Just Making an Inventory

Introduction:  From Inventory to Choice

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

-Winston Churchill

In an article published on June 27, 1965 in the Italian newspaper “Il Corriere della Sera”, the poet Eugenio Montale, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, dialogued at a distance with another Italian intellectual, Enzo Siciliano, highlighting a very profound theme of discussion contained in the following statement: almost all the artists of the sixties “offer us inventories and not expressions”.

It is no coincidence that the title of the article was “Soltanto inventariare” (“Just making an inventory”).

If we extend this inspired concept from the artists of the sixties to all the intellectual production of the last sixty years, to all philosophical, political and scientific thought, we will find ourselves before a very worrying dichotomy: Mankind is now torn apart and disheartened, if not actually annihilated in the “inventory” mode and not in the “decision-making” mode, the mode of the “choice” . The “choice”, the basis of freedom and dignity of man, the result of critical and painful elaboration of human thought through the centuries, has dissolved, liquefied in the “inventory” of everything and everyone eliminating the “choice” itself as a free and conscious manifestation of the determination of both individual human existence and society as a whole.

For years we review reality as it is, we translate it into algorithms for computers and servers, we homogenize it and load it into silicon components, we make it the object of “enumeration and counting” leaving the so-called “Semantic Web” to provide relationships and interpretations between men and thoughts, between words and things, between freedom and hidden manipulation, between true democracy and oclocracy. It is not by chance that the Sciences that since the eighties have had more popular “success” have been Computer Science and Semiotics. This last one its detractors accuse to have discovered the “obvious”, to be interested in everything (and therefore in nothing!) and to have annulled the traditional scales of values, indeed to operate in the total absence of values.The criticisms are not all true and not to be taken seriously in most cases: it is a useful thought activity to reflect on the production of signs and its relationships, implications and applications.

But this “success” lets us understand and perceive the abdication of the majority of men to the critical and thinking activity, a choice constituted by intellectual sloth and therefore a ” not-choice”, founding such activities on the emptiness, on the nothingness of any scale of values. A constant “inventory” to the detriment of “choice”, of “criticism” of “thought” and of “freedom”.

The present work (and also my writings previously published on Voegelinview), without any pretension of completeness and with an exposition as popular as possible, tries to reflect on the “choice”, on the “history”, on the “challenge” that humanity must face in order to give back to itself the “center” of epistemic and philosophical dimension and reflection that concerns it and belongs to it by right. A choice between freedom and dictatorship, between constructive and edifying “critique” and “death of thought” with brains in the heap, between life and death, to get out of the “inventory society” and regain the dimension, sometimes tragic but authentic, of choice. 

I. The Concept of “People” : from “We the People”  to “Who’s the People?”

“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”

-Mark Twain

At the National Gallery in London is exposed a painting by Hans Holbein the young, painted in 1553, entitled “Ambassadors”. It represents, life-size, the ambassador of Francis I to Henry VIII, Jean de Dinteville, and his friend George de Selve, bishop of Lavaur. The painting is very simple: the two characters, in all their majestic figure, are portrayed leaning against a piece of furniture on which astronomical and musical instruments are clearly visible; looking a little further down there is a curious object, located at the feet of the ambassadors. Whoever wants to understand what that elusive figure is will make useless efforts, since the closer he gets to the painting the more incomprehensible it becomes, while we find ourselves overwhelmed by the powerful and grandiose figures of the two ambassadors.

The painting evidently wants to be an exaltation of power: but appearances can be deceptive! In fact, if the museum visitor, leaving the room, turns around, he sees to his surprise a different painting: the figures of the ambassadors vanish and in their place we see a distinct and sinister skull! The power of men vanishes with their vanity and death reigns over all.

The optical phenomenon described has a name: anamorphosis. It has been described and studied with incomparable competence by one of the greatest and most original historians and experts of art, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, who has dedicated a whole life to researching these “aberrations”, “deformations”, which then turned out to be the reality of the work, its intimate essence, beyond the appearance of a single perspective view.

Reality and appearance, mask and face: it all starts with Descartes.

