Armchair pundits take over Spain's philosophy wars

Gustavo Bueno, armchair punditry and Spanish philosophy

Can a thinker who builds an all-encompassing philosophical system and turns it into a trench weapon be taken seriously? That question hangs these days over the culture war surrounding the legacy of Gustavo Bueno and his main media heir, Jesús G. Maestro.

Among those trinc these battles, consensus is scarce: Maestro and Bueno have become the new testing ground for Spain's homegrown armchair punditry. Not even Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a top competitor in the category, manages to unseat the literature professor. His crusade to promote Cervantes against the Anglo-Saxon world is read by some as a defense of Hispanidad (the idea of Spanish cultural identity) and by others as an inferiority complex with delusions of grandeur.

The contradiction of philosophical materialism

The heart of the quarrel is philosophical materialism. Its defenders describe it as a system with clear, auditable rules, rooted in scholasticism; its critics see schoolroom dogmatism that talks about Luther or the Anabaptists without ever leaving Kant and Krausism behind. There is an irony nobody resolves: the very people who proclaim themselves anti-Anglo-Saxon build a philosophy of disbelief closer to the Anglo-Saxon tradition than to the Spanish one, which was transcendental, sly and vitalist.

1914: the world that never came back

Amid the squabble, historical pessimism surfaces: we live in the ruins of a superior civilization, the world ended in 1914. It is no minor quip. If the language no longer suffices to write a divine comedy, perhaps something broke earlier, and we have spent a century managing the ruins.

One certainty remains: some see in Maestro and Bueno the last great effort to shape a national philosophy, while others see only stopped clocks that are right twice a day. Divine it does not look. Comedy, as much as you like.