La Forma del Mundo (English translation) - Julio Cabrera

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Referência CABRERA, Julio. La forma del mundo: ensayo sobre la muerte del ser: elementos de meta-filosofía primeira. Florianópolis: Ed. do Autor, 2020. E-book.

JULIO CABRERA

THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD (ESSAY

ON

THEDEATH

THE BEING) Elements of Meta-philosophy First

OF

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3 INDEX METHODOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION. THE CURRENT OBSTACLES OF THINKING (4). NEGATIVE ONTOLOGY: THE TERMINALITY OF BEING. ONTOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF STRUCTURAL WORTHLESSNESS. 1.1.

TOWARDS THE TERMINALITY OF BEING. DEATH AS A FORM OF ENDING (19)

1.2.

NATURE/FORTRESS (23)

1.3.

BEYOND THE SUBLIMATION OF THE FOUNDATION (33)

1.4.

WHY FORGET ONE'S IDENTITY WITH ONESELF? GLIMPSES OF CONCEALMENT (39)

1.5.

BACK TO METAPHILOSOPHY (42)

COLLOQUIUM WITH HEIDEGGER, THE LAST AFFIRMATIVE ONTOLOGIST (BEING WITH HEIDEGGER, BEING WITHOUT HEIDEGGER). FROM APPREHENSIVE AFFIRMATIVE ONTOLOGY TO EXISTENT NEGATIVE ONTOLOGY (44) HEIDEGGER AND THE APPREHENSIVE TRADITION OF ONTOLOGY (54) .I. DEATH (55) .II. NATURE (61) .III. VALUE (65) WHAT MAKES US PHILOSOPHERS (CAN A BOLIVIAN BE AN "ESSENTIAL THINKER"?) (72) .2. NOTES FOR A NEGATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY: LIVING KILLS. 2.1. THE HUMAN BEING AS A BEING WHO HAS TO LIVE THE NEGATIVE ONTOLOGY AND NOT ONLY CONTEMPLATE IT (81). 2.2. THE HUMAN BEING WITHOUT OBJECTIVES, BUT WITH OBJECTIVES. OBJECT AND REJECTO (86). 2.3. CONCEALMENT AND DEFECTION (93) 2.4. ANNOTATION ON THE REAL (95) 2.5. THAT BEING THAT IS NOT THERE (100) 2.6. BEYOND "GOOD" AND "EVIL" (102) 2.7. FROM NEGATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY TO NEGATIVE ETHICS (110)

.3. THE WORTHLESSNESS OF HUMAN LIFE AND THE GENESIS OF AFFIRMATIVISM THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY, FROM HESIOD TO SCHELLING (AN ARCHEOLOGICAL REFLECTION). INTRODUCTION (112) 3.1. FROM HESIOD TO LUCRETIUS CARO (114) 3.2. FROM SENECA TO PLOTINUS (125) INTERLUDE: FIRST FORMULATION OF THE SCHEME (132) 3.3. FROM AGUSTIN TO ESCOTO ERIGENA (140) 3.4. FROM ANSELM TO DUNS SCOTUS (154) 3.5. TOWARDS "MODERNITY" VIA RENAISSANCE. (169) SECOND INTERLUDE: THE GREAT HERESY (173) 3.6. MODERN FORMS OF AFFIRMATIVISM, FROM LEIBNIZ TO SCHELLING (186)

.4. SUMMARY OF MY PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM. 0. INTRODUCTION (203) 4.1. THE TERMINAL STARTING POINT (205) 4.2. NEGATIVE (220)

ETHICS

ETHICS AND

ONTOLOGY (220) SUICIDE (228) ABSTENTION (233) NEGATIVE SURVIVAL (238) 4.3. LOGIC CANNOT PROVIDE THE FORM OF THE WORLD (243) 4.4. FROM ANALYTICAL AESTHETICS TO LOGOPATHY. WHY THE POINT OF DEPARTURE COULD NOT BE AESTHETIC (253) EPILOGUE WITH FICHTE (256)

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METHODOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION THE CURRENT OBSTACLES TO THINKING

In the past twentieth century there were more obstacles to philosophizing than there were in other centuries. Before, philosophizing had been done instinctively, by irresistible impulses; now philosophy has to fulfill certain additional requirements. It is filled with mediations and referrals. Any and all philosophy today has to be done on the frame of reference of the philosophy that has already been done. References to the past need not be explicit or erudite, they present themselves spontaneously as imposing all kinds of conditions and presuppositions, and even styles o f writing. It is not possible to philosophize as in previous centuries, not even as in the 19th century, and not even as in the first half of the 20th. Many things have happened and happen again every time we set out to philosophize and we are forced to learn about it and act in consequence of what we manage to understand. We should be free to philosophize without historical or methodological impositions. We should even be free to submit ourselves totally to these impositions if we so wish. For, as philosophers, we should not have to do the philosophy that is imposed on us as an obligation of thought, nor should we have to take all kinds of care to see whether or not we are philosophizing as we should philosophize in keeping with the times, without falling into the anachronisms and naiveté to which we would now, and not before, be more exposed. In the twentieth century the "professional" way of doing philosophy has exploded, and this does not coincide with the university way of doing it, since neither in the universities of the thirteenth century nor in those of the nineteenth century was it forbidden to do one's own philosophy instead of competently expounding the philosophies of the "great philosophers". The demands of a philosophizing conditioned by the profession seem to be new and arise in the twentieth century, which may be remembered as the century of "specialization in philosophy". And that will be its own founding paradox, because philosophy itself is what can in no way be professionalized. A book by a certain Italian philosopher is subtitled "What it means to think after Heidegger and Nietzsche". This leaves me intrigued and perplexed. If someone were to ask me how I propose to philosophize after Heidegger and Nietzsche, I would answer that I will philosophize in exactly the same way as I have always philosophized, from my own entrails and from my existential situation. For what is it that Heidegger and Nietzsche could prevent me from doing?

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I have, like them, certain thoughts about the human situation, ethics and argumentation (my negative ethics, my negative logic), and Heidegger and Nietzsche have nothing to do with that. For when I philosophize seriously and not for hire, I have in my own thinking, in some way or other, the marks of my social, political and cultural world, without my needing to update it or highlight it in quotations or proclamations. Whether you like it or not, you will be a thinker of your time or you will be an extemporaneous of your time, without having to worry about what Heidegger said or what Nietzsche said. And, whether you like i t or not, you will be a thinker of all times if you really are a thinker. An initial obstacle for current philosophical reflection is the obligation to say something important and complex. This is serious for what I want to expound in this book, which is, basically, something very simple and almost trivial. My fundamental meta-philosophical thesis is precisely that the truth about the human situation can be expressed in a set of completely simple and banal statements. This will not be well received, for philosophy today has an internal commitment to the complexity of thought, a complexity that was being created historically. Today's philosophers strive to make very complex what seemed simple to earlier philosophers. It is not a question of making it clearer, but of showing that it is always more complex than it was thought before; this seems to be the most expressive task of present-day philosophers. In this book I intend to give an explanation of this undefined complication, and for this reason I cannot assume the same complexifying methodology. This makes it especially difficult to find the place from which to present my theses, both philosophical and meta-philosophical, because they do not adapt to this "becoming complex", but rather, in a way, walk in the opposite direction, in search of what is simpler. The problem arises when I realize that there is nothing "interesting" about what I have to say in this work, at least in the pyrotechnic sense of a Slavoj Zizek, who writes every sentence as if it were a crucial revelation. Although perhaps the very fact of setting out to say something ultimately trivial is interesting. For I argue that what is uninteresting points precisely to an effective truth about the human situation. And the truth of the human situation may be anything but "interesting"; for everything interesting is built - is what I argue - against that monotonous, dull, insistent truth, which is not worth, it is said, formulating. It is not one of the least difficulties of the present essay on Meta-philosophy First, the demand that truth must be "interesting," and that it can never be discovered easily and on the first try. (This is what, not without irony, I call the "syndrome of

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Heidegger", that never-ending dive in search of greater depths, always seeking to show that "the deepest" has not yet been thought of). This demand is placed, I would almost say, as an initial obstacle to thought. Whether or not it is true that, in the history of European philosophy, a great effort has been made to say "how things are," in the twentieth century thought seems much more concerned with "keeping itself going" through the ever-renewed posing and rectification of what has already been said. As if the major concern of philosophy were to keep problems always open, even against what might be insinuated as a truth that encloses the discussions. It is as if philosophy continually postpones its traumatic encounter with a truth that is at once banal and forceful, instead of as it has repeatedly proclaimed - passionately seeking it. For this reason, the reflection on the terminality of being, which this Essay promotes, is inevitably intermingled, from the very beginning, with a fundamental metaphilosophical question about the very nature of philosophical work. For if philosophy is conceived as a necessarily complex and inconclusive activity, as always in search of a distant and transferable depth, then what we want to think about here may not be attainable by that kind of thinking. For the thought of the terminality of being can only be expanded by someone who does not accept to be intimidated by the demand for "depth" and "complexity", and who is willing to think questions that present themselves without the announcing rumblings of the unheard of. The search for complex truth has taken place, in the history of European philosophy, in the form of successive thoughts that are then rectified by other thoughts. Thus, it is to be expected that whatever is said in a text such as the present one - which wants to speak once again about being - will not be accepted by those who read it. For the usual attitude of those who consume philosophy is rectifying and oppositional. Discordance is the inevitable and expected reaction. Even if one shakes one's head in assent, the text read will always be approved under condition, as a hostage, and not rarely under the sign of some subtle or gross "misreading". Rarely, if ever, do we talk about the same thing. Whatever a text affirms will be considered, to some extent, inadequate or simply false.

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In this sense, a text belongs primarily to the self-absorption of each thinker, and every form of philosophical "communication" is a (generally unsuccessful) negotiation between self-absorptions. This is the astonishing patency of the other in the phenomenon of the reading of philosophical texts, and of the astonishing plurality of philosophies, which philosophers never thematize, and of which, in fact, they were never sufficiently astonished. The porphyry consists in insisting that previous thinkers failed to encompass all the "complexity" of the world, and that their own efforts will succeed in doing so now, and in the best way. We are regularly refuted or surpassed for failing to be "critical" or "deep" enough. At no point is there any metaphilosophical doubt that the truth about the world may not be profound at all, and that it is grasped precisely by the plurality of philosophies in full diaspora, and not by some mythical final philosophy that would come to provide the answers long sought. This is why a metaphilosophical (and methodical) question is intertwined with the very question we wish to think about here. The thought of others is seen by every philosophy as adventitious "equivocal", and not as something that has its own right to exist. No thinker is sufficiently detached to be surprised by the astonishing fact that thoughts other than his own exist. No important conclusions are drawn from the fact that all thinkers assume to have proved that others did not think deeply enough. One does not grasp the particular coefficient of delusion that might arise from seeing others' thoughts as "equivocal," rather than seeing them as plausible alternatives to what we hold, in light of the fact that every thinker thinks the same of the others, at least as far as their failure to reach a truth always more complex than expected is concerned. No one seems to challenge the image of philosophical endeavor as a set of competitive efforts in the face of an unbearably complex reality. No one makes this "meta-philosophical ascent" (in which the philosophical perspective itself would have to be seen as a panoramic one, just as one among others), deeply based on a formal motive (on what I call, precisely, the "form of the world") but stubbornly sticks to the usual contents and explanations (the "complexity" of the world, the insufficiency of reflective efforts, the "errors" that are always foreign). The reflection attempted here tries, on the contrary, to see the world in its formality, in what it must be for the different philosophies to consider it "complex". To see the world as the stumbling block where the speculative attempts of philosophers break down, as that which made the world "complex".

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Descartes and Kant lament the irreducible plurality of philosophy, instead of seeing in it the development of its more proper nature. I believe that the plurality of philosophies is a fundamental datum of reflection, and not a fortuitous and contingent element to be deplored and tried to be overcome. The fact that, systematically, what I think is denied by others as not going "to the bottom" of things, must say something about what the world is. For it is the world that produces this state of affairs, not an "external" world, but the one into which we have always been thrown. The world is not that which must, some day, be reflected by some philosophy superior to the others, but that which all philosophy denies that the others are capable of reflecting. The world appears in the cracks and crevices of the difference between philosophies and not in the content of any of them. The world is not grasped by one philosophy, but by the fact that there are many philosophies. And it has to be a Meta-philosophy that makes this adequately noticeable. I believe that, on the philosophical plane, multiplicity is insurmountable, but that on the metaphilosophical plane it can be elucidated. The world seems tremendously complicated when viewed as that in the face of which all philosophies fail; it will seem less complicated if viewed as that in the face of which all philosophies triumph. The scandal of philosophy does not consist in the fact that none of them succeeds in giving an account of the world, but in the fact that they all succeed, even if they do so in the midst of the repudiation of other philosophies. In order to be able to think the terminality of being (the nucleus of the form of the world from which the multiplicity of philosophies arises), one must assume philosophical activity in a certain peculiar way. It will be seen later in this Essay that philosophical activity itself can be conceived as a particular way of organizing the terminality of being rather than being, a way of assuming it by disappearing, or as an elaborate way of postponing one's own disappearance. Philosophers continually open up problems, they refuse to solve them in the same reflexive pantomime in which they apparently intended a solution. For "solving problems" is the last thing philosophers want. The life of a thinker the day after the ultimate truth is discovered is unimaginable, the endless problematicity of the world is what he needs to breathe. What a philosopher wants is not truth, but to keep on thinking, and truth can be an obstacle to that. Even when philosophers give the impression that they are interested in "solving problems," when the problems seem to be in the process of being solved, they are once again open,

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redefined its terms, changed its approaches, so that reflection continues, so that the life of thought is not consumed, so that new paradoxes, riddles and incongruities appear and the task of thinking is never closed. Philosophy would be characterized by what the Argentine thinker Eduardo Mallea once called the "continuous rectifications" of philosophers. This seems to me, in the intriguing interweaving of a methodical question with a substantive one, a particular way (the philosophical way) of dealing with the terminality of being. In the sense of this endless task, philosophy is much more at the service of life (of the life of thought) than at the service of truth, insofar as its quest functions only as a spur to continue thinking (to continue living). To enter into my first Metaphilosophy, it is necessary to remove this initial methodological obstacle that entails a particular way of understanding philosophical activity: the idea that the world could only show itself to a thought full of meanders and unfathomably complicated, something that any simple thinking must, perforce, lose; that there is nothing on the surface to discover, that nothing superficial can pass over. In a way, my methodological attempt is based on a kind of choice for the abrupt and unbearably obvious truth, and not for the endless life of thought. If repetitive and trivial truth can be linked to the very movement of ending (and of death as one of its forms), the thought of the terminality of being is also thought of the death of thought, at least as one of the possibilities of reflection. It is not my intention to entertain or to make thoughts caper to the delight of avid readers of philosophy, who enjoy the eternal currency of problems. The very exposition on the terminality of being that, in a certain way, pretends to challenge endless thinking through the methodical liberation of triviality as a resource of thought (triviality not sought, but inevitably encountered by anyone who tries to think the terminality of being), will also be visualized as inadequate, false or absurd by the very rectifying and oppositional dynamics of philosophical activity as we know it. This kind of reaction will be considered, in my metareflection, as a fundamental fact, not as mere contingency. The lack of communication between my text and the reader, the fundamental misunderstanding between our respective self-absorptions, will show the sense of my main meta-philosophical theses. Trying to refute me -whether I succeed or not- will be how my reader will have understood me. Forced to sink into his own self-absorption, he will have ceased to understand these theses, which is the normal destiny of philosophical ideas. (In a word: the thesis of

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that we never speak of the same thing and that we are constantly raising only one possibility of thought among thousands, is self-applied, in a suicidal way, to my own meta-philosophy. For a thought that does not commit suicide cannot be taken seriously; if it continues to live after having attacked and eliminated all other thoughts, it means that it did not think to the end). The triviality of thought about the terminality of being becomes, paradoxically, "interesting" by force of its systematic concealment. What by itself would constitute a triviality, becomes a profound triviality, because it deeply conceals. Certain trivialities become important by virtue of the force with which they are disguised and postponed. This is how saying trivialities can become important. Un-hiding regularly hidden trivia can be a non-trivial task. If trivialities about the terminality of being were not systematically concealed, it would not be important to talk about them. If to any extent the present reflection manages to be original, heuristic and inciting, it can only be so thanks to the colossal force of the regular concealment of the terminality of being. Without it, all its content would have become impalpable, not profoundly trivial, but trivial for repeating (tiresomely) the same fundamental meta-truth. The present reflection owes precisely to the concealment, the fragile appearance of having said something, in the end, important. My first meta-philosophy aims to recover the importance of truth about the world on a meta-philosophical level, even if truth remains trivial on the philosophical level. Without concealment, that meta-philosophical truth would be dispensable. Radically thought philosophical contents will still have to gain their own triviality, and in that gain it will be seen whether or not that triviality is important or worthy of being said. For much needs to have been thought to begin to see something as profoundly trivial. A decision has always to be made: where one is going to reflect philosophically, at what level of sharpening of the human situation and the problems of the world, and at what level of depth of reflection one is going to try to think. This may depend on what is being sought. "Depth" is not what we must necessarily choose, nor what defines a philosophy as such. In philosophy we have no obligation to be "deep," just as we have no obligation to be "edifying" or "publicly useful." We will be philosophers, and the rest will follow.

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But, to make matters worse, in addition to being trivial, my meta-philosophy is also authorial, that is, if you will pardon the word, mine. (Professionalized philosophy fears the authorial, and reassures itself with quotations). ) This does not mean that it is mine alone, or that it is "private", or that it concerns only me, or that it raises personal and non-transferable problems. I mean that it arose from the painful and uncomfortable friction of my thinking personality with things, and that developing i t met, as is inevitable, with the thoughts of others, but without the one-sided relationship of "competent commentary". They did not arise from readings or from the worldview of other philosophers, of the many I read. I encountered these other visions only through my own philosophy. If South American intellectuals think that they are not yet sufficiently "prepared" to philosophize, that they have not yet finished the period of their school education, and that a century or two of intense studies are still necessary, repeating, assimilating, quoting and "keeping up to date", they should be surprised at the unusual extension of this endless schooling. For we are always perfectly prepared to philosophize if we do it from ourselves. Our torments do not need a bibliography. In addition to trivial and authorial philosophy, what will be read here will seem to be the fruit of a dogmatic and pre-critical metaphysics, contrary to the anti-metaphysical philosophizing of the second half of the twentieth century. For I accept that the world has a fixed, given and immovable structure, which we are always trying to move, to make complex, to construct, to plagiarize, as if we were arrogantly passing ourselves off as its makers (perhaps in order to suffer less the humiliation of submission to its monotonous workmanship). In these preliminaries, I should say that my philosophy, in its metaphilosophical register, is essentially the attempt to formulate a "first meta-philosophy", not strictly a "metaphysics". It will be clear from what follows in these texts that, contrary to the whole philosophy of the twentieth century, I do consider it possible to speak of an ultimate foundation of the world. My text will also have to give, albeit laterally, a diagnosis of the "anti-metaphysical" spirit of this turn of the century, and of the systematic negation of any form of fundamentalism, showing that mine is, paradoxically, a first meta-philosophy. This thought is extemporaneously linked to a primordial experience, to an attitude, and also to a specific kind of terror, to what, Borgianly, could be called a "universe". I confess that I have had a fundamental philosophical experience - that of the terminality of being and that of its consequent "valuelessness" - which I am now trying to formulate in an elaborated way, and of which I have lived and thought fragments throughout my already long life dedicated to

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philosophical reflection. It is certainly a personal metaphysics, but never private, in the sense of being mine alone, but in the sense of not being thinkable by anyone. (I believe, on the other hand, that no philosophy is absolutely "for everyone"). This text believes, naively, that the real exists, that the terminality of being is the real, of which mortality is only one type. To show that I had to sustain a foundationalist metaphysics. Philosophers representative of the spirit of the times, such as Richard Rorty, argue that we can dispense with ultimate foundations, both in epistemology and in morality. He links this with Platonism, substantialism and political authoritarianism, and with the desire for a reassuring stability. With metaphysical and religious reference points fallen, all absolutes and "great certainties" must fall as well. We live, according to him, in a world of contingencies and fragile beliefs, where we can only have short-range plans for our well-being, without grand narratives or grand destinations. This seems to me to correctly describe the intra-world in its astonishing variety and fragmentation. Rorty and twentieth-century philosophers in general board a train that is already in motion, visualizing not the birth of the process but only the life that lies ahead to be lived, with its cognitive and moral enterprises, its projects of fulfillment and "well-being." For the intra-world, Rorty's view is convincing. But I do not recall a single text where Rorty talks about death or birth. For him, human life is a realm of practical realizations that must pay off in the short term. He never asks himself why we were forced to abandon the metaphysics of grand narratives and grand destinies and exchange it for a philosophy of the fragile world; he never asks himself where this fragility and the current need to assume it come from. They come, I will argue, from the same core that led, in the past, to embrace dogmatic metaphysics and that now demands its abandonment. For that being that is now "weakened" was in reality always weak, and its original weakness motivated both metaphysics and its subsequent abandonment. This also has its resonance in Rorty's philosophy when he, after speaking exclusively of welfare, is forced to allude to cruelty and suffering, and to change his optimistic slogan of the "promotion of welfare" (a luxurious project) for the much more modest one of "diminishing suffering". All of this - the abandonment of the metaphysics of "grand narratives," the acceptance of fragility, and the trading of "well-being" for the diminution of suffering - point to a structure of the world and show that the intra-world does not stand alone, that whatever we do in it

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will have to look sideways at its insistent terminal structure. To point toward that structure (as I irritatingly do in this essay on the death of being) will not be to build another metaphysics of "grand narratives," but to point toward the minimal metaphysics that explains what was the profound necessity of generating a metaphysics of "grand narratives" and the no less profound necessity of its present overcoming. This minimal metaphysics, unlike the great affirmative metaphysics of the past, brings nothing reassuring in its stability; on the contrary, it invites us to view with uneasiness all human projects, including philosophical projects, and including Richard Rorty's "deflated" philosophical project. Metaphysical sensibility in this minimal sense develops when we begin to perceive certain constants throughout human history: humans have always been in wars and conflicts, always experienced great misunderstandings, always created protections against natural forces, always believed in myths and superior figures and ideals. These simple recurrences lead one to think that these things are not historically created by specific circumstances, but belong to some background of being, to a natural ontology. (However much this might make the postmodern Heideggerian and Wittgensteinean shudder). ) It seems implausible to continue to provide purely psychological or sociological explanations for recurrent human actions over the course of centuries. How long will it be reasonable to continue attributing these recurrences to historical contingencies and specific social forms? What separates me from Rorty and all the philosophers of the twentieth century, the philosophers of the "end of certainties", is that I think that the intra-world functions in this way (is forced to function in this way) because there is a minimal nucleus on which all things rest, and that this nucleus is "negative", in a sense that will become clearer (or darker, depending on the will of the reader) in the course of this Essay. It is as if the terminality of being were a very tiny point that is supporting the immensity of the world on its back. This tiny point is what I call "the form of the world". And this minimal metaphysics has none of the difficulties of traditional metaphysics, even when it points towards an ultimate foundationalism. These are some of the problems that arise when we try to philosophize in the 21st century: when something absolute is discovered, there is an obligation to deny it, because, as we know, t h e r e is nothing absolute and there cannot be. Once you discover a certainty, you have to abandon it,

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for it has no place in the epoch of the "end of certainties". Here the philosophy of the "form of the world" has an internal drawback, since it has found a strongly organizing, agglutinating and destructive content with which it is not sure what to do. As if the form of the world, paradoxically, were linked with a Great Content, with a privileged content. And it is as if the being were ashamed of having this content. What to do with this uncomfortable essence in the midst of a century without essences? All my thinking tyrannically refers back to the content of terminality, but, at the same time, I am forced not to let myself be defined by that content, to bet on my own "making myself", on my own contingent goals (Rorty). I am forced to pretend, to pretend that I have only intra-worldly problems. Terminality (of which death is only one mode) is the place where form and content meet. Any human life will have that content. If this content disturbs and energizes the creation of values, it will be for strictly formal reasons. For the terminality of being is formal, and, therefore, an obstacle to thought, because it is precisely the type of absolute that, according to the philosophy of our times, is bound to have disappeared in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The philosophers of the twentieth century, in a Foucauldian tone, will ask: "From where does the discourse of the "terminality of being" speak? How is it generated socially and politically? On terminality (and on mortality specifically) it is possible to have different Gestalten: some see it as fall, others as ascent. "What you offer is not the ultimate reference of the world and of thought but only a vocabulary, a narrative, a semantic proposal, a politics, a regime of truth." This is weak thinking: terminality is something to be overcome as a principle, only accepted as an intramundane circumstance alongside others. This is the current word of order of philosophy. The thought of the "form of the world" holds that humans of any latitude are always referred to their terminality, by the attitudes they will have to take and by the values they will have to create in order to learn the impossible task of ending. But this thought is, in the 20th century, invited to abandon these metaphysical illusions and to live in the Rortyan ontic super-market, where there are only "problems to be solved". Death will surprise us buying an electrodomestic appliance or a book, it doesn't matter. Rortyans do not deal with death, and logicians only know that all men are mortal. In the second half of the twentieth century the fascinating dispute between German universalists and French and American "post-modernists", a funny dispute in which the latter

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The latter assume "relativistic theses" and the former try to combat them with affirmative devices (of the type of Apel's "performative self-contradiction", or the resources of Habermas' "communicative acting"). Rorty, in contrast, maintains that there is no need to think foundationally and that everything is reduced to the use of certain vocabularies linked to the satisfaction of needs. Here the widely spread ideology of the present time prevails, that everything that is fixed and permanent is harmful and detrimental, while what is dynamic, variable and revisable is humanizing, good and advisable. "All the descriptions we make of things are descriptions that serve our purposes," says Rorty. In the face of this lackadaisical treatment of problems (which eliminates at a stroke the philosophical reflection of many centuries in favor of a great Conceptual Utility Fair), the Germans have only to oppose their socialdemocratic foundationalism, the rules of Unlimited Dialogue and the Aprioris of all Communication, with which they easily expose themselves to the malicious criticism of the relativists. In everything that refers to the realm of the intramundane, relativistic attitudes are difficult to refute. It is necessary to remind them, in a radical way, that all projects - like Socrates - are mortal, and, as a counter-attack, to show them that their own relativistic projects consist in a rehashing of something fixed. Rorty develops his vocabulary (since not his "philosophy," which he does not want to have) as if death does not exist, as if mortality were as constructed as bank accounts and insurance. But terminality is exactly what cannot be fabricated, what cannot be constituted and, above all, what de-constitutes our projects, what, fundamentally, does not serve our instrumental planning, our ends and purposes. The destruction of our projects may take time, but it comes. Terminality is not a temporal category. The "delay" of a being in fully consummating its being-minguant is philosophically inessential. It should be pointed out to the relativist that the world has to be, formally, something that can be described with quite clear and definite features, in order for him - the relativist - to have the idea that the only thing that can be done is to construct provisional and utilitarian theories. One could imagine another reality that would not give rise to this kind of attitude; in such a way, the relativistic theory, in spite of everything, reflects the world. It is the difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of living in this world, of being born-dying, that leads to the construction of theories, relativistic or not: the attempt to show things as being, at all times and without problems, available for our aims and purposes, is the relativistic way of hiding the terminality of being, just as Apel and Habermas hide it under the democratic clothes of the aprioris that would guarantee the

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functioning of the "public sphere". In both relativism and foundationalism, the terminality of being is hidden, it does not participate in the discussion. Something also fundamental to understand the first meta-philosophy developed in this book is that it is, if you will, a kind of betrayal of the usual affirmative use of philosophy. It is a philosophizing that unmasks the endless concealment of the terminality of being by philosophy, including philosophies of death. The initial difficulty is that I have no wonderful proposal to offer. I am not a European thinker. I may have my head in the sky, but a Latin American always has his feet in the mud. He does not have at hand the marvelous spiritual possibilities of the ancient world, of the Italian Renaissance or German Romanticism, that portentous capacity to fly, to hold existence in the air, to suppress the miseries of the body by pure thought. A Latin American philosopher does not know how to fly, and for him it is a compliment to be told that his thought "lacks speculative flight". In general, he is not considered a deep thinker who does not have something affirmative to offer, if he merely describes what everyone knows, that the world is not a good place. It seems that a "true philosopher" has the obligation to explore the higher regions of the spirit until, some day, death annihilates him; but it seems that death is not part of his philosophy but only of its external limit; for the limit itself one has no thought. I, on the contrary, want to have thought for that, for that limit. From European philosophy comes to us something like a spiritual and "elevated" vision of life, where there are no vulgarities of the body, its imperious needs, cold, hunger, pain. It is always about a "transcendence". It seems that philosophy begins and ends far from the miserable poles of life. I believe that we Latin Americans do not manage to reach those extreme degrees of sublimity. They don't tell us stories, or we don't believe them anymore. Nor do we manage to believe in philosophical constructions: we see them in a panoramic view, we play with them eruditely, but we do not manage to take them seriously. (Perhaps that is why Brazilians, for example, are not at all interested in having their own philosophies: why create another one if we already have so many?) Philosophy has been developed in an affirmative way, and someone who is present in its history must have made some "contribution", must have made the world of thought better and more beautiful. Reading Dostoiewski, Thomas Bernhard, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Leon Tolstoi, Milan Kundera, Virginia Wolf,

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Henry James, Stendhal, Guimaraes Rosa, José Lezama Lima, Lovecraft, Kafka, Broch, Kerouac, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Clarisse Lispector, Borges, Bioy Casares and Ernesto Sábato, among thousands. Lawrence, Clarisse Lispector, Borges, Bioy Casares and Ernesto Sábato, among thousands, I see that all their stories, in one way or another, deal with human hardship, pain, death, disease, injustice, ingratitude, betrayal, lies, ungratefulness, war, contempt and the unspeakable efforts of humans to build within that a relief. Contrary to literature, when dealing with a question philosophically, it is not supposed to describe it in its singular pain, in its offensive and indecent concreteness suffered, but thought has to fly over and understand the problem outside its lived dimension, it has to give it some theoretical, general, impersonal and anonymous "solution", where feelings, emotions and affective impacts do not count, but only what reasoning can say and deduce. In that sense, my philosophizing would like to remain at a literary level of expression, in the insurmountable pain of the singular, without any kind o f "solution"; but, at the same time, it wants to be philosophy, and not mere conceptual entertainment. (Borges and Cioran laughed when they were called philosophers. But when they laugh they contribute to maintain the dubious reference point of anonymous and depersonalized philosophy, alien to any literary expression). These methodological preliminaries sound misleading insofar as they are already part, inevitably, of what we want to think about here. I have set out the main obstacles to thinking in the present time: (1) We have to say something important, something that attracts the attention of the audience; (2) We have to expose something or someone, not expose ourselves; this would be impudent, irresponsible and lazy, it would give the impression of wanting to be a philosopher, and that is - especially in Latin America - an arrogant temerity; (3) Whatever is said cannot be absolute, one cannot bet on any "great certainty", because it is already known that we live in the era of the end of all certainty; (4) Whatever you say, you have to offer "ways out", your thinking has to be affirmative, it has to offer something for knowledge to be possible, for morality to be possible, for life to be possible, for society to be possible, for the future to be possible, for some god to be possible. You cannot be pessimistic or skeptical, nihilistic or relativistic; pessimism, skepticism, relativism, nihilism, are the great villains of philosophy, transitory states that must point toward the great final finding that removes us from those morbid and unproductive states; you have to say how life can be lived. What you say about how to end will not be considered productive.

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But these four features - triviality, authoriality, groundedness, negativity - are the most conspicuous characteristics of my own thought and of my own thinking. There is nothing interesting (much less new) in what I have to say. Terminality is not interesting because everything "interesting" is built against terminality; it is monotonous, boring and insistent, without any personal charm. It is not interesting to harp on what everyone knows. Second, I pretend to have done my own philosophy, my expositions of other authors are insignificant and inaccurate, and I don't think anyone "learns" anything from me (despite the fact that most of my students think otherwise). Third, my early meta-philosophical thoughts are inevitably metaphysical because they accept a strong notion of "nature" (as we shall see) as given and permanent. I am thus a foundationalist, because I believe that the world has a minimal structure. Finally (and this is, perhaps, most important) although philosophy has always had a strong affirmative vocation and has been concerned with offering ways out of a dark world, my negative thinking does not offer ways out (nor do I understand well what it would mean to offer them), and in that sense I betray philosophy in its most noble traditional role, because I use it more to despair than to save or gladden. Perhaps the only usefulness of this preliminary methodological assumption is to point out that the meta-philosophical prelude is already imbricated with the very question one wants to think about. In order to be able to think the terminality of being, one must assume philosophical activity in a certain alternative way or against the grain of what is currently understood as doing philosophy. One cannot think the terminality of being in the same way - affirmative and sublimating - in which European philosophy has regularly thought its questions. There is, then, an intertwining of the methodical question with the substantive question that remains to be thought. Never does thought feel its helplessness so much as when it tries to think the very helplessness of thought. For the thought of the terminality of being is, itself, terminal, and thematizes the very terminality of thinking.

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1. NEGATIVE ONTOLOGY: TERMINALITY OF BEING. ONTOLOGICAL ORIGINS O F STRUCTURAL WORTHLESSNESS.

1.1. Towards the terminality of being. Death as a form of ending. We usually note the wear and tear and final disappearance of all things, living or non-living: people, animals, stones, mountains, stars or galaxies, as well as their relationships. We note the terminality of everything that arises. Mortality as a form of terminality is linked to wear and tear, to end, to be undermined, worn out, corroded. Perhaps "mortality" is a term that does not carry far in the investigation of being. If one is not going to accept the highly metaphorical degree of an expression like "The stars die," it would be better to state that we note the ending, the ending, the succumbing, one particular type of which is mortality. (In what follows, I sometimes use the terms "terminality" and "mortality" interchangeably, although the former is broader and more encompassing, and is the metaphysically decisive one.) From what was said in the preliminaries, if I held a fundamentalist philosophy in the 13th century that said that the ultimate truth is God, I would not have to meta-justify it as I have to do now, in the 21st century, when I affirm that the ultimate truth is terminality. In other times, one would have to justify it only in its own terms. I maintain that the truth of any being is its termination. I would like to maintain here that terminality is the ultimate reference of the thought of being. The ending, the termination (of which mere death is a case) is that which cannot be synthesized in higher principles or referred to something more fundamental. All that we are and do is ultimately referred to the terminality of being, both our own and that of all that there is, in the form of a having arisen in completion. This is what must be clarified in the present Essay. But meta-philosophically, it must be said that nothing - except a certain "spirit of the times" alluded to in the Introduction - prevents us from developing the possibility of an ultimate foundation, if we do not think of it as an affirmative foundation (of a metaphysical or theological type, but also of a secular type, as in Nietzsche or, whatever it may be, in Heidegger, as we shall see), i.e., not as a foundation

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supreme, spiritual or transcendent, in the most varied forms of transcendence. If the foundation is brought to its pure immanence, there is nothing intrinsically wrong in thinking that the world has an ultimate foundation in this deflated sense. Those metaphysicaltheological foundations were imposing. On the contrary, the terminality (the ending) is precisely that immense triviality liberated by an impeded reflection, contrary to what is expected today of a genuine thought. How is the world, and how is philosophy from the trivial truth of the terminality of being, in the sense of its initial ending? This is a fundamental question of my meta-philosophical thought first: Why does the emerged being die instead of continuing? (Or, provocatively, and in an anti-Leibnizian tone: Why is there nothingness and not rather being?). A question that is not only to be understood biologically, but also metaphysically. My first meta-philosophy tries to explain why this triviality is not raised despite its irritating obviousness. The fact that this triviality is neither pointed out nor transformed into the main theme of any philosophy (on the contrary, as we shall see, all philosophies are constituted in a systematic concealment of it) points not trivially to something in itself trivial. This is not to say that philosophers do not speak of the terminality of being. They speak, especially when they refer to the theme of death. But death is, perhaps, the least revealing manifestation of the terminality of being, or else it runs the risk of being thought that death exposes the totality of the terminality of being. That the being of entities dies is a reflection of the full completion of being. Thus, frequently, in the philosophers' talk about "death", the terminality of being is hidden. It is a speech that does not say, that speaks in order to conceal and postpone, that does not expose. In the philosophers' talk, death continues to appear as something that "happens" to the living, and not as a reflection of their being in its most intimate making, something that affects the living and that is not reduced to the mere weakening of their forces but to their deepest ontological structure. The philosophers' discourse on death not only disguises the terminal structure of being, but is not even an adequate discourse on death. For death is presented as something that appears at the end of a life, whether this end is immediate or long awaited. But what is essential is not said about death. What is never said about death is what links it internally with birth, with arising, with having arisen. Would the taboo of death be in dependence on something that "arose badly", that was "badly born"? We do not know yet. But it is

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suspects that the scandal of death, the fact that it is always treated as adventitious and external, as anomaly and strangeness, is an inheritance of an older scandal, the scandal of the initial stumbling of birth. The real scandal is that something has arisen, and not that what has arisen has to die. Precisely because of this concealment of the stumbled origin, death is always spoken of on the sly and as if to neutralize it, without really exposing it. Death exposed would dazzle and could become something unbearable for philosophical thought, even for the most "critical", insofar as what torments humans about death is nothing other than what was given to them at birth. The deepest thought will not have been given until we dare to look our birth squarely in the face as the primordial, inescapable and trivial fact of having-emerged-terminal, and in that terminality consists our being, later adorned with the most varied contents. One must become familiar with this idea that terminality is simply what a being has gained by arising. Terminality is a form of being, that form which invaded and took account of everything in the world. Terminality is thus the form of being, and not some attachment. Terminal being is characterized by fragility (even of "strong" natures, such as those of a shark or a mountain), by gradual destruction, friction (in the case of living beings, pain) and final annihilation. Death is not only linked with dying, but with the terminal being of being as such, with its passing full of frictions and stumbling blocks. What is at issue here is a foundation of intelligibility, a radical point of reference, and not a physical causal or psychological motivational explanation. For example, the mathematics that the mathematician does (let us not speak of the physical person of the mathematician) is terminal. Mathematics points, in its own way, toward terminal-being, toward fundamental limitation, however advanced it may be, however marvelous its developments, however astonishing its progress. It is not terminal because it was made by a mortal being. Stars and galaxies are not made by mortals, and yet they are terminal too, they are condemned to perish, to suffer friction, to degenerate, to meet their own limits, purely and simply by the radical and unassailable fact of having come into being. The laws of mathematics do not depend, internally, on terminality, but they reveal it in their own way. And what happens with mathematics happens with any other human activity; only that it has been good to begin with it, because mathematics seems, somehow, unlimited, all-powerful,

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independent, a sort of formal model of immortality. The mortal fragility of mathematics will manifest itself, at some point, here and there, in the very fabric of its constructions (for example in the crisis of naive set theory or in the metatheorems of limitation), beyond its powerful intramundane self-substantiation. The terminality of the being of entities is an internal limit of what can be thought, but a defining limit, not an adventitious one. It is not a merely empirical phenomenon but a structure, at the same time, factual and necessary, contingent and internal. For being might not have been terminal. But from the moment it is, terminality informs and structurally influences all that is done in being, all that is in the world, and all that can be thought. Mortality (as a form of terminality) not only "traverses" the world, but IS it, constitutes it insuperably and inextirpably. The dying of living beings is not a mere biological or material fact (occurring only in "nature," in the sense of matter and energy), but the very having arisen mortal from a certain kind of terminal being. Human relations and states of mind are also terminal and perish, just like animals, stones, mountains and galaxies. It is therefore important to distinguish between two dimensions of death; the meta-philosopher is first interested not in dying, but in mortality as structure (precisely, terminality), that which establishes the trivial and astonishing correspondence between arising and ending. Whatever a thing is, whatever its specific content, its situation, its making, it is terminal, even if it is so in a contingent way. "Terminal being" is, then, the same as, simply, "being." And the redundant, pleonastic nature of that expression evidences it as the ultimate foundation, as the insuperable triviality. Even when we do not know what we are talking about, even when we have not seen or heard anything, even when we do not know of a certain unknown planet or of certain beings we have not yet encountered, we already know of all those things that they will end, that just as they arose they will disappear, and that they will disappear because they arose, whatever their characteristics, whatever the fabrics of their particular modes of being and their particular time and mode of passing away. Their emergence has always set them on the path of their constitutive terminality. Terminality is groundedness in the sense that everything that is (whether material or immaterial, living or non-living) responds, in different ways, to the primordial and irrebasable fact of its constitutive termination. In this sense, everything that happens in the intraworld is

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as flooded with completion. The first meta-philosophy studies being as terminal emergence. Beings, seen by the first meta-philosophy, are constantly and regularly referred to their defining emergence, independently of their specific determinations. Occultation (on the human plane) works constantly, day and night, in the sense of detaching beings from their original emergence, studying them as beings that are simply there and can be described, and where their completion is postponed and forgotten. Traditional logic and metaphysics have tended to present self-identity as a primordial characteristic of being, or as the characteristic that coincides with being itself, with the very making of being. For every being is what it is, or is equal to itself. This would be a purely logical way of referring to the being of entities in their very entity. Terminality, on the contrary, with mortality as one of its forms, is not a logical way of approaching being, but a synthetic and contingent, but nevertheless constitutive, permanent and insistent way. Traditional metaphysics, steeped in theology, has held that entities are necessarily "identical to themselves." In first metaphilosophy, entities, on the other hand, are by no means necessarily terminal, or mortal by necessity. Notwithstanding that, entities (beings, the entities that are) are constitutively terminal. (On the other hand, identity, even if it can be defended as a constitutive mode of being something that should still be thoroughly discussed - is not the kind of characteristic capable of propitiating the thoughts that are of interest here. The purely analytical triviality of identity is not the kind of triviality that interests the present reflection.) 1.2. Nature / Fortress All beings end, but they have different ways of ending, of ending, of finding their non-being (non-being is said in many ways). Things are finandas (a house, rocks, consciousness, a star, a book, an animal, inspiration, the sea, patience), everything ends, but in different ways. Fire, death by burning. Water, death by drying or drowning. Air, death by suffocation. But also human relationships, death by lack of communication and disengagement. (Every human relationship carries its end in its own emergence, like fire). From the point of view of the foundation, it matters that things end, it does not matter how. How beings end depends on the characteristics of each one of them.

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Ending is not present in every possible world but in the very possibility of something being a world (any). Ending is not something that appears within one world yes, within another world no, because ending is what the world is insofar as it emerges as any world. Within its possibility essentially nests its terminality: possible worlds are terminal worlds, possibilities of the terminal-being. The entity is combustible, suffocable, floodable, incommunicable. But terminality is neither "origin" nor "cause" nor "end" of anything, but only the mode of being of things, the mode of their happening. Any natural principle taken (water, air) or any psychological law (incommunicability, intolerance) is appropriate to expose the terminality of being. When philosophers of the past said that the ultimate truth is God, they were responding from the spiritualist-culturalist tradition that comes from Platonism and Neo-Platonism (see Part 3 of this Essay). According to this tradition, the foundation had to have a certain type of perfection or completeness in order to be the foundation of the most imperfect and incomplete. In this tradition, in order to be a foundation it was necessary to be the best, the most perfect and luminous. This assumes that the foundation does not allow itself to be sullied by what it founds. In my reflection, on the contrary, the foundation is no less imperfect than what it founds, no less mortal, no less fragile, no less lacking and incomplete. It is no less pitiful or less deteriorated. The foundation belongs to the world, but to its "worldly" making, not to the underworld or to some sublime Superworld. The foundation of the world is in the world's own world-being, in the form that makes it the world, the terminal world that it is, irrespective of the particular kind of world it is and its particular mode of ending. The first meta-philosophy that is proposed here travels along the path of the full recognition that this "nature" that is considered as the overcome moment of the Hegelian dialectic, is the very "place" of the terminality of being, and that this nature cannot be overcome, in a "dialectical" (Hegel) or "existential" (Heidegger, Sartre) or any other way. But "nature" is not only the mineral texture or atomic composition of objects, or the biological fabric of living beings. It also encompasses all that suffers friction and decay, all that is emergentdying, things like human relationships, psychological states, artistic inspiration, virtues (such as perseverance), etc. A relationship that deteriorates with the passing of time, that begins exuberantly, that manifests its own internal weaknesses and that ends up transforming into hatred that which it

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began as love, it is an emergent-mortal process like any other, and, therefore, it is included in the idea of "nature". The processes of deterioration of human relations (and of feelings, attitudes, political positions, governments, etc.) respond to the internal components of their elements, and manifest themselves with the same necessity as the processes of material nature. It is true that the participants react to this in very different ways, but also the elements of material processes react in different ways (not all people react in the same way to intolerance, but not all material objects react in the same way to heat). Thus, in addition to being subjected to the final demise of their bodily materialities and their spiritual qualities, humans, during their lives, are already paying partial terminal debts, both corporeal and psychological: some of their organs become ill, some of their relationships deteriorate, and so on. Perhaps the fundamental fact that it is impossible to sever the links with "nature" thus understood, transforms the world into an impossibility for the human being (at least for him). Terminality is presented to him as nature, and the terminal is marked by the provisional, the ephemeral, the changing, the degenerating, the unpredictable, by that which "cannot be counted on", which does not allow even short-range forecasts. But in the case of the human animal, this difficulty becomes gigantic. For his brain, although it does not automatically give him rationality, has given him an instrument for introducing control and constancy and the hope of obtaining them, without, however, such an objective ever being fully attained. All that the human animal achieves is provisional and fragile, and it achieves it in the midst of a struggle to the death against expiration. A being too rational to be an animal and too animal to be rational has more difficulties in the face of the terminal nature of being than a non-human animal, even though both human and non-human animals suffer the pains of fragility and provisionality. Rough contact with the terminal nature of being means that beings must strive to simply be. For terminal being is not a gift: all its difficulties must be laboriously worked out (and it is this that has created, in traditional theodicies, the idea that humans are guilty of these difficulties, guilty of their terminality, as we shall see later). The terminality of being (in living beings in the form of mortality) is an insurmountable difficulty for humans if we understand that to be-mortal is not simply to die, but to emerge, to chafe, to suffer, to be subject to contingency and the unforeseen, to be unable to make provisions, to be constantly surprised, wounded, sullied, to not "have time", to not be able to

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to carry out one's plans, to be unable to behave as one would wish, to be unable to love or be loved fully and permanently, to be unable to keep what one loves, to be subjected to gradual and inevitable moral and physical deterioration. To be-terminal is to be fragile, disabled, unsuitable, maladjusted, malfunctioning, to walk out of time, to wander, to wander, to feel fear, to feel pain, to be subjected to forces that are not understood. Nature" has entered our reflection in a somewhat inopportune way. For, in truth, we were speaking of being, and not of nature, and it would seem illegitimate to identify them without some supplementary explanation. What happens is that, in an adjectival conception of being, of being always with small letters and where the very being of being is - for a human being - mortality, "nature" seems a privileged scenario of this type of being, which can be called, with justice, "naturalized being" (in this sense of "nature" as the terminality of all types of entities, material or not). In this way, being and nature approach each other, as in the pre-Socratic philosophers and as in many indigenous American cultures. The ending emergence is visibly linked to the nature of things. And this link helps to conceive nature in a minimalist way, as the simple and crude scenario of the dying-emergence of entities. Nature" is considered in the minimalist sense of mortality, and not in the maximalist sense of, for example, "jusnaturalisms" or of the alleged "natural" slavery of certain men, which constituted, in the past, a clear abuse of the notion of "natural". Nature was placed by affirmative thought alongside the metaphysics of entelechies and theology as foundations, without perceiving (or perhaps perceiving-hiding) that nature tolerates a minimal version, a qualification that neither metaphysics nor theology could ever hold, because of their unrenounceable maximalism (spiritualist or culturalist). What disqualified nature from being a foundation was the fact of conceiving it metaphysically or theologically, in a maximalist way. Seen minimalistically, simply as the emergence-terminal of everything (of states of matter or of psychological or situational states) nature can be seen as the foundation of everything that is and is not, of everything that can or cannot be thought. (Which is, certainly -let us not forget-, an immense triviality). Being and philosophizing have not been constituted as natural, or in the direction of nature - in the sense of referring to a minimal foundation - but, on the contrary, in opposition to nature. The invention of culture has cherished the possibility that she

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can, at some point, if not totally replace, at least satisfactorily dominate nature. But, in the sense that has been exposed, it is clear that culture itself is nature, in the sense that also cultural goods and actions are internally terminal just for having arisen. Human relationships, political projects and artistic enterprises are cultural productions internally eaten away by the terminality of their being. One of the first effects of this anti-natural constitution - which I call "affirmative", in the affirming-positivizing sense that I study in the Critique of Affirmative Morality (1996) - of being and of philosophizing, is to render ultimate and fundamental truths "trivial", and the philosophies that speak about them and try to develop them "dangerous" and "inoperative". To constitute oneself in systematic opposition to minimal nature is, I believe, common to all humans, to all cultures, to all tribes studied by anthropologists, common to Germans, Brazilians, Indians and Eskimos. Although such a thing is sometimes proclaimed, there is no culture that is constituted according to nature, following its generating/degenerating duplicity. To do so would be to set oneself immediately on the road to one's own destruction. Life forms that manifest the purpose of "living according to nature" (e.g., vegetarians) have already grasped "nature" in a solely generative and culturalized manner, catering to the demands of humans, and whose degenerating element has been elaborated in such a way as not to harm. All ethnographic differences stem from different ways of taking a position on terminality, expiration and wasting away, whether some tribes develop state-of-the-art technology for this purpose or others engage in cannibalism. (That is why the assertion that, for some peoples, "death is not a problem" is not accepted here. This assertion comes too late. If ending does not seem problematic for a people, it means that, already early on, the spirit and culture of that people reached the primordial fact and rendered it harmless; the "non-problematicity" of death exists, yes, in many peoples, but as a cultural construction, not as a primitive experience). In philosophy, nature was, ab initio, stigmatized by affirmativity, even from the very word "nature" itself, linked to "nascor", "to be born". In its very name, nature is seen only as the birth of things, not as their death. The word adopts the root of "being born" in its etymology, but hides that of dying, "mortality". It is not, in fact, death that is hidden here, but the mortality of arising (of being born), the intrinsic character of the mortality of being. Nature is already originally visualized as "that which

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from which or from which beings are born and develop". It is nature as source and wellspring. The word "nature", because of its connection with "being born" and "unfolding", already carries within itself, in an inextricable way, the only affirmative interpretation that makes it unsuitable as a foundation. Nature is named as "the generation of that which is born", much less as the "de-generation of that which dies". It is named as "the first element from which emerges all that grows", but much less remembered as "the last element into which submerges all that dies". Nature is, in reality, source and tomb, emergence and submergence, birth and dejection, unfolding and envelopment, evolution and involution, it is both at the same time and inextricably and inseparably. "To be born" is not "to emerge", but "to emerge- mortally", to emerge as "dying" (or also: as "waning". The moon is waxing- waning (and its ranges), and the moon is ALL THAT, its waxing and its waning. We admit that of the moon because it does not cause us pain when it wanes, perhaps only to some ultra-sensitive poets). If the term "nature" refers only to the pure arising, it is necessary to have another word to refer to the inseparable complex arising-emerging, emerging-submerging, the "natumortaleza". The natumortaleza is that which, in bringing forth, kills, that which, by putting in the being, wears out and expels. Nature should not be conceived as a generous and kindly Great Mother, characterized only by a "going" movement, a creative, establishing movement, pure opening. This is still a religious conception of nature (and of motherhood), still very much in force in the midst of an allegedly "secularized" philosophy. (On the level of moral reflection, to the affirmative interpretation of "nature" corresponds the myth of "maternal love", taken by many (such as Hans Jonas) as a paradigm of moral relationship, a mystification of the same type as the pre-Freudian belief in the sexual innocence of children. These are myths linked to a presumed "purity" of natural maternal intention, something holy, ethereal or divine. The late belief in a unilateral "maternal love", belief in the exclusively positive part of nature, is one of the great prejudices of modern philosophical thought, and we will understand little about the shape of the world as long as we maintain its validity). What happens with the term "nature" (that the term itself already entails an affirmative interpretation) also happens with terms such as "existence". To conceive of certain entities as "existent" is already to conceive of them affirmatively, insofar as "to exist" means to

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"ec-sistere", "to emerge", "to go out" (See Arturo García Astrada, Tiempo y Eternidad, Gredos, p. 17). The word "existence" hides the moment of "sinking", of "closing", of "going under", what we could call "in-sistence", in the sense of submerging. (To insist is to repeat. To exist is the new, the unrepeatable; to insist is the old, the always the same, the dead). Entities exist/insist, they belong to natumortaleza, and only with both elements inseparably united will we understand the way of being of being, something impeded in the usual affirmative reflection. There is a metaphysical version of the foundation that accommodated the supranatural metaphysics of the past. But natumortaleza in the minimal sense provides a nontheological version of the foundation. The foundation need not be metaphysical in a transnatural sense. The ultimate foundation can be physical. This was, perhaps, the deep intuition of the Ionian "physiologists," although they thought of a specific physical element as the foundation (Water, Air, Fire), rather than conceiving of a more abstract and general natural mode of the very being of entities. Terminality is not reduced to water or fire, but certainly water, fire and any other natural element are terminal in the minimal sense of natumortaleza. Maximalism in the use of nature is seen, for example, when speaking of the "natural rights" of man, or when claiming that some human or social practice (e.g., homosexuality, or suicide) is "unnatural". Nature, seen minimally as natumortaleza, is simply an endless process of generation/degeneration of all that is, of all that there is. Talk of "natural rights," "natural duties," "natural virtues," "natural values," "natural tendencies," "natural forms of government," or "natural nurture" are illegitimate maximizations of nature, cultural projections. In the minimalist sense, each scientific province (natural or social) is a particular sector of the terminality of being, a sectorialized explanation of a specific way of ending. (All science is about some sector of the terminality of being). The "propositions of natural science" deal with the earth, the planets, natural resources, accidents, the oceans, etc. From these studies emerges a vast set of fundamental truths about the terminality of being: the exhaustion of resources, the finiteness of exploitation, the struggles between species, the expiration of organisms, poisoning, the limitations of human beings and other animals to modify the surrounding reality. At this point, the physicist could counter-argue by affirming that the matter and the

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energy are not terminal. What is born and corrupts would be the particular organizations of matter and energy, but not matter and energy themselves, which would be eternal, that is, outside the realm of terminality. The death of entities never means total annihilation of their matter, but always perpetual transformation. No particle, large or small, is lost in the universe. The entities that are born and die are a continuous metamorphosis of the same primitive matters. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are maintained through transformations. Atoms remain indestructible, they are neither created nor destroyed, they only combine in different ways. Since matter and energy ARE, it is then proved that being is not the same as beingterminal. Whether matter and energy are, in fact, eternal is something we cannot know with complete certainty by scientific means, there are contradictions around this. This is true with the data we have so far, but science, unlike religions, is open and is always moving in all directions; we cannot know what we will discover later about the structure of matter and energy. We might think that eternity is always a metaphysical notion in a maximal sense, whether the eternal is spiritual or material. We might prefer to think that matter and energy will also end one day, if they began, even if we do not know how to explain this in scientific terms, for it is difficult to conceive of the eternal, whether material or spiritual. But even if something like the "eternity of matter" were scientifically demonstrated without any doubt, the thesis of the terminality of being would not be affected. For in negative ontology, being is always being of entities. What is terminal is the being of determinate entities. The transformation of their minute elements is precisely what realizes or executes the terminality of those entities. There is not something like Matter or Energy in general (if we do not want to conceive them as new gods), but determined material entities charged with energy; it is these that terminate in their material being, under the form of the incessant transformation of their elementary components. Being cannot be conceived of except in particular entities, some of which are material. In the world, everything is in a state of permanent transformation and, consequently, in a state of already announced perishing, in the diversified forms of perishing that the world offers us. For there to be terminality there must be something to terminate; matter can be seen as the raw material with which the terminality of entities works. It provides the elements

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that make it possible to describe the terminality of entities; this provision of elements cannot be lacking, because without them entities would have nothing to terminate. The form of terminality of material entities consists in their need to constantly transform themselves and to eliminate the entities they had previously produced; their terminality is their incapacity to conserve their productions, and to produce something without destroying the previous one. In order to consummate this type of terminality, matter has recyclable material; for matter, to terminate is to transform, not to annihilate. That the very being of material entities is terminal means that matter, with its transformations of the same elements, makes these entities die simply by being. The effort that matter makes to continue being through its transformations generates friction and destruction. Matter itself is strangled, it manufactures entities with the remains of others. That material entities are terminal means that they die by virtue of the transformations of their material being. When it is affirmed that being itself is terminal, it is meant that all entities are terminal insofar as they are. In the case of material entities, they terminate insofar as they are material entities. The being that is terminal is the being of determinate entities, and not their single elements, material or not1. Moreover, the terminality of being is not an entirely physical concept; it is a metaphysical concept, but not a substantialist or theological one; it is an interactive concept, neither subjective nor objective, which arises in the relation of entities with the world; terminality is suffered by entities of a certain structure, and is not reduced either to the psychological or to the physical. It is of the same type as the Apeiron of Anaximander, the monads of Leibniz, the Wille of Schopenhauer or the biographical in Ortega y Gasset. For example, one could not refute the thesis that the human being begins to end from birth by claiming that there is in the baby a period of upward growth, and that it takes a long time before the physical deterioration of his body begins. For the assertion that humans begin to end at birth is a biographical thesis, not a biological one, a thesis of lived reality, not only of physical biological functioning. The terminality of the newborn is not something purely objective, but interactive, it includes the ways in which the birth is experienced by the newborn and by those around him. The friction, friction or suffering of human and non-human entities is the plane where the thesis of the terminality of being is formulated.

1

I am indebted to Prof. Olavo Da Silva Filho for precious indications on this subject.

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Medicine is a particular science that considers, by obligation, the foundation. It moves, for professional reasons, in the environment of the rationale, but it does not think about the rationale either. Physicians, in their incessant attempt to participate in and take advantage of the commercializing apparatus of public or private health, end up stumbling upon the foundation that they prefer not to face. In a way, hospitals smell more truth than philosophy departments. It must be a real scandal to observe the close coexistence between professional doctors (with their billowing scrubs and their overbearing movements as masters of death), and the most grandiose and revealing dimension of being. The fragility of human health has placed physicians in this absurd position of privilege. Physicians face the mortality of being well equipped technically, as the profession demands. The existence of sick people, their statistical number, is counted with the same precise indifference with which the existence of drive-ins is counted. The health policy of the moment profits from the existence of the sick, passing over what is most fundamental in the very condition of being sick. For the physician, illness is a kind of state, like wealth, drunkenness or bachelorhood, something that requires special evaluation, treatment and manipulation. He does not see illness as a pathology of the being-terminal of being. Of all the ways of concealing the terminality of being, concealment through medicine is one of the most perverse. Does death (mortality, terminality) now take the very place of the Absolute and transform itself into God? Hypostatically one could say: the only thing that does not die is Death. This would certainly be an illegitimate divinization of death. But death is conceived here, in the first metaphilosophy, in a verbal, not a substantive way. Death is not someone, not a person [as in Bergman's film, "The Seventh Seal," or, before that, in the short story "The Masque of the Red Death," by Edgar Poe)]: simply, everything dies. (Even in Bergman's film and in Poe's story, despite the embodiment of Death in a person, death has no explanation for the course of the world, things simply die. When Knight Block asks Death what his secret is, Death replies, "I hide no secret.") Death, in the sense of the mortality of being-not-being as a form of terminality, could be conceived as a kind of absolute immanent to the world, which would not be sufficient to conceive of it as divinity. For a divinity is primarily affirmative, that is, the "good" and "intelligible" half of being-not-being. Being has been affirmatively

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interpreted, first as exclusively generative nature, later as God, later, in modernity, as Free Subject, as Reason, as Language. The terminality of being, its being-not-being, is not one more affirmative interpretation alongside the others, but neither is it a "negative interpretation" of being, neither a divinization nor a demonologization of being, but a restoration of its emergent-dying, affirmative-negative totality, unbalanced by the affirmative tradition towards the only emergent part of being. It tries to show itself to the terminality of being as it appears to a radical reflection, without transforming into something - into a thing or a god - the very way of being-not-being of being, without divinizing the terminality. .1.3. Beyond the sublimation of the foundation For one could doubt whether what is presented here is really a foundation, because the theological-metaphysical idea of the foundation as that which must "make things what they are" has always been held. In this sense, the "natural" foundation presented here is inert, a kind of frame of reference that "does nothing", that lets things be-not-being, that let things decay in their natural termination without doing anything to "save" them. The terminality of being is grounding in the sense that all the rest "comes to it," finds its ultimate intelligibility in it, in the sense that things are understood as indefinite remnants of the terminality of being, ways of trying to inhabit an uninhabitable world, of making negotiations with the internal component of the non-being of being that will, in any case, obtain the final victory by simply consummating itself as terminality. In the history of European philosophy, beginning with the Greeks and, above all, in the Christian era, philosophers have seen the foundation through some spiritual or cultural demand to refuse terminality, or to reinterpret it in such a way that it never says the final word. This demand not to end has been linked to a metaphysical critique against non-being, in the sense of an attempt not to grant it an entity, to make non-being not to be, not to be able to be, so that only being is. Sometimes the arguments rest on the merely linguistic fact that one cannot construct sentences about non-being that do not resemble the usual entitative sentences, of the type "X is..." ("Non-being is..."). But if entities are emergent-dying, if their being is emergent-dying (or "insurgent"), their being is of that kind (although it could be otherwise), their being includes from now on, from always, inextricably, a component of non-being. Not being able, then,

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To speak of non-being is not to be able to speak of being, of one of its internal components. If it is not possible to speak of that component, the limitation will be of language, and it will be necessary to construct a semantics that manages to speak about non-being. Perhaps nonbeing cannot be correctly expressed in language, or perhaps it cannot be lived in an effective experience ("Death is not lived", Wittgenstein), but this has nothing to do with the possibility of conceiving ontologically non-being within the scope of a first meta-philosophical speculation such as the one attempted here. To understand nature only as being, as arising, as being born, without the component of non-being intrinsic to it, is to understand nature "by half". And this has been the usual concealing procedure (since the very coining of terms such as "nature", "existence", "being", etc., as we have seen). For example, that one cannot speak about death, that one cannot live it in the register of "I am dead now" without contradicting oneself, says nothing against nonbeing (of which death is a motive) as the subject of a first meta-philosophy. On this plane, non-being is absolutely indispensable, beyond the laudable efforts of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and, later, Sartre, to show that non-being is somehow lived, for example in anguish and other stimmungen. But even if it were not lived, even if it were inexpressible by the usual resources of language, non-being could be discovered by the force of reflection. In the affirmative-hiding tradition, everything has been done to take advantage of linguistic and psychological-experiential arguments to try not to open up the primordial sphere of non-being (in my terms, the terminality of birth), to conceive of being only as arising, opening and promise. The linguistic argument is particularly fallacious within specifically theological affirmative thought, because in it the ineffable has never been an insurmountable difficulty, since it has been accepted that a great part of what can be known and spoken about God is known and said through a "negative theology", whose affirmations are allusive, never direct. Why is this same tolerance towards the ineffable not reedited when it comes t o conceiving the non-being, a negative element as ineffable as the Great divine Affirmative? When the ineffable is good, affirmative, supportive, great efforts of language are made to make it intelligible, but when it is bad, negative, unsupportive, everyone stops paralyzed in front of the ineffable.

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Also of non-being and death (which "cannot be lived," which "cannot be spoken of," etc.) we have, to a large extent, an indirect knowledge, a kind of "negative ontology." After all, it is just as logically-linguistically problematic to say "God is" as it is to say "Non-being is." In both cases one must explain the particular kind of "being" one is trying to talk about. God is a maximalization of being, a supreme being, an ultra-being, whereas non-being is a diminution of being, a diminution of being, an infra-being; but in both cases the attribution of "being" is problematic. Affirmative philosophical thought is willing to make an unspeakable effort for the ineffable and the linguistically problematic when it is about Ultra-being, not when it is about diminished being. Terminality is not an extrinsic explanation of being, but a way of re-posing being, of formulating it anew, of repeating it. Being is terminal is another way of saying: being is, only by saying it in this way it is clear that being is-not-being, being is born-dying, is an original lack (which was so often religiously interpreted). The miserable linguistic argument retorts: "Non-being cannot qualify being, because non-being already presupposes being, insofar as nonbeing is also intended to be. And, certainly, affirmative thought has language in its favor, since language compels us to refer to anything always by saying that it is. But non-being is not something about which we are compelled to refer entitatively; non-being is the very being of entities. Symmetrically, we could say that it is not possible to speak of being without already disidentifying it. We cannot visualize being if not as flagging, as wearing out, undermining or waning, beyond the linguistic formation of "meaningful sentences". We cannot "refer" (not only linguistically) to being if not already through its constitutive non-being. If non-being is conceived privatively, it must be conceived privatively to being itself, if we strip ourselves of the usual affirmative prejudices. Being is not defined, then, "in opposition to nothingness," but as beingnothingness in mutual remission. Thus, "being" is not opposed to "non-being", but to alwaysbeing (immortality). The idea of an immortal God expels being (instead of empowering it!) if we understand it fully, with its affirmative and negative elements. God is, fundamentally, that which is not, that which was never born, which never arose, and therefore, that which cannot die. This non-being of immortality is not the constitutive non-being spoken of here, but a kind of "ultra-being," created ad hoc by occultation. Affirmative thought has removed non-being from the constitution of being, transforming it into something extrinsic, transient and adventitious.

