The philosopher always rebels against the scandalousness of our world. If we were absolutely happy, there would be nothing to think about. Philosophy exists only because there are «problems»: the problem of evil and injustice, the scandalous existence of death and suffering. Plato entered philosophy under the influence of the blatant death sentence of his teacher, Socrates: the only thing he could do was to react to this event.
This is what I tell my students at the beginning of the last school year: philosophy is necessary because our existence is not cloudless, because there is mourning, unhappy love, melancholy and indignation at injustice in it. “And if everything is fine with me, if there are no problems?” they ask me sometimes. Then I reassure them: «Don’t worry, problems will soon appear, and with the help of philosophy we will anticipate and anticipate them: we will try to prepare for them.»
Philosophy is also needed so that we can live better: more richly, more wisely, taming the thought of death and accustoming ourselves to it.
“To philosophize is to learn to die.” This quotation, borrowed by Montaigne from Socrates and the Stoics, could be taken exclusively in a «deadly» sense: then philosophy would be a meditation on the theme of death, not life. But philosophy is also needed so that we can live better: more richly, more wisely, taming the thought of death and accustoming ourselves to it. The insane reality of terrorist violence reminds us how urgent is the task of comprehending the scandalousness of death.
But if death as such is already a scandal, then especially scandalous deaths occur, more unjust than others. In the face of evil, we must, as never before, try to think, understand, analyze, distinguish. Don’t mix everything with everything. Don’t give in to your impulses.
But we must also realize that we will not understand everything, that this effort to comprehend will not free us from evil. We must try to go as far as we can in our thinking, knowing that something in the deepest nature of evil will still resist our efforts. This is not easy: it is to this difficulty, and primarily to it, that the edge of philosophical thought is directed. Philosophy exists only insofar as there is something that resists it.
Thought becomes truly thought when it confronts that which threatens it. It may be evil, but it may also be beauty, death, stupidity, the existence of God…
The philosopher can give us a very special help in times of violence. In Camus, rebellion against unjust violence and the reality of evil is equal in strength to the ability to admire the radiant beauty of the universe. And that is what we need today.