Do not preoccupy!!

Besides of thanking God these posts are finally over, I want to make clear that I think identically to Pascal. In a letter to Mlle de Roannez, he says that "the past should not preocupy us... the future has nothing to do with us and perhaps we might never reach it... and the present is the only time that is truly ours... we are always intent on living in the future and never on living on now" I agree with all of these statements, they show the manner people makes use of time and what we commonly decide to do with what we could say are the stages of time. In the first part Pascal talks about how the past should not preocupy us, as the word signify the past should not guide the situations that haven't happened yet and we should not occupy on things that haven't take place, past is history and nothing we can do about it, what is done is done end of the point. Next he says that future has nothing to do with us and I believe this is right because we'll never know when we are going to die, and this opens the panorama to casualties and outcomes that are not manageable. Then Pascal says that the only time that is truly ours is present; this is the time we can act, we can express what we want and we can concrete our ideas, this is the time of action, not the past or the future. At last he says that we are always intent to live on the future, and I believe this relates to some deep wishes of humanity like the one of living forever, like a God.

Define what is time!

In this last chapter of the book “The Questions of Life” Fernando Savater talks about what is time. We all know what time is and what it defines, but if you want to put the definition of time into words it is very hard. Also it is very hard to say when did time start how did humans started to measure it and how it was define. This are very hard questions that many important philosophers and scientists have tried to answer, but could not give a clear answer. I think that it is not important to answer these questions like Pascal (French moralist) said; the only important period that matters is present because it is the only one that can make an immediate change.

My opinion is that we shouldn’t be worrying about what time is, how was it defined, or when did it started, we should neither be concerned about the past because let’s face it we can’t change it, we should only worry about the future because it’s the only tense that could affect us or our future. We should concentrate in the present and try to enjoy it the most, without worrying about anything else, time will give us everything.

Past is gone

What is time? Maybe if you have a physics class in your schedule, you would recognize that time is a measuring system to sequence events to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. But this is not the kind of time I am talking about. The time that I am trying to create a discussion about is what time represents to us human beings.

People always say that you should live each moment like it is your last because time is not running backwards, and it actually is not. Some people also say time will heal all injuries. This is actually a bad sustained argument, because I think time will not heal injuries, but the moments and event that you experience throughout the time that has elapsed since the beginning. Time is always going forwards, so if you have done something bad, you should regret it, but you will not change it, so you need to start looking for a solution, which will solve this problem. Time is a huge issue in human lives, basically our entire life is affected by time, there is day and there is night and there is nothing we can do about this, so all I would say is do not let anything slip away and try to do all the things you can while you are alive, because you can’t make time go backwards.

Enjoy your life today, yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come

Savater in this chapter mentions three zones in which time is divided; past, present and future. The French moralist Pascal argues that the only zone which we should preoccupy is the present because the only things that can have a direct effect on us are the things that take place in the present. I disagree with Pascal. The past and the future are also really important for us.

Maybe we can’t change what has happened. We can’t recover that time because it has already passed, but we could learn from what we have experienced so we don’t make the same mistakes again. So, maybe the past hasn’t a direct influence on us, but definitely has an indirect one. We could learn many things from our past that could help us know what to do in our present.

The future could also affect our present in an indirect form. For example knowing that tomorrow will be our final philosophy exam. That would affect the decisions we make in our present because we will study hard to prepare for the exam. If there wasn’t an exam in our future, we wouldn’t prepare or study for any exam at all, we would use our time in something completely different.

We can’t change the past, we can’t predict our future, but definitely both of them have an influence on our present.

As time passes by...

Chapter 10. When I first saw the title of the chapter I said to myself, this chapter is going to be interesting because it will talk about time. After reading it, I considered that it was without a doubt one of the most interesting chapters that I read.
Without a doubt, without measurements of time this world would be a chaos, that’s because measurements like hours, months, moon phases are all part of our lives and how we achieve our daily chores. We need time to have an order and also to have a standard way all the world communicate.
I was also very amazed of the dilemma about “this”. As Hagel said “...it is surprising that those things about which it seems we should be most certain...what we are tempted to call the - concrete, now, here, this – completely lose their content as soon as we try to think about them”. After thinking about this statement I was amazed because it’s very interesting of how when we try to be more concrete we end being more abstract. For example last time I received a call from my mom and she was trying to say me where a watch was located. She first said me, the watch is there in your room, the problem was that my room is big, so I then said like where in my room, she then told me like there in your desk and I had the same problem because my desk has many drawers. Therefore I started to tell her like is it in this drawer or on that drawer. We had a little discussion until I found it, which took me around 5 minutes.
So in resume, time is very important for humanity because it is the way we measure almost everything. Even though some times when we want to be concrete in time it’s very hard to be completely concrete.

Does it deserve to be Beautiful?

Is it really beautiful or do you like it? This is a question people don't ask each other very often. I remember hearing from countless people that tastes are independent, they can be different from person to person and they obey the person's likes and not what the majority of the people would agree on. I have seen how things that are extremely ugly to me are the prettiest things for some other person. If this happens and we get lost in the world of tastes, we barely distinguish why we chose something to be liked by us. There are no standards, there are no laws, but tastes are so bonded to the beauty. When we say we think that something is beautiful we are mostly looking towards our tastes and not to everybody's opinions about the object. What value but only individual can exist if we affirmed that the notion of beauty depends on the tastes of each person? For me it is not okay to denote something as beautiful if no one except me can value its beauty, as an alternative I openly prefer the thought that what is beautiful for me has to be beautiful for someone with similar traits like mine, maybe not for all the world, but yes for other people who share common interests with me. What would be the meaning of something beautiful if it can't be valued by somebody? That is why I conceive that what I find beautiful should rather be equally or more beautiful for somebody else.

B-E-A-utiful

What is beauty to us? Beauty is represented by what gives us pleasure. For example a friend and you are walking on the street. You walk by a statue and your friend tells you, Oh man that is beautiful, we usually answer, Oh yes it is, but after a while we start to think if the object he was talking about was actually beautiful to you. You need to start to consider things like if this statue really made you feel pleasure, or you were just answering to what your friend told you.

Everyone has a different point of view in this world, and for someone it could look that something was beautiful that for others was not. Some people have to consider all the outer events to even consider if something is beautiful or not. On the other hand I personally think that you need to look at something and at the instant you know if that is beautiful or not. You do not need to analyze a thing to say that is beautiful or not. It is supposed to be like if you look at something and at that instant you get a shiver, that is when you know something is really beautiful.