PHILOSOPHY SECULAR CONSCIENCE : Vito Mancuso, The soul and its destiny, Raffeallo Cortina

 I AM THE MATERIAL OF MY BOOK

PHILOSOPHY SECULAR CONSCIENCE : Vito Mancuso, The soul and its destiny, Raffeallo Cortinaphilosophy secular conscience

"secular conscience: that part of conscience, present in every man, believer or non-believer, who seeks the truth for  itself and not to belong to an institution; that part of the conscience that wants to adhere to the truth, but he wants to do it without any ideological forcing of any kind, and if he accepts something he does it because it is deeply convinced and not because one of the numerous popes or one of the equally numerous popes of the secular culture"

Vito Mancuso, The soul and its destiny, Raffeallo Cortina, 2007 p. 1

 

ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY

The moral law - says Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason, I, 1, 3 - must be conceived and accepted as a duty "useful and valid" in itself (this is what Hegel also reiterates in paragraph 503 of the Encyclopedia of philosophical sciences). The point is always related to the question of authority. An authority is needed that do you speak to others or "on behalf of others" on moral issues? And if so, where does this authority draw and legitimize (I would like almost saying "subsumes", since the moral sphere is always personal) one's arguments to the point of considering them "legitimate"? And again, can these arguments have universal value? If we consider morality on an equal footing of other forms of knowledge, we should say that there is no logic in itself that justifies an authority in the field of morality. Kantian speaking, everyone builds their own moral framework by inserting it into the larger
"specter" of the morals of others in order to cohabit you. If instead we want to consider, with Hume and the naturalists, morality released from other forms of human knowledge and place it in a more "utilitarian" context, that is, linked to temporal and practical contingencies, then the discourse would change again. But it is clear that it would lose most of those universal "values" to which any authority could refer from time to time wanted to propose it or - even worse - "impose it".

Unlike others, on the issues of morality I have no certainties, even if - obviously - it is one of the themes that matters most to me. I do not think that a life centered on an "autonomous" morality - so to speak - has minors guarantees of "validity" with respect to that which follows principles "dictated" from above. I don't think it's a question of values
"horizontal" or "vertical" to inform an ethical principle, but rather the ability to consider that claims
of the other, if they do not want to trample my "particular principle", they are permissible. Different is when, on very vague and smoky "universal principles", we want to concentrate a vast idea of ​​morality; here the risk of leading to a certain
"absolutism" of thought is highly probable. As probable also becomes the danger of a radicalization of various "morals", up to the failure to recognize the other or - worse still - to the alleged "immorality" of those who do not accepts the ethical principle of a self-proclaimed "moral" authority, even in clear contradiction with its own
history and their daily practice.

LOGOS PHILOSOPHY

Logos in Greek is a very plastic term, which usually means "word", understood in its most diverse forms
("Speech", "story", "said", "reckoning" ...). But it also means "reason", "sense", and its light root recalls a collection, a link, a bond. It belongs to the common language, but from Heraclitus in the sixth century. BC, it was introduced in the philosophical one to indicate the universal and cohesive principle of the world

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE PHILOSOPHY

"I do not know a calmer book, and one that disposes more to serenity" wrote Flaubert dei Saggi, great books in which Western culture is expressed, not many are those that present just as immediate
the imprint of a serene spirit, sovereign and measured coordinator of an infinite and fluctuating variety of contents.

Supported by a curiosity that stops at nothing, the close investigation (albeit by no means systematic)
that Montaigne leads in his book sees his results reduced to a single constant which is the study of himself, of his own humeurs et conditions, and through it he arrives at the representation of man "painted entirely, and completely naked".

 Persuaded that everything has been said and concerned to demonstrate that the human spirit always remains similar to itself himself, paradoxically, he comes to the conclusion that nothing can be said to be certain, except that everything is uncertain.

