Enzo Paci

"In the cool wind that rises in the night [...] perhaps a glimmer of hope is rekindled: that the horrors of life can be forgotten, and its labyrinthine and tormenting problems transformed into value, with the passing of time [...] in the slow and irreversible journey towards death. A smile consoles you, a gesture of affection reaches you, even if it ignores your anguish."

"By reviving the myth of Faust, Thomas Mann has Adrian, in order to save himself from the aridity and crisis of contemporary art, a crisis that is at the same time the crisis of a civilization in decline, make a pact with the devil who will give him greatness and creative power in exchange for renouncing love and the salvation of his soul. For Mann, Germany, discouraged, inhibited, and powerless, attempted to free itself from its inhibitions with the morbid and diabolical intoxication of Nazism. It seems that even art, in the contemporary world, cannot survive unless it allies itself with the morbid and the diabolical, and unless it laughs at itself, condemning itself at the very moment it is created, resolving itself into a parody of itself. Art, and music in particular, is today in utter disorder and ambiguity. How can we get out of it? How can we overcome the chaos? How and where can we find a principle, an order, a system of rules? Politically, this order has been sought in the denial of freedom. The composer Adriano Leverkühn seeks it in the new rules of twelve-tone music after he too has diabolically intoxicated himself, using his illness, syphilis, as a monstrous drug to stimulate his aesthetic fertility, only to sink into the dark night of madness and death."

"With the triumph of the new philosophy, man discovers within himself the inexhaustible power of spiritual creation and relives, in the history of his own thought and life, the becoming of the world. (p. 187)"

"[...] the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” this work of philosophy which, rather than a philosophical system, brings to mind an impetuous flight of Wagnerian themes and, at the same time, a Greek tragedy set in the universe, leads man to the conquest of the infinite. And, as in Schiller's Ode to Joy and the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, humanity seems to break the boundaries of time and ascend to that Eternal One who, only from the realm of all living beings, sees the richness of his infinity rise up to him, as if from a sparkling cup."

"Hegel created history: man is no longer alone. Every action transports him into universal becoming, the deepest secrets of his personality become figures of absolute consciousness, illuminated by the sunlight of the idea. (p. 188)"

"Faith in the infinity of movement: this is the secret of Hegel's thought. (p. 188)"

"In Hegel's vision of the universe, all guilt is erased. (p. 188)"

"In Wagner's “Tristan,” the drama of unhappy consciousness is revived in a theme already presented by Hölderlin and Novalis: the contrast between the separating clarity of the day and the primal unity of the night. Day is the world of reality in which the laws of loyalty and honor that govern civil life apply, and in which Tristan is the hero, the loyal warrior of King Marke. But the life of the day is nothing but an illusion in the face of the cosmic unity that binds souls to itself in their deepest absence and, once the illusory bonds are broken, submerges them in the universal breath of unconscious will. (p. 195)"

"In Heidegger, rethought philosophically, we find the terms of "Tristan]]": the “banal existence,” in which man disperses himself in chatter and in the superficiality of his social relationship with others, equivalent to the world of light that Tristan and Isolde betray and forget; ‘being-towards-death’, which for Heidegger is true historicity, where man finds himself faced with nothingness, equivalent to that world which the two lovers reach only through death, in the voluptuousness of submerging themselves in infinity. (p. 195)"

"And the fidelity to one's destiny that Jaspers, referring to Nietzsche, brought back to the forefront as a philosophical problem, does it not make us think of Siegfried, who only completes the meaning of his own myth in defeat and death, a death due to betrayal, it is true, but linked to the inability of the child hero to become, to be a man? And is there not something in Jaspers' fatal defeat, failure, or shipwreck that is desperately faithful to Wagner's pessimism?"

"When we talk about romanticism, we think of the defense of sentiment, of the irrational, of the impulse and passion of the infinite, of the taste for the obscure and the indeterminate. And it is true that the sense of the infinite is dominant in the Romantics. It is also true, however, that the Romantics sought in sentiment and, as in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, in eros, the solution to a dualism, the dualism between nature and spirit and between the unconscious and consciousness, which also includes the dualism between the finite and the infinite. (chap. 2, p. 15)"

"The ‘'Philosophy of Art’', written in 1931, is a crucial point in the thought of Gentile. Here, art exists only if it is not resolved in thinking thought, which, on the other hand, it cannot fail to do. However, if art is resolved in thinking thought, it is thought and not art, and as art it does not exist. Art posits itself but in positing itself it negates itself: it is elusive, it can be experienced but not thought. If it is thought, it dies. (chap. 3, p. 64)"

"The central point of Dilthey‘s philosophy is the conviction that 'categories arise from life’ and from the historical situation. [...]. There is no knowledge separable from life, there are no categories and methods not rooted in psychic experience, which mediates the fact and the awareness of the fact. (chap. 4, p. 85)"

"[...] Unamuno saw the characteristic of human existence in the drama of action torn between dream and reality, between the agony of the finite and faith. For Unamuno, existence can be saved in the paradox of Don Quixote's faith because dreams are an intensification of life: it is always a pragmatic tone that is highly critical of the rationality of thought and, ultimately, polemical towards philosophy itself. To live as “if Don Quixote's dream were reality”: this could be Unamuno's formula. (chap. 5, p. 123)"

"Hartmann [...] often said that what matters in philosophy are the problems and not the solutions [...]. (chap. VII, p. 194)"

"The future development of 20th-century philosophy could be determined, at least in part, by a revival of Husserlian philosophy. As Husserl's manuscripts are published, it becomes clear that not only Scheler and Hartmann should be interpreted in relation to the philosophy of Husserl, but that Martin Heidegger's existentialism is also part of a particular problem that arises from phenomenology. (chap. 8, p. 204)"

"The danger of Heidegger's philosophy lies not so much in its masked nihilism, which is always perceptible, but in the fact that, in its undeniable depth, this philosophy contains within it demands that cannot be rejected by contemporary thought, so that the value of many of Heidegger's analyses becomes a cover that often prevents us from recognizing the negative that constantly lurks behind the positive. (chap. 8, p. 210)"

"Enzo Paci, Introduzione all'esistenzialismo di Jaspers, in Logos, Vol. II, S. A. Editrice Perrella, Roma 1940."

"Enzo Paci, La filosofia contemporanea, series Saper tutto, Garzanti, Milano, 19634."