Abstract
The Cartesian logic of understanding the world by breaking it down into ever smaller units of analysis has never had great appeal in Latin America, where there has been a recurrent bias toward a holistic approach. The idea that to be truly free, to be “fully human,” individuals must be “open to the four winds of the spirit,” not bound by any single mode of apprehending reality, can be found in many early-twentieth-century Latin American texts.2 Generous, expansive, symphonic natures have long compelled Latin American admiration, the multitudes they were thought to contain eclipsing any contradictions. It is perhaps no coincidence that in Latin America there has not been the radical rejection of reason that occurred in Europe: Latin Americans saw Goethe and Tolstoy as inspirational, but not Wagner or Nietzsche; famously, they preferred Sartre to Camus. Maybe because rationality had never been raised so high, correspondingly there was no need to bring it so low. Instead, the haunting themes of twentieth-century Latin American discourse have been the integration of theory and practice; the reconciliation of reason and spirit; the claim that reason does not necessarily exclude passion or imagination or intuition; and the view that reason is one source among others rather the fount of all knowledge.
Rationality [in Latin America] is not the disenchantment of the world, but the intelligibility of its totality.
Aníbal Quijano1
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Notes
Aguilar, Madrid, 1957, p. 145. The same phrase occurs, along with “fully human,” in Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s classic americanista essay, “La Utopía de América” [1925], in his Plenitud de América, pp. 11–19. References in this chapter are to works by Rodó unless otherwise stated; most are cited from the Rodríguez Monegal edition, hereafter OC. The exception is Ariel [1900], for which I have used Gordon Brotherston’s edition, published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967. Ariel is also in OC, pp. 202–44.
José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier T. Jaén, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1997, p. 48. My translation.
See, e.g., Augusto Salazar Bondy, Existe una filosofía en nuestra América?, Siglo XXI, Mexico City, 1968; Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de la liberación, Edicol, Mexico City, 1977.
Rubén Darío, “Cabezas: José Enrique Rodó” [1909], in Hugo Barbagelata, ed., Rodó y sus críticos, Biblioteca Latino-Americana, Paris, 1920, pp. 105–7, p. 105.
Gonzalo Zaldumbide, José Enrique Rodó, Editorial América, Madrid, 1919, p. 47.
Aníbal Ponce, Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario [1935], Imprenta Nacional de Cuba, Havana, 1962; Alberto Zum Felde, Proceso intelectual del Uruguay y critica de su literatura, Editorial Claridad, Montevideo, 1941, esp. pp. 242–3; Luis Alberto Sanchez, Balance y liquidación del novecientos [1939], Editorial Universo, Lima, 4th edn., 1973, pp. 71–89.
Revisionist interpretations include Arturo Ardao, ed., Rodó: Su americanismo, Biblioteca de Marcha, Montevideo, 1970; Jorge A. Silva Cencio, Rodó y la legislación social, Biblioteca de Marcha, Montevideo, 1973; Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America, Verso, London, 1999, esp. pp. 108–113; and Ottmar Ette and Titus Heydenreich, eds., José Enrique Rodó y su tiempo, Cien años de Ariel, Vervuert/Iberoamericana, Frankfurt and Madrid, 2000. The stimulating centenary volume edited by Gustavo San Roman, This America We Dream Of Rodó and Arid One Hundred Years On, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 2001, contains both revisionist and non-revisionist views.
Emilio Frugoni, “La orientación espiritual de Rodó,” in Frugoni, La sensibilidad americana, Editor Maximino García, Montevideo, 1929, pp. 171–85, esp. p. 177.
Eduardo Mendieta, ed., Latin American Philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2003, p. 13; Eduardo Devés Valdés, Del Ariel de Rodó a la CEPAL (1900–1950), vol. I of El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX: Entre la modernización y la identidad, Editorial Biblos, Argentina, 2000, p. 29.
Alfonso Reyes, “Rodó” [1917], in Reyes, Obras completas, vol. III, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1956, pp. 134–7, esp. p. 135.
Juan Zorrilla de San Martín [leading Uruguayan poet], “Discurso pronunciado en el pórtico de la Universidad,” in Revista Ariel, “Homenaje,” pp. 151–61, esp. p. 155.
Both the leader of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, Emilio Frugoni, and the Argentine Socialist Alfredo Palacios were staunch defenders of Rodó. See Frugoni, El libro de los elogios, Editorial Afirmación, Montevideo, 1953; and Palacios, Estadistas y poetas, Editorial Claridad, Buenos Aires, 1952. Two famous British left-wing admirers were Havelock Ellis, who wrote an introduction to The Motives of Proteus, trans. Angel Flores, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1929 and Aneurin Bevan, as discussed in Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, Paladin, St. Albans, 1975, vol. 1, p. 195. See also Gustavo San Román’s survey of Rodó’s reception in the United Kingdom, in San Roman, This America, pp. 68–91. Conservative Latin American critics included Francisco García Calderón, La creación de un continente, Librería Ollendorf, Paris, 1912, p. 98; and José de la Riva Agüero, Carácter de la literatura del Perú independiente, Librería Francesa Científica Galland, Lima, 1905, p. 263.
