A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History (review)

342 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution o/ National History. By Joao Cruz Costa. Translated from the Portuguese by Suzette Macedo. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1964. Pp. x + 427. $8.50.) Is there a distinctively American philosophy? Mexican? Brazihan? Chilean? Argentinian, etc.? These questions repeatedly raised by program committees have evoked numerous papers at national and international philosophical congresses in Latin America during the past fifteen or twenty years. Beneath these self-conscious, modestly phrased queries seems to lie a hope that both North and South American thinkers have now emancipated themselves enough from the domination of their European homelands to have achieved original philosophies of their own. It is probably a safe generalization that most of the papers on these matters have drawn these conclusions: (1) Transoceanic influences have been very hard to overcome. (2) Same beginnings have been made in this direction. (3) There cannot be such a thing as an American philosophy any more than there can be an American arithmetic or physics. (4) Philosophy in each American nation does take on some distinctive characters because of that particular nation's own peculiar history, racial constitution, natural environment, social and political problems. Professor Ralph Barton Perry came to similar conclusions in his 1949 article, "Is There a North-American Philosophy?" (published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research). Cruz Costa quotes him: Although in the United States there is no body of doctrines or school of philosophy that can be considered North American, there is, nevertheless, an intellectual mould created in the United States as the result of its history, its ethnic origin and its natural environment, which is reflected in the type of philosophy that tended to predominate and to prevail. And Cruz Costa adds, "This is perhaps equally true of what goes on in our own country." Such conclusions set the task of the present volume. It will not present any philosophy which could be labeled "Brazilian." It undertakes rather to trace the history of what happened to the important European philosophies that traveled to Brazil. The question is: What happened to any given philosophy when it came to Brazil, and why? In this assimilation process, some transformation and even some deformation of the original European ideas must emerge. Each of these outcomes is explained by the concrete practical situation in Brazil which necessitated the modification. The originality of the Brazihan thinker is thus found to consist in his ability to apply the alien idea to the new problems of the Brazilian scene, not in creating a wholly new set of ideas. Cruz Costa's historical method thus rejects two extremes: the notion that there can be created a purely Brazilian civilization ez nihilo, based upon a purely Brazilian reality; and the notion that the venerable culture of Europe is so enchanting that mere imitation of it is a sufficiently high virtue for the Brazilian or any other American. This book is thus the very interesting history of the vicissitudes of those European ideas that came adventuring to Brazil. It is not at all a history of philosophy in the North-American textbook sense of that term. Least of all could it be a medieval philosophical compendium of abstract ideas such as the Jesuits used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Brazil so effectively that "Portuguese philosophic development was lulled to sleep by the mass of theological commentaries" (p. 17). It is history--but more. It marshals all the relevant economic, social, political, cultural, and other historical factors which account for the Brazilian modifications of the alien ideas. This book, ~hen, exhibits in action that hiz~oricismo which is the philosophy of Cruz Costa. It is the result of his lifelong efforts to understand all available writings of Brazilian thinkers by use of all the tools of historical study. This single-minded devotion to the native writings of his countrymen fully warrants his colleague, Luis Washington Vita, in attesting him "the major authority on Brazilian thought and its best expositor." His historical method seeks out the immediate , the concrete, the actual, and shuns all abstract metaphysicizing. In this he is a true Brazilian...