January 2023
Foreword
The history of thought on emotions, feelings, reflections and similar things is so vast that it is not easy to make a reconstruction and much less a synthesis of what has been produced in these areas.
Naturally it is not my intention here to add a few pages to the already present quantity and that even Wikipedia is struggling to collect into a unitary whole; there is no need for new acquisitions since the academic world never ceases to update us with new results. And this above all since the forces of the neurosciences, far from being secondary, have taken the field, and are tackling the subject from a new point of view, joining the specialists of philosophy, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology .
I am not an academic and I do not belong to any of the disciplines just mentioned, but I believe that a heuristic approach could be useful when knowledge assimilated in a non-superficial way meets continuous reflection on the person’s daily experience.
It is clear to me that specialized studies are not useless, but necessary, and that a different perspective can, however, provide stimuli for further investigations: this different perspective has developed in a recursive relationship with the object of the experiment and with its responses during the investigation. Unlike the classical disciplines, in this case the experiment was continuous and long-lasting, making sure that even the provisional syntheses were part of the experiment itself.
However, there is another aspect that must be taken into consideration and which shifts attention to a different perspective, more subjective but not without cultural references. This aspect has to do with the diffusion of a mass culture which is the fruit of ever-increasing literacy and of what is offered, in the field of knowledge, by the rapid development of technologies.
As I have highlighted elsewhere, this new recent situation has produced a justified and understandable, albeit controversial and unaware, affirmation of the Ego which tries all possible ways to emerge seeking visibility regardless of its consistency. Unlike before, the development of a reflection on these issues cannot be left to specialists, whose role remains fundamental, because while before the separation between knowing and not knowing was clear, today it is characterized by almost infinite intermediate stages.
Every day we witness a debate outside the official channels and which sees the protagonism of the subjects involved, practically each of us, as a central element. However, there are official sites and international research centres that have undoubted recognition and that represent the real point of reference for those who want to proceed with the deepening of any topic that may be of interest. Actually, given the increasingly complex character of knowledge, the affirmation of a thesis is often questioned following multiple fracture lines and so those research centres are not only the object of the usual work of scientific comparison which is never lacking, but also of a number of entities that survive only thanks to the work of contesting the theses coming from the most well-known and reliable sites. We have seen this with the campaign against vaccines and practically every thesis coming from the most accredited centres is the object of attacks that once would have been marginalized, while today they find non-secondary adhesions thanks to more widespread culture and the greater diffusion of knowledge.
A negative case is taken, e.g. the declaration of side effects on a leaflet, and a campaign is launched online that finds a certain following: most people are satisfied with sensational but simple statements and do not intend to proceed with further investigation. The complex requires more effort than the simple and the visibility of the individual is greater if the thesis has a significant effect compared to an articulated reasoning which instead of fixed points (and exclamations) highlights the inherent problems. The natural relationship between costs and benefits has been replaced with the generic and impossible principle of precaution, as if the point of reference were not history with its difficulties and the hindrances of living, but an abstract model which always and in any case guarantees 100% success.
This phenomenon is most present in the medical and environmental fields, where catastrophism dominates beyond any evidence of the phenomena and beyond the most reasonable hypotheses. The spread of liberal democracy has then led many people to believe that everyone has the right to express what he wants and that for this reason every statement, every thesis must be considered valid for the mere fact of having been pronounced. A 5-10 pages of a journal article with generic references thus has the same value as a 500-page study full of data and information. The operation is very often completed by the criminalization of the author, generally accused of being an instrument of multinationals (sic!) and strong powers (sic!), entities as generic as abstract. Moreover the moralism blames wealth and so develops senses of guilt, without understanding (or wanting to understand) how much world wealth has allowed the improvement of living conditions and how much guilt feelings are unable to produce initiatives.
This practically happens in all fields of human life and everyone feels entitled to express their opinion by legitimizing themselves or through one of the many free sites, certainly easier to consult than a book.
However, there is a terrain in which, in addition to these contradictions, natural and historical at the same time, a further difficulty is added: the lack of open studies and the acceptance of clichés that have spread over time.
The field to which I am referring concerns the theme of the person and her behaviour. In this field, a mass interest has only recently spread and has its basis not in studies of a scientific nature, but in freer and more open areas that make personal experience and a vague philosophical or sociological approach the real hub. The Ego is an elusive and slippery, broad and complex, unique and multiple field that collides with the need for acceptance of one’s person: while a tsunami, like war, affects me only if I find myself in the middle; love otherwise obliges me to a continuous and daily confrontation.
- 1) TRAWL FISHING
A big difference between ancient cultures, especially oriental (India, China, Japan), and Western philosophy lies in the centrality of myth and myths. Even Greek culture, which we studied at school, had its first foundations in a detailed and articulated mythology, thanks also to first-rate literary works. The merit of Greek philosophy was to detach itself from that narration, not because it was useless or devoid of values and horizons, but because the characteristic of every mythology is to have references, even numerous and important, which however appear definitive and closed. Every reflection, every analysis always leads back to that narrative that represents the beginning and the end without the possibility of a complete review. This does not mean that the myths did not propose real points of view, through events, stories, characters: the figures, heroic or not, the stories, exciting or sad, the events, with or without historical references, well, all this proposed models and values that they were transmitted to the community which felt united through them and united proceeded.
For man, word has always had the meaning of dominating and occupying spaces, as for all animals with different characteristics, but to really do so, word had to be transformed into thought. Myths have made it possible to carry out this transformation, with which we tried to explain reality i. e. the set of all the elements that characterize men and that made up the surrounding world, namely Nature.
While the myths, through the image, tried to recompose the sense of reality and therefore also of human beings, philosophy presents itself in simpler and at the same time more complex forms: simpler because philosophers did not need images, more complex because the research was brought back to the level of the word, pure and essential, which required a more abstract commitment without mediation.
Myth operated from word to word through images, philosophy passed directly from word to word which became thought.
From the reality of which man was a part, we slowly moved on to consider man as an autonomous and independent reality: thanks to Christianity and above all to St. Augustine that man becomes a “person”. The shift is only apparently meaningless, because man and person seem to be the same thing; in reality there is a leap of great proportions: man is the human being as such, an entity that is indifferent to the individual, while person highlights that particular, specific individual who has certain points in common with all the others, but which is characterized by its own particular way of being and existing. Hence the free will and responsibility that are ingrained in every single human being.
At the beginning this person must respond to values that are determined, and Dante offers us a large catalogue of them: we can find multiple punishments and multiple rewards that everyone deserves because he has interpreted those messages that were proposed to him, doing it in his own way.
Dante’s certainties derived from the philosophy of St. Thomas, but there was also another way of translating the discovery of the person: it comes from Augustine and it in Dante’s time will find its greatest interpreter in Petrarch: certainties are not lacking, there they are, we know them, they are visible there on the horizon, but what is not certain is the subject who should interpret them, the person, a fragile, weak being, full of doubts, pushed by different winds.
Philosophy is only partially affected by this discovery and will continue in its task of knowing, understanding, explaining, trying to create a unitary system that would allow man to find his reason for being: philosophy remains, however, on man and on its existence as something general and, as such, common.
The interest in the person, understood as a single and specific individual, becomes the prerogative of literature and above all of poetry, where, certainly in compliance with established formal rules, the poet uncovers his person. Augustine himself in The Confessions had shown how important it was to dig into one’s own existence to bring one’s soul to light. Since the times of Dante and Petrarch, literature has taken charge of this work, very often through fictional characters, but sometimes also, as Petrarch had done, considering self-talk to be decisive, not as a memorial autobiography but as an inner search.
Continuing the research on the sense of reality, a turning point takes place in the 17th century with Descartes through the division that operates in reality between res cogitans and res extensa, which leads to the affirmation of the EGO when he concludes his reflection with the well-known “Cogito ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am”. We are still in the traditional sphere which, however, will have a decisive effect (together with authors such as Galileo and Newton) in determining the foundations of the so-called Modern Science whose objective and deterministic assumptions will only be questioned in the last decades.
Philosophy continues in its research now pushing the materialist key now through idealistic settings, but always confirming what has always been the choice of Western philosophy, based on the value of Metaphysics. Only in the 19th century did we begin to think outside of Metaphysics above all thanks to Nietzsche with a path that would explode in the 20th century and will be evident today.
Despite this continuous development, deepening, crisis, reconstruction and new perspectives, literature, and in particular poetry, will always provide a continuous contribution to get out of the generic (and absolute and metaphysical) character of the person to bring the individual to light. The moment in which it imposes itself not only as an experience, but also as a theory, is the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to two French poets, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who will succeed in making word no longer an aesthetic element, but an instrument of building their own person.
I refer to what has been written in my other essays for a broader understanding of this phenomenon and of the relationship between modern poetry and the science of complexity; here I develop the part relating to the definitive emergence of the individual, the concrete one in the flesh, not the general and metaphysical one. The EGO.
Baudelaire expresses himself in anti-Cartesian terms (Correspondences, Hymn to Beauty) and uses the words to delve into his own person, thus transforming poetry from representative into creative. At the end of his verses, the poet is no longer the same as the first word; he certainly starts with an idea of what he wants to address (the what), but “the how “ is more important and it is the words that he arranges on the sheet in that specific form and sequence. In this sense it is useful to say that the collection “Les fleurs du mal” wants to show the ability to extract something attractive even from negative situations, but this prevents us from hitting the mark, because poetry does not serve it to declare something, but to produce and show a transformation. Let’s take Spleen IV. The verses are not the declaration of the level of suffering that man can reach, but a particular condition that the EGO-Baudelaire lives in a precise historical moment of his existence and uses the words we read to dig into this existential moment of his life.
