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Review Article - (2022) Volume 12, Issue 1
Received: 07-Feb-2022, Manuscript No. IJMSA-22-53678; Editor assigned: 10-Feb-2022, Pre QC No. IJMSA-22-53678 (PQ); Reviewed: 25-Feb-2022, QC No. IJMSA-22-53678; Revised: 04-Mar-2022, Manuscript No. IJMSA-22-53678 (R); Published: 11-Mar-2022
This article argues that Palacios proposes the essential elements for a systematical philosophical anthropology, under the influence of his time, mainly evolutionism and racism, but different while trying to give a wide perspective of racial mix as the result of cultural contamination by contact and the sociocultural mutation as a result. Raza Chilena is a book that contains a holistic hypothesis that link all forms of science, history, biology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics available in the 19th century Chile.
Philosophical anthropology, racism, myth, racist speech, Chilean identity
Certainly, my country is the result of fantasy; like any community, it must be imagined to possess values that draw it together. However, this goes beyond the socio-cultural analysis and requires a semiotic analysis to assume that the fantastic is the very foundation of reality. In the sixteenth century Alonso de Ercilla invented the “Araucanians” in his poem La Araucana (a classic of world literature) and generates the euro centered founding myth of the Chilean mastication. Meanwhile, at the end of the century nineteenth century, Nicolas Palacios gives substance to the Chilean myth: two great forms of exercising the most influential function-and therefore perlocutive and pragmatic function-of literature, and build identity and community. It is about pieces of writing fantastic and real at the same time: Chile becomes a poem in Ercilla and its continuity depends on an act of fantasy from Nicolas Palacios; but Ercilla is part of the collective consciousness on a universal level, Palacios is hidden.
The book Raza chilena (Chilean Race), by Chilean physician and essayist Nicolás Palacios (1854-1911), accepts many readings due to its thematic extension expressed in the two bulky volumes of the 1918 edition and the attempt to outline a value system that identifies and defines the Chilean identity as a way to be legitimate and authentic. The work content appears as an attempt to create a systematic thought that refers to the Chilean identity as a way of being in the world, explaining its present and projection towards the future.
This is the starting point for the attempt to read Raza chilena (Chilean Race) as “pre-philosophical material” from which it is derived an elaboration of a first draft of a Chilean philosophical anthropology. The difficulty in lifting this interpretation is that the approaches made to the work are located mainly in the field of history and literature, particularly from the most diverse political and ideological perspectives, which have generated an understanding of the work as a conservative and nationalist text, a sort of anticipation of the Nazi movement (NACI, under Chilean name) as a reactionary text or just a kind of delirious intertextuality resulting from a mixture-not entirely harmonious, between evolution (mainly Darwin and Spencer), positivism and romanticism (shown in tune with the ideas of Schelle´s popular philosophy).
The literary form that has framed the work of our author is the essay, literary genre pierced by a critical position that reveals a certain philosophical substrate, which is not completely clear for its critics and commentators. Historian Ariel Peralta in his Ideas de Chile (Ideas of Chile) indicates that Nicolas Palacios is for many the “Chilean essayist par excellence”. Clearly, this classification of Palacios within the Chilean essay is essential and central to many researchers. Ricardo Lachtman in his book El ensayo en Chile del siglo XX (The essay in the twentieth century Chile) indicates that, from 1900 on, this genre brings the direct consequences of intellectual and neo-Romantic individualism of the last literary generations, which is able to interpret with singular originality the collective attitude as a people and nationality; and within this characterization it is Palacios who laid the foundations of what we know as modern essay. Moreover, (Lachtman, 1935) emphasizes the idea of Raza chilena (Chilean Race) as a different book, written fluently sometimes, but full of a narrow and xenophobic nationalism against Latin peoples, which has no scientific backing. In our judgment, that does not know the basement of those attitudes. The critique is clear on anthropological, social, literary and even historical levels, but very little concerning the philosophical aspect, as we note in what will be presented next. Cristián Gazmuri in El Chile del Centenario (The Centennial Chile) defines Palacios´ thinking as “confusing, passionate and often contradictory” (Gazmuri, 2001), where it is possible to rescue a quite structured idea of the national crisis, an idea which is part of the rulers´ tradition of the “Chilean race”, which is the product of the fusion of two pure races (Alvarado, 2001).
