Essayists From Italy

"In philosophy, searching is everything: we search because we are not. It is like the moral imperative: only those who feel they must always continue to act on it actually act on it. The verb of philosophy, as in morality, is not “to be” (sein), but “to ought” (sollen)."

"The philosophical word, in its questioning, always gives voice to the Other, to silence, to death. Its task is to “speak Silence.” The Silence “of” things, “in” things, “in” names, ‘in’ the “sounds” of things [...]. In saying things, the Silence present in the sounds of things, the philosophical word rekindles wonder for the being, the wonder “that the being is.”"

"Interviewer: What is topology? Vincenzo Vitiello: It is a hermeneutic practice rather than a theory. And it is a practice linked to a very personal way of “reading”: it is impossible for me to read Aristotle with eyes other than those with which I read Hegel or Heidegger. There is a contemporaneity in philosophy—but not only in philosophy—that is at the basis of its “history.” As I like to say, by way of example: Hegel is more “contemporary” with Augustine than with Schelling, and the latter is more contemporary with Plotinus than with Hegel – ‘’ en philosophe', of course; because the two – Schelling and Hegel – exchanged friendly letters and fierce criticism between themselves and not with Plotinus and Augustine. The fact is that historical time is constructed in layers; it does not have a single dimension. What Kant considered u'‘ngereimt’', senseless, the contemporaneity of different times, is a fact of experience; ‘'ungereimt’' is only the reduction of every time to the linear succession “past-present-future” of physical-mechanical time. Moreover, it is from Kant that we learn the difference between “moral” time and “physical” time."

"The Truth is what you seek when you do not yet know what it is, but you know it exists."

"Frederick II's attempt was part of the European process of forming the first modern states, which culminated first in the Battle of Bouvines (1214) and then in the bitter clash between secular powers and the Church. In this conflict, which led to the conquest of full secular sovereignty by France and England, Frederick failed. He failed as emperor but also as unifier of Italy. He was, after all, Italian, the son of a Sicilian mother, heir to the Norman kingdom of the South, educated in the nascent Italian culture of which he was a promoter and also a protagonist."

"Italian politics left the European stage, becoming vulgarised in partisan competitions, and culture was saved only by distancing itself from politics and living in a national political vacuum."

"Based on the observation that the economic conditions of the proletariat had improved, thanks in part to political struggles, Eduard Bernstein set out to “revise” the entire Marxist tradition. He rejected the “theory of collapse” of capitalist society due to the impossibility of overcoming crises of underconsumption. From there, Bernstein went on to deny the need for a revolutionary transition to socialism and argued for the possibility of social transformation through reforms. Reformism and the introduction of universal suffrage would deliver power to the workers. (chap. 1, pp. 10-11)"

"Controversial with populist traditionalism, Lenin argued that new social forces had to take the lead in the modernisation process by fighting for representative democracy and political freedoms. This analysis prompted the economist Lenin to devote himself to political action. And it was certainly this analysis that led to the development of his theory of socialist leadership of the democratic movement in a peasant country. (chap. 1, p. 13)"

"Fascism in Italy brought together disparate social forces from a wide range of political backgrounds (socialists, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists, clerical Catholics, nationalists, atheist republicans, former monarchist officers), united by their discontent with the agitation of workers and peasants and the peace treaty. There was also a lack of serious programmatic elaboration because fascism originated as a street movement organised by squadrist actions and “punitive expeditions” carried out in retaliation against leagues, chambers of labour, socialist sections and newspapers. (chap. 3, p. 36)"

"A notable cultural impulse to Catholic political and social thought came from the Modernist movement (Adolf Harnack, Alfred Loisy, Ernesto Buonaiuti), which proposed a profound renewal of religious traditions in the face of new trends in science, liberalism and socialism. (chap. 3, p. 45)"

"For Vyšinskij, the state remained a mere instrument of the party's political will, and the law could be nothing more than an expression of that will. Strongly opposing his theoretical adversaries, Vyšinskij did not fail to assert the argument of force as Attorney General in Stalin's trials. (chap. 4, p. 54)"

