Philosophers From Italy

"Brothels have been closed down, not by the Merlin law but by a shift in demand, which no longer seeks sexual exchange but the buying and selling of the imaginary. In large cities, prostitutes have been almost entirely replaced by “'veados”', mostly Brazilian transvestites, imported for a season and then sent back to their “'favelas”'. This is a sign that what is sold on the streets is not sex and even less sexual exchange, but rather the “'representation”' of sex and the glitz of the images it produces."

"Philosophy loves disagreements, because disagreements produce, generate, feed, and create thematic variations, heuristic games, and absolute novelties. (p. 88)"

"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."

"The explicit transition from the interiority to the exteriority of the soul, to which Christian practice had contributed, takes place with Descartes who, in radicalising Platonic dualism, ends up “abolishing” it, resolving the body and the world into representations of the soul, which thus becomes the absolute horizon of presence."

"If learning cannot take place without emotional gratification, then neglecting emotions, or addressing them in such a hasty manner as to be counterproductive, is the greatest risk that a student faces today when going to school. And this is no small risk because, if it is true that school is the highest experience in which models of centuries of culture are offered, if these models remain contents of the mind without becoming formative ideas of the heart, the heart will begin to wander without horizon in that restless and depressed nothingness that even the noise of youth music cannot mask. (p. 38)"

"So sex as the source of life and life as the reproduction of harmony. The sexual act as an act of creation where one does not get caught up, as we do, in births or abortions, but where at a certain point one celebrates the meaning of heaven, earth and the ten thousand things that inhabit heaven and earth in composed harmony. Why do we Westerners believe in the stars and horoscopes that fall from the stars and have forgotten that our slow, agile or violent acts change the stars, their balance, their light, their rotation? Man's act creates harmony or disharmony in the universe, and our sex, as a composing act, can become a fading not so much of ourselves, but of the cosmos that does not ignore us. (p. 219)"

"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)."

"Then came Christianity and with it the curse of the flesh. Christianity broke the mandala, the four that make up harmony. Three are gathered together and separated from the fourth, the devil, whom iconography began to depict with the features of Pan, the Greek god of sex who, at his favourite time of day, chased the nymphs of the forest with his goat's hooves and broken horns. Christianity kept sexuality in check in the West, where heaven was separated from earth and spirit from flesh. If one fine day we stopped condemning pornography, which is nothing more than the flesh in its solitude, and began to condemn those who have reduced the flesh to solitude, separating it from heaven to make it the antechamber of hell, the first circle of the “'Comedy”'. (p. 220)"

"This is how philosophy was born: philosophy meant going into the square and teaching people how to govern well, how to lead the soul well, how to respect nature. Philosophy was born for this: to teach men these things. Socrates did this, he went to the square and talked to people. Then it became entrenched, it became an academic, self-referential thing, a doctrine. Something that now closely resembles a sort of daughter of theology."

"I am thinking of something: philosophy is always translated as love of wisdom. But this is not the case, it is the opposite: it is not love of wisdom, it is wisdom of love. And so the figure of love is first and foremost intersubjectivity, it is exchange. That is, truth must not emerge as a doctrinal body: this is wisdom, not philosophy. It must arise from dialogue. From dialogue between two people. Dialogue with the other and above all with that other who is woman. Why is it that no woman ever appears in the history of philosophy: what is this being sidelined? Perhaps women navigate in regions that are not overly logical, which frighten men? These are questions I ask myself."

"Shame is a fundamental feeling. Shame [In Italian: vergogna] comes from vere orgognam: I fear exposure. Today, exposure is no longer feared. So what happens? If I behave in a transgressive manner, well, what's the harm? I fulfil the hidden desires of each of us and expose them, how clever I am. And so at this point, the codes of good and evil are no longer clearly visible. Kant said that everyone feels good and evil naturally, he used the word “feeling”. Today, this is no longer true. Simply put, if someone has the courage to show themselves to be vicious, if they have the courage to show themselves to be transgressive, they are a person of value, at least they have courage, they have interpreted the hidden feelings of each of us. This now means, I would not say the collapse of collective morality, but even of individual morality, internal morality, psychological morality. Therefore, the end of times."

"So let's suppose that God speaks: are we sure we understand what he says? When I give a lecture, I am convinced that my students, whether there are thirty or fifty of them, understand thirty or fifty different things. Because language is immediately a translation: when you listen to me, you translate what I say into your world view. And so this translation means that you understand something I did not say. What's more, God; I don't know: some people hear him, some people believe he speaks to them. But let's be clear: did you really hear him with your ears, did he say things to you when he met you, or do you imagine that those are the words of God?"

