EMPATHY SUMMARY OF THE VOICE EROS EDITED BY GIOVANNI BOTTIROLI: CRITICAL REVIEW
In this regard, UMBERTO GALIMBERTI wrote:
"Empathy is that ability to understand the other beyond explicit communication, which everyone considers themselves provided with, especially those who blindly trust their "first impression", without even suspecting that with the first impression one gets to know not so much the other as, precisely, one's own impression that is the effect that the other has done on us, that we are not crystalline mirrors, but glass deformed by our life and ours experience, so from our impressions it is easier to derive who we are and not so much who the other is.
Empathy it puts space and time into play, in that "right distance" that prevents love from overwhelming and indifference from freeze.
Empathy means “right time”, because where pain (but also love) is at stake, what matters is not
the truth, which psychologists call "diagnosis", but the time of its communication, which must not be either anticipated or delayed. Also for this the Greeks had a word: kairós, the opportune time, the due time, the time where the word meets with listening without misunderstanding in that right coincidence that the long one frequentation makes it possible and leads to the discovery of the unrepeatability of the individual as an intersection of floors unpredictable space-time, as well as the sense of an unfounded happening, revealed by chance and intuitive in the instant as earthly kairós, "due time" of each and every thing, temporal clipping that is offered to us as a gift, and where our daily experience can find an opportunity to return to manifest itself. "
EROS
SUMMARY OF THE VOICE EROS EDITED BY GIOVANNI BOTTIROLI
ENCYCLOPEDIA EINAUDI - VOLUME 5 (Pages 656-681)
Eros is commonly connected to love, to emphasize its difference or complementarity: eros is something other than love, eros is completed with love and vice versa; but also: eros is opposed to love, eros is the part of love to which a strong censorship must be applied. All these beliefs, which constitute a complex cliché, differently connoted according to the ideology that applies to it, they seem neglect even the least part of the Freudian lesson (more rarely they constitute some form of exceeding).
In fact, if the satisfaction, more or less complete, of the drives (cf. drive, unconscious), indeed the resolution of any conflict based on overcoming all forms of castration and complex (or at least the dominant ones),
... it is considered as a necessary point of reference, then eros can hardly be assimilated to a generic desire and / or pleasure without love (and love will not risk being considered beyond pleasure); nor much less can it be sustained by generalizing that desire is reserved for eros and pleasure for love.
If eros is (or does it represent?) The entire life drive, which needs a certain "energy" to assert itself (libido,
in particular, for sexual drives), then eros actually takes on a significance, as has been said
general speculative, almost constituting the place, culturally and not only biologically defined (cf.
masculine / feminine, man / woman, woman), of sexuality, but without the latter being transferred into a discourse and / or in an image, you cease to exist as such.
In the Convito, PAUSANIA distinguishes from vulgar eros, which addresses bodies, celestial eros, which addresses souls.
[.....] The doctor ERISSIMACO sees in love a cosmic force that determines the proportions and harmony of all phenomena both in man and in nature. ARISTOFANE, with the myth of primitive beings composed of man and woman (androgynous),
divided by the gods as punishment in two halves of which one goes in search of the other to unite and reconstitute the primitive being,
it expresses one of the fundamental characteristics that love reveals in man: insufficiency. From this character, in fact, begins SOCRATES: love desires something it does not have, but needs, and therefore is lack. In fact, the myth says he is the son of Poverty (Penìa) and of Purchase (Poros); as such it is not a god, but a demon; therefore he does not have beauty but desires it, he does not have wisdom but aspires to possess it and is therefore a philosopher,
...while the gods are wise. Love is therefore a desire for beauty; and beauty is desired because it is the good that makes you happy. The man who is mortal tends to generate in beauty and therefore to perpetuate himself through generation,
[...] leaving behind him a being who resembles him. Beauty is the end, the object of love. But beauty has degrees different to which man can only rise later through a slow path. First, it is the beauty of a body that which attracts and captivates man. Then he realizes that beauty is the same in all bodies and
so he goes on to desire and love all bodily beauty. But above it is the beauty of the soul; to the
above again, the beauty of the institutions and the laws and then the beauty of the sciences and finally, above all,
beauty in itself, which is eternal, superior to becoming and death, perfect, always equal to itself, source of all another beauty and object of philosophy ».
(from N.ABBAGNANO-G.FORNERO, Philosophers and philosophies in history, PARAVIA 1986, page 130)
Atonement
EXPIATION - The book, the film from NonSoloProust by gabrilu
The novel Atonement, by the English writer Ian McEwan, is from 2001, was a great success, and it was also made into a film that is currently nominated for 7 Oscars.
