Juan Antonio Rivera, a philosopher committed to rigor | Culture

Philosophy is nothing without rigor, clarity and relevance. Not in a single page of his extensive work did Juan Antonio Rivera betray his commitment to this conception of philosophical work, as simple as it is unusual. He did so at the price, which he valued cheaply, of radically distancing himself from metaphysical questions, where there is often no more rigor than in the calculations we make in dreams and where the knowledge sought is suspiciously trivial. This conception operated as an antidote that protected him from the fashionable authors at the time when he studied philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, and thus he was spared, according to his own confession, from wasting time trying to decipher sacred cows like Adorno or Deleuze, of whom he said, in the jocular tone that he very rarely abandoned, that they were poorly literate. He also kept a prudent distance from Heidegger, driven by the suspicion that “what is not understood in his work may not be more interesting than what is understood.” He did not, however, apply this prudence to Marx, another of the revered authors of that period, from whom he only distanced himself after having read him exhaustively and aided by an intensive course of logic and analytical philosophy.

Looking back now, I realize that not only his interests, but also the core of his philosophy, were already perfectly defined when I met him in 1987 in Tenerife. Political philosophy and, in a secondary sense, personal ethics were and would continue to be until his recent and sudden death a few days ago the two preferred areas of his research. But what distanced him from the majority approach, at least in Spain, in philosophical research on these topics was the scientific tools he used, based on game theory, evolutionary biology and economics. This intense hybridization between empirical methodology, mathematical rigor and philosophical concerns bore fruit shortly after in a brief essay entitled Hayek, Tolstoy and the Battle of Borodino, the first of the long series that was published in Keys to practical reasonIn it he argued that societies are complex systems that tend to organize themselves spontaneously; intervening in them, relying on our rational capacity to improve their functioning, is extremely risky. To begin with, it is impossible to control in a centralized and self-conscious way what is done well in an unconscious and uncoordinated way. Things simply do not work that way, and when attempts are made to make them work, the result is catastrophic for the societies they are trying to improve. Needless to say, the victims of these experiments in social engineering are not nations or other abstract entities, but real people who are deprived of their freedom, their ability to satisfy their desires frustrated and their lives miserably wasted.

Virtues do not always go hand in hand: competence in a subject has never been a guarantee of intellectual honesty. That is why it is appreciated that Rivera’s defense of liberalism, although passionate and solidly argued, is never dogmatic. He had absolutely no herd spirit: he was always willing to disagree with those with whom he agreed on almost everything. This leads me to talk about another of the central themes of his philosophy, which is the importance of chance in our lives. The rationalist ideal of personal self-control is no less absurd and pernicious than the central planning of the economy and social relations. He argued this thoroughly and with impressive theoretical support, as was his norm, in The government of fortunehis first book, built mainly from articles previously published in KeysBut he also set forth this same idea, and in a delightfully entertaining way, in the first of the popular books he wrote, What Socrates would say to Woody Allen. Based on the arguments of two films, Family Man and Jurassic Parkshows us how far we are from being masters of our destiny, in the sense that is usually given to this expression. Luck is inextricably intertwined with our decisions, and not even a more or less tenacious, hard-working or ambitious character is independent of vicissitudes that we do not control. It is therefore meaningless to base our liberal convictions on the idea that we deserve what we get when we act freely. Rivera always defended that freedom is the highest good, but this did not lead him to underestimate the importance of fraternity, which urges us to lend a hand to the losers of society and to partially rebalance the inequalities brought about by the ever-capricious fortune. He always considered that his liberalism was moderately tilted to the left. After all, there is no freedom without equality, and that also includes a certain economic equality. In this respect, his position was, as we can see, indebted to Rawls.

Voracious reader

In addition to being an extraordinary philosopher, Juan Antonio was a voracious reader of literature and a tireless movie watcher (which until very recently he watched on the tiny screen of an old television and always in dubbed versions). Deep down, what interested him were the stories, and he preferred that the authors, whether they were writers or filmmakers, not draw attention to the technique used to tell them. On this point he was not intimidated by the dominant opinion among experts and looked with disbelief at those who say they enjoy the story. UlisesTarkovsky’s films or Béla Bartók’s quartets. He preferred nineteenth-century novels, American melodramas and Schubert’s music.

It will not be surprising, after what I have just said, that the two popular books he dedicated to the relationship between cinema and philosophy are not a reflection on cinema as an art, but an explanation of some of the intricacies of moral and political philosophy, made in the thread of the stories told in a handful of films chosen with a strictly functional criterion. But the illustrative use of stories is not exclusive to his works aimed at a non-specialist audience. His more theoretical essays are also sprinkled with examples that he took from the countless films, novels and biographies that he watched and read tirelessly. Good examples are part of the clarity required in any philosophical explanation. One must be wary, I said, of those who do not provide them, because it is likely that they do not know very well what they are talking about.

Rivera had been working for some years on an ambitious project on the biological origin of moral attitudes: our conception of what is good and bad does not obey, as Kant and so many others thought, the dictates of reason, but is a historical phenomenon; in other periods it was, therefore, different from the current one, and it could have been different from what it is if our history, including our biological history, had taken other paths. Civilization has been possible, among other things, thanks to the fact that we have developed a morality of respect towards strangers that allows us to live peacefully and even cooperate with them. Unlike what happened with warm morality, which is the glue that maintains cooperation between members of the small group, cold morality or respect is not a natural attitude and its appearance therefore requires an explanation, which is what he provides us in what will be his last book, published by the Arpa publishing house just a few months ago with the title Morality and Civilization. A History.