Il metodo "svela-frottole" di Carl Sagan

Su "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/":

The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking

by Maria Popova
 

Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.

Carl Sagan was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and common sense, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.
In a chapter titled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan reflects on the many types of deception to which we’re susceptible — from psychics to religious zealotry to paid product endorsements by scientists, which he held in especially low regard, noting that they “betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers” and “introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.” (Cue in PBS’s Joe Hanson on how to read science news.) But rather than preaching from the ivory tower of self-righteousness, Sagan approaches the subject from the most vulnerable of places — having just lost both of his parents, he reflects on the all too human allure of promises of supernatural reunions in the afterlife, reminding us that falling for such fictions doesn’t make us stupid or bad people, but simply means that we need to equip ourselves with the right tools against them.

Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:

The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes:

In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.

He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action:

1. ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)
2. argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)
3. argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)
4. appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
5. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)
6. begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)
7. observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)
8. statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)
9. misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
10. inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);
11. non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
12. post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)
13. meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)
14. excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)
15. short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);
16. slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);
17. confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)
18. straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)
19. suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)
20. weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)

Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:

Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.

The Demon-Haunted World is a timelessly fantastic read in its entirety, timelier than ever in a great many ways amidst our present media landscape of propaganda, pseudoscience, and various commercial motives. Complement it with Sagan on science and “God”.

L'Arte di Vivere

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/02/how-should-we-live-roman-krznaric/" :

How Should We Live: History’s Forgotten Wisdom on Love, Time, Family, Empathy, and Other Aspects of the Art of Living

by Maria Popova
 

“How to pursue the art of living has become the great quandary of our age… The future of the art of living can be found by gazing into the past.”

“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth,” Goethe famously proclaimed. Thomas Hobbes extolled “the principal and proper work of history being to instruct, and enable men by the knowledge of actions past to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently in the future.” It is this notion of “applied history” that cultural historian and philosopher Roman Krznaric — who gave us How to Find Fulfilling Work, one of the best psychology and philosophy books of 2013 — places at the center of How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life (public library). Part psychological manual, part cultural manifesto, part philosophical memoir of our civilization’s collective conscience, the book explores yesteryear’s great works of philosophy, social science, economics, anthropology, and cultural mythology. Krznaric trawls the timeless to surface the timely and excavate practical ideas about the art of living, about how we, today, can live better, richer, more fulfilling lives — ideas across love, work, family, time, money, death, creativity, and more.
He writes in the introduction:

How to pursue the art of living has become the great quandary of our age.
[…]
I believe that the future of the art of living can be found by gazing into the past. If we explore how people have lived in other epochs and cultures, we can draw out lessons for the challenges and opportunities of everyday life. What secrets for living with passion lie in medieval attitudes towards death, or in the pin factories of the Industrial Revolution? How might an encounter with Ming-dynasty China, or Central African indigenous culture, change our views about bringing up our kids and caring for our parents? It is astonishing that, until now, we have made so little effort to unveil this wisdom from the past, which is based on how people have actually lived rather than utopian dreamings of what might be possible.
I think of history as a wonderbox, similar to the curiosity cabinets of the Renaissance — what the Germans called a Wunderkammer. Collectors used these cabinets to display an array of fascinating and unusual objects, each with a story to tell, such as a miniature Turkish abacus or a Japanese ivory carving. Passed down from one generation to another, they were repositories of family lore and learning, tastes and travels, a treasured inheritance. History, too, hands down to us intriguing stories and ideas from a cornucopia of cultures. It is our shared inheritance of curious, often fragmented artefacts that we can pick up at will and contemplate in wonder. There is much to learn about life by opening the wonderbox of history.

Rather than approaching that wonderbox as an instructional manual, however, Krznaric looks at history as a choose-your-own-adventure compendium of do’s as well as don’ts. In addition to shining light on yesteryear’s forgotten wisdom on living, he also seeks to highlight the habitual attitudes we’ve unwittingly inherited from the past and to bring mindfulness to the bad and the harmful as well, so we can begin to decondition them — those toxic belief systems that sell us impossible romantic ideals, strain our relationship with time, force us into work that falsely prizes narrow specialization over wide intellectual expansion, measure our success in material terms, and otherwise warp the meaning of life:

We need to trace the historical origins of these legacies which have quietly crept into our lives and surreptitiously shaped our worldviews. We may choose to accept them, understanding ourselves all the better for it, or we may reject them and cut ourselves free from an unwanted inheritance, ready to invent anew. That is the sublime power we wield when we have history in our hand.

The Histomap by John Sparks, 1931. Click image for details.

In a chapter on love, Krznaric contends that our modern definition of love is too narrow, which both deprives us of the breadth of this grand human capacity and sets us up for disappointment:

We can navigate these difficulties of love — and enhance its joys — by grasping the significance of two great tragedies in the history of the emotions. The first is that we have lost knowledge of the different varieties of love that existed in the past, especially those familiar to the ancient Greeks, who knew love could be discovered not just with a sexual partner, but also in friendships, amongst strangers, and with themselves. The second tragedy is that over the last thousand years, these varieties have been incorporated into a mythical notion of romantic love, which compels us to believe that they can all be found in one person, a unique soulmate. We can escape the confines of this inheritance by looking for love outside the realm of romantic attachments, and cultivating its many forms.

To lift our culturally conditioned blinders, he turns to the six varieties of love found in ancient Greek philosophy: eros, or sexual passion; phila, a more virtuous love often translated as “friendship”; ludus, the playful affection between children or casual lovers; pragma, the mature love and deep understanding that develop in lasting relationships; agape, the selfless love extended to all human beings, offered unconditionally and with no expectation of reciprocity; and philautia, or self-love, which can be both negative, manifested as greed and narcissism (after the myth of Narcissus), and positive, as a nourishing broadening of our capacity for all love, starting from within.

Vintage illustration for Homer's 'The Iliad and the Odyssey' by Alice and Martin Provensen. Click image for details.

Observing history’s long quest to define love, Krznaric finds in the ancient Greek model solace for our modern hearts:

One of the universal questions of emotional life has always been, “What is love?” I believe that this is a misleading question, and one which has caught us in futile knots of confusion in an attempt to identify some definitive essence of “true love.” The lesson from ancient Greece is that we must instead ask ourselves, “How can I cultivate the different varieties of love in my life?” That is the ultimate question of love that we face today. But if we wish to nurture these varieties, we must first dispel the potent myth of romantic love which stands in the way.

