Reniassance Secularism, Humanism and Individualism
LITERATURE "serves"
The two lives Is there a moment in which we can say with absolute certainty that literature "serves"? I think so, and this not only in the precise moment in which someone benefits from reading it.
Literature also comes to our aid when a passage or verse are more useful than complex reasoning or a theoretical abstraction to understand - and therefore to better address - real life. It has often happened to me that the other life contaminates this life, and the feeling it left has always been positive, like the results.
from akatalēpsía, October 16, 2006
SECULARISM
The sense of the layman
This term is not a synonym for atheist or unbeliever but implies respect for others and freedom from any idolatry
by Claudio Magris
When, at the university, we studied German with some friends, a language not very widespread at the time, and some companions who they ignored him and asked us to teach them some sweet romantic word with which to talk to girls.
Germans who came to Italy, we suggested to them a couple of terms that were anything but gallant and rather unreliable, with the conceivable consequences on their approaches. This joker, stupid like all jokes, contained in itself the drama of the Tower of Babel: when men speak without understanding each other and think they are saying something using one word that indicates an opposite, misunderstandings arise, sometimes dramatic to the point of violence. In the painful own goal in which the riot against the Pope's invitation to the University of Rome was resolved, the most tacky element was, for the umpteenth time, the incorrect, distorted and overturned use of the term "secular", which can justify yet another, in my case
repetitive, an attempt to clarify its meaning.
Secular does not mean at all, as is ignorantly repeated, the opposite of believer (or Catholic) and does not indicate itself, neither a believer nor an atheist nor an agnostic. Secularism is not a philosophical content, but a mindset; is essentially the ability to distinguish what is rationally demonstrable from what is instead the object of faith, a regardless of adherence to this faith or not; to distinguish the spheres and areas of the different competences, first of all place those of the Church and those of the State.
Secularism is not identified with any creed, with any philosophy or ideology, but is the attitude to articulate one's own thought (atheist, religious, idealist, Marxist) according to logical principles that cannot be conditioned, in consistency of their proceeding, from no faith, from no pathos of the heart, because in this case one falls into a
mess, always obscurantist. Culture - even Catholic - if such is always secular, as well as logic - of
Thomas or an atheist thinker - he cannot fail to rely on criteria of rationality and the demonstration of a
the theorem, even if made by a Saint of the Church, must obey the laws of mathematics and not the catechism.
A religious vision can move the soul to create a more just society, but the layman knows that it certainly cannot immediately translate into articles of law, as the aberrant fundamentalists of all kinds want. Secular is who he knows the relationship but above all the difference between the fifth commandment, which orders not to kill, and
the article of the criminal code that punishes murder. Lay - Norberto Bobbio said, perhaps the greatest of the laity Italians - are those who are passionate about their "warm values" (love, friendship, poetry, faith, generous political project) but defends the "cold values" (the law, democracy, the rules of the political game) which alone allow everyone to cultivate own warm values. Another great layman was Arturo Carlo Jemolo, master of law and freedom, fervent Catholic and very religious, a staunch defender of the distinction between church and state and a tough opponent of the unacceptable public funding for private schools - Catholic, Jewish, Islamic or tomorrow maybe racist if some parents they will pretend to educate their children in this delusional creed.
Secularism means tolerance, doubt also addressed to one's own certainties, the ability to strongly believe in certain values knowing that there are others, also respectable; not to confuse thought and authentic feeling with fanatical conviction and with visceral emotional reactions; to laugh and smile even at what you love and continue to love; to be free from idolatry and desecration, both servile and forced. Intolerant fundamentalism can be clerical (as it has been so many times, even with ferocious violence, over the centuries and continues sometimes, even if more mildly, to be so) or partisanally secular, equally anti-secular.
The bigots who are scandalized by nudists are just as little secular as those nudists who, instead of undressing legitimately for the pleasure of sunbathing, they do so with the emphatic presumption of fighting against repression,
to feel like little Galileans in front of the Inquisition, never happy until some stupid priest starts babbling
against them.
A layman would have the right to formally warn the cagnara held at Sapienza from boasting the title
"Secular". It is legitimate for everyone to criticize the academic senate, to say that it could have made even better choices: to invite to example the Dalai Lama or Jamaica Kincaid, the great black writer of Antigua, but is in the senate, elected according to
academic rules, which had to be decided; you can criticize his choices, as I criticized the choices
unspeakable by the Berlusconi government, but without pretending to prevent him, since unfortunately he had been elected according to the rules of democracy.
