Philosophers From Italy

"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)"

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

"As for the relationship between faith and morality, I believe that in order to establish a proper coexistence among human beings, reason is capable of establishing a morality (see Kant) independently of faith, which, as our times and past times demonstrate, contributes more to hostility and ferocity among human beings than to their peaceful coexistence."

"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?”."

"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."

"Dostoevsky puts a similar idea into the mouth of one of his characters, Versilov: that it is enough to renounce absolutes, to rid oneself of any claim to immortality is enough for men to learn to reconcile themselves with the earth, that is, with their finitude and fragility, finally loving one another, because there is no love except where there is a sharing of a common destiny and a feeling of pity for those who die, that is, for everyone. This idea in Dostoevsky's novel is not refuted, but simply put into the mouth of the Devil and dismantled with the most bitter of smiles. (chap. 5)"

"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)"

"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."

"Religion is a living thing."

"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."

"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)"

"(About the Italian debate on euthanasia) We are faced with a strange alliance between technocratic culture and Catholic religious culture, both of which seek survival at all costs. But Catholic culture at least has a sense of the suffering of the dying, which is foreign to technology, interested only in the proper functioning of the apparatus."

"Umberto Galimberti, Umberto Galimberti racconta Freud, Jung e la psicoanalisi, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, Roma, 2011."

"Nothing remains of the philosophy of '68. Simply because that philosophy never existed."

"Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e techne. L'uomo nell'età della tecnica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1999. ISBN 88-07-10257-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Paesaggi dell'anima, Mondadori, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-04-42130-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Psichiatria e fenomenologia, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2006. ISBN 88-07-81932-5."

"Since ideology prevailed over criticism by a wide margin, it was precisely the authors whom the movement had chosen as teachers, or rather (since teachers were rejected) as guides, who were massacred."

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

"Umberto Galimberti, La parola ai giovani. Dialogo con la generazione del nichilismo attivo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editori, Milano, 2018. ISBN 978-88-07-17297-7."

"Umberto Galimberti, Le cose dell'amore, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 88-07-84048-0."

"Umberto Galimberti, La casa di psiche. Dalla psicoanalisi alla pratica filosofica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 88-07-10391-5."

"Umberto Galimberti, L'ospite inquietante. Il nichilismo e i giovani, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-17143-7."

"Umberto Galimberti, La lampada di Psiche, a cura di Paolo Belli, Casagrande, Bellinzona, 2001. ISBN 88-7713-345-7."

"Umberto Galimberti, Orme del sacro. Il cristianesimo e la desacralizzazione del sacro, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-17044-2."

"The 1968 movement was neither the subject nor the object of philosophy. It did not produce its own independent thought. Nor was it conceived as a philosophical event."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il gioco delle opinioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-81800-4."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il corpo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2013. ISBN 978-88-07-88237-1."

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

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

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

"Umberto Galimberti, Idee: il catalogo è questo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-81527-0."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il segreto della domanda. Intorno alle cose umane e divine, Apogeo, Milano, 2008. ISBN 978-88-503-2717-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Gli equivoci dell'anima, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-81642-3."

"Umberto Galimberti, Cristianesimo. La religione dal cielo vuoto, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2012. ISBN 978-88-07-17222-9."

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell'occidente, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-428-0386-3."

"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."

"Truth is no longer conformity to the order of the cosmos or of God because, if there is no longer a horizon capable of guaranteeing the eternal framework of immutable order, if the order of the world no longer dwells in its being but depends on “technical doing”, “effectiveness” explicitly becomes the only criterion of truth. (p. 38)"

"Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger e il nuovo inizio . Il pensiero al tramonto dell'Occidente, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2020. ISBN 978-88-07-10553-1."

"Umberto Galimberti, Il tramonto dell'occidente. Nella lettura di Heidegger e Jaspers, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 978-88-07-81849-3."

"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)"

"It is easy to say “love”. But only the Devil knows what lies beneath this word."

"Among the enthusiastic followers of Tissot we find Rousseau and Kant, for whom those who masturbate are not unlike ‘suicides’ who destroy with a single gesture the life that masturbators sacrifice over time. (p. 48)"

"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)"

"Love is only the key that opens the doors to our emotional life, which we delude ourselves into thinking we control, while it, deceiving our illusion, leads us down paths and detours where, unbeknownst to us, the vitality of our existence flows in a tortuous and contradictory manner. (“'Love and Desire”', p. 65)"

"A virtue (“'areté”') that is a path towards the invisible and unspeakable centre (“'árretos”') from which only the unfolding of those harmonious circumferences that are the straight, the round, the beautiful and the just is possible. But this requires “the highest knowledge (”'méghiston mathémata'“)”, that mathematical knowledge for which Plato had the words “No one may enter here who is not a geometer” written on the door of his school. (p. 40)"

"Unlike animals, humans know they must die. This awareness forces them to think about the beyond, which remains so regardless of whether it is inhabited by God or nothingness. This makes the future unknown to humans and the hidden trace of their secret anguish. We are not anguished by “this” or “that”, but by the nothingness that precedes us and awaits us. And since there is nothingness at the beginning and end of our lives, the question of the meaning of our existence arises unavoidably. An existence for nothing or for God?"

"Unlike all the beings that populate the earth, in fact, man thinks, and every thought tells him of his total estrangement from the earth. “Thrown into the infinite immensity of spaces that I do not know and that do not know me, I am afraid,” says Pascal, and he is not alluding to the infinity of cosmic spaces, but to their ignorance of human affairs: “They do not know me”. The indifference of the earth, its strangeness to the human event it hosts without knowing it, and to which it sends only a message of loneliness. (pp. 13-14)"

"Love is between me and that abyssal depth within me, which I can access thanks to you. Love is very solipsistic; and you, with whom I make love, are that Virgil who allows me to go into my Hell, from which I then emerge thanks to your presence (because it is not a given that those who go to Hell will ever come out again). Thanks to your presence, I emerge: this is why we do not make love with just anyone, but with the one we trust; and what is it that we trust? The possibility that after plunging into my abyss, you will bring me back out."