This opens the doors to him on an endless journey within himself, the only possible object of his research because the only verifiable through direct experience and, ultimately, the only interesting for him: “I dare not only speak of me, but speak only of me ... ». The parts are thus reversed; man must not accept a line of preconceived conduct, even if made venerable by a solid and by now acquired tradition, nor untangle in the forest of contradictory doctrines that which serves as a guiding thread for his own life; he must rather express a way of life that aims to be peculiar and unique. This relentless, almost fussy reductio of all previous culture was undoubtedly the great discovery of Montaigne, and that which made the Sages a  milestone in the history of Western culture. The book is indeed the great summa in which they are exposed, criticized, partially accepted or rejected with astonishing freedom of judgment the traditional theories more generally accepted, the
 large reservoir through which the classical spirit flows and in which all the main currents of the
 ancient thought, but above all it is the first great modern representation of man in his whole condition
human, uprooted, it would seem, from its existential relationship with totality - but not from that with Nature -,

man as the only point of reference for every action and every judgment. Montaigne's man, this subject

"Vain, varied and undulating", is no longer the hero trying to overcome his condition in a tragic effort or mystical, but the new man, l'honnête homme, who accepts himself, his potential and his limits. The Sages are hence the first great, fully conscious effort to make the very substance of psychological and moral investigation  literary activity, since clarifying one's "shapeless fantasies" to oneself by means of the word becomes in reality a way of living more fully: "It is not so much I who made my book, but my book which made  me, a book consubstantial with its author, of a personal utility, a member of my life ... ».

From the flap of the Adelphi edition

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE PHILOSOPHY

SOME REFLECTIONS ON MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Giovanni Greco

University of Bologna

 

Montaigne's Journey to Italy - for many reasons already clarified by reliable rumors and for others that I will try to explain here

- can be considered a classic tout court. So, preliminarily, I ask myself with Roberto Roversi: «I am still the lianas bridge of the Incas, flickering on tremendous overhangs, which with a wire of hard rope and pieces of wood do they combine distant and opposing banks otherwise inaccessible? They still resist being the specific miracle of long duration?". And the answer, for me as for many other readers, is yes: we must not, for example, resist
temptation to cross the stretched bridge between organized society and the unjust justice of marginalization, or among the most diverse contemporary sensitivities and ancient cultural traditions. What is more, the ancient and modern classics there allow us to feed - it is precisely Montaigne who persuasively supports him - "a back room of our own, absolutely autonomous, where to keep our freedom, have our most important refuge, enjoy ours solitude".   

 

Montaigne does not cultivate prejudices of style, but has a constant cult of the ancient classic, to which he consecrates reflections of considerable breadth, to the Sainte-Beuve so to speak. In the panorama of modern thought then, as we know, it occupies a
really central role our Michel Eyquem, lord of Montaigne, wealthy landowner and wine producer,
substantially author of a single, incomparable work, the Sages. Indeed, the Journey to Italy which we will now deal with -

even reading it as a mirror of the wonderful and miserable age in which it was laid - it can be considered de they plan an enrichment and strengthening of Essais, as well as a key with which to penetrate into the essence spirituality of the European Renaissance.

 

Montaigne - this inexhaustible sixteenth-century maître à penser which so often happens to us to feel close to our restless "postmodern condition" - yes, he suffers from stone sickness, but he also finds in the therapeutic reasons a excuse to embark on an intensely desired journey: he therefore goes to the most renowned spas of the time, from the baths of Plombières to the Bagni della Villa (today's Bagni di Lucca), where he undergoes various he cares with a diligence tinged with skepticism, which does not know how to have too many illusions about results and benefits.

 
Montaigne was so fond of traveling, visiting unknown places that, like the transported reader and
captivated by the book he was leafing through, he suffered in fear that the work was about to reach the conclusion: «he had so much pleasure of traveling who hated the proximity of the place where he should have stopped ».

 

The Journey to Italy was not intended for publication, and was largely written (just under half) by a Montaigne's familiar whose identity we do not know, but who - as acutely clarified by Fausta Garavini, exegete and extraordinary interpreter of the entire montaignana opera - was anything but inexperienced from a cultural point of view.

Starting from his stay in Lucca, Montaigne then tried to try his hand at the Italian language, which he also proves to have knowing how to use with a certain studied familiarity.

