The Mesoamerican Philosophy Renaissance

500 years after the conquistadors began burning books written by the original philosophers of Mexico and Guatemala, America’s classical thinking now rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Nahua and Maya philosophy hand us a mirror for our era.

On October 1^st, the renowned emeritus professor Miguel León-Portilla (1926–2019) passed away in Tenochtitlan, better known today as Mexico City. The impact of León-Portilla’s work during the past six decades, can hardly be overstated. He is the pioneer scholar credited with unearthing the largely overlooked philosophy of the original inhabitants of Mesoamerica: the Nahuatl-speaking Nahuas (also known as Mexicas or “Aztecs”, of the High Central Plateau of Mexico) and the Maya (who live in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and parts of Mexico).

At the age of 87, León-Portilla was awarded the “Living Legend Award” by the Library of Congress. Recently, his works on the philosophy of the Mesoamerican peoples have been vital for such scholarly books as James Maffie’s Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (2014) and Alexus McLeod’s Philosophy of the Ancient Maya (2018) – both focusing on the original metaphysics of the continent’s first residents.

Now, Cambridge University Press has decided to publish an introductory volume of Mesoamerican philosophy as part of its series “Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy.” In this volume, McLeod will also cover the philosophical traditions of the Zapotec and Mixtec – who developed their own writing systems – and other Mesoamerican peoples. So finally, the classical philosophy of the Americas is about to be accepted into at least parts of the philosophical canon. The ideas of the Nahuas and the Mayas are being restored.

By chance, this philosophical reconstruction occurs exactly 500 years after Moctezuma II (1466–1520), the speaker (tlatoani) of the Aztec Triple Alliance, met the conquistador Hernán Cortés outside his capital in November 1519. The present Mesoamerican Renaissance materializes half a millennium after the European zealots began their destruction of the non-Christian manuscripts in the libraries of the Nahua and Maya peoples. It has been a long time coming.

Already in the 1530s, the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún learned that the societies of the Nahuatl-speaking Nahuas (Aztecs) had their own devoted scholars (tlamatinime) – a gender-neutral term meaning “knowers of things”, “the wise”, or “philosophers.” These philosophers were dedicated to writing, preserving the Nahua classics, and teaching both girls and boys from the age of eight about the world’s existential questions. Several of them were women, and they had been educated for years in calmecacs – the Nahuas’ institutions for higher learning. The philosophers took care of and wrote the contents in the books; the memory banks of society. The Nahuas looked to these tlamatinime, who also included poets and historians, for intellectual and moral leadership.

When Sahagún realized – with the help of indigenous collaborators like Antonio Valeriano – the depth of the thinking of the elderly Nahua informants, he wrote admirably about their “wise men or philosophers” (sabios o philosophos). Thus, one century before the advent of Descartes and modern European philosophy, Sahagún noted that like the “Greeks, Romans”  it “was also the custom in this Indian nation” to hold “the wise, eloquent, virtuous, and courageous” in “high esteem.”

Accordingly, Lynn Sebastian Purcell argued in a 2016 paper that received the APA prize in Latin American thought, the Nahua argument for a “rooted life”, neltiliztli, “functions for ethical purposes in a way that is like Aristotle’s eudaimonia.” Purcell compares this Greek perspective to the Nahua philosophers’ conception of the virtues (“the good, noble”: qualli, yectli). Hence, the Nahua “held a view about ethical philosophy that is similar to Aristotle’s.”

Purcell also stresses that Nahua philosophers “often did break with ordinary understandings” in their society. For example, the Nahua philosopher Nezahualcoyotl (1402–1472, his name translates as a “Coyote who fasts”) is “clearly expressing doubt about life in a place after death.”

Agnosticism was present among the first nations of America, in addition to its widespread pantheism. There were discussions, disagreements. And Sophists. Sahagún’s informants complained about the “false wise man, like an ignorant physician, a man without understanding.” Such a Sophist “leads the people astray; he causes others to lose their faces.”

Over four decades from the 1540s, Sahagún transcribed his discourses with the learned Nahua elders; first they wrote in Nahuatl, in the Roman alphabet – then they translated this into Spanish. The result was an encyclopedic and bilingual work of 1,200 pages and 2,400 plus illustrations drawn by Nahua artists: The General History of the Things of New Spain – today known as the “Florentine Codex”. These 16^th century books, which took 30 years to translate into English, completed in 1982, cover the Nahua inhabitants’ views on everything from history and nature to economy, astronomy, and philosophy.

Luckily, not all the Mesoamerican manuscripts were lost in the Spanish colonizers’ lootings and book burnings. Thousands of pages were copied and preserved. And now they are slowly coming to life through deciphering, translations, and new studies.

The most famous Maya text is the Popol Vuh (“Council Book” or “Book of the Community”), written down in the middle of the 16^th century north of Guatemala City. This “Council Book” describes the origins and histories of the Mayan K’iché people, who now number more than 1.5 million people in Guatemala. And it gives voice to the women; “grandmothers” are referred to more than twice as often as “grandfathers.”

