Samuel Ramos 1897 – 1959

Samuel Ramos was a Mexican philosopher and one of the principal exponents of philosophy of lo mexicano, the reflective inquiry into the character of Mexican national life that flourished in the second quarter of the twentieth century. A pupil of Antonio Caso and a careful reader of Adler, he produced the path-breaking Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico in 1934, in which he applied the categories of Adlerian psychology to an account of the Mexican character marked by an inferiority complex inherited from the colonial period. Toward the End of Philosophy and his later work on aesthetics extended his project into a wider humanism.

Samuel Ramos Magaña was born at Zitácuaro in Michoacán in June 1897. After medical and humanistic studies in Morelia and Mexico City he attached himself to the circle of Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, took his doctorate in philosophy at UNAM, and pursued postgraduate study in Italy under Croce and in Paris in the 1920s. From 1930 he held a chair at the National Preparatory School and at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, of which he served as director from 1945 to 1952; he was a founding member of El Colegio Nacional in 1943.

His books include Hipótesis (1928), El Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, 1934), Hacia un nuevo humanismo (1940), Historia de la filosofía en México (1943), Filosofía de la vida artística (1950), and the posthumous Estudios de estética (1963).

Ramos applied an Adlerian psychology of the inferiority complex to the cultural history of Mexico, diagnosing the bombastic bravado of the pelado and the imitative Europeanism of the educated classes as defensive responses to a colonial wound, and called for an authentic Mexican humanism reconciled to its mestizo history. The book opened the line of reflection on lo mexicano that Octavio Paz later carried forward in The Labyrinth of Solitude. He died in Mexico City in June 1959.