Tag: Umberto Galimberti
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
I believe that we do not die because we fall ill, but we fall ill because we must die.
Umberto Galimberti, in various lectures
The superego is a structure soluble in alcohol.
The first psychologists, in the 1960s, when they introduced psychology in Italy (as Galimberti recounts in an interview).
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
What does it mean – and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note – what does it mean to “anticipate death”? That is, to be persuaded that one must die; what is the advantage of the tragic dimension?, which consists in the fact that you have to die and there is nothing waiting for you in the afterlife? The advantage is that you work a relativization of the problems of the now. You don’t rush like a desperate man, you don’t argue like a madman. You don’t kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you don’t despair, you don’t die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, it’s not as if life ends: you’re the one who made it coincide with your work life and outside that you no longer know who you are. Because by now our identities are assigned by our social roles, right? We know who we are only because others recognize us in a role, outside that we no longer know who we are; and indeed all actors and actresses lead tragic lives, why is that? Because they didn’t anticipated death, because they didn’t assumed it as a condition… like a thickness of the soul, here – let’s use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.
But let’s keep this anticipation in mind, because by relativizing things we stop those typical dramas of those who believe in the immortality of the soul and therefore believe that this life has its own importance, their Ego becomes hegemonic and what depends on the Ego decides life and death; a love ends, and women are killed because it’s all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things don’t have that thickness of despair anymore (despair, not tragedy). But who are these desperate people? Those who had hope. Because those who never had hope, never despair.
Umberto Galimberti at Paisiello Theater in Ruffano (Lecce)
It’s not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness – that’s it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
Becoming aware of the oblivion of Being means witnessing the collapse of all that has been built upon its forgetting: God and world.
Umberto Galimberti – Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell’Occidente (“Heidegger, Jaspers and the Decline of the West”)