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In the Neoplatonic schemes, the terminality of being is presented as a "lack", a fall, a "defect" to be remedied (we will see this in detail in part 3 of this Essay). It transforms the degenerating journey of being into a restorative journey, the impotence of being into a being in potency. Terminality does not "add" anything to being externally, but restores the unity hidden in affirmative thought. The idea that something is "added" is tributary to that thought: in reality, by putting non-being into so-called "being," an illegitimately broken unity has been reestablished in the current affirmativism. Now it is better understood why the fundamental question of the first meta-philosophy is not: "Why is there being and not rather nothingness?". It could not be, since we accept from the outset that there IS non-being (in the sense of primordially terminal being, which has no other way of arising than by ending), not as "counterposed" to being, but as being itself in its own making. The first meta-philosophy does not raise questions of why or causal questions. Theology and the sciences, in different ways, ask why, but not philosophy. The first meta-philosophy would never wonder about the "first causes" of the terminality of being, it would simply ascertain it; but it would wonder about its concealment. It is not the terminality of being that is astonishing, but its regular concealment. The question would be "Why is there the concealment of being and not rather its full manifestation?" (This again shows why first philosophy must be meta-philosophical). As a meta-philosopher, I do not have to explain how the world originated (that is the problem of science, although it never solves it), nor why the world originated (that is the problem of theology, which always solves it). Philosophy only tries to point to the what of the world as it presents itself, with all its opacities, doubts and difficulties. By wanting to explain "where things come from" or "why" things come as they do, first philosophy becomes distorted and falls into theology or science (and, in many cases, into pseudo-science). Theological thought, as part of its affirmative mechanism, conceives of being as "created," which presupposes a creator. And finitude, mortality, limitation are understood only as a characteristic of the created-being, as if mortality, the non-being-of-being, were the product of a God, of a creative act, or as the fruit of perverse acts of humans, but never simply as the way of being of being, with total independence of the nature of its origin, "where it came from", of whether it was "created", "emanated" or whether it was "corrupted". The question is not the mode of arising, but the arising (in any way), for it is the arising that establishes terminality. In any case, the problem of the mode of emergence, of the specific origin of being, is not the problem of the mode of emergence, of the specific origin of being.

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a problem of first philosophy, but, in any case, a problem of physics, a scientific problem. That the supposed creator cannot create something immortal does not cease to be a kind of proof that not even He is capable of fleeing from the structural terminality of being. Thus, whether being was created by a God or emanated from the One or emerged from the Bing-Bang, the fundamental philosophical question is that being (created, emanated or exploded) is terminal, is in the form of being-not-being, was terminally born. The theologization, sacred or profane, of being, is a continuous temptation of thought. According to my perspective, it is not that entities "participate in being," or "have their entity by being," or, worse, "thanks to being" (this creates a realm of grace alongside the realm of nature, with being arising through a favor and not by its own dying-generation). Entities are, and it is thus (by the being-not-being of entities), that we know of their being. Being is linked, by the negative way, with all entities equally, and not, privilegedly, with the human. Any entity manifests it in its non-being, although only the human shows it in its being-not (as will still be explained in Part 2, the negative anthropology). But entities are-dying, are-being-mortal, are-not-being, and their being is this dying-being, this fading or "undermined" being. The consideration of being cannot be reduced to a consideration about entities (according to the Heideggerian lesson), but that does not enable one to place being in the place of a "grace" of entities. Entities are not "graced" by being: they simply ARE (in the terminal form of non-feeling, which has no grace). For affirmative spiritualist metaphysics has always had this automatic retort on the tip of its tongue: "Mortality affects only beings, entities, but not being itself. This retort is the affirmative attempt to "save" something from the corrosive power of terminality as if it were some kind of "evil", curse, "fall". It is undoubtedly ironic that one tries to save the being from its own terminality, this being its own making. To save being from itself is absolutely unfeasible. The ontological distinction between intramundane entities and the very being of the world - the worldliness of the world as such - is perfectly pertinent and must be made. Being and entity are different, not in the sense of a dualism but because of entities we can always ask ourselves either about their properties or about their being, about how entities are or about the very fact that they are. (A difference that we will find not only in Heidegger, but also, for example, in Wittgenstein's Tractatus). ) But both being and entities are equally affected by terminality, by the terminal being of being, precisely because it is not a duality: the terminality of entities is their way of being,

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independently of how they are (independently of how they elaborate and consume their terminality). There can thus be no difference between the terminality of entities and the terminality of their being, nor can there be the spiritualistic way out that distinguishes between "mortal entities" and a presumably immortal Being. Many philosophers, ancient and modern, tried to show that corruption, disappearance, etc., are apparent, affect only entities, but not being. They tried to show that the "deep" reality, "invisible", is eternal and unperishable. The affirmative mechanism par excellence is the denial of mortality, the postulation of something immortal. Terminality seems unbearable for thought, as if it could not be confronted without some kind of mediation. But it is precisely the deep, invisible reality that is terminal, that which is internally affected by terminality. It is the being of entities that is terminal, and not just the entities taken as such or such entities, as if it were a painful idiosyncrasy of them against the reassuring background of the immortality of "being itself," which would be as it were free from the dregs of mortal entities. Entities do not end insofar as they are such and such entities, or insofar as they are entities so and so, or insofar as they are entities that are here or there, but they end insofar as they ARE, insofar as they are entities, not such and such entities, but entities, entities that are (anything). They end in their entity, in their being-entities. THE BEING-ASBEING DIES. What is mortal is the being-of-entities, the-which-entities-are. There is no deep or invisible being that does not manifest itself in the being-ness of entities. Entities die for being. The being-of-entities is mortal, or, better still, the mode of being-of-entities is being-mortal, entities cannot be if not mortally, that is, ending, terminating (and this is intolerable for thought, that which par excellence must be hidden). The terminality of being is not some supra-natural or supra-mundane thing, some kind of curse that has fallen upon the world, but purely and simply its ontological make-up, its fabric, its structure, the way in which being is constituted. Entities are terminal not because of this or that circumstance, but because their very being is terminal, because being and beingterminal are one and the same thing. But this is what has been unacceptable to humans, who insist on the idea of a terminality that is always adventitious and foreign, the product of sin or error, and that can be avoided through epistemic maneuvers or moral projects.

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1.4. Why forget about identity? Glimpses of concealment. One point at which the philosophical-primary advantage of mortality over purely logical identity becomes apparent is precisely the question of concealment. A phenomenology of speech and attitudes would readily give hints that human beings regularly tend to conceal the ground rather than manifest it, and this as a mode of their innermost being-not-being. But if being, being itself, consisted in self-identity, would it not be enigmatic that human beings would tend to conceal it? Where would this curious urge to conceal a purely logical principle come from? What harm could a tautology do us? What could be the terrible stigma of A being equal to A? What would be shameful, opprobrious, sinful, impudent, or criminal about self-identity? On the contrary, trying to answer the question of why the terminality of the self is systematically concealed is quite understandable and opens up the kind of reflection I want to inaugurate here. (Mortality and identity are connected in Sartre's metaphysics. It is symptomatic that the Sartrean existent, with all its desires and its diffuse sexuality, unlike Heidegger's aseptic and virginal Dasein, is ontologically characterized by "being-for-itself", which, according to Sartre, systematically transgresses the identity of being with itself. Being-for-itself and Dasein ARE NOT identical with themselves. One could see this systematic transgression of identity as a resonance, in the realm of logic, of the terminality of being. Perhaps if the human were immortal he would get to be what he is and not be what he is not. Thus, self-identity and terminality seem to develop in opposite directions). A first meta-philosophical question of the greatest importance is the following: why is there, in general, concealment, alienation, repression, concealment, forgetting, and not the opposite: manifestation, remembrance, unfolding, appropriation? Why are things not liberated in what they are, why are they already presented in the form of concealment? Why are things inenfranchisable "in the face of the face"? The Heideggerian sublimated ontology does not give an answer to the reason for the "forgetting of being" (see below, the discussion with Heidegger); the forgetting is simply ascertained in a perplexed and contemplative experience, almost in a pleasant mystical rapture that makes one forget such forgetting. But what is the primary reason for forgetting, why forget something so affirmative and welcoming? Being is, in Heidegger's texts, so hospitable, sheltering and defining (I would almost say, maternal), that one does not understand why it should be forgotten in favor of mere entities, so much more worthy of prodigious oblivion. Already

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In his own style, Heidegger's philosophy is magical, captivating, interesting, announcing something mysterious and grandiose, profound and thrilling. Nor does he seem to escape the temptation to sublimate the foundation. Freud's Psychoanalysis and Marx's Critique of Ideologies have given - within the European panorama - a plausible intramundane explanation for the "forgetting of the self": that which produces pain, that which cannot be assumed, that which would uncover our shame, our true intentions, our ideology of unjustifiable domination, the breakdown of some normative principle (real or imaginary), is forgotten. It is forgotten the immoral, the filthy, the prurient, the shameful, the childish, the naked, the unjust (see my book "Margins of the Philosophies of Language", III.3). But there is nothing to prevent us from seeing these forgettable instances as displays of the terminality of being. This is forgotten because it displeases, discomforts, disabuses, disinhabits, because it manifests the visceral unavailability of things (despite their apparent pragmatic and utensil availability). It is forgotten that which destroys projects, that which disintegrates, that which deconstructs discourse, unsettles and disturbs, sickens and maddens, or even leads to the desire to consummate one's own non-being and, in extreme cases, to actually consummate it. This can be saved from being a merely "psychological" or "sociological" explanation only to the extent that it is remembered that suffering (and its displays, such as shame, etc.) is structural, it is part of the very making of the world. Psychoanalysis and the Critique of Ideologies have provided important categories for getting to think the non-being component of being. Both have an external control that philosophy does not have: respectively the clinic and social movements. They start from a situation: someone who suffers, someone who is unwilling, something that is not "available". The evil of philosophy is that in it no one suffers, philosophers only speak of suffering, they are healthy carriers of the mortal illness (as when Sartre admits, in his last year of life, that he never felt anguish after forty years of provoking it in others). In philosophy everything is available, in philosophy everything is resolved. Philosophy drastically suppresses suffering, it generates metaphysics of the Intelligibility and Amiability of being. Being is something that allows itself to be known and loved, this is the most sublime message of the European philosopher. But the sufferer suffers for an omission, a hole, an unsaid (or an unsaid), and not with anything that manifests itself in categories (in what can manifest itself in categories, "all is well", there is no "indisposition" whatsoever).

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The very operational notions of "unconscious" and "ideology" must be seen as attempts to access certain dimensions of the unsaid, of the hidden, of that which segments and punctures discourse and experience. "Unconscious" and "Ideology" are notions that attempt to deal with the non-being of being without having to put it into sentences or experiences. The philosopher does not possess categories of this kind, and so his task is viscerally affirmative and concealing. To the extent that the philosopher is reconciled (and consoled) and does not suffer (despite sometimes writing about suffering), he can continue indefinitely to conceal the terminality of being. This is fundamentally the object of suffering, not of argumentation. But arguments can be affirmative indefinitely. The best arguments fail in the absence of pain. The phenomenon of concealment has an epistemic resonance very well visualized by Freud (although in a limited field): concealment inverts the sense of the object, the object is no longer what is seen, what is ascertained or observed - a "first degree" object, we could say but what is concealed, disguised, adorned, dissimulated, postponed, that which is not there, a sort of "inverted object". The object is constructed through affirmation as a response to the terminality of being, to a truly irresponsible situation. Therefore, a philosophy that seeks truth should follow the opposite direction of its object, since the direction of any object is that of concealment. First philosophy must be a meta-philosophy precisely because its object is an infra-object, an object not installed, rejected, an object that is not allowed to be installed, an object not given. To remain in philosophy, in its usual affirmative practice, is to remain in concealment. One must ascend a level in order to be able to unhide the object. It is necessary to meta-philosophize in order to reach the sought object of thought, the terminality of being and its resonances. But if concealment (alienation, oblivion, the repressed) is inevitable, if the terminality of being is "unlivable", what is the point of pointing out concealment or criticizing it? But radical reflection as such does not have a platform, it does not propose anything else but to develop as reflection. It is philosophically important to distinguish between a world simply "given" and a world affirmatively constructed in opposition to something that is systematically concealed. It is philosophically important to know that things are not simply being, but are in the form of non-being, which conceals their primordial non-being. (And that is why the famous Leibnizian question must be inverted. For it supposes that being evidently is, rather than nonbeing. But a

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being-terminal is not, it is condemned in advance, and so the fundamental question is why he is not, rather than being). .1.5. Back to metaphilosophy. Reflection on the terminality of being is inevitably meta-philosophical. For it can only arise within a refusal to complicate philosophical considerations for the sake of the pure possibilities of thought. It is not a matter of thinking beyond the world. Complexification, the search for the non-trivial, can be seen as a clear and conspicuous mechanism of concealment. The word of order in philosophy seems to be, "Turn the interesting world upside down!". Strategically move away from all that is simple, for the simple smells of death, of detention, of slowing down and ending. Philosophical thought has been one of the movements through which life seeks the only thing that interests it: to continue. Philosophy has been, in the European tradition, a vital movement that seeks the indefinite continuation of the task of thinking. Any alleged "opposition" between life and thought is therefore problematic, as if philosophy were located at a level where it seeks something else (the "truth", "objectivity") different from simply "continuing to think". Of course, particular philosophers have tried to "stop" thinking in their systems, but other philosophers have taken it upon themselves to undermine this intention, thus escaping from the despair of having "solved" something, opening again the apparently closed categories so that thinking can continue. Thus Hegel did it with Kant, Kant with Hume, Spinoza with Descartes, Descartes with the Scholastics, the Scholastics with Aristotle, and Aristotle with the pre-Socratics. The attempt of a philosopher to "close" thought is the anguished and vain attempt of a particular being to resolve, in the short time of his life, the wound of the terminality of being. But no philosopher lets others do that. Each philosopher represents for others the impossibility of closing the endless task of thinking. Schopenhauer has grasped the "form of the world" through a reflection on "will" as "will to live", as pure wanting (anything). Marx, in the critical part of his philosophy (the Ideologiekritik), has grasped the "form of the world" through the phenomenon of ideologies: the contents take a back seat in favor of their ideological structure. Freud has formulated the "form of the world" in terms of the libidinal economy: also the content of the "form of the world" has been formulated in terms of the libidinal economy.

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conflicts is inessential there. My own reflection is intended as a kind of maximum generalization of these results, which does not need, stricto sensu, volitional, ideological or "unconscious" contents to express themselves, since both the intellectual and volitional registers, both the unconscious and the ideological, are affected by the form of the world and by the astounding irrelevance of its contents. That the world is not explained by any content, that the essence of the world is of a formal nature, is a central thesis of my first meta-philosophy, which is at the basis of my philosophy of logic, of my ethics and even of my early aesthetic thought (See Part 4 of this Essay).

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COLLOQUIUM WITH HEIDEGGER, LAST AFFIRMATIVE ONTOLOGIST (Being-with-Heidegger, Being-without-Heidegger) From apprehensive affirmative ontology to existential negative ontology Ontology was traditionally posed, in the history of European philosophy, as the problem of thinking being, or, in general, of grasping it, of grasping it, of saying what it is. I call this an "apprehensive ontology", or the apprehensive approach to ontology, predominant in the Western tradition. This apprehension has often been given in terms of knowledge, so it could also be called, though less appropriately, cognitive ontology. The apprehensive ontologists say: "All thinking is thinking about something, for if it were not so, it would be thinking about nothing; but this nothing would still be something, an object of thought". Then, being begins to be seen as an object of thought and language, as something that has to be grasped and said. For that, being has to be something, a correlate of thought-language. In this way, it is obvious that there is being, because thought could not refer to nothing. This is the apprehensive or cognitive point of view. The question of being is posed as a theoretical question, of visualization, as if being were something to which we have to "refer" (and often, in the twentieth century, it is demanded that this referring be as clear as possible). The question of being appears as a discursive or linguistic, propositional question. Being is something about which we think and something about which we speak in propositions. One of the first characteristics of this apprehensive (cognitive-linguistic) approach to being is an almost immediate estrangement from non-being. For it is difficult or impossible to visualize non-being as an object of thought or language, to see it as the content of an articulated proposition. Thus, when it is said that thought and language have to be "about something that is," because they could not think or speak about anything, an initial and progressive estrangement begins to develop with respect to non-being. For if being is the inevitable object of thought and language, there is no place for non-being in the apprehensive approach. In this theoretical-intellectual approach, being is investigated in its meaning and its determinations, but not in its affective impact, or in relation to its value, to the value of being. We speak, as we shall see, of the "goodness" of being, but in strong relation to truth and intellectual structures (Ens, Bonum, Verum). It was only in the 19th century, and specifically with

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Schopenhauer, we will have, for the first time, the elements to think the "pathic" of being, its impact on beings - and in particular on humans - not only as liberated from intellectual moorings but showing how intellectual structures are subjected to the pathic or affective dimension, which would become the primordial one. It is the idea that being, at the same time that it is the object of thought and language, is suffered. In the intellectualist tradition of European philosophy - from Plato to Hegel - the question of the "knowledge of being" has been studied, without ever questioning the conviction that being is capable of fully manifesting itself to an apathetic thought and language. A characteristic of the apprehensive approach of ontology is that being is understood as a "notion", and as the most general and empty of notions, because it applies to everything in general and to nothing in particular. If we insist on visualizing being as an object of knowledge, this will be practically inevitable. Being is thought in the register of a profound unity, against the tendency of humans to sink into the multiple and varied of entities. Being unity, being is that which is common to all, and, therefore, empty of any particular content. This is often frightening and disappointing: we try to think being as full and what we manage to think is the emptiest. But perhaps this emptiness is produced by the apprehensive point of view itself; perhaps the emptiness is produced precisely by the very attempt to apprehend where there is nothing to be apprehended. Perhaps from other approaches, being is really the fullest, and not the emptiest. And, in fact, on the pathic plane opened by the reflection of Schopenhauer (a thinker who, as we shall see, Heidegger does not take seriously, does not consider him an "essential thinker"), the experience of being is a full experience, full of content, in strong contrast to the empty, general and formal character of the "notion" of being in the apprehensive approach. Heidegger himself has seen this in his study of anguish in the famous opuscule "What is metaphysics?" (the most hated and vilified by analytic philosophers): when anguish becomes present, the individual comes into contact with nothingness in a kind of plenum of experience, concomitant, perhaps, with the conceptual emptiness of being considered as a "notion". What is "emptied" in the articulated proposition (for example, those of Wittgenstein's Tractatus), is what is "filled" (or plenified) in the experience of being. This is a first crucial difference between the apprehensive approach and the existential (pathic) approach to being.

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The position of the human within being is another important way to see the differences between the apprehensive and existential approaches. The human being is the "privileged entity" to carry out the apprehensive or cognitive ontological enterprise. For the human being is the apprehensive being par excellence, characterized by thought and language. Even in Heidegger, the analysis of the being of the human must liberate the appropriate horizon for the elucidation of the meaning of being and its unfoldings. The question of being is thus linked to the question of the human as such. We will see later that Schopenhauer had already attacked the roots of this intellectual "humanism," for by liberating the pathic plane (which Schopenhauer visualizes as a metaphysical foundation, like the Kantian "thing-in-itself") the human is - somewhat brutally, one might say - equated with all other beings, without any ontological privilege. The human is the only being that thinks and speaks, but suffers like all beings, is suffering, patient, passive, object-of, like all beings, without any privilege whatsoever. So this delay in the analysis of the human (which gave Heidegger an excellent motive - or, better, a "quietive," to use the Schopenhauerean term - for not writing Being and Time II) may not be necessary in a nonapprehensive approach. One of the most important aspects of the famous Heideggerian attack against cognitive ontology is the fact that the latter has not thought being, but only entities and especially some privileged region of the entity that always pretends to put itself in the place of being. But posed in this way ("Being has not yet been thought, only entities have been thought"), it seems to be a question internal to cognitive ontology and not its radical impugnation. For it would not be a question of going to a dimension where it would not matter to think being, but to a dimension where being - and not only entities - were duly thought; a dimension where we do not abandon thinking, but where we ask ourselves what it means to think. In Heidegger, in this way, it is still a question of seeing what would be the correct and adequate way of thinking in the task of thinking being. The present Essay, at this difficult moment of its development, proposes to follow two anti-Heideggerian paths: one of them, the path of the radical contestation of apprehensive ontology; the other, the possibility (also of Schopenhauerean inspiration) that even the traditional metaphysical strategy (the choice of a "privileged entity", especially agglutinative, as the path of the clarification of being) is legitimately passable, but only if that privileged entity ceases to be a "supreme entity" and becomes something like an "intimate entity", perhaps the "lowest" of all entities.

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The privileged entity, if it is not a "supreme entity", metaphysical or theological, may not be a reason for forgetting, but, on the contrary, for maximum remembrance. These are entities that have a special impact on humans and tend to agglutinate senses in a dizzying and revealing way. And disturbing. Two of these privileged entities would be, for example, sexuality (close to the Schopenhuerean will) and death, deeply "interesting" entities (inter- esse, which place in the middle of being), agglutinating, strongly significant, but, at the same time, destructive, corrosive, aggressive, frictive and disturbing. Low" foundations (in the direction of Freud's and Schopenhauer's idea that the highest can emerge from the lowest). A nonapprehensive ontology, subject to the pathic, to desire and to death, would be a kind of ontonaturalism, of "debasement" - if one can speak in this way - of the foundation itself (the foundation is not the most supreme, but the most vile and miserable, but it is, at the same time, the material with which the highest is produced, just as, for Freud, Leonardo da Vinci's sculpture can have a coprophilic origin). My problem is not, then, that of Heidegger: it is not a question of forgetting being in favor of entities, but of the reference of being to onto-theological entities instead of referring it to onto-natural entities. One does not always forget being when stressing entities. Emphasizing the entity death, for example, puts one in the way of being (of the terminal being of being). The problem has been the affirmativism of the metaphysics of being, which has always thought that the privileged entity had to be, necessarily, a "supreme" being, divine, immaculate, sublime, untouched by the asperities of the entities. Also, in apprehensive ontology, the clearest logical characteristic of being is identity with itself, or selfhood, as the essence of the entity as entity, as its most intimate law. Selfidentity, as we know, is also a fundamental logical principle. Logic and ontology meet in the crucial theme of identity, that which seems to characterize every entity independently of its form of being, and which ameliorates the initial emptiness of the "notion" of being. This characteristic is purely formal, the only one that, it would seem, should suit all beings equally. But there are material characteristics that also suit all beings equally: having arisen terminally (or mortally) is one of them. In a certain sense, when one points to terminality as the fundamental mode of being as being, one points to the rupture of identity (to the opposite of identity), for terminality is the very destruction of selfhood, of being identical with oneself. Everything seems to be directed to the loss of identity, not to its consummation.

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Terminality is linked to such ordinary experiences as the vertiginousness of time, with our galloping aging, with time cruelly slipping through our fingers, experiences in which humans experience the increasing rupture of their apparent selfhood (and - as we shall see in negative anthropology - it is this rupture of selfhood that humans fear most and that keeps them moving, much more than any positive "love of life"). The totality of entities, and among them the human entity, suffers from the terminal emergence of being, and it is this suffering that is principally thematized in a pathic ontology, an ontology in which being "makes a dent" in entities, and in a peculiar way, in humans. Here it is no longer a matter of "thinking" being, but of "being affected" by it in suffering experiences. (Heidegger, certainly, was the one who opened up the pathic realm of ontology - through anguish and tedium - but, as I intend to show, he does not take it radically beyond the apprehensive approach, because there is still an attempt to "think being" although no longer in a purely intellectual sense, as did the tradition he criticizes). These are fairly well known characteristics of an apprehensive or cognitive ontology. The most particular issue that the present Essay tries to point out is the affirmative character of this approach (an affirmativism from which, as we shall see, Heidegger is by no means free), which was already shown, fleetingly, in the question of the exclusion of non-being as an object of thought and language: "To think non-being, one must already transform it into being; to speak about non-being, one must transform it into something". Thus, in the apprehensive approach, being is, at root, linked with affirmativity and openness, with manifesting and showing itself and, by extension, with truth as manifestation and donation. Being is understood essentially as truth-manifestation, as word, expression, showing itself, appearing, as light. The Greek experience of being is totally manifestive, veritative and discursive, Lógos. The negative dimensions (concealment, veiling, subtraction, silence, etc.) are brought in and commented upon, but always in the register of the "also", and never in an original register: "there is also concealment", "being is also veiling, it is also shadow, silence", etc. The negative is always counterpart, they are the problems and vicissitudes with which the being-opening painfully faces, they are the shadows and reflections that can, from time to time and if we are careless, obfuscate the original light of the opening of being. In this line, the negative has no entity of its own, it is always problematic and exceptional. My reflective effort walks precisely in the opposite direction, it tries to think of the self as an original disappearance, as absence, flight, lack, always charged with

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a radical "negativity. This original un-appearance of being - a being extinguished, without light - is present in the very emergence of entities, in their lacking birth, in their incomplete and uncomfortable being. It is not that being "also" hides itself, but that it is concealment, it is failure, diminution, discomfort, discomfort; and that all this appears when we remove the weeds that hid it. It is not an originally open and pure being that would be sullied by the negative, but, on the contrary, an originally inhospitable and incomplete being, arduous (and perhaps impossible) to be lived, regularly hidden under the affirmative undergrowth. It is not a being that appears generous and that, from time to time, veils itself (to become more interesting and loving), but a being that is not, that never was, and whose non-being appears at every moment through the debris of human maneuvers. In this existential and pathic vision it is the non-being that has its own entity and the being that lacks it, contrary to what appeared in the cognitive-linguistic propositional approach. If we cannot speak of non-being (within a proposition) unless it is already transformed into being, it can be said that we cannot have experiences of being (in an existence) unless it is already transformed into non-being. The neediness of being is reflected or resonates directly in the human experience, in the suffering of the continuous and exhausting living. Human hardship arises originally from a being that is not there, that refuses to be lived, that only manifests itself fully in suffering. That we are unhappy, anxious, desperate, bored and assaulted (by nature and by other humans) is not something contingent or eventual but the inevitable resonance of the absence of being, impossible to be lived, of the regressive being thrown into the maelstrom of time that passes at full speed devouring all our possibilities and killing everything we hold dear, human and non-human. If the being shone, if the negative were only of the register of the "also", this could not happen. Our original suffering has to do with our arising, with being born, independently of concrete contents. In this sense, one could see terminality (and mortality as a mode of it) not only as materially binding, but also as a formal characteristic of being, such as identity, but a form powerfully charged with content. (Terminality is the point where form and content meet in an ontologically elucidative way). The affirmative effort goes in the direction of including the human contribution, through action on being, as if being were constructed or re-constructed by the human, as if the human were not placed in an already given being, but himself constructed the being in which he has to inhabit. It is the attempt to absorb the being-terminal of being into the intra-world,

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as if death were our invention through actions. In the pathic-negative approach, being is that to which human actions are opposed, that to which they react, that which forces humans to react. Human action is not original, it is not positive, it is reactive and defensive against a being already given in the emergence-terminus of being. Human actions arrive late and only remain reactive, not as a "free" choice but as an imperious necessity of survival. The question of being, in the apprehensive approach, is thus "affirmative", in the double sense of affirmation and of taking hold. What appears only does so through an act of affirmation or position. But in the affirmative tradition this act has been seen as positive, as a creative or establishing action, totally unconscious of being only reaction. In that tradition, the primordial experience of being that appears and opens up is always flanked by the unrealized possibility of non-being. Being is seen as primordial affirmation. In the negative approach, this situation is reversed. The fundamental question is: why don't we have a being to live, a genuine being, instead of not having it? Why can't we live, instead of the opposite? Or, for that matter: why do we emerge terminally rather than fully emerge? The affirmative point of view gave us the idea that we have a being that, from time to time, we can lose or that can be veiled. But there was never that inaugural opening of being. When we are born we are already born into a diminished, leaky, indebted, unlivable being. And this diminishment is not ontic, it is not something we suffer from the fact that we are this or that entity, but it is a diminishment of being; it is being itself that diminishes and not us specifically (even when the whole metaphysical-theological tradition has tried to foist the diminishment on human entities, as if they had offended with their negative actions the immaculate perfection of being). But being itself is terminal and it is its terminality that is distributed in entities, like a contagion or a dissemination; we do not create the terminality of being, we inherit it, we stage it, we act it and over-act it. The terminal is the originary, an originary that we call "negative" only relatively to the affirmativism in force, but which, in truth, is neither negative nor affirmative, but, purely and simply, what it is. We have never had any experience of "opening to being" that was not, at the same instant, a closing (not a being that closes, sometimes, but that, emerging, already closes). At birth, the being already closed for us, already refused and withdrew far from our bodies badly wounded in the friction. The being never sheltered us, never wanted us to be, or we are completely indifferent to it. We are bastard children of the

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being, illegitimate to the strict extent that we are natural, stumbling, contingent and ill-gotten beings. All this "lack of comfort" of existence is seen as "exceptional" from the affirmative point of view, which continues to imagine that there was, once upon a time, a welcome, some being who opened generously for us and who, for some reason (usually our fault) closed. Our individual birth was already a traumatic, uncomfortable and inhospitable event, regularly adorned by affirmative images and values. (It is not for nothing that this problematic origin was once hidden from children, replacing it with the graceful and immaculate flight of the stork from Paris, a version that no longer fascinates post-modern children). In the affirmative apprehensive approach some problems appear that do not arise in the existential, pathic and negative approach. Being conceived as an object of apprehension, and our senses being appropriate only for the grasping of entities in their diversity and variety, suggests the idea that a special intuition is required for the apprehension of being in its full affirmativity and openness. A sort of organ or ontological sixth sense that allows us to investigate and conceive being as being. The task is also imposed, in this approach, to find out how the multiplicity of entities can emerge from the unity of being, how multiplicity can emerge from pure identity. In the negative ontology of the pática we do not need any special intuition to relate to being once we renounce the desire to "grasp" it, since our access to it is fundamentally suffering, and in order to suffer we do not need any intuition other than the natural sensitive one (our own skin always at the disposal of suffering). The other problem - the emergence of multiple entities from the single being - tends to be pseudo-problematic in the negative approach; for it presupposes that being has something that entities do not have, and that it would have to be "distributed," as if unity were a gift that is somehow tainted in the diversity of entities. But the terminal being of being is the mode of being of entities, without any ontological difference; there is no terminal being beyond the diversity of the terminal entities themselves. In front of an entity, we can study it as this particular entity with its peculiarities, or we can see it as simply being. When we see it in this second way, we see it in its constitutive terminality, we see it being in the mode of non-being. We do not conceive of being as something prior that is then distributed into entities, but as something that only shows itself in entities when we see them in their being. Of the character

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intrinsically terminal of being arise - as if by contagion - the many and varied forms of ending (of the stars, empires, the great saurians, human relationships, etc.). A particularly important aspect for the critical remarks against apprehensive ontology is the question of an alleged "value of being" in affirmative ontologies. At the moment of thematizing the human "will," within a purely intellectual approach to being, it is claimed that just as truth and openness characterize being in the register of intelligence, so "goodness" and "niceness" characterize being in the register of will. Being is, at the same time, truth, goodness and beauty. This is one of the most enigmatic ideas of the affirmative approach, which will be taken up later in this treatise, in negative anthropology. The problem consists in understanding how it is possible for humans to still accept that being (understood as having arisen, being born terminally) is something "good", being permanently assaulted and finally destroyed by it. The "acceptance" of being by entities (human and non-human) may, at first, have nothing to do with its presumed "goodness," but only - in a Schopenhauerean register - with a volitional anxiety of sustenance, which, despite all the arguments of reason, stubbornly insists on continuing. This "wanting to live" can be totally detached from any "niceness of being" or "goodness of being." (Beings such as humans can desperately cling to something very bad and painful for total lack of alternatives, as I tried to explain in my Brazilian book "Malaise and Morality".) The idea that "being is good" is - in the non-apprehensive existential, paternal and negative approach - one of the most extravagant ideas to have arisen in the history of European philosophy. Of course, in this approach, all the terrors that can be observed (philosophical visits to hospitals, clinics, hospices, prisons and "favelas" can be instructive), will always be seen as "exceptions" and "deviations" on the mythical background of a "good being". But, according to the negative approach, people confined in these places are so by virtue of displays of the terminality of their being, such as the loss of mental or physical health, or of freedom or dignity. These are, in a certain way, the privileged places to observe the crumbling of the self. But in any family, school, association or workplace in any country of the world it is possible to observe the permanent friction of the terminality of being in existences beset by illness, poverty and aggression, or by the simple "passage of time". The thesis of the "goodness of being" is truly very strange and it would not have been a minor merit of the negative approach to have removed it from its apparent obviousness.

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In the idea that "being is good" there is present that affirmative effort to try to embed human action within a being that rejects it or is indifferent to it. For human actions produce intramundanely all the good that exists in the world. What is not observed is that this good introduced is always introduced in a fierce and hard-fought opposition against an originally "bad" being (not in a metaphysical sense, but in the perfectly physical sense of "causing sensitive and moral discomfort" in humans), a being opposed to our interests, incomplete, hurtful, painful, enticing, strangled and lacking. The original discomfort of the being is confused with the actions tending to counteract it in the intra-world. What is already the way back is taken as the way out. Every time life shows us something "good", it is already the product of something we built on the way back from a journey in which we suffered the discomfort of the world; and now we confuse the products of that confrontation with the being itself, as if the ardent product of our actions constituted the being itself and not what we invented as a defense against its primordial discomfort. Heidegger's merit is to have linked ontology with temporality, and to have shown that, since always, since the Greeks, being has been understood according to some determination of temporality (the present, eternity). For, for the human perspective, at least, temporality seems to be the unassailable horizon of the question of being. The traditional ontotheological option was for the supreme entity and for human temporality thought from the supreme entity. This supreme entity was Nature, God, the Subject, Reason, Language, some privileged ontic region. Negative ontology chooses neither existence (traditional metaphysics) nor eternity (onto-theology) as temporal determinations adequate to the terminal being of being, but, in any case, the already-been, the already passed, the "it is consummated," already pre-announced in the very act of birth; the idea that what is mortal is already dead, that the only thing that separates a being from its consummation is only time. (An idea beautifully expressed in Portuguese by Father Antonio Vieira in some of his famous Sermons: if at some point we will be dust, in a certain way we already are). Philosophy, throughout its history, not only Western, has systematically concealed the terminality of being through different affirmative devices. My first meta-philosophy is a critique of that affirmativism and, at the same time, a re-positioning of what was hidden. To dismantle affirmative philosophy is, at the same time, to show what it concealed. From Greek spiritualism, passing through Christian thought, we enter modernity not by abandoning the affirmative way, but by trying to secularize it through reason. This, until the 19th century. The

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20th century affirmativism had to be contorted and extremely subtle in order to develop and sustain itself. The new affirmative devices now pass (after the crisis of reason) through society, communities, language, social and political practices, pragmatics, consensus, communication. The terminality of being is now concealed through these emergent devices, which are not new, but which were energized after the crisis of the previous devices (Nature, God, Reason) (See chapter 3 of this Essay). Heidegger and the apprehensive tradition of ontology. Apparently, Heidegger's thought is an invitation to un-occultation. But what is it that his thought un-hides? And what is intended to be un-hidden, was it really hidden? Someone may say that, while he was being honest the devil was hidden, and that an evil action un-hidden the previously hidden devil. Shall we take him seriously? What is unhidden in Heidegger, on the contrary, seems something sublime and superior (at least that is what his style suggests, which enchants and seduces). In that sense, Heideggerian un-occultation is entirely affirmative. In his auspicious philosophy the human being is the privileged place of the epiphany of being, a luminous, plenifying manifestation, in spite of the nadifying edges that beset him. Despite always being proclaimed as a thinker of rupture and nothingness, Heidegger continues the tradition of the primacy of being over non-being that runs through the history of Western thought. The human receives the commission to un-hide the being of entities (to shepherd being) after having received many other commissions in history (to speak with the gods, to be the son of God, to be the seat of Pure Reason, etc). However much Heidegger may want to present himself as a total break with the past (a break which, in a certain sense, he succeeds in making), his philosophy is a resultant of a whole past of affirmative thought, now pretentiously freed from its onto-theological moorings. But, on the other hand, and seen from the negative perspective, Dasein2 is not in an ontological condition to completely fulfill the Heideggerian task. Dasein has no time for being because being torments and sours it; it has no time to unhide what corners and wounds it. It cannot afford the luxury of letting all the light of being manifest without I do not say "the Dasein," as I usually do, because Dasein is both masculine and feminine. As Sartre noted, Heidegger never thematizes in "Being and Time" the sexuality of Dasein. The use of the neuter does not point here to a sexual neutrality, but to any sexuality, masculine, feminine, and everything in between. (But I leave the masculine article within the Heidegger texts I quote). 2

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blinding and obfuscation. But not because Dasein has some "bad nature"; it is its situation, perfectly factual, that disables it from uncovering being. It is placed in a difficult situation, with no way out, with little space, with little time, with others who are in the same situation and threaten it, always beset by illness, suffering, failure, aggressiveness, boredom, depression, aging. This being has not the slightest condition to shepherd the being. In the needy conditions in which it finds itself, Dasein can only hide, not because it is "bad" (because it has a "perverse nature"), but only in order to be able to continue to survive. Heidegger insistently denounces the concealment and objectification, the objectifying oblivion of being, but he does not diagnose anything about why the human has had to do that throughout time. In the negative approach, the theme of unhiding becomes much clearer. What I call the terminality of being (of which mortality is a type) is what systematically prevents the human from un-hiding being, from shepherding it, from objectifying others and himself. It is that dimension neither luminous nor numinous for which there can be no opening, but, on the contrary, closure. Heidegger overcame the cognitive point of view but does not fully reach the existential ontology pática, because his philosophy of existence is still impregnated with affirmative thought. Moreover, he does not fully abandon the plane of apprehensive ontology. He still thinks it is a matter of thinking being (What does it mean to think?). And when poetry is called, it is not because of its pathic qualities (suffering, suffering), but because he considers it as the authentic apprehensive thought (poetry thinks, science does not think), as that which is capable of grasping being, of apprehending it by letting itself be affected by it. The pathic is discarded in Heideggerian thought, but it continues to be a means, a way. Let us look at this Heideggerian affirmativism in 3 aspects, fundamental for the present first meta-philosophical reflection: death, nature and value. I. Death. Heidegger in my thought constitutes a chapter of my critique against affirmativism in philosophy. He manages to build one of the last and most ingenious affirmative protections of the twentieth century against the death rays of being, especially in his luminous conception of being as donation and of the human as opening. I believe that Heidegger did not explore the negative moments of his thought enough, except in the sections of "Being and Time" devoted to the

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being-for-death, and in the booklet "What is Metaphysics?", and even then, with limitations. The question of nothingness continues to be treated in reference to being, which continues to be fundamental. Nothingness is the nothingness of entities of ontological difference, as expounded, for example, in the opuscule "On the Essence of the Foundation". Heidegger, certainly, removes nothingness from its propositional logical expression, but keeps it within the privative and complementary, where being continues to be the ultimate and absolute guide and reference, leaving nothingness always in the register of the "also" (there is being but there is "also" nothingness). Nothingness swims being or swims in being, but it is not being itself that swims. Being continues to be. Being is preserved. My fundamental idea is that being itself swims, that being itself is nothing, that it is nothingness that is primordial, that it is being that is illusory, that is product, manufacture; or that, simply, there is no being. To put it more poetically, that terminality affects being in its very emergence and, therefore, that it never really succeeds in being without its being being being, at the same time, its more or less slow and vertiginous ending. That ontologically we can never separate being from its terminal emergence, in such a way that all things, including human things, are originally nothingnesses that develop until their full consummation as such, finally disappearing. This radical lack of being (fundamental scarcity, being died long ago and we do not know; it was born dead) is reflected (or refracted) in the structural malaise of any human life, even the most ontically "successful" or "realized". (And this is the impact of ontology on anthropology). The human, as in Heidegger, is, also here, the thermometer of being, the ontological place where being manifests itself; but, in the negative approach, the human is the stage where being exhibits itself in its original ending (for the stars are not in a position to think their own explosion; they simply explode); not, then, in its "opening", but in its original closure, in its refusal to be lived by a being such as the human; a scenario where we see nothingness being realized in the form of a frictionalized (painful, boring, morally disqualified) survival. Human suffering is like the patency of the non-being of being in a particular form of being, which we call "human life". It is in the human that we see the terminality of being unfolding as structural suffering (which will still have to be better grasped by a negative anthropology).

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The agreement with Heidegger is, then, that being and human being are internally connected, referred one to the other; but I see this connection in a negative register: because being is nothing, prevented from being by its constitutive terminal origin, Dasein ends up "hosting" this nothingness that wounds it regularly and from which it always has to defend itself. The sensible and moral suffering of humans, their being-towards-death, is like the patentization of the very death of being, of nati-mortal being, of the non-being of being, of the very and internal terminality of being. In Heideggerian affirmative ontology, on the contrary, being is seen as primordial light, as the original opening of which the human is like a receptive and generous house. It is this that enchants Heidegger's readers, that of being hosted by an auspicious yet danger-filled being. This is the central question from which most of my withHeidegger, without-Heidegger questions derive. In the human and living world in general, the most striking and extensive pathology of the terminality of being is mortality, which "jumps to the eyes", especially in the punctual death, the one that takes our acquaintances and that awaits us all at any moment (and not, as it is said, in "some day" far away). But terminality is not reduced to death, since disappearing in death reflects the structural terminality of being in general. We do not die eventually; death is like a petty manifestation of terminality, something that belongs constitutively to the very order of being and not something merely ontic or biological. In that sense (and only in that sense), everything is toward-death and not only Dasein; being itself is toward-death, even if Dasein is toward-death in a peculiar sense. The human is as it were the seat of an existential elaboration of beingtowards-death, but it does not, of course, have the monopoly of being-towards-death. The peculiar being-towards-death of Dasein, according to Heidegger, transforms death into a form of becoming, of transcendence, of which only humans are capable. But all forms of being, even non-living ones, suffer friction and wear out from their emergence, they are diminished, diminished, corroded, corroded and finalized. Each one is-toward-death as best it can. Heideggerian being-towards-death succeeds in enclosing death within the concentration camp of Dasein. In the human realm, being-towards-death can be carefully attenuated by means of signaled existential behaviors, leading to ownership or impropriety. This gives the impression that general being-towards-death could somehow be controlled and overcome within the human world, where being-towards-death is existentialized. This is Heidegger's affirmative maneuver, to develop a philosophy of being-towards-death.

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of existence in which being-towards-death seems to be able to be confronted and directed according to a peculiar way of life. The affirmative strategy consists in detaching the human being-towards-death from the rest of the terminality of being (which also constitutes a certain kind of humanism). As Sartre pointed out, it is a death that can be humanized, that can have a meaning, depend on choices, etc., something that the poor stones, the poor animals or the poor stars do not manage to do with their own being-towards-death. In seeing its being-towards-death as a possibility of its own, its irresistible imposing character is affirmatively concealed, in the sense, also pointed out by Sartre, of a death that brutally interrupts life and brings it back to the natural plane, which knows nothing of property or inappropriateness. For if Dasein is, constantly, an attempt to make itself and to transcend itself, the being-towards-death of being itself (its terminality) no less constantly undoes these projects and cuts off all transcendence, bringing the human being back to its radical immanence, as a dead thing right there and then and without delay. Whatever the human being-towards-death does, it does always within a being-towards-death that undoes. (But not like Penelope, who undoes, herself, what she has done by day; what humans do is undone by being itself, by their own terminal being.) Our privileged connection with being is also the opportunity for that being not to let us be, not to allow us to "make ourselves," for the primordial fact that our being is mortgaged, is under condition, under bond, pledged by the original terminality of birth. Thus, non-being is not an exception, but what is the case. That being is not, that it is dead, that it is death, that its form of being is non-being, is the idea that should no longer be surprising, since Heidegger invited us to take the question of being from its traditional logical formulation to its ontological-existential exposition. (The news of the death of being should not be as thunderous and "interesting" as the death of God, proclaimed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra). That being itself is not-being is exemplified, in an exemplary way, in the particular type of human not-being. Our lives, stuck and hindered, lacking, tragic and confused, are the reflection of the vacillations of being in its most original hindrance. If we do not perceive it this way, it is because of the tireless and stubborn work of concealment, of the uninterrupted attempt to make being be. But this intense work of concealment is confined to the intramund, to the plane of the beings that are, of the shelves. The anxious inventions of entities do not succeed in reinventing being, since entities are invented.

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precisely to compensate - and never sufficiently - for the thunderous absence of being. On the contrary, entities count on the absence of being in order to be invented. The intramundane invention of entities counts on the primordial fact that being is not. (That being is not, that being is not being, that being is terminal, are all expressions of the same thing). Heidegger interprets anguish as a patentization of being itself. But anguish, anxiety, tediousness, are more patentizations of the absence of being, like cries for a desired and denied dead, which is withdrawn and spared. It is not because of a nothingness of being that anguish is anguished, because of a nothingness that would afflict being from time to time (for we are not always anguished), but because of the primordial fact that being itself is nothing. For a nothingness of being could still be cured, something could still be sought that would discard nothingness and obtain being. But anguish is the basic and taxing disconsolation of non-being; not of a non-being of being, - which would still entail a being - but of the non-being that is there not being, and that does not even refuse or retract. It seems that Heidegger wanted to call his famous book with the title Sein und Lichtung (Being and Light). Just as being is time, being is light, and entities participate in that light. An angelic image where the entities seem to play in the fields of the Lord. Certainly, being needs humans to happen, but since being is radical absence (not the absence of something that was and left, like the gods abandoning humans, but the permanent absence of a non-existence, since terminality is not "installed", but has always clamored), it needs a being that manifests, in its way of being, that absence, under the form of an impact. All the diverse, numerous and constant discomforts of a human life (of any human life) are a plenary manifestation of the very penury of the non-being of being, of being not-being, and this is the only way of being that being leaves us. We humans would never have the portentous capacity to be nothing without the indispensable help of being, without being itself being nothing. (Unlike Sartre, it is not humans who bring nothingness into the world, but they are the ones who manifest it in the most dramatic way. The Sartrean Para-itself punctures an already punctured being, imprints a nothingness on a previous nothingness. Humans are innocent: when they came into the world, nothingness was already installed in it long before). In the negative approach, we do not see the self as light and opening, but as shadow and closure. Not as "also" closure, or as "also" a veiling or hiding, but as primordial closure. There has never been a being that then withdraws, flees, hides. Closure is not of the

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register of the "also", but is constitutive. Being is connected with the human through closure, refusal, expulsion. Being does not want us, does not welcome us, does not demythologize us. There is no welcoming and generous light. We had to turn on all the light in the world, to open spaces for it in an arduous and provisional way, with the whole world against our efforts, with a being that prefers to remain in the dark. Heideggerian hardship and inhospitality are still like the refusal of a rigorous but wise and good Father in his own harshness, by whom we nourish hopes of one day being embraced if we behave well. The demission of being, by contrast, is structural and hopeless. Human suffering, the terminal character of its pleasures and realizations, are like the resonance of the rejection we suffer from an absent being, permanently drowned out by the intramundane hard work of empowering entities, which give the impression that "all is well" and that life can be "good life". Human lives float on the enormous importance that entities can take on within the intramundane, be they material goods, spiritual realizations, family relationships, political powers or sporting gratifications. Here something like a literal burial of non-being occurs beneath layers and layers of entities that come to matter in their own right. The self is urgently forgotten because its not-self is not inert or calm, but a hurtful not-self that causes discomfort, a not-self that hurts, bores and makes us indifferent and inconsiderate of others. A being that we have every reason to want to forget (on the contrary, why would a luminous being be forgotten?). The first non-Heideggerian negative point is, then, death-being, being as mortal emergence, with its correlative (and highly understandable) oblivion. There is no such thing as a being that does not manifest itself in the everyday outburst of entities, in their simple and striving coming to be, ontological preannouncement of their falling apart. This vision agrees with Heidegger in the importance of withdrawing being from the logical realm (as "the most universal of concepts", and also as "the emptiest"). Mere arising is not a concept but the inauguralsepulchral explosion of any and every entity. If we examine any entity, we will not find in it its arising as a property next to others, since its being is simply its being there decaying with all its properties.

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II. Nature. In section 10 of "Being and Time", Heidegger tries to delimit his existential analytic with respect to the natural sciences, in a broad sense that embraces empirical biology, anthropology and psychology. And in his delayed analysis of the "world" and the "worldliness", he tries to dissociate the world from the "nature", in the sense that the worldliness would be something "beyond" of the mere nature, denouncing any intention to clarify the phenomenon of the worldliness starting from what appears in front as nature. Let us read: "...an attempt is made to make an exegesis of the world starting from the being of the entities that are there ahead within the world (...) that is to say, starting from nature. Nature is - understood ontologically-categorially - a limiting case of the being of the possible intramundane entities. Natural entities can only be discovered by Dasein in a determined mode of its being in the world (...) 'Nature' in the sense of the categorial ensemble of the structures of being of certain entities that face within the world, can never make worldliness comprehensible. But neither is it possible to grasp ontologically the phenomenon 'nature' in the sense of the concept of nature of romanticism, but starting from the concept of the world, that is, from the analytic of Dasein" (ST, section 14, p. 78). Here nature has no ontological priority; it remains dependent on the existential structures, on the mundanization of the world of Dasein, and in this way it is subjected to our maneuvers. All its threats are only mundanizations, existential maneuvers, ways of constructing worlds, and nature would be like a limit-case of this construction. This is a contemporary, postmetaphysical version of the traditional maneuver of spiritualist and culturalist metaphysics: to define some realm that is unaffected by the frictions of nature, and, at the same time, to safeguard the results of philosophy from the influence of the methods of the natural sciences, thus avoiding all "naturalization." (This Heidegger learned from his teacher Husserl, who was concerned about the dangers of naturalization of consciousness. Although Heidegger does not think from the category of consciousness, he is concerned with the naturalization of existence.) Heidegger pursues "great philosophical problems" - arising in the history of Western thought which, as in the metaphysical tradition, would not be solved in the natural sciences but "on another plane". The "fundamental ontological question," in particular, has nothing to do with nature.

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Heidegger thinks that, by making this delimitation, he will be moving away from the merely "epistemological" point of view of the sciences and from a certain type of naturalistic and positivistic philosophy. One can agree that the epistemological point of view must be overcome in an analytic o f

existence, but nature can have - in another approach - an

ontological dimension relevant to that analytic. As in the "original thinkers" of whom Heidegger is so fond, nature is also primordial being, and not only an object of cognitive exploration. For nature gives indications about the emergence of entities and not only about how to know them or how to place them in epistemic relations. Death, as a natural fact, is not just any entity, or is not just an entity, but also what unmakes an entity in its own being, that is, what constitutes its ending in some way. Nature is not merely presential, but structural-ontological. Denying his Diltheyan past, Heidegger wants to distance himself from any "philosophy of life", considering the notion of "life" (and, therefore, of "death") as metaphysical notions. (Or perhaps it would be better to say: natural instances presented and implemented in a metaphysical way). ) He notes that Dilthey and the "philosophers of life" did not succeed in posing the ontological problem. This is precisely what is attempted here, even though the present treatise does not rely too much on achieving it. (Indeed, the negative philosophy presented here is not a "philosophy of life" in Dilthey's sense either.) But an ontology of life without nature seems unintelligible. Ontology has to be naturalized. By contrast, Heidegger sees the mode of being of Dasein as essentially different from natural things. According to his perspective, the human being, as an exemplar of Dasein, cannot be seen as just a simple sum or aggregation of natural elements. And this is convincing: the human being does something with these elements and transcends them. One can agree with that idea, but that is not enough to put the human being beyond nature, or as prior to nature. For that mode of being that "makes itself" and "transcends itself" has, at some point, arisen as that peculiar and designated mode of being, and in arising it has already become inevitably affiliated with a natural mode of being that acts precisely in that way, doing something with its emergence, but without being able to go radically beyond it. The human being is a natural being that transcends the given, but that is precisely his nature, that is, his particular way of being terminal. The human being is a being that ends in a peculiar way (Heidegger knows this), but that does not put him beyond or beyond nature; it only puts him beyond the nature of things and non-human animals, but

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(In fact, humans too are not born like other animals, or like a galaxy is born). This conception of the human departs as far as Heidegger would wish from the traditional attempt to define the human as a "rational animal". Nor is the attempt to provide the human with defining characteristics promising, and it really seems more interesting to refer him t o

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particular "mode of being". But none of this allows us to infer that the emergence-terminus of the human, even if different from the emergence-terminus of a giraffe, characterizes the human as an entity that is not part of nature. Not in the trivial sense that the human also has a biology, a body, natural needs, etc., but in the sense that his very peculiar mode of being is as natural as the mode of being of any other terminal being. He is the being that transcends the terminal being of his being in a project of making himself (and up to that point we can go along with Heidegger), but this does not withdraw him from the nature that generates him and that undoes him in that particular way of being. Its becoming and transcending itself does not make it less natural but only specifies its peculiar nature of undoing. Here we perceive an ambiguity in the notion of "transcending." Heidegger thinks of existence as "transcending" the natural in the sense that the natural is already apprehended through a worlding; Dasein, in a sense, is not simply subject to natural laws, but receives them within a project of being; and so fundamental ontology would be something deeper and more arcane than mere nature. I prefer to see existence as "transcending" the natural in the sense of realizing, in a peculiar way, the laws of nature. What the natural sciences provide for ontological-existential analytics is, curiously enough, only the punctual, inextensive, undeveloped and completely trivial information of the terminality of being, of the emergenceterminus, and not important contributions provided by the scientific discoveries of "wellestablished" or consolidated "sciences". Anaximander and Kripke had intuitions that natural science is able to provide the fundamental ontological data, and not philosophy, flooded with spiritualism and always bent on a rejection or attempt to overcome nature. The terminal emergence of being "was given", in our world, in the form of nature. This was not necessary. Nature has, in our world, the privilege of patenting the being-terminal of being. To make this clearer, it would be necessary to conceive nature not only as emergence, but also as completion, as natu-mortality, as something that devours by creating, all in the same movement, without emphasizing either the affirmative or the negative side.

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Heidegger links death with biological nature, considering death as a natural entity, incapable of taking the place of being. But being can be conceived as the original arising of things, as coming into being, as the initial explosion, as being born, and, consequently, as decaying, sinking, "going to the bottom". The arising-sinking in general (not only of humans, but also of animals and stars) is gratuitous, abysmal, without reason, without justification, factual. As an emergence-terminal and subject to friction, being makes entities uncomfortable, and in particular the human entity, which for this reason does everything to forget its emergence, its being born. This oblivion operates as the suppression of the sinking dimension of being born, leaving it as a pure blooming emergence (this is what is celebrated on birthdays, a birth that does not exist and never existed: a non-terminal birth). Heidegger says, and we can accept it, that there are ontological considerations that must be made in the first place in order to understand the background on which the usual ontic studies on natural death appear. But this does not imply that such ontological considerations must be "prior" to considerations of natural life and death. It is a question of inquiring into the ontological dimensions of nature understood in a plenary way, as natumortality. But Heidegger is interested (as, in general, European philosophers were) in establishing a profound dissociation between everything that dies and human death, not only in the harmless sense that there is a difference, but in the sense that this difference makes the human "transcend nature" and not only represent it in a peculiar way. Dasein has a natural death even if operated through a particular mode of being. Heidegger makes here his most important concession: "The biological-medical investigation of the cessation of life can achieve results that can be significant also ontologically, once the basic orientation of an existential exegesis of death is assured. Or will illness and death in general also have to be conceived under the medical point of view, primarily as existential phenomena?" I would answer these questions in the affirmative, without a doubt. Certainly, illness and death are part of the very texture of being and of Dasein, they are not eventual accidents. To what degree of abstraction does metaphysics have to fly before we are left without these states and events? But Heidegger insists on his mysterious thesis of "anteriority": "The existential exegesis of death is prior to all biology and ontology of life". But why? It seems more plausible to think that there is an insurmountable terminal situation in front of which Dasein positions itself in a peculiar way. What seems to be primary is the mortalbeing of being born, of having been born, and not what Dasein will do afterwards.

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with "it". Ec-sistence is a response to the natural situation and not the other way around. Existentialism, self-making, transcending, are reactive. One can agree that an ontological exegesis must be done to better situate the merely ontic (psychological, sociological, anthropological) treatments of death and mortality, but this does not mean that we must accept that this exegesis must be something detached from an ontology of life-death guided by all that we know, with the help of the sciences, about nature. III. Value. My third point with Heidegger is the question of valuation, which he wants, by all means, to avoid. The primary question is that of the "meaning of being," never that of its value. At several points in Being and Time, Heidegger insists that he is not speaking valuationally (and, especially, morally), but only ontologically. The stylistically curious thing is that this frequent warning (that what is being read should not, at all, be considered valuationally) perhaps draws the reader's attention to something that would not even have crossed his mind in a spontaneous reading of the text. (And this is the danger of any warning: that the sign draws attention precisely in the direction it was intended to be avoided.) In the particular case, the moments in the text where Heidegger places his warnings are those, precisely, where the question of value shines and discomforts and where the statements insinuate themselves as irrepressibly valuational. For example, when he explains the impersonal "Self" (Das Man), he refers to Dasein as being "under the lordship of others. He is not himself, others take away his being", or when he speaks of the "dictatorship" of the Self (it is spoken, said, read). The texts are well known: "Every privilege is brought down...", "Everything original is flattened...", "Everything ardently conquered becomes vulgar", "Every mystery loses its force", and there is talk of the "leveling" of the possibilities of being. The "publicity" of the Self "...does not enter into the depths of matters because it is insensitive to all the differences of level and authenticity. Publicity obscures everything...it withdraws from Dasein all responsibility (...) (The Self) preserves and consolidates its tenacious dominion". Immediately he says that the mode of being of the Self "...does not mean a diminution (Herabminderung) of the facticity of Dasein, any more than the Self is, by not being of anyone, a nothingness." Here Dasein is presented as struggling to wrest from impersonality something that it can really consider as "its own".

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It is hard not to think that, by achieving all that, an "improvement" of the existential condition is obtained. Without an accentuation, without identifying what is to be avoided or longed for, it becomes difficult to understand the Heideggerian description of the Self. The valuational imbalance (to live something of one's own is better than to remain sunk in the Self) seems a condition of understanding (and without denying that the Self is as existential and as much a part of Dasein as the opposite). Being itself includes "shock values," it strikes the existent in one way or another. The Dasein cannot walk through the world, "mundanize," without already accentuating or preferring. Heidegger certainly does not want to do what medieval thinkers did, transform certain human accentuations into something like "evil," or strip certain human preferences of ontological density (e.g., by making only "good" have entity). It is not a matter of denying ontological density to Se (and to the other markedly preferential or accentuative elements of existential analytics, such as "cadence"), but only of pointing to its impact value on a being such as Dasein. The latter has to feel the Self as adverse if what it seeks is its singularity (and supposing that this is what it seeks, which is controversial). It has to feel the Self as leveling, de-personalizing, and even degrading. This does not have to entail the maximal values of the tradition but it cannot avoid assuming minimal values of strong existential impact. ("Evil" as a metaphysical notion can be left out of existential analytics, but not the uneasiness that the world provokes in the existent). This kind of "shock value" is not a plus that is added to being, and that could loiter in a phenomenological description of the "fundamental structures" of existence, but something that has always been inevitably present in the relationship of the human being with the world. Existential possibilities, such as the world, death, cadence, the Self, cannot be lived in pure indifference by a being such as Dasein, but already in a certain accentuation that characterizes its swimming walk through the world. Heidegger writes: "When Dasein...opens to itself its own being, there always takes place this uncovering of the 'world' and opening of 'being there' as a removing of the concealments and obscurations, as a destroying of the disfigurements with which Dasein encloses itself against itself." It is not that texts such as this one "contain" valuational elements, but that they cannot be understood without them. To strip them of valuation is not to remain with a text without value, but simply to remain without text. (In the same register in which the Cordovan metaphysician Nimio De Anquin said that it was the guest that constituted the house).

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When Heidegger says that Dasein is always in "states of mind," this implies that it is a valuational being that is always pondering (gravitating), considering that something is worthy of provoking sadness or euphoria. Philosophical ideas are dramatized, in them there are villains and heroes, things to avoid and things to long for. It is the "commotion" of ideas against the pretended apathy of fundamental ontology. It is as if Heidegger conceded the pathé, but wanted to take them out of his own exposition: a cold exposition about affects. The Heideggerian "opening to being" must already be painful and aggressive, and this is shown in the regularly crepuscular existential pathé of Dasein. It could not be otherwise, despite the very strange current idea that we should be "happy" to be, to be there (a truly extravagant idea), to the point of considering a person who does not manage to "be happy" to be sick or crazy. This shows a deep estrangement of the terminal structure of being, elaborated with zeal by that being that feels in the skin its original ontological disadvantage. Heidegger preserves the usual affirmative vision of the "opening" (in which, at the most, "there is also the veiling, the hiding"), and with that the twilight pathé are very strange, when, in truth, they should be the most comprehensible thing in the world (and the pathé of "happiness" incomprehensible). Heidegger wonders, perplexed, why we do not feel anguish all the time (ST, section 40), but who says we do not feel it? It takes a less luminous existential analytic to see whether or not this is the case. Perhaps permanent anguish, in the form of "anxiety," is constantly drowned in attitudes, convictions, actions, work, pleasures, and remedies. (When we wake up at night, generally unawares, we feel anxiety almost automatically, until we recover our hiding mechanisms.) Anxiety, a pathos neighboring anguish, and partly superimposed on it, is permanent. We live anxiously, both in our work and in our hours of pleasure, in the sense of being constantly and regularly moved by longings and desires, which can even be executed with a certain calmness; we are always looking for something that we never achieve and that leaves us restless, agitated and frustrated. Anguish closely accompanies this anxiety of all moments. And it would be strange if it were not so, since each one of us is the irreversible consummation of the terminality of being born, hidden, already from the beginning, behind the jumble of entities. Anguish may seem rare and exceptional due to the extraordinary and stubborn power of everyday concealment, but this constant concealment is fully "anxious", as much as that which it is trying to conceal.

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Already at the beginning of the exposition on "finding oneself" (ST, section 29), when referring to the undefined states of mind, Heidegger mentions the person to whom "...being becomes patent as a burden. Why, she does not know." It is curious that, being the being itself a burden, a weight, a burden (in the Heideggerian existential analytic itself) at the moment in which Dasein feels it, it appears as inexplicable, as not knowing the reason for this feeling. It does not seem that the Heideggerian existential analytic makes any effort to get out of that situation of estrangement in front of the crepuscular and the heavy. Anguish is, for Heidegger, a pathology of being, but it continues to be an "exceptional" state of mind (and even revealing of something sublime), and with this exceptionality it continues to preserve its estrangement. The anti-valorizing signs continue in the exposition of the theme of the cadence (Verfallen) of Dasein. Already at the beginning of the exposition on Das Gerede (the talkings), he says: "The expression 'talkings' is not to be taken here in a pejorative sense" (nicht in einem herabziehenden Bedeutung). He says that it is a "positive" phenomenon. And of course it is! It is not privative, it has an ontological density. But it is experienced by Dasein in a valuational register of accentuations and de-emphasizations, as something to be avoided or appropriated. This is manifested in the very terms in which Heidegger describes the phenomenon: "What matters (to people) is that it is spoken...what is said, the ordinary sentence, are now a guarantee of the real and true of discourse and its comprehension. Speaking lost or never achieved the primary relation of 'being relative to what is spoken'; it is never communicated in the mode of an original appropriation of this entity, contenting itself with repeating and passing on the speaking. What is spoken in the talkings drags with it ever-widening circles, assuming an authoritative character." It is evident that Heidegger is describing here how Dasein lives the speaking in the talkings in an accentuated, preoccupied and moved way. To understand Das Gerede it is fundamental and unavoidable to understand it in a pejorative sense as well. Only in part, because the talk is a fundamental ontological dimension, with its own positivity and density. But this dimension cannot be understood if we do not dramatize the idea of cadence, if we do not see Dasein at a crossroads between speaking and chattering, between chattering and austere silent listening. "The talkings are the possibility of understanding everything without the previous appropriation of the thing". Of course, to remain meekly in the Self is an anticipatory decision of Dasein like any other: in a n y case, one will have existed, purely and simply. There is no

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moral" accusations, in the traditional sense, against the Dasein that remains in the talk. But there is in Heidegger's text something like a tendency which he, with good judgment, does not want to be confused with a "moral" enterprise, but which points, likewise, towards a property with an appreciable ontological value, even if it is difficult or impossible (a life totally liberated from the Self). "Appropriation" is a value that runs through Heidegger's entire oeuvre, even after "Being and Time," and it may be bad faith not to want to see (and to forbid the reader, by means of signposts, to see) appropriative events as desirable, as positively emphasized, and as rejectable the processes that lead away from that appropriation. "What is said and transmitted without basis comes to make the opening become the opposite, a closing." "Opening-closing" is another value-dual that runs through Heidegger's work: what opens is better than what closes, although what closes has its own ontological positivity, it remains an important existential dimension. The talkability "...hinders every new question and discussion, discarding them and postponing them in a peculiar way". He says that chatter is an "uprooted understanding of Dasein," and notes that there is no place of discourse entirely free of chatter. But this, far from removing its negativity, accentuates the lost character of all our speaking. (Not because we fail to rid ourselves of it does the phenomenon become "nonpejorative," as if we could not consider something we cannot rid ourselves of to be regrettable). Similar things are said about other existential components of the fall, such as greed for novelty (die Neugier) and ambiguity (die Zweideutigkeit). The former is characterized by the "not lingering in the surrounding world from which we are cured", and by the "dissipation in new possibilities". The second "provides the previous discourses and the curious perceptions in relation to what properly happens and, with that, they seal the realizations and the actions with the stamp of the backward and insignificant (zu einem Nachträglichen und Belanglosen)". With respect to the fall, comes the unfailing sign: "Dasein, being essentially fallen, is, due to the very constitution of its being, in 'falsity'. This term is used here ontologically, the same as the term 'fall'. It is necessary to guard against any negative 'valuation', which would be ontic in its analytical-existential use" (ST, seção 44, p. 243). See something similar with respect to the "debt" of existence, which shows Dasein as "non-being": "This determination does not in turn signify in any way the ontic property of the 'failed' or 'worthless', but a constitutive, existential ingredient of the structure of the being of the projecting" (ST, section 58, p. 310).

