Journal of Catalan Intellectual History

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English edition

2013 Issues 5&6

Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Issues Journal of Catalan 5&6 Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

2013

JOCIH The 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.

CONTENTS

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

http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH Print ISSN: 2014-1572 // Online ISSN: 2014-1564

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. 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 twentyfirst-century Catalan, Valencian, Balearic and Northern Catalan authors.


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Issues Journal of Catalan 5&6 Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

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Issues Journal of Catalan 5&6 Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

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Issues Journal of Catalan 5&6 Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana Issues 5 & 6, 2013 Números 5 i 6, 2013

Editors-in-Chief / Editors Generals Josep Monserrat (Universitat de Barcelona) Xavier Serra (Universitat de València) Pompeu Casanovas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Language Editor / Editor lingüístic D. Sam Abrams

Web Site Lloc Web Institut de Dret i Tecnologia (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) http://www.catalanphilosophy.cat

Traducció del Català / Translation from Catalan Dan Cohen, Joe Graham, Mara Lethem, Barnaby Noone

Electronic Edition Edició electrònica http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Scientific Board / Comitè Científic Ramon 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 Redacció Meritxell Fernández Barrera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Honorat Jaume (Societat Catalana de Filosofia) Marta Lorente Serichol (Societat Catalana de Filosofia) Marta Poblet (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) Marta Roca Escoda (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Université de Lausanne) Joan-Josep Vallbé (Universitat de Barcelona) Journal Management / Gestió de la Revista Enkeleda Xhelo (Institut d’Estudis Catalans) Blanca Betriu (Societat Catalana de Filosofia) Rebeca Varela (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Núria Galera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

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

Web Master Jorge González Conejero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Editing Institutions Institucions editores Institut d’Estudis Catalans Societat Catalana de Filosofia, filial de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans IDT Societat de Filosofia del País Valencià Associació Filosòfica de les Illes Balears Institut de Dret i Tecnologia (IDT-UAB) Institut Ramon Llull Projects / Projectes UB-EIDOS-2009SGR-00447 UAB-IDT-2009SGR-00688 IEC-PT2012-S05 Online Edition Edició electrònica Institut d’Estudis Catalans C/ del Carme, 47 E-08001 Barcelona, Catalonia, EU http://www.iec.cat Prices and ordering (Print) Preus i comandes (Edició paper) Compra d’un Volum individual (2 números): 35€ Suscriptors: 29,75€ Suscripcions a la revista en paper: info@huygens.es Aquesta obra està sota una llicència AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported de Creative Commons. Per veure una còpia d’aquesta llicència, visiti http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 3.0/. El disseny i maquetació estan sota copyright de Huygens Editorial (Barcelona).


Issue 5&6

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contents JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Issue 5 articles

Nationalism versus Cosmopolitanism: a comparative approach. Montserrat Guibernau .......................................................................................................

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The position of Barcelona’s Destino group and other regime sympathizers with regard to the Second World War: the example of Britain. Francesc Vilanova ............................................................................................................

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Philosophy in Valencia during the early decades of Franco’s rule. Noèlia Mateu ...................................................................................................................

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memoirs

Reflections on Philosophy in Catalonia (1979). Josep Ferrater Mora ............

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life-writting

Life-writing of Manuel Casamada i Comella. Ignasi Roviró ............................

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reviews

Liz Castro (ed.): What’s up with Catalonia?: The causes which impel them to the separation Escrits de Xavier Serra: A peu de foto. Writings by Xavier Serra. At the foot of the picture. Photographies by Francesc Vera Marta Poblet i Pompeu Casanovas .....................................................................................

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Alexandre Jaume i Rosselló, Complete Works. Andrés L. Jaume ........................

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contents JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 6, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Issue 6 articles

Eugeni d’Ors. Philosophy and Humanism in the Twentieth Century. Joan Cuscó i Clarasó .......................................................................................................

The philosophy of education in Catalonia in the 20th century: dialectics, sythetics and vitalists. Xavier Laudo & Conrad Vilanou ...............................................

91 115

Opera Omnia Raimon Panikkar. Toward an understanding. Joan Requesens i Piquer ..................................................................................................

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memoirs

Reports from lectures given by Joan Crexells at the University of Salamanca in 1921. Josep Pla ..................................................................................

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life-writting

Sebastià Trias Mercant (1933-2008). Andrés L. Jaume Rodríguez ........................

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reviews

Eugenio d’Ors: The science of culture. Josep M. Porta Fabregat ..............................

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Montserrat Guibernau: Belonging, Solidarity and Division in Modern Societies. Pompeu Casanovas .........................................................................................................

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article JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.2436/20.3001.02.71 | P. 13-34 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

N

ationalism versus Cosmopolitanism: a comparative approach Montserrat Guibernau Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS, United Kingdom m.guibernau@qmul.ac.uk

summary Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are often portrayed as radically opposed to each other and scholars defining themselves as ‘cosmopolitans’ tend to display a very critical attitude towards anything that includes the word ‘nationalism’ and/ or ‘national’. Being a nationalist is frequently regarded as an obstacle to adopting a cosmopolitan outlook, as being in direct opposition with it. Why is this so? Are there any particular circumstances in which both cosmopolitanism and nationalism can coexist and be compatible? Or, on the contrary, are we faced with two irreconcilable ideologies? Following current debates on these issues, this paper offers a careful analysis of the specific conditions in which nationalism and cosmopolitanism might become compatible. The paper is divided into four sections. First, it considers the treatment of nationalism in classical social theory and offers a detailed analysis of the concepts of state, nation and nationalism as well as the interrelations between the three. Second it introduces cosmopolitanism by studying its origins, development and key principles. Third, the paper adopts a comparative theoretical approach to establish a distinction between democratic and non- democratic forms of nationalism. To illustrate this it examines democratic Catalan nationalism, as exemplified by the Assembly of Catalonia (1971), as an opposition movement to Franco’s dictatorship which embodied both national as well as cosmopolitan concerns.

key words Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, democracy, nation, Catalonia.

Nationalism Nationalism in classical social theory

Nationalism has traditionally been an uncomfortable topic for social scientists. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we encounter numerous examples of major scholars who paid scant attention to what clearly was one of the major

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political forces of their time. As I have shown elsewhere, Max Weber, a German nationalist himself never provided a systematic theory of nationalism. Weber revealed his German nationalism through his opposition to Polish immigration in eastern Germany, his support of German nationalists during the First World War, and his reaction against the Treaty of Versailles. He encouraged and correctly foresaw a movement of German irredentism after the First World War.1 Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx predicted that nationalism would soon disappear and they understood it as an ideology, which needed to be transcended. Durkheim’s and Marx’s approaches are slightly different. Durkheim’s position could be described as ‘pan-nationalist’. By this I mean that his stance places ‘human’ aims above ‘national’ ones. According to Durkheim, the ‘patrie’ has a key role in the process of moralization since it is the ‘highest organized society that exists’.2 In contrast, Marx’s attitude can be described as ‘internationalist’. His main objective was ‘universal emancipation’ and he envisaged some kind of world solidarity. But he recognized that this could only be possible if nations were free from their conquerors, because only then could the workers think in international terms about a working-class solidarity.3 History has proved Marx and Durkheim to be wrong. Instead, nationalism has played a key role in the modern age and it currently manifests itself as a potent force. Nationalism has often been associated with xenophobia, racism, discrimination and backwardness and regarded as a political doctrine opposed to the cosmopolitan ideal once formulated by Kant.4 Great uneasiness and even open hostility towards nationalism stems from its potent emotional dimension, which clearly differs from the ideal of rationality defended by the philosophes and, above all, hostility derives from the association of nationalism with illiberal and totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and Nazism and the violence and oppression perpetrated in its name. The Holocaust, the Soviet domination of the Baltic peoples, genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the repression endured by the Catalan people during Franco’s dictatorship represent only a small sample of cases which illustrate the socalled dark side of nationalism.

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1

M. Guibernau, Nationalisms, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, p. 36-38.

2

A. Giddens, Durkheim on Politics and the State, London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1987 [1972]) p. 202.

3

See M. Guibernau, Nationalisms, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, p. 41.

4

See E. Kant, “Toward perpetual peace” (1795) in Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 311-352.


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 13-34 Nationalism versus Cosmopolitanism: a comparative approach

Nationalism, the nation and the state

Nationalism is Janus-faced and it is important to establish a distinction between its two sides. Yet, in some cases nationalism is associated with xenophobia, racism and ethnic cleansing, while in other cases, it is applied to describe social movements led by peoples prepared to defend their right to exist and peacefully cultivate their own particular culture and language. Nationalism, however, cannot be viewed in isolation I argue that a clearcut distinction needs to be drawn between three main concepts: nation, state and nationalism. By ‘state’, taking Weber’s definition, I refer to ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’;5 although not all states have successfully accomplished this, and some of them have not even aspired to accomplish it. By ‘nation’, I refer to a human group conscious of forming a community, sharing a common culture, attached to a clearly demarcated territory, having a common past and a common project for the future and claiming the right to rule itself. This definition attributes five dimensions to the nation: psychological (consciousness of forming a group), cultural, territorial, political and historical. 6 By ‘nationalism’ I mean the sentiment of belonging to a community whose members identify with a set of symbols, beliefs and ways of life, and have the will to decide upon their common political destiny.7 As a political principle, nationalism ‘holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ 8 this is, nation and state should be co-extensive and the legitimacy of a state requires its own nation identifying with it. However, there are numerous examples of more than one nation -and parts of nations- coexisting within a single state, nations whose boundaries stretch well beyond the borders of the state, and nations that leave some of its nationals outside while including some foreigners. It is the exception rather than the rule to find an example of full coextensivity between nation and state. A state regarded as alien by the nation lacks legitimacy in nationalist terms. In turn and while accepting the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty, a nation has the right to decide upon its political destiny. This includes 5

M. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and Wright Mills (eds.), London: Routledge, 1991 [1948], p. 78.

6

M. Guibernau, Nationalisms, Cambridge: Polity Press: 1996, p. 47.

7

M. Guibernau, Nationalisms, Cambridge: Polity Press: 1996, p. 47-48.

8

E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 1.

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the right to construct a state with which those who belong to the nation are able to identify and feel represented. However, not all nations are prepared or willing to create their own state, some are content with various degrees of political autonomy and federation within large political institutions. It is usual to locate the rise of the nation-state and nationalism in late eighteenth-century Europe and to link their emergence to the ideas which gave rise to the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. The political dimension of nationalism is closely related to the emergence of the concept of popular sovereignty –designed for the ‘whole people’– in the eighteenth century. When the revolutionaries stated that the principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, they may be taken to have asserted that the nation was more than the king and the aristocracy. National selfdetermination turned out to be one of the most frequent interpretations of popular sovereignty. The spread of the new ideas of the philosophes emphasizing the cult of liberty, equality and, in particular, the idea of state power rooted in popular consent, where initially applied to the construction and consolidation of the nationstate as a modern political institution, characterized by the formation of a kind of state which has the monopoly of what it claims to be the legitimate use of force within a demarcated territory and seeks to unite the people subject to its rule by means of cultural homogenization. This raises issues about processes of ‘nation-building’ carried out by the state with the aim to homogenize an otherwise diverse population in linguistic and cultural terms. It also highlights the fact that most states are formed by more than one nation; thus including various nations or parts of nations within their boundaries. Moreover, it also emphasizes the relevance of a wide range of strategies employed in the construction of new nations destined to confer legitimacy to the state; a process in which the non-eternal and dynamic nature of all nations is brought to the fore. Yet while some nations are able to locate their ethnic roots in pre-modern times, others have emerged out of nation-building processes carried out from the late eighteenth century onwards.

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Nation, state and nationalism form a triad characterized by a constant tension between its three components. Hence, changes in the definition of one of the constituents have the capacity to influence and, to some extent, even alter the definitions of the other two. For instance, if belonging to a nation is defined in terms of common blood, the definition of the state and with it that of citizenship, as an attribute conferred upon its members will have to include blood as a sine qua non condition for membership. Consequently, any nationalist movement emerging in these specific circumstances will focus upon common blood as a requisite for exclusion and inclusion in the nation that they want to defend and


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promote. In other cases, where common ancestry is replaced by territory or by the will to become a member act as the main condition for membership of a particular state, the definition of the nation and the character of nationalism are altered accordingly. The example that I have just mentioned refers to conditions for membership, this is to elements which are considered indispensable in order to establish a distinction between those who belong and those who do not belong to the nation. However, alterations in the definitions of nation, state and nationalism are not restricted to conditions for belonging or criteria for membership. The state’s self-definition as a unitary, a federal or even a multinational political institution holds significant consequences for the peoples living within its boundaries. Once one of these self-definitions is adopted by a specific state, it has the capacity to influence the definition of the nation. This is particularly evident in the case of being confronted with a state that declares itself to be multinational, thus assuming the coexistence of more than one nation within its territory. Such a position entails an automatic distinction between nation and state that challenges the commonly accepted coincidence between the two. A multinational state explicitly acknowledges its internal diversity and in so doing, it influences the range of definitions of nationalism that may emerge within its territory. First, in these cases, the nationalism instilled by the state will necessarily involve the acceptance of the nations included within its borders. This type of nationalism tends to focus on shared constitutional rights and principles as elements able to hold together an otherwise diverse citizenry. Second, the nationalism emerging from some of the national minorities included within the state is bound to be strongly influenced by the state’s recognition of their status as nations. The minorities’ nationalism generally demands greater power and resources with the aim of furthering self-government, –this is assuming that they are already entitled to some political autonomy. In spite of this, often states seek the cultural and linguistic homogenization of their citizens. Whether at the same time states will be prepared or not to respect and recognize the particular cultures and languages of their national and ethnic minorities will depend on the political culture of each particular state. Alterations in the definition of nationalism have the power to impact upon the definitions of both the state and the nation. Therefore, a nationalist discourse based upon the rejection, dehumanization, and portrayal of those who do not belong to the nation as ‘enemies’ and as a ‘threat’ will feed xenophobia and ethnic hatred. This type of nationalism will invariably foster a narrow definition of the nation based upon the exclusion of the different and the belief in the superiority of one’s own nation above all others. A state endorsing this

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sort of nationalism is likely to base its policy on the marginalization or sometimes even the elimination of ‘others’ within its territory, and/or the pursue of a consistent assimilation policy. This type of state often engages in conflicts with other states as a result of an aggressive economic and/or territorial expansionist policy. So far I have offered some examples showing how differences in the nature and definition of one of the constituents of the triad trigger substantial variations in the definitions of the other two. A further consideration suggests that different definitions of nation, state and nationalism coexist simultaneously in different parts of the globe. Hence, the relation between the three components of the triad can be analyzed by focusing upon two different levels. The first, as I have shown above, involves the study of how changes in the definition of one of the constituents affects the other two. The second moves on to consider the eventual emergence of external factors capable of altering the very nature of the triad by shifting the balance of power between its members and even threatening to undermine one of them at the expense of another. Here we are confronted with radical transformations able to alter the more or less stable equilibrium existing between the triad by affecting their relationship at a structural level well above the particular situations considered when analyzing individual cases. At present, the main challenge to the relationship between the triad concerns the radical and rapid transformations altering the traditional nature of the state. The proliferation of supranational institutions, the increasing number of multinational corporations, and the emergence of substate nationalist movements contrive a novel political scenario within which the traditional role of the state is being undermined in a fundamental way. The signs of this have already become apparent; the radicalization of state nationalism, the proliferation of ethnic and national conflicts and the state’s resistance to give up substantial aspects of its sovereignty represent but a few examples which hint at the state’s urgent need to recast its nature; undoubtedly a process which is already under way.

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Currently, democratic nationalist movements in nations without states such as Catalonia, Scotland and Quebec invoke the principle of consent and the idea of popular sovereignty to legitimate their claims for self-determination, a concept embracing a wide range of options encompassing political decentralization, devolution, federation and independence. The recognition of the right to self-determination has the capacity to challenge the nation-state as a political institution, which, in most cases, has been created upon the attempt to seek the cultural and political homogenization of its citizens, paying scant attention to its own internal national diversity.


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 13-34 Nationalism versus Cosmopolitanism: a comparative approach

Cosmopolitanism The Stoics initially formulated cosmopolitanism –they were a pre-Socratic philosophical school that criticized the historically arbitrary nature of boundaries of polities and their role in fostering a sense of difference between insiders and outsiders. In their view, the emphasis placed on boundaries contributed to shifting the focus away from the human condition shared by all persons by stressing differences rather than commonality among them. The Stoics sought ‘to replace the central role of the polis in ancient political thought with that of the cosmos in which humankind might live together in harmony’.9 During the Enlightenment, the cosmopolitan idea was given a new impetus by Immanuel Kant who stood in favor of allowing people to ‘enjoy a right to the free and unrestricted public use of their reason’10 by placing themselves beyond the limits –rules, prejudices and beliefs– set up by their polities and by acting as members of a ‘cosmopolitan society’ defined by its openness. The entitlement to enter the world of open, uncoerced dialogue was adapted and developed in his concept of ‘cosmopolitan right’.11 In the late 1970s and partly influenced by the intensification of globalization processes, cosmopolitanism re-emerged once again. Currently, cosmopolitanism has three central separate meanings which are often in tension. First, cultural cosmopolitanism is associated with those individuals who enjoy cultural diversity, are able to travel the world and tend to enjoy a privileged position, which places them well beyond ethnocentric views of culture and identity. This type of cosmopolitans forms a selected transnational elite and the study of their views on culture and identity belong to the realm of sociological analysis. Second, philosophical cosmopolitanism relates to the adherence to a set of principles and values destined to attain global social justice and, with it, the elimination of dramatic disparities of wealth. This type of cosmopolitanism has a strong ethical nature. It is engaged in the quest for some minimal ethical values to be applicable to the whole of humanity; for instance, the commitment to Human Rights, as defined by the UN.

9

D. Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order” in G. Brock, and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10-27 (p. 10).

10 J. Schmidt, “Civility, Enlightenment and Society: conceptual confusions and Kantian remedies”, American Political Science Review, no. 92, 1998: 419-427, p. 424. 11 O. O’Neill, “Enlightenment as autonomy: Kant’s vindication of reason” in L. Jordanova and P. Hulme (eds.), The Enlightenment and its Shadows, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 194.

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Third, institutional or political cosmopolitanism refers to the study of how novel forms of governance and political institutions might match up to a more cosmopolitan order. Yet, in some instances a tension arises between cultural and philosophical (ethical) cosmopolitanism. For example: 1/ The enthusiasm that cultural cosmopolitans show towards cultural creations and diversity often ignores the circumstances of their origins:12 an issue of paramount significance for ethical cosmopolitans concerned about social justice. 2/ A different attitude towards difference itself. Hence, while the cultural cosmopolitan praises and enjoys diversity, the ethical cosmopolitan seeks to find some universal standard concerning what ought to be regarded as inalienable rights and principles to be applied to all members of humanity. 3/ A somehow different position with regard to inequality. The cultural cosmopolitan enjoys an advantaged position and his/her open mind is generally associated with the opportunities enjoyed in terms of access to education, travel and the means allowing for a specific life-style. A certain inequality stands at the core of the privileges of which cultural cosmopolitans benefit. Therefore, resentment, lack of trust and criticism of cultural cosmopolitans usually originate among the ranks of less privileged people. According to ethical cosmopolitans, the quest for global social justice requires the mitigation of inequality, which, among other things, has allowed an elite to become cultural cosmopolitans. However, a more nuanced approach to this issue leads Sypnowich to argue that ‘the idea of global justice involves some idea of cultural evaluation’.13 In addition, some further tensions exist between the three notions of cosmopolitanism mentioned above. For instance, a cosmopolitan ethicist could be very skeptical of the possibilities of a cosmopolitan culture, in turn; an institutional cosmopolitan may adhere to a variety of different ethical commitments. Not to mention differing views upheld by cosmopolitans with regard to the existing gap between cosmopolitan philosophy and social reality. The three key principles defended by scholars of philosophical cosmopolitanism, who are essentially ethical philosophers who focus on the nature

12 C. Sypnowich, “Cosmopolitans, cosmopolitanism, and human flourishing” in “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order” in G. Brock and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 55-74 (p. 57). 20

13 Ibid., p. 58.


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and form of ethical justification, such as C. Beitz, Thomas W. Pogge and Brian Barry14 , are: 1/ Principle of individualist moral egalitarianism or egalitarian individualism, that is, all humans are free and equal beings. 2/ Principle of reciprocal recognition, ‘each person has an equal stake in this universal ethical realm and is, accordingly required to respect all other people’s status as a basic unit of moral interest’. 15 3/ Principle of impartial moral reasoning ‘requires that each person should enjoy the impartial treatment of their claims –that is, treatment based on principles upon which all could act’.16 David Held has formulated the most recent and original work on institutional cosmopolitanism. He argues that cosmopolitan principles – equal worth and dignity; active agency; personal responsibility and accountability; consent; reflexive deliberation and collective decision-making through voting procedures; inclusiveness and subsidiarity; avoidance of serious harm; and the amelioration of urgent need – ‘are the principles of democratic public life, but without one crucial assumption –never fully justified in any case in liberal democratic thought, classic or contemporary – that these principles can only be enacted effectively within a single, circumscribed, territorially based political community’.17 This implies that ‘states would no longer be regarded as the sole centers of legitimate political power within their borders, as it is already the case in many places… States need to be articulated with, and relocated within, an overarching cosmopolitan framework’.18

14 See C. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton University Press, 1979; C. Beitz, “Philosophy of International Relations” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1998; T. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty” in C. Brown, (ed.) Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 89-102; T. Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23, (1994): 195-224; B. Barry, “Statism and Nationalism: a Cosmopolitan Critique” in I. Shapiro, and L. Brilmayer, (eds.) Global Justice, New York University Press, 1999, p. 12-66. 15 T. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty” in Brown, C. (ed.) Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 89-102 (p. 90). 16 D. Held, “Cosmopolitanism: Ideas, Realities and Deficits” in D. Held, and A. McGrew (eds.) Governing Globalization: Power, Authority and Global Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p. 305-324, and p. 311. 17 D. Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order” in G. Brock, and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10-27 (p. 21). 18 D. Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order” in G. Brock, and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10-27 (p. 27).

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I understand current accounts of cosmopolitanism to be closely related to the image of the world as a single interconnected place where an unparalleled degree of visibility brought about by the technological revolutions of the late 20th century and after have provided unprecedented awareness of political, cultural, linguistic, religious, gender, economic and other forms of difference. Within this novel scenario, increased multilevel interaction strengthens the case for cosmopolitanism as the ethics of the global age. Cosmopolitan values defend the equality and freedom of all human beings, a principle already accepted and included in some constitutions, international norms and regulations. There is a big gap, however, between the theoretical vow to cosmopolitan principles and social reality since, at present, not a single institution or organization is recognized by all humans as capable of enforcing compliance with cosmopolitan principles and having sufficient power, legitimacy and means to punish those transgressing them. The global world is not guided by cosmopolitan principles, although there are some signs that a growing transnational movement, if still incipient, is beginning to emerge. Yet, some cosmopolitan values are embedded in some international and regional institutions such as the UN, the International Criminal Court and the European Court of Justice, among others, as well as in some transnational social movements and organizations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, hence steppingstones exist.

Democratic nationalism and cosmopolitism A type of nationalism based on the believe in the superiority of a particular ethnic group –ethnocentrism– aiming to dominate and exploit other peoples economically, culturally, military or politically, is not compatible with cosmopolitanism. This type of nationalism, which I refer to as ‘non-democratic nationalism’, tends to seek the expansion of its nation’s borders and is primarily concerned with acquiring sufficient power to achieve its aims. Non-democratic nationalism tends to embrace political ideologies infused with authoritarian, dictatorial or fascist ideas. It fosters unequal relations and tends to promote illiberal and undemocratic forms of government. But not all nationalisms define their objectives and the means to achieve them in non-democratic terms.

22

When studying the possible compatibility between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the sometimes almost visceral rejection of anything related to nationalism on behalf of some defenders of cosmopolitanism, for whom nationalism is invariably associated with backwardness, ethnocentrism and even racism, has to be acknowledged. Often, an instead of engaging in a dispassionate and rigorous analysis of the Janus-faced nature of nationalism, they tend to focus solely upon the pernicious side of nationalism. In so doing, they fail to


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recognize that, in some instances, nationalism is strongly associated with democracy, the search for recognition and the peaceful desire for the development and survival of peoples.

Catalan nationalism as a democratic force during Franco’s dictatorship

Two opposing ideas of nation and state came into play in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).19 The Francoists presented an extremely centralized and uniform image of Spain. In contrast, the Republicans defended a moderately diffuse image of a state that would allow the historical nations, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, to enjoy a certain degree of political and cultural autonomy. However, it should be noted that the centralist view of the Spanish state was never exclusive to the Spanish extreme right, but rather a characteristic shared with most of the political spectrum. The main difference between Spanish political forces lies in their attitude toward internal diversity: while democratic parties accept it, fascists reject it. 20 Franco’s victory led to the suppression of Catalan political institutions, the banning of the Catalan language and the proscription of all the symbolic elements of Catalan identity, from the flag (the senyera) to the national anthem (Els Segadors). 21 The Francoists, who called themselves ‘nationals’, professed a conservative form of state nationalism unwilling to accept Spain’s national diversity; this informed their nation-building strategy aimed at the cultural and linguistic homogenization of the country.22 For them, the unity of the Spanish nation was a nonnegotiable principle. Their nationalism was the result of a reaction against modern ideologies, such as socialism and anarchism, and also a rejection of the Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalist movements, regarded as a threat to the traditional socio-political structure of Spain. The II Spanish Republic had introduced progressive policies (among them abortion, divorce, devolution) and tried to build a state in which the historical nations were recognized and received 19 See M. Guibernau, Catalan Nationalism: francoism, transition and democracy, London: Routledge, 2004. 20 J. Llobera, “Catalan identity. The dialectics of past and present”, Critique of Anthropology, vol. X, nos. 2 and 3 (winter 1990), p. 16. See also P. Preston, Franco, London: Fontana Press, 1994, and H. Raguer, La pólvora y el incienso: La Iglesia y la Guerra Civil Española (19361939), Barcelona: Península, 2001. 21 See J. Benet, Catalunya sota el règim franquista, Paris: Edicions Catalanes de París, 1973. 22 J. Triadú, Una cultura de la llibertat, Barcelona: Aymà, 1978, p. 15.

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a substantial degree of cultural and political autonomy. The right-wing nationalism of the Francoists reacted by calling a halt to the modernization of the country and choosing to maintain the traditional structures defended by broad sectors of conservative Catholics.23 The closed image of Spain imposed by the regime contrasted with the image of a plural Spain (mainly defended by the Catalans, Basques and Galicians) capable of recognizing and celebrating the wealth of its linguistic and cultural heritage. The opposition between the authoritarian nationalism of Francoism and the nationalism of the Catalans, Basques and Galicians, willing to lay claim to their difference was evident when studying the relationship between these two types of nationalism it is essential to understand that, while the regime had the power and the resources necessary to impose its vision of Spain, the peripheral nationalisms were dismembered or condemned to secrecy. Indeed, after the Civil War, the majority of the most important representatives of the democratic political parties banned by the regime went into exile, were imprisoned or executed. The relationship between the ‘victors’ and the ‘defeated’ left no place for dialogue. The authoritarian state designed by Franco did not accept dissidence, and had conferred on itself, by force, the power to decide on the status of the historical nations included within its territory. The regime’s aim was to annihilate them as nations. Faced with a repression, which pervaded all daily activities of the population, most, although not all, Catalans responded with passive resistance. They had been defeated, their country had been destroyed and they now lived in precarious conditions. They had to confront the presence of an army, which defended the dictatorship and an imported and imposed bureaucracy, which only spoke and wanted to hear Castilian. The official public sphere was completely dominated by the new regime. In that context, the regime’s efforts to suppress internal diversity accentuated even more the distinction between ‘us’, the Catalans, and ‘them’, the Francoists (identified with Castilian culture and language, conservatism, centralism and conservative Catholicism), although not all Catalans were democrats and anti-Franco, and not all Castilians supported the Franco regime. The submission of Catalan society in the public sphere encouraged a ‘tacit agreement’ and a specific feeling of solidarity among Catalan people, a feeling resulting from sharing a situation of danger and collective oppression. For most Catalans, irrespective of their social class, the Franco regime and its officials were seen as a common enemy, at least because the mere fact of being a ‘Catalan’ was enough to generate

24

23 See A. Balcells, Catalan Nationalism, London: Macmillan Press, 1996.


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the suspicion and hostility of the regime’s agents. Only certain sectors of the Catalan bourgeoisie received the Francoist victory with relief and showed their support for the new fascist ideology committed to protecting their economic interests. Catalan identity was preserved thanks to the dynamic and engaged action of a very small intellectual elite, but also thanks to family and friendship circles within which Catalan was spoken and traditional Catalan culture was maintained.24 Catalan nationalism acted as a progressive social movement against the Spanish dictatorship (1936-1975) and Catalan nationalists endured persecution and death during the regime. In spite of that they stood up in favor of the democratization of Spain and the right to self-determination of the Catalan people thus defending their right to preserve and develop their distinct culture, language and political institutions. Under Franco’s dictatorship, the former were forbidden and the latter where completely dismantled. Political parties were illegal and clandestine resistance to the dictatorship was actively persecuted and repressed. On 7 November 1971 about three hundred people representing different Catalan political, social and professional sectors founded the Assembly of Catalonia, a clandestine organization that soon became the broadest and most important unitary Catalan movement since the Civil War. No similar unitary movement, in view of its scope and its relevance, was created in any other part of Spain. According to Josep Benet, a member of the Assembly, ‘without the mobilizing power of the Assembly and its prestige, the Suárez government and even some Spanish democrats would hardly have taken the Catalan national demands into account’.25 The Assembly initially founded by the socialists and, in particular, the communists received the economic support of the group led by Jordi Pujol 26 , which subsequently joined it. 27 The left wing MSC (Socialist Movement of Catalonia) and the communist PSUC (Socialist Unified Party of Catalonia) won over the support of significant sectors of the working class and of a high number of Castilian-speaking immigrants. They all voiced the need to bring together democracy, left-wing policies and autonomy for Catalonia. 24 M. Guibernau, “Intellectuals and nationalism in nations without states: the Catalan case”, Political Studies, 48, 5, ****: p. 989-1005. 25 J. Benet, “Introducció”, in A. Batista and J. Playà Maset, op. cit., p. 16. 26 Once democracy was restored, Jordi Pujol became president of the Generalitat (Catalan Government) 1980-2003. 27 A. Balcells, El nacionalismo catalán, Madrid: Historia 16, 1991, p. 181.

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The main aims shared by the Assembly’s members were: ‘achieving a general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles’, ‘the upholding of the fundamental democratic rights: freedom of assembly, of speech and of association –including trade unions–, of demonstration and the right to strike, which guarantee the effective access of the people to economic and political power’, ‘the provisional re-establishment of the institutions and of the principles embodied in the 1932 Catalan Statute of Autonomy, as a clear expression of the right to selfdetermination’, and ‘the coordination of all peninsular peoples in fighting for democracy.’28 Its motto was: ‘Freedom, Amnesty and Statute of Autonomy’. Assembly members risked their own lives to defend democracy at a time when repression was commonplace. I argue that in defending freedom, democracy, dialogue and social justice the Catalan nationalism embodied in the Assembly of Catalonia stood up as an example of the compatibility between democratic nationalism and the main tenets of cosmopolitanism. In particular because the objectives of Catalan nationalism went well beyond the specific democratization of Catalonia, rather they focused upon the democratization of Spain and the desire to join Western liberal democracies while committing their support for Human Rights. The Assembly worked tirelessly to circulate these demands and its mobilizing action continued until the first democratic parliamentary election held on 15 June 1977. From then on, the political parties became the new political actors. The unity of the opposition did not last long and was replaced by competition between the ‘images’ that the Catalans had of their country and of the status that Catalonia should have within Spain, depending on their loyalties and on the political interests of the different parties.

Democratic nationalism and cosmopolitanism: conditions for their coexistence

While compatibility between non-democratic forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism is impossible, I argue that, coexistence between democratic forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism stands as a viable alternative. For instance both ideologies share xenophobia, intolerance and injustice as powerful common enemies. This is not to argue that democratic nationalism is either the only actual and possible condition for the emergence of cosmopolitanism or, that democratic nationalism will necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan outlook. Rather, it is my

26

28 Communiqué of the “I Reunió de l’Assemblea de Catalunya”, 7 November 1972. Included as an appendix in A. Batista and J. Playà Maset, op. cit., p. 301-302.


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contention that, in some cases, the values intrinsic to democratic nationalism – social justice, individual freedom and deliberative democracy- and those of cosmopolitanism –the belief that all individuals are equal and free and deserve equal treatment regardless of their origin- allow and favor the compatibility between the two. In my view, whether nationalism is compatible with cosmopolitanism or not depends on the political ideology nationalism is associated with. This is, a democratic form of nationalism –associated with social-democracy, socialism or liberalism, to mention but a few political ideologies that usually inform democratic nationalist political action- subscribing to the principles of social justice, deliberative democracy and individual freedom shares some of its values with cosmopolitanism. In contrast, non-democratic forms of nationalism associated with fascist and authoritarian ideologies stand in outright opposition with cosmopolitanism and democratic nationalism alike. Being a cosmopolitan involves a commitment to global equality, but is it possible to sustain such a commitment and defend a preferential treatment for fellow-nationals? This is the crux of the matter when analyzing whether cosmopolitanism and nationalism can be compatible. The response is a nuanced one. Basically we need a definition of global equality and also an account of the meaning and limitations of the so called ‘priority thesis’ for fellow-nationals. To define global equality is a difficult task because the meaning of words such as ‘sufficient’ and ‘basic needs’ is subject to variations according to different cultures and locations; still, this should not prevent us from offering a more general definition. I understand that the basic tenets of global equality are the avoidance of death by poverty and the fulfillment of Human Rights as defined by the UN. A clash between cosmopolitanism and nationalism comes to light whenever the nation, through its policies, contributes to global poverty and the transgression of human rights. Pogge writes: ‘Our failure to make a serious effort toward poverty reduction may constitute not merely a lack of beneficence, but our active impoverishing, starving, and killing millions of innocent people by economic means’. 29 Among the arguments commonly neglected by cosmopolitans when assessing the moral value of democratic nationalism and its nuanced compatibility with cosmopolitanism are: 29 T. W. Pogge, “Priorities of Global Justice” in in Held, D. and McGrew, A. The Global Transformations Reader, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003 [2000] (2nd edition), p. 548-558, (p. 550).

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- ‘Their failure to acknowledge the role of the community and social relationships in constituting both selfhood and agency’.30 - The idea that many nationalists perceive national membership as a good in itself and not as a mere instrument. - The assumption that the sense of community shared by members of the nation make national belonging valuable and meaningful to individuals. Although one should be aware of the non-homogeneous nature of the majority of nations and also bear in mind that, national belonging is not attributed the same value and status by all citizens. Nations are not eternal but subject to change and they are hardly ever culturally homogeneous. In spite of that, it is possible to speak about a sense of community emerging out of a shared sentiment of belonging to the same nation while simultaneously acknowledging that there will be always a number of people who will remain outside and feel alienated due to social, cultural, economic, religious or other factors. - The belief that sentiments of national belonging generate a ‘community of obligation in the sense that their members recognize duties to meet the basic needs and protect the basic interests of other members’ 31 thus providing a foundation for the development of social justice. - The idea that within a democratic polity national attachments may attain moral value by instilling social justice, trust and respect among fellow citizens, thus contributing to enhance and promote democracy. Yet, the compatibility between nationalism and cosmopolitanism still hinges on whether the cosmopolitan commitment to global equality can be reconciled with the nationalist principle of granting priority to fellow nationals. At this point, we could push this a bit further and ask whether the commitment to global equality is compatible with giving priority to family members and friends. Although we should be aware that, as Erskine, argues ‘morally relevant identities are created not only by “communities of place” but also by membership of nonterritorial and overlapping communities of various types’.32 Cosmopolitans adopt two broad positions concerning this issue, basically they all accept the principle of egalitarian individualism, and nevertheless, they attribute different weight to the various modes of interpretation of other principles.

30 T. Erskine, “Citizen of Nowhere” or ‘The Point Where Circles Intersect’? Impartialist and Embedded Cosmopolitanisms”, Review of International Studies, 28 (3), 2002: 457-78, p. 461 31 D. Miller, On Nationality, Oxford University Press: 1995, p. 83. 28

32 Erskine, “Embedded Cosmopolitanism and the Case of War: Restraint, Discrimination and Overlapping Communities”, Global Society, 14 (4), 2000: 575-90, p. 575.


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David Miller establishes a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of cosmopolitanism.33 According to the former, ‘all moral principles must be justified by showing that they give equal weight to the claims of everyone, which means that they must either be directly universal in their scope, or if they apply only to a select group of people they must be secondary principles whose ultimate foundation is universal’.34 In contrast, ‘weak’ cosmopolitanism ‘holds only that morality is cosmopolitan in part; there are some valid principles with a more restricted scope’, so that ‘we may owe certain kinds of treatment to all other human beings regardless of any relationship in which we stand to them, while there are other kinds of treatment that we owe only to those to whom we are related in certain ways, with neither sort of obligation being derivative of the other’.35 Among the main advocates of ‘strong’ cosmopolitanism are Martha C. Nussbaum and Bryan Barry, defenders of ‘weak’ cosmopolitanism include Michael Walzer, Kor Cho Tan and Andrew Linklater. In this respect, some liberal nationalists argue that the subordination of national commitments to cosmopolitan justice fails to properly accommodate people’s national allegiances and undervalues the moral significance of national identity. Moreover, ‘nationalists who reject the subordination of nationality to cosmopolitan justice do not necessarily reject the idea of global justice per se. What they reject is the cosmopolitan egalitarian ideal that the terms of distributive justice ought to be defined independently of people’s national commitments… National allegiances must be allowed to shape the terms of global justice, and not the other way round as cosmopolitans hold’.36 By being able to develop a sense of national solidarity and duty towards their fellow nationals, individuals move beyond the immediate family circle of solidarity and trust. In a similar manner, a democratic nationalism prompting people to be aware and sensitive to cosmopolitan values may contribute to strengthen the influence of cosmopolitanism. I argue that, in the global age all 33 David Held refers to ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ cosmopolitanism. See, D. Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order” in G. Brock, and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10-27, p. 17. 34 D. Miller, “The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice’ in D. Mapel, and T. Nardin (eds.) International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 166-167. 35 Ibidem. 36 K. C. Tan, “The demands of justice and national allegiances” in G. Brock, and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 164-179 (p. 167).

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democratic nationalisms ought to incorporate a further dimension to their traditional values. Their concern for the nation and fellow nationals should be accompanied by a clear commitment to the cosmopolitanism values of social justice, freedom and dialogic democracy. For instance, I regard support for the International Criminal Court as a step towards global justice. By supporting this initiative, democratic nationalisms will be contributing to the strengthening of cosmopolitan values at a global level. Attachment to fellow nationals does not imply denigration and disrespect for others. On the contrary, the main argument for defending the so called ‘compatriot priority claim’ assumes that we have a duty towards compatriots because they are members in a democratic political body that we, as active citizens, have a duty to sustain and improve.37 The ‘priority thesis’ is founded on the specific type of relationship established among individuals forming a community, in this case, the nation. It is my concern that the sentiments of solidarity that individuals tend to develop towards members of their own community have the capacity to generate a sense of special duty and care towards them. Being prepared to support your fellow nationals as well as the expectation that one would be assisted by them when in need constitutes a major tenet of social cohesion, this is, a situation in which a minimum set of values and principles able to maintain a sense of unity and common purpose are shared among the members of a particular society who are also prepared to make sacrifices for the well-being of the community. But, why national solidarity is so important? Basically, because we do not live in a cosmopolitan world within which individuals feel free, equal, secure and are treated with dignity wherever they go regardless or their origin, gender, age, class and culture. Although some stepping-stones are pointing in the direction of cosmopolitanism, most nations remain engaged in a constant competition with each other, their relations being determined by their own power and status within the international community.

On liberal nationalism and cosmopolitanism It is the concern of some liberals that a particular type of nationalism, this is, liberal nationalism, is compatible with cosmopolitanism since ‘it is within the context of a national culture that the core liberal values of individual autonomy and self-identity, social justice and democracy are best realized’.38

37 P. Kleingeld, “Kantian patriotism” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29, 4, 2000: 313-341 (p. 327). 30

38 See Kymlicka, 2001; Gutman 1996; Tamir 1992; D. Miller 1995 and Nielsen 1999.


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Liberal nationalism focuses on the connection between liberal democracy and the nation-state. Three basic principles define liberal democracy -social justice, deliberative democracy and individual freedom – and it is the liberal nationalists’ view that they are all better achieved within the nation-state. These principles are: – Social Justice. It is the concern of many liberals that moral cosmopolitanism –that is the commitment to global social justice– is better accomplished by fostering it within the nation-state rather than by the creation of some kind of –still so far inexistent– global state. The construction of a welfare state can be regarded as a step toward social justice within a particular society and, as its name indicates, the state is its creator and designer. A ‘nebulous cosmopolitan order’ does not provide welfare state programs, public education, religious liberty, tolerance or the prohibition of racial and sexual discrimination’.39 Furthermore, a theory of social justice ignoring the particular ties and obligations shared by fellow-nationals cannot be considered suitable for humanity since it blatantly ignores the role of those nation-states committed to democracy and their quest to turn themselves into a political space within which social justice is promoted and regulated.40 It is through the commitment to liberal democratic values that the nation-state may become an organ of global social justice. However the intrinsic association of the nation-state with power and the use of violence generates a tremendous tension between its commitment to liberal democratic values and its determination to place national aims before cosmopolitan commitments. Although some relevant attempts have been made recently aiming at the adoption of principles destined to promote global social justice, the scope of their impact is limited when compared with those principles according supremacy to the nation-state. It would be naïve to ignore that all nation-states’ actions are not necessarily conducive to social justice. For instance, it is true that, in some cases, nation-states seeking their own benefit or trying to protect themselves have sabotaged global initiatives destined to tackle specific transnational issues related to social justice such as global warming, genocide, the status and treatment of immigrants and refugees as well as national minorities, to mention but a few.

39 G. Himmelfarb, “The illusions of cosmopolitanism” in Cohen, Joshua (ed) Nussbaum, M. C. with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 72-77 (p. 77). 40 K. C. Tan, “The demands of justice and national allegiances” in G. Brock, and H. Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 164-179 (p. 164).

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– Deliberative democracy entails ‘a system of collective deliberation and legitimation that allows all citizens to use their reason in political deliberation’.41 It requires a high level of trust and a mutual understanding among citizens, which, so far, only the nation has been able to generate. In a corresponding manner, a possible path towards global democracy may be achieved through the promotion of democratic citizenship at national level. Citizens should be encouraged to transcend their own national interests by balancing them with a genuine commitment to cosmopolitan values. Democracy, tolerance and respect within a given society can never be fully attained through the strict compliance with the law - although the law and in particular the threat of punishment tend to persuade those inclined to act otherwise to comply with it. These are attitudes and values that need to be learned, internalized and regarded as so precious that individuals should be prepared to make sacrifices to preserve them. In my view, a genuinely democratic political culture is difficult to achieve, it cannot be improvised and heavily relies on democratic values being introduced through education, political practice, the media and public debate. A commitment to democracy presupposes readiness to engage in a dynamic process, which recognizes dialogue as a means to reach solutions and overcome differences. Democracy, if only applied to the political arena, does not guarantee the construction of a democratic society. I regard democracy as a vital attitude defining private and public relations and occurring in the political, social and economic milieu. – Individual freedom. The relationship between individual autonomy and national culture is a complex one. Liberals argue that national identity ‘makes individual freedom meaningful’.42 By offering individuals a specific value system, a way of life and traditions, national culture bestows meaning upon specific social practices and situates the individual on a vantage point from which to relate, understand and value those of others. This is why national culture makes individual freedom meaningful. National identity offers a moral anchor to individuals by means of the specific corpus of knowledge and values it embodies. This represents the context within which individuals make choices and foster solidarity bonds with fellownationals. Trust and mutual respect are likely to emerge among people socialized within a shared democratic culture including a value system.

