Champion of the Spirit: Anzaldúa’s Critique of Rationalist Epistemology

Abstract

“Fighting with the spirit,” Gloria Anzaldúa stands at the vanguard of a movement, currently underway, to go “beyond the mind, the vital, and the physical” (Interviews/Entrevistas 124–25). She develops a mode of consciousness offering both an integrated theory of pluralist totality and a recorded life experience of “multiple little selves” coexisting within “the big self” (Interviews/Entrevistas 20). Anzaldúa preserves cohesion without sacrificing differentiation by grounding her lived experience and conceptual thought in a spiritual dimension, pointing the way beyond the deadlock between modern rationalism and postmodern scepticism. She ardently criticizes the Western mindset for privileging “the mechanical, the objective, the industrial, the scientific” (Interviews/Entrevistas 163) while denigrating imagination, fantasies, and dreams as equally legitimate modes of knowledge. The depth vision Anzaldúa cultivates injects lucid observation with the prismatic powers of imagination, intuition, and feeling. Far from constructing subject/object binaries, she weaves self, world, and spirit into a synergistic whole: “I look for omens everywhere, everywhere catch glimpses of the patterns and cycles of my life” (Borderlands 58).

Growing whole means becoming divine …It’s like recognizing myself, taking the veil off. It’s like building a bridge to the source—to the creative life force, the substance that’s in everything.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa