For the immortal yet always human Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso, the principal role of philosophy is to inspire. Whether societies can progress is always questionable, but that individuals are capable of great acts of heroic self-sacrifice and love is always an immanent possibility. What is more, what if philosophy gave itself to that end, or strove toward that ideal?
It is the purpose of this essay to raise questions about what happens to philosophy if it is institutionally modeled after biological egoism as Caso understands it. My thesis is that if philosophy models itself after the economic, that would be its gradual undoing. I can’t help but to notice that when Caso, the Mexican Socrates died, Mexico wept (Haddox 1971, 9). I wonder, who would weep if philosophy were to die now? Admittedly, the world has turned away from philosophical concerns and inquiry, relegating philosophy, the study of being itself, to the status of a mere fringe (and hardly marketable) interest; yet, at the same time, philosophy has succumbed to models of institutional professionalism, making it less appealing to the general public. I call for all involved to risk greater heroism in how they envision the future of philosophy in its institutional practice.
Economic Perceiving and Doing
For Caso, human consciousness first knows the world through the phenomenological filter of appetite. The world is disclosed through a self-involved type of knowing corresponding to the egoic self, a mode of being Caso refers to as ‘economy’ in his La existencia como economia, como desinterés y como caridad (1919 and 1943), which provides much of the theoretical groundwork for his subsequent writings. Economy is a state of being that can be likened to a fetus: it attempts to assimilate every liquid and possible nutrient into itself, even at the expense of the host, to increase its chances of survival. Caso often describes economy in terms of nutrition. To live economically is to impose one’s own form upon other forms, to digest and subordinate exterior forms into oneself for purposes of self-increase and future survival. It follows that if economy, what might otherwise be termed biological egoism, took on cosmic proportions, it would consume everything into itself, thereby destroying the world.
The ethical and the epistemic continuously overlap with one another, as I interpret it, in Caso’s philosophy. For example, the egoistic mode of being interprets the world exclusively in relation to the self. Beliefs and judgments are formed through the evaluative standpoint of the utility that things, people, or processes offer for personal gain. Accordingly, one’s perception of the world and knowledge about it are structured by egoistic desire. A person in the egoistic state knows or judges a tree, as an example, only as timber, shade, or fuel, whatever may be considered advantageous to the increase of one’s physical wellbeing or those of one’s flesh. While there are deeper and more accurate ways of understanding the tree, these remain closed off to one through the filter of egocentric perception.
The way the ego phenomenologically and evaluatively discloses the world (orders one’s field of vision) acts as an epistemological barrier, obstructing a fuller or more objective vantage point from coming into view. The tree, again, under the phenomenological filter of the economic, is known or intended as property or a ‘resource.’ This is inaccurate, since such an intentional framework doesn’t perceive the tree as it might be known in a fuller, truer light; at the same time, it is a vision of reality interpreted through an unethical frame of reference as Caso considers it. Just as a person can be viewed falsely and unethically as a tool or object of one’s own ends, which would conceal the deeper reality (in the Kantian sense) that humans are rational beings who can propose ends for themselves, so too do unethical modes of being-in-the-world correspond to false modes of perceiving the world.
Caso is clear in his position that the economic life is ethically inferior to its opposite: a life of self-giving love. The economic is rooted in biological law and therefore can only ever (re)produce more of the same. As a result, all who follow in its footsteps are mere imitators. Nothing truly new ever appears in this realm, even though it is eminently rational and pragmatic. While new life forms replace old ones, they are just placeholders in an endless, unchanging cycle of life and death. This mode of existence is, for Caso, by itself, vain and meaningless. It burns up life; it attacks real or imagined adversaries, always for the same ends of survival and self-increase, which are in turn reducible to the instincts of sex and hunger. Inspired by Nietzsche, he reads biological egoism as only ever more of the same, and he clearly states that without love, which he views as the contradictory of egoism, life is not worth living (2018, 94)—and can be viewed as an order above that of the “the biological law of self-interest” (Haddox 1971, 43).