It was said in a televised debate that the Pope should not have spoken as the Church relies on another procedure of path and research compared to that of scientific research, of which the university is a temple. But it wasn't about to establish a chair of Catholic Paleontology, obviously a nonsense because paleontology is neither atheist nor
Catholic or Lutheran, but to listen to a speech, which - depending on his intellectual and cultural level, that
could not be judged before reading or hearing it
- it could enrich a little, a lot, a lot or nothing
(like so many speeches given at the inauguration of academic years) the audience. After all, if the Dalai had been invited instead Lama
- against whom no one rightly has nor would have objected, which he is rightly seen with sympathy and esteem for his works, some of which I read with great profit.
- he too would have kept a speech inspired by a logic different from that of Western scientific research.
But even in this regard the layman feels some doubts arise. Just as the Gospel is not the only religious text of humanity, but there are also the Koran, the Buddhist Dhammapada and the Hindu Bhagavadgita, even science has different methodologies. There is physics and there is literature, which is also the subject of science - Literaturwissenschaft, literary science, say the Germans - and whose investigation relies on other methods, not necessarily less rigorous but different; the rationality that presides over the interpretation of a poem by Leopardi is different from that which regulates the proof of a mathematical theorem or the analysis of a historical period or phenomenon. And at the university, yes
they study physics, literature, history and so on. Even some great philosophers have taught at the university, proposing their philosophical conception to students of other beliefs as well; not for this reason was taken from them word.
It is not the what, it is the how that makes music and also the freedom and rationality of teaching. Each of us, willing or unwillingly, even and especially when he teaches, he proposes his own truth, his own vision of things. As he wrote
a secular genius such as Max Weber, it all depends on how he presents his truth: he is a layman if he knows how to game, distinguishing what derives from demonstration or verifiable experience from what is instead only an inference although convincing, putting the cards on the table, that is, declaring a priori his beliefs, scientific and philosophical, so that others know that perhaps they can also unconsciously influence his research,
even if he honestly goes out of his way to avoid it. To put on the table, with this spirit, one experience and one theological reflection can be a great enrichment. If, on the other hand, truths arrogantly assert themselves, give one once and for all, one is totalitarian, clerical intolerant.
It doesn't matter if Benedict XVI's speech read at La Sapienza is creative and stimulating or rigidly plastered or
- as happens in official and rhetorical circumstances such as academic inaugurations - learned, well-behaved and dull. I only know that - once it was decided by those who legitimately had the right to invite him
- a layman could also prefer to go for a walk that day rather than to the inauguration of the academic year (as I have almost always done, but not to challenge the speakers), but not to dismiss the speech before hearing it.
In fact, a very unscientific prejudice has taken place against Benedict XVI.
It has been said that it is unacceptable the opposition of Catholic doctrine to Darwin's theories. I am on Darwin's side (whose discoveries stand on a
other plan than faith) and not of those who would like to ban it, as a minister of the previous one tried
government, even if the contrast between creationism and selection theory is no longer put in crude terms many voices of the Church, in the name of a more credible and less mythical conception of creationism, are no longer up those anti-Darwinian positions. But Benedetto Croce criticized Darwin in a much more crude way, rejecting that which seemed to him a reduction of the study of humanity to zoology and, moreover, not being able, otherwise
from the Church, to offer an alternative answer to questions about the origin of man, even knowing that the Pythecanthrope he was different from his philosopher uncle Bertrando Spaventa. Even mathematics denied the dignity of science, defining it
"Pseudoconcept". If the guest had been Benedetto Croce, a great philosopher even if more anti-scientist than Benedict XVI, would there have been just as much noise? Why does the Pope boo when he denies the marriage of homosexuals and do not boo the embassies of those Arab countries, pro- or anti-Western, in which the homosexuals and are pregnant women stoned out of wedlock?
In that television program, Pannella, in addition to having unhappily approached the protesting professors of the Wisdom to the professors who refused the fascist oath by losing their professorship, their post and their salary, has
a correct observation, denouncing the interference of the Church and the frequent supine subjection by the State and the media about them. If this is true, and in part it is certainly true, it is for the laity to strive for
to fight this interference, to give other religious confessions the full right of expression, to reject
every clerical invasion, in short, to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God, a secular principle which, as is well known, is proclaimed in the Gospel.
But this necessary battle for the secular state does not authorize intolerance elsewhere, as happened to
Wisdom; if my neighbor makes noises at night, I can report him, but don't hit his car in return.
One thing in all this foolish affair is worrying for those who fear the political regression of the country, the clerical and the possible return of the devastating previous government. It is worrying to see how people and forces do that they say and certainly feel sincerely democratic and should therefore rationally operate by holding given the gravity of the political situation and the danger of a regression, they seem to be seized by a fever
self-destructive, from a cheerful irresponsibility, from a carefree vocation to a disastrous defeat.
January 20, 2008
to work
Love the modest craft you have learned and be content with it
TO READ
Of the spiritual exercises suggested by PIERRE HADOT as philosophical practices aimed at forming the soul, those coming from pagan culture are basically four: learning to live, learning to die, learning to dialogue, learn to read.
