The indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico enjoy long and rich traditions of philosophical reflection dating back centuries before being characterized by their European “discoverers” as “barbarians” or “primitives” incapable of or unmotivated to think rationally, abstractly, or philosophically.1 Pre-Columbian societies contained individuals who reflected systematically upon the nature of reality, human existence, knowledge, right conduct, and goodness. The Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Central Mexico - including those residing in Mexico-Tenochtitlan known today as the “Aztecs” - were no exception. Nahua societies included individuals called tlamatinime (“knowers of things,” “sages,” or “philosophers”; sing. tlamatini) given to puzzling over such questions as, what is the nature of things? where did we come from? what is the proper path for us to follow? and what are we able to know?
DOI: 10.5876_9781607322238.c000
Nahua metaphysics served as the backdrop of Nahua religious, theological, and philosophical thought (including moral, political, epistemological, and aesthetic thought) as well as Nahua ritual praxis.2 Indeed, I argue one cannot adequately understand the latter without first understanding the former. More prosaic, everyday practices such as weaving, farming, hunting, and childrearing likewise presupposed (albeit perhaps only tacitly) metaphysical views. What is metaphysics? Metaphysics investigates the nature, structure, and constitution of reality at the broadest, most comprehensive, and most synoptic level.3 It aims to advance our understanding of the nature of things broadly construed. Questions concerning the nature of reality, existence, being qua being, causality, time, space, personal
Identity, the self, God, free will, mind, and body are among the questions traditionally assigned to metaphysics by Western philosophers. Nahua metaphysics thus consists of the Nahuas’ understanding of the nature, structure, and constitution of reality.4
Because one cannot adequately understand Nahua theology, religion, and ritual as well as ethical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic thinking and activity without first understanding Nahua metaphysics, I devote this work to Nahua metaphysics. Nahua ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and aesthetics will be the focus of a later work. This work’s conclusion sketches in broad outlines how Nahua metaphysics shapes these latter areas of inquiry.
I aim to approximate Nahua views about the nature, structure, and ultimate constituents of reality at the time of the Conquest. Given its greater name recognition, I adopt the term Aztec in place of Nahua with the caution that it is both clumsy and inaccurate. Aztec refers specifically to the Nahuatl-speaking residents of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the Mexica-Tenocha, but not to the Nahuatl-speaking residents of Chalco, Cholula, or Tlaxcala, for example. The term’s use also imposes an artificial unity upon Mexica-Tenocha thinking. Views about the nature of things were fragmented since they obviously differed between nobility and commoners; priests, warriors, merchants, artisans, and farmers; men and women; dominant and subordinate city-states; regional and ethnic subgroups; and finally, even between individuals themselves.5 They were contested and resisted by various groups in various ways and in varying degrees. What’s more, metaphysical views are living works in progress and thus are continually changing over time. Some scholars contend, for example, that at the time of the Conquest Aztec philosophy was becoming more hierarchical, militaristic, and masculinist - as evidenced by the increasing prominence of Huitzilopochtli (the Sun-War God) in Aztec religious affairs - due to the increasingly hierarchical social and political stratification of Aztec society, the emergence of a hereditary ruling elite, and the ruling elite’s greater emphasis upon war and military conquest.6 This contention notwithstanding, I submit that the central concepts and organizing metaphors employed by Aztec philosophers in thinking about the nature of things were rooted squarely in ordinary ways of thinking and speaking about everyday activities such as living, dying, eating, weaving, farming, hunting, sexual reproduction, and warfare. Therefore, while I consider the metaphysical views presented here as an approximation of the more or less shared understanding of the upper elite of Aztec priests, scholars, and educated nobility, I nevertheless maintain that these views were firmly anchored in non-elite views about the nature and way of things. The former group simply had more opportunity to refine and articulate their views than did the latter. Their views accordingly differed in degree of refinement, not in substance.
Our current scholarly understanding of Aztec thought and culture is the product of a rich and sophisticated interdisciplinary conversation between anthropologists, archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, art historians, historians, linguists, literary theorists, and religionists. This book draws deeply and openly from this ongoing conversation. Noticeably absent from this conversation, however, is the voice of academic philosophy. This study seeks to fill this absence. How then does it differ from existing scholarship?
I come to Aztec metaphysics as someone trained in contemporary academic Anglo-American analytic philosophy, history of Western philosophy, and comparative world philosophy. What makes mine a philosophical rather than a historical, religionist, or anthropological examination and interpretation is the fact that I bring to bear upon our understanding of Aztec metaphysics the analytical tools, concepts, hermeneutical strategies, lessons, and insights of these areas of academic philosophy. Doing so, I hope, enables me to shed new light upon the Aztecs’ views about the nature, constitution, and structure of reality. This project reconstructs Aztec metaphysics in the sense of presenting and explicating the concepts and claims of Aztec metaphysics in a manner not necessarily identical with the Aztecs’ manner of presentation. Doing so inevitably involves highlighting and making explicit certain aspects of Aztec metaphysics at the expense of others. What’s more, many of the terms and concepts I employ - beginning with the concept of metaphysics itself - are alien to Aztec thought. This is unavoidable in any explication that involves interpreting and translating one way of thinking about things into an alien system of thinking about things. Although alien, my hope is that the terms and concepts I employ are not hostile to and do minimal violence to Aztec metaphysics. I will let my critics determine the degree of violence my interpretative translation of Aztec metaphysics into non-Aztec metaphysics wreaks upon Aztec metaphysics.
I approach Aztec metaphysics as a systematic, unified, and coherent corpus of thought, worthy of consideration in its own terms and for its own sake (quite apart from what contemporary Western readers may find instructive or valuable in it). I accordingly aim to understand the internal logic and structure of Aztec metaphysics - that is, how its claims, concepts, metaphors, and arguments fit together - rather than causally explain Aztec metaphysics in terms such as genes, memes, collective unconsciousness, dietary needs, social-political function, mode of production, or physical environment. Before explaining causally why the Aztecs believed as they did, one must first correctly apprehend what they believed. I examine the internal logic of Aztec metaphysics in the same manner that Euro-American academic philosophers engaged in “normal” (in the Kuhnian sense7) history of philosophy routinely examine the internal logic of the metaphysics of Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, or Russell. The project is cut from the same cloth as these projects; it is no more and no less a history of philosophy - or anthropology or intellectual history, for that matter - than are they.
Approaching Aztec metaphysics in this manner does not commit one to an idealist view of philosophy that sees philosophers and their views as operating autonomously from the exigencies of history, politics, economics, culture, and natural environment. Aztec philosophy, like all philosophies, emerges in response to everyday life problems and challenges and admits of naturalistic explanation in terms of these. However, naturalistic explanations of philosophies advanced by anthropologists and sociologists of knowledge, neuroscientists, intellectual historians, and evolutionary psychologists remain a thoroughly Western scientific project. And by forcing Aztec and other non-Western philosophies upon the Procrustean bed of Western metaphysical and epistemological assumptions in this manner, such naturalistic explanations inevitably privilege Western metaphysical and epistemological assumptions to the detriment of non-Western philosophies. Yet such privileging of the Western is a priori unwarranted and question-begging. By parity of reasoning we must be willing to give equal consideration to non-Western (e. g., Aztec or Daoist) explanations of Western philosophies.8
Finally, this study focuses upon what I consider to be the central tenets and concepts of Aztec metaphysics. It does not purport to be exhaustive. I see it as complementing the closely related and often times overlapping work of other scholars in the field.
World History