Krznaric argues that the myth of romantic love, whose origin he traces across three stages over the course of civilization — the poetry and music of medieval Persia in the first millennium, the courtly love ideal of Europe in the Middle Ages, and the utilitarian union of passion and companionship of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century — is a toxic myth that only robs us of love’s dimension and leads us to believe all forms of love should be found in a single person. Instead, he suggests that returning to the ancient Greek taxonomy would enrich our lives and give greater freedom in cultivating our capacity for love:

The varieties of love invented by the ancient Greeks … are what we should be striving to cultivate, and with a range of people rather than just one person. I am not saying that you should get your pragma from a steady marriage but then satisfy your eros in a series of lustful affairs. That is bound to be a destructive strategy, for sexual jealousy is part of our natures and few people can tolerate open relationships. What I mean is that we ought to acknowledge that we may only be fulfilled in love if we can nurture it in a multitude of ways and tap into its many sources. So we should foster our philia through having profound friendships outside our main relationship, and make space for our lover to do the same without resenting the time they spend apart from us. We can seek the joys of ludus not just in sex but in other forms of play, from tango dancing and performing in amateur theatre to laughing with children around the family dining table. And we must recognize that being drawn too far into self-love, or limiting our love to only a small circle of people, will not be enough to meet our inner need to feel part of a larger whole. So we should all make a place for agape in our lives, and transform love into a gift for strangers. That is how we can reach a point where our lives feel abundant with love.

In a chapter on family, Krznaric explores the lost history of the househusband — presently an exotic species statistically outnumbered by housewives by a ratio of forty to one, and yet a species that used to be far more common in pre-industrial society. In a chapter on empathy, he invokes the famous anecdote of St. Francis swapping his clothes with a beggar in order know what it was like to be a pauper, then writes:

Empathy matters not just because it makes you good, but because it is good for you. It has the power to heal broken relationships, erode our prejudices, expand our curiosity about strangers and make us rethink our ambitions. Ultimately empathy creates the human bonds that make life worth living.

He once again offers an important caveat to our current cultural understanding — or misunderstanding — of empathy:

It is important when thinking about empathy to distinguish it from the so-called Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Although a worthy notion, it is not empathy, since it involves considering how you — with your own views — would wish to be treated. Empathy is harder: it requires imagining others’ views and then acting accordingly. George Bernard Shaw understood the difference when he remarked, “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you — they may have different tastes.”

George Orwell

But it is another legendary writer to whom Krznaric points as the “one person who did more than most others to transform this experiential form of empathy into an extreme sport” — George Orwell. Raised in a privileged upper-middle-class British family, with the benefit of an elite education, Orwell found himself suddenly disillusioned with imperialism when he spent five years as a colonial officer in Burma in his early twenties. More than that, he couldn’t live with his own contribution to the system he came to so vehemently disdain — he wrote that the job made him “see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters” and left him oppressed “with an intolerable sense of guilt.” Those five years were Orwell’s training ground for empathy. Krznaric traces how the beloved writer put his own twist on the St. Francis approach:

If Burma was his apprenticeship as an empathist, Orwell’s formative training took place in London in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Determined to be a writer, he came up with a plan that would give him both a literary and a moral education: to conduct a radical experiment in experiencing poverty. He wanted to know what it was really like to be downtrodden, to exist on the margins of society, to be short of food, money and hope. Reading about it was not enough — his aim was to live it.
[…]
So, for several years, Orwell regularly dressed as a tramp in shabby clothes and shoes, and ventured out virtually penniless to frequent the “spikes” — hostels for the homeless — and doss-houses of the East End of London, wandering the streets with beggars and other destitutes. He would stay for anything from a few days to several weeks. At all times he did so without concessions or compromise, without carrying spare money for an emergency or wearing extra layers of clothes against the winter cold.
[…]
Orwell’s empathy grew out of an attempt to liberate himself from his elite background and the imperialism of which he had been a foot soldier. But he also wanted to touch injustice with his own hands rather than be just another clever intellectual who pitied the poor from a comfortable distance. And in this he undoubtedly succeeded.
He also succeeded in showing how empathy was about far more than ethics. His tramping excursions certainly challenged his prejudices and shifted his moral values, but they also gained him new friendships, nurtured his curiosity, expanded his ability to talk to people from different social backgrounds and provided him with a rich seam of literary materials which would last him for years. For a young man who had once worn a top hat at Eton,his experiments in living down and out were an intense, exhilarating and often challenging lesson in life itself, catapulting him out of the narrowness of his privileged past. Trying to survive on the streets of East London was the greatest travel experience he would ever have.

Though Krznaric notes that few of us can go to the extremes Orwell did in our pursuit of embodied empathy, he draws from the writer’s experience a seemingly simple yet, when applied, profound everyday aspiration:

The idea of empathy has distinct moral overtones and is often associated with “being good.” But experiential empathy should really be regarded as an unusual and stimulating form of travel. George Orwell would tell us to forget spending our next vacation at an exotic resort or visiting standard tourist sites. It is far more interesting to expand our minds by taking journeys into other people’s lives — and allowing them to see ours. Rather than asking ourselves, “Where can I go next?,” the question on our lips should be, “Whose shoes can I stand in next?”

But my favorite is a chapter in which Krznaric considers our strange relationship with time — that peculiar dimension of life that we’ve attempted to measure and make palpable since the dawn of, well, time. Given how profoundly metaphors shape our thoughts and emotions, Krznaric makes an especially pause-giving point in exploring how our flawed metaphors for time — much like our flawed metaphors for memory — deform our experience of it:

Our concept of time is similarly structured by metaphors, and we need to become aware of the subtle ways they work on our minds. One of the most prevalent metaphors already mentioned, which emerged during the Industrial Revolution, is of time as a commodity: spending time, buying time, wasting time, saving time, “time is money,” “living on borrowed time.” Another dating from the same period is time as a possession: “my time is my own,” “give me a moment of your time.” These two metaphors, in tandem, constitute the psycholinguistic roots of our problems with time. If our time is like private property, it becomes possible not only for it to be freely granted to others, but possibly owned by them or appropriated at an unfair price against our wishes.

Discus chronologicus by German engraver Christoph Weigel, a timekeeping chart circa 1720s. Click image for details.

