- 1 This influence is especially noticeable in the first editions of Caso’s capital work La existencia (...)
1Bergson’s work had a considerable influence on the renewal of Mexican philosophy in the first decades of the 20th century. Willing to combat the positivism prevailing in Mexico with their own weapons, namely, with a philosophy supported by a more comprehensive experience, renowned thinkers such as Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos enthusiastically read the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and attentively followed the appearance of other works of the French philosopher up to Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Bergson’s reception by Caso deserves special mention. Not only did he contribute decisively to overcoming the narrow positivist mentality that hindered philosophy and culture in Mexico, but he also proposed a philosophy of existence with a notably Bergsonian undertone, and continued to be inspired by the French philosopher in his final reflections on totalitarianism and the dangers humanity faced in the most critical moments of World War II.1
- 2 Regarding the phenomenological sources of Ramos’s thought and its place in the history of philosoph (...)
2However, I aim to address the reception of Bergson in Samuel Ramos, a critical disciple of Caso and representative of a second generation that wanted to follow Ortega y Gasset’s program by founding a philosophy of Mexican circumstances that could be reintegrated into the history of the philosophy and at the same time contribute something of its own to universal culture. Under the influence of Ortega y Gasset, Samuel Ramos opens the doors to German philosophy, especially to the phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger.2 In its final stage, Ramos’s philosophy is a new humanism that wants to offer, from non-exclusively Eurocentric perspective, an alternative solution to the crisis of the 20th century, the ultimate consequence of the nihilism inherent in the positivist reduction of life and from the spirit to the mere mechanisms of inert matter.
3In this context, Ramos recognized Bergson’s overcoming of materialist monism, but always maintained critical reservations regarding his theory of intuition, considering that it suffered from a certain anti-intellectualism and therefore required correction and complementation by other philosophies. Today Ramos’s reading of Bergson appears narrow in many aspects. Thanks to the reinterpretations of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, among others, as well as the knowledge of unpublished courses by Bergson and the systematic investigation of his work, his thought acquires new relevance. However, the study of Bergson’s reception in Ramos is not only of historiographical interest, since it shows constants of a reception’s style that, in my opinion, continue to be relevant for Spanish-speaking researchers of Bergson’s work, even after the institutional turn towards analytical philosophy since the 70s: the need for a descriptive philosophy of experience that synthesizes reason and intuition; the idea of a mutual complement between intuitionist philosophies, for example between Bergsonism and phenomenology; the integration of Bergson’s master ideas into an anthropology, a philosophy of culture and history capable of confronting the crises of each era.
4Let’s follow the traces of Bergson’s influence on Ramos’s philosophical project. We will see that the deepest motivations of Bergsonism were always present in the work of the Mexican philosopher, despite an initial critical distancing that became more nuanced over time. In his first book Hipótesis, published in 1928, Ramos opposed the intuition-instinct of Bergson with the intuition-feeling of Croce (from whom Ramos also draws inspiration to develop a philosophical aesthetic). While the notion of feeling in Croce remains too vague, the notion of instinct in Bergson has a concrete and precise meaning from a scientific and philosophical point of view, thus offering a solid basis for intuitionism (Ramos 1975, 21-22). Ramos also points out the importance and relevance of Bergsonian intuitionism in the combat that Antonio Caso waged at the beginning of the 20th century against scientific materialism and determinism. Bergson has been the “Mexican Pontiff” who allowed Caso to replace the prevailing positivism with a spiritualist philosophy and free will (Ramos 1975, 62).
5Ramos, for his part, shifts the emphasis of his reading of Bergson from artistic disinterest and self-denial of charity, phenomena of the free act whose analysis is central in Caso’s philosophy, towards the question of the personality of the deep self, in short, towards the anthropological question. But Bergson alone is no longer enough to address it. It is also necessary to consider the perspectivism of Ortega y Gasset and German philosophy, especially phenomenology. Ramos indeed notices an insufficiency in Bergson’s anti-intellectualism, still indebted to philosophical romanticism (Ramos 1975, 67). He even goes so far as to call Bergson a “theorist of irrationalism” (Ramos 1975, 70). But it is necessary to explain this statement, which in its context shows many nuances. Ramos knew very well that Bergsonian intuitionism aspires to bring life and knowledge as close as possible. The difficulty is that an extreme approach leads to affirming that life and action are both absolute knowledge. For Ramos, this equivalence is ultimately a game of philosophical prestidigitation to make us believe that where we see one thing, life, there are two, life and knowledge. Naturally, what has happened is that with the identification of subject and object, intuition has dissolved in life, denying itself as a gnoseological doctrine (Ramos 1975, 72).
6Ramos, for his part, believes that intuitionism is ultimately worth less as a gnoseological doctrine than as a new idea of man: “intuitionism should not be discussed as a gnoseological doctrine, but rather transferred to another field and considered as a new idea of man: homo faber as type more in line with the meaning of life than homo sapiens” (Ramos 1975, 72). In other words: in its deepest sense, Bergsonian intuitionism reveals a human dimension unknown to mechanistic rationalism. Homo faber does not designate in this context man guided by purely utilitarian criteria, but rather human life adopting his environment and objects with greater and greater precision. Already in the conclusions of Hipótesis Ramos acknowledges Bergson having established that those realities such as animal and psychic life, time and freedom “cannot fit without distorting into the moulds of intelligence” (Ramos 1975, 77). But Ramos objects to Bergson that knowledge of the limits of intelligence is already a new mode of intelligent understanding, an act of surpassing reason by reason itself. It is not necessary then to oppose intuition and reason (the danger that constantly threatens Bergson’s philosophy, in Ramos’s view), but rather to reform the latter in support of the spiritual demands of human beings and culture.
7Ramos would later explain the meaning of his criticism of Bergsonian intuitionism: by refuting the scientistic postulate of the identity of the real, Bergson showed that it was not possible to apply the intellectual frameworks of materialism to life and spirit. He thus ran on par with the German philosophical tradition that, at the end of the 19th century, established that the Kantian categories (space, time, etc.) apply only to physics and that therefore it is necessary to look for other categories in other orders of reality. The difference, Ramos observes, is that in the field of physics the categories are already made, and philosophical criticism only must verify and define them. In other scientific fields it is necessary to create them. Bergson’s merit consists in having placed himself in this original attitude from philosophy. Metaphysical knowledge, based on intuition and that philosophy and science must develop in combination, corresponds to the task of penetrating living matter (which science alone, due to its original pragmatic sense, treats as inert matter) and the spirit.
8This is precisely the meaning of Bergson’s first works, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and Matière et mémoire. Philosophy has the task of examining animate beings and consciousness without preconceived ideas. It wants to see intuitively, unlike science which, left to itself, operates exclusively on inert matter and can only consider heterogeneous realities under the aspect of inert matter. The method of genuine philosophy consists of getting out of this vicious circle, to plunge into the reality of life and spirit. Mostly accepting Bergson’s criticism of positivism, Ramos nevertheless departs from the French philosopher regarding the theoretical value of science. According to Ramos, Bergson had not managed to escape the psychological error that explained knowledge by psychological laws and these by the principle of action. From this perspective, Ramos considers that phenomenology has surpassed Bergsonism:
The philosopher who with such a subtle spirit was able to perceive the differences between the various orders of being, cannot discover the autonomy and ideality of the world of thought that is placed apart from purely psychological existence. On this point, German philosophy, especially “phenomenology”, has had a much more penetrating and accurate vision (Ramos 2011, 392-393).
9I would like to highlight two ideas from this quote: Ramos, a witness to the historical crisis of his time, is interested in a reform of reason that reestablishes a humanist philosophy or founds a new one. Bergson’s overcoming of materialist monism was a necessary step to break the nihilism that reduced the being of man to a mere epiphenomenon of inert matter. I will talk about this later; I want now to point out the reasons why Ramos thought that Bergsonism should be complemented by other philosophical currents. Bergson alone could not carry out the desirable reform of intelligence, since he conceives her still under psychological assumptions that do not allow us to see the autonomy of theoretical thought. Hence “a certain incongruity between the idea of a reform of intelligence and the idea of intuition as an exclusive organ of philosophy” (Ramos 2011, 393).
10The reform of intelligence does not only consist of obtaining greater and greater intuitive precision regarding biological and psychological phenomena, but also of delving deeper with reason into the reality of being, to effectively establish a metaphysics “that reabsorbs intelligence in its principles”, as Bergson himself intended. According to Ramos, Bergson had already outlined the idea and the conditions of possibility of this reform since L’Évolution créatrice, but he had not been able to complete it because of an ambivalent concept of intelligence. The incongruity, Ramos points out, consists in the fact that it is not clear whether Bergsonian thought “bans reason from the field of philosophy or admits it, only reformed” (Ramos 2011, 393).
