En busca de la presencia.
Looking for presence.
Traducción: alumnos de 4to ESO B
“Oh life! Nobody answers to me” It is the first line of a sonnet by Quevedo taken by Octavio Paz to open his poem, dated April 20, 1996. With his poem he concludes reflections: a dialogue with Quevedo, or even better: phase of a question from which not a single man is excluded and that may cover his or her entire experience. By the way, between body and soul, Paz used to write that our culture was the first alleged to abolish the dialogue about the supression of one of the interlocutors: the soul. Something similar happens with the question about sense. Sometimes it looks like a matter of intelligence to put off the question. Is it really? Everything points to the man, but the man, where does he point to? He does not know for a fact, “in fact” is just an expression of the language, with it we do not pretend to demand that the criteria of scientific investigation are accomplished. We might get to know, or not, for a fact if we are loved. To require a scientific test to know it is not proper of a sane person. What would we do with a certificate in hand? Probably feel the fragility of scientific demonstrations more than ever, their validation as long as they do not get replaced by other theory. Certainly the ordinary is science getting in the way of the question for meaning, but, we cannot ignore that a lot of people believe they can see a definite answer in it. Together with science, other realities that are not scientific, as political life, contribute to the construction of consciousness, thing that Paz has pointed out several times. He wrote, democratic liberalism is a civilized way of living in society. In my opinion, he is the best among those who have talked about political philosophy. However, he does not provide any answers to most of men’s questions, like fraternity, origin and ending, sense and value of existence.