I’ve always been extremely wary of the notion of “work-life balance,” which pits work as something undesirable that takes away from the desirable parts of life and must thus be balanced against those, kept to a reasonable level, quarantined. This dichotomy leaves no room for the kind of purposeful work that is life. Curiously, the very concept of “work-life balance” tends to use time as the currency by which balance is measured, so I find Krznaric’s admonition against conceiving of time as a commodity especially resonant when it comes to how we think about work and play:

One manifestation of the “time as a commodity and possession” metaphor is when we talk about taking “time off” from work. This expression is essentially saying that we have given our employer ownership of our time. . . . Each year the firm will give us back a little of our time, usually no more than a few weeks. This vacation period is usually referred to as “time off”; it is their gift to us, a temporary pause in the regular pattern, in which being at work is, by implication, “time on.”

Instead, he proposes we think of leisure as our “time on,” which would imbue our non-work time with value and awaken from the cultural trance that consistently blinds us to how much more precious presence is than productivity.
Krznaric traces the history of time as a commodity to the dawn of the Protestant ethic, which equates productivity and efficiency with virtue. Coupled with that is the cultural legacy of our fear of boredom, beneath which Krznaric finds a deeper anxiety:

On some level we fear boredom. A deeper explanation is that we are afraid that an extended pause would give us the time to realize that our lives are not as meaningful and fulfilled as we would like them to be. The time for contemplation has become an object of fear, a demon.

He argues that we can begin to undo this baleful legacy by borrowing the mindset of Gustave Flaubert, who famously observed that “anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” Krznaric even proposes a somewhat radical pragmatic intervention: a “chronological diet” that banishes timekeeping devices from your wrist, your smartphone display, and your walls — a tactic, however disorienting at first, that promises to make you “less likely to interrupt a conversation or a thought with a glance at your watch which sends you scuttling off to the next task.”
How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life, an illuminating and awakening read in its entirety, goes on to explore how Michelangelo deformed how we think about creativity and precipitated the dangerous myth of the sole genius, why money is not enough, what the Toltec and Aztec civilizations teach us about our understanding of mortality, and much more. Complement it with George Myerson’s exploration of what history teaches us about attaining everyday happiness.

Come vivere: A lezione da Montaigne, Padrino del Blogging

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/07/how-to-live-montaigne/" :

How to Live: Lessons from Montaigne, Godfather of Blogging

by Maria Popova
 

Don’t worry about death, pay attention, read a lot, give up control, embrace imperfection.

“Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” Karl De Schweinitz wrote in his 1924 guide to the art of living. But this is an art best understood not as a set of prescriptive techniques but, per Susan Sontag’s definition of art, a form of consciousness — which means an understanding that is constantly evolving.
In How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (public library), British biographer and philosophy scholar Sarah Bakewell traces “how Montaigne has flowed through time via a sort of canal system of minds” and argues that some of the most prevalent hallmarks of our era — our compulsive immersion in various forms of lifestreaming, our incessant social sharing, our constant oscillation between introspection and extraversion as we observe our private experiences more closely than ever so we can record and frame them more perfectly in public — can be traced down to this one proto-blogger, the godfather of the essay as a genre:

This idea — writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity — has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Périgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Salvador Dalí, 1947. Click image for details.

What separated Montaigne from other memoirists of his day was that he didn’t write about his daily deeds and his achievements — rather, he contemplated the meaning of life from all possible angles, and in the process popularized the essay as a form. He began writing fairly late in life, when he was thirty-nine, and continued for twenty years, halted only by his death in 1592. The 107 essays he penned range across the entire spectrum of human concerns — from the grandly existential, like death and the art of living, to the universally human, like fear and friendship and sadness and love, to the seemingly trivial, like the customs of dress. Above all, however, he was interested in the simple yet infinitely profound question of how to live — which, Bakewell is careful to point out, is quite different from the ethical prescription of how we should live. She writes:

Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life — meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

Despite the enormity of social and cultural change that has transpired in the centuries since Montaigne’s writings, however, what makes them endure and enthrall is their timeless relatability — that special skill he had of speaking to the most universal preoccupations of the human condition, yet speaking to each of us individually, leaving us with an unshakable sense of being seen and understood down to the depths of our most private selves. Indeed, writer Bernard Levin captured this beautifully in a 1991 Times article, observing: “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’” Blackwell considers how Montaigne was able to do that so elegantly:

Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of mass networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves bounced back from different angles.
[…]
From the first sixteenth-century neighbor or friend to browse through a draft from Montaigne’s desk to the very last human being (or other conscious entity) to extract it from the memory banks of a future virtual library, every new reading means a new Essays. Readers approach him from their private perspectives, contributing their own experience of life. At the same time, these experiences are molded by broad trends, which come and go in leisurely formation. Anyone looking over four hundred and thirty years of Montaigne-reading can see these trends building up and dissolving like clouds in a sky, or crowds on a railway platform between commuter trains.
[…]
The Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of “How did he know all that about me?” Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader. But sidelong chat goes on among the readers too; consciously or not, each generation approaches Montaigne with expectations derived from its contemporaries and predecessors. As the story goes on, the scene becomes more crowded. It turns from a private dinner party to a great lively banquet, with Montaigne as an unwitting master of ceremonies.

Bakewell proceeds to extract Montaigne’s most timeless lessons on the art of living, prefacing them with Gustave Flaubert’s beautiful advice to a friend who was concerned about how to approach Montaigne:

Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.

'That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die'
1947 illustration for the essays of Montaigne by Salvador Dalí. Click image for details.

In the first lesson, titled “Don’t Worry About Death,” Bakewall recounts a near-death experience 36-year-old Montaigne had while riding through the woods behind his chateau with some of his estate staff. One of his servants, a muscular giant on a powerful horse, lost control of his animal and “came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse,” thrusting Montaigne onto the ground with enormous force and rendering him unconscious. His companions were eventually able to resuscitate him, but he was throwing up lumps of clotted blood — never an assuring sign — and kept slipping in and out of consciousness, then surrendered to a kind of delirium. Montaigne survived, but the accident profoundly impacted his understanding of life and death. Reflecting on it later, he recorded the peacefulness of that surrender in what he called an exercitation about the experience:

It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.

Bakewell draws from this Montaigne’s lesson on relating to death:

Through his exercitation, he had learned not to fear his own nonexistence. Death could have a friendly face, just as the philosophers promised. Montaigne had looked into this face—but he had not stared into it lucidly, as a rational thinker should. Instead of marching forward with eyes open, bearing himself like a soldier, he had floated into death with barely a conscious thought, seduced by it. In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on “the edges of the soul.” Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.

