According to Aristotle, we are a specie endowed with the thirst of learning. «All men by nature desire to know», he wrote, in his Metaphysics.
But the love to knowing can be seen in a much less extolling view. Frequently we are too absorbed with our ideas, illusions and dreams, or with our sons, consorts and business, without time or will to spy through the holes that give access to the other side of life and to other levels of knowing.
What we love most is not the true knowing, or truth. The knowing we like is the immediate and conventional one. It’s the knowing that feeds our capacity of survival and our relationships with others. A knowing often mingled with myth and dream.
To worsen our predispositions, when a stronger impulse comes into our life and incites us to peep through the holes of life to the other side of things, we often don’t like of what we see. We distinguish uncomfortable and threatening realities – weaknesses, limitations, emptiness, wars, death…- or realities too complex and incomprehensible. And we run away.
But the love to knowing can be seen in a much less extolling view. Frequently we are too absorbed with our ideas, illusions and dreams, or with our sons, consorts and business, without time or will to spy through the holes that give access to the other side of life and to other levels of knowing.
What we love most is not the true knowing, or truth. The knowing we like is the immediate and conventional one. It’s the knowing that feeds our capacity of survival and our relationships with others. A knowing often mingled with myth and dream.
To worsen our predispositions, when a stronger impulse comes into our life and incites us to peep through the holes of life to the other side of things, we often don’t like of what we see. We distinguish uncomfortable and threatening realities – weaknesses, limitations, emptiness, wars, death…- or realities too complex and incomprehensible. And we run away.
Most of the times we prefer the dreaming and the myth - the myth that we are strong, that we are children of God (instead of descendants of apes), that we are at the centre of the universe, that our country is the best of all, or that man… has the love of knowing.
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