PHILOSOPHICAL
MISTAKES
FEDERICO GONZALEZ
Like it or no, the vision that we have of a thing or theme has a particular focus. It is dyed in a color with which our viewpoint, the angle of our vision, is particularly compatible. This is particularly true in the intellectual order. Our baggage of ideas, preconceptions, tastes, attractions, and phobias, with which our thought and even our very feelings, are conditioned, are limited first and foremost by the circumstances of space and time in which it has fallen to us to exist. These circumstances, learned as reality, mark and frame the position we take before things, whether it be a matter of the deepest beliefs or merely of superficial habits.
For the most part, this limitation passes unobserved, and we unconsciously
identify with it in an aprioristic fashion. It is given in cultural terms
by the dominion of determinate parameters relative to our historical time
and our geographical space. Regarding the former, let us observe that our
conventions, or the ideas of our era, will determine our vision. As to the
latter, we see that the presuppositions of "modern civilization"
are clearly Western, and have come to invade the whole planet. This double
circumstance is noticeable especially in our understanding of the pre-Hispanic
traditions, which have been discovered precisely at the moment when the
West had just made a breach with its own tradition. That tradition had endured
to the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, and lingered on into the seventeenth
century (perpetuating itself, indeed, in an "occult" fashion,
down to our own day). From there on, the reality of symbol is transformed
into allegory-later to lose all of its meaning-and a series of facts and
circumstances is unleashed which will lead to a breach with the universal
principles from which no authentic civilization had prescinded. Now these
principles will be forgotten, and regarded as relics, opposed by a solid
progress that can tolerate them in no way.
This has issued in misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, mistake upon
mistake, in our own times, which have faithfully inherited the legacy of
a series of erroneous philosophical presuppositions. While these presuppositions
have their antecedent with the Greeks themselves, they culminate in the
Renaissance and its logical consequences: Cartesian rationalism, the industrial
revolution, production as an end in itself, consumerism, and technical dehumanization.
It will not be our purpose to treat the decadence of the West here. We only
wish to understand in depth certain conceptions peculiar to scholars of
the American phenomenon, conceptions intimately related with their time
and culture. While proper to recent centuries, these notions tend to be
attributed to the universal human being of all times and all spaces. That
is, the tendency is to deny the living forms of utterly vast earlier cultures,
burdening them with characteristics proper to the modern West, which, in
all messianism, invests itself with the status of governor and redeemer
of savagery and backwardness. The West, we see, is owner-manager of a supposed
official or scientific truth that makes us-as persons integrated into modern
culture-somehow superior, so that we must sometimes charitably forgive ancient
civilizations their deficiencies, as well as praise certain virtues of theirs
in order to demonstrate that, after all, their members were not absolutely
stupid, or ill-intentioned savages. Otherwise the attitude is one of wholesale
repudiation.
Granted, this is not the case with the great number of those who, with intense
love, patience, and complete dedication have occupied themselves with the
arduous, beautiful, and exhausting task of their investigation. Still, this
does not militate against the fact that they approach the themes of their
specialty with their cultural baggage, that of their time. And it must be
further stated that, if these paraphernalia were to be composed of philosophical
ideas that were mistaken even in classical antiquity, they will certainly
mark scholars' viewpoint just as erroneously today, despite their merits,
and the many useful or empirical rewards they may have yielded, or generously
bequeathed to us.
Padre Joseph de Acosta is scandalized, from a frankly religious standpoint,
that the natives had no specific name for the Supreme Being and Maker, even
though they knew such a Being. (They named that Being by way of various
intermediate deities.) ". . . Whence one sees how slender and weak
a knowledge of God they have: they are not even able to name Him."
