“Si la razón es verdadera, ¿para qué sirven el ejemplo y la autoridad?”. Ilustración y conciencia crítica en dos textos del criollo Miguel de Lastarria

Abstract

The main objective of the study is to understand the enlightened character of two texts that the Peruvian creole Miguel de Lastarria wrote while his stay in the Government of Chile. The hypothesis that guides the work is that the enlightenment of both texts is practical and contingent, which is inferred from Lastarrias’s biographical data. The analysis shows that such qualities are observable in the texts. The Enlightenment produced in them is moved by a patent empiricism, so it is proposed to understand it through the concept of “critical consciousness” formulated by Edward Said.