Juan David García Bacca was a Spanish-Venezuelan philosopher and university professor. He was born in Pamplona on June 26, 1901, and died on August 5, 1992, in Quito, Ecuador. Bacca began his education under the Claretians and was ordained as a priest in 1925. He continued his studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the University of Zurich, and the University of Paris. However, during the 1930s, he left the Church and pursued philosophy at the University of Barcelona. In 1936 after criticizing Francisco Franco, Bacca was forced to live in exile. He first traveled to Ecuador where he taught at the Central University of Ecuador from 1939 to 1942. While in Ecuador, he became close friends with a writer named Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco. He then went to Mexico where he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) from 1942 to 1946. He eventually established himself in Venezuela in 1946 and was granted citizenship in 1952. Bacca was a professor at the Central University of Venezuela until his retirement in 1971. He was recognized for his life's work and was awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1978.
Biography
Early life and education Juan David García Bacca was born on 26 June 1901, in Pamplona, Navarre. After the early death of his father, Juan Isidro García, a schoolteacher of Aragonese origin, he entered the Seminary of the Claretian Fathers at a young age. He completed his novitiate in Cervera in 1916-1917.
In Cervera, he studied philosophy and theology from 1917 to 1923 and was ordained a Claretian priest in 1925 after two years of moral and legal studies in Solsona.
His mother, Martina Bacca Benavides, gave birth to him and three other children. Bacca wrote,My mother died […] in . […] The superiors did not allow me to go see her. […] And let it be said with the harsh truth, such news did not impress me as it should have been due to nature, due to humanity. Years and years had gone by without thinking about my mother.
During his stay at the seminary, he met the Hellenist Daniel Ruíz Bueno. He studied theology, philosophy, and science at various Central European universities, including Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the University of Zurich, and the University of Paris. In Louvain, he studied Thomist philosophy.
Science and Irreverence The thirties are characterized by a progressive separation from his ecclesiastical studies, a process exacerbated by the Civil War and exile. He graduated in philosophy from the University of Barcelona in 1934, reaching his doctorate a year later with the thesis Essay on the logical-genetic structure of the physical sciences. As a member of the Vienna Circle (1934-6) he taught mathematical logic and philosophy of science at the University of Barcelona between 1933 and 1937. In February 1936 he obtained the chair of Introduction to Philosophy at the University of Santiago de Compostela, but he did not exercise it since he had to leave Spain precipitously due to the start of the Civil War. In 1938 he left the priesthood after having lost his faith. It would have felt finite. He will then embark on a journey, propelled to a great extent by the well-received teachings of Christian theology, towards infinity. In that year, when the ecclesiastical authorities ordered him to return to Franco's Spain where he risked being tried and even shot because he had identified himself as a republican and was prohibited from publishing his writings, he decided to reveal himself. In his work Confessions: intimate and exterior autobiography he comments as follows:One day [October 26], after lunch, at noon, I knelt down and asked the community for forgiveness for the bad examples I had given, while thanking them for their fraternal and generous hospitality. We all retired to take the usual Spanish siesta. I went up to my cell, took off my cassock, hung it in the closet; I dressed fully as a layman, took my suitcase, went downstairs; but instead of going through the goal, I went out through the church. I found myself on the street. I felt free, for the first time in my life. (p.68)1938 had not ended when the General Council of the Congregation agreed on November 13 to expel and exclaustrate him. Years later, in 1965, the ecclesiastical hierarchy granted him "full dispensation" from priestly obligations.
He was critical of the Francoist uprising, which is why he remained in Paris during the hostilities, years in which he devoted himself to logic, to go into exile, after the war, in Ecuador (1939–42), Mexico City, Morelia, (1942) and finally in Venezuela, where he has established residence since 1946. So that the Spanish civil war ended with victory for Franco, García Bacca opted for the tropics of America.
Ecuador and Mexico Upon arriving in the equatorial capital, already hired as a professor in the Philosophy section (which he himself inaugurated) of the Higher Institute of Pedagogy and Letters, he established a great friendship with Alfredo Gangotena. Also in Quito, he married Fanny Palacios Vásconez. Later in Mexico he would work as a professor of philosophy, mathematics, physics and Greek at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He also served as a collaborator of the Fondo de Cultura Económica and a member of La Casa de España in Mexico, later El Colegio de México, where he befriended Alfonso Reyes. During his stay in Morelia (Mexico) he was also a professor at the Universidad Michoacana. In 1943 he became a founding member of the Mexican Mathematical Society.
He entered El Colegio de México in April 1943. In June of that year and at the request of El Colegio he taught a course on Greek Philosophical Philology at the UNAM Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and another on Mathematical Logic at the Faculty of Sciences from the same institution. In 1946 he was entrusted with the direction of the Classical Greek Studies Seminar. He gave lectures at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia and courses at the University of Panama and the University of Costa Rica.
