Umberto Galimberti ā Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Also see: āThe weariness of the self: Diagnosing the history of depression in the contemporary ageā, by Alain Ehrenberg.
Note: the term Technology, capitalized, stands here for the more broad Italian āTecnicaā, the ātechnological Instrumentā as in Heidegger, a way of thinking about the world, and a modus operandi which has now become an end in itself.
Table of contents
- 2023/11/28 - I won't write any more books
- 2022/10/31 - Muschio selvaggio (podcast) Ep.102
- 2021/05/22 - Discourse about time
- 2020/10/16 - Finding your true identity
- 2020/09/16 - Where the soul comes from
- 2020/03/03 - Coronavirus
- 2019/11/17 - Guest at Marco Montemagno
- 2019/09/13 - The preconceptions of our time
- 2019/04/17 - The degeneration of school
- 2019/03/26 - Conversations on the spirit of education
- 2019/03/13 - Fear
- 2018/09/21 - The things of love
- 2018/03/11 - Youth crisis in the age of nihilism
- 2017/05/16 - Psychoanalysis: a romantic story
- 2017/03/08 - The Greek wisdom
- 2017/02/24 - Dictionary of the new vices
- 2016/11/15 - Absent utopia. Young people dealing with the future
- 2016/09/24 - The illusion of freedom
- 2016/07/21 - The beauty
- 2015/10/03 - Me and the others
- 2015/03/07 - The double life (the deceitful one of the Ego and the truthful one of the species)
- 2014/03/14 - Generations orphaned of future
- 2010/11/25 - The evil of our century: Nihilism
- 2009/05/07 - Vanishing to be nothing: the contemporary problem of nihilism
2023/11/28 ā I wonāt write any more books
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpiuR5YeGN4[š”]
Conversation with Antonio Alizzi, Milan
( On his latest book āThe ethics of the wayfarerā )
However, we must not confuse the wayfarer as someone who carries out a sort of anarchic wandering. As he walks, he begins to perceive what the earth is, he becomes aware of the condition of the earth, because he goes around to obtain knowledge. [ā¦] He reject the anthropocentric model typical of our culture according to which man must dominate the earth ā not limiting himself to the use of the earth but even going so far as to wear it out.
[ā¦]
The wayfarer is a metaphor to say the opposite of the man we have in mind and see every day.
ā»
( On his public figure. )
My public figure doesnāt matter to me at all. [ā¦] I like my monastic component better, all things considered; I live alone. [ā¦] for me the relationships are only the dual ones. [ā¦]
Interviewer: This expression of yours struck me: when just the third person arrives, there is noise.
Galimberti: Yes, there is already a multitude, the third is already a crowd. But itās like that for everyone, in the dual relationship there is more sincerity, there is more communication. Two is what counts for me. So the crowds donāt give me anything at all.
ā»
Interviewer: Are you afraid of dying, professor?
Galimberti: No, because Iām old enough, so bored of this world, such that everything I see Iāve seen before. So, seeing that everything repeats itself, that itās all dĆ©jĆ vuā¦ And then, āIām Greekā: [ā¦] if you get used to the fact that you have to die from an early age already, first of all you develop a beautiful ethics of the limit, which we Westerners donāt have, and then, well, death becomesā¦ I am convinced that those who have cultivated the idea that they must die, die better [ā¦].
2022/10/31 ā Muschio selvaggio (podcast) Ep.102
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arVmczOyLpU[š”]; Muschio selvaggio (podcast) Ep.102 ā Letās own our future, with Galimberti
Even when Iām doing the conferences, as soon as they are over, I generally donāt start the questions. Because the questionsā¦ when one asks a question in these contexts, what he does is telling you about his own life, itās not like heās actually asking a question.
( ed. A related quote from Galimberti, from somewhere else: You kill someone only to tell people about it later.
Or, yet, how Saviano and others tell us, the mafioso becomes such not for money or adrenaline or whatever, but for power, and power only exists in a relation with the others.
So, at the fundation of many behaviors, if not all of them, there always is unbridled narcissism. )
ā»
The Roman Empire collapsed due to the corruption of tradition. [ā¦] Today, would our youth be able to pick up the rifle that the Ukrainians are picking up to go shooting? No. Well, thatās it, case closed, weāre done. Iām not literally saying Ā«go grab your gunsĀ», but you certainly arenāt stronger. Actually, I think that here lie [the deep roots of racism]((/transcripts/dario-fabbri-the-cultural-element-in-geopolitics.html) in Italy.
ā»
GĆ¼nther Anders, who is a pupil of Heidegger, says that Technology is nothing less than the maximum expression of that small-town mentality that was Nazism. [ā¦] He wrote to his teacher Martin Heidegger: Ā«You taught me that man is the shepherd of being; I here, at FordĀ» ā because at the time he was a worker at Ford ā Ā«I am the shepherd of machines.Ā»
ā»
(about Corso Buenos Aires in Milan)
Who are these people? [Itās] half of Lombardy that comes down on Saturdays to buy anything, just to go home with satisfaction. Usually, depressed people, when they donāt get help at all, have this āself-medicationā method which consists in buying something for themselves, buying new trousers, a new pair of shoes, and for one day they are happy. Then, maybe they are never going to wear them, but they are happy. [ā¦] We have shifted identity from who I am to what I have. [ā¦] Having becomes the compensation for a lack of being. [ā¦] Look, I started practicing as a psychoanalyst in 1979, and back then the problems were sexual problems, emotional problems, love problemsā¦ Today, thereās no one who talks about this stuff anymore. What they ask you is what is the meaning of their life. Because if you are reduced to a servant of the apparatus, to something carrying out the actions described and prescribed by the apparatus, of course you ask yourself, after a while, what is the meaning of your life. [ā¦] My friend GĆ¼nther Anders always said that if we treat the world as a world to be thrown away ā and this is nihilism ā we will end up treating humanity itself as a humanity to be thrown away. And weāre already there.
ā»
Also unbearable things are good manners, formalitiesā¦
2021/05/22 ā Discourse about time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiuy2vjC_oM[š”]; uploaded 2021-05-22, YouTube channel of Gianpaolo Ciaramella.
[ā¦] Technology also changes time.
[ā¦] letās go back for a moment to the Greek world, which had identified two types of temporality. [ā¦] first of all the cyclical time, identified as the time of nature. Cyclical time provides for a sort of eternal repetition of the same, which we can roughly imagine if we refer to the time of the farmers, which precisely provides for the cyclical nature of the seasons. [ā¦] Cyclical time [ā¦] was also the time which man conformed to, and not so much because of the sacredness of nature, and not only in Greece, but rather because the means of its subsistence depended on the cycle of nature. The cyclical time [ā¦] does not foresee a future that is not the eternal repetition of what has already happened. So the imminent anthropological picture is the picture of memory. The memory that becomes sediment and wisdom in old age because the old man, having seen more cycles, is the one who knows the most. [ā¦] This model is not defunct, of course; first of all it remains as a temporal structure of nature [ā¦], but it also comes to structure the human category of experience. [ā¦] What is eminent in cyclical temporality is therefore the dominance of the past, which the present reaffirms; while the future ā as a place of novelty, occurrences, unforeseen events ā has no particular relevance.
Nietzsche also refers to this cyclical time, where he speaks of the Ā«shield of Destiny/FateĀ», borrowing from Greek categories, Ā«that no desire can reach to invocate, that neāer defiled or sullied is by Nay, Eternal Yea of life, for eāer am I thy YeaĀ» (Ecce Homo, 1922). [ā¦] desire is a projection for whatās coming, and therefore desire absorbs the future, and therefore which Ā«no desire can reachĀ» if the cyclical nature of time is regulated by the shield of destiny. And which is not Ā«sullied by NayĀ» because there is no possibility of saying no to the eternal recurrence, to the need for cyclical occurrence. [ā¦ here] we already have an indication of the containment of desires, of the limitation of desire.
Desire is a word that has to do with the stars. [ā¦] Something to do with the nothing is implicit in desire. In the sense that desire hosts within itself, as its supporting structure, the absence[š”]. Desire feeds on absence. Weāre going to talk about this nihilistic dimension underlying desire as the constitutive structure of love, which can exist only in the form of absence.
A culture that organizes itself around the failure of desire is naturally antithetical to a culture that organizes itself around the promise of hope; because when Christianity leads us to hope, or pictures time as hope, it evidently has a much more optimistic vision of the future than the Greek dimension of desire as a place of longing and absence, which does not allow you to hope because the shielf of fate, the destiny, does not allow your desire to breach the order of the regularity of the cycles.
Alongside this type of temporality, the Greeks had also intuited another type of temporality which they had called chronos time, or in Italian the scopico time. [ā¦] [ā¦] in Greek, ĻĪŗĪæĻĻĻ (skopĆ³s), comes from the word ĻĪŗĪæĻĪĻ (skopĆ©o) which means I look, I see. [ā¦] And also the Italian word scopo is purpose, objective, that target that I keep in sight and that I want to reach. [ā¦] what we call an end or purpose is a choice of the human gaze, that is, something chosen by my gaze. There are no purposes, but there is my choice of purpose. [ā¦] And of course the aim is also limiting, in the sense that if I place my attention only on one object that becomes my aim, everything that passes me by, somehow passes unnoticed. [ā¦] every time we elect a purpose in our life, we know that we put in dim light all the offers of life that have not been focused by our gaze. I am convinced that many cases of unhappiness simply depend on the fact that we have established that happiness is the object that we have taken as our goal and all the offers of happiness that life offers us are not even noticed because we have established that happiness is there, where we set our gaze at. So in every unhappiness there is a guilt, there is the guilt of inattention. [ā¦] We could ask every person who goes to therapy if at times his suffering is not determined by the determination of his desire, which elects an object as the sole purpose and all the rest disappears. [See] neurotic depression.
[ā¦] the Greeks had inserted in this chronos time the factor of ĪŗĪ±Ī¹ĻĻĻ (kairĆ³s), which is another type of temporality, inscribed in chronos / skopos time as the appropriate time: favorable circumstances. [ā¦] This time is attributed to the gods, to favorable circumstances; actually in such time also finds home that virtue of practical actions [ā¦] ā ĻĻĻĪ½Ī·ĻĪ¹Ļ (phronesis) ā which is the virtue of Ulysses, which is to capture the advantageous circumstances to get out of danger and to reach the goal. The Greeks were very fond of this type of temporality: it is the ability to resolve practical situations because I am sensitive to circumstances, because I am attentive to my surroundings, because Iām not blinded by my desire, my longing for the object is not as strong as to obscure the sight of the favorable or unfavorable situation.
[ā¦]
Chronos time is a short time. [ā¦] Something becomes functional and allows to reach the goal if it is here yesterday or, if you want, today [or tomorrow]. [ā¦] ā letās say, the recent past and the immediate future. This is manās time: it is the time that allows things to happen. And it is also the time that establishes things as means and as ends. A means is a means if the end is here at hand. [ā¦] Something arises as a means, and something arises as an end, only in a rapid contraction of time. [ā¦] This is manās time, well coordinated with his short life, isnāt it? Hippocrates said Ā«Art is long but life is short.Ā» As if to say that the discoveries of medicine will continue, but in the meantime men will die.
[ā¦] The contraction of time is what gives birth to things in their configuration as tools and the co-presence of the goal ā its being at hand ā is what configures something as an end. At this point, after all the things we have said, you understand that this is the time of Technology. Technology, which perceives things as means only if the tools are there at hand, and conceives something as tools only if the means are available. So the Greeks, who were the only people ā being the most intelligent on earth ā who identified the problem of Technology in the tragedy of Aeschylus and Prometheus, also identified the kairĆ³s time, that is, as a contraction of temporality: Technology is a speeding up of time. [ā¦] It is because of Technology that the generations are no longer marked by the relationship between fathers and sons but by the generations of products, you know: second and third generation mobile phones, second and third generation computers, that is: the machines are what is now marking time. Chronos time is the contraction between the recent past and the immediate future[ ā think of the Internet]. Inside there is the alea (random), uncontrolled time, the time that the gods can make favorable or unfavourable, what Machiavelli later calls luck, good fortune. [ā¦] Man, in this extremely contracted time, has created our culture, our civilization. In this respect the Westerners are admirable; however I donāt know if this contracted time is also the time of lifeā¦ Because by now we all complain that āwe got no timeā, that is, the whole world of life is being unhinged by the lack of time: we no longer meet people, to have dinner you have to book a month in advance, there is a whole concept of temporality that reduces communication between men determined precisely by the fact that the time of Technology burns time, does not waste time, being the most rational form. And in rationality, it happens that time cannot wait.
Well, letās move on to the last temporality, this time of Jewish-Christian origin, which is instead another type of temporality, which is eschatological time. The eschatological time is characterized by the fact that the word į¼ĻĻĪ±ĻĪæĪ½ (Ć©schaton) is a Greek word; you should not be surprised because all the biblical vocabulary used in Christian theology and literature is a Latin or Greek language, because the Bible was translated into Greek by the Septuagint and that particular Greek translation became the standard. Ćschaton means last. Eschatological time means that on the last day what was announced at the beginning takes place. And everything that is not understood in time (during the course of time) is due to the fact that we are not yet at the last day. The last day is the day of the apocalypse; apocalypse is another Greek word, which means Ī±ĻĻ ĪŗĪ±Ī»ĻĻĻĻ (apĆ² kalĆ½pto), kalĆ½pto means I hide: I remove the veil from all the mysteries of history, and I reveal the plan underlying time. [ā¦] Therefore the Christian has good game in saying that what is not understood belongs to the mystery of God. [ā¦] time in itself is not the custodian of a meaning ā cyclical time does not host any meaning, it is pure repetition; the chronos time hosts the sense of the goal achieved, but the goal achieved is not the final meaning. In your biography, each objective achieved did not constitute the meaning of your existence, on the contrary, the meaning of your existence consisted in starting afresh from each objective achieved. The only time that bears meaning is the eschatological time, because it is said that a plan is inserted into time. And when time is coexisting with a plan, History is born. There is no History if time is not serving a plan ā which is a project of salvation, of course, within the Christian vision of temporality.
[ā¦] In your biographical experience, when you fall in love, [in Italian] you call that time a āstoryā: Ā«I had a story.Ā» (ed. Ā«I had an affairĀ») One must be very careful with everyday expressions because they reveal very deep meanings. [ā¦] What does Ā«I had a storyĀ» mean? It means that in time, which is the same ā Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., and so on, and all over again ā [ā¦] there is a time that escapes from temporality, acquires a new quality, because that time is inscribed in a plan of love. And it acquires its own peculiarity, its relevance, its non-consequentiality with the rest of time. [ā¦] Thucydides, for example, begins his stories by saying that they begin ten years before his birth because nothing important has happened before; because the Greeks have no notion of History, because they have no notion of salvation. Man does not need to be saved, man is mortal, his existence is inscribed in the cycle of nature, that type of temporality does not project any scenario, any plan, any salvation, and therefore there is no History. I donāt know if thereās History in the Eastern worldā¦ No, there is no History. History is only a Western event, as a Judeo-Christian event. [ā¦] History has a meaning, time has no meaning; time is cycle or [short-term] purpose, but not meaning. Meaning is rigorously connected to History. [ā¦] And the time is between the beginning (creation of the world) and the end of the world; this is the eschatological time. At the beginning there is evil, the negative, now there is redemption (which is not only the advent of Christ, but also the works that good Christians do for salvation), and in the end there is salvation, which is the positive element. So it is an optimistic view of History: evil is redeemed and we are saved. [ā¦] When people ask for ājust a tiny bit of hopeā they are reasoning in this scenario, because in the other scenario[, that of cyclical time, ] the question of hope does not even arise. A question about hope does not make sense. And [in kairĆ³s time either], because here there is either the disappointment of not having achieved an objective, or the joy of having achieved it from which one sets off for other objectives; therefore it is a game of trial and error, but not of hope.
[We said:] an optimistic view of History. Outside of the tragic dimension, you know, itās obvious, because in the end salvation awaits us.
[ā¦]
Interesting, in this scenario, is pain. Pain is seen as an atonement for a fault and as an earnest of salvation. [ā¦] So also the problem of the evil that torments so muchā¦ Ā«How can a good god tolerate that children die of hunger?Ā» Well, itās of no interest: Ā«God is good because he saves humanity, and salvation comes through the path of pain.Ā» This is faith.
[ā¦]
Today we complain that in the age of Technology we do not see a horizon, we do not see a final goal. Againā¦ the ultimate goal. How does the need for a final goal arise within us, how does the need to find meaning arise within us? How does the lament arise within us that Technology does not allow us to glimpse a final goal and, even less, allows us to find a meaning, neither for History, nor for biography? It arises from the fact that we are in this culture: that our psyche ā as Western Christians ā is built according to this model. And precisely because our psyche is built according to the model of time as a plan, and of the plan as History, the question of meaning arises. And since Technology does not offer any meaning, the discomfort of meaninglessness arises. The question of meaning, from my point of view, is a question that arises only within the Judeo-Christian tribe: it is not an anthropological question. The search for meaning is not a question that is pertinent to man. [ā¦] It is no coincidence that psychological discomfort has always been treated according to religious modalities, which are the modalities of comfort, confession, forgiveness, acceptance. And here ā I donāt want to offend any psychoanalyst ā it seems to me that psychoanalysis is nothing more than a less successful copy of these methods. [Letās also add] the identification of the cause: Ā«What is the original sin of your life which your pain depends on?Ā» Here it is: the machine is the same. Then when psychoanalysts complain by saying Ā«Once we treated neuroses, now instead people come to ask for the meaningā¦Ā», very well: it is the neurosis of neuroses. And you, psychoanalytic machine, cannot provide any answers here. In the sense that itās ok if I go into analysis because I canāt leave the house, or because I have panic attacks, [ā¦] or because Iām depressed, but itās quite another matter when I go to therapy to ask for the meaning of my life: there youāre asking too much, there you went too far. There, for a Greek, you are committing a tremendous į½Ī²Ļ±Ī¹Ļ (hĆ½bris): as if the world were built for the satisfaction of your demand for meaning! Well, here is the hĆ½bris, the arrogance.
[ā¦] ecclesiastical practices have carried out a therapeutic operation compared to which psychoanalystsā work can pale big time. A huge therapeutic operation of comforting pain, of hopeā¦ They are therapeutic actions because the problem isnāt so much whether something is true or false, the problem is whether itās believed or not, you knowā¦ Beware of the truth, which is not really the panacea for all things: faith is much more interesting from this point of view, in psychological terms. Because if I believe [ā¦] that I will be saved, true or false [ā¦] it is enough that I believe and my psyche is fine, because the psyche is allied with faith, it is not allied with truth. We said yesterday, that from the point of view of truth we all know that we must die, but the psyche does not believe it. Its faith is in immortality.
