José Vasconcelos
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 141st anniversary of the birth of José Vasconcelos Calderón (28 February 1882–30 June 1959), who was born in Oaxaca on this date in 1882.
While most of us would count (contemporary) Latin America generally and Mexico more specifically as a part of Western civilization, Vasconcelos’ conception of the Mexican people as the “Cosmic Race,” and his understanding of Mexico’s place in history, is a good introduction to the profound internal differences possible within the tradition of Western civilization, and a reason to read Vasconcelos.
For Vasconcelos, the implied other of his society was the Anglo-Saxon societies that dominated North America, which he described as follows:
“The Anglo-Saxon mission has been accomplished sooner than ours because it was more immediate and was already known to History. In order to accomplish it, all that was necessary was to follow the example of other victorious people. Being mere continuators of Europe in the region of the continent they occupied, the values of the Whites reached the zenith. This is why the history of North America is like the uninterrupted and vigorous allegro of a triumphal march.”
The Cosmic Race in Mexico, by contrast, has a distinct history and a different destiny:
“Our own physical isolation and the mistake of creating nations, together with the original mixture of bloods, has served to keep us from the Anglo-Saxon limitation of constituting castes of pure races. History shows that these prolonged and rigorous selections produce types of physical refinement, interesting but lacking in vigor. They have a strange beauty, like that of the Brahmanic caste, but are decadent in the end. Never have they been seen to surpass other men, neither in talent, in goodness, or in strength. The road we have initiated is much more daring. It breaks away from ancient prejudices, and it would be almost unexplainable if it were not grounded on a sort of clamor that reaches from a remote distance, a distance which is not that of the past, but that mysterious distance from where the presage of the future comes.”
The unique admixture of peoples and civilizations that made the Cosmic Race possible is here described in Leopoldo Zea: From Mexicanidad to a Philosophy of History by Solomon Lipp:
“[Vasconcelos] asserted that America was capable of surpassing Europe in the realm of thought. Universality was itself characteristic of Latin America. Nevertheless, the national component seemed to emerge triumphant. The continent was heir to all of the experiences which Europe and Asia had to offer, since it had always been the crossroads of the world. Even though Vasconcelos seemed opposed to universalism, he was, nevertheless, careful to distinguish between philosophic nationalism and a philosophy which was forged as a result of national experience. We can lay claim to a philosophy from the Hispanic point of view, he insisted, with the same right that Germans, Frenchmen, or Englishmen have to their respective national schools. These are all considered points of departure in an effort to elevate humanity.”
Following is a passage from The Cosmic Race that I find particularly interesting, despite Vasconcelos’ weaving of a pseudo-history of Atlantis and Lemuria that precedes these observations:
“The confirmation of the great antiquity of our continent may seem idle to those who see nothing in the chain of events but a fateful repetition of meaningless patterns. With boredom we should regard the work of contemporary civilization, if the Toltec palaces would tell us nothing else but that civilizations pass away leaving no other fruit than a few carved stones piled upon each other or forming arched vaults or roofs of two planes intersecting at an angle. Why begin again, if within four or five thousand years other new immigrants will distract their leisure by pondering upon the remains of our trivial contemporary architecture? Scientific history becomes confused and leaves unanswered all these ruminations. Empirical history, suffering from myopia, loses itself in details, but it cannot determine a single antecedent for historical times. It flees from general conclusions, from transcendental hypotheses, to fall into the puerility of the description of utensils and cranial indices and so many other, merely external, minutiae that lack importance when seen apart from a vast and comprehensive theory.”
In his poetic rejection of “scientific history” and “empirical history” we see the rejection of positivism that I mentioned in last year’s post on Vasconcelos. However, we also see a very different valuation of the perennial idea of the rise and fall of civilizations as that which makes up history. In several posts I have discussed Hugh Trevor-Roper’s conception of history being constituted by “purposive movement,” which sets civilizations apart from non- and pre-civilized societies. Vasconcelos makes of this purposive movement of civilizations “a fateful repetition of meaningless patterns” (though he implicitly attributes this view to others). If we equate historical purpose with historical pattern (and I am not suggesting that this is universally valid), then the purposive movement of history sensu stricto is no more meaningful than the “ebb-and-flow” history of non- and pre-civilized societies. According to this way of understanding history, civilization is simply ebb-and-flow history of a high order of magnitude and complexity, but not qualitatively different. However, merely to make this latter observation suggests the possibility that when ebb-and-flow history, or what Vasconcelos called a repetition of meaningless patterns, passes a certain threshold, qualitatively distinct properties appear, marking off a distinctive new period in history.
If the method of the historian (or the philosopher of history) is not to be scientific or empirical, what is to be? Michael and Deena Weinstein in their paper “The Problematic of Marginality in Mexican Philosophy” attribute to José Gaos (of the translators of Husserl’s Logical Investigations into Spanish), the following interpretation of Vascencelos’ method:
“…Vasconcelos, independently of European realists, developed and elaborated the thesis that all purely eidetic knowledge fails to capture reality, which is composed of singular and individual entities.”
Since Goas is coming from a phenomenological perspective, he no doubt formulated this in terms of eidetic knowledge, but, for all practical purposes, this is the now-familiar distinction betwen the nomothetic and the idiographic, with Goas attributing to Vasconcelos the ultimate inadequacy of essential knowledge. From this one might conclude that one ought to focus in on the singular and individual details of history. But this does not seem to be the case.
In the above-quoted passage by Vasconcelos, he says something that I have not encountered in any other philosopher of history, and which points in the opposite direction of a focus on singular and individual details. While Bergson’s method has been compared to phenomenology, Bergson himself was not the relentlessly rational figure that Husserl was, and his conception of “intellectual intuition” that allows one to enter into some object and to see it, in effect, from the inside, may be closer to Vasconcelos’ project: historical immanence without epistemic essentialism or empiricism.
While much philosophy of history from Hegel’s death to the present has defined itself as being non-Hegelian or anti-Hegelian precisely in order to avoid any “vast and comprehensive theory,” this is precisely what Vasconcelos advocates, and this is what The Cosmic Race presents to us. I have myself noticed that, where genuine understanding is lacking, scholars will take refuge in recounting precise details (what Vasconcelos calls “the description of utensils and cranial indices”). While I cannot follow Vasconcelos in his implied condemnation of scientific and empirical history, nor his pseudo-history of Atlantis and Lemuria, I understand and appreciate the criticism. My takeaway from the valid scope of this criticism is that historians and philosophers of history need to spend time developing the conceptual framework they employ no less than their empirical investigations. Either one without the other is a vain and empty undertaking, and while the conceptual framework we formulate for understanding history may not be a vast and comprehensive theory, it probably needs to be more robust and daring than the implicit contemporary ideal or scientific history shorn of all philosophical content.
The humanistic (non-positivist) retort to Vasconcelos’ desire to see history understood in terms of transcendental hypotheses is to be found in Montaigne, who had seen transcendental hypotheses in action and felt that they followed from the lowest instincts of human nature, rather than the most elevated:
“The mind has not willingly other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its necessity. They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation.” (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, “Of Experience”)
The “transcendental humors” that affrighted Montaigne and attracted Vasconcelos, like technologies, are “dual use” — they can be used for good or ill. We need our transcendental humors and hypothesis, here we can agree with Vasconcelos; we also need to regulate our transcendental humors and hypotheses, and here we can agree with Montaigne.
Further Resources
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Last year’s post: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/Jos%C3%A9-Vasconcelos
