Rediscovering the experience

Jaime Alonso de Velasco, student del Double Degree in Law and Philosophy,
of the University of Navarrabrings us an interesting reflection
on the meaning of individuality
 

Sometimes, after a continuous intellectual activity, inner calm requires an exercise of silent rebellion, to break the subtle chains generated by an excessive rationalisation of reality. That is why, even if only in the eternal brevity of written words, I have decided to move away from the exhaustive intellectual rigour demanded by any philosophical exercise of category, to see how far the poetry of restless beats leads me. 

But first of all, I must come clean with the reader; I am not writing these brief reflections out of purely intellectual motivations or out of a disinterested thirst for truth, if that is possible; on the contrary, it is precisely an experience staff, individual, which at times has threatened to overthrow the rational Structures that I believed to be solidly rooted in my being, that has prompted me to address the topic of individuality .

I don't like to name this intimate and profound experience with the word "feeling", probably because of the wrong meaning it has been given throughout history. feelingprobably because of the erroneous meaning it has been given throughout history. And the fact is that, in spite of being found in the deepest part of the human person, it is one of the most unknown areas in the broad panorama of existence. 

Such ignorance has produced all sorts of unfair and disproportionate assessments, from its rejection and contempt, as an obstacle to human virtues, to its recent coronation as the exclusive and unquestionable guide of all human action. Faced with such a perversion of the signifier, we run the risk of losing sight of the true meaning of what we name. 

That is why I prefer to use the word "life". experiencewhich contains within itself the strength and depth - life, after all - of the silent breezes and hurricanes that are unleashed within each person.

So today I am writing to give vent to an experience of existential repulsion and rejection, born as a reaction to an idea that has dug its venomous fangs without prior notice into the intimacy of my being. This idea was nothing more and nothing less than an attack on what I most properly possess, on my individuality: the suggestion that my most unfathomable experiences, those that had cleaved into me like a sword, to the point of wounding and forging the essence of my person, were not really mine, but those of the whole human race.

The terrible affirmation that those indescribable storms that had shaken my insides, wrenching from me groans of pain or joy, more vivid and immense than any external word or gesture, were something as common, as vulgar, as a flu or a cold. 

There was something of a grotesque mockery in this threatening thought, for is there a more stupid, more enormous mistake than to consider one's own experiences as unique, to understand one's own individuality as exclusive, when those experiences and that individuality are in reality a tiny grain of sand on the great beach of humanity? The proofs of my mistake were undeniable: all men love and this love is for each of them a virgin universe, without limits, waiting for the first human trace.

I found myself, then, faced with a contradiction that I had never believed possible between the evident reality and my deepest experience of it. They were the longest days in history - in my history - those days that I believed inaugurated a new epoch marked by the terrible adaptation of my experiences to the mediocrity of a burlesque reality, where the most immense and unrepeatable heartbeats would be no more than echoes in the immense sea of cloned individualities, with the condemnation of an unconscious farce, until a death a thousand times represented. 

If what was most undoubtedly mine was comparable to the sprouting of a seed in the immensity of the forest, to the first flight to other lands of a swallow with its flock, to the uncontrollable forces in an atomic nucleus trillions of times replicated, hidden, forgotten, what was the point of continuing to speak of individuality, of continuing to believe in the exclusive reality of my "I"? Soon the mud wall on the shores of a nameless sea would crumble.

However, in the midst of the chaos eager for deadly uniformity, a sweet chord timidly caressed my heart, leaving the fragile aftertaste of a harmony different from equality and order: the symphony born of the embrace between individuals. Could it be possible that...? It is difficult to believe when the noise of doubt blinds the senses, it is difficult to understand that there is no light in the blizzard, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire; it is difficult to wait and wait, without certainties where the soul can rest, until the arrival of the gentle breeze reveals, with a whisper, unsuspected horizons. 

Yes, it was possible to reconcile reality and experience, it was possible to be me and for others to be me, it was possible the greatness of love, even if there were a thousand springs. Because being an individual does not mean being unique, but quite the opposite; it means being part of the symphony that humanity can sing, spinning the unrepeatable melodies of each human life, with its intimate succession of beats.

I would like to say goodbye with a small gesture of reparation, for the unjust attention that the experience has historically received; because justice, as Ulpiano said, consists of giving to each one his due (no more, no less). And I can conceive of no better or more intimate homage than that of living the beauty of silence itself. 

It is in silence that one understands that experience is not merely a contingent agitation that threatens the very pillars of human existence, but that it is at its very core: the individual only acquires a name of his own by imprinting his experiences with a brand new essence, just as a mould gives its particular shape to molten, amorphous and indeterminate iron .

Only experience possesses a mysterious recreating power, the capacity to consummate the irreducibility, unique and universal in itself, of each person, beyond the rational, ordered and cold cosmos. Only it can unleash the primordial explosion of the unfathomable universe that every human being baptises with the word love.

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