Introduction to a Mundane Philosophy
I
Philosophy, which has always been in search of the truth, lately faces a
serious problem with truthfulness.
Truth is something that is predicated on logical propositions and
compares the correspondence of those propositions to the object.
Truthfulness, on the other hand, compares the proposition, declaration or
judgment itself to the conscience of the subject. It does not deal with the
agreement of the judgment with reality, but the assent given to the content of
the proposition by those who express or listen to that judgment. Kant
extolled the importance of truthfulness on the part of those who pronounce
moral judgments because this “sincerity with oneself,” also called
“scrupulousness of thought,” and which was embodied most notably in the
figure of the Biblical Job, is the premise of virtue, while its absence constitutes
a blameworthy and corrupting betrayal of the human heart. Unlike truth,
truthfulness is always ethically demanding, considering that, as Kant says:
I can, indeed, err in the judgment in which I believe to be right,
for this belongs to the understanding which alone judges
objectively (rightly or wrongly); but in the judgment whether in
fact I believe to be right (or merely pretend it), I absolutely
cannot be mistaken, for this judgment – or rather this
proposition – merely says that I judge the object in such-andsuch a way.1
In short, if I say something, the measure of the truth of what I say is found in
the world of external objectivity. However, if I am truthful in that which I
say, I am so because I give my honest assent to my statement and believe in it
personally. It is clearly visible to my own conscience. Therefore, truthfulness
is an unavoidable duty, because nothing can impede its conformity to the self,
as long as one is not deceiving oneself.
1
I. Kant, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” (1791), translated by George di
Giovanni. In Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni].
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 34.
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It is possible to take a different point of view from that taken by Kant.
He was interested in thinking about truthfulness as a prerequisite of acting
morally, which is why he focused on the sincerity of the person expressing the
judgment. However, to this perspective it is possible to add another that takes
into account the truthfulness that this judgment deserves for the rest of the
people who have come to know it. Going even further, one can consider not
only the truthfulness of an isolated judgment, but that of a theory, a doctrine,
a philosophical system, or even, with complete independence of its author, the
truthfulness of the precipitate of unconscious and anonymous beliefs that we
all share at any given time and that we call “outlook on the world,”
“worldview” or Weltanschauung. Ideas are always presented as a proposal of
truth and, while not refuted in most cases, people stop assenting to them
because, in their view, the ideas have lost their usefulness as an instrument for
understanding the world and themselves. So the universal history of
philosophic thought, in contrast to scientific thought, could be presented as a
sequence of truths which, without ceasing to be true, successively acquire and
lose validity for human beings who, when a certain moment arrives, withdraw
their deeply felt attachment to them, because they no longer seem as
convincing as they once were.
Plato’s philosophy, for example, succeeded in defining a great truth
because it knew how to state, in concepts, a dualism in reality pre-intuited
since the earliest ontology. It distinguishes the phenomenological-perceptible
world of experience, on the one hand, from the intelligible and ideal world, on
the other, as well as explaining the connection between the two worlds as the
participation of the first world in the second. That dualism and participation
are not inventions of an imaginative philosopher, but based in reality, is
proved by the fact that Platonism, which presupposes nothing less than the
hypothesis of a logico-mathematical rationality of being, has permitted the
development of the sciences in the West and, as a result, is at the origin of the
technical and efficient transformation and domination of the natural world.
That is to say, Platonism expresses an unchanging aspect of being, which is
the conviction that the phenomenological world perceived by the senses does
not exhaust reality, for reality encompasses, as well, another, more perfect
world in which the first participates analogically and of which it is the
perceivable symbol. The world can be and, in fact, has been conceived of in
many ways, one of the most enduring of which is, without doubt, that of the
symbol. That is why Platonism held sway for such an extraordinarily long
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time and why, under different guises, it held the ancient, pre-modern
worldview together solidly.
