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Introduction The French philosopher Blaise Pascal was not exactly a fan of philosophy. On the contrary, he came to detest it, because it seemed useless and unhelpful to him. Although he was a philosopher himself, these pithy statements against philosophy are his own: “Reason works slowly, and with so many considerations, on so many principles, that at every moment it falls asleep or goes astray. Passion acts in an instant ,” “I would not give even an hour of my time for all the philosophy that has been written in the world.” Unfortunately, Pascal had his reasons for rejecting it, because philosophy depends entirely on language, and despite the efforts of philologists, philosophers, and writers, language is not exactly an exact science, and languages continue to contain concepts with ambiguous and sometimes contradictory meanings, or with multiple meanings for a single concept . In many cases, it is impossible to establish the boundaries of an idea—for example, what are the “exact” criteria for determining what constitutes an ocean and what constitutes a sea? However, what Pascal should have asked himself before launching his furious criticisms is why we created language in the first place, since without it, philosophy would not have been possible. Any animal knows how to distinguish things through mere experience; it knows when it is day or night; what cold and heat are; what is harmful and what is not, and so on. So do we. However, even though through experience and memory we could come to know an infinite number of things and sensations, we have created a system of sounds and signs to identify and represent them; that is to say, we have created a parallel reality contained within those sounds and signs that aim to faithfully represent the physical reality from which they originate. Chapter 1 Why did we create language? Simply because we believed that language would make it easier for us to communicate, and evolution did the rest. There is a huge difference in communicative capacity between guttural sounds and vowel sounds, and that was the stimulus that drove biological evolution until it became possible to articulate words —a process that took several million years. But as we became capable of articulating words to identify things, we grew increasingly dependent on those early words, which initially represented only the “substance” of things—that is, “nouns”—but we lacked verbs, adjectives, or any other predicates. As the number of words expanded, language became more complex, and verbs—which express action—and adjectives—which describe characteristics, values, or attributes—appeared. Eventually, we were able to develop a complex system of sounds (later signs with the invention of writing) capable of expressing complex ideas and a comprehensive understanding of reality as we conceived it. But this development of language implied something we we obviously took into account: the possibility of “speculating” on the meaning of what we conceived, and one of the first questions we were able to ask must have been: Who could have created the things we see and conceive? In other words, “doubt” arose, and with it the various answers that language itself allowed us to provide. The more complex language became, the more complex and varied the questions grew, and the more difficult the answers became. There came a point when that complexity was such that we no longer asked ourselves about the causes of things, but rather about who and how the questions were being asked; that is, we ceased to be interested in “physics” and invented “metaphysics,” which went beyond mere experience to fall into an abstraction that began and ended in thought, without transcending observable reality. Thus, it became necessary to create new terms, such as “mind,” “consciousness,” “being” , “entity,” “existence,” “object,” “subject,” and many others, all disconnected from real things. With metaphysics, we created a new world that unfolded entirely within the activity of the mind; that is, within thought—which is precisely the language of philosophy itself! Chapter 2 Since Parmenides, the first philosopher to engage with metaphysics— it is a subject of study, but it must not transcend the realm of thought and must be grounded in the meaning of the terms of the language in which it is expressed; that is to say, philosophy must never concern itself with experiential physical reality, but rather with the reality that can be expressed through metaphysical speculation—or, in other words, it must never be a line of thought tied to apparent reality. But for many later philosophers, this disconnection from reality was intolerable and must be linked to physical reality. Others, beginning with Plato, believed that metaphysical speculation should not only be detached from physical reality but was, in fact, the “true reality,” while the physical world was the “false reality,” because it was changeable and fickle. With this, he created the abstract world of ideas; that is to say, “idealism,” which consists of placing ideas before facts, thereby elevating the world of the “being of things” above the world of the “ things themselves.” Since then, philosophy has not advanced in any fundamental way, for we continue to speculate on whether we should prioritize ideas over experience or vice versa—or, in other words, whether we should have a worldview based on ideas (idealism) or on experience (materialism). For this reason, this little book only goes as far as Aristotle, because he was the first philosopher to raise the dilemma, and since then we have not resolved this controversy; we remain divided between those who believe the world cannot advance without new ideas (metaphysics) and those who believe it advances solely through new experiments (physics). Chapter 3 Philosophy begins when someone, setting aside revealed truths, myths, and historical tradition, asks what nature is, and to reach a conclusive answer relies solely on the reasonable use of language—language that they know or create themselves, incorporating new terms as needed in their reflections and reasoning. That person, in the history of Western philosophy, is, of course, Thales of Miletus. From the moment this new activity of human knowledge begins, it can be said that, at the same time, a new “context” for that very knowledge: the philosophical one—although it is more accurate to call it “understanding.” This new context will be associated with a specific “language”—one used exclusively in all ontological reasoning—gradually moving away from the “old language,” which was created to confirm the apparent evidence of things or to provide an explanation of their origin apart from the conclusions proper to reason and logic and based on myths and legends. Philosophy, by requiring that every conclusion be grounded in reason, likewise demands the strictly accurate use of the concepts it employs, which in turn determines logic. Philosophy therefore depends on how we use language, and this cannot be anything other than a “specifically philosophical language.” For the same reason that philosophy begins when truth is sought through reasonable speculation using a specific language, philosophy should end when reason can no longer find “words” to explain reality without resorting to anything other than reasonable speculation using those very same words. Any transgression of the context proper to philosophy would lead us to the “ transgression” of philosophy itself, in which case it would no longer be philosophy, but “something else.” Philosophy must have come to an end several centuries ago, with Hegel’s monumental work of rationalization, in which he believed he had reached the end of the absolute—the highest level that the use of philosophical language allows reason to attain. However, in my opinion, this was not the case. Therefore, philosophy must have already been exhausted before Hegel. But not only because Hegel’s reasoning was incorrect, but because, in order to develop his grand philosophy, he resorted to “non-philosophical” language—undoubtedly due to his theological training and his national circumstances—such as the “Spirit.” The confusion lies in the “meaning” of the concept “Spirit” in the German language, which translates as “Geist.” In this language, there is no clear distinction between “spirit” and “mind,” perhaps because etymologically this distinction is not necessary. The same is not true in languages of Greco-Latin origin, where “mind” is a philosophical category and “spirit” a theological one. Why do these two ideas become mixed and confused in German—a confusion that, in turn, the monumental philosophical work of Hegel and his successors—those who do philosophy in German? The explanation must lie in the absence of a philosophical tradition among the Germanic peoples at the time philosophy began and, above all, the absence of a profound “Greco-Latinization” of its population. Thus, when philosophy reached the various languages and dialects of the Germanic peoples, they already had established concepts of “spirit,” based on the categories that would give rise to their theology—that is, their myths and legends. German in Hegel’s time was a language without significant “Greco-Latinization,” with few words borrowed from other languages, compared to the languages of other peoples who had been profusely and continuously invaded, such as those of the Mediterranean. Therefore, German philosophy, once it is “formed” in German, needs to “rework” all its postulates by adapting them to the concepts available in the new language being used. One of the fundamental concepts for philosophy is precisely that of “spirit,” and its confusion with “mind” or even “understanding” will lead to confusion regarding the entire philosophy related to the spirit. The same can be said of the concept “existence,” which is distinguished from “being” in the Greco-Latin languages but which, in the Germanic languages, is resolved “as if it were something natural and substantial,” by adding to the concept “Sein” an indication of place “da”—that is, “Dasein”—just as is done with non-philosophical concepts: “Bürgermeister” (mayor) or “ Baumwolle” (cotton), etc. It is a paradox that the language that has produced the most philosophy is, apparently, the least suited to reaching reasonably conclusive and “absolute” conclusions, as Hegel himself intended. The conclusion to which this final reflection leads us is that, if philosophy may eventually find itself lacking the words to articulate the reasonable nature of things without the need for testing and experimentation—that is, to establish “ absolute truth” based solely on the use of concepts and reason, this can only be done “reasonably” with those languages that have, within their own etymology, terms equivalent in meaning to those that were created when the reasonable explanation of things made them necessary. Therefore, Western philosophy must remain within the language in which it originated—that is, Ancient Greek—and can hardly be “translatable” into other languages , especially if they do not have etymological roots in Classical Greek itself. Chapter 4 Thus, philosophy can only address ideas such as death if it is “made aware” that this constitutes a transgression, since death is not a concept that can be included in metaphysical reasoning—in which case it must resort to the concept “nothing.” This transgression is constant and repeated throughout the history of philosophy, despite attempts to “contextualize” language by notable philosophers such as Huxley, among others. The difficulty lies in the fact that in some languages it will be “impossible” to reach “conclusive” philosophical conclusions due to a “lack of words” suitable for that purpose. The reasons why philosophy has been more prolific in some countries than in others has nothing to do with language, but rather with their cultural and social conditions. Thus, those countries that assimilated the conclusions of Renaissance physics, underwent the Lutheran Reformation, and are governed by liberal economic principles will be more inclined toward philosophy. Conversely, other countries such as Spain—with a language well-suited to philosophy—are prevented from doing so by “circumstantial” conditions, to to cite Spain’s “only” original philosopher (the earlier ones were Iberian, and the later ones contribute nothing new or original), do not allow for it. For example, we can perfectly well say that the philosopher does not “create ” like the artist, nor does he “produce” like the craftsman (although both qualities may well be present in a philosopher), but rather simply “conceives.” Conceiving is the way in which the philosopher “creates his world”—naturally using an expression proper to the theological context—or “produces the nature of things,” using the physical or scientific context. But what does “conception” consist of? And how do conceptions manifest themselves? The answer to this question precisely “delimits” the philosopher’s domain and the result of his activity. Hegel himself understands that to attain the “absolute,” it is necessary to eliminate all “confusion” from language itself, and to this end he seeks to find a “category” that encompasses both subject and object: “The abolition of difference is the fundamental task of philosophy.” According to this reflection, once a category is attained that stands above the subjective and the objective (above good and evil, truth or falsehood; justice or injustice), this should mark the end of philosophy. But, once again, we are faced with the paradox that this supposed category of the absolute has been developed from the relativity of a language that does not distinguish between spirit and mind—that is, a language that moves between theology and philosophy without discerning the possible and necessary differences. To conceive of things, the first step is to establish the possible “perspectives,” as Gasset called them, of the conception itself. The first is that from which nature as such and as a whole is questioned (Thales); the second: the human being within nature (Socrates); and the third: the idea of God within the human being and nature (Plato’s “Demiurge”), even though this is not the order in which they appear. Neither Descartes nor Hegel contribute anything fundamentally new to the motivations inherent in philosophy. Therefore, the foundations of the conception itself are the answers to the questions regarding: “Nature, Person, and God.” This perspective leads us to observe things according to their “point of view”: substantial things; things that are both substantial and insubstantial at the same time (it is assumed that people have a “soul” ) and purely insubstantial things. This is the culmination of Plato’s philosophy, for everything converges on the “ideas” or the “idea in itself” . The paradoxical aspect of this observation is that perspective does not imply that the observer ceases to be what they are as such an observer of things; that is to say, perspective must be something that lies “within the observer,” which amounts to saying that “we do not see a single aspect of observable things, but rather these three contexts must somehow be present within the observed thing.” In other words, everything stems from the observation of a thing, but this observation leads us to consider various messages, each related to a different context. Thus, while it is a single thing, it can be interpreted in various ways and produce various sensations, impressions, or suggestions, respectively, which correspond to the “logical, ideological, and psychological worlds.” To be even more thorough and detailed, we can say that these are the “perspectives” inherent in science (genetics), philosophy (aesthetics), and theology (ethics). This leads us to discover the origin of certain things we conceive of but which lack substance, such as, for example, “happiness,” “morality,” “justice,” etc. These are concepts that cannot arise from the observation of things as such substances; that is to say, happiness does not come from an “object” whose substance is happiness—which would allow us to package it and sell it in supermarkets—but rather these concepts must arise from things, though they do not manifest as “substances” but rather as part of their attributes, the observation of which suggests these “insubstantial ideas.” Therefore, from the observation of every thing, we must infer not only the conception of “objective” ideas but also the conception of “other insubstantial things” or “subjective ideas” that “ emanate” from things and are perceived by those who observe them. For example, the idea of God must be inferred from the pure observation of things (which led to Descartes’s so-called proof of God’s existence); the idea of love must also be inferred from the observation of things, as must that of happiness, and so on. Thus, when we conceive, we perceive “objective and subjective impressions,” all of which are contained within the things themselves. This leads us to consider the need to first establish how “things really are,” and this is, precisely, the very essence of philosophy: to “understand” the mode of being of things in their entirety—in space and time, or more properly, in their “duration.” That is to say, if things transcend themselves, we cannot penetrate their transcendence without observing the potentially transcendent thing. Transcendence in itself is a “subjective thing” that must necessarily emanate from the “ objective thing.” When we attempt to penetrate the way things are, we encounter the difficulty of truly knowing them—not merely as an “analysis” of the present and apparent thing—but we must also consider that all things present themselves to us with a “temporal” or “present” appearance, so that when we shift our point of view, we must do so not only with respect to their “current or present” impression but also to their “impression in space -time.” This is the basis of all dialectical reasoning, for it is evident that things, in addition to displaying various “facets of themselves” at the moment they are observed, are subject to constant—and perhaps cyclical—change. Thus, dialectics cannot consider only the passage of time and its evolution, but rather the passage and non-passage of time in the evolution of its various facets. Chapter 5 Let’s suppose we go back in time and take a walk with Thales of Miletus along the shores of the Aegean Sea, on the tranquil coasts of present-day Turkey. The philosopher observes the nature surrounding him and discovers that he is faced with something he “does not truly understand ” but that he “apparently knows.” Since childhood, he has known every rock on the shoreline; he has noticed the growth of the trees; most of the animals—both land and many sea creatures—are familiar to him; he can distinguish between the silhouette of a Greek ship’s sail and that of a Phoenician one. In short, he apparently “knows the things that make up his environment,” and yet, at a certain moment he reacts and tells himself that “in reality” he has “no idea” about what he knows. That is to say, everything he sees is nothing more than substances and images of which he has no real understanding of the reason for their existence. This distresses him, but it also impresses him and sparks a desire to “know more about things by understanding their cause or reason for being,” because he has the “ impression” that he can come to understand them. But what more can one know about something one already knows? Tales is not content merely to know the “characteristics” of their substance (their nature) at the moment he observes them—that is, whether they are hard or soft, sweet or salty—nor is he content merely to assess their appearance, good or bad, peaceful or aggressive; rather, he wants to know the reason for the existence of all these things and their true nature, apart from their substance and appearance—that is, he wants to know their causes! What is exceptional about his reaction is that he does not accept the traditional, mythological explanation of the origin of all things, as is customary among the most prominent scholars and men of science of his time, endowed with a great memory and historical experience , because accepting those “beliefs” does not resolve the main question that concerns him: their “reason for being.” Myths tell him that things are “in fact” (made by the gods), but they do not tell him the gods’ reasons for making them, and even if they do, these reasons are not based on reasonable causes but on capricious and irrational ones; they are not “justified,” for Thales, for the first time, bases his reasoning on the axiom (the foundation of philosophy itself) that “everything reasonable must be probable, and everything that is probable must be reasonable.” This conclusion constitutes the foundation of philosophy: from Thales’s rebellion against myths to the renunciation to find reasonable evidence for the first causes of things. Therefore, what we conceive is the “way things are,” and what we find is the reasonable cause of their existence and their very existence itself; thus, it must be “probable” that they are as we conceive them—but the final proof lies with science! The reason that drives Thales to seek the causes of things is the evident that they “change,” and if they change, they must do so from a single point or principle, “arché,” to a totality of points or a multiple and totalitarian end. We could also say: from nothing to everything. The idea that this movement can be from “one to infinity” is a later development and did not emerge until the incorporation of a unitary god into philosophy. Thales faces many alternatives, but he considers that things tend to “dry up” after death—that is, at the end of all fundamental and dynamic change—and therefore the “moisture of things must indicate their stage of evolution: the more moist, the younger; the more dry, the older.” Thus, “absolute” moisture must be the beginning, and “absolute dryness,” the end. He therefore deduces that water must be the fundamental principle from which nature as a whole must arise. Thus, the first “truly philosophical thought is that which holds that the origin of all present and existing things lies in water.” Continuing with Thales’s probable reflections, later taken up by his disciples Anaximander and Anaximenes, since the “reasonable” alternatives regarding the origin of things were not limited to a single option—but rather other principles could be taken into consideration—the very evolution of philosophy consists of “refuting the previous thesis” (which has now become the antithesis) in favor of the next thesis, in order to establish a new “synthesis.” The first thesis becomes the antithesis once its reasoning and plausibility have been overcome and refuted. Returning to the very origin of philosophy, Thales’s concern with understanding the reason for the existence of apparent things fails to take into account what is fundamental: the reason for the desire to know things. This attitude justifies what Aristotle once said: “The city came before the house”—that is, the first Western philosopher emerged with an awareness of “ whole” before becoming aware of the “part,” or of himself. The “phenomenon of the emergence of awareness of rational causes” occurs, and this awareness is first projected onto the external world before subsequently turning its attention to the cause of rational awareness itself. It is like a blind man who regains his sight, and the excitement of observing everything observable makes him forget himself as an observer. Therefore, Thales’s awareness is not is the same consciousness as that of his predecessors. Thales conceives only that which has a reason for being. Therefore, something has occurred in his new consciousness that has led him to reject the old one. That “something” is related to the way his ancestors “became aware of things,” which leads us to consider, once again, the very foundations of “philosophical thought”—which can equally be called “rational thought” or “true thought.” Most “ordinary people” today “ think and conceive of things” just as the citizens of Miletus, contemporaries of Thales, did. By “ordinary people ,” I am referring to those who “accept the common as the true”—that is, who possess “common sense”—and therefore everything they “see and conceive” is the result of the appearance of the observed object and its evaluation by the community in which they are integrated and on which their survival depends. Philosophy has always been an activity of people “out of the ordinary,” because it constitutes a “personal judgment of reality” grounded in methodical reflection that goes beyond the mere appearances of things—a stimulus that must necessarily come from intuition, whether regarding things that can be observed or those that cannot. So when we walk along a sidewalk and come across a streetlight that blocks our path, we don’t stop to reflect on the “reason for the streetlight’s existence,” but rather we simply take note of its “presence” and try to avoid it so as not to bump into it. Have we thought about the streetlight? Not at all! We have simply taken note of its “appearance” through our imagination. If we had bumped into it, we would have become aware of its “consistency.” This reflection reminds us that “not all sensations produce the same effects or serve the same purpose.” What distinguishes them from one another is their “extent in time and space.” That is to say, some sensations identify things according to their appearance or substance, their shape, and their image, but all convey information “about the thing as it actually is,” which the mind “automatically” compares with similar things already stored in our memory or experience of things. Once we have compared the “appearance” of the present thing with the likeness of the thing stored in our experience, we act accordingly, or we “ “re-cognize” it (we come to know it anew based on the “resemblance” we have in memory): in some cases we avoid it (the example of the streetlight blocking our path), in others we eat it (in the case of food), in others we’ll probably use it as a coat, etc. In this process, which involves a certain amount of reasoning and logic—since it’s reasonable to avoid the streetlight so as not to bump into it—we haven’t established the reason for the existence of things. We have nothing but a “static and immovable sensation, because it is current and present.” Therefore, what makes Thales revolutionary is his attempt to form an “idea of the movement of things,” or of the reason for the existence of things in space and time. Philosophy is nothing other than a reasonable attempt to explain the “movement” of a reality that insists on appearing static and immovable, that is to say, that is always contemplated in a supposed “present moment.” Since things are observed in an instant that is always current and present, breaking this tyranny of the present and “penetrating” its transcendence is the very essence of philosophical thought. If he accused “ordinary people” of thinking with “common sense” and always in the present tense, it is because everything necessary for subsistence is necessarily in the present moment, which, despite moving, will always remain in the present. Tomorrow will also be the present; in ten years’ time, it will once again be the “present,” and so on. The ordinary individual is not concerned with the future as such—as the future—in the present moment, which is the philosopher’s task, but rather with the future when it becomes the present, which is when he will have to satisfy his needs. To be a philosopher, one must think, above all, of “a non-present time” , which constitutes the “duration” of things. This is a topic that goes beyond the scope of this initial statement. Therefore, after Thales, what thought questions is no longer merely “the rational cause of all apparent and present things,” but above all the “absent cause that gives rise to the causes of apparent things.” That is to say, rather than inquiring about what is seen and touched, from now on the philosopher will also ask about that which may likely exist but is not “evident” to the bodily senses. This is precisely what it means to think about the “way of being of the future” in the present moment. Philosophy, therefore, begins as above all a “transcendental” form of thought, which can also be called “intuitive.” Chapter 6 The philosophers of the School of Miletus were viewed with suspicion by the local monarchy, which served as the visible head of a state that was precarious in its declarations but firmly grounded on “natural” foundations. The paradox was that one of its earliest philosophers, Anaximander, “reasonably” justified the existence of a state that until then had been justified by the myths of a historical past, passed down through legends, but above all, based on the right of conquest—that is, the state belonged to whoever conquered it. But the state did not exist and has never existed; yet it can be said that it “has always been,” a paradox that justified its existence, just as the probable existence of the gods was justified. The state is a catharsis brought about by a fierce act of force that “delimits a territory” and transforms the conqueror into the “absolute owner” of the boundaries established by that nonexistent entity known as the State. Once “delimited and appropriated,” the State acquires “consistency,” which is justified both by its “delimiter” and by the boundaries themselves .” Hence the need to “substantiate” the “being” of a nonexistent state through two basic elements: the “head of state” and the “territorial boundaries of the State.” Therefore, the State—an abstract and nonexistent idea—“appears” with the emergence of a visible head and lines on a map. This is how all States have arisen, and, despite today’s democracies, they remain a construct with a visible head and territorial boundaries. But the State remains an idea that lacks existence. Since the French Revolution and even before, since Thomas Hobbes’s *Leviathan*, we have accepted by consensus (though not reasonably) that “ the State is all of us,” and if we are all of us, how can the State be “itself”? What Anaximander does is begin to reflect on things that do not exist but are decisive for those that do, as in the case of the State: “The principle or ‘arché’ of all things is the indeterminate.” That is to say, the principle was the “State,” which is the “indeterminate,” which is why he considers that the “indeterminate must have limits” (ápeiron). Thus, in the beginning were the gods and the limits, and, as a consequence, the monarch and the limits that shape his State. Why?1 Because present reality cannot be conceived unless it is “limited to a certain space-time,” where the present itself is “embedded” as an “illusion,” since there must be no more than a specific duration (the limits, even of the universe), and we are at a specific point in that duration consumed by time in motion. The most “modern” example that comes to mind to illustrate this idea is very familiar to those of us who use computers and download programs: the idea described resembles the “duration of a software download,” in which, to make the passing of time visible, a progress bar appears that gradually “fills with time” where there was previously “nothing,” until it is completely full and “the movement and time cease,” that is, the program has already been downloaded. This is how Anaximander must have seen it, even though the existence of computers was still 2,600 years away—a span of time corresponding to a specific duration, the one in which we are “trapped.” With Anaximander comes the first sign of negativity in the human mind, a sign that will intensify with Schopenhauer, becoming increasingly negative until we see see nothing but the “negative side of reality,” culminating in Sartre’s phrase: “Being is grounded in nothingness,” or the anguish produced by the insubstantiality of what merely exists. If the reader is somewhat astute, they will have noticed the analogy between