philosophers-from-italy

"I never held any major positions in the PSI, but I had the honor of being a friend of Craxi."

"Once the [PSI] party was dissolved, some became Muslims, some Jews, some Catholics. But we have always remained socialists."

"I’ll miss politics, but it’s no tragedy. I’m going back to my studies, to medieval philosophy."

"I will miss certain moments. I, who had been in the PSI until the public prosecutor’s office dissolved it in ’92, remember well the months spent at the Ministry of Justice: together with Minister Biondi, we were the protagonists of the failed—though noble—attempt to bring the justice system back on track."

"Beyond the smooth boundaries of humanity, some individuals of the monstrous species have observed the other, or at least what remained after the classification we often hear referred to as the “evolutionary ladder.” That terrible moment—that disarming awareness—was like a violent shock that held a caress within it. The name of that caress is antispecism."

"Infinite ways of being, which we call individuals, never cease to amaze us and reveal themselves—making existence much more like a symphony than the sad, unbearable soliloquy that has been recounted by anthropocentrism."

"Leonardo Caffo, Il maiale non fa la rivoluzione: manifesto per un antispecismo debole, Sonda, Casale Monferrato, 2013. ISBN 978-88-7106-701-8"

"The most promising, versatile, and original among young Italian philosophers."

"Leonardo Caffo is a true visionary who has provided, in this little book [Only for Them], a theoretical construction which lays the foundation for a new way of thinking and being. The clear logic and palpable passion with which Caffo writes has the potential to open minds and hearts – and to change the world."

"One idea, and only one, I would like to convey through all this writing with the paws of a pig: another world is possible, in which your children and those of a cow can play together, discovering that they are united in that wonderful mystery we call existence, regardless of the supposed differences in language or intelligence. This world depends on each of us, and on changing the political and intellectual system in which we live—start demanding, starting tomorrow, your share of this life to come. I am confident, and I owe it to the pig that I am."

"Leonardo Caffo (with Felice Cimatti), A come Animale: voci per un bestiario dei sentimenti, Bompiani, Milano, 2015. ISBN 978-88-452-7857-0"

"Leonardo Caffo, Flatus Vocis: breve invito all'agire animale, Novalogos, Aprilia, 2011. ISBN 978889733941X"

"The essence of education is to promote the experience of difference and the exercise of enjoying what is not trivial, thus forming strong personalities."

"Leopardi argued that modern man no longer feels passion and emotion, that he spends his life in boredom. This state of mind, this fundamental insensitivity to difference, is accentuated today by the wealth of resources at our disposal, which multiply technical possibilities by pursuing quantity for its own sake."

"(About Fëdor Michajlovič Dostoevskij) He provided neither theology nor metaphysics, but today theology and metaphysics cannot do without him."

"Naples is the city of longevity, it is always the ‘new city’, reborn ‘new’ in the 5th century BC, Greek in blood and spirit, but hybridized by countless cultures, offended by long oppression and never surrendered. Every time 'capta cepit". Its genius is not only concentrated in its extraordinary philosophers, from Bruno of Nola and therefore a fellow countryman to the great Vico, but also in the fabric of popular culture. The Neapolitan has no irony, but sharp wit: thus he defends himself not from life, like the ironic, but in life."

"God wants to exist and wants to be what he is, which means that he is free not only with regard to being in general, but above all with regard to his own being, in short, he is not bound either to his own existence or to his own essence."

"Naples, in my dream, even if hopping and mocking like Pulcinella, will manage to build self-respect. [...] I have often reproached Naples for its shortcomings, for this bourgeoisie that I have deplored for its lack of unity. In Naples, there are many good bourgeois, but not a class that knows how to elevate the collective life of all through the effort of common dialogue, of a project. :*Quoted in ‘’The dream of Masullo, honorary citizen: ‘I would like Naples to build respect for itself’'‘, ilmattino.it, June 8, 2018."

"It is not without reason that religious experience focuses above all on the suffering and redeeming God, which confirms that the ultimate recourse to the problem of evil is religion, certainly not morality."

"The temporal dialectic as a struggle between good and evil is that which exists in human temporal history, in which positive and negative, good and evil are always in struggle, always in tension, always together."

"The only sense in which it can be said that He [Jesus] gives an answer to the problem of evil, and that he himself is this answer."

