Philosophers From Italy

"If we already take for granted what madness is, philosophy becomes completely superfluous."

"The position of Parmenides is unique because it is also the point of greatest contact with the East.[...] Parmenides' radical solution is this: becoming no longer threatens, it cannot be harmful because it does not exist. [...] Everything that is distressing, terrible and horrendous in the world is illusion; this is the meaning of Parmenides' “'doxa”'. Well, this is also the path taken by the East: the “”Vedas“”, the “”Upanishads“”, the Buddhist revival of Brahmanism are all great themes that converge on this point: man is unhappy because he does not know he is happy, because he does not know that pain is outside him, and that he is a pure gaze that is not contaminated by the pain that passes before him, just as the mirror is not contaminated by the image reflected in it."

"The whole of Western civilisation says: “Things are not nothing”. But the West adds: “However, they become”. This attitude is based on faith in becoming, the fundamental faith of our civilisation, which, while “opposing” things to nothingness, also “identifies” them with nothingness; since to think that they, in becoming, come out of nothingness and return to it means to think that they are nothing. From the beginning, Western culture has had an ontological meaning. It has this even when it is unaware of it. But it is ontology that identifies being with nothingness. This identification is the very essence of Madness. Non-Madness is the appearance of the eternity of all things. The becoming of the world is not the creation and annihilation of being, but the story of the appearance and disappearance of the eternal. Precisely for this reason, we (and everything) are “eternal and mortal”: because the eternal enters and exits from appearance. Death is the absence of the eternal."

"Cornelio Fabro essentially drew on Thomas Aquinas, while someone like Bontadini was first and foremost a Gentilean."

"As the destiny of necessity, truth is the appearance of the being of the being as such (i.e. of every being); that is, the appearance of its not being other than itself, i.e. of the impossibility of its becoming other than itself, i.e. of its eternal being. The appearance of the being is the appearance of the totality of the entities that appear [...] The parts are a multiplicity. The appearance of a part is the relation of transcendental appearance to a part of this totality [...] This means that there is a multiplicity of these relations. In this sense, not only is the content that appears manifold, but so is its appearance."

"Since the USSR no longer controls the grassroots movements against global wealth and Islam has taken their place, the survival of the rich world is in danger."

"The civilisation of technology is what I call “the most rigorous form of extreme madness”. Even more quietly: extreme madness is believing in the ephemeral, temporal, contingent, random nature of man and reality: it is the conviction that everything comes from nothing and returns to it. However, the supreme defence against the anguish aroused by this conviction – the defence that in tradition is ultimately constituted by God – has become technology. Everywhere, technology is becoming the most radical form of salvation, which today has supplanted any other form of remedy against death."

"Hegel called it spirit, we call it culture. Culture is a negative definition, a jumble of things, made for the most varied purposes, not to provide us with a concept of spirit. Ernst Cassirer wrote “For a Philosophy of Culture,” but it was a masked, reduced, debased philosophy of spirit."

"Where the insular element dominates, it is impossible to save oneself. Every island waits impatiently to sink. A theory of the island is marked by this certainty. An island can always disappear. A talactic entity, it is supported by the waves, by the unstable. The metaphor of the ship applies to every island: shipwreck looms over it. The insular feeling is a dark impulse towards extinction. The anguish of being on an island as a way of life reveals the impossibility of escaping it as a primordial feeling. The desire to disappear is the esoteric essence of Sicily. Since every Sicilian would not have wanted to be born, he lives like someone who would not want to live: history passes him by with its hateful noises, but behind the tumult of appearances lies a profound quiet. Every story is vanity of vanities. The presence of catastrophe in the Sicilian soul is expressed in its vegetal ideals, in its historical taedium, a kind of nirvana. Sicily exists only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Only in the happy moment of art is this island real."

"It bothers me when people speak ill of Sicily, but they speak ill of it because their judgment is not based on fact, it is poorly motivated, it is rather something unrequited, a resentment."

"And so he became a writer. Well done. Every now and then he will come back for holidays, perhaps to see his family, and he will criticize us fiercely because he lives in civilization. But there is one thing he does not know, that this land, like the Ionia of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, is magical, and always calls back those who belong to it, as if exercising a right. The law of belonging. And even for him, one day the return will be inevitable. It will be the climate, the light, the air... An almond granita!"

