Tag: philosophy

By Lavelle:

Il n’y a qu’une attitude qui donne à la douleur son véritable sens, c’est celle qui consiste à l’accepter, à la faire nôtre, à lui demander les moyens d’enrichir et d’approfondir notre être intérieur, c’est-à-dire à la convertir en un principe de joie. L’origine de la moralité est la souffrance volontaire.

What dignifies the being is the active work he does on the circumstances at his disposal. Pain, therefore, like everything else, only acquires meaning when it is transmuted, when it is absorbed and used as fuel for some positive transformation. There is no merit or demerit in suffering it; man, however, only appears when he transfigures it, necessarily imprinting his individual mark.

The repeated experience of the irreversible teaches more than any study. Only if man is imbued with the notion of inescapable finitude can he fill his life with meaning and understand the value of the moment. This persistent repetition, magnificently represented by Poe in The Raven, teaches humility, responsibility and urgency all at once, something that no book can convey with such intensity.

Although the first few years of an intellectual life seem by far the most fruitful, in which each one of them seems to bring about a complete transformation in knowledge, after a certain time, although progress seems to lose momentum, the gain in direction is remarkable. In other words: at the beginning, when everything is new, we discover a lot, but knowledge expands simultaneously in many directions, and we can hardly see a direction, we can hardly see where the effort will lead. After a few years, we make far fewer mistakes, and although the difficulties increase, we move forward more consciously towards where we want to be.

When one follows the recommendation of Ortega y Gasset, Viktor Frankl and Louis Lavelle, who, from different perspectives, emphasize the importance of seeking to integrate individual circumstances into the plane of existence, the act certainly acquires an extraordinary solidity and life becomes more serious. But there is an unavoidable problem here: sometimes the circumstance is so miserable and depressing that its assimilation is dangerous. That is to say: he who wants to look at and understand raw reality, if taken by this sense of responsibility towards the circumstance, can never do so as a detached and impartial observer. What he calls to himself is what he suffers, what he seeks to integrate is what hinders, pressures and depresses him. What he does is the opposite of the rational path of detachment, and this task is never undertaken without leaving deep marks on the character. The result may not be good…