Anaximander’s phrase and Sartre’s. This proves that philosophy makes no progress whatsoever in essence, but only in its formal and conceptual aspects (incidentally, becoming increasingly less comprehensible and more elitist). Before the emergence of this philosopher, life was a “positive tragedy,” hence its irresistible appeal among the Greeks of the time (Aeschylus would go on to become more notable than any of the philosophers of his era). After him, tragedy is partly positive and partly negative, until tragedy becomes entirely negative—the meaning we ascribe to it today. Tragedy was positive because it was “real,” and “everything real is necessarily positive,” whereas the negative is “necessarily unreal.” This simple reflection would lead Leibniz, a few centuries later, to say that: “This universe must indeed be the best of all possible universes.” What this brilliant mathematician and inventor of the first calculator meant was that whatever exists—whether tragic or joyful—does so by virtue of its necessity; thus, what is not necessary has no reason to be and ought not to exist. If the gods decided to bring misfortune upon the Greek people by confusing their minds, causing them to commit horrendous crimes against the gods themselves and against one another, it was because it would be “necessary” for them to commit them; for otherwise, what need was there to even consider the possibility of their existence? Thus, Leibniz views life as if it were the half-full part of the bottle, and considers the half-empty part to be an imperative necessity for the full part to be possible; therefore, what exists is best because it is “necessary” . In his day, the preindustrial era of agrarian “full employment,” it was possible and reasonable to make this argument. But today’s unemployed are “people who are unnecessary to the labor market, yet who exist”; therefore, for them, this “must not be the best of all possible worlds .” We see that we cannot fill the history books of philosophy with clichés, because it may be that they are already emptied of content. In this case, it is evident that something has gone awry in Leibniz’s logic for us to have been able to refute his splendid and optimistic philosophy in such a simple manner. Thus, with Anaximander, philosophy has barely begun its journey and is already taking a course “anti-natural” and “negative” paths. But this is only a first, vague statement about “negativity,” the “indefinite,” and the “confusing”—concepts that two of his later colleagues would elevate to their rightful status: one was Parmenides, possibly the “father of metaphysics,” and the other was Plato, the “conceiver” of ideas in all their meaning and fullness. Neither metaphysics nor Plato’s ideas (many believe that before him there were no ideas) belong to “ this world”—that is, on the “positive side of reality”—but rather from its other side, “anti-reality” or “ir-reality,” that is, from thought. Anaximander, who, as we have said, is the second documented philosopher in history, already intuits dialectics because he considers that all individual existence and all becoming is a kind of usurpation against the “ arché” or principle of the “cosmos” (a fundamental term for theology, which we also owe to him). That is to say, he already understands that what a person does when thinking is to “empty something that is full,” whereas if they do not think, they pass through things without touching or emptying them. In other words, human beings possess the whole truth, but to know it, they must “destroy” it, and to Anaximander this seems like an “injustice,” which is why he concludes that: “Right there where things come into being, destruction also occurs, as necessity dictates; indeed, they atone for one another’s faults and make amends for the injustice, according to the order of time.” His exact words. Anaximander also anticipated Darwin by a few centuries and correctly deduced that animal evolution originated in the sea. But not only that, he also anticipated theories on the formation of the universe based on the “Big Bang” model, explaining the process of this formation as the gradual “cooling” of the universe’s initial matter (a theory I do not fully share; see my essay “On Being, God, and the Cosmos”) . In short, I don’t know why we call these philosophers “pre-Socratic” with the insidious and malicious intention of pigeonholing them—as if their only concern were to discern which of the four basic elements was the first and the cause of nature. Chapter 7 Einstein cast doubt on the “stability of apparent matter,” but as early as the third philosopher in history (or perhaps the fourth, if we consider him to have come after Parmenides, of whom it is said that he was also a disciple)—contrary to his later colleague Kant—he did not believe that reality was composed of the noumenon, or the diverse things that constitute a unity, because for him there was no such diversity ; rather, everything was the consequence of the apparent state of “air.” Shortly thereafter, Anaximenes’s “air” would be replaced by the “atom,” marking the beginning of modern atomic physics. I don’t know what would have happened if, before writing my essay, “On Being, God, and the Cosmos,” I had paid closer attention to my first reading of this philosopher’s theses. I suppose it was due to the prejudice I harbored against these early philosophers, who—perhaps because their original works are lost—are often treated in histories of philosophy almost as a “prologue” or “introduction to philosophy,” receiving only cursory attention. Yet there is no history book that does not devote a few dozen pages to Hume, Kant, Hegel, or Schopenhauer, even though their theses, which are undoubtedly much more formally elaborate, had already been articulated by the so-called “pre-Socratics.” Fortunately, in some books on the history of philosophy, they are treated more generously: these are the ones not written by “intellectuals”—undoubtedly intelligent and erudite—but by “philosophers,” with the basic scholarship needed to avoid confusing dates and names, as I intend to be the case with this very book. As I write this new essay, I am learning philosophy, because I am not only writing it but also “reasoning” through what I write, and I demand of myself that I “understand” each philosopher’s propositions and the fundamental and necessary connection between them, especially when their work and conclusions unfold within the same historical and cultural context and within the unity of the same “temporal and spatial idea,” namely Magna Graecia. I mentioned that had I read Anaximenes more carefully, I would have seen more than just an “anecdote” in his theory regarding the origin of the universe as the consequence of the various aspects and states of “air.” In my essay, I conclude that what is “apparent” must be nothing other than different aspects of energy in “motion .” Like me, Anaximenes was also searching for something “subtle” and “invisible,” but which can “become visible” simply by “changing its aspect.” For him, this change of aspect is due to the “rarefaction and condensation” of air; for me, it is due to the creation of “magnetic fields” resulting from the energy at rest within the apparent substance, which can be expressed by Einstein’s well-known formula “E=mc².” Unfortunately for the philosopher in question, Einstein had not yet been born, which led him to make some glaring errors, such as believing that the Earth was flat and drawing other similar conclusions. But for Anaximenes, air is not simply air but “pneuma,” “breath,” or “divine breath.” Curiously, history of philosophy books devote more attention to Bergson’s theory of the “vital breath” than to Anaximenes’s “breath,” when both are the same idea! Therefore, air, for this philosopher, is not only “vital breath” or “divine breath,” but the well-known and frequently mentioned Hegelian “Spirit.” Thus, even in its earliest stages, the fundamental tenet of philosophy was correctly articulated. The other astonishing coincidence between the theses I have presented in the aforementioned essay and those of Anaximenes is that I arrive at the reasonable conclusion that the universe must be or has been an organism; Anaximenes says that “just as our soul, which is air, holds us together, so too does the pneuma or air envelop the cosmos.” This means that, for him as well, the substance of the universe does not fundamentally differ from our own, thereby establishing a “probable” correlation between human beings and the cosmos, since both possess a breath (pneuma) and are enveloped by protective air. My thesis is based on Ortega’s “circumstance” and my own idea of the “double dialectic”: nothing can grow from itself toward itself without circumstances outside itself; therefore, if the universe “expands,” it is because there must be “other circumstantial universes” outside our own. I cannot reveal the rest of the thesis because I must protect my own copyright. In other words, the fourth great philosopher in the history of philosophy already has a totally reasonable and probable “idea of the probable nature of the universe.” And this without the fundamental aid of modern astral physics. Chapter 8 I doubt that, despite having read and commented on Parmenides’ work time and again in my previous writings, I am yet capable of comprehending everything this philosopher left us in a few hexameters—the only ones that have survived from his original work—for while much is known about him, it is primarily through the commentaries of Plato and Aristotle, who, despite refuting him, undoubtedly admired him deeply. He was a contemporary of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and even Anaximenes, whose theories on the principle animating nature he would undoubtedly have been familiar with. He was a native of Elea, and from its tradition arose the famous and mythical School of Elea, whose most notable representative was undoubtedly himself, but also Zeno, who attempted to prove to us—and even today it is doubted whether he actually succeeded—the “impossibility of motion.” If I am concerned with learning about his contemporaries, it is because, in accordance once again with Ortega’s thesis that nothing can exist without “circumstance,” it is essential to understand what this philosopher’s circumstances were; for, despite possessing within himself the answers to all his questions, he was unable to reach his own conclusions without finding, outside himself, the clues that would guide him. We philosophers do nothing but try to “clarify” what is murky, but we do not “invent or create any truth.” Greek society between the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.E. —during which the philosopher lived—was not, in essence, very different from our own. Moreover, in urban areas, it was surely much more “advanced” than many pockets of agricultural societies in our brilliant postmodern and digital age. As is the case today, the urban classes—likely composed of wealthy merchants and bureaucrats, as well as landowners with high agricultural incomes thanks to the use of enslaved labor—were aware that their social status would endure if, in addition to preserving their sources of income, they distinguished themselves through greater culture and education . For this reason, they sent their children to study at those places that, at the time, offered academically organized instruction. Thus, for example, he would have studied theology with the priests of Memphis and Diospolis in Egypt. From the Babylonians, he must have learned astronomy, geography, and perhaps medicine; and from the Phoenicians—from whom he was descended—he must have learned the rules of commerce, the use of credit, money, and all the intricacies of trans-Mediterranean trade. With such an education, he was able to divert the course of a river, play a role in high politics, and speculate on olive harvests, from which he reaped great financial gains. Therefore, we should not hold a “crude” view of that Hellenic feudalism, which over time was even capable of establishing the first form of democratic government and which, in many respects, has not has yet to be surpassed. It was a “modern” society that valued education just as we do today. The obvious question is: What purpose did philosophy serve in Hellenistic society? Why did prominent families allow their children to devote part of the time meant for preparing them for real life to such ambiguous and “ abstract” knowledge such as philosophy? One possible explanation might be the young Athenians’ own interest, but the more likely explanation is that philosophy would soon degenerate into “rhetoric,” thus becoming the “art of deceiving with seemingly irrefutable arguments.” Its social and economic utility was evident, since in the absence of a legal “corpus” that could serve as a precedent for adjudicating disputes over purely economic matters (there were only fundamental laws enacted by “wise men,” as in the case of Solon in Athens), these disputes were resolved after an arduous and intelligent debate in the “Agora” or any other forum where they were presented. Thus, “knowing how to argue” was undoubtedly a practical and useful skill. Today, that knowledge has been passed on to law schools, for as the term itself indicates, “everything that pertains to law does so because it has a reasonable cause, whereas what pertains to fact has no reasonable cause.” Thus, to be a lawyer, it is essential to argue for the defendant’s innocence by finding a reasonable cause that justifies their possible crime, to the point of transforming it into “innocence.” This class of philosophers of rhetoric was called “sophists,” and they constituted the “intellect” of the early Athenian democracies. But this does not seem to be the case with Parmenides or the philosophers who preceded him. Rather, it seems to be a case of a “passionate vocation” (love of truth) to find, once and for all and beyond refutation, the probable and reasonable causes of all things (which he believed he had achieved). He is, therefore, a pure philosopher, entirely untainted by rhetoric; for this reason, he did not concern himself with investigating things as “they appeared to be” in search of some kind of “utility,” but rather stripped things of their deceptive appearances and laid them bare in such a way that he arrived at the “being of things in themselves.” This way of thinking about things is the part of philosophy we call “metaphysics ” (a term that emerged long after Parmenides, as a mere historical footnote, to describe Aristotle’s later writings—those that follow his works on physics). Put this way, it seems as though I have presented something simple to understand, as if we had known all our lives what the being of things and metaphysics are. The proof that this is not the case is that the reader will be experiencing the “tension” inherent in the very dialectic of understanding itself—which consists of the impression produced by the intuition of a truth, which stimulates the will to understand through the realization of the new idea. So at this very moment, while I am engaging in these preliminaries, the reader’s mind is already asking, “What is metaphysics, really?” To find an answer, it is best to rely on the answer given to us by its “creator” —that is, Parmenides himself—and which is contained in his own thesis. The first step is to establish the precedents that shaped his circumstances, and these could only have come from his contemporaries. Thus, metaphysics must necessarily have its origin in the theses of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, or Pythagoras. Heraclitus was of the same generation, but he lived in Ephesus, whereas Parmenides resided in Elea; therefore, it was unlikely that they exchanged knowledge and conclusions. According to Diogenes, Parmenides was a disciple of Xenophanes, but he did not follow him in his doctrine. Diogenes himself must have influenced his personal attitude, for he led a contemplative life devoted entirely to philosophy—the logical conclusion to which his thought led. It seems that his reputation as a “sage” allowed him to address certain political matters in his city, providing it with a code of “just and reasonable” laws. But the keys to his thought must have lain as much in Anaximenes’ theory of “air” as in the “harmony of numbers” of the mathematician and esotericist Pythagoras. Both refer to the “insubstantial” as the cause of the “substantial.” We have already discussed the first thesis; now we must focus on Pythagoras. Why haven’t I devoted a chapter to Pythagoras? Simply because, rather than a philosopher, I believe he was a mathematician “abducted” by the “kabbalistic speculations” to which the numbers themselves led him. These are conclusions similar to those of Babylonian astrology or the Hebrew “Kabbalah” itself, which cannot strictly be considered philosophical or metaphysical, since they do not develop an “idea” but rather a “doctrine” suggested by the numbers. It is, therefore, a “theological” conclusion ” that lacks “ideology”—or, in other words, conclusions based on the movement of numbers rather than on “ideas,” which is the “ substance” characteristic of philosophy. Undoubtedly, Pythagoras draws “true” conclusions by relating numbers to things, but this knowledge is “useless” to human understanding, as it can lead only to “schizophrenia and paranoia”; for to be certain of the truth without being able to reason it out by establishing its “idea” can lead only to schizophrenia. For this reason, the Pythagoreans found themselves compelled to “exclude themselves” from the mainstream society of their time, creating a sect where they could practice their “numerical fundamentalism” without interference. Their sectarian life was turbulent, and they were expelled by the inhabitants of Croton. Eventually, they were able to settle in Taranto, where they founded a new school. Most of today’s sects lead to schizophrenia and paranoia—in some cases destructive—because “they believe they possess the truth without being able to reason it out.” Despite my admiration for Parmenides, I regret having to downplay the originality of his thought, since his popularity and historical significance are, in part, largely the result of mythologization; and as a philosopher, I must strive to focus on the validity of ideas for what they are in terms of the true causes of things. Parmenides’ metaphysics is fully contained within Anaximenes’ theses and can be summarized in this simple reflection: “That which is, in order to exist, must have limits in space and time; therefore, that which is totally limited must be all that exists in all space and all time.” Parmenides does not need to know what things are like in concrete terms as substance; he no longer speaks of “ air” or even “spirit”; to understand the world, it is enough for him to understand the “true nature of being” . Parmenides gives this “way of being” a name: “the entity,” and he expresses it in this hexameter, which he recited in public squares and marketplaces: “Nor is the entity divisible,for it is entirely homogeneous;nor is there more entity at any point,than would disrupt its continuity: Nor is it any less so at any point, since it is entirely filled with being. It is, therefore, entirely continuous Being, for being is adjacent to being.” Now we need only “divide the entity into smaller beings,” limited by a concrete thought, and we have reality as it exists—that is, that which is and exists. But not everything that is possesses entity; rather, only that which we think of possesses it. We can understand this “mysterious” quality of being by returning to the example of the State. The State is an entity provided it has limits—that is, provided it “is” (hence the very term and concept of “ State” as that which “is limited”). This must have sounded like heavenly music to the ears of Hegel, one of the philosophers who helped to “overvalue” it by adding to its real value that of its myth. Hegel says of it: “With Parmenides, authentic philosophizing begins; in him we must see the ascent of the ideal.” But what does that ideal consist of? Without doubt, the answer lies in this other hexameter of his: “But because the limit of Being is a perfect boundary. Being is in every respect like a beautifully circular sphere in every direction” What sounds like the “music of the spheres” to Hegel’s ears is precisely the “ idea of the spherical” as the “absolute.” But he had already suggested that the sphere is the form adopted by “dead” bodies, whereas the living adopt forms entirely opposed to the absolutism of the sphere. Therefore, Parmenides’ Being is a “dead being,” just as Hegel’s “Spirit” is. Nor does Parmenides understand life, which he categorically denies, thereby denying movement. But life possesses the quality of moving and remaining formless, because it has the means to “ perpetuate itself,” so that Parmenides’ Being and Hegel’s Spirit are “residues of life” that move by inertia, but do not constitute the foundation that “drives the dynamic nature of things.” Of course, what is not cannot “not be,” but what “already is”—which necessarily also “is”—can come to “not be.” Therefore, “being that is can cease to be and cease to exist” in the way it was and existed. This idea corresponds to “death ,” which does not imply collapse or absolute non-being. This “relative non-being” is not considered by any idealist philosopher until the arrival of Aristotle, who is therefore no longer an idealist. Parmenides, like Plato, holds that “It is necessary that what can be said and conceived be. For there is being, but there is nothing.” But as Aristotle would later argue, what is “potential” (by default) is “nothing that is, but which does not exist.” In this philosopher’s idealism, a “double dialectic” is missing: the one that moves from potential nothingness toward actual being, and the one that moves from all that is potential and actual toward further potentiality and actuality, without our being able to see where this “becoming of the informal or potential” ends. By denying the double dialectic, we “enclose” within precise limits what is (Parmenides’s sphere) and what is not , thereby halting movement. It is true that Parmenides is an idealist, but he is neither the first nor will he be the last. Like every idealist, he sees the culmination of his “system” after the death of things and at the critical point of their “duration.” But also, like every idealist, he falls into the contradiction of trying to find the link between two analogous things and claiming that death and life are two “simultaneous phenomena”—that is, that one can be both alive and dead at the same time, with life being the relative and apparent and death the real and the absolute—which means ob obviously denies movement by denying “duration.” Another of his most fervent apologists is obviously the next great idealist in the history of philosophy, Plato, who says of him that he is “both venerable and fearsome… a magnificent and very rare depth of spirit was revealed to me in him.” Of that there is no doubt. Without Parmenides, the “phenomenon” known as Plato. With this last comment, the reader must think that I am an unrepentant materialist, and—paradoxically—I suppose I must be, despite everything, an idealist, an indispensable condition for being a “philosopher,” and now is not the time to clarify this assertion. The fact is that idealism, while necessary, is inconsistent. The same is true of the idea of God : many philosophers (the most notable example being Bergson) needed to believe in God despite recognizing the impossibility of reasonably proving His existence. But it is also, for example, once again the case of Aristotle, who found himself compelled to carve out a place for God in his system without allowing Him to intervene in the affairs of nature. In other words, we philosophers are idealists condemned to prove the contradictions of our idealism. That is why, time and again, I direct my somewhat malicious “barbs” at Hegel, because he is the only idealist in the history of philosophy who stands firm in his position, claiming that he can prove the validity of his convictions. In reality, we are all a bit sectarian and therefore possess a more or less well-concealed dose of schizophrenia, since we end up believing in that which is “ probable” to exist. Chapter 9 It was inevitable and necessary that one of these outstanding early philosophers would question something as obvious as the fact that the light of day is followed by the darkness of day (we mistakenly say “day and night,” when it is evident that day, like everything that exists, is limited by time and space—that is, a duration—which we have agreed is 24 hours—the time it takes for the Earth to travel a distance equal to its diameter). That first philosopher was Heraclitus; at least, he is the one who has left us writings in which he observes this “duality.” With Parmenides, his contemporary—since they were born four years apart—philosophy began to find its own form of expression. It is not that earlier philosophers used their “metaphors,” based on terms related to nature, in a non-philosophical sense; rather, both Parmenides and Heraclitus introduced new terms specifically for the use of the new philosophy, which replaced the earlier nature-related metaphors. We noted that for Anaximenes, “air” is not a specific molecular composition but rather his way of expressing the “spirit that moves nature.” Heraclitus, among other new terms, introduced that of “logos,” which means that with him, humanity’s search for the reason for the existence of things now has its own distinct expression. Thus, “theology” is the quest for knowledge of God, and thereby to establish his “logos”; “philology” is the quest for knowledge of the meaning of words, and so on. Heraclitus lived in the Greece of Pericles, the most brilliant era in the history of Hellenism, and his philosophy must reflect an absence of the “dogmatism” characteristic of his predecessors—who were often persecuted by the respective “ruling tyrants of the day”—which does not mean that the philosopher sympathized with the democratic ideas of Athens; on the contrary, he fought against them. In fact, he was a sick man stripped of his aristocratic “dignity,” which fueled his contempt not only for Athens but also for his fellow citizens . Despite these personal circumstances and the observation that: “The complete unites with the incomplete; the constant with the dissonant, the unison with the dissonance, and from all become one, and from one all are made,” his “unitarism” must leave some room for a certain “relativism.” Therefore, his totality is not the totality of Parmenides’ “entity”; rather, these opposites must behave in such a way that, despite presenting a “unity in the present,” they “separate in the past or the future.” For this reason, he contradicts his own apparent “oneness ” by stating, at the same time, that this unity is not static and immutable, since “those who bathe twice in the same river bathe in different waters.” This famous phrase by Heraclitus lends itself to much controversy, because every philosopher has translated it according to his own point of view, and I have translated it according to mine. It seems that the most accurate translation is: “We both enter and do not enter the same river, for we both are and are not [the same].” The first translation is the most straightforward and logical; the second is the most complex to interpret, but it amounts to the same thing, since I have already said that opposing things stand in opposition in the present, but will separate in an “absent” time, because they will no longer be the same “op ” but others, which will form a “new unity” in a new present time, etc. First observation: Hegel “literally copies Heraclitus’s metaphysics,” but interprets it not as “opposites” but as “contraries” —a fundamental distinction, since it is from this opposition that “change” or “synthesis” arises. Indeed, the opposite must “exert pressure on the opposition to bring about change.” That is to say, it must “counteract the opposition,” and the counteracted opposition is forced to “move.” After the struggle, the result is “another opposition and another unity of what was opposed,” which is now in “different waters.” This is the foundation of the “grand Hegelian dialectic.” Second observation: this dialectic apparently does not apply to things that move by “inertia”—that is, things that are dead—but rather to those that move by “ dynamic”—that is, things that are alive. Here Hegel makes no distinction—or at least that is how it appears to me. It is evident that “light does not oppose darkness,” and from light and darkness a unity is formed—the day—which repeats itself tirelessly for as long as “the universe endures,” which is what imparts its inertia. Heraclitus, at least, speaks of “ bathers,” that is, human beings who oppose one another, to the point of considering that this dialectical and dynamic becoming is driven by conflict: “War (pólemos) is the father of all things,” says Heraclitus, providing the grounds for Hobbes to develop his philosophy a few years later (Heraclitus had the brilliant insight to regard war as masculine). Conflict consists of “opposing the opposition,” and it is striking how familiar this expression sounds today; from this, we can easily deduce that Heraclitus, despite being a declared enemy of Athenian democracy, was one of the first “theorists of the current democratic system,” if not the first. Thus, his dialectic is by no means “absolutist ” at all, and for this reason it provides philosophy with the keys that allowed Aristotle to develop his well-known metaphysics of “act and potency.” In case the reader still needs some explanation regarding the evident relationship between these two philosophical systems, I can offer a brief clarification: Aristotle’s “act” is “entering the river and being in the river,” and “potency” is “not entering the river and not being in the river,” despite being part of “the same action” . In other words, Heraclitus introduces the idea that things “are and are not at the same time”—that is, they are “in act and in potency.” But this is not the time to delve further into this question, which will be explored in greater depth when it is Aristotle’s turn. Just an anecdotal curiosity: one of my first essays on philosophy was titled: “I think, therefore I am and I am not”—and here I was thinking the title might be original! Finally, Heraclitus, following the philosophical “trend” of his time, could not help but propose a natural element as the cause of all things: fire. But, as in the case of Anaximenes, his fire should not be understood as “flames” that destroy but as “combustion” that builds. In fact, I believe Heraclitus intuited, just like his predecessors, that the universe had its origin in “energy”; the difficulty lies in “giving substance to that energy,” and this philosopher comes closer than his predecessors to the “probable cause of the universe.” An idea that proved proved fatal for him, for, convinced that life was regenerated through “combustion,” he buried himself in manure in an attempt to cure his dropsy, but all he achieved was to hasten his death. Chapter 10 Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to settle in Athens. His predecessors taught in various parts of Magna Graecia, particularly in the rich and prosperous region of Asia Minor, in the cities along the Aegean coast. But Athens had become one of the most “ progressive”—and therefore prosperous—city-states of Magna Graecia. It is worth noting that all classicism contains both what “ends” and what “begins” within the same time and space. At the critical juncture of all evolution, prior to transformation, lies its “classicism,” because it is there that the “canons”—the final fruit of past evolution—are established, and upon those canons the foundations of a new world and a new “mentality” are laid. Anaxagoras would be the philosopher of the “new mentality” or of the “mindset itself.” We could also say that he was a philosopher of our own time, in