Jose marti our america pdf

The pompous villager thinks his hometown is the whole world. As long as he can stay on as mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, and watch his nest egg grow in its strongbox, he believes the universe is in good order. He knows nothing of the giants in seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, the battling comets in the heavens which devour the worlds that lie sleeping in their paths.

These are not times for lying comfortably in bed. Fortifications built of ideas are more valuable than those built of stone. No armored prow can smash through a cloud of ideas. A vital idea brandished before the world at the right moment like the mystic banner of Judgment Day can stop a fleet of battleships. Nations that remain strangers must rush to know one another, like soldiers about to go into battle together. Those who once shook their fists at each other like jealous brothers quarreling over who has the bigger house or who owns a plot of land must now grip each other so tightly that their two hands become one.

A man of honor does not collect a debt of honor in money, at so much per slap. We can no longer be a village of leaves fluttering in the air, crowned in flowers, creaking and buzzing under the caress of capricious sunlight or thrashed and felled by tempests.

The trees must line up to block the giant in his seven-league boots. The hour to muster and march in unison is upon us and our ranks must be as compact as the veins of silver in the depths of the Andes. Their spindly arms, with clinking bracelets and polished fingernails, shaped by Madrid or Paris, cannot reach the lofty tree, and so they say the tree is unreachable. We must load up the ships with these termites that gnaw away at the core of the patria that nurtured them.

These scoundrels who disown their sick mother and leave her alone in her sickbed! Who is more truly a man? One who stays with his mother to nurse her through her illness? Did Washington, the founder of their nation, go off to live in England when he saw the English marching against his land? But these incredible creatures drag their honor across foreign soil like the incroyables of the French Revolution who danced, primped, and dragged out their Rs. Never before have such advanced and unified nations been created so rapidly from elements so disparate.

The incapacity lies not in the nascent country, which demands forms appropriate to itself and a grandeur that is useful to it, but in those who wish to govern unique populaces, singularly and violently composed, by laws inherited from four centuries of free practice in the United States and nineteen centuries of monarchy in France. It is, rather, one who knows what elements his own country is made up of, and how best to marshal them so as to achieve, by means and institutions arising from the country itself, that desirable state in which every man knows himself and exercises his talents, and all enjoy the abundance that Nature, for the good of all, has bestowed on the land they make fruitful by their labor and defend with their lives.

The government must arise from the country. The native mestizo has triumphed over the exotic criollo. The battle is not between civilization and barbarity [4] but between false erudition and nature. He is prepared to use force to regain the respect of anyone who has wounded his sensibilities or harmed his interests.

The republics have cured the former tyrannies of their inability to know the true elements of the country, derive the form of government from them, and govern along with them. Governor, in a new nation, means Creator. The uneducated masses are lazy and timid in matters of the intellect and want to be well-governed, but if a government injures them they shake it off and govern themselves.

Our young men go out into the world wearing Yankee- or French-colored glasses, and aspire to govern by guesswork over a country about which they know nothing. Men who are unacquainted with the rudiments of politics should be barred from a career in politics. Knowing those factors, without blinkers or circumlocution, will suffice. Anyone who deliberately or unknowingly sets aside a part of the truth will ultimately fail because of that missing truth, which expands, under such neglect, to bring down whatever was built without it.

Solving a problem in full knowledge of its elements is easier than solving it without knowing them. To know is to solve. To know the country and govern it in accordance with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny.

The European university must yield to the American university. Our own Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours: we need it more. But there are particular reasons we choose to study a particular thinker. In my own experience, such explanations are more of an afterthought. I am usually drawn by more practical, more personal reasons. I am Cuban-American. My families have deep roots in the histories of both the United States of America and Cuba.

I hoped that what I learned about the most prominent figure in Cuban thought and culture might help me understand the other half of my heritage. With each additional work I read my interest grew. As I came to understand him I realized that in our present circumstances his philosophy still has practical implications. If it is valuable to discuss our own philosophic motivations, then it may offer insight to ask the same of those we study.

These were Americans who had lived his dream. In their lives he saw the hopeful future of his own, but he also saw the mistakes he was not willing to live out. The bliss of self-rule was short lived in South America. Soon after the end of fighting with Spain, many revolutionaries turned on each other fighting over who would rule. Is it not a sign of divinity to have conquered? He conquered men, swollen rivers, volcanoes, centuries, Nature!

Would he have undone the work of centuries if he had not been able to build anew? Did he not unshackle races, disenthrall a continent, bring nations into being? Has he not covered more people with the banners of freedom than has any other conqueror with the banner of tyranny? As for me I realize that a nation cannot be led counter to or without the spirit that motivates it; I know how human hearts are inspired, and how to make use of a confident and impassioned state of mind to keep enthusiasm at a constant pitch and ready for attack.

But with respects to forms, many ideas are possible, and in matters of men, there are men to carry them out. He was prepared for the process to develop one, but not to impose one. Furthermore, through a detailed discussion of the education of individuals I wish to create a central piece of the political method that was prescribed in Nuestra America Our America. The chapter is divided into three sections. The catholic bent of his mind makes him receptive to all of the various currents of nineteenth-century thought, both European and American: historicism, mysticism, transcendentalism, social Darwinism, democratic populism, liberalism, romanticism, and the rest.

He knows as much of the Bible as he does of Cervantes. His style of writing puts him outside the scope of the canon. With the current growing interest in Latin American philosophy the hard and fast borders between philosophers and other writers will continue to blur.

As we see the present conception of philosophy falter, we are faced with a choice either to hold onto the exclusive definition of philosophy, or to push forward accepting a new richer definition of philosophy. His contributions in Latin American newspapers spread news of prominent U. But he was more than a passive observer and scholar. His own work brought together diverse influences in a uniquely American way.

Both his thought and style of writing offer a bridge between North America and Latin America. His writing of essays and newspaper articles was common practice in Latin America, but also fits with the style of the 7 Gordon K.

His essays seek solutions to real world problems, while at the same time educating the reader on philosophic insights. Unfortunately, one has to read a good deal to be able to take an authors work as a whole and systematic philosophical outlook.

He became a knower of things human and divine, and of the ways things could be made to work for the betterment of humankind. That is why it has been possible for later commentators to extract sentences and passages from the collected work to prove almost any point of view.

On a perfunctory analysis it is also hard to disagree with the assessment described by Richard B. As we will discuss shortly, Gray does not hold this assessment. His works, both prose and poetry, need to be understood in terms of the intent with which he wrote them. His works where attempts to change the world. We must keep sight of both the context and goals of his writings.

Good is God, and the tear the source of eternal feeling. After warning of this trend, John M. He had not read enough from the book of life17 or from the books of the many writers that 15 John M. Mendive was the primary influence from through early Included are his published and unpublished works, articles, speeches, essays, poetry, letters, textbooks, notebooks, and journals.

Mendive taught in a gentle and familial manner. Openly opposing the predominant scholastic education, he began to espouse a more liberal education model developed out of his readings of Krause. He was introduced to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel among others. Coley Taylor, trans. New York: Devin-Adair Co. In his home country Krause was for the most part unknown, and today is not recognized as an important figure in the history of philosophy.

Schelling identified with the object. Hegel--and he was great—put it in relation. Krause—and he is the most great and complete, studied the subject, the object and the way in which they are one: relation. He based the analytical aspect of his doctrine on Kant. My translation. He was most noted for his attempt to reconcile theism and pantheism. In The Ideal Of Humanity one can see his panantheism at work.

His philosophy states all things are in God. This book develops both a strong, direct relationship of individuals to God and an equally vibrant set of relationships among groups of individuals.

The relationship of individuals in and to their groups is equally important, but all of existence is prefaced on God, the living being. His work centered around explaining the place of Man in God. Krause worked with a triumvirate of God, Nature, and Reason. As we have just said, for him as for Schelling and Hegel everything is in God, including Nature and Reason. Most of human existence is based in the relation between Nature and Reason. This union, like all other unions, Krause described as one of growth.

All of existence is in a constant process of growth; consequently all philosophical concepts must describe a process of growth. His belief that existence was essentially a process of growth led Krause to develop a very open ethics.

Krause considered individuals, relations, and wholes all to be of importance. His project was to understand the developments of all three together. Krause saw love as the driving force of this development. Individuals, relations of man and God, man and society, and Nature and Reason , and wholes were united by love. Krause developed a relatively complex notion of love. Krause provided a sketch of this complexity in the following: The purest and most original, and most blessed love that lives in every pure heart, is love to God, accompanied as it is with the impulse to know God, to feel Him, and to be inwardly one with Him.

In this highest love, man becomes sacred to himself. He seeks divine wisdom in order that he may behold the Idea of God always more purely and more clearly; he strives after divine art in order to initiate the life of God in what is living and beautiful; and he searches in the wide domain of experience for all that is living and beautiful in order to honor it as a manifesting and speaking of the love of God.

As we will see later, 28 Ibid, In The Transcendentalist, Emerson offers the insight that transcendentalism is not a new phenomenon.

Rather as he argued, transcendentalism is idealism in New England in He may have found in Emerson many of the strengths that had originally attracted him to Krause. Emerson and the New England transcendentalists appear to be the catalysts of this development. Most if not all of the writing following his memorial to Emerson bear the stamp of the influence of U. We will return to this influence of transcendentalism later in the project. The essays I have chosen represent the respective influences of Mendive, Krause, and Emerson.

Political Prison in 34 Gonzalez, Epic Chornicler, Writers, All three essays focused on the quest for the freedom of Cuba. He believed that if he informed them of the situation in Cuba that they would have to change their ways. Even as he has suffered, he retained this hope: Honor can be stained. Justice can be sold Everything can be torn apart. But the notion of righteousness floats over all and never sinks.

The structure of the argument itself is noticeably different. He described what would be necessary for Spain and Cuba to remain linked: If there is to be a fruitful, loyal, and affectionate union, as a fair and patriotic resolution is needed, the fate of the peoples must be decided by working with perfect reason, and the homeland—disfigured by the arrogant, debased by the ambitious, discredited by fools and deserving of so little fortune because of its actions in Cuba—must be honored by strictly upholding justice.

That is his developing idealism began to shape his political and moral thought. In making his argument he put forward his definition of what a homeland is. A homeland is something more than oppression, something more than bits of land without freedom or life, something more than the right of possession by force. A homeland is a community of interests, the unity of traditions, a singleness of goals, the sweet and consoling fusion of love and hope.

Here Krause showed a strong affinity to Hegel. Furthermore, it is somewhat misleading to refer to Our America as an argument. Beyond the structure of the essays, the most meaningful change in Our America is found in the content. In the earlier essays he argued that Cuba should be free on the basis of universal laws.

Since Cuba has its own hopes and aspirations it deserves autonomy. In Our America Cuba is identified as American. Cuba deserves its freedom from Spain so that it 45 Ibid, He sought how to be American by way of the example of those who were most American. Both his Americanism and his high esteem for Indians are based on his view of nature. As noted in the discussion of the previous chapter, nature the central theme of Our America was completely absent from his earlier works.

His style offers a challenge to interpretation. However, his philosophy is based on a well- developed conception of nature; this conception is developed throughout much of his later writing. With the discussion of Our America, we begin to see the relationship between nations and nature. The first is that the relationship between humans and nature is best understood as a dialectical process.

More so then with systematic writers of philosophy structure, emphasis, style, and historical context are of prime importance. A passage from The False Myth of Latin Inferiority gives a complete introduction to this process: Nature did not give us the palm trees of our forests and the Amazon and Orinoco that water our lands, in vain.

The ample Hispano-American mind comes from those rivers, its fame from those palm groves, its wisdom from what is preserved 49 At this time I do not wish to enter into a debate regarding to what extent Emerson advocated individualism. John T. Oh, the day when the Hispano-American mind commences to shine, it will shine like the sun—the day when we consider our present provincial existence as dead.

Our minds and wisdom develop out of the natural surroundings. But we also notice that humans participate actively in this process. The end result of all this is a joyous and pure life. What follows is a deeper consideration of this process. It is a treat to find theory so thoroughly embedded in such detailed considerations of particulars. Our America springs neither from Rousseau, nor Washington, but from itself!

In the sunset against Mt. Avilla he surely saw the bloody events to come…53 This description of Nature, on first examination, appears to be broken into two levels. We have first the micro level, things we can see in front of us such as palm trees, oranges, the Amazon, the light, mountains, and so on. This would be the level of pictorial landscapes, what we can perceive from our vantage point.