11However, Ramos resists labelling Bergson. The reproach of anti-intellectualism would roughly mean prohibiting any use of reason in philosophy, to advocate exclusively the use of intuition. Ramos admits that the concept of intuition suffers from a certain vagueness in the French philosopher’s writings, but he specifies: it is not at all a mysterious faculty with a mystical meaning, but rather a kind of extension of instinct, the vital force itself “that operates through blind without knowing what it does, but nevertheless it proceeds with wonderful precision, as if guided by an unconscious calculation” (Ramos 2011, 394). Bergson’s effort consists in methodically turning instinct into reflective consciousness, therefore, into intuition of a higher degree. However, Ramos misses in Bergson the lack of logic and a methodology of intuition, such as those that Descartes and later Husserl tried to find. However, Ramos points out, the vagueness of Bergsonism is ultimately more of a virtue than a defect. By resisting solidifying the data of consciousness and by descending from scientific theories about life and spirit to questions of fact, Bergson remains faithful to facts that are given to intuition. Instead of considering life and spirit from a preconceived theory (materialism, mechanism, etc.), Bergson tries to return to the immediate, to the original evidence of intuitive data. The important thing about this effort, Ramos observes, is that intuition opportunely amends the path of science without replacing reason.
12In his 1938 book Más allá de la moral de Kant a positive turn is noted in the appreciation of Bergson, who had published Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion in 1932. Ramos attributes a “realistic sense” to Bergson’s ethics and solidity in the presentation of her scientific material. He further describes the mature reflections of the French thinker as one of the “trends of current philosophy that underline the social character of morality” (Ramos 1975, 201):
13The morality of obligation, since it is only valid for small human groups, cannot constitute the only expression of morality. Above that social morality, we must place another morality that, surpassing the borders of races and nations, has a universal scope; she is properly a morality of humanity. These are two very different morals, not only in breadth, but also in content (Ramos 1975, 206).
14We will see that this revaluation, conditioned by the idea of complementing Bergsonism with other philosophical approaches, plays an important role in the reinsertion of Bergson into Ramos’s project of a reform of reason and the establishment of a new humanism. The keys to this reinterpretation already appear in Más allá de la moral de Kant. Ramos highlights there the affinity of the ethics of Bergson and Max Scheler. Both consider love as the very foundation of the moral act, but Brentano and Scheler provide the idea of “intentional acts.” Bergson and Scheler locate the origin of moral conscience in an “emotional intuition.” But Scheler shows that this intuition relates the subject to a world of values, an axiological dimension that Bergsonism ignores. Now, Ramos continues, these failures in the analytical part are relativized by the overall value of Bergsonism. From the beginning, his doctrine establishes a correlation between duty and freedom, treating obligation as a fact of conscience from which the existence of moral freedom is inferred. Bergson also distinguishes two forms of morality: the morality of obligation, typical of simple and closed societies (which are opposed to others, thus containing the morality of obligation an element of hatred), and a morality irreducible to that of obligation, namely, a moral aspiration to constitute or imitate an exemplary ethical personality. Ramos comments on this:
By distinguishing a type of morality that is irreducible to that of obligation, Bergson points out an undeniable fact that has not been sufficiently insisted upon, perhaps because Kant’s suggestion has been so great that there has always been a tendency to identify morality with the duty. It seems that this morality of aspiration corresponds better to the real effort of creation in historical moral life than the doctrine of the immutable ordering of values upheld by Scheler (Ramos 1975, 210).
15The morality of aspiration, as Bergson presents it in Les Deux sources, thus offers axiological phenomenology an indispensable complement: instead of treating values as an immutable object of a Wertnehmung, Bergsonism allows them to be considered as both subjective and intersubjective historical creation, placing them thus in a line of evolution that goes from instinct to the higher and transforming forms of personality. That is why Ramos thinks that Bergson has been right to link the morality of aspiration with his doctrine of creative evolution. Another point that interests Ramos, within his project for a reform of theoretical and practical reason, is Bergson’s idea of a historical conflict between the morality of obligation and the morality of aspiration in history: “Every moral reform at birth is “against established social morality, and appears, at that time, as an immoral movement” (Ramos 1975, 210). But beyond this observation, the question arose about the historical relevance of the description of the conflict between both forms of morality, which Ramos, referring to Bergson, describes as follows:
Immanent in the morality of duty is the representation of a society that tends to preserve itself. That is why its precepts have the rigidity and immutability of tradition. The feeling of progress is implicitly contained in the morality of aspiration. It is, therefore, a flexible and changing morality, whose emotion is the enthusiasm of a march forward. By delving deeper into this new aspect of morality, we discover its coincidence with the generating effort of life (Ramos 1975, 207).
16In his 1940 book Hacia un nuevo humanismo, in some ways Ramos’s masterpiece, the Bergsonian distinction between a social self and a deep self is evoked. The first is, so to speak, the spatial projection of the second. While the social Self lives outside itself, passively adhering to external norms, the deep Self acts freely and recovers itself. Commenting on this distinction in the first chapter of Hacia un nuevo humanismo (“La crisis del humanismo”) Ramos points out that many individuals ignore the creative dimension, the open temporality and the living force of their deep self. But this is largely because they have been stripped of the created values to make them something external and unaffordable or the property of a few. This is the case of economic values in a capitalist system, for which they run separately from the destiny of the individual and communities. The inaccessibility of economic values is also endorsed by a bourgeois and materialist morality that is imposed on people from outside.
17But the crisis, as Ramos saw it even earlier in 1938, is even more radical. In an article titled “La civilización europea en peligro de muerte” Ramos reflects on the imminent world conflagration (at that time the Spanish Civil War, a prelude to the Second World War, was taking place). The Mexican philosopher precisely addresses the paradox of an imminent war that European civilization had to exclude on principle. Faced with this bleak panorama, Ramos posed the question: How is it possible that European history is governed neither by reason nor by moral motives, and not even by a basic instinct of conservation? Closely considering the historical circumstances of that time, Ramos wrote:
It seems to me, judging by the tension of the European atmosphere and the destructive efficiency of modern weapons, that the next war will very possibly mean much more than the annihilation of a social class or an economic regime. The most likely thing is that no one will win in this fight and that its result will be the total ruin of Europe and its civilization (Ramos 2011, 216).
18Thus, not only capitalist materialism but also the possibility of a civilization that self-destructs, constitute the ethical problem that must be confronted through the founding of a new philosophical anthropology. Precisely in Hacia un nuevo humanismo Ramos undertakes “a liquidation of ideas”, a “settling of accounts” with the European philosophy of the 20th century. Ramos shows there that the historical and cultural crisis of Europe was fundamentally caused by the idea of man that had been sustaining the old humanism. What is characteristic of the understanding of man in modern consciousness is “a deep dualism in the valuation of life that separates the spiritual and the material into two isolated realms” (Ramos 1985, 3).
19This approach explains that in 1944, shortly before the end of the Second World War, Ramos retrospectively reevaluated the role played by Bergson in the history of Mexican philosophy and the offer of a new anthropology from a specifically Latin American perspective. Ramos points out that all the movements of intellectual life in Mexico during the first three decades of the 20th century had relied almost exclusively on French thought, especially on the work of Bergson. The preference for French thought was explained above all by its humanistic sense, from which a value of application to the realities of man, political and social life was derived. Already since 1941, the year in which Ramos wrote the obituary note “La muerte de Bergson”, this idea was noted: the work of the French philosopher owes its importance more to his humanistic sense than to his early combat with positivism. One of Bergson’s last acts during his lifetime, the rejection of an exemption from the racist laws which would have required him to abandon his position at the Collège de France, acquires an exemplary value for Ramos. Through this gesture, Bergson’s philosophical thought was evident as “the birth of a new meaning of life” (Ramos 2011, 210) and the metaphysics of his spirit as an overcoming of the implicit nihilism of exclusively materialist and technocentric reason.
20That is why Ramos asserted that the spiritualist breath of Bergson’s philosophy had been necessary “to lift the spirit of the man whom previous philosophies had made believe that he was a poor anguished animal” (Ramos 2011, 212). Bergson’s optimistic faith was particularly timely at a historical moment that called for the reestablishment of renewed humanist values. In a 1941 conference entitled “Concepto de la filosofía según Bergson” Ramos summarized his final approach to it: it consists fundamentally of a reform of intelligence that leads reason itself to overcome not only its theoretical limitations, but also the nihilistic and destructive consequences of a partial conception of intelligence (Ramos 2011, 395). This is not a purely methodological issue. Thanks to Bergson, philosophy finally understood itself as a reabsorption of reason in its vital principle. This reform of reason, to which Bergsonism offers an essential contribution, should seek a more comprehensive contemplation of reality. But it will also motivate the expansion and self-transcendence of humanity in a properly ethical sense, especially when historical crises demand it.