AN ESSAY ON EXISTENCIAL
PERSONALISM
Guillermo OVIEDO GAMBETTA, LL, JCD
Roman Catholic Presbyter
Peruvian Navy
Civil Functionary Fifth Level
BRITANNIA ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE
Dartmouth, November
13th. 2007
Ladies and gentleman
Just in the very beginning of my words I
want to thank this invitation to dialogue with you in such an important matter
as it is announced and mainly with all the concerns we have at the beginning of
the Third Millennium.
It is not new throughout the history of
mankind trying to deepen in nothing less and nothing more as it is a wider
understanding of the very same being of man and his doing. Precisely BEING and
DOING are the main issues that concerns all the paths of the Ethical Science
Subjects
related in the intellectual and axiological formation have to be deepen in this
time of ours when it is not scarce the misconceptions and misunderstandings of
these two main matters. HUMAN BEING AND HUMAN DOING it is a fact that in this
beginning of the Third Millennium are some characteristics and distinctiveness
in all the related to the clear concepts of what human being is. So it is that
Ethics and Morals are intimately linked to Metaphysics due to the same fact
that ethical values have a big basis in Metaphysics, and not just as simple
ideas created or fashioned in these of ours now calls of the POST MODERNITY.
Metaphysics might be like the main sustain for
Ethics and so we have to give an overview in this aspect, and we do affirm that
Ethics and Morals deepen their roots in the reality of being. We ought no to
forget that a synonym of Metaphysics is precisely ONTOLOGY, that comes from the
Greek i.e. ONTOS and its correspondent in Latin ENS – ENTIS, i.e. BEING.
So we must affirm that all sciences study reality from its proper aspect and
considerations, i.e. Mathematics studies the being in as much as one and
multiple, quantities, etc. There is no science that does not study the BEING OF
REALITY.
Reaching this
point we must go directly to consider a certain anamnesis of this time of
mankind. So we shall go to a very rich German word, commonly used nowadays: the actual Weltanscahuung. The German speaking people might know that “Welt”
means world and “schauen” means to look, and “anschauen” to look with attention
and concern. So Weltanscahuung means the attentive observation of the world
surrounding us. That cosmovison is formulated by and ecological environment,
i.e. were we were born or raised; otherness environment, i.e. those we have
been in touch since children, teenagers; and the third is the axiological
environment, i.e. the values incarnated in those that were close to us: family,
neighbourhood, school, college, etc. It is quite different of idiosyncrasy that
corresponds more to a certain people, region or country description or
mentality.
We ought to talk about our contemporary Weltanscahuung
of the cosmovison of these first years of the third millennium to locate us in
the time and the space in which we live and avoid the risk of
being anachronistic (from Greek “out of time”) or anatopic (from Geek “out of
space”) and so avoid just theoretical or academic dissertations, and rather go
to the very same nucleus.
So
we shall go to what we call
THE
ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES OF THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING IN
THE ERA OF THE POST MODERNITY.
FIRST: We live years
of deep and bottomless time of SUBJECTIVISM. Nowadays many millions of
individuals have the feeling (just because they feel it so) “that things are as
I think that they are" and therefore they are careless of what might
really be the truth of their assertion and so they think this is a new victory
of freedom. This erroneous misconception makes them think that the less weight
your commitments might have or the less compromises you have, you become free
as ever before. This subjectivism has a lot to do with the
now omnipresent relativism. And precisely these affirmations conduct us to the
path in which we must make a clear difference between certainty and opinion. From the very pre Christian era Philosophers
made a clear difference of EPISTEME and DOXA. The first one was referred to certainty,
sureness, conviction, and was the answer to all that was necessary: horses are
mammals, sparrows are birds, etc. Instead all that was contingent (all that
could might have been or not deserved an opinion, the word for doxa); you might
have a dog as a pet or not; you might like pastrami or not... it depends of
your own opinion… The certainties are
absolute; the opinions are relative.