[ā¦] But just by carrying out the mass therapy operation, they now find themselves in the tragic condition of no longer being able to give the answer they have given for centuries. And theyāre no longer able to give it because Technology erodes the ground for religion or, as I prefer to say, it corrodes the throne of God. And it corrodes it not so much because with Technology we manage to achieve what we once were forced to obtain by praying the gods, starting from the rain, starting from the sun[: ā¦] what we once asked to God we now obtain thanks to technical mediation; just think healing ā I donāt know if youāve ever found yourself in a life-and-death situation ā an experience worth trying [ā¦] When you are on a deathbed your husband can come, your wife, your lovers, your friends, the priestā¦ But your eyes light up only when the doctor arrives, donāt they? That is, the man of Technology arrives, not the man of faith. Not even friendship, not even love can withstand the impact: because the faith we had in religion we have now transferred to Technology.
[ā¦]
Soā¦ there has been this transition from the religious to the technological, but this is not the reason for which the throne of God is corroded: the reason is another. The reason is due to the fact that for me to have faith, hope, my psyche must be able to accommodate an eschatological time, a long-range time, up to the last day, up to the apocalypse, a time starting from Adam and Eve and ending with the final day. [ā¦] once upon a time, the Church, when it did the spiritual exercises, something not dissimilar from what we are doing today, [that is, this lesson], very strenuous, in general, with two sermons a day; it began with the creation of the world and it ended with the end of the world. It were cycles of four, five days, [ā¦] to instill eschatological time in the human psyche: that your story does not end tomorrow, that no matter how many misfortunes happen to you there is always a remedy, that God provides for men, that nothing is left to chanceā¦ [ā¦] The psyche introjected eschatology, this specific temporality, and therefore it was able to believe. Because Iām not in a position to believe if my psychology accommodates cyclical time; and Iām not in a position to believe if my psychology accommodates the time of a today-tomorrow planning. But if Technology gets us used to thinking about the time of today-tomorrow, the recent past and the immediate future, our psyche gets used to the long time, and therefore it no longer has the condition to think in eschatological terms. If Technology gets us used to thinking overnight ā because this is the time of Technology ā and if we get used to thinking about means-ends, means-ends, means that become the means for other endsā¦ If this is the rhythm then I no longer have the eschatological time as a time to think of History as a time endowed with meaning, therefore for hope, therefore for all those other things. And therefore I no longer have the time for faith, for hope, I no longer have the time for salvation introjected into my psyche. [ā¦] Newspapers tell us nothing about the final days because they are focused to the present moment; televisions, in the momentā¦ All temporality is momentary, today; we are in the moment. And this is also the reason why Technology gets rid of utopia ā that is, for example, if we were to make the utopia that war should be banned from humanity, there is always someone who jumps out to say that these are mistakes. So now peace is a mistake and war is legitimate, I donāt get it, what? [ā¦] Itās like that, if I have this dream āIām outdatedā, right? You are an extremist if you say that peace is a value and war is a disvalue. [ā¦] The revolution: another eschatological figure. When John Paul II died, I took the liberty of saying that Marx is a great Christian in the sense that he lives the same eschatology of religious timesā¦ And this thing is no longer understood because Marx, since he is a communist, he cannot be a Christianā¦ [ā¦] No, communism is a Christian event: I donāt care about the historical effects, but the underlying eschatology is the same: the past is evil, the revolution is redemption, and the future is salvation. I donāt care that it is not realized: was Christianity ever realized?!
[ā¦] [The empire of Technology] burns all the past and inaugurates the future as a succession of discoveries, knowing that each discovery is the liquidation and rejection of all the antecedent. [ā¦] Technology sees the past not as evil, but as waste, as unusable, as insignificant. So the earth will become a pile of waste, not because we donāt do waste sorting, but because it is a fundation of Technology to refuse everything that is not new. The consumer society is a technological event rather than a commercial business; but since entrepreneurs do not understand these things, let them believe that it is a commercial business; but in reality it is the implicit of the technological. Which, in order to continue producing, it is necessary for people to consume in a continuous devouring, because if you donāt consume you donāt produce, and if you donāt produceā¦ The essence of nihilism, letās not go looking for it in metaphysics, itās already here, nihilism is taking place in Corso Buenos Aires in Milan (ed. shopping avenue): you have to consume, you have to, because if you donāt consume, you donāt produce, and if you donāt produce, people get no jobs. The cycle is perverse. And the essence of nihilism is that things are made not to last but to end. [ā¦] And if the washing machine lasts a little too long, [ā¦] then fashion intervenes[: ā¦] this item is no longer up to date, thatās it. You donāt want to go around in that dress that was trendy last year, do you?
2020/10/16 ā Finding your true identity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hyIENW--J4[š”]
āLe sfide che fanno crescere: I valori che educano alla comunitĆ . I valori e le regole del con-vivere civile, 2019-2020ā, Cinecity Lignano.
While animals eat when they are hungry, man is also hungry for future hunger. That is, he gets hold of food even with a full stomach, because he knows that he is going to get hungry in the future.
[Anticipating, foreseeing, instead of instincts.]
Men have no instincts; what do they have? They have drives with an indeterminate goal.[ā¦] We men, moreover, just to glorify ourselves compared to the rest of the living, even think of ourselves as āfreeā. And we confuse this freedom with what actually is our indeterminacy.
2020/09/16 ā Where the soul comes from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lV0L9J-ssY[š”]
Organization Rinascimento Culturale. Gussago, Palazzo Caprioli. āInvestigation on the soul: between reason and madness, between spirit and matter.ā
( ed. Iām transcribing the following things even though I donāt agree with them, because they are very interesting, because itās the boomer who explains how people once lived, without nihilism; it doesnāt matter if today this is already no longer possible for some, and it will gradually be impossible for more and more people: the humanistic concepts are still fundamental; itās like Jordan Peterson talking about responsibility to create meaning; today, for the individual without identity and aware of the collective illusion, it is unfeasible and unthinkable, but such individual lives badly indeed, commits suicide, or waits for his death dwelling over his own suffering, while the vision of the world and humanity that the former guys have is how one can actually live.
Or again, the Severinian[š”] nonsense to try to dismantle nihilism. Sure, you can dismantle everything if you want, Wittgeinstein dismantled the entire language. But when you dismantle really everything and not just what interests you personally, you have nihilism, which makes it impossible to take any convenient partial deconstruction seriously, and any miserable embarrassing attempt at reconstruction even less seriously (Nietzsche with the Ćbermensch, Severino with the concept of Glory, the post-nihilism movement, reinterpretations of old stuff, transhumanist utopias, etc.).
Among others, the example that you will read below about the gaze, Galimberti is obviously taking it from the works of his teacher Severino where he tries to refute solipsism; it is clear that whoever speaks these things does not have a personal schizoid/narcissistic experience of what it means to see (or, better put, not see) the other. Which is not an experience of mental illness, but an experience of clarity, objectivity, impartiality, and perception of the illusion which the human race is immersed in. )
ā»
Science proceeds by trial and error, which is why it fears no competition, because it is very willing to change its hypotheses. Therefore, science is the only human knowledge that does not suffer from heresy like religion, should one deny religious dogmas; nor suffer from the juridical order, which establishes the list of rights and wrongs, which then estabilishes what is true, what is good, what is right; science doesnāt do that: it allows itself to walk past its errors, because it is continually willing to change its premises.
But it doesnāt tell the truthā¦ it says the correct, the exact things, i.e. obtained from the premises: āex-actuā (exactu).
[ā¦]
Well, what does Descartes do: he changes the notion of body, and establishes that our body is nothing more than a sum of organs. [ā¦] And then, in order to read the body, clear and distinct ideas are adopted, the ones that in his time were those of physics. But is the body read with the laws of physics, the same body that I live in the world of life? No, itās something else. And from this point of view Descartes did very well, because without this reading through clear and distinct ideas, medicine would not have been born.
[ā¦]
The princess [Palatina] made an observation [to Descartes]: Ā«Listen, master, but I have a knowledge of my body that goes beyond clear and distinct ideas, that is, beyond the physical readings that the physical laws make of my body.Ā» And he replies: Ā«Ah, Iām sorry, but despite your rank I see that you think like common folks.Ā» Well: the common people think of their bodies according to the world of life; it has no need for the soul, because the body is soulful already; and what does move it, what is enliving it? Its relationship with the world. Letās make a very simple example: suppose I have an eye problem and I go to an ophthalmologist. My eyes are the body: which enters into a relationship with another person; they are organs that put me in relationship with another person, likeable or unpleasant, who create trust or distrust in me, but they are a way of being in the world. My eyes are eyes that see. When the doctor puts his machine on my eye, my eye no longer looks: it is looked at, it becomes a thing, a thing looked at by science, and then in that moment it becomes an organ; it becomes an organism; there is this difference between body and organism. Science is right in reducing our body to a sum of organs, but our body is not just a sum of organs, because the world of life engages it and it responds to the stimuli of the world, and the world sends it invitations. My body, in this moment, is the absolute here of every there, there is no other geometric space above me and you. The space I have is this and this only; the space you have is that and that only, decided by your body. The time we spend together will be a very boring time or a short time depending on whether or not you are interested in this talk. It is lived time, it is not the time of the clock: the time of the clock is the time of science. The lived time is the time of waiting, itās the time of hope, itās the time of expectation, itās the time of memory. Hey! Letās not lose these meanings! Because by doing so we lose the world of lifeā¦
The fault is ours, because we have adopted the scientific model of the body which is to reduce our body to a sum of organs, and we reason in such a way; but since we reason in this way, it is inevitable that we also need the soul (ed. which doesnāt actually exist, itās a bogus construct, he says), because everything thatās impossible to explain at an organic level needs a supplement, and this supplement is called the āsoulā.
See also: Philip Goff on consciousness
Therefore, science has perfectly gotten along with religion: you, science, deal with the organism ā the body reduced to an organism ā and I, thanks to the fact that you have reduced the body to an organism, can add my supplement of soul. They shared the tasks through the Platonic-Cartesian dualism. Then came the psychologists, who translated the word soul with the word psyche, just like that (ed. randomly) ā they couldāve very well kept the word soul ā and all of you are now convinced that you have a psyche. And so much so that a science called psychosomatics was also born ā and I donāt know how they can justify it, because if I call you an idiot and you blush, you have to explain to me why a word produces vasodilationā¦ Vasodilation happens to you because you are in a state of tension in a context of the world, because you are facing someone who is insulting you.
But never mind, because these things then, anyway, I wonāt be able to convince anyoneā¦ (ed. including me, mind you, but see the above note)
ā»
When you complain about the lack of humanity of doctors, what are you exactly complaining about? That the doctors, with their clinical gaze and their visualization of your body reduced to an organism, they are not interested in your experiences, it is not their job. [ā¦] and it makes you suffer, [ā¦] you have lost the world of life.
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[ā¦] because there is no life that can be sustained without love: old people die because no one loves them anymore.
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Then psychiatry was born, which is meant to beā¦ the medicine of the soulā¦ (*sarcastic gesture*)
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The hysteric (ed. who has been replaced today by the anorexic person ā is a different disease but whatās underneath is the same, he says), says Freud, is a woman who simulates suffering, sickness, at the base of which thereās simply a lack of love. [ā¦] Freud says: and these people were punished for āsimulationā. You fake a disease you donāt have, so youāre a liar, so youāre punished. Freud says: no, you shouldnāt punish them, because they are people who, if they ask for love, by means of words, wonāt get it; if, on the other hand, they get sick, they will remedy some attention and some treatment. And hysteria is nothing more than a body language to get love or, at the very least, some care. This is another step forward that psychiatry has made. But it doesnāt know the causes of mental illnesses; [ā¦] mental illnesses ā you see there already, āmentalā, the soul, the mind: to know a person you must know her world.
ā»
In phenomenology[, on the other hand,] the soul-body dualism introduced by Plato, Husserl replaces it with the body-world relationship. The body of the world of life, however, not the body reduced to an organism.
[ā¦]
Sartre appropriately says: when we laugh and when we cry, we are engaging the same facial muscles and the same nervous system of the face. But this does not allow us to say that the meaning of crying is the same as the meaning of laughter. [ā¦] Therefore, from an organic point of view, a cry and a laughter do not differ. But from the point of view of meaning there is a chasm, and in this goddamn world we live through meanings, which you canāt retrieve at the organic level.
That said, phenomenology was continued by Heidegger, who never calls man āmanā ā even though the Germans have [the word] āMannā for āmanā ā he calls it āin-der-Welt-seinā, āto be in the worldā, he calls it that way.
ā»
And Merleau-Ponty says that the middle class always feel like those who are staring at the others, the poor; however, when the poor do a revolution and look at the bourgeoisie from the ground to the balcony, then the bourgeoisie too feels watched: here the revolutionary event begins. Gaze. Which is an objectifying gaze: your eyes objectify people. Then itās up to the other person to be able to maintain their gaze, or lower their gaze, or turn their gaze away. These movements of the world of life must be internalized, you must understand that your body is not the organism described by science.
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The worst books are the best sellers.
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Basaglia, in Italyā¦ Today, we have an asylum condition, a management of madness, which was not in Basagliaās dream ā Basaglia wanted the environmental conditions to be appropriate too, etcetera; instead, the crazy, when they are discharged from the hospital after a week, return to the family, which is the most pernicious place they can return to.
However, [if we had] a liberation from madness, we owe it precisely to the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, translated by psychiatrists into the world of life.
ā»
[ā¦] because literature is more intelligent than psychiatry, because literature tells you the condition of your way of being in the world much more effectively than psychiatric definitions tell you. Psychiatry is a science that knows nothing, in the sense that it does not know the causes of the disease.
2020/03/03 ā Coronavirus
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/03/[ā¦][š”]
The philosopher Galimberti at āSono le Ventiā (channel āNoveā)
[The pandemic] has taught us (ed. maybe to you people) that life is precarious, that life is uncertain, that it is a dimension that we Westerners have very little; because we Westerners are the weakest people on earth because we are the most technically assisted: to get light we just press a button, to get water we turn on a tapā¦ But this is not the life of all humanity, it is the life of us Westerners. And our life is no more reassuring [than that of] others, because it is precarious, and the Coronavirus has taught us that nothing is certain, there is no safety, there is no guarantee in the face of any life event.
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ā But are we citizens, at this moment, scared or anxious?
ā In my opinion we feel anguish, because we donāt know where the danger comes from. Fear ā everyone uses this word improperly, but fear has a specific subject, if there is a fire I run away, if I have to cross the street I look to the right and to the left to not get ran over; anguish, anguish is the condition for where I have nothing to use a reference point.
For example, children, who are not afraid of anything because they donāt know the dangers, get anxious when they go to bed and the light goes out before they fall asleep. Because they got nothing to cling to. Both Heidegger and Freud gave good definitions of anguish, even though they didnāt know each other: Ā«Anguish is when there is nothing to cling to, to defend oneself.Ā»
2019/11/17 ā Guest at Marco Montemagno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRCrgo1Bh4c[š”]
When we lived in the age of discipline ā that is, before 1968, basically ā what was the theme of depression? The sense of guilt: allowed or forbidden ā when you did something forbidden, you had a sense of guilt; the accumulated guilt became depression. Now depression is no longer organized around the sense of guilt, because in the age of Technology and on the Anglo-American model (efficiency and productivity) the theme of depression is organized around the sense of inadequacy: can I, or can I not reach the objectives that the apparatus imposes on me?
[ā¦] Therefore, we get phenomena of anxiety, insomnia, disesteemā¦ because identity ā and self-esteem ā itās not like you have it innately [ā¦but it is] the fruit of recognition.
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Who invented Google, who invented Facebook, they invented in their garage in that age ranging from twenty to thirty years old. And they created the most radical transformations in history. There is neither a world war nor an atomic war that has brought about such a radical transformation of the world: a change in the notion of time ā today we no longer live in time, we live in the speeding up of time; eliminating space ā I can talk to someone in Australia, or I can see everything I donāt see when I experience leaving the house. They made a radical transformation: between the ages of twenty and thirty. Now, let us consider that our young people, aged between twenty and thirty, or rather between fifteen and thirty, have:
- peak of biological power ā they are handsome and they are strong (and the market buys this kind of stuff, because the market knows our young people better than parents and better than teachers)
- peak of sexual strength ā but not reproductive, because in our culture you cannot generate when your sexual organs are born, at the age of 14-15, you have to generate at 30-35ā¦ And a purposeless sexuality becomes an insignificant sexuality in the end. Iām telling you as a psychoanalyst: itās not true that young people make love so much: no. Itās not true. And then, above all, they are so insecure that they have to use Viagra, Cialis, that kind of things. Here you have it: sexuality for its own sakeā¦ said Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher, who wrote a letter to Paul VI, the pope, saying: Ā«Our civilization has created angels that God had not foreseen.Ā» Now, itās clear that kids are not playing angels, but purposeless sexuality becomes meaningless.
- peak of intellectual power ā from 15 to 30 years old, then we decline. What do we make them do today? Now, without thinking on Alexander the Great who at 27 had conquered half of Asia, or about Mozart who at 17 played in front of princes and kings. But, for example, Einstein discovered his formula when he was 24 years old. Not when he was 60. Leopardi wrote āThe Infiniteā when he was 21: can you imagine today someone who writes āThe Infiniteā at 21? There is therefore a real decadence, isnāt it there? And why? Because we donāt use young people: we make them scan and print documents, do co.co jobs (ed. collaboration contracts in Italy), do contract workā¦ but they have maximum creative power! Maybe itās not an organized conception (for that it is sufficient for someone to be there to help them organize it), but the intuitive moment happens there, at that age, thatās when you have to make it happen. My first book, written at the age of 23, was entitled āThe Downfall of the Occidentā: I had already hit the nail on the head, I had already guessed it right. I was only 23 years old, we were in 1975. We need to use this generation here, because how does a society go on without using the maximum biological power, the maximum sexual power, the maximum ideational power?
[ā¦]
Then, nowadays, with medical science, old people are getting older and older, myself included. My father died at 60, the right age, in my opinion. Because in this way there is the organic turnover of goods ā the children inherit the goods of the fathers. Now at 60 no one dies anymore, it goes on up to 90: you see those horrible situations, these old people who are beyond all visibility, they make me feel terrible, with the Ukrainian nurses who hold them with one arm and have their cellphones in the other ā because they donāt give a damn about the old person they have their hands onā¦ Whatās the point of going on to see the deterioration of your body down to the last fiber? This is an effect of medicine, which has not lengthened life, it has lengthened old age, and thatās it. Therefore we have three generations, and so the organic turnover has stopped: the elders have the power, the adults are there waiting for them to die to take it, and the young? Are they young until they are fifty? We have, in Italy, the average number of researchers ā researchers are those who find new things ā who are fifty years old: at fifty you no longer have ideation.