And, yet, even for Platonism, with all its great explanatory power and
understanding, its time arrived and, with the maturing of modern subjectivity
in the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, it lost the
truthfulness that it enjoyed for so many centuries in a short time. No one had
proved the falseness or error of Platonic philosophy. How could that be
done? Philosophical truths are neither verified in the laboratory nor rejected
through experiments as are scientific hypotheses. They are meaningful
proposals that are introduced among those who understand them and they
gain their acceptance thanks to their ability to convince and generate
consensus on their value and fruitfulness. When numerous authoritative
opinions within the community of people who are, in Kant’s terms,
recognized to have good taste agree that the doctrine proposes a truth, it
becomes, eo ipso, true. The perspective of history teaches us that in philosophy,
the truth yields to truthfulness. Or said in another way, although no one has
definitively refuted the fundamental thesis of Platonism, from the moment in
which the world stopped being conceived as a symbol and the shining
medieval cosmos changed into the Cartesian res extensa, Plato’s truth lost its
ancient truthfulness and people withdrew their assent. Then Platonism waned
as an explanatory narrative for modern consciousness, which is looking for or
generating other ways of understanding the world -- ways better suited to it.
II
We are now witnessing in our time a larger phenomenon and one with
greater consequences. It may not deal simply with the loss of truthfulness of
specific philosophical doctrines produced at the heart of Western culture and
which, like earlier ones, may be dissolved in the unceasing ebb and flow of
worldviews. Rather the issue is one of the loss of truthfulness of Western
culture itself. That is, it is not so much a change within the system as a
change of the system itself – a system suddenly perceived to be a body of
fossilized, inert and untrue doctrines. Thus, many voices were raised in the
last century proclaiming the decline of the West, the eclipse of ideologies, the
death of God and man or the end of history – voices announcing the advent
of a new cultural stage whose identity lies precisely in being posterior to the
former and that is almost always designated with the prefix that indicates this
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posteriority:
post-modern, post-industrial, post-ideological, postmetaphysical, post-historical, etc. In this large-scale shift, from which it seems
few things are being saved, philosophy is not escaping from the colossal
shipwreck. So here, too, we may have arrived at what seems to be the end of
a long and brilliant story that was born in ancient Greece. For example,
Ortega y Gasset and Heidegger said much the same thing just a few years
apart. The position taken by the former in a number of essays in the 1940s is
well known and well stated in condensed form in the essay Origin and epilogue to
philosophy. As for Heidegger, he was already instigating the destruction of
traditional ontology in Being and Time, while in later writings, most notably the
lecture The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, he continues the
demolition already begun to the entire edifice of philosophical knowledge.
Consequently, in these two writers the loss of truthfulness is not limited
to a specific philosophical system, but to philosophy itself as a way of
approaching and knowing the world. According to them, philosophy may
have fulfilled its historic spiritual mission and it may be replaced in the future
by “other ways of thinking” that are not strictly philosophical and whose
characteristics they explore in their writings without arriving, it must be
acknowledged, at firm conclusions.
It is paradoxical that these two men gave in to the temptation of
writing an elegy to philosophy when both, each one in his own way, were
pioneers in the emergence and consolidation of a strictly philosophical trend
from whose premises one can deduce precisely the opposite: the continuation
of philosophy itself as an anthropological universal. I refer to hermeneutics. This
school is situated in the context of the general crisis of positivism and its
aspiration is to create a rigorous science, free from prior assumptions.
Hermeneutics agrees with the diagnosis of philosophy’s loss of truthfulness as
a discipline that is codified, scientific, rigorous and free from prejudices, but
not because it has exhausted the strictly philosophical ways of confronting the
world, but for the awareness that this positive science, which wants exact,
definitive and true knowledge of reality is, despite its aspirations, only a
derived and secondary knowledge and by its nature conditioned on another
prior, fundamental one immanent in non-formalized, natural language and
designated by writers with various names, such as understanding, preunderstanding, belief, prejudgment, world, or interpretation.
