Alberto Zali

Nihilism relentlessly changes shape in the night of the contemporary age. It is the faceless, which proliferates in its own masks and makes any representation problematic. Even if one tried to identify the dangerous criminal, each would provide a different testimony: it is the new Babel of interpretations. This paper aims to find a key to commensurability between the authoritative opinions of Severino, Heidegger and Nietzsche. In the three philosophers, nihilism refers to different phenomena, which however show a family air. The middle term is provided by a divergent hermeneutic of morality, root of both transcendental psychology and cosmology. At the end of the research only the initial eeriness is fully confirmed. However the detective gains a track along which to proceed, albeit gropingly – after all he walks on conjectures and interpretations

In the wake of Nietzsche’s memento to the despisers of body, the twentieth century has developed a real obsession towards the theme of corporality. I intend to explore the sense of Zarathustra’s sentence: «There’s more reason in your body than in your best wisdom». If wisdom is the adequacy of will to the highest good, Nietzsche says that the body knows and performs the epitome of morality way better than Reason. An answer to the dark genius of Röcken can be found in Heidegger, whose works grant a new perspective on the sense of corporeal being. This can be encountered only by virtue of an ontologically different opening: bodies are the space where the blinks of heaven problematize the ontological status of earth. In conclusion, the distance between the two philosophers can be measured by comparing the meaning they assign to pain, which is the stigmata of corporeality. The result is a philosophy of parting ways, which defers to a practical-hermeneutical location the crucial decisions around what body and pain are and should be.

In conclusion to the IX book of the Republic, Socrates invites men of good will to realize a complete identity of theory and practice, inhabiting the intelligible world which they first measured with their gaze. The last two centuries, however, have sanctioned the failure of the Platonic project: the “real world” has finally turned out to be a fairy tale. An infinite ocean has taken its place, as a conflictual hermeneutic space and a perturbing sentinel that accompanies each of our dwellings. This contribution establishes a comparison with Heidegger’s work, reinterpreted as a constant attempt to “make a home” in the abysmal enigma that we have become to ourselves. Then, it tries to show an internal aporia to the German philosopher’s speech, except to articulate some consideration on the theological antinomy that stands out against the world-abyss. Ultimately cosmology passes into cosmopolitics. Still, the above mentioned identity is broken: now it is the practice that casts shadows in the pre-cosmic regions of one’s constitutive ignorance. Its attempt to give a face to the unknown is thus constantly exposed to the risk of denial.

The opposition between light and shadow passes through the history of occidental philosophy: it is the everlasting horizon where the possibility of a "sense" is to be decided. In the recent Italian thought, special focus was given to this topic by Emanuele Severino, who tacitly proposed a metaphorical reading, seeing it as a symbol of a more radical opposition between being and not-being. This article shall problematize this metaphorical character. Our hope is that of a possible theoretic profit, thanks to a certainly interested and nevertheless rigorous hermeneutic of the Platonic and Heideggerian works, which may allow to breach Severino's original structure. The ontological priority of shadow opens the wider horizon of transcendence, which may be an antidote to the difficulties which nihilism faces in its attempt to answer the ethical questions and to their utter elimination in Severino's eternalism.

In an autobiographical note released upon his retirement, the Genoese philosopher Alberto Caracciolo looks back on the most significant moments of his thirty-year engagement with Heidegger's works. His inquiry was driven by philosophical questions into the nature of death and time. He portrays Heidegger as a thinker deeply engaged with religious themes: a striking insight which sparks renewed interest among the Italian scholars, who generally viewed him merely as a follower of romanticism or even as a nihilist. Over the past seventy years, this hermeneutic paradigm has created a unique hermeneutic situation within the academic context of Genoa. Caracciolo embraces the Heideggerian truth and transmits it to his own students, who in turn inform several generations of students: much like how poets address rhapsodes, and these address the people according to Plato's famous image. However, this comparison is flawed, as Plato envisioned a process of diminishing understanding whereas the Genoese school engages in a continuous dialogue with Heidegger always seeking to uncover the inherent truths within his ideas. This present contribution adds to the critical-rhapsodic game carried out by this tradition, questioning the consistency of its interpretative move.

