God, man, animal
When Nietzsche, almost one hundred and fifty years ago, formulated his diagnosis on the death of God, he thought that this unprecedented event would radically change the existence of men on earth. «Where are we going now? – He wrote – Isn't ours a continuous fall? […] Are there still highs and lows? Are we not wandering through an infinite nothingness?" And Kirilov, the character of Demons , whose words Nietzsche had carefully meditated on, thought of the death of God with the same heartfelt pathos and had drawn as a necessary consequence the emancipation of a will without limits and, at the same time, the non-sense and suicide: «If God exists, I am God... If God exists, all the will is his and I cannot escape his will. If God is not there, all will is mine and I am forced to assert my free will… I am forced to shoot myself, because the fullest expression of my free will is to kill myself."
It is a fact that one should not tire of reflecting on that a century and a half later this pathos now seems to have completely disappeared. Men have placidly survived the death of God and continue to live without fuss, so to speak as if nothing had happened. As if nothing – precisely – had happened . Nihilism, which European intellectuals had initially greeted as the most disturbing of guests, has become a lukewarm and indifferent daily condition, with which, contrary to what Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Heidegger thought, it is possible to peacefully live with, continuing to look for money and work, to get married and divorce, to travel and go on holiday. Today man wanders without giving a thought in a no-man's land, beyond not only the divine and the human, but also (with all due respect to those who cynically theorize a return of men to the nature from which they come) the animal .
Certainly everyone will agree that all this makes no sense, that without the divine we no longer know how to think about the human and the animal, but this simply means that everything and nothing are now possible. Nothing: that is, that at the limit there is no longer the world, but language remains (this is, if you think about it, the only meaning of the term "nothing" - that language destroys, as it is doing, the world, believing it can survive it ). Everything: perhaps even - and this is decisive for us - the appearance of a new figure - new, that is, archaic and, at the same time, very close, so close that we cannot see it. Whose and what? Of the divine, the human, the animal?
We have always thought of the living within this triad, both prestigious and uncertain, always playing them off against each other or with each other. Hasn't the time come to remember when the living thing was not yet a god, nor a man, nor an animal, but simply a soul, that is, a life?
While
To free our thinking from the traps that prevent it from taking flight, it is best to first accustom it to no longer think in nouns (which, as the name itself unequivocally betrays, imprison it in that "substance" with which a thousand-year-old tradition has believed of being able to grasp being), but rather (as William James once suggested) in prepositions and perhaps in adverbs. That the thought, that the mind itself has, so to speak, a non-substantial, but an adverbial character, is what the singular fact reminds us of that in our language to form an adverb it is enough to combine the term "mind" with an adjective: lovingly, cruelly, wonderfully . The noun – the substantial – is quantitative and imposing, the adverb qualitative and light; and, if you find yourself in difficulty, it will certainly not be a "what" that will get you out of trouble, but a "how", an adverb and not a noun. "What to do?" paralyzes and nails you, only "how to do it?" it opens a way out for you.
So to think about time, which has always put the minds of philosophers to the test, nothing is more useful than relying - as poets do - on adverbs: "always", "never", "already", "immediately". , «yet» - and, perhaps – most mysterious of all – «while». «While» (from the Latin dum interim ) does not designate a time, but a «in the meantime», that is, a curious simultaneity between two actions or two times. Its equivalent in verbal modes is the gerund, which is neither strictly a verb nor a noun, but supposes a verb or a noun to accompany it: "but still go and as you go listen" says Virgil to Dante and everyone remembers Romagna of Pascoli, «the town where, as we go, the blue vision of S. Marino accompanies us». Let us reflect on this special time, which we can only think of through an adverb and a gerund: it is not a measurable interval between two times, indeed it is not even a time properly, but almost an immaterial place in which we somehow dwell , in a sort of resigned and interlocutory perenniality. True thought is not that which deduces and infers according to a before and after: "I think, therefore I am", but, more soberly: "while I think, I am". And the time we live in is not the abstract and frantic escape of elusive moments: it is this simple, immobile "while", in which we are always already without realizing it - our small eternity, which no broken clock will ever be able to measure.
Ethics, politics and comedy
It is necessary to reflect on the singular circumstance that the two maxims that have attempted to define with greater acuteness the ethical and political status of humanity in modernity come from comedy. Homo homini lupus – the cornerstone of Western politics – is in Plautus ( Asinaria , v.495, where he jokingly warns against those who do not know who the other man is) and homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto , perhaps the happiest formulation of the foundation of all ethics, we read in Terence ( Heautontim. , v.77). No less surprising is that the definition of the principle of law "to give to each his own" ( suum cuique tribuere ) was perceived by the ancients as the most appropriate definition of what is in question in the comedy: a gloss on Terence states it without reservation : comic par excellence is to assign unicuique personae quod propriom est . If you assign to each man the character that defines him, he becomes ridiculous. Or, more generally, any attempt to define what is human necessarily ends in comedy. This is what the caricature shows, in which the gesture of grasping the humanity of each individual at all costs turns, according to all evidence, into a mockery, and is truly laughable.
Plato must have had something like this in mind when he modeled the characters in his dialogues on the decidedly comical mimes of Sophro and Epicharmus. "Know thyself" is the antithetical principle to all tragic arrogance and can only give rise to a game and a joke, even if these can be and are perfectly serious. The human, in fact, is not a substance whose boundaries can be traced once and for all - it is, rather, an always ongoing process, in which man does not cease to be inhuman and animal and, at the same time, to become human and speaking. For this reason, while tragedy brings to expression what is not human and, at the point in which the hero suddenly and bitterly becomes aware of his inhumanity, ends in mutism, the person , that is, the comic mask, entrusts the smile as the only possible enunciation of what is no longer and yet is still human. And against the West's incessant, hateful attempt to assign the definition of ethics and politics to tragedy, it is necessary to remember every time that man's habitation on earth is a comedy - not divine perhaps, but which nevertheless betrays laughed his secret, subdued solidarity with the idea of happiness.
Great video