The place of birth as an organizing center is part of the circumstances of thought, but does not exhaust them. The "from Brazil" is not only a nation… - Julio Cabrera

Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 19 <small></small>

In a first moment, philosophizing is, for me, the fundamental way of man's installation in the world: a way that is insecure, fearful, ignorant, unsatisfied, desirous, incomplete, and suffering. I link philosophizing with despair. Philosophizing is the very cry of finitude, whatever the scope or level where it manifests itself. These primary feelings are present in all people, so that at this first moment, and as was always said before the professionalization of philosophy, we are all philosophers for the simple and terrible fact that we are in the peculiar human way of being: finite, mortal, threatened, helpless, ignorant, and questioning beings, thrown into an unwelcoming world. In the midst of the tumult of their daily concerns and personal dramas, from time to time the essential questions arise in all people, literate or illiterate, inevitably: meaning, death, pain. These questions are immediately buried by the majority, or put aside; for long periods, one lives as if they didn't exist. In a second thought, on the contrary, almost nobody is a philosopher, not even most philosophy professors. For philosophers are those questioning and wanting beings who turn their threatened finitude into an obsessive quest for knowledge and a powerful form of sensibility (and sexuality!) that manifests total priority over any other concern; not because the philosopher sets out to do so, but because he is compulsively cast into this peculiar form of existence. It is as if the philosopher, in this second sense, exacerbates or brings to a paroxysm that which is a fleeting and dispensable moment for most people. The philosopher is the one for whom those anxious and uncomfortable questions are his permanent atmosphere, the air he breathes, the center of gravitation of his way of being. The obsession with knowledge, the susceptibility to all that is finite, incomplete and insecure, to the constant threat of the world, to despair without consolation, bring new misfortunes to the philosopher, not something like a "wisdom of life." On the contrary, humans who simply live the drama of being human without reflecting it, possess strengths, defenses, and wisdoms that the philosopher loses in the very instant he sets out to reflect. In this sense, the genuine philosopher has no wisdom to offer; on the contrary, he will spend his life trying to recover, through thought, the wisdom he believed he had when he was not a philosopher (Wittgenstein: a tragicomic example of this).

These are huge, even colossal, temporal modules of the transition of all things toward their end, which—from our minuscule, singular, finite, and perspectival temporal module—make us see as static and permanent what is impregnated and corroded with temporality, fluidity, and terminality. It is as if being itself appeared while already hiding its decaying nature. The human mechanisms of concealing the terminality of being follow the concealing rhythm of being itself; every human tends to hide their terminal temporality and its frightening lack of value behind a slow and reassuring temporality. If we could grasp, even for an instant, the swift temporality of the terminal nature of being—like that mad scientist in Terence Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), who ages and dies in a few seconds in front of the cameras—we would be horrified. We can endure the terminal nature of being only because it is given to us little by little, in a periodic temporality.