Video transcription

In the previous movement we left off with the shadow of suspicion hanging over the Kantian system.

When Philosophy turns its attention to Language, two broad developments unfold. On the one hand, natural languages are accused of exerting a subtle form of manipulation, shaping the very construction of Thought. On the other, they are judged insufficient to represent reality in an objective manner.

Indeed, not everything that thought can grasp allows itself to be translated into Concepts and not everything that is conceptually formed can be converted into a linguistic Sign. In every act of translation, between perception and thought, between thought and speech, there are inevitable losses: residues of meaning, shadowed regions, margins that cannot be said.

Ordinary language fulfills multiple functions, not only denotative, but also expressive, emotional and imperative. These components, essential to Art, prove inadequate for Philosophy, which, in the wake of the scientific method, feels the need for a pure and controlled language.

From this need arises the attempt to construct a system of signs capable of symbolising logical objects. Logic and Mathematics, thus, begin to interpenetrate within Symbolic Logic. As early as the XVII century, Leibniz attempted to outline a formal language able to reflect thought in a pure manner. Yet his project would be resumed only two centuries later through the efforts of George Boole and above all Gottlob Frege.

With his "Ideography", Frege constructs an aseptic language purified of every connotative ambiguity, a symbolic system capable of expressing the structures of thought with the precision of Mathematics. Formal Logic thus acquires the status of a 'science', able to guarantee philosophical thinking the rigour its arguments require.

Yet this "mechanisation" of Logic produces side effects. Some philosophers begin to feel a sense of "alienation" towards a system which, though formally impeccable, seems ever more distant from human needs. Doubt arises that, far from enlarging our horizon, a certain mathematisation of Logic restricts Philosophy's capacity to question lived experience, for instance, aesthetic experience.

Gianni Vattimo writes: "The result of these efforts to attain formal objectivity has so far been only this: the mechanical transfer of the notion of 'method' proper to the natural sciences, with its ideal of 'demonstrability' and 'objectivity', into the field of the human sciences with the consequence that one loses sight of the specific truth that characterises these forms of knowledge."

In pursuing the demonstrative method typical of Science, Philosophy seems to lose its way. The Aristotelian principles of Identity and Non-Contradiction, pillars of traditional logic, appear too rigid to grasp the fluidity, tension and reversibility proper to consciousness.

Martin Heidegger expresses this unease with extraordinary clarity: "It is by no means settled that classical Logic and its fundamental rules, are capable of offering us a criterion for the problem of Being as such. On the contrary, it is possible that all the logic we know, and take as though it had fallen from the sky, already rests upon a particular answer to the question of Being, such that every thinking which merely obeys those logical rules finds itself, from the outset, unable even to understand the question concerning Being. Worse still, it finds itself unable to develop it in any genuine way and to arrive at an answer."

This "asphyxiation" of thought appears to be produced by the dominance of a binary logic, the very logic that Hegel had sought to overcome through his ternary and dialectical system. Formalism in Language guarantees rigor, yet it seems incapable of grasping the dynamism of Being or of reaching meaning itself. Philosophy thus remains suspended between the precision of form and the need for a profound content.

From the idealist perspective that guides this narrative, the XX century presents itself as an age of deep darkness. In his essay, "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology", Husserl denounces the impoverishment of the human under the pressure of formalism and calls for a return to the origins of Philosophy as a "science of meanings":

"The critique of Science does not concern its method, but rather what it can mean for human existence. The exclusivity with which, in the second half of the XIX century, the modern human being's overall world view allowed itself to be determined by the Positive Sciences and allowed itself to be dazzled by the prosperity that resulted, meant a turning away from those problems that are decisive for an authentic humanity. Science excludes in principle precisely those problems that are most burning for the human being, who, in our troubled times, feels at the mercy of fate: the problems of the sense or non-sense of human existence as a whole. Mere Science of facts has nothing to say to us on this matter. It abstracts from every subject. Objective scientific truth is exclusively an ascertainment of what the world, in fact, is. The positivistic concept of Science in our time has let fall all those problems that were included in the concept of 'Metaphysics'. In the ancient idea of Philosophy there was implied an order of meaning of Being, and thus problems of Being. For this reason, to Metaphysics, as the science of ultimate and highest questions, belonged the dignity of "queen of the Sciences". Its spirit conferred upon all knowledge, upon what was attained by all the other Sciences, its distinctive meaning. All the modern sciences end up finding themselves in a crisis that concerns the sense in which they were founded. This is a crisis that does not touch the theoretical and practical successes of professional specialization, and yet it nevertheless shakes to its core the sense of their truth. Scepticism regarding the possibility of a Metaphysics, the collapse of faith in a "universal Philosophy" capable of guiding the new human being thus indicates the collapse of faith in Reason. Faith collapses in an absolute Reason that gives meaning to the world, faith in the meaning of history, in the meaning of humanity, in its freedom as the active possibility for the human being to confer a rational meaning upon individual human existence and upon human existence in general."

Husserl argues that the positivistic attitude, though effective in the techno-scientific domain, is incapable of answering the questions vital to human beings, leaving a spiritual void that is mirrored in the technocratic drift of contemporary society. Similar doubts are raised with regard to Logic as a specialized science.

In entrusting oneself to the mechanics of Science, one senses a loss of meaning. If a formal language were able to reach where our natural language cannot, would formal sentences still have a meaning for us as humans? Would we be able to translate and understand them? And if we could translate them, would the very purpose of having a formal language not diminish? Yet if we could neither understand nor communicate what formal language is able to express, would it make sense to elaborate "objective truths"?

In fact, if a formal language, through a correct procedure, succeeded in symbolizing reality, but that result were not translatable into human terms, then it would not be "useless in itself", it would be "humanly useless".

'Sense', then, becomes Philosophy's last frontier. 'Sense' is the fragile thread that anchors the human being to what surrounds them. Our understanding of reality is wholly anthropocentric, and we cannot go beyond the human without, at the same time, obliterating sense.

Here, by 'sense', we mean not merely a 'meaning', but 'orientation'. 'Sense' is a product of spatiality. It implies a placement and a direction. It is determined by our position in relation to the surrounding space. Thus, to orient ourselves in existence, we do not need the outcome of a calculation, but a map of reality, and the recovery of our own position within it.

'Sense', as Husserl warns, is a product of Metaphysics. Yet traditional Metaphysics, now misunderstood and distorted, collapses definitively under the assault of Nietzsche. After him, nothing seems able any longer to oppose the void felt by modern society.

The third movement ends here. In the next video, we shall explore the fourth, and the function of the Symbol as a bridge cast between Language and a new - and very ancient - Metaphysics.

"To the Principle!"