Mapping out the modern

Rodó's critique of pure reason

pp. 23-69

in: Nicola Miller, Reinventing modernity in Latin America, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

The Cartesian logic of understanding the world by breaking it down into ever smaller units of analysis has never had great appeal in Latin America, where there has been a recurrent bias toward a holistic approach. The idea that to be truly free, to be "fully human," individuals must be "open to the four winds of the spirit," not bound by any single mode of apprehending reality, can be found in many early-twentieth-century Latin American texts.² Generous, expansive, symphonic natures have long compelled Latin American admiration, the multitudes they were thought to contain eclipsing any contradictions. It is perhaps no coincidence that in Latin America there has not been the radical rejection of reason that occurred in Europe: Latin Americans saw Goethe and Tolstoy as inspirational, but not Wagner or Nietzsche; famously, they preferred Sartre to Camus. Maybe because rationality had never been raised so high, correspondingly there was no need to bring it so low. Instead, the haunting themes of twentieth-century Latin American discourse have been the integration of theory and practice; the reconciliation of reason and spirit; the claim that reason does not necessarily exclude passion or imagination or intuition; and the view that reason is one source among others rather the fount of all knowledge.