Category: Notes

Detaching from the world does not mean to annul any worldly expectations, but to adopt an impassive posture before what happens. To expect that a good action will bear good fruit is natural and even stimulating; to plan and act according to a plan in the hope that it will be successful is, at the same time, to value time and one’s own being. Quite different is the case of the one whose expectations neither stimulate nor dignify the act, and whose existence is reduced to an uncontrolled yearning that has in the world, and not in the act, the parameters for its own realization.

If not always, it would certainly be interesting today for philosophy to return to its beginnings as an antidote to its own misrepresentation. To teach it, it would be better to pretend that nothing was ever written down and expound concepts as if they were being taught for the first time. The teacher would then teach in the open air with the pupils sitting in a circle, and when he said “act”, he would show precisely the meaning of this word, so that, for the rest of their lives, the disciples would have in mind the actual act witnessed, and would not give in to the temptation to apply this word in a sense that was detached from the one the teacher made them witness. And so for all the important words. It is always profitable to secure the knowledge of a patent reality to which one must turn one’s eyes and without which reasoning is a waste.

It is amusing to observe that, in some philosophers, we can witness the emptying of the meaning of words as we read them, or rather, the words, as they turn the pages, cease to mean what the dictionary defines them to fulfill the function of subjective concepts, which are worked on as if they were toys in an imaginary playground. There comes a moment in which we witness constructions that would be impossible if the words were used as they are, and then we realize, first, that the philosopher has distorted them, and second, that his philosophy has nothing to teach us about the real world.