It is a Cartesian problem, precisely, that the object to appear as it is must absolutely not resemble the model, as a Cartesian problem is the subjective reality of things, which has established a new ontological consideration heedless of the anthropocentric and geocentric systems that until then had sought their fixed point outside the thinking subject.

The discussed German political scientist Carl Schmitt, in his work “Political Romanticism”, in the second part, dedicated to the analysis of the structure of the romantic spirit, in the first chapter entitled “La recherce de la réalité”, starts from Descartes and from the fracture he caused to the thought, with the establishment of the dualism “thought and being” that will immediately translate into concept-reality, spirit-nature, subject-object, to describe the essential characters of Romanticism. It is helpful to start with this chapter of Schmitt’s work in order to begin to understand what Schmitt means by “people” and how this concept acts within our political and social times.

In the opinion of Schmitt, the German romanticism of the beginning of the nineteenth century belongs to that current of thought proper to an aestheticizing (lyrical) sentimentalism, the one that is first found in Shaftesbury in opposition to rationalism, leading to a transformation of metaphysics and its problems, up to a representation of God and the Absolute integrally new compared to the previous ages. The “transcendent God”, the oldest form of transcendent reality on which metaphysics was firmly bound, was already eliminated long ago in the considerations of the thinkers of the time and at this point comes the question of who, in historical practice, would have inherited the functions of God, who would have constituted “essentially” “the highest form of reality and the supreme source of legitimacy”. Two new entities, real according to these thinkers, two demiurges assert themselves and with them a new ontology is founded: Mankind and History. Mankind has different forms and always plays a revolutionary function (in the best meaning of the term) of the old schemes: people, community, human society. The other demiurge, History, is represented as a conservative God, always ready to restore what the other, Mankind, has revolutionized, so restricting the people within individual entities governed by particular laws and languages as an expression of their national and spiritual individuality: the “Volksgeist” is found only historically.

But in this forge of History an objective reality is attributed to the People (a forge that within the historical development also produces the “Volksgeist”) assigning a “superhuman” creative force to the People. From this point the step is short to dethrone the God of the old metaphysic,: Hegel takes care of it. The People is being rationalized in the form of the State and History is now understood as dialectical movement of the Spirit of the World making the “Volksgeist” a functional instrument of the logical process of the Spirit of the world. From here to the Nazi or Bolshevik people, reactionary or revolutionary but always totalizing (and annihilating the individuality and the becoming) the step is short and it is also logically consequential as well as tragic. The paradox at the turn of the 19th and 20th century has its most obvious criticality in the “Germanicity” of Herder and Fichte and in the “Slavicity” with Leont’ev and Aleksej_Stepanovič_Chomjakov (founder of Slavophilism together with Ivan Kireevskij) who, in the involution within a non-existent entity denoted by common characters just as non-existent, rejects the development of modern thought. The thought is abandoned to myths and legends built only to aggregate the multitude of individuals around an inconsistent identity.  In so doing, the “unconscious” potential of the People is unlocked, exploited and manipulated in every way. In this view, which has found its followers even in the third millennium, the People have the surreptitious and unacceptable “duty” to keep away from any form of true edifying education and be only the target of “news flash news”, “breaking news”, hypocoded forms of education and communication, real existential slogans; a bucolic, arcadian, apathetic People that will decree the end of the political concept of “romantic”.

The People is now an entity that builds ( real and ideological) walls to protect an identity that never existed but was built only to control and manipulate it: the Being kills the Becoming and what is “other”, according to this worldview, must be removed from the community reduced to tribe and so it has need destroing, annihilateing in every way the “different”, the “stranger”, the “sick”, the “poor”, the “old man”.

The Here and Now, which perhaps by mistaking methods and perspectives Romanticism wanted to erase , are on the contrary the cornerstones of the wall, of every wall of those who reject History as “Becoming”.

