The wonder of a world beyond our grasp

The ever-stimulating Catalan professor Jaime Nubiola explores culture, friendship, art and technology, and discovers that the truly philosophical attitude is to rejoice that reality always exceeds our understanding and can be seen from so many different points of view.

OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD

I recently attended an interesting lecture by Carles Duarte at the Ateneu Barcelonès about Farid-Uddin Attar (1145-1221), one of the great teachers and poets of the Sufi mystical tradition. Duarte has translated from Persian to Catalan the most important work of Attar which in English is known as The Conference of the Birds.

I found it a stimulating session as I knew nothing about this author and it suggested a certain affinity between the Sufi mystic who seeks union with God and the Christian tradition.

“Before the internet,” Duarte said, “ideas travelled. Saint John of the Cross is not understood without Ramon Llull and his logic of [the Persian Sufi] Al-Gazzali.”

The conference was followed by a colloquium in which, answering questions from the audience, Duarte displayed an admirable familiarity with various very different Western and Asian languages.

Speaking of the linguistic kinship between Persian and some Spanish terms, he commented en passant: “The culture in which we live has not been made by us.”

Duarte referred to the library in which we had the meeting, the society of the Ateneu itself, or our common language as examples of realities in which we live and which none of those present themselves made. Our own perception of the world is mediated by our culture and the language we speak.

I found that observation to be enlightening.

How important it is to note that neither the world, nor language, nor even culture with all its notions and traditions have been self-made!

Realizing that reality is social, that our language is shared and that our world is common, puts us in our place in the face of today’s dominant egocentric individualism. We have received everything as a gift. It doesn’t come from ourselves. Not only do we live in a culture that none of us has made, but rather it is that culture which has given life to each of us.

THE PRACTICE OF FRIENDSHIP

I have read with pleasure and interest Marina Garcés’ new book La Pasión De Los Extraños (The Passion of Strangeness. A philosophy of friendship, 2024: at present only in Spanish). It is superbly written and deals with the question of friendship which, of course, interests us all. As Aristotle wrote: “Without friends no one would want to live even if he possessed many other goods.”

Perhaps the book has made a special impression on me because my friend Esteban López-Escobar, a great journalist and university professor, passed away last March. A few weeks earlier we had ‘rescued’ him from the hospital – with the nurse’s permission – and Javier Laspalas and I had taken him to a barbecue restaurant for lunch.

Esteban had a mushroom puff pastry and some kokotxas, and he wanted to pay for it himself. Afterwards we returned to the Clínica de la Universidad de Navarra and had a friendly chat in his room. In his book, Garcés points out that much of what has been written about friendship is on the occasion of the death of a friend.

I copy here a few sentences from the book which have caught my attention:

“Friendship is that strange relationship that ties a world together, that makes the world a world.”

Or this one. “What makes charm charming? It is enough that someone perceives it and opens up to it. Friendship makes strangeness a charm and turns it into a form of companionship.”

And perhaps most striking for me was the defence or explanation of civic friendship: “Friendship is thus not a bond or a goal, but the vehicle for radical change, which can be driven in real time. As movements such as anarchism or feminism in their many forms advocate, it is necessary to put the practice of friendship at the centre of collective life in order to transform it.”

Putting the practice of friendship at the centre of our lives. López-Escobar was especially gifted for friendship. Thinking and reading about friendship can help us to put our friends at the centre of our lives too.

ON TRAINS AND PAINTERS

The other week I was able to visit with my fellow philosopher Marcela Duque the section of the National Gallery in Washington dedicated to Impressionism. Early in the morning and with few visitors, the tour paused by a dozen rooms – and accompanied by a magnificent poet – seemed wonderful: I was captivated by so much beauty.

Marcela drew my attention to the painting ‘The Railway’ — unknown to me — that Édouard Manet painted in 1873. He painted it from the backyard of a friend’s house that gave on to the Parisian Saint-Lazare station. Apparently, when it was exposed the following year at the Paris Salon, Manet was ridiculed because his topic did not seem academic enough, but rather something everyday or trivial.

But this fact drew my attention to two panels of the museum where it was stated that, thanks to the development of the train in France in the 1850s and 1860s, Parisian artists could move to the countryside and there dedicate their paintings to depicting so many exquisite landscapes: Argenteuil, Giverny, Trouville, etc.

I had never thought of this, but it seems to me a great example of how technology can favour artistic creation, even in something as material as the ease of commuting.

In the face of those who are afraid of the development of technology because they think it kills creativity, it seems to me that it almost always stimulates the creativity of the best artists.

LET REALITY SPEAK

I recently attended the posthumous tribute to my dear colleague Professor Rafael Alvira, who passed away a year ago. I was impressed by the number of people who came to the Aula Magna at the Universidad de Navarra: colleagues, alumni, friends. I loved that two of the four speakers said in their exhibition that Rafa had been their best friend.

Of these four intelligent and sensible speeches I’m left with one sentence: “Let reality speak”. This is how one of the speakers defined Professor Alvira’s philosophy. Those words brought to my mind that in our current times — in which so many race through life — the attitude of patiently listening to reality is of immense importance.

Surely the genuine philosophical attitude should be to long to understand, rather than imposing our prejudices on reality.

Following a venerable tradition, I am convinced that God speaks to us through the things of this world and, also, through the people around us. Ours is to listen carefully, with serenity, with openness, and then try to express with our words what is heard in the heart.

By contrast, several people in recent days have shared with me their fears about certain social and political situations (and politicians!) and how this has overwhelmed and paralyzed them and stopped them thinking clearly. In such a situation, the challenge is to come to understand that fear and ask yourself how you are going to respond to it, how you are going to own your own response.

Letting reality speak means both listening attentively and stopping to reflect until you can articulate a personal response. Becoming master of your own response opens up the vital space of your inner freedom.

IT’S GOOD TO HAVE DIFFERENT OPINIONS

I have been defending pluralism for years as a necessary consequence of personal freedom and the individual life experience of each. Besides, I have often emphasized that defending pluralism is not defending relativism, because — following Stanley Cavell — there are better and worse ways of thinking about things.

Thanks to study, experience and dialogue it is possible in many cases to recognize over time the superiority of one opinion over another. It’s enough to cite scientific and technological progress as evidence of this.

But, really, why do we think so differently? Precisely Descartes, as one of the first pillars of his Discourse on the Method, tackles this question: “The ability to judge and distinguish true from false, which is itself what we call good sense or reason, is naturally the same in all men; and therefore the diversity of our opinions does not stem from the fact that some are more reasonable than others, but only from the fact that we direct our thoughts in different directions and do not consider the same things.” Or put simply, we all come at things from different points of view.

I like to stress that opinions on a particular subject are not infinite, because even if each has his own, really different opinions on a particular ordinary subject will not exceed six or seven.

It is often said that opinions are infinite and are like the nose, each has their own, but it is not true that this is so. In fact, even within their diversity, human noses are quite similar to each other. In questions of opinion – which regularly fill the media – the same theses are repeated over and over again in a very limited spectrum, which does not go much beyond six or seven possibilities.

Loving pluralism brings with it the conviction that in every seriously formulated opinion there is something we can learn from it and also, probably, at least some part of it we already share. Diversity of opinion is therefore, firstly, not always that diverse, and secondly, not a limitation, but a richness.

The above article is based on various recent Facebook posts by Jaime and is published in Adamah with his permission. For other Adamah articles by Jaime, see here and here.

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