THE PHILOSOPHERS BEHIND THE SCENES

POLITICAL FAMILY

“Behind the scenes, behind the scenes,

discreetly, as a confidence… in

relation to a matter that is not made public.”

Argot teatral

Back in 1966, the “Breviarios” collection of the Economic Culture Fund published a book with the provocative title The Philosophers Behind the Scenes. Author, the German W. Weischedel writes in the prologue to the first edition of it:

“Whoever is old and sees that his end is approaching, it is very possible that, in some moment of tranquility, he will remember the beginnings of his life. The same thing happens in Philosophy. He is only two thousand five hundred years old, and there were not a few who prophesied an early death to him. And whoever dedicates themselves to Philosophy today may sometimes have the feeling of dealing with something that seems tired and a little outdated. From this sensation may arise an increasingly pressing need to go back to the past, in search of the origins, when Philosophy was still new and full of youthful vigor.

However, anyone looking for the moment of the birth of this science will be filled with confusion, since there is no civil registry of spiritual events whose data goes back to such a distant past that the date of that birth can be found. No one knows for sure when Philosophy was born, since its beginnings are lost in the darkness of past times.

However, there is an ancient tradition that says that Philosophy was initiated by Thales, an intelligent man from the merchant city of Miletus, in Greek Asia Minor, where he lived in the 6th century BC, being the first human being who dedicated himself to philosophizing. .”

In another order of ideas, although it is true that the philosophical concern grew with me, I must mark two events to support that growth: first, the classes of Professor Arturo Esperón Villavicencio, from the University of Jalapa, who supported his always interesting and enjoyable professorships. basically in the book The Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell. Understand the difference between Religion and Philosophy, grasp the theories of thinkers that an average Mexican only knows because their names coincide with the name of a street in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, or because we stumble upon it circumstantially, but that We do not know exactly what humanity owes to their brilliant contributions.

The author of the first cited text considers that the origins of Philosophy (with a capital letter) as a science are lost in the mists of time. Thus, in ancient Egypt, the powerful Pharaoh, in an act that seemed magical, ordered the Nile to overflow its waters to fertilize the lands in its basin and allow the development of a culture enormous for its time. Why is some omnipotent Pharaoh not considered the father or creator of philosophical science, if he believed himself to be God? What elements did history take to award a man the title of creator of this important science? We must remember that, personally, we all have our own philosophy (like that, with a lower case letter) of life. Its origins are irrelevant.

Jacobus Bruckerus, goes back in his research beyond the Egyptians and Babylonians, even beyond the flood, to a time between Adam and Noah. Therefore, the first part of his book is called Antediluvian philosophy; However, he does not stop there, he dares to raise the question: might there also be philosophers among angels and demons, before humanity existed?

Getting into the subject, Master Esperón began to discuss the History of Philosophy with the ideas of a group of thinkers in ancient Greece, before the emergence of the three greats: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: the Presocratics. Those who study the matter are not clear enough regarding the times or the precision of the concepts; I infer that they went down in history for marking the difference between Religion and Philosophy, by answering the same question with different answers. Who is the creator of everything that exists in the world around us? The first answer is obvious: God; He is the creator of what existed, what exists and what will exist. He is omnipotent (he can do everything), omniscient (he knows everything) and omnipresent (he is everywhere). The second argument to answer the same question is: Everything that exists has its origin in water; This same principle, attributed to Thales of Miletus (officially, the Father of Philosophy), applies to all pre-Socratic thinkers. The difference is obvious, religious criteria attribute the origin of everything that exists to a supreme being of ideal nature; Philosophers, on the other hand, seek to explain everything in the materiality of the things themselves.

Centuries later (totally out of context) I allow myself to remember the famous speech of the young candidate to enter the Lateran Academy, in 19th century Mexico, Ignacio Ramírez, the Necromancer who, without any blush, before a group of accomplished theologians expressed : “God does not exist, natural things stand on their own.”

I will only cite a few pre-Socratics: Anaximenes (in air and not in water, everything that exists originates). Empedocles; It is pluralistic (water, air, fire and earth). Pythagoras: (the number). Heraclitus of Ephesus: shows a certain interest in Dialectics; He assures that no one bathes in the same river twice, because when doing so a second time, the river is no longer the same and neither is the person who gets into it.

Most pre-Socratic philosophers criticized the concepts of earlier philosophers, even when they used them to develop their own ideas.

It’s really interesting to see how thinkers work to capture philosophers behind the scenes; that is, when they surrender to their own nature; to be them, without masks, without posturing, without hypocrisy, without diplomacy.

Behind the scenes, the people of Mexico should get to know their leaders and those who aspire to be them, without party masks, without commitments, without pressure from powerful interest groups; with no other witness than his own history. That is why each person must speak their own ethics: the Ethics of Responsibility.