Beyond the unavoidable damage to the reputation of some of the authors analyzed, the thesis that permeates Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals seems to be convincingly justified by the variety of examples offered in the work. Johnson shows that every “intellectual” who believes himself capable and wants to reform the world according to his own ideas ends up, sooner or later, possessed by them, which means worshipping them and holding them above the truth, which means taking sides with them to the detriment of real people. Possessed, he becomes a moral monster, refuting through his conduct any possible nobility contained in the idea that has dominated him. On the other hand, Johnson also shows that the way out of the magnetic attraction of ideas can only be through a sincere appreciation of the truth and the awareness that an idea is not worth a life. It is a work that, like good moralistic treatises, humanizes by exposing dehumanization.
Tag: philosophy
The 20th Century Does Not Seem…
The 20th century does not seem to have been enough to demonstrate the risk of politicizing philosophy, nor the disasters that result from interpreting the “act” as a political act, or “responsibility” as a principle that claims the individual as a collective agent. The effort to distort thought and use it as a pretext and resource in this modern factory of activism persists, even though it has been proven to produce nothing but destruction. It is unfortunate, but it does not seem to be with less activism that the current activism can be combated.
It Cannot Be Accepted for a Second…
It cannot be accepted for a second that authors such as Kierkegaard, Pascal and Dostoevsky have been lumped together with figures such as Heidegger and Sartre in this so-called existentialism. In fact, what is most surprising is that it was precisely Sartre who proposed such a bundling, as if he were part of a fictitious current and claiming to have absorbed them all, without being immediately challenged on the absurdity of imagining an evolution from Pascal to Sartre. One can see, for example, that Sartre uses arguments such as “l’existence précède l’essence” or “l’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il se fait” in order to paint a man isolated from his circumstances, created from nothing and independent from the start, something visibly antagonistic to Christian thought. And it is certainly similar disparities that separate Sartre from many others labeled “existentialists”. Imagining a “philosophical current” that unites them is something that only interests Sartre himself, and it should not convince anyone.
Intelligence Begins With the Ability…
If, as has been said, intelligence begins with the ability to marvel, it also follows that the more the notion of normality spreads, the more difficult it is for intelligence to manifest itself. In other words: starting with the universe, passing through nature, through society and culminating in the details of everyday life, looking at all of this and seeing it as natural, ordinary, instead of being amazed at the extraordinary succession of factors necessary to generate it, is actually restraining the manifestation of intellect.