but grew and nurtured it according to their habitus and
symbolic understandings.
III: The Framework of Heterorationalities
Let us now recap everything we have extracted from these intellectualsthe arguments
made thus fa. Kireevsky introduced the concept and possibility of an indigenous philosophy,
grounded in cultural dynamics (primarily for him a communitys religious confession). We then
attempted to delve deeperto discover the roots of these philosophies. Beginning with Lavrov and
Taylor, we gathered a rough sketch of how physiological, cultural and intellectual needs aris. We
saw also the way in which the habitus and the explicit understanding intermingle to create the
symbolic understanding. The symbolic maintains and contains the communitys indigenous
rationality. Differing rationalities in turn nurture differing ideals according to which historians
interpret the past. Next, Mikhailovsky taught us not to equate social development with individual
development. The society cannot be treated as if a perfect analog for a united organismleading
us to recognize the fragments of an indigenous rationality to be scattered across the community
rather than floating into a shared consciousness.Esteva and Prakash demonstrated the interplay
between heterorationalities when they contact, yet do not subsume. Finally, Lavrov,
Mikhailovsky, and Chakrabarty argue toward a subjective methodological approach to history.
They contended that an investigator cannot understand the movements of history without first
grasping something of the aspirations of historys agents. In other words, one must be able to
identify with the protagonist on the stage to understand the pla.
Although this may appear as what Chakrabarty terms a decisionist approach to history,
our model differs from that. First, decisionism looks to the past as resources for constructing an
ideal future. Our framework, in contrast, borrows from Mikhailovskys social/individual

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evolution distinction to recognize the everyday inhabitant of the community as generally moving
within the goals of the day-to-day and thus not necessarily concerned with social evolution.
Without social evolution in mind, the everyday inhabitant taps into the pool of resources
instinctively, rather than consciously and for different aims. In fact, even intentional agents of
social evolution may instinctively and unconsciously tap those resources. Secondly,
heterorationalities entail neither a necessary end nor an ideal. Rather, heterorationalities imply an
ever-rootedness in the pastcontinuity over an enda concern for moving in the present above
moving toward a destinatio.
IV: The Effects of Heterorationalities on Historical Hindsight
With this framework in place, we will examine three examples in order to demonstrate
the ways in which distinct heterorationalities allow distinct categories for a communitys
interpretational rubric. We will first examine Europes intellectual revolution (termed the
Enlightenment by many of the natives to this day). Next, we will see how select Arabic
thinkers drew upon the resources of Islam and Arabic language to interact with Europes
rationality as it meandered into Egypt. Finally, the book Bushido by Inazo Nitobe will provide
insights into an aspect of Japans symbolic understandingnow found competing with Europes
indigenous rationality for dominance.
We will here provide only a superficial survey of Europes context wherein a young
rationality began to bud. As several civil and religious wars signaled growing frustration with the
Holy Roman Empire, leading intellectuals began seeking alternative sources for social models.
These sources grew from the declining strength of the Empire. For example, social secularism
directly challenges any religious authority. This emphasis comes at a time of general revulsion
toward religious strife of the last few centuries. In addition, emphasizing reason and science

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further undermined religious claims about the natural world. By 1750, new cultural ambitions
emerged as a newly literate middle class took interest in the worthiness of their own thoughts,
theories and ideas, rather than the exclusive printing of upper class elites. Moreover, as reason
and science began to replace religion and traditionand thus also religious political authority,
the belief in progress through reason also stemmed from the crumbling of a political structure
that seemed to hinder the well being of the peasantry.
Under this context, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote the highly influential What Is
Enlightenment? in 1784. There he answered that enlightenment is humanitys release from selfincurred immaturity,34 which he defined as the lack of knowing for oneself. In line with this
definition of maturity, he writes the following later in the essay. One age cannot conspire to
place the succeeding age in a situation in which it becomes impossible broaden its knowledge
whose original destiny consists in this progress.35
Leaving aside the explicit definition of enlightenment, note the categories with which
Kant views the past and future. The past looked to him as a bleak narrative of captive reason,
from which humanity had recently escaped. The future, in contrast, seemed bright so long as
society had free room to growin knowledge. As Mikhailovsky suggested, the interpreter, in
this case Kant, interpreted the flow of history in terms of his own ideals, i.e. the pursuit of
knowledge and the exercise of reason. Progress through freedom and the authority of reason
grew from historical developments and landed in the pool of resources. These three categories
became part of Europes habitus. Then, when Kant answers the question, he used the iconic, i.e.
symbolic, categories of progress, freedom, and reaso.