41 W. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 226. 32

42 W. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 227.


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In Nielsen’s view, ‘a truly liberal nationalist should also be a cosmopolitan nationalist and cohere with the quintessential cosmopolitan principle of normative individualism and ethical universalism’.43 Thus the cosmopolitan commitment to global egalitarianism can be reconciled with the national principle in so far as this is informed by liberal nationalism, as an ideology prepared to protect the integrity of the nation while adopting an internationalist and egalitarian outlook. One of the major weaknesses of liberal nationalism is its emphasis on individual rights and its disregard for collective rights, a concept of uppermost significance for democratic nationalists. I argue that individual rights cannot be fully enjoyed if they are not conceived within a framework including respect for collective rights. Thus, for an individual to be able to develop all its potentialities, he or she cannot be considered in isolation but as a member of one or more groups. Two sets of different rights which complement each other need to be taken into account, those concerning the individual as a free agent, and those related to the social dimension of individuals who live within specific communities. In late modernity, these communities tend to be nations. After years of developing and promoting individual rights, we are now confronted with the socio-political need to counteract an exceedingly individualistic society threatened by a fragmentation resulting from a growing lack of civic coherence.

Conclusion We live in a world of nations within which national identity compels individuals to social and political action and where national loyalty takes precedence over cosmopolitan allegiances. We do not live within a cosmopolitan order, although some progress has been made in this direction. At present, the cosmopolitan ideal remains far removed from the constant competition, conflict and war defining international relations. It is within this context that most individuals turn towards their own nations as a source of identity but also as an environment within which they enjoy some rights. As I have showed in this paper, there are certain instances in which nationalism and cosmopolitanism may be compatible. To illustrate this I have argued that the Catalan nationalism embodied by the Assembly of Catalonia (1971), which stood up to Franco’s dictatorship, offers an example of a type of nationalism firmly committed to democracy, freedom and social justice, a democratic nationalism whose values and principles were compatible with those

43 K. Nielsen, “Cosmopolitan Nationalism”, Monist, 82, 1 (1999): 446-490 (448-450).

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embodied in cosmopolitan tenets. The objectives of Catalan nationalism went well beyond the specific democratization of Catalonia, rather they focused upon the democratization of Spain and the desire to join Western liberal democracies while committing their support for Human Rights. At that time, their supporters acted outside the dictatorship’s law and were risking their own lives in the name of democracy and freedom. Democratic nationalism is legitimate. It defends the right of nations to exist and develop while recognizing and respecting internal diversity. It rejects the territorial expansion of nations and shows a commitment to increasing the morality of the nations’ citizens by promoting democracy, social justice, freedom, equality, and mutual respect concerning cultural and other differences. Only by being committed to these principles can democratic nationalism become compatible with cosmopolitanism. From a normative perspective, I argue that all nations –with and without states– should be encouraged to set up the conditions favoring the emergence of cosmopolitanism as an attitude compelling individuals to add a further dimension to their care and concern for fellow nationals by raising awareness about the respect, dignity, freedom and equality that should be granted to all human beings. Indeed, while this process applies to those reaching out to cosmopolitanism via democratic nationalism, I am aware that others are adopting a cosmopolitan perspective from the outset while remaining skeptical of all forms of nationalism, democratic or not. Yet by comparing the main tenets of both democratic nationalism and cosmopolitanism and establishing the conditions for their compatibility, I have sought to bridge the theoretical opposition between the two. I am convinced that the political agenda for the future of nations should include the commitment to cosmopolitan ideals and values capable of informing political action and adding a new moral dimension to national identity and nationalism. The advent of cosmopolitanism requires the pledge to eradicate social, political and economic exploitation of individuals and nations. Its strength as a political and moral ideology will depend on its own ability to act as a transformative force leading a multidimensional process destined to change the relations of power in society. I envisage it to encounter fierce opposition. Original in English by the author

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article JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.2436/20.3001.02.72 | P. 35-62 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

T

he position of Barcelona’sDestino group and other regime sympathizers with regard to the Second World War: the example of Britain Francesc Vilanova Fundació Carles Pi i Sunyer Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona fvilanova@pisunyer.org

It invigorated him to spend those two or three days amongst friends and in an atmosphere of such freedom. During the first meeting, JosepVergés asked him this question: “Well then, Brunet, what’s to be done?” “We have to publishDestino. We have to publish a magazine that is both pro-and anti-regime at one and the same time.” Back then, almost everyone began to laugh. But his words endured and have gathered the strength of an axiom. JosepPla, “Manuel Brunet”, from Last texts, Complete Works Volume 44, Barcelona: Destino, 1984, p. 540

summary Franco’s victory in 1939 abruptly dismantled the entire structure that had governed Catalan thought and its journalism right through the decade. To consolidate its advance, however, the regime also needed to fill the vacuum left by those thinkers who had been sent into exile. They did this by launching new politico-intellectual publications like the local Falange’s weekly SolidaridadNacional, the unashamedly pro-Franco broadsheet La Vanguardia Española and the Catalan catholic and nationalist paper Diario de Barcelona. But these were soon overshadowed by a far more original and ambitious publishing venture: Destino. Política de Unidad. A weekly magazine created in Burgos in 1937 by the Territorial Catalana de Falange (the Catalan cell of the Spanish Falange), Destino was privatized and moved to Barcelona in 1939, eventually becoming the regime’s most effective political and cultural platform in Catalonia and the linchpin of a proFranco movement which sought to promote anti-Catalan and anti-liberal sentiment, to offer a final solution to the Catalan problem in the so-called “new state”, LanuevaEspaña, and forge a new intellectual order.

key words Destino, Franco’s regime, Ignacio Agustí, Santiago Nadal, Manuel Brunet, anti-Catalan sentiment, Catalonia, Second World War, Winston Churchill, pro-ally sentiment. 35


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 35-62 FRANCESC VILANOVA

Introduction In 1939, in the wake of their destruction of republican Catalonia and the imprisonment or exile of those who had defended it, Franco’s regime quickly busied itself with building a new social, political, cultural, economic and ultimately journalistic order that would make Barcelona the paradigm of its cause. This activity brought together many different pro-regime forces, from the civil and military administrators and their attendant personnel to the returning fugitives of 1936 and the newly-enlisted or veteran rank and file of the falange, and the carlists and catholics of the unified falange forces. And it also involved the members of committees that were entrusted with reviving the economy and industry and all those journalists, writers, essayists, poets and social and political commentators who, as of autumn 1939, became the sole narrators of wartime Europe to the people of Barcelona (indeed, to all the Catalans who read the press of that period), informing them of their Caudillo’s politics and ideology and of his and their role in the so-called “new state”, La nueva España. Always within the strictest dictates of the regime, this self-styled intelligentsia had to provide clear guidelines to those sectors of the public who had been cut adrift from the rest of the nation by three years of war and revolution and many more years of contamination by pro-Catalan sentiment; and the blunt simplicity of the titles of the more notable texts—José Pemartín’s ¿Quées lo nuevo?, for example (Pemartín, 1938)—indicates how very basic their intended level of instruction was designed to be. The structure of culture and knowledge that was to replace the republican and Catalan nationalist mindset were assembled with the help of both new and older mechanisms, by appropriating political platforms and cells that had existed before 1936 and combining these with the conviction that journalists –or rather, the analysts and chroniclers of the daily and weekly newspapers– could become the means to transmit the new power. This is what Santiago Nadal observed in March 1940, 1 when, in line with his words to Arriba on 2 May 1939, he described this ‘new order’ journalism as “a review of the facts of current affairs exactly as they stand but after they have been subject to the scrutiny of a higher, discerning force that can give them order and authority. This means, therefore, that the journalist must serve and that in serving he must prove his most humble submission to the mandates decreed by this new order...”. So it was that in Barcelona the local falange cell commanded by Luis G. Santamarina (aka Luys Santa Marina and Luis G. Santamarina) took control of

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1. Nadal (1940b) made no bones about the relationship between journalists and the new state: “To my mind and when combined with the interest our war inspires in national matters, the official version of neutrality and the public’s effective neutrality can favour the task of the propagandist, journalist or politician but only as long as he is strictly guided by criteria that protects our national interests.”.


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La Vanguardia (renamed La Vanguardia Española) and of El Correo Catalán, and transformed the confiscated Solidaridad Obrera into the fascist Nacional (Fabre 1996). But before very long, more ambitious groups of thinkers began to appear, spearheaded by the magazine Destino. Política de Unidad (Cabellos and Pérez Vallverdú, 2007; Geli and Huertas, 1996). Younger analysts made a name for themselves in the city’s cultural or media forums and the veteran chroniclers from republican times also returned from exile to share in one common, allimportant mission to help Catalan people address a barrage of urgent issues: to clarify just what had happened in the years before the Civil War (Tallada, 1939) and how, by 1939, the country could have reached the state it was in (VallsTaberner, 1939; VallsTaberner, 1940); to decide what should be done with the remains of Catalan nationalism (Palau, 1939); and to explain how the Spanish should respond to the outbreak of war in Europe, according to the doctrine and precepts of their “highest ruling force”. A product of the regime and a producer and disseminator of new or familiar discourse, this journalistic, “intellectual” Barcelona was a world of its own but a fairly heterogeneous one: the ‘Catalan-Spanish’ victors of the Civil War prided themselves on their unity and embraced Spain’s fascist cause, but there were inevitably internal differences, prompted by the origins of a given circle or movement or because of the differences in how movements grew and interacted. So the party line in Luis de Galinsoga’s La Vanguardia Española didn’t quite match the carlist convictions of the rough and ready “priest of the people” in El Correo Catalán; and the falange cell directed by Gutiérrez Santamarina, who attempted to make Solidaridad Nacional the benchmark publication of the new official culture, was not quite the same as the circle of Santamarina’s own excolleagues at Destino (for colleagues is exactly what they had been in 1937 and had continued to be in 1939), “a magazine of champions” published by thinkers whose governing and business structure had become independent from the Barcelona Falange but who “continued to be falangists, not because they were militants but because their ideology had the same roots” (Cabellos and Pérez Vallverdú, no date). However, the illusion of plurality created by so many forums could not really hide the intentions of the dictatorship, whose stone tablet would never accept an alternative political discourse. But the few answers were to be given by a whole series of different groups who had merged either before or during the war into “more or less effectively organized counter-revolutionary initiatives bearing a notable resemblance to one another and marching to the beat of European fascism in general and Italian fascism in particular: that ideology which would replace republicanism with a new anti-liberal, anti-Marxist and counterrevolutionary order” (Moliner and Ysàs, 1992: 12). Sánchez Recio has also observed that at every level of political power, from the national arena right down to regional and local administrations, the dictatorship armed itself with “a

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fairly wide net of civilian collaborators whose political ideologies and persuasions were diverse but whose common conviction on one count was absolute: that they would deter the attempt to revive the policies of the Second Spanish Republic and strive, instead, to recover and wield such power as would favour the interests of the society’s conservative sector” (Sánchez Recio, 1996: 27). The same premise also held for the Barcelona of the pro-regime essayists, journalists and analysts who explained to their readers exactly what the European arena of the Second World War should mean to them (as well as instructing them in any number of other, equally important issues). And the political landscape of platforms and individuals was therefore characterized by many different shades of grey, even though the majority views were essentially the same. (As Ysàs observes, their “diverse origins” did not undermine the “coincidence” of their “analysis and conclusions”. See Ysàs, 2005: 15.) In the pre-war period, some of these writers had been more or less directly involved in the regionalist political and cultural ventures of FrancescCambó and, as we shall see below, some went on to form Destino. And although there were sometimes problematic differences in origins, the various circles of writers and thinkers were not impervious to one another. For example, Santiago Nadal, Ignacio Agustí and Carlos Sentís all published in both Destino and La Vanguardia Española, which was managed by the somewhat theatrical Luis de Galinsoga under the aegis of the Count of Godó. None of these three would have been ready to bow and scrape to Galinsoga and he was probably not particularly enamoured of them either; but neither would he have considered them a dissident force or threat to his own position. And so the common ground between the biggest papers and magazines allowed these ‘new order’ analysts to appear in more than one publication at a time and to consolidate their self-styled role as the period’s social and political analysts. Some analysts, like Ramón Garriga, came from the world of Francesc Cambó (note, however, that Santiago Nadal did not): Garriga was a friend and associate of Ramón Serrano Suñer and La Vanguardia Española’s correspondent in Berlin and Switzerland. That he was also one of this paper’s analysts assured him the enmity of the local falange cells, which became increasingly more desperate as the Second World War escalated and the Spanish regime turned its back on them. Indeed, to truly appreciate what unleashed the falange diatribe against Ignacio Agustí, we need to understand the dictatorship’s internecine trouble, its particular balance of power and influence and the disappointment of those who believed certain objectives had not been achieved.2 2 38

“...when things were going badly, far away from the Front in Burgos IA [Ignacio Agustí] was giving himself up to an impassioned expression of Castilian. Cultivating a falange moustache, he began that series of articles which were to be gathered in the book Unsiglo


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Certainly, the content of the text cited in Footnote 2 is very much in tune with the times in which it was written –March 1945, in this particular case– and confirms what few are actually aware of: that in the mid-forties, during this final stage of the Second World War, the falangist writers of the weekly broadsheet Estilo had suffered a decisive defeat and had been abandoned by the Catalan reading public in favour of more challenging, complex styles of journalism that were more relevant to their lives. The new voices were of writers like Ignacio Agustí in his weekly column in Destino, which of course had originally emerged from the the Catalan cell of that same Spanish Falange (the Territorial Catalana de Falange). One year earlier, in March 1944, Santiago Nadal had also been criticised for his article “Verona y Argel” (Nadal, 1944). If Agustí was made to pay for his old-school Catalan nationalist position and for having betrayed the Falange by “wresting” the weekly from them (with the help of JosepVergés), Nadal was also penalized for being a monarchist and for writing in a publication that had turned its back on its origins to recall a Catalan past that was not by nature nationalist. However, there were other thinkers whose origins and activities were less suspect than Destino’s “second-time converts” or who, for example, were at least more discreet and appeared to be fewer in number than the contributors to La Vanguardia Española. Either associated with or responsible for the political and ideological mainstream of the regime in Catalonia, this circle controlled the production of Catalonia’s ideological discourse; but in some ways precisely because of this, it had less influence at the more cultured end of society (which supported the national cause in the war and revolution but expected more something more sophisticated than the parade of slogans and arguments manufactured by the dictatorship’s propaganda machine). The carlistfalangist Feliciano Baratech was one of these, a champion of the fascist unification movement of April 1937, a mainstay in the publication Solidaridad Nacional and an influential contributor to the magazine Azor (which, in 1942, had been reinstated after its demise in the Republican years). Baratech declared himself a fervent germanophile in that year, convinced that the Nazi victory was irreversible and that Spain would join Germany in “a new world order” (Baratech, 1942). Other no less notable figures

de Cataluña and covered the entire spectrum of authorial sentiment, from the most heartfelt homage to the Falange to the most unreserved apology for German nationalism. Nor should we forget the book’s date of publication, 1940. [...]Had I. A. kept a little quieter, his discursive skill might yet have helped him avoid the painful consequences of some welldeserved diatribes. But he took it into his head to initiate some kind of transformation, harking after Portela, and made it his business to argue that the results of the War might be detrimental to the Falange... Indeed, he has been so eager that, just as once before (and in the words of the exiled writer) he “sold his Catalan nationalism to the best buyer”, now he is ready to sell his Spanish pride, the difference being that now it is the worst, whatever he says.” (unknown author, 1945).

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were Baratech’s fellow correspondent Fernando P. de Cambra, whose supposed expertise as a military analyst did not belie his anti-Semitic fervour in articles on the Jewish exodus during the fall of France (Cambra, 1940), and the veteran Catalan nationalist and fiercely fundamentalist Christian democrat Jaime Ruiz Manent, who because of that common ground between different publications wrote for both for Destino and Solidaridad Nacional (more occasionally, in the latter case) and who had succumbed to the dominant tide of anti-Semitism (Ruiz Manent, 1941). Along with Baratech and Cambra, there was also Luys Santa Marina, the national counsellor of the Falange who was also variously involved in Barcelona’s first post-war Ateneu (its athenaeum or intellectual society)and directed SolidaridadNacional. Santa Maria wrote little but was a familiar figure in many circles, as was his friend and associate Félix Ros, an aspiring member of the literati and an influential voice in the early post-war period. With this group’s support and the help of other writers, the journalist and self-appointed whistleblower Miguel Utrillo was able to publish “Fantasmones rojos” (literally, ‘Red braggarts’), a long series of articles systematically bent on discrediting Catalan nationalist and republican politicians and intellectuals. Unfortunately, Utrillo’s attempt to become the intellectual arbiter of Pemartín’s new-state ideology in Catalonia backfired spectacularly (Fabre, c. 1996; 88).3 Years before the final disaster, however, the editors of Solidaridad Nacional had attempted two separate manoeuvres. First, they recruited a number of eminent men of letters who could give the paper respectability and authority: Josep M. Millàs i Vallicrosa, Martí de Riquer, Jaime Ruiz Manent, Félix Ros, and the Díaz-Plaja brothers were all asked to contribute to the paper for these reasons, at least during the first two years of the War. Other important figures were the new representatives of the regime who were arriving in Barcelona. The most formidable was Martín Almagro, who took charge of and dismantled the legacy of the University of Barcelona’s Pere Bosch Gimpera Chair and who, once settled in the city, decided to make the falangist newspaper his particular platform. Solidaridad Nacional’s second manoeuvre consisted in taking advantage of the local falangists’ organizational dependence on the headquarters in Madrid, turning

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3. Jaume Fabre observes, however, that the impact of SolidaridadNacional during this period was considerable: “From an initial edition of just 12,000 copies and thanks to official patronage of various kinds, [the newspaper] upped its production to 100,000, the maximum number allowed by wartime paper rationing. Every government office had its own copy and many cafés and barbershops were expected to subscribe to the paper, whether or not they wanted to. Indeed, just having a copy in full view of those coming in and out of the room was enough to avoid certain kinds of unpleasantness” (Fabre, 1996: 88). And again Fabre notes that, coming as the end of the War, the year 1945 “provoked a terrible crisis” (Fabre, 1996: 88).


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to its advantage the constant toing and froing of writers between SolidaridadNacional and the Spanish Falange’s official publication Arriba, directed by Ramón Serrano Suñer and a handful of men chosen by him. This was how the influential Manuel Aznar recovered his position in Barcelona after his brief career as co-director of La Vanguardia Española with his friend JosepPla (Aznar, 1940a, 1940b). Another key figure in Barcelona’s regime (although in a slightly different manner to those described above) was the editor of La Vanguardia Española, Luis de Galinsoga. Galinsoga was in Barcelona to monitor the political climate and gauge the citizens’ levels of patriotism and adhesion to the Fascist cause. His tasks were to give counsel on how the events of the times should be strained through the media filter, from the Battle of Stalingrad to the fall of Mussolini or the Nuremberg Trials, and to direct the city’s most influential paper. Through that paper, he was to impose upon the public a new language and style of discourse that could help them understand the realities of the world beyond Spain on three different scales (GallofréiVirgili, 1998): locally, nationally (the Spanish rather than Catalan notion of the word, of course) and internationally. Internationally, that reality was divided in three main blocks: the decadent democracies, the GermanItalian axis and the barbaric Asian countries. No further distinctions were deemed necessary. And from the pages of La Vanguardia Española, he chose his moments to intervene and comment on any of these three blocks. He did nothing when his correspondent Santiago Nadal was imprisoned for the article “Verona and Argel”, which Destino had published in March 1944, and he generally kept himself apart from Catalan society, which he felt would never respond to the fascist cause in any completely satisfactory way (for all the effort invested in it by the Caudillo). Luis de Galinsoga was also responsible for another interesting area of operation: instead of encouraging the local Catalan community to contribute to La Vanguardia Española and make it their benchmark (and even a formidable rival for Destino), he allowed the paper to have a cultural, ideological and linguistic flavour that was quite alien to many of his readers. Wemight wonder, forexample, why he assigned the task of writing a series of articles to commemorate the “liberation” of Barcelona in 1942 to Manuel Machado (“Letanía de Barcelona”), Alfredo Kindelán (“El vigía de Montdedeu”), W. Fernández Flores (“Lo que iba con las tropas”), M. Fernández Almagro (“Emoción de la unidad en Barcelona”) and Eugenio Montes (“Cataluña de ayer y hoy”); or why, in 1943, he assigned articles to José M. Pemán (“26 de enero”), Joaquín Arrarás (“La pequeña historia. Intimidades del Gobierno rojo”) and Eduardo Marquina (“Recordatorio”); and again, why in 1945, he asked both Manuel Machado and Fernández Almagro to write further articles (“Loores de Barcelona liberada y libre” and “Pasos que sonaban a gran historia” respectively) and also brought Eugenio d’Orsin to the paper (“Liberación, resurrección”). The list goes on, including such writers as

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Francisco de Cossío, José Francés, Eduardo Marquina and Juan Aparicio. In short, although some local writers were more or less regularly included in the newspaper (FerranVallsTaberner, Josep M. Junoy and Josep M. Tallada, for example) there were not enough to balance the scales. These choices made by the Godó family’s newspaper and officially attributed to Galinsoga were a deliberate strategy to allow the other newssheets room to manoeuvre. The more general public announcements and obituaries of Solidaridad Nacional continued to be read but its political and intellectual content could not be made to suit a reading public who wanted something else. Finally, like the Blanco y Negro –and ABC– signedHungarian writer Andres Revesz (who, in between translating and writing romance fiction also contributed to Destino and to a lesser extent to SolidaridadNacional), Galinsoga was never totally accepted in Barcelona’s intellectual milieu, even by those who read his work or at least looked through his paper to find out what was happening outside Spain (Gallofré i Virgili, 2000: 209).4 As time went by, an increasing number of “indigenous” hybrid formulae began to gather weight in the paper, as they had in Destino,because apart from being well written the publication attempted to cater to the readers who missed the kinds of columns that had been published before the War. In the long run, however, this “readiness” to instruct readers who had already decided what they wanted may have obliged Galinsoga’s correspondents to “modify their attitudes” (Cabellos and Pérez Vallverdú, no date: 149).

Destino, its writers and supposed readers: a complex political and intellectual artefact The entry of the Nationalist Army to the provinces of Lleida and its partial occupation of the capital of Segrià at the beginning of April 1938 was a turning point for the Catalan Front: the fascist forces immediately declared the Statute of Autonomy null and void; believing that the final Catalan Offensive was imminent, Lluís Companys ordered his counsellors to send their families across the borders of Catalonia to safety; and the “Burgos Catalans” responsible for Destino prepared for their move to Catalonia and their first contact with new readers.5 These Catalans, it was understood, would initially reject any discussion of the “national zone” and it was only natural that the publication should find obstacles 4 42

In 1946, Galinsoga was considered a source of irritation rather than a man whose opinion counted. As Barcelona’s Chief of Propaganda observed in a report cited by M. JosepaGallofré, “The people of Barcelona do not like Don Luis’s somewhat mannered and often turgid style” (Gallofré 2000: 209).


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to new projects and new ideas at the beginning: after all, these were the people who had attempted to destroy “the very foundations of Spanish identity, wiping the slate of history clean in order to reinstate prehistoric man, that barbarian from the cold” (Montes 1941). But although the writers of Destino were prepared to face and somehow get round these obstacles, they appreciated that some serious reflection was needed to understand who and what had put them there in the first place. After an initial period focused on the slogans against the League (unknown author, 1937b) and FrancescCambó (unknown author, 1937c), what they eventually needed was a much more detailed analysis of the factors that might impede the success of Destino’s reception in Catalonia. The man entrusted with this analysis was one of the period’s most formidable thinkers and journalists: Santiago Nadal Gaya. Originally from Lleida, during the 1930s Nadal had gone to school in Barcelona’s most fiercely monarchist, anti-republican circle of thinkers (Manent, 1986; Molas, 1972; Culla, 1977; Molas and Culla, 2000). In the summer of 1936 he had fled from Barcelona and after travelling through Italy had settled in nationalist-occupied Spain, where he wrote for different papers including Destino. An excellent analyst and thinker, Nadal could discuss peace in Westphalia or the consequences of the Congress of Vienna or the Crimean War with the same elegance that characterized his eulogies on the subject of iron surgeons (recalling regenerationist Joaquín Costa’s notion that Spain was in need of an “iron surgeon” to accomplish its urgent reforms) and various major figures in politics, from Bismarck and Cánovas del Castillo to Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. It was Nadal, then, who was given the task of bringing to the fore the most important social group in Catalonia at the time: those who came from “Catalan families and who, born in Catalonia, were loyal to the call of their blood, which coursed through their veins in Spanish” (Nadal, 1939a). This was to be Destino’s model, both for its correspondents and for the readers who were to embrace it as the vanguard that celebrated Catalonia’s recovery by Spain. Nadal explained that those

5

“The glorious advance of our troops has put Destino in an important position. In the words of the Minister of the Interior in one of his most recent speeches, ‘Destino is now faced with the difficult but necessary task of bringing the formidable communist element into the fold’. Their foothold in our region now firm, our comrades on the second Front have started to act less like refugees [...] In a new dawn, Franco’s troops stepped upon Catalan soil and expressed in their unity the true spirit of Spanish Catalonia; and in this new era, which shall see our flags flying in every last corner of the homeland, Destino will channel its activities towards new horizons so that it might finally reach the end of the campaign as the testament of all that has come to pass; so that it might become the standard-bearer for those of us who were made to flee from the marxist forces and serve the Nation from afar, helping those who fought with renewed vigour, day after day, to keep the light of our victory shining bright.” (unknown author, 1937a)

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Catalan-born Spaniards who “would proclaim their Spanish identity” had suffered “a veritable Calvary” at the hands of both left- and right-wing Catalan nationalists who strategically controlled all political cells of activity and “to whom those who did not submit were destined to fail” (Nadal, 1939a). Nadal’s political background and career differed considerably from the origins of men like FerranVallsTaberner, a Catalan traditionalist and correspondent for La Vanguardia Española whose article La falsa ruta argued that the Catalan regionalists had in some sense “fallen from grace” (Valls described this as their extravío); instead, Nadal argued, the Catalan nationalist hegemony had so overpowered society that many people had to accept it to survive.6 Faced by this overwhelming force, which was also supported by the republican forces in Madrid, initiative was finally taken by a series of “resistant cells of younger people”.7 This, we might argue, was the cornerstone of the Destino project: to create a political and cultural artefact that could rescue Spanish Catalonia from the overwhelming forces of Catalan nationalism or, more specifically and in the words of Nadal himself, “to imbue the Catalan bourgeoisie soul with the essence of Spain”; or again (and after thirty years), to finally disprove that “Spain had in some way been the malign force or was merely ‘the peninsula’, i.e., a geographic fact, or else ‘the Spanish State’, i.e., a political fact—and an undesirable one at that; and to prove, instead, that it did constitute the Catalans’ true homeland” (Nadal, 1939b). Designed in this way for readers who had been inoculated against Catalan nationalist or revolutionary temptation, the magazine was launched by an editorial board and team of writers of the very highest intellectual calibre: with a prewar background in the regionalist politics of FrancescCambó, there were Ignacio

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6

“[T]o get the government councils, big businesses and newspapers to accommodate them, meaning not only to let them to work and prosper but to liberate them from the ‘spell of silence’ and the systematic disregard with which all values not inspired by Catalan nationalism were treated (while a formidable propaganda machine praised whatever mediocrity was supported by Catalan rule).” (Nadal, 1939a)

7

“Young Catalans joined under the Spanish flag and swearing absolute allegiance to the State as it had existed before and during the Republic, these custodians of memory recalled those institutions that had formerly unified their country, proclaimed their Spanish identity and were almost alone in remembering that Catalonia was also Spanish. Of a tender age, they weathered their opponents’ hostility and contempt, the attempts to impede their advance and the vacuum in which the separatists forced them to live… Their enlightened struggle–offensive to those Catalan nationalists only because it provesthat one can be both Catalan and Spanish–has finally borne fruit. The sacred flame of patriotism they watched over has leapt higher and now illuminates the ranks of the fifty thousand sons of Spain who marched forwards from a new, impassioned Catalonia to endure unimaginable trials and fight and die in Spain… It would be unjust and foolish to ignore such lessons of experience in this painful moment of Spain’s resurrection.”


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Agustí and Manuel Brunet, the latter having made a name for himself as one of the most articulate polemicists of the 1920s and 1930s. From the ranks of the Catalan nationalist christian democrats and the newspaper El Matí there was Jaime Ruiz Manent who, deeply affected by the War and the revolution, had cultivated a decidedly fundamentalist and anti-Semitic style of discourse. Further contributors included Nadal, who (as observed above) came from a different ideological background and who Juan Ramón Masoliver described as “a young man who, here in Barcelona, can rightfully claim to represent the essence of Spanish identity as it stood long before the Movimiento and whose mission to do just this has always been reflected in his essays and articles” (Gracia, 2007: 51). In more general terms, Nadal, Agustí and Brunet took most of the responsibility for the magazine’s national and international political analysis, while the contributors Joan Teixidor, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, Rafael Vázquez Zamora and of course Josep Pla wrote on cultural affairs. As is widely known, Pla’s own column “Calendario sin fecha” played a key role in attracting readers who no longer found satisfaction in any other quarter and who often subscribed to Pla’sarticlessimply for want of something better (Cabellos and Pérez Vallverdú, 2007: 49). From the beginning, the position Destino’s correspondents took to sell their particular vision of the Second World War was fairly uncompromising: a ferocious anti-communism that was both radical and persistent in nature (Pons, 2004: 83–84); the conviction that the European arena was essentially a battlefield where Christian civilization as the West knew it would either be saved or would expire (in this sense, it was also the continuation of Spain’s own Civil War and Franco’s victory); unreserved contempt for liberal democratic systems, which the magazine judged to be weak-minded and decadent, preyed upon by communist ideologies or else simply supportive of Bolshevism; and, finally, the belief that Spain’s salvation was on a par with the salvation of Europe because of the role that Spain must eventually play in a new European order freed from its liberal and capitalist empires. These were the positions Agustí, Nadal and Brunet defended in their weekly analyses; and reading between the lines, one might be conclude that together they created a body of discourse that went far beyond their journalist’s task. In other words, they became specialists of a sort, thinkers who could generate very specific wartime opinions that their readers would then hold, who would always follow the party line but whose take on current affairs would be considerably more stimulating. On the one hand, we should note that many of the issues they addressed were subject to the course of events and might disappear as quickly as they had appeared: in the years 1940 and 1941, for example, the magazine still regularly lauded the Nazi model of conquest and the genius of Hitler, the future hopes of fascist Italy and the promise of a new European order controlled by the three great anti-communist powers; but as the weakening military power of Germany

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and Italy became more difficult to ignore, such feelings were less strongly expressed. On the other hand and regardless of the turn of events, certain positions not only remained a fixture ofDestino but were redoubled, as was the magazine’s anti-communist line and its strong roman catholic sympathies. As the power of Axis declined, the magazine simply replaced one major concern with another (in this case, Nazi Germany with the spectre of Soviet expansionism), compared the two totalitarian systems and entertained the idea that the British, American and French alliance would be able to contain the Bolshevik threat with Franco’s political, cultural and ideological support. If this is all true, then what was the basis for certain claims that Destino was pro-ally? In what circumstances did this notion gather legitimacy? One factor might be the passage of time itself, meaning the many opportunities across the years for history to be rewritten and for its actors to be recast. But the fact that the weekly paper’s analyses did not imitate the fairly basic dogma produced by most of the regime’s broadsheets would also have given it a certain intellectual edge and might have intimated, even, that it sometimes assumed a pro-ally position. Destino’s columns were intelligent pieces of at least middle-brow writing and for this reason the quality of the magazine was very definitely above average. Perhaps because Luis de Galinsoga was there to blame, Destino became very much appreciated after 1945. But did its writers really sympathize with the Allies or not?

Pro-ally? Britain as an example between 1940 and 1941 In 1942 and during a series of conferences on journalism in Barcelona, Santiago Nadal declared that “all manifestations of contemporary war” were “monsters of democratic origin” and the direct consequence of the egalitarianism and nationalism of the French Revolution (Nadal, 1942: 59). Attributing the responsibility for the various evils of contemporary society to the French Revolution was hardly new, but his use of the term ‘nationalism’ referred to two different things: on the one hand, the troublesome French chauvinismthat had become the clearest force of its kind in any European nation-state (but also, unfortunately, an entirely republican and lay example); and on the other, the European national minorities and revolutionaries who had played a leading role in the Paris Peace Conference (in order not to regress to 1848) and who had been responsible for such tragic events as the destruction of AustriaHungary.

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The most significant point in his argument in 1942, however, was that democratic systems were what most clearly lead to war. At that time, the Second World War was about to enter its third year and had already stretched beyond


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Europe’s frontiers to include the United States and the Soviet Union in one arena and Japan in another. In other words, the War was so far advanced that an objective analysis of how it had originally come about was already going to be a somewhat tall order. But Nadal’s words were tame in comparison to the regime’s accusations of just three years earlier, in 1939: “One thing is absolutely clear, however, and that is the contrast between Germany’s conciliatory intentions and Poland’s intransigence. As for England, it only thinks of how it might turn the situation to its advantage—or rather, it has only thought in such terms, given that it is always at the ready for whatever might drop” (unknown author, 1939). This is just one example—and by no means a falangist example—of the Regime’s generalized view that it was France and Britain who had started the War. Bearing in mind these proposals—either the earlier ones made in 1939 or the later ones made in 1942—we need to read between the lines of the articles of those times to determine the accuracy of the repeated claims that many reporters at papers like Destino, Madrid’s monarchist ABC or La Vanguardia Española were actually pro-ally in their views (in the last case, in spite of the vigilance of Luis de Galinsoga) but could not express this between 1939 and 1943 and could only express it to a certain degree between 1943 and the end of the War. When we consider the literature, the list of those who are considered to have been ally sympathizers (and fully-fledged ones at that) includes Santiago Nadal, Ignacio Agustí, Manuel Brunet, the international news team at La Vanguardia Española and special foreign correspondents like Augusto Assía and Carlos Sentís; even the Count of Godó is supposed to have been a firm supporter of the Allies (Arias, 2005a; Arias, 2005b; Nadal, 2005; Sentís, 2007). But beyond the controversies about whether certain journalists in Barcelona were pro-ally but unable to express this because of the regime’s censorship, we can see that many of the values that defined the Western Allies’ programs would never have been acceptable to Spanish journalists and not just because the regime might be looking over their shoulders. The Allies shared a series of objectives that these journalists would never have wished to be part of, from the defeat of fascism in its Italian and German varieties to the reconstruction of democratic systems of government and the recovery of freedom in the states that had been occupied by Germany; from their hopes that a new Europe could be guaranteed peace in a just and equitable manner to their determination to rebuild Europe according to the tenets of democracy, federalism and intercontinental cooperation; or from the defence of human rights and the rejection of solutions that could only be imposed by brute force to the reconstruction of an arena for international cooperation that would be like the League of Nations but stronger still. Another factor would also have held these journalists back: to be proally meant having a particular political profile which would be very difficult to maintain in either Barcelona or Madrid. To start with, one would need to be anti-

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fascist. Of course, nobody felt obliged to hide their anti-communist feelings— Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle certainly never did—but all those states which had been threatened by the Axis powers were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. Moreover, one might defend the notions of the republic or the monarchy, but always in democratic terms and with constitutional systems that could be homologated to those systems that had already existed in most of Western Europe. Did this position necessary exclude the communists? From a liberal-conservative point of view or for a christian democrat or social democrat, surely this was so. But Winston Churchill—whose conservative politics hardly qualified him as a communist sympathizer—had already identified the real enemy: not communism, at least not in the years 1939, 1940 or 1943, but Nazi Germany, its allies and everything that Nazism sought to destroy (starting with human rights and civil liberties and culminating in the legacy of Europe’s Age of Enlightenment). Churchill went even further: the real danger was Nazi Germany’s expansionist nature, which threatened to undermine the balance between different nations and states across the European continent. Like a game of nine-pins, when France had fallen there would be nothing left between Germany and Britain and the Soviet Union; the Third Reich would systematically bowl over one country and then the other. Driven by their visceral anti-communism and their contempt for democratic forms of government, the Barcelona journalists were incapable of understanding this idea. This became evident in 1940, for example, when after the French defeat Santiago Nadal displayed a conspicuous lack of regard for London’s call to resist and to go on believing that victory might be distant but was not impossible.8 8

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“Meanwhile England is beginning to feel increasingly uneasy and the difficulties are becoming more and more apparent, as witnessed by the official measures taken against supposed defeatists and alarmists, by the constant denials of rumours and by the restrictions being adopted. Seeing how things are from here in Spain, it does not seem in any way absurd to suppose that “Peace Campaigners” should actually exist or even that their numbers should grow so constantly; this is not just some vague manifestation of the spiritthat would be but a hard fact, demonstrated by the real measures adopted against [Oswald] Mosley’s followers and others in different fields, including the Duke of Windsor, no less; and demonstrated, even, by rumours of impending changes in the government, with the possible replacement of [Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain. The long and the short of it is that there is nothing new about this conciliatory sector of the English public that would take the Central powers for an ally. The increasing intensity of the German bombing will remain an important conditioner in such matters, we can be sure. Whatever the case may be, the photographs of young men armed with nothing more than a helmet, gas mask and rifle and going clumsily through the motions of military drills does not say much about England’s power to defend itself, were the Germans to set foot upon their island. In the course of history, whatever proof the world has had of their bravery, these improvised soldiers are certainly no match for the Führer’s magnificently prepared warriors in arms” (Nadal, 1940d).


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Britain’s position was certainly a complex one. But in contrast to the dictatorships of that period, itknew exactly what it was facing. On 18 June 1940 just after Paris had fallen and with the French Third Republic hanging by a thread, Churchill stood before the House of Commons and, in the peroration to the speech popularly known as “Their Finest Hour”, he formally acknowledged Britain’s lack of military strength, the difficulties its civilians were facing and its isolation at that time; but he also argued that Britain had the support of the Commonwealth and that there were “good and reasonable hopes of final victory”; and he concluded with the solemn declaration that would be the subject of scorn in Franco’s Spain: “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” (Churchill, 1948) In regime circles in Barcelona and Madrid, this speech was almost entirely ignored because nobody believed in Britain’s ability to defend itself or in the danger that might be posed by the French general Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped London and who had called upon the French nation to rise up against the German invaders. Nadal considered the French government in London to be a “pretence” and added that “it is so bereft of power and so clearly controlled by the British nation that it cannot seriously hope to succeed” (Nadal 1940c). In the prevailing climate it was logical that Hitler’s promises of peace to Britain (unknown author, 1940; Colville, 1989) should be welcomed with such great expectation and, what is more, with such clear and precise expectations: London could only accept the German dictator’s offer of peace. Refusal to do so, wrote Nadal in Barcelona, would put Britain in an “awkward and unenviable position” with the rest of the world which, generally speaking,“wished the War to end” (Nadal, 1940f). Informed by his reading of Mein Kampf, the analyst from Lleida was convinced that only one thing could now happen: Britain would have to accept the “new situation created in Europe”. But would it? His doubts, of course, were justified.9 9

“How would Hitler’s position be received in England? The Government would probably refuse to listen, but we can be sure that it has had its effect on the people and on those political forces that are stronger than is generally supposed and that already before the war had promulgated the development and defence of the Empire, united in their views with Germany and acknowledging Germany’s potential as a world power and leader of

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Britain neither surrendered nor accepted any kind of pact with the Nazis but this did not help Barcelona’s journalists to gain any greater understanding of the political and ideological complexities that the War had woven together. On the contrary, during the year 1940-1941, between the fall of France and the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the regime’s discourse had scarcely varied from the earlier period of 1939–1940: Franco’s Spain continued to praise the new European order, to celebrate the promise of the great fascist states and to announce the final defeat of liberalism and the democracies, as well as Britain’s irredeemable decadence. This incomprehension was transformed into a fierce and merciless attack when, on 22 June 1941, Winston Churchill delivered his speech “The Fourth Climacteric”,which was to permanently alter the way the world understood war, politics and ideology. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union looming on the horizon, once again he pointed his finger at the real enemy: “The Nazi régime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels all forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. Noone has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.The past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial.” And then came hisdeclarations ofBritain’s intentions, which were nothing if not explicit: “We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi régime. From this nothing will turn us – nothing. We will never parley, we will never

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the European continent. These, quite simply, are the politics that triumphed in Munich but that Chamberlain had unfortunately abandoned in return for the policies offered by the opposition, on the basis, most importantly, of the destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Apart from the trepidation provoked by the sheer size of a German offensive, Hitler’s call to arms will resonate in London. And it is basically in the interests of the English that this happens before they have gained knowledge of the beginnings of the German invasion. We all know how much the world could gain if the war were to end now. It would be the perfect opportunity to begin the reconstruction of Europe according to the new designs that have been established and to avoid the dangers of further areas of conflict. If London refuses to answer that call then it will have no one to blame but itself for the catastrophe that will befall it.” (Nadal, 1940f)


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negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until with God’s help we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.” After that, as he reached the last part of his speech, he returned to one of the subjects he had raised on the eve of the War: “[Hitler] wishes to destroy the Russian power because he hopes that if he succeeds in this, he will be able to bring back the main strength of his army and air force from the East and hurl it upon this Island, which he knows he must conquer or suffer the penalty of his crimes. His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles. [...]He hopes that he may once again repeat, upon a greater scale than ever before, that process of destroying his enemies one by one, by which he has so long thrived and prospered, and that then the scene will be clear for the final act, without which all his conquests would be in vain – namely, the subjugation of the Western Hemisphere to his will and to his system.” And finally, just before the end, his words again became crystal clear: “The Russian danger is therefore our danger and the danger of the United States just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.” (Churchill, 1948) But we should now consider the regime’s response to Churchill’s “dramatic” speech, as Colville put it (“a speech that has impressed us all”) (See Colville, 1989). Here is an example: “With Churchill as its spokesman, Britain has taken pains to offer its services to the USSR. A graceless gesture in political terms, if ever there was one, and the last in a long line of diplomatic blunders committed by the British in this War: on the one hand, because it will be impossible for Britain to provide Russia with truly efficient assistance, given that Russia already has more men, supplies and raw materials than it needs and is totally isolated; and on the other, because by attempting to move in this direction Britain has assumed the odious role of ally to the most monstrously inhuman regime that history has ever known in the very moment when the world is holding its breath and hoping that this regime might collapse (and collapse more dramatically than any other ever has); and because it sarcastically calls Russia ‘a free nation’ and refused to ally itself with the true free nations,

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the Baltic states and the Finns, in the moment when they suffered the brutal Soviet aggression.”10 As if he wanted to prove that he had not listened to Churchill’s speech of 22 June, Santiago Nadal recalled some of the British premier’s more literary anti-communist declarations from before the War and concluded that Britain’s moral force had been undermined by its failure to meet the demands of the situation: it had chosen to ally itself with the USSR, “the foundation of the most dangerous and hateful of all ideologies”, and had not recognized that Hitler had chosen the perfect moment to mount an attack on the Soviets, “clearly anticipating the Kremlin’s Machiavellian objectives” rather than waiting “ingenuously for Stalin to choose the moment to enforce his communism” (Nadal, 1941b). Nadal was not the only analyst to describe Churchill’s fatal errors during June and July of 1941. Madrid’s monarchist weekly ABC also observed the “surprising levity” with which the premier had committed his “gravest mistake” and had provided the world with “an object lesson about what happens when one loses one’s calm” (unknown author, 1941c). The falangist Fernando Barangó-Solís proposed that in their hurry to position themselves against the threat of the ‘German Fatherland’, Britain’s union with Stalin and “the Soviet hordes” was actually worse for them than losing the War would be (Barangó-Solís, 1941). Further examples abound. Nadal’s colleagues at Destino generally followed suit. The analyst Andres Revesz (who also occasionally wrote for Solidaridad Nacional and for ABC and Blanco y Negro in Madrid and who would later be considered an ally sympathizer) declared that Churchill had written off his nation to a country doomed to military failure.11 To avoid precisely this, Churchill had decided to act upon his celebrated promise to ‘sign a pact with the Devil’ (Colville, 1989) because in 1941 he knew only too well that the real danger was coming from an Austrian corporal who

10 Unknown author, 1941a.

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11 “In moral terms [Stalin] lost the war some time ago and Churchill should never have allied himself with the Russians. The Russians don’t fight for England’s interests anyway, but for their own. And in reality, England’s assistance has amounted to nothing more than the waste of many millions of pounds, the postponement of England’s own re-armament and the transformation of the USSR’s defeat into the indirect defeat of Britain itself. And what will the Anglo-Saxons have to say about the defeat of their allies? Perhaps they will regret having forged such close ties with a regime that was destined to disappear. I do not only speak in moral terms, however. A good hard look at the facts indicates that London and Washington have committed a tactical blunder” (Revesz, 1946). And in what was almost a paraphrase of “The Fourth Climacteric”, he concluded: “The campaign has really finished now, not only in the East but all over Europe. Germany has overthrown each of its adversaries one by one”.


