THINKING FROM LATIN-AMERICAN

                                  THINKING FROM A "LATIN AMERICAN"  PERSPECTIVE


There is a difference between an introduction to Latin American philosophy and a Latin American introduction to philosophy.

An introduction to Latin-American philosophy is something like Carlos Beorlegui's 2006 book, or Enrique Dussel's and collaborators' 2011 book, a commented list of Argentine, Colombian, Brazilian or Bolivian authors who do "philosophy": some of them are analytic philosophers, others are phenomenologists and others do philosophy of liberation.

This is not the point here. I want to understand what it means to do philosophy from Latin American circumstances. This is not the same as studying the philosophical activities made in Peru or Argentina or Bolivia. Thinking ciscumstances are not only geographical. I want to know how we arrive at thinking from a Latin American perspective.

To begin with, the term "Latin America" is particularly uncomfortable, since it refers, in part, to the name of a colonizer (Vespucci) and, in part, to a nineteenth-century denomination to distinguish ideologically the two "Americas" in terms of the various interests of foreign powers and local elites. The name "America" recapitulates the history of the invaders and "Latin America" refers to an ideological distribution of political territories, leaving aside all the not "latin" - indigenous and black - forms of thinking.

On the other hand, many argue that it is not possible to speak of "Latin America" ​​as a unit, as something unique or unified, since it is composed of a group of very different countries, against Bolívar's famous continental ideal. But in the specific case of philosophy, the same scheme crosses almost all "Latin American" countries:

(a) They all were invaded by an Iberian country at the same time (between 15th and 16th century).
(b) Indigenous people were enslaved or exterminated and their cultures destroyed.
(c) In many of those countries, black people were brought from Africa to work as slaves.
(d) In almost all of them European culture was imposed as official and obligatory: Scholasticism, cartesianism, romanticism, positivism, anti-positivism, marxism, and more recently academic philosophy with its diversified expositions of European philosophy.
(e) Almost all of them became formally "independent" more or less at the same time (first decades of the XIX century).
(f) All of them retained their economic and cultural dependence in regard to the new world powers (England, France, and later the United States), and they were and are still treated as culturally subalterns until today.

(a)-(f) configures what I wish to call a negative unity among the "Latin American" countries, unified by the same process of exclusion regardless of their many positive ethnical and cultural differences.


When we ask how we can do philosophy from "Latin America", this is not the only problematic term of the question. The very term "philosophy" is also problematic. "Philosophy" is the very specific kind of thinking developed from Greece, which Europe considers as the cradle of thought. From the Latino-american perspective, "philosophy" is the specific name of the kind of wisdom imposed by the invader on the colonies. When we ask for "philosophy" in America we are looking for the wisdom that perpetuates our cultural dependence.

What I want to think is how to introduce ourselves to the problems of life and death from the "Latin-american" perspective, not by force through "philosophy" as exposed in the official history from Thales to Wittgenstein. "Philosophy" is just one manifestation of thinking. What we have to discover is how to think from our own historical situation, which is not coincidental with the European one. From our perspective, our ancestors are not certainly the pre-socratics or Chistianity.

The Latin-American perspective includes many things, but it begins with a situation of violent cultural invasion. There are many other elements, but that is the inaugural event. The fact of having been colonized and educated in the culture of the dominator forces a dramatic choice that all Latin-americans have to face: adaptation or resistance (and intermediate positions). Latin American countries are not, of course, the only ones in this situation, but this is the primary event from which further differences arise.

Thinking from dependence and resistance is necessarily "insurgent". This term has to be understood as a technical term. Thinking from "Latin America" ​​cannot, for historical reasons, simply appear, because in the current geopolitics there is a strong pressure so that this thinking does not arise.

A Latin American thinker is not expected to think for himself or herself; they are expected to be good commentators or interpreters of European philosophy. That is why own thinking will necessarily be "insurgent" or not at all.

"Insurgency" should not be understood as a mere act of "rebellion", but in an ontological-existential vein. It is not a "fight for freedom", but a struggle for existence, for the elementary right to exist.

The prevailing view on Latin-american thinking assumes the following guiding ideas: (1) Indifference or open rejection of the indigenous tradition;  (2) Acceptance of the Western European philosophy as a model of thinking of high quality; (3) American philosophy as proceeding from a favorable cultural miscegenation; (4) American philosophy does not exist yet; the conditions must be created for it to appear in the future; (5) This will be reached through professionalization, technique, rigor and erudition, discarding all amatteur working; (6) "Latin-American philosophy" will arise from the contact with the western tradition of philosophy in the form of "contributions" to the "universal thinking".

