Tag: philosophy

I read mystics with real pleasure. Mystics: men who claim to see what I do not see, who argue with what I cannot prove. And pleasure, of course, to know myself eliminating to the last trace the ignorant presumption that characterizes the man of this century responsible for molding me. I am happy to see that there may be others with faculties that I do not possess, that I do not represent the human model in the fullness of capabilities. To me, reading them is always a lesson in humility.

It is disappointing to see that fame never fails to chain and corrupt. Exceptions are very rare. And the consequence of this is that success, even if deserved, comes to destroy. One looks into the past and discovers the lack of authentic idols, idols that, while rising, remained true to themselves. And so biographies are closed describing pitiful sketches of personalities who allowed themselves to be overshadowed.

Viktor Frankl, thrown into a Nazi concentration camp, saw his reality reduced to its fullest misery. Rationally, although with an almost superhuman coldness, and although for the sake of survival, for the urgent need to preserve his mental sanity, he set out to view his misfortune through the lens of a scientist. He isolated his mind in a fictitious intellectual bubble and made physical, psychological and moral destruction the object of his investigations. It is, keeping proportions, what every serious investigator of life should do.