Raúl Fornet-Betancourt has been one of the elders of Uniterra since the very beginning. He has been a promoter of intercultural philosophy in Europe, creating the first chair at the University of Bremen. Responsible for the North-South Dialogues and the International Congresses of Intercultural Philosophy, he is a reference for decolonial thought in Europe and Latin America. He recently created the International School of Intercultural Philosophy based in Barcelona and has been director and editor of the Concordia Philosophy Journal since 1982.
His latest book “With the Authority of Melancholy: Humanisms and Their Melancholy” is a vindication of melancholy as a state of the soul that, by connecting us with human freedom, acts as an antidote to modern servitudes. We have found it appropriate to share some of the key ideas that we consider interesting.
Melancholy , understood as Raúl Fornet-Betancourt says, is at this moment the attitude that must be taken to find meaning in this time of standstill. Taking advantage of the fact that nature has made us understand what our place in the world is, let us make this standstill allow us to think about what the destiny is for humanity and let us not rush to look for remedies and alternatives thought up in moments where we have been immersed in a thought and action reactive to the inherited conditions of the prevailing social and political system.
Raúl’s words, when he talks to us about boredom, help us understand this melancholic dimension that is so poorly considered in the vision of the human being today. Since it is only valued for the activity, possessions and successes it achieves without being able to respond to what is essential to human nature, which is the soul.
“Boredom disturbs the human being by throwing him into a movement in which he cannot avoid the appointment with himself and his relationship with time”. It is forced or forced in the sense of a pressure that is felt from the depths and, therefore, also more typical of human existence, which is precisely the bottom of (melancholic) freedom”(1).
Precisely because this leads us to “(…) the idea that true freedom is an expression of the experience of the finite condition as a melancholic condition (…) that does not sink into despair or resignation, but, on the contrary, is moved to commit itself to an act that can resist the temptation of activism and thus correspond to the most proper and original of the human…”(2).
I like this idea of being bored to discover who we are from our finite condition , which is so difficult for us to accept in a world that seeks immortality by making time run by without ever catching it. And from there, let life speak. It seems to me that the key to living this moment is in recovering melancholy as a way of feeling the depth of being. This is the measure of true freedom, deciding what I want to do knowing who I am and how I can transcend and find the other in me and myself in the other .
And this leads us to say with Raúl that “…the authority of melancholy must be spelled out in all its intensity, since it is sustained by the many and diverse melancholic memories in which the human race has kept in the nurseries of its cultures and religions the hopes of humanly satisfying the yearnings of the soul”(3).
Recovering melancholy means connecting with our history , that of all human beings, just as people do when we enter a crisis. We get sick, we get depressed, and by stopping we can turn to our memory to understand where we have deviated from our essence. And we recover when we can build a way of seeing ourselves more in agreement with the world.
This will be the way to survive the crisis we are living. Melancholy is a human experience that leads us to the other, to the process of “otrarse”, to use this beautiful neologism that Fernando Pessoa uses in the Book of Disquiet . It is when we see ourselves in the Other that we discover the meaning of existence and feel one with everything that surrounds us .
And it is from this melancholic position that we will find the place to establish a dialogue with other cultures as the only way to be human.
Text: Anna Vilaseca
Bibliography:
Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl “With the authority of melancholy. Humanisms and their melancholy”. Verlaugshaus Mainz, Aachen 2019.
(1) p. 272
(2) p. 275
(3) p. 341
