Binding: Paper, 119pp.
ISBN: 0941532119
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Preface

Roots of the Human Condition: this title suggests a perspective concerned with essentiality, hence conscious of principles, archetypes, reasons for being; conscious by virtue of intellection and not ratiocination. No doubt it is worth recalling here that in metaphysics there is no empiricism: principial knowledge cannot stem from any experience, even though experiences--scientific or other--can be the occasional causes of the intellect's intuitions. The sources of our transcendent intuitions are innate data, consubstantial with pure intelligence, but de facto "forgotten" since the "loss of Paradise"; thus principial knowledge, according to Plato, is nothing other than a "recollection," and this is a gift, most often actualized by intellectual and spiritual disciplines, Deo juvante.

Rationalism, taken in its broadest sense, is the very negation of Platonic anamnesis; it consists in seeking the elements of certitude in phenomena rather than in our very being. The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more "concrete" and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved.

Rationalism is the thought of the Cartesian "therefore," which signals a proof; this has nothing to do with the "therefore" that language demands when we intend to express a logico-ontological relationship. Instead of cogito ergo sum, one ought to say: sum quia est esse, "I am because Being is"; "because" and not "therefore." The certitude that we exist would be impossible without absolute, hence necessary, Being, which inspires both our existence and our certitude; Being and Consciousness: these are the two roots of our reality. Vedanta adds Beatitude, which is the ultimate content of both Consciousness and Being.

To know, to will, to love: this is man's whole nature and consequently it is his whole vocation and duty. To know totally, to will freely, to love nobly; or in other words: to know the Absolute, and ipso facto its relationships with the relative; to will what is demanded of us by virtue of this knowledge; and to love both the true and the good, and that which manifests them here below; thus to love the beautiful which leads to them. Knowledge is total or integral to the extent that its object is the most essential and thus the most real; the will is free to the extent that its aim is that which, being the most real, frees us; and love is noble by the depth of the subject as much as by the loftiness of the object; nobleness depends upon our sense of the sacred. Amore e`l cuor gentil sono una cosa : the mystery of love and that of knowledge coincide.

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