This study is a collection of six essays presented by Professor Zea at scholarly conferences throughout Latin America between 1970 and 1974. The topics range in scope from a general philosophical treatise entitled “From the History of Ideas to a Philosophy of Latin American History” to more specific chapters on the origins of negritude and indigenism, the ideas of Antonio Caso, and nineteenth-century Mexican culture. Although most of the themes are not original, having appeared in many other works by Zea (e.g., América como conciencia, El positivismo en México, etc.), this volume is still a valuable summary of the recent development of Zea’s thought.
As a somewhat random collection of writings, the book does have some structural weaknesses. If this work were to be improved, it would need the services of a competent editor to remove the many repetitious phrases and ideas which appear throughout. In any case, a lasting strength of the book is found in the author’s dominant mood—a pervasive and compelling plea for “philosophy” to be used in a people’s struggle against dependency and for human liberation.
Zea’s main argument is that Latin America (and the Third World in general) cannot achieve liberation from its dependency, underdevelopment, and current alienation without “mental” and “cultural” emancipation. In other words, an awareness about the Latin Americans’ past thinking (i.e., the history of ideas) will reveal the sources and content of present modes of thought and consciousness. With this awareness, the Latin American can develop an authentic New World philosophy which will be the basis for cultural emancipation.
According to Zea, nineteenth-century “mental” emancipators like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José María Luis Mora, and Francisco Bilbao, among others, rejected their indigenous and Iberian pasts for European and North American models of law, economics, and philosophy. England, France, and the United States provided the models of liberalism, positivism, neo-capitalism, and socialism which were foreign to the Latin American reality. The only result was that of substituting one dependency mentality (colonialism) for another (neocolonialism and imperialism).
For Zea, liberation, development, and independence will require a new generation of mental emancipators who will enable Latin America to assimilate its indigenous and Iberian past. The model for the future is the Hegelian dialectic or Aufhebung. Assimilation, not accumulation or rejection, is the key. Zea’s final plea is for a philosophy of history in which Latin American culture assimilates and transcends the past while conserving a root consciousness—a philosophy of Latin American history which is the mental and cultural complement to socioeconomic attempts at liberation. In this respect it is somewhat surprising that the literature of “dependency” always includes social and political theorists like Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Theotonio dos Santos, but not the ideas of a philosopher like Zea.
While Zea’s general outline contains many worthwhile insights, the accuracy of many of his historical views is open to question. The basic problem of Zea as an historian is his impatience with details. To argue, as some apologists do, that Zea’s primary concern is philosophical, and not historical, is not sufficient. As most logicians know, the validity of historical generalizations, whether conceptual, theoretical, interpretative, or descriptive, is ultimately dependent upon accurate data and representative samples. And herein lies the problem, for Professor Zea’s views of Latin America’s past are, in many instances, nothing other than overextended generalizations.
For example, Charles Hale in his well-documented study on Mora has demonstrated how Mexico’s liberals derived many of their doctrines from Spain. In other words, contrary to Zea, he argues that Mora’s thought was not a simple imitation of European norms and a rejection of the Spanish past. Or again, Zea generalizes about Latin America’s rejection of its Indo-Iberian past, yet too often supports this observation with the single example of Sarmiento (hardly a representative figure given the peculiar influences of the British in nineteenth-century Argentina). Other cases could be presented, but the point is that, given, as Zea insists, an integral relationship between philosophy and history, his philosophy of history, no matter how appealing on political, psychological, or intellectual grounds, must be suspect by those, like myself, who insist that (no matter how subjective the task) “theory” must be derived from an accurate account of past actuality.