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had turned himself into the dictator of a powerful state. According to Santiago Nadal, however, the positive side to Churchill’s mistake was that because the Russian army was doomed to defeat (in spite of its formidable power and its ability to resist), once the Soviet spectre had been removed there would be no need to help Britain or give it political satisfaction (Nadal, 1941b). Perhaps then and in the painful knowledge of his error, Churchill would be forced to accept Germany’s new European order.

The impossible ally sympathies of the Franco’s Catalan (and Spanish) followers As the two main junctures in the first part of the War, June and July of 1940 and June and July of 1941 are particularly significant moments for Britain, certainly in the manner that Franco’s regime understood the War politically and intellectually. As with the fall of France in June 1940 or the defeat of Italian fascism in July 1943, Britain’s refusal to surrender to Germany and its support of the Soviet Union helped to draw out the ideological essence of the regime’s interpretation the War. For Franco’s Spain, it was impossible for anyone to consider themselves pro-ally, especially when apart from the condemnations of Winston Churc hill there was not a single analysis of even a vaguely impartial nature, let alone any a neutral voice. The men involved might protest that the government watchedtheir production far too closely for to them to write in any other way than they did and with any greater complexity than they did. This, indeed, is what some complained of and to a certain extent it was the truth. At the beginning of January 1942, the National Delegation for Propaganda issued a very clear warning that communist propaganda was increasing in the democracies because of certain “agreements” that these democracies had signed. 12 But beyond the political pressure and censorship they were subject to, some of the main thinkers in this period did actually explain what their supposed ally sympathy amounted to; and in their explanations there was no real mention of a political power exerting official pressure on them or indeed any real indication that they were sympathetic with the Allies’ ideas. Along these lines, Ignacio 12 “The agreements recently made between representatives of the democratic states and the bolshevik bosses constitute a serious danger for all Europe... In return for allowing them to join him, Stalin has demanded and obtained from all the democracies carte blanche for all manner of bolshevik propaganda. And thus, the powers in London and Washington have subjugated themselves to the service of European bolshevism and the annihilation of Western culture. The Moscow agreement on Europe’s post-war reconstruction and the destruction of Germany as the chief obstacle to communism allows us to see with perfect clarity just how far the democracies are prepared to go.” (SevillanoCalero, 2000: 61-62)

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Agustí proposed that his sympathies and the sympathies of his colleagues at Destino were purely sartorial.13 And if there was still any doubt, this was dispelled by what he had to say on one occasion: “We never said that the Allies would win the War; [we said that] the Allies might not lose” (Agustí, 1974: 375). At the beginning of 1944, when the end of the War was some way off but Italy had fallen and the Red Army was advancing on the Eastern Front, some particularly interesting explanations were being offered in Madrid as to what exactly ally sympathy or pro-British sentiment meant.14 This, perhaps, is one of the clearest explanations of what it meant to be pro-ally during Franco’s regime. As long as Britain went on displaying this “comprehension” of Spain’s problems and maintained a “neutral” position with regard to these –in other words, as long as it neither announced its support for an alternative to the regime nor prepared itself in any way to attack the peninsula– the anglophile trend increased in different social spheres. The reasoning and itsquirky double standard were eminently clear: one could be an anglophile –or even pro-ally– just as long as the Allies did not threaten Franco’s Spain and recognized the “loyal attitude”of their “neutrality”. It was as simple as that. During regime times, an anglophile in Spain didn’t even have to want the Allies’ victory in the War, in any visible way. In certain cases, it would appear that the activities of the regime’s censors and the National Delegation for Propaganda and other similar services help to explain the tone and content of certain analyses and commentaries on the War. The truth, however, may be somewhat different: for obvious reasons of ideological affinity, the coincidences between the dictatorship’s party line 13 “During the day, our ostentatious ally sympathies were perhaps even more apparent. Vergés, myself and sometimes other correspondents for Destino would stroll around town in bowler hats, just like they do in the City. There were quite a few of us in Barcelona at that time who’d revived interest that particular item of clothing and who wore the hats to show their adherence to England in its time of difficulty, even while their love for their own country was of course paramount to them.” (Agustí, 1974: 388)

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14 “The attitudes displayed by British diplomacy had influenced the affective relations between Spain and Britain. But one important thing had been achieved: in Spain, the anglophile trend actually gathered force in different social spheres.Britain’ssympathy when it came to the dilemmas of our homeland, as a country that had reached out to collaborate in postwar Spain; and on the Spanish side, our innate sense of nobility [in Spanish, hidalguía], which makes us ever ready to repay generosity with greater generosity still. These are the things that havehelped us see Britain’s attitude to Spain with other eyes and fostered an impartial and friendly relationship between the two nations; more important still, as this had stemmed at least in part from our loyal attitude of neutrality and from England’s sensibility with regard to the problems facing Spain, it was reasonable to hope that the relationship would endure.” (unknown author, 1944)


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and the writings of Revesz, Nadal, Brunet, Agustí, Masoliver and their contemporaries were arguable and perfectly visible. The common ground for Franco’s bureaucrats and these aspiring thinkers (who, it must be remembered, were not university professors or cultural arbiters but simply journalists) had been well marked out: they shared the arenas of anti-communism, antiliberalism, national catholicism, radical Spanish nationalism and the discourse of the new order in a new Europe. Taking as a point of reference the pre-war group Acción Española, Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer describes these men as members of the “reactionary anti-Republican coalition” who defended “a hostile position that was not only a policy but actively sought to forbid what they perceived as the ‘essence of Spanish identity’ identified with catholicism, nationalism, and social tradition and immobilism, to which they added “authoritarian regenerationism” and “the badly learnt Fascist solution” (Gracia and Ruiz Carnicer, 2001: 157 and 158). But the program of this “reactionary coalition” did not only affect the Spanish project. On the contrary, there was a direct link between the Alzamiento and its contents and the War in Europe; and this link had existed long before the German offensive against the Soviet Union prompted people to speak of «España, precursora» (unknown author, 1941c), to declare that “Our Crusade is the now the Crusade of the World” (Agustí, 1941), or to propose that, against the Soviets, “we are all coparticipants and enemies” and that “we feel our appetite for revenge and the certainty of our rightness” (Agustí, 1941). One year before all this, after the French defeat in June 1940 and with his customary literary elegance, Santiago Nadal made the connection between the regime’s 18 July and the new European order in a text that he would neither support nor refute in later years.15 Note, in that analysis, his proposal that Spain rose to the occasion “of its own account and by no other force”. And note how perfectly he understood that the order which would ultimately “rule over the continent” was not the one the British-led Allies were defending in either 1940 or in 1945. So was there ever a particular moment when the custodians of the regime’s official party line and the journalists examined in this paper actually collided, ideologically speaking? The short answer is, no. Indeed, the many moments when these two groups agreed and even the manner in which they agreed disproves the thesis –always proposed long after the facts themselves– that perhaps those

15 “The prophetic nature of the events of 18 July 1936 is now wholly clear; we see it in the way the Spanish army rose to Spain’s defence, supported by the anti-republican forces. We see that it was on this very day that Spain readied itself, four years ahead of time, to take its place in the new order that would rule over the continent. And it did so instinctively, because it believed in the national necessity, of its own account and by no other force, neither by persuasion from those who were abroad nor by the events that had taken place there.” (Nadal, 1940e)

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journalists had no choice and were forced to tow the party line, that they could not swim against the current, that the censorship was impossible to bypass, or that the politicians left the editors and owners of the various papers with no room to manoeuvre. Not only were the coincidences between the two camps and their identification with one other quite notable; there were also signs that both the party liners and the journalists had assessed the realities of the War according to the same specific criteria. For at the end of 1944, when most of France had been liberated, Ignacio Agustí was still writing on the subject of a German Arcadia populated by occupied countries.16 There is further evidence for this. In one revealing moment, Santiago Nadal shared with his Barcelona readers what he considered the most serious effects of the War: snapshots that had reached the press room at La Vanguardia Española portraying Soviet officials dancing in the imperial ballrooms of Hofburg Palace in Vienna. “The tragedy of Europe,” Nadal concluded, “is more clearly visible in these photographs than in any newsreel of fugitive convoys or concentration camps, because Vienna has become home to one of the main political reasons why this continent is sinking” (Nadal, 1945). What set of values was Nadal working from when he set the blame for the war on the shoulders of the Soviets who had occupied Vienna rather than on the men who had created the terrifying reality of the Nazi extermination camps? What principles did he use to analyze the War and its aftermath? What exactly lay behind the strange choice he made between two kinds of photographs? Was it representative of what he normally wrote (and wrote without undue pressure) for mass consumption by his countrymen? Summing up the year 1945, Andrés Revesz was another writer who only focused on the problems related to communism and Russian imperialism.17 In his text, there was not a single mention of defeated Germany, of what should be done with the Nazi apparatus, the war criminals, the extermination camps, the material devastation or the economic problems that the country now faced.

16 “The formula is to bring the European nations into Germany’s wider sphere of influence. Because most of them are vassals of Germany in either political or economic terms, Europe’s nations must learn that what’s best for them is simply to collaborate with rather than surrender to the victors. Aware of the temporal nature of its mandate, Germany is making haste to implement its system and demonstrate the benefits of its particular Arcadia to all the countries around it.” (Agustí, 1944)

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17 “The year 1945 began with the Anglo-Russian rivalry and at the end of the last month the political problem remains the same: Marshal Tito and leftist totalitarianism in Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, the Greek National Liberation Front as an instrument of Moscow’s imperialism and the Russian expansion towards the Eastern Mediterranean.” (Revesz, 1946)


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Revesz reiterates the importance of one course of action which the regime might have considered to make the best of its new, uncomfortable reality but which it never really did: the notion that in one sudden move it might replace its economic, intellectual and ideological commitment to Nazi Germany with its resistance to the new Soviet expansionist policies and that it might run up an anti-communist, anti-Soviet flag that could be shared with the Allies. In the event, it managed to do neither. Neither a modest display of approval at the Allies’ victory, nor a critical assessment or self-assessment of the Nazi experiment or of fascism in general (Brunet, 1954a, 1945b, 1945c, 1946a, 1946b). On the contrary, the regime busied itself with making sure that no internal instability would now become a challenge. In August 1944 and on the eve of the liberation of Paris, the regime stood fast by its declaration that the “key to the question” was a sustained anti-communist front and, in relation to this, the consequences of the War (SevillanoCalero, 2000: 61-62). At that decisive moment, it appeared, the country had nothing better to do than pursue Franco’s curious theory about the two or three wars that were being simultaneously fought. 18

18 On 9 June 1942, when the new American ambassador Carlton Hayes was formally presenting his credentials, General Franco explained to him that Spain’s non-belligerence meant that his country was not neutral in the fight against Communism, “especially in the War between Germany and Russia”, even while it did not take any part in the conflict between the Axis powers on one hand and the Allies on the other. On 11 May 1944, he repeated this idea: “For us the struggle against the Bolsheviks and the Western conflict between civilized Western nationsare two separate issues. Communism is not some state of being which remains within the borders of whatever country espouses it; it is a revolutionary activity that expands and targets all those around it, working to undermine the peace and order of other countries” (RosAgudo, 2002: 18). As Rio Cisneros has observed (see the text “Orden y orientaciones sobre la actual situación de la guerra en Europa y el tono de información del frente oriental y del frente occidental, con los matices oportunos dentro de los debidos límites de la neutralidad española. Sobre la expansión del comunismo”): “The Caudillo understood that the Second World War was not just a simple set of historical facts and could not be easily understood; that the powers that fought in it were not a homogenous group. In practical terms there existed –there had always existed– wars that simultaneously served different political purposes and embraced many conflicting interests. Because of this, within the strictures of the tactical agreements imposed by military necessity, the various warring sides always revealed different attitudes and chose different roads in the aftermath of conflict. An objective examination of war would always lead us to the same conclusion: a country would have an initial position with regard to war and a final position with regard to the peace that came afterwards. And the Caudillo further observed the radical difference between our expectations about the War in the East, where the subject of dispute was a communist border, and the conflict in the Western European arena, whose protagonists were christian nations and with whom we have maintained friendly relations marked by cultural and economic exchange. This Spanish view has gained force in recent times and its common sense is well understood by other countries”. (Río Cisneros, 1977: 330–331).

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The fact is that even if their political or ideological persuasions differed, thinkers in many camps actually agreed on the most important things, which of course meant the dictates of the Caudillo. They could be monarchists of different kinds, Catalan ex-regionalists, supporters of the regime and Falangists, catholic fundamentalists or traditionalists –but no matter who they were, their basic views coincided and matched with their leader’s. Was this proof of the power that can be exercised over a media structure, however big it is or however prestigious its exponents are? Or was it the logical result of political and ideological coincidences between people who shared a project, if not their origins, and a certain way of understanding the world? As argued above, the idea that such individuals “could do nothing else” does not actually ring true when we consider their writerly conviction. The notion that the threat of censorship might dissuade them from writing and publishing an alternative discourse does not sit well with the facts and it is difficult to imagine these men, in the years 1942 or 1945, sitting down to write articles denouncing their regime and its dictator. But there is another way of understanding their circumstances. Men like Santiago Nadal, Ramón Garriga, Andres, Revesz, Manuel Brunet, Ignacio Agustí and even Antonio Tovar (Gracia, 2007: 154)19 were too good as writers to allow their texts to be stymied by state censorship. Their intellectual class, the substance of their professional careers andtheir acute cultural sensibilities would never have allowed them to become mere scribes for the powersabove them. It’s true that Santiago Nadal encountered trouble in his relationship with the regime’s permanent watchdog in Barcelona, La Vanguardia Española’s director Luis de Galinsoga (Barcelona’s citizens were not sufficiently appreciative of the regime to be left alone during these times). It’s true that he had even more serious problems with the city’s civil governor Antonio Correa Véglison in March 1944, because of his article“Verona y Argel”. It’s also clear that Destino eventually grew away from its falange origins and that, in time, its writers, readers and intentions became very clearly distanced from Solidaridad Nacional, just asthe paper ABC could not be equated with Arriba. In this period of Spain’s history, we might argue, there were no Nazis but everyone supported the regime, simply because to one degree or another everyone shared the regime’s politics, ideology and common mission. As a monarchist and adherent to the Provençal author Charles Maurras, what Santiago Nadalreally wanted was for

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19. Antonio Tovar’s political coherence was particularly clear. As late as January 1945, he had this to write to Dionisio Ridruejo: “Have you seen the German offensive? What men! Almost mythical in stature, veritable superhuman beings that loom over the likes of Churchill, Roosevelt or Eisenhower. As for that other giant, Don José [Stalin],we’ll just have see what happens. But those reactionaries and “democrats” and all the other radical pigs that we know so well can just go and stew in their own juices! There’ll be no world left for them to take.” (Gracia, 2007: 154).


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the monarchy to be reinstated while someone like his colleague Manuel Aznar was happy enough to move in the motley circle of falangists, catholics and Spanish nationalists surrounding the Caudillo. But neither man dreamt of the day when Spain would implement a system of democracy in its landsand form a legal stateon a par with those nation-states that populated Western Europe from 1945 onwards. Instead and in almost official terms, these different writers and intellectuals were considered to be the “reactionary coalition” and they were ruled over with absolute power by General Franco. Monarchists, falangists, catholics, right-wing thinkers of various kinds or traditionalists, practically all of them shared “some degree of catholic fundamentalism, bolstered by a basic traditionalism and what we might call the fascist solution badly learnt”. This combination produced a style of discourse that condemned without reservation “the symbols of Spain’s modest free-thinking past”and the Europe’s Age of Enlightenment in general (Gracia and Ruiz Carnicer, 2001: 158-159). Precisely for this reason, Santiago Nadalwas able to blame the French Revolution for what happened at the end of the War and to propose that all traditional Europe’s ills had originated in 1789.

References AGUSTÍ, Ignacio (1974). Ganas de hablar. Barcelona: Planeta. p. 388. AGUSTÍ, Ignacio (1941). «Cara o cruz». Destino [Barcelona], 206, 28 June. I.A. [AGUSTÍ (1944)]. «El espíritu y los pueblos». Destino [Barcelona], 381, 4 November. ARIAS, Jaime (2005a). «Londres heroico». La Vanguardia [Barcelona], 9 July. ARIAS, Jaime (2005b). «Siempre adelante». La Vaguardia [Barcelona], 6 October. AZNAR, Manuel (1940a). «Ha muerto la teoría de las pequeñas nacionalidades». Solidaridad Nacional [Barcelona], 20 June. AZNAR, Manuel (1940b). «Política de España en Europa». Solidaridad Nacional [Barcelona], 13 and 14 July. B ARATECH, F. (1942). «Una tarea urgente a realizar». Azor [Barcelona], 2 (30 November). F.B.-S [BARANGÓ-SOLÍS] (1941). «Momento internacional. Las declaraciones de Serrano Suñer». Solidaridad Nacional [Barcelona], 31 July. B RUNET, Manuel (1945a). «La Biblia, el libro desconocido». Destino [Barcelona], 405 (21 April). B RUNET, Manuel (1945b). «La catástrofe hitleriana». Destino [Barcelona], 408 (12 May). B RUNET, Manuel (1945c). «El virus hitleriano». Destino [Barcelona], 413 (16 June). B RUNET, Manuel (1946a). «Hacia el neofascismo». Destino [Barcelona], 450 (2 March).

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BRUNET, Manuel (1946b). «”Si Alemania hubiera triunfado”». Destino [Barcelona], 451 (9 March). CABELLOS, Pilar and PÉREZ VALLVERDÚ, Eulàlia (no date). (1939–1946). Entre la repressió i l’altruisme. Thesis, unpublished. Bellaterra: UAB. CABELLOS, Pilar and PÈREZVALLVERDÚ, Eulàlia (2007). Destino. Política de Unidad (1937– 1946). Tres aspectes de l’inici d’una transformació obligada. Barcelona: Fundació Carles Pi i Sunyer. CAMBRA , Fernando P. de (1940). «El judío errante ha pasado». Solidaridad Nacional [Barcelona], 30 June. CHURCHILL, Winston (1948). The Gathering Storm (The Second World War, Vol.1). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. COLVILLE, John (1989). The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955. London: Hodder& Stoughton, 1St Edition edition (August 1, 1989) CULLA, Joan B (1977). «L’extremadreta a Catalunya durant la República. Els “ultres” d’abans de la guerra». L’Avenç [Barcelona], 6 (6 October). FABRE, Jaume (c. 1996). Periodistes uniformats. Diaris barcelonins dels anys 40. La represa i la repressió. Barcelona: Diputació-Col·legi de Periodistes de Catalunya. GALLOFRÉ I VIRGILI, M. Josepa (1998). «El nouperiodisme: Luis de Galinsoga». A RIQUER, Borja de (dir.). Història, Política, Societat i Cultura dels Països Catalans, vol. 10: La llarga postguerra, 1939–1960. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana. GALLOFRÉ I VIRGILI, M. Josepa (2000). «Un nou llenguatge». A Les ruptures de l’any 1939. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat-Fundació Carles Pi i Sunyer. p. 209. GELI , Carles and HUERTAS, Josep M (c. 1996). Les tres vides de Destino. Barcelona: Diputació-Col·legi de Periodistes de Catalunya. GRACIA , Jordi (ed.) (2007). El valor de la disidencia. Epistolario inédito de Dionisio Ridruejo, 1933–1975. Barcelona: Planeta. GRACIA GARCIA, Jordi and RUIZ CARNICER, M. A. (2001). La España de Franco (1939–1975). Cultura y vida cotidiana. Madrid: Síntesis. MANENT, Albert (1986). El Molí de l’Ombra. Dietari polític i retrats, 1946–1975. Barcelona: Eds. 62, p. 128 (for Nadal’s militancy in the right-wing Peña Blanca during the Republican years). MOLAS, Isidre (1972). Lliga catalana. Un estudi d’Estasiologia. Barcelona: Eds. 62. Vol. II. MOLAS, Isidre and CULLA , Joan B. (dirs.) (2000). Diccionari de partits polítics de Catalunya. Segle XX. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana. MOLINERO, Carme and YSÀS, Pere (1992). El règim franquista. Feixisme, modernització i consens. Vic: Eumo. 60

MONTES, Eugenio (1941). «La Cataluña de Agustí», Destino [Barcelona], 202 (31 May).


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NADAL, Carlos (2005). «Periodismo aliadófilo bajo el régimen de Franco». La Vanguardia [Barcelona], 24 July. NADAL, Santiago (1939a). «Los que siempre se llamaron españoles». Destino [Barcelona], 82 (25 September). NADAL, Santiago (1939b). «La burguesía del alma huera». Destino [Barcelona], 119 (28 October). NADAL, Santiago (1940a). «Unidad espiritual de España». Destino [Barcelona], 137 (2 March). NADAL, Santiago (1940b). «Nosotros y la guerra». Destino [Barcelona], 141 (30 March). NADAL, Santiago (1940c). «Nota del día. Fin de la guerra continental». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 25 June. NADAL, Santiago (1940d). «Nota del día. Después del tercer Munich». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 12 July. NADAL, Santiago (1940e). «Nota del día. El 18 de julio y la nueva Europa». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 18 July. NADAL, Santiago (1940f). «Nota del día. El último llamamiento». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 20 July. NADAL, Santiago (1941a). «Debilidad de la posición moral británica». Destino [Barcelona], 211, 2 August. NADAL, Santiago (1941b). «Peligros de la alianza anglosoviética». Destino [Barcelona], 226, 15 November. NADAL, Santiago (1942). «La política internacional y la prensa diaria». A Cursillo de conferencias de extensión cultural profesional. Barcelona: Asociación de la Prensa Diaria de Barcelona (C.N.S.). p. 59. NADAL, Santiago (1944). «Verona y Argel». Destino [Barcelona], 349, 25 March. NADAL, Santiago(1945). «Tragedia de Austria, tragedia de Europa. Hemos visto unas fotografías...». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 21 December. P ALAU, Francisco (1939). «El catalanismo no puede quedar insepulto». Solidaridad Nacional [Barcelona], 20 April. P EMARTÍN, José (1938). Qué es «lo nuevo»: consideraciones sobre el momento español presente. Santander: Cultura Española. P ONS, Agustí (2004). Néstor Luján, el periodista liberal. Barcelona: Columna. REVESZ (1946). «La política internacional en 1945». ABC [Madrid], 1 January. RÍO CISNEROS, Agustín del(1977). Viraje político español durante la II guerra mundial, 1942– 1945. Réplica al cerco internacional, 1944–1946. Madrid: Ediciones Europa, 1977. ROS AGUDO , Manuel (2002). La guerra secreta de Franco (1939–1945). Barcelona: Crítica. RUIZ MANENT, Jaime (1941). «Ofensiva de Israel». Destino [Barcelona], 211 (2 July).

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SÁNCHEZ RECIO, Glicerio (1996). Los cuadros políticos intermedios del régimen franquista, 1936– 1959. Diversidad de origen e identidad de intereses. Alacant: Institut de Cultura Juan Gil Albert. SENTÍS, Carles (2007). Memòriesd’un espectador. Barcelona: La Campana. SEVILLANO C ALERO, Francisco (2000). Ecos de papel. La opinión de los españoles en la época de Franco. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. TALLADA, José M. (1939). «Revisión de conductas». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], February–March. Unknown author (1937a). «Armas de paz». Destino[Burgos], 18 (3 July). Unknown author (1937b). Destino [Burgos], 18 (3 July). Unknown author (1937c). «Sabemos que Cambó y su compañía de corchos de la Lliga, pescadores en ‘yacht’, intentan tirar sus redes. Pero las aguas no están turbias ahora. Ni dejaremos que las enturbie nadie nunca más». Destino [Burgos], 8 (24 April). Unknown author (1937d). «Cambó y los sombreros de la reina Mary». Destino [Burgos], 10 (8 May). Unknown author (1939). «La moneda en el aire», ABC [Madrid], 1 September. Unknown author (1940). «Hitler, victorioso, exhorta a Inglaterra a la cordura. Histórico discurso del Führer en el Reichstag». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 20 July. Unknown author (1941a). «Nota del día. Alemania contra la URSS». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 24 June. Unknownauthor (1941b). «Inglaterra, aliada de los soviets». ABC [Madrid], 24 June. Unknown author (1941c). «España, precursora». La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 24 June. Unknown author (1941d). «Nuestra Cruzada es ya cruzada del mundo». ABC [Madrid], 24 June. Unknown author (1944). «Relaciones anglosajonas». ABC [Madrid]; and reproducedbyLa Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 3 February. Unknown author (1945). «De un extremo a otro extremo, pasando por el justo medio». Estilo [Barcelona], 11 (14 March). VALLS T ABERNER, Fernando (1939). «La falsa ruta», La Vanguardia Española [Barcelona], 15 February. VALLS TABERNER, Fernando (1940). Reafirmación espiritual de España. Barcelona. YSÀS, Pere (2005). «Prólogo», in VILANOVA, Francesc. El franquismo en guerra. De la destrucción de Checoslovaquia a la batalla de Stalingrado. Barcelona: Península.

Translation from Catalan by Joel Graham 62


article JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI 10.2436/20.3001.02.73 | P. 63-73 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

P

hilosophy in Valencia during the early decades of Franco’s rule Noèlia Mateu Societat de Filosofia del País Valencià noeliamateu@yahoo.es

summary With the arrival of Francoism to the University of Valencia, the academic world was mired in a decadent atmosphere unbearable to anyone with intellectual aspirations. It all began with a Falangist who, without receiving any orders, decided to assail the University; immediately the old professors were cast out. What followed was a period in which, in the Philosophy Department, ideology was more important than teaching preparation, and the ambition for power and prestige was the driving force in the professional careers of the new professors.

key words Philosophy of Education, Contemporary Pedagogy, Educational Theory.

Manuel BatlleVázquez was a professor of law at the University of Murcia, who was cold-blooded enough to attack the University of Valencia and turn it from Republican to Francoist in a matter of hours. He was part of a group of Fifth Columnists1 who, on the morning of March 29th, 1939, occupied the University, just a day before the Francoist troops burst into Valencia. He led all the maneuvers quickly, efficiently and organized in a sequence worth reproducing here. The first step was to show up at the University on the morning of the 29 with the rest of the Fifth Columnists, some of them professors who had been eliminated during the Republican era. He decided that someone would th

1

The “Fifth Column” was an association devoted to the organization of clandestine Falangist groups that served as contingents to help the Francoist troops enter the Republican area. Among its functions were to come to the aid of abandoned prisoners and offer food and other necessities for the survival of the families of dead “martyrs.”

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have to take care of the rectorship and he himself assumed that responsibility until the pertinent entities could intervene and impose their wishes. As a result of this decision, he now had the task of selecting the new professors, at least for the time being. He chose the professors who had been persecuted and expelled from the Republican educational system. By four in the afternoon he had already chosen all the deans and professors, not only for the institutions of higher learning, but also for the institutes and secondary schools. So, at that same time, he drew up the joint document declaring his assumption of the rectorship and the naming of the new professors. This entire occupation had been decided and carried out without the approval of the Francoist authorities. Not even the troops that were advancing toward Valencia were aware of Batlle’s movements, but the surprise was well received. The leadership of the National Higher and Secondary Education Service of the Ministry of Education had designated two delegates to carry out the university occupation in Valencia: JosepGascó Olivares, professor of Science and former vice-rector ousted by the Republican authorities, and Antoni Ipiens Lacasa, also a professor of Science. Both delegates showed up at the rector’s office on March 31st and encountered the new situation: a restructuring perfectly led and organized by a new rector who had acted completely on his own orders, even in his own naming as rector. One imagines that the initial shock soon turned into satisfaction at finding someone who had done, and very “correctly,” the work that they had been charged with doing. They deemed Batlle’s efforts praiseworthy and encouraged him to continue as interim rector until the Ministry assigned the post to someone else. And so that was how the Fifth Columnist continued as the head of the University of Valencia until April 24th, when Josep Maria de Zumalacárregui i Prat was named to replace him. Batlle then returned to Murcia, where he was named dean of the Law Department. Yet his rise in the ranks continued, and in 1944 he was given the rectorship of the University of Murcia, which he used to keep that university mired in the mediocrity that, according to him, the provinces deserved. A mediocrity that guaranteed tranquility and eliminated all possibility of altercations and revolts within his domain. He had two opportunities to take up the post of Supreme Court Judge, in Madrid, but he turned them down for the following reason, which he expressed at the opening ceremony of the 195758 school year: “God’s plan is for me to speak from an electoral seat.”2 In 1975, when he was nearing retirement, Manuel Batlle was dismissed for friction with the Ministry. Some months later, he died. 2 64

M. Batlle Vázquez, Consideraciones sobre pedagogía jurídica. Múrcia. 1957 (quoted by M. E. Nicolás Marín in «Murcia durante la dictadura de Franco» a 100 años en la región de Murcia, Múrcia: La Verdad, 2002, p. 177).


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FrancescAlcayde Vilar benefited greatly from Batlle’s fleeting rectorship in the University of Valencia. This Valencian professor knew how to be in the right place at the right time. He was born on June 30th , 1889 at house number 9 on the street Pasqual i Genís, the first son of a doctor who later had two more sons: Manolo and Antonio. His childhood –at least in the memories he himself wrote– was that of a typical son of a well-to-do family in the city of València at the start of the 20th century including summers in Cabanyal and stays at his maternal grandmother’s country estate, located between Gillet and Sant Esperit. He attended secondary school at the Institut Lluís Vives, where he graduated with honors, and he considered following in his father’s footsteps and studying medicine, but it was his progenitor himself who got that idea out of his head. Finally, he chose to study Exact Sciences. The family moved to Madrid for work and that was where a friend who studied philosophy took him to a lecture by the professor Adolfo Bonilla Sanmartín, who was continuing the studies of philosophical history that Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo had begun. We know that this experience was a decisive one in his academic life. Impressed, AlcaydeVilar felt he had discovered his true vocation and decided to quit mathematics and start studying philosophy. In this new field he studied under Ortega y Gasset, in Metaphysics, and the previously mentioned Bonilla Sanmartín, in History of Philosophy and Psychology. Once he finished his degree course, he earned a doctorate with Ortega y Gasset, with a thesis entitled Passions as the link between body and soul and, immediately afterwards, he began to prepare for his competitive exams. After four and a half years he finally obtained a university professorship. His first post was in Santiago de Compostela, where he was professor of Fundamental Logic. He remained in that city for three years, during which he wrote a play and married Carmen Miranda, the daughter of the former Captain General of Cartagena, who he had begun to court during his stay in Madrid. Then he moved to Zaragoza, where he lived with his wife for three years in a hotel (knowing he wouldn’t settle in that city either). Remember that, during the Franco regime, professors came and went often through the “universities in the provinces.” Basically, most of them were desperately trying to end up in Madrid. But FrancescAlcayde’s fate was another, and it seems that he did nothing to change it: he didn’t have the centralist aspirations so common among his contemporaries. The next city in his particular, hectic itinerary was Salamanca, where the rector was Miguel de Unamuno, who Alcayde was bursting with pride at having met. He described him as a man of imposing character and physique who was always surrounded by students from other universities and travellers who sought him out to ask for his autograph. After Salamanca he went to Granada, right before arriving at his final destination: Valencia. It was in 1931, at 42 years old, that he was able to return to his hometown. The Valencian university had always been his goal. There he came, in 1932, to hold the LluísVives Chair,

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about which he would later say the following: “It was not a very egotistical task, since it was done by sacrificing the vanity of individual renown in the interests of universal diffusion of the name of LluísVives and his doctrine. So we have only followed the teachings of the master when he tells us that the professor should not seek out personal glory and renown in his chair, but the glory and renown of the person who formulated the doctrines he explains. And that is what I have done from the Chair of LluísVives, which I hold. It hasn’t brought me personal fame or glory: but I have brought glory and fame to LluísVives.” What I have not yet mentioned about Alcayde is that he had joined the ideological current of Valencianism (the Valencianism from prior to the Spanish Civil War). I should explain this position: Alcayde’sValencianism was regionalism, not nationalism. At that time there was no pro-Catalanism or anti-Catalanism in that school of thought because separation from Spain wasn’t a possibility. The current typical characteristics, both of pro-Catalan Valencian trends and Catalonophobe trends, have nothing to do with the regionalism that was timidly spreading in 1930s Valencia. Independence was nowhere near the fate that AlcaydeVilar, nor any other Valencianist at that time, would have imagined for their homeland. They merely strove to reform the Spanish State so it would abandon its centralist stance and give more recognition to the Valencian culture, but while continuing to give merit and tribute to Spain from the fruits of that Valencia culture. The problem with Valencianism was understood as a culturalism. Its goal, among others, was to support and propagate Valencian culture. Now what they understood as “Valencian culture” didn’t usually go much beyond speeches and overwritten poems about the bucolic landscape, or pedantic sentimentality having to do with the friendly and tranquil psychological makeup of the inhabitants of Valencia. Basically, poetic evasiveness over breakfasts of traditional sausages in the shade of the orange tree… Beyond questions of right and left-wing, the question of Valencianness took on a fundamental role in Alcayde’s political ideology, and that was made manifest in articles such as “Valencianism and Dignity” (May, 1933) and “The Customs Wall” (also May, 1933). At the University of Valencia, during the Republican period, his position was preeminent: in addition to heading the LluísVives Chair, he was named a member of the Cultural Council and director of the Pedagological Seminary. He also was well received in the pro-Valencian cultural institutions: he was a member of the Valencian Cultural Center and the Rat Penat.

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In philosophical questions he presented himself as a Catholic thinker, though not a scholastic. We should explain that scholasticism was traditionally the prevailing philosophical current in Spanish universities. It seems that Alcayde’s influences were others. Remember that he wrote his thesis with Ortega, which led him to study, at least superficially, the works of Kant and Husserl. Of course,


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his true mentor when he began to study philosophy was Bonilla, who awakened his vocation and sent him on the path of studying speculative psychology; one of his main interests as a philosopher. Within speculative psychology, he focused on the issues of the psychology of peoples and of emotions, and passions. He wrote a few books on emotions and passions, most noteworthy among them Las emociones[Emotions].3 In Las emociones, where he gives Bonilla an important place in the acknowledgements in the prologue, he gathers the theories of emotions of Aristotle, the Stoics, LluísVives, Spinoza, James, Darwin and Camper. From the examination of these theories, he comes to the conclusion that there are two opposing general theories, but that all of them have some common factors. All of them accept three points: 1/ That there is a representation. 2/ That there is a state of mind called emotion. 3/ That there are organic changes, alterations to the body and other physical reactions. The difference between the two opposing general theories lies in the fact that the first, maintained by James, establishes that the physical alterations are the cause of the emotions, while the theory upheld by Descartes, Darwin and others affirms that, quite the opposite, the emotions are the cause of the body’s reactions. AlcaydeVilar adopts James’s theory claiming that our organic changes alter the sentimental tone of our representations. His argument is based on the observation of the fact that, when we don’t feel well or we are feeling faint, even the most pleasurable things, like a nice smell or a song, can make us feel worse; while when we feel well we interpret as positive stimuli that could have easily been interpreted as negative. The third chapter of this book –“Las emociones y la vida total psíquica” [“Emotions and overall psychic life”]— was reproduced word for word in Las pasiones como enlace entre el alma y el cuerpo. [Passions as the link between body and soul].Then the book includes a section detailing experiments carried out on children and adults about the emotions they feel in certain circumstances and what physical reactions come into play in those moments. Lastly, the author makes a classification and detailed description of each of the emotions that he believes we can feel throughout our lives, and adds as a colophon a 17th -century Italian text entitled Trattado di Fisionomia, which relates anatomy with psychology and aspires to explain which physical characteristics reveal concrete personality traits. When he finishes the transcription, he says “Thus ends this unpublished manuscript. As you can see, it is rudimentary, arbitrary and more appropriate for the spiritual nourishment of a gypsy than as scientific element.* Of course, in the period in which it was written we found no more serious treatise on this subject. The distinction must 3

Las emociones (3rd ed.). Madrid: Suc. de Rivadeneyra.

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be made between the art of discovering emotions through expression and the art of discovering character through physiognomy. The expression of an emotion is the emotion itself externalized, while physiognomy of an individual can, sometimes, completely and unconsciously falsify his character.” Another field within philosophy that Alcayde investigated was the study of the Valencian regional/national tradition, including his studies on Viviesism (the philosophical system of LluísVives). These studies, naturally, were intimately related to his Valencianism and served as a kind of “philosophical” letter of introduction among the regionalists. But, a few years later, during the Civil War, Alcayde will see his academic position diminished. By the order of January 22, 1937, he was listed as “hostile” with many other professors. His declared political neutrality (based on the idea of giving priority to regionalism) awakened suspicions of the government authorities about his loyalty to the republican political regime. They declared him “at the government’s disposal,” which meant remaining temporarily isolated from the university and losing a third of his salary. He was lucky, because that sanction was among the least harsh. However it marked him, once the war was over, as someone “punished” by the Republic, which helped him to create a place for himself in the new university of the Francoist period. And this is where we return to the start of our story: once again beside Manuel Batlle. Alcayde took advantage of his disgraced situation to join up with the Fifth Columnists and take part in the coup of the republican university on March 29th, 1939. With this action he immediately earned, the very day of the occupation, the post of dean in the Department of Philosophy and Letters. At the time there were only four departments at the University of Valencia and, therefore, only four deans were needed. Alcayde formed part of that select group along with MiquelMartí Pastor (Department of Medicine), Salvador Salom Antequera (Department of Law) andFrancesc Beltran Bigorra (Department of Sciences). His deanship extended until 1946. Just a year before Sabino AlonsoFueyo Suárez earned his doctorate, a student with whom Alcayde maintained a very special relationship. Sabino Alonso was born in Lada, Asturias, on January 14, 1909. He was the son of a salaried employee of a mining exploitation who decided to send him to study for an ecclesiastical career. At nine years old he entered the Seminary of Oviedo, where he tried to prepare himself for religious studies and the life of a monk with courses in Humanities, Philosophy and Theology. But even after changing seminaries,4 he didn’t last long and in 1927, when he was already eighteen, he abandoned his religious studies to attend secondary school in the city. In 1931 4 68

It is also known that he spent some time in the Valdedios Seminary, right before abandoning his religious career.


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he earned his law degree at the University of Oviedo, just a few years before having begun to write both poetry and prose. His first publications are in local magazines and newspapers such as Alas, Covadonga, VeranoAstur, La Tribuna, El Lunes and Región…, all under the pseudonyms Sabal5 and Florestán. The Asturian would publish journalism throughout his entire life, and from 1930 to 1936 he was part of the writing staff of Región and, in some periods, he even assumed the roles of editor-in-chief and director of that newspaper. He also taught and worked as a lawyer. In Madrid he earned his doctorate in Philosophy in 1947, with the thesis SaavedraFajardo’s Political Thinking, directed by YelaUtrilla, the Falangist6 leader in Asturias since the end of the Civil War. He also earned a doctorate in Law that same year, but it is in journalism and philosophy where he will find success, although not without external help. In the forties, after working in Valladolid for the newspaper Libertad for five years, we know that Sabino Alonso Fueyo moved to Valencia to accept a very appealing offer: the post of assistant director of the daily paper Levante. There is where he met Francesc Alcay de Vilar, with whom he forged a long relationship both professional and personal; a relationship motivated by personal interests and the desire to achieve a good position in the academic and journalistic world they were both a part of. When the Asturian arrived in Valencia, he wasn’t satisfied with the promotion in his journalistic career; he also wanted to continue teaching and he entered the Teacher’s Training College as a professor of Logic and Psychology. Shortly afterward he manages to get work as an assistant professor to Alcayde in the Department of Philosophy and Letters and ends up, after a few years, an interim lecturer of the Chair of History of Philosophy at the University of Valencia. In the journalism realm, Alonso Fueyo was a very influential figure who could help glorify someone or run their name through the mud. In the Levante newspaper he was promoted to management after ten years as assistant director. He stayed in that post for nine years, until 1962 when he was asked to come to Madrid to head the newspaper Arriba, which, like Levante, was part of the official 5

We suppose that this pseudonym was the result of combining the first three letters of his given name (Sab-ino) with the first two of his last name (Al-onso-Fueyo), to create the name he signed his articles with: Sabal.

6

Sabino Alonso Fueyo worked for the Asturian Falangist newspaper La Nueva España. We remind the reader that Yela Utrilla was a leader of the Falange in Asturias, positioning him as a popular, well-known figure in the AsturianFalangist circle, which leads us to believe that it is possible that the choice of thesis director was conditioned by the events of the Civil War, ten years before they met on the university campus in Madrid.

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press for the National Movement.Making some calculations using the dates of his job change and knowing, from an interview in Blanco y Negro, how many years he spent at each post, we can conclude that he decided to move to Valencia in 1943, before finishing his doctorates in philosophy and law in Madrid. During the years he lived in Valencia, he won two of the three most important awards of his career: the José Antonio Primo de Rivera Prize (1947) and the Jaime Balmes Award (1962). Alonso Fueyo’s position at Levante was of interest to Alcayde, who had lost all his drive after the war. Alcayde needed to increase his academic popularity without actually producing philosophical works, since he had gotten used to his venerable position and had lost all interest in research. Now he preferred to write articles of opinion and prologues that gave him prestige as an “acclaimed writer” among the academic philosophers of the Francoist period. He understood that being asked to write small reviews was a sign of his own “success,” since the writers asking for his collaboration did so thinking they were promoting their books with his endorsement based on the “fame” he had acquired some time back as the dean of philosophy at the University of Valencia. And this was the procedure followed by Alonso Fueyo when publishing his book Dios, otravez. El mensaje de los seres [God, again.The message of beings]. On the title page stated, right beneath the title, that it had a prologue by “Dr. Alcayde.” The Valencian’s position of power in the university realm obviously attracted the attention of the Asturian, who, even though he was successful as a journalist, was still unsatisfied with his teaching career and his philosophical vocation. Fueyo needed contacts at the university and Alcayde needed them in the newspapers in order to publish his articles. So they were forced by their mutual self-interest to find common ground. It is easy to understand the motives behind Alcayde and Fueyo establishing an intense relationship: they each had what the other wanted. But ideologically there were some differences between them: Francesc Alcayde Vilar was much more politically and religiously moderate than Sabino Alonso Fueyo, who was a Falangist before the Civil War, a militant of Catholic Action and an active member in an anti-Marxist campaign in 1931, for which he was tried and imprisoned for a brief period. He was, without a doubt, a supporter of Franco, even though the Caudillo hadn’t been terribly friendly to him the one time they spoke. It seems that Franco once received Sabino Alonso Fueyo as the director of Arriba. The Asturian journalist complained about the pressures he was under from different sectors and families of the National Movement. Franco, in response to his words, gave him some advice: “Fueyo –he contends that Franco said– you should do what I do, not get involved in politics…” 70


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So it is not surprising that in El mensaje de los seres –where, by the way, he constantly quotes his thesis director, Yela Utrilla–, he makes a hyperbolic defense of the qualities of Christianity and proposes the Catholic religion as a solution to the problems that, according to him, the Renaissance had brought to modern society, precisely because of the idea of man as the measure of all things, the exaltation of reason and the casting aside of faith. This excerpt I quote here perfectly illustrates what I have been saying up until this point: “That idea of a cosmic order moving peacefully according to eternal laws no longer exists. God passes to a second plane; man lives with his back to this destiny, and that is why conflicts, wars and paganism emerge. The bankruptcy, in short, of a European culture, because if that culture is, according to Keyserling, “a life-form as immediate expression of the spirit,” it must be recognized that the entire life of our continent has been profoundly and emotionally religious, spiritual. The bankruptcy of a culture, if you will: but not of Christianity, which is universal, which is a series of principles placed above human realities and at the margin of any faltering. As the world grows further from God, disaster ensues. We are left with no other recourse besides returning to Him along the double path of faith and reason. In this wise conjunction of reason and faith resides all our natural and supernatural knowledge of the primary Cause that governs the Universe.”7 Other successes that will make Sabino Alonso Fueyo into a person of “renown” within society are the Francisco Franco Award, which he won in 1965, when he was the head of the newspaper Arriba, where he would only last another year, since after that they offered him the post of Minister of Information in the Spanish embassy in Lisbon, the post of National Press Minister and the vicepresidency of the Press Association of Madrid. He was also awarded the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise and the Cross of the Order of Naval, Aeronautical and Military Merit (this one, which he received from the hands of the Minister of the Army on May 4th, 1966, was a decoration also given to civilians, despite the name). He was a lecturer at the Spanish Institute of London, where he spoke on the philosophy of LluísVives (which, we’ll remind the reader, had also been a subject of Alcay de Vilar’s), and at the universities of Rio de Janeiro, Asunción and La Paz and the institutes of Hispanic Culture in São Salvador da Baía, Portoalegre, Sao Paulo, Córdovaand Mendoza. He was a member, in addition to the cultural institutions we have already mentioned, of the Institute of Political Studies, the Institute of Asturian Studies and, in Madrid, the Institute of Hispanic Culture and the Hispano-Arabic House. 7

Sabino Alonso Fueyo, Dios, otra vez. El mensaje de los seres. València: Guerri. 1946.

