Umberto Galimberti

"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."

"(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."

"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."

"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."

"(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."

"AIDS, by presenting us with this inextricable intertwining of life and death, and of love and death, reactivates the image of the vampire who, with his cleft lip, piercing canines, scarlet face, sharp tongue and single nostril, gruesomely represents that death which is never in its place and therefore haunts the unconscious of those who live striving to keep it as far away as possible."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"We have a continental philosophy that also speaks in a literary way, think of Heidegger, to name a philosopher of the last century. In reality, they [the British] have always been empiricists: Bacon, Locke and Hume were empiricists, then they had Stuart Mill in the 19th century, who was a positivist. In America, they have John Dewey and William James who are pragmatists. They need to see the concrete, so they are incapable of abstraction. Philosophy is abstraction... Eastern thought cannot enter into the abstract; we Westerners invented it."

"There is only one solution for raising children happily: loving relationships, whether between a heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple. Where there is love, children grow up well; where there is violence or emotional coldness, children grow up badly."

"Socrates said he knew nothing, precisely because if he knew nothing, he questioned everything. Philosophy arises from questioning the obvious: we do not accept what is, because if we accept what is, as Plato reminds us, we will become a flock, sheep. So, we do not accept what is. Philosophy arises as a critical instance, not acceptance of the obvious, not resignation to what is now fashionable to call healthy realism. I realise that, realistically, someone who enrols in philosophy is doing something crazy, but perhaps if there were no such crazy people, the world would remain as it is... as it is. So philosophy plays a very important role, not because it is competent in something, but simply because it does not accept something. And this non-acceptance of what is does not express itself through revolutions or revolts, it expresses itself through an attempt to find the contradictions of the present and of what exists, and to argue for possible solutions: in practice, thinking. And the day we abdicate thinking, we have abdicated everything."

"So, perhaps a little hastily, I must tell you that males, at least in their imagination, are not monogamous. Their polygamous fantasies are perhaps the cultural legacy of animal behaviour where, with the exception of a few species, monogamy does not exist."

"Fidelity, if we want to strip it down a little, is the virtue of those who feel weaker in the couple and have the impression that, having lost the man or woman they live with, they have no other “chance” than the desert of loneliness. And so they cling to the other's indifference, if not hostility, immersing themselves in those exaggerated forms of love that are the flip side of their absolute need for the other."

"If the need to reassure one's own intrinsic insecurity generates fidelity, the need not to lose oneself in the other generates betrayal."

"All this to say that love is not possession, because possession does not tend towards the good of the other, nor towards loyalty to the other, but only towards the maintenance of the relationship, which, far from guaranteeing happiness, which is always in the search for and knowledge of oneself, sacrifices it in exchange for security."

"By betraying them, the other person surrenders them to themselves, and nothing prevents us from saying to all those who feel betrayed that perhaps one day they chose who would betray them in order to find themselves, just as one day Jesus chose Judas to meet his destiny."

"In this way, personal merit ends up being the least significant factor in finding a job, resulting in personal frustration and the poor functioning of society, where it is only by chance or pure coincidence that the right person is found in the right place. We can thus understand why the fight against the mafia will never be won in Italy, because the mafia is nothing more than a gruesome version of widespread customs, where kinship, acquaintances, the exchange of favours, in a word, the “familistic” network prevails over the recognition of personal values and citizenship rights. What can be done? Very little can be done until the level of civilisation is raised, with the recognition of the value of individuals as its first pillar. In this regard, the Americans could teach us something and, given that today's widespread culture proclaims itself pro-American, we could import from them this one virtue in which they excel. But perhaps our pro-Americanism only means doing our business under their protection."

"We adults are responsible for this disillusionment, as we have unconditionally adhered to the “healthy realism” of a single mindset incapable of seeing beyond business, profit and individual interests, abandoning all bonds of solidarity, all compassion for those worse off than ourselves, and all emotional ties outside the narrow confines of the family. Furthermore, we have inaugurated a world view that looks at the earth and its inhabitants solely from a market perspective."

"I do not like the definition of “atheist” because it is applied to me by those who believe in God and view the world exclusively from their point of view, dividing it into those who believe and those who do not. This labelling reflects the arrogance of their mindset, which makes their faith the discriminating factor between people."

"Before the birth of reason, which is a recent phenomenon, having emerged 2500 years ago with philosophy (which, to distinguish itself from theology, has always reasoned ‘as if God did not exist’), religion was an attempt to find causal links to defend oneself from the unpredictable and the unknown, which has always terrified man and generated anguish."

"As for reason without faith, it seems to me that this falls within the scope of reason, which, as Kant reminds us, is a tiny island in the ocean of the irrational. Given its size, allow me to be among those who are committed to its defence."

"In this sense, it is possible to say that science, utopia and revolution are all animated by a deeply religious view of time and history, where what was announced at the beginning is ultimately realised."

"The Church already realised this at the time of Galileo and, without being deceived by the religious vision of history underlying both science and utopia and revolution, it came into conflict with these secularised versions of eschatological time, because it understood that they corrode it from within to the point of losing track of it, with irreversible damage to the institutions (the Churches) that have their foundation and justification in the eschatological vision of time and history. This is what history teaches us, and the facts confirm it."

"Still in accordance with God's command to man to have dominion over nature (Genesis 1:1-5), modern science will eventually take this dominion away from God, who, being less and less accessible to reason, ends up being increasingly confined to faith. Taking the place of God, reason becomes the legislator; it does not “learn” from nature, as was the case when nature was considered the unfolding design of God, but, as Kant says, it forces nature to answer its questions. In this way, nature has no meaning in itself other than that which it assumes within the human project, which tends to make it a resource available to man. Today, science, not in those who practise it, but in those (and that is all of us) who place their hopes in it, if not for salvation, then certainly for health, healing, progress and growth, continues to feed on religious ideology, even if its actual practice disregards this ideology and proceeds as if God did not exist."

"No historical era, however absolutist or dictatorial, has ever experienced such a process of massification, because no absolute ruler or dictator was capable of creating a system of conditions of existence in which conformity was the only possibility of life."

"We are in the age of technology, where it is impossible to live except at the price of complete standardisation to the world of products that surrounds us, and on which we depend as producers and consumers, to the world of technical and administrative tools that we serve and use, to the world of our fellow human beings relegated to second place, because we relate to them as representatives of their functions."

"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."

"It is clear that the more technological society becomes, the more jobs are lost. Paradoxically, what has always been man's oldest dream: liberation from work is turning into a nightmare."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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”."

"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’."

"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)"

"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."

"After Ernesto De Martino, Carlo Tullio-Altan, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89, was the greatest Italian anthropologist in two senses: as a significant exponent of cultural anthropology, a discipline so little cultivated in Italy, and as a ruthless investigator of the anthropology of Italians."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."