An essential question deserves to be asked: who are the Enlightenment the inheritance? The texts and the ideas of the Enlightenment have been the subject, since the 18th century e century, very many translations. They circulated, they were transmitted, received and adapted, in different contexts.
The Indian historian Partha Chatterjee spoke with subtlety before an audience of African students, in 1997, the ambivalence of this heritage for many intellectuals from the world colonized by Europe: the lights were transmitted by the ‘Ancient British colonizer, but also by contemporary philosophy and social sciences, they are inseparable from modernity, it is therefore a heritage that it is possible to claim and defend, with a critical distance born from acute consciousness that This inheritance was transmitted through a situation of violent domination, even if it has also provided the resources to denounce it and defeat it.
This transmission process has therefore contributed to the universalization of lights, but to an ambiguous and incomplete universalization, since in some of these heirs remains a dual relationship that may be like W. E. B. , in another context, that of black American, called “double conscience”.
translation and hybridization
This is all the identification of the Enlightenment in Europe, so significant in our representations, which must be questioned. The lights have never been an exclusively European heritage. The South American revolutionaries, at the turn of the 18th century e
é> and XIX e é> centuries, translated and read the social contract, which was one of the main sources of republicanism, of the rio of the Plata to Venezuela.
In turn, the Ottoman and Persian reformers, then the Japanese of the Meiji era, like Fukuzawa Yukichi or Nakae Chomin, turned to French, German and English authors to think about modernity and what they called them rights of the people. They adapted them to their own objectives and interpreted them with regard to their traditions. As Maruyama Masao has shown, who was himself, in Japan of the 20th century, an enlightened intellectual figure, the success of the lights of Meiji is not only due to appropriation of Western knowledge, but to the existence of a Japanese intellectual modernity, which, during the 18th century e century, had already started criticism of neoconfucianism, rites and tradition.
If the Japanese case is particularly speaking, it is not isolated. Today, in many countries of the world, lights remain a promise of emancipation, no longer as a lesson from elsewhere, but because for a long time, translation and hybridization processes have forged local intellectual traditions , even if these sometimes remain minority or muffled. It is essential to get rid of an interpretation in terms of influence or dissemination, as if the ideas circulated exclusively and peacefully from Europe to the rest of the world.
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