Of the strenuous task of being free

Living is a motley and difficult journey. Life raises matter in an improbable leap that opposes everything: the peaceful mineral gravity, scarcity and excess, the wear and tear of time, the universal increase in disorder... Astronomers search for habitable planets, and that task alone it is exquisitely arduous: the stars, the planets, the temperatures, the gases, everything must have come to an odd balance. And not even favorable conditions make life probable: the concurrence of countless chances is still missing, their confluence at a point where the happening against the current becomes a miracle. “The strange thing is to live”, writes Carmen Martín Gaite. Life is an exception, the fruit of a thousand exceptions, and every minute a legion of forces attack so much complexity, demanding a return to simplicity.

And is there anything simpler than dying? Just wait. Dying is the unavoidable arrival point of the leap of life, there where it returns to exact horizontality and the attempt ends. Death is the interruption of the exceptional, and its return to the baseline. If life requires strength and effort, and perhaps a certain derangement, dying imposes itself, it always happens and in peace. Everything helps in its way; nothing tires him, nothing contradicts him, nothing prevents him. That is simplicity.

How is life not going to waste us, if it is an exception and complexity? Over and over again we have to reaffirm it, and for this we have to relentlessly oppose what conspires against it, which is everything, including itself. Life has to be reconstructed and justified at every moment: I still want to go on, I still have strength, I'm still capable... The human project, a particularly complex version of life, falls and rises again and again, until it definitely falls. While it lasts, it's a commitment. The same as the French poet Paul Valéry, in his Marine Cemetery, glimpsed with joyful astonishment before the sea that never ceases to recreate itself, the waves that break in without truce... from where?

Human life: a crazy and laborious endeavor, full of noise and fury, but also of light and poetry. Every day is a task, as Ortega y Gasset reminded us: the task of building ourselves by projecting ourselves towards the nothingness of the future, of making our way through the infinity of possibilities (Heidegger would say), of inventing ourselves (Sartre would say)... Can there be a greater mystery? than freedom, a purer expression of the complexity of the human? All determinism is the dream of a return to simplicity, which contradicts us but at the same time calms us down. Every time we discover something that conditions us, we seem to rest a little. “I am a rebel because the world made me like this”, Jeanette sang so many years ago, moving us with that air of a sad and desolate girl. But after each determinism the possibility of choosing appears again: perhaps the world made you rebellious, but behaving as such, or not, is your decision. Even pushing everything to rebellion, you could choose to oppose it. “I can't even conceive of a life without rebellion, so deep was the mark I received. How could I choose what I do not conceive? How everything unheard of is chosen: by commitment. By creative will.

In that election against the grain is where ethics is forged. When we let ourselves be carried away by determinisms, we assume simplicity: letting what conditions us do. That is the probable, and therefore the easy. It is the world choosing for us, pushing us in its flood. Our conditioning accounts for a good part of what we are, of course, therein lies the basis of all the human sciences, which seek those predictable regularities of our behavior. They explain to us, then, but they do not justify us. To justify ourselves, we need a choice, that is, there must be consciousness and freedom. A predetermined human being cannot justify itself, it simply acts by natural programming. It lacks even the most characteristically human. If you can't help but be cruel, for example, then you are literally inhuman.

But if you can avoid it, if you can choose something else, then you go back to the core of your humanity. In return, you can no longer take refuge in determinisms. Sartre called bad faith that fallacious resource behind which we so often hide our decisions. "Man is what he does with what they made of him," she declared with unprecedented lucidity. Condemned to freedom, without possible compromises, we are left alone with our responsibility. Accepting it is a start. It is to assume that, definitively, we have been expelled from simplicity; that our heritage is complexity.

Someone who gives his life to save another person's is a glorious example of that option for complexity. If we admire his feat it is precisely because it goes against determinisms. Or maybe there is a deeper, more secret, more complex determinism that drives us to that exceptionality that is altruism? Social psychologists have suggested the possibility that we carry altruism in our genes, and explain that it could be a behavior that favored our survival as a species. Seen this way, heroism does not seem so admirable. However, our hero still had a choice, and his decision was probably not easy: to lose everything so that someone else, perhaps a stranger, can gain something... Even considering a mere hidden struggle of genes, there is always the decision that chooses to go in favor of some to the detriment of others (because genes also have their dilemmas). Courage and cowardice are our responses to conditioning; we can understand both, but we find one better than the other. That assessment sums up ethics.