I argue that these guiding ideas (1)-(6) keeps us in cultural domination and delays our insurgency. I propose another organization, completely different, in the following terms:

(1) The Latin-American thinking has one of its inaugural matrices in the indigenous antiquity, in spite of its dispersion and diversity and of the many difficulties of its reconstruction in our days.

(2) The violent emergence of the European model of thinking is not a precious heritage but a historical vicissitude for America, not a model to be acritically followed, but an object anthropophagically devoured and used for emancipation.

(3) If Latin American thinking is pluralistic and diversified, it must be the result of multilateral miscegenation. Frequently miscegenation was the product of rape and have, as explicit horizon, the disappearance of the black and Indian races by succesive mixtures. These mixtures should not be uncritically celebrated (in terms of a supposed "racial democracy") but they must be given to them a new meaning.

(4) Thinking from Latin America ​​already exists, it is not something future that we would still have to wait for. Our thinking is already there, but our Europe-centered eyes prevent us from seeing it. We look for our thinking with inadequate expectations. This thinking has to be digged out through a work of excavation. It is constituted, before the invasion, by the millenarian indigenous thinking, and, after the invasion, by the thought and actions of resistance, including cultural resistance, which is present from the first moments of the invasion, crosses the scholastic age, enters the European modern period and reaches our present days.

(5) It is not through "professionalization" how Latin American thinking will emerge, not by "rigorous" techniques of analysis or "deeper knowledge" of the "history of philosophy". On the contrary, this idea of ​​philosophical education can operate as a powerful way of formal colonization. On the contrary, our thinking will emerge from the most varied range of philosophical, oral and written styles, crossing myth, narratives, music, images and reasoning, without ever remaining within the walls of the academies, but capturing popular and informal thinking.

(6) Thinking from Latin-American circumstances must manifest an insurgent originality, not a mere "contribution" to the problems raised by the official history of "philosophy". Another agenda of problems should be created and developed.

We must dare to write an introduction to thinking from Latin America ​​without the Greek philosophers, without the medieval theologians, without the English empiricists, without the German idealists, without many of the "great figures" of the official history of philosophy, once we assume the criterion of resistance against dependence to identify and evaluate thinking activities. Therefore, "Great thinkers" of the official history of philosophy, like Leibniz (for example), can be insignificant in the Latin-american agenda.

Nothing prevents us from including Plato, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant or Wittgenstein in our agenda in order to make considerations or establish comparisons, taking their emancipatory elements, if any. But European thinkers will not appear in our education as models to be followed or reverential figures. They will be our objects, not our subjects, our tools, not our guides.


THE BRAZIL CASE

A thinking perspective is not merely geographic but a historical-existential process. If  Brazil is part or not of Latin America is not an obvious fact but a philosophical problem. Brazil is a very peculiar case within the context of Latin American thinking, and I have, as a Hispano-American living in Brazil for more than 30 years, privileged position to contemplate all sides of the matter.

What does it mean specifically to ask: "Is there philosophy in Brazil?"

Faced with this problem, a good part of the Brazilian scholars think that there are no genuine philosophers in Brazil. They think that philosophy is synonymous with European philosophy or that there are only European (and North-American) philosophers. Another part thinks that these thinkers do really exist, but they are strongly connected to the institutional project of the Brazilian universities, founded only in the 20th century. 

In neither case the possibility of an authorial philosophy is even considered, if understood as thinking beyond the analysis of texts and the study, exegesis and interpretation of the history of European philosophy. Any supposed "independent philosopher" would be considered incompetent, uninformed or dilettant from the point of view of the institutional philosophy project in Brazil.

It is a fact that Brazilian thinkers belonging to the tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are not studied in the curricula of philosophy in Brazil, not even mentioned; thinkers like Tobias Barreto, Farias Brito or Jackson de Figueiredo are not even considered as genuine philosophers, because philosophy is defined on the basis of modern techniques of text analysis, a task in which the ancestors were obviously not competent. Therefore, they are not exposed in classrooms or in meetings and conferences, except within very specific and narrow groups of scholars, who work in a somewhat marginal way and are seen by their Eurocentric colleagues with a certain skepticism and irony.

