Despite the turmoil of a century, the paradigmatic philosopher remains statuesque. He is a being of dignity and composure, who at a distance ascertains the interrelatedness of all parts that conform reality. He is a being of moral authority insofar as his commitments reveal a balanced view of life. The true partisan of reason, one is compelled to admit. Look at Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Quine. Philosophy is a cortege of tranquility amid disintegration. What to make of the recalcitrant? Empedocles, Lucretius, Erasmus, Marx, Guyau, James, Goldman, De Beauvoir. There is hyphenation (philosopher-poet, philosopher-sociologist, philosopher-psychologist)—the disclosure of an alloy. Or there is silence (discreet, professional). It would be wise to allow for a third alternative: wholehearted inclusion. Philosophy is the dynamism of abstract thought, and the source is always a tension between acting and thinking. Philosophers, then, move in two planes, and their work is the record of this movement. We can say with Ingenieros that “the only evil is to lack ideals and be a slave to the contingencies of immediate practical life, renouncing the possibility of perfection.” No tension approximates that of an ideal. As member of a fraught tributary, Copal lived in constant readjustment, attentive to the ripples through which a present act (a present thought) reaches and affects the future. That is, he asked for his life to signal, even if intermittently, an accord.

Socialism was the tributary. His father, Arista Diharce, rode alongside Pascual Orozco in the deserts of Chihuahua and, after supporting various alternatives to the Mexican Communist Party, joined the Popular Graphic Arts Workshop (TGP) in 1940. He was austere, retiring, and conscientious, a man forged by moribund codes of honor and liberating vistas. In one of his late essays, “On Parental Sway,” Copal reminisces about his forward-looking pessimism:

But his passion did not fully mesh with the TGP. Arista was a mediocre printmaker and, incapable of concerning himself with technical matters, he abandoned project after project in sullen fits of impatience. In the same essay, Copal describes his father’s disdain for artists:

To this excess of severity, Copal initially reacted with a deliberate epicureanism. Only with his father’s death in 1967, he tempered and developed it into the peculiar celebratory form one finds in his heroes—Engels, Lafargue, Rhodakanaty.

His mother, Enriqueta Zalacosta, came from a well-off family of lawyers. She met Arista at the height of the revolution and improvised a new groundplan for her life. They never married. Consigned as she finally was to housework, she still managed to contribute articles to endless newspapers in Arista’s line:

Enriqueta had a rare talent for friendship. Her household was a meeting place similar to Kate and Henry Salt’s cottage in Tilford. Copal repeatedly declared that much of his understanding about people derived from the heated discussions that would unfold over the course of months. He, too, participated in them on and off until his mother’s death in 1970.

For the first decade and a half of Copal’s life, Chihuahua was a prosperous state, and Delicias, his birthplace, an expanding city with a strong cotton industry. Workers managed to preserve negotiating powers that the governments of Ávila Camacho and Miguel Alemán had succeeded in dismantling in the rest of the republic. But the situation was typically frail. The dawn of the sixties inaugurated a heightening of the agrarian problem that would result in years of guerrilla warfare. Copal received a practical education in cooperatives and local bodies that was meant to prepare him for the coming struggle, but his spirit eventually revolted. As many of his friends organized against the rule of the caciques, Copal headed to the University of Chihuahua. It was there that he caught news of the attacks spearheaded by Arturo Gámiz and Pablo Gómez (1965) on the military base at Madera. The decision to leave Delicias was momentous. Again and again throughout his life it served his political opponents as an effective rhetorical device to prove his lack of integrity: he could act, yet he chose to study; that is, he could live like a radical, yet he chose to live like a bourgeois. But it also served as a spur. Copal writes in “On the Irreparable Damage of All Choice”:

His stay had a duration of three years. He had written close to a fourth of Emotion, Feeling, and Sentiment by the end of it, which was enough to grant him the bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1967. Not long after, he settled as a history professor in a modest school in Saucillo from 1967 to 1980.

Emotion, Feeling, and Sentiment (1975) is a monumental work of history and philosophy very much in the tradition of Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason, and Bernal’s Science in History. Its aim is to dispel the view that emotions (catch-all term) are invariants and demonstrate that through their social manifestations in each epoch they undergo all manner of shifts (“Our misery can find a congenial ear only in the present and only in certain spaces, for posterity is bound to simplify its pulsating rhetoric.”). The concepts of feeling and sentiment help trace these shifts: whereas emotion designates the irretrievable physiological response, feeling designates the reasoned apprehension of its effects in consciousness as they turn into action and sentiment the indulgence of those effects as they die off. In other words, feelings streamline the cooperation of intellect and will; sentiments can only block it, originating a dependence on inertia. The array of beliefs of every period affects the balance of these active and passive states. Copal is therefore unwilling to entertain visions of grand moral isolation. To quote one of the more brazen assertions, “Private life is the amount of public life the individual believes himself able to order; his interior monologue is nothing more than a heavily revised chorus.”

Now, what constitutes the book’s great strength and great weakness is its markedly abstruse analytic method. Feeling and sentiment are conceptual starting points: within the classificatory effort, Copal pursues the development of each emotion in a manner reminiscent of phenomenology. One gets the impression of a Jamesian commentary interspersed with the dry distinctions of a Pavlov or a Merani. In his classification of happiness as a feeling in the libertine ethos, for example, Copal overwhelms us with twenty pages of dissecting prose that stumble upon poetic insight and pedantic rigor at sadly unequal rates, to which he adds fifteen more on gluttony as a sentiment. But one should lessen the severity: whatever its unusual merits, Emotion, Feeling, and Sentiment is still the work of a student. Copal fears the accusations of vagueness and dilettantism that most undergraduates and autodidacts fear, and so he is aggressive with his displays of erudition and logical gamesmanship. He does not have the courage to fail in his own name. Not yet.

It was on account of his friendship with a fellow professor that Copal managed to publish the book through Ningún lugar, a reputable socialist press in Cuauhtémoc. This friendship, which reached its highest point throughout the writing of Lapses in the March, is of such import in Copal’s life that we must treat it at length.

Copal’s first years in Saucillo contrasted greatly with those in Delicias and were more of a continuation of his university days. He worked thirty weekly hours and spent the rest of his time reading, writing letters to old acquaintances (usually his parents’), drinking alone, and walking. There was a minimum of social life shared with his conservative colleagues. The purgatory ceased with the arrival of Silvestre Muñuzuri in 1972, an eccentric hire. Unlike Copal, he had no links to academia. He made up for it with a commanding presence (relevant to the school administrators) and countless links to insurrectionary groups (relevant to Copal). Their friendship began with ardent debates about the worth to a revolutionary cause of the Zasulichs, Hödels, Galleanis, and Mosts, which in turn became passionate invitations to several clandestine reunions. There is a full-fledged portrait of Silvestre in one of Copal’s letters to a friend of his father’s around this time:

Silvestre indulged in portraiture too in a letter to Valentín Granado, the editor-in-chief of Ningún lugar:

With the publication of Emotion, Feeling, and Sentiment, Copal felt unburdened, even if its immediate impact was nonexistent. Yet he still resisted almost all forms of activism. Silvestre had managed to move him around, introduce him to workers and organizers. Copal prepared for a new book instead. Like Marcuse, he believed that the intellectual had a preparatory role: he articulated the vision that would generate an instinctive need for a new life—he catalyzed. At any rate, the example and conversations of Silvestre delimited the scope of his next book, Lapses in the March, which would take five years to write. After its completion, they parted ways. In 1981, Copal joined Valentín and a group of likeminded socialists in their attempt to establish a workers’ palace at the suggestion of Valentín’s wife, a belated follower of Flora Tristan. Silvestre left for Coahuila, where numerous workers were protesting the new Chrysler and General Motors plants.

Lapses in the March (1982) is a survey of utopian communities in Mexico from Mendieta’s millenarian settlements in the XVIth century to Santa María Auxiliadora in the XXth. Its foundational idea is that every variant of utopia reveals the constitutive need of humanity to suspend historical time and assess its current potentialities and that the recurrent failures to instantiate utopia broaden humanity’s views of possibility in unsuspected directions. Counterintuitively, then, utopia as an abstract formulation maximizes the ideological self-conception of a period while utopia as practice refashions it. Copal goes on to argue that bricolage has been the norm in Mexico’s trials and that any large-scale model is condemned from the start to exist only in paper: “The future of utopia in our country lies in proliferation. Convergence will be the outgrowth.”

Much speculation has been devoted to the extent to which Valentín acted as an editor for the work. It presents Copal’s most polished, restrained, and structured prose. In almost all relevant stylistic aspects, it is an advance. We need not worry about the intrusion. Copal would publish no more books, and it is appropriate that Lapses be a sort of culmination.

Silvestre died in 1983. He was shot outside San Vicente Ferrer, one of Abasolo’s modest churches. Copal shed half his being with him and incorporated what he could in a fruitful amalgam of tempers. Up to that point, his labors in Cuauhtémoc had been strictly pedagogic; afterward, they expanded to the economical and political—he assisted Valentín in gathering funding for the press and Ocampo in his beleaguered dream to create a socialist party in the spirit of the FPPM. Copal became active at last. To follow Fechner through Stanley Hall, “The dead press in upon us, yearning to add their strength to ours, for thus they not merely live, but grow. New impulsions and sudden insights in us are inspirations from them.”