But then, paradoxically, he emphasizes how impressive the temples and rites,
and "religiousness," of the folk are. And particularly, referring
to their cosmogony, he observes, sagaciously: "It appears that they
have drawn the dogma from the ideas of Plato." Actually, there is nothing
strange about not naming the deity directly, and traditional doctrine regards
the Supreme Identity as unnamable precisely by virtue of its supracosmic
essence, which is subject to no determination and hence to no name. That
essence is expressed only by way of its attributes-that is, through the
divine names, a procedure obviously intimately related to the Platonic archetypes,
not to mention Islamic Sufism and Jewish cabala, which flourished in the
same historical space, contemporaneously with the Precolumbian civilizations.1
On the other hand, the natives subjugated by the Inca empire used the word
huaca for the presence of the sacred and the magical-telluric in any of
its multiple forms or manifestations (rocks, mountains, rivers, stars, celestial
and terrestrial phenomena, crossroads, cults of the dead, and so on), which,
of course, were present everywhere in a sacralized world-and sacralized
mental space.2 It is ignorance of traditional symbolical thought-ignorance
of how antiquity conceived and experienced symbol-to deduce from this fact,
via a simple exterior reading (nearly always subject, besides, to current
fashion), that the natives were polytheists, idolaters, animists, or naturalists.
No, the natives simply reverenced the countless states of a Universal Being-the
deity, the Holy-manifested in everything around them as hierophanies.
And so it behooves us to single out some mistaken ideas-or preconceptions-in
certain attitudes determined by the intellectual currents in vogue in a
given period. We do not intend to draw up a list of them, or exhaustive
classification, which would seem to us to be without utility, and inadequate
to our purposes here. But we can indeed briefly refer to some of the more
common errors (to which we shall return in the course of this book). Nearly
all of these are sprung, as we have already stated, from the positivistic
science of the past century, that science being the legatee of rationalism
and evolutionism with its sequels: progressivistic ideas which have no support
today (that is, even the more recent empirical "science" has abandoned
them), but which continue to flourish and prosper as factors of social power,
brandished by certain personages with their characteristic arrogance.3
We have already indicated that it is wrong to consider Precolumbian societies
as polytheistic, animistic, naturalistic, or, especially, idolatrous. In
the first case, to regard them in this mistaken fashion is something our
culture does with all of the traditions and religions that see the energy
of the deity to be incarnate in numerous forms, in various gods, or better,
numina, principal or secondary, descending or ascending, which manifest
attributes of the Universal Being. Among the ancients and the moderns this
is the case with the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Nordics, Celtics, Chaldeans,
Mazdaists, Hindus, Buddhists, Far Easterners, and so forth. In Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, an analogous function is performed by archangels,
angels, and divine beings: these are intermediaries-symbols or messengers-of
the Supreme Identity.
For the second case, the conventional thinking is that the peoples we saddle
with the name of "animist"-generally, "primitive" peoples-must
have been victims of the terror inspired in them by the cosmos, to which
they rendered tribute and entreaty, regarding it as animate. Reverence for
life, and fear of or respect for the sacred, are confused with an ignorance
capable of conceiving evil or benign spirits as independent entities, endowed
with a life of their own, all but materialized, in which these peoples are
supposed to have believed literally and which they obeyed blindly. This
is possible only for the mentality of our contemporaries-those who build
their arguments from films about cowboys and Indians, and cannibals and
explorers.
The third error is akin to the second-as each is akin to all. The "naturalistic"
vision, of which the world's best exponent may be J. G. Frazer, a good writer,
consists in the reduction of all myths, symbols, and rites of the primitives
and antiquity to mere acknowledgments of natural or astronomical phenomena,
to which magical categories were assigned, when they are only scientifically
verifiable facts, and perfectly normal. Many of the scholars who have followed
this line have the enormous merit of having seen the relationship between
certain beliefs, usages, and customs with celestial and terrestrial events,
cycles of the stars and generation, and so on. But they err in limiting
Americans' understanding to a simple observation of events, and consequent
stupefaction and astonishment in the face of these events, which is thought
to lead them to the adoration of these forces in themselves. On the contrary,
those energies are but manifestations of invisible principles, which they
express and of which they are merely the symbol. The Precolumbian civilizations
were only crediting the supernatural, which, as everyone knows, is that
which is found beyond the natural, however much it may be expressed in the
symbolical sacrality of nature.
