Beyond Socrates’ Dia-Logos. Luigi Giannachi

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СКАЧАТЬ out on self-discovery journey. Yes, I know, but it’s useless to say it, we are constantly afraid of death.

      Worldly repute is but a breath of wind.

      When we think on our body, we are afraid of losing it and, at the same time, we can’t advance it, to make it evolve. Death really permeates us conceptually, just because we attach an exaggerated relevance to our physical body, without thinking about our invisible part, even less about the invisible part of an entire population. If thought is the beating heart of a person, culture is the beating heart of a population. Thus, if you used thinking only for the purpose to support your ego instead of contribute to universal culture enrichment, we have lost another opportunity to pulse humanity.

      On the contrary, if we expand our point of view to the Earth we live in, death becomes one of the smallest phenomena that have ever existed on this planet, I should say that the planet survives precisely because of beings’ death and rebirth whose live in its surface.

      Fear and death are the two thoughts that have always influenced human work. How do we make sure they don’t influence us again?

Homo liber de nulla re minus, quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est.2

      In our society impoverished of contents, where appearance is more important than being, become immortal is now a biological need, as if we can’t leave our mark in some other way than preserve our body. Actually, there are potentially endless ways to become immortal, which have more to do with psyche and memory, or even the soul of a person. Immortality results from fulfilment capacity during our mortal existence. Paradoxically, we could become immortal during our mortal life, even if we see the effect of what we did only at a later stage.

      Death isn’t something to be ashamed of, but rather a limit in our possibility to learn. Our possibility to teach in distance doesn’t end with death, to people we will never know, but inevitably they will keep us in their heart, if they have seen sincerity and passion in our teaching.

      However, I think that has never been taken into account how great is the man’s ability to learn and evolve, and how much this ability depends on the relationship with the other, with those around us, with those who make us feel good, but even with those who try to oppose us. In trying to survive to himself and to the world, the individual suffers constant metamorphosis to which he’s exposed, because he intentionally agrees to participate in the research of a motor and spiritual equilibrium. Body gradually ceases, wastes away over the years, but the spiritual growth should, at the same time, be able to proceed indefinitely. However, if man made so much progress in technology, his adaptability and learning ability from every situation deserves credit, regardless how he came to find out something.

      It isn’t new that some discoveries were made by necessity during war periods or that discoveries can happen randomly, pursuing other objectives considered ex-post less worthy. This doesn’t mean that war or serendipity are useful in that connection, it’s rather remarkable that man can sometimes make a virtue of necessity.

      Lost in the whirlwind of the huge and frightening amount of information that daily comes from every planet corner, man risks to lose his ability, unique in animal world, to select information, from every source, and to make them useful for the common good and for his knowledge application. If it’s true that every individual has infinite potential at birth to prune during lifetime, with the choices that have been made during his personal evolution, what outcome can ever have choices no longer dictated by his own experience or social logic but conditioned from the mass media grapevine visited without a constructive criticism? In a kind of existential impasse the fake news, the wickedness from an already determined fate, the selfish actions of overbearing people are going to prevail in the collective imagination, as if there wasn’t any alternative.

      The greatest danger, in which we may end up, is to arouse fears towards the other and the different, increasing conflicts between schools of thought and between religions, giving more importance to errors and sins’ negative valence, forgetting virtues’ enrichment capacity and the potential of living beings.

      A little magic light, found in the whirl of thoughts, spurred me to start a journey to plumb the multiple learning capacity that humanity has produced in activities sometimes distant between them, but with a focal common ground: human mind.

      Like every good traveller, I also have a fear that I could got lost without your help. I would even say: after the terror of death, the fear of getting lost, without any reference point, ends up becoming the greater anguish able to oppress our ambitions. There is no son, in his destiny realization, who may forget to thank at least once his father, the one who saw him born or grow up. There is no poet, musician or painter who, in the childhood of their being artists, can forget the emotion of the first time at reading that poem, listening that music or viewing that painting. Contingent references of our mortal life render immortal the memory transmitted to others.

      The family, that I’m going to surround myself to make this journey, are the adventure companions you have shown me, at times they will get lost with me in the windings of the human mind, at other times they will be the propitiators of concepts and philosophical figures intended to be developed in the future, perhaps by readers who are still waiting to born.

      They will lead me through these secrets, in the turning point of these dialogues, to know characters who have given a push for humanity with their actions and their writings. The unexpected look of these encounters will be the simplicity with which I have discovered their invention of the world and the dullness with which the world has noticed them.

      Just as illness sometimes arises from the inability of mind to clean up the past dejections and troubles getting the knowledge up the streets of experience, so we can maybe find solutions for social malaise accepting the inheritance of philosophical discoveries left behind but still available for getting up the social development.

      N1 He’s an Italian, World Cup winning former footballer who played for Juventus for many years in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Regarded as one of Italy's greatest ever wingers, throughout his career, he was give the nickname "The Baron", because of his stylish moves on the pitch, as well as his well-educate

      N2 A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life. B. Spinoza, The Ethics, Part IV, Prop. LXVII.

      

      

      1. Open-mindedness

      

      

      Even this, like every journey, started without any notice or forewarning.

      Â«Maybe we would like to get some help at birth, but the awareness of living, in that moment, is so far away that be able to breathe is more important, crying and yelling» I heard his voice, which I had never heard, whispering to me like a brotherly friend.

      At 49 years old, just when I would have been, in a handful of months, in the half way through the journey of our life (even supposing that life ended at 100 years old) I found that I was in a wood of thoughts, so confused was the way to take for the knowledge of myself and for the depth human cognition. I couldn’t tell when the poet stood before me to cheer me up, but he was there in a moment without being requested...

      ...Then quieted a little was the fear, which in the lake-depths of my heart had lasted...

      I СКАЧАТЬ