Polemical Essays

Juan Nuño
The veneration of cunning. Controversial essays , Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1988.
The school of suspicion. New polemical essays , Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1990.

Compilation and review of the digital edition: Miguel Zavalaga Flórez (2012).
 Index
Prologue……………………………………………………………………4
The veneration of cunning. Controversial essays
Arabs and Jews…………………………………………………………14
From one Nazism to the
other……………………………………………….. 16 Different ways of
saying goodbye………………………………………19 The Fourth
Reich…………………………………………………........................24
The banality of evil…………………………………………………25
Peace, a good business………………………………………………..32
Metaphysics,
today………………………………………………………….35 Misery
of feminism………………………………………………..37
Myths of yesterday and
tomorrow………………………………………………39 Nationalism:
myths and reality…………………………………….........................42
Psychoanalysis and
Marxism…………………………………………….46 Sartre: an
exciting life……………………………………….48 Game theory
…………………………………………………..60
The school of suspicion. New controversial essays
Praying to
God………………………………………………………….69 Science
without God…………………………………………………… .71 The
eclipse of Marxism……………………………………………….72
Football, bullfighting and
death………………………………………. .82 The
people………………………………………………………………84
The sex of things………………………………………… …………86
Fetishism of the law…………………………………………………88
Form over substance………………………………………
…………….89 The difficulty of being an
atheist……………………………………………….90 The
disintegration of the Soviet empire………………………………92 The
woman in the temple…………………………………………………95
The nuclear
nightmare…………………………………………………………97 The
abortion traps……………………………………………….100
Bad words…………………………………………………………..102
Death of atheism………………………………………………….. .103
The death penalty……………………………………………………104
Thoughts in Venezuela, from Gómez to the present day………………
 105
Appendices
What is happening in Venezuela?..
…………………………………………..113
Nuño, the furies and the sorrows.
…………………………………………116 The Wittgenstein of Juan
Nuño.………………………………………117 Bibliography of Juan
Nuño.…………………………………………..124
Foreword
Approach to Juan Nuño

The rescue of a philosophical work usually responds to the need to establish and
expand its academic reception or to the interest that it may have previously aroused
among non-specialized readers. Classic authors are republished according to the
curricular needs of educational institutions or their degree of popularity among a diffuse
general public. Less frequent is the case of the reimplantation on the market of works of
indisputable value in their corresponding fields that did not enjoy wide dissemination at
the time. And even less so are those that acquire a reputation as unavoidable and
fundamental, despite not circulating easily in the market and, therefore, not being within
the reach of new readers. In the latter case, it can be said that they represent good
examples of contradiction in terms: that of works that deserve to receive the treatment
due to the classics without having previously earned at least one of the aforementioned
conditions necessary to receive such an honorary seal.
There is no doubt that Plato's Thought , by Juan Nuño, belongs to this paradoxical
category. Published for the first time in 1963 in Venezuela, republished twenty-five
years later in Mexico, Nuño's book was widely read, commented on and studied in its
day in the Philosophy departments of the main Latin American universities, from
Mexico to Buenos Aires, from Caracas to Lime. With this essay, the author disclosed his
first major philosophical work, since it was of great ambition both for the scope covered
– Plato's philosophical thought in its entirety – and for the unusual nature of its
methodological approach – the emphasis on a non-ontological reading. but
anthropological of the work of the founder of the Academy–, and conceived, at the same
time, to serve as a pedagogical tool. Later I will stop at some of the highlighted features
of this book by Nuño. For now, it is advisable not to lose sight of what is atypical about
its status within the framework of philosophy in the Spanish language of the last half
century.
The relative eccentricity pointed out—a work that can legitimately aspire to the status
of a classic philosophical text in the Hispanic field while, at the same time, remaining
poorly known—undoubtedly refers to external factors. On the one hand, the bumpy
evolution of the exchange of ideas between the countries of Latin America, a
consequence of an endemic fragility of the traditional channels of dissemination of ideas,
from publishers to universities. Added to this weakness, on the other hand and partially
coinciding with the intellectual life of Juan Nuño, was the anomalous functioning of the
intellectual and academic relations between Spain and the Latin American countries
during the long period of Francoism. This is not the right place to properly address this
phenomenon, but it is a verifiable fact that, without a doubt, has had a negative impact
on the horizon of the reception of a work like that of Juan Nuño. A Spanish philosopher,
it is worth remembering, who added to other heterodoxies - which I will address shortly -
the always complex condition of the expatriate.
Not "exiled." It is convenient to establish this distinction, which the historiography of
the Spanish exile does not always properly attend to. One thing is the Spanish
intellectuals who, at the time of the civil war or when the national side triumphed, left
their native country; These usually arrived in their host countries supplied with published
works and known reputations. For those, among the exiled intellectuals, thinkers and
writers, who were lucky enough to remain alive after the death of the dictator, returning
to Spain was still possible. And even in cases in which the return did not give rise to due
academic or institutional recognition (those of Ferrater Mora and Américo Castro come
to mind), the rescue of their work by the new generations of Spaniards has been an
approachable task. The case is very different for the members of the generation born in
the 1920s, who received their training and developed their work entirely in their
destination countries. These expatriates , who fled an economically and intellectually
impoverished Spain, carried out activities and published works that were fully
recognized in the Latin American field, but often perfectly ignored on Spanish soil.
When the Spanish university began to unravel and emerge from its many dogmatic
dreams (a task still unfinished today), some of the expatriates found a timid echo,
especially among their younger colleagues. 1 To just cite a few examples of philosophers
divided between the two categories with whom Nuño frequented and of whom he was a
disciple or professional colleague, the exiles include Juan David García Bacca (1901-
1992), José Gaos (1900-1969), Eugenio Imaz (1900-1951) and Eduardo Nicol (1907-
1990); to the second, that of the expatriates, Federico Riu (1925-1985).
In short, if in the last stage of Nuño's career his figure achieved recognition on both
sides of the Atlantic, this was not always or in all cases due to a thorough appreciation of
his work, which was multiform and, in some of its manifestations, , not limited to the
narrow academic field. For the reasons mentioned - which can be summarized in one:
uneven reception of the work - before presenting this Thought of Plato it is appropriate
to offer the reader some keys about the life and work of this philosopher.

***

Juan Antonio Nuño Montes was born in Madrid, on March 27, 1927, into a family of
modest origin and economic profile. The firstborn of four siblings, he grew up in an
environment devoid of intellectual or cultural activities and interests. After receiving his
first training at the Institute of the Marist Brothers, Nuño wanted to study Philosophy at
the Central University of Madrid. A year of attending this institution led him to
understand that either he abandoned his philosophical dream or he should emigrate to
lands more conducive to the free teaching of the discipline he had decided to study. The
philosophy taught in the 1940s in the direct predecessor of the current Complutense
certainly allowed one to acquire the arcana of the Aristotelian-Thomist school of Father
Suárez, but little else. Nuño was already then painfully aware of the provincial and
mediocre nature of intellectual life in Spain. There was an added factor that had a
powerful impact on his decision to seek less limited horizons: in order to pass the course,
in addition to passing the mandatory exams, it was advisable to prove registration in the
National Movement. Nuño, who had managed to go through a virgin adolescence of
affiliation to this apparatus of political and social framing and its multiple tentacles, and
faced with the panorama of a poor and stale academic training, decided to emigrate to
Venezuela. The choice of this country as a destination, instead of Mexico or Argentina,
where most of the Spanish intellectual and academic exile had settled, was due to
1 In the case of Nuño, it is fair to mention Javier Muguerza, Victoria Camps and Fernando
Savater. And, among his strict contemporaries, Emilio Lledó.
economic reasons: a few years before a relative of his had settled in Caracas, which
guaranteed him an exile, at least in principle, free of probable setbacks and hardships.

That family chance turned out to be providential: the same year that Nuño made the
decision to emigrate, in 1947, Juan David García Bacca settled in Caracas, coming from
a decade-old exile that had taken him to Paris, during the years of the Civil War, and
later to Ecuador and Mexico. The great philosopher, pioneer in Spain of the philosophy
of science and mathematical logic (it is often forgotten that García Bacca was a member
of the Vienna Circle), shortly after his arrival in Caracas joined the teaching team of the
modern Faculty of Philosophy. and Letters from the Central University of Venezuela
(UCV), promoted in 1944 by Mariano Picón Salas and by two figures from the Spanish
exile, today almost completely forgotten in their country of origin: the Barcelona-born
Domingo Casanovas and the Majorcan Bartolomé Oliver, who exercised of deans of the
young faculty, respectively, in 1947-50 and 1950-51. García Bacca himself, for his part,
would occupy the deanship in 1958.
Thus, Nuño could finally study a philosophical career with content and in a teaching
framework defined with broader and more current criteria. Upon obtaining his degree in
1951 in the first graduating class of the new faculty, he received a scholarship to expand
his studies that allowed him to attend Logic courses taught by David Pears at the
University of Cambridge for a year. And from 1952 to 1953 he settled in Paris, where he
completed postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne, under the direction of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty.
It is in these two years when the young philosopher immerses himself in paths that
largely marked his career, although only one of them, the logicist, ended up becoming a
true philosophical passion. But in the 1950s, and well into the next decade, an already
combative and controversial Nuño felt especially attracted to the French side of Husserl's
school. It is worth saying, for a phenomenology that, more humanist than Husserlian and
far from Heideggerian desires for the forest of Being, put at its disposal, on the other
hand, tools of analysis that were less inattentive to the existential condition of man.
Needless to say, even then Nuño showed little inclination for ontologies of any kind.
Upon his return to Venezuela, at the end of 1953, he joined the teaching team of the
Institute of Philosophy of the UCV, founded and then directed by García Bacca. In this
Nuño always recognized his teacher, and García Bacca saw in Nuño his most advantaged
disciple, at least in those years, to such an extent that the young professor inherited his
chair of Ancient Philosophy from the teacher. Nuño could have limited his scope of
professional interests to this honorable preserve, which he occupied for two decades. In
fact, he developed an impeccable academic career that led him to retire as a full
professor at the age of 52, after creating (in 1960) and directing the Institute's
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science (1962-64)—which he returned to direct
from 1975 to 1979—and found the chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Mathematical
Logic (1965). Already retired, he established the first Postgraduate Studies in Philosophy
at the UCV, with specialization in logic, language analysis and philosophy of science.
His academic career certainly led him to become an "admirable Hellenist", according to
the opinion of Alejandro Rossi, and a magnificent specialist in Plato, about whom he has
left, in his research side, in addition to The Thought of Plato , the important a more
technical study on Platonic Dialectics that constituted his doctoral work, under the
direction of García Bacca, and which was published with a prologue by José Gaos.
In the decade after his return to Venezuela, in addition to his teaching activity -
interrupted during the last two years of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who
closed the UCV - and the preparation of his doctorate on Plato, Nuño developed an
intellectual activity also marked by his interest in Marxism and the work of Sartre (about
which he wrote a luminous book and of which he ended up being a rigorous and
skeptical critic). The most visible tip of this iceberg was his participation in the creation,
in 1960, of the magazine Crítica Contemporánea , one of the most influential platforms
for criticism and debate of ideas of its time in Latin America.
Then another aspect of Nuño's intellectual activity emerged, which not only would not
abandon him, but would end up becoming, in the last years of his life, his predominant
passion: applying the tools of philosophical analysis to phenomena that are not
philosophical per se, but that his training and capacity enabled him to address it in the
greatest depth. This tendency to consider current topics or trends of contemporary
interest as not foreign to the interests of a philosopher marks one of the clearest dividing
lines between the development of his philosophical career and his status as a philosophy
professor. And the fact is that, just as he disbelieved in the interest of large ontological
systems for philosophical thought, Nuño was suspicious of the confinement of the
exercise of his discipline in the precincts of academic specialization. His ideal of
philosophy certainly involved the mastery of a technique, but in no case could it be
reduced to it. Hence also his successive commitments to causes that had little or nothing
to do with the usual concerns in the academic world, and instead a lot to do with the free
assumption of his status as an intellectual: for example, his denunciation of the situation
suffered in the USSR by the Jewish refuseniks or its brilliant approach to left-wing anti-
Semitism and its Marxist roots. Just as this comprehensive conception of the exercise of
his profession also explains why during the 1960s and 1970s he practiced film criticism
with equal rigor and amenity, regularly publishing reviews and essays in specialized and
general magazines, such as Cine al Día and Summa , which ended collecting in volume.
Despite the audacity that these comparisons always entail, it would not be inaccurate to
apply to Nuño, modulating and adapting him, what Cicero said about Socrates: that he
had made philosophy come down from heaven to earth, until he made it enter the homes
of men. men. More humbly—no doubt also more pragmatically—Nuño, an unredeemed
atheist and therefore little given to scrutinizing the heavens, took philosophy out of the
classrooms and made it confront the ideas and men who populate the world.
The third aspect in Juan Nuño's work has already been mentioned: that interest in logic
that led him to the seminar of Pears, the main specialist of the time in Ludwig
Wittgenstein and translator, together with Brian McGuinness, of the Tractatus . Early
interest that little by little grew and developed, until covering the entire philosophical
horizon of his professional activities. At one point, he had the honesty to recognize that
his training had been deficient in terms of mastery of mathematics and formal logic, and
the added courage, being already a recognized specialist in Plato, to reorient his career
by subjecting himself to a new period. of doctoral training. Thus, in 1964 he dedicated
his first sabbatical year to studying in Switzerland with Iosef Bochenski, a disciple of
Lukasiewicz and at the time the most influential historian and methodologist of
mathematical logic. A direct result of this stage is the only technical manual that Nuño
wrote: Elements of Formal Logic . And the application of his new and definitive
orientation had notable effects in the academic field, as summarized by one of his
disciples:

It was Juan Nuño who, from his professorship, introduced into the philosophical community
[of Venezuela], first enchanted for the most part with the spells of predominant
phenomenology and existentialism and, later, under the enchantment of the revolutionary
promises of Marxism, the figures by Bertrand Russell, G. AND. Moore, L. Wittgenstein, R.
Carnap, W. Quine, A. Tarski and other thinkers of contemporary analytical currents, whose
impact in the long run was little less than an intellectual liberation. 2

2 J. H. Martín [Julio Hernández], "Juan Nuño: From the Academy to the Criticism of everyday
 The last fifteen years of his life were dedicated by Nuño above all to intervening with
his analyzes from various press forums on the most varied issues. But it would be a
mistake to see this activity as a hobby added to a successful and already concluded
academic career. Nor would it be accurate to characterize it using the categories used in
the media. Nuño was not a commentator more or less specialized in specific topics, of
which he was able to address a truly astonishing variety, extracting them from politics,
history, literature or the simple commonplaces of the changing opinions of his
contemporaries. However, any reader of this part of his work immediately understands
that he has before him a coherent, as well as heterogeneous, corpus. The knowledge
acquired and refined during more than thirty years of practicing philosophy appears here
perfectly acclimated to an essential critical function: contributing to the unveiling of the
fallacies and impostures— the idola fori , Bacon would have said—that prevent a full
understanding of the world in reality. that we live. Ultimately, an objective invariably
pursued by Nuño in his three major philosophical facets: that of a Hellenist, that of a
specialist in logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of science, and that of an
intellectual committed to his contemporaries.
The best summary of the fascinating diversity of the Nuño galaxy is found in the
profile drawn after his death by his friend, the philosopher Alejandro Rossi, from which
I extract these lines:

Juan Nuño was, luckily for us, a complicated person, the opposite of a predictable and
linear character. In love with the world, very curious about what was happening and at the
same time, a disbeliever in the great plans of salvation. Perhaps the fracture of the Spanish
Civil War and those sordid post-war years in a poor, suffocated, resentful country (...)
influenced his intellectual temper (...) Incredulous, I said, not skeptical in a more or less
sense. less technical of the word. It is natural, therefore, that he was attracted—and amused
—by the contradictions of life, the discordances, the hypocritical distance between words
and actions, and that he preferred the critical instruments of philosophy. I believe, for
example, that the interest he had in his youth in Sartre - about whom he wrote a book - was
due less to ontological constructions than to the French philosopher's repugnance for the
bourgeoisie and its rites, to his analyzes of "bad faith". But do not be confused: the critical
temperament, a mental style that never abandoned him, was linked to a very fine
philosophical culture. It is impossible to remember all his works here and, however, it
would be unfair to silence that Juan Nuño was also an admirable Hellenist: there are his two
excellent works: The Thought of Plato and The Platonic Dialectic . The true passion,
however, was modern philosophy, and the critical inclination led him to Marx—again the
taste for unmasking—and then to a terrain that he already accepted, with multiple variants,
as his own: mathematical logic. , logical positivism, philosophy of science, analytical
philosophy, etc. There he found, it seems to me, his authentic keys, his lasting loves: Frege,
Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Popper and many more. He was in Paris, in Cambridge, and
studied with Bochenski in Switzerland. Among these authors and themes he found the
mixture of criticism and rationality that he had been looking for since his youth (...) On
almost all the issues and thinkers mentioned he left us a book or an article. Firm, erudite,
original work, among the most memorable of philosophy in contemporary Spanish
language.3

***

In Professional Confessions , José Gaos recalls that for his teacher Ortega, Kantian
philosophy had been "his prison for approximately ten years." 4 Gaos himself recognized

culture", Episteme , Caracas, vol. 17, no. 2, June 1997.

3 Alejandro Rossi, "Juan Nuño", Vuelta , Mexico, July 1995, p. 52.
4 José Gaos, Professional Confessions , Tezontle, Mexico, 1958, p. 38.
in Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's ontological existentialism two
philosophical prisons in which he remained as a tenant for three decades. Nuño, who
taught Ancient Philosophy for twenty years, never completely abandoned his love for
Plato, but that did not mean he saw Platonism as a prison. If anything, her relationship
with the Athenian was a love subject to change and the occasional eclipse. In other
words, a marriage. Which went through all its phases: the initial passion and desire, the
complicit companionship, the gentle cultivation of solitude à deux . And despite Nuño's
infidelities, he did not want or dare to settle for divorce. "The example of the intellectual
monogamist," as Nuño defined Plato, echoing Unamuno, at least on this point he
managed to impose his logic on him.
That Nuño married Plato's philosophy is demonstrated by the survival in his
philosophical work of approaches and readings directly tributary to his own
interpretation of Platonism, clearly expressed in Plato's Thought . Starting with the
already mentioned trait: the idea that philosophizing is not necessarily equivalent to
developing closed and totalizing systems and that it undoubtedly has much more
incessant activity than a finished product. Already in Sense of Contemporary
Philosophy, Nuño placed the proper scope of philosophy in the sphere of doing,
endorsing Wittgenstein's proposition that declares this discipline "not doctrine, but
activity." And already then what could be called Nuño's taxonomic drive emerged, a
drive, it should be clarified, not based on the postulation that the essential thing about
philosophies is their affiliation to such or such schools or currents, but rather on attentive
observation of the recurring prevalence of a handful of themes. Such a conception is, at
the same time, pessimistic and hopeful: if it is true that nihil novum under the sky of
philosophy, it is also true that philosophy is reborn or begins again incessantly.
"Contrary to what progressives and systematics may think, authentic philosophical
problems are not even dissolved: they reappear, they are raised again." 5 This vision of
philosophy as an eternal recurrence, derived in the first instance from his reading of
Plato, germinated powerfully in two works that do not take Plato as their own object of
analysis but that fully deserve the epithet of Platonic or, at least, Platonizing :
Philosophical myths and Philosophy in Borges .6 The one dedicated to the Argentine
writer is recognized as the best philosophical analysis of Borges's work and the
philosophy that nourishes it, but it is undoubtedly in The Myths where Nuño most
clearly exposes his global vision of philosophy, in the light of the stated teaching.
platonic:

[It] is not proposed with this philosophical myths an ineluctable chain of identical
repetitions, duly regulated, nor is it even pointed towards an internal key to such a process
of reiterations. It is stated, without further ado, that the limited philosophical themes assume
diverse forms, but remain as such core themes.
(...) In such a way that doing philosophy is a repetitive enterprise not for the sake of a
Platonic substantial identity, but because of the creative limitation of the philosopher
himself, who sticks to one, any of his favorite myths, even though he tends to do it most of
the time. sometimes with the naivety and enthusiasm of a neophyte lover. Instead of a great
and gigantic backdrop of ideas eternally identical to itself, what exists culturally speaking is
a finite number of themes, which are those that correspond to the different philosophical
myths generated and developed successively by human culture.7

Along with this vision of philosophy as a repetitive taking and returning, walking and

5 Juan Nuño, The Thought of Plato , FCE, Mexico, 1988, p. eleven.

6 Originally published under the title The Philosophy of Borges . It was the express wish of its
author that the definitive one, if republished, would be Philosophy in Borges .
7 Juan Nuño, The philosophical myths , Reverso, Barcelona, 2006, pp. 210-212.
retracing properly philosophical topics, for Nuño it was essential that ad hoc reflection—
philosophy as an activity, not as a doctrine—be based on verifiable knowledge about the
world and man. . I believe that this is one of the reasons for the powerful fascination that
Plato always exercised over him, and at the same time one of the keys to his mitigated
taste for Aristotle, "whose capacity for schematic simplification of the authors he
comments on is inexhaustible." ".8 Nuño, who disbelieved in schematisms erected as a
system, did not think that the search for philosophical truth was irreconcilable with the
exercise of human freedom. In fact, although he never allowed himself the arrogant
audacity to proclaim it, those two terms—philosophical truth, human freedom—implied
each other: there is no philosophically achieved truth that is not born from the free
exercise of the human condition, and every truth philosophically thought (and lived)
engenders the condition of new forms of freedom. Among all, the most genuine, the
properly philosophical: freedom from dogmas and doctrines. For Nuño – and, from his
perspective, for Plato – this freedom is always the result of the roots of ideas in reality.
"Unless we still live on myths, we will have philosophy as a human product and
dependent, therefore, on the attitudes, positions, conveniences and interests of those
who, in one way or another, for one purpose or another, manage it, if "It's just that they
don't practice it."9
Likewise, and in a general way, the orientation given by Nuño to his career as a
researcher and teacher from the 1960s onwards, although it apparently distanced him
from the stricto sensu study of ancient philosophy, cannot however be understood in its
ultimate intention without reference to the author of the Republic . Nuño was greatly
attracted by the uses of language and the pointing out of the dangers entailed by its
misuse and abuse. An attitude of distrust that ultimately draws from the Platonic source,
and that also drew from it the fascination with "paradoxes, criteria of truth, levels of
language, tautologies"10 , before strengthening and refining it as he passed through the
philosophies of language and those writers—especially Cervantes and Lewis Carroll—in
whom he found material for several of his postgraduate courses in logic.
Ultimately, Plato's Thought already contains in germ the trunk and branches of the
philosophical tree planted by Nuño. In itself, a masterful book that covers the most
seminal work of Western philosophy (if, with Whitehead, we think that the entire
tradition of European philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to the Platonic corpus)
focusing on "the course of the Platonic philosophical development, through the
anthropological common thread"11 , also offers the best introduction to its author's
philosophical goals. Who, before dying, in May 1995, was pursuing two projects: a
study dedicated to Wittgenstein and a (new) revision of Plato. The impetus for this
second work, through conversations and some notes left by Nuño, was provided by the
edition of Plato's complete work in García Bacca's translation.
Plato ended up being for Nuño, thus, the beginning and predictable, although not
fulfilled, end of an exemplary philosophical career, at the same time tributary of that
early fascination and free of its many philosophical dungeons. From whom he learned,
above any other teaching, the lesson of commitment to the search for truth, and to whom,
in turn, his own definition of the Athenian can well be applied: "First of all, he was a
man with his feet on the ground." and a life dedicated to the affairs of his city, without
escapism or intellectual subterfuge.12

8Juan Nuño, Plato's Thought , p. 158.

9 Juan Nuño, Sense of contemporary philosophy , EBUC, Caracas, 1965, p. 36.
10 See, for example, "The barber and the soap bubbles", in Juan Nuño, The veneration of
cunning. Controversial essays , Monte Ávila, Caracas, pp. 85-88.
11Juan Nuño, Plato's Thought , p. eleven.
12 Ibid., p. 16.
 Coda

The genetic fact of being the daughter of Juan Nuño does not necessarily result in the
consequence of her not getting to know him. It is already known: our closest and dearest
ones become invisible to us through daily contact, and custom leads us to fix the image
we have of them in a clear, although also simplified, image. Juan Nuño was my father,
certainly, but I never managed to even primarily imagine him as such. All the credit, of
course, is his, since, without ceasing to be so, he was naturally many other things. A
friend, a counselor, a companion. I said "naturally" because he was all those things
without imposition or effort, and I know that he was also the same with those who
managed to penetrate the precinct of his privacy.
If the word had not ended up being loaded with so many negative connotations, I
would say that Nuño was above all a thorough intellectual. His way of being in the world
was, and forgive me the tautology, precisely that: being in it. He did not feel alien to
anything that was happening around him and that had an impact on our lives: politics,
the debate of ideas, science. Literature, cinema, music. He was nourished by all of this
and wrote about almost everything, and even about football, one of his passions, he left
us a luminous essay.13
If I had to summarize in a single word the impression that seeing him and talking with
him made on me, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment: a trip. Be careful: not an adventure,
but a desired and planned journey through a region that has been decided to travel to
discover it or get to know it better. Sometimes the trip was real: Juan Nuño loved to
travel. More than once I heard him say that his ideal life consisted of not having his own
house and being able to live in a hotel, preferably in an unknown city. To the utmost
pleasure of discovering – and also without being discovered: anonymously – he added
the pleasure of sharing his discoveries with his friends and family. But even if you didn't
physically travel with him, just talking to him was enough to end up discovering
something new. And not only because his ideas and reflections were almost always
original and substantial, but because talking to him brought to light thoughts that we had
not formulated before, due to laziness or lack of due attention. In an apparently casual
way, Nuño led his interlocutor by the hand to an area that he could recognize as new and
at the same time his own. A mental environment, without a doubt, but no less friendly
and habitable for that reason. Without intending to, then—although this may only be half
true—Nuño applied in his conversation a, fortunately less didactic, variant of Socratic
maieutics.
There was an insurmountable contradiction between his true character and nature and
the image that those who only knew him through his writings could have of him,
especially if they had been the object of any of his scathing criticism. He was a
genuinely reserved man and endowed with a very fine sensitivity, which made crowds in
any of their forms detestable. But he was anything but a misanthrope, and he sought the
company of his friends whenever he could, which he tried to frame as pleasant and
gratifying occasions: a good lunch or dinner, a visit to a museum, a walk through a
beautiful corner of the city where will find. He hated lecturing, that is, reducing his
interlocutors to the status of public or troupes. From there also came, I believe, his
detestation of some philosophers clearly fond of monologue, such as Ortega or
Heidegger, and his fascination with thinkers and writers who exemplify the urbanity of
dialogue, from Russell to Borges, from Oscar Wilde to Orwell.
Only those who do not know true circumspection can be surprised that a reserved man
is at the same time a fierce debater. Those who do not like flags, sects and chapels, in
reality, are much freer to publicly formulate their ideas; When it comes to thinking on
13 "Reason and passion of football", Vuelta , Mexico, no. 116 (July 1986), pp. 22-26.
his own, he does not owe anything to anyone, and it is only due to his convictions. Nuño
had a well-deserved reputation as a fearsome debater, it is true. But there was something
more, something that not only commanded respect, but also made his readers, or many of
them, feel more intelligent after having read his comments, lucid, honest and, at times,
steely. Along with magnificent prose—a limpid Spanish, without rhetorical touches,
clear and precise and at the same time eloquent and sonorous—, Nuño put into practice
that classic virtue in authors sure of their ideas and mature in the mastery of their tools,
which consists of appealing to the intelligence of the reader. He never committed the
serious ethical mistake of assuming he was less enlightened than he had, and of course
he did not seek to flatter him by feeding his prejudices and preconceived ideas.
I will relate just one anecdote to illustrate the impact that the opinion articles that, in
the last years of his life, he published weekly in various newspapers in the Venezuelan
capital produced on his Caracas readers. It happened days after his death. I had gone to
the post office where Nuño had his post office box to collect the correspondence that had
accumulated. An employee, who saw me do such a thing, approached me to ask if I was
a relative of "Mr. Nuño." I knew about my father's death from the press: all the
newspapers in the country published the news, the most important ones on the front
page, and for weeks they received tributes in the form of comments on his work and
testimonies from friends. After giving me her condolences, that woman - a postal
worker, I insist, not a university student or a professional - pronounced, in simple words,
the best posthumous tribute that a thinker can dream of: "You don't know how much we
are going to miss you." ".
Fortunately, we can mitigate that nostalgia by reading and rereading Juan Nuño.

Ana Nuño

This text appeared as an introductory study in the edition that the Fondo de Cultura
Económica published of Juan Nuño's work The Thought of Plato .
 The veneration of cunning
Controversial essays
Arabs and Jews
Miss Fray was that delicious character, half teacher, half spy, hopelessly spinster ,
who in The Lady Vanishes by the great Hitchcock recommended: «I don't think that a
country should be judged by its politics. After all, we English people are honest by
nature, aren't we? That's the thing. One thing is the politics of any country and another is
the country, its inhabitants, the people.
In the case of Israel, when judging it, there is always double bad faith: from outside
and on the part of the Israelis themselves. The strange thing is that it is the same game in
both cases: intention process. Israel is never judged by what it does, but by what it
should never do. Even worse: you are judged for both what you do and what you
shouldn't do. Because it is a Jewish State, it should not persecute or repress anyone,
because as everyone knows, having been persecuted for so long, Jews no longer have the
right to persecute anyone. Theirs is to suffer, in silence if possible, whether as
individuals or as a collective, as the State of Israel. That the bobbies abandon their
traditional phlegm in Notting Hill and fight with their canes with every black person who
protests the inhumane living conditions in the proletarian ghettos is something accepted
by the rest of the world as something inevitable, the necessary evil. If the polite French
gendarmes "turn to snuff" every miscreant, undocumented or suspicious person who
capriciously puts them in the panier à salade , it is accepted as the natural state of things:
that's what the police are for. The sic of coeteris . Ah, but if the one who hits the batons
or fires the tear gas bombs is the State of Israel, then the cry is universal: not them,
please, as Jews they have no right to repress anyone.
For their part, the protagonists of the drama, the evil Israelis, are not far behind when it
comes to distributing plot bad faith. They begin by lying, saying how things are not: it is
always the Arabs who do not want peace, and they continue to protest their altered
innocence: okay, they accept, they had to hit a little, they are very sorry, but that was not
their intention. His intention, as we know, was to create an ideal State, another dream, all
brothers, without oppressed or oppressors; that biblical nonsense of the lamb grazing
with the wolf. Unfortunately the circumstances, for the moment, force them, but they,
with a lot of pain in their hearts, find themselves dragged along, what more would they
like, they promise to be good, this will stop soon, a little understanding. How irritating
they can be: why the hell do they have to justify what they do at every step? They are a
State like any other, neither better nor worse, they have social and public order problems
like any State and they proceed to repress like any government equipped with repressive
forces. Didn't they want a State? Well: they already have it, but they should not also ask
to be loved and understood in everything they do. A State is that: one against another, in
a gentle and hidden way, or openly and brutally. If being judged bothers them so much,
they just have to abandon the idea of the State and return to the passive condition of the
diaspora. And if that seems like a very high price to them, let them continue being the
State and stop giving explanations. Let them learn once and for all that Sartre was right
when he said that politics was filling your hands up to the elbows with shit and blood.
They cannot expect to win on both boards: that of Realpolitik and that of human
understanding. Either they are Jews, in the sense of victims, the only one that the rest of
the world understands, or they are Israelis, as persecutors of their enemies. It is going to
be increasingly difficult for them to continue being both things.
What is happening in the territories occupied by Israel is shocking. On the other hand,
no one is tearing their clothes over what has been happening in Northern Ireland for
many years. The gentle Mrs. Thatcher ordered three Irishmen to be killed in Gibraltar,
without saying a shot, and the seraphic and useless Amnesty International has barely
taken notice. In the Armenian revolt in the south of the USSR people die; Until further
notice, Afghanistan remains occupied by the Soviet invader. All of these events are
considered "normal"; the monstrosity is concentrated in what Israel does. Nobody has
spoken again about the brutal Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which also produces
victims; nor of the crushing of the Kurds by Turks, Iraqis and Iranians. Not to focus on
Africa, continent of all misfortunes. None of that matters compared to the terrible Israeli
repression in Gaza and the West Bank.
Of course it is terrible, like everything that affects that region; That the evils of the
world are concentrated there should not be surprising if you think that the three terrible
monotheistic religions came from there. But it would be a good idea to start transcending
the anecdote, no matter how painful it may be, and try to see beyond the dead, no matter
how innocent they may be. The sad and fundamental truth is that the climate of violence
benefits both Israel and the Palestinians. If, due to one of those miracles, to which
believers of such religions are also addicted, peace suddenly descended on the biblical
lands, Israel, on the one hand, and the Palestinian people, on the other, would engage in
the most atrocious of internal strife. For Israel, the permanent Palestinian threat is a
guarantee of national unity; On the day that threat ceased (such would be the miracle), it
would not be unlikely that Israel would break into several pieces: so many are its social
and even racial tensions. As for the Palestinians, they don't seem to have much of a
future, other than killing and being killed, as they have been until now. The Jordanians
want nothing to do with them and they proved it in that dark month of September; They
have already been kicked out of Lebanon once; The Israelis have offered Gaza to Egypt
on more than one occasion and the Egyptians have responded no way, they do not want
Palestinians in their territory. Not to mention the internal divisions of the PLO, held in
place thanks to Israeli aggression; The day that this aggression ceased to exist, Arafat
and Habash (to name only the two best known) would cut each other's throats in less than
an hour. It will be as cynical as you want, but on certain occasions (like this one) a state
of war is highly recommended.
If the game of superpowers is added to that, it does not seem to clarify the horizon.
Peace is not convenient for the US and the USSR either; Both one and the other would
lose influence in the area. Especially the Russians, because if everything were at peace
(again the impossible miracle), the Syrians, for example, would not have to depend on
them, it would take them very little time to turn their backs on them and in the process
forget about the billions that they they must. So, by chance or by chance, it is convenient
for some and others that the Zapatista movement continues. To all. And to be cynical,
one could say that even the dead, because to live in the miserable and horrendous
conditions in which these unfortunate people are living, it is better to die showing one's
face.
A classic of 20th century morality, Adolf Eichmann, put it very clearly: “if a few die, it
is a catastrophe; "When it comes to millions, they are just statistics."
From one Nazism to the other
The least important thing is the anecdote: more than fifty years ago, Hitler took power
in Germany. Nor how he takes it: coup, semi-coup, elections, coalitions, tricks,
Reichstag fire, threats. Nor why he takes it: economic crisis, war revenge, Prussian
militarism, cowardice of democracies, recourse to Bolshevism. What counts is what
Nazism means. Not what it meant fifty years ago: what it continues to mean, its
undeniable weight in this century, the century of totalitarian ideologies on the march,
tested and more than proven: triumphant.
Only thanks to historians, Hollywood, political scientists and pornographic sadism, the
image of a Nazi is a mixture of a monster dressed in black dripping drool while torturing
a half-naked and crushed victim, all under the swastika. The bogeyman of the time: good
for scaring democratic children.
With Nazism we must begin by denying. It was not an isolated, exceptional,
extraordinary phenomenon that one bad day broke out in the cultured, industrious,
advanced and democratic German nation. On the contrary: it comes from the darkest and
most authentic way of being German; nurtured in the old romantic irrationalism, a la
Wagner, a la Nietzsche; formed in the totalitarian ideas of the great German philosophy,
like Hegel, like Fichte, with the blind preaching of adoration towards the almighty State;
seasoned with the very German sauce of the most vicious anti-Semitism, that which is
based on the rejection of everything that is not eigentlich bei uns . Nazism belongs to
Germany as much as Siegfried, Walhalla and Luther. Or as little as Goethe, Beethoven
and Dürer. Nazism was not a pathological event, the violent and uncontrollable action of
a few unleashed madmen who, through the technique of the Putsch and the exercise of
terror, imposed themselves on an entire peaceful people and threatened the world. I wish
it had been like that. The Nazis were perfectly normal beings, healthy, balanced, family
fathers, workers, above all, hard-working and organized. True models of bureaucratic,
calm and disciplined bourgeoisie. Of course: with an ideology to believe in and a
program to fulfill. A little-known anecdote reveals its seriousness. On November 9,
1938, Ernst von Rath, counselor of the German Embassy, was killed in Paris, murdered
by the Polish Jew Grynzpan, desperate for the deportation to which his family was
subjected. That homicide was the spark that unleashed the famous Kristalinacht of
November 10 throughout Germany: burning of synagogues, attacks on Jewish businesses
and physical violence against people. That isolated order had departed from Goebbels to
the SA, the assault sections of the early days of the Nazi party. The order created deep
unrest in the party. Goering, Himmler and Hitler himself internally criticized the events
and condemned the excesses. Well, the Nazis did not advocate any vulgar and street
violence against the Jews. They were serious people. The thorny Judenfrage had to be
resolved scientifically, not with shoving, gasoline cans and broken glass. And indeed:
they tried to solve it definitively: Endlösung , that is, six million scientists. For a first
test, not bad.
 Above all, Nazism was not limited to one country and one era. Enough of the
recounting of the facts and the historical-economic interpretations. Compared to Shirer's
classic book ( The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ), Arendt's little-traveled one ( The
Origins of Totalitarianism ). Nazism was not only something of the German past. It is
part of us and of this century. It's there, here, everywhere. Nazism as a historical
expression, that is, Hitler and the Nazi movement, was only a first exercise in total
domination. But he was not the only one: he was the first and he failed. But the human
being is tenacious and believes in progress. There is the Gulag, about which many things
can be said, but not that it is a failure. Total ideological domination has taken hold in the
social body. Civilization can be proud. Starting from the West, but now without global
limits, this civilization, by dint of abstractions, has created the masterpiece: the
totalitarian ideology.
It began with the abstraction of one god, instead of many; The abstraction of nature
continued and the forces and powers that explain actions and processes were
depersonalized. Therefore, behind the Nazi ideology, we must look for the biological
notion of survival of the strongest and superior. This explains why the Nazi performers
could be at the same time implacable and calm, evil and banal: they were applying a
biological law, which requires the superior to take precedence over the inferior. That was
it. Behind communist ideology, the historical notion of group survival: class struggle
explains everything and justifies everything. Opposing Judenreinnigung , the cleansing
of blood through the elimination of Jews, was as foolish as opposing the cure of cancer.
Dissenting from Stalin's purges or Brezhnev's psychiatric hospitals or Andropov's KGB
is as absurd as disagreeing with the liberation of slaves. That was a biological necessity;
This amounts to a historical obligation. Both ideologies claim to be scientific, are
protected by laws and aspire to serve all humanity. Forever, for all men, without appeal,
because they are The truth and The solution. That's where we are. And if you don't like
it, you already know what to choose: the thermonuclear holocaust, the other side of the
coin. The technological side of a scientific coin that feeds the great totalitarian ideologies
of the century.
Despite everything, we must recognize that Nazism has something anecdotal, a dark
history, a little démodé . Compared to what came after, Hitler was a poor fellow, hardly a
provincial amateur. He is very reminiscent of Jack the Ripper from Nicholas Meyer's
ingenious film Time after Time , in his didactic confrontation with the naive youthful
Wells, a believer in utopia and socialism. In that Californian hotel room, Jack the Ripper
teaches the Victorian Wells, recently arrived from 1893 in his time machine, another
machine, television, full of wars, crimes, violence, genocides, death everywhere, and
that's when he lets loose. the great phrase, the one that Adolf Hitler could now say with
all propriety if he were alive: "In my time, I was a monster and now I feel like a simple
amateur."
It doesn't matter that they don't kill Klaus Barbie, aka Klaus Altnann. With him, for
now the last of the Nazis, they will put on the great charming show again. The good
conscience of humanity will be relieved once again by embracing its own beliefs as
truths. Once again it will be shown that the Nazis were monsters, horrendous mutants
unworthy of the human species, dedicated to rape, genocide and sadism; Stories from the
house of a thousand horrors will be re-read, in which evil will be localized and
concentrated, exposed before the astonished eyes of the innocent and the unfortunate
fascinated by the destructive maelstrom. Like invaders from a dark and distant planet,
one bad day they arrived to make half the world suffer and exterminate. It was a
monstrous accident, a burst of divine madness, the black night in which the demonic
powers ruled the earth clad in their shining black uniforms with silver skull headdresses.
The terrible angels. The avenging sword. God's punishment for the sins of men. The
bitter hour of atonement.
You close your eyes and forget; or they open in fits and starts to vaguely remember the
nightmare while mechanically praying that it doesn't happen again. Marked by the
infamous sign of the swastika, Evil stands before men, separate and close, distant and
close, decidedly the Other, the Negation, the Enemy. When they judge Barbie, they will
evoke her brutality and the extermination camps, Drancy and Auschwitz, the human
cattle cars, the gas chambers and the "final solution." In the shadows, far behind,
crouched, in the dark corner of memory, without ever mentioning them, there will
remain the pogroms , the inquisitorial pyres, the first South African concentration camps
invented by the English, the many nights of Saint Bartholomew, the long million of
massacred Armenians, the slave trade, the burned witches, the children of Guernica, the
exterminated Indians, the exterminated Mensheviks, the exterminated Protestants, the
exterminated Catholics, Stalin's purges, the army of children in the holy crusade, other
Nazis , the Nazis themselves, the all-too-human beast. Klaus Barbie today, Adolf
Eichmann yesterday can fill their chests with civilized pride: they fully represent an
entire way of being and living, a centuries-old historical tradition. That certainly, even
God forbid, does not end with them. Moving forward, other no less glorious milestones
emerge: My Lai, the boat people, the electrocuted Rosenbergs, Sabra, Chatila and Tal-al-
Zahar, "Black September", the immense Gulag, the missing, the mothers of Mayo, the
exodus of Mariel, apartheid, Cambodia, Indonesia, Etas and other Iras, red, black
brigades, of all colors, Vietnam and fragmentation bombs and napalm and defoliants, Idi
Amin, Pol Pot, Bokassa. Where to choose while the legitimate and inevitable successors
arrive.
Barbie was an unfortunate person, just another official, just a modest bureaucrat, an
incipient sorcerer's apprentice, a tiny screw hidden in the Bolivian jungle. They are going
to suddenly do him the immense honor of putting him in the spotlight, of concentrating
all the light on him, of turning him into a symbol of Evil. Once again, objective
accomplished: in the background, in the resplendent darkness that no one wants to see,
the great machine of this civilization without which neither Barbie nor Hitler nor Stalin
nor Pinochet nor Castro nor Franco nor churches nor single parties nor dogmas nor
ideologies nor doctrinal lines work and are understood. Better, don't try to understand
them and just let them function, tireless ants of a very humane civilization of
persecution, intolerance and death. Very Christian. Judeo-Christian. Most Mohammedan.
Monotheistic and exclusive. For some reason man fell from Paradise to the abject state of
sin in which he was born and lives, and God, all magnanimity, from above, takes care to
redeem him, again and again, through fire, suffering and death.
When Simon de Montfort, one bright morning in the summer of 1209, Duke of
Montfort, but in reality an official of repression then and always, a Klaus Barbie of the
time, gave his troops the cold order to enter with blood and fire in the city of Béziers and
put to the sword all its seven thousand inhabitants, men, women, children, young and
old, without exception, all of them Cathars, Albigensians, heretics, enemies, someone, a
candid soul, who is never lacking, He noted that with such a drastic measure he risked
taking away more than one innocent person. The reassuring response of Amairie, Catalan
bishop, portrays all the Barbies, all the humble bureaucrats of evil, all the sweet believers
in any truth, revealed or dialectical: «The Lord, up there, in his infinite wisdom, will
know how to separate innocent from guilty. Amen.
 Different ways to say goodbye
Borges warns that suicide and farewells, if they become too frequent, lose dignity.
Which does not prevent us from talking about goodbyes, in the plural, without referring
to the repetitions that the same subject could attempt, but rather to the diversity of ways
that they affect.
Perhaps on the occasion of China's farewell to Marxism, the old topic of farewells to
the great doctrine has regained interest. More than old, reiterated: from Schapper and
Lassalle to Colletti and Lévi, passing through Bernstein, Kautsky and Korsch, there have
been so many goodbyes that more than a social movement it seems like orphaned
Marxism abandoned on a lonely station platform. These days, at the end of the century,
goodbyes are back in fashion.
The least important thing is to try to find out why they say goodbye: from historical
disappointments (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Afghanistan) to dark movements of the soul,
each person will have a reason, or at least an excuse, to withdraw from the Marxist
scene. More worthy of curiosity will be to know what they are saying goodbye to, since
it could be the case that they are saying goodbye to very different and even conflicting
realities. Manifesto turns out that a cold and systematic scholastic like Colletti does not
say goodbye to the same things as a wandering adventurer like Koestler or a tear-jerking
romantic like Garaudy. If the Italian says goodbye to a theory, the Hungarian said
goodbye to a risk and the Frenchman said goodbye to a belief. Hence the diversity of
their destinies: Colletti replaces one theory with another (the return to Kant); Koestler
embarks on another risk (Zionism), and Garaudy lurches from belief to belief (first,
Christianity and, for now, Mohammedanism), perhaps confirming that errors are
perfectly interchangeable.

