Philosophy and Revolution, Essays by José Carlos Mariátegui
The Life That You Gave Me
A poem written for Anna Chiappe, lover of Mariátegui, on their first meeting in Rome in 1920.1
I am reborn in your fifteenth century flesh like that of [Sandro] Botticelli's Primavera. I chose you out of all of them, because I felt you were the most diverse and the most distant. You were at my destination. You were God's design. Like a pirate skiff, without knowing it, I was looking for the most serene inlet to anchor. I was the principle of death; you are the principle of life. I had a premonition of you in the naive painting of the fifteenth century. I began loving you before I met you, in a primitive painting. Your ancient health and grace were waiting for my pale and sallow South American sadness. Your colors of a rural Sienese maiden were my first festival. And your tonic possession, under the Latin sky, entangled a serpentine of joy in my soul.
Because of you, my bloodstained path has three auroras. And now that you are a little faded, a little pale, without your old Tuscan Madonna colors, I feel that the life you are missing is the life you gave me.
Imagination and Progress
An essay on the revolutionary impulse.2
Luis Araquistáin writes that “the conservative spirit, in its most disinterested form, when it is not born from a base selfishness, but from the fear of the unknown and uncertain, is at bottom a lack of imagination.” Being a revolutionary or a renovator is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative. The conservative rejects every idea of change because of a kind of mental inability to conceive of it and to accept it. This is, of course, the case of the pure conservative, because the attitude of the practical conservative, who adapts his ideology to his utility and comfort, undoubtedly has a different genesis.
Traditionalism, conservatism, are thus defined as a simple spiritual limitation. The traditionalist has no aptitude except to imagine life as it was. The conservative has no aptitude except to imagine it as it is. The progress of humanity, consequently, is fulfilled abortively to traditionalism and in spite of conservatism.
Several years ago Oscar Wilde, in his original essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” said that “to progress is to realize utopias.” Thinking similarly to Wilde, Luis Araquistáin adds that “without imagination there is no progress of any kind.” And in truth, progress would not be possible if the human imagination suddenly suffered a collapse.
History always gives reason to imaginative men. In South América, for example, we have just commemorated the figure and work of the animators and conductors of the independence revolution. These men seem to us, justifiably, great. But what is the first condition of genius? It is, without a doubt, a powerful faculty of imagination. The liberators were great because they were, above all, imaginative. They rebelled against the limited reality, against the imperfect reality of their time.
They worked to create a new reality. [Simón] Bolívar had futuristic dreams. He contemplated a confederation of Indo-Spanish states. Without this ideal, it is likely that Bolívar would not have come to fight for our independence. The fortune of Peru’s independence has depended, therefore, in large part, on the Liberator’s imaginative aptitude. When we celebrate the centenary of a victory of Ayacucho, we are really celebrating the centenary of a victory of the imagination. The sensible reality, the evident reality, in the times of the revolution of independence; it was not, by the way, either republican or nationalist. The benefaction of the liberators consists in having seen a potential reality, a higher reality, an imaginary reality.
This is the story of all great human events. Progress has always been made by the imaginative. Posterity has invariably accepted its work. The conservatism of a later epoch never has more defenders or proselytes than a few romantics and a few extravagants. Humanity, with rare exceptions, esteems and studies the men of the French Revolution much more than those of the monarchy and feudalism then overthrown. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette seem to many people, above all, disgraced. They don’t seem great to anyone.
On the other hand, the imagination is generally less free and less arbitrary than is supposed. The poor thing has been much defamed and very deformed. Some believe it more or less insane; others judge it unlimited and even infinite. Actually, imagination is rather modest. Like all human things, imagination also has its limits. In all men, in the most brilliant, as in the most idiotic, it is conditioned by circumstances of time and space. The human spirit reacts against contingent reality. But it is precisely when it reacts against reality that perhaps it depends most on it. It strives to modify what it sees and what it feels; not what it is ignorant of. Therefore, only those utopias that could be called realistic are valid. Those utopias that are born from the very core of reality. Georg Simmel once wrote that a collectivist society moves towards individualist ideals and that, conversely, an individualist society moves towards socialist ideals. Hegelian philosophy explains the creative force of the ideal as a consequence, at the same time, of the resistance and the stimulus that it encounters in reality. It could be said that man foresees and imagines only what is already germinating, maturing, in the dark bowels of history.
