When Nietzsche wept...
25 Sep, 2007
João Calangro

Would kindness be the most unsettling thing in the world? This question comes from José Saramago (Cadernos de Lanzarote), one of the most revered intellectuals in recent Portuguese literature. A communist, materialist, atheist, and pessimist, known for his unconventional narrative, his work has lent itself to an endless torrent of analysis. In the text presented in this link, Alípio Maia e Castro (A Família - Uma Perspectiva Cristã), a Portuguese Catholic author, presents his thesis that Saramago is, above all, a humanist. By weaving his argumentation that leads to the discovery of a “Saramaguan goodness” and a search for the “human nature” embedded in the discourse of his fellow countryman, he does nothing more than exercise to the fullest the characteristic that the phenomenologist Luc Ferry (Learning to Live: A User’s Manual) highlights as essential to understanding the human world: “expanded thinking.” Like Ferry, a self-proclaimed atheist phenomenologist, but not a materialist, maintaining intense intellectual exchange with his atheist friend who is openly a materialist but a humanist, André Conte-Sponville (A short treatise of the great virtues), this possibly unlikely dialogue between the texts of Saramago and Maia e Castro refers us to the new ethics that Luc Ferry and the humanist phenomenologists believe emerge from respect for plurality: a “philosophy (and ethics) of love.” Does not this dialogue between antitheses, this plurality of opposites coexisting in a harmony that even Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of Ecce Homo, did not dream of with his hammer strikes, truly unsettle us?