Philosophers From Italy

"If we were to ask ourselves about the usefulness and harm of pessimism in life, there would be only one answer: truth or life."

"He saw Paris as a set of ideas. To think in this city is to think it, he said. And for a time, he devoted his self to it."

"It bothers me when people speak ill of Sicily, but they speak ill of it because their judgment is not based on fact, it is poorly motivated, it is rather something unrequited, a resentment."

"Hegel called it spirit, we call it culture. Culture is a negative definition, a jumble of things, made for the most varied purposes, not to provide us with a concept of spirit. Ernst Cassirer wrote “For a Philosophy of Culture,” but it was a masked, reduced, debased philosophy of spirit."

"I am not an intellectual, I am a cleric. An intellectual is someone who takes sides with extremely political values. A cleric, on the other hand, is someone who strives to follow values that are universal."

"The singer must convince others of his ideas. Unlike the philosopher, however, he can do so without arguments."

"I am me and Sicily. I cannot ignore or exclude it, I would be guilty of a poorly constructed abstraction."

"The mafia itself does not bring anything to mind. Like the homeland, the dead of Solferino. Ancient things. [...] Sciascia was a civil writer, a schoolteacher who wanted to teach us good social manners. But revisiting him today is like rereading Silvio Pellico. His function has been exhausted. We no longer need Sciascia. We need a new reflection, another Sicilian consciousness."

"Where the insular element dominates, it is impossible to save oneself. Every island waits impatiently to sink. A theory of the island is marked by this certainty. An island can always disappear. A talactic entity, it is supported by the waves, by the unstable. The metaphor of the ship applies to every island: shipwreck looms over it. The insular feeling is a dark impulse towards extinction. The anguish of being on an island as a way of life reveals the impossibility of escaping it as a primordial feeling. The desire to disappear is the esoteric essence of Sicily. Since every Sicilian would not have wanted to be born, he lives like someone who would not want to live: history passes him by with its hateful noises, but behind the tumult of appearances lies a profound quiet. Every story is vanity of vanities. The presence of catastrophe in the Sicilian soul is expressed in its vegetal ideals, in its historical taedium, a kind of nirvana. Sicily exists only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Only in the happy moment of art is this island real."

"True life is the life of the mind."

"That there is nothing worse than the world does not need to be proven."

"Sgalambro's philosophy, which from the point of view of language quality has Schopenhauer as its reference author, is a painful philosophy about the captivity of man, about being bad, in the sense of being a prisoner, with a central theoretical theme that is the relationship between being and having to be, and with the claim to affirm truth and not opinion: if I speak, I speak because I mean what I say as the truth, not to add doubts to doubts, otherwise I remain silent."

"[About Angelo Scandurra ] With his language, this poet skins things alive. Imagination does not deal with current affairs but knocks imperiously on the doors of the universe. The image of an enormous spider grows before our eyes. The spider with which Spinoza plays, throwing flies at it and laughing, evokes in the philosopher the image of the ‘orto divinus’, whose insistent geometricity is the implacability of a God without passions. Like an enormous mass looming over terrified beings. In our poet, the spider is a ‘grumpy and cunning god’. The overbearing image, however, is not satisfied. The theme looms behind the courtesies of a man of the world. The poet is always vigilant. Whether with sharp lashes or caresses, he takes us from behind. As in an ambush in which we risk our prudent tranquility. Old sensations stir from afar, worn-out emotions are reawakened, and in the end we encounter ourselves."

"In ‘industrial’ music, the irreversibility of time is immanent. It is entropic music, music that destroys itself. Pop music is the epitome of the self-dissolution of music. And yet it is the only form of music that makes sense to everyone. On the edge of the abyss, Mahler composes ‘The Song of the Earth’ but hums a Neapolitan song."

"Sgalambro was a Schopenhauerian, he was Schopenhauer. I don't think this critical and essentially pessimistic vein did Battiato much good, as he lost some of that vein of irreverence, the paradoxical, ironic, sometimes even completely light-hearted energy he had in his works such as ‘Bandiera bianca’."