Authenticity of Marxism

Which serves to realize that there is an apparent diversity of Marxisms, despite the
centralizing, absorbing and ecclesiastical efforts to unify the dogma. That's where we
should start: by trying to dissipate at least part of the fog that surrounds the mistaken
concept of 'Marxism'. Without necessarily being exclusive, we hear at least three capital
names mentioned, alluding to the same entity: authentic (or real) Marxism, philosophical
Marxism and ideological Marxism. Or, if you prefer: Marxism as a sociopolitical
practice, as a philosophy and as an ideology. The importance of the differences is given
by the pragmatic circumstance that it is certainly not the same to say goodbye to political
militancy as it is to say goodbye to economic or sociological or vaguely philosophical
research.
The dispute over the title of authenticity of Marxism is as vain as it is enriching. Vain,
for hiding a false problem; enriching, in view of the scriptural jungle to which it has
given rise. Disputing for the right to represent the original purity and, therefore, the
undisputed authenticity of Marxism, is as false as fighting for the establishment of
primitive Christianity. Perhaps it makes some sense to talk about early Christianity,
forcing testimonial documents from the time (Dead Sea scrolls, chronicles of Flavius
Josephus) to imagine something like a miserable Jewish sect lost in the desert, like
Essenes. The reality is that Christianity is reduced, exhausted and fully expressed in the
various existing churches that claim the Gospels. At the same time, the reality is that
Marxism is reduced, limited and fully manifested in the variety of regimes and political
movements that claim texts so classic (including Lenin) that they should already be
considered authentic gospels or sacred texts.
 Those who fight to impose a reading of the Manuscripts over that of Capital , or to
privilege such a section of the mythical Grundrisse over the German Ideology, only
manage to prove their Alexandrian belonging: sleepless scholiasts who tire the sacred
codices to extract from them some unprecedented reflection, the sterile surprise of a
weak variant, the dark possibility of promoting an imperceptible semantic shift to the
term 'alienation'. Poverty bookworms who gnaw through half a dozen well-thumbed
texts, in the haughty belief that, like the Kabbalists of the Zohar, if they persist in their
hallucinated efforts, some remote dawn they will be able to stumble upon the key that
will reveal to them the pristine legitimation of The doctrine. What difference does it
make if they translate this way, that they read one text before another, that they start
from Hegel or Ricardo, that they "economise" or "humanize" Marx: their Marxism, if
anything, will be a weak laboratory product for limited purposes? consumption of the
academic cenacle, almost a secret society in the process of becoming extinct, or passing
into the mystery of a trembling clandestinity. Because the true face of Marxism, the only
face of Marxism, the historical, palpable and verifiable reality of Marxism, is called the
Soviet Union and satellite countries of Europe, China, Vietnam, Albania, Yugoslavia,
Cuba, Laos, Ethiopia, Angola, Khmer Rouge , Sendero Rojo, Red Brigades et alia. There
is no other real and authentic Marxism than that embodied in communist regimes (Gulag
included) and in revolutionary movements (terrorism included). It will not be out of
place to remember certain words of Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, in
his famous and, it is to be feared, somewhat forgotten Chance and Necessity :

It is true that one can disagree with this reconstitution [he refers to the one he
himself has just made of Marxism] and deny that it corresponds to the authentic
thought of Marx and Engels. But it would be absolutely secondary. The influence of
an ideology depends on the significance that said ideology gains among its
followers, as well as the significance that its followers give it.

The epigones of Marxism are the regimes and movements that have carried out or
aspire to carry out politically, practically, the postulates of that old Marxist theory. The
always debatable fact that, when carrying them out, they have removed so many
centimeters or myriameters from the supposedly original doctrine is, as Monod points
out, perfectly secondary. What counts is what was done or attempted to be done in
political practice, not the obscure embryonic idea in its supposed primordial purity.
Marxism is judged and recognized by political practice. "By their works you will know
them," said the other Jew. And Engels' variant is well known: "the proof of the pudding
is in eating it." The words of Kolakowski, another turncoat from Marxism, in Man
Without Alternatives , have sufficient clarity:

Marxism has become a notion endowed with institutional content, not intellectual
content, something that, moreover, happens with any doctrine proper to a Church.

Validity of Marxism

On the other hand, accept for a moment the thesis of the purists, of the strenuous
defenders of a mythical textual authenticity of Marxism. The consequences would be: a)
the most drastic reduction of any praxis to a single theory (always in the forced
assumption that there is a single theory worthy of the appellation of authentic and
original); b) the total reduction of Marxism to philosophy, one more of the many that has
been produced by man's repetitive desire to coordinate words.
In the first case, by reducing Marxism to just theory, one would be, anti-Marxist,
denying its status as a revolutionary doctrine, a theory designed to be realized in social
practice, which is precisely what all the regimes that claim to be the same have achieved.
Marxism; But it happens that, by considering it just another philosophy, the supposed
validity of Marxism would be reduced to that of any other philosophy of its time. With
which Marxism would have as much validity as the positivism of Comte, the biologism
of Spencer or the pragmatism of James could have. It would be, without a doubt, the best
news that could be given to the Pentagon and the State Department of the US Empire,
which, if it were still interested in fighting it, would only have to spend very little money
on reinforcing the staff of liberal and neoconservative professors. in North American
Universities. Someone is wrong on this point. And it does not seem that, since 1918, the
governments of the optimistic "free world" have been. For his political practice,
Marxism is only the rival political practice. Not because it is based on the correct theory
of value or on the original disalienation of man, but because, by becoming a political
practice, it has generated another Empire, no less ambitious than that one and, of course,
perfectly competitive and exclusive. The rest is scholarly nonsense pigeonholed into half
a dozen musty pages. The true, real, authentic Marxism has registered names and
surnames: those of the countries, regimes and movements that call themselves "socialist"
or "communist."
However, we must not be stingy and deny all "validity" to the cultists of scholastic
Marxism, to the decipherers of texts and nuances. They have the same validity as those
who study Cartesianism or the texts of Plato or Malebranche. No more: a ghostly,
chimerical validity, of shadow play, of confrontation of ideas, of periodic scholarly
congresses. The archaeological validity of the dead and unearthed. Philosophical systems
(if they persist in allowing Marxism to fall into this category) have no other validity than
that which can be conferred on them by the weak and changeable memory of men: pieces
of a museum to be contemplated and studied. But, if the validity of Marxism is
understood to correspond to the socio-political realities of officially Marxist regimes, as
long as such regimes exist, Marxism will have a very precise validity. Something that
should gladden the hearts of believers in the new faith: there is no doubt that Marxism
(that is, the "socialist" empire) is advancing. Just as Christianity advanced in its day until
it managed to take over the head of the Empire of that time and, from there, decree the
validity of the single religion. For now, as long as the two imperial forces confront each
other, each legitimizes the other. Thus, the validity of Marxism is conferred by rival
North American politics, not by the arduous students of the busy pages of Marx and
Engels. Counterproof of this thesis is offered by the sovereign indifference of the
Marxist regimes towards their doctrine, so notable that a kind of law could well be
created: the greater the material influence of Marxist ideology, the less development of
Marxist philosophy. Indeed, what are the philosophical contributions of the communist
world to Marxism? In any case, which ones can be compared with those carried out in
vitro in the chapels and schools of the West? What names from the communist world can
compete with any of those of the Frankfurt School or with those of Gramsci, Althusser or
Colletti? So simple, the explanation is insulting: why would Marxist political regimes,
firmly established in power, need to continue wasting time with scholastic discussions
about sacred texts or the theoretical depth of the doctrine?

Goodbye to Marxism

It will be understood, in light of all of the above, that it only makes full sense to say
goodbye to Marxism when it is a practical farewell, of a political, militant and active
nature, while that same expression applied to it will hardly have a restricted, analogical
meaning. to the dead, non-current part of Marxism, that is, to the original Marxist
philosophy.
That's right: saying goodbye to a philosophical doctrine of the past, to a historically
recorded conceptual theory, can only mean that, for whatever reasons (personal,
doctrinal exhaustion, lack of resources, etc.), you stop studying that doctrine. Then, the
goodbye to Marxism will only be an academic goodbye: to Marxist texts. While, applied
to real, institutional Marxism, to current and active Marxism, saying goodbye means
much more: it means that a political action (the famous praxis) is abandoned, also for
whatever reasons, and that one stops fighting for : a) the consolidation of certain Marxist
regimes; b) the spread of Marxism in other places and the constitution of new Marxist
regimes.
Of course, the restricted philosophical farewells are important, since they are generally
justified by a corrective theoretical contribution from Marxism. The list is very long and
always interesting: Silone, Fast, Nizan, Lefebvre, Claudin, Djilas, Zinoviev, Semprún,
Haya de la Torre, Roy and, recently, Colletti, are just a few names in an illustrious
plethora of "disappointed" . The others, those who say goodbye to real Marxism, not just
Marxist philosophy, tend to be less attractive theoretically, for the same reason that,
having been activists most of their lives, they do not feel the need to reason their
departure. or this is so violent that they come to the other extreme: in unbridled anti-
communism, no less active than their previous Marxist militancy: common behavior
among converts.

The crossroads of Marxism

Not that of real Marxism, political Marxism, dominant in those governments or

revolutionary movements, but that of the pale Marxist philosophy, that discussed in the
halls of the West, increasingly torn into a multitude of tendencies and interpretations of
the mother-doctrine.
In the theoretical shadow of Marxism, its philosophy, three paths are open to choose
from, perfectly exclusive from each other. Either it is affirmed as mere philosophy or it
aspires to the envied status of science or it is accepted as a vulgar ideology. In each case,
the consequences are different.
If Marxism is just another philosophy, it will present all the drawbacks of the
philosophical systems recorded in any history of ideas, but it will gain, for the same
reason, a certain doctrinal advantage. The drawbacks are those of belonging to the
perennial state of a fluid set of opinions, the realm of doxa, an infinite game of
interpretations: from there arises that unique and not inconsiderable property that great
philosophical systems possess: their own perenniality, their conceptual immortality,
assured. due to their very inability to be refutable and, therefore, perishable. Marxist
philosophy can continue to be studied, as such, as long as human beings dedicate
themselves to the task of recording their past thoughts. What does not cease to constitute
a profound irony: the doctrine that in its distant day was presented, revolutionary, as the
horizon and closure of all philosophy, the mechanism that overcomes all metaphysical
tendencies, is incorporated, as one more, into the monotonous parade of imperishable
philosophical systems.
If Marxism truly aims to be science it will encounter a large number of difficulties.
Without going into the heart of the problem (if it really can be) the mere fact of
postulating it as a science continues to generate strong opposition within the Marxist
ranks themselves (that was Althusser's commitment, in the face of the bitter resistance of
the "humanist" Marxists. , that is, Marxist philosophers). Not to mention the external
criticism of Marxism, of which Popper is the most representative sample as he refutes the
claims to scientificity. But there would be something even more disturbing. Suppose, in a
fit of generous fever, the scientific character of Marxism actually managed to be proven.
For the same reason, its extinction would be decreed. Scientific systems, in addition to
being provisional and conjectural, are eminently perishable, extinct, destined to be
replaced by other scientific systems of greater or different explanatory power.
Finally, if it is considered an ideology, one of three: either the term is understood in the
pejorative sense that Marx gave it, that is, a false representation of the system of values
that serves to hide a very specific social praxis of a group. human or it is understood, in a
broad sense, as a simple political ideology to mobilize public opinion, or it is converted
into the equivalent of a new redemptionism, similar to that of the classic esoteric
religions. In either case, a disservice is done to Marxism: in the first, the repressive role
of Marxism on the very societies that declare themselves Marxist would be admitted; in
the second, it would be treated as a vulgar tactical resource, of a temporary nature, at the
level of any handful of political slogans; In the third, his approach to the religions of
salvation would be confessed (in particular, those of the Judeo-Christian trunk). It is not
necessary to add that none of these three possibilities is exclusive with the other two.
That triple state of Marxism (philosophy, science, ideology) can be summarized in a
simple dilemma: either Marxism aspires to persist ad aeternum , in which case it must
pay the price of sacralization and religious enthronement, or it seeks (which can obtain it
is something else) scientific status, at the price of inevitably expiring. All practical
evidence (that is, those recordable in the area of real Marxism) point to the first
possibility: the ideological-religious persistence of Marxism. It would be foolish to deny
validity to political Marxism, its expansive power, its territorial imperialism, its capacity
for indoctrination. Since man is a religious being, this condition ensures more than half
of the triumph of a doctrine of salvation.
As for the increasingly rare rational or simply thinking spirits, they will always be able
to find some consolation for the annoyance of having to still waste time talking about
Marxism, in that cynical verse of the great Lope de Vega: "Well, as the vulgar, it is fair /
to speak foolishly to him to please him.
The Fourth Reich
East Germans and West Germans meet, understand each other, agree: they discover
that they are all Germans. Very dangerous discovery once, as they are careless, between
meeting and beer, suddenly, a single Germany. The nightmare that begins. Quite rightly
so. If Germany, divided and not exactly by gala, in two, is in each half an impressive
world power in all orders, a unified Germany would be the super Japan of Europe.
For some reason the Russians have lost sleep and are desperately trying to cut the ties
with their vassals in communist Germany. They may contain the threat of reunification
this time and perhaps also next time, but they have already begun to talk about the fact.
With that clumsy intelligence (thank goodness) and with their Teutonic obstinacy, they
will not give up until they put the great Leviathan back on its feet. The monster has
awakened. Frankenstein beats again. Destiny is pregnant with a Fourth Reich.
It's the end of everything. Goodbye to that immense trap of world poker that they
played in Yalta forty years ago. The entire balance of Europe, the entire cynical
distribution of areas of influence, the entire sense of nuclear terror, the entire key to
global bipolarity would collapse like a sand castle the day the German eagle takes flight
from its ashes from the Reichstag. . Siegfried emerging from the sacred Rhine with the
shining avenging sword in his fist. To run has been said. To make us tremble, it will be
enough to imagine the beginning of the 21st century with a new Axis Pact with Germany
(one) and Japan, owner of fourth-generation computers. This time they wouldn't need
Italy (neither the other time). Of course there is always a forceful remedy to such a
threat: nuclear weapons to the aid of the threatened Christian-Marxist civilization.
Everything will go. So the outlook could not be brighter. Either nuclear catastrophe or,
third time the charm: the millennial triumph of the Fourth Reich.
About twenty years ago, Mauriac wrote something about Germany that sounded anti-
Germanism to a German and he complained about it to the French. Mauriac's response,
protesting his innocence, has not lost any relevance: «Don't I love Germany? "If I love
her so much, I want there to always be two Germanys, so I can love her more."
 The banality of evil
The precedent of the Holocaust, the genocide of the European Jewish people in the
first half of the 20th century, is neither the Inquisition nor the pogroms nor that massacre
of Armenians. The most direct precedent, if you have to look for one, is called Murder,
Inc. and is part of Italian-American civilization: organized crime. On a smaller scale, but
it responds to the same plan: how to kill (in one case, selectively; in the other, massively)
in an objective, impersonal and systematic way.
It is possible that the only advantage that the passage of time has in this case is to
allow a more advanced degree of reflection, with the consequent reduction of the
emotional components that, especially at the beginning, dominated in all attempts to
understand the phenomenon. of the Holocaust. Only for the purposes of organizing the
ideas, a simple scheme can be attempted that would distinguish three levels of capturing
the phenomenon: (1) superficial level, which yields a first attempt at a merely descriptive
understanding of what happened: what happened; (2) intermediate level, moving towards
detailed knowledge of the Holocaust: how it happened; and (3) deep level, which is
interested in the structure underlying said phenomenon: why it was possible for what
happened to happen.
The first graphic and testimonial documents, as well as some classic films (Resnais,
Rossif, Wajda), exemplify the first level: it corresponds to the moment of maximum
global emotion due to the discovery of horror, but remains detained in the feelings that
easily arouse a tragedy of such proportions.
Works such as those of Hilberg, Reitlinger and Poliakov, among many, reach the
medium level, in which, having reduced the emotional tone, one begins to gain detailed
knowledge of the phenomenon.
It was Hannah Arendt who opened the door that gives access to the third and deepest
level, with her debated work, Eichmann in Jerusalem : Report on the Triviality of Evil,
1963. But it was not the only one. It is true that simply descriptive or historical works are
more abundant compared to interpretive and analytical ones. It is possible that this is due
to the fact that the former are limited to working on the emotional level of the event,
while the interpretive ones touch on controversial points, as was made clear by the
resonance that Arendt's aforementioned work had at the time. The various Jewish
communities remain trapped in the apocalyptic vision of the event and seem to avoid
delving into its real motivations; Added to this is the geopolitical interest of the Zionists,
which fuels the vision of persecution among the diaspora as an immigration expedient.
After Arendt's work, the most daring on the path of in-depth interpretation are those of
the American rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein: After Auschwitz (1974) and The Cunning of
History (1978).
In short: anyone who just wants to know what happened (assuming that at this point
someone still ignores it), should concentrate on Claude Lanzmann's long film (nine and a
half hours), Shoah (1985), or read Poliakov's Auschwitz ( 1964) or Treblinka by Jean-
François Steiner (1966); Anyone who wants to learn more about how it happened cannot
do without Hilberg's work, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), but anyone
who seeks to delve into the depths of why such a catastrophe happened must turn to
Arendt and Rubenstein, in the works already mentioned.
The thesis of the triviality of evil, imposed by Arendt, has been distorted and
misunderstood: evil is not banal because its performers were banal; It is not about
looking at the faces of Eichmann or Barbie and reaching the not at all difficult
conclusion that they were men as insignificant as everyone else and that, consequently,
the evil they committed was banal only because they were banal. Great assassins do not
have a mark on their face unless you believe the legend of Bluebeard. The triviality to
which Hannah Arendt refers is that of bureaucracy: in this century and only in this
century, it has been possible to institutionalize evil administratively because there are
highly bureaucratized societies, in which citizens acquire the mentality of docile and
obedient officials who a One day they carry out one task and the next day another, which
may well be the opposite, as long as such tasks are part of previously ordered activities.
As banal as manufacturing Leicas, distributing letters in the mail, sorting tax receipts or
attending to the movement of trains in a station, it was for German bureaucrats to carry
out the set of acts that led to the death of millions of people. From the churches that
issued certificates of racial purity to those in charge of throwing Zyklon-B through the
hatches of the gas chambers. The triviality is not in the people, but in the system and in
the type of life that the system develops and in the type of activity that men carry out in
such a system. Arendt proves that our society, as Max Weber already diagnosed, is a
bureaucratized society; within which any action can be executed as long as it is properly
organized through routine administrative channels. Rubenstein goes a step further: such
banality of evil, a product of highly bureaucratized and organized societies, is a
consequence of the tendencies developed by Western civilization; It is not a coincidence,
it is not something that could have stopped happening; It is not a banal triviality, but is
the logical result of a special form of civilization. There is a reason why Rubenstein
maintains that "those of us who live in the postwar period have seen the emergence of an
absolutely different moral universe," thereby indicating that the process of banality
continues its march. Once what could fairly be called the domination of bureaucrats has
been established in a society, automobiles, televisions or crematoriums can be
manufactured in which human beings are massacred. The same company that produces
fertilizers is the one that produces defoliants that kill all forms of plant life in enemy
territory. And it has been possible to reach such a type of society due to the combination
of two factors: the preponderance of the State, which can only survive by feeding on
officials, and the secularization of religious consciousness, typical of the Judeo-Christian
religions; In them, what counts is the worldly application of the chosen ones (either as a
collective or as individuals: case of the Protestant way of grace) and their material
achievements. That Protestantism, the proud cause of capitalism, is also the proud cause
of bureaucratic methods, without which there is no possibility of sustained capitalist
development. In the dark depths of this unnatural, anti-pagan civilization, beats what
Rubenstein does not hesitate to call the "Judeo-Christian disease." Natural religions have
been replaced with bureaucratic and abstract ones and now the State is the god to revere
or at least obey.
Only that such a basic explanation could be accepted as a necessary but not sufficient
condition: there must be bureaucrats to implement "final solutions" with German
meticulousness, but those same bureaucrats could have dedicated themselves to
promoting kindergarten for Jewish children or to studying the relationship between the
increase of lepidoptera in the summer at sunset. Why the extermination? It is necessary
to complement that explanation with the sufficient condition, which has to do with the
Western historical evolution in its relations with the Jewish world. It is true that mass
death has not been reserved for the Jews in this century, since from the Stalinist
massacres to the Cambodian genocide the range tends to open.
The particular case of the Jews, favorite victims of an increasingly repressive
civilization, will always remain to be explained. The Jewish extermination of the 20th
century is partially explained in the historical sequence that Hilberg presents in his
aforementioned book: first the newly formed Christian society decided that Jews could
not live among Christians if they remained Jews, and the implementation of such a
policy gave place for conversions as a primary form of repression; Then, another twist
took place: it was said that Jews could not live among Christians in any way, converted
or not, and the phase of expulsions ensued, which presented direct, brutal forms (edict of
1492 of the Kings Catholics), to the hints, but no less brutal, of the ghettos; Finally, the
definitive step was taken, without adjectives or circumstantial considerations, which
consisted of saying that the Jews could not live. Without further ado. Which meant
collective death.
The above is a good schematic explanation that leaves out certain considerations and
raises some doubts. For example, it would be a mistake to believe that in the first
repressive phase (conversion) Jews were not killed. Or that the policy of assimilation
(French Revolution and Napoleon) was not another way to "kill them", turning them
intocitoyens and denying them Jewish specificity. And finally, Hilberg's tripartite
sequence does not explain the Holocaust either: it explains the principle by which the
anti-Semites of the 20th century will be governed, but it does not go down to explaining
the characteristic form of Nazi repression. It must be taken into account that what
differentiates the Nazis from previous forms of repression is very little: only
systematicity. Not the quantity, which depends on the demographics of the moment and
the nature of the repression, but the systematic nature with which the Nazis proceeded. In
the rest, they were practically the same as all the other repressive anti-Jewish
movements; Where they differ is in that detail: the Nazis were systematic in their
conception of repression. It was not a momentary or localized repression, or specific, or
occasional, or with exceptions. It was a total and systematic repression, as befits a
totalitarian society perfectly organized according to the bureaucratic model.
Nor do the overly global explanations of Rubenstein or Hilberg himself penetrate the
particular case of Nazi repression. Because not every bureaucratized society carries out
genocides, and even assuming that the difficulty is avoided with the argument that, given
the conditions, all of them would do it, it would still remain to explain why precisely the
German society did it and why with the Jews. . Answering that he did it because anti-
Semitism is eternal continues to leave the problem open with a play on words that
explains nothing. If anti-Semitism is general and ancient, one can again ask why some
persecute and others do not. Or why some do it more frequently or more viciously than
others. In any case, the problem remains, unanswered, and marks the contours of the
specificity of the German case.
It is a historical fact that the Holocaust was a German work. It is possible that, as
Rubenstein maintains, the condition of a highly bureaucratized society has been decisive
in the type of genocide carried out. It is evident that on this occasion the anti-Jewish
persecution has taken the form of absolute genocide, according to the thesis of increasing
intensity that Hilberg maintains. But in any case it will always remain in the shadow of
the most indecipherable irrationality why in Germany. To say that there was persecution
of Jews also in other countries (Poland, Hungary, France) is to unnecessarily confuse the
problem. Because the fact is that only in Germany and only by Germans and only
following German guidelines was the Holocaust carried out as an enterprise of total and
systematic extirpation.
Most people, if not all, are horrified by the results. It was the dominant reaction at the
end of the war when the various media widely publicized the reality of the extermination
camps: two kinds of corpses, those piled up in piles, ready to be cremated, and those still
alive, spectral, to be seen. one step away from dying definitively.
It would be inappropriately optimistic to claim that it was the first time that human
beings killed their fellow human beings so brutally and massively, but on the other hand
it was the first time that the world found out about it in such a graphic and direct way,
since on that occasion it was decided of information resources no less massive than the
crimes committed. The world was horrified because for the first time it saw what human
desperation was capable of. It's just that staying stuck in the horror of the images is a
comfortable way of not being too scared: what those images mean is even worse. Those
two examples of corpses exhaust the promises of the Nazi universe: on the one hand, the
absolute availability of the human being; on the other, the appearance of a new species.
The mountains of corpses were possible from the notion of availability: humans are like
any modifiable material, of which a residual part ends up being discarded. As if they
were slaughtered birds, slaughterhouse cattle or, simply, offal, waste, useless bagasse. As
for the living dead that, at the always late hour of liberation, crawled among the
elemental geometry of the fields, the inhabitants of the city of the future announce:
Nineteen eighty-four was born from the concentration and extermination camps. The
arrangement of society will be decidedly vertical: at the top, the upper class, the
nomenklatura, the SS, the innerparty or whatever you want to call the dominant
minority; Below, at the unlimited service of those, the shapeless and usable mass of the
underdogs , the submen, the proles: good at working for a while and dying quickly.
Everywhere, those two ideas: availability and malleability. The Nazis laid the first stone
of a building that has not stopped rising: that of social engineering, to treat man as a
mere brick, from which to attempt any project, no matter how monstrous it may sound.
The particular project of the Nazis directly, although not exclusively, affected the
Jews. It was a very simple project: cleaning the living space by the owners of the house.
Everything that was considered harmful, harmful or simply inappropriate for that space,
had to be eliminated. The Nazis only did what is known as "putting their own house in
order." To do this, they started from an elementary classification: who has the right to
live there and who does not. The latter must be made to disappear. More than a racist
ideology, that of the Nazis was a prophylactic, hygienic, disinfectant ideology: on the
one hand, the clean, the pure, the unpolluted; on the other, dirt, impurities, garbage. In
such a way that racist theories were subordinated to the great prophylactic theory,
complementing it. Because the Germans (and the English and the French) had long
developed complicated racist theories, but what the Nazis did was put those racist
theories at the service of a more powerful theory, of a clinical nature: as a prophylactic
measure, in a well-organized space, the pure should not mix with the impure.
This explains the various phases of the Nazis' anti-Jewish repression: they began by
isolating the Jews, like someone locating the germ to eliminate; They continued with
their expulsion and estrangement, as a form of isolation; to end with the most radical
measure of all, the final solution or definitive and total extermination of the polluting
agent.
Whoever wishes to extract philosophical-moral considerations from such an
experience can look at what happens when the idea imposes itself on practice. The Nazi
mind was perfectly logical, if by logic we mean that mind that does not deviate even one
millimeter from the execution of the previously drawn up plan. From psychopathology, it
is known that exaggerated logicality is typical of paranoids. But it would be too easy to
return to the excuse that they were crazy to do what they did; perhaps some of them,
perhaps at the beginning, perhaps in the elaboration of his doctrine, but without the
meek, faithful and unfailing collaboration of the German people, who, no matter how
bureaucratic they were, were not crazy, the realization of such an immense undertaking
would have been impossible. project. It is something often said, but it would not hurt to
repeat it: the Nazis did not kill Jews for the pleasure of killing or because they hated
them or because they wanted to take over their property or just because they were an
inferior race: also the French, as Celts, and The Italians, as Latins, were for them, the
Aryans, inferior races, and they had no need to exterminate them at the time when they
could do so. They make the Jews disappear simply because they contaminated the Aryan
space, which had to be cleansed of impurities. So, more than bloody murderers, who
sadistically take pleasure in the suffering of their victims, we must see them as effective
rat killers who carry out an unpleasant but necessary and urgent task. They had a job to
do and they did it to the limit of their strength and possibilities, which were many.
When knowing in detail the prophylactic enterprise of Nazism with the Jews, there is
an aspect that not only draws attention, but also creates a certain intellectual discomfort.
From the first moment, at all times, the Nazis dedicated themselves to conscientiously
erasing the traces of what they were doing. They never used direct expressions such as
"kill", "liquidate" and the like, but began by talking about "final solution" and continued
using circumlocutions such as "rearrangement", "installation", "disposition" and others
that were no less euphemistic and neutral. Precisely for this reason, by hiding their
gigantic cleaning work, they were faced with tremendous problems of administrative
logistics of the fields. To make the bodies disappear completely, they invented crematory
ovens, since they were not satisfied with burying their victims, but rather they needed to
incinerate them so that, partly, they would go away in smoke, and partly, in ashes, which
they were careful to scatter. then into the rivers so that they would disappear completely.
The Soviets did the same with their victims: Slansky and his companions, summarily
tried in Prague in the early 1950s, were hanged, burned, and then their ashes scattered in
some river.
But in the case of the Nazis, the problems were enormous, since making thirteen
bodies disappear through this procedure is not the same as applying it to millions and
millions. It cost them a lot of money and effort and they lost a lot of time. All so as not to
leave a trace of what they did with the Jews.
At first glance, it seems like a contradiction or, at the very least, an anomaly,
something inexplicable according to the Nazi mentality itself. If they were so sure of
their doctrine and of dominating the world with a thousand-year-old Reich, why take the
trouble to make every last atom of the murdered Jews disappear? Hiding the body and
making it disappear completely is a common concern of any murderer, from the
gangsters of the North (Chicago, New York) to those of the South (militaries of "dirty"
wars). But the common and ordinary criminal acts like this as a measure of protection: to
avoid being accused, by that old principle according to which there is no crime without
proof. That is when confusion arises when considering the case of the efficient Nazis: it
is not possible that from the first moment they dedicated themselves to eliminating Jews
they were worried about any guilt and the possible consequences if they were
discovered. But they had been the first to proclaim to the four winds what they were
going to do and why. Furthermore, every time they had to take terrible and savage
reprisals, from Lidice to Oradour or the Ardeatine Trenches, they did so openly, in the
open sky, and assuming full responsibility for their actions, since they acted precisely to
terrorize the world. Why, in the case of the Jews, this strange obsession with hiding the
slightest trace of their mass elimination?
They reached the semantic perfection of prohibiting the use of the term "corpse";
Instead, those who operated with the bodies should say "figures" or "rags", but never
"dead" or similar, under penalty of being harshly punished.
What is most annoying is to think that they acted like this out of a bad conscience and
as if they regretted what they were doing: they were ashamed of being vulgar criminals
and they deceived themselves and tried to deceive the world by pretending that they had
done nothing wrong, for which They hid and made the residue of their mischief
disappear. They neither talked about what they did nor left any trace, in an effort to make
their crimes forgotten. In such a way that they were mass murderers, relentless,
organized, whatever you want to say, but in the end they turned out to be shameful. They
fled from their crime even in the administrative language with which they inevitably
needed to refer to it. Is it really possible to think about the possibility that they felt shame
and hidden regret? It would be too human a note to believe that such weakness could
afflict the Nazis; If so, there would be a crack in the edifice, a flaw in his worldview, and
a hope in his monstrous behavior.
The only possible explanation is the simplest and above all the most consistent with
Nazi thought itself. It also has the advantage that it is also valid for similar Soviet crimes.
As on so many other occasions, the key is in Orwell: it is that of declaring the enemies of
the State "non-persons" when making them disappear. Thus they disappear definitively.
Not only do they cease to bother, that is, to exist, in the present, but they also disappear
from the past, they have never existed, they are erased forever from the book of history,
from the memory of men.
For the Nazis, the Jews were non-persons from the outset: they were not properly
human, but rather an inferior, subhuman race, so that by making them disappear, in
addition to doing a favor to the superior, properly human peoples, cleansing them of such
plague, they were not actually eliminating human beings, but a kind of insects, things,
waste, figures, rags. In what way does man keep memory of himself, from time
immemorial? Through the cult of the dead, which begins with the burial and the marking
of the place where they bury their fellow human beings. To their fellow men, but
precisely the Nazis were not killing their fellow men, so they did not even deserve to be
buried. Had they been buried, they would have run the risk of someone from future
generations removing their remains and confusing them with those of the men
themselves. The Jews had to disappear from the face of the earth, not only physically,
but even their memory, their names, their history, their most subtle vestige. As if they
had never existed. In the thousand-year-old Reich, which the Nazis were beginning to
build, they would never have existed, and such an enormous task was what the coming
generations of Germans would owe, without even knowing it, to Himmler's sacrificed
men. Such was the message of the Wansee conference to the faithful SS. That is the
reason for a viciousness, which was not such, but rather the systematic nature of an idea:
the world belongs to some, but not to others. That proclaimed Lebensraum demanded a
complementary space of death for those who did not have the right to life. The
extermination camps thus mark the Todesraum of Nazi culture.
The application of these ideas, their implementation, has been agreed to be described
as "evil." There can be no evil more vulgarly administrative nor, at the same time, more
properly human. Before the Nazi evil, the usual one was recorded, born from instinctive,
hypothalamic reactions; The Nazi evil, the Holocaust, is a direct consequence of the
most evolved brain of man, the most perfected: it is born from the rationality of an idea
and materializes with the rationality of a plan. Whoever is going to deduce from this that
man is more dangerous the more rational and advanced he is, will not be far wrong.
Jorge Semprún tells in Le grand voyage of his own experience as a prisoner in
Buchenwald, as a Spaniard and a communist. He was lucky enough to survive and, as
soon as the lucky few who escaped hell were released, the protagonist of the novel
finally does what he had always wanted to do since the confinement of the camp: he goes
to a beautiful German country house, located on a splendid hill, right in front of the
concentration camp, a house that he had not stopped seeing every day since his
confinement. Once outside, he wants to reverse the position: see the countryside from the
house.
 In the house there is a respectable older lady, with gray hair, who, although a little
scared at first, agrees to show him the inside of her cozy mansion. What the newly
liberated man is looking for is on the first floor: the magnificent balcony of the
gemütliche Wohnstube where that peaceful family gathers. An impressive view over the
countryside, including the gigantic chimney of the crematorium: as it were, a box
entrance to the daily spectacle. When the prisoner asked the kind lady what they thought
when at night, every night, they saw the incessant flames rising to the sky, she only
managed to tell him that she also lost her two sons in the war. It is the German measure
of the value of lives: two against millions. Otherwise, everything had passed calmly and
orderly in that pleasant house that every day enjoyed contemplating the busy activity of a
death camp.
The banality of evil does not only cover the officials: everyone accepted it in the most
natural way. That is precisely its triviality. There is always the rare consolation that next
time it will be even more banal.
 Peace, round business
Why shouldn't the world be at peace if it brings more profits than war? Another
excellent example of the many Marxist mistakes. That the insatiable greed of capitalism
led it, in a blind and logical need for profits, to wage periodic wars in order to avoid its
current crises is an old-fashioned lie. If it was ever true (perhaps in the First World War:
1914-18), it was soon abandoned for a better method, since it is characteristic of that
capitalism, villain of history (which the Chinese and Russians have just re-entered), to
have a fabulous power of accommodation to times and conditions. In short, why be
surprised at the failure of another messianic prophecy? Unhappy Marxism has taken such
stumbles that it would be impious to continue picking at the wound. It is enough to
remember that great predictive success of Herr Engels: «After the Franco-Prussian War,
in which the rear-loading rifle was used, weapons have reached such a point of
perfection that a new progress of radical importance is no longer possible. in that field. I
wish it had been true.
And it wasn't true because it couldn't have been. The characteristic of human beings is
not to give up in their desire to exploit the resources of their brain, so specifically
evolved. Not the Thompson or Vicking machine gun or the long-range Bertha cannon,
but nuclear weapons and intercontinental rockets were as inevitable as aviation itself. As
soon as man delves into the knowledge of the sub-atomic world of matter, he has to
reach the use of nuclear energy. And the first use of what he discovers has always served
to destroy. Because it is in our condition to be aggressive, and, if we were not, we would
still be, probably happy (that is, stupid animals), climbing the trees eating fruits and
chewing leaves. Everything else is stories of self-righteous people or tricksters under the
silly pretext of pacifism.

