philosophers-from-italy

"Realism is the premise of criticism, while irrealism is characterised by acquiescence, the fairy tale told to children to help them fall asleep. (p. 30)"

"Interviewer: How do philosophy and theology coexist in you? Vannini: Since the age of reason, I have felt a certain love and interest for deeply philosophical and theological issues, according to the Hegelian interpretation that philosophy has the absolute in common with religion."

"The area in which scepticism and the abandonment of truth have shown their most aggressive face has been politics. Here, post-modern de-objectification has been, exemplarily, the philosophy of the Bush administration, which theorised that reality was simply the belief of “reality-based communities”, i.e. of naive people who do not know how the world works. We found the most concise expression of this practice in the response of a Bush adviser to journalist Ron Suskind."

"For me, Meister Eckhart is truly Meister, magister, as his contemporaries called him. He is the Christian who most deeply understood the Gospel message and, at the same time, the medieval philosopher who was able to gather the best of the classical heritage. His works are all equally important, both those in the vernacular, intended for the people, and those in Latin, created for the university environment. From a more philosophical-theoretical point of view, however, it can be said that the ‘'Commentary on the Gospel of John’' is the most dense and relevant work, while for a more immediate access to his thought and experience, it is certainly the works in the vernacular, the ‘'Sermons’' or the so-called ‘'Treatises’' that are most useful. They are also the most fascinating, profound and at the same time simple works, accessible to all, as only a great teacher of life – ‘Lebemeister’, and not just ‘Lesemeister’, or professor, as Heidegger noted about him – can be."

"By making mistakes we learn, or others learn. Saying goodbye to truth is not only a gift without return to ‘Power’, but above all the revocation of the only ‘chance’ of emancipation given to humanity, realism, against illusion and enchantment. (p. 112)"

"Almighty God the Father is the one who can be prayed to, and prayed to for help, both for eternal life and – above all – for the needs and desires of this earthly life. It is therefore not surprising that religions continue to thrive, particularly in those parts of the world and among those sections of the population that feel the harshness of existence most acutely. In this sense, Karl Marx's old definition of religion as the opium of the people and the groaning of the oppressed creature is still valid, and is necessarily expressed precisely through the image of Almighty God the Father. The picture is completely different among the educated classes. Since the Enlightenment, since the days of Reimarus and Lessing, historical criticism and philological analysis have destroyed that image, as they have dismantled the supernatural claim of the Bible, the foundation of that image throughout our world, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From this perspective, God is truly dead, as in Nietzsche's famous passage, and the fact that businesspeople have not noticed this does not detract from the fact itself: the biblical God died the moment people realized that they themselves had constructed his image."

"Even at a superficial level, the objections that weak thought raises to truth as violence are objections to violence, not to truth, and are therefore based on a misunderstanding. Omitting these circumstances leads us to situations with no way out: power is always right; or, conversely, counter-power is always wrong; and even, in a rather perverse form, counter-power and counter-knowledge – even if it belongs to a mafioso or a witch – are always right. (p. 91)"

"To assert that everything is socially constructed and that there are no facts, only interpretations, is not to deconstruct but, on the contrary, to formulate a thesis – all the more accommodating in reality the more critical it is in the imagination – that leaves everything as it was before. (p. 70)"

"The depths of the soul are not a faculty, a “power” of the soul, but rather the place where uncreated grace operates, God himself who “works with the soul to such an extent that he frees it from itself, as a creature, so that nothing remains but God and the soul itself, without mediation.”"

"What is faith? Is it a belief in otherworldly realities, in which imagination reigns supreme, and perhaps in truths expressed by sacred scriptures defined outside of all rationality, whose interpretation allows us to deduce everything and its opposite? Or is it the path of intelligence, indeed of the whole being, towards the Absolute, which precisely for this reason removes everything relative, all pretended knowledge, empties our soul and leads us into nothingness, into that “night” , from which alone the dawn can rise, or rather, the eternal light can reveal itself? These two questions belong, I believe, to every thinking consciousness of all time, but even more so in our time, that is, after the Enlightenment, after contemporary philology, which makes that faith as belief and that adherence to Scripture that was perhaps possible for a man of the Middle Ages extremely problematic. Must we pretend to believe in the existence of biblical characters and events that have been shown to have the same historical reality as the Homeric heroes and the Trojan War?"