It can be said that Schmitt’s great painting of Romanticism shows two anamorphoses: the first is the appearance of Romanticism, far removed from the reality vainly pursued by the romantic subject, which is shown from afar to those who observe with a critical eye the whole phenomenon in question; the second is the appearance as if by magic of the concept of the People as a fundamental element of political dialectics from the twentieth century onwards. Like the skull in Holbein’s “Ambassadors” painting, it towers over the entire conceptual painting of our History and the concept of “political”. The psychological charge of the word “people” we find again when we are reflecting on any Constitution of a State: the Constitution is a form without a subject, and the subjects believed to be the creators of a Constitution, of the Fundamental Charter, dissolve upon careful analysis, when the Fundamental Charter is ” manumitted”, “revisited”, “amended”. Who does these “operations” ? Is it the same People who are believed to have written it “once upon a time” ? Or someone else or something else ? From “We the people” to “Who’s the people ?”: a question that must be answered. The Becoming is demeaned to ontological regress: Spontaneity, the forms of social aggregation between individuals are not tolerated but controlled and manipulated on web platforms and social networks, a “stare decisis” by citizens or ” wise” magistrates is not allowed, everything must be controlled: the friend and the enemy, us and the different from us.

Everything is labeling: or it is included or it is excluded. for the current world politics a society that is too ” fluid ” in the style of Bauman’ s thought risks drowning: and so someone erects walls of hatred, of indifference, of sovereignty, of exclusion.

In a macabre “masquerade dance”, the ideologies that have lacerated the twentieth century are now re-proposed. We need a “new juridical subjectivity”, as I wrote in my degree thesis many years ago. We need to outline and make work in practice a social and political subject whose identity and reality is not expressed by Being but by Becoming: the Constituent Subject of true freedom that respects humanity as an existential category and not only biological.

Today’s politics is an aberrant one and if we  are seeing it from the right anamorphic perspective it shows “death”: of thought, of freedom, of human dignity.

II.  Political Mythology : reading Raoul Girardet

 “I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.”

– Woody Allen

Looking around these days, one cannot help but think that Weber’s obsession has materialized over and above all imaginable expectations: the nightmare of a universal bureaucratization that has crystallized the system in a situation of dominance of illiberal mediocrity. All this was defined by Weber as a “steel cage”, “Gestell” in Heidegger’s translation, which would have imprisoned the individual and his area of action favoring the victory of an incompetent administrative power so unable to produce and constantly to renew the political world.

The conclusions that Weber drew from his analysis were not and are not shareable, even if prophetic: “Not being able to believe as Marx (or Rousseau) in a universal emancipation as a radical overthrow of a condition of total alienation (social and political) and therefore in a historicist and dialectical negation of the Modern, Weber sought shelter in the existential heroism of the individual and in the charisma of the political leader”. ([1])

For Weber,indeed,  leaders must be “charismatic”, in the meaning that in addition to having the “gift of grace” (charisma) they must be motivated by a “calling”, a “vocation”, a “Beruf”; all politics is a “calling” and cannot become a “profession” without moving irremediably away from its main objective which is, for Weber, the production of a radical change that only a charismatic leader can realize.

A combination of “the ethic of belief” and “the ethic of responsibility” will create the man potentially disposed to the political vocation.

Weber drew his categories “secularizing” them from his studies on the history of the Church and from these he became convinced of the revolutionary power of the charismatic leader, capable of giving “soul” to the uninanimate machine of the bureaucratic State. In order to get out of the damage caused by the disenchantment of the Modern, by its secularizations that had led to a basic nihilism of society shattered into a centrifugal and disintegrating “polyverse”, people like Weber and his student Schmitt saw that the only way was a charismatic leader. ..and unfortunately Hitler came, the Führer, the charismatic leader who was supposed to slow down the entropic drift of the Modern, to stop the anguished becoming that made Heraclitus weep on the river bank.

However, why are we sould turning to the charismatic leader? It is enough to be a little bit focused on the last forty years of the Italian politics, (for example and only limiting geographically the discourse) it will be noticed even unconsciously that many politicians have posed as “charismatic chiefs” (and many still pose as such and someone also believing to be such), certainly not comparable to Hitler, but deviously perhaps more evil and poisonous if we are framing them in the changed historical, social and cultural context.

Why not give another value to the exceptional zone where to identify a not paranoid sovereignty of a dictator but clear as the phliosopher’s  analysis ?

