ONLINE FIRST
published on January 7, 2023
Michaela Ott
https://doi.org/10.5840/pga20231636
Dividuation as a Heuristic Concept for a World Philosophy
To highlight the interdependencies of persons, cultures, social, ecological, and artistic entities as a precondition for a planetary thinking or a world philosophy, this essay offers a short reconstruction of the coinage and transfer of the term ¡°culture¡± in the European-African-Antillean context. It underlines that a world philosophy can no longer be executed on ideas of individual entities and corresponding opposites such as ¡°European vs. African¡± and so forth. The author cites cultural understandings of different authors of the Global South as examples of affirmed cultural mixtures and of their mutual participations to bring about a philosophy of relation and dis-individuation. The argument is this: the world of today needs new terms to be conceived adequately in its cultural, social, eco?logical, and artistic interdependencies. The old term, ¡°the individual,¡± must be replaced by the new term, ¡°dividual¡± or ¡°dividuation,¡± thereby underlining the processuality and intermixing of all sorts of entities, helping to move toward a decolonized philosophy of the world.