More than one peace

Also: what peace are we talking about? Of nuclear peace or circumstantial peace in
this or that point of the globe? Of peace imposed, as a result of conquest or annexation,
or of peace agreed upon as a result of a reasonable understanding? Because "peace" is
also a polysemous term and it would be advisable to agree on one of its various
meanings if we do not want to fall into another Babelian discussion. La Paz, with a
capital letter, which refers to the non-use (for now) of nuclear devices, has a price that
cannot be stopped paying every day. Firstly, this Great Peace is broken down into two,
very precise and oppressive: pax Americana and pax sovietica with everything they
mean in each case. It has been two thousand years since Tacitus said that lapidary thing:
"They made a great desert and called it peace." The current variant is not much better:
"They made a big deal and called it peace." The fact is that no one escapes its
consequences: either one is under the Soviet nuclear ceiling or one lives sheltered by the
no less nuclear overhang of American weapons. The small powers (what do you mean,
apart from the bad joke, by "small" and "powers"?) that play with their tiny nuclear
arsenal are more laughable than pity. The only thing that counts are the impressive
nuclear resources of the two overwhelming Empires. The ratio is simply 100 to 1.
Neither France nor England nor China have the nuclear power to resist the gigantic
atomic umbrellas of the two dinosaurs for even ten minutes. However, they continue to
arm themselves to the teeth. That's the secret: arming yourself is (also) big business
today.
 armed peace

Double business: on the nuclear level, which leaves millions, since there are always
subpowers (to call them in some way: India, Israel, Argentina...) willing to buy
technology and resources at prices of the best spy, and business also on the nuclear level.
conventional, which is the one that leaves billions. According to French estimates (and
they know what they are talking about since they are one of the largest arms sellers), the
current figure for arms sales around the world is around 50 billion dollars a year. To
realize the importance of that figure, think about the deficit of the United States, which is
about 170 billion; which means that it would be wiped out in about three years only with
what arms sales leave. Or seen another way: with what is sold in weapons there would be
enough to pay almost twice the Venezuelan external debt. It is even more illustrative to
look at loose data. The weapons that the United States have recently sold to Iran (those
from the scandal that threatens Reagan) amount to about 10 or 12 million dollars; It is
understood that this was their original cost, but what the Iranians had to pay for them
was 60 million, that is, five to six times more. As a profit margin, 600% is not bad at all.
More than one naive spirit (leave them, for theirs will be the Kingdom of Heaven) will
think that this is typical of the capitalist world, implacable and cruel. Let him wake up
from his dogmatic dream, because in this arms business, without which there would be
no peace, everyone is up to their necks: Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and even our
neighbor Brazil, one of the most voracious. The Russians are among the biggest sellers,
as their weapons have a reputation for being effective and cheap. A manual anti-aircraft
rocket, a SAM-7, is sold for half the price of its Western equivalent (Italian or French).
Either they have quickly learned the most unforgiving laws of the market or they have
much cheaper and less demanding labor. A couple of facts will suffice for business
morale. The Chinese recently sold Iraq one and a half billion dollars in weapons, which
has not prevented them from signing a contract with Iran for one thousand six hundred
million this year: a greater sense of distributive justice, impossible. They sell equally to
both parties, with which, in addition to winning twice, they ensure the continuity of that
little war, that is, that of the prosperous arms market.
Brazil, for its part, is the largest producer of Third World weapons, in the double
meaning: not only because it belongs, but because it mainly sells to miserable Third
World countries. With a particularity over all other sellers. They are all hypocritical
enough to add a clause to their sales contracts that prohibits transfer to third parties,
especially if, as it is modestly written, it is about some " unfriendly power ." Brazil does
not demand anything. He sells unconditionally to everyone who wants to buy from him
and pays in dollars. As one of its ministers, with the evocatively biblical name, Paulo
Tarso, recently declared: «We do not have any problem of conscience. "We only serve
our own benefit."
To sell, everything is sold. Whoever wants to find out about these and other no less
delicious data, should read the prestigious and knowledgeable English magazine Jane's
Defense Weekly . There you will find, for example, that always through the increasingly
active and flourishing market, Iraq has sold tanks and weapons captured to the enemy on
the battlefield. And the one who has bought them, in its relentless thirst for weapons, has
been the enemy itself, that is, Iran. So the same tank is sold twice (or many more times)
to the same country: once, before entering battle, and once, afterwards, if it has been
lucky enough not to be damaged and to be resold on the market by the enemy against
whom it was assigned in combat. Captive audience, closed market, total benefits ad
infinitum . Who would not like it if, under such conditions, peace, this lucrative peace,
continues?
 Peace as anesthesia

Once again, that same naive spirit, now doubled as selfish, may argue that it does not
matter to him as long as the other great conflict, the terrible and probably very final
nuclear holocaust, can be avoided at any cost.
Leaving selfishness aside, it would be the most foolish and short-sighted of visions.
Who can assure you that tomorrow it will not be your own country that will be involved
in the appetizing business of a localized conventional conflict, in order to continue
fueling the fabulous pace of arms sales? Anyone who sees it this way should think only
of Central America, a region not far from Venezuela, and know that conflicts tend to
become generalized. And if you don't believe it, ask Cambodians or Laotians, neighbors
of the Vietnamese. Or the little Cuban soldiers, forced to die in Angola or Ethiopia,
which, as everyone knows, are countries bordering Cuba.
In such a way that for approximately forty years we have lived in a supposed peace
that fuels the most gigantic arms business that has ever existed. And all thanks to the
convenient resource of letting a little war flare up here today and tomorrow on another
side of the planet. It is the best proof of how right one of the great philosophers of the
century, Alfred North Whitehead, co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica , was
when he warned that "the deliberate desire for peace easily turns into its bastard
substitute, anesthesia."
This is how the world has been, in this supposed peace, since 1945: anesthetized with
words such as "International Year of Peace", "Peace Manifesto" and other such
nonsense. Anesthesia fulfills its double objective: it keeps the consciences of some
asleep and allows others to operate in the endless arms business. As usual. And when
they find a way to use nuclear weapons in a limited way, without blowing up the whole
world (because it would end the business), but just a portion of it, they will not deprive
themselves of doing so because that day the business will take a great leap forward. : the
gigantic unused stocks (for the moment nothing more) of the most expensive and
complicated weapons that the human creature has built will begin to be sold, save poor
Engels and his ridiculous rear-loading rifle.
The best definition of "peace" remains that of Ambrose Bierce, the "old gringo" of
Carlos Fuentes, in his unsurpassed Diccionario del Diablo : "In international affairs, a
period of deception between two periods of struggle."

Metaphysics, today
Why begin by assuming that in this imprecise today, about which everyone speaks
without knowing very well what is being referred to, Metaphysics must be something
else, if at all it really is?
Metaphysics was yesterday a desire, and the day before yesterday, a discipline.
Perhaps for the same reason someone suspects that today he has to be just a shadow, a
bad memory.
As a discipline, it was a solid matter of dispute, in such a way that, as one of the
greatest metaphysicians of all time, the Andalusian Suárez, "excellent doctor", stated,
without it there is no access to God. It began by talking about the world and its divisions;
We proceeded to distinguish between being and entities; the differences between
substance and accidents were limited; The categorical levels were then marked, as if
drawing a map of fine ontological roads, to end in the terrible and vain enterprise of
proving the impossible: the existence of a Being above all others, including reality.
It is undeniable that the baroque of metaphysics had a meaning, that is, an internal
coherence, and a beauty, that is, its august uselessness.
The fragmentary rupture of the great toy, the compartmentalization of the immense
palace, reduced metaphysics to a hidden longing. Or at least, such was the interested
positivist version of why we went from the richness of Being to the rags of mathematical
variables. The background is less poetic. Since Aristotle, metaphysics has been more
about desire than fulfillment. That "being as being" that was pointed out did not go
beyond a glimpsed term, without reaching a stone on which to lean. If knowing then was
knowing in pieces, integrating knowing in a single embrace becomes a loving dream of
grandiose monstrosity. Erotics of metaphysical desire: possessing the loved one with a
single gesture. Metaphysics approached mysticism by natural steps. From Plato's
"beyond the essence", it can hardly be surprising that Hegel is a mixture of religion and
system; There, the tragic rupture, the sustained split, the radical separation between
subject and object allude equally to the loss of paradisiacal unity and to the dialectic of
all knowledge. Being fragments in the world, in everyday life, in the fall, in the way that
man sinks into sin or the proletarian sinks into his misery. The unitary dream of all
metaphysics points to the pristine recovery of the first instant: Absolute Spirit, Idea,
Classless Society, what does it matter: the day before everything began, man, history,
world, science, metaphysics, nostalgia.
There also came the day of disenchantment in which metaphysics was considered a
nightmare or a speech disorder, like someone who diagnoses: a lapsus mentis . They
were the arid and terrible days of logical empiricism, presided over by a repressive
police, dedicated to the search and capture of criminal metaphysical expressions, the
shameful nonsense, prohibited in the safe zone of language. Metaphysics thrown into
ineffable darkness. To be a metaphysician was to be imprisoned, without realizing that
whoever signs the decree of persecution thereby becomes the worst of metaphysicians,
the one who ignores himself through a new and subterranean order of metaphysical
ideas.
There is usually no shortage of insufferable optimists who begin by declaring
metaphysics extinct and end up supporting it transmuted into biology or Marxism. The
truth is more prosaic and bearable: with just a discrete semantic change, the metaphysical
charge is constant and is preserved from one philosophical era to another. It is true that
there is no talk of objective spirit or theory of ideas, but disputes continue about the force
of dialectics in nature and arguments are made about the ontological status of the notion
of a whole. Rather than a thematic eternity, we should speak of a cultural persistence, of
a deep-rooted habit, perhaps of a Western penchant for repeating certain patterns, for
traversing repeated paths. Not even the most blatantly anti-metaphysicians are spared.
The claims of human existence were at all times a pretext to take up the metaphysical
thread from further away. Kierkegaard to reach God, Sartre to mourn the useless passion
of the for-itself obsessed with the impossible plethora of the in-itself, and Heidegger not
to mention: to better rethink the difference between being and beings and prepare to
attend to the strange silence of the voice of the first. Any of the tireless commentators on
mind-body relations, so in vogue in the philosophy of the past decade, would not have
felt uncomfortable or misunderstood in the face of Descartes and his dual explanation of
substance. The rise of modal, tensional, paraconsistent and intuitionist logics has led to
the very Leibnizian revaluation of an ontology of possible worlds, while the tendency to
psychologize linguistic action, with the theory of speech acts , leads to the metaphysics
of temporal processes, worthy of any neo-Hegelian. Bunge is writing a long treatise on
"basic philosophy" that will differ in terms (and formulas), but not in claims, from any of
those majestic Summae of noble scholasticism: from the language, that is, from the
subject of knowledge, the integral theoretical effort stands there until building an
architecture of the world.
Like certain viruses with high mutation power, metaphysics appears and reappears,
always different and always the same. Blessed are the poor in spirit (critical) who never
recognize it, for theirs will be the kingdom of perennial philosophy.
 Misery of feminism
Feminists, the latest arrivals at the dubious banquet of ideologies and other "isms",
have satisfied that naive demand of Italo Svevo when he pointed out that the truly
original woman would be the first to imitate a man. Unfortunately for us and their
misfortune, they have already done it and in spades. The worst of imitations: constitution
of an ideological movement, that is, something confusing enough so that no one knows
what it is about and everyone feels united in the common cause of an immense void.
Ideologies are usually characterized by developing a certain taste towards the cult of
saints, patriarchs (matriarchs, in this case) and founding fathers or mothers of the
overwhelming movement. In the case of feminism, there does not seem to be much
doubt: the mother-founder was, is and will continue to be the eternal and leaden Simone
de Beauvoir, also known by French gossip as " La Grande Sartreuse ." The founding
document or first stone was exposed with that little phrase with which the inevitable
Bible begins: «You are not born a woman; she becomes a woman..." But what followed
was even worse: "no biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that,
within society, characterizes the human female...". That is to say, a very Parisian
confrontation (later, false and superficial) between biology and culture. Let it be noted
that it was Beauvoir who introduced this reference to "biological destiny." Because it so
happens that if something is established and well established in biology it is: first, the
perfect and inexorable distribution of the species into genera with a very specific
function; Second, if we must speak of a basic, primordial sex, from which the other is
derived, such a role corresponds to the female sex, since the male sex is the consequence
of adding a chromosome (Y) to the original genetic femininity. That is to say: the
woman is a woman in her own right, while the male is only such due to endocrine
repression of the other sex. So enough of continuing to talk about "second sex", since it
would rather be the very first, just as enough of continuing to talk about Freudian
nonsense about "penis envy" and other deprivations and desires. Those who truly
become or become (to use Madame de Beauvoir's vocabulary) are the males. A woman
is born a woman, despite the high priestess of the first feminism.
Also, what the hell did he mean by "becoming a woman"? The thing about "being a
woman" is definitive; the other ("become", "become", "become") would be modifiable.
That is, destiny versus vocation, since it is obvious that not all are priests nor are all
priests always. Now, it happens that we have not yet reached the point of abandoning the
feminine condition as one abandons that of a plumber or a violinist. Let's imagine the
following dialogue, feminine?:
-"What are you going to do this year?"
—"I don't know very well, maybe I'll become a woman..."
But not everything is the fault of Beauvoir and her simplistic and metaphysical (and
Sartrean, it must be said) anti-scientific vision of the human being. She limited herself to
starting a movement and providing it with a sacred book; which is not little, although it
does not exceed the limits of what is usual in these cases. What has come out of there is
worth taking a look at. Let's see if it is possible to understand something.
That "feminism" can only be either a doctrine, with overtones of intrinsic truth, or an
ideology, that is, agitation propaganda for something. It just happens that if "feminism"
and "machismo" (supposedly the opposite) were doctrines, the second, "machismo", is
the only one that could be based on science and claimed from it; Not so the first,
"feminism." There may be a "scientific machismo", that is, that doctrine that is based on
the differentiating and established fact of two sexes dedicated to fulfilling the biological
function of reproduction through the mechanism of sexual selection, which supposes,
among other things, the consecration of polygamous tendencies in the male for better
fulfillment of that function. Or put another way: based on science, the vision of relations
between the sexes is a decidedly sexist vision.
It seems that feminism has nothing left but to proclaim itself "ideology", which it very
wisely or instinctively did not stop doing from its beginnings, fleeing from scientific
reference (go back to Beauvoir) as from the devil. Because such an ideology is
appropriately situated in that turbulent zone of little or no rational attitudes, loaded with
feelings, beliefs, desires and volitions. Despite everything, a rational effort can be made
to try to find out what is behind the gesticulating positions of feminist ideology.
A double possibility could open up when it comes to attributing arguments. Either
man/woman relationships become ideally neutral, without the need for any
predominance that justifies the respective ideology to maintain domination (for example,
until now the sexist one); or such relationships occur in the form of abuse of one by the
other sex. And in turn, if the latter, either that predominance is the product of some
conspiracy (or any other political-social resource), or it is a natural consequence of some
biological inequality. In summary, no matter how you look at it, feminism faces these
three exclusive options: 1) or it proposes a utopia: sexual indifference, without
predominance of any of the sexes, something like the relationships that apparently exist
between geese ; 2) or proposes a revolution (another utopia): overthrowing a system of
oppression to probably replace it with another, but of the opposite sign; and 3) or
recognizes a biological fact: sexual differentiation and reproductive competitiveness.
Now, in neither of the first two options does science have any place at all. And
precisely where science can say something, there is only the third option, which would
inevitably have to be described as "sexist." So it is not difficult to see that, in effect, they
have imitated man, as good old Svevo asked, and they have imitated him perfectly, since
"feminism" is equivalent to a vulgar political movement, condemned as such to live
among the denunciation of a hated order (in this case, the biological order) and the
shouting of revolutionary promises.
Who knows? Maybe they too will one day take power so that, like in La Gattaparda ,
everything remains the same.
 Myths of yesterday and tomorrow
Asking if we will continue with the same myths or invent new ones, as replacements,
is like inquiring about the universality of the myth. Believing that humanity is one and,
therefore, with formal variations, basically enjoys the same persistent myths is a myth
and not a small one. The myth of cultural identity, myth of the background, of the hidden
treasure. If this is so, man continues to accumulate myths.
Thousands of years ago, the myth of the tower of Babel rose, if not to the sky, at least
to the present day. Which hid another myth: that of a single language for all peoples.
That the tower is destroyed, that men fail in their madness, that the diversity of
languages finally prevails, does not mean that the myth of linguistic unity died forever
among the rubble of Babel. In this century, Chomsky has taken it up again, with his
generative-transformational theory that preaches the structural unity of all human
languages. Even more: it postulates the mental identity of all men, the only animals
endowed with language. Added to the myth of a single language is that of innatism,
which wants the language to be in the souls in the form of seeds that are only waiting to
be fertilized to bear the fruit of language. Consequence: myths are transformed, which is
also a myth, and yet they remain, which is another myth. Zeus had the power to change,
to transmute: bull, swan, and remain Zeus. If something changes but persists, if the
myths leave only to return, the myth of return, perhaps of eternal return, will be
accepted. To talk about myths is to somehow fall into the mythopoietic game.

Adam and Eve

Because myth means, speaking, telling, since Plato: telling something, telling a story,
inventing a legend. There is a reason why "myth" is related to "memory" and "mantra":
both the language that is remembered and the magic word. It will be very difficult to
escape from myths as long as we have language and it serves to distinguish us, to
separate us. That was another myth: that Adam gave a name to everything around him,
that he mythologized it. Because myth is much stronger than history. As we understand
it since Herodotus and Thucydides, history is just a kind of myth: that story ordered in
time, subject to chronology. But the myth is bigger than a temporal sequence that it
always transcends. That is why it persists, even changing.
There is a tribe in the center of Brazil, the Sherantes, to which what we mythically call
"civilization" has brought its own myths. If a Sherante Indian is told the myth of Adam
and Eve, he understands it perfectly in order to introduce a change in him: they have to
be brothers. For their worldview, nudity is not a sin, but incest is. Hence the strength of
the myth: it is a story that does not need to respect what is told to continue impressing
the person who receives it.

What are myths for?

There are myths that are more recurrent than others or are more so in one form of
civilization than in another. In all known ones, there exists, under any guise, the myth of
the theft of fire, the myth of the flood, the myth of the resurrection and the myth of the
birth from a virgin. It doesn't matter what they are or how they are: myths serve to
displace human responsibility, to exonerate man. The famous myth of the cave at the
beginning of the seventh book of Republic , by which we are prisoners of a cave and
cannot see the light of the sun, which is the truth, serves to transfer our intellectual
responsibility: we are not guilty of not knowing The true. The crushing myth of original
sin morally frees us from the responsibility of that guilt, although paradoxically it puts it
back on our generational shoulders. Or the myth of Pandora, who opened the box of all
evils: if anything, the culprit is women, another no less recurring myth. Through the
myth of Prometheus we transfer our responsibility in the tremendous sin of transforming
the natural and introducing technology into the world, while the myth of Persephone,
cyclically kidnapped and released in the vegetation and fruits, served to avoid the
responsibility of being cultivators. , that is, periodic aggressors of Mother Earth.
Because they reassure by exonerating blame, myths also fulfill the conditioning
function of all ideology: they control, educate, subjugate. Behind every myth, there is a
cosmology and a morality. A great Spanish cartoonist of the seventies, who is hardly
talked about now, Ops, denounced more than one myth and its obsequent function. One
of his drawings represents a peaceful and traditional family, father standing, mother
sitting with baby in her arms, and a little boy next to him waving a flag; They are
looking out from the balcony of what is supposed to be their house and because of the
flags and the attitude, perhaps they see a patriotic parade passing by. From the balcony,
from the balcony railing, instead of a large flag, as is customary, hang strings of human
intestines, the honorable guts of the honorable, placid and orderly family. Your dreams
are your patriotism or the other way around, which is the same thing. The myth of the
Homeland.

The titan in the rock

Myths come and go, maybe they don't change that much. Now Hercules or Gilgamesh
are called Superman or Rambo, and Aphrodite could have been Marilyn Monroe or the
last "goddess" of cinema, who are shamelessly called "sexual symbols" in a mythological
way. Prometheus has taken on the face of Einstein, Fermi or Oppenheimer. Or all of
them together: they had the audacity to steal the fire from the atom, from the intimacy of
matter. And we will pay as dearly as the titan chained to the rock forever. Other myths
disappear for the moment, awaiting their rebirth. In this century, the myths of utopia
(classless society, paradise on earth) and of the noble savage, a rationalist variant of the
myth of Eden, have suffered a total eclipse: they do not seem to sell human goodness
well, neither in a natural state nor, much less , refined. Certain myths in vogue can sound
new, if you don't look closely. Thanks to technical advances, in the biomedical domain,
the myth of human perfectibility (transplants, grafts, artifices, genetic engineering,
longevity) seems powerful. New? The Greeks believed that some men, by their actions
or by being chosen by the gods, could gain immortality, receive, so to speak, a
promotion and ascend to demigods. For its part, cybernetics brings us closer and closer
to the artificial man, the electronic brain: myths of Pygmalion and the Golem.

The myth of the millennium

To predict the myths of tomorrow is to also fall into another myth: that of the gift of
prophecy, Apollo and Cassandra. But to imagine that just because it is a new century, the
21st, there have to be new myths, is to embrace a very old one: that of the millennium.
Which is actually a submission, belonging to the great myth of the order of the universe
or periodic repetitions. Man would like, and this is what he dreams of in the myth, that
the march of time and his own would conform to figures and obey laws: for example,
every thousand years. End of the world or at least of one world and beginning of another,
different and, if possible, brand new. You don't have to follow courses of skepticism to
know that 2001 will be essentially the same as 1994 and that between 2087 and 1987, if
there are differences, it will be for the worse. More inhabitants, more problems. That is,
if we are lucky and we are still, as a species, here.
However, something can be ventured. If the equalizing trends in the relations of the
sexes and the greater control of women over sexual activities continue, the myth of the
androgyne can be revived. The sexes tend to be confused, functions alternate, initiatives
are shared. Plato invented a myth that spoke of a time when the sexes were not
differentiated, but rather composed beings existed: man attached to woman, in one; man
with man or woman with woman. Then they separated us and what happens happens.
Comfortable myth, like all of them: in addition to explaining homosexuality, it transfers
responsibility to another era: we are the way we are because, separated, we search for
our lost half. Recently, the excellence of life as a couple has been preached as a weak
resource against the threatening plague of the end of the millennium. By getting too
close, couples can recreate the myth of androgyny.
The myth of Sisyphus was more complete than is usually told: he did not go up and
down that hill out of innocence. Sisyphus was a devious man who, after spying on Zeus
in one of his amorous dalliances, allowed himself the luxury of outwitting not once but
twice the terrible messenger that Zeus sent him to punish him, Thanatos, death. He
managed to tie her up so tightly that he was able to escape her once, and then a second
time, he tricked her into having to attend her own funeral. The myth of defeated death
also haunts us. For the first time, technological man has wanted to bind death through the
use of cryogenics. Death in suspense, tied, sustained, unfulfilled, postponed, awaiting the
time when man can completely defeat it. He still has to use the other resource: deceive
her, asking her to let him attend her funeral. For this, it will be enough for graft and
transplant techniques to advance so that one day a man dies in another, without dying
himself. The one who gives up the organs to continue living in the donated one dies.
Myth of immortality or, at least, of the postponement of the Pale.

XXI century

But it would not be unlikely that the two most powerful myths of the next century will
be the myth of Freedom and that of Happiness. Just as Don Quixote spoke to the
goatherds about that happy age and happy centuries in which "those who lived in it were
unaware of these two words of yours and mine," could the men of the 21st century, much
less happy and golden, refer to the time when freedom existed on earth, even if it was in
such a precarious way that it barely remains. From the old myth of Happiness, we will
not have to make a greater effort to continue placing it in the hearts of humans, because
as they seem to get closer to such an elusive butterfly, it flies further and further away,
disdaining to live among us. Not even between two of us.
In addition to being supposedly rational, man is mythopoietic: if he does not believe,
he does not live. Only animals, Borges teaches, are immortal because they ignore death.
Hence all the evils: from knowing. "Sharpen your brain and wake up": to escape from his
destiny, increasingly ominous, man turns to others he never even had. The myth is the
memory of the impossible, without which it is not possible to continue. Calm down:
there will be myths. Which is it? Deep down, they are the same, dressed in technological
clothing: they will return to change, they will change to return.

Nationalism: myths and reality

The terrible thing about the head of Medusa, the most fearsome of the Gorgons, was
her immense and fixed eyes: with them she petrified anyone who looked at her. Either
one cuts off one's head, as Perseus did and Cellini immortalized it for the glory of the
Florentine loggia , or one suffers the stony freeze of that gaze. Those who have
contemplated the face of nationalism are condemned to be stones crossed in the history
of peoples.
Another myth can also be used: nationalism is the Sleeping Beauty that, once
awakened by the romantic kiss of the 19th century, transforms into the uncontrollable
monster of Dr. Frankenstein.

State and nation

The silliest and most hackneyed solution to get out of trouble is to resort to the
convenient resource of double registration: there is a good nationalism, and another, a
bad one. Examples, no less silly and used: good are African, Asian, and Latin American
nationalisms, and bad, very bad, is German or Japanese nationalism. Or the American
one, which receives the ugly name of imperialism. I wish the world were as simple as the
Manichaeans always want. Up close, things get complicated.
First came the State; then the nation. And hence the monster: nation-states. The State,
the oldest, is the legal framework that allows a community social life, regardless, in
principle, of the nationality of its citizens. Rome was a State, never a nation; On the
contrary, the cives Romani came from many and diverse regions or peoples or nations.
When a nation predominates and seeks exclusiveness, instead of a simple State, the
hybrid arises: State-Nation; Instead of being a legal instrument, it becomes a national
machine. Romanticism was the culprit: in love with differences and obsessed with
nature, it exalts the nation as the common and non-transferable origin of a human group.
The State was conquered by the nation and nationalism is the resulting sentiment, the
covering ideology, the sale of the product.
But the State-Nation contradiction remains. Paradigm: the French Revolution that, on
the one hand, exalts the rights of man, which are supposed to be universal, and, on the
other, national sovereignty, which is nothing more than a particular claim and even
reduced to a single country. With this, either human rights come up against the multitude
of sovereignties that would have to be fostered, or they become and are diluted into
simple national rights. For some reason, Hannah Arendt speaks of the "perversion of the
State" for having become a simple instrument of the nation. Perhaps all the members of
the State are citizens, but only some will be nationals, that is, first-class citizens because
they are "nation" citizens by birth. The others, if any, naturalized, are second-class
citizens. That's the perversion. What is natural, what is factual, what is random
predominates over what is legal, what is established, what is necessary. For this reason,
in this inversion of values, the Nazis were consistent and went as far as constitutional
schizophrenia by clearly distinguishing between Staatsfremde and Volksfremde , since it
was not the same nor did they value being a foreigner for belonging to another State the
same as being a foreigner for being part of another. town or nation. Both were
foreigners, but, in an Orwellian advance, the latter were more so: the case of the Jews,
who although they were citizens (in fact and in law, they belonged to the German Staat ),
in reality they were totally foreign because they belonged to another people or nation. (
Volk ) and not to the sacred German people. "In reality" explains everything:
appearances are not enough, but, armed with some key (blood, race, class), we must
penetrate to the depths of the phenomena, to "reality." That was the methodological trick
of romantic doctrines and the fuel that encouraged rampant nationalism, not only during
the 19th century.
 Ambiguity and contradictions

The funniest thing about nationalism is its permanent ambiguity. In addition to that
poor duality between good and bad, there is confusion between nationalism and religion.
It has been said that it is no coincidence that nationalism appeared just when religion
declines and it is even claimed that it is just the substitute for it, the modern way of being
religious. In such a way that nationalism would be a complement to religion. Instead of
worshiping and serving God, incense is burned on the altar of the Nation. Explanation of
the erection of Pantheons and other sacred national monuments. There is a reason why
the religious fundamentalists and Jewish fanatics of Mea Shearim abhor the State of
Israel: they see the Israeli nationalists as their worst competitor (in addition to being
blasphemers) by attempting to replace one cult with another, no less transcendent. Only,
again, things are not so simple. The Mohammedans are there to prove that, more than a
complement, nationalism is an enhancer of religion. Furthermore, that religion has
declined is unfortunately another rationalist myth of the last century. They also assured
that nations would dissolve so that fraternal internationalism would emerge. There is
more religion than ever (of all: the "true" one and the others) and a nationalism as strong
as in the time of Bismarck or Garibaldi. Only more widespread: now any ethnic group
has its flag and a place in the UN. Such is its ambiguous other side: death and
transfiguration. Instead of diminishing, as the internationalist apostles naively believed
(among whom, the most naive, the Marxists), it has reappeared with greater force. Hence
its permanent and even humorous contradictions.
Bulgarian national sentiment is supposed to exist, which has not prevented its
"national" anthem from containing this emotional stanza: "Glory to the great sun of
Lenin and Stalin that, with its rays, illuminates our path." Ghana, before being
nationalistically called Ghana, was a British colony known as the Gold Coast; For a
vibrant national feeling, such a name was inadmissible and they invented Ghana, which,
apparently, in the past designated a mythical African empire, about which very little is
known, but what is known is that it did not contain within its borders to the Gold Coast.
What difference does it make. There must also be ardent Pakistani nationalists, who
idolize their nation, Pakistan. Perhaps you know (or have not yet been told) that this
name (Pakistan) was invented by a Cambridge student, from the initials of the Muslim
provinces of India. When inventing new names for the benefit of new nationalities, there
is no one like that Dr. Sukarno from Indonesia, who insisted on creating a new nation,
made up of three others (Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines), so, in a display of
fever Imagination, he proposed calling it "Mafilindo", like someone who names a
country house in memory of three daughters. Of course, let's see, there are certain
American names that are not very brilliant: the United States (which is not a proper or
univocal name) solved the problem by cutting it in the middle: they took the name of the
entire Continent. That must be why the poor Argentinians were left without a noun to
represent them. Such absurdities are not exclusive to either the last century or the Third
World; It will not be out of place to remember that if English nationalism (English,
English language and culture, not just the country) is proudly fed by the cult of the great
figure of Shakespeare, the first national poet, the bard of Avon, etc., etc. ., this is due to
the German scholars who, in the 18th century, to combat French classicism (Racine and
company), elevated it to that pedestal from which it has not yet come down.
Contradictions occur in all areas. The most undermined is the one that aspires to define
and specify the concept of "nation." Because if, as some simple people believe, language
were the criterion, Switzerland and, contemporaneously, India should not have existed
for many centuries. Of course, the idea that the nation is made up of nationals,
understood as those born in the same territory, has long ceased to be true. Ask the
children of Tunisians or Algerians born in France or those of the Arbeitgüster or
immigrants, born in Germany or Switzerland. If a Turkish woman gives birth in
Düsseldorf, that child will not necessarily be German, as the original nationalist creed
would seem to demand, but is still a foreigner, a Volksfremde , since Nazism left its seed,
the egg of the snake, well sown, and not only on German soil.

Triumph and failure

Taking things with a bit of humor, there is no doubt that the most hilarious chapter of
nationalism is provided by Marxism. Poor Marxism! The truth is that having failed in so
many areas, it should not be surprising that one of his first and most notorious failures
was that which gave him nationalism; Remember that fable of the two jugs, the one
made of iron and the one made of clay; of course, iron is always nationalistic.
First, the Marxists said that nationalism was a bourgeois product and, as such,
condemned to disappear in socialist society. Thank goodness it wasn't like that;
Otherwise, the Soviet Union would hardly have been able to win the war against the
Germans: they did it in the name of Holy Russia. But when things got really complicated
was when the new third world nations emerged: simply a bourgeois manifestation? Then
that game of four-way billiards began, with the idea that there are good and bad
nationalisms, depending on whether or not they advocate revolution or depending on
their relations with the Soviet Union (or with China or with Cuba, depending). Not to
mention the immense contradiction contained in the Russian Empire, unified and
centralizing, and the multitude of nationalities more or less allowed within it, not all of
them happy to belong "voluntarily" to the Leviathan. And the clash was inevitable:
Marxism is a theory that explains history through a vertical cut (those at the top versus
those at the bottom: exploiters and exploited), while nationalism always does so
horizontally (confronting human pluralities). The indisputable fact is that in such a
struggle nationalism has completely triumphed: in a long century it has created a
multitude of new states and fueled the fire of the old ones, but Marxism has completely
failed by failing to destroy (as it promised) at least one only State.

