The fall of immortals

First posted: 24 march 2010

Philosophy is dead and we killed it, apart from some gleam of men appearing here and there (although a missing person) within the decay we are passing through.

Even at the universities, during the lessons, we can feel the burden of this immense loss. We study informations (dates and datas), occasionally, if we’re lucky, we can attend at “teachers-driven” lectures about a doomed attempt to persuade students to accept the tutor’s truth, who is forcing, squeezing and crumbling authors extrapolated from their context. We try to dig into the ground written words pushing them into a self-misunderstanding, disrupting and forcing to reshape themselves and to betray their own author.

Where – I wonder then – has the real question vanished? I’m searching for the man, but where is the man if the question has disappeared? Philosophy is a continuous asking, interrogation, collision, confront beyond the so-defined dogmas, that is beyond the certitudes we build around us due to a personal choice or to find a sort of comfort, but nowadays how many of us are willing to test themselves, experiencing their limits, taking the risk of getting lost along a forest? Although everyone tends to feel the elected, the demiurge of the situation, with arrogance, only few of us understand that it’s not important to know and learn something with an absolutly certainty but it’s more important searching, changing, not being static and having the courage to change our mind.

But how can anyone get surprised by anything in the very present period of time? We believe that the desensitization makes us stronger, but it makes us more schizophrenic than we are: the thrilling of emotions, the one that frees us from all these self-imposed chains made by society that builds cyborgs, is considered as something to remove from ourselves.

We can’t dream anymore: we just schematize everthing, even the feelings. We fall in love with someone by various calculations: as in a schedule, we choose our partner, according to her/his qualities without really thinking about what we’re feeling for that person. We choose our work because of money and according to the easiest way to advance along the career. We watch a movie and, instead of letting ourselves experience it, letting the heart beat following the rhythm of the sounds that floods us, listening to the flow of the film streaming in front of our sight, we ask about the meaning of the plot to understand the moral teachings, that “something” able to fix all the fruition into an interrupted and detached frame, something able to stop the film from provoking our emotions, teaching us to give an interpretation of the worlds where it is moving on (and while I’m writing this, I’m thinking, for example, of a filmmaker like David Lynch).

Art tries to rape us and we stand by impassively: nothing can touches us if it can’t hurt us physically, what an horror! (“The horror… the horror” Kurtz said at the end of the book “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad or, if you don’t know it, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” by Coppola).

We are proud to become like stones, to prove being strong in front of people eyes who, like us, are believing in the power of impassibility without the comprehension that, nowadays, the strongest person is who has got the courage to show his tears, because he frees himself from cages that make people repressed in a mental mechanism holding them in a vise and more and more leading to apparently senseless panic attacks.

We use tricks to withdraw from ourselves and to feel something we are unable to perceive anymore. We’re drugging our senses to feel us omnipotent and, at the same time, to feel that something we lost: but without heart and pain, dreams and tears… Does it make any sense that we try to exist as if we were immortal gods? Suddenly an aporia stifles us.