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When talking about Marxist philosophy in Mexico, the first two names that come to mind are Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar Echeverría, and it is unlikely that third or fourth place will be reserved for Elí de Gortari. This is the product of a premeditated forgetfulness that we already pointed out (bit.ly/3w6q8jm), and not necessarily against his person, but rather his ideological orientation, since it does not fit into the canon of heterodox Marxism that nests in universities and social democratic organizations.
From his first writings dated in 1936, until his last books published at the end of the 1980s, De Gortari maintained his adherence to orthodox Marxism, that is, to the notions of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, today called Marxism. dia-mat
by its detractors, who make orthodoxy pass for dogmatism, lack of creativity and stagnation. Due to the above, a good part of his theoretical exchange took place with Soviet philosophers and those of the socialist bloc, in whom Marxist philosophy remained linked to the mature works of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Lenin. This led De Gortari to participate in the internal debates of the so-called Marxism-Leninism, such as the relationship between formal logic and dialectical logic, how many and what are the laws of dialectics, the relationship between general and particular laws, the relationship between logic and epistemology, the history of philosophy and Mao Tse-Tung’s contributions to the theory of contradictions.
Thus, his philosophy responds to the idea of Engels according to which all that remains of the previous philosophy, with its own existence, is the theory of thinking and its laws: formal logic and dialectics. The rest dissolves in the positive science of nature and history
. For this De Gortari cultivated dialectical logic, the epistemological bases of scientific knowledge and the contributions of scientific development to philosophy. Examples of this are your dialectics of physics, where he explains the developments of quantum physics in the light of dialectical materialism, a work with which he gives continuity to the unfinished project of Engels published as dialectics of nature; also the set of articles that he dedicated to categories such as space, time, energy, causality and determinism; and the work that he developed as coordinator of the seminar on scientific and philosophical problems, whose publications confirm the inclination of the dialogue between science and philosophy from a Marxist perspective (bit.ly/3CK3X3H).
His adherence to orthodox Marxism involved a double siege. On the one hand, that of the multiple non-Marxist conceptions promoted by capitalism as part of the cold Warsuch as existentialism, analytical philosophy, postmodernism, to name a few with which he temporarily coincided and about which he stated: “Every time a brand-new philosophical doctrine emerges, the failure of previous interpretations is expressly recognized, which were hardly new. a few years before […] The failure of the newest doctrine is openly shown, making it untenable even for its creators and, in its place, another even more novel philosophical theory is built and equally called to play the role of a transitory fashion. On the other hand, he was brushed against by the criticism of Marxists inclined to heterodoxy, structuralism, critical theory and other expressions of eclecticism linked to the new left; Expressions that to a greater or lesser extent were also promoted by the CIA in opposition to orthodox Marxism associated with the Soviet Union.
Although this situation relegated him to the academic sphere, it did not prevent him from maintaining a dialogue with philosophers, such as Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, with whom he discussed his Introduction to dialectical logic, and with Bolívar Echeverría around causality in quantum physics. He also had contact with non-Marxist philosophers who agreed with him in the field of logic, for example Carnap and Perelman. Despite the fact that De Gortari did not dedicate his pen to controversy, except in cases such as the one that occurred with Mario Bunge, dialogues with the ideas of other philosophers can also be traced through his personal archive, where notes on the ideas of Karl Popper can be found. and comments on the development of scientific knowledge that precede the work of Thomas Kuhn.
In addition to the unfavorable ideological context for his work, De Gortari had to face harassment and repression from the State, due to his political participation in solidarity with the Soviet Union, People’s China, the railway movement, the struggle for peace and the student movement of 1968. Added to this, his adherence to orthodoxy also faced the political test of the secret report from Khrushchev to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which dented the process of socialist construction and generated a worldwide rout of militants and sympathizers among whom the idea that it was Marxism Soviet
the culprit of the atrocities denounced in the speech, already partially denied. This ideological softening led some philosophers to abandon Marxism or walk towards heterodoxy, but this did not happen with Elí de Gortari.
Therefore, to recover and place De Gortari in philosophy is to recognize his affiliation with orthodox Marxism, which has nothing to do with the abstract defense of a purity
theoretical, but with the support of theoretical principles and a methodological procedure. This is a central point to undertake the study of his intellectual career and the whole of his work (bit.ly/3KLBFbQ), including his controversy with the Hyperion Group, his work in the seminar on scientific and philosophical problems, his differences with critical Marxism, his criticism of analytical philosophy and his late approach to Michel Foucault.
Elí de Gortari’s work is not a particular case of creative assimilation
of orthodoxy, but the real expression of it, and his work should serve to rethink to what extent this philosophical expression has been caricatured, causing contributions such as those of Elí de Gortari to be forgotten.
* Historian of the ENAH