SECOND: Now exists a
sort of MEDIATIC RAGE that means nothing else that people, men and women, young
and adults are experts in computer science and compatible branches of systems
and who maintain them with a mentality of "chronic" mediatic
dependency, "contagious", "progressive", that takes them to
live almost unconsciously in some occasions in a virtual world. A species of
contemporary connatural ability to the handling of the computer science means,
that it might seem today inconceivable the life without messenger, chat,
electronic mails, Skype, etc. being created almost like an
"addiction".
THIRD: A time of an OVERFLOWING AFFECTIVITY and FEELINGS
that take to understand in a sort of "affective and sentimental key”
essential aspects of the pentagram of human life, more than to be based on a
rational and intellective understanding and comprehension of the reality in
ethical key, that is the correct thing; that is precisely what in French can be
expressed as “bonhomie”: being a good man. Today, it seemed that it is
understood in key of feelings and affection that can take them not to measure
the consequences of their personal acts, so that an individual, in some more by
feelings than by rational decisions, thought, meditated.
FOURTH: We live time
of ABSENCE OF CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES. This has to be understood and translated in a remarkable poverty of ideas, of clear and
defined concepts, and therefore a great poverty of lexicon or vocabulary: no
words to express something that is happening; a certain incapacity to judge
situations that take to administer them responsibly their individual freedom
and are why it is frequent to listen to phrases as this one "I do not know
what happens to me", "I do not know how to call to such-and-such
situation", etc. is a fact that many persons do not know the essential
meaning of certain words of daily life. It is a real fact pointed by G. K.
Chesterton that usually one lives according to what he thinks..., but if the
conceptual structures are complicated or up side down logically, the personal
life is complicated and we end up thinking as we live...
FIFTH: A time at
which individuals receive great PRESSURE
OF THE EXTERNAL GROUP of which they are in a closer and immediate circle,
like relatives, schoolmates, colleagues and friends. It is true that we have entered in
the globalization era and the world is like a village, and of course the media
help a lot in establish links and contacts in such a speed that some years ago
it was just unthinkable. Almost everybody knows everything and their are some
opinion waves that they press in certain attitudes, that might conduct mankind,
in certain cases more like a flock, rather than singular individuals with
capacity of decision, and therefore to decide by their own selves. This group
pressure surrounds and involves society and some patterns of conduct obey much
more to those movements of currents. We ought to have the capacity to live with
our very own feet very in the Earth and so have the power to judge with common sense
our times and our realities. Times have changed in there is no doubt that in
the last half century the whole world has changed more than in two thousand. We must know the situations and circumstances
of this time of ours in order to diagnose suitably the treatment and to obtain
its total health as individual persons and as human society.
Lawyers can never leave aside the
Metaphysical and thus also ethical aspects in their daily commitments. Please
let me quote some outstanding words of the Great Pontiff John Paul II,
addressed to the United Nations General Assembly in his first visit on October
2nd., 1979. They need not further commentaries and with those words
I finish my dissertation, thanking you for your attention and good will, asking
God Our Lord to enlighten our minds and strengthen our wills of service and
good will. Our personal ethos will lead us, once well rooted in the truth of
values to a more just society, remembering the words of the great Roman Lawyer,
Ulpianus, IUSTITIA EST CONSTANT ET PERPETUA VOLUNTAS IUS SUUM QUIQUE TRIBUENDI.
And so laws might fulfil its perfect definition given by the same Ulpianus:
QUAEDAM RATIONALIS ORDINATIO AD BONUM COMMUNE PROMULGATA AB EO QUI CURAM
COMMUNITATIS HABET.
And now we
might go to the outstanding address of John Paul II.