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[Aristotle says:] Eudaimonia, happiness, is the purpose of life. [ed. of course thatās not true] [ā¦] āThe success of your good spiritā, of your deity. What does your spirit means? It means your ability, your specific one, your vocation, your art. What were you born for? [ā¦] The first thing to be happy is to āknow yourselfā. [ā¦] When you have known your spirit, realize it well. [ā¦] However, on one condition: [ā¦] do so by observing due measure. What does that mean? That if maybe youāre a good sculptor but youāre not Phidias, you mustnāt try to be Phidias, because you wonāt make it, and if you try that, you set up for failure. Maybe youāre an actor, but youāre not as good as Mastroianni, and if you try, youāre setting up for your downfall. The Greeks had this sense of limit because they had the concept of death, which is the great limit.
2019/09/13 ā The preconceptions of our time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vFVmgBZZu8[š”]
āConversation with our preconceptionsā ā Festival Rinascimento Culturale, 6th edition, Chiesa Parrocchiale di Villa Pedergnano
By the way, mothers who keep their children up to thirty years of age even, in the sense that they never let them go, itās not like they commit a lesser crimeā¦ Iād say that they would have to be killed as soon as theyāve given birth, so at least there arenāt any more problems, especially in the case of males.
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Intelligenceā¦ (ed. prejudices about it) You all have children who go to school. You go to school, when your boy is not doing so well, you go talk to the teachers; they say to you: Ā«Your son is intelligent, but he doesnāt have much willpower.Ā» Nothing wronger. Ā«He is intelligentĀ» in order not to offend the parents: itās actually not true; because one cannot say Ā«Your son is quite an idiot.ā, one cannot say that. So we resort to the āwillā, which by the way is a category that doesnāt exist. It is a category of morality. At school thereās interest, not will. If you get a person involved, he automatically moves, because he is prompted by the appeal. With the will you do nothing. With āwillpowerā, evenā¦ It is the passion that counts.
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[ā¦] women usually have not only mathematical logic, but also intuitive logic, even sentimental logic, and when she moves along these tracks, what does she hear from the man sheās living with? Ā«You are crazy!Ā» Of course, because when something leaves the male program it is immediately placed in the framework of madness.
[ā¦] You canāt make love with your head, you canāt make love with the logical-mathematical system, you canāt make love by watching your gestures and those of the other: love is madness. Therefore you must enter the scenario of madness, and women are more predisposed to madness than men. [ā¦] And men for the amount of feminine they manage to welcome into themselves. Because a man is more interesting the more feminine sides he collects in himself. For how much dialogue he does with his female self, compared to defending himself from the female dimension.
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[Politics] is the place of decision. Today politics doesnāt decide anything: it looks at the economy, to decide. And the economy, is it the last instance of the decision? No: the economy, to decide, looks at the technological resources in which to make investments. So, the decision has moved to Technology, which does not open up scenarios of salvation, does not disclose horizons of meaning, does not tell the truthā¦ Technology āworksā. And since its functioning becomes planetary, everything that does not fall within its rationality becomes absolutely insignificant, including Man. [ā¦] Our kids are immersed in this technological scenario and itās the first generation, this one, where the experience of the fathers doesnāt pass on to the children; because the children are in another scenario. Children do not see the world except in the virtuality of their mobile phone they are always connected to.
2019/04/17 ā The degeneration of school
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exxZOvgzyaw[š”]
Guest at ābyobluā. Old banned Italian conspiracy theories YouTube channel; Galimberti ended up there too, but obviously, he didnāt know what kind of channel it was: after all, Galimberti doesnāt know anything, in practical terms, about the internet ā he was still using a typewriter since not many years ago ā so he likely didnāt check on YouTube, and he just accepted āyet another interviewā.
(About parents)
Yes indeed, poor souls, I pity them a little. Because in the pastā¦ I mean, letās not say at all that the parents of the past were better than those of today: when there was the ātyrantā father who wasnāt talking to his children, it was only the mother who spoke to the children, the function of the mother was that of mediating between the children and the father; therefore, this logic, thank goodness it ended with the ā68. Nevertheless, back then it was easy to be fathers and to be mothers; why? Because we were poor and the messages you received in your family, which were messages of commitment and sacrifice, were the same that you received from society: commitment and sacrifice. Then wealth arrived, opulence arrived, American models arrived, and then the family continues to ask you for sacrifice and commitment ā without even believing in it that much ā and society tells you Ā«nah, donāt worry, Iāll offer you discos, shoes, fashion, games, iPadā¦Ā»; and what do you do? Between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, the pleasure principle wins, Freud taught us, and thatās it.
[In] this gap [ā¦] the father becomes a weak, very weak being. Furthermore, the father is not so much interested in the education of his children, because fathers have two drawbacks: first, they donāt talk to their children when they are younger, then they complain that their children donāt talk to them when they are older. And of course: you, father, can talk to a son up to ten, eleven, twelve years old, then thatās it. Enough, because as sexuality appears, etc., children move on an horizontal level; that is, it is useless for fathers to try to make friends with their children: friends, sureā¦ they find their friends on their own. And at that point what works is just the example. And since fathers donāt set a good example in general, because when the children are ten, twelve years old, the marriage is already consummated enough such that you can start a bestial quarrel with the wife ā right? ā and existential disasters happen.
2019/03/26 ā Conversations on the spirit of education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqDPNkGAGtA[š”]
āConversations on the spirit of education: how can we educate today?ā Luca Mazzucchelli interviews Umberto Galimberti.
Because there are plenty of people who live without being aware of it, mind you ā not just young people, adults too, especially them. Who are alienated five days a week because they fulfill not themselves but the goals of the apparatus they belong to. And then on Sundays, Saturdays and Sundays, when they could finally take a look at themselves, they run away from themselves as from their worst enemy ā they get in the car and spend the āweekendā. To distract themselves. From their own self.
2019/03/13 ā Fear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfw5fliX5DI[š”]
Casa della Cultura, via Borgogna 3, Milan. 5Ā° event of the cycle āLe passioni degli antichi e dei moderniā, curated by Mauro Bonazzi, Silvia Vegetti Finzi e Filippo ForcignanĆ². āFearā ā March 13, 2019, Anna Beltrametti and Umberto Galimberti
[ā¦] we unconsciously feel ā and here is our real fear ā that they [ed. immigrants] are biologically stronger than us. Because we wouldnāt be able to leave Nigeria, spend three years in the desert, endure the appalling conditions that you can happen to endured by going from one truck to another amid whippings, payments, no food, sleeping on the ground, to land in Libya and live two years of persecutions, whippings, rapes, things of all kindsā¦ [The absurd Libyan prisons:] we know what happens in there. [ā¦] And after two years in Libya, facing the sea, looking at it as a liberation, and knowing that life and death are at stake. Would we be able to do that? My answer is no, we are incapable. Because we are the weakest people on earth: because we are the most technologically assisted. [ā¦] The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has said that we Westerners, who number 800 million, are 20% of humanity, but to maintain this standard of living ā even in times of crisis ā we need 80 percent of the earthās resources. Do you think such a system is sustainable? No: no system theorist guarantees the permanence of such a screwed up system. [ā¦] Ā«We GermansĀ», he says [Karl Jaspers], Ā«have a political fault, because we elected Hitler. [ā¦ But we also have] a moral fault, because we all knew what was going on. We all knew.Ā» [ā¦] Now, we are not to blame for being born in the West, but we cannot hide the fact that we have some metaphysical fault for being privileged. And donāt we want to expiate this metaphysical fault a little, by welcoming the desperate of the earth? No! We donāt want to. Look, guilt works as a form of fear within us; what can happen to us in this indignity? In this way of being unworthy? [ā¦] the sense of guilt generates that suspicion of non-innocence that frightens us. And I think that this metaphysical guilt is the core that runs through us, from which we distract ourselves, upon which we donāt want to reflect, which is the authentic core of our insincerity.
2018/09/21 ā The things of love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XemF4gvrJPM[š”]
Sala dei congressi di Ravenna (ENGIM Ravenna)
Reason is not truth. It is a system of rules, very useful, to understand each other and not to be afraid. What about madness?
Well, here I would really like to convince you that madness dwells deeply within us. Foremost, it is the characteristic of all of us in the first six years of life: children are born insane. Children are not afraid of anything. You know that fear is the condition by which we are able to live: precisely because Iām afraid, I look right and left before crossing the road; if I wasnāt afraid Iād go fast like a child and then a car would run over me. So, fear isnāt a bad thing, itās a serious defense mechanism thanks to which, precisely because Iām afraid, I practice cautious behaviors. Children are not afraid of anything because they are born into a scenario of madness. They donāt have the codes to interpret the world and so, precisely for this reason, children must be cared for continuously, their every action must be safeguarded, mothers spend a great deal of their existence seeing what children do, taking knives out of their hands; even the felt-tip pen with which they draw, because the felt-tip pen has a meaning ā it is used for drawing, but when they put it in their mouth, the felt-tip pen becomes a bottle: this is where the meaning changes. Or they put it in the little brotherās eye so it becomes an improper weapon: another variation of meaning. Children are crazy. Then they gradually reach the age of reason.
So, madness is our birth certificate, itās not like we liquidate it when we have reached the age of reason: it remains as our background. Crazy are the poets: with reason you donāt write a single poetic verse, because reason is a system of rules, with a system of rules you donāt invent anything.
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[Socrates] says: āYou know that I am the philosopher who knows nothing, the philosopher of erudite ignorance.ā Erudite because Iām ignorant but I know I am. And indeed philosophy knows nothing. This is an important thing. Philosophy is not knowledge, it is an attitude; it is a way of being in the world, it is not knowledge. Science has knowledge, religion has it, but philosophy does not have knowledge. Philosophy is an attitude that puts widespread knowledge to the test. What does Socrates do? He doesnāt teach anything, he asks his pupils: Ā«What do you think of justice? What do you think about the truth? What do you think of beauty?Ā» And everyone says their opinion, and Socrates tests these opinions to see if these opinions are the fruit of a sophistic education where they deceived you with false syllogisms; of a rhetorical effect, by which they have moved you and so you adhere to that emotion; they are the result of a discourse that comes from an authority that you esteem, which you take as truth; they are discourses that come from widespread opinion ā for the mere fact that it is widespread you assume them as truth. No, says Socrates, I have to teach you that true arguments are those that stand on their own.
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Eros and desireā¦ Desire is a word that we find in the āde Bello Gallicoā, in the sense that those soldiers who spent the night under the sidera, under the stars, were called desiderantes, waiting for the return of those soldiers who had not returned at sunset. The next day, if they hadnāt returned, they assumed them dead and there was no further discussion. So, once again, the desire is structured in the figure of missing something (those who had not returned). Love is lack of something. I want what I donāt have. And what about when you happen to have it? You donāt want it anymore. You enjoy it, but you donāt want it anymore. Desire is structured in the form of missing something. Incidentally, this would be enough to teach parents to stop filling childrenās bedrooms with toys, because when you flood them with toys, you take away their desire. And when you took away their desire, you deprived them of that revolutionary force such that if the world isnāt going well, and if you have a desire to change it and improve it, you do something about it and you donāt give up. But if you saturate them with things, you saturate them with gamesā¦ Which by the way these children donāt even use, because you only have fun with the games you invent. Children donāt need to be bored.
I want to show you clearly what desire means. Iāll do it with a small example. When I was young, like everyone my age, we came out of middle school, we saw a beautiful little girl, we fell in love like that, from a distance, we didnāt even have the courage to approach her, of courseā¦ we gazed at her: desire. With the prohibited goal, of course. Then maybe someone would allow us to have a contact, someone would give us the telephone numberā¦ Telephones at the time were in the middle of the house: so in order to speak, you had to invent a language that was not immediately translatable, not understood by all those who could happen to hear it. And then when you met her again, after having spoken to her on the phone in a language that you had to completely make up, you still didnāt have the chance to reach your goal, so there was a huge gap between the desire and its realization. Well, this space Freud calls it āpsycheā. The psyche is the distance between desire and its fulfillment. Because on this journey you have to invent so many things that before reaching satisfaction you end up having formed a psyche. Today however, what happens is that after meeting a girl twice youāre already in bed with her: youāve eliminated this space. Your psyche is not in action when you make love. At best, itās hydraulics. And in any caseā¦ No, donāt laugh because these here are tragic things. When you have done what Iām saying, you end up performing sexual actions that do not relate to a psychic understanding because you have not created such a psyche. And at this point even sex will bore you and you will need another taboo, which is called drugs, which is called alcohol. I envy your age because at my age it wasnāt like that, Iām very envious of you, who can do whatever you want; but I also feel sorry for you, because you do actions that donāt correspond to any psychic response. And therefore they are not beautiful, these actions.
[ā¦] Because only in absence you invent. Not when youāre satisfied, when youāre satisfied you sleep, you donāt invent anything. [ā¦]
Love is a metaxĆ¹, it is an intermediary between our rational part and our crazy part. Love is that condition whereby our crazy side manages to make itself understood by our rational side, and our rational side manages to translate and make itself understood by our crazy side. And how is this possible? And here comes the typical drama of Greek culture, splendid for me: you can start playing this game, because you are fascinated by your crazy side, you want to get to know it, you are bored with your reason, your Ego is tired of being its usual self; you must know that your egoic structure, the Ego, is a substantially fascist, substantially conservative psychic structure. Because it has worked so hard to get out of childhood madness (we have discussed children, who are mad) that it is struggling to hold up. And therefore the Ego is conservative. Your Ego is not a creator. With your Ego you donāt create. So this Ego must be corrupted by your crazy side. And how does this happen then? It happens through the other person. When the other, he or she, intercepts your crazy part, you feelā¦ not like they say Ā«He understands meā¦Ā», suuuure, he understands youā¦ When he intercepts your crazy part, he has captured you, you are naked; before you even undress, you are naked. And when he intercepts your crazy side, he puts you in touch with your own crazy side. And since he showed you your crazy part, you think you love him: in reality you are fascinated by your crazy side. And if the thing is mutual then thereās cohesion, harmony. As Jung says well, love is made with four parts: my rational side with your crazy side, your crazy side with my rational sideā¦ Jung can say these things because he was psychotic and therefore understood these situations well.
It is the other who reveals your crazy side to you. And you fall in love with it. And then [ā¦] what does Love do? It generates.
Not the children ā of course those too. But it generates your Ego again. Because if you enter a love story, if you enter your madness, when you come out of it you are no longer the Ego who entered. You are an Ego tainted by your madness and therefore transformed by your madness. But itās not a relationship between you and me, itās a relationship between me and my madness, thanks to you. Do you understand this point, that if love is a relationship with oneās own madness (which fascinates us), do you see that when love ends it is not that you have lost someone, in fact you have lost the eyeopener of your crazy side. And so you feel bad. Not because you lost one, but because you lost the one who uncovered you. The one who showed you who you are deep down, the undertone of your soul. And this is the reason discretion is not a matter of clothes and petticoats. Because itās not like you make love to everyone ā well, today itās kinda like that, thatās that ā but you only make love with those who have already stripped you naked by showing you that thing unknown to you and which you were attracted to, which are the dark depths of your soul that comes out in a condition of love.
We have said that Love is cognitive, it makes us know. So, someone who enters a love story, whether the story ends well or the story ends badly, itās always positive, because the Ego is regenerated. [ā¦] You have plunged into your madness and the Ego that comes out of it is no longer the Ego that entered it. And any of you who have had an affair know very well that things go like this, but he never knows why they went like this, because you have that romantic love in mind from āGrand Hotelā, right? Made of caresses, sweetness, delicacies, are you kiddingā¦ Love is a tragic thing, guys, tragic. [ā¦] Love is the violation of the integrity of the Ego.
ā»
The Greeks believe that relationship is much more important than identity. The Greeks think that the city comes before the individual. Aristotle says that if one enters the city and thinks he can do without the others, he is either a beast or a god. And speaking of god he says that god is probably not happy because he is a monakos, because he is alone. Well, you must know that our identity does not come from us, identity is not a natural gift, it is not that being in the world gives us an identity. Identity is a social gift, identity is given to us by others. If I tell a child that he is good and his teacher tells him so too, he builds a positive identity. If he is told that he is an idiot and the teacher tells him so too, he constructs a negative identity. Identity is the product of recognition, I need others to know who I am. And the Greeks had understood these things, and the Christians have not yet understood them because with the concept of soul they place the individual before society. [ā¦] And Rousseau rightly says Ā«Christians are not good citizens, because they are interested in individual eternal life. And what are they delivering to the country? They just remove the impediments that are obstructing their salvation of the soul.Ā»
ā»
Do you have any questions to ask? No, ask them, because I imagine that love is always a topic thatā¦ I mean, the success of psychoanalysts is that people feel bad in love situations, because if everyone is fine, they would go hungry.
2018/03/11 ā Youth crisis in the age of nihilism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dDk-UfKfGM[š”]
Fiera internazionale dellāEditoria āTempo di Libriā, 2018. Conversazione con Umberto Galimberti autore del libro āLa parola ai giovani. Dialogo con la generazione del nichilismo attivoā (Feltrinelli), realizzata da Massimiliano Coccia con Umberto Galimberti.
Yes, we need to discuss youth issues in the age of nihilism. It is a problem that I posed to myself in 2005 when I met Miguel Benasayag in Paris, who had written a book which in my opinion was significant [ā¦], entitled āLes passions tristesā. Miguel Benasayag said that young people are not sick for psychological reasons: all of us in adolescence have been sick, in some way, for psychological reasons, in the sense that adolescence is characterized by a maximum intensity of sexual-erotic impulses and the frontal lobes, which are the lobes of rationality, mature at the age of twenty. So, there is an imbalance, this is why adolescents are in crisis: they are in crisis because they have an excessive drive level compared to the rational level. Well, he said that young people are not sick for psychological reasons, but for cultural reasons. And this was due to the fact that for them the future was no longer a promise, but a threat.
Well, I donāt know if itās a threat for them: certainly the future is unpredictable. And when itās unpredictable, the future doesnāt act retroactively as motivation: why should I work, why should I study if thereās nothing in front of me that acts as an incentive? And if it serves as demotivation, one gives up. He gives up and experiences what I am calling the absolute present. Live 24 hours a day, without a look into the future because such a look would produce anguish.
I said to myself, well, maybe itās not a threat, but itās unpredictable: this unpredictability is due to a situation that has arisen, and which I have named the āage of nihilismā.
