Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America

Margins of Modernity

Adam Sharman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030370190
• Print ISBN:
  9783030370183
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History

This book is about Enlightenment culture in Spanish America before Independence—in short, there where, according to Hegel, one would least expect to find it. It explores the Enlightenment in texts from five cultural fields: science, history, the periodical press, law, and literature. Texts include the journals of the geodesic expedition to Quito, philosophical histories of the Americas, a year's work from the Mercurio Peruano, the writings of Mariano Moreno, and Lizardi's El periquillo sarniento. Each chapter takes one field, one body of writing, and one key question: Is modern science universal? Can one disavow the discourse of progress? What is a "Catholic" Enlightenment? Are Enlightenment reason and sovereignty monological? Must the individual be the normative subject of modernity? The book's premise is that the above texts not only speak to the contradictions of a doubtless marginalised colonial American Ilustración but illuminate the constitutive aporias ofthe so-called modern project itself.

Drawing on the work of Derrida, but also on both historical and philosophical accounts of the various Enlightenments, this incisive book will be of interest to students of Spanish America and scholars in the fields of postcolonialism and the Enlightenment.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. SharmanDeconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish Americahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37019-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: How Not to Write the History of the Spanish American Enlightenment

Adam Sharman¹

(1)

Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Adam Sharman

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 1680, a comet crossed the skies of Mexico City. Spanish Jesuit Kino thought it was a dry exhalation from the earthly atmosphere which had condensed and become inflamed in the firey zone; Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, a body with regular movements in conformity with the laws of gravity and one whose course could be predicted. Kino’s vision was Aristotelian while Sigüenza y Góngora’s was an early example of the New Philosophy that would go on to inform colonial Spanish America’s Enlightenment or Ilustración . It so happened, however, that Sigüenza y Góngora’s explanation also had elements of a medieval way of seeing and of a “fe ancestral.”¹ According to Ruth Hill (2000), this religious frame of reference condemned Spanish America’s innovative, colonial baroque application of the Nueva Filosofía to barely registering on a scale of human achievement calibrated to a European rationalist understanding of modernity.

Important work has been done by scholars in order to rectify the situation and demonstrate Spanish America’s contribution to knowledge. The likes of Elías Trabulse (1974, 1985) and Juan José Saldaña (2006) have attempted to reconstruct the Spanish language and indeed indigenous scientific and philosophical traditions in the region. It is just that, specifically where that phenomenon conventionally called the Enlightenment is concerned, it is not always clear in this and other work on the subcontinent what the Enlightenment is.²

Perhaps the most emblematic instance of this difficulty with the Enlightenment is Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s (2001) influential work entitled How to Write the History of the New World. The book claims that the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America was not principally a challenge to religion or politics, but rather involved things like political economy, the creation of a public sphere, criticism of Eurocentric interpretations of America, and a religious dimension entirely ignored by classical scholars of the Enlightenment such as Ernst Cassirer. The Spanish American baroque of the second half of the eighteenth century, he says, fashioned “alternative epistemologies.”

Truth be told, a number of these alternative modes of Enlightenment look either odd or vaguely familiar. José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez (1737–1799) “made a career out of discovering natural phenomena that contradicted the natural ‘laws’ devised by European naturalists” (p. 283). But it turns out that his challenge consisted in saying that Linnaeus should have grouped things by “virtues” rather than misleading youth by concentrating on the sexual characteristics of plants. Cañizares-Esguerra’s main thesis is that someone like Alzate y Ramírez deployed the new Enlightenment art of critical reading but took his distance from Europe by extending it to all Amerindian sources. Enlightenment in the colonies was thus about questioning the ability of outsiders to comprehend local realities and had “little or nothing to do with seeking new religious and political languages of legitimization” (p. 299). He cites the case of José Ignacio Borunda (1740–1800), who brought his idiosyncratic understanding of Mesoamerican hieroglyphs to bear on the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which, according to legend, had been miraculously imprinted on the cape of Juan Diego in the 1530s. Traditionally viewed as a sign that the Madonna had appeared to the peasant Diego, Borunda argued instead that the image had nothing to do with Diego or with any apparition, but had been left in Mexico by St Thomas to teach the mysteries of Christianity to Amerindians. In short, the image was not one of God’s miracles but “merely a human document” (p. 318). Borunda, Cañizares-Esguerra says, employed baroque religious scholarship to advance modern views and to undermine the authority of tradition.

