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Universalist Vocation and Cultural Fragmentation
The Same Masks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The question thus formulated is inscribed in the purest philosophical tradition: it actualizes the scope of wonder, that Greek sentiment that awakens not before the extraordinary, but precisely before the most ordinary and obvious, before the fact of being there; wonder that is particular to the first thinkers of the dawn of the West and from which philosophy and science are born.
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- Copyright © 1996 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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Notes
1. “Of all the marvels of this world, none is superior to man.” Sophocles, Antigone.
2. This is a persistent awareness in the history of the West. See Pico de la Miran dola, De humanitatis dignitate.
3. An analysis of interesting myths of diverse peoples, in which man appears, from the beginning, endowed with language is found in José Manuel Briceño Guerrero, El origen del lenguaje, Monte Avila, 1970.
4. Aristotle, The Politics, I, 2, 1253a.
5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 8, 1169a-IX, 9, 1169b.
6. This expression is from Briceño Guerrero. We use it to consider the double human characteristic that it expresses: on the one hand, the physical character istic determined by the homonym—homo erectus—and the moral characteris tic, pointed out by Plato, of the “fallen soul” that has lost its wings but not the longing to fly.
7. Aristotle says that the family is the community constituted by nature in order to satisfy the daily necessities, and the best communities result from the union of various families in order to satisfy more than daily necessities. Aristotle, The Politics, I, 2,1252b.
8. Homer immortalizes this process in The Iliad.
9. “Das Herrenrecht, Namen zu geben, geht so weit, daß man sich erlauben sollte, den Ursprung der Sprache selbst a Machtäußerung der Herrschenden zu fassen.” F. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Erste Abhandlung, 3.
10. See Briceño Guerrero, La identificación americana con la europa segunda, Merida, 1984.
11. Debate specifically raised by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, in his Apologética historia sumaria, published in Seville in 1533.
12. Carlos Fuentes, “Imagining America,” in: Diogenes, No. 160 (Winter 1992), pp. 5-19.