Success in Venezuela
Regarding the geopolitical situation of the Spanish-Republican philosopher, Alberto Ferrer García refers that in 1955 "due to the entry of Nationalist Spain into the UN, Alberto Ferrer García refers to that in 1955 "due to the entry of Nationalist Spain into the UN, all Republicans were left without a passport".2 García Bacca would confess already into the 21st century, in his Confessions:
"We were not going, I was not going, to request a Spanish passport, from Franco. He was stuck where he was. Luckily, in Venezuela. [...] The most natural resource was to naturalize myself as a Venezuelan. [...] Being naturalized, apart from the legal aspect, is [...] "giving oneself fully...". (pp. 87–88)
In Caracas (Venezuela) he had a fruitful philosophical career when he was the founder of the School of Philosophy at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) in 1946 ―which was the first school of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, today the Faculty of Humanities and Education―, remaining active until 1971.5 At the same time, he taught at the Pedagogical Institute of Caracas (1947-1962). In 1952, he obtained Venezuelan nationality. His work at the UCV was very active: he was dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education (1959-1960) and founding director of the Institute of Philosophy. He influenced the formation of Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla, Juan Nuño Montes, Ludovico Silva, Federico Riú, Eduardo Vásquez, J.R. Nuñez Tenorio, Elio Goméz Grillo, Guillermo Morón, Ignacio Burk, Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, J.R. Guillent Pérez and José Hernán Albornoz. When the dictator died, he returned to Spain several times, the first in the summer of 1977.
Later years Bacca chose Ecuador as his final resting place, the Tumbaco valley, on the outskirts of Quito, where he spent his last years in the company of his wife, the Ecuadorian Fanny Palacios, his daughter Anita, his son-in-law Eduardo Pólit and the grandchildren Pólit García (until his death in 1992). The philosopher's private library at his home in Quito was donated in 2011 by his family to the Library of Navarra, dependent on the Government of Navarra.
Contributions The historian of philosophy, José Luis Abellán, acknowledges that,"he is perhaps the most powerful philosophical mind of all that we have in America and one of the first figures of philosophy in the Spanish language of all time. As far as his intellectual preparation is concerned, there will be few people who will reach the level he has reached."
His writings have been described as having a rigorous and philosophical style that drew both admiration and criticism.
García Bacca has been one of the best philosophers in Venezuela, Spain and the Spanish language. Known for his popularizing work on Western philosophy, his originality is just beginning to be understood in light of advances in science. His contributions have been overlooked partly because his enunciation space was a Latin American country, misnamed underdeveloped, and partly because his risky metaphorical and aphoristic prose, and even poetic, mathematical and musical, sometimes contradictory, left encrypted "philosophical instruments", as he used to call them, for later generations.
García Bacca insistently and honestly praises technique, thus paying a debt that philosophy had with it. A separate section is dedicated to this contribution later.
Metaphysics and theology Bacca gave special attention to metaphysics and theology, and their contribution to the history of knowledge. An example of this is found in his book De él Infinito, transfinito, finito . In this work, the author assures that scholasticism marked the beginning of differential calculus . The Greeks saw no difference between the finite and infinite and the definite and indefinite respectively. And worse still, the Greeks repudiated the infinite-indefinite. But, in medieval times, Santo Tomas de Aquino (St. Thomas of Aquino) more so a theologian than a philosopher, he separated the infinite from the indefinite and gave positive value to the infinite by saying that God is definite but infinite. Historically, this gave rise to Newton and Leibniz, independently, and not so much as theologians but as mathematical philosophers. They felt "handsome and supported" to "invent and patent" the infinitesimal calculus .
Supported by the notion of the infinitesimal, he essays a metaphysics of soma as the foundation of creativity and immortality, perhaps comparable to Leibniz's monadology, where he states that:Death to the macroscopic: to the body, is not death to the microscopic: to the soma. 11Regarding this of immortality, Juan Nuño interprets in the prologue of Transfinitude and immortality : "This of immortality would come to be the "Nuclear Symphony" or "Symphony of the Nuclear Man", which is the one who never dies for having reached the transfinite level of knowledge. Something like the new exaltation of a superior, scientific-technological religion that the author proposes to call "radioanthropology", because as he explains, that is the force that impels man to transfinitude or escape from his natural and bodily closure." By the way García Bacca declares:Life, the living being, in body and fortiori in soma is, and fortunately has to be, a supplier of novelties, an improviser of spontaneity, a premiere of originality; radiontological, radioanthropological, in occurrences, wits, thanks, wits, tricks, inventiveness, evasiveness, surprises, admiration, and improvisations.
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