"Attention deficit disorder is not cured by reading a leaflet."

Barcelona"A cold house is not a home: it looks like one, but it isn't," he recalled. Josep Maria Esquirol (San Juan de Mediona, 1963) in the third session of the Dialogues on Ethics and Moral Philosophy held at the Pedralbes Monastery, co-organized by Barcelona City Council and the newspaper ARA and curated by philosopher and essayist Daniel Gamper. The series has so far featured the participation of Victoria Camps, Remedios Zafra and Josep Maria Esquirol, professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona and author of essays such as Intimate resistance (2015), More human human (2021) and The school of the soul (2024).

Esquirol began by explaining why he wanted to title the talk On the right track"I try to articulate a philosophy of the fundamental human situation," Esquirol said. "One of the axes of this proposal has to do with the fact that what is most real and true are people. I try to reduce abstractions to the maximum. Each person is a beginning, an origin, a start. Strong words like freedom and willpower They derive from the fact that each one is a starting point. Whoever is a beginning needs a path to follow, that is, to live." Esquirol likes to focus on colloquial language because "it shows essential things." And he continued: "When I was young, I met an Italian teacher who looked after me a lot. Once I showed him a piece of work, he told me 'you're doing well.' It's an expression I liked and have continued to use with my students. Going well means going the right way. And the right way is not unique, but is written in the plural."

There is school because the right path is not predetermined

One of the "institutions" Esquirol analyzes in his latest book is school. "School is a sustained attempt to help young and old find their way," he said. "There is school because there is bad weather and because the right path is not predetermined." The school of the soul, Daniel Gamper recalled, Esquirol explains that we currently live in an age of confusion, in which it is difficult to maintain repeated attention. "The lack of attention is part of a certain generalized confusion," Esquirol said. "There is nothing perverse about technification. The problem arises when we try to technify what doesn't need it. Attention deficit is not cured by reading a brochure, but by training in a way of being." The philosopher has defined attention as "the human capacity to receive": one of the fundamental spaces where it is cultivated is school and university. A "porous" person can receive; an inattentive one ends up being "closed."

Esquirol is concerned about "the excess of verbosity" in our present. "Everyone chatters, and so many words create noise," he added. "Socrates did not encourage so much chatter. He said that before speaking, we must work on the capacity to listen, and that means silence." One indication of being on the right path "is the ability to enjoy the beauty of the world," the contemplative life. Another is "being capable of loving others." Ardilla calls it the medical gesture: "We all care or are susceptible to doing so." Finally, the right path also involves "creating beauty" and "making the world more beautiful": it is "the art of knowing how to do things well."

That Esquirol emphasizes his philosophy on people does not mean that he "wants to enhance their selfishness," as neoliberalism and its current ramifications have done. "At times when the economic word expands into other areas where it does not belong and dominates them, we become impoverished," he said. "The attitude toward this is resistance. Those who resist defend their position of marginality because they believe it still makes sense. Who knows if tomorrow they will once again occupy a prominent place."