Why Some Seek Truth and Others Don’t?

 

Many times I ask myself why there are people who seek truth and people who don’t.

So far, I had never found an acceptable answer, until I read Saint Augustine (I found many answers in Saint Augustine...)

Corpus pondere suo nititur ad locum suum. Pondus non ad ima tantum est, sed ad locum suum. Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Oleum infra aquam fusum super aquam attollitur, aqua supra oleum fusa, infra oleum demergitur...
"The body strives toward its proper place by its own weight. Weight does not only pull downward, but toward its proper place. Fire rises upward, a stone falls downward. They are moved by their own weights, seeking their proper places. Oil, when poured beneath water, rises above the water; water, when poured over oil, sinks beneath the oil..."
(Confessiones, XIII, 9.10)

This explanation by Saint Augustine offers a better perspective to understand my issue than Spinoza’s.

Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur
"Each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being" (Ethics, Part III, Proposition VI).

Spinoza’s proposition explains why a body (res) is what it is and why it endures in itself, but it doesn’t explain (as Saint Augustine does) why some bodies seek something and others seek something different.
In the end, it is a Dasein issue (to resume Heidegger’s leitmotif): each body (Dasein) locum suum et proprium (ἴδιον) petit - each body seeks its own and proper place.

As elsewhere, we characterised Dasein as a structure; we can say that seeking something instead of something else is a structure’s problem.