He has just won the National Essay Prize for The Fragility of the World (published by Tusquets) and Joan-Carles Mèlich (Barcelona, 1961) feels "surprised and very pleased because it is one of the best recognitions an author can receive that all life has written essays". The jury believes that it is an essay "profoundly knowledgeable about the contemporary world and courageous" in which "it carries out a healthy critical exercise that reminds us that we are not the sole owners of the planet." Even with emotion, the Catalan philosopher speaks with La Vanguardia on the award-winning book.
What is 'The fragility of the world'?
An attempt to think of the world as the human being as a being in the world. There are two dimensions in the world, one that I call the grammatical dimension, in which the human being is an heir, he inherits a grammar, a language, a moral, some gestures, he inherits a world at birth. But at the same time the world also has a dimension of unavailability, there is something that escapes us. And it is very important to defend that fragility.
And I think that one of the contributions of the book is that the prevailing technological system, the technological logic, which is the empire of haste and which is dominating everything, be it education, human relations or friendship, all the great human relations they are captured by this logic of haste, it has broken the fragility of the world.
And if the world is lost, we lose ourselves, we cannot live apart from the world, we are beings in the world. Faced with the unavailability of the world, that the world does not belong to us, that it is not within our reach, technological logic, that of haste, has told us that everything is possible. That we can do with the world what we want. If we do, the world will die, but so will we. The book is a cry of alert. It is not a book about the pandemic, but from the pandemic, hence its subtitle, Essay on a Precarious Time.
Are you talking about the pandemic as an effect of this rush, this acceleration?
It is not that the pandemic has brought new things in this regard, but how some people and groups have reacted. I work in a Faculty of Educational Sciences. And I have heard from many people that the pandemic will have something positive, that we will finally make education up to the times. But for there to be education, there must be a face-to-face, skin-to-skin relationship, creating an atmosphere, I have to be able to see the other's face. Without that there is no education, there can be learning or instruction, but education is an ethical face-to-face relationship with the other. That there are aspects of education that can be worked on under the logic of competencies or online connection is very good, but the most important thing is the face-to-face relationship.
For me what happens is very worrying, because relationality is lost, ethics is a relationship, if we lose it, we lose the relationship with the world, with others, with things. The basis of human existence is the relationship with the world. The opening sentence of the book is a quote from Kafka: "In the fight between you and the world, defend the world." Today many people would say the opposite, they are more important. No. The world has to be taken care of. In education we do it taking care of the tradition, with the reading of the classics, for example.
Maintain the relationship with the absent.
That is essential. Reading is a dialogue with the absent, with tradition. Technological systems do not value reading the classics. Caring for the world is caring for our cultural, symbolic tradition, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Greek tragedies, Plato, the Bible, but not that of those who believe, the Bible is our heritage. Taking care of the world is taking care of a library.
Is that why you speak of your approach as literary philosophy?
It is not a literature of ideas, literary philosophy is to be aware or discover that in addition to the western metaphysical tradition that has thought about the world from the point of view of the philosophical system, it is also possible to think from change, movement, uncertainty, ambiguity. . The dominant metaphysical philosophy in the West since Plato has thought of the world of ideas to the detriment of shadows, of change, of transformations. I defend the philosophy of great writers, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, María Zambrano.
Woolf shows in The Waves that the world is movement, human life is constantly changing. The basis of Greek tragedy was moral ambiguity, and that is what metaphysical philosophy has not tolerated. That is why I defend a literary philosophy that pays attention to the great names of literature, of the literary canon, who express very powerful thought, Dostoyevski for example.
Has Western philosophy considered this fragility very little, has it not been comfortable?
It is not easy to accept fragility, it means that there are no firm and sure truths, that we live in a provisional state. It does not mean that everything is relative, but it does mean that everything is in relation, that we are finite beings, mine is a philosophy of finitude, to be finite is to be in relation to the world, others and things, to live in uncertainty, the ambiguity. The modern subject is an individual subject separated from the world and we cannot separate ourselves from the world, we must take care of it because it is fragile.
There are different social systems that, when their symbolic systems are imposed, break the fragility of the world and lead us to destruction as human beings. And we are not human because we have human essence. There is no human essence, what there is are relationships with others, always uncertain, of compassion. The ethic that stems from the fragility of the world is an ethic of compassion, shame, and forgiveness.
