Gustavo Bueno: biography of this Spanish philosopher.

Summary of the life of Gustavo Bueno Martínez, Spanish thinker and promoter of philosophical materialism.

Although it may surprise some people, Spain is a country with an extensive philosophical trajectory. Modern Spanish philosophers may not have had as much repercussion abroad as Noam Chomsky, Simone de Beauvoir or Jürgen Habermas, but their approaches are certainly very interesting.

Gustavo Bueno has been one of the contemporary thinkers of the Spanish philosophical scene, with interesting views on the ideas of left and right, a clear defense of Spain as a great nation and creator of a philosophical system which he called philosophical materialism.

Here we will see the interesting life, thought, ideology and work of this Spanish philosopher, considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century through a biography of Gustavo Bueno.

Brief biography of Gustavo Bueno

Gustavo Bueno Martínez was born in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, La Rioja, on September 1, 1924. His parents were Gustavo Bueno Arnedillo, a physician, and María Martínez Pérez. In his youth he received a fundamentally Catholic education, which allowed him to acquire a good knowledge of theology and the Christian roots of Spanish society.

His university life was spent at the prestigious universities of La Rioja, Zaragoza and Madrid. After completing his doctoral thesis as a scholarship holder at the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), in 1949 and at the age of only twenty years, he obtained his doctoral degree in 1949. in 1949, at the age of twenty-five, he obtained a professorship in secondary education.. It was at that time that he began to teach at the Lucía de Medrano High School in Salamanca, where he worked until 1960.

Gustavo Bueno became an apprentice of the Falangists Eugenio Frutos Cortés and Yela Utrilla while on a scholarship at the Luis Vides Institute in Madrid, a place to which he had gained access thanks to his friendship with Rafael Sánchez Mazas. He also had the opportunity to receive knowledge from members of Opus Dei such as Raimundo Pániker and Rafael Gambra.

At the end of his teaching work at the Lucía de Medrano Institute in 1960 Gustavo Bueno moved to Asturias, the land of his birth. moved to Asturias, where he settled for good.. There he would work as Professor of the Foundations of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems at the University of Oviedo until almost the end of the century in 1998. It was in that year that he founded the Gustavo Bueno Foundation, with its headquarters in Oviedo, from which he developed an intense work.

Since the 1970s Bueno has been developing his own philosophical system, which he would call philosophical materialism.. In addition, as the years went by, he would acquire a vision that clearly defended the idea of Spain as a great nation, so that, in addition to founding his own institution and expressing his patriotic pride in his texts, Bueno was a member and honorary patron of the Foundation for the Defense of the Spanish Nation (DENAES).

In his later years he became embroiled in various polemics about his vision of Spain, the ideas of left and right, and religion. All of them made him become quite famous during the 2000s, for better or for worse, and he became quite a media figure, something quite remarkable in Spain, since rarely a philosopher gets to have so much repercussion in the Iberian media.

Gustavo Bueno Martínez died on August 7, 2016 in Niembro Asturias, at the age of 91.. He died two days after the death of his wife Carmen Sánchez. He was the father of Gustavo Bueno Sánchez, also a philosopher.

Philosophical materialism

The philosophical materialism proposed by Gustavo Bueno has in common with traditional materialism the negation of spiritualism, that is to say, the denial of the existence of spiritual substances.. However, it should not be thought that it reduces his philosophy to corporealism, as is often the case in other materialisms. Bueno's philosophical materialism admits the reality of incorporeal material beings as, for example, the real (not mental) relation of the distance that can exist between two physical objects, such as two vessels. The distance between these two vessels is incorporeal, it exists, but it is not spiritual.

Among the ideas that can be found within Bueno's philosophical materialism broadly developed we can highlight the following four:

• Ontology (general and special).
• Gnoseology (the theory of categorial closure).
• Philosophy of religion (and the role of animals in the essence of religion)
• Literary theory

These were the most recurrent themes in Bueno's work until the 1990s. However, at the beginning of the new millennium he began to delve into themes related to ethics and social and political criticism.. The way in which he presented these new themes has been criticized, since he did not present them with the same rigor as with the previous ones. For example, it has been said that his criticism of pacifism is more a form of disqualification than a well-founded opinion.

Among other themes that can be found in Bueno's work in the early 2000s we can find:

• Criticism of the idea of culture
• Theory of the State
• Idea of Spain, its unity and identity in history and in the present day
• Analysis of the essence of television

His ideology

If in expressing his philosophical views Gustavo Bueno was quite controversial, the way in which he expressed his political ideology was no less so. He was a pupil of the national syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz whose ideological trajectory led him to embrace a mixture of right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism at the end of Franco's regime, even showing sympathy for different paratotalitarian political projects, including the Soviet Union.

