WOMEN: Are made to be loved not to be understood." Oscar Wilde

WOMEN

"Women are made to be loved not to be understood."

Oscar Wilde

WOMEN

"Remember, a man hurts you, but a woman ends you."

VOLUNTEER GIFT

MASSIMO CACCIARI,

Free to donate

[The word "voluntary service" does not adequately convey the meaning of the gift, which is based on freedom understood as responsibility.]

 

Premise

I will try to reflect on the fundamentals of volunteering, ie its underlying reason.

Meanwhile, in a provocative sense, I wonder if the term volunteering makes the idea. Perhaps it does not do justice to the reasons of the

 Volunteering.

I would like to recall those verses of Dante in the song of Paolo and Francesca, when he says "... What doves of desire you call with their wings raised and still at the sweet nest they come through the air from wanting to be carried ". Here the souls of two damned who have subjected the reason to their will they are portrayed flying through the air by wanting to carry. That is, the will can be considered causa sui: our will, if we think about it, has always already happened. Our will follows necessarily our being. If we limit ourselves to our will we should say that our work follows to our being.

 

Will and freedom

I believe that there is no linear development between will and what volunteering means. That is, volunteering speaks of will, but it means something else, which has no simple, linear, univocal relationship with the will. Intends that is, freedom.

But the will as such is never free. What we can say is that we ardently desire to be free, but there is no possible proof that we are actually free. To address the problem we must proceed until we despair of our will: there is the backlash that gives life to volunteering. Bad name, I believe. Because he had to invent a name that does not have its root in will, but in freedom.

If we understand how it is impossible to give a rational demonstration of freedom and even more of the will,

Well if we reach this depth, up to the anguish the medieval fathers said, to the point of feeling suffocated from the impossibility of defining what we ardently desire, that is to be free, the fact of being springs from there forced to take care of our distress.

The will wants itself free, it decides to be free from the depths of its humilitas, because we react to this
suffocation when we realize how ardently we desire what is impossible for us to define. When we understand that we are not able to say free, to say cause on.

Freedom is the will that wants itself free, that decides for its own freedom, or better still that believes in its own freedom.

The volunteer is the one who believes in his own freedom, because he feels the suffocation completely unbearable, the anguish for the need, one's own and of anyone else. And he believes he can free himself. He believes, but it is not possible
prove it. This is a fundamental fact, because on this basis the volunteer is always characterized by one
profound humilitas and profound insecuritas. It is really in his attitude the opposite of anything of
confessional and fundamentalist, precisely because he is the one who desperately tries to make himself free and to make himself free.

And this being insecurus, humilis characterizes him laically with respect to so much secular fundamentalism that circulates.

Therefore the volunteer is the true layman, because the true layman from the rational philosophical point of view is the one who knows, but while purely secular thought such as Spinoza's necessarily ends in a skeptical position, the voluntary decides, and this has nothing to do with a rational foundation, decides or bets to believe to be able to be free and to be able to do free.

 Responsibility as an answer

 The volunteer is the one who responds to the state of need, the one who responds to distress, his own and that of others,

because he sees the world dominated by necessity, and this is unsustainable and unacceptable to him and therefore he believes he can be free.

Responsibility is a great name that cannot continue to be reduced to an ethics of rational calculation. There responsibility comes from a demanding term. Spendo in Greek meant "libare to the gods". And respond in Latin it comes from the same term from which it comes to marry, that is a promise that engages you entirely.

The volunteer is the one who responds, that is, the one whose being there is determined by the attempt, by the search to give an answer to distress, to the state of maximum necessity, of maximum suffering. Which belongs to each of us at the moment we hear that what he most desires, being free, cannot be grasped, cannot be determined. Then there is sympathy, the consolerance. The key term to use is responsibility, but according to the great commitment of the term. Yes responds to despair. To the one who no longer thinks he can be saved, that he can keep himself. And that properly he does volunteer work, this is his cure.

This means being children, because the one who answers is a child, who is necessarily related, because the child is inconceivable without a root, a belonging, without hu-militas. That is, knowing that his will is determined, which are a series of causes that necessitated his will. And therefore the freedom of the child does it all determines in the ability to respond. Here is the abyss with the concurrent conception of freedom. Freedom as an idea of ​​obligation it is not just a Christian or Islamic concept, it is a Roman idea. When freedom is not bond the Romans called it licentia. There is the freedom which is obligation and there is the freedom which is license and which it is not freedom, because freedom is all in the ability to respond, but where the answer is not that of a good father, but that of the co-suffering servant: nothing philanthropic.