Javier Gomá (Bilbao, 1965) is a worldly philosopher. And this statement, which would offend many of his people, he takes to heart. He defines himself that way. What's more, the current director of the March Foundation defends that thinking should go that way. He stated it with all the conviction in
Mundane Philosophy
and reaffirms it in his latest book,
Concrete Universal
(Taurus), a work very much indebted to traumatic experiences such as the death of his father or his experience with covid, which have led him to a synthesis radical nature of his thought, exposed in previous works such as those that make up his tetralogy on exemplarity and others such as
Reason: goal
,
Dignity
,
Learned ingenuity
... Throughout its radically mundane pages, of course, we find reflections not exempt from provocation and therefore so much more than stimulating on eternal issues: democracy, dignity, freedom, equality, death, memory, culture, civilization, a vindication of vulgarity, goodness in conflict with the system, evil, ego, love... And, of course, on the most famous axis of his thought: exemplarity, for which he has found a forceful axiom: "Live in such a way that your death is scandalously unjust." In that and other things, Gomá, in full maturity, sharpens his humanist radicalism.
What is a worldly philosophy?
The thesis is Kant's. Authentic philosophy, without it becoming mush to be assimilated, must be thrice mundane. It has to talk about the world, for everyone and with a little bit of the world. It represents the appropriation of one's own time with thought, Hegel said.
Of the present time and in a collective sense?
Necessarily joyful daughter of her time. And what we find in the last 50 years, the vast majority of the time, is one that talks incessantly about books, not about the world. Also, I point out, philosophy is literature.
Aim well: with your own poetics?
He has it. So that it is understood by a majority. There is no point in writing for philosophers. Nobody would understand it.
Why then does it lose its meaning and usefulness?
Exactly. Because it is an anomaly. Not a rule. Philosophy is literature because its assumptions are not empirically demonstrable. In that sense it is as reliable as poetry or the novel. The truth is based on the consensus that it builds among its readers.
When you also say that you should have a little bit of the world, do you mean...?
To cultivate what promotes communication. To be told with beauty, elegance, taste and the sense of humor that anyone can display in a conversation. The difference between science and literature is that the former is interested in the latest, and the latter in the usual. Everything scientific in philosophy ends up being boring.
The philosopher Javier Gomá, in his office at the March Foundation, which he has directed since 2003. Gianfranco Tripodo
You don't like the term postmodernity, why?
I prefer to talk about a second modernity. The
pos-
is misleading and suggests that it is very difficult to go further. The first modernity takes place, above all, with the romantic movement and the first Enlightenment. 18th and 19th centuries. In the second modernity, which I propose, the surprising discovery occurs that there are other selves that also deserve respect. From I to we. From freedom to equality without giving up the first. Therefore, an ability to be free together must be developed. Modernity is an important stage because it recognizes the dignity of the human being. Kant says that there are things that have dignity and others that have price. What is characteristic of dignity is the human and what is characteristic of price is the object. The worst crime that can exist is the reification of dignity.
I mean, capitalism?
If you leave capitalism alone without educating it, it would tend towards a conversion of everything human into merchandise. On the other hand, communism collectivizes it and represents a return to the premodern world. But the same thing has happened in both. This, socially. In the metaphysical we face death. Because every person with infinite dignity has ended up in the rotting heap, becoming a corpse. Knowing that we are doomed to the reification of a death produces discomfort.
What does dignity have to do with happiness?
I contrast both. Happiness is a concept created in another era. It doesn't help to explain it. What was it in ancient times? The fulfillment of the function that is proper to the person within the world that has touched him. Being happy consisted of fulfilling your mission. In modernity, when the self becomes a totality, the important thing is not to be happy, but worthy of being happy. Dignity is universal. Those who were waiting in line for the gas chambers could not be happy. But worthy.
And this moral conquest occurs after the apocalypse of World War II?
Yes. Furthermore, I want to turn that aspect of exemplarity and dignity into a maxim: live in such a way that your death is scandalously unjust.
It also claims the time of naivety. If we think about this concept developed by Wagner in the opera
Siegfried
, remember that those who misinterpreted it
led Germany and Europe into the arms of Nazism
. Isn't it a double-edged sword?
I'm talking about learned naivety, not first-degree.
But isn't that difficult or artificial?
What you are referring to is instinctivism, something primary. I am talking about a person who knows the tragic reality of life and yet, despite everything, dares to aspire to an ideal. I distinguish between being intelligent and wise. The intelligent person knows well the means to achieve an end. The wise man knows the ends that are worthwhile.
And does that save time?
True, but you must have cultivated a certain naivety.
Is it better to be naive and wise than cynical?
Exactly. You can dedicate yourself to being back, be a disbeliever or you can, consciously, knowing in the end what awaits you, aspire for the best.
Can we talk then about goodness and evil?
I don't know if we should translate it into moral terms. If we think about Gaza, we see there that someone has crossed out their lives. It's difficult for them to maintain that naivety, I think.
“What's the point of having everything if I'm nobody,” you say.
All modernity had established that man is individual when he is separated from the social. My thesis insists completely on the opposite. For me, there are two stages: one of subsidized, aesthetic idleness, in childhood and adolescence, when parents and the State support you and the individual has no other obligation than to possess himself. Another, which comes later and later. Specialization and adaptation appear. It is an ethical stage with two specific functions: a job and the heart. A job and a shared life, if we talk about a typical relationship. That's what it means to adapt. And in those two you discover your own finitude. In the aesthetic stage you have the prospect of death far away, by socializing you become aware of your end. In the first you are totally free, in the other, free and with commitment.
Let's move on to another concept: being mortal. He wonders what a dead person can be an example of. Did the death of his father and his own experience with Covid at the beginning of the pandemic leave a mark on you?
Yes a lot. I had a vocation in the fall of 1980. An activation of all my intellectual, sentimental and volitional faculties in one direction. From there, I wrote my first four books, then my
Mundane Philosophy
. Then, when you turn 50, when you already have some scars, my father, who gave me life, dies. I think there are two types of people. Those who have had a feeling of fulfillment when they were children and spend the rest of their lives with a certain disappointment due to nostalgia. Then there are those of us who live through adolescence. There we discovered two things. First of all, how important we are. The second is that no one pays attention to that importance. That generates a conflict. I had always considered myself the son of my adolescence, but the death of my father meant that someone poured water on those youthful embers and put them out. I don't see myself like that anymore. I feel emancipated from that. And, therefore, I have come up with a book like a concrete Universal, in which all the pieces of my life and thought, taken with that new distance, fit together.
The maturity…
Exactly, to which I add a third stage. old age
But I see you looking great!
Thank you so much. Likewise. Besides, I, at the age of 60, want it all. Everything good in this world belongs to me and I demand all of it.
Do you have the right to that everything?
Yes. To everything: in the feeling, in the desire, where I am world champion of the universe.
Well, I smelled for you! But doesn't that desire come because you feel closer to death and it stings you?
There is something of that. But also because naivety excites me. I don't want to anticipate becoming a corpse, in the meantime, I aspire for the best.
Does that aspiration console you?
Yes Yes. And if when I die everyone thinks it was scandalously unfair, I will feel fulfilled.
Then comes memory.
How can we endure? By two means, through the work of art or posthumous exemplarity, the image of your life, which is memory.
Is that your idea of transcendence and not the afterlife?
I distinguish between experience and hope. Experience has to do with shared facts. Hope is a hypothesis that must be probable. From the first we find two ways to endure, he said. An artistic work or possessing individual truth, such an exemplarity that it is worth remembering. Being exemplary concerns everyone, but only a few are capable of conceiving a work of art that lasts.
That exemplary memory of which he speaks can be built with all the examples of people who have raised an idea of good. Only then do all those atoms of decent life acquire meaning?
