Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

Edgar Morin and many other thinkers like Habermas say that an education, a philosophy of life is necessary, but the question of what life is is not simple.

Many times when we are faced with a serious problem, a loss or a radical change in our lives we ask what the meaning of life, the question without a definitive answer was faced by many philosophers, novelists, theologians and poets.

I remember the Song of Tamoio de Gonçalves Dias, “do not cry my son, do not cry that life is fighting hard, living is fighting …”, although it was only a poetry she helped me throughout life.

Shopenhauer (1851) and Tolstoy (1886) reflected the fact that our lives end up with more, so it is impossible to think of one theme without the other, since life ends in a point, has a finitude, refers us to infinity and Surely this has made all people think of beyond-death, in their cosmogonies.

Belief in God and an afterlife alleviates the situation, to the point that some philosophers admit that if God does not exist, human life is absurd, but Albert Camus and Thomas Nagel have accentuated the little objective significance of our lives, so we walk in the different direction of the infinite, the Nothingness, the nihilism, but the conflict between them awakens Ek-sistence, I Martin Heidegger stressed in Being and Time.

Existentialism is fundamental, because the thought in the line of Camus, leads to live what he described as “absurd man” who lives the life “without appeal”, in his view this person embrace life as fully as possible even without forget or deny some fundamental rational of it, this is at bottom the way of nihilism.

Nagel’s thinking is more cosmological, to the liking of some in our daily life, as the Brazilian Mario Sergio Cortella, the recognition of our insignificance before the cosmos, the light of this thought that seems to go towards the infinite, and will not, avoids an exaggerated and dramatic attitude, irony being the most appropriate, is a form of skepticism.

Both paths are attractive because they are facilitators, think about the essence, this is what “is” of the things of life and of the world, and what in fact they are, that is, what is the “being” in this world before the cosmos and the infinite?

This path also refers to the question of the principle, what we have already been and where we came from, must not be displaced from time but built in time.

Schopenhauer, A. The suffering of the world (1851 first publication).

Tolstoy, L. The death of Ivan Ilitch (1886 first publication).