Bergsonism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico: Antonio Caso’s Theory of Aesthetic Intution

• In Event: Race, Revolution, and Bergsonism in the Americas

Abstract

This paper is an examination of Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso’s (1883-1946) conception of aesthetic intuition and its relationship to Bergsonism. Among the theoretical resources that Caso turned to in an effort to critique the Porfiriato’s exaltation of the natural sciences were the writings of Henri Bergson. Caso adapted vitalism to develop what he hoped would be a new role for art and a new form of aesthetics in post-revolutionary Mexico. Aesthetics, for Caso, offers not only a way to reshape national identity, but, philosophically speaking, becomes the foundational link between the moral and natural orders of the human animal. Reading Caso’s aesthetics, scholars of his work such as Rosa Krauze de Kolteniuk and Patrick Romanell have argued that Caso is more consistent in bearing out the philosophical implications of Bergsonism in Existencia como economía, como desinterés y como caridad than Bergson is himself in Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Yet, the manner in which Caso adapts Bergson’s writings and the lenses though which interpreters of Bergson have read Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion may leave contemporary readers of both figures with unanswered questions regarding the relationship between their philosophical ideas. This paper thereby attends to the manner in which Caso interprets Bergson’s writings on intuition and the function that aesthetic intuition plays in his overarching philosophical system. The paper then concludes by taking up several philosophical questions regarding humanism, race, and feminism that may be of interest to contemporary readers of both Caso and Bergson.

Author

• Andrea J Pitts, University of North Carolina, Charlotte