The movement that scares (what might not be written today)
In our opinion, the importance of Palacios lies in selecting (and articulating) elements of the story to raise conceptual categories (the myth foundation) for the interpretation of the present situation of man, beyond a mere characterization of the sociocultural Chilean reality, a genealogy of how it has come to be Chilean. Simultaneously, these hermeneutics becomes the basis sediment, and therefore the “objective” of a global political and ideological project that ensures a genuine development of the Chilean identity as a way of being (identity) and thinking (rationality) in the world. The substrate organizing the work materials of Palacios revolves around his conception of the origin of Chilean identity from a mythological basis focused on the narration activity, not only as an activity of language but, rather, in the living realization of speaking, as a permanent founding and invitation to the world, in a sort of linguistic enérgeia (Gadamer, 1977) capable of establishing and sustaining the stories that address all understandings of what is human. Palacios attempts to build a myth of origin referred to an archetypal founding past and a possible idyllic future, understood as the construction of the éutopos or good place (Benjamin, 1994).
The resolution of the conflict, sparked by the post-independence processes regionalisms, results, in the Latin American context, into different forms of identity revindication under the guise of Indianism and nationalism that, at their highest level of radicalization, allow the establishment of racist currents, or at least with revindication traits of identity from biologists lines. Concepts like Chilean race in Nicolas Palacios, coined in 1892, in the first anonymous edition of this book, give rise to a real secular mythology, an attempt to interpret the incorporation to modernity from a cultural specificity, understood as a fine process of pollution-including the indigenous-read as the unique and powerful process of mestization that gives authentic and original meaning in the process of shaping the Chilean identity. To Palacios, the concept of “Raza Chilena” (Chilean race) points to the composition of a way of being as Chilean people, from a biological-ethnic structure characterizing the population, formed from the peninsular Gothic element on the one hand; and the Araucanianian-aboriginal on the other, by a process of mutual contamination that allows the harmonious fusion and articulation of both physiological and psychological characteristics of the Goths and Araucanian peoples, generating a unique race, as an essentially patriarchal and warlike group. This statement is neither gratuitous nor emerged from nowhere, but corresponds to a hermeneutics detached from the participation of people, especially the popular classes, in the Pacific War (1879-1883), in which they have a particular participation that determined the Chilean victory. In this sense, the concept of race means to recognize oneself as different from other races (a reading derived from the winners-defeated distinction), along with a form of natural self-consciousness derived from the encounter and contamination of two opposite races: “It is the human brain the greatest wonder of Creation, above the sun and the firmament, and by which Nature itself is conscious of its own being v” (Palacios, 1918).
The postulates of this Chilean race emerge from diverse sources of philosophical, anthropological and sociological knowledge, deriving from the contact of authors like Le Bon, Spencer, Gumplowicz, Smith Hancock, Ammon, Varcher of Lapouge and even Nietzsche himself, who reflect the European instruction of Palacios and the mastery of ethnological, linguistic and philosophical knowledge-among other fields; a fact that certainly influenced his work. Another determining antecedent is the inter text that articulates with the work La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga (1533-1594) who, when expressing the meeting of two literally fierce and uncontrollable people allows to connect his concept of race in two peoples that over 400 years fought in wars for domination and self-determination, for freedom from subjection and dependence (Benjamin, 2009). The literary invention of a powerful American rival for a glorious Spanish army gives rise to generate a myth that makes the concept of Chilean race derive from the aboriginal and the Goth as an overcoming of the European (Fichte, 1994).
The Chilean race derives from the mutual contamination of what Palacios considers two primitive races, in that founding sense besides being pure, not because of being naturally superior to other races, but rather because they possessed “stable and fix qualities from many previous generations”. Note that this race arising from pollution has a dimension of a historical project developed over time, and consisting of a fruit and not in an original foundation based on nothing. In this sense, it is an experience of transparency of racial knots that form the Chilean ethnic configuration that the establishment of a superior race. Europeans arrived in Chile will seek to generate the foundation of a people from the ownership and empowerment of the land that will sustain the process of mixing and contamination: “The idea expressed by Valdivia concerning the object of the conquest of our lands was that of all his colleagues and successors of the same race: get a land where the lineage of conquerors perpetuated and a blessed memory remained from them and on.” That is the right and fair feeling, a feeling that was perpetuated in Chile by psychological heritage, and reinforced from generation to generation by the ongoing struggle with the Araucanian, a struggle that offered the lands of that legendary race as the prize for victory. Having that hope nurtured at every moment our race has developed (Levitas, 1990).