Pro and con

That's all very well, but people want personal definitions: for or against nationalism? If
you are a pure Marxist, of the old school, you have to be against and use all the moth-
eaten internationalist slogans; If, on the other hand, you think third-worldly, à la Fanon,
à la Che Guevara, you will embrace any nationalism as long as, of course, it points in the
direction of imperialism that suits you, that is, that you detest the most. If he is anti-
North American, he will support Nicaraguan nationalism and even Libyan or Angolan
nationalism, but if he is anti-Soviet, he will applaud Afghan or Chadian nationalism or
that of the Vietnamese. Nobody can complain: there is something for everyone. And
what about being around the house, one's own nationalism, the one that each quisque is
supposed to have? There the answer is nuanced.
A minimal and classic sociological lesson teaches that the condition of "human being"
is not innate but acquired and modifiable; It is that of the wolf children, left in the jungle:
they neither speak nor can they adopt the erect position; They are practically animals. To
acquire and perfect the "human" condition, that is, civilized, with all its advantages and
all its disadvantages, it is necessary to coexist socially and be culturally trained, and if
this is done with large human conglomerates, the better: the more civilized the people
will always be. inhabitants of the great metropolis than those of the hamlet or village.
Old lesson since Aristotle. The more international, the more open, the more
cosmopolitan, the more human man will be; Nationalism is always a provincial resource,
of narrowness and contraction. But you have to understand: those who have nothing else
to hold on to, use that, their exalted, insulting and aggressive nationalism.
 Psychoanalysis and Marxism
The brotherhood of psychoanalysis and Marxism, rather than Reich, is a matter of
Popper; It is not a tactical issue but a structural one: both doctrines share the same
operational principles. Psychoanalysis and Marxism are omni-explanatory and irrefutable
theories. Only for Popper and scientific methodology, a theory that explains absolutely
everything and that does not present the possibility of being refuted, is not a scientific
theory, but a religious dogma or a primitive myth.
In fact, psychoanalysis can explain everything: both why a gesture is made and why it
is stopped. Why is a person shy at times and aggressive at others; why you make love
instead of making war, or why you fight instead of making love. Everything: nothing
escapes its explanatory capacity, not even the refusal to accept that tremendous capacity.
Refusing psychoanalysis and its total explanations will also be explained as a symptom
of resistance, that is, as a sign of serious neurosis. So if the truth of psychoanalysis is
accepted, everything is seen in the light of Freudian (or Adlerian or Jungian or Lacanian)
explanations. And if it is not accepted, by the very fact of not accepting it, the immovable
truth of psychoanalysis is also being confirmed.
The same thing happens with Marxism: it equally explains the success or failure of a
strike; the increase in crime or its momentary decrease; the Marshall plan for European
recovery or the financial crisis of 1929; Stalinism and its crimes or its denunciation by
Khrushchev. Nothing escapes its fabulous explanatory power. As Popper points out, "a
Marxist cannot open a newspaper without discovering on every page proof of his
interpretation of history." Kurt Tuchoisky, that Berlin cabaret artist from the 1920s, said
it even better: "The task of Marxism is to show how everything must necessarily happen
this way, and if it does not happen, to show why it could not happen this way."
That's the problem with theories that explain everything: that they explain one thing as
well as its opposite; They equally explain A and Not-A, the positive and the negative, an
affirmation and its denial. The least important thing is not the contradiction that this
entails but the inanity created: by explaining everything, nothing is explained. For a
theory to be scientific it only has to explain something determined and isolated, not a
totality; To explain the totality is to include in the explanation the very negation of that
explanation, that is, to annul the explanation, to ultimately leave it without any
explanation.

There are no rebuttals

Nor do psychoanalysis and Marxism offer the testable and critical support for its
possible refutation; They are not doctrines that can be tested, that can be verified,
corroborated or refuted through some comparison with the facts, with reality. A
psychoanalyst diagnoses that someone tried to commit suicide because his thanatic
(destructive) impulse, together with a feeling of residual guilt from a non-sublimated
Oedipus, led him to such a desperate act; The subject is treated on the couch, officially
cured and commits suicide again, this time with complete success. The same
psychoanalyst will once again explain it by his rejection or by the drive of the Superego
that acted as censor of the healing. He will never accept that his theory has been refuted
or could be refuted. There are neither refutations nor failures in psychoanalysis or
Marxism: they are impenetrable theories. Hence its power of persistence; As long as men
believe in them, they will be valid theories. People also continue to believe in astrology
as in the time of Babylon. To believe in Christian dogmas it is not necessary to live in
today's world. To accept Marxism or psychoanalysis, it does not matter to have the
mentality of the Manchester worker of 1870, of the Vienna bourgeoisie of 1905 or of the
man of the late 20th century. It is enough to accept, as an article of faith, the postulates of
these doctrines and instantly your eyes will be opened and everything will be understood
with dazzling clarity.

Key for a closed door

Because both are doctrines that provide a key, the key to open a door until then closed.
The key to dreams or the key to history. That key may be libido or class struggle,
repressed sexuality or the laws of dialectic. It does not matter. The important thing is not
to accept the world as a set of facts, but as a fabric of signs to be deciphered.
Psychoanalysis offers a total interpretation of these signs; Marxism too. Reality, for both
doctrines, is reduced to a secret language; Science (if by "science" we mean omni-
explanatory and irrefutable theories) becomes a mysterious reading. Marx and Freud,
each in their own way, propose another "reading" of the world; not what is immediately
given but what is hidden that needs a special revelation. Of a key. For some reason,
Hannah Arendt has seen in Marx the last of the Jewish Kabbalists, someone who
deciphers a book of strange characters. The same can be said of Freud. Except that
believing that the world or man contains an arcana is a trait of primitive mentalities, of
magical thinking.
Another common feature of both doctrines is their immediate and permanent
fragmentation into opposing sects, as well as the successive attempts to recover the
pristine purity of the original doctrine (Althusser, Lacan and their respective "readings"
of each doctrine).

For now, psychoanalysis

Of course they are rivals: to the extent that each doctrine seeks to explain everything, it
has to exclude any attempt at an explanation that is no less totalitarian. This marks a
fundamental separation: each doctrine aspires to be the only possible explanation; Each
doctrine explains the other, engulfing it in its immense explanatory power. They also
enjoy another momentary rivalry, of a tactical nature. For now, it is psychoanalysis that
has managed to ally itself with the great religion of the West, Judeo-Christianity. It is not
that the mixture of Marxism-Christianity is impossible, but that it will take more time.
For believers in Judeo-Christian dogmas, psychoanalysis has come in handy. Under the
guise of a "scientific" doctrine, they continue to speak a spiritualist language that
privileges human beings over the rest of the world. Darwinism as well as the
development of biology and cybernetics endanger the great Judeo-Christian taboo,
according to which man is not an animal but the king of divine creation. This taboo is
safe with psychoanalytic theory: man is not reduced to conditioning and neurons, but
remains something apart, endowed with the unconscious, a contemporary name for the
spirit. Marxism, with its humanistic desire to seek the disalienation of man, is also
presented as a reinforcement of Christian mythology; When the time comes, when it is
convenient, we will resort to the Christianity-Marxism marriage, not as scandalous as
that other one about heaven and hell, sung by Blake. For the moment, it is the
psychoanalysts who are favored with the tender gaze of the different churches: they
ensure, at the same time, mystery and spirituality. With their long cunning and the
undeniable help of God, positive religions triumph over the hated critical rationalism. It
does not matter that the price to pay passes through a couch, today, through three
dialectical laws, tomorrow: three is a number familiar to believing hearts.
 Sartre: an exciting life
Megalomaniac, logorrheic, spiritualist, cyclical thinker, polygamous, spendthrift,
tireless, despising his body, controversial, second Voltaire, finally canonized, but, above
all, a writer, a great writer who filled forty years of the cultural life of France and the
world and that still continues to make people talk.
A classic already: published in La Pléiade , that impressive literary pantheon, summa
of the belles lettres not only French, and now, Sartre revived and reconstructed in Cohen-
Solal's magnificent book14 , to which can be added with benefit that of another woman,
another Anna: Anna Boschetti15 , whose title does not reveal the richness of its
biographical content, although partial compared to that of Cohen-Solal, which aims to
cover Sartre's entire life: 1905-1980.

Sartre the man

Finally an intellectual biography, a reconstruction of the gestation of Sartre's ideas and

literary project. It is still curious that, until now, it has been mainly women who have
been in charge of the task. Of course, Simone de Beauvoir, the Great Sartreuse , as she
came to be called with all the malice of the Parisian cenacles, who did not spare us even
the smallest detail of Sartre's daily life: all his manias, all his movements, his perfect
schedule and even all its physiological miseries of the sad and decadent end. He has
done, as Cohen-Solal observes, "a meticulous and clinical account." In reality, she has
been true to herself: her extensive autobiography is nothing more than an implacable
compilation of diaries kept day by day, hour by hour, where nothing is left out or at least
that overwhelming impression is had when reading it. One would like to think that Sartre
wrote Les mots as a relatively gentle way of teaching him a lesson: Madame, an
autobiography is written like this, not unforgivingly transcribing all the gossip and
anecdotes that happened.
Colette Audry, an old friend of both, also tried 16 the outline of his thought through a
selection of his texts. Not to evoke Iris Murdoch, who dedicated two books to him 17 , in a
certain way advanced from Sartre's biographies. Now, these two, Cohen-Solal and
Boschetti. It is true that Jeanson is the male exception to such matriarchal dominance
over Sartre's life and work. Through his popular little book, Sartre par lui-même , which
is already more than thirty years old, but also through two others, he mixes both timid
biography with a determined hermeneutic task.18 .
The advantages of this biography of Cohen-Solal are several: firstly, the fact that it is
the first post-mortem, thus being able to have the closed cycle of Sartre's existence,
although not of his work, since a strange situation of competition, but of dispute, to see
who publishes the most unpublished works of the philosopher: whether the daughter,
Arlette El Kaim-Sartre, actually executor of Sartre, or the inevitable Beauvoir, the
faithful Castor, who also has a good amount of writings, since Sartre, as is well known,
did not economize when it came to putting his pen to work: " J'ai toujours considéré
l'abondance comme une vertu ," he wrote one day to Simone.

14 Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre , Gallimard, Paris, 1985.

15Anna Boschetti, Sartre et "les Temps Modernes", an intellectual enterprise , Les Éditions de
Minuit, Paris, 1985.
16 Colette Audry, Sartre et la réalité humaine, Seghers, Paris, 1966.
17 Iris Murdoch, Sartre , Collins, London, 1953: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist , Yale University
Press, Yale, USA, 1953.
18 Francis Jeanson, "Un quidam nommé Sartre", which is an appendix to Le problème moral et
lapensae de Sartre , Éditions du Seuil, 1966; Sartre dans sa vie , Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1974.
 Another advantage of Cohen-Solal's book is that he has been able to handle certain
testimonies from people close to Sartre in time; For example, he collected Aron's
testimonies in a timely manner, and also held various interviews that, until now, no one
had ever achieved (another notable example, Dolores Vanetti, the famous M. of Sartre's
enthusiastic trip to the United States, even in the middle of the war). Not to mention
testimonies of personalities: Giscard D'Estaing, Gallimard, Moravia. Cohen-Solal has
also been able to verify documents that about Sartre or his family are in archives that are
not easily accessible, such as those of the Nobel Academy in Stockholm, those of the
French Navy, in the Vincennes fort, those of the editions Gallimard and even those of the
FBI, which cover the Departments of Justice, State and the Air Force of the United
States. Such access possibilities are explained by the influence of the original promoter
of Cohen-Solal's book, a New York publisher, who, in combination with Gallimard, was
the one who commissioned the work, with it first appearing in the French edition.
But, even if it is of stature, those would only be the material advantages of Cohen-
Solal's book. The main ones, specific to the work, and fully attributable to the author's
ability, are the power of synthesis, the ease with which she moves between terminology
and philosophical concepts and a certain sense of humor, which translates more than
anything into a separation and aspect of the consecrated figure of Sartre, in such a way
that it creates enough distance to be able to achieve a dispassionate judgment, something
never achieved until now by any of his biographers or commentators, probably because
all of them (Audry, Jeanson, not to mention de Beauvoir) were too attached to the little
great man. In that sense, the story of Sartre's visit to John Huston's country house in
Ireland and the absolute incomprehension that arose between two such different
personalities is simply delightful.
It has been said that Cohen-Solal's Sartre reads like an adventure book and it is true,
but that is its only notable defect. He has insisted too much on the adventures of a life
certainly rich in vicissitudes and events, but by choosing to highlight these, one has the
impression, probably false, that Sartre's entire life was nothing but a continuous mundane
agitation, a series of extraordinary events. , a swing between his many loves and his
numerous controversies and political and cultural commitments. A well-filled hero's life.
And it is no less explanatory of this vision that Cohen-Solal has chosen the symbol of
Pardaillan, the character in Sartre's children's readings, to use as a continuous reference
to his inexhaustible literary work. There is no doubt that Sartre was a combative being
and launched towards the search for glory, as he himself has confessed in Les mots . But
it is worth not forgetting that he achieved notoriety, and not a small one, relatively early,
at the age of 33, and with his first novel ( La Nausée ), which was published in 1938.
And from then on, without stopping publishing and releasing, everything was a
triumphant path, particularly since 1945. Only that would be the least of it: uphill or
easily, it could have been a hero's life and nothing more. Because we must not forget that
this hero is a thinker of stature and a writer of great inspiration and none of that is
achieved overnight or by dedicating himself to giving interviews, meeting beautiful
women and traveling halfway around the world. There is a dark, hidden Sartre, an
irrepressible worker, who is the one who explains and feeds the public and brilliant
Sartre. Without the Sartre normalien , without that rigor that is acquired (or was
acquired) in that impressive factory of teachers that was the École Normale Supérieure,
where only the first year was dedicated to "getting one's way", that is, to filling the page
after page of random copies, in order to train, acquire muscles and be able to withstand
the very long written exams, which lasted at least eight hours; Without that Sartre
bûcheur , hardworking, tenacious, little ant, the other Sartre would not have existed, the
heroic and exterior Sartre that has so attracted Cohen-Solal. Sometimes, she seems to
realize that there is also that Sartre, the machine, as she describes him, working at full
speed when they let him (maximum example: the drôle de guerre , which made him
happy, since he only wrote), but in general passes by him without enough insistence. To
give just one example: he tells us about Sartre's well-known addiction to stimulants
(amphetamines) in order to speed up his work. But he doesn't tell us what the price he
had to pay for living both lives: you can't be famous and hardworking with impunity;
time is not enough. On another occasion, Cohen-Solal reveals a little-known aspect of
Sartre's youth: his dedication to boxing; He trained for hours exercising and developing
the muscles of his arms and chest and even participated in some amateur combat. But it
would have been worth investigating a little more: it is very possible that behind that
momentary dedication to sport, and therefore to the cult of the body, of contingency,
incomprehensible to the mentalist philosopher who was actually Sartre, there was a
resource found. material to increase their work power, their material writing capacity.
Sartre did not write with a typewriter, but by hand, and that is tiring; hence, first, the rue
d'Ulm training ( se faire la main ) and, then, the desire for boxing. It didn't stitch without
a thread. And Sartre's thread was always the same: write, write, because the day he didn't
write the tattoo would catch on, which, as he has not stopped telling us, was branded with
fire. Of course, access to this Sartre is very difficult and perhaps impossible; first,
because it was part of his way of being that he took to the grave and, second, because
those close to him tend to highlight the other aspects, the results, the controversial
personality, the coffee man and not the man in the study, although many times one and
the other coincided.
That Sartre was a true homme à femmes is something we began to know through the
Letters to the Beaver and the Carnets de la drôle de guerre , intimate writings published
after his death; Now, Cohen-Solal has discovered more of Sartre's intense love life and
has revealed certain names (such as that of the beautiful Russian guide, Lena Zonina),
although, for reasons of understandable contemporary discretion, he still conceals others.
And the parallel that could be established at this point between the two great thinkers of
the century, otherwise so separated in their philosophical conceptions, does not fail to
draw attention: Sartre and Russell. Both "consumed" (if feminists allow the brutal term) a
large number of lovers. There is a letter from Russell, from 1948 (therefore, when she
was already 76 years old), addressed to a student who, apparently, had expressed her
admiration somewhat impulsively, in which Lord Russell warns her that he is willing to
go as far as the ultimate consequences in that relationship. Sartre also collected female
students. And actresses and friends of their friends, starting with Beauvoir, and sisters of
their previous lovers, until they formed, although not only with them, a strange "family",
half harem, half limited partnership. And even exalting one of those student-lovers to the
role of adopted daughter, with which she could see her fantasy of incest realized, exalted
in The Kidnapped of Altona and confessed in Les mots . The fact that Sartre, that Russell,
that such literary prolific, creative men have had such an intense love life does not seem
to fit very well with that simplistic explanation of the sublimation of the libido through
art and literature. On the contrary, the more they loved, the more they produced, and who
knows if it wasn't rather the other way around.
Of course all these loves fit into the famous necessary/contingent relationship that
Sartre presented from the beginning to Simone de Beauvoir, and
which reveals that he was somewhat fond of the elementalism of the heliocentric model,
a la Bohr: the sun surrounded by planets, it does not matter whether it applies to the
atom, to women, or to philosophical systems, since that is what he says in Questions of
method with respect to Marxism (sol, of course), around which all other contemporary
philosophies revolve. However, the thing about some "essential" loves and other
"accessories" seems to have not worked very well, because on more than one occasion,
as Cohen-Solal does not fail to delicately highlight, the Beaver rebelled against some
dangerous "essential" rival. (cases of Olga and Dolores). In turn, all this, so gossipy and
secondary, is framed in the Sartrean category of "transparency", a testament to the
authenticity of conscience, to better combat its natural tendency to self-deception or
exercise of "bad faith." . Thus, in the name of the floozy "transparency", Sartre tells
Beauvoir, in detail, what he had done with this one or that one. And by the way, the
Beaver, by publishing those very personal letters without any shame, has allowed the
whole world to find out. It is not of great importance, since, seen clearly, this
transparency of Sartre fits perfectly into the French "life": from Descartes, who begins
with some confessions, to the Jouhandeau couple who we had to endure the short story of
their very boring fights, The French do not stop showing off without any shame.
Literature of diaries, of confessions, of sincerities, of exposition of the inner life. Or at
least that's what it seems to those of us who belong to a very different "life", in which
modesty, modesty and even secrecy are part of our way of being and our tradition. That if
the emblematic French reference is the Cartesian confessions, ours, contemporary with
that, begins with a deliberate exercise of biographical amnesia: "...whose name I do not
want to remember."

Literary Sartre

It was known by his own confession that he always wanted to be a writer, preferably a
novelist. Therefore, the timid children's essays, first, youthful, then ( L'Ange du Morbide,
Jésus la Chouette, Légende de la Vérité ), and with that intention he prepared, first, at the
Henri IV high school and at the Louis-le -Grand and then in the ENS At that time, around
the age of twenty, he suffered the influence of Bergson, the fashionable philosopher at
the time, the darling of the general public, the star of the Collège de France; The other
great patron of French philosophy was Brunschvicg, who reigned undisputed at the
Sorbonne. "To make his life an aesthetic creation," such was Sartre's original plan: to live
his life like a novel. It was Bergson who gave him support material to get to know
himself, to begin to master the psychological plane, to "anchor his philosophy in his own
inner experience," as Cohen-Solal points out. In this way, we are in the presence of
another "realism", as if the series that literature has suffered since the 19th century were
inexhaustible: Sartre's would be a "psychological realism", one that conceptualizes his
inner experience. For that reason and only for that reason, he studies philosophy, but it is
not surprising that his first preferences are directed towards psychology; hence the study
of Jaspers and his interest in psychopathology, visits to the asylum and the mescaline
experience. Philosophy serves as a means to achieve his goal of being a great writer; He
will do the same later with phenomenology. It is no coincidence that he begins writing a
novel and four or five short stories, since the previously published philosophical works (
L'imagination , La transcendance du Ego ) are considered by Sartre to be academic
exercises in which he settles accounts or with behavioral psychology (Dumas). or with
too narrow a subjectivism in Husserl. His true passion for writing is concentrated in his
novel, so many times remade: Melancholia , which thanks to Gallimard will be called La
Nausea , and, in fact, he lives the first years of the long-suffering teaching in Le Havre
(Bouville) as Antoine Roquentin.
Because Sartre's destiny was marked from the moment he made, with his inseparable
Nizan, the decision not to be a professor; rather, "to be anything but a teacher, to avoid
being a teacher; of not ending his days like that " Jésus la Chouette ", the mediocre and
diminished provincial professor, married to one of the damsels of the region and full of
children: another petit bourgeois of the many who fill this world, that world. Therefore,
his attacks, his practical jokes at the École Normale, his contempt for the director or, as
Cohen-Solal points out, the division established between the Republic of Teachers that
the Republic of Letters faced. Probably before, at home, in the confrontation, first, with
his grandfather Schweitzer and, later, with his stepfather Mancy, the provocative,
disrespectful and subversive Sartre had been born, questioning the bourgeois order, so
well represented in society by the body. academic. Of course, the academic world always
returned the coin whenever they could and treated him with a similar capacity for
rejection; It is enough to read the letter of the collaborationist rector of the Paris
Academy, expurgated by Cohen-Solal, to realize the irreconcilability of both positions;
There the Rector, appointed by the Vichy government, asserts that Le mur et La Nausée ,
the two works published until then by Sartre and which had begun to bring him so much
fame in the world of letters, "no matter how much talent he had, testify, they are not
works that it would be desirable to see a professor write, that is, someone who has souls
in his charge. That M. "Sartre meditates... and may he benefit accordingly for his career
and his existence." Thank goodness he didn't! Of course, Sartre did not need the
protocolary and hollow text of any Rector, neither of Vichy nor of the Republic, to send
the entire teaching staff and their starched customs to hell. In the short time in which, for
pecuniary reasons, he had no choice but to bow to the system and teach in various high
schools, in the provinces and the capital, he distinguished himself for his rebellion, for
his capacity for provocation, for his tendency to disrupt student-teacher relationships, not
respecting established customs, in short, always being a different teacher. Hence, also,
the enormous enthusiasm that he aroused among the majority of his students. It is
something that goes back to May 1968: Sartre was never the type of snotty professor, not
even serious, distant, as, on the contrary, his comrade and friend from L'École Normale,
Raymond Aron, must have been. That is the big difference between the two and not
Hegel or phenomenology or politics: Aron always wanted to be a professor, to bow to the
establishment , to be part of it. Very typical of the assimilated Jew, who takes
assimilation to the extreme, to perfect mimesis. While Sartre abhorred the noble teaching
institution from a very young age and fought against the salauds that represented it: he
was the son of that class and could afford to rebel against it. And he did. And literature
was his means of expressing his displeasure, his disgust, his rejection of those who
conceived life as something serious, full of obligations, norms and values.
But all that is only Sartre's starting point, the reason for his total dedication to
literature, first and, in general, to always writing. Along the way, other factors emerge:
the encounter with the North American novel, the application of certain resources of
phenomenology and the discovery of theater as a more powerful expressive medium.
Cohen-Solal has the merit of having searched for a little-known text by Butor, in which
he remembers having attended in 1944 (autumn: Paris had already been liberated) a
conference by Sartre about "A social technique of the novel" and, as Butor himself
confesses, "it's the first time I heard of Virginia Woolf, Dos Passos, Faulkner...". Even
before that, Sartre's informative task had already begun: in his articles for the Nouvelle
Revue Française , in the years between the publication of Nausea and the occupation of
Paris, Sartre had introduced the great American novelists and had declared his
admiration. literary by them, particularly by the use of narrative time. This is how the
Sartre writer was formed, culminating in Les mots , his masterpiece, and who confesses
to having found " le travail du sens par le style ", which is much more than the
hackneyed "style is the man." Because what Sartre proclaims is the subordination of
meaning (semantic space) to the ordering of words (syntactic space); truth as a function
of beauty; Philosophy at the service of literature.
Such were at least his purposes, his " douce folie ", his strange neurosis, from which he
came to awaken, to be cured, as he declared, only after he was fifty years old. Although
the literary truth is that only in Les mots were such beautiful purposes fulfilled; The
Sartrean paradox, and not the least one, is that, despite all his good intentions as a creator
of beauty, philosophy gets in his way and reverses the relationship: his works (novels and
theater) are the expression of his ideas. , the embodiment of their philosophemes. Forced
in 1972 to explain the relationship between his theater (in particular, Huis clos ) and his
philosophy (specifically, Being and Nothingness ), at the time of publishing the ninth
volume of Situations , he could not be clearer: « Mon gros livre "se racontait sous forme
de petites histoires sans philosophie ." In fact: his metaphysical obsessions, contingency,
freedom, consciousness, never abandon him either when doing philosophy or when doing
literature. Man is a consciousness (therefore, a nothingness, a hole, a void permanently
open and seeking in vain to fill itself) lost in the factual and viscous jungle of the
contingent (of the "ontic", Heidegger would say); or he accepts it and then deprives
himself of his freedom, alienates himself in the world of the practical-inert; or he
exercises his freedom in any way, but always his own, to build another world, always
factual and viscous, but in which relationships, norms, values are invented and created by
man.
Annie Cohen-Solal begins her impressive biography by narrating a recent auction in
the Drouot room, in which, among bibelots , various paintings, Nerval's notes, dedicated
books and old love letters, Sartre's manuscripts begin to be sold ( sic transit ). . Four
years after his death, the dispersion of his relics has already begun. And the saddest thing
is that Sartre is quoted poorly, at low prices; not due to lack of interest but due to excess
supply. Consequences of having been so generous, of having written so much and, above
all, of having given away without rhyme or reason, left and right. Cohen-Solal was
particularly concerned with an old and never published text by Sartre. That novel that he
wrote when he was twenty ( Une défaite ) and that everyone has talked about and very
few have read or even seen. Cohen-Solal finally achieves it and gives us the transcription
of a passage, a few lines that belong to a central story of that unpublished novel, titled,
not originally, "A Fairy Tale." In it, Frédéric is the tutor of two girls from a bourgeois
family, and for the pleasure of his pupils and their mother, whom he sought to seduce, he
invents the fairy tale. It is the story of a prince, "of wonderful intelligence and exquisite
beauty", but cold, impassive and even cruel; Because he did not believe that men had
souls, he lived surrounded by automatons, but one day, the evil prince got lost in a forest.
It is worth translating at least part of the passage that Cohen-Solal has transcribed for us:

The prince saddled his horse and galloped off. Then a horrible thought crossed his
mind: Do all things have a soul? He passed by a meadow in which tall grasses
stirred. «Do the things have...?» What was that shudder that ran through them like a
soul? What dark life speaks in them? At such an idea, he was overcome with infinite
disgust. He spurred the beast, which, frightened, galloped away. The trees, agitated
by the speed, fell on top of him to disappear as if they were paintings... And all
things seemed to live, to live with a dark, hateful life, which caused him trouble, a
life directed towards his life. He believed he was at the center of an immense world
that was spying on him. He felt watched by the streams, by the puddles on the road.
Everything lived, everything thought. And suddenly, he remembered his horse: this
docile beast too... Holding himself with difficulty in the chair, the prince
contemplated those immense, dark beings that he thought he knew so well and that
now seemed to him to be monstrous apparitions: the trees. He started screaming...

Later, says Cohen-Solal, the discoverer of the text, the prince little by little heals: he
gets used to living in a world surrounded by souls. “He becomes a man like others,”
wrote Sartre at the age of twenty. Cohen-Solal is absolutely right: that extraordinary story
is La nausée within the reach of children. What's more: there are in nuce all the
components of Sartre's philosophical literature: not only the nausea at the full existence
of the in-itself, but the possibility of escaping contingency through the freedom of
consciousness. If it is true that Sartre always knew that he was going to be a novelist, it is
no less true that, from his youth, he knew what type of philosophy would feed his writing
imagination.
Cohen-Solal has invented a convenient category to explain the radical changes that
Sartre's thought experienced throughout his life, both in the order of ideas and in that of
action: thinking in cycles: « la logique de la no N contradiction n'avait never is the
sienne, il pensait par cycles, pratiquait la technique du mouvement perpétuel ...». This
"cyclical logic" is a magnificent excuse to understand the violent changes of position that
Sartre's literary or philosophical conception suffered on fundamental issues.
Thus, the great writer, the man destined to possess the world by the magic of his pen,
the novelist permanently encouraged by Beauvoir, who kept recommending that he write
stories instead of wasting time doing philosophy, is the same one who commits a double
attack against literature. First, putting it at the service of the political struggle or, at least,
chaining it to the everyday life of the circumstantial. Finally, denying its value, its
importance in the face of the sad social reality of which this unjust and unequal world is
made up. Committed literature, on the one hand, and that other, so brought and carried
from " En face d'un enfant qui meurt La Nausée ne fait pas le poids ." The first is more
important ("makes more weight") than the second in Sartre's literary conception; The
thing about the child who dies is still an abrupt ex in the face of an exasperating social
situation. But demanding “ engagement ” from literature is something more serious. It is
perfectly expressed in the famous editorial of the first issue of Les Temps Modernes , to
which this "commitment" responds to Sartre's philosophical conception. His horror for
pure subjectivity (his rejection of Proust, finally) and, however, his impotence to escape
from a mentalist and subjectivist philosophy that privileges consciousness required him
to compensate for the metaphysical imbalance in favor of the mind with a permanent
longing for the world, otherness, the concrete, the contingent, the domain of Being.
Remember another no less hackneyed expression: that man is a useless passion. Passion
in the double sense, of passively suffering the harassing presence of things, and of
suffering, as in Christian mythology, the death of one's projects and intentions. Useless,
certainly, because it will never reach the absolute, the fullness, the peace of the in-itself.
He is condemned to the freedom of that hole that is consciousness, not even inert, but
always tending (that is what phenomenology and its notion of "intentionality" served him
for) towards something outside of it, different from it. What is strange, then, that
literature that is built on such a metaphysical scheme requires a permanent
"commitment" to what surrounds it? Well, this commitment does not necessarily have to
be understood in the political or social sense; it is enough to read the philosophical key
that rejects the states of mind, the interiorities of consciousness, the onanism of the happy
subject contained in himself, reified.
Where you see that it is not innocent to do philosophy at the same time as wanting to
be a great writer. Sartre was able to learn from Hemingway and Faulkner and in
Manhattan Transfer certain narrative techniques, but his application was dominated by a
phenomenological metaphysics, in which consciousness, in addition to being
permanently privileged, demands to consume everything that surrounds it, it needs to
"engage", that is, projecting oneself, filling oneself with passing content. Something as
simple as eliminating the narrative subject will be enough so that when consciousness
disappears, the problem of literary "commitment" disappears: this is what the
experimentalist writers of the Nouveau Roman did, for some reason Sartre was quick to
describe it as an "anti-novel." . Proust would probably have used the same term if he had
come to know Nausea .
 sartre philosopher

From a distance, the irony stands out: Sartre, who fled like a scalded cat, like a soul
that has seen the devil, from all determinism, from all mechanism, from everything that
smacked of positivism and scientism, built a type of philosophy perfectly determined by
its cultural environment. What's more: the mere fact of abhorring determinist
philosophies, of having "chosen" a type of anti-determinist philosophy, already
presupposes a certain cultural determinism, just as, in the lesson of Sartre himself, not
choosing is a way of doing so.
By the time the young Sartre received his philosophical training, there was only one
dominant philosophy in France, Cartesian spiritualism in any of its variants. Either
Bergsonian irrational spiritualism or Brunschvicg's rationalist spiritualism: either
philosophy attends to that dark force that is intuition or it limits itself to recording, as in a
warehouse inventory, the stages of consciousness in the history of philosophy.
Everywhere, realm of the subject when establishing knowledge; French philosophy, by
fleeing from Kantian criticism, became what Sartre himself called a "food philosophy",
digestive, swallowing, capable of turning the knowing subject into an immense and
voracious stomach that reduces everything with its powerful ideal juices. ; The world, the
object, the Other, whatever you want to call reality, disappears in the gastric folds of an
overly absorbing consciousness. For those who are obsessed by contingency, by
viscosity, by the concretion of the real, a sleight of hand metaphysics that with a simple
trick made the world disappear and reduced it to intellections and states of consciousness
had to be unbearable. Said simplistically: Being came to fully coincide with
consciousness, the subject swallowed the object, the realm of subjectivity knew no
barriers; as if there had been no Kant or Husserl or, of course, Heidegger. Hence the
clearly revealing title: Being and Nothingness , or what is the same, the total,
overwhelming, massive, impenetrable reality of what is, surrounding the miserable hole,
the helpless nothingness of consciousness. Some journalist well versed in Sartre's work
lacked the courage to title the fact of his death in metaphysical terms: "At last, Nothing
has become Being."
There is no doubt that, if the reason for the predominance of this type of philosophy is
extra-philosophical, we must look for the cause of such subjectivist imperialism in
French nationalism, which exalted Descartes. Worthy heirs of Cartesianism. Between the
two kings , the post-positivist French (and even Comte himself, but that would be another
story) did not hesitate: res cogitans as dominating the extensive. It may sound simple, but
it has the force of consistency: replace res cogitans with néant (or pour-soi ) and res
extenso with être (or en-soi or practico-inerte ) and, from a terminological point of view
at least, all of Sartre is transcribed. Of course, the differences in valuation are missing;
What for Cartesian philosophers was not worth taking into account, outside of
consciousness, for Sartre is precisely the threat that reifies it. Hence his interest in
Heidegger and existential analysis, which reveals the details of the other side, of the
terrain in which consciousness is lost. Even to rebel, to raise the Cartesian anti-system,
the exaltation of the precariousness of what exists, the song of a freedom understood as
failure and condemnation, Sartre was also a tributary of the great spiritualist tradition
characteristic of Cartesianism: for his rejection of science, for its disdain for the
philosophies of language, for its inability to set limits to the problem of knowledge, for
its excessiveness in raising a subjectivist metaphysics. Only now are certain young
French philosophers beginning to emerge from the Cartesian quagmire. Read Pierre
Jacob's revealing Preface to his work Vampirisme logique19 to understand why French
19 Pierre Jacob, L'empirisme logique, ses antécédents, ses critiques , Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 1980.
philosophy has been dominated by what Jacob calls "the repugnance that Darwinism
inspires in French philosophers." More evidence, bordering on the anecdotal: when
Resnais's film Mon oncle d'Amérique was premiered in Paris in 1979, in which Laborit's
behavioral theses and Laborit himself were presented, French critics mocked the film.
The explanation remains the same: the Catholic taboo persists, according to which man is
not an animal nor is his behavior determined by any nature. Between the “free will” with
which all men were generously endowed by God, at the moment of making him king and
lord of creation, and the freedom to which the for-itself is condemned, according to
Sartre, there is no metaphysical distance. . Sartre is the last lay representative of the most
rancid Catholic theology, exalting the primacy of the human subject.
Mention is sometimes made of Sartre's Protestant côté on the side of his mother's
family, the Schweitzers; Perhaps Sartre only had a certain obsessive love for intellectual
work left from Protestantism, but his metaphysical background is magnificently Catholic:
the doctrine of free will versus that of predestination or grace. Or perhaps, to satisfy the
Hegelians of the late Marxism into which Sartre fell, a synthesis of both: because what
we are condemned to be free can be understood as the meeting of the Protestant burden
(condemnation) with the all-embracing freedom of the Catholic. Whatever the case,
Sartre's philosophical anthropology always moved at the upper limits of consciousness,
however understood, and its moral tasks: choosing, being authentic, conferring meaning
on the inert world of the in-itself. Adam in the initial moment of creation would not have
felt more powerful with respect to the world, even though Sartre, as in the tale of the
prince, presents man (Roquentin or Mathieu or Goetz) as a vacillating and trembling hole
of nothingness eternally threatened. by the viscosity and reification of the material world.
In the end, it is man who imposes order, who attributes meaning, who invents and
chooses so that the inert remains at his service. Another proof of his ability to express in
metaphysics the strength and rigor of Christian theodicy.
While Heidegger's philosophy is still much more representative of Protestantism, since
Dasein , in addition to being absolutely predestined ( Sein-zum-Tode ), is at the mercy of
Being and the simply historical fact that it wants to call it , make your voice heard.
Sartre, on the other hand, satisfies Cartesian-Catholic culture by privileging the
cogitating thing over the extended and inert thing: «Je ne suis à l'aise que dans la liberté,
échappant aux objets, échappant à moi-même... Je suis un vrai neant ivre d'orgueil et
translucide... "Aussi est-ce le monde que je veux posséder" he noted in one of his
Carnets de la drôle de guerre . Cohen-Solal, who is already part of the new generation,
has also realized that belonging. For the same reason, when referring to L'être et le
néant , he points out: «Tout y repose, en fait, sur l'idée d'une tension permanent entre
l'être et l'en-soi en d'autres termes, entre la subjectivité et le monde. Déclaration d'absolue
suprématie de la subjectivité sur le monde, L'être et le Néant est une oeuvre
profondément cartésienne ...».
However, despite the undeniable Cartesian and, therefore, spiritualist background,
there is a note of originality in Sartre's positions, if only for the personal fact of having
belonged to that rare species of self-coherent philosophers, of philosophers who coincide
their life with its philosophy; to preach, as they say, by example. Furthermore, on top of
that phenomenological Cartesianism of Being and Nothingness, two attempts at grafting
were presented, with unequal success: the Heideggerian influence and Marxism; in
particular, the latter acted as a foreign body in Sartre's original system.
There are philosophers who make their life coincide with their philosophy, since
Diogenes of the barrel, so as not to go back to Socrates. They are—they have to be—the
moralist philosophers, with their center of concern in man, from the Stoics to Sartre;
philosophers of the bacular species, for whom philosophy is not only a cane, orthopedics
or support, but a saving recipe: reason for being. On the other hand, it would be absurd
and meaningless to demand that a Russell live according to the theses of logical atomism.
The fact attested by the anecdote that Kant had a reputation for being moderate and
routine does not necessarily have to do with the critical, demarcative approach of his
philosophy. That, if this were the case, Hume, a skeptical philosopher if ever there was
one, would have had to live practically with his back to the world, when in fact he led a
rather mundane, rather hedonistic existence.
The curious thing is that Sartre was not going to be a philosopher, but rather a writer,
so the doubt will always remain as to whether his character, his way of being, was what
determined the type of philosophy that, in the long run, he professed, or whether, On the
contrary, once the system and even the language or jargon in which it was inscribed were
lifted, it became attached to both as a form of existential confirmation. This point is not
trivial: the fact that Sartre alive repeats to a large extent the actions of that Roquentin of
Bouville-Le-Havre, that he never wanted to own anything, that he lived at the drop of a
hat, with few or no books, without other emotional ties than those of the strange, artificial
and variable family that was added to him over the years, more due to the attraction that
others felt for him than out of his own need, configure that heroic conception of
existence, exalting the subject and rejector of the environment on which a central
anthropological philosophy is built and justified. Cohen-Solal goes so far as to speak of
Sartre's "megalomania", thereby expressing that he was only really attending to one
dialogue: his own with himself.
Thus one has the impression that, from the outset, Sartre already had his own baggage
to construct a closed and sufficient system. It is known that, however, phenomenology
represented a kind of revelation in his training that led him to delve deeper into Husserl's
work. But be careful: from phenomenology you will only take what is convenient for
you, the category of "intentionality", which bases the preponderant role of consciousness,
and the love for "things themselves", which will serve as an alibi to penetrate the
harshness , in the otherness of the world. And, of course, the rejection of the empirical, of
the scientific contribution, of the observational work that only yields heterogeneous and
disconnected results (always understood the same: lacking an organizing center, subject-
consciousness, owner of its ability to choose).
Before the war and the immediate post-war period opened Sartre's eyes to the social
and historical environment, Heidegger, as he himself confesses, introduced him to
"historicity": " Savoir où je suis ne prend de sens qu 'From now on,' he muses while
reading Sein und Zeit . Heidegger thus acts as a catalyst that accelerates the process that,
in any case, was already taking place due to the force of circumstances. As he got used to
saying, in another jargon, no less popular and imprecise: Sartre became historically and
socially conscious, and Heidegger was no stranger to that aggregate of his consciousness,
until then solitary and haughty. And that is where the relationship with Marxism comes
into play. The difficult relationship with Marxism.
Not because Sartre spent his time fighting and reconciling with the communists; not
because the French CP was especially unskillful, dogmatic, unruly and lacking in tact
(which it was, above all, compared to the Italian); not because Sartre sought to sincerely
participate in political action as a way of accepting his relationship with the world. All
this is anecdotal and Cohen-Solal does not fail to inform us punctually from the first
attempts, with the clandestine group " Socialisme et liberté ", which inspired so much
distrust in the communists, until the adventure of the RDR and the most serious and risky
adventures of the Jeanson réseau during the Algerian war. Until culminating in the sad
buffoonery of recent years, completely surrendered to the infantile and not always well-
intentioned manipulations of the "Maos." But there is a doctrinal aspect that Cohen-Solal
does not delve into: the reason for Sartre's philosophical failure with Marxism, of which
that enormous work called Critique of Dialectical Reason is a monumental testimony.
 Sartre was destined not to come to terms with a doctrine like Marxism, with rigidly
deterministic claims and approaches and openly scientificist assumptions. What Sartre
called the "sclerosis" of Marxism is true Marxism, real Marxism, and when he
complained bitterly that Marxism sought to dissolve man in a bath of sulfuric acid, he
was putting his finger on the sore spot: for a philosopher of existence that, like
Kierkegaard compared to Hegel, seeks to save the individual from the absorbing and all-
explanatory clutches of the system, an integrative and totalizing doctrine, as Marxism
always is, is the end of the road. It would be foolish to try to present Sartre as ignorant of
such a contradiction, but precisely from there, from his knowledge of the problem and
useless attempt to overcome it, his anguishing work of the Critique begins, from the
outset doomed to the most resounding failure: attempting to provide an existential
foundation. to Marxist anthropology is as much as wanting to marry water with fire. It is
not strange that, since then, he called every political failure, alone or with the
communists, a "clash with the concrete." If Daniel, Lucien and so many other anti-heroes
of Sartre's literature are characterized by that resource of the mauvaise foi , which leads
consciousness to seek the reification of the in-itself, to surrender, so to speak, to the
world, to treat of being a fixed and stable essence, instead of this uncomfortable and
vacillating absence of being that is consciousness, always open nothing, the irony of the
case is that Sartre also fell into the trap and, through Marxism, desperately sought to
embrace the in-itself through its struggle with the practical-inert, another name for the
world, for Being, for the opposite of the solitary subjectivity of existing ones.
Anna Boschetti prefers to speak of Sartrean "prophetism", a position that begins to
manifest itself after the creation of Les Temps Modernes . Sartre is the prophet who starts
from a language and the mastery of a key: we are surrounded by viscous matter and, as
free consciences, condemned to assume and exercise full responsibility for our freedom,
we can only fight firmly, willing to suffer, such is our fate, failure after failure. When this
apocalyptic, pessimistic "prophetism" encounters the other, with the messianic and
optimistic prophecy of Marxism, and gives in (or seems to give in) to it, Sartre's tracks
are erased, he loses his orientation, and begins to wander south. place , to turn on itself,
to desperately try to find a center in which to settle. But he had left that center behind, in
the theses never renounced, never surpassed, never abandoned of Being and
Nothingness , that enormous project to take over the world from the Cogito, in the best
Cartesian tradition. While Marx's work was always a master plan to decipher the world
and man from what is hidden, from what is underlying, in the purest cabalistic tradition,
as Hannah Arendt has well shown. The philosophical contrast was insurmountable. How
could the same Sartre who abhorred the world, who reached the sensation of
metaphysical nausea with things, be able to commune with the materialism, vulgar or
dialectical, always pantheistic, of Marxism?
The melancholic ending of Les mots is not so metaphorical: "For more or less ten years
(just the time of surrender to Marxism), I have been a man who wakes up, cured of a
long, bitter and quiet madness, and who does not return." to relapse or stop remembering
without laughing his previous ravings and that he no longer knows what to do with his
life..."
What he did was "relapse": existentially analyze Flaubert and, without completing that
work either, languish in physiological disaster, between two madnesses, his own,
recovered through Flaubert's existential reconstruction, and that of the "Maos." , “in the
shadow of the tower,” as Cohen-Solal likes to put it.
 game theory
Lévi-Strauss includes in his Pensee sauvage , the custom of a tribe from New Guinea,
the Gahuku-Gama, whom the whites taught to play soccer; In fact, they play it, but with
a certain variation; They play as many games as necessary for several days in a row to
exactly balance the wins and losses of each side. They thus transform what should be
mere play into a ritual act, through which they repeat their balanced vision of the
universe. But isn't that exactly what happens in "civilized" football games?
The notion of play is more metaphysical than real; It has served to try to explain many
things: the origin of the State, as Ortega intended; artistic forms, as Caillois analyzed, or
even the entire social activity of man, as Huizinga insisted on seeing it. But define it
however you want, the fact is that, in practice, every game is reduced to competition, that
is, to fighting, that is, to that way of being so essential that is human aggressiveness.
Maybe that's why boxing remains so popular. First, because it has very little of a "game",
except for a minimum of rules that limit it to a space, a time, a weight and some
punishment areas; but, above all, because instead of "playing", that is, recreating another
world apart from the real one, the boxing "players", reduced to a minimum (one per
side), what they do is only fight: they reproduce the most elemental and primary of
human behaviors. Instead of a game, boxing is a direct social expression, a fundamental
way of life: trying to kill others.

