Antonio Caso: Philosopher of Mexico 9780292775855

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A N T O N I O

CASO

Philosopher of Mexico

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THE TEXAS

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PAN A M E R I C A N

SERIES

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&#££

Antonio Caso (Painting

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by Jose Clemente

Orozco)

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PHILOSOPHER

OF

MEXICO

John H. Haddox

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN & LONDON

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The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company and other friends of Latin America in Texas.

International Standard Book Number 0-292-70108-X Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 70-635001 © 1971 by John H. Haddox All Rights Reserved Type set by G&S Typesetters, Austin Printed by Capital Printing Company, Austin Bound by Universal Bookbindery, Inc., San Antonio

ISBN 978-0-292-77585-5 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-77612-8 (individual e-book)

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Dedicated to the wonderful women in m y life—Carmen, Mary, Katy, Chris, Meg, Raissa, Grace, and Madeleine—for all the love and joy they have given me.

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CONTENTS

Prologue

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

PART ONE Political Ideologist-Philosopher-Educator 1 2 3

Life Philosophy: Heroic and Discreet . . National Identity: Search and Discovery .

PART TWO 4 5 6 7

Points of View: Economic, Disinterested, and Love

Synthesis Sought Life as Economic: Social, Political, and Economic Thought Life as Disinterested: Aesthetics . Life as Love: Ethics and Religion

PART THREE

8 9

27

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32 42 51

Christian Vision

The Panorama of Human History . A Message: For Man and for Mexico

Appendix: Translated Selections

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3 10 i6

. .

. .

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63 70 77

Bibliography

119

Index

125

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PROLO

GUE

If the "Good Neighbor Policy" were a fact rather than a political slogan or at best a pious wish, the life, work, and death of one of the great thinkers, writers, and teachers of the Western Hemisphere could hardly have passed almost without being noticed in the AngloSaxon part of the American continent. On March 6th of this year died in Mexico City Antonio Caso, mourned by Mexico and her Ibero-American sister republics as well as by three generations of students who in their minds and hearts bear indelibly the moral stamina which they received in the classes taught by their beloved maestro in the Escuela Preparatoria and the Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico. Jose Vasconcelos, in his funeral oration, recognized in his departed compatriot "the most eloquent voice of Mexican philosophy, that voice which kindled in human minds the love for truth and beauty," and then recalled in his personal apostrophe the great scholarly and human qualities of Antonio Caso: "You were," he said, "a despiser of everything vile and wicked; you were disdainful of money, and you turned your back on power. . . . With your great gifts you might have gained materially comfortable positions of influence.

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xii

Many times Fortuna knocked at your door, but you refused to open because you had decided to remain loyal to your vocation as a thinker. . . . Meanwhile, your conscience stayed wide awake, sensitive to noble actions and sublime ideas. . . . Those who follow your leadership recognized in your balanced mind the marks of the classicist; in your sensitivity, those of the romanticist; in the integrity of your conduct, those of the gentleman. Maestro complete: wherever there is a school, there is your fatherland. Mexicano universal: through you our nation occupies a distinguished place in contemporary thought." Kurt F. Reinhardt. "A Mexican Personalist: Antonio Caso (1883-1946)," The Americas, 3 (July 1946): 20.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks are due to the following persons at The University of Texas at El Paso: to Presidents Joseph Smiley, Joseph M. Ray, and Dean Ray Small for their encouragement; to Professor John M. Sharp, Dario Prieto, Rene Cantu, and my wife, Carmen, for their assistance in translating the beautiful prose of Antonio Caso from Spanish into English; to my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy; to Chester Christian, director, and the other members of the Inter-American Institute for their support and inspiration; and to the Organized Research Committee for funds with which I pursued this study.

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C H A P T E R

1

L I F E

C/ew men have influenced the educational and cultural life of Mexico in this century more than Lie. Antonio Caso y Andrade. Caso was born in Mexico City on December 19, 1883. The period of his childhood was uneventful. At the proper age he attended the National Preparatory School where he studied psychology under Ezequiel A. Chavez and history under Justo Sierra. The preparatory school, founded by Gabino Barreda, was strongly under the influence of the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. This positivism stressed that the scientific method was the only useful one to be applied not just to the physical world but also to the area of social and economic affairs. Like Comte, Barreda viewed positivism, with its denial of metaphysics and theology and its exaltation of science, as the necessary instrument for social progress. By the time young Antonio Caso was a student the Comtean

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4

Political Ideologist-Philosopher-Educator

positivism of the preparatory school had been modified by certain elements of the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. At this time a group of intellectuals, who called themselves the cientificos, the party of the scientists, were ideologists for the "honest tyrant," President Porfirio Diaz. The ideals of this group were political order and economic progress, with the so-called scientific philosophy, positivism, as the intellectual tool and Diaz as the political force to operate it. In the perspective of history it is now rather amusing to note the attempted justification of the president's repeated reelections on "scientific grounds"; the cieniificos argued that Charles Darwin had established that the fittest survive in the struggle for existence and, since Diaz had survived the challenge of several elections, he was obviously the one most fit to rule Mexico. Such reasoning apparently satisfied Caso for a while, but, after receiving his training in law and earning his licenciado at the School of Jurisprudence, he joined, in 1909, with Jose Vasconcelos, Pedro Henriquez Urefia, and Alfonso Reyes to organize the Ateneo de la Juventud. This organization, consisting of about fifty members (mostly young Mexican intellectuals), had as its goals the destruction of Porfirism, the removal of foreign economic controls in Mexico, and the lessening of the influences of positivism on the cultural life and the educational system of Mexico. 1 In fact, during the tenure of President Diaz (from 1876 to 1911, except for one four-year period) foreign capital had come to dominate the economic life of Mexico. The ownership of much of the land, many industries, and some of the natural resources was taken over by American, Canadian, British, French, and 1 Edith Flower, "Mexican Revolt against Positivism," Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949): 115-129.

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Life

5

other foreign interests. Thus, although profits in Mexico were higher than before Diaz's reign, the members of the Ateneo pointed out that comparatively little had remained in that country and what did remain improved the lot of the already wealthy. The condition of the poor Indian and mestizo continued to be as bad as ever. Of the Porfirian positivism of this time Caso later remarked that it formed a generation of men greedy for their material well-being who were jealous of their prosperity and who supported the dictator for thirty years. Positivism had become, in fact, the ideology of one political-economic faction in Mexico. Further, Jose Vasconcelos has said that the positivism in Mexico, which took the form of a naive empiricism, was merely a doctrine that spared a group of mediocre scholars the task of thinking. A final problem with positivism in Mexico (similar to the earlier problem of the scholasticism of the colonial period) was that it was established as an official dogma, the one and only doctrine to be taught. Positivism created a stifling, closed system. Then, as Alfonso Reyes put it, "a slight crack, an invisible opening, appeared through which the fresh air began to find its way, and the enclosure, oxygenated, exploded like a bomb!" 2 The members of the Ateneo de la Juventud were a primary source of this fresh air, and when the revolution against Diaz broke out in 1910 these Mexican pensadores attempted to formulate an ideology of revolution and cultural rehabilitation after the revolt. It has been pointed out by Patrick Romanell that this involved a discovery of Mexico by Mexicans as well as a recovery of Mexico for Mexicans. 3 2 3

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Alfonso Reyes, Pasado inmediato y otros ensayos, p. 14. Patrick Romanell, Making of the Mexican Mind, p. 63.

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The recovery of Mexico was necessary, because under Diaz most of the Mexican economy had fallen under foreign control. Far more important, these men felt, was the discovery of Mexico, which during its less than a century of independence had been in a state of almost constant turmoil. This attempt to discover the proper character of Mexico and to develop a Mexican philosophy (which later became the goal of such Mexican neoOrtegans as Samuel Ramos and Leopoldo Zea who labored to discover what they felt would be the true Mexican "perspective") was initiated largely through the work of Antonio Caso and Jose Vasconcelos. In El problema de Mexico y la ideologia national Caso discusses the difficulties of forging a strong and unified nation from such differing, in many ways opposed, races and cultures as the Indian and the Spanish. In addition there was the problem of the colonial mentality that remained in Mexico long after political independence from Spain had been won. The habit of looking to the mother country for ideas, institutions, customs, and traditions was virtually impossible to break; the ideas taught and applied in Mexico during the nineteenth century continued to be adopted from Europe— no longer from Spain but from France and England—with a minimum of adaptation. The need to discover their own reality as Mexicans was, therefore, of major importance for the members of the Ateneo. Caso felt that if Mexicans lacked the courage to be the people that they are and if they slavishly followed foreign ideas, their homeland could not survive as an independent nation. 4 The thought of Antonio Caso was, thus, profoundly influenced in several ways by the dramatic experience of the 1910 Revolu4

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See Caso et al., Conferencias del Ateneo de la Juventud.

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Life

7

tion against Porfirio Diaz and by his role as a leader of the Ateneo. On the negative side was Caso's continuing opposition to positivism. As late as 1941, in Positivismo, neopositivismo y fenomenologia, he is critical of what he considers the arbitrary emphasis on certain limited aspects of human experience. Here he is concerned not just with the nineteenth-century positivism of Comte, but also with the more sophisticated twentieth-century version of men like Frank and Reichenbach. 5 The struggle against the tyranny of Porfirio Diaz and against the cientificos' "biological-evolutionary" view of life—a battle in which the most powerful and ruthless are victors—also had enduring effects on Caso's philosophy. As a revolutionist the Mexican philosopher wanted to remove the corruption of the past, but, even more, he was determined to ensure a better future for his native land. Other members of the Ateneo had the same goal. For example, Jose Vasconcelos noted that after the pohtical struggle to achieve social reform it would be necessary "to awaken the nation's soul or to create a soul for the poor, tortured Mexican masses." 6 The Revolution was, then, a political, economic, and military upheaval, but it was clearly a moral revolution as well. Both Caso and Vasconcelos sought lofty goals for the new Mexico that would develop after victory had been won. To achieve these goals they remained active in the nation's public life after the Revolution: Vasconcelos as secretary of public education, one of Mexico's greatest, from 1920 to 1923, and as a political figure, one of Mexico's most controversial; and Caso as Mexico's perhaps most distinguished and influential philosopher-educator. 5 6

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Caso, Positivismo, neopositivismo y fenomenologia, pp. 89-107. Jose Vasconcelos, Breve historia de Mexico, p. 526.

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Political

Ideologist-Philosopher-Educator

When the National University of Mexico was reopened after the Revolution Caso was named professor of philosophy, a position he held, along with a professorship in the law school, for more than thirty years; he also served periods as an educational administrator, including the top posts at the National University (rector) and on the university's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (director). Although he served at intervals in diplomatic posts in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, he was above all else a devoted teacher who inspired a whole generation of Mexican youth. 7 Except for his youthful, more or less activist role in the Ateneo de la Juventud, Caso usually avoided direct involvement in political controversy. In the 1930's, however, he spoke out against the law enacted during the Lazaro Cardenas regime requiring educational support for socialism and was removed from his position at the university. This dismissal aroused such an uproar from his students and from Mexican intellectual leaders that he was quickly returned to his post. Antonio Gomez Robledo, in the preface to Homenaje a Antonio Caso, writes: "If there is something missing in this collection perhaps it is that only an artist could evoke with complete success the aesthetic quality, the insuperable beauty, of the oral teaching of Antonio Caso, each of whose lessons, day by day for so many years, was a finished work of art. Some courses were more constructive than others, but none was ever lacking in verbal eloquence, delicate treatment of material, honest emotion, or gentlemanly demeanor." 8 7 Samuel Ramos, "Antonio Caso, filosofo romantico," Filosofia y Letras, 11 (April-June 1946): 195. 8 Antonio Gomez Robledo, ed., Homenaje a Antonio Caso, pp. 13, 14.

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Life

g

On March 6, 1946, Antonio Caso died suddenly of a heart attack. As Patrick Romanell commented: "The Mexican Socrates passed away quietly and Mexico wept." 9 9

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Romanell, Mexican Mind, p. 71.

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CHAPTER

2

PHILOSOPHY Heroic and Discreet

C/or the sources and influences on his thought, it is clear that Caso agreed with the statement of the eighteenth-century Mexican philosopher Fray Benito Diaz de Gamarra: "Happy are those eclectic philosophers who, imitating bees, seek from flower to flower the sweet honey of knowledge." 1 1 From Errores del entendimiento humano, quoted in Samuel Ramos, Historia de la filosofia en Mexico, p. 80. Perhaps the most important of the "flowers" from whom Caso sought this "sweet honey of knowledge" were Henri Bergson and Emile Boutroux. They influenced him to insist in his first published books, Los problemas filosoficos and Filosofos y doctrinas morales (both in 1915), that positivism drastically dwarfs the human spirit and that a metaphysics based on intuition can be developed. Among the other influences on Caso's thought during his career were certain aspects of the ethics of Max Scheler, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer, of the methodology of the pragmatist William James, of the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, of the theory of knowledge of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and the philosophy of history of Nicolas Berdyaev and of Wilhelm Dilthey (along with lesser influences from Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Heinrich Rickert, Maine de Biran, Max Stirner, and Emile Meyerson).

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Philosophy: Heroic and Discreet

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The philosophers that he read fed his appetite to know; none ever satisfied it. While they influenced his thought, Caso could never accept or identify himself with any of their systems as a whole. He insisted that the "eyeglasses" of such systems would limit his ability to seek the truth freely and objectively. The distinguished Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos notes that a philosopher is not just one who creates a new and completely original doctrine, but is equally one who can draw upon the teachings of others to create a profound and vital synthesis from diverse philosophical positions; he remarks that, while the philosophy of Antonio Caso is not wholly original, it is one in which the ideas of others are sensitively interpreted, at times accentuated, at times rejected, but always brilliantly and enthusiastically expressed.2 In one of his earliest books, Problemas filosoficos, Caso insists that the means of knowing cannot be reduced to the rational, that in order to approach the truth about reality we must found our rational knowledge on intuition. 3 It is clear that this Mexican philosopher is not critical of reason as such. Rather, he rejects a dogmatic faith in isolated reason as a source of metaphysical knowledge. Since, he insists, all objects that exist are individual, since there are no "general objects," universal ideas are merely means of thinking about individual objects that must themselves be grasped by means of intuition. 4 2

Ramos, "Antonio Caso," pp. 180, 181. Caso, Problemas filosoficos, pp. 205, 206. The term "intuition" is first used in a Bergsonian sense by Caso as an immediate grasp of the singular objects as a whole. Later a reading of the phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, led him to accept a rational type of intuition leading to a direct knowledge of essences. Samuel Ramos, on page 189 of "Antonio Caso," comments that Caso did not distinguish clearly between the two types of intuition, and, indeed, he seems to have used them as two versions of the same idea. 3

4

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Political Ideologist-Philosopher-Educator

In La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad Caso states that reason is blind without concrete intuitions of individual objects or idea tic intuitions of essential characteristics of these objects. In order to know something rationally one must first grasp it, apprehend it, in short, intuit it. "Reason and intuition," he notes, "are complementary. They are the two wings of the spirit that bear it aloft in its quest for truth." 5 The intuitionism in the metaphysics of Caso was, in the beginning, combined with a pragmatism in science. By the time he wrote La existencia this pragmatism was also applied to areas other than science. In the spirit of the American pragmatist William James, Caso writes: "The present day anti-intellectualism holds that man is not a simple contemplator of aesthetic forms, nor is he a singer of the harmonies of creation or an epiphenomenon of the world, but an actor, an inventor, a creator." 6 However, this idea is a special sort of pragmatism, according to which the pragmatic test of utility is applied to collective needs. For an idea to be true, an action to be good, an object to be beautiful, each must be socially useful.7 Eventually Caso moved beyond this social pragmatism, as he had earlier transcended the positivism of his youth. He continued to insist that pure theoretical knowledge can never satisfy human aspirations. Knowledge must be for the purpose of teaching one how to live. The formula of the Zen Buddhist, Daisetz Suzuki, "intuition linked to a concept leading to action," could well be taken as Antonio Caso's. Yet in his later works it is not action for social utility that 5 Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p. 77> «Ibid., p. 767 Caso, El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores, pp. 81-84.

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Caso desires. The goal of activity becomes a life of love and sacrifice for others. In its mature state Caso's philosophy no longer has the limited range of his early pragmatism. As he now puts it, "philosophy has for its object a synthetic conception of the world as a whole." 8 Existence, especially human existence, his primary concern, is much more complex than the simple laws and theories that some philosophers employ in pretending to explain it. Caso notes that the philosopher, as a philosopher, must not seek to know all the details of human life from any one point of view; he must seek to understand the human situation from all points of view. Philosophy must be based on all aspects of human experience, ranging from those of the [scientific] laboratory to those of the [religious] oratory. 9 Thus, while Caso gradually disengaged himself from the social pragmatism he had once fostered, he continued to distrust, or even to reject, the excesses of pure reason. He insisted that intellectual theories must be enriched and enlivened by intuition and feeling. He wanted to philosophize, not with an isolated intellect, but with his whole being, as a man of flesh and bone and blood. Philosophy was, for him, a continuous, never-ending quest, an exploration of human life that utilizes all available tools and traverses every possible avenue to human knowledge. Even in such an early work as Filosofos y doctrinas morales, published in 1915, Caso proclaims that "philosophical activity is not something independent of life and action, of art and science," and he insists that the poetic, historical, political, and religious spheres must all be the concern of the philosopher. 10 8

Caso, La fdosofia de la cultura y el materialismo historico, p. 31. Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p. 18. 10 Caso, Filosofos y doctrinas morales, pp. 11-13. 9

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Philosophy is not only knowledge, or even wisdom alone; it is a way of living. Oswaldo Robles wrote: "For Antonio Caso philosophy is two things at once: it is the highest wisdom, knowledge of existence from the point of view of eternal principles; it is also a mode of being, a type of human existence, the heroic." 11 In his Ensayos criticos y polemicos Caso distinguishes between the heroic and the discreet (or circumspect) approach in philosophy. 12 Among the terms that he uses to describe the heroic are inventive, enthusiastic, intrepid, striving, and problematic, the discreet he terms objective, calm, abstract, logical, and impotent. Among the philosophers he classifies as heroic in his Historia y antologia del pensamiento filosofico are Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Pascal, Bergson, and Scheler. Among the discreet are Aristotle, Clement of Alexandria, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. The nearest thing to a concurrence of the two approaches he finds in Thomas Aquinas. 13 Such a synthesis of the heroic and the discreet is Caso's goal. Without the heroic, philosophy will be exact, but will end as a mere empty dialectic of reason. Without the discreet, philosophy will be unable to systematize or to explain the heroic goals. Yet, while he admits the need for both approaches, Caso prefers the heroic. He remarks that an ingenious and fertile error is worth more than a trivial truth. 14 Philosophy is a vindication of the human spirit. As a theory of existence it is incomplete without a theory of the value of existence. Thus ethical concerns 11 Oswaldo Robles, "Caso y el heroismo filosofico," in Antonio Gomez Hobledo, ed., Homenaje a Antonio Caso, p. 59. 12 Caso, Ensayos criticos y polemicos, pp. 64-72. 13 Caso, Historia y antologia del pensamiento filosofico, pp. 8-13. 14 Caso, Ensayos criticos y polemicos, pp. 64-65.

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Philosophy: Heroic and Discreet

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have a priority over purely speculative interests. In Discursos heterogeneos he proclaims: "Philosophy is a theory of right, of felicitude, of beatitude. . . . Philosophy shows everyone how to be heroic as heroes, saintly as saints, artistic as artists, wise as wise men, industrious as workers; pure and clean of heart." 15 15

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Caso, Discursos heterogeneos, pp. 35, 36.

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CHAPTER

NATIONAL

3

IDENTITY

Search and Discovery

t ^ e f o r e turning to Antonio Caso's developed system of ethical dualism, which includes his stands on social, economic, political, aesthetic, ethical, and religious questions, two related, special concerns of his will be examined: his search for a philosophy of Mexico and for a philosophy of education to be applied there. Both of these resulted from the role that Caso had played in developing the ideology of the revolution against Porfirio Diaz. Erico Verissimo has noted that "the Revolution gave the Mexicans the consciousness of a destiny to fulfill and the desire to recover the land they had lost even before they had been born as a nation." 1 There was, as has been noted, in the first part of the twentieth century a desire on the part of many Mexicans to discover their 1

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Erico Verissimo, Mexico, p. 243.

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National Identity: Search and Discovery

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homeland. This was necessary because during its almost one hundred years of independence (since the W a r of Independence from Spain) whatever philosophy the newly independent nation possessed was adopted from other nations, hence foreign to the reality of Mexico itself. The members of the Ateneo de la Juventud insisted that utilitarianism, borrowed from James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, which Jose Luis Mora (author of the Reform Plan of 1833) attempted to apply to conditions in Mexico, could never provide a viable philosophy for that nation; the same was even more true of the Comtean positivism of Gabino Barreda and later of the Spencerian positivism of the cientificos which was employed to support the "honest tyrant," the dictator Porfirio Diaz. As a leader of the Ateneo, Caso sought, in the classics of literature and philosophy, ideals for a new Mexico to replace the positivism that had been the ideological bulwark of the Diaz regime. This positivism, he insisted, was foreign to the reality of Mexico, a land in which science and technology had played minor roles. Therefore, it deformed the traditional Mexican view of life. More than this, Caso insisted that as a form of animal egoism it corrupted one's basic concept of man. Insofar as it appealed to the selfish, violent, and brutal tendencies in man, it destroyed nis noblest feature: the ability to sacrifice, to give, to love selflessly. Caso felt that Mexican positivism was of its very essence tyrannical because in the Diaz regime all Mexicans were at the mercy of a few, who themselves were subject to the dictator. With the defeat of the dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911, Mexican intellectuals, including Antonio Caso, sought, first, to discover the authentic reality of Mexico, and, second, to formulate ideals that could be utilized to improve this reality.

