Gustavo Bueno

Gustavo Bueno Martínez (Santo Domingo de la Calzada, La Rioja, September 1, 1924-Niembro, Asturias, August 7, 2016) was a Spanish philosopher. Since the 1970s he has been developing a system of philosophical thought that he later called "philosophical materialism." Some media have pointed him out as one of the greatest Spanish philosophers of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

His work has been built in constant exchange with the sciences and the history of philosophy. Gustavo Bueno is the author of numerous books and articles on ontology, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, anthropology, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, atheism, and television, among other topics. In addition, from his youth he showed a deep interest in theological issues, to the point that it has been said of him that he "knew scholasticism by heart". In his last years, in addition to writing, he recorded videos and audios with analysis many philosophical questions. His eldest son, Gustavo Fernando Bueno Sánchez, is a professor of Philosophy.

Pupil of the national syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz, whose ideological path led him to embrace a mixture of right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism during the late Franco regime.

In Spain he is especially known for his participation in public debates and his appearance on television programs such as Big Brother. Some of his books have achieved notable dissemination, such as Essays materialists , The myth of the left , The myth of the right , The myth of the right Myth of Culture or Trash TV and Democracy. His work has given rise to a good number of doctoral theses and articles by followers and detractors, and the magazines El Basilisco and El Catoblepas are published around it. The Oviedo School of Philosophy regularly meets at the Gustavo Bueno Foundation, located in the same city. Some of his books have been translated into German, English and Chinese.

Biography

The son of the doctor Gustavo Bueno Arnedillo and María Martínez Pérez he was born in the Rioja municipality of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, where he was named favorite son in 1997. He received a Catholic education and studied at the universities of La Rioja, Zaragoza and Madrid. After completing his doctoral thesis in 1947, entitled Formal and material foundation of the modern philosophy of religion , as a CSIC scholarship holder, at the age of twenty-five, in 1949, he obtained a Chair of Secondary Education. Likewise, in 1949 he began his teaching life at the Lucía de Medrano Institute in Salamanca, where he would practice until 1960.

During his training as a scholarship holder at the Luis Vives Institute in Madrid, which he entered due to his friendship with Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Bueno was an apprentice to the Falangists Eugenio Frutos and Juan Francisco Yela Utrilla, as well as a companion of the Opusdeist Raimundo Pániker and the Carlist Rafael Gambra. During his time as a high school professor in Salamanca, Bueno was actively involved with the Falange: he was director of the Youth Front Training Seminar, director of the Center for Political Studies of the SEU, as well as a member of the Union Board of the University District.

In 1960 he settled permanently in Asturias, where he was Professor of Fundamentals of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems at the University of Oviedo until 1998. From this date on, he has worked at the Gustavo Bueno Foundation, which has its headquarters in Oviedo, a city that in 1995 recognized him as an adoptive son.

Member and honorary patron of the DENAES Foundation,

Work: philosophical materialism

Philosophical materialism is a systematic doctrine on the structure of reality, characterized by its opposition to monistic materialism (typical of Diamat) and monistic idealism or spiritualism of theological stamp. Philosophical materialism is a pluralism of rationalist sign, which postulates, however, the uniqueness of the world as a development of a general ontological matter that is not reduced to the empirical world. Philosophical materialism denies, against continuist monism, and in accordance with the symploké principle, that "everything has an influence on everything", and denies, against pluralistic atomism, "that nothing has an influence on anything".

Regarding traditional materialism, philosophical materialism has as a common feature the denial of spiritualism, the denial of the existence of spiritual substances. But it does not reduce materialism to corporeism, as in fact happens with other materialisms. Philosophical materialism admits the reality of incorporeal material beings: for example, the real (not mental) relation of the distance that exists between two bottles of water that are on top of a table is as real as those two corporeal bottles; that distance is incorporeal material and has nothing spiritual about it. He redefines the term matter for philosophy and shows a more precise word than matter, the stroma.

This system has been developed in numerous areas, among which the following can be highlighted:

• ontology (general and special);
• gnoseology (theory of categorial closure);
• the philosophy of religion (and the role of animals in the essence of religion).

These were the predominant themes in Bueno's texts until the 1990s. However, starting in the new millennium, he began to deal with issues of ethics and social and political criticism. However, it has been criticized that on these issues Bueno did not display "in general the same rigor". For example, it has been said of his criticism of pacifism that it is more an attempt to carry out "misleading analysis", than "rhetorical attitude"; and that they often come "to insults and gratuitous disqualifications from partial analysis", without ever showing changes of position in his arguments. Apart from this, he has been dealing with other issues that have to do, among others, with:

• criticism of the idea of culture (as a consequence of the ontological idea of grace);
• State theory (and its 18 powers);
• the idea of Spain (its unity and identity in history and present);
• the analysis of the essence of television.

It has been said that his work remains "prisoner of scholastic metaphysics" in his defense of the "idea of truth". Likewise, he would not have been open to accepting the constructivism that he really would have practiced "in all his work", in favor of an objectivist theory of truth.