Totally agree. I detest aristocratic exemplarity. I do not believe in a select minority in the manner of Ortega y Gasset. I don't trust that privileged class that only asks the people, the masses, for their docility to those they consider better. They make me allergic. I boast a very deep egalitarian spirit, according to which we are all an example for everyone and live in a network of mutual influences. Faced with the select minority, I look for the select majority. I vindicate the vulgarity, the normality, the apparent insignificance of those who have exemplary lives whose death produces a scandal, I repeat. This weaves memories that, when generalized, lead to customs, a collective, sentimental evidence that can lead to that select majority.
Why does the ego that you claim have such a bad prestige?
Ego is one thing and selfishness is another. We must also differentiate between egocentrism and narcissism, which for me is a pathology of the ego. Let us not judge things by their corruptions but by their ideal. I claim the ego as the very essence of the desire to live, survive, transcend, be virtuous or bold and accomplish great things. If we become purists, moralists, lucid or cynical, there is no behavior that does not carry a stain behind it. Therefore, I claim naivety.
For ego, that of Jesus Christ? If he preached the idea of the flock, it is to calm down and so that our ego does not compete with his. Doesn't the ego's bad press have anything to do with it?
I don't know if this is the right example. But it is also true that excess moralization entails vulgarity, let us flee from those who have nothing to say and give lessons. Excessive moralizing is intellectual vulgarity.
And you defend gossip at all costs.
Completely. So was Kant in his second
Critique
of Him. We must specify the universal with examples.
These examples have often cost the lives of those who give them. Starting, again, with Christ.
I call that conflictive exemplarity. Not accepted by the system. Hence the rarely noted case that exemplarity often succumbs violently. It is the danger of good. The case of Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Luther King or Socrates... Concrete examples that call for repetition. But it happens in our lives. If you have a friend, a family member who demonstrates virtuous behavior, judgment is opened to you, whether you want it or not.
Does envy come in there?
The trial. Doing so has a personal cost. But the most normal thing is that it generates hatred, envy. Exemplarity is not sweet or sappy, it is essentially conflictive.
Javier Gomá. Gianfranco Tripodo
Why do people obey?
Ah, that is a central theme. There was a time when she did it under duress from power. But now, in democracy, probably because we all obey ourselves for two reasons: democracy is sustained by a subtle game between the majority and the minority. Both are based on respect for individual dignity.
Let's go to the values of that democracy. He believes that from freedom and equality an ugly descendant of two beautiful parents was born to vindicate: vulgarity. It is a statement, we would say, controversial.
It will bother the reactionaries. Contemporary vulgarity is a progress of civilization. Something positive, yes. It is the provisional expression of the historical realization of the principle of equality. An uneducated spontaneity. What was there before? A codified aristocratic culture. Today, vulgarity has swept that culture, since the end of World War II. Vulgarity is the cultural state of our time.
And is it good or bad?
Well, without a doubt. Liberal democracy is our termini station. There is no more progress, nothing better. Those who want to change it seek to destroy it, and that has an enormous cost. We're heading there. Politically. Culturally, not yet. Vulgarity is a starting point, not an arrival point.
What are your steps?
Vulgarity must be directed towards an egalitarian exemplarity that will end in a select majority, not a minority. But if politics goes wrong, everything will go to hell. Therefore, in my book, I claim and develop a theory of educated vision and an educated heart. The educated vision consists of having a historical vision and warns us that we can lose it. The educated heart aims to develop feelings in the right direction. Love and hate, even, in the right way. But, I insist, anything can happen. The human is a house of cards on quicksand.
He is afraid?
Yes, but also trust.
In what?
In collective intelligence. The human species tends to put itself in danger. But in the end, just before the disaster, he avoids it.
At the beginning of the 20th century, in Europe, we were not able to stop it.
True, but the species, although it left a multitude of individuals along the way, as a whole, has progressed since then. It has been saved. I do not declare myself an optimist, but if we look back we see that history has meandered, it has tried shortcuts and done atrocities, but, overall, a collective intelligence has prevailed. How are we today in countries where we enjoy liberal democracy? Better than ever. In the material and moral aspect. If you ask someone from a disadvantaged class what era he wants to live in, he will tell you this one. We are the best, I maintain, but we are dissatisfied.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_