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A Philosophy of Our America?

From the late 1920s the question whether there is, or should be, a philosophy of this America became the field’s own subject. In Peru José Carlos Mariátegui raised it in 1928; its centre then became Mexico, around Samuel Ramos (1897–1959), José Gaos (1900–1969) and Leopoldo Zea, whose thesis Gaos directed.

Mariátegui (1894–1930) joined thought to life and to his country. “Mi pensamiento y mi vida constituyen una sola cosa, un único proceso”, my thought and my life are one thing, a single process, he wrote in the preface to his Siete ensayos (1928); he was “lo más lejos posible de la técnica profesoral y del espíritu universitario”, as far as possible from professorial technique and the university spirit, and believed “que no hay salvación para Indo-América sin la ciencia y el pensamiento europeos u occidentales”, that there is no salvation for Indo-America without European or Western science and thought. The task was invention: “No queremos, ciertamente, que el socialismo sea en América calco y copia. Debe ser creación heroica”, we certainly do not want socialism in America to be tracing and copy; it must be heroic creation (“Aniversario y balance”, in his journal Amauta, 1928). The journal’s title was Quechua.

Ramos began with doubt about Mexico itself. El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1934) is, in his words, “un ensayo de caracterología, y de filosofía de la cultura”, an essay in characterology and in the philosophy of culture, meant as the starting point “para emprender seriamente una reforma espiritual de México”, for seriously undertaking a spiritual reform of Mexico. His thesis: “la única cultura posible entre nosotros tiene que ser derivada”, the only culture possible among us has to be derived, for Mexico “se ha alimentado, durante toda su existencia, de cultura europea”, has fed throughout its existence on European culture. He proceeded “a ejemplo del método cartesiano”, after the example of Descartes’s method, by doubt.

Gaos made philosophy itself the question. “¿Qué es, pues, esta filosofía, en la que no sabe uno a qué atenerse?”, what, then, is this philosophy, in which one does not know what to hold to?, he asked, and called the answer “teoría de la filosofía … hasta que el conocimiento de Dilthey me hizo adoptar, como nombre más propio, el de filosofía de la filosofía”, the theory of philosophy, until knowing Dilthey made him adopt the more fitting name, the philosophy of philosophy, whose only just basis is the history of philosophy. For Mexico his programme was the history of ideas, as “creadora, en la parte que le toca, de la filosofía mexicana”, itself a creator, for its part, of Mexican philosophy: the “inexistencia de filósofos mexicanos”, the non-existence of Mexican philosophers, holds only so long as there is no history able to find them.

Zea held that the questions of being and of God belong to every human being, but “the solution to them will be given from a Latin American standpoint” (1948, tr. Nuccetelli), and that aiming at Americanness was the wrong aim: “todo intento de hacer filosofía americana, con sólo la pretensión de que sea americana, tendrá que fracasar. Hay que intentar hacer pura y simplemente filosofía, que lo americano se dará por añadidura”, any attempt at an American philosophy that only aims to be American will fail; one must try to do philosophy purely and simply, and the American will come of itself (América como conciencia, 1953). Augusto Salazar Bondy answered in ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (1968) that philosophy “fue traída por los españoles porque éstos vinieron a conquistar y a dominar la tierra americana e importaron con ellos las armas intelectuales de la dominación”, came with the Spaniards, who came to conquer and dominate the American land and brought with them the intellectual weapons of domination, and that “el problema de nuestra filosofía es la inautenticidad”, the problem of our philosophy is inauthenticity, rooted in “nuestra condición histórica de países subdesarrollados y dominados”, our historical condition as underdeveloped and dominated countries. It could be authentic by becoming “la conciencia lúcida de nuestra condición deprimida como pueblos y en el pensamiento capaz de desencadenar y promover el proceso superador de esta condición”, the lucid consciousness of our depressed condition as peoples and the thought able to set off and promote its overcoming: not the owl of Minerva but “la mensajera del alba”, the messenger of dawn. Zea’s reply was titled La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más (1969), American philosophy as philosophy, simply.

Rodolfo Kusch (1922–1979), reading an Andean chronicle of around 1600, proposed that “sólo cabe hablar en América de un probable predominio del estar sobre el ser”, in America one can only speak of a probable predominance of estar over ser, the two Spanish verbs “to be”, and that “de pensar culto y de pensar popular no enunciamos dos distintos modos de pensar, sino dos aspectos de un solo pensar”, in speaking of learned and popular thinking we name not two ways of thinking but two aspects of one (as quoted by Juan Cepeda from América profunda, 1962, and later works).

Arturo Andrés Roig (1922–2012) took his rule from Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy. Philosophy, he wrote, “se caracteriza por ser un tipo de pensamiento que se cuestiona a sí mismo”, is a kind of thought that questions itself, and so “supone además una filosofía de la filosofía”, presupposes a philosophy of philosophy. Hegel had placed its beginning where the subject holds itself as absolutely valuable; Roig made that a plural norm, “ponernos para nosotros mismos como valiosos”, to put ourselves before ourselves as valuable, for “la filosofía exige un pueblo”, philosophy requires a people. This a priori antropológico gives philosophy back “su valor de ‘saber de vida’, más que su pretensión de ‘saber científico’”, its value as knowledge for life rather than its claim to be scientific knowledge, and “exige el rescate de la cotidianidad”, requires the recovery of everyday life (Teoría y crítica del pensamiento latinoamericano, 1981).