Regarding Bueno's oratory in the media, some have claimed that he cultivated "extravagance and outburst'. For David Teira, Bueno was also "hurtful in the insulting, arbitrary in his decisions and abusive in his ways".

Ideology

A pupil of the national-syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz, and an active Falangist militant in the 1950s, his ideological trajectory led him to embrace a mixture of right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism during the late Franco regime, showing sympathy for different para-totalitarian political projects, including the Soviet Union. A recognized Europhobe —Well, he used to repeat that "Europe is the problem and Spain is the solution", he saw Europe as a source of danger to the survival of the "Spanish nation"—, he abhorred the idea of that the European continent could be the natural place for the international projection of Spain, advocating instead continuity with the Spanish empire and the idea of "Hispanidad". He thus emphasized his philosophical materialism as an analytical tool in a dichotomous classification sui generis between "predatory" and "generative" empires (among which he classified the Spanish). chauvinist and reactionary statures, for being one of the members of the board of trustees of the DENAES Foundation ("for the Defense of the Spanish Nation") since its founding in 2006, a Spanish organization created in 2006 that has operated as a training workshop for political cadres, journalists and revisionist "academics".

Ideologically, Bueno has been defined in many ways: Catholic atheism (that is, an essential atheist but one who does not deny the Catholic cultural environment in which he was born); Heterodox Marxist (critical of "vulgar Marxism", since he understood philosophical materialism as an "upside down" of classical Marxism), non-believing Thomist (defender of the Spanish scholastic tradition initiated in the School of Translators of Toledo); Platonic (in the sense of the academic philosophy of Plato's Academy, with which he came to compare himself); of the left (in the sense that he renounced right-wing particularism, although he went on to postulate as part of a materialist left that was highly critical of the really existing left in Spain).

In his later years, he publicly supported the Popular Party (PP) on various occasions, supporting the candidacy of Mariano Rajoy for the presidency of the Government of Spain. He also defended the PP in local candidacies. He affirmed that he voted for Mariano Rajoy because "he is the only one I trust to maintain the unity of Spain for a little longer".

Likewise, both Bueno's philosophy and the Gustavo Bueno Foundation have served as "ideological grounds" for part of the political positions of the Vox party. In this sense, the similarities between the Bueno school and the right-wing party are "remarkable", with a relationship that was also established "a through personal treatment". For Bueno Sánchez, "the keys that mark Vox are those that Bueno has always defended".

Controversies

Runnings and incidents around Bueno

Due to the difficulty of classifying his thought and the dialectical constitution of his system, throughout his career Bueno was involved in numerous controversies with different groups:

• On December 1, 1970, Maoist students of the Proletarian Communist Party of Barcelona threw a paint boat to his face, assaulted him and tried to put a poster Lacayo of Capitalism. They would protect by, according to them, supporting the USSR against China.

• On February 1, 1976, an extreme right group named GAE set off the Land Rover of its property in the avenue of Galicia in Oviedo.

• In 1985, with the publication of his book The divine animalHe entered a long polemic with Spanish ambassador Gonzalo Puente Ojea. The ambassador accused Well of erring in his diagnosis of the origin of religions, which for Puente Ojea were born by introspection and questions that assaulted the primitive man in the vast world around him seeking transcendence. For Well, instead, religions arise in a historical and dialectical process that begins with the worship of animals, thus distinguishing three historical stages in the religious evolution of human societies: that of the primary religions (those who worshiped animals) secondary religions (which began to worship in an animist and polytheistic way to numinous deities, with characteristics at the same time animals and humans), and that of those of tertiary religions (the monotheisms that personalize God, to a greater or lesser degree, mainly Christianity, Judaism and Islam). For Well, the recent belief in extraterrestrial beings is a recovery of those secondary religions, as these extraterrestrials would be a contemporary version of the Noenes worshiped in Ancient Greece.

• In 1987, he called Lluis Xabel Álvarez "type" and "complete cretin" and so he denounced him for insults before the Provincial Court of Oviedo, who died in favor of Good in 1989. The judgement was ratified by the Supreme Court in 1991, who assumed that Well did not injure Lluis Álvarez.

• In 1989, in the missing program The key by José Luis Balbín, in Televisión Española, recorded a live dispute with a Jesuit around the supposed miracle of Fatima. Well, he accused the Jesuit of totally disregarding his own religious dogma and calling the miracle absurd.

• In 1998 Well protested against the decision of the Board of Government of the University of Oviedo to appoint him an honorary emeritus professor, who carried his retirement. According to Well, this meant his "expulsion of the classrooms," so he qualified the rector of the university, Julio Rodríguez, as "miserable". However, the Board itself explained that the decision did not prevent Good from imparting unregulated teaching, although without economic retribution from the University. The posture of Good was described as "sovereign", with the words "who is considered irreplaceable when the time of withdrawal comes to him is not an authentic teacher, for he has not been able to leave seed that fructifies vigorously in his disciples".