I play as mimesis

The games themselves are more complex and require satisfying the condition of being
a "representation", an "imitation" of something. Think of chess, which imitates the world
of war, and each piece has a direct military reference. Each type of collective game can
be translated into a more complex social language. In football, we talk about rearguard,
attackers and defense; In baseball, players dedicate themselves to stealing or buying, in
addition to creating a gestural language that the opponent tries to decipher; Just as in
football there is a sacred redoubt that is defended at all costs so that it is not violated by
the penetration of the opponent, in baseball one is torn away from a home or house, to
which one must return, after a race through the outside world. , traveling through
obligatory stages, like someone traveling through strange countries or overcoming untold
difficulties. In general, games that require collective participation are the closest to the
definition of recreation of another reality, even though this is always done through a
mimetic resource. While non-collective sports, reduced to the minimum number of
participants (not only boxing, but also tennis, when it is individual), only reproduce the
basic relationship of direct human contests; Their language, then, is closer to everyday
and elemental reality: if in tennis there is a metaphorical "sudden death", in addition to
"mates" and "crushes", in boxing, very often, crushes and deaths They are brutally real.
In 1977, an American film ( Rollerball , by Jewison) prophesied a future, not too distant,
in which the favorite game of the crowds is a sport, a mixture of others (skating, rugby,
wrestling, boxing), in which not only It is not allowed to kill, but that is precisely the
objective of the "game."

Game as spectacle

But the most curious thing is that the sports that should properly conform to the
definition of a game do everything possible to distance themselves from it and regain
contact with the social reality from which they left and tried to distance themselves. Let
us momentarily accept that, in effect, play is, as Caillois wants, a "marginal universe
outside of reality." It is that legend that the Greeks suspended all activity, including war,
to concentrate only on the Olympics. Let's suppose that this was the case and that they
only "played", that is, that they did not continue to wage war in another way and with
other more direct means. But such purely playful behavior is not what corresponds to
contemporary shows. Let's ignore the players, the athletes, the directly participating
athletes; If they acted alone, that is, without an audience watching them, they would only
prepare their behavior (as in training or rehearsal) for another more important moment:
when what they do becomes a spectacle and the isolated game becomes a shared game
and judged by spectators.
The purpose of every recreational activity has always been to offer itself as a
spectacle; Perhaps the origin of everything is the behavior of the males strutting in front
of the females so that they, in view of the different excellences and through the
comparative resource, can choose sexual partners . In any case, there is no game without
an audience; Proof that the public is essential to the spectacle is that when, for whatever
reason, sporting events have had to be held behind closed doors, that is, without an
audience, not only has the quality of the competition declined, but at a certain point it has
lost its meaning. Even so, it is possible to conceive (and in fact, it has happened more
than once) that a football match, for example, be held without an audience. First of all, it
is false that it is really without an audience; someone sees it; Even if they are the trainers
and reserves of both teams. Furthermore, the collective competition of two teams, with
or without an audience, produces a result that allows the match to be classified: someone
wins or no one wins. On the other hand, try to imagine for a moment a bullfight without
an audience: impossible, it would not make the slightest sense. First, because a bullfight
is not a game that has to produce results, since it is always the same, because even
assuming the exceptional death of the bullfighter, this is never the final result of the
bullfight. Second, because who participates in the game of bulls, as much as the
bullfighter, is the public; Better said, the bullfighter acts to be contemplated, appreciated
and judged by an audience, which is not going to see results but to consider details of the
performance, to taste and compare "plays." And to do this, in addition to being there, you
have to "know about bulls", be understood, as they say; That is, he has to participate with
the same emotional and mental intensity as the bullfighter, although, of course, with less
risk than the latter.

I play like, falsehood

So: there is no game without an audience. But the real public is never actually going to
see the game play, but rather they are going to see their team win and, sometimes, not
even that: they are going to see the other team lose. This is what makes the difference
between bullfighting and any other sporting competition; In bullfights, in principle, the
public goes to see the spectacle itself, since they know that the result is always the same.
Of course, there can also be introduced the aberrant factor of going just to prefer one
bullfighter to another and then attending with the sole intention of hailing the triumph of
the favorite or protesting the failure of the rival.
So every game, as a recreation of a separate universe, is a falsehood: because what it
reproduces does not remain separate, but is colored and mixed with all the passions and
interests that come from the external and everyday world, from which precisely the The
game, as a game, sought to escape with its festive and autonomous representation. Thus,
the falsity of every game is twofold: not only because it continues to reproduce the social
behavior of each group, but because this reproduction is sterile, it leaves no benefit, it
exhausts itself, it dies at the end of the game. Go back to the war analogy to understand it
better. If sport is the continuation of war by other means, it is a war that leaves no profit,
that leads nowhere, that does not aim at any real conquest. The country that wins a real
war, wins something: either territory or raw materials or power. But the team that wins a
championship wins nothing from the point of view of the spectator, who is the one who
has transferred their collective passions to the show. That athletes earn money only
proves that, in the social game of confrontation and rivalries, they play the role of
mercenaries of the ancient armies. One of the great advances (?) of Western civilization
has consisted of conditioning human beings to fight for free in battles whose interests
transcend them. It is an advance of the same nature as that of wage earners compared to
slaves: in fact, a slave was much freer than a proletarian, from the moment in which the
work he did was done against his will, which was never alienated. . It was necessary for
society to take control of the will of the workers so that slavery could change into wage
labor. In the same way, mercenary soldiers had freedom of contract, while modern
patriotic soldiers, from the different services or military conscriptions, do not have it:
they are obliged to fight and also for free, because since they do it for the country, no one
He is going to pay them, except, of course, the grateful country. Well, football (or
baseball or basketball) players are freely hired as the mercenaries that they are and fight
with the limited enthusiasm of any professional: they perform a job, like the actor who
performs his role in the theater. Who are, then, in modern sports, the patriots who have to
fight for free, just for the love of their colors? They are the spectators, who, in addition to
paying to attend, add the passionate note of the real battle. With this, the center of
interest of the game has moved from the field of spectacle to the stands and stands of the
stadiums. The game of football (or baseball, etc.) is a game that is actually truly played
off the field, in the spectator stands. And, in fact, more than once it has been like that,
with all the tragic realism. Suffice it to remember the terrible case of the Belgian
stadium, with a small war to the death between the Italians and the English and supposed
neutrals intervening. If it had been an accident (a wall collapsing, a fire breaking out), it
would not merit further comment; If it is talked about, it is because it only adjusts to the
reality of the game carried out directly and with all the participatory passion outside the
field improperly called a game.

Loss of identity

That participant who is so active and so poorly or not at all paid, who is the spectator
(for something called, without any shame, "fanatic" or "feverish", which is what a
typhoid turns out to be), suffers a transmutation of his personality as soon as he enters. to
the sacred place where the ceremony of the religious contest will take place. He
immediately abandons his individuality to become serialized, to integrate into the group
with which he has just merged. He then strips himself of his individual soul to assume
for a certain time a kind of Aristotelian collective soul of the group to which he belongs
or with which he participates in the game. Furthermore, he loses his particular identity
(lawyer, worker, married, etc.) to acquire the common identity of the fanatic, that is, the
officiating member of a special ceremony that, in the best of cases, takes the form of a
party or carnival and, at worst, a settlement of accounts with members of the enemy
tribe, whom he confronts on the spot . Someone will remember that that is what the
Romans did in the circus. Not exactly: the ferocity was below, in the arena, while the
spectators quenched their thirst for theirs through the spectacle offered to them; they had
no need to exercise ferocity against each other. From which it could be inferred that what
has been gained on the one hand has been compensated on the other: now the sporting
arenas do not usually get bloody (aside from occasional accidents), because the ferocity
has moved to the top: the Roman circus continues, but in the stands of modern stadiums.
The essential aspects of collective behavior remain unchanged. And one of the most
essential is aggressiveness: periodically, the human animal kills for the pleasure of
killing, no matter how much it covers it with pretexts, religions or ideologies; If he does
not kill with his own hands (burning of witches, pogroms of Jews, lynchings of blacks),
he does so through an intermediary: through the hands (or feet) of others, of the players,
on whom he projects a good part of its constitutive aggressiveness.

Soccer specificity

Of course, everything said so far is not specific to football, but rather characteristic of
any act that is called a "game", whether it is sports or not. Football, in addition to
participating in all the aforementioned features, has other specific ones, which do not lie
in the materiality of its rules. It would be a mistake to reduce the difference between
similar games, such as football, baseball and basketball (to name only three collective
and competitive games), to the difference between their respective rules. They present
deeper aspects that, ultimately, make the real difference.
Basically, they are all distinguished by the different conceptions and different uses
they make of the time factor.
In football (it is understood that here, at all times we are talking about the European
modality, corresponding to what North Americans call soccer ), the time factor, in
addition to being taken into account, exists for the game, is taken into account from the
the same way as it is done in everyday reality: time passes for the football game in the
same way as it passes in and for the lives of the spectators. The internal time of the
soccer game coincides, then, with the external or real time.
In contrast, time does not even exist in baseball, it has been eliminated by not taking it
into account, in such a way that baseball is a timeless game, a sport for which time does
not pass: it is something that remains on the other side. of the stadium, thus creating a
kind of magical space in which only pure play exists, located outside of time.
While, as with football, time also exists in basketball, which means that it is taken into
account for the purposes of the game; It is not a timeless game, like baseball is. But in
basketball the use of time is not real, but perfectly unreal; there time is estimated like a
rubber band, distributed at will, cut into slices as thin as one wants and can; It stops
being what time really is, a continuum , the flowing river, to become a segmented string
of discrete units, of different lengths. In basketball, the poet's wish is fulfilled ("O time,
stop your flight..."), because, in effect, time stops, over and over again, since the action
of the game can be suspended as many times as necessary. and, by doing so, the passage
of time is also suspended, within the game and for its effects.

(American football, European rugby , is a kind of basketball time applied to soccer: it

can be divided into segmented units, while hockey, in any of its modalities, presents the
same type of internal time as soccer, continuous with the single break of rest or breaks;
volleyball returns to recover the type of fragmented time, typical of basketball.)
From there, from these different uses (and, of course, different conceptions) of time,
the substantive, fundamental differences between all these games are derived.
Perhaps this is the explanation why football is probably the most passionate sport, as a
spectacle, and attracts the most crowds around the world. Because the time that is played
is real, a double tension is generated: that of the game itself and its incidents and that of
the fight that is established against the passage of time; The second is the important one.
All games generate tension, all are agonizing, in all of them two rivals fight, but if in
some there is more tension than in others, this can only be because there is an added
tension, that of time, which is what really affects players and spectators. If the game, as
is the case of football, is subject to the relentless passage of time, not only those who
participate in it in one way or another feel that the game is developing, as they say,
"against the clock", but, When this happens, due to the fact that it is being carried out
under the sign of the real temporal process, the game then becomes part of existence.
It is known that human existence is the only one that is aware of being affected by
time. Animals live like men only in appearance; In reality, they live more like plants:
unaware of the passing of time, dragging them towards the inexorable end. From the
moment man knew that his existence was something limited, he began to live it
agonizingly, he began to live "against the clock." He knows that his life is a brief passage
that inevitably heads to the same place for everyone: death. That invisible, but very real,
presence of death is what affects everything that develops under the sign of temporality.
A soccer game is more distressing and dramatic than any other game because, in it,
time runs parallel to the time of human existence. The passion generated by football has
its roots in the hidden presence of death, which presides over all human acts, every time
those acts are measured with the passage of time. Hence those anguish at the end of a
soccer game; Hence, also, that tension release when something helps eliminate time
pressure (for example, a great goal difference, practically impossible to overcome).
Contrast proof of this is provided by those spectators who, when this happens, that is,
when, out of the certainty that the result is already settled, they begin to file before the
match ends: there is nothing more to see, because time has already passed. stopped
weighing overwhelmingly about the outcome of the game. In reality, strictly speaking,
until the final whistle of the referee who directs the match, there is always "more to see",
but that attitude only proves that the essential interest of the spectator, more than the
game, is the result, and however This is conditioned by the time factor, once it is clear
that interest disappears, and the viewer feels that they must leave. Then, real time, the
life of each spectator and that of everyone, regains its power and autonomy: everyone
suddenly has something to do, they have to go home, pick up their wife, they have to at
least think about going out. soon from the quagmire of cars parked around the gigantic
stadium. The real time of the encounter has disappeared and only the no less threatening
and no less real time of existence remains; Only with this, man has other resources to
fight or, at least, forget about it.
Impurity and unreality of games

So saying that games lose their purity when reality is bastardly introduced into them,
in the form of political passions, for example, or commercial or propaganda interests, or
mere regional rivalries, is still a deviation. rhetoric of the authentic alteration that the
supposed ludic purity experiences.
There is no such thing as a pure game, isolated from the context, since everyone, in
one way or another, is subject to the time factor; Time is in everyone, present or absent.
If the first, that presence is already sufficient proof of penetration of the external world;
If it is absent, as in the case of baseball, this only means that the intrusion of reality has
been carried out prior to the game, and has been carried out by man, creator of games
and game variants, through the maneuver of artificially concealing time. With which it
has been chosen to shift the tension of the game to other areas.
In this same order of ideas, it could be accepted that the exalted defenders of baseball
are right when they maintain that this is more of a game than football. It is more of a
game, in effect, not because it contains more complex combinations and more open
variants of moves in its combinatorics, but because it has previously been unloaded from
the tensional load of time, leaving it just a game. In it, the invasion of reality is carried
out through other channels (nationalism, regionalism, favoritism, betting, etc.) and
affects the game in the same way as it does in all the others. But the baseball spectator
does not have to get out of his seat until the last moment, which is actually the last play,
since time does not count for anything in the result; For this reason, once the result has
been decided, the winning team does not need to waste time developing a series of plays,
although legitimate by rules, absolutely useless for the purposes of the result.
But, for the same reason, the fanatical defenders of football are also right when they
affirm that theirs is a more exciting and passionate game: reality has burst into it with the
deadliest of its weapons, the unappealable presence of the passage of time, that subjects
everything to the anguish of a resolution permanently limited by that horizon that is there
and no one can suppress.
There is a very different game that is related in this aspect to football, and it is chess.
Differences aside, also in chess there is real time pressure. Only the type of tension that
is created is not so great, since, in practice, this pressure, in addition to being limited to
the first plays, manifests itself discontinuously, with suspension of the passage of time
that one player or another plays. ; Furthermore, after a certain number of moves, the time
that players usually have is so great that it is equivalent to no time: as if they played
without thinking about it. On the other hand, in chess the tension that may be caused by
the coercion of the time factor only affects the players; the possible spectators do not feel
it, they are alien to it, while the spectators of a football match participate in the same
tension that those who directly play suffer and by their massive presence they feed back
the tension of the players, then producing that particular emotion that They usually have
the big football matches.
The curious thing is that, while time affects the nature of the game and determines its
specificity (football is what it is; baseball is what it is, etc., due to the use they make of
time), it also serves to create a emptiness, an isolation, typical of every game with
respect to the surrounding reality. It is the unreal character of every game: an
exceptional, festive situation, stolen from time, in which men forget their daily lives and
surrender to a different, purely artificial relationship; Through games, men experience a
truly creative, truly poetic relationship. Because each game is a creation from nothing, a
gratuitous and free act, something that did not have to exist in the world and that the
human imagination has introduced into it like a foreign body, only to be able, through it,
to isolate itself by a time of the real context. That is to say, if in games one can speak of
a use of time, that time is as artificial as the game itself and, consequently, internal to the
game. Outside, the other, outside time, continues to run and act. Games create a
parenthesis that, on the one hand, serves to isolate from real time and, on the other, to
recreate it within the parenthesis, with different modalities. The interior time, that of the
parenthesis, is what allows games to be profoundly differentiated from each other. But
all of them, as parentheses, play the same thing: to isolate themselves from real time, to
give man a break that momentarily takes him out of the world and introduces him into
that curious world of rival tensions that all games are.
Since it seems that this is something that men like, they tend to get addicted to it and
then proceed to adopt resources to prolong the parenthesis. Instead of a single, escotero
game, they create a temporary succession of games, in the form of Leagues,
Championships and, in general, tournaments of all kinds and diversity of participants. It
is a playful reinforcement to make the game time longer and, in this way, isolate yourself
a little more from the executioner who awaits us all at the end of the road, the "executive
collector of Death", as Quevedo called him.
In such a way that football, for example, not only lasts ninety minutes, but it lasts an
entire season of many months and every so many years that season is also extended by
another extraordinary one, by an exceptional orgy, a super season in which they
participate. teams from different nations. Of course, in the latter case, the bastardization
of the game due to the intrusion of reality becomes unbearable: in the World
Championships, spectators are unlikely to see the game played or appreciate techniques
and variants; They are basically going to see their team win. It is the most explosive of
mixtures: nationalism, which is increasingly stronger than the socialists of the 19th
century, plus the tensional passion of football.
Add to such an analysis the communication factor and its increase in recent years. The
triumphs in the Greek Olympics were only "communicated" through the paean songs of
the vates who celebrated certain feats or athletes; The sporting events of our time are
seen directly by hundreds of millions of spectators, practically spread throughout the
world. When, in a World Championship not many years ago, Italy was eliminated by
another team, Italian television viewers reacted angrily, releasing their accumulated
tension on the television sets themselves. Such events are an excellent commercial
opportunity and there is no reason to think about the innocence of the big factories and
brands: they are behind the game, adding a new factor of adulteration to the mythical
purity of the sport. Furthermore, the fact that television viewers are not present on the
playing field is no guarantee of the absence of tension. Rather, there could be an increase
in it, from the moment in which the incidents of the game acquire a redundant
communicational character, and doubly so: because certain plays are repeated and
because there is always a narrator who describes and comments on them and, of course,
alters The tension load of the distant spectator, the television viewer, is greater precisely
because he receives the image of the game doubly distorted.
All of the above justifies that the English maintain that their national game par
excellence (which is not football, but cricket), more than a game, is an institution.
It is the same thing that Catalans usually say about their regional team when they say that
Barça is more than a club.
Well seen, every game is more than a game: it is an imitation, better or worse, of the
only other game that we have to play without appeal. Only this one, the real one, is tragic
because of what Beckett observed: "There is no return game between man and his
destiny."
The school of suspicion
New controversial essays
 Praying to God
What a world this is: even religion has been infected by politics. Meetings are also
organized at the "summit" by the gurus of the various sects that afflicted humanity
enjoys, for their solace and consolation. Only they have better taste than the leaders of
the two Empires that rule us. Instead of going to the inhospitable and unpopulated
Iceland, the many hierophants, undoubtedly illuminated by so many powerful divinities,
choose the city of pink stone, the Assisi of silence and birds, full of flowery balconies, at
the foot of Mount Subasio. Thus, anyone prays.
There is always, of course, an excuse to meet. These say that they are going to pray
together for peace. Understand: together, although not mixed. Each one prays with his or
her little book. Goodness. Because there is nothing more ridiculous and annoying than
those common prayer books that gringos have commercially devised to use in their
hospitals and to please all (almost all) of their patients. It's like taking a common factor
from religions: they are left with half a dozen vaguenesses. Deep down, who can deny
that this is the true religious book.
Although there are quite a few kilometers between both cities, this prayer meeting at
the summit of Assisi smells like something of a trip to Canosa. Why didn't they go to
pray in Tibet or Mecca or Jerusalem, taking advantage of the tranquility and security that
reigns in this most sacred city? That "the others" have agreed to go to Italy is still a
political triumph for the Polish Pope. It doesn't matter what they pray: with just the trip,
Rome wins.
Are you going to pray for peace? Strange, very strange in some religions. "I came to
bring war, not peace..." says the Christ somewhere. And by faith your Holy Church has
followed it to the letter in its two thousand years of existence. Nor are Mohammedans
fervent pacifists. For the true believer in Allah, war is supposed to be something holy,
which serves as the key to gaining Paradise. Let's not talk about the Buddhists, who don't
care eight or eighty: war or peace are just turns of the immense wheel of destiny and,
ultimately, everything points to Nothingness. So, if you analyze a little, that prayer for
peace is another proof of the eminently political nature of that meeting of healers. The
peace thing is a pretext.
It will not be the first time that the wise men come from the East. That now they come
to pray and before they came to worship only proves the devaluation of beliefs along
with the persistence of customs. Of course: that once again they come from distant lands,
in peace, could become a sign of democratic tolerance between religions. The detail to
keep in mind is that tolerance in religious matters is limited to respecting the religion of
one's neighbor in the way one usually respects one's neighbor's belief that his wife is
beautiful and his children are geniuses. Politely. That everyone has the ritual of prayer in
common only demonstrates the strength of the imagination in humans. Turgenev already
said that when they pray, everyone asks for the same miracle: "My God, make two plus
two not four." Pity. It has been forty years since Orwell showed what happens when that
miracle is fulfilled on earth.
Let us trust that the prayers for peace by so many gathered saints are a little more
fervent and sincere than those of Mr. Reagan and Comrade Gorbachev. However, there
is a good chance that, the day after so much Babel prayer, the temperature of the world
will remain the same. Of course: you will have seen a beautiful circus, with a very
skilled master of ceremonies and results, in the end, as meager as ever.
For some reason, those of us of the old Hispanic strain prefer to listen to the good
Sancho: "A jump from the bush is better than a prayer from good men."
 science without god
Who is the daring one who still doubts the existence of God? That was fine in the time
of Roscelin, Abelard and other medieval disputants who spent their lives arguing
whether it exists or not. The last word did not belong to Kant, but to Voltaire, once again:
"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." And so much. From there Hitler
copied the phrase to apply it to the Jews, in a probably involuntary trait of Nazi
intelligence: after all, they are practically synonymous, since at least He who has touched
us by beatific fate was born — et pour cause! — in Genesis and stayed for a time at the
Sinai Hotel while he sold some tablets to a certain Moses.
Once the disputes to prove its existence with this or that irrefutable argument were
over, the prudent Church, multinational of the product in question, had to face the grim
threat of thriving Western science. It was the terrible time of those intemperate cries of
all the unbelievers and atheists who passed through the anatomy classrooms. "I have
plunged my scalpel into hundreds of bodies and I have never seen a soul," an ordinary
doctor, overwhelmed by the scientific aura, came to exclaim, at the height of irreverence
and provocation. And when the astute Emperor, ready to restore everything that the
Revolution had overthrown since the storming of the Bastille, asked Laplace about the
place that God occupied in his well-oiled and predictable universe, the wise man did not
hesitate to respond disdainfully to Napoleon that I didn't need such a hypothesis at all.
Times change. Herr Einstein in a similar position simply observed that he could not
accept that God had conceived the world as a game of chance, thereby, en passant ,
legitimizing the Creator from the summit of relativity. And so that all those shameless
atheists who still continue to quote Feuerbach or Stendhal have no doubts, this Polish
Pope has just put science in its place. The existence of God is not to be proven by obtuse
bug sniffers, because God, are their words, far surpasses the scientific world. Thus the
Pope sets limits on science like any Kant, dressed in Pizarro's armor: here, in the
laboratory, to be poor in theology; On that other hand, God to be rich in everything. God
remains in the mists, beyond science, directing the stage as always behind the scenes.
And of course, only the Pope knows it and has the key to communicate and ensure that it
escapes our poor understanding. It's the old trick of the closed door: behind it, everything
can exist. The problem is not that it is always closed, but that, when we look around,
with malevolent rational doubts, we ask ourselves the most innocent question: which
door? What does "existence" mean? Because if we say that numbers "exist", Bolívar
"existed" and this newspaper "exists", we can also say that God "exists". And the bicycle
and the windmill and the wheelchair and the monetary system. Whoever thinks that it is
an unforgivable irreverence, not to say blasphemy, to compare God with a banknote,
should remember what happened to that poor teacher when he taught the numbering of
banknotes: there are tens, twenties, and fifty. , he said without stopping, one hundred
and, here his voice trembled, they say five hundred, as he raised his eyes to the roof of
the miserable school.
The eclipse of Marxism

The disappearance of old ideas coincides with the

disappearance of the old conditions of existence.

K. Marx: Communist Manifesto

 Communism is not a threat: it is a parasitic industry
that thrives on the mistakes the West makes.

J. Le Carré: The Russian House

More than in any other doctrine, in the case of Marxism it is necessary to distinguish
between "ideology" and "philosophy." For a minimum of internal coherence, "ideology"
will be understood as the political conception resulting from the application of the great
Marxist theses to those revolutionary societies that once claimed a socialist/communist
ideal. While "philosophy" will be the bookish expression of classical thought that covers
from Marx-Engels to Lenin-Trotsky, passing through Lasalle, Kautsky, Bernstein et al.
Between themselves, the relationships of both concepts are not coextensive: within
Marxist philosophy, communist ideology is a subset belonging to the political expression
of officially revolutionary countries and movements.
It happens that both philosophy and ideology have collapsed, if by collapsing we mean
losing the theoretical, political and historical validity that they once had. Only, and hence
the need to distinguish them, they have collapsed at different times and with different
consequences. For this reason, another distinction will be used: "collapse" does not mean
disappearance, destruction, but, if anything, eclipse, concealment, which, like all things,
can be momentary. It should be kept in mind that, if one pays attention to the
development of ideas, a kind of law of conservation of matter could also be stated here.
And if we add to it the well-known legend of the inevitable return of ideological ghosts,
nothing guarantees that they cannot reappear at any time in the future, even with
noticeably altered features. Aristotelianism suffered an eclipse of sixteen centuries until
it re-emerged in the West, under the guise of Christian philosophy at the Sorbonne, after
having played the role of Muslim doctrine in Averroes' Córdoba.
The collapse of Marxist philosophy is ancient; dates from different times. The totalist
Marxist philosophy, converted into summa metaphysica , which explained the course of
history (historical materialism) as well as the behavior of nature (dialectical materialism:
Diamat), was discredited almost at the moment of its formulation, carried out more by
Engels than by Marx and in any case codified by the socialist editors, in Berlin, of the
MEGA (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe), first, and then by the Academy of Sciences of the
USSR.
Neither the science of the end of the century, eminently mechanistic, nor the physical
science of the beginning of the 20th, which debuted with the theory of relativity, allow us
to speak of supposed dialectical laws. Much less after 1927, when Heisenberg's laws of
indetermination prove that even the rigid determinism on which the linear and causalist
vision of Marxist philosophy was based was falling to the ground. There is yet another
more significant moment in the early eclipse of Marxist philosophy. It is the effect
produced by the clash with the revolutionary theses of the Vienna Circle. Logical
empiricism and its Manichean distribution of the sciences (which still subsists in the
methodological partition between "hard" and "soft" sciences) inevitably placed Marxism
in the execrated rank of a metaphysics, that is, a speculative theory without support or in
the physical-natural field nor in the logical-mathematical domain, but perhaps in the
limbo of metaphorical creations. The final blow was given by the strict Popperian
methodology with its falsifiability criterion as an unavoidable resource for classifying
and legitimizing the sciences. From then on, any discipline that does not provide its own
possibilities of contrast and possible falsification will not be considered a scientific
product worthy of respect. Psychoanalysis and Marxism fell there at the same time,
somehow nineteenth-century creations with remote cabalistic roots, according to Arendt.
Subsequently, all philosophical attempts to revitalize Marxism have suffered from two
serious defects: either they have to resort to the resource of graft to found a philosophical
system worthy of the label "scientific" or they limit themselves to practicing the endless
heuristic task of deciphering over and over again the same consecrated texts. Thus, it can
be argued that, in the last fifty years, Marxism has either practiced symbiosis (with
existentialism, with psychoanalysis, with structuralism) or has been reduced to the
hermeneutics of itself. This is called "collapse" here.
But the world seems to be more attentive to the other, to the ideological collapse of
Marxism. Which is understandable, since the fact that a philosophical system is eclipsed,
in addition to barely being noticed, is something that only interests half a dozen scholars
of the subject. But if the collapse occurs in the area of ideology, which affects daily
political events and immediate history, even the so-called man on the street feels it and
everyone wonders about the phenomenon.
The first observation to make about the collapse of Marxist ideology is that it is worth
keeping in mind that Marxism collapses through real socialism, in the variety known as
Marxism-Leninism.
Essentially, Leninism meant, within Marxism, on the one hand, the supplementation of
historical theory and, on the other, a very determined political adaptation.
Supplementation has to do with the hypothesis of imperialism as a superior and
successive phase of capitalism. This is not an innocent addition, but a profound
transformation of the original Marxist doctrine. Classical Marxism had placed the term
of the irrational and uncontrolled evolution of history in capitalism. As soon as
capitalism was overcome by a planned and rational socialism, the true history of
humanity would begin to unfold. With Lenin what happened with Saint Augustine and
the Christians. Even the first preachers, including Paul, said that the Kingdom of God
would be seen arriving by the children of those who listened to them; or at least, their
children's children. Then, such a close date was no longer set and in Augustine of Hippo
the theory of the two cities ( civitas dei / civitas diaboli ) emerged to justify that the
struggle was long and that, for now, there was no need to wait for the advent of the
Kingdom. fiance. In our days, evangelicals and other sects who go around announcing
"Christ is coming" belong to the primitive species of Christianity, which spoke in terms
of an imminent liquidation of history. Living proof that no doctrine dies completely. For
his part, Lenin perceived that capitalism would still last for a while and hence the
development of the hypothesis of imperialism, as another stage in history, something like
the chapter that Marx had forgotten. An important theoretical modification that had its
practical translation, which Lenin's followers, from Stalin to Khrushchev, knew how to
take advantage of.
Having accepted that capitalism can continue in the form of new and more complex
phases of exploitation is what led to the intensification of the class struggle, since this
was an indication that only in this way could the decomposition of the enemy system be
accelerated. But also and above all, if capitalism, in its supreme or imperialist
expression, is increasingly stronger and more aggressive, it will be necessary to oppose it
with an equally strong and organized State; again, the dualism of the two cities or
empires, the good and the bad. Hence, the justification, first of all, of the very existence
of the USSR, in opposition to the theses of the world revolution (Trotsky), as the first
socialist state isolated from the rest of the world and, secondly, the subordination of the
revolutionary movements to the Soviet cause, which was the one that carried the weight
in the final fight against imperialism. Within such a scheme it is necessary to situate and
understand the relations of Soviet communism with world revolutionary movements,
from the failed attempt at Trotskyist globalization to the Chinese Revolution and the
national liberation movements of the Third World countries. They would all have to
organize themselves pyramidally, with the USSR at the top, in order to better confront
imperialism, the "higher phase of capitalism." This same rigidly vertical and hierarchical
organization in international tactics helps to understand the second and most important
change that Leninism introduced in the body of Marxist doctrine: the so-called
"democratic centralism", a euphemistic way of designating the rigid and vertical
organization of the communist parties. Even more: until Lenin, there was not even the
Communist Party as such, but rather a Social Democratic Party, derived directly from
Marxism. Split, as is known, into those two fractions, the Menshevik or minority, and the
majority, Bolshevik, he allowed himself to be carried away by the latter, which
advocated the seizure of power directly by the Party and not as an effect of a great
popular uprising and, later, the implementation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
Only to reach such a stage, the first thing that was done was to begin by establishing
another dictatorship, that of the Communist Party, and even more specifically, that of the
Central Committee, and already with Stalin, that of the General Secretary. Such a
reduction of the legal organs of power and this concentration of all power in an
undisputed and authoritarian superior vertex is what was given the name "democratic
centralism", characteristic of Leninism. Where it can be seen that any attempt at
restructuring (perestroika) has to be directed in fact against the basic Leninist theses. A
party that is neither the only one nor the one organized pyramidally will no longer be a
communist-Leninist party. This is the variety that has entered into crisis and is clearly
collapsing in the countries of so-called real socialism.
This last name forces another distinction. "Real socialism" is understood to exist in
countries with a Leninist political scheme in power. That is, the USSR and the satellite
countries of Central Europe, continental China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Albania, plus, on the African continent, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique, and on the
American continent, Cuba. It is assumed that "real socialism" is a term that is opposed to
another, which would only be "potential", and even to a third, which would be merely
"ideal", and which would be represented by non-Leninist social democracy (systems of
Scandinavian and Southern European governments, at this time: 1990). "Potential
socialism" was represented for a time by the communist parties of non-communist
countries, in particular, two large organizations, the Italian and French CP. The
distinction is introduced to point out that the collapse of Marxism-Leninism began first
in the periphery, that is, precisely in those representatives of "potential socialism",
typical of the communist parties outside the sphere of Soviet geopolitical power. In
particular, the Italian CP had begun to show signs of aggiornamento or perestroika avant
la lettre ; Then others followed, to the point of establishing, in the seventies, on the
initiative of the Spanish CP, the so-called "Eurocommunism", which advocated the
abandonment of the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore, the
collapse, within Leninism itself, must also be qualified. Because first it occurs in the
periphery (the communist parties of the West) and only finally does it reach the very
heart of the system. With variations in such a transformation. The most important
corresponded to the so-called "Prague Spring": in 1968, the Czechs attempted a
transformation of Leninism that failed due to the intervention of the Euro-Soviet central
Leninism in the form of a military occupation of the country, followed by the
corresponding repression of the reformists. . What Gorbachev is currently carrying out in
the USSR is what Dubcék had started in Czechoslovakia twenty-two years ago.

