In this text, José Enrique Rodó outlines his vision for a future Latin American civilization based on the pursuit of idealism. He stages this description as a lecture being delivered by an elderly teacher named Prospero to his young students. Rodó has Prospero begin his lecture by asking his students to consider the beauty and grace of a statute of Ariel that sits in his classroom, and by contrasting Ariel’s beauty with Caliban’s barbarism. The body of Rodó’s text is made up of sections in which Prospero discusses the issues that his youthful audience must consider as they attempt to lead Latin American into a new era. Prospero discusses education, arguing that education should not just teach one a vocation, but that it should prepare one to participate in society as a noble and just member. Warning of the danger of educating towards specialization, he cites how the beauty of Athens reflected a society in which balancing human faculties was highly valued. Rodó continues by arguing that learning to appreciate beauty should be part of a moral and proper education, and that such qualities as justice, nobility, and morality are derived from one’s ability to appreciate beauty. Prospero continues his lecture by contrasting the “rational life” (a life based on the contemplation of beauty) with “utilitarianism” (a life driven by self-interest). In this section, he argues that unchecked democracy is bad for the development of culture in any society, because it inevitably ushers in utilitarianism and barbarism. Recounting how analysts of late-nineteenth-century democracy have widely identified this problem, the speaker does not, he says, want to argue for the complete abandonment of democracy. Instead, Rodó describes how hierarchies should be established within it. Universal education, for example, should be applied to realize the full potential of especially talented students, instead of as a leveler. Civilization, he argues, needs a democracy in which the “supremacy of intelligence and virtue” is nurtured and recognized. Prospero continues by warning his students against falling prey to admiration of the United States. The problem with the U.S., he says, is that its people lack spirit and art because it is a society in which utilitarianism dominates so thoroughly. Imitating the U.S., he warns, would not allow Latin Americans to develop either character or genius. In the hands of the U.S., Positivism has lost its spiritual basis, which was, he explains, safeguarded from vulgarity in England by the English aristocracy. According to him, art is only ever made in the U.S. by rebels such as [Edgar Allan] Poe (1809-49) and [Ralph Waldo] Emerson (1803-82), because in general its education system diminishes high culture, promoting instead an undeniable, mediocre “semi-culture.” Instead of looking to the U.S. as the model for an ideal civilization, Prospero (the teacher) urges his students to look to the future, and to dream of an America that has not yet been realized. “Can you envision it, this America we dream of?” he asks them. These young students, he declares, will lay the groundwork for this future America which will be a society founded on the “spiritual idealism” obtained via the pursuit of art, science, morality, religion, and “the politics of ideas.” Rodó urges his students to put aside self-interest for the sake of this vision, concluding his lecture by reminding them how Ariel, indeed, symbolizes the victory over barbarism.

The Uruguayan poet and essayist José Enrique Rodó (1872-1917) wrote Ariel in 1900. Emerging at the beginning of modernismo poetry in Latin America, Rodó became, along with figures such as Rubén Darío (1867-1916) and Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938), a proponent and practitioner of this cosmopolitan literary movement that blended ideas associated with Romanticism and Symbolism into writing that expressed interior themes in stylized prose. In Ariel, Rodó considers the problems of Latin American civilization, and argues that its future depends on the evolution of spiritually, aesthetically, and morally enlightened citizens. Its youth (Rodó was 29 when he wrote Ariel) hold the promise for the region’s future. In this spirit, Rodó writes Ariel in the form of a lecture being delivered by an elder professor to his young students. In this lecture, the professor employs the characters of Ariel and Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-11) as symbols for, respectively, the different types of societies in Latin America versus the United States. Ariel is beautiful, graceful, and noble, while Caliban is coarse and barbarous, he explains. The professor’s lecture is essentially an extended analysis of the negative effects of the United States’ unchecked utilitarianism (which is spurred by, among other things, the pursuit of material goods); and a proposal for how Latin Americans should pursue a different path in which “spiritual idealism” is the overriding goal of society. In short, the latter society would foster spirituality, morality, reflection, art, science, and other forms of high culture in a way he sees lacking in the United States. To form his argument, Rodó draws on many sources from Western history and literature, including Greek philosophy, Christian theology, French and German philosophy, and European literature. His argument for a new Latin America is also based on a visionary idea of its youth and its people as representing an as-yet-realized future society. Utopian but not completely egalitarian, this society would resemble something like ancient Athens, in which the spiritual balance, harmony, and hierarchy of its social organizations and individuals would be reflected in the beauty and genius of its achievements in the arts and sciences.