Palacios sees this pollution of races as a process of progressive races encounter, which becomes the adaptation of each other, a process that generates progress. For Palacios, progressive races are those that bear men whose individual pleasures are beneficial to social progress; the latter being called adaptation. The concept of “Chilean race” appears as a way of understanding and interpreting all that is Chilean, which is understood as a social group “endowed with magnificent organic conditions and a vital first class power.” The concept derives from a vision of nationality in opposition to the ruling classes-who Palacios extremely criticizes-also, from internationalism at the expense of the national good, expressed in the thirst for easy money and general moral decay. These would articulate a kind of dispersion of the Chilean national identity. Xenophobia, attacks and criticism against the foreign represent a kind of reaction to the perception of establishing a systematic conspiracy against the Chilean race, which seeks to end the impediment of the birth of a national industry and the limitation of the real Chilean independence. Besides, it seeks the dissolution of the national identity in an internationalist system, with its “nonsense doctrines of universal brotherhood, universal race, universal homeland and universal mixture of races to form civilization, and many other Latin utopias” with which the “enlightened” ruling class is too imbued.
Being faithful to the racial heritage in the contemporary in which Palacios writes is choosing a nationalist development, where xenophobia, separatism and every element that prevents contaminating the strength and true character of the Chilean individual become the basic premises of that nationalism. Palacios was accused of being the mastermind of a radical nationalism rooted in a radical racism, from which he offers an identity construction based on an essence, naturalized and objectified in a mixed race like no other. This makes it possible to articulate a single meaning of the constitution of a Chilean identity, as reservoir of original values (strength, nobility, warrior spirit, military cunning, sense of freedom) and essential elements from which the subsequent development of the “homeland” is thought. Today, when many reread Palacios, they did not think of him from the periphery, because they do not accept the periphery status, but the condition of the lost fragment of center peaks. Our thought is built up in dialogues with reason; dialogues that show characteristics of idolatry at times, when dreaming of being an illustrated Creole, permanently exiled from any metropolis.
Raza Chilena (Chilean race), the founding myth: A delirious origin for the Chilean identity
This paper will attempt to establish a reading of the work that allows an improvement or at least a critical distance from these perspectives in their biases, establishing an understanding of the work as “prephilosophical materials” for the development of the Chilean thought and a philosophical anthropology emerged from it.
Raza Chilena (Chilean Race) appears as a “prephilosophical materials” as it offers a set of materials that allow the encounter of a mythical form with an underlying logical background capable of generating categories that allow a rational account of reality. In his work, Palacios offers an attempt to bring order to the chaos that underlies the experience of the Chilean being in the world, as a valid identity style able to contain and shape it over time. Founding a myth that explains reality does not seek to raise a finished explanation of it, but rather to allow the participation of those who interact with it. In this sense, the myth emerges as a unity of intuition, a former intuitive unity and underlying all explanations given by discursive thought (Cassirer, 1965). Palacios attempt generates a bridge among experience, life and rationalization of thought, as posterior moment, as the myth has a contemplation starting from an attitude, as an act of feeling and will. The myth condenses a lasting configuration that exposes before us “the stable profiles of an objective world of shapes; the meaning of such a world only becomes intelligible to us if, behind it, we can feel the dynamics of the vital feeling from which it originally grew”.
In this sense, the “prephilosophical materials” allow us to get in touch with the way people feel life, ideologies and imageries holding worldviews and time, beyond the styles in which they appear and deliver materials to be thought and rationalized. The myth of Chilean identity contains a “dynamic of the vital feeling” able to provoke to thought. It is not about forcing the understanding of the work from a philosophical understanding, but rather exploring the categories that flow from it. The reflection of philosophy is a kind of invention or production (poiesis) having start from the materials offered by the myth (Franfort, 1993) generating another sacralizing and solemn myth arising from the rational word.
This “prephilosophical materials” have been useful for the development of many of the trends that have sought to systematize the Chilean identity, and also for the fields of work and reflection of sociology and anthropology. That is why it is our proposal to read not only focusing on the time of writing and first reception of the work or the personality of the author himself, but rather, we focus on the text and the textual author, whose writing seeks to develop a systematic hypothesis, through a complex web of elements of science (of his time) with the rhetorical forms of literary character (predominant at that time) that allow him to raise a foundation myth about the Chilean being, “Palacios praises the soul of the Chilean identity, praises personal bravery, righteousness, loyalty, the ability to work and suffer, the humor they defined in the calicheras and the fightings against the Chilean roto, which he attributed to the glad mixture of the Gothic and Araucarian blood.” (Salinas, et al. 1988).
