Translator: María Teresa Pérez Fernández de Líger Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I was invited to speak about the humanities,
and when I heard, although I was very busy,
I couldn’t but accept.
Because not only do I think that the humanities are essential, basic
and indispensable in human life
but also that they are so precisely because of the clash
with the world of mobile phones;
or “immobile”, since they can lead to a certain immobilisation,
even if it is useful to have them in our lives, undoubtedly.
But reading, the humanities, knowledge,
reflection upon words.
Because the human being,
ever since the Greek tradition,
since the first Greek philosophers,
the human being -- you see, “humanities” --
was characterised by the uttering of a “phoné semantiké“.
Now that Classical languages are not on trend,
please forgive the pedantry of saying it in Greek.
“Phoné” - this is where the word ‘phonetics’ etc. come from.
And “semantiké”
was a term that,
the tongue articulated certain sounds that were not only of use
for pointing at the world but that were also little by little
creating that marvellous universe
that couldn’t be pointed at with the hands.
We cannot point at beauty, at justice,
at truth.
Sounds that were progressively creating what is actually the universe of life,
the universe that we can
And if we do one day, then we will regress to animality, of course,
since we are mammals
just like any other.
Except that, as I said, that semantic air created something that was called “logos”,
which was the word.
And the word was something that built the city.
And that’s why the first philosophers were always, so to speak, obsessed --
because, what was truth?
Because if truth in a society is built on lies
it ends up, forgive the neologism, “liefying” the rest.
The problem is that, as we find in one Plato’s texts, actually,
it is politicians who must organise that collective logos,
that society, that community.
But they should have an essential trait.
They need to be,
allow me to use the Greek word, since it’s so beautiful: “spoudaios”,
they need to have decency.
Because the lack of decency
tears society apart.
Because the lack of decency is founded on the lie,
on the opposite of communication
by those words that served the purpose of creating society.
Language is essentially social.
It served to connect, to unify, to provoke feeling, to provoke thinking.
But in a world such as ours,
teeming with information media,
which are, I repeat, very useful,
we are starting to lose our footing on language.
We are starting to slide and we don’t even notice.
We skid on language, without realising
that what underlies language is life itself.
Because this language was the fruit of reality, of experience.
That is why I find it odd when “philosophy” is referred to
as “love of wisdom”.
Never, the inventors of this word, that comes,
as you know, from the Greek tradition, they were never thinking about “wisdom”.
Philosophy was to know, to know how.
The “sophós”;
the “sophós”, the knowledgeable person --
in the first texts,
in the very first text of our literature, of what we call our cultural tradition,
in the Iliad, the “sophós” is the carpenter.
A carpenter was the knowledgeable one, because he knew how to use matter, wood;
how to touch it, transform it, build it.
And the “sophós” was the person who knew how to connect with others.
To connect with others,
but to begin with, to connect with the real world.
But it was also necessary to think
about the content of those communications.
In this regard, I have always been in awe
of the Greeks’ obsession with truth.
With
They said, for instance: a politician that lies
leads the society under his “power”, in inverted commas,
he leads it to its ruin.
But Plato says in a famous text:
This only is not the worst of it, even though this is terrible;
but that the politician starts to “liefy”, forgive the expression,
to “liefy”, to become lie.
OK, just a parenthesis, these terms I am using,
leave the Spanish Academy out of this.
(Laughter)
But lies enter your own brain,
your own mind.
And this is the start of what will become the destruction of the brain:
the presence of mental lumps that creep inside of us,
that take hold of us, and then we don’t know how to think anymore
because we “lumpify” everything we see,
everything we read, everything we feel, everything we are interested in;
everything that our deformed mind is interested in.
Hence the enormous importance, I insist, of political decency.
Twenty-something centuries after this was said --
this has been in Aristotle’s Politics for 24 or 25 centuries --
our culture has made undeniable advances;
all this space, all this ... all of this
is culture, is civilisation, is positive.
And to have, suddenly,
a pathology appear, illnesses
built perhaps on selfishness, but above all, built on ignorance.
Ignorance is --
Someone can know a great deal about a specific matter,
or have many university degrees, and still be intrinsically ignorant;
though not a born ignorant, because ignorance is learnt.
And it is for this reason that university life is so important, too,
and reading is so important.
I am now a resolute, passionate champion of reading.
It is one thing to have the flickering of mobile phones;
they’re unquestionably very helpful, right?
But reading is something else.
I have at home
a very large library, not full of valuable volumes
but of the books of my lifetime; that I bought in Germany
in the many years that I lived there, that I bought wherever.
But these are working books, right?
Now that I basically live by myself because my children have left the nest -
well, I just had my daughter with me, she lives in the US, and my grandson;
but my books are my companions.
I look at them and I can almost --
I am exaggerating --
almost remember where I bought each one.
They keep me company.
I have occasionally said half-jokingly, Kant,
my copy of his Critique of Pure Reason is falling to pieces,
it’s been a year since I last read him,
and when I walk into the room where Kant lives, he scolds me:
“You’re really neglecting me, aren’t you?”