This notion of not worrying about death became Montaigne’s most central answer to the question of how to live, recurring again and again in his later work, precipitating a crystalline conviction that living with presence and impermanence is the only true way to live. Bakewell writes:

He tried to import some of death’s delicacy and buoyancy into life. “Bad spots” were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to “slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface.” Through this discovery of gliding and drifting, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense that life, as it passed through his body — his particular life, Michel de Montaigne’s — was a very interesting subject for investigation. He would go on to attend to sensations and experiences, not for what they were supposed to be, or for what philosophical lessons they might impart, but for the way they actually felt. He would go with the flow.

'That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die'
1947 illustration for the essays of Montaigne by Salvador Dalí. Click image for details.

While the riding accident could happen to any young man in the Renaissance, Bakewell points out that what made Montaigne unique was his impulse not only to write about it, but to extract from it a wealth of insight and to let it inform his understanding of a multitude of existential questions. But the accident also taught him something else, something just as valuable yet just as rare among humans — Bakewell titles this lesson “Pay Attention,” which doesn’t come easily to our intentionally discriminating minds. In fact, this yearning to distill the tumultuous bustling of the mind into attentive thought is what drove Montaigne to write in the first place. Blakewell explains:

In a simile borrowed from Virgil, he described his thoughts as resembling the patterns that dance across the ceiling when sunlight reflects off the surface of a water bowl. Just as the tiger-stripes of light lurch about, so an unoccupied mind gyrates unpredictably and brings forth mad, directionless whimsies. It generates fantasies or reveries — two words with less positive associations than they have today, suggesting raving delusions rather than daydreams.
His “reverie” in turn gave Montaigne another mad idea: the thought of writing. He called this a reverie too, but it was one that held out the promise of a solution. Finding his mind so filled with “chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” he decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born. … Later, his material grew until it included almost every nuance of emotion or thought he had ever experienced, not least his strange journey in and out of unconsciousness. That, Bakewell argues, is precisely what Montaigne sough — and, ultimately, found — in writing:

'Upon Some Verses of Virgil'
1947 illustration for the essays of Montaigne by Salvador Dalí. Click image for details.

Writing had got Montaigne through his “mad reveries” crisis; it now taught him to look at the world more closely, and increasingly gave him the habit of describing inward sensations and social encounters with precision. … As Montaigne the man went about his daily life on the estate, Montaigne the writer walked behind him, spying and taking notes.

Indeed, centuries later, Susan Sontag would observe that “a writer … is someone who pays attention to the world.”
Montaigne, like most educated minds of his day, was greatly inspired by the philosophy of the ancients, particularly Seneca, who insisted that salvation is to be found in paying full attention to the natural world, and Plutarch, who advised that the key to achieving peace of mind is in focusing on what is present in front of you in each given moment. But this was far from an easy endeavor — Montaigne himself lamented in one of his essays:

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

More than two centuries before psychology pioneer William James coined the term “stream of consciousness,” Montaigne grew fascinated by it and beheld it regularly. Bakewell writes:

What was unusual in him was his instinct that the observer is as unreliable as the observed. The two kinds of movement interact like variables in a complex mathematical equation, with the result that one can find no secure point from which to measure anything. To try to understand the world is like grasping a cloud of gas, or a liquid, using hands that are themselves made of gas or water, so that they dissolve as you close them.

Indeed, Montaigne advocated for the uncomfortable luxury of changing one’s mind and wrote himself:

If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

And therein lies the essence of this particular lesson as well as Montaigne’s greatest legacy, which Bakewell syntheses beautifully:

If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it — and “you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.”
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.
[…]
Observing the play of inner states is the writer’s job. Yet this was not a common notion before Montaigne, and his peculiarly restless, free-form way of doing it was entirely unknown.

'Of Experience'
1947 illustration for the essays of Montaigne by Salvador Dalí. Click image for details.

But as much as Montaigne taught us about writing, he arguably taught us even more about reading — after all, the two are inextricably intertwined, for a good writer is invariably a good reader. Another insight on the art of living that Bakewell extracts from Montaigne’s writing is to “read a lot.” For Montaigne, books weren’t mere entertainment or education; they were entire experiences, exchanges, bridges to other minds and other epochs. (Cue in my answer to a little girl’s question about why books exist.) Bakewell writes:

What Montaigne looked for in a book, just as people later looked for it in him [was] the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries. … He took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family.

Montaigne’s greatest lesson, however, is what Bakewell calls the “little tricks” he learned to employ in mastering the art of living. He borrowed some from the ancient Greek philosophers — for instance, the quest for spiritual equilibrium through freedom from anxiety, known as ataraxia. Bakewell brings us back to the art of paying attention:

Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.
[…]
Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world—and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view. Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is, Seneca says, can never be bored with life. … For Montaigne, learning to live “appropriately” (à propos) is the “great and glorious masterpiece” of human life.

Paradoxically, however, Montaigne frequently used the opposite of mindful attention — deliberate distraction — to quiet his worries. In his essay “Of Diversion,” he wrote:

A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky.

He applied this trick — one of several “side-stepping techniques” he developed over the course of his life — in helping others in distress as well. Bakewell offers an anecdote:

Once, trying to console a woman who was (unlike some widows, he implies) genuinely suffering grief for her dead husband, he first considered the more usual philosophical methods: reminding her that nothing can be gained from lamentation, or persuading her that she might never have met her husband anyway. But he settled on a different trick: “very gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote.” The widow seemed to pay little attention at first, but in the end the other subjects caught her interest. Thus, without her realizing what was happening, he wrote, “I imperceptibly stole away from her this painful thought and kept her in good spirits and entirely soothed for as long as I was there.” He admitted that this did not go to the root of her grief, but it got her through an immediate crisis, and presumably allowed time to begin its own natural work.
[…]
Distraction works well precisely because it accords with how humans are made: “Our thoughts are always elsewhere.” It is only natural for us to lose focus, to slip away from both pains and pleasures, “barely brushing the crust” of them. All we need do is let ourselves be as we are.

'That Fortune Is Oftentimes Observed to Act by the Rules of Reason'
1947 illustration for the essays of Montaigne by Salvador Dalí. Click image for details.

Another lesson from Montaigne has to do with relinquishing control — something particularly prescient in the context of publishing, remix culture, and peer-to-peer sharing. Working long before the establishment of copyright law, Montaigne had no illusions about creative ownership. Bakewell writes:

Montaigne knew very well that, the minute you publish a book, you lose control of it. Other people can do what they like: they can edit it into strange forms, or impose interpretations upon it that you would never have dreamed of. Even an unpublished manuscript can get out of hand.