From this perspective, Raza chilena (Chilean Race) appears as the articulation of a set of hybrid narrative strategies among literature, philosophy and science, which allows us to develop the essential hypothetical planning: Palacios’s work, through a systematic statement, outlines an approach that seeks to sustain and justify the Chilean as a way of being in the world, through a founding myth of the Chilean identity. This can be understood not only as a “protoantropology”, but rather as the foundation of a weltans hauung that generates a “prephilosophical” material from which are derived the identity discourses that have helped the understanding of the Chilean identity as a form of rationality and a “way of being in the world”. This “prephilosophical” material raises up its performance from the miscegenation that took place during the conquest to the social processes of the nineteenth century, allowing a theoretical projection since it forms a genealogical basis (Foucault, 1993; Foucault, 1994) of the Chilean thinking on an ideological and anthropological levels that will affect the political-cultural understanding of the state and of man, particularly in an anthropological and philosophical vision behind the discourses they hold. In our time, the statements referred to in the work do not seem scientifically valid, but it is not the scientific validity of this work our main interest: Palacios wrote a text that seeks to articulate a “myth of origin” (Eliade, 1981; Levi Strauss, 1987; Levi Strauss, 1997), a founding fact for different perspectives and ideological functions, which constitutes a valuable and attractive “prephilosophical” material because it is the fruit of the human “mythopoetic” activity that creates a language capable of establishing and inviting the world while articulating a social involvement of what is founded (Wartofsky, 1973). Moreover, Palacios´s attempt sets out the essential elements for a systematic outline of a philosophical anthropology, somehow influenced by the thinkers of his time, mostly racist and evolutionist ones, from whom he separates when trying to offer an overview of miscegenation, as a result of a process of contamination of encountering cultures and a resulting socio-cultural mutation. In this attempt, he takes hold of all the “scientific” analytical and comprehensive resources at their disposal, which is an effort that must be rescued, not because of its scientific credibility, but, rather, because of the efforts for a systematic thinking which, by its background, exceeds the mere pamphlet. This is a not always happy understanding we have of the work thanks to biased or merely ideological readings.
From the perspective of a “mythopoetic” foundation, this work appears as a central text to recognize the base that will give a definite access to the reality a group of people to the insights of the Chilean identity: “The purpose of the essay by Palacios is the revindication of man of peoples, as the maximum result of the mixing process, contrary to the racist development of his environment. His main thesis is that “the Chilean roto constitutes a perfectly defined racial entity; being mestizo, from Gothic and Araucanian, both having a patriarchal psychology represents the higher human value. As it is known, Palacios first formulated the theory of the gothic origin of the Spanish conqueror that came to Chile, a thesis also exposed by Encina in a more nuanced way” (Godoy, 1981).
Despite the conditions and assumptions from which Palacios writes, that seem inconceivable today, he first personifies the ambition to propose thinking from the totality, the event of miscegenation [being Chilean] as a founding identity of a way of being, unique and specific. That is why Raza chilena (Chilean race) develops from a hypothesis without accommodating recesses or axiological voids: a totalizing, poetically and rhetorically undeniable hypothesis that neatly joins all forms of science, philosophy, history, biology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics, the latter available in Chile in the late nineteenth century. This thesis presents the myth of the Chilean as a sort of Araucanianian-Germanic, which is proud unprecedented and prodigious, as well as bombastic as an approach to the phenomenon of miscegenation between the Mapuche and the Basque-Gothic Spaniards. Besides, it is aimed at an amazing, but indigestible, philosophical formulation (also anthropologically). The significance of this attempt is the positive understanding of miscegenation that joins, as a bridge, two almost irreconcilable realities until our days: the European and the vernacular, two banks of an abyss that had been sung (and exalted) by Alonso de Ercilla in La Araucana. Palacios´ book represents a political-utopian proposal, as it has “ideological will to power”, as it is coated with a “will to truth” (Foucault, 1994) which a founding myth reveals and projects.
Myth and ideology as categories of unity and belonging in identity
Palacios conception of an arauco-Germanic race seems something crazy today, if what we seek is an isomorphic relationship between his thinking, the language used and the reality to which he refers. Palacios discursive forms are metaphors directed to the foundation of an identity myth. His discourse thinks from the whole and to this end, the use of time as a narrative strategy appears in a sacred dimension: the past and the future is embellished, in a utopic way, you dream. This is not a speech that starkly shows the reality as it is, but rather aims to establish a channel of participation in “the beauty of being a Chilean.” This is what we understand as a pre-understanding that provides meaning to the structures of historical finitude in the human being (Vattimo, 2000). We insist that the European indigenous mestization is not the textuality in the case of Palacios, not a mere biological or cultural fact, but rather the highest point of a process of contamination in two ways of being (beyond two rationales) that nowadays must be justified, for a necessary projection in the future.
