It is no secret that I also write for the newspapers, and “professional” philosophers view that as something of a blot on philosophy. You start doing it because it’s a chance to earn, then you keep on for ideological reasons, or to justify yourself, or because you discover that it is not such a base occupation after all. Actually, in my considered view, there is no difference between what I do when I am teaching in the university, and what I do when I write a column for a newspaper.
These days, the media presence of cultural luminaries is normally justified by the high status their scientific or scholarly achievement has won them. It is obvious that when Rita Levi-Montalcini offers an ethical or political opinion it isn’t scientific discourse, but since she is a Nobel Laureate, people ask her things like which party to vote for. Nothing personal against Levi-Montalcini, but in general this seems to me foolishness: there are pure mathematicians who are pure asses, and who utter inane opinions about life. But I believe things are different when it comes to philosophers. At any rate, I for my part feel specifically authorized to do the job of writing what are (sometime scornfully) called “opinion” pieces as something proper to my profession and not a side benefit of being an established philosopher, deriving authority from work done in my own field. I think it is very important to emphasize this point, because it bears directly on my vision of philosophy, and on what it is philosophers are supposed to be doing.
As regards myself, I’ve always made it my goal to serve salvation, but not primarily my own. Often I’ve said to myself: I have to perform well as a philosophy professor, because it’s my job. But ultimately “because it’s my job” just means: because I am of service to someone. Now, from the time I began to study philosophy, I already felt myself an educator, and wanted to teach; hence my activism in Azione Cattolica, in the youth movements, and the jobs I held (and the volunteering I did) teaching young people.1
In reality I’ve always been a guest speaker, when I was in high school I used to go around giving talks on Maritain’s Integral Humanism. That’s how my philosophical vocation began. But whatever slice of my inner self there may be in my philosophical practice, whatever modicum of personal participation and involvement, lies on the border between philosophy and religion. That, I believe, gives my philosophical style and my writing their dominant tone.
Only with Belief in Belief,2 in 1996, did I began to write in a style that was not only unsuited to the genre of the treatise (sometimes I find I am unable to write treatise-style even when the situation calls for it), but also foregrounded the first person and reflected upon my own writerly situation. If there is a stylistic or literary “turn” in my philosophical writing, it flows from a kind of religious intimacy, but which I still manage to bind to philosophy. It’s not out of the question that this may lead me to write differently in the future, and maybe to work differently in philosophy. About that I am noncommittal as yet, because basically, deep inside, I am diffident of my individuality, and of that which is personal. Weak thought for me connotes a certain intrinsic irony about subjective emphasis, stylization of any kind, and overly private and sentimental writing. When Derrida starts out with observations like “We are not far from Rome, but are no longer in Rome. Here we are literally isolated for two days, insulated on the heights of Capri,”3 he fails to enchant me. Unlike Rorty, I am not a fan of the personal note in Derrida’s philosophical style.4 On the contrary I accuse him of literariness in the negative sense of the term. I should add that in general his texts show this defect only at the beginning; what he has to say subsequently is usually more to my taste. In a sense, the exordium on a personal note is like a sort of Wittgensteinian ladder to him, so I shouldn’t be too harsh.
One always feels blocked at the start, of course, and hermeneutics helps one get over it by making an explicit theme of precomprehension, the act of setting down clearly what one already knows about the theme one wishes to address, and setting out clearly one’s motives for wanting to do so. Sure, the easy way past the block would be to dabble in psychology and the sociology of knowledge, but I don’t believe that extrinsic factors like that really cut it: hermeneutics is calling us to a different way of expressing the significance of the beginning.
The fact is that what we are really dealing with in our work, and not by accident but fundamentally, is primarily and predominantly the problem of the beginning. Philosophy is, still today, thought about the beginnings, the first foundations, and bears the weight of the whole system of second-order modes of knowing. And the second-order modes of knowing also have a philosophical meaning or dimension, inasmuch as, like it or not, they always have a problem of (relating to) beginning. When you get right down to it, what I called the block at having to begin has nothing to do with psychology, it is something specifically philosophical: it’s the block of the existential condition, it’s the character both personal and impersonal of thought in the effectuality of existence. In other words, it’s the same image with which Kierkegaard critiqued, and at the same time reformulated, the Hegelian problem of commencing. From this perspective, writing in the first person is often just an inflection of the problem of beginning, just a way to render explicit the arbitrary (personal?) and at the same time necessary (suprapersonal?) nature of what gets said and how it gets said.
