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Samuel Ramos on the Philosophy of Mexican Culture: Ortega and Unamuno in Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Patrick Romanell
Patrick Romanell*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at El Paso
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In 1943 there appeared in Mexico City the first book in Spanish on the story of philosophy in Mexico written from a nonscholastic or lay standpoint. Its title is, simply, Historia de la filosofía en México, the author being Samuel Ramos (1897-1959) of Zitácuaro, Michoacán, a philosophy professor at the National University of Mexico. The pioneering work is tentative and modest in content but firm and ambitious in intent. It opens and closes with the same fixed idea in mind: To encourage Mexican thinkers to develop their own philosophy by integrating European philosophy with their national spirit; that is, by nationalizing philosophy itself. Put negatively and more effectively, the whole point of the author's endeavor is to get Mexican intellectuals out of the traditional habit of imitating the philosophies of others by inviting them to think henceforth on their own two feet about the fundamental problems of Mexico herself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 1975 , pp. 81 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by Latin American Research Review

Footnotes

*

Presented at the Fifth National Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, San Francisco, California, 16 November 1974.

References

Notes

1. For such passing allusions in their ideological writings on Mexico and kindred matters as speculative antecedents of the methodical and sober work of Ramos in the field, vide especially Antonio Caso, Discursos a la nación mexicana (Mexico City: Librería Porrúa, 1922), and El problema de México y la ideología nacional (Mexico City: Cultura, 1924); also, José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), pp. 3-102, and José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (Paris: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925), and Indoiogía (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1927).

2. Samuel Ramos, Historia de la filosofía en México (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1943), p. 153.

3. Ibid., p. 149. The name “Contemporáneos” for Ramos's generation derives from a literary society and journal founded in 1928 by a Mexican group of young writers. For more details on the general dissatisfaction of Ramos and his generation with the Bergsonian romanticism in Caso and Vasconcelos, the two leading philosophers of the previous generation (1910) in Mexico, see my essay on “Don Antonio Caso y las ideas contemporáneas en México” in the joint memorial volume, Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, Homenaje a Antonio Caso (Mexico City: Editorial Stylo, 1947), pp. 77-91.

4. José Ortega y Gasset, “Ni Vitalismo ni Racionalismo,” reprinted in Obras completas, 5th ed., vol. 3 (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1962), pp. 270-80.

5. José Romano Muñoz, “Ni irracionalismo ni racionalismo, sino filosofía crítica,” Ulises, 1 (1927):4-10.

6. Ramos, Historia, p. 151.

7. Ortega, Goethe desde dentro (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1933), p. xxiv; Ortega, Concord and Liberty, trans. H. Weyl (New York: Norton, 1946), p. 184.

8. Ortega, El tema de nuestro tiempo, 8th ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1955), p. 96.

9. Ramos, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, trans. Peter G. Earle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), p. 108. There are four editions of El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1934, 1938, 1951, 1963); the English translation of Ramos's major work is based on the third edition (1951).

10. Ortega, Tema, p. 97.

11. Ibid., p. 99.

12. Ibid.

13. Ortega, Concord, p. 13.

14. Ramos, Historia, p. 150.

15. Ramos is the translator of Wilhelm Dilthey, La esencia de la filosofia (Mexico City: Filosofía y Letras, 1944).

16. Ramos, Historia, p. 150.

17. Ramos, Hacia un nuevo humanismo (Mexico City: La Casa de España en México, 1940), p. 40.

18. Charles M. Bakewell, ed., Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), p. 67.

19. Ortega, Tema, p. 100.

20. Ibid., p. 101.

21. B. A. G. Fuller, A History of Philosophy, 3rd ed., pt. 2 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 499, coins the word “patriocentrism.”

22. Ramos, Historia, pp. 150, 153.

23. Ortega, Meditaciones del Quijote, 5th ed. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1958), p. 18.

24. Ibid., p. 38. Mi vida in the later Ortega is equivalent, of course, to mi situación in the earlier.

25. Ibid., p. 9.

26. Ibid., p. 47.

27. Ortega, Tema, pp. 91-94.

28. Ibid., p. 91.

29. Ibid., p. 92

30. Ortega, Invertebrate Spain, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 179.

31. Cf. Ramos, Hipótesis (1924-1927) (Mexico City: Ediciones de “Ulises,” 1928), pp. 5-8; and Ramos, Profile, p. 98.

32. Ortega, Tríptico (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1941), pp. 130-32.

33. Ortega, Meditaciones, pp. 90-101, 124-27.

34. Aristotle, Poetics, 6, 1449b 23.

35. Ortega, Meditaciones, p. 125.

36. Patrick Romanell, Making of the Mexican Mind (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1952), p. 22. The present writer has since developed the formal typology of life's conflicts in several publications on medical ethics, but the distinction between the Problem of Evil and the Problem of Good is as applicable to the intellectual as to the moral side of life.

37. Tragedy and tragic are two of the most grossly misunderstood words in our vocabulary. In popular diction, tragedy is always confused with an unforeseen and terrible mishap, and in the aesthetic field the tragic is ordinarily confused with the pathetic. (Otherwise, why would we persist in the error of calling Shakespeare's Othello a tragedy?) In either case, whether tragedy is made descriptive of some disaster or pathos, the tragic quality of experience gets associated by mistake with the common Problem of Evil in the world of fact and fiction, thereby losing its proper identity with the rarer but more poignant Problem of Good in life.

38. Ortega, Meditaciones, p. 100.

39. Ibid., p. 125.

40. Ibid., pp. 1, 13.

41. Is Aeschylus the teopoeta Ortega's blind for Unamuno, the theological poet of contemporary Spain?

42. Ortega, Invertebrate Spain, p. 92.

43. Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Fitch (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954), p. 37.