In our view, the only possible utopian anticipation in Palacios in his narrative work is that one that constitute his speech in a myth with an alpha and omega, clear and distinct, which starts in his thinking, from that perfect and balanced process of arauco-Germanic mestization-contamination, and ends in an obsessive reaffirmation of what he will understand as Chilean-manners. The myth founded from the beginning a kind of constellation able to organize, in time, this whole society which depends, is understood and explained under that myth. The world participation based on the myth depends on the effectiveness of public actions. It appears determined by the degree of awareness and participation acquired from the foundation myth. In this sense, the myth operates through a temporary dislocation that contracts in the same event different time frames, “a myth always refers to past events but the intrinsic value ascribed to the myth is due to the fact that these events, which are supposed to have occurred at certain time in time, also form a permanent structure. It refers simultaneously to the past, present and future” (Levi Strauss, 1970).
In Palacios the use of temporary is made from a seemingly progressive chronology, which results in the externality of a different time, deposited at the origin of an archetypal past. It is closer to religious saga (as proto-history) than that of a kind of prehistory narrative. It is the affirmation of a “now” from the origin, closely linked to the future, that in part has not been yet, and on the other, will not be, but, rather, is currently (and permanently) being. Moreover, the future settled in his racism and xenophobia result in a utopian fulfillment that becomes possible from the power of the will to rule, not the mere denial of the other but rather a self-affirmation to the other. For example, the respect and admiration for the United States, as a nation that knows how to recognize, assess and utilize the skills and individual capabilities, is to Palacios, the essence of that greatness and power of the North Country: “That same selection is what has created these genius organizers covering with their powerful understanding the totality of a great industry worldwide. The superior skills of command, organizing skills, scientific and technical knowledge and extraordinary physical and mental energy that must possess these men are also imponderable”.
Palacios ideology is the resulting product of the myth, as a space where a system of values is understood as social action orientations. His concepts are, as signs, polysemic but not evil: the trilogy of race, the Chilean and the roto, that is, that which manifests identity, are part of an ideology that appeals to a historical specificity (being in the world as an event) which basis is not exclusively empirical, but it is about ideal types that attempt to generate social movement from the use and processing of the evidence, as it once did Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in the first half of the XIX century. It is therefore a realization-oriented ideology (deconstruction of utopia as an éutopos), that we can understand as “the possible plenitude”.
Specifically, it is a myth that gives signs, which become ideological parameters when carrying a condition of xenophobic possibility and downright arbitrary times, but they do not pursue anything other than the consolidation of identity in an emerging nation and process of development. This is reflected in the criticism of Palacios to foreign immigration in southern Chile: “So the current of rejected discarded by the old world selection, those physically or intellectually unable to earn their living there” will seek for a place in the non-German America as there is no place for them anywhere in the world. This is the army of misfits whose invasion will be fatal to the country that may suffer it. The methodical and constant infiltrations of foreigners have the serious drawback that the evil it produces in society is not perceived with the liveliness given to the damage. It’s like a virus that enters the body without pain and without pain extends its lethal power to the very source of life”.
Our author is presenting his xenophobia from a condition of possibility that escapes his claims of identity affirmation that comes to life-though not really in the discursive forms of Chilean conservatism.”Racial sheets” of Francisco Encina Antonio are an ideological sign from an “ideologized” myth projected even in the forms of stratification that the Chilean right dreams for the XX century. In Palacios myth and ideology is self-supported and delimited only when the racial factor is brought up in his discourse, as an original idea, a zero point of his writings. It is about denying other to have your self-assertion, a suppression of the differentiating otherness by the hegemonic homogenization of the one, coming to set up a sort of “metaphysical terror of the one” that escapes out of the same possibilities in Palacios story. On the other hand, we know that human races, at least sociologically, do not exist the way Palacios thinks of them; but this is not important, since the myths are not true or false, but rather are efficient or inefficient in their founding participation purposes and inclusion in what they explain.
