Umberto Galimberti

thumb|Umberto Galimberti in 2008 Umberto Galimberti (born 1942) is an Italian philosopher, university professor, essayist, and psychoanalyst. He has been a disciple of Emanuele Severino. Quotes 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. from Il corpo (“The Body”) 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. from “Dracula, blood analysis”. (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. from Omnibus, LA7, 31 January 2016. Visible at 00:11:30 of 'Omnibus - The Odyssey for those in Italy who want to adopt (Episode 31/01/2016)“”, YouTube, 1 February 2016. 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. From the foreword to Ernesto de Martino, “'Sud e magia”' (South and Magic), Feltrinelli, Milan, 2001, p. XI. ISBN 88-07-81675-X 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. From an interview with Marco Montemagno, 17 November 2019. Video available on “'Youtube.com”' (min. 0:50-1:50; 3:35-5:41). (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. from the radio programme “Corpo delle donne” [Women's Bodies], Radio Feltrinelli podcast. 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. from “”Dracula, blood analysis“”. 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. From the programme “'In Onda”' broadcast on 12 February 2023; in “”Galimberti: ‘Society channels us into a strict sexual division that serves it’“, 'la7”, 12 February 2023. 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. quoted in “”Galimberti's accusations against Christianity“”, “'Varese News”', 27 February 2024. 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”. Umberto Galimberti: Quella virtù così difficile da insegnare 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. From an interview with Marco Montemagno, 17 November 2019. Video available on “'Youtube.com”' (min. 0:50-1:50; 3:35-5:41). 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. From the television programme “'Anno Uno”', La7, 4 June 2015; quoted in “”Galimberti: “Love is the only tool for raising children well”'“, ”'Announo.tv, 4 June 2015. 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. from the meeting “'Intellégo – Paths of emancipation, democracy and ethics”' in Copertino, 25 January 2008. Quotes derived from articles D la Repubblica delle Donne Tradire è amare, October 2001 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. dì che ti mando io, 6 December 2003 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. Non spegnete l'utopia, 26 March 2005 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. Fede e ragione, 17 June 2006 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’Etsi Deus non daretur, a formula coined by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (or Huig de Groot, 1583-1645).), 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. Scienza e religione, 2 September 2006 There is no doubt that science is steeped in theological metaphors. When Bacon conceived the first draft of the scientific method in 1600, he wrote that through science and technology, man would regain the supernatural virtues that Adam had lost through original sin. And it would contribute to redemption by freeing humanity from the toil of labour and the suffering of pain, which were the two punishments that God had inflicted on Adam when he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. To this we can add that the religious view of time, which sees the past as guilt, the present as redemption and the future as salvation, is re-proposed by science in a similar perspective where the past appears as evil, science as redemption and progress as salvation. 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. Siamo tutti omologati, 7 April 2007 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. Quando l'uomo è ridotto a capitale, 21 July 2007 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’From “'Critique of Practical Reason”'., 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. Ripensare l'idea di lavoro, 8 September 2007 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? Scienza e fede, 22 September 2007 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. La sanità e i tributi, 3 November 2007 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. Socrate e Gesù di fronte alla morte, 16 February 2008 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’. L'Epresso Facciamo un lifting alle nostre idee, 24 May 2007 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) la Repubblica 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.Giordano Bruno la divina follia contrapposta alla scienza, 11 February 2001. 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.Il filosofo pioniere dell'antropologia, 16 February 2005, p. 50. 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.Also reported on the back cover of “'Le cose dell'amore”', Feltrinelli.Linguaggio. Desiderare, sollecitare, pretendere con infinite parole vere e bugiarde, 11 September 2004 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.Linguaggio. Desiderare, sollecitare, pretendere con infinite parole vere e bugiarde, 11 September 2004 Smettiamo di crescere, 2 September 2005 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”.From “Man is Obsolete”, vol. II: “'On the destruction of life in the age of the third industrial revolution”'.. 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. Narcisisti e schizzati, così trionfa l'apparenza, 14 November 2006 And so, by giving nothingness a semantic power that radiates at a distance to mean anything, fashion cheaply solves identity problems that put an end to the agonising question: “Who am I?”. If old age no longer shows its vulnerability, where can we find the reasons for “pietas”, the need for sincerity, the demand for answers on which social cohesion is based? 