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Bibliography ALCAYDE VILAR, Francisco. Sobre las emociones. Memoria doctoral 9 de mayo 1916, Madrid: Imprenta Alemana, 1917. http://biblioteca.uam.es/psicologia/imagenes/expo/ P1020851.JPG - Las emociones (3ª ed.), Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1922. - «Lògica i Política», El Camí 52 (4 de març de 1933). - Contra el valencianisme. Discursd’ingrés al Centre de Cultura Valenciana. Sessiód’apertura, dissabte 24 de febrer de 1934 al Paranimf de la Universitat de València,València: Imprenta de la Semana Gráfica, 1934. - «Què és lo nostre?», Lo Nostre 4 (1 de maig de1936) - «El concepto de nación según José Antonio. Discurso leído en la solemne apertura del curso académico 1939-1940», Anales de la Universidad de Valencia, any XVII, curs 1940-1941. - «Signo y valor de este acto. Cursillo de exaltación de los valores hispánicos: solemne sesión de clausura», Anales de la Universidad de Valencia, year XVII, course 19401941. - «El Utilitarismo de Luís Vives», Anales de la Universidad de Valencia, year XVII, course 1940-1941. - «Ofrecimiento a Juan Luís Vives», Anales de la Universidad de Valencia, year XVII, course 1940-1941. - «Cultura y elegancia de Valencia», Vértice. Revista nacional de la Falange Española 55 (1942). - «Las pasiones como enlace entre el alma y el cuerpo», Anales de la Universidad de Valencia, year XXIV, course 1950-1951. - «Variaciones fisiológicas en sujetos emocionales», Revista de Psicología y Pedagogía 2 (1951): 21-25. - «Teoría de la pintura del futuro», Revista de Ideas Estéticas, 68 (1959). ALONSO FUEYO, Sabino. Dios otra vez (El mensaje de los seres), Valéncia: Agebe, 1946. - Luís Vives y su examen de los ingenios, València: Universitat de Valéncia, 1948. - La experiencia políticojurídica en Saavedra Fajardo, Valéncia: Publicaciones de la Academia de la Jurisprudencia y Legislación, 1948. - Saavedra Fajardo: el hombre y su filosofía, Valéncia: Guerri, 1949. - Existencialismo y existencialistas, Valéncia: Guerri, 1949. - Platón en la formación del hombre moderno, Valéncia: Guerri, 1949. - Filósofos con Dios, València: Guerri, 1952. 72


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- Filosofía y Narcisismo, Valéncia: Guerri, 1953. - El periodismo, cátedra de cultura, Valéncia: Sucesores de Vives Mora, 1955. - El drama del hombre actual, Valéncia: Sucesores de Vives Mora, 1958. - «Mensaje perenne de la filosofía tomista. Santo Tomás de Aquino, filósofo de la armonía», El español 129 (1945): 6. - «Existencialismo español: Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno y Xavier Zubiri», Saitabi 9 (1949): 3-12. - «Los filósofos existencialistas: Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno y Xavier Zubiri», Educación 3 (1950): 27-42. - «Enseñanzas actuales de Platón. El platonismo en el pensamiento de Occidente», Saitabi 33-34 (1950): 158-164. - «Juan Luís Vives en el paisaje cultural de nuestro tiempo», Educación 5 (1950): 19-34. - «El existencialismo es humanismo», Anales de la Asociación española para el Progreso de las Ciencias (1955): 613-614. - «Platón y los estudios totalitarios», Anales de la Asociación española para el Progreso de las Ciencias (1955): 845-847. - «Nueva versión crítica de Sartre», Índice 133 (1960): 22. - Sol de Romances. Poemas. [s.n.] Oviedo. 1938. B ATLLE, Manuel. Consideraciones sobre pedagogía jurídica, Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1958. GARCIA, Sebastià - SALAVERT, Vicent. «L’ocupació de la Universitat de València el 1939 pel quintacolumnista Manuel Batlle, catedràtic de Múrcia», Afers 3 (1986): 123198. - L’ocupació franquista de la Universitat de València el 1939, València: Afers, 2008. NICOLÁS MARÍN, Encarna. Murcia durante la dictadura de Franco, Murcia: La Verdad, 2002 SERRA, Xavier. «Francesc Alcayde Vilar, valentinicultor», Afers 55 (2006): 575-600.

Translation from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem

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memoirs JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 P. 75-78 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

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eflections on Philosophy in Catalonia Josep Ferrater Mora

After nearly a year in the planning, Victòria Camps confirmed in a letter to Josep Maria Ferrater Mora on 23 April 1979 that the spanish Ministry of Education had decided to award him an honorary doctorate from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). On 21 November of that year, he received the degree in an investiture ceremony at which he gave an acceptance address that was later to become famous. Because the university did not yet have an auditorium for such events in the building that housed the rector’s office, the ceremony was held at the UAB’s University School of Business Studies in Sabadell. Indeed, the location also made sense because the second individual to be honoured that day was Pau Vila, a native son of Sabadell. The auditorium was full to overflowing. Ferrater expressed his delight at the honour and read a text that in reality reprised the subject that he had addressed from Santiago de Chile thirty-five years earlierin his volume Les formes de la vida catalana [Catalan Ways of Life] (1944). Now he set out his ideas of seny, mesura and ironia (in English, good sense, measure and irony), adding faithfulness to reality, a penchant for contracts, professionalism and the desire for clarity.Between these two texts, he had moved through logic and analytic philosophy in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and this experience added nuance to his original arguments. His reprisal of the subject fit well with the spirit of the times, which had not yet been dubbed the Transition in Spain. Rather, it involved the retrieval, renovation and reconnection of everything that had been lost in the tradition of philosophy forced abroad. The address generated expectation and also, beforeh and and afterwards, ambivalent feelings on the subject matter. Below we reproduce extracts from this acceptance address, with special attention given to the passages that deal with the question as they appeared in the university publication: Pau Vila i Dinarès, Josep Ferrater i Mora (honorary doctorates): speeches delivered at the investiture ceremony, held at Sabadell on 21 November 1979 at the University School of Business Studies. [Pompeu Casanovas]

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 75-78 JOSEP FERRATER MORA

Reflections on Philosophy in Catalonia (1979) Josep Ferrater Mora I say “philosophy in Catalonia” and not “Catalan philosophy” because my philosophical predilections lean toward the idea that philosophy – like science – has no nationality. Speaking of “a Catalan philosophy” is only slightly less absurd than saying “a Catalan chemistry” or a “Catalan mathematics”. I believe that Catalans, to the extent that they do philosophy, must do so as it is (or should be) done everywhere by everyone: without too much concern for whether it does or does not express the national spirit. If national spirit is problematic, create philosophy of a national spirit is anenormously fuzzy thing. If it does not appear to be so at times, this is because philosophy has been mistaken for some hazy form of ideology. From the time that we begin to take philosophy seriously, we realize that adjectives are a hindrance, save for those adjectives that can clarify the conceptual structure of the philosophy being done. The impertinence of extra-philosophical adjectives reveals itself as soon as we specify a class of philosophical problems to tackle. Take problems that are epistemological in nature. Do we speak of a Catalan theory of knowledge? What would be involved in a Catalan philosophy of linguistics or of physics? A number of authors think that a universally quantified proposition does not imply the existence of what is denoted by the variable. Others hold that a particularly quantified proposition can be inferred from a universally quantified proposition so that the variable linked to the former proposition will be referential. Is there a Catalan theory of quantification? Or a Catalan theory for the reference of linked variables? You will say that extra-philosophical adjectives are superfluous when rather abstract problems of the kind mentioned here are posed, but that they are much more appropriate when we pose questions that seem less abstract –for example, questions about the human being, human society, human history. In these latter cases, I do not believe that the philosophy is specifically Catalan, English or Finnish. There is no “physical reality – mental reality” problem that is typically Catalan. There are no Catalan concepts of justice or equality. Catalan society, like Catalan history and the Catalan language, may be an important piece of empirical data for an ethics or for a political and social philosophy; I highly doubt, though, that this will lead us to establish the existence or the possibility of the existence of a Catalan ethics or a Catalan philosophy and political science.

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Once we have stripped philosophy or science of spurious adjectives, we can acknowledge that ways of living, acting and thinking are forged in a human community, particularly in a national community, and that these give rise to certain preferences. In the culture of philosophy and science, preferences are expressed in a variety of ways: sometimes, it is the particularly intense cultivation of certain disciplines; sometimes it is a tendency to adopt given procedures or methods;


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 75-78 Reflections on Philosophy in Catalonia (1979)

sometimes it is the most typical way of formulating judgments, which may be dogmatic, sceptical, measured or something else. Earlier, I expressed little enthusiasm for the existence of a “national spirit”, perhaps because I have scant sympathy for spirits of any kind. Therefore, the ways of living, acting and thinking to which I allude are not, as I understand them, manifestations of any hypothetical collective spirit; they are simply ways of living, acting and thinking that appear better suited than others to the historical conditions –the social, political and economic conditions– in which a community develops. Evidently, as soon as they become rather permanently established in the form of a tradition, these ways of living, acting and thinking have an influence, in turn, on their historical conditions. However, this is precisely the opposite of a national and collective spirit autocratically pressing down on the individuals in the community. [...] Cum grano salis –a tiny grain of salt, which gives only a slight aftertaste to food without altering its composition– we can assent to the idea that certain communities with their own sufficiently developed cultural traditions appear to prefer certain methods to others. In the case of philosophy, which is much less unified than science and probably much less able to be unified as well, the peculiarity of the methods and procedures are quite striking. It is also revealing because the methods and procedures used are more directly bound up with the directions followed in the course of research. In this sense, we can talk of a “Catalan philosophy”, although we need to add hastily that this expression is no more than a convenient shorthand for identifying ways of approaching philosophy that have generally prospered in Catalonia and in Catalan-speaking lands. Ways of approaching philosophy can become apparent in the form of tendencies or attitudes. […] We now turn to a consideration of tendencies and attitudes in philosophy in Catalonia and in Catalan-speaking lands and introduce them under the general form of “traits”. Understood correctly, this is not a question of traits common to allthinkers, but rather a collection of various characterizations that have what Wittgenstein called “an air of family”. This does not mean that each and every thinker in a given cultural community has each and every one of these traits. But it does mean that there are traits that enable us to move from one to another without finding ourselves, in a manner of speaking, “outside the case”. Obviously, there are no common traits or at least no common philosophical tendency among Ramon Llull, Balmes, Llorens i Barba, Ramon Turró and Joaquim Xirau [...] A quick glance at the works of these thinkers shows that they are very different from one another and not only because they come from different periods in time, but also because of their temperaments. Nonetheless, the family resemblance appears undeniable. For example, we do not find in Balmes or in Llorens i Barba the passionate mysticism of Ramon Llull, but we do find a similar confidence in the ordering power of human reason. We do not find in Ramon Llull the moderate scepticism

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 75-78 JOSEP FERRATER MORA

of Balmes or Llorens i Barba, but we do find a strong inclination to give order to mental acts and faculties. The spiritualism of Balmes and of Llorens i Barba looks nothing like the naturalism of Ramon Turró, but all three share a wellknown confidence in the cognitive possibilitiesof experience. Joaquim Xirau would have found little use for the positivism of Turró, but the pair would agree on the necessity of avoiding speculative fantasies of the kind to which subjective idealismwas fondly given. In this suggested “family” order, perhaps more significant than the groupingof tendencies is the grouping of attitudes. We consider these to be elements of a kind of a system within which they can be combined in various ways and in various proportions. What “elements” am I speaking of? I see four that appear important to me: faithfulness to reality; a penchant for contracts, or “pactism”, which does not reject compromise unless it involves sacrificing a value held to be essential; professionalism; and a desire for clarity. This fourfold structure may recall the four “Catalan ways of life”, of which I spoke many years ago. In effect, there are analogies between some of the mentioned elements and the “ways” to which I referred. […] I will limit myself to saying a few words regarding two of the elements introduced fairly surreptitiously: faithfulness to reality and a desire for clarity. Faithfulness to reality can be expressed in a very straightforward manner: being faithful to reality means, first of all, keeping your feet on the ground. It means treading carefully. To this end, one must be, I concede, slightly distrustful and even a little bit standoffish. Not a sceptic –which would be dogmatic from head to toe – but rather the opposite of reckless. [...] The desire for clarity can be expressed in a very straightforward manner as well: being clear means, first of all, calling things by their name. It means not beating around the bush, not uttering circumlocutions of the kind beloved by obscurantists of all stripes. Obviously, it would be absurd to state that “clear” and “Catalan” are the same thing. But it is curious that the common saying “clar i català” is used to indicate clarity. Translation from Catalan by Barnaby Noone

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life-writing JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.2436/20.3001.02.74 | P. 79-82 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

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ife-writing of Manuel Casamada i Comella Ignasi Roviró Alemany Facultat de Filosofia Universitat Ramon Llull ignasiroviro@gmail.com

Manuel Casamada [1772-1841] was a philosopher, aesthete, rhetorician, theologian and defnder of Liberalism. He studied in the Mercedarian Convent of St. Peter Nolasc in Barcelona, where he obtained his doctorate in Theology and of which he would later become rector. In 1815 he joined the ranks of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona [Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona]. In 1821, compelled by an allegiance to the liberal cause, he became secular. Having left the Order of Merced, he put himself, as a secular priest, in the service of the diocese. Casamada took part in public events in favour of the restoration of the 1812 Constitution and at times undertook the role of a political commissar. He was a defender of moderate Liberalism, with quite some influence upon the Barcelona of the time. He was member of the reading room Gabinet de Lectura, writer for the newspaper Diario de la ciudad de Barcelona o sea El Eco de la ley, director of the Acadèmia Cívica academy and one of those involved in the Tertúlia Patriòtica de Lacy, a gathering of thinkers dedicated to the discussion of ideas. He came to be the most sought after preacher for sermons containing political comment during the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823). In Catalan liberal thought, he stands for the defence of the British political liberal model against its French counterpart. This model of thought can be found, essentially, in his speech on The difference between the beautiful and the sublime (1837) where he offers a critical dialogue with Hugh Blair and Edmund Burke.

Works by Manuel Casamada i Comella

His works can be divided in three different groups: books (A), sermons (B) and speeches (C). Find also some references to works on him (D).

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 79-82 IGNASI ROVIRÓ ALEMANY

A/ Published books with a pedagogic orientation: 1. Curso elementar [sic] on eloquence by D [on] M[anuel] C[asamada] y C[omella] P[riest]. Barcelona, imprenta de José Torner, 1827. 248 p. 2. Curso elementar [sic] de poesía por D[on] M[anuel] C[asamada] y C[omella] P[rebero]. Barcelona, imprenta de José Torner, 1828. 386 p. 3. Curso de gramática latina: según el método de las gramáticas de las lenguas vivas. Barcelona, Impremta de Manuel Saurí, 1829, vol. I, 323 p.; vol. II, 225 p. B/ His sermons are the most visible part of his liberal ideology: 1. La Confianza en Barcelona en María de las Mercedes, durante los apuros de su cautiverio correspondida y premiada por la Virgen Santa: oración gratulatoria ... / dixo el 6 de julio de 1814, el Padre Fray Manuel Casamada. [Barcelona]: Oficina de Gaspar y compañía; in Relación de las fiestas que con motivo de la solemne traslación de la milagrosa imágen de María de las Mercedes ... se celebraron en los dias 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 y 10 de julio de 1814. 2. Barcelona victoriosa por su fidelidad contra los enemigos extrangeros y por su lealtad contra los traïdores 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: oficina de Miquel y Tomas Gaspar, 1815. 3. Un Heroísmo singular modelo de si mismo: discurso que en el día 27 de junio del año 1815, aniversario de la gloriosa muerte de Ramón Mas, Julián Portet y Pedro Lastortras, sacrificados por el gobierno intruso en igual día del año 1809, dixo en la iglesia de la Real Ciudadela de Barcelona ... Manuel Casamada ... / sale á luz á expensas de algunos devotos. Barcelona: Imp. de Agustín Roca, en dicho año [1815]. 4. Las víctimas sacrificadas a los amaños de la más negra porfidia en los días 8 de abril y 23 de octubre de 1811… oración fúnebre que ... à la buena memoria de D. Miguel Alsina, D. Ignacio Ramón y D. Manuel Prats ... dixo en la parroquial iglesia de Sta. María del Mar de la ciudad de Barcelona el dia 15 de noviembre de 1815 el R.P. Fr. Manuel Casamada / Barcelona: impr. Miguel y Tomas Gaspar, 1815. 5. Deberes de la piedad y de la gratitud para con unos hermanos difuntos que perecieron por no poder sufrir los desprecios de la religión santa y las desgracias de la patria: elogio fúnebre que en el capítulo que celebró en Tarazona la provincia de Aragón del real y militar Orden de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, Redención de Cautivos ... dixo en el día 26 de febrero del año 1816 ... Manuel Casamada ... Barcelona: Oficina de Miguel y Tomas Gaspar , [1816?].

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6. Un sabio sin igual, que con una ciencia humilde y amante confesó en sus escritos de un modo original los extravíos de su corazón…: sermón que en honor … de … San Agustín/ dixo el día 28 de Agosto del año 1818 en … Barcelona … Fr. Manuel Casamada religioso mercenario. Barcelona: por Miguel y Tomas Gaspar… , [1818?].


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 79-82 Life-writing of Manuel Casamada i Comella

7. La Muger sabia y prudente que á un tiempo poseyó en el trono las virtudes domésticas y sociales: elogio fúnebre que en las solemnes exequias tributadas por su S.E. la Real Audiencia del principado de Cataluña a la gloriosa memoria de S.M. la reyna católica de las Españas doña María Isabel Francisca de Braganza, dixo en la parroquial iglesia de Santa María del Mar de la ciudad de Barcelona, el día 19 de enero de 1819 el R.P. Fr. Manuel Casamada. Barcelona: Oficina de Miguel y Tomas Gaspar, 1819. 8. Tributo de gratitud a las víctimas del Dos de Mayo de 1808 cuya sangre sentó la primera piedra del santuario 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 Mercenario, maestro en sagrada teología, director de estudios en la provincia de Cataluña y examinados sinodal del obispo de Gerona. Barcelona: Impr. Miguel y Tomas Gaspar, 1820 9. La constitución política de la Monarquía española base de nuestra felicidad, cuando está apoyada y sostenida por las virtudes sociales. Sermón 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 dramática, Barcelona, Imprenta Nacional del Gobierno, por Dorca, 1820 10. 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 ayuntamiento constitucional 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 Ayuntamiento. Barcelona, en la imprenta de las casas consistoriales, por José Rubió y Tomás Gaspar, 1822. 11. La Religión cristiana obra de la sabiduría de Dios en su establecimiento y del poder de Dios en su propagación: sermón que el domingo segundo de Cuaresma del año 1837 dijo en la Santa Iglesia de Barcelona el iltre. Sr. Dr. Manuel Casamada. Barcelona: Valentin Torras, 1837 12. Corrupción del corazón y orgullo del entendimiento: dos fuentes de la impiedad: sermón que el domingo tercero de cuaresma del año 1837 dijo en la Santa Iglesia de Barcelona el iltre. Sr. D. Manuel Casamada. Barcelona: Valentin Torras, 1837. C/ His speeches are to be qualified as ideological or political, if delivered during the sessions of the Tertúlia Patriòtica de Lacy, or intellectual and academic, if presented at the Royal Academy of the Belles Lettres of Barcelona.

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 79-82 IGNASI ROVIRÓ ALEMANY

1. We had access to an account of one of his political speeches published by Joaquín de Alcántara in the newspaper the Diario Constitucional, político y mercantil de Barcelona, in its edition from 25 November 1822, p. 3-4. Of the latter, we have knowledge of two by the title: 2. La diferencia entre lo bello y lo sublime [published in Ignasi Roviró (ed.): Estètica catalana, estètica europea, Barcelona: PPU, 2011, p. 68-79. The original manuscript is kept at the archive of the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona (Manuscrit UI 39, llig. 18, núm. 5 de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres)]. 3. On 18 November 1838, Casamada presented in the same academy an Examen crítico de las dos gramáticas castellanas publicadas por Don Vicente Salvá y Don José Maria Moralejo, speech now lost. D/ On Manuel Casamada i Cornella ROVIRÓ ALEMANY, Ignasi, «Hug Blair a Catalunya: el discurs sobre El bell i el sublim de Manuel Casamada i Comella», a Ignasi Roviró (ed.) Estètica catalana, estètica europea, Barcelona: PPU, 2011. pp. 43-80. ROVIRÓ ALEMANY , Ignasi, «El liberalisme anglès a Catalunya a la primeria del segle XIX: Manuel Casamada i Comella». Journal of Catalan Intellectual History, n. 3 & 4, (2012): 125-138. Translation from Catalan by Ignasi Roviró

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reviews JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 P. 83-86 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

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iz Castro, What’s up with Catalonia?: The causes which impel them to the separation Catalonia Press, 2013. 228p.

scrits de Xavier Serra, A peu de foto. Writings by Xavier Serra. At the foot of the picture. Photographies by Francesc Vera Ed. Afers, Catarroja, 2013. 140p. Marta Poblet IDT-UAB marta.poblet@uab.cat

Pompeu Casanovas IDT-UAB pompeu.casanovas@uab.cat

We are reviewing two books that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, and are not strictly philosophy. Or maybe they are. We keep denying. The first book edited by Liz Castro is not a research paper. However, both its subject —historical conditions of the present— and the way this has been dealt with —crowdsourcing in social networks— has gained attention and had an immediate impact. The second book, by Xavier Serra and Francisco Vera, cannot be considered either as research from an academic point of view. The collaborative work between the writer and the photographer was published first in a blog whose content was eventually gathered into a book. Its impact has been also significant, and the readers have been spreading it into the web. We should wonder in both cases, why. On January 15, 2013, American tech writer Liz Castro, who also defines herself as a “gourd crafter, would-be farmer, and Catalanista” posted on Twitter an open call to disseminate via crowdfunding a collection of articles she was editing in English on the situation of Catalonia after the massive rally for Catalan independence of September 11, 2012.

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Crowdfunding can be broadly defined as a method to raise small amounts of money from a large group of people to support projects and initiatives by other people or organizations. Even if crowdfunding precedes the Internet, both the Web 2.0 and mobile technologies have fueled the emergence of online platforms that enable collective fundraising. Liz posted her project in Verkami, the pioneer crowdsourcing platform based in Mataró, and she got and amazing response: in less than two months, the initiative largely surpassed the goal of €7,500 and collected €12,372 from nearly 600 sponsors. Each sponsor received a copy of the book, plus an additional copy or two to be sent to the person the sponsor had previously selected.

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What’s up with Catalonia? leverages Web 2.0 in its full. As Liz Castro writes in her editor’s note “it occurred to me that with the contribution of Catalan experts, the help of new technologies, the power of social networks, and some good translating, I might be able to edit a comprehensive collection of articles so that people outside of Catalonia could get a much clearer idea of just what’s going on there”. Indeed, a large crowd of Twitter users (including most of the book contributors) have played a major role both in spreading the word and publicizing the final outcome. In a similar vein, Josep Maria Ganyet recalls in “Keep calm and speak Catalan” how a spontaneous tweet he posted on his way to work grew into a full-fledged campaign: “Soon after I published the tweet, still on the train, I realized that the message “Keep Calm and Speak Catalan” had taken off. It was soon to follow the general path of all those messages that go viral: Twitter and social media, blogs, digital newspapers, radio, television, printed editions of newspapers, and then round again. The poster “Keep Calm and Speak Catalan” appears on websites in Japan and France, in protest movements in the United States, on websites in favor of Catalan culture and independence in


Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana. Número 5. 2013. P. 83-86 Liz Castro (ed.), What’s up with Catalonia? The causes which impel them to the separation Escrits de Xavier Serra, A peu de foto. Writings by Xavier Serra. At the foot of the picture. Photographies by Francesc Vera

Catalonia, as the avatars of thousands of Facebook and Twitter users, and at its peak had reached almost one million Google results”. The book, which includes a prologue by Catalan President Artur Mas, contains 35 essays and notes written in a concise, agile, and reader-friendly style by renowned academics, political representatives, community leaders, writers and journalists who present Catalonia’s history, economics, politics, language, and culture to the rest of the world. While the essays are explicitly targeting an international audience, they also aim at raising awareness on the “causes which impel them [Catalans] to the separation”, to use the quote of the US Declaration of Independence that provides the subtitle of the book. In this regard, the book provides historical context for remote causes while exploring the most recent events that have triggered the growth of the independence movement (i.e. the rulings of the Spanish Constitutional Court against the Catalan Statute, the fiscal asphyxia, or the unrest provoked by the policy of the Spanish Ministry of Education towards Catalan language). Generally, nearly all contributions of the book distill a point of no return with regard to Catalan-Spanish relations. As Germà Bel puts it: “in the end we have to choose between changing states or changing countries. From what we’re seeing, it seems like there are many more of us who would prefer to change states rather than bury our own country.” Overall, the shared feeling is that the stakes remain very high in Catalonia at the moment, and adjectives defining our present time as crucial, momentous, or exhilarating are widespread. Nevertheless, the book also casts times of hope. As Muriel Casals writes: “The future is in our hands. We defend Catalonia as a new state in Europe out of Catalan patriotism and out of European patriotism. We hope to be able to add our Catalan cultural and linguistic contributions to

Francesc Vera: Vàter públic, Torí. 2010

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2013. P. 83-86 MARTA POBLET, ANDREU CASANOVAS

increase the richness and diversity of the continent that we share with our European compatriots.” We come back now to Xavier Serra and Francesc Vera. For several months in 2010 and 2011 the authors published thirty-six photographs and comments on a blog online. There are still traces of this collaboration which can be found on the web (http://apeudefoto.wordpress.com). The outcome deserves attention. The photographs are not only minimalist, austere geometrically flawless: they reveal surprising details of our contemporary life through their composition and the moment they capture. Those are present and of-the-present images which, however, have the virtue of instigating, drawing from the collective memory that lives in us. This is a starting point: buildings, landscapes, fragments of cities —often European cities—, evoked by Francesc Vera’s trigger the viewer’s kaleidoscope of memory. Actually, by pressing the shutter of his camera, Francisco Vera also hit the brain that produces the image. And the miracle occurs, because without acknowledging very well how it may happen, a personal discourse, yet timeless, width, made of memories and full of meaning, infiltrates as a stowaway into our consciousness. We reflect upon it when we find the intruder. There is neither inside nor outside in universality. There is no localism. Maybe this is what happened to Xavier Serra also when writing his short comments. Writings convey a rare, very rare sense of freedom. The writer’s stories are not quite the photographer’s: it is not necessary at all. The stories evoked by the writer come from his Valencia family memories, from travels to Italy, and always from the background of philosophy in which he lives and where he works. For us there is no doubt. The reader is willing to watch the pictures again, and is willing to re-read the texts. This contemporary Book of Hours is a method book. We should study well its apparent ease, because basically it is a great little book of intellectual history. The intellectual history of all of us, what today we meant by cosmopolitan. The web has the ability to capture what is of paramount interest to a disaggregated community of users which turns in the end into different types of collectivities. Personal memory is transmuted into a shared memory. Both Liz Castro’s volume on Catalonia and Vera and Sierra’s volume on the timelessness of the present time have this feature in common. Very different in style and composition, the web has made them all and for all. English version by Marta Poblet

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reviews JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 5, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 P. 87-89 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

A

lexandre Jaume i Rosselló, Complete Works of Alexandre Jaume Roselló, Palma: Lleonard Muntaner, 2011. [Volume 1: Alexandre Jaume Roselló (1879-1937), a biography edited by Alexandre Font Jaume, prologue by Jaume Massot Muntaner, 399p. + 12 plates. Volume 2: Writings from Prison, edited by Alexandre Font Jaume, prologue by Andreu Jaume Enseñat. Volume 3: 1931-1933 Impressions of a constituent member, edited by Alexandre Font Jaume, prologue by José Bono Martínez and introduction by Maria Ballester Cardell, volumes 4 and 5 are in preparation]. Andrés L. Jaume Universitat de les Illes Balears andres.jaume@uib.es

Alexandre Jaume i Rosselló was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, the November 22 1879. The son of Andreu Jaume Nadal and Isabel Rosselló Pastor, Majorcans who emigrated to Uruguay. His father had studied at the Seminary of Palma, but left the clerical career and opened a training centre (1867-1868) in addition to prepping Latin. His wife, also a school teacher, was the sister of Alexandre Rosello i Pastor, minister of Grace and Justice in the Antonio Maura government. However, Andreu Jaume Nadal emigrated to Uruguay, where his father had been settled and had an important business together with his brothers. So Alexandre learned the first letters in Uruguay where he was educated in French. In 1889 the Jaume family returned to Palma and young Alexandre studied high school in the Balearic Institute from 1891 to 1895. From 1896 to 1897 he studied Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, where he was student of Daurella, but he gave up, apparently because of family pressures, and he started studies in law at the same university. However he did not stay in Barcelona, but he continued his studies at the universities of Valencia and Madrid, where the 12 October 1900

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obtained a degree in Law with excellent marks. His father seemed to have planned a political career in the liberal party in order for him to succeed his uncle Alexandre Rosselló. This included a good education for Alexandre prepared by his father, and after finishing his studies in law he went to Paris (1901-1903) to study economics at the Sorbonne. After that he was appointed, thanks to the efforts of his father, Consul of Uruguay in Palma and was dedicated to the practise of law and politics, with a clear preference for the latter. Jaume was member of the Liberal Party from 1904, and in 1909 he managed to be appointed city councillor in Palma, but apparently he was disappointed by local politics. The following year, he left the Liberal Party and went in to business with his brothers. The disillusionment with politics and the practice of law brought him ideologically closer to socialism and in May 1919, on the initiative of Llorenç Bisbal, he joined the socialist association of Palma when it had only 28 members. The surprise was great for family and society, a bourgeois businessman with a good economic position affiliated to a party of workers considered rather radical at the time, but Alexandre Jaume stayed his decision and collaborated actively in the diffusion organization of the party, The Balearic Worker, with many theoretical articles on socialism from a perspective clearly influenced by Jean Jaurés, i.e. pacifist and non-revolutionary socialism. In 1931 took his vath as deputy in the Constituent Assembly. He was the first socialist deputy of the Balearic Islands, but until 1936 did not hold any office in the party and even had problems with a section of it. On 23 April 1936, he was elected delegate by the President. When the coup d´état of General Francisco Franco broke out, he was arrested on 19 July 1936 at the Port de Pollença where he spent the summer. He was imprisoned at the Castell de Bellver and on16 February 1937 the military court sentenced him to death. He was shot against the walls of the municipal cemetery of Palma, on the morning of 24 February 1937, along with Emili Darder, first Republican Mayor of Palma, Mateo Antonio, Mayor of Inca and Antonio M. Tions, amid a furious mass of people shouting and clapping at each shot of the execution squad.

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Alexandre Jaume, though he made no philosophical-political system, was concerned with spreading and reflecting about socialism in a time when various trends existed. During his lifetime, he published two books, Impressions of a constituent member 1931-1933 (Palma: José Tous, 1933) and the October insurrection. Catalonia, Asturias, Balearic Islands (Felanitx: Felanigense, 1935). As highlighted in the unpublished notes brought to light in 2011, My Torment (p. 127), he authored a brief introduction to socialism, The Socialist Script, a general work, but it was burnt when Jaume was arrested. Finally, while James was in prison, he sneaked out some notes to compose a book entitled My Torment, a work that has remained unpublished until 2011, and has been published with the letters written from jail. Jaume was also a regular contributor to The Balearic Worker and The Last Hour. They are currently preparing an edition of these writings within the up coming edition of his Complete Works, edited by Alexandre Font.


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 5. 2012. P. 87-89 Alexandre Jaume i Rosselló, Complete Works of Alexandre Jaume i Rosselló

The study and the recovery of the memory of Alexandre Jaume was not an easy task after the years of Franco and on an island where everyone, until recently, know everyone. Oral sources, mainly the children of Alexandre and his nephew Andreu Jaume Rovira were not always explicit, though the latter retained a handful of writings -Archive Jaume Rovira-, and is concerned with the reinstatament of the figure of his uncle. Also the direct descendants of Alexandre Jaume maintain an excellent documentary archive -Archive Jaume Planas-. However, there were no studies on him until the work by his grandson Alexandre Font Jaume, a High School Latin teacher who holds a doctorate in Classical Philology. Indeed, several studies by Dr. Font reveal a scientific approach that outweigh emotional memories of his grandfather. We can say today that everything that could be said about the biographical aspects of Alexandre Jaume has already been said, particularly in the biography published in 2011 Alexandre Jaume Rosselló (1879-1937). However, there are stills some tasks left such as the analysis of his political background and the theoretical model behind it, work that can only be undertaken through a textual analysis, his library was burned for family security reasons.

Bibliographic Note

CRUANYES, J. «L’assassinat d’Alexandre Jaume», El Temps, 80, (2-8/09/2003). DD.AA. Documentos Socialistas. Escritos de Indalecio Prieto, de Ramón González Peña, Toribio Echevarria, Amador Fernández, Antonio Llaneza, Alejandro Jaume, Francisco Torquemada, Jóvenes Presos de Asturias y de Madrid, etc. Madrid, 1935. FONT JAUME, A. Alexandre Jaume. Palma: Ajuntament de Palma, 1987. GABRIEL, P. «Alexandre Jaume, primer intel·lectual socialista mallorquí», Randa, 3, (1970): 167-225. J AUME

ENSEÑAT ,

A. El somni d’Alexandre Jaume. Barcelona: Fundació Rafael Campalans, Arxiu Històric, 2003.

J AUME MAS, J. “El final de Alejandro Jaume”, Diario de Mallorca, 20 de juliol de 2006. — «75 aniversario de una ignominia», Diario de Mallorca, 16 de febrer de 2012. M OLL MARQUÉS, J. Crònica d’una infàmia. El procés contra Emili Darder, Alexandre Jaume, Antoni Mateu i Antoni Maria Ques. Palma: Editorial Moll, 2009. PAYERAS, M. «Alexandre Jaume. Una aproximació al seu pensament polític (19311936)», Randa, 22, (1987): 81-113. TRIAS MERCANT, S. Història del pensament a Mallorca, vol. I i II. Palma: Editorial Moll, 1985 i 1995. Translation from Catalan by Josep Monserrat and Glòria Farell

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article JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 6, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.2436/20.3001.02.79 | P. 91-114 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

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ugeni d’Ors. Philosophy and Humanism in the Twentieth Century Joan Cuscó i Clarasó Societat Catalana de Filosofia jcusco@vinseum.cat

summary Eugeni d’Ors i Rovira was the most influential thinker in Catalan culture in the twentieth centur y. He stood at the forefront of Noucentisme, which he captures in his philosophical novelof 1911 La ben plantada [The Elegant Woman], the main focus of this essay. The contribution of d’Ors falls within the context of European debates on humanism, its meaning and its value, particularly in the aftermath of the First World War. His work is an interpretation of the Mediterranean and Greek roots of European civilization.

key words Eugeni d‘Ors, Catalan philosophy, humanism, Joan Maragall, philosophy and art.

A book reaching a hundred years of age is not at all exceptional. What is highly interesting, though, is that a book can succeed over the years (and right from the moment of its first appearance) to enjoy regular reprinting, multiple adherents and numerous replies. Such success cannot be overlooked. If, in addition,the author is a philosopher and the work is one of the main stays of his output, then the matter will most certainly be of interest to us. This is case withLa ben plantada[The Elegant Woman](1911), by Eugeni d’Ors, a work that is central to Catalan culture in the twentieth century and a pillar underpinning the philosophical thought of d’Ors and the Noucentisme movement. In Catalan culture, La ben plantada marks a turning point. When d’Ors corrected the galleys of the book, Joan Maragall (the reigning Catalan cultural totem up until thatdate) was on his death bed. Also, the book is a literary work that is highly revealing of Noucentisme poetics. Both statements are quite accurate. That said, however, the most important statement to make is that Catalonia, with d’Ors, turns its eye squarely toward the twentieth century, leaving the nineteenth century behind. As someone who had as little in common with d’Ors as Miquel

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Siguan conceded (in a remark made in a seminar dedicated to the Catalan philosopher from the Ferrater Mora Chair at Girona), “He is a figure in our intellectual history who merits and requires review”.1 D’Ors himself was mindful of this turning point when, in the pages of La ben plantada, he compares Adelaisa (the main character in Maragall’s poem El comte Arnau) with Teresa (the protagonist and symbolic archetype of his own book). For d’Ors, both expressed strength, but: “And now that I have mentioned the Adelaisa of Comte l’Arnau it occurs to me to ponder what similarity or dissimilarity to her may mark out the Ben Plantada [Teresa, the titular character of his own book]. The self same Race is there, both women are full of life. But I think Adelaisa is a sense of touch and colour, while the Ben Plantada is Measure. Both aim to reflect instinct. But in Adelaisa, this instinct appears particularly targeted at the purposes of the species, while in my creation what is subtly in operation is the instinct of the Race, that is to say, a thing that is now intelligence and –profound, unconscious– Culture”.2 Adelaisa symbolizes the Modernisme movement; the Ben Plantada, Noucentisme. Since no culture is of a single piece, however, the Ben Plantada spurred a string of responses: Santiago Rusiñol published a reply in the pages of L’Esquetlla de la Torratxa;3 Rodolf Llorens i Jordana turned the book on its head in La ben nascuda (1936);4 Joan Capó, nearly in parallel with d’Ors, wrote La ben amada (19111914) in the Balearic Islands; and Salvador Dalí penned La real ben plantada (1949), combining d’Ors’s Teresa with Lídia of Cadaqués (incorporating the realism of surrealism). La ben plantada is a work that throws open a door onto a greater understanding of Catalan culture in the twentieth century, although d’Ors himself acknowledged in 1954, inLa veritable història de Lídia de Cadaqués [The True Story of Lídia of Cadaqués] that “I confess I have written a book that is too pure” (much as the artist Xavier Nogués had depicted with great accuracy in his etching of 1912).5 A work that brings the intellectual movement of the twentieth century alive on the page, La ben plantada was written in a watershed year for European

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1

Josep MariaTerricabras [ed.], El pensament d’Eugenid’Ors. Girona: Documenta Universitària, 2011.

2

Eugeni d’Ors, La ben plantada. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2004, p. 29.

3

MargaridaCasacuberta, Santiago Rusiñol: vida, literatura i mite. Barcelona: PAM, 1997.

4

Rodolf Llorens, La ben nascuda.Vilafranca del Penedès: Andana, 2005.

5

Eugeni d’Ors, La veritable història de Lídia de Cadaqués. Barcelona: Proa, 2002.


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 6. 2013. P. 91-114 Eugeni d’Ors. Philosophy and Humanism in the Twentieth Century

culture: in that year, Schoenberg published his treatise on harmony (Harmonielehre), Joan Maragall and Gustave Mahler died, Kandinsky produced the painting Impression III (concert) and Bartók composed Bluebeard’s Castle, embodying the anxieties of the period in the figure of a woman (as in the work of d’Ors and also in Schoenberg’s one-act opera Erwartung, completed in 1909). La ben plantada marks a turning point not only in d’Ors’s output, but also in European culture. It is neither a collection of essays nor a volume of philosophical theory (such as theLa filosofia de l’home que treballai que juga[Philosophy of the Man Who Works and Plays]).6 Nor is it a text of militant idealism. Nor does it fall halfway between these two stools, like La vall de Josafat [The Valley of Josaphat].7 It is a work of creation, expressing philosophical thought, which is expressed differently from, for example, scientific thought. It is the product of the creative act of thinking and, like any other work of art worthy of that name, it outlasts the fleetingness of time. To think, for d’Ors, is to create with all the consequences of creation for human life: La ben plantada is not the child of an “artist of the ephemeral” producing “certain manifestations of art which are fully subjugated to the influence of time, situated in time, with their real significance found only in a given segment of time, an era, a century, a season perhaps”. Against this weak sort of creation there is true creation, which responds to “the constancy of a work, the firmness of a vocation, against which time can do nothing”.8 And this true creation is what he sets out to do, because a philosopher must be capable of doing it, if he intends to address the matter. Creation involves mastering the will to live by means of the love of wisdom. “One way or another, we must always be learning and in love”, writes d’Ors in “L’Aprenent i l’enamorat” [“The Learner and the Lover”]. 9 This explains the opposition d’Ors draws between “the man who works and plays” and the “man who smokes and yawns”. Clearly, d’Ors’s Glosari [Glossary] is an effort at dialogue (that updates Plato’s ideals in a contemporary setting), but we cannot read all of the glosses

6

This book, published in 1914, was the first to collect the journalism of d’Ors systematically. See: Eugeni d’Ors (1995), La filosofía del hombre que trabaja y que juega. Madrid: Prodhufi.

7

Eugeni d’Ors, La vall de Josafat. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1987. This book, which appeared in 1918, is highly interesting in that d’Ors states clearly from its early pages that Western civilization is once again back in the situation in which Socrates found himself. Citing Pascal, d’Ors argues for the need to assert the power of thought to achieve an “ethics of the intelligence”. We need to bear these words in mind in the exploration of the topics that follow.

8

Eugeni d’Ors, Pablo Picasso. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2001, pp. 36-38.

9

Eugeni d’Ors, Glosari 1916. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1992, p. 3.

