CENTRE FOR ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY
Cassino, Italy, Sala degli Abati (Badial Palace), Saturday 5 October 2024
the SEMINAR was held: CRISIS OF TOTALITY AND DECLINE OF IDEOLOGIES
Moderators (in their capacity as Co-Directors of Civitas et humanitas, Professors Paolo Russo and Pasquale Giustiniani
The seminar in fact took its cue from the volumes from the annals of ethical-political culture CIVITAS ET HUMANITAS:
the volumes were illustrated by Professor TERESA SERRA (La Sapienza University, Rome)
- first volume under consideration: Crisis of ideologies and new ethical-social instances (Mondostudio, 2020);
Speakers:
Pietro Boccia - Sociologist
Permanent and inclusive education as a way out of the crisis of ideologies and neoliberal/totalitarian capitalism;
Michele Indellicato – University of Bari
Totality as synchronization between horizontal transcendence and vertical transcendence in Karol Woityla;
Giuseppe Cantarano – University of Calabria
Crisis of ideologies in the twilight of politics;
Giovanni Turco – University of Udine
The right of rights. Louis' philosophical-juridical contribution; Lachance, through and beyond the crisis of totality;
Alberto Nave - University of Cassino and Southern Lazio
From weak thought to the "weakness of thought" and the nemesis of reason (against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of totality)
- second volume under review: Crisis of totality and risk of survival (Mondostudio, 2021)
Speakers:
Pasquale Giustiniani – Suor Orsola Benincasa University - Naples
The whole is superior to the part, of which it determines the scope and limits. A criterion for the season of "resilience";
Lelio Imbriglio - E-Campus University – Novedrate (CO)
Crisis of totality and new ethical-pedagogical demands;
Aldo Gervasio – Psycho-pedagogist
The mystagogical pedagogy of Ignatius of Loyola;
M. Gabriella De Santis – University of Cassino and Southern Lazio
Complex society, globalization and pedagogical-educational paradigms
Michele Leone - Musicologist
Mysticism between identity and otherness in the songs of Franco Battiato
Cassino, Italy, October 4, 2024, Prof. Pasquale Giustiniani
Presents the eleventh and twelfth volumes of the series “Civitas et humanitas”, concerning respectively: Crisis of ideologies and new ethical-social instances and crisis of totality and risk of survival.
These Annals of ethical-political culture, created for the initiative and generosity of Prof. Alberto Nave – coordinator of the Civitas et Humanitas Movement, generated in connection with the University of lower Lazio of Cassino – connected to the Center for Italian Philosophy, today directed by Aldo Meccariello with headquarters in Terni, can today celebrate two volumes XI and XII of the series. Both help us to put under the spotlight of our intellectual light full of love (Paradiso, canto XXX, v. 40), two notable profiles, both significantly reread under the profile of the crisis, to which some of the Authors of the volume oppose possible exits in the path of ethics and even in the path of the religious. Pareyson already conceived the idea of ​​God as crucial in the definition of existentialism as a philosophy of the finite, destined to resolve itself, as a philosophy of choice, in spiritualism. For Pareyson, the historical crisis is a cultural and above all philosophical crisis: the crisis of philosophy, for which, with a chiasmus of a typically Castellian tone, the philosophy of the crisis is the crisis of philosophy, it is the crisis of idealism in its Hegelian culmination. In turn, Castelli is the one who remains most, also problematically, tied to the idea of ​​existentialism as a philosophy of crisis understood as structural. Castelli's reflections. which introduced the single issue of «Archivio di filosofia» of 1945 and also the political sense of the organization of the 1946 congress, directed at that time towards the easiest reading at a superficial level: the crisis is the abyss into which the entire world and Europe even more found itself precipitated at the end of the Second World War, the abyss of material destruction, of the millions of deaths, of the extermination in the concentration and extermination camps, of which there was still little awareness, of the dehumanization legacy of totalitarianism. Existentialism would be, as a philosophy closely connected to life and philosophy of individual commitment and responsibility, the possible cultural response to the metaphysical abstractions of idealism and its epigones. Christian existentialism, described by these authors as a philosophy of crisis, could only translate into the crisis of philosophy, so that the alternative of Christian existentialism founds spiritualism, providing the reasons for the choice, once made one can resume philosophizing, despite the crisis. Christian existentialism, which Castelli reluctantly took up, certainly does not present itself as a philosophy of transit towards another, nor even as a foundation in the sense proposed by Pareyson. The exclusion that Castelli gave is a subtle but clear ridge: «A Christian philosophy is possible if it is anti-intellectual», or if it is an edifying and persuasive philosophy, that is to say a philosophy that assumes the ultimate incomprehensibility of existence and choice.
In the everlasting contrast between crisis and progress, between the cognitive and transformative power of the human person and the unpredictability of his creations, the sense of human limit is proposed again, a limit that, apparently overcome or moved further and further forward, reappears in the aspect of the absolute unpredictability of all the consequences of the choices that are made: it is a total ecological and environmental crisis, which no longer spares any recess of our planet; we are in the crisis and in the total eclipse of great guiding ideas of the past that had maintained and supported every social and civil development; the hidden reasons that remain hidden and unexplored for the current upheavals; it is a ruinous parable of our time, in which a faith in "progress", typical of times that are increasingly distant from ours, from the certainties of modernity are now supplanted by the "post-modern", which seems to have put every possibility into crisis and question. In a stimulating, acute and lively booklet, "The Fourth Man. Postmodernity or the crisis of modernity”, Gianfranco Morra effectively outlined the stages of the descending parabola of man’s self-understanding in the West: the “first” man is the homo theoreticus, the cosmotheoròs of Greek antiquity, the man who discovers through wonder and amazement the sources of “philosophy”, because all knowledge that man can achieve is first of all philìa, friendship, of the sophòn, of the wise man, who can only be God; and it is such also as science, and not only as logic and dialectics of pure concepts; he is followed by the man of the Christian faith, entirely open and devoted to transcendence but certainly not incapable of taking up and preserving, keeping alive, the motives and impulses of the “cosmotheoretical” of the Greeks; At the beginning of the modern age, the man of “reason” follows, understood as the universal capacity for free thought and capable of embracing all of humanity in the spirit of cosmopolitanism and universal brotherhood. This is the man who still believes strongly in the universality of moral values, the man who obeys the imperative sapere aude, have the courage to know, forcefully recalled by Kant (“What is Enlightenment”). This is followed by the great warnings of Husserl (The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1936), who never ceased to ask himself the reasons why there is a profound crisis in the sciences which, despite their continuous successes, always retain their enduring relevance. Perhaps philosophy no longer plays any relevant role, the field being entirely occupied by scientific knowledge, the only reliable voice and, today, by its hyper-technological results, which are the cyborg and the so-called artificial intelligence?
The eleventh volume of Civitas et Humanitas is, therefore, appropriately titled Crisis of ideologies and new ethical-social instances, Mondostudio, Cassino 2020, pages 244. The specific section of the volume, which is also an annual scientific journal, presents the contributions of Franco Bosio, Teresa Serra, Giovanni Turco, Alberto Nave, Fiorenza Taricone, Clementina Gily Reda, Orlando Todisco, Michele Indellicato, Giuseppe Cantarano, Pietro Boccia and Lelio Imbriglio. Wanting to focus, for reasons of time, especially on the twelfth volume - which seems to me more akin to the developments of the volume currently being prepared -, I would like to recall here the question, in that eleventh volume, posed by Pino Cantillo, on "how to overcome the terrible year 2020, which marked the beginning of what would become the long season of the global pandemic". The question that circulates in the essays of the eleventh volume is related, precisely, to how to place oneself beyond the crisis of ideologies, especially of scientific-technological ideology, of feminist ideology, linked to the question of emancipationist-feminist movements, not without looking, as Orlando Todisco does in the volume under discussion, at the sacred, in an era that someone has defined as post-sacral and in which, as Indellicato recalls, both personalism as anti-ideology returns to the fore, as well as, as Cantarano recalls, as an opportunity for a relaunch of political ontology, or, as Pietro Boccia recommends, a stimulus to re-start on the paths of permanent and inclusive education; or, on a similar wavelength, re-launch, as Imbrigli does, new pedagogical-formative instances for the exit from the crisis of ideologies. All this not without a re-opening...