ā»
Then kids go to high school and [ā¦] that very powerful thing called erotica intervenes. Which is not only sexuality, it is also feeling, it is also emotionā¦
( ed. He replaces, if comparing with other conferences, the term sexuality with the broader erotica; discussions about this topic already exist somewhere else in this page. )
ā»
[ā¦] I donāt think they do these things for the pleasure that alcohol or drugs produce, I think they do it to anesthetize themselves. In the sense that if the future is offering me absolutely nothing, I would rather not get anxious thinking about my future, and so I anesthetize myself. I anesthetize myselfā¦ either by sleeping until noon, or by getting drunk, or by living in the absolute present in such a way that the future is not on sight.
ā»
[ā¦] our psyche is not able to get excited except for proximity, for what is close. If my wife dies I will suffer like a dog, if I have loved her; if my neighbor dies I offer my condolences; if they tell me that eight children die every second in the world, I have a feeling of powerlessness, and rather than facing the limitations of my being, I just donāt care. Unfortunately, our psyche has this limit. We are offered the world [by media] and the tragedies of the world, which wasnāt happening in previous ages: the media offer us the World. In the fifties we knew the world of our country, the world of our neighborhood, but not the World ā when our psyche is unable to be in the World, it is only able to be in its environment. The Germans have a word for World: welt. And then they have a word to say the world that your psyche inhabits, which is umwelt, the surrounding world, the nearest, the proximal world. And the more global world they show us, the more they reduce our psychic ability to react.
ā»
Just to give an example, when you have to buy a house, you think that youāre doing all your reasoning, the mortgage, the cost, the money you have, the request for some money from your parents, do all the calculations on the table, think about it, look at the house, establish the plan, the exposure, everything. After all this rational operation, when you decide to buy it, you enter that house and, the moment you enterā¦ you feel or you donāt feel at home. This stuff is called feeling. Thatās where the decision happens. Decisions are all made on a sentimental basis.
2017/05/16 ā Psychoanalysis: a romantic story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wurdqtwc8fU[š”]
Ordine degli Psicologi della Lombardia. Elements of philosophy for psychologists and psychotherapists, curated by Umberto Galimberti. Casa della Psicologia, piazza Castello 2, Milan. Third event of four.
[The women were giving birth and the men had spare time during which they were playing, and the game they were playing is History.[š”]]
ā»
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you donāt praise or exalt āthe individualā, you are pessimistic, of course, right?ā¦ ā¦ Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isnāt he? Those who say āpessimismāā¦ Iām like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it?
ā»
The first psychologists, in the 60s, when they introduced psychology in Italy, used to say, as a joke, that Ā«the Super-Ego is a structure thatās soluble in alcohol.Ā»
ā»
How do we save ourselves from this will to live (Wille zum Leben) that doesnāt give a damn about individuals, from this nature that doesnāt give a damn, this great dancer who dances, and loses individuals in her unbridled dance. How do we save ourselves from this dimension?
Schopenhauer had indicated three ways, the way of entsagung, of resignation:
- Compassion: compassion means being aware that this suffering is generalized, itās the condition of the human lot. Not Ā«why me?Ā» [ā¦]
- Art: artistic contemplation, because it lets us transcend, itās kind of a relief, it takes us out of this macabre fate. It is not an egoic operation, it is not a project of the Ego (artistic, ecstatic contemplation), because you are captured by the beauty, it is not the Ego that plans something, but the thing fully absorbs you. Itās a kind of escape.
- Chastity: if no one generates anymore, nature, the species, ends.
ā»
[ā¦]Nietzsche had captured the tragic essence of Greek, you know, which consists in this: if you go read āThe Birth of Tragedyā, there is a beautiful passage in which King Midas meets Silenus [ā¦]
ā»
Hey, be careful, you know: when it comes to saying that patients are today looking for a meaning in their lives, be careful to give them meaning, because I mean, itās okay to deceive them, but not too much, you knowā¦ This search for meaning is a Christian experience, itās not really something that honest, because Man, sure, needs to build a meaning to live, but then, when facing deathā¦ I mean, we should be aware of the tragic condition of Man: tragedy is no trifle, itās not āpessimismāā¦ Tragedy is what the Greeks taught us. And Nietzsche rightly says that tragedy is not a literary genre, tragedy is the human condition.
ā»
Without too much believing that psychoanalysis is about discovering mysteries: the unconscious is not a statute of the riddle; dreams are not riddles, they are indicators of viable paths, and at a certain point one discovers what becomes the theme of oneās existence, without thinking that you have to heal from this theme, but simply living with good relations with the theme of oneās suffering. Because having good relationships with your own suffering means that your suffering gives you energy. [ā¦] If you declare war to it, it will unleash hell on you, but if you make peace with itā¦ And Jung even says, you should love your suffering, and at that point it gives you its energy. To do this, however, we must give up the Christian concept of perfection ā perfectum means finished ā and instead assume the model that balance is a well-rounded condition, where there is good and there is evil, light and darkness: and one must say to oneself: Ā«Yes, all right, I am this too, so what?Ā» But he must tell himself so first, before telling others.
2017/03/08 ā The Greek wisdom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZc2n3wLMm8[š”]
āFestival della Filosofia in Magna Greciaā, nonprofit organization, Copertino Castle, March 08 and 09, 2017
Teenage years are the time of philosophical reflection. In the full sense, because one is born with a certain view of the world which is the one he learned from his parents and from the culture in which he grew up; then, with adolescence, thanks to the appearance of that revolutionary dimension called sexuality ā which forces you to change your vision of the world ā a critical attitude begins, in which the view of the previous world is put into crisis. Crisis and criticism have the same etymon: krino in Greek means to judge. While first things are accepted passively, in the age of crisis ā which is the teenage years ā a critical attitude begins, which goes from slamming doors when leaving the house to insulting parents ā all physiological, mind you, nothing to condemn: if you donāt do that at that time, youāll do it later in a much more tragic way. And this critical attitude fits the exact essence of philosophy: what is philosophy? It is questioning common beliefs, and seeing if the things that are being said, the widespread opinions, the average mentality are justified in their statements or not.
Socrates, when discussing with his students in Greece, asks them Ā«What is beautiful?Ā» And everyone says what beauty is, according to their ideas, their opinion. And he, Socrates, knows nothing ā in fact, he calls himself an āignorant scholarā. And to the question Ā«What is your role, then, if you donāt know anything, if youāre not wise?Ā» Well, priests, wise men have the truth, but not philosophers. Keep this difference in mind. The priest can teach you a truth, the wise man can teach you a ready-made truth, the philosopher cannot. The philosopher listens and evaluates the opinion of those who propose a discussion about something and then he, Socrates, says: Ā«My task is like that of the potters, who with the knuckle of their finger test whether the vase is real bronze or of other inferior material.Ā» That is to say, I check whether your opinions stand on their own for their argumentation, whether they are free of contradictions, or whether instead they are hearsay, or whether they are an adhesion to a faith, or an adhesion to a authorityā¦ All this is of no interest to philosophy: philosophy is born when you know how to argue and defend what you say regardless of faith, regardless of authority, regardless of widespread opinion, regardless of the seduction of affections.
So doing philosophy means thinking with your own head, debating about your own things. And towards common beliefs ā which are not the same as common sense ā you take a critical attitude. Critical means, does what has been said have a basis or is it only valid because everyone is saying it? And this is particularly significant in an age like ours where opinions are formed through television, through the internet, and are assumed simply because they are widespread, and not because they are discussed. Since this critical attitude begins in teenage years, Professor Ferraraās definition heās just given here, is good: this age is the age at which the philosophical question is asked. Then perhaps you abandon it, then perhaps you rejoin the flock, but in adolescence you are not yet a sheep. In adolescence you are a thinking subject because you are restless, because you are upset, because you no longer fit into the previous view of the world and you have not yet built the new one. This age of uncertainty is the most fruitful, and teachers should take care of this uncertainty and this fruitfulness.
Well. Having said that, letās talk about Greek wisdom. Iāll say straight away that Greekness is not so much a cultural place; yes, it is that too, but it is rather a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a way of seeing the world. And Greekness is one of the roots of the West in the same way as the Judeo-Christian tradition is. The West has these two origins, Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek culture. We could simply say āJewishā, because Christianity is nothing more than a Jewish heresy, you know. In fact, it welcomes the whole Bible and then it brings us a variant called the Gospel. So there is this tradition of Semitic culture and the tradition of Greek culture; these are the two sources.
[ā¦]
This truth that is valid for everyone, [the one found through the Socratic dialogue,] is it an eternal truth? No. It is a historical truth, it is a truth that works and is accepted until an objection arises which shows that this truth also contains a contradiction; so the truth becomes history, there is never an absolute truth in the Greek way of thinking. [ā¦] Faith does not need to overcome its negation, because faith is an emotional adhesion to a content, but the truth is condemned to intolerance, intolerance of its refusal; and when its refusal gets the upper hand on it, its negation becomes the truth.
[ā¦]
( Then he talks about the conflict between Ego and the subconscious of the species. )
[ā¦] Freud teaches us that we know that we must die but our psyche does not perceive it. Our psyche does not feel ā there, I am interested in the verb āto feelā, it does not internalize our dying. [ā¦] And if you have taken care of people at their terminal phase, and you talk to them, you hear them talk as if in a condition of life. They say: Ā«Oh, please, now that Iām not at home, that Iām here in the hospital, take care of this and that, pleaseā¦Ā» as if they are going to be back. Because the psyche does not feel death: we know that we have to die, we know it with our brain, but we donāt know it with our psyche, and this is the advantage, it is that sort of blindness that the species grants us, thanks to its goodness, for not to witness what is our destiny anyway.
[ā¦]
( Then he talks about pain; Ā«Sustine et abstineĀ» )
Pain is not exhibited, because it has no meaning in Greek culture. And because the Greek knows a much more radical pain than the pain that is shown every day. The Greek knows a much more important, much more dramatic pain, he knows the pain of tragedy, which Christians do not know because they are not tragic (ed. they have the afterlife). The pain of tragedy consists in this: that man, unlike animals, needs to construct a meaning in order to live, in view of death which is the implosion of all meaning. Ā«Incipit tragoediaĀ», here the tragedy begins. [ā¦] Because the animal lives based on its instincts, which are rigorous codes that induce behaviors which are always the same ones, rigid behaviors. Men have no instincts. As Freud says well, man has drives with an indeterminate goal.
[ā¦] (We can also sublimate the sexual drive, for example, by writing a poem. )
The fact that men are without instincts is told to us by Plato, [by Thomas Aquinas ā he adds in another conference], by Kant, Herder, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson in the last centuryā¦ Gehlen, who defines man as an animal whose nature is lacking. We are not organic with nature. [ā¦] And this biological deficiency of man is also what makes it possible to say that man has been able to survive on this earth thanks to the Technological expedient. That is, Technology has taken over as a tool to allow man to live. Technology begins when a man takes a stick to pull down a fruit when his hand cannot reach it. This Technical dimension is what allowed this man without instincts, who does not know how to live in the world, to survive, unlike animals for which survival is automatic because it is codified by instincts. But precisely because man has no instincts he needs that compensation, those things in place of instincts which are the laws, the institutions, which act as a barrier, which tell him what he can do and what he cannot do. Therefore the city, the institutions, the laws are what gives man an order of life, prevents him from dispersing into insignificance, prevents him from becoming anarchic and therefore unproductive.
[ā¦]
Once we have understood this, man finds himself to live in this life not codified by instincts only if he is able to construct a meaning of his own biography, and today many people go to therapy because they no longer find a meaning to their life. And in fact this search, this finding has become increasingly precarious. And this meaning is carried forward until death which is the implosion of every meaning. Here lies the tragic dimension. Because if I didnāt have the problem of meaning, death wouldnāt involve me in a tragic way, but since I live according to it, death is tragic.
You know, when we die, the tragic moment is not so much in the fact that we abandon the people around us, our loved ones, our wife, our husband, our children, our lover, our thingsā¦ The essential pain of death is rather that we abandon ourselves, that is, the love that we have developed for ourselves throughout our lives, because by dint of living with ourselves we have also fallen in love with ourselves, and it is this love that we lose with death, and we grief this love, not the other ones. That is, we have to say goodbye to ourselves. And all the love we have had for ourselves all our lives, we must say goodbye to that love. One day, King Midas meets Silenus, etc. [ā¦]
The word tragic comes from tragos, goat, and odia (for ode), song, the shepherdsā songs. The shepherds did not live in the city, a symbol of culture; the shepherds lived in the mountains in contact with nature. The shepherds understood well that their life cycle was a cycle of nature: birth, growth, reproduction, death, and they understood that their destiny was like that of sheep, with the difference that sheep do not have the need to construct a meaning of their existence, while we do. And that sense is the place of our desperation. The shepherd who looks at the animal sees that the animal jumps, plays, eats, falls asleep, sunbathes, gets up, grazesā¦ it is happy. The shepherd envies that happiness, and then he reflects, but he finds out that he doesnāt want it like the sheep has it. Here, this ālikeā, this āhowā, which constitutes the torment of the tragic dimension of man.
[ā¦]
( Then he talks about how to realize happiness according to the Greeks. )
[ā¦]
When you tell me Ā«But we live better than our grandparents didĀ», well, are you sure? Are you sure they werenāt happier than us? Are we really happier than them, with all our Technology?
Internal link: advertising, grandparents, identity
Or did they have a rate of communication, of intimacy, in harmony with their cultural level they managed to have a relationship and a state of happiness perhaps greater than the state of happiness of us who are stuck in virtual relationships in front of our computers exactly like the monks of Kalabaka, who took refuge in the caves so as not to see anything of the world, and we to not lose even a fragment of the world ā in which we do not even participate. In the past we needed to get out into the world to make experiences, now to know what is happening in the world we have to lock ourselves at home. This is already a form of perversion.
( Information technology has eliminated space and time. We therefore live in a civilization of the unlimited, of the omnipotent, the Greek sense of limit has been lost. )
Internal link: past, present, and future
( Drugs in young people āto anesthetize themselvesā. )
2017/02/24 ā Dictionary of the new vices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgJ5oyORI3E[š”]
Filosofarti 2017 ā Teatro delle Arti, via Don Minzoni, 5, Gallarate
In a system about connecting apparatuses, itās not possible for a creative idea to arise, and starting from there, the whole chain is disturbed, you know: you have to be like everyone else. Ā«But I have different ideas with respect to my apparatus, for example in the bank it could be done like this instead of the other way, in this chain it could be done like this instead of that other method, in this office one could proceed working in a different way.Ā» If you have different ideas then psychologists come to the rescue to make you even more compliant with the system, and how do they come about? Through those machines that are in fashion today which are cognitivism and behaviorism, because they notice, in such characters, who are a little creative, or who have some difference with respect to the average way of thinking and acting, they identify something that it is pathologically called ācognitive dissonanceā, that is: you donāt think like everyone else and therefore you disturb a little with your original thoughts, you donāt behave exactly like everyone else, and you feel bad too, in this way, because no one treats you as a friend, nobody trusts you if youāre a little different, a little weird.
[ā¦]
He is induced to become like everyone else. Because since you feel bad if you are a little different, then, not being able to change the world, you have to change your ideas a little, or you have to change your behavior, you have to adapt to the foreseen and prescribed modality, because in this way you become reliable, you create friendships, you are like the others. And you donāt feel strange, different, alone. Cognitivism, behaviorismā¦ which have practically put psychoanalysis out of the game because someone who wants to know himself is mad: āWhat does it mean to know oneself, to go and investigate oneself?ā (Ā«I have deeply investigated myselfĀ», said Heraclitus) Ā«Are you kidding me? There are things to do in this world, what do you care about investigate yourselfā¦ You only risk getting sad, getting depressed one.Ā»
Well: conformism is a bad machine, because it is the basis of fascism.
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By now we find ourselves in a context where we are no longer dealing with reality but we are dealing with the description of reality, made by the media. Iām not saying that the media lie: they donāt lie, they tell the truth, I think: itās not that they tell me one thing for the other. No, they tell the truth, but they highlight one thing, after which for five or six days everyone talks about that thing. Then thatās enough, no more talking, the end. Oh, one more thing! Then everyone talking about this other thing. How can we be so trashy? How can we continually stay on the wave of current events? But what is the value of current events? Why are current events better, why is the present better than the past, or the future? What is this topicality? And you have to be current, mind you, because if you propose a thought, they tell you: Ā«What can you link it to? Why do we need to talk about it?Ā» Oh, because that one other event happened, in that case, okay, we can talk about this one. But itās not like the fact is giving you permission to talk about it: the description of the fact simply gave you the opportunity to talk about it. Now, for example, everyone talks about that poor woman who died in the workplace in 2005 while living the life she was subjected to by the corporals, we all talk about it, but why didnāt we talk about that before?, We knew very well what was going on in those places, we knew very well that in Apulia the olive harvesting was done like that, Michele Emiliano also knew the things happening in the region that he was governing. And why no one did something about it? Because nobody talked about it.
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In my opinion, pornography isnāt such an innocent thing ā Iām not saying because it goes to watch obscene things, thatās not relevant ā itās not innocent because it has a design, in some way, and for me itās essentially a fascist design. Because what does pornography do in the end? In the end, it kills your desire, because the repeated, continuous recurrence of gestures that, moreover, you will never be up to, right? But apart from this, in addition to the depressive element compared to certain pornographic performances, there is also the fact that the continuous repetition of these gestures also makes you feel nauseous, i.e. it kills the desire. But, gentlemen, desire is potentially revolutionary, and you mustnāt think of revolution simply as shouldering truncheons or rifles or revolvers, revolution means changing the world. The world you live in doesnāt suit you and you try to change it, desire works on change, desire wants a new world.
[ā¦]
Sex is the basis of ideation, of enthusiasm, of impulse, of all these things, it is not only that misery to which pornography reduces it to. But if you lose this impulse because youāre bored, because youāre used to it, because nothing satisfies you anymore, because you have to do some crazy perversions to be able to find even a shred of curiosity, well, then your desire is extinguished.
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(On feelings, which we learn from literature)
Since we fill our schools with computers instead of literature, we make computer scientists, not sentimental people. If you do not have a feeling for yourself and you can not even participate in a feeling for others, you are not a man. And remember that schools, whether primary or secondary, up to university, are all education courses: itās not that you have to go and learn a job, school and work are useless: go to school and learn literature, which will form feelings, and with feelings then you can also navigate yourself through life.
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When your husbands treat you badly, escape, escape! Do not rely on your delusion of omnipotence: since you procreate and therefore are the master of life and death ā which is absolute power, it is the power of the king ā the woman and the king are the two antagonists. You women can create, and the fact that you can create gives you an unconscious delusion of bringing life into the world and you can also decide to have an abortion, therefore also a power of death. This power of yours makes you think you can change a man, but itās not possible, man is a stone, he doesnāt change, and if they treat you badly, they will treat you worse and worse until they kill you. [ā¦] Try to defend yourselves from these things, without hope, without relying on the idea of changing things, things donāt change, they radicalize, at best.