"The Church considers itself the sole repository of ethics. Ethics as the exclusive prerogative of religion brings Christianity considerably closer to the Islamic mentality. Fortunately, we have had the Enlightenment and the secular state, which have partially immunised us. On the part of the Church, however, there is a tendency to deny that ethics is a human quality, as Kant said, and instead to assert that it derives from religious dogma. Humans would be incapable of producing morality. At this rate, we end up with a theocratic state. But morals are nothing more than rules of coexistence aimed at reducing conflict. Humans can give themselves these rules: ethics is an anthropological category."

"In ‘The House of Psyche,’ it is noted that the problems that exist today can no longer be addressed through psychoanalysis, as they once were. Psychoanalytic tools treated the discomfort of the individual, the discomfort of civilisation in the sense of the miserable conditions in which people lived, in what I call “the society of discipline”, where the game was between the desire of those who wanted to break the law and those who wanted to suppress this desire. Today, this is no longer the scenario of pain. The scenario of pain, especially under the influence of American culture, which pushes us to achieve our goals in the shortest possible time, produces situations of anxiety determined by demand. No longer the traditional psychoanalytic demand (what is allowed and what is forbidden), but what can I do, what am I capable of doing? This inability to achieve goals when the bar is set higher and higher creates a sense of inadequacy, of a lack of meaning and, ultimately, beyond the technique that has no purpose but simply functions within an absolute, radical lack of horizons in view of who knows what."

"Sometimes I wonder if the Church still believes in God. This is certainly a paradoxical and provocative statement, but it has its justification: when the Church intervenes massively to promote legislation favourable to its ethics, then we may wonder whether those who wield ecclesiastical power believe more in the instruments of the world or in the work of God."

"Today, however, there is a much more subtle form of power, which is essentially the control of thought, the control of ideas. This is very dangerous because when I control the ideas of all those who are subordinate to power, they think like power, they applaud it, they want it, they desire it, they adore it. Because they think like it. And then the second degree, even more pernicious, is the control of feelings. There are television programmes that teach young people how to love, how to hate, how to fall in love, how to get angry. When I have established control over feelings, I have absolute power. Because not only do I think as the television media has taught me to think, but I feel as they want me to feel. At this point, I have achieved complete control over the world in which I operate."

"I am not a theologian, but a philosopher of history who follows Nietzsche's “genealogical” method, which, unlike Plato's, does not ask, for example, “what is the soul?”, but rather: “How did this concept come into being, what is its history, what meanings has it taken on, what effects has it had on reality?”, convinced as I am that the essence of a thing, its meaning, lies in its history."

"The importance of Heidegger lies in the fact that he describes his philosophy as “going beyond metaphysics”. Given that metaphysics refers to all philosophical thought from Plato onwards, this means placing oneself in a pivotal position, of which Heidegger is fully aware. What does metaphysics mean? Nothing more than the philosophical version of the religious view of the world. (p. 59)"

"If it is true that we are able to understand our time even without the word “God”, it is equally true that we would not understand it if we removed the word “Technology”, the meaning of which has been clearly explained by Sergio Givone. Heidegger said some essential things on this subject. He illustrated on several occasions that technology has brought the humanistic era to an end, so that man is no longer the “subject” of history, but the “functionary” of technical apparatuses, by which he is in some way “employed” (be-stellte). Indeed, he risks becoming raw material, indeed the most important raw material (der Mensch der wichtigste Rohstoff ist), from the point of view of absolute usability. (p. 60)"

"In this regard, I would like to recall that Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul of Tarsus, says that faith, unlike science expressed by human reason, leads in captivitatem omnem intellectum, that is, it makes the intellect a prisoner of content that is not evident, and therefore foreign to it (alienus), so that the intellect is restless (nondum est quietatus) in the face of science, towards which it feels in infirmitate et timore et tremore mult”. Where has this Thomistic prudence gone, which does not allow us to immediately identify faith with truth? And if Catholics already possess the truth, what is the point of studying and teaching philosophy if they already possess the truth that philosophy seeks to find? What do they say to Heidegger when he writes that when philosophy is accompanied by an adjective, as in the case of ‘Christian philosophy’, we are faced with a square circle or, as Heidegger puts it, a ‘wooden iron’? And finally, what kind of dialogue is possible with a Christian if he is already convinced that he possesses the truth?"

"Crossed by sexuality, the ego yields its limit in order to reaffirm it at a higher level. By coming into contact with the other part of itself, the ego goes beyond fascination and desire to reach that “immense void” where the ontological decision is made, where being reaches its limit and where the limit defines being. (p. 233)"

"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."