This
hermeneutic discovery uncovers for us a world prior to scientific positivity
and shows us that “the known depends on the well-known, what we see on
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the obvious, judgment on prejudgment, knowledge on recognition and science
on belief.”2
Understanding philosophy as “interpretation of the world,” we might
think that philosophical activity, far from finding itself on the verge of
extinction, like a tool that has lost its use and been replaced by a more
advanced technology, may, on the contrary, now have reached a surprising
universality that it lacked before. Interpreting a world requires, as a prior
condition, having (experiential knowledge of) a world, and this world that we now
have prior to understanding and which makes the latter possible, lies in
natural language. The Greek word logos, which means both “discourse” and
“reason,” already suggests that “reasoning and giving reasons” (logon didonai) is
a demonstration of that prior “having a world” intrinsic in the natural
language that belongs to the speaker (homo loquens).
However, the natural language that allows philosophical understanding
is also common language, the language that all members of a community
usually use to talk to and communicate with each other. From this it follows
that – to say it with a play on words – “everyone in the world has a world”
and, as a consequence, philosophical understanding is a characteristic universalis
that can be attributed to all men to the extent that they speak. From the
perspective opened by hermeneutics, all men carry out the philosophical
activity of interpreting the world in some way. Without a doubt, some
interpretations will exist that are better defined, better thought out or more
highly thought of than others, and the overcoming of the “prejudice against
prejudice” – in the well-known expression of Gadamer – does not impede the
recognition of the greater truth of some interpretations compared to others.
However, that does not refute the fact that every person inevitably holds an
interpretation of the world – and to that extent is designed to philosophize.
The announced end of philosophy, then, may be limited to that
specialized, technical and codified discipline practiced by a minority with
stable employment in educational and academic institutions. Without a doubt
there are, of late, many telling symptoms indicating the decline of this
institutional conception of philosophy as something reserved for the field’s
specialists. Only if philosophy in general is identified as a whole with that
2
Cf. Imitación y experiencia, p. 43. On the end of philosophy and the testing of new ways of thinking.
See: “La posibilidad de un contexto no lingüístico: los nuevos modos de pensar y la experiencia de la
vida”, ibid.,p. 46ff.
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specific form of philosophy – cultivated, of course, with extreme lucidity in
the last two or three centuries, only then should we say goodbye to
philosophical thought for good. But in view of the fact that hermeneutics
revels to us a philosophical task that involves all men to the extent that they
all, without exception, are carriers of a philosophical interpretation of the
world, then the bankruptcy of one way of philosophizing would not imply the
end of philosophy as a whole, but, on the contrary, the opening of a new way
to try out and to practice a different philosophy, now neither institutional nor
professional, but extended subjectively to all men equally. The aristocratic
privilege that philosophical activity has had for many centuries would change
democratically into a universal human concern which, like love or death, is
found wherever people are, since without it that which is human would not be
intelligible.
In summary, the new ontological centrality of natural or common
language leads contemporary philosophy to embrace an egalitarianism never
before attempted – philosophy has traditionally been a close ally of a minority:
the literate, cultured, leisure class. This egalitarianism, in turn, clears the way
for an understanding of philosophy as an anthropological universal now that
no one can deny that what happens to every one equally is, perforce, universal.
III
The egalitarian universalism to which the prior reasoning leads has
consequences for the subject and style of philosophy, as well as for the
mission it must fulfill in systematically managing the fields of human
knowledge. Because if philosophy is a practice reserved for an institutional
and professional minority, its exercise is governed by the criteria of
specialization that this minority imposes on itself as the model of excellence.
In the case of modern philosophy, these criteria have been, among others:
knowledge of the tradition, enormous erudition, familiarity with scholastic
vocabulary, formalized and apparently scientific presentation of the works
produced, etcetera. These criteria determine the subjects and, in general, the
setting of what is legitimately thinkable in philosophy. This philosophy is a
discipline whose management, according to this scheme, falls to those who,
relieved of other duties and social functions, devote their lives to reading,
study, research and, ultimately, the preparation, editing and composition of
texts.