which we too have “canonized” many of the ideas that emerged precisely during his era, such as democracy and the social state governed by the rule of law. Therefore, it falls to our era to produce the first signs of a new age, just as the “signs” suggested the ideas of the philosophers of the classical era of Pericles. The cornerstone of Anaxagoras’s philosophy is the introduction of the idea of “mentality”—a new term, “noûs,” which expresses another specifically philosophical concept. But for its creator, “noûs” is not an insubstantial idea but a substantial one: it is a “fluid” that manifests itself in natural things. That is to say, it acts as if it were “energy,” since energy manifests itself only through substances “potentiated” by it; if there are no substances, energy does not flow. We now consider the existence of “dark energy” with no apparent mass, but we do not really know what that energy is like. The only thing we truly know about energy is its behavior with respect to substance, with its corresponding polarity and magnetism. In other words, what Anaxagoras does is propose a new “element” as the cause of the “arché” or active principle—one that not only exists in nature and produces substantial things but is also part of the human being and the cause of their “thoughts,” thanks to which “it discovers the existence of the things around him ,” “conceptualizes” them, and “conceptualizes” himself—which amounts to saying that he “conceives” them. This marks the birth of “epistemology” or the “theory of knowledge,” and this new “science” is a clear sign of the dawn of a new era. This philosopher—advisor to Pericles and teacher of notable Greeks such as Archelaus, Protagoras of Abdera, Thucydides, and the playwright Euripides, and, it is said, also Democritus and Socrates, is the “father” of classicism, which is canonized in Plato and Aristotle. But fathers are not usually the creators of great systems; rather, that task is reserved for the sons, who are the ones who have the opportunity to develop more fully what their forebears barely had time to sketch out. The ideal would be to have two lives: one for conceiving ideas and another for developing them, but normally each of these tasks is assigned to different people, though they are closely related to one another. Anaxagoras’s most notable “son” is undoubtedly Plato. Anaxagoras’s “mind” is the concept upon which the very notion of conception is based, and without knowing how the mind works, our idea of the cosmos is nothing more than an imprecise “nebula” whose physical appearance we can barely discern. Anaxagoras equated the mind by analogy with (physical) “energy” and with (theological) “spirit,” not merely as a semantic curiosity, but because each of these meanings corresponds to a “thelos” or “context” in which it must be used, the purpose of which is distinct in and of itself. By introducing the “noûs” into the etymology of philosophical language, a new “totalitarian vision of reality” is introduced, in which “everything is in the mind” . This idea was taken to its ultimate conclusion by Plato with the development of his theory of ideas, which are nothing but an activity of the mind. If everything is in the mind, then everything we see is nothing more than ideas, and what we perceive is merely the way in which ideas reveal their “apparent aspect.” Idealism, therefore, is strengthened and consolidated thanks to Anaxagoras’ “noûs” of Anaxagoras. Without the mind, everything would be pure “consistent materialism”—that is, matter as the source of all things—but there would be no “mind that causes everything that exists” . But the paradox is that, insofar as the mind is analogous to energy and spirit, we can say that “everything is in energy” (Aristotle) or “everything is in the spirit” (St. Augustine). We have merely shifted our perspective in observing things: in the case of the “mind,” it is the perspective of the “philosopher”; in the case of energy, that of the “scientist”; and in the the spirit, that of the “ theologian.” This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that, since Anaxagoras, philosophy has been “confined” to a single context or perspective in the contemplation and analysis of reality: that of the mind and, consequently, of ideas. What is immediate to the mind is being, and the “fruit” of both is being and its idea. Therefore, only when we consider reality as an idea of itself are we truly engaging in “philosophy.” For this reason, I believe we should consider Anaxagoras the true father of philosophy. The least important aspects of his thought are his accurate conclusions about the composition of matter—which Aristotle called “homeomeries” (from which the concept of “homologous,” or similar, derives and which served as the foundation for the “atomists”)—nor his speculation that the sun might be “a mass of red-hot iron” , while the moon was nothing more than a rock reflecting the sun’s light. Unfortunately, such claims led to his being accused of “impiety” or “atheism,” forcing him to flee Athens and settle in a colony near Miletus, where, disillusioned and forgotten, he let himself starve to death. An all-too-common ending in the history of “intellect " for us to consider it exceptional. X Democritus With Anaxagoras, a new path opens up in philosophical thought—one that would become his own—that of the mind and subsequent ideas. But before Plato incorporated this thesis into his system, philosophy continued to seek answers in the apparent, even though, since Heraclitus and even Parmenides, it had already been aware of a “dark” and “imperceptible” aspect of reality that must be taken into account. It is not possible to conceive of things without someone to conceive them, and that someone cannot be a specter but must be something substantial. Therefore, it is inconceivable that substance could be conceived from “insubstance.” The essences of things must derive from the substances of things. The eternal dilemma of philosophy, as I suggested in the introduction, boils down to the three basic postulates around which all philosophical inquiry: nature, the person, and God. Anaxagoras is responsible for the person’s emergence in philosophical speculation, even though it would be the controversial Socrates who would take the credit for it in history. God is not yet a central theme and would not become one until the “philosophical manipulation of Scholasticism.” Even in Plato, God—whom he calls the “ demiurge,” appears as a logical outcome within a process of reflection, and is what the reasoning says it is—not in and of itself, absolutely and apart from the nature of things. That is to say, for Plato, the “demiurge” is not a concept that can be integrated into philosophy unless it is understood as a related aspect or part of nature itself. Put another way, the idea of God, being first and foremost an idea, is part of philosophy as long as it remains an idea. Medieval theology sought a philosophy that would conform to the “revealed image” of God, whereas the Greeks sought God in philosophy, not as a revealed image, but as a reasoned idea. Therefore, following Anaxagoras, his students took up his theses on “plurality” or the seeds (spermata) and sought to give them a more “para-physical” and credible meaning. I use the term “para-physical” because Democritus can be classified as neither a metaphysician nor a physicist. In the first case, it would be necessary for his “atomism” to be understood as “attributes of being,” and in the second, he would have to prove the existence of such atoms with more than just reasoning and probabilities—whether through some mathematical formulation or through some experiment on the matter itself. Obviously, none of that is found in Democritus. Why did what has been called the “atomist school” come into being? Because any plurality—and it seems evident that the nature of things is composed of such plurality— should be reducible to “singularity.” For the same reason, all plurality should result in the absence of plurality—or in the absolute—which is not the case. However, it seems evident that the apparent whole, whether or not it is absolute, must be composed of parts; and since these philosophers do not seek “parts in the abstract ” but rather real ones, they reach the obvious conclusion that substantial and plural reality must be composed of substantial parts that can no longer be divided—that is, the “atom,” which in Greek means “that which cannot be divided.” This is “probable physics” or “paraphysics ,” but it seems to me a mistake to consider it “philosophy.” However, such evidence is not without a certain complexity, for between the “atom” or the part and the rest of the parts there must be “ something”—that is, a “non-atom,” or a void whose substance must also be reasoned out and explained. How can there be a void where everything is “full of atoms”? Democritus’s paraphysics does not reach any major conclusions, such as, for example, that if the atom is the smallest part of the universe, the sum of all atoms (if they have a beginning, they must have an end) would form a whole whose origin we do not know where it is, because we do not know where the first atom—or part of the whole—comes from. This is the eternal dilemma of philosophy that has not yet been resolved, because it is a “tautology,” or, in other words, the repetition of an unsolvable dilemma through the simple use of reason, no matter how logical it may be. To help the reader understand what I am trying to say, this idea can be expressed with a simple question : Can darkness turn into light without ceasing to be darkness? Obviously, darkness that attempts to pass into light becomes “illuminated” and ceases to be darkness. I won’t delve any deeper into this question because it will be one of the fundamental theses for introducing Plato and his theory of ideas—a topic we’ll cover in a few chapters. With Democritus and later Epicurus, philosophy reaches a dead end, because it ceases to be philosophy. Even Aristotle would take this path, though without completely abandoning the purely philosophical. Thanks, however, to this “deviation” from philosophical thought, the cultural legacy of Athens was able to free itself from the irrational theism of the Middle Ages and pave the way for Renaissance astronomy and physics—naturally, only after reintroducing Aristotelian thought and that of the “para-physicists,” such as Democritus himself. For 400 years, Plato reigned in the “heights” without his philosophy ever really being taken into consideration—only that part related to theology, which was developed during the Patristic period through St. Thomas and Francisco Suárez. It consisted of replacing ideas with an image from which an “immanent idea” was extracted—one as vague and imprecise as the image from which it had emerged. As a prelude to the introduction to Plato, I can say that the only way for darkness to penetrate the light and remain darkness is if we “imagine” it. In this way, Dante was able to wander through the circles of hell and emerge unscathed without even getting singed, and Quevedo, years later, could recount some anecdotes from that same hell, also emerging unscathed from the experience. The Middle Ages were, above all, a world based on “imagination,” “psychology,” and “emotionality”; that is why there is absolutely no room for the existence of philosophy. But atomism still faces a refutation that calls into question even the “idea” we have of the modern atom, and to address this, we need only move forward a few years to return once more to Heraclitus (I say “move forward” because we follow the Christian calendar, which implies considering the existence of “anti-time ” or “reversible” time—the time that constitutes the “duration” of the world up to the birth of Jesus). Heraclitus presents us with the dilemma of the absolute impossibility of the existence of the “absolute” by demonstrating the necessary duality of all that exists, but above all, of all that is “consistent.” As “unity,” he conceives only “harmony”: an unstable yet enduring unity, dialectical and either expansive or depressive. For this reason, he would reach the necessary conclusion that things “have no limit in terms of their capacity for fullness: that the small, too, had no limit.” Why do the atomists accept the existence of something small and limited? Undoubtedly because otherwise the things that “are” cannot “exist,” since this quality of being requires “limits”—or, in other words, a beginning and an end defined within an indivisible beginning. In this way, we are once again faced with a tautology, which is resolved “conveniently” but not “truly.” It is imperative that things stabilize at some point in their being, creating for themselves limits where they are “indivisible.” Therefore, the atom is a “false” term, since it signifies what cannot be its meaning; it is like the term, also Greek, “utopia”: a “place” that is nowhere. In other words, the atom, which is divisible, “does not exist”—a conclusion conclusively confirmed by scientific experimentation. If we continue to call “atom” (that which cannot be divided) something that can be divided, we are using a term that lacks real meaning. The conclusion is that, unless proven otherwise, not only does the atom not exist, but everything composed of “false atoms” is also “false.” With this final reflection, we are drawing closer to Plato’s position, who vehemently rejects “apparent reality” in favor of ideas, or “absent reality.” X Socrates Socrates must have known that truth only emerges when it is discovered within oneself; therefore, we all possess the whole truth somewhere in our minds— we just have to “discover” or “unveil” it. They say this idea was inspired by his mother’s profession as a midwife, but I believe it is more likely that it came from his father’s profession as a sculptor. The midwife helps to “discover” what was inside the mother, while the sculptor uncovers the image that exists “potentially” within a block of marble. Typically, , the father’s profession is not mentioned, even though it is more closely aligned with “maieutics” than his mother’s work of bringing children into the world—an activity that is more tangible but less creative. In both cases, however, it is necessary to “conceive something” : in the first, a form that becomes an idea, and in the second, a person who will also become an “idea of themselves”—something a sculpture cannot do. In his time, his way of reasoning and of making others reason was considered characteristic of the Sophists, and Socrates, despite criticizing them, was undoubtedly one of their representatives. But his rhetoric did not pursue profit but virtue, which is that, paradoxically, he lambasted the Sophists. It is no wonder that many authors compare his exemplary death to that of Jesus Christ, but the same cannot be said of his less-than-exemplary life, which appeared careless and vulgar on the surface but was refined and intelligent in what was not apparent—or “essential.” To get an idea of Socrates’ “technique,” we can imagine this dialogue between him and one of his fellow citizens whom he questioned: – Who are you? – So-and-so – What are you? – A person – What is a person? – ? I don’t know! – “The only thing you know is that you ‘know nothing’!” With this aggressive line of questioning and the conclusive and reasonable conclusion, Socrates sought to demonstrate that our knowledge of the things around us is “superficial” and “imperfect.” Thus, things “ all contain their own truths hidden within their idea of themselves.” Therefore, the first thing we should do is form a “true idea of ourselves” as a preliminary step toward forming an idea of other things. This conclusion would be fundamental for Plato, because it demonstrated to him that ideas “concealed” the true nature of things. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because the person being questioned could have responded to Socrates in a way that would refute his conclusions and the resulting accusation of being “ignorant” with relative ease. Every “person,” despite being unable to define the very idea of a person, knows only what they “need to know,” since everything that is “something” must necessarily have “limits,” and if knowledge is something, it too must have its limits. If knowledge had no limits in either time or space, it would mean that we would have attained knowledge of everything that is substantial or real, and since we would be aware of everything in reality, the being that consists of something necessarily limited would not exist; but as Parmenides says, being cannot not be! Even the reader may have been misled by this reasoning and come to believe in the possibility of this fallacy, but must take into account a simple detail already present in the example of the conversation between Socrates and one of his fellow citizens whom he questioned. It is precisely Socrates who “provokes” the citizen to come to know himself, thereby becoming the “external” source of “internal” knowledge. Thus, when the citizen comes to know everything about everything and believes that the world “ends” because he has attained the “absolute of himself and, with it, of the entire world,” Socrates will still remain outside the “absolute” world of the “absolutist” citizen .” What I mean is that the very last thing we can learn about “all things” will have been taught to us by “someone” who will survive our “absolutism and death,” and this is how life remains on the sidelines and free from all absolutism or idealism. Hence my repeated criticisms of Hegel. Therefore, Socrates, without writing a single line, is “used” by Plato in his “Dialogues” to help him discover the “essence of things,” which must lie in his “ideas.” Obviously, with this observation I am casting some doubt on the true biography of Socrates and his teachings, which were probably not as history has handed them down to us. Socrates is the external circumstance that helps philosophy discover something fundamental about itself—namely, the ideas themselves and the idea in itself. His charge of impiety was based on the fact that his teachings led to the destruction of the State (in this case, the city-state of Athens) since, as we have seen, the State is precarious in that it cannot exist without concrete limits—the very same limits as human knowledge, which is truly the “very substance of the State.” In other words, the State is a limited entity composed of limited individuals, both in their “knowledge” as in their territoriality—the very limits imposed on them by their own State. That is the very essence of democracy! However, we are faced with the historical paradox that Socrates, despite demanding the abolition of the State through the liberation of his “citizens from ignorance,” believes in the “morality and harmony provided by the laws of the State” —for which he is willing to drink the hemlock, even though his friends were able to secure his pardon. Plato Karl Marx’s arrogance—likely a result of his great vitality—led him to commit major and notorious blunders, especially in his ill-fated attempt to ground his political convictions in philosophical reasoning. Throughout his life, he wavered between the absolute and the relative; between evolution and revolution; between good and evil. Ultimately, history literally “swept him along” and compelled him to write something as grand and elaborate as his treatise on *Das Kapital*, but on philosophy he probably never wrote a single truly coherent line. If the “First International” had not commissioned him to draft the first “Communist Manifesto,” Marxism would not have existed, but with the manifesto, he set the bait himself to fall into his own trap. Thus, Marxism begins because of a “phantom” of Karl Marx: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” With this sentence, his “Communist Manifesto” begins, demonstrating that Marx had anything but a “phantasmal ” of what communism was—one that was phantasmagorical and nebulous—and that, for the time being, “was nothing but a ghost,” and he himself is compelled to embody it or give it physical form. The reason communism as a political system is conflated with “Marxism” is because both are one and the same: Marx creates communism, and the communism created by Marx ends up reshaping Marx and his Marxism. Pure dialectics ! But I did not wish to refer to this ambiguous phrase from his Communist Manifesto, but rather to another, more closely related to the topic at hand. The phrase we will discuss in the chapter dedicated to Plato is found in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” a philosopher of the so-called “Hegelian Left” (Hegel, who was an absolutist, could have neither a left nor a right, nor even a center). Marx says: “Until now, philosophers have merely sought to interpret the world, but the real task is to change it.” The first point to consider is what the “limits” are within which Marx situates his “now”—that is, when does historical time begin for Marx? This initial consideration is important because history, like everything “existing,” must be bounded; hence the “division” between “prehistory” and “history” . Thus, historical time proper has a duration, the boundaries of which are defined by the end of “prehistory” and the inevitable arrival of “post-history”—which we do not know whether we have already reached or is still to come; in other words, we wonder whether the history that begins at the end of prehistory might not already be post-history -history, in which case history ended some time ago and only a few privileged minds, such as that of Francis Fukuyama (the first to suggest this), are capable of realizing it. The boundaries Marx sets for history do not coincide with those of the general public, and his history of philosophy must begin with Descartes, possibly the first philosopher who did not intervene directly in politics, because all those who came before him not only intervened but in many cases “changed” it. There is not a single philosopher from Magna Graecia who did not speak or write about politics, and many of them held important responsibilities in the formation or reform of their city-states. They were typically entrusted with the task of legislating, since there was no political entity elected by popular representation to handle legislative matters. Thus, when a philosopher attained a certain level of prestige, he was entrusted with the task of drafting a new constitution for his city-state that would guide the citizens along the path of morality and justice. They usually achieved this with relative success. Even Aristotle wrote a new constitution for Athens, though it would never be implemented. If Marx criticized them for not helping to erect “barricades,” he did not do so either; yet, in a certain sense, he managed to temporarily change the course of history. Plato is no exception; he was a philosopher who did not limit himself to interpreting the world but sought to change it, at the risk of his own person and dignity. It seems that Dionysius, tired of his bad advice, enslaved him and put him up for sale along with some of his other slaves, and that one of his wealthy friends and former students bought his freedom, sparing him from dying in slavery. By the time philosophy reached Plato, it contained all the necessary elements to develop the great “synthesis of the history of philosophy,” but Plato did not take on the challenge in an orderly and systematic manner; rather, he “unraveled” the synthesis as his thought progressed—a process that would invariably characterize the history of philosophy. Descartes did not create a system; rather, a system “emerged” as he attempted to justify certain physical—or paraphysical—theories regarding the behavior of light. Plato’s system is a creation of the “Neoplatonists” who preceded him. And even today we continue to “systematize” his thought, and this modest book is no exception. It is still necessary to make a few further observations regarding the characteristics of the society in which Plato lived, which are markedly different from those of the society in which Marx lived. If philosophy flourishes and proliferates in M Greece, it is above all because there is not yet a “public opinion” capable of affecting the integrity and security of its city-states. The feudal system lacks “political opinion” proper, and such opinion is limited to the religious sphere. Philosophy introduces for the first time a “political consciousness within public opinion,” but in its early stages its influence is still minimal, and it only reaches the “masses” beginning with Socrates crates, and above all, in the early democracies of Athens. Crimes against the state are therefore crimes against the religious foundations that legitimize the power of the state; that is to say, against public opinion. All philosophers will be systematically accused of “atheism,” but in reality they are accused of “sedition.” Hegel commits the philosophical “naivety”—especially for someone of such genius—of “ “relativizing” the causes of the idea of the State by suggesting that for it to exist there must be a large population, class differences, tensions, and conflicts that make the creation of the State and its institutions necessary—which are the very raison d’être of the State itself. Thus, a State without tensions or inequalities cannot be a State. But we had said that the State exists only by virtue of its limits, so that a person who limits themselves to their person is just as “sovereign” as the State itself. What Hegel sees is the “emergence of public and political opinion” and, immediately, the “reaction” of the “State’s political police” (it would be more appropriate to describe it as “police of public opinion”) to control precisely that public opinion. Therefore, Hegel must believe that a state cannot exist without “public opinion.” All states of Hegel’s time have a public opinion controlled by the state’s political police. But in Greece, where philosophy arises and develops, there are city-states -states without public political opinion, so that the existence of “free thinkers”—or “sovereign” individuals who are their own state within the state, which, in turn, is within the state that constitutes known reality, which also lacks public opinion—is possible. Hegel based many of his political conclusions on the limited insights he could glean from the political systems of the city-states, and he reached many accurate conclusions about their early democracies, but perhaps he did not appreciate the decisive importance of the emergence of “public political opinion.” If Socrates was accused of impiety, it was likely not because of public opinion, but rather due to a specific accusation by some notable figure—the father of one of his students—who had been swayed by his teachings, thereby diverting his interest away from the matters and issues that the father must have considered most useful and convenient for the continuity and consolidation of the family and its privileges. Therefore, philosophy is not only possible but also tolerated in those states that do not yet have a public opinion capable of affecting the security and stability of the state itself, since philosophy affects, above all, public opinion. Obviously, this can only arise through “massification” and the control of the potential for change that may exist within public opinion—a force that is manipulated by “organizations,” whether political parties, religious denominations, or the state itself as an organized bureaucracy. Today, public opinion, thanks to the help of the mass media, has literally brought the state to its knees. Plato’s life unfolds under these conditions, and for that very reason he is able to be a free thinker who thinks what is reasonable rather than what is expected of him, whether or not it is reasonable. In other words, Plato still enjoys a world free from the pressure of public opinion and its “common sense ,” framed within the limits imposed on him by his State—which is also “common.” For this reason, he was able to synthesize philosophy. After Rome’s politico-military system destroyed the Hellenic world, theocracy emerged, whose “City of God” (St. Augustine) is based on total and absolute control of public opinion, which must conform to the dogmas imposed by the fundamentalist and totalitarian Christianity. This is a purely political matter, skillfully disguised as spirituality. In fact, the internal struggles of medieval Christianity—the heresies—are struggles for control of public opinion within what remains of the weakened Roman Empire. Plato, to the glory of philosophy, still enjoys a world free from the pressure of public opinion. But let us now get to the heart of the matter—that is, ideas. “To conceive is to limit,” but to limit the “unlimited.” It is thus a way of thinking about a time and space that is part of a contingency of unlimited time and space, and therefore part of non-being or nothingness. What we do when we conceive is “bring into being from non-being” a being that consists of a portion of a limited and finite entity, taken from an “inconceivable” contingency of unlimited and absolute entity. “Everything that is limited was once unlimited”—this could be the summary of idealist thought, which begins with Parmenides’s Being and ends with Sartre’s nothingness. Since it is not possible to think of something unlimited, in order to think at all, one must first “limit”; that is to say, we can also say that “to think is to delimit” . Thought does not think of “everything that is thinkable” but rather of a limited part of the thinkable. This “idea” of what an idea is has been present in philosophy since Anaximander’s “ápeiron.” Anaximenes, his student, was the first to attempt to deny ideas by “dissolving” reality into the air, but he had to acknowledge that by changing states, it “limits itself to concrete things .” Parmenides attempts to penetrate ideas from the perspective of metaphysics and completely disregards physics; thus, for him, there are no “recognized limits”—thought is not possible, things neither exist nor move because being is “immobile,” perhaps that is why Plato fears him and considers him “dangerous.” Anaxagoras’s approach to ideas is more “realistic”; his “homeomeries” are limited parts. Heraclitus is the one who comes closest to the ideas, for his “logos” is a flow of the unlimited that imposes limits on the things through which it flows, creating the very things he thinks about—which are, naturally, limited. There must have been other philosophers before Socrates—and even among the Sophists—who analyzed this peculiarity of “ideational” thinking, but it was Plato who took the credit because he explained it most clearly; and, as I have suggested on another occasion, we philosophers do not “invent ideas”—we merely try to “clarify” them. Which means that every idea, despite having a limited and perfectly defined entity—for everything that has been limited is in turn delimited—reveals only an insignificant part of its “effectiveness,” namely, that of its “existence.” This existence is brought about at a specific moment within the general entity of the idea, that is, in the present moment. Thus, of everything we think about, we have a “present” idea—or, which amounts to the same thing, “a moment of its effectiveness.” Socrates reproaches his fellow citizens for their negligence in failing to take an interest in understanding more “thoroughly” what they think about in their daily lives, but those questioned were within their rights to defend themselves by arguing that what they thought was necessary for their survival, and if survival depended on thinking more deeply about things, there was no doubt they would do so. Why does Plato insist on knowing more about them when it is not necessary to do so? Undoubtedly because, in setting out to be a “philosopher,” the very raison d’être of his vocation is precisely to know more about things, even it not being necessary to know them. It is solely out of “love of truth”—that is, by virtue of being a philosopher, he must think like a philosopher, but it is not fair to