New doors have been opened for philosophers now, as the glyphs of the Mayas have been deciphered during the last few decades. Hence, as McLeod states in the introduction to his latest book on Maya philosophy:

“Today, it is possible and valuable for a philosopher like myself, with no archaeological training, to engage with ancient Maya thought in a way that would have been impossible even twenty years ago. Enough has been deciphered, uncovered, and understood about Maya writing and culture that it is now possible to examine Maya philosophy as philosophy.”

Such an acceptance is a rather new situation for classical Mesoamerican philosophy. When, in 1956, León-Portilla published his doctoral dissertation on Nahua philosophy, La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes (“The Nahuatl philosophy studied in its sources”), the term “filosofía”, philosophy, was controversial: Could philosophy really be a task of the first peoples of  “America”? (Named Cemanahuac, «surrounded by water», in Nahuatl and Abya Yala, «full land», in the Kuna language of present-day Panama.)

The University of Oklahoma Press solved the “filosofia problem” by replacing the term “philosophy” with “thought and culture” in its translation. Thus, the English version of León-Portilla’s book received the title Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (1963).

Regardless of the title, the content was explosive – in English too: Leon-Portilla’s study demonstrates that the Nahua speaking philosophers (tlamatinime) pondered rational self-questioning arguments which “did not emerge in Greek philosophy until the time of Socrates and the Sophists,” as he wrote, echoing Sahagún 400 years earlier.

For example, one line – written down by Sahagún’s informants in the early 16^th century – reads as follows regarding the role of a philosopher among the Nahuas:

“He puts a mirror before others; he makes them prudent, cautious.”

Consequently, León-Portilla, who also published on Maya philosophy, wrote: “Again there is a similarity to the ethical thought of Greece and India: man needs to have knowledge of himself, the gnóthi seautón or ‘Know thyself’ of Socrates.”

As we enter the 2020s, and possibly a world of both extreme climate and extreme politics, it might be an idea for us, too, to put a mirror in front of ourselves – to enter a Mesoamerican philosophical renaissance, if not also a revolution. We are at any rate living in an era where people are slowly growing accustomed to a brave new world of fake news on the worldwide web, of frequent 100-year storms, of artificial intelligence outsmarting humanity, and of democratic states on the brink of destabilization.

In an era like this, it is time to ask some fundamental and existential questions. Such as the conundrum raised more than 550 years ago by one of the great pre-Columbian Mesoamerican philosophers of the 15^th century:

“I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this: Is it true one really lives on the earth?”

Nezahualcoyotl was a Nahuatl speaking philosopher-king and patron of arts who was responsible for the flourishing of the city-state Texcoco, the intellectual center just east of today’s Mexico City and the now-vanished Lake Texcoco. It was he who ordered the construction of aqueducts that provided the city with running water. And he made the workers build halls in the palaces to create meeting places for philosophers, artists, and poets.

But when it came to philosophy itself, Nezahualcoyotl never gave any clear answers to his questions and riddles. Rather, this Nahua thinker ponders our general lack of knowledge, as “we are mortal, humans through and through.”

Nezahualcoyotl worries: “I am intoxicated, I weep, I grieve, I think, I speak, within myself I discover this (…)” He asks his readers and listeners existential questions as such: “What does your mind seek? Where is your heart? (…) Can anything be found on earth?”

Poised on the brink of a new decade, such fundamental questions seem more pertinent than ever if we are to obtain a “global 2020 vision.” The United Nations Climate Change Summit, and activists like 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who challenge short-sighted politicians to face a climate crisis, have brought the global calls for collaborative action to the world’s attention.

Possibly, a greater awareness will arise when it comes to similar global challenges. In that case, Americans need not look across the ocean, or to Scandinavians, to seek philosophical inspiration with which to face the existential threats of the 21^st century.

Instead, hope might be found in the classical philosophical traditions of ancient America itself. Because the fundamental questions of Nezahualcoyotl remain relevant, 550 years later:

What is truth? What is real? And how to keep balance on our “slippery earth” (tlaticpac)?

Such were the questions with which the pre-colonial and Nahuatl-speaking philosophers of today’s central Mexico grappled.

The role of a Nahua philosopher was that she or he “puts a mirror before others”. The philosophers should make people “cautious”, to cause “a face (a personality) to appear in them.” Because we are on earth only in passing: “Here, we only come to know ourselves”. The skepticism among the leading Mesoamerican thinkers is reminiscent of the rational inquiries of Socrates.

Among the Nahua, women were regarded as important philosophers, as we learn from the written narratives of the indigenous people in the 16th century. One chronicler reported that “Lady of Tula” had philosophical discussions with the enlightened and elected Texcoco ruler Nezahualpilli (1464–1515) – the son of the aforementioned Nezahualcoyotl. He debated with the Lady of Tula, who was described like this: “She was so wise that she could discuss with the ruler and the wisest men in his kingdom and was very gifted in poetry.”

Another intellectual woman was Macuilxochitl (b. 1435), who wrote an assertive poem about how women saved an enemy ruler in 1476. Thus she begins her poem: “I raise my songs, I Macuilxochitl, with these I gladden the Giver of Life, may the dance begin!”

