PERDOAR

in the experience of gratuity means to make possible a future where the opening to the
radical novelty of the human life that encloses forgiveness becomes reality.
This gratuity, which is found in the root of the term forgiveness, asks not only to
be introduced into the children’s world, but also to be kept in the adult’s world. Today
we live immersed in a world where, much too frequently, all reference to gratuity is
banned. Currently, the «condition of the modern man» (H. Arendt) is ruled by technique
and by the (new) technologies as a way of life adopted as language, the language of
logic, a language apt for science, but radically insufficient for the development of the
humanity of men and women of our time. The reduction of the word to a sign and of the
sign to its logical meaning, forgetting or despising the symbolic value of every human
word, admits the dehumanization and the technicalization (the «logicalization») of all
that is human, making the human being incapable of language (symbolic), incapable of
the human and humanizing word. The consequences of the establishment of the truth as
identity between thought and language, that Parmenides put in the origin of Greek
thought (metaphysical), that is, the principle of identity (which approximates briefly to
formulating a=a), we now see them developing with great amplitude, and in such a way
that they reestablish —and are commercialized— as the form of independent life of the
times to come. The reduction of the world and of language to logic identity determines
us as objects of the same technique, with no need or possibility of having a meaning, of
re-creating it again. We find ourselves immersed in a nihilistic world from which it
becomes difficult to free ourselves, precisely because of it character, necessarily
globalizing and all embracing. The consequences of these nihilistic times we live in
now, are of an incalculable reach, so far. Currently, to make it apt for gratuity, we must
face repeatedly the question in search of truth, to face truth itself, that which philosophy
(to say it according to our Western tradition) has tried to do since the beginnings. We
must again situate the fundamental role of philosophy, of every form of comprehension
of truth. In a recent article in Revista Catalana de Teologia , Dr. Ignasi Boada,
dialoging with Heidegger, wrote:
The word filosofiva thought in the scope of essential thought, acquires a quite
different dimension and significance from that of a simple academic occupation to
which we can dedicate ourselves or not, aiming our more or less «subjective»
preferences or our tastes, without this dedication or not, having greater consequences.
We can chose «studying» Philosophy, Journalism, Law or Political Sciences and it may
seem to us that | what is at stake is simply the activity in which we will «occupy»
ourselves in the future. It is normal to think that the decision has to depend upon our
tastes. That is not so: in filosofiva something else is at stake, aside from the
expression of certain «subjective» preferences. Neither is it an academic discipline
having as a «goal» a comprehension and a description of certain abstract concepts or of
certain methods of knowledge. In filosofiva something essential occurs, because it
constitutes a human means of answering the fact of «being called by its being» […].
The characteristic gesture of the thought that thinks is not so much the question that
inclines towards the system, as the concentrated listening; therefore, there is no thought
that thinks immediately, but only after a patient preparation. 38
38 Ignasi BOADA, «Heidegger lector de Parmènides: Repensar la veritat», Revista Catalana de Teologia
XXIV/1 (1999) 184-185.
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