When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
On the groaning mind in the grip of long troubles,
And that from the horizon embracing the whole circle
He pours us a black day sadder than the nights;
When the earth is turned into a damp dungeon,
Where Hope, like a bat,
Goes away beating the walls with its timid wing
And banging their heads on rotting ceilings;
When the rain, spreading its immense streaks,
imitates the bars of a vast prison,
And that a mute people of infamous spiders
Comes to spread its nets in the depths of our brains,
Bells suddenly jump with fury
And send to the sky an awful howl,
As well as wandering and homeless spirits
Who start moaning stubbornly.
– And long hearses, without drums or music,
Scroll slowly through my soul; Hope,
Defeated, weeps and the atrocious, despotic Anguish,
On my tilted skull plants his black flag.
It’s a path, a journey that takes place between the 1st and 20th line. Baudelaire-man is suffering (on that day, at that time, in that place) and the first stage is a feeling trapped in his physical dimension, as if in prison. The second stage introduces Hope, which cannot fail to be present, but also cannot find a path. The third stage involves the inner dimension, the soul and the mind, which survive and hope, but the blows (physical and sonorous) fall against them. It’s not the end, but we’re close. And here we are at the arrival point, deadly, definitive when and where the triumph of Anguish is celebrated.
It is not a declaration on the pain of living, but the exploration inside the soul and the discovery of the forms and means by which Anguish takes possession of the soul to the detriment not only of Hope, but also of Boredom-Difficulty. The day after is another day, and another poem, but one that cannot forget what was expressed – and acquired – thanks to the experience and the words of the day before. That experience happens to everyone, but only word allows us to proceed with the making of the person, because without those words there would have been no metabolization.
More words will give life to other poems and will con-form the person of the Baudelaire man.
Even clearer is the discourse of the other poet, A. Rimbaud, in Lettres du Voyant (The Letter of the Seer) where he clarifies in both a theoretical and historical key what I am highlighting here: the emergence of the concrete individual, here and now, historically and geographically determined.
Since the cultural movement that had exalted the role of the individual was Romanticism, this is what Rimbaud addresses by writing:
Romanticism has never been well judged. Who would have judged him? The critics!! The Romantics, who prove so well that the song is so rarely the work, that is to say the sung and understood thought of the singer? Because I am another. If the brass wakes up bugle, it’s not his fault. It is obvious to me. I witness the blossoming of my thought: I look at it, I listen to it: I move my bow: the symphony stirs in the depths, or leaps onto the stage. imbeciles had only found the false meaning of the Me, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for an infinite time, have accumulated the products of their one-eyed intelligence, claiming to be the authors!
It is true that the Romantics discovered the EGO, but “those old imbeciles have only found the false meaning of the EGO, and so we must sweep away those millions of skeletons who, for an infinite time, have accumulated the products of their one-eyed intelligence, claiming to be the authors!”.
So what is the true meaning of the I?
Meanwhile the EGO is another, that is, it is multiple as will be clear with Nietzsche and Freud, but above all it must be the concrete EGO which does not limit itself to photographing his thought, but must deform it in every possible way to search for one’s own soul; and that is not enough, because he must cultivate it and retain only its quintessence: it is a process that takes us into the unknown and that has no end except with our end.
Naturally the Letter is much richer, but what I have reported is sufficient for my reasoning: with Baudelaire and Rimbaud the EGO comes out into the open with the awareness of having found a new starting point. After them, literature will move mainly in this direction and culture in general will have to deal with the concreteness of the individual; science too will abandon general and universal principles in favour of the particular, the specific, the individual and the contingent. Just think of the decisive “role of the observer” mentioned in quantum physics and which since then will be part of every branch of scientific research.
Just as mountains are not triangles, so the EGO that has always been talked about is only its reduction, its approximation: for some decades now we have been having to face a more complex investigation, much more complex, even when we want to talk about the person , especially of us.
In the past, the individual in flesh and blood was attributed only to great and powerful people, often assimilated to divinities, but slowly it passed to identify more numerous people, first Kings, Generals, Priests, artists, poets and some figures considered important. For a thousand years the panorama has expanded to include entrepreneurs, merchants, officials, inventors, scientists. Today the puzzle is complete and that panorama includes each of us.
It is understandable that we find it difficult to act in this new and original situation, so we do it in a messy, chaotic, funny, often inconclusive way. The most curious aspect of this situation is that we do it without realizing it and indeed often in the utmost conviction that we are dedicating ourselves to altruism, to solidarity, a conviction that leads us to deny what is instead the selfish reality that characterizes us.
As in trawling, in the end, in the midst of hundreds of sardines, something more precious remains: in the trawling of history, we begin to see the individual more and more.
2) EMOTIONS
From an etymological point of view, the term derives from the Latin emotionem, with the root emot-, which we find in the past participle emotus of the verb emovere, ex-movere, to move from, to carry out, to move, to shake.
Something that is inside is moved and brought out. Movere does not simply mean moving, but indicates something less linear, less easy, such as wave motion, social movements, karate moves, dance moves: getting out of our inside requires passing through different layers and this happens through the shaking of the person. Emotion is this shaking.
It is interesting that the term emotion is not present in the Greek and Latin languages and that it appears only in the Middle Ages by Christianity and has branched out, flourishing and bearing fruit in the following millennium. However, the word “commotio” (emotion-pathos) already exists, albeit not very present, as in Cicero: “(Commotio is called affectio) a disposition of the soul or of the body, a sudden change for some cause such as joy, desire, fear, harassment, sickness, weakness” (De inventione) or in Quintilian who defines it as “A temporary movement of the soul such as anger, fear…”.
Here we grasp the essence of emotion as “affection of the soul or of the body” and its “temporary motion”, but, always with Christianity, the two words will tend to diverge with the commotio that shows a sense of pity and the emotion a more complex condition. It is no coincidence once again that commotio is increasingly deepened by Christians such as St. Gregory the Great, St. Benedict (the Rule), St. John Chrysostom. In the classical world the presence of this disposition is recognized, also in the poets who know how to grasp it like Virgil (not by chance the master of the Christian Dante) the term movere appears to a greater extent as something physical (emotus is what Palinuro feels but also the movement of hinges).
It is from 1700 (Anton Maria Salvini, Magalotti…) that the term emotion becomes more and more the object of attention and in the 19th and 20th centuries it sees the greatest interest and the greatest amount of studies up to the neuroscience approach with A. Damasio (author of the famous “The errors of Descartes” and above all of “Emotion and consciousness”).
If we try to understand what is specific to emotions we find a vast literature in which scientific research is expressed; there are many positions, generally not antithetical, but each one expresses its own point of view which is linked to the particular approach of the discipline and to the horizon that this imposes. I am not a researcher, but I believe I can contribute to the reflection of the common man through a phenomenological and heuristic attitude.
What and how does the “phenomenon” of emotion appear to us?
First of all, it directly involves the body through evident (ex-videre, i.e. visible) manifestations: laughter, tears, chills, tremors, jerks, sighs, tachycardia and much more.
Secondly, the appearance of these manifestations is quite instantaneous, in the sense that it appears almost suddenly and is almost never prepared by a path that wants to compose it.
Thirdly, the emotion is not long lasting, in the sense that the manifestation generally does not last for hours both because it subjects the body to very strong pressure and because it needs to protect itself and to protect the person.
Often or almost always the appearance of emotion takes place without an immediate understanding of the origins and causes: this does not mean that there are no elements that have pushed to move that manifestation out, quite the contrary. Nor does it mean that those who experience more emotions are richer persons than those who have fewer manifestations.
In this case:
1-It may be that there is a repression that the soul operates due to the habit of following a linear and smooth path that avoids dealing with ourselves;
2-It may also be that there has been an advanced metabolization work : we have dealt with our personal history which does not need many signals that the soul sends through the body.
As much as we want to keep separating mind and heart, soul and body, it appears increasingly clear that these two universes are interconnected and that behind every bodily manifestation there is a soul in which thinking and feeling interact and conflict (this is life). Once upon a time (until 50 years ago) feeling emotions was a sign of weakness, but, as often happens, the phenomenon was later reversed and the new ideology condemns those who show few emotions or those who show none at all. As always, what is important is the how, not the what or how much; and the how tells us the importance of tracing the emotion felt back to the elements that generated it. Recently tears came out of my eyes watching a film that told a normal family story: I rummaged through my thoughts and found the door through which to pass in order to understand the link between my story, my person and that particular event.
Today the word “emotion” has become a passe-par-tout and a note of merit, so much so that it is present in every television broadcast and in posts on Instagram and Facebook with a precise sense, meaning and direction, because it goes hand in hand step with the word “truth-true”. “The real me” is expressed through emotions because emotions are naive and instinctive, they do not hide ulterior motives and therefore they make the truth speak and show “The real me“.
Leaving aside Saint Augustine, Petrarch, Rimbaud and the modern neurosciences, this is the emblem and the palpable-evident representation of all the discourse made in the Premise: today’s individual, once belonging to the ignorant people, has emerged from the fog and has always something to say; he believes that speaking after a millennial silence guarantees its truth, while in fact he only reproduces sounds collected here and there and does so with the poverty of his studies and of his own person.
The tendency to oppose mind and heart is very strong even if today it is the heart that has the upper hand. On a popular level it is always the simplistic opposition between Enlightenment and Romanticism, despite Gadamer having shown the closeness between the two movements. Today, however, this contrast has entered the individual experience and reproduces the conflict, because the human being knows by differences (G: Bateson) and the strongest and most expressive difference is the conflict, the struggle, the creation-presence of an enemy.
