The writer Javier Otaola will present his book 'La Ilustración escarmentada' in Málaga.

Next Friday, December 5th at 7:00 PM, the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (Constitution Square, 7) will host the presentation in Málaga of the book 'The Enlightenment Learns a Lesson', featuring its author, Javier Otaola. The event will be moderated by Ascensión Tejerina and is open to the public until full capacity is reached.

In this work, Otaola's thesis is that the Enlightenment, although historically identified with the 18th century, is much more than that: it is a constant search for light and knowledge that, in some way and under other names, has always been present in the human spirit.

"The leitmotif of these fragments and aphorisms is the conviction that, both individually and socially, we are made up of dualities in tension that we can only handle by articulating them: the subjective and the objective, reconciling the existential and the political, necessity and desire, harmonizing the physical and the metaphysical, managing the rational and the emotional... In short, loving life and its contradictory forces; practicing compassion and resisting in ourselves and others the inclination, so human, to inhumanity; counting on life and health but also on illness and death," summarizes and evaluates its author.

"My book can be read as a diary of brief reflections on my philosophical readings over the past years and on my own 'lessons learned' viewed from the perspective of my being in my sixties," adds Javier Otaola.

An admirer of the enlightened sociability represented by the Societies of Friends of the Country, the author joined the Álava section at the end of the last century. "This noble intellectual and moral tradition is closely linked to the ideals of enlightenment and progress of the 18th century, but today, in this unsettling 21st century, it is necessary to rethink the ideas of enlightenment and progress, not to abolish them but to make them more real and effective," he reflects.