Thomas Bernhard, in Extinction, makes a very sharp reflection on what can be called the practical man and the thinking man. According to his reasoning, the practical man hates idleness and usually identifies it with the thinking man. However, the practical man, unaccustomed to thought, only conceives of action as practical action, and therefore cannot understand the absence of practical action as anything other than idleness. But the truth is that idleness does not exist for the thinking man, because it is precisely under the appearance of idleness that he experiences his states of greatest excitement. This, however, is far beyond the comprehension of the practical man. The curious thing about all this is that, in fact, it is precisely the practical man who slips into the idleness that he hates so much: incapable of thinking, only for him does the absence of practical action mean genuine and absolute inaction.
Tag: philosophy
The Real Student Is the Teacher
The real student is the teacher. Because teaching is, in essence, also studying; but studying in a depth that can only be achieved through teaching. Or rather: it is teaching itself that demands it, since it brings up a multitude of problems that lead to further research, unimaginable to the average student. So the teacher, if he is not a bad teacher, the more he teaches, the deeper he gets into the subject, the more he learns about its details, the more he crystallizes the theory in his mind and the more able he becomes to teach, because he discovers what the student needs to learn.
The Problem With Utilitarian Man
The problem with utilitarian man is that he believes that everything is necessarily for sale, just waiting to be negotiated. That is why he ends up, sooner or later, breaking his face when he comes up against his will against a nature that does not share his convictions. So he lashes out, wages war and sometimes insults what he does not understand; in all cases, however, whether he thinks he is triumphant or not, he is forced to swallow his own smallness.
The Rational Foundations of Common Sense
Perhaps the most important and necessary function of philosophy is to lay the rational foundations of common sense. It is necessary, again and again, to travel the same paths and repeat the same age-old arguments in favor of common sense; otherwise, how easily it is dispersed! and how regrettable the consequences of this dispersion! In fact, Edward Feser is right: all the moral ills that modernity suffers from can be traced back to the estrangement from Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas and the other thinkers who, for many centuries, formed the basis of Western thought.