In a long dialogue with a colleague of mine on the relationship with children, since I insisted on the importance of metabolization through excavation and thought, she told me that words-speeches were not needed but only hugs. I pointed out to her that I kept hugging my daughter and that every day I woke her up with kisses and hugs and kissed her goodnight: she didn’t know what to say anymore, because for her there were only the mind and the heart and only one could be the leader
And instead…
Pascal is often quoted for the famous “the reasons of the heart“, but Pascal also proceeds to separate the two organs, even if he connects them. The point is that it is difficult to reflect keeping the channels open and without setting supremacy. It is difficult to reflect, indeed to think, in a recursive and reticular way i.e. with a cause that generates an effect that generates the cause. If we do not experiment on ourselves, we will always continue the habit of establishing in an absolute way a principal and a secondary (another form of cause-and-effect determinism). The experiment must abandon the linear and general (or absolute) dimension to conceive a reticular and particular-provisional structure. Reticular (like the brain) means that there is no centre and periphery which are such only in a relative way, when we decide that that element is the centre and the other periphery: what we decide today to be the centre tomorrow can, without problems, become suburb. And this is the aspect for which we must get used to considering the various nodes of our existence as particular and temporary: this does not diminish or de-qualify them, because we are the ones who establish their quality and importance.
For example, I have considered love as the decisive aspect of my existence.
At first I made it a general and absolute aspect (I remember when I passed from communism to love), then I introduced new and different elements which led me to transform love into a horizon and not into a reason for living: in this case it would border on obsession. Those new elements introduced aspects related to professional, social, sentimental and cultural life, but the path was never one-way: every external element that I introduced into love was regularly modified by the experience of love in a relationship of mutual interdependence.
Acquiring the importance of the market and competition (aka capitalism) in human history allowed me to revise this aspect in love relationships and better understand the aspect of rivalry and jealousy.
The acquisition of madness not as something monstrous and abnormal, but as an aspect that is not alien to our humanity helped me understand the failure of relationships where mutual friends pushed the button “she/he is crazy“.
Understanding how scientific determinism had given way to a complex vision, that did not deny what was previously discovered but seen as approximation and reduction, led me in love stories not to use de-finitive words, as told by the common sense, and to see their structure : I stopped using expressions like “I love you-I don’t love you anymore, asshole, traitor, whore, liar” etc. These words were devoid of substance because they had (and have) a closed meaning, while behind them there is a rich and complex world made up of networks and not just cause-effects. They are like triangles in relation to fractals (see Stoppard: mountains are not triangles).
Understanding that History cannot be traced back to one or more causes, but moves by flows like a river and that “even the past had a future” (Ricoeur) and that the particular is not indifferent to the path (Morin) and that the possibilities depend on constraints (Ceruti) and that in front of us there is not a target but a horizon (Gadamer) prompted me to transform love: no more a continuous series of IloveYou but a process of construction that forced me to reckon with single daily episodes in the light cone of the past and in the horizon of the future.
And so after saying IloveYou I wrote “the young meeting of Chance” to highlight how Love had not ended but a Love and that Chance, always my friend, had made me meet Her and this Love was different, new, more complex: “He was all for her… The awakening was the sweet awakening and her smile was his smile. The night had the colours of the chance, but always – however – the awakening was the sweet awakening and her smile was his smile … New round, new race. Everything is reset and we proceed to reshuffles and new provisions. Yet Chance continues to be your friend. It avoids stacking and relativism, it challenges you on the ground you thought you were the master of, it introduces pawns, it corrodes your certainties, it invites you to think. Still…”. Only those who are beginners fail to see in those words and in all the others of my book Sorriso (Smile) a fuller and richer love, a gift from Heaven that no one had received before.
Many other examples make up the different pieces of the puzzle which, by renewing the previous paintings, have made it possible to proceed with the construction of my person in a recursive relationship between love-profession-culture-relations-body-mind, where the discovery made in each of these aspects transformed , enriching it, all the others.
This digression is not a useless parenthesis, but one of the branches that reflection on emotions has produced and which strengthens the trunk itself, to which, however, we must return. And returning to emotions means remembering Damasio’s contribution. I’m not a neuroscientist or even a scientist and I don’t intend to enter here into the merits of the debate on the mind, consciousness and feeling: I’m not in the trade, Zalone would say. I speak of Damasio because he is the author who opened new horizons to me starting from his “Descartes’ error“, a title which is certainly also a captivating way to talk about neuroscience: opening new horizons does not mean, in the construction of my person , “to agree” with Damasio, which would be ridiculous and pathetic. Not being in the trade, it means that the interpretation of certain reflections of him allow me to structure the path of construction of my person. It may be that Damasio himself would not recognize himself in my transformation of his words into my construction, but I think this is the correct method for words to become creative and not mere opinion or representation. Damasio’s critique of Descartes, through a wealth of studies and experiments, leads back to overcoming dualism, that is, the separation between the world and the EGO, between body and mind. Many other aspects are important in that book, but here we are interested only in this element.
First of all there is the properly scientific analysis which makes no sense to discuss: “In short, emotional states are defined by a myriad of changes in the chemical profile of the body, by changes in the state of the viscera and by changes in the degree of contraction of various striated muscles of the face, throat, torso and limbs. But they are also defined by changes in the collection of neural structures that first caused those changes and then also other significant changes in the state of many neural circuits.” (Emotion and Consciousness, in Italian, p. 339. Adelphi 2000).
So there is no separated body and mind, but the two are related, integrated and interconnected: frowning depends on what is recorded by the brain and produces new incorporations in the brain, ready to act when conditions require it.
There is in this process an element that I have already highlighted and that Damasio recalls in the synthesis of the process, speaking of a first step: “Involvement of the organism by an inducer of emotion, for example a particular object visually elaborated, from which derive visual representations of the object. One may or may not become aware of the object and may or may not be recognized, since neither awareness of the object nor its recognition is necessary for the continuation of the cycle.” (idem, p. 340).
Awareness of the roots of an emotion is not an unimportant fact, as cardiocentric people think, because it is one of the many manifestations with which our Ego expresses itself, leaving its mark, the imprint of a presence that comes from the past: one of the many roots that make us up. Carpere diem, convinced that the past is passed, is, precisely starting from here, a mistake that we risk paying dearly, especially if it becomes the practice with which we move. Getting used to digging into the manifestations of our existence starting from expressed emotions helps us to orient the construction of our person, to give sense (meaning and direction) to this construction, showing the indissoluble link between present, past and future. It is certainly not the only method, but it is certainly one of the best. The present, as O. Paz recalls in his speech on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize (La busqueda del presente), the present is above all presence, i.e. pre-(ex)sistence and therefore the present is something outside of us and at the same time it’s us, our EGO: living in the present means looking for it (busqueda) because in the present there is our entire history and our possible futures.
There is no history without geography, which means that there is no time without space: the present as time is also presence as space and the two terms are interconnected, inextricably linked.
The present is the place of presence, indeed “it is the source of presences” (O. Paz, ditto). “Reflection on the present does not imply renouncing the future or forgetting the past: the present is the meeting place of the three times. Much less can it be confused with easy hedonism.”. (O. Paz, idem)
It’s not a matter of curriculum vitae, but presence is only possible by retracing the steps, the choices, the responsibilities that have brought us here in this moment and in this place. It is a network that is made up of many filaments and that originates with our birth. Being a network and not a line means that the construction of our person up to our presence in the present has moved through all possible movements, including going back, retracing stretches already furrowed, moving obliquely, going back and proceeding forward repeating what has already travelled or giving life to completely new and unexpected filaments. It is not possible to reconstruct the web that we have spun or woven over all the years and all the movements of our existence. Anyway it is possible, at some point in our lives, to want to rebuild that web, knowing that the sooner we start the better is, knowing that there are many traps and one of them imposes itself, a trap we have always lived with and which often makes fun of us.
This trap is memory.
Also on this issue neurosciences have warned us and so we have made progress in the knowledge of our knowledge (Ramachadran Schacter…). We know by now that memory is not a drawer in which we store our memories like photographs, ready to present them years later as needed in their original form: memory actively intervenes on those memories sometimes safeguarding them as a whole, but more often modifying them little or much always when needed. There are interesting studies that help to understand where we are. I mention only one for its usefulness: two psychiatrists followed a person at the same time and, at the end of all the sessions, they were asked to present a report on the sessions. Despite having met the patient in the same place and for the same time, the reports turned out to be discordant as if the two doctors had met different people (Pluriverse, n.1).
Let’s get back to us.
Many of these things are known, they have become common also thanks to cinema and television, to films to series to entertainment. However, there is a leap when we have to move from acquired, recognized and manifested knowledge to their application in our daily experience.
Now everyone knows that madness doesn’t exist and that the concept of normality is vague, yet that dear friend of mine, a bi-graduate and an intellectual of great depth, did not hesitate to declare that the wife who had left him with strange manifestations was crazy.
The same goes for the constant clashes between relatives, friends, boyfriends and spouses over the memory of episodes: you said, you did, but you said first, no I didn’t say it, it’s not true, etc., things that belong to the relationship life of each of us. In particular, after the experiment mentioned above, it seems incredible, probably incorporated at a genetic level, that the hypothesis that the two different points of view are both legitimate is still not taken into consideration. If we did this we would get used to a deeper and less conflictual, more responsible and constructive vision: responsibility is not responding to moral or civil Commandments, but to our thoughts and actions according to what we know. The habit of transforming knowledge into (absolute) Truth continues to characterize us in daily behaviour with a zero-sum game: the prisoner’s dilemma has shown that there is the possibility of playing and winning both, proceeding along a construction path. Everyone knows, and they declare and write and post and teach, that the concept of normality is outdated, yet those all in their daily lives continue to think in dualistic terms, us and the others, good and evil.
