Lucas Soares: "What does it mean to be human today when we're one step away from becoming cyborgs?

For as long as he can remember, Lucas Soares has wondered about the origin of things: of nature, of the heavens, of humanity. He grew up among thinkers. The nephew of Nicolás Casullo and Ana Amado and son of journalist Norberto Soares , his childhood was spent among libraries, slides, ideas, and merry-go-rounds. Therefore, for him, philosophy is based on wonder, and it is there that the figure of a child plays a prominent role: “In some philosophical positions such as those of Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and Deleuze , childhood is like a metaphor for that primordial strangeness that ignites philosophical inquiry, of the freedom and impunity to question established values, and also as a symbol of the philosophical (and artistic) game of creating and recreating meaning,” he says in an interview with Ñ about his new book What is This Thing Called Philosophy? (Siglo XXI Editores). "By thinking philosophically, we rediscover that questioning, denaturalizing, and creative perspective characteristic of childhood. Philosophy is about learning to listen and taking more seriously that childlike voice that constantly 'asks the world why and wherefore,'" says Soares.

What is philosophy and why does it matter? is the question in the book, and the answer could be that in a world where thoughts run at the speed of TikTok or X, reading invites us to stop and reflect, to suspend performance for a while and be able to think outside of likes. Lucas Soares is a professor of ancient philosophy, writer, and poet. In this book, he travels through different definitions of philosophy: from Socrates to Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze , to name a few. But he does so from a close place, inviting reading and encouraging a love of knowledge and the power of doubt as a search engine.

–Could you explain the phrase “Philosophical thought is, in a certain sense, the result of a gradual deepening of our most immediate and simple wonders”?

–In some ways, what we see captured in the great philosophical texts is the conceptual translation of our most primordial perplexities, those that habitually cause us to wonder and that haunt us from birth to death, such as, for example, the question of why there are things and not, rather, nothing. The sequence of philosophical inquiry begins with an initial sense of wonder, which, by making us conscious of the need for an answer to our wonder, triggers the desire to untie the knot that is philosophy. From this point of view, it can be understood as a progressive refinement of the act of wonder, whose arc goes from the simplest things to others of greater complexity. Understanding philosophy as a progress in perplexity, which is one of the chapters of the book, implies that it aims to gradually investigate, in concentric circles, our most basic perplexities to find tentative answers or at least to understand them a little better.

–In that sense, childhood is fundamental in being amazed, because it sees the world for the first time.

–Yes, and in fact, the figure of a child plays a prominent role in some philosophical positions, such as those of Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and Deleuze , among others. Childhood as a metaphor for that primordial strangeness that ignites philosophical inquiry, for the freedom and impunity to question established values, and also as a symbol of the philosophical (and artistic) game of creating and recreating meaning. By thinking philosophically, we rediscover that questioning, denaturalizing, and creative gaze characteristic of childhood. Philosophy is about learning to listen and taking more seriously that childlike voice that never stops “asking the world why and why.”

–How could the concept of artisanal thinking be explained?

–There is a fundamentally mechanical, automated, and accelerated gesture in the way thought is expressed in our hyper-technologized age, a gesture that turns our mind into a screen on which contents scripted by algorithms unremittingly follow one another. Metaphorically speaking, in contrast to this “industrial” thinking, in the book I understand philosophy as a “craftsmanlike” thinking, slow, non-serialized, which advances critically by retreating, that is, constantly walking and retracing the path of its inquiries, under another time of maturation for its questions and answers. In this sense, philosophizing would be like dropping an analytical anchor in this sea of ​​machine thinking in which we are sunk, opening up the possibility of thinking about delay that, among other things, allows us to measure the extent to which algorithms and artificial intelligence chats are scripting our daily lives. What does it mean to be permanently captivated and interpreted by this industrial thinking?

Possible answers to this question cannot be given from that same kind of thinking. Understanding philosophy as a form of artisanal thinking reflects the way this discipline works when reading and analyzing the sources that make up its textual tradition; work that requires effort, dedication, patience, and, above all, a constant grappling with the experience of not understanding. In contrast to industrial thinking, this artisanal approach to thought that philosophical activity represents represents, for me, a refuge for the transmission of a passion. Because I believe that today, in times of AI colonizing all fields, teaching is not so much about the transmission of content but rather about knowing how to awaken passion for it , like a craftsman who, through his object, teaches us the passion he puts into it.

–Why is philosophy important in our present, in which we are witnessing a kind of anti-humanism?

–It's important on many levels, and any answer to this question will always be too general. But beyond the prefixes we assign to the notion of humanism, philosophy is important, on the one hand, to critically re-enact a question that runs transversally through the history of this discipline and that can only be answered in the light and shade of the epochal context in which it is articulated. A question that, adapted to our era of techno-digital capitalism, would be: What does it mean to be a human being today when we are one step away from becoming cyborgs? What space remains for what is truly human within the framework of an artificial intelligence that is increasingly fused, in intellectual terms, with what we have been calling the "human"? Philosophy allows us to question not only what we understand by the human in each historical period, but also to consider the ongoing re-creation of its meaning and the various forms of coexistence between the human and the non-human. On the other hand, I believe that, in a present marked by public debate understood as the art of chicanery, sadism, and cruelty, philosophy provides us with conceptual and argumentative tools to oppose, on theoretical grounds, the hegemony of unfounded opinion at any price.

–What does it mean that philosophy does not have a univocal definition?

–Beyond the prototypical definitions of philosophy formulated by Plato (love of wisdom) and Aristotle (a knowledge of the primary causes of reality as a whole), the truth is that when we delve into the textual universe of this discipline, we encounter other ways of characterizing it that presuppose, question, or even extend these prototypical definitions. This is what I address in the book: that throughout its history, we have not found a univocal conception of philosophy that encompasses the multiple, different, and contrasting ways of thinking about it; hence, there are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophies. But what I am interested in highlighting is that this multiplicity and diversity, rather than a defect, constitute an advantage for philosophy. Because it is precisely in this definitional flexibility that much of its richness and power resides, constantly opening itself up to new meanings, like a kaleidoscope that, when turned, rearranges its various images to give rise to new configurations.

–What do you mean by “in philosophy everyone wins because no one wins”?

–I like to think of philosophy as a desire to assemble and disassemble those puzzles that represent the essential perplexities it addresses. Because what does the history of this discipline show us through its millennia-long tradition of thinkers? That these puzzles can be assembled and disassembled in different ways. Precisely because there is no univocal, privileged way of doing it, philosophy will continue to offer us new ways of assembling and disassembling these puzzles . I say that we all (philosophers and readers) win in terms of spiritual enrichment because in philosophy no one wins or has the last word . If someone were to win, the game would be over.