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Political Ideologist-Philosopher-Educator

For the first of these, Caso felt that la patria is primary—before the Iberian or Hispanic American race, before humanity in general. Mexico comes first, because Mexico is the reality within which, he insists, the Mexican must operate. Caso thus writes: "We Mexicans must never forget that the native country comes before the race, just as the race comes before humanity. That is to say, the best way to serve the race is to be a good patriot and the best way to serve humanity is to work for the race. La patria is a reality like the individual, like the family: the race is an ideal like humanity." 2 Later he proclaims: "Distrust those who want to impose in the concrete and living reality of a native country the love of a hypothetical race; distrust, above all, those who, boasting a false humanitarianism, propose to deny their patria."3 Caso further emphasizes the importance of the reality of Mexico as a factor in his philosophy with this statement: "Neither Sancho nor Quixote. Neither shackles that prevent walking, nor explosive that may destroy, but a firm and constant desire to obtain something better, knowing, in spite of it, that true victory is obtained by putting lead on the wings." 4 For Caso this lead, the limit to the flying fantasy of Mexican ideas, should be the reality of Mexico. H e insists that Mexicans have the right to long for all the ideals; he also insists that they never forget the land, never forget the reality that is Mexico. The ideologists for post-Revolutionary Mexico must cease imitating others. If they have to adopt ideas, they should do so with considerable adaptation, turning their gaze toward the people, their customs, and their traditions. The motto of Antonio Casa 2

Caso, El problema de Mexico y la ideologia national, p. 78. Ibid., p. 87. 4 Ibid., p. 73. 3

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National Identity: Search and Discovery

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may, then, be expressed in these words: "wings and lead." Have ideals, yes, but do not forget the situation in Mexico. 5 Among the ideals that he sought were two that he felt to be especially important for Mexico: freedom and love. Creative freedom is required in order to achieve the desired political and intellectual self-determination of his homeland. To replace the Porfiristic view of man as an economically determined, egoistic being driven by a raw and brutal craving for power, Caso offered the view of man as a being capable of heroic, self-sacrificing love. This love, which is unique to man, can be realized only in freedom. It is the dynamic, creative operation through which he overcomes his dominating animal drives. Caso's goal is, in sum, a humanism, not speculative but active, a humanism imbued with a vibrant faith in the inborn goodness of man and in the Christian ideal of charity. He thought that the cientificos, ideologists for the Diaz regime, had betrayed Mexico and the Mexicans with their teachings, but, more than this, he felt they had betrayed ail men. Here, then, were the historical roots of his central concepts of life as economic and life as charitable that Caso was later to develop and apply to the human situation in general, as well as to Mexico in particular. 6 Caso sought and taught these concepts as a dedicated educator of young Mexicans for more than thirty years, which kept him

6 For an excellent analysis of this thesis of Caso's see Leopoldo Zea's article, "Antonio Caso y la Mexicanidad," in Antonio Gomez Robledo, ed., Homenaje a Antonio Caso, pp. 95-108. 6 In a book entitled Ramos y yo: Un ensayo de valoracion personal, published in 1927, Caso explicitly states that, while he could never lose his abiding concern for Mexico, any truly philosophical ideas he had formed were ones with a universal significance and an unlimited application.

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in intimate contact with the concerns of his native land. He was well aware that the vast majority of the youth of Mexico had received little or no higher education, and that (at least in his own generation) the few who had gone beyond the primary years had been trained by the positivists whose teachings he deplored. For this reason Antonio Caso taught philosophy with such dedication for so many years. In expressing his concept of the spiritual potential of m a n he sought to make of his students not merely good philosophers but good men and good citizens of his patria, Mexico. In an address on the philosophical problems of education, presented to the humanities faculty at the Universidad de la Plata in Argentina, the Mexican philosopher notes that "to educate" means "to lead," but then asks "where?" or "to what?" 7 Before attempting to answer this question Caso insists that it can be answered only by a philosopher, because only a philosopher could have the ordered, synthetic view that would allow him to determine the true ends of education. If no such ends can be discovered the educator is wasting his time; worse, he is wasting the time of his students. Caso presents next a preliminary answer to his question, noting that the educator's task is to aid in the formation of men, to waken the human personality. These answers, of course, raise further questions: W h a t is this "man" who is to be formed? What is this "human personality" that is to be wakened? Caso's answer is rich and complex. Man is a being in whom several dimensions are integrated. He has animal functions to perform and bodily needs to satisfy. H e has intellectual abilities that allow him to solve diverse, and at times difficult, practical (generally economic) problems. The intellect will be employed 7

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This address is published in Ensayos criticos y polemicos, pp. 13-28.

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National Identity: Search and Discovery

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to solve the largest number of such problems with the least amount of effort—and substantial success often results from this endeavor. Further, man possesses the ability to take pleasure in hearing for the sake of hearing and in seeing for the sake of seeing. This is the disinterested pleasure that Immanuel Kant saw as the end or purpose of art. Finally, the most distinctive and yet most extraordinary feature of man is his ability to gain the greatest possible fulfillment from sacrificing his own desires, his own well-being, perhaps even his own life for others. Caso remarks that surely there is no one, egoist though he might be, who has not felt on some occasion the impulse to give rather than to take. The animal in man is always seeking; from this perspective he is always imploring: "give," "give me this," "give me that," always "give me." Yet the properly and distinctively human feature of man is his ability to say to others: "take," "take of m y time," "take of m y concern," "take of m y interest," "take of m y possessions," even, "take of me" Antonio Caso concludes this address with these moving words: If we wish, then, to make men in the schools—returning to the point of the dissertation—let us form individual souls, let us form good animals, let us improve the race, let us form men who are beautiful and ready for action, but at the same time, let us inculcate in them this subtle egoism of thinking, this incomparable pleasure of seeing, of contemplating, of hearing, this distinctive and magnificent activity of giving for the sake of giving, which has a classic and Christian name. Let us make man charitable; let us make him artistic; let us oblige him to be intelligent, each time more intelligent in his actions with the things of the world; then we will have achieved the ends of education. Then our students' actions will be those of men truly worthy of the name.

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Political Ideologist-Philosopher-Educator

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Once Napoleon and Goethe found themselves face to face. Napoleon had this single eloquent expression of praise for the incomparable German poet: "Goethe, you are a man." I would like, in closing, for each of you, in your work as educators, to be able to say to each one that you have educated—in the words of Napoleon: "Now I have formed you; you really merit this beautiful name: you are a man." 8 Apparently Antonio Caso achieved this exalted end. Numerous former students attest his ability to inspire the curiosity, the intellectual hunger and thirst, needed to sustain an enduring search for truth. Indeed, for Caso education was just that—a perpetual search for truth. This search must be free and open and ever-questioning. Caso continually interrogated philosophers, past and present, criticizing, appreciating, always learning—and always teaching what he had learned. He sought, in his own words, "to open wide the doors of our spirit and allow the world to inhabit us." 9 Caso never dogmatized, he simply taught. He never presented his conclusions as if they could not be questioned. In fact he preferred to raise stimulating questions for his students rather than give them answers. The Mexican philosopher described as absurd, criminal, and odious the notion that one becomes educated by memorizing a list of abstract formulae from a handbook. Such general principles may be of value in science but they simply cannot be applied in solving the vitally important moral, political, social, and other personal problems in our lives. For one thing our individual lives are so diverse that it is impossible to directly apply these propositions. As Caso expressed it: "No two drops of water 8 9

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Ibid., pp. 27, 28. Ibid., p. 23.

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are identical. When we examine them under a microscope we find important differences even between one drop of water and another . . . Two leaves from the same tree are not identical; they are similar, but each has its unique features. Now, if we can say this of two drops of water or two leaves of one tree, how much more must we say this of two human souls?" 10 For Antonio Caso, then, no person is ever a finished portrait; rather, each of us is a sketch whose details are gradually (and partially) filled in through the experiences of our lives. Education he conceived to be a philosophical art that aids each person in his attempt to create for himself an integrated picture of the diverse facets of reality—a picture never to be completed. Thus the purpose of education is not to deform, but to inform; not to persuade, but to discuss; not to dictate, but to liberate. 11 10

Ibid., p. 20. Rosa Krauze de Kulteniuk, in La filosofia de Antonio Caso, pp. 139-145, presents an excellent analysis of his philosophy of education. 11

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CHAPTER

SYNTHESIS

4

SOUGHT

r / a s o was manifestly critical of philosophical systematizing. H e opposed the tendency of some philosophers to attempt to construct a prioristic systems for explaining existence. He felt that in such systems reality is always considered from some one point of view—rational, empirical, practical, or some other—thus allowing only very limited approximations of the whole truth about the whole of reality. Further, he was always concerned with defending the freedom of philosophical endeavors against any "official" or even "semiofficial" philosophy—which scholasticism and positivism had been in Mexico during the colonial era and the last half of the nineteenth century respectively and which he feared Marxism might become in the future. As was noted earlier, Caso was

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Points of View: Economicy Disinterested, and Love

an eclectic who wanted to feel free to choose ideas from a wide variety of sources. Finally, it was also noted before that Caso preferred the heroic and problematic to the discreet and systematic approaches to philosophical questions. Yet, especially in La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, he sought a synthetic conception of the diverse aspects of existence; his goal was an organized and integrated picture of the world as a whole. Caso did, then, oppose philosophical systematization but, at the same time, he sought a philosophical system. However, the contradiction here is more apparent than real. What he denied was the ability of a philosopher to account for or to explain reality from any one, especially an abstract, rationalistic point of view. He sought a philosophy founded on experience in the broadest sense; it would include both some of the findings of other philosophers, which would make up his "eclectic mosaic," and what he could discover himself by the collaboration of the different knowing faculties. One must philosophize with the complete self, not just the thinking self. Distrusting the excesses of pure rationalism and of pure empiricism, he wanted to combine the revelations of the senses with those of the intellect, the intuition, the emotions, and the will. Finally, in his search for a multilateral vision, Caso drew upon the fruits of such nonphilosophical areas and disciplines as art, poetry, history, and religion. In the prologue to the third and final edition of La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, the work in which he presents the most complete expression of his philosophy, Caso describes briefly six different points of view from which existence can be considered.

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29

The first is the metaphysical point of view, which seeks to explain existence by means of abstract, unchanging concepts of essences—"eternal truths." 1 Opposed to the metaphysical is the historical point of view, which examines reality in terms of its changing and contingent, its temporal, character. Next Caso notes that existence can be considered in terms of utility, according to which one seeks to obtain the most personal profit with the least possible effort. This is the economic point of view. To this criterion of utility is opposed one that is revealed in Christianity: charity, authentic and unselfish love, according to which one seeks the least profit for oneself while expending a maximum effort for others. This is the ethical point of view. The final pair of opposites are the logical and the aesthetic points of view. The first of these is that of purely formal relations among abstract ideas; the second is that of immediate, concrete intuitions of beauty that are free of any practical interest. Thus there are three antinomies: the metaphysical versus the historical, the ethical versus the economic, and the aesthetic versus the logical. His task, Caso feels, is to attempt to synthesize these diverse points of view, establishing a hierarchy in which all are included, but the ethical, the aesthetic, and the metaphysical predominate. Of these six points of view, however, only three, the economic, the aesthetic, and the ethical, are examined in any detail, and only one of the antinomies, the ethical-economic, receives extended treatment. His concentration on life in the biological (economic) sense and its opposite, the charitable (ethical), re1 The six points of view are presented on pages 21 and 22 of the third edition of La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad.

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Points of View: Economic, Disinterested, and Love

fleets his revulsion against certain prevailing features of the modern world. La existencia como economic como desinteres y como caridad was published in 1919 when Caso's memories of the "biologicalevolutionary" defense of the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and the violence of the Mexican revolution were still strong, and when World W a r I (in which such weapons of human destruction as poison gas, the airplane, and the submarine were employed and over 8.5 million persons died) had just ended. Further, the definitive edition of this work was published in 1943 during the horrors of World W a r II, a conflict in which ultimately more than 15 million persons would perish. In a prologue to this edition he decries the modern world's exaltation of brute force, "power without scruples," over love and even over law, which, he complains, makes "our time one of the most bitter in the history of the world." 2 Caso was also aware of the brutality of the Nazi "solution" to the Jewish problem with the nightmare of mass murder in its concentration camps. Is it any wonder, then, that he was compelled to oppose an interpretation of life that made of man an animal, irrevocably self-impelled to strife, and to present and defend an alternative view? In the following three chapters Antonio Caso's treatment of life as utility in La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad will serve as a point of departure for examining his sociopolitico-economic philosophy, while his treatment of 2 Ibid., p. 17. (It has been pointed out recently that between the years 1900 and 1969 over ninety million persons have been killed in and over two trillion dollars spent on various wars.)

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life as disinterested will raise problems to be discussed in a study of his aesthetics. Finally, his praise of life as love will set the stage for an extended consideration of his ethics and his philosophy of religion.

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CHAPTER

LIFE

AS

Social, Political,

5

ECONOMIC and Economic

Thought

Cyn La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad Caso describes life from the economic point of view as essentially self-centered and egoistic. Man's utilitarian tendencies are merely highly developed versions of the biological drives that he shares with brute animals in their relentless struggle for existence. 1 For such animals, Caso insists, knowledge is never disinterested and actions are never altruistic. Similarly, the utility-dominated man is a creature of animal instinct in whom the sole motive of thought and action is self-satisfaction.2 A person so 1

Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, pp. 39-432 Ibid., p. 52.

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motivated seeks to grasp and possess all that is within his power while giving to others as little as possible. The economic is an important factor in society, providing the means for such biological necessities as food and shelter, but Caso insists that when human activities are directed solely to satisfy biological requirements they lead inevitably to conflict, to struggle, and possibly ultimately to war. Such had been the experience of his own youth. Thing—Individual—Person Two of Caso's last major works to be published, La persona humana y el estado totalitario (1941) and El peligro del hombre (1942), 3 reveal his fidelity to the principles that originally had been elaborated m a n y years before in La existencia, but now are projected into the sociopolitical sphere. In the 1919 edition of the latter work he distinguishes three levels of being—thing, individual, and person—that follow an ascending path beginning with inanimate objects and culminating in God. Caso presents this same distinction in a more definitive form in La persona humana y el estado totalitarian A thing is a physical object with a relative homogeneity of parts and no organic unity. Since things are inanimate, they can be broken or divided with no essential change in their nature taking place. The individual is on a higher plane of being. Individuals are living organic beings composed of heterogeneous parts that are organized into cells and tissues (and in the higher forms into 3 These two books are composed of a series of articles that Caso had written for the Mexico City newspaper El Universal and were like two parts of one work. I n fact, Jose Gaos in Pensamiento de la lengua espahola remarks that lie considers El peligro simply a major chapter of Estado. 4 Caso, La persona humana y el estado totalitario, pp. 187-190.

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Points of View: Economic, Disinterested, and Love

organs and organ systems) in such a way that they cannot be broken up or divided into separate parts without perishing. The operations of the living individual exhibit direction and purpose: the effort for self-perpetuation of the individual and its species. In this realm there are three levels: plants, brute animals, and man. Man is an animal organism with an organic unity and a substantial identity and, as such, is an individual, but he is also something much superior: a person. Only man is a being who conceives general ideas; only man is a creator of values; only man has a spiritual dimension. Each person is unique and special. A further distinctive feature of the person emphasized by Caso is his capacity and propensity to create a culture, and, since cultures can only develop within society, the person is a social being. Finally, in an article in El Universal (March 31, 1944) Caso affirms that ultimately the human person can be understood only in reference to the Divine Person. Man is the being who can be aware of his own imperfection and is thus ontologically dissatisfied. Only man desires a happiness that he can never achieve in this life; only he knows his finitude and longs for perfection, bliss, the infinite. In Caso's words: "To contemplate the absolute and finally to eschew the relative has always been the human attitude. To prefer the unobtainable, to scorn achievements that fail to satisfy, these are appropriate to man. Man is the being impossible to satisfy." Thus our longing, our continuing aspiration; thus "the object of our search alone gives meaning to existence"; thus "to exist is to seek, to long for, to yearn." But though these aspirations cannot be satisfied in this life Caso is confident that one can obtain the ultimate in happiness in a future life of love and contemplation of God. This possibil-

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ity, sustained by hope, also gives man joy in the present life. Without this possibility, without this hope, there is only anguish. Caso thus accepted Kierkegaard's alternatives, "despair or believe"; and believe he did! Personalism The seminal personalism of such early writings as La existencia como economia y como caridad (1916) and La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad (1919) gradually developed until by the 1940's it blossomed in such works as La persona humana y el estado totalitario (1941) and El peligro del hombre (1942). Finally, in an article published in the June 9, 1944, issue of El Universal Caso affirmed that the principles of personalism (truly the culmination of his philosophy) can be employed in the search for answers to questions in every area of human concern. Actually, he averred that human beings are both economic individuals (biologically) and moral persons (spiritually) and that problems arise because, while the spiritual-personal side of human nature should control and direct the biological-individual, in practice the reverse is usually true. The dominance of the latter in the sociopolitical order leads to two systems that Caso abhors: individualistic, laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Both of these systems, denying the spiritual dignity of man, view him as an egoistic, economic animal; they differ in species but are generically identical. Caso notes that the egoistic individualist views man as a biological unit seeking his own profit as an individual task. 5 This, he insists, is a mistaken view, for the isolated individual is impotent. The error of communism is much like that of individualism in 5

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Ibid., p. 190.

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Points

of View: Economic,

Disinterested,

and

Love

that it also assumes an egoistic, purely economic view of man. In this system, the person is converted into a cell absorbed in the social and economic body, the community. 6 Manuel Salazar y Arce has listed as the three most vital aspects of Caso's thought "the defense of academic freedom in the university, the exaltation of Christian spirituality, and the condemnation and radical repudiation of Marxist materialism." 7 Caso saw Soviet communism as a type of religion, not just as a political movement, pointing to the Marxist-Leninist dogma with its myth of a "Messianism of the proletariat." 8 He quotes Edmund Goblot, saying that, as is true with traditional religion, Marxism has "its symbols, its sacred formulae, its liturgical language, its orthodoxy, its heresies, and its schisms. It has a dedicated faithful, apostles, missionaries, fathers of the church, saints, martyrs, and confessors of the faith. It has provincial, national, and ecumenical councils, its Holy Office, its major and minor excommunications, its ceremonies, its rites, its processions, and its solemn pilgrimages." 9 Later he remarks that communism is simply a religion that forgets God. Further, Caso warns that the egoism of this heinous system has led, in practice, despite claims to a broad internationalism, to a narrow form of nationalism. Patriotism, this Mexican patriot proclaims, is a good to be sought for the person, the nation, the world, but a nationalism that erects the state into an idol, that turns "the relative into the absolute, the contingent into the

6

Ibid., p. 194. Manuel Salazar y Arce, "La herencia de Antonio Caso," La Prensa, Janu a r y 29, 1964. 8 Caso, Nuevos discursos a la nacion mezicana, pp. 10-14. 9 Caso, La persona humana y el estado totalitario, p. 74. 7

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necessary, the transitory into the eternal and imperishable," is an evil that must be avoided.10 In summary, the individualistic egoist wants to have more through his own economic activities; the communistic egoist wants to have more through the economic activities of the community. The mad scramble for material possessions with no concern for the means employed leads, Caso feels, to a decadence of the human personality, to a dreadful spiritual inertia. The question becomes: Have I human dignity or may I be purchased as one buys goods in the market? 11 Caso points out, first, that the person, in contrast to the economic-individualist, wants to be more through his ethical and social activities and, second, that society exists for man—for the realization of his nature and the perfection of his personality. Man was not born for society, but society for man. Society is a means, never an end. 12 When this philosopher asks which is worth more, the individual or the community, the reply he gives is: "Neither the individual nor the community; but a society based on justice. This is a moral union of men, respecting their value. The community that tyrannizes man forgets that persons are 'persons,' spiritual centers of cultural action, not mere 'biological unities.' The individual who is opposed to the community . . . forgets that above the egoistic individual is human culture, which is always a synthesis of values." 13 Caso asserts that the very spirituality of the human person is only realized in a society based on the moral union of men. 10 11 12 13

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Caso, Caso, Caso, Caso,

El peligro del hombre, La persona humana y El peligro del hombre, La persona humana y

pp. 37-38. el estado totalitario, pp. 98-99. pp. 53-54. el estado totalitario, pp. 191-192.

