Philosophers

"At least two different ways of receiving the European legacy could be clearly formulated: (1) Continue to expose and spread the thought generated in Europe; or: (2) Try to receive this legacy in order to assume the same creative attitude that the Europeans have taken to build, value and spread their own philosophy. In option (1), Europe bequeathed us an object of study; in the alternative (2), Europe bequeaths us an attitude. Assuming the first alternative, we present the contents of European philosophy; assuming the second, we try to make philosophy as the Europeans did theirs."

"In universities, no one is expected to develop a philosophy, and if one tried to do so, they would be evaluated poorly, and considered irresponsible. (...) There is no explicit censorship against this, that is, no one who forbids doing more personal works or essays on national authors, but someone who dares to do so would be heard by a few, or worse, viewed with distanced irony, and the author considered a dilettante or a "weak philosopher". The "community" itself plays the role of censorship here, dismissing it as an external authoritarian mechanism. Authoritarianism was incorporated into the community."

"I am not trying here to define Philosophy, but, on the contrary, to strip it of any fixed definition, to leave it as free as possible to find its own definitions that are more fitting, provisional, celebrated or unaccepted. Just as I want to see it free of any "critical," "theoretical," or "profound" obligation, I would like to be able to experience it without the stigma of the edifying affirmativism that has haunted it throughout arduous times, as a struggle against rhetoric, relativism, skepticism, pessimism, and nihilism. I believe that philosophy has no duty to seek conceptual edification, salvation through ideas, or the construction of a just society. The less "tasks" it has, the better. I do not rule out the possibility that sophistry, rhetoric, relativism, skepticism, pessimism, or nihilism are powerful ways of thinking. It is not my task as a philosopher to "overcome skepticism," "overcome relativism," "go beyond nihilism," or "not be overwhelmed by pessimism," but to ponder whether skepticism, relativism, nihilism, or pessimism can develop as legitimate possibilities of thought. If skepticism is correct, we should be skeptical. If relativism sees important aspects of the real, we should be relativists. If our thinking leads us to see the world as nothing, we should be nihilists and pessimists. A philosopher has no apostolates or missions, and no obligation to engage in crusades. I have, therefore, no affirmative conception of philosophizing. Philosophical activity is, for me, ruthless, incisive and unforgiving, and goes as far as its categories lead it. A Philosophy may shake the values that sustain our society, or it may even destroy its own upholder. It is a dangerous task, whose outcomes cannot be predicted."

"(...) "institutional philosophy" has transformed philosophical activity into a series of automatic and lifeless movements; in an enormous apparatus where teachers and students appear submitted to static and meaningless routines. (...) students often write their work far from what they would really like to do, works that will be read absentmindedly (and then shelved in large thesis banks that nobody consults) by professors increasingly busy with administrative and political tasks, and who also offer, absentmindedly, the classes that their students will listen for by obligation."

"Helplessness is hidden or camouflaged under the professionalised forms of philosophizing, both in analytical philosophy and in the studies of the "experts on Nietzsche". The fragility intrinsic to all philosophizing (all living) is disguised as an apparently firm, secure and technical way of "mastering subjects" and constructing arguments. But even there, philosophizing cannot hide its original helplessness."

"A "quiet" movie in which "nothing happens", where people are shown looking through the windows, walking the streets, living in completely banal situations, or simply looking at each other without saying anything, does not satisfy the spectator eager for novelty ( ...) this type of spectator usually says, after watching an ontological film, that he did not like it because in it "nothing happens": precisely the kind of attitude that Heidegger intends to provoke in his writings, making the absence of pressing entities put us in touch with the being."

"(...) Paradoxically, the silent cinema inaugurates the act of saying, and the audio cinema the act of silencing. Saying does not need words, but silencing does. The lack of sound was not a "limitation" for silent movies, but rather the lack of silence. And this does not seem to be a strictly Wittgensteinian type of limit."

"Pessimism seems to have an existential density that optimism - even non-naive optimism - does not have. In Bernardo Bertolucci's famous Last Tango in Paris (1972), the unknown (Marlon Brando) whose wife has just committed suicide, wanders around Paris and casually meets Jeanne (Maria Schneider), with whom he has a rich and violent physical and existential relationship, in an unfurnished apartment, where conventions and the name of things or people do not matter (...) But the moment he can get out of the pit and get back into life, dress well and resume the exercise of usual conventions, knowing her name, marrying and being happy, it becomes a conventional caricature and his relationship with Jeanne abruptly ends (...)."

