Gustavo Bueno

Gustavo Bueno Martínez (1 September 1924 – 7 August 2016) was a Spanish philosopher, founder of a philosophical doctrine dubbed by himself as "philosophical materialism". Pupil of the national-syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz, Bueno's philosophical path reached a blend of Aristotelico-Thomist scholasticism influenced by the Catholic School of Salamanca and Marxism–Leninism during the years of the late Francoism.

Biography
Gustavo Bueno Martínez was born in Santo Domingo de la Calzada on 1 September 1924. He was the son of a Germanophile and the grandson of a Carlist. He began studies of philosophy at the University of Zaragoza, earning his licentiate degree (as well as his PhD degree) from the University of Madrid. His PhD dissertation, under supervision from Santiago Montero Díaz, was titled Fundamento formal y material de la moderna filosofía de la religión ('Formal and material foundation of the modern philosophy of religion'). From 1949 to 1960, he worked as a philosophy professor (and from 1951 on also as a principal) in the 'Lucía Medrano' female high school, located in Salamanca. Throughout the 1950s, he appears as provincial political commissar of the Movimiento. In 1954, he married noted SEU activist Carmen Sánchez Revilla. In 1960, he left for Oviedo, as he was appointed as a professor of Fundamentals of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems at the University of Oviedo. He died in Niembro (Llanes, Asturias), on 7 August 2016.

Philosophical materialism
Philosophical materialism is a systematic doctrine about the structure of reality, characterized by its opposition to monistic materialism (typical of dialectical materialism) and to monistic idealism or spiritualism of theology. However philosophical materialism is a pluralism of rationalism, that postulates the uniqueness of the world as a development of a general ontological matter that does not reduce to the empirical world. Philosophical materialism denies, against monistic continuity, and in agreement with the principle of the symploké that, "everything has an influence in everything" and denies, against pluralistic atomism that, "nothing has an influence in anything".

With respect to traditional materialism, philosophical materialism has a common characteristic, the denial of spiritualism, and the denial of spiritual essence. But unlike other materialism, philosophical materialism does not reduce materialism to the denial of supernatural things. Philosophical materialism admits the reality of incorporeal things: for example the real relation (not mental) of the distance that exists between two bottles of water that are on a table is as real as two corporeal bottles. This distance is incorporeal material and is not spiritual. With this criterion the concept of matter is redefined for philosophy and shows a more precise word than matter, the stroma.

This system has several aspects to be described:


 * Ontology (general and particular)
 * Gnosiology (theory of the categorical closure)
 * Philosophy of religion (and the role of animals in the essence of religion)

These were the predominant subjects of the writings of Bueno until the 1990s. However, at the start of the new millennium, he started to deal with ethical subjects and social and political subjects. He is well known in the hispanophone world for his book España Frente a Europa, in which he presents an innovative philosophy history on the basis of a historical materialist analysis of the origins of Spain, the Hispanic empire and Europe offering a systematic reconceptualization of a series of ideas that are central to Marxism and the history of political thought more broadly. In this text he confronts the idea of nation through a historical study of the term itself concluding that “the modern Idea of Nation, the political nation, could only appear in a historical moment of the modern epoch, namely, the moment of the struggle of the people (stratified in diverse social classes) against the Ancien Regime. An Idea of a political Nation that developed in close interaction with other Ideas, namely, the modern Idea of State and the modern Idea of Culture”. In this sense he is writing “opposed to many politicians or historians who “naively” try to define the “nation” as if it were a univocal, taxonomic-bureaucratic, technical or timeless concept, by ad hoc accumulation of components considered essential or proper, in the same way as so many manuals of political law proceed, or as Stalin himself proceeded in his famous writing Marxism and the national question.” Bueno therefore proceeds to rigorously clarify the difference between, say, a “political nation” and an apolitical “ethnic nation”.

Spain and Empire
A main intellectual reference for 21st-century defendants of the legacy of the Spanish Habsburg Empire (as opposed to the Bourbon) jointly with Elvira Roca Barea, he espoused the idea of the Asturian kingdom as an embryonic 'Spain' and as a case of Translatio imperii with respect to Rome (bypassing the Visigoths, as they occupied the Iberian Peninsula, but they would have done it so "with the will to remain in seclusion in it"), pursuing the "imperial city" category for Oviedo, underpinning his main thesis of that of the "consubstantiality" of the process of the constitution of 'Spain' as a characteristic entity of Universal History and the process of its conformation as a Universal Empire. He supported the political reunification of Hispanic states in the form of a confederation: “The constitution of a Hispanic or Ibero-American Confederation, with a Common Market of around 500 million inhabitants, is, for Professor Bueno, the only alternative that the American peoples, as well as Spain and Portugal, have open to free themselves from the Anglo-American Empire.”

Bueno’s philosophical analysis of the idea of empire can be summarized with the following quote: “Universal history is supposed to be the history of the human genus. According to, say, Hegel and St. Augustine. But this must be subjected to criticism. Universal history is not made by the totality of the human genus but rather by a part of it. That part is an empire.” From there he concludes that “the Idea of a Universal Empire, endowed with uniqueness, is impossible (not that it is improbable) since it would imply the extinction of the State (the State always presupposes the plurality of States separated by their “cortical layers”), and with it the ratio imperii of any kind of plans and programs. This means that the Idea of Empire (this is its dialectical contradiction) could never go beyond the particular circle of States and can never be extended to the totality of the Human Genus.”

Filmography

 * 2015 – Gustavo Bueno. La vuelta a la caverna (dir. Héctor Muniente) – documentary