demand that those who are not think as if they were. Perhaps part of his personal problems stemmed from his insistence that everyone be a “philosopher.” Today, in colloquial terms, we would say he “got too clever by half.” So far, we have seen that all things that “exist” have limits in space and in time (the universe itself is a “thing” limited in space and time), and within that limit lies the complete idea of itself; therefore, we must not trust “appearances,” for things conceal their true nature from us by hiding what is not in the present (in their presence). Consequently, Plato needs to ground all his reasoning in something that reveals the “true cause of things,” which he calls “episteme,” without taking into account their “appearance,” which he calls “doxa.” Thus, the “nous” is the fundamental cause of all that exists, and outside the mind there can be nothing “existing,” but only what is “consistent” or “apparent,” and from whose sensory or imagined certainty the truth cannot be attained. The dilemma can be posed in these simpler terms: Do things exist because we think of them, or do we think of them because they exist? Plato correctly deduces that things must be caused by thought because only thought can “penetrate the true nature of consistent and apparent things,” that is to say, things themselves are unthought, and we can only perceive their mere substance or appearance; knowledge of these does not establish their cause, and therefore they cannot be “understood.” The paradox is that, for Plato, “light” lies in “episteme” and darkness in “doxa.” That is to say, while we believe we see real things because they are illuminated, they remain “obscured in the darkness of their appearances” until they are illuminated by thought, where light and clarity reside. Put this way, it seems like a “whim of Plato’s,” who attempts to expound this idea of “light and darkness” in his Allegory of the Cave; but if we consider a more relatable example, the dilemma will be easily resolved and will no longer seem so capricious. Suppose Let’s imagine we enter the attic of an old house where we’ve been told there are objects of extraordinary value. The problem is that there is no light in the attic, and since it happens to be nighttime, no light enters at all. First question: What is in the attic? “There may” be many things, but this is merely a “probability” that requires certainty. If we say that inside the attic “there ” things, that is a hasty assertion, because we have no “sensory” confirmation. The same is true of apparent reality: if we do not think about the things perceived by our senses, their existence is merely a probability; therefore, it is probable that they exist, but only thought distinguishes one thing from another according to the limits or contours of their forms—and of their ideas! Limits whose “impression” may come from the sensation provided by any of the senses, from touch to hearing. I am not referring to the extrasensory faculties of instinct, intuition, and faith, because that would go beyond the scope of this first approach to ideas. Therefore, the dilemma is resolved by this line of reasoning: Only that which has an impression and is conceived in consciousness—which is “absent” reality—actually exists, but that of which we have only a perception of its substance or appearance simply “exists,” and is “present” reality. But the dilemma is far from resolved, because the “tautology " of the chicken and the egg, for if the present makes the existence of the absent possible, which came first—the absent or the present? In other words, Plato believes that things are nothing but appearances of ideas. But then, is Plato an idea that thinks of itself as an idea of itself? There is no possible escape, because we will never find the “link” between the absent and the present, and Plato did not find it either. We cannot know what lies beyond death until after we are dead. But despite this reasonable difficulty, Plato persists in his system and delves as deeply as he can into the very essence of ideas, which will lead him to conclusions that hold the keys to our current culture and the subsequent development of ideas. Paradoxically, what Plato leaves us as a challenge for the future of philosophy is not ideas, but “episteme”—that is, a new path for philosophy to find its own subject matter to contemplate. Put simply, Plato casts doubt on the rational foundations of reason itself and of all human understanding—or the means by which thought comes to know things as they truly “ought to be.” Lights and Shadows of Platonic Idealism For Plato, ideas are the only means by which things are fully understood and therefore known. This is not entirely true, since things can be known—at least in a cursory and superficial way—simply by seeing them or imagining them, which is nothing more than “unveiling” their presence by bringing them forth from the darkness —where they were supposed to be—into the light, where we can then have proof of their appearance and the impression they make, and we can think about them and their nature; that is, we can begin to know them more deeply until we come to understand them. The bright side of idealism is that philosophy as such is grounded in ideas; the dark side is that ideas can be separated from the things from which they originate and “become idealized.” But Plato wonders whether ideas truly originate from the things that make an impression on us, or whether the impression itself might be caused by a preconceived idea of things—one that lies in the “light” outside the cave, according to the myth he proposes to support his argument. In other words, if we observe a thing about which we have no prior knowledge or experience, no matter how much we think about it, we will never be able to know what it is like or its cause. Undoubtedly, in this scenario, the “logical” approach is to consider its resemblance to another known thing and establish its “ontological kinship” in order to find a suitable name that establishes this kinship, so that the new idea arises from the resemblance of the thing being thought of to another already known idea; this is what we might call the “dialectical evolution of ideas.” But Plato wonders how the “first idea” arose if it were not possible to apply this dialectical method—the very one through which language itself has developed—and he concludes that the first idea actually stems from “intuition”; yet in intuition there is not merely a first idea, but an “absolute idea,” from which all others will arise through a process of logical and reasonable reflection. That is to say, insofar as reason does not “create,” everything it “discovers ” is because it already existed; otherwise, it could not arise. In other words, everything that “strikes” us and moves our will to know what it is and form an idea of it is because it must already be in our “intuition,” but that which we think about and which does not strike us is because it is already part of our knowledge or experience. To understand what is new, intuition is necessary—which is the “light” that lies outside the cave and allows us to see the shadows on the back wall of that same cave. Plato uncovers the source of understanding, which he calls “episteme,” but he makes the mistake of “idealizing” his own discovery, since he assumes that all “relative” ideas are contained within an “absolute and perfect” idea that awaits full revelation: absolute truth. But this is an aporia, for if everything we can conceive is contained within an absolute idea, that absolute idea cannot itself be conceived, since it lacks “movement”—for every idea “ limit” the scope of a thought, from its cause to its effect. Without that movement, no idea can be brought about. One after another, all the idealists in the history of philosophy would fall into this error, and perhaps Ortega y Gasset was the first to “renounce himself” and disavow his idealism—borrowed from the Neo-Kantians—to become a “vitalist,” alongside his friend Bergson, with whom he nevertheless disagrees considerably. What Gasset is essentially saying is that ideas may arise from intuition, but intuition is nothing more than the “circumstance” , and this is by no means perfect or absolute, yet it is the cause of ideas—as imperfect and relative as circumstance itself. But Plato must have been too enthusiastic about his discovery to consider this possibility, for the defining characteristic of every idealist is to “deem creation complete” by placing a god, or demiurge, at the beginning and end of the process of understanding, since no idealist accepts the ambiguity and relativism of dialectics. Plato correctly identifies the causes of our understanding of things, which can only occur in thought through ideas; but this is an “existential” and formal knowledge that disregards the characteristics of the things it understands. However, in order to “know what is understood ,” the idea formed in consciousness must be transferred to a thing or object; otherwise, what is understood cannot be known “objectively.” Plato believes that this aspect of understanding belongs to “doxa” and should not be taken into account when establishing the true nature of things—and he is right—but in this case, one must limit oneself to understanding them and not to “knowing” them. Aristotle would make possible the union of ideas with things, without altering the essence of the Platonic system, but by “changing the context”—that is, shifting the perspective from existence to “consistency,” or that of substance. We might be tempted to criticize Plato for his idealism, but it is necessary and understandable that human beings need to “set limits on their reality”; otherwise, they would lack existence, or an idea of themselves and their “circumstances.” In other words, we as people cannot coexist without setting limits on our community—upon which to base our culture, laws, or social norms—and those limits are set by the State, which is nothing more than an “idea that exists but does not consist,” since its substance lies in the people who constitute it. In his *Republic*, Plato seeks to present a form of government based on the right to govern held by those who “ought to do so” by virtue of their attributes—which we might call existential, but also personal—and not those who “can do so” by virtue of their birth privileges or the prerogatives of brute force. With this, Plato means to tell us that human beings, unlike animals, upon discovering their existence through ideas, discover the power of their mind; and from then on, their reason for living must be the search for the “reason for their existence”—a philosophical perspective—and not the reason for their “consistency,” which belongs to science, or the reason for their “appearance,” which belongs to theology. With this, Plato believes that human beings must strive to understand rather than merely to know, and to base their social behavior on duty rather than power, thereby laying the foundations of law—that is, of Western culture, to which we are indebted. In other words, it was with Plato that the Enlightenment began—the perspective of existence as a source of human restlessness—and the search for the reason for existence leads, through idealist philosophy, to the search for truth in and of itself, which will gradually become the cause for overcoming all religious fanaticism or scientific positivism, neither of which is concerned with truth or existence, but rather with the good and the positive, respectively. But due to Plato’s “error” —failing to regard intuition itself as relative and imperfect, but rather as perfect and absolute—we in the West have suffered the effects of “idealistic” and “absolutist” regimes, and early Christianity, under the influence of the Neoplatonist Plotinus, adopted the dark side of Plato’s ideas, since it conflated “mind” with “spirit,” a confusion that has not yet been overcome. In short, , Plato’s idealism, like all things in this world, has its “good” side and its “bad” side—though I refrain from using the correct terms, which would be “true” and “false.” The good is that it sets limits on our consciousness without renouncing the quest to discover the truth of the boundlessness inherent in intuition; the bad is that these temporary and inevitable limits have been interpreted as “ absolute and timeless” limits, giving rise to all the conservative and reactionary ideas throughout our history. With Plato comes the contradiction between duty and power, which is resolved through “democracy” and the “republic.” But as Gasset and Unamuno told us, democracy does not consist in the power of a state’s masses, but rather in the duty that is derived from the reason of existence; that is, democracy should always be grounded in the “ultimate truth attained, transformed into a right.” Unfortunately, in the wake of last century’s existentialism and postmodernism, Plato has been temporarily “surpassed,” and rather than seeking the reason for our existence, we are concerned with our mere survival—in other words, we are returning to Aristotle, but to a misinterpretation of his “materialist” interpretation. Aristotle Aristotle’s philosophy can be considered the foundation of orderly and systematic scientific thought—the very thought that led Einstein to develop his theory of relativity, since it is evident that the “physical proof” of his theory would not come until the detonation of the first atomic bomb in the Nevada desert in the United States. He is a philosopher who is just as controversial—if not more so—and whose work is just as than his teacher, Plato, with whom he shared views and worked during his twenty years as a collaborator at the Academy. He, too, was caught up in the political vicissitudes of Magna Graecia, where philosophy flourished even as tyranny and ancestral feudalism—dating back millennia—persisted. Aristotle himself would prove ambiguous toward democracy, even becoming an advisor to tyrants and such as the young Alexander the Great, who obviously disregarded everything his distinguished teacher had tried to teach him. His death, in exile on his mother’s native island, was typical for the time (and unfortunately remains so today) for those who exposed the ignorance of the majority of prominent figures—tyrants, politicians, or notable citizens—which is why “int intelligence” was invariably accused of “impiety” or atheism. But Aristotle did not deem it appropriate to portray Socrates’s naive nobility; instead, taking a more realistic approach, he opted for exile. Another heroic death would have been impossible to record for history; Socrates’s was enough, for it is nothing more than an “exemplary anecdote” used to illustrate the world through anecdotes. Two such instances would have ceased to be anecdotal and become the norm, and therefore would not have been recorded for posterity. The roads of Greece were lined with crosses where the condemned—accused of impiety and other crimes—were dying, but none of them went down in history until the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The reasons must be sought in the very “ anecdote” that his crucifixion represents—which is not the time to analyze here. Of course, Aristotle does not break with his teacher, nor even with the philosophical tradition that constitutes the legacy from which his own must necessarily draw nourishment. That break would not come until several centuries later, a consequence, in turn, of the collapse of the Hellenistic world as such. Not only does he not break with his teacher, but he “enriches” him. It is worth noting that Plato himself might have come to accept some of Aristotle’s conclusions had he had the time and opportunity to do so, but political upheavals prevented him from doing so. Plato established the priority of the mind and the existence of things over the certainty that the senses or suggestions. But for this very reason, the path to all scientific knowledge was closed off, which prompted Aristotle to react. The reasoning that led him to refute his teacher is simple: If what is understood has no connection to what is felt, it can never be truly known. With this attitude, Aristotle “dangerously strays from philosophy,” and it could be said that he renounces metaphysics, but at least he bridges the gap between science and philosophy. Centuries later, Aristotle would be considered the cause of all heresy within Christianity, as this passage from Tertullian shows: “All heresies ultimately have their origin in philosophy. [...] It is the wretched Aristotle who has instructed them in dialectic—the art of constructing and destroying, of shifting convictions, of firm conjectures, of hard-hitting arguments, the architect of disputes, vexing even to itself, always ready to reexamine everything, because it never admits that anything has been sufficiently examined.[.. .] Let this human wisdom—which manipulates and distorts the truth—remain in Athens, where the multitude of contradictory sects with their various heresies abounds. But what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What connection is there between the Academy and the Church? What do heretics and Christians have in common? Our school is that of Solomon’s portico, which taught that one must seek the Lord with simplicity of heart.” Over time and with the Reformation, part of the Christian world became definitively confined to the philosophical tradition of Aristotle, abandoning that of Plato. While Plato insists that there is no reason for being other than that which can be derived from existence—and is therefore caused by the mind—Aristotle proposes that existence lacks meaning if it is not firmly grounded in “substance,” ence”—that is, in “substance.” While Plato paved the way for scholasticism—once the mind had been reconverted into spirit, or spiritualism more properly speaking—Aristotle laid the foundations of modern science, which, once it had overcome the spiritualism that dominated Western culture until the Renaissance, would become the fundamental “driving force” of our culture to this day. But this is not a radically different philosophy from that of his teacher, but merely a shift in perspective and, therefore, a shift in concepts. Aristotle attempts to view the world through the mind of things rather than his own; that is, he puts himself in the place of things and conceives of them as if they were thinking for themselves, or as he himself puts it, “ per se.” To put it another way, he lends them his own mind so that they may express themselves as they truly are. This is the attitude of every scientist who strives to understand things from the point of view of the things themselves and not from his own. But is this splitting of the mind possible? For Plato, obviously not; for his student, yes. The solution to the dilemma lies in the connection established between understanding and knowledge through the “object”—the medium between what exists and what is. While the mind gives rise to ideas, nature produces things; yet things and ideas share a common point of convergence in the object. For Aristotle, any idea that has no relation to an object cannot become knowledge—which is the way an idea becomes “objective.” Plato is content with the subject, that is, the idea itself, without any relation to an object, already seems “true” to him. For Aristotle, Plato’s metaphysics leads nowhere beyond the mere existence of things in the mind, but to verify that this existence “consists of something,” there must be an object common to the idea of itself and the thing-in-itself; otherwise, it is simply “ it is not a true idea.” It is merely a more “realistic” point of view, but not necessarily a “truer” one, because ideas in and of themselves allow for the understanding of things, even though such knowledge is subjective. While Plato allows new ideas to emerge from intuition—ideas that aid in understanding things that cannot be observed, such as the foundations of modern theoretical physics—Aristotle imposes a strict curb on that “subjective” idealism to force it to keep its feet on the ground and not go beyond what can be “objective.” In other words, while “Aristotle keeps us in check, we move forward thanks to Plato.” However, Aristotle could not completely abandon metaphysics and found the answer through what we might call the “metaphysics of physics itself,” such as his thesis of “ Act and Potency.” Aristotle could have called this metaphysics the “Effect and by Default,” in which case he would not have strayed from the existence of things; but insofar as he considered the perspectives of substantial things, he found a way to replace terms specific to existence with others specific to substance, such as “Act and Potency.” In fact, I believe we should consider Aristotle’s metaphysics as the “metaphysics of physics”—not only because this term itself arose from the need to classify the philosopher’s writings as coming “after physics,” according to Andronicus of Rhodes, the compiler of his works, but also because, as the term itself suggests, metaphysics always refers to the “nature of things” and not to the “ being of things.” Why we understand the study of being—which is more properly the domain of ontology—as metaphysics is one of the mysteries of etymology, philosophy’s greatest enemy. The analogies between Plato and Aristotle are obvious if we shift our focus from existence to consistency. What for Aristotle is the “act” is for Plato the “effect”; what for the former is “ in potential” for the former is “by default” for the latter. That is to say, while Plato uses terms characteristic of philosophy grounded in the discourse on ideas and existence, Aristotle uses other terms that are already characteristic of physics, grounded in the “substance” of things, to the extent that they have become strictly scientific expressions—as is the case with “potency,” which in physics is defined as the amount of work performed per unit of time. In other words, power requires time, and time merely denotes a “present” moment; the rest of the duration of things constitutes their “potentiality.” Therefore, while I have no objection to describing Aristotle as a philosopher, strictly speaking, he deserves the title of “scientist” , since he ostensibly abandons the realm proper to philosophy—namely, the being of things and their existence. The Being and Non-Being of Things It has rightly been said that the so-called “metaphysics of act and potency” actually belongs to Aristotle’s physics. This leads us to ask what philosophy truly is and, above all, what its “substance” is . My answer is unequivocal: for me, the substance of philosophy is ideas and what can be inferred from them, and its only “metaphysics”—though this is not a very accurate term—is that which deals exclusively with being in itself and its possible causes. Aristotle himself makes this distinction by calling the pre-Socratics “physicists” because of their interest in natural causes without taking into account the possible answers contained within the very ideas of the things they were thinking about. This momentous step in philosophy will first come with the “noûs” , and would ultimately reach its synthesis in Plato. For this reason, I have no qualms about saying that with Plato the decline of philosophy begins, because it ceases to be an “active philosophy” and becomes a “passive philosophy”—or the act of “rethinking everything he himself has thought”— but it would be more appropriate to define it as a reflective and analytical activity concerning things themselves, which we might well describe as “intellectualism.” Philosophy prior to Plato is not intellectual, despite being grounded in what we call the intellect, which is frequently confused with “intelligence” in the broadest sense. In this bewildering world, there have been more foolish intellectuals than fools themselves. For example, the Nazi Joseph Goebbels can be described a “stupid intellectual” (and I use the term “donkey” in its pejorative, not literal, sense) due to his profound ignorance—which is why he detested “intelligent intellectuals,” particularly those of Jewish origin, whom he must have secretly admired. His book burnings sought the same goal as that Chinese emperor who ordered the burning of all accounts of previous dynasties , or Cardinal Cisneros, with his futile attempt to destroy the cultural legacy of the Muslim people of Al-Andalus. Goebbels sought to eliminate every work by intellectuals that was on a higher level than his own, which would have led to the destruction of all books in the Third Reich, including the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. Hitler also took his first tentative steps as an intellectual with his sordid manifesto work *Mein Kampf*, and even Franco wanted to try his hand at it with his *Raza*. Thus, intellectuals may be clever or foolish, but they are rarely “philosophers” at the same time, because one condition almost inevitably nullifies the other. Intellectualism in and of itself is the cause of the nullification of intuition, the very foundation of intelligence itself. The intellectual does not create but rather analyzes, synthesizes, organizes, and renews the language of the original; delves into the semantic content of words; and searches through history books to extract hidden clues, dates, names, and surnames that are essential for “delimiting and analyzing” the content of ideas and of history itself—which is indeed active, but does not create or generate anything new on its own! In other words, he becomes a scholar, or an encyclopedia incapable of going beyond what is stored in his prodigious memory. In my opinion, Aristotle represents the transition between the philosopher and the intellectual, and I say “transition” because the original and creative aspect of his philosophy is no longer really philosophy but “physics.” The creative philosopher, to truly be one, must contribute “something new that is contained within ideas,” and find something original in ideas after Plato. After more than twenty years of teaching idealism, Aristotle left the Academy—but also the foundations of philosophy—to delve into those of physics, and for years we have his physics as philosophy. The paradox here is that his metaphysics is entirely consistent with that of his teacher, but approached from a new perspective: that of substance. It is no coincidence that his logic is “syllogistic,” such that a similar conclusion must be inferred from both Plato’s propositions and his own. Let us briefly examine his metaphysics of “act and potency.” Suppose we wish to understand a “thing” and take as an example something paradigmatic and accessible to any observer, such as a tree. The tree has “substance, form, and image.” The tree has a “presence” easily perceptible by the senses: its matter “consists” in the realization of its impenetrability when we come into “contact with it”; its form is “penetrable” and serves to “identify it” through its “resemblance” to other similar forms stored in our memory (no two trees are alike, nor is the same tree the same when observed at two different moments in its duration—which rightly led Heraclitus to conclude that we cannot bathe in the same river twice while intending to do so in the same waters) , and the image is the “combination of its form and surroundings” as if it were a photograph—that is, what the form of the thing shows us “fused” with its surroundings, where the suggestion of its psychological and emotional value also lies. Observing the tree conveys to us, with hardly any effort on our part, a “superficial” image of its presence, because we see it “automatically” . The mind must be like a digital recorder with immense memory, connected to a computer that automatically and “comprehensively” distinguishes, contrasts, and organizes (according to its matter, form, and image) the sensations it perceives. The images are stored, some in “consciousness”—active memory—and others in the “subconscious” or “passive memory,” the more extensive and prodigious of the two because it must contain “innate” information—that is, information transmitted at birth—in other words, intuition. Up to this point, we don’t see the observer performing any “work” at all; it’s as if we were sitting in front of the TV after a long day at work and, after “channel-surfing” for a while, decided to settle on a channel offering a nature program, which can be watched without really “thinking about what we see or hear”; in fact, we might even turn off the sound and just watch the images. Others might prefer to turn off the TV and do some yoga; the end result is the same: being alive without thinking about anything! To think about the things we perceive, we must do some “work,” and all work requires the consumption of “energy.” Therefore, knowing “does” take up space, but it doesn’t seem that way to us because we store most of it in our passive or subconscious memory. Knowing, therefore, must “consume energy .” What happens is that if we intend to “recognize” what we are observing—of which we know nothing except its resemblance to an image or sensation stored in our memory—we must rely on a “force” that makes it possible for “an idea of what is observed to emerge from mere observation.” That force is “will.” Therefore, will must be the synergy produced when we “conceive” the things we observe. This synergy requires effort, and that effort must be properly valued, for the result of this ideation must compensate for the energy expended in the will required for it. The key to performing this “work” is the interest motivated by an “impression.” In other words, the activity of the mind has at least two facets and states: “automatic or phenomenological” perception and “conscious or volitional” thought, which must be reasonable and simply logical. This was not invented by Husserl nor by the earlier so-called philosophers who already mentioned the very idea of “phenomenology,” but is already present in Parmenides in his “path of truth and path of opinion,” though it was systematized by Plato with his categories of “episteme” and “doxa” . Thus, in order to “conceive” an idea, the first thing one must do is make a considerable effort of will; otherwise, ideas simply do not arise from observed or sensed things. This is an “economic” attitude that the vast majority of human beings—and all living beings without exception—instinctively practice, which helps maintain the natural balance and harmony of the mind. Therefore, it is this minimal level of mental activity that achieves harmony and balance between things and their needs: they know no more than what they need to know to ensure their survival. Thus, “will” is a substance that occurs with greater intensity in highly “competitive” environments where it is necessary to “understand more things in order to counter more challenges and their risks.” Finally, will is the force that drives “philosophy” itself, since philosophizing is fundamentally “conceiving.” Plato would see the tree and form an “actual” idea of it—an idea common to anyone who contemplated the tree, without needing to be a philosopher. But that actual idea tells Plato that the tree is “effectively” or “affirmatively”—that is, that it not only “is” but is “represented in its idea.” Ever since Parmenides, it had been known that things “are” insofar as being cannot not be, and thus they must necessarily be. But Parmenides left things in their mere being—“without end or beginning: without limits or destruction”—and Plato’s task would consist in “setting limits on the limitlessness of being itself by conceiving them as ideas.” Therefore, through a considerable effort of will, he “conceives” the being of things and sets limits on them. These limited things now “are and exist,” because they are “in fact.” The idea cannot arise without an effort of will, and it is the will that “brings about ” the tree’s existence—not as something that consists of material and characteristic properties, but rather as something that exists, or as the “idea of a tree”—and this is sufficient for Plato, for the moment, to confirm its “being and true existence,” since his primary concern is to