Journal of Catalan Intellectual History

Englishedition

Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la

Issues3&4

2012

2012

Englishedition

Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la

Issues3&4

2012

Editors-in-Chief / Editors GeneralsJosep Monserrat (Universitat de Barcelona)Xavier Serra (Universitat de València)Pompeu Casanovas(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Language Editor / Editor lingüísticD. Sam Abrams

Translation from Catalan / Traducció del CatalàDan Cohen, Joe Graham, Mara Lethem, Barnaby Noone, Julie Wark

Scientific Board / Comitè CientíficRamon Alcoberro (Universitat de Girona)Jesús Alcolea (Universitat de València)Misericòrdia Anglès (Universitat de Barcelona)Salvador Cardús (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Enric Casaban (Universitat de València)Jordi Casassas (Universitat de Barcelona)Montserrat Guibernau (Queen Mary University of London)Salvador Giner (Institut d’Estudis Catalans)Thomas Glick (Boston University)Tobies Grimaltos (Universitat de València)Pere Lluís Font (Institut d’Estudis Catalans)Joan Lluís Llinàs (Universitat Illes Balears)Jaume Magre (Universitat de Barcelona)Isidre Molas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Antoni Mora (Societat Catalana de Filosofia) Carles Ulisses Moulines (Ludwig Maximilians Universität München)Vicent Olmos (Universitat de València)Joan Lluís Pérez Francesch (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Joan Ramon Resina (Stanford University)Ignasi Roviró (Universitat Ramon Llull)Jordi Sales (Universitat de Barcelona)Josep-Maria Vilajosana (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)Conrad Vilanou (Universitat de Barcelona)

Executive Committee / Consell de RedaccióMeritxell Fernández Barrera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Honorat Jaume (Societat Catalana de Filosofia)Marta Lorente Serichol (Societat Catalana de Filosofia)Marta Poblet (ICREA, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Anna Punsoda (Universitat de Barcelona)Marta Roca Escoda (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Joan-Josep Vallbé (Universitat de Barcelona)

Journal Management / Gestió de la RevistaEnkeleda Xhelo (Institut d’Estudis Catalans)Blanca Betriu (Societat Catalana de Filosofia)Sílvia Gabarró (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)Núria Galera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Print ISSN: 2014-1572Online ISSN: 2014-1564

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual HistoryRevista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

Issues 3 & 4, 2012Números 3 i 4, 2012

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Journal of Catalan IntelleCtual HIstory, Issue 3&4, 2012 | Print Issn 2014-1572online Issn 2014-1564 | P. 7-8http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JoCIH

Welcome to the Journal of Catalan Intellectual History (JOCIH), a biannual electronic and printed publication created with the twofold purpose of foster-ing and disseminating studies on Catalan Philosophy and Intellectual History at an international level. The Journal’s Internet version is published in Catalan and English at the Open Journal System of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC) (http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH) and its paper version is published in English by Huygens Editorial, Barcelona.

The JOCIH is edited by four Catalan public universities – the Autono-mous University of Barcelona (UAB), the University of Barcelona (UB), the University of Valencia (UV) and the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) – and by three academic societies – the Catalan Philosophical Society, the Va-lencian Philosophical Society and the Mallorcan Philosophical Association. The JOCIH also draws on the support of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC), the Institute of Law and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (IDT-UAB) and the Ramon Llull Institute.

Contents

As its name suggests, our journal focuses mainly on philosophy. However, we also understand intellectual history, in a broader sense, to be a synonymous with cultural heritage and the JOCIH therefore regards cultural history, the history of ideas and the history of philosophy as different branches of a single tree. For this reason, we encourage authors to submit not only papers on philosophy, the humanities, the social sciences, religion, art and other related subjects examined from a historical approach, but also essays and more general reflections on cul-tural heritage.

As well as articles on specific topics, the JOCIH also features critical reviews of the latest publications in the field, memory documentaries and ex-haustive bio-bibliographies of various eighteenth- to twenty-first-century Ca-talan, Valencian, Balearic and Northern Catalan authors. The journal also fosters international research on sixteenth-century Catalan intellectual history. And fi-

foreword

rom one epoch to anotherF

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 3&4. 2012. P. 7-8

nally, the associated website www.catalanphilosophy.cat offers updated news on publications and academic events in the field of Catalan philosophy, difficult-to-access books, articles published in other journals and audiovisual materials.

Peer Review Policy

The JOCIH strives for academic excellence. Authors from all over the world are invited to submit their manuscripts to us through the IEC Open Journal System using either the Catalan or English version of the journal’s template, which is available at the JOCIH website. Alternatively, author submissions may include versions in both languages. Publication guidelines can be found on the website but authors should bear in mind that the maximum length of submit-ted papers should not exceed 6,000 words. All submissions will be carefully evaluated through a double-blind review process. Successful submissions will be published in both Catalan and English, and will therefore require some ad-ditional work in language editing.

Disclaimer

The editors of the Journal of Catalan Intellectual History make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the content of the journal. However, the editors, the participating institutions and universities, Huygens Editorial and its agents and licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the ac-curacy, completeness or suitability for any purpose of the content and hereby disclaim all such representations and warranties whether express or implied to the maximum extent permitted by law. Any views expressed in this publica-tion are strictly the views of the authors and are not necessarily the views of the editors, of the institutions involved in the publication of the journal or of Huygens Editorial.

The Editors

Issue 3

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Journal of Catalan IntelleCtual HIstory, Issue 3, 2012 | Print Issn 2014-1572 / online Issn 2014-1564http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JoCIH

Issue 3

articles

Democracy and Dictatorship among the Catalan Intelligentsia: the Matteotti Affair and the Reflections of Francesc Cambó. Giovanni C.

Cattini . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Jaume Miravitlles and Marxism: a Twentieth-Century Voyage. enric Pujol 29

Josep Lluís Blasco, politician and philosopher. sílvia Gómez soler. . . . . . . 47

The philosophy of Josep Lluís Blasco. The transcendental view. Víctor J.

luque Martín . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

life-writing

A text by Capuchin friar Miquel d’Esplugues on the irreverent Cris-tòfor de Domènec (1879-1927). Miquel d’esplugues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

bio-bibliography

Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés (1940-2003). Jesús alcolea Banegas . . . . . . . . 91

reviews

Carles Rahola, Breviari de Ciutadania. La pena de mort a Girona [Edi-tion and prologue by Josep-Maria Terricabras], Girona: CCG Edi-cions i Fundació Valvi 2009. Josep Monserrat Molas . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Josep-Maria Terricabras (ed.), El pensament d’Eugeni d’Ors, Girona, Documenta Universitaria, 2010. Joan Cabó . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Josep Mª Terricabras (ed.), La filosofia d’Eduard Nicol, Girona: Docu-menta Universitaria, 2010. Joan Cuscó i Clarasó . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

contents

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Journal of Catalan IntelleCtual HIstory, Issue 3, 2012 | Print Issn 2014-1572 / online Issn 2014-1564DoI 10.2436/20.3001.02.37 | P. 13-28reception date: 1/06/2011 / admission date: 12/12/2011http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JoCIH

article

emocracy and Dictatorship among the Catalan Intelligentsia: the Matteotti Affair and the Reflections of Francesc Cambó

Giovanni C. Cattinifacultat de Geografia i Història. university of [email protected]

abstractThe debate over dictatorship and democracy is a fundamental feature of the cultural and political landscape that gave rise to the strategies and approaches of intellectuals between the two world wars. Their conceptions of the two systems weighed heavily in their reflections as liberal democratic ideals lost credibility and fell into decline. It is often said that the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Italy in 1922 pushed intellectuals to choose between socialism and fascism. The political situation in Catalonia offers suggestive insights into this dilemma. More specifically, the present paper examines the debate sparked among Catalan intellectuals by the kidnapping and assassination of a socialist member of the Italian parliament, Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924). The Matteotti affair coincided with the publication of a series of articles exploring the connections between democracy and dictatorship. Notable among these pieces are the contributions of the conservative Catalan nationalist leader Francesc Cambó (1876-1947), who wrote for the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya. Cambó’s articles, reprinted later in the same year in a book on Italian fascism, Entorn del feixisme italià, spawned a bitter refutation of his position that reached beyond the historical context.

key wordsFascism, Democracy, Dictatorship, Nationalism, Intellectuals, Catalonia.

D

The post-war period and the rise of dictatorial systems of government: Primo de Rivera and the Catalan regionalists

One of the most striking features of the years immediately following the First World War was how profoundly the panorama of European states had changed, and the Mediterranean area was no exception. The worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the disappearance of ruling dynasties in Rus-sia, Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire had set a new international stage. The very ideas of democracy and the liberal state entered into a pro-

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GIoVannI C. CattInI

tracted period of crisis. This crisis was visible in the collapse of states forged in the nineteenth century and it ushered in a period in which constitutional freedoms were suspended and dictatorial systems of government took power. On the shores of the Mediterranean, examples included Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece1. The rapid chain of events in Italy served as a lesson for the entire Mediterranean. Starting in 1919, Italian society experienced an explosion of revolutionary activity known as the “Red Biennium”. The period was char-acterized not only by workers’ revolts and insurrections but also by mounting violence committed by fascist groups led by Benito Mussolini. The violence of Mussolini’s Blackshirts succeeded in overturning the will of the country’s last liberal government, which decided to hand power to Mussolini in late October 1922, after thousands of fascists had gathered in Rome2.

The Catalan nationalist and republican Amadeu Hurtado (1875-1950), right-hand man of Francesc Macià and Niceto Alcalá Zamora, recalls in his memoirs that the leader of the Blackshirts had taken “power to impose his fe-verish nationalism on the country and firmly establish one of [the] many dicta-torships of the period”. Interestingly, Hurtado himself drew an analogy between events in Russia and Italy, noting that the Italian dictatorship “marked the lead-ing edge of the invading spirit of the Eastern hordes”3. In the long debate on the nature of totalitarianism4, liberal public opinion underscored the deep-seated analogies between socialist and fascist dictatorships. From early on, Catalan in-tellectuals linked to the autonomist and nationalist camps stressed the analogy between the differing dictatorships that were to mark the twentieth century5.

1 R. Griffin, International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus, London: Arnold, 1998; D. Berg-Schlosse, J. Mitchell (eds.), Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919-1939, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; J. W. Borejsza, La escalada del odio. Movimientos y sistemas autoritarios y fascistas en Europa, 1919-1945, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2002.

2 Cf. F. Fabbri, Le origini della guerra civile. L’Italia dalla Grande guerra al fascismo (1918-1921), Torino: utet, 2009 and G. Albanese, La marcia su Roma, Roma: Laterza, 2006. For more on fascist violence, see also M. Franzinelli, Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista. 1919-1922, Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

3 A. Hurtado, Quaranta anys d’advocat. Història del meu temps 1894-1936, Barcelona: Ed. 62, p. 400 (1st ed. Mexico: Xaloc, 1956).

4 Cf. the voice of totalitarianism in N. Bobbio, N. Matteucci, G. Pasquino, Dizionario di Politica, Turin: UTET, 1983.

5 The initial debate is explored in G. C. Cattini, “Democràcia versus dictadura: els intel·lectuals catalans entre la presa del poder del Mussolini i el cop d’Estat de Primo de Rivera” in S. Serra (coord.), Les investigacions recents del món contemporani a la Mediterrània, Palma: University of the Balearic Islands, under publication. On the impact of the First World War and the decade of the 1920s on Catalan intellectuals, see E. Ucelay de Cal, “La crisi de la postguerra” in P.

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Democracy and Dictatorship among the Catalan Intelligentsia: the Matteotti affair and the reflections of francesc Cambó

Similarly, international politics and European national movements came to play a crucial role in the articulation of the strategies and approaches of the political wing of Catalan nationalism6.

On 29 October, back on the Italian peninsula, Mussolini took his first steps toward consolidating the so-called “fascist revolution”. He turned the Blackshirts into a regular police corps in the Volunteer Militia for National Security (MVSN) and pushed through electoral reform designed to secure him a solid governing majority. The new Acerbo election law, passed in November 1923, gave the party winning the largest share of the votes – provided that they had secured at least 25 percent of the votes – two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Under this new law, elections were called for April 1924. Amid widespread violence by the Blackshirts, victory went to the nationalist list (an umbrella grouping of the National Fascist Party, liberals and conservatives). The nationalist list gathered more than 61% of the votes, while opposition forces in parliament were almost completely annihilated. In May 1924, the moderate socialist Giacomo Matteotti alleged election fraud against the fascists and called for the results to be declared null and void. Matteotti had collected proof that showed how startling levels of corruption had enabled the fascists to take power. Bankers and industrialists had given huge sums of money to the fascists and, in return, expected to win contracts. The corruption had funded the creation of fascist chapters throughout Italy and rapidly filled the pockets of the move-ment’s supporters. Moreover, Matteotti had unearthed a two-pronged scandal of colossal proportions that threatened to topple the whole regime: first, the

Gabriel (dir.) Història de la cultura catalana. Vol. VIII: Primers Avantguardes (1918-1930), Bar-celona: Edicions 62, 1997, p. 31-80; for a broad overview of the Catalan intelligentsia of the period, see J. Casassas (coord.), Els intel·lectuals i el poder a Catalunya (1808-1975), Barcelona: Pòrtic, 1999. For the debate on the reception of fascism in Spain, see the selection of texts collected by Manuelle Peloille in M. Peloille, Fascismo en ciernes. España 1922-1930. Textos recuperados, Toulouse: Presses universitaires de Mirail, 2005.

6 X. M. Núñez Seixas, Internacionalitzant el nacionalisme. El catalanisme polític i la qüestió nacional a Europa (1914-1936), Catarroja: Editorial Afers & Publicacions of the University of Valencia, 2010, but also E. Ucelay de Cal, “El Mirall de Catalunya: models internacionals en el desen-volupament del nacionalisme i del separatisme català, 1875-1923”, in Estudios de Historia Social, no. 28-29 (1984), p. 213-219; “Moderni sogni girondini. Italiani, portoghesi e catalani nella rivoluzione repubblicana spagnola (1923-1938)” in Quaderni del Circolo Carlo Rosselli, no. 2 (1996), p. 67-86; “Entre el ejemplo italiano y el irlandés: la escisión generalizada de los nacionalismos hispanos 1919-1922” in Ayer, no. 63 (2006), p. 75-118. Also, J. Burgaya, La formulació del catalanisme conservador i els models “nacionals” coetanis. Premsa catalanista i moviments nacionalistes contemporanis, unpublished doctoral thesis, Autonomous University of Barcelona, 1999 and G. C. Cattini, “L’edat de la violència i els nous nacionalismes: els intel·lectuals cata-lans i l’ocupació de la ciutat de Fiume (1919-1920)” in the publication of the proceedings of the First Pere Anguera International Congress, Reus-Tarragona, Rovira Virgili University, under publication.

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state was trafficking in leftover war materials (from weapons to food and cloth-ing), selling them at cut prices to merchants and businesspeople friendly to the regime; second, Mussolini intended to hand over monopoly control of the Italian petroleum market to the US giant Sinclair Oil. To avert public exposure of these scandals, a group of fascists kidnapped Matteotti in Rome on 10 June 1924. Mystery shrouded Matteotti’s disappearance until 16 August, when his remains were found in a ditch outside the Italian capital. In response, the op-position stormed out of Parliament, expecting the king to take action by calling for the resignation of the leader of the Blackshirts7.

These events attracted widespread comment in the Spanish press, de-spite the censorship imposed by the military council of Primo de Rivera. At that time, dictatorship in Germany was still in its early stages. A conjunction of factors was to pave its way8, principally the structural crisis of the post-war German state and the almost chronic presence of the military in public life. In addition, liberal regimes across Europe had fallen into disrepute and there was growing interest in what was called “Pretorianism”, which drew on anti-parliamentary theories in wide circulation since the end of the nineteenth century. For example, in stark contrast to the Spanish military uprisings of the eighteenth century, Primo de Rivera brought the military to power with the express aim of instilling the values and attitudes of the army in all citizens.

Another weighty reason for the coup can be traced to the economic and social crisis of the post-war period. Sweeping layoffs in the textile and steel industries soon led to armed conflict between the gunmen of the Free Trade Union and the anarchists. The death toll reached into the hundreds9.

The Rif War in Morocco provided yet another cause. Army officials were critical of the parliament’s handling of the Disaster of Annual, a major military defeat for Spain. They deplored the defeatism and pacifism of liberal

7 Cf. M. Canali, Il delitto Matteotti, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004.

8 E. González Calleja, La España de Primo de Rivera. La modernización autoritaria 1923-1930, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005; DDAA, La Europa de las dictaduras: de Mussolini a Primo de Rivera y Salazar, Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1997; S. Ben Ami, La dictadura de Primo de Rivera, 1923-1930, Barcelona: Planeta, 1984; J. Casassas, La dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1983.

9 Cf. A. Balcells, Violència social i poder polític. Sis estudios sobre la Catalunya contemporània, Bar-celona: Pòrtic, 2001; id., El pistolerisme, Barcelona: Pòrtic, 2009; S. Bengoechea, Organització patronal i conflictivitat social a Catalunya. Tradició i corporativisme entre finals de segle i la dictadura de Primo de Rivera, Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1994; M. A. Pradas Baena, L’Anarquisme i les lluites socials a Barcelona 1918-1923. La repressió obrera i la violència, Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2003.

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politicians. The high command abhorred the decision of the liberal political class not to prosecute the war and finish off Abd el-Krim and his troops, par-ticularly after the defeat at Annual in 1921, but instead to focus their priorities on downsizing and modernizing the army.

Lastly, nationalist momentum in Catalonia acted as a further crucial factor in the coup, particularly when it became evident that radicalized na-tionalist sectors had, on the one hand, gained ground in the Catalan working class and, on the other hand, joined with Basques and Galicians in the Triple Alliance of 1923.

Right from the start, the Italian dictatorship became a model for imita-tion and emulation by conservative movements throughout Europe. Primo de Rivera himself sought to imitate the Italian example. This new development features in most of the memoirs written by intellectuals of the time. For in-stance, the republican journalist Claudi Ametlla (1883-1968), wrote that fascist theories had poisoned the minds of men close to the Spanish dictator who then used these ideas to justify their grab for power10. Hurtado, mentioned earlier, compared the Spanish dictatorship to a historical turning point, reached jointly with countries such as Russia, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Hungary and Turkey.11 The liberal regionalist Joan Garriga i Massó (1871-1956) insisted that social issues could not be resolved by “alternating weak, indecisive and ill-prepared govern-ments” and fuelled speculation that King Alfonso XIII was “on the lookout for his Mussolini”. In the end, it was General Primo de Rivera who toppled the government. A portion of Catalan society greeted him eagerly, because it was thought that his repeated “regionalist” statements prior to the coup would re-sult in accords with the Regionalist League (the Lliga Regionalista)12. Jaume Bo-fill i Mates (1878-1933), an intellectual and writer in the Noucentisme move-ment, wrote that a large section of Catalan society viewed the overthrow “with

10 Claudi Ametlla said of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship: “The first part of the reign of the Dic-tatorship was particularly military in character; the second gave roles to civilians poisoned by the fascist theories that Mussolini had enthroned in Italy in 1922. They tried hard to imitate the precedent set by the neighbouring peninsula. Without [this precedent], it is highly likely that we would never have known the anti-democratic regime, or it would have been nothing but a flash in the pan. It is common for military governments to want to justify themselves a posteriori with doctrines that, in this case, the Italian example produced in abundance” in C. Ametlla, Memòries polítiques. Vol. II, Barcelona: Distribucions Catalònia, 1979, p. 57.

11 A. Hurtado, Quaranta anys d’advocat…, cit., p. 414.

12 J. Garriga i Massó, Memòries d’un liberal catalanista (1871-1939), Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1987, p. 258 and ss. Cf. the contemporary debate on democracy versus dictatorship among Catalan intellectuals in C. Cattini, G. C. Cattini, “Democràcia versus dictadura: els intel·lectuals cata-lans entre la presa del poder del Mussolini i el cop d’Estat de Primo de Rivera”, op cit.

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a certain sense of relief ”; it was believed that the military would put an end to social unrest in Catalonia, clean up Spanish politics and favour the demands of Catalan autonomists against the radical proposals of minority separatist sectors13.

Puig Cadafalch, the architect and former president of the Manco-munitat of Catalonia, acknowledged this view when, in February 1930, he recalled that the coup had been well-received by Catalan regionalists and the Catalan bourgeoisie because everybody expected swift military action to re-turn social peace to Catalonia and put a stop to the charade of democracy at the national level in Spain14. Similarly, Francesc Cambó, the charismatic leader of the Regionalist League since 1917 and twice a minister in Spanish gov-ernments (1917-1921)15, also admitted in his memoirs that Primo de Rivera, when he was Capitan-General of Catalonia, had laid the ground for his coup by garnering support in various Catalan cities and villages and cultivating good relationships with the top officials in the regionalist movement. None-theless, Cambó emphasized his complete non-participation in the events. He had recently retired from politics, in June 1923, and was sailing in Asia Minor at the time in question. In fact, when he read of the coup in the papers, he fired off telegrams to leading members of the Regionalist League instruct-ing them to refrain from any participation or commitment to the dictatorial adventure16.

13 J. Bofill, Valoració inicial de la dictadura (manuscript of January 1924) cited by J. Casassas, Jaume Bofill i Mates (1878-1933), Barcelona: Curial, 1980, p. 296-298.

14 Cf. J. Puig Cadafalch, “La Mancomunitat de Catalunya i el Dictador” in La Veu de Catalunya, 27 and 28 /II/1930 cit. by C.E. Ehrlich, Lliga Regionalista: Lliga Catalana, 1901-1936, Barce-lona: Institut Cambó - Editorial Alpha, 2004, p. 358. There were also writers in the period, like Artur Perucho, who recalled meetings held prior to the coup in which the regionalists had negotiated their backing of Primo de Rivera’s takeover in exchange for recognition of Catalan autonomy and the establishment of economic protectionism (cf. A. Perucho, Cat-alunya sota la Dictadura, Barcelona: Proa, 1930, p. 16-21, cit. by J. Casassas, La dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923-1930). Textos, Barcelona: Anthropos, 1983, p. 77-80).

15 The leading biography of Cambó remains the book by J. M. Pabón, Cambó, 3 vols., Barce-lona: Editorial Alpha, 1952-1969 (reprinted in one volume in 1999). For Cambó’s thought, cf. J. Casassas, “Introducció als grans temes cambonians” in M. Roca Junyent (ed), El món de Cambó, Barcelona: Editorial Alpha, 2001, p. 13- 35 and idem, “Francesc Cambó Batlle i la seva aportació al catalanisme regeneracionista” in F. Cambó, El catalanisme regeneracionista (ed. J. Casassas), Barcelona: Edicions de la Magrana - Diputació de Barcelona, 1990, p. V-XXXVI; A. Almendrós, Francesc Cambó: la forja d’un policy maker, Barcelona: Publications of the Abadia de Montserrat, 2000 and B. Riquer, Francesc Cambó: entre la Monarquia i la República, Barcelona: Editorial Base, 2007.

16 F. Cambó, Memòries (1876-1936), Barcelona: Institut Alpha, 1981 p. 375-376. For information on the period, cf. J. M. Roig i Rosich, La dictadura de Primo de Rivera a Catalunya: un assaig de repressió cultural, Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1992.

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Political forces opposed to conservative regionalism levelled accusations against the sector for providing cover to Primo de Rivera’s project. The warm reception given to the general by leading figures in the Regionalist League at the furniture trade fair l’Exposició del Moble on 14 September 1923 supported this speculation. In one of its ultimate issues before closure by the authorities, the anarchist newspaper Solidaridad Obrera attacked Cambó as a “wandering Jew”, out of the scene in Catalonia but certain to return as a minister as soon as the dictator appointed him. The republican newspaper El Imparcial lambasted the regionalists for applauding Primo de Rivera17.

The Matteotti affair: international scandal and Cambó’s reflections

Contemporary observers could not fail to take note of the remarks made by Cambó in his renowned lecture at the Teatro del Centro in Madrid. To emerge from social, economic and political crisis, Cambó claimed, what was needed was an imposition of authority. In his view, “governments with the most solid structures at present are defined by one man and revolve around one man”18.

According to Garriga i Massó, Cambó had repeated his call for a dicta-torial government of six months to carry out the legal changes needed in Spain. Primo de Rivera himself had spoken in his manifesto of “a promissory note due in three months”19.

Abolishing the prerogatives of the Mancomunitat and enacting harmful legislation attacking the Catalan language and symbols contributed to a new coolness and growing hostility among conservative regionalists toward Primo de Rivera.

Less than a year after the coup, news coming out of Italy took on special significance with the disappearance of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. The severity of the crime blemished Mussolini’s regime with an indelible stain.

17 Cf. “Alrededor del golpe de Estado” in Solidaridad Obrera, 21/IX/1923, p. 1. For the history of this newspaper, see S. Tavera, Solidaridad Obrera. El fer-se i desfer-se d’un diari anarcosindicalista (1915-1939), Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona / Col·legi de periodistes de Catalunya, 1992 and for the period, see E. González Calleja, La España de Primo de Rivera… cit. and idem, El máuser y el sufragio. Orden público, subversión y violencia en la crisis de la Restauración, Madrid: csic, 1999.

18 F. Cambó, “L’actualitat social i política”, lecture given by Francesc Cambó in the Teatro del Centro in Madrid on 10 April 1920, reproduced in F. Cambó, El catalanisme regeneracionista, cit., p. 231-244, with the citation on p. 239.

19 J. Garriga i Massó, Memòries d’un liberal catalanista (1871-1939), cit., p. 261.

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The negative light cast on his dictatorship could, mutatis mutandis, implicate any type of authoritarian regime, particularly the Spanish regime. Primo de Ri-vera himself had never hidden his sympathy for the leader of the Blackshirts20. Columns appearing in the press most closely allied to the ideals of Catalan na-tionalism voiced unanimous condemnation. On 17 or 18 June, the regionalist newspaper La Veu de Catalunya gave over almost its entire foreign affairs section to the disappearance of the Italian socialist deputy. An anonymous editorial, which was undoubtedly penned by Joaquim Pellicena (1881-1938), the editor of La Veu de Catalunya, denounced the fascists’ constant resort to violence. He argued that, as in the case of the Irish nationalists, it threatened to plunge the country into a spiral of bloodshed that would be hard to stop21.

From the pages of the republican newspaper El Diluvio, commentators focused on the need for all the press, fascist and non-fascist alike, to demand that moral law be re-established and justice done22. For his part, the longtime repub-lican Eusebi Corominas disparaged all brands of political radicalism and their “demagogic nonsense” and contrasted them with democracy, a regime charac-terized by freedom and respect toward its citizens. Corominas wrote: “a Gov-ernment without the taint of absolutism is the supreme ideal of our politics”23.

Some days later, an editorial in the same newspaper stressed that the better part of Italian public opinion was firm in calling for a return of parlia-mentary sovereignty to Italy24.

20 With regard to Primo de Rivera’s sympathy toward Mussolini, I turn to G. C. Cattini, El gran complot. Qui va trair Macià? La trama italiana, Badalona: Ara Llibres, 2009, p. 181-203; also Cf. J. Tússel, I. Saz, “Mussolini y Primo de Rivera. Las relaciones políticas y diplomáticas de dos dictaduras mediterráneas”, in Italia y la guerra civil española, Madrid: Centro de Estudios históricos, 1986, p. 171-245; S. Sueiro Seoane, “La política mediterránea de Primo de Rivera. El triángulo hispano-italo-francés”, in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, no. 1, 1987, p. 183-223; idem, “El complot catalanista de Prats de Molló. Una intriga internacional oculta tras un suceso interno”, in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, no. 5, 1992, p. 385-396; idem, España en el Mediterráneo. Primo de Rivera y la “cuestión marroquí”, 1923-1930, Madrid: uned, 1993; G. Palomares, Mus-solini y Primo de Rivera. Política exterior de dos dictadores, Madrid: Eudema, 1989.

21 S.A., “El conreu de la violència” in LVC, 18/VI/1924, p. 5.

22 “Un Gesto”, El Diluvio, 18/VI/1924, p. 8.

23 E. Corominas Cornell, “Los radicalismos políticos”, El Diluvio, 22/VI/1924, p. 22. He contin-ued to affirm that “the free citizen, with the ability to speak and write, to assemble with other citizens in order to discuss and set the basic rules of government, is, in my opinion, absolutely necessary for the highest function of a democratic regime, which involves the rule of law ac-cording to criteria that may be broader or more restrictive, but that never undermines rights, against which any disrespectful aim is criminal and worthy of punishment”.

24 S. A., “El parlamento en triunfo”, in El Diluvio, 25/VI/1924, p. 7.

21



On 27 June, the republican newspaper printed a visibly censored edito-rial conjecturing that Primo de Rivera had drawn inspiration from Mussolini’s government when he organized his military council. The newspaper’s view was that the Italian dictatorship had been wounded by the Matteotti affair and blasted the rhetoric used by the head of the fascist regime25.

A special denunciation of fascism and a blunt condemnation of the Matteotti affair appeared in the pages of the La Publicitat, the mouthpiece of Acció Catalana. In one of the pieces, Josep Pla unhesitatingly compared fascism to a cancer on European society and he roundly condemned Mussolini and his Blackshirts for the assassination of the “poor Giacomo Matteotti”26. Pla accused the Italian bourgeoisie of using the fascists to suppress the social demands of the workers’ movement27. He also publicized notes from the Italian press detailing the arrests of numerous fascists throughout Italy. Pla’s articles attracted heavy cuts from the censors of Primo de Rivera’s military council28.

From the pages of the newspaper of Acció Catalana, two contributions by J.V. Foix are especially noteworthy. On 1 July29, Foix’s first piece featured an editor’s note reminding readers of contributors’ freedom of expression. In the article, Foix responded to articles written by Josep Pla, with whom Foix had sparred in 1920 from his column in the journal Monitor30. Now Foix harked back to the spirit of that earlier controversy, underscoring “that we need to search Italian fascism for more than bourgeois reaction”. Foix singled out ele-ments that he, as a Catalan nationalist, considered worthy of admiration: na-

25 S. A., “Fuegos artificiales”, in El Diluvio, 27/VI/1924, p. 11.

26 J. P. [Josep Pla], “Els crims polítics. Giacomo Matteotti”, in La Publicitat, 19/VI/1924, p. 1. For more on Pla and his output in those years, see M. Gustà, “El Fascio de la primera hora vist per Josep Pla” in L’Avenç, no. 186 (1994), p. 10-15 and in more detail in idem, Els Orígens ideològics i literaris de Josep Pla, Barcelona: Curial, 1995.

27 Josep Pla, “Després de l’assassinat de Matteotti. La davalla del feixisme”, in La Publicitat, 20,VI/1924, p. 1.

28 Josep Pla, “Després de l’assassinat de Matteotti. La banda del Viminale”, “Després de l’assassinat de Matteotti. La clau del Feixisme”, “Després de l’assassinat de Matteotti. El Caporetto del Feixisme”, “D’Itàlia. L’anvers del miracle feixista”, “Itàlia. Farinacci”, “Persistència de la crisi del feixisme”, in La Publicitat, 22, 25, 26/VI, 5 and 30/VII and 13/VIII/1924, p. 1.

29 J. V. Foix, “Aspectes del feixisme. L’expressió d’una voluntat nacional” in La Publicitat, 1/VII/1924, p. 1.

30 See note 5 and also: M. Guerrero, J. V. Foix investigador en poesia, Barcelona, Empúries, 1996 and P. Gómez Inglada, Quinze anys de periodisme: les col·laboracions de J. V. Foix in La Publicitat (1922-1936), Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010. Also E. Ucelay de Cal, El imperial-ismo catalán. Prat de la Riba, Cambó y la conquista moral de España, Barcelona: Edhasa, 2003.

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tionalist revolution, heroism, youth, the renovation of the old politics, the spirit of self-sacrifice and, above all, the collective manifestation of a national spirit.

Ten days later, in response to accusations of philo-fascism31, Foix wrote again on Mussolini’s regime, justifying his passion and his hopes in the Italian movement by holding it up to comparison with another movement that had fixed his attention and the attention of the whole world: the Soviet revolution. In Foix’s view, the two events both drew on Engel’s vision of revolution as “the most authoritarian of things: because it is an act whereby one part of the popu-lation imposes its will on another part through guns, bayonets and cannons”. Foix stressed that the real difference must be sought between defenders of de-mocracy and proponents of dictatorship, regardless of whether it is the dictator-ship of a class or of a nation. “Anyone who takes an interest in how the social and political struggles in Europe unfold,” Foix wrote, “must, from an intellectual point of view, put himself in one of two camps, the camp for Democracy or the camp for Dictatorship”. To conclude, he wrote that it was necessary to weep both for Matteotti assassinated in Italy and for all the Matteottis murdered in Russia or deported to Siberia32.

In that same month of July 1924, the complexity of the debate on democracy and dictatorship occupied various editorials of the mouthpiece of Acció Catalana. The pieces took inspiration from reflections on the impact of the violence of the First World War in European countries and on the decency of democratic systems in contrast with the new dictatorships33. Where the cen-sors permitted, news reports addressed actions taken by the Primo de Rivera regime, including the removal of locally elected officials who were replaced by individuals directly appointed by the military council34.

31 J. V. Foix, “Motivacions italianes del feixisme” in La Publicitat, 11/07/1924, p. 1.

32 The author wrote that the champions of Democracy need to “fight tenaciously against fascist Rome and Bolshevik Moscow, the dictatorship of the nation state and the dictatorship of class [...] and voice the same indignation at the Italian secret police as at the Russian secret police. They [the champions of Democracy] must weep not only for Matteotti, assassinated so despicably in Italy, but also the Matteottis, socialists too, assassinated in Russia or deported to Siberia. It is not laudable to battle fascism with democratic catapults in the service of the army of communist social revolution [...].”

33 “El perill dels violents”, “Austeritat democràtica”, “La Guerra i el futur”, “La malaltia de la violència” in La Publicitat, 19/VI, 9 /VII, 5/VIII and 14/IX/1924.

34 Cf. the editorial “Les crisis municipals” in La Publicitat, 24/VII/1924, which states: “Just as backlash from the two anti-democratic experiences of Russia and Italy will have given a new prestige to the democratic idea in the broadest international, social and political sphere, so will the fleeting experience of Spanish—and also Italian—municipalities lead to an analo-gous conclusion in the most limited sphere of public life. Even if democracy had no positive

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Democracy, liberalism and dictatorship also stood at the centre of a series of nineteen articles on fascism written by Francesc Cambó in La Veu de Catalunya between 16 July and 15 October 1924. A few years later these articles were collected into a book that was translated into several languages35.

Cambó took up the topic of fascism impelled by a comparison be-tween Italy as he had known it in 1922, amid the Red Biennium, and Italy conditioned to fascist violence in 1924. From his first article, the conservative regionalist reflected on the impact of the First World War and how it had given birth to two movements, the Bolsheviks and the fascists, united by their “faith-fully anti-democratic” natures and by their denial of popular sovereignty. They seized government “for the minority who, because of its audacity, its strength, its heroism, has won the right to govern over others” (16/IX). In another ar-ticle, Cambó unwaveringly compared Lenin with Mussolini, although he also saw their sharp distinctions. He saw one, the socialist leader, as the paradigm of an ideologue, while the other was the personification of the man of action. He wrote: “Between Lenin and Mussolini, there is the chasm that separates the Slavic world from the Latin world; the East from the West; the solitary vision-ary who is consumed by his inner flames, from the Latin steeped in the air and the sun of the Mediterranean” (24/IX). The use of violence was typical of the Bolshevik and fascist regimes, but also typical of the Irish cause, and aspects of all these cases suggested the contradictory limits of government imposed by force (27/IX).

The Italian case also gave Cambó an opportunity to remark on the disrepute of parliament as an institution and he made clear allusions to Spanish

virtues, it would have in its favour the fact that all other systems capable of replacing it are frankly worse”.

35 F. Cambó, “El feixisme italià. I. Feixisme i bolxevisme”, “II. La Itàlia de 1920”, “III. La Itàlia de 1924”, “IV. El desprestigi del Parlament”, “V. Causes i remeis del desprestigi parlamentari”, “VI. La decepció de la victòria”, “VII. Els orígens immediats del feixisme”, “VIII. En Mus-solini i el seu feixisme”, “IX. L’evolució doctrinal d’En Mussolini”, “X. Justificant l’evolució d’En Mussolini”, “XI. Característiques essencials de Mussolini”, “XII. La força i la feblesa de la ideologia feixista”, “XIII. Paral·lel entre Lenin i Mussolini”, “XIV. Els fruits de la violència”, “XV. Les conseqüències de l’assassinat de Matteotti”, “XVI. El present i l’esdevenidor de la revolució feixista”, “XVII. La democràcia i l’autoritat: els moderns Parlaments”, “XVIII. Com s’és transformada la missió de l’Estat” and “Com nou òrgans han de venir a complir noves funcions” in La Veu de Catalunya, 15, 23 and 30/VII, 6, 13, 20 and 27/VIII, 3, 10, 13, 17, 20, 24 and 27/IX, 1, 4, 8, 11 and 15/X/1924. The title of the book is: Entorn el feixisme italià, Barce-lona: Editorial Catalana, 1924 (ed. in Spanish: 1925; ed. in Italian 1925; ed. in French: 1925). I have drawn on the history of the Italian translation of this work and of La Nacionalitat catalana by Prat de la Riba, in G.C. Cattini, “Joan Estelrich i l’Expansió Catalana. La traducció de Prat de la Riba i Cambó en la Itàlia feixista” in Cercles. Revista d’Història Cultural no. 12 (2009), p. 75-89 (available at: http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Cercles/article/view/196513/298971).

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reality as it was before the coup of Primo de Rivera. The low standing of repre-sentative institutions was not peculiar to Italy. It was shared by a large number of European countries, particularly the Latin countries of the Mediterranean area. Moreover, it had existed prior to the First World War, although the conflict had served to foreground the contradictions in the political system. The regionalist leader noted that democratization and expanding the vote had not realized the ideal of the parliamentary democratic conception of the nineteenth century, which had promoted belief in “the substantive potential of abstract formulas” at the expense of “real values”, but had instead produced a reality of democratic farces, of cronyism and fraud (6/VIII). In Cambó’s view, this had been made possible because of Spain’s lack of civic culture. He thought that only countries where the people had a deeply ingrained sense of citizenship, such as Britain, could produce the conditions needed for genuine parliamentary democracy. He put this in stark contrast with the pantomime that had occurred in the Medi-terranean area (13/VIII). Cambó viewed the coup as “appropriate and desir-able” if it put a stop to “a system, a regime that was fruitless and abject, doomed to drive the country to ruin, debility and the liquidation of all the vital means and energies of a nation” (20/IX).

In other articles, Cambó analyzed the peculiar conditions that account-ed for the triumph of fascism in Italy. He drew on political and economic his-tory, but he also made appeals to pseudo-scientific theories on the southern na-ture of the Latin peoples, who were supposedly irrational and prone to support violent responses and insurrections and where the theorists of socialism had never been truly understood by the masses, who idolized their revolutionary leaders. Significantly, this theory is a focus of Cambó’s reflections in an article published only two weeks after the remains of Giacomo Matteotti were found (27/VIII).

The regionalist leader comments on the evolution of Mussolini and his ideas, noting how their adaptability to circumstances had enabled the re-publican fascism of 1919 to evolve into monarchical fascism by 1922. What had made the change possible was the pragmatic character of fascism, which subordinated everything to Italian imperialism, expansion and grandeur. In this context, Cambó was critical of Mussolini for allowing himself to be intimidated by the opposition after the Matteotti affair. Mussolini’s reaction had been to order the arrest of men at his side from the beginning. He had also replaced Emilio de Bono, Minister of the Interior, with Luigi Federzoni, an intellectual from the Italian nationalist camp who had not been an early proponent of the fascist cause. These actions, according to Cambó, showed great weakness on Mussolini’s part and signalled his coming end (1/X).

In his final articles, Cambó took stock of the “present and future of the fascist revolution” and once again compared the Bolshevik and fascist revolu-

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tions. From the former, he thought that the world had learnt “the absolute failure of the communists’ total solution”, while the latter appeared to have left Italy “an irrefutably positive value”. Nevertheless, he expressed his regret that Mussolini had backtracked when it was time to push the “fascist revolution” to its ultimate consequences, which he called “the transformation of the State through the abolition or substantial alteration of the parliamentary regime”. In his view, this experience would have become the keystone of the system and a contribution to all Latin peoples36.

Cambó also reiterated his support for democracy in his final articles, despite his view that mass action by the people had had a damaging effect in the Latin countries. Similarly, he denounced the impact of the growing inter-dependence of states with world politics and the global economy. Life in every country was being altered in ways that had been unthinkable in the past. Finally, Cambó argued for the need to create presidential regimes, as the United States had, in order to limit the disrepute of parliamentarianism and the dangers of falling into dictatorships. In the US, all the functions of executive power resided in the president, while the parliament was limited to legislative tasks.

Cambó’s predictions about Italy and the future of fascism were entirely at odds with the reality of what came next. Mussolini did not bow to parlia-mentary opposition. On 3 January 1925, he imposed fascism throughout Italian society. He banned members of the opposition from parliament and he pros-ecuted and prohibited associations, parties and trade unions that were hostile to fascism.

Within the framework of the law and under the eyes of the censors, publications linked to the cultural and political wings of Catalan nationalism followed the process with telling concern. The newspaper La Publicitat reaf-firmed and defended the superiority of liberal democracy over dictatorial op-tions then gaining increasing favour among intellectuals37. The articles, chiefly

36 Or in Cambó’s words: “[If Mussolini had abolished Parliament] – if, contrary to what I be-lieve possible, he would yet do it! – Mussolini and fascism would have done an invaluable service to the Latin peoples of Europe and principally to the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula. Whether the attempt failed or succeeded, whether an ideal formula was found or only the ineffectiveness of a formula proven, the value of the lesson would be considerable. And, in this matter, speaking of the new political institutions to be given to the people, it is better, if possible, that the attempt occur elsewhere than at home, because all too often such lessons come at a high price and the glory of receiving them is not always worth the sorrow and the hardship of the giving.” (4/X/ 1924)

37 Cf the editorials: “La pitjor malura”, “L’objectivitat de la democràcia”, “Jocs de mans allà a Moscou”, “De Roma a Londres”, “El criteri qualitatiu en el sufragi”, “Cal partir del sufragi universal”, “Els específics miraculosos”, “La tradició en la política”, “Els vots i els llocs”,

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written by Antoni Rovira Virgili, were later collected into a book38 that served as a genuine defence of democracy and liberalism. Rovira’s articles were im-bued with the ideas of Benedetto Croce, whom Rovira himself had helped to introduce to Catalan readers, writing not only in La Publicitat but also in the new Revista de Catalunya39. In the latter journal, Rovira also devoted a long article to the thought of Francesc Cambó, calling Cambó a “great engineer” and a competent administrator capable of “conquering material, mechanical and technical difficulties”. However, he was critical of Cambó as well, pointing out that he lacked two qualities essential for a good politician: “a fixed sense of direction” and “the ability to know men and perceive human realities”. In other words, Rovira accused Cambó of failing to link his politics to programmes but, instead, of acting in accordance to a realpolitik pragmatism that bowed to “sub-jectivism” rather than to any nuanced appreciation of reality40.

Much sharper criticism of Cambó appeared in the federal republican organ El Diluvio41. Of particular note is an article by Àngel Samblancat, who penned the harshest indictment of the regionalist politician. In Samblancat’s words, the author of Entorn del feixisme italià “once again demonstrated in this work his brutal positivism, his incomparable cynicism and his absolute disdain for intelligence and virtue”. He went on to charge Cambó with excessive in-dulgence toward the Italian dictator, arguing that “both men burnt with the same thirst for authority, hierarchy and discipline. Both feel the same appetite for Power, for Government, more or less absolute”42.

“L’organització política”, “Els principis lliberals”, “El gran invent d’Itàlia”, “Aquella Repú-blica”, “Les novetats prehistòriques”, “Pessimisme i optimisme” in La Publicitat, 5, 8, 9, 11 /X/1924; 14, 18, 22 /XI/1924; 6, 10, 12, 29 and 30/XII/1924; 3, 4, 7 /I/1925. Also for ar-ticles by J. Pla, “La política exterior del feixisme”, “La situació política a Itàlia”, “La fase final del feixisme”, “Els factors del Feixisme”, “Mussolini venedor de fums” in idem, 19, 24, 27, 30/XII/1924; 2/I/1925.

38 A. Rovira Virgili, Defensa de la democràcia, Barcelona: Fundació Valentí Almirall, 1930 (now: Pòrtic 2010).

39 Cf. A. R. V. “Professors, filòsofs i poetes”, “Benedetto Croce i el lliberalisme” in La Revista de Catalunya no. 7 (1925), p. 105-106; no. 10 (1925), p. 406-407.

40 A. Rovira Virgili, “Notes per a l’estudi dels polítics catalans. Francesc Cambó com a polític” in La Revista de Catalunya, no. 7 (1925), p. 221-230. This paper was collected by Rovira Virgili in his book on Catalan politicians: Els polítics catalans: Enric Prat de la Riba, Ildefons Sunyol, Jaume Carner, Joaquim Lluhí i Ressech, Francesc Cambó, Barcelona: Tipografia Occitània, 1929 (an edition from 1978 contains a foreword by Josep Benet).

41 Cf. Vir, “La ideas del doctor Cambó”, or M. Serra, “Pi y Margall y N. Estévanez”, in El Dilu-vio, 14/IX/1924, p. 17 and 4/X/1924, p. 15.

42 A. Samblancat, “Un parto de Cambó”, in El Diluvio, 10/I/1925, p. 12.

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The newspaper El Diluvio tirelessly criticized the deterioration of Italian politics, stating repeatedly that the direction of modern history was toward greater democracy in society43. In this context, Samblancat’s article on Cambó articulated a contempt and an animosity that Catalan republicans did not try to hide. The roots of their animosity stretched back to Cambó’s alleged betrayal of the revolutionary aims of the summer of 1917, when an assembly of parliamentarians, convening in Barcelona, toyed with the idea of a workers’ strike in August, only to backtrack and throw their support to the government of national unity after the intervention of two members of parliament from the Regionalist League (Felip Rodés and Joan Ventosa). That was the prelude to a flurry of ministerial activity that was to bring Cambó into the government of national salvation led by Antoni Maura: first, in 1918, as minister of public works and transport, and then, in 1921, as finance min-ister.

At the outset of Spain’s Second Republic, Samblancat again levelled accusations at Cambó and Cambó’s men for their “nauseating materialism and Phoenicianism”44. Added to these, the accusations of intellectuals from the so-cialist and communist left, Catalan and Spanish alike, pegged the leader of the Regionalist League as the chief apologist for the coup perpetrated by Primo de Rivera. Even though Cambó published the book Les dictadures in 1929, which spoke of his preference for democratic systems and noted the difficulty of emerging from a dictatorship45, the radicalization of the intellectual debate fixed him as one of the men of the dictatorship, a moniker given to him by Joa-quim Maurín (1896-1973) in his highly influential book of the time. Maurín, a communist intellectual, held the view that the Catalan regionalist had published Entorn del feixisme italià as a “guide to being a dictator”, while Les dictadures was

43 Cf. F. Urrecha, “Breviario laico. Cabo suelto”; n.a., “Filofascismo”; E. Corominas Cornell, “Por la paz de Europa. El fascismo en decadencia”; n.a., “La revolución se ha hecho conser-vadora”; E. Corominas Cornell, “En Ginebra: desde Italia: el mundo asiático”; M. Domingo, “Orientaciones. Del régimen monárquico al p régimen parlamentario”; idem, “La autoridad democrática no se desea”; idem, “La violencia contraproducente”; n.a, “Las naciones parla-mentarias”; M. Domingo, “Mussolini i Mac Donald”; A. Guerra, “El sufragio universal”; E. Corominas Cornell, “Aspectos de la política internacional: la dictadura en Italia”; n.a., “El silencio italiano”, n.a. “El fascismo a la baja” in El Diluvio, 7/IX/ 1924, p. 13; 11/IX/1924, p. 7; 14/XI/1924, p. 19; 18/IX/1924, p. 8; 21/X/1921, p. 20; 26/IX/1924, p. 19; 1/X/1924, p. 11; 8/X/1924, p. 15; 22/X/1924, p. 8; 1/XI/ 1924, p. 26; 4/XI/ 1924, p. 23; 16/XI/1924, p. 23; 22/XI/1924, p. 9; 29/XI/1924, p. 9.

44 A. Samblancat, El caudillo de la Estrella (Maciá), Barcelona: El Pasquín del pueblo, n.d., p. 7.

45 F. Cambó, Les dictadures dels nostres dies, Barcelona: Editorial Catalònia, 1929. For a summary overview of the date, see P. Gabriel, “Reflexions polítiques davant la crisi dels Estats liberals” in P. Gabriel (dir.) Història de la cultura catalana. Vol. VIII. cit. p. 81-102.

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“the guide for the perfect dictator who wants to stop being one”46. Andreu Nin (1892-1937) was no less caustic, devoting his entire study Les dictadures dels nos-tres dies47 to a Marxist response to the content of Cambó’s book.

These contributions are a far cry from the discussions of dictatorship and democracy that heralded the first difficult post-war years in Europe, when many of the liberal states on the continent were collapsing in the face of dic-tatorial regimes set to hold power through the coming decades. The 1930s ushered in a period of increasingly embittered confrontation. Gradually, a part of the Catalan intelligentsia moved along a path of growing radicalization, en-thralled by totalitarian regimes that seemed to personify the onset of a new stage in history.

Translation from Catalan by Joe Graham

46 J. Maurín, Los Hombres de la dictadura, Barcelona: Anagrama, 1975, p. 94-95 and 112-113 (1st ed. Madrid, Cénit, 1930).

47 A. Nin, Les dictadures dels postres dies, Barcelona: Llibreria Catalònia, 1930.

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article

aume Miravitlles and Marxism: a Twentieth-Century Voyage

Enric PujolGrup de recerca «Manuscrits». universitat autònoma de Barcelona [email protected]

abstractThis article examines the political career of writer and journalist Jaume Miravitlles i Navarra (Figueres, 1906 – Barcelona, 1988). It proposes that the importance of his contributions to intellectual thought and politics deserve reassessment, partly because Miravitlles’s political progress was typical of certain left-wing European in-tellectuals during the period in discussion: of those whose initiation in politics was full-blooded Leninism, but who then progressively distanced themselves from Soviet ideology and finally became profoundly critical of political Marxism. Miravitlles played a leading role in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, when he headed the Generalitat’s Propaganda Commissariat. After 1939, in exile, he became one of the leading narrators of human experience during this period of war and revolution, a role that he reaffirmed on his return to Catalonia in 1963.

key wordsLeninism, the avant-garde, Salvador Dalí, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (Bloc Obrer i Camperol), the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya), the Civil War, the Propaganda Commissariat (Comissariat de Propaganda), exile, cold war, historiography, political thought.

J

Miravitlles as a representative figure

Jaume Miravitlles i Navarra (Figueres 1906 – Barcelona 1988) is one of Catalan intellectual history’s most interesting thinkers but also remains, quite undeserv-edly, one of its least well-known. Specialist historians may identify him as the head of the Generalitat’s Propaganda Commissariat during the Spanish Civil War, the work of which has been widely recognized even by its detractors; his name may also mean something to scholars of contemporary art and the Sur-realist movement, given that Miravitlles shared with Salvador Dalí the native town of Figueres, a close friendship and, from the 1940s onwards, an increas-

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ingly important working relationship in which Miravitlles was of the artist’s main standard bearers; finally, he may even be familiar to researchers for his journalistic production of over 10,000 articles of different kinds, variously pub-lished in Europe and America1.

But Jaume Miravitlles is rarely cited as an important intellectual or po-litical thinker of his times, even though his writing is highly relevant and his in-tellectual and political progress reveal a great deal about the transformations and contradictions that characterized the twentieth century. And in the progress of his association with Marxism he was especially representative of his fellow Eu-ropeans and of Europe’s experience of Marxist thought. Raised in the ideologi-cal trenches of anti-Stalinist Leninism, during the Civil War years Miravitlles distanced himself from the Marxist-affiliated parties and went on to hold, in the years following the Second World War, a clearly articulated pro-NATO and anti-Soviet position. That position, not at all uncommon in postwar Europe, did however make him something of a rara avis when he returned to Catalonia, which had become characterized by its hegemonic Marxist and communist re-sistance to Franco. At the same time, however, although he changed some of his ideas and political affiliations over the years, there were basic Marxist principles that remained important to him throughout his life.

Miravitlles’s initiation in Marxism-Leninism

In his youth and still in his native town of Figueres, Miravitlles’s attraction to Leninism had much to do with his interest in the artistic avant-garde, two cur-rents which shared an intention to raise provocation to the level of an esthetic statement and which made immediate sense, each in its way, to a restless young man like Miravitlles.

As for his initial political positioning, Miravitlles was particularly in-fluenced by the Empordan Martí Vilanova, who in 1921 established one of the first documented Leninist cells, itself clearly dedicated to the struggle for Catalan state sovereignty. Miravitlles was just fourteen years old at the time and another important cell member, Salvador Dalí, was only seventeen. When Miravitlles moved to Barcelona to study at the School of Engineers he was also able to join the independentist cells associated with Francesc Macià. In 1924,

1 This is the subject of a doctoral thesis by Ramon Batalla, whose research can be sampled in R. Pascuet and E. Pujol (ed.), La revolució del bon gust. Jaume Miravitlles i el comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona: Viena Edicions, 2006. Further aspects of Miravitlles are examined there by other writers.

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Jaume Miravitlles and Marxism: a twentieth-Century Voyage

he was arrested for his activities and sentenced by a council of war to two years’ imprisonment, which he only avoided by fleeing to France. From there, he took part in the 1926 attempted overthrow of the Spanish army known as the fets de Prats de Molló, for which he was arrested, along with the other members of the group, and taken to trial. In the end, however, by pleading his student status in France, he managed to avoid deportation back to Spain.

This period of exile, spent mainly in Paris, helped to bring Miravitlles much closer to the artistic avant-garde in general and to the Surrealists in par-ticular. His friendship with Dalí had provided an initiation and he’d contin-ued this in Barcelona, which was not unfamiliar with the winds of change in artistic and literary circles2); but it was Paris that intensified his experience of the movement. Paris was where Miravitlles formed “a very close friendship” with the poet Robert Desnos and Paris was where he first met André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara and André Cayatte. It was natu-ral, then, that in 1928 Miravitlles was one of the few to speak out in defence of the Manifest Groc or Manifest Antiartístic Català (‘The Yellow Manifesto’ or ‘The Catalan Anti-artistic Manifesto’), a text co-authored by Dalí, Sebastià Gasch and Lluís Montanyà and described as “the Catalan avant-garde’s single-most impor-tant declaration in all its years of activity”3. In the same year, in La Nova Revista, Miravitlles also published his article “Notes a l’entorn de l’art d’avantguarda. Miró, Dalí, Domingo” (‘Notes on the Context of Avant-garde Art. Miró, Dalí, Domingo’) and in 1929 he played an acting role in the famous surrealist film by Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou4.

In November of 1930 and upon his return to Catalonia, Miravitlles was arrested and jailed, and was only released after much public campaigning, in March of 1931. Following his release he joined the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC), a Leninist party constituted in 1930 independently from the Commu-nist Party of Spain and the Communist International, and in time became one of the party’s most active publicists. The BOC’s leader Joaquim Maurín became an important guiding force for Miravitlles, both politically and intellectually, as Miravitlles himself describes in El ritme de la revolució (‘The Rhythm of the Revolution’) (1933) —something which comes as no surprise when we con-sider that Maurín was one of the great Marxist theorists of the first thirty years

2 Avantguardes a Catalunya 1906-1939, Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1992.

3 Cf. J. Minguet, El Manifest groc. Dalí, Gasch, Montanyà i l’antiart, Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya–Galàxia Gutenberg–Fundació Joan Miró, 2004, p.17.

4 Cf. Josep Playà, “Dalí i Miravitlles, profetes i empordanesos” in La revolució del bon gust: Jaume Miravitlles i el Comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya 1936-1939, p. 225-231.

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of the twentieth century. In different publications but mostly in La revolución es-pañola: de la monarquía absoluta a la revolución socialista (‘The Spanish Revolution: From Absolute Monarchy to Socialist Revolution’) (1932) and in Las tres etapas de la cuestión nacional (‘The Three Stages of the National Question’), which was published in the BOC press tribune La Batalla (16-VII-1931), Maurín set out his interpretation of the revolutionary process, which comprised three, clearly-differentiated stages in history and took as its point of departure the dialectical struggle between two forces in two different camps: the class confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in one camp, and the nationalist confrontation between Catalonia and Spain in the other. This concept of revo-lution was to have an extraordinary influence on Miravitlles’s writing in the field of political theory.

According to Maurín, the first stage of the bourgeois revolution had been initiated by the Catalan industrialists who attempted to subjugate a state in which large parcels of agrarian land were in the hands of a chosen few and in which capitalism had arrived comparatively late and played a subordinate role to other such systems in the international arena. But hampered by their dependence on the apparatus of repression required to keep the growing work-ers’ movement in line, the industrialists failed to impose their will and so the monarchic order collapsed. This paved the way for a new era, the second his-torical stage, which began in 1931. The new social power at this stage consisted of the working class, the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie who sustained the Catalan liberation movement, which demanded freedom from the Spanish state. The chief role of the working class in this new equation was not to pilot the democratic-bourgeois revolution that the industrialists had previously failed to impose but to take the country straight to stage three: socialist revolution. Of the various objectives of this final revolutionary phase, Maurín was particularly concerned with the destiny of nationalities, which he believed must finally free themselves from the Spanish state, which had never properly acted as a nation-state because it had never seriously engaged in industrial development. As well as defending the Leninist notion of the nations’ right to self-determination, Maurín advocated a separatist route as a necessary preliminary phase in the constitution of a Spanish federal union because he believed it would be impos-sible to transform the old order of the monarchic, united and centralized state without first changing its structure.

In this period, as well as being influenced by Maurín’s ideology, Mi-ravitlles was fascinated by the man himself. Maurín was indeed charismatic, a public figure whose character was enhanced by the success of his political ca-reer. Originally trained as a school teacher, Maurín’s first political allegiance was made to the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), which he represented as a delegate in Moscow in 1921 at the founding congress of the Red Inter-

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national of Labour Unions. A spokesman for the Soviet experience, he became a member of the Communist Party of Spain in 1924, but then left its ranks to create the BOC, becoming its leader and its most prominent theoretician. His knowledge of Leninism was therefore not purely academic but emerged straight from his experience of the soviet revolutionary process and was closely tied to direct, everyday political activism. And Maurín’s dual identity as thinker and activist was something that Miravitlles sought to emulate5.

Per què sóc comunista? and other revolutionary texts

The similarities between Maurín’s and Miravitlles’s vision of the contemporary historical and political process and the points at which that vision was actually shared are seen in various texts written by Miravitlles in his youth. So in the short essay Per què sóc comunista? (‘Why I Am a Communist’) (no date available), Miravitlles sets out to build the theoretical groundwork for his beliefs, dividing his argument in two parts: one addressing theory, offering his account of his-torical materialism and of the three major stages of all human civilization, slave society, feudalism and bourgeois revolution; the other examining more strictly political issues and the history of those major stages at the level of the Span-ish state and Catalonia. His introduction to the essay explains how the notion of there being successive and enduring stages in human history which evolve progressively — i.e., the Marxist proposal that a series of constants repeats until a new cycle is reached — helps him understand that history may repeat itself and that, at the same time, there might also be a pattern of constant renewal and progress. Once Miravitlles had adopted this particular aspect of Marxist thought he stood by it for the rest of his life, even while he went through other ideological changes or allied himself to groups of people who actually opposed this notion of time and history. In this sense, his analysis of enduring stages of history as a means to understand the present was more than just a preoccupa-tion of his formative years.

If in this brief Marxist disquisition Miravitlles began to consider how the character of all cultures is class-related, he was to return to it at greater length in a longer and more ambitious work, Contra la cultura burgesa (‘Against Bourgeois Culture’) (1931). The premise was that in Catalonia, the bourgeois culture was the dominant one because it mirrored the society that had created it. This allowed Miravitlles to criticize the anarchists’ attempts to culturize the

5 Miravitlles offers a detailed literary description of Maurín in Homes i dones a la meva vida, Barcelona: Destino, 1982.

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working class without ever examining or appraising the class component of the culture that they themselves promoted. On the other hand, he did defend the critical position of a figure like Dalí (who he referred to as a Marxist critic), even though he refuted the body of Daliesque Surrealist thought, proposing that “in philosophical terms, nothing can be more radically opposed to Marx-ism than Freudianism” (p. 55).

At this time, Miravitlles was still attempting to find common ground be-tween the axioms of the revolution and the avant-garde’s efforts to renew the social concept of aesthetics. In 1931, as a BOC member, he brought together Dalí and the Surrealist writer René Crevel in a debate in Barcelona. Miravitlles hosted the meeting himself, going so far as to say that though the Surrealists and the Com-munists used different methods (the former seeking change within the individual person and the latter seeking it within the socioeconomic system), both shared a hatred of the bourgeoisie and the intention to wrest its power away from it.

Miravitlles’s earlier use of avant-garde formulations can also be seen in his book El ritme de la revolució. Published in 1933, as observed above, but com-prising articles mainly from before that year, its texts are marked by occasion-ally provocative and irreverent turns of phrase and by Miravitlles’s use of pro-nounced caricature to portray his adversaries. The same feeling is enhanced by the inclusion of drawings by Dalí, completed during the 1920s and donated by the artist to the press publication L’Hora when he was still a full member of the BLOC6. Because it is a collection of earlier writings ordered by the author himself after a certain lapse in time, Miravitlles is able systematically present the way he had thought during this period. Right in the prologue he expresses his disappointment with the Catalan nationalist republicans who had been his companions in arms during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, including Macià. He accuses them of not having defended the Catalan Republic to the end, (a position the BOC had defended practically on its own) and of having accepted the Republic’s transformation to Generalitat of Catalonia following an agreement made with the Republican government in Madrid. Unlike his three great revolutionary models, Martí Vilanova, Joaquim Maurín and Gimé-nez (a Catalan anarchist who had taken part in the fets de Prats de Molló and who had subsequently died in prison), the Republican leaders had not been “born for heroic action”. And when they had gone to their knees, only the working class would be able to renew the revolutionary momentum.

Miravitlles’s criticisms of Macià then became more thorough, right from the title of another work: the article Ha traït, Macià? (‘Has Macià Betrayed

6 Cf. I. Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, Barcelona: Empúries 1998, p. 405.

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Us?’), which was published one year before El ritme de la revolució but probably written later than the texts in that other book, pursued the same subject of the defeat of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Macià’s responsibility for not having defended the Catalan Republic to the last. And also in 1932, Miravitlles’s published De Jaca a Sallent (‘From Jaca to Sallent’), this time a single and substantial piece of writing rather than a collection of essays, and an indication of the weight he was giving to historical discourse. Divided in two parts, half the book records the universal transformations that from as far back as Luther and Cromwell had led to the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the particular shape of this major but unfinished transformation in the Spanish state; the other half analyzes the events at the beginnings of the 1930s, as explained above. Even then, therefore, Miravitlles had found the formulation he needed to address “immediate history”, as it might now be termed, in the context of an explanation of history’s enduring stages, an argument that would become constant in the rest of his writing.

Notes on the impact of Leninism in the first third of the twentieth century

Miravitlles’s enlistment in the Leninist movement in Catalonia was made at that movement’s height, basking in the glow of the triumph of the Russian Revo-lution of 1917. Indeed, throughout the 1920s the message behind the slogan “Act as in Russia!” provided a major challenge not only for those who aspired to radical social change but for those who had associated this change with a process of national liberation. Leninism gave value to what we would now refer to as struggles for state sovereignty, itself the natural result of actions that were imperative once any revolutionary process had been triggered in a plurinational empire like Russia; and by giving such movements value, Leninism distanced itself from the classical Marxist tradition of the Second International but at-tracted societies of people like the Catalans, who experienced both severe social divisions and a serious national dilemma.

One of the most prominent figures in the Leninist movement was Joaquim Maurín, whose direct influence on the younger Miravitlles has been discussed above. But in the list of those Leninists admired by Miravitlles we should also remember the cell organizer Martí Vilanova, (another key figure in the fets de Prats de Molló). In fact, allegiance to Leninism was not at all uncom-mon amongst the members of Macià’s political party Estat Català, of which Miravitlles and Vilanova were both members. Estat Català Leninists included Miquel Ferrer, Josep Rovira, Abelard Tona i Nadalmai, and Josep Carner-Rib-alta, author of the book of memoirs De Balaguer a Nova-York passant per Moscou i Prats de Molló (‘From Balaguer to New York by way of Moscow and Prats de

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Molló’) (1972). And it was during the struggle against Primo de Rivera’s dic-tatorship, in the heart of the independentist factions (the advocates of armed resistance who were referred to at that time as “separatists”) that there was a move towards Leninism. This was observed by analysts of the period such as Ferran Soldevila, who in 1931 and just before the declaration of the Republic observed in La Revista de Catalunya “the landslide towards communism of those individuals who most significantly represented Catalan nationalism”.

Amongst those individuals there were other important figures and members of different groups, such as Jordi Arquer and Andreu Nin. Jordi Arquer, a founding member of the BOC, produced an anthology of Marxist classical writings on the subject of the national question in El comunisme i la qüestió nacional i colonial (‘Communism and the National and Colonial Ques-tion’) (1930), which he took as the point of departure for his work Los co-munistas ante el problema de la nacionalidades ibéricas (‘The Communists and the Problem of the Iberian Nationalities’) (1932). Andreu Nin, rightly considered to be one of the most important Marxist writers and leaders of the first half of the twentieth century, was originally a school teacher and CNT-affiliated union leader who combined reflection with political activism and who was informed by his direct contact with Russia. On this last point, it can be said that in Catalonia it was Nin who knew more than anyone else about the Soviet experience, having lived in Moscow for most of the 1920s and hav-ing been a member of the full-time secretariat and assistant general secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions. In Moscow he had formed part of a group of critical thinkers who gathered strength during the emergence and rising power of Stalin and had therefore also suffered a political ostracism which in Nin’s case led to his return to Barcelona in 1930. His main writings on theory of the decade of the 1930s include Les dictadures dels nostres dies (‘The Dictatorships of our Times’) (1930) and Els moviments d’emancipació na-cional (‘The National Emancipation Movements’) (1935). In the second book he proposed that because the bourgeoisie formed part of the oligarchy of the absorbing state, only the working class could achieve Catalonia’s national liberation and that it would achieve this by means of a democratic socialist revolution. His fusion of social revolution and national liberation and, in par-ticular, his support for the Catalan liberation movement, were quite deliberate and reflected a deep-seated conviction, shown by his affiliation to intellectual groups of the period leading a wide-ranging movement that sought to re-cover and normalize Catalan culture. At a political level, in 1935 and together with Joaquim Maurín, Nin founded the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unifica-tion (POUM), a result of the fusion between the Communist Left of Spain, which Nin had founded in 1932, and Maurín’s BOC.

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All these Marxist figures and organizations of the first third of the twentieth century were characterized by theoretical and political principles that distanced them from the Communist Party of Spain (which had only a marginal foothold in the Principality of Catalonia) and the question of Catalan national sovereignty provided clear reasons for this distancing. It was of no small significance that recognizing this national reality also meant ac-cepting the existence of a correlation of forces that were specifically Catalan and, therefore, embracing the notion that any policy of alliances to achieve revolutionary objectives would have to come from these specific forces. For this reason, these ‘unorthodox’ or disaffected Marxists were distinguished not only by their sensibility to the national question but also by their affinity with the anarcho-syndicalist movement, in which many had occupied lead-ing positions.

The Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) did not play a major role in this period, certainly in the Principality, where its reticence about ques-tions of national reality and the party’s subsequent role in the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera led to heavy criticism and sparked the formation of socialist organizations of Catalan obedience, such as the Socialist Union of Catalonia Party (USC), founded in 1923. A number of the USC’s leading voices put forth Marxist- and Leninist-based theoretical proposals that were closely associated with Catalan national liberation, and Rafael Campalans and Manuel Serra i Moret were two of these. Serra, a staunch Marxist and advocate of Catalan state sovereignty (as demonstrated by his unqualified commitment to Macià’s declaration of the Catalan Republic in 1931), understood political democracy as a value that should be defended by the popular classes, despite his deep re-spect for the Soviet revolution. When Joan Comorera assumed the leadership of the USC, there began a progressive distancing between Serra and Comorera, which grew in 1936 with the unification of the USC, the Proletarian Catalan Party, the Catalan Communist Party and the Catalan Federation of the PSOE in what became the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), allied to the Third International and associated at a constitutional level with the Communist Party of Spain, even while it maintained its independence. In 1940, Serra was expelled from the PSUC and helped, in 1946, to found the Socialist Movement of Catalonia, which he led and in which he was accompanied by younger fig-ures such as Josep Pallach, teacher and historian who had come from the BOC and the POUM and who also produced a large body of work with a focus on political theory that has yet to be studied in any detail. For his part, Comorera also wrote various works in which his use of historical analysis was particularly notable and his defence of Leninist theses on self-determination, appearing in a variety of articles, took as its point of departure Stalin’s Marxism and the Na-tional Question. Finally, in 1949, Comorera was expelled from the ranks of the

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PSUC for his demands, from the leadership of Communist Party of Spain, for the Catalan right to determine policies independently.

The Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War

In 1933, the year El ritme de la revolució was published, Miravitlles suffered a profound ideological crisis (explained much later7). Hitler’s rise to power in January had forced him to reconsider his politics, and he was becoming increas-ingly critical of the BOC’s radical distancing of its position from other parties. Miravitlles favoured the idea of a union against fascism between leftwing and progressive parties but without the classical Communists, an exclusion which the BOC could not accept because it supported a revolutionary front. In the spring of 1934, this difference of opinion led to his withdrawl from the BOC and to his affiliation with the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), in which he formed the group “Spartacus” and created the platform and publisher Acció Constructiva d’Esquerra Republicana (ACER). After the Barcelona revolt of 6 October and its subsequent repression, Miravitlles went into hiding and during this time he was able to write Crítica del 6 d’octubre (‘Critique of 6 October’) for ACER.

Crítica del 6 d’octubre is therefore a work completed on a specific subject and with a certain deliberation. There, he returns to the theme of enduring stages of history but uses it this time to explain the events of the Barcelona re-volt and to focus on Catalan rather than global historical development. In fact, almost half the book addresses the history of Catalonia’s difficult relationship with Spain, examining its beginnings in the Middle Ages but concentrating most of all on Catalonia’s nineteenth-century history and the first decades of its twentieth. The other half analyzes the events following 14 April 1931. All in all, the book must be considered one of the clearest examples of what contempo-rary Catalan history brought together in the first third of the twentieth century. According to Miravitlles, in its simplest form what Catalonia most needed was to bridge the gap between two camps: those who advocated Catalan state sov-ereignty, independence and nationalism, and those others who wished to exer-cise Catalan authority in the business of Spanish politics. The political formula for this had been found by Lluís Companys, the leading political player in the events of 6 October who, in his speech from the balcony of the Generalitat, had effectively achieved “the fusion of nationalist and hegemonic intent in a single, ideal act of exaltation” (p. 251). In this book, then, Miravitlles demonstrates a

7 Homes i dones de la meva vida, p. 161-162.

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profound political and ideological shift. The ERC, which he had criticized so severely (and which, he said, he was therefore better able to judge), was the political organization of “the coincident popular classes” (p. 123), Macià had never been a separatist (p. 106), Companys was “the sea captain who has to sail our ship into the port of victory” (p. 217) and Badia and Dencàs, the men who were really responsible for a dangerous nationalist decline, had been victims of “the mirage that determines every revolutionary situation” (p. 117). To sum up, Miravitlles proposed, the events of 6 October had served to “close the book on a period of mistakes and turn a new page with dignity” (p. 216).

This new approach also altered the way Miravitlles’s chose to under-stand political theory. While he didn’t actually abandon his Marxist and Maurí-nian model, he now followed the great stages of history as these were defined by Ferran Soldevila, who, apart from Antoni Rovira i Virgili, he considered to be “the most competent historian of our country” (p. 249). There is no doubt that with this work Miravitlles became something of a historian himself — even though he could also double as a political thinker, as he admitted. Armed with the demographic thesis of Josep A. Vandellós and Carles Pi Sunyer’s L’aptitud econòmica de Catalunya (‘Catalonia’s Economic Aptitude’) he even attempted what today we would call future studies, imagining Catalonia as it might be in the year 2000, a country where more than half the population would be immigrants and where social cohesion would be made possible thanks to the country’s economic development.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 and Miravitlles’s leadership of the Generalitat’s Propaganda Commissariat spurred him to action on a number of fronts. At that time he had more resources than ever before to make a mark on the events that were happening and he used these effectively and with intel-ligence, even if he was unable to change the course of the war. The details of his work for the Commissariat have been discussed in other papers, but we might just remember the considerable political weight he was able to wield in that moment of armed conflict and revolution: first, that at the time of the insur-rection of the Spanish nationalist military it was Miravitlles who was appointed secretary of the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, probably because the worker leaders were aware of the respect he still commanded in worker cells; second, that he must have played an equally important role in dissolving that commit-tee and convincing its main parties and unions to integrate in the Generalitat government, given that he was subsequently entrusted with the leadership of the Propaganda Commissariat, designed as a key organism in the resistance apparatus. Finally in this period, there is also Miravitlles’s writing, which was prolific but also notably public in character. The more reflective, analytic style of earlier works would not be returned to until the beginning of the 1940s, during his exile from Spain.

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In 1939, the adverse result of the Civil War forced Miravitlles to flee to Paris, accompanied by members of the Catalan government. There he basically continued the work he had been doing for the Commissariat, albeit with more limited means and with greater organizational responsibility. In order to act with the legal authority of a government in exile, the Generalitat created the Layetana Office. Working out of the Office with few resources not only for ques-tions of governance but even for the basic needs of the many political refugees in Paris, Miravitlles attempted to simply maintain some kind of platform for ideological resistance. He contributed regularly to the French press and played a decisive role in the publication of the newspaper El Poble Català. President Companys entrusted him with writing a history of the Civil War so that the ex-iles might preserve their own account of the events, and although the work was never completed as planned, some of that writing did appear later, during the 1960s, in publications such as Episodis de la guerra civil espanyola (‘Episodes of the Spanish Civil War’) or even Gent que he conegut (‘People Who I Have Known’). With the Nazi occupation of Paris, Miravitlles fled south, until in 1941 he was able to board a ship bound for Mexico via Alger and New York, as he himself has described8.

The years of exile and the outbreak of the Cold War

In Casablanca in 1941, profoundly affected by the rapid collapse of France in the face of the German troops, Miravitlles began a book in which he tried to analyze its reasons, finally published as Muerte y resurrección de Francia. Causas profundas de la derrota de Francia y sus condiciones de resurgir (‘Death and Resurrec-tion in France. The Underlying Causes of France’s Defeat and the Conditions Required for its Return to Resistance’) (1943). And during all the period of his exile in Mexico (1941-45), he contributed to De Gaulle’s Free French move-ment.

His most ambitious work in this period was Geografia contra geopolítica (El porqué de las dos Guerras Mundiales) (‘Geography against Geopolitics – the Reasons for the Two World Wars’) (1945), a book of 335 pages illustrated by some forty maps providing a detailed analysis of the world powers’ foreign policy during the first half of the twentieth century. His main premise was that the geographical theories the world powers had drafted as their geopolicy at the beginning of the century had conditioned the results of both world wars and that the aftermath of the Second World War demonstrated “the failure of geo-

8 D’Europa a Amèrica. Dietari d’exili (1941-1945), Barcelona: Proa 2009.

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politics and the triumph of geography, pure and simple”. The book is divided in seven parts, the last of which analyzes the USSR’s achievement of a predomi-nant position in the world power balance. And this last part is precisely where where we find a very clear explanation for Miravitlles’s subsequent choices of direction. According to him, after the German defeat the USSR became the country that was most advantageously positioned for global domination, should it choose to pursue this. Miravitlles found this idea particularly alarm-ing. Having experienced the spectacular ascent of classical Communism during the Civil War and the signing of the German-Soviet non-agression pact that preceded the Second World War, one can understand why he began to take a distinctly pro-NATO approach to certain political issues and why, in 1945, he should eventually go to live in the US.

Apart from a two-year interval spent in Brasil, Miravitlles lived in the US from May 1945 to 1963, during which time he consolidated what we might be called the ‘ideology of his mature years’. Preoccupied with the pos-sibility that the USSR might become the world’s largest single power and after the traumatic experience of war, he was set against violent change of all kinds and had reinforced his belief in democracy. His contact with the North Ameri-can reality showed him that social reform could exist even within a capitalist-oriented society (even if this was of a kind that developed Europe would not experience in any generalized manner until the world’s postwar reconstruction had gained ground). In later years he would sum up his political views with the idea that wealth and freedom were the forces which could bring about social justice and that violence had no place for achieving this9.

With this ideological baggage and throughout the Cold War period, from its beginnings just after the Second World War, Miravitlles adopted a firm-ly pro-NATO position which in 1950 prompted him to propose the creation of an armed unit of republicans in exile that would fight alongside the North Americans in the Korean War.10 The proposal fell through but both this and his general political line distanced him from many other left-wing figures and crit-ics of US foreign policy, even some of those who were outspokenly anti-Soviet like him.

At the time of his proposal, Miravitlles had separated himself from the Spanish Republican government in exile, for which he had started working in 1946 through his close associations with its Basque president, José Antonio

9 Episodis de la Guerra Civil espanyola, Barcelona: Pòrtic1972, p. 12.

10 Cf. Jordi Guixé, “Catalans a Corea: les propostes militars d’un exiliat ‘d’esquerres’”, L’Avenç 245 (March 2000), p. 64-69.

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Aguirre. He had reached a position of considerable responsibility, directing the periodical of the Spanish Information Bureau, representing the government in relations with the North Americans and working as a UN observer. However, the lukewarm reception of his Korean proposal reflected his increasing isolation even within the heart of the exiled republican community, given his increasing-ly opportunistic approach to the problems of the Franco regime. Already in The Marshall Plan and Franco, published by the Spanish Information Bureau in March of 1947, Miravitlles was making a link between the possible development of the Spanish state’s economy and a democratizing process, an idea he discussed in greater detail in A report on the economic and financial situation of Franco Spain (1950)11. In an atmosphere of Republican disenchantment brought on by the rejuvenated power of Franco’s regime following its 1953 Pact of Madrid with the US and by the Spanish state’s admission to the UN in 1955, in 1958 Mi-ravitlles played what many would consider a politically opportunistic card in the letter he wrote to the Infante Juan of Spain, appealing to the monarchy to rally to the democratic cause.

The return to Spain

In the year 1963, Miravitlles finally returned home. Although the main reason he gives for returning is that he wished to raise his children in their own cul-tural context and society, we know that he had wanted to come back many years earlier so there were undoubtedly other, more deeply-rooted reasons. At one level these would have emerged from the ‘desire to return’ that is com-mon amongst all exiles; in Miravitlles’s case, there would also have been his conviction that by returning he could contribute to the work of democratizing Spain. So, after a brief period in which he was held in Madrid, he came back to Catalonia and, following a brief stay in the coastal town of Roses, he settled in Barcelona to begin an intense period of journalism.

At the start this was characterized by an intense adaptation and work, which explains why he did not publish any book during the 1960s. But in the early 1970s, this changed. First, helped by his friend the publisher and politician Josep Fornas, Miravitlles published two works that he had begun many years earlier, in a collection of pieces called “Els meus arxius” (‘My Files’): Barce-lona latitud Nova York, longitud París (‘Barcelona, Latitude New York, Longitude Paris’) (1971) and Episodis de la guerra civil espanyola (see Part 5 above) (1972).

11 Published in J. Miravitlles, Informes sobre l’economia franquista de postguerra [courtesy of Francesc Roca], Catarroja: Afers 2008.

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At the time, the intention had been to publish these and other earlier writings but unfortunately, the project stopped here. As its title suggests, Barcelona latitud Nova York, longitud París is written in homage to the three most important cities Miravitlles’s life and he tries to understand them together in a wider context. The title page announces that the text is an essay on economics, but in fact it becomes much more than that. Especially in its first part of some 250 pages, the text is a personal portrayal of the Catalan historical process from its early begin-nings to contemporary times, so that Barcelona latitud Nova York, longitud París represents the culmination of Miravitlles’s reflections on history, started in the 1930s and never completely interrupted. Of its precursors we have an alterna-tive history of Catalonia that he had attempted to write during his exile and in which he had defended a manner of ‘third way’ between the formulations of Catalan state sovereignty and Spanish nationalism, even though he never got beyond writing some thirty pages of the general outline. It was the same opportunist approach defended at that time by Catalans who did not believe direct confrontation with the regime would lead to any productive result. And on the inside this position was most noticeably held by the Catalans’ principle theorist Jaume Vicens Vives, who died suddenly at the beginning of the 1960s and who was the author of the important work Notícia de Catalunya (‘News of Catalonia’) (1st ed. 1954; 2nd ed. extended, 1960).

Barcelona latitud Nova York, longitud París is a substantially different text to the general outline Miravitlles had drafted years before, during his exile. Much more detailed and robust, with hardly any political agenda, one can feel its author’s satisfaction in having decided to use the experience of his years to systematically put down on paper his ideas about the history of his country rather than produce a work discussing some specific political action (which would have been difficult anyway, given the censorship that the regime was still actively applying in the 1970s). Certainly, his approach is political and economic in the sense that he reaffirms the accuracy of Marxism’s historical analysis; but in the same breath he announces that the Marxist vision is subject to serious limitations and that we should therefore address the importance of demographic determinants on the collective psychology of society (which he generally describes as ‘necessary’ rather than ‘sufficient’) and focus on the human factor in the equation. The only constant Catalonia has ever been able to rely upon for its progress is the individual person who is “decisive in the formation of Catalan collectivity”. The importance of the subject and of the collective mentality in which he has been formed leads him to cite substan-tial portions of Pi Sunyer’s L’aptitud econòmica de Catalunya (see Part 5 above), although during the text he also cites Ferran Soldevila, Pierre Vilar and, with particularly frequency, passages from Jaume Vicens Vives’s Notícia de Catalunya (News of Catalonia). The author who serves him best, however, is the North

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enrIC PuJol

American sociologist A.F.K. Organsky. Miravitlles takes Organsky’s historical outline as applied to all nations, composed of the three consecutive stages of political development the dynastic, the bourgeois and the modern, and he applies this to the Catalan and Spanish questions. In Miravitlles’s view, geo-graphical and historical determinants and determinants of mentality are what enabled the Catalan bourgeoisie to emerge from within the Spanish dynastic state, to gather momentum as a motor of change in both Catalonia and Spain and to almost reach the point at which they would separate themselves from the Spanish dynastic state as a bourgeois modern state. Miravitlles analyzes the stages of this bourgeois revolution and of the Catalans’ crucial role therein (the Cádiz Cortes, the Glorious Revolution, the First Republic), but focuses on the twentieth century. His conclusion is that “from 19 July 1917 to 19 July 1936, this country generated as much history as some countries do in centuries”. The words recall his thesis of the 1930s in De Jaca a Sallent, even though the period of time he was talking about then was actually just two years rather than twenty (1930 to 1932), and this indicates how far he had maintained his basic convictions in historical analysis, over the years. What had changed most was his understanding of possible revolutionary change, of what it might look like, how it might appear and which political responses its presence would require. For Miravitlles in the 1960s, the message is that “de-spite our socialist hopes, the historical role of capitalism as the progeny of the bourgeoisie is only just beginning”; and furthermore, that “those regimes that have flourished in different parts of the world in its name are nothing more than ‘capitalisms of the state’, the issue of a feudal complex so exclusive and hermetic that it obstructs the emergence of the revolutionary bourgeoisie”.

It is true that when Miravitlles returned to Catalonia he published many more books than those referred to in this paper and that the most relevant to academic study tend to be those in which he recovers the historical memory of the Civil War, such as the previously-cited Episodis de la guerra civil espanyola. But the writings that were most widely read were his books in the series Gent que he conegut (see Part 5 above), beginning with the book of the same title in 1980, followed by Més gent que he conegut (‘More People I Have Known’) (1981) and Homes i dones de la meva vida (‘Men and Women in My Life’) (1983). All of them played their part in recovering memory and all are important milestones in Miravitlles intellectual voyage. But none of them do quite so much as Bar-celona latitud Nova York, longitud París to illustrate one particular aspect of Jaume Miravitlles: the fact that even in his final days, when all around him others were pursuing very different political options to the past, Marxism was still a for-midable influence on his intellectual progress. Even at the time of the political transition, Miravitlles was giving his support to the Republican Left of Catalo-nia, and shortly afterwards passed to Ramon Trias Fargas’s Democratic Left of

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Catalonia, which subsequently joined Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (the party of the first president of the post-regime Generalitat, Jordi Pujol). To sum up, the story of Miravitlles and others like him is the story of thinkers who may have gradually distanced themselves from explicitly Marxist affiliations or even actively opposed these; but they are also people whose intellect remained profoundly influenced by Marxist thought and whose past and present were permeated by its currents, both within and beyond Catalonia, at every point along the river of twentieth century.

Translation from Catalan by Barnaby Noone

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article

osep Lluís Blasco, politician and philosopher

Sílvia Gómez Solersocietat de filosofia del País Valencià. sant Vicent ferrer secondary school, algemesí [email protected]

abstractJosep-Lluís Blasco (1940-2003) was an inspired ideologist to the political parties embodying nationalist and leftist positions in the Valencian Country. In regard to Philosophy, Blasco awoke an interest in analytic philosophy and took part in one of the most successful projects the Faculty of Philosophy of Valencia ever endeavored: the international symposia on Logic and Philosophy of Science and the publication of the journal Teorema. His work counts as one of the most solid contributions our culture has yielded within the field of Epistemology.

key wordsJosep-Lluís Blasco, Catalan Philosophy, Analytical Philosophy, Epistemology.

J

Professor Josep Lluís Blasco was born in Sagunto in 1940. Determining what his main concern, aspiration or personal motivation was throughout his life would entail having to decide whether his philosophical inclination was more weighty than his political interests, and that would be no easy assignment. Blasco showed a lively social and political conscience from an early age. He embarked on an Arts degree in 19591 and was diligent in his course work while also being among the critical and active students who were striving to contest the inertia of the Franco regime, which also permeated the university milieu. Finding comrades in the struggle was fundamental for Blasco. He lost no time in joining the cause of political Valencian nationalism, with eyes set on left-wing and nationalist political movements. Halfway through the nineteen sixties he became a member of the Partit Socialista Valencià (PSV – Valencian

1 He began this degree a year after having started a Law degree and continued studying the two courses simultaneously.

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sílVIa GóMez soler

Socialist Party). However, it should be noted that this party disintegrated and, some years later, around 1974, Blasco and a group of people sharing his political views founded the Partit Socialista d’Alliberament Nacional (PSAN – Socialist Party of National Liberation) in the País Valencià.2 The other left-wing nation-alist party, Partit Socialista del País Valencià (PSPV – Socialist Party of the País Valencià), was subsequently absorbed by the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE – Spanish Socialist Party).

The prospects for nationalism in the País Valencià were complicated since being successful in the elections meant renouncing certain “pure” posi-tions and opting to occupy the “vacuum” left by the Partit Socialista del País Valencià when it was absorbed by the PSOE. In those times it was not easy to understand that working in the political arena and being able to bring about change meant occupying positions of power, and those positions could only be occupied if they were won in elections. After the Franco regime ended the level of electoral practice was low. This “feet on the ground” project meant that Blasco would perforce fall out with some of his comrades who championed positions that, as was subsequently proven, led to electoral defeat. If the Valen-cian nationalists wished to win the elections, they had to introduce changes and make the effort to come to some agreement, et cetera. The creation of the Unió del Poble Valencià (UPV – Valencian People’s Union), which culminated with the creation of the Bloc Nacionalista Valencià (BLOC – Valencian Nationalist Bloc) were moves in this direction. Blasco was both driving force and ideologist in these parties.

Throughout his academic career, Blasco was aware of the nature of the society in which he lived and the role that the university should play therein. Hence, when he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, he resolutely defended the Catalan language, without hesitation or ambiguity. This was not an easy option at the time. In the post-Franco, heavily Castilian-influenced Valencia, Blasco’s position did not remotely represent a majority view. On the contrary, the environment was hostile to his political leanings. This is one of

2 The historic Regne de València (Kingdom of Valencia, 1239 – 1707) has also been officially known, in the Spanish context, as the Comunitat Valenciana (Valencian Community) since the first Statute of Autonomy in 1982. It consists of three provinces (Alicante, Valencia and Castellón) whose bounds more or less coincide with those of the old Regne de València, with the city of Valencia as its capital. “Valencia” can thus refer to the city, the province and the Community, while the adjective “Valencian” also includes the Valencian language, which has a linguistic community of about half the population of the Comunitat Valenciana. The term “País Valencià” came into use in the eighteenth century and became popular after the 1960s in leftist and nationalist circles since it did not imply the Spanish frame of reference [transla-tor].

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Josep lluís Blasco, politician and philosopher

Blasco’s merits: he was appointed Dean without having to conceal his views about the country, the language and the kind of university he wanted.

Observing his activities in the different spheres –academic, philosophi-cal and political– in which he moved, one might wonder how he attained the deanship, how he came to have the utmost prestige in the Department of Meta-physics when he was such a non-metaphysical man, how he introduced analyti-cal philosophy into the University of Valencia, and so on. I shall try to explain, then, how Blasco, with his critical and rational character, made the difficult easy in the very different domains of his career. Some examples speak for themselves.

The Philosophy Department in the Arts Faculty of the University of Valencia had only been established four years before Blasco started to study Philosophy. It was staffed by teachers transferred from Murcia who went along with the routine inertia, teaching the typical impoverished scholastic philoso-phy of the day. True renovation did not happen then but later, from 1960 to 1962, when three new professors came to the University of Valencia: Carlos París, to occupy the Chair of Foundations of Philosophy; José Luis Pinillos, who occupied that of Psychology; and Manuel Garrido who, after getting through some rather controversial public examinations, was to occupy the Chair of Log-ic. Of the three professors, it was Garrido who stayed longest in Valencia, while the other two moved to Madrid after a few years. Blasco was taught by all three, from his second to fourth year: Foundations and Logic with Carlos París; Phi-losophy of Nature and Anthropology with José Luís Pinillos; and Metaphysics with Manuel Garrido. The latter was very highly regarded among his students as he used the texts in the original language for his classes and this, since he was dealing with authors like Aristotle, who was generally studied in the scholastic versions, was remarkable at the time. Blasco was soon to make his presence felt. He studied with unusual rigour and, in fourth year Metaphysics, had the chance to demonstrate to Garrido his attentive reading of Heidegger. The fol-lowing year, when he finished his degree, Garrido had him contracted to teach a weekly class in Metaphysics. He was thus to combine university work with the classes he was starting to teach at the Lluís Vives Secondary School.

Blasco was preparing to write a dissertation on the concept of totality in Whitehead. His intellectual curiosity, however, led him to become interested in a wide range of authors who were beginning to make their name although little was as yet known about them. Hence he went from studying the category of Being in Whitehead and Heidegger to wanting to know what Wittgenstein, the logical positivists and, in general, the analytical philosophers had to say about it. Accordingly, as a result of his inquiries into this new line of thought, he forsook his original metaphysical concerns and came to focus his attention exclusively on epistemological questions. Eventually, in 1971, he wrote his doc-toral thesis on Wittgenstein and analytical philosophy.

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Studying this philosophical trend was not an easy choice in those years. In general, the new material came in from Germany. It is praiseworthy, there-fore, that not only did he discover new authors in this milieu that was so re-sistant to change but that his progress from his early readings influenced by logical positivism to his subsequent transcendentalist readings of Wittgenstein was a solitary endeavour. It is common knowledge that the Faculty of Philoso-phy of the University of Valencia played a fundamental role with regard to the study and cultivation of analytical philosophy in the Catalan cultural domain. It is also well known that Garrido, when he arrived in Valencia, had to learn symbolic logic at the same time as his students and that he was discovering the new philosophical tendencies together with junior teaching staff members who were joining the Department. While it is true that Garrido played no essential role in directing Blasco’s thesis, he did give him “free rein”, which was sufficient for Blasco.

This was the period in which the Faculty of Philosophy in Valencia was at the height of its splendour since it was working on one of its most productive and successful projects, the International Symposia on Logic and Philosophy of Science and, concurrently with these, the publication of the review Teorema, of which Blasco was a co-founder and the first secretary.

The symposia themselves were held from 1969 until 1974 and were all devoted to philosophy of science, cybernetics and analytical philosophy. With the exception of the second symposium, the proceedings were always published and they were all attended by world-famous philosophers and logicians, includ-ing C. Thiel, A. Diemer, H. Frank, G. Hasenjäger, W. O. Quine, D. Pears and P. F. Strawson.

Blasco presented papers in the last three, these dealing with his most recent studies in analytical philosophy. The third and the last of these symposia were, for different reasons, to have particular impact on his academic life.

The third symposium, which was devoted to Philosophy and Contem-porary Spanish Science, was presided over by Ferrater Mora and was massively attended. The members of the public, mainly students, made use of the occasion to give explicit voice to their protests against the Franco regime, thereby turn-ing the symposium into a rally. This was in 1971. This gathering, the professor from the University of Oviedo, Gustavo Bueno, wished to adopt the role of dialectical philosopher in opposition to the analytical line that was taken at the time by the Faculty of Philosophy in Valencia. The already-existent clash between analytical and dialectical philosophers came to a head in this forum. Bueno spoke after the paper presented by Blasco –“Anàlisi categorial” (Catego-rial Analysis)– immoderately attacking the philosophical inclinations of the De-partment in general. Both Garrido and Ferrater Mora made strenuous efforts

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to find a way out of this situation, which was repeated still more vehemently later on with the paper presented by another lecturer in Logic, this time Jesús Mosterín from the University of Barcelona. The dialectical battles gave rise to all kinds of claims and produced a heated situation for which Garrido, in the last instance, was primarily responsible in the eyes of the public and academic authorities, inasmuch as he was the main organiser.

It is necessary to understand the complexity of the scene since the in-terests of the “school”, on the one hand, were confronted with political interests on the other. From a position on this occasion that was more dogmatic than critical, Gustavo Bueno sought to incarnate dialectical Marxism by attacking analytical philosophy as aseptic and detached from social reality. Then again, the students found that this was an ideal occasion to give voice to their claims against the repression of the Franco regime. Moreover, the situation was exac-erbated with the expulsion of a lecturer who had discussed Marxist theories in class, which was the final detonator, or at least the most “visible” one, of the student protests. At this point, Blasco, together with one of the guest academ-ics, Javier Muguerza, came to agreement over a solution with the leaders of the student assembly: they would read a manifesto in protest at the expulsion of the Marxist lecturer on condition that the congress could then proceed without further interruption. Garrido was relieved to see that the agitators respected their part of the pact. He, however, failed to honour the agreement. No mani-festo was published in the proceedings, which put Blasco in a bad light, since it was he who had made the commitment to do this in reaching the accord. Gar-rido always suspected that Blasco had something to do with the revolt.

The two symposia that followed the third highly controversial one were held behind closed doors, attended only by teachers and students from the department and guest lecturers. In the latter event, held in the Sicània Hotel in Cullera, different papers were presented on the philosophy of Willard Van Orman Quine – the guest professor on that occasion – who then offered in-depth discussion of the lectures. This was highly productive. Subsequently, in 1974, Blasco engaged in correspondence with Professor Quine about some aspects of the Spanish translation of his work Ontological Relativity.

In March 1971, the Department of Logic working with the Depart-ment of History of Philosophy, launched a review –Teorema– of exceptional quality and rigour in those times. It was initially directed by two professors, Manuel Garrido and Fernando Montero, and was envisaged as a philosophical review that would embrace a wide range of tendencies: phenomenology, Marx-ism, structuralism, mathematical logic, philosophy of science, cybernetics and analytical philosophy, inter alia. Some months later Montero left the publication so that its production was entirely left to the Department of Logic, a circum-stance that would end up tilting it still more towards analytical philosophy and

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mathematical logic. Teorema published articles by members of the Department and those invited to the symposia, while the proceedings of the fourth and fifth symposia, for example, were published as monographic numbers of the review.

In 1973, with the book Lenguaje, filosofia y conocimiento (Language, Phi-losophy and Knowledge), the fruit of his doctoral thesis, Blasco offered a lucid, well-ordered account of analytical philosophy as practised in England and, in so doing, evinced his doubts and criticisms and set out his own conclusions. This thesis-based publication was brought out in Spanish by a Barcelona publishing house. However, Blasco had previously worked on the translation of different works into Catalan. In 1969, he had translated Althusser’s For Marx and Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. With Tomàs Llorens, he also directed the essay col-lection “Garbí 3” in the publishing house Concret, which had been founded by Valerià Miralles, Alfons Cucó and Tomàs Llorens, then owners of a Valencia bookshop of the same name. The impediments presented by the Franco re-gime against publishing in Catalan were by no means inconsequential since permission to establish Catalan publishing houses in País Valencià was system-atically denied. As a result, books produced by Concret and subsequently by Tres i Quatre, appeared with fictitious publication details. Such was the case with Althusser’s book, which was ascribed to the publishing house Lavínia (lo-cated in Barcelona). The “Garbí 3” collection was followed by “Quaderns Tres i Quatre”, directed by Vicent Raga, in which Blasco played his part in 1972 by writing the Prologue to a book by Galvano de la Volpe titled Lògica materialista (Materialist Logic).

Prologues tend to be written to support, summarise or highlight the thesis the author will be presenting and developing in the ensuing pages. On this occasion, though, Blasco spelled out the inefficacy of trying to apply a uni-versal method –such as dialectics– to the different spheres of knowledge, among them, mathematical logic.

While it is true that these collaborative endeavours show Blasco’s commitment to the language and culture of País Valencià, there was no truth in the accusation of the early seventies – which almost cost him his job – that he was fomenting and leading a “Marxist Catalan nationalist” insurrection in the bosom of the university, aided and abetted by his friend and colleague Alfons Cucó. Student revolts in those years were very spirited and the convul-sive situation in the universities led the government to ban classes so that the faculties were only open for students to sit for examinations. Garrido came to an agreement with the lecturers in his Department to award a political pass mark to the students, a move that displeased the authorities in the Ministry of Education who, having learned of this, wanted the guilty parties to be called to account. A meeting of professors was called in which it was declared that there was a Marxist and Catalan nationalist plot led by the staff members Blas-

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co and Cucó, who were held to be the real culprits behind the political pass and accused of having a pernicious influence on their colleagues. Logically, the Dean at the time, Julián San Valero, understood that an initiative such as a concerted political pass mark could not be solely the work of non-tenured lecturers. He was convinced that some professors had also been involved and was committed to taking adequate measures against them. When the Dean’s response is analysed it is reasonable to surmise that, in fact, what was to be expected from the threat was that the professors would salvage the situation out of fear of reprisals. And thus it was. The professors concerned were made to sign a document stating that they had carried out oral examinations. Blasco was never willing to sign.

The consequences of the whole affair were immediately evident be-cause when the occasion arose for joining the University’s staff of assistant lec-turers, both Blasco and Cucó, who met the requirements necessary for the new teaching posts, were excluded. The regime’s authorities had decided to carry out an ideological purge in the universities. Fortunately, the appeals made by both after some time had passed – and after the death of Carrero Blanco – were successful.

After these events it was difficult for Blasco to work with any normal-ity in the Department headed by Garrido. Fortunately for him, the professor of Metaphysics who had initially not shown any interest in the subject of Theory of Knowledge taught by Blasco –an indifference that ended up with this sub-ject being transferred to the Department of Logic– left the University and the incoming professor of Metaphysics, Navarro Cordón, reclaimed Theory of Knowledge for his Department. This circumstance meant that Blasco changed his academic location, moving from the Department to Logic to that of Meta-physics in 1975. Since Navarro Cordón did not remain in Valencia very long, Blasco was soon to become head of the department. The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Valencia was thus to acquire its own identity and analytical philosophers were working in different departments. Moreover, it was a faculty that, due to the fame it still enjoyed after the symposia and the publication of Teorema, tended more to science than to metaphysics.

Blasco was to make of every academic event a major piece of writ-ing. While Lenguaje, filosofía y conocimiento arose from his doctoral thesis, the book Significado y experiencia (Meaning and Experience), which was published in 1984, was the product of his professorial memoirs. On this occasion, his criti-cism was aimed at logical positivism and its reductionist endeavours. Although he recognised the doses of clarity and rigour introduced by members of the Vienna Circle into their approach to traditional problems of philosophy, he did not believe that such problems could be avoided.

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His last books, co-authored by Tobies Grimaltos who was first his stu-dent and then colleague in the Department, were Teoria del coneixement (Theory of Knowledge) and Signo y pensamiento (Symbol and Thought), published in 1997 and 1999, respectively. In the case of the latter work, Dora Sánchez was also a co-author. Both works were conceived of as manuals for students.

His inaugural speech as a permanent member of the Philosophy and Social Sciences Section at the Institute of Catalan Studies, delivered in Decem-ber 1999, is one of his most important and original writings. On this occasion, in a relatively brief space, he elaborated his La llibertat de la raó (The Freedom of Reason) from a purely epistemological standpoint, without resorting to the practical dimension of human reason. It would not have been so original if he had spoken of the knowledge we have of freedom, or if he had pondered the freedom a researcher should or should not have in the course of research be-cause, in one case it would have been a matter of discussing the epistemology of freedom while, in the other, it would have meant talking about professional ethics. He had a different idea: “I shall attempt to offer a direct explanation of the function of freedom in the structure of knowing”, which is to say he wished to deal with the question of freedom as a condition for the possibility of knowl-edge. If one speaks of freedom of knowledge, one is referring to practical effects and is definitively shifting into the terrain of morality. However, if one speaks of freedom by situating oneself within the structure of knowledge, one is on a different epistemological or theoretical plane.

In philosophy, it is possible to discern Blasco’s Kantian inspiration: hu-man reason, while it may be limited does not as a result of that have to be deemed ineffective because, besides alerting us to the dangers of being misled by false illusions or the preponderance wielded by certain philosophical sys-tems, it can become the best guide for managing human affairs. Blasco applied this rational, critical exercise to philosophy and politics and, in short, to the tasks for which he was responsible as Dean in the Faculty.

From an early age, Blasco understood that if one was to have any real influence in the political life of the country, having access to its institutions was essential. This idea explains his need to join the “Joan Lluís Vives” collective,3

3 The members of the Joan Lluís Vives collective were: Antoni Aucejo i Pérez, senior lec-turer in Technical Chemistry; Josep Maria Aulló i Reverte, non-tenured assistant lecturer in Chemical Physics; Josep Ll. Blasco i Estellés, senior lecturer in Metaphysics and Theory of Knowledge; Emèrit Bono i Martínez, professor of Political Economy; Joan Brines i Blasco, assistant lecturer in Contemporary History of Spain; Joan Brines i Solanes, senior lecturer in Paediatrics; Antoni Ferrando i Francés, senior lecturer in Valencian Linguistics; Agustí Flors i Bonet, research fellow at the Institute of Agricultural Chemistry and Food Technology of Valencia (CSIC – Spanish Council for Scientific Research); Ramon Lapiedra i Civera,

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where he would become one of its most outstanding members. The collective appeared in 1983 with the intention of “taking a stand” within and from the university. This group of academics explicitly set out the need to deal with and discuss matters that directly affected both the university sector and the citizens of País Valencià in general. From the legitimacy that was logically bestowed on them as members of the educational structure of the day, they called for a space in which it would be possible to express opinions on issues of special relevance, for example the unity of language in the Països Catalans.4 As they explained, they did not aspire to pronouncing “definitive verdicts” but to offer well-argued and justified opinions in their capacity as experts.

It must be said that not all the members were of the same political bent but it is also true that, while they were not motivated by party considerations and were not aiming at any specific political action, neither were they moved by purely erudite concerns nor even by a desire to engage in exclusively academic activities. Their purpose was to offer guidance at a time of utter disorientation. In a nutshell, it was that. When they declared as a priority the need to cooper-ate in bringing about cultural standardisation in País Valencià, they understood “cultural” in the fullest sense. This basically meant acting on three levels: uni-versity policy, linguistic standardisation, and defence and improvement of the natural environment and the historic and artistic heritage of País Valencià. If one focuses on each of the three areas of action, one finds that, with regard to uni-versity policy, it was deemed urgent to reinforce the independence of academic decisions vis-à-vis the tightly partisan and electioneering decisions being made outside the university. How to go about it? Public denunciation of instrumental activities and the university’s acquiescence in them. As for linguistic standardi-sation, it was a question of promoting the use of the language and engaging in initiatives appropriate for ensuring that such use was authentic. They posited that the linguistic unity proclaimed by all the pertinent scientific institutions had been questioned for political reasons – those of the Spanish right – without any criterion of objective value. In this case, it was essential to shed all ambi-guity so as to meet the demands of the task of institutionalisation of Catalan at all levels of teaching. Finally, with respect to the maintenance, defence, and improvement of Valencian heritage, collaboration between and coordination of

professor of Theoretical Mechanics; Antoni Martínez i Andreu, senior lecturer in Technical Chemistry; Vicent Martínez i Sancho, senior lecturer in General Physics; Josep Ll. Pitarch i Tortajada, lecturer in charge of the Valencian Linguistics course; Josep Ros i Pallarés, professor of Mechanics and Waves. All the members were from the University of Valencia.

4 This term coined at the end of the nineteenth century with more cultural than political con-notations is nowadays commonly used by Catalan nationalists to designate the territories in which the Catalan language is spoken [translator].

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the different initiatives had to be achieved by keeping partisan interests at bay since these were adverse to the interests of País Valencià.

As a teacher at the University and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and subsequently of Education Sciences, Blasco made a decisive contribution in the university reforms that were undertaken during the vice-chancellorship of Ramon Lapiedra. In the twenty years of the collective’s existence, a great number of articles were produced and Blasco took part in the writing of a considerable part of them.

Apart from the years between 1975 and 1979, in which he was basically engaged in politics, Blasco’s activities were eminently linked with teaching. He could have stopped giving classes quite early on since the illness from which he suffered left him, after a final operation, without vocal cords. However, he learned to speak without them and continued to give classes and to participate in all spheres of university life. As Dean, he continued to work thus, making his presence heard more with his good sense than with his voice. In a letter addressed to Manuel Garrido many years earlier, Blasco expressed what was, for him, a matter of paramount importance. He wished to counter the rumour that was then circulating at the Complutense University of Madrid claiming that he was physically unable to give classes and would therefore not opt for the chair which, as we now know, he eventually came to occupy. This idea was excruciating for Blasco as he did not want to stop giving classes, or to leave the university, and neither did he want to forego his chances of winning the chair in the public examination that was scheduled some months after his operation. He explained that he had made progress in speaking and how, with the help of a microphone, he had been acquiring the necessary fluency for speaking in public. He did recognise that he tired easily but offered assurance to his former teacher with regard to the speed of his progress. He wanted to challenge the false rumour of “retirement”.

In many instances academicism has led to an inertia that is difficult to break, a distancing between institutions and cultural life. This time, however, one finds an essentially academic man – lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Valencia, Dean of this faculty for many years, member of the Institute of Catalan Studies, et cetera – who was free of the ideological fiction that tends to accompany such cases.

Bibliography

Blasco, Josep Lluís. La nau del coneixement (The Vessel of Knowledge), Catarroja: Afers, 2004.

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– “Pròleg” (Prologue) to Galvano della Volpe. Lògica materialista (Materialist Lo-gic), València: Tres i Quatre, 1972, p. 9-27.

Corbí, Josep. “Josep Lluís Blasco y la libertad de pensar” (Josep Lluís Blasco and the Freedom of Thinking), Theoria 47 (2003), p. 229-231.

Defez, Antoni. “Filosofia i normativitat en l’obra de Josep Lluís Blasco” (Philo-sophy and Normativity in the Work of Josep Lluís Blasco), L’espill 15 (2003), p. 186-195.

Garrido Manuel. “Un filòsofo rey. Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés (1940-2003). In memoriam” (A Philosopher King: Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés (1940-2003): In Memoriam), Teorema, XXII/3 (2003), p. 203-209.

Grimaltos, Tobies. “Josep Lluís Blasco, servidor de la raó” (Josep Lluís Blasco, Servant of Reason), L’espill 14 (2003), p. 147-153.

Serra, Xavier. Història social de la filosofia catalana (A Social History of Catalan Philosophy), Catarroja: Afers, 2010.

– “Josep Lluís Blasco (1940-2003)”, Afers 44 (2003), p. 207-221.

Translation from Catalan by Julie Wark

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article

he philosophy of Josep Lluís Blasco. The transcendental view

Víctor J. Luque Martínfacultat de filosofia. universitat de València [email protected]

abstractIn this article we will do a survey of the life and works of Josep Lluís Blasco, who was professor of the Theory of Knowledge at the University of Valencia. We will see his relationship with the Marxism and politics during the Transition, the impact of logical positivism and Wittgenstein’s work versus metaphysics in completing his thesis, the impressions from Quine’s work and the challenges of his naturalism, etc. All in all, we will present Josep Lluís Blasco’s change of viewpoint from analytical philosophy to a more Kantian transcendentalism.

key wordsTranscendentalism, metaphysics, Wittgenstein, logical positivism, Quine, analytical philosophy, naturalism, Kant.

T

Philosophy has never had good press in our land. Truth be told, it is not sur-prising, given the historical circumstances. Even before Franco, the most rancid scholastic metaphysics one can imagine had been imposed on the universities1. If philosophy needs anything, it is honest work, research, comparison, debate and criticism. To say it simply, it is academic work, “a professor’s job” to quote Fuster. Philosophy without an academy to work carefully and interrelate with other academies is one of the worst forms of knowledge. And that, more or less, is what Josep Lluís Blasco found when he entered the University of Valencia

1 There is a famous, legendary says Pla, story about Law Professor Arana, who interrogated his students (who usually didn’t have a clue of what he was talking about and depended on class-mates to whisper them the answers) about whatever topic they were discussing –Kant, Rous-seau, etc.– but only demanded the refutation. Pla quotes “You didn’t know the theory, but you have said something to refute it. Not bad....(and Pla continued with his characteristic irony) I don’t think that high culture has risen so high as that which us shown by such true and unchal-lengeable facts” (J. Pla, El Quadern Gris, Barcelona: Destino, 1997, p 332). And this was 1919.

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VíCtor J. luque Martín

at the end of the 50s and beginning of the 60s, but aggravated by the presence of Francoism.

Despite all these structural lacks, when he started his studies Blasco had two ideas in mind that were as difficult to carry out as they were ingenuous, or were so difficult because they were ingenuous. We refer to Blasco’s attempt to prepare a doctoral thesis which dealt with the idea of totality in Whitehead, Heidegger, Marx, Wittgenstein and neopositivism. One must consider the size of the task proposed. But on top of that, he proposed the formulation of a new philosophy. The problem, as he would soon realize, was that a Valencian in the 60s had no chance of doing this in the university. Just the same, Blasco’s philosophic interests did not disappear and were directed, precisely toward the line of thought that wanted to eliminate philosophy as an independent part of knowledge.

Blasco and Marxism

There is a fundamental biographic element that marks Blasco’s intellectual life. In 1974 he entered political life as a leader of PSAN (The National Liberation Socialist Party). It must be said that the party had a clear Marxist bent. Marx-ism was the ideological style at the universities during the sixties and seventies. Curiously, this Marxist style put us on a par with the rest of Europe for the first time in decades. However, there continued to be differences because the other countries had had more time to digest Marxism and its variations. Certainly, the force of Communism in Europe had not diminished, and had revived with phenomena such as May 1968 in Paris or “The summer of love” in the USA (especially in California), but actions like Stalin’s massacres (brought to light by Khrushchev during the destalinization) and the repression of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 had brought about the first doubts about the socialist paradise.

In all these tumults, Blasco served as a bridge between the Marxists and the analytics. The Marxists accused the analytics of spending their time on unimportant things, technicalities that ignored re3al societal problems. On the other hand, the analytics accused the Marxists of lacking the necessary analytic, logical and scientific rigor and of spending time on pseudoscientific theories Marxist dialectic). And Blasco was in the middle of the dispute. As a defender of analytic philosophy, he had to agree with the analytics’ accusations; as a politi-cian with a Marxist bent, he had a clear concern for social conscience.

Dialectical materialism was supposed to be the new knowledge that would solve humanity’s problems. The great advances in 19th century science (especially physics and chemistry) were of the nature to which all knowledge, or

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the philosophy of Josep lluís Blasco. the transcendental view

what one wished to call knowledge, must aspire. This is what Marx wanted (and Engels moved ahead with) as dialectical materialism: turn it into a science; even more, into the only science. The problem was that it included two irreconcil-able terms. Materialism is the heritage of ideas from the Illustration (especially Holbach) where matter is the only thing which exists. Dialectic, on the other hand, is a direct inheritance from Hegel and the idealistic thinking, and is the basis for the motor of history and its change. The combination of the two terms in dialectical materialism can never be considered science, as the latter is a quan-titative knowledge while the former is always qualitative.

In a well-known prologue to Galvano della Volpe’s Logical Materialism, Blasco exposed the errors of trying to make Marxism science and logic into the only science, the only philosophy and the only logical system all at the same time. This Marxist tendency wanted to eliminate philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge.

Della Volpe believed that mathematical logic was an invention of the logical positivists, and therefore derived from their philosophical position. This viewpoint is erroneous, not only historically, but because logic, says Blasco, “is a science which substitutes all content with symbols, and analyzes the structures to which these symbols are submitted, according to certain operations which can be done on and among them(...) it is a science as neutral as mathematics”2. If logic is an abstract construct that uses symbols, it has nothing to do with whether logical positivists, Wittgensteinians, existentialists, Trotskyists or Mao-ists work in the field of study. The problem is that Della Volpe, accepting the analytics’ accusations, confuses and mixes concepts. The use of dialectics in po-litical and social fields is acceptable. The problem is to try and create a logical or scientific dialectic. “There are dialectic relations between master and slave, between state and people, between social classes, but I see no possibility of us-ing the term dialectic for the relationshio between «p» and «¬p» or between «2» and «¬2»3”.

Scientific knowledge is characterized by the ability to do experiments and make predictions and, therefore, implies a form of verification, a degree of confirmation or, at least, of falsifying propositions. The problem of scientific dialectic is that it claims to be logical, epistemological and empirical science, all at the same time. Logic is an abstract and formal construct and, as such, is governed “by the principle we could call internal tautology, based on the defi-

2 J. L. Blasco, La Nau del coneixement, Catarroja; Afers, 2004, p. 64.

3 J. L. Blasco, Op. cit, p. 66.

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nitions and rules which are the source of a logical system”4. Any application of logic as the world’s logic (be it dialectical or not) would fall into metaphysic and isomorphic dogmatism (as we will see later with Wittgenstein). To confuse the world with the theory which tries to encapsulate it is an error which leads to dogmatism. To quote Blasco:

“Dialectics may be the method of study for the contradictory role that science plays at the moment in society’s development (it is a liberating medium, but controlled by the dominant class...) a study which princi-pally leads to praxis, and requires a praxis aimed at overcoming present contradictions. But scientific logic is not a logic of praxis, and even less a logic of contradiction; and as a result physics, contrasting hypotheses (be they to verify or to refute), predicting results... without taking the contradictions of the present social moment into account in its internal logic”5.

Blasco has no qualms with the Marxism when it comes to worries about man’s social problems (he calls it anthropocentric Marxism). In fact, as has been said before, politically he is in the orbit of Marxist thinking but, as a good analytic, he doesn’t mix ideas. When speaking of epistemology, logic, science, etc., he is definitely an analytic philosopher, and in politics an anthropocentric Marxist. To put it in visual terms: in epistemology Blasco wears an analytic suit; in politics a Marxist suit.

Dialectics cannot be logic nor scientific methodology nor the two things at once. “It is not contrary to science to struggle against dialectic, it is the historic moment which does not allow science to be what its logic should be: an instrument in the struggle against all types of oppression”6.

As much as historic materialism (that is, dialectical materialism applied to social and historical questions) has been dogmatic and has become, according to Blasco, obsolete, it has served as a “lesson in humility to philosophy: philo-sophical thought does not guide society (...) but serves as a theoretical reply, as human nature enjoys a natural need for speculation, theorizing without limits, about the problems which society’s complex evolution presents”7.

4 Ibid, p. 69.

5 Ibid, p. 71.

6 Ibid, p. 73.

7 Ibid, p. 360.

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Marxism has never been able to construct a consistent epistemology, although Marxist dialectic wanted to claim itself to be a science. This tendency to reduce philosophy’s task to a science was not exclusively a Marxist domain. As we will see later on, some logical positivists and Quine defended similar po-sitions. The Marxists contrapose the terms science and ideology. The associated risk was that it wanted to be a science which did not permit revision of itself or its methods. Thus Marxist science became just as dogmatic as other ideologies, as it permitted no internal criticism. Its method was untouchable, and therefore its conclusions were absolute truths. A science that could not be reviewed. A science converted into dogma.

The problem that Blasco noted was that the Marxists did not differenti-ate between theoretical and practical reason. The transformation of the world is not work for theorists, and theorists’ errors can be overcome. Errors in practice, on the other hand, are irreparable. And if this distinction between theoretical and practical reason is not made, the result is a “mechanical” reason of praxis and doctrine becomes official, the supreme unquestionable reason applied to an infallible government. It becomes the only truth. Philosophy’s task is not to transform the world, as Marx encouraged in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, but, according to Blasco “philosophic thought is and must be the slave to society’s passions”8.

As we have noted, this attempt to reduce philosophy to a science carries the risk, repeatedly noted by Blasco, of falling into dogmatism, of being unable to perform any criticism outside of it which would allow a careful analysis of science, which discovers its basis and limits. This is the task reserved for phi-losophy.

Blasco and logical positivism

Blasco’s interest in the logical positivists springs from the fact that they were trying to overthrow metaphysics and epistemology as the main problem in the basis of knowledge. As they were one of the most influential groups in philoso-phy in the twentieth century, Blasco analyzed them to look for their errors, but also where they were correct. One thing must be made clear: the analysis of the Circle of Vienna was not a major concern in the rest of European and North American thought in the 70s and 80s. And this was true because the move-ment had influenced and been understood, adapted or rejected in all the major centers of thought. And here is one of the problems which faced Blasco and

8 Ibid, p. 360.

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his generation. The intellectual life of the country, especially in the universities, had been devastated by the Franco regime and the omnipresence of scholasti-cism (if the mishmash of Thomism and Spanish nationalism can be given such a name). In England there was no need to explain logical positivism and its posits, because they had already been studied: Carnap and others had been to explain the ideas and Russell and Wittgenstein had debated and rejected (some, includ-ing Blasco, would say refuted) them. But in these climes that was an impossible dream.

That is why we find Blasco writing a book like Significance and Experi-ence, a monograph on neopositivism, as late as 1984. We find him doing the work that Ayer had done in England in the 30s and 40s9, but with the differ-ence that Ayer was a follower and defender of logical positivism and Blasco was a fierce critic. Why did he talk about neopositivism if he thought it erroneous? Because Blasco, following his skeptical tendency to defend reason but not dog-matize it, considers the contributions of Carnap, Neurath and the rest of the Circle to be very important for modern thought, especially for analytic philoso-phy, which will be his final selection (but not as the only possible philosophy).

While in other lands logical positivism is no more than a stronghold of limited interest, now part of the philosophical canon within university philoso-phy programs along with Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, here we see that talking about Schlick is like speaking Greek. In an era in Spain monopolized by the Scholastics, in philosophy and by the Marxists (always clandestinely, but still the fashion in the universities of the time) in politics, the entry of analysis was like fresh air in the musty minds of the times If Fuster said that Russell was more a disinfectant than a philosopher, one can say the same of analytic thinking: it recommended rigorous analysis, use of logic and mathematics, precision and criticism as weapons. All of these characteristics are valuable on their own, but in the decades of the 60s and 70s they had a crucial importance and were the values that Blasco would defend the rest of his life.

All the same, if the logical positivists really interested him, it was be-cause they thought about and offered a heartless critique on the problems of ontology, epistemology and the justification of knowledge. For this reason he went back to them.

The first problem when talking about the Vienna Circle is that it was a heterogeneous group of physicists, logicians, mathematicians and philosophers:

9 The figure and influence of Ayer in the study of logical positivism is fundamental, and Blasco is no exception to the rule. One only need remember the resemblance in the titles of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (translated to Catalan by Blasco himself) and Blasco’s (Language, Philosophy and Knowledge)

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Philip Frank, Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, Hans Hahn, Herbert Feigl, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, etc., and the lines of thought varied considerably10. Just the same, to call them logical positivists or logical empiricists gives us an idea of the basic quality of the group: its tendency toward empiri-cism as the source of knowledge, or at least as the confirming agent of knowl-edge. In addition, it was characterized as a group open enough to establish links with other thinkers: Reichenbach, Hempel and the rest of the Berlin Circle; the Warsaw logicians like Lukasiewicz and Tarski; Bohm and the Copenhagen quantum mechanical school, etc. Placing itself in the empiricist tradition, it fol-lowed Hume’s flamboyant recommendation:

“If, convinced of these principles, we take a glance at the libraries, what havoc we must wreak! If we take, for example, any theology or scho-lastic metaphysics tome and ask “Does it include abstract reasoning on quantity or number? No. Does it include experimental reasoning about the questions of facts or existence? No. Then into the bonfire, because it can’t have anything but sophistry and illusion”11

We see that one of the most important characteristics will be the con-stant, harsh attack against metaphysics. This is important because metaphysics reflects on epistemology and ontology, on what is in the world, its characteris-tics and how we can know about it. Even though the word metaphysics had a bad sound to Blasco’s ear, and that of any student in the Franco era –since the scholasticism taught then was called metaphysics, and so it had a musty air to it, dogmatic and intellectually too light weight to be condemned to the flames– metaphysics talks about ontology and epistemology, the most important topics for Blasco.

The logical positivists, by leaning to empiricism, will try to carry out the task of showing that metaphysics and its presentation are senseless. There-fore the debate was aimed at analysis of language and tried to determine which is acceptable and correct (and can be called presentation) and which is not. Sense is understood in an exclusively enunciative way, that which teaches about the world, that has cognitive value. They don’t deny the existence of other senses, such as emotion or aesthetic, but these have no cognitive value and do not belong to any field of knowledge. This is the “empiricists’ criterion of

10 For example, the phenomenalism defended by Schlick is not the same as Neurath’s physical-ism (or changes of opinion in some of them, such as Carnap who went from phenomenalism in his 1928 book The Logical Construction of the World to Physicalist postures with all their epistemological and ontological consequences.

11 D. Hume, Investigació sobre l’enteniment humà, Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1998, [translation J. M. Sala-Valldaura, edition V. Camps] p. 205.

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significance”, which tries to establish a clear, precise criteria for demarcation. Metaphysics, if it wishes to be part of a field of knowledge, must be able to demonstrate the correspondence of each of its statements with some fact of reality, and thereby show that their statements are sensible.

The logical empiricists, as they only accept two kinds of statements (tautological or analytic, which don’t tell us about the world, and synthetic or empiric, which do) put the dilemma to metaphysics: as your propositions are not analytic, only empiric remains, but as they have no empiric procedure to determine their truth, they are senseless. The metaphysical statements can be seen and taken, thanks to the neopositivist language analysis, for what they re-ally are, pseudo statements with no connection with experience and no cogni-tive value.

We see that philosophy’s task is reduced to one activity, clarification of propositions, those of science, through logic-syntactic analysis which lets us see their formal structure. The influence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is clear12.

Philosophy ceases to be knowledge and becomes analysis13. As the het-erogeneous group it was, not all the Vienna Circle acted the same way. For ex-ample Schlick, being closer to Wittgenstein, allowed himself to theorize about philosophy as an investigation of significance, not truth. Carnap, on the other hand, understood that analytic activity had a therapeutic value: by showing that metaphysics was no more than senseless pseudo statements, it meant that the old metaphysical problems were not solved, but were dissolved.

Referring to one of the tasks of philosophy, reflection on the limits of knowledge, it is not resolved, but that such research has been deleted. Blasco, recalling the words of Hume, says: “This igneous radical idea proposed to burn all reasoning that is not logical or empirical eventually does not make sense, in that it denies a discourse on the meaning: if the fact of thinking about the limits of meaning is meaningless, no speech can be meaningful”14.

12 For example “The aim of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought. Philosophy is an activity, not a doctrine” (L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Barcelona: Laia, [transla-tion and edition J. M. Terricabras], 1981, aphorism 4.112). The problem is that the positivists misinterpret the thesis of Tractatus. When they read that metaphysics lacks propositions, it does not mean that Wittgenstein rejects it, but that he puts it in the plane of the ineffable, a series of ontological, gnoseologic and, for Wittgenstein, ethic and aesthetic (mystic) con-siderations , inseparable from the overall work. All the importance that Wittgenstein gives to metaphysics is rejected by all the neopositivists.

13 All philosophy is the criticism of language” (Ibid. Aphorism 4.0031).

14 J. L. Blasco, Op. cit., p. 150.

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The most radical of all, Neurath, is who best exemplifies the problems of neopositivism. His physicalism, and ultimately that of the rest of the logical empiricists (as we saw before), is characterized by the so-called “protocolary propositions”15, which are separable precisely because of their linguistic form16. Thus, through the inductive method, the proposals would be replaced by a system of physical determinations in a search for a language research as scien-tific as possible, replacing the physical-trivial language which requires proper names to ensure the observational character of the proposition17. Their desire to eliminate all metaphysical discourse leads them to remove even philosophy. If for Wittgenstein it was necessary to keep silent about of what you could not say, Neurath admits that there are times to keep them quiet, but not because there is something which can not speak of (which is meaningless) but because there is nothing to talk about. Neurath, in a pure inquisitorial style, prohibits any use of words is not reducible to logical syntax18.

Neurath’s coherence condemns him to the flames, as logical positivism’s task is as a scientific and analytic philosophy, which clarifies language, and it cuts so sharply that it eliminates itself. This job eliminated it. And therein lies the contradiction of neopositivist thinking. In trying to eliminate all non-empirical and non tautological statements (experience or logic), there is no philosophical exit left, and the result is solipsism or the elimination of the validity of scientific knowledge. The famous metaphor of the ship19exemplifies the impossibility of the antimetaphysical work. If the ship is a whole, with no privileged proposi-tions, the principle of verification is lost, as appeal to the real world is not permitted, the dock where you could repair the ship, but all the statements are part of the ship and there is no way to separate the verifiable from the meaning-

15 There are as many protocolary propositions as nonprotocolary, but all are real propositions to Neurath.

16 For example: “Otto’s protocol at 3:17: (Otto’s linguistic form of thinking at 3:16 was: (at 3:15 Otto perceived a table in the room)” (A. J. Ayer (comp.), El positivismo lógico, Mèxic: FCE, [translation L. Aldama et al], 1965, p. 208).

17 J. Echeverría, Introducción a la metodología de la ciencia; La filosofía de la ciencia en el siglo XX, Madrid: Càtedra, 1999. Especially chapters 1 i 2.

18 Blasco’s allusions to Neurath’s dogmatism (and to all logical positivism, but much more noted and carried to extremes by Neurath) are constant and strong.

19 We are sailors who must rebuild our ship on the high seas, never able to dismantle it in port and rebuild it with the best material. Only metaphysic elements can be removed without leaving a trace. One way or another, there are always imprecise “linguistic conglomerates”· as part of the ship. While we can limit the imprecision in one place, it always appears increased elsewhere” (O. Neurath, “Propositions protocolares”, a Ayer (comp.) 1965, p. 206-207).

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less. Carnap’s attempts to solve this forced him to accept, in the middle of the 50s, that there were parts of theory not verifiable by experience20, as the most important statements of accepted physical theories don’t satisfy the demands of empirical logic. That is, Carnap was obliged to accept generalizing theories with respect to data of experience and scientific knowledge. As metaphysics was defined as a unit with no enunciative meaning nor any reference to real-ity, when Carnap accepts that part of the statements are non-experiential, the metaphysical house of cards falls.

The idea that the meaning of a statement can be determined in isola-tion from the other statements has been one of the major problems of tradi-tional empiricists until Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Russell’s logical atomism. This error is one of the dogmas of empiricism so highly cited by Quine. In Blasco’s words: “Clear and simple, there are no elementary propositions in natural nor in scientific languages”21. All statements are related in a network where its meaning depends on its position and that of the other statements in the network.

The attempt to eliminate all metaphysical arguments fell into its own trap, as such a declaration is metaphysical because it includes concrete ontology and theory of knowledge. And so the neopositivist statement was correct, it would be “the judge who sentences himself when he rules his sentences invalid. And this is no more or less than a paradox: if the sentence is valid, then it is invalid, and if invalid, it turns out to be valid22.

For Blasco, the key to the Vienna Circle is the return to the importance of rigorous analysis of language and use of the most recent logical and math-ematical tools in the service of the philosophical task. This influence is most clearly felt in the Anglo-Saxon world where it sparks the philosophy of lan-guage movement in England (Oxford and Cambridge) and its later extension to the United States. The paradox, noted by Blasco, was that this movement, which came from the heart of Central Europe, had no impact on continental philoso-phy. So continental philosophy continued marked by Marxist views with Hege-lian roots on one hand, by Heidegger’s thinking on the other, and finally by the various French schools (existentialism, personalism, deconstructionism, etc)23.

20 Finally drifting toward probabilistic logic.

21 J. L. Blasco, Op. cit. p. 145.

22 J. L. Blasco, Significado y experiencia, Barcelona: Península, 1984, p. 106.

23 Blanco feels no love for French philosophy in the past century “different French styles, always changing”(Ibid p. 6) nor for so called postmodernism: “This so-called postmodernism is no more, in philosophy, than a mass media product” ”.( J. L. Blasco, La nau del coneixement, Catar-roja: Afers, 2004, p. 360).

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Blasco and the second Wittgenstein

Blasco’s contact with Wittgenstein did not begin until more than halfway through his university studies24. In those days, the 60s, analytical philosophy of ordinary language had established itself in the English speaking world. As a direct descendant of the writings (published during the 50s, when Wittgenstein was dead) and of his classes in Cambridge, the analytic trend, divided between Oxford and Cambridge) had made itself known and the Viennese thinker reso-nated in all the prestigious philosophical fields.

Although it was very difficult to reach Wittgenstein’s thinking in the Valencia of those days, Blasco managed to get hold of the Viennese’s work. Its impact was immediate:

“When I finished my thesis I had worked through Whitehead and Hei-degger’s view of totality and wanted to study what Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle had to say about them. When I reached this point I stopped my work on the idea of totality: I’d run into a line of philosophy that didn’t fit in my thinking because it was a line that fully rejected metaphysics and considered questions about being to be meaningless (...). In the end, that discovery caused me to abandon my early project, completely metaphysi-cal, and start a thesis on Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy”25

Wittgenstein’s life, although it sounds like a catch phrase, was like some-thing from the movies. Son of one of the richest and most influential families in Europe, life seemed to constantly shine on him. The family fortune (his family owned one of Europe’s largest iron and steel works) permitted the family to live in the best conditions at the end of the 19th century. As patrons of the Vienna of the era, his family lived among the crème de la crème of Austrian culture. Composers, painters and writers strolled through their salons (Brahms, Mahler, Klimt...). Ludwig developed around geniuses and the idea of genius pursued him the rest of his life.

There is a reason for giving this biographical data. His work has a great deal of mystery, points which are difficult to grasp, sometimes impenetrable, the result of his form of thinking and of expression. His tendency to hermetism and to aphorisms gave him the air of mystery so characteristic of geniuses and fasci-nating for those of us who aren’t geniuses. So it is not surprising to find affirma-

24 It was the same Blasco who, entering his third year of studies, asked Carlos Paris, professor of the Foundations of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems, to explain Wittgenstein in one of the classes.

25 X. Serra, “Josep Lluís Blasco (1940-2003)”, Afers, XVIII: 44, 2003, p. 211.

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tions in Blasco’s writings like: “the darkness and ambiguity of Wittgenstein”26, “reflect on Wittgenstein is a challenge to one’s philosophical imagination”27 , or mention “the sibylline Wittgenstein”28. Seeing this darkness, it is no surprise that Blasco always showed care and modesty29.

Despite this darkness, from very early on Blasco proposed himself the task of Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style of treating philosophy to a more constructive notion.

In his first work, Tractatus, Wittgenstein presents all his thinking in num-bered aphorisms and, through a logical analysis of language, tries to establish the limits of language and, thereby, of knowledge and thought. Language and the world share the same structure. The isomorphism implies that if the structure of language can be reduced to a logical form, then the world has a logical. Logic is the essence of language and the world. Logic is transcendental30.

We have already commented on the problem of this stance when deal-ing with logical positivism. It is impossible to separate the statements, but their meaning comes from their relation to other terms. Another interesting point is that the defense of this essentialist view of language leads inevitably to solipsism (a warning given by Wittgenstein31).

Reevaluation of his philosophical position brings Wittgenstein back to the analysis of language. But now language will be considered as something his-toric, social, more clearly manifest in its use or praxis. Language is no longer an immobile structure but a series of different uses made explicit by human action.

26 J. L. Blasco, Lenguaje, filosofia y conocimiento, Barcelona: Ariel, 1973, p. 109.

27 J. L. Blasco, La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, 2004, p. 225.

28 J. L. Blasco, Lenguaje, filosofia y conocimiento, Barcelona: Ariel, 1973, p. 202.

29 “The first past (that of suggestions on Wittgenstein’s works) requires a capacity for philosophy that not everyone has, and the second (systemizing the concepts of the work) runs the risk of weakening or betraying it”. (J. L. Blasco, La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, 2004, p. 225).

30 We see how Wittgenstein’s influence in the neopositivsts was decisive. We referred to the fact that logical positivism defended the so called empirical criteria of significance. Logical analysis of language permitted separation of meaningful language (scientific statements) from meaningless (metaphysical) and verifiable from no verifiable. But as we mentioned before, Wittgenstein’s interest is specifically in what can not be said, but can be demonstrated. This, although meaningless, is inevitable. Philosophy has been reduced to an activity, to establish the statements as true or false without saying anything about reality. Philosophy has nothing to say about the world, but must demonstrate.

31 “And what the solipsism wants to say is completely correct, but it cannot say, but must demonstrate” ” (L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Barcelona: Laia, [translation and editing J. M. Terricabras], 1981, aphorism 5.62.

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Therefore, analysis must be brought to these uses, to human action, forgetting all a priori and ahistorical pretenses. The meaning of words does not come from their internal structure (syntax) but from their use in each situation. These dif-ferent contexts of use will be what Wittgenstein calls “language sets”.

Language, says Wittgenstein, is like a toolbox, each tool stored according to its function. The philosophers’mistake was take them out of context, away from their “language sets”. Philosophical problems come when we disorga-nize the words, when they use their place and are in sets they don’t belong to. The philosopher’s job is, from this line of Wittgensteinian thinking, to indicate the correct use of each tool or illuminate situations of misuse. “Philosophy is a struggle against bewitching our understanding by use of our language”32, the Austrian thinker reminds us. So it seems that philosophy has a therapeutic function, illustrating misuse and showing how, in fact, there is no problem be-cause philosophy “leaves things as they are”33. Blasco easily accepts that there is a therapeutic part to Wittgenstein34, but has strong criticism for the ordinary philosophers of language in Cambridge because they reduce everything to this therapeutic vision, and even more, as the only therapy, a sort of psychoanaly-sis (for example, Wisdom). Basing himself on the same texts by Wittgenstein35, Blasco defends the existence of various forms of therapy, and they have nothing to do with psychology; they are logical, conceptual therapies.

For some followers of Wittgenstein, once the therapeutic task has been achieved, the philosophy disappears. Blasco, on the other hand, defends a cons-tructive part in Wittgenstein’s thinking. Following the Oxford school (Austin, Strawson, Ryle), he puts himself in the constructive position of analytic phi-losophy, defending that there can be no therapy without diagnosis, and there-fore, a prior analysis. It is the step from Wittgenstein’s profound grammar to categorical analysis.

As much as he is a clear defender of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, he can’t help being critical, especially of the Viennese thinker-s refusal to elabo-rate a constructive theory. “Wittgenstein tries to say that there is no specific

32 L. Wittgenstein, Investigacions filosòfiques, Barcelona: Edicions 62, [translation and editing J. M. Terricabras], 1997, paragraph 109.

33 Ibid, paragraph 124.

34 It would be difficult, if not impossible, to not accept the therapeutic vision after reading paragraphs like this: “Philosophy’s treatment of a question is like treating an illness” (Ibid. paragraph 255).

35 “There is not a method in philosophy, but there are methods, or as some would say, diverse theraìes”. (Ibid. paragraph 133).

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kind of philosophical problem, as there are in mathematics and physics, which have solutions. According to him, philosophical problems are not resolved, but dissolved.”36. When he reduces all of philosophy’s task to describe and not ex-plain37, there is little left to build. If philosophy does not solve problems, but dissolves them, little is left of philosophy, impeding a powerful philosophical theorizing. Wittgenstein’s extremely ascetic view of philosophy, carried to ex-tremes by some of his followers, takes philosophy to the limits of survival.

Blasco and Quine

The figure of Quine, along with those of Wittgenstein and Kant, are central to the reflections and studies that Blasco carried out in the last three decades of his life. Contact with Quine’s philosophy took hold in the beginning of the 60s. At that time in Valencia a group of students forms around Manuel Garrido. Of its two grand initiatives, the creation of the magazine “Theorem” and the organization of the International Symposium of Logic and Philosophy of Sci-ence, it is the latter which interests us. In 1974 the symposium was organized on Quine’s philosophy and thinking. The peculiarity was that Quine himself would be there and offer a commentary or response. This characteristic is what gave it an air above that of other symposia organized in Valencia. The presence of the person who is the topic of the symposium (not only Quine, but Straw-son, Pears, and Hasenjäger among others, a fact which sparked the idea of the ambitious project and dealing with vanguard philosophy) is a suggestive and unusual situation.

In the congress dedicated to Quine, Blasco gave one of the talks. In it one can see the critical spirit (in this case directed at ontological relativity and Quine’s ontic commitment) which would stay with him his whole life. But more than just criticism, in this early paper by Blasco38, he indicates possible problems he has found, never with demagogic superiority but with the skepti-cal and antidogmatic position that all serious thought should have39.

36 J. L. Blasco and T. Grimaltos, Teoria del coneixement, València: PUV, 2003, p. 57.

37 “All explanations have to disappear and be replaced by descriptions” (L. Wittgenstein, Inves-tigacions filosòfiques, Barcelona: Edicions 62, [translation and editing J. M. Terricabras], 1997, paragraph 109).

38 Early, but not the first time that Quine appears in Blasco’s work. The philosopher is cited in Blasco’s thesis bibliography in 1965.

39 He says in Significance and experience “Self criticism is a virtue of free spirits” (p. 68). And re-iterates: “Serious philosophy is always beginning so philosophers should be skeptics.”; “The

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The interest in Quine comes from the fact that his is principally di-rected at the ontological problem, of what is and how we can know it. The ontological and epistemological problems go together, and any metaphysical response which hopes to be accepted must satisfy both. After the fierce attacks of the logical positivists against metaphysics, Quine returns the philosophical view to ontology, but in an original and provocative form.

The range of Quine’s thinking is as ample as it is interesting, but we will focus on his reflections on ontology, philosophy and what Quine called naturalism. Naturalism is Quine’s attempt to give philosophy a scientific status. It consists in cognitive problems as psychophysical processes and analyzes them in that form. It begins with the unarguable premise that knowledge is a natural function of humans, as the biological being that he is, and therefore knowledge must be treated like all other physical and biological problems.

So now a problem which considered philosophy, epistemology or the theory of knowledge, is reduced to a psychophysical problem which must be answered from the corresponding scientific field. Science and philosophy are one, a continuum, which is the same as saying that philosophy disappears into the network of science. Quine makes it vary clear:

“The philosopher’s job, then, differs from that of others (scientists) in the details, but not in a drastic way as those who imagine the philoso-pher has an advantage beyond the conceptual scheme of his role. There is no cosmic exile. The philosopher can not consider or revise the fun-damental conceptual scheme of science and common sense without a conceptual scheme, the same or another equally in need of philosophi-cal scrutiny as the one he is using. The philosopher can scrutinize and perfect the system from within, appealing to coherence and simplicity, but that is the theoretical method. The philosopher has the resource of semantic ascension, but so does the scientist. And if the theoretical scientist, in his remote ways, is obliged to save the connection with non-verbal stimulation, the philosopher, in his remote ways, must save himself, too. It is true that we can hope for no experiment to establish an ontological truth, but that is due, simply, to the fact that all results are connected with the irritations of sensitive surfaces in diverse ways through the labyrinth of the intervening theory”40.

danger of dogmatism (...) has a confirmed antidote in the history of thought: skepticism in any of its forms or manifestations.” (J. L. Blasco, La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, 2004, p. 359 and p. 307, respectively).

40 W. V. O. Quine, Palabra y Objeto, Barcelona: Labor, [translation Manuel Sacristán], 1968, p.

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In the previous text Blasco tells us that there are two basic ideas: “the first is that there is no cosmic exile, philosophy is not man’s external contem-plation of the world and of knowledge, it is in the world and as much review as all conceptual schemes (scientific or common sense) we use to interpret the world. The second is that the scientist and philosophers’ tasks differ in detail, but not in methodology: both must appeal to coherence and simplicity (two golden rules in scientific methodology) and save the connection with sensorial data, as remote as they may be”41.

This attempt to naturalize epistemology is united to its holistic concept of meaning. As we mentioned when talking of neopositivism, one unsolvable problem seemed to be empirical criteria of significance, which assigned a direct relation with a worldly object to each, isolated statement, giving it meaning. Quine rejects this stance, defending the view that a statement’s meaning is related to that of nearby statements, and therefore it is impossible to establish meaning in isolation. This inscrutability of reference, as Quine calls it, has as a consequence that meaning comes with the whole theoretical set, a semantic holism. The dogma of empiricism (the basic system of knowledge) together with analytic/synthetic differentiation, was rejected by Quine in favor of a ho-listic conception of semantics, and therefore of epistemology and ontology.

This holistic conception, insists Blasco, “allows Quine to introduce Tar-ski’s thesis into epistemology, at least its fundamental point: the relativity of the truth of a statement to the language it belongs to; and this is because of the well-known Tarskian definition (‘p’ is true in L if and only if p) always defines the term true relative to a language; thus true is a metalinguistic predicate”42. From that p one can derive “1) proof is only relevant from a constituted theory (or view); therefore there is no absolute truth, nor does it make sense to speak of such; 2) from holism comes the principle of conservatism: unless there are insurmountable difficulties, we tend to conserve views and theories; 3) noth-ing in a person’s conceptual scheme is immune to review; 4) conservatism and simplicity, principles for selecting theories, are pragmatic principles”43.

If the unit of empirical meaning is all of science, as Quine would say, then epistemology falls into it and is reduced, as said before, to pure psychol-ogy, a neuropsychology of psychophysical elements which are responsible for

275-276.

41 J. L. Blasco and T. Grimaltos, Op. cit, p. 29.


43 Ibid, p. 211.

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knowledge. It is impossible to reflect from outside of science. Quine states it like this:

“I see science, not as some propaedeutic a priori or basic task for sci-ence, but as a continuum with science. I see philosophy and science as crew on the same ship- a ship that, to return to Neurath’s image, as I like to do, we can only rebuild while floating on the sea. There is no vantage point, no “first” philosophy. All scientific discoveries, all scien-tific conjectures that are plausible nowadays are therefore, to my view, as welcome for use within philosophy as outside of it”44.

Just the same, this thesis has two difficult problems. The first is circu-larity. If all knowledge is reduced to science, including philosophy in its epis-temological vein, it is difficult to justify scientific knowledge without falling into circularity, because the same scientific knowledge justifies the validity of the knowledge. Reducing epistemology, and therefore philosophy, to a field of scientific knowledge produces this sort of paradox. Science may or may not describe the form of knowledge (inputs) as psychophysical elements but the explanation and justification of what comes out (outputs) comes from epistemology.

The second problem, intimately related with the first, is the normative character of epistemology. If epistemology is naturalized, as Quine would wish, it loses all normative capacity to indicate limits and order reasoning in its search. In Blasco’s words:

“The epistemological normative supposes a reflection on scientific knowledge itself. To reduce epistemology to natural science is to elimi-nate epistemology. This exterior reflection does not imply a search for absolute bases: the ship can never enter the dock, but the philosopher, the theorizer of knowledge, must watch it from outside to offer an analysis of its functioning and be able to offer advice (only epistemo-logical) so that the ship doesn’t sink”45.

44 W. V. O. Quine, La relatividad ontológica y otros ensayos, Tecnos, Madrid, [translation M. Garrido and J. L. Blasco], 1974, p. 162.

45 J. L. Blasco and T. Grimaltos, Op. cit., p. 35.

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Blasco, Kant and the first Wittgenstein

Blasco’s view of philosophy has a very curious trajectory: from the Wittgenstei-nian analytical school, passing for Quine’s holism and ending up with Kant and Wittgenstein’s transcendentalism. His progressive distance from Quine’s think-ing (the attempts to conciliate Quinean naturalism with the Blasco’s first tran-scendentalist drift in the beginning of the 80s46) to his explicit rejection (in the 90s47) which turns his view back to Wittgenstein’s work. It is not surprising that all the criticism of Quine’s work from the 80s onward, in his research in tran-scendentalism, is supported with arguments and texts of the Viennese thinker. So we see Blasco’s need to view philosophy from a transcendental viewpoint as the only escape from intellectual impasse brought about by Quine’s naturalism.

Much as Blasco never rejected the idea that diverse forms of philosophy can, and do, exist48, there is a dimension of philosophy inherent in it: “philosophy is, from its very origin, analysis: analysis of thought and being, and of the condi-tions of one and the other”49. And this analysis leads to epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and more concretely, to the justification of speculative thought. And philosophy continues to be autonomous in its actions for one reason:

“These problems (the epistemological and ontological) cannot be eliminated. Science is always based on assumptions about worldly enti-ties and how we can know them. Reflection on these assumptions is necessary. What can be eliminated is the bad philosophy, the dogmatic philosophy”50.

For philosophy to do this task, there must be a transcendental method which is not stopped by reductions nor circular arguments and which let it think about the limits of knowledge and the justification thereof. That is, a normative, transcendental epistemology. For this reason, Blasco directs his atten-

46 To be exact, in 1982, with the article “The meaning of ontology in W.V.O. Quine” in “The ship of knowledge”

47 Xavier Serra places it in 1993, when Blasco taught the class “Is it possible to naturalize epis-temology?” in a seminar on Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy in Valencia.

48 “Philosophy is not a question of schools, and less of sides: the methods and problems must be interchangeable and we must return to the agora where we can all talk and be aware that we are discussing the same thing. (J. L. Blasco, La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, 2004, p. 32).


50 Xavier Serra, “Josep Lluís Blasco (1940-2003)”, Afers, XVIII: 44, 2003, p. 215.

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tion to one of the most important defenders and founders of transcendentalism, Immanuel Kant.

A reading of Blasco’s writing lets us quickly capture his interests and concerns: names like Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, etc. appear repeatedly in a natural way for one who has chosen analytic philosophy. But there is one name which is nearly omnipresent in the writings, cited or mentioned in passing, and that is Kant. Most clearly in his final work it becomes clear the importance and the study undertaken of Kantian thought, especially in its defense of transcen-dental thought.

Blasco establishes real connections in his thinking (with the necessity to reflect on knowledge and set limits to reason, establish a priori conditions, etc.) but in a skeptical, critical form. His transcendentalism is not immobile like Kant’s, but:

“So I propose a transcendental discourse which is more flexible, historic and constituent than the rigid, apodictic and necessary Kantian model (...) [A] “transcendental logic” as an attempt to join in one discourse the epistemic base of syntax (metasyntax) and of experience (metaem-piricism) [that] can establish a field of thinking (almost impossible, as Wittgenstein noted) in which the logical and empirical conditions of knowledge are joined”51.

This drive for transcendentalism which was started by Kant, to create an epistemology of epistemology as Blasco liked to quote Sosa, would lead him to revisit Tractatus for a rereading of the second Wittgenstein. As we have seen, Wittgenstein’s thinking triumphed in the Anglo-Saxon world, creating various schools. The most representative, Oxford and Cambridge, fought for the most adequate interpretation of the almost always obscure Wittgensteinian texts. From the start, Blasco was in a constructivist position, that of Oxford, and not the simple therapeutic Cambridge school.

Just the same, Blasco put Wittgensteinian thought in an analytic view, of course, far from transcendentalism. In his first work, Language, Philosophy and Knowledge, Blasco rejects the transcendentalism in the second Wittgenstein’s work52. It is not until the end of the 80s that Blasco looks back at Wittgenstein and sees the transcendentalism that he didn’t, or couldn’t, see before.


52 “All our knowledge is developed in the framework of our linguistic structures; therefore analysis of these structures is in some ways a priori to human cognitive activities: “We can also give the name philosophy to that which is possible before all discovery and invention”. (Ph. U., 126) It does not try to affirm that philosophy has a transcendental character for Witt-

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Transcendentalism in the first Wittgenstein’s work is clear to all readers. Tractatus calls forth a transcendental vision of life and the philosophic task, a solipsistic “I” marking the limits of the world and knowledge. In fact, a Kantian, “I”. Tractatus takes us on a journey to the heights where, finally, the reader of the propositions, “through them, climbing, scales above them. (To say it this way, one must hurl out the ladder after having climbed). One must overcome these statements; then one can see the world correctly”53.

To see the world correctly is to see it from above, from on high. One who wishes to see the world correctly must be above it. Grab Tractatus’s ladder and climb it.

This interpretation of the first and only work published by Wittgen-stein during his life was and undeniably is correct. But in Philosophical Investiga-tions and the rest of the works of his second stage we can find the same tran-scendental vision. It’s clear that there is a very important turn in his thinking, in how he focuses problems. Where the first Wittgenstein appeals to logic and syntax, the second appeals to pragmatism and use. As Blasco later points out54, Wittgenstein’s epistemological position will be, just as in Tractatus, transcenden-tal; a transcendental positing of philosophy (at least in the extended form of the word). More than just try to solve the problems of language (therapy) it also “serves to clarify the profound grammar of the terms”55.

It is obvious, strictly speaking, that the transcendentalism of the second Wittgenstein is not the same as that of the first. Where Tractatus seeks the funda-mental universality and necessity of logico-transcendental conditions, Philosophical Investigations seeks a critical examination of the prior conditions (non-empirical) of the cognitive intersubjective discourse. And it continues to be a transcendental position related to Kant’s notion of Critique (and, by the way, the same therapeutic notion of the philosophic task). In short, Wittgenstein abandons the pure tran-scendentalism of Tractatus but his transcendental perspective continues.

In his Philosophical Investigations we read:

“One of the principal sources of our incomprehension is that we don’t embrace the use of our words with our look. Our grammar lacks a

genstein, but at least that Wittgenstein doesn’t destroy philosophy, as is generally stated (J. L. Blasco, Lenguaje, filosofia y conocimiento, Barcelona: Ariel, 1973, p. 175).

53 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Barcelona: Laia, [translation and editing J. M. Ter-ricabras], 1981, aphorism 6.54.

54 In his article “The meaning of conceptual epistemology” in The Ship of Knowledge.


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panoramic quality. The panoramic representation gives us this compre-hension which consists, exactly, in the fact that we ‘see connections’. This gives us the need for intermediate members.

For us, the concept of the panoramic representation has a fundamental importance. It designates our form of representation, our way of seeing things. (Is it ‘cosmovision’?)”56.

Wittgenstein speaks of embracing with a look, of synoptic vision. More exactly, he talks of übersehen. It is a general vision, global, from on high. Philoso-phy is a task of global vision57. The philosopher, to be a real philosopher, must be able to distance himself.

“The philosopher is not a citizen of any community, and this is what makes him a philosopher”58.

The philosopher is one who can distance himself from his peers to do his job. For Blasco, the philosopher does not have to go so far as to leave the community, as Wittgenstein suggests. Cosmic exile is not necessary. But to do his job properly, distance is necessary. Certainly Blasco agrees with Quine that the philosopher and the scientist travel in the same ship, but in it “there might be helicopters which let us see the malfunctions of the cognitive ship from above, as the helicopter is a ship which needs revision”59.

The coinciding of the vision and the task of philosophy by Blasco is surprising. Even more surprising is the similitude of images used by Blasco and Wittgenstein: go up the ladder and climb it, synoptic vision, view from above, the helicopter that lets the philosopher rise and see the ship from above. In another surprising coincidence, Wittgenstein stresses that “thinking, in a way of speaking, can fly, it doesn’t need to walk”60.

56 L. Wittgenstein, Investigacions filosòfiques, Barcelona: Edicions 62, [translation and editing J. M. Terricabras] 1997, paragraph 122.

57 We find the same thing in “Genealogia dels fenòmens psicològics “: “I don’t search for exact-ness, but for a synoptic view ”. L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, Mèxic: UNAM, [translation O. Castro and U. Moulines, edition G. E. M. Anscombe], 1979, paragraph 464.

58 Ibíd. paragraph 455.

59 J. L. Blasco and T. Grimaltos, Op. cit., p. 33. The metaphor is taken from Dancy who, curiously doesn’t stop to explain it either: “This is the reason Blasco is so complacent with Neurath’s sailor parable, the sailor who must repair his boat while sailing in it. We must keep the ship of science intact, in general, while we examine and repair defective parts. We can’t anchor in a safe port and leave the ship in a Hegelian helicopter”. (J. Dancy, Introducción a la epistemología contemporánea, Madrid: Tecnos, [translation J. L. Prades], 1993, p. 265).

60 L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, Mèxic: UNAM, [translation O. Castro and U. Moulines, edition G. E.

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Going back to Blasco’s words, cited before:

“The ship can never enter the dock, but the philosopher, the theorist of knowledge, must be able to contemplate it from outside to give an analysis of the functioning and thereby elaborate advice (solely episte-mological) so that the ship doesn’t sink”61.

This is the philosopher’s task: place oneself above to see what problems the ship has, and see what problems might appear in the future. The philoso-pher must use transcendentalism, marking the path of reason en the search of knowledge, standardize and establish the limits of the knowledge of science and not reduce it to a part of science.

“Reason [notes Blasco] has the singular destiny of deciding its ideals and setting the rules which permit it to achieve them”62.

Due to this destiny of reason, the advice that the philosopher gives must be temporal, revisable, historic, conditioned by scientific advances because, as we can’t forget, the helicopter must land and fix the ship. But the philosopher is the only one who can rise above and see the ship synoptically: embrace it with a look. The philosopher is the only one who can see the ship from above.

Bibliography

Ayer, A. J. (comp.), El positivismo lógico, Mesic: FCE, [translation L. Aldama et al], 1965.

Blasco, J. L., Lenguaje, filosofía y conocimiento, Barcelona: Ariel, 1973.

–Significado y experiencia, Barcelona: Península, 1984.

–La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, 2004.

Blasco, J. L. i Grimaltos, T., Teoria del coneixement, València: Publicacions Uni-versitat de València, 2003.

Dancy, J., Introducción a la epistemología contemporánea, Madrid: Tecnos, [translati-on J. L. Prades], 1993.

Echeverría, J., Introducción a la metodología de la ciencia. La filosofía de la ciencia en el siglo XX, Madrid: Càtedra, 1999.

M. Anscombe], 1979, paragraph 273.

61 J. L. Blasco and T. Grimaltos, Op. cit., p. 35.

62 J. L. Blasco, La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, p. 290

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Hume, D., Investigació sobre l’enteniment humà, Barcelona: Edicions 62, [translation J. M. Sala-Valldaura, edició V. Camps], 1998.

Neurath, O., “Proposiciones protocolares”, en Ayer (comp.) 1965, p. 205-214.

Pla, J., El quadern gris, Barcelona: Destino, 1997.

Quine, W. V. O., Palabra y Objeto, Barcelona: Labor, [translation Manuel Sacris-tán], 1968

–La relatividad ontológica y otros ensayos, Madrid: Tecnos, [translation M. Garrido i J. L. Blasco], 1974.

Sanfélix, V., “Wittgenstein: ¿filósofo puritano?”, p. 455-472, XIVè Congrés Va-lencià de Filosofia, 2002.

Serra, X., “Josep Lluís Blasco (1940-2003)”, Afers, XVIII: 44, p. 207-221. 2003.

–“L’evolució filosòfica de Josep Lluís Blasco”, Quaderns de Filosofia i Ciència, 35, p. 175-184. 2005.

–Història social de la filosofia catalana, Catarroja: Afers, 2010.

Wittgenstein, L. Zettel, Mèxic: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, [translation O. Castro i U. Moulines, editing G. E. M. Anscombe], 1979.

–Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Barcelona: Laia, [translation and editing J.M. Ter-ricabras], 1981.

–Investigacions filosòfiques, Barcelona: Edicions 62, [translation and editing J.M. Terricabras], 1997.

Translation from Catalan by Dan Cohen

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Journal of Catalan IntelleCtual HIstory, Issue 3, 2012 | Print Issn 2014-1572 / online Issn 2014-1564DoI 10.2436/20.3001.02.41 | P. 83-90http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JoCIH

life-writing

text by Capuchin friar Miquel d’Esplugues on the irreverent Cristòfor de Domènec (1879-1927)

A

A Philosopher‘s Leisure is the title of Cristòfor de Domènec’s second book, pub-lished posthumously in 1928, and which was confiscated by police “on allegations of slandering Catholic religion and morality, shortly after its release. Domènec (Barcelona, 1878-1927) was an essayist and a self-taught philosopher, immersed in Barcelona’s bohemian world during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He became popular for his irreverence and corrosive humor through articles he published, under the pseudonym Brand, in the journal Social Justice, in a section entitled “Diary of Heterodox Thinker”, which also gave name to the collection of articles he published in his lifetime1.

That collection had already suffered distribution problems. As Sal-larès2 –editor and friend of the author– explained to Domènec himself, “the Catholic bookstores, it goes without saying, have refused to sell it”. However, it was in Criterion, an avowedly Christian magazine, in 1929, two years after Domènec died of tuberculosis, where the article A Philosopher’s Leisure (also the title of Domènec’s second book) was published in memoriam. We now present it for you here.

Criterion was the first Catalan journal of philosophy, and in entirely catalan. Remarkably, it was published three times a year without interruption for over more than a decade, from 1925 to 1936. Its founders’ main goal was

1 For more information on Cristòfor de Domènec, see the chapter by P. Casanovas, “Política i Filosofia en Cristòfor de Domènec (1914-1927)” [Politics and Philosophy in Cristòfor de Domènec (1914-1927)], in P. Casanovas (ed.), Miquel Carreras Costajussà i la filosofia ca-talana d’entreguerres (1918-1939), Barcelona, lnstitut d’Estudis Catalans-Societat Catalana de Filosofia, 2009.

2 Letter from Joan Sallarès to Cristòfor de Domènec, dated the 4th of June, 1926.

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MIquel D’esPluGues

to promote neo-Thomism, along the lines of Cardinal Mercier and Pope Leo XIII. On the other hand, its collaborators presented themselves as continuers of a purely Christian and Thomist Catalan philosophical tradition –as outlined by Bishop Torras i Bages.

This meeting of irreverence with piety was possible thanks to Miquel d’Esplugues, the Capuchin friar and author of the article we offer here, who was the heart and soul of Criterion. His tolerant nature lead the Thomist ranks to an openness toward “everyone, [...] whoever they are, wherever they’re from”, according to rules “drenched in the deepest patriotism and a broad spirit of openness to everyone’s work”. Under his direction, Crite-rion made good on Clascar’s saying that “in philosophy, reason weighs more than authority”3 and established itself as a philosophical movement invoking all that could bring together and unite: “join forces, unify ideals, not bemoan sacrifices”4. Certainly, this conversion to an accepting attitude is mostly explained by Miquel d’Esplugues’s genius for integration, which brought Catalan Thomists closer to the line of the “open” neo-scholasticism of the Lovaina school headed up by Mercier, and to other European initiatives that were gaining momentum at the start of the century, which instead of “making gestures imposed on them by the opposing initiatives”5 found their own path –and their own criteria6.

So much so that he made room in the journal’s pages for the article we publish here, A Philosopher’s Leisure, about the enfant terrible who was its autor –“deep down a good chap”7.

Text edited by Maria Arquer

3 Quoted in A. Galí, Filosofia a Catalunya 1900-1936, ed. Pere Lluís Font and Josep Monserrat Molas, p. 90.

4 “La primera revista catalana de filosofia”[“The First Catalan Philosophy Journal”], Criterion, 1 (January-June 1925), p. 17.

5 A. Galí, op. cit., p. 84.

6 For more on Miquel d’Esplugues, see the chapter by Antoni Mora, “Les lluites del pare Miquel d’Esplugues. Uns episodis de Filosofia (i) Política” [“The Struggles of Father Miquel d’Esplugues: Episodes in Philosophy (and) Politics], in P. Casano-vas & J. Monserrat (eds.), Pensament i filosofia a Catalunya. 11: 1924-1939, Barcelona, Inehca-Societat Catalana de Filosofia, 2003, p. 11-32.

7 Miquel d’Esplugues, “L’oci d’un filòsof”, Criterion, V, 16 (1929), p. 76-82.

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a text by Capuchin friar Miquel d’esplugues on the irreverent Cristòfor de Domènec (1879-1927)

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A Philosopher’s Leisure1

One summer day I unexpectedly met up with the author of this book in the orchard of the convent. He had joined a mutual friend who was coming to see me. And this friend had never bothered to mention that he was an acquaintance of the same man that years ago had promised me a visit and a copy of his first book when it came out.

Once introductions were made, he and I engaged in conversation for half an hour, or even forty-five minutes. It felt like we were old friends. We never saw each other again.

Cristòfor de Domènec would die less than a year later in the Hospice, and since in his final illness he was often visited by Father Baldelló, who already wrote in these pages one of the most cordial and balanced articles that have ever been written about him 2, I thought that, under such delicate circumstances, it was better for me to keep my opinion to myself.

I avidly read some facts about his life, very fairly expounded, and was very impressed by them. He had been a millionaire and had ended up almost destitute. He had endured hardship with most exemplary serenity. He was nearing fifty years old and he lived in celibacy, in the service of his beloved mother. Generous to the point of extravagance –this I learned from others–, if he ever had a penny and knew of some friend that was in need, he would happily give what was so badly needed in his own poverty stricken home. (Is it perhaps due to his money problems that most of his work remains unpub-lished to this day?).

This group of random facts, together with others which I already knew and would now not be able to differentiate, interest me much more than his philosophy.

Even when it is a philosopher, a writer’s life tends to be as interesting as his ideas, and quite often more so. Thinking is easy; living is not.

To deal personally with Cristòfor de Domènec, to see his actions and hear his words, to research his past and to read in the dying flame of his eyes, to glance leisurely at those pocked charcoal slabs that were his teeth, sentinels of a face as picturesquely tanned as a red Indian’s –what a delightful subject of study.

1 In reference to the book recently published with this title [Cristòfor de Domènech, L’oci d’un filòsof,] Barcelona, J. Horta, 1928.

2 F. Baldelló, “Semblança de Cristòfor de Domènech” [“A Portrait of Cristòfor de Domènech”], Criterion, III, 11, p. 497-500.

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But curiosity soon moved to the background. A strange emotion, be-tween fondness and sympathy, inexorably took center stage.

Unwillingly, and recalling Cánovas del Castillo’s famous paradox –“an idiot spoiled by learning”–, I tended to sum up Cristòfor de Domènec’s per-sonality more or less like this: “A big heart, almost heroic, wrecked by a tragic life; an above-average intelligence that had perhaps been ruined by reading”.

And maybe by other little excesses too. Little in and of themselves, like smoking, coffee and such, but big because he abused them. Because, as they say, “many little bits end up making a lot”.

F

When we parted, I was pleased to have met such a naturally Christian soul, in spite of his obsession against Christ; yet devastated by the fact that his case was lost, both physically and spiritually; a little spooked, not by his lack of religion, but by his liveliness, since it was useless, and even cruel, to contradict him, and regardless of how much I humored him, by the next day all of Barcelona could know what we had been talking about… or what we had not been talking about. Also, needless to say, I had to keep my distance between his Satanist phi-losophy and such a Christian ideology as mine.

The aftermath of his death is too recent to dredge up already. I don’t know what surprises will emerge from the announced publication of his numer-ous manuscripts. In any case, A Philosopher’s Leisure comes as the first disappoint-ment. Or the second one, if we think that the Leisure and the Diary of a Heterodox Thinker are as alike as two peas in a pod… and both equally devoid of philosophy.

I’m not in favor with smugly denying anyone the title of philosopher, as if it were membership in the Golden Fleece Order, or the French Legion of Honor. Generally speaking, those who argue that philosophy is an exclusive club are just trying to hoard the title of philosophers for themselves.

In the long term this is in detriment of philosophy. To turn it into a caste is to impoverish it. And also to discredit it, because to those outside it looks like “philosophers are unable to understand each other”.

In The City of God, Saint Augustine referred to this very old vice in his impressive argument against the theodicy of paganism. The same thing could be said of all other branches of philosophy3.

3 “C’est ainsi qu’avec les mille dieux de la Fable on aboutissait à un Dieu unique. Ce travail s’acomplit avec une habilité, une souplesse, une fécondité de ressources merveilleuses; par

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Let us say that everyone endowed with a transcendental curiosity that is persistent and cannot be uprooted, is a philosopher. To me, Aquinas was already a philosopher at six years old, almost as much as he was at fifty. Saint Augustine was one all his life, more than anybody else. There is no reason, therefore, to deny Cristòfor de Domènec that honor, since he was a man full of abundant and enduring transcendental curiosity.

What we can doubt is his personality as a writer of philosophy, and especially his originality. Being original in your ideas is not the same thing as being famous for your boutades.

The very flaw of calling himself a philosopher strikes me as a bad start. And this collection of little jokes does not contribute to making him a phi-losopher, either orthodox or heterodox, which in this case doesn’t really matter.

The only things that abound in his stories are sacrilege, paradox, sexual obsession, and, now and then, eroticism. But none of these specialties has much to do with philosophy.

Setting aside the enormous influence of a series of poorly digested readings, I am inclined to see all these tendencies –and the whole of his work– as an acute reaction to the author’s infantilism and as the revelations of a semi-tragic subconscious.

Erotic obsessions are a reaction to his almost heroic bachelorhood, with maybe a little of manly impotence added to the mix. There is not a bit of an-thropology here. Also, the illness that ended his life is a typical consequence of such reactions.

And the sacrilegious boutades reveal his profound religiousness, although inverted, which is further proof of his naïveté: “Le satanisme littéraire, n’est souvent qu’une fleur de l’ingénuité”. These are not the words of a friar, but of a modern professor and famous medical critic4.

This is why I took such a liking to him, and why I pitied him almost more than I liked him. I trust that neither God nor man will reproach me

malheur, chacun le fit à sa manière. Il n’y en eut aucun, parmi ces sages, dont l’autorité s’imposât aux autres. Au contraire, comme ils étaient ingénieux et subtils de nature, et qu’ils aimaient à le faire voir, tous tinrent à se séparer de leurs prédécesseurs et à donner des solu-tions nouvelles. Puis vint un lourd Romain, un compilateur consciencieux, le docte Varron, qui tint à rassembler toutes ces opinions différentes et ne fit grâce d’aucune. En les réunissant, il en fit mieux ressortir la diversité et fournit à saint Augustin la preuve évidente que ce grand effort des théologiens du paganisme n’avait réussi qu’à montrer plus clairement qu’il leur était impossible de s’entendre” (Boissier, La fin du paganisme, p. 325).

4 Voivenel, La chasteté perverse, Paris,s 1928.

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for this. It only took a bit of human understanding, not to mention Chris-tian piety.

Christianity, on the other hand, has always been synonymous with mag-nanimity. And Catholicism has always meant openness. Even more so in coun-tries like ours where all Christianity is Catholicism, through the millennia.

Cristòfor de Domènec suffered as much from intellectual illness as from tuberculosis. If we actually consider it from the vantage points of faith and phi-losophy, and therefore from a purely rational but unbiased perspective, what is Satanism, but a malady of the psyche?

Traditionally, corporal possessions have been regarded as maladies. Jesus himself considered them worthy of applying his thaumaturgic powers. But are mental obsessions any less of a spiritual malady?

It doesn’t take a genius to see clearly, through his appearance and par-ticularly through his obsessions, that Cristòfor de Domènec, for whatever rea-son, had lost the mental ability to perceive the sublime realities of Christianity. Hence the fact that those two emotions –fondness and pity– were so inextrica-bly entangled within me.

I think that people are insufficiently aware of the fact that reason itself is as delicate as a transistor radio or a camera –you can only obtain certain results under certain conditions.

Therefore, if concepts are to be revealed through the camera –alive, subtle and full of charms– that is our power of perception, then it is obvious that results will be subject to the innumerable flaws of our lens.

Sexual anomalies, sentimental crises, organic irregularities, either natu-ral or induced, an unpleasant impression, a slight fever, the stress and the prob-lems of everyday life, nervous exhaustion, the natural hotness of young blood, the thinning of thickening of said blood due to old age, rushing or agitation –all of these things often challenge the integrity of our perceptions, even our physi-cal perceptions, not to mention the intellectual ones.

I wish Catholic thinkers, mere borrowers of a gift that doesn’t belong to us, were much more lenient towards those who suffer spiritual maladies, just like Christ is lenient with them in the Gospels!

Because Christian faith is not some sort nobility that we should be flaunt as we wander through landscapes of egotism thinly disguised as religion; it comes directly from our Father that is in Heaven, and it should make us merciful, as He is merciful, and, like His only son, “mild and humble”. “I want mercy instead of sacrifice, since I have not come to call the just to repent, but the sinners” (Matthew, 12:7).

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This is our strength, and also the proof that Christ helps us move far above the enemy –his and ours–, who is generally not openly in opposition, but simply ignorant.

While showing him a load of ammunition, Baron d’Hermance, com-mander of the armies at Allinges, told Saint Francis de Sales, a missionary among the heretics of Switzerland, the following words: “Everything that you see is under your command. Just say the word. We have everything that is needed to either convert those heretics or punish them”. “These war machines are not nec-essary for the word of God to prevail”, replied the Apostle, who later became the patron saint of Catholic journalism (Bull of Canonization XV).

Let’s leave for the adversary, then, the gross artillery of gruesomeness and blasphemy, which are so often uttered just to see what effect they will have on our ranks, alas!, and to trigger the defenses of the Gospels, which do not always display the malignancy that they preach.

In any case we are obliged to set an example, not only a religious ex-ample, but also a civil and patriotic one, by not responding in the same tone, when religion is grossly attacked.

Finally, I find it really difficult to be fair to Cristòfor de Domènec with-out taking into consideration the following observation made by the aforemen-tioned professor and Medical critic:: “C’est Nietzsche, nerveux et faible, chantant la puissance. C’est le timide Stendhal, peignant en fer Julien Sorel. C’est Pierre Louys, délicat de poitrine et chaste, se complaisant dans son erotisme enchanteur. C’est Kleist et ses ‘visions’. C’est Octave Feuillet, dont Henry Bordeaux, dans son livre récent nous apprend que cet apparent ‘mondain’ fut en réalité un hypocondriaque renforcé. C’est Verhaeren, si doux, qui fulmine dès qu’il écrit; c’est Héredia dont les sonnets, impassibles, camouflent une sensibilité très profonde..., c’est..., etc.” (p. 239).

I think this points in a good direction. Unfortunately, it’s not a very usual direction among us, with a few exceptions, since we are too naively prone to either exaggerate praise or fierce attack. In other words, criticism without nuances or subtleties, displaying a sad lack of insight for discovering what is happening deep inside the authors’ minds.

In this case, I’m talking about the ill-fated gentiluomo that lay beneath Cristòfor de Domènec’s naïve Satanism, under his sick eroticism, under all that bad and ugly stuff that he, reversed hypocrite, enjoyed displaying, with the flir-tatiousness of a decent lady who wants to be seen as indecent.

And he was naïve enough to think that he was fooling everyone with the masks, often grotesque, of his impressive tragedy, both private and public.

F

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With the exception of this only aspect, truly moving and positive, we shouldn’t therefore give much credit –either from rationalist positions or from a Christian outlook, and much less from the vantage point of pure philosophy– to this man that became, in Catalonia, an enfant terrible with his Satanist jokes.

Deep down he was a good chap, even a kid. To show this, I will tell how I first took a liking to him and how our relationship started, not a very deep one, but quite friendly in both directions.

For five or six years, I occasionally received newspaper clippings. I fi-nally found out that they were sent by Cristófor de Doménec.

These clippings contained the basic elements of his lack of religion, either quoted from conferences or published in articles.

He must have delighted himself in imagining my horror at finding those atrocities in my mailbox. But I was only sorry that I didn’t have him with me to give him a good slap.

I want to believe that our Father in Heaven has not been more severe with that big hearted man, His son, illuminated –and led astray– by a complex, short-sighted intelligence.5.

Translation from Catalan by Mara Lethem

5 However, after these pages were prepared about two months ago, we read in the local press : “The posthumous book by Cristòfor de Domènec, L’oci d’un filòsof has been taken out of bookstores. L’oci d’un filòsof has been denounced to the public prosecutor for alleged slander of the Catholic religion and morality”.

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bio-bibliography

osep Lluís Blasco Estellés (1940-2003)

Jesús Alcolea Banegas facultat de filosofia. universitat de València [email protected]

J

Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés (Sagunt 1940 – Valencia 2003) was one of the promi-nent introducers of analytic philosophy into the Catalan Countries in the 20th century. Initially an adherent of ordinary language philosophy within analytic philosophy, he later became an acute commentator of Quine, Wittgenstein, Kant and logical positivism.

Bibliography of Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés

— “Un pueblo que renace”, Sagunto, 1, 2 (1960), p.6. [Reimprès en Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 81-82.]

— “Un intento de caracterización”, Sagunto, 1, 6 (1960), p. 14. [Reimprès en Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 82-84.]

— “Algunos problemas de la enseñanza universitaria”, Concret. Publicació univer-sitària, 1 (gener 1963), s. p. [Reimprès en Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 84-87.]

— “Un libro de metafísica en España”, Concret. Publicació universitària, 2-3 (fe-brer-març1963), s. p. [Reimprès en Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 87-88.]

— “La idea de totalidad en el pensamiento de Alfred North Whitehead”, tesi de llicenciatura sota la direcció de M. Garrido. València: Universitat de València, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, 1965, VI + 213 f. [Inèdita].

— “Lenguaje, filosofía y conocimiento (Semántica y metodología de la filosofía analítica del lenguaje ordinario)”, tesi doctoral sota la direcció de M. Gar-rido. València: Universitat de València, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, 1971, V + 390 f.

— “Bertrand Russell, filósofo”, a Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970. In Memoriam. València: Departament de Lògica i Filosofia de la Ciència, Universitat de València, 1971, p. 29-36.

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Jesús alColea BaneGas

— “Razón y análisis”, Teorema, 1 (1971), p. 15-30.

— “Wittgenstein: filosofía del lenguaje”, Convivium, XXXIV, 2 (1971), p. 55-66. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 159-172].

— Recensió de The Philosophy of Language, de J. J. Katz, Teorema, 2 (1971) p. 161-162.

— “Filosofía y lenguaje”, Teorema, 3 (1971), p. 111-117.

— Recensió d’El lenguaje común, de V. C. Chappell, Teorema, 6 (1972), p. 141-143.

— Recensió d’El laberinto del lenguaje, de M. Black, Teorema, 6 (1972), p. 144-146.

— “Pròleg”, a G. della Volpe, Lògica materialista, traducció de F. Mira. València/Barcelona: Tres i Quatre/Editorial Lavínia, 1972, p. 9-27. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p. 63-73].

— “El lenguaje ordinario en el Tractatus”, a Sobre el Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. València: Departament de Lògica i Filosofia de la Ciència, Universitat de València, 1973, p. 101— 112.

— “Análisis categorial”, a Filosofía y Ciencia en el pensamiento español contemponá-neo (1960-1970), III Simposio de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia. València, 11, 12 y 13 de novembre de 1971. Madrid: Tecnos, p. 53-67. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 33-46].

— Recensió d’Idealismo y filosofía de la ciencia, de M. A. Quintanilla, Teorema, III, 4 (1973), p. 589-591.

— Recensió de Las palabras y los hombres, de J. Ferrater Mora, Teorema, III, 4 (1973), p. 599-602.

— Lenguaje, filosofía y conocimiento. Barcelona: Ariel, 1973, 217 p.

— “Verdad y creencia”, a Conocimiento y creencia, IV Simposio de Lógica y Fi-losofía de la Ciencia, València, 16, 17 y 18 d’abril de 1973. València: Depar-tament de Lògica i Filosofia de la Ciència, Universitat de València, p. 25-39.

— “Alfred Julius Ayer: una sistematización de la filosofía”, Teorema, IV, 1 (1974), p. 107-116.

— “La identificación de individuos”, Revista de Occidente (2ª época), XLVI, 138 (1974), p. 237-251. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixenent, p. 47-62.]

— (Amb Julia Blasco) “Consideracions sobre la Lógica Moderna d’Andreu Pi-quer”, a Primer Congreso de Historia del País Valenciano, celebrat a València del 14 al 18 d’abril del 1971. València: Universitat de València, III, 1976, p. 717-723.

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Josep lluís Blasco estellés (1940-2003)

— “Compromiso óntico y relatividad ontológica”, a Aspectos de la filosofía de W. V. Quine, V Simposio de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia, Cullera, 28 y 29 de juny del 1974. València: Departament de Lògica i Filosofia de la Ciència, Universitat de València, 1976, p. 131-146; conté la “Respuesta a Blasco” del professor Quine, p. 165-168.) [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 173-190].

— “Taula rodona: el que volen els valencians (Coordinada per J. M. Solé i Saba-té, amb la participació de J. Fuster, J. Guia, J. Ll. Blasco, P. Candela i A. Seva)”, Canigó, XXIII, 473 (30 octubre del 1976), p. 20-24.

— “L’autonomia al País Valencià a través dels diferents avantprojectes d’Estatut”, a Els Estatuts del País Valencià, a cura de Josep Lluís Blasco. Barcelona: Edici-ons de la Magrana, 1977, p. 9-43.

— “El sentido de la ontología en W. v. O. Quine”, Cuadernos de Filosofía y Ci-encia, 2 (1982), p. 107-116. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 191-201.]

— “Autoconeixement”, Cuadernos de Filosofía y Ciencia, 4 (1983), p. 105-112.

— “Pròleg. A. J. Ayer i el positivisme lògic”, a Llenguatge, Veritat i Lògica, de A. J. Ayer. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1983, p. 7-15.

— (Com a membre del Col.lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Fuster y la Universidad de Valencia”, Campus. Suplemento de Temas Universitarios (Las Provincias), 6 d’oc-tubre del 1983, p. II.

— Significado y Experiencia. La Teoría del Conocimiento y la Metafísica en el Positi-vismo Lógico. Barcelona: Península, 1984, 159 p.

— “Pròleg”, a El coneixement humà: el seu abast i els seus límits, de B. Russell, a cura d’Oriol Castellví. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1985, p. 7-18.

— “Prólogo”, a Crítica de la didáctica de la filosofía, de Grup Embolic. València: Gregal Llibres, 1985, p. I-III.

— “Introducció”, a Lògica i Coneixement. Tres assaigs, de B. Russell, traducció, edició i cronologia prèvia a cura de J. Ll. Blasco. Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1985, p. 17-31.

— (Com a membre del Col.lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Ciencia y poder político en la Comunidad Valenciana”, a El País, 8 d’abril de 1985, p. 24.

— “Solipsisme i trascendentalitat en el Tractatus”, Quaderns de Filosofia i Ciència, 9/10, 1986, p. 119-125. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p.113-123.]

— “Los límites del empirismo. A propósito de Kant y Russell”, Agora. Papeles de filosofía (2ª època), 7 (1988), p. 41-53. [Traduït al català en La nau del co-neixement, p. 96-112.]

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— (Amb F. Vera) Filosofía del Lenguaje. Reforma de las Enseñanzas Medias, 2º Ciclo. València: Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, Educació i Ciència, 1988, 138 p.

— (Amb V. Ventura, D. Balaguer, E. Garcia, F. Pérez i Moragón) “La resistència d’El Temps a dir la veritat”, Turia, nº 1293 (14/20 novembre de 1988), p. 4-5.

— “Epistemologia empirista sense dogmes”, Quaderns de Filosofia i Ciència, 15/16 (1989), p. 117-121. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p. 205-213.]

— “Reflexions sobre el problema de la veritat”, Quaderns de Filosofia i Ciència, 17 (1990), p. 35-41. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p.214-224].

— “¿Què serà de la filosofia al segle XXI?”, Cultura. Butlletí del Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya (2a. època), 15 (setembre de 1990), p. 27-28. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p. 357-362].

— “El sentit de l’epistemologia conceptual”, a VI Congrés de Filosofia al País Va-lencià (Elx, 1989). Alacant: Institut de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert/Ajuntament d’Elx, 1991, p. 61-71. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p.225-239].

— “La recepción de la filosofía analítica en España”, Isegoría, 3, 1991, p. 138-146. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 17-32.]

— “Petita enquesta sobre ‘postmodernitat’ i futur del pensament”, Saó, 147 (de-sembre del 1991), p. 34-36.

— “Metafísica y Teoría del Conocimiento”, a Conocimiento y Racionalidad. Ho-menaje al profesor Sergio Rábade Romeo, Anales del Seminario de Metafísica, nº extra. Madrid: Facultad de Filosofía (1992), p. 207-215.

— “Hem perdut un bon amic (Reflexió al voltant de la mort d’En Joan Fus-ter)”, Levante-EMV (26 de juny de 1992), p. 74.

— “La teoría del conocimiento en el Tractatus”, a Acerca de Wittgenstein, edició a cura de V. Sanfélix. València: Pretextos / Departament de Metafísica i Teoria del Coneixement de la Universitat de València, 1993, p. 21-29. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement p.124-137.]

— “Joan Fuster i la Il·lustració”, a Fuster entre nosaltres. València: Generalitat Va-lenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, 1993, p. 159-163. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p. 295-302.]

— “¿Es possible naturatlizar tota l’epistemologia?”, a Inteligencia Artificial y Filo-sofía, actes del Seminario sobre Inteligencia Artificial y Filosofía, celebrat a la UIMP-València del 13 al 17 de setembre del 1993 sota la direcció d’Isidre Ramos i E. Casaban, València: Universidad Internacional Menéndez y Pe-layo, tomo II (1993), ítem 718.8.

— “La metalògica en la Crítica de la Raó Pura” Quaderns de Filosofia i Ciència, 23/24 (1994), p. 31-39.

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— “Problemes epistemològics dels condicionants prelingüístics”, a Lenguajes Naturales y Lenguajes Formales, X, actes del X Congreso de Lenguajes Natura-les y Lenguajes Formales (Sevilla, 26-30 de setembre del 1994), edició a cura de C. Martín Vide. Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias S. A., 1994, p. 17-28. [Reimprès a La nau del coneixement, p. 240-260.]

— “Pròleg. Reflexions crítiques sobre alguns problemes epistemològics del materialisme dialèctic”, a La irrellevància política del marxisme teòric (El cas Althusser), de F. Ferrando. Andorra la Vella: Premsa Andorrana, 1994, p. 5-13. [Reimprès a La nau del coneixement, p.303-310.]

— “El pensament filosòfic no està en decadència al món occidental (Entrevista a càrrec de M. Teresa Blanco)”, Diari d’Andorra (24 d’abril del 1994), p. 24.

— “Sir Karl R. Popper”, Mètode. Revista de difusió de la investigació de la Universitat de València, 9 (1995), p. 13. [Reimprès a La nau del coneixement, 363-365.]

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Sobre l’ús docent del va-lencià”, Dise. Revista d’informació universitària, VIII, 60-61 (maig-juny 1995), p.4-5.

— “Método analítico y trascendentalidad”, Revista de filosofía (3ª época), IX, 16 (1996), p. 41-56. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p.275-291.]

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Vicent Ventura i la Univer-sitat de Valencià”, Dise. Revista d’informació universitària, IX, 65 (gener1996), p. 21.

— “Ciència i racionalitat”, Mètode. Revista de difusió de la investigació de la Uni-versitat de València, 14 (1996), p. 16-17. [Reimprès a La nau del coneixement, p. 270-274.].

— “Thomas S. Kuhn, In Memoriam”, Mètode. Revista de difusió de la investigació de la Universitat de València, 15 (1996), p. 3.

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Elx: un “error” gens casu-al.” Levante. El mercantil valenciano (14 de novembre de 1996), p. 4.

— “El catalanismo en el País Valenciano peca de ingenuo y se ha quedado en una resistencia numantina (Entrevista a càrrec de E. Aigües).” Levante. EMV (1 de desembre de 1996), p. 22.

— (Com a membre del Col.lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Claredat contra hipocre-sia.” Levante-EMV (12 de desembre de 1996), p. 3.

— “Josep Lluís Blasco. El compromís ètic i l’acció política (Entrevista a càrrec de Nel·lo Pellicer)”, a L’oposició universitària al franquisme. València 1939-1975, València: DISE-Universitat de València, p. 150-151.

— “Descartes y el fundamentismo epistémico”, a Seminario de Filosofía. Cente-nario de René Descartes (1596-1996), edició a cura d’E. Ranch Sales i F. Pérez

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Herranz, Alacant: Universitat d’Alacant, 1997, p. 61-71. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 77-95.]

— (Amb T. Grimaltós) Teoria del Coneixement, València: Universitat de València, 1997, 201 pp; 2ª edició 2003, 215 p. La presentació i les parts I i V són de J. Ll. Blasco, 1997, p. 9-14, 15-57 i 149-193. Traducció espanyola, a càrrec de Lino San Juan Tamayo, València: Universitat de València, 2004.

— “La recepció escindida de la filosofia de Wittgenstein”, Taula, quaderns de pensament, nº 29-30 (1998), p. 13-25.

— “El Positivismo Lógico”, a Concepciones de la metafísica, edició a cura de J. J. E. Gracia. Madrid: Trotta / C.S.I.C., 1998, p. 293-310. [Traduït al català en La nau del coneixement, p. 138-158.]

— “Matemàtica i política”, Caràcters, 2 ( 1998), p. 24.

— “T. S. Kuhn. Lògica o sociologia de la investigació científica?” El contempo-rani, 15 (1998), p. 7-10. [Reimprès en La nau del coneixement, p. 261-269.]

— “Presentació: La filosofia de Marta”, a T. Grimaltos, El joc de pensar (Converses amb Marta), Alzira: Bromera, 1998, p. 9-17. Hi ha traducció al castellà El juego de pensar. Alzira: Algar, 2000.

— “Podria Descartes embarcar en la nau de Neurath?”, a Descartes. Lo racio-nal y lo real, actes del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Ontología (San Sebastián-Barcelona, 24-31 de març del 1996), edició a cura de V. Gómez Pin, Enrahonar. Quaderns de Filosofia, Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions, Núm. extraordinari (1999), p. 577-583.

— (Amb T. Grimaltos i D. Sánchez) Signo y pensamiento. Una introducción filosófica a los problemas del lenguaje. Barcelona: Ariel, 1999, 238 p. (Els capítols 1 i 6 són de J. Ll. Blasco, p. 13-57 i 157-173.)

— “Nota sobre un viatge”, a Jaume Fuster, Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1999, p. 61-66.

— La llibertat de la raó, Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1999, 20 p. [Reim-près en Quaderns de filosofia i Ciència, 34 (2004), p. 9-21, i La nau del coneixe-ment (2004) p.311-333.]

— (Com editor amb M. Torrevejano) Transcendentalidad y racionalidad, València: Pre-Textos, 2000.

— “Estructura lógica y valor epistemológico de los argumentos transcenden-tales”, a Transcendentalidad y racionalidad, edició a cura de J. L. Blasco i M. Torrevejano, València: Pre-Textos, 2000, p. 197-216.

— “Empirismo”, a Compendio de Epistemología, edició a cura de J. Muñoz i J. Velarde, Madrid: Trotta, 2000, p. 193-197.