Rodó stated: “I wanted to propose […] to the youth of Latin America a ‘profession of faith’ that they could make their own.” Letter to Enrique José Varona, May 7, 1900, OC, p. 1265.
Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 57. This quotation (actually from Charles Morice, not Rodo himself, although he evidently introduced it in support of his argument) is often cited by those who dismiss Rodo as a reactionary. See, e.g., Mary Kay Vaughan, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880–1928, Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb IL, 1982, p. 245.
Gordon Brotherston, “Rodo Views His Continent,” in San Roman, This America, pp. 35–49. Rodo did not at any point define explicitly what he meant by the term “culture” or how it differed from “tradition,” which he seemed to use to evoke the wider anthropological meaning of culture. Part of the explanation for this omission must lie in the difficulties of envisaging any kind of homogeneous culture given the social and political realities of Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century. As González Echevarría has argued, the region’s intellectuals wrote about “culture” as “part of a process of literary self-constitution” (Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1985, p. 11). For further discussion of what Latin American intellectuals meant by “culture,” see chapter 4 on Alfonso Reyes.
Michael Aronna, “Pueblos enfermos”: The Discourse of Illness in the Turn-of-the-Century Spanish and Latin American Essay, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC, 1999, pp. 87–134, esp. p. 99.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d. [1848; trans. 1888], p. 49. A Spanish version was published in Madrid in 1886; Rodo could equally well have read the French version, translated by Marx’s daughter, Laura Lafargue, in 1885.
Enrique Mendez Vives, El Uruguay de la modernización, vol. V (1876–1904) of Historia Uruguaya, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1975, p. 38. On Uruguay’s modernization, see also M. H. J. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay since 1870, The Macmillan Press, London and Basingstoke, 1981; and Fernando López-Alves, “Between the Economy and the Polity in the River Plate: Uruguay, 1811–1890,” Research Paper no. 33, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 1993.
Eduardo de Leon, “Uruguay en el espejo de Morse?: La generación del 900,” in Felipe Arocena and Eduardo de León, El complejo de Próspero: Ensayos sobre cultura, modernidad y modernización en America Latina, Vintén Editor, Montevideo, 1993, pp. 243–95, esp. p. 256.
See George Pendle, Uruguay: South America’s First Welfare State, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London and New York, 1952; Milton Vanger, The Model Country: José Batlle y Ordóñez of Uruguay 1907–1915, Brandeis University Press, Hanover NH, and London, 1980; and Francisco Panizza, Uruguay, Batllismo y después, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1990.
Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century,” in Roniger and Herzog, The Collective and the Public in Latin America, pp. 158–73.
Alberto Zum Felde, Proceso histórico del Uruguay: Esquema de una sociología nacional, Editor Maximino García, Montevideo, 1919, pp. 224–5.
Julio Herrera y Reissig (1899), cited in Pablo Rocca, ed., Montevideo: Altillos, cafés, literatura 1849–1986, Editorial Arca, Montevideo, 1992, p. 15.
See Carlos Real de Azúa, “Prólogo a Ariel,” in Rodo, Ariel: Motivos de Proteo, ed. Angel Rama, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1976, pp. ix–xxxi, esp. p. xx. Ariel was evidently well known at least in Mexican student circles by 1908, or the young Alfonso Reyes would not have felt moved to persuade his father to finance the first Mexican edition. Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez remembered it creating a stir in Spain in 1900 (see his Españoles de tres mundos, Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942, p. 62). By 1911, nine editions had been published in total: four in Montevideo, one in Valencia, one in Santo Domingo, one in Havana, and two in Mexico. In 1910 Pedro Henríquez Ureña noted that even though Rodo’s books were difficult to obtain in many parts of the region, his influence was still detectable everywhere, suggesting that the informal routes had been effective. Henríquez Ureña, Ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, p. 119
Carlos Real de Azúa, “Ambiente espiritual del novecientos,” in Arturo Ardao et al., La literatura del 900, special issue of Número [Montevideo], Año 2, no. 6–7–8, 1950, pp. 15–36.
Emilio Frugoni, “A los obreros,” Pro-Zola. Número Unico, Imprenta La Razón, Montevideo, 1902, pp. 5–7.