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But that value is embedded in being, that it is constitutive, does not eliminate it as value. It means that being itself shines in disturbing, affecting, afflictive, impacting ways, that being, in its own non-being, makes a dent, influences, is not neutral or balanced, but always wounding, aggressive and, in the last case, dying. All this is lived by Dasein in its own being, it is not something to be "added". Indeed, the idea that values do not compose being but only accompany it inessentially runs through the whole European philosophical tradition, from Hume and Kant to Wittgenstein and Heidegger. A defensive posture, perhaps, in order not to have to face the Great Disvalue of being itself? (It is always better to declare that the world has "no value" than to have to admit that it has a negative value! If the world had a clear positive value, affirmative philosophers would take the greatest pleasure in pointing it out; but since the world appears to be very bad, it is better for philosophy to discover that "valuing is meaningless", that the world is "neither good nor bad". A consoling agnosticism). To insist - perhaps unnecessarily - on the same idea, let us note that, at the moment of characterizing the whole of these phenomena as "cadence" and "fall", comes in ST the infallible warning: "The term, which does not express any negative evaluation, intends to mean that Dasein is immediately and regularly together with the world of which it is cured". We have then a "fallen" being who has to strive to face the fall. The being of the fall is named by Heidegger with the striking term of "Absturtz," "crumbling," collapse, precipitation, dejection. "Dasein collapses out of itself, into itself, into the groundlessness and 'non-being' of improper everydayness," undoing always concealed in everyday interpretations. This "...continually tears away the understanding of the project of one's own possibilities and throws it into the quiet presumption of possessing or achieving everything". Of course, the fall is constitutive, it was not, literally, a fall from a higher place. Nor does existential analytics make ontic claims about the "corruption of human nature". But the suffering of terminality is not a cold moral judgment, but the very suffering judgment of being-in-the-world itself, the very cry of finitude rising from the wounded bowels of Dasein. It is not a moral stigma, but an existing suffering, not "evil," but discomfort. The fall is certainly not sin or guilt, hardship or compensation. Dasein cannot be its Da except in the very friction of suffering, from its tight birth.

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(That being is not "bad", as in the metaphysical-moral tradition, does not mean that it does not provoke discomfort, a perfectly immanent and understandable impact). A "purely descriptive" ontology is not possible, because being-in-the-world is the description of the insertion-constitution of the human being in the world, where one cannot miss the dent or the impact or the suffering of the human being in front of the fact of having been born and of having been immediately put to an end. This insertion is lived in an inextirpable valorizing register, to live is to accentuate and to evaluate (as Nietzsche saw it, even instincts are already valorizing). Values are ontological, they are not an inessential aggregate, they are part of being. One cannot be without emphasizing. In the phenomenological description the impact that the world provokes in Dasein must appear. An impact that is, I argue, of initial discomfort, immediately counteracted by the incessant intramundane creation of values. The question of "how much being is worth" is of fundamental importance in any phenomenological description of human existence. Even when he speaks of states of mind, the Heideggerian analysis is cold and without experientiality. An apathetic ontology. Not even when it speaks of anguish does the Heideggerian analytic have an affective color, unless the reader adds to it. Anguish is treated as access to being, not as a painful experience. It is true that Dasein is presented as incomplete and pending, but the shocking fact is that this incompleteness is, at the same time, frictional and aggressive, corrosive and threatening. It is a facticity that affects, that not only withdraws all meaning, but also makes one suffer. To ask about the meaning of being is not enough, one must also ask about the value of being. Not only what being is, but how it is, how it allows itself to be lived, or if it can even be lived. These are fundamental ontological questions and not derivative or accessory questions. Nor should the question of ontological worth or worthlessness be confused with any analysis of "evil" in the world. To take into account the question of the value of being is not to return to a "moral" point of view on the world, but to remain on the plane of the ontological foundation prior to any morality. For from the value or disvalue of the world itself, or from our insertion in it, will arise a morality or (most likely) the impossibility of a morality, at least an affirmative one. (This is dealt with, in part, in chapter 4 of this Treatise).

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Which makes us philosophers (Can a Bolivian be an "essential thinker"?). Heidegger speaks, somewhat irritatingly, of "essential thinkers," almost all of them German. But the essential European thinkers, Heidegger included, are not good metathinkers. We may grant that they are good philosophers (and not as good as they are supposed to be) but they are certainly not good meta-philosophers. For each of them stubbornly continues to assert that his own philosophy is the true one and that all others are wrong, without any of them having sufficient reflective strength to grasp the astonishing fact that this assertion of theirs is made within a realm where thousands of other thinkers also say the same thing and with the same conviction. But if each philosopher affirms that his philosophy is true and the others wrong, these affirmations, seen as a whole, cannot all be true. No "essential thinker" realizes that his "essential thought" appears in the midst of many other essential thoughts, many of them non-European. This is a fact that only a great metaphilosopher, an "essential meta-thinker," can visualize. And Europe (and the United States) has not produced good meta-philosophers (perhaps the only ones worth mentioning are Fichte, William James and Wittgenstein). Thus, Heidegger, already at the beginning of his Lessons on Nietzsche, affirms that to see him as a "philosopher of life" is a "wrong" judgment, and he makes absolute affirmations of the same type throughout the work. He has not the least patience to understand what it means to say that Nietzsche is a philosopher of life, or to grasp the truth content of that statement. He is only interested, like all European philosophers, in doing away with all other philosophers, not by eliminating them (that would not give pleasure, it would not be enough), but by including them, disadvantageously, in his own thought. Heidegger spends all the Lessons denying many thinkers (especially Schopenhauer) the title of "essential thinkers", but he could be denied, immediately, the title of "essential meta-thinker" for continuing to believe that his interpretation of Nietzsche is "the only correct one" and the others "wrong". The finesse of a great metaphilosopher is seen in the ability to place his thought in the midst of other thoughts, without claiming to occupy the center. For just as a circumference cannot have more than one center, if philosophical problems have a unique solution, it is obvious that there cannot be many unique solutions to the same problem. The hypothesis that all the other positions are wrong is used by all the positions, and all of them have reasons to affirm it. These are the meta-questions

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philosophical issues that the European "essential thinkers" are unable to address, all of them clouded by their own pride in having finally discovered the one truth. Heidegger is by no means an exception to this, but, on the contrary, a clear example. He continues to try to swallow up the other philosophies instead of recognizing their independent existence, and to declare that, now yes, the truth (about Nietzsche, in this case) has been reached, without managing to visualize the profound self-delusion on which rests that belief shared by the whole metaphysical tradition that he criticizes so much. Heidegger fails to be an essential meta-thinker, insofar as he continues to be trapped in the impossibility of finding in his own philosophy something that enables it to sustain itself as the truth, next to the "errors" of the others, except for the gratuitous and perfectly irrelevant fact of being himself the author of that philosophy that, once again, pretends to be the only true one, capable of judging the deviation of all the others. An essential meta-thinker realizes at once that his philosophy is not true in the midst of the errors of others, but that it is true in the midst of the truth of others. Heidegger goes on to assume a radical incomprehension that what he brutally calls the "equivocations" and "errors" of the other philosophies may simply be their respective ways of arranging the pieces of the endless game of thinking. (To illustrate Heidegger's meta-philosophical narrowness, see, for example, his view that Baeumler's

and

Jaspers'

interpretations

of

Nietzsche's

"eternal

return"

are

"misinterpretations"; that all those who think that this idea is religious and personal are "flatly deluded"; Schopenhauer would have committed a "fundamental misunderstanding" in his view of the will; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche would have a "wrong interpretation" of the Kantian doctrine of the beautiful; and it is shown how much Schopenhauer "falsely interpreted" and "vulgarized" Platonic and Kantian philosophy, etc, etc; all statements that show the impossibility of Heidegger to put his philosophy next to the others; all his talent is philosophical, his metaphilosophy is mediocre and not original at all). Reading Heidegger, especially what he says about "becoming a philosopher", when he unconsciously repeats the idea of his despised Schopenhauer - that an authentic thinker is the author of a single obsessive idea, unlike the "researcher" who has many interests - I think of what could be answered, within the present Treatise (authored by a peripheral Latin American philosopher, fatally "non-essential"), to try to place the present reflection within that requirement. At least two things: (1) In the first place, that the determination of the

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(2) The particular determination of the being of the Being of the Being, mine and that of any other thinker, must be realized in a metaphilosophically enlightened environment, that is, as a philosophical determination alongside others, and not as the only true or the last of all. (2) The particular determination of the being of the Being presented in this Treatise is the determination of the being of the Being of the Being as terminality. Only, as has already been seen and will be abundantly seen in the rest of the present work, I present this determination of the being of the Being of the Being as being itself, without forgetfulness. Being itself is terminal, and the terminality of entities is the terminality of entities IN THEIR BEING. Outside of this, "being" is only phantasmagoria. I refer to Heideggerian statements such as the following: "The question arises in relation to what the entity is. We call this 'central' question bequeathed from Western philosophy the directive question. But it is only the penultimate question. The last, and this means the first, is: what is being itself" ("Lessons on Nietzsche", Part I). This may have airs of mystification, for it always seems that, beyond the question of the very being of entities there would be something like a "deeper" question about being itself, or even something beyond being. It is clear that the ontological distinction between being and entity is preserved and clearly stated when it is said that entities can be seen in two ways: either as the specific entities that they are or in their mere being. We do not need more. This dimension of being is the one that Heidegger reserved for himself in order to put everyone (including Nietzsche) in the penultimate question and to place himself alone in the last, first and primordial one. Heidegger says that Nietzsche gives two answers to the question about the Entity: the Entity in its totality is will to power and the Entity in its totality is eternal return of the same. (In my philosophy, I say: the Entity in its totality is terminality; therefore, eternal non-return). Heidegger explains Nietzsche's open affirmativism very well: since the truth that comes from the crude sciences is too unbearable, then art, the creation of values, the will to power and to expand, the will to "be more," must be put in the place of truth, and this is the famous "inversion of all values." Christianity, and religions in general, have denigrated life for the sake of a "beyond," of a truly valuable world beyond life. Nietzsche inverts this: indeed, he recognizes with the Christians that this world is horrible, but from this Nietzsche infers that value must be given to this, the only world that exists. One can believe, with Christians, that life is horrible, but, against them - and with Nietzsche - not accept that a better one exists. But from this it does not follow, against Nietzsche, that this world should be affirmed (or, much less, that it is "good," something that does not even

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Nietzsche thinks. Life can be affirmed "with all its terrors" without being good). In my line of thinking, I prefer to admit that the world is bad, even very bad, that there is none better, but that from that should not be inferred the affirmation of life with all its terrors. Such terrors are reason enough to try to be ethically better than the world, assuming an ontologically preserving attitude (in the sense of not multiplying the already existing suffering, whether through procreating or eliminating humans), always being ready for an ethical death (see chapter 4 of this Essay). Between the Nietzschean animal and the Christian angel, there remains, simply, that human that is. Then, the great feat of Nietzsche, "essential thinker", celebrated with great finery by Heidegger, is to have transformed life itself into the very consolation of having to live it "with all its terrors", with no more beyond. Indeed, the occasional moments in which we manage to ardently wrest some good-being from a systematically adverse being are enough for multitudes of desperate people (especially adolescents and young people) to ardently embrace Nietzsche's philosophy as the consolation they were needing and which the religions and metaphysics of the past could not provide them with. Unconditional love of Life replaces unconditional love of God. But submission to Life and submission to God are equally humiliating, like all unconditional submission. The "eternal return" is the immanent affirmative myth after the transcendent affirmative myths have fallen. The great Nietzschean "revolution" consisted in transforming Life itself into God, into a powerful immanent redemptive force; but it did not escape the bonds of consolatory affirmativism. (He himself said of Zarathustra: "For now, Zarathustra has only the totally personal sense of being my 'book of edification and comfort' otherwise, he remains obscure, veiled and laughable to anyone" (quoted by Heidegger in Part I of his "Lessons"). Heidegger celebrates all that is most obscure and difficult in Nietzsche, while he scorns the "commonplaces" of Schopenhauer, a "superficial" philosopher whose only merit would consist, perhaps, in having facilitated the emergence of Nietzsche, who is indeed an "essential thinker". But, precisely, the lay affirmative consolation needs to be extremely complex (vide Hegel and the German idealists, also admired by Heidegger, and whom Schopenhauer abhorred), and the more difficult and incomprehensible, the better, so that the consoling speculative fabric is not so easily discovered. Perhaps the transcendent religious fables fell down because they were too simple and easy to interpret. Always an element

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of darkness and enigma come well to a philosophy whose purpose is to edify and sustain in life. Whenever Schopenhauer tries to use Plato and Kant to express some crude and simple fact of the human condition, Heidegger accuses him of "vulgarizing" the thoughts of those great philosophers, or of uttering "commonplaces." It seems that the philosopher has to say something very complex and constructive to approach the truth. But this assumes that truth is located at the level of the complex invention of positive values that leads us - more or less consolingly - away from the terminality of being, which has nothing complex about it but is the most trivial thing there is. The philosopher has to bring novelties and the only way to bring them is to complicate his discourse indefinitely. If I simply expound the terminality of being, they will answer me: "No, it cannot be as simple as that; there must be something else!"). It is scandalous to see how all of Nietzsche's expository inadequacies always find in Heidegger's interpretation some plausible explanation, some apology, and even some new motive for praise and homage, as if the reader were always guilty of not understanding. Complexity is the stylistic and speculative resource to hide an unbearable simplicity. Superficiality is the sad stylistic prize that a thinker wins when, in elementary language, he succeeds in simply pointing it out, something that Nietzsche could still, in part, understand, but which Heidegger has already completely lost sight of. So now truth becomes art, that is, that which humans can invent illusory and fantastic in order to endure life. In my own terms, Nietzsche places truth at the level of intra-worldly invention of positive values, and not at the moment of the terminal structure of being, which is what imperiously forces the invention of positive values in the intra-world, fighting against a structure that will inexorably defeat them. Now Life gathers all the content of truth, after the death of God was published in all the newspapers. That is why art is exalted to incredible heights. But it is not clear what are the advantages of preferring Nietzschean illusions to Christian illusions, at the moment of restorative consolation, edification and comfort. Why Zarathustra's myths would be preferable to biblical myths. When the metaphysical-moral ideal falls, it does not really modify the vision of the world as being evil (or as provoking structural unrest), which was, in one way or another, assumed throughout the history of European thought (see part 3 of this work). The

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The only thing that changes is that now this bad-being of the world, of life, no longer has the hope of redemption and purification that it had in the metaphysical period. We have to "make do" here, in the only world there is, but without the unconditional acceptance of life, of the "Unlimited Say Yes". We can continue to say no to the world, to suffering, to injustice, to continue to see life as something terrible even when the ideal and transcendent worlds have fallen. Heidegger is, or was, an option in this direction, since he is neither a Nietzschean vitalist nor a philosopher of values. But his way of conceiving being, that being to which the human being opens himself, is so luminous that it does not fail to establish a new type of postNietzschean affirmativism. For him, there is certainly no transcendent world, and this world is neither good nor bad (at the risk of falling into vulgar pessimisms, into the "commonplaces" and trivialities of Schopenhauer), but only what appears to the apathetic fundamental ontology. But this static opening to being, "beyond good and evil," is as consoling as the Nietzschean affirmation of Life. It seems that the "highest truths", those thought by the "essential thinkers", are the affirmative ones, those that help to live, to over-live, to endure. But why would not the highest truths be those that kill us, those that prevent us from living? Heidegger's superficiality consists in never really asking himself these questions; Nietzsche did, but to infer therefrom, immediately, the Unlimited Saying Yes to Life, instead of the coherent saying No, which he could not allow himself for personal reasons. The idea of the "eternal return" is undoubtedly the most mystified part of Nietzsche's philosophy and the one to which Heidegger confers the greatest relevance. In particular, Heidegger takes very seriously the tremendism with which Nietzsche presents this "idea", as something terrifying, desolating, scandalizing, hiding the enormous affirmative and consoling power of the idea of the return, which does what religions have always done: to suppress death or put it under the control of some other force. Heidegger says that this doctrine is not one among others, but something very special, reflecting essential aspects of modernity. It is given as proof of the importance of the doctrine the importance that Nietzsche himself gave it. According to Heidegger, the "profound significance" of the idea of Eternal Return must be conquered from the context of thought in which it was generated (an exegetical charity that other thoughts do not seem to deserve). The doctrine is not the product of a "vain narcissism", but an "ever-renewed disposition of Nietzsche for sacrifice" that imposes that task on him. Thus, Nietzsche appears as someone who generates a profoundly disturbing idea

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for humanity. Heidegger does not want to perceive the immense satisfaction with which Nietzsche presents his idea, and how his horror and horror are a mask for the most intense rejoicing. The idea of the Eternal Return serves to affirm suffering, and with that, to neutralize it, to make it tolerable and acceptable. In his attempt to overcome the vulgar Schopenhauerian pessimism through tragedy (a step much celebrated by Heidegger), Nietzsche recovers the religious elements he wanted to overcome, while Schopenhauer remains at the level of natural science, so superficial, so little complex, so banal. The main element of pessimism is the existence of suffering in its triple dimension of pain, tedium and moral incapacity with others; the affirmative maneuver of the Eternal Return is to deny that suffering is a disqualifying element of life; suffering ceases to be an objection when it is desired as infinite repetition. It is clear that if suffering is no longer an objection to life, this is the best of all possible worlds! But this complicated (perhaps impossible) passage from pessimism to tragedy is made by Nietzsche in full mysticism, without any plausible argument. Even if the idea of the "eternal return" were conceived as "the highest affirmation", this would not identify it as "the deepest thought", but, perhaps, as another consoling and defensive thought next to so many others of the metaphysical stage of European philosophizing, a stage presumably "overcome" in the 20th century. The "highest thought" is, for Nietzsche (in the reading of Heidegger), that of the fullest affirmation of life. But why could not the deepest thought be that which leaves us without defense, Christian or Nietzschean? Perhaps the deepest thought coincides with the lowest negation. But this is resisted by all philosophy, even the most radical, even Heidegger's. Does a thinker, to be "essential", have to be affirmative? Does he have to show that spiritual (Thomas) or cognitive (Descartes) or existential (Heidegger, Sartre) or political (Marx) constructions have the last word? Is a thinker not forgiven if his thought is radically and irresistibly negative? Is he only given the title of "essential thinker" when he shows himself capable of giving renewed metaphysical hope? May not the radical impossibility of any and all hope be "essential"? Heidegger explains that, for Nietzsche, "value" is only that which is the condition of life, that which elevates life, that which supports, requisites and awakens the elevation of life. But if the Being itself is terminal, as is held in this first meta-philosophy, it means that the Being itself lacks "value." Nietzsche does not seem to be a radical thinker on this point, for he is incapable of

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to see that every moment of vital exaltation, of exaltation of life, is within the inexorable movement of terminality. The declining, decadent life is not a moral or ascetic option, but the very movement of the Being. The devaluation of the Entity, according to Nietzsche carried out by metaphysics, is, in truth, a correct verification of this, without any "slander", only with the emphasis that we do not need an Ideal World to verify the lack of value of the present world. It is not the metaphysicians who devalue the value of life; they only point to its structural lack of value. And what Nietzsche does is not to discover the "value of life" but to increase the intramundane construction of values in a way that tramples rationality and morality. If the affirmative character of thought was a fundamental feature of metaphysics, then it can be said that Heidegger is the last thinker of metaphysics and not Nietzsche. A fundamental unfolding of my unique thought (the terminal form of the world), that which, according to Schopenhauer and Heidegger makes me a philosopher of a unique and obsessive idea, is the critique of affirmativism in philosophy, the tendency (which hatches in Nietzsche) that thought must follow the expansive direction of life without seeing the possibility that the deepest philosophizing is profoundly anti-vital. Because the Entity is terminal, the various philosophies have regularly been concealing, constructive, reactive, affirming, and have put the Entity in that affirmative reaction, have transferred the affirmativity of the reaction to the Entity as being the Entity itself. My thought discovers the profound negativity of the Entity and, therefore, the necessity of an affirmative reaction in order to be able to support it; but this affirmative reaction will finally be sucked out by the terminal form of the world, whatever the concrete content of our lives and of our thoughts may be. Negative thought is an attempt to put itself in the strict direction of the terminality of being, in a movement that - against Nietzsche and Heidegger - still tries to be ethical. We Latin American thinkers are asked to accept all the complexifying maneuvers that Europeans used to flee from the terminality of being, without being allowed to choose, at least, our own maneuvers. Kant and Hegel are brought to us as the priests brought Christ to the Indians, as a truth that had arisen in the world without their knowing it, as a philosophical Good News to which everyone needed to bow. But the Nietzschean fable, with all its fantasies, is only an option, not a necessity. The Heideggerian idea that the "essential thinkers" HAD to think that, that what they thought was not something linked only with their personalities, but also with their own personalities.

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and their cultures, seems a mystifying and rhetorical thought. All philosophical fantasies are contingent, and if they appear not to be so, it is because they assume some absolute point of reference, constructed, paradoxically, in the midst of the sticky swamp of contingency. There is, therefore, no need to accept the "death of God" and the Nietzschean diagnoses and prognoses as "ersential". It is good that he has spoken, explicitly, of "European nihilism", leaving out Latin Americans and Africans. We are neither "nihilists" nor the opposite. Perhaps we are "swimmers" in an

Unamunian

sense3. We are still thinking about what we are

going to be. Heidegger is thinking about a "new beginning" when we are thinking about how to end in a not so undignified way. It is not that we are "behind" the Europeans; we are just on other paths. 2. NOTES FOR A NEGATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY: LIVING KILLS. In this conception of being as natumortaleza, as existence/insistence, as growthlanguage, as "insurgence," man is certainly not Dasein. For he has no special privilege of "access" to this being thus conceived. One can see (with Heidegger) a link between the human and being, but in a negative register: we know of the negativity of being through human stumbles, shortcomings and calamities. The human being is not especially referred to an opening, but referred, like any other being, to a fundamental opening/closure. Ontologically there is no difference between humans and other natural beings, since all are affected by the fact of having arisen-terminal. The human being is not, particularly, "the house of being", any more than are plants, animals and things. In all of them, the being dwells, in truth, badly dwells, lives badly (he is "badvivor"), lives narrow, lacking and without comfort. Or, one could say, the being lodges and evicts all beings equally, in one and the same inhospitality, in the universal intemperance. The natumortaleza could not inhabit a house, it could never have a habitat. On the other hand, God, yes, He needs a shelter, a Da-Gott, an obsequious and welcoming human receptionist. Nature can be accommodated anywhere. (Nor does the human being, as Sartre states, have the privilege of having "brought the nothingness to the world. For Sartre, nothingness is linked with consciousness, with the distance that the being I have dealt with these things at greater length in my book "Devouring Nietzsche. For a South American niilism". 3

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between itself and itself. Undoubtedly, this specific conscious nothingness is contributed by the human mode of being. But the constitutive non-being spoken of here does not particularly need the human in order to be introduced into the world. Whatever is taken could not be otherwise than non-being. The human being has introduced absolutely no novelty into being. Terminality points towards a non-being more fundamental than the non-being of consciousness, than the non-being of the Sartrean para-itself).

2.1. The human being as a being who has to live the negative ontology and not just contemplate it. Because being itself is being-terminal, is being-not-being, ending already from the beginning, a human life cannot be constructed following the direction of the being-terminal of being, but only by opposing it. A human life is forced to be primarily reactive. (And this is why the Nietzschean critique against reactive human characters affects all of humanity, including the "strong". Resentment is ontological.) To the extent that the ending sounds to the human as something painful and undesirable, the reaction must be the construction of something positive. All truth, goodness, beauty and justice in the world are built into the concealment of the foundation. In the world all seeking is at the same time concealment, an unwillingness to find, a procrastination. Within a negative philosophy, these two reflective tasks thus go together: the description of the foundation and the un-hiding investigation of it. Humans, much more than living, "go on living", "in spite of everything" (with "all the regret", with all the weight, seriously) because, after all, "one must live". Reflections such as the above generally do not occur, or are quickly absorbed by the exorbitant flow of life. One has the impression that a life was "given" to us (as a "gift"), and that this is naturally good, of which we must make the most of it (because, as we know, "it goes by very fast"). "Live intensely" becomes an imperative. It seems that life has given us a lot (as the poet says), and that if we are not grateful for it we are ungrateful and perhaps sick. If we expose the many frictions of life in the form of natural and social torments, we are accused of "not loving life" despite all its enormous benefits. It is a stigma not to love a life that has given us so much. This is the "tone" with which humans usually face, more or less automatically, the brute and brutal fact of life.

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In this routine consideration of our situation in the world, we are always asked whether or not we love life, but never whether life loves us. For it seems that life, from the very beginning, is a constant threat in the form of the most diverse dangers, from natural catastrophes (which can even wipe out the entire planet), to social catastrophes (such as the conquest of America, Nazism and military dictatorships), to the daily aging and diseases that beset us all the time, and which are no longer even entirely natural. It would seem that life, as soon as it is installed in our bodies, takes pleasure in cornering us in all sorts of risks from which we constantly have to take care of ourselves. There is not a day that goes by that we do not have to protect our bodies from hunger, thirst, sexual desire, accidents, small and large ailments, slander, exclusion, discrimination and injustice (lurking in families, schools, workplaces and even in places of entertainment), and from death itself, which permanently lurks in the streets, in dangerous transportation and in our own homes. We are not only haunted by what might happen to us, but also by what might happen to others, to those whose lives, for one reason or another, are important to us. And also to those we admire, to the bastions of our culture and education, writers, artists, movie actors. Our lives unfold as if, at every moment, life is trying to expel us. But, "in spite of everything", we love life, we cling to it, we beg it for one more year, one more month, one more day, one more hour, we fight for it even when we are being cruelly persecuted, when we are victims of injustice or when we are seriously ill, while it does everything to get rid of us. This is what I express, on the anthropological level, as "living kills". If we remain in life, it is by virtue of our incessant struggle, of our gigantic efforts against a life that does not love us, that continually threatens us. We love life, yes, but life does not love us. The love of life is not reciprocated. "Living kills" is the philosophical reflection on how a being such as the human manages to live in the terminality of being and specifically in the terminality of its being. In the terms of our previous research, how it is to live in a merely reactive way to a terminal birth that causes discomfort. For the human, with his large brain, has to live the terminality of being and not just contemplate it. Negative ontology is not just a scientific "given", but something that was imposed on us to be lived. How should we conceive the

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human (as rational animal, son of God, cogito, pure reason, language, Dasein, wandering metamorphosis) to understand his incomprehensible capacity to live from end to end the terminality of his being. A human who can perhaps be all that (rational animal, reason, Dasein, metamorphosis) only in the intra-world but whom the world itself engulfs and eliminates, not only "at the end", but hebdomadically. What is fundamental in our intra-mundane lives is that the terminality of being is not allowed to live positively but only in the register of defense, reaction and escape. This is fundamental. Everything that, on a daily basis, would seem "positive", or positively lived, in reality is always lived in failure, consumed, disqualified, withered and corrupted. Our lives would be pathetic (not even tragic) for those who see them from the outside: they would see a group of beings trying to positivize their non-being, to live an impossible, to fit their being into an ontological situation that structurally does not allow itself to be, in which holes of life must constantly be opened where life itself refuses to be lived. The protagonists of all these efforts themselves do not see themselves as pathetic, due to the strong mechanisms of concealment and the powerful forces of self-substantiation. In an effective human life, as it is lived, the terminality of being hurts everything it touches, it puts a price on any human action, it corrodes it with terminality. Humans manage to positivize something at a moment t (a relationship, a journey, an action, a product, a creation), but at the moment t + 1, what they had achieved falls apart and begins to crumble; relationships wear out, works are forgotten, journeys lose meaning, what has been built deteriorates, our dearest ones die or lose us. Our lives are crumbling, because, deep down, there was nothing there to be lived, even though life leads us to think that there is. There was only not being, a serious problem for a being like the human being who, "in spite of everything", still pretends to be and to be something. That is why we must begin to think of a negative anthropology. Everything positive happens as if by a gracious favor of the negative. All that is good is so by a breach of the uneasiness of being. All that is beautiful is a dimension of the ugliness of what ends more or less abruptly (one could say that all that is beautiful is a "truce", in the sense of Mario Benedetti). All that is good is constructed with the materials of discomfort. The relations of the bad and the good are inverse to those that come to us from traditional metaphysics (see chapter 3 of this Essay). What there is is malaise (not "evil", in the sense of "evil", in the sense

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traditional metaphysics, from Plato to Hannah Arendt); the good is privative. But not in the sense of a metaphysical "evil" that would have descended upon humanity, but in the sense of the discomfort that being itself constantly provokes in humans, and which they insist on interpreting as exceptional and adventitious. (We must gradually dispense with this uncomfortable vocabulary of "good" and "evil") 4. There is no place for us in the world, depleted and depressed beings (not in the psychological sense, but ontologically, as when we speak of the "depression" of a terrain), always terminal, having to live a being that does not allow itself to be lived, having to love that which despises us, that does not care about us. The being that was given to us is the object of fear and flight; from there comes the flight into the underworld, a runaway, harmful, full of damage and mishaps, because in our flight we run over the others, we damage them and we dispense them. In truth, it is a destruction that comes, originally, from the very non-being of being, as if the being from which we flee impregnates our flight in such a way as to make it destructive, heterocidal and morally disqualified. Human relationships are stumbling blocks (even loving ones, and especially them) because there is no being to live, because the being that there is not, or the non-being that there is, we have to "distribute" among ourselves as an always scarce negative patrimony, a diffusely shared nothingness, as an exchange value that passes from hand to hand giving the strong impression of being something. All this should provide the material for a negative ethnography never done before. But this intramundane flight must be properly understood. According to the beginning of the present reflection, it is, in the first place, a flight from the triviality of our terminal being towards some kind of complexity built in the intra-world. We need complexity. The structural skeleton of our lives is unbearably simple: we are arisen, we wear out and we succumb. Whatever contents we manage to fill this monotonous and very simple structure with, it will develop step by step in a downward direction. Therefore, for humans, it is a matter of enriching this structure by adding flesh and blood to the skeleton of terminality. Our lives are an attempt to make our walk through the world more and more complex, against the immediate intuition that we are trying to "simplify", to make life manageable. There may be an attempt in this sense, but as soon as humans get too close to simplicity, they recoil in horror and become more complex. For a deflation of the metaphysical notion of "evil" into the perfectly physical notion of "malaise" see "Malaise and Morality," chapter 2, section 2.4, pages 222-242. 4

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again, introducing elements that once again make our insertion in the world ambiguous, delaying the slide towards the great final simplification. We do not have the luxury of an active life. All human life is reactive, a laborious and constantly elaborated move from the unlivable nature of being-terminal being to some minimally habitable sector of the intra-world. This move cannot simply consist in a change of elements, or in an external installation, but must be accompanied by a work of valorization, both of what each one does with the terminality of his being and of himself doing it. For a being such as the human being cannot consider valuable the initial terminal situation from which he flees. No one "likes" to be corrupted, no matter how much he gets used to it, if possible. The structural skeleton in which our lives consist, being generated to "go to pieces", having a body that will decompose, being subject to diseases, etc., must plausibly be lived, by a being like the human being, as dis-value, as something fundamentally not valuable (not exactly "exempt of value", as the agnostic would say ("neither good nor bad"), but simply "worthless", with negative value. (Something with negative value is not "exempt of value"). Counterpositively, the intramund is the space where we create the positive values capable of counteracting the fundamental Dis-value of the terminal structure of being. Our situation in the underworld is primarily "valorizing", in the sense that we cannot "be" without valuing and without valuing ourselves. Our intramundane being is, at the same time, our valuing. Being and worth correspond totally. Only a philosophy devoid of any existential element, like that of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, can "find" a world totally "devoid of values", composed only of "states of affairs". But conceiving of a world only of facts is already a very powerful cultural value construction, which allows us to face the terminality of being in a successful way: in the Tractatus, death is not lived, and whatever we may want to affirm about the terminal structure of being is simply unsinnig. An elegant flight into the underworld that simply eliminates all that it flees from, even if in the tormented annotations of his personal diaries, Wittgenstein's existential preoccupation emerges irrepressible, indicating that nothing was really eliminated. Thus, structural Dis-value and intramundane values coexist perfectly, which enables, without mystification or incongruence, to recognize without any skepticism the positive intramundane values while maintaining a skeptical attitude (and even a skeptical attitude) towards the intramundane values.

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nihilist) with respect to any alleged "intrinsic value" of human life. Intramundane values can be recognized as extraordinarily appreciable (even if a large part of humanity, possibly the majority, is deprived of them) while seeing them in their constitutive terminality. Human life can be said to be "bad" (in the non-metaphysical sense of "causing discomfort") not because we cannot live extraordinarily good values in the intramundane, but because those values are internally terminal. Human life is not something "bad" per se, but, as it were, and at best, something intramundanally "good" that terminates from the beginning, in the sense of terminating by simply having come into being. Since the consummation of terminality is painful and morally disabling (in the sense of disregarding others by virtue of the little spacetime that the terminality of being leaves us), it can be said that human life is not "bad" because the values created in the intramundane are bad, but because they are good, very good (even extraordinary) values that end and end badly. (Our lives are like movies that end, invariably, with the death of the main actor). 2.2. The human without objectives but with reyectives. Object and reyect. The fundamental anthropological fact is that we humans must necessarily live and die that being which ontologically is not, which is not, which is not being and which, moreover, causes discomfort, hurts sensitively and morally. The terminal being of being is not scarce, it is not enough for everyone; on the contrary, it is excessive and aggressive. Human attempts to live a being that is not make the being that is not something in the arduous human survival, but always something uncomfortable and discouraged, that refuses to be: on the human plane, the nonbeing is transformed into a curious being-not. For, suddenly, that being that is not and to which the animal and vegetable forms of life were perfectly adequate, now has to be lived by a new type of being that appeared in the world and that absurdly insists on making the non-being something. This ontological inversion (from the non de dicto to the non de re) is the greatest human contribution to the ontology of the world; for the non-being of being manifests itself in all entities equally, but it is only the human entity that succeeds in making the non-being of being transform itself into a being that is not, because he is compelled to try to make that being that is not be. Humans transform a being that cannot be lived, that is impossible, into a non-living being, into a negative possibility (at the cost, of course, of its suffering). To live a human life is always a sacrificial act). And it is obvious that since we do not exist alone, since each one of us is a human being, we are not a being.

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(Sartre's reflections, which continue to be invaluable for any negative anthropology, refer to the human project but do not thematize its structural termination. His analysis of death is poor and very close to common sense, death as a mere interruption of projects. Sartrean philosophy emphasizes the intra-mundane invention of values through "freedom", and focuses less on the aggressive character of facticity, which forces the human to a reactive existence, although always "projective", in Sartrean terms). If being were something, we might have goals in our lives; we might want to achieve something. But being is not because it is eaten away by its own ending. Being is not but not in an absolute way; being is not in a quite specific way, at least for a being like the human being. For the human not-being has impossible projects (and not for that reason can cease to have them); everything it projects is dismantled, mocked and destroyed, corroded by terminality. Because they are terminal, human projects can only be reactive. Humans cannot have any objective that time does not destroy. Their existence is always failure and discomfort, but it is with them that humans do, among other things, works. (And works are usually better the greater the failure). ) The eternity of his works is made with the misfortune of his existence. Thus, the human being cannot have objectives even if he seems to have them. On the contrary, the human being has to do his things and lead his life against the corrosive action of time and the narrowness of space. It is for this reason, because all his projects are reactions against the "form of the world" that fiercely opposes them, that human actions have to accept to be guided much more by kingectives than properly by goals or aims. The human has only kingectives in the sense that, as his life is in the register of beingnot, they show him what he does NOT want, where he can NOT be, where he should NOT go, that which he does NOT have to be, those things he is better NOT to undertake, etc. In general, we are much more aware and enlightened about what we don't want than what we do want. (People say, "I don't know what I want, but this I certainly don't," not realizing that this is a resonance of the reactive nature of their existences)5. It was Professor Fernando Bastos, from Brasilia, a disciple of Eudoro de Sousa, who provided me with the term "reyectivo", in two e-mails in Portuguese in February 2006, which I reproduce here: "(...) 5

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Affirmative philosophers have racked their brains on how to define human happiness, the "good life," the "happy life," and other affirmative projects that depend on objectives, on goals that humans would set for themselves in order to achieve these "ends. But, according to negative ontology, we cannot be happy or have a "good life" according to affirmative goals, eaten away by terminality. It is this that, in the end, makes it impossible to formulate clearly what the "goals" of a "good life" would be. The fact that we set goals for ourselves stems from a profound ignorance of the shape of the world and of our own dwindling being. We are not in a position to set affirmative and objective projects; we are much closer to knowing what is an unhappy life that we want to get away from, than to understanding what would be a "happy life" that we should conquer. It seems much more feasible and authentic to make efforts to avoid immense unhappiness than to achieve the tiniest happiness. We know much better the places of our unhappiness than those of our happiness; we would be perhaps more successful in trying to avoid an unbearable life than in trying to "be happy" (and a "negative ethics" develops entirely in that minimal register). (Kant already pointed out that happiness is a diffuse and opinionated concept, different in different communities and people. But intense unhappiness and pain are much more universalizable than happiness. What brings happiness to one people or person is almost always very different from what brings happiness to another people or person, but what must be done to avoid terrible suffering is often much more similar among peoples and persons. The negative seems a much more effective moral guide than the affirmative). In terms of health, we know much more about what we should NOT do, what would put our organism at risk, than what we should positively do. The positive hides and does not give suggestions or clues. The positive only confuses us, sets traps for us. We only know well what we should avoid, although we never have a clear idea of what we want to achieve. When we did achieve it, it was not what we wanted either, but constantly jacto/jacere means to throw. Hence the terms ob-jecto/objective of objectus/objectio, in front of, to throw. Re-jectio, on the contrary, has the meaning of to throw out, to refuse, to repel, to reject, to rejeitar, to recuse. There are the terms rejeto or rejecto. Thus, rejective would be the neologism, opposite to objective, which would have the meaning of that which rejects, repels. (...)...the existential position of Jean-Baptiste, character of La chute, would be, therefore, rejective, because the world's gods should be rejected. Que acha de: a Filosofia Rejectiva, ou de, a corrente Rejectivista, ou ainda o Rejetivismo (...)". I believe that what he says in Portuguese can be transferred to Spanish without problems. Of course, I do not agree with his application of the term: for me, all human life is necessarily rejective and not only that of some personalities such as Jean-Baptiste, Camus' character.

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we know what we do NOT want to be, what we want to avoid. Our lives are much more avoided than achieved, more guided by kingectives than by goals, by things we want to avoid much more than by things we want to achieve. (In truth, our goals are kingectives, what we want to achieve is intersected by what we want to avoid. Like the Kafkaesque traveler, our goal is "to get out of here.") There is only the constant kingly jumping from one side to the other until the end is consummated (a curious "end" that can be consummated at any moment) to show that it was only a matter of finishing, that it is the only thing that is found without searching, without having it as a goal, because the great and only goal was already traced and was not "ours". We ourselves were the goal, and our attempt was to delay our transformation into a goal. It could be said that we cannot have goals because the goal is ourselves, a goal of which we can never be the subject. We see humans acting, going, returning, doing things, and the affirmative vision interprets this as: these beings do all that because they want to, because they have projects, because they are free, because they have positive aims and objectives and they freely move towards them, and they do that in order to reach those objectives and be happy. Life (and philosophy) develop in constant ignorance of their reactive, concealing nature, as if it has always been assumed that one can have a positive attitude towards being, that being can be lived. This is the dominant affirmative ethical vision, which went through a period of mythical and religious formulation, but which was maintained in modernity in secular versions. But the affirmative vision is deforming (by the force of concealment): aren't humans, much more, simply enduring, enduring, holding on, entrenching, resisting, reacting, fleeing, always in defensive, oppositional, reactive attitudes? Don't human behaviors offer a false appearance of positivity? After all, these humans that we see swarming and writhing there were born unconsciously and authoritatively, and it would be strange if, after that traumatic event, they had any chance of assuming any positivity that is theirs. What else can a human life be other than a reaction to unconscious birth, endowed with terminality? Its being cannot avoid being radically reactive since it encounters a being already given (with its consummated, contingent, asymmetrical and aggressive birth) to which it has to react in some way. If this is so, it is not that life is a "good" but that it constitutes a kind of "good".

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of compulsion, not something that humans freely consider as a positive "good" to be attained through their efforts. We are not free to reject life (not even in suicide do we reject it, but by killing ourselves we are already reacting to the irrefragable fact of life), so that it cannot be a positive "good", something we could choose and love, but only an imposition before which we have to "take a stand". Nor can the enjoyment of life (as a presumed "good") be tealos. Gratification" is the way humans manage to endure the thirsty compulsion of living. It is not about the "pleasure" of seizing a "good". We can see all that ancient and modern talk about life as a "good" and as "the ultimate good" as mystifying. Something is not "good" simply because we cling desperately to it. Being is not nice just because we thirstily seek it. We simply have no alternatives, or the alternatives are worse. The "love of being" because being is "good" is an intra-worldly invention. As Schopenhauer saw it, gratification is, much more, a flight or escape from suffering (i.e., reactive) an in-gratification (life is in-grateful). There is no "ultimate good" to be attained, but rather an "ultimate discomfort" to be avoided, an anti-telos, an end to be avoided and not coveted, the "supreme bad-being", not something we must attain, but something for which we must not be attained). When we see the human being as escape, we begin to understand. (In fact, the famous utilitarian principle puts "attaining pleasure" and "avoiding pain" in the same package, and treats them as if they were simply aspects of the same thing, when, in truth, they are totally different principles). The human being is certainly not capable of attaining the affirmative "ultimate good" (all classical and modern ethics bear witness to this, in which the "ultimate end" is always an ideal, a utopia, something diffuse that cannot be formulated). But neither is he able to flee successfully from the negative "ultimate end" (from "absolute bad-being"), since he is devoured daily (and not only "at the end") by the terminality of his being imposed at birth. The human being is characterized by his inaptitude, incompetence, lack of qualification and misfortune. He is destroyed by the inanity of his being, by his lack of sustenance, not only in illnesses and injustices, but also in the daily phenomenon of discouragement, of the "lack of desire" to continue. If the kingly character of life is not clearly perceived, it is because there is a powerful human work in the opposite direction. A being who cannot but react imagines himself as being able to choose his goals. Habitual ethics develop a permanent

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work of concealment. There is the constant denial of the end (the "flowering" MacIntyre speaks of in "Dependent rational animals" is not followed by a "deflowering"). No virtues are thought of for death, pain, corruption and the "residual actions" of the second part of life, of decay, aging and death. All analyses stop at the moment of "flowering", as if life were only that, the ascending moment, the pure search for the affirmative. That is why most ethics are designed only for the ascending half of life; they have nothing to say about the rest. Stoic ethics, which have thought about the descending part of life in a series of available texts, only clearly abandon the affirmative matrix of thought when they refer to suicide, strongly discouraged in affirmative ethics. In a Freudian register and against common sense, the human being does not seek pleasure in a positive sense (perhaps he sought it originally, but soon realized that it was impossible and went in another direction). What he seeks is to remain as stable as possible without having to die (since death, for the late Freud, would be something like total stability); and this occurs only if no unbearable suffering appears that would make it preferable to die. If unbearable suffering does arise, death is the only pleasure that remains. It is not that the "pleasure principle" is not in force, that there is a "beyond the pleasure principle", but that it can only be exercised, in a being like the human being, in a negative register (of obstacle, rejection, rejection). This flight from pain IS pleasure at the ontologically depressed level of the human. But pain is the symptom or the resonance of terminality, so that this flight will be, in the end (and at any moment) hindered, and the moment will come when pleasure and death will be one and the same thing. Thus, the "compulsion to repetition" is a form of pleasure and not its "beyond". Freud is still imprisoned to an affirmative conception of pleasure, despite his famous anthropological and cultural pessimism. Repeating suffering may be the only way for a cornered human to cope with it; repetition gives him an element of gratifying control. Pleasure is, then, many things: it is also the ontic excess of the movement of escape from suffering (sometimes we avoid it with so much effort, that, residually, we feel a positive pleasure, although paying a very high price for it); but it is also the avoidance of displacement in all its forms (anesthetic or analgesic), and also the postponed pleasure (reality), and also the controlled displacement (by agonizing repetition) and, finally, the pleasure of total stability, the liberating death of unbearable suffering. This is the whole spectrum of the so-called pleasure

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uman. We can never be "beyond" pleasure, but only beyond some of its many faces. In my own philosophy there are no sexual or self-preservation impulses, no Freudian dualisms, but only one principle, the anesthetic, the principle of avoidance of being (of being-born-terminal, of suffering). Not of death, because death can still be pleasure, and therefore be sought. The "sexual drives" are at the service of the anesthetic principle and achieve, for seconds, some positive pleasure, but always under condition. A single principle, weak and differentiated, of anesthetic pleasure (negative), and all the other supposed principles (reality, sexuality, death) are subordinated to it. Reality, sexuality and death are different forms of escape from being, from the pain of being born-terminal, from being condemned to disappear with suffering (and with the possibility of it all along the way). Perhaps there was a (mythical) moment when the human wanted to preserve himself indefinitely but received a strong challenge, the door closed in his face; there was a deep disappointment that convinced him that this was impossible. Now human life consists of a set of alternative responses to this primordial refusal. It tries, effectively, to protect itself from the terminal being of being by constructing protective entities until the moment when the only and last protective entity is death itself. All this puts the human being at risk, even in that which protects him for the time being (sexuality, food, drink, pleasures, companionship, procreation); in each of these entities there are destructive and destructive elements. There is thus no dualism between "selfpreservation" and what endangers the organism: everything that protects can kill. (Eating, which seems purely self-preservative, is a powerful destructive element; it can be said that all humans die from what they eat, leaving aside the extreme and clear case of "food poisoning". It can also be said that all reproducers are killed by what they produce, despite the usual fantasy of "perpetuation" through offspring). Even the same parts of the body are used for all phases of pleasure, from the alimentary to the thanatic ones: the mouth is used for eating, for oral sex, for gorging and for asphyxiation. Thus, there is only being-terminal and its constant and necessary avoidance. All human movements are, at the same time, of escape, of consummation and of attrition.

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2.3. Concealment and defection In the process of concealment of being in the underworld, processes are always visualized in their beginnings and in their booms. In their decline and corruption, in their consummation as terminal entities, the processes are not visualized, they are concealed as heresy, as something dirty and unpleasant. Precisely, if the decadent stage of life were visualized, the concept of "ultimate end" would dissolve, because it is clear that, especially in the second part of life, it is only a matter of resisting, enduring, carrying on, enduring, avoiding great suffering, leading as well as possible to the end; there, every attempt at positivity has already succumbed. Philosophically, it is a matter of realizing, from this integral vision of life, that the first part had exactly the same nature as the second: also the life of the baby, of the adolescent, of the youth, of the mature man was, from the beginning, only resistance, reaction, opposition, rejection, bearing, tolerating. The concealing mechanisms work better in the first stage, they weaken and falter in the second; but all the moments of life have the same structure, they are part of a unique process. The affirmative vision refuses to see human life in its totality. Our whole life is lived in the register of concealment; we would not be able to live it any other way. But concealment is, at the same time, the failure of concealment, a terminality that appears, that refuses to be totally concealed, that opens its way in the unexpected. Concealment is, fundamentally, the concealment of the final stage of processes that have always been terminal, the escape from their frictionate completion. We only know how to begin them; we have no idea how to end them. We do not know how to end despite the fact that we are terminal beings, or precisely because we are so. Our structural unhappiness consists precisely in the fact that we are terminal beings who do not know how to end. We are terminated by the non-being that we are before we manage to learn how to terminate it ourselves. We are terminated by a being that we do not manage to terminate. There are thousands of topics where concealment is exercised and fails. Every area of research (medicine, psychology, oceanography) is a scene of hidden and overt terminality. The topic of food is particularly sobering. Like the growth of children, the whole process of eating is visualized only in its beginnings and apices, but its culmination (i.e., the formation and expulsion of the residue) is concealed as indecent and gross; he who points it out is despised, it is in bad taste. Of food, as of children, its birth (the ingredients, the beginning of the culinary process) is also emphasized, its

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adolescence and youth (cooking, tasting, tasting) and his maturity (the peak of swallowing and tasting). The affirmative narrative stops at that point. Just as children never die, food disappears into thin air. But just as the child ages and enters moribundity, the food is processed by the organism and expelled. The waste is dead food, it cannot be exposed or named, it has t o b e hidden in the affirmative rituals of eating. It is eaten in public laughing and conversing, but it is expelled hidden, sad and ashamed. The "high", pleasant, profitable and aesthetic moment of eating is emphasized, without highlighting the humiliating end; those exquisite delicacies are now sticky detritus in which "haute cuisine" loses all its identity, where everything is inelegantly equalized for the purposes of mere expulsion, in a typical and literal "residual action "6: it was not defecating what we wanted, but eating, just as it was not returning what we wanted, but traveling. These are the places where the rejected terminality rears its indiscreet and disturbing head. All processes, eating, drinking, making sex, reading, writing (all of them present in Peter Greenaway's film, "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover") are captured only in their beginning and peak and abandoned in their decline. The "residual actions" are dead action (the return trips) that no one wants to live, that bore and wear out. It is the death that one does not want to live, the residue of what we do that assaults and offends us, that does not let us be. Everything we do leaves residues; even the most sublime things make us dirty, give off humors, remains, filth. Our lives are rejective, expulsive, the permanent and never so powerful rejection of the terminality of being. What is hidden is the end, which, curiously enough, is but the beginning, the violent and traumatic birth. The baby's clean white clothes try to hide its expulsive and repulsive birth. (All this is unpleasant to write, and certainly to read; but its unpleasantness may be a sign of its truth; the philosopher's work is unhealthy, like that of the sewer). Whoever claims that "life is beautiful" hides the end, which people do not consider part of life, but as something that "interrupts" life, as if the last part of the process were not part of it. "Life is beautiful" can only be sustained by pointing to loose, punctuated flashes of life in its ascending stage, removed from the terminal flow of time, moments in which life exults, pleases and explodes. Place those things on the timeline and there 6

See "malaise and Morality", chapter 3, section "Residual Actions", p. 290-309.

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will find their constitutive terminality. Our lives are abrupt beginnings with foreshortened endings. (All this is extraordinarily shown by Virginia Wolf in her deadly little novels, "Heading for the Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway.") Otherwise, literature and film show the human situation much better than philosophy. Otherwise, literature and film show the human situation much better than philosophy. What has to be done for these ideas to be considered philosophical and not mere literary impressions, by hypersensitive and sick writers?). 2.4. Annotation on the Real. If being is terminal, our lives must necessarily constitute a "staging" of that terminality. If being is terminal, being is not something to which we humans can "open ourselves" completely, but something from which we must also distance ourselves, something to which we want to "close ourselves" because it closes itself to us initially. We have with the self a mutually cautious relationship. The being is avoiding, it is not welcoming. Thus, it is true, in a Heideggerian tone, that human being is a peculiar kind of being because it is structurally linked to being. But the affirmativism of philosophy - and of Heidegger's own philosophy, as we saw - has always observed this linkage in terms of openness, birth, growth and light. The human being points toward being, says about being, but says it in a waning stumbling, in a failure, in a fundamental closure, in the fact that human lives do not function, and do not function in their being. That all human life is failure and failure does not only show a sociological phenomenon, but a pathology of being in the entity that is privilegedly linked to being. Only this privileged linkage is negative: in the stings and sorrows of human existence the terminal being manifests itself in its crudest and most pathetic (not even tragic) form. This structural situation of the human can be discouraging and generate the ontic phenomenon of so-called "depression", a perfectly natural reaction to the terminality of being, not at all an ailment. When humans, as is natural, "get depressed," they themselves and everyone else think that there is something wrong with them, that they are sick or crazy; at no time do they think that there is something radically wrong with the Real itself; at no time do they think that their state of discouragement is deeply motivated by the Real; that people who "feel good" have signed a provisional and advantageous contract with the Real, generally replete with concessions and subterfuges, pushing the "depression of being" a little further forward. Because it is the being itself that is "depressed", it is the being itself that

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depressed; we are depressed in our being, or in our impossible trying to be a being that is not, a clearly depressed and depressing enterprise. A good start for any therapeutic treatment is to make the patient (the sufferer) see that there is nothing wrong with him or her, that they did not "go down" but that the Real is really "low", as low as that human being sees it in his or her very understandable depression. It is necessary to show him or her that the strange thing would be NOT to become depressed (Depression as pathos of the terminality of being). Why is life, then, in general, viewed and lived affirmatively? It is not that humans accept life "naturally". There is nothing "natural" about it, nor is it, in fact, an "acceptance". Saying "yes" to life is a resigned and compulsive act, desperate and agonizing in the face of the unalterable fact that we live to end and that we have to do something with our terminality before it devours us. (There is, then, nothing of Zarathustra's exultant dance in that acceptance). Since we cannot be unborn (unattainable happiness?) and, therefore, we cannot avoid dying, we have to put something affirming, productive or intense between this being that hesitates and dies day by day, and our bodies. There is nothing "natural" about all this, but it is the result of a series of steps and attitudes, almost always pre-reflective. Life is usually seen from the very heart of the ontic, with its cries and presences, within an affirmative story full of inadequate ideas (about one's health, one's security, the idea that nothing bad can happen to us, etc.). Reality is created with affirmative elements, a reality that we manage to endure, a reality effectively created by compulsion and demands of the Real, of a Real that expels us, that does not invite us, that does not shelter us. The Real itself rejects, demythologizes, frightens, alienates, threatens, hurts and kills. Heidegger and the hermeneutic tradition denounce the "objectifying" attitude towards life without seeing this attitude as part of an inevitably reyective project. In a certain way, we are forced to objectify in order to be, in order to carry on an existence. We continue to assume that the Real is good, viable, livable, and we see its obstacles and impediments as exceptions. But the impediment is the Real, not the exception. It is thought that the Real is there to be discovered, penetrated by our intelligence, conquered and colonized, that the Real awaits us and responds to our cognitive and moral solicitations. The basically rejecting character of the Real is not seen. One does not want to see (or cannot see) that the Real does not want to be known, loved, understood or respected: all knowledge and all morality must be constructed against the Real, not in its direction. Therefore, against the affirmative tradition

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of philosophy and ethics, in the thought of the terminality of being, the encounter with the Real is not auspicious, but traumatic. The meaning of being cannot be understood outside the question of the value of being, or, better, of its disvalue or worthlessness or invalidity. For the being that hurts, hurts and kills (and sometimes bores), that rejects and forces to postponement and concealment, can only be lived by an entity such as the human being in the form of worthlessness, hardship, incessant effort, insufficient and suffered achievements, in the tiring and discouraging hustle and bustle of life. Thus, all affirmative values (epistemic, moral, aesthetic, erotic, sporting) are created ontically in an intramund that we try to turn into protection, in a fight to death against the self, without any harmony, without any announcing and sheltering "opening". There is nothing enigmatic about this. In the everydayness of our work and our days, we live in the suffering of our rejecting self, in our constant flight and in the harm we cause to others in our unbridled flight. A being that is flight is a being viscerally incapable of any authentically moral action, at least in the usual affirmative sense. A being that is pure reyection is a being that is always beyond any morality, incapable of morality. A being that is reyective, rejecting, fugitive, cannot be moral, because in its flight it runs over and destroys, and is run over and destroyed. The human world is therefore not "sinful," or "fallen" into "evil," as the metaphysical tradition has presented it. It has not committed any primordial fault or original sin other than that of having been placed asymmetrically in the terminality of being, which is by no means its fault. Morality demands patience, waiting, calm, silence, recollection, all that we need to distance ourselves from in order to continue living. Morality demands to place oneself at the level of the unbearable being, not to put survival as primordial. The philosophy of existence (also affirmative) has emphasized the constructive part of the invention of values (Sartre's "freedom"), without seeing that this can only make its way by destroying values, contributing to the development of the worthlessness of being that is not only in nature (in diseases, etc.), but also, and significantly, in the human world, in the endless conflicts in which we are forced to enter. Just as one does not manage to see prejudice and obstacle as primordial but only as exceptional and accidental, so one does not manage to see the worthlessness of being as primordial and affirmative values as derivative and reactive, but exactly the opposite: it is the "good" that is normal, the "bad" that is exceptional.

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Philosophy boasts of going beyond common sense, of asking what no one asks, of questioning the obvious, what everyone accepts without problems. But when it comes to the human condition, philosophy has remained in the same affirmative imaginaries of common sense. Philosophy has always viewed human life affirmatively, and the human being as cognitively and morally viable. It has thought that this enterprise is hindered by "error" and by "evil," eventual blemishes or exceptional obstacles that appear in the path of "good." Philosophy, as much as common sense, is always "on the way back"; both take the values that are constructed to support the Real as if they were the Real itself. This conceals the difficulties and aggressions of the Real that made it necessary to construct these values. When the philosopher begins to philosophize he already assumes the affirmative attitude, and his search for the "real" is based on its most radical concealment. It is in the Real where he steps, without perceiving it, to give impulse to his pretended philosophy of "the real". The Real is that which can never appear in a philosophy of "the real", that which philosophies need to deny and reject in order to develop. Philosophies are built on the ruins of the Real. Far from "seeking the truth", philosophies are built, fundamentally, as concealments of fundamental truths; they participate, in this, in the general concealing task, together with art, religion, and even science. Already located in the affirmative posture, the philosopher (following an intellectualized common sense) experiences a profound estrangement with respect to everything that is presented to him as "negative". It is in this twisted and cunning way that life is magically transformed into something essentially affirmative, and the negative into something exceptional and deviant. (If this were seen correctly, we could get rid of the unpleasant duality "affirmative/negative", and this is one of the goals of a negative philosophy: to be able to formulate itself without the help of the ephemeral and provisional notion of "negativity", an obsolete vocabulary that still keeps the reference point of the affirmative in force). The Real has to be excavated, seen from the side, always indirectly, for it is that on whose corpse we build (or try to build) our lives. It is a corpse-reality on which we bet in order to survive. The Real is the very consummation of the being-terminal of the being given at birth, of its always avoiding ending. But no one wants to know anything about the Real, not even the philosopher, who proclaims that his crucial mission would be to seek it out and decipher it. Philosophy is a form of concealment of the Real alongside others. The Real is the always postponed full consummation of being, that which absolutely cannot be faced.

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We want to stop natumortaleza at the moment of nascor, to avoid its slide towards annihilation, which we manage to avoid for some time. The Real is what threatens and, at the same time, what stimulates us to invent values that delay its full consummation; our lives are woven with the fragile obstacles that we manage to place to that inevitable consummation. But, you may object, why not also call "real" the invented values and constructions of the intra-world? Precisely because they have a purely reyective function, because they are fatally derivative, because they depend on a previous Real that threatens, frightens and pushes back. And because that which delays the terminal consummation of being does not succeed in eliminating the Real, but recognizes it and, finally, succumbs to it. All that merely delays fails to establish anything; it is too busy defending itself from being by postponing its inevitable consummation. Our lives are spent in the exhausting task of resisting and confronting obstacles and disturbances. To call this procrastination, this procrastination in which our lives consist, "real" would be strange, even if it is the most commonplace thing to do. Affirmativism has reversed the view and considered suffering and death as non-real, and affirmative values (God, cognitive and moral progress, the eternal works of art) as the truly real. The Real is what resists avoidance and ends up imposing itself; it is the insurmountable, irreversible and unrepresentable event that is only lived in suffering (for we are constantly negotiating it, making "pichinchas", administering it); only in suffering (as in illnesses and injustices) do we respond to the Real. On the plane of knowledge, we are always administering the Real in advantageous ways, exchanging it for other things. Hospitals, cemeteries, prisons and hospices (the places Schopenhauer preferred to visit to learn philosophy) are places where resistances falter, where the Real is flaunted, manifested in all its power, and also where the heroism of value creation reaches its maximum extremes. The Real is that which resists representation, that which breaks and refuses; it is the very realm of rupture, of the non-negotiable, of that which does not want to be signified or covered with meaning or justified. It is the lived rupture of significations. The Real is the traumatic moment of the payment of the debt of having been born, without deadlines or installments or parcels. The Real is not an ultimate content, in the representational sense of traditional metaphysics; the Real is that which

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it consumes us, it consumes us, it unrealizes us, it turns us into dispensable residue, it expels us. In the consummation of my terminal being I do not encounter the Real as something strange, but I myself am a figure of that Real; and I realize that the avoidance of the Real was always an avoidance of myself as a delayed emissary of the Real. I am finalized by what I am, by what I always was, by the terminality of my birth; I die as an initial sick person in the Real, long before I am a terminally ill person in the intra-world. The Real maddens, disturbs, neurotizes, depresses. The neurotic is right. The psychotic IS right. Humans manage to live by postponing, disguising, elaborating and denying madness and depression. They construct a fantasized and illusioned reality capable of withstanding the regular onslaughts of the Real. The Real itself is depressed, it is in depression, hollowed out, and humans only accompany that depression with their own transhumant selves. The Real itself is incomplete and humans accompany it with their own incompleteness. At the same time, all these attempts fail, and so humans suffer, chafe, and behave in morally disqualified ways. The affirmative view, for its part, persists in seeing all this as anomaly and distortion. But the concealment is always a failure, and we consist in this failure. The Real looms menacingly and we manage to live only in the gaps of an ever-failing concealment, so that the deadly rays of the Real somehow penetrate through the cracks and wound us. (For a negative anthropology).

2.5. That being that is not A genuine "option for being" should be an option for the non-being of being, for its terminal being, which is precisely what is never opted for, what we are always postponing by means of all kinds of entities, even unpleasant ones. For the worst of entities still protects from being. We cannot have peaceful relations with being, we can only negotiate with it, make pacts. Being does not let us be, it makes us uncomfortable and unsettles us. We need entities to tolerate it. There cannot, therefore, be a genuine "option for being", it is blocked to us. Being is a traitor, it will unilaterally and inelegantly break all the pacts we made with it; it will sweep away the entities and come to collect what always belonged to it. Being is not an option, it is not an alternative. Being, we are in the non-being of being, and our lives are obliged to constitute a being that always, from birth, only wants to

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consummate itself and consummate us. Being has not the slightest idea of our passions and anxieties, it does not know in what ways the various entities are going to deal with the terminality that it distributes in entities. For the sense of being is just that, to be consummated as terminal being. Any other more complex sense, with some noble content, is already an intramundane invention, a "sense" that humans seek through philosophies, diets and religions. When we are born we have no ontic destiny mapped out, but we do have our trivial ontological destiny mapped out. When we are born we are put in the uncomfortable situation of having to constantly postpone that consummation. The option to "continue living" is not an "option for being", but for the entities with which we face the being that consumes and consumes us. The entities are, in a certain way, the advocates of being; they protect us as entities but they also expose us insofar as, simply, they are, insofar as they are the emissaries of the nonbeing of being, of the terminal being of being. For, as we saw, although the entities themselves are terminal they serve us to negotiate, to make ephemeral pacts with being. Humans make unspeakable efforts to make entities last and to make their own being-being last, to delay as long as possible the pure being-in-being, the fact that entities are under the form of terminality. Humans make use of entities to try to continue, but without ever having a clear vision of how to end. Humans even commit suicide (the rates increase year by year) not as a way to end, but, on the contrary, because they feel inept to end, because they die without having learned how to end. We must think about the process of how the structural worthlessness of being is then transformed into "the most precious good", that is, how an inane being from which we permanently flee is transformed, for humans, into a supreme "good" to be preserved at any cost, and for which we are ready to do anything, even to kill. Why do humans consider their terminal life uncomfortable and anxious - "valuable" and do not want to lose it? Why fight to preserve it? It is the very terminal character of life that drives organisms to postpone its full consummation. Life is "bad" (causes discomfort) also because it imperiously forces us to accept its bad quality without discussion. In reality, by trying to preserve it at any cost, we are not giving it a "value". Dying is always humiliating. There is also something sporting in that preserving; we challenge ourselves to endure it; we despair at the possibility of total disappearance; we have a horror of losing ourselves. At all times we value ourselves, not life; we admire our ability to live "in spite of everything," and we are sort of driven to resist, sometimes inertly. No

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we enjoy the "value of life", we flee from its disintegrating disvalue. The so-called "life" so (For a negative anthropology). Of course, Sisyphus finds some pleasures on the way back and forth from his torment, from putting his immense stone on the top of the mountain. How could he not find them? He represents well the human condition. "We must imagine Sisyphus blissful", but always within the great structural unhappiness. Human life is a torment that admits internal pleasures. Camus lacked the sensitivity to understand that, from the acceptance of a meaningless life does not follow the acceptance of a life of suffering. The myth of Prometheus would be more sobering than the myth of Sisyphus (and, in fact, "The Rebel Man" could have been called "The Myth of Prometheus"). 2.6. Beyond "right" and "wrong". The terminality of being and the values that humans generate to face it are not located at the same level (and that is why the back-and-forth theories - "there is everything in life, good things and bad things" - are not convincing). The terminality of being is structural, while the values reactive to it are intramundane, occurring within the world, not at the level of the structure of being. At most, it can be said to be ontological that humans are equipped with a kind of defensive or reactive mechanism that makes them incessantly generate positive values to counteract the wounding rays of the terminality of being. (Positive values does not mean pleasant values; sometimes humans may prefer something intramundane-awful rather than face the terminality of being.) A being with the characteristics of a human, with a large brain, highly developed technical skills but also with strong desires and frustrations, with a very strong system of expectations, a very strong need to be recognized, admired and loved, etc., such a being immersed in natu-mortality, must promote an unfortunate encounter with the terminality of the being, in the sense that natu-mortality imprints or provokes in this particular type of being (in a way that does not affect totally, for example, giraffes) frictions, either in the form of pain, or in the form of discouragement, or in the form of conflict and injustice coming from the terminality of every human relationship. These frictions are experienced in a painful, suffering way, so that humans are always trying to get away from it.