 

If Stendhal's Journey to Italy "is a wonderful novel", if that of Montesquieu - he too, like Montaigne, great citizen of Bordeaux - it is ictu oculi full of life, color and taste, the Journey to Italy of our homme de lettres - Guido Piovene argued with a wealth of arguments - is certainly much less pretentious, but, among all the books related to this extremely appreciated and fortunate genre, is the most beautiful and the most modern of all. Not
by chance Sergio Solmi believed that Montaigne's works represented an autobiography of thoughts rather than of facts: moreover, the great Sainte-Beuve was already convinced that Montaigne, a superb author for depth and universality, was the “Horace of the French”: «Your book is a treasure trove of moral observations and experience. On any page, yes open and in any state of mind, one can be sure to find some wise thought expressed in such a way vivid and lasting, which stands out immediately and impresses itself, a beautiful meaning in a full and surprising word, in a single strong, familiar or large league ».

 

Montaigne has what is perhaps the most important gift of the authentic traveler, namely the awareness of not be superior to anyone; does not accept that the traveler wanders the world complaining of not finding what a he is used to: on the other hand he likes to adapt to the various territorial peculiarities, and would never make a trip to prove a preconception. Nonetheless, the comparison between the German countries and the Italians is to our distinct disadvantage for order, cuisine, well-being, honesty, buildings, finishes, glassless windows, accommodation, seductions lower than expected, women etc.

 

The "Montaigne bastion", to use certain typologies of Albert Thibaudet, is the bastion of the inner man, with drops of Jewish blood (mother was Jewish-Spanish), traditionalist, modern, cosmopolitan, Catholic, antisystematic, so much so that "stoicism, epicureanism, skepticism coexist in him". Montaigne is, in the words of Giovanni Macchia, the master of doubt, of doubt intended as an antidote to try to reach the truth as regards both the past is the present, the doubt, again, that pervades the shadows and outlines of the future. Montaigne then argues that.....

... "The plague of man is the belief that he knows", and he wants speeches that "strike doubt where it is strongest",
thus cultivating doubt and things in their essence. It was not by chance that Sainte-Beuve defined hours rotundo Montaigne

«le  français le plus sage qui aie jamais existé ».

Among other things, our philosopher will say of the commentators of his time that "there is more to be done in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things".

 Montaigne, who has known Latin as his mother tongue and has a genuine adoration for poetry, is an enemy sworn of boredom and of every passive and sterile form of idleness, as well as a writer who persuasively claims to strive to compose his work with the greatest possible sincerity: he emphasizes the latter with energy, which is rare quality already in the decisive and incisive incipit of the Essays ("This, reader, is a sincere book"), thus indicating the path he intends to follow is effective, a project that has his own person at the center

(«I am the material of my book "). 

Moreover, in one of his most successful self-portraits he tries to explain how he sees himself and why you speak of yourself in that disconcerting and unmistakable way of yours: "If I say different things about myself, it is because different angles. All the opposites are found in me in some fold or manner. I argue, insolent; chaste, lustful; chatty, taciturn; hardworking, listless; ingenious, obtuse; sad, cheerful; cheater, sincere;
learned, ignorant and liberal, and stingy, and prodigal, I see all of this in myself in some way, depending on how I turn; is whoever studies himself carefully finds in himself, and indeed in his own judgment, this volatility and discord.

I cannot say anything about myself once and for all, simply and forever, without confusion and mingling, nor in a word".

 

Montaigne is the exemplary provincial man, he is truly a born writer, he is a fine and restless conscience bound also sentimentally to the juridical disciplines, he is a man of letters who, so to speak, surrenders himself to paper, is a philosopher who considers the aspiration to wisdom a kind of permanent joy. It has a broadly secular view of
that Catholicism that values ​​a significant virtuous practice, the best way (perhaps) to grasp elements of authenticity religiosity.

 

He is perfectly aware, however, of the extraordinary difficulty for men to recognize and grasp the
truth, convinced as it is that human truth, to say it with Spagnol, is more often found rolled up in dirty clothes than in the folds of solemn parchment. It is also well known to him that, not infrequently, knowledge of the truth is knowledge of black (Rigoni). Montaigne even seems to believe that, if it is appropriate to always strive to the truth, however, it is likely to be revealed only from time to time. In full harmony with him is another great moralists, that Oscar Wilde persuaded that "the truth is seldom pure, and it is never simple". Yet, a simple reading of the montaignana work is enough to understand not only how much he cared about those themes and
 problems of a moral and pedagogical nature that he was constantly investigating in his beloved books, as well as in just no less beloved existential path, but also how strong he was in him - which he considered among other things, evangelically, man is a very humble clay pot - a taste for biblical and classical sentences.