After all, as Caroline Dodds Pennock explained in 2018: “While Christian Europe punished women’s sinful nature through the pain of childbirth, indigenous Mexicans valued female fertility as a direct link to nature and the earth (…)”

If we read the General History, the encyclopedic work Sahagún collected in the 16^th century – and more specifically book six, dedicated to “Rhetoric and moral philosophy” – we can find a vital passage that encapsulates the Nahua metaphysics. Here, a female philosopher (tlamatini) gives the following advice to her daughter, referring to “the noble women, the old women, the white-haired ones” who “reared us in such a manner”:

“We travel, we live along a mountain peak. Over here there is an abyss, over there is an abyss. If you go over there, or if you go over there, you will fall in. Only in the middle [tlanepantla] doth one go, doth one live.”

This “philosophy of balance,” in order to handle that “the earth is slippery,” is a vital part of Nahua philosophy. This thinking could turn out to be applicable for our era as well: after all, aren’t also we walking on a mountain ridge? Shouldn’t we also live in fear of stumbling on a stepping-stone, falling into an abyss?

Nahua thinkers argued that one should seek a middle footing, a middle way of being and living, as James Maffie points out in Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (2014) (This book is solely devoted to Nahua metaphysics; Maffie’s forthcoming Toltecayotl: An Aztec Understanding of the Well-Ordered Life emphases Nahua ethics and understanding of the good life.)

One vital Nahua concept is teotl: a single, dynamic, self-generating power or energy, it “vivifies the cosmos and its contents”, as Maffie underscores. Teotl is both metaphysically immanent and transcendent.

According to the non-hierarchical, this-worldly, and pantheistic Nahua worldview, life is all about keeping balance – knowing that a chasm is just one step away. Following the advice of the Nahua thinkers, we should act with more care, constantly taking the societal consequences of our words and actions into consideration. Truth (neltiliztli) is something we can seek in well-rootedness.

Hence, Maffie argues, truth becomes not a matter of semantics but a way of being and doing, a way of living. The Nahua concept of truth can be understood in ontological terms, as well-rooted-ness-cum-alethia. The full meaning of the Nahua concept of neltiliztli, “includes an ineliminable Heideggerian component, namely, nonreferential aletheia – disclosure (…),” Willard Gingrich has maintained.

An even more cosmological vision can be gleaned from the Guatemalan Highlands: Here, the advanced Maya civilization developed, with an epicenter around the city of Tikal (Yax Mutal) in present-day northern Guatemala, especially during the classical period (250–900 AD).

The Mayans not only created world-class architecture, art, and a base-20 numerical system that used zero as a placeholder as early as 36 BCE – the world’s oldest known use of zero. They also developed a logo-syllabic glyphic script some 1800 years before the Europeans arrived. The deciphering of the different combinations of the 800 signs – which combine logographic and phonetic principles – continues: In 2018, chemical tests proved that the “Maya Codex of Mexico” (formerly the “Grolier Codex”), which reappeared as late as 1964, is authentic. This document of syllabic glyphs on folding tree-bark pages was finished by 1154 AD at latest, making it the oldest book in America.

The Popol Vuh, the Maya classic, tells how the different indigenous peoples, with completely different languages, all came together to wait for the rising sun in the distant past. Gathered on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and looking east, the different peoples were “sown and came to light in unity.” This was because, in the words of Michael Bazzet’s new, prize-winning Popol Vuh translation: “However many nations / live in the world today, / however many countless people, / they all had but one dawn.”

In a world facing both massive climate change and human disunity, the ideas of the Maya seem more relevant than ever. In his latest book, Alexus McLeod compares the Maya philosophy with Chinese Daoism, in order to understand both better. He also reveals a Maya cosmovision for our global world: our actions are part of a “continual creation of the world.” Creation is not something that just has happened once, but “continually happens,” the Maya philosophy teaches us.

At times, scientists’ warnings about human-fueled climate changes in the 21^st century seem to echo parts of Maya philosophy and its “Council Book”, Popol Vuh. Now, maybe more than ever, it seems relevant to regard our planet as continually created.

Perhaps we are not merely living in a formerly created world, or on a planet formed four billion years ago. We might also regard ourselves, and our actions, our every breath, as part of the Earth’s ongoing creation – as the Mayas might say. In this way, we could perceive ourselves as co-creators, who help mold the globe of tomorrow.

How better can we rise to the challenges of our global climate crisis than to see that we are all in this together? That we only “come to light in unity” – that we “all have but one dawn”?

If we add to this the Nahua philosophy of “understanding a world in motion,” ever cautious of not tripping into the abyss as we balance on a mountain ridge on this “slippery earth,” we might, just might, envision a new dawn – philosophically speaking.

One day, if we let them, the classical Mesoamerican philosophers – whose descendants and cultural caretakers are still alive and living this philosophy in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras – can help us know ourselves better.

In the meantime, we need more philosophers who put mirrors “before others” – to make us all more prudent and cautious.