Philosophical thinking is, then, the moment of maximum
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consciousness of professionals of consciousness, and the matters that concern
all ordinary men who simply live, set up house, work and grow old, things that
concern people as human beings, are not, strictly speaking, suitable for
philosophical reflection, because they exhibit an inadequate degree of
sophistication for the tangled maze into which contemporary philosophy has
transformed itself. That is why they must yield their place to other more
elevated, profound, obscure and scientific concerns, the exclusive preserve of
elite corps of philosophers who, after an apprenticeship in academic jargon
and routines, demonstrate the acquisition of the necessary skills for the
correct and standardized application of philosophy.
As was said before, the egalitarian universalism which resulted from
hermeneutics and, in general, the linguistic turn experienced by the last
century’s thought, changes the ostensible state of things substantially. To
clarify this point, it seems appropriate to return to the well-known distinction
that Kant introduced between two views of philosophy. In various places in
his works, Kant distinguishes between a scholastic view of philosophy
(Schulbegriff) and a worldly view of philosophy (Weltbegriff). The first is
concerned with the systematic unity of knowing and the logical perfection of
knowledge, and its seat is in the university where, it is said, philosophy is
taught but not philosophizing or thinking independently for oneself
(Selbstdenken).
Egalitarian universalism is much closer to the second concept of
philosophy, the “worldly,” also translated as cosmic or cosmopolitan.
Worldly or cosmopolitan philosophy is, according to this division, the science
interested in the connection of all fields of knowledge with the essential aims
of human reason, that reason which is incessantly asking itself three questions:
“What can I know?” “What should I do?” “What can I hope for?” – and
which is condensed into a fourth and definitive question: “What is man?”
The answers to these questions cannot be subtle scholastic wars of words
suited to the tastes of the initiated, because they involve all men who want to
know, to do and to hope, or who wish to know themselves better. In short,
the answers speak to “that which is common to mortals,” as all men are, given
that absolutely all of them share the common condition of mortality which
makes them the same.
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It is known that Kant was, in the personal sphere, a sociable man, fond
of socializing with people and frequenting salons. A genuine existential pathos
underlies his great critical works that longs to answer the four questions
mentioned with all the seriousness the subject requires. But in his great
treatises and the majority of his minor works it is said that the worldly side of
his philosophy, although it never completely died, many times lies crushed
under the weight of the systematic and scholarly, buried under all that which
he himself called “the systematic unity of knowledge and logical perfection of
cognition.” Kant could not develop an authentic worldly philosophy because,
as a product of his time, he remained in the paradigm of codified and elitist
scientific truth, whose lack of truthfulness hermeneutics ultimately
condemned. Kant did not take into consideration the foundational,
constitutive character of natural language which – it is good to underscore this
fact – is always a shared creation. Because if language is, on the one hand,
that ontological instance that gives us (access to the) world and, on the other,
an artifact produced by society, which, like it, is historical and contingent, then
worldly philosophy has to seek the world by entering into society and learning
its particular operating rules. Without a world, without a social world, it
would be completely impossible to do worldly philosophy.