The relevance of phronesis to the practical and hermeneutic turn of phenomenology is well documented in a Marburg course held by Heidegger in the WS 1924-5. Not only does phronesis provide a paradigm to the late formulation of authentic existence, but its ontological implications are also at stake. Phronesis requires a radical conversion of the soul and thereby the acquisition of a new vision of the world. For the intellect performs an abstraction from the particular pathe of sensibility, phronesis as its perfection implies the active pursue of the universal good the former presents as its destination. This being the case, phronesis would be analogue to the Kantian notion of wisdom: that is the practical interpretation of the world, which is effectual only through ethical effort to realize the highest good. Yet this rises a problem: in the last two centuries the consistency of the latter has generally been denied, since its reality ultimately requires a moral author of the world considered at odds with autonomy. While we shall not take the onto-theological path to solve the aporia, the impact of negativity on phronesis as a hermeneutic act urges to be taken into account. On the one hand, the absurdum practicum is exulcerated by the deflation of values, which leads to regard any moral perspective as vapid and historically conditioned. On the other, this impasse provides a deeper insight on a meta-virtue required by phronesis, that is resoluteness. In this scenario, the meaning of resoluteness is to insist in a practical interpretation of the world, despite the defies one may experience. Yet resoluteness is only a neutral and negative meta-virtue. The positive aim of phronesis and the reality of the highest good are yet to be thematized. Still we gain one important formal indication, given that resoluteness entails the belief on the consistency of a differential gaze on things. Hence, why should we insist in a phronetic vision of the world? What are we actually looking for, that informs our behaviour?

La figura di Arianna dice il mistero del dolore. Il suo volto si illumina solo obliquamente: ora al dileguarsi dell’amato cui aveva affidato il filo rosso per uscire dal labirinto dell’esistenza – un’infinita distesa di ghiaccio le rende impraticabile il cammino; ora per le frecce spuntate del suo crudele aguzzino e sposo Dioniso, che è per lei ultima felicità e possibilità estrema di donare il proprio amore. Il rifiuto di senso ad ogni attesa non comporta che ella smetta di attendere.

Il frammento di Lenzerheide consente un notevole spazio di immersione nel pensiero nietzschiano. Esso non solo individua nel movimento di auto-superamento della morale cristiana la cagione prossima del nichilismo psicologico europeo. Approfondisce la mancanza in impossibilità di senso, dicendo l’inanità di ogni agire sullo sfondo dell’eterno ritorno che sostituisce la teoretica cristiana del tempo freccia. Il tempo ciclico sembra imporre una decisione al bivio: ad Arianna è dato insistere nell’elegia o abbracciare il proprio destino. E tuttavia il destino talvolta serba sorprese: così la veridicità morale si inganna quando intravede nel proprio tessuto vitale solo volontà di potenza, se l’eterna ultra-potenza è dalla coscienza piuttosto lamentata. Essa tradisce il desiderio che le cose prossime non siano riassorbite nella unità indistinta, che tutto conserva solo a patto di una compiuta nientificazione assiologica. La fatticità dell’amore è uno sguardo al già stato, frattura nella logica dell’essere che viene piegata in chiave ottativa.

Un antecedente illustre di questo movimento speculativo si ha in Platone, la cui teoresi sospende la redenzione estetica del negativo operata dal logos eracliteo al fine di salvare i fenomeni secondo la erotica socratica. Si tratta allora di tentare strategie di uscita dalla caverna che conservino nel noetico la verità dell’esperienza dianoetico-amorosa. La mossa platonica prospetta una via te(le)ologica, che la tensione ad estremo della prospettiva nietzschiana reinserisce a buon diritto nel serio gioco delle interpretazioni come ancora percorribile.