Life (Memory And Hope) As A Privileged Perspective For Understanding

Abstract

In this work, we would like to offer a proposal on the issue of the relationship between life and knowledge. In particular, I am going to present life, the actual life of every person, as a privileged perspective for knowledge. Especially since the Enlightenment, many authors have doubted that life, real life, with all its content, can be an appropriate place for knowledge. The criticism of the prejudices held by thinkers such as Descartes, Kant or Lessing, not to mention Husserl, has placed the philosopher to the position of having to remove himself from life in order to know, and so put aside what we thought we knew, abandon the tradition to which we belong and which shapes our way of thinking and, in general, relate to reality. We would show that the individual perspective, the life of each person, with his or her tradition («performative memory») and expectations («performative hope»), is the only possible perspective to achieve a true knowledge of reality.