Francisco Romero on Culture East and West

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present an expository synthesis of Professor Francisco Romero's conception of Western man and his culture. A critical analysis of his doctrines will not be attempted; instead, they will be presented panoramically in the light of his principal postulates. Some direct comparison with the East will be offered, but the far-reaching comparative aspects of the subject will be only implied or left to the reader. In recent years, Romero has consistently developed a set of foundational thoughts-his basic idea of man, his view of history, his notion of transcendence-as if pursuing the light of a radical intuition. Born in 1891, Professor Romero grew up in an epoch of philosophic reconstruction, in an Argentina where positivism was a lagging but still welldefended doctrine. Though he spent twenty-one years in the Argentine army, where he distinguished himself, Romero found time to study ancient and modern philosophy, to acquaint himself with the most recent currents of thought, and to develop his own views. When he retired from the army with the rank of major in 1931 and became a full professor at the Universities of Buenos Aires and La Plata, his philosophic works had already made him known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Since his youth, Romero, a cautious but earnest metaphysician, has endeavored to rid the Argentine mind of nineteenth-century positivism and to open new avenues of thought. He thus continued the work of his best friend, Dr. Alejandro Korn, and other members of the preceding generation who renewed philosophic speculations in the Argentine. The author of ten books and countless essays, Romero is today indisputably the foremost Spanish-American philosopher and the leading intellectual figure of the Argentine. On June 7, 1951, the Vaccaro Prize was conferred upon him in a ceremony that constituted, under present circumstances, the highest homage to the merits of a writer, an educator, and a citizen representative of the best Argentine liberal tradition.