Within philosophy, two very different souls have historically coexisted in permanent conflict: a literary soul and a scientific one.
The philosophy of exemplarity declares itself openly literary and, going even further, maintains that philosophy, the best part of it, is nothing other than literature, so it would do well to renounce forever the pretension of dreaming of being scientific. because every time he has tried to emulate science he has not only failed, but he has betrayed his true nature.
There was a time, at the beginning of its history, when the name philosophy was given to an all-encompassing knowledge that encompassed all the knowledge of the time. Still in the 4th century BC. C. Aristotle was capable of being the author of treatises on the most diverse subjects: logic, rhetoric, metaphysics, ethics, politics, poetics, history, physics, biology, meteorology, psychology. Philosophy was then the first science and in it the foundations of all possible thinking were established. Later, starting with the Renaissance, the disciplines began to specialize and, by emancipating themselves from philosophy and theology, modern sciences were born, autonomous in the study of the field that constitutes their specific subject matter, which forced philosophy to redefine its essence and to occupy a new position in the general system of knowledge.
Philosophy has always looked with admiration at science, fascinated by the accuracy, systemic coherence, method and predictive nature of its laws, which must be – this is essential – susceptible to some form of objective and public demonstration. Only those statements that pass the test of rational verification will be considered scientific. The laws of empirical sciences, for example, must be validated in the laboratory or in the experiment and anyone can verify them as long as they take the trouble to comply with the conditions or protocols determined by said laws for their corroboration. Based on increasingly precise demonstrations, science progresses, knowledge accumulates and its conclusions manage to explain the world better and more comprehensively than before. The category of progress, with the humility with which it is convenient to use this controversial notion today, is generically applicable to scientific development. No one except the historian of science cares about the state of molecular biology thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. In science, which always looks to the future, what is interesting lies in the latest and each new advance, which corrects or surpasses the previous state of the discipline, condemns the past to archaeology.
Now observe what, by contrast, happens with literature. It has been indicated that in science the moment of truth is in its verification. Now, does anyone know that the great masterpieces of literature have ever been verified: the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost or War and Peace? Is there a procedure to objectively measure its exceptional quality? It is clear that not. Where then is your truth?
In the absence of other more exact records, the only way to know the excellence of a literary work is to pay attention to its social acceptance in the long, very long term. We call classics those books whose reading, according to unanimous opinion, is fruitful and significant and, after years and even centuries, remains so until the present, since a classic behaves like a constant contemporary, similar to those perpetual snows of the mountains. taller ones that don’t melt even during the summer. The truth of literature lies in the consensus woven by tradition about the perfection of a work and, consequently, about its inevitable relevance. So, in short, what the laboratory and the experiment represent for science, the continued applause for a work written and sustained over the course of many generations fulfills for literature.
From which it follows that, in the field of literature, it is not appropriate to apply the category of progress as in the field of science, so that no one would think of maintaining, to mention literary works of epic spirit, that War and Peace Tolstoy’s poem replaces Milton’s Paradise Lost, nor does this poem replace Dante’s Divine Comedy, nor does it replace Virgil’s Aeneid, nor does it improve Homer’s Iliad. Literature is not cumulative, nor for it the ultimate, because it is, has a particular value. On the contrary, it is not unusual for the first manifestation of a literary genre to already reach its peak, as happened with the Homeric epic, taken as an unsurpassable paradigm of the epic by posterity. The passage of time conspires in favor of the masterpieces of the canon, which, when they really are, enjoy constant vitality and enormous symbolic power no matter how many years have passed since their composition. Furthermore, the oldest ones are not only not in a worse condition than the more modern ones, but, on the contrary, they enjoy a favorable presumption, because they have the consent of a greater number of people over a greater period of time.
And like literature, philosophy. If no one has empirically verified the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton or Tolstoy, neither have the philosophical theses of Plato, Aristotle, Saint Thomas, Locke, Kant or Nietzsche been validated. In both cases, there is the same absence of scientific proof. Therefore, philosophy is not, fundamentally, different from literature and is therefore sister to the novel, poetry or theater, with which it shares the same indocility to be captured by the impersonal legality of a science that, alien to the imaginative universe of the person of the creator, it is limited to studying the repetitive phenomena of nature. In philosophy, what matters is not the plausibility of science, but the applause of literature.
