Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in Latin America > An American philosophy

An American Philosophy

With independence the new republics had to found their own institutions, and their thinkers asked what knowledge would serve them: whether America should invent or imitate.

Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) put it as a choice: “Dónde iremos a buscar modelos?… —La América Española es original = originales han de ser sus Instituciones y su Gobierno = y originales los medios de fundar uno y otro. / O Inventamos o Erramos” (Sociedades americanas, 1842): where shall we look for models? Spanish America is original, so its institutions and its government must be original, and original the means of founding them; either we invent or we err. His end was education for everyone: “El objeto del autor, tratando de las Sociedades Americanas, es la Educación Popular, y por Popular entiende General.—Instruir no es Educar”, the author’s object is popular education, and by popular he means general; to instruct is not to educate. And “la América no ha de imitar servilmente, sino ser original”, America is not to imitate slavishly but to be original.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865), opening the University of Chile on 17 September 1843, held that “todas las verdades se tocan”, all truths touch one another, “desde las que formulan el rumbo de los mundos … hasta las que dirigen y fecundan las artes”, from those that set the course of the worlds to those that guide and enrich the arts, and that “el programa de la universidad es enteramente chileno: si toma prestadas a la Europa las deducciones de la ciencia, es para aplicarlas a Chile”, the university’s programme is wholly Chilean; if it borrows the deductions of science from Europe, it is to apply them to Chile. Its theme would be freedom, set against “la docilidad servil que lo recibe todo sin examen”, the servile docility that takes in everything without examination. The same speech took Europe and the United States as “nuestro modelo bajo tantos respectos”, our model in so many respects, and set “nuestra afortunada América”, our fortunate America, against “los sombríos imperios del Asia”, the sombre empires of Asia, and “las hordas africanas”, the African hordes.

Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), in Montevideo in the early 1840s, denied that there is one philosophy: “No hay, pues, una filosofía universal, porque no hay una solución universal de las cuestiones que la constituyen en el fondo. Cada país, cada época, cada filósofo ha tenido su filosofía peculiar”, there is no universal philosophy, because there is no universal solution to the questions at its root; each country, each age, each philosopher has had a philosophy of its own. So “es necesario que exista una filosofía americana”, there must be an American philosophy, and it “debe ser esencialmente política y social en su objeto, ardiente y profética en sus instintos, sintética y orgánica en su método, positiva y realista en sus procederes, republicana en su espíritu y destinos”: essentially political and social in its object, ardent and prophetic in its instincts, synthetic and organic in its method, positive and realist in its procedures, republican in its spirit and destiny. “Nuestra filosofía, pues, ha de salir de nuestras necesidades”, our philosophy must come out of our needs. It is philosophy applied, “no la filosofía en sí … sino la filosofía aplicada a los objetos de un interés más inmediato para nosotros”, not philosophy in itself but philosophy applied to the objects of most immediate interest to us, for “la América practica lo que piensa la Europa”, America practises what Europe thinks.

José Martí (1853–1895) made knowing the country the ground of government. In “Nuestra América” (1891): “el buen gobernante en América no es el que sabe cómo se gobierna el alemán o el francés, sino el que sabe con qué elementos está hecho su país”, the good governor in America is not the one who knows how the German or the Frenchman is governed, but the one who knows what elements his country is made of. “Conocer es resolver. Conocer el país, y gobernarlo conforme al conocimiento, es el único modo de librarlo de tiranías. La universidad europea ha de ceder a la universidad americana. La historia de América, de los incas a acá, ha de enseñarse al dedillo, aunque no se enseñe la de los arcontes de Grecia. Nuestra Grecia es preferible a la Grecia que no es nuestra”: to know is to resolve. To know the country and govern it by that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyrannies. The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to now, must be taught to the letter, even if that of the archons of Greece is not. Our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours. “No hay batalla entre la civilización y la barbarie, sino entre la falsa erudición y la naturaleza”, there is no battle between civilisation and barbarism, but between false erudition and nature.