[ā¦]
[What is the vice that is most inculcated in people since childhood?]
Children, in very early childhood, build cognitive maps and emotional maps. Cognitive maps mean the way of knowing the world. āWay ofāā¦ One can know the world in a logical-mathematical way, another one can know it in an aesthetic way, the other in a religious way, the other knows it in a metaphysical way. The modalities of knowledge are acquired in very early childhood. Emotional maps mean how to feel the world. Freud said that these maps are built definitively within the first six years of life. Today neurosciences say it takes even less: the first three years of life. Then, thatās it; then, whatās done is done. We must not think that everything is possible, everything can be improved. [ā¦] Then you can increase your knowledge, but not the way of knowing; you can increase your sensations, but not the modality that you use to feel.
Children try to show how they see the world and how they feel it: they go to their parents with their little drawings, with their scribbles, and what does their mother say? Ā«Yeah, I donāt have time now, Iāll look at it later.Ā» āLaterā means āneverā. Or thereās that stage where they start asking āwhysā. Children ask philosophical, literally philosophical questions. Once, while walking in Milan, I heard that a child said to his mother: Ā«In my opinion, God does not exist because he doesnāt have a mother.Ā» And what does the mom do?: she started laughing with her friend, to say Ā«How smart he is, nice, ah?Ā» Ehy!, the child is looking for the principle of causality because they are born without a code of the world, they donāt know the connection of things, and so they look for the cause, because through the cause they defend themselves from the unpredictable, because the unpredictable causes anxiety. If I know the cause, when the effect occurs I have already foreseen it and therefore I no longer worry. The cause, before being a logical principle, was invented as a defensive principle of psychic anguish. Because we get scared when we donāt predict, and to predict, however, you need to know the concatenation of things, the cause-effect relationship. But even there she doesnāt answer, we say Ā«When you grow up youāll understand.Ā» Sure, wait and hopeā¦ that this question still interests me when I grow up, assuming Iām going to remember it. And so, the lack of communication creates the toys. Then when the separations between husband and wife takes place, the disaster is complete. Because the father, who has never been used to talking to his children, doesnāt know what to say to them, so he takes them on rides, I donāt know, to the cinema, to eat ice cream, he doesnāt know, he doesnāt understand what he has to do, he doesnāt know how to speak, he hasnāt learned the language of feelings, he canāt stay with childhood, he doesnāt even remember his own anymore, itās a disaster. So how do these children grow up?
The material gratification of things in exchange for the slightly more tiring communication with the children. And gratified children then donāt learn the no, they donāt learn moderation, and Ā«Whoever doesnāt know his limits,Ā» the Greeks said wisely, Ā«fear fate.Ā»
Then, āhavingā also involves a transfer of identity, so I donāt know who I am but I am represented by the things I have, if I have a nice house, if I have a nice car, speaking in the masculine view if I also have a beautiful wife, if I have good kids, then Iām that thing. If I also have a lot of money, of course. When one of these things fails, one no longer knows who one is. Considering then that our identity comes to us from recognition, it is a social gift.
The individual, this perverse Christian conceptā¦, perverse because afterwards it creates individualism, then it creates selfishness, then it creates narcissism. The individual didnāt matter for the Greeks, the individual was someone only if he was in connection with the social. Plato says Ā«Wretched man, do not think that this universe was created for you, rather you are just if you adjust to the universal harmony.Ā» The individual was born from the concept of the soul that neither the Greeks nor the Christians had, it comes from a Greek concept which, however, served another function, which was not to save oneself.
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That said, I have nothing against Christians in the sense that itās so difficult to live that whatever you need to be able to live, take it, take it without mercy and without hesitation.
ā»
Freedom does not exist, because it conflicts with identity. There is only the idea of freedom. Once Jean-Paul Sartre went to the mountains, fell, broke his leg, went to the hospital, with his leg plastered etc., his friend Merleau-Ponty came to see him and said: Ā«Sorry, Jean-Paul, but couldnāt you have gone to the mountains with a guide?Ā» And he replied: Ā«Do you really think that I would go to the mountains with a guide?Ā» No, Jean-Paul Sartre does not go to the mountains with a guide, that is: his identity does not allow him to be free to follow a guide.
Social trust is based on this fact: why do I trust you? Because from you I expect, as far as I know you, a certain form of action, a certain consequence of actions, for which I trust you. What does it mean that I trust you? I trust that your identity is that, and that you can do nothing but that.
[ā¦]
Freedom makes you responsible, but if you are responsible you are also punishable. Power will always defend your personal freedom, otherwise punishment is no longer justified.
2016/11/15 ā Absent utopia. Young people dealing with the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7jNZsmH6w[š”]
Teatro Sociale, via Oss Mazzurana 19, Trento
And expulsion from the work world is equivalent to social insignificance.
ā»
Because when the child goes to school, he does one important thing: he begins to diversify his affectivity; first he only loved his parents, then he begins to diversify: in addition to the parents there is also the teacher. If you create a split in his affectivity, [you set? unintelligible] the premises of schizophrenia. Who is the schizophrenic? He is someone who has a split affectivity. And you do that, you parent, by attacking the teacher? Teachers must always be defended, even if they are worthless. Always! In order not to make this mess inside the childās mind. Because the child, when he differentiates his affectivity, he shouldnāt feel like if heās moving away from his parents: as he moves his affectivity away from his parents, a drama happens. And then he will never leave those parents. And later he will regret having been a subject of those parents, out of fear.
[ā¦]
Then the kids go to middle school: in middle school that great thing called sexuality appears. Hey, sexuality is not a cheap thing: sexuality involves a radical change in your worldview. Because itās not just a hormonal activation, sexuality is a change in the connotations of the world, because the world becomes eroticized. First the sun sets and the child says: Ā«Look at the sky, how red it is!Ā», then, in adolescence, the sun sets but acquires an erotic flavor, a romantic flavor. A change in the perception of the world. It is not that sexuality adds to the previous vision of the world: it radically modifies it. And you, at that stage, donāt have the tools to [deal with] this radical transformation of the world. The Greeks spoke of crisis, a word that comes from the verb krino, which means I judge. Well: your judgment is suspended, you are in crisis, you are in the absence of an organization of the world. Until you create it, this new organization of the world.
Freud says, in a short page from 1909: Ā«But a secondary school should achieve more than driving its pupils to suicide.Ā» Even at that time they were talking about thisā¦
ed. Here he changes and exaggerate the quote to sum up the entire subject of that text, which is obviously more complex and longer; for the record, I copy here part of the original:
But a secondary school should achieve more than not driving its pupils to suicide. It should give them a desire to live and should offer them support and backing at a time of life at which the conditions of their development compel them to relax their tics with their parental home and their family. It seems to me indisputable that schools fail in this, and in many respects fall short of their duty of providing a substitute for the family and of arousing interest in life in the world outside. This is not a suitable occasion for a criticism of secondary schools in their present shape; but perhaps I may emphasize a single point. The school must never forget that it has to deal with immature individuals who cannot be denied a right to linger at certain stages of development and even at certain disagreeable ones. The school must not take on itself the inexorable character of life: it must not seek to be more than a game of life.
By the way, did you know that 450 students a year commit suicide in Italy? Which means one and a half a day. And they do it in serenity: every now and then I receive letters from some parents who have had this misfortune, they send me a letter from their son who says: Ā«Dear parents, I thank you for what you have done for me, but to me life is insignificant. I say goodbye, please do not grieve too much; know that I will be happy.Ā» Period. Thatās it: there is nothing dramatic in what they write.
Then when a kid kills himself, they interview the professors: Ā«Ah, who would have thought!Ā» But have you looked these guys in the face that you have in front of you all day? Did you look them in the eye? Did you understand anything about them? [ā¦] That said, of course, the professors should be selectedā¦ [ā¦] We should do a personality test before endowing them with chair. (*audience clapping*) Because kids, in that season of life where sexuality explodes, are in an erotic zone. And as Freud says, they have to make such a radical transformation of the world and of their judgment of the world, that all that work that happens in adolescenceā¦ nothing more radical will ever happen to them, in life [ā¦]. And then school must no longer be a test of life, but a game of life. Game of life does not mean that one āplaysā (ed. fools around) ā games have rules, but within a non-dramatizing context. And so the teachers, to be teachers, must meet them where the kids are, and if they are in the erotic zone you must meet them there, emotionally: not by going to eat pizza with them, no, for godās sake! [ā¦] ā like parents who act as their childrenās friends, are you kidding me? Kids need authority, they want it. But they have to admire it. We studied well the subjects of the professors we admired, because our narcissism prevented us from making a bad impression on them. [ā¦] Professors must be charismatic, they should have crazy communication skills. Iāve never understood why someone 1.50Ā m tall is not allowed to be an [Italian] cuirassier, and someone who canāt communicate, isnāt charismatic, is allowed to be a professor and demotivate students for forty yearsā¦
( ed. By the way, professors know nothing about psychology and pedagogy and therefore do not intervene in time in psychiatric cases. The Italian school must simply be abolished. Better that it doesnāt exist and that the parents or someone teach one or two things in an amateurish way rather than the current horrible and unbelievable crap of the Italian school system. )
But there is something even more insidious today: there is an objectification of education, due to obscene pedagogues who have administered a quality of school ā they say ā Anglo-Saxon, ācause itās chic to say Anglo-Saxon, in reality it is a matter of objectification: the subjectivity of the students is no longer taken into consideration, only the performance is taken into consideration. We are in the age of Technology, arenāt we?
ā»
[ā¦] We donāt have feelings innately, we have them by culture. By nature we have drives ā so if you punch me, Iāll give you two punches back. Hence, the bullying. When faced with a bully, what does the school do? They suspend him. But if heās emotionally behind, you have to keep him there twice as muchā¦ [ā¦]
Then, the emotionsā¦ here we are halfway between nature and culture.
ā»
I wonder, in there [, in the technological rationality of workplaces], is there still Man? This is my question. Because I am much more humanist than those who complain about my arguments. In my opinion, there is no Man anymore, we are now social masks, spokesman. When you go to a meeting with strangers, I tell you my name, the other one tells his name, which you forget after a minute if you ever heard it in the first place, and then you begin to understand the geography of things when you give the business card and it says the position on it. Because we are now identified by the role, no longer by the name. And the fact alone about having lost oneās own name is a very dangerous thing.
ā»
( Tuesday November 15, 2016, five years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making a comparison to point out that the West is really falling apart and there are no ways out. )
Now, with Trump, whatās going on? That Europe either wakes up or doesnāt wake up. Because Trump will give a shit about Europe and will make friends with Putin, and Putin has expansive and aggressive anxieties. Last year I was in Prague to give a conference at the University of Prague, and there was ā as my interlocutor ā one considered a great intellectual from Prague. And I said, to these students in Prague, donāt be paranoid now, I understand that you are afraid of Russia because you have been under its heel for decades, but now there is no more Soviet Union, so these fears of yours they are unfounded. And this intellectual ā whose name I cannot pronounce because I am unable to ā looks at me and says: Ā«Ah, dear professor, optimism is the quality of poorly informed people.Ā»
2016/09/24 ā The illusion of freedom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ6udkwoMZ4[š”]
Event coordinated by UniversitĆ del Salento, Comune di Taviano, Teatro della Busacca and Vico degli Scettici. Taviano (LE), auditorium comunale āAldo Tundoā.
Pierre Clastres, who was a French anthropologist, studying the tribes of South America that still exist in the forest, saw that [ā¦] if someone transgresses the most important taboos he is expelled from the tribe, and he says ā this time not Pierre Clastres but LĆ©vi-Strauss ā that when there were these expulsions from the tribe those who were expelled died within 48 hours. They didnāt die of hunger, they didnāt die of thirst: in 48 hours you can resist. They died of disidentity: that person no longer knew who he was; because primitive people did not have an individual identity, they had a group identity, they belonged to a totem. Outside of this sense of belonging they became radically disoriented and died. [ā¦] Disorientation, which is the same thing that happens for example to people who have Alzheimerās, who get lost. Well, disorientation probably caused this kind of situations in a sudden and explosive way.
[ā¦]
Women were a currency of exchange, and have always been. Even today: we have only changed the methods. As Nietzsche says well, the difference between us and animals is that we do the same things, we do with the knife and the fork, while they do with the bite of their teeth.
[ā¦] RatiÅ: I give you 5 young goats and you give me 1 calf; the calf is the ratio equivalent to 5 young goats; the word āreasonā was not born in philosophy, it was born in economics. The ratio, redde rationem: give me the equivalent. There is where the market begins, which is therefore a rational form, contrary to the gift (ed. which has ulterior motives in the context of war and economy), destruction, theft, war. And money too: today money has become a terrible thing because it is the symbolic generator of all values, but at the beginning money was what redeemed many human lives, in the sense that the feudal serf had to give all his life to the master; however, with money, he only gave the master his service which was remunerated with money. And therefore he was āfreeā, money was a factor of freedom, because before you had to give all of yourself to your master. Should we then say that the economy is a rational form? Yes, it is a rational form. I know you say, Ā«Yes, but the market is regulated by someone.Ā» I agree, but since we donāt know who this someone is, the revolution has become impossible. Revolutions no longer exist, not because the Soviet Union has collapsed or because ideologies have collapsed. As Hegel explains well, revolutions are possible when there is conflict between two wills, the will of the servant and the will of the master. In 1968, symbolically, the master was Gianni Agnelli and the servant was the working class: conflict between two wills. Today, both the servant and the master are on the same side and have the market as their counterpart, and how can you face the market? And so the class struggle is over. There are still some who think that it is still there, but theyāre working with 20th century categories, but itās over, itās over for this reason, because with globalization the market has become the counterpart of both the workers and the owners.
[ā¦] economics is a form of rationality, but not the highest achieved, because it still suffers from a human passion, which is the passion for money; [ā¦] instead there is Technology, which has no passion.
[ā¦]
You [worker] must operate a slight schizophrenia between you and your functioning. You have to create a double subjectivity. Schizophrenia is a brutal disease, but what is the core of this disease? The split of the personality. And you must be divided indeed, a schizophrenia that I called in one of my books a āfunctional schizophreniaā: to live today you have to be a bit schizophrenic, put on the suit and tie on Monday and take them off on Friday evening, symbolically and metaphorically. You have to function according to the needs of the apparatus for five days a week, and then do what you want, if you are still capable to, if you still remember yourself, if you still have a memory of yourself, if you are still interested in yourself. But I think that this interest also disappears and everyone runs away from themselves as if from their worst enemy because they can no longer find themselves. [ā¦ Now] a Technological subconscious has also infiltrated, in my opinion, within us, which consists in the fact that this rationality has penetrated us and has also become the measure of our evaluation of the people who are next to us. In the past we were sitting close to workmates, who were [precisely] workmates, but now they are competitors, because if he is better than me, more efficient than me, he will keep his job, but I wonāt, and then itās war, itās war even within one meter. We have lost friendship, we have lost solidarity, because the logic of Technology sets this type of mentality.
How did we reach this point? Through a procedure where left-wing and right-wing demands intersected. In 1968, the left put into circulation some very good, nice concepts, like, I donāt know, āthe family is a gas chamberā, āthe school is barracksā, āthe law is aggressiveā, āit is forbidden to forbidāā¦ This mentality, which also created advantages, for example the liberation of women began there, starting from this āit is forbidden to forbidā. But this ādo not prohibitā has also become the motto of the American culture that has now taken over: you can do what you want, nothing is forbidden to you, I donāt judge you on your ethics, I donāt judge you on your personal value, I judge you only on your ability to achieve the maximum of goals.
So, the maximum of objectivesā¦ Taking into account that every year the bar raises a little and a form of depression is born that is absolutely unknown in psychiatric manuals ā because even today, if you open a psychiatric manual, depression is organized around feelings of guilt that cannot be relieved, which concern the absolutely fixed past. Now, however, there is no longer a sense of guilt, because there is no longer a morality that blames you. Today depression is organized around the sense of shame and inadequacy; the game is no longer between permitted and prohibited, the game is about Ā«Can I make it or not?Ā» Because if I donāt make it, thatās great trouble. So, insomnia, anxiety, no working hours ā we continue to work even at home. There is a beautiful song by Giorgio Gaber, Ā«The usual caress for the son, then eating, and then watching the movie on televisionĀ» (āLāingranaggioā, āThe gearwheelā), thatās it, thatās whatās left of the paternal relationship. A disaster. And we are taking great steps into the absolute unconsciousness because this logic is going to make us inhuman because man has this characteristic, that in addition to reason he also has the entire irrational dimension on which we essentially feed ourselves: [ā¦] itās the dimension of love, of the gaze, of sympathy, of compassion, of joy, of exaltationā¦ And all this stuff here has nothing to do with efficiency.
And yet the fact that humanism is finished is not something that Iām telling you today in 2016, Spengler told us, Heidegger told us, Jaspers told us, GĆ¼nther Anders told us. The humanistic system is finished, and the school is doing everything it can to make it end, filling the classrooms with computers instead of teachers; the school is doing its part to end humanism. Taking into account, then, that what is of interest up to the age of eighteen is a manās education: we should stop asking children āWhat do you want to be when you grow up?ā, school must not be thought as something leading to a job, it must be thought of as education, formation of the self.
[ā¦]
The only free space ā letās use this word āfreedomā, finally ā is love. And it is so free that it doesnāt last long, in the sense that even love was once codified, the rich were not free to marry whoever they wanted because behind the rich there were assets, so marriages worked in view of assets, not to be to shared but to be accumulated. And the poor, ah!, the poor couldnāt divorce and do whatever, they had to give birth to children so to have working hands and start a family in the traditional way. I myself, born into a very poor family, am the brother of nine brothers, so there are ten of us. [ā¦] Love has never been free, it has always been codified. Even today, in the Muslim world, it is codified, but we havenāt moved much away from the Muslim world; only fifty years ago, come on, I donāt know if you remember how our grandmothers used to dress: exactly how Arab women dress. I myself, who went to a Catholic university, remember very well that the girls wore aprons long to their feet, and there were signs that said that they couldnāt sit on the walls otherwise their knees would be exposed. Come on! We are not very far from that world that today we look at with such superiority because we go around all naked. Even in 1969, I was teaching in a teacherās school in Como, and girls who came to school wearing trousers were expelled ā with an expulsion lasting a week. Ehy! 1969! [ā¦] Itās just that we have bad memory; the elders should be listened to at least because of their repertoire of memories from when you were not yet born.
[ā¦]
Freud tells us that within the [first] six years [of life] our cognitive and emotional maps are definitively formed. āCognitiveā means that our future way of knowing is going to be decided by the way in which these maps were previously formed. How we are going to feel in the future is decided by how these maps were previously formed. [Today instead] neuroscience tells us that itās three years. [So, in this scenario, how can we talk about freedom?]