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and to alleviate it. It is perfectly possible to say that these frictions are experienced as a disvalue, even if this may be difficult to demonstrate on the logical level of the arguments. This disvalue is not in the terminal structure itself as such (in natu-mortality), but in the encounter between it and a being such as a human being. Suffering exists in the interaction between the two. This multiple "friction" appears to a being like the human being in the form of suffering in its triple register (pain, discouragement and disregard, in physical and moral sufferings, illnesses, natural catastrophes, social conflicts). Intramundane values are projected or invented precisely to successfully face these structural frictions. But here there is a fundamental unevenness: intramundane values are not on the same level as the friction of the terminality of being. There is an important asymmetry here. Values are arbitrary and contingent in a way that the friction of the terminality of being is not. The metaphysical vocabulary (which will be analyzed in the historical study in chapter 3 of this Essay) will immediately appropriate this situation by affirming something like: "You then want to say that while 'evil' is structural, 'good' is contingent and arbitrary; therefore, there is something like a priority of 'evil' over 'good'". My problem here is that this is not what I mean, but, at the same time, the content of what was thus metaphysically affirmed retains something of what I am interested in affirming, although one would have to try to express it without using the metaphysical vocabulary of "good' and "evil". This is not contradictory to my initial proclamation, that I have no problem in assuming metaphysics in the age of the end of metaphysics. I do, in fact, assume that general attitude, but I am interested in a naturalization of metaphysics, something that traditional metaphysics (and specifically the metaphysics of "good" and "evil") hinders. The metaphysics of "good" and "evil" seems superficial and anthropomorphic (humans consider as "evil" that which hurts or inconveniences them). It would be necessary to understand the trajectory that leads from metaphysical "evil" to simple empirical discomfort, finally dispensing with that childish terminology. The "evil" of the world arises from the mere unfortunate ("frictional") encounter of a being such as the human being with nature-fortress. My idea is that humans become "valuecreating" beings (Nietzsche) precisely as a radical and primitive reaction against the primordial "evil" of their mere installation in nature-mortality. Values are thus not a quiet choice, but what beings such as humans have to emit and invent values in order to simply be. Y

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this is the unevenness, the valuational-metaphysical phenomenon that I am interested in pointing out, but without the vocabulary of "good" and "evil" (and this is not merely a question of terminology). It seems evident that the terminality of life's being, (or its termination), is suffered by human beings in the form of discomforts, disturbances, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, discomforts, dizziness, discomforts, derailments,

disappointments,

disappointments,

depressions,

aggressions

and

disenchantments. It is rather surprising that the agnostic and other affirmative characters suppose that I should be obliged to demonstrate that suffering is something "bad", not in the metaphysical sense of theodicies, but in the mere empirical and crude sense of "badbeing", narrowness, discomfort and disturbance; that I should be obliged to demonstrate that what causes bad-being cannot be lived with joy. What is presented as malaise is "bad" in this relative and deflated sense, it is a primordial natu-mortal fact. Precisely, the meta-philosophical diagnosis that motivates this is that, in our affirmative societies, negative arguments are always required to have much more argumentative credentials than affirmative ones: that God exists, that the world was created or emanated from a good principle, that God only manifests himself in a world inferior to him and that, therefore, evil is justified, were ideas accepted throughout the centuries because, in addition to their argumentative force, they have a good and pleasant meaning. On the other hand, the trivial fact that being inside a nature-mortality that makes us suffer is an evil situation, requires rigorous credentials and demonstrations because it is unpleasant. It is as if it were an attempt to reduce the structural unevenness of the world to a mere subjective "way of seeing things". But when someone affirms something pleasant and consoling, it is never considered as just a subjective way of seeing things. When someone discovers something pleasant it seems that he has discovered something for all mankind, but when he discovers something unpleasant it is valid only for the one who formulated it. But be! We are going to "prove", in a first step, what we would not need to prove: that suffering is "bad"! A first answer is that humans, in general, avoid and hide what makes them suffer, which would show that these things, if they are not bad "in themselves" or in an absolute sense, are indeed felt as bad and dis-valuable by beings such as humans. But here appears the objection that was already made, within European philosophy, to the British philosopher of the 19th century Mill, when he affirmed that happiness is something good because all humans seek it, and that this is an ultimate fact that does not need to be demonstrated,

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because it is simply what we see happening in front of our eyes. The objectors declared that the fact that human beings do something (seek happiness), does not prove that what they do is "good", and whoever maintains this commits the famous "naturalistic fallacy". In a negative register, the objection would be the same: from the fact that human beings flee or avoid something (natu-mortal suffering), it does not follow that what they flee from is "bad". (The "naturalistic fallacy" in negative register). The objection against Mill is right: from the fact that humans cling to life and try to be happy, it does not follow that it is something "good". It could be something so "bad" that it drives them to try to invent a "happiness" to counteract the "bad" in life. Humans may cling to life out of desperation, because there is nothing better or because of a total lack of alternatives, which does not mean that life is "good"; or simply, as Schopenhauer argues, humans may cling to life (and prefer to live very badly rather than not at all) out of simple natural impulse, out of an irrational volition that does not show the "good" character of the desired object. But here, even if formally the negative and affirmative points of view are evenly matched and in symmetrical equilibrium, from the material point of view it could be seen that there is something like a primacy of the negative over the affirmative that makes it true that the fact o f seeking happiness does not imply that it is "good", but that makes it false that the fact of avoiding suffering does not imply that it is "bad". For while happiness is a loose construction, which leaves wide spaces, suffering closes them: happiness must be built luxuriously while the avoidance of suffering is something immediate and narrow (something animal), much more austere than "seeking happiness". As we have seen, we know much less what constitutes someone's happiness than what makes him suffer. This is the unevenness I want to refer to, and the material asymmetry I want to point out. What should be said, against the scholarly objection made to Mill, is that the fact that humans seek happiness not only does not show that life is a "good" thing, but may show just the opposite: in a basically uncomfortable and frictional situation, the pursuit of happiness may be an anxious, desperate effort, lacking alternatives, within which the modest avoidance of extreme suffering is much more viable. That is why, even if we keep the abhorred terminology, an improbable search for a "supreme good" that is longed for should give way to a more plausible flight from a "supreme evil," which is much, much easier to discover.

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That the encounter of the human being with his nature-fortress is "frictional" is what leads us to think that his life has to develop under the sign of concealment in its most varied forms: we cannot see the being with the naked eye, just as we cannot look directly at the sun. In this process of concealment the frictions of nature-mortality could cease to be felt as uncomfortable and disturbing by humans without them ceasing to be so: it could only show that the powerful work of concealment develops such a colossal force that the frictions of nature-mortality are neutralized, dissolved in the indifferent flow of life. That something can be "made valuable" (or at least "tolerable") by a powerful effort of compensation does not prove that what we value is itself valuable: it seems to prove precisely the opposite, that only something that has no value needs to be so strongly "valorized". The work of concealment is so formidable that this is exactly what happens most of the time: we do not realize that we suffer because we incorporate suffering into the flow of our lives. (The very poor classes are masters at considering their sufferings as "natural" and neutralizing them so that they can continue to live their miserable lives with satisfaction and even euphoria). Precisely the fact that the unstable wellbeing of our lives has to be obtained by force, always by means of the necessary concealment in the desperate generation of values, shows the opposite of the worthlessness of life. (We would not need to protect ourselves from a sun that only warms and shelters, but from a sun that can burn or carbonize). At this point, we could try to replace the old terminology of "evil" with the more deflated terminology of "discomfort" or "discomfort". For it is unpleasant to continue to use that ethico-religious terminology to say that the disvalue of life's being is something uncomfortable and disturbing that humans try to hide. This suggests that there is something like "evil," just as in the spiritualist tradition (Platonic, Neoplatonic, Christian, idealist) from which I want, by all means, to distance myself. In the theodicy problem of European philosophies, we have the following classical reasoning: Premise 1: God is good; premise 2: there is "evil" in the world; 3: God made man free. Conclusion: "evil" must have been introduced by human freedom. This is the general scheme (which I analyze in detail in Part 3 of this Essay) that crosses centuries, to save God from the responsibility of "evil". I have read many arguments where premises 1 and 3 are denied, but no one seems to deny the premise

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2, because it seems evident that there is "evil" in the world (even optimists such as Leibniz the accept, since even in "the best of all possible worlds" there is "much evil"). But that is precisely the premise that I deny. Of course I accept that there are in the world diseases, natural catastrophes and social injustices and that these things are suffered by humans as "ills"; but this is not "evil," but simply being, or rather, natu-mortality in its unfortunate ("frictional") encounter with a being such as the human. What was regularly interpreted in moralistic terms as being "evil" is what I prefer to see simply as the terminal making of the very being of entities. What was seen as error, sin, or cadence in the metaphysical tradition, is simply what there is. (This is what the tradition would put it this way: "being itself is bad"). Things are worse than what had been supposed in the metaphysical tradition: it thought that the world was bad, but the most terrible thing is not that but that the world simply is and that its "badness" is its very being and not anything eventual (not the effect of a "bad action", of having eaten some forbidden fruit). What is damaging about the terminology of "evil" is that it suggests that something was introduced into an essentially "good" world as a strange anomaly. But what was called "evil" was simply the being-terminal of being, its nati-dead being. "Evil" is a religious or mythical name for mere being. The friction of suffering in its various modalities is not something "evil" that would have befallen the being from outside, but the being itself. In that sense, there is certainly no "evil," but not because everything is "good," but because "evil" is ontologically involved in the very being of being. There is no "evil" and, therefore, no "good" either, but simply being with its natu-mortal affecting and afflictive frictions. It is only the estrangement from the human condition, typical of the metaphysical-religious view of the world that spans centuries, that leads to seeing the simple being as the "bad" that would adventitiously supervene on a basically "good" being. The world, in the strictly philosophical view, arose from natu-mortal sources and not by divine power, and in arising it already brings with it, inevitably, all the frictions and frictions of the earth (earthquakes), waters (tidal waves), fire (fires), all the frictions of the bios (diseases) and all the social frictions (injustices, intolerance, persecutions, corruption, etc). We did not, as the religious account suggests, have to do absolutely nothing "wrong" to be affected, inconvenienced and disturbed by these things. It just happened that the worthlessness of being appeared to religious humans in such appalling evidence that they imagined that something very serious had been done by human freedom, so that

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we could deserve a world so full of "evils". But the world, despite being full of suffering, is not "evil": it is simply frictional, it-is-not-being, it is nati-mortal, with all its natu-mortal frictions, disturbances and discomforts. Evil" is only the metaphysical symptom of the human being's extraordinary estrangement from his being, his inability to accept it as his own, and his attempt to see it as a being "diverted" from something else which, yes, would be worthy of being accepted and lived. But it is clear that we need not have done anything to deserve a world that makes us uncomfortable and disturbs us. The world is not "bad" (to use the cursed terminology) because it has "fallen" from somewhere, but it is "bad" in its own making, not in the metaphysical sense, but in the sense of painful, uncomfortable, disturbing, polluting and dangerous, of provoking discomfort. We could say that the world is all that, but we need not say that it is "bad", because that hides the primordial fact that the world is painful, uncomfortable, disturbing, polluting and dangerous just because it is, and not because it is this or that (nor, much less, because we have done something wrong). The primordial fact of a negative anthropology is the following: we have to live and die that being which is not, which is not, which is scarce, which day by day ends. We have to construct that being that is not; but any construction is impregnated with the non-being of being, with the natidead scarcity of birth. I say that the non-being of being is transformed in the human being into a being-not, into a being constructed by reaction. However affirmative the construction may be, it carries with it the indelible stigma of having been and of being a reaction, a rejection. This ontological inversion (from the no de dicto to the no de re) is the greatest human contribution to the ontology of the world: for the non-being of being manifests itself equally in all beings (including giraffes), but only the human being succeeds (not by merit, but by compulsion) in making the non-being of being a being that is not. Humans transform a being that could not be lived into a being lived negatively, or reactively, into an impossible being lived and suffered. If being really were, if being were not natu-mortal, then a human life could really have objectives, positive goals and not only reactive ones. (Suffering is the echo of impossibility, of the friction of what cannot be done. It fricts because it "does not fit," because it does not work, because it cannot be. Suffering is the resonance of the human impossibility of living the terminality of being). We read in science books about the wonders of cosmology, physics and genetics, about the emergence of the universe, the evolution of species, and we can't help but wonder how the universe came into being and how species evolved.

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admire ourselves in front of what was called the "miracle of life". In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett often emphasizes this "marvelous" character of life, and of human life in particular. But here it is useful to recall Schopenhauer and a distinction that, paraphrasing Heidegger, I would call the "positional difference," the difference between being and seeing (or the difference between who is in the position of spectator and who is in the position of protagonist). The laconic Schopenhauerean phrase in which this difference is presented is the following: "...the optimist commands me to open my eyes and look attentively at the world, to see how beautiful it is in the sunlight, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, etc. But is the world by any chance a magic lantern? Certainly, those things are beautiful to see, but to be one of them is already something very different." In my negative ontology, human life is visualized from the perspective of the singular forced to be a member of something that would always be beautiful to contemplate from the outside, as in the cinema (and it is curious that Schopenhauer uses the term "magic lantern", which is what cinema was later called). The helplessness of human life is lived in this singular register, and it is of little use to know that it is located in a universe that is a marvel of engineering. The human being who is preoccupied with his life, with his destiny, with his security, etc., is a cornered being whose perturbation will not be diminished by knowing that he is part of a "miraculous" universe. Whatever we have to live through, even if it is a "miracle", we will have to do it in the rough friction of things, and not in the benign light of a magic lantern. Being part of a cosmic miracle will not lift us out of singular lived despair. (In this regard, it is distressing to read scientific philosophers like Dennett, in their enormous effort to replace the jubilation of God with the austere joy of Science.) But also the ordinary reader, who knows nothing about science, may be very surprised by my description of human life, which seems to be refuted by everyday experience. It seems to be a fact that humans do their things and their lives actively instead of just "resisting"; it seems obvious that humans live their lives and do not just run away from their deaths. People are there happy to be alive, even euphoric, showing an incredible capacity for enthusiasm, joy and fulfillment. The philosopher is a sick being, with a basic deformation of the real. And, indeed, the philosopher is an unpopular figure. The philosopher thinks what humans simply live, and by thinking articulates what in life is fluid and, in a way, kills it. This is why the most fluid of philosophies is something still too articulate. The recovery

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of life by philosophy is always a failed effort, because philosophy lives on the articulated death of life. The philosopher discovers, through thought, what is not visualized in ordinary life, so that afterwards it is not justified to criticize the philosopher for doing precisely what constitutes him as such. Concealment is totally embedded in everyday life and life and our constructions are no longer distinguishable. Precisely, the philosopher is that tormented and badly obsessive personality capable of bringing to the foreground what for the most part remains an unthemed background, as a kind of "world of death" (of Todeswelt). 2.7. From negative anthropology to negative ethics. The problem of how negative ontology can be lived brings up the question of ethics. It seems problematic to think only of how to "live intensely" that dwindling life that was given to us, that torments us and for which we should still be grateful. For living anxiously the terminality of being within the limits of a mere human life (always living, as Zorba the Greek used to say, as if it were the last day) usually causes discomfort also in the other humans around us. For, at the end of the day, the others are not to blame for the terminality of being, nor, specifically, for the terminality of my being. Between ontology and ethics there is, then, that mediation of the human, or what the human can do with negative ontology. A "negative anthropology" would be like a preparation for a negative ethics (or for its impossibility). In the light of anthropological reflection, if we cared to open up the moral sphere here, the fundamental ethical question would not be, "How should one live?" but rather, "What is it possible to do with the terminality of being from which we flee in the intramund, so as not to harm or destroy others?" This is the fundamental ethical question that negative anthropology should prepare, to see what possibilities a cornered human being has of being genuinely ethical with others; whether he can even continue to live without already harming them. The next question is then the following: "In this attempt not to harm or destroy others, must my continuing to live at any cost necessarily be included?". Turning again to the book "Utilitarianism" by the British philosopher Mill, it is as if suddenly unexpected avenues for a better formulation of the

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negative anthropology, going from ontology to ethics. Mille's search for the "ultimate foundation of morality" is guided by an affirmative attitude that is never in doubt. It is composed of the following convictions: (1) That (human) life is something "good", that it is good to be born, that it is good to give life. Life is, then, a "good". (2) That the "ultimate end" is the use of life, the pleasurable usufruct, gratification. (Mill's "gratificationalism", better than "utilitarianism". The word "gratification" conveys the two ideas that he wants to preserve: pleasure (the pleasing, "that was very pleasing, it pleased me") and usefulness (the gratifying, "for that I was gratified, I was paid"). The two together form the concept of "good payment", of "pleasurable gratification" (since we could have received an unsatisfactory gratification). This is the "first principle". Finally, (3) That the human being is capable of attaining the supreme good through actions directed toward the ultimate end. These are three affirmative beliefs typical of moral discourse. At all times it is assumed that life is good, gratification is possible, and the human being is fit. Classical ethics all relied on a metaphysical or theological theos. Mill naturalizes the "ultimate end", secularizes it, but maintains it in its affirmativity. The impossibility of realization of the têlos is now transferred to its secular versions. As I have developed in my books, a "negative ethics" denies the thesis that life is "good," that it is "ultimate value," etc., showing exactly the opposite, the bad sensible and moral quality of the very being of life. It denies the affirmative thesis by assuming life as an escape, and tries to provide the human being with a set of "negative virtues" (abstention, minimal life, ethical suicide) not to make him "happy" (which would be a luxury) but only to keep him away from suffering and make him available for an ethical death, which does not run over the life of others in the anxious "intensity" of one's own life. The "lack of unanimity" about the "ultimate foundation of morality" of which Mill complains in his book is not fortuitous but a product of the affirmative approach itself: it is impossible to find the "supreme good" purely and simply because there is no such thing. In a reactive and fugitive life, the very idea of a "good" or of a positive "end" to be achieved is diluted. Humans will never coincide in the formulation of that which can "make them happy"; there is a much greater chance that they will coincide in pointing out that which they do not want, that from which they want to be freed. If one were to look for the ethical principle in the "ultimate bad-being" from which all humans flee, one would indeed find the first principle sought, but it is there that humans avoid looking for it. From a negative ontology and anthropology can only emerge a negative ethics, which will be outlined in Part 4 of this Essay.

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3. THE

WORTHLESSNESS

OF

HUMAN

LIFE

AND

THE

GENESIS

OF

AFFIRMATIVISM IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY FROM HESIOD TO SCHELLING (AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL REFLECTION).

Introduction My historiographical hypothesis is that the worthlessness of human life has been seen early on by all European philosophers, and that it is this worthlessness that leads to philosophizing. If life were good, it would not be necessary to exercise thought so arduously to try to find sustaining values. Thought (both in art and in philosophy) completes what is missing, fantasizes what is not given but is strongly longed for. Philosophizing is the way of being and acting of an incomplete and unhappy being. In this text, I try to discover, in many Western thinkers, the mechanisms of this compensation which, a contrario sensu, points towards what it wants to hide, highlights what it was trying to diminish. I do not know how this has occurred in other thoughts in other parts of the planet, especially in the Eastern world. Nor do I believe that we, Westerners, are capable of fully understanding these other dimensions of thought. But I think that helplessness affects all humans; what changes is the Western or Eastern way of dealing with it, from myths to the highest technology. Affirmativism seems to be the inevitable destiny of all that is human, the need to affirm oneself in the double sense of rejecting the negative and supporting or anchoring oneself in something. Negative thinking dismantles affirmative mechanisms and tries to show what they hide. In my books and in the other parts of this book, I have done that on a systematic level; now I want to do it here on a historical terrain, although always traversed by my reconstructive imagination. I do not pretend here a faithful exegesis, but a use of authors for my own reflective process. The affirmative path has been taken in the history of Western philosophy through 3 major strategies: (1) Construction of a spiritual dimension, eternal and pure (sometimes divine), of superior quality to our admittedly bad world; an alternative superior world where the real and superior values would be found, of which our world would be a pale reflection or its full negation; (2) Construction of a dimension of a rational-immanent nature, where values can be formulated, and which usually appears as unrealized,

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in fact, in our imperfect real world; (3) Open acceptance and ostentatious exacerbation of intraworldly invention of values, without construction of alternative worlds, sacred or profane, and without pessimistic criticism of the world. I argue that strategy (1) has been typical of Greek antiquity and medieval times; (2) seems to me to characterize the modern world, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century; and (3) is the strategy assumed by the twentieth century, especially in its second half. In contrast to the affirmativity based on the Great Certainties, the twentieth century builds its own affirmativity on the Absolute Lack of Certainties. Both are forms of affirmation. I argue that this affirmative attitude is not a "spontaneous" and "free" act, but an imperious necessity posed by the basic and formal worthlessness of human life, against which affirmations of thought are created following one of the three strategies mentioned above. In attitudes (1) and (2), the world appears denigrated (or, in Nietzsche's expression, "slandered"): for (1), the world has no value before the world of a Supra-being or Ultra-being, divine or not. For (2), the world has no value before a world ideally reconciled with Reason. Philosophy exercises, then, besides its much-declared "critical" function, also an expressive consoling function, even if it is not openly recognized as it was, for example, by Seneca in the second century and by Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century, as we shall see. Affirmation is protection against helplessness, against suffering in all its multiple forms (suffering-discouragement, suffering-pain, moral suffering). Consolation is realized here by comparison with alternative and better dimensions of life to which we can always aspire. In attitude (3), today dominant, there is no more denigration of the world nor visualization of another better world. These specific affirmative mechanisms have ceased to function today and there is an urgent and anxious occupation with all that this world (the only one there is) has to offer the human being. The consoling element did not disappear, it was incorporated to the valorizing maneuvers of the intra-world, with total oblivion of that criticalpessimistic content that was developed by thought when humans still believed that a better world awaited them. Of course, the fact that the rich pessimistic descriptions of the traditional philosophers (Seneca, Augustine, Pascal and so many others) are not accepted today, just because we have stopped believing in the Salvation on which those thinkers still managed to bet, must be counted as an epistemic error and as a moral weakness. Perhaps this

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world is as bad as those philosophers saw it, and, at the same time, there is no other to hide in it. Of course, the theme of consolation leads one to think of the deep links between philosophy and religion even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Philosophy would be a form of secular or profane consolation, especially for spirits that cannot or do not want to throw themselves headlong and openly into maximalist religious consolations (which give all that consolation requires). Contemporary philosophy no longer consoles itself with paradises and demons; today various kinds of conceptual consolation predominate. I argue that, if we are to console ourselves, religion remains the best option, and that it would be better to withdraw consolatory tasks of any kind from philosophy. All my negative philosophy tries to get rid of any consoling task, which does not mean that I intend to deconsolate, even though this may be the effect of negative reflections on affirmative spirits.

3.1. From Hesiod to Lucretius Carus At the very core of consolation in classical European philosophy are descriptions of the terrors of the world. In the almost compulsive creation of "better worlds", our world is diminished to the level of shadows, evil, sin and transgression, requiring punishment, purification and atonement. Let us begin with Hesiod, who, in the 8th century BC, in his work The Labors and the Days, already presents human life in the light of the loss of a first age and condemned to the harshness of work as linked to human faults. "Before that day, generations of men lived upon the earth free from evils, and from hard labor, and from the cruel diseases that bring death to men. For now mortals grow old amidst miseries (...) And behold, innumerable evils are spread among men, bringing them all sorrows in silence, because the sasbic Zeus has denied them the voice (...) It is easy to plunge into evil, because the way that leads to it is short (...).On the other hand, to exercise virtue the Gods themselves have sweated; because the way is long, arduous and at the beginning full of difficulties; but as soon as one reaches the summit, it becomes easy from now on, after having been difficult" (Book I). Hesiod picks up the usual idea in his time of work as punishment. But, at the same time, Hesiod sees work as an opportunity to improve oneself morally, as a test of one's own worth. Work, arduous and heavy, will be rewarded in the end.

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Hesiod writes his poem in the light of a great injustice done to him in the distribution of some family property for the benefit of his brother Perses, after the death of his father; thus he too experiences moral suffering alongside the physical suffering of the toil of the land. What is interesting is that he does not recognize this simply as the human structural situation, but as a situation of hardship that must be overcome, and as the result of a punishment that, at the same time, serves as expiation. This is the scheme that neo-Platonism will later refine and formulate in a clear and sophisticated way, but which has much older roots. In this scheme, the human situation and its intrinsic suffering (as Schopenhauer and Freud will show much later) are not recognized (there is no "philosophy of existence" in antiquity), and are attributed, within a metaphysical-moral novel, to external causes. It is as if a metaphysical-moral plus were added to the human situation in order to explain and atone for its worthlessness by means of a valuable form of life, curiously enough the same life whose worthlessness has been discovered. Metaphysics and morality go intimately together. Metaphysics builds a better world and morality provides indications for a life that leads to it. But between the two lies hidden the worthlessness of being and the intramundane values created, which consist in realizing the vanity of this world. Moral value comes through virtue, which is attained precisely through suffering, of which there is so much in the world that it constitutes a kind of inexhaustible reservoir to be used as expiation, penance and the way of salvation. If only the way of suffering saves, then this is the best of all possible worlds, because suffering is what is not lacking. Thus, curiously, helplessness acquires a value. At the dawn of Western thought we see that work is performed by the humble people, prisoners and slaves. From this social situation of injustice that leaves leisure time to the nobles, philosophy itself is born. So, in this world even the greatest is not free of enormous cost and sacrifice, of oneself and of others. In the particular case of Hesiod, son of peasants and rural worker himself, his idea of the better world is a life free of needs and fatigue, which will be accessed, paradoxically, through work. The atonement, compensatory and salvation novels take early on two very different directions: a naturalistic one, in the philosophers of nature (from Thales to the atomists); and a spiritualistic one, with Orphism and Pythagoreanism. But these are two types of

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affirmative thinking. I begin with the second, the religion of the mysteries, which flourished in the sixth century B.C., that is, after the Homeric poems and Hesiod. In the Orphic tradition, in the human being lives a divine principle that fell into a body because of an original guilt; this divine principle is immortal, but it is destined to reincarnate successively to get rid of the guilt. To purify oneself there is the orphic life, the only one capable of stopping the series of reincarnations; there are, then, those who manage to lead this life and those who do not, the rewarded and the punished. Corporeality is seen as an undesired element produced by guilt, although resolvable. But in the naturalist line, this maximal strategy, this metaphysical-moral inflation of the human situation, this impossibility of remaining to live in it without the additions of a restorative and purifying journey, remains in other terms. In the only fragment of the Ionian Anaximander that is preserved (and which merited a very long study by Heidegger), we read (in one of its possible translations!): "From where things have their origin, there their perishing is also directed, according to necessity; for they pay one another condemnation and expiation for their iniquity according to the fixed time". (Thus Heidegger reproduces the translation of Hermann Diels) It could be interpreted that Anaximander refers to the injustice of time itself, which causes anything to arise from the play of opposites, an injustice that will be expiated by the death of the world itself. Interpreters even saw possible Orphic influences in these thoughts, a certain underlying pessimism that sees in birth an unjust imposition and in death an expiation. From these religious visions we can extract the plausible idea that the ancients saw the world in somber colors, as conveying something unfathomable and sinful; if not something remorselessly bad, at least something not good: something that needs atonement cannot be good; or it can be good only in the weak sense of being a (metaphysical-moral) path to something better. These texts begin to show that the idea of the worthlessness of being, of the worthlessness and malaise of human life runs through the history of Western philosophy from its earliest origins. The same Orphic themes resonate also in such an important pre-Socratic naturalist thinker as Heraclitus in fragments such as 62: "Immortal mortals, immortal mortals, some live the death of others and others die the life of others" and others, where the idea appears that the life of the body is mortification of the soul and that the true

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life of the soul begins with the death of the body (later Platonic theme). In fragment 27, Heraclitus seems to refer to an afterlife in an expurgatory sense. In Heraclitus' apprehension of being, Lógos and Physis are linked. Physis alluding to hatching, to presence, to opening (like the opening of a flower), to coming forth, blossoming and maturing. Lógos is universal law, that which brings together opposites and relates them without annulling them in the play between the one and the multiple. Lógos is word and thought. In the origins of Western thought, being would manifest itself as Lógos, as a structuring and organizing principle, in a purely intellectual, albeit dynamic, register. Between the end of the 6th century BC and the beginning of the 4th century BC, the phenomenon of Pythagoreanism appeared, linked to the semi-mythical existence of Pythagoras, a philosopher who was the first to have taught the doctrine of metempsychosis, successive reincarnations to atone for a fault. Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates, was the first Pythagorean to publish his works, already in a period quite evolved from the Pythagorean doctrines. Here the body/spirit dualism is fundamental because it provides humans with the reassuring idea that the body is a prison from which the soul can escape through death. Death is thus seen as a door of escape (long before Christianity); the body - a place of suffering - as inessential, and the soul as having powers to live independently of it. The idea of reincarnation clearly shows this independence in the possibility of the same soul traveling through many different bodies, including non-human ones. This seems to give immense dominion and control over life: the one and only death is now transformed, within the moral novel, into a death between deaths where the true and purified life (or Biós theoretikós) is sought, which, on its own merit, will finally be found. This life is based on silence, austerity and chastity (sexuality, the crucial center of the body, is also linked with guilt and expiation). Scholars agree that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans did not invent all this but inherited it from Orphism, which is why they sometimes speak of Orphic-Pythagorean beliefs and doctrines. And they point to the influence of Orphic mythology in the formation of mature Greek thought and of all Western civilization, at least until the 19th century. Parmenides is a very special milestone in the path of philosophical affirmativism, since he is the thinker who explicitly denies non-being through a conception of being (centuries later taken up by Sartre) as massive, compact and without internal differences, where one cannot

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to slide the non-being. The ancient philosophers, naturalists or spiritualists, throw themselves directly on the world with a total forgetfulness of themselves, of the human who is seeing the world: they see what appears in the field of vision, but not the eye. The first thing that appears to reflection is the world and not the human (the objects we see through the glasses, but not the glasses). Then, the negativity brought by the human being (Heidegger, Sartre) is not visualized; only the compact and undifferentiated being of the things of the world, as if they were given without an observer, as if the observer were the limit of the world, but not the world (like the eye of Wittgenstein's Tractatus). The phenomenological conception of being is missing in Greece; its conception is purely logical. Being is not existed, only contemplated. The Parmenidean affirmation is total: being is the affirmative, or the affirmative coincides with what is. To be is to be affirmed, there is no place for non-being in being. Thus, movement is denied, and with it, being born and becoming corrupted in death. All change is illusory, a false product of the senses; for intelligence, nothing moves, nothing is non-being, there are no voids. "Neither never was nor will be, since it is now, all whole, one, continuous. For what birth couldst thou find for it, how and whence did it accrete? I will not allow you to say or think of 'the nonentity,' for that which is not is neither sayable nor thinkable. For what necessity would have impelled it to be born later rather than before, if it proceeded from nothing? (...) How could it come into being? For, if it came to be, it is not, nor is it, if it will ever come to be. Therefore, birth is extinct and destruction is unheard of" (Poem, Part I, 296). This is the ancient philosophical strategy of suppressing death by suppressing temporality and motion: true reality is motionless, and motion (and thus birth and perishing) are a delusion of the senses. This is the masterpiece of occultation. Post-Parmenidean philosophy tries to overcome the perplexities of this extraordinary conception: how to reconcile the moving plurality of phenomena with the immobility and full positivity of being? How could the overflowing plurality of entities not be reabsorbed by their one and equal principle? How to save the phenomena? How to explain the emergence of the multiple from the primordial one of being? (The Eleatic aporias). Aristotle would later mock these aporias, accusing the Eleatics, and Melisso in particular, of being on the verge of madness. Also in the post-Parmenidean Empedocles, from the 5th century B.C., we find the explicit denial of death and corruption, along with an explanation of the composition of things

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by four primordial elements (trying to elaborate the relations between the multiple and the one): "...there is no birth for any of the mortal things, and there is no end in the dismal death; there is only mixture and separation of the components of the whole. Birth, is but the name given by men to that fact" (Fragment 8). Empedocles moralizes the natural forces by calling them "love" and "hate", and returns to the persistent idea that the human soul is a daimon that, by an original fault, was expelled from the Olympus of the well-favored, thrown into a body and bound to the cycle of births. Humans who know how to purify themselves will incarnate progressively in nobler lives until, free from the cycle of births, they return to being gods among gods. Here the Empedoclean "naturalism" is totally impregnated with mysticism. Similar themes are found in Anaxagoras and the atomists. For the latter, birth is an aggregate of atoms, death is a disintegration or dissociation of the atomic compound, nothing begins, nothing ends. Atoms are in constant motion by their very nature and they constitute the ultimate metaphysical reality (and not the generation and corruption witnessed by the senses). The history of affirmativism and the concealment of the worthlessness of being reaches a point of rupture of the greatest importance with the emergence of sophistry, which can be considered as a moment of meta-philosophical reflection of a strongly negative character. The previous naturalistic and spiritualistic philosophy had developed all the possible positions on being, all the theoretical possibilities, which led to the unleashing of the "panoramic" metaphilosophical reflection of the Sophistic, the distancing from the positions, the idea that all positions had a defense, with the consequent discovery of the discursive and argumentative character of philosophy (instead of seeing it as an objective illumination of truth). During the Sophist period, the salvific expiatory scheme is suspended in favor of social conversations and discursive strategies. The attention now placed on man, ethical behavior and discourse, may be leading the affirmative strategy along other paths. The worthlessness of being is no longer interpreted mythically within cosmogonies or naturalistic metaphysics, but is recognized in human efforts for a dignified life, for a noble survival, an attitude that will be exacerbated in the philosophies of the Hellenistic and imperial eras. The worthlessness of being is reflected in the multiplicity of discourses, in the inconclusiveness of theoretical questions, in the suffering provoked by relativism, in the absence of an absolute and reassuring truth, in the always open possibility of redirecting any argument, no matter how many times it may be.

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absolute and conclusive as it may seem. This nihilism reaches its extreme in Gorgias, possibly the most relativistic, anti-religious and anti-mythical of the Sophists. It is Gorgias who is responsible for formulating the famous clause of radical metaphysical nihilism: "Nothing exists, and if it existed it would be unknowable; and if it were knowable it would be inexpressible". Here there is no metaphysical guilt, but there is an epistemic and logical obstacle: metaphysical nihilism becomes discursive nihilism. A world in which any thesis can be proved with equal success is not good. The Socrates-Plato-Aristotle trinomial is considered, according to the official version of the history of European philosophy, as the reconquest of Truth, Morality and Justice against relativism and sophistic nihilism. In a superficial sense, Socrates (from what we know of his oral teachings) attacks Orphic mysticism and places philosophy on the sound path of reason. But we will see how this crucial attitude of Greek intellectualism does not break completely with the consolatory and salvific scheme that characterized pre-Socratic philosophy, but rather, in a way, reframes that same scheme now within the categories of reason. As if the affirmativity of philosophy were a permanent character that only transforms and changes formulations as philosophy advances, it is said, "from myth to logos". The themes of the sage's happiness, autarchy and self-mastery, so much cultivated later in the Greek and Roman world, have their roots in Socrates. But everything happens as if the helplessness of being, after the failure of the metaphysical attempts at mythical or metaphysical exorcism, now tries to be tamed in the field of moral behavior by means of a solid attitude of indifference, self-sufficiency and irony. It is precisely these radical virtues that provide the right attitude in the face of death and natural and human catastrophes, but not in a purifying form of life, but in a life deeply inscribed in the community, even if only to challenge it. It is not only a holy life, but also a life that is political and modifies the real; not purely contemplative, but also active. This idea (as is clear in the book Kierkegaard dedicated to Socrates) is developed not in transmissible writings, but in Socrates' own life. The preoccupation with happiness and the virtues is continued in the thinkers called, equivocally, the "minor Socratics," the Megarians and Cyrenaics, such as Antisthenes and Aristippus. Plato is possibly the very apotheosis of philosophical affirmativism. Influences of Orphism have been noted in the Phaedo and other writings, but what especially

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problematic in Platonic affirmativism is its rational and argumentative approach to the expiatory-compensatory scheme. The ideas of purification and atonement are retained, but the kind of life that leads to salvation is a rational and cognitive life. Knowledge as purification. The famous Platonic "second navigation", with its "discovery of the supra-sensible", postulates a better reality as being the true one, and our world remaining, once again, in the position of the apparent and the false. Now the world is ruled by Intelligence (recovery of a pre-Socratic theme, present, for example, in Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia) and, therefore, phenomena are organized according to the Good and the better. Crude naturalism is superseded by a spiritualism guided by a being that coincides with the good. The affirmative worldview survives the passage from myth to logos; the logos does not renounce salvation and atonement, it only reformulates them in rational ("logical") terms. Platonic ideas have characteristics exactly opposed to the world: they are purely intelligible, incorporeal, immutable, one, etc., and, moreover, they constitute being itself, they are true reality with respect to which all other things "are" in a minor and subordinate way. The Platonic theory of ideas seems, then, the apotheosis of the rejection of the world and the precise statement of its worthlessness, inspiring the philosophical imagination that devises, for the pleasure of reason, a world that has everything we want and that was denied to us: it never dies, it does not change, we can know it, etc. The creation of an eternal world is the compensation for the deep dissatisfaction with the world we have: no one would create other worlds if ours gave us satisfaction. The invention of other worlds is the patency of the worthlessness of being. Plato makes the synthesis between Heraclitus (the sensible movement) and Parmenides (the intelligible one), which will be repeated by Kant many centuries later: two worlds must be accepted so that the one and the movement, the sensible and the intelligible, are simultaneous without contradiction. There being only one world, suffering is inexplicable and inconsolable. This world so full of discomforts must be transformed into a means to reach something better, it must gain a purely intelligible higher reason that resolves the aporias of the sensible. The theory of the double world refuses to accept contradiction and suffering and provides them with a meta-empirical solution that satisfies the longing for a better world in the face of the disappointment of the one we have. At the height of its religious inspiration, the One appears, in Plato's late work, as an organizing principle that rises above the ideas, providing an explanation

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of the totality of things. The intelligible sphere of being is equated with the intelligible sphere of good and both are compared to the Sun, an intelligible sun whose brightness resembles that of the sensible sun. Much of Plato's philosophy is a rationalist reformulation of Orphic and Pythagorean themes (especially in the dialogue Gorgias). The idea of the immortality of the soul, of life as preparation for death, and the longing to separate from the body at death in order to access the eternal life of the soul, are mythical elements clearly present in the Phaedo and other dialogues. Also the idea of the body as a tomb and source of all evil, and the idea of atonement through an ascetic morality. In the desire to die in order to free the soul hides an elegant escape from the terror of definitive disappearance. Death is magically transformed into an open door to plenitude: it seems that there has never been an idea so profoundly contemptuous of the world, none that so crudely ratifies its structural worthlessness, to the point that the best that life has to offer is its transformation into a door to something else. A world from which we need to be "liberated" to reach perfection, and which makes us desire the quick coming of death, does not seem to be a good world. In general, these spiritual worlds deny motion and death and postulate a supra-sensible eternity. Thereby, in the consolatory maneuver itself, they clearly manifest the unbearable character of corruption and annihilation, admitting that a mortal and painful world is bad and should be overcome by something better. Aristotle, unlike Plato, is the drastic interruption of the expiatory scheme within Greek thought, with the exception of the retention of the nous as the organizing category of the world, a clearly affirmative idea. But he is a naturalistic philosopher, though in a different vein from the Ionians; certainly, a mind completely refractory to all saving mysticism, both in his first and second philosophy, in his theory of knowledge and in his ethics. Perhaps for this reason, during the Christian period of philosophy, he was chosen as the Philosopher, and not Plato, because Aristotle represented, in a sharper and more distanced way, the results obtained by pure philosophy, which should converge with those acquired by Revelation. Plato was perhaps too close to Christianity to provide the elements of contrast for a discussion on the relationship between reason and faith. The immanentist ethos to face the problems of the worthlessness of life's being, instead of mystical ways out, an ethos that had already been anticipated by the Sophists and Socrates,

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is installed again in Greek thought in the so-called Hellenistic period, at the end of the fourth century B.C. The outlets are individual, the sage is self-sufficient and somewhat insensitive to suffering and setbacks. He is a practical, prudent sage, who knows how to live, and not only to contemplate the essences. In Epicureanism, Stoicism and Skepticism, Greek and Roman, something like an ethical blockade of worthlessness is observed, instead of the religious, OrphicPythagorean-Platonic initiatory treatment. "To be happy in the midst of the flames", that is, to achieve indifference in the face of suffering, once the strong metaphysical-religious reference points of Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato had fallen. Exhausted Greece and pragmatic Rome live the disenchantment of the intelligible, which only the emerging Christianity will revive again. In the Hellenistic period, thinkers moved away from Platonic metaphysics and turned to ethics. But it is an ethics of renunciation, skepticism and apathy, anesthetic virtues that proclaim, on the contrary, the unwelcoming character of the world. Even in Epicurus, the search for happiness is also a search for escape from pain and for resources that help to be content with the little that can be obtained. A world in which insensitivity, indifference or conformity through cold and distant behavior is recommended does not seem good. The ethical caution of the schools of this period shows the worthlessness in the practical field, without guilt or atonement, in the crude reality of those who try to build a life at least not so painful in a regularly adverse world. Epicurus' rejection of Platonic suprasensible metaphysics is explicit, involving Aristotle in his negative judgment, but not by virtue of the Stagirite's works as we know them today, but of his exoteric writings, which were, it seems, strongly Platonic. For Epicurus, the senses are able to grasp being firmly, while dialectical demonstrations fly in the void. Thus, the materialism of the Ionians and the atomism of Democritus are taken up and modified, but what was missing in these thinkers, the deep interest in the human and in ethics, is added. The fundamental thing is not to know the world but to manage to lead a happy or painless life in it; phronesis is superior to physis, and what is to be known of physis is always in terms of conduct and good life. Practical wisdom takes precedence over theoretical knowledge (the same as in Kant centuries later). Epicurus is fully aware of the suffering of the singular individual after the fall of the polis in consequence of Alexander's onslaught, and he devises a strictly individual ethic that helps to carry on an arduous life. But all that can be achieved through areté is for now; the human soul, for Epicurus, is mortal like the body. The worthlessness of being does not

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comes here by way of consolation, but by the need for a hard and firm morality in the face of an incredibly difficult and threatening world. Epicurus will clearly highlight the evil of the world by praising the "cathasmatic" pleasures, corresponding to the absence of pain and disturbance, and affirming with full pessimism that it is more rational to aspire to the absence of pain than to pleasure. For anesthetic pleasures do not run the risk of positive pleasures, of being mixed with pains and risks: getting rid of pain leaves no residue. The absence of pain, cathasmatic pleasure, is the supreme limit that pleasure can reach, a cautious idea far removed from the maximalist hedonism that used to be attributed to Epicurus. Epicurus does not lack consoling motives when he refers to pain and death. Intense pains are brief, physical pain is always bearable, and if it is very acute, it soon leads to death. As far as death is concerned, the consolation will consist, for Epicurus, and later for Lucretius Carus, in our permanent disagreement with it (when I exist, death does not exist; when it exists, I do not exist). Lucretius' famous poem is full of pessimism, sadness and melancholy, showing how pain and evil go through the whole world, marking something like a deep misunderstanding between the human and nature. It is madness to think that the gods took the trouble to create the universe for humans (De rerum natura, Book V, 220). "In not having existed, what did I lose?" (250). Mountains and forests, seas and deserts, already cover a huge part of the planet that are as if forbidden to humans, especially through very high or very low temperatures, which seems to scare away any human attempt at invasion. The rest, the earth does not give it generously, but humans have to snatch it courageously and relentlessly so that nature does not come to claim it violently. (290). Nothing would grow if it were not for that immense effort, and many times, made the effort, nature destroys in a few minutes what was slowly and painstakingly built, not only through exceptional earthquakes and tidal waves but through the usual attacks of frost, cold, rain, wind or heat. Disease and death are on the loose. "And the child, like the sailor, who was blown ashore by a fierce squall, lies on the ground, without shelter, without speech, destitute and deprived of all the help of life. From the moment in which nature has torn him with great effort from his mother's womb to the light, and fills the place with mournful wandering as it should, who has to go through such great troubles" (310).

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In truth, Lucretius only sings the pessimism already present in Epicurus, for whom ethics must make man wise and strong in a world where the wicked are happy and the just suffer, where death takes prematurely many virtuous and gives long life to tyrants, as Lactantius testifies speaking of Epicurus. Certainly, both Lucretius and Epicurus offer the antidote to the virtues, but the antidote only attests to the presence of the poison. Epicurus writes: "Not by prolonging life will we in the least diminish the time of death; we can take nothing from it that will enable us to escape annihilation. You can, while you live, bury as many generations as you wish; death will not for that reason be less eternal." Lucretius, finally, exclaims, "What evil would there be for us in not having been created?" Many times, philosophers, from Epicurus to Kant, have refused to draw the conclusion of the worthlessness of life from their pessimistic premises. Thus, Epicurus himself proclaimed the beauty of life and the victory over death in the midst of the most terrible pains. We will find praise for life amidst the description of all physical and moral evils, throughout the history of European philosophy. I call this the "in spite of everything" argument, which, I believe, commits the fallacy of invulnerability (self-sealer), because it renders irrefutable the thesis that life is beautiful; since, for any and every calamity X of human life (illness, injustice, death, etc.), one can always affirm that life is beautiful "in spite of X". The history of philosophy provides the premises, but philosophers do not always draw the relevant conclusions from them.

3.2 From Seneca to Plotinus The anesthetic virtues, the moral antidote already present in Epicureanism, are exacerbated in Stoicism. A world in which we need to be stoics does not seem to be valuable. Here the emphasis is on freedom and autonomy, on the ethical effort to free oneself from the ardors of the world through forms of conduct and attitudes. What matters is what is in our power, the rest has to be accepted with resignation and endured with fortitude. Here again there is nothing to atone for, but there is something to bear; the same helplessness, once confronted by salvific mysticism, now by an ethic of insensitivity. In both cases, the pain of being is recognized a contrario, because without it we would not even need atonement.

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metaphysics nor of insensitive ethics. The fact that there is an antidote does not throw away life's poison; on the contrary, it confirms it. The much celebrated Stoic invention of indifferent things (adiaphora), which are neither good nor bad, such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, good reputation, nobility of lineage, death, sickness, sorrow, happiness, weakness, poverty, ignominy, lowly lineage, etc. (this list is by Diogenes Laertius), can be considered a masterpiece of affirmativism. Everything that we do not control, everything that is related to the body, to biological functioning, is considered as "indifferent". Thus, most adversities are denied as evils. Moreover, the fundamental Stoic moral dictum is: "to live according to nature", and since human nature is rational, "to live according to reason", a Socratic theme that is exhumed in Stoicism, Epicureanism and other Hellenistic tendencies. But none of these classical thinkers faces the "objection of violence": this is also "natural", in all animals, including the human animal; it does not disappear with rationality, but the rational animal is rationally violent, it is violent in the rational way; that is why it practices cruelties and disconsiderations that other animals do not manage to practice. Must we then live according to the natural-rational tendencies of violence? If one says no, that violence should be avoided as much as possible (even if it is admitted exceptionally, in selfdefense or in "just war"), then an exception to "living according to nature" opens up. Here the affirmative element seems to be present in this tendency to see nature as "good" and not to see its cruel and devastating aspects (as it will be later in the Nietzschean conception of nature and life). Many ancient thinkers held that the source of unhappiness lies in passions, impulses, desires; the easy way to happiness, for most humans, lies in the attempt to satisfy those passions and impulses. But they prove to be insatiable and leave the human sad and unsatisfied after obtaining them. Classical Western philosophy teaches that, then, the way to true happiness, the philosophical happiness of the wise man, is, in a way, either to renounce those impulses or to dress them up in a way that does not depend on them absolutely. Stoic intellectualism, heir to Socratic intellectualism, conceals the endemic difficulties of these attempts, until the theme of the will, and its difficult relationship with the intellect, are subsequently developed, especially from the

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19th century, with some medieval anticipations, as we shall see. Greek philosophers continue to see the phenomena of desire and will as dependent on parts of the soul and linked to false judgments, that is, still in an intellectualistic way. Stoic apathy stems from an assumed capacity for rational mastery of the passions, a strongly affirmative ethical idea. The skeptic Pyrrhus was especially fond of Homer's passages describing the miseries of human life, and of all the Homeric passages that speak of the instability of the human condition, the futility of purpose and the puerile folly of humans. Skepticism, by getting rid of all great convictions in truth and being, functions as another powerful defense mechanism in the face of the wounds of the world. Radical skepticism protects, insofar as strong beliefs expose to greater dangers. Like the Stoics, skeptics advocate apathy. To remain adoxastic, that is to say, without opinion, to suspend judgment, is to remain without agitation, not to let oneself be shaken by anything: new bulwarks against an uncomfortable and aggressive world. In the imperial philosophical schools we will see the re-edition of the doctrines of Hellenism. In this period, a particularly interesting figure is Seneca who, in his consolatory writings, paradoxically, distills his dark vision of life. To his aunt Marcia, who has lost a son, he consoles her by reminding her that she never had any guarantee on that which she lost, and that if she thought she had, she lived wrongly. This applies to anything we lose (possessions, honors, prestige, children or life itself: "We have only the usufruct; fortune limits the duration of her benefits to her will: we must always be ready to return what was given to us for an uncertain time, and to make restitution without murmuring at the first request. A bad debtor is he who insults his creditor" (Consolation to Marcia, X). Nothing has been promised to us about health, eternity or longevity, so nothing is taken from us when we lose them. The idea of an internal link between life and death (between being born and dying) is clearly stated by Seneca: "When you complain of the death of your son, you accuse the day of his birth, because at his birth he was notified of death. With this condition he was given to you; and destiny has pursued him since he was conceived in your womb (...) Why mourn that part of life? New misfortunes will fall upon thee before thou hast satisfied the old" (X). "Born mortal, thou hast conceived mortals: being corruptible and perishable, subject to

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Did you expect your fragile matter to engender strength and immortality? (XI). "You were born to lose, to fear and desire death, and what is worse, to perish, to wait, to worry others and to never know what your condition is (XVII). But Seneca's negative reflection on human life does not stop at the question of the death of loved ones, not even at suicide (which he himself committed, at the behest of Nero, his patron), that is, at the death of those who already exist, but digs into birth itself and possible beings and questions, as rarely in history, the very problem of arising, of being born mortal. He uses the metaphor of a journey to Syracuse; if one were to say to the one who is about to leave: "I am going first to acquaint you with all the discomforts and satisfactions of your next journey; then embark" (Id). He then describes the beauties of the voyage, the islands, the whirlpool, the fountains, the harbor, and the sun. "But when thou hast beheld all these things, heavy and noxious summer will poison the benefits of the winter sky. There you will find Dionysus the tyrant, executioner of freedom, of justice, of laws, greedy for power (...)You know what can attract you and what can restrain you: leave or stay" (Id). Seneca compares birth to a journey to Syracuse, and declares that you cannot complain about the bitterness of the journey once you have decided to undertake it. "Let us refer to this image the entrance of man into life. (...) Suppose I am called upon on the day of your birth to advise you. (...) You then describe all the beauties of life. "But you will also find a thousand scourges of body and soul, wars, larcenies, poisonings, shipwrecks, hurricanes, diseases, premature loss of our own, and death, perhaps sweet, perhaps full of pains and torments. Deliberate with yourself, and weigh well what you wish; once you have entered this city of wonders, this is the way out. Will you answer that you want to live? Why not? But I consider that you do not consent in life, since you complain that something is taken away from you. Live, then, as agreed. But no one, you say, has consulted us. Our fathers consulted for us; they knew the laws of life and begot us to endure them" (XVIII). The Stoic, Epicurean and Skeptical schools of the imperial period, as well as pagan tendencies subsisting during the period after the rise of Christianity (such as pagan gnosis), represent, within the present reconstruction, something like the last throes of pagan consolation. It is a time of extreme desperation, something that is

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It is strongly noted in the writings of Seneca, but it is concentrated in all that the philosophers had managed to say about the human possibilities of "enduring life". Late paganism was at the limit of its existential forces. Such a deep despair needed a drastic remedy, a shock treatment, a kind of thought capable of giving the human being everything he needed to survive in a horrible world, a thought that gives a meaning to life and suffering, and that, through a way of life, allows to hope for metaphysical rewards that were never imagined by paganism: an eternal Father Creator of the world and provident, eternal life after death including resurrection of the body and other wonders, not easy to obtain but possible through great effort. The ancient Greek daimon, who disturbed reason, are replaced by angels and all kinds of intermediary entities in charge of making the life of humans more understandable, though no less painful, through announcements and messages. Thus, Christianity can be considered as the apotheosis of affirmativism in philosophy, a set of contents giving meaning and consolation for this life and announcing the other, the only type of thought that, in its absolute and curiously functional character, was capable of curing the unbearable pain of late paganism. Humanity, after trying everything, gives itself what it needs to live and die in a world full of all the sufferings so well described by paganism. This same world will have to be transfigured so that this incredible and exacerbated human response to the helplessness of being can make its way and triumph for centuries in the Western imagination. The extraordinary triumph of Christianity, in the present reading, represents the definitive triumph over the worthlessness of being and, at the same time, its most ostentatious manifestation: all the evils of the world must first be admitted so that Christianity may be seen as the philosophy best suited to confront them. A fundamental figure for understanding all this is the Hebrew Philo of Alexandria, a kind of precursor of Patristics and, in a mediate way, of Scholasticism, which will consummate the synthesis (surpassing?) of Greek thought with the triumphant Christianity, a synthesis that Philo suggests in a still obscure way. He begins with a much more radical attack than Plato's on Greek materialism, formulating a type of spiritualism never seen before, a radical negation of the corporeal and material, seen, at most, as a means to a higher reality. In his commentaries on the Torah, he adopts the word of Moses as the ultimate law by which all philosophical thought must be judged. Greek reason becomes totally subordinate to Mosaic faith, which was not properly thought in any sense until that time.

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admitted moment. For the first time, thought is confronted with a Revelation that has almost total primacy over it (several revelations appear in the world, such as the Koran for the Arabs). In expository style and methodology, the allegorical method, already used by Plato, is used by Philo and his followers to paroxysm. The main ideas conveyed by the Bible were, as is known: monotheism concentrated on a single, paternal, provident and loving God; the creationism of the world from nothing; God as the ultimate source and foundation of morality; human life as a fall from original sin through disobedience to God's laws, bringing as punishment work, effort, suffering and death, that is, all the crucial elements of the human condition; life as a path to salvation, linked not only by one's own strength but also by divine grace. The world acquires a cosmic meaning by moving towards its full realization in the Kingdom of God on earth. Against pagan pride, it is necessary to be humble, to accept ourselves as nothingness before the Great Eternal Father Creator who, although sometimes angry, loves us and is concerned with our salvation. The helplessness of being, inexplicable and painful in paganism, now receives a sublime explanation: the world is so bad because it is the place God chose to save us; a world, therefore, full of obstacles, sufferings and terrors as befits a place of trial, penance and expiation. Now we know why the world has to be so bad! We even know why it is not absurd to fervently desire it to be as bad as it manages to be, because that can favor, in tortuous ways, our salvation. And we cannot complain, for it was we who lost the good things God had given us: the human condition is our second chance. And the covenant with God ("testament" means "covenant") is unilateral: we have to accept it. Beginning with Philo, the salvific affirmativism, the double world, the scheme of the fall and the atonement, begin to configure the scheme that neo-platonism, with its own categories, will finally formulate. Now the world is not gratuitous, it has a meaning, and the human being occupies a place of privilege within it. Indeed, much is said about the effort of synthesis between Greek rationalism and the Christian message, but Greek rationalism was already so impregnated with mysticism and religion in the Orphic, Platonic and Pythagorean tradition that such a synthesis with Christianity should not be so laborious. (The synthesis with Aristotelianism, as attempted many centuries later, could pose challenges, since Aristotle was a thinker to whom we should not have to give up the idea of a synthesis with the Christian message.

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margin of the savior and atonement scheme, perhaps a thinker more profoundly out of his time than is usually accepted). Rational philosophy must now occupy a subordinate place to theology, because at this particular moment of humanity, it is a matter of "saving oneself" and not, as a priority, of knowing. Wisdom is subordinated to sapience guided by faith and Revelation. Reasonings are fragile and insecure while faith is absolutely sure and reliable. All immanentism and materialism that refers coldly to the sufferings of the world is abandoned (not, as is sometimes said, "overcome"); it is a matter of embracing a kind of knowledge that helps us not simply to face them (like the Stoics) but to make sense of them. The corporeal becomes a consequence of the incorporeal, true reality, true being. Every material explanation of the world is intelligible but discouraging; the biblical explanation is, on the contrary, animating although often difficult to understand or decidedly unintelligible; God himself begins to be conceived as ineffable, inexpressible and hidden, not even designable by names (negative theology). Mystery is a fundamental element of the new scheme of thought. Because it is a divine creation from nothing, the world must be beautiful and good, in spite of appearances; for it is created by an act of will of a good Being. Evil cannot have reality; the good must coincide with being. But it is not that the world is good in absolute terms, for it has no value if compared with its Creator, the source of all value. The world has only the derivative value that allows, through a form of life, to lead us back to God. All is grace, repeats Philo of Alexandria. The world is good for God, the supreme being; it is our fault that it is not good for us too. Platonic ideas are brought to the mind of God as intermediary entities, and Philo develops a rich angelology, treatises on angels who mediate our relationship with Him in various ways. Never has the human being had so much, but never has the price been so high: as Kierkegaard would see much later, faith begins when reason ends. It is clear that this scheme of thought must explicitly deny mortality: the soul becomes immortal when God gives it the breath of his spirit. For that, we must abandon interest in the world and replace it with interest in God; this, according to Philo, occurs at the moment when we become fully aware of our own nothingness; when our own nothingness (our own worthlessness) is recognized, our salvation begins. The happy life

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happens, then, when the human sphere is transcended. Philo lays the foundations of metaphysical contempt for the world and human life, with humans enlightened only by the hope of personal salvation guided by divine laws. In all of the above we can see that a scheme of thought inspired by ancient Orphism and Pythagoreanism and picked up by Plato is being built in history, which receives an ethicalpractical formulation in the Hellenistic and imperial schools, which has its first clear formulation in Philo of Alexandria and which receives its full concretization both in Christianity and in Neo-Platonism, in different but contemporary ways. From Philo to Plotinus, these ideas pass through the so-called "middle Platonism", through neo-Pythagoreanism and mystical hermeticism, preparing the ground for the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. This scheme is maintained, with different variations, as we shall see, in the Greek fathers such as Clement and Origen, in the Cappadocian fathers, the legendary Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, St. Maximus Confessor, St. John Damascene, St. Augustine, Scotus Erigena, Alfarabi, Avicenna, St. Anselm, Robert Grosseteste, St. Bonaventure, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, the Florentine Neoplatonists (Pico Della Mirándola), the Protestant mystics and theosophists (Franck, Boeme), Leibniz, Kant, German idealism and Karl Marx. This schema of thought is significantly modified by some of the philosophers mentioned (notably, by St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Kant, Hegel and Marx), but I want to show that its general lines are maintained. The persistence of that scheme seems to me to constitute the origin of the ethical and ontological affirmativism of Western thought over the centuries. I argue that affirmativity (and, above all, the identity of being with the good) and the systematic closing of spaces that (at least for some time) we will have to continue to call "negative", are residues of religious structures of thought (for religion is affirmative by essence).

Interlude: first formulation of the Scheme I want to stop for a moment my historical study in this transition from Philo to Plotinus, and before entering fully into the second, trying to outline the scheme to which I am referring. It is developed, approximately, as follows:

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1. There is something that has the ultimate being. This something may or may not be a someone, may or may not be a God. It may be a Unity, something perfect and supreme. This ultimate being is usually remote, hidden, sometimes unintelligible and unnamable, but one can always know something about it even if it is by a negative or privative way. 2. The being that is maximally, is also maximally good. Maximum being coincides with maximum goodness. Being is identical with good (the idea that the more something is, the more good it is). 3. From that supreme being comes the world, either by emanation or by creation, or by intermediary modes of emergence. In creationism it is insisted that God makes the world out of goodness, since, in doing so, he brings it "out of nothingness," which is seen as something bad and imperfect. It is supposed, then, that it is good to take something out of nonbeing to bring it into being. 4. But: in the world there is "evil", natural and human sufferings, diseases and hostile attitudes of humans against each other, wars, lack of communication and, finally, death. Thus, within the scheme, "the problem of evil" is born, and the problem of how from a good principle an evil world can arise. 5. Since the principle is maximally good and from it the world arose, the evil in the world must be the work of the human being or come from other sources than the supreme being. If the human being is guilty of "evil", then it is necessary to endow the human being with a certain autonomy, so that he can have "chosen evil". 6. Now there is a whole process of "return" to the unity or perfection lost by "evil", a corrective path, of redemption or atonement, as a new opportunity that the principle (God, in many cases) gives men to live virtuously. There is, then, a reconciliation, a cure, a salvation, a self-knowledge, a re-encounter. This reconciliation is usually done in steps, going through hierarchies of beings, situations, moments, theses, etc., in a sort of journey of restoration or atonement. (These are road-philosophies, but where the journey is always only "back". When we are born, the outward journey has already taken place).

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This Scheme evidently conveys a moral reading of the world. There is something originally good that is lost - almost always due to human intervention - and that must be "recovered". Never has the despair of living been so notorious as in this line of thought, such an obsessive and unpostponable need to believe in something beyond the world, accompanied by a profound despair of the given, a repugnance before the painful spectacle of the world that can only be tolerated by considering it a deviation or loss, something that must be saved, cured, reconciled. (The Neoplatonic scheme, in particular, takes the form of a gigantic hierarchically organized Metaphysical Bureaucracy, which has the function of placing between the reconciled Unity and our misery, the necessary bridge of a leafy army of intermediary beings, capable of filling the depressing hole of our existence). *** In second century Gnosticism, this Scheme adopts baroque styles of exposition. Gnostics see the world as the very realm of evil and our stay in it as an exile. God is remotely and essentially good, and therefore cannot be the cause of evil. The world was actually created by an evil demiurge (sometimes identified with the God of the Old Testament), who has to be rescued by a good God (Christ). Gnosticism is a fruit of late paganism, full of pessimism and despair, which only manages to express itself through heresies and deviations. The Scheme understands the emergence of the world as a necessary ontological emanation, and "evil" consists simply in the original imperfection of everything emanated, whatever it may be. This is a purely formal or metaphysical evil, not an evil in the form of a particular sin or fault that would have been "committed" by an emanated being. (This will change radically in the Christian version of the Schema). The emanated being is not evil for doing something, but only for being (for having emanated). The emanatist version of the emergence of the world must dispense the God-One from moral responsibility, since it is a necessary and not voluntary emergence. The ontological "distance" between the supreme being and the human being is filled, according to Gnosticism, by a hierarchy of intermediary beings, already on the return journey of the process. God degrades by emanating other beings from Him, but the hierarchy of beings remains there to be used in an eventual return journey and reconciliation with the first Principle (like the child in the story who drops crumbs of bread along the way in order to be able to return). The world is not the passage

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from non-being to being, but - hierarchically - from supra-being to less being. The affirmative concept guiding this scheme is that the good is degraded at the same time as being. Our sensible world is, at the same time, maximally degraded ontologically and ethically (the Gnostics and many others consider matter as the source of evil). It is the curious idea that when ontological quality is lost, moral good is also lost. (In all this scheme the world is seen correctly, as bad as it is, but its evil is attributed to a kind of "fall"). Making the distinction between metaphysical evil and moral evil, of course it is not strange that as one loses being, the original imperfection, the pure defect of having arisen, increases. But this "evil" seems pre-moral and does not imply any affirmative prejudice. The curious thing is when a notion of "moral evil" and "good" is introduced into the Scheme (and this will be paroxysmal in Christianity) that is not simply identified with ontological perfection. It is the identity of being with moral good that is affirmative, and not mere ontological good. (And it is moral evil, the belief that humans are evil, that is affirmative, and not ontological evil, mere malaise of being.) It is not necessary for any of the intermediary beings to commit a specific sin to introduce "evil" into the world, since the simple fact of the original ontological imperfection of the arisen (emanated) will inevitably also lead to a decrease of moral good, due to finiteness and limitation. There is no need to make the affirmative story even more baroque by involving some alleged "fact" (of the "original sin" type) that would be the specific source of "moral evil". In the emanatist scheme, the ontological evil is formal and comes simply from being, and not from being so and so, whereas the alleged moral evil has a specific content (or was given one), appeared in the world for such and such a reason, etc. In this sense, the "moral evil" is ontic, not structural, and might not have happened. What has been painted with the colors of sin and fall is simply being, but a being that humans are not capable of facing in its fearful original imperfection (translated into pain and suffering) without adding to it some additional motive, some extra meaning. That is precisely why a "return" must always be possible. If it were a simple fact, what is done is done, and there would be no possible return. But, according to the emanatist scheme, nothing material has happened, only the formal development of being that can only develop "downwards", via ontological degradation. A sort of journey with return. The

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ascetic can attempt the exercise of asceticism because he "did nothing", he simply was. In his spirit, the ethical-ontological effort will consist in trying to live up to the supreme ontological principles. This is the "solution" that makes the "goodness of being" compatible with the "evil of the world": that the world is not supreme or maximally, but always in a degraded form. Then everything is fine, for we are so low that, if we move, we can only go up. Instead of saying that the evil of the world shows that being is or can be evil, it is said that the world can be so evil only because, in a supreme sense, it "is not," it is ontologically degraded. Originally, being and good coincide, but that coincidence breaks down in the ontological stages after the first Principle. The world is thus the result of a long process of ontological degradation. Typical of the Scheme, from Plotinus to Kant and Hegel, is the duality of worlds. It is forbidden by the Scheme that there is only one world, at least if one wants to suggest that this is the only world. The world that is really valuable is never ours, it is always another. To reach the good and valuable world (which is not this one) it is necessary to travel, to move, to make an effort, to pay a debt, to do penance, to settle an account, to do something meritorious that compensates for the lack, the gap, the sin. It is the relief, transmitted by the Scheme, that one can do something with the worthlessness of the being that is not only to suffer it. A moral perfection is linked to the various capacities that the human being would have to return to the Principle; the moral virtue is related to the capacity that the human being would have to detach himself from the material, the changeable and the multiple. In truth, it is not necessary to have committed any moral sin to decay, only to have been emanated; but a moral virtue is necessary to rise following the hierarchy of beings, for this is something that I must choose; and I may or may not be able to do it. The return is not necessary, as was the outward journey, that of degradation. When we become aware of our life, of the place where we were thrown, we already have to run to buy our return ticket. The outward journey was simply the birth. Our whole life is, according to the scheme, a return, but a return that is progress with respect to a fundamental regression. For those who are born regressed, returning is progress. If you will, it is an unnatural, anti-ontological return. It is not planned that there is a being that, suddenly, decides to return. This demands an ontologically ethical effort.