In fact, in his time, shortly after the golden age of florilegia, copying was a legitimate and very common literary technique. Montaigne related to this inevitable loss of control with acceptance rather than vexation (or its contemporary equivalent, the legal cease-and-desist) — and this was one of his greatest “tricks” of living. Bakewell relays this beautifully, with a brilliantly placed Nina Simone reference:

There can be no really ambitious writing without an acceptance that other people will do what they like with your work, and change it almost beyond recognition. Montaigne accepted this principle in art, as he did in life. He even enjoyed it. People form strange ideas of you; they adapt you to their own purposes. By going with the flow and relinquishing control of the process, you gain all the benefits of the old Hellenistic trick of amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens. In Montaigne’s case, amor fati was one of the answers to the general question of how to live, and as it happened it also opened the way to his literary immortality. What he left behind was all the better for being imperfect, ambiguous, inadequate, and vulnerable to distortion. “Oh Lord,” one might imagine Montaigne exclaiming, “by all means let me be misunderstood.”

And in some strange and beautiful symmetry, this is all exactly as it should be and as it has always been. Much like Montaigne himself remixed the ideas of the Greek philosophers about how to live, so we too, today, remix his. It is precisely in this vulnerability to distortion that we find true literary immortality — by plunging into the cascade of ideas across the centuries and emerging, drenched to the bone, with our own. Even young Virginia Woolf knew this when she marveled at the chain of minds threading the world together.
Ultimately, what made Montaigne’s mind unique was his ability to find in any ordinary life, any ordinary experience, all that is worth knowing about life. He wrote:

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable.

Bakewell beholds this singular gift:

Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable.

'Of Age'
1947 illustration for the essays of Montaigne by Salvador Dalí. Click image for details.

Montaigne’s greatest gift to us, however, is his unflinching acceptance of imperfection — for, without it, we are bound to remain forever oppressed by our perfectionism. Much of this he drew from the fact — and the act — of aging, but not in the way we might expect. Bakewell writes:

It was not that age automatically conferred wisdom. On the contrary, he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young. They were inclined to “a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches.” But this was the twist, for it was in the adjustment to such flaws that the value of aging lay. Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all.
Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it.

Montaigne put it best himself:

Our being is cemented with sickly qualities … Whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.

He also, despite the magnificently winding road of his existential meditations, gave us the straightforward answer on how to live:

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

How to Live, which contains a total of twenty lessons drawn from Montaigne, is a must-read in its entirety. Complement it with Roman Krznaric’s excellent and more recent How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life, then revisit Alan Watts on how to live with presence.

Dal divenire come Dio alla morte di Dio - Parte I

Da "http://filosofiaenuovisentieri.it/2013/12/22/dal-divenire-come-dio-alla-morte-di-dio-parte-i/" :

di Daniele Baron
 

«Allora la donna vide che l’albero era buono da mangiare, gradito agli occhi e desiderabile per acquistare saggezza; prese del suo frutto e ne mangiò, poi ne diede anche al marito, che era con lei, e anch’egli ne mangiò. Allora si aprirono gli occhi di tutti e due e si accorsero di essere nudi; intrecciarono foglie di fico e se ne fecero cinture» [GENESI 3, 6-7]

«All’uomo disse: “Poiché hai ascoltato la voce di tua moglie e hai mangiato dell’albero, di cui ti avevo comandato: Non ne devi mangiare, maledetto sia il suolo per causa tua! Con dolore ne trarrai il cibo per tutti i giorni della tua vita. Spine e cardi produrrà per te e mangerai l’erba campestre. Con il sudore del tuo volto mangerai il pane; finché tornerai alla terra, perché da essa sei stato tratto, polvere tu sei e in polvere tornerai”» [GENESI 3, 17-19]

«Il Signore Dio disse allora: “Ecco, l’uomo è diventato come uno di noi, per la conoscenza del bene e dei male. Ora, egli non stenda più la mano e non prenda anche dell’albero della vita, ne mangi e viva sempre!”. Il Signore Dio lo scacciò dal giardino di Eden, perché lavorasse il suolo da dove era stato tratto. Scacciò l’uomo e pose ad oriente del giardino di Eden i cherubini e la fiamma della spada folgorante, per custodire la via all’albero della vita » [GENESI 3, 22-24] [1]

1. Ab ovo

Alla fine dei tempi, o a quella che si percepisce come tale, come anche nelle epoche di profondo mutamento, spesso traumatico, si rende necessario interrogare l’origine per comprendere se non siano presenti fin da principio i segni della fine e per cercare strumenti allo scopo di penetrare meglio ciò che si vive. Ciò che sta idealmente all’inizio della nostra cultura è il racconto della Genesi, della creazione del mondo da parte di Dio. Oggi, dopo l’evento della morte di Dio, che dobbiamo intendere storicamente come fine di un’epoca ed apertura di un’altra ancora incerta nei suoi orizzonti, ci troviamo forse oltre la dialettica, classica nella nostra cultura, di origine e fine. Ciò significa che il ritorno all’origine avviene oggi in modo differente rispetto ad una volta: rileggere la parola della Bibbia può avere un che di ironico quando non si crede più alla verità, non solo letterale, ma anche spirituale e allegorica, del suo racconto. Tuttavia, io penso che il nuovo possa essere edificato solo attraverso la contezza di ciò che ci lascia orfani, più o meno smarriti e più o meno felici; probabile che una nuova interpretazione dell’origine possa acclarare la verità che permea la nostra epoca o almeno rendere palese ciò che la perdita dell’origine tende a far diventare inconscio.

Di questo mito vorrei considerare i brani che ho messo in esergo ed interrogare filosoficamente il concetto del “divenire come Dio” da parte dell’uomo in quanto a conoscenza del bene e del male. Nella seconda parte passerò al concetto opposto della “morte di Dio”. Non so se il mio volo pindarico dalla fine al principio e poi dal principio alla fine risulti fondato filologicamente o dal punto di vista teologico. So solo che l’intuizione del collegamento è ciò che mi preme fondare in questo scritto; se il gioco esegetico qui tentato farà emergere un pensiero che possa rispondere ad un problema urgente ed attuale, allora sarà interessante da seguire e da leggere. Non sono il primo a percorrere tale sentiero: da sempre il testo sacro è stato filosoficamente letto in relazione alla Weltanschauung dell’epoca a cui appartiene chi tenta di decrittarlo.
Per ritornare ai brani riportati sottolineo un primo elemento. E’ paradossale che l’uomo diventi come Dio quanto a conoscenza del bene e del male e contemporaneamente diventi mortale, assuma la propria condizione finita. Lo stato divino connesso alla conoscenza del bene e del male fa sì che essa sia la conoscenza massima, assoluta, che ci scioglie da ogni legame con la terra, infinita, e insieme misteriosamente causi la nostra sciagura; infatti, il peccato originale è a fondamento della consapevolezza di dover morire. La morte è percepita come il male supremo. Altri effetti ne derivano come corollari di un postulato: la sofferenza fisica e morale, la malattia, la schiavitù, il lavoro che costa fatica.
Il peccato originale è dunque la conoscenza del bene e del male, Adamo ed Eva mangiano il frutto proibito dall’albero della conoscenza. Conoscendo il bene e il male sono diventati come Dio e dopo il peccato vengono estromessi dal paradiso terrestre, non potranno più mangiare dall’albero della vita, perciò assumono inevitabilmente la loro condizione di esseri mortali.
Il divenire come Dio è collegato al prendere coscienza della morte e della condizione mortale ed è il passaggio, irrimediabile in apparenza, da un luogo, il paradiso terrestre, ad un altro, la terra. Per lungo tempo si è creduto alla verità letterale del racconto biblico e si è considerato il paradiso terrestre come un luogo fisico, geograficamente collocabile, riservato solo a pochi. Gradualmente nell’esegesi storica si è imposta un’interpretazione esclusivamente allegorica e spirituale delle vicende narrate nella Genesi, sia di quelle relative alla creazione del cielo e della terra, sia di quella del Diluvio, sia infine di quella che ci interessa da vicino: la cacciata dal paradiso terrestre; questo è accaduto soprattutto grazie al progredire delle conoscenze scientifiche, del progresso nelle scienze naturali in particolare; ciò ha portato a considerare la parola di Dio non più nel suo senso strettamente letterale e materiale, a tenere il racconto biblico della creazione del mondo, delle specie animali e dell’uomo e della donna in un senso meramente simbolico e mitico. Bisogna aggiungere che nel corso del tempo il racconto biblico si è intrecciato con altre tradizioni di origine greco-romana che narrano di luoghi simili al paradiso, descritti spesso con accenti quasi identici e ciò di fatto ha creato un’amalgama di miti, di saperi, ad esempio sono stati accostati ad esso l’età aurea, le Isole Fortunate, i Campi Elisi, ecc.
Questi luoghi vengono tratteggiati con caratteristiche comuni: si tratta di regni felici, con clima mite, in cui la natura è rigogliosa in modo prodigioso, gli alberi sono sempre fioriti e danno spontaneamente i loro frutti tutto l’anno; l’uomo vi abita in una condizione di beatitudine, di pace, di amore [2].
Il racconto del peccato originale perciò ci rende sensibile un passaggio decisivo che comporta per l’uomo la fine di una condizione di innocenza, di felicità, di armonia con sé e con la natura. Esso può essere interpretato, in primo luogo, come trasposizione di un accadimento esistenziale-psicologico, come una drammatizzazione di un’esperienza comune a tutti, universale: la rappresentazione del trapasso dall’innocenza all’esperienza che sperimentiamo con la fine dell’infanzia.
Adamo ed Eva, prima che mangino dall’albero della conoscenza, ci appaiono infatti come bambini smarriti e felici, vivono in un sogno dai contorni confusi, in una condizione di radioso presente, in cui ogni cosa può mutare in un’altra, in cui tutto è possibile; sono curati, nutriti, coccolati, da Dio. Possiamo immaginarceli mentre giocano nel verde del paradiso ignari di tutto, del fatto di avere un corpo, di essere nudi, abbandonati alla purezza delle sensazioni senza cercare nessi causali.
“Diventare come Dio” è prendere coscienza di un sé stabile e ricondurre tutti gli stati di coscienza ad un io sempre uguale a sé, con una identità duratura; il soggetto cosciente viene postulato come essere identico, come sostanza, e come sempre presente in ogni stato di coscienza. Ognuno di noi riferendosi alla propria esperienza personale, può dire che c’è stato nella propria vita un momento di passaggio da una consapevolezza affievolita di sé ad una vera e propria piena coscienza di sé, passaggio che segna la fine dell’infanzia e dell’innocenza. Anche se non si saprebbe individuare un momento preciso nel tempo, l’innocenza finisce quando l’individuo pronuncia il pronome “io” e collega a questo soggetto appena posto tutte le sensazioni che prima viveva in molteplice dispersione. A questo passaggio si accompagna un sentimento di nostalgia dello stato appena lasciato che appartiene ormai in modo irrimediabile al passato. Si tratta di una sensazione collegata alla consapevolezza della perdita definitiva di una condizione di sogno, di un mondo in cui si viveva a proprio agio, in cui altri pensavano alla cura dei nostri bisogni, in cui un eterno presente si riempiva di nuove esperienze, di nuovi colori, sapori, odori, suoni. Lo stupore di fronte al mondo si colmava a poco a poco di contenuti sempre nuovi e solo parzialmente legati ad una coscienza di sé.
Perché proviamo nostalgia di quello stato di innocenza che precede l’età adulta, cosa invidiamo ad un bambino, perché suscita in noi tenerezza lo sguardo dell’innocente?