 

His Weltanschauung leads to the concept of physical and moral health, as he acutely claimed in famous pages Sergio Solmi, who defined Montaigne's "health" as an innate quality, an elementary and supreme balance of life. Therefore:
 keep the body firm and not allow any conditioning to morality, to define a precise life model constructive. And it doesn't really seem a coincidence that men who are anything but naive and inexperienced have decided to
to be formed in a way that is both virtuous and serene, severe and tolerant, virile and delicate, by reading and re-reading Montaigne: in truth, the Essais know how to arouse as few books, in the mind of the undistracted reader, desire authentic, the will to self-educate in a balanced way.

 

In the Essays - where the anthropologist (in the etymological sense) prevails over the chronicler, who instead is the master in the Journey to Italy - Montaigne's major concern is, as mentioned, that his pages are immediately perceive it as a sincere book. He therefore aspires to present himself without pretense and ensures that, if he were found
 among primitive peoples, he would have completely naked: "I want you to see me here in my simple way of being, natural and usual, without affectation or artifice: because it is myself that I paint. My faults will be read taken to the heart and my natural image ».

among primitive peoples, he would have completely naked: "I want you to see me here in my simple way of being, natural and usual, without affectation or artifice: because it is myself that I paint. My faults will be read taken to the heart and my natural image».


 

SENSE PSYCHANALYSIS PHILOSOPHY

The last part of the path of Thought One arose, at the end of my path, as the last answer to the question that had posed itself to me since childhood:

- What do you mean it is what it is?

Pressed by this question, during my adolescence I looked for an answer in philosophical thought. But neither Hegelian ontology, even in its synthetic vision, presented itself to me as exhaustive, since life, in its concrete objectity, it was irretrievably excluded. Life itself then forced me to seek the answer in biological science, which immediately revealed to me the evolutionary order of living forms as the order of one evolutionary dynamics of thought. It seemed to me then that the time had come to return to philosophy, to find the synthesis between spirit and matter in the rediscovered coincidence between thought and life. But once again life showed me that it was another...

...the way to go, that of the reflection of life on itself: the way of psychoanalysis. So it was that I discovered first of all that the psychoanalytic method is the concrete implementation of the Hegelian dialectic, insofar as it is the...

....human subject, and no longer an abstract subject, to take the reflexive distance from himself to know himself; is I also discovered that what the human subject becomes aware of is the same method of knowing oneself of the Thought which, starting from the first manifestation of the Being, as a projection of the One Thinking Subject outside of himself, has given rise to all that is. At this point a new attempt to highlight the synthesis between spirit and matter in a rereading dialectic of philosophical thought was once again redirected towards a scientific treatment of structuring of the cosmos, starting from the first making of matter as the objective of the Thought in the thought of itself which still is himself. It is here that the living experience of the original duality of the One took place in me and a further leap took place
reflexive, thanks to which the logic of the separation between subject and object was resolved in the unitary logic of the mattersubjectivity. From here on, thanks to the progressive awareness of this higher level of reflection as a concrete reality in the daily experience of intersubjectivity, Thought faced and finally solved the problem of the coincidence between the noumenal and the phenomenal; coincidence in which it recognized its reality as Unique Living. It is at this point that life finally pushed me back to philosophy, to retrace the path from it traced starting from the crisis of Thought One, already caught by me as a teenager, which arose at the beginning of the twentieth century from questioning of Hegelian thought and resolved at the beginning of the new millennium in the unitary vision of Being as the culmination of psychoanalytic thought. And from this unitary vision of Being the last answer emerged to the essential question of my existence:

- What do you mean it is what it is?

- It means that what is is the being of presence in the presence of another presence which is infinite of life.

 

In: Silvia Montefoschi, The last stretch of the journey of Thought One. Excursion into 20th Century Philosophy, Zephyro

 Editions, Milan 2006

philosophy religion

What is the difference between religion and philosophy?

 

For philosophy, transcendence is man himself who, despite being a finite being, is capable of thinking about the infinite. There religion establishes a split between immanence and transcendence, proposing itself as a link between them two entities otherwise incommensurable to each other

 Massimo Cacciari

garden

The mornings are milder now,

the walnuts turn dark;

the rounder the cheek of the berries,

the rose has left the city.

