Essayists From Italy

"Injecting heroin is called “bucarsi” in Italian. The body becomes an “abyss”, which etymologically means “bottomless”. Similarly, in French, “being an alcoholic” is called “drinking like a hole” (“boire comme un trou”). Drug addicts and alcoholics speak in ancient Greek and describe their inability to “contain” themselves with Platonic images. (p. 66)"

"Umberto Galimberti, La terra senza il male. Jung dall'inconscio al simbolo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1988."

"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."

"“'Myth is the search for origin”', its revival and re-proposal, “”religion is the announcement of redemption, its figures are hope and faith in what is to come. [...] Where religion intersects with myth, myth dies out. (p. 65)"

"Looking at man and looking at art, we must focus our eyes on their “belonging together”, because isolating man from his spiritual expression means reducing him to the condition of an animal, just as isolating art from man means making it twirl in the realm of the spirit, forgetting the material depth in which art, like man, takes shape and form. (p. 140)"

"And so the Age of Enlightenment, which for Kant marks ‘the emancipation of humanity from a state of minority’, reveals itself to be much more backward, obsessive and persecutory towards masturbation than previous centuries, which were governed by religion, which perhaps, more than reason, is familiar with the flesh and the sufferings of its loneliness. (p. 50)"

"This is the ability that today's man has lost, as he is unable [...] to “imagine” the ultimate effects of his “actions”."

"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."

"Reason is no longer the immutable order of the cosmos in which first mythology, then philosophy and finally science were reflected, creating their respective cosmologies, but becomes an “instrumental procedure” that guarantees the most economical calculation between the means available and the objectives to be achieved. (p. 38)"

"Ethics, when faced with technology, becomes pathetic: we have never seen impotence capable of stopping power. The problem is not what we can do with the technical tools we have devised, but what technology can do to us."

"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."

"I deal with religious issues because religions, all religions, with their commandments and rules of conduct, represented the greatest educational process that humanity, as a whole, experienced before reason established itself as the regulator of human relations."

"Are the goals of the economy also our goals? Or have we become mere instruments of the economic apparatus, which employs us as cogs in its organisation, insignificant links in its chain or, if we prefer, indispensable but also among the most interchangeable of all means within an economic-productive apparatus that has become an end in itself?"

"(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."

"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."

"Today, reason has found its highest expression in science, which does not conflict with faith, provided that faith renounces its claim to be the truth. Science has no relation to truth, because what it produces are only “exact” propositions, i.e. “obtained from (ex actu)” premises that have been anticipated hypothetically. The fact that the hypothesis is confirmed by experiment only tells us that we know the operational validity of that hypothesis, not the nature of the thing investigated with that hypothesis, because, when questioned, the thing did not show its face, but simply responded to the anticipated hypothesis."

"Umberto Galimberti, I miti del nostro tempo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-17162-8."

"Umberto Galimberti, I vizi capitali e i nuovi vizi, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2004. ISBN 88-07-84027-8."

"Due to a few incidents of medical malpractice, which are widely reported in the news, we risk forgetting that Italy has one of the best national health systems in the world, as certified by the World Health Organisation in August 2007. In the rest of the world, people die either because of a lack of facilities and medicines, as in poor countries, or because healthcare, like all other activities, is a profit-making business, as in rich countries overseas."

"And in fact, Christians do not know how to die. A comparison between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus suffices in this regard. [...] Unlike Socrates, Jesus is afraid, not of the men who will kill him, nor of the pain that will precede death, Jesus is afraid of death itself, and therefore truly trembles before the “great enemy of God” and has none of the serenity of Socrates, who calmly faces his “great friend”."

"From the place where he had been imprisoned awaiting sentencing, Socrates was invited by his disciples to escape. But his response was peremptory: "I have taught you all your lives to obey the laws, and now you invite me to break them at the end of my life. What I had to teach you, I have communicated to you. My cycle is complete." There is no trace of anguish, despair or melancholy for a life that has come to an end, only consistency between teaching and life. Even the drama of the moment is subservient to the needs of teaching, to make it more persuasive, more effective. And if the moment is the eve of death, it must be faced with dignity. ‘But finally, Socrates, tell us how we should bury you,’ his disciples press him. ‘As you wish,’ he replied. And, laughing quietly, he continued: ‘O friends, I cannot convince Crito that the real Socrates is the one who is now discussing with you and not the one whom he will soon see dead’ (Phaedo 115 e). His disciples begged him to wait, as others had done, until sunset. But Socrates wants to avoid making himself ridiculous by clinging to life when there is no more. He drinks the poison in one gulp "without fear, without changing the colour or expression of his face, but, looking at his disciples as usual with his bull's eyes, he said: 'What do you think? Is it lawful to make libations to someone with this drink or not?'‘ (Phaedo 117 b). Then he resumed walking until he felt his legs grow heavy, then he lay down, and when his limbs began to grow cold, he said: ’'Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; give it to him and do not forget it. “It will be done,” replied Crito, “but see if you have anything else to say.” Socrates did not answer this question" (Phaedo 118 a)."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il libro delle emozioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2021. ISBN 978-88-07-17400-1."

"We live within the Jewish Christian tradition and do not know how to face death except by entrusting ourselves to otherworldly hope. We have a very high opinion of ourselves, deserving of immortality. But does this belief reveal a truth or a disproportionate love of self? Because, in the latter case, it might be worth surrendering to our limitations well in advance, following the Greek wisdom that teaches: ‘Those who know their limits do not fear fate’."

"This is the programme of Giordano Bruno's magic, according to which 'since no part of the universe is more important than another”, man is not granted that primacy, first biblical and then Cartesian, which sees him as “possessor and ruler of the world”, but simply as “cooperator of active nature (operanti naturae homines cooperatores esse possint)”. This difference is decisive because it unmasks the underlying kinship that, beyond disputes, links the Christian tradition to scientific agnosticism. Both share the belief that man, possessing a soul as religion would have it or rational faculties as science would have it, is, among the entities of nature, the privileged entity that can subjugate all things to himself. To this Cartesian emphasis on the subject (Ego cogito), prepared by the Judeo-Christian tradition (according to which man is the image of God and therefore has the right to dominate all things), Giordano Bruno contrasts a path radically different from that which would characterise European thought for centuries. Not the primacy of man, but the primacy of the ever-unstable and ever-reconstructed balance between subject and object, between man and nature. Magic, which is not power over nature, but the discovery of the bonds that chain all things together, according to Heraclitus' model of “invisible harmony”, is Bruno's philosophical proposal, antithetical both to mathematical science, which feeds on human planning, and to religion, which, while subordinating man to God, does not hesitate to consider him, from the day of his expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the ruler of all things."

"The face is the first sign from which the ethics of a society originate. [...] The face of a mature person is an act of truth, while the mask behind which a face treated with cosmetic surgery hides is a falsification that reveals the insecurity of those who do not have the courage to expose themselves to view with their own face. Preferring a showgirl to a mature person means preferring the anonymity of a body to a body shaped by character, which in mature age appears in its uniqueness, finally allowing us to know what a person really is in their specific uniqueness. [...] It ends up feeding into the myth of youth that views old age as a prelude to death. (p. 199)"

"Umberto Galimberti, L'età della tecnica e la fine della storia, Orthotes, Napoli, 2021. ISBN 978-88-93-14314-1."

"Between the Self and the Self, the conflict is as violent as it is between God and the earth. (p. 20)"

"The very fact that we talk about human beings as “capital” or refer to them as “resources” (so-called “human resources”) speaks volumes about the way we view people today. With the decline of the principle that governed Kantian ethics, according to which: ‘Man must always be treated as an end and never as a means’, today we see that not only immigrants, but each and every one of us has the right to citizenship not because we exist, not because we are human beings, but only as a ‘means’ of production and profit."

"Since we were born, we have been taught that appearing is more important than being. And to this terrible dogma we have sacrificed our bodies, charging them with representing what we are not, or even what we have avoided knowing."

"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?"

"I had begun to wonder whether philosophy was a great defence against madness. [...] And I am still convinced of this today, because I am convinced that neurotics study psychology and psychotics study philosophy. Because if we consider who enrols in philosophy? People who enrol in philosophy are those who want to solve problems without going to someone else. [...] By every philosopher I mean a madman who wants to play around with his madness a little, but at the same time does not want to go mad and therefore arms himself to keep it at bay through a series of sound arguments, which are learned here... to keep madness at bay. :*from a conversation in the “'Master's Degree in Communication and Non-Verbal Languages”', Ca' Foscari University of Venice, December 2007."