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— “Racionalismo”, a Compendio de Epistemología, edició a cura de J. Muñoz i J. Velarde, Madrid: Trotta, 2000, p. 477-481.

— “Realismo”, a Compendio de Epistemología, edició a cura de J. Muñoz i J. Ve-larde, Madrid: Trotta, 2000, p. 491-495.

— “Transcendental”, a Compendio de Epistemología, edició a cura de J. Muñoz i J. Velarde, Madrid: Trotta, 2000, p. 560-564.

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Valencians pel Canvi: barca nova tingues bon vent”, Levante-EMV (3 de febrer del 2000), p. 4.

— “Un filòsof iconoclasta. En record de Willard Van Orman Quine”, Mètode. Revista de difusió de la investigació de la Universitat de València, 29 (2001), p. 4-5.

— “¿En los albores de una nueva era?”, Pasajes. Revista de pensamiento contemporá-neo, 5-6 (2001), p. 161-170.

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives.) “Universitat: Control soci-al, sí; subjugació al poder, no”, Levante-EMV (20 de març del 2001).

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Qui paga, mana.” Levante-EMV (15 de maig del 2001).

— “L’Institut d’Estudis Catalans, una institució per al progrés”, Levante-EMV, (6 de juny del 2001), p. 4.

— (Com a membre de la Plataforma Cívica Valencians pel Canvi), “A benefici d’inventari.” Levante-EMV (28 de juny del 2001), p. 4.

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “El millor servei que pot oferir la Universitat.” Levante-EMV (14 de febrer del 2002).

— (Com a membre del Col·lectiu Joan Lluís Vives) “Un diumenge de maig que s’acosta.” Levante-EMV (1 de novembre del 2002).

— “Pròleg”, a Júlia Blasco Estellés, Joan Fuster: Converses filosòfiques, València: Edicions 3 i 4, 2002, p. 11-16.

— Com a conversador a Júlia Blasco Estellés, Joan Fuster..., op. cit..

— “Poder, estat i identitat en la societat global (La societat global vista des de la nova configuració dels estats a Europa.”, a Europa-EE.UU. Entre imperios anda el juego, coordinat per F. M. Pérez Herranz i J. M. Santacreu Soler, Alacant: Institut de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert, 2003, p. 137-156. [Reimprès en La nau del conceixement, p. 334-353.]

— “El discurs polític”, Serra d’Or, 517 (gener del 2003), p. 33.

— “Decisions”, Serra d’Or, 518 (febrer del 2003), p. 41.

— “Informació i coneixement”, Serra d’Or, 519 (març del 2003), p. 40.

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— “Nosaltres, el valencians i el nacionalisme polític” Serra d’Or, 523-524 (juliol-agost del 2003), p. 25-27.

— La nau del coneixement, Catarroja: Afers, 2004, 403 pp, edició a cura de Jesús Alcolea i Xavier Serra; traduccions al català de Vicent Baggetto.

translations

— Auzias, J. M. La filosofía y las técnicas, Barcelona: Oikos-Tau, 1968.

— Althusser, L. Per Marx, València: Semana Gráfica (Col·lecció Garbí, 1), 1969, 213 p.

— (Amb E. E. Keil.) Kutschera, Von F. “Significado y uso de las palabras”, a La filosofía científica actual en Alemania. Primer Simposio de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia (València, 22, 23, 24 d’abril del 1969), Madrid: Tecnos, 1971, p. 17-40.

— Ayer, A. J. Llenguatge, veritat i lògica, València/Barcelona: Semana Gráfica/La-vínia (Col·lecció Garbí, 3), 1969, 164 p. [Reeditat, amb un ‘Pròleg’, a Edici-ons 62, 1983, 210 p.

— (Amb R. Beneyto) Diemer, A. “Para una fundamentación de un concepto general de ciencia”, a La filosofía científica actual en Alemania. Primer Simposio de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia (València, 22, 23, 24 d’abril del 1969), Madrid: Tecnos, 1971, p. 131-155.

— (Amb A. García Suárez.) Wittgwnstein, L. “Notes on Logic / Notas sobre Lógica”, a Sobre el Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, València: Universitat de Va-lència, Departament de Lògica i Filosofia de la Ciència, 1972, p. 6-47.

— Goodman, N. “El argumento epistemológico”, Teorema, III, 1, 1973, p. 71-78.

— Quine, W. V. La relatividad ontológica y otros ensayos, Madrid: Tecnos, 1974, només els assaigs 2, 4 i 6.

— Russell, B. Lògica i coneixement. Tres assaigs, Barcelona: Laia, 1985, 272 p.

Bibliography about Josep Lluís Blasco

Aguado, Josep: “La nau del coneixement. La filosofia de Josep Lluís Blasco”, Caràcters (2ª època), 28 (juny 2004), p. 33.

– “Josep Lluís Blasco: el compromís de la filosofia”, El contemporani, 30 (2004), p. 74-75.

Bono, Emèrit: “En record de Josep Lluís Blasco”, Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 59-61.

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Corbí, Josep: “Josep Lluís Blasco y la libertad de pensar (1940-2003)”, Theoria, 47 (2003), p. 229-231.

Defez, Antoni: “Filosofia i normativitat en l’obra de Josep Lluís Blasco”, L’espill, 15 (2003), p. 186-195.

Fornés, Pere Blai: “Llibertat i raó en l’obra de Josep Lluís Blasco”, Dilema. Re-vista de filosofia 7, 4 (2004), p. 11-20.

Garrido, Manuel: “Un filòsofo rey. Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés (1940-2003). In memoriam”, Teorema, XXII, 3 (2003), p. 201-209.

Gómez, Sílvia: “La trajectòria acadèmica de Josep Lluís Blasco Estellés”, Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 13-23.

Grimaltos, Tobies: “Josep Lluís Blasco, servidor de la raó”, L’espill, 14 (2003), p. 147-153.

Iborra, Josep: “Lliçons magistrals”, Saó, XXVIII, 290 (desembre 2004), p. 38.

Lapiedra, Ramon: “Josep Lluís Blasco: una vella i sentida amistat”, Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 53-57.

Luque, Víctor: “Josep Lluís Blasco i la ineliminabilitat de la filosofia”, Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 25-42.

Millon, Joan Antoni: “Els primers escrits (1960-1965) del jove Josep Lluís Blas-co”, Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 63-95.

Moya, Carlos: “Blasco, Josep Lluís (2004): La nau del coneixement. Edición a car-go de Jesús Alcolea y Xavier Serra. Catarroja: Editorial Afers”, Theoria, 51 (2004), 357-359.

Pérez, Francesc: “Josep Lluís Blasco i el seu grup generacional”, Braçal, 43 (2011), p. 43-51.

Serra, Xavier: “Josep Lluís Blasco (1940-2003)”, Afers, 44 (2003), p. 207-221.

“L’evolució filosòfica de Josep Lluís Blasco”, Quaderns de filosofia i ciència, 35 (2005), p. 175-184.

Història social de la filosofia catalana. La lògica (1900-1980), Catarroja: Afers, 2010.

Vera, Francesc: “Semblança intel·lectual de Josep Lluís Blasco”, Quaderns de filosofia i ciència, 34 (2004), p. 23-29.

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review

arles Rahola, Breviari de Ciutadania. La pena de mort a Girona [Edition and prologue by Josep-Maria Terricabras], Girona: CCG Edicions i Fundació Valvi 2009

Josep Monserrat Molas facultat de filosofia. university of Barcelona [email protected]

C

When preparing a history of intellectual activity in a specific linguistic area or territory, one must be sensitive to a full range of cultural activities that shape the environment in which the individual contributions are made. In a sense, we have to fill out the relief in the landscape of the past. Although this is a straightforward undertaking in all cultural traditions, in ours it has so often been broken off, falsified and avoided that it has become difficult to discuss the past without resorting to the misleading model where “exceptional figures” emerge from “barren wastelands”. For the observer who is even mildly motivated by vivid curiosity, and not driven by the urge to assert or be creative, the deserts were never really that barren, nor the figures so exceptional.

And there was no shortage of these exceptions. As soon as we look more closely at each and every participant in this history of ideas in Catalonia in the 19th and 20th centuries, we come across some truly remarkable figures of every class, kind and condition, both honourable and dishonourable. Carlos Rahola (1881-1939) is one of the honourable figures, both for his sincere com-mitment to the truth, and for his desire to serve his people. The highest honour he can be given today is to assess his work and trace our impossible connection to his writings. Impossible because we can no longer read his works (especially the work we are discussing, The Citizen’s Breviary) in the way he intended us to: there will never again be a youthful generation like that of Catalonia a hundred years ago. Even so, it is a book we ought to read if we want to grasp the author’s intentions, and those of the jury who saw fit to give the book an award in 1933. To do so is to enter into the history of popular education, cultural promotion and the republican government’s efforts to prepare the young for civic life.

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The tone of The Death Penalty in Girona, published the following year, was very different. This is not a text like the Citizen’s Breviary, which was a collection of exemplary lives, reassuring stories and anecdotes for youths and adolescents destined to “forge a new nation” which would make Catalonia “a force for peace, progress and civilization” among “the Iberian nations” and “the federation of European peoples”. The Death Penalty (1934) is a text for an audience that needed to have the tools to make decisions on a moral and legal matter. The book is a historical study, based on archive research, of executions in Girona, which has the moral purpose of opposing the death penalty: “Whatever our opinion of the death penalty may be, after so much discussion, and with the understanding that our impartial devotion to history teaches us about the need for rigour in so many cases and circumstances, we must wish, for the sake of humanity and Christian spirit [...] that the scaffold is never again erected within the august walls of our noble beloved Girona” (page 237). In the year the book was published, there had been no executions in Girona for twenty years. The fact that shortly afterwards, on the 15th of March 1939, the author of this work, an exemplary public figure, was executed by a Spanish firing squad after a shameful trial, obliges us to keep his memory alive, and to do so out of respect.

Rahola’s style of writing is that of a journalist. We can get an idea of this by reading the recently published selection of his articles (Carles Rahola, Against the Invader. A Collection of Articles from “L’Autonomista”, Valls: Cossetània, 2007). His style is simple and emotional, with a colouring that may seem af-fected by today’s standards, aimed at effectiveness above all other considerations. The books are made up of fragments pieced together, in many cases from earlier versions in the press. This gives his work continuity between his divulgatory journalism to the socialization of culture.

The lengthy introductory study by Josep M. Terricabras (“Carles Ra-hola: an intellectual portrait”) makes a valid contribution to studies on Rahola through a text that draws on a detailed knowledge of his works and corre-spondence, as well as the cultural, economic and political environment of Giro-na and Catalonia at the time. The progress of his thought from the philosophical drive of his early writings, with their young and rather incoherent Nietzschean influence, subsequently corrected by his reading of Guyau, to his work as a journalist, historian and ideologue in the political tradition of Pi i Maragall, and the literary mould of Anatole France. Josep M. Terricabras clearly sets out the affinities and divergences, taking advantage of his sources in public corre-spondence and private archives, along with the most recent studies of Rahola’s life and work, to make this study a magnificent introduction to his thought. A book that is worth getting to know, for many reasons.

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osep-Maria Terricabras (ed.), El pensament d’Eugeni d’Ors, Girona, Documenta Universitaria, 2010

Joan Cabó universitat ramon llull [email protected]

J

Eugeni d’Ors (1881-1954) was one of the most influential Catalan intellectuals of the first half of the 20th century. His was a multi-faceted personality who expressed his complex thought in original ways, especially through his articles in the daily press, which were nearly always printed under a pseudonym, such as Xènius or Octavi de Romeu. This superficial dispersion obscures his carefully considered systematic thought. This volume is drawn form the conferences on Ors organized by the Ferrater Mora Chair of the University of Girona and contains fifteen articles tackling very different facets of the writer.

After the editor’s prologue, Miquel Siguan introduces us to the char-acter and career of Eugeni d’Ors. Several of the contributions of this volume follow the thread of his political development. The articles by Josep Maria Ruiz Simon and Maximiliano Fuentes Codera offer wide-ranging summaries of this aspect. As an elitist and anti-democrat, Ors propounded a universal nationalism that would export his Mediterranean values and civilisme to Spain and Europe. He also proposed the spread of the values of noucentisme as a reaction against the 19th century, an aspect studied by Josep Murgades, who offers us an Ors who is an “inventor” of Catalan traditions that fit into this scheme. It is in this politi-cal context that we can study his relationship with other similar movements developing at the same time across Europe, the seedbeds of the ideologies that have been imprecisely labelled as “fascist”. Antoni Mora studies Eugeni d’Ors as a “protofascist” in the context of the European intellectual movement. This is also the basis of Henry Ettinghausen’s analysis of La Ben Plantada, a work which exalts patriotism and race.

Margarida Casacuberta tackles the figure of Xènius –the name under which he wrote many of his articles– as a literary construct of the author which finds expression in a Glossary which is in turn a form of epistolary between the

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character and his discerning readers. It also takes in another interesting literary phenomenon, that of Lídia of Cadaqués, who was driven by her love for Ors to make a paranoid reading of these glosses, a reading which is used by Oriol Pon-satí-Murlà to questions the interpretative theory of Umberto Eco. This varied collection also includes a text by Xavier Pla on some glosses which, although published, are little known, and which have been added to this volume.

Three more articles reveal the relation of the Catalan intellectual with other prominent figures of the time. Jaume Trabal studies the relations between Ors and Joan Maragall, his wife’s godfather who, despite their disagreements, he would always consider a genius; Maria Torregrosa and Jaime Nubiola look into the influence of Ors on the work of Josep Ferrater Mora, whose entry on “Ors” was one of the earliest in his dictionary; and Joan Cuscó examines the similarities and antagonism between Xènius and Francesc Pujols.

Finally, Norbert Bilbeny, Antonino González and Mercè Rius explore his philosophy of seny, his aesthetics and d’Ors’ position with regard to the mysticism of the 20th century, respectively. According to Bilbeny, Eugeni d’Ors developed his philosophy of intelligence by establishing a link between reason and life, logic and biology, which may have influenced the posterior formula of “vital reason” of his contemporary Ortega y Gasset. The following article, which examines the author’s work as art critic, carefully reveals his important contributions to aesthetics and presents his concept of arbitrarisme, with its blend of nature and liberty, as the nucleus of his philosophy, leading to the idea of seny, the distinction between reason and intellect, his philosophy of work and play and his criticism of modernity and the oftalmia of the modern world. The last article compares the figure of d’Ors with the outstanding exponents of 20th century mysticism, such as W. James, H. Bergson, S. Weil, G. Bataille, W. Ben-jamin, R. Musil, G. Colli, C. Diano or M. Cacciari.

This volume, then, is an interesting collection of works on Eugeni d’Ors, the cosmopolitan, philosopher, writer, journalist, art critic and political ideologue; an eminently multi-faceted personality who deserves a great deal more study.

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review

osep Mª Terricabras (ed.), La filosofia d’Eduard Nicol, Girona: Documenta Universitaria,

2010

Joan Cuscó i Clarasó societat Catalana de [email protected]

J

The Ferrater Mora Chair of Contemporary Thought was established in Girona in 1989. Its importance, as Ferrater Mora himself said, would lie in what the new institution was capable of creating. Under the guidance of its first and only occupant so far, Josep Maria Terribcabras, it has followed standard models of rigour and quality, of which the present volume is a good example.

The Ferrater Mora Chair has had great significance for the University of Girona, while becoming one of the fundamental institutions for philosophi-cal activity in Catalonia. Besides bringing the brightest and best figures of con-temporary thought to Catalonia (Prigogine, Sloterdijk, Chomsky, Davidson...), it has also advanced studies on contemporary home-grown authors. This second branch of activity has been undertaken through annual seminars studying the works of: Ramon Turró, Eugeni d’Ors, Eusebi Colomer, Josep Ferrater Mora, Joaquim Xirau, Joan Maragall and Eduard Nicol. The papers and speeches pre-sented and debated at each of these seminars have then been published.

The book we are looking at is a collection of the texts presented in the seminar dedicated to Eduard Nicol i Francesca, one of the most rigorous and prolific Catalan philosophers of the 20th century and, at the same time, one of the least known in Catalonia due to his exile.

The seminar was organized in 2007 to celebrate the centenary of his birth in Barcelona, and his widow was among those taking part. The seminar was a splendid opportunity for dialogue between Catalan and Mexican Phi-losophers and historians of iberoamerican philosophy. The book is a collection of writings by different specialists and Nicol’s followers in the Iberian peninsula and Mexico: Miquel Siguan, José Luís Abellán, Bernat Castany, Miguel Ángel Martínez Quintanar, Guadalupe Olivares, Rush González, Ricardo Horneffer and Joan Cuscó.

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Reading this miscellaneous collection means rediscovering the prolific and forceful writings of Nicol, his ceaseless activity founding journals, seminars and whatever else was needed, the importance of the Barcelona’s Autonomous University in the Second Republic, the breach and annihilation that Franco’s regime inflicted on Catalan philosophy, Nicol’s influence on Mexican philoso-phy and his international status, his moral integrity and his power as a thinker who is fully aware of his present and the universal perspective on human life that philosophical reflection must provide…

Nicol’s work is first-rate, and ambitious. Even so, he is practically un-known in Catalonia. He is rarely mentioned in study plans and his books are hard to find in university bookshops, but hopefully this book can help to redress this anomaly. First of all, there is an analysis of philosophy and Catalan philoso-phers at the time when Nicol was studying and taking his first steps. After that comes the study of his life in exile. Finally, there are a series of works that aim to analyze the fundamentals of his work, and contributions that look into the cur-rent situation of certain ideas put forward by Nicol. They are all interesting, but the work of Guadalupe Olivares showing the importance that Nicol acquired in his host country, and Ricardo Hornoffer on how Nicol’s energy has been passed on to his pupils, are of special interest.

A writer such as Nicol is too valuable an asset to be overlooked by any culture, but especially one such as ours in our current situation.

Eduard Nicol i Francisca (Barcelona 1907 – Mèxic, 1990), is a major philosopher for many reasons. Because he tackled the most important authors without prejudice, because he was clear about the challenges of philosophy in his time; because the influence of his teachers meant that he was rooted in the native tradition that was then beginning to establish itself; because his capacity for synthesis and for lucid observation never abandoned him (even in the thea-tre reviews that he wrote in his youth to pay for his education). As a philoso-pher he created his view of the world, while his awareness of the problems of philosophy as a discipline made him reflect on it and its values, going back to its Greek origins and, finally, as a prestigious intellectual, his was a critical voice on the contemporary world. These three broad themes give his work weight and relevance today. As this book shows, he makes it clear that ideas are not inert, and the act of thinking is itself a praxis, as Nicol himself liked to say.

Issue 4

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Journal of Catalan IntelleCtual HIstory, Issue 4, 2012 | Print Issn 2014-1572 / online Issn 2014-1564http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JoCIH

Issue 4

articles

Ramon Martí d’Eixalà and the Nineteenth-Century Catalan Philo-sophical and Legal Schools. Josep Maria Vilajosana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

English liberalism in Catalonia at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Manuel Casamada i Comella. Ignasi roviró alemany . . . . . . . . . 131

The influence of French aesthetics on Francesc Mirabent. Jordi Carcasó 149

Frederic Riu and Kant’s Critique: Hegel in the Mirror World. Giulio f.

Pagallo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

life-writing

Two texts about Jaume Serra Hunter (1878-1943). Josep Carner i Jordi Ma-

ragall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

reviews

Jaume Serra Hunter, Escrits sobre la història de la filosofia catalana, Bar-celona: Publicacions de la Facultat de Filosofia – Universitat Ramon Llull 2011. Vicent torres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

Pere Coromines. La mort austera, Barcelona: Acontravent 2010. Honorat

Jaume i font . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

contents

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article

amon Martí d’Eixalà and the Nineteenth-Century Catalan Philosophical and Legal School

Josep Maria Vilajosanafacultat de Dret. universitat Pompeu [email protected]

abstractThis text presents some of the central features of the philosophical and juridical thought of Ramon Martí d’Eixalà while also offering keys for interpreting his role in the establishment of the Catalan School of Philosophy and the Catalan Legal School in the nineteenth century. It draws attention to some unjustified interpretive clichés regarding his work, for example the attempt to link his theses with romantic postulates.

key wordsRamon Martí d’Eixalà, philosophy of common sense, Catalan School of Philosophy, Catalan Legal School, Catalan law.

R

Introduction

Vicens Vives says, “The rise of Catalonia and the work of a number of distin-guished teachers – Martí d’Eixalà, Bergnes de las Casas, Milà i Fontanals, Llo-rens i Barba, Permanyer i Tuyet, Reynals i Rabassa, Rubió i Ors, and Duran i Bas – ended up giving sense to the students coming out of our faculties: a sense […] of service to the land. In this regard, the Faculty of Law was outstanding […] in gradually forming a school that was notable for the vigour of its scientif-ic and human commitment” (Vicens, 1958: 130). In a recent book, an American scholar describes the core task carried out by lawyers in the construction of a complex network of ideological concerns and interests of Catalan society at the time, noting that, “Ramon Martí was one of the city’s [Barcelona’s] most pow-erful men in the decade of the 1840s and early 1850s” (Jacobson, 2009: 116).

How did Martí d’Eixalà come to occupy such a prominent position? What qualities did he have to be deemed worthy of such recognition? It is my

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JoseP MarIa VIlaJosana

view that Ramon Martí lived at a sort of crossroads and played something akin to a hinge role. He was at the forefront of pedagogical reforms in philosophy; he would lead the campaign for yearned-for restoration of the University of Barcelona1 where he was to train a batch of jurists who marked legal studies for a long time to come; and he would be an active participant in the moder-ate political offensive carried out by some Catalans in Madrid in their efforts to bring the administrative structures up to date and to modernise the interests of the Spanish political class.2 There is no doubt that it would be impossible to understand Martí’s thought unless one was aware of the social, cultural and political conditions of Catalonia at the time, but neither would it be possible to understand certain subsequent developments in some spheres of Catalan intel-lectual endeavour without taking into account his contributions and, above all, his teachings.3 In this paper I am concerned with the most outstanding features of his philosophical and juridical thought. I shall offer several pointers that should help the reader to grasp his importance in the creation of the Catalan School of Philosophy and the Catalan Legal School while also rejecting clichés such as that which attempts to link him with romantic currents.4

The Philosophical Thought of Martí d’Eixalà

the relevance of Curso de filosofía elementar

Martí d’Eixalà’s philosophical oeuvre is not very extensive. It is limited to Curso de Filosofía Elementar (Introductory Course in Philosophy) plus an Appendix and Notes to the translation of Jean-François Amice’s work titled Manual de Historia de la Filosofía (Manual on the History of Philosophy), both of these

1 Born in Cardona in 1808, he played a major role in the reestablishment of the University of Barcelona in 1837 and gave the inaugural lecture.

2 Martí was several times a member of the Spanish Cortes (Parliament) and it was during one of his trips to Madrid that he died unexpectedly on 18 May 1857.

3 As Ignasi Casanovas notes, “Martí d’Eixal is the prolific patriarch of many tribes: of philoso-phers, of jurists, of literati and of politicians” (Casanovas, 1921: 11). By way of corroboration we may cite some of his most distinguished students: Manuel Duran i Bas, Estanislau Reynals i Rabassa, and Francesc Permanyer (among the jurists); Francesc Xavier Llorens i Barba and Pere Codina (among the philosophers); Joaquim Rubió i Ors, Josep Coll i Vehí and Joan Mañé i Flaquer (among the literati); Laureà Figuerola (jurist, economist and politician); Ma-nuel Milà i Fontanals (philologist).

4 For a more thoroughgoing study of his philosophical, legal and political thinking, see Vila-josana 2011, Part Two.

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ramon Martí d’eixalà and the nineteenth-Century Catalan Philosophical and legal schools

books being published during the time when he was expelled from the uni-versity (1840 – 1843). Apart from these works, Martí published no other philo-sophical text. Nonetheless, there are several lectures he gave and a series of unpublished manuscripts dealing mainly with the sentiments. I shall now go on to highlight just three significant elements of Curso: empiricism, the concept of consciousness and the utilitarian nature of philosophy.

Empiricism

In general, Spanish academics had thitherto disdained any approximation to scientific method from the standpoint of philosophy. Martí, however, was to lay claim to the postulates of science which, in his view, were analysis and observa-tion of facts.

It is no coincidence that the man who gave such importance to science was the selfsame person designated to give classes at the Academy for Science and the Arts.5 His thinking was functional in an industrial society that was evolving at forced-march pace. Martí offers an explicit account of his aims: “I have consistently proceeded from the facts of the inquiry, both internal and ex-ternal, taking my analysis as far as possible”. He criticises the trend-setters of the time: These people [the eclectics] call themselves members of the school of ob-servation but, with every step they take, a vague fear of encountering the school they disparagingly label ‘empirical’ impedes them from going ahead to analyse the facts they admit” (Curso: VIII). Thus, Martí d’Eixalà makes it clear very early on that he embraces empiricism as the philosophical position that is closest to a “scientific” way of thinking, at least in terms of the way in which science was interpreted at the time. Seen from the perspective of our own times, however, the empiricism to which I am referring here must perforce be deemed ingenu-ous since one would find therein what Willard Van Orman Quine has critically dubbed two dogmas of empiricism (Quine 1953). I shall now comment briefly on the second of these.

Quine’s second dogma of empiricism, reductionism, consists in sustain-ing that it is possible to confront certain statements of an empirical science with the facts, and that the result of this confrontation entails a test that permits one to say whether the theory in question is correct or not. It would seem that, for

5 After 1835, philosophy teaching was carried out in the Acadèmia de Ciències i Arts (Acad-emy for Science and the Arts) and never at the university. He was the first layman to teach philosophy in the academic realm (Bilbeny, 1985: 160) and the Appendix is deemed to be the first publication on the history of Spanish philosophy, at a time when the discipline did not as much as exist.

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Martí, the notion that one’s senses could have direct access to the facts did not represent any problem. He tells us here that his method starts from external and internal facts. An inquiry into the role played in this method by internal facts helps one to understand adequately the originality of his philosophical thought, at the same time as it makes one aware of the cul-de-sac into which it eventu-ally leads.

A New Concept of Consciousness

Martí sustains that, “The condition of existence or of what is essential for any idea is to be conscious of it, however that may be. This will be the first fact or phenomenon which, in its generality, encompasses them all” (Curso: 21). One must pause at this point so as to take note of a peculiar element in Martí’s think-ing when it comes to characterising consciousness.

According to Martí, consciousness is not just another faculty that comes together with the rest. It is a capacity that encompasses the rest. This is a sig-nificant detail since it furnishes an original philosophical ingredient. Up to this point, the Scottish philosophers that had influenced him dealt with conscious-ness as a simple faculty. Martí is the first to take the step towards an all-embrac-ing concept of consciousness, before this position became famous once it had been sustained by William Hamilton (1869). Martí’s student, Francesc Xavier Llorens i Barba, bears witness to this when he says, “As long as I want, I know that I want; as long as I know it, I know that I know it. By rigorous induction […] I have with this a general fact, the fact of having consciousness. This is what our Martí d’Eixalà had set down before a celebrated school proclaimed that consciousness turns out to be the fundamental form of our existence” (Llorens, 1920: Vol. I, 116-117).

Nevertheless, the problem confronting Martí was that his insistence on the general and primary role of consciousness would help him to establish, at the very most, the connection between “internal” facts (to use his termi-nology). Where, then, is the link with “external” facts? If the only access we have to experience comes through our consciousness, this thesis runs the risk of falling into some kind of idealism and, pushing it to its limits, solip-sism (Roura, 1980: 239). In brief, it lapses into the impossibility of justifying knowledge of the external world (which is to say, that which lies beyond the bounds of our consciousness), which could then make the scientific charac-ter of the system look shaky. The suspicion arising from this short circuit is confirmed when one reads, “Man sees nothing other than his own thought and everything is reduced by him to being aware of some object, to having ideas” (Curso: 24).

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Utility of Philosophical Reflection

A pragmatic concern runs throughout Curso in the sense of signalling paths by way of which the material in the book might furnish a yield that is translat-able into actions. This utilitarian view that Martí has of philosophy is in line with his jurist’s mentality. I would say that Martí’s case would fit better with the archetypical jurist who engages in Philosophy than with the philosopher who engages in Law. Accordingly, he criticises authors of “abstract” systems for not using hypotheses that may be checked against facts: “The whole artifice of these systems consists of constructing and linking up hypotheses in such a way that there is no contradiction between them, and that they conspire together for the same end; however, just as adroit arrangement of the scenes of a drama does not prove the reality of the fact being assumed, neither can one conclude from artificial coordination of the parts of a theory that it conforms with the nature of things.” (Curso: 293).

Martí d’eixalà and the Catalan school of Philosophy

Two of the features that one might consider as defining the Catalan School of Philosophy are its defence of common sense, based on Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the priority it gives to analysis of the senses. Let us see now to what extent these elements are present in the thinking of Martí d’Eixalà.

The Philosophy of Common Sense

What has come to be known as “Philosophy of Common Sense” is generally deemed to be that which is most characteristic of the Catalan School. It is commonly said that it would have as its precedent Joan Lluís Vives, who was introduced by Martí d’Eixalà, and that its outstanding proponent would be the latter’s student Llorens i Barba. One frequently finds statements concerning Martí’s role in this respect. Joan Ruiz i Calonja, for example, says that Martí is “the master of what is known as the Catalan school of common sense philoso-phy, which is inspired by the Scottish School” (Ruiz i Calonja, 1963: 82). Pere Lluís Font, after affirming that “common sense philosophy was introduced by the jurist and philosopher Ramon Martí i d’Eixalà”, adds, “The Catalan School of common sense philosophy, twin of the Scottish one, while evoking the sim-ilar fates of two politically-subjugated yet culturally-alive nations, also helps one to understand the relationship between Catalan and Scottish romanticism” (Font, 1984: 186). From outside Catalonia other writers also describe Martí as a

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prime representative of Catalan philosophy of common sense, among them José Luis Abellán and Manuel Suances (Abellán, 1984: 349; Suances, 2006).

In fact, however, such assertions are not a close fit with the reality. I would not be so radical as Joaquim Carreras i Artau when he says that, in Curso, “one does not find the slightest trace of Scottish common sense philosophy” (Carreras i Artau, 1994: 19).6 Some influences of the Scottish School, and espe-cially of Thomas Reid (1785), are present. What is nowhere to be found is any specific mention of the concept of common sense.

How, then, is one to understand this tenacity in considering Martí d’Eixalà the paragon of the Scottish notion of common sense? I shall respond to this conundrum in two different but complementary ways. One refers to possible causes that might explain this biased interpretation while the other shows the systematic ambiguity with which the term “common sense” tends to be used in this context.

With regard to the first question, it is almost certain that the fact that Llorens i Barba –who was indeed a follower of the Scottish doctrine of Com-mon Sense Realism7 – was Martí’s most outstanding student of philosophy contributed towards the propagation of this tale (Llorens, 1859). One must note that a good number of the erroneous statements in this regard have their origin in the highly emphatic assertions of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1876, Vol I: 112). The latter has enjoyed great authority in Spanish intellectual circles, which would certainly mean that many of his pronouncements would have been un-critically accepted. Neither is it irrelevant to recall that Menéndez y Pelayo was a student of Llorens.

That there was a certain deformation of Martí’s thought in order to bring him closer to positions he had not upheld is clearly demonstrated by considering the features that a contemporary and student of Martí considered as pertaining to the Catalan School, which was only just emerging at the time. I refer to Estanislau Reynals i Rabassa. This author gives the following attributes as the defining characteristics of the “Catalan School that is about to be born”: analytical system, anti-dogmatism, empiricism, intellectual independence, in-dividualism and practical sense (Reynals i Rabassa, 1858: 18-19 and 59). All these traits are undoubtedly present in Martí’s thought and work. But what has happened to common sense? Why is there no reference to the concept that was later to appear as defining his thought? The answer that I think is most plausible

6 In this line of interpretation one might also find Roura (1980: 178) and Bilbeny (1985: 174).

7 Both Anglès (1998) and Cuscó (1999) make this clear.

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is that Llorens engaged in an a posteriori reading of his teacher’s philosophical thinking, attributing to him connotations that were closer to the ideas of the pupil. This “transfer” is passed on from Llorens to his own student Menéndez y Pelayo and thence to latter-day writers who merely repeated the claim.

Two Concepts of Common Sense

It is my view that the expression “common sense” is used ambiguously in the context now being analysed, thus leading to misunderstandings.

There is one sense that effectively corresponds with the common sense of which the best-known members of the Scottish School spoke. The function carried out by “common sense” in this case would be strictly philosophical. It would represent a way of justifying primary truths, the axioms of any philo-sophical construction.

Now, sometimes, especially when one wishes to say that a character-istic feature – even the most characteristic feature – of the Catalan School of Philosophy is the defence of “common sense”, it is understood in the Catalan sense of seny, which is to say good judgement or sensibleness. In this case, the definitional leap is unjustified. The word “seny” is no longer used to refer to the aforementioned philosophical function but to action contrasted with, or complementary to rauxa, which means impulsiveness or emotional outburst. If what I have just stressed had to be applied to Martí, I would say that he was a person who showed a great deal of seny in all the actions of his life.8 However, there is no evidence anywhere that he used the concept of “common sense” as a foundation of primary philosophical principles. As some writers have asserted, the relationship between Martí and Scottish philosophy is more a “deep agree-ment in intellectual viewpoints” than any causal relationship (Batista i Roca, 1957: 51).

As I have noted, the person who did have a part to play in propagating the Scottish ideas was Martí’s student, Llorens i Barba. In his lifetime he only published the inaugural speech of the academic year 1854-55 in which, before the staff of the University of Barcelona, he endorsed “a labour that although modest was very important” and carried out “with deep faith, exempt of sys-tematic pretensions, in the terrain of good sense, in Scottish simplicity”. Llorens who considered that philosophy was the “late fruit of a people’s intellectual cul-

8 Indeed, in the words of Duran i Bas, Martí was a well-balanced, circumspect and prudent man (Duran i Bas, 1905: 7-8).

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ture”, believed that the consolidation of philosophy teaching in the university would lead to “the development of philosophical thinking in harmony with our national life” (Llorens, 1854: 24 and 26). This aim would contribute to the Catalan cultural renaissance movement – the Renaixença – of the second half of the nineteenth century.

It was Llorens, then, who following this line of thought, would un-equivocally link his own philosophical thinking with the idea of common sense as an expression of a set of people (the Catalan nation, for example), just as the German romantics tended to speak of the spirit of a people. Llorens shares with his mentor the fact of starting out from consciousness as a basic reality. Yet, for him, consciousness does not only have an individual dimension but it mainly incorporates a collective and historical dimension, which expresses the feeling of a people. This has made it possible to affirm that Catalan philosophy particularly accentuates the social dimension of reason, in relation with con-temporaries as well as with the people who have come before us and the people yet to come (Nubiola, 1995).

Thus, if one reads the philosophical texts of Ramon Martí d’Eixalà at-tentively one must come to the conclusion that it is difficult to slot him into this romantic derivation. Nowhere does one find any illusion to any kind of collective spirit (neither Catalan nor of any other people). Martí’s position is strictly individualist. There is no consciousness that goes beyond what any one of us has.

The Role of Sentiments

Besides the idea of common sense, Catalan philosophy also tends to be consid-ered as giving considerable prominence to the sentiments, a form of procedure that one detects as early as in the writings of Ramon Llull. This quality is to be found in Martí’s texts, but only among the unpublished material. I now propose that we might engage in a small exercise of philosophical fiction so as to look at Martí’s position on this point in the light of certain present factors.

Some years ago, one of the characterising traits of a certain change of direction in the treatment of philosophical themes was precisely the growing significance given to the presence of impulses, sentiments and passions or, in short, to the whole area that was for a long time deemed to be an impediment to people acting rationally. It is illustrative in this regard that a book like An-tonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error should have been a best seller (Damasio, 1996).

Martí would have subscribed to Damasio’s critical review of Descartes’ thought without a second’s doubt, although not exactly for the same reasons. Damasio shows, as fruit of contemporary research in neuroscience, how emo-

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tion and sentiments are indispensable for rationality. This research reveals that the human mind is the way it is owing to the interaction between the brain and the rest of the body in the evolutionary process. Lesions in certain parts of the body can also harm the processing of emotions. Descartes’ error, then, would have been to postulate a radical separation between body and mind.

Now let us compare these contemporary ideas with Martí’s words: “Just as the brain is the organ through which the spirit verifies intellectual opera-tions, would not the brain together with the entire nervous system be the organ through which sentiment is felt?” (Manuscrits, XXXIV: 5). The mere formula-tion of the question is significant enough. So too is Martí’s approach to the question. It indicates that he was aware of the intimate relationship between the organic and spiritual parts of the human being. He argues that sentiment oper-ates on the organism which, in turn, makes possible action in the moral (read “spiritual”) sphere by bringing about an increased power of feeling and, later, reducing it. I cannot help thinking that, for all the anachronism, a Martí d’Eixalà transported to our own times would be very close to the position represented here by Damasio. I would even venture to surmise that the new discoveries would have helped him to eliminate – or at least diminish – the problems raised for him by “internal facts”. Seen from the present-day scientific perspective, they are perfectly explicable with the same scientific mechanism that helps to explain “external facts”. After all, an assumed immaterial mind could not exist apart from the material body.

Martí d’Eixalà and the Catalan Legal School

Ramon Martí d’Eixalà was, by family tradition9 and academic training,10 a man of law. He worked in several areas as a jurist, inter alia as a solicitor and participating in the drafting of some Barcelona ordinances. However, his well-earned renown came from his teaching activities at the University of Barcelona. It should be recalled that, in fact, he was a university lecturer only in legal subjects.

9 His great-grandfather, Melcior d’Eixalà, was an “ciutadà honrat” (honorary citizen) of Barcelo-na and held a doctorate in Law, as did his grandfather, Baltasar d’Eixalà i de Maerschalk, who was appointed Jurisdictional Advisor to the Duke of Cardona. Moreover, his grandmother was Raimona Thomasa, daughter and sister of notaries (Vilajosana, 2011: Part One).

10 He began his degree in Law at the University of Cervera in the academic year of 1824-25, attaining his bachelor’s degree on 14 November 1827, a degree in Law three years later and, once the University of Barcelona had been reinstated, a doctorate in Law on 27 April 1837 (Roura, 1980: 48).

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His academic works are his commentary on Las Partidas11 of Alfonso X and the only two books on legal matters that he published. Both these latter texts were written for teaching purposes. One (devoted to civil law) was his first publication, while the other book (a study of mercantile law) was his last.12 The subjects of civil and mercantile law constituted private law. That this should have been Martí’s concern is not surprising, both because of the commercial tradition of his paternal lineage and his own quite pragmatic sensibility, which also appeared, as we have seen, in his approach to philosophical problems.13

attributes of the Catalan legal school

The existence of a Catalan Legal School can be traced back through history (Vallet de Goytisolo, 2007). In what follows, however, my references will be confined only to the nineteenth-century sense of the term. Many Catalan ju-rists, who mid-century wished to confront fears of a push to uniformity arising from repeated attempts to draft a Spanish Civil Code, took as their theoretical reference the doctrine of Freidrich Karl von Savigny, an outstanding represen-tative of the Historical School of Law. Many people consider that Martí was among this very diverse group of men. At least this was the view of Manuel Du-ran i Bas, who described the Catalan School as follows: “a) Spiritualist without yielding to idealism; b) practical without being empirical; c) based on ethical principle and the historical element without being immobilised; d) more in-clined to private than to public law but without diminishing the latter through undue disrespect; e) essentially analytical without renouncing rising to synthesis when possible and when obliged to generalise; f) in harmony with the philoso-phy of common sense, which is the most apposite for a people of great practical sensibility as is the case with Catalonia; g) modest in its pretensions because it founds its doctrines on observation of the facts and proposes their applications in conformity with the conditions of the country. It therefore tends to reform without destruction, and focuses on the past, not out of mere aesthetic con-templation but because of the great lessons it holds: it requires the light of both

11 Also titled Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Code), this work was a Castilian statutory code compiled during the reign (1252 – 1284) of Alfonso X (“The Wise”) [translator].

12 They are respectively titled Tratado elementar del derecho civil romano y español (Elementary Treatise on Roman Civil Law, 1838) and Instituciones de derecho mercantil de España (Spanish Institutions of Mercantile Law, 1848).

13 Martí’s father was a merchant and small proprietor who was to become a veritable potentate thanks to his highly lucrative dealings in the Cardona salt trade (Vilajosana: Part One).

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reason and history, from the former not as the source but as the revelation of the absolute element of law and, from the latter in order to know the origins and to understand the spirit of the positive law of each people” (Duran i Bas, 1888: 352 – I have added the letters a) to g)).

Among these characteristics we certainly find in Martí’s work d), e) and partially g). Also present are a) and b) but with some nuances, either because of the inherent danger in Martí’s philosophical framework of lapsing into idealism, or because of the fact that if Martí upholds anything it is empiricism.

I have already discussed the alleged presence in his philosophy of the idea of common sense. I have maintained that there is ambiguity in the use that some writers make of the expression. Duran i Bas’ description of the attribute that I have designated with f) constitutes a clear case in point of this ambiguity: the philosophy of common sense mutates here into the philosophy of Catalan seny. As I have noted, Martí did show some influences of the Scottish School, but not in this regard.

What about the role of History? At this point there is no clear coin-cidence between Martí’s texts with what is stated in c) and partially in g). In another section below I shall sustain that, while Martí believed that the history of institutions was important (this, in fact, is one of the most outstanding points of the book Instituciones), the sense in which he does so is a long way from be-ing that which one finds in Savigny’s theses and, thence, in those of Duran and other members of the Catalan School. I shall deal with this issue below, after taking a path that leads to the matter of inquiring into the moot question of whether Martí d’Eixalà championed Catalan law.

Martí and the Defence of Catalan law

Two authors give a categorically negative answer to this question. Montserrat Figueras says, “Martí cannot be included in the nineteenth-century Catalan Legal School, which had as one of its leitmotifs precisely that of upholding Catalan civil law in the face of the Spanish legal code” (Figueras, 1993: 73). Another commentator, Judit Valls, opines that “[…] in order to be deemed a jurist one must know the laws and in order to be deemed a Catalan jurist one must know and uphold Catalan law. This, one sees, is not the case with Martí d’Eixalà” (Valls, 2009: 391). Valls drives home the point when she observes, “Martí d’Eixalà at no point defended Catalan law and Catalan institutions in his legal writings” (Valls, 2009: 479).

Is the vehemence of these statements justified? One must recognise that if one only pays attention to the literalness of the legal writings published by Martí, the judgement of these two authors would be correct: there is no sign

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of any explanation or citation of any law proper to Catalonia. Nevertheless, this undeniable datum should be viewed in relation with other facts. Then one sees that the overview of the resulting whole is more kaleidoscopic.

On the one hand, Martí, unlike other treatise writers of the time, gives great emphasis to his account of Roman law. This circumstance means that the material he dealt with brought him close to the law as practised in Catalonia which, together with canon law, was taught at the University of Cervera. José María Pérez Collados has emphasised the importance of the study of Roman law at this university as the background to the survival of Catalan law in legal studies to the point of bluntly asserting, “In Catalonia, upholding Roman law meant upholding Catalan Law in the face of Spanish Law” (Pérez Collados, 2004: 150). This is a highly significant point since it brings the Catalan experi-ence closer to other lands in which the struggle against legal uniformisation went hand in hand with a defence of Roman law, as James Whitman has stressed with regard to the German case (Whitman, 1990).

On the other hand, it is very important to offset what Martí’s writ-ings say, directly or indirectly, with the very prominent position he occupied in Catalan civil society. More specifically, one should bear in mind the negative response in Catalonia to the draft Civil Code of 1836 and, in particular, that of 1851. Making this context explicit paves the way for a thesis that I think is quite plausible: it is very difficult to imagine that Martí would have remained on the fringes of a protest against the uniformising thrust of the driving forces behind the Civil Code. We shall now look at this point.

the Catalan offensive against the Civil Code

The rejection by many Catalan jurists of the two draft Civil Codes I have mentioned has a background of factors of identity and also economic reasons. With regard to the former, there was a feeling that the proposed reforms would deal the deathblow to Catalan juridical institutions, which had already been impaired after the Decret de Nova Planta14 which had quashed any legislative capacity that might have made it possible to adapt them to new times. As for the economic reasons, there were convincing arguments for demanding that

14 The decrees titled (in Spanish) Decretos de Nueva Planta were signed between 1707 and 1716 by Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain, during and shortly after winning the War of the Spanish Succession. Based on the centralised model of Philip’s native France, the decrees sup-pressed the institutions, privileges, and the ancient charters of Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, which had formerly been part of the Crown of Aragon [translator].

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such highly prized institutions in Catalonia as the freedom to make a will and updated legislation on emphyteutic lease should be respected (Salvador, 1980).

What was Ramon Martí d’Eixalà’s position in this whole affair? There is one highly relevant datum. On 27 August 1845, a meeting of the Board of the College of Lawyers of Barcelona was held. The Dean at the time, Joaquim Ruyra, summed up in fifteen points the themes of the possible uniformisation that could have negative repercussions for Catalonia. The Board decided that Pere Nolasc i Cebrià should issue a report on the matter. He, however, agreed to do so only with regard to the part pertaining to emphyteutic legislation, after which Martí was given the task of writing the rest of the report (Egea, 1989: XXII and XXXVI). One should also add the fact that Martí was also very much involved with the defence of interests represented by the Junta de Comerç (Chamber of Commerce), while he was also a member of the Economic Soci-ety of Friends of the Country, two associations whose intervention in favour of upholding the emphyteutic legislation with variations was notable. What does one make of all this?

My impression is that, for a start, Martí was very well-versed in Catalan civil law.15 Would the Catalan lawyers have commissioned him with producing such a report if he were not truly proficient in the matter? Moreover, would they have entrusted him with the task if they were not sure that the report would reflect the view held by the majority in the College?

Nuance is required here. Since he was in favour of rationalisation as entailed by a code resembling the French Code16 and taking his conciliatory nature into account, one must suppose that his stance would not have been to-tally against the codification (and neither was that of Vives i Cebrià, it must be said) but that he would have wished to convince the codifiers that the aspects of Catalan law that should be preserved did not represent any unacceptable distor-tion of Spanish law. This fits with his decision to take on the task of comment-ing on Las Partidas which, as the Spanish legal text most influenced by Roman law, was thus the most adaptable to the Catalan standpoint.

Finally, one of the goals of the moderate Catalan members of parlia-ment in Madrid, Martí among them, was to rationalise administration. It is

15 Would it be possible not to have this knowledge for somebody who, like Martí, had not only thoroughly studied Roman Law, as I have noted, but who was the relative of a large number of notaries, precisely the group that did most to keep Catalan law alive and to apply it to everyday transactions.

16 It was Robert Pothier who systematised general contract theory which would subsequently have a decisive influence on the French Civil Code and other European and American codes. Martí praises his method of analytical work in Tratado (p. 24).

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reasonable to construe that what they were attempting politically they were also hoping to attain in the juridical sphere: if they believed that it was neces-sary to take things further with the freedom to make a will or that a good part of emphyteutic law should be retained, this is what they – Martí too – must have been defending. Disappointment was to follow, however, when the answer came in the form of imposition of the Spanish legítima (forced heirship) and the total suppression of emphyteusis.