 

Are we to conclude, then, that difficult is always better, as some have said? Not necessarily. Rather, you have to think about it the other way around: the best is always difficult; and probably, most of the time, it is more than the worst. A detailed revenge operation is difficult; forgiving, surely, is more. However, I am afraid that Nietzsche would not agree, and would consider forgiveness a weakness typical of the faint-hearted: after all, by forgiving we expose ourselves less to reprisals from our enemies, we opt for the security of compromise. You can forgive for weakness, but if we are weak, forgiving may be the smartest thing to do. Back to simplicity? May be. But choice, after all. Something to be gained and something to be lost. That is what is hard, José Antonio Marina would say, and it is no less so because we have chosen what is best for us.

 

Death is simple; life is hard. Within life, thinking and choosing for oneself, taking responsibility for doing so, is even more difficult. What to think of the abused woman who forgives and ends up murdered by her aggressor spouse? Maybe the hard part for her would have been to break that unhealthy relationship and leave. In this case, forgiveness -perhaps the result of fear- became more bearable, and choosing it was her downfall. She surely needed help, surely undoing her fateful bond was too big for her. She was the victim and that is why it seems to us that her murderer was the real culprit. However, putting yourself in the victim's place is also a choice. Understandable, of course justifiable, but a choice nonetheless. You can, you must help those who act out of weakness, but ultimately there will always be a margin that we cannot, must not reach: that of freedom. The margin of complexity that belongs exclusively to each human being.

We cannot escape complexity, any more than we can escape entropy, which is the relentless return to simplicity. As we cannot stop being while we are, nor prevent what we are from ceasing to be one day. Ours is to pass, ours is to choose: joy of complexity.

 

On the threshold of loneliness

The most deafening sound is the one that is born from silence, from that silence that only allows your heartbeat to inhabit your ears. Like that man who wanders in the gloomy corridors of a house inhabited by nothingness and emptiness, without light, without echoes, only the glow of some ghostly flash created by a spark that has managed to slip through.

 

A man who, upon arriving at his bed, finds in the darkness someone sitting in the old chair behind him, with only his rancid right hand visible, marked by the years and inviting him to come closer, remaining motionless, but in turn, with that involuntary impulse that escapes reason, thus beginning his brief but throbbing walk towards the unknown, feeling how the cold shelters him at every step, until, when he finds himself in front of that being scratched by time, able to from freezing his gaze, he plunges into the depths of his eyes, finding the abyss that lay in him, a man who only reflects what he has hidden from himself, what he has omitted when wanting to escape from loneliness.

 

Thinking and being in solitude

 

The human mind has become one of the loneliest and gloomiest labyrinths in which an individual can travel, being a space overwhelmed by a noisy silence, a storm of thoughts, and where its protagonist is often found in the mist of the opinions of third parties, leaving only that instinct to wave their hands in search of that company that guides them to the longed-for exit, but that, by chance of the unexplored, has not yet knocked on the doorknob of our taciturn Being, then, staying in a maze is not a matter of strength or resistance, but of will.

 

Being for the minority of those who do not walk the paths and days in an inert way, it is an act of great daring to desire detachment from what one is, and go for what one can do, since it is easier to shake the “wings” in the sense of the famished multitude of dreams, that run towards the mountain of discovery.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche already said it in his book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" that "I have found more danger among men than among animals, dangerous are the paths that Zarathustra travels. May my animals guide me!", making it clear that the worst adviser -many times- for man has been man himself, that is, the noise of those who shout sterile verbal conjugations, with the sole purpose of feeling judges among the condemned, leads to a sinister task, which is to assassinate ideas, without any shame, as inquisitors of thought, dressed in puritanical intentions and crimson mallets, being in truth, a tumult of incapable people who cannot think for themselves.

 

But why this? An uncomfortable question for routine ears, because the human being within his tiring life, full of conditions, beliefs and dogmas, is caged, with an indivisible possibility of escape for those who still fear retirement, being reduced only to power. of the will, a will that goes undoing the invisible threads of a social moral adjusted to the benefits of the jailer, and go, irremediably to the arms of the misunderstood solitude; for Nietzsche himself tells us that "a man's worth is measured by the amount of loneliness that he can bear."

