Tag: philosophy

Peace is the joint neutralization of will and feeling. However they manifest themselves, these are the spirit’s disturbers, agitators that disorient and move the being away from the healthy calm that configures peace. To understand this is to understand why even jubilation is harmful: great oscillations are undesirable when one intends to have a perennial and stable state, which serves as the basis for full harmony and makes possible a disturbance-free focus.

I jump from philosophy to astrology, from astrology to religion, and wherever I am there I find words of spite directed at Voltaire. Impressive! What the Ferney’s philosopher has achieved is an unmatched feat! I just read: “Voltaire, ce marveilleux ignorant, qui croyait savoir tant de choses, parce qu’il trouvait toujours le moyen de rire au lieu d’apprendre”. How not to sympathize or, rather, how not to fall into laughter? Time goes by, and my concept of this renowned philosopher who managed to irritate the world only grows. I believe it was Nietzsche who stressed the wisdom of Voltaire’s philosophical attitude, which always ended up stretching a smile on his face instead of frying his spirit by taking life and history so seriously. Smiling in the face of human stupidity: this is the very rare virtue that Voltaire, more than anyone else, knew how to practice.

What is most annoying about agnosticism, or rather agnostics, is the presumption of judging oneself to be a human model in the fullness of its potentialities. This, of course, is what points out the obvious. If the agnostic says that certain metaphysical or religious questions are unknowable to the human spirit, it implies that he knows it in its supreme degree of evolution. The possibility that there are human beings with faculties that he does not possess, or evolved to a higher degree than his own, never enters his mind. Instead of saying, “I am not able to understand metaphysics,” he says, “Man is not able to understand it.” It is the immodesty and narrowness of vision typical of inferior spirits…

No matter how great my respect for the author or how high the elevation of spirit that a dissertation produces in me, I never experience the feeling that I am facing the revelation of a truth. Is it a vice? An exaggerated and counterproductive skepticism? Or a perceptive limitation? It is true that the study of metaphysics takes the mind to a much more interesting plane than the plane of the so-called sensible reality; but what good is it, for a mind incapable of accepting formulas and opposed to affirmation? Reticences…