Conceptual literature: this is the fairest definition of the essence of philosophy, where literature is a noun and conceptual is an adjective. Now, in the phrase conceptual literature the adjective is far from being superfluous since it fulfills the important function of delimiting the genre of this literature by contrast with the others that already exist. What is specific about this kind of literary work is, to use Hegel’s expression, “the work in the concept.” Neither the verses of poetry, nor the narration of the novel, nor the theatrical scene: what is theirs is the orderly presentation of a body of abstract and universal concepts, linguistic translation of the particular vision of the world articulated by its author.
Over time, the most persuasive visions of the world are accepted, those that offer the reader a more convincing offer of meaning, those that are more truthful. Strange to a notion of truth as correspondence of a statement with the world (adaequatio rei et intellectus), in philosophy what counts above all is the veracity of propositions, understood as their validity before a conscience that judges what seems reasonable, credible. or credible. There is no place in literature for the curse of the fortune teller Cassandra: that of possessing the truth but lacking the persuasion necessary for others to believe in it. In the long run, in literature truth and veracity always coincide, since true philosophy ignores, cavalierly, that entire body of supposedly esoteric and private knowledge, as reserved for a few as it is inaccessible to others. In fact, the history of philosophical thought admits of being presented as a sequence of doctrines that successively acquire validity by the force of their rhetorical argumentation and that at some later moment lose it, when the community withdraws the intimate adherence that it first gave them, without that, at the beginning of that validity, no one has ever demonstrated its empirical certainty, and at the end of it, no one has ever proven its error either.
Despite this loss of acceptance, if at the time they managed to capture and give shape to an invariant aspect of the human condition (the idealism of Plato, the realism of Aristotle, the vital wisdom of Epicurus, the skepticism of Pyrrho), the doctrines philosophical, even if the schools created by the founders become extinct, they often remain worthy of constant meditation, as happens, by definition, to every masterpiece.
To some this corollary may seem disconcerting: the philosophical works that we read today better and with more fruit, because they maintain a topicality that still today incites us, challenges us and gives us something to think about, are those that were composed in their day with greater fidelity to its literary essence, while those others that made an effort to appear scientific have lost interest for us, have left the canon and we gladly hand them over to specialists. The literary is always young, the scientific ages. The scientific deals with the latter; the literary, the usual.
We read with great pleasure the early and middle Plato, an artist of philosophical prose, we are tired by the late Plato, literary drier. The treatises of Aristotle that are still alive are the humanistic ones – Poetics, Ethics, Rhetoric, Metaphysics or Politics -, while those on scientific topics – Analytical, Biology, Physics – rest on an archaeological site of forgotten ideas that only interest the researchers. Seneca’s Dialogues, Consolations and Letters to Lucilius are still bestsellers today, while his Natural Questions on Matters of Cosmology and Meteorology are no longer read by anyone. Among moderns, Kant is a genuinely literary author, possessed in many moments of his work by a poetic ethos of the highest order. The excess of his writings, which threatens to extinguish the heat of his fundamental philosophical intuition, the pseudoscientific bargain that hinders complete understanding and tires instead of seduces, is in that spurious Kantian desire to become the Newton of philosophy, folding which sometimes covers its poetic vision with a tedious technical apparatus.
It is already known: whoever wants can paint on a canvas, write on paper, sculpt a stone, but these supports do not guarantee those who use them the status of artist. Art does not take place without an ultimate cause that triggers the process of creating the work: we call this cause vocation.