 Maple sports more festive scarves,

and the meadow is dressed in scarlet -

For fear of being out of fashion,

I want to wear a pendant.

Emily Dickinson


 

GARDEN

A comment from Federico on the previous post makes me wonder which tree or plant I could ever give up. Not me I would certainly deprive of viburnum tinus (especially the "French" one: more compact and rosy), and then, I could give up having at least one lilac? I've always wanted a lot of roses, starting with my favorite rose bracteata (the Chinese one, to be clear).

But, among all the trees and plants I own, I would never, ever do without my magnolia trees (from those
evergreen to those who, a little prematurely, are in bloom now). Magnolias as well as being very plants
beautiful have something mysterious in them that has always made me feel close to them (and one day, if I feel like it,

....I will insert here the searches that, in various fields, I have done on this tree). Right now here in the garden I don't know a which one to be more fond of; I have brought up many with patience and passion. Rustic and cold resistant they love
have your feet in the deep lands of the valleys. Only the wind, and in particular the dry one, is definitely their enemy.

I understood that magnolias love quiet and sheltered places: they are certainly not "battle" plants. And also in this they look alike.

game

This final page is written not for those who play, but rather for those who, traditionally, do not play: mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, older brothers and sisters, teachers, teachers ...

 

Dear friends and colleagues, if you have an attitude of 'sufficiency' towards the game, if you contrast 'for fun' and 'on the serious', think a little, please, on my "praise of the game".

 

One of the most serious threats hanging over our "Western civilization", indeed one of the phenomena that already corrodes it and the spoils are consumerism, passivity, non-participation. We live in too rich a society, but badly rich, who does everything herself, who makes you find everything beautiful and ready and packed: games with their rules pre-arranged shows, shows always and only to be seen, TV broadcasts prepared by others, organized trips, the chess matches between Karpov and Korchnoj to be redone on the basis of the tables you find in the weeklies, the music take away, movies to watch ...

 

We live in a society that doesn't ask us to invent, that doesn't stimulate us to create. We live in a society in the which there is very little room to "play".

 

We recover the joy, the taste, of playing (badly), of painting (worse), of acting (like dogs), of making (bad) films ...
but to play, paint, act, make films ourselves. Well, collective smart play is one of the simplest forms, and in my opinion more effective, to recover creativity in the passive and passivating consumer society.

 But there are many other reasons to praise the game.

 The basic culture, the one without which one is a poor man, is also made up of a series of rules, notions, names that is very boring to learn from books or at school. I'm talking about the rules of spelling, about certain calculation skills mental, of the names of states and their capitals, of rivers and lakes and various localities. Well: figurative charades, game of 'spelling', famous men's game, one letter by one crossword puzzles, are, among other things, exceptional spelling exercises  (of Italian names, and also foreign ones); "Flowers, fruit and cities" is an excellent control of acquired notions; the shirt-maker, again celebrity men, the crazy game are a fun simple way to broaden your knowledge, and so on indirectly, one's own culture; the game of 'yes' and 'no' requires logical systematicity; some variations of the «game of
Carlotta »are an excellent exercise for dividing in mind.

 

Question (very serious, please believe, dear fellow teachers): but why sometimes, to check that
that your students have learned, don't you do an hour of intelligent games in the classroom instead of questioning?

 Learning to play, establishing and respecting honest rules, creates the habit of a civil coexistence much more than that not long sermons of 'civic education'.

 

The team game 'socializes', teaches to help and respect the little ones and the weakest, to balance the Strength. The games we propose are also a means, not easily replaceable, for the "recovery" of being joyful together between adults and children, between parents and children, between teachers and students.

 
Playing well means having a taste for precision, love for the language, the ability to express oneself with languages  non-verbal; it means acquiring intuition and rationality together, a habit of loyalty and collaboration. And praise of the game could continue. But I'll stop here. I started writing this book for fun, but gradually as I continued to enjoy myself, I realized more and more clearly that I was writing a
serious book. Perhaps the most serious of all I've written.

 
Lucio Lombardo Radice, In praise of the game, in The biggest toy, Giunti Marzocco, 1979, p. 104

TO JUDGE

It is difficult for the happy to judge the miseries of others correctly.

Marco Fabio Quintiliano

TO JUDGE

Si vitam inspicias hominum, si denique mores,

cum culpat alios, nemo sine criminis vivit.

