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A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, David
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Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
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is there something distinctive about Mexican philosophy, not simply philosophy done in Mexico, but philosophy that emerges from post colonial experience in that country? Carlos Alberto Sanchez thinks there is. Here he explains why and gives us some examples of concepts, such as nepantla, that relate directly to Mexican experience.
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Carlos Alberto Sanchez, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.
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We're talking today about Mexican philosophy. There are obviously philosophers who are Mexican, of course, but I'm interested in what's distinctive about Mexican philosophy, which is a different question. So can you say something about that? What, if anything, is distinctive about Mexican philosophy?
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B
Sure. You know, before I get to that part, let me just quickly make a quick distinction between Mexican philosophy and philosophy in Mexico. Philosophy has been in Mexico for a long time. In pre conquest times, particularly with the Mexica or the Aztecs, there were Tlamatini who were wise and consulted about and spoke about what we consider philosophical matters in the community. Pre Hispanic thought was not called philosophy only because the term didn't exist and it wasn't around, but there was philosophy. What we understand by philosophy didn't make its official appearance in the new world until 1540, which is when the Augustinian friar Alonso de la Veracruz held the very first philosophy lecture course in the Americas at a small monastery in the town of Tiripetio in the Mexican state of Michoacan. So technically, this is when philosophy in the Americas as we understand it appears for the first time in Mexico in 1540. It comes to the conquerors and the colonizers, and slowly it starts to change and adapt to the realities of the New World. And this adaptation is important for the question that you're asking, because by early 20th century, philosophy in Mexico transforms into Mexican philosophy, its very own tradition of thinking focused on and concerned with its own realities. What lends Mexican philosophy is distinctiveness is precisely that, that it is a post colonial philosophy oriented to the needs of its own people. And these are the needs for identity, purpose and freedom. So you could say the distinctive characteristic is it tries in its character not to be abstract, but to be focused on a particular reality.
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A
You talk about identity and freedom. Are you talking about freedom in a personal sense, a cultural sense, a national sense? What kind of freedom do you mean?
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Yes, so that's a good question too, because a lot of folks, when they think about Latin American philosophy in general, they think that it's strictly a political philosophy. So freedom in that sense would be like political freedom, but freedom in the sense of a personal freedom, and also in the sense of national freedom, and also in the sense of historical freedom. There's a constant harking back to the idea that freedom is the autonomous foundation of everything. So we have to somehow philosophize our ways into freedom or philosophize about it so that other folks can understand what it is that is most important about our existence. And I think that that's what Mexican philosophers have been trying to do, especially in the 20th century.
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And obviously that is linked to a history of colonialism. But is there something distinctive about a Mexican conception of freedom?
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I would say it's distinctive. I would say that it is a focus of Mexican philosophy, and that would be that freedom is never considered in the abstract. Freedom is always concrete. It's always the freedom of the Mexican people, or the freedom of the person or the freedom of the culture. There's this sense in which a lot of the philosophy in Mexico, especially in the 20th century, orients itself in that direction. And so you'll have folks like Jorge Portilla, who is one of the philosophers that's most important in this tradition, who writes about this concept known as relaxo. And. And relaxo has to do with attitudes within the Mexican community of simply not caring about the values that constitute reality or eschewing values that have been handed to them so as to organize their lives. And Portilla writes an entire book about how relaxo is something that should be overcome. But at the same time, there's a suggestion within his philosophizing that when you're aching values that have been passed down to you through tradition, when you try to not follow through on those values, that you're actually expressing a certain liberation from them.
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Right, I see. So overcoming these past values is a reflection of a freedom because it's discarding values that have been imposed from outside.
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Exactly. Yes. So a lot of philosophers do that, not just Portilla, is this idea that we have to question the values that have been handed to us by colonial tradition in order to find ourselves in the midst of all that. Yeah.
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And what would then count as an authentic expression of value?
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So now we get into. Into the weeds here. A contemporary Mexican philosopher, Carlos Pereda, doesn't like the idea of authenticity because he thinks that authenticity is going to make us think of relics and make us think of something that should be preserved. If something is authentic is more valuable than something that's not. So if you look Back in the history of Mexican philosophy, you'll also see this tension where philosophers, they're not necessarily concerned with proposing an authentic value or value system, but simply a value system that reflects the experience of the Latin American people or that affects Mexican experience, and in particular with Mexican philosophy. So without using the word authentic, I would say that a genuine value for Mexican philosophers would be one that emerges straight from the Mexican circumstances as they are lived.
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A
I want to talk about a couple of concepts that I know you've written about and which presumably reflect this philosophy that hasn't been imposed from outside. One is nepanthla. What is nepanthla?
