There were philosophers and sophists, formal education to teach values and profound ideas about life, all expressed in treatises, exhortations and dialogues. But this is not about ancient Greece, but about aztec empire.
Between the 15th and early 16th centuries, the Aztecs built an empire with a culture of great philosophical richness in what is now central and southern Mexico.
“We have many volumes of his texts recorded in the native language, which nahuatl“, wrote Lynn Sebastian Purcell, professor of philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Cortland, in the United States, in an article published a few years ago in the scientific popularization magazine Aeon.
Few of the pre-colonial hieroglyphic books survived the Spanish fires, so our main sources of knowledge derive from records kept by Catholic priests until the early 17th century.
Purcell extensively researched ancient philosophy and ethics, particularly those of Latin America and the Aztecs.
“I find it fascinating that Nahuas (Aztecs) were another pre-modern culture with a virtue ethics, although quite different from that of Aristotle and Confucius“, he told the American Philosophical Association (APA) in a 2017 interview.
And he recognized that it was interesting for him to delve deeper into a field in which, throughout all these centuries, academia had left an “evident void”.
He even added that the two great scholars of Aztec philosophy, the Mexican anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla and the American philosopher James Maffie, did a great job in analyzing their metaphysics, but not their ethics.
The famous Florentine Codex, a compilation of Aztec knowledge made by the Spanish Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, reproduces the speech of a king before assuming his post.
There he talks about how a “revered” man lives: he is “defender and provider,” he says, “like the cypress tree, in which people take refuge.”
But this same man also “weeps and grieves.” The king then asks himself: “Is there anyone who does not desire happiness?”
The text, according to Purcell, reveals one of the biggest differences between the philosophy of ancient Greece and that of the Aztec empire.
“The Aztecs did not believe that there was any conceptual connection between leading the best life we can and experiencing pleasure or ‘happiness,'” he wrote.
That is, for them, having a good life and being happy were not associatedsomething that may sound strange given the philosophical tradition of the West.
In an article awarded by the APA as the best essay on Latin America in 2016, Purcell explained that this dissociation has its roots in an existential problem described by philosophers or tlamatinime.
There is an Aztec saying that sums up this problem and could be translated as “slippery, slippery is the earth”.
“What they meant is that, despite having the best intentions, our life on earth is one in which people are prone to mistakes, prone to failure in their goals, and prone to ‘falling’, as if in the mud.” , Purcell detailed.
“Besides, this land is a place where joys only come mixed with pain and complications.”
- The Aztecs believed that no matter how good, talented and intelligent a person was, bad things could happen. Or you could make a mistake, slip and fall.
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