determine whether things exist or do not exist, even though he suspected the “probability of their existence ,” since the being of the tree was already “consistent,” or consisted of something. With this brief explanation, we have suggested that the “anecdote” of the Cartesian “cogito” is nothing more than an anecdote, whose purpose is to mark a turning point in the history of philosophy—the “rethought” one—regardless of the value the anecdote itself may hold, since Plato already establishes the cause of the existence of things as a consequence of “ideological” thought. As if that were not enough, the previous paragraph summarizes another major thesis, namely that of Arthur Schopenhauer, contained in his famous philosophical essay, *The World as Will and Representation*; for we have already stated that the will is the force that causes things that are to exist, revealed to the mind through their representations: the ideas of things. Since this is irrefutable, Aristotle does not refute it. He, too, sees the tree and forms a rough idea of it, but his affirmation of it is not “exclusively mental”—which is inevitable—but rather he wishes to confirm it through his substantial sensation; that is, to exist, it must be “actual” and substantial, and if it is substantial, it must have an objective and temporal presence—one that corresponds to the moment when it is perceived by the senses—that is, it must be “now and in the present.” But its presentness is “implicit” in the tree’s effectiveness as a representation through its idea; therefore, it is nothing more than a mere “semantic” issue. Aristotle prefers to call the “effectiveness of its idea” the “presentness of the substance .” The reason is that he prefers to view things from another perspective of possible reality—namely, “present” reality, his own—rather than Plato’s “ absent” one. But the paradox is that the absent reality contains the present one, and vice versa. Therefore, it is simply a matter of conceiving the tree from a new perspective—a perspective that reveals the inevitable duality of both the observed thing and the observer. Aristotle thus shifts planes of reality but not levels, because the level reached by Plato is apparently insurmountable. Up to this point, there is complete agreement, and the differences can be said to stem from their respective “personal characteristics.” Both gain a first impression of things through their bodily senses, but Plato confirms their existence through mere conceptualization, while Aristotle seeks to extend this confirmation to the union between the “idealization” and the “materialization” of the perceived thing. In doing so, he opens a new path to human knowledge that consists of “conceiving things without losing sight of their substance”—the foundations of , whereas for Plato it is sufficient to conceive of things without concerning himself at all with their substance—which is the very foundation of philosophy—as long as it is confirmed that a thing exists; that it has its idea in fact, and from that initial idea he can fully know and understand the thing. Once the idea is grasped, it will reveal everything related to it. In other words, Plato also deduces that ideas “in fact” are also “by default.” Changing the semantics, Aristotle relates this fact by stating that things in “act” are also in “potency.” Thus, both Plato and Aristotle focus all their attention on the “defectiveness” of ideas and the “potentiality” of things, respectively. So far, we see that there are nothing but purely semantic differences between the two philosophers. The only substantial difference is that in the first case we are dealing with a “mental representation” and in the other with a “mental and material representation,” as if it were a copy or a sculpture. That is to say, while Aristotle deals with “objects,” Plato deals with “subjects,” from which objects emanate, even though these objects, in turn, emanate from the subjects. We remain on the same plane of reality. We now turn to the question of “motion.” Zeno, whom I have not cited because his thought essentially coincides with that of his teacher Parmenides, attempts to demonstrate that, according to Parmenides’s metaphysics, motion is “impossible ”—and he was right: movement within existence—or, to put it another way, considering only the ideas of things—is impossible. For Zeno, things “that exist” do not move, because existence is, in fact, in its entirety, since it is not within time—for it has no “presentness, as it does not consist”—whereas things that consist have a beginning and an end, or potentiality, which is revealed only in an instant of the present within their duration; therefore, they move. Let’s take this simple example: If I did not consider my own duration, I could not finish this book despite already having an “actual idea” of it, because without duration, the present has no potentiality and “does not moves,” and the writing, without “time to do it,” would be interrupted at the last letter written, like for exampleeeeeee… (etc.), unable to go beyond that point, as if it were one of those old vinyl records when they got scratched. But “because I exist, I have a duration,” which allows me to have a “time to come ” or future in which the rest of this book will exist from this very “present” moment onward—that is, as a substance, I move. Ideas, however, do not move with time but with each new “realization” of what is moving. But once this “recognition” has taken place ,” the idea remains immutable until a new “recognition.” For this reason, the arrow cannot catch up to the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox, since every time I form an idea of where the tortoise is, it is already outside the instant of the conception of that idea. In other words, for Plato, movement is a matter of “leaps”; for Aristotle, it is real and sequential time, in accordance with the constant movement inherent in the nature of things. For Plato, movement proceeds from what is “in potential” toward what is “in actuality,” whereas for Aristotle, only the terminology changes—it is a movement from what is “in potential” to what is “in act.” Where does the difference lie? Not only in the perspective and the characteristics of movement from both viewpoints—since Aristotle posits “physical” or “real” movement and Plato “mental” or “ideal” movement—but also in the fact that movement in Aristotle does not depend on ideas but on the potentiality of things themselves. The “idea,” in effect, is nothing other than the cause of the “impression” of the thing at a moment of its actuality. Each time it is contemplated anew, it will be a “temporally distinct idea,” yet it stems from the actuality of the “same idea.” For example, we can look at various photographs of ourselves from different ages, and we will see how the idea conveyed by the photos suggests a “jump-like” movement—one for each photograph or “moment of awareness”—yet we have lived our lives in an orderly and sequential , in accordance with the potentiality contained within our duration. The dilemma faced by both philosophers is not the one that demonstrates the movement of the “effectivity or potentiality” of things—which is quite simple to articulate from both planes of reality—but rather the difficulty of explaining the “continuity of movement” when the things that exist come to an end. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor the who “rethought” their respective philosophies time and again, will ever find the solution—that is, the famous “arché” already articulated by the pre-Socratics. This is philosophy’s Achilles’ heel and the cause of its exhaustion following Plato’s death—who perhaps took the mystery to his grave (or found the answer there, according to his theory of transmigration). Philosophy was born out of a completely useless human curiosity—a curiosity that philosophy itself has been unable to fully satisfy. There must be a way that allows both ideas and nature—where the ideas themselves originate—to “self-generate” without anyone thinking or producing them, which is obviously a contradiction. So we return to Parmenides’ “unmoving being,” without end or beginning, which “is, but is neither here nor does it exist,” and we see no way that what is not here, yet is, could be unless it is thought of and conceived. That is to say, “the idea of an absolute idea is inconceivable and nonexistent.” This forces us to “cling ” to one of the conceivable dimensions of reality: the present or the absent; if one of them is destroyed, the chaos of both ensues, without, however, our knowing how they can be “recreated.” This is as far as philosophy goes, whose conception of itself is limited by the limitations of its own reasoning. It is tempting to quote Plotinus in a new chapter, but since my intention was to to set forth my view on the beginning and end of Western philosophy as an idea, I have just established its beginning with Thales of Miletus and its end with Aristotle of Stavros. Nevertheless, we can use this as a pretext to write the epilogue to what “was” of philosophy. If I turn to Plotinus, it is because he is the first intellectual-philosopher to attempt to resolve the dilemma by introducing a “creator” God, even though he does not hold God responsible for the will to create; that is, philosophy has already become theology, a path it will follow through Patristic theology and later Scholasticism. When it is reborn with Descartes, all that happens is that we rethink it in a different language—Latin—only to later rethink it again in other, more “vulgar” languages, which prove increasingly unsuitable for philosophy, until we abandon it—now reduced to useless debris—into the unconscious and non-philosophical void of “postmodernity.” Plotinus In philosophy, everything is implicit between Plato and Aristotle, but it is not sufficiently explained, argued, or clarified. The reason lies in the lack of a system in Plato and the loss of Aristotle’s fundamental writings, for what we have of his work amounts to nothing more than his “class notes,” and it is very likely that in his lost treatises Aristotle himself would have been more explicit and accessible. After his death, the decline of the Hellenic world began, leading to the canonization of a culture born of successive syntheses within an “idea”: the idea of Magna Graecia. Thus, this idea “moves within the consciousness of its philosophers” from one point to another, where its “mutation” occurs into the idea of the “Greco-Roman” world , even though, prior to the mutation, the “reality of Greece no longer lies in the idea of Greece.” I present it this way to justify several concepts that are not explicitly stated in either philosophy but are evident and implicit in their arguments, such as the concept of “time,” which is fundamental to justifying movement. Ideas “do not move”; what moves is the “will of the ideator,” which is reflected in the moment when he conceives the single, immobile idea. Therefore, if ideas are “spaces,” they can be traversed, and if they are traversed, they require the existence of time. The idea is always subject to the existence of the thing conceived, but unlike the object of the idea, whose observation requires its constant present presence, the idea remains exactly as it was conceived at the moment of the last observation of the present thing. To justify motion, it suffices to contemplate the conceived thing once more and verify that it is an idea “slightly different from the previous one,” which reveals the “passage of time over the conceived object” . From this it follows that the idea is timeless, or outside of time, but the object from which the idea proceeds is a “delimited” quantity of time, which constitutes its duration. This duration is achieved through “successive syntheses” or substitutions of some “temporal and circumstantial” ideas for others, until the thing is fully conceived and becomes “unobservable,” so that no further partial ideas from it. In this way, Plato not only justifies the very idea of time but also “dialectic.” However, not even Plato is the father of dialectic; rather, Aristotle correctly holds that Zeno was the first to use dialectical arguments to explain the motion of the motionless. In his widely cited paradoxical example of the arrow and the tortoise, Zeno considers successive syntheses each time the arrow believes it is about to catch up to the tortoise—the idea—while the tortoise has already traveled through a new, infinitely “divisible” space; thus, the successive syntheses are also infinite, and it is “impossible” for the supposed final synthesis to occur and for the arrow to catch up to the tortoise. If it does, it is because the tortoise “runs out of steam” and stops moving—that is, because movement collapses and with it the ideas. In other words, the arrow “moves”—or more precisely, “passes through”—different “ideas,” for every time it reaches the point where the tortoise was at the moment of attempting to catch up with it (conceiving the idea) , the next leg of the journey is already “another idea”—a new perspective that we must consider as an epilogue to philosophy itself. What Zeno shows us is the “real world of ideas,” with its infinity and its eternal dilemma between an inconceivable absolutism and an equally inconceivable relativism. As for concepts such as “nothing,” it is easy to deduce that, if ideas are in fact merely an actualized representation of things themselves, the part that is not “present or absent” will momentarily be the “nothing” of that very idea, only to become “something” in each of the present “instants” of its duration. Not only is this explicit, but it also suggests the existence of a nothing that “is” and another that “is not.” This double nothing (nothingness cannot escape Heraclitus’s theory of opposites or dialectics) is already present in Parmenides’s metaphysics, for the being that is not, is, but in the “nothing,” which is a form of “being nothing,” whereas the being that is in itself is in nothing in itself. But the paradox is that, as an entity, nothing must be “ everything that is nothing,” even without existing. Why does Parmenides need only a few hexameters to explain his nothing, while Sartre needs nearly a thousand pages of arguments—readable only to the initiated—to do the same? Good question! The only possible answer is that Sartre is an “intelligent intellectual” who tries to rethink what a “philosopher” thought, so that post-Aristotelian philosophy is nothing but pure rationalist exercises, produced by intelligent intellectuals who are concerned with the “aesthetics of their philosophical language” as much as—or even more than—with their arguments. In other words, it seems as if, since Descartes, “arguing” has been synonymous with “complicating and making complex ” what ought to be presented with clarity and simplicity. If I had said that philosophy is a useless curiosity, the very curiosity and uselessness of philosophy become its raison d’être once it is rethought, but it requires ever more “willpower” to present ideas as original, when they have already been presented with the least possible willpower— that is, with just enough to support their argumentation. In fact, we could almost say—as an anecdotal comment and without meaning to offend—that philosophy today is the tool used by academics, who, by simple dialectical relation, are the “antithesis of the students” , to torment their minds, for it is evident that very few go beyond a superficial understanding of what philosophy is and what it seeks to teach them, limiting themselves to memorizing a few isolated concepts and arguments taken out of context just to pass their exams. If they pass, it is because the professors in charge are content with the sacrifice and mental anguish inflicted upon the suffering students —which redeems them, regardless of whether they understand what they have learned. This is what early Christian theology understood as the “baptism of blood” (that of the unbaptized martyrs), which was considered more valid and redemptive than the simple baptism of water. Thus, in Plato’s philosophy, complemented by Aristotle, the ideas of Hegel’s “dialectic” , Schopenhauer’s “will,” Bergson’s “duration,” Heidegger’s “time,” Sartre’s “nothingness,” or Husserl’s “phenomenology,” among others. All these intellectuals produce an “intelligent but useless philosophy,” intended to fill the curricula of philosophy departments, but which never reaches the streets nor can be explained in hexameters in town squares and marketplaces. It is the residual facet of a creative philosophy that justified the very existence of the Greece that produced it and which, outside the idea of Greece, ceases to be philosophy (the arrow can never catch up to the tortoise, if the arrow strays from the idea of “Greece”). Plotinus is the first Western philosopher who is not of Hellenic origin, and therefore he is also the first whose philosophy lacks the appropriate environment and no longer “sprouts,” because philosophy has already been “denaturalized.” Of course, Plotinus does not claim to be “original,” for since the death of the two great Greek philosophers, there have been nothing but “Neoplatonists or Neo-Aristotelians”—a distinction that is mistakenly translated as “idealists or materialists.” Plato never lost sight of matter, but he dismissed it as a “tool for understanding things,” whereas his student never despised ideas, but “clothed them in substance” to make them more comprehensible and recognizable. Well then, Plotinus “hits the nail on the head” regarding philosophy that is “unfinished” because it is “infinite,” and he seeks “something” that causes itself. He has traveled through India and brings back a wealth of Eastern philosophy based on premises completely different from Western philosophy (I’m not sure whether we should call it philosophy or theology or even parapsychology), because it is more “imaginative” and “holistic.” He does not understand the world as the “representation and will” of ideas, but rather as an “emanation” of a “Divine Spirit,” knowledge of which is attained through the total absence of will via “direct communication with the cosmos”—from “cosmic mind to cosmic mind,” but also from “universal energy to universal energy” and from “divine spirit to divine spirit”—in an indecipherable and “insubstantial” “ecstasy,” which confirms what Parmenides deduces: that being “is, yet is not.” The certainty of its irremediable and necessary being cannot be attained through any sense “that belongs to the world of what is and exists,” but rather through the senses that neither are nor appear—that is, the “extrasensory senses,” such as “instinct, intuition, and faith” , just as “real” as sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch. Plato does not deny the “existence” of these senses—which are incapable of revealing their substance but which nonetheless exist—but he argues for the necessity of their existence without straying from the path of reason, and he dismisses the certainties provided by the bodily senses, or succumbing to the “vague and imprecise” certainties of the extrasensory senses. For Plato, philosophizing is above all reasoning and conceptualizing. It is therefore the “logical stance of rationalism and idealism.” Rationalism and idealism that would be passionately revived after the Renaissance by the “absolutist” thinking of the state, but also by the “dreamers and entrepreneurs” of the European urban bourgeoisie, beginning, as is well known, with Descartes. Plato argues for the existence of intuition or the transcendental aspect of the human mind, but he does so not in his philosophy, but in his theology, accepting the possible “transmigration” of ideas or the soul of things—and here lies the key to the very epilogue of philosophy and the missing link between the West and the East. If I say that the first key to finding that missing link will be provided by a Spanish philosopher, I may be accused of chauvinism, but that is the case. It would be Ortega y Gasset who would discover a fundamental contradiction in Platonic thought—and, by extension, in Kantian and Hegelian thought—but I very much fear that Gasset never became fully aware of it. Ortega was a philosopher entangled in the web of his own intelligent intellectualism, from which he could never completely free himself. Like Plato, he was what is popularly called “ restless soul” for philosophy. While his teacher developed his thought through his “Dialogues,” Gasset did so through his “Meditations,” but neither of them ever sat down and decided to set to work on a systematic and well-structured philosophical “corpus.” Gasset also sought to engage in politics to bring about an “ideal Republic ,” and, like his distant teacher, he faced the “tyranny” of another “Dionysius” who ended up “enslaving” him—he was “sold” at public auction and ransomed by his friends and former students—only to spend his final days teaching philosophy. These are two perfectly parallel lives, but Plato would never visit “Germania” as our philosopher did. From the very moment G asset read Kant, he understood that the philosophy of his time was “missing something,” and that something is circumstance! This would be the final creative contribution of a philosophy that is no longer creative but merely intellectual. Are circumstances implicit in Plato’s philosophy? Undoubtedly, but it was one of his best-kept secrets. First and foremost, I would like to present an idea to properly frame Gasset’s concept of circumstance. Any philosopher worthy of the name must begin by “delimiting the unlimited with his own idea” —that is, they must “mark their territory.” Nothing can enter this territory without being “rejected or assimilated,” so that everything that enters “circumstantially” will serve to “develop the delimited idea itself.” If I bring up Gasset’s concept of circumstance, it is because I intend to “devour” it so that it serves my purposes and “fleshes out my own idea .” It is therefore “the hunt” that gives meaning to the territory, so that it is the circumstance that gives meaning to the idea. We have now reasoned out the “usefulness of circumstances”; now we need only identify the substance of both the hunt and the hunter. Why do Plato’s ideas move? Because Plato thinks about them “ periodically”; therefore, the idea does not move—it is Plato who moves. The idea is static and incomprehensible, and Plato is on the lookout for something to appear in the “environment” that will make him doubt the “truth of what he has conceived of the idea.” That “reasonable doubt” compels him to conceive the idea anew in order to reconstruct it, “nurturing” it and carrying out a new synthesis. Now Zeno’s arrow reaches a point where he believes the tortoise is, but the tortoise has already traveled a certain distance, and the arrow still fails to catch up to it; thus, a new idea is needed. We can also say that this argument forms the basis the principle that “inspires” the Cartesian method. Since we are focusing our attention on the very idea of the tree presented as an example, we realize that what drives it is “Plato’s mind” through its successive “acts of awareness” of the tree at different moments of its duration, since the idea itself lacks mobility. Thus, “the circumstance” of the idea of the tree is the nature of Plato !—or the one who “draws sustenance from circumstances” to enable his ideas to grow and develop in time and space. I do not believe that Gasset reasons in these exact terms, but the circumstance—which does not resolve the essential issue—at least transcends the levels or perspectives of both Plato and Aristotle, placing the examination of the dilemma on a new plane. We have an idea that is successively conceived and “enriched ” through successive syntheses, but for doubt to arise, something new must emerge from outside the idea, which introduces a third plane to the very conception of the idea, namely: the beginning, the end, and the circumstance. But the circumstance, insofar as it comes from outside the idea, must also be part of another idea; therefore, it must also have its own beginning and end, plus its own circumstance, and so on. This “tril ogy” would form the basis of the new conception of reality in the post-Hellenic, Latin world, and the father of this line of thought would be the Neoplatonist Plotinus. But this trilogy not only opens up a new plane or perspective (another phrase from Gasset) on reality—that of circumstance—but circumstance is also part of another “ level” or dimension of reality. Until Plato, reality was the “idea that is thought”; from Plotinus onward, reality is the “idea that is thought by an idea that is in turn thought by another higher idea”—also thought… and so on. Indeed, if Plato is also an idea that must be “thought,” and for the idea of Plato to “move”—as it evidently does— since it is the “circumstance that causes the idea of the tree to move” , it must in turn be subject to a certain “circumstance.” In this way, the “levels” unfold into a new “infinity” that is no longer from the beginning to the end, but “from one level of absolute consciousness to another level of absolute consciousness”—albeit a superior one. This movement can be described with the prefix “trans”: “transmigration,” “transmutation,” “transdimens ion,” etc. It is not a linear movement but a “spatial” and “dimensional” one, because it begins at the end of the absolute and also begins at the beginning of the absolute; it is therefore not “nothingness” but the “non-being” that Parmenides vehemently denies. Therefore, being something must be capable of not being something; otherwise, we would have to renounce all sensory evidence and consider ourselves nonexistent ghosts in a world inhabited by deluded and unconscious beings. And this is not our case, for it is evident that we possess “appearance” and “consistency.” God: Creator or Destroyer of the World? When I die—something I have not only accepted but also anticipated might happen—and if any of my writings deserve to be saved from oblivion, I would not want it to be said that I “had” this or that philosophy, because philosophy is not something one “has” ” nor is it “learned”—rather, it is reasoned. If, however, someone insists that I must have had a specific philosophy—be it Neoplatonic or Neo-Aristotelian—to find it, they would have to travel to Berlin (I recommend doing so in April or May) and take a stroll through the gardens of Charlottenburg Palace, because it must be scattered along its paths , ponds, and groves—for that is where I used to reason out “my philosophy.” If you don’t find it at first glance, you can do what I did: feel the things around you and reflect on them in light of the messages they constantly send—from the lush greenery of the old beech trees in spring, to the meaningful song of the blackbirds at dusk, to the contemplation of replicas of statues such as that of the god “Cupid” and his companion, the goddess “Venus,” as well as the bust of the Prussian queen, Louise. If, despite everything, you don’t connect with my philosophy, you weren’t born to philosophize, and it’s best not to spoil your visit—instead, simply enjoy the park with the “mindset of a normal person,” that is, as a simple and honest tourist. I offer this lengthy preamble because I’ve asked myself dozens of times why I bother filling screen after screen with text—that is, thousands upon thousands of computer “bits”— with more or less reasonable ideas about things, but I don’t have a conclusive answer. It must be due to my inability to do anything better or more worthwhile than philosophizing. But at other times I tell myself that there must be something to philosophy that makes it endure, and we keep rethinking it over and over again, trying to uncover the half-truths that our ancestors left us to ponder. What I wonder is whether Plotinus influenced the conception of a new, perfectly bounded idea—namely, Christianity—which would profoundly shape the future of the West. For Christianity could not have arisen solely from Christ but from certain “circumstances” , among which we can include Plotinus. Philosophy, directly or indirectly, must serve some purpose; otherwise, who knows—it might even be harmful. If the Prussian totalitarian state was the consequence of Hegel, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better had Hegel not thought about the state at all. María Zambrano said that Plotinus could have been a Christian, since he thought like a Christian, but if he did not decide to profess this new religion, it must have been because his god did not fully align with the “Jehovah” of the Old Testament, since for Plotinus, God was, more than the creator, the “destroyer” of the world. Plotinus’s thesis is based on Plato and his “demiurge,” and it essentially states that whoever thinks, conceives; but in conceiving, he destroys the idea; he consumes it and causes its time to run out, exhausting its duration. Thus, the “will” only produces spaces filled only to empty them immediately after creating them. On the other hand, the thinker of ideas is, in turn, thought of by another idea, and there we already have Plotinus’s “creator” or “destroyer” god, but also the “anointed one anointed with the anointing” of St. Thomas. Since he is also an “idea,” he is something “absolutely full,” whose mission is to think the world, but not to create it, because the world is created simply by imagining it. That is to say, he is a god who creates the world through “emanation” from his mind (or spirit), which creates “anew,” and that newly created mind conceives the world—our world. Plotinus does not wish to go beyond these two levels: the One “above” and everything else below, or under the total dependence and slavery of “the One.” The blame for this negativity does not lie with Plotinus’s god, but with the humans who receive the mind from this god. They use it to “conceive the world” only to later destroy it. It is impossible to ascribe any attribute to his god, even though it must possess them, because it is “an unthought idea” (or so it appears to be); thus, every unthought idea is what it is completely, with its duration intact and complete and without circumstance; it is, in short, an idea that “cannot be conceived.” Why does Plotinus insist that it exists? For the same reason that Easterners have “faith” in a universal spirit accessible to extrasensory perception—that is, because he succumbs to the “spiritualism” of the era and abandons intuition to place himself in the hands of “faith.” For this reason, he could have been a Christian; he merely had to replace the idea of a god who emanates “negativity” with another, as he appears in the Old Testament—one who emanates positivity, a creator rather than a destroyer. I suppose he did not change his mind out of respect for his teacher and his “demiurge” , but at least the “Mystery of the Trinity” was correctly articulated by him: God is the beginning and end of all things without having a beginning or an end himself—that is to say: “God,” “beginning,” “end.” For Plotinus, it is not “reasonable that God exists,” but it is “plausible that there could be a God.” In any case, his god cannot “be or exist” because, if he were to be, he would be an idea conceived by someone, who, in turn, is conceived by someone else, and so on. (See once again Zeno’s paradox regarding the impossibility of the arrow catching up to the tortoise, because the arrow does not move but rather thinks.) Thus, Gasset introduces, through his circumstance, the cause of the movement that compels the “transmutation” of ideas, since it fuels them until they “collapse” or “cease to be.” If circumstance did not exist, ideas would remain intact, but circumstance is the raison d’être of ideas, so that one cannot be conceived without the other. The result? A succession of gods, each in its “own distinct dimension and level.” Each god conceives of another god, and all the gods enable the creation of all worlds, without our being able to find a reasonable way out toward the “abs “absolute” other than the totality of the infinite, or Heraclitus’s harmony—but this is not reasonable! If anyone wants a simple example of this thesis, I suggest that on their next visit to Russia they buy one of the popular “Matryoshka” dolls. It is the closest approximation to reality as it should be, but if there were artisans capable of producing dolls indefinitely, both inwardly and outward. If, instead of buying one, you buy half a dozen, the example becomes even more illustrative, for “infinity must have several levels and several planes” at the same time. That is why ideas are necessary—because they limit what ought to be unlimited! As I have said, philosophy arose as a curiosity of the human mind, and the human mind itself is trapped in that curiosity (curiosity killed the cat), for which there is no possible satisfaction through philosophy. For this “reason” we were cast out of Paradise, and all our attempts to return to it depend on our ability to find the “gateway” with the help of faculties that do not serve reason, such as “instinct, intuition, and faith.” Final Clarifying Note The reader should not assume from the final conclusions of this book that I am suggesting that, as soon as you close it, you should run to the first church you find and join it, regardless of its creed or orientation. No, quite the opposite. A few days ago, I was fortunate enough to see an exhibition here in Berlin of propaganda posters from the Second Spanish Republic, and one of them read, among many others, this recommendation: “Reasoned Faith.” Seen on a political poster aimed at the masses during that turbulent period in Spain’s history, it struck me as a real “boutarde,” but now, after drafting the final part of this brief philosophical essay, this striking phrase has come to mind, and I have realized its extraordinary coherence. For this reason, I am adding this note. Indeed, faith—which is nothing more than intuition in the context of the spirit—can only be reached through reason, but through one’s own personal reason, and only after we have exhausted all possible reasonable arguments, for there is no doubt that things remain a mystery to our understanding. Resorting to faith without having exhausted the possibilities of our own reason is what makes the world an insecure and unpredictable, since reason always leads us to act with “caution” and moderation, whereas “imagination”—on which “irrational” faith “irrational” imagination, leads us to act impulsively and, at times, violently. A reasonable world is not a perfect world, but at least it is a tolerable and tolerant world. Finally, in this book I have chosen not to include bibliographical notes, except for a few biographical sketches of the philosophers mentioned, because many of the reasons behind their ways of thinking can be inferred from their biographies. Only by reading biographies can one can one fully understand the course of history. But there is another, even more important reason: I have not only sought to “explain philosophy”—for which I lack the proper “intellectual” training—but I have also attempted to “tell” it; therefore, perhaps this book should be considered a “story” and myself a “storyteller”—so much the better! If I were to consider myself an intellectual, I could not be a philosopher, and, given the choice, I’ll stick with the modest and useless status of “philosopher-storyteller.” I believe Parmenides was one as well. REVERSED BIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPTS Thales of Miletus (Miletus, 624 B.C.