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Points of View: Economic, Disinterested, and Love

Just as life as economic in La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad is life as the egoistic individual in Caso's sociopolitical writings, life as ethical in the former is life as the human person in the latter. Egoism fosters the extremes of laissez-faire individualistic capitalism or totalitarian communism; personalism leads to a just society in which the rights and duties of both the individual and the community are not opposed but justly coordinated. Laissez-faire individualism and communism are both economically deterministic systems. All aspects of human life are dominated by the material means of production and distribution of goods in both cases. In contrast, the first consequence of personalistic humanism is freedom for the human person and its corollaries—political and civil freedom, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of thought and expression. In fact, for Caso a viable and just society is not possible without freedom of conscience, freedom of political association, and freedom to have private property. However, society and these freedoms that it requires are not ends in themselves; they are means for developing the human person. Further, these freedoms can only be preserved and fostered under a system of laws, and laws require authority for their promulgation and enforcement. Without these three—liberty, law, and authority—a just civil society is impossible. An unrestricted liberty that denies law and authority fosters anarchy; unlimited authority and law without freedom results in tyranny; and the suppression of all three brings about barbarism. Only a harmony among liberty, law, and authority makes honorable civil life possible.14 For Caso the primary task of the state is to protect the rights 14

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Rosa Krauze de Kolteniuk, La filosofia de Antonio Caso, p. 334.

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of man, thereby guaranteeing to every person the means for selfdevelopment. The state is a purely human creation and as a means must be recognized to be relative and limited, never absolute and unlimited in its power and value. Caso believed that the only political system that can serve as the foundation for such a state was a representative democracy, but he explicitly warned against identifying democracy with egalitarianism: "We are naturally unequal physically, intellectually, and morally . . . and we are unequal because we are men, that is, persons, not brutes, not things. To be human is to be different. . ,"15 The basic assumptions of the representative democracy that Caso lauded were the personal dignity, political equality, and transcendent value of all men, which, he insisted, are themselves fundamental concepts of Christianity. This democracy would, thus, be a means for developing the kind of society that would foster the achievement of the supreme values of goodness, justice, love, and holiness. The end for the person ultimately is not freedom, democracy, society, or the state, but God. Caso asserted that a failure to recognize this proper end for man is a basic source of individual greed and envy, along with national imperialism and military expediency. For many persons the state takes on the character of an absolute; it becomes God. Caso fears that the person may be annihilated by the state (sometimes physically, more often spiritually). A further danger results from the growing dominance over man of technological achievements: first, in the area of weapons development 16 15

Caso, La persona humana y el estado totalitario, pp. 79-80. Daniel Berrigan in They Call Us Dead Men movingly decries this development noting: "There was never before a time . . . when men could announce the simple power to end time, to end man, to end history, to bring down the world. Every prior crisis granted, at very least, space for the un16

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Points of View: Economic, Disinterested, and Love

and, second, in the artificially created demand for costly material superfluities. Because of the second, Caso laments that man's moral conscience has become drugged. He is saturated with avarice for material possessions, for more and more outer goods with less and less concern for his inner, spiritual perfection. Man seems to be running away from himself with no knowledge of where he is going. In Caso's words: "Today does not exist for the man of today. Time is not enjoyed . . . and time is of the spirit. A humanity that does not savor time, that does not enjoy it, but, rather, saves it, such a humanity equally rejects the spiritual. And death takes us by surprise as we run, always getting further away from ourselves, fleeing in terror from our own conscience and from reality, separating ourselves from the deepest springs of life. This is our authentic madness to die while running." 1 7 All these tendencies are sources of the violence, the tyranny, the injustice, the warfare that have been the experience of our history in general and of Caso's own experience (directly of the

born, an inhabitable area for the majority, blueprints for the future—in short, some trace of cultural vision, living men, and purpose issuing from ruin . . . with the threat we now lie under, no such luxury is granted us. Technology, as no one needs to be told, has introduced on the scene an altogether new possibility in the form of total w a r " (p. 160). " W a r technique implements its contempt for reason; it mounts a world arsenal built on the poverty of the multitudes, debases the moral sense of men with a massive propaganda of self-justification, narrows the freedom and breadth of human inquiry to a dark single-minded obsession . . . Its contempt for m a n assigns him finally only two possibilities; destruction or the arms race. These are the Neanderthal alternatives offered to a mankind of infinite resources. Their symbols are those of hideout and counterforce—the London tube shelters of the Second World W a r and the saturation bombing of the German cities, the shotgun at the shelter door and the nuclear atmospheric testing programs" (pp. 163-164). 17 Caso, Principios de estetica, p. 207.

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Mexican Revolution of 1910 and indirectly of World Wars I and II) in particular. To oppose these tendencies—violence, tyranny, injustice, warfare—he turned to a great potential power that could defeat the forces of overbearing self-interest and greed that dominate individuals and states. This great spiritual power is, for Caso, Christianity with its ideal of self-sacrificing, outgoing, giving, personal love. The real problem is that contemporary man has neglected this power by forgetting his own character as a person and by forgetting God. Man can and must free himself from domination by the economic sphere of his environment so that he can examine the conscience that he has forgotten he possesses. For Antonio Caso there is, then, real hope for man, a hope like that beautifully expressed by Daniel Berrigan, who proclaims: "The spirit has its own reality, which can never be entirely destroyed. Spirit speaks of possibility, of a sacred overflow of truth and beauty, of resources of altruism, of the passionate tendency of man to give himself and in his gift to renew himself, of love without measure or limit, of mortal dominion over a servant universe, of an infinite hunger to be and to become, to imagine and to trust the world." 18 18

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Berrigan, Dead Men, p. 164.

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CHAPTER

LIFE

AS

6

DISINTERESTED Aesthetics

/ / / n t o n i o Caso's treatment of art in La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad is relatively brief and more concerned with the disinterested character of the contemplation of beauty (which serves as a break with life as economic and sets the stage for life as ethical) than with many of the questions which traditionally have been the subject of aesthetics. The major discussion of aesthetics (along with developed and refined examinations of some of the aesthetic topics already considered in La existencia) is in Principios de estetica, which appeared in 1925, with an enlarged edition printed in 1944. The latter includes Drama per musica (which originally came out in 1920) and several essays appraising modern art reprinted from El Universal (where they appeared in 1943 and 1944). Finally,

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other brief examinations of aesthetic questions are included in such works as Doctrinas e ideas, La filosofia de la cultura y el materialismo historico, and Ensayos criticos y polemicos. In both La existencia and Principios de estetica the existence of art is accounted for in terms of the Bergsonian concept of a surplus of energy in man, 1 according to which, after satisfying one's biological requirements for survival, a quantity of unused energy remains for (to use the Kantian concept that Caso adopts) "disinterested" (nonutilitarian) activities. Art and play are both apparently among these activities, for they seem to be similarly purposeless. Yet in the second chapter of Principios de estetica Caso carefully distinguishes the two. Play or sport has (at times disguised but still very real) purposes: as diverting and relaxing recreation that prepares one for work or as a factor of sexual enticement. In this way play is closely related to economic or biological activity. By contrast, in art surplus energy is employed with no practical result intended. Thus when Caso says that our response to art is disinterested, he uses this term in a utilitarian-economic sense. He, of course, does not mean by it an "uninterested" denial of desire or pleasure. It is simply that the enjoyment of a work of art is for its own sake, with no further benefit sought. Clearly the world of art is, for this Mexican philosopher, opposed to the biological law of self-interest. Above the biological order exists another in which the activities of the person are not motivated by his greatest economic interest. 2 As Caso puts it: "Such is the victory of the soul over [biological] life, the aes1

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 129. See Caso La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como pp. 99-105. 2

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caridad,

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thetic victory, a superior human life—existence as disinterested." 3 With art, truly human life appears. 4 In this way the stage is set for the possibility of life from an ethical point of view: unselfish, and even self-sacrificing, love; and here it appears that for Caso the term "disinterested" has something of the meaning given it by Arthur Schopenhauer who valued aesthetic contemplation as a temporary escape or at least as a relief from the dominance of the biological will to power. Yet for Caso art has intrinsic values far surpassing those admitted by the German pessimist. The Aesthetic Intuition In La existencia he affirms that art reveals the properly spiritual and creative dimensions of the human person, while in Principios de estetica he concentrates on the unique value of the aesthetic intuition (which is consistent with and, in fact, an extension of the emphasis on intuition in his theory of knowledge described earlier). As Caso explains it, for practical purposes the scientist, the theoretician, and the mathematician abstract from the individual certain general concepts that they can schematize, organize, and put to use, while, in contrast, the artist, the poet, and the 3

Ibid., p. 103. This point was made beautifully by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man (p. 5 0 ) . H e noted that of all creatures man is the only one who is also a creator. Thus, writing of cave drawings of prehistoric men, he insists that they serve as "the testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree. A monkey does not draw clumsily and man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a m a n carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all. A line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin." 4

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musician present a distinctive, intrinsically valuable picture of the concrete individual. 5 In La existencia he puts it this way: "The world of art is inconceivable for pure reason, for to think is to relate, to utilize, but art is only known as individuality, as intuition. In the intuition the subject is the object."6 This identity of subject and object in an aesthetic intuition is explained by our author in Principios de estetica. He uses the concept of an emotional empathy according to which the role of the percipient of beauty is so direct, immediate, and vivid that the distinction between subject experiencing and object experienced is not made. 7 It is clear, for Caso, that the aesthetic intuition accounts not only for our response to or experience of a work of art but also for its creation. This spiritual selfless intuition, when it encounters the self-centered, materialistic, economic aspects of life, becomes creative, expressing itself in works of art. The work of art is a "vehicle of the spirit"; it is a spiritual intuition "materialized, externalized, embodied in symbols." 8 Like Croce, Caso insists that intuition cannot be separated from expression. It is clear, however, that this is not a simple one-to-one relation with each individual intuition requiring a specific expression. Personal genius plays an essential creative role between 5 Caso, Principios de estetica, pp. 63-64. (He notes on page 237 of this work that the philosopher should combine these two approaches.) 6 Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, pp.

104-105.

7 Caso, Principios de estetica, pp. 90-95. For an excellent treatment of the aesthetic intuition in Caso, see A. Berndston, "Mexican Philosophy: The Aesthetics of Antonio Caso," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9 ( i 9 5 i ) : 325-3278 Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, pp.

112-114.

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intuition and expression. Intuition merely suggests forms of expression; the artist with his own skills and feelings creates the expression, the work of art. In any event, symbolism is essential to art as the means of expressing the immaterial and spiritual in a material and corporeal medium. In all the arts—music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry—there is this synthesis of the spiritual and the material, the ideal and the real. Beauty On these assumptions Caso based as his concept of the supreme aesthetic value, beauty, which symbolizes a "rich concentration of ideas." This value does not derive simply from the role that art as disinterested plays in opposition to life as economic and in setting the stage for life as ethical. In contrast with these two— the first consisting of a relentless struggle for conquest and the second of loving, sacrificing activity for others—the aesthetic realm is one of peace, calm, and joy, "where good and evil gaze upon each other." 9 With beauty nothing is sought besides what is being contemplated. "In pure beauty one looks at the world only to see, to admire, to enjoy . . ."10 Thus beauty is outside the realm of good and evil. A truly beautiful work of art can represent evil without inspiring or arousing the percipient to perform evil acts. No beautiful work is moral or immoral. If, for example, a person feels sexual desires in the presence of a statue or painting of a nude, it is he who is immoral, not the artifact. The artist is not concerned 9

Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 125. (In Ensayos criticos y polemicos [p. 82] Caso writes of the myopia of art critics: "Since they cannot see, they think. To think is only tolerable when one cannot see.") 10

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about our desires; his goal is to create the work of beauty which will arouse a selfless response of aesthetic delight. In Ensayos criticos y polemicos Caso succinctly presents a similar argument. First he points to the law of contradiction: a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. Then he notes that if a work of art is a disinterested intuition and expression of an individual object for its own sake, and if an immoral thought or act is one based essentially upon self-interest, then no work of art can be immoral. That is, no work of art can be both disinterested and interested. 11 Later in this same work Caso insists that insofar as a work of art is immoral it is inartistic: "There is no intrinsic contradiction, nor can there ever be, between beauty and the good, between art and morality, which are the two highest forms or values of existence." 12 Caso's understanding of beauty is further clarified in his studies of its relations to such other aesthetic values as grace, comedy, tragedy, and the sublime, all of which are examined in La existencia^ with only the last of these considered in Principios de estetica. Grace, he first emphasizes, is not identical with beauty. Some beautiful objects lack the lightness, spontaneity, balance, and perfection of the graceful, while some graceful objects lack the splendor of beauty. But when a being possesses both values we are delighted by their synthesis. In a sense, comedy is the negation of grace. Caso notes: "If, for example, an acrobat hesitates in his tumbling or if a pianist hesitates in his performance or if a dancer stumbles, these move one to laughter." 13 The graceful here becomes comic. 11

Caso, Ensayos criticos y polemicos, p. 85. v Ibid., p. 88. 13 Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p.

130.

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Later, Caso notes that the essence of comedy is social; only man, the social and political animal, knows how to laugh. Often what is satiric or ironic and thus inspires laughter in one literary epoch or in one society elicits no response at all in others, and even in a particular society sometimes only a small group of initiates can grasp the humor of a joke expressed in esoteric language. A second requirement of comedy is reflection. Caso notes that a person is moved to laughter when, upon reflection (rapid and indiscernible though it may be), he becomes aware of the incongruity of the elements in a comic situation. In contrast, one's response to beauty is direct and intuitive. As Caso movingly puts it: "The soul pauses before a beautiful sunset, without judgment. The hues of twilight at vesper-time awaken in the soul that contemplates them soothing resonances of mystery and peace, of brightness and beatitude, which are unified in the consciousness."14 The third, and last, element of comedy that Caso discusses is mechanical interference with organic or psychological functions. If, for example, an individual who is elegantly attired stumbles, we laugh; if a person, whose desire to board a streetcar is evident from his physical attitude and movements, misses the step and fails in his attempt, we laugh. Finally Caso notes that in every case a kind of compassion or empathy is present as part of our reaction to comedy because the experience of another becomes our own. He writes that both joy and sorrow are contagious, but in tragedy, which engenders sorrow, the compassion is much more intense. The greater the suffering, the greater the compassion. If the object of our compassion has the quality of greatness and the sufferings endured are Ibid., p. 144.

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especially cruel and unjust, both the quality and the quantity of our compassion are great, "as when we contemplate the divine anguish of the mater dolorosa"1* In sum, for Caso true tragedy, being more profound and possessing greater spiritual dignity, can never be banal as mere comedy sometimes is. Tragic art, he remarks, can recall or inspire the tragic sentiment of life itself. Finally, the sublime is a major concern for Caso in both La existencia and Principios de estetica. An experience of the sublime consists not in the spontaneous pleasure elicited by the beautiful but in mixed feelings, on the one hand, of smallness, of abnegation, and, on the other, of exaltation. This balance of exaltation and abnegation is the psychological attraction of the sublime. Next, after reminding the reader that every work of art is symbolic, Caso writes: "Sublime works of art symbolize the Absolute in joining both worlds, the spiritual and the material, the ideal and the sensible . . . [Here] that which is supersensible enlivens the sensible." 16 The sublime is immense in magnitude, power, or duration. Persons feel small, even petty, before this grandeur. Yet, as noted before, this feeling is temporary because we are able to elevate ourselves to the level of that object whose grandeur had confounded us. This is the pleasurable element of our response to the sublime. The sublime differs from the beautiful not merely in quantity or extent, but in quality or even kind. The complex sentiments resulting from the experience of sublimity simply cannot be reduced to the direct, disinterested pleasure caused by beauty. 15

Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 134. (Caso employs the Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, but here he differs from Kant for whom art is beautiful and nature sublime.) 16

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Finally, Caso sets the stage for his treatment of existence as love by pointing to Kant's concept of moral sublimity, the ultimate aesthetic value. Caso remarks that the actions of the hero and the saint are not the result of a command from without. They freely give of themselves. As he puts it: "Life says: do not give what is yours. The Good says: give what your ego seeks, for in this way you will discover your true and profound being, your real autonomous personality, freed from life as a biological animal. . . . Sacrifice yourself, for in this way you will preserve yourself eternally. . . . Existence as charity is the plenitude of existence. This is what constitutes the sublimity of sacrifice."17 17

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CHAPTER

LIFE

AS

Ethics and

7

LOVE Religion

considering Caso's concepts of social, political, and economic life in chapter five, his ethical and religious teachings were (however summarily) introduced because they could not be divorced from his practical concerns. For example, when examining life as economic, with its attendant injustice, conflict, and violence, it was necessary to point to the role of self-sacrificing love as a countervailing force. Further, it was noted that in his Principios de estetica and in La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, when Caso treats the sublime in art, he indicates its role as an avenue to the awareness of moral and religious ideals. The central chapter of La existencia, entitled "La existencia como caridad," and the final two essays, on faith and on hope, in

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the 1943 edition, which represent the clearest and most fully developed expressions of his teachings in these two fields, will now be analyzed. As we have seen, Caso was decisively influenced by conditions of the world in which he lived, a world of violence in which had occurred two global, a few regional, and several civil wars, a world threatened with, and in some areas enslaved by, totalitarian political regimes, a world where, he feared, persons could too easily be reduced to mere biological or economic entities, a world in which technological and industrial developments tended progressively to become ends enslaving men rather than means liberating them. Ethics In the chapter on ethics in La existencia he movingly proclaims his conviction that a life directed to self-aggrandizement, a life of animal power with a consequent morality lacking obligation (such as he discovers extolled by the nineteenth-century philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Marie Jean Guyau, whom he characterizes as "demented men, weaklings in love with life, with strength") 1 would be one of conflict and one ultimately destructive of all human and humane values. He describes their moral philosophy as one "of sick people in love with the health they do not, have not, and never will possess. The morality of weaklings with no spiritual strength." 2 Caso also attacks Arthur Schopenhauer's view of life and the world as will, noting that this position does not and cannot ac1 Caso, La existencia 156. 2 Ibid,, p. 157.

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count for the natural human capacity to deny the egocentric will in loving, self-sacrificing activities. 3 The Mexican philosopher interprets Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: According to the first of these, man is a being inexorably driven by a will to power in the struggle that is life and should be as ruthlessly powerful as possible in order to achieve victory through violence; according to the second, man with his will to live is inspired to conflict by the motivating forces of egoism and malice, but by virtually renouncing his humanity (or at least these basic human motivations) he can become compassionate, sharing the inevitable sufferings of others and striving to contribute as little as possible to their pain. In opposing these position? Caso notes that it is true that insofar as man is a brute he is the animal of violence described by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Yet insofar as he is human he is able to surpass these selfish, animal drives to take, to hate, to kill with properly human tendencies to give, to love, to heal. In fact such activities are the fulfillment of human life itself.4 Only a person can perform such acts, and his humanity is progressively perfected in so acting. Caso insists that we can experience the errors of "the barbarous dictate of Darwin"—that life is a struggle for existence— and of the egoistic law which proposes the maximum profit for oneself with the minimum effort for others as the guideline for human conduct. To this he opposes another order, another kind 3

Ibid., p. 153. In El acto ideatorio y la filosofia de Husserl, one of Caso's last works and published posthumously in 1946, he insists that the end of ethics is the fullest realization of the h u m a n person, just as in El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores, published by Editorial Botas thirteen years earlier, he proclaims: "The only thing of value in the fullest sense is personal life." 4

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of life, a life of loving sacrifice whose directive is to exert the maximum effort for others while seeking the minimum benefit for oneself.5 According to Caso the mandate of biological life is "do not give what is your own"; of rational life, "to give to others what is yours would be insane"; of the good life, "you will have everything if you give everything away." 6 The person who gives of himself, no matter how poor he may be, is rich, while the person who hoards what he is and has, no matter how rich, is truly poor. Thus the good man freely sacrifices for others and, as Caso puts it: "He does not deny [himself] just to be denying; he denies in order to affirm a greater affirmation." Love is the active power that breaks through invisible walls—the walls of fear, envy, conceit, greed, and selfishness—that keep us apart. Through love, individual isolation is overcome and personal identity discovered.7 Caso counters Nietzsche's reproach that Christianity is a crutch and a comfort for the weak with the argument that sacrificing love requires the "purest moral strength," the courage and energy to struggle against evil without employing evil means. To be loving one must have the strength to accept personal responsibility to and for others; thus "weak virtue is clearly a contradiction." 8 He notes that most of us think of charity as the aid that the weak man receives from the charitable person and thus forget 5 Ibid., p. 154. (The economic world in Caso's term is centripetal—center directed—while the moral world is centrifugal—outward directed.) Q Ibid., p. 164. (Caso once noted in conversation that when one dies he can take with him only what he has given away.) 7 This notion is remarkably similar to that of Gabriel Marcel who expressed it as esse est coesse, insisting that each of us truly "is" a person only to the extent that he or she "is with" another person. 8 Ibid., p. 155.