The beginning[ .........
England.......[ .... ] A hot summer of 1935. The war raging on the continent is getting closer and closer.
In the Tallis villa in Surrey, Cecilia and Briony prepare for the arrival of their brother Leon and a friend of his.
Briony is 13 years old. He sees from the window a scene between his sister and Robbie, the maid's son who has grown up with them, she reads a letter from Robbie that is not meant for her, takes Robbie and her sister by surprise in an embrace in the library and, later, at night, he sees a male figure walking away from his cousin in the darkness of the garden
Lola, doesn't hesitate for a moment to point to Robbie as the rapist. Briony's testimony will destroy the life of the boy and Cecilia's.
There is no shortage of excellent reviews online that address both the book and the film across the board.
But here I want to talk only about a particular aspect of the book, the one that for me constitutes the most element interesting of the novel: the why of Briony's behavior.
What drives her to commit what she herself will later call "crime", that is, to accuse unjustly to rape an innocent?
"Where to start to understand this little girl's mind?" Robbie Turner wonders halfway through the novel and it is just what I asked myself too.
McEwan's Briony is a girl who is very fond of her brother Leon and her sister Cecilia, whom she greatly admires. Has a vivid imagination, at his age already shows passion and talent for writing. Great admirer of Virginia
Woolf, just a teenager, has already read three times his splendid but also impervious The Waves. It has a disposition methodical ", her love for order is downright manic. She is a perfectionist. In my opinion, the key to everything lies in this phrase from McEwan describing Briony as "one of those little girls possessed by desire in the world everything was absolutely perfect "
(p.8) Saoirse Ronan
When Briony watches from the window the scene between Cecilia and Robbie, that scene seems meaningless to her. But she doesn't he can tolerate that things don't make sense, everything must have a logic. So Briony interprets in her own way, with the cognitive tools of his age. The misunderstanding continues with the episode of the letter and the scene in which attends the library and all this will have dramatic repercussions for the existence of Cecilia and Robbie.
There is a passage that I want to report because it seems to me fundamental for the understanding of the novel. Also here, Briony looks out the window but this time she is outside the mansion and looking inside.
"... in the light of a single lamp, partially hidden by a flap of the velvet curtain, he was able to see one end of the sofa where a cylindrical object that gave the impression of being was leaning sideways suspended. Only after covering another fifty meters did he realize that he was looking at a leg isolated from rest of the body. Moving closer, she grasped the play of perspectives: the leg belonged to her mother [...].
Her figure was almost completely hidden by the shadow of the curtains, and the visible leg was supported by the knee of the other, reason why it appeared oblique and raised from the sofa "(p.168)
The light source is only one, the perspective can be deceiving. A leg "isolated from the rest of the body" may seem what is not, for example "a cylindrical object". By changing the distances, the point of view changes and the identity changes object observed ...
The deepest sense of Atonement, in my opinion, lies in its being a novel about how we perceive
reality, on the tools that each of us more or less consciously uses to give a sense, an order, one
logic to the world around us.
Briony is absolutely innocent and in good faith when she says "I saw him", and "it was him". But his is an innocence that turns out to be catastrophic. There are also those who have seen a novel about the risks of fantasy in Atonement.
This element is undoubtedly present, but I believe that Briony's "sin" lies above all in hers absolute, uncontrolled need to want to "give order to disorder", a need that pushes it to a sort of delusion of omnipotence in wanting to exercise control over the life of others. He will realize all this, at least in
he leaves, much later, and will try to "atone". But, without revealing the ending of the story to those who have not read the book nor seen the film, I mean that the same way Briony will try to atone for her "crime" keeps in somehow the characteristic of wanting to re-invent, re-write reality by manifesting, once again, a desire to control others.
Atonement reminded me of another novel now considered a classic, also written by a English: I'm talking about Edward Morgan Forster's Passage to India. I caught several similarities between the two novels (but also many differences). It would be interesting to be able to develop them and think about them, I think.
The 2007 film, directed by Joe Wright, very well made and very pleasant to see, is however one of those films that, while remaining very faithful to the book as regards the plot, it trivializes - and not a little, in my opinion - the meaning of Briony's behavior. In the film, in fact, she is made to understand quite clearly as Briony knowingly testified to the false and that his motive was on the one hand his unrequited love for Robbie and his envy and jealousy of his sister Cecilia. For heaven's sake, the story holds up well even so, and the film is still an excellent film. But whoever has read the novel carefully cannot fail to grasp this impoverishment of meaning.
ETHICS
The positions on ethics can be taken in two ways. In the name of truth and dogma, with general rules
and abstract; or in the name of charity and compassion, with concrete attitudes and behaviors.
Giovanni Botero in his Della Ragione di Stato of 1589 wrote about the ways of propagating religion:
"Among all the laws, there is none more favorable to 'Prencipi, than the Christiana: because this subjects them, only the bodies and faculties of the subjects, where it is convenient, but still souls; and binds not only the hands, but the still affections and thoughts. "Botero was a man of the Counter-Reformation. Unfortunately, there are those who still think so, among our modern "principles". They could make them the motto of a disciple of Botero who wrote: "this is the reason been, my brother, to obey the Catholic Church. "Now, if obedience to the Catholic Church is the reason of state, it is clear that the laity will never find a common landing place with them
Gustavo Zagrebelsky
ethics
"Morality" is what pertains to mores, to the set of behaviors and habits that a people obey, even
without any law having established them. This is how mos can accompany itself, but it can also oppose lex. For his nature (due to its conventional and covenant essence) the law will never be able to express that "general will" that instead it manifests itself in the almost timeless custom of costume. This different origin can always lead
conflicts: custom resists the intrusiveness of the "written" law, and the secularity of the law sees in the sacredness of custom something that in essence limits its power.
The scope of the mos, however, cannot in any case be reduced to that of the law and obedience to the law. It involves the entire memoria veterum: it preserves all the ceremonies, cults, institutes that the fathers they handed down. And for which one has pietas - a very particular care: that which is due to one's own root, which supports present growth. It could be said that "morality" is the unfailing pietas for one's carrier past: feeling one's own past as eternal.
Even richer in meanings and implications is the Greek term ethos which the Latins translate precisely as mos.
The long and complex work of entire generations that produces ethos cannot be conceived if not placed. Every ethos has its own "pasture", its certain abode. To be, it must live. Socrates never crosses borders of Athens. Thanks to this rootedness (as it appears, almost, produced by the genius loci), this ethos will come from shared many, it will create bonds of mutual belonging. Thus from ethos comes hetairos, the companion, the "ally" more sure, since raised with me in the same oikos (house - but the root of the Greek term is the same as the vicus
Latin. The hetairos is not the blood brother, the relative, but the one with whom the set of customs is shared more ancient, and the pietas for them). And a deep affinity links this family of terms to the one it designates the set of the free: the people legitimate children of a common land, nourished by a common "pasture". It therefore results this overall picture: truly free (that is, self-possessed: and in the Latin suus the root of ethos) is only ethical-moral behavior, in the sense that only those who perfectly "internalize" habits, customs, the memories of his homeland, and on their basis he makes lasting alliances, he can truly be said to be a son of the earth
that feeds it.
In what sense could we speak of ethos today? Where is there still a trace of a living veterum memory? Such as....
Could we call our occasional, fortuitous "residence" oikos? O hetairos, comrade, that "passer-by" who
do we meet? The very meaning of our civilization does not consist in "extending" us beyond the past, in removing it, in "infuriating" us all? There is no more time for a habit, a custom, to form organically; the values we are at educated are those of mobility, of pilgrimage. And they come from far away: already the Hellenistic ethos, in his abstract universalism is no longer ethos, according to the most authentic etymology. A "universal morality" (which the essay illustrates everywhere and to every man) has nothing to do with either the mores or the ethe. And ruthless, irreversible yes then he knocks down Christian criticism on the gods of the polis and of the civitas itself. No houses, no cities appear anymore
suitable to offer refuge to the miseries of man - indeed, they will be regarded rather as places always in power agitated by passions and oppressions, by seditions and quarrels. The idea of brotherhood is powerfully abstracted from every.properly ethical partnership (ethos and sodalis have the same root), to signify the universal belonging to Word, to the Announcement. The diversity of places and their stories appears as a resistance to be overcome, as does the the times of the various nations and cities are reduced to the indifferent unity of our calculation of the years.
Without charms, without regressive nostalgia, the problem must be faced: not only in today's metropolitan life there is none it is not even a memory of the dimension of the polis (which is accompanied by the intact sense of ethos - more: polis presupposes the absolute primacy of his "everything", of his cosmos, over the multiplicity of individuals), but no longer gives trace of civitas (which is a secondary term, deriving from the cives), since civitas cannot exist outside of that "general will" which is expressed in the mores and in the effective recognition of their value. In the "explosion"
the extreme product of this history of the dissolution of ethos consists of the form of the urbs, of the place of the city. Not it is that the traditional form of the city ends and therefore every properly ethical dimension goes down the drain - it is instead
the crisis of the idea of ethos that condemns the city: the urbs becomes an indifferent moment of space, or, rather, a obstacle, a heavy legacy, for a civilization of "universal mobilization", an unbearable stop in the flow of his time. And of this time we are, willingly-unwillingly, the "children": of no place and no time, that is,
...ethically considered. We must start from this condition, to grasp the signs of its possible "catastrophe", of another possible change of state - which can never simply restore "moral" sets.
