With some ridiculous clothes, incomparably more restrictive than a straitjacket, he walks on a thing of soil and stones which you can't even call desert.

The shortsightedness prevents him from seeing the distant and inaccessible and from living, abiding in its realm. He must go closer, feel it with his hands, make it his own. We could say that our era is filled with an intolerance for the inaccessible. It sees it only as deprivation: the inaccessible as the non-accessible. And it fights it. And it uses a way of possessing much more effective, it thinks, than feeling with his hands and acquiring. He has dived in the delirium of capturing through knowledge. And as knowledge means basically science, and science means unambiguity of its terms, a leading scientist, the danish Niels Bohr, utters the incredible phrase which of course constitutes the credo of each scientist:

Real is what can be measured

With this, science completes the arsenal, where already reigns another delirium for the real:

Nihil est sine ratione

Nothing is without (sufficient) reason

The two deliriums in perfect marriage give birth to a third, which names the manner things present themselves in science, but lately in everyday perception: process.

Wittgenstein writes specifically about mental states but his words are relevant to any scientific subject:

How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise[...]? The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided! Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them - we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)

I remember a lecturer of Medicine at the lesson on Pathology talking about something and saying in the manner of Donald Trump:

We haven't found it YET

As if saying to the yet unknown resisting science: Your end is coming! Or as they say in stupid cop movies threatening someone: You are dead!

And yet, what the scientific research encounters again and again, is that with each answer it manages to give, a multitude of questions open up. Its Fata Morgana: With each step the final answer, the final solution makes a leap even further. But apparently nobody notices it.

Knowledge is nourished by the vision of a better world: a more comfortable life, without illnesses, even without old age, a clean planet, the unanswered to having found their answers. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive director, in a recent speech titled "Building the digital future", cites a phrase of George Bernard Shaw which says: "You see things and say: why? But I dream of things which never were, and say, why not?" And Eric Schmidt continues: "Why is this so? Why can't it be better? Why is there injustice in the world? Why can't we fix that?"

We thus reach the delirium of evolution and progress. We expect our children to succeed, us to self-improve, humanity to move, as it says, forward. Which means that we constantly see ourselves in minus, in deprivation, and it's required to make an even greater effort, to achieve even greater performances. The minus is like the sunglasses. If the lenses were brown, then everything appears in shades of brown. When the lenses are set to minus, then everything appears deficient and requires development, improvement, correction, perfection. Goals, which as we are wearing these glasses, remain equally far to how much we try, how many steps we think we make.

A similar delirium is that of power. Its ideal is a characteristic that was once attributed to the christian god: causa sui, for one to be the cause of himself, that is, accountable to no one, e.g. the figure of the master of the universe and not just in politics. We are already subjected to it by car ads: there is nothing else on the street, except at the most people who look at it with admiration. While for politics, the older will remember the prediction of Andreas Papandreou about the Right Wing which will go in "the dustbin of history", and which a younger one repeats, as if he learned nothing, associating with the older one in a folie a deux, since they don't know that one form can never annihilate the other, as if they haven't learned from the mistake of their opponents, who in previous decades were chasing after the reverse chimera, the other Fata Morgana. And the aspiring successors swim in the same drunkenness, when they see the current ones as a "parenthesis". But none of them can do otherwise. Because power can be power only when it constantly exceeds itself. The economic and financial power are inheritably insatiable. Bulimic.

Sometimes the illusion is enticing. It seduces. This is what happens with what we saw so far: money, knowledge, progress, power, and authority.

Love seduces, too. It spreads its wings towards its own Fata Morgana: It's the escape of loneliness, towards the fusion with another soul:

How I long to live with you in the world for ever

and get drunk by your sweet kiss

our two hearts beating as one

and the beats spreading love flowers

It's the chimera of nesting in a microcosm which will remain, as a precious metal, untouched by the rest of the world:

The two of us secretly

as two lovebirds

let's weave a nest

in a hidden hidden place

like two small birds let's weave a nest

Perhaps the absolute Fata Morgana is life itself, where it demands to insist on itself. In the "Tunnel", from the "Dreams" by Akira Kurosawa, a soldier comes out of the tunnel and meets his commander, the only one who survived the battle.

The following dialogue is exchanged:

Commander: Soldier Nogushi!

Nogushi: Yes, Commander!

Commander: You...

Nogushi: Is it true commander? Was I really killed in battle? I can't ... I can't believe it that I am really dead. I went home. I ate the special sweets that my mother made for me. I remember it well.

Commander: You told me before. You were hit. You fainted. I looked after you and you told me this story. It was a dream. You had it while you were unconscious. It was so vivid that I remember. But some five minutes later you died. You really died.

Nogushi: I understand. But my parents don't believe I am dead.

At this point, the eyes of Nogushi fall on a small light on the opposite hillside. It's his life, as a Fata Morgana now:

Nogushi: There is my house. My mother and my father are there ... and they are still waiting for me.

Commander: But it's a fact. You died. I am so sorry, but you are dead. You really died in my arms.

Ambient folly. The man who, coming from elsewhere, would find himself in our world and our time, and would mutter, "Pallaksch. Pallaksch", could also be the young man from Schubert's "Winter journey" saying:

Our joys, our sorrows,

Are all a will o' the wisp's game!

What world is this? Why is it dominated by madness? In "Antigone" by Sophocles Creon is furious because, despite his orders, he finds out that Polynices was buried with all the funeral honours. Without any evidence, as in a paranoid delirium, he accuses the guard of bribery, and tells him he will pay for that. And the guard says the following words:

Oh! How terrible is for the one who has an opinion to have the wrong opinion!

The opinion, already as opinion, is always wrong. It exaggerates as it exceeds the limit: It takes a position upon the unstable, a position, to paraphrase Kalvos, "upon the infinite sea" of things. The Ancient called it Hubris. And here is a law stated in "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus:

The old hubris tends to bear new hubris and cause mortals more trouble

Thus, there is no solution for madness. Because madness produces even more more madness. There is only catharsis, and this comes in the end to which hubris inexorably leads: disaster. This fate is what Hölderlin's Hyperion sings:

But to us it is given

Nowhere to rest,

Suffering men

Falter and fall

Blindly from one

Hour to the next

Like water flung down

From cliff to cliff

Yearlong into uncertainty

Yet all these do not signify at all a life in blackness and despair. Konstantinos Kavafis in the poem "Alexandrian Kings" writes about the crowning of Cleopatra's children who were proclaimed kings of kingdoms that no longer exist. Another madness. The poem closes as follows:

The Alexandrians knew of course

that this was all mere words, all theatre.

But the day was warm and poetic,

the sky a pale blue,

the Alexandrian Gymnasium

a complete artistic triumph,

the courtiers wonderfully sumptuous,

Kaisarion all grace and beauty

(Cleopatra’s son, blood of the Lagids);

and the Alexandrians thronged to the festival

full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations

in Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,

charmed by the lovely spectacle—

though they knew of course what all this was worth,

what empty words they really were, these kingships.

A beautiful day is a hospitable day. It welcomes everything, warmly, without examining it, judging it, allowing it, or prohibiting it. But such a day also lets everything go, on time, without holding anything and without holding on anything. We can get excited and desperate with things, to enjoy them, or to suffer, knowing of course "what they are worth" - what they are worth according to the guard in "Antigone", the opinions - δοκειν is the ancient word. Or, with the words of the philosopher Jean Beaufret, which paraphrase the title of a poem by René Char:

A la santé des δοκουντα!

Translation: Maria Soupou, Psychotherapist