Idealists need to rely on the concrete interest of an extensive and conscious social layer. The ideal prospers only when it represents a vast interest. When it acquires, in short, characters of utility and comfort. When a social class becomes an instrument of its realization.
In our epoch, in our civilization, there have never been utopias that are too audacious. Modern man has managed almost to predict progress. Even the fantasy of novelists has often been overtaken by reality in a short time. Western science has gone with greater haste than Jules Verne dreamed. The same has happened in politics. Anatole France predicted the Russian Revolution by the end of this century, a few years before this revolution inaugurated a new chapter in the history of the world.
And it is precisely in the novel by Anatole France—The White Stone—, who, trying to predict the future, formulates these omens, in which it is noted how culture and wisdom do not confer any privileged power on the imagination. Gallio, the figure of an episode of Roman decadence evoked by Anatole France, was a supreme example of a learned and wise man of his epoch. However, this man absolutely did not perceive the decline of his civilization. Christianity seemed to him an absurd and stupid sect. The Roman civilization in his judgment could not pass, could not perish. Gallio conceived the future as a mere prolongation of the present. For this he seems to us, in his speeches, lamentably and ridiculously lacking in inspiration. He was a very intelligent man, very learned, very refined; but he had the immense misfortune of not being an imaginative man. Hence, his attitude to life was mediocre and conservative.
This thesis about imagination, conservatism and progress, could lead us to very interesting and original conclusions. To conclusions that would move us, for example, to no longer classify men as revolutionaries and conservatives but as imaginative and unimaginative. By distinguishing them in this way, we would perhaps be committing the injustice of flattering the vanity of the revolutionaries too much and of slightly offending the vanity, of course respectable, of the conservatives. Moreover, to the university and methodical intelligentsia, the new classification would seem quite arbitrary, quite extraordinary: But, evidently, it is very monotonous to always classify and qualify men in the same way. And, above all, if humanity has not yet found a new name for the conservatives and the revolutionaries, it is undoubtedly also due to a lack of imagination.
The Emotion of Our Time: Two Conceptions of Life
An essay on the emerge of fascism and socialism against liberalism.3
I
The world war has not only changed and fractured the economy and politics of the West. It has also modified or fractured its mentality and spirit. The economic consequences, defined and specified by John Maynard Keynes, are no more obvious or sensitive than the spiritual and psychological consequences. Politicians, statesmen, will perhaps find, through a series of experiments, a formula and a method to solve the former; but they will certainly not find an adequate theory and practice to nullify the latter. It seems to me more likely that they must adapt their programs to the pressure of the spiritual atmosphere, from the influence of which their work cannot escape. What differentiates the men of this epoch is not only doctrine, but above all, feeling. Two opposing conceptions of life, one pre-war, the other post-war, impede the intelligence of men who, apparently, serve the same historical interest. Here we see the central conflict of the contemporary crisis.
The evolutionist, historicist, rationalist philosophy, in pre-war times united, across political and social borders, the two antagonistic classes. Material well-being, the physical power of the cities had engendered a superstitious respect for the idea of progress. Humanity seemed to have found a definitive path. Conservatives and revolutionaries practically accepted the consequences of the evolutionist thesis. Both sides coincided in the same adherence to the idea of progress and the same aversion to violence.
There was no shortage of men whom this flat and comfortable philosophy failed to seduce or capture. Georges Sorel, one of the most acute writers of pre-war France, denounced, for example, the illusions of progress. Don Miguel de Unamuno preached Quixotism. But most Europeans had lost the taste for adventures and heroic myths. Democracy was gaining the favor of the socialist and trade union masses, pleased with their easy gradual conquests, proud of their cooperatives, their organization, their “people’s houses” and their bureaucracy. The captains [capitanes] and the orators of the class struggle enjoyed a popularity, without risks, that numbed in their souls all revolutionary inconstancy. The bourgeoisie allowed itself to be led by intelligent and progressive leaders who, convinced of the stolidity and imprudence of a policy of persecution of the ideas and men of the proletariat, preferred a policy aimed at taming and softening them with clever transactions.