Economy operates according to the principle of minimum effort for maximum benefit. As Caso describes it, it is a centripetal force whose end is always itself (2018, 78 & 89). Societies that live by economy alone find no true satisfaction, since success is not the same as joy, and self-increase is not the same as self-actualization. Regardless of the economic system, whether socialist or capitalist, if a society operates solely or with an exclusive focus on the principles of economy, it will always degrade the human personality. Further, if it has sufficient means, it will lead to conquest, land-grabbing, and imperialism, just as Plato’s state concerned with anything beyond meeting basic needs in harmony with filial piety will lead to endless wars out of the insatiable demand for excess. In this way, Caso gives primacy to the spiritual over the economic and the social in assessing the wellbeing of a society. If the spiritual has been eviscerated from economic activities (as, for example, capitalism excludes concerns relating to eudaimonia from the principal purpose and rationalization of its operations), the result will be the mechanization of human beings toward inhumane ends.
Let us move on to consider how Caso thought philosophy should be carried out as a practice.
The Heroic and the Discreet
Caso considered philosophy to be the undefinably balanced synthesis of the heroic and the discreet. The heroic is the raw material (“La materia prima” 2018, 46) of spontaneous inspiration, absent of rhetoric, from which the philosopher intuits truths or grasps questions of universal significance. Approximation and unpredictability are part of the venture, which may even border on the absurd, and analogies that surprise the thinker may suddenly surface (2018, 47-8). Like an eagle, the philosopher soars to the highest levels of abstraction, detached from personal interests, instincts, and sexual desires. Therein lies the essence of thought as one attempts to perceive the universal types and patterns implicit in endless becoming (2018, 49). This awakened wonder, valiantly ascending ever higher into the ether of abstraction, is not a pure science, but takes on the temper or character of genius, ingenuity, and intrepidity—heroism. The thinker doesn’t look down when climbing up the ladder of love but ceaselessly approaches the mesmerizing light of the Beautiful. Plato, for Caso, embodies the heroic par excellence.
The discreet, deliberate, and analytical mode weighs arguments against themselves, decides on contradictions and the extremes of positions, and organizes reasons while systematically subordinating data to a thesis (2018, 47). It is objectified thought: patient and precise. Like a snake, this manner of thought palpates the sensible and every tangible aspect of a being considered in itself to get at the secrets of nature. The snake follows after the work of the eagle, who has acquired the holistic intuition or comprehensive vision. By itself, however, the snake would provide no invention, for every newly advanced argument or problem, no matter how logically articulated, requires, to begin with, the intuition of a discovery made by the eagle. Reason, if removed from intuition, only produces perfectly organized systems that reveal nothing new. Hence, even the highest form of the discreet, if left to itself, would lack the quality of discovery. Aristotle, the systematizer of logic, exemplifies the discreet.
While the snake and eagle are to be one, Caso gives extraordinary weight to intuition and the heroic; reason without it is blind (2018, 53). Intuition completes and complements reason. It supplies to the mind the intuited Notion, active and alive, but unassimilated, which can subsequently be broken down for purposes of analysis. Philosophy must not do away with its native, fertile soil, since each philosophy begins by availing itself to intuition, and as such, the original intuition cannot be conflated with the ensuing analysis (which could, after all, go in different directions). Just as Plato’s metaphysical worldview differs from any one of the specific arguments he advances in favor of the Forms, his primary intuition, often best expressed heroically in myth or allegory, awakens and enlarges one’s sense of wonder, enabling one to puzzle and dream the world philosophically. Puzzlement asks for the aid of investigation, and the snake comes to assist, providing analysis or points of contrast palpable to the further examination of the intellect.
This dialectical process depicts how Caso thinks intuition and reason work together in the production of knowledge. Caso sees intuition as distinct from reason and the indispensable starting point of knowledge, while it is the discreet that supplies the testing ground for justified belief, since the two are supposed to work in concert with one another. The dynamic seems to be one wherein intuition discloses possibility or a vision of the whole, supplying raw contact with reality, while analysis brings order to those intuitions, resulting in judgment, and continued experience corrects or enlarges that vision. Immediate contact with the world is supplied by intuition whereas coherence is introduced when reason makes adjustments through logical points of reference.
Interestingly, Caso does not view intuition as infallible. Any such insight may be mistaken, approximate, or exaggerated. He is well-known for having remarked that an inventive, fertile error holds vastly superior value than any sterile truth (Haddox 1971, 14). From the sub specie aeternitatis point of view, that which ignites discussion and genuine wonder, even if flawed, approaches the deepest and highest spheres of which thought is capable and thus gets closer to the truth than a sterilely defined certainty. Error in this way can be epistemically valuable when it prompts inquiry, reveals a previously unnoticed problem, or opens a new realm of self-awareness. Spinoza immediately comes to mind here: even if his arguments can be shown to be faulty, he continues to inspire and fascinate because he sought to understand reality from the single point of a flash of insight. Much of Arne Naess’ ideas were inspired just by the noetic embers smoldering in Spinoza’s Ethics.