2016/07/21 ā The beauty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxJweN8jG_E[š”]
Vacanze dellāAnima 2016, plaster cast gallery at Canova in Possagno (TV)
I donāt think that we should and can talk about beauty, because when we talk about something we objectify it and above all conceptualize it, we put it in a context of reasoning, while beauty is something immediate, which escapes any reasoning. [ā¦] St. Thomas Aquinas makes a simpler, but not bad definition: [ā¦] Ā«Pulchrum est quod visum placetĀ» (Ā«Beauty is what when you see it, you like it.Ā») [ā¦] Kant [ā¦] says that beauty is without concept and without purpose. [ā¦] We must not forget this corporeal component of beauty: it is something that affects the senses; and the senses in philosophy have not had great success because the senses deceive us, they are not a basis for constructing a truth. [ā¦] Indeed, in a certain sense philosophy was born as a suppression of sensitivity, a suppression of bodies, because they are not reliable, in the sense that their responses, their information are absolutely not useful for building a scientific discourse, i.e. valid for everyone, built according to necessity and not according to individual opinions. But the nicest definition is given to us by Thomas Mann, when he says that beauty Ā«durchstechenĀ», beauty pierces. And again it is reiterated that I have no power over beauty, beauty has power over me. Not only in the form of wonder, from which one is astonished, even made stupid ā stupid is not a bad word, it is the condition of those who are astonished and therefore enchanted, paralyzed by beauty, [see] Stendhal syndrome[š”]. [ā¦ So beauty pierces,] exactly like the iconographic representation of love, which is represented precisely as a putto who shoots an arrow and wounds you.
[ā¦]
I remember a scene of a girl who got on the train (I was teaching in Venice and living in Milan) with a large musical instrument [ed. a harp]; there was a gentleman who was talking to her, he was interested in the art of that instrument, and after being interested and talking for half an hour, he finally asked Ā«I am enchanted by the things you say, I see your enthusiasm, but tell me, where is the business?Ā» Which means: Ā«How much do you earn with this thing?Ā» Today, we, with this mentality well described by Heidegger according to which we have a thought that is only capable of doing calculations, [ā¦] we no longer know what is beautiful, what is true, what is right, what is sacredā¦ We only understand what is useful.
[ā¦] there is a beauty of the word, which is well highlighted in the Jewish tradition. But at a certain point the Jews wanted something more than words, something that affects not only hearing but also sight. [ā¦] And in the Jewish tradition, the culture of images is prohibited: if you go to a synagogue you donāt even see an image, you only see, in the apse, some writings, Bible verses written in Aramaic. But even if you examine the other monotheistic religion, which is the Muslim one, you donāt see any image, because āyou donāt make yourself any image of Godā: absolute transcendence. [ā¦] This dimension of Christianity means that Christianity, of the three monotheistic religions, is the only one that stages art. If we Westerners have art history, we owe it to the Church. [ā¦] it was in order to attract people, because the pictures move, touch you.
[ā¦]
A work is a work of art when my gaze does not exhaust it, instead it leads you to a further meaning. And the enchantment consists in the fact that in front of this or that sculpture I continue to look for that additional meaning compared to what the tangible offers me. The difference between objects and works of art is that the objects are finished in my gaze, which captures their meaning, while in the work of art my gaze is unable to capture the totality of the meaning: there is an opening towards the ineffable [ā¦], the unspeakable, the invisible.
[ā¦]
When Leopardi says Ā«What doest thou in heaven, O moon?Ā» [ā¦] it makes no sense from a rational point of view; why is it poetic? Because for Leopardi the moon is the moon but also something else ā here it is, when it differs itself from the principle of non-contradiction. The moon is the moon but also a female interlocutor to whom I can ask questions regarding the meaning of my existence. [ā¦] The poet was the person who when he sees, he does not stop at the visible but has a superior vision, which the Greeks call epopteia ā pĆpto (ĻĪÆĻĻĻ) means to look, in Greek; I look beyond what is seen. Well, only if you have an āepopticā gaze, that is, capable of looking beyond what you see, you begin to understand what a work of art is.
[ā¦]
When we look at a work of art, we behave like when we look at a pearl. But every time we look at a pearl and admire it, we forget that the pearl is the disease of the shell; and without the illness the pearl would not have been born, just as without the schizophrenia of so many poets, so many sculptors, so many artists, without losing oneself in madness, a work of art would never have been born. So the game is a serious one, the game of beauty; beauty is not an easy thing: beauty is something that disturbs, it is something that pierces, it is something that paralyzes you, it is something that takes you to the dimension of the sublime, but you are not the master of the game, itās beauty that plays you.
2015/10/03 ā Me and the others
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-mC5rt0Ba4[š”]
Italian Society of Biosystems, Bologna, October 3 2015 ā Freedom of psychology: The Other
For example, I have no difficulty in understanding women who kill their children: at a certain point, they find themselves in that condition in which they feel that they are victims of the economy of the species. They donāt know it, no one tells them, no one explains it to them, and once they have generated and find themselves hostage of the newborn, those depressive phases begin which are not so much āpost-partum depressionā, but are the onset of the economy of the species: I donāt believe in postpartum depression, they are part of that psychopathology so dear to the DSM I, II, III, IV, V, but in reality the main figure is that the economy of the species totalizes this womanās life to its advantage and at this point this woman no longer knows where, what she is doing, what is the meaning of her life, where she is heading, and the child becomes her misfortune, the seizure of her own ego is projected onto the child.
2015/03/07 ā The double life (the deceitful one of the Ego and the truthful one of the species)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOhLccWRS9M[š”]
Event organized by KairĆ³s ā La Busacca, Teatro Stabile of Salento ā and University of Salento. March 07, 2015 ā Paisiello Theater in Ruffano (Lecce)
Nietzsche says: Ā«Schopenhauer is right.Ā» Schopenhauer had devised ways to overcome this dramatic dimension [where the Ego is not the master in its home because it is the species that decides]; the first way was art. Because art is unbiased, sincere, art is without concept: a thing is beautiful not because it is [mine? unintelligible], it goes beyond purpose, it goes beyond beliefs, it goes beyond the economy, beauty is in itself. And therefore the fact alone that one leaves behind the goals of the Ego is a form of salvation, for Schopenhauer.
Art, then compassion: which is suffering together, knowing that the fate is shared, not just mine.
But the strongest thing is chastity. It is chastity because if we stop generating, the will to live whose dream is to continue living, ends. It would be the victory of the man who sacrifices himself to defeat the species that treats him like its servant. Then one day, or rather one night, Schopenhauerās pupils see their master come out of a brothel and say Ā«Master, you here too? After everything youāve told us about chastity?Ā» And he replies: Ā«You must never judge philosophy by the conduct of the philosopher.Ā» Excellent. Perfect. Aristotle too had replied in the same way: Ā«Iām running away from Athens.Ā» After the death of Alexander the Great they wanted to kill Aristotle, who had been the instructor, the teacher of Alexander the Great. And he said: Ā«Athens has already committed a crime against philosophy: Socrates. I would rather not give them the opportunity to commit a second crime.Ā» And he flew off. Rightly so. Because philosophy (and, in general, science) stands on its own, not through the testaments of scientists or philosophers. Itās not like Einsteinās theory isnāt perfect, isnāt right, just because Einstein beat his wife like there is no tomorrow and because he raped his assistants, even the youngest ones. No, his theory is correct regardless, because as Karl Jaspers rightly says, Galileo could have even denied his own theory, but his theory is scientific, it doesnāt need the support of the scientist. While Giordano Bruno, whose theory did not yet become science, had to die for his theory. It is one thing to bear witness to faith, but neither scientific nor philosophical truth needs devotees. And these are important distinctions.
ā»
The West has become what it is because it has surpassed the Greek world because of these two roots Christianity has won, against Greek culture. It won over Christianity because it told men Ā«you will never die.Ā» And itās created an optimistic culture, enormously optimistic. And it has gone beyond the figure of Greekness which was the dimension of the tragic; and in what does the essence of the tragic consist? The tragic lies in the fact that to live, man must give himself a meaning, and he does so with the Ego, in view of death, which is the implosion of all meaning. [ā¦] Here begins the tragedy. And the satyr, half man and half goat, turns to King Midas and says to him: Ā«Now that you know this, itās better for you not to have been born. And the best thing I can wish you is to die soon.Ā» The Greeks attempted to go beyond the dimension of the tragic through the artistic one, creating gods similar to humans but not subjected to mortality, and that is their great work of art: in these gods who they did not believe in but who they admired, and they transferred in this aesthetic dimension, discovering the key, which Nietzsche announces very well, that is that only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life worth living. Thereafter, aesthetics was not enough, and so they moved on to rationality, philosophy was invented to move the tragedy from the emotional level to the rational level, because on a rational level, whatās the dimension charged with negative affectivity i.e. the tragic dimension, becomes just āa problemā, and problems may sometimes be solved. In fact, problems are the terms of something that can be solved, you see that it is liquid (ed. labial): problem; because [in Greek language] the things that cannot be solved are guttural, e.g. enigma. That you donāt work it out, you are stuck. Nietzsche always says that tragedy is not a literary genre, but it is the form of Greekness; and Jaspers adds in forty pages devoted to the dimension of the tragic that, after Greece, it is no longer possible to write a tragedy because there is no longer tragedy in a Christian culture, and not even Shakespeare is a tragedian: he is a narrator of tragedy-like things, but it does not have a tragic dimension because there is hope, because there is the hypothesis of salvation.
What does it mean ā and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note ā what does it mean to āanticipate deathā? 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 donāt rush like a desperate man, you donāt argue like a madman. You donāt kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you donāt despair, you donāt die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, itās not as if life ends: youāre 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 didnāt anticipated death, because they didnāt assumed it as a conditionā¦ like a thickness of the soul, here ā letās use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.
But letās 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 itās all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things donāt 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.
2014/03/14 ā Generations orphaned of future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u88VTAoqO_I[š”]
Umberto Galimberti and Aldo Genovese: āGenerations orphaned of future.ā Teatro Sociale di Trento, hosted by Corona Perer. Newspaper āSentireā.
There is no hope for youth, there is no future and there is no solution. The Western world is probably at its end.
ā»
Drug culture means understanding this: why do people take numbing drugs? Because when a boy finds himself in the position of never being summoned by, never called by name, never seen as a resource, but only as a problem, insignificant in the social fabric, what does he do? Can he live? Yes, if he anesthetizes himself: Ā«I donāt want to be here.Ā» Why do kids live at night and not during the day? Because during the day the world works in a different way, which does not includes them.
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[ā¦] Well, I rarely care about the solutions, because my desolation and the distrust I have in this Western society are so great, that I really donāt believe we can save ourselves at all, inside a culture like this. [ā¦] In a capitalist and mercantile society that sees us only as producers and consumers, in a vicious circle where if you donāt consume there are no more jobs, and if you produce but no one consumes you have to close the factory, isnāt this cycle vicious? [ā¦] And what does it mean to consume and push consumption, if not to bring things to nothing? Isnāt this nihilism too? [Then,] the fashion system, where something that still works is no longer fashionable; and fashion is a terrible nihilistic system, which makes what still works in terms of efficiency become zero in social value.
Advertisingā¦ There is a beautiful book by FrĆ©dĆ©ric Beigbeder, who was the greatest advertiser of the second half of the twentieth century, a Frenchman who lived in America, who became very rich from advertising, I donāt have here the exact text but Iāll tell you its meaning, [ā¦] in which at a certain point he regrets everything he has done ā the regrets of the rich never move me, however, after all, if they help too to think again our culture a bit, itās not badā¦ He says, Ā«I have been the greatest advertiser of the last twenty years. I made you dream, I sold you all that shit that you bought. Your happiness didnāt interest me at all. Now I tell you that he who is happy does not consume.Ā» [ā¦] production must not only produce things, but must also produce needs. We have arrived at this perversion; How do you find āpositive pathsā in such a perverse societyā¦ while maintaining this system? Here the thing has to blow up, and it is blowing up. Donāt be afraid, we will become more sober, more supportive, we will talk more with our neighbors, like our grandparents did, we will not imprison us there in front of our computers. [ā¦]
Communication: we heard before from Dr. Genovese that you build your identity through recognition, the first form of recognition is food, from there you form a vision of the world. Cognitive-affective maps end ā Freud said ā around the age of six; neuroscience shortens the time: three years. Then youāre screwed! If you donāt listen to them when theyāre children, if you donāt take care of those three years of life, and their mental and emotional-affective processes, youāve screwed these people, forever.
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Aristotle says, the purpose of life is to be happy, that is, to realize your good spirit. Well, does our society foresee this eventuality that one becomes self-realized? When someone goes to work, either in a factory, or in a notaryās office, or to a lawyer, does he realize himself or the objectives of the apparatus which he belongs to?
Technology, which is the highest form of rationality, even higher than the economy ā because the economy, unlike Technology, still suffers from a human passion which is the passion for money, from which Technology is substantially exempt ā leads us to be increasingly rational, with a very elementary rationality, which consists in achieving the maximum goals with the minimum means. So what is asked of any of you who live in this society is to be rational, that is: passions, desires, melancholy, depression, betrayals, lovesā¦ weekends. You deal with that on the weekend. On Mondays you come here and be a rational person. That is, you have to work like the computer in front of you, which perhaps already surpasses you a little in terms of memory and data collection. I donāt care about your private life, do what you want. [ā¦] why has the taboo on sexuality collapsed? Technology doesnāt care at all, because Technology is stronger than morality: when you commit a sin there is always someone who forgives you, but if you are inefficient you leave the technical apparatus which is equivalent to leaving the social apparatus. Therefore the widespread immorality is because Technology is much more cogent and constraining than morality. Morality also includes forgiveness, understanding; Technology does not: if you donāt succeed, you are out; and it does that with such a determination. And you know it, and you internalize it. And so you get used to being efficient and productive and functional from Monday to Friday, then you get home on Friday, on Saturday, youāre a little disoriented, and in order not to take care of yourself ā because you are your own worst enemy, because at the very least you donāt even know who you are anymore ā you get in the car and get stuck in traffic, thinking that youāre spending āquality timeā with your children, right? There you goā¦
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Information technology, which is the very sophisticated form of Technology and rationality, is causing frightening psychological disasters. Through information technology we have lost the notion that our fathers had of space. We are now talking to a friend who is in Australia, but Australia is not in Rovereto, it is on the other side of the world, but I donāt know if the young people who work in front of their computers all day think it is so far away, given that with Skype they can also see him, right? But if they want to hug him, they hug a screen, not their friend. Those are big differences. It is no coincidence that sexuality [ā¦] has gradually moved from the sexuality of bodies to the sexuality of visions. We have instructed the eyes to become sexual, not the bodies, because having someone else in front of you is more difficult than having a sequence of erotic images in front of you; much more difficult. Because the other can also say no, or say that they donāt like you, but the image is there, at your disposal. This shift, you knowā¦
The time. Earlier, Dr. Genovese spoke about a time for reflection. But how can you think if you get an emailā¦ I only look at emails on Saturdays, when Iām at home. And throughout all the week everyone is saying to me: Ā«Iāve sent you an email!Ā» Ā«And so what?Ā» I mean, do I have to be a continuous response to others, why? Because the time, the time, the time, thereās no time, thereās no time. They also took our time away, didnāt they? But time is the time of reflection: when we used to write letters, first you received it, you didnāt feel like answering, you thought about it for a week, and when you answered you have had some thoughts. Today you no longer even have thoughts with such a speed time is moving. In addition to not even having words either, because information technology reduces the amount of language you have, and in the end you can only say āLikeā / āUnlikeā. Itās too little. [ā¦] As Heidegger correctly teaches us, you cannot have a thought beyond the words in your mouth. How can you think of something to which no words correspond? And if you have few words, you think little. Itās not that thought generates the words, itās the words that generate the thoughts. [ā¦]
The last disaster of information technology ā and hereās the political moment of the IT world ā is that it develops convergent intelligences. Cognitivists call convergent those intelligences where you have to find the solution to the problem within how the problem has been set up. Computer science has a program and the solutions can be found within the program as it has been set up. Our school system also works with convergent intelligences: there is the Ministerial Programme, and you have to solve the problems within this programme. History has never moved forward with converging intelligences ā which are very useful to those in power, because if everyone thinks within the same system that I have programmed, I have a nice standardized society where everyone thinks the same things, and going a little further there, in the end they feel the same things, and want the same things. [ā¦] History moves forward with divergent intelligences, e.g. see Copernicus.
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Indeed, when love circulates we feel stronger, we are happier, we are recognized, we know where to go to cry and who we can laugh with, in short: itās life. Love is life. I donāt believe that life can be lived without love. [ā¦]
Ā«I have 500 friends but then none in flesh and blood.Ā» Well, yes, this problem tooā¦ He can certainly go out into the street, because you would want to tell him, you know: Ā«Try getting out of the house and see who you meet.Ā» And who does he meet? He meets no one. Because all the places for socialization have disappeared, the parishes have disappeared, places for political parties meetings have disappearedā¦ Where are the kids? At the bar. And whatās going on at the bar? You drink. Why this collapse of places for socialization? In 1998, once, in a television program, [ā¦] I had as my interlocutor the minister of that time, Minister Berlinguer, and I said to him, excuse me for a second, but why do these goddamn schools closes at one pm? Canāt you close them at midnight? What I mean, in the afternoon, the kids have a place to socialize, they can do theatre, they can see movies, they can learnā¦ at the time information technology was being born, they can make love ā because they do it anyway [ed. Ā«so, rather than doing it behind the wall, secretlyĀ», as he said somewhere else] ā they can play sports, they can invent a world if they are there, they can even study, perhaps, in the afternoon. In the evening they can do all the disco stuff there. Those are places dedicated to youth, why does youth end at one oāclock, in the most stressful moment of the presence in the school? And the Ministerās response was: Ā«Well, whoās gonna pay me for the janitors?Ā» The janitors? Iāve never even understood why there are janitors in high schools. I mean, canāt the kids who live in a classroom clean that classroom themselves? Canāt they paint it when itās dirty? Why donāt these things come up? Why? They could very well be done, right? [ā¦]
If schools were open in the afternoon, and properly supervised, of course, then many good things could happen, in every sense. Beyond that state of mass solipsismā¦ I see these young men as not dissimilar to the ancient monks who existed in Turkey and Greece: they retreated into the cave so as not to have any vision of the outside world. These retreat in the same way in front of a computer to see the whole world, a state of mass solitude that is so scary.
