In 1956, as a young art critic, the Mexican philosopher Juliana González first encountered the paintings of the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo at the artist’s breakthrough solo exhibition in Mexico City’s Galería Diana. González, greatly impressed, soon befriended the much older Varo and became a regular visitor to her studio, where they talked about her paintings and their shared intellectual interests in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, a conversation that ended with Varo’s untimely death in 1963 at age 54. A few (...) years later, González contributed this essay-homage to the 1966 catalog Remedios Varo. She opens with an evocation of Varo’s masterpiece, the triptych To the Tower, Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle and The Escape —a magnet for viewers at the recent “Surrealism Beyond Borders” exhibition in New York and London—and finds in it keys to the artist’s life and to her attempts through art “to flee this inexorable order toward another reality.” González’s close examination of the contradictions and ambiguities in Varo’s artistry, of “her wise, poetic humor,” and of her quest “to comprehend the universe” remains an essential read almost 60 years later. The catalog in which it first appeared is long out of print, and, to the best of my knowledge, González’s essay has never been republished in Spanish, making the text that follows as much an act of recovery as it is a translation. (shrink)

One can say that the historical Socrates cannot be interpreted as an “intellectualist” and an “enemy of life.” On the contrary: Socrates’s actuality lies precisely in the fact that wisdom implies knowledge of one’s own ignorance, the self-birthing and the daily improvement of myself using all the rational and irrational potentialities of life.This conception of the ethical soul in Socrates can be compared today with the moral brain of neuroscience, which is understood in its integral unity as the locus of (...) the body-soul in its complex unity: reason-emotion-instinct. However, in spite of the analogies, there is a clear opposition between the Socratic encephalon and the moral brain of neurobiology. The Socratic one is free, internal, personal. The neuronal can be induced and manipulated through technology. The Socratic lesson is that virtue cannot be taught—and even less artificially provoked—from the outside. Nevertheless, in today’s world, we cannot think about ethics without both: Socrates as well as the advances in neuroethics. (shrink)