 

For this reason, introspective exploration or self-discovery almost inevitably requires a period of solitude on the part of the individual in which his values, convictions and education can be adequately digested, evaluated and transformed; In other words, the preliminary thesis is that being apart gives the individual enough space and time to reflect through mental clarity and emotional sobriety, which he lacked in the social core. Thus, the consideration that solitude is not an arid, stormy and tempting paradise is clearly presented, but rather as a state of happiness and tranquility in harmony with nature; And in case hopelessness invades our mind, keep in mind that premise of Miguel de Unamuno, which reads "never despair even when you are in the dark afflictions, because clean and fertile water falls from the black clouds."

 

Now, if it is true that modern psychology shows that it is extremely important to have a pleasant social circle to achieve well-being, it is also convenient for you to ask yourself in what aspects solitude is favorable for me, Albert Camus said in one of his frequent epiphanies of loneliness that "in the depths of winter I felt that there was an invincible summer in me", then, that would be the secret for a novelist, philosopher and playwright apparently destined to seek solace from his internal emptiness, and who, through writing, managed to describe the optimism of what was believed to be non-existent.

 

Loneliness is the recipe for a brilliant madness that unleashes imagination, innovation, productivity, intimacy and spirituality, because his clairvoyance can be somewhat incomprehensible at first, but the value of being alone with our own conscience is imponderable, we normally perceive the typical figure of the misunderstood genius as an outstanding individual in intellectual terms who is deficient in emotional matters, so much so that there are many times when this stereotype is fulfilled in important figures of the humanities and universal sciences, being able to cite Arthur Schopenhauer, Issac Newton, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, who reaped sweet fruits from solitude, despite considering moments of suffering at some stages. At the same time, there are certain geniuses who, even if they find themselves physically isolated, do not qualify their solitude as something harmful, but rather as the best opportunity to develop as individuals, since they understand that they are not isolated, rather they communicate in a different way, they read They listen, debate, meditate, reflect, create and dream. There is a repertoire of thinkers who have woven a network of knowledge so expensive that it becomes incomprehensible to others, to those who are oblivious to the art of introspection, and it is not the simple fact that solitude has the power to make you resilient, ingenious, proactive, effective, conscious, wise, strong, it is that when one knows how to appreciate the greatness that solitude conceals, one is conditioned to be pleased with it, to the point that the company is much less in demand. Friedrich Nietzsche was forceful in saying "my loneliness is not determined by the presence or absence of people, quite the contrary, I hate those who engulf my loneliness if they do so they must at least make sure that their company is worth it".

 

After this, we can realize that being alone is not the same as feeling lonely, one can feel lonely even when surrounded by people, the statement "my loneliness is not determined by the presence or absence of people" describes it perfectly , one does not have to feel loneliness being alone or feel company when being accompanied, loneliness manifests itself when the quality of our social relationships is not comforting enough, in this way rejecting accompaniment will lead us to a totally different type of connection, It would be a calm, mystical, and pleasant link that is based on meditation, abstraction, metaphysical cataclysm, considering that this feeling that you are nothing and that no one cares about you disappears, because by setting a purpose you begin to design a plan to materialize it, you take repeated action, you enjoy the journey, you value the world, your feelings of participation, usefulness and belonging remain complete. fully restored, the introspective transcendence takes shape, since the desire to be with others has been eclipsed by another desire of greater strength, you manage to advance with firm steps towards your human potential, or as Arthur Schopenhauer would say "Loneliness is the luck of all excellent spirits.”

 

Certainly, confinement puts a soft but deadly blindfold on us, since it disguises the good as bad, the abstract as concrete, the convenient as lurid; making uncertainty more common than desired, but which, in turn, gives us an ideal circumstance to discover ourselves and grow internally, since what we are currently experiencing -despite how rough it seems to be- is a golden opportunity It is not for nothing that Schopenhauer reminds us when he says that “tomorrow, like today, will be another day that also comes only once. We forget that every day is an irreplaceable part of life", therefore you do not have to wait for anyone or anything to realize that the opportunity is not in others but is in you, knowing this, seek more and more balance Aristotelian, take care of building quality relationships, these are essential to maximize the aptitude the period in solitude; meanwhile make good use of the only jewel worth being greedy with, time, enjoy yourself, and remember that "solitude is sometimes the best company, and a short retreat brings a sweet return." (John Milton).

 

The geopolitics of Poland in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine

 Since the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine on February 24, Poland has played an important role in the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II: it has received more refugees than anyone else, functioning as a buffer zone between the fighting and the rest of Europe, and militarily assisted Kyiv, as part of NATO's support strategy.

