Tag: philosophy

The man who needs to understand reality and understand himself in order to make an attempt at integration will be a stranger. And he will feel more like a stranger the more he understands about reality and himself, the more he becomes convinced that what he knows is too little, and that he cannot accept reality just because it is. At the same time, he will be attacked from all directions because of his incapacity for passive adaptation, and will end up stigmatized for being what he is. He will therefore face great and unique difficulties because he cannot get rid of his predisposition. Only with luck will the world seem less than hostile to him. And despite all this, and despite how much he faces and how much he suffers, his unhappiness will only be guaranteed and complete if he fails to do his duty.

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 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 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?