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unforeseen. Degradation, on the other hand, is free, it is guaranteed by mere being. Emanation is a one-way trip. In some authors of the Scheme, for most humans there is only a one-way trip, and those who manage to return are very few. Other authors are more pious. But, in any case, returning costs an effort that is always related to a moral gesture. In some versions of the Scheme, all beings - not only the human - have the capacity to return to the first Principle, in which case the process is again ontologized, since it is a kind of forced "unfolding" of the One and not the decision of any being at a certain level of unfolding. Manichaeism introduces a new and advantageous element: the idea that "evil" is not a pure privation, but that it follows its own principle. Belief in Satan, together with belief in God, tends to reproduce the symmetry typical of philosophy. (Religious schemes unbalance philosophical symmetry to some side). To say, for example, that Satan does not exist, that evil is simply the absence of God, and that no independent principle is needed for "evil," is already to place ontological completeness on one side and interpret the other only privately. Similarly, one could consider God privatively and say that he is merely "absence of evil". I think that philosophy should try not to identify being with good, non-being with evil, not to see the world in a degrading way but as a datum, including its many "negative" datums (which should not be called so), as something complete that does not refer to any "degradation". Thus we would escape the colossal force of the Scheme. It is interesting to think that Satan may be trying to show us other ways of living and not simply "evil". It is to Mani's credit, likewise, that he visualized the possibility of seeing generation as a moral evil. Mani recommended virginity or childless union to avoid the spread of evil in the world. This is a good sign of the opening of the "negative" spaces, so called only relatively to the current affirmativism. (At the end of these thoughts, the affirmative/negative dichotomy must disappear). On the road that leads to Plotinus, the most important formulator of the Scheme whose secular validity I am trying to show, we find the figure of Numenius of Apameia, in Syria, in the second century A.D., who attempts a meeting between Plato, Pythagoreanism and the biblical wisdom of Philo. According to him, being has to be conceived as eternal, incorporeal and transcendent, identical to itself, without birth or death or any kind of movement or change. It is the being

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of Parmenides now identified with the being of God. Numenius came very close to the neoPlatonic formulations. Most of the thinkers linked to the Greek or Latin Patristics of the first centuries after Christ are subjugated, in one way or another, by the Schema. Clement of Alexandria, in the second century A.D., a Stoic who became a Christian, dedicates himself to combat the "false gnosis", purely negative, trying to formulate "the true one", according to which science and faith are reconciled, a theme that will cross the centuries until the end of Scholasticism. One of the first authors of this period, who clearly introduces the question of freedom in the Schema, is Origen (from the second to the third century A.D.), who at the same time attacks Manichaeism head-on. Rational creatures have free will and that freedom leads each of them to progress in imitation of God, or to decay by their own negligence. Possibly freedom is one of the most picturesque elements of the Christian cartoon. For men seem to have no responsibility (nor freedom) in the process of corruption, but they would have it in the effort and decision to return to more worthy and elevated ontological levels. Also in Origen we find the idea that the corporeal was born as a consequence of sin, the body not being something totally bad, but an instrument of expiation and purification through reincarnations. The doctrine of apocatastasis is the idea of the reconduction of all beings to their original state. Our world, in any case, is presented as a kind of mistaken unfolding, which needs to be redeemed by returning to the origin. The spirit of Plotinus' philosophy is to free oneself from this world in order to reunite with the primordial One. In his scheme, the corporeal, matter, appears in the last degree of the descending development of the One, and it is an obligation to try to divest oneself of the material in order to ascend mystically to the One. The world, again, is not something good in itself, but only a way to something better. But, against the Gnostics, Plotinus persists in the positivity of the world, even if it is in this register of pure way to something else. In his hierarchical philosophy there is a procession of hypostases (One, Spirit, Soul, until reaching matter), and a process of purification, going backwards along the path of the procession. But the sensible does not have selfsufficiency, self-sustainability. The description of the One is negative (it is said more what it is not than what it is) and consciously inadequate (predicates that do not suit it are attributed to it only to give approximately an idea of it, but, strictly speaking, what is said are nonsense).

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Through this negative-unintelligible description, the One appears as unthinkable and ineffable, as totally other, as profoundly estranged from the world, absolutely foreign, as if absolute good and being had to be understood as radical estrangement from this world, as if the One could not be tainted by any approximation to us and our situation: a colorful painting of the worthlessness of being by contrast. It is clear that the supreme, the absolute, the good, the maximally being cannot be expressed or understood with our categories. The light and strength of the One diminish as they are projected into our poor world without diminishing in the One itself. The humiliating and terrible suffering of our condition (which Plotinus himself suffered, sick, with hands and feet full of sores and almost voiceless, alone in the interior of the country), these philosophies place it as the appendix of a superior reality, of spiritual character, as to better bear the crude materiality of our misfortunes: instead of the given natural we have a natural that is degradation of a superior spiritual reality, degradation of which, in some way, we are guilty. The spiritual Principle is exempt from that, for the degradation has some possibility, however remote, of being resolved through some kind of attitude or action. But the curious thing is that the formulation of this Scheme ends up introducing all kinds of metaphysical problems; for now, in the light of the intelligible, the sensible world becomes a surprising and difficult problem. For if there is such a spiritual reality and our poor sensible world is a degradation of it, how and why did the sensible world derive from the intelligible? Why did the One have to unfold until it reached the despicable matter from which we have to free ourselves afterwards? Why all this enormous ontological detour? Plotinus will say that the very spiritual reality of the One forced it, somehow, to unfold, which seems much more plausible than the creationist novel (which we will see later). It is not a purely natural unfolding. The "need to create" is as unintelligible on the divine plane as it is on the human plane. Even admitting that we are spiritually and materially inclined towards procreation, we can always not procreate. The path of abstention is not metaphysically closed. Thus, God or the One could perfectly well abstain. It is curious that Plotinus, like other philosophers of the Scheme, refuses to give "evil" a positivity, a reality, a being, conceiving it as "deprivation of good", being good the primordial; without realizing that it is "evil" (the discomfort of worthlessness) precisely what forces to invent the whole metaphysical scheme within which good is the positive and evil the privative. Matter is the

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non-being and "evil", but matter is dependent; does not "evil" matter compel to create, by compensation, the affirmative and "good" metaphysical Scheme? Temporality is also degraded. Everything that comes out of the Unity unfolds in time and is already imperfect. The world is seen as a bad copy of the original model, but, at the same time, as the most beautiful possible image of it. Plotinus' fantasy runs rampant: "Even before birth, we were up there, we were other men individually determined, and also gods, pure souls, with the Spirit together with the Being, whole, parts of a spiritual Reality without confines or divisions, belonging to the whole..." (Enneads, VI, 4, 14). Our lamentable world must somehow come to pass, because the One has to develop all its possibilities, even if some of them are unpleasant or catastrophic for the singulars that we are, just to guarantee the perfection of the whole (the optimistic idea that Leibniz will still develop, many centuries later). Thus, the "descent" to matter is, in the consolatory scheme, an enrichment, for having contributed to the actualization of the potentialities of the universe, and even for having experienced the "evil", making clearer, by contrast, the "good". The meanderings of consolation are difficult to follow. The later Neoplatonists, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Proclus, follow these same lines, which represent the last great speculative effort of paganism before its total defeat by Christianity (with the edict of Justinian, in the 6th century).

3.3. From Augustine to Scotus Erigena Augustine is the philosopher who places God in a difficult position in terms of saving him from responsibility for "evil". For he is one of the thinkers who strongly criticizes emanatism and defends creationism and divine freedom. The world ceases to be a degraded emanation of the Nous and proceeds from a creation of God, who brings it out of nothing by a free and voluntary act, without necessity. God creates the world because he wills, but not (according to Augustine) arbitrarily or irrationally, but out of wisdom and love, making his creatures imperfectly partake of his perfections. God must be held accountable for his free choice of imperfection and for his rejection of non-being: better to be imperfect than not to be. Non-being was an easy choice for God.

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Augustine gives all being, light and happiness to God; humans are in dire need of his enlightenment and grace, and - at the apex of his pessimism of the world - he maintains that one cannot be happy outside of an encounter with God, that no finite good is enough to be happy. There is only true happiness in the next life, being impossible in this one. Here, in the world, we can only have a pale idea of it. It takes a good metaphysical novel to be a coherent creationist. The world emerges from nothing by divine will and not, as in the Platonic demiurge, from a manufacture that presupposes the pre-existence of ideas. In this sense, only God can create, because all creation is creation from nothing. There remains the enigma of the why of divine creation, at the same time attenuated by its volitional (though not arbitrary) character. Creation is guided by love and good. We may not clearly understand the divine purposes, but we know, by God's own definition, that they must be good. As for all the thinkers of the Schema, human disorders, sufferings, injustices, make up the extraordinary "problem of evil", with which Augustine also has to confront. Here the estrangement of the human condition is total because it is seen as "evil" what is simply human, it is not accepted that the human being could have been put in a situation that is debilitating, depressing, threatening; all this has to be seen as equivocal and deviant. For since the world is divine and therefore good, "evil" is absurd. In a world made by God according to good, "evil" must be an anomaly. There is as it were a human impossibility to see the very being of the human being except as fallen. But, certainly, the "problem of evil" would not exist if we managed to see the self as simply "being there" in a precarious and uncomfortable situation and not as a "deviation" from our "true being". The Augustan "solution" to this immense pseudo-problem is not at all original, since it comes directly from Plotinus: evil has no being, it is pure deficiency and deprivation, it has inferior degrees of being and good in relation to the supreme divine being and supreme good. Holism is also fundamental in the novel (which Leibniz will reuse many centuries later): what seems evil in detail, is good in the whole of creation. In the moral field, "evil" is the sin committed by human errors in the choice of goods, preferring the inferior to the superior, the merely created and not the Creator. The torments and sufferings are derived from original sin. The Augustinian novel is Platonic and neo-Platonic from the feet.

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(The emanated "evil" seems less enigmatic than evil as a by-product of a good Creation). After the pessimism about any earthly happiness and the recognition that the evils of the world are not totally explicable (because they refer to the divine will, which creates from nothing), Augustine closes his thought of the worthlessness of the world with the famous myth of the two cities, the earthly and the city of God, also inspired by Plato. The earthly city, which on earth seems dominant, will be definitively defeated; by rising in the heavenly city, the human being will finally have the eternal happiness that was impossible in the earthly city. The encounter with God will show, with all its lights, the radical worthlessness of the world and the innocuousness and insufficiency of all that is earthly. In an emanatist scheme (whether the One itself degrades or, as in Plotinus, remains intact), no one is to blame for ontological evil. Passing for a creationist scheme (which includes freedom for humans), such as the Augustinian one, God can be held responsible for that evil, since it was perfectly possible to abstain knowing that whatever He created would be ontologically imperfect, something inferior to Himself. Only once God is held responsible for ontological evil (for not having known how to restrain Himself), could humans be held responsible for moral evil; but human frailties, laziness and hesitations can be piously understood in light of the accursed inheritance of ontological evil, from which God (as well as our human fathers) could have delivered us. As long as metaphysicians try to save God from all responsibility there can be no friendly relations between God and humans (and, in general, between parents and children). It is like a kind of pact (or testament), as if God were saying to the human being: "Do you want to be, to come out of nothing? Well, I can create you, but however you are, you will be ontologically imperfect. I can do nothing to prevent that. But you can collaborate with me in the creation of the world by trying to rebalance it after it is created, through an attitude of reencounter with me. The world cannot be made from my side alone. I cannot create it perfect, not even good, but very imperfect and bad, so that you, with your effort, can perfect it and make it good, at least in part (the birth of Christ is a metaphor of that unspeakable and sacrificial effort, perhaps doomed to failure). The other alternative is not to create anything, not to emerge. The choice is, then: imperfection or nothing. You choose. Since there was never such a dialogue, it cannot be said that the human (the son) "broke the contract", or

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that "he did not fulfill his part". This is a second line to try to show the radical innocence of the human being: the first was that he is not responsible for the ontological evil, a responsibility that belongs entirely to the Creator (beyond the merely emanatist scheme). The second is that there was no prior covenant and that, therefore, the human could not "defraud the purpose and order of creation," since the God-human relationship is completely asymmetrical, and, therefore (as Kierkegaard saw it) is not an ethical relationship. God would have had to have previously posed things to the human being by assuming his own responsibility and presenting him with the possibility of not being, the "negative" space as viable. Many would have chosen not to be. A truly free choice would be one in which we could choose between being and perfection, a situation in which we could say: "As long as I can get out of nothingness, I accept anything, even imperfection," or, conversely: "If I cannot be good and not suffer, I prefer to be nothing. If there was no such choice, then the human lives a radical lack of freedom, which absolutely nothing can solve afterwards. It makes no sense to say that "the human being is created free", since by creating him, freedom has already been radically taken away from him. There is a line of argument available, linked to the Scheme, that defends the idea that taking something out of non-being and bringing it into being is "good". But, on the other hand, there is something in pure possibility that being ruins and limits. Here non-being is seen as perfect and being as havoc. In the Neoplatonic scheme, indeed, we find the two lines: on the one hand, it seems "better" to pass from non-being to being, only this passage necessarily creates imperfection. One could say in this line: it is good to pass from non-being to being, even if this step creates the ontologically bad. The other line could be this: it is good to remain in non-being, not to realize the possible, etc, for that avoids the ontologically bad. This line reasons in the sense that the real is always necessarily more imperfect than the possible. The first line, on the other hand, wagers that the imperfect is necessarily better than non-being. But the existence of these two lines leads to the convenience of not identifying being with good and non-being with bad. This would lead us to visualize that there is no ethical problem of "evil", but only an ontological problem (including also the third type of evil mentioned by Leibniz, physical evil, which refers to the problem of suffering). The idea of a "moral evil" is on the intramundane ontic level; it is an interpretation of ontological imperfection (on the side of being or on the side of non-being), something that the human does in the world while being able not to do it. But the evil of the world, not the evil within the world, is something that

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can only be understood with ontological categories. The emphasis is placed on "moral evil" because it can easily be shown that God has no responsibility for it and that the human being must bear the entire cost. God's responsibility for the "ontological evil", without which there would be no "moral evil", is here hidden. Thus, one tries to show that the human has "done" something within the world to explain the presence of "evil", hiding that evil is not only within the world, but in the very emergence of a world, of any world, and that for that the human is not responsible at all. (The misery of theodicies, but not for Lévinas' reasons). Paradoxes of the affirmative scheme: the depreciation of the sensible world, as the last degree of the corruption of authentic being - whose supreme model is God - promotes human death to qualified heights, as is already seen in the original Platonic source itself. In the "Phaedo", the true knowledge of the eternal essences is only attained after death. The paradox consists in the fact that in order to reach authentic being on the way back it is necessary to die, because authentic being excludes materiality and living being includes it. Curious ontological re-encounter in which the embrace with being eliminates the being reencountered, in a conciliation only compatible with its own non-being, thus showing that conciliation and being cannot be simultaneous. Conciliation is projected towards an infinity that cannot be reached in life, not for lack of time (for eternity would not be enough), but by nature. Negative theology", from the extraordinary figure of the pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite (5th century) to Scotus Erigena (9th century) and Nicholas of Cusa, highlights something important, which clearly shows the relative character of non-being: that God, in spite of being Suprabeing, ontological model, being par excellence, for us humans He is Nothing, something absolutely transcendent that we can only intuit via negationis. Mystical silence is the best way to this Supreme Being, the suppression of all our categories of understanding. Thus, from the point of view of those limited categories, God is not the Supra-being, but Nothing (it is not something that our categories can understand). They are two sides of the same thing: seen from God, the world is nothing, it is deeply degraded being, but seen from the world, God is nothing, nothing that we can understand, something profoundly elevated and distant, ineffable. The pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, especially in his extraordinary text on the names of God, shows the total and absolute transcendence of God as another way of nihilistic depreciation of the world, as much as the conception of the ontologically degraded world. In

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Indeed, one could consider that it is the same idea looked at from different sides. Dionysius is, in his own way, a philosopher of language, who has worked specifically with the question of the appropriate symbolism to capture whatever divinity is. His texts are extraordinary, of a subjugating style and contemporary acuity. Indeed, it is false to say that he "describes" divinity, because what he is trying to describe (not describing it, or saying that it is impossible to describe it), is something that is beyond everything, even beyond divinity. One could say that he describes (by not describing it, or by saying that it is impossible to describe it) the Beyondeverything (including the beyond the Beyond-everything), in such a way as to make the reader feel all the indispensable futility of the effort. He sometimes calls it Supra-essentiality. Something that surpasses all speech, all speech, all being, excluded from the category of being, not in the sense of non-being, but in the (non)sense of being beyond being and non-being. (This applies, in its discursive scheme, to any and every X/Y dualism - positive/negative, good/bad, being/non-being, etc - : not that That is not X because it is Y, but because That is something beyond X/Y; not that it is not positive because it is negative, but because it is beyond positive/negative, and so with all other dualisms.) It is ineffable, something before which one keeps wise silence. Undefinable, beyond any intellectual operation. It transcends all names. It is still too little to say that it is ineffable and unknowable, because to say this is already to bring it very close to our categories of fable and knowable. It is only a way of saying not saying. Total transcendence, but which i s not opposed to any immanence; transcendence that transcends transcendence, the transcendent/immanent duality. That (which it would be incorrect and perhaps indecent to call God) is not the object of any theoretical science but only of a lived experience bathed in silence. More worthy of celebration than of explanation. He is One, but not in the sense of numerical unity (neo-platonic theme), but unity that transcends the one/multiple dualism. In chapter 4 of the text on the divine names, Dionysius returns to the problem of "evil" and to the demonstration, usual at the time, of its non-being, of its lack of reality, a typical piece of the Affirmative Scheme: only good has being, evil is not. As Boethius will also say a little later: there are no evil humans because evil simply takes away their being. Dionysius again uses the metaphor of light; divine goodness is like a great sun that illuminates everything, but which dims and becomes dim when it illuminates certain objects whose receptivity fails. Evil is receptive impotence, sad capacity to attenuate the light received, but never total darkness, because then evil would have a being (there would be a demon, another guiding principle, Manichaeism). Thus, the

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"Evil" is not entirely evil, for it participates, albeit faintly, in good; there is only good, sun, light. Darkness is the place most extremely distant from the source of light, it is the absence of light, but it is not something. On the other hand, "evil" fulfills a function in the perfection of the universe (the holistic way out, so often used throughout the history of European philosophy). Evil is pure corruption; as evil, it is neither being nor does it produce being, it is through good that it exists. (Here is the total estrangement of the human condition, typical of the affirmative scheme). Evil is only a weakening of the natural activity of beings, a deviation, an abandonment of convenient goods, a failure, an imperfection, a failure in the conservation of perfection. No nature is evil except insofar as it opposes itself and deprives itself of that which naturally belongs to it. Even evil is sought as a good. Evil" has no substance, or is a kind of false substance. An evil reality is never totally evil in all respects (thus Caligula and Hitler would not be evil, but very faintly good). The method of Dionysius is thus totally negative, but in a radical, hyper-negative sense, of a negation by total transcendence and not of a negation simply opposed to affirmation or to the positive (not a privative negation). And he says that theologians have appreciated the negative method more because it frees the soul from what is most familiar to it. The limit of this ultranegative is silence (which will later be thematized by Scotus Erigena). In his text "The Mystical Theology," Dionysius writes: "Now, on the other hand, when one tries to ascend from the things below to the Supreme, as he ascends he begins to lack words and when he has already finished the ascent he will be totally without words and will be completely united with the Ineffable" (The Mystical Theology, Ch. III, p. 249-250). In chapter 2 of "The Celestial Hierarchy", Dionysius gives us another masterpiece of his negative philosophy of language: an argument showing that symbols completely dissimilar to the object better describe the ineffable than similar ones. In any case, both like and unlike symbols will never express the Super-transcendent; that being so, unlike symbols are better at showing clearly that: that the ineffable is not and cannot be anything of that which is being shown in the symbol. The dissimilar symbols de-symbolize, they disprove what they themselves "show," they invite the reader not to believe in them by showing the totally implausible. By representing the ineffable, let us say, as a horse (that is, by means of a symbol totally dissimilar to the object), they arouse in the reader the

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firm conviction that what is in focus is something totally different from a horse. These symbols do not signify what the object is, but what it is not. Inadequate symbols are negations and negations are true when they refer to the divine mysteries. Metaphors without resemblance are, thus, more apt to spiritually elevate our intelligence. Dionysius praises the inadequate images used profusely in the Scriptures: sublime metaphors (but no less inadequate) such as sun, star, fire, water; or vulgar metaphors, such as animals (lion, panther, leopard, bear and even worm!). This is something like the full humiliation of symbolism, like the linguistic celebration of the ineffable through the total failure of the image, of every image (of the sun as much as of the worm). It is like saying: every time you see an image of the ineffable, don't believe it. The worm assumes this non-belief more easily than the sun. I consider that chapter a masterpiece of the negative literature of that period and of all times, of an astonishing actuality. What I was saying before is that it seems to me that the hyper-negative strategy of Dionysius and other authors of the period is to succeed in formulating all that is good, luminous and what is, precisely in a realm super-distanced from our world, as if any element of our world would afflict and impede that formulation. Here there is a profound depreciation of the human world, in the sense that none of its categories will ever succeed in figuring what really matters, what is truly sublime, with respect to which we are at the lowest possible level. Every time the total insufficiency of the world in relation to the divine is emphasized, it shows how the perfect and sublime is infinitely far from everything we know, placing our world on the terrain of the most frightful imperfection and impotence. It is a sort of a display of the worthlessness of being through a critique of the human symbolic (in-) capacity. For what is that super-transcendent thing that escapes everything, that flees all categories and all articulated language? It is, precisely, value, worth, something that cannot be found in any nearby territory. Instead of showing the worthlessness of the world in a direct and positive way, Dionysius indicates it by means of an infinitely distant and unattainable, ineffable worth, in whose register we can only place ourselves through the negation of all that we know, through the silence of all our proud articulated language. The super-transcendence of value is a negative way of alluding to the worthlessness of being. (On the other hand, this absolute remoteness, is it not

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Also a way of denying the existence of God in any way that has anything to do with human lives? Isn't the ultra-transcendence of God a kind of non-existence? I s n 't ultra-transcendence a kind of refined atheism? Isn't it another way of saying that we are all alone?). Seneca had already shown, perhaps not intentionally, the bivalent character of philosophical consolations, by showing how the best way to console someone who has lost something or someone is to show him that the world is not worth much, that it gives us nothing, that we cannot lose what we never had. That same negative dialectic of consolation is shown in the Roman Boethius' 6th century classic, The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison in the midst of torture and awaiting death, after a bad political game and a fall from grace during the reign of Theodoric. Boethius was very interested in logical questions (in fact, his name appears in the histories of logic), and specifically in argumentation as applied to political questions. But logical subtleties do not always work in concrete situations. When the senator Albinus is denounced to Theodoric for conspiracy, Boethius, as master of Offices, comes to his defense by claiming that Albinus' accusers are liars. It seems that Boethius used, in his allegation, a proof by absurdity that was fatal to him: "If what Albinus did is considered conspiracy, then I myself and the whole Senate did the same; but this is absurd; from which it follows that Albinus did not conspire." The accusers did not grasp the subtlety of the indirect demonstration and interpreted Boethius as self-accusing. I delay in this because what is most striking in the classic book of Boethius (which did not interest me except as a testimony of the extraordinary circumstances in which it was written), is how it is poorly argued from the logical point of view, as if the goal of consolation at any cost simply forced to destroy the most elementary rules of logic through a barrage of fallacies; with the aggravating factor that, constantly, the author is referring to the "extraordinary correctness" of the arguments presented. In fact, Boethius uses a literary and rhetorical device to make excuses for the many logical fallacies and bizarre definitions he presents, attributing them to the Goddess Philosophy, who appears unexpectedly in his condemned cell and with whom he engages in the long dialogue that makes up the book. So it is the Goddess who commits the fallacies, although it is the poor condemned man, in need of consolation, who accepts them one by one in the best Platonic style. (The text suggests, between the lines, that consolation can only be achieved in an anti-logical, non-argumentative way).

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A central theme of the dialogue is the injustice committed by wicked against honest men (i.e., Boethius' own situation): how can a world made by a good God allow the dishonest to triumph and the honest to suffer? Boethius needs a justification for this apparent absurdity. In this issue (which I call, in my writings, "moral disqualification") logic and ethics come together. The first thing the Goddess Philosophy does when she appears in Boethius' cell is to drive away the muses of art, because only Philosophy is capable of true spiritual comfort (a thoroughly Platonic attitude). But given the meager results of the Goddess, after having torn logic to pieces with thunderous non sequitur, one thinks that perhaps the Muses' verses of pain would have been more efficient in the task of consolation. Boethius' "line of argument" is more or less the following: he wants to show that there was, in fact, no injustice in his case, that it is not true that his prison proves that the wicked triumph and are powerful, and that the honest are weak and defeated. The starting point is the following: (1) God exists and governs the world by means of Reason, establishing a purpose for the universe. At this point, an objection of informal logic could already be raised: in an argumentative process, none of the premises should demand a more difficult acceptance than the conclusions that are intended to be drawn from it. But that seems to be the case throughout Boethius' book, right from the start. In order to demonstrate that there is no injustice in the world (which is already difficult to admit), we are invited to accept that there is a rational God who establishes a finality in the universe, that is, something much more difficult to accept than what is intended to be "deduced." (Of course not for Christian philosophers, for whom the existence of God was the most evident truth). From this "first truth", it is inferred that: (2) Chance, injustice, disorder, etc, are only apparent, products of our finite, imperfect and incomplete perception. As humans live immersed in contingency, they interpret as random what has precise laws but far superior to their understanding. At this point, Goddess Philosophy develops another line of argument: (3) Those who complain about the ups and downs of Fortune (contingency) when it is unfavorable to them, should not have so willingly accepted its gifts when it was favorable to them, for it is irrational to expect that fortune will always be favorable (perhaps the quota of favors will run out at a certain point). This is a more consistent line of argument, but it is quickly abandoned.

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There is a line of argument, certainly not original to Boethius, which comes from Plato, Greek and Roman Stoicism, in particular Seneca, Neoplatonism, especially Plotinus, Augustine, etc., which will later be repeated in Leibniz, which I am especially interested in studying, and which refers to the nature of "evil" and of "evil" humans. It is that which affirms that: (4) All human beings seek good; no one seeks evil. Those who seem to seek evil, in reality seek good in the wrong forms. If the wicked saw the world properly, they would not seek the good in wrong ways, but in the rational way that should conduct human acts. (Scotus Erigena will maintain that even souls who sin seek God in sin; there is no one who seeks sin for its own sake). These erroneous ways of seeking the good are the search for wealth, honors, fame, pleasures, and even, sometimes, the formation of a family. All these goods are contingent, ephemeral and passing, they do not bring true happiness but bring new problems and harm others, for they have no internal but external value, an exchange value, producing only momentary contentment, but not genuine and lasting happiness. (In one of the bleakest moments of his text, Boethius writes: "It is true that the satisfaction of having a wife and a family may be a source of perfectly honest pleasure, but someone of whom I do not now remember said, quite rightly, that he discovered his tormentors in the figures of his children; and it goes without saying that, whatever their character, they will be a cause of worry (...) I n

regard

to

that, I

share the advice of my dear Euripides, who says that, when one has no children, then there is a chance of getting rid of misfortune" (The Consolation of Philosophy, III.13). Boethius then enunciates what true happiness would be: (5) Superior, rational happiness is one's own wise, rational and virtuous action, which has its reward in itself, in one's own virtuous and rational action, without needing anything external. This confers dignity, independence and great power on the virtuous person, insofar as he does not depend on the circumstances of fortune. From this are inferred the most counter-intuitive conclusions of the Goddess' discourse: (6) Power is always on the side of the good, while the bad are powerless and weak; therefore, the good are always rewarded, and the bad are always punished. For the bad seek the good wrongly and fail in their attempt, while the good seek it and achieve it. In this sense, the bad do not exist, because in failing to attain the good, they are always rewarded, and the bad are always punished.

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well, they lose their being: "Certainly, it will seem strange to say that the bad ones, who are the majority, do not exist; however, that is exactly what happens. In fact, I do not assert merely that they are evil, but, without hesitation, that they simply are not" (IV.3). For in order to be, it is necessary to retain a rational nature, and the wicked are degraded to the level of animals. (IV.5) When the wicked get what they want, they are even weaker and more impotent than when they try without getting it. And in his rational wisdom, God sometimes allows the wicked to achieve their goals, because if they did not achieve them they would do even worse things (IV.7, IV.11). (This is the same logic by which the Brazilian government pays high salaries to officials who handle public money to lessen their temptation to steal it). The text of Boethius is a privileged place to capture and denounce the affirmativism that characterized European philosophy throughout its history, a naive and deeply deforming affirmativism, a vision of the world without any application to any concrete human action, the proclamation of a "superior world" that sent Boethius to the ultimate sacrifice of death by the sword, the recommendation of a conformist and conservative attitude. An excellent classical locus to begin to destroy the affirmative categories of thought. Here metaphysics and morality are firmly intertwined. A Rational God ensures the logical rationality and the ethical and political justice of the universe, against all appearances. In the aggregate, things are always explained and justified. Our negative vision sins by partiality. Therefore, the world is guided by good, and since God is good, he cannot create evil. Evil is an illusion, a deprivation of good, it has no substance, because the world is of divine substance and t h e r e f o r e good. Therefore, all humans seek only good, but the vast majority seek it in the wrong ways. The good, the philosopher, is the one who lives in God, in the way of good, even if he must live in the midst of those who seek the good in wrong ways and thus harm the good, even sending him to death. In this "reasoning" we are witnessing a pseudo-argumentative realization of the concealment of the negative for explicitly consolatory purposes. Here again we find Plato's old idea that it is the philosophers who are destined to govern. Boethius complains bitterly of having believed in that slyly: "And yet it was you who dictated to me, by the voice of Plato, that states governed by the wise would be happy (...) to prevent the government from falling into the hands of unscrupulous and speechless persons (...) Then I, puffed up by that supremacy, and with the

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teachings that were given to me before and far from the crowd, I decided to apply them in political life..." (I.8), describing immediately all the calamities that followed from that. Boethius, who was a logician, says that "...if we find difficulty in adhering to a conclusion, it is necessary to prove that any of the preceding premises is false, or then to prove that the chain of reasoning does not necessarily lead to that conclusion; otherwise, having accepted the preceding propositions, the conclusion cannot be denied" (IV.7). Well, most of Boethius' initial premises are unacceptable or tremendously controversial; nor does the chaining of propositions work. The acceptance of the initial metaphysical premises creates all sorts of pseudoproblems that later arouse the greatest perplexity: "If God exists, where do evils come from? And if He does not exist, where do the goods come from?" (I. 8). For when the axiom of a good and rational God who commands the universe is put in place, we simply cease to understand the world and spend all our time trying to accommodate it to the absurd axiom. One thinks here on a different level from the empirical one. Goddess Philosophy says: "It is because I place myself on another plane that I consider more unhappy the dishonest who remain unpunished...." (IV.7). "...if we consider the judgment of men, who would find your ideas, I do not say credible, but not even audible?" (Idem). Here again appears the temptation of the two worlds, one sensible, the other intelligible. When a human does an evil on the empirical plane it can be said that, on the spiritual plane, he wrongly sought a good; when on the empirical plane he commits an injustice against another human, on the spiritual plane he attacks his own spirit and, in truth, does not even touch the good; when on the empirical plane the evil one achieves his purposes by showing his power, on the spiritual plane he actually degrades himself in his own impotence and weakness. The theological basis here seems fundamental: the world is divine, therefore good, so that evil is apparent, it cannot exist. Then, everything apparently evil is, in reality, good, but ignored by our limitations. This is the great pearl of affirmative thinking. Western philosophy (and perhaps all philosophy) is born on affirmative ground as a form of lay consolation (even in medieval times reason was apparently given a chance to be consoling on its own ground and in its own strength). I suggest reversing this traditional role of philosophy by trying to explore the dis-occultivating aspects of reflective activity; to betray philosophy in its innermost vocation, to force it to do what it proclaims to do without actually doing it: to seek truth and not consolation. That, that negative and

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dismantling, it would no longer be philosophy in the usual sense. With this, we can abandon Boethius to his own fate (which was not a very good one). He tried, in full despair, to accept his total destruction by an unjust ("morally disqualified") human society, and his "consolation" does nothing but show the terrible situation in which the virtuous find themselves in the midst of the imperfect always powerful. The Dionysian themes of silence and the inadequacy of names will be developed in the "Periphyseon" of the obscure ninth-century Irish thinker Scotus Erigena, in the same negative and radical sense. But he works more on the relations between divine and human, finally transferring the difficulties of defining the divine also to the human plane: if the divine is ineffable and indefinable and the human is made in its likeness, the human will also be, in its own way, ineffable and indefinable. It is, in any case, the mystery of an infinity that does not fit into the finite. Hegelian themes are anticipated here, in the sense that the divine needs the human in order to develop as divine (there is a need to be the father of something; being father appears as inevitable as being son). The human being is not a fallen being from some mythical paradise, but the biblical myth of the fall simply describes the human condition from all time: a paradise that was always and at all times lost. But there is in the human something like a forgetfulness of his forever lost condition and the proposal of a "recovery" of that memory. The non-being of God can only be remembered through an ethics of silence. Thus, to the negative, Dionysian richness applied to the divine, Erigena adds a singular anthropological richness, many centuries ahead of his own time. The world that Erigena sees as "nature," encompassing both what is and what is not (a kind of Wittgensteinean Wirklichkeit, encompassing both what is the case and what is not the case), has only the value of being the place for the practice of this "ethics of silence," restoring the memory of the paradise that has always been lost. Infinitely distant from the Godnothing (seen thus from the perspective of the finite being), the world has no value other than that: to be a bulwark for the recovery of true value, which perhaps coincides with death. In any case, the human maintains a position of privilege within creation. The world is like "medicine for the spirit" because through it and in it the human soul can be cured of its sin, which consists in an irrational movement away from God. By contemplation and fantasy, the cure of the human being is initiated. Unlike the entire Greek world, this task is in dire need of divine help, of Grace, since the human being is incapable of carrying it out alone. Anticipating Wittgenstein in centuries (Tractatus, 6.44),

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Erigena affirms that, in the theophanies, that is, in the appearances of the divine to the human, what is allowed to be known is not what God is, but simply that he is. This is the only way to heal the error of sin: "For I believe that in this shadowy life no study can be perfect or totally without error," writes the philosopher at the end of his magnum opus. (A Freudian detail in the Neoplatonic Scheme: Scotus Erigena and others affirm that, at the moment of the final reconciliation (return to the First Principle, Final Judgment, etc.) there will be no more difference between sexes. This distinction is linked to imperfection, to non-being. In general, in the Neoplatonic scheme all dualities are imperfections (why would not the duality of sexes be so?). At this point I want to make an observation of the greatest importance: reading Plotinus, the pseudo-Dionysius, Scotus Erigena and Heidegger, we find in all cases an ineffable, with something that cannot be said, with something that escapes all words, all articulated thought: the One, God, being. What I am trying to show in this negative historiography is that the true ineffable, the ineffable that is at the bottom of all the others, is the worthlessness of being. For in all these thinkers, what cannot be said to be ineffable because it is supremely good, supremely luminous, sublime, elevated; in none of them do we find the idea that something can be ineffable because it is supremely bad and disturbing. The Schema does not accept this and sees the negative unspeakable as simply the maximally far removed from God. But what cannot be faced, what must be kept away, what we must guard against, is the worthlessness of being, of which all the thinkers we have been examining had profound intuitions. The supremely good was created as opposed to the unspeakably bad and negative that does not allow itself to be confronted. The unspeakably bad was replaced by an unspeakably good, it was put in the place of an unspeakable that hurts us and from which we flee, an unspeakable that we long for and seek with passion.

3.4. From Anselm to Duns Scotus The drastic Christian remedy for the despair of being alive, from a one and triune God to the resurrection of bodies (beards and all, as Miguel de Unamuno would say), poses all sorts of problems for the relationship of this novel to our usual

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rational procedures. The interactions between reason and Revelation are a permanent torment for medieval thinkers. One might think simply of a total surrender to the Christian narrative since it functionally provides all that humans can need: for what reason in times of belief? However, this is not the case. Especially because of the enormous strength of the Greek legacy, the medievalists want to give an important place to reason within the process. Reason certainly cannot deny the truths of Revelation (and every time it tried to do so, a heresy emerged on the horizon); but it can prepare the way to them, or confluence with them, or confirm them, or enlighten them. It is a slavish and complementary role, but it is curious that these thinkers have been so tormented by this task of clarifying the relations between reason and faith, rather than simply dispensing with reason and philosophy (as Tertullian and Kierkegaard did). The curious "excess" of the Christian antidote: once man was given everything, For what philosophy, for what reason, for what logic? From the point of view of revealed truth, all these instances seem insignificant. But the medievalists did not want to see it this way and insisted on giving reason and philosophy a prominent place. Anselm of Aosta (later, of Canterbury) was commissioned precisely to write texts in which the sacred truths were demonstrated by the pure form of reason. Here we see this curious need to explain what would live better as a mystery. In the preface to the Monologion of 1077, Anselm writes that some brethren of the habit asked him to follow the following method: "...without any recourse to the Holy Scriptures at all, let everything that is expounded be demonstrated by the logical chaining of reason, using simple arguments, in an accessible style, so that it becomes evident by the very clarity of the truth". Anselmo did this successfully, producing a beautiful, clear and simple text. What is doubtful is that he succeeded in making reason independent of the revealed data. It seems that the great religious premises are given for reason and logic to deduce the rest. As I already said explaining Boethius, here the logical fallacy is not of inferential connection but of premises that are stronger than the intended conclusions. In the Proslogion of 1078, Anselm says that he realized that his first work was difficult because it contained so many arguments. "Then I began to think with myself whether it might not be possible to find a single argument which, valid in itself and by itself, without any other, would make it possible to demonstrate that God truly exists and that he is the supreme good...An argument

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sufficient, in short, to provide adequate proofs for what we believe about the divine substance". (Proslogion, Proemio). From this arises the famous "ontological argument" for the existence of God, which will be so much commented on for centuries to come and which had antecedents before Anselm. Immediately, already at the beginning of this second work, Anselmo expresses with vehemence the usual ideas of the misery of life, contempt for the world and the search for salvation: "Oh, how miserable is the fate of the man who has lost that for which he was made! How hard and cruel that fall, by which he lost so many things! And what did he find? What did he have instead? What was left for him? He lost the happiness for which he was created and found the misery for which he was certainly not made. He turned away from that without which there is no happiness and was left with that which is, in itself, paltry and outdated. Once man was fed with the bread of angels, and now, hungry, he eats the bread of sorrow, which he did not even know. O common mourning of men, universal weeping of the children of Adam, he had plenty of everything, and we die of hunger. He was rich, and we are beggars; he had happiness and lost it miserably, and we live unhappy, desiring everything and, destitute, we are left empty-handed! ...Why did he withdraw us from the light so that we might remain in darkness? Why did he deprive us of life to condemn us to death? miserable, from where we were expelled and to where we were thrown...from the joy of immortality to the horror of death!..." (Proslogion, ch. I). Our life, then, is miserable, and a fundamental part of its misery is mortality and pain. But the human being "was not made for that" but "went astray" and "strayed" from his true path; he has salvation if he returns to God, without whom no happiness is possible. At the end of this first chapter, Anselm expresses what will be one of the possible relationships between reason and faith: "I do not try, Lord, to penetrate into your depths: in no way is my intelligence molded to it, but I desire, at least, to understand your truth, which my heart loves and believes. Indeed, I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. Indeed, I believe because, if I did not believe, I would not be able to understand". Belief, faith, is the fundamental point of the consoling scheme; it is what keeps us in life and, therefore, the most important thing. No rational element should jeopardize this. When that happens, a heresy arises, which is always an idea of reason that undermines some deep vital sustenance. Reason cannot exercise any destabilizing function of belief; on the contrary, belief underpins and supports knowledge and understanding.

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(I think this is reproduced, many centuries later, in the Kantian theme of the "primacy of practice" that opens German idealism and one of the last secular versions of the neoPlatonic Scheme. That "primacy" is based on the radical fact that everything we can think, understand and comprehend is in a mortal body that has to survive; so that nothing we think can put that at risk. Theory cannot harm practice, thought cannot put life at risk. (Perhaps herein lies the very core of affirmative thought). Kant writes the first "Critique" and this is his true revolution: a purely theoretical consideration that eliminates freedom, God and immortal soul. This cannot remain so; practical reason does not accept it. In a way, just as Anselm believes in order to understand, Kant weaves a practical philosophy so that humans can live in the world that theory discovered. And German idealism - as we shall see later - will take this to paroxysm). The existence of a good, supreme, rational, just, etc., God is the primary object of belief of that period and, therefore, its fundamental premise. Anselm writes: "We firmly believe that you are a being of whom it is not possible to think anything greater" (Chap. II). In truth, this is not the object of demonstration; it is the initial and basic affirmative belief. To effect the "proof," Anselm substitutes the proper name "God" for a definite description, "The being of whom nothing greater can be thought." What is then shown (with quite impeccable logic, it seems) is that if one accepts that description (that essence or definition) of God, he must exist, because it is contradictory to say that a being has all the perfections but does not have existence, for this is a perfection: "But 'the being of which it is not possible to think anything greater' cannot exist only in the intelligence. If, then, it existed only in the intelligence, it would be possible to think that there is another being existing also in reality, and that it would be greater. If, therefore, 'the being of which it is not possible to think anything greater' were to exist only in the intelligence, this same being, of which it is not possible to think anything greater, would become the being of which it is possible, on the contrary, to think something greater: which is certainly absurd" (chap. II). In truth, I believe that this reasoning is impeccable, and that is why I think that Gaunilo's famous objection does not apply. The problem is, as I have already said, that the reasoning starts from a premise that is too strong and controversial, stronger than the conclusion that is intended to be drawn from it. And also that, for this very reason, the reasoning proceeds half-circularly: if we already accept a divine essence, its existence follows analytically. But

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it is perfectly possible not to accept that essence because it does not correspond to anything, because it is an empty description. But if that essence is accepted, it necessarily leads to existence. Gaunilo and many other critics of the ontological argument (St. Thomas, Kant) spend their time trying to show that there cannot be a passage from the possible to the real and the like. (The analogy of the lost islands is perfectly well rejected by Anselm, in a similar way to how Hegel will reject Kant's example of the hundred-thalers, showing that God is a special case, and that the "ontological argument" is valid only for Him, according to a certain definition of His essence). No: the point is to reject the premise, and this neither Gaunilo nor any other medievalist could do (and even Kant had problems for denying it). Recourse to logic is thus less spectacular than it seems; for logic is formal and proves anything, if we give it the right premises. What is critical in all proofs of the existence of God (a crucial element of medieval affirmativism) is that the arguments to prove that we must accept certain premises (such as, for example, the divine essence) are not conclusive. The premises are not logically justified, even if what follows from them is logically justified if they are accepted. Logic is, then, at the service of belief, and this is what the good Anselm means by "believing in order to understand". For if understanding were put first, belief would not be deduced. Logic is inexorable, it does not admit theological commissions; it is quite blind; when called upon, it can turn against theology itself (just as - if I may use the bizarre analogy - when I call the police to protect me, the police can arrest me). In truth, the rejection of revealed authority and the vindication of the forces of reason were not born with Descartes, and not even with Ockam, but are already perceived, for example, in the young students of Abelard, who were very enthusiastic when their also young teacher told them that truths contained in the sacred books could be accepted only with the forces of intelligence. This is narrated by Abelard himself in his famous autobiographical book, a masterpiece of worldly pessimism, History of my misfortunes. Abelard's incredible trajectory shows perfectly the fears of the affirmative mechanism in force, which lived at all times fearing that reason would open breaches in dogmas, which many thinkers, especially the younger ones, already in those distant centuries, were doing. In truth, Abelard's dialectical teachings were never aimed at dismantling the absurdities of the "absolute truths" of the religion of his time, but those who envied and feared him did everything to condemn him as a heretic. He came to think that he would be freer from

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danger among Gentiles than among Christians (History..., chapter XII). Abelard's courage served to expose the political use of affirmativism as well as the imperative need to impose and consolidate affirmative beliefs at any cost, even though, strictly speaking, he never threatened them. I said earlier that Aristotle remained somewhat outside the scheme inspired by the Orphism-Pythagoreanism-Platonism-Neo-Platonism square, but this philosopher is now brought back into the philosophical discussion especially by the Arabs, and his works rediscovered in their original redactions. In reality, the Aristotelianism of Avicenna (10th-11th century) is still permeated with neo-Platonism and elements of Islamic religion, and it is this mediation, and not strictly the Aristotelian view of philosophy and the world, that predominates. God is conceived Aristotelianistically as thought of thought, but also as the supreme intelligence that necessarily produces the first intelligence, and this to the second and so on, in a typically neo-Platonic descending procession. Averroes, in the 12th century, a careful commentator of Aristotle, accepts theses such as the eternity of the world, denies the immortality of the singular soul and defends the rational interpretation of religious texts. In his book "Decisive Discourse" he presents the use of rational syllogism in religious questions as a means to perfection. The first university statutes of the nascent medieval universities already condemned the commentaries of Aristotle made by Averroes, condemnations confirmed by Gregory IX in 1231, during a strike of more than a year of students related to the problem of Aristotelianism. Muslim philosophy, via Alfarabi, Avicenna, etc., introduces a distinction of the greatest importance in all Eastern and Western philosophy, the difference between necessary and contingent. The distinction is introduced above all to differentiate divine being from human being, since in the former two things are identified which in any other case must be distinguished: that which the thing is and the fact of being, essence and existence. The question of "evil" can be posed at either of the two levels, as essential evil and existential evil, as an evil of properties or as the very evil of existing, of coming into being. In God, by definition, this distinction makes no sense, since, in Him, existence is a property. But when God creates the human being He does two things: He creates him and gives him certain properties. When "evil" arises, one may ask whether it arises because of human properties or because of the simple fact that the human (with whatever properties) was created. This very ancient distinction is fundamental to open the ontological level of the question of the value of human life. (The sense of my reflections of the

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chapter 1 of this Treatise is that the lack of value of human life is given at the level of being itself. On the contrary, at the level of properties, the positive value of life is anxiously constructed to counteract the radically bad quality of the being given to us). The crucial distinctions between necessary and contingent, essence and existence, continue later in St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas, who take them from Avicenna and Boethius. (The latter makes the important distinction between quod est and quo est, the former being the concrete existent substance and the latter the universal form). It is sometimes said of Thomas that, through the influence of Aristotle, he would have suffered less from that of the Neoplatonic scheme. Especially with regard to the influence of Aristotelian "scientific" ontology, in which there is no model of being, but the careful description of the diversity of entities with their own natures and their variety. But I do not believe that this is so. St. Thomas was a philosopher not exactly characterized by his originality, but by his enormous capacity for systematization, and he continues to maintain a hierarchical conception of being in the best neoPlatonic style. This is a fundamental point, since the notion of hierarchy limits the "descriptive" method and its pretended concern for the plurality of entities, since, in a hierarchy, this plurality is referred to a supreme being that continues to be taken, in spite of everything, as a reference. A luxuriant "description" of beings of the most diverse nature is presented, but it is a diversity already ontologically "mortgaged" within an order that belies the very nature of a "description", which, strictly speaking, would not be obliged to follow the order of a seriation. The affirmative Scheme is once again predominant. That the order of knowledge is altered by the influence of Aristotelianism (the way in which the supreme being is reached) does not change the fundamental scheme. What Thomas does is not to replace the Neoplatonic scheme with an Aristotelian scheme, but - typical of his somewhat eclectic way of doing philosophy - to articulate the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and Christian elements in a single system. One can continue to hold the idea that there is a God from whom all beings arise by creation even if one admits that, in order to know this, it is not possible to start from God but from the detailed study of entities. The Aristotelian "scientific" procedure leads, finally, to finding the same universe of beings of the Neoplatonic scheme. It is a cosmic panorama in which all beings are integrated within a plan in which everything comes from God as from the first beginning and everything returns to Him as to its ultimate end.

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This defeat of Aristotelianism within the very heart of Thomistic philosophy will be clearly seen in the ethical field, where the break with Aristotle is total. (And it is curious that, centuries later, Kant is also rigorously Aristotelian in the construction of his theoretical philosophy, deducing his categories from the Aristotelian table of judgments, but quickly returns to the Platonic source at the moment of dealing with practical and moral philosophy. It seems that, in ethics, the Platonic source is indestructible, of an admirable persistence). Thomas Aquinas is a fundamental thinker in insisting on the distinction between what is and the act of being. In God these two things coincide, but when describing beings Thomas says that the act of existing does not intrinsically specify and determine the essence. What determines and specifies the essence is its mode of existing. In the case that these essences come to exist in act it will only be necessary to change in their definition the fact that, now, they possess existence in act, but this will not add a new note to the essence specified before, but will only put that essence, with all its properties, in existence; existence itself is not a predicate. (The level that I call "structural", in the question of the value of human life, resembles the level of Thomistic existentia). This was already there also in Aristotle ("...it is one thing what a man is and another that a man exists," Anal. Post, 92b 10). Thomas took the distinction from him, and from Alfarabi, Avicenna, Maimonides, Boethius and St. Augustine, at least. The act of existing is contingent in all beings, except in God, for they exist after they have not existed and before they cease to exist; it is a being surrounded by non-being. When they are not, beings are only potency, possibility, and when God intends to create, he must deal with those potencies and bring them into act. But the potencies are limitative of the act of existing, they set certain conditions, and it is within them that they can be created and can pass from potency to act: they cannot be contradictory and God must want to create them. God has, in deciding to create, to deal with non-being, to bring beings ex nihilo, from nothingness. But nothingness sets conditions, nothingness is - relatively - a nothingness-of-actual-being, but it is not a nothingness-of-power; non-being is as if impregnated with possibilities, with conditions. God already encounters them, with non-being and its possibilities, which are as it were structured or formalized. The potencies are potencies-of, potencies of certain beings, and that is why the world that God creates, whatever it is, cannot be unlimited, infinite, perfect, a replica of the creator God. It must be remembered that the possibilities (potencies) are forms of non-being (if

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something is possible, it is not) and that God is confronted, already in creating (anything) with that "full", full non-being, with non-being in the form of possibilities. Within an intellectualist scheme such as that of St. Thomas, God can only deal with possibles. Another way of conceiving creation - and there are elements in Thomas' writings for this - is to include in it one's own possibilities, in which case God limits himself in his own voluntary act of creation. The logic of possibles limits God's creative act from within. But there are dangers of slipping into voluntarism. Despite his departure from Aristotle on the level of morality, Thomas does not renounce eudemonism, that is, respecting the human being's anxiety to be "happy". But happiness must now be defined with elements of Christian philosophy. Man is, among created beings, the one who has the privilege of returning to God through a certain form of conduct in which he can find his fullness and good fortune. In the context of Thomistic philosophy, there is never any doubt that perfection and fullness must also bring happiness. It is to be suspected that such happiness must already be predefined in some way for it to be conceived on the same level as perfection, just as, centuries later, "self-contentment" is defined by Kant as the "happiness" adequate to unconditional obedience to the moral law. (It is rather difficult to imagine Christ happy; one never sees any picture of him even smiling, not even at the moment of resurrection, as if this were a moment of full realization, but not of jubilation). Happiness" must be a notion belonging to the story of "moral evil", that is, an intramundane and never structural element (of essence, not of existence), because if only perfection produces happiness, and it is known that the Creator can only create - if He decides to create anything - imperfect things (finite, mobile, changing, corruptible, etc.), the original imperfection itself (ontological evil) must also convey an original unhappiness that is impossible to heal. Happiness, then, must be defined within that original unhappiness, because although there is happiness promised in the return to God, there is the original unhappiness of the finite being of being forced to struggle for that return without, perhaps, ever achieving it in life (perfection within imperfection, happiness within unhappiness). The concealment of these two planes is part of the affirmative Scheme, in which only happiness and intramundane perfectionism are aimed at, without ever seeing the structural framework within which these qualities are located, and which was given by God in the very act of making being to be.

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In the famous theory of the "transcendentals," Thomas uncritically adopts the identification of being with the good, already present in earlier versions of the Schema. Moral good is, for him, a case of ontological good: every thing is good insofar as it is, insofar as it possesses the fullness of being that corresponds to it according to its nature. Otherwise, it is bad, because of a "defect of being". Every action, insofar as it has something of being, has goodness; and if it lacks something of being it also lacks goodness and is bad. This conception depends strongly on the fact that God, among other things, is ontological model, paradigm of being; his best name is That Which Is, the divine essence itself is affirmative. In that case, it is natural to see the whole finite world in negative terms, in terms of deprivation, of lack, of lack. And since God is also the Supreme Goodness, the totality of the finite world must be seen as bad, however much goodness may later be constructed, somehow, in the return to God. Here again the neo-platonic scheme infiltrates: in addition to the affirmative identification between being, one, truth and goodness, degrees of being (and, therefore, degrees of goodness) are counted in the various types of entities. For example, unity depends on the degree of being, such that the greater the being, the greater the unity. Thus, being is not good, but is goodness; goodness and being are the same thing, and the more being, the more goodness. Nor in Thomas, following a long tradition, is there any being in evil; evil is goodness in the last degree of the hierarchy. The depreciation of the world operates by descent, as being the last instance of being, but it is denied (in reality, for love of God, and not for love of the world) that there is absolute evil, evil as the total absence of being. Here a pessimism of the world, in the sense of its imperfection, coexists with an immense optimism of salvation. Despite its imperfections, the world is a first attempt to express the goodness of being, a kind of rough draft. All things are good because they participate, to some degree, in the goodness with which God wanted to create the world. (And "participation" is a Platonic notion, not an Aristotelian one, to which Aristotle addressed strong criticisms). Also in Thomas we find the idea of a return of rational beings to God, of an exit (exitus) and of a return (reditus, rédito, devolution), although modified in some aspects (without necessary "emanation", etc.). (The "goodness of being" is a thesis perfectly congruent with theological metaphysics, but it becomes very difficult to understand in a secular context like ours today). The finished formulation of affirmative ethicity is given in St. Bonaventure and in the continuation of the problematic of the transcendentals, when unity, truth, goodness and beauty are conceived as properties of being (and, consequently, multiplicity, the false, the untrue, the false and the beautiful as properties of being).

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bad and the ugly as properties of non-being). These properties (in one of the most luminous moments of the affirmative comic strip) are concatenated among themselves, so that beauty presupposes the good, the good the truth, the truth the one and the one the being. The Platonic-Plotinian-Agostinian schema is brought to life in this thinker, for whom speculation establishes an "itinerary from the mind to God," a mystical journey in the direction of the Creator. Rational proofs of the existence of God are not even necessary - as in Anselm and Thomas - because in the pious and speculative experience, the presence of God imposes itself. Reason is only instrumentum fidei. But although Christians like Bonaventure and Thomas are distant in everything (almost opposite), they share the same scheme of corruption and salvation. (This is my central point: the persistence of one scheme of thought across enormous doctrinal differences. There must be a powerful unifying element that motivates consensus a r o u n d that same scheme; that element is, in my thinking, precisely the terminality of being.) Indeed, Bonaventure was an energetic attacker of Averroist Aristotelianism, and following Augustine, a severe critic of philosophy as arrogant, presumably independent knowledge. (In the Confessions, Augustine had already written against the insatiable curiosity of philosophical knowledge). ) The essential point here is the following: the most important thing is not knowledge, but salvation. The world is dark and life is difficult and full of pains, and we cannot afford the luxury of philosophy as pure knowledge, as pure desire for knowledge; for we are in a body full of fears and sufferings and we need to save ourselves. All the animosity against philosophy, both in the Muslim and Christian worlds, perhaps stems from that source: the intrinsic capacity of rational philosophy to puncture the novel of salvation at some point which again makes the Christian man despair and plunges him into aggressive despondency, as it happened before with the pagan. Torn by the unbearable tensions between insatiable rational curiosity and the need for salvation, Latin Averroism, through Siger of Brabant, postulates the doctrine of the "double truth", prefiguring, in a way, the Kantian distinction between sensible and intelligible. It is the double point of view according to which freedom is, on one plane, impossible or problematic, but is a fact on another plane (and the same goes for the thesis of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God). Everything happens as if, during the long period between the first centuries of Christianity and the thirteenth century, the urgency of personal salvation had noticeably deprived the desire to know, especially in its experimental dimension.

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This Aristotelian element, experimentalism, sleeps for centuries to the benefit of metaphysics, duly platonized in key aspects. The purely logical dimension of knowledge (the trivium) could coexist well with the fervent desire for personal salvation only because it was useful for theological disputes (that is, logic was also at the service of salvation). At the end of the thirteenth century, and passing through the fourteenth century, the desire for salvation began to decline, or at least to be articulated with other elements, and the empirical exploration of nature began to be stimulated, even timidly. Robert of Grosetteste and Roger Bacon are key names in this trend (an empowerment of the quadrivium, of the real sciences). This aspect of Aristotelianism (not the Aristotle of substantial forms, but the experimental and naturalistic Aristotle) is still quite Platonized (e.g., in the "metaphysics of light"), but already with much greater difficulty. Roger Bacon dreams of navigation and aviation machines that the technology of the time was absolutely incapable of realizing! (Technology can put salvation in a more austere place, diminishing its secular anxieties.) I am not a great believer in these "periods" in the history of philosophy ("medieval philosophy", "modern philosophy"). Many so-called "modern" elements were already present in Augustine and Abelard; and the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show a continuity of attitudes that I find much less difficult to analyze if I do not accept that the fourteenth century is the last medieval century and the fifteenth the first period of the Renaissance. On both sides of these lines I see thinkers trying to understand the relations between the theoretical demands of thought and the existential needs of salvation, between the secular sciences guided by natural philosophy and theology, between Aristotle and Plato, on the one hand, and the Scriptures on the other (and, within this, also the relations between Plato and Aristotle, as if the former always tended towards the need for salvation and the latter towards natural demands). In this sense, I see Duns Scotus, Ockam, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico Della Mirandola and Erasmus of Rotterdam as wrestling with the same problem. In my reflection, I see this tension as the problem of the location of the theoretical search for truth within a human situation marked by the terminality of being and structural helplessness (How much knowledge is a being condemned to suffering capable of accumulating? How much is his capacity for "productive distraction"?).

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Franciscan at the age of 12, John Duns Scotus imbibed, at the same time, the naturalistic and demonstrative spirit at Oxford and the ambition of theological knowledge in Paris. So he is already placed in a certain "modern" spirit pointed out by Grosetteste and Roger Bacon, but he remains a man of piety and concerned with salvation, a tension that will continue, in various forms, until the German idealism of the nineteenth century. Scotus is thus no longer a "medieval" in the sense that Thomas was. Comparisons are made between these two thinkers, but, in a more general sense (apart from specific problems such as the problem of individuation), these are two thinkers who breathe different, and perhaps incomparable, intellectual atmospheres. The reconciliation intended by Thomas between philosophy and theology and their sharp separation proposed by Scotus are not, it seems to me, "different solutions" to the same problem, but two profoundly different ways of understanding philosophy and theology; they are not strictly speaking the same notions. Scotus is proposing a truism (of which Hume and, through Humean influence, Kant will be British heirs) according to which the whole Thomistic enterprise is meaningless (precisely because it is a "topical confusion"). Philosophy deals with the entity as entity, while theology deals with the articles of faith. Knowledge and salvation must be separated. Philosophy and logic demonstrate, while nothing is demonstrated in theology (and, therefore, the "proofs" of the existence of God, which will be attacked by Kant, were already absurd from the Scotist point of view, who, more radical and acute than Kant, does not even think that they can or should be refuted by reason). On the plane of salvation there is room only for preaching and persuasion, not for the demonstrative process. Philosophy is abstract and seeks the universal while theology aims at personal salvation. Trying to mix these two fields leads to disastrous results. This will be the tendency in all those centuries before the emergence of what we can call modern science. In truth, this is a slow process, which has nothing to do with conventional "epochs". In the British tradition, Scotus Erigena had placed God in total remoteness, suggesting that worldly and rational categories were meant for something else and not for any presumed knowledge of divinity. Duns Scotus is not a negative theologian, but he drastically separates rational demands from those of faith and salvation. (Hume will sharpen this separation, but already hinting at a skeptical judgment of religious truths (miracles, Revelation) based on reason, a judgment that Bertrand Russell, always in the British tradition, will consummate in an extreme form). The religious men of Duns' time were right (like

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(not did the contemporaries of Scotus Erigena) to fear the beginning of this process of topical separation between natural philosophy and religion, because they were the first symptoms of the independence of philosophical reason, first maintaining salvation as a legitimate but separate field, and later, as the centuries went by, questioning the very meaning of these problems. (There is, then, a path from negative theology to atheism, passing through agnosticism and fideism. It will be interesting to ask to what extent the yearning for salvation is still present in the twentieth century, even in the midst of philosophical atheism). In the light of my own reflection, I consider, in any case, "modern" that environment of thought and life in which the yearning for salvation is re-distributed between the world and the supreme and infinite Being, the latter ceasing to bear all the weight of salvation, as was the case until the thirteenth century. The world begins to be, in some way, valorized, as if a vague awareness began to appear that there is no other, that we are existentially obliged to find something of value in this world that is not only the transit towards a better life. From the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century onwards, this promotion of the intra-world will begin to grow, exploding in the twentieth century after the enormous technological advances. In a way, all the "heresies" were beliefs in which reason was granted a part of the support of human existence (or the grim right to drastically doubt any support), withdrawing from God some of his former power. And the ancient wrathful reaction against heresies - not entirely extinguished - was, perhaps, motivated by the fear of having to carry on one's own back the responsibility of salvation, instead of entrusting it, humbly, to divine Grace. Duns Scotus is already a "modern" thinker in this sense, because his thought begins to shake certain beliefs that the men of the previous century still needed and could not do without. In fact, the very idea that reason cannot be reconciled with Revelation, as even Thomas intended, is a dissolving and discouraging idea, which Duns Scotus did not always apply to all the problems he analyzed. The accent on the individual over the universal, and on the divine will (which leaves the world transformed into a free creation of his, whose purpose is difficult for humans to understand), are "modern" ideas in this sense. It is as if humans are slowly beginning to think of ways to deal with the helplessness of the world outside the ways of guilt, redemption and grace. If this concept of "modern" is accepted, modernity begins to develop, progressively, already from the first centuries of the Christian era.

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Although representing the Via antiqua, an attitude of strong intellectual independence is already evident in the philosophy of Duns Scotus, especially in his theory of abstraction and his ideas of the analysis of complexes into simple ones, which seem to develop according to his own principles without any admixture of metaphysical or theological elements. This independence is also brought to the political plane by a thinker like William Ockham. At that time (14th century) the nascent national states began to confront the authority of the church, salvation began to be seen as an intimate and individual fact of each one, and society only as an organization capable of allowing it, or, at least, of not hindering it. The idea that salvation is a public matter that should be in the hands of ecclesiastical institutions, and the very role of priests as administrators of this desire, began to be discussed. In the strictly philosophical field, Ockham also defends the separation between philosophy and theology, and the autonomy of reason and the temporal in relation to divine and spiritual things, assuming the political consequences of all that. He accentuates the ideas of the contingent character of the world, divine voluntarism and the primacy of the singular, already present in Scotus. Because of the radical way of exposing these ideas, Ockham had many problems with the authorities, who from 1324 began to examine his writings in detail and to prohibit several of them. In 1339, the reading of Ockham's works was forbidden in Paris. In reality, as we shall see, there are more modern elements (autonomy, individualism, voluntarism) in this late medieval period than in many of the thinkers of the Renaissance, who recover the neo-Platonic scheme of guilt and expiation in new guises. Even a figure like Meister Eckhart, who represents a certain neo-Platonic spirit, thinks within a mysticism that presents a radical rupture with the forces of reason, as if the mystical union were the only way of encounter between the human being and God, the rationalist attempts of Scholasticism having failed. In this sense, Eckhart is also a modern, because mysticism is much more an experience than a demonstration. Although present in the Scholastics, this mystical feeling always remained under the control of the intellect in earlier thinkers, whereas in Eckhart this feeling becomes independent in full force. The subversive nature of mysticism was perfectly grasped by the authorities, who condemned 17 of his theses as heretical. His lived neo-Platonism, so admired by Schopenhauer, breaks with Aristotelian attempts to reconcile knowledge and salvation.

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It seems that the perception of the worthlessness of being enters here in a third version: no longer in an expiatory and salvific scheme (Platonism and Neo-Platonism), nor in a scheme of indifferent and wise moral behavior (Stoicism, etc.), but in a kind of promotion of autonomous reason that coexists with God without interference. It all happens as if humans were seeking, by the way of reason, some kind of value vindication of the world after centuries of denigration, but prudently maintaining, just in case, the religious reference (a process that, I believe, is still maintained in our days).

3.5. Towards "modernity" via Renaissance While modernity seems to be far removed from the idea that the worthlessness of the self is something we are guilty of and would have to atone for, it does not seem to be so far removed from the Stoic-Epicurean-Skeptic moment, according to which worthlessness is something we have to deal with through a set of effective virtues, based on self-effort, fortitude and, to some extent, indifference. I am not interested here in the attitudes of the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (I will call them Renaissance only to facilitate the allusion) with respect to the Middle Ages, but I want to understand how they carry out the two movements mentioned above, which I will call the promotion of the intra-world and the conservation of the religious reference. (As if humans were playing the game of salvation on two fronts, trying to improve the world but without abandoning, for the sake of doubt, the aids of religion). During the Christian period, the world as such had been strongly despised, and the religious reference maximized. This is why Renaissance thinkers prefer to return to the ancients, because they, especially the Greeks, had already practiced a strong promotion of the intra-world through the cultivation of reason, the arts and war. The Renaissance do not seem to remember that this was the scheme that was exhausted and that Christianity came to overcome. But the early moderns believed that they had more elements to reattempt the ancient experience without the aid of the drastic Christian remedy; they thought that there were now more elements, which the Greek lacked, that permitted a prudent return to paganism and its preChristian wager in favor of the world. It is necessary to understand how Duns Scotus, Okham, Eckhart and the Renaissance men undertook the task of promoting the intra-world in different ways; not yet with the force of the period of full science, but, in the case of the first two, through the autonomous exercise of reason, in the case of the third, by means of a type of attitude

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existential, and in the case of the latter, in the various ways that we will now see (cultivation of the arts, magic, astrology, mysticism, mathematics, political inventions, etc). Neo-Platonism is strongly cultivated in this period, both as a mystical attitude and aesthetically, and even politically, and in related ways. Renaissance mysticism does not have a soteriological or expiatory spirit, but rather an extraordinary experience of the world, both in its capacity for beautification and for the invention of political utopias. It is the creative (poetic) aspect of neo-platonic mysticism that is brought out here. This is the way that human beings of the 15th and 16th centuries find to endure the world, and, paradoxically, as they are to suffer it in terrible ways (Giordano Bruno burned, Pico della Mirandola murdered at the age of 31, Thomas More guillotined, Campanella imprisoned during 27 years). This poetic-political neo-platonism was always in confrontation with the Aristotelian currents, with their more naturalistic spirit; but the Renaissance, many times, tried to reconcile the two classical currents. The inquiry about infinity is a typical theme of this period, which allows a curious and playful confluence between mathematics, poetics and mysticism, as can be seen in Nicholas of Cusa, in the first half of the 15th century. The infinite is beyond the reach of reason, but it is possible to approach it by analogical and conjectural means through speculation, in a method of "learned ignorance". For my present reflection, this method of dealing with problems is of great interest, rather than the details of its content. The coincidence of opposites in God, for example, is studied through a consideration of the properties of the circle and the line. Also relevant is the idea of the human being as a small cosmos containing in itself all the elements of the world in a compressed form. It is as if this were the first period in which one could begin to play freely with the elements of the past, having all the relevant information (a spirit that was exacerbated in the twentieth century where the entire past is available in seconds). It is the period of profuse translations of the great heritage of the past, especially Platonic. A certain playful element characterizes this period, but not in a frivolous sense, but in a mystical, aesthetic and exploratory sense, as a form of artistic, scientific and religious curiosity at the same time. Marsilio Ficino, also of the 15th century, added to his tasks as a translator those of a practitioner of natural magic. He considered philosophy itself as an initiation into the mysteries, making connections between the Hermetic tradition and Christianity. The "way of

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The neo-platonic "return" is much more a reason to admire man than to denigrate him or condemn him to a reparatory atonement: the encounter with the divinity ceases to be the payment of a debt and becomes a joyful encounter between the finite and the infinite (the atoning journey becomes a journey of intellectual pleasure). Magical elements come to add to this encounter of the human spirit with the world and with the Creator: Ficino made talismans, practiced

astrology and made use of musical charms. Pico della Mirandola, who

also studied Kabbalah and lived only 31 years, wrote a famous Discourse on the Dignity of Man in which he emphasized the greatness of the human being, a typical Renaissance theme. Anticipating Heidegger by centuries, Pico refers to the portentous capacity of the human being, and only he, to make himself, not to accept any previous essence that determines him. It seems to me that this is the Renaissance game: before the void of values, to invent the value of the human being through a poetic-mystical speculation, a sublime value that consubstantiates the human being with the cosmos and with God. The promotion of the intra-world is built with everything at hand in that important pre-scientific moment. But the best material at their disposal was the past, especially the classics. (A Renaissance man had a motive for enduring life that the classics did not: to preserve, enjoy and study the classics). In this register, the epicureanism of Lorenzo Valla (15th century) and the skepticism of Montaigne (16th century) can be seen. The strongly meta-philosophical character of the philosophy of this period is remarkable. The Renaissance interest in active life is most evident on the political level, both in religious reform and in reflection on government and the ideal city. Erasmus of Rotterdam is important for his caustic criticism of the power of the church, but he is of particular interest in the present reflection because of his refined anthropological pessimism, which will be shared by Machiavelli, contrary to the prevailing "humanism". In reality, the world is so terrible that only madness can keep the human being alive and fully active, from civic and family madness to the religious madness of faith, passing through the peculiar madness of the philosopher. That is why madness is to be praised. It is usually said that he who takes his own life is mad, but Erasmus maintains, on the contrary, that he who continues to live and create is the true madman, and should be praised for that (while, by contrast, it is insinuated that he who commits suicide does so out of pure logic; or even those who let themselves be killed, such as Socrates, were not mad enough to seek protection in their madness). It is understandable that the works of Erasmus were also placed in the Index.