It has by now been clarified that societies are born to unite against the offenses that Nature regularly produces and that survival depended on this, but societies as homogeneous bodies have seen other communities as rivals for the acquisition of what little Nature left them at their disposal. In this context, humanity has been structuring itself according to dualistic principles which then, both in paganism and in monotheistic religions, have involved superior entities to guarantee this dualism. So far nothing new, it is the history of humanity. When this dualism abandoned religious legitimacy and became incarnate in Science, which set out to know exactly the world and its rules, then dualism ceased to find its guarantee in supernatural entities and legitimized itself as the essence of man. Modern science took on a completely new statute and showed century after century a vast number of successes: at the same time the level of popular literacy grew, reaching a real mass culture. The dualism of religious origin taken up by modern Science in terms of True-False is incorporated in the daily life of single individuals: once the right to vote and school are been obtained, individuals feel independent and free and do their own all that is proposed by Science.
We could call it genetic cultural evolution.
The philosophy of the past comes in handy: tertium non datur and mathematics is not an opinion. For teacher, nurse, worker, farmer, craftsman and their children a substrate of values is created which claim to be objective and as such absolute and universal. Unlike the guillotine given to the royalists of the French Revolution, fortunately there is now only ostracism for those who dare to doubt the existence of values: a legitimate thing because the doubters are unable to justify their own antics. This system so well oiled and that we have to thank for the better life it has allowed us, well this system begins to show its cracks: we must thank poetry, literature, art, physics, biology, neuroscience between the 19th and 20th centuries. Today supporting “normality does not exist” or “who says what is normal?” belongs to common sense and thought, but…. But in daily life most people continue to proceed in a dualistic way. The interesting novelty is that, deprived of God and of absolute values, individuals, in order to sustain and justify their own existence, must refer to themselves; therefore they transform a difference of opinion or thought into a stigma to be fought because it is not at stake there are more values to fight for (adhesion), but the person himself (identification): his existence and his mirror depend on it. What would Vitangelo Moscarda (in Pirandello’s novel “One, none, one hundred thousand”) have said? Of course there are those who are almost indifferent and those who are obsessed with it: family stories in historical and social osmosis.
3) FEELINGS
If I want to address the three topics, emotions, feelings, reflections, in a complex way, I cannot limit myself to a separate analysis and then proceed to a sum: this was the big problem faced by Poincaré (the study of the three bodies does not correspond to the set of three studies of two bodies) and which has produced one of the best acquisitions of the science of complexity, whereby the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Not only that, but speaking of emotions I had to open up to other seemingly out of context elements and so I will continue, because what I try to do is weave a network that the reader will travel in the direction that his person will be able and willing to do. The beauty of the network lies precisely in these multiple possibilities, unlike the line which is only bidirectional.
Emotions are expressed through the body, they are instantaneous and do not last long. This does not mean that they are only what we see, because laughter, tears, amazement, trembling are just the tip of the iceberg whose base is always and in any case the whole, the total, of our person. And even in the most modest or terrible of our gestures the whole of our person is expressed: I cried at the wedding of a dear friend, whom I had not known for long, and I was the only one in the crowded church; I wondered, and I asked, the reason for my tears (almost sobs) and I got no answers, only a few nods from me that emerged from my stripping investigation.
Emotion is instantaneous, just like many of our reflections that regularly cross our brain are instantaneous (Joyce’s Ulysses and much modern poetry have tried to make them protagonists). And so it emerges that even the simplicity of emotion is something complex. I understand the fashion of glorifying emotions after centuries of underestimating them, but the anecdote of the merchant who asks St. Anthony for grace remains valid, too much grace that prevents him from getting on a horse, because, if before his legs were too short, now St. Anthony knocks it over to the other side.
When Reason went into a crisis in the mid-1900s people began to talk about feelings, but in the new millennium these have become subordinate because today it’s all about emotions.
I don’t disdain emotions, but the time has come to talk about feelings.
Feeling (sentiment) originates in latin sentire (perceiving with the senses and with the mind) where the participle is sensus, from which senses. The Latin sensus follows in meaning the Greek aistesis and therefore has the exclusive value of perceiving through the senses or thanks to the mind, in which case it takes on the meaning of intelligere, to understand. What we mean today by that word is for the Latins more easily affectus, ad-facere, addressing, confirming the interpretation that originally feeling (sentiment) had the value of sending, directing towards (as in English to send). On the other side, the mental one, we then have in italian senno, i.e. the quality of wise people
It is curious, but perhaps less than the first impact, that the value of sending then also leads to the meaning of perceiving, which is etymologically valid per-capere, that is, to take, to hold. It sounds like a contradiction, but maybe it’s not: the senses send information to the person who holds it, keeps it (to develop it).
Feeling as something that cannot be reduced to the senses is widely found already in the Late Middle Ages at the birth of the Italian vernacular, while to begin to approach that something more that goes beyond the body and the mind we have to wait for 1500 a. D. with the poetess Veronica Franco and then more and more with Galluppi and Rosmini. Romanticism will explode in this direction by providing an enormous amount of situations that are the fruit of a new era and which at the same time will have an enormous influence on generations up to the present day.
Returning to Damasio and his five passages, the first two concern emotions while the third refers to “a certain number of direct responses to the body and other cerebral sites…which constitute emotion” (idem, page 340).
The fourth step consists in the emergence of feelings, when “neural maps represent changes in body state” (idem, page 340). Neural maps mean that a codification of the lived experience takes place through a dialogue, an exchange, a click between mind and body. The continuous, constant, recursive interconnection between what the body expresses and what happens in the brain has made a leap with the emergence of feelings.
Let’s clarify right away. Let us avoid using the dualistic or dialectical method to try to understand these matters; the fact that emotions are less complex than feelings does not mean that they are lower category realities, but that they have different characteristics, which, as in any network, are both centre and periphery.
From my point of view and for the purpose of these reflections, it is not necessary to go into the specifics of the neuroscientific study of Damasio (or Edelman or Penrose or Eagleman) but they want to show how my approach to the subject, combined with all my cultural and personal life, has given rise to an original construction process.
Unlike emotions, feelings are not sudden, have a consistent duration, are not limited to a physical reaction.
To be such, feelings must form and then conform, become solid and structured and it is for this reason that they have a discrete duration and are not easy to disappear; finally, when we talk about feelings, despite knowing with Damasio how they operate on a cellular level, we are talking about something not easily identifiable; it will be culture that will provide us with some points of reference.
Feelings such as love, friendship, fidelity have a very generic common basis and express different aspects for each of us. When I say I laugh or cry or I’m scared I express a reality that is the same for everyone, but it’s not like that when I say I love you, you’re a friend, I’m faithful to you. Yet we all use the same expressions. This does not depend on the abstract and non-immediate nature of the feeling, but on its greater complexity. Just as mountains are not triangles, so love is not what we believe as we define it with the expression “I love you“, an expression that needs to be developed, that is, un-developed, open, deprived of the envelopment that makes us see only the title, it must be un-folded, opened, deprived of the folds that prevent us from seeing inside.
For many still today emotions and feelings refer to the heart and are opposed to the reflection that would be the product of reason: as always for many centuries it would be a matter of two separate worlds and, even if they were put in relation, a main and a secondary one would be established , a determinant and a determined, in the more common causal and dualistic form. Instead, we have seen that reason is present in emotions and also in feelings: we are just not used to recognizing it.
As far as feelings are concerned, unlike emotions and due to their complexity, it is very difficult to trace why we say we love that person: the what. However, reason can help us understand the why of our way of loving: the how.
“The heart cannot be controlled”, “love is mysterious”, “it was love at first sight, suddenly“: these are very common expressions that reveal a difficulty, but above all a refusal to dig deep, beyond the surface. Love and friendships end, today much more than before, and I won’t stay here to repeat the emergence of the EGO and its recognition: we respond to these events more and more in a relativistic way, through “we have to compromise”, “we have to leave each other our spaces”, “love while it lasts”, “the fucking-friend”, “loyal betrayal”, “polylove” and its many variations that can no longer surprise.
It is not a question of rationalizing each of our manifestations with the aim of dominating it, as happened with Modern Science towards Nature: this continues to be the most evident error of those who fail to see their rational component in feelings and for this avoids also using reason to unravel the skein, un-develop and un-fold what happens to us in less conventional relationships, such as love and friendship.
The reason is in the feeling because it is it that codifies the impulses of different origins and it does so not according to a pre-established scheme, but according to variable structures specific to each individual, those structures that make him who he’s.
Simple reason, the traditional one, tends to seek unique, absolute, universal answers, while complex reason, the one that goes beyond linearity, tries to reconstruct the different paths which, although similar, constitute the differences of each individual. Until a few decades ago love was a feeling that everyone recognized, today, faced with the failure of dualism and reductionism, we come to conceive six (chedonna.it), seven (psicoadvisor.com), eight (robadadonne.it) forms of love.
Expelling reason from feeling, or even subordinating it to it, leads its supporter into a trap. And here we return to a more general theme that goes beyond love, beyond feelings and concerns the totality of our experiences.
Word, discourse, reflection.
Once upon a time love stories ended with repudiation, a simple act of domination. Today, however, we ask for clarifications, we want to know the reasons for the separation, we recall episodes (memorable or fatal) that we had removed, we attribute blame (always the usual story for which we are unable to speak of responsibility): in short, we set in motion the superfluous word, the useless speech, the much mistreated reason. And naturally we are not satisfied, because on the other side there is generally something that goes beyond feeling and reason and it is the “will to power”. However, this is not the place to return to that discussion that has already been extensively addressed.
