Theodore Olarte: beyond miserable consciousness

Abstract

In just over a hundred months we will have entered the 21st century. Everything seems to indicate that there is a stop on the way. It is not for the periodic convenience of the balance sheets and picture sheets of today's world, but for identifying the keys of a West full of riddles. A West that opens up diverse branches as seen from developed nations or their out-of-time periphery. And that by that same diversity inhibits total vision, the encompassing conceptualizations.
"Unhappy consciousness" called in his hour Hegel a tear of a similar nature that prevented the capture of the whole. Theodore Olarte lived the nostalgia of this totalism (the old metaphysical ambition, in other words), renounting to build a system: for him it was about building a synthesis of the data and signals of the present and its cardinal vectors. Synthesis at the very latest, true, although of a provisional and paradoxically essential nature. The temptation of the Absolute was overcome, the risk of being absorbed by the chronicle of knowledge (especially the scientific-technical) remained, to which the philosopher retorted with a vigorous revaluation of the subject.
Being and man is a work of maturity that vindicates the metaphysical task, reviewing its contributions throughout history. At the same time - and mainly - it proposes a positive anthropology. Hence the Cartesian quotation of the introduction - "But after I had spent a few years studying this way in the book of the world and trying to gain some experience, I took a day the resolve to study also in myself and to use all the forces of my spirit to choose the paths I should follow..."-1 fits perfectly in the Olartian endeavor. Commitment prefigured by Kant and that today becomes a perentory, in the middle of a climate where knowledge simulates operating outside the cognoscent. Ten years after the philosopher's disappearance, it is worth examining his arguments, specifying the validity of his thinking and putting on the table his crucial thesis.