–?, 548 B.C.) Greek philosopher and mathematician. None of his writings have survived to the present day; nevertheless, numerous contributions have been attributed to him throughout history, from Herodotus to Xenophanes and Aristotle. Among these are the five geometric theorems that bear his name (all of them fundamental results), and the notion that the material essence of the universe was water or moisture. Anaximander (Miletus, 610 B.C. – c. 546 B.C.) A disciple and successor of Thales, he is credited with writing a book on nature, but his ideas have survived to the present day through doxographic commentaries by other authors. He is credited with creating a map of the Earth, the measurement of the solstices and equinoxes using a gnomon, work to determine the distance and size of the stars, and the assertion that the Earth is cylindrical and occupies the center of the universe. Anaximenes (Miletus, 585 B.C. – 524 B. C.) Son of Euristratus. He was a disciple and colleague of Anaximander. Anaximenes believed that the Earth was flat “like a sheet” and that it was formed by the condensation of air; the celestial bodies, also flat, arose from the Earth due to a rarefaction of its pneuma or exhalation. Parmenides (Elea Magna, c. 540 B. – 470 BC) According to Diogenes, Parmenides was a disciple of Xenophanes, but did not follow his doctrine. Sotion—according to Diogenes himself—states that it was Aminias who converted him to the contemplative life. Plutarch, Strabo, and Diogenes—following the testimony of Speusippus—agree that Parmenides ides participated in the government of his city, organizing it and providing it with an admirable code of laws. Plato, in his dialogue *Parmenides*, recounts that, accompanied by his disciple Zeno of Elea, he visited Athens when he was approximately 65 years old and that, on that occasion, Socrates—then a young man—engaged in dialogue with him. Of his writings, only 160 verses have been preserved, belonging to 19 fragments of a didactic poem entitled *On Nature*. Heraclitus (Ephesus, now lost, in present-day Turkey, c. 540 B.C.–Ephesus, id., c. 470 B.C.) Very little is known about the life of Heraclitus of Ephesus, nicknamed “the Obscure” due to the enigmatic nature that often characterized his style, as evidenced by a good number of the surviving fragments of his teachings. According to Diogenes Laertius, these were collected in a work titled *On Nature*, which dealt with the universe, politics, and theology. According to Diogenes Laertius, the cause of his dropsy may have been his retreat to the mountains, where he subsisted on herbs, driven by his misanthropy. Heraclitus’s contempt for ordinary mortals would be consistent with his origins, for it seems certain that he came from an ancient aristocratic family, just as it is certain that his political ideas were opposed to Athenian-style democracy and that he may have been part of the small group—composed mainly of nobles—that sympathized with the Persian king Darius, to whose domains Ephesus belonged at that time, against the will of the majority of its citizens. He buried himself in manure on the assumption that its heat would absorb moisture, with the result that it hastened his fatal end. Anaxagoras (Clazomenae, modern-day Turkey, 500–428 BCE) He moved to Athens for unknown reasons (he was the first philosopher to do so) . Among his students were the Greek statesman Pericles, Archelaus, Protagoras of Abdera, Thucydides, the Greek playwright Euripides, and, it is said, also Democritus and Socrates. Well-versed in the doctrines of Anaximenes, Parmenides, Zeno, and Empedocles, Anaxagoras had taught in Athens for about thirty years when he went into exile after being accused of impiety for suggesting that the Sun was a mass of molten iron and that the Moon was a rock that reflected the Sun’s light and originated from the Earth. He left for Ionia and settled in Lamps aco (a colony of Miletus), where, it is said, he let himself starve to death. Democritus (Abdera, Thrace. 470/460–370/360 B.C.) He was a disciple of Leucippus and a contemporary of Socrates. Hipparchus of Nicaea asserts, according to Diogenes Laertius, that Democritus died at the age of age of 109; and all ancient authors (whose writings have survived) who have referred to his age agree that he lived more than a hundred years. He was known in his time for his eccentric character. Socrates (Athens, 470 B.C.–id., 399 B.C.) He was the son of a midwife, Phaenarete, and a sculptor, Sophroniscus, who was related to Aristides the Just. Little is known with certainty about his life, apart from the fact that he served as an infantryman in the battles of Samos (440), Potidaea (432), Delium (424), and Amphipolis (42 2). He was a friend of Aritias and Alcibiades, whose life he saved. Most of what is known about him comes from three of his contemporaries: the historian Xenophon, the playwright Aristophanes, and the philosopher Plato. Considered a “sophist,” his conduct earned him enemies who, in the context of instability that Athens was experiencing following the Peloponnesian Wars, eventually came to view his friendship as dangerous to aristocrats such as his disciples Alcibiades and Critias; officially accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth, he was sentenced to drink hemlock after he had, in his defense, demonstrated the inconsistency of the charges brought against him. Plato (Athens, 427 B.C.–id., 347 B. BC) Plato, whose real name was Aristocles Podros—and whose pseudonym “Plato” means “broad-shouldered”—was the son of a family belonging to the Athenian aristocracy, specifically the family known as the Glauconids. His father’s name was Ariston and his mother’s was Perictione. During his youth, he experienced the consequences of the Peloponnesian War. At the age of 21, he joined Socrates’ circle, which brought about a major shift in his philosophical outlook. After Socrates’ death in 399 B.C., Plato took refuge in Megara for a brief time, where he began writing his philosophical dialogues. His knowledge and abilities were such that the Greeks regarded him as the son of Apollo and said that in his , bees had nested on his lips as a prophecy of the honeyed words that would flow from them. He was present during Socrates’ trial, but not at his execution. Athens’ treatment of Socrates affected him deeply, and his early works preserve the memory of his teacher. It is said that many of his writings on ethics were intended to prevent injustices such as that suffered by Socrates from to happen again. After Socrates’ death, Plato traveled extensively through Italy, Sicily, Egypt, and Cyrene in search of knowledge. In 396 B.C. he embarked on a ten-year journey through Egypt and various parts of Africa and Italy. In Cyrene, he met Aristippus and the mathematician Theodorus. In Magna Graecia, he befriended Archytas of Tarentum and became acquainted with the ideas of the followers of Parmenides. In 388 B.C., he traveled to Sicily and Syracuse, where he sought to influence the policies of Dionysius I and learned much about forms of government that he would later describe in *The Republic* (in Greek, *politeia*, meaning citizenship or form of government). His political statements, which in some cases were critical of the ruling class, led to his imprisonment. Anniceris of Cyrene recognized Plato at a slave market and bought him to restore his freedom. In 361 B.C., after regaining his freedom, Plato purchased an estate on the outskirts of Athens, where he founded a center dedicated to philosophical and cultural pursuits, which he called the “Academy.” The name derives from the fact that on that estate there was a temple dedicated to the ancient hero Academus, and the Academy operated continuously until its closure by Justinian I in 529 AD, as he saw it as a threat to the spread of Christianity. Many philosophers and intellectuals studied at this academy, including Aristotle. Aristotle (Stagira, now Stavros, modern-day Greece, c. 384 BC–Chalkis, id., 322 BC) The son of a family of physicians, he himself served as physician to King Amintas II of Macedonia, grandfather of Alexander III the Great. Orphaned in childhood, he went to Athens at the age of seventeen to study philosophy at Plato’s Academy, where he was a brilliant disciple. He spent twenty years there, during which he assisted in teaching and published several works that developed Platonic theories. In 348 B. BC, upon Plato’s death, he broke with the Academy and left Athens, where the political climate hostile to Macedonia was not favorable to him. He moved to Atarneia and served as a political advisor and friend to the tyrant Hermias; in 344 BC, he traveled to Mytilene, likely at the invitation of Theophrastus. He married a niece of Hermias, and later, after being widowed, to a former slave of the tyrant, with whom he had a son, Nicomachus. In 342 B.C., he was summoned to the Macedonian court by Philip II to oversee the education of his son and heir, Alexander, then a thirteen-year-old boy. There he learned of the death of Hermias, who had been crucified in 341 B.C. by the Persians because of his friendship with Philip, and he dedicated a hymn to him. Upon Philip’s death in 335 B.C., Alexander ascended the throne and, as a token of gratitude to his tutor, allowed him to return to Athens—which was then under Macedonian rule—where Aristotle taught at the “Lyceum,” so named because it was located in a garden near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, protector of sheep against wolves. Over time, and perhaps not until after his death, Aristotle’s disciples established an institution comparable to Plato’s Academy, called the “Peripatetic School” because of the custom of teaching and holding discussions during long walks. In 323 B.C., upon Alexander’s death, a backlash against Macedonian rule arose in Athens; Aristotle, suspected of being sympathetic to it, was officially accused of impiety for having described Hermias as immortal in the hymn he composed. Recalling the death of Socrates, he handed over the leadership of the Lyceum to Theophrastus and retired to Chalcis, his mother’s hometown on the island of Euboea, where he died a few months later. Plotinus (Lycopolis, present-day Egypt, 205–Campania, present-day Italy, 270) He is generally regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism . His thought was compiled by his disciple Porphyry in the *Enneads*, six books divided into nine treatises each. His journey with Emperor Gordian allowed him to come into contact with Persian and Indian thought, which he disseminated upon his return (c. 244) at the school he opened in Rome, where he taught for twenty-five years. THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF PHILOSOPHY FROM THE MIND TO KNOWLEDGE PROLOGUE What is philosophy? It would be extraordinary if there were a categorical answer to this “devilish” question, and I put “devilish” in quotation marks because doubt—which is the cause of every question—must be the devil’s doing, since God is supposed to be omniscient. To answer this question, we can offer our “opinion” or present our “argument.” What What is the difference? An opinion is the result of a belief; therefore, it is a personal response, whereas an argument is the result of applying a method—more or less logical—and can be universal. Therefore, the fundamental element in presenting an argument is the method; it is no coincidence that modernity is the consequence of the Cartesian method. But what is a method? A method is a reasonable system with more or less logic, since the logic of the method determines its effectiveness or, in this case, its truthfulness. The first necessary observation is that, unlike the mathematical method, here we do not operate with numbers but with words. What we are going to attempt is to “operate with concepts” rather than with “quantities.” But do words have a precise meaning so that we can equate them with numbers? Undoubtedly, for they arise within a strict ontological order: “The olive is in the olive tree, and the olive tree is in the olive grove” ; this is equivalent to saying that “two plus two equals four,” since it has the same logical foundation even though the method is different. So, to answer the question “What is philosophy?” the key is not to have a good personal opinion, but rather a good universal method. Therefore, first and foremost, I will explain the method I intend to use for my definition. The relationship between the olive and the olive grove has been straightforward, but now I ask myself : Where does the idea come from that this fruit is an olive and not an apple? Why am I so sure of the difference? How did the relationship between the fruit and the word “ olive”? In other words, how does the language upon which philosophy is based arise? This must be the first “methodological” step toward answering our question. Initially, words arise from the observation of things of which we form a “mental representation”; that is to say, words are not the things themselves but their mental representation. The relationship between words and the things they represent is necessarily “true,” or also “objective,” provided that the word (subject) represents an object—which is one of the three aspects that things exhibit: their substance, their image, and their form (of being) . The object relates to the subject, or the way things are. But what happens when the word does not represent a thing, as is the case with “philosophy”? Well, quite simply, we have neither the substance nor the image of the word, but only its form—or at least we try to find a “way of being” for it, despite lacking substance and image. In other words, there are terms that represent forms, but without substance and image. Let’s say they are purely mental concepts that do not represent things; they are “something,” but not “some-thing” (an English speaker could not express this last point, because for them “something” is necessarily “some-thing”; some-thing). But how and why do these substance-less terms arise? Simply because they do not arise from direct observation of things, but from reflection on the subjects from which the terms themselves originate as concepts. Philosophy is the result of reflecting on the term “man,” for it is man who “philosophizes”; it is a matter of giving a voice to a “mental activity of the human being,” which we call “philosophy,” and whose true meaning we are now trying to ascertain. For this reason, we have a term that we cannot associate with any thing, but rather with an “object”: the “object of philosophy.” The difficulty lies in “understanding” what the object of philosophy is. And I say “understanding” because, lacking substance and image, it cannot be known but only understood. What we can come to know is the part of philosophy that has “substance”; that is, the history of philosophical ideas, but not philosophy itself, which is active thinking about the nature of things. Therefore, philosophy cannot be as rigorously scientific as mathematics, for while the object of mathematics is numbers—which have an exact and universally agreed-upon meaning, or rather “value”—the object of philosophy is words, which should also have an exact meaning and value, but which are not universally agreed upon, because concepts have a relative value that is impossible to pin down with precision. For, what “exact” size must a pond have in order not to be a lake? Or what is the “exact” boundary between joy and sadness? But it is not only concepts that have a relative “ relative “value”—but various concepts can be equivalent yet expressed in different contexts, such as joy and happiness. So before we can know what philosophy is, we should agree on the true meaning of these terms, but above all on their context, which is what directly affects specifically philosophical discourse. For example, the term “joy” stems from a specific human state of mind, but if the term “happiness” exists, it is because it refers to “another distinct state of mind” from that represented by the term “joy”; that is to say, it is equivalent but in a different context. Thus, both concepts must have a “distinct cause related to their context,” but in everyday thought we can easily confuse them. For this reason, I said that all terms, despite having relative values, derive their raison d’être from a single cause, and if they exist, it is because it is necessary for them to exist; otherwise, they would not exist, since they would have no cause. Therefore, philosophy is the branch of knowledge that studies the raison d’être (the true cause), not only of substantial objects but also of insubstantial ones, such as philosophy itself, happiness, or joy , etc. To summarize even further, we can say that “philosophy studies concepts,” just as chemistry studies substances, mathematics studies magnitudes, or theology studies images. The purpose of philosophy is to understand the relationship between concepts and what they mean to those who philosophize about them, as well as their causes and their relationship to reality through the nature of the objects they contemplate. At present times, philosophy has only two proven uses: justifying the salaries of certain academics and providing content for certain publishers. In Greece, this was not the case. Socrates saw a fundamental purpose: “knowing oneself.” But his commitment cost him his life. Those of us who follow his example are not condemned to such a severe punishment, but all too often to ostracism and indifference—which is a subtle form of hemlock. With Plato, philosophy attains its true meaning—long sought after since the School of Miletus—and becomes the art of seeking the truth with the simple aid of words. To what end? Precisely to find a “purpose” for existence. We philosophers are also concerned about financial and economic crises, but what we ask ourselves is whether such problems might not be precisely the consequence of the “ absence of philosophy”—that is, whether it might be that we do not know the purpose of our “existence,” which leads us to do many things we “should not” do. Philosophy exists precisely to guide us regarding what our “duties” are, for everything that ought to be is so because it is “reasonable that it should be.” This is what underpins the argument for what we call “truth,” for truth, though it is always temporary, “is what ought to be according to what is necessary for it to be.” But to solve this riddle, we must first establish what is “truly necessary.” Ever since David Hume, the necessary has simply been the “ useful”—that is, only what serves a purpose is true. Then came Comte, Spencer, and even Habermas. They all had one thing in common: they didn’t want to hear a word about metaphysics. Why? Because metaphysics is that seemingly useless thing that insists on talking about existence, and whenever existence is discussed, the logical and inevitable question arises: What is the reason for existence? For existence itself would have no reason to exist if it is not the cause of reasonable doubt—that is, philosophy! That is not a typical question in science; rather, the questions are these: How is this thing produced? What is it used for? How much is it worth? How does it reproduce itself? What benefit can be expected from this thing on the market? But not a single word about its existence! If we are not concerned with existence and its troublesome question, then we simply we cannot say that we “exist,” only that we “consist.” We consist of something we have called a “human being,” just as we could have called it “Perico de los Palotes,” since all we’re interested in regarding that human being is what they do, not why they do it. In other words, we only ask ourselves what “a human being consists of,” and right now the answer is simple: “it consists of something that consumes”; that’s why it has recurring economic problems and others of that sort, but it will never again have an “existential problem,” simply because “it doesn’t exist .” To reach this state of affairs, it has been necessary to strip metaphysics from philosophy and devote ourselves obsessively to sociology, politics, and—why not?—religion. These branches of philosophy don’t ask silly questions; they address “concrete and useful matters,” such as communication, ideologies, or “social trends.” We’re also passionate about another branch of philosophy, straddling science—namely, psychology—because since we don’t ask ourselves anything related to our existence, at least psychology justifies the “ existence of the mind”—but we’re only interested if it’s a little crazy; not the healthy mind, which delights in metaphysics. The reason for existence—and therefore the usefulness of philosophy—is the discovery of truth that remains “hidden,” simply because “truth must be.” What Is the Mind? The term “mind” comes from the Greek word “noûs,” which can be translated as “mind” or “understanding,” but the meaning that has come down to us through Latin is “mens,” that is, mind. In everyday usage, we associate the mind with the brain. To understand the basis of this error, the best approach is to use the simple example of comparing the brain to a computer’s “chip.” In fact, a computer’s brain is its microprocessor, whose function is to establish the correct combination among the millions of possibilities that may exist between “zeros” and “ones”—that is, a possible binary combination. The rest of the machine is responsible for interpreting this command with the “output” required by the encoding of that same command. For example, we ask it to type the letter “e” in the word “mind,” and the chip establishes the appropriate combination, transmitting the command via its internal mechanical means to the screen, and we see an “e” that completes the word “mind.” But what made that command possible? Energy, without a doubt! All we have to do is unplug the computer, and the chip—no matter how marvelous it may be—is completely useless and incapable of interpreting our commands. For the same reason, if our brain did not receive energy, it would undoubtedly shut down. Through this simple analogy, we can already see that the mind cannot be the brain, but rather “a certain kind of energy” that makes possible what we believe to be the brain’s functions—that is, thinking. But a thought is an action, or more correctly, a “causation,” since it does not “produce anything substantial” but rather “causes something insubstantial,” as the result is not a thing but an “entity,” and subsequently a being, existence, and ideas. Since thinking is a “movement in consciousness,” something must “cause” it and keep it active long enough to result in an idea. Thus, a “fluid” is necessary for a thought to occur, and that fluid is the mind! To see this more clearly, let’s return to the example of the computer: what “drives” the chip is the energy that powers the machine, forcing it to carry out the commands it receives, so it’s easy to conclude that the mind, in the context of physics, is, in reality, “energy.” To illustrate just how common it is to confuse these concepts, I’ll quote the definition found on Wikipedia: “The mind is one of the names for what is nowadays most commonly referred to in science as consciousness.” Neither the mind nor consciousness are scientific concepts—they belong to philosophy! The mind must therefore be “a quantity of something that is located somewhere and serves to provoke a thought.” Now the difficulty lies in finding that location, which, once again, is often erroneously “pinpointed” in the brain. This very same error of context led Descartes to assume that the soul was in the pineal gland—that is, somewhere between the spinal cord and the brain—because that was where he believed he could “feel” it. Since the mind is a concept of metaphysics, it cannot be physical. The mind is solely and exclusively within “Being.” That is to say, if we refer to the thing and not to its being, we must change the context and call it “energy.” It is not that living beings do not have a mind, but rather that in that context we must call it energy, and if we persist in calling it mind, it is because we are arguing within the metaphysical context—that is, we are speaking of the being of things and not of the things themselves. This same error is common in psychology, where the mind shifts contexts and is referred to as “psyche,” “spirit,” or “soul,” as a personal spirit, since psychology is based on the representation and evaluation of images—that is, on the imagination. Psychology is not based on reasonable conclusions but on emotions or suggestions provoked by the imagination. It is not concerned with the essence of things but with their image. Another example of the philosophical misuse of this concept stems from its etymological meaning in Latin, which differs from in the Greek from which it originates; consequently, we consider the mind to be a quality or attribute of the body, whereas, in ontological rigor, the term “body” in the theological context corresponds to the “soul” , within the same context—which is nothing other than the mind expressed in the context of theology, that is, the spirit. Therefore, energy, mind, and spirit must in reality be “one and the same thing in three distinct contexts.” Philosophy is pure “understanding” and does not consist of a particular object or thing; therefore, all concepts within its own context cannot refer to particular things—that is, “consistent” ones— but rather to the being of things—or, in other words, solely to “existence .” The mind can reside in a “cosmic being” or in an “individual” or “personal” being, understanding a person to be any individual spatio-temporal being within the totality of the cosmos’s being. That is to say, just as with energy, “all living or dead beings must have a mind,” but depending on which particular being we are referring to, that mind may or may not have the capacity to give rise to a thought or “understanding.” Strange as it may seem , the “being of a stone” must necessarily have a mind, and to better understand this, we shift to the context of the stone itself and see that it contains “energy”—the energy that maintains the atomic cohesion of its substance—but since it is not an organism, that energy is not “vital” or “dynamic.” Thus, viewed from the context of philosophy, the being of the stone must necessarily have “ mind,” but it is not dynamic; that is to say, it cannot think. We can say that “all beings are endowed with a mind,” but some think and others do not. It should come as no surprise that in ancient animistic cultures, mountains were believed to have a “spirit,” and in general, it was correctly held that nature as a whole is constituted of “spirit”—which, in our context, we would simply call “mind,” and in the physical “energy.” All that remains is to discuss the specific function of the mind, and it is here that one hears and reads the greatest absurdities and contradictions. The mind, as a “form of energy,” does not move but is rather the cause of a movement: that of consciousness. Thus, the function of the mind is to “set consciousness in motion” so that, through the attributes proper to understanding, it may perform the necessary “intelligent” functions. The mind is the immediate cause of what constitutes “the very substance of understanding,” namely “entity.” Without entity, it is impossible to conceive of a single idea. To understand this better, one need only shift to the context of energy, and we already know that all apparent matter originates from energy. Thus, the most accurate definition of the mind would be: “That which causes the entity of everything we think about.” Finally, there is the possibility that the mind is a “flow of transcendental information,” which is the cause of intuition, just as energy can contain information, which is the cause of instinct; however, such an assumption is not accepted by metaphysics. What Is Being? The term, which obviously comes from the context of philosophy, first appears in Parmenides’ couplets: “Nor is Being divisible, for it is entirely homogeneous; nor is there more Being at any point, for that would disrupt its continuity: Nor is there less at any point, for it is entirely filled with Being. It is, therefore, entirely continuous Being, for Being is contiguous with Being.” What Parmenides is telling us is that “everything that is necessarily has entity,” so that Being in its totality or absoluteness is Being in its totality and absoluteness. It is therefore understandable that in other couplets Parmenides considers that Being must have the shape of a sphere: “But because the boundary of Being is a perfect limit. Being is in every respect like a beautifully circular sphere