Gallagos argues Portilla's and Uranga's use ofzozobracan help us understand a particular anxiousness in our daily lives. In turn, Gallagos thinks openly discussing this anxiety -- without problematizing or masking such feelings -- can lead to a better sense of community. Do you agree? Answer this question by explainingzozobraand discussing Gallagos' use of the concept.
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Community, Greatness, and Misery in Mexican Life (1949) - Oxford Scholarship Community, Greatness, and Misery in Mexican Life (1949) Page 1 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Central Florida; date: 27 November 2020 Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century: Essential Readings Carlos Alberto Sanchez and Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780190601294 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190601294.001.0001 Community, Greatness, and Misery in Mexican Life (1949) Jorge Portilla , Carlos Alberto Sánchez DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190601294.003.0014 Abstract and Keywords Jorge Portilla criticizes the practicality of sociological notions of community, which conceive of it as an “organic association” in which one finds oneself at birth, and binds one “by a solidarity of which [one] is not the author,” by an “unconscious emotional ground” of those who make it up. These conceptions seem to think of society in terms of its instrumental reality, or lack thereof, and thus do not reflect social reality. He suggests that one think of community in its everydayness, or pre-ontologically. Ultimately, for Portilla, the only account of community that resonates with the Mexican experience is one in which the community, like a person, has a face, which is responsive and can be held accountable. In this sense, the Mexican is neither a collectivist nor an individualist about community, since he seeks a responsive concept of community, a dialogical community. Keywords: Jorge Portilla, community, Mexico, sociology, collectivism Jorge Portilla was born in Mexico City in 1919 and died there prematurely in 1963, at the age of 45. He was founding member of the Hiperión group (founded in 1947) and author of La fenomenología del relajo (1966). Though he was a highly influential member of the Hiperión group, Portilla was not a prolific writer. The essay that follows is one of only a few published during his lifetime. Although he studied law and philosophy alongside other members of Hiperión and in various universities https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190601294.001.0001/oso-9780190601294 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190601294.001.0001/oso-9780190601294 https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=Jorge Portilla https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=community https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=Mexico https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=sociology https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=collectivism Community, Greatness, and Misery in Mexican Life (1949) Page 2 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Central Florida; date: 27 November 2020 throughout the world, Portilla was not a professional philosopher. He avoided the academic life altogether. Nonetheless, his contributions to philosophy, and phenomenology in particular as evidenced by the few surviving texts, should make evident his profundity. His Fenomenología del relajo is available in English in Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s The Suspension of Seriousness (2012). Introduction This lecture series aims to disclose the levels of reflection that have been reached in Mexico regarding our own values, regardless of whether those reflections aim to fix or discover the “being” of the Mexican, or merely point to a psychological description of the Mexican character. On this occasion, we do not intend, naturally, to offer a complete picture of Mexican reality. Rather, our aim is to offer an outline, perhaps of a mere idea, of a vast field of investigation that, we hope, might yield some unexpected results. For now, we would like merely to point out a tendency in contemporary philosophy that we find most relevant for the unveiling of certain key characteristics required for the clarification of our particularity. By doing so, we are entrusting ourselves to the fundamental orientation that present thought exhibits in our country, one that has given itself to an energetic project of autognosis, which is, (p.179) in the last analysis, the meaning of all authentic philosophizing from Socrates until today. Existential and Phenomenological Conceptions of Community Today it is evident that philosophical thought has begun to turn its attention from the individual to the community, or, at least, that it has modified its point of departure in such a way that it will make progress possible in this field, progress that evaded previous generations. Gabriel Marcel opposes Hegel’s absolute “I” with a religiously inspired philosophy of an absolute “Thou.” Between these two essential dimensions of human existence, Martin Heidegger has demonstrated a certain “being-with- others” that betrays the active and gregarious spirit of his nationalism, while Jean-Paul Sartre has posited the gaze of the other as a ground of our pre- theoretical knowledge as well as an originary consciousness of our being in community, one that provokes inevitable conflicts in the sphere of concrete relations between man and man.1 In his conception of concrete relations with the other, one can clearly read into the state of human relations in a society overrun by the most extreme individualism. This tendency in contemporary philosophy appears to us so evident that it is surprising that a thinker such as Edmund Husserl—who, in one of the final passages of his Cartesian Meditations, affirms that the ground of all objectivity is a “transcendental intersubjectivity,” which at times seems foundational and Community, Greatness, and Misery in Mexican Life (1949) Page 3 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Central Florida; date: 27 November 2020 other times is confused with nothing less than “Being” itself—is thought to be the most typical representative of bourgeois individualism and is even accused of solipsism. What Is Community? Let us then point to some ideas regarding the forms of community that are found in Mexico, ideas that lend justification to certain aspects of the national character and to certain essential particularities belonging to lo mexicano [to Mexicanness]. But first, what is “community”? (p.180) At first glance, it seems that the answer to this question should be sought in sociology. This science, if we can call it a science, has lent a precise and technical sense to that term. In sociology, “community” is a term that designates a particular form of association. There is already the well-known distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies between the concepts of “community” and “society,” which he considers basic sociological categories. Community represents a form of organic association into which the individual does not enter through a voluntary decision but in which he finds himself “always already,” developing within it, tied to it by a solidarity of which he is not the author, moved by spontaneous impulses, by a species of essential will, that is, a will penetrated and determined by the unconscious emotional ground of all persons—a non-accidental will untouched by the considerations of a reflective calculus. On the other hand, society is found to be freely constituted, by the free choice of the participating individuals, ordinarily realized by contractual procedures and in accordance with ends that the individual believes to be his own, but which coincide and concur with the ends of others, and in which he enters or exists voluntarily and deliberately.2 Typical cases of the first kind of association (i.e., of community) are the nation and the family; of the second, mercantile societies. Max Weber calls community a social relation “if and when the attitude toward social action is inspired by the participants’ subjective desires to form a whole.” And he defines a society as “a social relation in which the attitude toward action is inspired by compensation of interests with rational motives or a union of interest with a common motivation.” Similarities between both conceptions are obvious. However, as far as we are concerned, highlighting the differences does not matter much. Community, Greatness, and Misery in Mexican Life (1949) Page 4 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Central Florida; date: 27 November 2020 It is important to note that we do not find this distinction in Anglo-Saxon sociological thinking. It is a distinction characteristic of German thought, corresponding to familiar German ideas regarding culture and civilization. We have here two sociological conceptions of community, one founded on structural notions and the other on procedural notions, the details of which we need not analyze. Everyday Conceptions of Community These concepts and definitions of community, taken from sociology, are not useful for us. In the first place, they are overly general, referring to the most universal (p.181) forms of association, those we can find anywhere in the world. We would help ourselves very little if, for example, we were to offer abstractions regarding whether or not our community belongs to one of the types indicated by that science. Second, they are merely formal concepts, and our project could not be any more concrete: it is the project of determining, as clearly as possible, the specific structure of the Mexican community, making evident this structure as the ground of those superficial but visible manifestations that are the particular patrimony of our style of life. Our point of departure cannot be, then, a concept of community forged by scientific thinking in accordance with its own methods and its own goals, but must be a concept that will benefit our purpose. As a result, once we eliminate the sociological concept of community, we must return to our exposition and begin with the common, everyday, or pre- ontological concept of community. We must begin from that implicit conception of community that is at play when in everyday conversation we utter that word. Community as Person In its everydayness, we conceive of the community as a person, or as an entity that has, at the very least, one of the fundamental characteristics of the person, namely, being the ideal center, responsible for the performance of acts. When we speak, for example, of