The meaning of “kirio” in Pedro Figari’s late thought

Abstract

The Uruguayan Pedro Figari (1861-1938), a prominent painter, was also an original thinker. He was the author of a utopian/satirical novel, Historia kiria (1930), a work published in Paris, where he lived between 1925 and 1934. Not widely known and barely read, Figari presented in that novel the kirios, an imaginary archaic civilization whose old and good “essential virtues” he transformed into a universal standard of reasonableness and common sense: a standard from which he judged the events of the world around him, and its protagonists. As soon as the novel was published, Figari adopted the kirio point of view to formulate actuality comments and reflections, something of which there is abundant testimony in his correspondence from the period. Since it is not immediately obvious, it makes sense to ask what it was like for Figari to be a kirio. Or, better, what kirio is as a concept: what distinguishes it, what characterizes it. In this work, I try to offer an answer to this question.