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. L'anima. Se la Chiesa impone la sua verità, 26 September 2007 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? “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. Micromega Almanacco di filosofia. L'eredità di Martin Heidegger, March 2007 The importance of Heidegger lies in the fact that he describes his philosophy as “going beyond metaphysics”. Given that metaphysics refers to all philosophical thought from Plato onwards, this means placing oneself in a pivotal position, of which Heidegger is fully aware. What does metaphysics mean? Nothing more than the philosophical version of the religious view of the world. (p. 59) 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) Quotes from interviews Paolo Forcellini, Come Dio comanda, L'espresso, 16 March 2006 The more temporal power is separated from spiritual power, the more correct the relationship between the two is. The Church considers itself the sole repository of ethics. Ethics as the exclusive prerogative of religion brings Christianity considerably closer to the Islamic mentality. Fortunately, we have had the Enlightenment and the secular state, which have partially immunised us. On the part of the Church, however, there is a tendency to deny that ethics is a human quality, as Kant said, and instead to assert that it derives from religious dogma. Humans would be incapable of producing morality. At this rate, we end up with a theocratic state. But morals are nothing more than rules of coexistence aimed at reducing conflict. Humans can give themselves these rules: ethics is an anthropological category. Sometimes I wonder if the Church still believes in God. This is certainly a paradoxical and provocative statement, but it has its justification: when the Church intervenes massively to promote legislation favourable to its ethics, then we may wonder whether those who wield ecclesiastical power believe more in the instruments of the world or in the work of God. Salvatore Viglia, Europa Sera, 21 March 2007 In ‘The House of Psyche,’ it is noted that the problems that exist today can no longer be addressed through psychoanalysis, as they once were. Psychoanalytic tools treated the discomfort of the individual, the discomfort of civilisation in the sense of the miserable conditions in which people lived, in what I call “the society of discipline”, where the game was between the desire of those who wanted to break the law and those who wanted to suppress this desire. Today, this is no longer the scenario of pain. The scenario of pain, especially under the influence of American culture, which pushes us to achieve our goals in the shortest possible time, produces situations of anxiety determined by demand. No longer the traditional psychoanalytic demand (what is allowed and what is forbidden), but what can I do, what am I capable of doing? This inability to achieve goals when the bar is set higher and higher creates a sense of inadequacy, of a lack of meaning and, ultimately, beyond the technique that has no purpose but simply functions within an absolute, radical lack of horizons in view of who knows what. Le Storie, Corrado Augias (editor), May 2008 So let's suppose that God speaks: are we sure we understand what he says? When I give a lecture, I am convinced that my students, whether there are thirty or fifty of them, understand thirty or fifty different things. Because language is immediately a translation: when you listen to me, you translate what I say into your world view. And so this translation means that you understand something I did not say. What's more, God; I don't know: some people hear him, some people believe he speaks to them. But let's be clear: did you really hear him with your ears, did he say things to you when he met you, or do you imagine that those are the words of God? There are those who need this reference point that transcends life. But there is a much more basic transcendence: the people who are here in front of me transcend me. They have their own view of the world. Why don't we establish a horizontal transcendence instead of a vertical one? Why, instead of talking to God, don't I talk to my neighbour? Wasn't that one of Jesus' maxims? When he said that the image of God is in our neighbour. So let's start talking to people, at this point. Because being able to understand another person is already transcendence. There is no need to talk to the unknown God, where only I am talking because he does not answer, except with the words that I think he says. Which are, after all, the fulfilment of my desires. 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. Le Storie, Corrado Augias (editor), December 2009 Shame is a fundamental feeling. Shame [In Italian: vergogna] comes from vere orgognam: I fear exposure. Today, exposure is no longer feared. So what happens? If I behave in a transgressive manner, well, what's the harm? I fulfil the hidden desires of each of us and expose them, how clever I am. And so at this point, the codes of good and evil are no longer clearly visible. Kant said that everyone feels good and evil naturally, he used the word “feeling”. Today, this is no longer true. Simply put, if someone has the courage to show themselves to be vicious, if they have the courage to show themselves to be transgressive, they are a person of value, at least they have courage, they have interpreted the hidden feelings of each of us. This now means, I would not say the collapse of collective morality, but even of individual morality, internal morality, psychological morality. Therefore, the end of times. 