in every direction .” I have occasionally remarked that Spanish is one of the languages best suited for philosophy, and in this case we have one of the most evident proofs, for to ascertain the origin of the entity, the language itself allows us—without too much prior argument—to know where it arises from or what causes it, since it is only necessary to add a single letter to the word to find out: “m-ente.” Indeed, the very function of the mind is to “cause entity,” for nothing can exist without entity. That is to say, entity is the “substance” that the mind produces when we think of something. Since we are trying to define the entity within its own context, I have placed “substance” in quotation marks to make it more understandable, but the entity is obviously insubstantial and is nothing other than an attribute of the “mind,” since substance can arise only from energy. An entity, therefore, is the “cause of the things we think about,” and what makes it possible for them to have being. But once again, it is worth clarifying that we are speaking of something whose being does not refer to a substantial and consistent thing—such as a tree, for example—but rather to its “mental conception”; that is, it is nothing more than an “abstraction” or, more precisely, a “thought.” This is not a trivial clarification, because we constantly fall into the methodological error of confusing what is nothing more than a being existing in a thought with its material object—such as equating “mind” with “brain.” To understand philosophy, we must first place ourselves within its own context and avoid the error of “mixing” what is substantial or imagined with what is merely a thought in consciousness. To see this more clearly, we can say that Being is described differently depending on the context, such as the physical context, or Being “per se” according to Aristotle, which is something born or produced; the imagined or revealed Being, which is something that has arisen; and our being, that is, the being of philosophy; the conceived or thought being, which is caused. Within these three contexts, the term “entity” refers only to beings conceived or caused by the mind, but does not apply to substantial or imagined beings. This distinction is fundamental to the coherence of philosophical discourse, and of metaphysical discourse in particular, since it is common to confuse “entity” with something substantial and real. If we say that we are dealing with a banking entity, we are not referring to something physical—that is, the building and its employees—but rather to “something” necessary to construct the idea that represents the “substance” contained in the entity to which we refer, that is, the thing that is the bank. Naturally, everything that exists has entity, but we refer to it only when we speak of being caused by the mind and not of that which exists “in and of itself” or “in the imagination.” It is not that things that exist in and of themselves lack entity; rather, in such cases, we are dealing with a different context, and the result within its respective context is called “substance.” We must begin to accustom ourselves to “not mixing ” contexts; otherwise, we will not be able to arrive at any conclusive reasoning. Finally, it should be noted that if the universe as a whole is an entity, every particular thing that exists within the universe has its own entity; therefore, the entity is a whole composed of parts, just as Parmenides himself argues: “...for being is close to being.” What is Being? To state the true definition of Being, one must start with its cause, and its cause lies in entity; that is, only on the basis of entity can we say that there is Being. For its part, entity is the “automatic result of thinking about something that captures our attention as the cause of an impression” , whether through its sensation, the suggestion of its image, or the nature of its idea. In other words, Being is everything that attains entity. Thus, when we think of things, they “are” in our consciousness, and therefore we bestow Being upon them, in other words, we “conceive” them. The confusion surrounding Being is once again a matter of context. As Aristotle explains, things in the natural or physical context exist, but in and of themselves, without us thinking about them. The result is a being limited to its own substance, of which it is obviously impossible to form an idea—or, in other words, “ it is, but we will never know what it is”—unless we change the context! An animal knows that it “is” and is aware of its “consistency” through the simple perception of itself via its senses, but as long as it does not conceive of its own “ entity,” it cannot be conscious of being or of its existence, nor does it have an idea of itself, which is why it cannot recognize itself in a mirror. Nevertheless, it can survive perfectly well with the simple confirmation of its consistency, for natural beings nonetheless know what is “positive” or “negative” about what they perceive, thereby ensuring their survival perfectly; let us say that it is “ its way of thinking about the things it perceives.” Thus, the being in which we are interested is the one that comes into being immediately after conceiving its entity, for we now have a being about which we can know “what it truly is according to its particular way of being in and of itself.” The greatest errors in the history of philosophy—and especially in its most recent period—have stemmed from this line of thought, for the classics, beginning with Parmenides, ides, had already made this distinction perfectly clear. Due to its inseparable relationship with the entity, Being is “everything that is ,” but at the same time, being is divided into parts—or into the being of each particular thing we think of. Absolute being would be that which has no parts and cannot be divided, but such an idea is “inconceivable” due to an elementary and simple reflection: The entity is the consequence of a “movement in consciousness,” and to come into being as such, it requires what is inherent in all movement—a starting point and an arrival. If thought does not “limit” itself, it cannot conclude in an entity. That is to say, “everything that is must have a beginning and an end” or a “cause and an effect.” If this condition were not met, it simply “could not come into being.” Parmenides already understood this limitation of being when he asserted that the entity must be “eternal,” because it has not been “created” and has always been, and therefore cannot “not be.” I have put “eternal” and “created” in quotation marks because they are out of context within a metaphysical discourse, since they belong to the theological realm; in our context, there would be no place for “eternal,” since an entity cannot exist within time and, in any case, would be “utopian,” nor for “created,” “created,” since everything created stems from a belief, whereas what is caused stems from a cause by default. As for its relationship to existence, this is a different concept that requires a different explanation, but we can say that what is may not necessarily exist, whereas what necessarily exists is. That is to say, there are “inconceivable” beings that lack entity, and thus can come to be but not to exist. An example is the God of Unitarian theology, because it is possible to argue for “another God who can be and exist.” But as I was saying, this is a topic specific to existence as a concept. Finally, there is the “imagined being,” precisely what we were referring to in the previous paragraph, since imagination does not constitute a “thought” but rather a “vision” or “revelation” and therefore lacks substance. Since it lacks substance, “it can be, but not exist.” In other words, what we imagine is merely an “illusion.” What Is Existence? Although many philosophical books have been written about existence—some, like Heidegger’s, quite confusing—and many more will continue to be written, we might be tempted to summarize this matter by saying that “everything that is must exist,” so that existence must be “what is” —it’s that simple! This explanation is sufficient for ordinary people without philosophical concerns, and even for some less demanding philosophers, but the concept has many more possibilities; for although it is “partially true and irrefutable,” it has certain meanings that are precisely where the interest in the concept itself lies. To discover these meanings, we go back to the very origin of Being—which confirms existence for us—and we see that everything begins when the mind receives an impression—whether a vision, a sensation, or an idea—and this gives rise to a thought, the purpose of which is to “identify” what has been sensed, seen, or read. This thought unfolds and culminates in an entity, which in turn is the cause of the being of what has been perceived, and, finally, Being proves its existence and identity. If we analyze this carefully, what we have done is commit the apparent folly of “knowing the existence of a thing that already existed!” So which of the two existences is the true one: the “de facto” or the “de jure”? That is to say, if the perceived thing already exists, what is the point of thinking about it to confirm what it already is? We could say that by thinking about the perceived thing, it is not that we have given it existence, but rather that we have “discovered it in our consciousness.” But what use is this discovery? Before seeking a use for it—which it obviously has—it is worth quoting Descartes, since he, too, as a philosopher, understood that the existence that interested him was the one he discovered for himself, that is, “by thinking.” But Descartes already existed “in fact” before he thought about the cause of the sensation or vision of himself! So why does Descartes feel so satisfied after summarizing his discovery in his famous axiom “Cogito, ergo sum”? Once again, we encounter confusion caused by the “contexts” in which concepts are used, because existence “per se” or de facto must be called “consistency” if we use it in the context proper to nature. Indeed, things are neither and do not exist if we do not think of them, but “they are there” so that they can be observed and thought of in order to exist. Therefore, we can say that “unthought” things are neither and do not exist, but “they are and consist” because “they are apparent,” even though, in fact, they are nothing more than “appearance ,” an important concept that would require a new and much more extensive argument. Everything that consists can undoubtedly come to exist, but conversely, not everything that exists consists of something concrete, or has consistency. That which consists is substantial—a concept that, as we said in the previous section, is equivalent to an entity. It is the same thing, but to avoid confusion and logical flaws, within each context we give it the term that “objectively " to it. In this way, we return to the Cartesian axiom and see that if Descartes does not think about what he sees or feels, he finds himself faced with a thing that he knows is there—because it has “substance” and exists in space and time—but he cannot go any further; that is, he cannot know whether it “exists or does not exist” nor what its cause is, since to do so he must use the “path opened by thought” to arrive at existence, and once existence is known, attempt to determine what attributes the existing thing possesses—but without needing to contrast it with the Descartes who “exists.” Let’s take a simple example: the way animals perceive and recognize things. The animal’s mind sees or senses the thing and compares its smell or appearance with other smells or images stored in its memory or experience—or, in the case of an inexperienced animal, with its instinct. Through this process, the animal knows “what constitutes” what it senses or sees, but from this experience it can only determine whether what it has seen or sensed is positive or negative, whether or not it serves as food, or whether it might be a friend or a potential enemy. But the animal will never be able to become conscious of its existence as a form of being, because its perception of the thing does not give rise to an entity through which—and in a subsequent process—it could discover its own being, its existence, and establish its “identity”—a task reserved for the development of ideas and the learning of a “logical “logical”—or rather, “ontological”—method, such as language. But that capacity is not yet developed in an animal’s mind. Therefore, the only thing an animal perceives is a thing that smells or has an image, but it knows nothing of its existence as a being or as a specific entity and identity. That capacity belongs to human beings and is particularly well-developed among humans with the capacity for language—and, above all, among those who are drawn to philosophy. Thus, the things that “actually” exist simply “consist,” whereas things that exist by right—that is, by virtue of a thought— “exist.” Based on all that has been argued, we can now say that Descartes knew exactly what he was talking about, and existence is that which is conceived through thought. This leads us to the final conclusion that whatever is not thought of cannot exist, but everything substantial consists in itself—that is, it is and exists—yet it is neither and does not exist as long as we do not think of it! All that remains is to view existence from the perspective of the imagination, and since what is imagined lacks substance, it is not possible for images to have existence. But insofar as “they are in some way, since they appear,” we must objectively call that mode of being “illusion” or “appearance”—the foundation of theological thought. As for the usefulness of existence, it is simple, and the honor of its discovery belongs to the greatest of all philosophers in history—that is, to Plato—for without the existence of things, we cannot “conceive,” or discover, not only their true nature but also the method or “episteme” for knowing and recognizing them and forming an idea of them, as many times as necessary. In other words, existence is “the mother of ideas.” But this concept requires a new and extensive reflection. What Are Ideas? It can be said that philosophy begins when Plato “discovers” ideas. It is not that there were no ideas before Plato; rather, their existence was unknown—that is, no philosopher prior to Plato was capable of “forming an idea of what ideas were,” because they did not understand how ideas arose! Ideas are the result of a cognitive process—which Plato himself would call “episteme”—that begins in the mind, is followed by the discovery of being, and finally by self-awareness or one’s own existence, as early as the time of Socrates; hence, we consider “true” philosophy as having emerged after this particular philosopher. What happens during this process is that what “actually” exists has no way of “understanding itself,” for it does not think! What it does is “remember” what it sees and what it feels, and when it encounters similar things again in terms of sensation or vision, it relates them and “recognizes” them—that is what we call experience. For centuries, philosophy remained stuck in the pure experience of things, which means they were viewed with a “scientific mindset” rather than that of a philosopher, explaining their interest in the true nature of things. That does not mean these philosophers had no idea what they were thinking; it simply means they did not do so using the ology specific to philosophy—that is, within its own context. With the arrival of Plato came the great synthesis of Mind-Entity-Being-Existence, resulting in the Idea! An idea is not knowledge stored in memory, but rather the result of “methodical” thought that allows us to understand the things we think about, and once completed, it is written in a book, painted in a picture, or sculpted into a figure. Therefore, we now have the first key: ideas “are nothing more than a mental process.” If we recall that existence is a process that begins with an impression in consciousness, ideas, in turn, are caused by this very same reason. For this reason, David Hume said that “all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions .” He was partially correct, because Hume failed to understand how ideas are formed in consciousness. The existence of a being enters consciousness “informed” as a consequence of its “impression”—that is, by its way of being. That way of being is one of the thousands of varied forms found in nature; otherwise, it would not be a natural form. What we do next is not to speculate on what that form might be, but quite the opposite: “what that form cannot be.” In reality, it is the same cognitive process as mere experience, but instead of limiting ourselves to “seeing” or “feel” and try to recall it—once we have established its existence, its being, and its entity—we compare that same entity with other entities whose image or substance is similar. That is to say, it is the same process, but in this case we “project” it into consciousness, rather than simply onto the senses. With the entity and the being in consciousness, we compare, also within consciousness, the impression that has been thought through and transformed into an entity with other impressions that have likewise been thought through and transformed into entities; and if they are “identical,” it means they have the same entity, and consequently the same being and the same existence, but if they are not “identical,” it means they have a different entity, are a different being, and have a different existence—that is to say, it is something else entirely! It is then that reason and logic come into play, concepts we will explore in another topic. With the doubt already raised—the very same doubt that led Descartes to his famous method—we must “identify” that new entity, and as the Spanish language itself suggests, we must give it a new “id-entity,” which will provide it with a new being and a new existence. Once the process is complete, so as not to forget it, what we remember is not the identity of the new thing, but its impression and the method we used to discover its new identity. So whenever we encounter a new thing with the same impression, the only thing we need to retain in memory is the “experience” of that sensation or vision and a method for recognizing it for the first time or once again. Well, every time we carry out this process, we are forming an idea! Since the task of “ conceiving” is quite complex, it makes sense that once we have it, we should store it somewhere safe, such as in a book, because ideas cannot be stored in memory! This is what confused David Hume and led to his radical empiricism. Kant took a radical new approach to the subject of ideas. But Hume was right: ideas “stem” from the impressions of things, but since ideas already reside in consciousness—that is, they exist outside the “duration of things,” their existence is “detached from the reality from which they originate”—that is, “subjective”—because we can have the sensation of an image that is not in an object but in our imagination! For example, we can try to form an “idea” of a dragon or a genie emerging from a bottle based on a friend’s description, even though he himself has never “seen that” in real life—neither a dragon nor a genie emerging from a bottle. In that case, the “impression” Hume refers to is entirely subjective and does not lie in the experience of things or objects. Kant considers this a “transcendental idea,” since it transcends the experience of reality and can have no other cause than an artist’s intuition—but it is still an idea! Therefore, from the moment Plato introduced ideas, true chaos ensued in the human mind, because his ideas are “tainted with unreality and fantasy” stemming primarily from intuition, but also from the faith that sparks the imagination or the instinct that produces innate knowledge of unknown things. This is what we might call the irruption of the “conceptual or intellectual over the natural”—that is, Platonic idealism! From there, it was only a short step to the religious exaltation of the Middle Ages. Plato is the father of all the “subjectivity of this world,” and not even the sensible Aristotle could do anything to prevent it. The idea had already been created, and it was here to stay! Yet at the same time, we owe him all the “intellectual creativity of this world,” for without his idealism, the mere experience of things would have sent us back to the caves—from which those very ideas emerged! To summarize, an idea is the result of comparing one entity with another, whether stored in memory or arising from the imagination, and of knowing or recognizing its nature, its way of being, and its existence. Ideas belong to the realm of philosophy; if we shift to the realm of physics, their equivalents are simply the things that exist. If we consider it from a theological perspective, ideas are actually images, for as I have explained, we can use an image to form an idea. What Is Reason? The mind’s long journey toward ideas concludes when we manage to distinguish one entity from another; that is, we establish an idea for each entity because they do not correspond to the impressions we had prior to forming those ideas. It is as if we were to say that we have learned to distinguish an apple from a pear and now have the means to establish their respective ideas, because we have learned, in turn, a method that allows us to distinguish them, since we cannot retain the idea itself, but rather “photograph” it in our memory to retrieve it as soon as it is necessary to “identify” it again. Ideas, therefore, are not simply caused by a thought that brings about an entity, its being, and its existence; rather, we need something more to “reason correctly” so that the result is “conclusive,” though not necessarily “ true.” This “something” is obviously the faculty of “reasoning,” a component of the mind of extraordinary complexity, but one that sometimes demands more of us than our will is capable of accomplishing—that is, on occasion we are not capable of “reasoning” and we abandon ourselves to mental chaos, allowing our thoughts to be whatever they please without being “reasonable” . We should have already mentioned “logic,” since it is common to associate one with the other—in such a way that it is not possible to reason without logic—but precisely for this “reason” we see that they are not the same thing; rather, reason and logic are two distinct “ideas” and have different functions and different behaviors. There is hardly any complexity in the idea of an apple. The concept arose upon seeing the impression of its image hanging from the tree; its suggestion provoked the desire to know it —that is, a thought that easily led to its idea, which was the cause of our expulsion from Paradise! But ideas have become increasingly complex and structured, evolving into a succession of interrelated ideas, such as the theses set forth in Hegel’s “ Hegel’s *Phenomenology of Spirit*. In this book there is not just one idea, but hundreds of them concerning just as many aspects that together make up the “overall idea of the book.” Developing such ideas requires a great capacity for reasoning, but curiously, the principle is the same as that for establishing the idea of an apple: simply that there “there is no contradiction whatsoever,” since any contradiction nullifies the idea, whether it be that of an apple or the thesis of a philosophy book. Avoiding any contradiction is what makes a discourse “reasonable”—that is, reason does not depend on whether the facts presented are true or false, but rather on whether or not they are contradictory. Therefore, reason in and of itself does not have the pursuit of truth as its goal, but rather the absence of contradiction in the presentation of an argument. The truth or falsity of the argument will depend on the “objectivity of the premises and the rigor of the logic” . Returning to Hume, what I mean is that for any reasoning to be true, it must also be “objective”—that is, the resulting idea must correspond to the thing that prompted the thought, now transformed into an object. Returning to the example of the apple, the reasoning that allows me to discern that it “is not a pear” is the absence of contradiction between what I say it is and what my experience of the apple tells me it is. This is, on the other hand, a problem of “simple logic ,” what Aristotle calls “primary logic”—discerning between two distinct things. But since we are referring solely to reason, we set aside the question of logic and proceed to its attributes. Reason allows the mind to organize the information contained in the essence of things in order to “understand their nature,” whereas knowledge in and of itself only makes sense when what is understood is contrasted with experience and its identity is established. This transformation from “in-formation” to “formation” enables the “ordering of the forms of things,” and that order must be, in addition to being reasonable or non-contradictory, “ontological,” or formally logical. But not all our certainties stem from the activity of reason and its ontological ordering; rather, without actually “understanding” them, we can be certain of the consistency or appearance of things through mere sensation or vision. That is to say, it is not necessary to ascertain the nature of an apple to desire it and taste it—a process that children follow when they look at the image of a piece of candy, as they do not understand most of the things they know. This has been and will continue to be an endless debate in philosophy, for what I am trying to argue is that reason does not exist in the context of nature; but that does not mean that nature is mired in “chaos”—quite the contrary , for although it is not “reasonable,” it is perfectly “logical”—or, more accurately, “eco-logical.” However, it is not an infallible and exact logic like mathematics, for nature can make logical errors that may lead to the extinction of a “maladapted” species .” In the absence of reason, “innate” knowledge is called “wisdom”—that is, a certainty that does not need to be reasoned out to be known. This “wisdom of nature” is what we call “instinct” in this context—a topic we will not explore further here. For the same reason, in the context of the “spirit”—that is, of the imagination and appearances—unreasoned certainties can also be established; these are not “true” but may be “certain,” and they stem from “revelations ,” a transcendental source of knowledge that undoubtedly exists in natural beings. But this latter consideration is not foreign to the mind, since in this context it is called “intuition,” and it is the necessary complement to expand the possibilities of reason, without the premises necessarily having to be a consequence of what David Hume called the “impressions” of real things. But intuition is another matter altogether. What Is Logic? Most philosophers who have addressed the subject of logic came from the academic world of the sciences, and more specifically from mathematics, as in the case of Leibniz. In other words, it is as if we were to say that most of those who speak about bread are not bakers but biologists or chemists. What we are asking ourselves now is what logic is, but not what the structure of logic is, assuming we already know what it is. Because, what is the difference between what is reasonable and what is logical? And if there is no difference, what is the point of having two concepts that could be summarized in one? The difference between reason and logic is that the former analyzes any contradiction in the argument, while whereas the latter analyzes any contradiction in the meaning of the words used in a line of reasoning. It is therefore clear that reason and logic have distinct functions within philosophical discourse. To illustrate this difference clearly, let’s consider a familiar example by quoting a passage from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”: “The White Rabbit looked at his pocket watch.” The sentence is reasonable but is apparently not logical, because real-life rabbits don’t wear watches or have pockets! In other words, the absence of logic refers to the “true” meaning of the concept of a rabbit. This simple example shows us that logic must be rooted in the precise use of words according to their true meaning. Hence, many philosophers believe that philosophy has the potential to be an “exact science,” provided that words also have a single and precise meaning. Hermeneutics and etymology, which deal with the meaning of words, conclude that this meaning depends both on the context in which they are used and on the consensus of the language community that uses them; therefore, it does not seem possible that in philosophy, logic itself could have a scientific basis, except in the case where it is applied with “mathematical”—and therefore truly exact—values. This shows us that logic also has its own contexts: that of physics or nature, where logic is objective; that of philosophy, where logic can be both objective and subjective, because it depends on the subjectivity of the ideas themselves; and finally, that of the imagination, where logic is purely subjective. In other words, the “third option” that Aristotle. Lewis Carroll’s passage is logical “within its own context”—that of the author’s imagination, where rabbits are well-dressed and carry pocket watches. But when we transfer this same idea to the context of physics, it lacks logic, since rabbits aren’t quite that creative there. If we view it in the context of philosophy, it is a “hypothesis” that is logical insofar as we accept the premises, but it cannot be “objective” , since our experience of the idea of a “rabbit” points to an animal incapable of using watches. But no hypothesis is based solely on the experience of things; rather, it is grounded in ideas that arise from discourse itself in the course of reasoning and that amount to mere “hypotheses pending empirical verification.” How can we prove the existence of something whose dimensions—whether macro or micro—are not perceptible through experience but only through a perception contained within a “logical hypothesis”? The extraordinary thing about ideas is that they allow us to include elements that arise from rational discourse itself; that is, if we present a series of arguments in which there is no contradiction whatsoever, the result will necessarily be “logical,” even though it amounts to nothing more than a hypothesis, since there is no possibility of physically testing the result of such reflection. Therefore, logic is the relationship established between words according to the meaning they acquire following a line of reasoning free of contradiction. But, at the same time, logic can be objective or exact, subjective or relative, depending on the context in which it is used. What Is Understanding? We can use this new topic to propose a definition of philosophy itself—not as an idea in and of itself but as a tool—since philosophy is what allows us to understand both observable and unobservable things. It is common to confuse “understanding” with “knowledge” , but the difference is fundamental, since while the former concept belongs to philosophy, the latter belongs to science. We can come to know things without reflecting on them, through mere sensation or perception—which is what is retained in experience—but without reasoning about them, we cannot “understand” them. Understanding, therefore, is the result of a mental process, which we can summarize based on what was discussed in the previous topics , in a single long paragraph, so as not to lose the thread of the argument from its origin: The mind receives an impression, transforms it into an entity, which in turn becomes a being, thereby coming into existence within our consciousness; through the will, we reason about that existence without contradictions and within a logical framework, and the result is “an idea.” That idea has been made possible by a process that we can now call “understanding.” When we form an