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with the same criteria. Over time, the more theoretical, pragmatic and propagandistic glosses were marshalled into a system in El secreto de la filosofía [Secret of Philosophy] (1947) and La ciencia de la cultura [The Science of Culture] (1964). By contrast, the glosses that are expressions of thought-as-creation remained independent, such as the glosses that give shape to La ben plantada (1911).The former explain what the philosophical vocation entails, while the latter show the benefits of the philosophical viewpoint and of its efforts to create a language to sustain the demands of such a viewpoint. Some show how to build the architecture of thought, while others are the architecture of thought. For d’Ors, this works like an orchestral symphony that must be able to capture simultaneity in language, because simultaneity also occurs in reality and, at the same time, in order to generate a non-dogmatic viewpoint. To this end, the philosopher creates a double distancing, or estrangement, in his work: the first is the writer’s regarding what he writes and the second concerns the ideas in relation to the ideas themselves. That is, in relation to reality and in relation to what is said on the basis on reality. Certainly, in order to grasp his project, the most interesting glosses are the ones that that demonstrate the act of thought as a creative act, as a work of art. Hence the importance of La ben plantada, which reflects a philosopher’s way of grasping reality as distinct from a scientist’s approach. It is as though the scientist looks at reality at its most microscopic level in order to find all of its elements and laws, while the philosopher looks at reality from a certain distance to ascertain its meaning. At an exhibition of paintings, we would say that the scientists examine all the most specific aspects of each picture (i.e., its lines, materials, etc.), while the philosophers look from a distance and seek (without excluding the scientists’ results) how the works can change the minds and visions of the human being in order to transform a person’s actions and the world itself: “Where is the reality of things: in their phenomenal appearance or in their abstract essence? The answer to this cardinal question divides the philosophical world into two camps. At present, we have accepted this division and, in accordance with it, have argued over the legitimacy of the Science of Culture. In private, however, we have been guarding another solution. A solution that is not eclectic, but rather synthetic, raising the truth of the phenomenon and the truth of the noumenon together into a higher concept, the double objectivity of which is at once affirmed. Noumenon and phenomenon are reconciled in the form, which is general, like the former, and specific, like the latter; which assumes universality and life without any internal contradiction. A schema made up of a line that radiates into several lines at a certain point, with some or all of these lines in turn radiating, at a certain point, into more new lines”.10 94

10 Eugeni d’Ors, “Filosofía del esquema”, Atlántida, I, 1, Madrid. Rialp, 1963, p. 25.


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This is the explanation of what La ben plantadas hows as the child of creative thought, which deals with reality on an equal footing. Philosophy provides a way to understand reality and, at the same time, makes use of a language that does not seek followers or dogmas, only readers (interpreters) and dialogue. An activity of the intelligence. A language that constructs neither metaphors nor allegories of reality because it speaks of reality itself, locating in its way of speaking a synthesis of idealism and empiricism.11 It is a symbolic language that creates an objectivity of geometries. “In the ‘symbol’, the sign is identified with the represented reality; in ‘allegory’, it is not. Figurative thought, as it proceeds by schemas, proceeds by symbols”.12 Consequently, we cannot read philosophical texts like scientific texts nor read theoretical essays and treatises like philosophical novels (nor philosophical novels like literary novels). And little attention has been given to this fact when reading and rereading the work of d’Ors. Symbols –and speaking through symbols– is one of the primary features of philosophy. Nicol describes this in his definition of an idealist thinker: “But the word is symbol. […]. In effect, the symbol stands between the self and the real thing, between the self and the other self. But this mediation of the symbol does not threaten the reality of the thing at all, nor the reality of the two selves that communicate to one another through references to the thing. This symbolic way in which knowledge and expression operate constitutes man’s fundamental way of being. […] Man is the being that knows differently from how other animals know”.13 Reality, being and the self are the main focus of interest in the knowledge to which the philosophical vocation is directed. A vocation aimed simultaneously at wisdom and life, because knowledge must grow into a “paideia” and a way of life. Intelligence is ethics and aesthetics. However, throughout the twentieth century, this underwent change. Philosophy came to be considered a humanistic (second-order) discipline, the sciences with direct and immediate applications (such as the nuclear bomb) triumphed, soon to be followed by the ascendance of the sciences transformed into technology and technology transformed into nodes of connections and simultaneous interactions through flat screens and virtuality. 11 See: Eugeni d’Ors, Confesiones y recuerdos. Valencia: Pre-textos, 2000, p. 57. 12 Eugeni d’Ors, “Filosofía del esquema”, Atlántida, I, 1. Madrid. Rialp, 1963, p. 26. 13 Eduard Nicol, Las ideas y los días. Mexico: Afinita, 2007, p. 363.

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On d’Ors and Dalí The influence of d’Orsand his work changed over the course of the twentieth century as the context changed. In 1948, Dalísaid: “I am finishing a book, La real ben plantada [The Real Elegant Woman], the story of Lídia of Cadaqués, in response to d’Ors”.14 Unfortunately, the work is not to be found today. Nonetheless, the title given by Dalí is quite explicit. He produced a work that was aimed directly at reality. What is reality for Dalí? What response did he wish to make to d’Ors? Why did he link reality with Lídia of Cadaqués? Did d’Ors share the same aim withhis character of the Ben Plantada? How do knowledge, thought and reality fit together? First, it must be said that for Dalí, Lídia of Cadaqués is the protagonist that enables him to place on the same level the realistic and the stark raving mad (reality and dream).15 Dalí had his book in hand when he was defending the establishment of a “new classicism” in which art and the advances achieved by the sciences (especially in physics and in the work of Prigogine and nonequilibrium thermodynamics) opened the way for further progress.16 A leap made possible after the “Romantic entropy” of Wagner, as Dalí put it, or, in the words of Alex Ross, after the turn of the twentieth century when European culture experienced the implosion of Wagnerism, which became a black hole of irony.17 Without going any further at the moment, is La ben plantada of d’Ors the start of something or the end of something? Is it the door shutting on Romantic entropy? How should we read d’Ors’s book?Must we place it alongside other crucial works of the twentieth century that are, according to Roger Scruton, the wonderful farewells of a civilization tending, as the twentieth century went on, toward its own self-preservation? If the comprehension of reality conveyed by d’Ors and by Noucentisme is not adequate (in that Dalí, for example, needed to remake it), how should we 14 Salvador Dalí, La vida pública de Salvador Dalí. Barcelona: Ara, 2002, p. 63. 15 For more information on Lídia of Cadaqués, see: Cristina Massanés, Lídia de Cadaqués.Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2001. 16 In relation to this fact, Dalí wrote in 1953: “Eugeni d’Ors, who had not returned to Cadaqués in fifty years, came to visit me surrounded by friends. D’Ors felt drawn to the myth of Lídia of Cadaqués. It is highly likely that our two books on the same subject will be published at the same time. In any event, his is a vaguely aesthete and pseudo-Platonic work that will achieve little more than throwing into relief the realist and hypercubic underpinnings of my own ‘Ben Plantada’”. Salvador Dalí, Diario de un genio. Barcelona: Tusquets, 2009, p. 162. 96

17 See: Alex Ross, The Restis Noise. New York: Picador, 2007.


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understand it? Does La ben plantadahave to be situated among the works that Scruton mentions in defining what was dying with the twentieth century? “As I woke up, I had the thought that the twentieth century had been full of the most wonderful farewells and I thought of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus and James Joyce’s Ulysses. These works are all incredible farewells and I thought how wonderful it is to have known these things and to see how one is reconciled with death itself, but also with the death of a civilization. I woke with gratitudefor the art that had given all of that. I do not believe that it could be putany differently”. 18 First, we must situate La ben plantadaas an expression of philosophical thought as creative thought. And the first question to pose when reading the work of d’Ors today is whether one can place it within its Catalan and European setting. Second and prior to stepping into any other kind of controversy that puts anecdote and florid scholarship before the comprehension and meaning of what d’Ors has actually written,it is necessary to make very clear that La ben plantada is the most significant expression of the man’s thought. The book offers a clear demonstration of his viewpoint (which is patently reflected in its style). We need to leave aside (even though it is a fundamental fact for any understanding of the personality and style of d’Ors) that the author ofLa ben plantada was, in the words of Rodolf Llorens, a “living statue” [un home estàtua, in Catalan], or as Pere Bosch i Gimpera neatly characterized him, based on real events, a haughty dandy. Third and conceptually of more interest given the hundred years that have passed since its publication, the work needs to be read as a consolidation of the author’s Platonism in the twentieth century. The “Mediterranean”, in d’Ors, is Plato. “Philosophy” is Plato. “Culture” is Plato. And La ben plantadais Plato. For d’Ors, Plato is a philosopher unlike any other. We cannot think of him as the man who followed Socrates and preceded Aristotle. Although it is true that everyone has his value and contributes his grain of sand to the development of human thought, Plato is head and shoulders above them all. Plato is always relevant, everyday of the week and twice on Sunday, in the summer, autumn, winter and spring. Plato, writes Eugeni d’Ors in his Novisimo glosario [Newest Glossary], is inimitable in “the tremendous lucidity with which he elevates the standards of humanity’s naïve thinking to intellectual and discursive heights; of which the function is figurative and not abstract. Other philosophers may be 18 Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, Lo que piensan los filósofos. Barcelona: Paidós, 2011, p.156.

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masters of reflection: he was, is and will be the master of creation”. Hence La ben plantada! Teresa is not abstract; she is figurative. She is culture in block capitals. D’Ors himself put it clearly: “Figurative thought, that is, thinking by means of schemas, doubtless constitutes one of the supreme acquisitions of humanity; yet it must be said that humanity does not appear to have realized what this fact means: neither humanity nor even its philosophical mouthpieces”.19 With this statement, d’Ors propounds a singular way of constituting philosophical thought in relation to other forms of knowledge and expression. And in so doing, he poses a question that is very current: if, as he himself said, not even the philosophers themselves have understood that philosophical thought is constructed through the mechanism of figuration, then what is its role in contemporary society? What is its impact on society? In other words, what interrelationship does it maintain with its context? By posing these questions, he puts on the table evidence not only of the absolute crisis of humanism and the idea of progress, but also of the death of philosophy. If La ben plantada conveys this widely misunderstood mode of expression, then is the Ben Plantada, the character of Teresa herself, the beginning or the brilliant culmination of a cultural period or ideal? Her appearance is sudden and devastating and her ascendance boldly augurs the future!

On philosophy D’Ors’s work comes out of the triumph of Plato by way of the civilizing example of Rome (because it was Rome that taught us the effort required for culture to penetrate history). For d’Ors, in reality there are three great temporal processes: geology, history and culture. Through technical effort, history can penetrate the geological process. Through Rome (“in all of its sweeping expanse”), culture can penetrate history. Creation and arbitrariness. The Ben Plantada is this synthesis of Plato and Rome, of the creation of thought and the work of civilization. She was neither Teresa Baladía (who surely captivated d’Ors) nor Lídia of Cadaqués (who was captivated by d’Ors). Teresa is neither the bourgeois woman nor the fishwife and witch. Both women were important to d’Ors, but we must go beyond this. Certainly, the book is peppered with references to his family, to his break with Pijoan and so forth, and it has numerous biographical aspects, but we must not let these features distract us from the ultimate meaning of the book.

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19 Eugeni d’Ors, “Filosofía del esquema”, Atlántida, I, 1. Madrid. Rialp, 1963, pp. 25-26.


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The philosophical viewpoint and rigorous analysis need to push farther. La ben plantadais the fundamental and foundational piece of d’Ors. As noted by the scholar Mercè Rius, the principle of figuration (which, as we have seen, comes from Plato and takes form in Teresa) is the pivot around which d’Ors’s philosophy revolves (as does the importance that mysticism and the figure of the Angel acquires for him). For d’Ors, the mode of human beings is Trinitarian. Human beings are made up of three interwoven parts: the body, the soul and the angel (which is the shared soul); the material and the spiritual in relation to their expression or individual and collective particularization. The relations and forms of organization among these three parts generate the process of life, the movement of being through time. Teresa is the archetype towards which this movement must tend: a form of being tending toward serenity and seny, a Catalan idea of good sense, moderation and self-restraint. Thus, Teresa is the angel. An Angel that, together with the Body and the Soul, make up the constitutive skeleton of the human and his mode of being, which is Trinitarian. In d’Ors, as in the Greeks, the Trinity is the realm of movement and of dance, of thought and of life. Thanks to his three-part nature, the human being is able to produce movement and, with movement, thought. “Human reason takes a deep-seated pleasure from distributing each aspect of reality that it beholds into three ordered parts […]. The ordering of these three parts proceeds such that the most exquisite and unattainable perfection is found in the centre, while the first part is a tart, richly flavoured preparation and the last part is an excessive blandness”, writes Xènius in the book under examination.20 The movement of life toward serenity. The classic ideal embodied by the Ben Plantada.In his foreword, d’Ors says clearly: “The intention of the person who organized it was not to leave his reader in a state of daily increasing unease; but rather in a heightened serenity”.21 This is the expression of the new idea of education that Socrates and Plato put forward. Of “paideia” as the training of the human being, a training that was, as Sloterdijk explained, “a rite of initiation that is logical and ethical in nature for an elite of young men, rarely for women; under the guidance of an advanced teacher, the students had to overcome their purely family and tribal markersin order to achieve a national and imperial humanity of vast perspective and elevated thought. In this way, from the very beginning, philosophy is inevitably an initiation into something great, something which is greater, which is the greatest of all; it is a school of universal synthesis”.22

20 Eugeni d’Ors, La ben plantada. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2004, p. 39. 21 Ibidem, p. 5. 22 Peter Sloterdijk, Temperamentsfilosòfics. Girona: Edicions de la l·l, 2011, p. 22.

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The aim of this education, of this philosophy, is what the Greeks called “sophrosyne”. In other words: seny. It is what the Romans labelled “humanitas”. Thus, “paideia” is the initiation into adult seny. Humanity aspires to produce what has been called the individual with a “great soul”. A human being fit for the city and for the empire. The path of imperialism through “humanitas” is the value of cosmopolitanism, of one who finds order in chaos, of one who is able to achieve serenity in a chaotic cosmos. In 1907, d’Ors was clear in his gloss on social justice when he wrote: “Patiently, heroically, we daily raise up people in freedom, in instruction, in national consciousness: we mould them in citizenship”.23 In many other quotations, he reiterates this notion, particularly when he reaffirms that solidarity is the bedrock of the city, because the city is the supreme goal and solidarity is the supreme law: “Through solidarity, each has obligations to others, to all. The author writes alone in his study. Could he possibly imagine that he is free or independent? Free, independent! What madness! If he depends on each and every one of us! On the other lodgers in the house, on his immediate neighbours, on the neighbourhood, on the village, on his people, on his continent and on the six parts [sic] of the Earth and the Solar System and the universe ... without the universe, he would not exist; without every human being, he would not be a human being; without his fellow citizens, he would be no citizen …”, writes d’Ors.24 This is the political premise that characterizes and juxtaposes imperialism and liberalism. If liberalism says that each individual and each people are masters of their own fate (“look out for yourself ”), imperialism expresses a solidarity that binds each person and each people toone another (“and to the dead in history and to the generations yet to come”). This means that we individually and collectively share responsibility. Imperialism is “socialization, statism, the educational system, the city, the ideal of the growth of peoples, social justice, the fight for ethics and for culture”.25 D’Ors said that Plato did not do abstraction, but rather figuration (and that that is what makes Plato universally relevant). If abstraction moves from the particular to the universal by destroying what is specific and characteristic in the particular, figuration does not do so. Figuration links the roots and the sky. As a consequence, Teresa is not an abstraction: she is a child of the principle of figuration. It is no coincidence that in 1913, when d’Ors addresses “the eccentricities of culture”, he says loud and clear that “it is even better if a museum and a culture are singular in the sense that we find values and examples of

23 Eugeni d’Ors, Glosari 1906-1907. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1996, p. 414. 24 Eugeni d’Ors, Glosari. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1982, p. 27. 100

25 Eugeni d’Ors, L’home que treball i que juga. Barcelona: Eumo, 1988, p. 68.


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excellence that can be found nowhere else”.26 For philosophical language is based on the principle of figuration. In support of this statement, we need only review what d’Ors writes in his foreword to the 1935 edition of La ben plantada (in which he remarks on how the earlier editions of the book were received). He refers to his vision of the cypress as a metaphor for “paideia” and to the definition of seny. “A lopped cypress is not a cypress, and a corner of the world has no dignity except to the extent that it points and alludes to the serene blue universality of the Ecumen. Nor should we forget that Nando, the fisherman, he of the sanctity of daily work, is called thus, and not ‘Ferran’ or any other stylistic ‘purism’. Seny binds variety in unity and makes of unity a higher authority”, writes d’Ors unequivocally.27 Shortly before his death, he voiced this thought even more strongly: in the final foreword that he was to write for the work, he said that he aimed neither for literature nor for real life. He did not want the details, as the novelist does. He wanted the Angel. He did not want discontinuity, but rather that which is eternal. He did not wish to be a scholar, but rather a philosopher. He did not seek out the details and the plot, but rather the secret. The serenity that enables a greater understanding of the movement of life. Each individual, he writes, must work to find what is angelic within himself (“the pure rhythm and supreme unity of life”) and if the Romantics have said that each must make a poem of his life, d’Ors holds that each life must be as elegant as the demonstration of a mathematical theorem. 28 This value, which is local in the universal sense of d’Ors, he finds (and exemplifies) in the traditional Catalan song La Dama d’Aragó (see chapter eight of the first part of La ben plantada). It is no accident that in 1947, when a musical dramatization of the book was proposed in Madrid, the version included several traditional Catalan tunes arranged for voice and piano, nor that d’Ors himself was pleased a song with tambourine had been written in dedication to the Ben Plantada (1911). Indeed, “the movement of the Ben Plantada is governed by Music”. 29 The universal value of the local is what Xènius seeks through the Glosari [Glossary]:the starting point of a new philosophy and a new model of civilization, which was called Noucentisme. Teresa (the Ben Plantada),as a child of the figurative principle, comes out of this ability to know how to uncover the univer26 Eugeni d’Ors, L’home que treballa i que juga. Barcelona: Eumo, 1988, p. 184. 27 Eugeni d’Ors, “Pròlegnou” in La ben plantada. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2004, p. 108. 28 Eugeni d’Ors, La ben plantada. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2004, pp. 91-92. 29 Eugeni d’Ors, Ibid., p. 14.

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sal in what is local, the category beyond the anecdote. Teresa is an outgrowth of the synthesis of this task, which the philosopher carried out every day through the Glosari. However, the synthesis was also entrusted by the philosopher to Xènius, who is the expression of the intellectual personality superimposed over the philosopher of flesh and blood.30 Not for nothing is the symbol of Teresa a tree (divided into roots, trunk and crown) orher nation the sea (theMediterranean Sea as the cradle of philosophy and the sea itself as the tree’s wellspring of life). The sea as the origin and end of life, with the knowledge of cartography to make life more intense and more human. By 1908, d’Ors was already cleart hat his vocation was philosophy, but this vocation could not depend on a man of flesh and blood. The human being is merely a moment of spirit that aspires to know reality, coming to know what is universal, eternal, and exceeds the human. Therefore, this knowledge – which is not of quotidian anecdotes, but rather of things important for the present and the future – must be put in the mouth of someone else who can convey them through time and space. In the mouth of a messenger (or angel, as the etymology of the word tells us) that is not bound up with the contingency of human life, but can converse across the generations. And this messenger is Xènius. Xènius demonstrates what is enduring. Those aspects that need to be upheld as references. He is no longer the philosopher who steeps himself in ideas and transmits them to us, because that would be equivalent to creating schools and dogmas, and it is not what d’Ors wishes to achieve. It is not ideas that must be transmitted. Rather, we need to put in a superconscious constellation what is truly of value for the present and the future. We need to give an aura of timelessness to what matters. Xènius is the figure embodying intelligence, not the intelligence of d’Ors, but rather the intelligence of everyone who has collaborated in the undertaking of its development through the years. Thus, Xènius is the angel that emerges out of the work of separating the wheat from the chaff, the personality that unites the good and the best of all time in order to make way for the futureby means of the dialogue established through him. D’Ors is depersonalized in Xènius, who is his angel and much more than an alter ego or a pseudonym. Philosophy seeks what will enable us to solve the problems posed by life. When the philosopher detects these elements, he gathers them around a conceptual figure constructed to act as a nexus to unify individuals and generations. And this figure is Xènius. The philosopher contributes neither a system nor an instruction manual. He provides us with a body of facts and of achievements

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30 The narrator in La ben plantada entrusts this task to Xènius. See: Eugeni d’Ors, La ben plantada. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2004, p. 92.


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that are a crucial endowment to enable us to think better. A cultural endowment, an outgrowth of the activity of the intelligence, which compels us to dialogue and distances us from dogma. Philosophy is the love of wisdom: “On the one hand, the problem is something that resists. On the other hand, it is something in which this power is summoned and exercised. In the former lies the difficulty, although it is surmountable. In the second lies a satisfaction, an incentive that never fails to recall the incentive of love”.31 Teresa brings together and unifies the categories uncovered in reality in order to make them more universal. She reveals the necessary task of philosophy in its wish for the regeneration and transformation of society now that Romanticism is dead and Modernisme exhausted. This task was clearly defined by D’Ors himself before he began writing the Glosari [Glossary]: “When the advances of the intelligence, the diversification and immense specialization of knowledge and, with them, of the branches of human wisdommake increasingly necessarya comprehensive synthesis to which the contemporary intellectual movement is tending and which, integrated in general principles, is coming to distil the entire scientific effort of our times […] we can see in this future synthesis a new encyclopaedia that will free us from its eighteenth-century predecessor. […] Once again on her throne, more beautiful than ever and never more powerful, will sit the exiled queen, the august sovereign metaphysics”.32 Now that a century has passed since its publication, this early book of d’Ors must be reread to find everything that we can learn from it. As he wrote in chapter eight of the first part: “By drawing near theBen Plantada, one becomes better. By being governed by the Ben Plantada, there is a special gain in nobility. Around the Ben Plantada, all is order and concord. It must be eternity itself made beautiful appearance and joyful instant”. However, do not forget what d’Ors says just before the final page of the book: that a nation has only one Ben Plantada among millions of silent, dedicated workers; that each day brings the need for toil. This is why it is necessary to read the book: to learn actively of the solidarity that unites us to those who have gone before and those who will come after. Teresa is measure. She appears as an artistic creation that illuminates life and, in the end, disappears (with her ascendance). Teresa is the image that demonstrates the possibility of looking beyond the concrete; she makes visible the invisible. She is not an idol, but rather an icon that reflects reality. Therefore her symbol is a tree. A tree that illuminates our life because it is a tree that is “well-planted” [a play of words on Teresa’s moniker, ben plantada, in Catalan]. 31 Eugeni d’Ors, El secreto de la filosofía. Barcelona: Selecta, 1947, p. 72 32 Eugeni d’Ors, Papers anteriors al glosari. Barcelona. Quaderns Crema, 1994.

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On art, literature and philosophy These ultimate reflections of d’Ors lead us into a new area. La ben plantada is literature that expresses a philosophy. In other words, it is: 1)an understanding of the world; 2) an ethical commitment, and 3) an aesthetic commitment. It explains the basis of d’Ors’s understanding of the world at the same time that it is an act of creation that puts this understanding to the test. It is not an essay or a novel of ideas; it is thought that creates, the expression of the philosopher-artist, of creative thinking. This text is closest “to the normal module of the literary artist,” writes d’Ors. “It has been the most celebrated among mine”.33 Teresa is aesthetics and ethics. The Platonism of d’Ors leads him to create a protagonist who demonstrates the aristocratic calling of Noucentisme art. Art is a way to refine personality and awareness; it illuminates the way to live. Through artistic creation, we attain an experience of the world that is significantly enriched. The aesthetic experience puts us at a certain remove from the real world and from daily life in order to broaden our perspective, to force us to expand our imagination and to see what causes this distance, this estrangement, in us. Schopenhauer said that it was necessary to avoid losing, through reading, complete sight of the real world.34 We say thisin consideration of the double estrangement that d’Ors creates between himself and reality through the Ben Plantada. First,there is the estrangement of the writer. Second, there is the estrangement of the text itself. The work was not written by Eugeni d’Ors, but by Xènius, and Xènius is not a pseudonym (although it is often understood as such), as his uses ofOctavi de Romeu or the Guaita were. As the author himself said in 1906, Xènius is his secret, the secret to understanding him. Xènius is not a man of flesh and blood; he is not subject to time or space. Xènius is a soaring angel that soaks up the scents of the best authors so as to create his own perfume and infuse anyone who comes near him with it.35 In our time, an excellent definition of what Xènius was, which fits perfectly with the definition given by d’Ors, has been provided by Josep Maria Terricabras, who remarked on d’Ors’s glosses for the pages of the La Veu de Catalunya: “Throughout his life, but especially in the Catalan glosses – which are by far his best work – d’Ors is the very picture of somebody wandering the great city of the world, stopping at many spots, drawing 33 Eugeni d’Ors, Confesiones y recuerdos. Valencia: Pre-textos, 2000, p. 56. 34 See: Arthur Schopenhauer, Pensamiento, palabras y música. Madrid: Edaf, 1998. 104

35 Eugeni d’Ors, “De com el glosador es diuXènius”, Glosari 1906-1907. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1996.


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our eye to many shop windows, inviting us to enter some of the shops or visit diverse edifices and monuments. He feels called to act as a guide and not only as an incidental and entertaining guide for tourists”. 36 The second estrangement is of the text itself: La ben plantada is neither essay nor treatise nor tale. It is a philosophical novel. No other option was possible, if we bear in mind what d’Ors wrote in 1925: “Life is a dream? Life is art”.37 However, what is a philosophical novel? Is it a novel of ideas? No. For d’Ors, contemporary theatre and the contemporary novel had to be geared, and were geared, toward the intelligence (d’Ors mentions Jean Giraudoux and George Bernard Shaw), and that did not mean that they were works offering ideas, but rather the opposite. They were works whose notions fit the category of subtle ideas. And art had to saturate itself in this subtlety.38 D’Ors juxtaposes the novels of Dickens (much more brilliant and moving) with the novels of Barrès (which provide more theoretical suggestions). The latter works are far nearer to philosophy than the former ones. The great problem is whether this type of creation (which is typified by “knowledge, shrewdness and refinement”) can be popular (gaining space in contemporary society). Here we find ourselves before a new version of the dialectic between anecdote and category. Xènius is an aristocratic personality and therefore capable of understanding the tradition. By contrast, if the author were a person of flesh and blood, the work would no longer be directed at understanding, but rather at “serving novelty”. Surely we can say, in the words of d’Ors himself, that Xènius is like a Gozzi opposing a Goldoni. “When novelty triumphs once and for all, Goldoni is exalted, Gozzi forgotten”.39 We recall that for d’Ors it is the philosopher who walks the path between anecdote and category. For that reason, says d’Ors, the novel that becomes philosophical (like theatre and painting) approaches music through its subtlety and because, as in the case of going to listen to a symphony, the approach requires great effort. They are sculpted ideas. But why the double estrangement? Is not the estrangement already produced by artistic creation or philosophical thought enough? No. For d’Ors, it is not yet enough. The double estrangement is needed to carry out his project on two fronts: 1) “arbitrarism” and 2) imperialism. Neither can be embodied in 36 Josep M. Terricabras [ed.], El pensament d’Eugeni d’Ors. Girona: Documenta Universitaria, 2011, p. 11. 37 Eugeni d’Ors, Calendario y lunario. La vida breve. Valencia: Pre-textos, 2003, p. 19. 38 Eugeni d’Ors, Teatro, títeres y toros. Exégesis lúdica con una prórroga deportiva. Seville: Renacimiento, 2006, pp. 62-66. 39 Eugeni d’Ors, Ibid., p. 33.

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a single person. It is necessary to develop them through an “intellectual personality” or “angel” who cannot be identified with anybody in particular and yet, at the same time, with everyone. Xènius is this non-local personality, without flesh and blood. A European figure who reflects civility (which is the mise en scène of humanism) and can express and imbue us with “arbitrarism” (the free and creative will) in the direction of imperialism (the full universal solidarity that surpasses the first step of collective affirmation that is nationalism).

On philosophy and war The war of 1914 was a crucial moment to observe what would become of d’Ors’s project. As a war among Europeans, among brothers (d’Ors was to say), it cast doubt on the values of one model of civilization: humanism and liberty.40 To grasp what the First World War meant for European culture, you had only to listen closely to the music and the plot of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, based on Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck,of 1836. Composed between 1914 and 1924, Wozzeck opened in 1925. With satisfaction, Berg himself noted that no listener would get stuck on the opera’s formal aspects: “Nobody is alive to anything but the large social implications of the work, which goes far beyond the individual fate of Wozzeck.This, I believe, is my success”.41 ForXènius, Europe is important from two perspectives: first, as a political ideal (of a political solidarity that leads us from the nation to the state and then from the state to the union of states) and, second, as an ideal of civilization (Catalonia must be Europeanized). Solidarity is the political foundation that takes us from nationalism to imperialism and the purpose of this political project is the city and civility. We find these ideals expressed with great clarity from the tenets of 1903 at the First Catalan University Congress to the Lletres a Tina [Letters to Tina] (1914).42

40 See: Joan Cuscó, “Europa en la filosofia d’Eugeni d’Ors. Continent o contingut?” Europa: Col·loquis de Vic, XV. Barcelona: CatalanSociety of Philosophy / IEC, 2011. 41 AlbanBerg, “Una nota sobre Wozzeck”, Wozzeck. Barcelona: Gran Teatre del Liceu, 2005, p. 92.

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42 To grasp this turning point clearly, it is advisable to read the foreword that d’Ors wrote in the edition of his glosses to Tina, published under the title Tina i la guerra gran [Tina and the Great War] as part of the collection “Quaderns literaris” of the Llibreria Catalònia (volumes 76 and 77), Barcelona, 1935.


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The year 1919 witnessed the beginning of a new stage in the work of d’Ors and in the concerns that guided his task as a thinker or intellectual. After losing the competition for a university chair in 1914, suffering a nearly fatal bout of flu in 1918, feeling the effects of the First World War on his ideals, being forced to stand down from his post at the Mancomunitat in 1920, and getting expelled from the philosophy seminar of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) in 1921, d’Ors tried several times to forge ahead (teaching in Latin America, giving courses in Europe and ultimately triumphing in Madrid). The work in which this turnabout is most fully reflected isGrandeza y servidumbre de la inteligencia [Grandeur and Servitude of the Intelligence]. From its first pages, d’Ors states that he felt out of touch because of the radical shift that concepts and practices had undergone: “I see modern society made a republic of toil, which has a common law in material production, with money for compensation”.43 Yet he said he would not forsake the intelligence: “Today, as before, we hold that profession and loveare two revealing manifestations of the personality”. 44 What is needed is to see whether the two things can be fit together. On the contemporary world, he wrote: “Supreme freedom becomes supreme subjection” and it is necessary to reflect on whether this is also true in the case of the intelligence. He senses that wisdom and knowledge can find a place in contemporary society only with difficulty. They cannot get comfortable amid the “laziness and […] bustle” of those living today.45 And this is the paradox that must be solved. Whats hould the philosopher do? Throw in the towel? No, because he cannot give up on himself. However, he must be mindful of the context in which he works. D’Ors said that he once met a famous scholar when he was young and that he and all the other young Spaniards dedicated to culture and normality (the followers of Noucentisme) admired and defended this learned man because they were “thirsty for a greater Europeanness […]. For our cities, we too wanted an imitation of the paragon, object or finding encountered on our fervent pilgrimages through places and sanctuaries of the universal scientific life”.46 In those years of youth, when one visited a learned European, one became aware of one’s own shortcomings: the “visiting Spaniard is, by virtue of being Spanish, a newcomer

43 Eugeni d’Ors, Grandeza y servidumbre de la inteligencia. Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 1919, p. 16 44 Ibidem, p. 19 45 Ibidem, p. 33 46 Ibidem, p. 23

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to the scientific life”.47 Speaking with“authentic scholars”, one realizes that there is a type of society in which “science, pure science, can be a dignified profession, not a cynical extravagance, but not an extraordinary event either […], where scholars form part of the normal state of things”.48 Until the contemporary period, philosophy and the love of wisdom had been inexorable forces guiding the history of Europe. With the Sophists, wisdom became secular (and with them was born the history of culture and the possibility of the “strict intellectual”);49 in the medieval period, the university took another stride down this path (with the “establishment of the professional of the intelligence”),50 and that is the period in which the figure of Abelard stands out (who gave us a “new version of the intellectual type, the stark lesson of his privileged heights and of his difficult freedom”).51 Thus, d’Ors continues, “the Sophists invented the man of science; Abelard inventedthe professor; the Renaissance came to seek something else”.52 Later, the printing press arrived and journalism. By the nineteenth century, wisdom “already knew all of the instruments of intellectual freedom: it knew secular science, the university, book publishing and periodic publication. Now came time for the final examination. A professionalism of the intelligence would be put to the test”.53 Over the course of the nineteenth century, this was the battle. And what results did we achieve? If we analyse the products of “industrialized intelligence”, we have to say: “In the presence of its finest results, sampling its most exquisite fruits, before the mirage of a normal Europeanness, in the conquest of which we had put our dreams, we succeeded in deceiving ourselves. The upheaval in the world today disabuses us of our error […]. Intelligence sought to organize itself in the nineteenth century according to the common law of professionalism, entering normally into a republic of toil that has production as its common law, with money for compensation […]. This is an advance, an enrichment, a treasure; not in what it has produced as industry, but in what it has produced as enslavement, as another episode in the eternal, the irredeemable enslavement”.54 True culture 47 Ibidem, p. 25. 48 Ibidem, pp. 25-26. 49 Ibidem, p. 38. 50 Ibidem, p. 39. 51 Ibidem, p. 40. 52 Ibidem, p. 41. 53 Ibidem, p. 45. 108

54 Ibidem, pp. 49-50.


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was pushed to the fringes of “official culture”. The genuine intellectual is hidden and does not enter into commercial channels or prestigious circles. Neither communism nor capitalism has worked in favour of the intelligence. Toward the intelligence, politics always casts a suspicious eye, because one forgets the fact that “the great catastrophes of history have always followed periods in which the forces of the country have beendirected at industrial and commercial production, giving exclusive attention to economic development … Be that as it may, however, the most horrifying fact is this. The intelligence, the free intelligence, the sheer force of the spirit, is not summoned to take a position in the great struggle of collective interests into which the world is drawn”.55 The lived experience of the nineteenth century involved a radical shift in Western culture. The intelligence came to play a significant role neither under communism nor under capitalism, and any ideal of justice for the society of the future disappeared from politics. The democratization of culture has not been possible and the cultural commercialization of the twentieth century does not inspire hope. This is the x-ray of the situation. Out of this analysis, d’Ors made his idealistic (or poetic) leap: “Thus bereft, thus expelled, what remains for the intelligence? What remains, sirs, is a purpose that no profession will be able to take from it. What remains is the function of totality”.56 He eschews the commercialism of servitude, but at what price? There is a model of civilization –the one that gave form to Europe– that is slipping away from us. So what must be done? For Xènius, the response was simple: defend the “thirst for totality”. Europe and its culture have eschewed the “most vigorous palpitations of the spiritual life” of the human being. They have functionalized wisdom and culture: they have subjugated true wisdom and intelligence. It is no coincidence, then, that in this society: “Unfit pedagogues patiently write books of imitative prattle about children for children”.57 Being (or wanting to be) so functional, knowledge no longer serves what it is supposed to serve. When we break it into pieces and speak of the “culture of youth” or the “culture of the workers”, we are falsifying true culture and this has an impact on our way of life. An absurd, dead, functionalist knowledge develops to extinguish concerns. As a consequence: “The intelligence cannot be a free industry that, when it is free, is no longer industry, and when it is industry, it does not deserve the name of intelligence”.58 The

55 Ibidem, p. 54. 56 Ibidem, p. 56. 57 Ibidem, p. 60. 58 Ibidem, p. 69.

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failure of the nineteenth century teaches us a lesson: “We know that we cannot emancipate ourselves from the ordinary; but we also know that the best of ourselves is not for sale”.59 The lecture given by d’Ors to the students’ residence in 1919 marks a turning point in his thought. If until that moment we find a defence of curiosity and of philosophy as an outgrowth of the love of life, there is now a leap forward. When the philosopher collides with reality, when the idea that he has put on reality no longer fits it, the Catalan thinker goes a step further. He raises his eyes toward the heavens, toward the mystical. At this point, he thinks of the act of death as a symbolic act that helps to understand his attitude and his task (being interred in the tomb “To Matilde” in the cemetery at Vilafranca del Penedès).60 In addition, d’Ors radicalizes the postulates of some of the authors that mark his earliest philosophical essays of 1909. These are the authors that d’Ors approached in order to obtain grants to travel through Europe and to Europeanize Catalonia. We think of Ernst Mach (who saw no abyss between the physical and the mental worlds and defended the principle of economy of thought); the postulates that d’Ors called “conceptualist” of Pierre Duhem; and, above all, the vision of the psychologist James Mark Baldwin, who held that the object of philosophy must be beauty, not truth.61 More specifically, this turning point led d’Ors to reinforce his ethical and aesthetic attitude stemming from philosophy, turning his death into an enduring symbol. At the same time, it pushed him to undertake a synthesis and systematic ordering of the entire Glosari developed up to that moment, resulting in two books: El secreto de la filosofía [Secret of Philosophy](1947) andLa ciencia de la cultura [The Science of Culture] (1964). This is the point when d’Ors came to see that the Ben Plantada is a necessary symbol, but that a counterweight was also needed (as expressed in the symbolic act of his wish to be interred at Vilafranca). He recounts this realization in La veritable història de Lídia de Cadaqués [The True Story of Lídia of Cadaqués].

59 Ibidem, pp. 69-70. 60 The decision dates back to 1917, became firm in 1932 and was formalized in 1940 when d’Ors returned to Catalonia. He was familiar with the cemetery in Vilafranca and the tomb of his ancestors and decided that that was where he wished to be buried. This symbolic act ties in well with La ben plantada and its vision of philosophy as an ethical and aesthetic commitment. See: Joan Cuscó [ed.], La ciutat dels àngels.Vilafranca del Penedès: VINSEUM, 2010.

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61 For more information on the essays written by d’Ors in pursuit of any travel grants for Europe, see: Jaume Roure, “La etapa barcelonesa de Eugenio d’Ors”, Actas del III Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía Española, Salamanca: University of Salamanca, 1982.


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Teresa and Lídia of Cadaqués are symbols of this duality in human life. In this book, which d’Ors was writing in the final days of his life, he reviews the importance of Lídia of Cadaqués and says: “To the eyes of reason, this singular woman is not the Ben Plantada; but perhaps she is the complete woman. She raises the fruit-laden boughs of the tree toward the sky, because it had strong roots. She now goes deep into the dark empire of roots, because a miracle has wanted a splendour of skyand a radiance of justice to be with her. / Thus, what in Teresa traced an ascendance into the Roman sky above the cypresses of Tivoli, until she became a star, this is in Lídiaa descent through the soil of the motherland, by way of bare knolls and dizzying gorges, into subterranean caverns; into the very depths of the earth to the dwelling place of the impassiveoriginary ideas. Angels receive Teresa the Ben Plantada in song, while gnomes at their forges hail Lídia, the godmother. It is all equal to eternity. By what is Feminine, we are raised into the bosom of the earth’s realities. To the empire of the Intelligence or the ogre of the Instincts. To the universal Republic of Ideas or the universal Republic of the Womb …”.62

Angel, anxiety and time In the final years of his life, Eugeni d’Ors had a great clarity about his life and work. He said that his life could be boiled down to three letters: “ang”.These are the first three letters in the Catalan words for “angel” and “anxiety” [Àngel and Angoixa]. The Angel is the task borne out of creative thought (of philosophy) and anxiety characterizes the life of the philosopher of flesh and blood. On one side of the scale is human life. On the other side is what, thanks to the exercise of the creative intellect, transcends the life of the individual. On one side is flesh and blood; on the other, ideas and concepts. On one side is the ephemeral; on the other, the eternal. On one side is Eugeni d’Ors; on the other, Xènius. On one side is the contingent and the anecdotal; on the other, the category.63

62 Eugeni d’Ors, La veritable història de la Lídia de Cadaqués. Barcelona: Proa, 2002, p. 168. 63 D’Ors summarizes this stance well in the following words: “The cave from which the sources of the personality emerge is much deeper than all that; its common wellspring has arteries that will flow on through various moral channels. This explains why Nietzsche, in a dictum that only those untested by life could think a paradox, said that “being ashamed of our vices is the first step toward being ashamed of our virtues” ... “Because what develops between the former and the latter is shame in our personality”. Going beyond

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With the ideals of the nineteenth century abandoned and humanism in utter crisis, the first third of the twentieth century called for a search for other outlets for creative thinking and for philosophy (which also became the object of questioning within its own context). New avenues needed to be found for the future “heliomachy” or struggle toward the sun, which typifies the struggle of Noucentisme, alive in 1906 and reaching its point of no return by 1911, its moment of greatest splendour and yet, at the same time, its ultimate end-point. With the outbreak of the First World War, suddenly all “-isms” were thrown into doubt.64 D’Ors, too, was forced to rethink his philosophical project. If he had once said that it involved commencing the Glosari (to feed new ideas and fresh viewpoints into the popular imagination), now he turned to philosophy (to organize thought itself), a philosophy borne out of the oxygen that dialogue with others and with the good and the best of human culture can give to our perspectives, leading ultimately to “heliomachy” (the action of putting philosophy into practice), an attitude that is initially individual, but then, as Plato wrote in the Theaetetus, must finally become collective. In the path marked out by d’Ors, “heliomachy” is left deferred into the future. In the context of the twentieth century, d’Ors came to realize that this path was no longer open to the philosopher and that, therefore, it was necessary to adjust. This led him to halt the project of the Glosar iin order to create an atmosphere propitious for the future. The shifting context caused a swerve in d’Ors’s project that lent a new dimension to La ben plantada, which has been explored in this essay. The aim of the Glosariis to create an individual superconscious (which is Xènius) that would serve as the context of a new civility by creating a collective superconscious that establishes a place to meet and hold dialogue. From the decade of the nineteen-twenties, all of d’Ors’s work is directed toward this ideal. Thus, his Spanish phase is a consolidation, refinement and systematization of his Catalan phase (which is his more creative phase). The gloss, d’Ors was to say, has the same role as the task of Socrates adapted for the contemporary world. And this role is to universalize that wisdom of civility, as in Plato.65 La ben plantada is part and parcel of this superconscious, which is like the skin of a cell (and Freud’s psychoanalysis, d’Ors returns to Nietzsche. See: “Filosofía del esquema”, Atlántida, I, 1 (1963), Madrid: Rialp, p. 31. [The article corresponded to lesson 11, sections 1, 2 and 3, of the book La Ciencia de la Cultura, which the publishing house Rialp brought out in the following year (1964).] 64 Eugeni d’Ors, Confesiones y recuerdos. Valencia: Pre-textos, 2000, pp. 117-119. 112

65 Ibidem, p. 58.


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performs the same functions for life). In the words of Dalí,it is a dermatoskeleton created out of the strength of human thought, which was always aimed at fortifying life and ways of living: “Today, for the first time in his life, Salvador Dalí has felt this angelic euphoria: he has grown in stature. […] The time has come for Gala and I to build a house ‘outside’. In the realm of the angels, everything is ‘outside’. They are not conceived other than for their‘outside’ manifestations. / The dermatoskeleton of the soul of Dalí makes it debut today”, the artist wrote in 1953, deeming that he had now begun to transcend himself. This is thought-as-creation. Philosophy as a force that fights for humanism and civility, something that is clear in the world of art, as d’Ors made explicit in his study of Picasso. Philosophy is thought that creates a superconscious, a continuity that overcomes the ephemeral time of the human being and the irreversibility and entropy of time in physical reality. This creation demonstrates what William James called “the eternal inner message of the arts” and, by relation with F. C. S. Schiller, d’Ors was also to say that philosophy seeks out the bridge between mystic consciousness and discursive consciousness. Both aspects, which are bound up with the creation of the Angel and the establishment of the “principle of figuration” in the philosopher’s own style of thinking are addressed in the Introducción a la vida angelica [Introduction to the Angelic Life] and El secreto de la filosofía [Secret of Philosophy].66 As d’Ors intended, the Angel opens the way to irony and dialogue. It is not dogma that spreads, but rather a multitude of points of connection in a transcendent network, points that sustain encounter and dialogue. A map. A network. Once more we return to Plato. It is a cylical, non-contingent temporality which, in the manner of Plato, enables human participation in what escapes time: eternity and ideas. Once again, Plato. This vision of the Angel takes us back to the earliest texts of d’Ors on culture. Culture, he wrote, is synthesis. A total, highly centred vision: “Life’s brief knowledge [el saber curt, in d’Ors’s coinage]is all harmonized and organized, all in movement and alive; not separate or cut up, like entries in the dictionary; but all bound together and flowing, as in the physiological circulation of blood, each drop connected to the one before and to the one after”.67 Thus, the Angel 66 For more on these questions, see: Joan Cuscó, “Eugeni d’Ors i Francesc Pujols. Cara i creu del pensament filosòfic no acadèmic a Catalunya” and Mercè Rius: “Ors i el misticisme del segle XX”, in Josep M. Terricabras [ed.], El pensament filosòfic d’Eugeni d’Ors, Girona: Documenta Universitària, 2010. This subject matter is also addressed in Joan Cuscó, “Eugeni d’Ors i la filosofia com a música”, Quaderns de filosofia i ciència, 40, 2010, València: Societat de Filosofia del País Valencià / University of Valencia. 67 Eugeni d’Ors, “Sobre el concepte de ‘cultura’”, Quaderns d’Estudi, I, 3, Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona, 1915, p. 3.