I believe that an account similar to what I have just outlined does better justice to the complexity of the times and to the role Martí must have played therein. Independently of the facts that his legal texts in defence of Catalan law were not very explicit and that he was of a generation preceding that of people who would defend it unambiguously, the prominent position that he enjoyed in Catalan civil society at the time meant that he could not be excluded. I am inclined to think, then, that there is a defence of Catalan civil law behind his activities but perhaps not of all its core concepts, nor with the intensity that others would later show.

the romanticism of the Catalan legal school

I shall conclude this brief account of Ramon Martí d’Eixalà’s legal thinking by inquiring whether it includes postulates of the school headed by Savigny because it was precisely his work that, as we have seen, is one of the indicators applied when it comes to defining the Catalan Legal School. It should be recognised that Martí was concerned with the historical origins of the civil and mercantile juridi-cal institutions he examined in his books. Nowadays, this interest in history does not have the sense bestowed on it by Savigny and his followers. For Savigny, law is a product of the spirit of a nation, a position that is perfectly recognisable in Du-ran i Bas when he states that the Catalan Legal School has “the historic element at its base” and that it is “in harmony with common sense”, which is the most apposite “for a people of great practical sensibility as is the case with Catalonia”, or that legal analysis should be carried out in order to “know the origins and to understand the spirit of the positive law of each people”.

Nothing that Martí said would lead one to think that he would have endorsed this “romantic” role that both Savigny and Duran assigned to the his-tory of a people. One finds here, as happened with Llorens, another projection. Certainly the esteem in which he was held by both followers meant that they attributed to him the paternity of both Catalan schools, of philosophy and of jurisprudence. One symptomatic detail is that Duran i Bas presented the char-acteristics pertaining to the Catalan Legal School in 1888, thirty years after Martí’s death and fifty years after Tratado was published.

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To sum up, Martí was neither a historicist nor a romantic. He was, however, an enlightened man bound by conviction to champion a liberal view of the world, which was, on the other hand, what his times demanded. In the end, this is the perspective that is reflected in his political activities. The politi-cal group that he headed for a time was to be greatly disappointed to see that its modernising goals were not well received by a power that would be viewed with increasing distance. One can never know whether, as a result of this disil-lusionment, Martí would have moved closer towards the romantic approaches of his most prominent students, or even towards proto-nationalist positions. The fact is that his premature death, just when such modification was on the horizon, put an end to any speculation that one might make.

Bibliography

Works by ramon Martí d’eixalà

Books

Tratado elementar del derecho civil romano y espanyol (Elementary Treatise on Ro-man and Spanish Civil Law), Barcelona: Imprenta de Joaquín Verdaguer, 1838.

Curso de Filosofía Elementar (Introductory Course in Philosophy), Barcelona: Imprenta de D. José Maria de Grau, 1841.

Manual de la Historia de la Filosofía. Traducido del manual de Filosofía experimental de M. Amice, con notas y aumentado con un apéndice de la Filosofía de España y con la parte bibliográfica (Manual on the History of Philosophy: Translated from the Manual on Experimental Philosophy by M. Amice, with Notes and Supple-mented with an Appendix on the Philosophy of Spain and the Bibliographic Part), Barcelona: Imprenta del Constitucional, 1842.

Sanponts i Barba, Ignacio; Martí d’Eixalà, Ramon; Ferrer i Subirana, José. Las Siete Partidas del sabio Rey Don Alfonso el X, con las variantes de mas interés, y con la glosa del Lic. Gregorio López, del Consejo Real de Indias de S.M., vertida al castellano y extensamente adicionada con nuevas notas y comentarios y unas ta-blas sinópticas comparativas, sobre la legislación española, antigua y moderna, hasta su actual estado (The Seven-Part Code of Don Alfonso X, The Wise, with the Variants of Most Interest and the Explanatory Note by the Licenciate Gregorio López, of the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies, in the Spanish Translation and Extensively Supplemented with New Notes and Commentaries and Comparative Synoptic Tables, on Ancient and Modern

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Spanish Legislation to the Present Day), Barcelona: Imprenta de Antonio Bergnes, 1844.

Instituciones de derecho mercantil de Espanya (Institutions of Mercantile Law in Spain), Barcelona: Imprenta de Tomàs Gorchs, Barcelona, 1848.

Speeches

Discurso leído en la apertura de la Universidad de Barcelona (Speech Given at the Opening of the University of Barcelona), Barcelona: Imprenta de Antonio Bergnes, Barcelona, 1837.

Discurso sobre las reglas de observación, aplicados a los hechos que forman el patrimonio de la historia, al objeto de fundarla sobre sus bases esenciales (Speech on the Rules of Ob-servation, Applied to Matters that Comprise the Heritage of History, to the Aim of Founding It on Its Essential Bases), at the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona (RABL – Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona) on 9 May 1837, Archive of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, llegat 18 (ARABL, 18).

Juicio de la obra de Mr. Guizot, intitulada, Historia de la civilización (An Assessment of the Work by M. Guizot Titled “History of Civilisation”), at the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona on 21 March 1839 (ARABL, 18).

Disertación relativa a fijar las leyes de los que depende la suerte de las mujeres, en los primeros grados de la civilización de los pueblos (Dissertation on Establishing the Laws that Determine the Fate of Women, in the First States of Civilisation of Peoples), at the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona on 28 May 1842 (ARABL, 18).

Consideraciones filosóficas sobre la impresión de lo sublime (Philosophical Consi-derations on the Impression of the Sublime), a memoir read at the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona on 18 March 1845 (ARABL, 18).

Oración inaugural que en la solemne apertura de estudios del año 1849-50, dijo en la universidad de Barcelona (Inaugural Lecture at the Formal Opening of the Academic Year of 1849 – 1850, Given at the University of Barcelona), Im-premta Tomàs Gorchs, Barcelona, 1849.

“Estudis sobre la intel·ligència en els animals, i especialment en els mamífers” (Studies on Intelligence in Animals and Especially Mammals), Estudis Uni-versitaris Catalans, l’Avenç, Volume V, Barcelona, 1911.

Unpublished Manuscripts

36 manuscripts held in the Parpal Archive.

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references

Abellán, José Luis (1984). Historia crítica del pensamiento español, vol. IV: liberalis-mo y romanticismo (1808-1874) (Critical History of Spanish Thought, Vol. IV: Liberalism and Romanticism (1808 – 1874)), Madrid: Espasa Calpe.

Anglès Cervelló, Misericòrdia (1998). Llorens i Barba i la filosofia escocesa (Llo-rens i Barba and Scottish Philosophy), Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans.

Batista i Roca, Josep Maria (1959). “Martí d’Eixalà i la introducció de la filo-sofia escocesa a Catalunya” (Martí d’Eixalà and the Introduction of Scottish Philosophy in Catalonia), in Frank Pierce (ed.), Hispanic Studies in Honour of I. González Llubera, Oxford: Dolphin Book Co., p. 41-60.

Bilbeny, Norbert (1985). Filosofia contemporània a Catalunya (Contemporary Philosophy in Catalonia), Barcelona: Edhasa.

Carreras i Artau, Joaquim (1994). La filosofia escocesa a Catalunya (Scottish Phi-losophy in Catalonia), Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya.

Casanovas, Ignasi (1921). Actualitat de Balmes (The Present-day Relevance of Balmes), Barcelona: Atlas Geográfico.

Cuscó i Clarasó, Joan (1999). Francesc Xavier Llorens i Barba i el pensament filosò-fic a Catalunya (Francesc Xavier Llorens i Barba and Philosophical Thought in Catalonia), Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat.

Damasio, Antonio (1996). El error de Descartes: la emoción, la razón y el cerebro humano, Barcelona: Crítica, translated by Joandomènec Ros (published in English as Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, 1995, Har-per Perennial).

Duran i Bas, Manuel (1888). “La escuela jurídica catalana” (The Catalan Legal School) in Escritos del Excmo. Señor D. Manuel Duran y Bas. Primera Serie. Estu-dios Jurídicos (Writings of His Excellency Señor D. Manuel Duran i Bas. First Series. Juridical Studies), Barcelona: Ed. Juan Oliveres, p. 347-375.

(1905) Martí de Eyxalá y sus Lecciones sobre los sentimientos morales (Martí de Ey-xalá and His Lessons on Moral Sentiments), Barcelona: Imprenta de la Casa Provincial de Caridad.

Egea i Fernández, Joan (1989). “Estudi Introductori” (Introductory Study), in Vives i Cebrià, Pere Nolasc. Traducción al castellano de los Usages y demás derechos de Catalunya que no están derogados o no son notoriamente inútiles con indicación del contenido de éstos y de las disposiciones por las que han venido a serlo, ilustrada con notas sacadas de los más clásicos autores del Principado (Translation into Spanish of the Usages and Other Rights of Catalonia That Are Not Abolished or Not Notoriously Useless, with an Indication of Their Content and the Provisions through Which They Have Come to Be So, Illustrated

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with Notes Taken from the Most Classical Authors of the Principality), vol. 1, Barcelona: Departament de Justícia de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 1989 (first edition 1832), p. XI-LII.

Figueres i Pàmies, Montserrat (1993). Revolució francesa, Universitat de Cervera i Escola Jurídica catalana (La Filosofia Jurídica de Ramon Martí d’Eixalà en la 1ª meitat del segle XIX) (The French Revolution, the University of Cervera and the Catalan Legal School (The Juridical Philosophy of Ramon Martí d’Ei-xalà in the First half of the Nineteenth Century)), Lleida: Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs.

Font, Pere Lluís (1984). “Esquema històric de la filosofia catalana” (Historical Outline of Catalan Philosophy), Enrahonar. Quaderns de filosofia 10, p. 183-189.

Hamilton, William (1869). Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Edinburgh: Blac-kwood.

Jacobson, Stephen (2009). Catalonia’s Advocates. Lawyers, Society, and Politics in Barcelona, 1759-1900, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Llorens i Barba, Francesc Xavier (1854). Oración inaugural, que en la solemne apertura de estudios del año 1854 a 1855, dijo en la Universidad de Barcelona (Opening Lecture at the Formal Inauguration of the Academic Year 1854 – 1855, Given at the University of Barcelona), Barcelona: Impremta Gorchs.

(1859) Memoria acerca de la filosofía del malogrado D. R. Martí de Eixalà (Memoir on the Philosophy of the Late D. R. Martí d’Eixalà), given on 20 May 1859 at the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres, Archive of the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres, llegat 18.

(1920) Lecciones de Filosofía (Lessons of Philosophy), 3 vols., Barcelona: Univer-sitat de Barcelona.

Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino (1876). La Ciencia española (Spanish Science), Madrid: CSIC, 1953.

Nubiola, Jaime (1995). “Eugenio D’ors y la filosofía escocesa” (Eugenio d’Ors and Scottish Philosophy), Convivium VIII, p. 69-86.

Pérez Collados, José María (2004). “La tradición jurídica catalana” (The Cata-lan Juridical Tradition), Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español (Yearbook on the History of Spanish Law), vol. LXXIV, p. 139-184.

Quine, Willard v. O. (1953): “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 20-46.

Reid, Thomas (2004). Investigaciones sobre la mente humana según los principios del sentido común, Madrid: Trotta, in the Spanish translation of Ellen Duthie

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(published in English as An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense: A Critical Edition, 2001, Pennsylvania State University).

Reynals i Rabassa, Estanislau (1858). Elogio fúnebre del Dr. Ramon Martí de Ei-xalá (A Funeral Elegy for Dr. Ramon Martí d’Eixalà), Barcelona: Imprenta Nueva de Jaime Jepús i Ramon Villegas.

Roura, Jaume (1980). Ramon Martí d’Eixalà i la Filosofia catalana del segle XIX (Ramon Martí d’Eixalà and Catalan Philosophy in the Nineteenth Centu-ry), Montserrat: Publicacions de l’Abadia d Montserrat.

Ruiz i Calonja, J. (1963). Panorama del pensament català contemporani (An Over-view of Contemporary Catalan Thought), Barcelona: Editorial Vicens-Vives.

Salvador y Coderch, Pablo (1980). “El Proyecto de Código de derecho civil de 1851 y el derecho civil catalán” (The Draft of the Civil Law Code of 1851 and Catalan Civil Law), Revista jurídica de Cataluña, vol. 79, Nº. 2, p. 49-98.

Suances Marcos, Manuel (2006). Historia de la filosofía española contemporánea (A History of Contemporary Spanish Philosophy), Madrid: Síntesis.

Valls Salada, Judit (2009). Ramon Martí d’Eixalà. Un exponent de l’Escola Jurídica Catalana del segle XIX (Ramon Martí d’Eixalà: An Exponent of the Cata-lan Legal School of the Nineteenth Century), doctoral thesis, University of Girona.

Vallet de Goytisolo, Juan B. (2007). “La Escuela Jurídica Catalana del siglo XIX” (The Nineteenth-Century Catalan Legal School), Ius Fugit 15 (2007-2008), p. 513-536.

Vicens i Vives, Jaume (1958). Industrials i polítics (segle XIX), (Men of Industry and Politicians (19th Century)), in Història de Catalunya (History of Catalo-nia), Volume 11, Barcelona: Editorial Vicens Vives.

Vilajosana Rubio, Josep Maria (2011). Vida i pensament de Ramon Martí d’Eixa-là (Life and Thought of Ramon Martí d’Eixalà), Lleida: Pagès Editors.

Whitman, James Q. (1990). The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Roman-tic Era: Historical Visions and Legal Change, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Translation from Catalan by Julie Wark

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article

nglish liberalism in Catalonia at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Manuel Casamada i Comella1

Ignasi Roviró Alemanyfaculty of Philosophy, ramon llull university C/ Diputació, 231. 08007 [email protected]

abstractAt the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literati and writers of the Spanish capital were divided in conservative and progressive factions and this ideological po-larization was reflected in the literature. While the conservatives adopted the French aesthete Charles Batteux’s Principes de la littérature (1774), the more progressive think-ers modelled their production on Scottish minister Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Their use of Blair’s treatise reflects one way in which liberal English thought was being introduced in Spain and it also helped to more widely disseminate the ideas contained in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), a work of particular interest because it re-examined what had hitherto been regarded as two inseparable con-cepts. In Catalonia, Hugh Blair’s influence is seen in the writings of the liberal friar Manuel Casamada (1772–1841) and in the unpublished speech Casamada delivered at the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona in 1837.

key wordsHugh Blair, Manuel Casamada, the beautiful, the sublime, Catalan aesthetics.

E

1

In the period under discussion, the ideas of the English Enlightenment were gradually gaining ground in Europe. In the art of discourse and in literary theory, this expansion was visible in the presence of translations of certain Eng-

1 This article forms part of the research project “L’escola estètica catalana y sus aportaciones a la estética española (1800–1936)” (‘The Catalan school of aesthetics and its contributions to Span-ish aesthetics’), conducted at the Faculty of Philosophy, Ramon Llull University, and financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, FFI2009-07158. I would like to thank Professor Xavier Serra Labrado for his reading of the original and his intelligent suggestions.

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IGnasI roVIró aleMany

lish works and in the active role these new ideas played in the struggle between two camps of thought: one that recognized tradition and one that had become uneasy with the tenets of scholasticism. Already in the eighteenth century, there were notable tensions in Spain between these two groups, with the scholastics defending a traditional orthodoxy and the liberal thinkers recognizing in the winds of social change the need for a new approach to rhetoric and literature. In the humanities, four central figures of the age who were especially notable for their balance of tradition with the new ideas were Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Gregori Mayans, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Antoni de Campmany.

By and large, however, the textbooks on rhetoric and literature circulat-ing in Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century reveal the presence of an unresolved conflict. Choosing one textbook over another also meant choosing the school of thought behind it, embracing that school’s ideas on literary theory and flying its particular ideological and political flag. With regard to the books themselves, Don Paul Abbott has observed2 that Jovellanos’s Curso de humanidades castellanas (‘Course in Castilian humanities’) –which includes “Lecciones de Retórica y Poética” (‘Lectures in Rhetoric and Poetics’)– is the first Spanish work to reveal the influence of the Scottish minister and public speaker Hugh Blair3. Blair’s Lec-tures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres had been used to educate different generations of writers in the English-speaking world and, through translation, it gained consid-erable influence on writers and thinkers across Europe. The book was published in over one hundred editions and abridgements, and eventually translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian. It became compulsory reading in a number of study programmes, starting with the University of Salamanca follow-ing that institution’s liberal reform in 1807, then in the literature and history pro-grammes of the Royal Studium of St. Isidore of the Imperial College of Madrid4

2 “The influence of Blair’s Lectures in Spain”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric VII, 3, Summer 1989, 275–289. Cf. Don Abbott, “Blair ‘Abroad’”. The European Reception of the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres”, in Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Scottish Rhetoric and its Influences, New Jersey: Hermagoras Press, 1998, p. 67–78.

3 Hugh Blair (1718–1800) is considered to be one of the most important theorists on the art of discourse. His three main works are: A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763); Sermons (5 volumes, 1777–1801); and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Let-tres (1783). The last work, one of the subjects of discussion in this paper, was translated into Spanish in either its full form or abridged versions several times, of which the translation and adaptation by José Luis Munárriz is particularly notable: Lecciones sobre la Retórica y las bellas artes, traducidas y adicionadas a partir del original inglés de Hugh Blair (4 volumes, Madrid: Antonio Cruzado printers, 1798–1801). This translation of Blair’s work was officially recognized and used until the year 1825, when it was replaced by José Gómez Hermosilla’s Arte de hablar en prosa y verso (2 volumes, Madrid: the Royal Press, 1826).

4 José Simón Díaz, Historia del Colegio Imperial de Madrid, Madrid: CSIC, 1959, 2, p.148.

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english liberalism in Catalonia at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Manuel Casamada i Comella

and, in 1820, in the subject of rhetoric recommended by the Spanish government for the teaching of humanities and theology5. Furthermore, the Lectures were also the principle source for two other official works used in the study of the humani-ties: Principios de retórica y poética (‘Principles of rhetoric and poetics’) by Francisco Sánchez Barbero (1805)6, and Arte de hablar en prosa y verso (‘The Art of speech in prose and poetry’) by José Gómez Hermosilla.

Blair against Batteaux

The Spanish translation of Blair’s Lectures by José Luís Munárriz (see Footnote 3 above) was a milestone in Spanish liberal thought7, although it should also be noted that first, Munárriz actually replaced Lectures xiv and xx in Blair’s original with sections on the critical examination of style in Cervantes, and that second, he also added a section on epic Castilian poems –the new Lecture xlii– as well as appendices on Spanish literature.

Checa8 proposes that Munárriz translated Blair on Jovellanos’s recom-mendation. Either way, the translation became an important book of reference for a group of liberal literati gathered around the central figure of Manuel José Quintana. And in the same period, opposing Blair’s text with the Span-ish translation of Charles Batteux’s Principes de la Littérature, we find a group of

5 This was decreed by Royal Order 20/09/1820. Abbott (op. cit., p. 284) observes that “Arte de hablar [by Gómez Hemosilla] replaced Munarriz’s Lecciones de Blair as the humanities textbook officially approved by the Consejo de Castilla” and adds in a footnote that “at the time of this decision, Hermosilla held the position of Secretario de la Inspección General de Instrucción Pública.” In Gómez Hermosilla’s text, with an editorial footnote written in 1826, it is explained that by Royal Order 19/12/1825 the work was to be studied by humanities scholars. But even then, Blair’s text continued to be present in the lecture halls and, along with the poetics of Sánchez Barbero, it was even included in Alfredo Adolfo Camus’s Curso elemental de retórica y poética, a textbook recognized by the Council for Public Education and present in the educational programmes for the years 1850 (Gazeta de Madrid, 28/09/1850), 1851 (GdM, 05/09/1851), 1852 (GdM, 19/02/1852), 1854 (GdM, 18/10/1854), 1855 (GdM, 14/10/1855), 1856 (GdM, 18/09/1856), 1861 (GdM, 27/09/1861), 1864 (GdM, 03/09/1864) and finally 1867 (GdM, 16/09/1867).

6 Cf. María José Sánchez de León, “Los principios de Retórica y poética de Francisco Sánchez Barbero en el contexto de la preceptiva de la época”, Lectures from the 10th Congress of the International Association of Hispanists, Barcelona, 1992, vol. 2, p. 1439–1450.

7 Don Paul Abbott, op. cit., p. 287.

8 José Checa Beltran, Razones del buen gusto: poética española del neoclasicismo, Madrid: CSIC, 1998, p.134. Cf. Andrés Soria Olmedo, op. cit., p. 363–368.

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conservative thinkers, championed by Leandro Fernández Moratín9. The lit-erature shows that there was a long history of enmity between the two groups and that their exchanges were fierce and unforgiving – something intimated, for example, in the words of Moratín’s friend Juan Tineo Rodríguez when he describes Munárriz’s translation as “a classic work of the new school written according to the new poetic doctrine of the andreses, which shows just how awful the translation is”10.

In Recuerdos de un anciano (‘Memoirs of an old man’), Antonio Alcalá Galiano remembers the antagonism that existed between these two groups in the following words: “Around the time of 1806, literature in Madrid was divided in what were practically two opposing military camps [...]. One received the gov-ernment’s patronage or, more properly speaking, was ruled by the Prince of the Peace11 backed by a series of men – military officers, in effect – who had declared their undying allegiance to him. The main figure here was Leandro Fernández Moratín, distinguished as a comic poet if not as a man of creative talent or fervour [...], an outspoken critic of liberalism who enjoyed close ties with those in author-ity, even with the authorities of that period [...]. The opposing camp contained men who had already made a name for themselves [...]. They took the ideas of the eighteenth-century French philosophers and of the revolution of those people who were our neighbours [...]. In literature, the classicism of the men in this sec-ond camp was less pure than the classicism of their adversaries and while those in the first remained loyal to the orthodoxy of Boileau and Racine, the others allied themselves to the semi-heretics of the days of Voltaire. Whether or not he was ac-tually credited with it, the driving force in this second literary camp was Manuel José Quintana. [...] Both bands defended a kind of bible of their faith, or to be more precise, a book that declared their doctrines and offered satisfaction in their application. Moratín’s camp took Batteux’s literary principles while Quintana’s took the Scotsman Hugh Blair’s lectures on rhetoric and poetics.”12

9 For further details and an analysis of the translation, see Inmaculada Urzinqui, “Batteu es-pañol” in Francisco Lafarga (ed.), Imágenes de la Francia en las letras hispánicas, Barcelona: PPU, 1989.

10 The editor of Juicio Crítico de los principales poetas españoles de la última era. Obra póstuma de Don José Gómez Hermosila a que saca luz Don Vicente Salvá. Librería de Mallen y sobrinos (València, 1840, vol. 1) attaches a foreword written by Juan Timeo to the selection of Juan Meléndez Valdés’s poems. The citation comes from that foreword (page 184).

11 The title given to the statesman Manuel Godoy for having negotiated the Peace of Basel with France in 1795.

12 Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Recuerdos de un anciano, Madrid: Imprenta Central, 1878, p. 63–67. Alcalá returns to this subject in the book Historia de la literatura española, francesa, inglesa e ital-

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As Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo has observed, in many ways the di-visions described above were not limited to Madrid but extended across the Spanish state. This, he says, “would explain the curious fact that all those in-dividual voices in Spain that called for greater breadth and elevation in poetic thought and greater freedom in lyrical form also happened to be outspoken defenders of Blair – men like Cienfuegos, Quintana or, to some extent, Lista”13. But what of Catalonia? It might be argued that there is still no research to sug-gest that such ideological divisions were experienced as fiercely in Catalonia as they were in Madrid, and there are certainly few studies on Blair’s influence in Catalonia or the use of his ideas there for ideological ends. But what we do have is one figure whose work is clearly representative of Blair’s presence in Barcelona, and that is Manuel Casamada i Comella.

Manuel Casamada i Comella

Manuel Casamada was born in Barcelona on 9 September 177214. His family was well-to-do and at the age of fifteen Casamada entered Barcelona’s School

iana en el siglo xviii. Lecciones pronunciadas en el Ateneo de Madrid, Madrid: Printing Press of the Literary and Typographic Society, 1845, p. 436–465.

13 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de las ideas estéticas en España, Madrid: CSIC, 1994, vol. 1, p. 1160. Pages earlier, he had observed that “the group which was led by Quintana and Cienfuegos and which represented the vanguard of the Salamanca School and its powerful encyclopedic and revolutionary spirit adopted Blair’s Lectures, in the supplementary texts of which Quintana, Cienfuegos, Sánchez Barbero and others had participated. In a spirit of antagonism, Quintana’s adversaries led by Moratín the son supported the unlucky translator of Batteux, although their support amounted to nothing more than their criticisms of the Blair translation, which indeed fully deserved such treatment; in fact both translations did, Batteux’s like Blair’s being awful examples in a century of bad translations.” (Ibidem, p. 1159).

14 For a biography of Casamada, see Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Europeo-Americana, vol. xii, published by Espasa-Calpe, Madrid. Josep Rafel Carreras Bullbena, “Estudis biogràfichs d’alguns benemèrits patricis que ilustren aquesta Academia”, Bulletin of the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona 13 (1928), No. 100–101, p. 377–379. Juan Corominas, Suplemento a las Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalanes, y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña, que en 1836 publicó el excmo. e ilmo. Señor Don Felix Torres Amat... Burgos: Araniz Printers, 1849, p. 73. Guillem Díaz-Plaja, “Una cátedra de retòrica, 1822–1835”, Bulletin of the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona, 1962. Faustino D. Gazulla, “Los mercedarios en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona”, Bulletin of the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona 14 (1930), No. 103, p. 125. José Antonio Garí y Siumell, Biblioteca mercedaria, o sea escritores de la celeste, real y militar orden de la merced, redención de cautivos, Barcelona: Imprenta de los herederos de la viuda Pla, 1875, p. 59–60. Antonio Elias de Molins, Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de escritores y artistas catalana del siglo xix, Barcelona, 1889. Alfredo Sáez-Rico, La educación general en Cataluña durante el trienio constitucional, Barce-lona: Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, University of Barcelona, 1973, p. 131–136. Félix Torres

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and Convent of St. Peter Nolasco of the Order of Mercedarians15, where he studied and was ordained a priest. During the years 1792–1795, the subjects he studied are listed as Principles of religion, Theological institutions, Writing, Morality, and Biblical canon, and in 1798 he obtained his doctorate in theol-ogy. The record of Casamada’s role as rhetor or mediator in a theological debate between two Mercedarian students in 179916 shows that in this year he lived in the Convent of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy in the city of Vic. He probably continued living there until the invasion of Vic by the French army in 1808, holding the position of convent administrator, and he is also recorded as having been a member of the administrative board responsible for the city’s defence17. In later years, Casamada was also regent of studies of his old school, St. Peter Nolasco of Barcelona, and as the literature shows, he was also its rector in 1815. He acted as synodal examiner of Girona and general director of stud-ies of the Order of the Mercedarians for Catalonia. On 30 March 1815, he was appointed to the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona.

On 25 October 1820, Ferdinand VII of Spain ratified by royal decree the ecclesiastical reform law which shut down monasteries, reduced the num-ber of convents of male orders and forbade further ordinations to the priest-hood. Articles 13, 14 and 15 of the decree encouraged the secularization of the regular clergy18. Four months after it came into force, on 16 February 1821,

Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalanes, y dar alguna idea de la literatura de Cataluña, Barcelona: J. Verdaguer Press, 1836, p. 166.

15 The School was open from 1642 to 1827 and was located at the bottom of Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, the Rambles, near Ste. Monica. When Casamada became its regent, at the end of the Peninsular War of 1808–1814 (the Guerra del Francès), it had been occupied by the army. Between 1820 and 1823, when the School was also a convent, it was used by the police as a military barracks (as it had been at the beginning of 1809). Cf. Cayetano Barraquer Ro-viralta, Las casas de religiosos en Cataluña durante el primer tercio del siglo xix, Barcelona: F.J. Altés y Alabat Press, 1906, vol II, p. 131–134. For the School’s exact location, see www.monestirs.cat/monst/bcn/bn02nola.htm (25/08/2011).

16 Sacrae religionis dogmata questionibus scolasticis ac historicis adornata quae publicae exponunt arenae Fr. Cosmas Lupresti et Bruguera et Fr. Petrus Nolasco Jaques et Artigas reg. Ac milit. Ord. B. M. De Mercede redeptionis captivorum, medius inter ipsos erit P. Fr. Emmanuel Casamada et Comellas in praedicto Ordine Sacrae Theologiae Lector. Circo locum parabit reg. Vicen. Templum S. Eulaliae V. et M. die II Junii anni a nat. Domini MDCCXCIX... Vici in offic. Mariae Dorca Viudae, eam regente Joanne Dorca.

17 Miquel Furriols, “La junta corregimental de Vich en la guerra de la independencia”, Ausa 2 (1955), No. 12, p. 67–79. Id, “Els patriotes vigatans durant la guerra napoleònica” Ausa 3 (1963), No. 44, p. 374–376. Maties Ramisa i Verdaguer, “Aspectes de la guerra del francès a Vic (1808–1814)”, Ausa 11 (1984), No. 110–111, p. 239–249.

18 Gazeta del Gobierno, No. 123, of 29/10/1820, p. 544. Article 14 of the Decree: “When it so deems, the Nation shall bestow upon all those clerics ordained in sacris who determine to

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Manuel Casamada presented to Bishop of Barcelona Pau Sichar his request to leave the Order of Mercedarians. The bishop approved this request five days later and it was made effective on 16 April 1821. Casamada left the Order and, as a secular priest, came under the authority of the diocese.

During the three years of liberal Spanish government known as the Liberal Triennium (1820–1823), Casamada was one of the members of faculty who participated in the first attempt to restore the institution of the University of Barcelona. At this time he was teaching the subject of Literature and History, which was financed by the city council. He then went on to teach as profes-sor at the Theological College of Barcelona where, after examinations and the validation of the studies he had completed at St. Peter Nolasco, he received on 3 May 1823 his licentia in Theology and, on 19 June, his doctoral degree19. After Ferdinand’s absolute power had been reinstated, Casamada was appointed substitute Chair of Theology at the University of Barcelona, which meant that he could lecture but only if the faculty decided that a sufficient number of stu-dents had enrolled20. The documents testifying to this condition of employment would suggest that for ideological reasons certain decisions had been made at a higher level and behind the scenes to hold Casamada back from full profes-sional activity: at the beginning of January 1839 he asked the University for the status normally reserved for tenured faculty, which would allow him the right to vote in the faculty senate; but just before the end of the same month and even though they praised his teaching ability, the authorities denied him this status, first with the argument that faculty who had come to Barcelona from the defunct University of Cervera and from the Estudis Generals of Barcelona had priority in making such requests and second, with the observation that his subject, theology, was not even one of the subjects in the curricula of those institutions21. At the same time, Casamada taught Latin language and culture at

leave their religious order the sum of 100 ducats, which these persons shall enjoy until the moment they obtain some other form of clerical recompense or income by which to sub-sist.”

19 The source is transcribed at Antonio Palomeque Torres, El trienio constitucional en Barcelona y la instauración de la Universidad de 2ª i 3ª enseñanza, Barcelona: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, 1970, p. 199 and 202, respectively.

20 An internal report of the University from November 1837 records the information thus: “Only five students are enrolled in the subject of Theology and we shall therefore only need one professor; however, when considered convenient, Don Manuel Casamada shall teach on a temporary basis …” Document transcribed in Antonio Palomeque Torres, Los estudios universitarios en Cataluña bajo la reacción absoltista y el triumfo liberal hasta la reforma de Pidal (1824–1845), Barcelona: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, 1974, p. 261.

21 Antonio Palomeque Torres, Los estudios universitarios en Cataluña... p. 393–399.

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the Josep Carreras School of Barcelona22. On 20 January 1838, at the age of 66, he was admitted as a student to the Faculty of Law and began studies in law, although there is no record of him having completed a law degree.

Casamada was a liberal friar. As the titles and content of some of his sermons indicate, he defended liberal thought, supported his queen, condemned absolutist oppression and the French occupation and stood by the Constitution23. He took part in novenas conducted exclusively by liberal priests24. He was of-ficially assigned the task of writing and delivering a sermon for Barcelona’s con-stitutional city council on 9 September 1822, which celebrated the failure of the Royal Guard to overthrow the Constitution in Madrid25. He gave a public address

22 “[Manuel] Milá [i Fontanals] was taken by his father to the school of Don José Carreras, which was at that time a primary school, recently opened in this city (...) Together there we studied two years of Latin as the pupils of Don Manuel Casamada, a cleric who had left his Order and a man who treated us all and especially Milá with the personable kindness of a father.” Joaquim Rubió i Ors, Noticia de la vida y escritos de D. Manuel Milá y Fontanals, Barce-lona: Jaime Jepús Roviralta, 1887, p. 10–11.

23 Against those who wished to abolish the Constitution of the Cadiz Cortes and in his sermon of 1820 Tributo de gratitud á las víctimas del Dos de Mayo de 1808... (‘In Gratitude to the Victims of the Second of May of 1808...’), Casamada wrote: “You wretched men who, bound in slav-ery or in selfishness, thus speak so foolishly against the Holy Word; you who forswear sacred religion were the murderers of Lacy, Porlier, Mina and their kind; you who hoodwinked the unsuspecting Ferdinand and placed your own convenience before the common good, up and be gone from our lives… But reflect before this and take care not to carry with you the contemptible legacy of your ignorance. Know first that the beautiful articles of our wise Constitution were drawn from the ancient beginnings of our legislation; that they embrace the precepts and discipline of the Church and observe the spirit of our Monarchy in its Catholic and political essence. Know, and let it be known across the Nation and the world beyond, that the Cortes did nothing more than uncover from the dust and ruins those same laws that in centuries past led Spain to the height of its glory and splendour.” (p. 17)

24 Gayetà Barraquer records this note written by Fray Francesc Pi, Father Superior of the Con-vent of Ste. Clare of Barcelona: “In the year 1822: the novena held by some liberal devotees for consecration to Our Lady of the Rosary in her church of Ste. Catherine of the Domini-can Fathers in order to ensure that our constitutional arms might serve the purpose for which they were best intended.” Cayetano Barraquer Roviralta, Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo xix, Barcelona: Francisco J. Altés y Alabat Press, 1915, vol 1, p. 960–961.

25 In the sermon El imperio de las leyes sostenido y afianzado por las víctimas del 7 de julio de 1823 en Madrid; elogio fúnebre, que en las solemnes ecsequias celebradas por el escelentísimo ayuntami-ento constitucional de Barcelona el dia 29 de Agosto de 1822 dijo (...) Manuel Casamada… (‘The Kingdom of Laws Sustained and Defended by the Victims of the Seventh of July of 1823 in Madrid: Funeral elegy delivered by [...] Manuel Casamada on the solemn occasion of the order of Christian funerals celebrated by the Most Excellent Constitutional City Council of Barcelona on the 29 of August of 1822...’), Casamada wrote as follows: “What a substantial and striking contrast can be found between the behaviour of the Spanish people and the be-haviour of those vile agents of despotism! The former display constancy and suffering in their readiness to shed blood to defend the laws of their homeland, and are thus endowed with a

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supporting the restoration of the Constitution of 181226; and on occasions, he even assumed responsibilities of a political nature27. As a member of the reading room the Gabinet de Lectura de Barcelona and together with Gabinet associates Al-bert Pujol and Eudald Jaumeandre, Casamada defended what might be described as a liberal form of moderantismo, the Spanish movement that commanded a cer-tain influence in Barcelona during the Liberal Triennium, most effectively from the Gabinet itself. Casamada also joined ranks with Bonaventura Carles Aribau to write the opinions of this circle of thinkers in the newspaper Diario de la ciudad de Barcelona o sea El Eco de la ley28. And there are further examples of his liberal-ism. Dr Roca Vernet describes Casamada’s involvement in two different secret societies which flourished during the Liberal Triennium, the Society of the Ring and the Society of the Comuneros, and he also observes Casamada’s activity in the Gabinet, his work as the director of the Civic School of Barcelona (see Footnote 27 above) and his presence at the meetings of the Tertúlia Patriòtica de Lacy, a gathering of thinkers dedicated to the discussion of ideas, named in honour of the Spanish war hero Luis Roberto de Lacy and an important source of radical political thought in Barcelona during this period29.

heroic nature quite uncommon in the annals of history; the latter, meanwhile, are capable of nothing but the ferocious and bloodthirsty persecution of crimes and misdemeanours, which they conduct with unparalleled shamelessness.” (p. 11)

26 Jordi Roca Vernet, “La sociabilidad del trienio liberal en Barcelona: foros de educación políti-ca y de adoctrinamiento constitucional”, in Marieta Cantos Casenave (ed.), Redes y espacios de opinión pública: de la ilustración al Romanticismo: Cádiz, América y Europa ante la modernidad, Cadiz: University of Cadiz – Alienta, 2006: “The Dramatic Society was a company of actors who performed on the stages of Barcelona. In April 1820, they participated in the celebra-tion of the restoration of the Constitution of 1812 by organizing a formal thanksgiving ceremony, to which they invited Prior Manuel Casamada, supporter of the liberal cause, to deliver a sermon. Months later, the Society also financed the publication of this sermon. In it, Casamada appealed to the King’s good sense to respect the country’s constitutional laws as the fundamental political means by which the rights of men and their happiness might be protected. And he called upon the Spanish people to practise virtue, the quality he believed should characterize the new social order.” (p. 489–490)

27 “[Casamada] was appointed head of the Civic School of Barcelona [the charitable institution dedicated to the education of the poor, of the blind and of the deaf and dumb] to foil any attempt at re-establishing that space of political indoctrination of the militia”. Jordi Roca Ver-net, Política, liberalisme i revolució. Barcelona, 1820–1823. Doctoral thesis, Autonomous Univer-sity of Barcelona (UAB), 2007, p. 162. Note that Dr Roca Vernet’s thesis provides invaluable research on the various events that took place in during the period of the Liberal Triennium and is especially important in its examination of secret societies and civic movements.

28 The newspaper was first published on 1 May 1822. After the events of September of that year the newspaper adopted a more radical position and Casamada stopped contributing to it, as did Aribau.

29 Cf. Jordi Roca Vernet, Política, liberalisme i revolució. Barcelona, 1820–1823, UAB thesis, 2007.

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In the words of Gaspar Feliu, at the height of the period in which liberal thought dominated public activity Casamada became “the most sought after preacher for sermons containing political comment”30 and his militan-cy led to confrontations with other clerics. “Before arms were actually taken up,” Feliu continues, “the real battlefields were the pulpits and printing houses. The first attack was launched by Father Aragonès [...] when on one occasion he took from the Diario de Barcelona the example of two sermons delivered the day before and heavily criticized these (one was certainly Father Manuel Casamada’s)”31. Another religious figure involved in the controversies was the Servite friar Martí Estaper, arrested at the foot of his own pulpit and sent into exile for six years for the gravity of his attacks against the Constitution. During the last months of 1822, the parishes of Barcelona were subject to administra-tive reorganization and, as Feliu observes, passed into the hands of those lay clerics who had declared their allegiance to the liberal regime32. At this point, Casamada was instituted to the parish of the Virgin of Mercy33.

In the years following the Liberal Triennium and at the beginning of what came to be known as the Ominous Decade, Casamada was sentenced by the Bishop of Barcelona to confinement in the Mercedarian convent of St. Raymond Nonnatus, in the Catalan administrative division of Segarra. How-ever, Gaietà Barraquer has observed that Casamada was already back in Barce-lona delivering sermons in 182734, which suggests that if he was actually sent to Segarra, it was not for long.

Casamada was also prominent as an educationalist. On 21 August 1821, a few months after he had left the Order of Mercedarians and was finding ways to perform his new pastoral role, the newspaper the Diario Constitucional, político y mercantil de Barcelona announced the opening of a private humanities school to be directed by him35. Unfortunately, around this time Barcelona also suffered

30 Op. cit., p. 126

31 Op. cit., p. 153

32 Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, La clerecia catalana durant el trienni liberal, Barcelona: IEC, 1972, p. 99–100.

33 Cf. the magnificent study by Joan Barda, L’església de Barcelona en la crisi de l’antic règim (1808–1833), Barcelona: Faculty of Theology of Barcelona / Herder, 1986, p. 121.

34 Op. cit., vol. 1, p. 1033.

35 Pages 3 and 4 of the Madrid newspaper El Universal carried the advertisement and added this sentence: “Make many and varied the means for our learning and liberal ideas shall become a necessity for all those who have the good fortune to belong to this magnanimous nation.” 30/08/1821, p. 931.

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an outbreak of yellow fever, which set back Casamada’s plans. One of the out-break’s victims was Father Joaquim Català, founder of the Civic School of Bar-celona, who died in 1822. In March 1822, the city council appointed Casamada to replace Català36 and he led the institution until its closure – along with many other institutions – at the end of the Liberal Triennium in 1823.

In his later years, Casamada survived thanks to the few university classes he was able to teach and to the money he made from private tuition at the Josep Carreras School. He died in Barcelona on 7 November 1841, leaving the memory of a man who, in the words of Carreras Bullbena, was a “distinguished public speaker, philosophical lecturer and eloquent orator”37.

The works of Manuel Casamada

Casamada’s works can be divided in three kinds of writing and the first of these is the textbook. The full title of his first, published in 1827, was Curso elementar [sic] de elocuencia por D[on] M[anuel] C[asamada] y C[omella] P[rebero] 38 (‘Elementary course in eloquence by D[on] M[anuel] C[asamada] y C[omella] P[rebero]’), the introduction to which acknowledges use of the textbooks writ-ten by Hugh Blair, Antoni de Campmany and Francisco Sánchez, even while it also proposes that these works have no adequate teaching methodology for the youngest students. To set this straight, Casamada organizes his own book in the form of dialogues between a teacher and a disciple, where the disciple asks and the teacher answers in language that remains clear to the reader, even if that clarity sometimes oversimplifies the subject matter. As for the subject mat-ter, this first book is a summary of the essential ingredients in rhetoric and the discursive arts, accompanied by practical considerations and glosses on history.

In 1828, Casamada published his second textbook, Curso elementar [sic] de poesía por D[on] M[anuel] C[asamada] y C[omella] P[rebero] 39 (‘Elementary

36 Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona. City Council of the House of Bourbon, Book of Agreements, 2, 2 March 1822, f. 484. Casamada accepts the position of Academy director. Jordi Roca Vernet writes as follows: “The city council used the Academy to persuade the militant population to adopt a moderate interpretation of the Constitution of 1812. To all purposes and effects, it used the Academy to direct and shape the manner in which Barce-lona’s militant front interpreted the new political system”, Política, liberalisme i revolució. p.161.

37 Josep Rafel Carreras Bullbena, Estudis biogràfichs..., 2, p. 379.

38 Barcelona: José Torner Press, 1827, 248 p.

39 Barcelona: José Torner Press 1828. 386 p.

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course in poetry by D[on] M[anuel] C[asamada] y C[omella] P[rebero]’), which adopted the format of the previous book, using dialogues to illustrate the sub-jects addressed. Again, an introductory note describes the shortcomings of the various books already available in this subject area, including those of Juan Díaz Rengifo, Francisco Masdeu, Hugh Blair and Francisco Sánchez. And finally in this category, we have Casamada’s third textbook, Curso de gramática latina: según el método de las gramáticas de las lenguas vivas40 (‘Course in Latin grammar using the method of grammars addressing living languages’).

The second kind of writing that Casamada produced was the sermon. This is where his early eighteenth-century moderantismo and commitment to the liberal cause in often difficult times become most evident. In the literature, the full titles of four such texts are recorded as follows:

the sermon of 1815 titled Barcelona victoriosa por su fidelidad contra los enemigos extrangeros y por su lealtad contra los traidores domésticos: discurso que en 28 de mayo de 1815, primer aniversario y cumpleaños de su libertad, dixo en la iglesia de PP. carmelitas descalzos el R.P. Fr. Manuel de Casamada (‘Barcelona Victorious in the Integrity of its Resistance to Enemies from Abroad and Traitors at Home: Sermon delivered by the Reverend Father Fray Manuel de Casamada on the 28 of May 1815 in the Church of the Discalced Carmelite Fathers, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the city’s freedom’);

the sermon of 1820 (see Footnote 23 above) titled Tributo de gratitud a las víctimas del Dos de Mayo de 1808 cuya sangre sentó la primera piedra del santu-ario de nuestra independencia, y cuyas cenizas levantaron las paredes del santuario de nuestra libertad. Elogio fúnebre que en el solemne aniversario decretado por las Cortes generales y extraordinarias del reino dixo la santa Iglesia de Barcelona. Por el encargo del excelentísimo Ayuntamiento Constitucional. El R. P. Fr. Manuel Casamada Mer-cenario, maestro en sagrada teología, director de estudios en la provincia de Cataluña y examinados sinodal del obispo de Gerona (‘In Gratitude to the Victims of the Second of May of 1808, whose Blood Set the First Stone in the Sanctuary of our Independence and whose Ashes Raised the Walls of the Sanctuary of our Freedom: Funeral elegy delivered in the Holy Church of Barcelona by order of the Most Excellent Constitutional City Council and delivered by the Reverend Father Fray Manuel Casamada, Mercedarian, Licenciate in Sacred Theology, Director of Studies of the Province of Catalonia and Synodal Ex-aminer of the Bishop of Girona, on the solemn occasion of the anniversary of the Second of May of 1808 as decreed by the Cortes generales and illustrious figures of the Realm’);

40 Barcelona: Manuel Saurí Press, 1829, vol. I, 323 p.; vol. II, 225 p.

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the sermon of 1820 titled La constitución política de la Monarquía española base de nuestra felicidad, cuando está apoyada y sostenida por las virtudes sociales. Ser-món que en la solemne acción de gracias ofreció al ser supremo la sociedad dramática de la ciudad de Barcelona por el restablecimiento del código fundamental de nuestras leyes dijo en la iglesia de los PP. Agustinos descalzos el 18 de abril de 1820 el R. P. Fr. Manuel Casamada, mercedario, maestro en sagrada teología, director de estudios en la provincia de Cataluña y examinador sinodal del Obispado de Gerona. Sale a la luz a espensas de la misma sociedad dramática41 (‘The Political Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy, the Basis of our Wellbeing when Supported and Sustained by Social Virtues: Sermon delivered by the Reverend Father Fray Manuel Casamada, Merce-darian, Licenciate in Sacred Theology, Director of Studies of the Province of Catalonia and Synodal Examiner of the Bishop of Girona, on the 18 of April of 1820 in the Church of the Discalced Augustinian Fathers, on the solemn occa-sion of the thanksgiving ceremony offered to the Lord by the Dramatic Society of the City of Barcelona to celebrate the restoration of the basic code of our laws and paid for by the same Society’);

and finally, the sermon of 1822 (delivered during what was still the period of the Liberal Triennium) (see Footnote 25 above) titled El imperio de las leyes sostenido y afianzado por las víctimas del 7 de julio de 1823 en Madrid; elogio

41 On 19 April, the day after Casamada delivered his sermon, the newspaper the Diario constitu-cional de Barcelona carried the following text: “Let us learn from Father Manuel de Casamada, who yesterday caused us to shed so many sweet tears; let us learn from those meritorious clergymen who honour the province of Catalonia…”, p. 147. And on 20 April, the same newspaper wrote this of Casamada’s sermon: “The church event organized the day before yesterday by the members of the Dramatic Society of this city was especially distinguished by the Society’s felicitous choice of orator. Father Casamada (Mercedarian) has truly honoured the Church, his order and the Spanish nation with the patriotic sermon that he delivered. His brilliant ideas, his defence of those ideas and the passion of his persuasive style all testify to this holy minister’s knowledge of the intimate union between evangelical truths and the politics of human happiness. He clearly demonstrated that the Constitution is the organ that can assure our nation this happiness and that we are all equally bound to defend and uphold it, and his words to this effect were so well delivered that they should be printed for all and one to see. Praise to this noble cleric! The example he has set will surely be a blessing to us all and convinces us that within our regular clergy there are as many noble-minded Spanish patriots as there are in any other walk of life. The success of his sermon clearly proves that our constitutional system can be consolidated as much from the pulpit as from beyond it and that the church is a force of strength to be used. The good among us will always cherish Father Casamada and, in the noble undertaking of their thanksgiving to the Lord, the Dramatic Society could not have chosen a more dignified, passionate or articulate representative. His modesty will bear out our tribute to his talents and to his patriotic fervour and the citizens who gave us the opportunity and pleasure of hearing him will also accept this expression of our recognition.” (p. 152). One month later, in its books section, the newspaper the Diario constitucional, político y mercantil de Barcelona announced Casamada’s sermon (cf. the edition of 08/05/1820, p. 4)

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fúnebre, que en las solemnes ecsequias celebradas por el escelentísimo ayuntamiento consti-tucional de Barcelona el dia 29 de Agosto de 1822, dijo en la Santa Iglesia Don Mauel Casamada, Presbítero, Ecsaminador sinodal del Obispado de Gerona y Director de la Academia Cívica y Escuelas reunidas de Sordo-mudos y ciegos instaladas en esta ciudad. Sale a lux por disposición del mismo Escelentísimo Ayuntamiento42 (‘The Kingdom of Laws Sustained and Defended by the Victims of the Seventh of July of 1823 in Madrid: Funeral elegy delivered by Don Manuel Casamada, Presbyter, Synodal Examiner of the Bishop of Girona and Director of the Civic School and of associated Schools of this city for the deaf and dumb and for the blind, on the solemn occasion of the order of Christian funerals celebrated and hosted in the Holy Church by the Most Excellent Constitutional City Council of Barcelona on the 29 of August of 1822’).