"The fact that in order to exist, God had to defeat nothingness and vanquish evil, that is, put aside the negative, leaves a trace of negativity in him, albeit ineffective and inoperative, as if something remained unresolved and still pending. One has the impression that nothingness is still lurking, like a constant threat, and that latent and dormant evil could reawaken. Negativity and evil are present in God as possibilities that were foreseen but discarded, and therefore now forgotten and irrelevant."

"Evil must be distinguished as possible and real: in God it is present as possible, and there man finds it and realises it in history."

"Man awakens on the cosmic stage the evil that was dormant in God."

"Even those who do not believe in God cannot cease to be interested in what God represents for a believer, and only philosophy can show this."

"Giordano Bruno represented a break between the pre-modern and modern eras with his thinking. The pre-modern era involved the idea that there is an order in society as in everything else and that this order is vertical: from top to bottom; something, therefore, that clearly takes the form of a hierarchy. What Bruno brings to philosophy is the infinity of the universe. In an infinite universe, there are no absolute centers: every point is relatively a center, with respect to all the others. With Bruno, there is therefore a transition from a hierarchical vision to one that I would not hesitate to define as anarchic!"

"This is a theme that we have been pursuing for millennia, asking ourselves what is specific to Naples, if there is anything specific to Naples. From an approximate, empirical point of view, Naples certainly has the singularity of a character among its inhabitants that is very open to relationships with others. This has its historical origins. Those who live in the Basso, a few steps away from each other, are inevitably accustomed to a common custom, and it is this common custom that helps them in times of danger or difficulty. This is the first aspect. And it is on this fundamental, basic aspect that a whole culture develops. Neapolitan culture is a culture of community, of being together, as one might say. It is then a question of analyzing whether this being together is only a superficial attempt to remedy what we lack, that is, something deeper than our living, or whether this being together is itself the profound living that we seek. It is all to be decided, and we have not yet decided it in millennia."

"Among the characters frequently encountered in the great theater of Pulcinella that is Naples, there is not only the “guappo.” There is also the “soul of Purgatory.” On the walls at street corners in authentically working-class Neapolitan neighborhoods, one often finds votive shrines with Madonnas and saints, as well as “souls of Purgatory.” Their artistic value is nil, but their anthropological and cultural significance is very interesting. [...] It is not the devils of Hell or the angels of Heaven that inhabit Naples, but the souls of Purgatory. They are an intermediate population, whose only destiny is to try to save themselves from the worst depths and rise towards a definitive salvation from which they remain fatally distant. And the common people pray for the souls in Purgatory; they have a prominent place in their devotion. [...] The soul in Purgatory represents those who are not completely lost, who have not fallen into Hell, who have not disappeared, swallowed up in the bottomless cavities of the ground in Naples. In one way or another, Neapolitans nestle in these cavities and do not get lost: rather, like the soul in Purgatory, they remain suspended, halfway between high and low, between Paradise and Hell. Vertically, they move without changing place, without ever moving, just as horizontally a cyclist does, who, skillfully exercising their strength on the pedals, neither advances nor retreats: standing still on two wheels, they remain in balance or, as they say, ‘surplace’. [...] In the same way, the Neapolitan, without ever taking a step forward or backward, maintains his balance in his immobility."

"The inability to perceive differences afflicts all generations today, but it is particularly insidious for young people who have grown up under the banner of “nothing is impossible”: I can go to America in a few hours, dance all night, fill my eyes with hundreds of images in a few minutes, I can, I can, I can... a bulimia of quantity in which quality, that is, meaning, dissolves. In terms of time, speed is dominant."

"The driving force must come from those who can do more, i.e., from politics and institutions. Those who govern society at any level must show what it means to be human. Because example is the only thing that matters, the example set by those at the top makes collective effort possible. Only through example can rulers obtain consent to sacrifices."

"The aesthetic sphere is a necessary passage to morality, so much so that only as an aesthetic man is man truly man."

"Free evil is better than imposed good."

"The positive choice is itself a choice of goodness, and the negative choice is itself a choice of evil."

"God is being, goodness, truth, or the positive in general, but insofar as it is willed and chosen, victory over possible nothingness."

"[Beauty] is always free and adherent: free because it does not adhere to conceptual knowledge, adherent because it adheres to an interpretation of nature."

"Play is contemplation, removed from the seriousness of passivity as intuition and need, and of activity as intellect and reason."