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of history arises out of all life’s sparks of eternity. And each of these moments is what d’Ors sought to grasp in order to apprehend its own unique quality. All together, they are folds of time in which exist both Kafka’s “infinitely extensible time” and Borges’s “purely qualitative and internal time”. As a consequence, this is a conceptualization closely connected to the thinking of Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig. For them, time is no longer linear or continuous. Nor does it respond to causality. Time is “intermingled”. In the Angel, the past, present and future coexist. With the First World War, the philosophers of the twentieth century were forced to radically rethink the idea of progress and historical time.68 Translation from Catalan by Barnaby Noone

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68 See: Stéphane Mosès, El ángel de la historia. Valencia: University of Valencia / Càtedra, 1997. Massimo Cacciari, El Ángel necesario. Madrid: Visor, 1989.


article JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 6, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.2436/20.3001.02.80 | P. 115-131 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

T

he philosophy of education in Catalonia in the 20th century: dialectics, synthetics and vitalists Xavier Laudo Castillo & Conrad Vilanou Torrano Departament de Teoria i Història de l’Educació de la Universitat de Barcelona GRIHPPS (Grup de Recerca i Innovació en Història del Pensament Pedagògic i Social) cvilanou@ub.edu / xlaudo@ub.edu

summary This text is a contribution to the history of philosophy of contemporary education, which presents three major currents in educational philosophy in Catalonia in the 20th century. In the beginning it deals with the line of thinkers represented by Eugenid’Ors and OctaviFullat, who understood education as a dialectic between two poles or opposites in constant conflict.Then it will analyze the synthetic view following Jaume Balmes and the constantly modernizing pedagogy from Cardenal Mercier in the Catholic University of Louvain, which was represented in Catalunya by Professor Joan Tusquets.The third case will review the vitalist authors, Joaquim Xirau and Joan RouraParella, who understand education as a revitalizing activity. Finally, within the section on the vitalists, we will look at the cybernetic orientation, represented by Profesor Alexandre Sanvisens, who interpreted education as an open, dynamic enterprise tending toward optimization.The methodology used has been the hermeneutics of texts through analysis, interpretation and contrast with the philosophical-pedagogical of the aforementioned authors.

key words Filosofy of education, contemporany pedagogy, history of education, theory of education.

1. Introduction By philosophy we understand a comprehensive and globalizing knowledge of the educational processes through anthropological, epistemological and axiological conceptions. In uncertain times like the present, we think that it is a good time to look back at the past, which will allow us to have a new understanding of why the present situation is as it is, as it helps orient us for future decisions by drawing inspiration from tradition. In this sense, we would like to present a systematic view of the philosophy of education in Catalonia during the 20th century, and start to draw a map of the main philosophical-pedagogical streams in Catalonia.

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In this article we will look at three viewpoints which we have studied through authors we believe to be representatives of these three tendencies: dialectic, synthetic and vitalistic.

2. Dialectics: Heraclitus’ shadow There are two authors who, corresponding to the two halves of the 20th century, can be considered significant references in the dialectic tradition. We refer to Eugeni d’Ors, who led the Noucentisme movement starting in 1906, and Octavio Full at, Jaume Bofill’s disciple, who, starting in the 1960s, showed a clear interest in the philosophy of education. They were not authors to use an ex nihilo approach. Behind the two of them one can see and follow the presence of a dialectic grounded in pre-Socratic philosophy, especially Heraclitus, for whom (if we follow fragment B-53) all is struggle, war and confrontation: “War is the father of all, king of all, it makes some gods and others men, some slaves and others free” (Ferrer, 2011, 327) For Fullat, as we will see, history is a journey and tension in the form of violent episodes between opposites heading toward a kind of eschatology. For his part, Eugeni d’Ors presents education as a confrontation of eons. In his case, between the romantic spirit represented by Rousseau and the desire for neoclassical order which sprung up with the Renaissance – Rabelais is the paradigmatic author – and became more important with the rise of neoclassicism, led by Goethe.In this sense, one must understand d’Ors’ great pedagogic project of Noucentisme: the attempt to modernize Catalonia from a classical perspective that seeks order to combat the late XIXth. century Modernisme movement, a tendency with consisted of excessive spirit and baroque traditions.

2.1 Eugeni d’Ors: Baroque temptation and dialectic dialogue

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In 20th century Europe politics and pedagogy identified themselves with the same goal: the transformation and regeneration of a country – be it Spain, or Catalonia in the case of d’Ors, an intellectual recognized as a key figure in the political-pedagogical project of the Regional League and the director of Public Instruction of the Region. Campalans’ essential work, Politics means Pedagogy (1933) (Política vol dir Pedagogia) is no more than a symptom of the social view of those times: the transformation of individuals was seen as a secondary process, subsidiary to the collective social project, quite different from today’s viewpoint. In this situation, for Xenius (a penname for d’Ors used in Lletres a Tina), Catalonia can be taken as a protagonist with a trajectory qualitatively different from the rest of the European nations, and should aim toward them, not only in imitation, but to add their Mediterranean idiosyncrasies to the European whole.


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Despite its preference for classicism, it is also true that d’Ors’ thinking cannot be understood, nor its formation through the years, without the Baroque counterpoint which masks its intellectual production (Suárez, 1988, p. 28). But whatever the existential reasons, the case is that the struggle to distance itself from Baroque culture and thinking acquired the dimension of a category or an eon in the Noucentisme and d’Orsian thinking, and allowed a newly renovated reality counterposed to Classicism. Thus, the ideological combat dragged out by modernity through the first third of the 20th century became an open debate, a kind of dialogue, between the two movements: Classicism and Romanticism. Viewed properly, Eugenid’Ors was in favor of a significantly ironic (that is to say, always flexible) dialectic dialogue which tried to overcome the principle of contradiction by harmonizing the opposites, thanks to the principle of participation, by virtue of which each thing participates in the two poles which determine reality. From this perspective, Noucentisme – a 20th century liquidation project – can be understood as an attempt to install a civil and cultural order in tune with the humanistic past and opposing Rousseau’s romantic heritage, the enemy to be defeated. Goethe’s path showed d’Ors the route for Noucentista Catalonia to follow: the cultural splendor of the small duchy of Weimar. In this sense, the Romantic approaches represent the opposite of the laborious, energetic search, and therefore, of a task well done.Thus there is a definite struggle against one of the principles of Romantic pedagogy: spontaneity. D’Ors (1981, p. 66) couldn’t have been clearer in the paragraph we cite as a good indicator of his thinking: “The art of helping to guide students is called Pedagogy. And the danger to Pedagogy is found, as for so many other things, in Romantic ideology. From Rousseau to Spencer, and beyond, this ideology, with its superstition of spontaneity, has imposed on the world of education a repugnance for everything it disdainfully calls “mechanical methods” or “bookish means” or, significantly, “tiring means” of learning. It is said that this pedagogy comes from the Renaissance, but I believe this to be an error. Almost nothing is, in the 20th century, a continuation of the Renaissance. Rousseau began a mental cycle, not different, but contrary to that begun by Rabelais.” With this approach, Eugeni d’Ors wants to impose an education of work and effort, promoting well done work, and thereby eliminating the remaining airs of Romanticism. He was so much in this line, that he demanded the return of the Renaissance as represented by the the education proposed by Rabelais in Gargantua. “We compare the heroic spirit and learning which explode magnificently in Gargantua with the weaknesses of Rousseau’s Emilie, which has been the source of modern weaknesses: we can clearly see in these a principle of returning to vice-ridden sensuality, the shame of the Gargantua’s first teachers and from which his new Renaissance teachers can redeem him” (d’Ors, 1981, p. 66).

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In regard to this point Octavi Fullat, in his prologue to a selection of essays by d’Ors, justly titled The Man Who Works and Plays, makes the following comment: “Culture, for Xenius, is no more than the domesticating influence that the will exercises on historic forces. Seny (sagacity in Catalan), sagesse for the French, or living reason offers the formal steps to know, through action, the natural and historic worlds.The man who works, following technoscientific laws, and who plays, using surplus or useless forces, constitutes the anthropological-pedagogical translation of the epistemological conception of sagacity, a metaphysical conception paired with the ontological metaphysics of Power and Resistance” (d’Ors, 1988, p. xvi). This explains why for Xenius culture is the result of the struggle of power against resistance.

2.2. Octavi Fullat: Education as a dialectic of domestication

In Fullat’s thinking we find the traces of pre-Socratic dialectic, especially Heraclitian. In “La MevaVeritat” (My Truth), he manifests, “History, that is everything, can be reduced to pólemos, to struggle, and the presence of one is the presence of its opposite” (Fullat 2008, p. 44). But on going deeper into professor Fullat’s thinking, it can be seen that he has developed a ternary kind of thought. He also finds three areas in each civilization: cultural, which interprets the world from a view of man as a symbolic animal; technological, which modifies the world from an anthropological perspective that views man as a faber (doing) animal; and finally the institutions which constitute the different ways of fitting man in the world from viewing man as a social animal” (Fullat, 1988a, p. 33).“Education could be many things, but inevitably it is one thing; education is the process of transmission of information, of how to think and behave, of attitudes, of how to alter oneself in the face of circumstances, of abilities, of how to compose oneself in a context from a sensory-motor angle” (Fullat, 1987, p.54).

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Three clear stages can be seen in his intellectual evolution. Fullat began from a metaphysical conception as a believer, entered gradually into existentialism which set the possibility of transcendence aside. Finally he came to a period of research at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, from the perplexity to the flood of post-Modern theories, he himself noted the absence of an Absolute and the irremissible path of relativism (Laudo, 2011, p. 50). Bit by bit the question of God remained circumscribed by a mysterious approach, more along romantic lines. Professor Fullat stopped basing himself in metaphysics and trusted in the odds in favor of God (Pascal), and from there he postulated that all is concentrated in the mystery that can only be grasped by beauty, especially in music and poetry. This does not mean that he renounced the Christian tradition, nor the memory nor the axiology which depends on history; to the contrary, all is due to our cultural tradition which is, as it must be, based on


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a triadic articulation coming from the vertices of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, which “form the three gonon, angles, of the triangle which engender Western times: the Bible, the Odyssey and the Aeneid; Amen. Amen means “certainly” in Hebrew” (Fullat, 1990, p. 16). Under the intellectual influence of existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre) and psychoanalysis (Freud), Fullat outlined a phenomenological and existential analysis of education based on a dialectic between violence and eroticism, which preaches the pilgrimage of evil and twilight of good in sight of a pedagogy of the finitude that leads humans to an abyss. From this perspective, education is always moving between Eros and Thanatos, between eroticism and violence, renunciation and aggressiveness. This thesis appears through out his work, although formulated in various ways, but always with the intention of highlighting that the educational act constitutes a dialectical relationship of a military nature: “Education, in the field of facts, is war, the anthropogenesis of force “(Fullat, 1986, p. 58). This dichotomous and polemical view, that conceives the development of the thread of history through wars and tensions and, apart from the pre-Socratic philosophy, drinks from the springs of Hegelian thinking, the dialectic of master and slave,and Freudian psychoanalysis has influenced the professor’s pedagogical thinking. The educational task seems, then, a boxing match: “Teachers must exercise their power, it is their social function. Students oppose discipline, orders: it is their existential destiny. Who will win?” (Fullat, 1986, p. 13). To the extent that this dialectical approach, which considers education as a process of domestication of violence, gives meaning to an anthropology of an existential nature, often anguished and sometimes pessimistic, sees human beings as something wicked and perverse – which is also face to face with the absurd. While d’Ors’s aspired to the triumph of classicism over modernism, Fullat simply accepts the violence of the power derived from the authority. Life, and of course, education, is a “place of agony, struggle and anguish” (Fullat, 1986, p. 23). Education is nothing but a process of domestication through which the child, evil by nature, will be incorporated into the adult world in a process that moves from the physis to culture, an evolution which, following histriadic thinking, willhave three stages: “The little animal will become increasingly political; as he moves from one Basic level to the next he will be more corseted by hermeneutics, “knowledge”, and by techniques “know and do”. He will enter civilization. Should we applaud, or, quite the opposite, will we cry? “(Fullat and Sarramona, 1982, p. 195). Be that as it may, for Fullat one cannot educate without keeping in mind the Christian heritage. One thing is to lose faith and quite another to deny the weight and significance of the axiology of western culture based on Christianity. One of his favorite authors, Camus, closes his L’Etranger: “So close to death, the mother must feel liberated and disposed to live it all again… And I, too, I was

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also ready to relive it all … with no hope, faced with this starlit night, I opened myself, for the first time, to the tender indifference of the world. Finding it so like me, in fact so fraternal, I felt that I had been happy, and still was.” Although he continues without any promise of transcendental hope, Octavi Fullat is the protagonist, with the precarious balancing act of a tightrope walker, of existentialism aware of tradition, defending cultural values, challenging barbarism, and at the same time, with an urge to live. We can link the stream advocating synthesis to the neo-Scholastic tradition which appeared at the end of the 20th century in the Catholic University of Louvain, under Cardinal Désiré Mercier. In this synthetic line, with an unequivocally neo-Scholastic slant, the figure of Jaume Balmes takes on importance and can be considered a precedent with his own criteria. We can also put Bishop Torras i Bages in this stream, disciple of Francesc Xavier Llorens i Barba, who was an enthusiast of the Thomist restoration promoted by Leo XIII in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). We call them synthetic because of their desire to conciliate faith and reason, to harmonize, in accord with the perennial philosophy, the natural and supernatural worlds in a synthesis which tries to overcome the split of modern philosophy between what is and what should be, between intelligence and will and, as well, between the data from scientific experiments and the transcendent dimension. Obviously we can add that this approach coincides with a humanist, spiritualist and personalist conception, rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, and especially in Thomism, which was brought up to date by the neo-Scholastics.

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But we must point out professor Joan Tusquets, born in 1901, who at the age of 54 attained the chair of General Pedagogy in the Department of Philosophy and Letters in the University of Barcelona, which had been eliminated in 1939 and restored in 1954 under Education Minister Joaquin Ruiz Martínez. Tusquets stated that there is a direct relation between culture and education and thus established a system of communicating vessels between the two. This approach should not be surprising if we take into account that the European cultural crisis during the time between the wars (1919-1939) generated an unprecedented reaction in pedagogy. Following his culturalist vocation, Tusquets took advantage of the Viennese ethnological school, Catholic inspired, whose founder, Father William Schmidt (1868 – 1954), had appealed for a comparative method of studying religions. Tusquets, however, had received a major influence from his teacher Juan Zaragüeta and his Fundamental Pedagogy (1943). He formed a cultural phenomenology orbiting around the principles of nomadic and sedentary pedagogy and was able to build it up in an original way from the anthropological categories and the theory of natural cycles of the Viennese school. From this come the references to nomadic and sedentary pedagogy as two variables which allow one to analyze and understand contemporary pedagogy. The great value of sedentarism is that it treasures and consolidates, while its worst enemy is the


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stiffness and mummification. On the other hand, the highest quality of nomadism is that it enriches, and its worst aspect is skepticism. Sedentarism creates convictions and nomadism opens horizons. It is obvious that an excess of nomadism would cause a loss of convictions; an excess of sedentarism, a loss of hope. In his intent to conciliate the diverse trends in pedagogy, Tusquets took on, in accord with Mercier’s passion for seeking unity, an eclectic attitude, in a way that his General Pedagogy should not be “especially rational, experimental, systematic, historically critical nor synthetic, but problematic” (Tusquets, 1972, p. 27).To him, the education of problematics, and the underlying science of problematics, do not form a specific education, as might be the case in professional education, but something more generic, a way of conceiving general education.Tusquets’s position is clear and diaphanous: so old and new, the problems are the same as always, just changing in relation to an evermore plural context. In the end, Tusquets defends a perennial pedagogy which starts from gnoseologic realism and which fits in with the postulates of the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, so that education is “the radically human activity which helps the educated because, within personal limits and circumstances, a person can live with greater dignity and efficiency” (Tusquets, 1972, p. 18). On the other hand, in combining tradition and novelty, the pedagogy he proposes assumes the progress of modern psycho-pedagogic science. On this philosophical base Tusquets articulates a basically unitary and traditional pedagogy which adopts plural and modern aspects. We find ourselves faced with a synthesis based on the weight of Aristotelian and Thomist tradition (Vetera) with contributions (Nova) which respond to signs of the new times. In those times, after World War II, Tusquets aligned himself, far from existentialist positions, with the perennial pedagogy, so that his essentialist education has as a goal to give the educated the habits (forms), intellectual capacity (science) and moral disposition (virtues) which, in any case, would be intensified by existential reality. With this attitude, Tusquets denies positions that reject the human essence, and proposes an eclectic scheme where “existentialism keeps watch to see that essentialism instills authentic habits, not habits founded on alienation and artificiality; essentialism will exhort existentialism to cultivate attitudes which conform to truth, good and beauty” (Tusquets, 1966). Tusquets takes his place among synthetic pedagogues because his theoretical and epistemological approaches, in pedagogical science, seek a position of equilibrium and conciliation among the various trends and tendencies. Far from dialectic positions, neoclassical and paganizing like d’Ors and especially Fullat’s existential and postmodern dialectics, all is explained in Tusquets’ philosophy. Every problem has a solution. One only needs to find the particular adaptation to context for a given truth considered a universal truth.

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4. Vitalists and cybernetics: from organic unity to optimization Vitalism can be linked to the principle of functional unity as set out by Professor August Pi i Sunyer in 1919, when he published La unitat funcional, assaigs de fisiologia interorgànica (Funtional unity, essays in interorganic physiology). On the other hand the influence of Ramon Turró, first president of the Catalan Philosophy Society, is also clear in this stream that emphasizes the importance of life. We are not faced with a mechanistic approach, but rather a biological focus on life, whether life is biological or spiritual, takes the lead. The defenders of this option are characterized by giving more importance to the whole than the parts, and defend a global and integral vision which, contrary to the atomized, analytic manner proposed by modern science, constituted a unity, related by a sort of nexus organicus, and therefore linked to biology, which connects everything, material and spiritual, because life is a single reality: education is life, with biological and spiritual life forming a whole.

4.1. Joaquim Xirau: full life and loving awareness

As much as Eugenid’Ors was the first to institutionalize and systematize the study of pedagogy in Catalonia, one must wait for Joaquim Xirau for the opening of the Pedagogy Seminary in the University of Barcelona, inaugurated at the end of 1930. JoaquimXirau proposed a pedagogy of life based on a deep vitalist conviction: life is spirit, and in its turn, spirit is liberty. And so, according to the principles of M.B. Cossio, education implies living, making alive, giving life, spiritualizing, making it possible for the educated to freely live an authentic life through the creating essence of values transmitted through the history of mankind, for we mustn’t forget that man is a living culture generator and, as a result, participates in two worlds: biological or material life and axiological or spiritual life. So it should be no surprise that March 28, 1928, Xirau pronounced the following words at the AteneuBarcelonès, “So psychology and logic, which study thinking, are simply chapters of biology. Thinking of the truth is simply a way of verifying vital activity... psychology, and through it, all of philosophy, is reduced to physiology” (Xirau, El sentit de la vida i el problema dels valors, (The meaning of life and problems of values) O.C. I, 1998, p. 319).Philosophy, as such, is suppressed. Philosophy is psychology is biology, which means physiology. Physiology was converted into the condition that makes philosophy possible, and thereby, pedagogy, beginning with the supposition that educating is to make alive in the biological and, no less, in the spiritual sense.

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Xirau’s pedagogic vitalism must be set in the field of the axiological world transmitted historically through cultural heritage. So we have no problem noting that Joaquim Xirau also participated in the metaphysics of vital reason, a


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spiritualistic philosophy of action, the line defended by Serra Hunter who, in distancing himself from the fallacy of action for action’s sake, imposed an ideal realm of values which constitute a transvital regime gravitating over life and imposing atemporal rules on it (Serra Hunter, 1945, p. 131-139). In the end, one must accomplish that the educated, through a pedagogy of loving awareness, achieves a full life.We quote: “True love rejects earthly lust and elevates us, by a gradual ascent, by the progressive, deliberate death of individual desire, to a luminous sphere in which, by renouncing all earthly happiness, we achieve veritable, authentic bliss” (Xirau, Amor y mundo, OC I, 1998, p. 138).

4.2 Joan Roura-Parella: Living Education

Roura-Parella, who was born in Tortellà (Girona) in1897 and died in Middletown (USA) in 1983, is unknown to many philosophers of education because his name was kept in oblivion until the end of Francoism.That was when the heating up of new liberties began a process of historical revision which helped recover memories unjustly silenced by Francoism. After studying teaching in Girona (19131917), Roura-Parella continued his studies at the Escuela Superior del Magisterio (Higher Teaching School) (1919-1923) in Madrid, and graduated first in his class (with a major inscience). In 1923 he was posted to the Escola Normal de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria as professor of Pedagogy. He stayed there until 1930, when he went to Germany to study psychology. Thanks to that trip, Roura-Parella passed from concentrating on sciences to humanities without abandoning the former because, according to his viewpoint everything, biological and spiritual, comes in a global unity. Roura-Parella is found under the influence of the science of spirit (Geisteswissenschaften), instituted by Dilthey and cultivated by Spranger, without abandoning biological aspects. As a result, thanks to his contact with Spranger, Roura-Parella changed his world view (Weltanschauung) from an exclusively naturalist view to a global or unitary one that revolves around a concept of life, a life that is a whole and which must be considered from the perspective of the unity of the biological and the spiritual. An important aspect of the organic unity of life is based on the fact that man, besides his corporal and biological reality, has a spiritual and axiological dimension. For Roura, nothing in man is completely independent, so that a stratified anthropology is sketched, with Platonic cross-sections, as learned from his German teachers (Hartmann, Nohl). Humans, then, have different levels: physical, organic, psychic and spiritual. However man, in the process of forming himself, is responsible that these levels have a harmonic and balanced structure. When this balance doesn’t appear, each person sees reality in a different way, generating different world view. For those who live anchored in lower levels, all

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is material, determinism and natural laws, a sort of analismus where man is degraded to pure animality or, in the best of cases, to the condition of a simple machine. On the other hand, for those who are called to higher levels, man is reason, will and spirit, until he can impose his laws onhis nature. Spiritualizing an individual consists in carrying out the values of his essential core because true life, which does not accept masks, is based on nearing the ideal.

4.3 Alexandre Sanvisens and cybernetic pedagogy

Finally, we must includeProfessor Alexandre Sanvisens Marfull’s (1918-1995) cybernetic thinking in the vitalist line. From his chair of Pedagogy at the University of Barcelona (gained 1970) he articulated a philosophy of education with a systemic and cybernetic touch, which understands education as an open, dynamic process moving toward human and social optimization. Throughout his long academic career Professor Alexandre Sanvisens exercised an untiring intellectual activity starting the distant day in 1942 when he began as an assistant professor of practical ethics at the University of Barcelona, collaborating from the outset with his teacher, Dr Tomàs Carreras i Artau (1879-1954) who worried about the question of doctor-philosopher. Professor Sanvisens applied his great philosophical intuition to pedagogy in cases: man as a relating animal, the priority of awareness (an aspect inherited from the Catalan philosophical tradition, especially Llorens i Barba) and the cybernetic vision (a dimension acquired from the study of the doctor-philosophers and modern biology, highlighting the importance of the functional unity of living beings compared to their homeostatic equilibrium). On this base he erects a pedagogical structure of awareness and a cybernetic systematization, which points to the importance of the system which, besides working as an auto-regulatory system, is characterized by an optimizing vocation which not only affects individual conduct through a process of self-awareness and self-liberation, but also, thanks to social awareness, also contributes to the improvement of humanity, when considered globally.

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Formed in the shelter of the teaching of the brothers Carreras Artau, Professor Sanvisens interested himself in the field of the doctor-philosophers in an approach which tried to bring the Socratic heritage and the Hippocratic tradition in an integral, global vision of man and culture. Here, then, is the motive for which this integral anthropological reality based on the fusionof Hippocratic medicine and Socratic and Aristotelian philosophy, that is to say, the physical and the psychical, offers an unmistakable pedagogic dimension in the sense that the doctor-philosophers want to guide the lives of the people, viewed from the psychosomatic unity, which highlights the importance of the interrelation of brain and mind (Sanvisens, 1993).


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Viewing things from the horizon of the doctor-philosopher, education must contemplate both aspects, corporal and psychical, in a focus emphasizing global functioning of a system which always seeks homeostatic equilibrium, because education is a living, open system functioning in a coordinated and integrated manner among the diverse factors which determine it (anthropology, culture, society, communication) and opening it to the optimization of man and society. In the last case, and in accord with the Catalan philosophical tradition, Professor Sanvisens’ pedagogy turns to individual conscience as a regulating mechanism that permits mankind can proceed to its own self-regulation, and consequently, to its improvement and optimization.

5. Closing We have tried to present a systematic view of, in fact just a part of, the contemporary situation of philosophy of education through some of the 20th century Catalan pedagogues.This interpretation can be completed in the future and, possibly, we can thus build a map of the principal philosophical-pedagogical currents embodied in our pedagogues. In any case, it seems to us that the philosophy of education, sometimes marginalized, others silenced, enjoys a long tradition and acceptable health among us. Far from being moribund, educational philosophy is an field of study with an important tradition. Both in working in pedagogy and in forming educators, to deny it or not keep it in mind is to write in the sand, to sail without a map.

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– (2001) Els valors d’Occident. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans. – (2002a) Pedagogía existencialista y postmoderna. Madrid: Síntesis. – (2002b) El siglo postmoderno (1900-2001). Barcelona: Crítica. – (2005a) L’autèntic origen dels europeus. El cristianisme en la formació d’Occident. Barcelona: Pòrtic. – (2005b) Valores y narrativa. Axiología educativa de Occidente. Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona. – (2006) La meva llibertat. Inici biogràfic, home, Catalunya, sexe, Déu. Barcelona: Angle Editorial. – (2008) La meva veritat.Història, moral, valors, educació, per què? Barcelona: Angle editorial. – (2010) La meva bellesa. Barcelona: Angle editorial. – (2012) «Albert Camus: un perfil personal», Temps d’Educació, 41, (2012): 231-246. F ULLAT, O. I MÈLICH, J.-C. (1989) El atardecer del bien (Una pedagogía freudoexistencialista). Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. F ULLAT, O. I SARRAMONA, J. (1982) Cuestiones de Educación (Análisis bifronte). Barcelona: Ceac. G. SUELTO DE SÁENZ, P. (1969) Eugenio d’Ors. Su mundo de valores estéticos. Madrid: Plenitud. GOETHE, J. W. (1985) Anys d’aprenentatge de Wilhelm Meister. Barcelona: Edicions 62. J IMÉNEZ M ORENO, L. (1983) «El saber estético-lúdico de Eugenio d’Ors», a Actas del III Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía Española. Salamanca, 29 de setiembre1 de octubre de 1982. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, p. 371-384. – (1991) «Acentos d’orsianos sobre el hombre y la cultura», a Aportaciones de filósofos españoles contemporáneos. Madrid: Fundación Fernando Rielo, p. 7-28. LAUDO, X. (2011) «La hipótesis de la pedagogía postmoderna. Educación, verdad y relativismo», Teoría de la Educación. RevistaInteruniversitaria, 23, 2, (2011): 45-68. LLOPART, P. (2002-2003) “De Joaquim Xirau a M. B. Cossío: dotze cartes i una targeta de visita”, Temps d’Educació, 27, (2002-2003): 419-439. LLORENS BARBA, F. (1920) Lecciones de Filosofía. Barcelona: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. – (2010) Filosofia i consciència. Estudi i selecció de textos de Joan Cuscó i Clarasó. Barcelona: Facultat de Filosofia de la Universitat Ramon Llull [Col·lecció Eusebi Colomer, 12]. L LUIS F ONT , P. (2011) «El trilema de les cosmovisions», a Homenatge a Jaume Bofill i Bofill. Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, p. 87-101. MARAGALL , J. (1986) “La generació filosòfica de 1932”. Revista de Catalunya, 2, (1986): 4959.

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MERCADER , L.; PERAN , M. I BRAVO, N. (1997) Eugenio d’Ors, del arte a la letra. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Monog rafías de ArteContemporáneo, 3), 1997. MERCIER, D. (1901) Los orígenes de la psicología contemporánea. Madrid: Saenz de Jubero. – (1909)A mis seminaristas. Barcelona: Luis Gili. – (1913) «Vers l’unité».Revue Néo-Scolastique de philosophie, 20, 79 (1913): 253-378. – (1914-1918) OeuvresPastorales.Bruxelles-Paris, Albert Dewit& J. Gabalda [7 volums]. – (1917) Per crucem ad lucem. Cartaspastorales, discursos, alocuciones, etc., Prefacio de Alfredo Baudrillart. París-Barcelona: Editores Bloud y Gay. – (1926) «In Memoriam». RevueNéo-Scolastique de Philosophie, 28, 9, (1926): 9-22 [Aquest article, publicat poc després de la mort de Mercier, reprodueix extractes de dos textos que corresponen als seus començaments universitaris a Lovaina. Ens referim, en concret, al Rapportsur les étudessupérieures de philosophie (1891) i al discurs que va pronunciar el 2 de desembre de 1894, en un acte organitzat en el seu honor]. MOREU, A. C. (2005) «Alejandro Sanvisens y los médicos-filósofos», a Doctor Alexandre Sanvisens Marfull, pedagog i pensador, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona [Col·lecció Homenatges, 25], p. 77-86. D’ORS,

E. (1916) «La sistematització filosòfica de la pedagogia». Quaderns d’estudi, 1, 1, (1916): 25-32.

– (1947) El secreto de la filosofía. Barcelona,:Iberia. – (1963) «Filosofía del esquema». Atlántida, 1, gener-febrer, p. 25-31 [Aquest article es feia constar que corresponia a la lliçó 11, apartats 1, 2 i 3, del llibre La Ciencia de la Cultura, que l’editorial Rialp havia de publicar properament, tal com va esdevenir l’any següent (1964)]. – (1964) La Ciencia de la Cultura. Madrid: Rialp. – (1981) Diálogos. Madrid: Taurus. – (1988) L’home que treballa i juga. Pròleg i tria de textos d’Octavi Fullat. Vic: Eumo. – (2000a) Confesiones y recuerdos. Edició d’Alicia García-Navarro. Pròleg de Carlos Pujol. València: Pre-Textos. – (2000b) Trilogía de la «Residencia de Estudiantes». Pamplona: Eunsa. – (2002) Lo barroco. Pròleg d’Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Edició preparada per Ángel d’Ors i Alicia García Navarro d’Ors. Madrid: Tecnos/Alianza. PI SUNYER, A. (1944). La unidad funcional. México: Compañía General Editora. 128

P ÍNDAR (1987) Epinicis. Odes triomfals de l’Olimpisme clàssic. Barcelona: Edicions del Mall.


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RAEYMAEKER, L. de (1952) Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain. Louvain: Publications Universitaire de Louvain. – (1962) L’oeuvre universitaire du Cardinal Mercier. Barcelona: Universidad de BarcelonaFacultad de Filosofía y Letras. ROURA, Jaume, (1981). «Quan la filosofia esdevé saviesa. Reflexions entorn del Religio est libertas d’Eugeni d’Ors», Serra d’Or, 266, (1981): 33-35. R OURA-P ARELLA, J. (1931) «La educación viva». Revista de Pedagogía, XIV, (1931): 111 [Aquest article es va reproduir en el llibre Joan Roura-Parella. En el centenari del seu naixement (1897-1983). Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1997, p. 44-52]. – (1939) «La realització de si mateix». Revista dels Catalans d’Amèrica, 2, (1939): 1324 [Aquest article es va reproduir en el llibre Joan Roura-Parella. En el centenari del seu naixement (1897-1983). Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1997, p. 56-62]. – (1940)Educación y Ciencia. México: La Casa de España en México. – (1947) El mundo histórico-social (Ensayo sobre la morfología de la cultura de Dilthey). Mèxic: Biblioteca de Ensayos Sociológicos-Universidad Nacional. – (1950) Tema y variaciones de la personalidad. México, Biblioteca de Ensayos Sociológicos. – (1956) «Causalidad, finalidad y libertad (Tipos de determinación categorial en el hombre)». Homenaje al Dr. Augusto Pi Suñer. México, sense impremta, 1956, p. 207-227. ROVIRÓ, I. (2010) Balmes i el Seminari de Vic. Vic: Institut Superior de Ciències Religioses de Vic. [Lliçó inaugural del curs 2010-2011]. SANVISENS, A. (1953) Un médico-filósofo español del siglo XVIII: el doctor Andrés Piquer. Barcelona: CSIC / Instituto Luis Vives de Filosofía. – (1969) «Intento de sistematización estructural de la filosofía de Letamendi» Folia Clínica Internacional (XIX), 7-8, (1969): 390-400. – (1984) Cibernética de lo humano. Barcelona: Oikos-Tau. – (1989) «La conciencia en educación», a Pagés Santacana, A. (Comp.) Hombre y educación. Barcelona: PPU, p. 269-299. – (1993) Relacions entre el cervell i la ment. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona/ Facultat de Pedagogia. – (1995) «L’educació social, segons Letamendi». Temps d’Educació, 14, (1995): 293-314. – (1995-1996) «Conversión de la gimnástica griega al cristianismo, según José de Letamendi». Historia de la Educación, 14-15, (1995-1996): 101-124.

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– (2005) Doctor Alexandre Sanvisens Marfull. Pedagog i pensador. Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona [Col·lecció Homenatges, 25]. SERRA HUNTER, J. (1945) El pensament i la vida. Estímuls per a filosofar. Pròleg de Josep Carner. Mèxic: Club del Llibre Català. SERTILLANGES, A. D. (1944) La vida intelectual. Barcelona: Editorial Atlántida. SUÁREZ, A. (1988) El género biográfico en la obra de Eugenio d’Ors. Barcelona: Anthropos. THIERY, A. (1895) «Introduction à la Psycho-Physiologie», Revue Néo-Scolastique de Philosophie, II, 6, (1895): 176-187. TUSQUETS , J. (1926) «El Cardenal Mercier». Criterion, II, (1926): 45-56. – (1928) Assaigs de crítica filosòfica. Barcelona: Edicions de la Nova Revista. – (1953) La crítica de las religiones. Barcelona: Lumen (2ª ed.). – (1964-1965) «La pedagogía de los valores, en Eduardo Spranger y Juan Zaragüeta», Perspectivas Pedagógicas, 13-15, (1964-1965): 174-179. – (1966) «Hacia una Pedagogía esencial y existencial. Estudio comparativo del Esencialismo y el Existencialismo pedagógicos», Perspectivas Pedagógicas, 17, (1966): 9-20. – (1975) «El magisterio de Juan Zaragüeta», Perspectivas Pedagógicas, 35-36, (1975): 355-358. – (1972) Teoría de la Educación. Madrid: Magisterio Español. – (1986) Tarzán contra Robot. El neonomadismo y el neosedentarismo, protagonistas de la crisis contemporánea. Vilassar de Mar: Oikos-Tau. – (1999) El què i el perquè dels dos Concilis Vaticans. Pròleg de Jaume González-Agàpito. Barcelona: Santandreu editor. VILANOU , C. (2011) «Juan Roura-Parella and hisPresence in the United States», Journal of Catalan IntellectualHistory, I, 2 (2011): 131-147. WULF, M. de (1926) «Le philosopher et l’initiateur», en RevueNéo-Scolastique de Philosophie, 28, 10 (1926): 99-124. XIRAU, J. (1998) Obras Completas. I. Escritos fundamentales. Rubí/Madrid: Anthropos/Caja de Madrid [Conté, entre altres textos, els llibres Amor y mundo (1940) i Lo fugaz y lo eterno (1942)]. – (1999) Obras Completas. II. Escritos sobre educación y sobre el humanismo hispánico. Rubí/ Madrid: Anthropos/Caja de Madrid [Conté, entre altres textos, el llibres Manuel B. Cossío y la educación en España (1944) i Vida y obra de Ramón Llull. Filosofía mística (1946)]. – (2000a) Obras Completas. III. Escritos sobre historia de la filosofía. Vol. 1. Libros. Rubí/Madrid: Anthropos/Caja de Madrid. 130

– (2000b) Obras Completas. III. Escritos sobre historia de la filosofía. Vol. 2. Artículos y ensayos. Rubí/Madrid: Anthropos/Caja de Madrid.


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XIRAU, R. (1985) «Los filósofos españoles transterrados», a Estudios de Historia de la Filosofía en México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, p. 295-318. Z ARAGÜETA, J. (1943) Pedagogía Fundamental, Barcelona.

Translation from Catalan by Dan Cohen

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article JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 6, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.2436/20.3001.02.81 | P. 133-149 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

O

pera Omnia Raimon Panikkar. Toward an understanding Joan Requesens i Piquer1 jreques2@gmail.com

summary The incentive for writing these pages was the start of a complete edition of the work of RaimonPanikkar, a few weeks before his death. They are divided into three parts and sketch an initial understanding of his thinking, which is now definitive. The first discusses his use of etymology, which he often employed to dig deeper into the comprehension of that which he set forth, analyzed and interpreted. The second, which I call poetic, discusses his use of thoughts and images by poets and writers as a guide or complement to an idea. The third addresseshis creation of neologisms, a method whichhe used to capture the richness of a thought in a more precise or useful technical word when expressing himself in the various languages in which he wrote his work.He respected and valued all languages of the world equally; being that they are, as he used to say, the maximum richness, along with silence, of humanity.

key words Etymology, poetics, neologisms, word, languages, silence

“Linguistic atrophies lead to the atrophy of thought.”2 These words could be used as the catchphrase for the following pages and, in fact, they are their origin. 3 I think it is important to keep in mind RaimonPanikkar’s world of the word when looking at his work, now almost complete. I propose doing so via three converging paths: the etymologic, the poetic and the neologic.

1

Retired secondary school teacher. Retired professor of the Higher Institute of Religious Sciences in Vic, of the Theology Institute of Barcelona, and scholar in the research group of the Modern Literature Chair of the University of Barcelona.

2

R. Panikkar, «La paraula, creadora de realitat», Llenguatge i identitat. Symposium held at Vivarium (Tavertet) on the 12-13 and 19-20 of September, 1992. Montserrat: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1994, 53.

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The etymological recourse In his thesis on Sciences there are some pages dedicated to the laws of thermodynamics, the second of which refers to the concept of entropy. He observes that in addition “to its primary meaning of revolving and evolving, ejntropiva means confusion and shame. And really both senses can be applied to the modern word entropy. Science, literature, rhetoric, apologetics and prophetism have all revolved at some point around this magic word.”4 And he continues: if the universe is a closed system, its entropy will reach the point called thermal equilibrium, which is to say, arrive at inert material, static chaos, its end. Therefore, the origin of the movement of the universe that ends with the law of entropy presupposes its origin coming from an external cause, which would mean the following: “physics, by the intelligibility of its laws, would postulate the existence of God.”5 Well, then no. To affirm that would be entropy in the original meaning of confusion. All scientific principles exist only as a calculation mathematically expressible in the signs of formula’s letters and numbers. But the sign, a creation of our mind, can never mean the totality of reality in itself, which does not and will not submit to the logic of our signs; the signs only express reality in the quantitative dimension, not in the entitative. We are faced with two paths of knowledge, and mixing their conclusions or transferring them from one to the other is confusion; entropy that leads to incongruence. He speaks of two paths of knowledge when affirming that we are flanked by a dual problem: the anthropomorphic and the epistemologic. Of the first, he writes: “what did Protagoras mean when he said “man is the measure of all things”? What did the Rig Veda mean when it sings that “man is all”? Perhaps man is the juice of every dish –but now we must be aware, and discern (the gravy)».6 Regarding the epistemological problem: “we have already suggested that modern science is episte– vme and not gnôsis. Despite the multiple meanings of the first word, perhaps we would clarify many questions if we reserve it precisely for

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3

The circumstantial origin was the presentation of the Opera Omnia Raimon Panikkar in Manresa on the 25th of November, 2009. The directors of the publishing house Fragmenta, Ignasi Moreta and Inés Castel-Branco, invited me to speak there. I would like to thank them and Professor Xavier Melloni for his encouragement; all errors and omissions are mine.

4

R. Paniker, Ontonomía de la ciencia. Sobre el sentido de la ciencia y sus relaciones con la filosofía. Madrid: Gredos, 1961, 209.

5

Ibidem.

6

R. Panikkar, «El conflicte entre la teologia i la ciència», Revista de Catalunya, 82 (1994): 37.


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strictly scientific knowledge (based on the etymology and not the history of the word) to say that the episte– vme a true epi-hístemai (histe– vmi, from the root sta– ), which is to say, a ‘position [ourselves] before’ things; like in a fashion show: have the models parade before our eyes in order to judge them. And if we want to be even more subtle, which is one of the forms of irony, we can remember the discrete nuance of epi does not only connote before, but also upon. The episte– vme– would be that form of knowledge that places itself before but also upon things, not only to know them, but also to control them and to be able to predict what they will do, how they will behave.”7 T he etymological recourse appears for a second time in the aforementioned science thesis, in the development of all that Panikkar wants to clearly express. The first use of this etymological recourse was in his doctoral thesis on Philosophy, where he devotes nine pages to the evolution of the central word, “nature.” They are worthy of a detailed study that would reveal etymological references to no less than eleven languages –from Sanskrit to German Gothic to Lithuanian– plus the Spanish in which the thesis is written. Based on this astonishing display 8 and what is seen in the science thesis, I propose considering this recourse as one of the fundamental elements of all of Panikkar’s work: the constant search for the root of words; roots that are necessary for the comprehension of all reality accessible ? and it requires serious work? to the human-language mind or the language-mind of humans. Accessing the root of a word is reaching its underlying meaning. Of course, it will do us no good if we aren’t, at the same time, aware that the normal occurrence isn’t the loss or obscuring of the first meaning, but also its modification. If we take the present meaning, but don’t know the history of the word, the result is as poor as if we held on only to the original meaning without wanting to take the leap to the here and now. “Etymology […] takes each word from its isolation and situates it in a network of relationships, on two different planes: the linguistic and the human. The linguistic plane gives it a structural orientation, and the human plane incorporates it the life of man, the cultural, social and historical subject.”9 The root goes hand in hand with the meaning: etymology – now we would say the first plane as defined by J. Bruguera— and semantics being the second plane. An example: “The word ‘pena’ originally presented an

7

Ibidem, 37-38.

8

R. Panikkar, El concepto de naturaleza. Análisis histórico y metafísico de un concepto. Madrid: CSIC – Instituto de Filosofía Luís Vives, 1972, 55-63.

9

Jordi Bruguera, Introducció a l’etimologia, Barcelona: Societat Catalana de Llengua i Literatura, 2008, 27.