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The open, unsystematic, fragmentary and problematic philosophical thought of this curious period of human survival plunges into the question of the human, passing from panegyrics like that of Pico to ironic denigrations like those of Erasmus. Luther's philosophy (if he has one) is like a tragicomic staging of Erasmus' anthropological pessimism in active life. Luther believes in man neither in reason nor in philosophy and thinks that only God can save him; outside his relationship with God, the human being is simply nothing, and, worst of all, a proud and arrogant nothing, who thinks that he can rise from his miserable condition by his own strength. After the original sin there is nothing man can do, not even a neo-platonic reparatory journey back to the infinite beginning. For every time he acts, the human being follows his self-love and selfish arrogance, and only succeeds in sinning. Every human being should try, without intermediaries, to establish a relationship with God and place himself totally in his hands. But, in a clear example of moral disqualification, when Luther opens the doors to the free interpretation of the Scriptures, a flood of "abuses" occurs, forcing him to assume authoritarian positions. In a history of human attitudes towards the worthlessness of being, Machiavelli is a conspicuous thinker for the question of the moral suffering caused by some humans on others within the social conflict; these are specifically human sufferings next to t h e natural sufferings (diseases, earthquakes). In the words of one commentator, Machiavelli sought to establish the conditions of a good state for bad men. The valorization of the human by Pico and the humanists of the fifteenth century and the crude anthropological realism of Erasmus and Machiavelli in the sixteenth century are part of the game of reflection on the human, and two contrasting but confluent ways of taking a position on the problem of the organization of life in a postscholastic society. In my view, these are two ways of confronting the worthlessness of being: one, the invention of the value and dignity of man; the other, the organization of society assuming the worthlessness crudely (accepting man as he is and not as he should be, according to the famous Machiavellian dictum). The utopians Thomas More and Campanella suggest that the world is not good and are therefore compelled to the free invention of social utopias, where humans come together cooperatively and invent a harmonious and self-creative life. Like Boethius, perhaps More had an overconfidence in the power of reason within the political game and was already living imaginatively in his own utopia, without perceiving - to his misfortune - the real workings of

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things. Campanella's City of the Sun is another Renaissance utopia written by a philosopher who spent 27 years in prison, writing a large part of his work in that condition. The philosopher has his head in the sky and his feet in shackles. I see this period as that of the predominance of imagination in all its possible forms. Leonardo Da Vinci is perhaps the clearest case of this promotion of the intra-world through scientific and artistic imagination. But the most dramatic example of Renaissance imagination is undoubtedly Giordano Bruno, in the second half of the 16th century. A magician-philosopher, he created a kind of syncretic gnosis with pieces of Egyptian magic religion and neo-platonic elements, in a mixture that could only explode all the accepted limits of Christianity in force, as it contained pagan and pantheistic elements, intensely lived by an exalted spirit incapable of any measure. His imprisonment, torment and death at the stake show the particular type of invention of values of this turbulent and creative period, and his difficulty in being admitted by a type of organization that was still struggling (and would struggle until the 19th century) to preserve its selective power of ideas and customs. The Renaissance is the period in which the exuberant imagination had not yet acquired its full right to give a "value" to the world.

Second Interlude. The Great Heresy. At the end of paganism, the greatest despair ever seen prevails: humans see face to face the helplessness of being and of their being and turn, on the one hand, to myths and religions, and, on the other, to the ethics of enduring everything with fortitude. But both strategies are exhausted, which is strongly felt in the Hellenistic period. Something like Christianity became necessary, the Final Solution to the problem of human life, not small promises and great efforts, but the total renunciation of the world for the simple benefit of ALL: an eternal Godfather, eternal life, immortal soul, resurrection of the body, etc. But all this only through the exercise of a virtuous life and with the help of the indispensable divine Grace. The evils of the world were enveloped in a great Universal Sense, and the more evil they were, the better to perform the reconciling task and approach the eternal Father. Next to this absolute remedy, the mythical and stoic solutions seemed insignificant, while the moral and religious mission of the human being increased.

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But, unfortunately, the human being thinks. And, strictly speaking, only to a thinking being can Revelation be given as such. In the case of the faithful, reason makes the new Christian Order uncomfortable because it poses the problem of how to relate faith to reason. In the extreme case of the use of reason, "heresies" arise, which are, almost always, inopportune and irritating returns to reason, which bet on something earthly and rational against the divine, or find one of the many incongruities of the religious story, endangering the dogmatic truths and the human need for salvation. Heretics were people who, in one way or another, undermined the healing and saving role of religious fantasies, putting in dangerous contact with a terrifying Real already communally repressed. Heretics are humans who refuse to play a game that is, by essence, communal and interactive; they are myth strikers, humans who refuse to contribute to keep the collective beneficent illusion at work. That is why they are so hated. In my own terms, heresies were moments in which the worthlessness of being came to the fore by piercing the layers of concealment, moments in which reason asserted itself and tried to recover what today we can expose without any twists and turns: our constitutive, not eventual, discomfort. Our present despair as 21st century humans is completely heretical. It is a despair of the world (like Augustinian despair), but without God. The world is as bad as it ever was, but today we no longer aspire to salvation. We only enhance the intra-worldly value of the world to try to live, transferring salvation to the plane of health (cultivation of the body, sophisticated psychological treatments), or keeping it at the formal level of strictly personal religious practices, more or less genuine or empty as do the human masses all over the world, including humans of all social classes, also intellectuals, and even philosophers. Religion lost its existential substance and part of its political power, but its performances continue to occur. Philosophically speaking, the problem is that if we accept the existence of God as an axiom, together with the creation of the world by God's will and with the human being as part of that creation, many philosophical problems arise that perplex reason (and especially the reason of Christians): (a) Why did God make a world, why did he need to create it, if he could, for all eternity, simply enjoy his own eternal being in all its immense perfection, without staining or inconveniencing it with the useless epic of the world?(b) If God did not have to make the world (by necessity or emanation), if he did it because he wanted to and out of goodness, to give something to the created, and especially to the human being, why does the world appear to be

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so problematic, with physical ills, diseases, natural calamities, wars and human injustices and finally death? (c) On the more strictly moral plane, Why is it that in a world made by a good God, so many and so often the good are harmed and suffer terrible injustices and persecutions, while the bad do well, get rich, stay in power and nothing particularly unpleasant happens to them, beyond the inconveniences that the good also suffer? We must not forget the political question, that is, the exploitation that some groups made of this great crisis, in the face of the categorical hesitations to face the lack of value of the being in the passage from paganism to Christianity. Controlling agents of the strict fulfillment of the salvific model appeared, with the consequent persecution of all those who tried to move it. The salvific scheme becomes an organizing element of expectations and a powerful value invented intramundanely, which will then be used to increase it for the benefit of some to the disadvantage of others. Someone who lived in the eleventh or thirteenth century, or even in the seventeenth (or nineteenth!), and thought what I am going to write now, would not say it and would pretend socially so that some of his colleagues would not denounce him as a heretic or witch to the Holy Office of the day. Possibly in all ages - as I said when remembering the young students of Abelard - there were these people who were confident in their reason but did not dare to express their doubts aloud. The motives or pretexts that humans used to persecute and kill other humans were different from those used today. In the past, religion played an essential role in the condemnations, while today the reasons of state, the protection of society, the law of national security, the right to defense, private property, etc., play this role. So I am going to take advantage of the present state of society to formulate the Great Heresy, which is nothing else but the dismantling of the neo-platonic Scheme we have been seeing up to now. What would happen if we began to conceive of the human as complete and this world as the only one there is? Is not its "incompleteness" - its "lack" - a product of the religious worldview? What would the human "lack"? How would we rethink morality if we abandoned the idea that we "lack" something? In this heretical register, we do not "lack" anything; our tormented imagination of finitude invents a spiritual plus in contrast to which we would "lack" something. But it is the neo-platonic Scheme itself that creates the "lack". We do not "lack" anything: that which seems to be "lacking" is ourselves. We "lack" ourselves. But

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that is the same as saying that we "lack" nothing. When we suppress the religious vision, when it is it that is missing, we see ourselves as somberly complete, complete in our flagging mode of being; and we perceive that everything terrible that happens to us is not motivated by some "lack", but simply coincides with the being that there is. It is our own being that appeals to the religious imagination so that, "lacking" something, we console ourselves with our being and accept it as our fault or responsibility, pushing us in the entertaining - though arduous - task of completing ourselves, of saving ourselves, etc. But we have no responsibility, we are innocent through and through and there is nothing for us to save ourselves from. This is the initial idea of the Great Heresy. It is not that the starting point of heresy is the thesis of the "non-existence of God". To defend the non-existence of God or to try to "prove" it would be to enter fully into the religious worldview. Atheists are no less within that vision than theists or believers. Both recognize that there is an objective problem that can be called "the problem of God", in front of which there can be several positions, some in favor and others against its existence, as if it were a question of epistemic decision. I see religion as one of the possible and plausible existential positions in the face of the primordial question of the terminality of being. I do not hold Nietzsche's contempt for religious existences; I see existences guided by religious categories and existences guided by Nietzsche's ideas as two possible attitudes in the face of the miseries of existence. Atheists and believers flee from the same thing, they construct their universes for the same reasons. For it is clear that there are religious or mystical existences, such as those of Tertullian, Augustine, Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, Pascal or Kierkegaard. Of course one can exist religiously, and those types of existences have God, live with God and in God, and do not need at all that the existence of God be rationally proven (on the contrary, I think they need that there be no such proof). For these existents (who may deserve our greatest admiration) the question of the existence of God is totally dispensable and unimportant, because they are living in a dimension in which they do not need demonstrations or testimonies. I would say that, for these existents, atheists and agnostics are right, God "does not exist" if our lives are guided by reason, so atheists and agnostics are fully coherent (more so than many faithful), and disputes on the question are totally meaningless. It is not the "existence of God" that these religious lives require. For even after the most convincing proofs of the non-existence of God - to the extent that they can be presented - the

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The religious mode of existence of these humans would not be altered in any way because of this. And, on the other hand, those religious humans must view with a certain perplexity the countless efforts of the faithful (such as St. Thomas or St. Anselm) trying to prove the existence of God, something for them totally indubitable. Genuinely religious existences, which may be very few, not only accept that God "does not exist" in the rational sense, but that their religious experience requires this nonexistence for God's presence in them to be complete. There is nothing that a rational proof of the non-existence of God can do to break down a religious existence, not even killing that existent, because that will not destroy its way of life but only prevent the actions that it might still have performed. Nor can there be an edict or a news item in the newspaper proclaiming: "God does not exist. Current advances in science clearly demonstrate that. God was a saving illusion in times of darkness, which we no longer need from now on. Therefore, people who believed in God can stop believing in God and devote themselves to better things. What God gave them, science and society will now give them". These would be the headlines of some Comtian newspaper. None of this can happen because religious existences are invulnerable to any external determination, coming from science, technology or dominant political ideologies. So, when we say that "God does not exist", we are not pointing to an objective fact that we would have "demonstrated" (for this would be to place ourselves entirely within the religious perspective), but to the simple fact that, in certain existential positions, humans live and die without God, without his idea and without his reality; that something like God has no place within that type of existence. Not that these existences are guided exclusively by "rational categories". Existences without God can be extremely critical o f

reason (understood in a

narrow enlightenment way), and accept criticisms of that rationality from various perspectives (Nietzschean, Freudian, Marxist, etc.). In the perspective I adopt, the ultimate reference point of philosophy is existence: whether we choose to be men of science, religious people or criminals, we will have made, in all cases, an existential choice. This is what a classical analytic philosopher or a philosopher of science often fails to see: that their life choices - their decision to adopt a scientific worldview - are not analytic or scientific choices, but existential choices, such as the choice to be

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religious. We should not (although this is constantly done) try to annihilate one form of existence by means of another (as the rational forms of life were annihilated during the dark age of the Holy Office, or as today we try to annihilate the religious forms of life by means of the scientific vision of the world). The non-existence of God is, for me, a heretic of the twentieth century, completely evident, but only to the strict extent that I have chosen to live a certain type of existence in which God has no place; but this certainty does not affect in any way those who want to (or can) live religiously, that is, with God. On this point, I am totally against the predominance of the external vision over the internal one. Neither the scientists can say, from the outside, that the religious human being is totally deluded by his illusions, nor the religious can say that the scientist lacks the illumination of faith. If we leave the religious existences alone, we can draw many very important philosophical conclusions from the brute and dry fact that, in a certain type of non-religious life, God was an epochal resource to deal with the helplessness of being in a drastic way, after the exhaustion of the pagan resources destined to that same purpose. This shows that, in truth, the God thesis has nothing to do on the natural plane (to explain the origin of the world, for example), but that its importance occurs on the plane of salvation. This already begins to be seen by Duns Scotus, Ockham and the Okhamists, at the end of the Middle Ages, and is clearly manifested by Galileo in his stormy personal experience. In my own terms, I say that the human being has, on the one hand, a strong yearning for knowledge (today highly reinforced by high technology), but he is also afraid of the helplessness of his being (of diseases, catastrophes, injustices, etc.), just like the humans of past centuries. Therefore, God (as tirelessly repeated by the aforementioned authors) is important for the latter longing, but not for the former. That is why, in religious existences, the question of salvation takes on an enormously superior importance to the question of knowledge; or, better, the latter is dimensioned according to the demands of salvation (even when its followers do not admit it). This seems to me relevant to analyze the first of the two perplexities formulated above: Why did God create a world, and specifically a world with humans, instead of creating nothing? A typical traditional metaphysical problem. The rational acceptance that, standing in a certain type of existence, there is no God, solves this problem by dissolving it completely. Obviously, the world must have arisen by natural causes and not by divine design. We do not know these natural causes well, and the scientific theses on the origin of the world are not well known.

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remain hypothetical even today; but, at the risk of committing the fallacy ad ignorantiam, even if we do not know how the world originated and how the human species came into existence (suppose someone doubts the theory of evolution), still none of that would lead us to the thesis that there must then be a God who created the world, as fallaciously argued by the faithful who insist on rational demonstrations instead of simply living their religious existences. (I believe that they are so interested in the rational plane because, for one reason or another, they are incapable of living genuine religious existences, from which all these arguments would seem insignificant and unnecessary). So, in this heretical perspective, we do not need any "reason" for the world to exist, in addition to the pure and blind natural laws. The problem arises when the desire for salvation also requires the divine account of the creation of the world, as happened in the Galileo trials in relation to the theories of Copernicus. The faithful needed to believe that God had created the world out of goodness in order to believe and accept the rest of the story, the return to the creator God through a life of atonement, etc. This is the problem with which Kant and Fichte will still struggle, that the yearning for salvation (which many people still feel today) cannot always be drastically separated from the yearning for knowledge of the world. Of course, my existential solution serves to attempt an answer: within a religious existence there continues to be creation of the world by God, even when, outside of it, there are quite reliable rational indications that the world came into existence by rigorous natural causes. This may seem schizoid but it is consistent with the existential point of view I have adopted (a sort of existential version of the double truth). The non-religious human can say that, from his point of view, problem (a) does not make the slightest sense, and that all religious theories of world creation have to invent a paraphernalia of explanations to account for the amazing fact that an eternal and perfect Being has bothered to create the world and, above all, to create us. With this, we move on to the most interesting problem, (b), the "problem of evil". Here, what is involved in all medieval and modern philosophies that face this question is to save God from all responsibility for the evils of the world and to attribute them to the human being (at least in a good part of the traditional metaphysics, although not in all of them). According to them, God, being good, could not create evil; so that evil (diseases, catastrophes, injustices) must be caused by human actions. The injustices are obviously produced by human beings, but since it would be strange to attribute to them also the

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responsibility for earthquakes, it was necessary to create the original sin to blame the human being also for them and for all natural catastrophes, and even for his own death. So, it is the human being who brings evil into the world. But in the whole of divine creation as the good origin of the world, even the evil introduced by humans must ultimately result in some good (for example, in the total harmony of the world, or in redemption). As we saw, evil, for numerous authors of the period (Philo, Dionysius, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, Thomas, etc.) has no being, no substance, it is purely negative, it is deprivation of being, deprivation of goodness, it is nothing in itself. Therefore, "evil" is, on the one hand, provoked by human sin, and, on the other hand, it never has full positivity but is a privation. In this question of "evil" there is another line of argument very usual in that period, present, for example, in the "Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius, but also in Scotus Erigenaeus, Spinosa and Kant. The idea is the following: no one really wants evil, everyone wants good. Whoever seems to seek evil, seeks good in a wrong or inadequate way. If he were to see things with the light of reason, he would not seek the good in wrong ways, but in good and just ways. This is given in support of the argument that "evil" has no being, no substance, that there is only good. But in this idea there is an ambiguity. When a human being wants, for example, to steal another's watch, of course getting the watch is a "good" for the thief, but it is an "evil" for the victim. In this sense, even if the thief does the theft seeking his own good, he is doing an effective evil to another. It is from the perspective of the victim that the evil is seen, that is, of the one who suffers it, and not of the one who inflicts it. In other words, good and evil are relative perspectives: good practiced, evil suffered. But the idea that these philosophers present, that even a thief does not really want evil, is not this; it is not, simply, the idea that he wants to steal because, for him, that is good. No, the idea is metaphysical, a kind of natural Order of goods and evils according to which good and bad things are as it were already given in some Platonic or intelligible heaven (something that even Kant still accepts, in his own terms, with his dangerous approximation between the rational and the moral that was so criticized by Schopenhauer). Therefore, stealing is not bad merely because someone, as a victim, suffers it, but it is something "bad in itself" because it is irrational, or because it goes against the rational nature of the human being. Thus, the thief sees the theft of the watch as good because it is going against his nature, because, if he were to see properly, he would see that it is something bad in itself, even though it benefits him; and the victim would see that it is bad in itself and not merely because it harms him. (The victim would be

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also irrational if he believed that theft was wrong just because he was wronged). But this seems to assume that all humans naturally tend toward that rational Order, and that thieves and murderers are sort of "astray." This would be what is meant by "everyone seeks good, no one seeks evil," and not that, when the thief steals, he seeks a good for himself but does an evil for his victim, and, in that sense, he seeks it, directly or indirectly. So, one should not understand the statement that humans never seek evil in the empirical sense, but in the metaphysical sense of the rational Order that humans always seek, whatever they do. That Order is part of the Scheme. Once we postulate a good Creator God, "evil" has to be explained in this complicated way. But what if we accept that God depends on ways of existing, that God cannot be considered an absolute truth that is imposed from outside on all existences, that God has no place in a non-religious existence? Here is something very interesting, which Heidegger helps to visualize, but which he did not develop successfully because of his repudiation of dealing with the problem of the value of being. (This was studied in section 1 of this Essay). My answer to this question is this: if we dispense with God - as we can perfectly well do, once God need not have a place in all human existences - there is no such thing as the "problem of evil," purely and simply because there is no such thing as "evil." "Evil" and the "creation motive", are products of the pseudo-problematic character of questions (b) and (a) respectively. It just so happens that humans, even those guided by rationality, are much more sensitive to the problem of "evil" than to the problem of the motive for creation, and react much more strongly to the claim that there is no such thing as "evil" than to the claim that there is no "motive" for creating the world; but philosophically both are residues of the formulation of pseudo-problems. (Like the facetious question of what God was doing one day before he created time and the like, the kind of "problems" that so amused Rudolf Carnap.) What do I mean when I say that "evil" does not exist? Well, obviously I don't mean that diseases, earthquakes and injustices don't exist. What I mean is that there is no reason to label those things as "bad" as if the world were a "good" thing (created by a good God) and "evil" were something that arose eventually and contingently in the midst of the "goodness of being." Those things we call "bad" are - in the view I present - part of the valuelessness of being, that is, they have come along with being, and therefore are not contingent emergences that might not have appeared (just as, in the religious narrative, they are

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says that pain and death would not exist if the human being had not sinned). Therefore, if there were a God who created being, this being would intrinsically bring with it worthlessness, and, therefore, God would be guilty of it for not having refrained from creating. Long before any human original sin, there would already be a divine original sin, the procreation itself, which is also, possibly, the true human original sin. Since we do not accept God in a non-religious existence (which is very different from claiming to have rationally demonstrated his non-existence), what we say is the following: the world exists by natural causes and when it arises it inevitably brings with it all the frictions and pains of the earth (earthquakes), of life (illnesses), and of society (injustices). In being, and in being human, these elements all come together, they are part of his making. The being is helpless in its being, because in order to be it needs friction, natural or human. And because the helplessness is structural, the whole problem of "evil" is diluted, because the "evil" pretends to have arisen within the being because of some fault or error committed by humans, without seeing that the helplessness comes with the being itself, and that there is, therefore, no "problem of evil" outside the context of the religious narrative. So, it is not that earthquakes, diseases and injustices are not suffered by humans, or that they are not terrible things. Of course they are. That they are suffered, and in dreadful ways, is an essential element in my negative view of human being and human life. But that they are suffered does not mean that "evil" exists. What exists is simply the world and the human being with its expansive and destructive ways of being. Because the world arose from the earth, there may be new earth movements, new sea movements, etc., that affect human beings and kill them by the thousands, but they kill them not as an external stigma, for having done something wrong or by omission, but, purely and simply, because they are and are being in a natural world, which exists naturally with all the natural frictions that are internal to it, without it being necessary to have done anything to suffer its barbaric effects. These geological sufferings are not "evil", but simply the being-friction of the earth and the ocean. (And if ever, as in so many American films, a meteor crashes into the earth and destroys it completely, this will not be the biblical Apocalypse but simply a geological possibility of the earth, a natural astronomical possibility, and not "evil"). Evil" seems an anthropomorphic category, like the child who considers "evil" the fire that burned him. This is not "evil", it is simply fire, and fire has burning as one of its implicit possibilities; it makes us suffer; but this is a resonance of the worthlessness of being itself, and not "evil".

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The same happens with diseases. Diseases are not "evil", but, in the vision we assume, the intrinsic possibilities of the Bios, of living organisms, just as earthquakes and tidal waves are possibilities of the earth and the sea, and the collision of celestial bodies an astronomical possibility. Thus, we become ill not because we committed some fault or made some mistake, but because illness is a possibility already included in the very being of a living being, no matter how much we take care of ourselves and feed ourselves well or flee from danger zones. Even if, sometime, the number of diseases decreases drastically, that too will be a possibility of medicine and biology and not some external or extrinsic "good". These biological sufferings are thus not the "evil" but simply the being-brokenness of the human body. Finally, and entering into problem (c) of the previous list, the injustices committed by human beings (in wars, religious persecutions, racism, homophobia, misogyny, torture, exile, etc.) are not "evil" either, but simply the product of the behavior of natural beings who, besides having a body with permanent possibilities of becoming ill, and inhabiting an earth with permanent possibilities of becoming altered, live in societies of humans always with the possibility of becoming their enemies. From all this, very little space is left for moral action of consideration for others, and that is why our world is this ominous and horrifying sample of misunderstandings, miscommunications and intolerances throughout its bloody history (see the colonization of America as a good example). These human sufferings are not "evil," but simply the being-ness of human communities. This also comes along with being, it is not eventual, extrinsic, nor, much less, guilt or punishment. This, of course, also answers the pseudo-problem (expounded by Boethius in prison) of why the "bad" benefit and the "good" suffer injustice. This childish way of speaking hides the fact that there are no "good" and "bad" humans (therefore, we should stop tormenting ourselves to define what "goodness" and "badness" are), but that there are simply humans who endure with less success the frictions of being-terminal and, as a horrible vindication, impose frightful aggressions on others. But the Great Heresy is not yet complete. An important aspect of it is the following: in the assumed perspective, it is better for God not to exist, for if He did exist, He should be guilty for all human sufferings, for He is the original (metaphysical) cause of all other (geological, biological and social) frictions. For in creating being, God created it

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inevitably with all those frictions and the human being has nothing to do with it. God knew that he could only create an imperfect being affected by all that friction. The human being is totally innocent. But that doesn't mean that God is "evil" either. If there is no such thing as evil, there is no such thing as divine evil either. The divine mistake was simply to create the world. He did not create an "evil" world, he simply created, and in creating he created the frictions and sufferings from which the human has to bear not only the wounds, but also the enormous injustice of having to take the blame for his own sufferings. If God exists, He is to blame for everything (and perhaps that is why He hides Himself, the Deus absconditus must be an ashamed God, repentant of having committed the original sin of having created the world and of creating us; it is we who seek Him to explain Himself, and He prudently hides Himself). On the other hand, if He does not exist, He is metaphysically guilty of not existing, because if He did exist, perhaps, with His powers He could do something to relieve us from the frictions of the world, even if it had not been created by Him, but, let us say, by natural causes. So God, whether He exists or not, is always guilty, guilty of existing and of having created the perfectly avoidable frictions of the world, or guilty of not existing. And this is the Great Heresy of negative thinking, for which we would be burned in past centuries and may lose our jobs in our own. So, in truth, we did not "fall" into the worthlessness of being because of some original fault or because of some error committed. The "error" consists in simply being, and it was committed either by God or by our progenitors, or by nature, but never by us (in each case). We are not "fallen" beings, we are born beings. Miserably procreated. Precisely, the idea that we are "fallen" arose from the perception, perfectly clear, that life is worthless. The world was perceived as being so "bad" that humans thought it had to have "fallen" from somewhere: but it does not cause discomfort for having fallen from something better, but for being as it is, unfallen. A consoling way of seeing our miserable self is to see it as falling from a supra-being (One), rather than seeing it in its own constitutive nonbeing. Throughout history, humans have not been able to confront the structural helplessness of being and of their being. The ineffability of worthlessness, of being helpless, helpless and inoperative was replaced by the ineffability of supra-being, of the One (Dionysius, Plotinus). There is a visceral impossibility of facing the originary character of nonbeing (Parmenides tried to totally annihilate that originariness by rendering non-being unintelligible, and with that created a powerful

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affirmative tradition in European philosophy). Thus, when it is said that "evil" does not exist, that it has no substance, that it has no being, a moral version of Parmenides' thesis is formulated, that non-being has no substance. But if we were to accept the category of "evil" we would have to say that evil is originary, and that good is pure "absence of evil." For being already brings with it "friction" (geological, biological, social), which was usually interpreted as "evil". Being is originally friction, that is, non-being, that is, "evil" (accepting this category). Being is differentiated within the bosom of evil, good is exception, it is pure privation, it has no being (The Great Heresy). Here the questions are reversed in the sense indicated by Feuerbach and Marx: "Why did human beings have to create God (at least within a certain type of existence)? This does have an answer from the perspective assumed here. Because the world is problematic, because there are earthquakes, diseases and injustices in it, because in it the bad triumph and the good are persecuted. This is in direct opposition to the usual affirmative narration, which says: God exists; then the world cannot really be problematic, its problematicity is an illusion. The helplessness that cannot be said, that cannot be faced, generates the ineffability and extreme remoteness of an infinite Valía. Worthlessness generated God. The Scheme (followed by all theistic philosophy, ancient, medieval or modern) is totally correct if one accepts its fundamental premise: there is God, there is the Supra-being, there is the One, the supreme Being greater than all that can be thought, etc. All the rest follows from that with the most rigorous logic. If there is God, he must necessarily exist, must necessarily exist, must have created the world, must have created the human being, must be in charge of his salvation, must have planned our resurrection and all the rest. To get out of the Scheme, then, we must deny the major premise. In the historical journey from the European Renaissance to the modern era, the path of Heresy was not followed, and after the excellent reflections of Galileo (which take up Scotist and Ockhamian themes), there was a remarkable turn towards scholastic metaphysics throughout the 17th century, a thankless and ambiguous century, without the naive medieval metaphysical creativity and without the deconstructive irreverence of the 20th century, a decidedly unpleasant middle century in which European philosophy lagged far behind what was happening in science. Modernity is gradual and imprecise; there are modern elements in Augustine and Abelard, and very strong ones in Scotus, Ockham and Nicholas De Cusa. On the other hand, Malebranche is a thoroughly pre-modern philosopher, while we might see Okcham as a seventeenth-century thinker.

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Classical thought was characterized by a strong rejection of the world in favor of salvation, whether through a mystical-religious vision or an anesthetic ethic, while modernity tends to promote the intra-world (especially since the scientific revolution) and to keep salvation on a restricted, personal and formal level. These are two ways of rejecting the worthlessness of being: by disdaining the world and promoting God, or by promoting the world and formally and privately appreciating God. In past centuries, God was socialized and imposed through the strong power of the Church. Modern societies are organized in other ways but do not dare to leave God completely aside, but He is kept as a kind of background (as if He were kept in reserve, lest the promotion of the underworld should fail miserably). The pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite already began the drastic separation of world and God, and Galileo wants scientific questions to be totally detached from salvation. Even today, philosophers and scientists want that, to keep God infinitely distant from the world, but without totally suppressing Him (as Feurbach, Marx, Comte, Nietzsche and Freud tried to do). They still continue to see there something sacred that science should not touch.

3.6. Modern forms of affirmativism, from Leibniz to Schelling. From the analysis of modern philosophers, what new forms does affirmativism now assume? In truth, I believe that there is a tension between religious affirmativism, never totally abandoned, and the forms of affirmation permitted by the sciences. The work of Copernicus introduces a rupture as radical as a mere philosopher could never do. Descartes is, at the same time, a scientist and a metaphysician, but as a metaphysician he is not original (he repeats earlier theses in the midst of great proclamations of independence which he does not follow), and as a scientist (as he was criticized by Gassendi and other "minor figures" of the period) he remains still pre-experimental, very much attached to the conceptual game of Scholasticism; when he formulates some important scientific question, he does not follow his own method. As far as the relations between theology and philosophy, knowledge and salvation are concerned, Descartes is a great step backward with respect to Ockham and Galileo, since God is deeply involved in Cartesian epistemology, as was already sufficiently shown by historiography. So the "father of modern philosophy" is much more rhetorical (the anti-scholastic assertions of Discours) than something substantive that can be ascertained in the actual content of his works.

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The question of certainty following doubt is also a retreat from, for example, the negative thought of Nicholas of Cusa, who had promoted the notion of "ignorance" to the level of a philosophical concept through subtle and profound thoughts (there is no work of Descartes that comes close in speculative quality to The Learned Ignorance of Cusa). This Cartesian appeal to the search for certainty is a clear lay affirmative against skepticism. But the humiliation of this typically modern enthusiasm will occur when God is called upon by Descartes as the ultimate guarantee of all certainty. Scientific affirmation requires a Great Affirmation in the background. The famous certainty of the cogito seems banal and inoperative because it is not clear (we will have to wait for Husserl) what can be derived from this initial subjective certainty. It seems more a type of attitude (already present in the great scientists of the time) of mastering the laws of nature through the imposition of a method. Mathematical certainties are much more promising as certainties of the world than the Great Certainty in the existence of God. But the certainty of the cognitus has neither the utility of the former nor the saving grandeur of the latter. What is abandoned is the supreme certainty that the pre-moderns had about the nature of God, about His will, about what He did, about what He proposed, etc., that detailed and curiously knowledgeable theology. Negative theology had already cast doubt on this supposed "knowledge". Now God is simply the creator of nature that moves according to its own laws: the God of the philosophers, without love or proximity. In negative theology there was still the love of the distant and hidden thing, but this is becoming increasingly diluted. The seventeenth century is in charge of manufacturing this naturalized God through Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, a God who at every moment threatens to precipitate into simple nature. This God does not save, but only serves to complete the epistemology and avoid problems with the authorities. Where did the moderns put their longing for salvation? Had they resigned themselves to live a rational life and then die completely? The 17th century was religious in this sense indecisive and hypocritical, with this purely functional God (the great watchmaker, the great geometrician) or with scandalous falls into apologetics (Malebranche). Descartes now seeks absolute certainties in the world; he tries to make the search for cognitive certainty independent, leaving salvation as a background. Modernity bets on something like salvation (or, at least, health) through knowledge. The arrogance of the philosophers, so combated by Tertullian, Augustine and others, is openly assumed. In this

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In this sense, the relationship with God becomes cold and functional. The neo-platonic Scheme serves as an inspiration for scientific discoveries as a kind of heuristic stimulus, but it has lost its motivational force. We are witnessing the secularization of the foundation and the entry of science into the daily lives of humans. There is not even anesthetic wisdom of life (stoicism, etc). The search for knowledge creates its own despairs. Descartes created one that will run through the 17th century from end to end: the communication of thinking and extended substances. A perfect pseudoproblem that will keep many subtle spirits entertained. To say that God intervenes in all the occasions in which the soul and the body have to communicate is just a metaphorical way of affirming that only God can explain such an unfathomable and difficult relationship. Along with the God-nature of Spinoza, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz and the perceptual idealism of Berkeley, the occasionalism of Geulincx and Malebranche is a masterpiece of the affirmative imagination of the new times. Galileo had gone much further in attempting to overcome that kind of thinking, so that these disputes about substances can be seen as a major setback. Leibniz is the modern thinker who most clearly takes up the scholastic tradition and specifically the neo-Platonic scheme of salvation through his analysis of the existence of God and the "problem of evil", which is not at all original with respect to what had already been said throughout history. (On Leibniz you can reread my text "Leibniz and the innocence of the father" in the Critique of Affirmative Morality, 1996). This German philosopher tackles the two great problems of theistic metaphysics: the problem of the existence of the world (why did God create it?), and the problem of its evil essence (why did a good god create an evil world?). Duns Scotus had tried, four centuries earlier, to keep God and the world maximally separate through the idea of divine voluntarism, later followed by Okcham and others. The existence and the "bad" essence of the world have no comprehensible explanation, they are part of our ignorance (at the most, learned), and it is more worthwhile, in a Galilean register, to try to understand the workings of the world through reason and science and to leave God and his absolute Will aside. Leibniz reverses this process and brings God back very close to the world (against the efforts of Dionysius and the Cushanist), by making God and men share the same logic and both have to avoid contradictions. The geometrical and scientific god, typical of the 17th century,

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Leibniz gained in his hands an extraordinary strategy to justify "evil": God is a mathematician who works with possibilities, with structures that cannot contradict each other. The world was for Him a possibility that He had to ponder alongside other possibilities and His choice was strictly logical, not loving or volitional: He chose the best of the logically possible worlds and not merely the world He wanted to create. This elegant way out is completely original because it could hardly have been elaborated before (although Origen and Duns Scotus himself had already spoken of possible worlds, etc.). The problem with previous justifications of the worthlessness of being was that some procedure was sought to deny that the world was bad; in Leibniz's affirmative metaphysics this need not be denied, for "the best of logically possible worlds" can still be very bad without offending the original divine goodness, since we are starting from the hypothesis of a logical god. Thus, the logic and mathematics of the seventeenth century provide a new consoling element, unknown to the ancients (even if it had already been said, in a more vague and general way, that the "evils" of the world responded to a divine plan). The theses of the privative character of evil, of the receptive limitations of creatures, and of the metaphysical evil of bringing up, which Leibniz uses in his Theodicy, are all reformulations of ancient ideas and not at all original. The only new thing is that the affirmative element is mathematized, becomes logical, and universal optimism can, apparently, be justified by means of a calculus, showing that even mathematics can be used in a consoling way, and not as a bulwark of mental liberation, as for Galileo. In my text of the Critique I have already sufficiently shown that God has to be held responsible for the metaphysical evil of having created a world (any world), even if it is "the best possible world", instead of not creating anything. Leibniz lacks the justification for not having chosen not to create anything, which was perfectly possible for a free, not purely emanatist God. Once metaphysical evil is established, the other two types of evil - physical and moral - fall away (this is what I call sensible suffering and moral disqualification). Metaphysical evil, for which God is unequivocally responsible, is the inevitable formal condition of the other two kinds of evil. We are thus innocent of accusations. God (like our human parents) is not evil, he is not an evil entity, he is simply (like our human parents) a being who failed to restrain himself, a fool who deserves pity rather than a malevolent one whom we should hate. By creating (anything, even the best possible), he did not "create evil", he created evil, which is the only way to create.

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Ockham's British empiricism creates tradition, through Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Berkeley, and has ramifications in the materialist and sensualist French enlightenment. The theory of knowledge and political theory take up most of the space for reflection, leaving logicalmetaphysical questions aside, sometimes in explicit and provocative proclamations. The worthlessness of being seems forgotten or assimilated to pragmatic and efficient forms of life. The primary interest lies in organizing society on solid factual and cognitive bases, not leaving it to theology or metaphysics to do so, as happened in the past. It is the growing immanentism that traditional spirits lament so much. Hobbes' Leviathan is a dramatic demonstration of the conviction that the Sovereign God is not strong enough to dominate humans. It requires inflexible laws and a Body to enforce them. While George Berkeley is, in that context, a foreign body - an empiricist with apologetic interests - David Hume is the philosopher of that tradition who openly assumes the irrational character of religion and its skeptical critique. Salvation is transformed into a kind of object of analytical study and religion into a phenomenon that deserves curious and attentive scrutiny. Despite his Augustinianism, Pascal also assumes salvation in scientific and mathematical terms, in his own way. He accepts pagan pessimism about the human condition (the Pensées contains precious aphorisms on human miseries), he presents the theme of the concealment of misery (under the theme of "divertissments"); but what is inconsequential and inauthentic play can also be transformed into a wager in favor of God. The critique of divertissment and the wager for God are profoundly original motifs and anticipators of contemporary existential themes. Against Jacques Prévert, Pascal must be taken seriously. Despite his Christian apologetics, it is a symbol of modern times that belief in God must be put in terms of a wager. God in the theory of probabilities. But what comes closest to God is the inadequacy of the human condition, of which Pascal gave vivid descriptions. At this point in my historical reflections, I perceive that there are not many ways to face the helplessness of being. I point out the following three: (a)

Religious strategy. Belief in a kind of transcendent and provident force that sometimes adopts the figure of a good father even though a

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often fierce, capricious and unpredictable. This is, as Freud saw it, the most childish way out of the impasse of helplessness. (b)

The rational-scientific strategy. Belief in the scientific promotion of the intra-world, in progress, in the gradual improvement of the quality of life by means of positive factual, pragmatic and concrete knowledge, without metaphysical categories, but without excluding a Geometric God who makes the harmony of the world possible. This is the "adult" vision of the solution of the impasse.

(c)

The romantic-existential strategy. Throwing oneself into the great feelings and fantasies of total freedom, lashing out against the limits of the human condition and overcoming them in creative delirium and exalted imagination, which may include a romantic, infinite and disturbing God lived in great crises and violent spiritual renewals. A typically adolescent outlet.

Strategy (a) dominated medieval times and part of the ancient world; strategy (b) is typical of the 17th century and the age of Enlightenment, especially French. The influence of Locke and Newton (not Descartes) is strongly felt in the thinkers of the Encyclopedia and others such as D'Alembert, Diderot, Condillac, d'Holbach and Voltaire. But a thinker like Rousseau practices strategy (c), by highlighting the importance of passions and feelings, the natural state, the state of the innocent savage. An existential thinker in the midst of enlightenment rationalism, and yet the author of a reflection deeply situated in that context and inseparable from it. In English enlightenment (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke), a favoring of ethical sentiments such as sympathy, and skepticism of a morality guided only by reason, also predominates. The strategy (c) was used in the Renaissance (especially Italian), but it will reach its peak in the period of German romanticism, in the passage from the XVIIIth to the XIXth century, and will resurface in the "philosophy of existence" of the XXth century. Note that in all three affirmative strategies (a, b, c), there is a god or gods, in one form or another. In all of them there is a type of god appropriate to the state of thought in each case. Attempts to preserve some god as a still useful resource, in case of intramundane failure. Here the Hegelian left, and in particular Feuerbach, Stirner and Marx, will be the watershed. "Atheism" is simultaneous with the social (Marx) or vital (Nietzsche) promotion of the intra-world. This does not mean at all that mere atheism is the propellant to get out of the world.

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outside the Neoplatonic Scheme. Marx, in a certain way, preserves it, as Kolakowski already noted in his history of Marxism. Whenever the idea of a sinking and subsequent salvation, of a meaning to be obtained through a certain form of life, personal or social, is retained, we remain, in one way or another, within the Scheme. German idealism is the last great staging of the Scheme via (c): the freedom, metaphysically compromised, of a rational, virtuous and self-conscious being within a process that is the very development of the divine essence. God is not renounced, he is immanentized. But it was Kant who started it all, and that is why we speak of this philosopher as an "event", something much more serious and enduring than a mere philosopher. Interestingly, Kant was a philosopher of limits, but his philosophy gave breath to the most spectacular overcoming of the limits of thought within the German context (already from Jacobi's early criticisms to Hegel's exclamation, in the Encyclopedia, that to draw a limit is already to have overcome it). The important Kantian point is the topic, the work of demarcation, strongly influenced by British empiricism (especially Hume), according to which the interest in knowledge and the anxiety for salvation should never mix, as had been the case in Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz. But, as we have seen, already in Duns Scotus and especially in Ockham many elements for thinking about this topic appeared in the history of European thought. Kant maintains that there can be no "truths" deeper than those obtained by reason in its theoretical and practical uses, nothing unfathomable and absconditus, as in medieval thought. Reason cannot set itself insoluble problems. Everything finds its place in the map of reason. In its purely theoretical part (first Critique), strategy (b) is worked out with much propriety and sophistication. (And this is why Hegel still considered Kant an empiricist). But, as is known, Kant could not stand the imposition of his own limits and wanted to transcendentally construct the practical sphere, even giving (in two laconic and mysterious pages of the second Critique) priority to practice over theory. This, and the inconsequence of the "thing-in-itself" in the first Critique, gave birth to the "Kant event," composed of thinkers obsessed by the Kantian problematic of the "thing-in-itself," from Jacobi, Reinhold, Beck and Maimonides, through Schulze and culminating in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In Kant, the distinction of reason into a theoretical use (which remained meekly within the limits of experience) and a practical use (which extended those limits in a non-cognitive sense) configured a kind of transcendental version of the "double

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truth", a kind of Kantian Averroism: freedom, God, immortal soul have no meaning on the sensible plane, only on the intelligible. The neo-platonic Scheme is transcendentalized. Kant did the same as many of his noble predecessors: to reconcile knowledge and salvation by duplicating worlds. Kantian pessimism regarding this world is taken to the extreme, in the Platonic and neo-Platonic good path. The Platonic and Boethian idea that human beings behave badly out of ignorance and the identity between morality and rationality are also present in Kant's practical thought. He constructs a realm governed by Newton's laws, and maintains another Platonic world for a secular salvation. He consummates the idea of the separation between knowledge and salvation, which was already clearly expressed by Galileo, only that, in the Enlightenment vein, Kant transforms the old faith into a practical activity of reason. Unhappily for many (such as Schopenhauer), practical reason leaves the door open for the idealists to allow the neo-Platonic theme of vindication (the "way back") to invade the theoretical sphere (taking advantage of the primacy of practice that Kant himself had formulated). The phenomenon/nomenon distinction, and the famous "thing-in-itself", which will later be discussed by Reinhold, Maimon, Beck, Schutze, etc, is the philosophical element that preserves the neo-Platonic scheme at that time, for if everything were phenomenon, there would be no place for the restorative journey of salvation. (As Schopenhauer sardonically commented, after writing the first Critique for the learned, Kant had to write the second for his servant). The "Kant event" is all this: Kantian thought and all the gaps it left for that incredible pleiad of speculative philosophers to meticulously elaborate the in-consequences and paradoxes of the transcendental theory of the double truth, suggesting finally that there is no such double truth but a single truth, the Absolute Truth, in which the practical sphere (now the realm of the fullest romantic freedom) takes full command of the process and subjects the sphere of knowledge to its own creative spontaneity. The Hegelian "concept" is that resource capable of carrying out this gigantic task to the full. The original romanticism (not specifically that of Hegel, although not totally absent from his philosophy) is the moment of imagination and feeling, the existential moment, the exacerbated way of dealing with the helplessness of being through a defiance of all imposed limits. A very peculiar way of bearing the real: the accent on freedom, the creative power of genius, the

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artistic experience taken to the extreme of defiance and daring, even in the attempt to see religion as a supreme and comprehensive experience (Scheiermacher). Romanticism as an aestheticization of the worthlessness of being. The Greeks, in their own way, had already practiced it, but always within an intellectualist background. The helplessness is now lived and endured in an experience of overcoming limits, of an anxious and always unsatisfied relationship with the Infinite, as if the spirit could propel itself out of the human condition, as if God ceased to be a moral figure and transformed into a rapturous mystical passion. It is a form of paganization, of sensualization of the relationship with God. In the supreme German idealists, this paganization is still present (especially in Schelling), but the Christian elements (duly transcendentalized in a trans-Kantian sense) end up predominating. Novalis, who died at the age of 29 of tuberculosis, sees Christianity as a way of giving meaning to death, opening up to an eternal life. This same spirit, but with strong traces of paganism, is also present in Hölderlin, where nature is divinized. But it is curious that while the Romantics live their sublime experiences of freedom and overcoming limits, their bodies are decimated by cholera, tuberculosis, misery, injustice or all that together, which leads one to ask what is really the world to which the Romantics referred in their writings. In idealism nature is always sublimated, transformed into the surmountable moment of the spirit that always has the last word; meanwhile, nature continues to injure and kill, in in inelegant ways, its fragile human sustainers. (Nature, though majestically "surpassed" by the spirit continues to destroy the spiritualists and, in the long run, their works as well. Which begs the question as to where exactly nature would have been allegedly "overcome" by the work of the spirit.) What is of interest in this period of negative thinking - which I assume in this work - is not so much the existence of all these strategies to support the worthlessness of being, but its constant back and forth, throughout history, as if humans were passing through scientific positivism for a time, but this exhausted itself and pushed them towards the pole of romanticism, until a weariness of romanticism appears and a return to positivism and the rational vision of the world. The worthlessness of being is precisely that discomfort, that discomfort that gives humans the illusion that truth and life are always elsewhere, and that makes them oscillating beings. It is not so much existential romanticism or scientific positivism that is of interest, but rather their compulsive oscillation, as if romanticism served to flee from positivism and the

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positivism to distance ourselves from romanticism, and both to flee from being, as if during the flight we were not, precisely, in it, as if this back-and-forth were not one of its most typical displays. In all this I see that the positive "value" always sought after does not exist anywhere; that value is always distant, value seen from the outside, as something that, after some time, will wear out, returning to the place of worthlessness in the form of nonconformity, discouragement or satiety. (In the philosophical histories of Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, for example, this constant oscillation between positivism and "spiritualist reactions", followed by new "positivist reactions" to spiritualism, is perfectly remarkable. But already reading the usual histories of European philosophy, one sees with a certain irony the enthusiasm of philosophers discovering a new current and letting themselves be carried away by it, as if, now yes, the path had been found that will lead us to value, to life, to truth... until weariness and tedium (resonances of the worthlessness of being, which does not allow itself to be suppressed, which only moves from one place to another) make philosophy take another direction, with equal expectations, only in opposite directions). Within strategy (c), the last major version of the Scheme is processed in the metaphysics of German idealism. I am primarily interested, in this long historical reflection, in the limit of nature, which has to be overcome by freedom. Kant has given the elements for that (and from there the "very new philosophy" will be born). But that nature has to be overcome by the spirit is a recognition of the fearful character of nature, which demands such titanic spiritual efforts. The first Kantian reflection on freedom is already present in the first Critique, where it is a problematic concept, imprisoned in the third antinomy of rational cosmology, without theoretical solution. The world seems blindly governed by natural laws, and freedom is a scandal for the empiricist (and for nature), an inexplicable emergency. In the first Critique, freedom loses the struggle before nature, but a door is left ajar for freedom to seek its flourishing in other realms. If theoretical reason had condemned it without equivocation, the door would have been completely closed, and there would have been no German idealism, to Schopenhauer's delight. But the "spiritualist reaction" to naturalistic empiricism would have taken place in some other country, at some other time, according to that inexorable and compulsive oscillation between positivism of nature and spiritualism of freedom, the great battle that saves the Western intelligentsia from falling into the tedium of life.

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Freedom, which was a problematic and inexplicable concept in the theoretical sphere, is now proud of its "scandalous" nature for the empiricists already in the very first pages of the second Critique, the Critique of practical reason, where it, freedom, appears as a "fact of practical reason", also pure, that is, passible of a transcendental treatment, with its own categories (the "categories of freedom"). Here the question of the "thing-in-itself" is crucial: it could in no way be determined theoretically, but it can be determined precisely through the action of freedom. Through freedom, the thing-in-itself does not gain theoretical intelligibility, but it does gain a practical content in the rational-practical determination of the will. Following exactly the same ideas of the Greek and medieval tradition, Kant also thinks that the moral content of actions goes together with their rational-practical content, in such a way that there cannot be freedom to do evil, or to be irrational. Freedom is mortgaged by practical rationality (since not by theoretical rationality), in the sense that it is autonomous, insofar as human beings impose laws on themselves without allowing themselves to be determined by external laws. As in Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine and Thomas, a thief or a liar does not act freely, according to Kant, when they steal or lie. This is one of the most persistent affirmative mechanisms in the history of European philosophy: there is no evil, evil is always deviation. What there is is good, now inscribed in the rational principle: the irrational is not. Drastic negation of the human condition in which, in a first thought, there is precisely evil, the evil of being, and goods are constructed within the original evil of being, where good is simply the negation of evil. In a second thought, one can simply reject the whole terminology of "good" and "evil", though not in the direction of any consoling agnosticism ("The world is neither good nor evil"), but in the sense that suffering, in its triple determination (pain, discouragement, moral disqualification) is part of being and we have to suffer it, not under the metaphysical form of "evil", but in the physical and moral form of discomfort. It is worse than we thought: we suffer simply because of being, and not because being is "bad" in an adventitious and passing way. Thus, Kant provides the poison and the antidote (as do the totality of European philosophers; there was never a single thinker in those lands who had the courage to offer only the poison, not even the explosive Nietzsche). If humanity has always felt a hunger for the absolute and for salvation, this has to be seriously considered (this is true for the whole of the

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history of Western philosophy and, I believe, also of Eastern philosophy, in Kant and even in Heidegger, only a god can save us, even if it is in a radically new sense, a new god of which we know nothing). Theoretical reason only provides the conditioned, but tending towards the unconditioned is a law of the spirit and this must be taken seriously. We must therefore make a philosophy of the unconditioned, of spontaneous and absolute freedom. But what begins as only a demarcation, the establishment of a transcendental "place" for freedom, is gradually transformed into an absolute force that subdues the theoretical sphere and the dreaded nature, transforming them into an inessential and surmountable moment of the incessant work of the spirit. (A powerful philosophical mechanism, strongly immanent, not to overcome the Neoplatonic Scheme, but to preserve it in new bases and formulations). From Jacobi's first criticisms, it is about the search for something not purely relational, but substantive, the absolute itself, not something conditioned to something else, but the absolutely unconditioned. Freedom, in its rational-practical envelope, assumes in Kant an imperative of ought to be, of ideal, of utopia; but, little by little it is transformed into being, into what is, into the Hegelian effective: the absolute develops in human history and has never ceased to do so. The fundamental speculative principle is: "the thing must be constructed in the spirit in order to exist; outside the spirit, it exists merely in itself; only in the work of the spirit does it exist for itself". Thus, all natural evils (from the pain and gratuitousness of birth to the pain and gratuitousness of death, to the countless sufferings of human life) are only natural phenomena that have yet to be re-signified by the immemorial work of the spirit, in order to really exist in a human way. This is the new and powerful consoling mechanism: nature, with all its annoyances and aggressions, is not for itself, it is an inert and given being whose significance must still be discovered by the spirit. (No previous affirmativism had dared to say so much, despite the obvious Platonic and neo-Platonic sources of all these ideas, which monotonously recur throughout the entire history of European philosophy). To close this door of the paroxysm of freedom (which is not satisfied with a mere transcendental "topos," as in Kant, but which, once freed, tends to invade the whole territory of human thought), one would have to radicalize the first Critique and say that there is no "thing-initself" and that nothing should be said about it, for whatever is said about the thing-in-itself will be meaningless. (Schopenhauer always regretted that Kant had not died at once after finishing the first Critique.) ) German idealism would insist that all this is a kind of

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of spiritual work like any other: despair in the face of emptiness, conforming to what is given by science, this is also one figure of the spirit among others in its difficult transit towards itself. To suppress the thing in itself in a positivist way was a way of avoiding its idealist suppression through the infinite power of romantic freedom, but without being able to avoid that the positivist maneuver itself could be seen as a certain vicissitude of the spirit. (It is difficult to escape from the idealist spider's web; it, in its own way, is impeccable. It would be necessary to show that there is something that does not allow itself to be spiritualized, that does not allow itself to be absorbed by the work of the spirit; this is, for me, natu-mortality (See part 1 of this essay). All spiritual works are reactions to it; they never overcome it, they only use it to build paradises and castles). Fichte's mature idea (already at an advanced stage of the "Kant event") is that freedom is the original, so that as long as one continues to conceive of the thing-in-itself as objective or theoretical, as in Maimonides, the skeptic will win. It must be openly admitted that the thing-in-itself exists as another construction of the spirit and not as the absolute and unilateral limit that Kant had tried to establish. In reality, the world is exactly as it is NOT meant to be, so that it is infinitely conducive to the tireless work of the spirit. Instead of complaining about the evils of the world, it is better to set the spirit in perpetual operation to make the world exist as spirit; this is an infinite and obligatory task; it is already known that, if the world is only described, it will appear in its natural being-given-in-itself, that is, in its inessential moment; the world has to be integrally constructed in, by and for the spirit. This, in my perspective, is the fullest concession of the worthlessness of being: the world is so bad that the spirit has to reconstruct it integrally. To turn it for-itself is what I call "intra-worldly invention of values". The given being is substituted by a created being. God is absolved in this scheme, for God is life and not mere being, and a life requires development: what God has created is only the starting point for an infinite process of spiritual construction, a process at the end of which will really be the world, which could not be given but obtained by the incessant work of the spirit: human history coincides with God's own history. Evil" is an inevitable part of this process of obtaining being-for-itself by the untiring work of the spirit (transcendentalized and dialectized Neoplatonism). Fichte and Schelling have two different ways of suppressing nature (the great enemy!). This was even the reason for the rupture between the two, without either of them being able to see that they were trying to do exactly the same thing. (I believe that for this they were trying to do the same thing.

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needed a historical perspective which they could not have, but also that meta-philosophical talent which, in general, European philosophers, even the "greatest" ones, have totally lacked). Schelling constructed a "philosophy of nature" in which nature had its own spiritual principles, an inner life principle, a life that met or converged with the series of the spirit, while Fichte denied all that to nature. But from today's perspective, we do not see a gulf of difference between refusing nature any spirit of its own (Fichte) and attributing one to it (Schelling), being that in both nature is spiritualized; whether this spiritualization is nature's own or part of a great universal spirit, is a difference that today we see as purely technical. (I know that the "specialists in German idealism" will disagree). I think that all this is constructed on the plane of logical legitimization (here we can be idealists, solipsists or skeptics), but not on that of the physical being: there is the natumortality, that is, the nature that is born and destroys us. This is why the work of the spirit is put to work, or, better, against this. All this work, with all its dimension of necessity, is built on and against a previous terminal base that, at the same time, threatens and stimulates. The spirit spirals and can pick up, on the plane of legitimation, what was previously given to it; but this spiraling of the spirit does not remove natu-mortality, but confirms it by opposition. Plotinus thinks the highest and retires to a farm, full of sores and deaf. Hegel thinks the highest and dies of anger. Kierkegaard thinks the highest, faints in the street and dies in the hospital. The natu-mortality follows its inexorable path through all the "infinite work of the spirit". The natu-mortality is "surpassed" within the spiral of the spirit, but the spirit is constantly surpassed in the inexorable line of the natu-mortality. It is the supposedly "surpassed" natumortality itself that returns to take revenge on its presumed surpasser by eliminating it. Possibly the German idealist text that best shows the retention of the Scheme in this period is Schelling's essay On the Essence of Human Freedom, which was the subject of an essay by Heidegger ("Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom," a course given in 1936 in Freiburg). Schelling retains in his own way the steps of the Scheme seen above, but approaches them in an original and sophisticated way, rejecting some of its components (especially the thesis of the purely privative character of "evil"), and modifying the 17th century theodicy schema within the "very new philosophy" and, of course, giving a different idea of freedom. Here we see how German idealism insufflated in the

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Neoplatonic scheme a new force. To conclude this long historical speculation, let us look at its main elements. The original idea is that God is in becoming, and that the world is not his contingent option (as in Leibniz) but the historical and necessary development of his own being-foritself. That is to say: there never existed a moment in which God would have been in front of many possible worlds, still not totally decided to create a world, and finally deciding to create "the best possible one". God has to manifest himself as life of the absolute and in his manifestation he allows evil because he has to create something that is not him (that is not perfect) in order to manifest himself, not by free will or by geometrical-logical decision. If God were to create a perfect world, it would remain hidden behind him, it would not manifest itself. But evil is only part of that manifestation. In the full divine development, evil must disappear. Thus, the world is not good, but it will be!!! In other words, German idealism (and Schelling and Hegel in particular) introduce temporality into the Scheme; and this is the ultimate maneuver to keep it alive: to temporalize metaphysics! (As Heidegger will note some time later: temporalized metaphysics remains metaphysics. It is dynamic metaphysics, metaphysics in movement, but metaphysics). It must be conceded, then, that the world is far from perfect, but since it is in becoming (not as in Spinoza's static metaphysics), its perfection is too; one must wait patiently for the final stages of the work of the spirit. God is in becoming and perfection is at the end (the consoling twists and turns of affirmativism!). Here, then, the two central problems of the traditional timeless theodicy are solved: (a) How does a good God permit evil? (b) Why did God not refrain from creating a world that, even though it was the best possible, could be very bad (as ours is)? The answer to the second question is: because God needs to manifest himself in order to be; the world is part of his making; there can be no God prior to the world. God must appear. The answer to the first question is: evil is an internal necessity of the divine life, of its manifestation, because total good would not allow God to manifest Himself. Only in an evil world can He reveal Himself! Evil comes from revelation itself and not from anything ulterior. (This is, most likely, heretical). Therefore, evil has positivity, it is not pure deprivation. Evil is a kind of weakening of the human-divine vitality, a primitive background limitation of nature in its effort to spiritualize itself. That is why, for Shelling, the finite is not itself evil.

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Evil is the pain caused by a spirit that is trying to manifest itself, both divine and human, and they tend to converge. If the spirit were content to be natural and did not aspire to be spirit, evil would not exist. Evil is a product of the effort to overcome itself. It is the elevation to spirit that causes suffering; abandoning ourselves to the animal, there would be neither suffering nor evil, there would be only sensible life. (This is why Schelling disputes the Kantian idea that evil resides in sensibility, in which case it would not be a moral phenomenon, but a fact of nature. Evil must arise from a relation to sensibility, precisely that of trying to overcome it). Here we have a kind of temporal holism, as in Leibniz we had a spatial holism: in the latter, the evils of the world were explained within a larger space; in idealism, the evils of the world are explained within a larger temporality. The world is, indeed, evil, for it has yet to find its perfection. Following the primordial speculative principle, the world has yet to obtain its para-if. By transforming God into life (romantic motif), everything is solved, since life is fundamentally production, reproduction, manifestation, development. But if God is life, then he has to die! He has to be a mortal god. He has to develop, reach his apex and pass away. One could say, in a negative register, that the world is the death of God (and, perhaps, his suicide). What is important in Schelling's reflection is that "evil," while remaining in a metaphysical register, is not the product of a moral novel (the fall, sin, etc.) but becomes co-originary with creation itself, it comes together with being, with the being of the world and with the being of God. Evil" is the inevitable friction of life that reveals itself as life. Here vital necessity is introduced into the static Neoplatonic scheme. As can be seen, these new reanimating injections of the Neoplatonic Schema are difficult to deny if one accepts the primordial axiom: there is God. At the end of his essay On the Essence of Human Freedom, Schelling writes: "The question why God, who necessarily foresaw that evil would follow from self-revelation, at least concomitantly, insisted on revealing himself in some way, does not in fact deserve to be replied to; for that would be equivalent to expressing that in order that nothing should be opposed to love, it was preferable that love should not exist, that is, that the absolutely positive should be sacrificed to that which possesses existence only in the form of contrast, the eternal to the merely temporal (....) If, therefore, God had not revealed himself because of evil, the latter would have triumphed over good and love. (...) We have already shown (...) why God did not reject or suppress the will of the foundation. That would be equivalent to God

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suppress the reason for its existence, i.e., its own personality. Consequently, in order for the If evil did not exist, God himself should not exist". This shows how Schelling thought to the end, bringing the Scheme to its culmination (of greatness or of absurdity, depending on the perspective we assume). But he, in any case, as a man of his time, does not manage to confront, with his Christian spirit, the idea that nothingness could be morally better than being (an idea which, to this day, is not understood, not even examined, and which constitutes one of the crucial points of my thought). But he does see clearly that if we were to accept this, that nothingness can be morally better than being, then not only should we say that it would be better if the world did not exist, but we should also accept that it would be better if God did not exist. For in linking world with God, nothing can be said of the one without also being said of the other. But this is precisely what I want to argue here: that it would be morally better for the world not to exist, and that if God was involved in the creation of the world by insisting on revealing himself in it, then it would be morally better for God not to exist. Schelling sees this as a triumph of evil over good because his affirmative spirit still somehow sees evil as nothingness and good as being. But there being neither world nor God there is no moral principle to be affected, and, on the contrary, given the inevitable presence of evil in revelation, the non-existence of the world and God could show strict compliance with moral principles. I believe that the negative register is preferable to the affirmative exactly on the same ground on which the affirmative pretended, throughout the history of European thought, to assert its primacy.

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SUMMARY OF MY PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM

0. Introduction. A young Spanish student, many years ago, said, at a meeting in Madrid, in the house of Santiago Noriega, that for someone to be considered a philosopher he had to have his own system. On the other hand, a German philosopher whose word is enormously respected at the beginning of this millennium, declared that the time of systems has passed. I want to accept, in the following exposition, both the anonymous word of the young Spanish student and the consecrated word of the great German philosopher, but giving the former a subtle primacy, accepting the idea that a philosopher, to be considered such, must have his own system and that he can write it in the midst of the "end of systems". The German philosopher is not disavowed, then, in his statement that we are living in the era of the end of systems. It is only said, from South America, and specifically from Brasilia (the eventual and episodic place from which this philosopher from Córdoba, Argentina, writes this memoir), that a South American philosopher can perfectly well set himself the requirement of writing a system in the midst of the "end of systems" era, accepting that the era of systems is over, as if the era of the "end of systems" decreed by hegemonic philosophizing were the most appropriate atmosphere to build a philosophical system from the periphery of the world. To philosophize from South America should be, among other things, to take advantage of our immense reflexive freedom, that which allows us to ignore European agendas - or to take them ironically into account - and to philosophize as we feel and think best. This "free thinking" may include pieces of European agendas, but it may also allow us to do pre-critical philosophy after Kant, philosophies of consciousness after the linguistic turn, to defend private languages after Wittgenstein, or to do, after Heidegger, a metaphysics that forgets Being without remorse. We have absolutely no commitment to these agendas, which allows us, among other things, to follow them religiously if we so wish. The present text is a succinct exposition of my own system of ideas, in part already prefigured in the present Essay. This system is a metaphysics in the traditional sense, one of those metaphysics that European philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century say can no longer be done. It is, in truth, a universe of ideas, of my own universe, with

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its terms and categories. I am aware that each time I present my philosophy I modify it in many aspects, even though the essentials remain the same. In any case, here I present for the first time the total system of my thought, bringing together ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, while in previous texts only isolated aspects of it were exposed, outside the system, or, as in the case of "Diario de um filósofo no Brasil" (2010), within the context of other issues (such as the situation of philosophical activities in Latin America). My philosophy is, basically, a philosophy about the human situation, as I prefer to call it (instead of "human condition"). This situation is also a "human uncondition"; for our situation, in my thought, appears originally more as a kind of non-condition, or of a being "without conditions", of a situation that strongly stimulates to desist, to desert, to do nothing. My philosophical system starts from this "lack of conditions", although later, in its development, it is transformed into an ethics, a philosophy of logic and a philosophy of language, in the way I will explain later. It is as if the advanced parts of the system were giving meaning to the first ones, clearly deprived or helpless, as if at the beginning of thinking we had no right to put more thoughts into the world. My system is, then, the fruit of disobedience and insistence, since a South American is not supposed to think, but only to study and repeat carefully and without errors the systems of European philosophers. This initial situation of submission and helplessness fatally transforms peripheral reflection into meta-philosophical. By being rejected, or, better, by not even being expected, by having to make its way in insurgency, my philosophy is also, and in an essential way, a meta-philosophy, a reflection on philosophizing, and in particular on a philosophizing prevented from developing. That is why my metaphysics is also a meta-philosophy. As in the traditional metaphysical systems prior to Hegel and German idealism (and we will see, little by little, that my system of philosophy is a traditional metaphysical system, but, at the same time, a peripheral insurgent system, precisely at the antipodes of a German idealist system), the starting point of my system cannot be any arbitrary point, but must necessarily start from a certain primordial situation. Although written in the second half of the twentieth century, the present system does not follow the spirit and dynamics of the philosophies of that time, according to which there is nothing absolutely "given", there being only narratives,

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constructions, establishments and "registers of truth". I accept that the vast majority of our thoughts are constructive and perspectival, but that there is a minimal point of reference, precisely the human situation (or uncondition), which gives impetus to all systems. I consider my work to be composed, basically, of a negative ontology and ethics, and then of a fully constructive philosophy of logic and language. Ethics and logic maintain complex relations which, no doubt, I will not succeed in explaining satisfactorily here; I hope that the reader will learn something from this expository impossibility. Let us see, then.