• In 1999, with the publication Spain versus Europe, he entered into polemics with Professor of Philosophy Juan Bautista Fuentes Ortega, around the supposedly Spanishist thesis of Well, as Fuentes called them, while Well described him as a Trotskyist, defending the idea of empire as a political category that cannot be dispensed at any historical political stage. Later, John the Baptist Fuentes finished the polemic giving reason, "in substance," to Well. Sources himself, at a conference on The Role of Philosophy in All Knowledge held in May 2019, he defined Gustavo Bueno as "the most gifted philosopher in the 20th century". However, it would be from the publication of Spain versus Europe and The myth of cultureWhen the accusations of becoming conservative began.

• In 2003, with the publication The myth of the left, the enmity of Spanish secessionist groups was won, which accused him of fascist, just as some politicians criticized his theory of the left generations. Well he defended himself by saying that those groups had no idea what the political left and its origins are. He linked controversy in various programs of Fernando Sánchez Dragó with Santiago Carrillo, Ignacio Sotelo and José Antonio Marina. In addition to fascist, Well has been accused of Stalinist, for pretending, according to his detractors, to create a kind of alliance between liberals, communists and Catholics in the face of social democracy.

• In 2007, Andalusian independence groups qualified Good as a conservative and Islamophobic after criticizing the designation in the new Statute of Andalusian Autonomy of Blas Infante as the father of the Andalusian homeland. In addition, they recalled the xenophobic statements of Good in an interview carried out after the attacks of 11 September 2001 against the Twin Towers, in which he stated: "The roots of Islam must be destroyed." Well, he defended himself from the accusations arguing that, while the entire Islam of the terrorist attacks must not be blamed, it must be said that such attacks in which the terrorist is inflamed can only occur in Buddhism and Islam. On his request for the destruction of the philosophical roots of Islam, Well defended himself from the accusations of Islamophobic saying that, in the same way that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries philosophical rationalism shook the Christian ideological roots, we must do the same with Islam and with any religion. He also called the qualifications of conservative or racist to criticize Islam ridiculous and absurd. ad hominem "ignoring" those who did.

• In 2009, the PSOE accused Bueno of "making apology of gender-based violence," after stating in a talk against abortion that "the minister who separates reason of religion would have to throw it out the window." At the same conference, he further stated that "the woman who claims her right to abort because she is not a container has enough on her with such a small brain." He received criticism for this and was described as "sexist" and "violent" when making comments that "insult and assault women."

Well, in his strong atheism, he not only denied the existence of God but criticized the philosophical idea of God as contradictory, insubstantial and absurd. However, he never denied his sympathies for the Catholic Church On the other hand, he has been much more critical of Protestantism and Martin Luther, calling it the "principle of evil"; and "genuine representative of irrationalism", against which Catholicism would be a much more rational instrument.

In addition, Bueno has positioned himself against abortion. In turn, he has considered the category of gender as a way for women to "feel like victims and group together", which "part surely from a female inferiority complex".

Well he called "crazy" the animal movement, branding as "absurd" the recognition of animal rights.

He described as "obsessed with bones" to those who insisted on finding the remains of the thousands of victims who disappeared during the Franco regime.

Work

In addition to the previous books of his own, we should add:

• God saves reason (2008), together with VV. AA. (including Benedict XVI).
• Number 42 The Basilisco (2011) contains a very extensive article by Gustavo Bueno with "Some clarifications about the idea of "holization".
• Gustavo Bueno also worked assiduously in the electronic magazine The Catoblepaswith the section "Rasguños".

Works of the disciples

The works of Bueno's disciples applying or expanding his system are numerous and extend in time and subject matter, so they cannot be collected here. It is possible to highlight the analyzes of special sciences, the reinterpretations of the history of philosophy, the applications to the history of Spain and America, the polemics on philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, philosophy of literature and political philosophy. Among his disciples, Ricardo Sánchez Ortiz de Urbina stands out, perhaps the first of them, since Bueno's youth in Salamanca.Ortiz de Urbina has been proposing an alternative version of Bueno's system, phenomenological materialism. In addition, for some he has shown with his works "to be, with several leagues apart, the most outstanding disciple"; de Bueno. On the other hand, Gustavo Bueno's own grandson, the historian and philosopher Lino Camprubí, together with the philosopher Javier Pérez Jara, have exposed in recent years a series of criticisms and nuances of orthodox philosophical materialism, as well as a series of corrections (establishing a greater dependence of the materiality genres M2 and M3 on M1, shortening the difference between Mi and M as well as suggesting avoiding abrupt cuts so as not to fall into the problem of "filtered filters", modify the labels of "philosophical materialism" by "discontinuist materialism" or "gnoseology" by "epistemology", etc.).

Criticism

The presence among the members of the Gustavo Bueno Foundation and its entourage of far-right ideas, of a liberal nature and in defense of Spanish nationalism and the capitalist system has been criticized. Its foundation, private although subsidized with public money has sometimes been compared to a "sect" for his "dogmatism" around Bueno and by the tendency among its members to protect each other.