Adonis Diaries

Encourage your kid to reflect on his own views: Individual model of the world is the reality

Javier Goma Lanzon is a lawyer and a philosopher; he is the director of the Juan March Foundation in Spain.  Lanzon published “After imitation and experience”, “Achilles in the Gymnasium”, “Public examples”, “Learning to be candid”,  and “Necessary but impossible”.

Lanzon labeled his philosophy “Theorem of experience and expectancy“, a possibility for acquiring hope beyond the experience, a way of facing current transcendental trends.

We are going through a transition period, a cultural order that was based on a set of aristocratic knowledge; this current culture is giving sway to a culture of our finitude and egalitarian struggle.

Is there an alternative culture that may close the gap and relieve us from our disarray?

The modern “philosophy of suspicion” has indoctrinated us in the last two centuries to the habit of being western-centered:  It had for mission to liberate western people from the oppression of tradition and myths.  The “”philosophy of suspicion”, known as “philosophy of lucidity“, encouraged the exaltation of subjective thinking, the critics of ideologies and genealogy, death of God, end of history… It generated the doctrine of a post-colonial thinking that is mostly prevalent right now.

The “philosophy of lucidity” shaped mankind moral progress through blood and sacrifices.  The end result was a set of human rights that the public power had to negotiate with the people.  Authority had legally limited the enjoyment of our private life:  We are free in a big prison, devoid of individual ethical practices.

Modern philosophers isolated themselves from society (the attic philosophers) and could not validate their doctrines:  They proffered immoderate truths, scary models, and not normally feasible.

The “philosophy of lucidity” has reached its peak and can no longer clarify what to think next.

The paradigm of freedom is being displaced by the need to be more candid in viewing the world.  Schiller wrote: “The candid poem is the daughter of life and brings us back to life“.

The “philosophy of the candid” breaks through skepticism, relativism, pluralism, and particularism and extends a gentle confident hand to the objective world:  Everything that is universal and objective is within each individual.  It will be the result of choices of accumulated studies and adventures,

The candid philosophy is necessarily a worldly endeavor, a philosophy connected to the reality of society and people.  Any philosophy has to teach us ideas, forms, and emotions that favor “living together”.  Thus, learn to be friendly, courteous, ethically convenient to the community.

Our big problem is that ethics have been proposed and conceived as public behaviors, but no one has offered any ethics for the private life.

To feel emancipated, we have to invest energy and time to learning and reflecting on our own:  We have got the responsibility (private ethics) to construct our individual model of reality, of ethical conduct, the real thing, the true reality.

Aristotle wrote: “To put constraints on our private behaviors is to expand“.  We need to tend toward this “uniformity of life” so that people can judge us to be reliable and trustworthy.