In a similar vein, Ramón Ordóñez y Aguiar (1739–1825?) set out to prove that Palenque was nothing less than the legendary Ophir described in the Bible. Borunda and Ordóñez y Aguiar used the allegorical method “to question centuries of accumulated learning”:

True, Borunda and Ordóñez y Aguiar applied this baroque method to bolster the authority of the Bible, whose chronologies and accounts found confirmation, they believed, in Amerindian documents. Yet Borunda and Ordóñez y Aguiar proved remarkably daring when, with reckless modernity, they brushed aside all traditional colonial historiography. Whether their accounts were wrong is beside the point. It is their willingness to question authority that should preoccupy us. The intellectual and cultural histories of colonial Spanish America have more often than not been captured in shibboleths. Perhaps a second look at the radical modernity of the Spanish American baroque could in the same critical spirit of the patriotic epistemologists reviewed in this book begin decentering the Euro- and Anglocentric models that dominate the field. (p. 344)

It is a strange kind of Enlightenment that would bolster the authority of the Bible by making Amerindian sources confirm Christian legend. And it is a strange claim that would say that the truth of such accounts is beside the point. Protestant, Catholic, and atheist men and women of the Enlightenment held the reasoned nature of truth—its empirical verifiability or logical consistency—to be paramount. In any case, Cañizares-Esguerra fails to see that if their brushing aside of colonial historiography can be said to question authority (concesso non dato), then these baroque scholars were, after all, confirming “Euro- and Anglocentric models” of the Enlightenment, precisely by attempting to break from the past, to criticise and to take their distance from authority.

In fact, Cañizares-Esguerra’s is a conventional history that does not see that alternatives frequently inhabit the logic they criticise. Critiques that speak of “decoupling” from the Western tradition leave themselves unable to account for their own language. To utter words, in Spanish or English, to the effect that “we don’t need the Western tradition,” is to undercut the content of what is enunciated in the very act of enunciation. One confirms the Western tradition as one denounces it.³ Deconstruction teaches us that it is not possible to hold Enlightenment categories at arm’s length, that in certain decisive respects our thought is already shaped by that thing about which we think to speak objectively. Indeed, I suggest in this book that the play of attraction-repulsion extends to our affective sensorium, that it is never more evident than in our relationship to Enlightenment morality, above all to the latter’s revulsion at the “barbarism” of physical violence and suffering: we are revulsed at the men of the Enlightenment for dismissing people as barbarians.

The writings of colonial ilustrados exhibit no such revulsion towards European Enlightenment values. What they do exhibit, however, is a vulgar understanding of certain Enlightenment values, values such as progress, which is imagined as a line, frontier, boundary, threshold, or Rubicon, which one crosses or does not. This vulgar understanding cannot be attributed to lack of conviction or to bad faith, as though with the right amount of honest endeavour, one could think one’s way through progress absolutely. The point is that there is no once-and-for-all crossing of the threshold of progress. To give just one example, the commercial society desired by so many ilustrados (because it would represent a step-change in human development beyond a society based on conquest) is constitutively corrupted by the values of calculation and self-interest on which it rests. Progress comes at a price. Enlightenment articles of faith such as progress (others would be equality and emancipation) demand a more complex treatment. Which means a more complex reading.

One article of faith that this book will consider is “Catholic Enlightenment.” It was the same Cassirer dismissed by Cañizares-Esguerra who suggested the existence of a profound relationship between Enlightenment science and religious belief. Cartesianism, for instance, was premised on a rational (mathematical) knowledge because nature itself was rational, and nature itself was rational because nature’s maker, God, was rational. Cassirer’s argument is that, although the eighteenth century makes a dent in this rationalist theological worldview, much of even the most innovative sci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: How Not to Write the History of the Spanish American Enlightenment
• 2. Science: Three Degrees of Modernity: The 1735 Franco-Hispanic Expedition to Quito and the Question of Universal Science
• 3. History: Conjectures on Commerce and the “Stages of Civilisation”: Philosophical Histories of America
• 4. Periodical Press: Faith and Knowledge in the Mercurio Peruano
• 5. Law: Prologue to Revolution: Mariano Moreno Translates Rousseau
• 6. Literature: The Idle Noble and the Noble Citizen: El periquillo sarniento and the Invention of the Mexican Individual
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter