Abstract
The twentieth-century development of Mexicanidad underwent a series of treatments that changed how selfhood in Mexico was problematized and understood. Octavio Paz’s claim that Mexicanidad faced historical and philosophical obstacles in its development, such as the problem of solitude, allowed him to go beyond the accounts of Mexicanidad provided by Justo Sierra, José Vasconcelos, and Samuel Ramos. Paz’s account of Mexicanidad sought an explicit connection between the Mexican experience of solitude and the universal human experience of solitude. This paper demonstrates how Paz’s revised account addresses these and other problems in twentieth-century Latin American quests for national identity.
Highlights
In his essay “The History of Philosophy in Mexico” (1943), Samuel Ramos claims that “it has always seemed to me that one of the ways of doing Mexican philosophy is to reflect on our own philosophical reality, the reality of Mexican philosophers and their ideas, to find out if there are dominant features that characterize a national mind” (Ramos 2017, p. 64)
Vasconcelos is concerned with the origins and historical growth of national identity, he introduces the novel idea, lacking in Sierra, that the process of history from which Mexicanidad is produced is the same process that leads to universal human identity
I argued that the historical and philosophical development of Mexicanidad can be seen as a genealogical problem characterized by a multi-generational search for first principles of national identity
Summary
In his essay “The History of Philosophy in Mexico” (1943), Samuel Ramos claims that “it has always seemed to me that one of the ways of doing Mexican philosophy is to reflect on our own philosophical reality, the reality of Mexican philosophers and their ideas, to find out if there are dominant features that characterize a national mind” (Ramos 2017, p. 64). The four figures chosen for this essay show an unswerving focus on national and personal identity as philosophical problems, including the cultural as well as national representations tied to their ideas and practices Their grouping marks a fifth-generation (Sierra the first generation; Vasconcelos second; Ramos third; and Paz the fourth) attempt at putting emergent and established canonical figures and voices in dialogue. What makes these four views of Mexicanidad significant, is that their elemental and discursive contributions can be seen to have helped give a genealogical voice to a distinct twentieth-century philosophical tradition.
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