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  • Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Civilization, and the Quest for Coevalness
  • Thomas Ward (bio)

Philosophy and the Denial of Coevalness

In Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (1945), a direct intellectual trajectory is traced that moves from the ancient Greeks, passing through Catholic medieval philosophy, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantics, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Dewey. Latin America is not mentioned appreciably, except in extremely limiting terms: once in the chapter on Aristotle when the author compares the frequency of revolutions in ancient Greece to the reality imposed by nineteenth-century caudillos (190), and again when he refers to the Conquest, in the chapter on the rise of science (538). Aztecs and Mayas are not mentioned, although Incas are compared to ancient Egypt as having an unchallenged—that is, undemocratic—state (115). "Indians" are touched upon just twice to illustrate John Locke's ideas (623, 636). North Americans fare little better than Dewey in Russell's exposition.

Despite four and a half centuries of sustained contact between Europe and the Americas, and despite the compilation of substantial tracts of New World thought in works such as the Florentine Codex, Indigenous Mesoamerican thinking was not considered worthy of inclusion in the History of Western Philosophy. This regardless of having developed a far-reaching philosophical system, as Miguel León-Portilla would so aptly demonstrate eleven years later in his La filosofía náhuatl (1956).1 I do not mean to single out Russell's otherwise excellent work. The same critical gaze can be trained on countless other manuals of this type, such as J. Bronowski and [End Page 96] Bruce Mazlish's The Western Intellectual Tradition, and José Ferrater Mora's Diccionario de filosofía.2 Nor do I mean to imply that these authors were prejudiced or disinclined to include that which they may have felt inferior, although that may have been the case. Where I am going here is that philosophical inquiry is one of the hallmarks of what the West considers civilization, and Mesoamerica's glaring absence in Western intellectual history results from what Johannes Fabian has described as a "denial of coevalness" (31-35). Such an attitude emerges from taking as a given the modernity of a West bent on studying the "primitiveness" of other societies, judging them by a European timeline, not by their own, precipitating a worldview that does not consider the Nahuas (the Aztecs) as worthy of study even as one of Earth's cradles of civilization, a possibility already noted by R. Tom Zuidema (27).

The exclusion of the Americas' Indigenous pathways of culture and philosophy in Western thought can also be detected within the expanding Hispanic world. Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), who will provide a framework for understanding sixteenth-century European "civilization" in this article, was one of the more thoughtful historians of the Conquest of the peoples who would later be called Native Americans. Yet, he was not able to liberate himself from a historiographic tradition that denied the coevalness of other nations, beginning his three-volume Historia de las Indias not with Mexicas, Quichés, and Quechuas but with Columbus's lineage, which, for him, comes from the Roman historian Tacitus. Other sources that Las Casas integrates are Aristotle and, not surprisingly, the Bible (Historia 25-26). The Dominican chronicler, as per the norms of his age, begins his annals of the Indies with events in the Old World, not in the new one. Since, as José Rabasa reminds us, the establishment of the Modern Occidental episteme subjugated Indigenous knowledge ("Historiografía" 69), tending to deny any philosophy that inquires into identity, it does not seem to enter into Las Casas's mind that there could be a new world origin to the New World. Las Casas did not seem to understand this, but Amerindian authors did. Writing in the next century, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega asserts the coevalness of both sides of the Atlantic by opening [End Page 97] his Royal Commentaries with an affirmation that there are "many worlds" ("muchos mundos").3 He specifically asserts that the one called "new" has its own "ancientness and origins" ("antiguallas y origen"; 1...

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