The person is free, the universe is not

Of all that exists, we could say - in a somewhat radical but true way - that there are two beings: persons and all that is not a person, which I would call the universe. There are three ways of being persons: divine, angelic and human. And it is evident that the universe is not a person, however much the human person dwells in it, the angelic persons act in the universe, and the divine person creates and cares for the universe. And what differentiates the person and the universe is freedom. The person is free, the universe is not. And this difference is so abysmal that these modes of being cannot be equated. The universe's mode of being is far inferior to the personal. Moreover, one of the most current mistakes we are beginning to get used to is to treat the world better than people (or the same), and it is a mistake because the personal being is much more valuable than the universe, no matter how badly the human being behaves.

The universe is, it has its intrinsic, unchangeable rules, its modus operandi, We learn from the world what we know, from the world we admire its beauty. From the world we learn what we know, from the world we admire its beauty, in the world we live, in the world we are, in it we grow and we grow as people. Culture, true culture is to make the world more livable, more human, more beautiful. This means that culture consists in perfecting what we have been given: the world. And, on the contrary, to make it worse, to destroy it, is not culture, it is anti-culture. The cult, the care, the improvement of the world is what is proper to culture. There is also a cult of God, which would properly be religion, which is the way of relating to the creator. But the world does not love, it is not free, it exists but does not coexist, it is not a universe, it does not understand... that is to say, it is not a person.

The distinction between universe and person is key to understanding ourselves. What does it mean to be a person? Person means not only to be a creature because the universe is also created, but also to be a child. And to be a child does not only consist in being born, also the animal universe is born (to be born comes from nascor, (hence the word nature). Man is born feeling need, being dependent. The world, the universe is born being practically independent. To be a person means to be born in a dependent, needy way. co-being, co-it exists... it is not uni-verse, the person is the co from co-exist. As long as the universe exists, the human being co-exists and his or her condition of co is radical, because man alone is not possible.

The modern and postmodern pretension does not accept this dependence. And that is why there is much talk of autonomy and of a freedom that is not the freedom of a son, but the freedom of a god... deep down the modern pretension is that man is not a son but a god... And since he sees himself as a god, then he is accountable to no one, and in this goes their conception of freedom. It is the pretension of having no origin, of being creators, of manipulating nature at will, of not improving the world but of controlling and dominating it (power). And so ideologies are born. For example, gender ideology does not accept the laws of nature. And if it does not accept them then it cannot improve them. And if it does not improve them, it can no longer speak of culture. This ideology is anti-cultural, because it does not improve nature but changes it at will. It is a “social construct” they say when they define themselves as what they are. They decide who they want to be as if they could... but that is up to the creator, not to the creatures. They have dispensed with nature and everything is culture. But that culture that manipulates and controls but does not improve is, at bottom, anti-culture.

As an admirer of Leonardo Polo's philosophy, I propose that both modernity and post-modernity have not reached to the person. They have remained in the self. They have not glimpsed the person as intellect, gift-love, freedom and co-existence, but rather as reason, will and feelings. The self is important, the world of faculties, of potentialities is important, but they have not reached the act: love, intellect, freedom, co-existence, which is precisely what update those faculties of the self. A self, like Freud's, in which the key to his philosophy is the ego, A self like Nietzsche's superman, which is pure will to power, that is, faculty, potency, but not act, a self like Sartre's, where the self is not in the consciousness but outside of it, in the world, such a self is poor, very poor. And they have made a philosophy of man where instead of growing he has become smaller: a self that can and does not know what it can, with the pretension of wanting everything, without knowing what that everything is. A poor self that wants to be God, a power without knowing the act of personal being, which is what makes it grow. 

To these philosophies that do not go beyond, do not transcend the self, no matter how hard they try - let us not forget the work of Sartre The transcendence of the Ego-, these philosophies lack the hope of being a person. The person is a created gift that accepts its creaturely condition of dependence. To accept is not less than to give. To accept oneself is a challenge and a condition for growing as a person. And giving is properly what man can contribute. In both cases the person is a novum, The person is a novelty, probably the only novelty in the world: each person. And it is so insofar as it is accepted and is accepted by the creator and by itself, and insofar as it gives, and its contribution is acting, the proper of ethics. In such a way that acting follows being, that ethics follows the person, that the self follows the personal being, but a self that follows nothing but itself is a tragedy. Discovering the person, the act of personal being, is a way of discovering the key to human hope.