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. Gli equivoci dell'anima Incipit In a scientific civilisation, the word “soul” takes us back to the dawn of our history, when religion and philosophy competed for knowledge. Psychology, which built itself on the notion of the soul, has long wanted to emancipate itself from this background in order to be accepted into the ranks of the sciences and thus enter fully into “our” history. This emancipation occurs through the removal of its origins and thus with the loss of that stratification of meanings that makes the word “soul” so ambiguous that it can be associated with a wide variety of systems of thought, which at this point must clarify their relationships and reveal the semantic content they cover with this word. Quotes 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) The explicit transition from the interiority to the exteriority of the soul, to which Christian practice had contributed, takes place with Descartes who, in radicalising Platonic dualism, ends up “abolishing” it, resolving the body and the world into representations of the soul, which thus becomes the absolute horizon of presence. Il gioco delle opinioni Incipit Page after page, leafing through a hundred books to review them in the culture sections of our newspapers, I became convinced that the review is a literary genre that should be abolished because it leads to summarisation and therefore to the closure of the book. Books, on the other hand, should be opened, leafed through, dissolved in their supposed unity, to offer them up to that question that does not ask “what does the book say?”, but “what does this book make you think about?”. Books are not for “knowing” but for “thinking”, and thinking means escaping uncritical adherence in order to open oneself up to questions, it means questioning things beyond their usual meaning, made stable by the laziness of habit; it means preventing texts from becoming sacred texts for blissful consciences which, by renouncing the risk of questioning, confuse the sincerity of adherence with the depth of sleep. Quotes So sex as the source of life and life as the reproduction of harmony. The sexual act as an act of creation where one does not get caught up, as we do, in births or abortions, but where at a certain point one celebrates the meaning of heaven, earth and the ten thousand things that inhabit heaven and earth in composed harmony. Why do we Westerners believe in the stars and horoscopes that fall from the stars and have forgotten that our slow, agile or violent acts change the stars, their balance, their light, their rotation? Man's act creates harmony or disharmony in the universe, and our sex, as a composing act, can become a fading not so much of ourselves, but of the cosmos that does not ignore us. (p. 219) Philosophy loves disagreements, because disagreements produce, generate, feed, and create thematic variations, heuristic games, and absolute novelties. (p. 88) 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) Brothels have been closed down, not by the Merlin law but by a shift in demand, which no longer seeks sexual exchange but the buying and selling of the imaginary. In large cities, prostitutes have been almost entirely replaced by “'veados”', mostly Brazilian transvestites, imported for a season and then sent back to their “'favelas”'. This is a sign that what is sold on the streets is not sex and even less sexual exchange, but rather the “'representation”' of sex and the glitz of the images it produces. 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) Il tramonto dell'occidente Incipit To philosophise today is to be misunderstood. The origin of the misunderstanding lies in the fact that contemporary man seems to have only two languages at his disposal: the “common” language, attentive to everyday occurrences, and the “scientific” language, which supports the common language in its results while transcending it in its methods. Both are bent towards immediate or hoped-for utility. The latter represents the maximum metaphysical effort of modern man, whose only transcendence seems to be the usefulness of tomorrow, which finds its expression in the physical realm in space ventures that go beyond the boundaries of the earth, in the biological realm in genetic discoveries that decipher the mysteries of the body, and in the economic realm in globalisation that makes the earth a common space that tends to abolish differences. These are the areas in which metaphysical tension today gathers and is exhausted in vague thinking, corrupted by emotion or exalted by enthusiasm. Quotes 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) The meditations on Nietzsche by Heidegger and Jaspers have highlighted with the utmost rigour the metaphysical essence of nihilism and its profound traces in all aspects of the Western soul. (Introduction to Book Two: “'Western Thought”', p. 279) The tragic conclusion of the Second World War, with the atomic destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, is not just a historical fact for Jaspers, but an indicator of the nihilistic outcomes to which technical and scientific development left to its own devices can lead. (Chapter 58, “False Consciousness and the Claim of the Technical-Scientific Apparatus to be Beyond Comparison”, p. 422) L'ospite inquietante Incipit A book about young people: because young people, even if they are not always aware of it, are suffering. And not because of the usual existential crises that punctuate youth, but because a disturbing guest, nihilism, lurks among them, penetrates their feelings, confuses their thoughts, erases their prospects and horizons, weakens their souls, and saddens their passions, rendering them lifeless. Families are alarmed, schools no longer know what to do, only the market is interested in them, leading them down the path of entertainment and