"Hence the “impasse”: if knowledge is power, the instance that must produce emancipation, i.e. knowledge, is at the same time the instance that produces subordination and domination. And that is why, with yet another somersault, radical emancipation can only be achieved through non-knowledge, through a return to myth and fairy tales. Emancipation, thus, goes round in circles. For the sake of truth and reality, truth and reality are renounced: this is the meaning of the “crisis of the grand narratives” of the legitimisation of knowledge. (p. 101)"

"Just as in “there are no facts, only interpretations”, one can always turn the argument against weak thought by saying that if the explanation of the link between violence and truth is a truth, then weak thought is responsible for the very violence it condemns. (p. 91)"

"In its “prima facie” manifestation, the idea of truth as pure power is a very resigned, almost desperate statement: “the strongest argument is always the best”. But, in fact, there is reason to be more hopeful: reality itself, for example the fact that it is true that the wolf is upstream and the lamb is downstream, and therefore cannot muddy its water, is the basis for restoring justice. For, contrary to what many postmodernists believe, there are good reasons to believe, based above all on the teachings of history, that reality and truth have always been the protection of the weak against the bullying of the strong. If, on the other hand, a philosopher says that “so-called ‘truth’ is a question of power”, why is he a philosopher instead of a magician?"

"Interviewer: Professor Vannini, how did your interest in mysticism come about? Vannini: It arose spontaneously, from the religious education I received in childhood (this was before the Council!) and, at the same time, from my encounter with and passion for philosophy, which developed during my adolescence. It was precisely by following my own disordered but passionate paths of research that I discovered, in the Marucelliana Library in Florence, the little book edited by Professor Giuseppe Faggin, La nascita eterna (The Eternal Birth), which was the only anthology of Eckhart available in Italian at the time. Although I was only a high school student, I was certain that I had stumbled upon something extraordinary, infinitely deeper (or higher) than anything I had known – or been taught – until then, a certainty that today, half a century later, is, if possible, even stronger for me. Obviously, I did not understand everything, and in order to understand, I began to study philosophy and then theology, devoting myself in particular to the authors and currents that most related to this field. Thus, little by little, I became familiar with that world which, somewhat improperly and, above all, unfortunately in a very ambiguous way, is called “mysticism.”"

"R. Susskind, “”Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush“”, “'nytimes.com”', 17 October 2004."

"Humanity must save itself, and certainly never ever can a God do so. We need knowledge, truth and reality. Not accepting them, as postmodern philosophy and political populism have done, means following the alternative, always possible, proposed by the Grand Inquisitor: following the path of miracles, mystery and authority."

"We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own reality. A reality that you observers study, and on which we then create other realities that you will study again." An arrogant absurdity, of course: but eight years earlier, the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard had argued that the Gulf War was nothing more than television fiction. (p. 23)"

"Instead of recognising reality and imagining another world to be realised in place of the first, [postmodernism] posits reality as a fairy tale and assumes that this is the only possible liberation: so that there is nothing to be realised, and after all, there is nothing to be imagined either: on the contrary, it is a matter of believing that reality is like a dream that cannot hurt and that satisfies. (p. 24)"

"Dem Polyklet das Maß, und Phidias das Eisen gab."

"I don't believe there is a “calling” to mystical experience. I think that what is rather ambiguously called mysticism is nothing more than the experience of the spirit, or rather the experience of the truest and deepest reality of man: something that each of us is “called” to accomplish if we want to become what we really are. Of course, this requires a precise willingness not to be satisfied with the relative, to move towards the Absolute _ therefore a strong religious and philosophical need _ , but this also seems to me to be something absolutely “normal,” even if, perhaps, it is not so from a statistical point of view, so to speak."

"The oxymoron is preferred by the mystic because it allows him to express something ineffable, because it is the best tool for speaking of the unspeakable, because in the world of duality it creates the ‘'coincidentia oppositorum’', which Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), in the context of his theology of the Incarnate Word, considered almost the least imperfect definition of God. The mystic, in his talk of God, punctuated by ‘'improprietas’', ‘'voces obscurae, horridae, inauditae’', seeks through a paroxysmal accumulation of oxymorons to linguistically touch the divine. (from ‘'La mistica e i mistici’', p. 187)"

"Silence also enhances testimony. Silence does not prove, argue, or demonstrate; it only testifies. Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, it possesses an unusual power. “Why are you crying out so loudly?” God said to Moses. Yet Moses was silent. “So much,” commented Kierkegaard, “can silence cry out to heaven.” (p. 93)"

"If Nietzsche had returned to the beginnings of Greece to reconstruct the hierarchy of values, Hesse was an anti-authoritarian who appealed to institutions; if Spengler had diagnosed the agony of our civilization, he discovered Asia. The canton of Ticino was his true homeland. There he found what he was looking for. There he is buried."