"(...) an abstract conception of cinema opposes a photographic conception, marked by technology; because of this I do not like it when photography is talked about as a precursor or pioneer of cinema; photography is related to cinema only mechanically; the poetic predecessor of the cinema, its thinking pioneer, is literature much more than photography; there is nothing intrinsically photographic in the cinema, cinema is as abstract as literature, and so opaque; nor is photography concrete; nothing human is concrete, or transparent, every human is predicative, it shows by hiding, includes by excluding , understands by ignoring, thinks by dispensing (...)"

"When a European philosophizes, all his problems are of essence, there is no doubt about the existence of his thought. When a Latin American philosophizes (and this could be extended, for example, to Africans and other marginalized thoughts) he has to prove that his philosophy exists, that he has the right to reflect. (...) I call this a requirement of "insurgency" of Latin American philosophizing: to come into being, the activity of philosophizing from Latin America must insurge against intellectual exclusion (...) not strictly because it "wants" to insurge but because it is not allowed to "arise" in another way (...) Philosophizing from Latin America is reactive and insurgent or it isn't; it is an imperative need for survival."

"Cinema does not eliminate the requirement of truth and universality, but (...) redefines them within the logopathic phenomenon (...) the universality of cinema is peculiar, it belongs more to the order of possibility than to necessity. Cinema is universal, not in the sense of "necessarily happens to everyone", but in the sense of "could happen to anyone""

"(...) A good movie is precisely the one in which the camera disappears, when we are no longer aware of watching a movie, while an avant-garde film tries to turn the camera to itself and show the hidden device. A jocular way of understanding this would be to compare the reaction of a human and that of a cat when we point to an object with the finger; while the human looks beyond the finger trying to discover the object to which the finger points, the cat stares at the finger; in this sense, the cat is avant-garde, it is more interested in the medium (the finger, the camera) than the object pointed."

"The study of "lexical inferences" (if they exist) should be something that oscillates (...) between ML [Mathematical Logic] and informal logic. In historical terms, we like to say that this is a wittgensteinean undertaking of the intermediate period (...) something that has already passed beyond the deception of the one-dimensional semantics of the Tractatus, but which has not yet fallen into the dense multidimensionality of Philosophical Investigations (...)"

"(...) the cinematographic image cannot show without questioning, without destructuring, repositioning, twisting, distorting. Cinema cannot be the pure "record of the real" that the photographic conception of cinema usually formulates (and which currents like Italian neorealism have tried to take advantage of)."

"Psychoanalysis's interest in discursive breakdown is not merely theoretical, but also because it is regularly marked by suffering, by some kind of emotional involvement (...) Suffering is not an external "accompaniment" to linguistic anomalies, but a constituent part of them. The discursive break is the manifestation of a psychic break. The generation of language anomalies and discontinuities is linked to the attempt to avoid displeasure. The actual compactness of the linguistic chain, that is, the correct filling of it through authentic signs would generate unbearable suffering."

"(...) why is it illegitimate to eliminate philosophies? Here, logical-epistemic motives and ethical motives are joined. (...) what was thought creates a way of life of thought, one of its reflective possibilities. When a worldview is established, it is indestructible as a possible form of thought, as a direction of reflection; the fact of having thought is inextinguishable, and the only thing to be done with this view is to accept it, complement it or even exclude it, but these three attitudes already imply its non-elimination: the philosophical exclusion of a philosophy by part of another presupposes the recognition of its existence, only counterexamples of its laws are presented (...) We cannot eliminate other philosophies for a motive similar to that by which we cannot eliminate people."

"We call "divergent" (...) all the systems of ML of the last century that challenge some aspect of the "classical" ML (hence its proper name "non-classical") (...) Rather, we call here as "hyperdivergent" those logical projects that present logic in a way that is incompatible, or very difficult to assimilate, with its presentation in logic systems, in such a way that it is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to define this logic in relation to classical systems of ML and, consequently, their own divergence as even a divergence. Historically, logical projects such as those presented by Hegel, Husserl and Dewey, for example, are of this nature."

