More striking than this permanent need for guidance, so characteristic of philosophers, which leads them to an investigation that only ends with death, is the fact that many, as soon as they undertake it, are satisfied with the answers they find and quietly stop investigating. In other words: knowledge, which, as is well known, the more it grows, the more it opens up the unknown, and therefore the more it raises questions, the more it instigates study, the more it broadens the field of investigation, does not have a similar effect on some minds. It is very difficult not to resort to a predisposition to justify it, and to validate Ortega y Gasset’s observation that a philosopher is simply the one who cannot be anything else.
Category: Notes
One Must Always Return to That….
One must always return to that which gives unity to being, even and especially under repeated assaults of mutability. With every change, with every apparent dissolution of what lasts, we must strive to return to ourselves, again and again. Although stability can be a chimera, striving for it is not in vain; and if this striving is constant, albeit in an imperfect constancy, it ends up creating in this very act something close to the desired stability. Stability, balance and continuity are, rather, inner qualities.
There Is Nothing More Absurd Than Living…
There is nothing more absurd than living while remembering eternity, in other words, always having timelessness in mind while existing on the temporal scale. The eternal eliminates time; there is no contingency that is not dissolved in its scale. And so there can be nothing more unnatural than meditating on it when the structure of life, at every step, in every detail, is the opposite of it. Unnatural, absurd; and necessary, because this is the only way to overcome the illusion of the previous argument. We exist on the time scale: very well, very well; and only that?
The Brazilian Today Grows Up…
The Brazilian today grows up without a shared cultural environment. He grows up not knowing, for example, what literature is. And if, by chance, he discovers it, if a miracle awakens his curiosity about it and he looks for the place where the great authors write, where the great critics are presenting and criticizing literary works, disseminating the best that has been written and is being written, he does not find it, because that place does not exist. What is good are yellowed and faded pages that can be bought second-hand. And it is very curious to note that today, even what is written about literature is not written, but talked about: the format of any literary criticism that remains, compelled by the audience, is video. Books and letters have become unpalatable. This staggering cultural failure, the cause of an even greater human failure, would never occur in a country that had at least one educated elite, because if it were truly educated, it would take it upon itself to do something for culture, to do something for the country. But no, no… the best thing now is not to instigate it at all, because the possible patron is an already existing and disgracefully distorted patron.