Vocation is the word that answers the question of why you dedicate the best hours of the day, the best days of the year and the best years of your life to something that no one has asked of you and that, furthermore, is of no use. . The work demands from its creator an exorbitant strength to endure the slow time that is inherent to true art, and only those who have the vocation have the necessary patience to resist it. The vocational phenomenon constitutes an objective impoverishment for those who suffer from it in that it involves the mobilization of all of a person’s intellectual, volitional and sentimental faculties in a single direction, only one of the many that the range of life offers; But, in exchange for this vital anomaly, the affected person obtains an immense concentration of energies that give him courage and patience to accept the deprivations that are inherent to him.
Vocation is made up of two elements: visio and missio (vision and mission).
First of all, the vision. Our experience of reality is fragmentary, incomplete, and the understanding of its meaning never leaves it partial, provisional, precarious. It resembles a puzzle with fifty pieces of which only ten are in place, insufficient to guess the image that is formed once the game is finished: a waterfall, a tree, a pyramid, a city, whatever. We call artists those who, through a mysterious inspiration, complete with their imagination the forty pieces that are missing from the experience and, as if the fifty of the total were already in place, are moved by the resulting vision, which assembles the disordered plurality of the fragments and gives them unity of meaning for the first time. The vision, mentally anticipated by the artist before it exists in reality, strikes his conscience and enchants his heart, captivated by the perfection that illuminates his fantasy.
Whoever has seen that ideal image feels within himself the urge to produce an object that materializes it to prevent it, existing only in his consciousness, from being diluted over time and disappearing. This production is called poiesis in ancient Greek, which designates the generation of an artistic object without any utilitarian function aimed exclusively at providing consistency, coherence and durability to the vision of the beginning and, by fixing it on a stable support, making it permanently available to oneself and others. With which the second moment of the vocation has already been introduced: the missio.
The anxiety to create the object, which can become extremely absorbing, tyrannical and predatory, was represented by the Ancients as a kidnapping at the hands of the Muses, who attack whoever they want and when they want and capriciously snatch it from their own without asking them. permission. The kidnapped person (mousóleptos) experiences his kidnapping as a call to devote himself entirely to the elaboration of his idea and puts the entire organization of his existence at the service of the fulfillment of that mission. (…)
It cannot be a coincidence that Western philosophy is inaugurated with an episode starring the Muses, who visit the poet-philosopher Hesiod by surprise and entrust him with a mission. “Let us begin our song with the Heliconian Muses, who inhabit the great and divine mountain of Helicon” are the first words of European conceptual literature. Modern research begins the history of Greek philosophy with Hesiod’s Theogony, because it anticipates many themes that will later be taken up by Ionian physicists carrying out a first organization of the cosmos. The opening scene of this strange poetic work, which occupies a tenth of its total length, draws a charming scene of literary vocation in which none of its characteristic moments are missing. It presents the Muses as women full of grace who form beautiful and delicious choirs around a fountain of violet reflections in whose waters they have bathed carelessly. Born with a heart free of pain, thanks to their wonderful voice they send hymns to the wind that rejoice Zeus and the Olympian lineage of the immortal gods to “forget evils and remedy worries.”
One day, the Muses haunted Hesiod as he grazed his sheep at the foot of Helicon and instilled in him knowledge of the origin of the world and the gods, at a time when he was still enveloped in chaos (visio). They anointed him poet by giving him a branch of laurel and commissioned him (missio) to spread the story of that origin with his song, which he carried out in the rest of the Theogony. Also Moses, the liberator of the Jews, was called when he was shepherding a flock owned by his father-in-law. Upon reaching Mount Horeb, a burning bush spoke to him (visio) and sent men with a literary mission (missio): the composition of the laws of the chosen people, the Pentateuch (Exodus 3). The biblical scene highlights the fiery aspect of the vocation while the Greek scene highlights its grace and sweetness. In both cases, the epiphany is followed by the urgency of producing a document that structures the supervening vision and gives it a lasting form.
Philosophy is a genre of literature that, like all literature, arises at the request of a vocation. A philosophy without a visio and without a missio – without a literary vocation – could well be the text of a philosophy professional, of a professor, of an editor, of a philologist, of a translator, of a glossator, of a researcher, all of this even in an eminent degree, but not the work of a philosopher.