Then, on the macro level are geographic places, Cuba, America, and the United States. Perception of the micro scale is accomplished easily, but the notion of experiencing the United States, or even the county that we are in as a whole, seems a daunting task. Consider the quotation at the beginning of this section. The palm tree is in the palm grove. What look like two levels of experience is actually two aspects of one single experience. Our experience brings together the elements trees, mountains, rivers, clouds, light , forces, causes, and functions of nature to develop the essence or spirit of that land as a whole or unity.

It is this splendor, elegance, brilliance, and variety that compose the vital spirit of the natural setting of America. The spirit of a place originates from the harmony, order, and unity that is the expression of a living land.

Living or untamed is the basic essence with which we can begin to describe nature with the fullness that it deserves. Living describes an aspect of nature that is not particular to a single place.

It is a general term to describe places. In Krause one can find a similar attempt to keep ideas connected to the world of experience. On the other hand the essence of a place leads to the particularity of the people that live there. We were a phenomenon wit ha chest of an athlete, the hands of a dandy, and the brain of a child. The Indian hovered near us in silence, and went off to hills to baptize his children. The Negro was seeing pouring out the songs of his heart at night, alone and unrecognised among the rivers and wild animals.

The peasant, the creator, turned in blind indignation against the disdainful city, against his own child. We were left wit the hearer, the general, the scholar, and the sinecured. The angelic young, as if caught in the tentacles of an octopus, lunged heavenward, only to fall back, crowned with clouds in sterile glory.

The native, driven by instinct, swept away the golden staffs of office in blind triumph. Neither the Europeans nor the Yankee could provide the key to the Spanish American riddle. Hate was attempted, and every year the countries amounted to less. Exhausted by the senseless struggle between the book and the lance, between reason and the processional candle, between the city and the country, weary of the impossible rule by rival urban cliques over the natural nation tempestuous or inert by turns, we being almost unconsciously to try love.

Nations stand up and greet one another. The frockcoat are still French , but thought begins to be American. The youth of America are rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands in the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows.

They realize that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country's form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. Absolute ideas must take relative forms if they are not to fail because of an error in form. Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead wit hall, it dies.

The tiger within sneaks in through the crack; so does the tiger from without. The general holds back his cavalry to a pace that suits his infantry, for if its infantry is left behind, the cavalry will be surrounded by the enemy. Politics and strategy are one.

Nations should live in an atmosphere of self-criticism because it is healthy, but always with one heart and one mind. Stoop to the unhappy, and lift them up in your arms! Thaw out frozen America with the fire of your hearts! The new American are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature.

He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate. Economists study the problems at their point of origin. Speakers begin a policy of moderation. Playwrights bring native characters to the stage. Academies discuss practical subjects. Poetry shears off its Zorrilla-like locks and hangs its red vest on the glorious tree. Selective and sparkling prose is filled with ideas.

In the Indian republics, the governors are learning Indian. American is escaping all its dangers. Some of the republics are still beneath the sleeping octopus, but others, under the law of averages, are draining their land with sublime and furious haste, as if to make up for centuries lost. Still others, forgetting that Juarez went about in a carriage drawn by mules, hitch their carriages to the wind, their coachmen soap bubbles. Poisonous luxury, the enemy of freedom, corrupts the frivolous and opens the door to the foreigner.

In others, where independence is threatened, an epic spirit heightens their manhood. Still others spawn an army capable of devouring them in voracious wars.

But perhaps our America is running another risk that does not come from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves of the continent, and the time is near at hand when an enterprising and vigorous people who scorn and ignore our America will even so approach it and demand a close relationship.

And since strong nations, self- made by law and shotgun, love strong nations and them along; since the time since the time of madness and ambition-from which North America may be freed by the predominance of the purest elements in its blood, or on which it may be launched by its vindictive and sordid masses, its tradition of expansion, or the ambition of some powerful leader-is not so near at hand, even to the most timorous eye, that there is no time for the test of discreet and unwavering pride that could confront and dissuade it; since its good name as a republic in the eyes of the world's perceptive nations puts upon North America a restrain that can not be taken away by childish provocations or pompous arrogance or parricidal discords among our American nations-the pressing need of our America is to show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift conquerors of a suffocating past, stained only by the enriching blood drawn from the scarfs left upon us by our masters.

The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America's greatest danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come the lay hands on us.

Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect. One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. One must allow the best to be shown so that it reveals and prevails over the worst. Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell them the truth in time. There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races.

The theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveller vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man's universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent huger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors.