What if the worldview that we have adopted and learned from humanity’s great thinkers was nothing more than an abstract and dichotomous version of the world, no longer useful and no longer good? What if the exploration of existence solely through the concepts of good and evil, as advocated by countless generations of philosophers and artists, had so limited humanity’s imagination over the centuries that it led us into an inevitable and infinite conflict would have led? The philosopher and writer’s new book thrives on challenging the assumptions of modern thought Anna pink Buttarelli Good and evil inside. The revolution of the philosophers, published in bookstores on November 8th by Edizioni Tlon. The author – journalist and professor at the University of Verona and co-founder of Festivaletteratura – decided to question the world’s traditional reading conventions with the help of great thinkers, poets and authors like Flannery O’Connor, Maria Zambrano, but also Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Françoise Dolto.
The vision of female philosophers as the counterpart of a moral approach. The book by Annarosa Buttarelli
There is little that can be done: when one rereads human history and sees it repeating itself, the ineffectiveness of philosophical, intellectual and cultural systems in dealing with the emergence of violence and abuse becomes clear with undeniable force. But there is an alternative to this vision, which makes the other a constant threat to our identity, and always has been: “Why were the thinkers of all time listened to neither by academic philosophers nor by surface culture, even though they examined good and evil with surprising and, if accepted, clearly decisive results?“. This is the question that accompanied and tormented the author and that led her to summarize in a single text – the first act of a series: against the timewhat contradicts current thinking – the extraordinary visions of the most revolutionary figures of our time and beyond and their suggestions Behavioral practices that place “care” at the center of human relationships.
Good and evil are upside down. Interview with the author Annarosa Buttarelli
Can we say that this volume was born out of disappointment and surprise, that women’s ideas were ignored for a long time even though there was no viable alternative?
Of course the question is authentic. In looking for positions that differ from those of power and domination, even of a cultural nature, I have seen that in all periods of so-called Western history, thinkers, philosophers and poets have understood that the things that are created by dominance culture or patriarchalism were wrong and based on foundations that would have had disastrous consequences, especially if they continued to think abstractly about everyday things. An intuition that Nietzsche develops in his own way, again removing all capital letters from the major concepts of morality or aesthetics. Women noticed this immediately: male thinking was increasingly moving in a dichotomous direction, opposed to a reality made up of differences and contradictions and multiple levels that can never be reduced to one or even a system. . In the two millennia before us, male-dominated thinking has constructed reality in a dichotomous way and made everything abstract: if one always has to establish identification before the other – and this is always the case in male politics and philosophy – then this is it Case the rest of us should be eliminated. I have long wondered why even goodwill thinkers never noticed the warnings that, for example, would have avoided the ongoing carnage that also stems from this form of “two-fold mind.”
Why is it important to abandon the concepts of good and evil in order to think and talk about the world?
There are three things that are ruining the world: The first is the inability to relate to another otherness and to recognize in it the dignity of existence. The second is unconscious misogyny, which even today leads to a completely radical ostracism of female thought, even if it is more sublime or compassionate: there is a very ancient root by which the distinctions that women can make (think of Eve ), are hit The most dichotomous men have it bad, and that feeds a misogyny that can’t be eradicated. These men want to resist the temptation to “see” that they sometimes do not have and sometimes they know: we see Oppenheimer, a man who had within himself the alternative to his choice, but limited himself to doubting. Even many philosophers who disagree with concrete reality have denied this reality because it would be such a powerful mental revolution that they would not know how to organize their thoughts in a different form. Which is reflected, among other things, in the expulsion of women from cultural areas such as the university. And here we come to the third element that is ruining the world, which is the inability to accept reality as it is because it is too painful. The male philosophical mind responds by inventing abstract, absolute good and evil and almighty God. All things that are absolutely not found in reality.
How can the perspective of female philosophers offer a less banal and more real perspective?
A theme that I would like to develop in order to provide a complex answer in this field concerns what we call “feminine realism”. There is another form of realism than scientific positivism (which we can call “radical materialism”): it is an “experimental metaphysics” as conceived by Stein or Zambrano. It is also called “experiential thinking” and is a theory based on everyday life and not the other way around. There are lines of study that we can examine and in which we discover a form of realism that does not deny transcendence – as in Lonzi’s mysticism – but rejects absolutes, that is, things with a capital letter.
Are women still destined to be Cassandras, or is there a greater space for us to trust and listen?
I am saying that it is possible to create spaces for mutual listening: in the face of so much evil waiting to be heard, on the other hand, there are books like this that are welcomed and supported. We would need broader cultural and media support for these positions, but we have some positive signs. The new edition of Carla Lonzi, for example, was enormously successful: What will come of it? We are trying, but at the same time many women would have to ask their interlocutors to engage with these works so that a certain element of transformation becomes visible today.
So is this volume an appeal to women?
You definitely have to understand it that way.
Giulia Giaume
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