Contingency and Commitment

While a prisoner of the czarist state, Leon Trotsky underlined the phrase “Ideas do not fall from the sky” in a collection of essays by the Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola. According to Trotsky's own testimony, those essays sparked his understanding of philosophy as practical thinking. A similar reaction might be experienced by reading Carlos Sánchez's Contingency and Commitment, a book capable of disrupting our most firmly held beliefs and encouraging us to think differently.Focusing on the so-called Grupo Hiperión—a group of young scholars who introduced Jean-Paul Sartre's work in Mexico during the late 1940s while advancing an original interpretation of existentialism—Sánchez's book is, first of all, a reading exercise with both pedagogical and transformative intent. These two objectives are achieved by fostering a more comprehensive outlook on philosophy and by bringing to light “certain key figures otherwise relegated to philosophical oblivion” (p. 2). However, far from indulging in antiquarian concerns, Sánchez's inquiry into the past aims to serve our contemporary agenda, including the need for different intellectual frameworks in which to formulate the questions imposed by our present. In a time when conventional philosophy has lost its hold on our everyday lives, it is worth returning to authors who placed existence and circumstance as the central themes of their philosophical discourse. Self-transformation is the desired outcome. As Sánchez states in his introduction, “there is something to be learned from Hyperion's project—a lesson, or lessons, for Latino/a life in the United States, in particular, but also for the lives of those on the fringes of contemporary, postmodern or postcolonial, economic, political, cultural power” (p. 14).What are the lessons to be drawn from such a philosophical project? Following Sánchez's line of argumentation, there are at least two. One of them is methodological and has to do with how to approach philosophical texts. The second one is anchored in Hyperion's philosophical proposal, as the group defended the right to participate in the international intellectual community while remaining faithful to their own particular circumstances. With regard to the methodological lesson, Sánchez emphasizes certain reading strategies used by Hyperion and, more specifically, their decision to take French existentialism only as a starting point, without pretending or desiring to carry out a faithful interpretation of the original, now canonical texts. By performing a creative, “violent reading”—defined by Sánchez as an act of appropriation for a productive analysis—of those texts, not only did the Hyperion group “precipitate the fracturing of philosophy's Eurocentrism, of its stranglehold on its own mythology,” but they also prepared the ground for an undeniably Mexican philosophy (p. 91). The outcome was to “save” their own circumstances while maintaining an open dialogue with other philosophical traditions.Throughout the five chapters of his book, Sánchez endeavors an analogous violent reading, in an attempt to find in the work of Mexican existentialists “models to emulate for the sake of saving [his] own circumstance as a contemporary Latino/a in the United States” (pp. 17–18). While remaining faithful to the motivations that drove Hyperion, the author sets a challenge for both philosophers and historians of ideas. Such a challenge would require philosophers to abandon all pretenses of universality and timelessness, whereas historians of ideas would need to question the method of historical research, traditionally conceived as an effort to understand the actors of the past in their own terms. Although it remains to be clarified how far any violent reading should be taken without turning every text into nothing but mirrors for ourselves, Sánchez's strategy allows him to arrive at conclusions of great philosophical and historical interest.The fourth chapter is probably the most remarkable in that respect, as it draws a successful parallel between the Mexican existentialist Emilio Uranga and the American philosopher John Dewey. By comparing Uranga's notion of “accidentality” and Dewey's idea of “contingency,” the author shows how they both share a common conception of philosophy, one that defies the “Eurocentric passion for universal, abstract, and nonlocalized philosophy and emphasizes the value of an intellectual commitment to our own immediate social and individual existence” (p. 94). Those traits are characteristic, according to Sánchez's analysis, of what he calls the “‘American’ vision,” by which he means an intellectual framework spread throughout the continent (p. 109). As the relationship between the United States and Mexico becomes increasingly hostile today, is it not worth identifying and remembering the intellectual bonds that continue to hold us together

Aesthetics · Contingency · Epistemology · Existentialism · Interpretation (philosophy) · Pedagogy · Political science · Reading (process) · Sociology · Transformative learning · Ethics and bioethics in healthcare · Law · Philosophy · Religious and Theological Studies

• Mexican Existentialist Ethics and the Pragmatic Authenticity of Rodolfo Usigli's El gesticulador

  Open Access•Stephanie Merrim•Revista Canadiense de Estudios…•2020

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