"Pessimistic discourse belongs to the genre of oratory, because it presupposes an audience that can shout and get excited."

"And so he became a writer. Well done. Every now and then he will come back for holidays, perhaps to see his family, and he will criticize us fiercely because he lives in civilization. But there is one thing he does not know, that this land, like the Ionia of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, is magical, and always calls back those who belong to it, as if exercising a right. The law of belonging. And even for him, one day the return will be inevitable. It will be the climate, the light, the air... An almond granita!"

"We know the ‘reductio’ of all things in God by another name. In those who die, the infernal force, or, let's put it this way, the dear old essence of the world, is revealed ‘eo ipso’."

"Socrates dies because he broke the law. It is foolish to say that he was a gentleman, says Hegel rightly. If a philosopher is someone who pits the individual against the world, we cannot help but feel repugnance, he adds."

"There is therefore only one age. Or, as we might also say, all other ages are matters of psychology. Only old age is in itself. Only old age requires nothing less than metaphysics to be treated adequately."

"One cannot be reactionary because there is nowhere to return to; one cannot be progressive because there is nowhere to go."

"The vampire is a dead person who does not want to die, one of the many imaginative reflections that express the difficulty for individuals and groups to accept death which, as Freud reminds us, returns in dreams and runs through primitive communities, terrifying them with the fear of contagion, so that the dead must be buried, even if the earth does not hide them sufficiently and, above all, does not eradicate them from the soul. The vampire is therefore a dead person who returns, because for the soul he is not definitively dead. With blood, which is life itself, he snatches virgins, images of the soul, who struggle in the arms of vampires to resist death."

"From being a centre of symbolic radiation in primitive communities, the body has become in the West the negative of every “value” that knowledge, with the faithful complicity of power, has accumulated."

"(Regarding the detractors of the Cirinnà bill and Italian Family Day) Ultimately, it is essentially the emotional relationship, i.e. love, that establishes relationships. Let's stop thinking that homosexuals are essentially “sexual”. First and foremost, they are emotional beings, they have meaningful cohabiting relationships just like heterosexual families. They can very well adopt children because it is not necessarily true that two people of the same sex are “bad”. And children need love, not necessarily sexual differences. Let them stop saying that the family is made up of a man and a woman, because this is a fundamentally materialistic view, defended by Catholics who always talk about the spirit. Because if the criterion for being together is simply to bring children into the world, then this is the most sinister materialism. Whereas being together also means loving each other, dedicating oneself to the task of raising children. [...] Children are children not because you sleep with a woman and the woman sleeps with a man, they are children because you raise them, because you are together with them, because you answer their questions, because you pay attention to their needs. This is what “fatherhood” and “motherhood” mean, whoever performs them."

"The magnanimous person, in fact, should not be confused with the generous person: he is someone who aims for great things and, by committing himself to this, produces good things and, if he is strong enough, an overabundance of good that benefits everyone. (p. 133)"

"The magnanimous person does not look at others, not because he underestimates them, but because he finds his own measure in the task he has set himself. (p. 133)."

"Paradoxically, by mastering oneself, one becomes more open to others, indirectly becoming generous, since “bonum est diffusivum sui”. This is magnanimity, the great ancient virtue whose name has been lost today. (p. 133)"

"In this fusion of “'magic and history”', and in the relationship between “'history”' and “'metahistory”' that every magic inaugurates, Ernesto de Martino grasped the essence of magic and offered a true explanation of its ineradicability. Existence, in fact, is always precarious and could not survive without the protective structures that mythology, religion, magic, astrology, palmistry and reason itself are responsible for inaugurating and sustaining."