***
 It is one thing to verify the phenomenon of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, placing
it in its historical-geographical context, and another, more speculative, is to try to
investigate what causes caused it.
Regardless of the chance circumstances (personality of the leaders, historical moment,
internal tensions), we should begin by pointing out the deepest reason: Marxism-
Leninism made the tactical error of betting all its theoretical capital on the practical and
material card of the economic success. It is that communism was reduced to the
simplistic formula of "electricity plus soviets" and was reduced to the elaboration of rigid
five-year plans aimed at increasing heavy industry, exhausting all the expressive
possibility of a doctrine of social and humanist pretensions. . It is possible that if the
Second World War had not occurred, the collapse would have occurred sooner; but not
so much the war as its geopolitical consequences (annexation of regions and expansion
in areas of influence) allowed the Soviet Union to receive a second breath to continue
with its Leninist plan of forced industrialization. It is worth remembering that practically
all East German and Czechoslovak industry was dismantled and transplanted to the
USSR, not to mention the new captive markets available to it during the years of the so-
called cold war. In any case, it became evident by the end of the eighties that the system
was reaching its most complete exhaustion, namely: inability to maintain an economy
based on the almost exclusive production of heavy and military machinery, but not
technological precision, with the resulting lack of basic necessities, especially in the
agricultural sector. If we add to this the development of a strongly militarized state, that
is, dedicated, according to the most orthodox principles of Leninism, to increasingly arm
itself for the expected final confrontation with the imperialist enemy, it will be
understood that in practice it has ended up collapse. For a very important underlying
reason, contained in Leninist doctrine itself.
Leninism had corrected the original Marxism. According to classical Marxism,
capitalism would almost collapse only as a result of the accumulation of contradictions it
generated. In this way, a good social democrat, a pure Marxist, only had to start looking
or, at most, which is what the German and French social democrats did at the beginning
of the century, accelerate the fall by deepening these contradictions, which achieved
through wage demands, strikes, and strong unionism. But the Leninist strategy was going
to be very different. Since it begins by recognizing capitalism's power to perpetuate itself
in the form of imperialism, and gives it an aggressive, expansive and even more
organized nature, it can only be defeated through a direct and total confrontation. It is no
longer about sitting back and waiting for the enemy to collapse, but rather about fighting
directly with him until he is defeated. Famous and purely Leninist theses of Che Guevara
and his offers from multiple Vietnams around the world.
Now, the USSR, as a Leninist advance in the approach of a singular and deadly battle
between two systems, has been rearming itself for the great and definitive confrontation
throughout its existence, in particular, since 1945, the end of the Second World War and
moment in which the Leninist theses became more evident and manifest to Stalin, since
the world seemed to have been effectively reduced to two opposing blocks: it was only a
matter of time before the great battle, the expected Armageddon, took place. But time
has passed and not only has the USSR not fought imperialism, but when it could have
done so, it did not (case of the rockets in Cuba, in 1962) and when it undertook some
peripheral battle of attrition ( cases of Korea and Afghanistan) the results were as
unsatisfactory as those of imperialism, for its part, in Vietnam. And above all, because if
they had continued with the Leninist line of total confrontation, they would have had to
develop a technology of which they are ultimately not capable due to the same
limitations of a limited and one-dimensional industrialization policy. In this sense, we
must accept that the threat of the so-called "Star Wars" definitely contributed to the
internal collapse of the Leninist line. Indeed: to be able to compete successfully in such
advanced terrain, the USSR would have needed to have a cutting-edge computer industry
and material resources that it lacks. In this way, around 1984 (symbolic date in Orwellian
language) it became clear (probably this is what those who now direct the reform in the
USSR did) that during all that time they had been preparing, in a kind of increasing bid,
or pulse, for the great battle, but that it was impossible for them to continue raising the
ante: they were not going to be in a position to accept the challenge of a technological-
war confrontation in outer space, which is what the Star Wars meant. They had to
renounce the final confrontation and, in doing so, they renounced Leninism, or at least,
the imposed objective of reaching the enemy to one day be in a position to win the
decisive battle.
The most curious thing of all is that this abandonment and subsequent collapse have
occurred without the theoretical enemy (capitalism/imperialism) having changed its
nature. It is not that the reformist Soviets have come to the conclusion that the enemy has
ceased to be such and that, therefore, it does not make much sense to continue the
confrontation, but that they have recognized that they are not in a position to openly
oppose themselves with possibilities. of win. If this is indeed the case, this would mean
that the strategy or long-term vision has not changed, but only the momentary tactics.
Until further notice, we must assume that the communist strategy remains the same:
ultimately triumph over capitalism; What has changed, once again, is the way to achieve
it. That techniques and procedures taken from the enemy himself, such as market
economy, democratic pluralism and the like, are accepted for this purpose should not be
so surprising, since some of such tactical variations were also adopted during Lenin's
lifetime, when he was forced to introduce the so-called New Economic Policy. It is just
an application of the well-known Leninist tactical apothegm of steps back and forward: it
only indicates the determination to continue along the same path, even if it is at the price
of delaying the pace of the march. It remains to be seen if what is currently presented as
a simple tactical change will not become a more radical and definitive transformation
over time. It may be that, by postponing the liquidation of capitalism, the countries that
are embraced by a vague socialism end up adapting to the detested capitalist system,
even though at first and only nominally they deny it. Also the Christian Church of the
early times refused to accept the material reality of this world and the faithful practiced
celibacy for the most part and dedicated themselves to living in very poor communities
that shared everything; Over time, the Church accepted that this demonic world was
going to last longer than expected and became so well integrated into it that the Vatican
became one of the strong states of Christianity, with armies and banks at its service. This
does not mean, may the Lord deliver them from such apostasy, that they have
definitively renounced the Celestial Kingdom, but that for now and while the announced
end of the centuries arrives, they manage quite well with this one of the earth, no matter
how sinful and despicable it may be. . Marxist socialism can nominally subsist as such
and even with its symbols intact: the hammer and sickle, representative of an
increasingly distant and romantic proletariat; the sacred effigy of Lenin on the walls, in
the halls and on the official seals, but also on the banknotes and probably on the credit
cards that are issued under the capitalist system.
All of which seems to indicate that the Marxist collapse should not be understood as a
physical or historical collapse of such magnitude that it will be immediately followed by
a restoration of the Romanov dynasty or by the Christianization or Catholicization of all
Russia as one would expect. believers in the prophecies of Fatima.
 ***

The abandonment, rather than collapse, the momentary eclipse of a certain ideological
praxis, the Leninist one, seems rather to point towards a thorough revision of the theory
on which said praxis was built. That is: regardless of the real failures of Soviet society
(poverty, poor distribution, bureaucratism, corruption), it is legitimate to ask whether this
is not fundamentally due to the fact that the doctrine on which said practice was built is
an essentially wrong and negative. Or what is equivalent: at this point, there seems to be
no major doubt about the collapse of real socialism and its political and economic
practices, but does this mean that Marxism has also failed as a general and background
doctrine on which it appeared? and was that real socialism built?
It doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Marxism as a doctrine or political
philosophy is neither better nor worse than many others of the 19th century, where it
arose and which it faithfully represents. It is a rationalist, coherent and predictive
philosophy. Perhaps this last point is where its Achilles heel lies, since, in its two great
predictions, namely, the progressive and unstoppable impoverishment of the proletariat
and the internal decomposition of capitalism dragged by the mass of its insurmountable
contradictions, it is where its failure is most evident. Not in the other two aspects, which
are those that continue to give it the profile of a respectable and organized philosophy. It
is a rationalist and coherent doctrine, perhaps too coherent for the taste of falsificationist
methodologists. It is worth remembering at this point that there have been openly
irrationalist philosophies in the field of ideas, such as fascism and Nazism, based on
vague categories of blood, race and country. And it is not advisable to lose sight of the
fact that capitalism, which now appears so triumphant that Mr. Fukujama has allowed
himself to speak of a definitive victory and consequent "end of history", it is an
essentially incoherent social doctrine, with a strong component of irrationality, since he
accepts that the motives that guide humanity are profit and gain, inspired by the most
closed selfishness, forever ingrained in the human heart. Inconsistency that is a
consequence of its very way of operating, which is none other than the exaltation of
competition through the famous laws of the market. If his most famous theorist
inspiration, Adam Smith, allowed himself to speak of an "invisible hand" that ultimately
regulates economic processes, there is not much more evidence to be provided to
establish its incoherence as well as its weak rationality.
For a better understanding, Marxism as a philosophy can be compared with a parallel
and contemporary doctrine of its own, such as positivism, which also emerged in the
19th century. Positivism was a coherent and intelligent ideology that presented a closed
explanation of history through an ascending linear scheme. However, as far as is known,
for at least half a century, if not more, no one in the world has declared themselves
"positivist", either in political theory or in scientific methodology. Because? Not
certainly because it failed in practice, like the current Marxist failure with Leninism (in
reality, positivism was only weakly applied in Brazil), but because, as a philosophy, it
was replaced by others with a more powerful explanatory scope: functionalism,
structuralism and Marxism itself. Consequently: a philosophy and even an ideology
collapse not per se , but through its applications and by consequently giving way to other
replacement doctrines. It is the procedure that is observed in scientific models:
hypotheses and even complete theories are abandoned or limited in their explanatory
power when they cannot fully account for certain phenomena and when other more
powerful hypotheses and theories do so.
Except that Marxism becomes a special case because it is a particularly compromised
doctrine.
 By "committed" it does not mean that, from its beginnings, that is, since it was
enunciated as a philosophy, it had practical pretensions, not only theoretical ones. It is
that of the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, in which it was asked to stop understanding the
world in order to transform it. It is the predominance of action over reflection that gives
it the character of a committed ideology. What happens is that such a declaration of
practical faith is neither original nor exclusive to Marxism: it is characteristic of German
romanticism, little or not at all rational and very emotional. Go back to Goethe,
amending the Fourth Gospel by saying: Im Anfang war Tat . And in a clear preview of
Marx, Goethe himself says in Wilhelm Meister that it is necessary to "think in order to
act and act in order to think." That it was not exclusive to Marxism is proven by North
American pragmatist philosophy, from James to Dewey.
However, Marxism understood that "commitment" exclusively through political action.
Where, again, it was not exactly original either: a very old line of Western philosophy
that begins in Plato, since the entire imposing edifice of Platonic philosophy was built to
justify the education of the authentic rulers of the perfect Republic which, of course ,
they would have to be the philosophers. Since until the philosophers are the masters of
power, Plato does not see a solution to the old problem of a just and balanced society, it
was necessary to prepare them with the most refined knowledge. Proof that Plato did not
remain in the texts either is that, when possible, he tried to put his ideas into practice
through a political experiment at the court of Dion, tyrant of Syracuse. That the essay did
not go well should not be surprising and this is another precedent on which today's
Marxism could rely, at least to derive some consolation: Plato also "collapsed." But
Plato's philosophy does not collapse in the same way in the part corresponding to its
theoretical exposition. There are the texts of twenty-five centuries, in which men of
thought continue to nourish themselves conceptually. Another consolation, not meager,
for Marxism: nothing prevents its texts from also being reified and elevated to the
pantheon of Western ideas.
It would be appropriate here to go back to the distinctions. Because there is a tendency
to think that the only political form of social commitment that Marxism historically took
was that represented by Leninist Bolshevism. It is still a triumph of communist
propaganda, which has managed to give the impression of having taken over the entire
Marxist heritage. And it is not like that. Classical Marxism suffered more than one
incarnation, although it is not ruled out that it could still experience some more. The first
and most persistent incarnation of Marxism is that represented by social democracy, as it
was understood at the beginning of the century in Europe and even as it is understood
contemporarily in the Western world. Until recently, all the symbols of the socialist
parties fully coincided with those of the CP: red flags, hammer and sickle and that
Masonic motto: "proletarians of all countries, unite!" Even until about fifteen years ago
the French Socialist Party was actually called SFIO, that is, "French Section of the
Workers' International." And Spain's party is still called PSOE, "Spanish Socialist
Workers' Party", although it is becoming less and less of a worker. The recently deceased
Pertini asked to be buried in his socialist law of the beginning of the century: wrapped in
a red flag with the repeated and moving inscription calling for proletarian union. Only
that this incarnation of Marxism began to undergo mutations some time ago: the Socialist
International, of remote Marxist origin, includes parties that claim to be social
democracy and no longer have the slightest trace of Marxist memory, such as
Democratic Action, from Venezuela.
Of course, the most discussed and well-known incarnation of Marxism is the
Bolshevik, but we must remember the other, not only because it was the first and perhaps
the most authentically Marxist, but because the irony of history or the cunning of reason
He seems to want this, the social democratic one, to be the one most likely to survive at
the end of the century. As for Bolshevism, we have already seen that its political
commitment took the form of a violent and minority dictatorship in the name of the
proletariat, exercised by a small political pressure group, a hierarchically organized party
rigidly framed under an iron leadership that, at a time , they were happy to describe as
"monolithic." It is possible that this is one of the material reasons for its failure:
excessive rigidity, lack of operational flexibility. The sclerosis of the organism had been
denounced a long time ago, receiving various names: nomenklatura, new class, and
others similar, which indicated the hardening of the power structures and their usufruct
for the benefit of the few who held them. Which means that a good part of the rebellions
that have been witnessed in recent times (as is evident in the Romanian case) were
actually directed against the pathological, extreme and dictatorial, almost caricature-like
form that the communist party had adopted. in such cases. An important fact for leaving
the door open to reformism in the name of the purity of the doctrine: it would not be
surprising if, after a while, groups emerge that claim true Marxism or true Leninism to
try the political experience again without the circumstantial failures of the deviations
committed. They will resemble, if so, those born-again Christians and similar sects who,
in the name of a return to the pristine sources, extend new religious forms. Or to the
fundamentalists of Islam who ultimately always claim the purest of orthodoxies. In short:
the collapse of Marxism, as it has occurred, could well herald the emergence of a radical
Marxist fundamentalism, even more demanding and profound. As they say: it is about
succeeding where others failed because they were not authentic.
***

Back to the eclipse. It is not only produced by the rigidity of the implemented minority
system that, with the passage of time, suffers the inevitable degradation of any
phenomenon subjected to increasing entropy, but it is also a consequence of the
ideological impoverishment of Marxism, incapable of adapting to new realities. . We
must not forget that the Marxism prevailing in the societies of real socialism was a
codified Marxism without variations, made from half-philosophical, half-economic texts
from the last century. Its equivalent in the field of science would be something like if you
wanted to interpret the movement with texts from Aristotle: you can, but you will hardly
go beyond an analogical, simplistic explanation; It would be impossible to calculate the
trajectory, not of an intercontinental rocket, but of a simple stone. Or as if one wanted to
continue explaining the periodic cycles of fertilization and fruitfulness of the plant world
through the myth of Persephone, a maiden kidnapped to hell. It is an "explanation", but
with it it will not be possible to know the cellular composition of the grains. The
comparison is not as forced as it might sound: classical Marxism is largely a myth: the
myth of humanity freeing itself from one misfortune, the chains of exploitation, and the
myth of the individual man trying to free himself from another even greater misfortune. ,
the alienation into which it fell when it split into two realities, estranged from each other,
subject and object. Both class struggle and human alienation are myths similar to those
of the plain of Lethe or the loss of sexual unity. It begins by postulating an eternal
struggle between one another (between possessors and the dispossessed) and by
postulating the misfortune (why misfortune?) of the separation that the individual
experiences before his products, as if some mythical and imaginary time had never been
separated. . And then, from such myths, concealing rationalizations are built, that is,
ideology, which justify them and adapt them to a more up-to-date language. Or what is
the same: the philosophy of history, the theory of surplus value and the laws of
dialectics.
 With such metaphysical-mythological baggage it is unlikely that nuclear power plants
will be built, space stations will be put into orbit and, above all, it will be possible to
solve problems of an increasingly complex and diversified economy. The old and sad
story of the vicissitudes of genetics in Stalin's USSR confirms it: the collapse of
Marxism will be very old, but the aberrant case of Zdanov and Lisenko occurred forty
years ago. And just as Soviet or German scientists (Havemann model) had to forget
about Marxism to do mathematical biology and develop cybernetics and microphysics,
now it is the turn of Soviet politicians and other officially socialist countries to reach the
same conclusion: To do good economics and successfully manage a plural society,
ethnically diverse and agitated by multiple nationalisms, they need other finer
instruments and not only the old Marxist myths.

***

The analysis of the definitive composition of Marxism as a philosophy is reached not