He was widely recognized for his Europhobic views.. He used to say that Europe was the problem and Spain the solution, seeing the old continent as a source of danger for the survival of the Spanish nation. He found the idea that Europe could be the natural place for Spain's international projection frightening.

He was more in favor of continuing the legacy of the Spanish Empire and promoting the idea of Hispanidad instead. In his works The idea of predatory and generative empires is put forward, Spain being in the second category.Spain being in this second category.

It must be said that throughout his life Gustavo Bueno was not a person with a fixed or evident political ideology. The only thing in which he seems to have been well pigeonholed was being a Spanish nationalist. On the rest of the subjects he spoke about he showed somewhat varying opinions, such as, for example, considering himself a Catholic atheist, in the sense that he did not profess any religion but recognized the importance of the Catholic faith in Spanish culture; and a heterodox Marxist, criticizing vulgar Marxism and promoting a recovery of the more classical Marxism.

Also He has also been considered a non-believing Thomist, being a defender of the Spanish scholastic tradition already begun as far back as the School of Translators of Toledo in the 13th century.. He has also been classified as a Platonist, being compared to Plato's own Academy and a good connoisseur of it.

His location within the political spectrum is by no means fixed. One might think that, being a Spanish nationalist, he would have embraced right-wing and ultra-right theses, an aspect that seems to be partly true at the end of his life.

However, he has also been considered a leftist, he has also been considered a leftist, rejecting right-wing particularism, although no less critical of the Spanish left wing.. In his later years he was a public supporter of the Spanish Popular Party, supporting the candidacy of President Mariano Rajoy.

Bueno's philosophy and his homonymous foundation are considered to have served as an ideological reference point, in one way or another, for the formation of the Vox party. Many of the similarities between Bueno's school and the far-right party are remarkable, being considered that many of the keys that mark Santiago Abascal's party are the same as those always defended by Bueno.

Controversies

It is not surprising that a person as controversial as Gustavo Bueno was should have had several polemics throughout his life, with the left, the right, atheism, Catholics, Maoists.... His ideas on the Spanish nation, the Christian faith and the role of the right and the left aroused a lot of controversy in broad sectors of Spanish philosophy.. There are so many polemic episodes around his person that we could practically make a chronogram with each year from the time he finished his university studies until his death.

On December 1, 1970 Maoist students of the Proletarian Communist Party of Barcelona threw a can of paint at him, assaulted him and tried to put a sign on him saying "lackey of capitalism". They were protesting not because of his Falangist friendships or controversial views on Spain. They were protesting because Bueno took a stand in favor of the USSR, a communist regime, against China, another communist regime. Seven years later the aggression would come from the other side of the political spectrum, this time from the right-wing group AAA (Alianza Apostólica Anticomunista) setting fire to his SUV.

In 1989 he engaged in a fierce discussion on José Luis Balbín's program "La Clave" on Televisión Española.. There he argued with a Jesuit about the alleged miracle of Fatima, accusing the religious that he did not know his own religious dogma and telling him that this miracle was truly absurd.

In 2003 published "The Myth of the Left" in which he earned the enmity of several pro-independence groups in Spain.. They accused him of being a fascist, and so did several political scientists who criticized his theory of the generations of the left. Ironically, he was also accused of being a Stalinist for pretending, according to his detractors, to create a great alliance between liberals, communists and Catholics against social democracy.

In 2007 he was involved in another controversy, this time coming from Andalusian pro-independence supporters, who described him as conservative and inslamophobic after criticizing the designation in the new Andalusian Statute of Autonomy of Blas Infante as the father of the Andalusian homeland. In addition, some statements he made after the Jihadist attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, in which he stated that the roots of Islam had to be destroyed, reappeared to the light of day.

He tried to qualify by saying that he was not attacking the Muslim religion per se, nor was he blaming all of Islam for the terrorist attacks. However, he did make it clear that it is characteristic of Islam and Buddhism to immolate oneself for religious reasons, something in his eyes quite typical of the least thoughtful religious fanaticism. Moreover, he said that when he spoke of destroying the roots of Islam, he was saying it in the same sense that in the 17th and 18th centuries philosophical rationalism did with the ideological roots of Christianity..

Among other controversies, he has been considered to be an apologist of gender violence, to be against abortion, to consider the animal movement as nonsensical and to grant any right to animals, and he also considered people in favor of the historical memory and the recovery of the corpses of their relatives who died during the Spanish Civil War "obsessed with bones".

Bibliographical references:

• Núñez Seixas, Xosé Manoel (2007). Conservatives and patriots: Spanish right-wing nationalism in the 21st century. In: Carlos Taibo (Ed.). Spanish nationalism, essences, memory and institutions (Madrid: Catarata): 159-192. ISBN 978-84-8319-332-7.
• Gustavo Bueno Foundation (n. d.) Gustavo Bueno Foundation. Spain http://www.fgbueno.es/