PHILOSOPHY

The very word "philosophy" is to me suspicious at this stage of my thinking, because it points to the specific type of thought that was imposed in "America" during the European cultural invasion, and which continues today being imposed in the universities. I prefer to talk on thinking and acting, better than "philosophy", which is the specific form that thinking and acting adopted in the European tradition.

Thinking and acting from this particular and peculiar place that Europeans called "America", this is my main present concern, instead of trying to improve my knowledge and erudition in the official "history of philosophy".

If "philosophy is Greek by essence", it is not precisely philosophy that we need in our countries. On the contrary, the exclusive study of European "philosophy" keeps us dependent.

That "philosophy is Greek by essence" is something that teachers repeat without remorse; they do not dare to say so loudly that religion is by nature Christian. But just as we "latin-americans" have nothing to do with Greece in our origins (although we can study Greek thinkers among others if we like), we have nothing to do with Christianity either (although we can choose to be Christians if we want to).

Our ancients are not the pre-Socratic or Christ, but ancient indigenous antiquity, much older than Greece and Christ, one antiquity that we can hardly know because it was almost totally destroyed. It is a very curious ongoing antiquity because indigenous knowledges and ways of life continue to be destroyed to-day in front of us.

Of course we can continue reading European philosophy, not as a compelling intellectual training but as a valuable intellectual instrument, as a source among others, not as an orienting cultural compass. We are not obliged to be interested in the philosophical problems that come from Europe, nor to see them as universal problems that everyone has an obligation to deal with or solve.

Following in the footsteps of the Brazilian philosopher Oswald de Andrade, European thinkers and others must be devoured anthropophagically and used for our own benefit, without any kind of worship or veneration, as is currently the case in our subaltern universities.

Latin-american universities fulfill a normalizing task in an Eurocentric direction, discouraging any attempt to construct  thinking and acting from our own perspectives and circumstances, from our own agenda of concerns and paradoxes.

Professional philosophy banned the existential motivation for thinking and acting. Thinking is now an institutionalized task more than one way of existing. Human fragility and life's absurdity are hidden or camouflaged beneath the professionalized forms of philosophizing, both in the "analytical philosophy" as in the studies of the “experts in Nietzsche”.

Human weakness - including intellectual weakness - is now disguised in apparently strong, safe and technically competent ways of “mastering the subjects” and constructing "solid arguments”.

Making philosophy in the professional sense became a kind of productivity as any other. Philosophy becomes a “sector of the real” as odontology or gardening. And worst of all, the academic philosopher will answer: "Yes, yes, that's right, that's what philosophy should be, a profession like any other".

In my view, thinking is not reduced to information or "searching". By contrast, thinking is for me a way to discard information, to make contundent reflections without stunning with the excess of data.

Of course, nothing prevents a philosopher from being also a teacher in universities, like Heidegger or Enrique Dussel or myself. In the past, many European thinkers have not been teachers, like Spinoza, Hume and Schopenhauer, and in Latin-America the Colombian Fernando Gonzalez and the Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariátegui never worked at universities. But it is increasingly difficult to think within the universities.

Especially in dependent countries such as ours, it is convenient to assume a very broad notion of philosophy, since the academic tendency is exactly the opposite: philosophy is defined in a very restricted way, very few things are "genuine philosophy".

To the contrary, my idea is that philosophy has a multiple nature and that many types of texts, verbal, visual or written, may be philosophical: texts of logical analysis, existential analysis, but also autobiographies, narratives, poems, films, aphorisms and panflets.

I do not take any attitude of scandal before the multiplicity of the term “philosophy”, irritation before its “lack of a clear definition”, or fear that philosophy be "everything". Because I see the multiplicity  and diversity as a natural development of the very nature of philosophy, not as a mistake or accident to be regretted or resolved.

Thinking (and European "philosophy" is just part of this) develops within a flow of thoughts, since the logical-analytical articulation up to the existential diving into fluid life. Analysis and existence are polarities and philosophies develop a rich and varied range of activities within these two extremes.

I made an analytic philosophy of logic and an existential philosophy of ethics. But in the internal movement of my work both tend to their opposites: my negative ethics tends to sink into the arena of hard argumentation, and my philosophy of logic has Nietzschean grounds.

---

TEXTS

MARIO BUNGE'S IRRATIONALITY
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13KCMV_S1OX0UBA5UUZDFhhvcibfp-Daa/


THE ‘GRADUALISTIC’ COMMITMENT OF THE PHILOSOPHY FOR
CHILDREN PROGRAM
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ygHmdMsiG22PLgrpDkHHHfDREuHfewM6

Posted in: PHILOSOPHY