A decadent and aestheticist temper was spreading, subtly, in the upper strata of society. The Italian critic Adriano Tilgher, in one of his remarkable essays, defines the last generation of the Parisian bourgeoisie as follows: “The product of a civilization that was often secular, saturated with experience and reflection, analytical and introspective, artificial and bookish, this generation that grew up before the war had to live in a world that seemed consolidated forever and secured against all possibility of changes. And it adapted to this world effortlessly. A generation whose nerves and brain were worn out and tired by the great fatigues of its parents: it could not stand tenacious efforts, prolonged tensions, sudden jolts, loud rumors, bright lights, open and agitated air; it loved gloom and the twilight, sweet and discreet lights, muffled and distant sounds, measured and regular movements.” The ideal of this generation was to live sweetly.
II
When the atmosphere of Europe, near the war, became too charged with electricity, the nerves of this sensual, elegant or hyper-aesthetic generation suffered an unusual discomfort and a strange nostalgia. A little bored of vivre avec douceur [living gently], they shuddered with a morbid appetite, with a sick desire. They demanded the war, almost anxiously, almost impatiently. The war did not appear as a tragedy, as a cataclysm, but rather as a sport, as an alkaloid or as a spectacle. Oh!, la guerre [the war],—as in a novel by Jean Bernier, these people foresaw it and predicted it—, elle serait trés chic la guerre [she would be very chic during the war].
But the war did not correspond to this frivolous and stupid prognostication. The war did not want to be so mediocre. Paris felt, in its bowels, the grip of the war drama. Europe, conflagrated, lacerated, changed its mentality and psychology.
All the romantic energies of Western man, anesthetized by long periods of comfortable and linguistic peace, were reborn tempestuous and arrogant. The cult of violence was resurrected. The Russian Revolution instilled in the socialist doctrine a warrior and mystical spirit. And the Bolshevik phenomenon was followed by the fascist phenomenon. Bolsheviks and fascists did not resemble the pre-war revolutionaries and conservatives. They lacked the old superstition of progress. They were testimony, conscious or unconscious, that the war had shown humanity that events superior to the foresight of science and also events contrary to the interest of Civilization could still happen.
The bourgeoisie, frightened by Bolshevik violence, appealed to fascist violence. It had very little confidence that its legal forces would be sufficient to defend it from the assaults of the revolution. But, little by little, the nostalgia of the crass pre-war tranquility has begun to appear in its state of mind. This life of high tension disgusts and fatigues her. The old socialist and trade union bureaucracy shares this nostalgia. Why not return—they wonder—to the good, pre-war weather? The same sense of life spiritually unites and accords these sections of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, who are working in concert to disqualify the Bolshevik method and the fascist method at the same time. In Italy, this episode of the contemporary crisis has the sharpest and most precise contours, there, the bourgeois old guard has abandoned fascism and has agreed on the terrain of democracy, with the socialist old guard. The program of all these people is condensed into a single word: normalization. Normalization would be the return to a quiet life, the eviction or the burial of all romanticism, all heroism, all right-wing and left-wing Quixotism. Nothing to regress, with the fascists, to the Middle Ages. Nothing to advance, with the Bolsheviks, towards Utopia.
