Sometimes we can no longer see things for what they are. We lose the nature of awareness, our particular symptom that allows us to remember, see life as a whole, imagine perspectives or mental states. Also be aware of death. And it is precisely the ability to enter a world – the one we build ourselves, because “a dog lives in the world of a dog” – and in the position of others that confirms the importance of will: when we are in the throes of devastation of awareness, identity is very far away, and even being in memories struggles to recognize itself. I do not remember. If there is no longer the possibility of dialogue with the dimension through which to recover our truth, there can be no action. Because if “reality is a call to act”, man, emptied of the possibilities of the world, cannot recover movement. It also forgets the perception of one’s own freedom and that of others. Without the ability to imagine and overturn the senses of things we are lost individuals, at least at the level of consciousness. But we still manage to live. Oliver Sacks tells the case of a judge who, during the First World War, suffered a very serious injury to the frontal lobe: the trauma made him unable to feel emotions, to have a perception of himself and of the world, but it did not affect his intellectual faculties. . His profession, however, could no longer be exercised: the judge left the seat because he recognized that he no longer understood the motives of the others. What surrounds us can still tell us something, but we feel it without what the French call sensibilisation, which, as it happens, combines the two meanings of awareness and consciousness. Brain damage can give rise to David Hume’s philosophical chimera, namely being “a bundle or an accumulation of different sensations, which follow one another with unimaginable rapidity in perpetual flux and movement”. To experience how to lose the impressions of events and to feel that the sequence of numerous unrelated changes slip through the fingers: in Jimmie, another Sacks patient, they struggle – without his realizing it due to anosognosia – the emptiness and the miserable strength of identity, which survives the de-animation of the disease, Korsakoff’s syndrome. The power of our acting in reality is to overcome any kind of dissolution. There is certainly, in us, a place that can be taken care of, but without too many certainties. And the mind often is silent and limits itself to observing.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 