Federico Reyes Heroles
It was the late 1970s. In Mexico, the social sciences were dominated by Marxist thought. In fact, one could complete a bachelor’s degree with the sole focus of reading Das Kapital. Other approaches were dismissed as “bourgeois.” There were a few rare exceptions—some professors who taught courses centered on other schools of thought. Mariclaire Acosta was one of them: Durkheim, Merton, Easton, Veblen. Fortunately, the French influence remained present in the great mentors of the UNAM School of Political Science (FCPyS): Enrique González Pedrero, Víctor Flores Olea, Gerardo Estrada, and others. They introduced us to Raymond Aron, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Sartre. But Marxism predominated. It was difficult to broaden one’s philosophical horizons.
The Cuban Revolution, Castro, and Che were alive on the walls, covered with slogans and their portraits. They were considered permanent and unquestionable heroes. The threat of “single thought” loomed. That expression wasn’t used.
Suddenly, people began talking about the “Frankfurt School.” It was a group of thinkers with very diverse inclinations, whom no one could accuse of being conservative because of their profound knowledge of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and others. Far removed from Stalinist degradation, their criticism was directed at consumer society, the alienation of the industrial age, authoritarianism, and homogenizing culture. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm himself—its principal founders—discovered dimensions simply beyond the reach of Marxism. Its interdisciplinary nature—philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, economics, aesthetics—injected a freshness that broke through the suffocating Marxist framework.
Wandering the halls of the FCPyS was José María Pérez Gay, a brilliant philosopher, I would say, though his background was in communication; he was fluent in German, knew these authors, and kept up to date with their publications and theses. There were no translations; they were very scarce and often very poor, which is why dear Chema obtained the original versions, many of them from Suhrkamp Verlag.
The so-called “School” also had another source of strong convergence. Philosophers and scientists of Jewish origin sought refuge outside Germany. Marcuse spent a large part of his life and professional career in the United States. Einstein went to Princeton. Karl Popper would write his great text, The Open Society and Its Enemies, against uniform thinking in New Zealand. What libraries might he have consulted for that work, which became a watershed moment for Western philosophy? It was a diaspora that enriched the world.
Through Chema, Herr Pérez, I came across the work of Jürgen Habermas. His thesis left a deep impression on me. To achieve the consensus of a true democratic agreement, the fundamental step was to delve deeper into the forms of communication. Universal principles could only emerge from genuine dialogue. Knowledge was a social process. The recognition of intersubjectivity was another essential factor. Habermas’s work is highly complex for several reasons. The first is that he was a continuator of the tradition of the great treatises, like Hegel. The second is the demand for high abstraction. Third, his great ability to develop new concepts. As Hegel put it, “the effort of the concept.” Byung-Chul Han, the popular Korean essayist, is a heir to the Frankfurt School.
Habermas came to Mexico; he had a cleft lip, and his English pronunciation was very thick. Chema juggled to translate his presentation, back at the old School of Medicine. He was stocky and a great swimmer. I applied for a scholarship from the German government and presented him with a proposal for doctoral studies. He accepted me as a student. But life, that messy business, got in the way, and I was never able to go.
It’s easy to say, but Habermas expanded philosophy and democratic thought. One of the greats has left us.
Auf Wiedersehen.
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