If the first three immediately catch our attention and push us to dig into Hadot's text, in search of the words Greek definitions, formulas, maxims, prescriptions to follow, arouses a greater curiosity
the fourth exercise.
ROLAND BARTHES wrote about it in 1979 (Voice Reading of the Einaudi Encyclopedia 8, pp. 176-199) that "reading is a technique "," reading is a social practice "," reading is a form of gestures "," reading is a form of wisdom »,« reading is a method »,« reading is a pleasure activity ». Object, Operation, Phenomenon, it is in it desire involved; sense and intertext constitute its soul as a practice of textuality, trade with texts.
Well, according to Hadot, almost all the ancient philosophers wrote in function of the school, thinking of their students, of starting from specific problems. Even the most difficult and apparently systematic works are actually almost not so
never: the ancients thought in terms of research, of formulating problems from ever different points of view.
Reading for them meant this: reserving the comment, the collection, the treatise for different interlocutors. Different was the degree of knowledge possessed, various texts to which students, interlocutors, the public can approach. Reading
of philosophical texts for the ancients is the practice of spiritual exercises.
«Philosophy then appears - in its original aspect - no longer as a theoretical construction, but as a method
intended to form a new way of living and seeing the world, as an effort to transform man. In contemporary historians of philosophy generally have little tendency to pay attention to this
an aspect, nevertheless essential "(PIERRE HADOT, Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy, EINAUDI 2002, p. 66).
To understand who Hadot is, just think to work The Veil of Isis. History of the idea of nature (Einaudi, 2006), the result of 40 years of studies, built starting from fragment of Heraclitus: "Nature loves to hide",
to Plotinus or the simplicity of the gaze (Einaudi, 1999),
What is ancient philosophy? (Einaudi 1998).
Learning to read - Παιδεια
from Limen by gabriele de ritis
to read
ROLAND BARTHES wrote about it in 1979 (Voice Reading of the Einaudi Encyclopedia 8, pp. 176-199) that "reading is a technique "," reading is a social practice "," reading is a form of gestures "," reading is a form of wisdom »,« reading is a method »,« reading is a pleasure activity ».
Object, Operation, Phenomenon, it is in it desire involved; sense and intertext constitute its soul as a practice of textuality, trade with texts.
Well, according to Hadot, almost all the ancient philosophers wrote in function of the school, thinking of their students, of.starting from specific problems. Even the most difficult and apparently systematic works are actually almost not so never: the ancients thought in terms of research, of formulating problems from ever different points of view.
Reading for them meant this: reserving the comment, the collection, the treatise for different interlocutors. Different was the degree of knowledge possessed, various texts to which students, interlocutors, the public can approach. Reading
of philosophical texts for the ancients is the practice of spiritual exercises.
«Philosophy then appears - in its original aspect - no longer as a theoretical construction, but as a method intended to form a new way of living and seeing the world, as an effort to transform man. In contemporary historians of philosophy generally have little tendency to pay attention to this
an aspect, nevertheless essential "(PIERRE HADOT, Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy, EINAUDI 2002, p. 66).
to read
«What well-being the new books offer us! I would like the books that fall from the sky in large bundles every day tell the youth of the images. This vote is natural. This prodigy is easy. Up there, in the sky, it's not perhaps heaven an immense library? ".
But receiving is not enough, we must collect. It is necessary, the pedagogue and the dietician say in one voice, "to assimilate ". For this, they advise us not to read too quickly, and to be careful not to swallow too large pieces.
Divide, we are told, each difficulty into all possible particles to solve it better. Chew well, drink small
sip, savor verse by verse the poems.
All these precepts are beautiful and good. But a principle commands them. You must first have a good desire for eat, drink and read. You have to want to read a lot, read more, always read.
"Since morning, in front of the books piled up on my table, I make my prayer to the god of reading:" Give us today our daily hunger ... ».
read CLASSICS
A classic is something everyone would like to have read and no one wants to read
Read write
When a reader reads, he reads himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument offered to
reader to allow him to discern what, without a book, he would not have seen in himself
FREEDOM'
There is only one thing that - I don't know why - men do not have the strength to desire: freedom, a lot of good big and sweet! As soon as it is lost, all possible evils arrive and without it, all other goods, corrupt
from servants, they lose their taste and flavor. It seems that men have little regard for freedom, in fact, if it is if they wished, they would get it; one would almost say that they refuse to make this precious conquest because it is too easy.
"There is only one that men, I do not know why, do not have the strength to desire: it is freedom, well so great and so sweet! As soon as it is lost, all evils ensue, and without it all other goods, corrupted by
bondage, completely lose their taste and flavor.
Freedom, men only despise it, it seems
it, because if they wanted it, they would have; as if they refused to make this precious acquisition because it is too easy "
La Boétie, Speech on voluntary servitude, La Vita Felice, Milan 2007
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