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Well, nepantla is one of the most important concepts, I think, for both indigenous and Mexican philosophy. And nepantla just means in between or in the middle. And it reflects a particular experience in the beginning of colonization, when the indigenous people themselves would describe themselves as nepantla. This would be occasioned by the colonizers, the priests, trying to force them to be a certain way. And the indigenous people would say, well, you know, we can't be the way that you want us to be because we are still not there. We are still one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and we're in the middle. Eventually, that term gets incorporated into the work of Latina feminist philosophers in the 1970s to reflect that middlehood of being both American and Mexican.
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A
Give us a concrete example of being stuck between two different types.
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Oh, I could give you one that's very, very, very current here in the United States, which is there's an immigration crackdown happening right now. And. And it seems that the president of the United States wants to expunge all Mexican immigrants or immigrants from the country. I was invited recently to go to Mexico to travel and give a talk out there, but I didn't go. And I didn't go, even though I'm a citizen of this country. I didn't go because I was afraid of what would happen to me if I crossed the border. And that fear, I think, reflects my nepantla. It reflects this idea that I am not entirely American because otherwise I wouldn't be afraid, but I am not entirely Mexican because I understand that I was born here. So I'm stuck in this middle ground.
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You know, that's a way of being. That's an identity. What about practices? I'm thinking of things like medicine, where there might be an old method and a new method. And there, one might think, well, there's a danger of relativism. How does one reconcile scientific facts, as it were, with nepanthla?
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Well, that's an interesting question, because I think that at a certain point, especially when nepantla relativism falls on the wayside, because in this middle ground that you exist in, nothing is certain. And so one example has to do with my mother using medicines or techniques that were from her old life in Mexico, right? And I talk about how when I was a young child, I had a fever and she put potato slices all over my face to suck out the fever. If you get a fever and you put potato slices on your face, you will see them cook, right? And so that was her experimental observation, that, yes, the potato slices were indeed working, but it didn't work at that time. I still ended up getting sicker. And she gave me some Pedialyte, some hydrating fluids, and then she took me to the doctor. And the doctor was very upset with her because she hadn't taken me in earlier. And she said, but, doctor, I put potatoes like this on his face, you know? And he said, what? What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. We're in America. You should do things differently here. And she said, oh, well, I did give him Pedialyte. I gave him ear fluids. That's a practical example of being in a pantla. My mother is nepanthla in that sense, right? That she exists in both worlds at the same time. And unfortunately, those people looking from the outside in are going to not see the in betweenness in which she finds herself.
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But one might imagine that there would be a group of people who believe that the sun goes around the Earth and another group of people who believe that the Earth goes around the sun, and one of them is right and one of them is wrong, right?
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And then there's a group of people that believe in both things at once, right? Or there's a group of people that believe that the sun is a spotlight or something from an alien ship. In the state of nepantla, in the state of middlehood or in betweenness, there's really no certainties, right? It's indeterminacy all around. And it's okay. It's okay to be uncertain and to live in a world where things are not settled.
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That's nepantla. What is zozobra?
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Zo Zobra is the emotive or emotional expression of that nepantla, right? So your being is this in betweenness, going through this middle ground where there is no destination, really, you're no longer anchored to a particular location or place or time. And so sobra is going to be the anxiety that arises from that. It's easy to call it an anxiety because we're familiar with that term and we're familiar with the history of philosophy and the way that it talks about anxiety, but it's more than anxiety. It's more like a feeling of ungroundedness and indeterminacy that accompanies your entire existence. I've struggled in the past to try to distinguish or differentiate the Kierkegaardian notion of anxiety from Sosobra, but the only thing I could really say about that is that Sosobra is more encompassing of our lives. And you find yourself with a persistent feeling of doom and irreparable calamity. This idea that things are going to go bad any second now all the time.
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A
Is this a feeling that other cultures have but just don't have a word for it, or is it something very specific to Mexican culture?
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No, no, I think it's a feeling that other cultures definitely experience, and they might not have a word for it. The word sosobra comes from the Latin sub and supra. It was Spanishized by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, who talked about Sosobra as being this feeling of sinking in the middle of the ocean. Right. Floundering. But he just kind of mentions it quickly in his work. The Mexican philosophers are the ones that kind of take it in and begin to philosophize it and think, okay, well, yeah, that's the experience that we're feeling constantly. Right. It explains a lot of. Especially these days. It explains a lot of our feelings about what's going on in the world and the way that we feel about the things that are going on without being able to cognitively express them.
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A
So give us an example of when it might emerge. You're hinting there that it might be to do with terrible political circumstances that one can do nothing about, but presumably there were personal circumstances as well that might bring about a feeling of zozobra.
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, like, I think that for me to go back to what's happening here in the United States, this sense of being hunted down by the government, I think really illustrates Sosobra. Right. It brings on that feeling that. That the moment you step out of your house, something bad might happen. Right.
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It doesn't sound like a feeling one wants to live with for too long. Is there a solution to it?