For us, "freedom" gives the character of the children (of the free ones) permanently resident in a place and custodians of its values, it has been transformed into freedom from any stable bond, into freedom of movement in all directions.
We perceive as an "enemy" what hinders or slows down the universal circulation of things, men and ideas. The movement "Progressive" that has assailed the city tends, since its origin, to satisfy such a demand, or, better, is part integral to the culture that this need expresses. [...]
(from MASSIMO CACCIARI, Ethos and metropolis, MicroMega 1/1990, pp. 39-48)
ethics
«… The conduct of an individual can be judged moral according to whether or not it conforms to the rules or regulations current and proposed values. Yet it is not enough. The individual truly becomes a moral subject if he makes himself responsible of his conduct, whether it conforms to the rules and habits or differs from them. No individual can become
alone as a moral subject, but there is no morality if there is no assumption of responsibility. Likewise there is neither there could never be belief if the individual did not become an interpreter - more or less original - of the universe symbolic to which it belongs and within which it operates.
Foucault is right: “If it is true that every moral action implies a relationship with the real in which it takes place and a relationship with the code to which it refers, it is also true that it implies a relationship with oneself, and this relationship it is not simply 'self-awareness', but the constitution of oneself as a moral subject ”.
We must therefore constitute ourselves as "moral subjects". This is more urgent than ever in the contemporary world. There the complexification of society has disrupted the old references: they are increasingly differentiating in it performance and codes of conduct. We live in a growing social asymmetry that is not to be conceived only in
terms of dispersion, but also of enrichment. The dynamics of complexity have expanded the spaces of freedom, has implemented our possibilities to choose and above all to choose ourselves, to shape ourselves with wider discretion of the past. But to benefit from the changes of the present one must be up to them. The men they always live under the sign of ambiguity and the contemporary condition, like the others in history, is not deprives. But there are difficulties that are specifically ours. We are exposed to risks never experienced before.
Neither I point out two: first of all, we often run the danger of being overwhelmed by that same mobility from which we should benefit; secondly, to avoid the loss of identity induced by the very celerity of the mutations, we fix defensively in the series. We are afraid and therefore, far from valuing the opportunities for freedom, we accept the regime: we become passive and heterodirected. Involuntary obedients, without even the advantages of this famous one, ancient virtue.
To find stability in this drift we must establish ourselves more than ever as moral subjects. For this purpose it is it is necessary to fall back on oneself: one must gather and govern one's own power. You want to become a "moral subject" to say constituting a point of resistance in the face of mobility and environmental disturbances; stand up to the moment
stable selection / decision. If necessary, make yourself a place of neutralization and indifference: of absence. To do this takes skill. In fact this is the original meaning of the word arete: virtue. Virtuoso is in the first place he who is gifted with agility, who knows how to get out of difficulties. Becoming a law to oneself means turning one's own power in form, one's desire in character. This and no other was the reason why the ancients said that what is good is beautiful and what is beautiful is good.
But self-government is not a solipsistic operation. The idea of virtue is from the beginning linked to the relationship with others, to
recognition. This is best understood if we consider the meaning of the Greek verb grow. The term
derives from the same root art - from which, in fact, arete - and means I like myself, I am pleased, I am pleased; it means I even make amends. Virtuous therefore is the one who knows how to get by, but he is also the one who knows how to please, who knows
to apologize. Whoever is a law to himself does not invade the space of others. Indeed, individuals manage to be the more themselves, the more they relate to others: other men, but also other cultures, ethical traditions different. It is in the encounter / clash with differences that identity is gained. There can be no awareness of self outside the experience of difference. ... "
(SALVATORE NATOLI, Dictionary of vices and virtues, FELTRINELLI 1996, pp.8-9)
ethics of responsibility
The ethics of responsibility is TYPICALLY a secular ethics. What do you mean? In the sense that it does not derive from membership to a system of values but from the analysis of the concrete situation to which it is applied. Those who join it ask themselves which ones consequences will arise from his acts. And he takes responsibility for it.
The ethics of principles or absolute ethics (or of testimony or feelings or intentions) is TYPICALLY an ethics
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