4.1. The terminal starting point. When we begin to philosophize, it seems that we already "encounter" the world as if we were running over it, or as if it were running over us, although philosophers have tended to see the world as an "object of knowledge", as if instead of being immersed in it we had it "in front of us". Traditionally, the world has appeared to systems, in the first place, as a set of "problems" that it poses and that we should "solve". This impulse to see the world as a challenge to our cognitive faculties, as something to be grasped or apprehended, is recurrent and irresistible. A number of things appear in our vision and a good number of philosophies have been the attempt to "explain' those things in the sense of elucidating how they appear to us, whether they are really as they appear, what their essence is, what is the relation of our mind to them, and so on. Another series of philosophies have realized that this vision presupposed a grasping "subject" and have begun to study how this subject can function in its cognitive enterprise of the world, how the world is given to a consciousness. But one should think why we are so tyrannically led to think this way; why philosophy has seen itself as a form of knowledge to be compared with other forms such as science, art and even religion (saying things like "philosophy is knowledge by concepts, while science is conceptual and experimental knowledge", or "Art is not knowledge at all, but only a display of images", or "Philosophy elucidates the world by arguments and not by Revelation"). Then the question arises as to what kind of knowledge philosophy is, whether it is better or worse knowledge than science, etc. But already since childhood (and philosophy should remember that childhood), at the same time that

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We feel cognitive curiosity about things, we also feel a kind of distress, worry, discomfort, anxiety and disappointment in our first contacts with the world. But the child is already being taught, very early on, that in order to know the world adequately, he must put aside these afflictions as irrelevant affective accompaniments. He must learn to overcome his worry, anxiety and disappointment in order to see the world correctly. At no time is it suggested to him that the affliction he feels also comes from the world, or is something the world deserves, and that interest in the world should take the affliction into account, instead of considering it as a subjective and banal accompaniment that need not be attended to. The child is taught that the world is, in the first place, an object of exploration, the knowledge of which will satisfy our curiosity and diminish our uncertainty; he is not allowed to think that the world is, in the first place, our affliction, and that by exploring what afflicts us we would have a denser access to the world than by considering it only as an "object" of our representations. The child resists accepting that representations are what the world deserves best. He does not understand why representing the world is what will best show its innermost nature. Perhaps the world is something that manifests itself in t h e cracks of representations, precisely in those wounds of the world that motivate our early afflictions. The child, as a small pre-professional philosopher, resists renouncing his melancholy, not because he does not find it interesting to know the world, but because he cannot understand this knowledge without the melancholy that the world produces in him. The child philosopher thus has the impression that afflictions bring us into contact with the most original starting point of inquiry about the world. And when he grows up and studies the many philosophical systems that are out there, he suspects that although they are very important and worthy of study, they, insofar as they are guided by representations, do not consider the afflictive starting point that provokes the discomfort; and that is why those representations do not seem sufficiently basic to him. Nor can he explain why that which "affects" him seems to him more basic than that which produces a merely cognitive questioning. Perhaps in no sense acceptable to others is he capable of demonstrating such a thing. The origins he claims for his poor thoughts are purely animal and animals do not argue. When he studies philosophy, it seems to this ex-child that philosophical systems systematically hide their moments of affliction, precisely those with an animal basis. As if all the starting points invented by philosophers were something to be

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makes with that primordial affection, a spiritual elaboration of the animal, but not it, the affection itself. Certain privileged representations are constructed by philosophers as presumed starting points of their systems, but already from the very system that contains them, as if cutting from within the system those animal roots. To understand their starting points, it is already necessary to have entered their philosophies, to see the starting points from the philosophies that assume them, but without there being anything in them themselves that convinces us that they are genuine starting points and not presuppositions constructed a posteriori from the systems that claim to start from those presuppositions. What is at issue, for the authentic philosopher who ceased to be a child but who maintains his same cruel curiosity and obsessive insistence, is to find a starting point that does not demand that, that does not ask us to assume any philosophical system, not even the system itself, something that can be presented as the starting point without further ado. And this starting point should be (to use the jargon of philosophers) neither "objective" (the things that appear before us), nor "subjective" (the self or subject or consciousness that gives itself a world), but that which would be prior to the objective and the subjective in a radical and non-philosophical sense, that in which the subjective and the objective take hold as such. It may seem paradoxical or strange to ask that the starting point of philosophizing be nonphilosophical, but this is absolutely fundamental, if we understand that what the philosopher has to explain is not the world of philosophers but the world as such, the world without further ado, that which afflicts us all, philosophers or not. The philosophies that come to us from Europe, on the contrary, have constructed their own points of departure, they have made their past from their present, their animal affection from a superior and absolute spirit, which is subtle and interesting, but also tricky: to construct a point of departure seems to deny the very notion of "point of departure". This need not necessarily be so in any and every system, not every point of departure must go back to the philosophy of which it is the point of departure, not every point of departure must be sucked into its philosophy. A genuine starting point must really be something given to any given philosophy. A constructed starting point is not a genuine starting point. The loss of the starting point has been caused, in part at least, by the belief in that the "world" appears to us as an "object of knowledge", and that the "I" appears to us as an "object of knowledge", and that the "I" appears to us as an "object of knowledge".

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appears as the "subject" of that knowledge. And that everything we suffer while we are inaugurating those views must be set aside as cognitively irrelevant. But knowledge is something that we act, that we operate, that we construct, that we actively and dominantly do. The true starting point, the radical starting point, cannot be of this kind. It has to be something that grabs us, that snatches us, maniates us, subdues us, absorbs us, overcomes us, subjugates us, that makes us passive, that does not let us assume our usual attitude of active domination, typical of the cognitive attitude. The starting point must not be that of which we are subjects, not even that of which we are objects, but that which we do not control, because it gets us out of control, that which overwhelms us. A true starting point has to be that which we are without wanting to be, without having planned, agreed or accepted it, something that overwhelms and paralyzes us, that places us in our places as objects or subjects without our intervention. That convinces us, even, that whatever we come to think is inessential as far as the radical impulse that led us to think it is concerned. This confused and dismayed situation, perhaps, I would even say, humiliating, is the one that can put us on the path to the true starting point. In the twentieth century there has already been a philosophical attempt to find this absolute starting point prior to subject and object, although this attempt has managed not to put things in those terms (in terms of "absolute starting point"), because it is, according to it, a "metaphysical" way of approaching it (a way of philosophizing that, as I said in the Introduction, I assume here fully and without problems). This attempt is the ontologicalexistential analysis of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Ec-sistence is presented as a dimension with respect to which all cognitive enterprise would be derived. Dasein7

is a structure, for now embodied in humans, that takes care of itself, that makes itself, that

is in the world and that is towards death, and the knowledge of the world, set as primary by the whole history of the previous European philosophy, is now transformed only into an unfolding of existential structures of Dasein. Taking care of itself, the human existent, among other things, knows, but knowing is neither the culmination nor the center of its existence. But ec-sistence cannot be an absolute point of departure, and not for the reason that European and South American Heideggerians adduce (that the notion of "absolute point of departure" is metaphysical and, therefore, Dasein cannot translate it because Dasein is a postmetaphysical structure). Any philosopher who sets out to think inevitably proposes, sooner or later or later, that 7

See note 2.

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(Heidegger has that irritating way of philosophizing with which he pretends to differentiate himself from everything that has been said before him; he does not want to be anything, to resemble anything, to be compared to anything; he wants to be beyond phenomenology, beyond analysis, beyond hermeneutics and even beyond the philosophy of existence). But, in spite of this, meta-philosophically speaking, in order to consider ec-sistence as an absolute and ultimate referential point of departure, it is already necessary to have entered Heidegger's philosophy and to observe this point of departure from within (that is, in order to accept ec-sistence as an absolute point of departure, one must first have accepted the philosophy of ec-sistence), and this is the proof, the true proof, that it is not a genuine point of departure. It is necessary to find a starting point that is not constructed from any philosophy (not even from mine, and especially not from mine), and ec-sistence does not meet this requirement. They are starting points recognizable only from the end, which means that the true and never said starting points are within the philosophy in question, and not in the place of the starting point. For the German philosopher Hegel, the starting point could be, without any problem, anything, because, as a philosopher of the spirit, he held that, wherever the beginning of philosophizing was placed, the work of the spirit would circularly find it again within the developed system. This presupposes that we can distinguish between "beginning" and "point of departure": the beginning is contingent, arbitrary and inessential and can be anything; the point of departure is systematic and must be found in the living movement of thought. For Hegel, then, not only is it perfectly legitimate to find the starting point within the system, but that is exactly what has to happen for the starting point to really be a starting point for the spirit. It is to this, to this trait so typical of European philosophies (which finds its paroxysm in German idealism) that I am fiercely opposed on the basis of my insurgent and peripheral Latin American philosophy. Although I let myself be seduced (like everyone else) by these ideas of Hegel, and I am very moved when I read them (the heroic journey of the spirit searching for itself and reconciling itself in the end always brings tears to my eyes), I have to make an effort to get rid of them when they take me away from what I want to say. For Hegel holds the attitude to which I want to oppose head-on: that the real is what the spirit constructs, that the real is never given but is the result of a spiritual work that transforms into para-itself what is merely in-itself. But it is this in-itself that I want to find, an in-itself that I want to find, an in-itself that I want to find.

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in-itself resistant to any work of the spirit, a hard in-itself in which any spiritualistic enterprise is sovereignly broken. If there is this hard in-itself, as I believe there is, the distinction between beginning and starting point has to disappear, because it will be this hard in-itself that will have to assume the two roles. What I discovered after reading many philosophical systems is that the ultimate purpose of this strategy of constructing an absolute starting point from the system itself (which, strictly speaking, denies it as a starting point), is to deny, reject or refuse to see that hard initself whose enormous force and ultimate meaning can destroy any human life and any philosophical system at a stroke. In truth, European philosophies have been running away from their true starting point and inventing an intra-systematic starting point with which they could help themselves to endure the rigors of the true starting point, always postponed. Heideggerian ontological-existential analysis conceives ec-sistence as a way of doing one's own being in the care of things and others and being towards death. With this, Dasein gets the enterprise of ec-sistence to be seen as its own task, over which it has some control and management, even if it is that of a half-eastern "abandoning itself" to what is, to the very movement of being. (This reaches paroxysm in works such as Beiträge zur Philosophie). Being toward death is a way of bringing death into the domain of Dasein, transforming death into possibility more proper, part of the careful task of "becoming-itself". Even if it is not cognitive, this attitude is still one of mastery (even if it is a mastery "left" in the letting go, Gelassenheit), that is, it can be part of a program of life, of a doing, or of a letting go of doing, of walking through the world according to a diffuse but path-opening guide. Ec-being seems as ontologically "excessive" a task as knowing (in the previous philosophical tradition), and that excess (that ontological luxury) is what points to something else more primitive, more original in relation to which ec-being and knowing would be nothing but unfolding, always necessarily "excessive". For constructions are always "going beyond," placing dispensable embellishments and adornments on what is truly the point of departure and ultimate referential, constantly avoided, as if the encounter with the point of departure were traumatic and always postponed, an encounter for which we are never sufficiently prepared, an appointment for which we are always late and unpunctual.

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Then, the ontological-existential analysis has transformed the being that we have to be into choice (and even into "freedom"), anxiety and disappointment into care and healing, and death into being towards death, with which the ec-sistential mattress is ready to prevent us from hurting ourselves with the rough edges of the true starting point, which is now far enough away to, once again, not be perceived or feared. Ec-sistence is not, then, that which first wrests the human from its place of mastery and control, even if it has left, in the analysis of ec-sistence, the cognitive plane as pretending to be the central plane. The absolute starting point must be that which compels the human being to ec-sist and to know, that which drives him compulsively to do those things, to try to appropriate something that has already been appropriated by him. It is necessary to try to discover and formulate what it is that which has always grabbed the human being and forced him to throw himself into ec-existence and knowledge, that something from which and in which he does everything he does and is forced to do everything he does (even to eliminate himself, that is, to refuse to continue ec-existing and knowing). The genuine starting point has to be something extra-philosophical and extrasystematic, it has to be - against the spirit of the twentieth century - something given, something that cannot be merely "deduced" from the content of a particular philosophy (not even mine, and especially not mine), and it has to be something that the affirmative movement of thinking and living, in the senses already alluded to in the preceding parts of this essay, rejects. I call this point of departure terminality, and as it is posited on ontological ground, I speak of the terminality of being, of the being of entities, which - as was already seen in Part 1 - do not end by the fact that entities are this or that type of entity, with such and such characteristics, but by the simple fact of being, that they are, that they are entities, that they are there, that they have arisen terminally, that their being has always begun to end. Contrary to the recurrent European neo-platonic scheme (see Part 3), God is not he who truly is, the Supra-being or being par excellence, but, on t h e c o n t r a r y , he who, because he does not terminate, is not and cannot be. (Being is not opposed to non-being, but to supra-being). Terminality is not a stigma of mere entities in the face of a presumed and supreme eternity of Being, as in affirmative metaphysics; rather, entities are terminal in their being. Entities are terminal, meaning: they terminate by being, and not by being what they specifically are. Entities areterminating, are-not-being. What is terminal is the very being of entities, that entities are. Entities cannot be unless they are ending, terminating.

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This is not a metaphysics of compensation or of arrangement but a metaphysics of what is going on around us. It is not a consoling metaphysics, but, on the contrary, a deeply discouraging one; and discouragement can be a symptom of its truth. It is not a metaphysics that tries to "overcome" what happens, like European spiritualist metaphysics, but a metaphysics of what happens against our will and in spite of our rage and impotence. When a human sets out to philosophize, whatever philosophy he does, be it a spiritualist, materialist, existentialist, Marxist, Christian or atheist philosophy, he constructs it within the terminality of his being and within the terminality of being, which makes it, inevitably, a certain attitude to (or a certain handling of) that terminality. The terminality of being is not, then, the arbitrary beginning of philosophizing, but the ground from which and toward which one philosophizes. And this is not the result of my philosophical system, of that system I am expounding, since this system already presupposes it, already presupposes that primordial ground without which neither my system nor any other system could be thought. In general, systems construct that which is capable of sustaining, of consolidating, of affirming. No system (not even mine, and especially not mine) constructs that which destroys it. That which finalizes a system was already on the ground on which the system was built, a ground on which the system began to end from its inception. The terminality of being is not something abstract. It is given in unfoldings. The first terminality to which I have access is my own, that of my own being, that of my particular individual, the terminality of Julio Cabrera, half Argentine, half Brazilian, born in the midtwentieth century and dead at the beginning of the twenty-first century, author of the "Project of Negative Ethics", 1989, and professor of philosophy at the University of Brasilia. In the very first place, I see myself, Julio Cabrera, as a being who is going to end, whatever I do, whatever I think, whatever I write, whatever the content of my life and my philosophy. In the shudder of thinking this I see that I have made contact with the true starting point, stronger than any elaborate spiritual effort. (Perhaps because the South American spirit is "loose" and, as they say, "without speculative flight"). This is a radical fact that overwhelms me, that grabs me and does not let go, it is not something I build. But this unfolding is complex: I do not only know that I am going to end in "some very distant day" but that I can end at any moment, tomorrow, tonight, an hour from now or right now. The ending of my terminal being can come to me at absolutely any time, regardless of what I am, do, say or think, whether I am Buddhist or

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atheist, vegetarian or carnivore, criminal or professor, real estate agent or priest, empiricist or transcendental philosopher, conservative or revolutionary. And the terminality of my being is not a distant end, or a golden brooch after a long road, but the end always imminent, lurking and present, but not even close, just that, imminent. But I also see that the end does not affect me as Julio Cabrera exclusively, not even as a human being in general, but as a being in itself, as a being without more; that the terminality does not characterize me only individually, but affects me as one absolutely anyone among many others, regardless of my properties or virtues, not even as any human being, but as any being. The "quality" of being is its terminality. It is not something linked to my exclusive singularity. In addition to its certainty, its imminence and its generality, I see that the terminality of being manifests itself daily as wasting, decaying, waning, disengagement, weakening; my being is a constant and daily ending. I realize, moreover, that I end (in a certain, imminent, general and daily way) because I have arisen, because I have appeared in the world, because I have received being, and not because of any other additional characteristic or predicate. I perceive then that all the characteristics of terminality are transferred, in one way or another, from birth forward: the certainty of ending comes from the certainty of having arisen. The end comes regardless of who it is that came into being. And the end is constant because birth marked a moment of regressive beginning from which, day by day, my waning is counted. Everything we know about the term we know from the terminal emergence itself. Therefore, not only human individuals (I and others, I among others, as simply one more) end, but also groups, peoples, empires, communities, churches, human relations, pacts, contracts, conventions, agreements, conventions, subsidies, associations, warlike or pious. Empires and churches can last for centuries but, having arisen, they have already begun to end. Animals and plants also come to an end and so do the elements of the inanimate world; I perceive that all things have their end even if their endings are not a living "dying". Volcanoes, forests, stars and galaxies can and do end. "Dying" is a specific form of ending and metaphysically no more important or essential than the others. All these things, human or non-human, end for the most diverse reasons and motives, but seen metaphysically, the very first condition of their endings is the brute fact

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of having arisen, of being there to last for some time (a few seconds or millions of years) and then to end. Stars and insects are bound by their terminality and there are no important ontological differences between them. The ending is not a contingent emergency, a vicissitude, an avatar, but the consummation itself of the making of their being, of the making of being. All beings thus appear to be marked by completion, by the brute and radical fact that everything that arises walks towards its end, and that what we call its "life" or its duration is nothing more nor less than that walk. The terminality of the being follows a cycle and its peak is an undefined point. The cycle can be exhausted in one day or take 50 years, or centuries or millions of years, according to the particular terminal structure of each being. But there is a point from which it is only possible to crumble. There begins the fall that can be felt and seen, the only one that most people recognize, since the rest of the terminality is subtle, acts in silence and slowly. Old age is a palpable fall, but one must have philosophical eyes to perceive the fall of birth, and even more so to see that this is the same fall present in old age, seen at different times. Old is that which has been born, even that which has just been born. The rise of a terminal being may be marked by a great euphoria, but it is as if standing at the apex of the point from which the collapse will occur (the famous "moment of glory" of artists and athletes). It is an inextensive point because the usufruct of the terminal is always short and sudden, it is necessary to take advantage of it because it slips and slides, it is smooth and without traces. Most of the time the being is crumbling. Any euphoria is a defect of temporary module. Just as we do not perceive the movement of the Earth or the expansion of the universe or the evolution of species, there are few crumblings that are directly graspable with the eyes. If phenomenology is the system of what appears insofar as it appears, there is no phenomenology of the inextensive point of the terminality of being. Nature," devoid of its mythical and religious interpretation (from the Ionians to Schelling, within European philosophy), is simply the coming into being in completion. That is why I have coined the term "mortaleza" to refer specifically to the moment of passing away, and "natu-mortaleza" to refer to both moments. Nature is source and tomb, emergence and submergence, birth and dejection, evolution and involution, and both inextricably and inseparably. Natu-mortality is that which, by emerging, kills (the sinister mother who kills her own children), which, by placing in the being, wears out, corrupts and expels. It is opening and closing, fullness and waning.

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Heidegger once told Ortega y Gasset that he envied the Spanish (also Portuguese) difference between ser and estar. In German, the official language of philosophy, this difference is not pronounced, since "Sein" means both. Let us think then in South American. Terminality is terminality of being, not of mere being. Entities end not as shelves, but as entities that are. They are not there to end, the ending is not simply there, but is, independently of being and non-being. Entities do not end by being this way or that way, here or there, this way or that way, but by the radical fact that their beingnesses are being, which means ending, finishing, consummating (at different speeds) their most intimate and foreseeable ending. Being can refer to being thrown contingently and gratuitously, to being in facticity. But terminality is more radical than facticity, for what is there thrown there in a gratuitous, contingent and absurd way marches towards its end by simply being: it is a terminal facticity, eaten away by terminality; whatever sense the various human beingnesses want to give to the contingent and gratuitous absurdity of simply being will always be a terminal construction. (This is what must be added and opposed to the ontological-existential approach: a frictional, uncomfortable, aggressive and destructive facticity, and not just a gratuitous and contingent framework. A facticity that hurts). The terminality of being achieves what ec-sistentiality did not achieve: to constitute an absolute starting point that does not allow itself to be absorbed by any system, not even by mine, and especially not by mine. For the absolute point of departure is not terminality because my system of philosophy is pessimistic, negative or nihilistic, since any system, pessimistic or optimistic, negative or affirmative, nihilistic or maximalist, is already built on the terminality of being and in reaction to it. It is something that goes beyond the pessimistic or optimistic, negative or affirmative, nihilistic or Christian character of philosophies, because all these philosophies are rooted in the terminality and are a posture before it, and are themselves terminal. The terminality of being is not an affirmation of my system (as will be, for example, the affirmations of negative ethics, of negative logic and of the logopathic theory of cinema, later on), but that which forces us, among other things, to make systems, any system, including mine. Finishing is not a metaphysical theory, but a perfectly physical phenomenon, such as humans, animals, plants, and things that end up in front of my

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eyes. This is not part of my philosophical system but merely its trivial starting point which it shares with all other systems. Philosophical systems need not, then, look for a starting point because it is already provided extra-philosophically. Philosophies can now occupy themselves with thinking what they are going to do with the starting point. In this perspective, philosophies are not something that is characterized by assuming the terminal starting point, because they will have to assume it anyway, but philosophies are something that is done by them with the terminal starting point. Every spiritual construction - no matter how "elevated" it pretends to be - is already affected by the terminality of being. This means: the system we build is a reaction against terminality, but, at the same time, it is a terminal construction itself. Systems that want to postpone terminality end up realizing it, since terminality is all there is (because it is the terminality of being itself and not just of shelves as shelves). The systems themselves are terminal, and not just their human sustainers. Hegel's philosophy is terminal, and not only Hegel. But also, it is clear, the human sustainer is terminal, in a way worth remembering. While the human thinks the most sublime his body is ruthlessly crumbling, independently of his thinking, which has no influence on the terminal "toward." The only thing that thought achieves is to build some sublime spiritual construction that never manages to have even the slightest influence on the terminal deterioration of the body that precariously supports it. My philosophy wants to start from the sphere where we fall ill and deteriorate. Any spiritual starting point is not illegitimate, but it is posterior (even if it is capable of inventing intrasystematically some spiritual "anteriority" where the truth of the body becomes secondary). My philosophy wants to start from that moment unthought of by most (if not all) European philosophers; philosophy for the last moments of life of Plotinus, Hegel and Kierkegaard. For their own philosophies do not serve to explain, understand and evaluate those last moments: the One has no sores, the Absolute Spirit does not die of anger, the Infinite does not faint in the street or die in hospitals. The genuine starting point of philosophizing, insofar as only the human philosophizes, is a "self", but not in the sense of a "knowing subject", but in the sense of a being who has a "suffering" body, the absolute starting point of his life and his philosophizing. The world is, initially, my suffering. (And here we re-encounter the affliction of the philosopher child of which

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we spoke of at the beginning). "To suffer" is not here the same as "to suffer", but refers to "to be liable to". It is the same as "suffer" only when that term is used in expressions such as "suffered the influence of So-and-so", in the sense that he received it, not necessarily with pain, although with some affective tone. So, I perceive myself as a "suffering" being in the sense that I suffer influences and pressures of various kinds. When we are very small and our representations of the world are still very incipient, we are already fully suffering beings. My South American and peripheral philosophy opposes the European tendency - from Plato to Heidegger - to forget this terminal root, refuses to sink its head into a philosophical representation within which terminality (and mortality in particular) is neutralized and appears as an entity among others, without special importance, and which always offers a good intra-systematic solution to the insoluble. A starting point is not just an initial thing, but a principle that permeates and infects all the rest. I believe that we South Americans never let ourselves be impressed by the majestic Kantian spiritual edifices. We are too hungry and sick for that. We don't want so much as to reach the sublime; we want simply to survive and understand what destroys us. (When I say "we, the South Americans", I am not alluding to anything national. I use this expression in the same way that Nietzsche says: "We, the Germans", weaving reflections that are obviously not only for Germans. Nor is what I say only for South Americans, but I do speak from my thinking situation, as Nietzsche spoke from his). The suffering of the terminality of being is not exhausted in observations of nonhuman nature. There are also specific observations of the human social world that are crucial. I see that humans around me enter into permanent conflicts against each other, and that this occurred at all times in history, independently of social and political organizations. These conflicts need not be motivated by great reasons, they can be triggered by any triviality, as if responding to a powerful vital-mortal impulse. The world of the poorest, in particular, is marked by lack and mutual struggle to obtain the basics; the world of delinquents is a continuous struggle without quarter; but also in the middle classes, the conflict is permanent, as it appears in schools and primary and secondary schools, public or private. (Schools

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are, above all, schools of the most elementary human inconsideration, as has already been shown in numerous literary and cinematographic works developed in a school environment). Something that surprises and interests the philosophical gaze is the fact that any human group (family, school, business, and even church groups, charity and "helping others"), is eaten away by terrible infighting for power, money and prestige. Even the philosophy departments themselves are like that too, where people fight for scholarships, for honors, for intellectual pedigree, for knowledge, for a vacancy in a competition, for a professorship. The "superior" human intelligence did not manage to put an end to conflicts but reconstructed them at the human level: the human brain did not put an end to war, war became cerebral (the intelligence of hackers, or the "democratic coups d'état" perfectly protected by law). I hope it is clear to the reader why I consider human conflicts to be part of the terminality of being, of natu-mortality, alongside diseases and earthquakes (and they are not separate: social and political maneuvers can leave other humans exposed to diseases and earthquakes). Human relationships are also, therefore, terminal, parts of the very completion of being. The ending is a permanent spur to conflict and struggle. Humans who meet and form societies are also falling, ending, humans whose endings touch, stimulate and disturb each other. Human relationships, like humans themselves, are nati-dead; relationships show, in fact, that same decadent dying. Associations are lived decadently in their dizzying "going down the drain," only in an indefinite postponement of precipitating. But humans use each other in and for that postponement, and that is the primary source of conflicts, which humans stubbornly attribute, in the first place, to immediate empirical, social or psychological reasons. (These reasons also exist, but they are not primitive). As negative anthropology has shown before (See Part 2 of this Essay), human relationships are fatally terminal. This does not only mean that they only last for a certain time, but that they begin to wear out as soon as they arise, that they carry in themselves the germ of their wearing out, which can occur, like any other death, at any moment, and not only "a long time from now". Human relationships wear out independently of their effective contents, which humans systematically blame for the breakdown of the relationship. But human relationships break down for internal reasons,

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They have to crumble, because the terminality overwhelms them from the inside and marks them regardless of their eventual contents. When a relationship begins, it is known that it will end, whatever its participants do. Every human relationship carries a countdown clock, like bombs. There is no human relationship that can withstand the wear and tear indefinitely even if they can postpone it in a thousand imaginative, inauthentic, bad faith, heroic or pathetic ways. Every human relationship is a resistance against the inevitable consummation of its terminality. If human relationships seem to last for years and years, or "forever", it is because one or both of its participants, by means of affection, interest, inertia or stubbornness, or all of them together, hold the ends of the relationship and carry it from one side to the other avoiding its fall. A "forever" human relationship is a powerful intramundane construct. A human relationship begins by ending, but it really ends when one of its members stops investing his existential capital in the relationship, because he has loosened his affection, his interest, his inertia or his stubbornness, or all of them; one begins to see clearly the lack of value of the other, a value that the other never had, a lack of value that the relationship, when it worked well, covered up. The demonization of the other begins, his moral burial, the exchange of reproaches and blame, without perceiving the immense cunning of terminality, how it played with us the eternal game of ending, exactly the game we never learn to play and for which we should be superbly prepared. (Terminal beings who do not know how to end: this is the human tragicomedy). As announced in the negative anthropology, the fundamental question is whether an ethics is still possible within this desolate panorama, whether there can be moral relations between terminal and dying beings. Here arises a problem very similar to the one Sartre faced in the years following the publication of "Being and Nothingness": how to build an ethics in a negative ontology? His problems came, in part, from the fact that Sartre wanted to build an affirmative ethics (with strong Marxist elements) within that negative ontology, but did not succeed. The book of ethics promised in the last pages of his 1943 book never came, and the later books left behind, at many points, the paralyzing results of the negative ontology. I argue that from a negative ontology can only coherently emerge a negative ethics, which I try to delineate here as the second moment of my philosophical system.

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4.2. Negative ethics Against the agnostic, it can be shown that the very being of human life is something very bad (or, rather, that it causes discomfort, to avoid metaphysical jargon), or is experienced as discomfort by a being such as the human being, not in terms of "bad" contents, but by virtue of its structural ontological terminality; so that the usual affirmative ethics will not succeed in providing the human being with an ethics adequate to the terminality of his being. It is necessary to provide him with a negative ethics, or else to go outside ethics. Negativizing ethics is the penultimate step before having to simply deny it. What has been developed so far is what could be called a negative ontology. It is a naturalized ontology, or, better, a natu-mortalized ontology. We now enter another stage in the exposition of my philosophical system, which tries to say what could be an ethics that responds to the negative, instead of simply hiding it and putting it off. Negative anthropology was like a bridge between ontology and ethics. Now the questions are: how to live with all that, and is it about living, is living an ethical imperative or just a natural impulse? And how natural (how natu-mortal) is this impulse?8 Ethics and Ontology Traditional ethics have asked: How should one live? That is: what is the best way to live a human life? Others have posed the fundamental ethical question by asking: How can we be happy? Or, at least: how can we achieve peace, well-being? Or: What are the conditions of a "good life"? They have also asked what it means to be "a good father", "a good mother". Well, these are not the first ethical questions for a negative ethics. These questions uncritically presuppose that living, wanting to continue living, wanting one's own happiness or well-being, wanting to give one's life, etc., are all acts that are compatible, in principle, with the ethical point of view, or that these are undoubtedly ethical undertakings. What negative ethics asks, in a critical register for the time being, is whether proposing all these enterprises is ethically legitimate, whether it is not that

On negative ethics I have already written and published a lot: the books Projeto de ética negativa (1989), Crítica de la moral afirmativa (1996. 2nd edition, 2014), Porque te amo no nacerás (2009) and Malestar y Moralidad (2018) and many, many articles, so anything I may put here i s inevitably self-plagiarism, autophagic erudition. 8

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By wanting to live, wanting to be happy, wanting to procreate, we no longer violate elementary ethical requirements (not great moral requirements, but the minimum of consideration for others). We speak here of demands and not only of desires (if they were simple natural desires, they would be neither ethical nor unethical, but mere impulses); for it could be just questions about how to live life in response to that desire, ethically or not. Not every question about how to live is an ethical question (even the criminal wonders how to live). One could simply be asking how inconsiderate of others I need to be in order to make my life viable, comfortable or fun. The question of how to live is not, therefore, monopolized by ethics. Not everyone who wonders about a "good life" wonders about a n ethically good life. In the affirmative tradition, one does not consider the possibility that, in order to continue living and trying to be happy, one has to practice ethically reprehensible actions (reprehensible in the same sense established by traditional ethics, that is, in the usual affirmative sense, and not in some suddenly introduced "negative" sense). So, it is not just any "good life", but an ethically good life. But what has been understood by "ethics" within the affirmative tradition? The ethical point of view has traditionally been understood as the kind of way of life that tends to one's own perfection, to rational happiness and to consideration for others (in a restricted sense, as in ancient ethics, or in a pretentiously more "universal" sense, in modern ethics). That is, the attempt to live a human life that is "good" for oneself and for others (understood narrowly or "universally") in a sense of rational and affective perfection, creating habits of consideration for oneself and for others. But perhaps it is foolhardy (and certainly doubtful) to suppose that by trying to live and to continue to live, and by trying to be happy (among other ways, by procreating), we will always keep ourselves within the task of our own ethical perfection and consideration for others. It could be the case that, trying to continue living, to be happy and to procreate, we have to be imperfect with ourselves and, above all, inconsiderate of others. Affirmative ethics have generally assumed that continuing to live and seeking happiness are not incompatible with the ethical principle of self-perfection and consideration. At most, they have seen as an "exception" the fact that sometimes we have to die or accept to live unhappily in the name of what is ethically "good" (in the case of heroism or martyrdom).

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Negative ethics, on the other hand, fully assumes the negative ontology that was presented earlier (in chapter 1 of this Essay, and at the beginning of this summary of my philosophy). And we want to know in what condition is that being of whom we demand an ethics, in the usual affirmative sense, as consideration for others and rational and affective selfimprovement. This has not been done by affirmative philosophy, which has always assumed, uncritically, that the being from whom an ethic is demanded was in a position to fulfill it, only considering eventual inconveniences of the context of action or "unfavorable circumstances". Now we know that this being of whom we demand that he be ethical (not only that he formulate an ethic, but that he live it) is a being affected by affliction (already from childhood, and especially in it), and not only a being of knowledge. He is a being always exceeded or torn by the terminality of being and of his being, regardless of what he does, says or is. This terminality is not for this being something abstract but what manifests itself daily in relationships, projects, enterprises, acts, in everything he tries to build and maintain, within a time that constantly slips through his fingers, surrounded by other humans (sometimes very dear ones) that grow old and die, sometimes in terrible ways and always in deprived ways; by projects and enterprises that, after a while, begin to weaken, by relationships that wear out day by day. It is a cadent being that manages cadences and has only offal to offer. His experience is that of the whole flow of life sliding rapidly and inexorably towards a foreseen and not even programmed end, that of an urgent attempt to build something in an unstable and fleeting space. That being of whom we ask for an ethic is a terminal being simply because he is, not because he has done this or that or failed to do something, or because he has made some mistake. His terminality is not a promise but a daily imminence; he gets used to "not thinking" (to dis-think) in order to be able to continue living with some calmness until something forces him to pay attention to what he rejects and denies. He lives in a suffering body that he himself is, and a great part of his time has to be dedicated to take care of the needs of that body, in personal hygiene, in health always at risk, in nutrition, exercises, rest, etc. It is a being of conflicts, not because of contingencies, but because it cannot avoid entering into endless struggles with other beings like itself (in addition to the multiple frictions with non-human animals and things). By the fact that they are always terminal cadent beings, their relations cannot but be one of mutual conflict, since they are suffering bodies falling and ending that are

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touch in their respective falls. They are beings self-absorbed in their tremendous preoccupation with their own suffering body; lacking beings, imprisoned in narrow spaces and with few opportunities, who dis-encounter with nature-mortality, forced to live in the same reactive concealment. This is basically the being we are asking to behave ethically. At a first glance, we realize that his ontological situation leads him to precisely the opposite: it seems impossible that a being who is so badly and so urgently preoccupied with himself, finds any space to consider others without dis-considering himself, finds any happiness that is not obtained at the cost of the unhappiness of others, or can procreate unless it is for his entire benefit (for his own joy and fulfillment, to fill an empty life or as a simple product of a foolish act). Ontology seems to lead to unethical, self-absorption, thoughtlessness and de-perfection, for there is neither time nor space to be virtuous with everyone in the midst of a situation that urgently asks us, to sustain ourselves and to sustain those in whom we sustain ourselves. In fact, this is what happens, this is the "ethics" that beings like humans manage to practice: a heroic survival that constantly tramples on the moral principles of consideration, not because humans are "bad", but simply because they pretend to be and continue to be. Ethics, in its usual affirmative register, has to be obtained by following the path of concealment; there can be no ethics that follows the form of the world. The concealment of terminality, indispensable to install an affirmative ethics in the world, always pays a price and brings to light the terminality that it was intended to conceal. When we help someone or are helped we cannot do so except within the self-absorbed care of our own terminal natu-mortality. We do not help with real dedication, and even when we seem to do so, it is always within self-absorbed care, within our own opacity, and perhaps leaving the other for whom I "sacrifice" wrapped in his own despair (my "gift" will have been a new burden for him). The termination encircles and disturbs, it does not leave in peace; there are many ways to avoid it or to divert it. We are not in an ontological condition to be totally disinterested in our terminal natu-mortalities. Our aids and assistances are always opaque. One of the things we can do to rid ourselves of our natu-mortality is to donate it "generously" to others. Total selfsacrifice (as in the example of the mother who "gives everything" for her children, according to the mystified image of our affirmative societies) is a wonderful way to

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(It is not the mother's merit to "give everything" to the children, since the children, at birth, have already given everything to her; indeed, they have been born for that purpose, to fill the mother's life totally, to give her a joy and an occupation that will free her from the burden of her own terminal existence). Generosity" is within self-absorption just as all works of the spirit are performed within nature. Any human action, being reactive and insurgent against the inexorable direction of naturemortality, will tend to dis-perfect us and, above all, to disregard others. In order to "live well" we may have to be dishonest and insensitive to some degree, the "happy life" may be based not on a kind of improving wisdom, but, on the contrary, on a kind of desensitizing ignorance (what is usually called "tanning for life", the "Hacéte duro, muchacho" of "Don Segundo Sombra", by Ricardo Güiraldes, Creole version of stoic insensitivity). The deep and structural divorce between life and morality - one of the crucial themes of a negative ethics - is seen even more clearly when the question of the "pursuit of happiness" is examined. Affirmative moral philosophers have racked their brains over the conditions of a "good life," or a "happy life." But the pursuit of a "happy life" (from Seneca to Schopenhauer) depends on (rational) "objectives," on affirmative goals that we cannot have, because of the inevitably reactive character of our lives to which natu-mortality condemns us. Because of the natu-mortal character of being and the inevitably reactive character of all human life, we cannot attain what would be a "happy life" to which we should incline ourselves as to a "goal", since this would be finished already in its pure project, and because it could not fail to harm others or, at least, to ignore them in their needs. In truth, people live fluidly the necessary fall of their projects of realizing their happiness or well-being. (And perhaps those who achieve their longed-for "happiness" do so on the basis of a gigantic moral insensitivity). Having money means being able to place protections between us and the terminality of our being, so that it does not hurt us too much. To run out of money in our societies is to be reduced to garbage in a few days (or rather, to run out of money will show the nothingness that we always were and that money concealed). The poor all over the world, who form, not by chance, the majority of the planet, lack this protection and suffer all the harshness of the terminality of being, in order to protect the powerful from it. The poor

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(domestics, drivers, secretaries) are forced to receive the burning rays of the terminality of being in their own charred bodies in order to protect those who pay their wages. The terrible violence of this world consists, among other things, in the fact that the poor have never been satisfied with this situation and are constantly peeping through the cracks and knocking on our windows, stalking our homes, surrounding us, from begging to armed robbery, threatening; all our bourgeois "happiness" is eaten away by the dark and understandable desires of those who try to "improve their lives" in any way, escaping from the terrifying rays of the terminality to which their misery exposes them. It takes a lot of insensitivity to live with that, an insensitivity that humans hide in the fluidity of indifferent daily life. If we were to take radically seriously the moral principle of consideration for others, perhaps someone who decided to be rigorously ethical would not manage to live for long, the concern for others would consume him (as happens to Dostoyevsky's idiot prince Mischkin). If ethics were to be assumed radically it would lead, at one time or another, to live very badly, or simply not to continue to live at all. Which would show that all the "ethics" we know were not radical, were not ethical to the end, they all live by their own inconsequence, they put the desire to continue living and to procreate above the ethical principle of consideration. (This is the link that Nietzsche saw between ethics and nihilism, and what he called Kant's "moral fanaticism": taken rigorously, the moral imperative, exercised in the sensible world, should lead us to death, and not to rigorous living. This is a result that negative ethics not only recites, but takes rigorously seriously. In ethics, Kant was, to say the least, an inconsistent negative philosopher). For if a human being were to adopt the ethical point of view in the traditional sense, being immersed in the natu-mortality with all its hindering displays, he would have to ask himself, having adopted the ethical point of view, whether he should live and whether he should continue to live (and not only how he can do so) and, if he continues to live, to ask himself whether he is in a position to guide his life by the imperative of duty, happiness or well-being. It would be a matter of examining carefully the possibilities of establishing a moral point of view for a human being who has always been immersed in a nature-mortality that destroys him day by day and in the face of which he can only react in a way that makes it difficult not to harm others, insofar as pain and discouragement easily lead to injustice and disregard.

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In extreme cases of suffering (terminal illness, torture), any human thinks of death as a way out. (One may recall the dreadful chapter "Asking for Death," from Peter Singer's book, Rethinking Life and Death, whose reading is far more disturbing than that of any Edgar Allan Poe tale.) We want to continue to live as long as the work of concealment is functioning well. When this functioning suffers or fails, we want to die. (Whether or not we have the courage or technical mastery to die when we are convinced we have to die is a different matter. What matters philosophically is the conviction, not the mastery of techniques.) This wanting to die can be understood in an ethical register if the person who can no longer value (because he feels too intense pain), feels that the pain is also disqualifying him as a moral agent, by plunging him into the self-absorption from which the other was expelled. But think of the cases that don't involve disease, like, for example, that of Serpico, the honest young man who entered the Los Angeles police force (and was the subject of a Sidney Lumet film) full of illusions of justice and plunged into police corruption without limits, being shot by his own colleagues for getting in the way of normal business. Serpico lived in an environment where to be honest and considerate of others was to be a dangerous asshole. Here death would not come to Serpico by his own hand, but by the hand of circumstances (in a broad and not very metaphorical sense: to be honest in a corrupt world is a kind of suicide). Other extreme cases are Christ, Socrates, Gandhi and Luther King, who by taking on liberating tasks that promoted consideration for minorities or subjugated majorities, with a high rate of opposition to established powers, placed themselves in inevitable danger of death ("in the lion's den", as they say). To sustain ethical principles radically is like asking to die. One might think that these are "extreme cases". They are, but they point to a matrix of ordinary situations within the hellish world of humans in permanent painful-discouraged (sometimes depressive) conflict, and the always "strangled" character of actions. For a human being who has decided to assume the ethical point of view in the sense of consideration always harms those who, because of pain or discouragement, are part of the scheme of disregard. The harms are almost never as great and as public as in the cases of Gandhi or Luther King, and so are not visualized, or end up being negotiated within the fluidity of ordinary relationships. But suppose a simple, honest and thoughtful philosophy professor who works in a philosophy department, and who is very rigorous in the

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evaluations, while the rest of the department is very concessive and even careless (the professors do not carefully read the students' papers and perform their teaching duties with negligence). This anomalous, excessively careful and rigorous professor will make the larger group and the community of students accustomed to the general "flexible" situation uncomfortable; and even if no one threatens the professor's life (because his behavior does not put at serious risk such powerful interests as those of Serpico's or Gandhi's adversaries), he will have placed himself in an automatically disadvantageous and dangerous position, in a deadly situation. It would be very difficult for him to be killed for his attitude, but it would not be unlikely, for example, that one of his many enemies would arrange for the honest and considerate (and foolish) professor's employment contract not to be renewed. This is as much a case of moral disqualification as a shooting attack. Affirmative ethics have not elaborated this issue of the relationship between morality and stupidity, but, in fact, stupidity is considered as a limit of morality: yes, it is said, one must be moral but without being stupid; this is something that is implicit, for example, in the education of young people, but it is never made explicit. One should not be ethical to the point of getting killed or fired from one's job. But how much immorality can be tolerated in the persistent enterprise of not being foolish? Or, put the other way around: how much foolishness does the ethical principle demand of us? The demand not to be foolish is not a moral demand, but typically a vital need for survival. Fools succumb, but perhaps succumbing is what ethics demands. If we radically refuse t o b e foolish, it means that our living and continuing to live may be unethical to one degree or another, and even if for a long time our unethical acting may not have too devastating consequences. In affirmative ethics, humans are as "ethical" as they manage to be within the primordial project of continuing to live as long and as well as possible. Whereas the ethical point of view, on the contrary, if taken seriously, would recommend living as much as we manage to live within our primordial project of being ethical. In current affirmativism, the ethical principle is always subordinated to the vital principle, however much the importance of "moral values" is rhetorically manifested. Negative ethics can be seen as a thought (and action) experiment consisting in placing, for the first time in history, the ethical principle above the vital principle. And to show, meta-philosophically, how affirmative ethics are ethical by half, conditioned to the preservation of life and the pursuit of happiness which they uncritically assumed to be compatible with the ethical principle.

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None of what has been seen so far is yet "negative ethics" in a constructive sense, but only a critique of affirmative morality (the title of one of my books on the subject). Now we must begin to think what an ethics could be like that walks in the direction of the form of the world, that fully accepts negative ontology and tries to live accordingly. The first problem that arises is whether it is possible, precisely, to live in negative conditions, whether these do not inevitably lead to a refusal to live. If it is still possible to sign a pact between an ethical life and the terminality of being, or if it is possible to live ethically in the terminality of being. One could begin by abandoning the gigantic affirmative pretensions (to "be happy," to liberate others, to realize reason, to perfect oneself through the virtues, to attain the "highest good," to have many children), true ontological luxuries, and exchange them for more modest ones, such as: avoid intense suffering, do not harm others, survive, escape the "supreme evil," better not to procreate. And see if the terminality of being accepts some more austere contract of commitment. Or if it is really a matter of dying erotically. If there is still some kind of life (or over-life) that can live up to the moral demand taken radically seriously. These are questions that were not thought of by philosophical ethics in its usual affirmative register. Suicide, abstention, negative oversurvival. Suicide. By pointing to the internal relations between assuming the ethical principle and not continuing to live, many readers of earlier expositions of negative ethics thought they saw here a "recommendation of suicide". This has many problems. I have dealt with the question of suicide in Projeto de ética negativa (1989), chapter II, in Crítica de la moral afirmativa (1996), Part II, section 3; and in the articles "Dussel y el suicidio", "La cuestión ético-metafísica fundamental...", "O que é realmente ética negativa?", "O imenso sentido do que não tem nenhum valor" and in the entries on "suicide" in the Diccionario Latino-americano de Bioética. Suicide would seem to be the first attitude, almost the fatal attitude, in the face of the terminal structure of being, and this is how the most superficial readers of negative ethics have seen it (in what I usually call a "morbid reading"). But there is no Camusian tendency in these writings to say: "If the world is bad, one must commit suicide".

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of The Myth of Sisyphus has a revolver in his hand while reading and is waiting for the end of the reading to make his decision: if life is bad, then boom!) I would like to avoid this kind of attitude in my writings, for suicide does not follow directly from the terminality of being, but would be the result, if anything, of a consideration of the delicate balance between the terminality of being and the intramundane invention of values. To the extent that the latter (for one reason or another) falters or fails, the idea of one's own death appears naturally, whether or not it is actually executed. This is what I have begun to call, in more recent writings, "suicide as a possibility of existence", moving away from the idea that suicide, given the terminal nature of life, would be a necessity (as the Camusian would maintain), and also from the idea that suicide is something inconceivable because it is subject to absolute moral prohibition (as in Christianity, from Augustine to Hegel). The most appropriate modal (modal, not moral) quality of suicide is neither necessity nor impossibility, but possibility. Suicide is possibility of existence. Not only a logical possibility, but an axiological one. There is not, nor could there be, any "recommendation" of suicide, but a pointing towards its possibility as ethically plausible after careful pondering, without morbid jubilation or phobic rejection. I would like, in my considerations, to recover the original meaning of the term "suicide", as "death of oneself", as opposed to "heterocide" (a neologism invented by me to refer to the "death of another"). "Suicide" is a technical term within my philosophy, and does not mean the same as it usually means in literature. Within my notion of "suicide" are included not only those deaths that humans literally give themselves, but every situation in which humans put themselves or have been placed in deadly dangerous situations, whether through radical sports, political practices, religious beliefs, fasting, participation in wars, risk of contagion, etc. I do not accept the usual differential based on the "intention to die", due to the existential fluidity of this concept (we will never know whether Ayrton Senna, or Walter Benjamim, or Stefan Zweigt, or the fasting death fasting "wanted" or "did not want" to die). Those who claim to "want to live" but risk themselves to incredible extremes are not convincing: these are lives particularly fascinated by the proximity of death, and that is enough to treat them as "suicidal" in the technical sense proposed. Thus, the reader should not be offended when I refer to Christ and Socrates, or Gandhi, Ayrton Senna and Luther King as

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"suicides", because here the term is not being used in the "literal" sense (although there is also a "literalness" in these fascinating suicides). What remains to be examined is when these suicides in the broad sense are ethical suicides (or when a "possibility of existence" becomes an ethical possibility of existence). In the 1989 Project of Negative Ethics, I had already criticized the traditional views (Kantian, Spinozian, and even Schopenhauerean) on suicide as being psychologically superficial and philosophically non-radical ("Projeto...", pp. 33-36, 38-42). It is clear there the idea that suicide is not a "choice for death", but only for a way of dying, which can be more humane and meaningful (46-7), so there cannot be a radical condemnation of any and all suicide (pp. 36-7). I reject the idea that there is any moral imperative to continue living (4445). "Being that life is the result of a unilateral contract, 'without agreement between the parties,' there can be no incoherence in rejecting something that is being analyzed for the first time" (Chapter II, aphorism 23. My translation from the Portuguese, like that of the rest of the texts in this book). At the time of the Project, I actually thought that suicide was the attitude best suited to the shape of the world (I had not yet coined the notion of suicide as a "possibility of existence"). I wrote: "In order to survive, in order to be a non-suicide, I must necessarily be incoherent in the fundamental questions, even to be coherent in the remaining ones" (Idem, aphorism 36). I believe that, over time, I did not abandon the idea that suicide was the attitude most adequate to the terminal form of the world, and that any other over-living attitude had to be incoherent at some point, suicide being the fundamental coherent attitude. Note that the idea that suicide is the most coherent and adequate attitude to the form of the world is not altered when we come to regard suicide as a "possibility of existence". It means only that, through ignorance, cowardice or routine procrastination, we do not usually choose the most adequate possibility. For even if suicide is the most adequate attitude, this does not make it necessary for each one of us, because each one must still make it pass through the sieve of his own autonomy. (pp. 47-48). "Any project of over-survival removes the possibility of suicide and opts for the savagery of life (...) I cannot afford the luxury of truth or justice, since my ideas rest on a body that has decided to continue" (p. 49). In the 1996 Critique of Affirmative Morality, suicide is fleetingly addressed; after criticisms of Heidegger's ambiguities regarding death as a "possibility", suicide is not only a question of the possibility of death, but also a question of the possibility of death as a "possibility".

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In the "more proper" view, suggesting the exclusion of suicide, one of my fundamental ideas on the matter is stated: that we should not ask ourselves, as is usually done, about the "motives" of suicide as if they constituted a profound enigma. This is still the affirmative view of the question, which ignores the negative ontology and sees suicide as an act "without explanation", when, in the light of the terminality of being, it is the clearest and most evident act in the world (and what becomes strange is how humans manage to continue living, "in spite of everything", as many more suicides are not committed). I speak, in this text, of "formal suicide", as that practiced by virtue of the data provided by negative ontology: "...formal suicide does not need 'time' to constitute itself as an ethical mode of letting-being-its-ownbeing, because there has always been the ethical motive of fleeing from the moral disqualification that constantly lurks in letting oneself live (...) At the level of structural information, there is and always has been a motive, equally structural, for not continuing to be" (p. 77). Ontic motives to disappear can serve as reinforcements, but not as original motivations: I can only take advantage of some enormous ontic harm to "give me courage" and perform that act which has always been structurally motivated. (When I do not commit suicide, it is not "motives" that I lack, as Camus seems to think, but simply courage, that courage that situations of extreme pain give people in a totally natural and non-pathological way, unless one considers as such the feeling of not wanting to suffer or behave in an unethical way if one chooses to continue living unconditionally). I tried to defend in these texts the moral character of a peculiar type of suicide along these lines of thought, as a humanization of nature (just as we humanize food and sexuality, which are natural needs, we also humanize death and dying). For this it was necessary to introduce the expanded concept of "suicide", which was not present in the Project and which is here introduced for the first time: "But in the above, 'suicide' is understood in too limited a sense. In truth, what has usually been so called is only a way of understanding the letting-go-of-being-its-own-being, and it is this structure that we are trying to understand, and not only 'suicide' in a vulgar sense. Such an extension will sensibly help to understand the morality of the letting-go-of-being-its-own-being in general..." (p. 79). With one's own death, the death of the other is indefinitely postponed. At that time I still saw formal suicide as an ethical act in the absolute sense, without realizing the dangers of suicide not escaping from being an act that is inconsiderate of others..." (p. 79).

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(The book includes a thought experiment, "Kant and the Antinomy of Suicide". This is a text that criticizes the Kantian condemnation of suicide.) After a series of texts in which the question of suicide appears in relation to specific discussions (in "Dussel y el suicidio" within a critique of liberation ethics, and in "La cuestión ético-metafísica..." in relation to the bioethical issues of abortion and euthanasia), I elaborate the entries of the Latin American Dictionary of Bioethics, which already contain my mature thinking on the question of suicide. The entries are three: "Suicide: philosophical aspects", "Suicide. Empirical approaches" and "Death, mortality and suicide". The latter is the most important for my purposes in the present exposition. In that text, brief and forceful, I introduce what I call the "thanatic difference" between the punctual death that will happen to us someday (MP) and the structural mortality that is acquired at birth (ME), linked to what will later be considered the "terminality of being". The view of suicide as an indecipherable "enigma" stems from the fact that the thanatic difference has not been made: in the light of mere PM, suicide always appears as mysterious, but by including EM in the consideration, the enigma disappears, and what appears enigmatic is why humans do not commit suicide more often. MP is only the final consummation of ME in any life, suicidal or not. The suicide only consummates himself what is no longer there, he does not have the power to introduce anything, not even to "anticipate" anything, because although MP can be anticipated, ME cannot be; it always arrives punctually, it is never "premature". Consummation cannot be anticipated since it is born already imminent, so that it has no date or deadlines. The suicidal person rebels against the necessity of having to react against the terminality of being (still called "mortality" in those old texts) by means of the intramundane invention of values, and not against these values themselves, which may seem to him as wonderful as they really are: it is their mortal source that the suicidal person rejects with his act. This reaches the extreme case in the terminally ill, where the invention of values has become unfeasible and ME totally predominates. The ultimate intention of negative thinking in this matter seems to be the full humanization of suicide, to remove it from both its usual stigma and its immediate recommendation and to bring it to the plane of simple possibility of existence. That suicide becomes the only dignified way out for a human life in which the terminality of being is consummated is a new argument in favor of the disvalue of being: the acknowledged disvalue of suicide is part of the

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disvalue of being itself. For a world in which suicide can become the only possibility of existence is not good. Abstention This is possibly the most authorial point of my ethical thought (and also the most unpopular), the question of the morally problematic character of procreation, of "having children", an absolutely taboo subject (much more taboo than suicide) in the whole history of European philosophy, which does not even treat it in order to denigrate it. The theme is already early treated in the Projeto de ética negativa... (in chapter 1. "Paternidade e abstenção", pp. 17-31), taken up again in the Crítica... (part II, section 2. "procreation", pp. 59-70) and in the book Nascituri te salutant, written in co-authorship with Thiago Lenharo, and in a half-literary form (in a Kierkegaardian style). The question was dealt with in a definitive and argumentative way in the last part of the book Malaise and Morality. Note that the "Project..." is from 1989, that is, well before the beginning of the antinatalist movement. When listening to the exposition on the terminality of being and our situation within it many retort: "But then, if life is such a black and gloomy thing, why don't you commit suicide?". But no one ever asks the following question: "But then, if life is so black and gloomy, why don't you refrain from having children? This should be the first reply: since the world is dark, others should be spared it. There would be no point in committing suicide after having 10 children (or after having 1 child!). On the contrary, this would seem to increase even more the moral guilt of the procreator who, while recognizing the gloomy character of life, does not spare the children, who seem to be used to diminish the suffering of the procreator himself in the face of the terminality of his being (children as a "solution"). However, procreation is considered as a fatality: people have to be born, and then, if they do not like it, let them take their own lives, a terrifying and miserable thought that sometimes arises. We must ask ourselves why this "they have to be born", what are the rational and ethical bases for believing that we must continue to give birth to other humans, understanding this duty as a moral one. That the world would end if everyone refrained from procreating is not, per se, an ethical argument, but merely an empirical one. St. Augustine, a fully affirmative philosopher, shrugged his shoulders when it was retorted that if everything

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Augustine saw no inconvenience in hastening the encounter with God as soon as possible (hoping only that the minimum number of saints required for the end of time would be reached). He also saw clearly that the perpetuation of humanity is not a moral motive, since its end can be morally motivated. (There is, however, a fundamental and obvious difference between my terminal thought and that of St. Augustine: abstinence from having children was derived, in Augustine, from abstinence, that is, from chastity, from refusing to have sexual relations. I would hold the idea of abstinence without abstinence: sex without procreation (the best form of "safe sex"). What is morally problematic is not, contrary to what is usually thought, the exercise of sexuality but the exercise of procreation and parenthood. I have dealt with this extensively in the text "Why procreation faces more moral problems than heterodox sexuality", in the book Malaise and Morality). Chapter 1 of the Project begins by positing this curious "compulsion to procreate," which seems a natural impulse (of the many that European affirmative ethics have tried to humanize through the incessant work of the spirit) rather than a moral and rational motive (p. 17). "Being a son can be considered a kind of Destiny, but why should being a father be so too" (p. 18. This and the other quotations in this book are translated by me from the Portuguese). It is important that the question of the morality of procreation is introduced also to face the usual argument: "Whether we like life or not, anyway we are already alive and we have to live it", an argument that applies to our life but does not apply at all to the life of our possible children, who can still be saved. In this text I deal for the first time with a topic that especially interested me: the moral question of the procreation of children compared to the moral problem of the creation of the world by an eternal Father (the problem of theodicy) (pp 18- 19). Even accepting that this very bad world is "the best possible", it is still necessary to explain why God could not abstain from creating a world, any world (the best or the worst possible, it does not matter). Why could not abstention have a moral sense, why could not creating nothing be morally preferable to creating anything, even "the best possible"? If the human or divine procreator was aware that creating nothing was better than creating a being with ontologically guaranteed suffering, and still procreated, the procreation

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faces the moral problems that arise from manipulating the other for one's own benefit and giving to another something that we know is harmful to him, just by relying on the back-andforth calculation, which has no guarantee (our child may be born defective or have a life full of misfortunes). It is a gamble of dubious responsibility). "...the father condemns the child to live also the non-being: life calmly contemplated from the outside by the father is life arduously suffered in the non-being by the child" (p. 27). The final part of the text is devoted to narrating the necessary ontological vindication of the son in the face of his birth without moral justification (pp. 28-29). In the Critique of Affirmative Morality the theme of the manipulation of the other in the act of procreation is further accentuated, this being the unilateral relationship par excellence, which can always be avoided (pp. 59-63). We manipulate no less when we give being than when we take it away (p. 63). The children are seen aesthetically (and they are undeniably beautiful and graceful), thus hiding the moral responsibility of having given them the terminal being, something that their graceful movements will not be able to extinguish. The text "The primordial ethical question: the moral justification of procreation", included in Malaise and Morality, is constructed by a series of logically justified steps, as if trying to convince a rigorous analytical philosopher. None of Cioran's poetic style. The main thesis is that the generation of children, whether intentional or accidental, is not morally justifiable; it is sustained only affectively or emotionally, morality being understood as the double requirement not to manipulate and not to harm. In the first part of the argument we show that we inevitably manipulate the child for our own benefit, and when we reply that yes, there is manipulation, but that it is justified because we are giving something very good to the child, we show, in the second part, that a human life has an immense structural disvalue because it is marked by pain, discouragement and moral disqualification. To the thesis that, in the act of procreation, we would be manipulating the other, there are the following objections: (a) "There is manipulation when there is someone to be manipulated, which is not the case in procreation". To this I reply that, on the contrary, in procreation manipulation is exacerbated precisely because it is the very being of the person that is manipulated, and not this or that aspect. (b) "If there is manipulation in procreation, it is totally inevitable, since both nature and society impel us to reproduce ourselves". To this we reply that ethics, throughout its history, has often been constituted in opposition to the dictates of nature and society, in such a way that it cannot be

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morally sound an argument that simply highlights this double taxation as being presumptively decisive. Finally, the most important objection: (c) ""If there is manipulation in procreation, it is fully justified, for life is a very valuable good that the newborn will like to receive". But here the opponent will have to face all the proofs of Seneca, Schopenhauer and my own about the problematic value of human life, which has led humans, over the centuries, to invent all kinds of myths, fantasies, religions and ultra-mundane visions in order to endure existence. Here enter, it is clear, all the data provided by negative ontology (see again chapter 1 of the present Essay). From this point on, it can be proved that the procreative act harms the child, thus disobeying another aspect of the moral principle of not harming the other, in addition to having manipulated it. Thus, to summarize: the one who is born is subjected to unilateral manipulation, for the benefit of the interests of others, being able to be avoided, and giving something problematic, which will have to be reactively confronted through the intramundane creation of values on the ever descending path (without back and forth) of the consummation of the terminality of being. Someone, finally, could accept that life has a problematic value and that we manipulate the nascent by making it emerge, but, even so, sustain that life is valuable by betting on the quantity of pleasures and satisfactions that the child, in spite of everything, will be able to gather. But it is a bet that does not free the procreator from his enormous moral responsibility, a bet that consists in hoping that the quantity and quality of the values created in the intra-world will allow the child to successfully endure the terminality of his being. Often, as we know, this gamble is lost (people who were born commit suicide, or go mad, or spend their lives fighting against neurosis, or become social aggressors). On the side of the parents, the experience of procreation can be as "wonderful" as one wants, but negative ethics asks whether this experience is also as wonderful for those who are procreated for the benefit of others. The objector, at this point, points out that a large part of the children accept life as being valuable. I reply that the son has no other choice but to learn to like the life he received without consultation, for what other remedy is left to him? He must now "make do".

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He will try to adapt himself as best as possible to his difficult situation through his reactive creation of values. Eventually he will have to learn to laugh, after having cried at birth without anyone teaching him to do so. The experience of procreation can never be symmetrical for procreators and procreated: for the former, it is an a priori personal fulfillment, while for the latter, it is always a matter of having to make do a posteriori. The procreators like the life of the procreated, while the procreated has to like it, by force. Moreover, the offspring feels that he has come into the world with the task of mediating the difficult relationship of his parents with the terminality of his own being. He is part of his parents' fulfillment within the scope of a gamble that can always fail to his detriment. In fact, the swarming of children has historically been linked to poverty, moral laziness and ignorance: poor families rarely have less than 3 children, and male parents boast of their reproductive capacity as if it were a supreme virtue, even when they throw their offspring into the greatest misery. The reproductive function is one that can be exercised by anyone, even by the most abject. There is no virtue in mere reproduction. But it is curious that, in the middle and upper classes, the pride of a father is always justified but the writer or musician is treated as arrogant and vain when he is proud of his work; it means that he who simply exercises his biological functions as any animal could do is more valued than he who made an incomparable work with a singular and unrepeatable talent. Pure reproduction for its own sake is the everlasting movement of the purest mediocrity. As I wrote centuries ago: he who does not manage to do anything in life makes more life. But even if Mother Natu-Mortality urges us to reproduce incessantly, it seems an act of pure nobility to disinterest ourselves in this automatic function for the benefit of more creative and generous actions. Many argue that procreation is compulsive and involuntary and not perfectly planned, so it is absurd to morally and rationally impute the procreative act, since it makes no sense to blame someone for something not premeditated. I reply that I do not accept the innocence of someone who was careless or negligent, especially having all the necessary devices at his disposal not to be so. Their negligence is part of their guilt. Many have already described suicide as a reckless act, but procreation is just as reckless, if not more so. His recklessness does not free him from responsibility.