If, as has been said before, “everyone has a world” every time that
thinking and understanding operates from the prior instance of a natural
language given by the community, now we must qualify that statement,
because it is clear that not everyone has a world in the sense of behaving as “a
cosmopolitan man of the world” who knows and observes the etiquette
recommended for social relationships. The social world produces rules that
regulate a shared civilized life and it does so to different degrees that range
from the coercive rules of criminal law – which punish highly deviant and
antisocial acts – to, at the other extreme, the norms of tact, good taste and
urbanity. The delightful book, The Age of Conversation, by Benedetta Craveri, 3
offers a panorama of the most notable salons opened as modern schools of
manners and customs in the heart of Paris by illustrious ladies in the 17th and
18th centuries. Upon reading it one thinks about the impact on the
development of nascent public opinion and on the French Enlightenment
that could have been produced by the combination of intellectual knowledge
and esprit de finesse which blessed the people who were successful in the world
at large and, at the same time, cultured, sensible, clever and gallant. An
3
B. Craveri, The age of conversation. New York: New York Review Books, 2006.
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unexpected philosophical confirmation of the virtues of worldly sociability is
found in the work of Kant himself, certainly not in his first two critiques,
severely systematic as they are, but rather in the recovery of worldliness which
Kant produced in the third, the Critique of Judgment. There he developed a
foundation of taste as a felt, concept-free universal, deemed sensus communis
because it does not designate a private inclination or preference, but the
shared feeling of sensible people as a generic group.
It is not necessary to carry the analogy of contemporary philosophical
discussion to the refined conversations of the Parisian salons (of which Proust
wrote unforgettable pages) too far. Instead, the rest of the paper will try to
say something about the type of truth that is appropriate to a worldly
philosophy like the one described and about the historic mission it this has to
perform in the current cultural moment.
IV
The egalitarian universalism on which worldly philosophy is based
extends to the notion of truth itself. Since philosophy is an activity that all
men, without exception, practice, truth must, perforce, be a characteristic of
the discourses that, under normal conditions, all men should be able to
perceive, understand and feel – provided that we know how to redefine what
we call truth. That which is academically exact, rigorous, documented,
annotated and based on an exhaustive knowledge of the history of philosophy
will not be in first place – nor will it always be true. Without excluding
erudition when it serves an essential purpose, that discourse which defines
those questions intrinsic to our shared human mortality and which, because of
that, strikes us all with both emotion and force, is what will be true for
worldly philosophy. In an era of radical individualism like the present, human
mortality becomes the overriding subject of philosophy, since the price of the
recent conquest of individuality is paid for by being especially aware of being
mortal entities. (The other genera and species living may become extinct, but
the loss of individual members does not carry the significance we attach to
individual human deaths.) This individual mortality, in which lies the
innermost essence of man, is, at the same time, a condition shared with the
other mortals who make up humanity. Our most intimate and personal part
is, then, also the most universal, and the one on which we spend our whole
lives. That is why the statement that thinks about, meditates on or illuminates
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some area of this mortality of ours – at once unique and universal – will be for
us supremely true.
A worldly truth understood in this way has to be interesting and
moving for everyone, not just for the brooding reader of treatises and
systems, provided that whoever formulates that truth renounces the scholastic
jargon and verbal excesses so common in modern philosophical production,
when they add no technical precision to an idea, but rather just camouflaged
banality, pomposity and emphasis. Even the most obscure and mysterious
reality is capable of being described clearly in all its obscureness and mystery.
Boileau, the great poet, critic and arbiter of the elegant literature of Louis
XIV’s France, wrote in Canto I of The Art of Poetry:
What we conceive, with ease we can express;
Words to the Notions flow with readiness. 4
Nothing should hinder the accepted end of universal understanding that
motivates worldly truth. This truth is appealing because it moves the human
heart through concepts, assuming that these latter are right in stating
intellectually the deepest longings of a mortality that is enigmatic even for
humans themselves. The learning that is the exclusive patrimony of a group –
that of researchers, historians of philosophy, editors and commentators on
texts, whose works, never loaned out, yellow with age on the shelves of
specialized libraries – deserves the name “knowledge” more than that of
“truth,” as long this does not mean ignoring the indispensable contribution
that such ancillary knowledge represents for philosophical thought.
