Arquivo de philosophy | Page 106 of 124

Intellectual Formation Requirements

Intellectual formation fundamentally requires two tasks: to study the great authors and to study authors with radically conflicting world views. In the beginning, the obvious: it is a matter of respect for one’s own intelligence to toast with the great ones. The classics must be read, studied, absorbed, and integrated into the personality of the intellectual. Then, with the base set, it is possible to aim for evolution. The next step is to transform the mind into a violent battlefield. The intellectual necessarily needs the conflict, the clash of ideas: only in this way is it possible to progress. To read conflicting authors is to understand the complexity of life, the variations in the mechanisms of perception, to recognize and accept the ambiguous. Moreover, talk to different minds, if sincerely, not only widens knowledge but also imposes humility, but opens up merits where people say they do not exist, in short, it magnifies. This is why it is necessary to deal with opposites, to abandon prejudices, to free oneself from the chains of thought. The opposite path is to repeat what is convenient, deny contradictions, and never evolve. To let ideas burst freely is to let them, by force, drag the mind to the intelligence.

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Beat or Succumb to Death

It seems, at the end of all torments, to sum up life in the following question: beat or succumb to death? And the answer, which is nothing but the work itself, gives an additional torment (torments… are never exhausted!): overcoming death seems to depend on an uncontrollable external factor and subject to uncertainty, that is, subject to failure even if it is unjust. That is to say: the damned fortune, even at the end of all things, even after all trials and even after formidable answers, seems to have a decisive influence. And so the impulse to curse life seems to be irresistible.

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The Clash Between Vanity and Conscience

Some natures impress by the complete absence of the clash between vanity and conscience. Perhaps by the very weakness of conscience, which justifies seeing it ignored by the most popular currents of psychology. In some, it seems simply that it does not manifest. But it is incredible to think of someone who, not once in his life, prays for the pettiness of his own conduct, for the motivators of his own “will”. To do so and not proceed with condemnation would be understandable, but the fact is that, in most people, there is not the slightest trace of conflict.

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A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy

Funny how a single page is enough to see oneself before a great soul. What is the difference between the great writer to the average writer? Leaving aside aesthetics, the great writer addresses the great questions of life. And Tolstoy, in this essay called A Confession, shows why he is among the greatest writers of all times: he recognizes and faces the greatest human problems. Why live, if life is about destroying everything that exists? Why make any effort if the end is invariably nothing? How can not consider life as the supreme evil, since it always leads to sickness and mortification? Is there anything that death does not destroy? How to accept fate, or rather: how to interpret it? These and other questions fill the few pages of this magnificent work, like everything I have come into contact with from the pen of this genius. One page, I repeat, one page of Tolstoy is enough to understand that great literature will never be about only telling a good story—that also does the shallow literature. Great literature is thirsty for a reply to the tormenting question: Why?

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