"[About Angelo Scandurra ] With his language, this poet skins things alive. Imagination does not deal with current affairs but knocks imperiously on the doors of the universe. The image of an enormous spider grows before our eyes. The spider with which Spinoza plays, throwing flies at it and laughing, evokes in the philosopher the image of the ‘orto divinus’, whose insistent geometricity is the implacability of a God without passions. Like an enormous mass looming over terrified beings. In our poet, the spider is a ‘grumpy and cunning god’. The overbearing image, however, is not satisfied. The theme looms behind the courtesies of a man of the world. The poet is always vigilant. Whether with sharp lashes or caresses, he takes us from behind. As in an ambush in which we risk our prudent tranquility. Old sensations stir from afar, worn-out emotions are reawakened, and in the end we encounter ourselves."

"The mafia itself does not bring anything to mind. Like the homeland, the dead of Solferino. Ancient things. [...] Sciascia was a civil writer, a schoolteacher who wanted to teach us good social manners. But revisiting him today is like rereading Silvio Pellico. His function has been exhausted. We no longer need Sciascia. We need a new reflection, another Sicilian consciousness."

"I am me and Sicily. I cannot ignore or exclude it, I would be guilty of a poorly constructed abstraction."

"True life is the life of the mind."

"How can we still bear to call ourselves living—we who are dying!"

"I got everything I wanted out of life, now everything that contradicted me or my way of thinking, for example my family, has disappeared: I have been living alone for years."

"The first comer who wants to have his say boasts the right to independent thought, which he has been educated to believe in. Let him speak: he will hang himself."

"The singer must convince others of his ideas. Unlike the philosopher, however, he can do so without arguments."

"Here we see an attempt to construct a public theology—or rather, if we may borrow a stylistic feature from a great memory, a European public theology. If the age of theology appears to be over, or if only its shadow remains, it is because the dull intellects that have dealt with it (with a few exceptions) carry within them the worm that has gnawed away at the discipline. As if it had to follow the fate of the religion to which it was subjugated. The very fall of religion, now only an object of faith and hope – squalid supports of our uncertain destiny – was to favor it and clear the field of any misunderstanding. That God exists is just a sinister little fact. Nothing more. (Given the way things are going, it was to be expected)."

"We know the ‘reductio’ of all things in God by another name. In those who die, the infernal force, or, let's put it this way, the dear old essence of the world, is revealed ‘eo ipso’."

"Natural theology, as a “natural disposition,” belongs to blind spontaneity, to brute human nature. But at the same time, it reminds us that here there is only the lowest being. The same thing implies the blind formality of the disjunctive syllogism which, if we want to tell it like it is, leads us obtusely to conceive the outrageous idea of God. With this impiety, natural theology begins and ends."

"For physics, the meaning of the world lies in its end. The gaze that relies on physics sees things from the point of view of their end. This reverses the fundamental attitude of the individual. In the light of physics, it is not the origin but the end that is the goal. To see everything in the light of this, with life already destroyed, everything in eternal stillness, is to see it as it will one day appear. But it already appears today to those who can discern its morphological contemporaneity with us. It is a matter of already seeing the world in the light of this final catastrophe and referring to it as contemporaries from now on."

"One's own cognitive destiny (not the ‘letter on the subject’) leads far away. Asking a question and reading a book—what could be more foolish?"

"Theology is not the science of salvation, but of perdition."

"We drag ourselves through the streets at night and talk to ourselves. Dialogue flourishes during the day and echoes with its ignoble dealings. At night, we monologue. Like kings."

"He saw Paris as a set of ideas. To think in this city is to think it, he said. And for a time, he devoted his self to it."

"He had learned that irrational things have no system but narration. But that was not enough for him. He loved concepts and through them he sensed the smells of things and their quintessences and felt their power flowing in his blood, and he could even call them by name one by one... Concepts were his soul and through them he also filtered his moods. Individuals are embodied concepts. What do I care about possessing their flesh, he used to say. The image of an individual about whom nothing can be known except through his psychology seemed to him outdated and linked to a becoming image of man. Whereas, on the contrary, the individual is complete and can no longer be the object of psychology but of concept. This was his conviction. He had no fear of having prejudices."

"Sgalambro's philosophy, which from the point of view of language quality has Schopenhauer as its reference author, is a painful philosophy about the captivity of man, about being bad, in the sense of being a prisoner, with a central theoretical theme that is the relationship between being and having to be, and with the claim to affirm truth and not opinion: if I speak, I speak because I mean what I say as the truth, not to add doubts to doubts, otherwise I remain silent."

