Tag: philosophy

More striking than this permanent need for guidance, so characteristic of philosophers, which leads them to an investigation that only ends with death, is the fact that many, as soon as they undertake it, are satisfied with the answers they find and quietly stop investigating. In other words: knowledge, which, as is well known, the more it grows, the more it opens up the unknown, and therefore the more it raises questions, the more it instigates study, the more it broadens the field of investigation, does not have a similar effect on some minds. It is very difficult not to resort to a predisposition to justify it, and to validate Ortega y Gasset’s observation that a philosopher is simply the one who cannot be anything else.

One must always return to that which gives unity to being, even and especially under repeated assaults of mutability. With every change, with every apparent dissolution of what lasts, we must strive to return to ourselves, again and again. Although stability can be a chimera, striving for it is not in vain; and if this striving is constant, albeit in an imperfect constancy, it ends up creating in this very act something close to the desired stability. Stability, balance and continuity are, rather, inner qualities.

There is nothing more absurd than living while remembering eternity, in other words, always having timelessness in mind while existing on the temporal scale. The eternal eliminates time; there is no contingency that is not dissolved in its scale. And so there can be nothing more unnatural than meditating on it when the structure of life, at every step, in every detail, is the opposite of it. Unnatural, absurd; and necessary, because this is the only way to overcome the illusion of the previous argument. We exist on the time scale: very well, very well; and only that?

What is most discouraging is to see that, in the end, the dream of stability is vain… There will always be a day when, for unknown reasons, the world dawns sour, disruptive, unpleasant, and then effort, progress and reason will be questioned. And the conclusion will always be the same, that there is only full stability in what does not move, that life is antagonistic to peace…