"The only possible education is aesthetic education."

"To see nature as beautiful, it must be considered in its organic productivity, that is, interpreted. Wanting to interpret nature is already loving it: interpretation is already a vision in love with nature that highlights its beauty."

"The primacy of reality is in itself a victory over nothingness, and the choice of good is always a judgement on evil, so that God has two aspects in himself: that by which “ab aeterno” good has been chosen by an irreversible act and evil is rejected as a rejected possibility; and that by which evil, as a discarded alternative, subsists forever as the backdrop of possibility and as a hidden but available possibility."

"Evil is not the absence of being, the deprivation of good, the lack of reality, but is reality, more precisely positive reality in its negativity."

"The problem of evil has its roots in the dark depths of human nature and in the secret recesses of man's relationship with transcendence."

"What is important is not reason for its own sake but truth: the value of reason depends on its connection to truth and its ontological roots."

"God is master of his own essence, because in him act and essence, essence and will are one and the same."

"God himself, as absolute freedom and original will, contains, indeed is, the answer to the “fundamental question” [What is his name? (Ex. 3:13)], but he does not state it in explicit terms: he merely says “I am who I am, I am who I want to be”, which is a definitive statement. There is nothing more to say: it is an absolute act of will and freedom, by which God makes himself and declares himself master of his own being and of being in general."

"[First of all] there is the abysmal nature of God, that is: that void that exists before God and is God himself (the freedom of God, God as freedom) is God as pure beginning, which implies precisely the nothingness of freedom. Before God, there is only God. But God, before God, exists. God's existence can only depend on God himself; we must necessarily admit this kind of divine doubling. God's existence is an act of his original freedom, it is an act of freedom that establishes itself. God's freedom posits God's existence, God's freedom, that is: divine abyssalness, the nothingness of freedom as beginning, posits God's existence, that is, the fruit of this freedom, which thus becomes a historical fact. The first historical fact ever is the existence of God, which is therefore undeducible – which is therefore initial."

"There are therefore two aspects to God: that in which good is chosen and evil is rejected by an irreversible act, and this is the original positivity, the existence of God to whom the first choice has led; and that in which evil as a discarded alternative remains forever as the backdrop to positivity, as a presence that is forgotten and set aside, as a possibility that has been overcome but remains available. It cannot be said, then, that evil is present as such in the divine essence or nature; nor that instantaneous evil as such already resides in God, and that God, in order to become himself, must identify it and get rid of it. But it must be said that evil is contemporary with divine existence, in the sense that it arises in that timeless act in which original freedom affirms itself only by defeating the alternative possibility of nothingness. In the act in which God originates and therefore is God, that is, in divine existence itself, evil emerges as a reality already established, but as a possibility already discarded."

"Only the awareness that God shares human suffering can prevent suffering from increasing human negativity."

"The oxymoron is preferred by the mystic because it allows him to express something ineffable, because it is the best tool for speaking of the unspeakable, because in the world of duality it creates the ‘'coincidentia oppositorum’', which Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), in the context of his theology of the Incarnate Word, considered almost the least imperfect definition of God. The mystic, in his talk of God, punctuated by ‘'improprietas’', ‘'voces obscurae, horridae, inauditae’', seeks through a paroxysmal accumulation of oxymorons to linguistically touch the divine. (from ‘'La mistica e i mistici’', p. 187)"

"If Nietzsche had returned to the beginnings of Greece to reconstruct the hierarchy of values, Hesse was an anti-authoritarian who appealed to institutions; if Spengler had diagnosed the agony of our civilization, he discovered Asia. The canton of Ticino was his true homeland. There he found what he was looking for. There he is buried."

"The theme of silence can be topical or outdated. It is never out of fashion. And today, despite what many may think at first glance, it is undoubtedly topical. Perhaps more so than ever before. “As the power of language diminishes,” noted Susan Sontag, “the power of silence increases.” And ours are times in which language is seen as something corrupt. “In no century,” wrote Ignazio Silone in ‘'Pane e vino’' [the title is ‘'Vino e pane’'], "has the word been so perverted, as it is now, from its natural purpose, which is to enable people to communicate. Speaking and deceiving (often deceiving oneself) are now almost synonymous." The widespread disaffection with words stems from the realization that our speech and that of others has become mostly mere palatal facts, impersonal and banal chatter. (pp. 83-84)"