"Let us think, for example, of the experience of speaking a foreign language and what happens when one speaks "perfectly and without error", when one speaks German "as a German", and in what happens, on the contrary, when one speaks imperfectly, when, through the babble of one who "does not master a language", a vital dimension is shown that is hidden in the perfectly "dominated" language."

"As Wittgenstein would point out, the word "poor" does not have an absolute reference, but acquires its meaning in reference to specific language games, in which it acquires its reference to the world dynamically. The poverty to which Marx referred does not necessarily diminish by extending the benefits to the workers within the alienated society. A well-paid slave remains a slave and therefore alienated and poor in the Marxian sense. (...) the worker did not enter into a state of "non-poverty" in the relative sense of Marx (and Wittgenstein), but he remains alienated, living with the minimum (relative to the society that alienates him)."

"Heidegger's text [On the Essence of Language] will not be indicative of an object already made, but will consist of clues about how to live an experience with speech, an experience that is not "narrated" in the text, but elicited by him. The text will try to put the reader in a kind of scope or "environment" that gives opportunity to this experience."

"(...) "meanings", besides having objective dimensions, are also hermeneutic and temporal-historical instances, precisely those that the analytical philosophize cannot grasp, because they are situated beyond their limits of understanding. "Meanings" are instances that can only be fully studied by other philosophies of language, capable of incorporating these experiential elements."

"Wittgenstein is a philosopher rich enough (or sufficiently vague and imprecise enough) to the point of multiple interpretations. Analytical, hermeneutic-transcendental, phenomenological, and Marxian-dialectical interpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy are examined (...) as an expository resource to better characterize various types and styles of twentieth-century language philosophies. The assumed pluralism (...) makes all such interpretations as viable, so that none of them dismiss the others as "false", claiming to have presented "the true Wittgenstein." This presupposes a conception of what philosophy is and a way of producing and developing it. In each of the interpretations different aspects of the same thought are accentuated, as in a Gestalt experiment."

"Psychoanalysis is not science. But very few things are science. Nor is Kant's ethics a science, but it is a high-level reflection about the human being in his relation with the world, as is Freud's reflection. What seems curious is the scarce insistence about the fact that Kantian ethics is not science, while everyone seems so preoccupied with stressing the non-scientificity of psychoanalysis."

"Perhaps the lexical connections ultimately rest on the will to live, on the will to power, on pain, on mortality or sexuality, and not on pure logical structures. If our lexical logics were still considered to be linked to the "dispositional" and the technology of thought (in a Hegelian-Heideggerian line) there would be nothing to do; then it would seem that we went beyond the limits of all that could be called "logic" (...). For a convinced Heideggerian, little will have been gained by moving from the usual logic to [lexical logic]. Notwithstanding this, we feel that there is an intermediate sensitivity to be harnessed and cultivated, which would be between rigid analytical logical forms and wild "continental" existentialism, a sort of existential sensibility of logical forms."

"By exerting this effect of shock, visual violence, assault on sensibility, aggressiveness in the show, it is possible for the viewer to acquire acute awareness of a moral or epistemological problem as may not happen to him by reading a treatise on the subject. This "sensitization of concepts" may even question some of the traditional solutions of philosophical questions offered by the concept written throughout the history of philosophy (...)"

"To paraphrase what Norberto Bobbio (...) once said about Marxism, "one of my favorite phrases is that today one cannot be a good Marxist being only a Marxist. But the Marxist has an irresistible tendency to be just... Marxist, "one could say that today one cannot be a good analytic philosopher being only analytical. But the analytic has an irresistible tendency to be just... analytical."

"It could be said (...) that language is of interest to philosophy insofar as the former is understood not only as a "vehicle" of concepts, but as a framework in which concepts are constituted, concepts that allow the articulation of the world with the intention of making it meaningful to us. In this way, concepts and meaning go together. This "meaning" will be understood in very different ways by the different philosophies of language, and consequently the constitution of concepts will also be variously understood. I call this conception, in contrast to the vehicular theory, the constitutional conception of language."

"I start from the perspective that all that philosophers thought and developed in terms of reflection on language, whatever their perspective and methodology of access (analytic, hermeneutics, phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, critique of ideologies, psychoanalysis) should be considered as "philosophy of language" (...) My idea is that these issues are best viewed not from a single perspective, but from the confluence of several of them."