To write in the first person to me means putting oneself in question within a common project, rather than what Rorty calls “falling back on private fantasy,”5 or reducing philosophy to a textual practice for what Aldo Gargani calls “the redefinition of oneself”—goals of little importance, as I see it. I come back to what I said above about writing for the newspapers: in philosophy I believe that some political good is always at stake, some question of political community. That is what justifies philosophy as teaching, philosophy in the newspapers, and philosophy in politics too. It’s this last bend in the road I find myself facing today.
I reject the notion that this is a compensatory move, a way to evade a certain objective and historical crisis in philosophy, as Rorty seems to have viewed the relation between Derrida and literature. From certain vantage points, to shift from philosophy to some other human science or cultural practice amounts to a (col)lapse or a capitulation. I once heard Pareyson say ruefully, when one of his philosophy students changed his major to history, “he fell into history.” Imagine what he might be saying about me if he were still alive: that I have taken a dive into politics, without a doubt. But I am unable to share his outlook.
In my case, the continuity seems to me evident. I began to study philosophy because I felt myself caught up in a project to transform humanity, a program of emancipation. There might be a connection to my proletarian roots: it’s proletarians who can’t imagine really changing their own lives if they don’t change the world…. If your parents are rich lawyers, you can say without any moral effort: I want to be a lawyer too. But if you’re the son of a mother who was left a widow by a policeman who emigrated to Turin from the deep south, your own social unease motivates you to project a radical transformation; it’s virtually preordained.
In any case, I began to become aware of who I was when I was reading adventure stories at the age of twelve. The answers seemed obvious then: I immediately began to imagine myself involved in an undertaking of historical and emancipatory scope, I wanted to help establish the Italian republic in 1946 and I wanted to help the Christian Democrats win in 1948. I was ten in ‘46 and twelve in ‘48, yet I could tell that something important was at stake in Italy in those years. It was mainly, I believe, the intense involvement of persons of religious conscience in the political project that Christian Democracy represented at that time, before the postwar reconstruction got under way. Later of course the Christian Democrats turned into something else, but back then the link was perfectly clear.
In a sense I was born philosophically within that outlook—which from the religious point of view had its defects, like being moralistic rather than mystical, for example. I basically enrolled in philosophy because it seemed to me a way to take these ideas further, and to do so as a professional, an academic. I wrote my thesis on the concept of doing in Aristotle,6 because I felt I was part of an effort to construct a new Christian humanism against the Pharisees. Umberto Eco had a similar project when he did his research on the aesthetic problem in Thomas Aquinas. What was the upshot in my case? My original goals evolved into an affinity for the critical thinkers of modernity, and that was obviously something that was going to happen. Why would someone turn to Nietzsche after having studied Aristotle? Because someone who had studied Aristotle in search of an alternative to liberal-individualist, eudemonistic modernity, was pretty much fated to stumble across the critics of modern individualism.
There may be a certain Platonism about this kind of philosophical vocation. Plato is the supreme philosopher-politician, and while it may be paradoxical, it is not accidental that Plato was also the philosopher of Platonism, meaning of pure theory, of mathematism in philosophy. Be that as it may, I see the philosophical vocation as profoundly grounded in the polis. Philosophy didn’t just happen to be born in the open “political” setting of ancient Greece. If we go looking for philosophy beyond the confines of the West, we have to stretch things a bit to find it. The Vedanta, the Veda, the Upanishads—are they philosophy? I am convinced that philosophy is a historical science, not just in the sense I’ve been proposing, but also in the sense that it is born together with a history of culture and a certain historical culture, and I don’t know if it will die with this culture. What you might call Husserlian caution is always in order: something comes about, and it may not necessarily be ephemeral. Once medical science arises, people quit going to witch doctors, and that is a duty not natural but historical, a matter of faithfulness to history. It’s also the only one we have, seeing that our knowledge of nature amounts to very little.
So, if this link between philosophy and the polis is clear, it ought to be equally clear why I can be drawn to theory without feeling that writing for the newspapers is a compromising activity for a theoretically oriented philosopher—and the historians of philosophy among my academic colleagues generally find me liable on just that point, calling even my theoretical interest “journalistic.” Theory itself may be more or less “direct,” or rather it branches into sub-disciplines. You can be a theorist and study nothing but logic, or epistemology. But I believe that, in any case, if you forget what drew you into your field, if you forget the political interest that spurred you, the religious interest, the emancipatory interest in general, you end up reproducing “the crisis of the European sciences”: once again theory can’t (in the best of cases) be anything more than a simple literary exercise, or artistic-philosophical experimentation, or (more commonly), an exercise in individualism for its own sake, serving private interests and power.
Philosophy, project, historicity, theory, emancipation—for me they all mean the same thing. And that of course makes fitting in a problem, and influences how I view professional status, the philosophical profession. In that respect I believe I have my shortcomings, but it is also the type of philosophical practice in which I believe that inspires many of my “nonprofessional” or not wholly “academic” decisions and positions.
One aspect that might be worth bearing in mind is that a purely political vocation is a little bit different from a philosophical vocation oriented toward politics, like the one I am trying to outline. The vocation to do politics as a philosopher, to work for emancipation as a philosopher and not as a dedicated political professional, to me meant making a choice that was somehow more universal, less directly involved, yielding fewer immediate political or legislative results. It was more educational. Pedagogy, the idea of educating humanity, of putting the transformation of mankind ahead of the transformation of structures, had a lot to do with my choice to do politics as a philosopher. My democratic intention pointed me that way, rather than toward direct, immediate involvement in politics: if you are democratic, your job is above all to produce what used to be labeled theory, meaning ideas, cultural stances …
Naturally a lot of existential randomness gets mixed in with all this; at any rate encounters and opportunities seem to play a large part. But fundamentally the differences and affinities between the philosophical profession oriented toward politics in the way I have outlined and the political profession properly speaking are easy to sketch. Above all, the philosophical outlook is more obviously critical of the state of things. Real politics involves making choices day by day, year by year, legislature by legislature, and at certain points it must inevitably close off debate about the pros and cons, stop feeling around for possibilities and make a decision. It’s more pragmatic and less theoretical. At the same time, I’ve always seen myself as an ally of politicians, not as someone doing something completely different: it’s simply that there was a décalage, a gap or a distance with respect to the immediate situation. In a way, I have to admit, this distance guarantees certain privileges for a philosopher: life runs a little smoother if you don’t continually have to answer the question of what you would do tomorrow if you were the prime minister. Anyhow, I have the impression of working toward the same goals but at a different level. In 1968, when the students were occupying the university, Pareyson used to say “I am much more revolutionary than they are.” I knew just what he meant and felt the same way, because we were reading Heidegger and thinking about metaphysics and how it had to end, and these in their way were projects for radical transformation.
Pareyson also had a theory of the specification of spiritual activities that justified his outlook in robust terms. For him, the doing or making that specificates (si specifica) as pure doing or making, as pure formativity, is art.7 He was like Dilthey in assuming that the life of the spirit is a unity that specificates in the individual vocations and yet maintains a certain continuity. Just as, in making art, you express all your spirituality, likewise in doing politics or philosophy you express all your spirituality, nor could it be otherwise. So the fundamental idea was to maintain the unity of the spiritual life while knowingly accepting one’s own finiteness, and therefore choosing and accepting one’s own specialization.
When Dilthey speaks of historiography or art as ways of escaping the limits of individual specialization, what he meant was: spiritual life is the totality, it’s the ensemble of the possibilities with respect to the littleness of your situation that you somehow summon up there before you, while remaining in your specialization. As I see it Dilthey was still too much of an empiricist to grasp the importance of this thesis, because he resolved the vision of the possibilities only in the imagination, in other words the imagination for him was the faculty of grasping the ensemble of the possibilities of the life of the spirit. In Heidegger there is something more: Heidegger effectively disrupts the situation determined by the contemplation of Being as distinct from beings.
