Send article
i

Meridional. Chilean Journal of Latin American Studies is pleased to invite you to participate in the dossier “Relevance of Latin American Marxism: Thinking from, with, and beyond Michael Löwy’s work”, which consists in our 21st volume, to be published in October 2023. 

A spirit without mud. Andrés Bello and the critique of materialism in Latin America

Authors

No. 18 (2022): April-September. Dossier: Cultural transits in the 19th Century: musicians, painters, actors and writers on the scene of the national consolidation of the Southern Cone
https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-4862.2022.66486

Abstract

The paper reads some discussions and a poem written by Andrés Bello in the context of the hostility towards materialist ideas that can be read in the first half of the nineteenth century in Latin America. To this purpose, it begins by presenting some general notions about the materialist critique of religion and authority. Subsequently, it explains the impossibility of the development of a certain "radical Enlightenment" in the framework of the Latin American society of that time. Bello's criticism of materialism is then presented, particularly in relation to the work of Lucretius, which he presents by translating and transforming a text by Abel-François Villemain with which Bello seeks to separate Lucretius from any form of literature. This explains why Lucretius is quoted in the founding speech of the University of Chile to explain what literature should not be. Poetry for Bello must be antimaterialist, as in the poem in which he revisits the materialist topic of the fall to support the need for a spiritual direction of the body and the people. Finally, we highlight the importance that the revision of materialism can have for a critique of the past and present of an authoritarian democracy in the continent.

Keywords:

Andrés Bello, Lucretius, materialism

Downloads

Altmetrics
How to Cite
Fielbaum, A. (2022). A spirit without mud. Andrés Bello and the critique of materialism in Latin America. Meridional. Revista Chilena De Estudios Latinoamericanos, (18), 49–92. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-4862.2022.66486
ACM ACS APA ABNT Chicago Harvard IEEE MLA Turabian Vancouver
Endnote/Zotero/Mendeley (RIS) BibTeX
 
Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos
Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades
Universidad de Chile
DATOS DE INVESTIGACIÓN
Dirección de Servicios de Información y Bibliotecas (SISIB)