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ambivalent meaning; on one hand it means suffering, pain, and on the other punishment, penalty.”10 In short: researching the etymology is thoroughly pursuing the meaning or meanings. While Panikkar was expansive in this example, in others he is brief. “The term “ritus”, it goes without saying, does not mean exactly “ceremony”. Ritus, rhythm and arithmetic have an etymological kinship, by the way.”11 Other times he recurs to etymology to clarify a thought. In the text he affirms that politics “are the patrimony of man, even in the literal sense (ad panem)» and the note specifies that «French plays with the etymology of the word apanage,which we have translated for patrimony», with the clarification –I add– that some dictionaries specify «ensemble de biens de l’esprit».12 Using the etymology recourse or, if you prefer, etymosemantic, means revealing the cultural historical field that generated it, and, the other way around and simultaneously, once we have situated it within that field, the root of a word and its evolution from one world to another become fully intelligible to us. «As 10 Here the note that elucidates the quote: «Ilgreco poih (poiné) significapro priamente: il riparare, il ripagare nel bene o nel male. Oltre a ricompensa significa anche punizione. Il latino poena conserva questo significato di punizione in termini giuridici. Più tardi la stessa parola entrerà a far parte di numerose lingue neolatine col senso di sofferenza. In sanscrito “pena” protebbeesseretradotto alla lettera con dan≥d≥a: bastone, verga (Cf. il greco devndron [dendron], albero); o anche con pi d– ≥a, che significa in primo luogo sofferenza, pena, e in seguito assume il senso di tortura, correzione (Cf. pi d– ≥agr≥ha::– camera di tortura, riformatorio). Significativamente il verbo pî? era usato in origine per indicare l’azione di spremere il soma. Perciòl’atto del sacrificio produceva sofferenza. Il sanscrito usa anche vedanâ per esprimeresofferenza, pena, tortura, e questo termine significa anche percezione, sensazione». R. Panikkar, Mito, fede e dermeneutica. Iltriplice velo della realtà. Milano: Jaca Book, 2000, 79. 11 R. Panikkar, Entre Déu i el cosmos. Una visió a-dualista de la realitat. Converses amb Gwendoline Jarczyk. Lleida: Pagès, 2006, 145.

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12 R. Panikkar, L’esperit de la política. Homo politicus. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1999, 14. I have here the French translation of the English original. «Le mot anglais worship n’a guèred’équivalence dans les autres langues européennes. “Culte” est peut-être le synonyme le plus proche; tous les autres mots d’origine latine ou germanique ont un sens bien plus restreint. Le mot worship es textrêmement vague [...] Etymologiquement, le mot vient de weorp, c’est-à-dire worth, valeur, et veut donc dire estime, honneur. A partir de là, il a acquis la signification d’importance, de respect, de dignité (cf. le motallemandWürde). Dès les origines, le mot a des connotations religieuses: vénération d’une puissance considéré ecomme divine, révérencepour en êtresupérieur, adoration, etc. Ilestsignificatif que le sens étymologique, et probablement les sens premier, de worthsoit “valeuréconomique”: c’est le prix de quelque chose. Nous témoignons donc du respect à quelqu’un ou nous lui rendons hommage et vénération, parce que nou savons découvert que celui estl’object de notre culte a une valeur pour nous» (R. Panikkar, Le culte et l’hommeséculier. Paris: Seuil, 1976, 17-18).


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you know hJ politikhv is a Greek word that, even before Plato and Aristotle, had acquired autonomy from the base word povli~ ‘city’. We point out that polis still means ‘city’ and sometimes ‘state’, but only indirectly. The verb polivxw, already in Homer (The Iliad VII, 453; XX, 217), means ‘to build the walls of the city’, following the etymology of polis». 13 And a bit further on we can read: «the expression ta politiká was also sometimes the opposite of basilikh, which is to say, basilikh tejcnh or the art of governing characteristic of kings. Ho politikósis the public man, the statesman, the citizen. Literally, politikhÌ is the «political space», the agora, the ager publicus»14 and continues to be from Ancient Greece to the present times. The title of this chapter is «The History of the Word». Would the book be the same without it? No. We have mentioned two paths of knowledge. Panikkar searches for the etymological source: «jñana» (Sanskrit), «gnosis» (Greek)15 and upon arriving into Latinit splits into SCIENTIA which gives us «science» and all its derivatives. The other path was at one point GNOSCERE, a word that underwent two more alterations: NOSCERE, in educated expression, and COGNOSCERE, which turned into the colloquial «conoscere», the immediate root for the Romance languages. We understand its meaning, however it is more densethan it appears because from its Indo-European origins it has had a near homonym. NOSCERE/NASCERE : «to know» / «to be born». From the root GNOSCO that became «science», Panikkar draws the conclusion that today, in this word, we have limited the original meaning to the sense of physical analysis by dividing and subdividing, breaking and subbreaking in desk calculation and in experiments. By doing this, we have put science at the service of technique, which, in turn, no longer means as it did for the Greeks «to do artfully» or «inspiration». Running the risk of breaking the flow of this paragraph, I leave it unfinished to insert the following, which I think is significant for the overall subject: «“Mechanical” was used in modern languages before “machine,” to which it is related. On a side note, keep in mind that the original pejorative meaning (still in use today) of cunning and artificial ingenuity which is maintained in the word “machination” and the sad memory tied to the Latin machina (the platform on which slaves were display for sale). The original Greek mechané (cf. mechos) means instrument (the means of achieving something and, then, also cunning), is the closest to the Gothic magan (mazan),which means to be able (compare with the German vermögen from the root magh “to be capable of, to have the possibility of ”). Technology refers to the realm of the machines, while technique belongs 13 R. Panikkar, L’esperit de la política. Homo politicus. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1999, 74. 14 Ibidem, 77-78. 15 R. Panikkar, Ecosofía. Para un espiritualidad de la tierra. Madrid: San Pablo, 1994, 21.

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to the world of instruments (tools). The power of the tool comes from man; that of the machine, from beyond him. The energy source of the tool is the ingenium, that of the simple machine is conducted nature (wind, water, etc.), and of the complex machine is transformed nature (chemistry, atomic force, etc.)».16 Now the technique is splicing more and more until reaching the atom that blew up in our hands. We have violated the harmony of matter. And with the expansion of so much technique our psychological harmony has also exploded. «The characteristic of modernity, brought to a fever pitch by modern science, [is] the method of fragmenting problems and, therefore, reality and, as a result, also man».17 I now return to the paragraph I left unfinished. In the Greek root GNOSCO, which is maintained in its near homonym that means “to be born,” Panikkar sees the possibility of regaining the lost balance. It can be found in an etymological detail of the Latin form: the addition of the prefix CON to the root GNOS, which when added to verbs, indicates that the process is arriving at its end. Briefly, I am born [neixo], which means I am brought forth by nature into the world, but until I con-neixo, until I reach coneixement –knowledge—I haven’t made the leap from nature to culture. That explains the ancient tradition, reminds Panikkar, that associates gnosis with salvation. «Honoring human dignity to the end is the main task facing man».18 It is here, I believe, where some words must be added, which were said as if in passing, 16 R. Panikkar, La nova innocència. Barcelona: La Llar del Llibre, 1991, 119. 17 R. Panikkar, «La paraula, creadora de realitat», 48. A second example says: «My hypothesis maintains that there is a qualitative leap between technique, understood as the Greek technê, and modern technology. The first represents a human variant. All peoples have technê, art, artifacts, manipulation of nature [...] Perhaps the most adequate term for expressing this reality is “handicraft” [...] culture is handicraft. Modern technology, on the other hand, is the fruit of one single civilization [...] Its human space is rational organization; technocracy [...] I call the second usage “technocracy” based on the etymology of the word and the fact that this second usage, unlike the first, does not refer to a simple instrument, which is easily managed by the consumer, but rather it demands or imposes a way of thinking, a lifestyle [...] Technocracy represents the shift from the technê as art, as handicraft, to technology as control. Like krátos, like power». And these lines are accompanied by the following quote that Panikkar takes from the work of E. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969, vol. II., p. 71): «Krátos ne signifie ni ‘force physique’ (iskhús, sthénos), ni ‘force d’âme (alkê), mais ‘supériorité, prévalence’, soit á l’assemblée... Mais, dans d’autres emplois, kraterós se rapproche, pour les sens, de krataiós (‘dur, cruel’), kratús (‘dur’)... Krátosest á repprocher de l’indo-iranien kratu, qui désigne la ‘vertu (magique) du guerrier’»: this is how Benveniste sums up his study of this word. I refrain from commenting ironically and sadly that the magical force of the machine has “prevailed,” not only over homo faber, but also over animal loquens». R. Panikkar, Paz y desarme cultural. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2002, 92-94. 138

18 R. Panikkar, Entre Déu i el cosmos..., 80.


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but are highly revealing of his teachings: «In order to demonstrate that it is a universal subject while remaining in the concrete, due to my philological obsessions and my need to relearn Catalan, I have tried to see what this word we use means: l’home i la seva por [man and his fear]. And in searching for the meaning of «por», I found that a language like Catalan has, at least, fifty-five words to refer to this concept. They all connote or denote «por» [fear], and create a conglomerate that, when trying to investigate to find some clarity within it, appears like a dark forest that Dante himself would have feared: absurd, paüra, fàstic, nàusea, angoixa, apocament, terror, esglai, ensurt, opressió, neguit, frisança, esgotament, pànic, angúnia, ansietat, basarda, desassossec, cova, malestar, impaciència, quimera, atribolament, esverament, aflicció, alarma, covardia, caguera, fòbia, malfiança, recel, pusil·lanimitat, temor, horror, esfereïment, trepidació, etc.».19 Now I will draw attention to those words said as if in passing: «my philological obsessions». Why? Just because he was returning to Catalan after many years spend in Englishspeaking ambits? There occurs to me a more personal and basic answer: «etymology (from e[tumo~ truth) has its importance».20 He confesses that researching it is the search for the truth enclosed in each word.21 Some earlier lines were devoted to the word «coneixement». While the etymological meaning he presents and its evolution may be quite clear to us, one thing is certainly true: el coneixement [knowledge] is limited. So can we go further? Yes. Above knowledge there is wisdom. In the words of Panikkar: «the German word Weisheit (wisdom) is related, etymologically, with vidya–, veda [Sanskrit], idein [Greek], videre [Latin], vision, wissen; the Greek word sophia and the Latin sapientia indicate experience, skill and taste. Even though the word «wisdom», in other languages, expresses other contexts, it seems that these two aspects are always present. Saint Bonaventuremade it very clear when he derived sapientia from sapor and sapere, from “taste” and “to know” (II Sent. d. 4, dub. 2). With this he designates both the part of wisdom that is affective, sensorial, that affects taste, and the intellectual, cognitive and scientific part. It is, both technê and epistêmê, to do and to know, praxisand theory. […] Heraclitussaid that sôphronein, to think wisely, was the greatest virtue, and that wisdom, sophia, consists in saying the truth and acting according to nature, listening to it».22 Listening. Here we have the beginning of wisdom. And through that, according to Panikkar, we reach the highest level of knowledge, self-awareness and the path to surpass it through contemplation. 19 R. Panikkar, La nova innocència, 145-146. 20 R. Panikkar, La plenitud del hombre. Una cristofanía. Madrid: Siruela, 1999, 240, nota 147. 21 To honor that truth: «the word modernity, etymologically means precisely “mode”, that which is in style. It comes from modus: that which lasts only a moment and immediately disappears» (R. Panikkar, Benaurada senzillesa. Barcelona: La Llar del Llibre, 1988, 122). 22 R. Panikkar, Invitació a la saviesa. Barcelona: Proa, 1997, 19.

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There are many other examples throughout his body of work, but I will limit myself to two final notes taken from the discreet footnote, which are a basic componentof the reflections that Panikkar wrote about peace.23

The poetic recourse In the work of R. Panikkar there is a second significant recourse. I call it poetic in the sense that a text –in verse orin prose–generates a reduplication or polysemy with what it has been linked to. I am referring to the detail of the subject headings of books, chapters, articles… and also the citing, in the body of the text, of

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23 «The cross and the sword were bound together for centuries» with the note: «“I interpret the Latin bonus as ‘the warrior’ assuming I am right that bonus derives from an older form duonus (compare with bellum; duellum; where I think that duonusis contained). Thus, Bonus is the man of conflict, of division (duo), like a man of war” (F. Nietzsche)». R. Panikkar, Paz y desarme cultural, p. 60. Panikkar’s supposition can be confirmed. Etymologically everything points to, if not a direct derivation, than a quite clear crossing. «bonus, -a, -um(de duenos, duonus, formes encore attestées à l’èpoquearchaïque [...] : bon. Le comparatif et le superlatif son tempruntés à d’autres racines: melior, optimus. Le sens est proche de celui de “brave” commepour gr. ajgaqov~; [...] Souvent employé dans des formules de politesse: uirbonus, boneuir (= w\ j gaqev). Synonyme familier de magnus [...] La forme *dwenos sur laquelle repose bonusne se retrouve pasailleurs. Tout ce que l’on peut essayer d’expliquer, c’est un élément radical *du-.», etc., que cal completar així: «bellum, -i n. (forme ancienne duellum [...] encore bien attestéedans les inscriptions, chez les poètes et les glossateurs [...] De là l’étymologie populaire [...] duellum bellum, uidelicet quod duabus partibus de uictoria contendentibus dimicatur [...]): guerre [...] (A. Ernout – A. Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine. Histoire des mots. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979). «Religious peace, on the other hand, was considered more of an inner attitude [...] And that, in spite of the fact that, originally, many words like salam, shanti, shalom, eirênê, pax and mir, also contained a political and religious meaning», he writes, with notes on the six words: «[1] Common Muslim greeting, which includes peace with God and with one’s brothers, along with wellbeing. Cf. Qur’ân VI, 56 [[This aleya from the sixth surah, says: «Say [prophet]: “I was forbidden to worship and serve / those you invoke / and who are not the only God, Allah”. / You also say: “I will not follow your desires. / If I had I would have strayed far from the path, / I would cease to be among the rightly guided”».] The Sumerian root silim (Acadic sâlamu) indicates fullness, health being complete. / [2] Shanti is simultaneously the reflection and the projection of the inner harmony of the universe [he refers to one of his texts] / [3] [in this note he refers to another text written by someone else] / [4] “Le mot désigne d’abord la paix considérée commeune état durable (à la difference, chez Homer, de Qilovtp` ~, qui concerne la conclusion d’un accord); n’est pas originellement un terme juridique ou diplomatique”: Chantraine 1968 [Dictionnaireé tymoligique de la langue greque, Paris (Klincksieck)], sub voce “eirênê” / [5] The Latin word (pacem a pactione) has the expressly juridical meaning of “pact” / [6] The Russian word mir means, both “peace” and “world”; the latter in the sense of kovsmo~, which is lovely, harmonious, ordered. Looking at the world as it really is (should be): peaceful. Lack of peace destroys this world. This is the traditional idea of ordo, ?ta, etc.»R. Panikkar, Paz y desarme cultural, 62.


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verses strictus ensu and the mentioning of men of letters. I think that an exhaustive analysis of this recourse will bear relevant surprises. The preface of the work is headed with this quote: «h\qo~ aÌnqwvpwÛ HERACLITUS, Fragment 119».24 The note reads: «proper nouns, out of respect to the different cultures, are kept in the original language except where popular use has established another spelling». And further on he writes: «the heading of our study speaks to us of ethos. Literally: “For man, ethics [is his] spirit”. Daimônis what comprises the true personality of man, that which gives him his deepest and most distinctive characteristic. Ethos is here the untransmittable nature of each person, his character, his dignity, his “ethicalness”».25 It seems very clear to me that the quote of the heading is not here mere ornament, but rather a guide and tool for interpretation. A second example of headings taken from sacred books, be they biblical, from vedas or others. «Me– phylax tou adelphou mou eimi ego–? / Am I my brother’s keeper? / Genesis4:9 / Tat tusamamvayât. / Yes! Thanks to the mysterious harmony that embraces all / Brahma Su –tra, I,1,4» with the following note: «Obviously the two translations are not literal».26 This double quote presides over the entire book – even before the double prologue—devoted to the subject of dialogue among religions.27 It seems unnecessary to clarify the relationship between the two quotes to see them not only as an entrance point, but as a demand that justifies the book and invites the reader to join the world of men and the cosmos. Another quote that presides over an entire book: «an[ eu deÌ ajpeth`~ ajlhqinhj~ qeoÌ~ lejgomeno~ o{nomaj ejstin Without true virtue, the God of which you speak is a [mere] name. (PLOTINUS, Enneads, II,9, 15,39)».28 The meaning is clear: if one who speaks of a god, of God, does so on the sidelines of deep reality itself, without virtue, limiting himself to a simple contemplative exercise, the result will not be a book about a god or God, but pointless speculation. He makes that clear right from the second part of the title. And he confirms it in the chapter «Fragments al voltant de l’experiència de Déu» [Excerpts on the experience of God] where one reads the names, side by side, of Dionysius the Areopagite and Thomas Merton, and some verses by John of the Cross.29 24 R. Panikkar, L’esperit de la política..., 13. 25 Ibidem, 15. 26 R. Panikkar, El diàleg indispensable, 7. 27 Ibidem, 21. 28 R. Panikkar, Les icones del misteri. L’experiència de Déu. Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1998, 9. 29 Ibidem, 56.

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The volume Invitació a la saviesa [An Invitation to Wisdom] is a collection of two conferences and two articles that, in book form, was first published in German. Panikkar adds a «Prologue to the Catalan edition» that begins: «Invitació a la saviesais the new title of the book». 30 In effect, and as we have already pointed out, Pankikkar’s work is redone, retranslated and reedited with changes. The book is headed by a Latin quote and its un-credited translation (perhaps Panikkar’s own?) The first part, a Biblical quote; the second, one from the Rig Veda; the third, this: «There is no word without sound and body» with a note that reads: «allusion to Stefan George. The poem Das Wort was published in 1919 for the first time in the book ofpoems Das Neue Reich».31 The fourth part is not preceded by a quote. Concisely: a quote that synthesizes the author’s intention by commenting the words from the Bible on wisdom from the book of Proverbs (primarily 9:1), «Gaudensgaudebo in Vita, quia in cordehominisiucundamsibiSapientiamansionemparavit. / I shall rejoice in Life because Wisdom has prepared a glorious dwelling place for itself in the human heart»; the second: «Sapientiae dificavit sibi domum. / Wisdom has built her house. Pr 9:1»; the third: «This is my magnificence, / and even greater is man: / one quarter are all the beings, / three quarters are the immortal in heaven. Purusha-sûkta, Rig Veda X, 90,3»; the last, from the German poet (1868-1933). Another example is offered in the texts added in 1979 in an Englishlanguage volume, most of which come from a first edition in French (10), English (4) and German (1) between 1968 and 1972. I have the Italian version constructed, in regard to the poetic recourse, in the following way. After the title and credits of the edition, the first quote from the Kena Upanisad, II, 3 and, in note, threeparallel references to three other Oriental books. Following the introduction, three untranslated words in Sanskrit and a short verse from the Brahma Sûtra. Part I is headed up by a confession from Aristotle, Ad Antipater (1582 b 14), in Greek and translated. You turn the page and see the first chapter with a double heading, Sanskrit words from the Dammapada VII, 6 (95) and from Luke 21:19 plus two notes on semantics; second chapter: Tao Tç Ching, 18 also with a semantic note; the third: Matthew 6:34; the fourth: two quotes taken from the Úatapatha Brâhma?a I, 3, 3, 1 and VI, 2,1,18. Part II’s overall quote comes from the letter to the Hebrews 11:3; then comes the fifth chapter (which I will comment on later); the sixth: Psalm 35:11. And it continues like this until Part III and, at the end, the fifteenth chapter presided over by Galatians 5:13, a chapter divided into two epigraphs and each headed by its own quote. The book ends with this one: «Sit finis libri non querendi / (La fine del libro non sia la fine della ricerca) / Brahmane≥ 30 The first: Der Weisheiteine Wohnung Bereiten 142

31 R. Panikkar, Invitació a la saviesa, 85.


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namah ≥». 32 With this example we are facing the articulation of texts through a game of quotes that appear from one end to the other and throughout, like the layers of a liliaceous bulb (let’s think of a gladiola, instead of an onion). With this structure confirmed we could continue to study the contents of these quotes to discover in them, layer by layer, the implicit links between the partial subjects, or between the wider blocks of the parts, and perhaps even a loop between the first and last of the books. We could go on and on. However, it is worth stopping for a closer look at the quote heading the fifth chapter: «kaiÌ ejanv mhÌ pistuvsete, ouJdeÌ mhÌ sunh`te / Se non crederete, non esisterete. / Is 7:9» with the note, which I transcribe for its value in relation to the contents of the chapter.33 The importance of this note lies, I believe, in the fact that it is the heading, first of all, of the chapter «La fe com a dimensió constitutiva de l’home» [Faith as a building block of man] and secondly because the content of the chapter begins with its interpretation.34

32 R. Panikkar, Mito, fede e ermeneutica... 33 «Prima di commentare il testo, darò alcune delle sue più comunit raduzioni: “Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis” (versione dei Settanta, generalmente utilizzata dai teologi medievali); “Sinoncredideritis, non permanebitis” (Vulgata); “Vosotros, si no tuvierais fe, no permaneceré is” (Nacar-Colunga); “Si no creéis, no podréis subsistir” (Martín Nieto); “Se non avretefede, non starete saldi” (Istituto Biblico); “Se non crederet, non restarete saldi” (Nardoni); “Mais si vous ne tenez à moi, vous ne tiendrez pas” (Bible de Jérusalem, ma in una nota: “Si vous ne croyezpas); “Gläub tihr nicht, so bleib tihrnicht” (Luther); “Se vi perdete di coraggio, la vostra causa è persa” (Knox); “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established” (AV e RV); (RSV only changes ‘ye’ to ‘you’); “Have firm faith, or you will not stand firm” (NEB). Questo testo è stato ampiamente commentato dalla tradizione cristiana. Cf. Agustí, Epistula 120,1,3 (PL 33,453; Sermone 43,VI,7 (PL 38,257); Sermone 118,2; 126,1,1; ecc.».Ibidem, 189. The names and abbreviations referred to in the text correspond to the following books: the Latin edition; the Spanish versions by Alberto Nacar and EloínoColunga, the Catholic version based on the original languages done in 1944; the version of Evaristo Martín Nieto, as editor, is after the Second Vatican Council; the next is from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome; Nardoni’s version, the Italian version byCastoldi, Nardoni, Pasquero and Robaldo published in 1961; the next two are well known; followed by the English Catholic version of the Vulgata by Ronald Knox done between 1945 and 1955; the initials correspond to: Authorized Version, Revised Version, Revised Standard Version, New English Bible. 34 «“Senza fede non potete esistere”. Così dice questo passaggio chiave della speculazione teologica cristiana tradizionale. Significativo è il gioco di parole in ebraico: se non credete, ta’aminu, non esisterete, te’amenu. Aman (Cf. amen, emet) è uno dei due modi di esprimere la fede. Se da un lato betah (batah) mette in resalto l’aspetto della confidenza, emet (aman) dall’altro indica fermezza, solidità, sussistenza e quindi consistenza». Aquesta nota és del – anu– (forma verbale di mu’min, ilcredente), text: «Cf. Corano, XLVII, passim, ove gli am “coloro che hannofede” (imân) svolgono un ruolo importante nell’Islam»(Ibidem, p. 190). Ja redactades aquestes pàgines ha apregut el segonvolum de l’Opera omnia: R. Panikkar,

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We establish, then, after that transcription, a triple bond: that which is created between the quote and the text, the content of the text, and the etymological and semantic clarifications. It is also important to consider the references and literary citations as a part of this poetic recourse. Homer and R. Tagore, F. Dostoievsky, T.S. Eliot and Antonio Machado are quoted; in the text or in notes, G. Benn, Dante and Jacopone da Todi, A. Solzhenitsyn and G. Tabidze, J. W. Goethe, Horace the Elder, and the young –because he is still alive– poet David Jou, F. Kafka, A. Camus, without counting the writers from Asia. This list is not exhaustive. The writers and the quotes have value because they act as a source of ideas, a guiding boundary marker, a maxim that confirms the thought, a light in the dark, but never as mere ornament. Two examples that prove how the quotes work with the content: the first are some verses from the Cant espiritual by Joan Maragall recast byPanikkar. They become the distilled idea, not only of the prologue they conclude, but of the entire book, becoming the summarized declaration and guiding comprehension. His originality, in addition, allows a rereading of the verses of Maragall, making them more expansive, charged with more meaning to the point, I would argue, of reversing their melancholy, griping air. «Allow me to say it by paraphrasing the poet: I quan vingui aquella hora de saviesa en què es desvetllaran els sentits humans, feu que siguin molt més penetrants, que sense oblidar la immediatesa ens duguin a descobrir la bellesa en la Vida tot estant».35 And when that hour of wisdom comes in which human senses are revealed, make them much more penetrating, so without forgetting the immediacy they lead us to discover the beauty in Life while in its midst. The second example: the subject of this statement is the human word: «Man is a speaking being; one cannot separate his speaking from his being: Homo loquens».36 This is so much the case that Panikkar explains it with a careful

Mite, símbol, culte. Opera Omnia Raimon Panikkar, Volum IX, Tom 1. Barcelona: Fragmenta, 2009. This contains five chapters, with their mottos, from the book Mito, fede ed ermeneutica. The reorganization of the material into two volumes and the addition of sections devoted to symbols and worship, obviously, alters the described usage of quotes. 35 R. Panikkar, Invitació a la saviesa, 8. 144

36 R. Panikkar, «La paraula, creadora de realitat», 26.


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consideration preceding the verses, which I quote here: «Each word is a mystery in that it says a universe. The word rosa, for example, awakens, says, reveals not only what it is (which is already an abstraction), but also all that it truly is “in everything,” because it is in constitutive relationship with the universe [...] To be precise, the word rosa is no mere noun: it is a noun loaded with adjectives (rosy); but it is also a verb, an action. The word rosa, ‘to rose’ to put it one way: goes from the rose to me, to us, and from us to the rose; there is much transitive and intransitive action between the rose and all that the rose ‘roses’: we imagine it, we smell it, we prune it, we offer it, we talk to it, it talks to us, it fascinates, it attracts (or repels), it reminds us, it excites us (to the point of irritating us with its doomed sentimentalism) [...] The rose is never alone. Even the purest nominalism has to add a tenemus to “the name of the rose”: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.37 Harkening back to the poets is not “poetic license”, but rather strict linguistic rigor: I jo m’he dit: construiré la rosa del pensament amb pètals de flaire suggerida: no cobegis la flor –no som en el jardí–, camina quietament pel viarany ombrós, a voltes fulgurant, de les paraules».38 And I told myself: I will build the rose of thought with petals of evoked scent: don’t covet the flower –we are not in the garden—, walk placidly down the shady, sometimes dazzling, path of words. The reader should keep in mind the way Panikkar introduces this poem. The poem is by Joan Vinyoli, from his book El callat.

On neology Approaching Panikkar’s work from the word leads one to discover that he has coined new ones. Words which, it should be said from the outset, are not simple

37 This note is from the text: «“Yesterday’s rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.” An expression from the 12th-century Benedictine Bernardus Morlanensis (of Morlaix) in his book De contemptu mundi and popularized by Umberto Eco’s novel, Il nome della rosa [...]». 38 Ibidem, 28-29.

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technical terms created by derivation or composition.The resulting words are dense because they are not configured as strictly unambiguous signifiers, but rather, in many cases, polysemous. However, not necessarily due to their strict lexico-semantic state, but rather because, beyond that state’s boundaries, they suggest much more within the context of Panikkar’s body of work. For example, «ontonomy» which he creates between the well-known words «autonomy» and «heteronomy». The composition creates a new word, generic in that it refers without restriction on the actions of any being. However the referential generalness still automatically connotes certain beings and certain actions that carry with them certain contexts.To put it another way: we are here faced with new technical terms for dense texts, mostly not closed in a univocalness of meaning reducible to a single context. There are precise in their meaning, yes, but also suggestive of other connotations. Perhaps it would serve us to consider a quote from Augustine in the hope that it will be of help in understanding how far one must go when entering the world of Panikkar. The Bishop of Hippo refers to signs in this way: «quod signasunt, id est, quod significant» and says: «Signum est enim res, praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire / The sign is that which, in addition to filling the senses with an image, evokes from inside itself another way of thinking».39 Which is to say, if the sign –Panikkar’s neologism— directs us to the signification that allows us to enter via the sense or senses into the lexico-semantic structure, it also evokes the thought of something else: a radical extraction from a specific culture.That is: in perceiving the, let’s say, new linguistic meaning we also grasp that there is another in the coordinates of other cultures and, what’s more, that from now on we have to retain both in order to be faithful to it. Based on his expressions, this one for example: «when the seed of Christian (we have no other word) faith falls in the Indian sun, it penetrates to grow and flower, but the results may be quite different from the branches and fruits of other lands.The root of the Christianity of two millennia is Jewish (Rm

39 Aurelius Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II, 1.1. (CC SL, 32). This same Augustinian text is used by R. Barthes, but with a more restricted meaning, while still equally valid, complementary and even a basis of my reading (see Roland Barthes, Elementos de semiologia, Madrid: Alberto Corazón, 1971, 39 [note the error: he refers to II, 1.2.).

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40 R. Panikkar, «Una teologia cristiana índica», Fe i teologia en la història. Estudis en honor del Prof. Dr. Evangelista Vilanova, a cura de Joan Busquets i Maria Martinell, Montserrat: Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya – Istituto per le Scienze Religiose (Bolonya) – Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1997, 675. Em permeto d’allargar la nota amb les referències bíbliques perquè em sembla que s’han de tenir presents, fins i tot literàriament: «Si les primícies són santes, també ho és tota la pasta; i si l’arrelés santa també les branques» (Rm 11,16); «Jesús els digué: en veritat, en veritat us ho dic, abans que Abraham vingués al món, jo sóc» (Jn 8,58).


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11,16), but not the seed (Jn 8,58)», 40 we comprehend the entire Panikkarian discourse –not only that which deals with the Christian world of the example— refers to a paradigm that strives to embrace all human visions of Reality (with a capital R, because it must omnicomprehensive). In any case, as for the neologisms and their particular connotation –we’ll call it omnicultural—there is no other path than a detailed study, and this is not the place for that; here we just indicate a case in point. 41 Real things are not sufficiently represented by scientific terms, given that scientific language, after all, is reduced to an organic group of signs and information for the communication of objective data, to which we react and act in consequence. «Science is information».42 However, reality and life are something more than just data; they are each person’s experience. Panikkar expresses it, very clearly, this way: «we use terms, but we say words. A word is not a mere term. The word is not a mere sign.»43 Why? «A real word includes the speaker as much as the person he is speaking to and what is being spoken about.»44 And to drive this point home, I will copy a repetition of these thoughts taken from a later text, spoken and printed in Catalan: «the word is only word – “living word” Maragall would say–, when it includes the thing spoken of and the speakers [...] It is not language which reveals things as it is not things which ‘cause’ language. Things are themselves linguistic crystallizations –like etymology already suggests; the things themselves are revealed to humans and animals– and possibly to all beings […] The things are the revelation itself. The thing is when it reveals itself. The language of things is their awakening. The thing is this unveiling. That is the symbol. Which is why the symbol is not purely subjective nor exclusively objective. The symbol only is symbol when it symbolizes and it only symbolizes when it is revealed to itself».45 We will not enter the path of the «symbol» even though we are aware that «here we arrive at one of the most interesting points in Panikkar’s discourse:

41 «We all know Nominalism […] is the basic assumption of Science. Now, the scientific use of terms implies that we have abolished the “whims of fantasy” and found the exact correlation between terms and concepts. […] This is the essence of Nominalism: names do not name things but merely represent concepts. […] Clarity, distinction and precision are the ideals –and conditions– for scientific intelligibility». R. Panikkar, «Words and Terms», Archivo di Filosofia [or cited thus:Esistenza, Mito, Ermeneutica. Scritti per Enrico Castelli], II, (1980): 121]. 42 Ibidem, 122. 43 Ibidem, 123. 44 Ibidem, 124. 45 R. Panikkar, «La paraula, creadora de realitat», 23-24.

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the notion of the symbol».46 I think that the excerpts allow for the assertion that the bulk of the neologisms created by Panikkar are encapsulated more beside the word than the term –without getting too far from his own approach, obviously. When he writes in the small type of a note: «I have coined the term techniculture to express the passage of a civilization from agrarian to technicultural»,47 he has not created a word that can be evaluated with the same preciseness and limitations that a mathematician would use with the «logarithm» or «sulphuric» of the world of chemistry. Techniculture (not «technology») is the neologism that becomes symbol of a particular culture, that is, of a concept of the world and of life with the subsequent way of relating to it, living it and expressing it. When we hear it or read it we enter into this conception to understand it and confront it. In his aforementioned book Le culte et l’homme séculier, he uses the neologism«nigriques», which in English would be negrics. «Rubric» is an old word from the Christian liturgical world (in Western Europe beginning in the 14th century), that note written in red ink that determines how a ritual should be carried out. The neologism refers to the part written in black ink and comes to mean the content of the rite; if the rubric explains how to perform it, the negric is it in itself. «Originally there was little separation between rubrics and negrics. Form and content were inseparable; the outer act had as much important as the inner one [...] In a fascinating process, in which human consciousness is totally implicated, the rituals gradually become internalized until, finally, the intention begins to dominate to the extent that it endangers the material, external aspect of the act. Then a compromise and a certain balance, which is not always easy to maintain, is reached between the negrics and the rubrics».48 Having read this quote I am, you could say, tempted to think that we have always had the two words in our Romance languages. I won’t deny that both are lovely words from the semantic field of the liturgy, but it is also true that in Catalan from «rúbrica» we have derived «rubricador», «rubricista» and even «rubricisme» –although not found in the normative dictionary– and last but not least, «rubricar», the verb that has leapt the furthest from the liturgical realm, which makes all speakers think of the name at the bottom of a document (supposing that the word hasn’t been completely replaced by «to sign»).

46 Steven Hopkins, «El símbolo, la plalabra y el mito del pluralismo. (Reflexiones sobre la metodología intercultural de R. Panikkar)», Anthropos, 53-54 (1985): 83. 47 R. Panikkar, «Words and Terms», 124. 148

48 R. Panikkar, Mite, símbol, culte, 467-468. While I used the French book in the presentation, here I copied from the definitive Catalan version.


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One last example. «Anachronism is what our grandparents do: they judge the world of today with their ideas from yesterday [...] On the other hand catachronism falls on the other extreme: it is using today’s categories to judge the past».49 The innovation is clear. The dictionary lists «anachronism», putting together the prefix ANA that means «out of» with the noun CRONOS, «time». Quite a common word. But its opposite doesn’t exist, created with the prefix CATA that means «beneath», which is to say: if the former tells us of something situated outside of the present day, the latter tells us of a time past beneath something present. How can one explain the absence of this neologism in the dictionary? Certainly not because this error of appreciation is less real than the one committed by our grandparents! Is there a psychological explanation, a sociological one…? I hasten to reiterate that the neologisms found in the work of Panikkar cannot be discussed in the space of four pages; they are merely mentioned here as another aspect to keep in mind.

In closing Our look at Panikkar’s work draws to an end. It is as if we were closing a circle by returning to the first path that sheds light on the work of RaimonPanikkar, that which searches out the root. The poets, who have also made an appearance here, have more solid arguments to close these pages. I reproduce a few of their words, taken from an interview with the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwix, who died less than two years ago. «Poetry can only watch over the light, it can learn from the strength of the grass more than the strength of an airplane. It can renew and revive man’s astonishment. Words in poetry always maintain the essence of their first life. Poetry teaches us how to return to the childhood of things, to our childhood within those things, and renew it. This is the best means to defend human existence».50 Translation from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem

49 R. Panikkar, Benaurada senzillesa, 47-48. 50 Hassan Nadmii Larbi El Harti, «Mahmud Darwix», Avui, Suplement Cultura, (May 5, 2005), III.

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eports from lectures given by Joan Crexells at the University of Salamanca in 1921 Josep Pla1

Josep Pla had already met Crexells before the two men set off in 1921 for Salamancaby way of Madrid. They had started work at the Spanish-language Barcelona daily newspaper La Publicidadon the same day, under the directionof Romà Jori. Jori had given Pla the task of reporting for the paper on the philosophy lectures that Crexells was to give at the University of Salamanca. Pla’s descriptions of the journey’s events, which appear in his journal Madrid 1921, portray Crexells as a very educated young man, who was highly conversant with European culture and never gave himself over to intellectual laziness. When Pla and Crexells arrived in Salamanca, Unamuno took them on a tour of the university and other sites of interest. During their stay, Crexells found it impossible to get a word in edgewise on the subject of philosophy with Unamuno, who as rector of the University of Salamanca was fixated on the only two matters apparentlyof concern to the manat that time: Madrid politics and poetry. It was Unamuno himself who, in a hushed voice, introduced Crexells to the assembled audience. Pla, seated at the back of the hall, heard hardly any of the introduction. Based on the Crexells lectures, Pla wrote two lengthy reports.For the lectures themselves, Pla moved to a seat in the front row. Between him and Professor Noguera sat Unamuno, who was demonstrably impressed by the youthand talent of Crexells. The reports written by Pla for the La Publicidad are confusing, convoluted and riddled with errors. Nonetheless, they remain a document of considerable value. Crexells, after paying tribute to his hosts and to his audience, turned to his work on the latest currents in German philosophy, which he had studied during his time in Berlin. His first lecture attested to the need to eliminate reductionist prejudices that restrict our understanding of the phenomenon of culture, while his second lecture sketched out the current panorama of philosophy with uncommon clarity and made an extraordinary effort to cast Scholasticism in a fresh light. Scholasticism still played a dominant role in the university chairs of Spain and certainly, in that distant year of 1921, Crexells still guarded secret hopes of one day rising to fill one of those chairs. [Sílvia Gómez Soler] 1

La Publicidad 8-III-1921 (evening edition, p. 1) and 11-III-1921 (evening edition, p. 1).

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Crexells’s first lecture at Salamanca: the meaning of modern culture In his introduction to Crexells, Professor Noguera evoked the pre-eminence of the lecturer in Berlin. Crexells, for the other Spaniards in the German capitol, served as a spiritual guide. Then Crexells took the podium to speak. Our friend saluted Salamanca, the spirit of that ancient city of learning, and extolled his contact with this spirit, paying tribute to Miguel de Unamuno, with whom his dealings, as Crexells put it, showed Unamuno to be an infinitely more complex, more provocative and more subversive spirit than anyone might imagine. Then Crexells launched into his subject, dispelling its apparent obscurity with remarks on the division drawn since the eighteenth century between Culture and Nature. In addition to Nature and the Natural Sciences, which are the ones studied by the being crucified in space and time, there is Culture and its sciences, which are studied by an unreal reality, that which is the spirit situated in time and outside space. Crexells analysed the factors that come into play in the spiritual phenomenon of the Word in order to reinforce his dualist position, citing Maragall. The Word has an expressive, physical significance. And it has a significant value – the truth or falsehood of a word – which is a construct of culture. Going into greater depth, Crexells demonstrated that this analysis serves to free us from what a modern philosopher has called the prejudice in favour of the real, which consists in the absurd proposition that all objects to which we can refer in speech must necessarily yield to translation in terms of Physics or Psychology. Once this hurdle of monism is overcome, the truth of the dualist position can be seen more sharply by examining the objects of various sciences. History, for example. The real portion of History’s object is infinitesimal. History is a science that studies a tissue of ideal relations, with a foundation in reality. These relations cannot be translated intothe terms of Physics. The same can be said of Mathematics as well. Only an arbitrary realism or contradictory empiricism can think of numbers as realities.

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In addition, without the justification of the ideal, it would be impossible to speak of moral ideals. Things, in their aspect of reality, do not belong to any moral system: they are simply real or unreal, not good or bad. Goodness and evil come about only when their meaning is compared to the degree with which they fulfil an ideal system. The contrary case is called fetishism.


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Nor is it possible without the justification of the ideal to build an aesthetics. Aesthetics disappears when its object can be translated in terms of Psychology or Physics. After clarifying these matters, it is possible to begin speaking of the thing that is “culture”, which is composed of these ideal, not real, elements of being. Prejudices that arise in reflections on culture: the view that there is only a single line of culture that is distinguishable by degrees. In a word, the prejudice of progress. The chief merit of Spengler, the author of the work The Decline of the West, which has recently appeared in Germany and which Crexells has discussed in La Publicidad, lies precisely in showing the possibility of interpreting history as a series of cultural processes that do not inform one another, so that each culture pursues a given development until its most deep-seated motives disappear and no one else inherits them. Another prejudice to avoid is reducing the process of culture – which is complex and made up of divergent elements – to a moral progress of humanity. This is the Kantian prejudice. From this point, Crexells drew on some words of Goethe to establish the enormous complexity of the phenomenon of culture. This is a complexity that nonetheless enables us to distinguish two factors in the concept of culture: an object to which we refer and the subjective function that drives our reference to a thing. Through the crack opened up by this distinction, Crexells proceeded to the heart of his lecture, noting that the tendency in the cultural attitude of modern man, unlike the cultural attitude of hisclassical counterpart, is to merge into the culture, to take greater interest in the subjective elements of the subjectobject dualism within culture than in its objective elements. Then Crexells went on to support this idea with evidence, singling out crucial moments when such an interest becomes apparent. First, the interest in history, viewed not as the act of adopting an attitude of curiosity towardwhat has been left behind by the centuries, but as the taking of a suitable stance to uncover how the individual and social subjects of history viewed their things. This interest entails the smallest, but no less intense, interest in biography. Related to this point, there is in the modern sensibility a special taste for unfinished things, for torsos. In works of art, this sensibility wants to see the effort, the passion,the furrowed brow of the artist. This explains the desire for the subjective, which is not found in the finished work because the fact of its being finished makes it entirely independent of its creator.

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This also explains the predominance of music in modern culture as opposed to the predominance of sculpture in ancient culture. Another feature of modern culture is a certain tendency toward originality. This can be explained by the fact that what is objective, both real and ideal, is the patrimony of all, it is something vulgar. Works that are original and unique, works that cannot genuinely be reproduced or communicated – these are subjective phenomena. In addition, there is a tendency in modern culture to put greater trust in intuition than in intelligence, for the reproduction of reality. And however hard it may be to believe, this tendency comes to us from the North, from Goethe, from the grand Romantic systems of the Germans, and it has been systematized in Bergson. This tendency is perceptible in morality, too. The predominance of Kantian morality enthrones subjectivity. We are constantly told that acting according to an external code, according to a traditional system, is legality, not morality. Moreover, the talk is constantly of Life. Life is the word in vogue. The demand is that art be alive, that itgoes hand in hand with the period, that science has a life-affirming value, that anti-vitalist morality is inhuman. This word Life is used today to a degree and to an extent that has never before been greater. The truth is that since Goethe everything of Life is a divine thing anointed with religiosity. The preponderance of the notion of Life is simply the possibility of being in direct contact with a consciousness, awakening its deepest subjective resources. Crexells alluded to Spengler’s work when he said that this tendency [of modern man] toward subjectivity, in opposition to the objectivity of his classical counterpart, explains why there has been no communication between the two cultures. They have bothcome about organically. Both have been born and both have matured. Classical culture has died. Our culture will go on until roughly the year 2200. A revolt against this state of affairs in the name of rejuvenation is futile. Crexells took Spengler’s conclusions as they must be taken, i.e. with a certain sense of irony, and moved on to summarize that the tendency of modern man toward subjectivity is an ethical tendency, in opposition to the ethics of his classical counterpart, which was objective and essentially aesthetic. The objective provokes contemplation. The subjective is a spur to action. Ultimately, Greek morality is about beauty, elegance. Modern beauty is closely bound up with certain moral interests. 154

In his conclusion, Crexells refuted the materialist interpretation of History, a truly powerful source of objection to any dualist philosophy.


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He stated that this doctrine emerged remotely from the hands of the theoreticians of capitalism. And now it is pushed by capitalists and Marxists alike, who deny the existence of a disinterested life beyond economics. In response to the fact that recent history has not followed the Marxist path, in response to Berstein’s revisionism, which attempts to unite socialism with Kantian philosophy in order to define history according to ideal elements, in response to the failure of Marxism to explain any fact of culture, in response to all of this, Crexells said: “Even if economic materialism were right, it would be unjust”. Crexells closed the lecture with a reminder of that tragic scene from George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. The son of an armaments manufacturer fights his father, because the business is repugnant to him and he wants to devote his life to politics. Crexells also spoke of another tragedy, the one of the businessman who becomes imprisoned by phantoms – ghosts of gold – that he himself has created. And next to the unlimited power that we have given to gold, there is the power that we have given to another spectre, the stomach. A “dictatorship” against capital, but also a “dictatorship” against the stomach in order to ascertain the principle of freedom and, ultimately, of potency in the creation of new works – that is what Crexells seeks. The “dictatorships”of capital and of the stomach are injustices. And even if these “dictatorships”, which are mechanical or biological, are things that we cannot rid ourselves of, they do not therefore cease to be the more unjust.

