Video Transcription

The scientist and the philosopher may converse, at times, without truly understanding one another, attaching divergent meanings to the same term, shaped by their world view, their experience, their culture, their school, and their language. This incomprehension is itself part of the richness of our civilization. If such richness is the substance that nourishes Art, were we to condense into a single task the mission of Philosophy, its highest aim should lie in the construction of a universal plane of dialogue. For the scientist and the philosopher inhabit the same reality, and this troubled sharing compels them to an eternal dialectical confrontation.

Kant, drawing upon Heraclitus, declared: “In wakefulness, we have a world in common, in dreams each has his own world.” In the fragment of Heraclitus quoted by Plutarch and later taken up by Kant, the word Cosmos appears. The translators render it as “common world”, yet the sense of the phrase is less poetic and more precise than it may seem: Cosmos denotes the “Objective World”, apprehended by the awakened consciousness, in opposition to the subjective representations that anyone—uninitiated into wisdom, and thus asleep—may fabricate through fantasy. Here we glimpse, in transparency, the dichotomy between Episteme and Doxa, later revived by Plato.

While Art sublimely portrays dreams and subjective representations, Philosophy—that which does not resign itself to merely “knowing”, but aspires, with some arrogance, to “comprehend”—should help us grasp how the “waking world” operates. Science, though proceeding by errors, advances with unyielding tenacity in its endeavor to build an objective vision of reality, compelled to forge a shared formal language. Modern philosophy, by contrast, hesitates over the very notion of objectivity, and meanwhile resigns itself to deconstructing dreams, perceiving in this shift an achievement, a historical advance.

Gadamer, for instance, appears to surrender to relativism when he asserts that the interpreter of a message cannot set aside himself or the concrete situation in which he finds himself. He invites us to acknowledge our prejudices in relation to what we seek to interpret, while maintaining a clear awareness of the distance between sender and receiver. Yet, we ask, is such awareness sufficient? Would it not resemble attempting to interpret another’s dream without ever leaving one’s own?

Were this principle valid also for Science, and not merely for Philosophy, since the dawn of the scientific revolution we would have accumulated only a mass of unrelated experimental data, gathered through disparate tools and languages, and the great theories of Physics would never have emerged on the horizon of our culture. To interpret the dreams of others without even simulating the effort of situating oneself outside one’s own dream is a purely academic exercise: rather than contextualizing the thought of the author under interpretation, exegesis itself becomes the object of further exegesis, in an endless process where “knowledge” piles up vertiginously at the expense of “comprehension”.

Add to this the manifold philosophical mythologies and their associated jargon, and the result is: Babel. Instead of investigating the “waking world”, modern Philosophy multiplies, exponentially, the dreams.

By shifting from Objectivity to Subjectivity, Philosophy has taken a step back that renders it handmaiden to Psychology, content with a marginal and surrogate role. Thus, to recover its ancient savour—that universal, powerful, inspiring aspiration—those who still long to “comprehend” must turn to the popular works of Theoretical Physics, thereby declaring, in effect, Philosophy’s uselessness as an instrument of inquiry. What remains is the reduction of Philosophy to an alluring subject of cultural salons: when reality is at stake, outside those salons the spotlight inevitably falls on the scientist, not owing to the scientist’s arrogance, but to the fragility of the philosopher’s mere “opinion”.

Far from rendering their texts more akin to Mathematics, modern philosophers strive to make their thought ever more literary, poetic, cryptic, specialistic, baroque, elitist, in desperate search—within one of these adjectives—for some original value to ennoble a reflection as refined as it is weary. Much of modern Philosophy is, in truth, Literature, though it continues to adorn itself with that name once conferred by Pythagoras, its illustrious yet repudiated father.

Within contemporary Philosophy, who occasionally takes centre stage is the thinker whose sensibility happens, by chance or design, to resonate with the atmosphere of his epoch, shaping his content by feeling the pulse of his audience, obeying the constraints of his school, or subordinating his thought to a particular sociological or political vision. Plato summed all this up in a single term: Sophistry, the extraordinary art of bending truth to serve particular ends.

The most significant achievements of modern Philosophy belong to the field of deconstruction, which is a rather innocuous exercise, as any true skeptic can attest. Every subjective standpoint enables us to deconstruct another subjective standpoint with more than sufficient reasons. To aspire to Objectivity, by contrast, entails fatigue and risk and leaves us exposed: whoever has the courage, or the recklessness, to construct a representation of the “waking world” is compelled to lay bare, before all, the meager limits of his mental universe and the gaps within it. The great systematizers have long since disappeared, and that ambitious mode of philosophizing that yearned for Objectivity, when not transferred to Science, was accused of mystification and “unmasked” by Nietzsche. Thus, in modernity, the attempt to comprehend the “waking world” has lost much of its allure.

In the twentieth century the “dream” began loudly to claim its value and irreducibility. In truth, the century just past poses corrosive questions concerning the intimate mission of Philosophy.

The account we present here—through its scant adherence to modern concerns, which leave us indifferent, much like the dreams of others—declares an approach to knowledge not “pre-modern”, but “trans-modern”, and “philosophical” in its original sense, that is, deeply Pythagorean and Platonic.

Yet let the seasoned interlocutor not be alarmed: the aim is not to describe yet another imaginary world to be christened with our name, as is customary with celestial bodies. The aim is rather to attempt to answer Socrates’ innocent and terrible question: “How does man know what he knows?” To the Principle!