Sentiment needs reason not only to be able to be born, but also to be able to consolidate and eventually expand. Feelings may well manifest themselves without reason, but then they need this to give sense (meaning and direction) to their (feeling’s) existence. We are witnessing the end of loves and friendships that we fail to understand, not because of the usual stereotype of “True love“, but with respect to their birth: all relationships of this kind are born with the pretension of lasting and therefore the question to ask is not “Why do they end?”, but “Why I couldn’t make them last?”. And if this is the question, then we cannot expel (or subordinate) reason from (and to) feeling: we must have the ability to question ourselves as early as the second day of the relationship and try to answer without waiting for someone to tell you it’s over. And it’s not important at that point that real or presumed faults are produced, it’s not important because by now the games are over. It is obvious that to nurture that feeling we cannot act without word, discourse, reflection.
Let’s see this aspect by broadening the perspective through an example that arises from the experience that sooner or later belongs to everyone: the death of a loved one. There is an expression that has become common and that we find outside the psychological realm: Processing of mourning. Pain is not only a physical feeling and it can be devastating if it touches the ganglia of relationships that have engaged us in a positive and profound way. Sometimes the pain never goes away and life drags on vegetatively, but most of the time you can get over it and move on. This takes place through a process of elaboration, of metabolization, that is, of transformation of the mourning experienced, a process that follows distinct stages and which can be autonomous or guided: in both cases the word, the discourse, the reflection return to being protagonists. The expression has been expanding to broader fields than the traditional one of death and is increasingly including the loss of a loved one, which occurs through abandonment by this: it is somewhat the nucleus of every separation.
Metabolizing means transforming substances to make life easier, “processing until completely assimilated“(Treccani). There is therefore a physical-chemical metabolization and a psychological or spiritual metabolization that involves feelings and relationships. The feeling that we experience needs a process of metabolization not only when it is injured, but on a daily basis; we eat regularly every day and not just when we’re sick. Hence, even in the field of feelings, there is no need to wait for mourning to proceed with a metabolization, but this becomes a necessity if we want that feeling, and the relationship it has formed, to continue the life cycle for which they were born and that we want to make last. . As with mourning, the metabolization continues to see word, discourse, reflection as protagonists.
I love you-I don’t love you anymore: tertium non datur.
The dialectic of opposites is more nuanced: bourgeoisie-proletariat in struggle will lead to the victory of one of the two in a new context, thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
However, this does not work when we are dealing with complex phenomena and there is no need to bother Borges for whom in History Ugolino ate or did not eat the little ones, while in Poetry he ate them and did not eat them. Even if Borges had intuited the complex nature of reality.
From reason to sentiment, from sentiment to emotions. A historical path that corresponds to the development of mass culture: as quantity increases, quality decreases. Heir to the age-old debate between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the culture of the twentieth century reproposed it by exchanging the poles, until the irruption of “the one which is worth one” meant that even the sentiment was too complex and so from simplification to simplification we moved on to the emotion, which, as I said, has become contemporary spiritual oxygen: if you don’t talk about emotions, and above all you don’t show them live, you are dead and you have no right to speak.
Here I am doing the opposite process, trying to go back from emotions to feelings to arrive at reason, because every complex system needs to keep its components together and not to establish structural hierarchies. Leafing through the pages of the Internet, we find that there are those who speak of the existence of as many as 101 emotions, making a list of them, while as far as feelings are concerned, the number drops considerably, reaching around 17.
101 emotions, 17 feelings: this is not the terrain to play on in order to try to understand the behaviours and relationships in which we are the protagonists. Of course, since the numbers are infinite, remaining in that field guarantees us a lifelong privileges: I’m not saying that all of this is not true or useless, because working on numbers also requires that they be explained and therefore it is possible to focus hitherto neglected boxes; I say that this is not the way to go, because in a complex phenomenon the whole IS NOT the sum of the individual parts, more or less numerous.
Emotions and feelings require a closer look; and if an emotion of fear, for example, can have a relationship with a simple and modest event, the feeling of fear refers to something sedimented and structured that is generally not taken into consideration both for processes of repression and for consolidated habit. The need to look deeper corresponds to a growing urgency: this is demonstrated by the ever wider recourse to psychoanalytic sessions. It is not that we are more unhappy because of society, but this corresponds to what I call the emergency of the EGO. I do not consider it a mistake to consult a psychoanalyst, because it can help, but beyond the more than numerous schools of thought and beyond the type of suffering, the doctor cannot accompany you in everyday life and above all in the daily manifestations with which we express our presence in the world.
Going back from an emotion or a feeling of fear to something that created it is not a necessity; we can also live with it, as with any other emotion and above all with any other feeling, but having managed to reconstruct the path that led us to this expression means having managed to come to terms with ourselves.
Here, dealing with ourselves is the perfect synthesis between emotion, feeling and reflection. When you have just passed adolescence it may not be important, as well as in old age, but starting – let’s say – from the age of 30 it becomes a duty. We can find this path, albeit through an extensive paraphrase and analogy, in the thought of S. Kierkegaard who speaks to us of three evolutionary phases of our existence: that of the seducer, that of the father of the family and that of the religion. Of course it is an analogical extension that brings us back to three ways of living our existence: worldly pleasure, social duty and the deeper and inner question of sense.
Despite the growing public weight that emotions have, feelings (from the so-called part of the “heart”) are the decisive states in our person and they are so because they are consolidated, lasting, structured. Once we have understood that feeling is also reason, we must learn to enter into it, to know how to move in this labyrinth of reality where something so instinctive as to appear natural to us is much more complex: the result of an intertwining between culture and nature, between an accelerated heartbeat and rational articulation. This discourse brings us back to the value that the cultural factor has for us, a factor that is anything but closed, also an interweaving of genes, social and family history, chance, individual choices. The task before us is not to revolutionize the world or to adapt to models or to find the causes that have determined the con-formation of our person.
Rebuilding a network of relationships is different from looking for the cause or causes of our behaviour. To an adolescent, the meaning of life is presented in entertainment (as one of my students replied), but to an adult, it splits in meaning and direction, that is, in the value that my life has for me and towards which horizon I want it to go. direct. This is the only way that allows for the real existence of responsibility, without moralizing and outside of ethical principles which, as such, respond to the ideologies that procreated them.
The habit, the practice of separating the heart from the mind, feeling from reflection, has meant that it is difficult for us to see the interweaving between the two aspects and so we prefer to attribute to the word “interweaving”, the adjective “inextricable”, to “feeling” the condition of “mysterious”, and we think that “complex” is the same as “complicated”. On the one hand we willingly live in this fog because it is our fog (ours, that is our parents, our friends, our colleagues, our favourites), but on the other hand we have to look in the mirror and so we find justifications, these are so imaginative and of minimal use. “Dear friend, you have disappointed me, I was wrong to trust you”: what is the meaning of this sentence? Express the fact in different words: is the mistake in trusting yourself or in trust as such? “Dear love, you betrayed me, I was wrong to love you“: here too the fact is expressed in other words: is it you or love that is the mistake?
In both cases we have justified what exists and have not made any progress: disappointment and betrayal are two devastating feelings, we want to know, but if feeling excludes reason what can we know? We can only break the event into its parts and proceed to a new composition of the puzzle with the same pieces and this will hardly allow for a recognizable picture.
The use of moral attributes (it’s your fault) that can also lead to violence is an unnecessary but easily practiced complement. By treating feeling as something separate from reason, an obligatory path is created whose results are obvious. By treating feeling as something interconnected with reason, we are allowed to take different paths, move towards different horizons, build different people and relationships, avoiding the natural, common, ordinary outcome of events.
It’s like when I ask: what is 2+2? And they all answer: 4. There is no creation of reality, but a simple, natural, common, ordinary outcome. Why? Because saying 2+2 and 4 is the same thing, because 4 is already in 2+2 and this is already in 4.
Treating feeling as something interconnected with reason does not weaken the relationship, it does not diminish desire or passion or gestures of tenderness or attention. This is one of the many preventive fake opinions in order not to undermine the commandment “Feeling is separated from Reason“, but it is also the truest, albeit limited, fruit of what we have thought to be Reason, i.e. a tool capable of knowing and dominating the world, indeed the only tool.
Here we are at the moment to talk about reason.
- 4) REFLEXION
The word, the discourse, the reflection.
That is the Logos.
Around the leg-log root, many words have arisen with different values that have created an important universe: Leg is speaking and reading, it is choosing and law, it is also a legend; log is speech and reason, it is logic; there is also (in)ligence and (in)tellect.
From emotion to feeling to reflection: it is a process that takes us into a much more complex universe that neuroscience is increasingly bringing into focus.
“Explicit human intelligence is neither simple nor trivial; it requires a mind and the contribution of developments related to it: feelings and consciousness. It requires perception, memory and reasoning. The contents of the mind are based on spatially mapped schemes” (A. Damasio: Feeling and knowing, Adelphi 2022- pg.49). Those schemes, those maps allow us to measure their extension, to establish similarities and differences, to break them down and recompose them, through a process of manipulation. In short, practically everything is allowed to us and, if we consider what has been developed by biology, we have a further point of reference: knowing is creating and creating is knowing, in the sense that while we are making a transformation our mind acquires knowledge and in the same way when we develop knowledge a transformation of reality takes place (Maturana-Varela: The tree of knowledge, 1987).
These are clear concepts and not difficult to understand, yet we generally act and behave differently, believing that the mind is separate from the body and that thought is something different from action.
These are legacies of the traditional clash between idealism and materialism with which we are imbued; moreover the mass-level development of technological society (naturally material) has caused us to lean towards a materialist worldview. Heirs also of Marxism which had declared that it is not enough to interpret the world, but that it must be transformed and that this was the task of philosophy, which finally brought man back keeping the feet on the ground.
Today, more than 50 years after the start of the process of massification of society, we can better understand the (new) terrain in which we find ourselves operating and the (new) rules that the (new) game asks us to respect: of course I’m not talking of moral or legal rules, but of paths and methods to be exploited to better enhance our presence in the world.