"This minority that remains tense, that is unable to get distracted, that cannot relax, that listens to others, that is moved by their stories, that maintains an acute sensitivity to the problems and sufferings of others - this minority is usually sick, even physically, like the Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's novel "The Idiot," who was capable of a sublime surrender to others only due to suffering from epilepsy. "Normal" people are laid-back and therefore insensitive and morally inconsiderate, those who yawn while their friend is telling them about their most terrible problems."

"Here, ordinary humans seem to teach the rare philosopher something: if you want to maintain your mental health and not be destroyed by the impacts of life, it is better to ignore than to know, to assume a callous, summary, and immoral way of living - not to take things too seriously, not to try to know anyone in depth, not to know too much about the world. Ordinary people teach the wise philosophers the true negative essence of life: a life so wretched, so miserable, so painful and so unfair, that the only way to face it is through some kind of ignorance, and not, as philosophers have always dreamed, through some wisdom that would allow one to reach a kind of "self-improvement". On the contrary, life is so hard and inconsiderate that, in order to live it, it is more convenient to be a worse human than we already are; more insensitive, more immoral, and more ignorant. In the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, paradoxically, we should preach this message: Ignore thyself! For who can guarantee that wisdom and life go hand in hand?"

"Those who live in a distracted way are usually extremely insensitive to the sufferings and needs of others. They harm others already "unintentionally," such as the person who obstructs the passage of others without realizing that he is bothering them. He usually excuses himself by saying that he "didn't mean to," and this is usually true. However, no one should, in this tense and increasingly crowded world, relax to the point of disturbing others "without intending to". We should concentrate more, be more attentive, not relax to the point of forgetting that others are always around, and that by moving our arms in an exaggerated and inattentive manner, we can harm someone "unintentionally.""

"Theory of knowledge, ethics and aesthetics are not only three academic disciplines, but three major human accesses to the world (...) Making the world meaningful is an epistemological-ethical-aesthetic undertaking (...) Different philosophies of language will accentuate one or other of these functions. (...) Knowing the world is not all that man does with it, and many thinkers (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud) have already doubted that knowing it should be considered as the most basic and profound relation that man can establish with the world."

"It is shocking to see how children's desperate tears, during and after birth, are not taken seriously by adults. Quite the contrary, the baby is surrounded with immense joy, euphoria and celebration. The baby's helplessness is drowned amidst commemorations, gifts, toasts and laughter; the cheerfulness of parents, grandparents and friends totally muffles the unattended agony of the fragile and helpless baby, literally stunned by frightening and overblown attentions, cries and gestures. It is a very stark contrast indeed: the crying child surrounded by the laughter of exalted adults. How is it possible that no painter, no photographer, no cinematographer has ever focused on this moment of severe disparity of attitudes, such asymmetry of emotions and reactions?"

"A good deal of uncertainty and suffering will still await the baby after the primary crying stage. The baby will have to be nourished, one of the most delicious ceremonies for the two proud genitors. However, for the baby, it is still not very clear what goes in and what comes out of his small body. He does not know what it means to eat or defecate, but both things are unpleasant, so he cries bitterly at the moment of wanting to ingest and at the moment of expelling. There is not for him much difference between the two (the baby has not yet been taught to conceal this shameful proximity). All of the inescapable and tyrannical bodily necessities are already presented to the baby in the form of new cries and sufferings. Progenitors will become increasingly conscious of this and they will keep saying: “He’s crying; maybe he’s hungry”; “He’s crying; maybe he’s cold”; “He’s crying; maybe he’s tired”, without ever arriving at the ominous “He’s crying because he was born”."

"Of course, the possibility of the newborn not having the strength to endure the life struggle is just a possibility, not a necessity. However, the point is that its mere possibility is enough for moral imputation. There are no strong causal relations between methods of education and raising of children to shape their destinies in life. As they say, a child is "a lottery". The precautions that progenitors take to avoid certain risks for their children could be precisely the ones that expose them to greater danger. The many human lives that end catastrophically seem to illustrate the very high price to be paid in an attempt to ethically justify the "gamble" of procreation, even if made in the most serious way by the sensitive procreator. However, it is important that even when none of these catastrophes occurs, the success of the newborn in life does not exempt the progenitors from the moral responsibility of having put him at risk of falling victim to one of these calamities. Moreover, even for the child who has "won" the gamble, his "success" will remain forever and indefinitely connected to the unilateral nature of the procreative act. The gamble will have been won, but this will never be the child's own bet. The newborn may get lucky and "win the gamble", but he was never in a position to refuse to enter into the competition."