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"the explosion of strength" that charity requires to overcome selfishness "causing the soul to bloom with strength." 9 To be loving is to be giving and to be giving is to be strong! Further, as Caso notes a little later, the person who does not sacrifice never really knows the meaning of human life, nor can it be explained to him, just as there is no way to explain sound or color to one who has been deaf or blind from birth. As there is no color for the blind or sound for the deaf, so there is no morality for the selfish. (Also, just as a deaf person cannot criticize a song nor a blind person a painting, someone who is evil cannot attack a life of charity, "the incomparable work of art.") 1 0 The good, he notes, is not a law or a category of reason, in a Kantian sense: "It does not rule; it never commands; it inspires . . . it is not induced, deduced, or realized; it is created." Finally it is something more than human: "[it is] the supernatural which feels like the most natural thing on earth." 11 Philosophy of Religion Charity is Christian love: " [it is] the basic religious and moral experience [which] . . . consists of giving oneself, of giving to others, of bestowing and lavishing oneself with no fear of suffering exhaustion." 12 Caso insists, further, that heroic men of charity—saints and martyrs—are more completely, more perfectly human than any one else. In Nuevos discursos a la nation mexicana he notes that if we wish to achieve our personal ful9 Ibid., p. 156. (On this point Caso remarks: "Charity is unquestionably strength and goodness, strong because it is good and good because it is strong," and a page later: "The charitable man cannot wish to be strong or happy, because he already is both, more than any other man.") 10 Ibid., p. 160. 11 Ibid., p. 154. 12 Ibid., p. 155.

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fillment we must each in his own way, strive to be a saint, a hero. 13 Of course the greatest saint, the most perfect hero, the paradigm of saintly heroes, was, for Caso, Jesus Christ, whom he terms the sign of contradiction: "Jesus, as the contradiction of animal life, is the living affirmation of life as unselfish and as loving." 14 In fact, at the end of La existencia he announces that one can finally forget about ethics as a speculative philosophical venture and "say to individuals and to nations only this: 'Imitate Jesus.' " 15 In an article entitled "My Philosophical Conviction" ("Mi conviccion filosofica") Caso says that he often wished that Jesus had never lived or that if he had existed it had been as a supernatural vision, an angel, or a pure spirit, but the fact is he was a man who lovingly sacrificed himself for all of us as one of us. Thus: "There is no escape. By hanging from the cross he committed everyone. If we do not sacrifice ourselves we are not saved." 16 As a Christian there is no question of faith or works, for Caso. Faith only is if there are good works or, to put it another way, faith that does not issue in loving action is no faith at all. He has written: "Faith is impossible without charity, just as light is impossible without the sun," 17 and later: "To believe is to act, to 13 14

168.

Caso, Nuevos discursos a la nation mexicana, p. 240. Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p.

15 Ibid., p. 199. (In El problema de Mexico y la ideologia national [p. 96] he puts it this way: "The whole of morality, the whole of human freedom, is found in imitating Christ. Herein is contained ethics as theory and sanction, as metaphysics and law, to say to individuals and nations only this: imitate Jesus.") 16 Caso, Ensayos criticos y polemicos, pp. 74-75. 17 Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p. 161.

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18

see, to live." The greatest evidence of faith is the experience of loving acts. Reason can err, but the experience of good is irrefutable. Although his father was a liberal positivist and his mother an ardent Catholic, Caso was a Christian who could not accept a dogmatic Catholicism. He said once in an interview: "I am a Christian and a follower of the gospels, though not a member of any church or communion." 19 As was noted earlier he continually opposed any form of dogmatism, whether philosophical (positivism), political (Marxism), or religious (Catholicism), the first especially during his youth and the other two during his mature years. A particularly exciting example of the controversy stimulated by his religious position in predominantly (though, of course, unofficially) Catholic Mexico was a debate of eight-months duration between Caso and Alfonso Junco published in the newspaper El Universal from March to October in 1936. Caso had written an article for this paper on Renan and Berdyaev in which he accuses both the Roman Catholic church and the Bolshevik revolution of attempting to establish a "new Middle Ages" by submitting free intellectual activities to dogmas and by denying individual values. 20 He identifies Catholicism and Marxism as "dogmatism in thought, fanaticism in sentiment, and tyranny in action." This was simply too much for the poet Alfonso Junco, a dedicated Catholic, who wrote an article for the paper attacking Caso's position. So the debate was on, and what a debate it became, ranging over such topics as freedom and dogma, orthodox 18

Ibid., p. 162. From La cronica of Lima, Peru, July 16, 1921. 20 This article was reprinted in La filosofia de la cultura y el historico, pp. 154-159. 19

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and heterodox faith, the opposition of faith and reason, and the Thomistic arguments for the existence of God. 21 On the first of these topics there was, finally, an agreement of the two disputants that they are not irreconcilable; in fact many philosophers have admitted revealed truths, but "no truth can be imposed by force." 22 Concerning the character of the Divine Being, Caso insists that very little can be known and even his existence cannot be "demonstrated by necessary syllogisms" as Catholic Thomistic philosophers claim. God is not a rational truth, Caso insists, so any attempt to establish his existence by a purely rational mode of demonstration must fail. According to Caso we can say of God primarily that he lacks the limitations of contingent beings: that he is "in-finite, in-mutable, un-created, ab-solute, and incomprehensible." Further, God is not incomprehensible as an absurdity, but as a Being absolutely exceeding the powers of reason to comprehend. However, that God is not a rational truth does not lessen the importance of our knowing and loving God. Faith compensates for the failure of reason. Faith does not see, but knows; does not understand, but loves; does not perceive, but hopes. Faith believes and hopes and loves. As Caso expresses it: "Grief and death, ignorance and sin are conquered on another [nonrational] plane of life and being. 'There,' says faith, 'beyond all that our pequeha razon thinks . . . Beyond!' " 23 Caso also insists that faith can never be seen as the sole possession of any religion: "Faith is an attribute so universal that under no circumstances can it be the possession of Catholics 21 Juan Hernandez Luna presents an excellent analysis of this protracted debate in Homenaje a Antonio Caso, pp. 161-167. 22 Caso, "Liberty and Dogma," El Universal, March 20, 1936. 23 Caso, "Desarticulando paralogismos," El Universal, August 21, 1936.

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24

alone." A universal yet dogmatic religion was for him an absurdity. The question of God comes up, of course, in several other contexts for Caso, as when he explains the meaning of "person" in La persona humana y el estado totaiitario and when he discusses faith and hope in the last edition of La existencia. In the former he describes the ideal person as active and omnipotent, loving and absolutely unselfish, with an intelligence embracing all objects of knowledge in a single thought, free and completely independent of all else.25 This person is, of course, God. In the La existencia essay on hope, Caso states that God is not a principle, or a blind creative force, or simply a lawgiver: "Rather, he is a person . . . the most personal of all persons, the most real of all realities, the most fully existent of all existents." 26 Later in this same essay, when explaining that God is love, he recalls the oft-repeated teaching that the essence of Christianity is charity (joined inseparably with faith and hope) and points out that all Christian love must have its foundation in divine love, for "to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you can only be the work of grace." 27 The faith of Antonio Caso is, then, definitively and succinctly expressed in his essay on that topic with the words, "No one can declare the depths of the richness of the human person but Jesus. No one but Jesus was God and man." 2 8 24 Ibid. (Perhaps it should be noted here that the "Catholic positions" that Caso criticizes were generally those of Catholics in the first half of this century in Mexico that should not and cannot be identified as "the" positions of that faith in any absolute sense. Today many [even most] Catholics would probably side with Caso on several of the issues debated.) 25 Caso, La persona humana y el estado totaiitario, p. 190. 26 Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p. 186. 27 Ibid., p. 187. 28 Ibid., p. 197.

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C H A P T E R

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T H E P A N O R A M A OF H U M A N H I S T O R Y

(/he great Mexican archeologist Alfonso Caso has pointed out that his older brother Antonio had been a dedicated student of history as a young man before he became interested in philosophy. It is interesting to note that near the end of his career as a philosopher he turned (or, better, returned in earnest) to history, his first love. In the late 1930's and the early 1940's articles by the philosopher on various aspects of history and the philosophy of history appeared with increasing frequency in El Universal1 1 These include "La filosofia de la historia" (June 19, 1938), "Filosofia de la historia contemporanea" (July 8, 1938), "El Mundo es historico" (May 8, 1940), "Historia y filosofia (July 17, 1940), "El concepto de la historia" (December 12, 1941), "El sentido de la historia" (October 15, 1943), "Ciencia e historia" (May 12, 1944), "Sociologia e historia" (December 1, 1944), "Historiografia" (December 15, 1944), "La filosofia de la historia" (July 27, *945)> "La historia de la filosofia" (October 5, 1945), "La objectividad de la historia" (November 23, 1945), and "Kant y la idea de progreso" (February 22, 1946).

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Even these studies were the culmination of decades of sporadic concern about the nature of history and historical knowledge rather than the expression of completely new ideas and interests. In fact these topics are discussed briefly in La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad (1919 and 1943), Doctrinas e ideas (1924), La filosofia de la cultura y el materialismo historico (1936), and La persona humana y el estado totalitario (1941) and extensively in El concepto de la historia universal (1923) and El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores (1933). In these works and in the El Universal articles Caso wrote about the meaning of history, its relation to philosophical and scientific knowledge, and on the contrast between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history. History is a unique study of individual events that have occurred and can never recur. 2 It is not a science, because it is concerned with particulars and, Caso agrees here with Aristotle, there can be no science of the particular. History also cannot be identified with philosophy, though the two agree in their difference from science. Both history and philosophy require a blend, a harmony, of ideas and intuition, while science is strictly conceptual, hence universal. However, in El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores Caso explains their difference, saying that in philosophy there is the intuition of a universal concept, while in history there is the intellectual reconstruction of particular occurrences. 3 In a chapter of La persona humana y el estado totalitario 2

In his first book, Los problemas filosoficos, p. 248, Caso calls history "an intuition of that which was." 3 Caso, El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores, pp» 138-141.

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titled "Historia y filosofia" Caso first distinguishes the two in a manner similar to that of the early chapter of La existencia. He describes the six points of view from which reality can be examined and contrasts sub specie aeternitatis (the view of metaphysics) with sub specie durationis (the view of history). The historian examines the changing, temporal facets of our experience, while the philosopher seeks to discover unchanging, eternal principles. 4 In La persona humana Caso also distinguishes philosophy from history by their character as abstract and general, on the one hand, and concrete and particular, on the other (much as he did in El concepto de la historia universal). He notes that the philosopher asks such questions as "What is?" and "What value has existence?" but the historian is too attracted to and even delighted by the concrete reality of the individual occurrence to care about such generalities. 5 Caso shows, for example, that, although the philosopher might be concerned with the nature of war, the historian is concerned with such things as the particular kind of warfare called a "blitzkrieg" and how it is similar to and different from other kinds of warfare that have been employed over the centuries. 6 For other examples, Caso remarks that the philosopher is concerned with the values that constitute what we would call a good life, but the historian's task is one of examining the actual realization of such values in men as Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi. Further, the philosopher is concerned with the meaning of truth, while the historian might describe the evolution of German idealism or the developments of Anglo-French positiv4 See La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p. 21, and La persona humana y el estado totalitario, p. 247. 5 Caso, La persona humana y el estado totalitario, pp. 247-248. 6 Ibid., p. 248.

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ism. Finally the philosopher asks "what is beauty?"; the historian shows its precise realization in the statuary of Athens or of Donatello. 7 However, Caso emphasizes that the historian does not simply seek to discover and to describe facts about the past. His task is as much normative as descriptive because he cannot avoid making evaluations, that is, judgments about the strengths and weaknesses, the good and evil, the beauty and ugliness, the loves and hates of the figures that make up human history. Accordingly the historian must have in him something of the poet: the ability to select, to accentuate, and to create, "to reconstruct" the past. Thus in El cancepto de la historia universal he writes: "History is a creative imitation, not an invention as in art, nor an abstract synthesis like the sciences, nor an intuition of universal principles like philosophy." 8 He proclaims that, with reverent hands, the historian takes up past events covered with the dust of ages and rebuilds civilizations. Of course the historian does not perform the selecting, accentuating, and reconstructing operations in an intellectual vacuum. He generally employs certain, probably implicit, philosophical assumptions—although Caso admits that among historians there is a whole spectrum of positions on the role of philosophy in history. At one extreme are "positivist" historians who purport to stick to describing historical facts; at the other are historians largely concerned with questions from the philosophy of history. Most historians fall somewhere between these extremes. The historian of philosophy is, of course, the one most likely to combine these approaches. As such, in a narrow sense, he does 7 8

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Ibid., p. 249. Caso, El concepto de la historia universal, p. 81.

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not concern himself about which of the many philosophical systems is true but only with the manner in which these systems have succeeded one another. However, Caso feels that the historian of philosophy, as a person, can hardly avoid some questions asked by the philosopher of history. The latter proposes to ascertain in a philosophical way the sense, the meaning, of the evolution of history. As he expresses it: "For the historian of philosophy a system of philosophy is a historical fact; for the philosopher of history a historical fact is an object of speculation concerning its value and significance." 9 The questions that seem to have most interested Caso as a philosopher of history were those concerning human progress: Has there been progress in the past? If so, in what areas? Can there be progress in the future? If so, how? The answer to the first question is both yes and no (with the first of these a very qualified affirmation). In La filosofia de la cultura y el materialismo historico Caso criticizes the Marxist emphasis on technical and economic progress. He, of course, has to admit a certain amount of progress in these areas but he does insist that it is a mixed blessing. For one thing the economic is not—like the good, the true, or the beautiful—intrinsically valuable. Its value is merely instrumental. 10 Further, in La existencia he explains that progress in the scientific sphere has led to technological developments and economic improvements but that this kind of utilitarian progress might well foster "insatiable new desires" increasing our needs, our greed, and, very probably, our suffering. Thus Caso asks:

9

Caso, La persona humana y el estado totalitario, pp. 249-250. Caso, La filosofia de la cultura y el materialismo historico, p. 13.

10

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"is this kind of progress a good?" 11 Science, he feels, raises at least as many problems as it solves (at least in the area of morality). But how about progress in the moral realm? In La existencia he writes that at the present time we may have become more adept at deceiving ourselves, more skillful at rationalizing about motives, and, consequently, more ready to accept a double standard of morality for ourselves than men were in former times, but we are not really better. Thus, "if some virtues thrive and some evils decline, at the same time, other virtues flee and new vices flourish."12 Men seem, to Caso, to be as good and as evil as they ever were. In El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional he describes this century as greedy, rancorous, bloody, and perverse; but this is nothing new. He remarks that today there are as few saints and as many damned as always. 13 Can there, however, be more saints and fewer damned in the future? If so, how? Caso replys with an enthusiastic yes to the first question and notes that the answer to the second must be discovered by the individual person. That is, humanity cannot progress, because humanity does not exist. Only individuals exist and only they might grow in courage and love, which is the only real progress. Moral progress is not, Caso insists, a law of history. History 11

Caso, La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p.

152.

32 Ibid., p. 150. (Concerning progress in art Caso is similarly negative. Works of art are the result of unique intuitions so they cannot be compared for relative worth in any historical sense. W e can see changes in art and differences in works of art during different periods but we cannot say art has improved. Can one say that the sculpture of modern artists is better than that of the classic Greeks? There m a y be glorious achievements in both periods—but not progress. On this point see La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad, p. 151.) 13 Caso, El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional, p. 96.

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has no laws, no predetermined or foreordained plan. He expresses this in El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores. "History has neither sense nor value. The only thing of value in the fullest sense is personal life."14 Moral progress is the movement toward self-perfection, which is achieved by self-sacrifice. In this way the person will have less but will be a great deal more. Only the person can give meaning and value to his life through heroic, loving acts of giving—and the term "heroic" does not, for Caso, have any grandiose or self-flattering implications. A heroic act may appear to be something very small and humble, like forgiving an injury, or being less selfish than usual, or showing concern for the problems of a neighbor and helping him solve them. These are the acts of love, and only through such acts is there any moral progress at all! 14

138.

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Caso, El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores, p.

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CHAPTER

A

g

MESSAGE

For Man and for

Mexico

/ / / n t o n i o Caso was a scholar dedicated both to past history and to the present and future applications of philosophy; to what philosophy had been for mankind and to what it is and might be for Mexicans. He was a pensador amante, always concerned to make his thought living and relevant, whose own life personified his teachings, his message for man. Further, as an inspiring and beloved professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico for more than thirty years (as well as a teacher for a short period at the National Preparatory School and a sociology professor for ten years at the National School of Law) and as a popular writer who authored countless newspaper columns for Mexican papers and magazines and over forty widely read books, he clearly intended this message for the men and women of his patria.

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One of Caso's several published debates was with a former student, the outstanding Mexican Marxist Vicente Lombardo Toledano. 1 A primary controverted topic was Lombardo's position that Marxist socialism has a scientific foundation. 2 Caso thought this belief was just one (though an important and influential one) of the forms of modern scientism ("scientific superstition") that he felt compelled to oppose. However, Caso was more dismayed about some of the effects of science than about scientism as a theory, especially the growing faith in technology as an end in itself, which would leave man exposed, as Thomas Merton has written, u to a horrifying spiritual inertia on the one hand and to a demonic activism of self-interest, comfort seeking, and conscienceless wealth on the other." 3 This scramble for material success with no concern for the means was for Caso a primary source of trouble for man. He also questioned a widespread contemporary faith that moral problems will recede or even disappear with the advances in science, technology, and economics. He insisted that science raises many moral problems that simply cannot be solved by scientific, technological, and economic means. (For example, the scientist can provide us with a large variety of contraceptives and an even larger variety of weapons—to stop an explosion or to start one—but the scientist qua scientist cannot provide us with answers to questions about the morality or immorality of our use or nonuse of these devices.) Caso was terribly concerned 1

Other debate opponents included Francisco Zamora, Eduardo Pallares, Guillermo Hector Rodriguez, and Alfonso Junco. (The dispute with the latter was examined in Chapter 7.) 2 See Antonio Caso and Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Idealismo vs. Materialismo Dialectico: Caso-Lombardo. 3 Quoted in Daniel Berrigan, They Call Us Dead Men, p. 54.

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about what Barbara Ward once termed "the failure of moral sense to keep pace with physical fact." 4 To remedy this failure he suggested not speculation, but loving action. A continuing theme in his writings was the priority of action over thought: "The supreme truth is not in knowledge, but rather in action." 5 Much as Aristotle had taught, Caso insisted that a person does not become good by knowing what goodness is but by being good, by living a life of goodness. In a book with the intriguing title Zen Catholicism, Dom Aelred Graham writes: "Genuine love is compounded of appreciation and sympathy, issuing eventually in action, but first in a kind of contemplative egolessness,"6 and, later, "while knowledge brings what we know into our our own minds, love takes us to reality itself."7 This sounds like an echo of the Mexican philosopher who, emphasizing that philosophy itself is empty, even impossible, without love, urged his readers not just to be sages, but saints! Caso was concerned that Christianity had become for most persons a perniciously negative force, an institutionalized, overstructured law enforcer and supporter of the status quo. Such views he felt to be destructive of any authentic Christian spirit. He viewed Christianity charismatically, not institutionally. True Christianity must be expressed in loving actions, in such concrete expressions of love as the works of mercy. Christian love he insisted is without any self-interest, without any desire to dominate the beloved.8 It is the "true love, the sacri4 Barbara Ward, "Two Worlds," in Christianity and Culture, ed. J. S. Murphy, p. 33. 5 Caso, Drama per miisica, p. 47. 6 Aelred Graham, Zen Catholicism, p. 42. 7 Ibid., p. 115. 8 How far this is from anthropologists and zoologists like Konrad Lorenz

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ficing love" which, as S0ren Kierkegaard has said, "loves every man for his own characteristics [and] is willing to make every sacrifice: for it does not seek its own."9 For Caso a person cannot love another in this way without a perfectly legitimate love of himself, but, at the same time, he cannot love himself (as loveable) if he is selfish and does not love others. As expressed by St. John of the Cross: "Where there is no love, put love—and you will find love." The greatest sin, for Caso, was to not love enough—and the finite love of man presupposes an infinite source (who has shared our finitude). In El peligro del hombre he writes of Christianity: "Our religion is the only one that loves and reveres God incarnate in mortal clay."10 Caso notes that it is not by rational arguments that we influence persons to become Christians. We must present an "invitation to mankind" by the example of our activities: we must help others, comfort, feed, house, clothe, enlighten, struggle for justice in the presence of injustice. Caso prayed for a Christianity like that which led.the pagans to say of the early Christians: See how they love one another. He would certainly have agreed with the reminder of G. K. Chesterton that "the Christian ideal has not been tried and, found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried." Further, nothing less than a revolution is required for this ideal to be realized. In a world filled with the ruthless violence of race against race, rich against poor, developed nation against underdeveloped, the violence of "overkill," arms race, and starwho in his On Aggression attempts to explain human behavior in strictly animal terms! Caso is speaking of man, what man is and can be. 9 Spren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p. 218. 10 Caso, El peligro del hombre, p. 143.