“…man lives at the same time both in the world of
material values and in that of spiritual values. For the individual living and
hoping man, his needs, freedoms and relationships with others never concern one
sphere of values alone, but belong to both. Material and spiritual realities
may be viewed separately in order to understand better that in the concrete
human being they are inseparable, and to see that any threat to human rights,
whether in the field of material realities or in that of spiritual realities,
is equally dangerous for peace, since in every instance it concerns man in his
entirety. Permit me, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, to recall a constant
rule of the history of humanity, a rule that is implicitly contained in all
that I have already stated with regard to integral development and human
rights. The rule is based on the relationship between spiritual values and
material or economic values. In this relationship, it is the spiritual values
that are pre-eminent, both on account of the nature of these values and also
for reasons concerning the good of man. The pre eminence of the values of the
spirit defines the proper sense of earthly material goods and the way to use
them. This pre eminence is therefore at the basis of a just peace. It is also a
contributing factor to ensuring that material development, technical
development and the development of civilization are at the service of what
constitutes man. This means enabling man to have full access to truth, to moral
development, and to the complete possibility of enjoying the goods of culture
which he has inherited, and of increasing them by his own creativity. It is
easy to see that material goods do not have unlimited capacity for satisfying
the needs of man: They are not in themselves easily distributed and, in the
relationship between those who possess and enjoy them and those who are without
them, they give rise to tension, dissension and division that will often even
turn into open conflict. Spiritual goods, on the other hand, are open to
unlimited enjoyment by many at the same time, without diminution of the goods
themselves. Indeed, the more people share in such goods, the more they are
enjoyed and drawn upon, the more then do those goods show their in destructible
and immortal worth. This truth is confirmed, for example, by the works of
creativity -- I mean by the works of thought, poetry, music, and the figurative
arts, fruits of man's spirit.
A critical analysis of our modern civilization shows
that in the last hundred years it has contributed as never before to the
development of material goods, but that it has also given rise, both in theory
and still more in practice, to a series of attitudes in which sensitivity to
the spiritual dimension of human existence is diminished to a greater or less
extent, as a result of certain premises which reduce the meaning of human life
chiefly to the many different material and economic factors -- I mean to the
demands of production, the market, consumption, the accumulation of riches or
of the growing bureaucracy with which an attempt is made to regulate these very
processes. Is this not the result of having subordinated man to one single
conception and sphere of values?
What is the link between these reflections and the
cause of peace and war? Since, as I have already stated, material goods by
their very nature provoke conditionings and divisions, the struggle to obtain
these goods becomes inevitable in the history of humanity. If we cultivate this
one-sided subordination of man to material goods alone, we shall be incapable
of overcoming this state of need. We shall be able to attenuate it and avoid it
in particular cases, but we shall not succeed in eliminating it systematically
and radically, unless we emphasize more and pay greater honour, before
everyone's eyes, in the sight of every society, to the second dimension of the
goods of man: the dimension that does not divide people but puts them into
communication with each other, associates them and unites them.
I consider that the famous opening words of the
Charter of the United Nations, in which the peoples of the United Nations,
determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, solemnly
reaffirmed "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of
the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and
small," are meant to stress this dimension.
Indeed,
the fight against incipient wars cannot be carried out on a merely superficial
level, by treating the symptoms. It must be done in a radical way, by attacking
the causes. The reason I have called attention to the dimension constituted by
spiritual realities is my concern for the cause of peace, peace which is built
up by men and women uniting around what is most fully and profoundly human,
around what raises them above the world about them and determines their
indestructible grandeur -- indestructible in spite of the death to which
everyone on earth is subject. I would like to add that the Catholic Church and
I think I can say the whole of Christianity sees in this very domain its own
particular task. The Second Vatican Council helped to establish what the
Christian faith has in common with the various non-Christian religions in this
aspiration. The Church is therefore grateful to all who show respect and good
will with regard to this mission of hers and do not impede it or make it
difficult. An analysis of the history of mankind, especially at its recent
stage, shows how important is the duty of revealing more fully the range of the
goods that are linked with the spiritual dimension of human existence. It shows
how important this task is for building peace and how serious is any threat to
human rights. Any violation of them, even in a peace situation, is a form of
warfare against humanity.
Those were the words of John Paul II. He defended
with all his might ant spiritual strength the individuality of humans and the
essential ethical dimension of their own beings.
Thank you very much for your kind attention.