Three decades of tireless work lay ahead, in which Copal’s thought would disperse throughout thousands of essays of varying length and value, varying solemnity and jocularity: “On Smoking and the Mild Masochisms,” “On Drinking and Ritual,” “On Youth in Control,” “On the Spirit of Strikes,” “On Vacations and Their Relation to Morale,” “On Temperate and Intemperate Laziness,” “On Woman, Man, and the (Allegedly) Primordial,” “On the Myth-Making Mind,” “On Relativism as Intellectual Sport,” “On Machinery—Human and Not,” “On Pets and Sentiment,” “On Libraries and Liberating Space,” “On Drafting Our Utopias,” “On Being a Critic and Being a Man,” “On Open Poetry,” “On Novels of Idea(l)s,” “On a Decision of Sor Juana,” “On a Fundamental Difference between Losing and Failing,” “On Sacred Derangements,” “On the Education of José Vasconcelos,” “On Engels and the Fulfillment of Life,” “On Rhodakanaty and the Evangelical Will,” “On Ricardo Flores Magón and the Possibilities of the Hour,” “On Lafargue and Principled Suicide,” “Against Grand Gestures,” “Against Revivals,” “Against Transactional Bonds,” “Against Cloistered Knowledge,” “That the Society That Made Us Is Not the Society to Which We Are Indebted,” “That the Mind Is the Body,” “That Love Is Ours Only in Action,” “That Our Sympathies Can Be Wide,” “That Communities Last in Coexistence, Not in Isolation,” “A Tribute to Wenceslao Roces,” “Our Marxist Historians,” “The Monolith,” “Radical Moralities,” “The Specter of Ruination.” Owing to the labors of Mauricio Paredes and Liliana Alfaro, who have published ten volumes of essays with an unobtrusive commentary, we now have a clearer view of the remarkable consistency that makes these pieces cohere. It is sufficient to state that the philosophical spirit, even in its dissent, hangs on to an enthusiasm for orchestration.

Many have found this period lamentable, however. They see exhaustion where others see energy. Where is the industrious research? Where are the fine-grained arguments? Where is the tempered prose? Few professionals are as enamored with the appearance of intellectual expenditure as those of philosophy; the constrained spirit in confusion with itself deals in their aridity with greater success than the expansive spirit in autonomous creation. One must simply look at the reception of the early Hume, the early Husserl, and the early Wittgenstein among them. Regardless, there is a justification for this shift in “On the Essay as a Blossom of Time”:

Three decades of disappointment and frustration. Valentín’s son, at his father’s death, sold Ningún lugar to a private university. The workers’ palace fragmented into mutually exclusive initiatives. Copal’s only love interest, Susana Vestal, died in a suicide pact with Ocampo. The reactionary tide at the beginning of the new century blasted Copal’s already feeble reputation. Mexico was eager to sweep aside an ambiguous inheritance. If Copal plodded through, it was because of the asperities. He had witnessed the infirm glory and systematic disgrace that shadows the noncompliant.

As his life came to an end, with a winning inconsistency, Copal dedicated his best hours to an untitled manuscript on the daily routines of a utopian community. This explains the notorious drop in publications throughout the 2010s. Paredes, who is editing the manuscript, has described it as an experiment in a recent article:

A novel? A hybrid form? A genuine innovation? The answer is less important than the realization that Copal could not help being faithful to his bent. The inconsistencies that besiege a spirit rich in convictions are the fountainhead of momentum.

Copal died of pulmonary failure after undergoing surgery for his emphysema. His last essay, “Administrative Styles,” was published in Alfaro’s 2 a month prior. It was Copal’s distinct fortune to be born surrounded by effervescent souls, too busy in the improvement of concrete life to mind nihilism and its concomitant dissipations. One is not impervious to the rhythms of channeled energy: the body learns and thereafter never misremembers. Pauses, delays, addition. The weight of an ideal will bury us, but it will leave us whole. And there is the possibility that we will then become a steppingstone for others. Have we not grown tired of crowns and thrones and the paraphernalia of untouchable authority? Are we not tired of staring at gulfs, wishing for extinction? To judge by the affairs of the world, no, not really. But the continuous formulation of these questions that the lives of the recalcitrant demand is enough to limit despair.

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Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the short story collection Sleep Decades (Malarkey Books, 2024). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Exacting Clam, Firmament, Able Muse, new_sinews, and elsewhere. Twitter: @iab9208