Finally, to call traditional Americans idolatrous supposes that what they
see in the physical image of a god is simply that which is directly represented
there. It may be that this did occur in some case or at some moment, just
as it did in Judaism and Christianity. But the generalized hypothesis seems
rather to have been based on the zeal of Catholic priests who saw only idols
or demonic forms in everything that was not the Jesus of the European Inquisition.
Another error seems to us to be the concept that the Precolumbian languages
did not thrive-meaning that they did not reach a stage of phonetic writing.4
Quite the contrary of what is usually thought, the ideographic and hieroglyphic
representations are immeasurably richer than the phonetic ones-for the peoples
who experience them concretely and really, not for ourselves who do not
understand them-and more subtle, along with being simple and available to
immediate understanding. They promote countless associative mental operations,
and broaden the intellectual capabilities of the individuals and societies
that manage these codes. At the same time, their evocative power and the
plurality of their images facilitate continual syntheses, and broaden the
universality of consciousness. Ideographic and hieroglyphic representations
designate various levels, or volumetric spaces, in which they are able to
combine different readings and concepts among themselves. Chinese writing
is partly ideographic even today, and that civilization's refinement of
thought is well known.
Actually, all writing has been ideographic in its origin, and has been corrupted-like
all cultural forms-into their phonetic, then alphabetical, simplification.
This simplification crystallizes and particularizes a concept, by limiting
and fixing it-and separates it from the whole-besides depriving it of its
creative, generative power. The attitude in question goes hand in hand with
societies' cyclical changes, and the passage from an intuitive, synthetic,
and analogical mentality-which apprehends directly-to that of reason, and
the multiplicity of analysis and logic, which are indirect.
The city at its apogee, civilization (the great classic cultures as we admire
today, or that, as rigid modules that proclaim their own impending collapse
and disappearance), are the best examples of this last assertion. Such also
is philosophy, which must be seen as a decadent expression, inasmuch as
it implies in itself an activity: love for wisdom, which must be stimulated
when Knowledge is lost. The models or molds implanted by our cultural period
are as rigid as the walls, fortifications, and stone constructions of the
city, which are transferred to the thinking of its inhabitants, who thus
become the unconscious protagonists of that solidification.
Just so, it has been said that the natives did not have, and still do not
have, "personality." This criticism is a curious one. A form of
being is condemned that, as it is not usual, is judged a deficiency in the
other. Peoples who believe that their exile is earth, their abode accidental,
and their destiny and origin heaven, to which they are to return, find it
difficult to regard themselves as "personalized" individuals in
the sense of the modern ideal, which, for that matter, is the antithesis
of any traditional teaching.5
Laurette Sejourné, one of the most influential and lucid scholars
of the Precolumbian, criticizes another important researcher-Eduard Seller-for
holding a view too proper to his time and situation. But she falls into
the same error in her Pensamiento y Religión en el México
Antiguo ("Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico"). There, despite
correctly connecting the theogony and cosmogony-and ways of social and individual
life-of the pre-Cortesians to their initiation (a universal practice in
traditional societies), errs in attributing to the latter a simple religious,
devout, or ascetical character, thus reducing it almost to a pious formalism.
Indeed, on the one hand her book declares, with perfect accuracy, that Teotihuacan
was the city of the gods, which, "far from implying any crass polytheistic
beliefs, evokes the concept of human divinity," and that it "was
none other but the place where the serpent learned miraculously to fly-that
is, where the individual attained the category of celestial being by interior
elevation." But then her assertion is evacuated when she associates
interior elevation with religious ideas in which the "mystical"
and the "moral" are compared to the initiatory process of knowledge.
This is partial, and mistaken, just as it is to continue thinking that magic
is an antecedent stage to the religious conception, and that both are equivalent
to the process of metaphysical realization, or initiation.
As to the judgment that the natives had no history, which is an attempt
to point to an element of backwardness in these societies, or a defect,
we shall only recall the maxim, "Happy peoples have no history."
