Antonio Caso 1883 – 1946

Antonio Caso Andrade was a Mexican philosopher and one of the founders of the Ateneo de la Juventud, the intellectual circle that broke with Mexican positivism in the years before the Revolution. Long-time professor and rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he developed in his Existence as Economy, as Disinterest, and as Charity a Christian-tinged personalist philosophy in which the human being is defined by the capacity for sacrifice and disinterested love. His careful critiques of positivism and pragmatism shaped the next generation of Mexican philosophers, including Samuel Ramos and Jose Vasconcelos.

Antonio Caso Andrade was born in Mexico City in December 1883. With José Vasconcelos, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, and Diego Rivera he was a founding member of the Ateneo de la Juventud in 1909, the circle of young writers and artists that broke with the official positivism of the Porfiriato. He taught philosophy at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and at the Universidad Nacional, of which he served twice as rector, and he was a founding member of the Mexican Society of Philosophy.

His major works include La existencia como economía, como desinterés y como caridad (1916; expanded 1919), Discursos a la nación mexicana (1922), El concepto de la historia universal y la filosofía de los valores (1933), El acto ideatorio (1934), México: apuntamientos de cultura patria (1943), and La persona humana y el estado totalitario (1941). His philosophy drew on Bergson, Husserl, Boutroux, and Christian personalism.

Caso argued that human existence is structured at three levels — the economic struggle for self-preservation, the disinterested contemplation of art and science, and the self-giving of charity — and that the highest stage is ethical and Christian, not biological. With Vasconcelos he is one of the founders of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, and his sustained defence of the human person against fascism and communism made him a major Latin American liberal voice. He died in Mexico City in March 1946.