symposium on love by guggenheim public |
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symposium contributions forum info italiano english |
Credo che l'individuazione
di un tema come quello proposto e la sua disponibilità ad essere oggetto
di un simposio ponga un ordine di questioni difficilmente riducibili e risolvibili.
L'ambiguità del tema risiede infatti nell'identificazione di un significato
che potrebbe essere o meno condivisibile; il modo in cui esso può essere
proposto, quasi come un segno privo di articolazione e determinazione, mi
sembra intuitivamente, il primo dei nodi da sciogliere. Poiché ci addentreremo
in un argomento come l'Amore, dovremo essere consapevoli che entreremo e usciremo
mille volte nello stesso labirinto da mille diverse porte. Massimo Kaufmann |
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symposium contributions forum info italiano english |
I
believe that the individuation of such a topic as love and its receptiveness
in being a symposium subject put a series of hardly resoluble questions. The
ambiguity of this topic resides in the identification of a meaning which could
be shared or couldn't be shared. The way in which it could be set, almost like
a sign with no articulation or determination, it seems to me, as the first point
to solve. Since we are going to penetrate into a topic like love, we will have
to be fully aware that we will enter and exit a thousand times the same labyrinth,
and from a thousand several doors. So let's take a proper step backward. The Platonic dialogue, which we are trying to update, and after which the word symposium assumes the meaning that we know as for a power of extension to all the other topics that become a subject of a debate, connects itself to the dimension of dialogue as an exchange rather than a philosophical dispute. It's connected to the special role that the attending people assume with regards to the topic itself. We talk about love in a friendly, convivial situation, eating, drinking, passing a night with friends, with your lover. It is from this aristocratic pattern of exchange and comparison that use of the word symposium comes from, and it means convivial aggregation, a "sympathetic" union. And after that any cultural or scientific debate (not the politic one, and there will be a reason) is called symposium. And here is the first ambiguity: only some modes and topics, but not all of them, are reasons for an exchange, rather than dialectic. Talking about love we have to put away our weapons, we dress up with our best manners and we are willing to face a conversation which we know in advance that will surely be not homogeneous, thus not dialectic. As a not homogeneous conversation I mean to say that if, in example, we would talk about logic, or physics, or Russian literature, we should foresee that our reflections are structured on homogeneous introductions, or least on some homogeneity. Philosophy, starting from Plato, is exactly this; if we talk about something, would it be a man's body, we are able to do it because that body is no more my body or your body, but is simply the body, or an organ, or a complex of organs. If I go to see a doctor because my body suffers, I don't bring myself to scientific knowledge in order that it attends to my body, but I bring (my) body, which, being similar (by virtue of a body's image) to others that the doctor have studied on books. And he already knows this body, having verify during experience what he has learned on books, so he will be able to understand why my body suffers and what he could do to heal it. But we are talking, anyway, about a body which is homogeneous to the other bodies, for which a stated knowledge can elaborate a diagnosis. Talking about love we know from the start that we can't bring a common body, because each of us owns experiences that make the love's perception as something absolutely unique, this is the exchange that we have produced between our common language and our personal emotional involving. This exchange doesn't resemble at all the books on which the doctor have studied, nor the bodies which he usually visits, but it's a state similar to the one between two individuals, or the emotional level has been placed upon the knowledge level, and consequently the moral level will be placed upon the ethic one, and so on. Each of us maybe shares a language, a mythology, a reading, an experience. But they have always various results, which concern private aspects of our perception of that knowledge, so we can take for granted that our opinions will just be opinions, "doxa", and we will propose them as absolutely not homogeneous point of views. A conversation on love, in my opinion, has to start from this awareness, without any pretension of wanting to reach a synthesis. In that the dialogue on love is exactly the Dialogue, the exchange; we maybe could venture that love itself is the exchange. By virtue of the fact that we know the distance that separates us, we can try to short it, but hardly put it upon one another. For exchange needs symmetry, giving and getting something, taking and giving back something. And that is the Goodness and Beauty of which Plato talks, that we have to add to end of the navigation at sight that we have to expect. It is likely for this reason that the characters of the Platonic dialogue talk nearly always with a symbolic language, akin to myth rather than to logic. There are really numberless cues that result from the Plato's explanation to talk about the Goodness, and Beauty. Because, in my unpretentious opinion, they concern a non-economic vision of existence, of which love is an attainment instrument. Any discussion on ethics, on beauty as a common property, on good as a shared property and on which we can build up arts or politics, I think it passes through a non-economic vision of existence, an overcoming of the meaning of usefulness. At the same time, the philosophical route that leads to the Goodness of which Socrates talks about, it seems to be placed among the routes that can only be achieved by individuals, through an exchange, but as singularity. It's in this sense that I wanted to recall the contradiction that the love topic will bring to us: if we really can talk about it searching for values that join us, even if we live outside of a mythological dimension, even if we live as orphans of the dogmas on which our society keeps being founded and keep regenerating. And , nevertheless, we don't stop asking ourselves if we will ever be able to imagine our own freedom in order to a common good. Our momentary aristocratic freedom to talk about it seems for the moment the best privilege. Massimo Kaufmann |
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