"It is not morality that denies life - it is life that denies itself, that kills itself by killing us. Life is suicidal. We try to live intensely, but life, intensely, kills us. Life itself is skeptical - it doesn't believe in anything it creates. It creates only to destroy what it has created. It doesn't need nihilists to deny itself, nor does it need suicides to commit suicide. We suffer because we are part of life's suicide weapon, part of what it daily kills."

"We are not nihilistic towards life - it is life that is nihilistic towards us. It is life that denies us, expels us, and kills us. Do we not want to live intensely and forever? Are we the ones denying life? Is it not life that denies us day by day?"

"Young children continue to cry a lot for several years; they cry and cry endlessly; they may bother us often, but they are right and we have to be moved by their crying and accept it as a perfectly fair reaction to what has been done to them; some cry until quite advanced ages, until finding other forms of protest and manifestation of their suffering; even as adults, we continue to cry in a variety of ways."

"The current professionalized philosophy has been openly understood as "apathetic," without pathos, exclusively driven by the intellect and leaving aside emotions and sentimental impacts. Only a few philosophers of the last two centuries (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger) have resisted this tradition by questioning the hegemony of intellectualist reason and the systematic exclusion of the emotional component in the task of grasping the world. In this sense, we can call these thinkers of the European tradition "cinematographic"."

"Humans live in automatic ways, maintaining routine relationships with each other while knowing almost nothing about those other humans they deal with on a daily basis; summary knowledge about others is sufficient to work and behave. They greet each other and ask "how are you doing", but they no longer listen to the answer; they only want to know if "everything is all right" in order to be able to carry on distractedly with their epidermal relationships. And if, by chance, someone says that they are not well (that they are very ill, or in debt), the person they are talking to will remain silent, as if the other had broken a sacred rule of conviviality; after a few minutes they will say: "But other than that, things are all right, aren't they?" Humans found this relaxed, indifferent, summary, and self-centered way of "leading life" when they realized that living life, really living it and not just "leading it," would entail a huge expense in terms of suffering, loneliness, reflection, and connection with the world."

"(...) my approach to these possibilities of the constitution of signification will be largely negative, following the point of view that characterizes my general philosophical perspective on the world. Such a negative approach in the field of the philosophy of language will be manifested in the fact that here we focus not so much on the successful generation of signification, which (according to my perspective) seldom or never happens, but precisely on the regular obstacles to its establishment. (...) But my approach is negative in a radical sense (...) Each of the philosophies of language constitutes itself as the negation of the enlightening project of the others, each constituting itself as the formulation of the inadequacies of the others."

"The problem is that they come here and talk about their philosophical problems in their language, and we go there and talk about their philosophical problems in their language."

"Films do not "have" a meaning that has to be interpreted, but they establish with the viewer an interrelationship from which an unintended meaning arises which was nowhere waiting to be found."

"These are huge, even colossal, temporal modules of the transition of all things toward their end, which—from our minuscule, singular, finite, and perspectival temporal module—make us see as static and permanent what is impregnated and corroded with temporality, fluidity, and terminality. It is as if being itself appeared while already hiding its decaying nature. The human mechanisms of concealing the terminality of being follow the concealing rhythm of being itself; every human tends to hide their terminal temporality and its frightening lack of value behind a slow and reassuring temporality. If we could grasp, even for an instant, the swift temporality of the terminal nature of being—like that mad scientist in Terence Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), who ages and dies in a few seconds in front of the cameras—we would be horrified. We can endure the terminal nature of being only because it is given to us little by little, in a periodic temporality."

"When someone (including philosophers) defends the alleged beauty of "having children", they refer to the pleasure of "seeing them grow up": first as children, then as adolescents, and then as graduated and independent adults (this happens not only in wealthy classes but also, in part, in more modest ones). However, it is strange that, when they speak about their children, they inexplicably stop at that point and never refer to their decline, their aging, or their decay; perhaps because they think they will not be there to contemplate this decline. The parents prefer not to see the end of this process, as if the child vanished into thin air. The residual aspect of parenthood is omitted; only the flourishing aspects of the child are visualized. The death of the child-residue is denied any visibility. The consummation of the processes is concealed as something dirty and indecent, not worthy to be shown."