Why is ” the calling ” reserved for a special human being from Weber onward ? And what about other men? An answer to the number of questions that naturally arising maybe come from a consideration that sinks into “myth”: all the activity of political thought is conditioned, unconsciously (obviously in the best of cases) “piloted” by a few “myths”:

• the Myth of the Conjuring
• the Myth of the Fatherland’s Savior
• the Myth of the Golden Age
• the Myth of National Unity

The idea is not of the writer but of a French historian, Raoul Girardet, who some years ago wrote a book entitled “Mithes et mythologies politiques”.

The Myth of the Conspiracy: According to Girardet, the mythology of the conspiracy first flourished in the nineteenth century. Examples now known to many people  are the following: the pamphlet “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (one of the most shocking literary hoax of History!) tried to convince that the Jews conspired to conquer the world.[2]  Not to mention Eugene Sue (author of the famous book “Mysteries of Paris”) who reiterated his popular success by publishing between 1845 and 1847 “The Wandering Jew” where, on the contrary, it was the Jesuits who were plotting to dominate the world. Could Alexandre Dumas be missing from the list? In fact he was punctual with his book “Giuseppe Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro” where he claims that it is the Freemasons who at night gather in secret lodges to control the world.

As you can see, nothing new under the sun.

Obviously Girardet limited his discourse to the French political situation of the time, but it is enough to look up and be a little less limited and “provincial” to find phenomena such as “McCarthyism”, a classic product of the American type who sees communists, Jews and blacks everywhere plotting against him and attacking his Wasp’s peaceful life. Forty years later in Italy we were having Berlusconi who saw communists everywhere even though they had disappeared a while ago (someone tells me he still sees them!). In short, the “evil” is always someone else’s fault, the enemy is always outside, plotting against us, and it doesn’t matter if it is a witch doctor who casts spells or a politician who “rationally” wants to affirm his ideology, his religion or his way of life that differs from ours: we are all innocent victims, according to this way of thinking, of the “wickedness” of an “other” that shows itself in its diversity from us.

To be correct, the thesis in question has been illustrated not only by Girardet but also by well-known masters of thought such as Georg Simmel and Karl Popper: the first would have highlighted the “syndrome of the secret” for which every mysterious thing is important and essential and those who pass themselves off as the holder of the “cosmic” secret will not hesitate to propose themselves as the holder of the “political” secret, obtaining credibility and power against other subjects (usually lacking critical and logical antigens). Popper would have, like Girardet, described the “syndrome of conspiracy” as a “social theory of conspiracy” where humanity is drawn like the heroes who fought at Troy according to Homer, who could not perform an action that was not the reflection of conspiracies plotted in Olympus.

If man believes in the “conspiracy” he frees himself from remorse and from the responsibility of evil in the world… and we now live in a world where the majority of individuals in Western society consider themselves free from remorse and from the responsibility of evil in the world only by hating, excluding the other, demonizing everything that we do not understand and that we do not want to understand analytically and humanly: it is enough to synthetically make the other of us a “conspirator”, a partner in some conspiracy.

As Umberto Eco masterfully described at the opening of the Frankfurt Fair in 1987, we owe all of this largely to a “Gnostic inheritance”: a cosmic conspiracy has thrown into the world (Heidegger’s “Dasein”) that spark of divinity in the body of man, which is a prison, an exile in this world, and only the reunion with the divinity can free us from the initial error of creation. And this Gnostic legacy has weighed heavily on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: we are all a bit Gnostic both when we are making curses and when we read between the lines what is not written. Both Eco and Girardet have warned us that any institution could be read as the result of a “conspiracy”; if then someone discovers, understands that the conspiracy is “cosmic”, instead of being hospitalized in a psychiatric ward he will find followers and voters who probably will take him to some Parliament around the World.

It is a duty to underline that Umberto Eco’s “intuition” is not really original: years before, a great philosopher and political scientist, Eric Voegelin, saw imposing gnostic influences in all of history and modern philosophy, identifying several ideological analogies between ancient Gnosticism and modern political doctrines, all described in his impressive philosophical work, still today object of study by few people.