It would be advisable that, before tossing a truth into the world, it pass
a preliminary “test of worldliness.” Truth, besides being rational, would also
have to demonstrate that it is also sufficiently reasonable, that is, that the truth
is capable of persuading and instilling truthfulness in a community of cultured
and perceptive people. If someone believes he has a new idea, let him try it
out by presenting it in conversation after a business lunch, at a meeting of
friends, at a family gathering, in a lecture or in a newspaper interview. This
test would show whether the new ideas he had thought up were convertible
into intellectual “coin of the realm” or not. If, in the situations described, the
ideas did not generate excitement or awaken interest, it means that they are
4
N. Boileau-Despréaux, The Art of Poetry. Trans. by Sir William Soame. London: R. Bentley and S.
Magnus, 1683, p. 10. (Canto I, line 153)
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not interesting, and, if they are not interesting, it means, in the final analysis,
they are not true either.
Certainly a truth of this nature requires a certain urbanity of the
philosopher and that he himself socialize properly, adapting himself in certain
measure to the conventions of a cosmopolitan life. The most common in
recent centuries has been the opposite. What has predominated in the
collective imagination is the stereotype of the misanthropic philosopher who, in
his sublime, blissful solitude, hurls fierce condemnations at the world, its
general beliefs and customs, common sense and the firm middle ground, this
last thought to be a compendium of all that is loathsome and contemptible on
earth. One has the impression that these “unworldly” philosophers would
have moderated the incendiary radicalism of their opinions more than a little
had they mixed a bit more in the society of men and acquired from it the
habits and accommodations that well-mannered people have created to pay
attention to pleasing others, assimilating the thousands of tactful courtesies
that everyone lends to the others in a sort of constant mutual tribute. There
boundless subjectivity learns to subordinate itself to the general well-being of
the rest of the men “invited to life,” those which are left cold and indifferent
by the fevered conjectures subjectivity makes when it has been isolated from
the world for too long and who prefer pleasantness, entertainment, learning,
brilliance, gentleness and all that serves to increase collective enjoyment.
Worldly philosophy is urbane philosophy and the urbanity of its conduct,
ethical more than epistemic, when it comes from deeply felt conviction, more
likely ends up producing systems of thought which are much more
reasonable, sociable and disposed to civic friendship among men.
V
From the foregoing follows a specific mission for philosophy in the
current cultural moment. It was argued before that philosophy constitutes an
anthropological universal like love or death. That philosophy is a universal
that accompanies people while they continue having the attributes that make
them recognizable as humans does not mean, however, that philosophy fulfills
the same role in every era. Like art, philosophy always serves the ends of
civilization, but these ends vary with historical developments.
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Thus during the reign of the pre-modern worldview, which presented
the cosmos as an ordered unity, perfect and finished, art was celebratory and,
in parallel, philosophy was realist. When, between the 18th and beginning of
the 19th centuries, the self, abruptly separated from this cosmic whole,
suddenly acquired consciousness of itself as absolute individuality, making
itself into a new all-encompassing subjectivity, art collaborated with this
project of the moral progress of humanity through novels about subjectivity
and the avant-garde. All the writings and all the canvasses produced by the
masters of modernity, transgressors and upsetters of tradition to the hilt,
decisively helped the emotional development of the modern self and
awakened it to the feeling of its own dignity, so frequently run roughshod
over by the built-in oppressions of pre-modern culture. Those sad fates of
the 19th century novel where the protagonist’s individuality is unfairly crushed
in the face of the iniquitous rule of an alienating society, and those bold
experiments in the form of avant-garde art that broke with the preceding ageold tradition, provided modern man with timely instruction in the passion for
liberty and the love of self.
Philosophy did not shy away from this great historical event, but, for its
part, contributed the needed conceptual apparatus for the theoretical
delegitimization and practical dismantling of the former worldview which, like
the cities of the Old Testament, underwent a siege at the hands of postmodern philosophy, having its walls knocked down and its people put to the
sword. The critical philosophies and philosophies of suspicion, in a variety of
shapes, names, systems and schools, shed light on genealogies, etymologies
and archaeologies – three of the most celebrated of modern lucidity – which
demonstrated the nonbinding, even depraved, nature of all social inhibitions
and encouraged the massive process of individual liberation that took place in
a rapid and spectacular way in the second half of the 20th century. Therefore
philosophy, like art, also rendered an important service to the great civilizing
cause still in progress.
