Tag: philosophy

It is interesting to note the description of the demonic man contained in the Bhagavad Gita. Although there is the natural mention of the malicious and cruel model, the emphasis is on the greedy, materialistic one, whose insatiable desire guides him in the incessant search for wealth and power. Having this, having that; success, ambition; pleasure in feeling powerful; infinite vanity… From all this, a lustful and arrogant worldview is extracted, which throws the being into competition with others, giving rise to envy and stinginess. A being that acts and spares no means to achieve what he wants: he subjugates the world to his personal project. Never parsimony, never frugality, never sincere compassion. Needless to conclude…

Unfortunately, it is not wise to write only in the last stage of life, since it is not possible to define it previously… Sartre is right when he says that “l’homme est ce qu’il se fait,” and that therefore the act is responsible for materializing the genius, for realizing potentialities that, without action, would end up wasted. The act is the voluntary effort that transforms faculties into reality; by what it does, one man can be distinguished from another; Dante was and became Dante by composing verses, Shakespeare by doing plays; and so, although the conclusion may lead to unhappy results, there is no denying that the most important is the now.

It is prudent when Ortega y Gasset says that “yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo,” and also the realization that, living for his time, man lives for all times. There is, however, a danger in this. Dostoevsky inserted a timeless theme into the setting of his time; Dante represented the morals of his time in sublime verses whose essence lay in an acronymic spiritual drama. It is impossible to abstract them from circumstance without deforming them, yet in both, circumstance does nothing but pigment—individualizing, of course—a universal expression common to men of all times. The author, if obsessed with his circumstance and devoid of a sense of timelessness, tends to lose himself in ephemeral futilities, becoming irrelevant to the future, or even outside his social circle. More than anything, it is necessary that he develops a sense of what passes and what remains, of the detail and the essential; otherwise he will be fatally forgotten.