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It is good that we are all pathological, because only through the fact that you have wounds you are able to understand, to enter into communication with the other who will in turn have his wounds. If one were completely intact I think he would not be able to understand much of the other and enter into real communication. The big problem is that, as Aristotle said well, we keep saying āIā, āIā, āIā, āIā, āIā, and we think we are the subjects of our existence. In reality, we also suffer from another subjectivity which we never refer to, which simply sees us as servants of the species. And as servants of the species, this other subjectivity, the species, acts on us and the Ego suffers from the action of this different subjectivity. And how does it express itself? Since it has in mind the conservation of the species, it acts through those two primary drives which are sexuality and aggression: sexuality to procreate, and aggression for the defense of the offspring. These two dimensions do not belong to the Ego and the Ego suffers of them. And when we are in the throes of sexuality we speak of passions: the Ego cannot govern this thing, it must undergo the passion; and when we say we have a passion for a person it means that we are already suffering the other person and we are no longer in a position to be autonomous subjects in regard to them. Love is confused with passion where there is a yielding of the Ego, and something else is suffered. Then, sexuality and aggression, which Plato already describes to us well in the āPhaedrusā, these other two components, he attributes a soul to both, and they are not in possession of the Ego, they are in possession of another subjectivity.
No wonder that Freud, who had studied Plato a lot, places these two primary drives in the unconscious. The unconscious isnāt an unknown area, itās what we donāt pay any attention to, because we canāt consider ourselves to be servants of the species, we canāt get used to thinking that we are essentially just that; and that the goals of the species are contradictory to the goals of the individual.
If we were to take a mother and we were to ask her Ā«Do you want a child?Ā», in her answer the species is speaking, not her. Because if we get a bit rational and we consider that this woman, first, must undergo a transformation of her body, a laceration of her body, then she must reduce her body to something which feeds the child, a child who takes away her sleep, time, work, passions, whereās the gain for the Ego? There isnāt. And if we were to spread these things, people would be able to understand why mothers, beyond the commonplace that they adore their children and love their children, are mad for them, in reality, inside them, there is as much eroticism than there is aggression. And when the aggression takes over the love for the children, they kill them. And this seems very strange, but why? Because we always think in terms that we are āIā, āmeā, a subject who disposes of oneās own feelings, oneās own passions: we donāt have anything at all, there is another subjectivity that thinks of us for its economy and not for the economy of our Ego. And therefore in every woman there is this strong ambivalence of love and hate. Even the common language like Ā«Iām going to eat youĀ», Ā«Iāll kill youĀ», what language is that? Itās the language of those who, in some way, also externalize aggression towards their child who is yet adored.
That said, the species provides us with sexuality for a certain period of time and with aggression for a certain period of time, when it is precisely the best time for reproduction. Afterwards it gradually deprives us of sexuality, it deprives us of aggressionā¦ Itās not that old people are wise: they have a very low dose of sexuality and aggression, thatās it. And at this level they are also calm, when they donāt have a bad temper. However, this conflict between the two subjectivities: we suffer from the other subjectivity, we are not the actors. When she falls in love she is not an actor in that story, she has a passion, that is, she suffers (a drive, a possession, an enthusiasm), she suffers the other: these are the passions.
And so, then, the pathology, when one becomes pathological: pathology is nothing but the exasperation of some autonomous complex that governs your entire mind and you suffer it, because your Ego cannot govern what assails you regardless of what your Ego says.
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Youāre asking if psychotherapy is effective?
You know, to say it just with an aphorism, I would say that love is effective. Then psychoanalysis does nothing but structure love according to certain methods which, however, start from an emotional participation between two people who are talking. The thing is, unfortunately, that a long time ago people talked to each other: first of all, when one had a pain, he went to tell it to another; now, on the other hand, we have to pay to talk because we have become a society so much regulated by efficiency, etc. Now Iām not saying that psychoanalysis is just a place of love: it has its technique, its structure, its discipline, its cornerstones of reference. But the great machine is called ālisteningā, but attentive listening, loving listening, understanding listening. And when you listen, you already modify the other one. Is it effective?, yes, I tell you yes, itās effective. (ed. unless the loving listening is not what youāre searching forā¦)
2010/11/25 ā The evil of our century: Nihilism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXA0NIvLanA[š”] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qq-GD2Warc[š”]
Festival āLāepoca delle passioni tristiā (āSeason of the sad passionsā), curated by Gustavo Cecchini for the Library of Misano Adriatico. Debate between Umberto Galimberti and Marco Guzzi based on the book by Umberto Galimberti āThe disquieting guestā; the Greeks and the cyclical time.
See first āDiscourse about timeā
I would like for you to understand that the concept of History is a concept soaked with meaning.
Naturally, if the Christian promise fails because God is dead, then history also loses significance: meaning implodes, there is nothing more to wait for if God is dead.
[ā¦] So, āGod is deadā does not mean God exists or God doesnāt existā¦ If one dies, he was there before, he was alive before. What does it mean that God is alive? It means that the world happens according to Godās dictates, according to the configurations it assumes due to the fact that one believes in God: then God exists, āhe shapes the worldā. If the Middle Ages has a literature that is hell-purgatory-heaven, if art is sacred art, if even the woman is an angel woman, God exists: because if I remove the word āGodā I no longer understand anything of that era. But if I remove the word āGodā from the contemporary world, do I still understand the contemporary world? The answer is yes; I no longer understand it if I remove the word money, for example; if I remove the word Technology, for example. Then God doesnāt shape the world anymore, he is dead. [ā¦] The promise no longer works, the world happens as if God doesnāt exist. [ā¦] History no longer happens under a given meaning.
It is no longer even possible to speak in terms of progress, we can only speak in terms of development. Quantitative development of some phenomenon ā economic development, technological developmentā¦ But development is quantitative growth, it is not progress which always involves a qualitative dimension which connotes time and gives it new meaning. [Science, Marx, Freud, they all actually think in a āChristianā way, the past is evil / place of trauma, the present is redemption / revolution / healing, and the future is salvation.] Everything is Christian, in the West. But if God is dead, what happens? Time provided with meaning implodes. And this implosion opens the door to the nothingness that awaits us. The purpose is missing, the why is missing, all values are devalued.
(ed. In response to Marco Guzzi who says Ā«But are we sure that it was better before? Today at least we are aware of nihilism, we recognize it, and maybe we can do something about it ā see the Nietzschean super-human.Ā»)
[ā¦] Nihilism has always been and today it is revealed. Until now we have lived in a two thousand year lie. This two-thousand-year-old lie is the philosophy of the West from Plato to Nietzsche, and Christianity, which according to Nietzsche is nothing more than a Platonism explained to the people, has deceived us for two thousand years. Now that we have revealed this great lie according to which there is a real world ā which is called Hyperuranium for Plato and is called paradise for Christians ā and a temporary world, a sensible world, āvalley of tearsā in Christian language, a place where pain is endured āin view ofā, a place where injustice is supported āwith a view toāā¦ Therefore this time characterized by the great lie was also characterized by a great optimism: there was still a remedy to pain, there was still a remedy for injustice, there was still a remedy for suffering. [ā¦] There was a great consolation within this two-thousand-year-old lie. And a lie do work for two thousand years if it is capable of persuading, if it consoles, otherwise it collapses immediately. [ā¦] Indeed, whenever I try to persuade you that man is mortal, there is always some resistance. Once I try to persuade you that there is only the body and there is no soul, there is always a resistance. Because it is not comforting to think that there is no soul or that when we die we become dust. Lies work if they bring advantages. [ā¦] If it is true that facts are never facts but are always interpretations, I must subscribe to a new interpretation, and since I donāt have this new interpretation yet, and itās not easy to construct a new interpretation after two thousand years of Christian interpretation, where do I seek consolation? Because itās now when I have to live. In this sense, nihilism is a tragic dimension too. And we cannot escape this tragedy. It is true that history in the name of God has made disasters that have never occurred even for political and economic reasons. [ā¦] But neither can we judge that we are better now because of the fact that we no longer do medieval massacres, which were small massacres compared to what we do today: today we can kill without even facing the enemy, it is enough for us to push a button. We are not better for this, but we are indifferent, we are no longer interested in what man is.
For example, Kant said that man should always be treated as an end. This story never happened. Today if an immigrant comes to us, the fact that he is a man is not interesting, it can only be accepted if he makes a profit, otherwise he doesnāt have the right of citizenship. Being a man is insignificant. As long as Christianity existed, the face of God is in your neighbor, at least theoretically. [ā¦]
āHopeā is a Christian virtue, isnāt it? I am always accused of having no hopeā¦ If I am not a Christian I cannot have hope! Letās put the words in their place! All in all, within the Christian vision of the world I have a direction, I have a sense, I have a home, I have a place, I know what words to address, I know what words to say, because it gives me the vocabulary, the interpretation of the world. But if this world is over, if the two-thousand-year-old lie has been unmasked and no other description of the world has yet been born, then here we are in what Nietzsche describes as Ā«There is no longer an up and down, there is no more a right and a left, weāre rushing towards an infinite nothingness.Ā» [ā¦] Whether another sense occurs [further down the line], all in all it concerns me relatively, because we will be dead. Because itās not like the senses are born suddenly, they are born from historical bequests, from teachings, from culture, from an event; provided that the West continues to be the place where a flow of meaning is distributed which has somehow allowed the westernization of the world, because even this is now problematic. A sense described by Chinese thinking could happenā¦ I donāt think the Muslim one ā we choose badly even our own enemiesā¦ But the Chinese thought, maybe, maybe. But until that happens, what world do I live in? Because we are never āin the worldā, rather we are within an interpretation of the world.
I have found my home (because I too need a place to be), which is the home of the Greeks, who take death seriously. The Greeks are before the two thousand year old lie, they donāt believe in the immortality of the soul. [ā¦]Take this concept of āmortalā seriously; we look at life from the point of view of āthe mortalā. With the resulting aquisition of the limit. Our culture need limits, for example, doesnāt it? [ā¦] Do we know how to die? Do, we, know how to die? Are we getting used to the idea that we are mortal? Or do we live in the oblivion of death and then in the dramatization of dying?
( ed. Marco Guzzi suggests that the nihilistic age is not to be seen only as negative, but that one can abandon the ego to discover a new meaning, Ć la Nietzsche. Galimberti replies: )
I come out of the ego and go where? Here (ed. in Guzziās talk) it is said, psychologically, in the Self. But psychology is nothing more than a minor language compared to a major experience which is the experience of religious structures. If I emerge from the egoic human, where do I go? What do I risk? I risk entering that one dimension which in another book of mine I called āthe sacredā, which is a word that means āseparatedā, because this sacred ā where God arrived very lateā¦ In fact, every time we say āGodā we should actually take chronology in consideration: assuming āGodā is a synonym for the sacred, which is not a good thing to assume, but just to be clearā¦ This place, beyond the ego, that Marco Guzzi rightly reminds us is a place of madness, why is it the place of madness? Because it is the place of the undifferentiated. Heraclitus says: Ā«The god is day and night. Satiety and hunger. Winter and summer. War and peace.Ā» And all things are mixed, taking on their aroma from time to time. What can you think of when you say āwar and peaceā? What do you think? What do you think when you say āsatiety and hungerā? You canāt think. You can only think of the juxtaposition of two opposite meanings. In fact, man reasons, and what does reasoning mean? Instituting differences ā without which one cannot live. And in fact Heraclitus still says: Ā«Man considers some things right and some unjust.Ā» Here lies the difference. Men have emancipated themselves from the sacred, from the undifferentiated, from the confusion of codes, from the contamination of meanings through reason. āWe must be reasonableā, if we want to create a community, if we want to understand each other, and if we want to live together. [ā¦] [Furthermore,] through reason one overcomes anguish, because if my every behavior is disturbing, the community cannot stand, living in an atmosphere of angst. And itās disturbing if I havenāt arrived at the de-finition of things yet; if I have not yet arrived at their de-termination of meaning.
We must get out of the sacred. And then you have to come back, with caution. Because Jung, again, comes to tell us: Ā«Not all doors should be opened.Ā» Because the sacred is far more powerful than the rational structures, reason is a very fragile, very weak, even elementary tool. It is not the place of truth, the reason. It is a system of rules to be able to coexist and understand each other unequivocally, nothing more. We must gradually leave the rational dimension to draw from the sacred dimension that inhabits us ā because madness, sacredness is within us, as well as represented by religions as a scenario from which we still come and which we probably must continually relate to. Creative types, artists, poets continue to have this trade with the undifferentiated, with the contamination of meanings [ā¦] But Plato himself, who āinventedā reason ā and this is the interesting thing ā comes to tell us what Marco Guzzi was saying, that Ā«The madness coming from the god is much more beautiful than human reason.Ā» [ā¦] Because he knows that reason is a tool; and that the place of spring, of creativity, of ideation is all pre-rational. But we cannot inhabit madness and the sacred. We cannot inhabit it if we donāt want to end up in the asylum. Who is the schizophrenic, if not the one who contaminates meanings? And therefore he fears, he is terrified of this contamination. [ā¦] Plato knows it: āhe inventedā reason, because without reason there is no city, no republic, no polis. [ā¦] But wisdom is not there; wisdom is elsewhere. [ā¦] Ā«The greatest goods come to us from madnessĀ», naturally given as a divine gift.
[Therefore:] reason is a tool without which there is no community. However, within your personal experience you can risk going beyond, violating reason. But you canāt give that as a message to the community, because there are those who can make it and those who canāt. Because the sacred and crazy dimensions are far more powerful than the rational ones.
( ed. Marco Guzzi replies by saying that one can stop at a creative aspect without reaching total madness. The problem is, I reply, that nihilism also affects the creative aspects for which, for example, you sit at the piano and the notes all seem the same, and you canāt make music. And then he says āwho am Iā, āwho can I becomeā, the usual old story of the personal mission, which yeah, is good for those who have it. And then Heideggerian-Severinian words on the Nothingness, just words, incompatible with the reality of our time, everyday-time and not. )
( ed. Question from the audience asks Ā«What about Schopenhauer?Ā» )
I think that Schopenhauer also represents someone who has decentralized the ego, establishing as a subjectivity adjacent to the ego, but actually fundational, the fact that we are simply servants of the species. [ā¦] Therefore, there are different ways to go beyond the Self: either you find the divine madness, or you simply find the economy of the species. [ā¦] I am convinced that anorexia is a refusal to be slaves to the species: menstruation is interrupted, one is no longer in the condition to generate. [ā¦] There are many ways to get out of the prison of the ego, but one can get out Ć la Schopenhauerian way in a pessimistic form ā for me, realistic, but I say this incidentally ā in the sense that maybe thatās simply what we are; and by not giving up we delude ourselves. After all, what does Nietzsche say too? Ā«Give me a mask, please, one more mask, letās delude ourselves, letās play all the illusions, if this is what itās all about.Ā» And he calls Schopenhauer his teacher even if he then denies him in the conclusions: not pessimism, but the Dionysian feast of illusions.
( ed. Question from the audience about the season of the sad passions. )
So, āseason of the sad passionsā is a phrase by Spinoza which, however, has become current thanks to Benasayag who described a bit the sadness that characterizes the juvenile condition. Anyway, that we are in a season of sad passions is denoted by the fact that if we are to identify a syndrome today, the most widespread, among the forms of existential unease, we must call it depression. And it is interesting that: in the seventeenth century, when they discovered the body as an organism, we all became hypochondriacs and all mental illnesses were called hypochondria; at the end of the nineteenth century they were called hysteria; then there was schizophrenia ā which is today ongoing ā but the dominant form has become depression. What is depression? It means that to me the future is meaningless. If the future doesnāt attract me, why do I have to move? Why do I have to get out of bed in the morning? We all know that depression has this as a dominant symptom: I donāt feel like getting up in the morning because the day gives me nothing. Moreover, today depression has also changed its nature because we are in the age of efficiency, of performance, so one is never sure of being up to parā¦ (ed. etc., see here) The identity crisis becomes my depression, my sad passion: I no longer know who I am, I have to take care of myself alone because nothing more comes to me from others in terms of recognition and identity confirmation.
[ā¦] ( ed. Marco Guzzi says: )
Speaking very explicitly, in a nutshell. I believe that an epoch of Christianity meant as planetary initiation is coming to an end ā the epoch of the egoic representation of the mysteries, the epic of the Platonization, metaphysic if you will, of Christianity. In my opinion, this era isnāt all wrong, I said it already, letās make it clear, itās a distortion that perhaps was inevitable, it was necessary, I donāt know, weāre not talking about that now, itās sure though that it is no longer enough. The whole crisis of religions is not the crisis of the mysteries, it is the crisis of the egoic representation of the mysteries, which has led to wars, to all the inconsistencies, contradictions precisely because we have passed from initiation to institution, which is a deformation. Today, in my opinion, we are moving from the egoic representation of the mysteries to a spiritual realization of the mysteries. We are all terribly hungry for this, in my opinion, consciously or unconsciously, each with its own languages. But this also explains other phenomenologies, including, positively ā because there is black and white there too ā the explosion of the psychological interest in the depths, the explosion of interest in Buddhism; and here we should make a link with Schopenhauer who is basically the first who understood something about Buddhism, but not just any thing, that is, he understood that if you extinguish a certain modality of will you do not die but you reach states of bliss.
( ed. Which I quote for the interesting analysis. But of course we know that nirvana is the illusion of the Buddhist, what there is to reach but in reality it is never reached because it does not exist, so much so that if it ever were, it would be the discomfort of the anhedonic schizoid, so even these Eastern spiritualities do not actually solve the question. Galimberti then closes by quoting Plato and love, to leave the audience, as itās usually done, with something that sounds good and puts up a smile; then who cares if love is the oldest of illusions. )
2009/05/07 ā Vanishing to be nothing: the contemporary problem of nihilism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRLE23SuFTQ[š”]
Intellego, Caā Foscari university, Venice, Castello di Copertino, May 7, 2009. Open problems of contemporary philosophy ā Cycle VIII.
Nietzscheās definition is as follows. āNihilismā: the purpose is missing. The why is missing. All values depreciate. Now, the fact that values are lost is not a big problem: history moves forward because certain values are devalued and others are born or reconsidered. With the word āvalueā we must not mean anything spiritual, much less anything absolute: values are only factors of social cohesion. A given society evaluates that certain values allow us to live better than other values, but values are nothing more than human evaluations, and from this point of view they undergo all the typical human fates, including their transitory nature. Just to give an example, before the French Revolution, there were hierarchical values and society was organized according to these values. After the French Revolution, values of equality and citizenship were born ā at least formally ā and then hierarchical values waned and others were born. Nihilism means something more: that the values that preceded our era have faded and no other values have been born, so there remains nothing to cling to.
