Examining Gender Difference in Leopoldo Zea’s Filosofía como Compromiso

• In Event: The Intersections Between Cuban Studies and Latina Feminisms

Abstract

This topic of this paper begins with a group of young philosophers known as the Ateneo de la Juventud. The Ateneo began to meet just before the start of the Mexican Revolution and was comprised of writers, politicians, and educators who came together to form a critical response to the positivist projects of followers of Porfirio Díaz. These theorists rejected the scienticism and conceptions of social evolution that characterized the Porfirato. Instead, prominent members of the Ateneo such as Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos turned to the humanities and to public education in an effort to transform the nation. As a philosophical enterprise, these theorists took up the question of what made up the features of lo mexicano, i.e. what distinctly made up the cultural, historical, aesthetic, and political characteristics of mexicanidad in the aftermath of the Porfiriato.
Leopoldo Zea, writing a generation after the Ateneo, also took up questions regarding the distinctive characteristics of lo mexicano.Zea’s writings take as one of their primary concerns the discourse of “the indigenous problem” that characterized much of Mexico, in particular, and Latin America, more generally, Thus, regarding race, Zea’s work was a direct reply to (neo) Hegelian views of world history that excluded mestizo nations from the trajectories of historical development. However, with respect to gender, Zea’s work is less clear. Critics of the universalist projects of the Ateneo and the Grupo Hiperión claim that these movements constructed a conception of history that excluded women from the universal category of the human. That is, the struggle for a universal relevance for lo mexicano was a philosophical project that could not be taken up by Mexican women. Rather, the task of uncovering la mexicana, the role of women during and after the revolution and the relevance of feminism in the nation remains an unfinished task. In this paper, I thus put feminist writings on women’s involvement in revolutionary Latin American movements in conversation with Zea’s writings to examine the question of gender difference within his conception of la filosofía como compromiso.

Author

• Andrea J Pitts, Vanderbilt University