"QUESTIONABILITIES THROUGH THE TIMES"

 Zélia de Toledo Piza

From the most remote antiquity the man is cogitating regarding the origins and purposes of the life.

The Egyptian tradition tell us that, since there are already thousands of years, the Sphinx is posted in the entrance of the desert of Sahara, close to the city of Gize, challenging the pedestrians to solve this it great enigma: "WHO ARE YOU? FROM WHERE DO YOU COME? TO WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"

The man has been seeking the to answer that millenarian inquiry, through the religions, the philosophical theories, the archeological explorations, the geologists' investigations, the physicists, the biologists, the astronomers and through other branches of the science of the present time, but still the definitive answer was not gotten.

Up to 400 years before Christ, the man just worried about the phenomena of the nature and he tried to explain them in a religious and mystic, superstitious way. Starting from the classic thought, in Greece, the philosophers' interest started to rotate around the man and the spirit. With Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the philosophy leaves the Metaphysics and begins to unmask, in a more systematic way, the human being's psycho-mental metabolism, above all the intelligence and the morals.

Socrates, for instance, thought that the best form of serving to the motherland would be through their own attitudes, living justly and forming citizens wise, honest and balanced.

In spite of all the spent efforts, the man continues submerged in the ignorance of himself and of the world that surrounds him and, therefore, in anguish state.

The scientific discoveries, instead of making possible a smoother and calmer life for the man on the face of the Earth, they have been generating larger anxieties and fears.

Analyzing the several thinkers' opinion that have been concerned with the men's destiny, we can infer that there is need of a violent ending so that the language of the past be dissolved and, just as it happens with the phoenix, of their ashes, sprout a new vision of human inter-relationship.

They are countless the prophecies that point a calamitous end for the humanity, but, in opposition, also countless thinkers exist affirming that the man can change that panorama.

The teacher José Henrique de Souza, that threw the bases of the philosophy Eubiótica, affirms: "But, in spite of that whole ballast of horrors and disappointments, we don't want to say that there won't have modifications... It would be enough that the Men with good will wanted to work, together, in favor of a durable Peace."

To turn this phase that we are living now, of revaluation and rebirth, so painless as possible, it is necessary that the man modifies their attitudes to stop reacting in a competitive and aggressive way, that there is a reformation in the social relationships and in the own social organization. It is necessary that the man learns how to drive his own destiny, as individual and as nation.

If we get those indispensable modifications, we will be capable of participating in a harmonious and peaceful cultural transition just as it is registered in the Chinese philosophy, in the "Book of the Mutations": "The movement is natural, it appears spontaneously. For that reason, the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded, and the new is introduced. Both measures are harmonized with the time, not resulting from there, any damage."

To reach, or not, this harmony ideal, inside of this convulsed moment of the century XX, depends on the man, then the need of thinking about that distich inserted at the porch of the temple of Delphos, in Greece: "Man, does know yourself".