Why write philosophy?

 Human existence is complex, turbulent, sloppy, and tragic, and it only supports systematic thought with violence - almost always with poor results. When we do not proceed systematically, it is even worse. I understand philosophical thought as the result of a passionate process of mythologization, theoretical creation, and critical interpretation of the experience of life. From my humanity, from the consciousness of this idea that our species has forged in its evolution, and bringing together diverse perspectives in the changing unity of my person, I look at the past and my own time as the heir to a vast estate whose beauty runs hand in hand with its monsters. Amid so much deed and action, heroic songs, and long laments, I recognize my humanity in the life of anyone else, fearing tomorrow and the present, building new forms for life, ideals, and symbolic forms that conjure up the inevitable uncertainties.

In many moments, I have wanted to be a foreigner on this planet, I have looked at our history, our present, with horror, and I have wanted to flee to some better no-place, far from the barbarism and the exploitation of some humans by others. I cannot say that the feeling has completely disappeared, although I have chosen to come to terms with what I am, as an individual being and as a species, and I understand myself as a never-finished symbolic process, precariously sheltered in the middle of a storm, and that amidst great difficulties, tries to build itself on impossible foundations. For this reason, I always understand philosophy as philosophical anthropology, an anthropology that expresses at the same time a fundamental form of nudity. For me, there is no reality or truth in the cosmos outside of the life-intelligence process. I do not see the universe as a great human being, it is not some primordial Purusha (as Hindu mythology would say) from which gods and creatures have arisen, nor the work of a form of self-conscious intelligence that executes its theorems. I do not believe that -as the Kabbalah says- the human being is the final purpose of creation or that the perfection of the worlds and of the Supreme Being depends on us. If there were other higher forms of life-intelligence in the universe, we could only understand them in relation to our way of being and the way of being of life on this planet: our myths would be the measuring rod for any "first contact". My generation has grown up looking at the stars. I myself was a member of the Planetary Society chaired by Carl Sagan in my teens, and we looked into space expecting to hear sequences of prime numbers that promised to end the local red neck behavior, but the logic of military domination finally imposed its trumpets on the telescopes. In fact, trumpets always dominated, but my youthful musical Pythagoreanism wanted to dream something else.

After many failures, I have awakened somewhat dazed in the house of life, discovering, as the Sufis said, that I have been knocking on doors with the intention of entering without realizing that I was already inside. Man is not the measure of all things, but life is: of those that are insofar as they are, and of those that are not insofar as they are not. What we say that there is in the universe, as well as what we say that there is not, only makes sense in reference to life-intelligence, and in particular, to the symbolic forms developed by the human being. The sun, which we invariably see crossing the sky, is not understood in the same way today as it was three thousand years ago, a representation that does not coincide with that of the animals and plants that surround us. 

It is as difficult as it is undesirable to develop a single way of thinking and living in the world, although not all worldviews have the same validity, because while some favor life, others gallop towards self-destruction. The very concept of the world, or nature, or objective reality outside the human being is nothing but the biologically necessary form of the representational synthesis that our sensitive intuition adopts, that is, the determination of the sensory impulses that our psychobiological system (developed in long periods of time)  as not-me, survival processes that go beyond our species. However, the necessary form of such representations is a set of concepts that admit various combinations and interpretations: the necessary form of our intuition is a matrix of multiple possible determinations. The evolutionary trajectory of human communities shows that such determinations of worldview experience have become increasingly complex.

Philosophy demands effort, the tension that comes from making your own path, no matter that we carry a good load of provisions with the thoughts of those who preceded us. Nothing assures us that we will get somewhere, or that even if we do, we will like what we find there. Why then do philosophy? The question implies that we have a choice and that there is some way to justify it. Yes, there is a choice, and it is an evolutionary choice. If we look at our past, we see that we did not always do philosophy. Philosophy is a mythology of universal law that began to be practiced about 2,500 years ago in Greece and is now in clear decline. Its very name is restrictive since the concept of wisdom presupposes the objectivity of the world (a true way of being of things) that no longer makes much sense. Philosophy is characterized by thinking, or more precisely, by an attitude of permanently living, thinking critically, questioning, constructing, disassembling, and undoing when necessary, that is, philosophy develops a non-automatic, liminal life. Let's call this activity what we want. Why do it? Because it is an evolutionary prow.