We have seen that heart and mind interact continuously and that the traditional images of this relationship no longer correspond to what we participate in. The processes are not simple: the signals that the senses send to the brain are not a simple movement and deposit in the central vault, the memory is not an archive of data to be pulled out when we need it, the shivers of the body are the product of impulses sensitive and mental patterns, the body movements may not be in tune with the impulses coming from the brain, the parts of the brain that are believed to be responsible for certain functions do not stop talking to all the other parts.
It looks like Chaos, but it really isn’t: we need to learn about new paradigms.
Certainly there is a theory and there is a practice, aspects of existence that we can separate and photograph distinctly, that’s not the problem. Of course, we have seen that theory was formed in the moment of action and practice immediately created patterns and maps in the mind, but that’s not the problem either.
These are just the premises.
It is interesting to note that many people agree with these two theses and perhaps even discuss them animatedly during a dinner with friends and differences of this type can even break relationships: what is really interesting, however, is that for none of the two mutual opponents life changes the next day and everything goes on as usual. The evolutionary history of our species shows enormous transformations, but these need time and tortuous paths, they need experience, indeed experiences (many) and the changes, or rather the adjustments, often and willingly take place de facto, and also de iure, but without understanding not only the extent but also the origin and the path that led to these changes. So it was for Magna Charta Libertatum and for many historical events, so much so that a philosopher, W. Wundt, made a theory of it, that of the heterogenesis of aims, which in reality is only a statistical theory which, as such, does not allow us to predict but in retrospect it helps to understand. Without bothering philosophers or sociologists and given the crisis of universal values and laws, this is what happens today: understanding a posteriori and creating relativistic theories, to give a semblance of seriousness to our thinking. Thought that in any case remains detached from action, and this happens in macro-relationships as in individual relationships that directly concern us.
A properly cultural aspect brings us back to Cartesian dualism which is not worth repeating, but there is also something more general and which concerns the evolutionary history of our species. Survival is the fundamental purpose of all living things from the unicellular bacterium to the rodent with a brain to the most evolved homo sapiens, but only the latter has developed the brain in mind, consciousness and culture. It has only been a few decades, however, that this process has ended up involving almost the entire world population, in the sense that it is not an elite but the single individual who is the protagonist. In some way, even modern societies and institutions have registered this enlargement of contributions: greater literacy, better living conditions, more free time. Despite this evident progress, the reflective and rational function remains less developed. It is not a question of offending the lower classes, but of recognizing a fact hidden under the alleged equality between individuals.
Lenin, champion of proletariat and lower classes, argued with Marx that the dominant ideology was that of the ruling classes, which in modern times meant the bourgeoisie. For this reason proletarian culture was possible only thanks to bourgeois intellectuals who denied their origins and placed themselves at the service of workers. In reality, proletariat only had to obey the Party which declared itself to be the expression of the interests of the dominated classes.
There has been talk for more than a century in left-wing circles of a working-class culture that was opposed to the bourgeois one, but it was an “expression of the interests of the working class according to the culture of some intellectuals of bourgeois origin who developed Marx’s thought ”. In reality, individual workers had other thoughts and those who recognized themselves in what for decades was presented as “working class culture” expressed what was explained to them in party meetings or what they read in the party newspaper. There was no shortage of Catholic workers who had given life to political and trade union organizations and their thinking also repeated what was presented by the Church or by Catholic intellectuals. In both cases thought acted starting from the respective values, while introspection (or self-reflection) was not recognized and accepted, in the first case because it was a deviation linked to bourgeois individualism, in the second because the earthly point of reference had to be ” the neighbour“, not the self.
Fortunately, today thought, and therefore reflection, are aspects that almost everyone considers important and they do so in every situation, at any age and in the most varied forms. It is true that I have also met people who laughed at me when I said that reflection is a decisive factor, but this is not worth talking about. Anyone who has lived in the school knows that a teenager today feels entitled to express his thoughts, more opinion than thought, but for him there is no difference. For him, it is above all the means of mass communication that have opened up the function by which the brain is activated, even if in general it is the speeches of others taken in full or in fragments.
More or less the same goes for adults with the difference that it is generally easier for them to make a selection, the result of a greater amount of data linked to the greater number of years lived.
I don’t consider this fact negative, in the sense that 50 years ago the student was silent and did not dare, while the adult repeated the slogans of the community of reference (politics, sport, friendship…), while today the brain of each individual recovers, records, order.
Until 50 years ago, one’s behaviour was limited to filtering in the light of recognized values, among which there were not only the large and well-known moral ones, but also secondary aspects, such as coherence, rigour (mathematics is not an opinion), loyalty, good manners and more.
Today one’s own behaviours have replaced absolute values and therefore we are faced with a chaotic, noisy, uncertain increase in traffic in relationships that qualify not only for doing, but also for speaking: a labyrinth of words, of speeches, of thoughts. In the 90s Sociology had some success thanks to the post-modern invention of the society of tribes: it didn’t talk nonsense, but limited itself to recording some phenomena that characterized this transition period between mass society and the society of individuals- mass. Like all post-modern inventions, since they are relativistic and devoid of cultural foundations, the society of tribes has also vanished, leaving few traces of itself.
It is worth recalling Pirandello’s reflection on the small lantern lights, once the big lanterns have gone out.
“And this feeling of life for Mr. Anselmo was precisely like a lit small lantern that each of us carries within us; a lantern that shows us lost on earth, and shows us good and evil; a lantern that projects a more or less large circle of light all around us, beyond which is the black shadow, the fearful shadow that would not exist if the lantern were not lit in us, but which we must yet to believe true, as long as it keeps alive in us. …I would first of all say that they are of many colours; what does she say? according to the glass that gives us the illusion, great merchant, great merchant of coloured glass. However, it seems to me, Mr. Meis, that in certain ages of history, as in certain seasons of individual life, the dominance of a given colour could be determined, eh? In every age, in fact, it is customary to establish among men a certain agreement of feelings which gives light and colour to those lanterns which are the abstract terms: Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Honour, and what do I know… And don’t you think that it was red, for example, the lantern of pagan Virtue? Of a violet, depressing colour, that of Christian Virtue… Not uncommon in history are certain fierce gusts of wind that suddenly extinguish all those big lanterns. What a pleasure! In the sudden darkness, the confusion of the individual lanterns is indescribable: some go here, some there, some go back, some go around; none of them finds the way anymore: they bump into each other, they join together for a moment in tens, in twenty; but they can’t come to an agreement, and they scatter again in great confusion, in anguished fury: like ants who can no longer find the mouth of the anthill, blocked up for fun by a cruel child. It seems to me, Signor Meis, that we are now in one of these moments. Great darkness and great confusion! All the big lanterns, off. Who should we contact?” (The late Mattia Pascal, chap. XIII).
A highly complex system with its own characteristics, above all reticulation, recursion, a relative relationship between centre and periphery, shows how word-discourse-thought emerge from the primitive homeostatic perspective and introduce new elements capable of modifying the entire system.
Word has taken the place of silence even if silence has not been completely renounced, only that now it expresses at most not the ignorance of the past, but the crudest material will to power.
As Canetti recalls:
« …The power of silence is always valued highly. In fact, it means that those who keep silent can resist all the innumerable external opportunities to speak. Nothing is answered, as if one had not been questioned. You don’t know if you like one thing or the other. You are silent without really being silent. And yet you listen.
Silence presupposes a precise knowledge of what is kept silent. Since it is practically not possible to remain silent all the time, a choice is made between what can be said and what is kept silent. What is kept silent is what is known best, with greater precision, and which is considered more precious….
Silence contrasts metamorphosis… One is silent above all where one does not want to transform oneself. When he becomes silent, all the opportunities for metamorphosis disappear. In speech everything begins to flow between men, in silence everything stiffens.
Who is silent enjoys an advantage: his words are more awaited, more weight is attributed to them. Rare and isolated, they resemble commands… » E. Canetti : Mass and power, 1960 (chap. Elements of power : The secret).
Once cleared and legitimized, word becomes speech, showing a higher level of involvement of neural networks: like word, speech also ceases to be the slogan of the past and proposes itself as the spearhead of the person. Today word is easy, but speech is easier because the amount of data we come into contact with favours a vast combination of elements; moreover recognition is easier when words are combined to express something that makes sense. The word “Love” is less pregnant than the speech “I love you with all my heart“.
Thought is also the evolutionary product of the mind, but for this to happen a much more articulated and complex involvement of the various components of the mind is required: the simple perception of the external environment is accompanied by a feeling that corresponds to states of our internal environment. And this is already a step forward because, at an even higher level, there is a connection, a recursive and reticular relationship between the different patterns that make up the neural maps. Thought is the final product of this path; it exists thanks to experience which is the starting level, but lives without always having to respond to it in the form of both perception and feeling.
The differently complex character of these relationships, in the presence in each individual of tens of billions of neurons (some say 86 and some say 100), causes extremely variable realities to be created: it is not that once thought production is reached the game is done. Meanwhile, we must remember that brain also needs experience and the more we subject it to the production of thoughts and the more thoughts we produce: but that repetition favours a single type of thought, while the habit of moving away from seriality allows us to experiment with new connections and it enables us to access ever new types of thoughts.
This is fundamentally the difference between simple, linear and unidirectional logic compared to complex, reticular and recursive logic: the difference between simple and complex thinking.
Simple thought is well codified and appears repetitive; it works like primitive feelings: I casually put my hand on the fire and felt pain, next time I’ll avoid it.
Complex thinking codifies a region and does not reject the acquisitions of simple thinking, but it is not satisfied and after having avoided putting your hand back on the fire, it plays with it and tries to see what happens if you put on the fire a sheet or a piece of wood or a piece of metal.