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Yeah. You know, I think that the philosopher that mostly talks about sosobara is Emilio Uranga. He says that Sosobra is something that connects us. We're all experiencing Sosobra, we just don't talk about it. So if there was a way to connect our Sosobras together, we would realize that we're in this world together, that we're going through these calamitous times together. And the solution to feeling that you're about to be squashed by history is to come together in community and share it. Share that feeling, and then you'll see that you're not alone in this. This is a simple solution, but it's one that I think is conducive to the creation of communities and dialogue and discourse.
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One might imagine that an obvious cause of Ssoppra was the inevitability of death. And I wondered whether there's a distinctive Mexican approach to death that's related to this.
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Yes, death is one of those concepts that I think Mexican philosophers, earlier on, they caught on to the idea that their conception of death was different than, say, the North American or Western conception of death. For the North American and the Western conception of death, death is something that's always in the future, it's something that's coming, it's around the corner. So you prepare for it, you get life insurance, you pick out a burial plot. On the other hand, the conception of death the Mexican philosophers work on is one where death has already happened. Death is already here. Death is a presence. And so you account for that by not dismissing the possibility, for example, of ghosts and presences, and by not being disgusted by death, by not being turned off by it. The poet Octavio Paz talks about playing with death, making death your best friend, right? And there's this idea that death is always around. And if you look at the actual social history of Mexico and Latin America, you'll see why this conception kind of makes sense. From the beginning of conquest and the colonization of the Americas, there was death everywhere. You got used to the idea of death. Today, in certain parts of Mexico, where the narco presence is most defined, you have thousands, literally thousands of deaths taking place on a yearly basis, on some places, on a monthly basis. People are, you know, they get used to that idea. Death is always around. And so there's no need really to be afraid of an impending death if death is already there.
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You mentioned ghost. I remember being in Venezuela and meeting actually some members of gangs who had their own spirits that they thought were going to protect them. And to me, as an atheist, it just seemed like a form of superstition. Like any other, but religious framework. But you think there's something we can learn from this idea of ghosts and spirits being all around?
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that what we learn is that a lot of these people that believe in ghosts and spirits are not going to be cowering behind their beds waiting for death to show up. You know, it's going to be courage towards death, this idea that, okay, well, death is here, all right, let's deal with it instead of trying to flee from it in many number of ways that you can. Again, you can be an atheist. Like my father's an atheist who I remember telling, because he used to work late at nights. And I would say, aren't you afraid of ghosts? Like in the middle of the night when you go to your work? And he would say, no, I'm not afraid of ghosts. Ghosts are not going to do anything to me. It's the living that are going to do something to me. Right. So if anything, you learn that people are more dangerous than death itself.
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But it also has this downside because the people I mentioned that I met, these gangsters, thought that the spirits were going to protect them. There was no empirical evidence for that at all. They should have been more afraid of death than they actually were.
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Right. And that's a question too. Like, one of the things I write about currently is anarcho culture in Mexico and how I was astounded to find out a while ago how many deaths there were in Mexico and why nobody in the United States, especially philosophers, were talking about it. And so I decided to write a book about that. It's called A Sense of Brutality. And I try to make sense of why it is that these folks are not afraid of death. And it turns out that they are afraid of dying, the process of demise. What they're not afraid of is death itself, because social, political, economic situations make it so that life is really worse than anything else that could be offered to them. So the narco culture, narco existence, is an opportunity for them to take advantage of life to the fullest, while at the same time understanding that death is right there next to them. And it's going to come very, very quickly.
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A
Let me ask you one final question. None of the things we've been talking about in this interview have made it into the curriculums in Europe and the US Why do you think Mexican philosophy has been so neglected?
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I think that it's been neglected partially because of an implicit unconscious bias. There is a sense in which you read or you hear about Mexican philosophy and you think, well, what could these people possibly contribute to philosophy? That's my gut reaction to that question. The more intellectual reaction to the question has to do with the fact that a lot of folks think that Mexican philosophy, because it was a colonized or a colony, is going to just be reflecting the Western philosophy that was imported there or that came there with the conquerors and the colonizers. One of the things that I tried to show in the books that I write is that that's not necessarily the case. What happens when an imported philosophy lands in Mexico or Latin America is that it begins to adapt and to change and to absorb the culture in which it is in. And then eventually what comes out is going to be a very interesting conception of the world, of the universe, that's going to teach us things about not only those cultures, but about ourselves, that we didn't know before. So I think that one of the ways to get people more interested in Mexican philosophy is to think of it that way. To think that one of the things that makes it distinctive, besides the things that I already mentioned, is it's its non Europeanness. Yes, it's going to be some sort of branch of the Western philosophy tree, but it's going to also not be that. It's going to be Napantla, in a sense. And that's the lesson that I think is important to leave you with.
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A
Carlos Alberto Sanchez, thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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You've been listening to Philosophy Bites. This episode was made in association with the Institute of Philosophy and supported by the Ideas Workshop, part of Open Society Foundations. For more Philosophy Bites, go to philosophybytes. Com.