"The place of birth as an organizing center is part of the circumstances of thought, but does not exhaust them. The "from Brazil" is not only a national reference, but an existential-historical circumstance, linked to the particular configuration of the world that we make when we see it from South America and not from Ethiopia or Canada. Names like "Brazil," "Israel," or "Paris," do not allude to nations, but to organizational prospects of the world. While it makes some sense to state that in a globalized world the narrow idea of nation is diluted, it may be fallacious to say that globalization suppresses perspectives and circumstances from which this globalization is to be lived and thought."

"In a first moment, philosophizing is, for me, the fundamental way of man's installation in the world: a way that is insecure, fearful, ignorant, unsatisfied, desirous, incomplete, and suffering. I link philosophizing with despair. Philosophizing is the very cry of finitude, whatever the scope or level where it manifests itself. These primary feelings are present in all people, so that at this first moment, and as was always said before the professionalization of philosophy, we are all philosophers for the simple and terrible fact that we are in the peculiar human way of being: finite, mortal, threatened, helpless, ignorant, and questioning beings, thrown into an unwelcoming world. In the midst of the tumult of their daily concerns and personal dramas, from time to time the essential questions arise in all people, literate or illiterate, inevitably: meaning, death, pain. These questions are immediately buried by the majority, or put aside; for long periods, one lives as if they didn't exist. In a second thought, on the contrary, almost nobody is a philosopher, not even most philosophy professors. For philosophers are those questioning and wanting beings who turn their threatened finitude into an obsessive quest for knowledge and a powerful form of sensibility (and sexuality!) that manifests total priority over any other concern; not because the philosopher sets out to do so, but because he is compulsively cast into this peculiar form of existence. It is as if the philosopher, in this second sense, exacerbates or brings to a paroxysm that which is a fleeting and dispensable moment for most people. The philosopher is the one for whom those anxious and uncomfortable questions are his permanent atmosphere, the air he breathes, the center of gravitation of his way of being. The obsession with knowledge, the susceptibility to all that is finite, incomplete and insecure, to the constant threat of the world, to despair without consolation, bring new misfortunes to the philosopher, not something like a "wisdom of life." On the contrary, humans who simply live the drama of being human without reflecting it, possess strengths, defenses, and wisdoms that the philosopher loses in the very instant he sets out to reflect. In this sense, the genuine philosopher has no wisdom to offer; on the contrary, he will spend his life trying to recover, through thought, the wisdom he believed he had when he was not a philosopher (Wittgenstein: a tragicomic example of this)."

"What is meant by "ethics" in this initial context of reflection cannot be anything too complicated or strongly committed to particular ethical theories, but rather quite a basic concept that could be accepted by them all. I propose to speak of a "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" (FEA from now on) to refer to the following concept: In decisions and actions, we must take also into account the moral and sensitive interests of others and not only our own, trying not to give systematic primacy to the latter just because they are our interests."

"Our "love for life" is always, in some way, unrequited love.... Life does not care about us; it does not even know about our particular circumstances. Contrary to what is said, life gives nothing for free, and everything we manage to obtain is snatched away from us. Life does not need us, but we chase after it, we humiliate ourselves, we beg and accept everything it makes us go through, even the greatest sufferings. Many are capable of the worst moral acts just to preserve their own lives a bit more.... To those who ask, "But, do you not love life?" we should answer, in a poetic way: "Of course I love life; I always did. I always wanted to live, but it is life that does not let me live, that limits me, that hurts me, that makes me ill and destroys me. It is not me who does not want to live, because life is everything I always wanted. I wanted to build things, but life demolished everything I built; I wanted to love others, but life killed everyone I loved. Do not say that I do not love life; it is life that does not love me, that does not love anybody.""

"Just as we do not perceive that the earth is in motion (to all intents and purposes, it seems to be perfectly still); just as we are unable to apprehend the gradual death of the planet, even though we are convinced of it by scientific arguments; just as we do not perceive the evolution of the species, even though we know that they are changing; just as we perceive matter as still and static, even though its entire molecular structure is in permanent motion; in the same way, we do not perceive the terminality of being in ordinary human behavior, and we see everything as stable and permanent. We see old and deteriorated matter (including aged humans) as always having been that way; we fail to perceive them as becoming, as having deteriorated and become old."