"The role played by the Catholic Church in Italian history and culture has generally been assessed from a highly ideological perspective. The main emphasis has been on the spiritual role played by the Church in inspiring Italian culture and art. Less attention has been paid to analysing the political and institutional role played by the Church. In particular, the role played by the “'Papal States”', the only case of temporal power in the West, has been completely overlooked. Instead, emphasis is placed on the balancing function that it is said to have played in Italy, which was in fact inspired by the Church's desire to protect itself from any attempt to unify the Italian peninsula. (chap. 1, p. 11)"

"[...] Machiavelli is the first great Italian political thinker completely and definitively freed from any cultural dependence on theology and Catholic culture: he is also the first entirely secular European political thinker, who no longer refers to the sacred scriptures, to which Hobbes and Locke will still refer. (chap. 4, p. 35)"

"Poised between a last, desperate attempt to outline a strategy for the construction of a unified state and the dramatic awareness of the political impotence to which the Italians are reduced, Machiavelli is a great, solitary witness to the political decline of a highly intellectual civilisation. He has something of Dante in him, a passionate politician and disdainful exile, and of Luther. He is the last great voice of our realistic tradition and the first modern reformer of Italian consciousness. (chap. 4, p. 36)"

"Overall, the three great figures of Bruno, Campanella and Sarpi attest that in Italy the distinction between civis and fidelis, opposed by the Church, had established itself in the highest consciences, laying the foundations for the sovereignty of modern states and also for freedom of conscience and religion. (chap. 5, p. 47)"

"The idea of national unification matured in Italian political thought at the end of the 18th century and in the early decades of the 19th century under the weight of new foreign invasions and the failure of new political experiments such as the Neapolitan Republic and the Napoleonic Republic. These new disappointments eroded the remnants of the rhetorical tradition and put political speculation and reflection on the customs and public spirit of Italians to the test of realism. (chap. 6, p. 60)"

"Resistance to political unification was not Italy's only problem. This was certainly the primary problem, but it was also the result of a profound process of disintegration following centuries of fragmentation. Literary culture had long been sterile and remained so at least until Parini; philosophical and scientific culture was more a constellation of individual personalities, sometimes brilliant but almost always isolated and persecuted. In many respects, the condition of culture was the same as that of the Italian language: refined, but little connected to the everyday communication of Italians. (chap. 6, p. 62)"

"The Cold War created serious ideological divisions, and the growing intrusiveness of political parties, encouraged by the proportional electoral system and the lack of alternative governments, led to clientelism, corruption and inefficiency. Land parcelling, hidden financing and parliamentary consociationalism led to a regression of the parties, prompting the intervention of the judiciary. Almost all parties, subjected to serious ideological erosion, had to change their names, symbols and leadership as a difficult transition to a new majority political system began. (chap. 7, pp. 83-84)"

"Umberto Cerroni, Il pensiero politico del Novecento, Il sapere, Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma, 1995. ISBN 88-7983-971-3."

"Umberto Cerroni, Il pensiero politico italiano, Il sapere, Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma, 1995. ISBN 88-8183-265-8."

"Emotions are boundless; there are strong emotions and weak emotions, emotions that cannot help but expand conversation and dialogue with others. On the other hand, there are emotions that shut down this dialogue, ultimately making our ongoing relationships with others more difficult."

"In the term dying, living also remains “alive”; in the word death, life disappears."

"The image that lives within us is linked to our conception of life and also to the difference we make between dying and death."

"Fairy tales teach us that fear should not be locked away in an inaccessible closet inside ourselves, but felt, experienced, and confronted."

"Graves are made for the living."

"Ultimately, and in a nutshell, it is to escape death that we invented language, art, philosophy, and politics."

