The writer should always remember the example of Dostoevsky who, being the staunchest critic of nihilism, is considered by nihilists to be one of their own. This is only because Dostoevsky puts himself entirely from the point of view of his characters, so that when they manifest themselves, the ideas of their creator are indistinguishable. More than effort, achieving this level of artistic expression requires a predisposition: one that seeks, above all, to do justice to the object portrayed; one that, in a word, we call sincerity.
Identifying the Political Leanings of Writers
There is an infallible way of identifying the political leanings of writers who deal with this subject in literature. The technique is very simple, and boils down to checking the treatment given to “bad” characters. On the one hand, we have a trend that creates them as always ambiguous, always complex, never entirely evil; on the other hand, we have the trend that can only paint them as stereotypes, as representing absolute evil, devoid of any virtue. The first thing to note here is the radical difference in the results: in the first case, we generally have interesting, realistic and thought-provoking works; in the second, they are practically unreadable crap, stupid even for the supporters of shameless ideology, which is not ashamed to ruin the literary endeavor. The technique, therefore, shows less the degree of political passion than the stance derived from it: the first group humanizes and seeks to understand the opponent; the second only thinks of destroying him. Nothing more needs to be said; anyone can identify them.
More Striking Than This Permanent Need…
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.
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.