Michoacán, Mexico and King City, California. He is the co-founder and executive editor of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy.
Sánchez applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us toward the Good Life, and reported the following:
Page 99 is one of the culminating pages of Chapter 9, “Be Late to Parties,” which discusses the Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla’s views on punctuality. In this page, I summarize a quote from the previous page which, I claim, “could easily describe our current state of robotic hurriedness. It is the need to fulfill this value that we can blame for road rage, work-related injuries, and other time-related stresses.” This value is what Portilla calls “punctual being”— the idea is that we want to be punctual at whatever cost. I continue, “However, arriving on time once or a million times does not make me punctual in the sense that my very being, the way that I exist in the world, is itself punctual. There is more to life than being punctual— or generous, or trustworthy. Besides, tomorrow or the next day I may fail at being punctual, generous, or trustworthy. It is said, for instance, that in eighteenth- century Königsberg, Prussia, townsfolk would set their watches by the impeccable routines of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Year after year he would take his evening walk at the same exact time, so people knew what time it was when he passed by. But was he at one with punctuality? Had he achieved a “punctual being”? A day came in 1804 when he no longer passed by, when he was no longer punctual. Death made this so. Hence, the answer is no, he was not at one with punctuality. Ultimately, Kant was just a person with a good track record of having kept a strict routine. What this means is that a value, like punctuality, or generosity, or politeness, is only a guide for my actions, something that helps me make sense of and act on the world in which I live. Portilla says that one truly becomes punctual, or one completely fulfills the demands of the value of punctuality, only in retrospect. This is when all of my “on times” are collected into a memory of me, and the final verdict by those who knew me becomes ‘He was punctual.’”Visit Carlos Alberto Sánchez's website.
Page 99 is a fairly good representation of the book as a whole. The book itself is meant to introduce readers to Mexican philosophy in a way that is neither technical or hard to grasp. And page 99 does this well. Each chapter is written in such a way that the philosophical idea expressed in an illustration (Kant’s punctuality here) that readers may find either amusing or familiar. Here, on this page, I try to mix the philosophical idea of punctuality with comments about how we all want to be on time but ultimately fail; how death is the only “on time” you’ll ever achieve, and so on.
I wouldn’t say that Blooming in the Ruins passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors. While it is a good representation of the tone of the book, the rest of the book contains many more stories and anecdotes that readers will appreciate, find amusing, or instructive. In other words, the book is even less technical than page 99 and much more so than any philosophy book that the reader may run into.
--Marshal Zeringue
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