Mexican Hyperion Group

The claim

Philosophy is done from somewhere. The circumstance of the philosopher is not noise to be filtered out but the material, and a Mexican philosophy has to begin with the Mexican situation.

What it held

The group formed around Ortega y Gasset's dictum — I am myself and my circumstance — carried to Mexico by Spanish Republican exiles, and around the French existentialism they were reading as it appeared.

If existence precedes essence, then there is no universal human nature from which philosophy proceeds; there is only this person, here, with this history. And Mexico's history is a conquest, a mixture, and a long argument about which parts of the inheritance are authentic.

Emilio Uranga's Analysis of Mexican Being is the group's central work, and its move is to take a national self-description — that Mexicans are marked by insufficiency, by accident, by not being fully one thing — and argue that this is not a defect. European philosophy took substance as the ideal and accident as deficiency. Uranga inverts it: accidentality is the human condition, and a people who cannot hide from it are ahead rather than behind.

Leopoldo Zea did the historical work, arguing that Latin American thought has been distorted by measuring itself against Europe, and founded the study of Latin American intellectual history as a field.

The group lasted about four years.

How it argued

Phenomenological and existential analysis applied to national character, using literature, popular speech and history as material.

What it was arguing against

Positivism's stage theory, and the assumption that philosophy is universal in a way that makes local circumstance irrelevant.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether national character is a philosophical subject at all, or whether the group was doing cultural criticism in philosophical vocabulary.

Common misconceptions

That it is a philosophy of national inferiority. Uranga's argument is the reverse: what Europe treats as deficiency he treats as the human condition seen clearly.

How it began

Spanish exiles bringing Ortega, French existentialism arriving in translation, and a generation of Mexican students for whom the revolution was recent history.

What became of it

Dispersed by 1952. Its members went into other work and the moment passed quickly.

Lasting influence

Latin American philosophy's turn toward its own circumstance. Zea's historical programme, which outlasted the group by decades.

Why it still matters

The question of whether philosophy can be done from a particular place without ceasing to be philosophy is now asked in several traditions at once.

Put another way

A person asking what it is to be from here, and finding the question is the philosophy.

Where to start

Paz for the atmosphere, then Uranga for the argument.

The surprising bit

Uranga argued that accidentality — being contingent, insufficient, not fully constituted — is the truth of the human condition, and that Mexicans had simply been unable to disguise it. It is a national self-description turned into a metaphysics.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Existentialism, Phenomenology

Opposed by

Latin American Positivism

Influenced

Philosophy of Liberation

The verdict

Four years of work by a small group, and it changed what philosophy in Latin America could be about.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy