“Reading as prayer”: ethics, memory and spirituality in the thought of Joan

For his work “The fragility of the world. Essay on a precarious time Joan-Carles Melich He has just received, a few days ago, the National Essay Award 2022. Doctor in Philosophy and Letters, the writer is a full professor of Philosophy of Education at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His reflections on ethics, the limits of existence or good and evil have led him to earn, in the same way, a foreground as a leading author in Editorial Fragmenta, since his first publications. “Reading as prayer. Philosophical Fragments I” is a little book from this publishing house (specializing in philosophical thought and interiority) in which the author condenses, almost through aphorisms, his interpretation of the world and of the wisdom that has spent millennia searching for answers in religion, in the arts and in reason.

vindication of literature

As Harold Bloom already did when comparing the wisdom present in Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy with that of the literary works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe or Proust, Mélich proposes, against the teaching that is reduced to names and concepts in the abstract, use literature to learn to think. “There are two ways to study philosophy: reading Aristotle and Kant, or reading Dostoevsky and Kafka,” he writes in “Reading as Prayer.” “Over the years I prefer the second option,” he concludes. betting on the ability to evoke the narrativeof stories, more powerful than the sciences that are dedicated to demonstration.

ethics for peace

Another didactic axis of Mèlich’s work is the differentiation between the plane of ethics – people and concrete circumstances – and that of morality, theoretical. “All ethical response is in situation, here and now. Morality tells us a priori what we should do”, he explains. And from there he goes on to analyze the harshness and importance of sorry (“one forgives because justice cannot be done, because the victim cannot return, because the damage and pain cannot be repaired”) and the dangers of the weakening of values ​​in postmodern society: “If God is dead, everything is allowed. If God No is dead, everything is justifiable”.

As a good critic, he takes a look at contemporary reality and its problems, but offers a proposal for improvement in the face of its shadows. From the paranoid acceleration of these times (“everything that can be done quickly does not interest me”) to delving, without forcing but firmly, into the great contribution of Christianity to Western culture: the figure of the Samaritan. “It is not enough with Creon – the legality– nor with Antigone -the legitimacy. A third character is missing: the Samaritan -the adequacy”.

A finite being cannot put the world in parentheses. Neither the body, nor the memory, nor the experience, nor the situations, nor the stories

Deflate the balloon of authoritarianism

In the today of many peoples of the planet, of many human lives, that compassion does not exist because authoritarianism has been imposed in politics and individualism around everything, in addition to a lack of memory that the author conceives against nature because humans “make memory without wanting to”. In this line of thought, Mèlich laments in “Reading as a prayer” that democracy has become “a Godot” that many expect without ever having seen it, and denounces that the dualistic vision that has triumphed in the West since Parmenides is the one that has created the conceptual monster of purity, “the totalitarian ideal”.

To achieve the diversion of that thought made up of binomials of oppositions that only leads to Manichaean violence, Mélich vindicates everything that mixes (in philosophy, in literature, in art, in spirituality, in education…) the fictitious and the real, intimacy and the environment, the abstract and the useful, the past and the future, death and life. Because “a finite being cannot put the world in parentheses”, he points out. “Neither the body nor the memoryneither the experience, nor the situations, nor the stories”.

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