"There are those who reproach q:it:Massimo Fini for squandering his enormous talent, as if talent could be used for anything other than squandering it. He did so in the only way permitted to a true journalist: through the right reading, through writing, through the integrity of his ideas. But above all, by relying on the immeasurable ignorance of his colleagues. [...] I would have loved to have been friends with Massimo Fini in the 1970s and breathe in the exhilaration of that joyful and unknown journalism, which is not a job but a gift from the gods, accompanied by the amazement that at the end of the month they even pay you."

"(About the film Life Is Beautiful}} Instead of relying on a lazy rehash of himself, Benigni has decided to perform like an acrobat, oops, on the reckless tightrope of the comic-tragic."

"Here is the latest from the master [Roberto Benigni] who, in terms of box office predictions, has to contend with his pupil, assuming that Vergaio's jester has anything in common, apart from his Tuscan origins, with the big kid Pieraccioni."

"Leonardo Pieraccioni, whom an unexpectedly controversial Carlo Verdone has called a “comedian of nothing.”"

"Finally, I had followed the surprising career of Piersanti Mattarella [brother of the Italian President Mattarella]. His career developed in the shadow of his powerful father Bernardo, who was a minister several times and a great collector of votes and friendships, some of which were compromising, in Castellammare del Golfo, in western Sicily, home to the most ruthless mafia. [...] We must not betray our origins if they have brought us privileges and benefits. And Piersanti had unfortunately forgotten that he was the eldest son of Bernardo and his vows."

"The freedom that must be loved is [...] the freedom of others. Only on this condition is the love of freedom not a selfish aspiration, but a moral idea, indeed the sole and exclusive content of moral experience."

"Take Calogero, for example: secularism is a method of coexistence between all possible ideologies and philosophies, which must respect, as a primary rule, the principle that no one can claim to possess the truth."

"Anyone who looks through the telescope and sees things differently from me is always someone who can teach me a lot, and I will read it with the attitude of a disciple who wants to understand what is not yet clear to him; if I then discuss their conclusions, I will do so with the respect and gratitude we owe to those who have paved the way for us to go further, evaluating their approach retrospectively on the basis of their arguments, not a priori by comparing their conclusions with my own. This is the attitude that my teacher Guido Calogero taught me to call ‘the will to understand’ or ‘the spirit of dialogue’."

"The country taxed itself with a new kind of tithe, and the children of Abruzzo had to feed themselves even less than before, to prevent the blond young men of Scotland and the giant blacks of South Africa from starving to death in the caves of Genzana."

"Karol Wojtyla burst onto the scene in the 1980s with the solemn gait of the most famous pope in history. Famous, but not celebrated. [...] After fifteen months of pontificate, Pope Karol Wojtyla is no longer an unknown figure: yet the more the world knows him, the less it loves him."

"Padre Pio never theorised anything. The epochal disputes of the conciliar Church did not even touch him."

"Padre Pio always lived between heaven and earth. Literally."

"(About Padre Pio) His profile of holiness is everything except what one usually imagines: blue, haloed, joyful. Quite the opposite."

"His sweet life Padre Pio began by flying to heaven [...], because he was never blessed on earth."

"The real problem is that the price to pay for saving these lives is the tragic one of suppressing others. The utilitarian principle that one can do evil to achieve good is being replaced by the Western and Christian maxim that it is not permissible to do evil, even to achieve a greater good. Whereas in the past the traditional “signs” of death were used to ascertain that a living person was not considered dead, today the new Harvard criterion treats the living as corpses in order to be able to transplant them."

"The truth is that the definition of brain death was proposed by Harvard Medical School in the summer of 1968, a few months after the first heart transplant performed by Christian Barnard (December 1967), to ethically justify heart transplants, which required that the heart of the donor still be beating, meaning that, according to traditional medical standards, he was still alive. In this case, the removal of the heart was equivalent to murder, albeit carried out “for a good cause”. Science posed a dramatic moral question: is it permissible to kill a sick person, even if they are terminally ill or irreversibly injured, in order to save another human life of superior “quality”?"

