Plato’s reflection on life’s purpose: “We seek knowledge we know we will never attain”

For Darío Sztajnszrajber, fulfillment does not arrive as a finished condition. The Argentine philosopher told La Nación that he finds happiness when he can realize himself in the present, while admitting that he never feels completely fulfilled.

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I find some happiness when I can realize myself in that now. I never think I am 100% fulfilled.

He described realization as an inner, vocational question that returns whenever someone becomes too certain. The question is simple but unsettling: are you really fulfilled, or have you merely convinced yourself that you are?

Sztajnszrajber said philosophy becomes easy when everything is falling apart. The harder task, he argued, is to philosophize when everything is working well, because comfort can make people stop questioning the purpose of existence. He connected that idea to Plato’s definition of philosophy in The Symposium: “We seek knowledge we know we will never attain, but we continue anyway.” For him, the pursuit itself provides motivation.

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The difficult thing is to philosophize when everything works well.

He said happiness means giving concrete form to desire in one’s life. His own desire is philosophy, understood as a desire for knowledge and a recovery of wonder. He said he does not want to consume reality exactly as it is sold to him, but prefers to examine it through the critical tradition associated with Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, known in philosophy as the school of suspicion.

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We seek knowledge we know we will never attain, but we continue anyway.

The philosopher also questioned familiar promises of completion: finding the truth, achieving happiness or meeting one’s other half. People may believe they have reached those goals, he said, only to discover days later that something still unsettles them. Even if philosophical questioning turns out to be “a great load of nonsense” and the world simply is what it is, he said, exercising the desire to question it, even through narrative, fulfills him.

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Perhaps in the end all philosophical questioning was a great load of nonsense and the world is simply what it is. But exercising, even narratively, the desire to question it fulfills me.