Finally we move to the third category of Casamada’s literary activity, his public speeches. These are ideologically and politically oriented, written to be delivered in the gatherings like the Tertúlia Patriòtica de Lacy, or else literary or academic, intended for the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona.

Of the first kind, an example is cited by Joaquín de Alcántara in his col-umn of the newspaper the Diario Constitucional, político y mercantil de Barcelona, which describes and then quotes from a speech Casamada gave at the Tertúlia on 22 November 1822. De Alcámtara speaks thus: “The eloquent speech de-livered at the lectern by lay cleric Casamada negotiated the difficult task of

42 In its edition of 29 August 1822, on the same day the sermon was to be delivered, the Diario constitucional, político y mercantil de Barcelona carried the following text: “With this intention and at ten o`clock in the morning of this day, the procession shall begin at the Town Hall, led by the Marine Guard, Presiding Justices, District Overseers and Superintendents and other such public authorities who, together with members of the Barcelona Provincial Council, shall proceed directly to the Cathedral to celebrate a solemn funeral mass and hear the sermon of Presbyter Don Manuel Casamada. The people shall then leave the Cathedral and proceed by way of Calle del Obispo, Plaza de S. Jaime, and the streets Call, den Aviñó and Ancha, walking across the Plaza S. Francisco to the sea wall where, as is customary on this day, the military units gathered shall fire a gun salute. The authorities shall inspect the units and then ascend to the balcony of the Casa Lonja to observe the battalion standing to attention before the Commemorative Stone of the Constitution…” (p. 3–4). Four days later (02-09-1822), the same newspaper carried a more detailed report on the event, which included this section: “Though the ideas were not new, the depiction of the crowds on the cenotaph in the Holy Church was fitting: our only reservation is that the detail of the four women mourners did not provide the striking effect that might have been achieved by other images – military tro-phies, for example, symmetrically arranged and ordered by a series of laurel wreaths, or other such representations of victory. For it is true that tributes to heroic events, glorious deaths or sacrifices made for one’s country should not portray gloomy figures or emblems that prompt melancholy in the observer, but should seek instead to inspire his passion and make him wish to emulate what he sees. This, certainly, was the effect of the inscriptions on the four sides of the cenotaph and of the patriotic Christian speech that the presbyter Don Manuel Casamada delivered with such fierce love for his country.” (p. 2)

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explaining the origins of despotism. Casamada started by examining the sover-eign power which had belonged to the common people in earlier periods of our history but which had been gradually taken from us. He then looked back at the War of Independence to consider examples and show how, through the war, the Spanish people had recovered their sovereignty by instituting a par-ticular kind of constitution: a constitution which, to some degree, drew from the ancient laws of Aragon the maxim that kings cannot make countries but countries can make kings. ‘In 1814,’ Casamada said, ‘our nation lost the rights we had shed blood for, but now that the invincible sword of [Rafael del] Riego has recovered these rights, they will never be lost again. They will give Europe its freedom and something greater still: for if we stand firm, not one of all the tyrants in the world will be able to wrest those rights from our hands – let alone a man like the Baron of Eroles, whose heart is as crooked as the eyes on his face and whose followers have been tricked. Not ever, if we decide together as Spaniards that our choice is this: Constitution or Death.’ And Casamada then concluded his speech wishing long life to the Constitution, the Cortes and the King by the Constitution, and was embraced by the master of ceremonies, who added his own ‘And long live the good ministers of the Church’.”43

The foremost example of Casamada’s literary and academic speeches is the Disertación leída en la Academia de Buenas Letras en la sesión del día 31 de Marzo de 1837 (Speech read at the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres in its session of 31 of March of 1837’), which addressed the differences between the notions of the beautiful and the sublime. One year later, on 18 November 1838, Casamada delivered another important speech, the Examen crítico de las dos gramáticas castel-lanas publicadas por Don Vicente Salvá y Don José Maria Moralejo44 (‘Critical exami-nation of the Castilian grammars published by Don Vicente Salvá and by Don José Maria Moralejo); but it is the speech of 1837 which we shall consider here.

As observed in the abstract of this article, Casamada’s choice of subject when he wrote on the difference between the beautiful and the sublime was an indication of the influence that English liberalism had brought to bear on Cata-lan thought in this period, especially the works by Hugh Blair and Edmund Burke. Their reception took place on what were essentially preceptive terms – this much is evident in Casamada’s textbooks on eloquence and poetry – and for this reason, the speech of 1837 distinguishes between the literary sublime and the experiential sublime. But it’s also true that the sublime in preceptive

43 Edition of 25 November 1822, p. 3–4.

44 Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona. Minutes of the Meetings of the Royal Acad-emy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona. Book 2.

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or instructional contexts in Spain already had a long history of its own, having originated in Longinus’ On the Sublime, and so why is it, exactly, that Casamada’s speech of 1837 can be identified as an example of the English model of aesthet-ics, or at least of its reception?

At one level, it’s because he proposes that, in absolute terms, the sub-lime excludes the beautiful. This at least shows the break he has made, because in models of aesthetics in Spain –especially in neoclassical thought which in French and Spanish aesthetics dominated both poetics and literary instruction– a thread of continuity between the sublime and the beautiful had always been maintained and it was in fact that thread which eventually manifested itself in style. Indeed, in the years under discussion the first textbook on aesthetics given to Spanish university students continued to maintain this thread, its author Milà i Fontanals insisting that “notwithstanding the differences that have been established between what is in essence either beautiful or sublime, we may still consider the two as differing degrees of beauty”45. But what is interesting about Casamada’s break and the speech that describes it is that he does this nine years before Milà’s defence of tradition and textbook.

Milà’s textbook was published in 1849 but, as we know, Casamada`s speech countering traditional ideas was delivered in 1837. And to the question, more properly speaking, of whether his alternative model was Blair and Burke, the literature makes it clear that this is so46. When Casamada wrote his speech, he had both men’s works in front of him and sometimes followed them so closely that his own text exactly reproduced their examples, words and ideas. When there was disagreement between the two, he generally followed Blair, although he occasionally tried a different tack. A good example here is in his treatment of the concept of terror, closely bound to this question of breaking the thread of continuity between the beautiful and the sublime. Edmund Burke was the first writer to revolutionize European aesthetics by taking the sublime –a major subject of eighteenth-century debate– and making it inseparable from terror. Hugh Blair adopted Burke’s position to a point but proposed that the sublime might in fact be more totally ruled by other principles and attained by other means than terror; that it might be more properly said to derive from power and force, given that the exertion of power and force are always pres-ent in any experience we might have of the sublime, while terror is present in

45 M[anuel] M[ilà i Fontanals], Manual de Estética, Barcelona: Pons Press, 1848, p. 18.

46 For further details, see Baldine Saint Girons, Le sublime, Desjonqueres, 2005. The author pro-poses that there have been four principle paradigms in the history of the literary sublime, as defined by Longinus, Vico, Burke and Kant, and she gives slightly more importance to the fact that Casamada’s model broke with the previously established definition.

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some but not in all. In his speech, feeling himself to be within Burke’s circle of ideas, Casamada accepts Blair’s correction but makes a kind of combination of the two: he decides that terror and force are both prerequisites for attaining the sublime.

Finally with regard to influences, in Blair we can also find the source of the division Casamada makes of the sublime, which he orders in different classes. It is from Blair that he takes the examples of natural landscapes (as so many others also did), the violence of the elements, the strength and power of nature, the terror of sound, the light that blinds our sight, darkness, loneliness, silence, disorder, magnanimity, the moral sublime in acts of heroism and the references to the Book of Habakkuk. On the other hand, his use of the concept of infinitude, his references to Virgil and the examples of Leviathan and Milton’s Satan come from Burke.

Manuel Casamada was aware that any attempt to maintain the tradi-tional link between the beautiful and the sublime would lead him to the con-servatism of neoclassical thought –a position which was still very much alive in the poetics of his time. He knew that politically, this conservatism would only express itself in absolutist and reactionary terms, casting a shadow over the schoolbooks and literary textbooks that were intended to teach writing and the use of words; over books that somehow had to find a way of going on in time and surviving time. In the end, Casamada’s discourse brought Catalan aesthetics one step further than it had previously travelled and placed it at the heart of Europe’s ongoing intellectual debate.

Translation from Catalan by Barnaby Noone

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he influence of French aesthetics on Francesc Mirabent

Jordi Carcasó facultat de filosofia. universitat ramon [email protected]

abstractThe importance of English and Scottish Philosophy for Catalan Philosophy has of-ten been a subject of study, whilst another more powerful influence has very seldom been noted: French Philosophy. Francesc Mirabent’s aesthetics, in particular, are es-tablished in an intense relationship with the professors at the University of Sorbonne, through whom he will be able to penetrate the European debate on aesthetics. We have attempted to briefly determine the thematic links that bond Francesc Mirabent with the principal French aesthetes in the 20th century.

key wordsFrancesc Mirabent, French aesthetics.

T

Francesc de Paula Mirabent i Vilaplana was born on the 21st of Novem-ber, 1888, in Barcelona, into a modest family. Because of that, his youth was marked by his struggles to maintain and improve his family’s financial situa-tion, which led him to create his own company that imported pharmaceutical products.

The initiative he showed in business paralleled his life-long intellectual vocation. In 1907 he began to regularly contribute articles to several Republi-can and liberal newspapers, such as El pueblo, El radical, La unión republicana, El liberal, until 1911 when he started to change genres, abandoning journalism and writing several novels, almost all romances.

In 1916 Mirabent earned his secondary school diploma, allowing him to enter the University of Barcelona, where Jaume Serra Hunter was his main mentor. From that moment on, he began to study the philosophy of com-mon sense, writing his doctoral thesis on the subject of British Aesthetics in the

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Eighteenth Century1. This was also the start of Mirabent’s identification with the Barcelona School, and he began his most productive period as a professor at the University of Barcelona, alongside other professors such as Pere Font i Puig, Joaquim Xirau, the Carreras i Artau brothers, Francesc Gomà...

We have found various links between Francesc Mirabent’s aesthetics and the French aesthetes of the late 19th century and early 20th. Particularly when Doctor Mirabent began to travel more frequently to Paris. On these trips he would meet with the aesthetes at the Sorbonne, who kept him informed on the European aesthetic debate.

Most noteworthy among those French aesthetes were Victor Basch, who was the first Chair in Aesthetics at the Sorbonne, and Charles Lalo, who suceeded him, as well as other professors including Raymond Bayer and Étienne Souriau.

We have divided these links into three points, allowing us to connect these early-20th-century French aesthetes and see how they can form a cohe-sive unit, which could also include Francesc Mirabent himself.

Personal and academic link

There was constant intellectual exchange between Mirabent and these French phi-losophers. In Mirabent’s papers, archived in the library of the University of Barcelona, there are 88 letters of his correspondence with Raymond Bayer and 15 to Charles Lalo. When we take into consideration the possibility that some of the letters have been lost, the obstacles presented by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and World War II, as well as the fact that communication in that period was a slower process, we are looking at a correspondence practically uninterrupted over twenty years.A) Among the papers bequeathed is ample academic documentation on

the various courses in aesthetics given at the Sorbonne, with syllabi, lec-tures and even summaries of books, which were later used by Mirabent as the basis of his classes at the University of Barcelona.

B) In a letter dated 1924, Victor Basch advises Mirabent to continue re-searching the 18th-century British aesthetes, as precursors to Kantian thought. This would prove to be a particularly relevant suggestion, ar-riving as it did in Mirabent’s formative period, and we will see how he follows Basch’s indications closely. In fact, this is the line of investigation that he will follow in his main book: De la Bellesa, published in 19362.

1 Francesc Mirabent. La estética inglesa del siglo XVIII. Barcelona: Editorial Cervantes, 1927.

2 Francesc Mirabent, De la bellesa, Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1936.

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C) In 1927 an article on his book La estética inglesa del siglo XVIII is pub-lished in Paris, in the Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie3, further evidence of not only his contact with the Parisian intelligensia, but even a certain degree of recognition of his work.

D) In 1937, Mirabent presents, at the Ninth International Philosophy Con-ference in Paris, a paper entitled “Les valeurs esthétiques et le jugement du goût”. Shortly afterwards, he assists the 2nd International Aesthetic Conference, also held in Paris, where he speaks on “Vérité et réalité dans l’expérience esthétique”. It is worth noting that he presented his papers in French.

E) Also in 1937, he is appointed a member of the Committee of Inter-national Conferences on Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. It was Charles Lalo and Raymond Bayer themselves who nominated him.

F) In 1948 he was appointed a member of the administrative committee of L’Institut International de Philosophie, with its headquarters in Paris, and the Spanish delegate to the journal Bibliographie de la Philosophie4. He also participates in the 10th International Philosophy Conference in Amster-dam, where he presents the paper “L’Esthétique et l’Humanisme”5.

G) In 1949, he attended the Conference of French-speaking Philosophy Societies in Neuchâtel.

It is interesting that Mirabent attended this Conference, because it means that he was so well-regarded as to be invited just like fellow philosophers working in French.

H) That same year he attended the Goethe Veranstaltungen, which takes place in Frankfurt, as a representative of the Department of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Barcelona.

I) Finally, it is important to remember that he was also a member of the American Society for Aesthetics, with its headquarters in Cleveland (Ohio).

All considered, one is left with the impression that Mirabent, within the realm of aesthetics, ended up taking on more institutional and representational responsibilities outside of Spain than within, and particularly in France.

3 Revue des libres. Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie (1927), p. 465.

4 A journal created by l’Institut International de Philosophie ( I.I.P.) following the Conference devoted to Descartes.

5 Mirabent, F. “La Estética en el X Congreso Internacional de Filosofia”, Estudios Estéticos y otros ensayos filosóficos, Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones científicas. Instituto Luís Vives de Filosofía, 1957, Vol. I, p. 339-348.

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French philosophical influences

Mirabent constantly quoted French authors in his writings. He displayed a thorough understanding of the work of Ribot, Jouffroy, Delacroix, Maine de Biran, etc., and clearly acknowledged the influence of their ideas on him.

For example, Mirabent explicitly continued on the concept of emotion laid out by Ribot:

“We believe emotion,” he wrote, “is an affect belonging to the general classification of sentiment –just like pleasure and pain, fondness and passion, and characterized by a brusque, unexpected and intense psy-chological movement; in short, Ribot’s version”6.

In addition, Ribot was very knowledgeable on the studies of sentiment7 and the philosophers of the Einfühlung8, which Mirabent dealt with extensively in the fourth chapter of his book De la bellesa, entitled “Del sentiment estètic”9.

On the other hand, Mirabent quoted Delacroix’s consideration of senti-ment as being far superior to sensorial pleasure, because it abandons somatism and embraces spiritualism10. He also writes of play as an end in itself11, just as Delacroix had. And later he even publishes an exhaustive study on the author, entitled “Delacroix, o la inquietud de lo estético”12.

From Main de Biran he takes the need to limit sensualism and con-sider the subject a “substantial entity”, instead of seeing it as merely an inter-mediate element between sensation and the metaphysical absolute. He also published a study on this author: “La estética en la metafísica de Maine de Biran”13.

6 Mirabent, F. De la bellesa, p. 136.

7 Theodule Ribot, La Psychologie des Sentiments, París: Libraire Felix Alacan, 1922.

8 Theodule Ribot. La Psychologie allemande contemporaine (1879), París: Ed. L’Harmattan, 2003.

9 F Mirabent. De la bellesa, p. 101.

10 Ibidem., p. 155.

11 Ibidem., p. 112.

12 Mirabent, F. “Delacroix, o la inquietud de lo estético”, Estudios Estéticos y otros ensayos fi-losóficos, Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones científicas. Instituto Luís Vives de Filosofía, 1957, Vol. I, p. 71-77.

13 Mirabent, F. “La estetica en la metafísica de Maine de Biran”, Estudios Estéticos y otros ensayos filosóficos, Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones científicas. Instituto Luís Vives de Filosofía, 1957, Vol. I, p. 221-247.

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One of the most revealing moments, in terms of his intellectual tenden-cies, is when he points out his immediate sources for his theory on “sympathy”. Firstly he mentions Jouffroy, whom he links to Maine de Biran:

“This branch, which was originally presented indifferentiated, as a general attitude of mind, acquires its first differentiation in the work of Jouffroy, a French psychologist from the first third of the 19th century who, in 1826, taught a course in Aesthetics in Paris, in which he stated that the senti-ment of sympathy is the fundamental aesthetic sentiment. Jouffroy is one of the most illustrious men in the school of Royer-Collard and, conse-quently, was influenced by Scottish philosophy, which brings together the investigative value of psychological analysis with the normative value of the spiritualist doctrines from which originate the purest moral essences. Moreover, Jouffroy comes into contact with the metaphysical theory of Maine de Biran, and that reaffirms his spiritualism, which leads him to distinguish between Psychology and Physiology and to state that the self is revealed directly through the activity of consciousness”14.

This spiritualist tendency, widespread in France, will also become one of the characteristics of the aesthetics of Mirabent and, in fact, it will also be common to several members of the Barcelona School.

And, finally, it should be also pointed out that many of the authors quoted by Mirabent –from Descartes15 to Bergson16– belong to the French philosophical tradition.

Thematic Similarities

Earlier, Mirabent studied the aesthetes of Great Britain in the elaboration of his doctoral thesis17. But many French aesthetes had also used the British aesthetes as references in their studies. Thus, the fact that Mirabent began in the field of aesthetics inspired by British philosophy can be considered a characteristic that, instead of separating him, actually brings him closer to a significant group of French aesthetes to which his teachers, or the teachers of his teachers, belonged.

14 Mirabent, Francesc. De la bellesa, p. 121.

15 Quoted in De la bellesa up to 9 times. See the index of authors, p. 299.

16 “A propósito de Bergson”, Estudios Estéticos y otros ensayos filosóficos, Barcelona: Consejo Su-perior de Investigaciones científicas. Instituto Luís Vives de Filosofía, 1957, Vol. I, p. 278-287.

17 Mirabent, Francesc. La estética inglesa del siglo XVIII, Barcelona: Editorial Cervantes, 1927.

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Victor Basch undertook the translation of several works by German philosophers on the theories of the Einfühlung, introducing the new trends in German aesthetics into France, allowing Charles Lalo to incorporate them in a broadening of his aesthetic perspective and, as a result, Mirabent was also exposed to them.

We find a concurrence in the explanation of the Einfühlung as identifi-cation, following the guidelines of Volkelt and Lipps, which Basch had contrib-uted before Lalo, and Lalo before Mirabent.

“Lipps –wrote Mirabent– points out two primordial and unyielding elements of the Einfühlung: a) the instinct to imitate foreign movements and attitudes, either of people or objects and b) the innate and recipro-cal connection between states of consciousness and organic modifica-tions. It is, therefore, a link between the classic theory of imitation and the modern theories of emotions, which are significantly influential to the theory of the Einfühlung. Note the fact that Volkelt and Lipps go to lengths to stress the prevalence of emotion over the intellectual mind, and particularly to distinguish Einfühlung from all possible con-fusion with association, representation and with analysis or introspec-tive observation; instead associating it with joy, pleasure, glee, and this leads them to say that ‘beauty is the identification of our life with an object’[...]”18.

Lalo had written:

“Le contenu propre de mon Einfühlung esthétique c’est l’ensemble de mon état intérieur, ou la manière d’être de mon attitude interne, d’où émane chacun des actes de ma volonté et de mon activité. Ou, plus brièvement : il consiste dans la personnalité que je vis dans l’objet perçu avec lequel j’identifie mes états affectifs… Je les vis doublement: en lui, en moi; c’est une identification”19.

And also:

“Une foule d’œuvres de la plus grande valeur ont été consacrées dans les dernières années à l’analyse de cette idée. Les plus importantes sans con-tredit sont la récente Esthétique de Lipps, et le Système de l’Esthétique, de Volkelt”20.

18 Mirabent, F. De la bellesa, p. 123-124.

19 Lalo, Charles. Les sentiments esthétiques. París: Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1910, p. 68.

20 Ibid., p. 54-55.

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Mirabent and Lalo also concur in their criticisms of the lack of clarity in the definition of Einfühlung. It is not enough to specify what it isn’t, nor can we be satisfied with general definitions filled with vagaries, such as the ones offered by Volkelt and Lipps. When we are unable to find positive definitions, ones that are not merely the negation of other terms, the explanation remains incomplete.

On this subject, Mirabent wrote:

“The negative definitions that Volkelt and Lipps give us of the Einfüh-lung (I, it is not association; II, it is not perception; III, it is not intuition; IV, it is not a derivative somatic movement nor a reflex; V, it is not mere imitation or representation) can be understood and even accepted. But the positive definitions are complicated, filled with exceptions and in-terpolations, and inevitably lead to confusion and obscurity”21.

And in Lalo’s Les sentiments esthétiques we find these passages:

“Or, en réalité, il n’y a de valeur esthétique que dans ces touts com-plexes qui engagent toute notre personnalité intime. L’Einfühlung n’est donc pas une association”22.

“Cette imitation intérieure, mais qui ne suppose nul modèle ; -ce sym-bole, mais qui ne représente que celui qui la pense ;- cette extériorisa-tion de notre sensibilité qui crée en nous une sensibilité nouvelle dont nous serions incapables sans elle ; -cette exaltation et cette profondeur de la vie affective qui exclut les plus exaltées et les plus profondes des impulsions sensibles, comme celles de l’instinct sexuel ; -qui se produit même lorsqu’elle est physiologiquement impossible, comme lorsque les hommes sont censés éprouver des sentiments féminins et les femmes des impulsions toutes masculines ; -cette identité enfin dont les deux termes se distinguent et s’opposent à la fois, et qui est si bien réciproque, que dans les résultat el ne doit plus rien rester de propre à chacun deux êtres, bien qu’elle soit l’exaltation suprême de leur individualité, -c’est l’éternel “je ne sais quoi” chargé faute de mieux d’expliquer tous les faits”23.

In the writings of Mirabent there are also numerous quotes from Lalo’s work and direct references to the French author:

21 F. Mirabent De la bellesa, p. 125.

22 Charles Lalo. Les sentiments esthétiques, p. 60.

23 Ibid., p. 82-83.

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“Lalo says sincerely and keenly that when one takes on the study of the Einfühlung one believes he has a clear notion of it; but as he advances in his study, that notion becomes confused and contradictory.”24

“As regarding aesthetic sentiments, Th. Ribot and Ch. Lalo have writ-ten noteworthy monographs that serve as guides, placing this prob-lem in an historical and doctrinal context. But in the specific point of sympathy, we find ourselves faced with a fact that surpasses the strict field of sentimental life. On one hand, we have seen that the origins of sympathy stem from moral tendencies and the remotest and semi-instinctive emotional movements; on the other hand, the most qualified commentators of sympathy introduce intellectual elements that make it even more complex and harder to define this sentiment generally referred to as “sympathy””25.

“We note, first of all, the accuracy of Ch. Lalo’s charge that the Einfüh-lung is a first step towards mysticism[...]”26.

“The aesthetic sentiments, meticulously studied by all aesthetes –and notably by James Sully, Victor Basch and Charles Lalo [...]”27.

And we have even found a concurrence in the order in which certain concepts are explained:

Mirabent, for example, places the subject of play and the sexual instinct within the larger subject of aesthetic pleasure, following the same order as Lalo in Les sentiments esthétiques, Chapter III (“Le pensée esthétique proprement dite: Les sentiments esthétiques”), where he discusses play28, and in Chapter IV (“La conscience Esthétique”), where he talks about the sexual instinct29.

The ordering of Mirabent’s first chapters (“On Aesthetics, philosophi-cal discipline”) coincides methodologically with Basch’s (“Method and Senti-ment”), before they both begin to study the criticism of Kantian judgment: Basch entitles the following chapters “Theoretical reflective judgment” and

24 F Mirabent, De la bellesa, p. 123.

25 Ibid., p. 122.

26 Ibid., p. 126.

27 Ibid., p. 156 -157.

28 Charles Lalo, Les sentiments esthétiques. París: Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1910, p. 187.

29 Ibid., p. 239.

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“Aesthetic reflective judgment”30, which Mirabent sums up with a chapter en-titled “On aesthetic judgment”.

In this aesthetic context of the early 20th century at the Sorbonne, we also find the precedents of one of the definitions we consider most original to Mirabent, when he defines sentiment as “substantial energy of the soul”31.

Lalo had already defined sentiment as “energy”:

“ Bien des synonymes peuvent exprimer cette irradiation indéfinie d’une source d’énergie intense dans tout notre être ; et les théoriciens les ont multipliés à plaisir : spontanéité de la vie, jeu harmonieux des facultés, expansion de notre personnalité, libre développement de l’imagination créatrice : aucune de ces formules ne l’épuise toutes en approchent ”32.

This conception of sentiment as energy that Mirabent uses is, therefore, very close to the notions of the French énergie. In spite of the originality of his use of these terms within the Barcelona School, we can see their roots in several French esthetes such as Lalo, Ribot, Bergson, Jouffroy, Lamennais...

Without denying Francesc Mirabent his originality, since he created his own definition and developed it over several chapters, it seems clear that the consideration of sentiment as energy was definitely one of the subjects of debate among the French esthetes. Within this current of study on sentiment, he took the subjectivist direction from Victor Basch’s commentaries on Kant. On one hand, he is already familiar with the Germanic investigations of the Einfühlung, and now, on the other hand, he knows Basch’s work on the last of the Kantian critiques, which allows him to maintain the spiritual framework in which to situate beauty, truth, kindness and continue the spiritualist trend com-mon to both the Barcelona School and several French esthetes.

We can say, therefore, that Mirabent arrives at the European debate on Kantian judgment via the French translations and interpretations, primarily by Lalo and Basch. But the similarities do not stop there. We have seen how they share many points of reference and similar themes. And when Lalo and Basch introduce Mirabent into the aesthetic debate on the theories of the Einfühlung, he rediscovers the subject of sentiment that he had previously tackled in his

30 Basch, Victor. Essai critique sur l’Esthetique de Kant, Milton Keynes: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. Pages 108 and 151 respectively: “Le jugement réfléchissant théorique” and “Le jugement réfléchissant esthétique”.

31 F. Mirabent, De la bellesa, In Chapter IV “Del sentiment estètic”, Point VIII “Del sentiment com a energia substancial de l’ànima”, p. 101.

32 Charles Lalo. Les sentiments esthétiques, p. 153.

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study of the British philosophers and enriches it with the theories of Lalo, even coinciding directly in many of the criticisms, argumentations, vocabulary and explicit quotes.

Our goal with this article has never been to question Mirabent’s iden-tification with the Barcelona School (with which he himself professed “affilia-tion”), nor deny the impact of British philosophy on him, nor much less detract from the work carried out by Mirabent, starting in 1939 at the University of Barcelona, to revitalize the subject of aesthetics, nor his later collaboration with various Spanish colleagues. But we do see clearly in Mirabent an intellectual who over time acquired an aesthetic discourse of his own based on his interac-tion with the French aesthetes, with whom he would collaborate throughout almost his entire academic life, holding important posts and maintaining con-stant contact, a contact which, furthermore, was the basis for an unprecedented process of internationalization of the aesthetics made in Barcelona.


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rederic Riu and Kant’s Critique:Hegel in the Mirror World*

Giulio F. PagalloCentral university of Venezuela (retired professor)accademia Galileiana di scienze lettere ed arti di PadovaCentro per la storia dell’università degli studi di Padova

ὄψις τῶν ἀδήλων τὰ φαινόμεναanaXÀGoras, B 21 a

“Daréte el dulce fruto sazonado del peral en la rama ponderosa.¿quieres decir que me darás una pera?

¡Claro!”antonIo MaCHaDo

abstract

I will introduce and explain in this article the basic features of the philosophy of my friend and colleague at the School of Philosophy at the Universidad Central de Ven-ezuela Frederic (Federico) Riu i Farré (1925-1985). Riu is a thinker of the difference between real experience and rational system, and conceived of philosophy as a kind of sentry of the “Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences”. Hence the critical attention given to the basic ontological positions held by Husserl, Heidegger, Hartmann and Sartre. And hence his return to the examination of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in light of the conditions of twentieth century thought..

key words

Frederic Riu, Federico Riu, Catalan philosophy, Venezuelan philosophy, exile, phe-nomenology.

F

* The following pages are written in memory of Frederic Riu, a friend who shall never be forgotten. For nearly a quarter of a century, our friendship remained strong, warts and all, until on a summer night in 1984, when, just before the penultimate round of drinks and our farewell hugs, we ventured to make plans together for retirement, naive perhaps of ὕβρις and forgetful, in any case, of how envious the gods can be.

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At the end of the 1960’s, political and academic preoccupations fue-lled the philosophical inquiries of Frederic Riu1, a professor of metaphysics at the School of Philosophy in the Central University of Venezuela. At that time, Riu’s thinking appeared in books such as Historia y totalidad and Ensayos sobre Sartre2. Shortly beforehand, in 1966, however, Riu had already displayed his critical intelligence in the work Ontología del siglo XX3. In its pages, Riu’s intimate Einfühlung and the intensity of his critical engagement with the phi-losophies of Husserl, Hartmann, Heidegger and Sartre seem to apply the sense of the Hegelian metaphor that truth is revealed only at twilight, when day’s work is done. In reality, all of Riu’s essays chart this moment of farewell, much as Haydn’s Farewell Symphony does. Guided by an interpretative aim that un-folds in two parts, the essays open with a passionately “objective” exposition of a theme or author, and then develop into a kind of critical Umwälzendung, dismantling the “system” under examination in order to show its logical in-consistencies and/or discontinuities. In each case, Riu’s crucial touchstone is the contrast between the principles and categories of the “system” and the original data of experience.

Perhaps this was Riu’s valued theme, the real “difference” that re-sists every attempt at rational mediation, the difference represented by daily events in their immediacy, in the innumerable moments of “here and now” that surround us. Frequently and not without irony, Riu evoked this diffe-rence in order to gauge the distance that separates the notion of “system” from common experience. Lines by Antonio Machado –one of Riu’s favou-rite authors– feature in the epigraph4 precisely to introduce the philosop-hical humanity of Frederic Riu: his elegant and mordant sense of humour, his opposition to anything that might be pointlessly sententious, and his long-standing idea of philosophy as metaphysical knowledge grounded th-rough the Socratic method. I think that Riu’s view of Machado’s duet might perhaps tolerate “el dulce fruto sazonado del peral”, provided that we could

1 With permission, I refer to Giulio F. Pagallo, “Federico Riu y la ontología contemporánea”, Apuntes filosóficos 11 (1997), p. 39-57.

2 Federico Riu, Historia y totalidad, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores 1968 and Ensayos sobre Sartre, Caracas: Monte Àvila Editores 1968. Both essays are collected in Obras completas I [Foreword by Fernando Rodríguez], Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana 1996, p. 83-134 and 135-297, respectively.

3 Federico Riu, Ontología del siglo XX, Caracas. Ediciones de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela 1966; now collected in Obras completas I, p. 3-82.

4 Manuel and Antonio Machado, “Amplificación superflua”, in Obras completas, Madrid: Edito-rial Plenitud 1962, p. 1131.

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frederic riu and Kant’s Critique: Hegel in the Mirror World

quickly turn back to the real pear eaten with pleasure, a ripe pear and not too expensive. Res non verba!

If we turn back to Ontología del siglo XX and the philosophies of Hus-serl, Hartmann, Heidegger and Sartre, the idea that ties the different analyses to a single purpose is this: the crisis befalling the positivist vision of reality and knowledge led to the disappearance of the notion of philosophy as a straight-forward ancilla scientiarum or, in its ultimate representation, as a sentinel of the “encyclopedia of the unified sciences”. As a consequence, the period covering the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth cen-tury saw a call for the return to metaphysics in order to revalidate the principle by which philosophy was simply, first and foremost, episteme and first science. The renewed claims of metaphysics gave rise to two programmes of ontology. The first adopted a realist perspective and emphasized the return to “things themselves”. It characterized the Being of a thing in terms of its autonomy and thereby prevented its reduction to a mere phenomenon of subjective consci-ousness. By contrast, the second programme viewed the transcendental self as a horizon of critical thinking and, therefore, reduced the object and the thing-in-itself to a phenomenon of the self ’s consciousness. Of these two programmes, the latter is the one that held sway. Riu noted that the philosophies of our century not only pay heed to the theses of Husserl but are actually tied to his idea of “constitution”, which entails “an ontological approach that interrogates the conditions of possibility [...] of the appearance of the thing as thing”. In this sense, contemporary ontology “is linked to the modern idealist tradition that culminates in Kant, for whom” –Riu reminds us, and not without a certain tone of irony– “the proud name of ontology must give way to a more humble analytic of pure knowledge”5.

In one of his last and most committed exercises in philosophical his-toriography, Riu surveyed the panorama of contemporary ontology and con-cluded that we needed to look at Kant again. Going back to Kant, according to Riu, involves not only asking what the authentic principle of contempo-rary philosophy is, but also seeing that the Critique has left us a legacy that it is in all likelihood the thorniest, most tangled version of the “difference” between formal rationalism and empiricism. The Aufhebung of this difference passes through the German idealism of Schelling and Hegel to the Frankfurt School to Sartre’s critique of dialectical reasoning. It should come as no sur-prise, then, that Riu proposes a metaphysical reading of Kant that differs shar-ply from the interpretations of the Neo-Kantians and the idealism of Croce

5 Ontología del siglo XX, p. 33-34.

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and Gentile. In essence, Riu’s lecture on Crítica y metafísica en Kant6 in 1981 represents his own intellectual autobiography and, at the same time, the end point of his studies of Sartre, Lukács and Marxism, as well as a new opening –only sketchily outlined– toward a discussion of the problem of technique in Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, which features in his last essays, published posthumously7.

Going back to Kant, Riu introduces his analysis by recalling that the author of the Critique wished to “resolve the problem of metaphysical knowled-ge”, i.e. of a “rational knowledge that would provide the universal predicates (categories) of the object in general or of the object as object”. For metaphysics to take the form of rational knowledge, it must “be carried out by means of a defined set of a priori concepts” that “do not derive and cannot be derived from experience”, even though the concepts aim to “constitute the absolutely universal and necessary predicates with which we think of the objects of ex-perience”. Only because the Kantian concepts “contain a synthesis that cannot be empirical, because of their apodictic character” does our experience assume universally valid forms without which metaphysics, as a science, would be im-possible8.

In relation to the tradition of modern rationalism, the Kantian pro-ject radically modifies the meaning of a priori concepts and the meaning of the object. The “Copernican revolution” manifest in the Critique proposes the principle “that objects are governed by a priori concepts” and, therefore, that “a priori concepts refer to objects […] with absolute necessity and universality”. Metaphysics is put back on the right path “down the sure road of science”9. As a consequence of this Copernican revolution, the notions of object and a priori concept acquire a meaning that differs greatly from their meaning in traditional

6 Federico Riu, “El mundo del espejo. Crítica y metafísica en Kant.” Text of the lecture given on 21 October 1981, in tribute to Kant on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Critique of Pure Reason, organized by the Instituto de Filosofía de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, Episteme NS II, 1-3, p. 85-117; now in Obras completas II, Caracas: Monte Ávila 2005, p. 391-421. Cf. Ezra Heymann, “El Kant de Federico Riu y el problema de la consistencia de la 2ª edición de la Crítica de la razón pura”, Episteme NS 8, 1 (1988), p. 13-25; and José Herrera, “El mundo del espejo. Historia y reflexión en Federico Riu”, in ID., Tres fundamentaciones de la Filosofía Marxista en Venezuela, Caracas: Ediciones de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela 2011, p. 41-71.

7 Federico Riu, “Sobre la técnica”, in ID, Obras completas III, p. 519-613; also independently in: ID, Ensayos sobre la técnica en Ortega, Heidegger, García Bacca, Mayz, Rubí: Anthropos Editorial 2010.

8 Op. cit., p. 391-392.

9 Op. cit., p. 392.

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metaphysics. First, “the object is not the thing that exists in and of itself, but the transcendental unity of a diversity of sensible representations given in the intuition, in the phenomenon. Second, the a priori concept is not a representa-tion of any property of the thing as thing, but a transcendental representation, a pure form, introduced in the function of judgement, which confers unity to the sensible diversity of intuition”10. Starting from these preliminary considerations, how should we understand the relation between some object of knowledge and some other real object, to which the former appears to refer?

For Riu, there are two ways of interpreting the question above: “Either the object is something beyond representations and denotes the thing-in-itself; or the object is something that does not cross the threshold of representations, but rather denotes a specific unified consciousness of the representations”. Riu states that, despite the intricate hermeneutics of the “transcendental object” in the first edition of the Critique, “We know that Kant’s doctrine aims at the se-cond possibility”11. That is, the thing-in-itself cannot cross the horizon of trans-cendental consciousness to become an autonomous and independent thing. However, the “change of method” formulated by Kant “involves the application of a given interpretation of scientific knowledge to metaphysical knowledge”12. Further still, the reduction of everything we know to “a diversity of sensi-ble representations synthetically unified” leads to the idea that “metaphysical knowledge is intrinsically constitutive of experience” and that “anything that is apparently as remote from such knowledge as physics is, nonetheless contains it as an internal condition of its possibility”13.

If we examine the essential aspects of Riu’s analysis on this point, we observe first that “everything revolves around the concept of phenomenon”. His fundamental understanding is that “the theoretical fixing of this concept must necessarily occur in contraposition to the notion of the thing-in-itself ”. This is because “it is not only that the concept of phenomenon cannot be de-fined without the notion of the thing-in-itself, but that, right from the start, this caput mortuum, as Hegel calls it, dislocates the coherence and solidity that many grant Kant’s doctrine”14. In the text of the Critique, we see at B, 69 that “in the phenomenon, objects and even the properties we assign to objects are also

10 Op. cit., p. 394.

11 Op. cit., p. 397.

12 Op. cit., p. 392.

13 Op. cit., p. 396.

14 Op. cit., p. 409.

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considered as something really given”, so that it seems to establish “a distinc-tion between the object as a phenomenon and the same object as a thing-in-itself ”15. The interpreter will object that this distinction is highly problematic, because the relation of the given object with the subject “is fulfilled between a representation put in space and a subject and, in this sense, no distinction can be drawn ‘in the object itself ’ as a phenomenon and as a thing-in-itself ”. Effec-tively: “Where is the object? If it exists in space, as the Aesthetics indicates, then it must be said to exist in a mental, ideal, imaginary realm and the subject-object relation is equally an ideal, intentional relation of consciousness”16.

At the crucial juncture of his interpretation, Riu’s response draws on the literary imagination that bolstered his critical acuity: “The form in which we must understand the relation of the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, according to the assumptions of the Critique, is totally different […]. To em-ploy a simile, the world of phenomena is like the world of the mirror. […] The world of the mirror is an ideal world. In it, space, depth and relations exist only to the extent that we perceive them.” Metaphorically, the world of phenomena “is like the realm of an immense mirror without borders, without a frame. At the same time, we are the mirror and we behold it. Presumably, the mirror reflects what is unknown to us, but this original thing is not “in” the mirror or “behind” it or before it. Rather it is nowhere. What the mirror reflects is the subject itself separated from what produces and beholds it and what is believed illusorily to move within it. […] The world of phenomena is not the same world as the thing-in-itself insofar as it appears to a subject, but it is another world, unreal and imaginary, with a relation to the world of the thing-in-itself that, if it does exist, we do not know. It is not only formaliter, but also materialiter different”17. Once we affirm “the transcendental ideality of space” as Kant does, it becomes impossible to hold that any distinction can be established “in the object itself ” between phenomenon and thing-in-itself. In effect, “there can be only representations”18 in a space limited to ens ima-ginarium, or mental space. Riu adds, however, that “I can think” that each of these representations “given or put in space corresponds nowhere to a thing-

15 Op. cit., p. 412.

16 Ibidem.

17 Op. cit., p. 412-413.

18 Op. cit., p. 413.

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in-itself, but this thought is a conjecture, an opinion, a belief, that the Critique does not demonstrate”19.

This is the critical passage: “Having reached this point, we need to ad-dress the discussion raised by Kant himself as to whether the phenomenon is an appearance or an apparition”20. The issue appears in these terms: “What is in me seems to be outside me”. This brings into the play the distinction between the “ingenuous realist consciousness” for which “bodies are outside me and I perceive them as things-in-themselves” and the “transcendental critic”, who has access to the knowledge that “some bodies are only representations that are in me” so that, in short, it is only “within the mind that bodies seem to be outside”21. Therefore, “it must be said that the phenomenon is the apparition of an appearance and the appearance of an apparition”22.

With this proposition, Riu turns to the text in which “Kant specifies the meaning of his transcendental idealism as opposed to transcendental realism and empirical realism”23. From the viewpoint of transcendental idealism, “all pheno-mena are seen as mere representations and not as things-in-themselves”. By con-trast, transcendental realism “views external phenomena as things-in-themselves, existing independently of ourselves and our sensibility”, while lastly empirical idealism thinks that “all our representations are unable to ensure the reality of these same objects”24. Between the transcendental idealist and the empirical ide-alist, Kant poses the following difference: the latter, having only the “certainty of the existence of his representations” cannot be certain that there exist “objects external and independent of himself”. By contrast, the transcendental idealist is certain of the existence of these objects because “existing outside of me does not mean independently of me, but rather in space”, which “is me, is a representation, but causes what it represents in space to appear as outside me”25.

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19 Ibidem.

20 Op. cit., p. 414.

21 Ibidem.

22 Op. cit., p. 418.

23 Op. cit., p. 416.

24 Op. cit., p. 416-417.

25 Op. cit., p. 417.

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In the preceding characterization, the concepts of “appearance” and “appari-tion” have a highly specialized meaning, at least with respect to the crucial role they play in the critique of the Kantian theory of knowledge. The insistence with which Riu underscores their extremely problematic character suggests a possible connection with a similar aspect of themes raised by Hegel in several of his works, starting with his first attempts to tackle Kant’s Critique. Riu warns that the Kantian notion of “subjectivity” makes the concept of the “thing-in-itself ” inconsistent, if not contradictory, and this brings to mind the Hegelian definition of the “thing-in-itself ” as an incoherent and useless caput mortuum in Kant’s philosophy. In addition, the categories of “appearance” and “apparition”, justifiably used to foreground obscure points and amphibologisms in the Cri-tique, evoke, to some extent, the dialectical nature of “apparent knowledge” in the sensible consciousness, the experience of which is consummated –in Riu’s reading of Kant– in the endless Aufhebung of the “certainty of truth” by the “truth of certainty”.

Another critical consideration that recalls the inspiration behind an im-portant extract from Hegel’s Phenomenology is Riu’s observation on the impro-per character of Kantian assertions on the existence of external objects. The transcendental idealist, Riu says, cannot have an awareness “that external things exist, but only that things that seem external to the immediate and ingenuous consciousness are in reality ‘internal things’, images”26. Riu points to the logical and semantic distortion that Kant commits here: “Once this reflection has been made, an immediate consciousness or perception is superseded in the sense of being preserved” –here again, this is the exact sense of the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung– “but decoded and integrated in a higher truth. Returning to the plane of immediate consciousness as though nothing had occurred, therefo-re, is an error. Immediacy is not suppressed, but mediated, and this mediation transforms it”: “the world of phenomena, which for the immediate ingenuo-us consciousness is revealed” –Hegel would say, is experienced– “as a world of things-in-themselves, outside of me, is, for the consciousness that has perfor-med transcendental reflection, a world of apparent things, of mental objects, of subjective representations”27. In his introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel used this analogy: “Consciousness, however, is its own concept and, therefore, it is immediately the act of going beyond what is limited and, as what is limited belongs to it, it is the act of going beyond itself. […] Consequently, the consci-ousness causes itself to suffer the violence brought about by limited satisfaction.

26 Op. cit., p. 418.

27 Op. cit., p. 418-419.

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Feeling this violence, anxiety can certainly shrink from the truth and aspire to conserve the very thing whose loss threatens it”28.

However, the possible consonances between the starting points of these critical considerations in opposition to the Kantian theory of phenomenolo-gical knowledge and the “thing-in-itself ” do not in any way imply an identity of systematic intentions or aims. For Riu, the critique of Kant and his work provides a more solid foundation for metaphysical realism.

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Let us return to the main threads of Riu’s argument. The first observation to highlight in the context of the transcendental analytic is the contradictory nature of the postulate of the “thing-in-itself ”, which takes us directly to the Hegelian formula of the caput mortuum. In Hegel’s case, this mot d’esprit may be fitting, but it is not simple. Rather, it is the synthetic expression of the very essence of Kantianism. It represents the reflective sublimation of the sensible consciousness, which maintains the opposition between subject and object as essential to itself. “In every dualist system, but especially in Kantianism, the fundamental defect can be seen in the incoherence into which the system re-lapses in its desire to unify”, i.e., when it seeks to unify moments of Being and thought that are seen as separate and independent. “This way of doing philoso-phy lacks the simple awareness that, with such toing and froing” –that is, from the Being per se of the “thing” to the science of phenomena– “each of these singular determinations is declared as insufficient, and the defect consists in the impotence of putting two thoughts together (given that the form only allows for two)”29.