idea of a thing, we not only grant it being and existence, but we also mean to say that we understand the observed thing. Once that first thing is understood, we can bring about the existence of many other entities related to the first idea, until we understand the “necessary relations of the conceived thing,” so that if we have the idea of an apple, by following the “thread of this first idea” we discover the necessity of the existence of a tree, and thus of nature itself. Thanks to understanding, “we know more than what we observe” and it is now that we grasp the thesis of so-called empiricist philosophy, which reaches the correct conclusion that one “knows” only that which comes from a sensation, but one can “understand” everything related to that same sensation. This is, once again, what the account in Genesis and the conversation between Eve and the serpent suggest to us, for the serpent assured Eve that by “biting the apple” she would we would be like “gods”—that is, we would come to “understand the idea of God” , even if we did not come to know Him. What the empiricists denied was not understanding itself, but its practical “usefulness,” since only what is known has apparent usefulness, but not what is merely understood. To clarify this argument, let us return to the example of the apple. If, instead of an apple, I were to observe an exotic fruit in a produce store, I would not “know” the tree from which that fruit comes , but I would understand that it must necessarily be a tree with the basic “characteristics” of all trees—that is, rooted in the ground, with leaves, periodic blooms, and so on. But what use is there in understanding something I do not know? For a scientist, none; for a philosopher, everything, for that is the very essence of philosophy. Understanding does not necessarily know everything it comprehends, because the result of understanding can lead us to prove the existence of something that cannot be observed as such a thing nor can we come to know it. This leads us directly to a new basic concept in philosophy, namely the “object,” since the existence of the idea of a thing must necessarily lead us to an object whose nature is related to the impression of the “ thing,” which confirms our understanding. But if we have been impressed by an idea that comes from a thing that was not the cause of our impression, the result cannot be another object but rather a subject. Therefore, in this case, we do not come to know objectively what we conceive, but only to understand and know it subjectively, because we have only a “hypothesis” of it—that is, the result does not amount to “knowledge ” but “understanding.” In other words, understanding leads us to establish the existence of the “subject,” but not that of the object, since they have no counterpart in observable things. This is precisely the crux of the endless controversy surrounding “epistemology,” or the theory of knowledge of things, since empiricists (scientists) hold that only what can be observed is known, whereas idealists (necessarily philosophers) believe that we can know anything that is likely to exist, even if it is subjective. Thus, we could come to know the existence of God if we can “understand” Him, even though we cannot prove “objectively” prove His “consistency.” All that remains is to introduce a fundamental context: that of the imagination. Since the imagination is not the result of thought but of a “psychological” suggestion, it cannot acquire entity—and therefore being and existence—so it cannot become a “logical and reasonable idea”; thus, anything that is merely imagined “cannot be understood .” What Is the Will? It is obvious that without “willpower” we would not be able to “think of anything”; therefore, it is clear that the will is a “force.” If, at the beginning of this brief essay, while studying the mind, we said that it was a “flow” capable of moving consciousness and making us think about things, we could conclude this new topic and say that the will is the mind itself. But we had also said that the mind “does not move,” but was merely the “energy” that gave rise to thoughts. I could quote Aristotle and compare the mind, as I have described it, to his “ unmoved mover”—the cause or creator of the nature of things—and it would be an apt comparison that the philosopher himself would corroborate. Therefore, the will, which is a force, cannot be motionless. What we are seeking is “the force that moves a thought,” for which a “consumption of mental energy” is necessary. In other words, what is missing from our reasoning thus far and from all the topics discussed previously is a “reason” that explains why consciousness is moved to bring an idea to fruition. In other words, the force we are seeking has ideas themselves as its purpose. If that force is the will, then ideas cannot arise without “willpower.” But why? I will quote one of the many definitions of will available online because it will provide the key we are seeking: “Will is the capacity to carry out actions contrary to our immediate tendencies at a given moment.”There is no doubt that this definition contains a brief “intuition” of what causes the will, the clue to which lies in the word “contrary.” Indeed, what “provokes all movement is opposition.” Energy moves due to the opposition of its polarity; the mind, which we had said is a “form of energy,” must also be driven by a “contrast.”Since the function of consciousness is to develop ideas, the possible contradiction must lie within the ideas themselves. With this reflection, we are on the verge of encountering “dialectics,” which, in the history of philosophy, originated among the classical philosophers of the Eleatic School—Parmenides and Zeno. However, the credit went to Hegel. Yet it is Descartes who, through his method, explains the causes of the will in the simplest way: reasonable doubt!When we are certain of something, there is no reason to strive to change that certainty. We are fully satisfied, and it fulfills all our expectations of “ certainty.” But if, like Descartes, we were to “doubt” what we “believed,” we would be “compelled” to revise our old and dubious beliefs.In other words, “a void of certainty would arise in our consciousness,” which would have to be filled with a new certainty. What compels us to act is that “we do not know the answer” to the doubt raised. For therefore, ignorance of what we do not know but need to know generates a force capable of moving our consciousness until it finds the answer. That is willpower!It is not, as the previous definition suggests, a matter of doing something contrary to our usual habits—such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator—but rather a necessity brought about by the loss of certainty, and the alternative is simple: regain certainty or remain in ignorance, for which no willpower is needed!We see the similarity with energy and its peculiar movement, since what has happened is that a “positive” consciousness, confronted with the experience of things, has become “negative,” and it urgently needs to regain its balance by discovering the cause of its negativity—that is, of its doubt. Undoubtedly, Arthur Schopenhauer understood this perfectly, but I believe he dramatized it more than necessary, since the will is a “reasonable cause within evolution,” which is nothing more than a “dialectical reason,” where the thesis is constantly confronted by the antithesis, resulting in a new synthesis—until the next doubt or moment of awareness!The will is unique to beings with understanding, for among “natural” and irrational beings this dialectic is resolved through “dynamics,” or “dynamic force.” In to say, they have no doubts, only needs that they satisfy through the use of knowledge derived from experience and, where applicable, instinct.Finally, we turn to the context of the “spirit,” and since the imagination conceives of nothing, it also doubts nothing. Thus, movement arises from the “impulse” produced by the very suggestion of the images themselves, when they lose their value and it becomes necessary to “re-evaluate” them.What Is Intuition?Let us suppose we accept that all knowledge has its origin in the “impression of a thing.” This would demonstrate that before the “mind that is impressed” existed, the impressionable thing must have existed. That is to say, according to this hypothesis, things arise before the mind, so that the mind must arise from things.In this brief exposition, we encounter a monumental logical problem, since it is not “logical for the mind to create things” when we know that things arise from a process initiated by the appearance of a certain contingent amount of energy, such as the “Big Bang.” In other words, at present it seems more reasonable that the mind is contained within the “being of consistent things.” But obviously we might be in for a big surprise if one day we were to prove the “consistency” of God, because His “being” is relatively straightforward.The logical error consists—once again!—in using concepts out of context. By “logical” necessity, the error must lie in the fact that we are confusing “mind” with “energy.” That is to say, according to empiricism, things came first and energy came later, but according to experience itself, the exact opposite happened! But we could also accept the opposite hypothesis...But since we live on the side of spacetime, the logical problem—ours, of course—lies in the fact that energy does not question the reasons for knowledge; rather, it does so in its contextual form of “mind.” In other words, things possess both energy and mind; while energy is the “natural” aspect of things, mind is the “intellectual” aspect of those same things; while energy “produces substance,” mind “brings about entity.” Things “stimulate the mind,” and the mind stimulates the “existence of things,” thereby bringing about “objects” .From this reflection, we conclude that everything that has energy necessarily has mind, but we must “view it in its own context.” As natural things, we “act,” but as intellectual beings, we “think”; as natural things, we are “dynamic,” but as intellectual beings, we are “volitional”; as natural things, we “give birth,” but as intellectual beings, we “conceive,” etc.Thus, once the “contextual” method is established, we reach the conclusion that “ideas” arose before “thought,” which is obviously illogical! This line of reasoning is equivalent to saying that matter came before energy. It’s illogical but may be reasonable!From our perspective of reality, if the first thing was a thought that had “no idea” what to think about or anything to impress it, this thought would necessarily have to have some “orientation” to arrive at an idea. That is, the “energy without experience” would have to know how to produce matter and subsequently organisms.Curiously, we have no problem considering that this quality resides in “instinct,” but when we transfer this idea to the context of the mind—that is, to thought, we are unwilling to accept that it is “intuition”—which is the analogue of instinct in the context of the mind!The same thing happens if we shift to the context of the imagination, since the “spirit” would have to have “faith” to create images—among which is also the image of God—whereas, for an empiricist, the images should precede faith, which is the cause of their creation. This is not logical, unless we ourselves are gods, and what we call God is wondering about our existence! Therefore, whenever we are “thinking,” the “impressions” are phenomena that follow the cause of the “first idea,” which must necessarily stem from “intuition.” In other words, while the will is part of the dialectic—as is the need to fill a void created by doubt—intuition is the very cause of thought, not as doubt, but as “certainty!” Thus, at the origin of understanding lies the intuition of that which we wish to understand and know. Therefore, intuition must be purely and simply “the information contained in the mind by default.” Kant calls this “transcendental idealism,” but it was already known from Plato’s theory of ideas, as set forth in his “Allegory of the Cave” . What Is Experience? Experience is the result of “storing” impressions of things or ideas in memory; that is to say, experience does not resolve the question of the “first cause,” or arj ; or, to put it another way, ideas have not been “caused” by mere experience. What I mean is that things that “exist” can “move” in order and equilibrium without the need for experience, simply by “inertia.” The planet Earth did not need experience to break away from the sun and, after a process of cooling and condensation, become what it is today. The universe did not need experience to “react” in a certain way and give rise to galaxies and constellations. This “knowledge” was contained within the “principles” of its own constitution as a universe. These “principles,” as the term itself implies, refer to “what enables something that begins to know how it must unfold in time and space,” and for this, experience is not necessary but, once again, the “principles.”Experience as such should be considered only with the emergence of understanding and the need for knowledge, since it is necessary to “store the causes of what is understood so as not to forget it”—that is, it concerns only what is knowable about things, but not the things themselves, which are governed by principles.If experience is so recent, how was the universe formed? Without doubt, once again, by its principles! But just as we suggested in the section on intuition, principles are, in turn, contingent upon information, for everything that has a certain “way of being” must necessarily have been “in-formed.”Thus, long before experience, “information” or “intuition” must have existed, and this cannot be perceived through experience, since what is experienced must necessarily come after what has been formed.Therefore, once again, David Hume limited himself to considering knowledge of what has already been formed—which can be acquired through experience— but how can experience begin without the very process of formation itself beginning—a process that is not caused by experience?The answer is already found in Plato and his theory of ideas: intuition necessarily precedes experience.What Is Dialectics?It is no surprise that, by offering a “materialist” interpretation of dialectics according to Hegel, Marx came to the conclusion that God was a “creation” of man. It is a pity that he used the term “creation,” for in doing so he does not distance himself from religion!Indeed, creation is always the consequence of a belief, and beliefs are based on “evaluations born of the imagination.” If he had been more rigorously philosophical, he would have had to say “caused by the human mind,” for ideas are not “created” but rather “caused.” If, on the other hand, he had adhered to a purely materialist interpretation, he would have had to say that God is a “product of man,” but in that case he would have been forced to clarify which product he was referring to, which would have posed a great difficulty.Marx, like so many other philosophers who have come before me, made an error of context—and therefore of logic. If God is a creation, He must be visible in an image—and He is!; if God is a causation, He must exist in an idea—and He does! And, finally, if God is a product, He must exist consistently—which, for pantheists, He does!Dialectics is the cause-and-effect relationship within what already is and exists—that is, in the experience of things unfolding in space and time. It can “materialize” by changing context, in which case dialectics becomes an ecological “action-reaction” relationship, or even be extended to social behaviors, such as the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as in the case of Karl Marx and his followers.The “materialist aspect of dialectics” is precisely that one cannot conceive of a reasonable “beginning or end” within a dialectical relationship. Only idealists “believe”—because it is irrational—that in the end there could be an absolute synthesis, unaffected by space-time, or an “absolute certainty” or “that which does not doubt”—that is, something “ideal and perfect”: God.Very few philosophers ultimately avoid falling into some form of idealism, including Marx, since he sees the “perfect being” in the “totalitarian state”—with the honorable exception of my fellow Spaniard Ortega y Gasset, probably the only republican philosopher in the history of universal philosophy, and I am not exaggerating.Gasset said that Hegel’s dialectic had a flaw—it had too much of God! And to prove it, he left us his famous axiom: “I am myself and my circumstances, and if my circumstances are not saved, neither am I.” In other words, the absolute and the perfect cannot be conceived, because there is always an inherent circumstance on which I depend—one that is as imperfect as I am myself, yet is the cause of my own imperfect nature! For this reason, he broke with his teacher Kant, because Kant, too, falls into “deism” and sees “the hand of God” in his “transcendental idea.” What Gasset is telling us is that “there is no is no such end in a dialectical process,” because everything that is supposedly absolute and perfect will nevertheless depend on “its circumstance .” Thus, the “one,” which seems absolute and perfect, depends on “zero,” its dialectical reason; but this “circumstance” is no longer in this “world,” but rather in “nothingness”—a concept that so complicated the lives of Sartre and Heidegger—and in that nothingness or “other world,” things are just as imperfect as in this one; that is why they are necessarily dialectical! In the case at hand—that of the mind and understanding—the conclusion we draw is that the “first certainty” is not truly the first, nor is it perfect or divine, but rather a simple intuition contained within the “imperfect causality of our own mind,” where ideas exist “by default”—which Aristotle, who was a scientist, would call “potentiality,” and St. Augustine, who was a theologian, calls “light.” It’s a matter of context! The proof of my thesis lies in our marvelous Spanish language, for “potency,” as far as the mind is concerned, is called a “defect”—that is, “by default!” Therefore, we can hardly consider the God of Kant and so many other idealists as a “defect.” What Is Consciousness? The Royal Spanish Academy of Language, whose dictionary simply humiliates philosophy, states that consciousness is “the immediate knowledge that the subject has of itself, of its actions, and of its reflections.” But what does this long and unintelligible definition mean? Consciousness cannot be “knowledge”; consciousness is at the antipodes of the subject; consciousness is not merely “of itself”; consciousness by itself knows nothing, neither immediately nor later. This is a case similar to that of the concept “mind,” which does not move but rather causes movement, since it is “energy.” We need to be more methodical in breaking down “understanding” and examining each of its parts—something we have no difficulty doing when it comes to dissecting the brain, but in a metaphysical context we are already less “scientific .” The order of appearance of what constitutes an idea, after receiving the corresponding impression (which is the cause of the idea itself), is, as we said, as follows: mind, entity, being, existence, idea. This entire lengthy process requires: intuition, experience, will, reason, logic, dialectic—and we have the object! But where? Well, in consciousness! Where else? Therefore, consciousness is “the brain of the mind,” but expressed in its own context—that of the “intellect” or the “metaphysical.” So, if it is in the brain where “sensations are produced,” it is in consciousness where “impressions are caused”—the result of those very sensations, which are the consequence of ideas. We have already established that consciousness is “ part of the understanding,” and its function is not to know but to serve as an “intelligent container” for the entire intellectual process that leads precisely to knowledge. Consciousness neither “feels” nor “imagines”; consciousness merely allows thoughts to organize themselves with the intention of forming an idea. Thus, an “unconscious person” is one who feels and suffers—and even imagines—but “does not think about what they feel or what they imagine.” Obviously, after death we lose consciousness, since it is nothing more than brain activity in the context of the mind or metaphysics. As for the context of theology—that is, the imagination—we are dealing precisely with its exact equivalent, since images require a “space in which to be projected and evaluated.” Therefore, imagination, the brain, and consciousness “must be one and the same thing in three distinct contexts.” For this simple reason, most psychologists do not really know what they are talking about. What Is the Object? Although the mind is a concept belonging to the context of metaphysics, precisely because it is a context, it must have its equivalent in the physical realm. That is to say, in principle, we cannot accept that the mind exists on its own “without a being that contains it,” as Plato claimed. Put another way, the ideas produced by the mind do not come “exclusively from God,” but from other causes related to the consistency of things—that is, from experience. But how is the necessary relationship established between what “is not consistent”—such as the mind—and what is consistent—such as energy? This is another of the “Gordian knots” of philosophy, and one that only Kant resolves reasonably. When the philosopher from Königsberg stated, in introducing one of his “Critiques,” that he supported Hume’s thesis that all knowledge must necessarily stem from an “impression,” he reserved the right to reinterpret it as needed to explain why, if this is the case, a “first cause” is possible. That is to say, how can a first idea without things to experience or experience itself? This is a question concerning “intuition”—that is, a topic we have already addressed—and therefore we now consider the thesis of empiricism to be irrefutable and see that the “points of connection” between the inconsistent mind and the consistent or substantial are established between two perfectly delimited points: the impression, or seed of an idea, and the object, or the idea already conceived. In the intermediate process, we had the “understanding”—that is, the interaction between intuition, will, entity, being, existence, and finally the idea. Therefore, we conclude that the object must be the “point of convergence” between a thought and the reality contained in the impression of the thing that caused it. For this reason, the object and the observed thing must coincide “exactly”; otherwise, it would not be a “logical” reflection—that is, what we call “objective.” If the idea does not correspond to the initial impression, the result is an “unverified object”—that is, , a “subject.” What we have seen is that the indispensable condition—that every thought culminating in an idea must have a “beginning” and an “end”—is fully met; but in metaphysics we speak of a “cause” and its “effect.” If the thought does not end in an object or a subject, no idea can be derived from it. Thus, what “links the mind to the real world” is both the impression and the final object, brought about by the impression. Only through the object can we say that we attain knowledge, for this consists in identifying the object with the thing sensed or perceived that has impressed us. In reality, this is a process as natural as the gestation of a new being, which only truly exists once it is born. That is to say, we only know something when we have conceived it as an object and it fully corresponds to the thing that provoked our “desire to conceive it ,” whether due to an impression or an intuition. But this process has its “catch,” which is why we have created a world full of artificiality and devoid of any naturalness, because the conceived object is not necessarily the observed object, but rather the result of pure and simple logical and reasonable reflection based on a real and natural thing. What I mean is that we can take the impression of a tree as a “reference” and conceive of an object that “will no longer be the tree,” but rather the “painting of a tree”; in which case we have “mentally” manipulated its impression and turned it into a “ object distinct from the original object that gave rise to the impression.” Now is when we can refute Hume and tell him that, indeed, everything we know comes from the impression of its substances, but once in our consciousness we can alter them in such a way that we “create things not previously experienced,” such as the version of the tree in an “abstract .” The result would be a tree “tainted with unreality,” and that unreality “cannot stem from reality.” To put it plainly, we have “created a new tree,” as objective as the natural one, but it is “our tree,” the fruit of our “inspiration,” and this “addition” cannot be found in experience but only in “intuition.” We return to Königsberg! In this way, we support Kant and his “transcendentalism,” and we see that thought begins with the impression of things, but can “recreate” or “recause” them, giving rise to new objects, just as “real as natural ones” . That is called art, and it is the source of humanism—and obviously of philosophy itself—but also of science, for without “intuition” “theories” cannot be conceived. Finally, we must not overlook the context of the imagination, since the “impression ” that Hume identifies as the source of all knowledge has its “cause in an initial suggestion brought about by its image.” Once the image has stimulated our desire to know the imagined thing, “we must renounce mere vision” in order to transform it into a “conscious thought,” thereby giving way to “understanding.” This is “objectively” what the writers of the Bible did, but since the “vision” did not come from “this world,” nor from the experience of something “substantial,” rather than having an “objective idea of God,” it remains a “great idea,” but a “subjective” one. What Is Knowledge? One need only try to find a definition of what knowledge is in the various available sources to realize that we are facing one of the most passionate debates in the history of philosophy. But by following the order in which ideas are formed, it is not difficult to reach certain reasonable conclusions, not only about what knowledge is, but also about the very cause of knowledge. To know is undoubtedly to have the certainty that the things we observe are present in our memory or experience, represented by an impression, sensation, or image, through which we can eventually “form an idea.” I say “eventually” because, contrary to what is customary in definitions of “epistemology,” what is known is what is stored in experience—and this may be as simple as a scent or the image of a tasty apple. With this clarification, I seek to argue that epistemology itself does not take into account forms of knowledge for which it is not necessary to think, to conceptualize entity, being, or existence, and—through an act of will—to construct the idea that leads us to the object, which is supposed to be knowledge of the conceived. Animals do not follow this process and “know” many smells, as well as the image of many things, without forming even the remotest “idea” of them. Therefore, Plato’s “episteme” refers exclusively to human understanding, a consequence of the effectiveness and breadth of his “ understanding”—that is, a process not shared by all natural beings that “know” or possess “knowledge.” The reason is simple to understand: knowledge is not a concept specific to philosophy but rather to physics. To know, we need something that is not in the “mind” but in the “brain”: memory! And memory is a data store that “consists of something.” In reality, knowing is comparing the result of an object with its “impression, sensation, or suggestion” stored in memory. That is to say, we know only what is properly stored in memory—not as ideas, which are temporary mental processes, but as impressions, sensations, or suggestions—that is, what Plato despises because he calls them “emotions.” What the mind stores is the “method” for “reconstructing” the objects we have identified as sensations or emotions. Our personal computer “ “knows many things”—those stored in its memory—and projects them onto the screen thanks to a “program” triggered by a “command” or “desire” from the user. Thus, machines can come to know many more things than we do, but they will never understand a single one of them, because they lack understanding, which is grounded in intuition! Having made this fundamental clarification, let’s now focus on this type of knowledge. What we see is that the premise that gives rise to it is always the same, but the result is different. While an animal stores a scent or image in the memory that constitutes its experience, we not only store those same scents or images, but—because of “understanding”—we “transform them into ideas,” so that we know not only “what” the observed things are but also “why” those things that catch the attention of our senses or imagination are as they are. What we do is “organize” what we understand according to their “way of being”—that is, according to the essence of things, which we have bestowed upon them by virtue of possessing understanding. Thanks to having bestowed upon them essence and existence, we are able to understand them as “concrete beings ” and not simply as “things ,” and it is then, once processed, that we store them in the “pantry”—that is, in memory—because the mind’s work is complete. However, this does not mean that we store things in our experience or memory differently from how animals do—a level of knowledge immediately inferior to ours—but rather that we take the trouble to reflect on what we perceive in order to understand their nature, and immediately afterward this knowledge “disappears,” since “it has been nothing more than a movement in consciousness,” which was the cause of the idea. For this reason, every time we contemplate something, we have to “recognize” it based on the only thing we retain from experience: its sensation or its image, which suggests its “resemblance”—that is, just like animals! To better understand this process, which is the cause of “mental exhaustion” , we can use a simple example. Suppose we are watching a television news program and a large number of people related to the story appear. To identify these people, what we do is “compare” the images of those who “appear” with those we retain from our experience, and if they “match,” we “recognize” them. In other words, we merely “believed we knew them,” but to fully confirm this, we had to repeat the entire process of their “ideation” for their “recognition”: making a conscious effort to think—prompted by doubt—to generate an entity, give it being, bring it into existence, conceive it, and compare it. Only then do we recognize them as human beings with understanding! Knowledge based on understanding knows no more things than any animal, nor does it retain more sensations or images in memory, but it is capable of forming an idea of the known thing that allows it to distinguish not only their modes of being but also establish their dialectical relationship with other things according to their formal relationships, from which—following a “logical and reasonable” process—a succession of “syntheses” arises, which in themselves constitute “intelligence.” The purpose of all knowledge is “survival” and “reproduction,” but among human beings, knowledge can have an end in itself—that is, philosophy! Finally, we must consider the third context, that of the imagination, which also “knows what it imagines,” but as in the case of the natural context or physics, no “objective” ideas can be extracted from what is imagined, since the images lack “ substance.” Therefore, they are stored in memory exactly as they arose and constitute an experience with no greater value than that suggested by the images themselves.