so much by denouncing the Leninist ideology that was derived from it (or the softer and
more adaptive one of social democracy, increasingly less willing to recognize itself as
"Marxist"), but by suspect that the ideological component derived from there can be
eclipsed as much as one wants, but this does not necessarily mean that the original
philosophy, the mythological core of original Marxism, has to collapse. As a philosophy,
it will remain among the products of man, just as other no less mythical philosophies
have remained, such as Augustinianism or Thomism, among Christian beliefs, or
Buddhism or Mosaic messianism, among other beliefs, monotheistic or not. . Or how
Platonism has remained in mathematics of all times; or irrationalism in contemporary
psychology.
To conclude with a note, somewhere between obituary and hopeful, which is what the
rhetoric of every funeral usually requires: to confirm in one way or another the
disappearance, even momentary, of Marxism is to guarantee its ascension to the heaven
of philosophical beliefs, where it must shine alongside the great metaphysical systems of
humanity. And who can forget: maybe suddenly someone will try another reincarnation.
 Football, bulls and death
The spectacle of football is very different from the game: like chess, like cooking, like
baseball, like social etiquette, football responds to rules. Or constitutive (how many
players, where, how long) or operational (what is allowed and when) or circumstantial
(sanctions, extensions, penalty resolutions), but all with one characteristic: ultimately
submitted to the absolute subjectivity of the only non-player. , the referee. Paradox of the
game: the official voyeur , the privileged spectator, decides who does not play.
Then there are the others, the distant and distant spectators, increasingly isolated, more
caged, even subjected to forced quarantines. They are the external playful face, the added
spectacle, the indirect participation, vicarious players, sublimated pseudo-athletes. Over
time, the spectacle weighs more and more on the game, the public and its demands on the
sport and its rigors.
What began as a private activity, for schools and clubs, long ago became a public
company. The crowds, in addition to generating profits, provide an operatic, scandalous,
theatrical note to what is in itself a relatively simple game and a particularly demanding
sport. Unlike baseball, a highly complex game, but a barely athletic sport: it can be
played by obese people and with glasses. In football, on the contrary, the demands of the
increasingly massive public force players to the maximum sporting rigor. Before, half a
century ago or even less, it was not exceptional for men over thirty years of age to play
it; now, unthinkable: they burn them quickly. They "die" sportingly when they reach
their thirties, except for goalkeepers, who are not so physically demanding. The change
has to do with football-spectacle, introduced by pressure from the masses. Aesthetics
begin to take precedence over practicality. It is true that what counts is the result, but
people, those who attend the game or those who watch it on television, want something
more: they want the artistic aggregate of how that result was obtained. The goal is
applauded, but risky, showy plays, acrobatics or intelligence are also celebrated. To the
massive pressure of direct attendance (in the large stadiums, an average of one hundred
thousand spectators) and the influence of festering passions (massacres in the stadiums,
from Lima to Brussels) is added the invisible attendance of those who watch it on
television ( hundreds of millions). Then another type of influence is exerted, since the
player, in addition to knowing that he is being watched practically all over the world, is
aware of the recordings of his performance, in which his successes and errors will
forever be recorded. Televised football goes from theater (what happens only once on the
field) to cinema (what can be seen over and over again). A long time ago, players
stopped being athletes only to become "stars", favorite actors of their audiences. It is not
surprising that, with female assistance, some have received flattering nicknames (" Il bel
Antonio ") that have nothing to do with their soccer ability or even because of an
indiscreet photo (Butragueño, in El País ). , his admirers (and perhaps secret admirers)
exalt other non-specifically sporting attributes. The show asks that football (and the
footballers) be seen, not only that the plays be appreciated or the results celebrated.
Slow, but unstoppable conversion of football into something like a kind of aggiornato
bullfighting. The bullfighting public loves their idols not for what they do (they all, in
short, do the same thing), but for how they do it. They celebrate his bearing, his
gallantry, his virility (there have been no shortage of bullfighters who have discreetly
supplemented Mother Nature to achieve a better effect) and they applaud or cheer the
artistic "plays" he knows how to make against the blind enemy. It is no coincidence that
for some time the football crowd has been behaving like the bullfighting crowd. Spain
may not occupy a prominent place in the annals of world football, but it has already
brought a certain language to the spectacle. From there comes the " olé " with which the
crowds chant certain plays of their team. Clear bullfighting roots: typical phenomenon of
contamination or transculturation of one show with another.
But shouting " olé " is wanting to turn sport into art, wanting to make football a
bullfight without a bull. Note that it is only said at certain moments, not precisely when
the maximum objective of the game, the goal, is sought and achieved, but when the
spectacle is exalted, when the game is enjoyed for its own sake. In this way, thanks to
multitudinous football, the Arabic-Andalusian olé ( wa-l-lah , "by God"; a relative of
wa-sal-al-lah , hopefully, "God willing"), has penetrated to the farthest reaches. boreal. It
is frightening to see barbarian, Nordic, Saxon, German crowds chanting olé in football,
absolutely ignorant that in that simple and sonorous expression centuries of an art and a
culture to which they are completely alien are concentrated.
If only it were a pure spectacle, like ballet or bullfighting. Because football, no matter
how much it aspires to be closer to art, is loaded with harmful passions that drag it away
from aesthetic emotion and increasingly take it to the tortured terrain of religious wars.
Nor is it innocent that crowds wave flags and sing fiery war hymns. Football-spectacle
dangerously drifts towards a form of popular religion, in which the blinded believers
(they are not called "fanatics" for nothing) are willing to die and kill (more than once
they do) for their colors. Consoling yourself by thinking that it is a drain for man's old
obsessions is practicing the most miserable of deceptions: more than tranquilizing and
exutory, football acts as an incentive, a tinder, a sting for the religious and aggressive
phobias that are an inseparable part of human nature. . To his credit, he already has a war
between nations (in Central America, precisely) and for some reason John Huston chose
it as the theme and background for a film about the Second World War (The Great
Escape), representing on the field the clash between two conceptions of the world, the
Nazi and the democratic.
At the entrance to some bullrings, such as the one in Mexico, there are statues of
famous bullfighters, not to mention the contribution of poetry: that Llanto por la muerte
by Ignacio Sánchez Mejias . It would not be surprising if, if we follow the trend of
football, more and more spectacle and less sports game, sooner rather than later the same
thing happens: statues in the stadiums and the emergence of some García Lorca of
kicking the ball.
Well thought out, it would not be very aesthetic to say that you see the effigy of the
dwarf Maradona or endure a sonnet to King Pelé. But there is no need to despair:
everything will work out. However, football, no matter how much art it tries to introduce
into the game, will ever come close to the shadow of bullfighting: in addition to lacking
the undeniable beauty of man alone before the beast, it lacks the essential and sacred
component of bullfighting: the act sacrificial contained in the ritual of danger that
ensures, in each bullfight, the constant presence of death. Soccer players, no matter how
skilled or strong they are, only risk the millions of their juicy contracts. Heroes of our
time.
The village
What would politicians, orators and other charlatans be without the recurring word
"people"? It is curious that someone who is said to have nothing less than the voice of
God, everyone allows themselves to speak in his name, as if he were mute.
Pueblo is an ancient teratological resource, so useful that, from the Romans to the
present day, it continues to provide benefits to everyone who uses it. But if the endriago
dates back at least to Cicero ( Salus populi suprema lex est ) it was in the overwhelming
French Revolution where, thanks to the disastrous combination of Rousseau and the
Abbe Sieyès, it adopted the decidedly ectopagical form that still overwhelms us. Call it
"people" or "nation", it is the final resource with which all vaunted individual freedoms
are limited. There is a reason why the well-publicized Universal Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen contained a couple of insidious articles, 3 and 6, with
totally nugatory effects. The 3rd requested that the origin of all power reside in the
nation, adding that no group or individual could have even a hint of superior authority:
an unappealable way to forever end the supposed rights of individuals. What rules is the
nation, that is, the people, that is, the collective, that is, something monstrously shapeless
and never specified: a chimera lounging in the shadow of every Constitution. While, for
its part, article 6 stated, as beautiful as it was empty, that "the law is the expression of the
general will." As you can see, that is what revolutions are for: instead of the absolute
power of one person (monarch), a mysterious irrational entity ( volonté générale )
appears, no less overwhelming and incontrovertible. At least with the King, I know who
is oppressing me; with democracy, it is always something, indefinite. From there,
Robespierre and his cronies were able to dedicate themselves to making the guillotine
work legally, in the name of the people, the nation and the general will. It must be very
different if someone's throat is not cut by order of a person, with a face and name, but by
order of a concept.
Later, Disraeli, Lincoln and all the American Heroes of all the independences that
existed and to have, did nothing but repeat the invention: of, by and for the people, which
sounds so good, although in truth one never knows to what or to whom they are referring
to. Proof of its vigorous vitality is that in recent events it has reappeared, aggressive and
triumphant: there is talk of the awakening of the people in 1989, just as around 1830,
with eighteen years of prophetic advance, Ludwig Boerne spoke of a Voelkerfruehling , a
romantic "spring of the people", that is, another escabechina that humanity is incapable
of depriving itself of from time to time. The truth is that, as a social expedient, it is the
most useful: everything is done in its name, no one would dare to go against it, among
other things, because it proudly proclaims with lip service that we are all a people,
although each one inside one really trusts that town, town, what is called town, municipal
and thick, only the others are. English speakers have it even worse, or could it be that
they really are more democratic, because for them all people are people , while in other
languages, a little more subtle, less barbaric and simplified, distinctions are usually
made. To the point of giving ourselves the luxury, in Spanish, of also using a tasty
derogatory term, "populacho", and calling certain professionals "populists" of the
promises made on behalf of such a monstrous entity.
It would be unfair to forget that, above all, there is the chosen people, whose mere
mention casts doubt on the equalizing effectiveness of the simplistic method invented by
Juan Jacobo on the banks of the Lemán, while he was undressing to the scandal of the
Geneva damsels. Schopenhauer, like a good German, saw it differently: «as tastes differ,
they are decidedly not my chosen people. They are the chosen people of their God and
this is not even suitable for such a people. It seems a bit exaggerated because it makes
you want to think when you see how things have gone for them in history that with a
God like that they don't need more enemies. Because extremes sometimes come together,
the Nazis also never used the word "people" ( Volk ) for everything, from a newspaper to
a disgusting automobile.
We would have to ask for less people and more individual respect, because ultimately,
as almost always, the one who was right was Oscar Wilde: "The only possible society is
oneself."
 The sex of things
That of the angels, so disputed for centuries, was finally established by Lord Byron
when he discovered that they are all Tories , conservatives; which is confirmed by
grammar: they are masculine. That is precisely what irritates the insufferable feminists.
What a plague. Sir: it must be that they accumulate at the end of the century. Now they
attack language, confusing, among many other things, gender with sex. The inevitable
happens: they make the biggest fool of themselves. They only imitate their Anglo-Saxon
predecessors, who twenty years ago took to saying nonsense such as talking about She-
God and wanting to reform the Bible in order to eliminate the sexism it contains.
Without realizing that first they would have to put an end to the Jewish religion and that
"disease of Judaism" (Borges dixit ) that is Christianity, authentic bastions of the most
refined sexist ideology. There are no priestesses in Christianity, although it must be
recognized that there was a Popeess, that Juana who gave birth in the middle of a
procession, and for her part, the first thing the good Jews do in the morning is thank
Jehovah for not having made them women. But, of course, still in the English language
those little games with personal pronouns have a certain meaning, since they distinguish
between the female goat and the male (properly, goat) by putting the "she" or "he"
before them. Should we then say "Waiting for HeGodot" or, rather, "Waiting for
Godota"?
Spanish-language feminists have also gone crazy. The first thing they ignore is that
gender is a grammatical category that functions as a classifier of nouns, adjectives or
pronouns, but without having any semantic value. Simply arbitrary. Two words with the
same ending (forehead, tooth) have different genders without any sexist intention. They
also ignore that, since the masculine gender is not marked in the masculine/feminine
opposition, it is the one chosen when attributing gender because it is less compromising.
But if you listen to the excited feminists, you will have to say "the singing" and "the
running" instead of "the singing" and "the running." In their extreme ignorance, they also
ignore that in Indo-European languages the origin of the generic distinction is not the
masculine/feminine pair, but the animate/inanimate opposition, from which in most of
these languages three genders emerge, adding the neuter. Which explains why, in the
most anti-Freudian sense, “child” is neuter in German ( Kind ). Furthermore, feminist
madness applied to language would only have a limited scope, since there are many
languages that do not distinguish genders, another point ignored by the proponents of
sexist language reform. Thus, for example, in the African Bantu languages (Swahili and
others) there are only classes, and a little closer, Basque or Basque does not allow
generic morphemes. So, in Basque, "boy" and "girl" are the same (haur) or "dog" and
"bitch" (zakur). The least important thing is that feminists are unaware of linguistic
complexities; The serious thing is that they do not realize the foolishness of their
proposals. Does it mean that only those who speak languages that distinguish genders
will be able to express their feminist rage? What happens with Basque women? Don't
they complain about sexism? Is it that perhaps this vague and metaphysical aspect of
sexism is in grammar or customs and people?
The funny thing is that they not only abhor linguistic sexism and propose nonsense
such as saying "human" instead of "man." By the way, why is it male? Wouldn't it be
better "humane" (ending in e) as a Spanish philosopher wants and proposes without even
laughing? Thus, Nietzsche's book will become Humane, too humane for feminists not to
scream.
What a feminine habit it is to mix sex with everything. Machismo will be highly
unrecommended, but at least it has the advantage of putting sex in its place, which is
where it should be.
 Law Fetish
That laws are temporary and crime eternal, is proven by the religion that shelters the
people of the West: first Cain and, much later, Moses appears armed with the laws.
Perhaps that is why Hispanic wisdom has defended itself against legalism and its
worshipers: once the law is made, the trap is made, it warns of the bad conscience of a
very common tradition. And even better: abide by the law, without complying with it,
which is the intelligent, Suarezian way of defending popular sovereignty against the
power and relativity of the laws. Good Christians should be inspired there, since it was
not just anyone, but Saul, better known as Paul of Tarsus, who verified that "where there
is no law, there is no transgression" (Romans, 4:15). Better are the prophetic words of
the poet Blake: "With the stones of law prisons are built and with the bricks of religion,
brothels."
The bad thing about the laws is not them or the abuses that allow them or even the
fragility of their historical condition as social, temporary and replaceable products; The
bad thing about the laws is the priests who live in their shadow and thrive on the
lucrative job of enforcing them. Pharisees of an immense civil temple, they put on the
ancient majesty of the shamans to unload on the terrified heads of the citizens what,
without any metaphor, they call the weight of the law. Without laws, the Roman Empire
would not have existed, but for the same reason it is absurd to exalt them without taking
into account that the purpose was above all political. I wish that were its only limitation
and narrow relativism. Bacon was more right than a saint when he invented that the
seven wise men of Greece compared the laws to spider webs, which only serve to trap
small insects, since the fat ones escape from them. Elegant and classic way of talking
about the well-known figure of the funnel.
Even so, the laws fulfill a momentary function; The bad thing is that they require
interpreters, deciphers and guardians, who are the ones who unnecessarily complicate
social relations. Here we should also extend the truth of Clemenceau, the first Tiger:
laws are something serious enough to be left in the hands of lawyers. This is a terrifying
word, because for some reason the worst of the gypsy curses is the one that promises to
be entangled in their sinful hands. If at least the rabulas limited themselves to their job,
which is just that of thriving in the forest of Codes and living off the unfortunate people
who have to go through it; The bad thing is that, by repeating the jingles of lawyers, it
leads some to believe that they also think. And instead of reasoning, they declaim;
Instead of using logic, they exhaust the cheapest of rhetoric. The forum and the
deaneries serve demagoguery, not intelligence.
Remember that before the Law there is the powerful gatekeeper who guards the
entrance and before each of its countless doors there is an increasingly powerful
gatekeeper. The poor man who turns to the Law believed, in his naivety, that "everyone
had access to the law at all times." The least important thing is that he dies without
accessing the Law. What is revealing, what is current, what is melancholic, as Kafka
emphasizes, is that we do not have to accept these things as true, but as necessary.
 Shape on background
Proust claimed that you could fall in love with someone by the way they drank their
cup of tea. Those incapable of perceiving nuances will say that these are effeminate
things: real men fall in love with something specific: hips or a dowry. Substantive beings
versus modal beings. Old opposition between what and how. The Greek was right when
he stated that the universe comes from water; He just said what. What is important is to
explain how things are formed from water. In principle, all humans agree in believing
that a just society is one that contains neither the oppressed nor the oppressors. But how
to achieve it? There are lovers who are satisfied with wanting and expressing it ritually:
grace is in the way they do it. Wanting is very easy: just declare it. What counts, what
remains, is the way of loving. The substantive is always factual, inert, dead; The modal
belongs to the realm of the imaginary, the living, the created. And since Gracián, a
creed: "the true could never reach the imagined."
All art is modal: even the most low-level photography is a way of changing the given.
What does it matter that the famous, reclining odalisque has an extra vertebra or that the
famous smile is enigmatic, dyspeptic, or non-existent? You don't look at what, you pay
attention to how. Perhaps that is why medicine still remains, deep down, more art than
science: it is not just that there are sick people instead of diseases, but above all there are
doctors instead of treatments. It all depends on the way, and if it were reduced to what
doctors would be left over: machines and manuals would be enough. There is a not
strange proximity between doctors and cooks: anyone can burn a piece of meat; Anyone
can make it heal. The art is in how to do it: the good doctor is the best chef of the human
body: an artist at the service of health, as the other is at the service of gourmandise .
For this reason, philosophy is the antithesis of art: an eminently substantive discipline.
So much so that he began to search for the essence of things and, ultimately, the being of
everything. Socrates was irritated by being told about the virtue of the soldier or the
shoemaker or even, in the abstract, that of man: what he was looking for was the essence
of virtue. Always the reducing mania of what, the loss of qualities, modes, manners, the
way of presenting oneself, not simply being. Contrary to the saying, the habit makes the
monk. And sometimes, it undoes it. It has taken many centuries for certain philosophers,
obsessed with language, to become interested in the manner, what they call, with the
usual pedantry of the trade, the "illocutionary force" of every expression. Try saying
"you believe" in different tones: affirmative, interrogative, doubtful, to see how different
results are obtained: the mood always gives meaning to the verb. That is why
rhetoricians, politicians, especially skilled in the style or way of saying things, triumph.
That's why women give in to Don Juan, more because of his talk than because of his
figure. That's why no child believes their parents when they promise something for a
non-existent tomorrow, a way to get out of trouble. That is why Lenin was completely
wrong: instead of "what to do?" He had to have considered "how to do it." That is why,
for now, capitalism wins the game: it deceives better, it wraps its products in attractive,
seductive, modal packaging. Form on background.
The difficulty of being an atheist
The Polish Pope once again declares: "it is easier to live without God." How do you
know? Have you even tried it? Anyway: if His Holiness says so. But it still seems
strange. Generally, they have tried to sell the product the other way: by giving facilities.
Christ was speaking with his disciples about the size of the needles and the difficult
entry of the rich into the Kingdom of Heaven when someone dared to express certain
doubts (Saint Matthew, 19:26). With God everything is possible, Jesus closed his mouth.
It is a point that was discussed a lot during the Middle Ages: if, in fact, God can do
everything, can he, for example, change the past? The answers don't matter; What counts
is the security that believers have, having God on their side. So, how easy. Even the
world, nothing less than the entire universe, with stars and planets, and the entire earth,
full of animals, seas and plants, was the work of just six days. It is true that they worked
hard, since they demanded their proportional rest. Believers have a clear path to any
explanation, no matter how implausible it may seem: it is enough for them to refer to the
mysterious will of the Lord. Voltaire will be right: if God did not exist, he would have to
be invented. So what did the Pole who sits in the Roman Solio mean by saying that
without God everything is easier?
Will it be a confession in pectore of his doubts? Because it sounds cri du coeur : as if
he didn't want to reveal how much it costs him, how difficult it is for him to sustain his
faith in God. He is not without some reason, if one stops to consider that teratology
imposed in the dogma of a God who is at the same time three gods, but only one, but
three, but one. A real riddle, religion as a charade. Or that of transubstantiation: that in
each mass the priest converts simple bread and simple wine into flesh, tissues, nerves,
cells, and blood, with everything and lymphocytes, which are not just anyone's, but from
God himself, It's really difficult to swallow. But, in short, they are the small sacrifices of
weak reason to have, in exchange, the all-embracing help of such a powerful Being.
If at least it had been the Jews who complained, but as far as we know the Pope does
not suffer from Semitic contamination. It would be missing more. Because those do have
something to complain about and can talk about difficulties: because they insist on
maintaining the pact with divinity, things have not always gone well for them. God will
be as powerful as desired, but at the time of Auschwitz he looked the other way. It is true
that he was also distracted at the time of Hiroshima, although it is not known for sure if
he also has to take care of the yellows as they say he takes care of his own, white and
chosen ones. It doesn't matter: with everything and those small and divine flaws, living
with God at your side is still walking down the middle street: everything easy. Because,
ultimately, whatever the believer does not obtain in this life, he can console himself with
the thought that it will be given to him in the next, in spades. Excellent.
Difficult, hard and short is the existence of the atheist. There is only birth and death,
said those Spanish Sadducees. Anyone who thinks this way finds themselves radically
alone from the start: without a daddy to protect them or anyone to whine to when things
get tough. The life of an atheist is so difficult that, for the best of us, it is simply absurd:
it could be as well as not be. Because man is not a mathematical law, which has its
reason in itself. If you don't accept a God as a remote cause, you have to deal entirely on
your own. For that, it takes a little more courage than to take refuge in the comfortable
lair that is God for comfortable believers.
The relationship should be considered the other way around: it is God who finds it
easy to coexist with man. Because, without this, as Camus noted, it would be impossible
to imagine a God. The easy and the difficult are down here: so much so that the very
existence of God depends on it.
 The disintegration of the Soviet empire
Hitler dreamed of a "new order" in Europe, but sometimes, instead of German
predominance or the superiority of the Aryan race, he spoke of the "European vocation"
in the world. After his defeat, the Western Allies continued to think for him, a gentle
way of saying that Nazism was not completely dead. Because from there came a "new
order" that is now also collapsing. And because thanks to Hitler, Stalin was able to build
the Great Soviet Empire that would last half a century.
The first thing to collapse is the reorganization of Europe, starting with the division of
Germany. It is very easy to talk about the "German miracle" and compare it,
disparagingly, with the poverty and lesser development of the Marxist part of Germany
until recently. But it is forgotten that while the Russians took every last screw to
compensate for their losses, the Westerners left German industry intact, which,
moreover, even in the midst of Nazism, had not ceased to be associated with great
Anglo-Saxon capital. : IG Farben, while manufacturing crematorium ovens and Zyklon
B, was a subsidiary of New York's Standard Oil and Her Britannic Majesty's Imperial
Chemical. Despite everything, the East Germans rose to tenth place in the world
industry. Just the one Czechoslovakia had at the beginning of the war; For their part, the
poor Czechs fell, thanks to a peculiar anti-spring socialism, to the level of Peru, which is
already going down.
The year 1989, which saw the beginning of the Soviet imperial disintegration, served
for an official Commission of historians of the USSR to denounce the secret pacts that
Hitler and Stalin signed in 1939 to divide up Eastern Europe. Corso e ricorso of history:
at the end of the First World War, the Tsarist Empire broke up, from which Finland, the
Baltic republics and part of Poland emerged. Twenty years later, thanks to the German-
Soviet pact, the pieces came back together again in the form of an Empire. Except for
Finland, everything returned to the bosom of Holy Russia, which became the Soviet
Union. In 1945, in Yalta and Potsdam, the reconquest was consecrated. And if that were
not enough, from 45 to 48, the Soviets extended their zone of influence with a protective
belt of puppet states, from Poland to Bulgaria. Inside and outside, the Empire was taking
shape again. What Lenin called "the people's prison" in the tsarist era once again became
the Stalinist prison of the nationalities. From the Ukrainian to the Tatar. On the other
hand, old pan-Russian expansionist vocation.
It is said that the onion domes of Saint Basil's, in Moscow, are eight in number to
commemorate as many severed heads of Muslim leaders, defeated by Ivan the Terrible,
the first expansionist tsar. But the Mohammedans, in their various sects, are only one of
the ethnic groups vassaled by Soviet imperialism. Now, with the beginning of
disintegration, they raise their heads: they have already begun in the Caucasus to demand
independence and their total break with the Union.
Twelve years ago, in 1978, the French historian, Hélène Carrière d'Enclause, began to
talk about l'Empire éclaté : its explosion has already begun. And the most serious thing
is that nationalisms in the USSR are not only centrifugal or external: there is also, and
perhaps the most dangerous, central or Great-Russian nationalism, grouped around the
Pamiat (Memory) party, chauvinist, racist, anti-semitic and ultra-religious. The
disintegration is also internal.
The disintegrating currents of the Soviet federation are so diverse that some theorists,
such as Guseinov, predict in the medium term three nationalist models or foci in the
territory of the USSR: the Lebanese model, in the Caucasus, with religious and racial
divisions and quarrels; the Central European model, in the Baltic, with countries
probably associated with the European Community, and the most backward, the Latin
American model, in Siberia, with barely nominal independence, but still economically
subject to the central government.
The Europe in force until 1989, artificially designed in Yalta, was a divided and
subdivided Europe. What is disappearing are the divisions. First of all, the great division
between East and West, between socialism and capitalism, between the Warsaw Pact and
Nato. But Europe was also divided at its heart: two Germanys and, in turn, within that
division, another one: two cities in a Berlin cut by the ugly scar of the wall. All that fades
away. The Germans embrace each other and do not ask for sausages or socialism or
betamax: they ask for reunification, an einig Deutschland , which they will end up
having, perhaps in the form of a Confederation, according to the old Bismarckian model.
The Poles, what a remedy, lower their heads and accept, once again, the German boot:
Kohl did not visit them to unleash rhetoric, but to buy wills: three billion dollars and the
same amount in credits buy many. Reminding them, in passing, that Germany has to
fulfill a "historical destiny." Read: some borders to rectify and perhaps some lands
(Silesia, Pomerania) to reclaim. The Poles shudder, but they have to eat. The Hungarians
have not beaten around the bush: they have already asked to join the Council of Europe
and are requesting what the Soviet invasion in 1956 meant for them: leaving the Warsaw
Pact. Romanians prosecute the entire Communist Party previously declared illegal. The
"iron curtain" that Churchill invented in Fulton, in 1948, is melting in plain sight.
Once the astonishment had passed, the first reaction was one of joy: Europe has
rediscovered itself and Gorbachev, with that "European home", remembers De Gaulle,
when he promised a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. There is no longer talk of
Eastern Europe and the old name for Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, is used again. From
the Norwegians to the Greeks, everyone is moved by the reconciliation of their German
brothers. Now that the nightmare seems to have come to an end, the enormity of that
monstrous fact is gauged. Anyone think for a moment that your own city (Maracaibo,
Caracas) would be cut in two by an impassable wall under penalty of death: total
aberration. Only, once the initial joy has passed, it is time to reflect on the consequences.
Above all, the ancestral fear of a united and powerful Germany. In fact, even
unconsciously, on November 9, another nightmare began to replace that one. Not
because it is recurring, it is less obsessive: the nightmare of a new German Reich.
The saddest thing about the aforementioned article by Francis Fukuyama, an obscure
State Department official, is that he is right when applied to himself. His unoriginal
thesis of the "end of history", in addition to repeating Hegel badly, plays with the
ambiguity of the term: he only meant "end of ideologies", that is, what many others
already said before, among the which, Aron, much better expressed than poor Fukuyama.
But he is completely right if it is understood that in this era there is no great historical
theory worthy of comparison with Marxism. Fukuyama's own article is the best proof of
the ideological poverty into which the world has fallen at the end of the century and the
fact that such vulgar work has had such resonance only confirms the lack of thought.
However, I miss Fukuyama, more than one has dared to theorize what things will be
like in the 1990s. In the British Sunday Times , someone has argued that the end of the
century will be dominated by two major events: the definitive collapse of the USSR and
the emergence of the Fourth Reich as a European superpower. Within Federal Germany
itself, the division is notorious between "Atlanticists", in favor of remaining tied to the
increasingly weakened American economy, and "Europeanists", where the social
democrats are located, with Willy Brandt at the helm, determined to create a "new
order", that is, willing to explain the growing contradictions of Nato and deepen the
economic war already begun with the USA. In that case, all of what until recently was
called Eastern Europe would revolve around the German pole of attraction, which would
voluntarily direct the policy of an enlarged European Community, while Japan and the
smaller Asian tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore ) would dominate the scene from Siberia
to Hawaii, leaving the United States the eternal backyard, that is, Latin America.
Within the American Continent, in that same decade it is not difficult to prophesy the
end of the Cuban Stalinist bastion. You only have to read Castro's latest speeches to
realize the panic that dominates the communists on the island. After confessing that he is
astonished by recent events, he asks the rhetorical question: "Where are we going to end
up along these lines?" To end by openly threatening an apocalyptic end: «Who knows
when the objective difficulties of the world will force us to a maximum of heroism.
Maybe one day we will have to apply war to all the people for the survival of the
revolution. Ceausescu thought the same. And before both, Hitler. Beginning and end
would coincide, in the dizzying fall of the tropical Arturo Ui. Because it is worth
remembering that the first to launch the operatic phrase "history will absolve me" was
Hitler, in the trial that followed him for the failed Munich Putsch. With or without Fidel,
the world of the new century will return to a slightly Orwellian aspect: three large blocks
facing each other economically.
For now, everything is parties and celebrations, like that collective madness that hit the
Germans on the last night of the year, next to the wall and on top of it. Even Marlene
Dietrich, the great and unforgettable Lola-Lola (" Ich bin von Kopf zu Fuß zu Liebe
eingestellt ") has announced in Paris that she is going to return to look for the suitcase
that, as she says in one of her most moving songs, one day left forgotten in old Berlin.
They all return: Rostropovich and Nureyev, to the USSR, and Ionesco and Cioran, to
Romania.
But after the party will come the awakening: mouse, hangover, hangover. Because the
problems persist even when they are more acute and the deposed characters are only
crouching, in the shadows, also awaiting their bureaucratic return. Remember what
London said: the "referents" or police torturers who interrogated him in the communist
regime were the same ones who had loyally served the Gestapo during the German
occupation.
Once the joy is over, many citizens of Eastern Europe will discover another wall, much
higher and impassable, that of the society of money, where it is only worth having it and
in abundance. Then new regrets will come, other reflections and probably, once again,
some great utopian thought, in the form of a proposal, that will once again set in motion
that history that Mr. Fukuyama has tried to stop with sixteen ridiculous pages from an
office in Washington.
The woman in the temple
If, as someone noted, women are man's last colony, thanks to the Holy Church it is still
possible to keep the colonial statute in force. Faithful to its origins, the Church and its
representatives have known how to put women in their place, which is always to serve
God and man, for almost two thousand years. And now, suddenly, giving in to the
deceptive voices of a supposed renewal, it seems that none other than the bishops
gathered in Rome are beginning to falter and show signs of giving in to feminine power.
What a disgrace for the Church, what a loss of character for Christianity! It would be
better for them to keep in mind the wise teachings of those holy men of the first
centuries, rightly considered Fathers of the Church: "Woman is a treacherous mule, she
is a tapeworm stuck in the heart of man," declared Saint John Damascene, many
centuries before Nietzsche and Schopenhauer realized this. And it is known the zeal with
which Saint Cyril, that most learned disputant, who knew how to confront the Nestorian
heresy, treated the shameless Hypatia, who in the height of the most pagan
shamelessness had dared to teach mathematics and astronomy. The Christian people,
carried away by the sacred word of the saint, attacked the infamous woman in the street,
tearing off her flesh in strips with the help of the pointed shells that abound in the Bay of
Alexandria. So: the woman in her place, which is none other than that of silence and
meditation in the temple, and as Cervantes expressed in a magnificent formula, when
married, her leg broken and at home.
So much wisdom comes to the Church from afar. When the Apostle asks in
Corinthians I that women limit themselves to silence in the church, he only refreshes his
recent Judaism, since it is worth noting that the good Jew always prays a prayer in the
morning in which he gives thanks to the Lord, praised be his holy Name, for not having
made him a woman. Why come now with novels about deaconesses and other sinful
audacity? Let high dignitaries measure their actions carefully, because by giving in to the
vile temptation of modernity, they could well be opening the door to the destruction of
religious values. In fact: if religions tend to have the bad habit of being eternal, it is
largely due to the sustained pedagogical effort of women. Who instills in children the
doctrines transmitted from generation to generation? Who ensures that the tender shoots
do not go astray and succumb to the attraction of the unknown? Who demands that the
traditional values on which their very condition of submission is founded and sustained
be maintained, if not the woman in the home? Give sacred power to women, take them
out of the homes so that they can rule in the temple, give them a voice and vote in
transcendental matters and it will soon be seen that it will not be long before the solid
foundations of the churches begin to collapse. sexist religions that preside over and
protect us.
It inevitably had to be a woman who said that feminine virtue had been the greatest of
man's inventions. Thanks to which, it may be added, religion and a good part of society
are sustained. If a priest deviates from the right path, he is just a poor sinner to whom
God will still give another chance to return to the fold, but if a nun just has a bad thought
and begins to become more agitated than is convenient, he declares her to the priest.
possessed by Satan and will be duly exorcised. Like the virtue of women is the
cornerstone of this proven sexist civilization. It is like tempting misfortune to introduce
women to the highest and most reserved role of man: the august priesthood. It would be
something like rehabilitating the snake, as the infamous Ophites believed, and going
back to the moment of the first sin which, it will be worth remembering, was committed
at the evil instigation of the woman. Let things remain as they have been if you want this
business of religion to last as long.
 The nuclear nightmare
The majority of the current inhabitants of the planet were born in the middle of the
nuclear age. The minority, or what is the same, the old, were already adults before
August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, three meters long
and a half wide, called Little Boy , and the What happened.
But in reality, the nuclear age began much earlier. It began the day when a man named
Einstein wrote the famous formula on a blackboard in Berlin: E= mc 2 . If energy is
nothing else but vertiginously accelerated matter, all that was missing was: physically
accelerating it to transmute it into energy. This is what they did, first Rutherford, in
Cambridge, and then Fermi, in Chicago, with that rudimentary cyclotron that makes
atoms dance until they break and convert them into released energy.
From the moment such a feat was possible, man was afraid. Not in 1945, when the
destruction of Hiroshima and three hundred thousand human beings occurred in a few
minutes, but somewhat later, when realizing what had been unleashed, the experiments
began to continue with the nuclear monster. The first of such experiments was carried
out on a lost atoll in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, with a name that would later be
extended to women's clothing: Bikini. Then, when they were going to explode the test
bomb, towards the middle of 1946, a rumor spread around the world centered on three
words: "chain reaction." Since it was feared that, if the experiment occurred, the energy
unleashed would be uncontrollable, which would continue to produce more energy in
contact with the rest of the matter in the universe. The fact that none of this nonsense
was true did nothing to make the fear disappear. And the proof that, deep down,
something speaks is that, in effect, that is what happens when the radioactivity of certain
unstable substances is unleashed, such as uranium-235: they do not stop producing
radioactivity, sometimes even for thousands of years. And radioactivity, in the long or
short term, due to destruction of the nervous system, third-degree burns or cancers of all
kinds, kills. Thus, since man has mastered the atom, he has lived with the shadow of
another death, this time massive and uncontainable.
But atomic energy is not released just to kill. Just as dynamite can be used to commit
an attack or assassination or to blow up rocks that open new avenues, nuclear energy can
be a cause of death (cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, until now) as well as life:
applications of nuclear medicine. In the form of energy, it is considered a more reliable
source than the traditional sources, fossils, coal and oil, since it exists in enormous
quantities, lasts longer and can be induced by man, owner and lord of such terrible force.
Hence, atomic power plants emerged around the 1950s, of which there are already more
than four hundred in the world: 93 in the United States, 51 in the USSR, 43 in France,
the countries with the greatest development of this type of energy. In theory, the process
is simple: when radioactive uranium decays, for example, it produces energy, which is
translated into heat, which is why the water used to cool the process is in turn heated
until it becomes steam, which , driven to a turbine, will produce electricity. Instead of
using the potential energy of the water stored in a dam, as it falls towards the turbines,
the steam produced by the heat generated by the decay of radioactive materials is used.
Then, the entire technical problem derived will consist of controlling the energy thus
released. That's where the difficulties begin.
In 1979, an American film, The China Syndrome , was released, with Jane Fonda and
Jack Lemmon in the lead roles. It presented the possibility of an explosion of a nuclear
power plant and the consequent danger, since, if the radioactive critical mass melted and
penetrated the Earth's crust, it could in theory continue its march towards the antipodes,
to China itself, and that is why the title . It was not a great film, too didactic and
simplistic. What made it famous is that just a few weeks after its release, a major
catastrophe occurred at one of the North American nuclear power plants, Three Mile
Island, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Once again, fiction was ahead of reality. It was not
the only accident that occurred at nuclear power plants. But that one was serious and
spectacular enough for reassuring statements to be issued: it would never happen again.
Until it happened again.
It happened in Chernobyl, or rather, in Pripyat, a Ukrainian village on the banks of the
river of the same name. A few years ago, on April 26, 1986, it is not very clear why,
whether it was due to human error or excess accumulated radioactivity, but the fact is
that a fierce fire broke out that caused reactor number 4 to explode. Chernobyl. It took
almost a month to control it and thousands of people died plus the undetermined number
of those who, in the next forty years, will die as a result of the radioactivity dispersed by
the accident, not only in the USSR, but in a good part of Europe.
Because a gigantic cloud was formed, about a kilometer high, which was carried by
the winds, first towards the North, Finland and Sweden, and then towards the South,
Germany, France and even Italy. That cloud was loaded with lethal radioactive
substances. It has been, until now, the worst of the nuclear accidents that have occurred.
And that, as experts say, was very lucky. In effect: firstly, because it occurred at night, at
one o'clock, which resulted in only the technicians and workers on duty working at the
plant and not the thousands who work there during the day, as well as, in In the
neighboring town, people were in their homes, so they only received a tenth of the
radioactivity that, if they had been exposed, they would have received. The same terrible
power of the fire caused this gigantic column to rise between 500 and 1000 meters,
preventing radioactive substances from falling directly into the immediately neighboring
areas. Then, the dominant wind, from the south, dragged that column towards wooded
regions, very sparsely populated. And finally, we had the immense luck that, not only at
that moment, but in the days and weeks that followed, the weather remained
predominantly dry, that if it had rained or been humid, the radioactivity would have
condensed and fallen soon to land. Even so, it was a terrible accident: for the number of
victims and for the future consequences. There is a fact that, in addition to proving it,
allows us to extrapolate to other situations. In addition to the Soviet government using
all its great technical and human resources to help the victims, they received important
help from the Western world. American and Israeli experts, specialized in bone marrow
transplants, went to Moscow to collaborate with their Soviet colleagues. Even so, despite
the enormous resources used, in fact everyone was powerless to treat more than three
hundred seriously injured people, most of whom died. It is not an exaggeration to think
what would happen in the event of a global nuclear conflagration, when the equivalent of
thousands of Chernobyl reactors would explode. It must be taken into account that just to
control the fire and expose the reactor, spitting tons of radioactive matter into space, the
Soviets needed almost a month. To avoid the danger of melting of the radioactive core
and its penetration into the globe ("China syndrome"), they had to inject liquid nitrogen
into the ground under the reactor in order to harden the surface, protecting it from
possible penetration. And finally, enclose the unleashed monster in an immense and very
thick sarcophagus of cement and lead, which will theoretically keep it there for many
centuries, as long as its power of radioactive disintegration lasts.
The nuclear dream, with which a good part of humanity has believed to solve its
enormous energy problems, is born from the peaceful use of the power contained within
matter, once it is achieved atomic disintegration. Thus, instead of depending on fossil
energy, accumulated for millennia in the subsoil, man would begin to replace it with
nuclear energy which, in addition to being supposedly cheaper, is practically unlimited.
But there are many who, after the 1986 accident, think that the Chernobyl catastrophe
marks the end of the nuclear dream. Or rather: the dream turned into a nightmare.
 The pitfalls of abortion
It is still a sad irony that the first supporters of abortion are the anti-abortion
abortionists: their only mission is to abort abortion. Without caring about the
consequences, social and human, or even the rationality of their position. They know
very well that if they were willing to listen to arguments, it is not that they would be
convinced of the advantages of abortion, but their intransigence could well waver. For
this reason, they practice the abortion of abortion at all times: even before the possibility
of discussion arises, they refuse to reason.
To do this, they usually take refuge in the parapet of the laws: if it is prohibited it is for
a reason; They don't want to know more. It is still the weakest of defenses: laws are
perishable and changeable. Women and illiterate people were also prohibited from
voting. Or that the priests entered the country legally. In addition to being a weak
position, it borders on the irrational: abortion is bad because they believe so, and that's
enough: don't discuss it anymore. However, with everything in mind, such closed-
mindedness is still preferable to the few attempts at argumentation that anti-abortionists
have tried. To reason, they reason, but incorrectly, that is, they use as much fallacy as
they can handle because they do not start from a neutral position, willing to see the pros
and cons, but rather they have already taken sides beforehand and, by making the effort
to argue, They only have one purpose: to affirm themselves in what they maintain.
Who doubts that abortion has drawbacks: particularly if it is performed clandestinely,
by anyone, in unhygienic conditions, something that does not seem to worry anti-
abortionists in the least. But, even under normal conditions, fully authorized, it will
always be a traumatic act for the woman who suffers it. So is pulling a tooth or getting
an injection. The point is not that: what must be addressed is not the consequences of the
act of abortion or termination of pregnancy itself, but rather the others: the
psychological, physiological, economic and moral consequences of an unwanted
pregnancy and consequent birth. by the woman for whatever reason. This aspect will
never be weighed by anti-abortionists. They will refuse to see beyond the fact of
abortion and if you manage to pressure them to speak out, the most you will be able to
extract from them is a derogatory and mean statement: that they would have thought
about it before. It is still a medieval conception of the responsibility of human acts:
whoever did it, pays for it. But it is revealing that they "reason" like this: because it
proves that deep down they are not so much concerned about abortion as their idea of
morality. They are furious anti-abortionists because they are vengeful: they are bothered
by the free disposition of the body that a woman can make. And they think, resentfully:
let him pay for what he enjoyed.
His favorite argument is only one: respect for life. The fallacy underlying the use of
that term is twofold: first, they never take the trouble to explain what this vague "life"
thing is. Plants also have life and they do not stop pruning them; Their position of sacred
respect for life would only be serious if they proceeded like certain religions to not even
kill cockroaches and only eat vegetarian. And note that not even Buddhists are
consistent, since the lettuces that they chew with relish also have life. "Life" is a
confusing term that needs scientific refinement. Can someone's nails be said to have life?
Do they have it in their hair or their nose or their breasts? But no one protests because
nails and hair are cut and noses and breasts are redone. When is the fetus alive? And
above all, what kind of life does a fetus of less than eight weeks have? With which we
arrive at the other hidden fallacy: equating a fetus with a rational and thinking being. An
abortion, therapeutic or of the type that
Whatever, carried out at the advisable moment and under correct conditions, it is an
operation that does not kill anyone because no one still exists, since one can only kill,
with moral and criminal consequences, a human being, that is, someone who, in addition
to live, think and reason. The furious anti-abortionists should review the doctrine of the
Church, which does not grant spirituality to fetuses except from a certain moment,
because the soul is not something that resides in the genes or that develops from a
chromosome. So, however you put it, it is an abuse of language and reasoning to talk
about "killing", "murdering" and such tremendous exaggerations.
Not to mention the complex and delicate social aspects of a dangerous or unwanted
pregnancy. But it would be naïve to demand that relentless anti-abortionists have
understanding and compassion for their fellow human beings. Perhaps that cynical
Frenchman was right when he warned that having an abortion is proof of impatience:
that given our civilized customs, it is better to wait until they are older.
 Profanity
It's not that they are more than the good ones, but that they are used more. Hence they
are bad. For his abuse. They spread like counterfeit money, in this case, from word of
mouth. They abound, they repeat themselves, they become universal and broad, and they
only ensure that no one knows what they mean. Which does not prevent, but rather
encourages, their continued generous use.
"Love", for example, so as not to start causing blisters. It deserves to be the queen of
bad words, since it is used for everything, and, worst of all, for everyone. Until it
becomes an obligation. Because if it is necessary to love someone, especially our
neighbor, by precept, only the name remains of love. Spouses also owe each other love,
which is the safest and quickest way to start not tolerating each other and probably
coming to hate each other. What could love not have been for? It makes the world go
round and, if Dante is to be believed, it moves the sole and the other star , nothing less.
He is stronger than death, demands oaths, and survives measles. Because it is so
universal, poets have exalted it to the point of lowering it. Common as light is love ,
Shelley sang, that if it were true, everything would be flooded with love and the world
would become unbearably sweet. Word that penetrates all speeches; voice with which all
humans clear their throats. Favorite fetish of religions, politicians and all types of
preachers. It works the same for a torn one as it does for a torn one. The same applies to
commerce as to sublime inspiration, so love with a price and the other, priceless, coexist.
Passing love and eternal love. Crazy love and prudent and wise love. Truly, what would
men do without love, that is, without the word love?
It is no less bad "freedom." Everyone has uttered it; Very few have enjoyed it. In his
name, as Madame Roland sighed on the way to the scaffold, crimes have not stopped
being committed. And what I will haunt you. Freedom is something that is promised,
sought, longed for. It sounds like a trip, to another world, like an escape. Perhaps it is
worse than love, because it can be faked more easily: everyone dreams of it in their own
way. Its definition is as impossible and as unnecessary as that of love. If the latter
excites, the former lulls. It serves as anesthesia while man surrenders more and more to
his destiny as a sick and repressive animal. If the sellers of religions traffic in love, the
peddlers of social illusions thrive in freedom. For some reason Claudel, an old Catholic,
an expert in love and freedom, came to exclaim: Délivrez-moi de la liberté! Impossible:
from bad words, from big words, no one can free us. They are our daily currency, our
hallmarks to go out every morning.
The one who saw it very clearly was Orwell: "Love is hate", "Freedom is slavery."
Interchangeable voices. Contradictory propositions. Ends that touch. Equality of
opposites. All of this is also given another bad, very bad word: "dialectic." No one is free
from this last plague, because for at least a hundred years here, everything is dialectical.
Even underdevelopment, a poor word that, like democracy, does not even reach the
category of bad. We live surrounded by those and other bad words. They have neither
value nor meaning; They chatter, they do not communicate; They shout, they say
nothing. Suitable for slogans, poor in rational discourse; They ask for more than they
deliver. They demand without giving an answer to anything. Words that, as Valéry
noted, have performed all the functions. Even the oldest in the world, like love; even the
most corrupt, like freedom and the least rational, like dialectic.
Death of atheism
It is a typical Spanish thing, but it is attributed to none other than Buñuel, who, when
faced with the impertinent question, used to respond that he was an atheist, thank God.
The curious thing is that there is more truth than joke in the boutade : because only by
believing in God in some way can one consistently be an atheist. In effect: the atheist
wastes time and effort trying to prove the unprovable: that God does not exist. Just like
the rationalist believer, since it is the same to strive to prove the existence of God as it is
to try to do so with his non-existence. There is no need to be shocked or think that this is
some dark problem. It couldn't be simpler.
In principle, the existence of anything is not proven. If anything, the existence of
something is postulated, which is very different, that is, it starts from the simple fact of
what exists and, if it does not exist, it cannot be taken as a starting point. Wanting to
prove its existence is like turning it around: starting from scratch to arrive at the
existence of what you want to prove. An absurdity. What exists is there to be taken into
account, it is not a hidden treasure that must be sought with special methods. That is why
the provers of the existence of God waste their time. If they believe so, let them start
from there, but only as a belief, since their proof, in addition to being impossible, does
not make the slightest sense. It would be like wanting to prove the existence of the
unicorn or the winged horse: they exist as fictional beings and it is all a matter of
knowing how to limit oneself to that type of existence. Something similar happens with
the nation of a supreme being. Where it can be seen that it is even more absurd, not to
say ridiculous, to try to prove its non-existence, which is the determination and mania of
the atheist. Atheists and deists join hands in accepting something and then wanting to
prove its existence or non-existence.
Therefore, as Tierno Galván, the "old professor", warned, it is advisable not to confuse
atheism with agnosticism. The atheist believes, the agnostic does not, that if atheists did
not believe they would not waste their time impugning God. Agnosticism is, on the
contrary, in one sense more radical and, in another, more neutral. It is more radical
because it goes to the heart of the matter, by not accepting beliefs of that type, but it is
neutral in declaring that the Lord in question can either exist or not exist: the agnostic
does not even pronounce on the point. He simply does not waste his time on such a
matter. That is why the efforts of professional and militant atheists, such as communists,
to uproot religious beliefs are pathetic. First, because they have the wrong objective:
atheism is a doctrine that argues against a certain existence, it is not a neutral, non-
religious position, but quite the opposite: deeply religious in its belief that God does not
exist. But also because it supposes that it is going to remove with arguments what are
only irrational beliefs. The results are visible.
Take the two extremes of Europe (not just geographical): Spain and the Soviet Union.
Spain, after forty long years of fundamentalist and arrogant Catholicism, has the highest
rate of irreligiosity in all of Europe. In the Soviet Union, after seventy years of militant
and aggressive atheism, 60% of its population declared themselves believers: seventy
million Orthodox, ten million Catholics, four million Protestants and sixty million
Mohammedans, not counting the wayward Jews. . The lesson is very brief: nothing like
atheism for religion to flourish, the inverse being no less true: nothing like religion to
detach yourself from it and come to think on your own.
The death penalty
It must be another way to measure the delay: raising the very old debate on the death
penalty. Tell when they do it: why always wait for any vulgar murder? It's about
remembering a certain saint when it thunders; which does not fail to reveal part of the
old problem: the death penalty as revenge of society, conceived and executed to calm
passions and drain humors.
 The curious thing is that with the death penalty what happens with marriage: those
who are inside want to leave and those who were left outside want to enter. Humanity is
so unoriginal that it swings in such an uncomfortable swing: when a country enjoys the
benefits of the death penalty, there is no shortage of voices that stir up the debate and in
the long run manage to abolish it, at least for a time. Then, other protests will begin to
raise the tone of the discussion until it is restored or imposed again. Which would be
enough in itself to prove, if it were necessary to do so, that the death penalty is not a
solution to anything. If anything, it helps to appease certain bad consciences, if it does
not fulfill another more primitive function: quenching the animal's thirst for blood in
society. As is known, until not so long ago executions had to be public: in addition to
serving as a supposed example, they entertained the populace, eager for revenge and
cruelty. Now, if implemented, they would be broadcast live and direct. And it would
happen as with everything: at first, great rating , and then, after a while, their interest
wanes. A non-silly game is to imagine who would be the advertisers interested in
sponsoring the program, apart from religion, of course, which does not waste the last
moments to sell the product. The extreme case was provided by that chaplain-chief of
Franco's prisons, who maintained, most seriously, that no one is happier than the person
condemned to death, since being the only one who knows exactly when he is going to
die, he has the opportunity, which is not presented to everyone, to prepare your soul as
God and the Holy Church command. It is still overwhelming logic; Taken to the
extreme, it would encourage the spread of capital punishment sentences just to fill
heaven with repentant sinners. It has the small defect of not being able to apply to the
impious, those who deny that breath called "soul."
The best argument in favor of the death penalty was advanced last century by a French
humorist, Alphonse Karr; More than an argument, it is an allegation against the
abolitionists: «if they ask to abolish the death penalty, that MM. "Let the assassins
begin." A cruder than ingenious way to update the very old law of retaliation. On the
other hand, the argument that the enemies of the death penalty will always be able to
brandish is that of its absolute and proven uselessness. Man does not stop killing because
he knows that he can be killed. Rather: remember those somewhat rhetorical films by
André Cayatte against the death penalty (Justice was served, We are all murderers), in
which he presented the case of criminals who had tattooed a dotted line on their throat
with the inscription: « "cut at the dotted line", in order to facilitate the thankless but well-
paid task of the executioner.
If the indignant demanders of the death penalty are like the maddened Queen of Hearts
("Off with their heads!"), the meek defenders of human life always remember those little
verses by Donne, which begin by assuring that The death of any man diminishes us to
end the busy bells and for whom they toll. Debate as useless as it is fallacious: everyone
deep down exalts life: the abolitionists to avoid more bloodshed, the friends of the death
penalty to avenge what has already been shed. Their signs have changed: either a life of
more or one of less.
Thoughts on Venezuela, from Gómez to the present
day
There is a constant in the production of Venezuelan thought: the dependence on
Eurocentric ideas. This norm has been in force since the Colony: then, it was the
Thomists and Suarezists, from the Tocuyo School; later, with Andrés Bello, English
empiricism and, with Simón Rodríguez, it was the turn of Rousseau and the
encyclopedists. In the 19th century, Venezuela will continue to depend on imported
conceptual expression. A situation that will not change in the 20th century, so that the
demand that Leopoldo Zea formulated more than thirty years ago, from Mexico, when he
called for an American "mental emancipation" remains unsatisfied.
Since the end of the 19th century, it is positivism, in its various variants, that
permeates Venezuelan cultural life: with this, Venezuela follows the Ibero-American
trend. From Mexico to Argentina, without forgetting Brazil, where the central positivist
motto was incorporated into the flag itself (" Ordem e Progresso "), the Ibero-American
Continent fully received the impact of Comtian doctrine. In Venezuela, it was like this
until the appearance of the so-called "generation of '28."
The scientific variant of positivism, social Darwinism, which is represented by the
names of Ernst and Villavicencio, served to imbue the generation of historians of the first
years of the 20th century with biologism, that is, above all, Gil Fortoul, Arcaya and
Vallenilla Lanz. What those social theorists aspired to was to make history a science,
within the purest positivist requirement. But the sociological positivism, dominant in
Gómez's time, soon transmuted into an ideology that concealed the dictatorial system. To
do this they only had to develop to the limit the deterministic theses contained both in
Comte's positivism and in Spencerian evolutionism. In effect, both geography, climate,
ethnic composition (they still dared to say "race", although Arcaya is now openly critical
of the concept), as well as social, psychological and material conditions served to raise
the notion of the "leader" or " gendarme” necessary. What it was about, with that
intermediate figure, and forced by negative circumstances, was to ensure social progress
that guaranteed entry into the Comtian and inalienable idea of "progress", always within
an "order." It is not necessary to insist on the fact that it was Comte himself who was in
charge of underlining the importance of social order to the point of openly confronting
the socialist ideas of the time, which for Comte were, as an expression of revolutionary
violence, the denial of any possibility of progress. So before rushing to place the entire
accusatory burden on a Gil Fortoul or a Vallenilla Lanz, it should be kept in mind that
the valuation of order as an essential condition for aspiring to any progress belongs to the
most classic positivist spirit.
For this reason, to the extent that positivist ideas, in their social and political phase of
the dictatorship, served as an ideology of support for the Gomecista regime, it is not
surprising that, with the physical disappearance of the Andean leader, the decline of the
Positivism as a representative conceptual expression of Venezuelan thought. It must also
be taken into account that until the 1930s, any Venezuelan conceptual manifestation was
exclusive to the upper classes on the social scale, the only ones with the possibility of
accessing university education, in the country or abroad. In this sense, Venezuelan
positivist thought could well be called "elistesque." The fact that it also gained its most
representative expression through the biological sciences and history can be explained by
the academic origins and the specializations that resulted: the Venezuelan thinkers from
the beginning of the century, until the end of Gomecismo, were mostly doctors and
lawyers. It will be necessary to take into account that, since the extinction of the colonial
university system, with a marked theological nature, there were no specific studies in the
human sciences (the traditional Philosophy and Letters, plus the social and psychological
disciplines), but rather, in a fragmented form and subordinate, were included in the study
plans of the law degree. This may explain the certain delay that is registered in the
Venezuelan conceptual expression compared to other Latin American countries. In
Argentina, for example, there could be a comprehensive positivist thought like that of
Alejandro Korn, or in Mexico, that of José Vasconcelos, because both countries have
continued with the tradition of autonomous centers of humanistic training (Faculties of
Philosophy, Letters and History). . Not so Venezuela, which had to wait until 1946 for
the first democratic action government to reopen a Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at
the Central University. This creates a curious paradox.
And it is that, with the emergence of the revolutionary parties on the political scene
(Democratic Action, after its changes of acronyms; URD and, above all, the Communist
Party), with the disappearance of Gomecismo, the lower social classes enter the scene,
Until then, they had not been represented politically or culturally in Venezuelan social
life. The aforementioned paradox is given by the fact that while it was the elite, superior
Mantuan classes that had control of national thought, they did not consider it convenient
to have a higher academic center for the transmission and teaching of the ideas on which
they were nourished. While it was precisely the popular representatives, both of the
proletariat and the rising bourgeoisie, who took the step of restoring the old Faculty of
Philosophy and Letters, a traditional expression of European-style Western thought.
In the interregnum of political transition that Venezuela experienced from 1935 to
1945 (from the death of Gómez to the seizure of power by a Civic-Military Junta headed
by Rómulo Betancourt), positivism as an expression of social thought definitively
declined. This is not only the case due to the already registered connection of said
thought with the Gomecista dictatorial regime, but it is partly a consequence of the drive
with which new conceptual systems were presented in the agitated political and social
horizon of that Venezuela. The ideas that displace nineteenth-century positivism from
first place are the formless but combative nationalism of the first democratic actionists,
and the deficient and rudimentary Marxism of the introducers of communist ideas in
Venezuela. It must be noted, however, that none of the new ideas manages to supplant
positivism in its role as an unofficial and dominant ideology. Both nationalist and
Marxist ideas appeared in a state of agitation and confusion, more apt to combat the
established ideology (determinist, gradualist and, ultimately, pessimistic) than to replace
it with a new and powerful replacement ideology.
Nationalism was initially fed by the Indo-American ideas that Haya de la Torre was
developing in Peru, while Marxism did not penetrate through direct influences, but rather
through texts of great conceptual simplicity (almost all of them breviaries of dialectical
materialism). or by Latin American adaptations of Marxism, such as the one carried out,
also in Peruvian lands, by Mariátegui. So, in this new phase, the dependence was
twofold: not only were they ideas borrowed from Eurocentric ideologies (those
nationalisms were remotely inspired by the French Maurras and Italian fascism), but on
this occasion they were not even The loan was operated directly, but through Latin
American intermediaries. The most representative example of political thought of this
period continues to be Rómulo Betancourt because both currents coincided in him.
Tribute at the same time to the nationalist and Americanist ideas of the Peruvian APRA
and the most general Marxist categories, the Betancourt of the first period, that is, the
creator of Democratic Action, comes to synthesize the incorporation of the new populist
ideology with edges of proletarian doctrine. He was not the only representative of these
trends. In the Marxist camp, the communist social representation was more profound and
sustained, with names in theory such as Salvador de la Plaza and, later, Rodolfo
Quintero. They were militant Marxists from the economistic era of Marxism, who placed
all the emphasis on the class struggle, applied to the social, and politically and
economically, on the contradictions that they believed they detected in the capitalist
system. In any case, from then on, Marxism makes its appearance in the panorama of
social ideas in contemporary Venezuela, although it is convenient to record here a
historical difference: in its beginnings (period from 1935 to 1950, approximately), the
Marxism was an instrument of political struggle handled almost exclusively by
communist and related militants. But, starting in the 1950s, Marxism became a
philosophy with university roots, which is discussed, taught and polemicized from
classrooms or specialized writings.
But the generation of '28 also gave rise to the emergence of names independent of
politics and open to the creative and speculative field that have covered practically the
entire period with their work and conceptual expression. From Picón Salas to Úslar
Pietri, without forgetting names like Gabaldón Márquez, Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Isaac
Pardo or Briceño Iragorry, the men of that generation, no matter how disparate their
positions and diverse their means of expression, coincided in the obsession of understand
and recreate Venezuelan history and customs. They are more dispersed than systematic
thinkers to the extent that some of them prefer to choose literary genres of fiction for the
presentation of their ideas, but they all accuse the weight of the Gomecista heritage to try
to shake it off through fragmentary analysis and artistic creation. If literature can
sometimes be a vehicle of progressive and hopeful ideas for a country in turmoil, as was
the Venezuela that suffered the Gomecista dictatorship, the work of Rómulo Gallegos
should also be part of the story of a thought that strives to find itself. .
On a purely political level, which was ultimately predominant in the transition phase
from the dictatorship of Gómez to that of Pérez Jiménez, totalitarian ideas, represented in
Europe by national socialism and fascism, also exerted a certain influence. In Venezuela,
the partial introduction of such ideologies was done mostly through right-wing political
parties, such as the incipient Copei, loosely influenced in its origins by the Spanish
Falange and the right of Gil Robles, also from Spain. To a certain extent, the October
1945 coup, together with the Allied victory that same year in World War II, put an end to
any totalitarian pretensions of the right. From 1945 to 1948, the ideology that tried to
penetrate the political power groups was more populist nationalism than anything else. It
was the moment when the government promoted secular teaching in schools, not without
some resistance, and encouraged the type of normalist teaching inspired by Chilean
pedagogy and experience. The result of that policy was the creation of the Pedagogical
Institute and, later, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Through both institutions, but
especially the second, new ideas and currents of thought penetrate Venezuela.
The most powerful vehicle for the propagation of scientific and philosophical theories
were the Spanish refugees from the Civil War. Although its cultural impact in Venezuela
was not nearly as powerful as that experienced in Mexico, quality representatives
continued to settle in the country and soon made their influence felt. In science, for
example, Augusto Pi i Sunyer meant the renewal of biology and medicine at the
University of Caracas. In the field of historical-literary research, the work of Pedro
Grases has been of great importance. But it was in the field of speculative thought where
the Spanish republicans made their influence most markedly felt. Already prior to the
Spanish war of 1936-39, the writings of Ortega y Gasset had set the tone: through a
dissemination organ as prestigious and widespread as the Revista de Occident, the Ibero-
American countries of the Spanish era received a marked training Orteguian at the same
time as Europeanizing. It is worth keeping in mind that when Ortega spoke of the West,
referring to Europe, he meant, almost exclusively, Germany and thought in the German
language. He could make certain concessions to French thinkers, but at no time did the
Revista de Occident serve to present the ideas of Anglo-Saxon countries. Ortega's
contempt for England is well known, which he labeled a "country without imagination",
not to mention the superiority with which he deigned to speak of the Americans, as was
the European tendency of the time. Still at the end of the forties, Ortega went so far as to
say that the triangle of contemporary science was limited to that geographically formed
by Berlin-Paris-London. It is worth noting such limitations in Ortega's approach because
his influence was notable in Latin America, although not as much in Venezuela, as, for
example, in Argentina. But the majority of the Spanish thinkers that the civil war brought
to the American continent were either Ortegians by training (in the case of José Gaos) or
they were in agreement with the Germanocentric ideas of European culture (in the case
of García Bacca).
The result was that the systems of speculative thought that took hold in Venezuela in
the late 1940s and early 1950s were, for the most part, of German descent and affiliation.
Thus, phenomenology, Heideggerian existentialism and Hartmann's epistemology. This
explains the formation of an important current of Venezuelan professionals addicted to
the German metaphysical tradition. However, it was impossible to close oneself to
certain currents in vogue, such as Sartre's existentialism or, much later, in the sixties,
French structuralism. Both influences were the result of having created and put into
operation, since 1946, a center for higher philosophical studies. The dominant figure for
many years in philosophical teaching and dissemination, and the teacher who trained
several generations of new researchers was the Spanish Juan David García Bacca. Later
that study center, which was the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Central, was
accompanied by others when, already in the midst of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, the
Catholic University was created. In it, as well as later in Zulia, other Humanistic
Faculties emerged that came to reinforce the systematic studies of philosophy in the
country. The almost ten years of the Perezjimenista dictatorship had a double
consequence in the field of ideas: on the one hand, a growing influence of religious
orders in secondary and higher education. On the other hand, as a reaction against the
dictatorship, the proliferation of Marxist ideas and their theoretical deepening. The
majority of intellectuals opposed to the regime felt the need to express their disagreement
through the general revolutionary explanations that Marxist doctrine offered them. To
the point that, at the fall of the dictatorship, in January 1958, Marxist groups were
dominant in the intellectual panorama of the country. Add to this the prestige that the
Cuban Revolution achieved in a short time among the nationalist and advanced sectors
and it will be understood why, from the sixties onwards, the general picture of socio-
political ideas was dominated by the lively controversies that militant Marxism and the
academic unleashed without respite.
Meanwhile, under the shelter of the newly founded Catholic University, the social and
philosophical ideas of Maritain and those of Mounier's personalism penetrated and
spread in certain, rather small, circles. The new cadres of the Christian Social Party (also
in hiding during the dictatorship) were formed in the heat of such doctrines, without
forgetting the enormous influence that the aggiornamento that the Catholic Church
experienced with the Second Vatican Council of 1962 later had. Over time, such seeds,
sown in part in the encyclicals Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris , along with the
growing problems of Latin American societies in crisis, would give way to more radical
positions, marked by the motto of "theology." of liberation"; In particular, the Jesuits
were attracted by such radicalization.
In the economic order, Venezuelan society had followed, since large-scale oil
exploitation began, a de facto Keynesian trend: the State was the dispenser of budgets to
ensure both the availability of jobs and the import capacity of goods and services.
services. This line was accentuated during the dictatorship, not only because, during it,
the boom in oil exploitation increased in the heat of new concessions to multinational
companies, but also because of that curious tendency towards a cement policy that all
dictators seem to have. To the extent that Pérez Jiménez was not an exception to this rule
and promoted the construction of large works, roads (highways), luxury (hotels, cable
cars) or housing (multifamily blocks), the Keynesian vision of the Venezuelan State was
consolidated. Subsequent democratic governments did not do much to abandon this
trend, even though they redirected public spending towards works of greater social
interest (health, education). During the sixties and seventies, this trend was
complemented by the no less expansionist trend in the economy brought about by the
rise of developmentalism inspired by the ideas of ECLAC: hence, forced
industrialization and the accumulation of large debts, the result of that economic policy.
growth at any cost. It has been necessary for the general crisis of the eighties to occur for
Venezuelan economic thought to diversify and critical expressions to emerge both from
the planning and centralist sectors and from the most aggressive neoliberals, which are
on the rise at the end of the century.
In the political-social field, the most notable note of the last twenty years is provided
by the worldwide collapse of Marxist ideology and the consequences that this has had in
the countries subjected to its influence, either direct (political) or indirect ( simply
philosophical). First, there were internal divisions, from Titismo and Maoism to more
radical and utopian groups (Shining Path, Khmer Rouge) passing through the entire
range of national liberation movements. Particularly influential in Venezuela during the
sixties were the indigenous and Third World doctrines of Fanon and the foquistas, of
Debray and Che Guevara. Its influence was not merely academic, but was taken to the
bloody terrain of practice with an enormous loss of effort and human lives. All of this
contributed in no small measure to the collapse of revolutionary theories of Marxist
inspiration, which began to be recorded in the seventies and reached its lowest point at
the end of the eighties. From a political point of view, this has meant the reinforcement
of moderate positions (both social democratic and social Christian), but from a
theoretical and conceptual point of view, it has marked a climate of disorientation and
confusion that negatively influences contemporary intellectual positions. It must be taken
into account that, to a large extent, Marxism had been accepted as a religious doctrine of
salvation in most Latin American countries; which means that its disappearance will
bring with it a spiritual void for new generations. This could explain the easy penetration
that non-traditional religious creeds have achieved in recent times, Christian in
orientation (Protestant sects), Eastern (Buddhism, Harekrishna) or simply pagan (magic,
sorcery).
For its part, the evolution of philosophical thought, for the most part academic
belonging and training, can be concentrated in two words: revision and pluralism. Since
the end of the sixties, the great currents of thought (phenomenology, existentialism,
Hegelian historicism) lose the almost thematic exclusivity that they enjoyed in the
studies and have to give way to other philosophical schools, such as structuralism, both
in its Marxist aspect (Althusser) as socio-cultural (Foucault) or simply linguistic; Various
scientific philosophies are also gaining popularity, starting with logical empiricism and
continuing with the analytical philosophy of ordinary language and the methodology of
science. In part, in the university field, such a transformation is a consequence of the so-
called "cultural renewal" that many Venezuelan universities experienced due to the late,
but violent influence of the French May 1968. As can be seen, there is always the
imitative or reflection factor in the appearance of ideas in Venezuela.
Along with the proliferation of new forms of intellectual production, successive critical
waves were recorded in the review and assessment of traditional doctrines. This allowed,
above all, to remove Marxism from the field of immediate political activity and to be
able to study it critically with the objectivity due in all academic research. It also served
to evaluate traditional metaphysical systems in light of modern guidelines of conceptual
and terminological analysis.
Such an abundance of studies and dispersion of research efforts has been possible
thanks to the appearance of higher centers of humanistic education in the country: to the
several in Caracas, where at least three universities have philosophy studies, we must add
those in Valencia. , Mérida and Maracaibo.
Although towards the sixties there was an attempt to "nationalize" abstract thought,
through the adoption of themes such as "the being of the Venezuelan" and similar,
generally taken from the Mexican philosophy of the time (as can be seen, always the
tendency to copy), the expression of philosophical thought in Venezuela continues to be,
due to its very plurality, a universal model reference. If anything, what has happened in
the last twenty years is that the area of reference has moved from Germany and central
Europe to English-speaking countries. However, since the same phenomenon has
occurred everywhere, namely, the loss of stable philosophical paradigms, the fact that
contemporary Venezuela enjoys a pluralism of doctrines and the consequent evaluative
relativism only confirms once again the cultural dependence on the doctrines generated
in Europe and the United States.
No matter how many criticisms may be made of university intellectual activity,
sometimes pitting it against another, more open and participatory, more informative and
general activity, it must be recognized that Venezuelan philosophical thought exists and
is creative. Regardless of the many and varied works that successive generations of
professionals have contributed to the editorial index in the last forty long years, there is
one work that stands out and serves as the epitome of all the intense and fruitful work of
this period: the monumental translation of the Complete Works of Plato , made by García
Bacca and published in Venezuela. Since the last century, such a thing has not been
done: for a single researcher to undertake and successfully complete the arduous
undertaking of pouring out all the enormous work of a thinker like Plato. But if the
example cited is the best example of philosophical creative thought in its academic
dimension, it is worth not forgetting that the intellectual expression of a country is not
limited to the university walls.
The essayists, the political scientists, the new historians begin to provide the materials
that will determine the continuity of thought in the Venezuela of the future.
Appendices
 What's happening in Venezuela?
With the generic title of “The Notebooks of Sanity” a series of articles with reference
to Venezuelan intellectuals have appeared in Vuelta . Although they contain very severe
judgments, the most important of these articles (the first two) were written in a local key.
Only a limited group of Venezuelan writers and thinkers could guess what and who was
being talked about. Because they have been published in a magazine as prestigious and
as widespread as Vuelta , it would be advisable to first of all try to clarify certain aspects
that facilitate their understanding, and also offer another perspective on the same issue
and know the current situation of intellectuals in Venezuela.
Although it should not be this way, in this case the political background counts. What
is happening in Venezuela in recent times is not different from what is happening in
more than one Latin American country. First of all, a country burdened by an immense
debt, to the point that it is no exaggeration to say that at the beginning of the government
of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989) the nation was bankrupt. This forced the adoption of a set
of very severe and unpopular economic measures, necessary to confront such a
calamitous situation. The discontent generated a street revolt of some importance
(February 1989) and, from there, a lively and tenacious opposition to the government's
economic measures. This opposition degenerated into two violent coup attempts, which
were aborted (1992).
However, the conspiratorial line persisted, manifested in writings and statements from
various sectors. It would not be unreasonable to maintain that the rate of administrative
corruption is not higher in Venezuela than in other countries, Latin American or not. The
truth is that it served as an incentive for opponents of the Pérez government and its
measures to intensify their attacks, making use of every resource available to them. Thus,
a complaint about the management of some funds from the government's secret fund was
enough for, through legal channels (Attorney General's Office, Supreme Court,
Congress), the suspension of the President of the Republic to be achieved in May 1993.
and, in September, his final retirement, even before being judged.
During the months that preceded the President's defenestration, there were many
(intellectual or not, assuming that the term "intellectual" has a precise demarcation) who
gave their opinion in favor or against, not so much of the character, but of the democratic
system and the need to adopt certain measures. This is supposed to be the reason for the
democratic game. Some of those who gave their opinion did so with passion and even
virulence and it is not impossible that, in private, they may have participated in meetings
perhaps of a conspiratorial nature, if by conspiring we mean changing a democratic
government before the scheduled elections. Which leads to the heart of the matter: the
relationship of the intellectual with politics.
Not to look too far back, at least from Voltaire to Sartre, through Gibbon, Donoso
Cortes, Vasconcelos and Ortega y Gasset, the intellectual has played some role in the
political affairs of his environment, sometimes not as such an intellectual, but as a
participant. active: John Locke suffered exile and condemnation; José Vasconcelos went
from Secretary of Education to presidential candidate. The recent cases of Vaclav Havel
and Mario Vargas Llosa would prove, if necessary, that there are intellectuals who do
more than just be pure intellectuals. Nothing to be surprised about. If anything, one
should be surprised that some are surprised and raise a storm in the name of the honor of
the intelligentsia .
Venezuela does not escape the rule of the “committed” intellectual. It is a historical
fact that Juan Vicente Gómez, “the Tyrant of the Andes”, with many years of iron and
retrograde government, was surrounded by an important group of intellectuals, from Gil
Fortoul to Uslar Pietri. There is an emblematic name in contemporary Venezuelan
literature: Rómulo Gallegos. He went from a member of a party (Democratic Action, the
same as Carlos Andrés Pérez) to President of the Republic. Compared to Gallegos,
young writers (José Balza, for example) have always preferred to highlight another,
lesser-known novelist as a great novelist, Guillermo Meneses, who was a diplomatic
representative of the dictator Pérez Jiménez, in the 1950s.
Pérez Jiménez's dictatorship ended a few days after a group of personalities, led by
Mariano Picón Salas, made public a manifesto against him. With the advent of full
democracy (1958), a good portion of Venezuelan intellectuals aligned themselves with
the theses of the Communist Party first and the Cuban Revolution later. Almost all of
them have followed the course of the Marxist phenomenon, from exaltation to decadence
and disillusionment, if not to the most determined repudiation. For at least four years, the
left has not existed in Venezuela, neither organizationally nor ideologically. If anything,
on the one hand, there are more or less populist movements and, on the other, nostalgic
foci of more prehistoric Marxism continue in some Universities, with less and less
resonance and importance. Like museum specimens.
It does not seem necessary to remember the cases of Jünger, Céline, Pound, Orwell,
Mariátegui, Gentile or Aragon, just to give a few paradigmatic names that one thing is
the political performance (conceptual or participatory) of the intellectual and another,
very different, is his creative work. Just to highlight the most notable: Céline was a
shady character to say the least: a declared and active anti-Semite, a collaborationist
during the German occupation, condemned at the time of Liberation. But when judging
him as an intellectual, do you take that into account or do you pay attention to what a
work like Voyage au bout de la nuit meant? This is the point to be discussed.
Firstly, it is not understood why there was a certain scandal in the recent case of
Venezuela. Suppose the worst (something that is just that: an assumption): some
Venezuelan intellectuals have conspired not only against Carlos Andrés Pérez, but
against the democratic system. Very good. Or very bad. But then judge them as citizens
who practice a certain policy, not as intellectuals, who were and continue to be, good or
less good.
Secondly, to infer from there that the entire Venezuelan intelligentsia , in addition to
not behaving virilely, is distorted, if not extinct, and that intellectuals in Venezuela are
prey to cultural Stalinism and the most fanatical of nationalisms, in addition to such a
generalization abusive as false, it is an evaluative extrapolation. What does the
intellectual's work have to do with his opinions or even his political actions? It is
possible that, in fact, some intellectuals, by virtue of having access to the media, figure
more than other citizens in the political-social panorama of the country. It is not only
their privilege, but their duty as intellectuals, not isolated from the environment in which
they live. What cannot be asked for is unanimity of opinion or inflexible political
alignments. That is what would actually deserve the name “Stalinism.” Within
democratic pluralism, everything is admissible: even antidemocratic positions. Such is
the strength (and weakness) of authentic democracy.
With or without Carlos Andrés Pérez, with or without economic measures, and it could
even be said and hopefully not happen, with or without democracy, Venezuelan
intellectuals will continue to be intellectuals. It would be advisable to learn to judge them
only with intellectual criteria. Morality and literature have always mixed badly. Consult
Gide.
Juan Nuño
Caracas, September 1993.
Article appeared in Vuelta 203, October 1993.
 Nuño, the furies and the sorrows
Although I never met Juan Nuño (Venezuelan born in Spain in 1927, died in Caracas
this year), I always had the impression of knowing him: his chronicles and essays, which
I have read like someone who reads reports on the state of moral times before Going out
into the open has been essential to me; and in them I thought I recognized the familiar
voice of a didactic conscience that improved the landscape for us. He was, until his
recent death, a regular chronicler of what he himself called Time of Disbelief, in his book
The School of Suspicion (Monte Ávila, 1990). His other books are Two Hundred Hours
in the Dark , The Philosophy of Borges , The Veneration of Cunning and, among my
favorites, Commitments and Deviations , partly dedicated to North American narrative.
Juan Nuño appeared to me as one of the last bearers of the Stoic lesson. Because if
reason abounds in evidence of skepticism, faith in reason is about to be unreasonable in
its commitment to civility. That internal tension made Juan Nuño's furies and sorrows a
philosopher against the current, capable of critical indignation and passion for extremes.
Reason did not appear to him as the mere middle path but as the force of contradiction.
He wrote in a chronicle: "The reason, and incidentally, the last word is, as so often,
Gracián: not being easy either in believing or in wanting." He had no illusions and did
not hide his disappointment, but since no one dedicates so much passion to disbelief and
even less to disliking, it occurs to me that, in the end, Nuño was the unlikely inhabitant of
a shareable city.
Criticism as a discourse of the crisis was natural to him, he was as implacable as he
was impeccable when writing against common mythologies, the obsolescence of logic
and the abuses of power. Sometimes the hyperbole gave him a prophetic air, like an
enlightened Jeremiah or a streetwise Wittgenstein. He gave lessons about expiration, as if
everything were precarious and therefore dubiously true. I keep a note of his that I read
in Caracas last year, as an example of shocking bravery in favor of losing poets in this
world of winners; I understand that the poet was allowed to be restored to Plato's City,
from where he would surely expel other less uncertain and more costly tribes.
He might have been a great satirist, in the tradition of Swift or Pope, out of little
patience with social comedy and boredom with printed leisure. But he must have
believed, almost secretly, in the virtues of redeemable man, out of emotional intimacy
with good literature and the best poetry. It was his turn, however, to be starkly right; and
that loneliness exacerbates the gaze that strips and sharpens the word that consumes.
Still, despite his reputation as a nihilist, Nuño always seemed to me more alarmed than
disenchanted; perhaps because of his capacity for wonder, to which his literary essays
bear witness. They are made with the diligent curiosity of the solitary at agape.