The current cultural moment can be described as one of a culture
already liberated, but still not emancipated. 5 The civilizing mission of modernity,
which can be summed up as the liberation of the self, is complete. It is
certain that the novels, art and philosophy that are produced today remain,
almost without exception, in the previous subject-liberating paradigm.
5
See the introductory chapter of Ejemplaridad pública: “La cuestión palpitante”.
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However, beneath this scar hardened by a long fight and the passage of time,
flow new energies which still have not found their form. Human beings have
increased the sphere of their liberty immensely, but have not yet agreed on the
principles of a responsible, social, civic and virtuous exercise in this broader
sphere of liberty: exactly what the diagnosis of a liberated but not
emancipated culture refers to.
That amour de soi that Rousseau recommended is more than sufficiently
established in our hearts and minds. Now the new cultural mission is not to
elaborate on a liberation already consummated ad nauseum, but to find a way to
reconcile, in peaceful coexistence, the millions of subjectivities in love with
themselves and not very used to giving up any of the desires they hold up as
the supreme law of morality. Because, on closer examination, it is a kind of
miracle that people today accept the inhibitions immanent in a shared civilized
life, which always mean restrictions on their recently expanded and sanctified
individual liberty. Why should one conduct oneself as a civilized person if it is
more authentic, more honest, more liberating to give uncivilized impulses
room to manoeuvre? Today it is necessary to use all the means that turn out
to be persuasive to convince man, in the dilemma raised by that question, to
bend his will toward a civilized style of life in spite of all the annoying burdens
it brings. The civilizing task now pending is the “urbanization” of the
instinctive spontaneity of the self as a first step in the transformation of him
into a full citizen.
In order to remove the obstacles that are delaying this task, an art and
philosophy with an emancipatory spirit will be born. In fact, they are already
in the works: art will create a new feeling and philosophy will supply
truthfulness to a reshaped, shared, natural language. Naturally, this does not
express a prediction, but rather indicates a direction, the outline of an ideal
capable of mobilizing latent forces and of attracting that already mentioned
underground current of vitality in search of a form. We need an art of poetry
which sprinkles enchantment and seduction over all the civilizing burdens,
that makes them bearable for liberated man, who in principle detests the
discredited limitations imposed on his original spontaneity by society. And,
for its part, philosophical thinking and reflection must lend a conceptual
framework for a future interpretation of the world that is credible, appealing
and convincing, and they must be conducive to civil friendship and harmony.
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The reigning worldview in any specific epoch is the product of what
poets, philosophers, novelists, artists and scientists thought and felt a long
time before in the solitude of their studies and laboratories, and which they
spread through their works. In the usual course of things, these had their first
reception in a small circle and later radiated their influence in a larger circle,
and later still, little by little, became generalized as the opinion of the majority
and finally crystalized naturally and normally to encompass realty for the
collective conscious. The worldview, perceived as natural, works silently but
efficaciously on man, creating in him, through epistemological and behavioral
habits, the tangible traits that make him a product of his time. In premodernity, it was the idea of the cosmos; in modernity, modern subjectivism
and his liberation; and, now, the pending emancipation. The historic
responsibility for creating a language and molding a fresh worldview that, with
this renewed constellation of traits, will be in force in the coming stages of the
history of the spirit now weighs heavily on philosophy. Worldly philosophy
must be an essential collaborator in the task of civilizing the world for the
generations to come.
As can be seen, philosophy takes on a mission in the service of the ever
changing civilizing cause in each cultural moment, and now has the task of
pursuing that cause under different historical conditions.
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