"If it is a duty to reprimand one's friends, it is a sign of great wisdom to take the criticism of one's enemies seriously. (p. 59)"

"The processes of emancipation have undoubtedly expanded the scope for autonomy and choice, but they have also instilled a demand for unconditional freedom without even being up to the task. (p. 65)"

"No one is ever right in advance, and it is therefore a cognitive necessity and a moral obligation to submit one's thoughts to the truth and the judgement of others. (p. 57)"

"The question is: to what extent is what is “possible” actually “possible”? In other words, where is the boundary between what is “lawful” and what is “achievable”? (p. 46)"

"At this stage of civilisation, in order to avoid being manipulated and at the same time divided, controlled and serialised, it is necessary to “fall back” on oneself, to establish oneself as a “nucleus of resistance” and a “centre of strength”. In order to assert oneself, it is necessary to consolidate, preserve one's form, give oneself a style... (p. 68)"

"The first rule of any discourse is, in fact, to “tell the truth”. (p. 55)"

"I had the advantage of being born poor, into a family of ten children, with a deceased father, a mother who was a teacher, 60,000 lire a month, and ten of us plus my mother to live on. So we all had to start working from an early age. I was destined to become a metalworker because I didn't do very well at school. Then a priest saved me by putting me in a seminary, where I was able to study, without much success, to the point that when I reached the second year of secondary school, I couldn't tolerate the authority above me. I left the seminary and set about completing five years of middle school and three years of high school on my own. I took a few trigonometry lessons because I didn't really understand how it worked, and I sat the final exams on my own, without any school behind me. [...] I got 10 in philosophy, 10 in history, and my essay was published in the Gazzetta Varesina: a tremendous success. So I started to believe in myself, but mind you, always starting from a position of poverty, because there are people who are born university professors in the cradle, but I was not born a university professor in the cradle. Then I wanted to study medicine, but it was too long and there was no money. Thanks to that high school diploma, I won two scholarships: one from the Catholic University and one from the Province of Milan; 400,000 lire and 400,000 lire made 800,000 lire, and with that I said, 'Oh well, then I'll study philosophy. Yes, I got top marks, but that's not enough to motivate someone to study philosophy. But did you like philosophy? I had some exceptional teachers, who no longer exist."

"We humans, as singular entities, are finite powers, and in order to make the most of the power that we are, we must know how to manage it, to become its masters. This and nothing else is what it means to take ownership of life. (p. 8)"

"If desire stimulates invention, it can, however, lead us to a presumption of omnipotence and thus become a cause of deception. It makes us forget that we are finite powers: in fact, our power is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; therefore, as Spinoza would say, we do not have absolute power to adapt things outside ourselves to our use (ad nostrum usum adaptandi). We are therefore destabilised from within and without: by the impulses that press upon us and by the affections that condition us from outside. And since we do not know how powerful we are, desire manages to set us in motion without our knowledge, bypassing our consciousness. Proof of this is the fact that we often find ourselves agitated, upset, or even happy, without knowing why. Hence an instabilitas that we must govern. This is why desire, which is positive in itself, should not be passively indulged. However, it should not be denied either: it must simply be well managed. We need to measure the multiple powers that agitate us. In the words of Nietzsche, “greatness means giving direction”. To do this, virtues are necessary. (pp. 18-19)"

"If we want to talk about freedom, we can say that the more we gain knowledge of the processes that determine us, the more we are able to be free. (p. 8)"

"In the Gospel of Luke, for example, we find a beautiful image of happiness, in which the Virgin Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who, like Mary, is pregnant. It then happens that, at the sight of Mary, the child in Elizabeth's womb begins to leap. Think of the motion of joy as this “jumping”!"

"Francis de Sales concedes nothing to the pagan style, which, moreover, has long since abandoned its tragic guise in ancient schools."