 

The cause seems to lie in its geographical position: Poland shares a 498-kilometer border with Ukraine, 375 kilometers with Belarus—Moscow's most staunch ally—and 209 kilometers with Russia, around the Kaliningrad enclave. Even so, he would like it, he does not have the possibility to stay on the sidelines.

But there are also clues in its recent history: after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Poland left behind the communist system and its position in Moscow's sphere of influence to integrate as quickly as possible with Western Europe, joining NATO. and in the European Union.

 

Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, has also tried in recent years to move closer to Western Europe and progressively leave Russia's sphere of influence, and this movement has been one of the main causes of the war.

 

The war reaches Polish territory

The fall of a missile in Polish territory, which caused the death of two people, has just further expanded the country's role in the war, although it does not participate in the fighting or seek an open conflict with Russia.

 

The origin of the missile and the circumstances of the event are not entirely clear, but the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, said Wednesday that there is "no indication" that it was an "intentional attack." The main hypothesis, according to Duda, is that it is an S-300 air defense missile.

 

And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also indicated that it was "most likely" an S-300 fired by Ukraine on Tuesday, mistakenly landing on Polish territory.

 

In recent days, Russia has fired close to 100 cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine, and Ukrainian air defenses, including S-300 systems, have attempted to counter this offensive.

 

Poland, Ukrainian refugee center

Since the first day of the war, the daily reality of Poland has been shaken by the massive arrival of Ukrainian refugees, through its 498 kilometers of border.

 

According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Acnur), a total of 12,485,047 Ukrainians crossed the different borders of the country after the start of the war (many returned to their homes in the following months).

 

Most of these Ukrainians, 7,583,850 in total, crossed into Poland, followed by 1,746,421 who went to Hungary and 1,525,677 who arrived in Romania, among other initial destinations. Also, 2,869,100 Ukrainians crossed the border into Russia, as Russian troops occupied different cities and amid reports of forced transfers.

 

Regardless of where they crossed the border, the Ukrainian refugees were then distributed throughout Europe. Of the total 7,841,359 currently registered by UNHCR (i.e. the total number of people who crossed minus the number who later returned to Ukraine), 1,497,849 are settled in Poland under temporary protection as refugees, more than anywhere else. country (next on the list is Germany, which received 1,019,789 Ukrainian refugees).

 

The geopolitical position of Poland

Poland lies in Eastern Europe, between Germany and Russia, and right on the Great European Plain that has allowed for fluid migrations between east and west, a situation that has subjected it to centuries of foreign domination.

 

The country was part of different empires - among them the Russian one - until 1918, then divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II, until it became the People's Republic of Poland, a communist state under the shadow of Moscow. , during the Cold War.

 

When the USSR began to disintegrate, Poland regained its independence

André Glucksmann, successor to Voltaire

Who is Andre Glucksmann?

André Glucksmann (June 19, 1937, Boulogne-Billancourt–November 9, 2015, Paris) began to stand out in the 1970s as a member of (or rather presiding over) the ranks of the group of so-called nouveaux philosophes, young thinkers disenchanted with the Marxism that reflected deeply and starkly on politics, ideological commitment and its social consequences, not hesitating to denounce and criticize both right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism.

From that time there are two interesting books that arise from Glucksmann's pen: The Cook and the Man-Eater (1976) and The Master Thinkers (1978). In these works, the author delves into the roots of the crimes committed in the name of ideologies and the ideas in whose shadow barbarities such as the Soviet gulag are forged. The metaphysics of domination and ideological violence go back to master thinkers such as Hegel, Fichte, Marx or Nietzsche.

 

Later came other decisive works. In 1982, his Cynicism and Passion, an examination of the exercise of philosophy in times of crisis, was published in our language. In 1983, La fuerza del vertigo, a lucid look at the tragedy of a relative world peace based on the deterrence of nuclear weapons.

 

In 1993, The Eleventh Commandment, an analysis of moral behavior before the announced end of history, where classical humanism gives way to a modern humanist ethic that is not afraid to denounce evil from the dark revelation: «That nothing that is inhuman be strange to you." In 2002, Dostoevsky in Manhattan, an invitation to rethink nihilistic violence and the collapse of values in the light of great literary works.