Fascism speaks a belligerent and violent language that alarms those who only aspire to normalization. [Benito] Mussolini, in a speech, said “It is not worthwhile living as men and as a party, and above all, it would not be worth calling oneself a fascist, if one did not know that one is in the middle of the storm. Anyone is able to sail in a sea of prosperity, when the winds blow the sails, when there are no waves or cyclones, the beautiful, the great, and I would like to say [that] the great, is to sail when the storm is raging. A German philosopher [Friedrich Nietzsche] said: live dangerously. I would like this to be the watchword of the young Italian fascism: to live dangerously. This means to be ready for everything, for any sacrifice, for any danger, for any action, when it comes to defending the homeland and fascism.” Fascism does not conceive of counter-revolution as a vulgar and police enterprise, but as an epic and heroic one. An excessive thesis, incandescent thesis, exorbitant thesis for the old bourgeoisie, which absolutely does not want to go that far. Let the revolution be stopped and thwarted, of course, but, if possible with good manners. The club should not be used except in extreme cases. And we must not, in any case, touch the Constitution or the Parliament. We have to leave things as they were. The old bourgeoisie longs to live sweetly and parliamentary. “Freely and calmly,” wrote Il Corriere dalla Sera in Milan, arguing with Mussolini. But both of the terms designate the same longing.
Revolutionaries, like fascists, for their part, propose to live dangerously. In revolutionaries, as in fascists, one notices an analogous romantic impulse, an analogous Quixotic humor.
The new humanity, in its two antithetical expressions, reveals a new intuition of life. This intuition of life does not appear, exclusively, in the belligerent prose of politicians. In some ramblings of Luis Bello I find this sentence: “It is convenient to correct [René] Descartes: I struggle, therefore I exist.” The correction is indeed timely. The philosophical formula of a rationalistic age had to be: “I think, therefore I exist.” But in this romantic, revolutionary and Quixotic age, the same formula no longer serves it. Life, more than thought, desires to be action today, this is combat. Contemporary man needs faith. And the only faith, which can occupy his deep being, is a combative faith. They will not return, who knows until when, those times of living with sweetness. The sweet pre-war life generated nothing but skepticism and nihilism. And from the crisis of this skepticism and this nihilism, there is born the rough, strong, peremptory need for a faith and a myth that moves men to live dangerously.
Man and Myth
An essay on knowledge, conviction, and action.4
I
All the investigations of contemporary intelligence on the world crisis lead to this unanimous conclusion: bourgeois civilization suffers from lack of a myth, of a faith, of a hope. This lack is the expression of its material bankruptcy. The rationalist experience has had this paradoxical efficacy of leading humanity to the disconsolate conviction that Reason cannot give it any path. Rationalism has only served to discredit reason. The idea of Freedom, [Benito] Mussolini has said, has been killed by demagogues. More exactly, no doubt, is that the rationalists have killed the idea of Reason. Reason has extirpated from the soul of bourgeois civilization the remnants of its ancient myths. Western man has, for some time, placed Reason and Science on the altarpiece of dead gods. But neither Reason nor Science can be a myth. Neither Reason nor Science can satisfy all the need for infinity that there is in man. Reason itself has taken it upon itself to prove to men that it is not enough for them. That only Myth possesses the precious virtue of filling his deep ego.
Reason and Science have corroded and dissolved the prestige of the ancient religions.
Eucken in his book on the meaning and value of life, clearly and certainly explains the mechanism of this solvent work. The creations of science have given man a new sense of his potency. Man, who was previously overwhelmed before the supernatural, has suddenly discovered an exorbitant power to correct and rectify Nature. This feeling has dislodged from his soul the roots of the old metaphysics.
But man, as philosophy defines him, is a metaphysical animal. One cannot live fruitfully without a metaphysical conception of life. Myth moves man in history. Without a myth, man’s existence has no historical meaning. History is made by men possessed and enlightened by a higher belief, by a superhuman hope; the other men are the anonymous chorus of the drama. The crisis of bourgeois civilization appeared evident from the moment this civilization realized its lack of a myth. In a time of proud positivism, [Ernest] Renán gloomily remarked on the decline of religion and worried about the future of European civilization. “Religious people”—he wrote—“live by a shadow. What will those after us live on?” The desolate interrogation is still awaiting an answer.
