Tag: philosophy

He who has something to teach and wants to teach needs to understand that, in order to make his desire a reality, there must also be someone who wants to learn. This is a fact: the best teacher is not able to overcome some of the barriers that a bad student can put up; a good student, on the other hand, is able to learn something even from the worst teacher. From this we can see that learning, in short, depends more on the student than on the teacher, who is limited to facilitating or hindering learning, stimulating or discouraging. This is the case no matter how great the teacher’s will or knowledge.

Something inexplicably funny happens when we come across a crystal-clear, perfect and irrefutable logical exposition that does not exert on the listeners the same brilliance and charm that radiates from the expositor’s words. Thomas Aquinas comes to mind… What can be said? Unfortunately, logic can only impress those accustomed to practicing it or, at the very least, those capable of understanding it. The work of Thomas Aquinas is an impossible feat. The proofs he presents, for example, on the necessity of God’s existence, could not be better or more logically formulated, nor more clearly explained by a human head whose expressive instrument is language. And yet they are useless, absolutely useless and hollow to most mortals.

It really is an impressive phenomenon that the antithesis of dominant thought always emerges, precisely when it believes itself to be sovereign, and ends up being surprised with a violence proportional to the effort made to consolidate it. In the same way, genius emerges when the environment seems to make it impossible. And when we see that, after a few decades, the impossible happens and the tiny overtakes the enormous, we wonder at these frequent coincidences…

Only bad news can restore reason and put expectations in their proper place… And all the sloppiness, all the boredom and numbness towards existence suddenly dissipate, when circumstances compel the realization that it is from death that the meaning of all things derives, the sense of urgency, the need to do. Then the futile and the important, the true and the false become clear, the reason why one must proceed with firmness and resolution, leaving aside everything that is illusory and deviates from that core without which it would be best not to exist.