I Was Born From A Secret Marriage

Sebastian Purcell’s Philosophical Biography

If you ever run into a professional philosopher, ask them how they ended up on that track. Their answers almost always follow a winding path. In that respect, my own life is no different.

But I’m atypical even for a philosopher. I write and research on topics, like Aztec and Mayan philosophy, that most other professionals don’t even know exist. And my strange life explains why I think that folk philosophy — the wisdom of ordinary people who have lived through extraordinary circumstances — is worth listening to.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should probably start at the beginning or just a little before that. My father’s mother, who is of British heritage, would never have accepted my mother, who is Mexican and of both Spanish and Nahua heritage, into the family. So, my parents decided to marry in secret.

A Lucky Couple

As you might imagine, my father and mother met quite by accident. It was the early 1970s, and for his study abroad, my father (Jeffrey, but he uses Jeff) went to Mexico. He and his roommate were apparently unusually studious and quiet. As a result, their host family worried that something was wrong. The mother of the host family called over her niece to translate and to figure out what to do. That niece was my mother, Nora.

After that meeting, Nora and Jeff went on a double date. Then they began dating on their own. Eventually, Jeff had to return to the United States, and so they continued their relationship in the old way — by writing letters to each other.

It was through these letters that Jeff finally won Nora’s heart, and she agreed to fly up to a small town just outside of Salem, Oregon to see how living arrangements might work. After staying only two weeks, they married before a justice of the peace and a small number of witnesses; they were Jeff’s hippie friends who were sympathetic to their relationship.

When Jeff told his mother about it, she was predictably furious and demanded that they have a proper marriage before a Protestant minister (a religious decision my mother has never forgotten). After finishing his university studies, Jeff and Nora returned to work in the family business (selling auto parts), which Jeff’s mother directed.

It was into this environment that I was born, and as you might imagine, I was not my grandmother’s favorite grandchild.

Stumbling Into Philosophy …

While I had a loving home, the experience with my broader family and surroundings made it necessary for me to understand how to navigate an often difficult environment. From a very young age, as a result, I had an interest in questions surrounding race and racism.

This beginning, however, was complemented by my frequent travels to México, where I would live with my mother’s family for extended periods. From these travels, I not only learned to speak Spanish como un mexicano (like a Mexican), but also became interested in ethical questions about what we should be doing — both as people individually and as a society.

It is difficult to describe, in a few words, what that experience was like — moving between worlds and living among many different social groups in different languages. Much of it was wonderful. Other features were challenging. It’s probably easiest, then, to give you a sense by recalling one salient incident that motivated me toward philosophy.

My mother and I had arrived in Guadalajara, México just after the explosions of April 22nd in 1992. Later investigations revealed that new water pipes made from a zinc-coated iron were laid too close to existing steel gas pipes. These elements, coupled with the underground humidity, served to catalyze a process of erosion, which eventually resulted in a gas line leak. Local residents then complained, finding the smell both unpleasant and worrisome, and a detail of experts was sent to investigate. On hearing the report, the mayor decided that an explosion was unlikely and delayed the repairs.

Then, about a week later, just after 10 am on a Saturday, a first of a series of explosions were triggered that collapsed streets, intersections, and adjoining homes. Although residents called into emergency lines almost immediately, little, by then, could be done. The explosions continued, one after another, flipping busses and collapsing infrastructure, over a four-hour period and an eight-kilometer stretch of roadway.

The official numbers from Mexican officials have always been doubted, especially by locals, since the incident exposed the incompetence of the ruling party. Lloyd’s of London projected that some 252 people died, though witnesses claim more than 1,000. As someone present the day afterwards, I tend to agree with the latter numbers. Officially, more than five hundred were noted ‘missing’, and because the explosion leveled so many homes, some 15,000 residents were rendered homeless.

The reason my mother and I had travelled to México then was to visit my abuelita (grandmother), whose health was ailing her. It was no part of our plan to arrive at the center of widespread destruction. Fortunately for our family, the explosions stopped about two blocks short of Abuelita's home. While shaken, psychologically, the events left her physically untouched. Though I was only 12 at the time, I was impressionable enough to remember the events well.

My mother had hoped that I might become a computer programmer, and the logic and mathematics that I studied in that field has served me well as a philosopher. But it was the experiences of my youth, typified in that visit to my abuelita, which drew me out of that orbit.

I was too young, then, to do much to help, so I wanted at least to understand the situation. Living in the United States, such catastrophes were unknown. Yet this series of explosions was the second such event in less than a decade for México. At base, my questions were double: why did things get this way for my family living South of the border? And what should we be doing in response anyway?

I discovered the answer to the first of these questions rather quickly: colonialism and its history. The second question proved trickier. Since it asks what should be done, its topic is the study of either politics or philosophy. And since only philosophy seeks to answer questions about ‘shoulds’ systematically, when I first read Plato’s Republic I was hooked.