34
35

Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?. Kant, What Is Enlightenment?. p. 58.

Ibid,. 61.

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We see the procedure followed again, but with different resources, when we look to
Arabic intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Rifa al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), these
thinkers sifted through a wide spectrum of conceptions of rationality. Tahtawi, inheriting
traditional convictions, viewed an unbridgeable gulf between the Islamic teachings and the
positivism prevalent in Europethe theory that human reason will ultimately replace religion.36
However, Tahtawi saw Europes strength in its mastery of the natural sciences, a strength once
belonging to medieval Arabic culture.37 Tahtawi thus challenged his readers to take up the
sciences but to reject the placement of human reason on Gods throne.
Mohammed Abduhs (1849-1905) project centered on advocating the reasonableness of
Islam, so he wanted to show how the rational mind could affirm faith in Islam. By reason, we can
know the existence and select attributes of God. We can also know that prophecy exists. But if
prophecy exists according to reason, we can recognize the limits of the latter and its need for a
supplementary source of knowledge. Now if reason can demonstrate the existence and role of
prophecy, it can certainly offer criteria for identifying prophets. Finally, reason can show that
Mohammed meets these criteria. Therefore, the rational mind will accept that God is one and
Mohammed is His Prophet.38
Taha Husayn (1889-1973) makes an even farther move from Tahtawi than did Abduh. For
Husayn, the aim of life is civilizationthe rule of reason over nature and life. Religion is
marginalized from the public policies and left to the personal spectrum.39 In short, religion fills
hearts while reason fills heads. He thus sets the two in balance by setting them into distinct
spheres.

36

Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. p. 82

Ibid., 81.
38
Ibid., 145ff.
39
Ibid., 328f
37

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What interests us here is not the tensions between thinkers in the diverse concepts of
rationality nor the spectrum thereof. Rather, we now focus on the categories through which they
see the future destiny of Egypt. Also worth noting is the direction in which the three move.
Tahtawi writes first and foremost from the categories of Islam. However, as the European
rationality further permeated Egypts symbolic level of understanding, the thinkers sound
increasingly European with regard to their categories. Tahtawi, the most infused with Islamic
tradition of the three saw progress in regaining that which Islam had forgotten. Abduh, more
influenced by Europe as that rationality became more ingrained into Egypts intellectuals,
strongly advocated the role of rationality, yet still ultimately submitted it to Islamic authority. His
attempts to fit enlightenment values into these categories mark his writings. More heavily
aligned with Europes symbolic understanding, Husayn sounds just in line with Kant at first.
However, even Husayn valorizes Islamic language.40 Of importance for us is the fact that the
categories became more European as time progressed and Europes rationality became a deeper
and more prominent element in the Egyptian habitus and symbolic understanding.
Inazo Nitobes Bushido offers a final and brief example of an indigenous rationality.
Again, we shall see Japans rooted deeply in Japanese cultural soil. In the business of education
of the samurai, the building of character constitutes the utmost importance. Even the term for
intellectualityChidenotes wisdom above knowledge. Samurai education did not abandon
knowledge in and of itself, but subordinated it to the role of the formation of the samurais
wisdom, courage, and benevolence.41 The Japanese peoples general admiration for the samurai
led to the Bushido ideals to be felt in every class.42 What Japan was she owed to the samurai.
They were not only the flower of the nation, but its roots as well.43
40

Ibid. 325.
Inazo Nitobe, Bushido. p. 94.
42
Ibid., 163.
43
Ibid., 159.
41

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V: Conclusion
The framework and methodology of heterorationalities need not imply an incapacity for
communication across cultures for two reasons. First, as Pyotr Lavrov argues, we all begin with
the same physiological needs. That is to say, while ideas and concepts may not be universal,
certain experiences are surely shared between many communities. Therefore, even if categories
in one rationality do not find a perfect correlate in another, the categories may nevertheless show
some level of similarity. Secondly, for good or ill, eighteenth century Europes rationality has by
now trekked the planet.Therefore, the ideas and values have been imparted in various degrees to
most of the world. Even if a culture responds in absolute resistance, they have been embedded in
that cultures habitusunderstood however negatively. Therefore, even if the ideas are a point of
friction, they are still points of contact. The Western-trained student of history admits the evils
done in the name of this ? nomadic rationality. However, the same student sees that wandering as
an opportunity to make amends by understanding the tragedy as told by the victims. Although
many bridges still burn, others may be rebuilt so that offender alike may share heterorationalities
only in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude.44

44

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. p. 255.