Everyone embraces their own inconsistencies. Carlos Javier González Serrano, too. Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, counselor in the Baccalaureate stage, director of the program In the light of thinking (RNE), Scientific director of the Café of the Social Observatory of the La Caixa Foundation, president of the Society for Studies in Spanish on Schopenhauer... and thus a long etcetera of occupations of a person who puts non-production at the center.
He is more than aware of this “continuous and suffocating doing” in which society navigates. It invites reflection on the way we live, especially in the creation of "community ties that allow us to question the structures that feed our discomfort." The digital sphere would not be the place for this. "We believe that in social networks we communicate , but in reality there is a libidinal discharge of worries.” Despite the pessimistic undertones, he claims to start the course “very excited,” especially for his students, who “catapult him to be a better teacher.”
September is the month of returning to work and, with it, the flowering of post-vacation stress. What do you think about it?
What mainly worries me is the obsession we have with our discomforts. It seems that all the time there is something that prevents us from living the way we want to live. We are always being promised prosperity, a life full of happiness…. always in the future. But that future turns out to never come. All this post-vacation stress, this worry about returning to work, in the end leads to an obsession with our discomforts and instead of, as Aristotle defended or other thinkers in the history of philosophy defended, focusing on well-being, we focus on How we should avoid discomfort.
Is it in our power to take the work more calmly?
The issue with the discomfort associated with productivity is that we have very normalized the need to continually do things to be well. So the Aristotelian concept of a good life, achieving plenitude through a path previously determined by us, is closely associated with a continuous and, above all, suffocating doing. This I think is the point. We are suffocated by a condition of happiness that has to do with filling, and that filling has to do with producing, and that producing has to do with getting tired, with being permanently fed up with our life due to the conditions in which we live. gives. However, we do not question what is happening so that we have to constantly produce and be attached to those discomforts.
Better to be resilient or better to be overwhelmed?
I am a great critic of the trivialization of the concept of resilience, which is many years old and comes, above all, from existential psychoanalysis with Viktor Frankl. Resilience is understood as the ability to integrate suffering or painful and harmful circumstances into our lives in order to move forward. Any of us need to be resilient in that sense. I am against a self-help book resilience through which we must adapt to circumstances. Being resilient in the face of a breakup with a partner or grieving the death of a family member is not the same as being resilient because at work they are demanding extra hours for which they are not paying me. We do not have to adapt to everything. What I'm saying is that we need resistance. A resistance in the form of revolution or intellectual rebellion through which we precisely combat that constant adaptation that is asked of us.
It seems that the ball of change is in the court of the individual, responsible for the bad things that happen to them and for the solution.
This is called stress privatization. When we are blamed for the situation we are experiencing, that hand that blames is also telling us that we are the only ones capable of getting out of that situation. But reality is not like that. If you are born into a family with a certain purchasing power, it is much easier for that social elevator to work. If we don't talk to each other, if I don't know what worries the other, then I can't claim from the institutions what I lack.
Don't we talk to each other?
There are fewer and fewer banks on the streets, for example, especially in the centers of large cities. This means that the gatherings of the population are increasingly subject to being mere consumers. We are passers-by who go from one store to another, but we don't stop to see what happens to others. Simone Weil talks about this need to look into the eyes of the other and see what needs she has. Because in the gaze of the other we see ourselves reflected and thus I see that the other is not another, but is a self that has the same problems.
Returning to the previous thread, is a shift towards the useless necessary?
I like to be careful with this, because what is useless can be very useful many times. When I teach Philosophy to second year ESO kids, I see that it is completely useful knowledge. We do not have to rule out that thought, particularly dissident critical thinking, or any humanistic knowledge, or even the basic sciences, is useful. All this theoretical scaffolding is extremely useful to develop the intellectual powers of the individual.
I am referring rather to uselessness in the sense of leaving aside performance as a motivation to carry out an activity, not that it will not eventually be useful.
Here, more than the usefulness of the useless, I would speak of the relevance of the useless. What we must teach is that there are things that, although apparently useless, nourish our lives with values that transcend pure usefulness. With my students we see how the sun rises, “Apollo is rising over there,” and I show them a painting of the Pythagoreans giving thanks for the new day. He gives me goosebumps saying this (laughs). In fact, some students sent me a video this summer greeting Apolo from the beach. That experience nourishes them socially, anthropologically. It is nourishing them with values such as friendship, love, affection, and conversation. Utility or performance was not present at that time. The fundamental thing is to bring closer the relevance that not everything has to be subject to a do-for. That stop, that preposition is what is killing knowledge and education today.
I see all these assumptions linked to the concept of degrowth.
There is a verb that I really like and that I have invented from thinking about these things: unstop. We are having so many things that in the end we forget that having is not what fills our lives and we end up being possessed by what we have. My kids, when they buy the latest fashion item, realize that when they have used it enough, they feel empty. But we cannot be naive either. If we defend this degrowth, we must do so knowing that society is demanding the opposite from us: have, produce, spend, consume. In the end we must become participants in the fact that there is an ideological deception through which we can only become happy by consuming ourselves. I think that the only thing that would allow us to put a parenthesis and a critical consciousness are the humanities.
What would a good life be then?
I am very insistent with María Zambrano and an expression she has in “Person and Democracy” which is “we are solitudes in coexistence.” I think a good life is about taking charge of that. When we all go to bed at the end of the day we are left alone with ourselves and with some questions to face: what is life, what is death, what is good, what is evil... Or things that we They worry about our relationships with others or emotions we are feeling. We must take charge of that loneliness knowing that others are also lonely. A good life is about taking empathy seriously.
What do you mean by empathy?
For me, empathy has to do not with putting oneself in the other's place, but with taking charge of the other's pathos, of the other's state of mind, to know that they are not another, but that they are a self with the same concerns. than me, who is suffering like me, who is happy like me. In short, the good life is taking seriously with all possible depth that we are solitudes in coexistence, that we are individuals who have to take responsibility for the fact that, even when we are alone, we would have to keep each other company because only in that company is our well-being, It is good for us to know that we are worried about each other.
What questions should we ask ourselves to move towards the aforementioned intellectual revolution?
The fundamental thing here is not so much what questions to ask ourselves, but whether we are asking ourselves questions. The problem is that we slip and that has the disadvantage of not taking charge of our circumstances, as Ortega y Gasset said. And that is why I believe it is so important that there is philosophy in formal education. Also that our environment is permeated with philosophical concern, even that universities are trainers to ask questions and not creators of mere specialists or an intellectual elite. We must have the breeding ground for boys and girls to ask questions from a young age, and we cannot achieve that if we give them answers.
It makes a lot of reference to boys and girls, but what do we do with adults?
Spaces must be created for the question to arise. This has nothing to do with ideologies. It has to do with achieving a citizenry that thinks about itself and its own limitations in order to move forward. We cannot say “I am anchored in my adult life because I have to produce and support my family.” We all have to do it, except the absolutely privileged people. But we must have the courage and emotional and intellectual independence to realize that there are things that are not working well. The Government can also take actions to create critical citizenship from a humanistic point of view. Just as there are prevention programs against drug addiction or gambling, there could be cultural awareness campaigns.
As a summary: the humanities must be embedded in society, in everyday life, because we need them to be well.
We need them like air, like air...
