Against calumny. In defense of Boaventura de Sousa Santos – by Marinela Chaui

Marilena Chaui is a professor at the University of São Paulo. She is Brazil's most important philosopher and one of the world's leading experts on Spinoza's philosophy. She holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including the University of Paris 8.

Anyone visiting the Uffizi Gallery will surely wonder at the difference between two paintings by Botticelli: Primavera and The Calumny of Apelles.

The first is radiant. With its heavenly beauty, Spring hovers in the air, her feet barely touching the grass of a lush flowery forest, where the Three Graces dance. In contrast, the second is dreadful: Envy, accompanied by Fraud and Malice, wrapped in dark robes, approve of Calumny, who, grabbing the victim's hair, drags the half-naked Apelles across the ground, while Ignorance and Suspicion whisper poisonous words in the king's ear. At a distance from this evil group, alone, pointing to heavenly justice, stands Truth, naked, for she has nothing to hide.

 To us, Brazilians and Portuguese, who for years lived under dictatorships where thinking was a crime, where friends and comrades, in the struggle for freedom, justice, and happiness for our peoples, were secretly dragged to prisons and dungeons, suffering physical and psychological torture and murder, leaving indelible pain and scars on the survivors, Botticelli's painting exposes the unacceptable and the unspeakable.

It seems to me, however, that there is no image more pertinent and appropriate to describe what slanderers, with fraud, malice, and envy, have perpetrated against Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose political biography reveals his role in the democratic struggles of Portugal, Africa, Brazil, and other Latin American countries, as well as his resolute presence at the World Social Forum, and whose academic biography is woven with the threads of his innovative thinking and his work in training new generations of teachers and researchers in Portugal, Brazil, Africa, and other parts of the world. Proof of this is the creation, at the University of Coimbra, of the Center for Social Studies and the Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais.

One of the most striking features that define the work and the person of Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the articulation between theoretical reflection and practical intervention, while introducing innovative and thought-provoking concepts, in which the work of thought is the first moment of an action whose effects unfold in the invention of new social, political, legal, scientific, and university practices. In short, for Boaventura, the work of thinking is the first moment of an action whose effects unfold in the invention of new social, political, legal, scientific, and university practices.

For slanders to be seen for what they are – precisely as slanders – it is necessary to highlight and reveal the theoretical strength of Boaventura's work, which could have no other source than the sharpness of his reflections, leading him to formulate a concept unprecedented in the social sciences and philosophy, that of knowledge-as emancipation, aimed at criticizing what he called indolent reason. Such concept was based on an analysis of the crisis of modernity and its theoretical and practical failure to harmonize the opposition between regulation and emancipation, which are constitutive of the modern project. To this end, Boaventura proposes something unprecedented: a new paradigm as a way of confronting and overcoming the crisis of modernity – the ecology of knowledges – capable of destroying the assumptions with which modernity opposed ignorance and knowledge as a paradigm legitimizing cultural exclusions superimposed on forms of economic exploitation, ideological domination, and social and political exclusion. The concepts of knowledge-as-emancipation and ecology of knowledges are intrinsically linked, insofar as they express the epistemological core of science and philosophy as work that questions experience in order to make it understood, moving from fact to concept, from data to meaning.

Precisely because it views knowledge from the perspective of emancipatory knowledge and an epistemology of emancipation, taking the ethical-political dimension of knowledge as its decisive determinant, the ecology of knowledges leads Boaventura de Sousa Santos to reject the ideology of multiculturalism. This presupposes the existence of a dominant culture that accepts, tolerates, or recognizes the existence of other cultures in the cultural space where it imposes itself. Against multiculturalism, Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes interculturality, which presupposes equitable cultural plurality, mutual recognition, and mutual enrichment between the various cultures that share a given field of interaction.

In a world currently poor in thought and complacent with indolent reason, it is imperative to assert work capable of creating thought. There is a second reason for choosing this path. Indeed, Boaventura de Sousa Santos' critical work is never carried out without the elaboration of theoretical and practical counterproposals, since, for him, it is essential to reinvent rationality, reinvent society, reinvent politics, reinvent democracy, reinvent culture, and reinvent the university. That is why his work seeks to recreate a critical theory whose meaning lies in the practice of emancipation, that is to say, his work can be read in the expression he coined: “prudent knowledge for a decent life.” That is why in his work it is not possible to separate theory and practice. His thinking is action, and his actions are thoughts concretized in the practices of social, political, and historical subjects.

The assumption that a thinker of this stature would need to plagiarize students is laughable. On the other hand, it is equally malicious to imagine that the defender of a decent life would take advantage of their supposed naivety to sexually harass them, for we must not forget that, as scholarship recipients at the Center for Social Studies, the slanderers enjoyed an academic tradition of good living and working conditions through academic procedures for the remuneration of research scholarships, and not through sexual favors. Not only that. By falsely attributing an indecent life to him, the slanderers hurt the ideals of feminist movements, because it cannot be liberating to use lies as a weapon of liberation.

The slander seeks not only to discredit Boaventura de Sousa Santos as a person, but also his decisive intellectual contribution as a thinker capable of developing innovative concepts that give meaning to our present and to the direction of our future. We will not let it win.

As a colleague of Boaventura, I express not only my indignation at the malice perpetrated against him and against the Center for Social Studies, but also my admiration and respect for his work as a thinker. As a woman, I have always recognized his generous, elegant, kind, and courteous attitude in his gestures and words. As a friend, affection has been the hallmark of our long and happy friendship.

In one of the most beautiful passages of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that friendship is the human way of imitating the divine. Finite and needy, we are inhabited by lack, dependence, and the presence of death; but also, and for this very reason, we are moved by the desire for fulfillment and self-sufficiency, which are proper to divinity. Friendship is what brings us closer to the divine: the affection between friends, the sharing of our lives with them, the mutual and selfless help in which each one completes the other, gives each one and the unity they form the most perfect human figure of self-sufficiency, freedom, and happiness, which would seem to be reserved only for the divine.

Therefore, echoing Aristotle, La Boétie wrote that “friendship is a sacred name, a holy thing; it never surrenders itself except between people of integrity and only allows itself to be captured by mutual esteem; it is maintained less by benefits and more by a good life. What makes one friend trust the other is the knowledge of their integrity, natural goodness, fidelity, and constancy.”

Marilena Chaui

Professor of Philosophy, University of São Paulo, Brazil

São Paulo, August 18, 2025