So, while a proposition may be technically correct, it may contribute nothing to understanding, but an imperfect intuition may lead the mind toward questions never considered, or to problems that remain unsolved or unformulated. Knowledge advances through the opposing forces of el heroísmo, intellectual courage guided by insight, and logical grounding, which nonetheless do not cancel one another out; one must take risks, even risking error, while the discreet introduces refinement, distinctions, and subtleties to the original materials of thought. There is the discovery, the sudden apprehension, which is the original acquisition of what can later become knowledge; but just as discovery itself doesn’t follow a formulable rule, neither does justification seem to follow a decision-procedure but will be contingent upon what was intuited to begin with.
This is Caso’s view of how philosophy should be done. Taking that for granted, there is an irreducible ethical component to doing philosophy in just this way, since the capacity for heroism is first discovered in the realm of intuition; and, as will be discussed below, intuition is awakened through ridding ourselves of self-centeredness. Philosophy receives its manna from an impulse unrelated to biological egoism; it cannot even be inaugurated if it lives on bread alone. And this raises the question of what happens to philosophy if it is modeled after biological egoism. Does it even merit the name ‘philosophy’, or does it become something else?
Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which inspires philosophical thought to this day, could well serve as an example of a work illustrating the patterns according to which, for Caso, philosophy should be practiced. It was written as an outpouring of intimately recollected field journals and observations, with epigrammatic and unaffected independence offered to any reader in a spirit of selflessness. Only after these intuitions were gathered in freedom of the spirit were they then studied under a distilled standard of their ethical implications, as the Land Ethic comes near the end of the book. In detachment from the ego, for Caso, is where we discover our creativity, ingenuity, and love for others or ‘the Others’, the term Farley Mowat used to refer to non-human animals. Not only does the life of love begin by quitting the ego from the self, but the philosophical endeavor does as well.
Art As a Steppingstone to a More Loving, Truer Life
For Caso, when the search for the useful is suspended, reality can appear in ways previously obscured by appetite, and this can be awakened by attaining temporary release from the self-interested mentality through the medium of art.
Going back to the tree again: suppose you read a stirring poem that paints a singularly unique image of the final days of a young pine tree. Its branches and needles are withering, desiccating, weakening, and dying for lack of water in the grip of prolonged drought and excessive heat, reduced rainfall and snowpack, or beetle infestation. And supposing yourself moved by the poem, Caso, I take it, would say that this aesthetic contemplation of the tree disrupted the cycle of interests that would otherwise have kept one confined to their biological cave/cage. It opened a worldview (and view of the world) released from the desire to dominate and the tree suddenly became an individual center of concern or value. For art, by bringing egocentric regarding and desiring to a standstill, activates a state of openness and free association in the knower, making visible, with increased definition and significance, a world that is appreciated and admired in its free-flowing, intuited objectivity, more in line with how things stand in themselves in their totality. Once again, the ethical and the epistemic are dialectically fused together: the debasing thralldom that keeps one bound to self-serving considerations is relinquished in aesthetic contemplation and allows reality to be contemplated independently of the principles of reason (2018, 82-3). Or put another way, the suspension of the ego brought about by aesthetic experience generates epistemic openness and the possibility of entering into empathetic union with the things so regarded. This is Caso’s way of updating the medieval doctrine that Beauty and Truth differ in concept but not in reality.
Art, in this way, can be a steppingstone to living a more loving, freer, and truer life—one no longer externally directed by biological drives. Art, by stimulating disinterested receptivity in the percipient, makes room for the “centrifugal” force of love to direct one’s attention beyond oneself in a state of unconcupiscibly directed feeling, perception, and concern. Selfless love is for Caso something wholly new on earth (heaven as it is on earth), since it is the antithesis of evolutionarily molded psychology.