Julio Ortega

Article appeared in El Peruano , Lima, October 14, 1996.

The Wittgenstein of Juan Nuño

Throughout history we have had great thinkers who have contributed to philosophical
work in Latin American countries. It is necessary to take them into account (both Latin
Americans in general and Venezuelans in particular) not only because of their ideas, but
because of the importance of practicing philosophy or any discipline in our language.
The language of each people reflects its culture, its customs, its imagination, its
ingenuity, its history, its roots. We tend to highlight the importance of foreign authors
who are distant from us not only because of the context and the time, but (and basically)
because of the language and its use. In this way, it seems pertinent to me to take
advantage of these strange philosophies that are useful to us (as Juan Nuño advised in
one of his articles) to adopt them and adapt them to our reality and create, based on them
and in our language, new philosophies or currents of thought that better reflect us and
that are in the real search to identify with our own name, our concerns and conflicts; For
this purpose, we could think of the image that Ludwig Wittgenstein offers us in the
Tractatus logico-philosophicus of throwing the ladder after using it.
There have been many authors who have worried and dealt with the subject; García
Bacca, for example, illustrates this same idea by stating that a language is an area, a
space of problems in which philosophical life is exercised. A language, he maintains, is
the consequence of a type of life that allows analyzing theoretical problems with
philosophical impact. He then proposes that to achieve philosophizing in Spanish, the
suggestions and developments of literature and ordinary language must be collected. He
believes that there must be a necessary attention to one's own language, which leads to a
unity between the Castilian way of life and philosophical reflection in Castilian.

“Castilian has not yet become the vocal organ of philosophizing; and debate between a
supposed function of Speaker - of translator of originals - and that demanded by the
perfection of a mother tongue that knows how to speak literally about everything - except
philosophically about philosophy... when will we demand what we have simply given up,
and do we complacently give up: the independence of our philosophical language in the face
of foreign philosophers, whether they are Latin or not?20 .

Álex Grijelmo, a Spanish author somewhat more contemporary than García Bacca
claims, defends the same idea:

“We are children of Shakespeare and Verlaine because we belong to the human race, but we
will never be able to think exactly like them if we do not dream in English or French. On the
other hand, nothing said in Spanish, in fact, can seem foreign to us; and nothing that we
build on what is already our language should violate its principles.”21 .

A little based on this general idea and with this concern about language, about our
language, I tried, based on a comparative study carried out between the philosophies of
two thinkers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Juan Nuño (who at first glance do not seem to
have obvious similarities) , by the type of proposals that each one presents and by the
unequal importance that these have had) demonstrate that Nuño was influenced by
Wittgenstein's thought and that he also went beyond a mere influence since, in my
opinion, he managed to adapt it to the environment and their work in their own way.
From this comparison, carried out under three topics: philosophy, language and system,
which could surely be expanded, the similarities that seem essential to me between these
authors that I have proposed are presented with greater clarity and foundation.
I found it attractive to study and present from this point of view a Venezuelan thinker
as controversial as Juan Nuño is (and was), since he reflects in his writings what I
consider the quintessence of Latin American thought and its manifestations: a mixture of
everything a bit. Not assumed as a simple mixture of elements, but as a mixture of
components that are transformed when passed through different instances, such as humor
or imagination (extraordinarily relevant characteristics of Latin America and the Spanish

20 Bacca, García, J.: “Philosophy and language” in Essays , Peninsula, Barcelona, 1966, p. 28.
21 Grijelmo, A.: Passionate defense of the Spanish language , Taurus, DF Mexico, 2004, p. 116.
language), and that results in influences on our thought of places and people that we had
not imagined, neither in ourselves nor in the other; nor would we have imagined how this
is reflected in our work. This confluence of influences that seemed unimaginable was
what allowed me to trace the Wittgensteinian features contained in Nuño's work.
Nuño defended ideas that he transmitted in press articles on various topics focused on
criticism; This allowed him to spread his thoughts by putting into practice what he
considered correct and allowing us to read his theoretical basis on some specific topics.
Wittgenstein, for his part, presented his proposals mainly in two books: the Tractatus
logico-philosophicus and The Philosophical Investigations (posthumous publication),
each one diverse in its approaches.

Philosophy

The main concern of these authors is the question regarding philosophy, what it is, what
it is for and where it is going. Philosophy is closely related to language (for both
authors); It is, after all, linguistic analysis. Philosophy understood as the one in charge of
clarifying language is transformed into a secondary role discipline that mainly seeks its
self-liquidation; since by resolving the misunderstandings that language produces, it
ceases to exist. This is raised and practiced by Wittgenstein in the aforementioned
publications, but mainly in the Tractatus ; Nuño agrees with this approach, to the point
that he never presented his own systematic philosophical proposals, but, as said, made
use of his regular press articles, which were later compiled.
Latin American philosophical work was always a particular concern of Nuño. He
thought that this task had enormous possibilities of being worked on through linguistic
analysis that would allow us to analyze and criticize the use of bombastic and
meaningless language that characterizes us, rather than forming large systems of thought
that explain the world or theses that guide us in life. Wittgenstein would probably have
agreed on this, especially if he had known our language and the unique way we have of
handling and using it, since his proposal was, mainly, that language criticism be used
when addressing philosophical thinking to avoid falling into nonsense.
In his article: “Wittgenstein: silences and betrayals”, Nuño explains that the silences in
Wittgenstein have been important and determining; However, whatever the silences were
—personal, in the way of writing, in non-publication, in which there are Tractatus things
that cannot be said but shown—they managed to convey a clear message for Nuño.

Silence can be considered a possibility of saying and showing, as Wittgenstein stated;

By existing on certain occasions or by not being able to express something with words,
silence allows us to reflect on the topic in question and that, in my opinion, is where its
importance lies. Both authors allow themselves silences, leaving the reader the
possibility of thinking, and Nuño even managed to reflect out loud based on
Wittgenstein's silences.
On the other hand, in the article “The Overcoming of Philosophy”, Nuño maintains
that every philosophy that is respected at some point has to undertake the task of
liquidating itself so that the new proposal remains the only possible one. Wittgenstein is
no exception: with the Tractatus he proposes the liquidation of philosophy, solving the
difficulties that make up philosophical problems, and once resolved it would no longer
have to continue existing; but, in this way (perhaps unintentionally), he proposes a new
philosophy that tries to be the only possible and the last one, given that after it,
philosophical questions could not continue to exist as they are understood. Wittgenstein
limited the task of philosophy to clarifying the propositions of language and thus
eliminating the meaningless problems that are properly those of metaphysics; He carried
out this by drawing limits on language, to which Nuño points out:

“That philosophical current that accepts, in principle, a role of methodological

subordination for philosophy, will necessarily be an anti-philosophical current, that is, one
that denies most of the supra-scientific or para-scientific philosophical claims.” 22 .

The issue of the liquidation of philosophy is of utmost importance for Nuño. He

affirms that all philosophy has to carry out its liquidation, maintaining that the
philosopher who carried out this task to the maximum was Wittgenstein in the Tractatus ;
He then applies this notion to Marxism and logical empiricism. Now, however, he
concludes that the result is to add more layers to philosophy when: “ in short: the highly
philosophical task of liquidating philosophy remains a desideratum rather than a certain
reality. For some, it will be a matter of relentlessly battling the enchantment of reason
through language .23 .
Just as for Wittgenstein, and although they have important differences in the
development of the topic, the authors converge on the same result: philosophy serves to
clarify language. Nuño proposes that metaphysics (especially Marxism) try to analyze
and clarify their language so that they do not continue to produce so much nonsense,
which although they still have a certain attraction, nevertheless no longer have the
importance they once had.
Nuño defends with Wittgenstein that “ the question that questions the totality of what
is covered by that language cannot be formulated in the same language ”24 , nor can the
question be asked or answered in language, since it would mean leaving the limits of my
world25 and see it from outside this limit; It would be - he affirms -, like the gaze of God,
" it is not a matter of humbly accepting 'man's place in the cosmos' before divine
omniscience, but of disarming such metaphysical bombs."

(reality, world, God) translating them into meaningful language ”26 . Once again we find
Wittgenstein's ideas in Nuño's story.

The language

While Wittgenstein theorized about what language and its structure should be, what
nonsense and language games were that depended on use and context, and where family
resemblances were derived, Nuño practiced all this, used language as he pleased, He
played with him, criticized him, using different contexts, uses, family resemblances,
without clearly realizing that he was doing so. That is to say, both authors theorized and
practiced their philosophical theses, but Wittgenstein has an explicit theoretical
foundation, while in Nuño you have to look for it among his articles. Regarding practice,
Wittgenstein taught for a long time in schools and universities different subjects that
allowed him to put his theories into practice, while Nuño made use of his job as a
columnist to express his proposals.
Nuño bases his proposal on criticism and, therefore, on distrust, just as Wittgenstein
proposed; The difference is that the latter focused on the issue of language (criticizing
language because it is distrusted), while Nuño criticized everything that in his opinion
22 Nuño, J.: “The overcoming of philosophy” in The overcoming of philosophy and other
essays , Editions of the UCV Library, Caracas, 1972, p. 13.
23 Ibid. , p. twenty-one.
24 Nuño, J.: “Commitments and deviations” in Commitments and deviations , Editions of the
UCV Library, Caracas, 1982, p. 144.
25 Cf. Wittgenstein, L.: Tractatus logico-philosophicus , Editorial Técnos, Madrid, 2003.
26 Nuño, J.: “Commitments and deviations”, op.cit ., p. 144.
admitted criticism, from the great systematic philosophies, passing without detours
through metaphysics, to reach the Latin American language. He took Wittgenstein's
advice and guidance to heart and adapted it to his interest and work. This practice,
characteristic of the two authors, can be considered systematic: criticizing based on
distrust to, based on it, build something solid and clear. So, although none of the authors
actually developed a system as had been conceived until then, it seems that their personal
system was criticism, which also better adapts to their way of thinking.
With respect to the search for a perfect language or limitation of language made by
analytical philosophers - especially the first Wittgenstein - where they understand that
there is a correct language that is, in turn, correctly formulated and that, therefore, has
meaning compared to another meaningless language that it does not designate, Nuño
prefers to understand it from Sartre and the division that he defends between prose and
poetry, in which the first consists of meaning and the second freely uses words without
any type of reference, which allows him to associate himself with a private language,
closed in on himself. In relation to prose, he maintains that it is the model of correct
language in the face of the deviations that poetry can propose. Although he does not
completely clarify the point here, in terms of philosophies, Nuño agrees with the
deviations to which we refer, since they indicate the possibility of a breadth of criteria,
even though with respect to language he does not seem to have the same opinion. .
On the other hand, according to his opinion about the use of language in Latin
America, it needs to be carefully scrutinized in the linguistic analysis to be reformed and
reformulated. In “The Importance of Having Ideas”, he refers to Wittgenstein's advice
regarding language, he names it aptly when he states that language tends to go on
vacation causing pseudoproblems: “ it seems as if the verbalist spring were part of the
genetic endowment.” and no one would adhere to that healthy taboo of remaining silent
in the face of what cannot be spoken. "27 , since Venezuelan is characterized by rhetorical
and hollow phrases and "bombasticity", instead (and ignoring Wittgenstein's advice) of
remaining silent in what cannot be said because it cannot be formulated correctly. In this
way, behind Nuño's story we find Wittgenstein with his philosophy of the Tractatus ,
understood as criticism of language and with his famous paragraph “What you cannot
talk about, you must keep your mouth shut. ”28 .
The solution that Nuño proposes for the Latin American is then proposed through the
Philosophy of Language, the reflective one, the one that helps us combat the empty and
inflated use that we make of it; In this way he resolutely supports the proposal that
Wittgenstein made for general philosophy, and proposes applying it to Latin American
philosophy, thus making it his idea. What it is about is applying once again the
knowledge that comes from outside to the inside, using what is useful and fertile to the
philosophical field that surrounds it, the Latin American one.

System

Criticism is a consequence of distrust, which Wittgenstein considers fundamental in

thought; He distrusts language and from there he carries out his task of studying it in
different ways in each of his books. At the same time, Nuño also absolutely distrusts
language and philosophy; That is why he criticizes the great philosophical systems with
which he does not share his confidence, in theses that sometimes cover the total
explanation of the world, understood from points of view that, in his opinion, are absurd.
This aberration for the system, for creating one's own and for those made by others, is

27 Nuño, J.: “The importance of having ideas”, in Commitments and deviations , Editions of the
UCV Library, Caracas, 1982, p. fifteen.
28Wittgenstein, L.: Tractatus logico-philosophicus , op.cit ., §7, p. 277.
characteristic of both authors, who could not (or did not want to) create philosophical
systems because it went against their proposal and what they thought should exclusively
be. philosophy: criticism.
Nuño seems to have taken the issue of criticism literally and used it in everything he
could. There are few things that he did not reproach with his ironies, including, as the
height of the paradox, Wittgenstein's own philosophy. This method of operating,
although Nuño's own even before meeting the Viennese author, is similar to the theory
applied in The Investigations , except that he does it only with respect to language, but it
was his opinion that philosophy should be critical ( of language) and should not seek to
create systems, because it had, in some way, a secondary importance, since it served
other disciplines for the clarification of the language used.
We know then that along with criticism comes distrust, of the language with which we
work and of philosophy itself. That is why criticism plays such an important role in this
process, since from it not only the language but also the thoughts expressed by it are
clarified. Nuño says that recommendations on the mistrust that one must have when
working with philosophical issues will never be enough and that this mistrust is what
fuels any criticism. Linguistic philosophers start from a principle of distrust of language;
Their work consists of analyzing, criticizing and, based on the results, delimiting
language and its uses. In this way, philosophy plays a secondary role, and is put at the
service of other disciplines (mainly scientific); It no longer seeks to build systems, nor
explain the world, nor be itself a science; It is not intended to be more than an instrument
of use for other non-philosophical activities.

Nuño bases his work on criticism and distrust, somehow granting philosophy that
secondary role, since he does not seek with it a science or a system and seems to agree
with that role that has been granted to philosophy. :

“All of this (the lack of systems in contemporary philosophy) arose from the awareness of
past errors, with the consequences to pay for the sins committed, and above all, it was born
from a tremendous distrust, that spirit of distrust that fuels all criticism and which will never
be sufficiently recommended for philosophical use and even for everything 29
use” 9 .

Nuño also proposed pluralism in philosophy. That the different philosophies do not
ignore each other, that they allow the integration of different resources from other
disciplines or trends that are accepted or approved, which would provide them with a
breadth of criteria; More than others, he proposes it to Marxism, openly advising it to use
the philosophy of language and logic to realize its linguistic confusions and not end up
becoming just another metaphysics.
Likewise, it recommends that logical empiricism take advantage of Marxism's socio-
historical intention and its application as an ideology so that it can be understood as a
useful doctrine. In this way, philosophy advances and can be developed better if
philosophies do not ignore each other. In fact, in a way this is what Nuño does: he tries
not to ignore the accepted philosophical currents and based on that he proposes what he
thinks they should be and he himself applies them in his writings. The best example of
this pluralism is found in Wittgenstein's Tractatus which, based on the logic of Frege and
Russell, proposes some improvements to it, including a metaphysics: that of logical
atomism.
On the other hand, one finds in both authors the image of the path that must be retraced
to know the world. In the case of Wittgenstein, with the image of the staircase proposed
in the Tractatus ; That is to say, once you know the logical apparatus and the structure of
language, you have to launch the ladder to be able to see clearly, forget what was learned
along the way so that the world can be shown and understood. Nuño, for his part, assigns
philosophy a double role; on the one hand, secondary in its work, which is why it
proposes that the best thing is to “forget” what is known about philosophy in its main
role to apply it to knowledge of the world; and on the other hand, autophagic, since in
some way it has to constantly travel the path on its own steps.
Both authors have two key ways of inviting reflection through distrust (this point
further and better developed by Wittgenstein). These two elements place us in an
uncomfortable situation that activates our thinking, as explained in previous paragraphs;
Distrust of everything, even language itself, produces doubt and questions arise that we
need to think about to be answered; Both authors doubt everything, which results in
criticism, for Wittgenstein theorized and for Nuño practiced. Silence leads us to
curiosity, to try to understand what it says, which we well know tells us something. Nuño
understood Wittgenstein's different silences, he exposed them, he criticized them, he
assumed them in some way.
Analyzing the three topics selected for the study of these authors and their respective
comparisons, we realize that Nuño has great influence from Wittgenstein and his
philosophy; but not only that, but it has its own application of Wittgensteinian
philosophy: he took what interested him from this author and took it to another context
and in other terms, he adapted it to Latin America and especially to Venezuela and

29
Nuño, J.: “The Distrustful and the Piara of Circe” in Commitments and Deviations , Editions of
the UCV Library, Caracas, 1982, p. 100.

to their own interests. That makes it more interesting and in line with his criticisms, such
as when he states that in Venezuela “dry” ideas are always imported, ideas that are no
longer useful, that are outdated; We now know the potential value of importing fertile
ideas, to think of ourselves as a continent as he did with Wittgenstein, whom he not only
studied, but took advantage of and used at will and for benefit.
To conclude, Wittgenstein states in the prologue of the Tractatus that only he who has
thought about what is stated in it can understand it; Nuño had surely already thought
about many of those things, which helped him criticize, share, multiply and enrich the
quality of his proposals.

Vanessa Alcaino Pizani

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Article appeared in Concienciactiva , number 22, December 2008.

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