"(About Hermann Hesse) Like few others has summarized in his work the impulses and escapism of our time: loved a few years ago by the right, he is not disliked by the left and is appreciated by those who devote themselves to spiritual research. In him, Ladislao Mittner noted, pietism and Buddhism coexisted; in his pages, we find a religion born of a similar union, capable of reflecting trends without offending them."

"The theme of silence can be topical or outdated. It is never out of fashion. And today, despite what many may think at first glance, it is undoubtedly topical. Perhaps more so than ever before. “As the power of language diminishes,” noted Susan Sontag, “the power of silence increases.” And ours are times in which language is seen as something corrupt. “In no century,” wrote Ignazio Silone in ‘'Pane e vino’' [the title is ‘'Vino e pane’'], "has the word been so perverted, as it is now, from its natural purpose, which is to enable people to communicate. Speaking and deceiving (often deceiving oneself) are now almost synonymous." The widespread disaffection with words stems from the realization that our speech and that of others has become mostly mere palatal facts, impersonal and banal chatter. (pp. 83-84)"

"There is no real escape from this vortex. The only way to become immune to the plague is to expose oneself to its contagion. But this inevitably means becoming prey to it in an endless cycle. The plague generates itself, reproducing tirelessly, despite and precisely because of attempts to eradicate it—in reality, hiding it, crushing it against the fragile wall of oblivion and repression. Humanity is nothing more than that thin strip of land that stretches between one wave of the plague and another – emerging into the open only when the tide recedes, before rising again and submerging us once more. That in some seasons the plague – this plague in man and of man – disappears, recedes, vanishes, is our impression. It has always been there, lurking, waiting to return and explode stronger than before, like the dark shadow that stretched across the burning heart of Western civilization in the 1930s."

"Recalcati reconstructs in all its facets the development, far from linear, of a thought, such as that of Lacan, formed at the point of convergence and tension between existentialism and structuralism, capable of absorbing, translating them into a highly original mixture, the influences of Hegel and Heidegger, Sartre and Kojève, Saussurre and Jakobson – not to mention Freud, who remained his privileged interlocutor until the end."

"The plague is a metaphor for evil. Of evil that comes from outside, or from above, like the arrows shot by Apollo at the Greeks leaving for Troy. But also, and above all, of evil that arises and grows within us. Within the world and from the world. Rooted in that nature that both envelops us and constitutes us as finite, fragile beings, exposed to the icy wind of death."

"It must be understood that the silence referred to by the adjective ‘mystical’ is not external, esoteric silence, intended to conceal secret truths from the ‘uninitiated’, but rather inner silence, which consists in silencing one’s thoughts, however profound they may be, and therefore in detachment, especially from all our supposed knowledge. Detachment is the work of intelligence, which incessantly recognizes the finiteness of its own contents and, at the same time, of the will, which incessantly recognizes in those same contents the presence of egoism, of that amor sui that is truly the root of all evil."

"I think it is possible to speak of “a Christian philosophy” as long as it is understood in the sense in which the Fathers of the Greek Church, Origen, or Gregory of Nyssa could understand it. Certainly, Christianity, in the strong sense, is itself philosophy, but not because there is a Christian philosophy ideologically placed alongside others, but because the life of the Christian as such is profoundly “philosophy.” The expression “Christian philosophy,” therefore, taken in a certain sense, does not bother me at all, precisely because I believe that Christianity is the true philosophy, without prejudice to the universal and absolute value given to both terms, Christianity and philosophy."

"Philosophy in the strong, classical sense shares with religion the object, truth, the Absolute in and of itself, and is therefore properly a stripping away, a removal of everything that is relative and accidental, in order to get to the essential. This concerns first and foremost ourselves, according to the precept of the Delphic Apollo: ‘Know thyself’. It is the ‘sculpting of one's own statue’ that Plotinus speaks of, removing the marble that covers it and prevents it from coming to light."

"But the question of the plague—in its not only pathological but also moral, ontological, and metaphysical meaning—had already been raised by Lucretius and, before him, by Anaximander. The plague is destiny, but also, when measured by ethical standards, the fault of a man who, being part of nature, shares its evil or, at least, senseless character."

"In news programmes and political programmes, we have seen Nietzsche's principle of “there are no facts, only interpretations” reign supreme. A few years earlier, philosophers had proposed this as the path to emancipation, and in fact it presented itself as a justification for saying and doing whatever one wanted. Thus, the true meaning of Nietzsche's saying was revealed: “The strongest reason is always the best”. It is also for this reason, I believe, that claims of philosophical realism have come to the fore since the end of the last century."

"Ontology simply means: the world has its laws, and it enforces them. The mistake of the postmoderns was based on a simple confusion between ontology and epistemology, between what is and what we know about what is. It is clear that in order to know that water is H2O, I need language, schemata and categories. But water wets and fire burns whether I know it or not, regardless of languages and categories. At a certain point, there is something that resists us. This is what I call “unamendability”, the salient characteristic of the real. This may certainly be a limitation, but at the same time it provides us with the very foothold that allows us to distinguish dreams from reality and science from magic."

"Postmodernism has found full political and social realisation. Recent years have taught us a bitter truth – namely, that the primacy of interpretations over facts, the overcoming of the myth of objectivity, has been achieved, but it has not had the emancipatory results prophesied by professors. [...] The real world has certainly become a fairy tale, or rather [...] it has become a “reality”, but the result has been media populism, a system in which (provided you have the power) you can claim to make people believe anything. In television news and talk shows, we have witnessed the reign of “There are no facts, only interpretations”, which – with what is unfortunately a fact and not an interpretation – has shown its true meaning: “The strongest argument is always the best”. (pp. 5-6)"

"Is not the height of madness to think that being is nothingness? And is not “nihilism” first and foremost to think that being is nothing? And is it not because of this ancient thought that all the radical destructions that mark the history of the West have been able to mature?"

"Hemingway conceived sincerity as the supreme moral commandment. This applies above all to writing, which must not hide what man truly feels."

"If Christians are convinced that Jesus is the holiest, they must believe that nature, disposition and impulses are the most evil in him and that he is the holiest precisely because he alone is able to overcome them. The crudeness of certain expressions of Jesus may be a symptom. The first step in overcoming what is “terrible and fearsome” in each of us is to look it in the face."

"The most rigorous form of madness today is technology: we are living in a time of transition from tradition to this new god. Authentic globalisation is not economic, it is technological. We make the mistake of believing that capitalism and technology are the same thing: no, they have different purposes. Capitalism aims at the infinite increase of private profit, technology at the infinite increase of the ability to achieve goals, or power. Technology will kill democracy, starting with the weakest states such as Italy. This process will then also affect the US, Russia and China. At some point, the United States will prevail, but not as a nation, rather as the primary managers of technological power. We are now struggling to understand this because we are in an intermediate period. We are like a trapeze artist who has let go of one piece of equipment (tradition) and has not yet grabbed hold of the other (technology, the new god). We are suspended in mid-air and feel lost."

"Even for atheists, things come from nothing and return to nothing: God's friend is a madman who believes he needs a master, a lord, a creator; the atheist is a madman who believes he does not need one, but both belong to the same soul."

"Hemingway had learned that the pleasure of life is inseparable from pain: life is a struggle – it is “war”, said the ancient Heraclitus."

"In the West over the last two hundred years, relativism – a term that is so widely used today thanks to the Church – is a phenomenon that runs deeper than we might think. It concerns the outcome of history. Let us consider two periods: the first, that of philosophical tradition tout court up to Hegel, is followed by that of the twilight of the gods, or rather the inevitable dismantling of this tradition. This is the era of relativism. Interviewer: Why is dismantling inevitable? Severino: Because it is not a change in taste, that God is dead because people have lost the taste for believing in him. That would mean he could be reborn. I am talking about inevitability, about incontrovertibility. The conferences will overturn a still prevalent way of thinking, attributable for example to Marx, which holds that it is the existence and life of man that transforms the world. As if to say that philosophy is only a superstructure placed on top of a basic reality. This is not the case. Contemporary philosophical discourse has its own invincibility."

"Interviewer: Do you watch football matches? Severino: I'm not a fan, but I'm passionate about the World Cup. And fencing, do you know why? My father was a fencing master and led his military team to victory before the First World War. It was the only sport I was any good at; until recently, I could have disembowelled someone. Interviewer: How should life be taken, with kisses or slaps? Severino: Giving me my wife was a big kiss, taking her away from me was a big slap. Interviewer: One last question: what is love? Severino: Ah, love is still a form of will, but it always leaves you dissatisfied: so ending a programme with this phrase leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mouth."

