Thinking the Present. (In Search of Lost Meaning)

Abstract

In a certain sense, uncertainty regarding the meaning of the present itself has always accompanied the human being. But the mere persistence of the issue does not automatically make it one of those eternal questions, which we will never cease asking ourselves despite being aware that they have no answer, as a classic (Kant) said. Perhaps it would be better to say that they are not eternal, but persistent, and that their relevance lies in the fact that, while the question has remained for a long time the type of answers is precisely what has been changing. Answers that sought not only to understand what happens to us, but also to elucidate what to do in order to get better things happen to us than those that actually occurred. This is the same than to affirm that, whether it has recognized it or not, philosophy has always gone hand in hand with politics, and today it could not be otherwise. Hence the difference between the two following lectures. In the first one, we talk about something that happens to us, under the title “politics”, while in the second one it is addressed, under the rubric “philosophy”, the question of the distillation of knowledge (or lack of knowledge) that we obtain from this experience.