Il motivo è evidente e nasce dall’antitesi lampante tra le due fasi della vita dell’uomo: da un lato, durante l’infanzia, la disponibilità del tempo a venire, carico di presagi e possibilità, dall’altro lato, nell’età adulta, l’irrimediabile trascorrere degli anni con l’assottigliarsi delle possibilità; prima, il gioco come forma di principale occupazione, ora invece il lavoro e la fatica mentale e fisica, interrotti da brevi ed isolati lampi di divertimento (distrazione più che altro, volontà di non pensare a nulla); prima, la bontà di ogni sensazione come pienezza di vita, il corpo come essere vivente e fluente, ora la distinzione tra sensazioni buone e sensazioni cattive e il corpo come mero strumento; nell’infanzia, la mancanza di pudore o vergogna di sorta per ogni funzione corporea, nell’età successiva la vergogna e la derisione per le parti basse; prima l’assenza del pensiero della morte, mentre ora l’angoscia legata al sentimento della fine e alla consapevolezza che il passare del tempo ci avvicina fatalmente al nostro tragico destino; prima il vivere in un eterno presente con un passato subito dimenticato e un futuro disponibile ma non agognato, ora, di contro, il peso della memoria del passato e la speranza in un futuro che potrebbe deludere le nostre aspettative, ecc.
A questa prima interpretazione, ne voglio affiancare un’altra, riguardante l’ontologia, per illuminare ancora meglio il legame esistente tra il divenire come Dio e l’io inteso come soggetto identico e sostanziale.
Il peccato dell’uomo è stato quello di prendere coscienza di sé conoscendo il bene e il male; ciò sul piano ontologico si traduce nella separazione tra essere e non essere e sta alla base del pensiero dell’essere come identità oggettiva, come ente in ultima analisi. Dio diventa allora il garante di questa concezione che, ponendo l’essere come un oggetto identico, tradisce l’originaria indistinzione tra essere e non-essere. Dio è a fondamento dell’essere oggettivo e il soggetto, diventando come Dio, partecipa di quest’ordine e di questo fondamento. Prima del peccato c’è, dunque, l’innocenza del divenire come superiore unità rispetto ad ogni distinzione. Dio, essere e bene nel racconto della creazione prima del peccato sono già uniti, identici, tuttavia è ancora assente la coscienza dell’uomo che possa testimoniare la presenza di Dio come fondamento. L’uomo diventa come Dio nel momento in cui pensa a sé stesso come essere identico, sostanziale, e opera la separazione tra essere e non-essere, in particolar modo pensati come bene e male, senza comprendere come possano ancora conciliarsi tra di loro. La storia dell’uomo, dell’umanità comincia con il peccato, dunque con il male, ma fin dal principio ha alla propria base una teoria che pone l’essere come qualcosa di dato ed identico al bene; l’essere così inteso è sia l’essenza dell’uomo che il suo ideale.
Perché la Genesi ci dice che il peccato originale ha reso l’uomo come Dio? Non era forse più divino e sacro lo stato che precedeva la conoscenza del bene e del male e dunque la consapevolezza di sé, o coscienza, collegata all’Io? Di sicuro l’Eden ci viene descritto come un luogo maggiormente felice per l’uomo. Con il peccato originale per l’uomo c’è stato un guadagno o una perdita?
Non posso qui analizzare le infinite posizioni ermeneutiche che si sono succedute nella storia del pensiero nell’analisi di questo passo nel loro tentativo di definire il rapporto tra Dio e uomo dopo il peccato.
C’è chi ha visto in questo passaggio un che di irrimediabile che introduce una differenza incolmabile tra Dio e l’uomo e di conseguenza tra la vita nel paradiso e la vita sulla terra, c’è chi ha cercato di vedere in questo accadimento originario un viatico per la salvezza dell’uomo, c’è chi ha interpretato il peccato come un atto di libertà dell’uomo, libertà concessa all’uomo da Dio in un atto d’amore e di autolimitazione della propria onnipotenza; in questo caso il peccato è sì irrimediabile, è male, ma non così grave poiché espressione della libertà dell’uomo donata da Dio.
Ciò che è interessante qui sottolineare è che lo stato di innocenza di Adamo ed Eva, la loro vita prima del peccato, è spesso stato equiparato ad uno stato di natura che precede la civiltà. A livello sociale-politico lo stato di innocenza è stato avvicinato dagli interpreti, infatti, ad una particolare organizzazione ed a particolari condizioni di vita che possiamo definire naturali. Il mito della Genesi si presta ad una interpretazione di filosofia politica.
Tra parentesi si deve preliminarmente tener presente che il modo in cui pensiamo l’innocenza non è mai innocente; ogni affermazione riguardante l’uomo e la sua storia che ponga come principio la natura o qualche cosa di simile ad uno stato naturale, considerandoli indubitabili, è sospetta. In età adulta, dunque, non si può discettare in modo innocente sull’innocenza se non si vuole cadere in malafede: ciò significa che ogni pensiero sull’innocenza è già una presa di posizione ed ha conseguenze pratico-morali.
Poco cambia che lo stato di natura sia considerato reale, cioè come un insieme di condizioni di vita di una parte dell’umanità o dell’umanità intera ai suoi primordi (quando l’uomo era in fondo più simile ad un animale rispetto all’umanità attuale, essendo guidato quasi totalmente dall’istinto) oppure solo ideale, vale a dire come un insieme di condizioni ipotetiche e immaginarie; l’importante è comprendere appunto in che modo ci poniamo di fronte allo stato di natura o di innocenza e perché abbiamo bisogno di valorizzare uno stato del genere.
Di fronte al mito dello stato di innocenza si possono dare e si sono dati differenti atteggiamenti; qui ci limitiamo a considerarne qualcuno che possiamo considerare tipico.
Il primo è quello di rimpianto di una condizione in cui l’individuo viveva in armonia con la natura, nei boschi o nella campagna, nelle società rurali o agricole, in un mondo comunque opposto alla società moderna e contemporanea, mondo stravolto dalla industrializzazione, dalla urbanizzazione, dalla specializzazione del lavoro, dal progresso tecnico. Dopo un’età caratterizzata da un vivere in armonia con la natura e con gli altri, si è imposta un’esistenza innaturale, forzosa, causa di tristezza e di depressione. In questi casi la nostalgia dello stato di innocenza coincide con il desiderio di una vita meno frenetica, meno agiata e comoda forse, ma sicuramente più alla nostra portata, più umana, più morale, più sana. Si è scorto in alcune culture, in alcune popolazioni, la sopravvivenza di uno stato naturale, innocente, si è costruito il mito del “buon selvaggio”. Questa concezione si accompagna spesso con la sensazione che la natura, oggi così calpestata, così artefatta, si ribelli e torni a far sentire la propria voce nel mondo con la furia distruttiva, attraverso maremoti, uragani, terremoti, e nell’uomo con la rinascita degli istinti peggiori, belluini. La natura violentata si vendica, si suol dire. Questa opinione è legata al desiderio nostalgico di un’armonia ormai perduta con la natura.
Possiamo indicare in Rousseau l’archetipo per questa prima posizione. Il suo Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes è esemplare nel tratteggiare lo stato di natura come quello in cui un’umanità primitiva viveva felice in seno ad una natura generosa; la civiltà, il vivere insieme, è un decadimento rispetto all’origine [3].