Bourgeois civilization has fallen into skepticism. The war seemed to revive the myths of the liberal revolution: Freedom, Democracy, Peace. But the allied bourgeoisie, immediately, sacrificed them to their interests and their grudges at the Versailles conference. The rejuvenation of these myths served, however, for the liberal revolution to finish fulfilling itself in Europe. Its invocation condemned to death the remnants of feudalism and absolutism still surviving in Central Europe, in Russia and in Turkey. And, above all, the war proved once again, reliably and tragically, the value of myth. The peoples capable of victory were the peoples capable of a multitudinous myth.
II
Contemporary man feels the peremptory necessity for a myth. Skepticism is fruitless and man is not satisfied with fruitlessness. An exasperated and sometimes impotent “will to believe,” so acute in post-war man was already intense and categorical in pre-war man. A poem by Henri Franck, “The Dance in Front of the Ark,” is the document that I have closest to hand regarding the mood of literature of the last pre-war years. There is great and deep emotion in this poem. For this, above all, I want to quote him. Henri Franck tells us of his profound “will to believe.” An Israelite, he tries, first, to kindle in his soul faith in the god of Israel. The attempt is in vain. The words of the God of his parents sound strange in this epoch. The poet does not comprehend them. He declares himself deaf to his sentiment. Modern man, the word of Sinai cannot grasp him. Dead faith is not capable of resurrection. Twenty centuries weigh on her. “Israel has died from having given a God to the world.” The voice of the modern world proposes its fictitious and precarious myth: Reason. But Henri Franck can’t accept it. “Reason”—he says—“reason is not the universe.”
“La raison sans Dieu c’est la chambre sans lampe [Reason without God is a room without a lamp].”
The poet sets out in search of God. He urgently needs to satisfy his thirst for infinity and eternity. But the pilgrimage is fruitless. The pilgrim would like to be content with everyday illusion. “Ah! sache franchement saisir de tout moment—la fuyante fumée et le suc éphémére [Ah! know how to frankly seize any moment—the leaky smoke and the ephemeral juice].” Finally, he thinks that “truth is hopeless enthusiasm.” Man carries his truth in himself.
“Si l’Arche est vide oú tu pensais trouver la loi, rien n’est réel que ta danse [If the Ark is empty where you thought you would find the law, nothing is real but your dance].”
III
Philosophers give us a truth analogous to that of the poets. Contemporary philosophy has swept away the mediocre positivist edifice. It has clarified and demarcated the modest confines of reason. And it has formulated the present theories of Myth and Action. It is useless, according to these theories, to search for an absolute truth. The truth of today will not be the truth of tomorrow. A truth is valid only for one epoch. Let us content ourselves with a relative truth.
But this relativistic language is not accessible, it is not intelligible to the vulgar. The common people don’t use such subtlety. Man refuses to follow a truth as long as he does not believe it to be absolute and supreme. It is in vain to recommend to him the excellence of faith, of myth, of action. We must propose a faith, a myth, an action. Where can we find the myth that is capable of spiritually reviving the order it faces?
The question exasperates intellectual anarchy, the spiritual anarchy of bourgeois civilization. Some souls strive to restore the Middle Ages and the Catholic ideal. Others are working for a return to the Renaissance and the classical ideal. Fascism, through the mouth of its theorists, attributes itself to a medieval and Catholic mentality; it believes itself to represent the spirit of the Counter-Reformation; although on the other hand, it pretends to embody the idea of the Nation, a typically liberal idea. The theorization seems to take pleasure in the invention of the most convoluted sophisms. But all attempts to resurrect past myths are immediately destined to fail. Every epoch wants to have its own intuition of the world. There is nothing more sterile than trying to revive an extinct myth. Jean R. Bloch, in an article published in the magazine Europe, writes in this regard words of profound truth. In the cathedral of Chartres he felt the marvelously believing voice of the distant Middle Ages. But he warns how much and how that voice is foreign to the concerns of this epoch.
“It would be madness”—he writes—“to think that the same faith would repeat the same miracle. Look around you, somewhere, for a new mysticism, active, capable of miracles, capable of filling the unfortunate with hope, of raising martyrs and of transforming the world with promises of goodness and virtue. When you have found it, designated it, appointed it, you will not be absolutely the same man.”
