Most historians of science and historians of philosophy have advanced the doctrine that philosophy preceded science, the so-called Pre-socratics from Thales to Democritus being the philosophers who provided the stimulus for science to begin.

There are a few historians who see the Pre-socratics as scientists. However, these historians seem without exception to be uncertain about two of the Pre-socratics: Parmenides, who appears to them to be essentially a philosopher or a logician, and Zeno, the Eleatic, who excites their attention mainly because of the influence of his paradoxes reflected in the history of mathematics.

An animal enters the world with a set of highly specialized and firmly directed instincts which are correlated with pre-typified situations in the environment. Consequently it lives in a surrounding world, structured by its instinctual inheritance, which is specific to its own particular species and admitting only a limited range of variations within which life for it is possible. Man at birth is, compared to the non-human animal, an unfinished being, and his surrounding world partakes of his unfinished character. It is a world that must be fashioned then by man's own activity; he must make a human world for himself.

All civilizations are necessarily concerned with political wisdom, with events, and with applicable rules of conduct. Clearly, all political wisdom is implicitly bound up with morality and metaphysics, but the originality of Greece consists of having, at a very early stage, made this relationship explicit, and of having sought a world-picture in which politics would be directly linked to a general philosophy: Plato and Aristotle are examples of this. In addition, once created, political philosophy was to maintain its place in almost all modern systems of thought, but the rediscovered emphasis of political thought assures it today of a prominent position in all countries where, for example, Marxists or liberals confront one another. The beginnings of such a mode of thought therefore deserve some attention.

The questioning of Western civilization is today a commonplace exercise, and the condemnation of science constitutes a necessary chapter. But is this condemnation of science or of technology, or of the uses that modern society makes of one or the other? We do not want to examine here the value or the means of a political control of technology nor do we want to distinguish between “pure” science and its blameworthy applications. The ties are too tight and historically too evident between Western civilization and the development of science. It is science itself which is in question, and one more commonly blames it for ignoring the quality of things and for not recognizing anything but the measurable. Around this central criticism are rather confusedly expressed secondary themes, ranging from “the quality of life” up to the ineffable modes of special communication.

… The ultimate contradiction of capitalism—in the words of Marx—can be understood and should be described as follows: capitalism is the value-system, its development and its maintenance (money being the external value); value is produced exclusively by work done by men and women; the fate of capital is thus the fate of this work—the subjective praxis of the individual. Inasmuch as the real process of production includes within it the accomplishment of this praxis, it is precisely the same thing as a process of value-formation, a process of valorization. *

From here stems the first moment of Marx's problematics: his analysis of capital as it effectively exists; in other words, his analysis of the process of its formation, which in turn leads to the analysis of the real process of production and the revelation, in this process, of the element that produces value, namely, this subjective praxis. Economic analysis, therefore, is nothing more than the analysis of the effects of the real component parts of the process; the composition of capital into value refers, inasmuch as it is an organic composition, to its technical composition and this is where its whole explanation lies.

In Mexico the skeleton of the danse macabre, the skeleton of the “triumph of death,” has become a sugar candy. It has become a plaything, a caricature.

Why this caricature? The reasons for the contemporary Mexican's feeling about death must not be sought in some psychological defense mechanism consisting of macabre humor in face of an unhappy fate. One must not invoke the consequences of a pseudo-catholicism more or less colored by mystical masochism. Nor must one reduce it to the simple pagan heritage of a poorly defined indigenous past. One must go much further, because, after all, what is dying?