In this sense, the myth of Palacios is truly efficient since there is a true will to truth in him, a whole revelation without which liberal conservative alliance could not have designed a remotely coherent cultural project in Chile. Moreover, in its concrete approach to language, the Cartesian heritage that, as an underground river runs along the western linguistic thought is expressed in Nicolás Palacios, who like Humboldt or Port Royal, always looks for an empirical support in the evidence dominated by clarity and distinction. This is done based on a model that in the epistemological rationalist style, defines not only the analytical framework, but also makes a forced agreement, which makes use (and abuse) of empirical data without ever truckle to him. In this sense it is an effort that, as a “poet-hero” Palacios makes by taking favorable pieces of the phonetic and syntax reality unites them in the manner of a craftsman who defines the efficiency of his work measuring the consistency with an archetypal, mental, ideal and ethereal model. This model, based on the pre-structure of understanding, will define all of his research, including racism, to which Palacios comes oriented in a single direction, but not being naive because it is a resource that allows the identity affirmation. Finally, in this way, mind and language are linked to our author always to help the foundation of myth as an attempt to fix the Chilean manner (as a human experience) over time. Palacios argues with the forms of language science of his time, captivated by his myth and from there, he refutes the linguistic canon, without much foundation but with passion.
Nicolas Palacios´s founder language: an endless semantic waterfall
Until the XVIII century, in which European travelers come into contact with distant peoples, not a proposal appears to explain the origin of languages. At this time begins the comparison of modern languages with the dead languages, carrying messages of the past. After his travels in America and the Pacific, Humboldt made a general theory of language. For him, language is power; he made a distinction between the phonetic and conceptual matter and language form, which are the words and their syntactic chain. After these concepts a century later, Ferdinand de Saussure formulated the theory of the linguistic sign. But we own to Humboldt still one more concept: thinking that each language has its own internal form and that form is based on the vision of the world their speakers have; that or modern heritage was picked by the modern generative school: “The ingrained and widespread belief that the Chilean people have corrupted the Spanish language is old in the country and had as its main and first supporters, two authorities as enlightened as JJ de Mora and the erudite A. Bello. No wonder, therefore, that national “habilistas” have continued to maintain the same, or that one of our foreign teachers has given it as a fact and is determined to find the cause of the corruption”.
There is no clarity regarding the influence that European rationalist language may have had on Palacios; yet we know that there is some sort of sign of his times in the use of language he developed, a peculiar resource to the German Romantics of the XIX century. On the one hand the language ensures to an individual belonging to a linguistic community a sort of independent existence, the myth introduces the individual in an established relationship on participation, in the world´s last true, generating behavior towards it, or from it, which results in an individuation by a social community participation. The myth does not claim an autonomous existence of who participates in it, but rather, (it) speaks that throughout the world, showing what is in its actuality with others and among others. The world is just world for the individual as it is shared by myth. The myth has its true existence (and profit) in the fact that it represents the world from a primordial time that explains present relationships.
In the myth time it stops to explain the movement now from a source that does nothing to speak from, and to, now. Who does not know the myth does not know the world does not know the reason of time nor the reason of now. Is excluded from any possible understanding of the now, therefore, from the fields of meaning of life as well. In this sense there is no way to build a human world without language or a way of inviting the world without language, which leads us to affirm that there is no world without language. Language is not only one of the gifts that man has to function in the world, but it settles and represents the fact that men do not have world, rather, they are inextricably put in the world (Gadamer, 1977). For man the world is there as a “dumb” reality in a way not available to any other living creature than he, that needs to be related or told to be understood. The existence of the world is linguistically constituted. It is in this context that the myth makes its appearance as an attempt to time setting in language: that which moves on the temporality experience of man in the world, must find a static origin from a story that serves as a guide in the cosmos.
Rafael Videla Eissmann makes a brief summary of the idea of Chilean race Nicolas Palacios manifested in his work. To prove his hypothesis he makes a comparison of the two elements that shape this race from the origin (Goths is equal to top of the Arctic island/Araucanian is equal to diluvian catastrophe) to beliefs or rituals, God/is (Goths is equal to God of the runes, and Tuisto and Hesta/Araucanian is equal to Nguenechen, sacred action), sacred tree (Goths is equal to Irminsul/Araucanian is equal to Canelo). Then the new explorers who come to America are: Spanish, gentlemen, that is, the Goth´s children. To Videla, in its interpretation of Palacios, this new breed apart from revealing the biological-ethnic structure of our population, has also acquired unique physiological and psychological characteristics. So, Videla emphasizes, Palacios makes a Chilean race genealogy through a physical, psychological, social and moral characterization of the Chilean mestizo, trying to clean the Araucanian and the current subject image who is a synthesis of the primary mix: the roto as a synthesis of a process of meeting, contamination and mixing of races that is the foundation of the Chilean identity.
