It's said...

A writer who observes reality from a height reveals a world which we, who move at ground level, are unable to see. Precision is better perceived from a distance, details are shown with more clarity, the grain in the haystack is singled out with a penetrating gaze, and everything becomes more understandable.

Josep Maria Esquirol holds out serenity in a world alarmed by a raging present, compulsive discourse, a critical mass of information that isolates us from any understanding of reality, and fuels a world of fantasies. He makes an urgent call for recovering the vocation of thinking. La resistència íntima: assaig d'una filosofia de la proximitat (Intimate Resistance: Testing a Philosophy of Proximity - Quaderns Crema) is a way of thinking that breaks with the politically correct and dares to offer a metaphysical, modest, and yet intelligible gaze on the challenges of modern politics, economics, and technology.

In this brief, meticulously composed, and carefully pondered essay, Esquirol pays tribute to the dignity of the simple lives of people who are not coddled by fame, notoriety, heroism, honours or wealth. It is necessary to return to normality of making small things great because they are associated with the attitudes of people who act from nearness, with no other aim but to do things well. If everydayness, simple existence, can be recovered, it is possible to enter the more immediate universe where others can always be found.

Strength, patience, and resistance are the same thing, Esquirol says. If one is not to lose one’s personality, knowing how to resist, how to endure, how to protect one’s own intimacy is important. So, too, is not giving in to present-day dogmatism. Esquirol is emphatic on this point. “True resistance to the present means not ceding to dogmatism. There is no other kind. Sometimes it will be public and conspicuous and other times discreet and silent.”



Esquirol draws attention to fraternity as the cornerstone of the famous catchphrase of the French Revolution, and examines it in order to characterise it as a distinctive feature of humanity itself. Given the certainty of our own limitations and the remoteness or non-existence of a paradise lost, we find ourselves living on the fringes, at the mercy of the elements in outer realms. It is an accentuated precariousness, somewhat apocalyptic, when the present is described as “a today degenerated since the first glimpse of dawn”. Here, outside the limits of plenitude, human life is only possible thanks to generosity: “The kindness of the actions of some people towards others [...] is the hope of the world.” His forthright upholding of kindness, necessarily active, detached and generous, is especially suggestive, although risky since it comes perilously close to self-help tips which entrust everything to hugs and affection for saving the world. Aware of this abyss, Esquirol enfolds himself in a more extensive, more populated world of philosophical references to classics and thinkers like Nietzsche and Francis of Assisi, and through to others of the present day.

His opting for sensitivity is not in opposition to the dimension of human rationality. He writes, “There is no need to make intelligence more palatable with the emotional dimension because feeling is intelligent in itself.” This affirmation leads him to make a distinction between thought, understood as creation and action, and knowledge, seen in a more pragmatic and passive sense. Esquirol laments the fact that the latter is being imposed, thus giving precedence to individualism, fatalism, and scientism.

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