"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)"

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

"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."

"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."

"Self-realisation is therefore the decisive factor for happiness. But for self-realisation, it is necessary to exercise the virtue of enjoying what is obtainable and not desiring what is unattainable. Hence, the “right measure”. “Katà Métron” [...]. (from “Umberto Galimberti: That virtue so difficult to teach”."

"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."

"The priority of Christians is to save the soul, and this has, on the one hand, placed the individual before the community and, on the other, eliminated death and awareness of the cyclical nature of time. For Christians, the future is always positive, it is progress, as it is for Western science. Whereas the past is ignorance, and the present is research. But this senseless hope that has replaced the awareness of death is dramatically passive."

"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."

"The male-female sexual division is a very strict one, which serves society more than individuals... However, we all know - biologically and psychologically - that we are all male and female, but not in the proportions of 10% and 90%, but rather 40% and 60%. After that, society channels us into a strict sexual division, male and female ...which serves society to identify us, but does not serve our lives; and fluidity ... is an anthropological structure present in each of us. And a man who has a relationship with his femininity is much more interesting than a man with a square jaw."

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

"The Maid of Orléans [...] continues to jealously guard her maidenhood, the intimate and profound core of her vocation. I am left with a deep doubt that I have not understood her: but running after her, retracing old written pages and old paths between the Vosges and Normandy, has perhaps helped me to rediscover a part of myself that I thought was lost or vanished. For this too I must be grateful to her. (p. 6)"

"But, between Fleming and Rossellini, I had discovered France [...] during a school trip in 1953 [...]. And that young woman, gilded in gold, high on the great horse of the monument in Place des Pyramides, fascinated me; just as I was moved by the images taken almost entirely from Ingres's swift painting and replicated in a thousand ways [...] in all the churches of France. (p. 4)"

"Why Joan? Why this girl in the 15th century, clad in iron and burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition, then rehabilitated by a subsequent ruling, then canonised [...], later becoming an emblem first of traditionalist Catholics, then of anti-clerical populists, then of the right, then of the left, then of patriotic gatherings, then of feminist movements? Does it make sense to revive, at the turn of the second and third millennia, this young woman born on the borders of France and elevated to a central symbol of the French nation [...]? (p. 3)"

"My Joan is that of a boy who loved parish cinemas and those in the suburbs – the only ones he could afford – between the 1940s and 1950s. For this reason, she will forever have the face of Ingrid Bergman, discovered shortly after 1952 in Fleming's Technicolour blockbuster – admired, moreover, in a cut-up third version – and then seen again, in a completely different interpretation and with a very different intensity, in Roberto Rossellini's 1954 film, which, through the text of Paul Claudel, reinterpreted the allegories of medieval sacred representations. (p. 4)"

"I owe my love for the Middle Ages first and foremost to Joan of Arc."

"He was a great philologist and had edited the critical edition of Beowulf. In short, he was a remarkable scholar who suddenly wrote a novel: a path made famous in Italy by Umberto Eco, but well rooted in the Romantic and nineteenth-century tradition."

"The paradoxical thing is that Tolkien, now a mass phenomenon, was a niche writer: he wrote by hand and did the illustrations for his books himself. Above all, he wrote not only for himself, but also for his colleagues and students at Oxford, for people trained to recognise all the references and quotations. In short, he wrote for an elite, and it is worth bearing this in mind when reading him today."

"Tolkien was a member of the Oxford Christians, a Catholic and a conservative. He was part of that rural solidarity movement, linked to the neighbourhood and traditions, which has been important in English politics since the time of Coleridge. The “Shire” in the book is an idealised England, which is ultimately destroyed by rampant industrialisation. Moreover, Tolkien was anything but simple politically: he was conservative, yes, but anti-totalitarian. Letters to Father Christmas is in fact a book against Hitler. If this seems obvious, it is worth remembering that in 1930s England, many Catholics of South African origin - like Tolkien - were pro-Hitler. He, on the other hand, understood very well the demonic, Faustian aspect of Nazism."