• Now let’s come to the Myth of National Unity: it is the myth of a Unity conquered through the centuries and against centrifugal forces. It was born with Modernism in order to counteract its disintegrating thrusts.The United Europe is seen as a “failure” because it substantially attends to national unity and to every myth underlying this concept, burying even the concept of Federalism in the name of an anachronistic sovereign vision of peoples. However, this myth must be combined with the other one:
• The Myth of the Golden Age: Hurray to the ancient time, of morigerous customs and serene affections, when there was respect from the children and families were united! A world full of solidarity where everything was clear, limpid and crystalline … but when has this ever happened? Benjamin Constant wrote : ” La diversité c’est la vie, l’uniformité c’est la mort”[3]…but nobody believes him yet. Mankind wishes to lose itself in a One Whole, as Michelet has stated:” Nous avons qu’un seul désir: nous perdre dans le gran tout”.[4]

This ” Whole ” you can easily recognize if you open your eyes. This myth has been magnified in the course of viral contamination between academics more attentive to esoteric and magical than to the sad reality and there are intellectuals of all respect who have spent rivers of ink to demonstrate its evanescent and insubstantial existence: as an example, it is enough to read the book “Hamlet’s Mill” written in 1969 by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, a beautiful work that certainly makes us less ignorant but at the same time we must be careful not to become foolish by getting bogged down in the labyrinth of myth.

• Last but not least is the Myth of the Fatherland’s Savior : it is what we all obviously need, tired and disempowered as we are of the alleged and non-existent “cosmic” and “historical” conspiracies of the multinationals, of the Illuminati, of the Jesuits, of the Jews, of the Bankers, of the Freemasons, of the satanic sects, of the fans of the adversary soccer team and above all of the scientific Scopone club (very dangerous, mainly in Italy!). Give us a Solon and in return we will give you the entire Parliament, our freedoms and even the mother-in-law (we must always take the opportunity !). Give us a “decision maker”, a self made man  one who talks ” burping ” to the belly of the voters and not to their brain, who asks only “like” and not critical feedback and we will all be saved, maybe on some web platform, now seen as a parallel universe guardian of the brains placed in storage, a stock of warehouse born by entrepreneurial spirits without human and social empathy as well as without morality and historical sense.

Girardet made us reflect in unsuspected times that thinking politically does not mean going outside our humanity with its fears and myths, with its frustrations and its quest for certainty and delegation of responsibility to someone “strong”, who “thinks of everything”, perhaps disguised as a democratic man.

The charismatic leader is always lurking, because the philosophical disenchantment produced by the Modern has unleashed a “virus” that still produces its devastating effects and for which there is no cure.

We are all drowning in a dark sea by the death of thought, where we no longer struggle to live but only to survive events: our existential situation is now a constant fade out.

Here is the role of the executor: since thinking is tiring, we let some men think inside some secular temples and we execute their orders, overt or covert, mechanically. We let them to regulate our lives, merely giving as part the answers to web polls.

At the risk of repeating myself, by now human beings, particularly Western man, have renounced the fruitful dialectic between Being and Becoming to abandon themselves to a life without thought. The charismatic leader is the one who dominates in a world made weak by growing needs, the one who dictates the law in the defeat of the brain. Therefore, one integrates oneself into the society of the eternal present by “suffering” one’s own time and not establishing an authentic relationship with it; one finds oneself on boarded on some “stultifera navis”, the ship of fools [5]:

“the ship of fools crosses a landscape of delights where everything is offered to desire, a kind of renewed Paradise, since man no longer knows neither suffering nor need; and yet he has not rediscovered innocence. This false happiness is the diabolical triumph of the Antichrist, it is the End already near (…) the end…it is the advent of a night in which the old reason of the world is consumed…The world sinks into universal fury. The victory belongs neither to God nor to the Devil, but to Madness.”so wrote prophetically many years ago M. Foucalt [6]

If man is will not given again the precious gift of the inquietude of his conscience and of the uncertainty of his becoming, the new Leviathan (or maybe the same one of that

time) will swallow him up and this time forever. This is not an outstanding profecy but simple sad statement.

III. Is Batman a bat?

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” 

-George Orwell

Mankind and his world (with his thought, his relation with “other worlds”, actual and possible, proper to the modal logic) is “complex” and “logically incomplete” but above all “contradictory” up to the paradox and the absurd.