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vation, the only viable revolution must be a nonviolent struggle against the selfishness of individuals, classes, and nations. Loving conflict is, indeed, required, that is, heroic opposition to all egoism and exploitation of persons with the resultant violent conflict. As was noted earlier, strength and heroism are required to oppose evil without employing evil means. Martin Luther King, Jr., has presented a moving illustration of this heroic Christianity: "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force . . . Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children; send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road, beating us and leaving us half dead, and we will still love you." 11 Such tactics of nonviolent resistance require the greatest courage possible to man. The force called upon here is the power of justice and love. Caso tended to be pessimistic about what man has done and been. In Discursos heterogeneos he characterizes daily living as a restless whirlwind, artificial and purposeless, "and there we go, nations and individuals, limping on the slippery floor of birth at death, never having taken time to reflect on our activities except in the moments preceding our inevitable death . . . [when] our conscience will examine itself and gaze, in tragic summary, on the indecisive, . . . tormented panorama of life." 12 If our lives have been wasted, then our death, truly, will be a time of anguish. Yet he was optimistic about what man can be and do if only he can free himself from himself—from the persistent demands ^ M a r t i n Luther King, Jr., Stride toward Freedom, p. 215. Caso, Discursos heterogeneos, pp. 59-60.

12

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of his brutal animal instincts or his egocentrism. To this vital current of combat that seeks a violent victory over others Caso opposes charity which is "another victory, a mystical victory over life, which triumphs healing, yielding peace not war, love not booty, beauty not satiety." 13 Existence as charity is the plenitude of human existence because only the person can be unselfish, loving, and giving. One becomes truly human in so acting. This is the message of Antonio Caso for mankind and for the Mexico that was the lead on his wings. In his Discursos a la nation mexicana and El problema de Mexico y la ideologia national he lovingly extends this message to his patria. In the former Caso pleads for Mexicans not to be content with seeking pleasure and possession but to have the courage and enthusiasm to seek unselfishly the good of their compatriots. In the latter he states that the problem of Mexico is essentially a moral problem. He says we do not need a Christ the King, but rather a Christ of the people.14 Two of the Mexican's more urgent requirements are to forgive and forget former offenses of other Mexicans of whatever political persuasion, economic position, or social caste, and to unite the Mexican criollo, the Mexican mestizo, and the Mexican Indian through an ethic of sacrificing love and unselfish service. Only in this way can a great nation be forged. Caso was very hopeful that such an ethic could be established. 13 Caso, Doctrinas e ideas, p. 230. (Here the following words of Daniel Berrigan seem to be particularly apropos: "The decree of the future is written large in every language. T h e decree says that mankind is one, that all men will be free or all will be slaves, that the whole of mankind will achieve its peace or the race will die in a single conflagration" [They Call Us Dead Men, p. 51].) 14 Caso, El problema de Mexico y la ideologia national, p. 66.

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He says that if the problem of Mexico, the problem of overcoming egoism and materialistic desires and achieving an ethic of love, can be resolved, then "to hold us back is impossible." 15 In an article, "Mexico: Hazte Valer," Caso exhorts Mexicans to have confidence in themselves and thus to expect much of themselves—as he expected much of himself. Thus Antonio Caso, a philosopher who lived his thought as have few in history. Jose Gaos, who emigrated from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish civil war, has praised the warm generosity with which he was welcomed by the beloved maestro mexicano. He further recalls with joyful nostalgia the late night hours in the refuge of Caso's library where they partook of the "eighth holy sacrament," conversation, and Caso shared his philosophy ("philosophizing with body and soul, even to the marrow of his bones") and gave his love.16 Caso once wrote that we do need to know, to know mathematics and logic and history and theories on the significance of life, but "the first thing is to live!" 17 —and live he did, in the richest sense possible. Human life, for Antonio Caso, is love, and his life was the very personification of love! 15 16 17

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Ibid., p. 30. Jose Gaos, Filosofia mexicana de nuestros dias, pp. 51-53. Caso, Historia y antologia del pensamiento filosofico, p. 16.

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A P P E N D I X

SELECTIONS PHILOSOPHY: HEROIC A N D DISCREET

"Philosophical Heroism" from Ensayos criticos y

polemicos

NATIONAL IDENTITY! SEARCH AND DISCOVERY

"Mexico: Wings and Lead" from El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional "Philosophy of Education" from Ensayos criticos y polemicos "Personality and Education" from Doctrinas e ideas SYNTHESIS SOUGHT

"Sub specie . . ." from La existencia teres y como caridad

como economia, como

desin-

LIFE AS ECONOMIC: SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT

"Person, Individual, and T h i n g " from La persona humana y el estado totalitario "Individualism and Communism" from La persona humana y el estado totalitario "Selections" from El peligro del hombre "Marxism as a Religion" from La persona humana y el estado totalitario "Selection" from El peligro del hombre

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L I F E AS D I S I N T E R E S T E D : A E S T H E T I C S

"Art as Disinterested" from La existencia como economia, desinteres y como caridad "The Nature of A r t " from Doctrinas e ideas

como

LIFE AS LOVE! ETHICS AND RELIGION

"Existence as Charity" from La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad "Selections" from El peligro del hombre "The Ultimate Christmas" from El problema de Mexico y la idealogia nacional T H E PANORAMA OF H U M A N HISTORY

"History as a Work of A r t " from Doctrinas e ideas A MESSAGE: FOR M A N A N D FOR MEXICO

" M y Philosophical Conviction" from Ensayos criticos y polemicos "Socrates, Perfect Moralist" from Doctrinas e ideas "Mexico: Show T h e m Your Worth!" from El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional

PHILOSOPHY: HEROIC AND DISCREET

From Ensayos criticos y polemicos Selections from "Philosophical Heroism," pp. 63-69 There is an omission i n the celebrated book of Carlyle consecrated to the cult of heroes and the heroic in history, that of "philosophical heroism," the silent archetype of a discreet and impassioned attitude. T h e maxims that follow are intended to indicate how and why, side by side with the warrior, the king, the prophet, the poet,

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and the gods, there ought to be the philosopher with his unique heroism—an attitude that though quiet is not petty—that is expressed with rare perfection in the lovely n a m e that Pythagoras invented: "lover of wisdom. . . ." (p. 63) The philosophical spirit is a constant and incorruptible spirit of adventure that has in it much of the heroic. The enchantment of philosophy rests, more than in the success—always problematical —of its affirmations, in the effort displayed w h e n meditating. Whoever aspires to an interior quietude of the mind, a strong stability, a soft and easy rest—which corrupts thought and psychic activities in general—should not preoccupy himself with a study of philosophical questions. . . . (p. 64) The heroic has as essential characteristics the power of invention that is called "philosophic intuition" and, as a direct corollary of this, intrepidity, that is, the systematic subordination of the data collected to the thesis professed. He who is discreet is characterized not only by his equanimity but also by his great objectivity. Since he is not a victim of the enthusiasm of invention, the ideas he professes do not challenge h i m , as does the heroic, with threats to his own conscience. He is implacably righteous. He balances opposed theses, making them negate themselves mutually, compelling them to harmonize; he joins them and orders them in an organic synthesis, and thus he gets nearer than the heroic to full objectivity, or, at least, to the common sense of men, a metric system of objectivity. The philosophical progress of history, the proper rhythmic pulse of philosophy, is due to the concurrence of the heroic and the discreet. If only the heroic would philosophize, metaphysics would be a magnificent multiplication of inspired thoughts without mutual relations, without traditional logical connections, "without windows," as Leibniz says. If only the discreet would philosophize, philosophical thought— patient, exact, scrupulous, scholastic—would lack the highest quality of invention, the supreme power of intrepidity that verges on the absurd, at times, but that, at other times, guesses or discovers unforeseen approximations and surprising analogies.

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Appendix

Socrates represents the alliance of the heroic and the discreet. The notable author of the Griechische Denker, Theodor Gomperz, a most delightful and exceptional author, resorts to a n ingenious comparison in order to explain the Socratic spirit. He says that the Athenian was like those machines moved by the expansive energy of vapor which, in spite of their very high temperature, produce ice. A fountain of heat that forms frozen blocks, that is, a great power of philosophical intuition that develops into impeccable reasoning, a vigorous personality who objectifies convincing demonstrations, a divine and frenetic passion that overflows in discreet and subtle conversations . . . This was Socrates: interior vigor and graceful expression; a m a n of discourse and of genius. . . . (pp. 67-68) We m a y conclude on h u m a n heroism and philosophical discretion: "Thinkers—the muse of the noble writer seems to say—be Socratic to the extent that you may. Thus, you will be, at the same time, heroic and discreet. To the wings of metaphysical invention add, I request of you, the dependable ballast of logic. Boldly and firmly you shall then fly through the varied regions of thought, in the ethereal and distinct spheres or in the hidden darkness of the conscience." (pp. 68-69) Translated by Rene Cantu and John H. Haddox

NATIONAL IDENTITY: SEARCH AND DISCOVERY

From El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional Selections from "Mexico: Wings and Lead" pp. 69-73 One of the fundamental laws of social activity is imitation. Not only of social life, but also of psychological life. M u c h more is imitated than is invented, and even w h e n something is invented there is much more imitation than invention. The greatest men of genius who honor h u m a n i t y owe more to their predecessors than to their own ingenuity. A Newton, an Einstein, a Descartes, a Comte are contained in their predecessors and they seem to make explicit w h a t is implicit in them. . . . (p. 69) The inspired invention floats,

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if it m a y be so expressed, in the intellectual atmosphere of the epoch that engenders it. This does not mean to lessen or undervalue the exceptional individual, but to place him, positively, in a historical environment. He is not an archangel dazzling inferior beings, who follow h i m as i n a dream, as Carlyle thought; but, as Gabriel Tarde opines, a m a n who knows how to listen carefully and accurately to the soul of his contemporaries. . . . (pp. 69-70) There are societies that invent as there are m e n who invent, and societies that imitate as we individuals imitate, but they are not unlike in nature. Any h u m a n society is capable of exaltation and the achievement of m a x i m u m advancement. The so-called inferior races can well demonstrate their worth and transform themselves into seedbeds of intellectual and moral activity. . . . (p. 70) Mexico has not been an inventive country. W e refer, naturally, to the Mexican nation derived from Spain, not to the native culture, because the latter, far from signifying little in the social evolution of the world, is, with the Incan culture, one of the most original achievements of all times. Its place is just after the great Oriental civilizations: the Chinese, the Hindu, the Persian, the Egyptian, and the Chaldean-Syrian. Even more, even if our parents conquered by Spain were original and profoundly inventive, we have not distinguished ourselves w i t h the gift of reflecting better t h a n any other the precious jewels of the genius of a race. Our social and political systems are derived from Europe and the United States of America. It had to be so, to a great extent, because of the short lapse of our independent life, but it is urgent now, for the happiness of our people, that we cease to imitate the sociopolitical regimes of Europe and that we apply ourselves in order to discover the geographic, political, artistic, and other conditions of our nation, the very molds of our laws, the forms of our conviviality, the ideals of our activity. W e cannot continue assimilating the attributes of other lives that are foreign to us. Our contemporary misery, our chronic revolutions, our tragic bitterness are the cruel fruits of our unintelligent imitation. Let us be, at the proper time, democrats, socialists, or fascists; but let u s remember that our democracy cannot be that of the Greeks or

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that of Lincoln; our socialism could not be copied from the Asiatic and mystic r h y t h m of Lenin; neither could our conservative spirit dress with the picturesque attire typical of the dictator Mussolini. To imitate without intelligence is the worst of sophisms . . . Imitate if nothing else can be done, but even when imitating, invent, adapt . . . It would have been better for us to know w h a t is at home t h a n to import from foreigners theses that are not in accord with the Mexican soul! The real redeemer is not the deluded one, who does not recognize the ground he walks on, but the sage who combines the real and the ideal in harmonious proportions. The ideal is not the unreal, but the very reality combined with intelligence and filtered and magnified in it. Idealists, you who commit yourselves to the salvation of the republic, t u r n your eyes to the soil of Mexico, the resources of Mexico, to the men of Mexico, to our customs and our traditions, to our hopes and our dreams, to what we are in reality. Only in t h a t m a n n e r shall you guide us to a better condition of life and shall you redeem us from our misfortune! . . . Whoever wants to fly must have "wings and lead" . . . Without aspiring to something better you retreat without any alternative, but without the knowledge of where you are going, you are surely defeated; "Wings a n d lead, such must be the motto of our redemption, so anxiously desired! The gravity of the matter exaggerates the daring of t h e thought. MEXICO: Wings and Lead!" (pp. 71-73) Translated

by Rene Cantii and John H.

Haddox

From Ensayos criticos y polemicos Selections from "Philosophy of Education," pp. 16-25. M y theme is the philosophical problem of education. Without any reservations I shall say that, as far as I am concerned, education is related to philosophy as art is related to science; this means that one cannot be a good educator who is not a philosopher. To educate is to conduct; it is to convey. But, to conduct where? Where shall we convey men? How shall we form their destinies, if we do not investigate i n advance what these are? Education cannot be rescued

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by the psychologist, the biologist, the historian, or the sociologist. It is indispensable to have a broader criterion. It is indispensable to contemplate the problems of education from a loftier point of view. All those problems of education, from the biological and psychological point of view, must be subordinated to the supreme point of view of education: the philosophical. Only practical philosophy embraces in its entirety, as a synthesis, an ordered meditation on the things of the world in terms of the things of the spirit, and only thanks to this kind of meditation is it possible to investigate how to influence men, how to form their characters, how to integrate their personalities. Therefore, education conforms to philosophy as an art form conforms to a fundamental science. The basic discipline is philosophy. It is indispensable, then, to ask ourselves: W h a t is it that we wish to accomplish when we educate? W h y do we educate? W i t h w h a t purpose do we call persons to populate the schools? The great fear of the educator is that he m a y cause men to waste their time at school. He would then be the most delinquent of all criminals; he would have called students to misuse the best hours of their lives filling the halls of knowledge where they would have gathered only confused and incomplete ideas. It would perhaps be better, then, to abandon each spirit to its own personal discipline, r a t h e r than to call h i m to school with others. Consequently, it is urgent to inquire: W h a t are we going to do when educating? W h a t are we, the educators, going to gain w h e n we educate? W e are going to integrate personalities, to integrate men, to form men. W h a t is a man? W h a t should a m a n be? . . . And who else can answer, but the philosopher? W h o will be able to know w h a t a m a n is, but the philosopher? . . . (pp. 16-17) All things of the universe are individual; nothing, no existent being, lacks individuality; there are no general things or general beings. Reality is always individual. General ideas are ways of thinking about things. W h a t exists in the world is nothing but a collection of concrete beings, the investigation of which concerns the philosopher. Because of this, the major error of the educator may consist in settling for a general synthesis, not having integrated

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anything but formulae, and in having established only definitions w h e n the issue is, precisely, something very different: the forming of spirits, the defining of individualities, the clarifying of vocations, and the crystallizing of souls. If this is true, the worst educated men in the world would be those who would simply have as their purpose to follow the formulae they learned or the physical or chemical laws they remember, d r a w n from the pages of their school texts. It is an error to think t h a t such things as conic sections really exist, that in reality all intellectual forms exist and through them we understand the universe. To think that God, according to Descartes or Pascal, arranged the world by means of a treatise on cones, is simply not to understand the value of a treatise on cones, aside from being disrespectful to religion, with which, at this time, I do not wish to occupy myself. . . . (p. 18) Imagine a h u m a n being who would be worth no more than a guidebook, who would have no meaning beyond that of a notebook of formulae, and who would leave school with his head filled merely w i t h general propositions. As his life passed by he would become more and more disenchanted every day; the formulae he learned would be far removed from life since every m a n is different as are the problems that each must face . . . There are two different ways to develop the spirit: either condition it so that it will always seek general principles from which can be deduced "perfect" solutions for particular problems, or free the spirit so that it will always be autonomous, always intuitive, always agile, and always in harmony w i t h reality. The first path is mistaken; the second is generous and true. Along the latter I would advise you as educators, both men But of individuality, it might be asked: Is it the individuality of a delinquent or of a saint? Is it the personality of a hero or of a martyr? Which personality do we attempt to awaken or to arouse w h e n we educate? Which h u m a n personality? And I answer: the human personality. But, after all, is not a criminal a man? Shall we seek to awaken the criminal instinct in the schools? Is not a and women, to travel. . . . (p. 19).

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m a r t y r a man? Shall we make it a point in schools to increase the n u m b e r of martyrs? Is not a hero a man? Shall we make it a point in the schools that the number of heroes be augmented? I answer: It is necessary to form and integrate h u m a n personalities. I n short, the difficulty, the confusion concerns the significance of these words: W h a t makes one h u m a n ? I ask myself here in the Faculty of Humanities of La Plata, W h a t makes one h u m a n ? W h a t is the foundation of that which is human? W h a t is characteristic and distinctive about humanity? . . . (pp. 20-21) [After discussing the use of intelligence for practical purposes and the disinterested pleasure resulting from the apprehension of beauty, Caso writes:] It is indispensable to work constantly for the realization of m a n in the two fundamental activities already defined. But another characteristic is lacking. M a n is also the being who sacrifices himself; he is the extraordinary being who, at a given time, feels the most pleasure in activities that cause h i m the most pain but benefit his fellow-man. . . . (p. 25) Translated

by Rene Cantii and John H. Haddox

From Doctrinas e ideas Selections from "Personality and Education," pp. 198-201 "To be, is to be individual" I judge that the supreme law of education is to respect the personality of the one who is being educated. I think that its ultimate goal is the development of each one's distinctive personality. I n sum, for me, education does not "form" its object, but simply "informs" it. The h u m a n spirit, irreducible, independent, sui generis, unique, must not be schooled in order to "deform" but to "inform." Schools, thus conceived, must not educate directly for the family, for the country, for humanity, or for God, but for the individual who receives the education. . . . (p. 198) If in other lands education today frankly tends to develop individuality, in Mexico the necessity of individual disinvolvement

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is urged in the school. I n other lands distinct individuals of exceptional character abound. In Mexico are those who, because they are essentially different, quickly submit to social discipline, to common ideas, to the hateful truism celui-qui-ne-compr end-pas, to disagreeable preoccupations of every kind that are the exclusive guidelines of our psychological life. I n t r u t h one could say t h a t among us individuality is a crime and something to be ashamed of. To the cowardly positivists frightened by the idea of "mental anarchy" I say, no. I believe education should tend to free us, to unbind, to relax, in a word, to individualize us. Whereas the mental life of Mexicans will be more diverse insofar as each one of us will live more and more uniquely, more profoundly, as Bergson said, and will be ever less weighed down with secular, political, and religious preoccupations, with the sad hatred of change in our society, the happier place Mexico will be; above all it will be richer and more noble in what, in the last analysis, is most important to us, that nobility of our proper existence that we can fully expect and not [obtain by] good luck, the supreme and unexpected gift of the gods. I clearly conceive, then, educational institutions as sites of intellectual information and moral systems, as repositories or libraries that offer valuable data and premises useful to the spirit; and I firmly believe that all those who fail to adjust to this conception essentially corrupt the school by converting it into a penitentiary, a barracks, a convent, a laboratory, or at least a place of vulgarization instead of individualization. . , . (pp. 200-201) Translated

by Carmen and John H.

Haddox

SYNTHESIS SOUGHT From La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad "Sub specie . . .," pp. 21-22 Existence can be considered from diverse points of view. The

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search for a synthesis of these diverse points of view is w h a t constitutes philosophy. If one examines things sub specie aeternitatis, abstracting from the temporal, the metaphysical point of view is achieved. This is because the essence that endures lacks duration. Essences can only be viewed, intuited, from the point of view of eternity. Further, the supreme principles of knowledge are, in every case, conceivable; they constitute "eternal truths." One can also consider existence sub specie durationis, a position antithetical to the previous one. This viewpoint is that of history. To be contingent and to be in time are the same. Philosophy ought to discover a synthesis of the metaphysical and the historical, taking into account the history of metaphysics as well as the metaphysics of history. Also, existence can be seen from the utilitarian point of view, sub specie utilitatis, a position opposed to that of ethics. If we consider existence sub specie utilitatis, we have economics. From this viewpoint the world is distorted by our attempts to achieve the greatest profit with the least effort. Opposed to the criterion of utility is that revealed in Christianity, wherein existence acquires a new sense, being considered sub specie charitatis. The economic synthesis of thought is precisely reversed, because love consists of charity, the authentic love that obtains the least profit with the greatest effort. Philosophy synthesizes the economic and the moral as it does the metaphysical and the historical. Also, it is possible to consider existence as a regular arrangement of relations. To relate is to think, to discover, to invent. Logic and all the sciences examine things sub specie relationis. The most abstract relations, universal forms of relation in all their applications, constitute the object of logic. The other sciences, in their proper limitations, express the order of relations to the scientific sphere that each treats. Likewise one can consider existence from the point of view of beauty, sub specie pulchritudinis. The aesthetic contemplator is,

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in his intuition, free of all relations. W h a t converts it into a n exclusive world turns one into a solitary individual—as a painter who paints a picture. The only object of his intuition is his model viewed in its pristine exclusiveness. Philosophy has discovered a synthesis of the aesthetic and the logical, just as of the ethical and economic, and of the metaphysical and historical. In this m a n n e r we conceive the direction of philosophical studies. Philosophy is the explanation of existence. Translated

by John H.

