Background
Echeverría, José was born in 1913 in Santiago de Chile.
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José Echeverría
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University of Chile (1952-1953). Puerto Rico (1953-1976). Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universidad Católica de Chile from 1971.
Views
Echeverria’s thought addresses itself to the perennial issues which centre on the topic of death and the immortality or otherwise of the soul. Around this question, he sets out views on time in human experience on, what lends value to lile and on the ultimately social nature of the human predicament. These views are worked out largely in the course of meditations on the ideas of the figures listed above as influences on him. The world of human experience is includibly a social world, a world of others and of nature in which we Find ourselves: our condition is an 'insertion in the world’. We achieve our selfhood hy means of our free acts. The future is open, and each life has value according to the contribution it makes to the history of the world. Human time is not cyclical but has a direction: it develops in a line with a terminus which is death. Death is feared because it is absolute exclusion from the world: because humanity is in its essence social, total 'solution is our worst fear. The horror of death can be overcome when we make of it an act of communion with the destiny of humanity and the world. This point of view Echeverría discovers in the words of Jesus and the Apostles, and in Marx, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote is their embodiment and exemplar. During the course of his three salidas. Quixote constructs a past while attemptlng to change the world by his voluntary acts. The book is a curative for our cultivated ignorance of death, and teaches us how to die well.