And the reason that they have none is that their thinking, their culture,
has no purchase on, does not emphasize, the successive, the fragmented,
and the individualized-save in the indication of certain cyclical events
manifested in their genealogies and mythical events. Instead it seizes upon,
underscores, the simultaneous, and thus experiences an indefinite present,
which is always new since it is constantly regenerated.6 The current historical
vision bestows on historical time an hourly, linear chronology, and claims
to endow it with an objective reality, which is such only in the subjective
mind of our contemporaries. To have a concept of "history," or
"philosophy," or "literature" is not, contrary to the
prevailing notion, a social advance, or a superior cultural stage. On the
contrary, it is the clearest index of an inconvertible degradation. This
is what has happened with classical antiquity, and now the West has been
winning over the East, so that today even the East has finally found itself
hitched to the deafening collapse of modern society.
Now, if these evaluations, which we have just repulsed, have been made from
a standpoint determined by space and time (and by the ideas and conceptions
that flow together in space and time), then our focus, as well, might be
expected to be subject to these cultural caprices and fashions. But we do
not believe this to be the case. We have taken our standpoint in the perspective
of the Philosophia Perennis-that is, from a permanent thought not subject
to fluctuations, as it is archetypal and Traditional. This permanent, invariable
thought is expressed in unanimous fashion through symbols and cultural structures
within every society. This is precisely the object of the study of Symbology,
inasmuch as this science considers the cosmos and man in their totality,
and ultimately takes all manifestations, especially cultural manifestations,
as symbolic.
At the same time, as symbol is the bridge between the known and the unknown,
so Knowledge furthered by Symbology bears on the invisible, or unknown,
level, through the intermediary of the symbol, which represents the invisible,
or unknown, on the level of the visible, or known. We shall not make bold
to say that this viewpoint, which we maintain, extends as far as the esoteric,
since this word seems today to indicate something, as it were, outside of
reality. Another reason why we shall not use the term is the discredit into
which it has fallen owing to its being understood as "secret for secret's
sake"-that is, as synonymous with mystification. But were we to see,
in this word, what it actually expresses-its contraposition with the exoteric
as two modalities of one and the same thing, the two sides of a tapestry,
the exoteric being the brilliant and descriptive side, and the esoteric
that of the dark weft and warp-or, in other terminologies, the external
and the internal, or existence and essence-were we to understand this word
in its authentic meaning, then, we could thereupon agree that symbology,
in taking symbol as the object of its study, will gradually approach the
unknown under the guidance of the known.
NOTES
1 The Guarani worshiped a God called Tupá, meaning, "Who are
you?"
2 The Iroquois, and other North American Indians, denominated this presence,
"Orenda." It was also incarnated in Manitu, the Great Spirit,
called by the Sioux "Wakan-Tanka"-Wakan being the generic word
in their language for all of the sacred, that is, for anything (object,
phenomenon, or being) having the power to transmit the energy of the divine,
especially nature as the image or vestige of the supernatural. Let us observe
that the terms, Wakan and huaca are practically identical in meaning. One
of the paradoxes of Precolumbian reality is that certain languages of tribes
of the North American plains are of the same family as Quechuan, even though
they are separated by thousands of miles and an infinitude of other languages.
3 Although the origin of modern Science was magical; just to mention Bacon,
Newton, Boyle, Kepler, and so on, as well as Paracelso and all successors
for generations, who later saw the inversion of their principals due to
cyclical reasons.
4 We have a clear example in the introduction to the Códice Borbónico
(Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1981), p. xiii, by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso,
in his commentary on that codex.
5 "Do we speak something true here, Lifegiver?
We but dream, we but rouse ourselves from sleep.
It is but as a dream. . . .
No one speaks here any truth. . . ."
[Cantares Mexicanos, vol. 5 v. Spanish trans. Miguel León Portilla].
6 It is not that they failed to concern themselves with (historical) facts,
but that, for them, those facts were charged with other meanings-broader,
in their multidimensionality, than those registered by a simple historiography.