The prevailing view in Brazil admits that there are philosophers in Brazil only after the creation of the University of São Paulo (USP) in the 1930s and  the creation of the national postgraduate program between the 60s and 70s, where the philosopher becomes a competent researcher of Euro-North-American thought.

In the background of this situation there is the curious idea that a genuine original philosophy will arise after a long preparation in the techniques of analysis and in the intense and careful study of the history of European philosophy. The whole matter is put in severe institutional terms. The prevailing view is that a community of scholars, good commentators and connoisseurs of classical and modern European philosophy was created, capable of generating papers and books that can compete internationally in quality and rigor. This should, in their view, be regarded as the Brazilian contribution to "universal philosophy".

We soon perceive a strong contrast between this calm and harmless view of the situation of philosophy in Latin America, and the Spanish-American view (from José Martí and José Carlos Mariátegui to Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo), which focuses much more expressively on the issue of dependence and the need for insurgency. In the Latin American context, philosophers in Brazil seems to be the ones that have most accepted the situation of colonization and are perfectly adapted to it, totally forgetting the indigenous and Latin American traditions of fight and resistance.

Brazilian social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists, educators, economists, geographers) had focused on the issue of dependence and emancipation much more than philosophers (if we think in great Brazilian intellectual figures as Florestan Fernandes, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto Freyre, Milton Santos, Darcy Ribeiro or Paulo Freire, none of them strictly a philosopher trained by the hegemonic system).

Surprisingly, the problem of an original and creative philosophy is conceived in Brazil as the result of all this institutional manoeuvering; generations of scholars and commentators should be prepared, creating a community of researchers paving the way for an independent thought. This suggests that a philosopher should be the product of some favorable cultural environment, in such a way that, given certain conditions, the philosopher will arise. Hence, Brazilian scholars spend much time talking about “social and institutional conditions” for the creation of philosophy, or about the situation of libraries, the number of translations, the quality of post-graduation courses and so on.

All these issues are seen as crucial for the creation of an authentic and creative philosophical thinking in Brazil, as if from well prepared institutional conditions a genuine philosopher will emerge. They talk about “stages”: a first step of acquiring study material, the second of knowledge and erudition, and, finally, the stage of original philosophy. This long program allows burning generations of young philosophers in favor of a further generation that, finally, will make autonomous or original philosophy.

I believe that this ideology that thinking requires a big “impulse” is discouraging and paralizing. Thinking does not require any professional "training" or burning many generations: we are now able to think on our own if we have the sensitivity and willingness to try to do it, even facing all kinds of risks. In the institutional approach to thinking the singular and brave decision of thinking is totally missing. This dramatic decision can emerge from a highly individual mode of thinking (the Kierkegaard type, in the European tradition) or from a strongly social and public project (of the Marx type) or from severe erudition (as in the Husserl's and Heidegger's cases). This decision of thinking does not guarantee anything, but puts the thinker on the path of reflection, in the situation of facing things, experiences and events and not just in the endless task of commenting texts about texts about texts.

Someone acts as a philosopher when he/she cannot avoid talking and writing about the world in a particular and singular perspective. Someone does not begin to philosophize just because he/she feels that the institutional conditions of his/her country attained a point where thinking became possible. Thinking arises from an irresistible impulse to expose the world in an inevitably personal way, but , at the same time, affecting everyone. 

This is a heresy to be said at present in Brazil, but I think that a philosopher does not even need libraries or “good translations” or a “favorable environment” or large scholarships. On the contrary, a genuine thinker grows when faced with shortcomings and adversities, when he/she thinks with little social and institutional support, with few books and few possibilities to travel. In any case, genuine thinkers will not stop thinking because they lack these elements.

Although institutional conditions cannot provide or explain the emergence of a creative and original thinking, these conditions, by contrast, may cause a thought not to arise. Thinkers end up expressing their thoughts against all obstacles, and ordinary minds will not achieve it even with all the favorable instruments and conditions. By the time of Kierkegaard, the little Denmark was far from offering the best material conditions for the emergence of a great thinker. On the other hand, the better institutional conditions, far from promoting the emergence of philosophers, may in fact be suffocating and eliminating them before they were born.

Perhaps those who complain that "there are no philosophers in Brazil" do not realize that the very system of production and transmission of philosophy may be preventing them from arising. The Brazil case can be very pedagogical to understand the limitations and dangers of a purely institutional project of philosophical thinking.

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TEXTS

Philosophical Life and Professional Philosophy.