See Glicerio Albarrán Puente, El pensamiento de José Enrique Rodó, Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, 1953, pp. 71–93 and pp. 371–449; Gordon Brotherston, “Introduction,” Ariel, pp. 1–19; Carlos Real de Azúa, “Prólogo a Motivos de Proteo,” in José Enrique Rodo, Ariel, pp. xxxvii–civ; and Belén Castro Morales, J. E. Rodo modernista: Utopía y regeneración, Univ. de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1992, pp. 25–33. See also Rodo’s own sonnet, “Lecturas” [1896], OC, p. 863, in which he mentioned Perrault, Lamartine, Hugo, Cervantes, and Balzac, and his notes on a university literature course outline, in the appendix to Pablo Rocca, Enseñanza y teoría de la literatura en José Enrique Rodo, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 2001.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “El positivismo de Comte” [1909], in his Obra crítica, ed. Emma Susan Speratti Piñero, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1960, pp. 52–63, both makes a critique and includes an account of the broader context of the attack on positivism in Mexico led by Antonio Caso. Other major philosophers to criticize positivism included Alejandro Korn in Argentina; Alejandro Deustua in Peru; and Carlos Vaz Farreira in Uruguay.
Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1987.
Ignacio Zuleta, La polémica modernista: El modernismo de mar a mar (1898–1907), Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Bogota, 1988, p. 31.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Fontana Press, London, 1985, p. 18.
Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 46. Rodó made frequent references to Schiller: see, esp., “Lema,” OC, p. 146 (the “ideal city”) and Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 43 (“a more extensive and complete culture, in the sense of lending oneself to a stimulation of all the faculties of the soul,” original emphasis).
Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology, C. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 8th edn., 1880, p. 403.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “La obra de Jose Enrique Rodó,” in Siete ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, pp. 118–31, p. 125.
Alvaro Melian Lafinur, in Nosotros, III:22–3, July-August 1909, pp. 351–6, esp. p. 352.
Walter Benjamin, “Analogy and Relationship,” Selected Writings, vol. I: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, pp. 207–9.
Dario, “El hierro” [1893], in Obras completas, vol. 4, Afrodisio Aguado, Madrid, 1955, p. 613. See Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 165.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 39.
Nicola Miller, “‘The Immoral Educator’”: Race, Gender and Citizenship in Simón Rodríguez’s Programme for Popular Education,” Hispanic Research Journal, 7:1, March 2006, pp. 11–20.
For a short introduction to this topic, on which there is a burgeoning literature, see Catherine Davies, “On Englishmen, Women, Indians and Slaves: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish-American Novel,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, LXXXII: 3–4, 2005, pp. 313–33.
Antonio Gómez Restrepo, “José Enrique Rodo,” Nosotros, II:15, October 1908, pp. 137–47, p. 138.
Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays, Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 2001, p. 2.
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.
Roy Rappoport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 124.
Hans Kellner, “Triangular Anxieties: The Present State of European Intellectual History,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Caplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1982, pp. 111–36, esp. pp. 130 and 132.
Alfonso Reyes, “Apuntes sobre la ciencia de la literatura” [1940], in Obras completas, vol. XIV, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1962, p. 356.
Reyes, “El suicida” [1917], in Obras completas, vol. III, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1956, p. 294.
Barbagelata, Rodo y sus críticos, p. 16. For collections of his parables, most of which were extracts from other works, see Rodó, Parábolas y otras lecturas, Claudio García and Cía, Montevideo, 4th edn., 1943; and Rodo, Parabolas: Cuentos simbólicos, Contribuciones Americanas de Cultura, Montevideo, 1953.
Gonzalo Zaldumbide, Parábolas, Editorial Bouret, Paris, 1949, cited in José Pereira Rodriguez, “Prólogo,” in Rodo, Parábolas y otras lecturas, p. ix.
Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., Literary Guide to the Bible, Collins, London, 1987, p. 199.
Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1960. Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium is a parody of Gorgias’s style.
Silviano Santiago, The Space In-Between, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001, p. 37.
Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, Verso, London, 1979, pp. 349–86.
Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Others, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2002, esp. “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” pp. 154–69.
Ottmar Ette, “‘La modernidad hospitalaria’: Santa Teresa, Ruben Dario y las dimensiones del espacio en Ariel de José Enrique Rodó,” in Ette and Heydenreich, José Enrique Rodó y su tiempo, pp. 73–93, p. 91.
Leopoldo Zea, “1898, Latinoamérica y la reconciliación iberoamericana,” Cuadernos Americanos (Nueva época), Year XII, vol. 6, no. 72, pp. 11–25, esp. p. 13.
Beatriz González Stephan, “Economías fundacionales: Diseño del campo ciudadano,” in Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan, ed., Cultura y tercer mundo: Nuevas identidades y ciudadanías, Nueva Sociedad, Caracas, 1996, pp. 17–47. On manuals of conduct in Uruguay, see José Pedro Barrán, Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. Vol. I: La cultura “bárbara” (1800–1860) and Vol. II: El disciplinamiento (1860–1920), Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1990, esp. vol. II, pp. 34–6 and p. 53.
Carlos Fuentes, “Prologue,” in Ariel, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1988, pp. 13–28.
See Philip Oxhorn, “From Controlled Inclusion to Coerced Marginalization: The Struggle for Civil Society in Latin America,” in John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 250–77, esp. p. 256.
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Miller, N. (2008). Mapping Out the Modern: Rodó’s Critique of Pure Reason. In: Reinventing Modernity in Latin America. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610101_2
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