In an era that has its most metaphysical discourse in the horoscope, and in astrology its most certain explanatory paradigm of everything that happens (to us), it is not surprising that destiny has such good press, at least when it comes to accounting for about who we are, what we do and why we do it.
As strange as it may seem, but it is not at all, horoscope and astrology as forms of knowledge coexist amicably with scientific ideology and with technology as its executing arm, since it is not in vain that astrology and science both aspire to an all-encompassing vision of reality. .
The curious thing is that science being a modern invention, like freedom, claims an exhaustive knowledge of everything that exists at the price of ignoring that freedom, transmuted into destiny at the expense of genetics, thus pretending that human life is more tragic than dramatic, more typical of destined beings than of free people.
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Live as if we were the only owners.
"That makes us slaves
," Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Gustav Janouch, and that is what very precisely happens when science and technology believe they are masters of life (and death), which makes us their slaves and, as Terencio assures,
“slavery is so degrading that men can come to love it.”
Believing one is destined, by the stars or by DNA, is a form of lack of freedom, of absence of the dramatic dimension of life, since it is not in vain that drama comes from the Greek verb “drao”, which means “to act”, and only He works who is free, and owner of his actions and responsible for their consequences, something that could never happen with the slave, whose lack of freedom makes his life tragic, lacking emotion and mystery.
There is, however, a realm in which being destined and being free are one and the same, a space in which being destined is equally dramatic and not tragic, the happy instance in which we are destined for others and others. to us, a time and space in which fragility and strength, vulnerability and compassion, giving and receiving, identity and otherness, sadness and joy are combined, since only from a dramatic life can happiness be expected.
Now, outside of that scope, believing that human life is explained solely and exclusively by agents external to it, be they astrology or science, knowing that one is thus destined, is self-dispensing from the necessary personal exercise that leads us to build one's own life, with abysses and summits, with free decisions, which lead us to convert uncertainties into risks.
In fact, there is no happiness without risk, without adventure, without a journey and a story that tells it, without words that name it and give it meaning. There is no happiness in tragedy because human life is not tragic, despite many appearances at first glance. respect, but dramatic, which is what makes it life and what, above all, makes it human.
Carlos Álvarez Teijeiro is Professor of Communication Ethics at the Graduate School of Communication at the Austral University