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It is not easy, but it must be said: human beings come into this world with the disadvantage of being just that: human beings.
I would have to justify this statement, but I think that at this point in the game (which some ecologists consider “overtime”), it is clear that those of us born under the seal of our species did not choose that fate. In fact, I believe that the awareness of the human disadvantage explains, to a certain degree, the tendency of recent generations to exercise their non-reproductive capacity and even accept (also to a certain degree) the long-awaited social legitimization of couples who biologically cannot have children.
Despite appearances, this disadvantage is not recent. It is not the product of modernity or postmodernity nor fierce capitalism. However, the latter has done its bit, mainly assuring us that our disadvantage has a solution, immediately espousing restorative consumption, encouraging competition, and upholding “ethical” violence.
To start, I believe (and I admit that it is a belief, a faith) that our disadvantage has no “solution” and that it is part of the human condition and our natural disorientation in this world (disorientation that can be summarized as not knowing if the path depends on the goal or if the goal depends on the path).
However, the readers should not be discouraged! Instead, they can console themselves that the problem has been the subject of reflection by the greatest philosophers since antiquity, including, of course, the Chinese, who saw themselves constituted by forces of darkness and light, or the Greeks, who investigated illusion and incompleteness. Naturally, it has also become culturally relevant in recent times. I thought that original sin was only a Judeo-Christian convention and also very old-fashioned, but it turns out that it was a hot topic among philosophers as contemporary as the Frenchmen Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, to mention only the ones I remember first.
Of course (and here the reader may become discouraged again), none of these, neither old nor current, has satisfactorily resolved the problem. In fact, the problem is even more serious: not only are human beings born disadvantaged, but they also enter the world facing disadvantages in bulk. We are not talking only about the human world or the world as we see it, but the world itself, the world as it is, the so-called Cosmos. Or will they tell me that humans are the only fools in a coherent reality?! Of course, if an external order exists, as rationalists and especially scientists believe, we would have the hope that one day, our head could also be ordered accordingly. However, this is a vain hope. Again, at this stage of the game, it is better to get used to the idea that there is no such order, neither internal nor external.
But let us take courage: disorder does not mean misfortune. There is salvation! In fact, there are many good fortunes (the thing is that we talk about which one we think is the most authentic). A good example of their diversity occurred in the twentieth century and its eve. During that time, as religions became increasingly discredited and, especially the “representatives of God on Earth,” half the West began to disband outside the churches in search of new practices; even new temples emerged: scientific positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, artistic avant-garde, fascism, pacifism, and existentialism. These were joined by New Age spiritualities, consumerism, pseudoscience, neo-Marxism, libertarian theologies, holistic therapies, and an increasingly wide range of possibilities of personal identity and belonging (many of them crossed by environmentalism).
Within this spectrum, in our time, a path forgotten for several centuries seems to be re-emerging: the mystical way, which in the end is no more than recognizing and accepting that human beings do not know anything about order and that, if it were up to us, we would never have any idea where we are going.
One of the great mystics of the past once gave a clue about the path to take when we do not know where we are going: it is the clue of the non-clues, which says, “To go where you don’t know, you must go where you don’t know.” (The mystic was the Renaissance Spaniard, St. John of the Cross, recognized by many as the best Spanish poet). This mystical paradox suggests that we forget the place we are going and the path we think we must take and move forward without any purpose, only sustained by trust in transcendent love, without pretending that it will take us anywhere or serve us anything.
In mysticism, the paradoxes are intensified when carried away by natural skepticism, we seize the mystic by the shoulders and demand explanations:
“Fine, what you say sounds very nice, but now tell me: what exactly is love, and how does it manifest? Specifically, how can I know that my feeling is love and not something else?”
Then the mystic (not St. John but another one I now invent) will say things that, for us, beings eager for control and power, will be quite confusing:
“Love is, first of all, a feeling: a pleasant feeling of defeat; yes, of liberating failure; a renunciation of controlling, governing, exercising any coercion and achieving any type of achievement or recognition.”
My invented mystic continues:
“By renouncing all this, the one who loves also renounces treating others and himself as means to achieve something.”
And he concludes with some metaphors, perhaps as mnemonics:
Love is an experience of the present; that is why it is symbolized by fire. The latter, in fact, has no remembrance of the past and has no future: it concentrates its being in the now, a time in which everything vanishes, burns, and turns into ashes. In our self-defeat, love somehow returns us to our condition of precisely that, i.e., ash and dust. Powder in love, said Francisco de Quevedo, another Spanish poet.
A quiet fire is the best metaphor (René Descartes achieved finding himself while meditating in front of this type of fire). But we all know it is not the only one, much less the one that prevails. We must admit that we are always won over by that passionate fire, the one that wants to forge something, whose primary purpose is to take Quevedo’s enamored powder and make it rise, possess, and achieve. It is a fire that tries to increase its power, take over the world, grow in the desire for possession, and spread, rising as a high flame that devours everything and is seen from the horizon.
Aware of this devouring desire, which in the end turns everything into fire until exhausted, human beings seem to have come to need a mystique that liberates those spaces that ambition cannot govern despite its gasps. It would seem to be a mystique that in education, for example, renounces the sad objective of “forming” our children to become “something,” or worse, “someone,” someone more than they already are; a mystique that allows us to accept a truth that for most of us represents the worst defeat, but contains the seeds of immense freedom: that at birth, human beings are already all they can become; that from that moment, the human condition and the surrounding world are in their greatest fullness – therefore, there is and never will be anything better than living in the present, cultivating that feeling of liberating renunciation called “love” (the same we have sung together with John Lennon in his iconic hymn, “Imagine.” Imagine all the people living only for today.)
While the idea of renouncing all future purpose sounds like what we abhor as resignation, we can also reinterpret this word (as I did many years ago in a little piece I published as resignifying (re-signing), converting the inevitable into the extraordinary. At least, I prefer to see it that way, trying to avoid the opposite attitude, that is, to consider our children, at birth, as incomplete beings in the process of completeness and to see ourselves as the ones who can lead them to it, thus justifying our techniques to persuade, limit, lead, pressure, evaluate and correct them, as if we really knew where we were going (all this in the best of cases, for almost always the pretension of guiding them to “be better” becomes tragically “to be the best” in the belief that if life does not have meaning in itself; it acquires it through comparisons with others).
Despite what I have said, it is evident that a mystique of the now (although it sounds great in the face of the unfair idea of bringing children into the world as competitors in a race) is not aligned with contemporary humanity. For now, living in the present requires, at the very least, some temporary bridges that bring us closer to another vision of the world. I do not underestimate the attempts to remind us in the multiple messages that proliferate on WhatsApp that we live today (Happy Tuesday, Happy Wednesday, Today can be a great day). For many people, these represent, if not a vivid feeling, then an authentic ideal. However, I think it is necessary to seed them a little deeper so that the reminder emerges from memory and does not have to be repeated daily.
In that sense, we can resort to a more detailed philosophy in this regard. That is why I allow myself a brief comment on what I believe is a form of thought that points to it. This is the reflection made by the South Korean Byung Chul-Han in his latest book, The Spirit of Hope, which, for now, I only know a few paragraphs that reveal the latter (hope) precisely as the bridge between a present with its own meaning and a future that is not posed as overcoming today and much less an achievement of triumph.
Han’s conception of hope has nothing to do with the calculation (not even half-intuitive) of what we expect to happen; It is not a bet based on the probabilities of what one thinks will happen. “Hope is not a prognosis,” Han said, quoting Czech writer and politician Václav Havel, “… it is not optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out later.” He adds, “Hope foresees and foreshadows.” His words argue the following (in opposition to Plato, who said that all knowledge is already in us as reminiscence and that we should only recognize it through our reasoning): “Hope generates its own knowledge…it builds a bridge over an abyss into which reason does not dare look. Hope perceives a harmonic for which reason is deaf. Reason does not perceive the signs of what is to come or the unborn. It is an organ that only traces what already exists.”
The unborn! Han’s words echo inside me. It is a fact that taking into account all the problems of the world, sensible reason has no choice but to consider the worst (“Either we do what science says, or we will be lost,” for example), dismissing as deluded the dreams that an unexpected solution will arise. Deep down, this belief affirms that the endless repetition of the same thing awaits us ahead. However, returning to Han, we can well see the future as something absolutely unexpected, in which (according to that radical vision of time that we call hope) lies the solution to climate change, overpopulation, pandemics, child abuse, animal abuse, discrimination, authoritarian and utilitarian education, misinformation, and even – hope upon hope – poverty, war, crime…
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher of deconstruction, described, I think, this “hopeful future” as events that suddenly burst vertically into our always horizontal gaze (they fall from the sky, I would say). This translated into imagination and even a little bit of science fiction, allowing me to write that in that unexpected future, for example, are:
… young people creating neo-hippie communes, where they have managed to solve the issue of food, housing and transportation, among many others. They have a global organization without hierarchies that encourages and supports virtual and even face-to-face exchanges (what used to be called “migration”). This entire movement is inspired by an anonymous mystical collective active in the third decade of the 21st century (specifically 2027-2030), which gathered billions of followers. One of their slogans was “They don’t expect anything, but they wait,” a phrase apparently taken from the text “Los Amorosos” by the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines. To me, this mystical collective makes me think of the series “Sense8” by the Wachowski sisters, which was very successful at the same time.
As I say, the above is part of an unforeseeable future (unforeseeable for us but not for hope, as Han explains). Open to this perspective, perhaps I can stop clinging to my one hundred percent anti-utilitarian position and think that having purposes – to foresee, plan, and fight for a future – possibly keeps the seed of authentic generosity towards the new generations and is compatible with a mystique that is daily life, a practical and present action, a way of thinking and feeling at this moment. Thus, the now and the future combine in a mystique that allows us to be informed, to dialogue, to argue and theorize, to know ourselves and each other by all the means that life gives us; a mysticism also (of course!) of the fun life, in its meaning of joy and entertainment; a mysticism of diverse ideas, emotions, and experiences; and all this without losing sight of the (possibly) daily exercise of the mysticism of salvation, understood not as a way of avoiding suffering, not as survival, not as the last resort in the face of our immanent dangerousness (I resist the idea that human beings are dangerous to themselves!), but understood as love, as a return to humility, as accepting to lose everything in defeat, finally and forever.
I deliberately use the word exercise to conclude this text with the words of a teacher who uses that term to decipher this mystique of resignification in education and the classroom. This is Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Italian filmmaker (who achieved worldwide fame filming both “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” about The Marquis de Sade, a work of eroticism and dark, sordid cruelty, and The Gospel According to Matthew, considered by many to be the most beautiful life of Jesus ever filmed). Pasolini says: “I think it is necessary to educate the new generations in the value of defeat, in dealing with it, in the human that emerges from it, in building an identity in which one can fail, in not passing over the bodies of others to be the first. In the face of this world of important people who occupy power and hide the present, before this world of figuring, of becoming, and before this anthropology of the winner, I prefer the one who loses. It’s an exercise that reconciles me with myself.”
This unique exercise remains, then, as a proposal to illuminate our lives and our classrooms.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