consumption, where what is consumed is not so much the objects that become obsolete year after year, but their very lives, which can no longer project themselves into a future capable of offering any promise. The present becomes an absolute to be lived with the utmost intensity, not because this intensity brings joy, but because it promises to bury the anguish that appears every time the landscape takes on the contours of a desert of meaning. Quotes Humans have never inhabited the world, but only the description that myths, religion, philosophy and science have given of the world from time to time. (p. 15) We still carry within us the traits of pre-technological man, who acted with a view to goals inscribed in a horizon of meaning, with a wealth of ideas of his own and a set of feelings with which he identified. The age of technology has abolished this “humanistic” scenario, and questions of meaning remain unanswered, not because technology is not yet sufficiently perfected, but because finding answers to such questions is not within its remit. Technology, in fact, does not tend towards a goal, does not promote meaning, does not open up scenarios of salvation, does not redeem, does not reveal the truth: technology “works”. (p. 21) What does this crisis consist of? A change in the sign of the future: from the “future-promise” to the “future-threat”. And since the psyche is healthy when it is open to the future (unlike the depressed psyche, which is entirely focused on the past, and the manic psyche, which is entirely focused on the present), when the future closes its doors or, if it opens them, it is only to offer uncertainty, precariousness, insecurity and unease, then, as Heidegger says, “the terrible has already happened”, because initiatives fade away, hopes appear empty, demotivation grows, and vital energy implodes. (p. 26) The lack of a promising future deprives parents and teachers of the authority to show the way. A “contractual” relationship is then established between adolescents and adults, as a result of which parents and teachers feel constantly obliged to justify their choices to young people, who may or may not accept what is proposed to them in an “egalitarian” relationship. But the relationship between young people and adults is not symmetrical, and treating adolescents as equals means not containing them and, above all, leaving them alone to face their own impulses and the anxiety that comes with them. (p. 29) But which teachers assess, in addition to the cultural skills of their students, the degree of self-esteem that each of them has for themselves? Which teachers are aware that much of learning depends not so much on goodwill as on the self-esteem that triggers goodwill? Who, with appropriate recognition, reinforces this self-esteem, the primary driver of cultural education, and avoids destroying it with epithets and derision that, if directed at adults, would lead straight to court? (p. 32) If learning cannot take place without emotional gratification, then neglecting emotions, or addressing them in such a hasty manner as to be counterproductive, is the greatest risk that a student faces today when going to school. And this is no small risk because, if it is true that school is the highest experience in which models of centuries of culture are offered, if these models remain contents of the mind without becoming formative ideas of the heart, the heart will begin to wander without horizon in that restless and depressed nothingness that even the noise of youth music cannot mask. (p. 38) Emotional excess and a lack of reflective cooling essentially lead to four possible outcomes: 1) the “stunning of the emotional apparatus” through ritual practices such as nights at the disco or drug use; 2) “disinterest in everything”, implemented to numb emotions through sloth and non-participation, leading to an opaque attitude of indifference; 3) “violent behaviour”, when not murderous, to release emotions and achieve an overdose that exceeds the level of addiction, as with drugs; 4) “creative genius”, if the emotional burden is accompanied by good self-discipline. (p. 42) [...] before the psychotherapist's couch, where words are exchanged, as we know, for a fee, before the drugs that stifle all the words with which we could learn to name and understand our soul's movements, we must convince ourselves of the necessity and urgency of preventive emotional education, which is very rare in the family, at school and in society. (p. 49) We knew madness as an excess of passion. We saw its symptoms, we foresaw its possible scenarios. Today, more and more frequently, in the world of young people, madness dresses itself in the clothes of coldness and rationality, revealing nothing and exploding in unsuspected contexts that give no hint or even the slightest suspicion. (p. 50) Feeling is not languor, it is not ill-concealed melancholy, it is not anguish of the soul, it is not disconsolate abandonment. Feeling is “strength”. That strength that we recognise at the heart of every decision when, after analysing all the pros and cons that rational arguments unfold, we “decide” because we feel at home with one choice rather than another. And woe betide us if, out of convenience or weakness, we make a choice that is not our own, woe betide us if we are strangers in our own lives. (p. 54) If we call “intimate” that which we deny to strangers in order to grant it to those we want to let into our deepest secrets, often unknown even to ourselves, then modesty, which defends our intimacy, also defends our “freedom”. And it defends it in that core where our personal “identity” decides what kind of “relationship” to establish with the other. (p. 57) Injecting heroin is called “bucarsi” in Italian. The body becomes an “abyss”, which etymologically means “bottomless”. Similarly, in French, “being an alcoholic” is called “drinking like a hole” (“boire comme un trou”). Drug addicts and alcoholics speak in ancient Greek and describe their inability to “contain” themselves with Platonic images. (p. 66) [...] 