Tag: philosophy

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.

Much less impressive is the impact of death and its countless heralds than the human capacity to live ignoring them all, to live as if the possibility of them suddenly appearing was non-existent. It is truly extraordinary that the bulk of minds spend their entire lives without reflecting for a second on what is perhaps the only existential certainty, and therefore do not even suspect the wide-open fragility of everything. And so, again and again, those who think will have to face the surprise of others with what should in no way surprise them.