Tag: Innerarity

Innerarity on Prophets of Doom and Gloom

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

From Innerarity’s Ética de la hospitalidad (Ethics of Hospitality):

There is nothing more annoying than these prophets of misery who sit there eagerly awaiting for the humanity to destroy itself just to prove them right.

Did I say this guy was brilliant, or what? I’m sure we all know such prophets of doom and gloom both in the public realm and in our own lives. They especially love musing on how everything is getting more horrible with every passing day and how humanity is doomed after a hearty meal and several expensive drinks.

More From Innerarity on Time

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

The reason why I like the Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity is that he discusses all of the philosophical issues that are of interest to me (identity, tolerance, multi-cultiralism, progress) but without the doom-and-gloom attitude that other philosophers practice with such dedication. In Innerarity’s world, everything is good and can get even better if we try to make it so. Look, for example, how he responds to the tedious complaint about the scarcity of time in the world we live in:

The watch and the calendar are nothing other than instruments that provide is with mastery over time. They don’t rob us of our time, but help ensure we have it.

Innerarity reminds us of something that should be obvious but that we keep forgetting because of our love of blaming progress even as we put to use its benefits in order to formulate our complaints: people who live in a post-industrial society have a lot more free time than their ancestors who had no access to time-saving technology.

I find Innerarity’s position a lot more honest than that of the philosophers who paint apocalyptic scenarios and sigh over the sad fate of the downtrodden and the exploited as they sip expensive wine in their antique-filled studies furnished with the money they make from these apocalyptic treatises.

P.S. For those who are bored with my posts on Innerarity, I’m sorry, but I’m writing a conference talk about him and it’s easier for me to figure out what I’m going to say if I do it in the form of blog posts. Also, I think it’s unfair that so few people know of this philosopher’s work simply because he writes in Spanish. Spanish writers and thinkers deserve to be promoted and this is what I’m trying to do.

Daniel Innerarity on Time and the Other

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

With the loss of the significance of the territory, space has been replaced by time as the central concept in human conflicts. Nowadays, strangers are not those who live far away but those who live in a different epoch. Margins are not a territorial category but a temporal one. . . The real inhabitant of the “provinces” . . . or of the “periphery” is a narcissist of his own calendar.

– Ethics of Hospitality. (Translation is mine.)

This is just brilliant, people. This Spanish philosopher – who deserves to be a lot more widely known than he is – has come up with the perfect definition of what the Other is today. Ethnic conflicts that are based on disputes of territory are moving into the past. We are seeing more and more ethnic tensions that are based on the differences of calendar. People of the post-industrial, feminist, secular societies and the inhabitants of the feudal, patriarchal, fundamentalist cultures begin to clash more and more often in the countries of Western Europe and North America.

This is one of the reasons why the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians cannot be resolved by Israel withdrawing to pre-1967 borders. You can settle the territorial aspect of the conflict but that will do nothing for reconciling the temporal contradictions between a culture that has moved (albeit not without its problems) into the modern era and one that has not.

Daniel Innerarity on Human Dignity

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Please remember the name of Daniel Innerarity, one of Spain’s leading philosophers of our time. I am preparing a conference talk based on his work and will be sharing some of Innerarity’s ideas (as well as my ideas on his ideas) with you on my blog. Spanish philosophers (artists, scientists, writers, etc.) find it quite difficult to make themselves known outside of their country even when their work is definitely worthy of being widely known. Innerarity is a philosopher who definitely deserves being read but it is hard to find his books in North America even in the original, let alone in an English translation.

The translations of all the quotes will be mine. I warn you that I don’t translate word for word. My translations always sacrifice the similarity of the form to the original text in favor of remaining faithful to the content.

So here is what Innerarity has to say about chance and human dignity in his book Ethics of Hospitality:

The fact that all of us get born as a result of actions whose outcome is more or less uncertain serves as a guarantee of our human dignity. It is as if not being intentionally created by anybody gave us the right to escape anybody’s absolute domination in the course of our lives.

It is very impressive that Innerarity is not afraid of talking about chance and eventuality in his work. Fatalism is one of the qualities that, in the mythology of national character, has been associated with the Spaniards. Consequently, anybody from Spain who wanted to pass for a serious thinker had to be very careful not to play into this myth. However, after a while, trying studiously not to be what your national mythology expects you to be becomes quite limiting. Innerarity overcomes the fear of appearing old-fashioned and nationalistic in order to take his ideas in the direction he needs.