"In the spirit, there are still continents to conquer, discoveries and great journeys."

"He who has been educated in pessimism and has become its disciple, and moreover, as an epigone, intends to carry it into his own time, sees in it a classic theme, an eternal theme. He knows well what pessimism demands and what is demanded of it. He is the pessimist of truth, if one can call him that. Pessimism honors truth: this is the general thesis. This pessimist has followed the righteous path of honor. He has honored truth. This is the pessimism we want with all our strength, he says: to walk the path that every man who has approached truth walks to its cruelest core, where it is no longer with him. Because truth is the whole against the part, the whole against you."

"If we were to ask ourselves about the usefulness and harm of pessimism in life, there would be only one answer: truth or life."

"Sgalambro was a Schopenhauerian, he was Schopenhauer. I don't think this critical and essentially pessimistic vein did Battiato much good, as he lost some of that vein of irreverence, the paradoxical, ironic, sometimes even completely light-hearted energy he had in his works such as ‘Bandiera bianca’."

"Socrates dies because he broke the law. It is foolish to say that he was a gentleman, says Hegel rightly. If a philosopher is someone who pits the individual against the world, we cannot help but feel repugnance, he adds."

"If you still want me to bring out this obscure evidence of mine and shed some light on it, I see, for one thing, the principle of non-contradiction, the categorical imperative, the principles of science, knowledge about our solar system, just enough to face our fate—I mean that of the species. It is this communism that I am referring to."

"The species is nothing; some men are everything."

"True, society should save us from the universe that swallows us up. But what saves us from society?"

"Only those who preserve values lose them, and only those who can only subvert them actually preserve them."

"The means of mass destruction correspond to the grand return of value in place of being."

"There is therefore only one age. Or, as we might also say, all other ages are matters of psychology. Only old age is in itself. Only old age requires nothing less than metaphysics to be treated adequately."

"An idea does not seem truly reliable to me unless it also satisfies my senses."

"The task of theodicy was accomplished at the very moment it disappeared, not because it failed but because it succeeded completely. In the final analysis, it made the very notion of evil disappear."

"A righteous man is one who knows this: that he must annul God daily so that the measure of eternal justice may be fulfilled daily."

"I define thinking as paying attention to everything that is not oneself, or paying attention to oneself as if one were not oneself. Because of the misunderstandings this causes, I tend to use “being attentive” instead of “thinking,” and ‘attention’ instead of “thought.” One of the benefits would be to leave “thought” in its current usage. The idea of effort connected with it would be well explained by the concept of attention that is implicit in it. I then define idea as the gap between us and things. I am taken aback when I hear people say that ideas and things are identical. It is the power of this gap that defines the ability to think."

"True discipline in matters of the intellect is a ruthless intransigence against the spirit of discussion. Every concession made in the name of mutual equality is a betrayal of the truth, over which courtesy prevails. Thinking divides."

"I equally deplore the triumphalism of Kant and, in general, of those philosophies which, finding it necessary to start from the self, praise it as if it were a great achievement and not the miserable fate that has befallen us."

"That ‘I’ should be governed: this is where the scandal of politics begins. Therefore, in examining my aversion to it, I intend to examine the idea in relation to those who make it their profession, and then both in relation to my spirit. It seems obvious when viewed from the outside. But examined in relation to my spirit, or to any spirit, the idea that someone should ‘take care’ of me (this person should in fact be the ‘politician’) never ceases to amaze me. That I should be governed, that is where the scandal lies. My spirit's aversion to this idea is total."

"If Karl Kraus had written ‘'Capital’', he would have done so in three lines."

"Why do I insist on calling myself a “philosopher” even though neither philosophers want me nor I want them? Because I entered this discipline, with its venerated rules, as a child and my loyalty has never wavered. For more than fifty years I have studied it without distraction. I have grasped its secrets and reticence, I have seen its exaltations and declines, its excesses and forgetfulness. Philosophers on the altar and then hurled down. I witnessed their reign and the dominance of their ideas, and I studied it more than that of leaders and commanders. I had lasting loves, I imitated models (but how can one imitate the Idea, alas). I grew old there. I know three or four things about it better than my contemporaries. I have nothing more to add."

"If you steal, they arrest you; if you say that God exists, it's just an opinion. That has always amazed me."