Jorge Galíndez y Luis L. Franco: German Romanticism and the critic to mechanism in Catamarcan Thought in the 20th century

Abstract

This paper analyzes the essay production of two thinkers from Catamarca during the first decades of the 20th century. On the one hand, we focus on the essays by Catamarcan doctor and philosopher Jorge Galíndez, who in many publications finds critical considerations in German Romanticism to rethink the problems of his time in the late 1940s, such as fascism, state authoritarianism, and the advance of cultural capitalism. On the other hand, we explore how the work of Luis Leopoldo Franco begins to lean toward recovering Romantic foundations to consider the natural and social problems of his time. In Franco’s literature, we can find traces of a philosophical thought developed from local cultural coordinates, such as his rejection of religious priority in the province of Catamarca, the region’s modes of speech, local nature, conflicts over water and land, as well as his critique of the politics and art of Argentina and the northern region. To carry out our analysis we appeal to the historical-intellectual reconstruction of the New Intellectual History, which will enable us to re-establish the tensions and disputes over ideas in the contexts of local culture. We believe that, through this approach, we can reconstruct the authors’ ideas within their respective contexts, considering the tensions, the prevailing discourse of the early 20th century, and the intellectual debates that unfolded in their texts. In doing so, we aim to account for a field of conflicting ideas that will allow us to identify the philosophical ideas circulating in Catamarca at the beginning of the 20th century, thus contributing to a history of local philosophy. Finally, we try to emphasize that both authors reject the growing mechanistic nature of the societies of their time, attempting to find in the aesthetic experience of Romanticism the possibility of thinking of a response.