Vicina a questa concezione è la posizione di chi vorrebbe ritrovare la felicità dello stato di natura “coltivando il proprio orto”; di chi, isolandosi dal mondo, dai problemi troppo grandi, contento di ciò che possiede, scettico di fronte a tutto ciò che non è alla sua portata, vorrebbe vivere alla giornata le piccole gioie della vita, noncurante di tutto il resto.
Si può anche dare il caso in cui il rimpianto per l’età dell’innocenza si unisca con la speranza, più o meno recondita, che qualche cosa di simile possa tornare per l’umanità. In molti aneliti utopici e rivoluzionari possiamo leggere in fondo la delineazione in un tempo futuro di un ideale che ha molti tratti del mito su cui stiamo ragionando.
Sia che si concepisca il presente come inesorabile decadenza, assumendo così una posizione reazionaria, sia che lo si consideri invece come momento di passaggio e proiezione verso un altrove vagheggiato, cavalcando ideali rivoluzionari o anarchici legati ad ammalianti utopie, agisce sempre l’archetipo positivo dello stato di innocenza.
Rapportando queste posizioni al racconto della Genesi, si può affermare che, da questo punto di vista, solo il divenire innocente prima della conoscenza del bene e del male era divino, l’essere come Dio dopo il peccato infatti è ben poca cosa rispetto allo stato di innocenza, è solo il presagio delle future sciagure. Il fatto che l’uomo con il peccato diventi come Dio, perciò, suona come una beffa se si analizza la sua condizione dopo la caduta in rapporto alla vita precedente. L’uomo scacciato dal paradiso diventa mortale e Dio affatto distante e trascendente il mondo. Il padre buono che curava Adamo ed Eva, ora li abbandona sulla terra alle loro fatiche, ai loro dolori, alle loro paure, al loro corpo-strumento di lavoro, alla loro vergogna del fatto di essere nudi, alla loro condizione mortale, diventa un despota, un tiranno ineffabile, un Altro.
Questa non è l’unica concezione possibile né l’unica praticata nella storia del pensiero. A tal proposito, come contraltare rispetto a Rousseau, spicca per la sua originalità e per la novità che introduce nella considerazione del mito dell’origine la posizione di Kant, quale emerge dallo scritto Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte [4]. Qui la ripresa della tradizione interpretativa classica si concilia con la fiducia nel progresso e nella ragione come guida dell’uomo. L’uomo nello stato di natura ubbidisce come gli altri animali alla “voce di Dio”, l’istinto, ma in lui la ragione comincia a svegliarsi ed a voler estendere le proprie conoscenze al di là dei limiti dell’istinto; in questo modo nasce la concupiscenza. Il peccato originale, il cogliere un frutto proibito che appare desiderabile, viene considerato da Kant come la prima prova della libertà di scelta. Questa scelta ha avuto conseguenze irrimediabili per l’uomo in questo senso: non è più possibile per lui ritornare a quello stato di innocenza, di pace e di armonia che precede il peccato originale. Tuttavia, per Kant essa ha aperto la strada verso un uso sempre più adeguato della ragione e in ultima analisi verso la perfezione. La cacciata dell’uomo dal paradiso terrestre, dunque, per il filosofo di Königsberg non dovrebbe comportare alcuna nostalgia per lo stato di innocenza lasciato, poiché non è un avvenimento negativo: rappresenta, infatti, l’abbandono da parte dell’uomo dell’animalità e il passaggio da uno stato bruto all’umanità. Dobbiamo dunque respingere l’immagine dell’età dell’oro tanto esaltata dai poeti e dai pensatori nostalgici per volgerci verso il futuro dell’umanità fatto di progresso e dell’uso sempre più perfetto della ragione. Adamo, pertanto, ha peccato a causa del cattivo uso della ragione, ma nessuno può far cadere su Adamo il crimine originale né la propria responsabilità, perché ciascuno di noi al suo posto, date le stesse circostanze, si sarebbe comportato nello stesso modo.
In questa concezione, opposta alla precedente che insisteva sulla divinità dell’innocenza e sulla miseria conseguente al peccato, acquisisce un nuovo senso la formula “divenire come Dio”, poiché il peccato originale perde la propria gravità, essendo meramente un cattivo uso della ragione nel primo uomo, causato da inesperienza. Il peccato è il primo esercizio della libertà dell’uomo e come tale è la rivelazione per l’uomo che la ragione è ciò che davvero può renderlo divino, simile a Dio.
Alla fine di questa prima parte dell’analisi, riassumendo quanto scritto, si può dire dunque che il “divenire come Dio” biblico ha differenti sfumature di significato a seconda che si assuma una di queste due posizioni:
1. quella che considera lo stato di innocenza prima del peccato in modo positivo e come oggetto di rimpianto, mentre l’età adulta dell’esperienza come decadimento; il divenire come Dio è visto come ciò che strappa l’uomo dal paradiso per sempre e lo getta nel mondo a tu per tu con la propria morte; un evento, dunque, beffardo ed ironico per le sorti dell’uomo, poiché lo precipita nella condizione opposta a quella divina, rendendolo mortale;
2. la seconda posizione, invece, considera lo stato di innocenza come una condizione felice, naturale, ma ormai inesorabilmente passata a causa del peccato; l’uomo divenendo come Dio ha sperimentato la propria libertà e non può avere nostalgia di uno stato di natura in cui viveva come un animale guidato unicamente dall’istinto e dalla necessità, in cui in fondo era solo un automa e non era libero; Dio è fondamento di un ordine in cui l’uomo esercita sempre meglio la propria libertà in vista della perfezione che ha il suo ideale nella trascendenza.
In entrambi i casi viene comunque mantenuta la distanza tra uomo e Dio, per cui il divenire come Dio è basato esclusivamente sull’analogia, non sull’identità vera e propria. Uno iato incolmabile separa l’uomo da Dio, nonostante diventi come lui.

NOTE:

[1] La Bibbia di Gerusalemme, EDB, 1999 Bologna.

[2] Per un approfondimento del tema del paradiso terrestre rimando al seguente eccellente libro: J. DELUMEAU, Storia del paradiso. Il giardino delle delizie, Il Mulino, 1994 Bologna. Si tratta di un’opera di ricostruzione storica, letteraria, iconografica e cartografica del mito del paradiso terrestre dall’Antichità fino al Rinascimento.

[3] Cfr. J.-J. ROUSSEAU, Origine della disuguaglianza, Ed. Feltrinelli, 2004 Milano.

[4] Cfr. E. KANT, Congetture sull’origine della storia, in IDEM, Scritti politici e di filosofia della storia e del diritto, UTET, 2010 Torino.

[Fine prima parte - continua]

[Clicca qui per il pdf]