A lot of what I have said to this point has its warrant in the notion that there is a unity to the spiritual life. I grew up cultivating the evangelical saying “to save your soul, you have to lose it.” To me it feels drastic to say “I’m not coming this evening because I don’t concern myself with those matters, they don’t pertain to my vocation.” It’s like answering “Don’t you know who I am?” It’s impossible for me to refuse with equanimity when someone asks me to commit my time. I only say “I can’t” when I already have another commitment lined up and really can’t be in two places at once. But I choke on words like “that’s not my vocation, that’s not my specialty,” and so on. They seem excessively egotistical, too self-important, even faintly ridiculous.
This has to do directly with the problem of the philosophical vocation in the current context of the teaching of philosophy in Italy. There are some who seclude themselves in their research into things like the historiography of philosophy because they feel threatened by too many calls, too many appeals, too much of a public profile. I understand them perfectly: barriers certainly do protect one’s tranquillity, being a specialist must do the nerves a power of good (though you wouldn’t know it from the concrete cases I’ve seen). It is sometimes said that the characteristic of philosophers is that they have a certain rapport (which may even be critical) with totality. Georg Simmel depicted the philosopher as “he who possesses an organ that perceives and reacts to the totality of Being.” The ordinary person is always concerned with one thing or another, but the philosopher has “a sense for the wholeness of things and life.”8 Given that premise, it would be hard to deny that under certain circumstances there is something radically defective about narrow specialism in philosophy, and that is basically what I was referring to when I spoke about “losing one’s soul.”
I don’t, however, believe that Simmel’s definition can be accepted without reservation: in general one isn’t born a philosopher, it’s something one becomes. Pareyson used to say that those who sign up for a major in philosophy mostly do so after giving up on law because the lineup at registration is too long, and it wasn’t an entirely facetious remark in my view. A vocation is made up of so many external and contingent factors: maybe if I had been rich I would have enrolled in medicine or some other faculty where they take attendance at lectures. One of the reasons I enrolled in the faculty of Letters and Philosophy was certainly that I could skip lectures but still sit the exams, and I needed gainful employment. We tend to forget how much is fortuitous in every vocation: naturally, as Pareyson also used to say, all that fortuitousness becomes a vocation when you interpret it and shoulder it.
Fortuitous circumstances, though, are mostly just the start of a trajectory that is driven much more by necessity, in form and in detail, than it may appear to be at the outset. There is a contingency in every professional vocation that transforms in part, or may transform, into necessity. For example there is a certain determinism in the affinities that one goes on to discover, or forge. Heidegger’s “vocation” came from theology, from an initial philosophical-theological-religious inclination that left an indelible imprint on the kind of philosophy he did. Husserl practiced an entirely different philosophy, and he began as a mathematician. This implies a further qualification, a specification of the route: chance becomes necessity, but it doesn’t just become a generic vocation to do philosophy, it becomes a road, a cultural and spiritual path.
Reflecting on Husserl and his origins as a mathematician, I sometimes find myself wondering whether what he did was really “philosophy.” For me the only philosophy, the only way of doing philosophy, is the one I have described, which arises out of religion and politics. Moreover: I believe that this way of thinking and practicing philosophy is what distinguishes it from any other scholarly or scientific profession. In that respect I disagree with what Husserl says in The Crisis of the European Sciences, to the effect that there are the scholars and scientists, and then there are the philosophers, the “functionaries of humanity.” I believe, on the contrary, that whoever is not doing philosophy is a diminished human being, or a “lowly laborer.” Any effort to gaze tolerantly on the other human conditions seems to me slightly hypocritical. I am convinced that when you get right down to it, nobody can seriously “specialize” unless they are permnanently alive to the totality of spiritual life: that is what’s “philosophical” in every human life.
Naturally I don’t regard my doctor friends, or chemist friends, or cyclist friends as poor wretches. But I do ask myself what those who don’t do my job have on their minds when they are not doing their jobs. What does a poultry-retailer do when he’s not retailing poultry? I sometimes think that the importance of eros in the lives of persons lies in the fact that it fills up exactly those blank spaces that aren’t filled by work.