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) La casa di psiche Incipit 1. “'The Romantic Age as an era of disillusionment”' Unlike all other peoples on earth, Western man one day said ‘I’. Plato announced it and Descartes made it explicit. Psychology captured this word and made it the “'centre of subjectivity”', unfolding a worldview starting from this centre. Quotes Love is between me and that abyssal depth within me, which I can access thanks to you. Love is very solipsistic; and you, with whom I make love, are that Virgil who allows me to go into my Hell, from which I then emerge thanks to your presence (because it is not a given that those who go to Hell will ever come out again). Thanks to your presence, I emerge: this is why we do not make love with just anyone, but with the one we trust; and what is it that we trust? The possibility that after plunging into my abyss, you will bring me back out. La terra senza il male Incipit This book is about the earth and its evil, about the sign and symbol of language and its limits. This book is about Jung, because like Nietzsche, Jung reaches the “violent essence” of psychological discourse and therefore the “origin” of discourse, which even philosophy does not know because, as a “human science”, it only speaks of its limits. With Jung, “humanism” hangs by the slimmest thread of the ego that narrates itself, because, instead of allowing himself to be deceived by the Narrative, Jung asks what the Narrative is. A terrible question because it besieges the invulnerability of knowledge. That “I” am “constructed” is the same story as “my narrative” that says so. So I am not constructed except by an oblivion of my genesis. But who narrates the “Genesis” to me if not God? Quotes 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,”From “Pensées”, no. 205. 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) A virtue (“'areté”') that is a path towards the invisible and unspeakable centre (“'árretos”') from which only the unfolding of those harmonious circumferences that are the straight, the round, the beautiful and the just is possible. But this requires “the highest knowledge (”'méghiston mathémata'“)”, that mathematical knowledge for which Plato had the words “No one may enter here who is not a geometer” written on the door of his school. (p. 40) Le cose dell'amore Incipit Why a book about love? Because, compared to previous eras, love has radically changed form in the age of technology. On the one hand, it has become the only space in which individuals can truly express themselves, outside the roles they are forced to assume in a technically organised society. On the other hand, this space, being the only one in which the self can unfold and exercise its freedom outside any pre-established rules and order, has become the place of radicalisation of individualism, where men and women seek their own selves in the other, and in the relationship not so much the relationship with the other as the possibility of realising their own deep selves, which no longer find expression in a technically organised society that defines the identity of each of us in terms of our suitability and functionality to the system to which we belong. Quotes Love is only the key that opens the doors to our emotional life, which we delude ourselves into thinking we control, while it, deceiving our illusion, leads us down paths and detours where, unbeknownst to us, the vitality of our existence flows in a tortuous and contradictory manner. (“'Love and Desire”', p. 65) Unlike animals, humans know they must die. This awareness forces them to think about the beyond, which remains so regardless of whether it is inhabited by God or nothingness. This makes the future unknown to humans and the hidden trace of their secret anguish. We are not anguished by “this” or “that”, but by the nothingness that precedes us and awaits us. And since there is nothingness at the beginning and end of our lives, the question of the meaning of our existence arises unavoidably. An existence for nothing or for God? Love fades because nothing remains the same over time. It is easy to say “love”. But only the Devil knows what lies beneath this word. Among the enthusiastic followers of Tissot we find Rousseau and Kant, for whom those who masturbate are not unlike ‘suicides’ who destroy with a single gesture the life that masturbators sacrifice over time. (p. 48) And so the Age of Enlightenment, which for Kant marks ‘the emancipation of humanity from a state of minority’, reveals itself to be much more backward, obsessive and persecutory towards masturbation than previous centuries, which were governed by religion, which perhaps, more than reason, is familiar with the flesh and the sufferings of its loneliness. (p. 50) Orme del sacro Incipit ‘Sacred’ is an Indo-European word meaning ‘separate’. Sacredness, therefore, is not a spiritual or moral condition, but a quality inherent in that which has a relationship and contact with powers that man, unable to dominate, perceives as superior to himself, and as such attributable to a dimension, later called ‘divine’, thought of in any case as “separate” and ‘other’ with respect to the human world. Humans tend to keep their distance from the sacred, as always happens when faced with what is feared, and at the same time are attracted to it, as one might be to the origin from which one has one day emancipated oneself. This ambivalent relationship is the essence of every “religion”, which, as the