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Negative oversurvival But it is about living, isn't it? We know now that living is not a moral obligation, let alone giving life to others. But, anyway, we can stay in life for other than moral reasons (for example, to try to get all kinds of pleasures while we can, or out of laziness or stubbornness or indifference or curiosity or irony or sportsmanship or simple inertia). What we must ask ourselves is whether it is still possible, after the negative ontology, to stay in life for ethical reasons, or, at least, to continue living without injuring ethical principles. It would seem that this is not possible: to live is to transgress ethical principles all the time, even if concealment prevents one from seeing it. In the usual affirmative sense, always seeking to live longer and as intensely as possible, trying to be as "happy" as possible and having many children, it does not seem feasible to lead an ethical life. The power of concealment makes humans, even the most well-intentioned, no longer perceive the high ethical prices that must be paid for their well-being and their continuing to "live intensely" at any cost. Perhaps this is clear in times of war or serious crisis or major accidents, but it dissolves completely in the stultifying and leveling everydayness of "one day follows the next". From the kid who bullies the shy classmate and makes his life miserable just for the fun of it, to the individual who hides information that suits him, to the opportunistic and profiteering journalist or the beverage distributor who adulterates drinks to increase his profits, or the simple "livelier" who always gets a good parking space through trickery, or profits through fraud, none of them consider that they are doing anything unethical, but just "living as best they can". Happiness" pays high prices. The poor classes, who live in permanent penury, perceive it more clearly; they realize, albeit instinctively, that society functions and progresses at the cost of their suffering, and know that there is something unjust when they see that some have more than the superfluous while they lack the elementary. Even if they do not know sociology they realize that they pay the price for others to be "happy" and have a "good life". Happiness is a notion that cannot look at its own shadow, and the "happy" human, if he has even a shred of conscience, will not dare to look around and see all the suffering and hardship that makes his happiness possible. The lucky users of "happiness"

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prefer to consider it as something natural and attainable by the wisest and most intelligent, or by those who are "achievers". The son of rich parents does not want to know where his welfare comes from; he is excited about his trip to Europe and has already learned to see the situation coldly: there are rich and poor as there are ducks and mailboxes and it is lucky to be on the side of the rich; it is all about enjoying to the fullest. That the boy of the same age from the poor class has never been out of his town and feeds on waste he finds in the garbage cans outside his door is nothing to worry about, and there is nothing in the education he receives that tells him that the happiness he enjoys is made possible by the unhappiness of many other young people like him. It may be that his parents teach him that these poor people are poor because they want to be, because they are vagabonds and vicious people who deserve no consideration and who, moreover, must be guarded against. In the meantime, the concealment works successfully and we no longer see how our affirmatively directed lives are immoral. Therefore, it is very surprising when a philosopher makes this point and seems to be crazy, affirming things that are counter-intuitive and deforming of the real. Since the real is already deformed, any talk about its true constitution will sound like deformation. (When deformation functions as a point of reference the truth seems deformed, just as, in Father Montesinos' famous speech, ambitious colonists accused him of coming up with "new ideas" just because he held the absurd idea that the Indians should be treated well.) Affirmative ethics are written by intellectuals of the upper middle class where it is still possible to ask phlegmatically what are the conditions for a "good life". When referring to the dispossessed poor, middle and upper class adults (let us suppose well-intentioned) think, at most, that there are still many people excluded from the "good life" (which they believe they are living) and that, little by little, they will have to be included in it; But few of them realize that the very idea of a "good life" has, as one of its conditions, the existence of the effort and poverty of the majority of the world's population in order to be implemented. There is no idea that happiness is a notion that, by definition, cannot be universalized, that it lives from its non-universality. It is not a distant ideal that may one day be achieved by all, but an already effective reality that must not be achieved by all in order to work (badly). Each of us takes our social status and living conditions as "given", and acts accordingly. Affirmative ethical principles are accessible to the wealthy classes,

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that transform them into "merits" (to live a lot, to live well, to live happily). It is clear that there is also talk of consideration for others and helping them or, at least, not harming them, but consideration and help for the neediest presupposes that the needy exist and continue to exist so that ethical principles can be applied, so that ethical people always have other humans to help and consider, "in spite of the differences". (The great feasts of the rich whose profits are donated to charity). And considerations to others within the same middle or upper class are subject to practices of pragmatic reciprocity, where there is never any risk of losing something important, where everything works with cordiality and indifferent tolerance. Outside of commercial relations, for example, in relations between neighbors, the only thing that will be done is to develop coexistence policies in which each party will not lose anything and will not have too many problems with the proximity of the other. When conflicts arise, each party will defend its own interests and those of its own, even against all evidence, and what will matter will be to continue one's own life in the greatest possible "happiness", overcoming the obstacles that need to be overcome, and possibly making the neighbors unhappy. The relationships that many consider "ethical", with friends and relatives, are more affective relationships than strictly ethical relationships. In such relationships, the defense of one's own point of view against everything that opposes it is exacerbated in an extreme way (the case of the murderer's mother, who is unconditionally on the son's side, whatever he has done, even the most abominable). Human lives in affirmative societies enter into relationships of these types, commercial, strategic, tolerant and pragmatic, or simply affective. When someone tries to establish more authentic and considerate relationships, he begins to have problems in a society that has bureaucratized and created routines of indifferent behavior, where mutual manipulations and prejudices are ameliorated and hidden in the daily automatic living. This is what we call "living". The negative human being has realized the difficulties of living an ethical life in a world marked by the terminality of being, that is, of being ethical and living at the same time. That is why I speak here of over-living, a word that marks the fact that someone who really intends to live ethically, observing the requirements of not manipulating and not harming, cannot live but only over-live, that is, live as long as ethical principles allow, which he will never be able to do for very long. This is precisely the experiment proposed by negative ethics.

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Affirmative ethics live in the oblivion of the terminality of being, constantly rejected as the worst, as that which cannot be remembered or brought to speech. It is even inelegant and even inconsiderate of others. A fundamental part of a negative ethic is the refusal of concealment, accepting clearly and fully that we are in an imminent terminal situation, in the gap, at the point of no end, and that it is about dying, that "living intensely" as long as possible may not be the most important thing. To realize that others are not to blame for our discomfort, that we should not destroy them because it is not possible for us to live nonreactively; that they are not to blame for the fact that we cannot live the non-being of being. To realize that, in this context, we are terminal and that destroying others will not free us from the terminal structure. A negative ethic should be the one that fully assumes the conviction that we can only over-live, and always paying a high price that we have to be ready, at any moment, to pay even with our own life (today, if necessary). To the extent that we have still refused not to be (for one reason or another), to the extent that we have not risked enough and are still in the world, negative ethics is constituted as an ethics of survival. I have expounded negative survival in the "Little Handbook of Over-survival," in part III of the Critique of Affirmative Morality (pp. 151-166). Something fundamental, in a negative-ethical survival, seems to be the minimalist attitude, as opposed to the affirmative life, eminently expansive and maximalist. If life is exacerbated in affirmative ethics, it is reduced to its minimum exponent in the negative attitude. (In this sense, an ethical-negative life is at the antipodes of a Nietzschean vitalism, with all its expansive cruelty, which so seduces adolescents all over the world). ) The respective attitudes towards suicide and abstention are fundamental: while affirmative ethics strongly reject suicide and accept procreation without limits, this is reversed in negative ethics: the disposition to suicide (in the broad sense mentioned above) and the outright refusal to procreate characterize an ethico-negative life. As long as it is not openly exposed to the deadly rays of non-being, negative living may not differ, in appearances, from some austere affirmative living; but what distinguishes them is the full acceptance, on the part of the negative, of the moral disregard which we are led to practice, in no exceptional way, in our daily lives, and its disposition

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always open to risk one's own life by refusing to manipulate and harm. "Thus, the 'survivor' sees himself, basically, as someone who, up to the moment he speaks or writes, has systematically refused to non-self from ever structurally motivated, to the detriment of his most radical morality and coherence." His living is not inert and automatic: "His non-suicide is something explicit and defining, a refusal that pervades and characterizes all his effective existence" (p. 152). Some ethico-negative indications found in this work are the following: the full assumption of the transgression of simply being, avoiding making moral claims and vindications (pp. 154-55); taking advantage of all the negative slots (omissions, abstentions, absences, missing, remoteness), of all the advantages of what is not (155); the importance of maintaining unrealized dreams, the administration of one's own absence, suicide as a regulative ideal (157), stopping to defend oneself indefinitely and unconditionally (157/8), declaring the other innocent of the lack of being, "Realizing that the other is not the place of non-being (....) but only its eventual and passing face..." (160), to see procreation as a useless ontological luxury and a serious moral problem (161), to operate a kind of agonic aestheticization of life, where we reinstate the human condition on symbolic and metaphorical levels (164/5): "Perhaps ethical values can never be realized in the world, but only repeated, that is, 'agonized' " (165). Ethico-negative oversurvival could be summarized as follows: living as little as possible, as soberly as possible, not reproducing and remaining open and willing to nonbeing in agonistic behavior. (This conception of negative survival was further developed in part 3 of my more recent book, Malaise and Morality). For a long time I preferred not to give concrete indications about how to live and die negatively. It seemed to me that the less said about this, the better. At the end of some of my lectures, the audience would ask me what was "the way out" of the negative situation. In Mexico, a student - Federico Areda - after listening to my ideas asked me for "the antidote". But the idea was precisely to show that there is no way out, and that any antidote confirms the poison. More recently, I decided to outline better what this negative survival would be, realizing that the reader would opt for the "morbid reading" and would find it difficult to imagine forms of lifedeath adequate to a negative ontology. These "negative imperatives" were developed in the aforementioned book.

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If these forms of ethical survival prove impossible for humans, if they are seen as belonging to heroes rather than to ordinary humans (and this has its grain of truth: the world is so horrible that only a hero can be ethical in it), then it is better to abandon the ethical point of view and dedicate oneself, like everyone else, to live with the lack of sensitivity, indifference and thoughtlessness typical of humans. But, in homage and memory of the lost ethics, let the option for the "intense" and inconsiderate life be openly assumed as an unethical (and, almost inevitably, unethical) option. Never disguise it in the garb o f "morality".

.4. 3. Logic cannot provide the shape of the world. My philosophical system also encompasses a philosophy of logic. Why "also"? Was it not necessary? The "also" makes one think of a contingent and ornamental juxtaposition. In a sense, a philosophy of logic was necessary in my system, but it was necessary to show the radical lack of necessity of logic. On a purely biographical level, metaphysical ethics appears already in childhood, adolescence and early youth: all the terrors of the terminality of being are present there. (It is clear that the terminality of being corrodes any childhood, but it has to be moderately unhappy and what childhood is not unhappy, if concealment lets it be seen? - to become selfconscious). Logic, on the other hand, only appears in university times (in my case, in the university of my native Cordoba, founded in the 17th century), in the middle of the "age of reason". It is commonly said that children can be taught logic and mathematics but not morals or politics, which are the tasks of maturity. I was, then, a kind of anti-child, the same as I still am; a kind of child philosopher, a mind that, fortunately, never "matured", in the sense of becoming a serious adult who is ashamed of what he was before; an existing one who fully felt the moral problems already at an early age but who understood the logical problems by reading books. To impose itself existentially, cold logic needs a vitally intense logician. In my case, that logician was Andrés Raggio. Logic has to appear within the impetus of an extraordinary, selfconfident personality that fascinates us and drags us into scientific philosophy and

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(Raggio was of the opinion that reading Gödel's memoir of the famous theorem was far more fascinating than reading García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude). To what extent did I not realize that what was extraordinarily revealing and exciting about the experience of logic did not belong to the logic itself but, on the rebound or in addition, to the overwhelming personality of a particular logician (the singer not the song). In that time of Cordovan youth, I let myself be deceived: I believed that logic could provide me with the form of the world; I thought that I could organize the world on the basis of logic, without realizing that the essential thing was not logic, but the existential vitality that the logician put into teaching it and transmitting it to his fascinated students (God save us from an enthusiastic theologian). So that where pure logic seemed to triumph, it was where the vilified existence triumphed absolutely, where logic showed that it would never impose itself except through a concrete existence, as if logic had to show its vitality through a body, in spite of being itself the crucial negation of corporeality. (Syllogisms have no flesh, only skeleton). In Andrés Raggio, as in all logicians, one could breathe that uncontainable admiration for the strength and beauty of formal structures, that conviction that logic provided something fundamental and inevitable, a kind of irresistible lay salvation. My existential concerns, not openly confessed (only lived and suffered in afflicted silence), rested, in that undecided period, on some interests in theoretical aesthetics and literary criticism. The means I found, in that period of great despair, to attend simultaneously to Raggio's logical appeals and to my baser literary inclinations, was to try to apply the rigorous methods of logic and language to the study of literary works. From this monstrous association were born my two academic theses, undergraduate and doctoral, both on logic applied to aesthetic discourse. My more existential Argentine students, listening to my curious logical-aesthetic classes with amazement, realized that a large part of my speculative creativity was as if strangled by logical-linguistic demands, and felt that, someday, I had to free myself definitively from logic. (In my novel The Logician and the Beast (1995), I symbolically kill the logician, Professor Ramses Viaggio, an upstart swindler and creator of myths and lies, whom I get rid of by the rigor of the letter).

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This biographical allusion is not minor or irrelevant in the summary of a philosophical system that claims to have existed and not only to have been thought. But I want to try to explain how logic (the logic, not the logician, the song not the singer) appears in my philosophical system. Logic always had the pretension (very strong in the classical analytics of Russell and the first Wittgenstein, less strong later, but always present in some way) of providing the ultimate form of the world, of formulating a sort of hard core to which everything and any discourse, whatever its content, must necessarily refer, on pain of illegitimacy, absurdity and dishonesty. I was interested in this claim of logic to have succeeded in establishing a sphere of "pure formality", "with total independence of content". I wondered, even at an early age, what kind of formality that would be and I always felt an enormous distrust towards it, noticing that the displaced contents were always lying in wait, ready to take by assault the supposedly "pure" form that had expelled them so intemperately. Logic was presented to me as a cognitive (or apprehensive) enterprise, and I could believe, even with misgivings, that it could provide, at most, a form for the knowledge of the world, but not for its full access. But I already knew, many years before I succeeded in formulating negative ontology, that the form of the world could not be reduced to that, that logic had no power to discover that which took us by assault and made us enunciate "meaningful propositions". Logic could, at most, fascinate, but the fascination of logic was always inherited from another fascination, it was fascinating by mediation, it had no brilliance of its own; just as the Earth reflected, in its perfect forms, the brilliance of a previous sun. Certainly, logic would not succeed in shuddering; it gave more pleasures than tremors; logic does not suffer, but plays in an apathetic realm where everything becomes possible. And when a logician suffers, like that sick and coughing logician who tormented himself searching for the foundation of mathematics, he suffers existentially like any other mortal (finally, as we know, all men are mortal). One can suffer from logic, but one cannot suffer logically. My studies of logic, then, were always marked by that detested and, at the same time, inevitable playful fascination, but also by a deep philosophical dissatisfaction with the foundationalist pretensions of logic. The enigmatic thing was why I felt that I had to spend so much time settling accounts with logic instead of

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simply ignore it, as a good Heideggerian would. After all, Raggio was dead in real life and symbolically in my novel; why did I have to kill him again, now on the theoretical plane (which would take me many years)? Wasn't it better to do as the existentialists I admired, shrug my shoulders and simply pretend that logic did not exist? But I wanted to overcome logic Heideggerianly, not like the Heideggerians, but as Heidegger had tried to overcome metaphysics, from within, starting from the roots of logic itself, and from there to show the great deception of "pure form," the false position that logic pretended to occupy. Contrary to the enthusiasm of some of my colleagues, I saw logic as a rather arbitrary (though not entirely) construction, and not as this miracle of perfection that seemed to descend from the heavens surrounded by a divine aura. Logic was human, all too human, and the interesting thing was to try to understand its genesis, where all its claimed perfection had come from, what things must have been done before for such perfection and beauty to be possible. (I felt, already poisoned by the negative ontology not yet formulated, that someone must be paying the price, in some corner of the world, for the immaculate perfections of logic). Who builds logic? Human beings, it will be said. But what human being? Who human being? The rational animal? The person? The son of God? The humanist? The homo faber, the homo sapiens, the homo viator, the homo ludens, the Dasein, Sartre's Para-itself or Raúl Seixas's walking metamorphosis? No. I knew that logic had been constructed by that terminal being who falls vertiginously in the midst of painful, discouraged, disabled suffering, that being who has no time, who sees how all his projects unravel while he is making himself, who insists while he exists, shrinking while he expands, falling while he grows. The same one who invents ethics that he will not be able to fulfill later, now invents the logic in which he will be able to pretend mastery. In fact, from logic comes all that magnificent technology paradoxically managed by animals, those electronic miracles administered by beings incapable of morality. But I felt that this was only a passing victory, that the "pure form" of logic had to be overthrown by negative ontology; that it was only a matter of time. And what I did in my philosophy of logic was a contribution to that dismantling: to make of formal logic a radical critique in which the constructed and arbitrary character of the domain of "pure form" was shown, to finally place logic in the true form of the world, a place which it had tried to occupy in full exercise of usurpation.

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In any case, I conceded that logic had the capacities one might expect from an ultimate metaphysical foundation of the sort that the twentieth century rejected out of hand. It was an understandable usurpation (I would not grant such a claim, for example, to political philosophy, anthropology, communication theory, or pedagogy). It seemed plausible to me that logic would try to take the place of the foundation formerly occupied by spiritualist theologies and metaphysics. Bertrand Russell had an interesting argument to justify these foundationalist pretensions of logic: the foundation had to be something impersonal and anonymous, stripped of all desire, and philosophy was better the more it became anonymous and impersonal, assuming that the human being is a wisp without much importance in the general economy of the universe; it was nobler for that insignificant bug to try to understand something of the complex mechanism of the universe than to spend a lifetime caressing its wounds and highlighting its unsatisfied desires. I liked very much that vision in which the human being was seen as a worm. But I was not interested in human suffering in a morbid and romantic existentialist sense, but in that of a crude scientific observation: the terminality of being seemed to me an important finding (in its unfathomable triviality), a fundamental certainty, not only to understand practical philosophies, but also cognitive attempts. It seemed to me that Russell's anonymous and impersonal vision was, in the end, an existential attitude towards the terminality of being like any other. (And, in fact, Russell admits in his autobiography that it was logic and mathematics that kept him away from the strong suicidal ideas he felt throughout his youth). The foundationalist claim of logic weakened over time (today no one would hold, for example, a thesis like that of the Tractatus, where logic provides the isomorphic structure of the world and language, nor Russell's thesis of logic as the essence of philosophy), but the idea of logic as a realm of privilege is maintained to this day, not only in the sense of a formal metaphysics, but also in the sense of a method that constitutes itself as an inevitable reference of discourses: if a discourse commits an "error of logic" everything stops, whatever the content of what is being discussed; according to the still prevailing ideology, there is nothing the content can do to counter a "purely formal" error. If you formally contradict yourself you will be interrupted, whatever it is that you

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you speak. The distinction between form and content remains in force, despite the proliferation of non-classical logics in which this distinction is not superseded but only diversified. Precisely, logic claims to win this colossal right by virtue of its pretended ultraformality, ultra-generality, Topic-neutrality and philosophical neutrality, by its prodigious ability to refer to "any object". These are the precise points that my philosophy attacks, not within an independent philosophy of logic (as if I had arbitrarily included "also" a philosophy of logic in my philosophical system in order to "complete" it), but by internal systematic demands: logic had to be criticized as the pretended hard and fundamental core of the world in its claim of "pure formality". The form of the world cannot be logical because logic can never be totally formal. Paradoxically, only a Great Content (precisely, the terminality of being) could be purely formal, in the sense of traversing from side to side everything we do in the world, including logical systems. My idea is that logical forms fail to tame the contents of life, expressed in ordinary language, which rebel against the fixed molds and patterns of formal argumentation theory (and also against many of the informal schemes, as presented by Toulmin, Walton, Fisher, etc.). It is as if the vital anxiety of content could not be kept within the limits of categorical and systemically fixed logical forms of reasoning, except through great expressive sacrifices (those that young philosophy students underwent in their complicated logic classes). This fundamental fact was already noted by philosophers of logic such as Sir Peter Strawson, without, it is clear, having the sensitivity and philosophical capacity to see the depth of what he was criticizing. He thought he was only making a vindication of "common language" against the normative and organizing pretensions of logic, without seeing that this common language contains, precisely, all the nuances and absurdities, the irregularities and asymmetries typical of life, with its existential concerns generating irradiating meanings, unassimilable for the logical referential. To put it in clearly non-analytical language, logic does not have the capacity to occupy the place of being, of pure being, the fundamental ontological place, because entities affect it too much, they wrinkle it and spoil it, they do not let it be. Logic has to establish a series of criteria, presuppositions and prohibitions in order to continue pretending to occupy the place of being; but without these theoretical precautions, without the precautions that it permanently has to take, it is not able to occupy the place of being, of pure being, the fundamental ontological place.

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to continue to remain in its castle of crystalline forms, logic is literally invaded by excesses and defects coming from the mere common entity, in the form of expressions of ordinary language rebellious to logical regimentation. Logic cannot be being itself, it can only expose entities or configure an entity among entities; it does not constitute, even if it pretends to do so, the plane of "pure form" but betting already, since always, on a certain type of smuggled content (that which, surreptitiously, dictates the truth tables of connectives and the behavior of quantifiers). This is the sense of what Heidegger, in his poetic and oracular style, means when he places logic in the register of the forgetting of being. Ontic speech, with all its follies and nonsense, would immediately invade the realm of logic if the latter were to neglect for a second its stern guard. The real hard core is not theo-logical, as was thought in the past, but neither linguo-logical, as was thought in the twentieth century, but, at any rate, bio-logical, that never thematized natural background alluded to by two or three fleeting aphorisms of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. But what is missing in Wittgenstein is the idea of urgency and suffering, because he always saw the human being as a simple apprehensive or grasping being (although he suffered a great deal throughout his life, and was constantly pursued by the idea of suicide, he never thought that this should be part of his philosophy. His existence is in his Diaries, not in his books). Logic, as Nietzsche saw it, is a natural production like any other, not a miracle of Pure Reason or a divine gift (as it is still sometimes presented today to first-time students of logic). Quine once said that logic was nothing but a set of trivialities, but of trivialities that made it possible to express all the rest, trivialities like "a = a", "(a and b), therefore a", and so on. The idea that the most fundamental must be composed of trivialities is perfectly acceptable and is one of my methodological starting points (see the Introduction to this Essay); but those trivialities mentioned by Quine are not the genuine trivialities since they all have counterexamples (and it is this that I have tried to show in my books and articles on the philosophy of logic). Instead statements like "All humans begin to die as soon as they are born" are genuine trivialities without exception. (As if logicians know that in their unconscious, "All men are mortal" has been, throughout history, their favorite major premise.)

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I began my philosophical criticisms of formal logic in my old book, published in Portuguese, La Lógica condenada (1987). In the early 2000s, together with the physicist Olavo L. Da Silva, in Brasilia, we started writing together what would become the book Lexical Inferences and Interpretation of Predicate Networks (2007), also in Portuguese, which contains what can be called the constructive part of my philosophy of logic. Finally, in the book Open Logic, written between 2008 and 2011, which I never managed to publish, I have directed 10 criticisms against the idea of logic as "pure form", in some of its possible deployments. (This book contains the destructive part of my philosophy of logic.) (I have the idea of assembling a book called "Philosophy of Logic", containing anthologically parts of all these works). I will give here a quick idea of the destructive part of my philosophy of logic. First, I criticize the alleged "philosophical neutrality" of logic, based on the idea of its "purely formal" character, trying to show how logic, on the one hand, eliminates philosophies, which shows that it is not neutral (if it were, it would only analyze without destroying); on the other hand, it itself needs philosophical presuppositions to be constituted. Second, I have attacked the idea that logical arguments are superior, in an absolute way, to intuitions, supporting the idea that intuitions and arguments must mutually correct each other. Third, I have attacked the idea that logic, because of its formal character, must be ultra-general and topic-neutral, presenting numerous apparent counterexamples drawn from common language, and showing that, to the strict extent that they are not recognized as real counterexamples by logicians, the thesis of ultragenerality must fall. Fourth, I have attacked the exclusion of lexical connections (of the type "x is very high, therefore x is not low") by formal logic as being mere content connections, trying to show the possibility of a formal logic of lexical connections. Fifth, I have attacked the arbitrariness of the "logical vocabulary", by which one tries to defend that everything that is expressed exclusively by means of this vocabulary is purely formal, showing other possible choices of logical terms and the diffuse character of the very distinction between "logical" and "extra-logical". Sixth, I have shown that all apparently "purely formal" logical analyses of philosophical discourses are always based on paraphrases that cannot be formally guaranteed, but are inevitably based on analytical hypotheses about meanings of the relevant terms. Seventh, I show that the establishment of a "purely formal" system of symbols produces anomalies (linguistic monsters), within the phenomenon that I call "symbolic expansion", when applied to the analysis

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philosophical, showing the prices to be paid for the maintenance, against nature, of an preserving police logic of a presumed realm of "pure form". Eighth, I vindicate the usefulness and philosophical interest of those structures considered as "fallacies" by formal logic. Ninth, I give indications as to how the history of logic should be written if we were to stop accepting the idea that it is possible to isolate form completely from content: we would then have many non-Aristotelian historical lines to study, especially in the periods declared "unproductive" by the official histories of logic (e.g., between the end of the Middle Ages and Boole). Tenth, I present a kind of x-ray of the social community of logicians and a study of the typical personality of the professor of logic, as an attempt to explain, also psychosocially, the reason for the unrestricted hegemony of the idea of "pure form" and of logic as a "fundamental science" in our philosophical communities. All of these can be seen as existential elements that strain against the seemingly solid walls of logic. Just as negative ethics is, in the first place, a critique of affirmative morality, so my philosophy of logic is, in the first place, a critique of pure formal logic. Both the affirmative in ethics and the "purely formal" of logic can be seen as concealments of the terminality of being. (One might even say that the idea of a "purely formal" realm of logic, immune to the advances of content, is an affirmative idea akin to the idea of a realm of pure morality immune to the advances of human maneuvering. One could say that it is the same idea, the idea of a normativity that cannot function because cases are systematically opposed to it). In a word, logic has yet to discover its own contingency, its own terminality. The terminal starting point and its deployments thus remain a kind of hard core also in my philosophy of logic. But that hard core is minimal, and all the rest, the vast majority of my philosophy and of philosophies in general, including the infinite "systems of logic" that we can construct, always seemed to me somewhat multiple, plural and irreducibly perspectival, in the best spirit of the twentieth century. The shape of the world fits on the tip of a pin, for it is concentrated in a handful of trivial data about the human situation in respect of which there is room for infinitely many different attitudes. In logic we can construct many systems, all of them correct for something or from something, since logic goes

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as "loose" in the world, it has no anchors or moorings, it has no relation to the world except a title of hypothesis or conjecture. My 10 points against the pretended "formality" of logic must show it as a contingent and revisable construction, but in a much deeper sense than the idea of the "non-classical". For non-classical revisions still maintain the classical point of reference, producing only divergences, but not admitting hyper-divergences (such as those proposed, for example, by Hegel, Husserl, Dewey, Piaget or Jerrold Katz, or by our systems of lexical logic). Limits, perceived by logic as mere "inadequacies", are suffered in ethics in the form of suffering. Transcendental logical-semantic-pragmatic idealism has no strength to face pain, for we can construct the world as we wish within our systems of logic, but the world destroys us as and when it wishes. As soon as I suffer, the world is no longer my object, but I myself am the object of the world. I can put everything into my language except suffering; suffering is unspeakable. Not only the immense suffering of the conquest of America, Auschwitz or Gaza, but also the slightest and most trivial suffering, the cry of the child that makes adults laugh so much. Suffering interrupts language but cannot be part of it. In ethics, we cannot be transcendental idealists. In logic, we can build indefinitely. Suffering informs us that not everything is our construction, not because it says so in a "meaningful proposition" but simply because it destroys us.

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From analytical aesthetics to logopathy. Why the starting point could not be aesthetic. As I have already said, in my personal biography, logic and aesthetics went together at the beginning of my life. In my philosophical training in Córdoba I tried to apply logic and philosophy of language to the field of aesthetics and literary criticism. More recently, in the last decade of the last century, I turned my philosophical lanterns towards cinema, my oldest passion (even more than literature and philosophy). So, art and aesthetics appeared in two very different moments of my philosophical life, at the beginning and at the end, but with their peculiarities: in the aesthetic period (approximately from 1970 to 1981), with total primacy of logic over emotions and feelings or over any existential pathos; in the second period (from 1995 until today), the relationship was reversed, and the páthos, without depriving over the logical, was articulated with it in the notion of "logopathy" (which had already had in the notion of "logodrama" an antecedent, at the time of publication of my slapstick novel The Logician and the Beast). Logic began to crack, to have to live with what I did not understand. In my writings on cinema I finally released what my Argentine students saw as strangled when I gave them classes on analytical aesthetics, in the distant 1970s. In spite of always maintaining as a background my catastrophic vision of the "disvalue of being" (whose first intuitions come, as I said, from childhood), my effective philosophizing at the university began with theoretical aesthetics and logic, with primacy of the latter. Already in my youthful work, Possibility and realization of a system of psychologically based aesthetics and the determination of the intrinsic structure of art, written at the age of 24 as my undergraduate thesis at the University of Córdoba, Argentina, I had manifested my first and early interest in the form of the world, and I still believed I could find it in the arid corridors of logic. In the appreciation of literary works (the only ones that interested me in those studies), the critical contents seemed to me an inessential filler: many things could be said about the same literary works. The strong impression that the plurality of philosophies of art could not be reduced, and that each philosophy was self-supporting against the others independently of its contents, was already present in those distant times. In other words, the idea that truth was formal, that it did not adhere to concrete contents. I was looking for that formality in an obscure way, in logic and analytical aesthetics, that is, where it could not be. On the level of content, the idea of a single truth had always seemed to me to be an illusion. More than that, the attempts to bring the truth to the system itself seemed to me to be a

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something repulsive, like a supreme act of theoretical egotism. What there were were irreducible perspectives and perception of aspects, and I always saw my own philosophy, from its first wobbles until now, as one among many. Logic and philosophy of language provided rigorous methods of approaching theoretical aesthetics, which seemed to me to be swamped with inaccuracies. Aesthetics and logic also went together in what was my doctoral thesis, where I tried to build an artificial language, the C language, in the best style of Carnap (a philosopher who was fundamental at that time, especially after the careful reading of the Aufbau with Raggio), a language that was able to refer to literary works in a precise way (in 1985, already living in Brazil, I published in Portuguese the book Problemas de estética e Linguagem: uma abordagem analítica, a summary of that doctoral t h e s i s ). In fact, biographically, I worked with logical systems applied to aesthetics long before I thematized the hard core of the disvalue of being, only vaguely intuited. Logic and aesthetics were fields in which one could play. That is what I did. My works in logic, language and aesthetics are composed of constructions and, from the negative metaphysical point of view, I can see them today as intramundane activities with which we entertain ourselves and make our lives drinkable. Instead of leading me towards the form of the world, these studies were leading me further and further away from it. These games make it possible to exchange the intractable coexistence with the hard core of the world for a set of manageable problems. My fundamental problem in aesthetics was whether we could construct a language by which we could talk precisely about literary works. My fundamental problem in logic was whether we could apply logic to the treatment of those works. The perverse marriage between logic and aesthetics was consummated. But the aesthetic has always harbored in itself the pathic and the suffering, and it was this aspect that could put it in contact with the ultimate foundation of the world, with what I would later call the point of departure or the form of the world. Therefore, it was not at all absurd to think that aesthetics, once freed from the perfidious domain of logic, not by eliminating it but by articulating it with the pathic, could slowly bring us closer to the terminal foundation. It was my studies on cinema that finally freed aesthetics from the clutches of logic, the C-system was invaded by logopathy. At the end of the millennium I published in Barcelona my fundamental work in this area, "Cinema: 100 years of Philosophy". When, in this work, I recover my former interest in cinema and nourish the idea of formulating my thoughts on how cinema can think, I see that the pathic element is that indispensable "excess" without which the

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merely logical content of the film cannot work. Talking about films, then, was not only a referential task that could be done from a regimented language, but an exercise of metaphoricity and conceptual imagination capable of dealing with the pragmatic element in the performative and elicitive functions of language (functions that I was to describe a few years later in the 2003 book Margens das filosofias da linguagem). To determine to what extent the aesthetic element, now freed from the tyranny of logic through cinema, can approach the ground, one would have to understand better (I mean, better than this brief summary allows) the relations between cinema and the terminality of being. Here I see an oscillation: on the one hand, cinema ostensively shows terminal suffering without trying to resolve it, and in that it is basically anti-affirmative. The ending of being allows itself to be filmed, very far from the vulgar vision of cinema as "entertainment", even in the most obvious cases (like almost all of Spielberg's cinema, for example, which, against his perception as a prophet of entertainment, seems to me to be of an unfathomable pessimism). On the other hand, generally speaking, cinema attempts an agonizing repositioning, an imaginative administration of excess far better than the negative ethic of over-survival achieves it, but which is nonetheless a reaction to the structure of the world, the best of intramundane inventions of values. (Think of David Lynch's first film, "Eraserhead": at the same time that it depicts the terminality of being in an unbearable way, it also, ultimately, aestheticizes it agonizingly to the point that Lynch considers this his "most spiritual" film.) Thus, the foundation cannot be "aesthetic" except in the very vague and general sense of suffering; but if the suffered foundation is the terminality of being, cinema maintains with it a double movement, one, in the direction of the foundation, the other as a reaction to it. Thus, even when the aesthetic was withdrawn by cinema from its former subjection to logic in the "analytic aesthetics" cultivated by me in the distant 1970s and now forced to articulate itself with the pathic in the logopathic, it continues to be something reactive; it remains at the same level of invention of values as ethics, although with much more success than it.

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EPILOGUE WITH FICHTE The German philosopher Johann Fichte, who lived in the 19th century, wrote several introductions to his book Doctrine of Science. At the end of the 18th century, he wrote one of them with the suggestive title "Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre für Leser die schon ein philosophischen System haben", that is: "Second introduction to the Doctrine of Science for readers who already have a philosophical system". I am, as recorded in this writing, one of those addressees, a reader who already has a philosophical system. Therefore, Fichte's writing is intended for me. In this text, Fichte intends to lead these readers out of their "error" and to bring them to accept his system, the true one. The present epilogue wants to expose why my system cannot be unilaterally engulfed by Fichte's system (or by any system), without the very system it intends to engulf not running the same risk, that is, that of being engulfed by my system. I believe, in fact, that this is the situation of all philosophical systems: each one mortally challenges the others but all have to coexist with all of them, without being able to eliminate the others without running the risk of being eliminated by them. (This is the pluralistic and negative meta-philosophy that I developed i n Part IV of Margens das filosofias da linguagem and in my recent research on "negative logic", especially in my book "Introduction to a negative approach in argumentation", published in England in 2019.)

Towards a philosophy without "speculative flight". The European philosopher sold to the world the idea that while the body corrupts, the spirit lives, somehow, forever, that neither Plotinus, nor Hegel nor Kierkegaard (nor anyone else) died with the deterioration of their abhorred bodies. But in order to be able to say this, we are obliged to place ourselves already at an advanced stage of the spiritualistic system of those philosophers, which already presupposes our acceptance and conviction of its foundations. Any spiritualistic point of view already demands a prior conviction about the work of the spirit (as absolute self, representational subject, human person, or whatever). To accept that only the body is corrupted but the spirit is not, we already have to be within the spiritualist system. European philosophy, and more specifically German philosophy, and even more specifically, German idealism, would contest my starting point (the terminality of being, the brute ascertainment

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of the death and dying of our body and of all things) as being "arbitrary" (like every empirical starting point), and as still having to be picked up by the patient work of the spirit, which would have to re-signify it. This is the fundamental speculative movement of German idealism, the transition from the merely in-itself to the for-itself, where things find their genuine being. European philosophies are philosophies that (whether spiritualist or materialist or pragmatist) stress the human capacity to transform and overcome the threats of nature (death and dying); whereas South American philosophies seem more willing to surrender to the brute animal sense of death, in the sense that we fail to overcome our natural state through a superior and long-breathed philosophical game. This is the famous "lack of speculative force" of South Americans, their "lack of flight", which makes many Germans - including South American Germans - say that we cannot do philosophy, when, in truth, that "lack of speculative force" constitutes, precisely, our particular way of doing it. Europeans have that powerful capacity for self-deception that we starving and marginalized South Americans are not capable of assuming. As a South American thinker, my mortal condition is the insurmountable starting point of all philosophizing. Spiritual works exist and are effective, but they all occur within nature, and therefore do not and could not overcome it. All spiritual constructions are strictly intra-natural. South American thinkers are people who are stuck in the moment of the Hegelian antithesis: their spirit is not strong enough to gather nature into the infinite work of the spirit. We are loose in spirit; that characterizes us as philosophers; we do loose philosophy, not in the pejorative sense of poorly argued or mediocre, but in the sense of disenchanted and flightless, a philosophy that remains stubbornly on the natural ground; they are the huge feet and small heads of Tarsila do Amaral's paintings. The Brazilian philosopher Tobias Barreto may not have been wrong when he said that his compatriots had no philosophical head, but he forgot to look at their feet. It is to be expected, then, that any speculative philosopher will reject out of hand the starting point of my system - the terminality of being - as merely "subjective," for making things appear in such a way that the basic and fundamental are death and suffering, and not the millennial work of the spirit. For a highly speculative philosophy this would be precisely the negation of a philosophy, since, according to it, philosophizing has to give death a place within the system that neutralizes it and takes away its terrors through an intra-systemic interpretation.

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systematic, that surpasses it in the very exercise of its location. A pretended philosophizing that allows itself to be defeated by death is, from this point of view, the very negation of philosophy. It cannot be denied, and the speculative philosopher himself should not deny it, that beliefs about our mortal situation - as opposed to typically affirmative questions such as the destiny of the human spirit or the unfolding of God in history - are among the most self-evident and indisputable knowledge available to us. If I put these trivialities of the human situation as starting points, I do so not merely as a morbid gloating, but as a way of understanding the world on a basis which, I believe, is more secure than the Cartesian, Kantian, Fichtean or Husserlian basis. To this, the idealist system will reply that my starting point is merely empirical, and that, as such, it is arbitrary and has yet to be overcome. And so it will have become clear to the reader of my Abstract the essential discordance between my system and a German idealist system, and how each of these systems threatens to engulf the other (as is the case with every system). Having made this general introduction, I now turn to consider Fichte's text and my response to it. Response to Fichte from someone who already has a philosophical system Fichte, together with the American William James and the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein are possibly the best meta-philosophers that appeared within European philosophy, in general very poor in meta-philosophy. And yet Fichte commits - in his expositions of the "Doctrine of Science" - the same meta-philosophical error of all European philosophers: he thinks that because he managed, in a certain line of thought, to organize the world in a certain way, that way must then be the only true one; he confuses, then, his own philosophy with philosophy without more. He fails to attach importance to the fortuitous and casual fact that he, precisely, is the author of the system that finally found the absolute truth; he no longer manages to be surprised by the astonishing fact that the absolute truth has been spoken, precisely, by him, within the system of which he is the author; and, above all, he is not able to raise his head and realize that, around him, there are hundreds and hundreds of other thinkers who have also successfully organized the world and think, like him, to have discovered the only true system. This is the enormous meta-philosophical incompetence of the "great European philosophers".

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(In meta-philosophical matters, we, South Americans, surpassed them immensely, not by our own merit, but because they, the Europeans, forced us to meta-philosophize, to transform ourselves into fine meta-philosophers forced to think about what it is to philosophize, why our thought is excluded and how we can rebel against this situation). If Fichte or any of us were enormously enthusiastic about the system of another thinker and believed that the truth is in that other person's system and nowhere else, there would still be suspicions about his attitude but never so many as in the face of the astonishing fact that the absolute truth has been expressed, precisely, by the philosophy which, fortuitously and coincidentally, has myself as its author. Why precisely would I (I, Fichte, I, Julio Cabrera, I, Ludwig Wittgenstein) have had the luck and talent to discover the absolute truth? This is a mysterium tremendum for all philosophers who claim to have discovered the unique system of the world. The suspicion is that truth is installed in every system in an aspectual way, and not in the decisive way with which its author intends it. The fact that "I" am the author of that system is not a fundamental characteristic of it, nor can it show by that alone that it must be the only true one. Rather, it seems that I myself use my system as a resource to give myself a special value that I deny to others. Fichte has the impression that he who does not embrace the Doctrine of Science is "mistaken", lives an "error" from which he has to be "freed". It is incredible how such an intelligent author as he does not perceive that his philosophy is only one among many, how he does not draw the conclusion of the plural nature of philosophy simply by looking around and discovering the other philosophies around his own, and that he does not manage to see them except under the veil of "error". Fichte begins his text by speaking of "unprejudiced readers," who are those who can embrace the Doctrine of Science without problems, and "prejudiced readers," those who, blinded by their own systems, fail to accept Fichte's system. Of course he has reasons to defend that, he has reasons to show the prejudiced character of those readers, and he has an argument to show why his philosophy is the one to be embraced; the only thing he does not perceive is that any other philosophical system also has all those things, that his arguments are just arguments among arguments, and his philosophy a philosophy among philosophies. I believe that this is the attitude, the gesture, that philosophers in general (and European philosophers in particular) are incapable of doing: to renounce their own centrality, to put themselves in the

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periphery. Each of them prefers to occupy, fortuitously and casually, the place of the center, until other systems, other philosophies, remove them from that place and place them, with greater or lesser violence, in the periphery that corresponds to them. What the displaced philosophy will be able to do is not to avoid this, but, at most, to counter-attack, showing that the philosophy that displaces it does not have the merits to occupy the place of the center either. For each philosophy is the de-centering of all the others. Thus, amusingly, all that Fichte says about "prejudiced readers" applies equally to him: "From the building itself they have abstracted certain maxims which have become for them fundamental principles. And everything that is not constructed according to these rules is for them, without further examination and without their even needing to read it, false. It must undoubtedly be false, because it has been carried out contrary to their method, which is the only valid one" (Fichte, Second Introduction to the Doctrine of Science for Readers who already have a philosophical system, Técnos, Madrid, 1987, p. 39). And Fichte advises to do with them what I would like to do here with Fichte: "We must arouse their distrust of his rules". Next, precisely to prevent his own system from being seen as one system among others (because it is in the very nature of a philosophical system to want to impose itself on the rest as the only one), Fichte says that the context and significance of his system, the Doctrine of Science, are "completely different from the context and significance of the philosophical systems that have been made up to the present" (Id). Here the philosopher already hawks his wares on the market with the merit of exclusivity and distinction: you have seen many things, but never anything so extraordinary as this which I now show you. Fichte says that the other philosophers, the "makers of systems", "...start from some concept; without worrying at all about where they have taken such a concept from or with what elements they have interwoven it...". Fichte boasts of starting not from a dead concept, but from something living, from a certain activity that produces knowledge from itself, And this is something that the philosopher witnesses, he is the vehicle and not the source of that incessant activity (p. 40). The other philosophers concentrate not on the independent and objective activity, but on this or that product of it, raised to the status of supreme and fundamental concept, in an arbitrary and artificial way. And by emphasizing this product, he kills it, transforms it into dead matter. Fichte then minimizes that which would put the system of the Doctrine of Science on the same level as his adversaries: while the latter start from a dead concept, his

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system starts from a living act, from which one can make any system one wishes. It is as if Fichte had discovered a formal device whose formality gives it the right of primacy over all other systems, which are now seen only as contents or instances of that pure form. And its superiority over the other systems consists in that, in that only the Doctrine of Science has succeeded in grasping the pure formality of the thinking process, realizing that philosophy consists in that living process and not in this or that concept within that thinking path. Thus, I suppose that Fichte would consider mortality or terminality as examples of those "dead concepts" which ignore their own arbitrariness and which disqualify them as pretended ultimate foundations or absolute truths; for, for him, terminality would be only an aspect of that which the creative spontaneity of the subject manages to traverse, but whose accentuation is perfectly arbitrary. After this methodological preliminary, Fichte enters the subject with a typically idealistic question: "...whence comes the system of representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity? Or: how is it that to the merely subjective we nevertheless attribute objective validity? Or again, if you will: since objective validity is characterized by being, how do we come to admit a being?" (p. 42). Here one starts from a consciousness and wonders how something that takes consciousness as its point of departure can be. So we must accept Fichte that the whole question has its starting point in consciousness, and that "...the immediate object of consciousness is none other than consciousness itself". Extremely debatable starting points that already begin to show how Fichte's thunderous results are tributary to heavy and not at all harmless starting points. But let us accept them for the sake of argument (not without a certain hatred). Continuing: the being asked about has been abstracted as "being in general". That to which one must appeal in order to answer the question of being "...is the conscious, the subject, which should be grasped, according to this, cleansed of all representation of being, in order to show in it alone the ground of all being - for itself, it is already understood. But to the subject, when all being has been abstracted from itself and for itself, nothing else corresponds but an acting; the subject is, especially in relation to being, the acting" (p. 43). The form of the world, for Fichte, is an activity, not an object or a concept. And having discovered this places his system, according to him, above all others, and enables him to try to convince others to abandon their systems in order to embrace the system of pure activity, the source of all systems. (It is as if Fichte were saying, "Abandon your cherished principles-the

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terminality of being, or the goodness of God, it matters little - and surrender yourself to my system, for in it you will find the primitive activity which will enable you, later on, to rediscover your principles, but within the system of acting being." My meta-philosophical idea is that each system proposes a way of organizing the world; philosophies have a propositional and performative character, in the sense that what they propose is imposed through their own thinking activity; what is being proposed is realized through the proposal itself. Idealist principles are very hard to swallow, but Fichte asks us to accept them without question. For him, any being outside the self has to be grounded in the self and conditioned by it (p. 44). He says that this cannot be demonstrated by arguments (well we suspected!), but, with Kantian echoes, only "by the observation of the original proceeding of reason, as valid for reason" (44). With regard, then, to the objective, to what is outside of consciousness, to what imposes a feeling of necessity, it is a matter of seeing "...how the I is and comes to be for itself, and then that this being, of itself, is not possible for itself without at the same time a being outside of itself also arising" (Id). It is amazing to see how Fichte so carelessly refers to "prejudiced readers," who refuse to abandon their fundamental beliefs, when he forces his ("unprejudiced") reader to accept as a starting point that any feeling of objective necessity is an unfolding of the structures of the self. Perhaps what Fichte calls the "prejudices" of his readers are simply their own presuppositions, which they are fully entitled to have; if not, there is no reason not to regard Fichtean idealistic principles as his own "prejudices." Fichte asks us, then, for a kind of rational faith, of asceticism of action: to believe that there is nothing that the self is before its self-constitution: "The self reverts into itself, affirms itself. Does it not exist for itself already before this reversal and independently of it? (...) To this I answer: No, by no means. Basically by means of this act, and only by means of this act, by means of an act upon an act (...) does the I come to be originally for itself" (p. 45). According to Fichte, only the philosopher has the privilege of seeing this process as if it existed before, because he already made the whole experience of thinking: the "original acting" is the object of philosophy, but that is not the normal posture of humans, who live the self-constitution of their self reverting to itself. This reverting to itself is not a conceptual grasp, but an intuition (45), which arises even without consciousness (46). The philosopher is the reflective human for whom this selfconstitution is himself, his existence as a philosopher. It can be said that the philosopher is the free human being par excellence (46/7).

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Objectivity, being, are thus part of this process of "turning back on itself", as if it were a necessary unfolding of the constitution of the self. It is a domain of original creation: "It is so because I make it so (...) The question of objectivity is based on the curious assumption that the self is still something other than its own thought of itself, and that this thought is still based on something - God knows what the defenders of this thesis are thinking - outside of thought...". But there is nothing outside thought, in this original and self-creating dynamic sense; so that these adversaries should themselves set out in search of that which would be outside thought "...until they come to understand that the unknown which they are searching for is then also their thought..." (47). In the case of the philosopher, this becomes strongly conscious: "...the philosopher is looking at himself, he immediately intuits his acting, and knows what he does because he is the one who does it" (Id). This is how Fichte wants us to see the world. In any case, of the original acting there is only a primordial intuition and not a concept, not even an argument or a communication by concepts (48). The I is not a substance, but an acting ("...I and acting that reverts to itself are completely identical concepts"). Any person can have this intuition of self, even if the philosopher is the human personality that consists, fundamentally, in having this intuition of self; he is the type of human that reverts to himself, a sort of model of the original acting that is present in every human. Thus, all consciousness is based on self-consciousness, and this is the totally unconditioned or the absolute (49). At this point, and as if all this were completely evident, Fichte issues a challenge: "From now on, whoever has anything to say with respect to this course of action, I have only, in order to lessen the blows given to the void, to refer him to the preceding description of the same, asking him to tell me concretely against which member of the series he stumbles" (49). Well, I am going to do that, I am going to accept the challenge. And I am going to do it starting from the story of a dream. Suppose the reader (any reader, with or without prejudices) that I have had an altercation with someone and that I am very sorry for it, that I would very much like to meet him and clear things up so that our relations continue well. That night I dream that I meet this gentleman, that we talk and that we end up embracing as great friends. I dream that I tell him:

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"What luck, So-and-so; I was so bad about this situation; it's a pleasure to have cleared everything up." But, already inside the dream, I feel that this is worthless, that nothing has really been solved, that things are the same as before, because this is a dream and, therefore, that my agony will continue the next day just like today, when I wake up. And the interesting thing is that I don't even need to wake up to know it; already inside the dream I tell myself that it is a dream, and that the difficulties will continue outside of it. From the point of view of thought, everything is thought; but the point of view of thought is not the only point of view; there is, for example, the point of view of discomfort (in this case, the discomfort of the altercation). From the point of view of thought, discomfort, like anything else, is thought and pure thought, it is nothing other than thought; but since thought is not the only point of view that transforms everything it touches into that which it is (all philosophy is philosophical), that which is "only thought" from the point of view of thought can be something else from the point of view of X when X is not thought, when it is, for example, suffering. It does not mean that, from the point of view of thought, suffering is not thought, because, from the point of view of thought, everything is thought, including suffering. But the point of view of thought is not the only perspective that we can assume, so that even though, assuming the point of view of thought, everything is necessarily thought, there is no need to assume the point of view of thought; assuming the point of view of suffering, everything is suffering, including thought. These two views have to coexist (badly, probably). The lesson that philosophers never learn - and Fichte is no exception - is that everything is necessary within their philosophies, but that it is not necessary to assume those philosophies. Their necessity is intrasystematic; the systems themselves, with their respective necessities and absolutes, are within the contingent realm of the multiplicity of systems, and adopting a system (necessary, as they all are) is an act of pure contingency. Of course, this is what no philosophy accepts or concedes; each of them wants not only that the necessities internal to their systems be accepted, but that they themselves be necessary, that it be necessary to accept those necessities and not others. Fichte challenged his readers to discover some point in his argument where a problem arises that prevents the adoption of his Doctrine of Science. I discover that point,

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but he is meta-philosophical. What was stated in the previous paragraph points to the member of the Fichtean deductive series against which I stumble. Sleep sees everything from the point of view of sleep, but wakefulness sees everything from the point of view of wakefulness, and there is no need to be asleep or awake; being asleep, dreaming or awake are perfectly contingent states: I am awake now, but suddenly, five minutes from now, I may feel a terrible drowsiness and fall asleep in an armchair. The self-criticism of sleep should be the metaphilosophical self-criticism of philosophies: just as sleep itself knows itself to be a dream, so every system should know itself to be a system, instead of fanatically surrendering to everything that the assumed point of view is capable of offering, with all its destructive load of the other points of view that could be assumed at any moment. If this is not seen, it is because each system has intra-systematically constructed its own necessity, its own inevitability. But that the inevitability of each system needs to be intra-systematically constructed already shows that there is no absolute eligibility of systems. I have to decide contingently which necessity I prefer to submit to, and which necessities I would be loathe to submit to. The capacity that each system has to account for everything is no proof that it is the only correct system, since every system accounts for everything. And this is precisely the paradox: that each system, being only one among thousands, accounts for the totality of the world. The absolute primacy that each system imagines it has over all other systems is part of the dream from which we do not even need to wake up to know that it is a dream. When Fichte affirms: "It is so because I make it so (...) The question of objectivity is founded on the curious assumption that the I is still something else apart from its own thought of itself, and that this thought is still founded on something - God knows what the defenders of this thesis are thinking - outside of thought...", I answer that the I cannot be something else apart from its own thought of itself if we already assume the point of view of thought. One cannot get out of thought once one has departed from it (it would be possible to get out of it if we had ever entered it). But the self can be something other than its own thought of itself if we do NOT assume the point of view of thought, assuming, for example, the point of view of suffering: thought is a way of dealing with this discomfort. And assuming this point of view, everything is organized according to it, just as assuming Fichte's point of view, everything is organized according to his point of view, exactly as two perfectly legitimate Gestalten (as in the

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famously drawn, neither the duck nor the rabbit could be determined as unique and absolute by eliminating the other; and yet both are objective and sustainable). Fichte is right that it would be a mistake to think of suffering as something on which thought is founded in absolute terms. But since there are many systems, and not only Fichte's system or mine, there can be no absolute foundation, but only diverse foundations, all sunk in the most radical contingency. Suffering could not be the absolute foundation of thought, nor vice versa; suffering is another perspective that places itself in front of thought, and with that placing itself in front of thought, it transforms thought into a point of view among others, into a denied universality, and the perspective of thought does the same with the perspective of suffering. Fichte, like all European philosophers, has allowed himself to be carried away by selfbenevolence; when each system discovers the truth (not only its truth, but the truth, the truth itself, only from a perspective) it should be satisfied; but it needs an illegitimate reinforcement, given by the fortuitous and unjustifiable fact of being me (in each case) the discoverer of that truth. It does not only want to have discovered the truth from one perspective, but to have discovered a truth that must be true for any and all perspectives. The realism of suffering neither refutes nor destroys the idealism of Fichtean thought. For philosophical systems do not relate to each other like two human beings in relation to a one-place seat where one of them, by sitting down, dislodges the other. Philosophers must be freed from the firm and unshakable conviction that because their own system explains everything, it must then be the only system; they must be shown, as in a liberating act, that every system explains everything, that explaining everything in the midst of other systems that explain everything must give the dimension of the external limits of each system, despite the fact that each of them is seen internally as limitless. This is the member of the Fichtean series with which I stumble, a difficulty familiar to Fichte, since it is, from head to toe, a meta-philosophical difficulty. The philosophical movement strange to Fichte and to philosophers in general is the one quite familiar to the psychiatrist or psychologist (rather than to the psychoanalyst) when they refuse to enter into the discourse of the neurotic or psychotic and come to see this discourse "from the outside": it is not a question of refuting the neurotic or psychotic fichteano since, along their lines, they are irrefutable; it is a question of showing them that there are other ways of seeing things which do not destroy their ways of seeing things, but which oblige them to live with what is different from themselves. The readers

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who already have a philosophical system have the right to fall ill as they wish in order to face the world through their favorite Erasmian follies; they are not "prejudiced" just because they do not want to adopt the neuroses or psychoses to which they would not know how to adapt or which they would not be able to face. Despite his idealism, Fichte thinks that the world must have only one system that explains it correctly, while all the others are wrong and full of prejudices. To the philosopher, neurotic or psychotic, who has his affections committed to a single way of seeing the world, we should not try to "refute" him, but to show him that he is not alone, that there are other people whose affections are equally committed to their own ways of seeing the world. The mere presence of a thought can be more effective than his arguments. (One must rid the philosopher of his certainties, as Fichte himself proclaims). There are systems in which it is shown that I make everything (Fichte) and others in which it is shown that I am made (Schopenhauer, Freud). The former explore what we discover by supposing an intellectual intuition of one's own creative activity (p. 49/52), while the latter explore what we discover by denying that intellectual intuition. But Fichte is not satisfied with so little: "Intellectual intuition constitutes the only firm reality for all philosophy. From it everything that takes place in consciousness can be explained; but, let it be understood, only from it. Without self-consciousness there is no consciousness at all (...) From this reality of intellectual intuition I cannot go beyond it because I am not allowed to go beyond it; whereby transcendental idealism shows itself, at the same time, as the only existing way in philosophy of thinking in accordance with duty (...)" (53). Fichte also tries to argue in favor of his point of departure against others: "...it is not as unimportant as it seems to some whether philosophy starts from a fact or from an action (...) If it starts from the fact, it is placed in the world of being and finitude, and it will be difficult to find from it a way to the infinite and suprasensible; if it starts from the action, it is in the full point that connects both worlds and from which they can be embraced at a single glance" (55). Here I return to points touched upon earlier. For the European spiritualist thinker (and especially that of the 19th century), it seems obvious that philosophy must tend towards the infinite, and that it is bad philosophy that remains in the finite. But it is perfectly possible to opt for the finite by choosing a fact (such as mortality) as a starting point, and not the pure original action of the spirit. We do not necessarily have to be obliged to seek the suprasensible, we do not necessarily have to prefer spiritual actions to natural facts; it is a matter of philosophizing in

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different directions. Philosophy seeks (so they say) truth, and truth can be death, at least in one possible direction of the philosophical task. In section 6 of his opuscule, Fichte analyzes the position of the Doctrine of Science with respect to Kant, mentioning many other authors of the time and warring with them for Kant's favor or trying to show who interpreted the Master better (pp. 55/73), questions that I am not at all interested in entering into here. But towards the end of that section, the author addresses the question of affection, which has an interesting relation to my topic, because it illustrates well that curious capacity of systems to engulf each other. Fichte's objectors recall that Kant, his author-fetish, has clearly said that objects are given to us through the affection of sensibility, which seems to go against the theses of transcendental idealism (73/4). But Fichte manages to engulf affection by means of thought: "The object affects; something that is only thought affects. What does this mean? If I possess no more than a spark of logic, it means no more than this: it affects in so far as it is, that is, it is only thought of as affecting. (...) Since we think only the affection itself, we doubtless also think only the commonality of it; it is also only a mere thought. If you put an object with the thought that it has affected you, you think yourself affected in this case; and if you think that this happens with all the objects of your perception, you think yourself as affectable in general, or, in other words: you attribute to yourself by this thought of yours receptivity or sensibility. This is how the object, as given, comes to be only thought (...)" (p. 75). And he continues implacably: "It is true that all our knowledge starts from an affection, but not as an effect of an object". This limitation is, according to him, a limitation that the self puts on itself. It is an originary limitation, a necessity of my own unfolding as self. "This limitation of mine in its determination reveals itself in the limitation of my practical faculty (...)" (p. 77). The dogmatic tendency is to fall into "the importunate thing-in-itself" (Id). What can be shown here is that t h e opposite point of view can do the same, and affection can engulf thought. The anti-Fichtean way may be the following: everything is affection, everything is suffering, nothing exists for the human except in the form of an experience of suffering some effect of the world in more or less painful or tedious ways; humans are thrown into the world subjected to all sorts of discomforts, discomforts, and

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difficulties and the activity of thought, far from being a priority, is only one of the ways of dealing with the annoying and uncomfortable affection. We try to know the world not out of an interest of pure thought but in order to flee from painful affections: to know is to protect oneself from the world, and all the activity of thought is at the service of maintaining the life of those natural beings called human beings. Thus, while Fichte thinks that it is thought that sets itself the limit of affection, we can perfectly well think that it is suffering that sets thought in motion. Who is right? But how could one choose between performances? It is clear that the Fichtean path and mine can both be followed, though not at the same time. The choices are not arbitrary or absurd, but they are flooded with contingency. That affection can be devoured by the incessant activity of thought does not close the door to the fact that, in another perspective, the activity of thought can be devoured by the incessant corrosion of affection. Philosophers should war less and explore more, see the other not as an "adversary" but as someone who is proposing other perspectives, other thought experiments. Already in the first Introduction to the Doctrine of Science, Fichte had said that there are only two possible systems of philosophy: dogmatism, which gives priority to things in themselves over consciousness, and idealism, which gives priority to consciousness over the thing in itself. (First Introduction, in the same volume, pp. 10/11). For Fichte, it is clear that a third type of philosophical system cannot exist. (Today we could say that a third type does exist: it is that system which denies the dichotomy consciousness/thing-in-itself and declares that we start from both things, from a consciousness already in the world, as in the philosophy of Ortega y Gasset). His problem (which is also of interest in this work) is in what way someone decides to be an idealist or a dogmatist. In section 5 of that text, Fichte states: "Neither of these two systems can directly distort the opposing system, for the controversy they are engaged in concerns the first principle, which can no longer be deduced from another; only by admitting their respective principle, each of the two systems already rejects that of the other. Each denies everything to the opposite system, and they have no point in common from which they can agree and coincide. Even when they seem to agree as regards the words of a proposition, the truth is that each of them takes them in a different sense" (pp.14/15). This shows how Fichte could also have meta-philosophical genius when he wanted to: according to him, since the disagreement between idealism and dogmatism is one of principle they could not

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have no disagreement of detail, nor any agreement; all agreement or disagreement will be apparent. This means that one must be idealistic or dogmatic from the beginning and from the root, and not in this or that detail, a little idealistic or a little dogmatic. It would therefore be a mistake to declare that idealism negates dogmatism or vice versa, for in order to deny each other they would have to have something in common; since their differences are in principle, they cannot even deny each other, since there is no basis for such a denial. Only apparently there would be a mutual negation, for that which idealism denies would already be something different from that which the dogmatist holds, and vice versa. In truth, each system constructs within itself the principle of the other, dethroning it as a principle. The dogmatist shows that the free spontaneity of the idealist is apparent, and the idealist shows that the thing-in-itself of the dogmatist is a construction of spontaneity. But these differences are very basic, they are differences of starting point, such that each of these philosophies constructs the other within itself, which does not, it is clear, constitute any "refutation" of one by the other. Although neither of these systems can refute the other, they are radically incompatible, and any attempt to articulate them must fail (pp. 16/17). Fichte then asks the crucial question: what perchance can move someone to prefer to be an idealist or a dogmatist, that is, to sacrifice the independence of the thing or the independence of the self (p. 17). He says that "There is no ground of decision possible on the part of reason," and that the decision "depends only on the freedom of thinking" (18), and "is determined by inclination and interest. The ultimate reason for the difference between the idealist and the dogmatist lies, therefore, in the difference of their interest" (Id). It is a question of two different types of humans, those who find themselves only in representing things to themselves; those who believe in their autonomy by inclination and make it their own by affection, will be idealists (19). "The kind of philosophy one chooses depends, then, on the kind of person one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead utensil that can be left or taken as one pleases, but is animated by the soul of the person who has it" (20). These are wonderful words which I fully assume in my own pluralistic metaphilosophy; but Fichte does not manage to remain long on that balanced level of thought. He has, in spite of everything, to find some stronger justification for the idealistic preference or inclination. He had already suggested, pages earlier, that a genuine philosopher has to rise to the idealist principle: "The philosopher in the indicated point of view - which is the one he must irremissibly adopt if he is to be held to be a philosopher, and in which man, owing to the

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The progress of his thought and even without taking an active part in the matter, in the short or long run, he ends up by placing himself - he finds nothing more than having to form the idea that he is free and that outside of him there are certain things. It becomes impossible for man to remain in this idea; the idea consisting of a mere representation is only half a thought, an incomplete piece of a thought..." (p. 17). A true philosopher cannot, therefore, be content, according to him, with dead representations, for that would be like renouncing the life of thought, which is what makes someone a philosopher. So an ordinary human being can be dogmatic, but a "dogmatic philosopher" is a contradiction in terms, for he would be someone who has renounced the very exercise of thinking, who has meekly accepted the determinations of representation. And further on he writes: "A character lazy by nature, or softened by servitude of spirit, refined luxury and vanity, a crooked character, will never rise to idealism" (20). In other words: dogmatism cannot be refuted by idealism, but the person of the dogmatist can be considered, from idealism, as a lower form of existing. Only the argument ad hominem (even if it is ad universalem hominem) is available here. In section 6, Fichte attempts a disqualification of dogmatism along these same lines, which, in order to be coherent, should not consist of arguments but, rather, of forms of persuasion. "...dogmatism is totally incapable of explaining what it has to explain, and this dictates its ineptitude" (20). He suggests that even the dogmatist has to recognize in himself the intellectual intuition, the action of his own consciousness: "...dogmatism cannot deny what immediate consciousness affirms about representation" (Id). Intelligence sees itself in its producing and not even the dogmatist can ignore this. The producing of intelligence cannot be causally explained, as the dogmatist claims (21). "The passage from being to representing is what the dogmatists had to demonstrate; and this they do not and cannot do, for in the principle on which they rely there is given only the foundation of a being, but not that of representing, totally opposed to being. They make an enormous leap into a world totally foreign to their principle" (22). Further on, Fichte accuses dogmatism of simply repeating its principle without developing it, and surprisingly concludes: "(dogmatism) cannot, from it, make the transition to what is to be explained, nor can it deduce it. But it is precisely in this deduction that philosophy consists. Dogmatism, then, considered even from the side of the

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speculation, it is not a philosophy, but only an impotent affirmation and assertion. The only possible philosophy left is idealism" (p. 24). But this is no longer an ad hominem criticism against the lazy person of the dogmatist, but seems exactly what Fichte said earlier that it was not possible to do: a refutation of one of the two positions from the other by argument. In this he falls back into the well-known meta-philosophical mediocrity of European philosophy of all times, with its endemic inability to see philosophy itself as one among many others. Returning to the Second Introduction (written for us who already have a system), he insists that the creative spontaneity of consciousness is something we constantly see and are, so that denying it or reducing it to mere causal mechanisms constitutes what today we would call a performative contradiction. Referring to the opponents of idealism, he says: "...they prefer to deny the possibility of an action at the very moment they perform it rather than renounce its rules; and they give more credence to any old book than to their own intimate consciousness" (8)). Recurrent in Fichte is this idea that what the Doctrine of Science establishes, does not have to be simply read or known externally by the reader, but that he has to try to make the journey himself, activating his own intellectual intuition. (This is very clear, for example, in the beginning of the "Communiqué clear as the sun..."). In the Second Introduction, he mercilessly mocks those who would claim not to be able to speak in prose (like Jourdan) without first knowing the rules of prose, saying that "...they will soon go to consult Aristotle as to whether they are really alive or whether they are already dead or buried" (p. 81). This "existential", "lived" element is fundamental in Fichte's philosophy and I fully assume it. But this means that, according to him, it is idealism that must be assumed, for this is the position that fully recognizes this existential element, which the dogmatist wants to reduce to a causal and representational mechanism. Despite his extraordinary reflection on the impossibility of refutation of the only two possible philosophies due to the ultra-basic character of their differences, Fichte ends up taking up again the old method of the philosophers already denounced before, of ignoring the plurality of philosophies starting from an absolutized point of view, which would not be wrong in itself since each philosophy has to absolutize its point of view. The meta-philosophical move that Fichte and all philosophers lack, is the recognition that all philosophical systems - including the dogmatic ones - absolutize their points of view, so that philosophy is a sort of forced coexistence of many absolutes that refuse

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mutually their absolute character, not by explicit negations but only by the mere fact of existing within the immense field of possibilities of philosophies. And if I am told that I would also have to renounce my own certainties, I say that I have long since done so, that I have already committed theoretical suicide by doing just that, and that I am at all times presenting my philosophical system only as one among others, only fighting for its right to exist and at no time claiming uniqueness or universality or absolute necessity. But my opponents would be right in saying that although I have renounced my own philosophical certainties, I have not renounced my own meta-philosophical certainties (and this is one of the many arguments by which I defend this distinction, without ever denying, obviously, that metaphilosophizing is philosophizing): I would in no way accept a meta-philosophy that would hold that it is possible to find a final unique and absolute system capable of explaining everything and of showing clearly that all other systems are wrong. In that sense, my suicide is philosophical, but not meta-philosophical.

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