Now philosophy is what you are thinking about when you have nothing else in particular to think about…. In that sense, perhaps doing philosophy corresponds not so much to a talent or a vocation as to a defect, or rather the reinforcement and institutionalization of a defect. In philosophy, what is being thought “professionally” is the interludes of existential specification, when professional specialization is dormant and the totality of spiritual life assumes higher relief.
Evidently an inclination of this kind only occurs in a certain kind of society, under specific cultural conditions. If the academic study of philosophy did not exist, if it weren’t notionally feasible as a profession, nobody would dream of emphatically qualifying the absence of specific thoughts as thought. So, once again, philosophy is merely historical finiteness in its pure state.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m a parasite, and it isn’t just an ironic pose—I mean, the question comes to mind: how long will the government continue to pay the salaries of philosophy professors? Philosophy certainly isn’t a “natural” profession. It’s not just an oddity that philosophers in the past ground lenses for a living, and there’s always a hint of dilettantism clinging to philosophy that imparts an instability to the trade. The fact is that while the problem of The Crisis of the European Sciences, in other words that of holding one’s own specialty in relation to the totality of spiritual life, may be marginally present in every profession, in philosophy it is structural.
Yet when I ponder these problems of specialization and non-specialization, I realize with dismay that I am only talking about 0.0001 percent of humanity. There are people for whom the problem of specialization doesn’t arise because their problem is paid work of any kind. There’s a mass of unskilled labor in the world and Bildung is the last thing on their mind because they are living hand to mouth. Would my aunt, who was a worker in a factory making socks, even have understood this problem?
The life of most of humanity is spiritually fulfilled by religion and eros: an oscillation between the afterlife of the soul and the survival of the species. In villages where people are dying of hunger, what sense could a problem of this kind have? I myself am sometimes appalled at the narrowness of the horizons that bound my own reflections: I’m the one preaching “loss of soul,” but I spend my time talking about myself and those who ply trades on the same spectrum as mine—civil servants in other fields, or professionals, or even workers at Fiat. But the bottom layer of the proletariat, primitive peoples, the urban poor squatting in the streets of Calcutta, what could the things I am talking about ever matter to them?
So, cards on the table: it’s my belief that when I do philosophy, I produce a discourse that only matters to a certain slice of the world, and that’s all. True, philosophy legitimately and dutifully proposes to be a universal discourse, but only inasmuch as it cannot be. Such is the pressure of the whole, of the totality of spiritual life. How do I relate myself to the question of the urban poor squatting in the streets of Calcutta, whether or not it’s raining, whether or not there’s anything to eat? What do I think of my universality vis-à-vis that? I think a bit like Husserl thinks when he talks about the witch doctors and the medical doctors, in other words they would need to have the capacity to compare their existence with mine. And it is my ineluctable belief that they would choose mine, or at any rate would choose a kind of awareness capable of entering into dialogue with me, and with other forms of awareness. I do not feel myself more evolved than primitive peoples, but I do think that even just the possibility of communication, of imagining a possible communication with different cultures, puts me in a position of privilege, and basically a certain primacy.
The idea of universality as a construct, of the universal as task or project or guiding idea—the idea fundamentally driving all of philosophical culture since Kant—must be bound rigorously to a political project. Indeed, it demands to be recognized as a political construct to all intents and purposes. This is not a eurocentric idea, even if it is a product of Europe. And it has an objective correlative. Right now we have the problem of technological universality, which has the capacity to spread without bearing with it the value horizons that have made it possible in the West, or is threatening to spread without bearing them, or may be quite incapable of bearing them. When the Japanese master electronic technology but not democracy, a properly philosophical problem is presented.
I believe that philosophy has plenty of work to do here. And the European Parliament is an ideal place for it to get done, because it is much more about trust in the possibility of modifying customs and cultures than it is about legislative platforms. The relative vacuity of what goes on in the European Parliament is sometimes disconcerting: a lot of money gets spent on just uttering declarations. If you think about it, though, it is a lot like philosophy: less immediately efficacious on the plane of day-to-day politics, but a source of hope that vaster projects bringing change in the long term may be realized. Philosophical responsibilities are like that, you have to shoulder them even when it doesn’t feel particularly gratifying and costs a lot of effort.