Until a few decades ago the panorama was simple, but today it has become confused and complicated and every aspect highlighted, word-speech-thought, presents various states: for some word is just a word, while for others it is speech and so discourse remains discourse or becomes thought, and finally thought remains such or opens onto other paths. For many, unfortunately, thought remains that thought, a unique clear limpid, a solid with sharp angles with which it is easy to identify and build one’s image: it is a big step compared to the past, but completely useless compared to the future.
Thought, because that’s what we’re talking about, develops through reflection or introspection or self-analysis; it takes place when the internal environment manages to dialogue with itself.
This dialogue can be repeated indefinitely in the same forms, making sure that at each step the coding is increasingly stronger and is con-firmed by con-forming more and more.
There is also the possibility that other roads are sought and that the flows pass through other regions: this can happen if the map we have created leaves some open space also as an escape route, an escape route that can turn into a greater and more intense neural activity that opens up to new maps. It is in this case that culture becomes fundamental, because it depends on the culture, that informs the group we belong to, if the map created at the beginning keeps one or more doors open.
It is interesting to note that there is a certain parallelism between brain activity and the structure of society; here too we see a typical feature of complex systems, recursion. An open neural coding pro-poses an open society and vice versa, in a reciprocal interaction that always creates new openings: we visit new rooms of the castle, but we don’t forget any and the map of the building becomes richer, clearer, more precise .
Knowing that word, speech, thought are not enough by themselves is something we have learned in the course of evolution; now we are slowly learning many other things, such as the provisional nature of knowledge or the presence of reflection in feeling and feeling in reflection through mutual conditioning and mutual dialogue.
Culture has always recorded and influenced everything that happened in society, even if in the past the influence was greater than the recording; today the two aspects go hand in hand because society, understood as a group of individuals, has the same power of sound and claims to have its say and does so using all the means at its disposal: the real claim is to be heard and to demand recognition.
From here arise many completely new aspects that mix with old and usual elements: popular culture, the culture of memory, the culture of women, the culture of minorities (ethnic, sexual, physical), even going so far as to interpret an animal culture. The search for affirmation of the individual, of each individual, becomes self-referentiality: only Native Americans can speak of Native Americans, only women can speak of women and so on in a creation of numerous and restricted prisons in which thought is locked up.
Fortunately, these new emergencies fail to destroy an open thought that shuns borders: the urgency of the contemporary individual remains for recognition and here we are still on the high seas, because there are hypotheses, proposed horizons, but sharing the route is still lacking.
The unifying canon of the past, a literary and philosophical reflection of the importance of absolute values, survives in the communitarianism which I mentioned a little above; on the contrary there is the most outrageous cultural relativism that legitimizes everything; in the middle a multiple and variegated plot which, shunning absolute values and relativism, creates hybrids of all kinds. The latter attitude is incapable of unifying research but is capable of keeping alive realities through crude and bare forms: it is possible to deal with these and it becomes necessary to start from them.
A dear friend received a book of mine (about love) as a gift, almost 200 pages, the result of study and experience. In the thank-you letter, she appreciated what I wrote and concluded by saying that she “largely agree with my vision“. I was very pleased with the appreciation but it made me think: agreeing largely means disagreeing to a small extent, so there are parts on which she disagree. Why not talk about it? Why not start from those to develop a reflection? It seems to me that this is a common procedure of ordinary people: to transform thought into opinion; read a book and grasp only some aspects; avoid developing reflection by following the door opened (even by what we disagree about).
It is true that each of us has his own times and priorities, but I think an opportunity is being lost.
I remain in the horizon proposed by O. Paz: “The text demands the death of the poet who writes and the birth of the poet who reads“. The tools available are now numerous, but times and priorities often come into play to avoid playing. Again, We have to wait. We will wait. The fact that the dynamics between continuity and breaks are increasingly complex, giving rise to sudden accelerations, should not make us forget that the conformation of change takes place only in the long term. It occurs in relations between states, in social relations, in relations between individuals and also within the individual himself, that is, in the elaboration of thought.
Emotion is sudden and arises from a relationship with the outside; feeling has a duration and arises from the dialogue that takes place inside, between the body and the neural network; thought remains for a long time and arises from the dialogue between the different maps to which the mind has given shape.
Today the main task we have to face concerns thinking because it is what ultimately makes us who we are, capable of feeling, giving life to emotions, sure of our progress in the world.
However, thought is not what we often believe and it is no longer the Cartesian “cogito“, that “res cogitans” that knows and organizes the outside world, that is, “res extensa“. Ex-tensa is es(x)tended, i.e. tends and extends outward (ex). Heirs of that idea, we continue in an existence that assumes that our thoughts (each of them) find legitimacy in the activity common to all, namely the Cartesian “cogitare“. It is the general EGO that is capable of thinking and finds its raison d’être on this ability: this does not mean, not even for Descartes, that this justifies every thought of every single person. Yet this is what happened, in a far from curious way because, as I wrote in my notes on aesthetics, in the transition from the top of the intellectuals to the bottom of mass epistemology, weight and extent are lost. For Descartes it was a question of legitimizing the existence of the EGO on the basis of thinking, while for today’s individual it is a question of legitimizing and recognizing his own individual existence and so the individual does it on the basis of his thinking. Descartes’ mistake (from the title of Damasio’s book) does not consist in recognizing the importance of thought, but in the dualism that separates the thinking subject from the thought object.
The modern individual, by now common at all latitudes and longitudes, needs recognition: he is not stupid, he moves as best he can, taking advantage of the contributions that come from the past, but which he reworks with tools that are his alone: in doing so he moves sure, but he does it by crawling, trudging, pushing, running over, risking falling into the ravine, completely indifferent to the territory, the weather and the passing hours.
Here we are.
From emotion to sentiment to reflection to consciousness and from there to culture: this is the reticular path that leads us to greater degrees of complexity. As Damasio points out (in the aforementioned Feeling and knowing, page 125) the term conscience is still absent in Shakespeare and that only from the end of the 1600s will it become an ever more used word and more and more an object of reflection. It is true that the term consciousness has numerous meanings, but it is also true that today there is a meaning common to many disciplines: “consciousness as a mental experience and this is a state of mind imbued with two notable and connected characteristics: its contents they are felt and adopt a unique perspective” (idem, page 126). In summary, there is an EGO that senses and directs the entire flow of information and processes that it codifies thanks to the external-internal and internal-internal relationship.
The EGO is passive and active at the same time, having to manage billions of connections of which it is also at the mercy and that is why each of us is a completely different individual from each other and this diversity increases and will increase more and more: it happens gradually as the interconnections between individuals, who in the meantime present themselves at the meeting in more complex forms ,will grow. Also from this point of view we understand the increasingly decisive reason for the emergence of the EGO.
At this stage we need to take a step back.
If it is true that the word “conscience” appears only recently, it is also true that we find traces of it in the distant past. I believe that the philosopher who came closest to what neuroscience is proposing today was Saint Augustine, when he speaks to us of the soul in a non-generic way proposing it as an articulated intertwining of three elements: intellect, memory and will.
“Soul is therefore not a generic entity, a state of consciousness, but something more complex and profound. It is individual in the sense that it expresses specific realities, compositions and transformations of each of us, but also in the sense that it transfers to the responsibility of each of us the evolution of one’s soul and the choice of its path.
The intellect is a component of the soul; it expresses the ability to intelligere-(understand), through reflection, by means of the processes of reason, analysing, thinking, connecting thoughts. In the soul, therefore, the rational component plays an important role which over the centuries (and especially since the seventeenth century) has been lost.
Memory is a component of the soul; it allows everyone to come to terms with himself, recovering within himself the numerous threads that make up and constitute our being. Remembering in order to rediscover the red thread and to identify the numerous-infinite steps that have led us to think and act as we are doing. Remembering why dealing with ourselves allows us to project ourselves and plan our path. Behind the problem of memory lies the problem of time, i.e. the past-present-future as present, i.e. remembering-attention-expectation.
Will is a component of the soul; knowing the good does not automatically imply wanting the good. The will is desire, but above all the determination of being and in this sense it must be seen, because only valuing it as an essential constituent of the soul reconnects us with the responsibility of our choices and of the project of our path”. (E. S. De spiritu, 2000)
Today it is fashionable to recover ancient philosophies, especially oriental ones, to say that certain results of contemporary scientific research had been anticipated by enlightened thinkers. Exemplary is the reference to the Tao which has been connected to quantum physics not by improvised scholars but by real scientists such as F. Capra: naturally these are generic and general affinities which do not help to create continuity between ancient thought and modern science .
Unlike this ideological approach (the works following the Tao of physics abandon the few references made in that book to modern physics) there is a continuity between the concept of soul of Saint Augustine and the reflection that neurosciences have developed on the EGO. The three elements identified by Augustine remain central to contemporary scientific research and it is no coincidence, since both are an expression of the great Christian revolution which declared the centrality of the person.
From the person in general to the individual in general understood as a reality common to the specific individual: this is the explicit path that links the past to the future. The affirmation of the Augustinian EGO is the recognition of his awareness of him, which is characterized by what he knows, by what he remembers, by what he wants.
If we used Augustine’s thesis to characterize our EGO we would already have many tools: if I recognize myself in what I know, in what I remember, in what I want, I have already defined a perspective that places me in the vital process.
Since then, however, many things have deepened and developed: knowledge is no longer the observation of reality, memory is no longer a photo album and will is not the simple desire for something. Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Freud, the Science of Complexity broke that ordered universe and showed the complexity of the EGO: they did it first through a philosophical study and a poetic production of the EGO, then through the scientific method readapted to the reading of complex phenomena. The billions of neurons of our neural apparatuses are not devices put at the right point to make the machine work, but they are articulated disarticulations that open up various perspectives.
Once people were judged on the basis of their adaptation and correspondence to a social average, today we must shift attention to that articulated disarticulation created by the billions of neurons of each individual, which reduces the importance of social component common to families, groups, ethne, nationalities.