[José] Ortega y Gasset speaks of the “disenchanted soul”. Romain Rolland talks about the “enchanted soul”. Which of the two is right? Both souls coexist. The “disenchanted soul” of Ortega y Gasset is the soul of the decadent bourgeois civilization: The “enchanted soul” of Romain Rolland is the soul of the foragers of the new civilization. Ortega y Gasset sees only the sunset, the passing, der Untergang [the Decline]. Romain Rolland sees the sunrise, the dawn, der Aurgang [the Rise]. What most distinctly and clearly differentiates the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in this epoch is myth. The bourgeoisie no longer has any myth. It has become incredulous, skeptical, nihilistic. The Renaissance liberal myth, it has aged too much. The proletariat has a myth: the social revolution. Towards that myth it moves with a vehement and active faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms. Bourgeois intelligence engages in a rationalist critique of the method, theory, and technique of the revolutionaries. What a misunderstanding! The strength of revolutionaries is not in their science; it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. This is the strength of Myth. Revolutionary emotion, as I wrote in an article about [Mahatma] Gandhi, is a religious emotion. Religious motives have shifted from heaven to earth. They are not divine; they are human, they are social.
For some time the religious, mystical, metaphysical character of socialism has been noted. Georges Sorel, one of the highest representatives of French thought of the twentieth century, said in his Reflections on Violence; “An analogy has been found between religion and revolutionary socialism, which proposes the preparation and even the reconstruction of the individual for a gigantic work. But [Henri] Bergson has taught us that not only religion can occupy the region of the deep ego; revolutionary myths can also occupy it with the same title.” Renán, as Sorel himself recalls, was aware of the religious faith of the socialists, noting their impregnability to all discouragement. “With every frustrated experience, they begin again. They have not found the solution: they will find it. They are never assailed by the idea that the solution does not exist. That is its strength.”
The same philosophy that teaches us the necessity of myth and faith is generally incapable of understanding the faith and myth of the new times. “The poverty of philosophy,” as [Karl] Marx said. The professionals of intelligence will not find the way of faith; the multitudes will find it. It will be up to the philosophers, later, to codify the thought that emerges from the great multitudinous deed. Did the philosophers of Roman decadence understand the language of Christianity? The philosophy of bourgeois decadence could not have a better fate.
Pessimism of Reality and Optimism of the Ideal
An essay on criticism and affirmation.5
I
It seems to me that José Vasconcelos has found a formula on pessimism and optimism that not only defines the feeling of the new Ibero-American generation in the face of the contemporary crisis, but also absolutely corresponds to the mentality and sensitivity of an epoch in which, having spited the thesis of Don José Ortega y Gasset on the “disenchanted soul” and “the twilight of revolutions,” millions of men work with a mystical ardor and a religious passion, to create a new world. “Pessimism of reality, optimism of the ideal,” this is Vasconcelos’ formula.
“Never conform to ourselves, but always be beyond and superior in an instant,” — Vasconcelos writes—“Repudiation of reality and a struggle to destroy it, but not out of an absence of faith but out of a surplus of faith in human capacities and out of a firm conviction that evil is never permanent or justifiable and that it is always possible and feasible to redeem, purify, improve the collective state and the private conscience.”
The attitude of the man who sets out to correct reality is certainly more optimistic than pessimistic. He is pessimistic in his protest and in his condemnation of the present; but he is optimistic as to his hope in the future. All the great human ideals have started from a negation; but all have also been an affirmation. Religions have perennially represented in history that pessimism of reality and that optimism of the ideal that the Mexican writer preaches to us at this time.
Those of us who are not content with mediocrity, those of us who are even less content with injustice, are often designated as pessimists. But, in truth, pessimism dominates our spirit much less than optimism. We do not believe that the world should be fatally and eternally as it is. We believe it can and should be better. The optimism we reject is the easy, lazy Panglossian optimism of those who think we live in the best of all possible worlds.