word suggests, encloses and keeps within itself (re-legere) the area of the sacred, so as to guarantee both its “separation” and “contact”, which remain regulated by ritual practices capable, on the one hand, of preventing the uncontrolled expansion of the sacred and, on the other, its inaccessibility. It seems that all this was foreseen by humanity before fearing or invoking any deity. In fact, God arrived very late in religion. Quotes Looking at man and looking at art, we must focus our eyes on their “belonging together”, because isolating man from his spiritual expression means reducing him to the condition of an animal, just as isolating art from man means making it twirl in the realm of the spirit, forgetting the material depth in which art, like man, takes shape and form. (p. 140) “'Myth is the search for origin”', its revival and re-proposal, “”religion is the announcement of redemption, its figures are hope and faith in what is to come. [...] Where religion intersects with myth, myth dies out. (p. 65) Psiche e techne Incipit “'1. Man and technology.”' We are all convinced that we live in the age of technology, enjoying its benefits in terms of goods and freedom. We are freer than primitive men because we have more playing fields to engage in. Any regret or dissatisfaction with our times seems pathetic. But in our addiction to using tools and services that shorten space, speed up time, ease pain and nullify the norms on which all morals have been carved, we risk not asking ourselves whether our way of being human is too ancient to inhabit the age of technology, which not we, but the abstraction of our minds, forcing us, with an obligation stronger than that enshrined in all the morals that have been written throughout history, to enter into it and take part in it. Quotes This is the ability that today's man has lost, as he is unable [...] to “imagine” the ultimate effects of his “actions”. Ethics, when faced with technology, becomes pathetic: we have never seen impotence capable of stopping power. The problem is not what we can do with the technical tools we have devised, but what technology can do to us. Reason is no longer the immutable order of the cosmos in which first mythology, then philosophy and finally science were reflected, creating their respective cosmologies, but becomes an “instrumental procedure” that guarantees the most economical calculation between the means available and the objectives to be achieved. (p. 38) Truth is no longer conformity to the order of the cosmos or of God because, if there is no longer a horizon capable of guaranteeing the eternal framework of immutable order, if the order of the world no longer dwells in its being but depends on “technical doing”, “effectiveness” explicitly becomes the only criterion of truth. (p. 38) Incipit of some works Cristianesimo “'On the sacred”' 1. “'The meaning of the word”' “Sacred” is an Indo-European word meaning “separate”. Sacredness, therefore, is not a spiritual or moral condition, but a quality inherent in that which has a relationship and contact with powers that man, unable to dominate, perceives as superior to himself, and as such attributable to a dimension, subsequently called ‘divine’, thought of in any case as “separate” and ‘other’ with respect to the human world. Man tends to keep his distance from the sacred, as always happens when faced with what he fears, and at the same time he is attracted to it, as one can be to the origin from which one has one day emancipated oneself. Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell'occidente “An axis of world history, assuming that one exists, should be found 'empirically”, as a fact that is valid, as such, for all men, including Christians. This axis should be located at the point where everything that man has been able to be since then was generated, at the point of the most overflowing fertility in shaping the human being; it should be, for the West, for Asia and for all men regardless of a specific content of faith, if not empirically cogent and obvious, at least so convincing from the point of view of empirical insight as to give rise to a common structure of historical self-understanding for all peoples. This axis of history therefore appears to be situated around 500 BC, in the spiritual process that took place between 800 and 200. There we find the clearest demarcation of history. It was then that man arose as we know him today. For brevity's sake, we call this era the “axial period” (J – UZ, 19). Heidegger e il nuovo inizio “'1. His early years and first studies in philosophy and theology”' Martin Heidegger's life was extremely uneventful. In fact, with the exception of the years 1933-1934, during which Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, joined the National Socialist Party, it could be said that the dates of his life coincide with the stages of his philosophical journey, marked by the years of publication of his works and some of his decisive lectures and conferences. I miti del nostro tempo “'1. The myth of maternal love”' We all know that maternal love is never just love. Every mother is filled with love for her child, but also with rejection of her child. Sometimes rejection prevails over love, and then we have those cases of infanticide, whose disturbing frequency no longer allows us to relegate these tragedies to psychiatric case studies and dismiss them in the perfect style of repression. I vizi capitali e i nuovi vizi This book stems from a reflection inspired by a short treatise written in 1724 by Bernard de Mandeville entitled “A Modest Defence of Public Houses of Pleasure”. It is estimated that in the first half of the 18th century, there were more than fifty thousand prostitutes in London alone; the plague-like spread of venereal diseases – the “Gallic disease” as Mandeville calls it – had exacerbated prejudices against sexual incontinence and licentiousness. To counter the wave of prohibitionism, which led to strict legislation outlawing prostitution, and at the same time aware of the serious social implications of the phenomenon, Mandeville, ‘to counter the bad consequences of irrepressible vice’, proposed the opening of public brothels that would guarantee efficiency and good organisation and be protected in the same way as public service institutions. Idee: il catalogo è questo “'Alchemy”' In 1928, Jung received a Taoist treatise entitled “'The Secret of the Golden Flower”' from Beijing, sent to him by the Protestant missionary and sinologist Richard Wilhelm, with a request for a commentary. As he wrote in his “'Memories, Dreams, Reflections”', the first encounter that interrupted his solitude, providing him with evidence of a natural and spontaneous kinship between psychic experiences and alchemical experiences, where attempts were made to transform base metals into noble metals and, simultaneously, the psyche of the operator (alchemist) from impure human conditions to pure and noble conditions. In alchemical language, “transformation” means reaching the fullness of one's secret essence by freeing it from impurity and corruptibility. This process applies to both the work and the operator. Il corpo “'Nature and culture”' are not the extremes of a path that humanity has never travelled, but simply two names that we use here to designate the ambivalence with which the body expressed itself in archaic societies and the equivalence to which it has been reduced today in our societies by the codes that govern them and the set of their inscriptions. Submerged by the signs with which science, economics, religion, psychoanalysis, and sociology have connoted it from time to time, the body has been experienced, in accordance with the logic and structure of various fields of knowledge, as an “organism” to be healed, as “labour power” to be employed, as “flesh” to be redeemed, as “the unconscious” to be liberated, as a “support for signs” to be transmitted. Never does the imprint of its solitary life, on the periphery of structural codes, go unnoticed in its “ambivalence” which, regardless of the principle of identity and difference with which each code expresses its bivalent mirroring, says it is this, “but also” that. Il libro delle emozioni “'1. The mind and the heart”' We reason with our minds, we love and hate with our hearts. This is the condition of man, attracted by the mind that exercises control over the passions, but also seduced by the passions that escape the mind's control. Il segreto della domanda “'1. Origin of the book”' This book collects sixty of the many letters that readers of “'D la Repubblica delle donne”' send me every week, asking questions that are then discussed in a somewhat unusual way, which is not to answer the question, but to radicalise it, going as deep as possible to where the root cause lies. This approach can sometimes seem irritating, sometimes difficult, sometimes disappointing, but it is better to disappoint the expectation of an immediate answer than to sterilise the question, impoverish it, and fail to live up to what it asks. My comments on the letters reproduced here are not intended to be a recipe book for life's problems, because that would imply that I understand my own life and that of others, whereas the beauty of life lies precisely in its inscrutability, in the game indicated by its enigmas that do not lend themselves to easy solutions. Invito al pensiero di Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger's life was extremely lacking in external events. In fact, with the exception of the years 1933-34, during which Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, joined the National Socialist Party, it could be said that the dates of his life coincide with the stages of his philosophical journey, marked by the years of publication of his works and some of his decisive lectures and conferences. L'età della tecnica e la fine della storia It is not only because we live in time that history exists. History is something quite special: for it to come into being, time must be inscribed in a plan, and time is not inscribed in a plan by itself. It can take on a linear chronological value (past, present, future) – as in the Judeo-Christian tradition – or a cyclical one – as in the Greek tradition. That said, however, time is not yet history; history is when time, being inscribed in a design, has meaning. Not all times have meaning – and we mean meaning in two senses: significance and direction. We therefore say that time has meaning when the design in which it is inscribed gives it a direction that confers significance upon it. Young people understand this better than older people, because young people fall in love, and when they fall in love, we say that “a story is born”. And what does it mean for a story to begin? It means that that time is not the time before and the time after, it is not simply the passing of days, but it is a time full of meaning and direction: either of love or of the shipwreck of love. So the story has its own quality, a temporal quality: it is not temporality as such, but time endowed with meaning. La lampada di Psiche Sexuality and prostitution in the age of technology A series of crimes has reignited the debate surrounding the phenomenon (which is essentially always hidden) of prostitution. The greatest revolution of the twentieth century (women's emancipation) has not eradicated this ancient profession, which survives every historical era, including our own. This news story therefore prompts an initial reflection: sexuality and prostitution in the age of technology." La parola ai giovani ‘We twenty-somethings are in a hurry to realise our dreams.’ Dear Dr Galimberti, we are the generation of twenty-somethings. Those who are in limbo, too young to be credible in society and too old to live carefree like children. We have our first responsibilities to deal with, we are hungry for life and want to be, to succeed, to assert ourselves. But like the culture of fast, conveyed by the media and made possible by technology, we too want to be here and now. We want to arrive. To realise ourselves. We are impatient. To become, to assert ourselves, to see ourselves as adults in control of our independent spheres. Paesaggi dell'anima “'The silent horizon of myth”'We Westerners have given voice even to the silent words of the soul, and thus we have resolved myths into meanings and symbols into signs. Psychoanalysis, the science of decoding, has applied itself particularly to this desecrating operation, dissolving every myth into a residue of signs that may indicate the path to health, but no longer the magic of life. And so knowledge increases, but it does not illuminate the landscape that myth preserves as an infinite reserve of references which, if they do not reach a destination, at least prevent man and the world from falling into the anguish of a definition. Psichiatria e fenomenologia The crisis in psychiatry and the suspicions surrounding psychoanalysis are not entirely unfounded. Both derive their conceptual models from the scheme introduced by Descartes and adopted by science when, for its explanatory purposes, it divided man into soul (res cogitans) and body (res extensa), producing what Binswanger called ‘the cancer of all psychology’. Umberto Galimberti racconta Freud, Jung e la psicoanalisi In 1927, at the age of seventy-one, when life begins to reveal its secrets to those who have lived it, Freud wrote in the “Postscript” to his essay “The Problem of Analysis by Non-Physicians”: 'After forty-one years of medical practice, my knowledge of myself tells me that I have never really been a physician. I became a physician because I was forced to turn away from my original intentions, and the triumph of my existence consists in having rediscovered, after a tortuous and very long detour, the direction I had set out on at the beginning. References Bibliography Umberto Galimberti, Cristianesimo. La religione dal cielo vuoto, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2012. ISBN 978-88-07-17222-9. Umberto Galimberti, Gli equivoci dell'anima, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-81642-3. Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell'occidente, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-428-0386-3. Umberto Galimberti, Heidegger e il nuovo inizio . Il pensiero al tramonto dell'Occidente, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2020. ISBN 978-88-07-10553-1. Umberto Galimberti, I miti del nostro tempo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-17162-8. Umberto Galimberti, I vizi capitali e i nuovi vizi, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2004. ISBN 88-07-84027-8. Umberto Galimberti, Idee: il catalogo è questo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2009. ISBN 978-88-07-81527-0. Umberto Galimberti, Il corpo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2013. ISBN 978-88-07-88237-1. Umberto Galimberti, Il gioco delle opinioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-81800-4. Umberto Galimberti, Il libro delle emozioni, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2021. ISBN 978-88-07-17400-1. Umberto Galimberti, Il segreto della domanda. Intorno alle cose umane e divine, Apogeo, Milano, 2008. ISBN 978-88-503-2717-1. Umberto Galimberti, Il tramonto dell'occidente. Nella lettura di Heidegger e Jaspers, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 978-88-07-81849-3. Umberto Galimberti, Invito al pensiero di Martin Heidegger, Mursia, Milano, 1989. ISBN 88-425-0080-1. Umberto Galimberti, L'età della tecnica e la fine della storia, Orthotes, Napoli, 2021. ISBN 978-88-93-14314-1. Umberto Galimberti, L'ospite inquietante. Il nichilismo e i giovani, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2007. ISBN 978-88-07-17143-7. Umberto Galimberti, La casa di psiche. Dalla psicoanalisi alla pratica filosofica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 88-07-10391-5. Umberto Galimberti, La lampada di Psiche, a cura di Paolo Belli, Casagrande, Bellinzona, 2001. ISBN 88-7713-345-7. Umberto Galimberti, La parola ai giovani. Dialogo con la generazione del nichilismo attivo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editori, Milano, 2018. ISBN 978-88-07-17297-7. Umberto Galimberti, La terra senza il male. Jung dall'inconscio al simbolo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1988. Umberto Galimberti, Le cose dell'amore, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2005. ISBN 88-07-84048-0. Umberto Galimberti, Orme del sacro. Il cristianesimo e la desacralizzazione del sacro, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2001. ISBN 88-07-17044-2. Umberto Galimberti, Paesaggi dell'anima, Mondadori, Milano, 1996. ISBN 88-04-42130-4. Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e techne. L'uomo nell'età della tecnica, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 1999. ISBN 88-07-10257-9. Umberto Galimberti, Psichiatria e fenomenologia, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, 2006. ISBN 88-07-81932-5. Umberto Galimberti, Umberto Galimberti racconta Freud, Jung e la psicoanalisi, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, Roma, 2011. Galimberti, Umberto Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:Philosophers from Italy Category:Essayists from Italy Category:Psychoanalysts