When you evaluate something historically, you relativize it. At the very moment you place fundamental philosophical questions within a historical context, you deprive them of their philosophical value and relativize their significance. The same applies to truth: it cannot be relativized. Truth is one. Likewise, fundamental philosophical questions belong neither to a particular time nor to a particular place.[1] It is with such a principled question that the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad begins.
कस्मिन्नु भगवो विज्ञाते सर्वमिदं विज्ञातं भवतीति
kasmin nu bhagavo vijñāte sarvam idaṃ vijñātaṃ bhavatīti
O Blessed One Sir, by knowing this [locally] does the [idam] All become known?
In other words, if I know this (hic et nunc), I will know everything else. If this (hic et nunc) comes into being, everything else will come into being as well.
In Antanas Maceina's thought, this fundamental structure of the question of knowledge was linked to suffering. Maceina discovered suffering as the primary driving force of human existence.
Maceina encountered the evil raging in the world at a very early age: "Evil in its many forms (poverty, misfortune, ill will)) was close to me from my earliest youth (after my mother's death, I grew up with my aunt in Prienai), and thus my thinking was determined above all by suffering."[2]
We have chosen the example of Antanas Maceina because he is a philosopher for whom suffering - as a powerful component of Lithuanian thought and society - was of profound importance in the development of his philosophical thinking.
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[1] The best example in this respect is Machiavelli's The Prince, which examines fundamental questions concerning the structure of princely rule, questions that remain just as relevant today as they were when the work was written.
[2] "Per filosofą prasiveržia dvasinis nerimas" ("Through the Philosopher Breaks Forth Spiritual Anxiety"), Švyturys, 1989, No. 20, p. 22.
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