From The Republicto My Mother's Body: The Search for (F) in a Kingdom We Do Not Know, and an Apology to the Philosopher

In my previous research, I argued with Plato in all my arrogance. I refused that woman should be half a guardian in his Republic. I told him that the ideal city must be built on every continent, and that we must fight for all of humanity. I said to him: I am a philosopher, and I accept no half-war. I am sorry, Plato. Exhaustion has worn me down. I thought philosophy dwelled in books, debate, and academic halls. But life came to me with my mother sick, cancer invading her body from within, and I found myself not arguing, but guarding. Not writing about justice, but practicing it on the sickbed. Plato, I am sorry that I attacked your noble lie. Now I am the one begging for it. I want the doctor to lie to me and say she is improving. I want to whisper to my mother: You will win. I want a white lie, not to establish the authority of a city, but to save what remains of hope in my heart. This is a war in which I found no foothold for my principle (F) (Sovereign Consciousness). I did not find it within the body because the enemy is not external. The enemy is a rebellious cell, defected from the body of someone I love. While I was reviewing my words about peace between humans, my mother's body was declaring its silent rebellion. The cells divided, and war broke out from within. Today I ask what my books have not answered: How does the body betray us without warning? How do we stop this tearing? And how do we beg the rebellious cells: Return, it is my mother? I now stand at the cruelest paradox: I use the same chemical weapon that was produced to kill humans in the trenches (mustard gas), to use it now as a last resort to fight this internal defection and save her life. I realized too late: True peace is not the absence of war between nations. Peace begins with the living being's ability to restrain its internal rebellion, and with the witness's ability to become a guardian who gathers the fragments of themselves before they scatter. This is the core of philosophy: reaching truth to the point of ecstasy, and acknowledging that we all, at the level of the body or nations, struggle only for survival. I am now a guardian on the front line of my mother's body. I write about her war, I mix research with prayer, to testify that philosophy is not only written in offices; sometimes it is practiced on the sickbed. I once wrote: Why does all this happen to me, so that I write all this? It is the philosophy of life.