Haddox

LIFE AS ECONOMIC*. SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT

From La persona humana y el estado totalitario Selections from "Person, Individual, and Thing," pp. 187-190. There are three degrees of being: the thing, the individual, and the person. W h a t are the differential attributes of each grade of being? . . . The thing is the being without unity. If a thing breaks, nothing has perished in it. Things are constantly referred to as divisible. It is the region, the sphere of the physical, where life does not exist. Things are not living; thus they can be divided without changing their intrinsic nature. They remain things. Dividing them does not modify their nature. If one passes from this inferior grade of being to the next superior, the fundamental difference between the physical world and the sphere of organic matter appears, of course. W h e n we divide things we get things, but, the moment that contact is made with life, existence manifests itself endowed with properties that are profoundly different. The being that is gifted w i t h life is called a n individual. The denomination itself implies something essentially different from the nature of things. The individual refers to w h a t cannot be divided. Even the name of organic being includes the idea of indivisi-

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bility; the living being is always indivisible; it is always individual; it always assumes in its own substance a degree of being superior to the thing. This superiority is in the indivisibility. . . . (pp. 187188) The most perfect form of individuality is the animal organism. M a n is an animal organism, the most perfect organism of all; but his evident superiority is not by reason of his biological nature, but by virtue of his intellectual and moral superiority. M a n is a microcosm; in h i m is given the individuality that excels in physical nature, but also another nature evolves in h i m that cannot be reduced to pure individuality. M a n is an individual, an admirable biological individual, but he is something more t h a n this; he is a person. To the biological individual are added the qualities of unity, of identity, of substantial continuity. Only m a n plays a role as a social being. Hence the denomination of person, which signifies, precisely, to play a part, as it is played by the actors in the theater. I n the same manner, man, as a social utility always plays a role in history. W h a t other being in the world is capable, as is man, of realizing and performing a social function? . . . Only m a n conceives t h e ideal; only he is capable of availing himself of his spiritual faculties, for instance, reason, science, sentiment on behalf of cherished ideas, those ideas that the will affirms. This being so, a cherished idea is decidedly the ideal. The pure psychic nature of m a n does not suffice to define the concept of person. Above the psychic is the spiritual. M a n is not only a psychic being; he is also a spiritual being. He is a "creator of values," according to the magnificent expression of Nietzsche. H u m a n spirituality cannot live in the isolation of the psychic. This is w h y Aristotle defined m a n as "the political animal." T h e so-called animal societies are like an individual, not a person. I n them, every being of which they are composed realizes a regular function, an activity that is tenaciously reproduced; certain divisions of labor, stereotyped, organic. A beehive is a n individual t h a t reduces to its rule of action each of the individuals who make it u p .

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T h e error of individualism and the error of socialism are singularly similar, because in their extreme forms, both social theories, both philosophical creeds, do not take cognizance of the superior n a t u r e of the h u m a n being, the level of his spiritual being. Individualism and communism reduce the dignity of the person. T h e person and the culture are concomitant. The person implies society i n his development. Society needs, in turn, the person in order to be. The spirit blossoms above life, as does life above physical nature. Concerning the diverse grades of existence: The supreme grade is personality. . . . The h u m a n personality in Dante, in Newton, i n Plato is the supreme degree of being. The major powers of history, of all nations the most notable, the favorite cultural cities like Athens, Florence, or Paris, have personalities, but regardless of the measure of their spirituality they cannot reach or compare w i t h that demonstrated in the inspired work of Plato, of Newton, or of Dante. The h u m a n person is the highest grade of being. But, notwithstanding the qualities that those great figures of genius reveal, they are inferior to the h u m a n ideal. Man's ideal cannot be achieved except by postulating a person who, if he is active, will be omnipotent; if he is loving, will be absolutely disinterested; if he is intelligent, will embrace every object of knowledge in ONE thought; if he is free, will be completely autonomous; if he is saintly will be sanctity itself. This person postulated as the h u m a n ideal is the synthesis of the being and the ideal, GOD. (pp. 188-190) Translated by Rene Cantu and John H. Haddox F r o m La persona humana y el estado totalitario Selections from: "Individualism and Communism," pp. 191-194. Individualism and communism are identified as two forms of egoism. The community is egoistic, it claims its own continuity and priority over the individual. Prior to individuals is the community. I n it they were born and exist. It is the whole, and the individuals

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9i

the parts. The individual, part of a whole, has to be subordinate to the community. This is the egoistic essence of communism. This is also the egoistic essence of individualism: the individual declares, in turn, that his being is the only real one. He says: I conceive the state as a means for m y happiness; society was established for m y felicity. I am myself. That which is of God is divine —but I a m not God; w h a t is h u m a n belongs to humanity. I a m w h a t is real. M y good is w h a t I w a n t to possess, not what others w a n t to give me, and if they don't want to give it to me, I shall get it somehow. The two rival positions are false, for they place the values of [biological] life above culture and the spirit. The community asserts its distinct being; the individual his very own. Both struggle and quarrel endlessly. Both say: I am primary; both believe: I am the truth; you are for me for you are false. The individual argues with his individual life; the community w i t h its common life. Who will be able to decide in the conflict of two different lives, if he takes life as the only criterion; that is, as the only apparent and usual way of living? . . . (pp. 191-192) If we only refer to biology, we always refer to egoism. Struggle shall break loose, every time more fierce, for life is, precisely, a conflict of egos, the aggrandizement of means for nutrition and reproduction, that is, incorporation of what is another's to oneself. Life says, with Hobbes: " M a n is a wolf to m a n " ; with Darwin: "Struggle for life"; with Nietzsche: "Not contentment but more power." But h u m a n society is not the conflict of the community and individuals; it is, fortunately, something more profound and superior: the coordination of the persons within their rights. The personal being does not w a n t to have something more, but to be something more, as Nietzsche said. . . . (pp. 192-193) The only solution to conflict is axiological, ethical, and juridical. Communism and individualism oppose rights, the law. The issue is that of two individuals, two "biological units," which tear at each other. Above tyrannical communities and individuals who believe themselves absolute within an anarchy there is something

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else: spiritual human society composed of persons. Just persons and just societies must prevail. Communism and anarchism are two errors that have the same baneful root: an overvaluation of intrinsic and vital egoism. The contemporary world supports this tremendous insatiable egoism, for it has lost a sense of personal being. The lack of spirituality in the life of the world is w h a t unleashes catastrophes, is w h a t casts individuals against individuals, individuals against states, states against individuals, and states against themselves. . . . (p. 193) No one shall ever be free while individuality, a thing essentially biological, is confused w i t h personality, which is love, culture. Individualism and communism—according to pure logic—are two contrary propositions that are judged to be exclusive. But two contrary propositions—also according to pure logic—can be: one false and the other true; or, as in the present case, both false; both true, never! Translated by Rene Cantu and John H. Haddox From El peligro del hombre, pp. 40-41 Absolute individualism, which is condemned in the relations among individuals, is justified in the relations of societies. The anarchism which speaks of a "free association of egoists" becomes the formula for alliances of nations, because this is exactly how the great powers act, guided by their monstrous and anarchic egoism. The absolute individualist within a given society will go to prison or to the gallows, but the society that practices absolute nationalism is honored as one of the victors in history. There are, therefore, two weights and two measures. The law that is affirmed within national communities is denied in the international community. In opposing the delinquencies of individuals the goodness of law is recognized; yet it seems to be wrong to enforce this law when it is applied to murderous nations. There are two weights and two measures, two rules and two commands: in the private sphere, law, in the international, injustice. To kill a m a n is a horrendous crime, but to destroy a nation constitutes an act of heroism. Anarchism

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among members of a society is wrong, but absolute individualism is "a principle of international life" to the sovereignty that sustains it. No one is embarrassed by this contradiction, so all nations live in injustice. Translated by Dario Prieto and John H. Haddox From El peligro del hombre, pp. 46-48 The h u m a n person is endowed with comprehension, with the capacity to distinguish the false from the true, the ability to recognize w h a t is necessary and perfect. The h u m a n person is conscious of the difference between reason and instinct, between reason, ignorance, passion, and insanity. . . . Our century rebels against the person when it ignores the directive of reason. W h e n the person is completely subordinated to the state, reason (that admirable power of comprehension) always vindicates the prerogatives of the personality itself, because the personal conscience denies the absolute subordination of the person to the state. I n this sense, what we term conscience is only reason applied to our moral life. In the presence of the audacious mysticisms of this century, in the presence of irrational "totalitarianism," the mind protests w i t h the powerful proclamation of Kant: "Every object that has a relative and extrinsic value is a thing; rational beings, persons, have an intrinsic value; they are ends in themselves. Things have a price, persons have dignity." Because of this, servility is the lowest kind of life. It corrupts the dignity of the person; it transforms men into things that can be bought in a market. Personalism declares that each rational being is irreplaceable, precisely because he is a person. One makes a contract to exchange one good for another at a price; this makes good sense w h e n dealing with things. W h e n dealing with persons, not "biological unities," their dignity is found in affirming their unique character. He who has dignity can never have a price. Translated

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by Dario Prieto and John H.

Haddox

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94 From El peligro del hombre, pp. 50-51

Individualism and rationalism are false because they represent the improper use of reason in metaphysics and ethics. Reason, yes; rationalism, no. Personalism, yes, because it stands for spirituality and affirmation; individualism, no, because individualism fails to recognize the moral law, the necessity for each person to realize his place in the midst of a society that is, inescapably, the spiritual heir of all the centuries, the work of generations that preceded us, and in the present, a spiritual union, a solidarity, of efforts to form our own personality by relations with other persons. Tradition is love for w h a t used to be; solidarity is love for the present. The h u m a n person is realized, in terms of tradition and solidarity, both through self-respect and through love for others. Translated

by Dario Prieto and John H.

Haddox

From El peligro del hombre, p. 53 Totalitarianism is false because it aspires to subordinate h u m a n persons within a purely political conception. Society exists for man, for the realization of his nature, for the development of his personality, for the achievement of his destiny . . . Translated

by Dario Prieto and John H.

Haddox

From El peligro del hombre, pp. 54-55 Personalism is the truth. Transpersonalism is false. Every achievement of salvation is destroyed, every integration of the h u m a n subject is corrupted if transpersonalism is true; that is w h y it can never be true. H u m a n association lives from the rich variety of the elements that compose it. From this comes the splendor of art, the elevation and tone of moral life, the majesty of religious sentiment, the urbanity and delight of civilization and society. To believe in the state as a being superior to h u m a n nature is to believe in fantasy. Translated by Dario Prieto and John H. Haddox

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From El peligro del hombre, pp. 83-84 If scientific work is venerated it is not because it is sought as a disinterested study, but because of self-interest due to its practical triumphs. Science is loved because it gives power, because its results give pleasure. Not in itself, or as disinterested speculation, or as philosophy, or because of the resulting wisdom, but only for political motives [is it v a l u e d ] . Science is loved because through it result great industries that serve the war effort in struggles among nations and the social classes within them. Such is the anguish of the historical moment at which we have arrived. But despite the power of evil one cannot deny the good and the true . . . Translated by Dario Prieto and John H. Haddox From La persona humana y el estado totalitario Selections from "Marxism as a Religion," pp. 64-67. Religion, ever since the origins of humanity, has been unfolding according to certain forms that the sociologist can determine without invading the exclusive field of other scientific investigators. Professor Leopold von Wiese in his History and Principal Problems of Sociology declares: "While the objects of the different ancient social sciences are, primarily, the processes of socialization, thence the different real aspects of social life (as economy, jurisprudence, etc.), sociology concerns itself with the different existent forms of socialization having innumerable purposes and variable contents. These multiple realizations ought to be abstracted conceptually from their divergent contents and considered as psychic phenomena of a special nature." M e n have always lived together socially within the dominion of a religion, but not always within the same religion. This means that religions are transformed but not the form of religious association. This social form is the object of sociology. Diverse and varied religions constitute the object of knowledge in the history of humanity's religious evolution.

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M a n is homo credulus; it is impossible for h i m to free himself from the essential tendency that rules h i m when he perfects what he knows with what he believes, experimental data with the act of faith, science with religion, the axiom and theorem with dogma and m y t h ; and this since the first dawnings of culture. Fetishism, totemism (which religion exhibits), manism, polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism, in the Orient as in the Occident, in the Old World as in America—these are the contents of social religious forms. From the humble fetish to the demigod, the heroes, and the gods, diverse h u m a n societies offer different contents in a consistent form, which is religion considered from the sociological point of view. Rene Worth has minutely explained the elements of religious form: "All religion, sociologically analyzed, contains: a m y t h or a dogma, a cult, a n aggregate of sacerdotal institutions, and an ethics derived from the myth, the dogma and the cult." It is clear that in the beginning of the evolution of religion such confusing elements are not manifested clearly, but even enclosed i n the practices of witchcraft there is some belief that is affirmed (myth and dogma), some practice of it (embodied in the incipient cult), and its practice transcends customs, influencing the principles of conduct and of morality (ethics). . . . (pp. 64-65) We shall focus the problem of Marxism-Leninism, seen as a newborn religion, by means of the following syllogism: A religion from the position of sociological-formal evidences has (a) a dogma, (b) a cult, (c) a n aggregate of sacerdotal institutions, and (d) a correlative morality. Marxism-Leninism includes (a) a singular dogma and myth (the economic structure of social life as a basis for history, and the messianism of the proletariat), (b) a set of cultural practices: calendars, ceremonies, festivities, and correlative commemorations, (c) a group of organizations for executing the acts of the new cult, and (d) a n ethics derived from the concepts of the dogma. As such, Marxism-Leninism is a new faith, a religion that arises from contemporary society and tends to convert to its dogmatic teachings all the nations of the world. W e are speaking of a new faith of ecumenical tendencies: "Workers of the

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world, unite!" says the celebrated summons of the "Communist Party Manifesto." The new faith is opposed to the old. Christianity and communism struggle between themselves in the present period of h u m a n life. I t is the struggle that Spengler saw between culture and civilization. Christianity is cultural; communism declares itself a civilizing force, as scientists and technicians. We refer to scientific socialism and not to the utopianism that its initiates declare it to be. "It starts," says Berdyaev, "the cult of life, without taking into consideration, in any way, its profound internal, its innermost significance. All absolute worth disappears. The profound moments of living exist no more. Every instant of existence is transformed to mere intermediate states in procedures intended to continue the giddy flight of existence, procedures directed toward a fallacious eternity, toward the devouring vampire of the future, toward the happiness and the power situated in futurity. Civilization marches at an accelerating tempo. For her the present is nonexistent nor does the past exist; there is also no solution in the eternal. Only the future exists! Civilization is always futurist while culture turns to contemplating and conceiving the eternal. The machine and technology have created this acceleration." The new faith does not believe in the eternal but in a universal dialectical process that necessarily leads to its t r i u m p h ; it does not place its ideal, its ultimate end in another region of reality outside time, like Christianity, but here below, in the contingent and evanescent world. It does not glow like a "City of God" before the astonished eyes of believers; it lets them behold the rebirth of the earth. All else is illusory, mystical contemplation. Here, in the "City of M a n " that Cain founded, the acquisition of all the good t h a t is compatible with life has to be effected. Is not this, perhaps, a new religion, a new mysticism that draws from the messianic Israelite its idea and tends today to diffuse it over the people of the universe? . . . Is it not the old idea of the prophets combined with t h e industrialism and the imperialism of contemporary civilization? (pp. 65-67) Translated by Rene Cantu and John H. Haddox

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From El peligro del hombre, pp. 106-107 Kierkegaard is the Christian; Nietzsche, the pagan; Karl Marx, the inspired Israelite. Israel's idea is essentially that of messianism. This idea is joined in the different works of Marx with a vindication of the proletarian and the apotheosis of labor as a foundation of economic worth. The discovery of the economic structure as a basis of social life is not an idea that issues exclusively from Marx. I n the famous essay "The Political Principle of Population," a work of Malthus, the concept is already there, but no one can deprive Marx of the merit of having insisted, systematically, on the economic phenomenon as the essential element in explaining history. To explain history sans the economic is as impossible as explaining it only by means of the economic. But the mystical attitude consists precisely in seeing strictly, absolutely, one aspect of reality. The social superstructures are subordinate to the privileged and central thought. Marx's influence is enormous in contemporary social life. He searched for salvation i n the economic. Therein lies the secret of the ages. Therein resides the foundation of justice and of felicity. Worth is work. Salvation is in work, and progress resides in the solidarity of the working men of the universe. Such is the message of Marxism. Translated by Carmen and John H. Haddox

LIFE AS DISINTERESTED! AESTHETICS

From La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad Selections from "Art as Disinterested," pp. 101-103 Art is not an economic activity. The more one renounces possessing things in order to consecrate oneself to contemplation, the better one achieves the artistic spirit, to the extent that if one were disinterested in every sense he would have become a supreme artist. . . . Art is an innate disinterest that life does not explain; it requires

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an enormous effort and its result is not useful. Works of art do not serve the economy of existence. In defining art Schopenhauer said that it is "the contemplation of things independently of a rational principle, in contrast to another kind of contemplation that finds itself subject to said principle and which is that of experience and the sciences. . . . (p. i o i ) Inasmuch as the mind has ceased providing for its utility, its subjectivity, its miserable well-being, the world is delivered to it in its unique pristine individuality. Things and beings are then seen, not as a means for achieving practical or theoretical ends, but in their own nature in order to contemplate them in themselves, or better yet, for them to be contemplated. They are as they appear. . . . (pp. 101-102) Such is the victory of the soul over life, the aesthetic victory, the principle of superior human life, existence as disinterested, (p. 103) Translated

by John H. Haddox

From Doctrinas e ideas Selections from "The Nature of Art," pp. 61-65 He is in a good position to understand artistic activity who clearly discovers that the human spirit is not so compressed and constrained within the realm of biological activity that it has not a metaphysical moment in which is offered to it the world as an object of contemplation. Animal life is always interested. Its essence is in assimilating and dissimilating activity, economic and egoistic . . . (p. 61) Art breaks with the cosmic law; it implies its first exception, its contingency in the human sphere. It is another law of existence. Marvelously, it results in a truth that cannot be explained by purely biological laws in a being like man, that is to say, a superior animal, more greedy than any other, who always acts for his egoistical interests, his "spirit of domination," devoting himself foolishly to contemplate that which when well used nourishes and develops him. The economy of the vital effort cannot explain "innate disinter-

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estedness," or as Bergson stated it, "this humble or inspired artistic individuality." Art, compared w i t h the biological imperative of egoism, appears to be a shocking waste, a secret and violent antithesis. Artists have always felt the authentic life that distinguishes and differentiates them. T h e y know that nature, universal existence, possesses a peculiar quality or tone that is communicated to them, a sui generis kind of life that is not everyday life common to all men. . . . (pp. 62-63) Artists did not choose that profession. Their good fortune offered it to them. They see and hear by their own disinterested nature, without submitting themselves to the rules elaborated a posteriori by academicians and rhetoricians. They perform the activities of their aesthetic life, driven by a hidden sympathetic instinct that relates them with things. . . . Art is based on this divine complicity with the individual being of each thing or entity. It is the secret of artistic intuition, of intuition itself. All ontology begins i n art. "The more poetic a thing is, the more real it is," as Novalis used to say. I n inspired creation the circle of h u m a n interest is broken, and, as a n immediate corollary, the soul, detached from its prison cell, reflects a world that was hidden by its egoism. Because the spirit was egoistic, it knew not; it only thought of itself; because it willed for itself all that existed, it ignored everything else. Now, the soul ceases to w a n t "its" good and actually enjoys "other" goods. Before, it was a n enemy of the world that it wanted to dominate, and the world would hide from its contemplation. The soul ceases to desire for a while; the crazy and shifting waves of egoism cease to h u r l one against another with insatiable, tumultuous desires; it is at these moments that the soul becomes free and happy among the other beings that inhabit creation. It is now their sister and it contemplates them without effort; it observes them docilely, gently, like the tranquil waters of a pool, of an intrepid lake; it duplicates and reflects without violence the leaf of the tree and the blue of the sky. . . . (pp. 63-64) I n the intuition of the inspired one the duality of the subject and

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the object of knowledge is overcome. The forms of logic cease to prevail. "Things are as they appear." (p. 65) Translated

by Dario Prieto and John H. Haddox

LIFE AS LOVE: ETHICS AND RELIGION

From La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad Selections from Chapter VII, "Existence as Charity," pp. 149-163 It shall be said: if the individual is perishable, the species, on the other hand, is not, and for it will be the final victory. If anarchist individualism does not imply a n end in itself because of the perishability and transitory character of biological individuality, h u m a n i tarianism, the religion of the species, the love for future happy posterity, filial love for our descendants, who m a y be better t h a n we, are ideal and noble sentiments, justifiable as ends i n themselves. Devoting ourselves to their victory, we shall make life conquer the miseries attached to the contingency of individuality; we will love God, as did Comte, "in the union of progressive h u m a n beings. . . ." (P- M9) The Christian says that pain is the result of egoism. If egoism is denied, pain ends. This is the simple evangelical solution. But the Christian denies pain and egoism because he takes advantage of a new experience, a n e w intuition, a real life: charity, a powerful energy. He does not deny just to deny; he denies in order to affirm a greater affirmation. The artist sacrifices the comforts of life for the objectivity of a n intuition that is innate; the good m a n sacrifices selfishness to aid his fellow man, and this sacrifice is freely made. Because of this Pascal said: "No bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are worth even the least of spirits; because the spirit knows all this and knows itself, and material bodies do not. All bodies with all their spirits and all their productions are not worth the least movement of charity." I n brief, the table of values for humanity is as follows: the more one sacrifices and the more difficult the sacrifice of animal life to