"Emotional excess and a lack of reflective cooling essentially lead to four possible outcomes: 1) the “stunning of the emotional apparatus” through ritual practices such as nights at the disco or drug use; 2) “disinterest in everything”, implemented to numb emotions through sloth and non-participation, leading to an opaque attitude of indifference; 3) “violent behaviour”, when not murderous, to release emotions and achieve an overdose that exceeds the level of addiction, as with drugs; 4) “creative genius”, if the emotional burden is accompanied by good self-discipline. (p. 42)"

"“The stroke of genius of Christianity”, which exorcises death by guaranteeing immortality to every human being, has become a common belief that even science has failed to undermine; indeed, in a certain sense, it has contributed to definitively rooting this conviction."

"(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."

"The more temporal power is separated from spiritual power, the more correct the relationship between the two is."

"In fact, where production does not tolerate interruptions, goods “need” to be consumed, and if the need is not spontaneous, if there is no perceived need for these goods, then this need must be “produced”. In an opulent society like ours, where everyone's identity is increasingly tied to the objects they own, which are not only replaceable but “must” be replaced, we may begin to feel, beneath the sea of advertising that is poured over us every day, a sort of call for destruction, a form of nihilism due to the fact, as Gunther Anders writes, that: “Humanity that treats the world as a disposable world also treats itself as disposable humanity”.."

"Despite what advertising would have us believe, happiness does not come from the latest generation of mobile phones or computers, or more generally from “products”, but from a shred of “extra relationship”."

"All this will lead, as economists say, to a slowdown in growth, if not zero growth. And here we come to that insidious word: “growth”, which economists apply both to the dispossessed countries that account for four-fifths of humanity, and to the already developed countries that nevertheless “must grow”. How far? And at whose expense? And at what environmental cost? Here, the economy remains silent because the problem is not within its remit, and with the economy, the voices of the people who must bow to the laws of the economy also remain silent."

"And so each of us feels the thrill of zero growth, not knowing how to react, especially if we suspect that zero growth will increasingly be our future, not only because we cannot continue to think that four-fifths of humanity will continue to sacrifice themselves for our growth, but because when growth has no other purpose than to continue growing, it is the people of the privileged world themselves who become mere “functionary” of this fixed idea which, if it becomes the collective purpose of everyone's life, buries and destroys the “meaning” of life, its flavour, its significance for us."

"What if “philo-sophy” did not mean “love of wisdom” but “wisdom of love”, just as “theology” means discourse on God and not the word of God, or “metrology” means the science of measurement and not the measurement of science? Why this inversion in the sequence of words for philosophy? Why has philosophy in the West been structured as a logic that formalises reality, withdrawing from the world of life to shut itself away in universities where, among initiates, knowledge that has no impact on existence and how to live it is transmitted from master to disciple? Could this be why, from Plato, who describes philosophy as “the exercise of death”, to Heidegger, who insists so much on being-towards-death, philosophers have fallen more in love with knowing how to die than with knowing how to live? (12 April 2008)"

"Perhaps there is nothing behind life as a couple, and this hidden nothingness arouses that infinite curiosity that makes each of us tireless seekers of love, almost always oblivious to the fact that every event of love is always decreed by heaven."

"And so, by giving nothingness a semantic power that radiates at a distance to mean anything, fashion cheaply solves identity problems that put an end to the agonising question: “Who am I?”."

"Every love story lays bare the nature of our soul, which relies on language to express malice, envy, jealousy, kisses poisoned by hatred, tenderness feigned to the point of seeming real, the awareness of knowing each other's secrets: all links in that heavy chain that twists our soul into plots that only language can weave."

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

"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)"

"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 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)"

"If old age no longer shows its vulnerability, where can we find the reasons for “pietas”, the need for sincerity, the demand for answers on which social cohesion is based?"

"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 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)"

"Reason ‘knows’ what it says, while faith ‘believes’ in what it says. And since I do not “believe” that two plus two equals four because I ‘know’ it, there is no relationship between faith and reason, nor any hierarchical subordination, as claimed by men of faith who place their beliefs above their knowledge. In fact, I cannot ‘believe’ in what I ‘know’, and I cannot “know” if what I ‘believe’ is true. In reality, the area of faith shrinks as knowledge advances. Once, as Hippocrates reminds us, epilepsy was called the ‘sacred disease’; today, no doctor or patient would think of attributing the origin of this disease to God or the gods. :*From “”Faith as a remedy for senselessness“”, “'repubblica.it”', November 2006."

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

"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."

"Either religion is alive and necessary, or it is not. Alive insofar as it is necessary. In the sense that it speaks to us of things we cannot do without, but above all of things that only religion is capable of speaking about."