Bolívar Echeverría: Ups and Downs of Philosophy

Abstract

As a tribute to the late philosopher and essay writer Bolívar Echeverría, Hernández suggests that Echeverría’s critical discourse adopts, more than a philosophy, thought itself. Thought, in Latin America of the sixties, struggled with several concerns. First, that there must have existed a national philosophy, or one of the political members of a party. Secondly, the need to inscribe philosophy in the Academy was considered a problem. Finally, it was urgent to make the intellectual’s compromise with the present a priority in philosophy. And in this present coexisted the rapture of the revolutionary change with a certain pessimism about the period –exhaustion, pain, and dread for the victims of the changes–.
In this context, according to Hernández, Echeverría pondered over the relationship between Modernity and Revolution, between Modernity and later periods, and over the solidity of the Reform. He managed to think up the period, and to think up, at the same time, a critical thought. And he went beyond: he observed that, in spite of the distressing effect of the modern project, culture held out and created new ways to keep the spheres of the world of life. It was as the baroque, “a strategy to make ‘livable’ something that, basically, is not”. Moving along these paths, asks Echeverría, isn’t it the same as the event of thought?