Of Kant and Cars

What can I say? I guess I am being a bit less disciplined than I had hoped. It is more difficult than usual when no one depends on you; when I haven’t even yet had the chance to convince myself of what I am doing.

But be that as it may, this morning in my seminar on Literature and Philosophy there was a rather involved discussion on truth and happiness, inspired by Seneca and Kant on their respective journeys toward happiness and enlightenment, in the contemporary social context of Mexico. Most everyone seemed to agree that happiness for the average Mexican, blind to the wonders announced to the progressive world since Aristotle ‘know thy self’ and the sins of the idleness that only leads to regrets in old age, is found irremediably in vehicles. I took the comment as a metaphor for materialism and with a grain of salt as I do many things said in a classroom so full and blinded by the excitement and superiority that Rousseau, Diderot, Nietzsche, etcetera etcetera, tend to give new intellectuals over their society. It is an enjoyable class that I, too, tend to leave feeling rather inspired in my own way, and on my way home from school I picked up a paper and found something rather astonishing that I hadn’t yet noticed in the Informador. I have always known and lamented that sports takes up an entire section, often even bigger (as in today’s case) than the national or local news in their respective pages. But today their actually was an entire section dedicated to cars. I am new to this column-blog, and as it is also fairly new to the Informador, (tended to read a little further to the left but found that I had a hard time reconciling with the participilian titles and overall quality of El Occidental) so these are still some of the first real encounters with it as the most serious and respected paper of Guadalajara, and this, to me, came as a surprise. In days of as much news as these it is hard to believe that luxuries have space at all in the paper, let alone two of the four sections, but as a business the Informador has don better than any other paper for most of the 20^th century and just over a decade into the 21^st, which clearly shows their ability to supply satisfactorily its public’s demand probably more than a personal interest its writers and photographers might have in automobiles. So as it was my classmates deserve more credit than I had given them earlier in the day. Maybe when happiness is something as simple as an auto-self it is more worth a read than the truth, even when it means a somber no to a society’s enlightenment.