44. Ortega, Meditaciones, pp. 73, 65.

45. Unamuno, Tragic Sense, p. 124.

46. Ramos, Historia, p. 153.

47. Cf. Ortega, Goethe, p. 133, for the general reference to “a characterology of peoples and races.”.

48. Ortega, Invertebrate Spain, pp. 130-36.

49. Ramos, Profile, p. 11.

50. Ortega, Invertebrate Spain, pp. 87, 132, 48.

51. For Ortega's critical stand on Freudian psychoanalysis, see his 1911 article, “Psicoanálisis, ciencia problemática,” reprinted in Obras Completas, vol. 1, pp. 216-37.

52. Ramos, Profile, p. 4.

53. Ibid., p. 168.

54. Ibid., p. 4.

55. Ibid., pp. 15-72. The Orteguian counterpart of the Ramosian characterology of the Mexican is “Toward a Topography of Spanish Arrogance,” published originally (1923) in Revista de Occidente and reprinted in Goethe desde dentro (1933). As is well known, Ortega thinks that the cardinal sin of the Spaniard is soberbia, whose opposite is abyección (Goethe, pp. 128, 136). Curiously enough the latter, in the form of “inferiority complex” (Alfred Adler) or autodenigración (Carlos Pereyra), is the cardinal sin of the Mexican for Ramos (Profile, p. 17),

56. Romanell, Making of the Mexican Mind, pp. 163-66; “Ortega in Mexico: A Tribute to Samuel Ramos,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 600-608; book review of the Profile, in Inter-American Review of Bibliography 13 (1963): 344-46; Mexican Education in Cultural Perspective, ed., Stanley D. Ivie (University of Arizona: College of Education, Monograph Series, no. 5, 1971), pp. 32-49.

57. Time, 30 June 1958, p. 62.

58. Ramos, Profile, pp. 7-8, 70, 128, 138, 143.

59. Ibid., p. 56.

60. Ibid., pp. 18, 9.

61. Ibid., pp. 9-10.

62. Ibid., pp. 56, 11.

63. Ramos, Veinte años de educación en México (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1941), p. 80.

64. Ramos, Profile, p. 29.

65. Rubén Darío, “Unamuno poeta,” La Nación (Buenos Aires: March 1909).

66. Ramos, Profile, p. 85.

67. Carols Vaz Ferreira, Estudios filosóficos (Buenos Aires: Aguilar, 1961), p. 273. For his intellectual relations with Unamuno, vide Vaz's Tres filósofos de la vida: Nietzsche, James, Unamuno (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1965), pp. 199-241.

68. Vide Ramos, Profile, pp. 23-24, 131, 161-66, for references to Sierra.

69. Justo Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, trans. Charles Ramsdell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 62.

70. Ramos, Hipótesis, pp. 39, 56.

71. Ibid., p. 59.

72. Ramos, Profile, pp. 26, 31, 32, 35, 36, 63, 169. To complicate matters, Ramos is annoyingly inconsistent in his treatment of Mexico's cultural mestizaje, but this very inconsistency only points to the tragic clash within the Mexican author himself as a mestizo mentality.

73. Ibid., pp. 4, 72, 22.

74. Ibid., p. 174.

75. Ramos, Hipótesis, p. 109.

76. Ramos, Profile, pp. 73-76, 97-98, 102, 106-8, 110-25. The earlier Spanish analogue of Ramos's problem of cultural assimilation in Mexico is the hispanizante-versus-europeizante grand debate in Spain. Just as Ortega had built up a case against slavish imitation of Europe in Spain, so Ramos does likewise against “Mexican mimesis” (ibid., p. 19).

77. Ibid., pp. 108, 131.

78. Ibid., p. 108.

79. Ortega, Invertebrate Spain, p. 39.

80. Ramos, Profile, p. 12.

81. Ibid., p. 12. Despite this explicit contention of his in the Prologue to the third edition of the Profile (1951), Ramos does not seem to realize that his very acknowledgment, that “the problem of the essence of man is a question of general nature which should be treated in abstracto, without reference to any case in particular” (ibid., p. 12), flatly contradicts his original Orteguian revolt against the universalistic claim and aim of traditional philosophy—which (to recall his own words) “has always pretended to look at things from the standpoint of man in general” (Historia, p. 149). For, if it is pretentious to philosophize about the universe in abstracto, similarly it is pretentious to philosophize about man likewise. Besides, ironically enough, the prefatory acknowledgment itself of 1951 also destroys Ramos's own original neo-Orteguian basis for “the epistemological justification of a national philosophy” (ibid., p. 149). Even so, witness once more (in new form) the tragic dilemma of Ramos the neo-Orteguian (1943) and Ramos the neo-humanist (1951), as reflected subtly in his unconscious shift from one idea of philosophy (the antitraditional) to another (the traditional). This dilemma in Ramos the neo-humanistic nationalist of Mexico originates from his whole effort to do equal justice to two ideals of man which, as postulated in the author's particular scheme of thought, are individually attractive but mutually exclusive: The neo-Orteguian localized ideal of Mexican man in the concrete (Profile, pp. 97-98, 154-56), on the one hand, and the neo-humanist universalized ideal of the complete man as such (Hacia, pp. 72, 154), on the other. Either ideal of man may be defended separately (in theory at least) without clashing with the other, but not both at the same time, except by compromising the theoretical issue eclectically, as Ramos tried desperately in the end to avoid an unavoidable choice confronting him squarely as pioneer defender of the nationalization of the Mexican mind.

82. Ramos, Profile, pp. 72, 17.