Yo, señor, I was a scientist, and those in this guild gave us a natural aversion to philosophy. This is not my case. I didn’t want to live in a world without philosophers, because I think we would all be more confused than a donkey in a garage. It’s true that Aristotle seems big to me: his claim that the world couldn’t be filled with atoms and that they all fell into the ground has baffled scholars for millennia, as has his belief that heavy things fall faster than light ones. Of course, he would have only had to take a large and a small stone from a cliff to realize that he was wrong.
Galileo had to refute these ideas 18 times later, in the face of general skepticism and with little risk to his physical integrity. But it is also true that the trainee – nicknamed “the man from Manacor” in reference to Rafa Nadal – was the first experimenter. For example, I observed chicken eggs at different times and observed that the chicken embryo developed a barking heart very quickly. It’s even more incomprehensible than climbing a ravine to check the theme of two stones, but hey, you have to admit that cascading down a tree is easier than climbing a slope.
I was always most interested in Plato, his maestro at the Academy of Athens. The Platonic solids astonish me, with their fruitful simplicity, their necessary geometry and their emergent properties. You know that these are the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron, and do not look for another, because mathematicians have demonstrated in many ways that there cannot be more. It is not clear, however, that they exhibit selective affinities: the tetrahedron is the same way as the cube, and the dodecahedron is the same way as the icosahedron. A mathematics teacher very expert in papyroflexia showed me these dualities a few years ago with his paper figures and left me absorbed as if held for a long time.
Furthermore, what we call Platonic ideas reveal a profound truth about the mind: that there are innate concepts and that without them we could understand nothing. The most important ones are, of course, of the geometric type, like the distance between two points and the type of things that nothing needs to be learned. We are visual beings, and we carry in our circuits these cognitive sequences recorded at birth. There clean slate does not exist and behavioral psychology is wrong. Plato had more reasons than Skinner. They’re very curious, don’t you think?
But my favorite is of course Kant. I say that all philosophy revolves around four questions: What can I know? What should I do? What should I expect? What is human being? And this seems like the right historical time to revisit them. The first was complicated for us in a monstrous and paradoxical way. We have never known as much as today, never has knowledge been so within the reach of so many people, we have never had so many means to debate it, verify it, deepen it and yet, there are billions of human beings, certainly the majority of the species, who have chosen to ignore it to fall into the arms of lies, superstition and ideological poison.
Under these conditions, it is impossible to reasonably answer the second question, what should I do? and at the third, what should I expect? It is even possible to argue that it is better not to answer it, because with such a mental empanada, the consequences of any action and hope would probably be calamitous. We can only answer four of them: the human being is the oldest and the stupidest of the animals that open the Earth. This is why we need more philosophers. It’s a Christmas treat.
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