Caso’s ethics is intuition-based; selflessness is awakened by an innate stirring, a sudden, unexpected enthusiasm. He endorses the Christian view that the completely new ethics of selflessness— new in that it defies all commonsense considerations arising from self-interest— does not follow any law or dictate of reason, but springs only from that love which knows that “love and do what you will” will fulfill the law. Selfless love has no precepts and yet it is the highest expression of ethical life, and is always perfect in its expression, for when one lets no debt remain but love, whoever loves fulfills the law (Romans 13:8). Disinterested contemplation therefore, which enables one to immersively resonate with, contemplate, and feel things outside of oneself non-possessively, is spiritually connected to the possibility of ethical becoming.
Art, Philosophy, and Love
Problematically, graduate students and professional philosophers are institutionally required to produce intellectual offspring according to specific and discreet norms of assessment and evaluation. Their intellectual offspring are to be nourished, not by selfless midwifery, but by inheriting and hoarding as much philosophy that meets standardized criteria as they can assimilate into themselves throughout the day. In this, the practice follows the model of economy: one precisely digests and feeds off the intellectual offspring of others that were produced for reasons of self-increase in order to impose their own form upon them—to, in other words, subordinate exterior theoretical forms to their own theoretical form for the purposes of self-increase and prominence as measured by publications quantified both in terms of archivable mass and memetic volume. Their will is molded to desire to dominate, to self-organize rather than self-give, and prevail over those who would prevail over them according to rigidly defined standards of performance which shuts one off from the outpouring of spontaneous energy that can inspire ingenious and intrepid and wholly new (heroic) work that in turn inspires generations to come.
When thought is subordinated to the mechanics of life in this way, it is made to imitate the instincts of sex and hunger which are foreign to it. The philosopher no longer approaches the mesmerizing light of the Beautiful in delight and soulful relish but is institutionally directed to produce more of the same. If we accept the premise that philosophy is modeled after the economic, then, following Caso, it can only ever produce more of the same. And as argued above, philosophy today is modeled after the economic. So, it can only ever produce more of the same—ever more standardized research articles, compendiums, dissected dissertations turned into books, etc.
As it concerns the balance between the discreet and the heroic, arguably, analytic philosophy has become a reigning archetype of professional success in much of academia, which in its most rigorous forms disaffirms Platonic enthusiasm, yielding to the snake too much ground, mistakenly imagining the snake its master.
If a philosopher feels the pull and allure of art, she is likely wistfully looking for the enchantment that once drew her to philosophy, but which institutional norms now deny her in demanding the constant output of research to advance the university and increase her standing. Against herself, she has been taught to abandon the love she had at first.
The Kiss the Ground series also arguably follows Caso’s model of the philosophical method: it begins with the intuition of what regenerative agriculture can achieve and then utilizes evidence to support its claims for selfless ends. Were the philosopher in the above scenario inspired to work on such a project or one like it, it would likely be designated as service rather than research, leaving her economic metrics of productive output unfulfilled. Such work could very well be of greater value, were she encouraged to pursue it, than yet another work undertaken for the sake of publication. But her medium is quite narrowly fixed to the production of arguments on a page.
For Caso, neither philosophy nor art come from biological love. To impose biological individualism upon philosophy is to diminish its potential, distort it, or possibly kill it. Caso explains that the entelechy of a seed cannot be explained by an appeal to the physical constants found within it (2018, 72). In a similar way, the life and entelechies of philosophy cannot be reduced to the economic models of self-increase imposed upon it, not without corruption; more precisely, it would disallow the attainment or actualization of the philosophic personality in its heroic singularity (heaven as it is on earth).
Our hypothetical philosopher seeks to meld research and service, but her hands are tied, so the tension remains in place, and the selflessness of service is an afterthought to the primacy of output, just as the scope of service cannot exceed the boundaries of the research domain. And yet she is a philosopher; syntheses are second nature to her. But this synthesis is on perpetual administrative leave.
Or suppose she has an insight on how she could subvert advertising imagery to expose the destructiveness of commodity production using mixed media—combining research with art. Or it dawns upon her one evening how she could offer passersby indeterminate and unscripted experiences in urban settings where social relations are not mediated by things. And these ideas strike her as far more philosophically appealing than formulating a rigorously defined thesis. “Interesting, but it’s of no use to the college” academia says. But why? For, if executed well, this work could be far more memorable and singular, providing food for thought, rather than yet another paper nobody reads unless they seek to subsume it into a framework of their own for their own advancement.