"(On brain death) The irreversibility of the loss of brain functions, ascertained by a ‘flat encephalogram’, does not prove the death of the individual. The total loss of the unity of the organism, understood as the ability to integrate and coordinate all its functions, does not in fact depend on the brain, nor even on the heart. The ascertainment of the cessation of breathing and heartbeat does not mean that the heart or lungs are the source of life. If legal and medical tradition, not only in the West, has always considered that death should be ascertained through the cessation of cardiovascular activity, it is because experience shows that the cessation of such activity is followed, after a few hours, by rigor mortis and then the beginning of the disintegration of the body. This does not happen in any way after the cessation of brain activity. Today, science allows women with flat encephalograms to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth to healthy babies. An individual in a state of “irreversible coma” can be kept alive with the support of artificial means; a corpse can never be revived, even if connected to sophisticated equipment."

"Well, science has not yet been able to prove that the vital principle of the human organism resides in any organ of the body. The integrative system of the body, considered as a “whole”, cannot in fact be localised in a single organ, however important, such as the heart or the brain. Brain and heart activity presuppose life, but they are not strictly speaking the cause of life. Activities should not be confused with their principle. Life is something elusive that transcends the individual material organs of the living being and cannot be measured materially, let alone created: it is a mystery of nature, which science is right to investigate, but over which science has no control. When science claims to create or manipulate life, it becomes philosophy and religion itself, slipping into “scientism”."

"(About the Jehovah's Witnesses ) Their founder was a former Presbyterian and then Adventist, Charles Taze Russell. He preached the imminent end of this evil world and the advent of God's Kingdom on earth. And so he instilled in his followers the feverish activism of the great eve. They went from house to house, in pairs, to spread the Bible and a magazine, ‘The Watchtower’, founded in Brooklyn in 1879 and since then translated into all the languages of the world, the repository of their doctrine. A true organisational talent, Russell was the first to apply door-to-door advertising methods, the potential of a popular press such as Reader's Digest, and the appeal of the nascent cinematic arts to religious preaching. A magnificent film was, in fact, their advertisement."

"Wojtyla stands out as a leading figure in the Church's new phase of openness towards the East, moving beyond the purely diplomatic sphere."

"Today we have a reigning pontiff who uses the same language as the world and proposes the same theses as dominant secularist thought. On more than one public occasion the pope has avoided giving a blessing using the Trinitarian formula in order not to offend the sensibilities of non-believers and those of other faiths."

"Interviewer: ‘Is Italy still a Catholic country? Aldo Maria Valli: If we look at the figures for baptisms and children receiving their first communion, it would seem so. But very often it is a superficial Catholicism, linked to family tradition. Participation in the sacrament is more of an occasion for celebration and serves to strengthen family ties. As soon as confirmation comes around, there is a great exodus. In any case, compared to other countries with an ancient Christian tradition, two signs indicate that Catholic values are still alive in Italy: the stability of the family based on marriage (which, despite everything, remains a goal for many young people) and widespread solidarity, which manifests itself in voluntary work."

"When Bergoglio was elected, and I saw him take the name Francis for expressly ideological reasons and appear at the balcony of St Peter's, bowing to ask for the blessing of the people, after saying “good evening” instead of “Praised be Jesus Christ” (“good evening” which, of course, was very much appreciated by the enemies of the Church), I said to myself: “Here we go!" The prediction had come true. After that, it was a succession of painful confirmations, especially for me after Amoris laetitia."

"We Christians know this, or should know it: our faith is characterised by et et, not aut aut. We are not exclusivists. God is one and triune. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus is God and man, true God and true man. For Christians, man is flesh and spirit, body and soul. Christians like to integrate and include, not erect barriers. Through the Incarnation, God became man. The Church itself lives by the principle of et et. It is a Church of prayer and action, of great ascetics and great workers, of contemplation and mission. Ora et labora, not ora aut labora. The Church has preachers and confessors, cloistered monks and nuns, and street priests. The Church welcomes everyone: poor and rich, educated and uneducated, young and old."