Crexells’s second lecture at Salamanca: the rebirth of Scholasticism If the first lecture of Crexells was good, the second lecture, in which he improvised, fully demonstrated the youthful doctor in his philosophical calling, advancing an idea of how rich with life, interest and refinement his tenure will be as a professor. Crexells has a way of speaking that I find captivating. His oratory, with its hint of urgency, slowly builds without great shifts in pitch, creating as he goes. It is all as little Roman as anyone could wish, but it is closer to our own sensibility. The composed, academic orator and the chatterbox orator, who goes on like a parrot, such as the young do when they start off, I find utterly abhorrent. Crexells talked about the rebirth of Scholasticism. Pursuing this theme, which does not seem interesting at first glance and which we might even say has no interest for us at all, Crexells did nothing less than advance a highly personal

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synthesis of the doctrines and directions currently at the cutting edge of philosophy. An articulate, clear and profound synthesis. Crexells spoke of the direction of philosophy in our times, which some may see as an attack on Kant. While a critical review of Crexells’s remarks on the point does not fit in the commonplace pages of a periodical, I have sought to boil them down into a few words and, in so doing, I have given more thought to the few who take an interest in these matters than to the general readership. This is my attempt. From the Renaissance onward, Scholasticism fell into the same disrepute as the other products of medieval culture. Until recently, most treatises on the history of philosophy addressed Greek and modern philosophy at considerable length, while paying scant attention to the products and benefits of medieval philosophy, which were dispatched in a few cursory pages. The Scholastic method, the syllogism, suffered numerous reversals and it appeared to have been left so steely and bloodless that it became nothing but a heap of scrap-iron and rubbish. Today there is a movement to rectify this attitude, with new fields of study tending to give medieval philosophy the attention that it deserves. In contrast to the articles that until recently dominated the most interesting philosophical publications, contemporary philosophy now shows a tendency to pose questions and give solutions that share many points in common with the scholastics. Contemporary philosophy tends to reject the Copernican revolution of Kant: things do not revolve around knowledge, as the philosopher of Königsberg wished, but rather it is knowledge that revolves around things. The anti-Kantian movement was begun by the late Professor Brentano, in Vienna. Other noteworthy signs of this rebirth: The resurrection of the ontological problem by the school of Husserl. The development of formal logic, which is simply mathematical logic, the subject on which the famous Bertrand Russell is at work. The realism of Külpe and the American realists against the idealism of the Kantians and the sensualism of the positivists and of the new, more subtle positivists like Avenarius and Mach. Finally, the tendency towards a non-egotistical materialist ethics, which can be seen for example in the essays of Scheler, shows several aspects of this movement toward forms of scholastic thinking, such as we have observed. 156

Therefore, the modern scholar of philosophy needs to know Scholasticism and its special approach to problems.


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A highly fascinating philosopher who has recently died – Alexis Meinong – to whom scholastic influences have been attributed, even though they could not be direct influences given his imperfect knowledge of the school’s doctrines, decries this lack of knowledge. Meinong said that he recommended to his students that they study the philosophy of the Middle Ages as an essential part of their education as scholars of philosophy. In conclusion, Crexells noted that he had not been able to present the issues other than with a cinematic sweep given the broad horizon of the subject matter, but that he could offer further reading on all the points and would be delighted to go into greater depthwith anyone pursuing any of the issues discussed in his lecture. We have jumped from the cinematic to the homeopathic, from the vast sweep of thought to the most intimate well-being of the individual, and that is why it is infinitely more necessary for any readers who cannot encounter Crexells’s lecture except through my muddled and paltry report to turn to Crexells himself. I can assure them that Crexells will so admirably attend to them that they will be left short of words to praise him. Translation from Catalan by Joel Graham

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ebastià Trias Mercant (1933-2008) Andrés L. Jaume Rodríguez Universitat de les Illes Balears Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres Departament de Filosofia andres.jaume@uib.es**

Sebastià Trias Mercant was born in Valldemossa (Mallorca) in 1933. Trias completed secondary school at the Ramon Llull Institute, where he studied philosophy under Professor Josep Font i Trias, a man he would later succeed in the post. Between 1953 and 1959, Trias took his degree in Philosophy and Letters at the University of Barcelona. There, among the teaching staff, Joaquim Carreras Artau and Pere Font i Puig were important influences on him. In 1968, he joined the Maioricensis Schola Lullistica as a teacher and subsequently served as the organisation’s secretary (1978-1987), rector (1987-1993) and honorary rector (1984). In 1971, he defended his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of P. Raymundo Pasqual and the influence of Llullism on Pasqual’s thought. The thesis, completed under the supervision of Emilio Lledó, bore the title El neolulismo filosófico del P. Raymundo Pasqual. According to Trias himself in an interview published in issue 854 of the journal Lluc, he came into contact with Llull thanks to Professor Sanfèlix, who suggested that he write a paper on Llull, and not on Unamuno, as he had done in the subject History of Spanish Philosophy. Although Trias kept an interest in Unamuno, papers on Unamuno appeared to attract little interest in Barcelona at that time, especially in the journal Espíritu. However, the editor of Espíritu, the elder Roig i Gironella, did encourage articles on Llull, which he was delighted to publish. From 1972 to 1978, Trias took up a temporary cover position as professor of Fundamental Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. In addition, he was named to the Philosophy Chair at the Bernat Metge Institute, a secondary school, and he held this post until his return to the Ramon Llull Institute, in Mallorca. Trias could have taken a post in the new Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of the Balearic Islands, when the university became independent from the University of Barcelona in 1978. After all, the highly regarded, joint courses in Philosophy and Letters at the Estudi

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General Lul·lià were the seed of the current faculty. At the time, however, ideological differences appear to have existed with the academic authorities in the Department of Philosophy. As a result, Trias remained outside the University of the Balearic Islands, although he continued to enjoy the respect and admiration of other members of that academic milieu. From 1983 to 2003, he took charge of Anthropology as a tutor and professor for the online university, UNED, based in Palma de Mallorca. In addition to the Maioricensis Schola Lullistica, Trias belonged to several scientific associations. He was a founding member of the Catalan Institute of Anthropology (1974) and a member of the Asociación de Hispanismo Filosófico, the Royal Academy of Doctors of Catalonia (1995) and the Royal Academy of Genealogy, Heraldry and History of Mallorca (2000). He was an honorary member of the Philosophical Association of the Balearic Islands (2001) and sat on the governing body of the Estudi General Lul·lià. The scientific interests of Trias could be grouped into three areas: philosophy, Lullism (the thought of Ramon Llull and his followers), and anthropology. In a sense, for Trias, the three areas fell on a single spectrum, which could be characterised by the famous quotation of Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Trias viewed the study of anthropology, particularly the world of our Mediterranean islands, as indispensable to an understanding of the great philosophical problems in the history of philosophy. His ambitious project ranged widely from anthropological questions of Mallorca cuisine to linguistic studies undertaken from various standpoints, such as structuralism and Lullism. He was a man of great learning and avid curiosity. His extremely diverse work addressed the interplay between what is closest to hand and what is most universal. In the history of ideas, he wrote two volumes for the Historia del pensament a Mallorca, while in the field of Lullism, he penned the highly useful reference work Diccionari d’escriptors lul·listes, as well as a handful of specialist papers and works aimed at a more popular readership. In the field of anthropology, he produced studies on the works of Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria and on Mallorcan cuisine. Of particular interest are his texts on the anthropology of the Balearic Islands: Una historia de la antropología balear (1992) and L’antropologia cultural a les Balears (segles XIX-XX). A man of staunch religious faith, Trias died in Mallorca on 1 June 2008. He left behind a vast collection of works and writings, which appear in the bibliography that follows.1 1

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The attached bibliography was made possible thanks to the help of the widow of Dr. Trias, Antònia Prats. She generously provided me with an electronic document prepared by Dr. Trias himself, which contained practically all of the material that appears in the bibliography. I would also like to express my gratitude for the inestimable assistance of Dr. Alexandre Font, Dr. Peter Ramis and his son, Dr. Rafael Ramis, who provided me with their obituary of Trias published in issue 42 of the journal Revista de hispanismo filosófico. These pieces of information have all gone into the writing of this biographical and bibliographical note.


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 6. 2012. P . 159-172 Sebastià Trias Mercant (1933-2008)

Sigles AG Augustinus AHAE Anuario de Historia de la Antropología Española ASHFE Actas del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía Española Ath Anthropologica B Diario Baleares CD La Ciudad de Dios Cr Crisis DHAE Diccionario Histórico de Antropologia Española EB Estudis Baleàrics EL Estudios Lulianos Er Enrahonar Es Estudios Esp Espíritu Lt Latitud 39 Mq Mayurqa Mr Miramar Pn Pensamiento Rb Revista de Bachillerato Rd Randa REFM Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval RIJ Revista del Instituto de la Juventud SL Studia Lullistica Slu Studia Lulliana T Taula

I. Antrhopology - «El binomio joven-adulto en nuestra generación», RIJ, 4, (1966): 91-106. - «Los impactos del turismo en la juventud actual», RIJ, 7, (1966): 55-92. - «Apuntes para una clasificación de grupos juveniles», RIJ, 13, (1967): 61-95. - «Algunas relaciones vivenciales del Bachiller Superior», RIJ, 20, (1968): 19-54. - «Estructura y funciones del lenguaje como modelo de comunicación generacional», RIJ, 31, (1971): 37-75. - «Configuración histórico-sociológica de la problemática juvenil», RIJ, 31, (1971): 59-83. - «Lenguaje y ética. Hacia una revisión de la terminología moral del adolescente», RIJ, 37 (1971): 133-137.

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- «El hombre tridimensional en el lulismo de la Ilustración», AG, XVII, (1972): 397-420. - «Hombre y filosofía a nivel arqueológico», Mq, IX, (1972): 81-100. - «Posible estatuto de una antropología filosófica», EL, XVIII, (1974): 52-61. - «Concepto de de-construcción y antropologías», II Simposi Nacional de Antropología, Barcelona (1975). - «Una filosofía para las ciencias humanas», Es, XXXII, (1976): 195-214. - «Sujeto y lenguaje. El diferencialismo», Ath, (1977): 4-5. - «El hombre, las antropologías y el lenguaje», Pn, 129, (1977): 35-59. - «El ser del hombre y el ser del lenguaje», CD, CXC, (1977): 87-113. - «El hombre y sus parámetros dialécticos», Es, 132, (1978): 303-312. - «Platón y una gramática del poder», Pn, 37, (1981): 287-312. - Valldemossa. Una història, una cultura, un poble, Llucmajor, Imp. Moderna, 1981. - «Aproximació a l’obra de l’arxiduc Lluís Salvador», EB 2 (1981): 87-107. - Valldemossa. L’amor i la cuina, Palma de Mallorca, Moll, 1982. - «El concepte de ‘cultura nostrada», Lt, 39, 12, (1982): 14-16. - «El programa metodològic a l’antropologia de Lluís Salvador», EB, 11, (1982): 91-106. - «Ritos de paso. La ideología de los ritos de muerte en el XIX mallorquín», EB, 17, (1985): 91-106. - «Etnografía y folklore en Mallorca», en A. Aguirre, La Antropología cultural en España, Barcelona, PPU, 1986, p. 213-240. - «Crítica al pensamiento folk por el regeneracionismo mallorquín», ASHFE, Salamanca, Kadmos, 1988, p. 183-194. - «Ensayo de etnografía matrimonial en el Blanquerna», SL, Miscellanea in honorem S. Garcías Palou, (1989), p. 101-108. - «Las Tabulae Ludovicianae de Luís Salvador. Necesidad de una edición», EB, 39, (1991): 127-143. - «La antropología itinerista del Die Balearen», EB, 41, (1991): 87-94. - «La dialéctica Mallorca/América en el pensament de l’exili republicà», dins América y Mallorca. Del predescubrimiento hasta el siglo XX, Palma de Mallorca, Ediciones Miramar, 1991. - «¿Existe una etnografía balear?», AHAE, 1, (1992): 23-26. 162

- Una historia de la antropología balear, Barcelona, Boixareu, 1992.


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- «Folclore, etnografía y etnología en Baleares», en A. Aguirre (ed.) Historia de la antropología Española, Barcelona, Boixareu, 1992, p. 277-300. - «La antropología del Mediterráneo: Posible aportación española», Actas del I Congreso de Historia de la Antropologia Española, vol. I, 1992, p. 33-52. - Antropologia de la cuina mallorquina, Palma de Mallorca, El Tall, 1993. - L’arxiduc Lluís Salvador, una història de vida, Palma de Mallorca, Cort, 1994. - Les possessions mallorquines de l’arxiduc Lluís Salvador, Palma de Mallorca, Ed. Cort, 1994 (traducció a l’espanyol i a l’alemany). - La cuina mallorquina de l’arxiduc Lluís Salvador, Palma de Mallorca, J.J. Olañeta ed., 1994. - «La cuina lul·liana i els seus criteris dietètics i nivells socials», Actes del Ir. Col·loqui d’Història de l’ Alimentació a la Corona d’Aragó, Lleida, Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, vol. 2 (1995), p. 845-856. - «Los documentos y la cultura material», en A. Aguirre (ed.) Etnografía, Barcelona, Boixareu, 1995, p. 160-170. - «La etnicidad balear como problema», Ath, 18, (1995): 133-149. - «Alimentació i dietètica a la literatura lul·liana», XIX Jornades d’Estudis Històrics Locals, Palma de Mallorca, Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics, 1996, p. 689-697. - La diferencia entre los pueblos, Discurs d’ingrés a la Reial Acadèmia de Doctors de Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Cort, 1996. - Valldemossa. Història, mites i tradicions. Palma de Mallorca, J. Olañeta editor, 1996, (hi ha traducció a l’espanyol i l’alemany). - «La relación natural-artificial en el Libre de Home de Ramon Llull», Actes del Simposi Internacional de Filosofia de l’Edat Mitjana, Patronat d’Estudis Osonencs, Vic, 1996, p. 450-456. - La bona cuina. Un viatge vers el mite, Palma de Mallorca, Ed. Cort, 1997. - «Modos de ser, modos de ver. Alma, personalidad y etnicidad», en Etnología y tradiciones de las Islas Baleares, Palma de Mallorca, El Día del Mundo / Rey Sol, 1997. - Santa Maria de Valldemossa, Mallorca, Imp. Politècnica, 1998. - «El ritual de la denominació, X Plecs de cultura popular», Mr, 42, 2000. - «Nota sobre la pregunta antropològica lul·liana», SLu., XL, (2000): 111-115. - «Antropologia, història i musicologia», VII Trobada de Documentalistes Musicals, Campos (Mallorca), 2000, p.145-158. - «La enfermedad etnogràfica y los santos mediadores», Ciència i cultura en el siglo XXI. Estudis en homenatge a Josep Casajuana, Barcelona, Reial Acadèmia de Doctors, 2001.

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- Lluís Salvador d’Habsburg-Lorena, Les taules Ludovicianes. Qüestionari i arxiu del llibre Les Balears, Traducció, introducció i notes, Palma de Mallorca, Consell de Mallorca, Departament de Cultura, 2001. - Lletres, aromes i sabors. Els nostres llibres de cuina, Palma de Mallorca, ed. Documenta Balear, 2002. - «Història i genealogia: nació en comú i la meva nació», Memòries de la Reial Academia Mallorquina d’Estudis Genealògics, Heràldics i Històrics, 13, (2003): 63-76. - «Salut, malaltia i etnomedicina», Mr., 52, 2005. - Valldemossa dins la modernitat. Literatura i història, Mallorca, Imp. Politècnica, 2005. - «Historia y antropología de archivo», Memòries de la Reial Acadèmia Mallorquina d’Estudis Genealògics, Heràldics i Històrics, 15, (2005): 75-88. - «Les possessions, un patrimoni cultural», Mr., 65, 2005. - «Breu reflexió sobre el patrimoni etnogràfic», Lluc, 850, (2006): 45-46. - L’antropologia cultural a les balears (segles XIX-XX), Palma, Edicions Documenta Balear, 2008.

II. Philosophy - «El pensamiento cosmológico del lulista P. A. Raymundo Pasqual», EL, V, (1961): 263-294. - «Las tesis filosóficas de la Universidad Luliana», EL, IX, (1965): 208-227. - «Llull en su época y en la época moderna. La síntesis del P. Marzal», Esp, 54, (1966): 141-171. - «El sistema pedagógico luliano y las máquinas de enseñar», EL, XI, (1967): 209215. - «El conocimiento de Dios en el lulismo del periodo universitario», EL, X, (1968): 229-246; XI: 129-138. - «La ética luliana de las virtudes en el ‘Fèlix de les Meravelles», EL, XIII, (1971): 113-132; XIV, (1971): 33-152. - «Significado histórico-filosófico de la hermenéutica lulista de la época de la Ilustración», EL, XV, (1971): 35-54. - «La termionología ética de la filosofía lulista del setecientos», Es, 20, (1971): 515. 164


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- «Hermenéutica y lenguaje en la filosofía lulista del siglo XVIII», Mq, VI, (1971): 36-60. - El neolulismo filosófico y su integración europea según la obra de fray Pasqual. Resumen de la tesis doctoral, Universitat de Barcelona, PEUB, 1971. - El pensamiento y la palabra, Seminario de Filosofía de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Palma de Mallorca, 1972. - «Filosofía y lenguaje. Del lenguaje, objeto de la filosofía a la filosofía como lenguaje», Mq, IX, (1972): 81-100. - «Signo y símbolo. Breve introducción a la filosofía de las formas simbólicas», Traza y Baza 2, (1972): 133-147. - «La gramática filosófica en el lulismo de la Ilustración», Mq, VIII, (1972): 65-82. - «Leibniz et la Science universelle des lullistes du XVIIIè siècle», II Internationaler Leibniz Kongres, Hannover, 1972. - «La revisión filosófica del lulismo institucional», EL, XVII, (1973): 263-266. - «El problema del arabismo luliano», EL, XVII, (1973): 263-266. - «Encuentros de la teoría del lenguaje de Unamuno», Papeles de Son Armadans, CCVIII, (1973): 37-59. - Filosofia y Sociedad. Una ecología del neolulismo, Instituto de Estudios Baleáricos, Palma de Mallorca, 1973. - «Conversación, lenguaje y filosofía en Unamuno», Pn, 117, (1974): 37-66. - «Historia, lectura y filosofía», Es, XXXII, (1975): 465-496. - «Raices agustinianas en la filosofía del lenguaje de R. Llull», EL, XXIII, (1976): 45-68. - «Teoría y práctica del comentario de textos filosóficos», RB, 5, (1978): 25-33. - «L’escola Lul·lista i la nova tradició cultural», EL, XXIII, (1979): 203-206. - «La filosofía y su hábitat», CD, CXCIII, (1979): 239-268. - «Consideraciones en torno al problema de la fe y la razón en la obra literaria de Ramon Llull», EL, XXIII, (1979): 45-68. - «Sentido filológico y sentido simbólico. Dos modos de lectura en la filosofía de Unamuno», Mq,XI, (1974): 139-152. - «La ideología luliana de Miramar», Actas del Ii Congres Internacional de lulismo, (1979), vol. I: 9-29. - «La filosofía de Ramon Llull, encuentro de lenguas», Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Filosofía Medieval, vol.II, (1979): 1311-1317. - «L’Escola Lliure de Lul·lisme», EL, XXV, (1981): 269-294.

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- «Apunt per a una lectura kantiana de la Crítica de la Raó Pura», Er, (1982), 4: 6567. - «El concepte de cultura filosòfica nostrada », Lt, (1982): 14-15. - «La filosofia de l’educació a la Maioricensis Schola Lullistica», Er, 5/6, (1983): 181-185. - Història del pensament a Mallorca, Palma de Mallorca, Editorial Moll, 2 vols., vol. I, 1985; vol. 2, 1995. - «Sebastián Garcías Palou. Un hombre de iglesia, un hombre de ciencia», EL, XXVII, (1987): 253-255. - «Un nuevo manuscrito del P. Raymundo Pasqual», EL XXVIII (1988): 77-84. - Càntics i cobles. Pròleg i edició de l’ Exposició de los càntics… de sor Anna M. del Santíssim Sagrament, Palma de Mallorca, Moll, 1988. - «El Ramon Llull de Miguel Cruz Hernández y las “zonas calientes” del pensamiento luliano», Anthropos, 86/87, (1988): 98-102. - «Proyecto de sistematización de la ética luliana», EL, XXIX, (1989): 45-58. - «El lulismo barroco y fray Francisco Marçal», Cuadernos salmantinos de Filosofía, XVI, (1989): 107-125. - «L’anàlisi del llenguatge lul·lià a l’obra del P. Pasqual», Rd, 27, (1990): 119-133. - «El lingüisme filosòfic en el Liber de ascensu et descensu intellectus», SL, Miscel·lanea in honorem F.B. Moll et M. Colom, (1990): 77-88. - «El pensamiento historiográfico del P. Batllori o las variaciones crocianas», Anthropos, 112 (1990): 36-39. - «Los pensadores mallorquines del exilio (1937-1977)», ASHFE, (1992): 49-65. - «América y los misioneros franciscanos mallorquines del s. antropológico-teológico», ASHFE, (1992): 97-116.

XVIII.

Un modelo

- Ramon Llull. El pensamiento y la palabra, Palma de Mallorca, El Tall, 1993. - Llull, Madrid, Editorial del Orto, 1995. - «Arabismo e islamología en la obra de Ramon Llull», CD, CCVIII, (1996): 125138. - «Relació natural-artificial en el Llibre de Home», Actes del Simposi Internacional de Filosofia de l’Edat Mitajana, Vic – Girona, Patronat d’estudis Ossonencs, 1996. - «Las claves hermenéuticas del pensamiento de Ramon Llull», REFM, 4, (1997): 51-64. 166

- «Les claus de la Il·lustració mallorquina», Afers, 30, (1998): 297- 308.


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- «Cartas del abad Pasqual a fray Gifreu sobre Ramon Llull», REFM, 5, (1999): 109-117. - «Judíos y cristianos. La apologética de la tolerancia en Llibre del Gentil», REFM, 5, (1999): 61-74. - «Llorenç Pérez i la Causa Pia Lul·liana», EB, 62/63, (1999): 31-34. - El pensament a les Balears durant els segles XIX i XX, Col. Quaderns d’Història Contemporània de les Balears, 23, Palma, Edicions Documenta Balear, 2000. - «Nota sobre la pregunta antropològica lul·liana», SLu, 40, (2000), p. 111-115. - «Les cartes lul·lianes entre Mateu Obrador i Lluís S. Vives», SLu, 41, (2001): 1-110. - Josep Font i Trias, Escritos filosóficos. Transcripción, introducción y notas, Mallorca, Estudi General Lul·lià, 2002. - «Ramon Llull i les creences religioses a la Mallorca de Jaume II», Jaume II i les ordinacions de l’any 1300, Mallorca, Consell de Mallorca, Departament de Cultura, 2002, p. 114-130. - «Raimundo Lulio. Pensamiento y acción», M. Maceiras (ed), Pensamiento filosófico español, Madrid, Síntesis, vol. I, 2002, p. 178-195. - «Història i genealogia: Nació en comú i la meva nació», Memòries de la Reial Acadèmia Mallorquina d’Estudis Genealògics, Heràldics i Històrics, 13, (2003): 63-76. - «Pedro Malferit en la polémica salmantina sobre el dominio indiano de España», Cuadernos Salmantinos de Filosofía, XXX, (2003): 549-557. - «Una lectura atrevida del “De Institutione Feminae Christianae” de Lluís Vives», Memòries de la Reial Acadèmia Mallorquina d’Estudis Genealògics, Heràldics i Històrics, 14, (2004): 39-46. - «La filosofia historiogràfica del P. Miquel Batllori», Miquel Batllori i Munné (19092003). Memòria viva de Mallorca (1941-1947), Estudis Baleàrics 76/77, (2004): 139-144. - «Un nou manuscrit lul·lista i un nou argument a favor de Llull», Actes del Congrés Internacional de Lul·lisme, Col·lecció Blanquerna, Barcelona-Palma de Mallorca, 2003. - «Ramon Llull. Defectes i virtuts del millor llibre del món», Memòries de la Reial Acadèmia Mallorquina d’Estudis Genealògics, Heràldics i Històrics, 16, (2006): 131-138. - «Aproximación a una trilogía semiótica luliana», Memòries de la Reial Acadèmia Mallorquina d’Estudis Genealògics, Heràldics i Històrics, 17, (2007): 53-62. - Diccionari d’escriptors lul·listes, Col·lecció Blanquerna, Edicions UB i UIB, 2008.

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IV. Book reviews - «Valls, R., Del yo al nosotros», EL, XV, (1971): 253-255. - «Katz, J. J., Filosofía del lenguaje», EL, XVI, (1972): 91-93. - «Worf, L., Lenguaje, pensamiento y realidad», EL, XVI, (1972): 94-95. - «Ayer, A.J. Lenguaje, verdad y lógica», EL, XVII, (1973): 100-101. - «Fernández Santos, Historia y filosofía. Ensayos de dialéctica», EL, XVII, (1973): 211. - «Llinarés, A., Remarques sur les formes du symbolisme lullien», EL, XVII, (1973): 212. - «Richele,M., La adquisición del lenguaje», Ath 4/5, (1977): 170-172. - «Oerter, R., Psicología del pensamiento» Ath. 4/5, (1977): 173-174. - «Garcias Palou, S., Ramon Llull en la historia del ecumenismo», EL, XXVII, (1987): 127-128. - «Llinarés, A., Raymond Lulle, Arbre des exemples. Fables et proverbes philosophiques», EL, XXVII, (1987): 115-116. - «Llinarés, A., Amor carnal y amor espiritual en Ramon Llull», EL, XXVIII, (1988): 257-258. - «Llinarés, A., Le systeme des sciences de Ramon Llull d’après l’‘Arbre de ciència’», EL, XXVIII, (1988): 258. - «Llinarés,A., Les préliminaires de l’’Art’ lullien dans le Libre de contemplación», EL, XXIX, (1989): 89. - «Guy, A. et al., Filosofía de Hispanoamérica», EL, XXIX, (1989): 95 - «Llinarés, A., Traité d’astrologie», EL, XXIX, (1989): 192. - «Llinarés, A., Imágenes antiguas de la medicina», EL, XXIX, (1989): 204-205. - «Abellán, J. L. et al., ¿Existe una filosofía española?», EL, XXIX, (1989): 208-209. - «Hudry, F., Le livre des XXIV philosophes», EL, XXIX, (1989): 209-210. - «Segura, A., Logos y praxis. Comentario crítico a la lógica de Hegel», EL, XXIX, (1989): 211. - «Badia, L., A propòsit de Ramon Llull i la gramàtica», EL, XXX, (1990): 95-96. - «Garcías Palou, S., La formación científica de Ramon Llull», EL, XXX, (1990): 99103. - «Cruz, J., Antropología de la conducta alimentaria», Anuario de Historia de la Antropología española 1, (1992): 69-70. 168

- «Cañellas, N., L’aigua, el vent, la sang. L’ús de les forces tradicionals a Mallorca», Ath., 13/14, (1993) : 269.


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- «Contreras, A., Antropología de la alimentación», Ath., 13/14: 269. - «Carrasco, S., Antropología y alimentación», Ath 13/14, (1993): 270-271. - «Colom, M., Cuestiones Lulianas», Slu., XXXIX, (1999): 143-145. - «Garcia Cuadrado, La aportación de la filosofía hispánica medieval: el diálogo intercultural», SLu., XL, (2000): 162-164. - «Baixauli, Ll., Claves de la antropología y la ética de Ramon Llull en sus sermones sobre el Decálogo», SLu, XL, (2000): 177-178.

V. Journalism Published in Diario Baleares (Any 1971)

Ídolos y mitos (1 d’ abril) Razón y locura (7 d’ abril) La luz y la niebla (15 d’ abril) La palabra mágica y la palabra semántica (22 d’ abril) Nombres y pronombres (29 d’ abril) Uso de las palabras (13 de maig) Palabras y cosas (19 de maig) Lenguaje y religión (27 de maig) Lenguaje y sociedad (31 de maig) Nombres controvertidos (9 de juny) Espectros lingüísticos (16 de juny) Lenguaje y cultura (24 de juny) Lenguaje e historia (8 de juliol) Interpretación y lenguaje (15 de juliol) Sentido antropológico del lenguaje (22 de juliol) Un modelo de comunicación lingüística (29 de juliol) El modelo lingüístico y la comunicación generacional (5 d’agost) Comunicación y lenguaje informativo (12 d’agost) Etica y lenguaje (19 d’agost) Del ‘ser’ al ‘deber ser’ (26 d’agost) La pregunta abierta (2 de setembre) Aprobación moral y su significado (9 de setembre) Valor moral y ‘pauta total de intereses’ (16 de setembre) Emotividad mágica del lenguaje moral (23 de setembre) Hacia un lenguaje moral persuasivo (1 d’octubre) El lenguaje prescriptivo de la ética (7 d’octubre)

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Significado de ‘podría’ en la ética de la libertad (15 d’octubre) Análisis del verbo ‘querer’ (21 d’octubre) Hacia una moral social: lengua y conducta (28 d’octubre) Tiranía o magia de las palabras (11 de novembre)

Entries in the Gran Encicopèdia de Mallorca

170

Agripa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius (XVIII, 274) Alsted, Johann Heinrich (XVIII, 290) Altaner, Berthold (XVIII, 290) Antonio, Nicolás (XVIII, 300) Artus, Walter W. (XVIII, 307) Aubry, Jean de (XVIII, 310) Badia Pamies, Maria Dolors (XVIII, 312) Basili de Rubí (XVIII, 324) Baudoin de Montarcis, Pierre (XVIII, 327) Bertini, Giovanni Maria (XVIII, 334) Bruck, Anton Philip (XVIII, 351) Carbonet, Hugues (XVIII, 368) Catalina Tomàs. Història, utopia, mite (III, 225) Collet, Guillem (XVIII, 385) Dominguez Reboiras, Fernando (XVIII, 409) Eijo Garay, Leopoldo (XVIII, 412) El pensament, dins «Mallorca» (IX, 296-306) Escola apologètica cristiana (V, 18-19) Escola Lliure de Lul·lisme (XIX, 9). Gerson, Jean Charlier de (XIX, 44) Iu de París (XIX, 61) La metodologia del «Die Balearen» (I, 308) L’antilul·lisme dels dominics (IV, 330). Lul·lisme (VIII:140-154) Madre, Alois. (VIII, 167) Madurell, Josep M (VIII, 169) Maguntina, edició (VIII, 178-179) Maioricensis Schola Lullistica (VIII, 183-184) Marçal, Francesc (X, 194) Martins Gonçalvez, Mario (X, 294) Mendia Lasa, Benito (X, 382) Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino (X, 383) Miramar (XI, 37) Miramar, Monestir (XI, 38)


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 6. 2012. P . 159-172 Sebastià Trias Mercant (1933-2008)

Müller, Marian (XI, 243) Muntaner Font, Francesc (XI, 254) Neolul·lisme (XIX, 111-112) Neotomisme (XI, 355-356) Nicolau de Cusa (XI, 367-68) Nicolau Pons, Miquel (XI, 368) Núñez Delgadillo, Agustín (XII, 22) Olesa i de safortesa, mateu (XI, 45) Olesa i Santmartí, Miquel d’ (XII, 46) Oliver Orell, Bartomeu (XII, 75) Pacs de Quint, Agnes (XIII, 35) Pacs i Sureda, Nicolau (XII, 136) Pacs, Lluís de (XVII, 145) Peers, Edgar Allison (XIII, 33) Pereira, Michela (XII, 161) Perroquet, Antoine (XIII, 84) Pinós-Milany i Ballester, Beatriu de (XIII, 145-146) Pou Martí, Josep Maria (XIII, 411) Pring-Mill, Robert (XIV, 26) Proaza, Alfonso de (XIV, 27) Probst, Jean-Henri (XIV, 27) Rafel de Torreblanca (XIX, 148) Raimundus Lullus Institut (XIX, 148-149) Ramis Serra, Pere (XIV, 185) Revista Luliana (XIV, 269) Reyes González, Antonio (XIV, 277) Ribera i Tarragó, Julià (XIV, 285) Riedlinger, Helmut (XIV, 295) Riera, Antoni (XIV, 295) Riera, Joan (XIV, 297) Riera, Pere Antoni (XIV, 297) Robles Carcedo, Laureano (XIV, 326) Rogent Massó, Elies (XIV, 345) Rubí, Bartomeu (XV, 9) Rubí, Sewbastià (XV, 9) Rubió i Balaguer, Jordi (XV, 12) Ruffini, Mario (XV, 15) Sabater Mut, Josep (XV, 27) Salvá Salvá, Bartomeu (XV, 92) Salzinger, Iu (XV, 93) Sánchez de Lizarazu, Pedro Gerónimo (XV, 100) Seguí, Joan (XVI, 64)

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Sententia definitiva in favorem lullianae doctrinae (XVI, 149) Serra Rafols, Elies (XVI, 186) Serra, Cristòfol (XVI, 161) Sollier, Joan Baptista (XVII, 26) Soto Marne, Francesc (XVII, 39) Steenberghen, Ferdinand von (XVII,42) Stegmüller, Friedrich (XVII, 42) Stöhr, Johannes (XVII, 43) Studia Lulliana (XVII, 44) Studia Monographyca et Recensiones (XVII,44) Tarré Sans, Josep (XVII, 122) Tejada Spinola, francisco Elías (XVII, 145) Tusquets Terrats, Joan (XVII, 343) Urmeneta Cervera, Fermín (XVII, 387) Urvoy, Dominique (XVII, 388) Valldemossa (XIX, 196) Vileta, Joan Lluís (XVIII, 183) Vinke, Johann Bernhard (XVIII, 196) Vuorio, Anelma (XVIII, 152) Xiberta Roqueta, Bartomeu (XVIII, 248) Yates, Frances Amelia (XVIII, 262) Zetner, Lazarus (XVIII, 267) Zimmermann (XVIII, 190)

VI. On Sebastià Trias RAMIS, P. & RAMIS BARCELÓ, R., « In Memoriam, Sebastià Trias Mercant», Revista de Hispanismo Filosófico 14, (2009): 199-201. PERELLÓ , M.I., «Sebastià Trias o la Historia viva del lul·lisme a Mallorca», Lluc, 854, (2006): 1-13.

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reviews JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 6, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 P. 173-175 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

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ugenio d’Ors, The science of culture. Edited by Antonio Lastra and Jaime Nubiola, Santa Coloma de Queralt: Obrador Edèndum, 2011. 541p. Josep M. Porta Fabregat Professor de l’IREL jportafa@uoc.edu

The science of culture is one of the main works to know the thinking of Eugeni d’Ors (1881-1954). Published posthumously in 1964 by the publishing company Rialp in Madrid, this new edition, prepared by Antonio Lastra and Jaime Nubiola, textually revised by Andreu Moreno Giménez, includes as a novelty an unpublished preface by the author. The origin of the work is diverse: it was conceded of between 1925 and 1935, taken from Eugeni d’Ors’ lectures at the Social School of Madrid, on the lessons in 1933 in the Luis Vives Chair of the University of Valencia, the lessons given at the Ateneo in Cádiz, from university courses in Santander and abstracts presented in societies of philosophy and elsewhere. It maintains the lesson format are –specifically, eighteen lessons– but as regards the whole, the author has sought to go beyond the written statement of a course, turning it into a treatise. The book is organized into four parts: Preliminaries, Systematic about Culture, Morphology of Culture and History of culture. He devotes the first three lessons, grouped under the general title of Preliminaries, epistemological considerations about the science of culture. Eugeni d’Ors shows the crisis of History, that has gone from being considered the centre and the model of the humanities to be protes as to its foundations and supposed objectivity. The weakness of History lies in the fact of having remained in the area of what is “phenomenal,” “empirical,” that is, in the context of what is relative. Moreover, against exaggerated plans of positivists, science has been the subject of criticism denied by representatives of probabilism and indeterminism. Fortunately, the pragmatism of H. Poincaré has allowed a claim of science on condition that it emphasises its limitations: it cannot fully understand reality nor present an entirely appropriate picture. Science must give up on replacing philosophy and religion. Consequently, similar to the natural sciences,

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 6. 2013. P. 173-175 JOSEP M. PORTA FABREGAT

which capture the concrete in the form of species, varieties, genders, classes and types, a science of culture should consist of a “meta-history” in which, along with the flow of historical facts, “stable elements, fixed, perennials; some elements, even if they do not understand the historical reality, [...] are inserted into it and preside over the course of its evolution. “ Eugenid’Ors considers these elements as stable in what he calls, inspired by Alexandrian Neoplatonism, eons. The whole section on Systematics of Culture is based on this concept. He defines it as “an idea that has a biography”, and distinguishes two classes, pure and mixed. The first is coextensive with humanity, the second, however, it is possible to imagine that humanity survives to it. For example, the eon of the race is historically may be left behind if the merger between humans reaches a point where racial differences disappear, however, is beyond the disappearance of the male and female eons without loss of humanity itself. The work developes especially female and male eons, classical and baroque, Rome and Babel, exoter and ecumen, and mixed. If we see them synthetically, they characterize womanhood, suggested by Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche, through love, and manhood, for work. He makes a long dissertation about the Baroque, from philosophical and methodological discussions with specialists in art history that took place at Pontigny Abbey. The content descriptions and discussions of this meeting serve to clarify the notion of Eon. In this dissertation, that recalls Schopenhaeur and Nietzsche, the Eon is associated with classic logos, while the Baroque is associated with Pan. Rome is an expression of humanity, while Babel, abbreviation for the “Tower of Babel” is, on the contrary, the expression of their dispersion and separation. The ecumen Eon, a term that relates to “ecumenical,” indicates a center and a periphery, subject to the rules emanating from the centre (the whole of centre and periphery will constitute a cosmos) and the exoter, related with exotic, is what is outside the ecumen. Finally, mixed eons relate with race and war.

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The central position occupied by eons in the Systematic of culture, in the Morphology of the culture, the third part of the book, is occupied by styles. Our author distinguishes between “cultural styles” and “historical styles”. The first are not limited to one place or time, but occurs independently of a local or temporary assignment, in this sense, he refuses to recognize the existence of a French, Spanish and Flemish school of painting. He does not consider other spiritual productsas belonging to one nation or another, nor accept a certain time limit of a “cultural style” as Classicism. The “historic styles” as Gothic, however, are restricted by time and space, and can only be imitated in the form of a literal repetition. Moreover styles, Morphology of culture is about the way in which culture is presented in the fields of know, prefer and do. So Ors defines a Kennenkultur, a culture of knowledge, a Werterkultur, a culture of values, and a Machenkultur, a work culture.


Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 6. 2013. P . 173-175 Eugenio d’Ors. The science of culture

The book ends with a History of the culture that give details about two of its four “epiphanies” announced in the work planned, the epiphany of man and society, but it does not develop that of the State or People, that will constitute his continuation. He associates the epiphany of the man with the Greco-Roman Antiquity. This epiphany comes from the efforts of philosophers and sculptors that define man as composed of body and soul. With the epiphany of man, humanity comes into culture. The epiphany of the society, which has its origin in The City of God of St. Augustine takes place in the Middle Ages. D’Ors considers that this part of mankind, characterized by feudalism, is subject to the eon of Babel. The presentation of the book, The Science of Culture has been rightly considered by Professor Antonio Lastra as a precedent for contemporary Cultural Studies, which promotes the magazine through the magazine the Viceroy Tower. We add our claim in favour of a significant role that he played in the intellectual history of philosophy. Written in a brilliant language by a master of the word, it is an unpublished broad systematization from a cultural perspective, full of meticulously detailed analysis, suggestive or revealing. As much as a precursor, it is surely a work for the future. Translation from Catalan by Josep Monserrat and Gloria Farell

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reviews JOURNAL OF CATALAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, Issue 6, 2013 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 P. 177-178 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

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ontserrat Guibernau, Belonging, Solidarity and Division in Modern Societies Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. 240 p. Pompeu Casanovas IDT-UAB pompeu.casanovas@uab.cat

Contemporary societies are not like the traditional ones. The members of the latter accept tradition as a source of behavior, and adapt to a form of identity that excludes or significantly limits the ability to choose. In contemporary societies, on the contrary, the choice is open and it defines the space where individuals can interact and relate to the group they belong to. This basic dichotomy, first founded in the nineteenth-century French historiography and sociology of Michelet, Taine, Renan and Durkheim, and culminated in the sociology of Simmel and Max Weber, furnishes the threads with which Montserrat Guibernau weaves her web. She is in good company to perform this task. The sense of belonging to the group, the ability for selfidentification, for feeling excluded or integrated the line that delimits the inside and out, has been the key to understand the French and German sociology of the 19th and 20 th centuries. In this regard, the author is following a well-trodden path. “Individual identities are not clear-cut; rather, they are subject to transformations emerging from their intrinsic dynamic nature. Various identities tend to coexist at a time, and their relevance moves and switches according to individual needs, external demands and expectations”. What is new in the formulation of Guibernau book, then, is not the conception of social relations as a set of rules and behaviors of inclusion and exclusion, but that these are seen as a byproduct of the fundamental act of choice. Choosing becomes the basic act that constitutes sociality and, in the end, the dynamics of the community. “Belonging by choice” does not mean absence of limitations on individual will, but these are less strong than the act itself that allows group membership. Thus, “through the process of choosing, belonging is turned into a consequence of free will”. And this in turn opens the door to a

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Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 6. 2013. P. 177-178 BEGOÑA ROMÁN MAESTRE

process of identification with the community, a “primary identity” that transforms individualism and uniqueness of individual sorting. This process generates an emotional tension that is essential in the operation and management of the political identity. Through the emotional management of collective identity, Guibernau provides a more general scheme or model that can be used as a key to the understanding of identity in contemporary societies. Cosmopolitanism is in this sense a strong thesis on political identity that the author uses as a hermeneutical reading for a number of phenomena: the reinvention of tradition in relation to clothing or signs with a mark of identity (such as the burqa), uncertainty and ambiguity of cultural identity associated with the development of globalization, the emergence of the extreme right as a phenomenon that prevents social integration, the functioning of paradoxical loyalty as a political tool, and finally the emergence of nationalities and symbols, rituals and nationalist sentiments. Thus, “emotions act as a trigger for political mobilization.” Here, in the analysis of the dual nature (as enabling and constraining) identity applied to national projection Guibernau draws from her past contributions on the political culture of nationalism. To sum up, this is a rich, sound and consistent book within the classical political science tradition. It would be interesting to compare some of its concepts (eg. about loyalty) with contributions analyzing contemporary social phenomena from different epistemic and methodological traditions. It would be useful, for example, a comparison with the transformations of the rule of law (“deliberative” or “procedural”) as analyzed from different theoretical positions (neorepublicanism or neo-institutionalism). How new concepts emerge, as the socalled “right to decide” (which cannot be confused with free speech)? This concept is unknown in the Western legal tradition and belongs to what is called “poplaw”. How this analysis of the identity relates to the uses of ICT technologies? This has been an essential element of the Arab Spring, and it is difficult to understand the political mobilizations outside the technology that facilitates flash mobs. Technology already is, as Floridi argues, “In-Between”. And lawyers and political scientists have assumed that the technological dimension is regulatory, directly pertaining to “code” (to use Lessig’s formula) and not an outer dimension that can be set aside. The emergence, functioning and managing of social intelligence are hot topics of research, and the interested readers will find quite useful suggestions in Belonging to enter the discussion. English version by Pompeu Casanovas 178


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English edition

2013 Issues 5&6

Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Issues Journal of Catalan 5&6 Intellectual History Revista d’Història de la Filosofia Catalana

2013

JOCIH The 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.

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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. 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 twentyfirst-century Catalan, Valencian, Balearic and Northern Catalan authors.


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