Such variegated complexity and gnoseological incompleteness were first brought to light with “modern feeling” by Thomas Nagel in his famous article entitled “What is it like to be a Bat?”[7]

In criticizing the paradigms of “physicalism” and “reductionism”, which according to the author consist in accepting, as good explanations of what we do not understand, those explanations with which we are more familiar, Nagel outlines his concept of “consciousness” : possessing consciousness means that it “makes a strange effect” to be in certain mental states and that this experience is only “accessible” from a first-person perspective. Instead, the objectivity of an experience does not require “points of view” but a “super partes” look, from a  not individual location. Here you are the bats used by Nagel as an example: an animal with perceptions and relations with the world completely different from the human being can never be understood by a human being…even if we dress up as Batman!

It is a gnoseological void. Going down to human levels, the same thing happens if we try to “feel” how a person with some serious impairment “feels” compared to “normal”: the result, honestly, would be the same.

A human being’s experience of richness in the world cannot be “reduced” by functionalist or physicalist explanations.

Just this problem has been object of the philosophical analysis of the so-called “Qualia”, plural (Latin) of “Which omes”. What is meant by Qualia ? They indicate all aspects of  human beings’  mental life of synthetically contained in the expression “the effect that makes” a given thing, a certain experience. Michael Tye [Tye (1995)] listed what he saw as the basic Qualia:

Perceptual experiences.

Bodily sensations.

Emotional reactions and/or feelings.

Moods……..and obviously the list is not conclusive.

In fact, even sentences, thoughts, experiences and beliefs possess Qualia, to be understood as intrinsic properties and accessible to consciousness. They aren’t intentional and whose occurrence would explain some mental events. Even a subject’s Qualia is a World that requires accessibility to other Worlds, and such access is not always possible. The relationship that is establishing between them returns as “output” a shared experience, an even partial definition of the “real”, of the actual World, which is precisely an “intersection” between the Qualia of a subject and those of another. A reflexive awareness of mental states of the various subjects but also a “relationship” between them is necessary. The philosophers, who have devoted themselves to the Qualia, speak of “transparency of experience”. Perceptive experiences do not have exclusively “private” and introspective properties, but are properties of the objects of experience. They are intrinsic and essential properties.

Many of the Qualia escape the ” Relationship “, the ” Accessibility ” …. and here we find the Gnoseological Void. There are infinite Worlds unknown and unknowable to us, they are inaccessible and will remain so. We will have perhaps only relational points with such Worlds but not a really complete knowledge. After millennia, Socrates’ statement “I know that I do not know” is more confirmed than ever.

Coming back to Nagel and his bat, it has an ultrasonic echolocation system different from that of a human being. If the bat is assumed to have a “consciousness” it also has Qualia, a series of “qualities” of its consciousness and its ” reality” that can never be “known”, “felt”, “tasted” by a human being nor certainly communicated by the bat to the human being.

So: Is Batman a bat?

If we wanted to analyze it according to the “classical logic” we would have as answer: yes, he is ! With a lot of Truth Tables and no doubt about the tautological truth of such statement. Because Logic has mainly dealt and turns its “attentions” to the correctness of statements and their Structure.  In its classical formalization it is not concerned with their “truth” in the sense of in-depth analysis of the contents of argumentative discourse. This has generated seemingly unsolvable paradoxes. Batman in a actual (a.k.a. “real”) World is just a man (perhaps with serious mental disorders of a schizophrenic nature) who will never know what it’s like to be and feel like a bat.

For example, the statement “Batman is a bat” if we try to translate it into symbolic or formal Logic, even at an intuitive level we can write

A = B

where A is “Batman”

and B is “Bat”

keeping in mind that A and B are defined as “enunciative or propositional variables”” because instead of Batman and the Bat we can insert anything, for example “The pine cone is a fruit”.  As we have just seen, the statement “Batman is a bat” is formalized through the operator “=” called “identity relation” borrowed directly from mathematics (like the concept of “enunciative variable”).

Is this statement or rather the form of this statement (“compound statement”, because it articulates two simple statements A and B) correct?  Is it its “formula” correct? Can it be convincing to us, to inform us something about the truth of the fact that Batman is actually a bat ? Not for now, as we need to clarify whether the verb “to be” (is) within the compound statement “Batman is a bat” has “predicate” or “identity” value. It is clear that “being a bat” is not a predication of Batman ( “Batman is Ghotam’s hero”, it is a predication identity relationship, i.e. it informs us about a characteristic of the masked hero). While “being a bat” wants to imply an identity: Batman and a Bat are the same thing! We have taken a major step forward in that we have defined the “identity relation” as that relation which an object of our reflection has only with itself. If we had wanted to formalize “Batman is the hero of Ghotam” we would have had to write

A= e(C)

where A is Batman,

= is the predicative identity

“e” is the functorial constant that translates ” is the hero of….”,

 C is standing for Ghotam

Therefore we have seen that the enunciative and predicative Logic formally help us to describe objects of our reflection, which only within the same have values of truthfulness if their formal correctness is respected, if the formulas are well formed…but the truth, the reality that the same statements should communicate to us is far away and probably lost in a gnoseological void.

The complexity of the actual World ( using Leibnizian concepts ) and its equally complex accessibility to possible Worlds ( using concepts of modal logic or better developed by the same and  still Leibnizian origin ) outline that the search for a logical coherence of “our World” is far from being achieved and always in danger of being disintegrated, with the fear that there is no chance of a logical re-foundation that assigns meaning to a new World and its structures. Our world is ending, it is under everybody’s eyes in this period of Coronavirus pandemic even if the real perception of the drama is unconsciously and stupidly removed by many: can Philosophy and Logic (rectius: Logics) save us or will they?

Perhaps we should change the question from “Quid est veritas ?” to the other: “Quid veritatis ?” Or rather: from “What is Truth?” to the other: “At what point is truth or rather the search for truth?” . The fundamental question of Logic should perhaps be modified into an awareness of the conditions of the same and of its research, passing with courage and commitment from the dimension of “inventory”, the delirium of Bouvard and Peocuchet (the characters of Flaubert’s novel that it remained unfinished: this is representative of the consubstantial incompleteness of the dimension of “inventory”[8]), to the existential condition of “choice”.

References

Jurgis Baltrusaitis, in Anamorphoses ou Perspective curieuses [Les perspectives dépravées II], Paris: O. Perrin, Jeu savant, 1955. Éd. Paris: O. Perrin, 1969: Anamorphoses ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux.  English translation: Anamorphic Art, New York: Abrams, 1976.

Carl Schmitt in Political Romanticism. Guy Oakes, trans. (MIT Press,1986). Original publication: 1919, 2nd edn. 1925. and in State, Movement, People  (includes The Question of  legality). (Plutarch Press, 2001). Original publication: Staat, Bewegung, Volk (1933); Das Problem der Legalität (1950).

Giorgio De Santillana – Herta von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth, first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969.

Michel Foucalt , Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (tran. Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age). 1961 and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966)

Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, «L’univers historique », 1986.

Thomas Nagel (1974). “What Is Like to Be a Bat ?” – The Philosophical Review.-1974

Nicholas Falletta – The Paradoxicon – 1983

Tim Berners-Lee, The Semantic Web, in “Scientific American” – 2001

E.Hughes, M.J.Cresswell in A New Introduction to Modal Logic (1996)

Smullyan in First-order logic (1968)

Notes

[1]  Angelo Bolaffi, Italian philosopher and political scientist, in Micromega, n. 2/1987 ( italian review of philosophy and politics)

[2] In the year 1903  of the 20° century St. Petersburg’s Znamya newspaper publishes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

[3] Translation: “Diversity is life, uniformity is death”.

[4] Translation: “We have only one desire: to lose ourselves in the great whole”.

[5] Sebastian Brant, Stultifera Navis (The Ship of Fools alternatively: Das Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam ) printed in 1494 in Basel .

[6] Michel Foucalt , Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (tran. Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age).  1961

[7] NAGEL, T. (1974), “What it is like to be a bat?”, Philosophical Review, LXXXIII-

[8] Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881

Print