Tag: philosophy

Moralists are, in fact, indispensable for any serious student, just as moralism is indispensable for a fair understanding of man. Without it, one falls into countless traps and is always mistaken in one’s assessment of spirits and works. Rousseau cannot be understood through his infamous Du contrat social, or through what, according to himself, is his most important work. Rousseau can only be understood when we compare this Émile with the biographical note that most editions lack: the author who wrote a volume of eight hundred pages teaching how others should educate their children sent the five he had to an orphanage.

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…