 

This last mentioned work was André Glucksmann's response to the destruction of the American Twin Towers. It already announces in these pages the brutal power of universal nihilistic terrorism. He writes:

 

 

"The almost invisible violence of the 'forgotten' wars and the one that hits the heart of New York spectacularly are the manifestation of a single and identical hubris without borders. At the base, he eradicates with the submachine gun the fragile possibility of guaranteeing a minimum of rights to each individual on the globe; at the top, he programs the brutal annihilation of the democratic city; At both ends of the chain, he launches his deadly challenge to the 21st century, substituting, as soon as he can, the risks and fortunes of a free existence for the law of the thug ».

 

André Glucksmann belonged to the nouveaux philosophes, young thinkers disenchanted with Marxism who reflected deeply and starkly on politics, ideological commitment and its social consequences.

 

Voltaire's influence

Voltaire has been a constantly present figure in the thought of André Glucksmann. He dedicates his last book to him: Voltaire Strikes Back . He presents it as the most current and revolutionary example of the European Enlightenment spirit against the threats, more present than ever, of destructive fanaticism, recurrent totalitarianism and the temptation of a defenseless and accommodating languor in the face of them.

 

Voltaire Strikes Back, by André Glucksmann

According to Glucksmann, the lesson of Voltair's thought is the active defense of tolerance in the face of devastating barbarism. Thus, he does not hesitate to state: "Europe will be Voltairean or it will not be." The West is faced with dangers that it cannot even identify: identitarian and xenophobic nationalisms, theocratic fanaticisms that seek a return to the Middle Ages, nihilistic and fatalistic nightmares. Faced with these infamies, some injections of Voltairean illustration can serve to recover our senses, our author tells us.

 

Candide or optimism, by Voltaire, is for Glucksmann the manifesto of our time. He invites us to read this work that describes the world as it is and not as it is said to be. In its pages are the lessons that the West must remember. Cándido is a bomb for the fanatics and the intolerant, for the infamous of our time: «Since the deflagration, to Cándido, the devotees, whatever their church, cross or crescent, sickle and hammer, the embroiderers of the ideal did not they doubt: they detest it».

 

Glucksmann also says of this Voltairian work:

 

«Delighting in Voltaire does not mean dividing humanity in two —the good on one side, the bad on the other— nor does it mean reducing all issues to a single question that prevails over the others —profane enlightenment against sacred illumination, capitalism against socialism…—, but it does mean dealing with aporias and questions as they arise, with 'good judgment', without the help of extraordinary revelations, always keeping 'the simplest mind'. Following Montaigne, he learns 'more by the contrary than by example'. A man of reason —therefore of doubt, therefore of criticism—, far from the souls entangled in the dark threads of a first creation and a final judgment, Cándido learns the truth by discovering the false».

 

Glucksmann pushes us with his example and his books - and especially with the last one - to have the audacity to say in public, whatever the cost, what citizens consider true and fair. Today silence is not the option. "The crime of indifference," he scuffles in our conscience, "is the first and necessary condition for the work of assassins." And he gives us two quotes: “A scream causes the avalanche”, by Solzhenitzin, and “Shout and let them scream!”, by Voltaire.

 

Is it necessary to civilize man or is it necessary to leave him abandoned to his instinct?

Reading of Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784).Against lovers of order.

Diderot, was a great unknown among his contemporaries, considered a citizen outside of social conventions, both literature and philosophy reject him, without any granting him a worthy place, he had to wait until Goethe and Hegel (who used him in the Phenomenology of Spirit) for its dissemination. The brief reading that we rescue today may say something more about this author, about the civilization of man who lives in society.

 

Against lovers of order.

 

A. —Is it necessary to civilize man or is it necessary to leave him abandoned to his instinct?

 

B. —Should I answer precisely?

 

B. —If you propose to be his tyrant, civilize him; poison it as best you can with a moral contrary to nature; put obstacles of all kinds; intercept their movements with all kinds of obstacles; tie him to ghosts that terrify him; eternalize the war inside the cave and that the natural man is always chained at the feet of the moral man. Do you want me to be free and happy? Do not meddle in his business: enough unforeseen incidents will take care to lead him to light and depravity; and rest assured forever that it was not for you but for themselves that those wise legislators amassed and manipulated you as you were. I appeal to all political, civil and religious institutions: examine them deeply; Either I am very wrong or you will see the human species fold, century after century, under the yoke that a handful of rogues had promised to impose on it. Be wary of those who want to restore order. Ordering is always becoming the owner of others by bothering them.

 

Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784).Against Lovers of Order.