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unselfish ends is to make (until one arrives—by aesthetic contemplation and simple good acts—at heroic action) the more noble one is. . . . (pp. 152-153) Unselfishness, charity, and sacrifice are irreducible to the economy of nature. If the world were based solely on will, as Schopenhauer says, it would be unexplainable that the will could deny itself in sacrifice . . . What this proves, experimentally, is that there is another order and another life, along with the order and the life that is under the iron rule of the barbarous dictate of Darwin —the struggle for life. The equation of good will is as follows: Sacrifice = the maximum effort with the minimum benefit. The good is not a category, a law of reason, as Kant believed, but an enthusiasm. It does not rule, it never commands; it inspires. It does not impose, it does not come from without; it sprouts from the individual conscience, from the feeling that has its roots in the very depths of spiritual existence. It is like music that subdues and enchants; it is easy, spontaneous, and intimate, the most intimate part of the soul. It is not a compulsion of pure reason or of external life; it is not induced, deduced, or held in awe; it is created. It is freedom, personality, divinity. It is, in brief, to use the expression of an illustrious Mexican thinker, "the supernatural which feels like the most natural thing on earth. . . ." (pp. 153-154) Charity is neither demonstrated nor inferred. It is the fundamental religious and moral experience. It consists of going out of oneself, in the giving of oneself to others, in offering oneself and lavishing oneself with no fear of suffering exhaustion. In essence, this is what it is to be Christian. To be this one must be strong with personal identity, one with oneself as Ibsen would say. The weak man cannot be Christian except insofar as he intends to be strong enough to offer himself as a center of loving activity. . . . (p. 155) Christianity is not a justification for weakness, as some contemporaries believe, but for the purest moral strength, for the energy that opposes evil without using evil means to defeat it. Weak virtue is a clear contradiction. The Christian is the strong one: the apostle,

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the hero, the ascetic, the martyr. He has t h a t virtue which has accomplished the greatest deeds in history. W h e n one deals w i t h charity, one generally thinks of the aid t h a t the weak m a n receives because of the act of a charitable man. [One does not think] of the explosion of power t h a t the sentiment of charity requires to overcome the resistances of egoism and causes the soul to bloom with strength. Charity is indissolubly strength and goodness, strength because it is goodness, and goodness because it is strength, because it is virtue, which does not fit into the style of the Renaissance, as Nietzsche said, nor the Greek, nor the Oriental, nor the Roman, but virtue unadorned without too much of a humanized historical form. Eternal virtue, unique, divine, without affected modesty, scelleratezza, without sex or style. Simple charity, charity alone! I n the universe as economic, each living being is a point of centripetal action. I n the universe as charity, each moral being is a point of centrifugal action. The superman of Nietzsche, conceived in all his greatness of sacrifice, in his desire to elevate life, is, in that which is noble, Christian. T h a t "longing for the other side" is Christianity incredibly united w i t h a specific biological end, a certain "not contentment but more power," which is the vile economic interest of wild struggling beasts. Nietzsche, Guyau, Stirner, are examples of sick men, of weaklings in love with life, w i t h strength. They h a d the bovarisme of energy and action. Because they were weak, they desired passionately not to be so; their moral systems grew out of this contradiction between their animal life and their biological ideal. A convalescent experiences constant fluctuations between health and sickness during the period of chronic illness. He experiences almost regularly the r h y t h m of abundance and then the abandonment of life. . . . The morality of sick people in love with the health they do not possess, that they never have possessed, that they never will possess. Morality of weaklings with no spiritual strength capable of offering themselves with no price. Nietzsche and Guyau m i g h t

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perhaps have answered like Saint Beuve w h e n asked the question " W h a t would you have liked to have been?"—"A captain of Hussars." But Christian charity is stronger. It allows no h u m a n enticements or bovarismes. It is a n end in itself. The charitable m a n cannot wish to be strong or happy, because he is already more so t h a n any other man. . . The weak only w a n t more power, without honesty, without charity, without humility: the moralists of destruction and invalidism. Furthermore, Nietzsche as well as Stirner possessed the paralyzing faculty of analysis. Analysis is one of the fundamental operations of the intelligence, but it can also have a destructive effect. He who systematically cultivates his internal self may become insensible to external life, may arrive at senseless and sinful adoration of himself, m a y reach a Nietzschean self-worship, or may end up in the scepticism of Renan, in the simple and useless excusing of all moral attitudes and even of every evil. The fine kid-skinned glove of the emotional ideologies of Nietzsche and Renan conceals paralysis of action; but the great collaboration of m a n w i t h God is based upon energy and strength, upon the movement that prevents decay and upon the heroism that makes daily life like pure moral existence, as each soul expresses itself completely, as a new world, a new creation, leaving it intact, humble, and serene. The weakling who does not want to be generous, he who, a victim of laziness, is not even himself, cannot be heroic; and Christianity, like art, has heroic inspirations because, just as mistakes, deficient or frustrated works do not count in the history of art, neither moral hesitations nor compromises with egoism count in the moral biography of a Christian. He who has not the will to be charitable is not living according to the doctrines of Christ. How could he be living according to his teachings if Jesus was always acting, never exhausted, always brave, never compromising or accommodating evil. The Spanish thinker, Diego Ruiz, in his Jesus como Voluntad has properly explained how Christian humility, far from being the trait of weaklings, is the promise of charitable persons, of the strong, of heroes. . . . (pp. 155-1 &)

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Humility is the reverse side of the Christian medal of charity and heroism. . . . How could he who offered himself to others until he destroyed himself have arrogance? W h y should he have it? If he were arrogant, it would be a sign that he kept something within himself, that something spiritual had remained inactive, lazy, and inert. He would not be Christian, in the sense that he did not act freely. Goethe, in one of his brief and profound lyric poems, says that, upon examining great works of art, one takes note of w h a t great men have done, and, upon seeing one's own artistic sketches, thinks about what one might have done. The humility of the great poet in modern times is symbolic. H u m a n work is often less perfect t h a n it could have been. I n general it can be said that the supreme basis of education is this: make m a n put forth his greatest effort so that he wears himself out and burns with energy in his work. . . . (pp. 159-160) Charity is like a struggle. It does not explain itself; it is practiced, it is created, like life. It is another life. One can never have the intuition of that order opposed to biological life; one can never comprehend existence in its profound richness; one will destroy it if one is not charitable. One must live according to the fundamental intuitions. He who does not make sacrifices does not understand the world i n its totality, nor is it possible to explain it to him, just as it is not possible to explain sound to a deaf person or light to a person blind from birth. There is no optics for the blind or acoustics for the deaf; nor is there morality or religion for egoists. This is w h y they deny it. But just as the deaf person does not criticize music or the blind person art, the evil person does not argue against charity, the incomparable work of art. One must possess all his faculties in order to be m a n in his entirety, neither angel nor beast, in order to embrace existence as economy and as charity, as selfinterest and as sacrifice. Faith is the proof that, side by side with the world ruled by the natural law of life, there is a world ruled by the supernatural law of love. . . . (p. 160) Life always desires, and the good always gives. To believe is a

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direct consequence of good works. If you are not charitable, you w i l l not believe. . . . (p. 161) F a i t h is impossible without charity, just as light is impossible without the sun, just as a corollary is impossible without the axiom. . . . Good works are faith itself upon reflection i n the conscience of h e who performs them. . . . (pp. 161-162) Faith conceived as existing before experience is absurd. One believes because one is living a supernatural life. Tertullian said: credo quia absurdum; but no matter how m u c h we pretend that both terms are identical, faith is radically different from the absurd. T h a t which contradicts evidence is absurd, that which is contrary to w h a t is evident; faith has the greatest evidence, the experience of the good. To believe is to act, to see, to live. Without supernatural life (the good act) there is no faith n o r hope. (p. 162) Translated Selections from El peligro del

by John H. Haddox

hombre

(VI, 108-109) S0ren Kierkegaard is the Christian seer. His teaching says "despair or believe." Yes, hope, which is faith, or despair. T h e world is not conscious if it is only life. Pascal h a d already discerned three regions of reality, which cannot be reduced to each other: the world of the material substance, the world of spirit, and the region of charity, of love. T h e modern Pascal also makes his existence revolve around the problem of Jesus. Life fails to satisfy our h u m a n desires fully. M a n transcends the contingent and the transitory and looks to the absolute. All life ends i n the failure of each living individuality. Life is daring and failure. T h e pessimists insist on failure, the optimists, on daring. But there is something loftier t h a n life, and t h a t is faith. T h e other Pascalian region is the absolute t h a t m a n lives i n his religious ideal. This is the profound sense of Christianity. I n virtue of this it has always been a light across the centuries.

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( V I I I , 143-144)

We think that humanism, as an expression of the culture and integration of the human being, has not yet borne fruit thoroughly, nor will it ever while there are men on the surface of this planet, for if man is not integrated as the man of the Renaissance desired, he will not be able to save himself! Furthermore, humanism is joined closely but in a concealed fashion with the Christian religion and its mysteries. We Christians revere the man-God. Our religion is the only one that loves and pays homage to God incarnate in human clay! Thus, there is an undeniable foundation for humanism, manifest and splendid, in the dogmas of Christianity. The pure cult of "humanity," as understood by Auguste Comte, is a false position in the last analysis, profane; but Christ is God humanized. Here is the profound feeling of religious humanism. (VIII, 136) What will be the spiritual power that will be installed over the moral conscience of the world when the dreadful contemporary conflict ends? No one can prophesy this point, but either the spiritual power capable of overcoming the covetousness and the avarice of imperialism is achieved, or perhaps the human culture that has produced this martial civilization of ours shall perish, a victim of its own creations, in a fatal act. Translated by Carmen and John H. Haddox From El problema de Mexico y la ideologia national, pp. 93-98 Selections from "The Ultimate Christmas" When the year ends Jesus is born; always he is born and reborn at the end of the year, bringing us promises of his glory and his supernatural peace. He is the paradigm of the things of man that aspire to be divine. Practically speaking, between Jesus and God there is no difference. Because who knows who is God on the one hand and who knows who is this man on the other?

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I n order to say "he is not God, he was not God" it is necessary to have already discovered the essence of the divinity. This discovery is impossible from every truly h u m a n point of view. Who knows how far, how unforeseeably far, our h u m a n nature can reach? . . . (p. 93) I possess a criterion, excellent it seems to me, in order to prove the unquestionable superiority of Jesus Christ over all other h u m a n beings. The criterion is the spirit of sacrifice; the divinization and the supreme negation of the psychological individuality of man. The more one sacrifices the more one is free. Only he who gives everything possesses himself. Why? Because it is the only act that is not explained by an order or a law superior to the act itself. To be greedy, to desire, to w a n t for oneself is to be enslaved. The autonomy and freedom of each person is only achieved insofar as he is free from greed, appetites, and desires. W h e n we desire something, we are enslaved by what we desire. W h e n we live coveting the goods we desire, then we are subordinated to those goods. Whoever seeks riches is enslaved by them; whoever aspires to be honored is enslaved by the honors; whoever desires voluptuosities only exists for the voluptuosities that inflame him. To w a n t to be enslaved is to obey a law opposed to proper judgment; it is to confess a principle of activity different from genuine activity. Only w h a t we have sacrificed do we really possess. I n the act of sacrifice is born a negation of individuality and a glorification of the person. . . . (pp. 9 3 The entire universe is an effort to achieve liberty, peace, "the affirmation without contradiction." All beings, animate and inanimate, tend to be free, absolutely free. The mineral, says Aristotle, tends to be vegetable; the vegetable tends to be animal; the animal wants to be man, and all are enslaved, all obey a command extrinsic to their proper nature. Only Christ could realize completely his individuality in the sacrifice of the cross. . . . Thus he is the model for man. Only m a n who can act as he acted will be his son. On the hill of Calvary near the cross are the just ones of the world: Francis of Assisi, Vincent de Paul, Saint Louis, king of France, Saint Theresa of Jesus, Augustine,

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Jerome, Basil, Chrysostom, Pascal, Tolstoy, all these were m e n who renounced themselves, though they could not renounce themselves absolutely as is implied in divine charity. . . . W h o could sacrifice himself equally to the Lord? The whole of morality, the whole of h u m a n freedom, is found in the imitation of Christ. Here is summarized ethics as theory and command, as metaphysics and law; to say to individuals and nations only this: imitate Jesus. . . . (pp. 95-96) Let us have faith in the good that never comes. We believe that Mexico will finally overcome the forces contrary to her well-being; we believe, yes, we hope in Christ. In the Christ of the socialists and of the Catholics, of the Lutherans and of the Bolsheviks, in the great promise of h u m a n victory, Jesus. If we do not know how to sacrifice ourselves, let us seek nevertheless not to despair in the anguish of these moments. Whoever does not believe does not hope and does not love. M a y this Christmas grant to us, Mexicans, the Easter of love. . . . (pp. 97-98) Translated

by Carmen and John H. Haddox

THE PANORAMA OF H U M A N HISTORY

From Doctrinas e ideas Selections from "History as a Work of Art," pp. 69-73 To study the true nature of history, it is necessary to resort not to the disquisitions of philosophers, but to the work of the historians themselves. They are the ones who can indicate the essence of the activity they practice. Let us t u r n to the perennial masters of the historical type and we will see that their works are not merely essays of criticism and documentation, but, even more, poetic creations or at least clearly artistic. It is true that history today is not written with the purpose of moralizing or delighting; it is also true that its strength is heightened by the most minute and inspired learning that has been seen

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i n centuries. However, far from being able to reduce itself to mere learning, history, viewed i n its fullness, is a n organic effort to reconstruct the past; and only he who reconstructs the life that was a n d the world that was formed before and later divided in the everlasting evolution of things deserves the name of historian. While the philosopher investigates the universe, the historian proposes to reconstruct a succession of unique events. W h a t occurred once in time and space will never be again; such is history. It does not matter whether it is h u m a n history or the history of plant and a n i m a l species or even the history of the planet itself. A man, a country, a civilization, a race: Shakespeare, France, the Italian Renaissance, the Aryan or Indo-European race, these are the objects of history; these are beings, unique among themselves, unique m a n among men, cities, personal civilizations, and races, always as individuals. . . . (pp. 69-70) This is the first characteristic of history. Its effort is not to generalize like science, but rather to individualize like art. . . . (p. 70) W h e n the facts have been discussed openly and the documents express themselves clearly, the most admirable work [of the historian] has not yet begun. I t is necessary to complete it w i t h a synthetic intuition of the whole. Assume, to use a metaphor t h a t might illumine the doctrine, that the historian is like someone who would construct a solid body w i t h data that, simple and dispersed, lie i n museums and ruins, libraries and archives. Assume that the solid to be constructed was a pyramid. Furthermore, admit that, having computed and laid out the geometrical construction, w i t h the rapid and luminous intuition of the whole of the pyramid not yet grasped, all the faces of the pyramid would not be seen i n the mind. Above all the efforts of criticism, the unconstructed geometrical solid would remain to be constructed. Thus it is with the historian as it is w i t h the geometrician. It is necessary to know by intuition, to project one's own conscience tow a r d a n ideal point where everything converges just as do the faces of the pyramid in the explanatory metaphor. If the point of agreement is divined, if one has artistic sense to sympathize mys-

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teriously with the character of a people or of a man of genius, historical creation is attained ipso facto. If one remains indefinitely within the realm of emaciated or complete criticism, he is not a historian. The ultimate effort is essentially artistic. It is reached only by intuition. It is fulfilled only through poetic inspiration. W h y are we subdued by the story of Joan of Arc, as related by Michelet, or by the biography of Frederick the Great, as written by Carlyle? Why do we always prefer them to a few pages of Titus Iivius' report on the Roman Republic and to all the data on Caesar's crimes in the severe and elegant style of Tacitus? It is because criticism is not intuition, nor does voluminous reporting revive the past. It is because history is always art, profound art able to evoke the soul of the centuries over the dust of the centuries. The proverb states: "History repeats itself." It is not true. History is never repeated. Neither the majesty of Rome nor the divine genius of Greece will ever be born again. Themistocles will never again command his noble, triumphant armies. The heroes that were will never be again. There is a foundation for the eternal renovation in the universe. Jesus Christ expressed the mystery of the perennial youth of creation: "My father still works." This is why history is a noble romantic intuition, a melancholy aesthetics, a feeling of love toward that which will never return. Also, because they are near the great artists, near the great men of genius and philosophers who gaze upon the future, the historians are avidly seeking the traces of life in the abyss of time. (pp. 7i~73) Translated by Dario Prieto and John H. Haddox

A MESSAGE! FOR M A N AND FOR MEXICO

From Ensayos criticos y polemicos Selection from "My Philosophical Conviction," pp. 73-76 1. We are in the world in order to work. We are ignorant of the

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nature of our action and we probably always will be, but the meaning of our efforts is intelligible. 2. The positive sciences and history are fields of knowledge that can be perfected and that, as they develop, will make our efforts to control the world and ourselves more intelligible. 3. On the other hand, there is hardly any metaphysical progress. None of the great Greek cosmological theories presented before Socrates has been surpassed by or, as far as that goes, excluded from the group of the contemporary metaphysical ideas. Hylozoism is still a w a y of conceiving the ultimate reality of being. And through this ingenuous assimilation of spirit and matter Greek philosophical thought began. 4. Logic, ethics, and aesthetics, that is, practical philosophy, canon, as the Stoics said, the basic rules of h u m a n life, the philosophy of value, as we moderns say, has entered a period of evident progress. Logic is economic, biological, and utilitarian in essence. It is the selfish and sophisticated form of egoism. Mach, W. James, Bergson, Poincare, and others are the epistemologists who have resolved the problem of reason, insofar as reason can resolve itself; that is to say, they have resolved the problem of the law of rational functioning, whose forms were fixed forever by the Greeks and, above all, by the eternal prince of true thinkers, as Comte called Aristotle, the Stagirite. The nature of the thinking process will always be an enigma for that process itself, as Hoffding teaches wisely and eloquently at the end of his compendium of psychology. We know, in sum, how reason functions and why it functions, but we will never know what reason is. Docta ignorantia. 5. Kant, the greatest of the philosophers who came after Aristotle, founded aesthetics. To h i m we owe the impeccable definitions: "Beauty is a disinterested pleasure," and "an end without end." Schopenhauer and Bergson perfected the theory, completing its deintellectualization, if it can be so expressed; they removed whatever aesthetics had of the Platonic. Plato was the best philosopher among the poets and the greatest poet of the philosophers.

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6. Ethics was founded by our Lord Jesus Christ. As long as a m a n did not sacrifice himself for the ideal of sacrifice, ethics was a theory, that is, a n ingenious metaphysics, profound, but simply theoretical, dialectical, and unreal. Socrates died in order not to be inconsistent with his own self; Jesus died because of spontaneous inspiration. He did not act according to syllogisms as did the Greek. He lived. Christian morality is life, not hypotheses; acts, not law; conduct, not imperative. I have wished that Jesus had never existed, since he did exist, that he had not sacrificed himself; or that he had manifested himself in his own time as an angel, a genie, or a supernatural apparition. But he was a m a n and thus, since we are men, we must be like him. There is no escape. By hanging from the cross he committed everyone. If we do not sacrifice ourselves we are not saved. This is the truth. The other great religious founder, along with Socrates and Jesus, who was Buddha the Inspired, died from indigestion resulting from eating truffles. If the moral world is will, the most erroneous of moral hypotheses is the denial of the will to live. 7. We resolve to achieve the realization of a complete m a n by education. T h a t is, we constitute an ideal being such as has not been fully achieved in all of history. To imitate Christ (not like in a famous medieval book where disparagement—contempt—of the world is t a u g h t ) , as Francis of Assisi imitated him. This is h u m a n destiny. To create men who are good and shining spirits, apt living centers of artistic disinterest and moral abnegation (charity), this is the law and the prophets summarized: love for one's neighbor as for oneself. The rest, cosmology and ontology, are vanities of h u m a n reason that do not exist in order to understand the essence or the substance of anything but to serve action. First: for scientific knowledge, creating industry, always progressive, different from the metaphysics, which is always nonprogressive. Second: for the ethical knowledge, realizing man as the only source who gives sense to the world and to history. Third: for aesthetic knowledge, giving us respite from the grief of living, through t h e pleasures of seeing and hearing for their own sake.

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8. At the foundation of everything there is something; I do not know whether omnipotent, but a noble, faithful, and h u m a n e reality that makes heroism and sacrifice possible in order to fulfill a design, perhaps, that I can reflect only if I humble myself before t h a t being, understanding that I cannot understand. 9. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be t h y n a m e ; thy kingdom come; t h y will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as w e forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen. Translated

by Carmen and John H. Haddox

From Doctrinas e ideas Selections from "Socrates, Perfect Moralist," pp. 20-24 The word "perfect" signifies completion, fulfillment, realization. Everything that achieves its purpose is perfect. Therefore perfection is possible in the h u m a n as well as in the divine. M a n is more or less perfect from one point of view; God is perfect from every point of view. Only according to a vulgar judgment have we been able to decide that perfection is attributed only to divine things. The greatest theologians, like St. Thomas Aquinas, conceded perfection to h u m a n works. Among the works that h u m a n i t y can perform none is higher t h a n moral goodness. The best work of art is virtue, that is, the habit of performing good acts. "One swallow does not make a summer." One good act does not make one virtuous, as Aristotle said. I n morality, as in art, only one law is appropriate: perfection. Imperfect or frustrated works that are merely attempts count for nothing in the history of art. Deficient conduct, compromises made with egoism count for nothing in the moral biography of a saint. There are no mediocre good acts or mediocre artistic works. The command to the artist, as to the good man, is to be heroic. There is art or there is not; one is just or one is not. Aesthetic and moral intuitions are or are not. Heroism excludes making compromises i n conduct.