Heidegger, who reflected a lot on these pages of Nietzsche, says that our time is a time of extreme poverty, characterized by the fact that Ā«It is the time of need because it stands in double lack and double not: the no-longer of the gods who have fled and in the not-yet of the coming.Ā» ā quoting in this case from a poem by Hƶlderlin. [ā¦]
Nietzsche then distinguishes a sort of passive nihilism, ānihilism of the decadenceā, which has resignation as its consequence: if there are no more values, letās give up, and try to realize ourselves within a healthy realism which is then accompanied by a deplorable selfishness. Or, he says, one can instead engage in a sort of active nihilism which consists in really going to the bottom of nihilism, and this second undertaking was also urged by Heidegger, [who says: ] Ā«It is of no use to ignore nihilism, because is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in todayās world, invisibly. What is needed is to notice this guest and look it right in the face.Ā» What weāre going to do here, today, is to squarely look into this nihilistic dimension.
We are people who inhabit a region and a history that we have called the West, and the West essentially has two cultural origins: the Greek one, and the Judeo-Christian one.
(He then proceeds to present concepts that we find in other conferences, so I summarize briefly as follows, not always verbatim. )
For the Greeks, nature comes first; man is considered āmortalā, and is considered as part of the whole and not as the ruler of the whole. The Greeks take death seriously, they think that man is inscribed in a cyclical type of temporality, on the model of the peasants, therefore on the seasons. Knowledge comes from understanding nature, a thing over which man has no power, and on this it builds the laws of the city and the laws for the care of the soul ā of the self. The law of nature is inviolable and eternal, and consists in the fact that man is born, grows, and dies. There are no otherworldly hopes. Then the tragedy of Aeschylus and Prometheus, the latter who essentially represents the technological rebellion ā he gives fire to man, allowing him to challenge nature, and is then chained and tortured as punishment by the eagle-monster. The Greeks think that man experiences a tragic dimension, which is not connected to death, but to a more insidious dimension, which Nietzsche illustrates well in āThe Birth of Tragedyā: in order to live, man needs to produce meaning, in view of death which is the implosion of every meaning. Man carries within himself a double subjectivity: the Ego ā į¼Ī³Ļ (egĆ“) ā and then the subjectivity of the species, which provides us with sexuality ā for procreation ā and aggression ā for the defense of offspring. Between these two subjectivities there is a very powerful conflict, so from the point of view of the Ego, death is absurd, while from the point of view of the economy of the species, our death is what is necessary for the continuation of life, of nature. Then, King Midas meets Silenus, who tells him that the best thing he can wish for him is to die soon. We know these things today through Freudās concept of the unconscious ā which we should take away from psychologists and hand over to philosophers ā which contains the sexual drives and the death drives, Eros and Thanatos. But this Greek tragedy should not be dealt with tears or torment of the soul, it should instead be understood as something that teaches us the category of limit, which today we have lost: precisely because I am mortal, I must not provoke the gods, I must live according to due measure. So, know yourself, what your mission/calling is, and act accordingly. Ā«He who knows his limit does not fear fateĀ», Aristotle.
The other source of the West is the Judeo-Christian tradition, which won over Greek culture; today we are all Christians, even atheists āare Christiansā, [in the sense] that they think in a Christian way. [ā¦] Christianity said to man Ā«You are not going to dieĀ», and this has constituted a very powerful optimism-charged view in Western culture, [ā¦] where optimism consists in looking at the future always from the point of view of immortality ā if one was or is religious ā or in any case from the point of view of progress ā if you are less religious and more secular ā or in any case from the point of view that the future is a place of hope. [ā¦] Within this optimism, Christianity has even managed to metabolize pain, to tansform it to a value. According to the Greek, pain is evil, it is an evil that must be endured if one is a man, Ā«Sustine et abstineĀ» (abstain ā from everything that is not in your power, and donāt exhibit pain ā and endure it) (ed. Epictetus). [ā¦] And the meaning of pain for Christianity consists in the fact that pain serves to redeem us from guilt ā both the original sin and the personal guilt; and precisely because it redeems us, it also constitutes in some way a ādepositā for eternity. Therefore the entire Christian culture manages to take the maximum negativity, which is pain, and make it positive, to see it as a dimension that redeems the human from sin and somehow guarantees him an eternity of salvation. All Christian iconography is an iconography of pain that redeems. [ā¦]
Nietzsche says that promising men the immortality of the soul was the stroke of genius of Christianity, the truly great revolution that occurred in ancient times was the appearance of Christianity which said to man Ā«You are not going to die.Ā» But even before that, there was already an anthropocosmological approach that envisaged man as the ruler of the earth. That is, nature, which for the Greeks was the immutable background that no man and no god made, in the Judeo-Christian tradition it appears instead as the product of a will, the will of God who created it, and therefore nature is good, because itās a creature of God.
For the Greek, nature is indifferent, in the sense that it does not care about human affairs except insofar as men must procreate and raise children, but nature is indifferent, it creates both good and evil. Nature makes earthquakes, nature makes tsunamis, nature is also beautiful to look at. [ā¦] In Genesis we read Ā«have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.Ā» Therefore man is conceived at the top of creation, in the function of a dominator. And therefore we should not be surprised that the West is also the only place in human history where science and Technology were born: there is a long theological preparation for manās dominion over the earth. However, when the Greek Chorus asks Prometheus Ā«Tell me, Prometheus, is Technology stronger, or is the necessity that governs the laws of nature stronger?Ā», Prometheus replies Ā«TĆ©chne dāanĆ”nkes asthenĆ©stera makrĆ“.Ā» Technology is far weaker than the necessity that governs nature, and Prometheus is saying so, the one who had given men those tools, and made them from defenseless and mute, the masters of their minds. Even Sophocles, when in the Antigone he says that the plow splits the soil but the land then recomposes after its passage, in the same way as the ship splits the waters of the sea but the rough water is calm again after the passage of the ship, therefore Technology is far weaker than the necessity that binds nature to its law.
The Judeo-Christian tradition also overturns the Greeksā concept of time (ed. see, on this same page, āDiscourse about timeā). [ā¦]
When in 1600 faith in religion began to waver a little and modern science, mathematical science, was born ā the main names are Descartes, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei; well, they, especially Bacon, say, inscribe the scientific event in the Judeo-Christian tradition; so, when I hear about the discord between science and faith, I say with extreme simplicity that they are conflicts like ripples in water, nothing serious, because science is soaked to the depths of theological metaphors. Science is born from theological metaphors and feeds on theological metaphors. Bacon says that through science we will recover the preternatural virtues, which were the virtues that Adam and Eve had before the original sin, and above all we will redeem ourselves from the pains of the original sin which, as you might know, are two: the work now corrupted with hardship and struggle (āBy the sweat of your brow you will eat your foodā) and above all, the pain (āwith painful labor you will give birth to childrenā). Well, says Bacon: with science and Technology we will reduce the struggle of work, we will reduce pain, and thus we will contribute to the redemption of man. Science fits rigorously into the Christian theological scenario. But not only that: science lives the same concept of time as sacred history. [past is bad, present is research, and future is progress; and sociology too, including Marxist sociology; but also the medical culture, even the psychoanalytic one.] [ā¦]
( He then continues by explaining the meaning of Ā«God is dead.Ā» )
[ā¦] If money is the universal condition for satisfying any need and producing any good, money is no longer a means, but is the primary goal, and to obtain it, weāll see if satisfying the needs or not, and weāll see to what extent to satisfy the goods. ( Reversal of means into ends. )
To understand how science and Technology proceeds ā and here I imagine that among the public there are some scientists who work in laboratoriesā¦ Well, the process is not like the one that, I donāt know, Umberto Veronesi announces every now and then: Ā«Give money for research on cancer.Ā», knowing well that he is speaking to a widespread mindset which is the Christian mindset according to which there are noble goals to achieve which require means, and these means are money, and so Ā«Give us the money so that we can do the research.Ā» But research doesnāt work like that: in scientific laboratories scientists behave not with a view of a goal ā which they donāt know about. Their study method proceeds in this way: letās suppose we enter a biology laboratory; we will find a scientist who studies a protein for ten years. If you ask him for what purpose, he replies Ā«I donāt know. However, I know that I must know everything thatās possible to know about this protein.Ā» Another one is probably studying a nucleic acid: for what purpose? Ā«I do not know.Ā» The ethics of science is knowing everything that can be known, regardless of its purpose. If then, in the end ā multiply these two examples by three thousand, four thousand cases ā something emerges that can be advantageous for human beings, wellā¦ The paying human being, of course: the fact of being a man alone is not interesting enough, one must be a man with money in order for that to be considered advantageous, because otherwise with technical-scientific discoveries we could heal all the sick people in Africa from basic diseases that people die to, but since they canāt pay, Ā«just let them dieā¦Ā»
Anyway, this economic component asideā¦ If we continue to follow the logic here, if something advantageous for man arises, but most importantly, advantageous for that other component that governs the world called money, only then we can do it: for example today we also know how to cure kidney cancer, but since thatās very rare, no medicine is made because they are not profitable in terms of money. Well, this means then that the world happens for money and Technology. So what does man, at this point, become? Man becomes a servant of economic apparatuses and technical apparatuses. We have ceased to be, to think of ourselves, as servants of the species, to find ourselves to be, after a two-thousand-year Christian history, servants of technical apparatuses, where what is asked of us is essentially to proceed according to that model that Technology proposes, that is the model of maximum efficiency, which is called machine.
Then he says that we are servants to apparatuses.
( Then he talks about GĆ¼nther Anders at Ford. ) In the Nazi scenario, he says, [ ā¦] something much more serious has occurred ā he himself says it, as a persecuted Jew, I quote verbatim ā Ā«more serious than the six million murdered in the concentration camps.Ā» Why more serious than that? Because a model was introduced in the Nazi era which is exactly what is required of each of us in the age of Technology: the total removal of responsibility for our actions. When they caught some Nazi general and managed to put him on trial, the response the Nazi generals gave was Ā«I was just following orders.Ā» From the point of view of the age of Technology this is the required answer, the exact answer: you must follow orders. Gitta Sereny, a journalist who did 170 interviews with Franz Stangl, who was the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp, still alive today, [ā¦] well, she asked him, in these 170 interviews, tell me, what were you feeling while you were doing thisā¦ And he tries to elude the question, but Gitta Serenyās feeling is that he isnāt actually wriggling away, he does so because he doesnāt understand the meaning of the question: Ā«What was I feeling?Ā» And the answer is Ā«I didnāt feel anything, my task consisted in the fact that I arrived in the camp at 9, at 11 a load of three thousand people arrived who had to be killed by 5 because at 5 the second load arrived, which had to be killed by the next day because the third load were to arrive the next dayā¦ Wirth had devised the method, that was my job.Ā» Ā«Mein ArbeitĀ», āmy jobā, thatās it. In other words, what was asked of Franz Stangl? To do his job well. Was he responsible for his job? No, he was responsible for the perfect execution of his job.
Look, the word āworkā, which comes from a very noble tradition, then becomes a terribly ambiguous word: even when Bush said Ā«We will withdraw from Iraq when weāre done with our workĀ», what did that āworkā consist of? We must not ask such a question: because the question the soldiers had to ask themselves was not Ā«What are we doing here?Ā», [what they had to tell themselves was] Ā«We are good soldiers if our aim is good.Ā» This is what Technology rigorously invites us to do.
If we go to one of those factories in Brescia where landmines are madeā¦ What do we call those who work there, do we call them workers, criminals? What do we call them? I guess Iāll call them workers, in the sense that if they were offered the opportunity to work in another company, perhaps with a higher salary, they would go straight for it. What do you ask of them? To be responsible for the final effect of the landmines? No, they are asked to place the fuzes correctly. [ā¦]
GĆ¼nther Anders also wrote a letter to the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and asked him essentially the same question that Gitta Sereny had asked Franz Stangl. What did feel when you dropped that bomb, whose effect perhaps you didnāt even know of ā you certainly didnāt know the population on which you dropped it, a few weeks before you left you didnāt even know where Japan was. What did you feel? And his reply was Ā«Nothing. That was my job.Ā» What was his job about? To be very precise in dropping that bomb. Was he responsible for the final effects of his act? No.
[ā¦] I have given you some examples to make you understand that Technology has no purpose or meaning, it only requires perfect execution of tasks. And you are judged regardless of the final purposes, as is instead required by Christian morality which is a morality of intention, where what is required of you is the purpose for which you carry out an action, starting from what intent you carry out that action for. In the age of Technology you are only asked for the good execution of your job description, the perfect technical execution of your job description. What morals do we have to face Technology? None, to live up to Technology. Because, we said before, the morality of intention, Christian morality, is a morality which was a great morality because the entire European legal system was organized around it. Even today the courts, when judging, establish whether a crime is unintentional ā guilty according to the intents that you had to kill or not ā premeditated, unpremeditated, etc. But in the age of Technology all this reasoning of intent, of delving into the inner reality of man have no relevance. What intent Fermi or Oppenheimer had when they invented the atomic bomb is of no interest. Much more interesting is knowing the effects of the atomic bomb. [ā¦]
These are all consequences [of the concept] of Ā«God is deadĀ», mind you, these are forms of exemplification to make you understand Ā«God is deadĀ»: the world no longer happens according to Godās modalities.
Then there is a secular morality, that of Kant, which he summarizes in the formula Ā«Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.Ā» I call it secular not because Kant didnāt believe in God, but because Kant tries to construct a morality āas if God did not existā, regardless of God. And yet in this morality too we see the great legacy of Christianity, which consists in assuming man as an end and everything else as a means. That concept from Genesis is reiterated: Ā«You will rule over all things on earth.Ā» Therefore Kant also feeds very much on Christian culture. It is a morality, his one, that has never been realized; Kant knew this very well because he had given his morality the task of being a regulative idea of human behavior, rather than a prescriptive idea. You understand that, of course, it was not achieved: if an immigrant comes here, just because he is a man it does not mean that he has the right of citizenship: he has the right to citizenship if he fits into that symbolic generator of all values called money; then if he becomes a producer of money he has citizenship, while the fact that he is a man is not interesting. So God is dead, but man is dead too. The primacy of man is over. This is nihilism, with all that follows. But our condition is no different from that of the immigrant, because we too, when we go to work in an office, in a factory, in a university, wherever, we are employed to the extent that we contribute to the production of that symbolic generator of all values called money, that is, if we are useful, otherwise not.
But even if it had been realized, Kantās morality would not be suitable, because what does it mean to consider man as an end and everything else as a means? In our era, is air an end or a means? That is, is air a means or has it become an end that needs to be protected? Is water a means or an end that needs to be protected? Plants, animals, the atmosphere, the biosphere, the ozone layer, what are these things, a means? Or we must also take responsibility for natural entities the West has never established a morality for, because all the moralities that we have established are morals that regulate relationships between men, none of which takes responsibility for natural entities? We donāt have the ethics to confront this. Not only that, but we havenāt psychologically internalized that polluting is bad, that not paying taxes is bad, so if I rape a girl Iām immediately an emblem of evil, but if I pollute the areaā¦ Well, is that bad? Maybe. Theoretically yes, but then who is punishing me? There is no psychic internalization of natural entities. Letās kill all the whales, is that bad? Meh. Actually, weāre doing it, so thereās thatā¦ Our psyche has not internalized nature, and it is obvious: it is a Christian psyche, nature must be dominated, end of the story. [ā¦] We have reduced nature to raw material, and so be it. Heidegger says it well, in āBeing and Timeā: Ā«When we look at a river we think of electricity, when we look at the ground we think of a subsoil. The earth has become raw material, but it will not be longĀ», says Heidegger in 1951, Ā«before man will become the most important raw material.Ā» Ā«Der wichtigste Rohstoff.Ā» And GĆ¼nther Anders, in reference to the consumer society, says Ā«A humanity that treats a world as a world to be thrown away, why shouldnāt it also treat itself as a humanity to be thrown away?Ā» Humanism is over: with the death of God, man also is fallen ā as the subject of History. And his life is made possible only if he fits profitably into those other two generators of the worldās happenings called money and Technology. Outside these scenarios, man is certainly no longer a subject of History.
This is what the nihilistic era is about, and in this scenario we must go all the way. That is to say: Christianity which protected us from the nothingness that was death ā well acknowledged by the Greeks; it protected us with the category of salvation; with atheism we have become attached to health ā which is nothing other than a lesser form of salvation. And now we find ourselves in a purposeless scenario, without a meaningful horizon, because Technology guarantees us development but does not guarantee us progress. The difference consists in the fact that development means that a mobile phone that previously occupied a certain space will occupy less and less, and that a computer that previously knew how to perform certain operations will do many more ā this is called development. āProgressā means improvement in the state of happiness of humanity. āProgressā has a qualitative value; I didnāt introduce the difference, Pasolini already talked about it in the last years of his existence. Tony Blair, who is a character I have never liked very much, said something interesting though, he said that at the end of his third mandate that England had become three times richer but not three times happier.
( Question from the audience. So, what to do? Rediscover once again Christian values? )
Well, if God is dead, we can not go about burying and digging up the dead, itās obviousā¦ But the problem is another one: you should never ask a philosopher for a solution. Also because this question is very Christian, if you think about it carefully. Christians are thirsty for a relief, just as they are thirsty for forgiveness. I would abolish the word forgiveness. Every time something happensā¦ Ā«Have you forgiven the counterparty?Ā» But forgiveness doesnāt erase anything, if you have done something bad you keep that fault well in your mind, you keep it well within you, what forgiveness! Ā«There is a malaise. What is the solution?Ā» This is a Christian question. And I, as a Greek, cannot answer Christian questions. However, in general, the philosopherās task is not to indicate solutions; this is the task of others: the religious world, the esoteric world, the new age, faiths, ideologies, whateverā¦ The task of philosophy is to warn that the landscape we inhabit has changed. And so letās no longer approach it with the categories with which we previously framed it; if, before, the scenario was humanistic and has now become techno-economic, we can no longer think in humanistic terms and interpret the world in humanistic terms, we need to interpret it in techno-economic terms, with all the positive and negative consequences that follow. So, the philosopherās task is to say Ā«Look, the landscape has changed, now you need these tools, no longer the ones youāve used to reading the world until now.Ā»
Nowā¦ Is this situation desperate? Sure, but desperation is the consequence of those who have hoped. Only those who have had hope can then despair. It is in the etymology: latin de (without), sperare (to hope), but itās not wordplay: the Greek would never have despaired in the face of death: they knew from birth that they had to die. Itās only those who believed in immortality and then in the future and then in optimism and then in all those categories that replace salvation which now have the impression of despairing. But your attitude is a nice one, after all, because you at least see the evil and seeks the solution. There are people who donāt want to see the evil and say Ā«Heās just a pessimist!Ā» and therefore reduce a description of the world to a matter of feelings in order not to abandon their faith and to stay anchored to an optimistic vision of the world which, all things considered, if they need it in order to live and carry on, why take it away from them?, you knowā¦ But this is the situation the world is in.
Also see: āThe weariness of the self: Diagnosing the history of depression in the contemporary ageā, by Alain Ehrenberg.