Long before the Encyclopedia, in the first lines of the “Vorerinnerung” of his Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (1801), Hegel criticizes the improper and insufficient development of the original spe-culative principle in Kant’s three critiques. The meaning of the “identity of sub-ject and object”, Hegel argues, is turned upside down by Kant under the light of understanding and his analytic procedure. As a result, the absolute identity of the foundation is transformed into an equally absolute opposition, much as

28 G. W. F. Hegel, Fenomenologia de l’esperit, trad. into Catalan by Joan Leita, Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1985, vol. 1, p. 114.

29 G. W. F. Hegel, Enciclopedia de las ciencias filosóficas, Mexico City: Juan Pablos Editor 1974, p. 57.

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in the old dualist metaphysics. Only, Hegel adds, “with greater arrogance under the name of critical philosophy”30.

En Glauben und Wissen (1802), Hegel undertakes a thorough examinati-on of the Reflexionsphilosophie of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte and frames the inquiry in its essential terms: for the formalism of critical idealism –Kant’s philosophy– “the subject and things, or the non-I, each exist in themselves –the I of ‘I think’ and the thing-in-itself ”. Interrelated, each is identical to the other. However, this is a simple formal identity “that appears as a causal connection so that the thing-in-itself becomes object by receiving from the active subject a certain determination –which, therefore, is one and identical in both; but both are also something completely different, identical as the sun and the rock can be identi-cal in relation to heat, when the sun warms the rock”. Therefore, “the absolute identity of subject and object has gone beyond a formal identity as such and the transcendental idealism in this formal, or rather psychological, idealism”31. Consequently, this is a philosophy that is, in a certain sense, “the development of the philosophy of Locke”, but it interprets “perception itself as immanent form, and this signifies an enormous advantage, because the emptiness of perception or a priori spontaneity is absolutely full of content” and “at the same time, a priori understanding becomes, at least in general, a posteriori […] and this results in a formal concept of reason (Vernunft) that is both a priori and a posteriori, both identical and non-identical, in an absolute unity, the idea of which (Idee) continues to be understanding (Verstand), and only its product is known as an a priori judgment (Urteil)”32. It is precisely this space in which the caput mortuum of abstract objectivity takes refuge. Using this formula, Hegel adds: “The richness of thought always unfolds in Kant, therefore, only in an exclusively subjective form; all fullness, all content, fall within the act of representing, of thinking, of postulating. What is objective, according to Kant, is only this in-itselfness, without knowing what things-in-themselves are. However, this in-itselfness is only the caput mortuum, the dead abstraction of what is other, the indeterminate empty Beyond”33.

30 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 2, Jenaer Schriften (1801-1807), Frankfurt a. M. 1970, p. 9, 10.

31 Op. cit., p. 310.

32 Op. cit., p. 314.

33 G.F.W. Hegel, Lecciones sobre la historia de la filosofía III, trad. into Spanish by W. Roces; ed. prepared by Elsa Cecilia Frost, Mexico City – Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1955, p. 455.

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Following this line of thought, Riu focuses on the inherent contradic-tion for Kant in the relation of the subject and the “thing-in-itself ”. His view appears to take the Hegelian approach with respect to their ultimate conse-quences. For example, Kant states that “what is not found in the object-in-itself is always found, contrary to that, in its relations with the subject”, so that “it is justifiable to assign the predicates of space and time to objects of the senses as such, without any appearance existing in this case”. To this, Riu’s response is blunt: “Kant, in this text, refers to the relation of the predicates of the perceived object and the perceived object, a tautology, while we refer not to the predi-cates but to the object as such, to the phenomenon considered as a whole. To the extent that I cannot attribute the phenomenon to the object-in-itself, what supposedly appears is an appearance”. In conclusion, Riu writes, “We must say, therefore, that the phenomenon is the apparition of an appearance and the appearance of an apparition”. He goes further: if “Kant fixes the concept of apparition in the context of the subject-object relation in itself, and if this is not as it appears, I am saying that the apparition is an appearance”34.

In the end, the most difficult conceptual knot in Kant arises from an erroneous notion of phenomenon, because a phenomenon must have value not only as appearance but also as “apparition”, that is, the manifestation of the “ob-ject-in-itself ” to the consciousness. Riu’s insistence on singling out the aporetic character of Kant’s concept of phenomenon invites us to turn back to the inter-pretative registers used by Hegel, in order to highlight the dialectical character of the “experience” of consciousness and of the Erscheinung of knowledge. With this aim, two instances of the Hegelian critique are relevant: first, the criticism levelled at the formalism of Kantian philosophy, which becomes “empty idea-lism” in need of empirical integration. Effectively, this approach focuses on the barely a priori classification of categories. And second, the contradictory struc-ture of the “object”, as it is given in the sensible certainty and successive figures of the consciousness of phenomena.

With respect to the first issue, abstract reasoning “has forgotten” the path that it must follow to constitute itself. Therefore, “its first act of declaration is only this abstract, empty word that says that everything is its. […] The first reasoning known in the object is expressed in empty idealism which […] by pointing to the pure myness of consciousness in all Being and expressing things as sensations or representations, imagines that it has pointed to this pure my-ness as an accomplished reality”. However, this idealism is “at the same time, an absolute empiricism, for by the act of filling the empty myness, i.e. by the act of having the difference, and all development and all configuration of this very dif-

34 Federico Riu, El mundo del espejo cit., p. 414-415.

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ference, the reasoning of this idealism lacks an outside impulse in which there is only the varied multiplicity of perceiving and representing”. In this way, it cannot reconcile “its contradictory thoughts, the thought of the pure consciousness as a whole reality and also the thought of the outside impulse or the sensible act of perceiving and representing as an identical reality, but rather it fluctuates constantly between one and the other”35.

This first observation of Hegel appears to be reflected in Riu’s remark on the direct suppositio that the phenomena, the simple data of consciousness, move toward the “thing-in-itself ” in the Critique, and that this move entails a highly contradictory shift toward the “thing-in-itself ” of empirical traits, such as time and space, that cannot be predicated of the numinous object, whichever way you look at it, because it escapes any form of sensible intuition on its own. “In short,” notes Riu, “Kant founds transcendental idealism in order to provide a foundation for empirical realism”, which is equivalent to incorporating “the very figure of immediate consciousness”, i.e. the separation of representations and actually existing things. However, this operation leads to one of two results: “to a philosophy of ‘as if ’ or to scepticism (we take phenomena as if they were objects-in-themselves, knowing that they are not)”. By contrast, if “the trans-cendental foundation remains faithful to itself, it is obliged to go –according to the understanding of Post-Kantian idealists– beyond empirical realism”. This signifies that “it must stop being critical. Otherwise, it is unsustainable”36.

In his Encyclopedia, for example, Hegel cleanly argues a variation of what Riu points out about the impossibility that what is “apparent” to the consci-ousness at the same time signifies the “apparition” of the “thing-in-itself ”. At §41, Hegel observes that the Kantian investigation of the forms of knowledge preserves “the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity” and expands it to such an extent “that he brings together in subjectivity” both of the two moments of experience, i.e. the particular sensible matter and the a priori forms “and it leaves only the thing-in-itself in their place”37. However, even the categories by which “mere perception is raised to objectivity, to experience”, to the extent that they are interpreted “as a unity only of the subjective consciousness […] are equally a purely subjective element”38. In effect, the “thing-in-itself ” is reduced to ob-ject as “pure abstraction, the specific absolute emptiness only as a Beyond; the

35 G.F.W. Hegel, Fenomenologia de l’esperit cit., p. 147-148.

36 Riu, Obras completas cit., p. 419.

37 Hegel, Enciclopedia cit., p. 43-44.

38 Op. cit., § 43, p. 45.

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negative element of representation, of sensibility, of the given thought, etc.” In addition, “it is also clear that this caput mortuum is only the product of thought, of thought continued into pure abstraction; the empty self makes this empty identity into its own object”39. With clarity, Hegel shows the subjectivity both of phenomena and of the “thing-in-itself ”. There is no doubt that “if we take this unqualified as the absolute and true object of reason”, the knowledge of experience becomes “what is not true, such as appearance”40. However, in the contrary direction, it also becomes the thing-in-itself, the “truth” of which –as Riu repeatedly indicates– must be only the product of thought, according to Hegel. Therefore, “if Kantian philosophy is only a subjective idealism” that has assumed subjectivity “as the ultimate absolutely affirmative determination”, then the “thing-in-itself ” also becomes no more than “appearance”41. The fact that experience integrates the two parts –the a priori categories and the sen-sible intuitions– “constitutes a correct analysis without any doubt whatever”, even though, as Hegel remarks, it leads to a “singular contradiction”: “because the first part of experience is subjective per se”, and “the objective part, which should be in opposition to the subjective, is also subjective” to the extent that “it is enclosed within the circle of my own consciousness”. In effect, “the cate-gories are only determinations of our thinking and understanding”42.

According to Hegel, the negative reflection that affects phenomena and the thing-in-itself depends on the nature of the “object” of sensible consciousness. In reality, “the object must have an essential property that constitutes its Being as simple in itself”; at the same time, “however, it must also contain diversity”. In other words, it must refer to what exists in itself, independently of consciousness43. Here it is possible to find the paralogism into which Kant again falls in his attempt to mediate between phenomenon-appearance and phenomenon-apparition. As Riu notes, this attempt is doomed to failure. The certainty of the sensible consci-ousness, says Hegel, implies that the object be called “phenomenon [Erscheinung]”, and not simple appearance [Schein], because it is “Being that is immediately in itself a non-being”. The phenomenon in itself is “the complete set of appearance […] the object that is in itself”, “true to its consciousness”. However, at the same time, the

39 Op. cit., § 44, p. 45.

40 Op. cit., § 45, p. 46.

41 Op. cit., § 46, p. 46.

42 Hegel, Lecciones sobre la historia de la filosofía cit., p. 430-431.

43 Hegel, Fenomenologia de l’esperit, cit., p. 146-147.

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consciousness “is not yet conscious of this basis”, and for the consciousness, the object of its certainty “is not yet the objective phenomenon that disappears”44.

If we move from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic and its second chapter on “Essence”, the analysis of the “appearance (phenomenon)” is presen-ted in its essential dialectical terms. “The world that exists in and for itself ” and the “world that appears” are two worlds that “are interrelated such that what is positive in the phenomenal world is negative in the world that exists in and for itself, and vice versa, what is negative in the former is positive in the latter. […] Indeed, it is precisely in this opposition that both worlds have disappeared in their difference, and what should be a world existing in and for itself is itself a phenomenal world, and vice versa, the phenomenal world is itself an essential world”45.

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“That the Critique, on the one hand, contains the thing-in-itself, the entity as entity, as a troublesome residue, a phantom that is present but impossible to capture and that finds no place in the system and, on the other hand, that it sets out the programme of transcendental constitution, are two faces of the same spiritual fact that retain a particular tension in the Critique”46.

Perhaps it is precisely this tension that enables us to say good-bye to Immanuel Kant, without having left Kantianism behind yet, in the dimen-sion of modern and even post-modern society. In the last part of his essay, Riu proposes a historical interpretation of the Critique, according to which Kant’s work transcends the reservations about its theory and takes on another –and perhaps more significant– meaning in how it has gradually planted the roots of reason in history, paving the way for the contemporary triumph of science and technology. “In this way, what we think of the Critique today depends to a great extent on what the Critique has contributed to the shaping of who we are”47. “The seminal idea in Kant’s work”, writes Riu in his final remarks, “that ‘reason only recognises what it itself produces’ has become the key principle of

44 Op. cit., p. 161-162.

45 G. W. F. Hegel, Ciencia de la lógica, trad. into Spanish by A. and R. Mondolfo, foreword by R. Mondolfo, Buenos Aires 19682, p. 448.

46 Riu, Obras completas III, cit., p. 420-421.

47 Op. cit., p. 409.

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life today. For this reason, the ongoing debate about whether the Critique shall survive the new geometries or the new physics will always fall short of what the Critique has already achieved in historical reality, it will always come up short with respect to what this prodigious work, as Hegel and Heidegger considered it, says to us and demands of us”48.

The historical progress promoted by Kantian reason has reached the highest level of universality, captured by Francis Bacon in his aphorism homo tantum potest quantim scit. This, according to Riu, has increased and continues to increase the radius of human power ad infinitum. “To put it as Hegel did, if we take the Critique not only as a work expressing the opinions of the subject Kant, but also as the manifestation of a moment in the historical development of humanity, then the Critique has been realized and continues to be realized in us on a scale that surpasses all learned discussion”49.

Riu invites us to think in a Hegelian manner by considering the ac-tual thinking of Hegel in Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel looks be-yond the unpolished style and logical inconsistencies and considers that, from a theoretical perspective, Kant has traced “the rhythm of knowledge, of scientific movement, as a general schema” and “in this manner, Kant historically indicates the moments of everything and precisely defines and distinguishes them”, pro-viding philosophy with a solid starting point. Nevertheless, what is even more important than the “system” is the fact that the Kantian conception of reason has intervened in the life of human beings and “thought and thinking have, for the time being, become an insuperable necessity that it is not possible for us to abolish”. In this way, “thought has spread all over the world, it has adhered to all, it investigates all, it gives its forms to all, it systematize all; such that it is neces-sary to proceed in accordance with its determinations and not in accordance with a simple feeling, routine or common sense, this immense unconsciousness of so-called practical men”.

In the final analysis, “it is necessary to proceed rationally in theology as in governments and their legislation, with respect to the purpose of the state, industry and mechanics, and we begin to hear of the rational operation of a brewery, a tile factory, etc.”50.

Even in their references to a possible original foundation for contem-porary technical rationality, the Kantian readings of Hegel and Riu appear to

48 Op. cit., p. 421.

49 Op. cit., p. 409.

50 Hegel, Lecciones sobre la historia de la filosofía cit., p. 459, 460.

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agree on the individuation of an identical arché. Although the theoretical devel-opments of the Critique of Pure Reason fall far short of the speculative idea that underpins them, the principle of its Copernican revolution, for both Hegel and Riu, defines the destiny of the modern world, ensuring a philosophical foun-dation for the ideology of scientific and technical progress, and the boundless expansion of the regnum hominis.

Translated from Catalan by Joe Graham

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life-writing

wo texts aboutJaume Serra Hunter (1878-1943)

Josep Carner | Jordi Maragall

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Jaume Serra Hunter was one of the most important Catalan philosophers of the first half of the 20th century. He occupied the Chair of Fundamental Logic at the University of Santiago and in 1913 he moved to the Chair of History of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. With Tomàs Carreras Artau, profes-sor of Ethics, and Pere Bosch Gimpera, professor of Archaeology, he took part in the reforms proposed and decided on in the Second Congress of Catalan Uni-versities on the organization of humanities studies. Serra Hunter, was politically committed to catalanism and began his career in the Normal Studies of the Commonwealth –an institution set up by Prat de la Riba–; he wrote the articles on philosophy for the Espasa Encyclopaedia and took part in the founding of the Catalan Philosophy Society. During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, when the institutions of the Commonwealth were suppressed, Serra Hunter did not limit himself to his university teaching, but gave conferences and courses for cultural groups and clubs. He was named Head of the School of Philosophy and Letters within a few weeks of the Second Republic being announced, only to be appointed Rector of the University of Barcelona the following month – the first Rector to be democratically elected by the staff of the University. As Rec-tor, his role in the negotiations with the Central Government for the autonomy of the university was fundamental, aided by Pere Bosch Gimpera i Pompeu Fabra. In 1931 he was the candidate for the Partit Catalanista Republicà, and vice-president of the Parliament of Catalonia. His replacement as rector was the professor Pere Bosch Gimpera. His influence as an intellectual was further en-hanced by his occupation of these two posts. Among his publications, there are the two volumes of Philosophy and Culture (1930-1932), Sòcrates (1931), Spinoza (1933), Sentit i valor de la nova filosofia (1934) and Figures i perspectives de la història del pensament (1935)

At the end of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, Serra fled to France and settled in Tolouse, in the Llenguadoc, together with other intellectuals. He was one of the five members of the first Catalan National Council, created in

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1940 in France to carry out some of the functions of the exiled government, but when threatened by the German advance, he fled to Mexico, where he died in 1943, after falling ill on the long journey. Josep Carner wrote the prologue to the book Thought and Life, one of his unpublished works which was finally printed two years after his death. The articles by Jordi Maragall, collected in book form in 1985, are a good indication of the interest there is in rediscover-ing the work of this Catalan philosopher four decades later.

“Prologue” of the book Thought and Life1

Josep Carner (1884-1970)

Jaume Serra Hunter was born in Manresa in 1878, of Catalan and Irish stock.

His noble head, with its romantic aspect of delicate, troubled youth, agile in both enthusiasm and indignation, is one of my earliest memories of the University of Barcelona. We were both assigned to the class where meta-physics was taught by the least metaphysical man in the world, a stolid fish merchant, and another where the Latin language and literature were taught by the bullfighting correspondent of the newspaper Noticiero Universal, who had been directly appointed to the job. When I met him, Serra Hunter was already over twenty years old: I was an insignificant figure, a child of fifteen, and the contrast between us, which seemed important at the time, was ac-centuated by his severe attitude, especially to ethics, and the energy of his ideals encased in his fragile frame. I can still remember his courteous man-ner, which was enhanced by our mutual love of Catalonia and its poetry. He lent me books, and I sometimes visited the small flat where his family lived. In those days, Serra Hunter wrote poetry on a daily basis, and had filled many notebooks. He was diligent and wise, and was studying Philosophy and Literature and Law at the university. We all knew that he was, and would always be, one of the best.

I saw him again a few years later, in Madrid, in a gloomy hostel. He had become a kind of obstinate indomitable contrarian come what may, who was lofty enough to remain independent of cultural gangsters and, with a heroism that the world knew nothing of, and would have condemned as wrong-headed, argued that his simplicity was the obstacle.

1 Jaume Serra Hunter, El pensament i la vida. Estímuls per a filosofar, Mexico: Club del Llibre Català 1945, p. 9-14.

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two texts about Jaume serra Hunter (1878-1943)

After passing through other universities, at the age of thirty-six, Serra Hunter was welcomed as the head of the recently inaugurated Philosophy Sec-tion of Barcelona University. Prat de la Riba’s creation of new cultural insti-tutions had infused much needed energy and ambition into official cultural policies. The atmosphere at the university had worsened since our student days when it was moribund and poorly equipped.

I would say that Serra Hunter was born to be a Head of Faculty. He had a passion for knowledge, which is the highest passion of all, and another for teaching, generous like no other. He was an exemplary figure for the purity of his dedication to the practice and habit of thinking. One clear indication of this can be seen in his priceless texts, the utter clarity of his written expression as he places categories and values within your grasp. He belongs to that unfortu-nately rare breed –the only one worthy of holding the University Chair– who are inspired by a living inner flame, like the Damascene convert, but who come to represent everything for their disciples. They are a breed quite unlike the mundane cherishers of their ideas, or those who reel off unchanging lists while eyeing their options of piling up bureaucratic privileges.

Serra Hunter lived in and for the purity of the chosen. I know full well that many of these drudges consider their lives to be practical, on the one hand because they get paid, and on the other because they eliminate all speculative induction, and that the arduous dedication of Serra Hunter is unworldly, to them no more than an obsession for leisured idealists. They are incapable of imagining that knowledge is the highest fruit of life, and that they are no more than hangers-on in one stage of the arduous and perilous ascension of human-ity, and were it not for the heroic sacrifice of great thinkers, they would still be living in caves or in the tree tops. Nonetheless, it is a a stimulus or a challenge for anyone, that in the face of so many wasted lives, so many corrupted by warm climates, there was one, in a corner of Barcelona who, in the strict asceticism of his youth had set a course for the pure worship of knowledge that would lead him in maturity to a rigorous sacrifice for culture and his homeland, two ideals that for Serra Hunter were a living unity, like so many other notable compatriots. Neither a place nor a language can fulfil their potential unless it is as authentic centres and examples of the universal.

When one’s meditations and works are so demanding, those who are capable of such rare qualities remain untainted by the corruption of vanity, that hypersensitive self-obsession. They also avert another common vice – the im-penetrable armour of egoism. Therein lies a lesson for many Catalans. Disciples and colleagues of Serra Hunter, as well as visitors from overseas all coincide in remembering his simple friendly cordiality, his generosity and eagerness to help: he did not accumulate things for his own sake, but to make a gift of it to all.

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There was a profound connection in the arduous existence of a vital spirit in such a precarious body. In the days when Catalonia achieved a tem-porary and more or less desired recovery of its destiny, which was so soon to be turned back by the rapid degeneration of the Spanish Republic, and at the end of a period of reckless redress that has now been sunk for many years, Serra Hunter received public honours. He was a councillor of Barcelona, and presi-dent of the Cultural Commission. He was a member of the Catalan Parliament, where he rose to the presidency. At the same time, he was appointed Rector of the University. He did not, however, accept these honours as the culmination of his personal worth, but with dignity, as the fulfilment of his faith in Catalonia and the human spirit.

An even more splendid display of these qualities was the brilliant ex-ample he gave to all in his exile in Mexico, when he was ill and in dire poverty. It was there that, faced with the destruction and darkening of his world, he set about revising and renewing his philosophy studies. In contrast with the inan-ity and deviation of so many Catalans, he sustained his clear-sighted position as a patriot, and the instructiveness and vitality of his political writings from this time could stand as his testament. He spoke on behalf of the authentic Catalonia, that which was embodied in the younger Front Nacional, when he wrote: “If we believe them to have been overthrown (he was referring to the Republican Constitution and its statutes), we do so because we have seen that the problem of the national centres has not been resolved, and because we know that the Spanish parties, through war and the inner revolution of the Republican area, have moved backwards in their appreciation of the problem of Catalonia”. We can see the key to our future in these lucid words. Catalonia is obliged to ascend.

Serra Hunter died in Cuernavaca on the 7th of December 1943. His remains lie in the valley of Mexico, where two white-capped mountains, two monuments of the New World hold vigil. His journey came to an end in exile, in what should have been no more than an interruption.

This great teacher of thought, champion of catalanism, as much ours as he was universal, a fearless defender of freedom and social justice, was con-vinced that after death he would pass through a great gateway beyond the stars. But he deserves to be assured another form of immortality in his homeland, so his name should be a spur to the love of knowledge in our finest tradition, in which the tree should be as deeply rooted in our soil as its crown is open to the four winds.

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Jaume Serra Húnter2

by Jordi Maragall (1911-1999)

I

I am happy to complete the task I set myself a fortnight ago in my last article in Avui. On the other hand, I agree with Fèlix Cucurrull’s comments last week on the subject of the present, past and future. It is not pure romanticism to recall the past when we have been subjected to a forty-year process of cultural eradi-cation which has removed all trace of the men and institutions that had, at one time, been at the forefront of Catalan culture. We need to find our roots, and to know all there is to know about Catalonia and its cultural, scientific, economic and artistic life. Not to engage in weepy chauvinism, but the contrary, to affirm our identity. It is unfortunate that the rest of Spain should know so little about Catalonia; it must be a priority that all who live and work here know about Catalonia.

He was known as Serra Hunter, without the “i” that Catalans use to separate their surnames. I remember him on one day in 1930, at the Ritz Hotel, at the head table in the banquet offered to Castilian intellectuals. He was sitting next to José Ortega y Gasset. Serra Hunter had to speak. We, his students, were pained to see him trapped in this situation. He was not, at that time, a public figure. He found the formality of the occasion discomforting and spoke little with the other people sitting at his table. When he began to speak I remember him saying: “Fortune has seen to it that sitting on my left and right are two men who are symbols of Castilian culture…” One of the men was, as I said, Ortega y Gasset. The other might have been Ramón Menéndez Pidal, I don’t remember it that well. In any case, we were aware that Serra Hunter was not a man of the world, and that, sitting next to Ortega y Gasset, who most certainly was, he felt out of place.

I can say this with conviction because I had met Serra Hunter earlier, in 1925, when he taught French and Literature at my school, Col·legi de Sant Miquel. School children have always made fun of their teachers. When we were fourteen or fifteen, we had no idea that Serra Hunter was head of History of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. We saw him as just another school teacher, possibly a little more glum and shabbily-dressed. He looked older than he was. He was a good teacher, with a hint of the indifference that is the mark

2 Jordi Maragall, El que passa i els qui han passat, Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1985, p. 105-109.

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of a man who feels his situation is beneath him. We know now that at the same time he was giving classes at the Faculty and directing the Philosophy seminar that I mentioned in my last article. He was also writing the articles on Philoso-phy for the Encyclopaedia Espasa, but despite being engaged on all these jobs at the same time, life at his home was modest. Very modest indeed. His wife was a beautiful woman, the sister of the wife of the painter Ramon Casas, and they had two sons and three or four daughters, who were also beautiful. Teaching was poorly paid then, as it always has been. It must have been difficult making ends meet.

A few years later, in the year 1928-29, I was a student of his at the University. I had already realised, while still at school, who Jaume Serra Hunter was. Not because he told us, but because the other teachers told us about him: Ramon Roquer, Emili Planelles, Pep Vergés. The first two were students of his. However, it was not until Joaquim Xirau and Francesc Mirabent started their degree in Philosophy that we saw the greatness of the man. At that time, in 1928, Serra Hunter had been in charge of the History of Philosophy de-partment for fourteen years, and had organized that semi-clandestine seminar, where a small nucleus of Catalan Philosophers was taking shape. I remember well the density and depth of his lessons. His lectures were a pleasure because of the immense amount of information he had, and his remarkable capacity to establish connections between the classical currents of Western thought. I can still remember the sentence he used when beginning his lecture on Leibniz: “En tant que j’ai penché du côté de Spinoza...”

With the autonomy of the School of Philosophy and Literature in 1931, he was appointed to teach the course on metaphysics. In that year we were able to see for ourselves Serra Hunter’s allegiance to the Scottish school and its Catalan version which was founded in the first half of the 19th century by Ramon Martí d’Eixalà and continued above all by Llorens i Barba.

As a member of the Science Section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, presided by Pere Coromines, Serra Hunter appointed me to be the secretary-editor. There were three of us who benefited from this new impulse in the Sci-ence Section. Dr. Eduard Fontserè appointed Josep Gassiot, and Dr. August Pi i Sunyer appointed Jaume Raventós, who has recently been honoured for his re-search work at ICI in England. The new situation gave me much more contact with Serra Hunter. After having visited his humble quarters in carrer Còrsega, I now went to work some afternoons at his new residence in carrer Blames 67. I helped him organize the enormous filing system that he had created when writing the Espasa encyclopaedia articles. The flat was larger, but a little darker. The family dog got to know me. The family’s financial situation improved. He had given up the classes at my old school several years previously. Collections of his articles were being published (two volumes with the title Philosophy and

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Culture) and a few monographs (Socrates, Spinoza). Although his education and mindset had been tempered by the shrewdness of conservative thought, he was a candidate for Esquerra Republicana in the elections to the Catalan Parlia-ment, and for a time he was also vice-president.

Joan Roura-Parella, who was a lecturer at the School of Philosophy and Literature and Pedagogy in the Autonomous University at the time, spoke to me a few weeks ago about his meetings with Serra Hunter in his Mexican exile. He spoke very highly of him, stressing the extraordinary philosophical wisdom of Serra Hunter. That conversation brought him back to my memory, to see him once more a little stooped, his prominent nose and his tic of rubbing it now and again to breathe more easily. He was a likeable man with broad shoulders, who became nervous and agitated when impassioned. That is how I remember him at the Institute when the left won the elections for the second time in February 1936. On the short side, with a moustache and grey hair, glancing quickly around and walking with difficulty. He must have had some pain in his feet, because someone once told me that he had a pair of slippers at the Parliament for the days when he had to work there for long stretches. At home, however, he wore them all the time.

I am still not sure whether Jaume Serra Hunter was as great a gain for politics as he was a loss for philosophy. I tend to think that he had a remarkable knowledge of philosophy, and in a country where there are people prepared for all public responsibilities, Serra Hunter would have been better advised to remain at the University. In truth, he never really abandoned it, because he continued as Rector until the staff of the new Autonomous University ap-pointed Pere Bosch i Gimpera. He did not stop giving classes except for a few days when his political duties forced him to. However, this late drift towards politics to some extent blurs our image of doctor Jaume Serra Hunter, Head of the Philosophy Department.

He died in Mexico. His oldest son died. Of his other children, Jordi was a notable student of our Institute-School, and his daughters settled in differ-ent places. None of them in Catalonia. We do not have enough information to talk more about this. We can talk about him and his thought. Students setting out on their doctoral thesis have a good subject here for a profound and well-documented piece of work. My account is no more than an emotional memory.

II

The article by Lluís M. de Puig in Avui a few days ago has moved me to speak about Jaume Serra Hunter again, as I did in these pages on the 27th October 1977. However, Lluís M. de Puig has set in motion an idea that could lead to

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very positive results. My friend Olives, who has spent so many years on the problems of the book, called me to press for the release of some papers of Jaume Serra Hunter that would appear to be held at the University library. As regards the trunk with his original notes and files which is in Tolouse, I hardly need to add that I have begun the process of recovering them.

The situation is more or less as follows: Jaume Serra Húnter was hired by the Espasa publishing house to write all the philosophy articles for the En-cyclopaedia, from ESP onwards. Serra Hunter did a magnificent job. This was the origin of his famous files with details of authors and themes in philosophy. When Serra Hunter appointed me as secretary-editor for the Science Section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, he asked me to collaborate on the organiza-tion of these files as well.

Serra Hunter’s life was a hard one. There were his classes and the semi-clandestine seminar at the University, the articles for the Espasa Encyclopaedia, and then literature and French classes in schools. When the Republic came, and autonomy for the universities, he was able to give up some of these school classes and spend more time (besides his political activities) in collecting origi-nal material for the encyclopaedia which, after translating them into Catalan and rewriting them, he would publish as monographs on Socrates and Spinoza as well as the themes covered by the two volumes of Philosophy and Culture.

The trunk in Toulouse and the documents in the library probably con-tain these files and, possibly, sketches for the rewriting of some of these articles for another book. It would obviously be of great interest to recover them.

Nevertheless, these things must be properly done. First of all, we must contact the family of Serra Hunter (son, daughters and grandchildren), which I have done in the past and can do again. My friend Joan Roura-Parella, lecturer at Wesleyan University in Middletown (USA) already put me in contact once, and I am sure he will be happy to do so again.

Once we have the family’s consent, we can rummage in the university library until we find the documents. As for Toulouse, I can ask my friend Alfons Serra Baldó, who teaches in the French city, to track down the trunk which Domènech de Bellmunt mentions, according to Lluís M. de Puig.

The whole project could be coordinated by the Catalan Philosophy Society, which is affiliated with the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (lest we forget, Serra Hunter, along with Ramon Turró and others, was a founder member) and promoted through the doctoral thesis on Jaume Serra Hunter by a young graduate.

We therefore have a feasible project which would lead to the recovery of the personality and work of this well-loved master of philosophy in Catalo-nia. If anyone has any further suggestions they will be most welcome.

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review

aume Serra Hunter, Escrits sobre la història de la filosofia catalana, Barcelona: Publicacions de

la Facultat de Filosofia – Universitat Ramon Llull 2011

Vicent Torres societat de filosofia del País Valencià[email protected]

J

In his role as Professor of the History of Philosophy at University of Barcelona, Jaume Serra Hunter (1878-1943) aimed from the outset for normality. It was no easy task. Starting with his appointment in 1911, much of his efforts were spent trying to correct the chaotic situation prior to his arrival. The figure who best symbolized that university anchored in the past was Josep Daurella, professor of logic and a wholesale cod seller, whose posterity has benefited con-siderably from portraits by Gaziel, Pla and Sagarra. Serra Hunter –like Bosch Gimpera and some others– had to struggle from the beginning on two parallel levels: on one hand he tried to redeem the entire university simply by being an honest teacher; on the other he tried to show that those who saw the alma mater as an irredeemable burden and, therefore, ruled out any link between it and the new institutions created by the Mancomunitat –D’Ors and company–were com-pletely wrong. He was only moderately successful, in part because of adverse circumstances arising from the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Partly, also, due to a lack of a useful audience, some efficient disciples willing to continue the work he had begun. Yet far from being one of those many intractable professors who are content to publish at most one or two manuals over forty years, he had prolific periods in which he published several books and articles in Catalan on the philosophical issues that interested him.

Of those texts, the authors of this edition have selected four related to the history of nineteenth-century Catalan philosophy. Be warned before conti-nuing that none of these articles makes for good reading. Yet that does not mean that we cannot recognize merits in them all. The most interesting is, perhaps, the article on the academic career of Llorens i Barba. It is interesting for the large amount of reliable information it contains, which could still today serve as a guide to trace his biography. It should be noted here that no one before Serra Hunter had undertaken to write rigorously after carrying out arduous archival

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research –this is of course true in the case of Llorens i Barba, but also in the case of any other Catalan philosopher after Ramon Llull. And here they all end up in the same boat: Sibiuda, Vives, Balmes and Ramon d’Eixalà, any one you could name. For example, in the case of Vives, as recently as 1960, there were those who obstinately denied his Judaism. According to them, what lead Vives to move first to Paris, then to Oxford and finally to Bruges was not persecution by the inquisitorial process that reduced his entire family to ashes, but rather a desire to take in the sights. With such an intellectual backdrop, Serra Hunter’s work on Llorens i Barba takes on clear definition and undeniable importance, since it points in the right direction, towards clarification.

The other important text in this volume is the one in which Serra Hunter set out to classify the philosophical tendencies of the nineteenth centu-ry, and which was the speech he delivered upon joining the Acadèmia de Bones Lletres (1925). It is also interesting for the sheer volume of facts it provides, although –as Xavier Serra discusses in his introduction to the volume– the in-terpretation runs aground in some fundamental aspects. For Serra Hunter, the main trend in nineteenth-century Catalan philosophy was a local version of the Scottish school of common sense. Serra Hunter considered that this trend was perfectly suited to the Catalan character and that it was therefore neces-sary to continue it, along the path set by Ramon Marti d’Eixalà and Llorens i Barba. He had, of course, important reasons that led him to adopt this point of view. These reasons are basically the inefficiency and extremism of the other philosophical currents that had some impact on nineteenth-century Catalonia: the phrenology of Gall, old-fashioned scholastic philosophy or positivism. As a result, Serra Hunter saw a certain continuity in the cultivation of the philosop-hy of common sense in Catalonia. At least it provided the minimum necessary to start thinking about a local tradition that could lead to a national school. However, the Catalan adoption of the philosophy of common sense was clearly incomplete, and Serra Hunter pointed out the path to follow to perfect it: it was necessary to make the transition from introspective psychology to metaphysics. A difficult step that neither Serra Hunter nor anyone after him dared take. On the other hand, as correctly stated in the introduction to this volume, Serra Hunter underestimated the copious local production derived from scholastic philosophy and was being superficial when comparing the Scottish school of common sense to the ‘seny català’, since they each point in opposite directions and are therefore incompatible.

The two texts that complete the volume, studies on Llorens and Sanz del Río and the philosophy of Turró, are of less interest. Serra Hunter excelled like no other when it came to supplying his texts with rigorously researched facts. But when it came time to hammer out a relevant interpretation, he lacked the finesse that characterized the work of the great analysts.

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However, to keep the reader from getting lost in the muddle of ni-neteenth-century philosophy, this volume offers an excellent introduction by Xavier Serra, which brings together the essential elements necessary for hol-ding one’s interest throughout: its basis is a solid knowledge of the subject; it generates quite stimulating ideas about the book it presents and, finally, it is well written. This introduction now stands, alongside the biography by Jordi Salas-Coderch (Jaume Serra i Húnter: Semblança biogràfica, Barcelona, Institut d’Estu-dis Catalans, 2000), as a key element in assessing Serra Hunter’s contributions.

If readers are short on time, they should at least read this introduction. It offers a considered and quite effective approach to the figure of Serra Hunter. One will have to forgive, however, the carelessness of the printers, who did not even take the pains to begin each of Serra Hunter’s texts on a new page.


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review

ere Coromines. La mort austera, Barcelona: Acontravent 2010

Honorat Jaume i Font societat Catalana de [email protected]

P

La vida austera (Austere Life, 1908) was a huge success at the time and was translated into French, Spanish and Italian, which gives some idea of Coro-mines’ prestige both in Catalonia and abroad, where reviews situated the work as ranking with the “transcendental idealism” of Carlyle or Emerson. The book should be seen as belonging to the genre of essay or literature of ideas. The emi-nently personal tone of the text, one that is steeped in spiritualist sentimental-ism offset by commonsense reasoning, a tone that very much reflects the epoch, should not make us lose the sense of what the work was attempting and indeed achieved at the time of writing: effective reflection on the moral principles of personal life and social life. The aim was to demonstrate that a coherent and dignified life was explicable whether further from or closer to the religious principles of an omnipresent Christianity. While that might not be necessary today, it should not stand in the way of our understanding that this was a dif-ficult task to achieve. Pere Coromines’ work is located precisely at this point: the underpinning of a particular kind of life that could dovetail with Christianity with regard to key questions of a certain puritanical rigorism while also aiming to lay the foundations of this model with vital reason alone, without hypocrisy or renunciation. The endeavour was, then, to construct a non-clerical morality based on rational consideration of human nature. Addressing a public that was gaining access to the written word –a readership arising in particular from the literacy-promoting and encyclopaedic labours of cultural centres– and, in sec-ond place, “men of letters” with a certain critical spirit, Coromines’ book was so successful because that readership was being created all over Europe at the time. His son, Joan Coromines, recalls that this was a work “… of the kind that leaves an indelible impression in its words, its concepts, in the culture and in the language in which it is written”.

La mort austera (Austere Death) is the last part, the fifth and final book of La vida austera. At the end of this edition one finds a collection of quotes

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from the other four books that accompany the former work: Les albes de la vida (Dawnings of Life), Els dies venturosos de la joventut (Joyous Days of Youth), La santedat humana (Human Saintliness) and Les delícies de la terra (Delights of the Earth). The publisher also includes Elegia de València (Elegy of Valencia), a poem that traces the author’s life and that was read by Joan Coromines on the day of his father’s funeral. One is also appreciative to find, apart from Carles Duarte’s Prologue, the three Prologues by Pere Coromines for the 1908, 1909 and 1911 editions of La vida austera. As happens with other books by Coromines, an introduction titled “Història d’aquesta obra” (The Story of This Work) is not lacking either. Hence, in a few pages, one can obtain quite an accurate idea of the work as a whole. Bearing in mind the tastes of our own times, this is by no means a bad decision.

Pere Coromines started to write La vida austera at the end of 1905 and finished it in 1908. At the time he was working at producing the Extraordinary Culture Budgets for the Barcelona City Council and in the Institute of Cata-lan Studies (1907), of which he was a founding member. A letter addressed to Coromines by Joan Maragall in January 1909 praises the work, saying, “I have found in your expression a wholesomeness, a purity, a power of style so irresis-tible that it alone would oblige me to agree with everything you say: this is the sincere word of a man who speaks out for good and with marvellous clarity” (cited in P. Coromines Obres Completes (Complete Works), Barcelona: Selecta, 1972, p. 1163). In his introductory piece, “Història d’aquesta obra”, Coromines explains its origin: “The death of my father, the terrible blow it was for me, gave birth in my heart to the aim of starting a new book, a sort of exemplary booklet that traces the life of man, from the first days of life through to his last breath, a collection of pleasing comments on simple existence with which I would present the austere practices I learned from my father and to which he owed the salvation of his character and the conquest of new happiness. The steps of an austere life, of love for the truth, of indomitable energy, of healthy foresight, of hard work and sacrifice; the ideals of virtue and a firm resolution never to move away from reality, guided my pen at the time.”

La mort austera begins with reflections on death and immortality for human beings. Coromines offers a vision that is a long way from pessimism and gloomy resignation before death: man acts immortally and “… this is the cause of his optimal view of existence”. He acts immortally: he knows he must die and this is painful to him but in his heart is the certainty of immortality. Coromines presents the saintly man (of a lay or humanistic saintliness that does not square with the artificial theological or pious term) as one who is capable of transferring his heart into thought while always banishing the presence of death. From this concept of immortality are derived rules of conduct: “We must work in accordance with the most intimate law of our immortal nature,

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strengthening the vital columns of our virtue which would be debilitated by contemplation of death.”

Pere Coromines outlines a series of interpretations of death formulated throughout history in thought, literature and art, passing through Egypt, Gre-ece, Galilee, Rome, Europe, the thought of Anaxagoras, of Epicurus, the Book of the Dead, the poet Lucretius, the medieval Dance of Death, the paintings of Dürer, miniatures in manuscripts, the popular representations of life after death in Dante, et cetera. The human being, knowing he is immortal, experiences the dilemma of irrational annihilation. Coromines therefore notes: “Human reason in its divine power of invention has represented the survival of our being”. He warns the reader that the human being will not attain immortality by either in-tellectual or doctrinaire means. Immortal life is “… the natural gift of an austere life full of noble valour and powerful ideality”. At this point, he summons up the scene of almond trees in bloom. The setting, the landscape and the com-pany (of his wife and son) lead imperceptibly to happiness. Time is forgotten and contingent images disappear. This is immortal life, Coromines would say. Here, he takes goes one step further: the peoples of western civilisation can “act immortally” when considerations of death are expunged from reality.

Coromines invites the reader to safeguard health and love. It is good “… to take care of the body’s health so as to achieve the purest spirituality” since physical pain, in anticipating the certainty of death, perturbs the immortal power of man. Love “… is the irresistible disposition of our being”. When he loves, the life of man is full and immortal. If there is no love there is no life and Coromines says, “… so if you wish to live life immortally, give your heart the love it yearns for”. Otherwise, the lie and cowardice disturb immortality, usher in the presence of death and deny dignity. Speaking of faint-heartedness, Coromines would exhort action: “When human society offers you the laurels of glory summon up all the bravura of your heart and accept them swiftly and resolutely”.

The urge to cast out death should not be the cause of man’s ingenu-ously forgetting it. Death is a breaker. It breaks everything that man is capable of thinking and feeling. He thus does not hesitate to say that “… as men of good sense and virtue, we must consider death as the end of our existence, wit-hout self-deception.” Coromines does not find enough elements of guidance in “strictly human” tools. We are in the domain of finite experience yet wish to invade what is infinite. Whether a life might follow present life, Coromines would say, “… is not something that could be affirmed or denied in the closed field of human concepts and experiences”.

He reflects upon old age and the proximity of death, closing the pe-nultimate chapter with a layman’s prayer from which I cite a fragment: “We

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walk boldly towards saintliness, we take care of the prodigious marvel of our body and are always craving a loftier ideality. May our actions remain intense and powerful until exhausting the treasure of our human existence. Thus, never forgetting that we must die, we shall drive away the image of death and when our hour arrives we shall face it unwaveringly, with calm courage.” With these words he might end La vida austera.

Josep Iborra, L’estupor • Per Wirtén, On eres quan va caure Euro-pa? • Martí Domínguez i Anna Mateu, Periodisme desestabilitza-dor DOSSIER: Cap a on va la societat valenciana? • Jordi Muñoz, Com hem arribat fi ns ací? Les bases de l’hegemonia electoral de la dreta valenciana • Ernest Reig, La crisi internacional i l’economia va-lenciana • Rafael Castelló, Tendències socials al País Valencià • Adolf Beltran, Anatomia de la corrupció • Violeta Tena, Visions del País • Francesc Via- del, L’apropiació de la identitat • Toni Mollà, Joan Fuster i nosaltres DO-CUMENT Ge- orge Orwell, Per què escric • Wi- lliam Viestenz, La fi losofi a de la llengua de Josep Pla • Tom Van Imschoot, Sobre la autoinven- ció de la literatura fl amenca • Mer- cè Altimir, Lon-gus, Mishima i el relat d’iniciació • Xavier Ferré, De l’interès eco-nòmic al plan- tejament polític • François Rastier, Ne- ologismes i neo-nazisme LLIBRES Fracisco Fuster, La Transició i els seus des-contents (Maria Muntaner i altres,Transformacions) • Guillem Llop, La utilitat de la crítica contra el dogmatisme (Antoni Defez, Assumptes pen-dents) • Simona Skrabec, «Saps el país dels tarongers en fl or?» (Antoni Martí Monterde, Un somni europeu) • Pau Viciano, Una ideologia xe-nòfoba i antidemocràtica (Vicent Flor, Ofrenar noves glòries a Espanya)

PUBLICACIONS DE LA UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIAARTS GRÀFIQUES 13 46010 VALÈNCIA • [email protected]

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XXVI:70 (2011) Art, mercat i societat. Mil anys de relacions i interferènciesJuan Vicente García MarsiLLa: Art, mercat i societat. Mil anys de relacions i interferències / Carles ManchO: Promotors o artistes. La subtil frontera de l’art medieval / Juan Vicente García MarsiLLa: Bellesa compartida. Confraries, oficis i parròquies com a clients artístics a la València medieval / Ximo cOMpany:La trama social dels àngels de la catedral de València (segle XV) / Yolanda GiL saura: Les galeries de retrats a la València barroca. La construcció de la memòria / Rafael GiL saLinas: El triomf de l’art entre el públic valencià. El mercat artístic al segle XIX / Marta Bertran i arMadans: Els frontals d’altar durant la descoberta del romànic / Carmen Gracia: Què és l’art avui? Reflexions sobre el món actual

Miscel·lània: Francesc devesa i jOrdà: La salut en Monumenta Borgia VI / Lluís J. Guia Marín: «En obsequio de vuestra majestad, y considerable estrago de sus casas, y haziendas». L’exili dels veïns de Dénia arran de la Guerra de Successió / Alfons jiMénez cOrtacans: El feixisme que arriba. Reflexions a La Veu de Catalunya sobre el totalitarisme italià (1922-1936) / Narcís iGLésias:La llengua davant les experiències individuals de l’exili (1939-1945): fugida, desarrelament i guerra

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JOCIHThe Journal of Catalan Intellectual History (JOCIH) is a biannual electronic and printed publication created with the twofold purpose of fostering and disseminating studies on Catalan Philosophy and Intellectual History at an international level. The Journal’s Internet version is published in Catalan and English at the Open Journal System of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC) and its paper version is published in English by Huygens Editorial, Barcelona.

The JOCIH is edited by four Catalan public universities – the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), the University of Barcelona (UB), the University of Valencia (UV) and the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) – and by three academic societies – the Catalan Philosophical Society, the Valencian Philosophical Society and the Mallorcan Philosophical Association. The JOCIH also draws on the support of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC), the Institute of Law and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (IDT-UAB) and the Ramon Llull Institute.

CONTENTSAs its name suggests, our journal focuses mainly on philosophy. However, we also understand intellectual history, in a broader sense, to be a synonymous with cultural heritage and the JOCIH therefore regards cultural history, the history of ideas and the history of philosophy as different branches of a single tree. And for that reason we not only publish historical analyses of various subjects in philosophy, the humanities, the social sciences, religion, art and other related subjects, but also offer critical reviews of the latest publications in the field, memory documentaries and exhaustive bio-bibliographies of various eighteenth- to twenty-first-century Catalan, Valencian, Balearic and Northern Catalan authors.

http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Issues3&4

2012

Print ISSN: 2014-1572 Online ISSN: 2014-1564

Print ISSN: 2014-1572

UIB Universitat de lesIlles Balears

English edition

Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Print ISSN: 2014-1572 // Online ISSN: 2014-1564

Issues3&4

2012

Journal of Catalan Intellectual History

Documents

Transcript of Journal of Catalan Intellectual History