Chilean man race
There is a somewhat strange horizon in Palacios; from the morphological and syntactical analysis he tried to build a utopia, sustaining the myth on language. Though he delineated an improbable plot he created a strong aesthetic form. It is surprising to see in a thinker so influenced by the nineteenth-century biologist evolution a kind of new science in the manner of Vico; It is amazing to see him ground in a dimension of language and convert the same reflection in the sustain of his utopian proposal. In the style of a Humboldt who designs a linguistics of the “other” Palacios looks to his own language and its transformations foreseeing a kind of underlying structure (in a sort of one against the other affirmative design), of a deeply historical and external dimension, going back to a mythical origin that is difficult to contrast: “It is an accepted opinion that the early inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula spoke a binder language, like the current Basque, if it was not the same Basque used by all its inhabitants. This village was invaded in prehistoric times by other people, who had a flection language, the Celts; but his language did not leave known traces in Spain. G. Humboldt believes that geographical names that ends in “briga” have a Celtic origin. A few words that are present in Castilian have the same origin and seem to have come later”.
The diversity of issues addressed by Palacios in Raza chilena (Chilean Race) presents us a versatile thinker, informed and, above all, committed to a national project. Besides making a genealogy of the Chilean race through a physical, psychological, social and moral characterization of the Chilean mestizo, his pen does not hesitate to clean the Araucanian (mapuche) and the current subject image that articulates a synthesis of the primary mixture: the roto. The description of the character of the Chilean roto, Palacios makes, exalts characters that rise to the status of essential elements and, therefore, articulate the condition of a possibility, of an imagined social order, that can be built (eutopos). The roto is naive, friendly, simple, with a distinct character from the party-goer, improper spirit so characteristic in the Latin people: “But that diarist should know that the roto knows neither by name the hundred vices that corrode the soul and bones of some of his countrymen from the cities. When the pawn of the fields, villages and towns of the country come to the capital, he hears there, for the first time in life, certain words that startle his child soul and though he lived one hundred years in that city he would always be ignorant of many of those things because they do not fit into his spirit”.
The roto, the mestizo, is the configuration of the Chilean people. Acording to (Cruzat, et al.1987) Palacios thought that it: “was the social group in which the Gothic race that came from Europe remained really pure,” where the loneliness situation of this people gets deeper, postponed and abandoned by the ruling classes. Where does Palacios see this people? He sees it, and the authors we presented agree on this fact, from the moment he participates in the Pacific War and later as a medical student and doctor in the salpeter-works. (Godoy, et al. 2007) agree on this idea, indicating that in the midst of his medical work, his stay in Tarapacá and direct observation of the popular classes, Raza chilena (Chilean Race) was born. In this sense, the importance of Palacios is that he chooses elements of history to raise conceptual categories of interpretation of the Chilean sociocultural reality, which becomes at the same time the basic sediment, and therefore “objective” in which can be based a political project to ensure genuine development of the Chilean. In the exposed authors we have seen a number of analysis elements that does not directly consider the dimension of the prephilosophical material that intends to conform our work. On this last point, it is relevant Palacios vision of a nation in crisis: “Chile is in crisis because, the rulers betrayed the Chilean race, and the country was invaded by Latino immigration and other races he considered inferior”.
Palacios also approaches a social phenomenon: the crime, and in his analysis he very clearly distinguishes the origins of this social scourge, identified in the incorporation of the Latin race to our nationality. His ideas about morality justify and base, from a racist perspective, the decline of societies (an idea that is very much in tune with Spengler thought). In this sense he proposes biological foundations to place the role of women on racially determined values. His proposal of an education attached to the original values is the way to social normalization that our country urgently requires; it is the only mechanism to straighten the road. These kinds of concepts are fundamental to understand Palacios´ anthropological thought of and his influence on the Chilean state action in the XX century. Noteworthy are the pages devoted to the races classification: “biological constitution determines mental characters, so his proposal is to make classifications on the basis of brain functions: mental deficiency in matriarchal races for the objective analysis is what makes them unable to appreciate the difference between men”.
Similarly, Palacios is a staunch opponent of the Latinos immigration policy, who is considered as inferior races, agents of cultural diversity and identity and disintegration as well. He describes and defines the social prejudices that brought Latinos immigration in Chile: “The Latino immigration interrupts among us two of the social raising scales: the trade and the crafts Will there be any remedy? And even evil would not exist if, rather to justify, to protect, to strengthen the natural instinct Chilean people, his “enlightened” and leader class was not imbued in the absurd doctrines of universal brotherhood, of the universal fatherland and the universal mishmash of races to form the civilization, and so many other fatal and Latino utopias”.
