Essayists From Italy

"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."

"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."

"Today, however, there is a much more subtle form of power, which is essentially the control of thought, the control of ideas. This is very dangerous because when I control the ideas of all those who are subordinate to power, they think like power, they applaud it, they want it, they desire it, they adore it. Because they think like it. And then the second degree, even more pernicious, is the control of feelings. There are television programmes that teach young people how to love, how to hate, how to fall in love, how to get angry. When I have established control over feelings, I have absolute power. Because not only do I think as the television media has taught me to think, but I feel as they want me to feel. At this point, I have achieved complete control over the world in which I operate."

"Crossed by sexuality, the ego yields its limit in order to reaffirm it at a higher level. By coming into contact with the other part of itself, the ego goes beyond fascination and desire to reach that “immense void” where the ontological decision is made, where being reaches its limit and where the limit defines being. (p. 233)"

"Then came Christianity and with it the curse of the flesh. Christianity broke the mandala, the four that make up harmony. Three are gathered together and separated from the fourth, the devil, whom iconography began to depict with the features of Pan, the Greek god of sex who, at his favourite time of day, chased the nymphs of the forest with his goat's hooves and broken horns. Christianity kept sexuality in check in the West, where heaven was separated from earth and spirit from flesh. If one fine day we stopped condemning pornography, which is nothing more than the flesh in its solitude, and began to condemn those who have reduced the flesh to solitude, separating it from heaven to make it the antechamber of hell, the first circle of the “'Comedy”'. (p. 220)"

"The sunset of the West is the fulfilment of a meaning contained in the word that says: “'land of the evening”', “'occasum”', the last glimmer of that light which, rising at dawn, has dominated the day. The word expresses a destiny that cannot be escaped. The sun cannot be stopped. Sunset is inevitable. The West is the land destined to host this sunset. But what is the meaning contained in the word? Is “setting” the inevitable decline of light or is it the unconscious withdrawal of the earth from the light? To grasp the meaning of this question is to decide between waiting and choosing. (Introduction to Book Two: “Western Thought”, p. 277)"

"Sexuality is a risk where the individual gambles with their identity and society with its order. To avoid this risk, we resort to the imagination, which, in a hallucinatory way, allows us to live illusory experiences that we do not have the courage to dare. Thus, the ego experiences the thrill of its identity being put at stake without losing it, and society experiences the turmoil of disorder that does not, however, affect its order. The imaginary serves this purpose, not to enhance sexuality, as is believed, but to appease it at that phantasmagorical level that leaves reality intact as it has been constructed. (p. 208)"

"Sexuality does not belong to the narrative of the ego because, in its presence, the soul undergoes a dislocation which, by shifting the regime of its rules, weakens self-possession. Its plot is interrupted by something excessive which, by breaking the continuity of speech and the order of discourse, leads to escape routes that the ego and the reason that governs it are unable to pursue. Drives and desires, in fact, bursting in as uncontrolled signifiers in the established order of meanings, bring to light other connections, other plots, other intertwining threads whose knots sink into the other part of ourselves. (p. 207)"

"[...] Desire, which, as Plato reminds us, is made up of “lack” and “nothingness”, demands that the dose be increased, so that in a certain sense drug addiction reproduces, like nothing else, the perfect functioning of desire, which does not seek pleasure in the world, but the rapid and immediate extinction of that “lack” which is its constitutive structure. In fact, no one desires what they have, but only what they do not have. “Nothingness is the soul of desire”, which, in its anaesthetic version, makes appetite irresistible and pleasure unsatisfactory. (p. 70)"

"Starting in 1968 and gradually over the following years, the contrast between the permitted and the prohibited faded away to make room for a much more painful contrast between the “possible” and the “impossible”. (p. 80)"

"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)"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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”."

"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."

"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 ‘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)"

"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."

"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."

"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”."

"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”.."

"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?"

"If it is true that we are able to understand our time even without the word “God”, it is equally true that we would not understand it if we removed the word “Technology”, the meaning of which has been clearly explained by Sergio Givone. Heidegger said some essential things on this subject. He illustrated on several occasions that technology has brought the humanistic era to an end, so that man is no longer the “subject” of history, but the “functionary” of technical apparatuses, by which he is in some way “employed” (be-stellte). Indeed, he risks becoming raw material, indeed the most important raw material (der Mensch der wichtigste Rohstoff ist), from the point of view of absolute usability. (p. 60)"

"“The stroke of genius of Christianity”, which exorcises death by guaranteeing immortality to every human being, has become a common belief that even science has failed to undermine; indeed, in a certain sense, it has contributed to definitively rooting this conviction."

"I am not a theologian, but a philosopher of history who follows Nietzsche's “genealogical” method, which, unlike Plato's, does not ask, for example, “what is the soul?”, but rather: “How did this concept come into being, what is its history, what meanings has it taken on, what effects has it had on reality?”, convinced as I am that the essence of a thing, its meaning, lies in its history."

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

"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."