Philosophy in Latin America: Some Introductory Remarks

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Notes

¹Jose Gaos. En torno a la filosofía mexicana. México, Alianza (1ªed. 1952), 1980, 187; “El pensamiento hispanoamericano” (Jornadas 12). México. El Colegio de México, 1944, 11 (Cerutti Guldberg's footnote). Gaos (1900–1969) was one of the brightest Spanish philosophers that came to Latin America as émigrés from the Civil War (just to name a few: José Ortega y Gasset, to whom Gaos was very close, went to Paris, and then to Buenos Aires; Wenceslao Roces, who would eventually produce very influential Spanish translations of Hegel and Marx, also chose Mexico as his place of exile). Gaos, who had been the Rector of the Universidad Central de Madrid, lived the rest of his life in Mexico, where he taught at UNAM, Mexico's main public university. His philosophical interests evolved from phenomenology (his was the first Spanish translation of Heidegger's Being and Time, published in 1951) to a historicism influenced by Dilthey that, for reasons I will elaborate further in this Introduction, evolved into a “philosophy of philosophy,” a meta-philosophy for which the conditions of possibility, material-historical, as well as intellectual, of the practice of philosophy are at stake.

²“Historia de las ideas filosóficas latinoamericanas,” Hispanismo filosófico N°6 (2000), 4–12, 5. All quotations from Spanish sources have been translated by Eduardo Sabrovsky.

³“Pero si uno se fija bien en la literatura manejada, seguimos leyendo más a los de afuera que a los de casa. Quizás sea inevitable si sólo valoramos la calidad, pero mayor atención y diálogo o polémica con lo que nosotros mismos hacemos no estaría mal.” Reyes Matte is a Spanish philosopher, one of the founders of the Philosophy Institute, CSIC, Madrid (the acronym stands for Consejo Superior de Investigación Científica, Superior Council for Scientific Research). For the sake of the reader who may not be familiar with philosophy written in Spanish, I deem it not inappropriate to add that Reyes Matte is well known as a scholar specializing in the Frankfurt School and in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin.

⁴“Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Filosofía. Diez años de historia.” Isegoría N° 19 (1998), 145–149, 149.

⁵This is not an abstract possibility. The prospect of developing a genuine “Indigenous Philosophy,” an ontology based on the primal experience of the world of the ab-original peoples of America, is one of the trends that converge into the LAP community. The writings of Rodolfo Kusch Gunther (1922–79), an Argentinian philosopher, are nowadays its main referent. But, if philosophy is essentially Greek – as Edmund Husserl thought, and as, for instance, Jacques Derrida emphatically “repeats” in his criticism of Emmanuel Lévinas (“Violence and Metaphysics”) – then the attempt to redeem indigenous cultures by reading them as “philosophy” would do nothing but enclose them inside a Greek philosophical labyrinth. Carla Cordua's essay included in this volume (“History as a Phenomenological Issue”) carefully reconstructs Husserl's ideas on philosophy's Greek identity.

⁶“New Spain” used to be the generic name for the whole Spanish Empire.

⁷“The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” Labyrinths, London, 1970, 216 (translation amended).

⁸Beatriz Sarlo, Borges, a Writer on the Edge, London: Verso, 1993. Also available in: Beatriz Sarlo, Borges, a Writer on the Edge, Borges Studies Online. J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. Internet: 14/04/01 (http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/bsi0.php)

⁹“The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” 218.

¹⁰Bauman, Zygmunt, Legislators and Interpreters: On modernity, post-modernity and intellectuals Cambridge, Polity Press 1987.

¹¹Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, London, Penguin Classics, 1998, 168–70. Many other of hese “local” pieces can be found in this volume: “Man on the Pink Corner,” 45–52; “The South,” pp. 174-79; “Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden,” 208–211; “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1928–1874)”; “The Gospel according to Mark,” 397–401, just to name a few. But, as a brief review of these stories shows, the term “local” (and the split between Borges’ “local” and “metaphysical” stories, poems and essays) is unfair to them, and to the whole of Borges’ literary project and production, aimed precisely at deconstructing it.

¹²“Balance y perspectivas de la filosofía latinoamericana,” Endoxa: Series Filosóficas N° 12, 2000, 359–78, UNED, Madrid.

¹³ The Philosophical Review, Duke University Press Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1965), 3–12, 6.

¹⁴The Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia has neatly captured Wittgenstein's “edgy” nature. In Respiración Artificial, a novel originally published in Spanish in 1981 (Artificial Respiration, trans. Daniel Balderston, Duke University Press 1994), besides presenting in fictional form a discussion on Borges’ writing that thematises its being on the edge between Europeanism and Nationalism, Piglia introduces us to his character, the Polish philosopher Tardewski. Tardewski, once a Wittgenstein disciple, lives now in exile in a forgotten town at the North of Argentine. With no hope of getting back to Europe, he survives giving math lessons to the children of local landowners. Tardewski can be understood as a double Doppelgänger: Wittgenstein's, and Witold Gombrowicz’, the famous Polish writer (Ferdydurke), who was a real exile in Argentine for almost a quarter of a century (1939–63), living almost unknown and in scanty conditions.

¹⁵ An analytical Commentary to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1980, p. 95 (“Exegesis of §38”), §132. The final statement is also significant: “The confusions which occupy us arise when language is, as it were, idling, [wenn die Sprache leerläuft] not when it is doing work.” And the verb leerlaufen is translated a “to drain,” that is, to evacuate, to create a vacuum (die Luftleere), a “vacation.”

¹⁶He adds: “The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterises the way we represent things, how we look at matters.”

¹⁷It is suggestive that Hurtado Pérez, after going through the modernisation / authenticity debate, and seeing in “meta-philosophy” it's Aufhebung, focuses his attention, in the final pages of the article I have been commenting, on institutional, intra-university policies (mainly journals and editorials, syllabi). So, finally, even meta-philosophy turns to be a question of professionalisation, of work.

¹⁸Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Mass/London: Harvard University Press 1996.

¹⁹“Die Totale Mobilmachung” is the expression coined by Ernst Jünger in 1931, and later used by Heidegger in his 1938 essay “The Age of the World Picture” (Appendix 1).