 

Look at them, men,

how they live,

while they blame others: none

 it is without fault

 Cato, Couplets

Medusa publisher

 Translation by Giancarlo Pontiggia

JUSTICE

There is only one thing worse than injustice: justice without a sword in hand.

When the right is not the force is bad.

 Oscar Wilde


 war and peace

BED WITH TOLSTOJ

from NonSoloProust by gabrilu

 Michail Illarionovich Kutuzov (1745-1813) and Piotr Ivanonovic Bagration (1765-1812)

 

These days I see a lot of movies and someone probably noticed it too, but it's not like I've stopped
read, indeed.

 
It is that I decided to reread War and Peace from top to bottom. The first reading dates back to many years ago. Then I devoured it, but now I'm proceeding very calmly, sipping it. Anyway, nobody chases me.

 

The first time I was passionate about Natasha's private stories, as I think happens to more or less everyone Rostov, Pierre Bezuchov and Andrei Bolkonskj; now I'm enjoying all those long sections a lot too dedicated to the war and to the descriptions of battles, pages that I had read a little superficially then, maybe resisting even the temptation to skip them because they seemed a little boring. I couldn't grasp it great beauty.

 And so, for now I go to bed early in the evening and immerse myself in reading in the company of Kutuzov, Napoleon and Bagratiòn, the other trio protagonist of the novel.

 The day before yesterday, for example, I was on the battlefield of Ulm, and together with Andrea Bolkonskj I admired the authority of Bagratiòn.

 
Last night, however, I was in Austerlitz, to witness the battle "of the three emperors": "From noon on the 19th in the supreme spheres of the army began a great movement, between panting and excited, which lasted until the morning of the day after, November 20, in which the memorable battle of Austerlitz was given. "

 War is a mechanism that Tolstoy describes in this way.

 
And then, "when the sun [from] emerged entirely and with a dazzling radiance it sprayed its rays on the fields and fog, Napoleon (as if he was just waiting for this to begin the battle) took off a glove
uncovering a beautiful white hand; he made a sign to the marshals with his glove, and gave the order to begin to action "

 At Austerlitz Napoleon played them for good reason, to the Russians. But let's give time to time, and we'll see that
Kutuzov will make him pay ...

 For now they are (in the book) at the beginning of winter, and Napoleon is pondering the Russian campaign, porello. Does not know what awaits him, in those parts.

 I have only recently discovered that a fiction based on War and Peace has recently been broadcast on TV. Neither I peeked at some sequences on YouTube and from what little I've seen I'm glad I spared it.


Yesterday, however, I ordered on the Internet the three DVDs of the complete 1967 film by Serghej Bondarchuk (in Russian with subtitles in Italian). I had seen it in the cinema - but not unabridged - centuries ago, and I had found it much, much more beautiful than that of King Vidor of 1956.

 The curious thing, however, is that Vidor's American film is also easily found in stores. The Russian one of
Bondarchuk is out of print, you can only find it on the net and only in some online shops. Still, with all my respect and my admiration for Vidor, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer and Henry Fonda, despite being their very War and Peace good (and in fact I bought that too), there really are no comparisons between the two productions.

 Returning to the book: War and Peace is endless, and with the pace of reading that I decided to adopt I don't know when I will re-emerge and be able to read more.

 But the thing I do not mind neither little nor point


  

IDEOLOGIES

The image of fragmentation, which in many cases makes one suffer, however, is very often seen around ideological themes. It could not be otherwise, given that ideologies are forms of aggregation that tend to include who they agree with the assumptions and to exclude those who disagree: ideological discussions are never related to facts, but they tend to always focus on the exact application of the ideologies themselves to the facts themselves.


ENLIGHTENMENT

It is Kant who, in a famous text, one of the most beautiful ever produced by the thinkers of his time, published in December 1784, would have given in a few pages, on which we will never tire of returning, the most exact definition of...
....Enlightenment, and the one closest to the spirit of the philosophes:

"The Enlightenment is man's exit from the state of minority that he must impute to himself. Minority is the inability to use one's own intellect without the guidance of another [...] Know aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! This is the motto of the Enlightenment "

 
Zeen Sternhell, Against the Enlightenment from the 18th Century to the Cold War, Baldini Castoldi, p. 70-71