Emotions, feelings, thought, conscience. From a neuroscientific point of view, the evolutionary dynamic leads to conscious thought which, as we have seen, is the product of simple (homeostatic) feelings which, according to Damasio, we also find in bacteria; but conscious thought is also the product of complex feelings and of a relationship between all that has been codified inside us. In this sense, conscious thought is the element that has allowed us as a species to occupy space, modify it, create structures within it, and, at the same time, proceed to a continuous transformation of the individual himself, through continuous new mappings outside-inside and inside-inside.
Today it is fashionable to highlight how social cooperation is a characteristic that goes beyond the human community: the best known and highlighted examples are those of ants and trees. This real cooperation between individuals has made it possible to create societies between animals and plants, from which curious theses have developed that tend to see the human being as any form of nature.
Cooperation is undoubtedly a common element, but on the one hand it manifests itself in different forms and on the other there is something specific that characterizes human beings and it is not something of little importance: on the contrary it is the element that distinguishes us in the complex body of nature.
It is neither the brain nor the mind, but conscious thought.
What neuroscientific research has discovered is that the greater complexity that human beings express consists in the recognition of the properties of the innumerable images that are mapped in our brain.
The leap in quality occurs because our physical structure and internal-internal neural processes allow us to recognize as our own all those images, whatever their origin, sensory or mental, and which we already know are deeply interconnected. The same skeleton dialogues with the other parts of the body, viscera muscles brain, and its being is not there only for the upright position and greater solidity, but because it represents the point of view in the world, the perspective, therefore the distances and vicinity, which give the person his physical and mental meaning: that is, they constitute his identity. It is starting from this acquisition or better from this recognition, in which all the images that have been assumed converge, that the person enters into a relationship with others. As life grows and develops, those images determine what we are: we fix new ones, we destroy some, we strengthen others: conscious thought is such first of all for the conscience that all the images codified from time to time they belong to us, they are really ours. And they are beyond time and space, beyond memory and impressions, beyond emotions and feelings, beyond judgments and thoughts.
5) A. DAMASIO: THE OWNERSHIP OF THE MIND
“When we describe ourselves as conscious of a particular scene, we need considerable integration of its components… Greater integration of mental contents, extended to more flowing image material, provides a wider spectrum of conscious material, but I doubt that consciousness can be explained by resorting to the “connection” of the contents that contribute to it…
Instead, what really begins to generate consciousness is the enrichment of the mind stream with that kind of knowledge which denotes the organism as the owner of the mind… What begins to make my mental contents conscious is the identification of ME as the owner of the current heritage of my mind.”
(A.Damasio: Feeling and knowing, 2021- Adelphi 2022, pp. 161-162)
- 6) NEUROSCIENCE AND US
The brain has always been a very particular organ, much discussed and very difficult to understand due to its complexity. The organ study is relatively recent, but the real leap in quality came with the advent of neuroscience, whose distinctive feature was a different approach from that generally used in the study of other organs. At the beginning we had started in the same way proceeding to an ever greater fragmentation according to the principle whereby the whole is the sum of the parts: finding the individual parts would allow us to understand the structure and functions of the organ. This method allowed medicine to make many strides, but it soon showed its limits, which were decisive as far as the study of the brain was concerned. The results obtained in recent years by neuroscience have been such and of such importance that today no one, professional or layman, can ignore them. Not only psychology and psychiatry must look at these acquisitions, but also the specialist doctors of the various branches.
And we can’t help it either.
This is my thesis.
We started from emotions to get to feelings and finally discover consciousness, or rather conscious thought. We have seen how the various parts of the body interact with each other and even the bones, that make up the skeleton, play a fundamental role in the constitution of each individual’s thought. Even specialists, who once started from real axioms to understand the specific health problems of a patient, have abandoned this sectoral vision to move on to a complex approach that starts from the specificity of the individual, from his physical and spiritual history (or moral or emotional or sentimental). By now, except in particular cases, the approach to the body no longer ignores the mind, even if we are in a fairly experimental and heuristic phase, sometimes based on improvisation. We leave the development and study of these topics to neuroscientists and their research: there are many scholars and many working hypotheses, even for authors like Damasio who already have a rich heritage.
For us mere mortals, the time has come to have a more conscious approach, which in fact is happening thanks to the mass references to Doctor Internet that we inevitably face with the tools that belong to us; however, these tools are the old reductionism and the consequent ideological-moralist attitude. We saw it with regards to vaccines well before Covid and we see it in the lack of recognition of the doctor which goes hand in hand with the lack of recognition of the professors: if one is worth one and merit is no longer a point of reference most part of the people feel like a doctor and a professor.
Let’s leave the controversy aside and get back to us.
Greater individual awareness is possible starting from professional value and merits, recognizing the very field on which we can play.
We certainly cannot operate a transplant or identify the best treatment for liver dysfunction, but we certainly have all the tools to be in favour of vaccines or not disdain the use of medicines a priori. Above all, however, we all have the opportunity to use conscious thought for better management, that is, healthier and more serene, of our lives.
Let’s see some aspects that we shouldn’t have difficulty making our own.
The first and most important concerns the centrality of the individual. Now We know that conscience is such only starting from the recognition of ownership of everything we have incorporated and from the distances we have established. This awareness obliges us to overcome attitudes that are always in vogue such as the criticism of egotism and the subordination of the individual to society. There is no doubt that we are social animals (as Aristotle said), but we are social animals starting from that specific and unique formation which is our EGO, which is ourselves, as we have become thanks to the history of intrauterine dialogue, of the tens of billions of neurons and the most numerous axons with the outside world (nature and men) and of the dialogue that we incessantly build within ourselves.
The continuous philosophical and religious debates on the primacy of society over the individual, exasperated by the new mantra of “solidarity”, remain sterile events, right in the face of scientific recognition.
On the other hand, the lack of recognition of the centrality of the individual, being the real physiological and now also historical datum, cannot be suppressed by moralistic precepts; when this happens reality has its revenge, coming out in unforeseen forms and which we continue to marvel at, because we do not want to take note of reality. Typical of ideology and moralism: if the facts are different from the theory, it is the facts that are wrong. We confuse our brain by forcing it into improper mappings and dialogues, since we force it to give up its own recognition. Dialogue is such only if open to the multiplicity of images; unfortunately we still continue with a univocal dialogue, that is a monologue, which, once the new images have been identified, for convenience it superimposes them on the previous maps: accustomed to seeing Euclidean geometric figures in the mountains, we will continue to see them as triangles. It is true that repetition was born as a guarantee, but evolution, even mental, needs leaps.
The second aspect we can work on concerns the recognition of dialogue and interconnection between all the elements in which we are protagonists: emotions, feelings, thoughts.
We have to get used to thinking what it means that heart and brain, feeling and reason are not separate elements (I’m not saying conflicting) and therefore try what this entails, when we decide to give life to an emotional relationship, love or friendship it doesn’t matter. The consequence of this acquisition lies in the fact of delving into common words and expressions, without the need to demonize them. “I love you” is not a wrong expression, but it is insufficient and inadequate to dialogue with the person we have become. “I love you” demands that we discover it, that we remove the envelope in which it is enclosed and that we give it all the possibilities that we will be able to recognize. We always talk about knowing how to bring out from young people the talent that is contained in them, in the same way we should learn to do it with the words and expressions that history and society have placed in front of us. It is a work of which there are many traces, but at which the protagonist of the 21st century, the Individual, still has difficulty trying his hand. But he can’t wait too long.
The third aspect concerns the complexity of the brain, an organ that communicates with the external and internal worlds, a complexity partly determined by the quantity of elements that compose it and by the quantity of relationships that are established between them, but also by the communication that neurosciences have highlighted between the different parts that constitute it. We can read this reticular complexity as an inextricable “tangle” or, seeing that it is a tangle only because we are used to simplistic reductionism, we can begin to recognize traits of complexity in our thinking, in our expressions, in our relating: we need to go from one simple, linear, reductionist and approximate reason to a complex, reticular, open and multiple reason that shuns de-finitions because they operate in terms of closure.
Centrality of our person, interconnection between heart and brain, presence of a complex reason.
Three aspects, but perhaps could be many more. We can begin.
IBLIOGRAPHY RELATED TO THE TEXT
BATESON G.: A sacred unity
BAUDELAIRE C.: Les fleurs du mal
CANETTI E.: Mass and power
CAPRA F.: The Tao of physics
CERUTI M.: The bond and the possibility
DAMASIO A.: Emotion and conscience
DAMASIO A.: Descartes’ mistake
DAMASIO A.: Feeling and knowing
DESCARTES: Discours sur la methode
DESCARTES: Metaphysical Meditations
EAGLEMAN D.: Undercover
EDELMAN G.: Second nature
GADAMER H. G.: Truth and method
GESNER J. M.: Novus linguae et eruditionis romanae thesaurus
KIERKEGAARD S.: Aut-aut
LIPOVETSKY G.: L’ère du vide
MATURANA-VARELA: The tree of knowledge
MORIN E.: The challenge of complexity
MORIN E.: Relier les connaissances
PAZ O.: Complete works
PENROSE R.: The emperor’s new mind
PIRANDELLO L.: Il fu Mattia Pascal
PLURIVERSO, n. 1
RAMACHADRAN V.: The man who thought he was dead
RICOEUR P.: Soi-meme comme un autre
RIMBAUD A.: La lettre du voyant
SAINT AUGUSTINE: Confessions
SCHACTER D.: Looking for memory
SISI E.: De Spiritu
SISI E.: Smile
STEPHANUS: Thesaurus graecae linguae
STEWART I.: Does God play dice?
STOPPARD T.: Arcadia
UTET: Great dictionary of the Italian language
