Time and Being

In Latinamerica

In a small notebook of notes, made in Jena between 1803 and 1806, entitled Wastebook -"book of waste", it could be translated-, its author, the young Hegel, wrote a hundred aphorisms that, despite the premeditated and treacherous title , they have no waste. Rather, these aphorisms are of enormous importance for understanding the transit accomplished by the great thinker in the arduous and patient task that made the construction of the "science of the experience of consciousness" possible. One, in particular, inspires, and is probably his premise, the lines that follow: “Kant is admiringly quoted, indicating that he did not teach philosophy, but philosophizing; as if someone taught carpentry, but did not teach how to build a table, a chair, a door, a cupboard, etc.” The complexes – that continuous source of resentment and spiritual poverty – are superfluous. For example, to affirm that in a Latinamerican country, such as Venezuela, the existence of philosophers is "unimaginable", since, if there will be philosophy professors, it is a temerity that in itself captures the spirit of the tearing present in the Kantian formulation, between what is is and what is done. There is nothing pompous about thinking and teaching how to think, just as there is nothing exuberant about knowing history and exposing it, knowing the law and advocating for its compliance, or learning medicine and ensuring the health of patients.

 

Denying the possibility of the existence of philosophy, but pretending to exercise it, "carrying out" a "reflection on the nature of Venezuela, finding its essence, unraveling, Heideggerianly speaking, its "Being and its Time", is, an audacity, more worthy of the inventive audacity of Simón Rodríguez than of the subtle prudence of Andrés Bello, who, by the way, was not only a first-rate linguist -as Heidegger was-, but also the author of a Philosophy of knowledge, whose closeness to Kant and to what remains of Hume in him, are admirable, especially for the fact that he is also a child of the culture of "tropical hedonism, prevailing barbarism, exuberant nature, sudden enrichment and opulence, a little coarse, vulgar and ragged, without any finesse "who, however, contributed decisively to the construction of the Chilean Bildung, since he was a Senator, editor of the Civil Code and Rector of the University of Chile. You cannot judge a people only because of its geographical characteristics or its miscegenation. Much less because of what some villains -tropical hedonists- have decided to do with him. If this were so, it would have to be affirmed that a few Roman emperors or a few European monarchs and dictators only lacked the palm trees of the beautiful Venezuelan coasts to also be "tropical hedonists".

 

Theodor Adorno affirms, in Negative Dialectics, that the great defect of Heidegger's ontology consists in the pretense of founding a concept of historicity lacking “the salt of history”. By the way, for Marx, the science of history is neither more nor less than philosophy detached from any ahistorical formulation. It is about understanding philosophy in a living way. Croce had the privilege of defining it under the following terms: “philosophy is history and nothing but history”. Of course, this conception of history does not consist of an accumulation of chronicles -or chronologies-, nor in a museum of wax or old junk, accompanied by the respective nostalgia for what will never return. It is history in fieri, in a continuous act. Not, then, history res gestae but history rerum gestarum, as an understanding of the self that is a we and of the we that is a self, of the substance that becomes a subject. And this is precisely what it is about: the being is not a fixed, rigid, static, immovable entity. Being is what is being done, continuous becoming. The so-called human essence is not a photograph or a statistical table, and is determined by the cultural formation that men are capable of generating among themselves.

 

When a society has split, the extremes appear (erscheinen) quite clearly. Light and shadow are separated and concentrated, while the chiaroscuro gradually fade until they show their evanescence and their consequent insubstantiality. The fictio of the “center” or of the middle ground is not, not because the extremes push against it, but because, out of fear and hope, they do not push hard enough. There is no moderation without conflict. Rather, moderation is the result of the conflict, its conquest, its Aufgehoben. In his independent Venezuela, Mariano Picón Salas -another “unimaginable” Venezuelan thinker- asks: “Why was it not from the great and golden Viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico that the insurgent movement spread throughout Hispanic America? but from provinces somewhat marginal to economic life and colonial splendor, such as Caracas and Buenos Aires?” His answer is not Heideggerian, although it is historicist: unlike the closed indigenist movements, the formation and will of their leaders had a much more universal character. They are not satisfied with the myth of the restoration of the lost world of the indigenous, that fantasy that, by the way, brought so much benefit to the Chavista cartel. The independence of America was interpreted not as a local but a global issue. It was not a racist revolution, Indian or black, to overthrow Pizarro or Cortéz and restore the empire of the Incas or Aztecs; It was not about turning back the clock of history to go back to the cosmic time of the Maya: it was about placing oneself, unapologetically, at the height of his time. But no time is good or bad in itself. Every time has its advantages and disadvantages, its virtues and its defects. This is precisely why time becomes and becoming makes itself be.

 

What extremism, whatever its position, fails to understand is that not only can it not remain unscathed, but in its efforts to remain unscathed it assumes - and one could say expropriates - the logic of the other extreme. That is why left-wing extremism, taken to its last instances, ends up becoming right-wing extremism. The terms of the opposition mirror each other. They are the other of the other. An era of schizophrenia justifies the vileness of tearing. Venezuela is not the exception but -in the words of Carlos Fuentes- the most transparent region, in this case, of the morbidity of the present. Today, more than ever, the task of intelligence consists in untangling the loop that society itself has imposed as being of time and as time of being.