And The Aztecs

These stories give you a sense for why I became both a philosopher and one with rather unusual interests. I went to graduate school to study ancient Greek philosophy and philosophy from the ‘Continental’ tradition, i.e. philosophy from France and Germany, because this seemed the best way to find the answers I sought.

It wasn’t, however, until I had a chance encounter in a library as a graduate student that I discovered the existence of Aztec philosophy for myself. I was looking up materials on comparative philosophy for a class that I was going to teach next semester, and I happened along a copy of Miguel León-Portilla’s La filosofía náhuatl, or in English Nahua Philosophy (“Nahua” is another name for “Aztec”).

I read the book with fascination and disbelief. Apparently, León-Portilla’s book fell dead off the press in 1954 when first published, panned by the anthropological community. In part, this was motivated by the belief, at the time, that the “savages” of Mexico could not possibly have been so civilized as to undertake philosophical inquiry.

The book, when it was translated into English a decade later (also in an abridged form), was given the title Aztec Thought and Culture since this was thought the only format acceptable for León-Portilla’s claims.

Since I was trained in classical languages, I thought that I might do well to take up León-Portilla’s cause. And so, I began to learn classical Nahuatl as a dead language, just as I had Greek and Latin. Eventually, I supposed that I might write a small number of articles on topics related to those developed in the book.

Yet, remembering the experiences of my youth, I thought it prudent to wait a while before attempting this project. So, it was only after publishing enough on traditional philosophical problems to receive tenure that I ventured out on this track. When I did, I found myself in a centuries-long, halting recovery of Aztec philosophy.

Despite the strength of León-Portilla’s arguments, the anthropological community was not willing to accept his thesis. And so, for the next half-century, he treated the same topic under the various titles of “Aztec poetry” and “Aztec literature.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s two American philosophers, James Maffie and Alejandro Santana, separately stumbled onto León-Portilla’s early work. Maffie, who was trained in epistemology, wrote many dozens of articles that addressed the Aztec’s views on knowledge and reality. These found no wide support among philosophers so that he was forced to publish nearly all of them in journals for anthropologists and historians.

Alejandro Santana, who was trained in the philosophy of classical Greek and Roman antiquity, developed arguments about what counts as philosophy. He argued, importantly, that something could count as philosophy even if you couldn’t identify a single author, or if the people whose philosophy it was didn’t write it down themselves. This proved important so that philosophers, at least those of us interested in Latin America, might be willing to accept the idea that the Aztecs were philosophical.

After having studied Nahuatl for several years and effectively securing tenure, I ventured onto the path that Maffie and Santana had been clearing in early 2016. My goal was to do the first fully comparative work on the Aztecs, drawing a direct connection between their philosophy and Aristotle’s. Additionally, since I am a specialist in ethical philosophy, I thought it worthwhile to address this topic, as it was almost totally unexplored.

For my first article, which focused on the Aztec conception of the good life, I thought it prudent to submit the essay to a competition that the American Philosophical Association holds annually on any scholarship in the field of Latin American philosophy. My goal was to receive feedback that might be useful for the article’s later development. To my delight and shock, the essay was selected as the winner. By 2017, then, Aztec ethical philosophy was officially recognized by the American Philosophical Association as something which exists.

Public Philosophy

Of course, after having written a few viral articles on the topic, some books and translations are to follow (eventually). Perhaps graduate students will someday start to research this topic systematically in a university setting.

What I recognized in this process was that if our small group of researchers were going to bring pre-Columbian philosophy onto the world’s stage, we couldn’t just talk to other professionals. And besides, a number of prominent figures, including Ryan Holiday and Alain de Botton, had already been clearing a path for a new kind of public philosophy.

This philosophy often drew from sources I knew well, Stoicism, for example, but focused on giving people practices to live better lives. Since the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas viewed philosophy similarly, I thought it smart to venture into this field myself.

It was by reading Thomas Oppong, Steven Gambardella, and Donald J. Robertson that I was convinced that Medium might be the right venue to start the project. I only needed a place to support my views. Since I’m rather atypical in what I cover, when I learned of Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s Illumination, I knew I had found a home for my endeavors.

My first piece in the publication is still my most viral essay.

And since then, I’ve been helped along the way by an amazing team of editors, including Tree Langdon, Ntathu Allen, Britni Pepper, and of course Chelsea Mandler MAT

I’ve also been helped by all the people who have tried out the philosophical challenges I put out and write back to me about their results. I especially thank Chelsea for developing her own thoughts with me.

So that’s a bit of my story, from a secret marriage, between the borders of the United States and Mexico, through the university setting in America, stumbling into Aztec philosophy, and finally out into the public.

Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.

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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.