Since Chilean aboriginal by Jose Toribio Medina, the way it develops a type of discourse on diversity is intended to be consistent with both evolutionary and then developmental categories about our identity, as the most remote roots, roots systematically denied that joined with the unconscious but operating in categories such as Indian and people. In Raza chilena (Chilean Race), Palacios becomes the first Chilean thinker who goes beyond the historiographical study, building a text where he tells what he sees as the essence of Chilean national culture. His effort is complex because beyond the agitation pamphlet we find in him a text that uses all forms of science he has access to generate a racist but amazing coherent discourse.
The figure of Nicolas Palacios, dare we say without fear, is capital when speaking of an anthropological-philosophical thought, founder of our Chilean identity, despite the great disadvantage of his xenophobia, which dyes his condition of thinker of our modernity. That is the reason of certain voluntary oblivion-besides decontextualizing his thought as a punishment for his racist views, together with a radical evolutionism, which puts him in a delicate situation when thinking of him as a driver of the reflection about the Chilean identity.
His concern for the fate of the nation is one of the forces that lead Palacios to build the mythical story of the Chilean being the race a determining variable in the configuration of that destiny in our author´s vision. However, they are also urban growth, the labor movement and the beginnings of mass culture, factors interacting with racial determine Palacios´view. (Rinke, 2002) states the lack of a national project in the ruling classes is the phenomenon that permeates most notably the Raza chilena (Chilean Race) work. The ruling class is for Palacios races that do not have the Chilean race attributes and moral values. Immigrants, who come from the Latin race and their commitment to economic imperialism and the elite Europeanization, is the group that needs to become the excluded side. Palacios is also against anarchism and communism because of their globalizing bias. To cement his hypothesis Palacios not only takes what he sees in his social context in Chile, he is also influenced by currents of philosophical, anthropological thought and the evolution biologist. These influences are received mainly during his stay in Europe. Darwin, Spencer (assumed in their racism implicit in the assumption of a more or less functional specialization for each human group), and other sources that nourish racist European movements are his main source of initiation and allow him to build the race concepts, Chilean, roto, in short, the concept of identity in his grade as polysemic but not perverse signs; founding an ideology that appeals to the historical specificity which has no empirical basis, but these are ideal types that try to generate social movement.
From that tissue emerges the figure of the identification of the Raza chilena(Chilean race) with the roto, that put Palacios in a critical position before the exploitation system of the Chilean working class in his days, which eventually opens a broad anthropological identity space of the mestizo as a category for understanding the Chilean being in the world. The categories that emerge from the roto not only describe the current man of Chile, but outline its origin and its projection in time. This position puts us in a series of elements underlying in the anthropological and sociological discourses of Chilean identity as a substrate that supports and sustains them.
The significance of Raza chilena (Chilean Race) today is very diverse and generally has a strong ideological load, uplifted or hated. To (Bragassi, 2006), the work Raza chilena (Chilean Race) contributes to the sense of rootlessness experienced by new generations with the euro-centrist models, customs and traditions that are no longer valued as before. Videla Eissmann also presents a charged with political ideology Palacios that can be projected to our time: “The release of the extraordinary work Raza chilena (Chilean Race), in its centenary, fulfills the objective of spreading the knowledge about the origin of our population, raising the national spirit at the present time” (Videla, 2008).
A myth as explanatory system cannot be evaluated for its verisimilitude, but its efficacy, and Palacios is efficient: how much of the current understanding that articulates common sense both in the Chilean elite and the middle and popular sectors is derived from this nationalist delirium?, a delirium that assumes positions, legitimates and delegitimizes, approves and disapproves, fantasizes and concludes frantically, but above all thinks the whole. In our opinion it is not only Palacios´ anachronistic racism what prevents his acceptance, but what intimidates is his attempt to think the totality. Palacios is a totalizing myth that survives a surreptitiously and hidden way. Today that we have overcome the assumption, defined from the consciousness metaphysics, that the discourse on identity must make the recipient conscious about something that was hidden, we can read Palacios, not from the historical judgment or the ideological affiliation, but from the transparency to glimpse in his book Raza chilena(Chilean Race) a systematic philosophical anthropology, which achieves what classical European thought has ever achieved: to give an overview that defines a possibility of social integration.
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