"I am the first to recognise this. When I began to develop this way of thinking – but let's go back a long way – I was the first to realise that I should leave that university. Interviewer: However, you never broke off your personal relationship or esteem for your teacher, Gustavo Bontadini? Emanuele Severino: We loved each other, and I still get emotional when I think about it. I remember when he was in his last days... ah, what a dear man... I went to see him in Via Stradella – he lived in Via Stradella, near Corso Buenos Aires – and I said to him: “Maestro, I am Emanuele Severino”. He, who had not opened his eyes for days, gave a start and opened his arms to me. We embraced for a long time. Then he let go of my arms and I left him."

"Interviewer: The piano as a percussion instrument. Are we right in thinking that your point of reference was Stravinsky? Severino: Yes, I was steeped in Stravinsky's phonics and formulas, but perhaps above all in Bartók's. Interviewer: But who introduced you to music? Severino: My brother, who was eight years older than me, was an excellent pianist. I loved listening to him, and then, when I could, I would sit down at the piano myself and “compose”. Ever since I was a boy, I have always been attracted to the world of sounds, to the combination of sound relationships. Maestro Guastalli, my brother's teacher, who disapproved of my way of playing and urged me to study regularly, but I stubbornly preferred to combine sounds. To tell the truth, in later years I did study with a certain regularity, but not always continuously. So I remained a modest pianist."

"Today, the philosophical and scientific cultural climate, not to mention literature, has moved away from the concept of definitive, incontrovertible truth. Today's “truths” serve to transform the world according to certain plans. No one says anymore, as Galileo did, that man knows mathematical truths as God knows them. [...] Greek thought understands the definitive truth of things as an oscillation between non-being, being and non-being. If the things of the world, according to the belief of humanity today, did not and will not exist, it is inevitable that no definitive truth exists."

"In the past, the thesis that this conversation is eternal sometimes provoked a few chuckles, but then I realised that it was worth remembering that Einstein's relativity, although with a logic very different from mine, says that future and past events are no less real than present ones. So much so that when Popper spoke with Einstein, he called him Parmenides. Interviewer: The English physicist Julian Barbour asserts that time does not exist and that events are like postcards hanging on a clothesline, all present at the same time... Severino: Yes, he slightly varied the image that Popper used with Einstein of frames wrapped in a reel. But neither of them can explain the camera or the movement of the gaze that passes from one postcard to another. To do so requires a logic [...] that science cannot provide. In general, science believes that the mind is a special thing among things. This is where the theory of experience, which scientists tend to neglect, comes into play. Experience is the transcendental mind; it does not enter or exit a field of vision but is the place where everything enters and exits. To understand what the unwinding of the frames or the gaze that flows over the postcards is, we need to introduce the concept of transcendental consciousness, which was glimpsed in some way by idealism, that is, the place within which the eternal occurs. The so-called becoming of the world cannot be the beginning of being and the cessation of being, but is the appearing and disappearing of the eternal in that transcendental consciousness."

"Why is it that today, when not only philosophical but also scientific culture rejects the idea of a stable state of being, of stable knowledge... why is it that in this situation there is someone who proposes the absolutely stable, the Absolutely Existing? The elimination of all definitive knowledge stems from the way in which Greek philosophy took its first steps. Destiny calls those first steps into question. So, by questioning them, the claim to take a look at the Absolutely stable becomes less paradoxical."

"Interviewer: Can you explain, in the simplest way possible, what your philosophy consists of? Severino: We are kings who believe ourselves to be beggars. I question not only Christianity, but the whole of Western civilisation and its philosophy, according to which we come from nothing and end up in nothing. This is the essence of nihilism. No, each of us is a god with the conviction of being contingency, the shadow of a dream. Man is a poor thing: Pindar says so, Shakespeare and Leopardi say so, it is the climate created by Bertolt Brecht. In reality, we are the eternal appearance of destiny. Our dead await us as the stars in the sky await the passing of the night and our inability to see them except in the dark. We are destined for a Joy more intense than that promised by the religions and wisdoms of this world. The beggar is our conviction, for example, that I am raving, because real things are this world, Europe, Italy, economic, legal and sexual relationships. Whereas the essence of man consists in his absolute permanence. With death, we overcome the state of beggary: death allows us to transcend the sense of nothingness."

"It is believed that there is opposition between Islam and Christianity, but they are on the same side. Their enemy - as the Pope has pointed out - is the destruction of Western tradition. This is the real clash of civilisations, which is not between the two religions, which share a relationship with the God of the philosophers – the Greeks – and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."