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"To preach morality is easy; what is difficult is to establish it," as Schopenhauer said with inspired sagacity. I n morality, m a n can propose three approaches of varying value: to teach or preach it, to establish it, and to live it. To preach it is simple. To establish it is very difficult; to live it is tremendously difficult. The preacher, the moralist, and the saint are three different types of moral persons. . . . (pp. 20-21) There are those who preach and teach but who neither express nor live the good life. There are those who express it but do not know how to teach or to live their doctrine. There are also those who clearly live a life of virtue but neither teach nor rationally establish such a life. Absolute perfection for the moralist is to achieve these three ends at the same time; that is, to be a teacher, a philosopher, and a saint. Socrates is the only perfect moralist. He taught, he demonstrated, and he lived morality. He was a teacher, a philosopher, a saint, and a martyr. He appealed to the youth of Athens, constantly discussing virtue. He asked, for example: Is virtue knowledge? If it is knowledge, can it be taught? W h a t is virtue? Is virtue what is desired by the gods? Do all the gods want the same virtue? The final and classic irony is that with his supreme art of "intellectual midwifery" he taught that the basic principles of morality are independent of the gods. For this reason, without hyperbole, one could call Socrates "the founder of moral science," a title most revered of all those given to philosophers. Even more, he not only taught and explained virtue, he also acted according to his moral ideal, joining his life and his thought. All of his activities were dedicated to seeing that the will is not divorced shamelessly from intelligence. He wanted m e n to be consistent and perfect so that they do w h a t they think and w h a t they think is right. He believed that in developing the mind we, ipso facto, do the same for the heart. Perhaps it is not enough to have knowledge to be virtuous, even when the knowledge is of virtue. Our free will can choose what is evil even w h e n we know w h a t is good. Finally, he exemplified his own teachings with his martyrdom.

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T h a t is w h y he cannot be refuted; that is w h y he is perfect. W h e n his disciple Crito offered h i m life he preferred death with virtue to life without it. He never weakened. H e never contradicted himself. He lived as he thought and taught, which is the way to live. He died for virtue after establishing what it is and living it. . . . (pp. 22-23) Christians have here a sublime example of sanctity, of wisdom, and of heroism. No one surpasses Socrates in the u n i t y of his perfection. If one knew of the heavenly rapture of giving, of the charity of Christ and of St. Francis, it would be apparent that no other m a n has even equalled it. W e say in praise of his glory, as did a petty Renaissance noble: "Saint Socrates, perfect moralist, pray for us." (p. 24) Translated by Carmen and John H. Haddox From El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional Selections from "Mexico: Show T h e m Your Worth!" pp. 80-83 The most urgent of our problems is that of diffusing and propagating, by every possible means, true patriotism, that is, a consciousness of the Mexican collectivity. Our exaggerated individualism isolates us from our fellow-men and separates us from our neighbors, from our brothers. Let us differ, at the proper time, over doctrines and philosophical and social ideas, . . . let us freely exercise our mental initiative; but we must always have a fatherland and be united in the grief of [that country's] heart and soul, ever worthy of our sacrifice and of our love. How are we to love strangers if we cannot love each other? The races that most love themselves are the ones that best respect and bestow affection on foreigners; they possess a more cordial spirit. Observe this in the case of the United States. Aware of themselves, its citizens are favorably open to the immigrants of the world t h a t converge on New York from the heart of Europe or from the remote shores of the Orient in order to collaborate with the Americans and very soon to feel themselves citizens of the country itself. Our recalcitrant individualism is not the result of spiritual su-

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periority that makes each man of genius a tower of God splendidly isolated. No; it proceeds rather from our terrible psychological limitations, from our irreconciliable passions. How few inspired persons has Mexico bestowed on humanity! A Morelos, a Juana Ines de la Cruz, perhaps a Manuel Gutierrez Najera or an Amado Nervo, a Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta . . . The enormous majority of the inhabitants of this country do not distinguish themselves because of the exceptional endowments of a powerful psychic individualism and because of the absurd wealth of profound and vehement emotions that leap like wild horses over the stern prerogatives of reason. That is why we all want the first place and condemn those who occupy it. That is why we endlessly struggle in formidable public and private conflicts. That is why we wound ourselves and tear ourselves to pieces without accepting a truce, while other more fortunate nations love themselves and do demonstrate their worth. Nietzsche has said: "over the doors of our time is written: show them your worth" Mexico: show them your worth! In the school, in the shop, in the church, in the laboratory, let us substitute passion with compassion, the traditional antipathy with sympathy, offenses with intelligence and forgiveness; because, if we do not love ourselves, Holy God, who shall love us! ? Let us tighten the bonds of a nation that seems ready to crumble; let us organize our specific conscience, the national conscience now torn to pieces, dispersed and opposed atoms, hoping that other happier days will see Mexicans closer to one another in the mysterious and royal realm of the soul. After all, love is easier and less disturbing than hatred; it signifies rest and rapture, confidence and peace. Mexico: show them your worth! Translated by Rene Cantu and John H. Haddox

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY ANTONIO CASO

El acto ideatorio. Mexico City: Porrua, 1934. El acto ideatorio y la filosofia de Husserl. Mexico City: Stylo, 1946. El concepto de la historia universal. Mexico City: Mexico Moderno, 1923El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofia de los valores. Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1933. El concepto de la ley natural en la ciencia y la filosofia contempordnea. Mexico City: Porrua, 1917. Crispopeya. Mexico City: Cultura, 1931. "Desarticulando paralogismos." El Universal, August 21, 1936. Discursos a la nacion mexicana. Mexico City: Porrua, 1922. Discursos heterogeneos. Mexico City: Herrero, 1925. Doctrinas e ideas. Mexico City: Andres Botas, 1924. Drama per musica. Mexico City: Cultura, XII, 5, 1920. La embajada mexicana en Chile. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1923. La embajada mexicana en el centenario del Peru. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1922. Ensayos criticos y polemicos. Mexico City: Cultura, XIV, 6, 1922. Evocacion de Aristoteles. Biblioteca enciclopedica, 128. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1946. La existencia como economia, como desinteres y como caridad. Mexico City: Mexico Moderno, 1919. 2nd. ed. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1943.

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Bibliography

La existencia como economia y como caridad. Mexico City: Porrua, 1916. La filosofia de Husserl. Mexico City: Imprenta Mundial, 1934. La filosofia de la cultura y el materialismo historico. Mexico City: Ediciones Alba, 1936. La filosofia francesa contempordnea. Mexico City: Bouret, 1917. Filosofos y doctrinas morales. Mexico City: Porrua, 1915. Filosofos y moralistas franceses. Mexico City: Stylo, 1943. Historia y antologia del pensamiento filosofico. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica y Libreria Franco-Americana, 1926. "La libertad y dogma." El Universal, March 20, 1936. Mexico. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1943. Meyer son y la fisica moderna. Mexico City: La casa de Espaiia en Mexico, 1939. Nuevos discursos a la nacion mexicana. Mexico City: Robredo, 1934. La oda a la miisica de fray Luis de Leon. Mexico City: Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, 1921. El peligro del hombre. Mexico City: Stylo, 1942. La persona humana y el estado totalitario. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional, 1941. El politico de los dias del mar. Santiago, Chile: Ercilla, 1935. Positivismo, neopositivismo y fenomenologia. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Filosoficos de la Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1941. Principios de estetica. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1925Principios de estetica. Drama per musica. 2nd ed. Mexico City: Porrua, 1944. El problema de Mexico y la ideologia nacional. Bibl. Universo I, 4. Mexico City: Cultura, 1924. 2nd ed. Mexico City: Libro-Mex, 1955"El problema filosofico de la educacion," Humanidades (Buenos Aires) 3 (1922): 9-22. Los problemas filosoficos. Mexico: Porrua, 1915. Ramos y yo. Mexico City: Cultura, 1927. Sociologia. Mexico City: Stylo, 1945.

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Sociologia, genetica y sistemdtica. Mexico City: Secretaria de Education Publica, 1927. (And others.) Conferencias del Ateneo de la Juventud. Mexico City: Imprenta Lacaud, 1910. (And Guillermo Hector Rodriguez.) Ensayos polemicos sobre la escuela filosofica de Marburgo. Mexico City: Publicaciones de la Gaceta filosofico de los Neokantianos de Mexico, 1945. (And Vicente Lombardo Toledano.) Idealismo vs. materialismo dialectico: Caso-Lombardo. Mexico City: Stylo, 1963. OTHER WORKS

Alba, Pedro de. "Antonio Caso, El Maestro, i n Memoriam." Bulletin of the Pan American Union 80 (1946):425-428. Alba, Victor. Las ideas sociales contempordneas en Mexico. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, i960. "Antonio Caso, Mexican Philosopher, 1883-1946." New York Times, March 8, 1946. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: H e n r y Holt and Co., 1911.

Berndston, Arthur. "Mexican Philosophy: The Aesthetics of Antonio Caso." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9(1951): 3 2 5 327Berrigan, Daniel. They Call Us Dead Men. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Caturla Bru, Victoria de. (Cuales son los grandes temas de la filosofia latinoamericana? Mexico City: Novaro, 1959. Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927. Crawford, William Rex. A Century of Latin American Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944.! Davis, Harold E. JLatin American Social Thought. Washington: University Press, 1963. Flower, Edith. "The Mexican Revolt against Positivism." Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949): 115-129.

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Gaos, Jose. En Torno a la filosofia mexicana.

Bibliography Mexico City: Porrua,

1952.

. Filosofia mexicana de nuestros dias. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1954. . Pensamiento de la lengua espanola. Mexico City: Stylo, 1945. "El sistema de Caso." Luminar 3, 4 (1946). Garcia Maynez, Eduardo. "Antonio Caso y su obra." Revista mexicana de sociologia 8 (January-April 1946): 15-60. Garcia Naranjo, Nemesio. "Antonio Caso." Todo, March 21, 1946. Graham, Aelred. Zen Catholicism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963. Haddox, John H. "Antonio Caso: El Socrates Mexicano." Politica 6, no. 64 (1967): 83-91. • m "Philosophy of Latin America: Yesterday and Today," in An Introduction to Selected Latin American Cultures, ed. Frank W. Hubert and Earl Jones. College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press, 1967. Hernandez Luna, Juan. "La filosofia contemporanea en Mexico." Filosofia y Letras 12 (1947): 112-124. . "Los precursores intelectuales de la Revolucion Mexicana." Filosofia y Letras 20 (1955): 279-317. Hershey, John H. "Antonio Caso: Mexican Personalist." Unity (April 1943): 30-31. Kierkegaard, S0ren. Works of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946. King, M a r t i n Luther, Jr. Stride toward Freedom. N e w York: H a r per & Row, Inc., 1958. Krauze de Kulteniuk, Rosa. La filosofia de Antonio Caso. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1961. Pasquel, Leonardo. "Juventud de Maestro Antonio Caso." Hoy, August 27, 1955. . "Obra y madurez de Antonio Caso." Hoy, September 3, 1955.

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Povifia, Alfredo. Historia de la sociologia latinoamericana. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1941. Ramos, Samuel. "Antonio Caso, filosofo romantico." Filosofia y Letras 11 (1946): 179-196. . Historia de la filosofia en Mexico. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1943. Reinhardt, Kurt F. "Antonio Caso, Mexican Philosopher." Books Abroad 20 (1946): 238-242. . "A Mexican Personalist." The Americas 3 (July 1946): 20-30. Reyes, Alfonso. "En memoria de Antonio Caso." Cuadernos Americanos 121 ( M a y - J u n e 1946): 119-122. . Pasado inmediato y otros ensayos. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1941 Romanell, Patrick. Making of the Mexican Mind. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Romero, Francisco. "Tendencias contemporaneas en el pensamiento hispanoamericana." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (December 1943): 127-134. Salazar y Arce, Manuel. "La herencia de Antonio Caso." La Prensa, January 29, 1964. Salmeron, Fernando. "Mexican Philosophers of the Twentieth Century." In Major Trends in Mexican Philosophy. Translated by A. Robert Caponigri. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966. Sanchez Reulet, Anibal, ed. Contemporary Latin-American Philosophy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954. Solana y Gutierrez, Mateo. "Glorificacion de Antonio Caso." El Universal, March 15, 1961. Uraga, Emilio. El pensamiento filosofico. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1962. Vasconcelos, Jose. Breve historia de Mexico. Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1937. Verissimo, Erico. Mexico. New York: Doubleday Dolphin, 1962.

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Villegas, Abelardo. La filosofia de lo mexicano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, i960. Ward, Barbara. "Two Worlds." I n Christianity and Culture. Edited by J. S. Murphy. Baltimore: Helicon Press, i960. FESTSCHRIFTEN

Homenaje a Caso. Antonio Gomez Robledo, ed. Mexico City: Stylo, *947Contents: Gaos, Jose. "Las mocedades de Caso." Garcia Maynez, Eduardo. "Antonio Caso, pensador y moralista." Robles, Oswaldo. "Antonio Caso y el heroismo filosofico." Romanell, Patrick. "Don Antonio Caso y las ideas contemporaneas en Mexico." Zea, Leopoldo. "Antonio Caso y la mexicanidad." Moreno, Rafael. "Caso, su concepto de la filosofia." Hernandez Luna, Juan. "Las polemicas filosoficas de Antonio Caso." Gaos, Jose. "La biblioteca de Caso." Brightam, Sheffield. "Antonio Caso visto desde la Universidad de Boston." Garcia Bacca, David. "La filosofia de las ciencias segun Antonio Caso." Uranga, Emilio. "Antonio Caso y Emile Meyerson." Ramos, Samuel. "La estetica de Antonio Caso." Teran, Juan Manuel. "La filosofia de la historia en Antonio Caso." Recasens Siches, Luis. "La filosofia social de Antonio Caso." Homenaje de El Colegio Nacional al Maestro Antonio Caso. Mexico City: Cultura, 1946 Contents: Discurso del Dr. D. Alfonso Reyes Poema del Dr. D. Enrique Gonzalez Martinez Discurso del Sr. D. Jaime Torres Bodet

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INDEX

aesthetics: introduction to, 42-44; and the aesthetic intuition, 44-46; and theory of beauty, 46-50; as disinterested, 98-99; and the nature of art, 99-101 Aquinas, St. Thomas: as both heroic and discreet philosopher, 14; as theologian, 114 Aristotle: as discreet philosopher, 14; on becoming good, 72; and definition of man, 89; on knowledge, 112 Ateneo de la Juventud: 4-8, 17 Augustine: 14, 108 Barreda, Gabino: 3, 17 Basil, St.: 109 beauty: as beyond good and evil, 46; selflessness of, 47; and grace, 47; as nonreflective, 48; and the sublime, 49 Bentham, Jeremy: 17 Berdyaev, Nicolai: 97 Bergson, Henri: as heroic philosopher, 14; and concept of human surplus of energy, 43; on art, 100; on knowledge, 112 Berrigan, Daniel: 39, 41, 75

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Buddha: 113 Cardenas, Lazaro: 8 Carlyle, Thomas: 78, 81 Caso, Alfonso: 63 Caso, Antonio: education of, 3; political thought of, 4-7, 16-17, 35— 41; as educator, 8, 19-23, 70; philosophical influences upon, 10; theory of knowledge of, 11-12; view of philosophy of, 13-15, 2 7 29, 78-80, 86-88; and search for Mexican reality, 18-19, 80-82, 116-117; educational theory of, 22-23, 82-86; social, political, and economic philosophy of, 32-41,, 88-98; concept of man of, 33-35; aesthetic philosophy of, 42-50, 9 8 101; view of history of, 63-697 109-111 Catholicism: and dogma, 57-58; and faith, 58; and existence and nature of God, 58-59 Chavez, Ezequiel A.: 3 Chesterton, Gilbert K.: 44, 73 Christianity: ideal of charity, 19, 29, 41, 54-57, 59> 72-75; exalted

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by Caso, 36; as foundation for democracy, 39 Chrysostom, St.: 109 cientificos: 4, 7, 14 Clement of Alexandria: 14 comedy: 48 communism: and view of man as an economic animal, 35, 90-92; and economic determinism, 38; as a religion, 95-98 Comte, Auguste: 3, 7, 17, 80, 10 i, 107 Croce, Benedetto: 45 Dante: 90 Darwin, Charles: 4, 53 Descartes, Rene: 14, 80, 84 Diaz, Porfirio: supported by the cientificos, 4-5, 19; Caso's opposition to, 7, 16-17, 3° Diaz de Gamarra, Fray Benito: 10 dogma: as denial of individual, 58 Donatello: 66

Index Guyan, Marie Jean: 52, 103 Henriquez Ureria, Pedro: 4 history: as description of individual occurrences, 64; as distinguished from philosophy, 64-65; normative character of, 66; and historian as poet, 66; and the history of philosophy, 66-67; progress in, 67; relation of, to art, 110-111 Husserl, Edmund: 14 James, William: 12, 112 Jerome, St.: 104 Jesus Christ: as the perfect example of life as love, 56, 104, 106, 108-109, 113, 116; as God, 59, 107, 111 John of the Cross, St.: 73 Junco, Alfonso: 57

Francis of Assisi, St.: 65, 108, 113, 116

Kant, Immanuel: as discreet philosopher, 14; and theory of art as disinterested pleasure, 21, 43; on the beautiful and the sublime, 4 9 50; on the good as a category of reason, 55; on intrinsic value of man, 93 Kierkegaard, S0ren: on religious alternatives, 35; on love, 73; as a Christian, 98, 106 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: 74

Gaos, Jose: 76 Goblot, Edmund: 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 22, 105 Gomez Robledo, Antonio: 8 Gomperz, Theodor: 80 Graham, Dom Aelred: 72

Leibniz, Gottfried W.: 79 Lenin, Nikolai: 82, 96 Lincoln, Abraham: 82 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente: 71 Louis, St.: 108 love: and discovery of personal identity, 54; as greatest moral

education: exists for development of individual, 20-21, 23, 83-86; as perpetual search for truth, 22; relation of, to philosophy, 82-83 Einstein, Albert: 80

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Index quality, 54; as charity, 55-5^, 7$', and faith, 58; as essence of Christianity, 72-73, 102-104 Mach, Ernst: 112 Malthus, Thomas R.: 98 Marcel, Gabriel: 54 Marxism: as totalitarian system, 27; as dogmatic quasi-religion, 36, 57, 95-98; and economic materialism, 67 Merton, Thomas: 71 Mexico: colonial mentality of, 4 - 6 ; and need for cultural awakening, 5-6; and search for national identity, 6; and problem of creating a unified nation, 6; Caso's search for character of, 16-20, 80-82, 116-117; education in, 85-86 Mill, James: 17 Mora, Jose Luis: 17 Morelos, Jose Maria: 117 Mussolini, Benito: 82 Newton, Isaac: 89-90 Nietzsche, Friedrich: and view of m a n as driven by power, 53; attack of, on Christianity, 54; Caso's criticism of, 103-104; quoted, 117 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg): 100 Pascal, Blaise: as heroic philosopher, 14; view of God of, 84; on love, 101, 106, 109 Plato: as heroic philosopher, 14; as ideal personality, 90; as poet-philosopher, 112 Plotinus: 14 Poincare, Jules Henri: 112

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127 positivism: influence in Mexico of, 3-5, 17; Caso's opposition to, 7, 86 pragmatism: 12-13 Pythagorus: 79 Ramos, Samuel: 6, 11 religion: and faith, 56-58; and dogmatism, 57; and the Divine Being, 58 Renan, Joseph Ernest: 105 Reyes, Alfonso: 4, 5 Robles, Oswaldo: 14 Romanell, Patrick: 5, 9 Ruiz, Diego: 104 Salazar y Arce, Manuel: 36 Schopenhauer, Arthur: view of art of, 44, 112; and life as will, 5 2 53 science: positivistic view of, 3 ; use of, to justify Diaz regime, 4; general principles in, 22, 84; progress in, 67-68; dangerous effects of, 71, 95 Socrates: his life as example, 65, 114-116; as both heroic and discreet philosopher, 80 Spencer, Herbert: 3, 17 Suzuki, Daisetz: 12 Tarde, Gabriel: 81 Tertullian: 106 Teresa of Jesus, St.: 108 tragedy: 49 Vasconcelos, Jose: as fellow member of Ateneo de la Juventud, 4 - 5 ; as leading Mexican intellectual, 6-7

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Verissimo, Erico: 16 Vincent de Paul, St.: 108 Von Weise, Leopold: 95

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Ward, Barbara: 72 Zea, Leopoldo: 6

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