So, reading, reading time,
turning time with our hand, feeling the page.
I have a friend, someone I appreciate and know well, who says:
“These 10,000 volumes that you have, what an idea!
I would have them, they would fit, in 5 or 6 of these devices.”
And I think, if after this talk I get home and instead of that library --
that as I said doesn’t have luxury books, I was never interested in owning
a prized edition of Don Quixote, no ... but I have 15 or 20 copies,
the Austral edition, any, because I read it very often.
Incidentally, it’s a book I recommend you read.
In it, I discover --
These things are not what I intended to talk about
but, after all, they have to do with the humanities.
In Don Quixote, I discover what literary genius is.
Honestly, I’m not exaggerating,
I’ve read Don Quixote more than a dozen times
and I have these everyday editions by Austral, by whoever,
which are underlined, tattered,
and I can, always, have a dialogue with Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
And now that we speak so much, rightly so, about standing up for women,
one of the most wonderful pleas for women
is in Don Quixote, in Marcela’s speech.
It’s one of Don Quixote’s most beautiful passages from a literary point of view
in Don Quixote.
When Marcela says that she is free and she has lived in freedom,
and that was the reason for her to flee to the wood.
Marcela’s speech, please, for my sake, please read it, find it in Don Quixote.
It is one and a half pages.
So, this idea of freedom,
this idea of culture, of me still being able to have a dialogue
with Don Quixote after having read quite a few other books;
to me, this is wonderful.
There is no other book that I have read 12 or 14 times, not even in my discipline.
If you came to my home one day,
I would show you the Don Quixotes, tattered, underlined, and this --
I swear it isn’t down to personal bias, no, no, no;
this is being able to have a dialogue with that man, Cervantes,
who had to flee, who had to go away, who was even in jail.
Nebrija is a similar figure, isn’t he?
Nebrija, who went away and who discovered and cherished the Latin language
and who set out to improve it;
and at the same time, was constructing his wonderful Spanish Grammar.
But that love of culture, that love of reflection,
that love of not letting ourselves be taken in by the surface of words,
is something essential,
especially in an age that is so rich, which is great,
in information media,
that are occasionally deformation media.
Therefore, that defence of humanity has to be a defence of language,
because it is what distinguishes us and consequently what separates us
from the other mammals, that we are so similar to.
This defence of language,
what is extraordinary is that it could first appear as dialogue.
The first great literary building block
in the philosophical culture of what we call Western culture
is formed by Plato’s dialogues.
And it is the first, there weren’t others; there are only fragments, unfortunately,
from the Pre-Socratic philosophers; for a variety of reasons,
those papers, papyri or whatever they were, were lost.
But the great building block that are Plato’s dialogues,
those have been preserved; and they are
There are more than 50, or 60 though I haven’t counted them.
I did count them at one point, and I knew the precise number.
Two interlocutors who give their respective views about words,
and about politics,
which is the most “arkhitektoniké”,
the most architectural of sciences, because it encompasses everything;
which makes what I said earlier so important,
that politicians should have decency.
But those dialogues are --
Those characters
they think about their words, they think about what they are hearing,
and thus there is a wonderful dialogue, Plato’s Hippias Major;
they have been talking about beauty,
having discussions about what the Beautiful is.
Imagine if we now started a discussion on what the Beautiful is.
I mean, having a dialogue: on what the Beautiful is,
what justice is, what goodness is,
what truth is.
So, they are talking about beauty
and afterwards,
the last words, the last three words
in this dialogue, Hippias Major, go:
“khalepà tà kalá”, beautiful things are difficult.
They are saying:
Well, my friend, we don’t know; after having talked for so long,
we don’t know what beauty is.
And as the old Greek proverb goes --
says the dialogue --
“beautiful things are difficult”, “khalepà tà kalá”.
“Kalós”, the Beautiful, is difficult.
This is marvellous, and it is handed over to us, in a sense:
carry on thinking, you who will read this some time.
It is why not only with Don Quixote: with Plato and with anyone,
I like to have a dialogue.
There are some modern authors too, that I have a dialogue with;
but with other modern authors, I find that they make me lose my footing,
and I stop following them;
and I like reading, honestly, I am a very good reader.
And I believe, too, that for you, who are younger, this means
that you need to cultivate reading and make others do the same.
Reading is different from the flickering of mobile phones
The flickering is fine as I said, for information, etc.
But when a friend sends me some article,
“Hi, I’ve written an article,
I’ll send you the file”, it tires me out,
it even hurts my eyes, though this must be a prejudice of mine.
I say: “Look, unless you send a paper copy,
I won’t be able to read it.”
Because of the act of reading,
the act of feeling the book with our hands
and above all, because of the culture of the book.
The other day, a very important person --
I won’t name names, out of discretion --
said: “No, no: reading, the book, is already disappearing,
everything will be on computers and mobile phones.”
That will mean the death of culture, the death of our brain,
the impoverishment of intellectual life,
of what we call intellectual culture.
And that’s all. Thank you very much.
(Laughter and applause)