II
There exist two kinds of pessimists just as there exist two kinds of optimists. Exclusively negative pessimism limits itself to confirming with a gesture of impotence and hopelessness, the misery of things and the vanity of efforts. He is a nihilist who waits, melancholically, for his last disappointment. The extreme limit, as Artzibachev said. But this type of man is fortunately not common. He belongs to a rare hierarchy of disenchanted intellectuals. He constitutes, also, a product of an epoch of decadence or of a people in collapse.
Among intellectuals, there is not uncommonly a simulated nihilism which serves as a philosophical pretext for them to refuse their cooperation to any great renewing effort or to explain their disdain for any multitudinous work. But the fictitious nihilism of this category of intellectuals is not even a philosophical attitude. It boils down to a hidden and artificial disdain for great human myths. It is an unconfessed nihilism that does not dare to peep out from the surface of the work or the life of the negative intellectual who indulges in this theoretical exercise as a solitary vice. The intellectual, a nihilist in private, is usually in public a member of an anti-alcoholic league or of a society for the protection of animals. His nihilism does not have as its object defending him and guarding him but instead the great passions. In the face of small ideals, the false nihilist behaves with the most vulgar idealism.
III
It is with the pessimistic and negative spirits of this lineage that our optimism of the ideal does not allow us to tolerate becoming confused. Absolutely negative attitudes are sterile. Action is made up of denials and affirmations. The new generation in our América [nuestra América] as in the whole world is, first of all, a generation that shouts its faith, that sings its hope.
IV
In contemporary Western philosophy there prevails a skeptical mood. This philosophical attitude, as its penetrating critics point out, is a peculiar gesture of a civilization in decline. Only in a decadent world does a disenchanted feeling of life emerge. But not even this contemporary skepticism or this relativism is without kinship, without affinity with the cheap and fictitious nihilism of the powerless, or with the absolute nihilism and morbidity of the suicidal and the madmen of [Leonid] Andreyev and [Mikhail] Artsybashev. Pragmatism, which so effectively moves man to action, is at bottom a relativistic and skeptical school. Hans Vainhingher, the author of Philosophy of the ‘As If’ has justifiably been classified as a pragmatist. For this Teutonic philosopher there are no absolute truths; but there are relative truths that govern man’s life as if they were absolute. “Moral principles are on par with aesthetic ones, the criteria of law on par with the concepts on which science labors, the very foundations of logic, have no objective existence; they are our fictitious constructions, which serve only as regulatory canons of our action, which is directed as if they were true.” Thus defines the philosophy of Vainhingher, in his Guidelines of Skeptical Philosophy, the Italian philosopher Giuseppe Rensi that, as I see in a bibliographic note of the magazine of Ortega y Gasset, begins to garner interest in Spain and therefore in Spanish América.
This philosophy, then, does not invite one to renounce action. It only seeks to deny the Absolute. But it recognizes, in human history, relative truth, the temporal myth of each epoch, with the same value and the same efficacy as an absolute and eternal truth. This philosophy proclaims and confirms the necessity of myth and the usefulness of faith. Even if one then takes the time to think that all truths and all fictions, in the last analysis, are equivalent. [Albert] Einstein, a relativist, behaves in life as an optimist of the ideal.
V
In the new generation, the desire to overcome skeptical philosophy burns. The materials of a new mysticism are elaborated in the contemporary chaos. The world in gestation will not put its hope where the faded religions put it. “The strong strive and struggle,”—says Vasconcelos—“with the end of somewhat anticipating the work of heaven.” The new generation wants to be strong.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “La vida que me diste,” Poliedro, September 20, 1926, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/la%20vida%20que%20me%20diste.htm.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “La imaginación y el progreso,” Mundial, December 12, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20imaginacion%20y%20el%20progreso.htm.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “La emoción de nuestro tiempo: Dos concepciones de la vida,” Mundial, January 9, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/dos%20concepciones%20de%20la%20vida.htm.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “El hombre y el mito,” Mundial, January 16, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/el%20mito%20y%20el%20hombre.htm#2.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Pesimismo del de la realidad y optimismo del ideal,” Mundial, August 21, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/pesimismo%20de%20la%20realidad.htm.