"Being virtuous means putting oneself in a position to decide and therefore not easily yielding to external influences. As we can see, virtue has nothing to do with renouncing desire, but rather with controlling it in order to avoid dependence. Unfortunately, centuries of teaching renunciation have transformed what was a technical expedient – the ancients called it an exercise – into a value, to the point of making the very idea of “control of the passions” ambiguous. This has led to the identification of passions with evil, and hence to the logical consequence of eradicating them. This is an impossible task, and one in which all pedagogies that have attempted to achieve it have failed: they have not eradicated passions at all, but have only generated perversions. (pp. 22-23)"

"But good can never be imposed: it must be continually sought and chosen each time. (p. 43)"

"“'Vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usus”': life is not given as property to anyone, but “'for use”' to everyone. (p. 3)"

"Virtues are thus losing their traits of self-denial and taking on those of self-realisation. And, as was already the case for the ancients, happiness, far from being conceived as a reward for virtue, tends to coincide with its exercise. (p. 38)"

"Christianity has altered the pagan soul. When the dream of a world without pain appeared, we could no longer adapt to this pain, even though we believe that a world without pain will never exist. Consciousness has been visited by a dream that can no longer be erased, and even if we believe it to be unlikely, we still want it to exist."

"(About abortion) Kant taught us that man must always be treated as an end and never as a means. Forcing women to give birth every time they become pregnant means treating women's bodies as a means of reproduction, but treating women's bodies as a means of reproduction conflicts with Kant's teaching, which is not only Kant's but also Christian teaching, that man should be treated as an end and not as a means, that man is a person and not an instrument of procreation. The problem arises again in Italy because of the general subordination of Italian politicians to the demands of the Catholic Church: when I see both the right and the left genuflecting before the Catholic Church, I wonder: where is the Italian State? By definition, like any state, it must be secular, meaning that secular is a Greek word that means “common good”. So the secular person is the one who must take charge of everyone's needs, not the needs of a principle of faith: this is a very important thing. Secular people believe that they cannot have a moral code that does not derive from the will of God, but a moral code that derives from the will of God is typical of primitive moral codes, where men, not knowing how to make laws for themselves, had to anchor it to a higher will. But then we had the Enlightenment, and we began to reason; even if with little courage, we know how to use our brains. And so at this point it is quite possible to construct a secular morality, based first of all on that principle of Kant that we have mentioned, and then on another very important principle: that morality is made for men, not men for morality. This is another quote from Kant that reproduces exactly, in different words, what Jesus Christ said: the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, woe betide anyone who bends man to the law and uses the law as a judgement against man, because what needs to be saved is not the principle of the law, but man himself."

"That the death of God appears to be an event that is now behind us and leaves us essentially indifferent is not atheism. It is nihilism. (chap. 6)"

"Does the name of God still mean anything to people today? According to Nietzsche, little or nothing. The very announcement that “God is dead” is destined to fall on deaf ears. Perhaps everyone repeats the phrase in relation to this or that (secularization, de-Christianization, single-minded thinking, and so on). But as if it were obvious, a foregone conclusion, to be acknowledged and then filed away without too much trouble. It's a bit like saying: we are modern, emancipated, faith in God belongs to the past. Centuries will have to pass—Nietzsche maintains—before men return to questioning the profound and mysterious meaning of this death."

"Atheism, in its own way, holds fast to the idea of God. If only to destroy and deny this idea, while at the same time dismissing all forms of transcendence: both the transcendence of moral law and the transcendence of the ultimate meaning of life. All things that, from the point of view of atheism, would force man into a state of subjugation and prevent him from realizing his full humanity. Atheism sees God as the enemy of man. Therefore, it wages war against him. (chap. 6)"

"But what does it mean to remove the truth? It means, for example, that it will no longer be the law that has the power on its side (the power of truth, which legitimizes it), but power (power without truth) that will have the law on its side and do whatever it wants with it: perhaps legitimizing abuse on the basis of false evidence, invented for ideological purposes and power objectives. The idea that, once the truth is removed, there will finally be room for civil conversation in which what is worthy of belief or what, though not believed, deserves to be part of human heritage, will spontaneously flourish, is a beautiful idea, but perhaps hermeneutics should exercise a little of its art of suspicion on it."