Only love for Caso prevents stagnation. One may understand the whole history of thought or perform great acts in service for others, but without love, such accomplishments create nothing in the sense of failing to make the world anew. Love steps through all appetite and selfishness as if walking on water and makes present a presence of good will previously unknown and unforeseen to the world of egoic interaction and desire, without which all the productions of the world would be meaningless. The consciousness of love in the one who practices it says, “Y si tuviese el don de profecía, y entendiese todos los misterios, y toda la ciencia; y si tuviese toda la fe de manera que pudiere traspasar las montañas, y no tuviese caridad, nada soy” (2018, 94). This can be translated as “If I had the gift of prophecy, and understood all the mysteries, and all science; if I had all the faith needed to break through mountains, and had not charity, I’d be nothing.” If all productions of the world, including all knowledge, are nothing in the absence of love, then love is their perfection. Perhaps this explains why reading a textbook on ethical theory can disappoint anyone who expects it to inspire one to love or do what’s good. Instead, the reader finds that each article is loveless in that it doesn’t love anything other than its own analytic defense system.
Suppose our professor assists in establishing a community project that helps environmental professionals express ecological grief but does so in ways that give primacy to the professor’s favored or personally promulgated theories on how ecological grief should be processed or conceptualized. Then this is the imposition of the professor’s ego upon others, not done for them or the environmental missions and injustices that keep them up at night. Or suppose, with tremendous love and in the spirit of Joanna Macy, the professor leads seminars or sessions on ecological grief for youth, indigenous communities, or environmental professionals. Even if done with selflessness, the service must institutionally be communicated and understood as an accomplishment that is centripetal (self-referring) in its meaning. In both cases, the elevation of the organizer prevents the centrifugal force of love from realizing a more indeterminate and possibly heroic end.
The institutional supports for philosophy are many, but all must follow the same standardized egoic model of its practice. Imagine the freedom possible if philosophers could love freely. They do not need to rule the state; they only need the freedom to be wholly themselves. Socrates was wholly himself, fully and actually himself. He was not made servile to any institution. It was his love for others that moved him to reach the highest expression of his daimonically inspired personality. Were Socrates raised in a modern academy, it is worth thinking about whether he would or could have stepped outside of himself in love, or whether he would have rather remained focused on augmenting his CV and list of accomplishments, which Caso might refer to as the wretchedness of “having” over the personalism of “being” (2018, 181). Any service he might have done would have been done, even against his intentions, to bring attention to himself. Philosophers today bring attention to themselves by advancing theses, contrary to the Platonic practice of dialectically examining theses without attaching oneself wholeheartedly to any one of them. Not surprisingly, Caso endorses the Platonic manner of philosophizing. Dogma, he says, is an illusion, as truth is too capacious to be confined to any doctrinal mold. As Caso expressively puts it, “El reposo, la verdad, el dogma, son ilusiones, cristalizaciones momentáneas de nuestro movimiento espiritual…No es la posesión, sino la prosecución de la verdad lo que extiende las facultades humanas, dice Lessing en su Dúplica” (2018, 45). This is roughly translated as “Stasis, truth, dogma, are illusions. They are momentary crystallizations of our spiritual life…It is not the possession of truth, but its pursuit that stretches out the human faculties, as Lessing said in his Eine Duplik.”
The point is not to discredit academic writing (in fact, I do not think I have ever read an academic essay not worth reading), but to say that the heroic capacity of philosophy is far greater than what its institutionalized form allows. As a result, it is often degraded to quarrels over disputable matters rather than practiced to remove obstacles to greater love, which perhaps explains why none would weep were it to die.
Socrates’ ability to step outside himself was not unique to him but is anyone’s birthright. I cannot make positive recommendations, since love has no law, but I would ask philosophy’s guardians and participants to restore to it its ineliminable heroic element so it is no longer subservient to the economic. The same could be said for the humanities in general. Let all adherents of the arts and letters creatively receive each other and others who are their true beneficiaries, since art is philosophy’s companion in making seen the meanings hidden from the self-interested point of view, and in that company, find bread only new life can give. If it is retorted I am guilty of a performative contradiction, I can only say these words were written in love, for those who come after me, and out of love for Caso.
Works Cited
Caso, Antonio. Antología Filosófica. Titivillus, 2018. https://archive.org/details/caso-antonio.- antologia-filosofica-epl-fs-1957-2018/mode/1up.
Haddox, John H. Antonio Caso: Philosopher of Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.