Berlusconi's Ego-Land
Berlusconi is now the prime example of a new Italian super-ego. It is now okay for a prime minister to bring a prostitute to his bed in the house of the people. Berlusconi, in an act of self-evaluation has been quoted as saying: “this is the way the Italians like me.” Vico says that at that point of decadence a society goes crazy and destroys itself.
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Impressions of Italy and the European Union in 2009 - Part II.
Churches are now abandoned since everybody is in soccer stadiums on Sunday and religion is tantamount for many Europeans to medieval obscurantism, but then it is resented when Muslim immigrants buy them and transform them into mosques.
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Toward a Post-Secular Europe? A Review Essay
What are the consequences of taking seriously the empirical sociological fact that for the great majority of the world’s populations in the 21st century, it is not only possible, but quite normal to be both modern and religious? Might this question make a difference in the kind of paradigm that we construct in the West to better understand the nature of the modern world, be it European, American, Asian or African?
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Impressions of Italy and the European Union in 2009 - Part I
Compare that to what we have today in Italy. A prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who far from being a visionary considers Italy his private corporation of which he is the presiding CEO.
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Christianity: A Private Affair or Part of the European Identity? - Part III
Weiler points out that there is something comic, bordering on the tragic, in observing those most opposed to any reference to religion or Christianity in the draft Constitution at the forefront of opposition to Turkish membership in the Union.
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Christianity: A Private Affair or Part of the European Identity? - Part II
A Christian Europe is not a Europe that will endorse Christianity. It is not a call for evangelization. A Christian Europe is one that can learn from the teaching of Christianity. To reflect, discuss, debate, and ultimately assign meaning to European integration without reference to such an important source is to impoverish Europe.
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Christianity: A Private Affair or Part of the European Identity? - Part I
What exactly does Weiler mean by the internal walls of the European Christian ghetto? The reason he calls them “internal” is that these are walls created by Christians themselves.
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Dante’s Vision of a United Europe
As a Christian humanist, Dante exemplifies the synthesis of Antiquity with Christianity. The mere fact that he chose Virgil, the poet of Latinity, as his guide in the Commedia, hints at it. With that synthesis Dante becomes the poet of the Italians just as Virgil had been the poet of the Romans.
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Habermas on the Vision of a Post-Secular Europe - Part II
One may object that the likes of Dawkins are mere aberrations and therefore my argument against them is an ad hominem one, that I am fighting straw men and windmills, but to the contrary I would submit that they are examples of a type of “enlightened” modern prototypes ready to fantasize a bully God while denying his existence, convinced that the sooner religion is liquidated, the better.
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Jürgen Habermas on the Vision of a Post-Secular Europe - Part I
The misnomer “secular humanism” was certainly not invented by the original European humanists in 14th century Italy. Its acknowledged father, Francesco Petrarca was a deacon of the Church and indeed most humanists were and remained pious believers.
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Sundry Musings on the New Millennium’s Transatlantic Dialogue - Part III
Joseph Campbell used to enjoin to his audiences: “find your bliss!” The goddess Europa surely must have expected bliss or she would not have left a secure shore to head towards the unknown on the back of a bull.
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Sundry Musings on the New Millennium’s Transatlantic Dialogue - Part II
Contrary to what one may think when entering the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s narration does not begin with the creation of Light by God but with the drunkenness of Noah.
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Sundry Musings on the New Millennium’s Transatlantic Dialogue - Part I
At the turn of the new millennium I joined the online dialogue and debate on “The Future of the European Union.” It was inaugurated by Tony Blair and the then President of the EU Council Romano Prodi. They invited all Europhiles to participate with their own contributions and ideas and thus further the democratic spirit of the new polity.
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Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair’s View at Yale University - Part III
The 25 students who took the course co-taught by Blair describe his teaching method as Socratic; one of probing questions and tentative answers. He has discarded the air of seasoned authority on the subject. He appears to be exploring the truth himself rather than delivering it.
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Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair’s View at Yale University - Part II
One of the insights that Blair has brought to the course on Faith and Globalization at Yale is that while Globalization obliterates borders and frontiers, faith often becomes a reaction to it and pulls people apart and that is unfortunate.
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Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair’s View at Yale University - Part I
[W]e do know that Tony Blair, the son of a militant atheist began his exploration of Christianity while at Oxford in the early 1970s and subsequently embraced Anglicanism in 1974 and later on Catholicism; this too was in the tradition of C.S. Lewis, G.K Chesterton, and Christopher Dawson.
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The Deconstruction of Eurocentric Art by Two Afrocentric Artists, Part II
[F]or the artist, both the traditional aspects of his culture and those he appropriates from the West are simply vehicles for his creativity. In the artist’s imagination Africa and the West are not others to each other.
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The Deconstruction of Eurocentric Art by Two Afrocentric Artists, Part I
It is a well known fact that Picasso was greatly influenced by the encounter with masks and other art objects from Africa. In turn, via Picasso, modern art at the turn of the 20th century became abstract. Nevertheless, Western attitudes toward African art have remained ethnocentric and patronizing.
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Europa, Quo Vadis? - Part II
[W]hile rejecting what is worst (things such as imperialisms of all kinds, and colonialism and nationalism), Europe needs to recuperate what is best in its heritage: service to the whole of humanity.
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Europa, Quo Vadis? - Part I
Were I to choose an appropriate metaphor to describe this spiritual emptiness of modern European man ..., I would have recourse to a horrific scene in a dark cave in the deepest part of Dante’s hell where Dante and Virgil encounter a man, the so called lantern man, holding his own head in his right hand and “doing light unto himself.”
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Heroic Materialism in European Culture - II
In facing this challenge religion needs to answer this crucial question: Can it supply men and women of today with a convincing rationale for building up historical tasks within a humanistic philosophy of history, while at the same time bear witness to transcendence?
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Heroic Materialism in European Culture - Part I
[R]eligion may well be best overlooked remedy for the recovery within Western civilization of a lost cultural vibrancy and the sense of the transcendent.
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Western Civilization at the Crossroads - II
Hitler for one was proud of his talent for presenting logical iron-clad, unassailable arguments. It would appear that the more vigorously logic prosecutes its own internal pursuit, the greater is the danger of its turning away from direct experience and fact.
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Western Civilization at the Crossroads - I
[T]he so called “age of reason”...believes that it can easily dispense with what is childish: the fables and myths spun by poets and visionaries, the whole of the humanistic world based on the poetic. It believes that adults endowed with reason must preoccupy themselves primarily with issues relating to the economic and the political and leave the rest to the Don Quixotes of this world, i.e., the losers.
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The Loss of European Spiritual Identity - III
[I]s it still possible to revive the ideals behind Europe's spiritual identity? If this requires returning to a common Christian faith and to a pre-modern concept of reason, it will prove practically impossible.
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The Loss of European Spiritual Identity - II
It would be a mistake for the EU to imitate the US and attempt a repetition of a mega-nation which would translate into a super-power bent on power and the forcible exportation of democracy (an oxymoron if there ever was one).
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The Loss of European Spiritual Identity
[I]s not abstract rationalism and its irrationalist reaction responsible for much of the ominous nihilism which Nietzsche, for one, claimed hovers over Europe like a menacing specter? Has it not, in fact, corrupted the very principle of reason that, up to the Enlightenment, had constituted Europe’s spiritual identity? Has it not turned wisdom against itself?
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The Return of the Gods and the EU Constitution Transformed into a Treaty
[C]ontrary to what the modern anti-religion sophists and rationalists go around peddling nowadays, historically, most of the Constitutions of the world at the very least mention a Creator in their preamble as a way of grounding themselves in something more durable than the historical vicissitudes of humankind and its power politick.
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The EU Constitution: The Cart before the Horse?
Were one to glance at the very first article of the EU Constitution one would read these words: Inspired by the will of its citizens and the European States, to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union ... unless those first words of the EU Constitution are really meant and honored in the future, then that common future will be built on sand ... [A] cultural identity of disparate people with disparate mores and even disparate languages (which reflect their culture and therefore are to be jealously preserved) cannot be imposed from the top down by elitist leaders, philosopher-kings with esoteric ideas. It has to come from the bottom up, democratically.
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Europeans from Venus, Americans from Beyond the Stars?
Unless Puritanism is brought into the equation, even a sophisticated European may fail to discern what makes America tick, as was the case with Tocqueville at first. For this exceptionalism is exceptional indeed; it is an unprecedented phenomenon in history, even by aristocratic European standards. For while it is true that the French invented the word "chauvinism," that De Gaulle used to go around proclaiming that “France cannot be France without greatness and glory,” and that imperialism and colonialism originated in Europe, it is also true that even with all that Napoleonic hubris, no European nation has ever proclaimed itself as “chosen by God from beyond the stars”...
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Václav Havel’s Conspiracy of Hope for the EU’s Cultural Identity
With the possible exception of Franz Kafka, I know of no modern Czech writer whose political philosophy, within the Western Humanistic tradition, is more inspirational than Václav Havel’s. To my mind the best way to imagine him is as one of Kafka’s “heroes for our time,” a powerful voice calling us back home to our humanity and urging that Europe know its cultural soul.
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The Janus-Face of the European Union
What is urgently needed in the debate on the future of Europe is the substitution of old Machiavellian paradigms based on "real politick" considerations with new imaginative ones based on humanistic considerations. Unless we manage that substitution we shall end up pouring new wine in old putrid wineskins.
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Medieval Monasticism as Preserver of Western Civilization
Besides praying and working out their salvation and preaching the gospel, what else did monks pursue in those monasteries?
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Two Forgotten Communities of the EU Cultural Identity
There is little doubt that Europe finds itself at a paradoxical turning point. The rejection of the proposed Constitution is a mere symptom of a deeper malaise. Europe’s institutions have so far failed to generate what every political community needs in order to survive and grow: a feeling of belonging that goes beyond a, by now, parochial nationalism and the acknowledgment of a common purpose. This is another way of saying that it is not clear to the outside observer why Europeans wish to be together and what their shared vision and purpose might be.
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Christopher Dawson and The Making of Europe
Religion is the soul of a culture, and a society that has lost its spiritual roots is a dying society, however prosperous it may appear externally.
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New Paradigms of the Idea of Europe
In this global village in which we live, there is an urgent need to return to the future for a novantiqua kind of civilization. It is good to have lights on a car to see what’s ahead, but a rear-view mirror is also necessary to avoid a disaster.
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Klaus Held on Religion, Science and Democracy in European Culture
The twin institution which is born together with science in ancient Greece is that of democracy...These two institutions are the outward form of the "inaugural spirit of Europe."
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Emmanuel Levinas’ Challenge to the Modern European Cultural Identity
Were one to encapsulate the whole of Lévinas' philosophy in two succinct words, they would be "being human." This philosophy insists throughout that an extreme, unbalanced rationality devoid of imagination, feelings, senses and spirit, unconcerned with the ethical dimensions of life, is the equivalent to a refusal to be human, to allowing oneself to become a monster.
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An Imaginary Conversation on Mount Olympus between Poets and Philosophers
It would appear that to perceive the perfect, one needs to begin with the imperfect; to get to the universal one needs to begin with the particular, yes? That might not have been so at the very beginning when the Word was and that’s all there was, but something seems to have gone wrong and it is not so now, and we need many words and still do not perceive the light.
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Some Concluding Reflections at the End of the Journey into Vico’s Mind—Part 2
It is [the] inability to associate humanistic thought with truth that lies at the root of contemporary technocratic mentality and its sheer inability to provide a unifying vision of the whole of human knowledge…One cannot be too far from the truth in asserting that [the] degeneration of the concept of human spirit is directly related to our civilization’s present state of dehumanization. Indeed, to live by bread alone, for one’s belly, is to have sold one’s soul for a bowl of lentils, and ultimately to die spiritually.
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Some Concluding Reflections at the End of the Journey into Vico’s Mind—Part 1
And here lies the root of contemporary Man’s cultural malaise: in the presumptuous conviction that the human mind can and in fact will in the future encompass God’s mind. At that point Man will be a god of sorts. As we have pointed out above, Vico describes thus the last stage of deterioration of a whole civilization: ‘And finally they go mad.’ What brings about the madness is the delusion of being a god which is nothing else but the worshipping of one’s cleverness and its derivations...
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Vichian Reflections on Self-Forgetfulness and Dehumanization
As Dante and Vico have been trying to teach us for centuries now, to be human is to be forced to ask about one’s self, to be compelled by the image toward which one is thrust and which emerges at the intersection of essence and existence, at the point of ethical tension between what is and what ought to be.
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The Paradox of Transcendence and Immanence in Vico’s Concept of Providence
[I]t is precisely this paradox that appeals to contemporary man, disillusioned as he is with neat dispassionate theories of knowledge and ideologies reducing Man to a cog in economic-social schemes. This man is acutely aware that what is urgently needed is a mode of thought that is both more human and more existentially related to life’s experiences and the transcendent concerns of his humanity.
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Scientific Reality and the Complementarity of Vico’s Historicism
Vico was acutely aware that to treat real concrete moments of Man’s history as mere moments of something higher is not to take them very seriously. Indeed, this was Hegel's flaw...
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Between Descartes and Nietzsche
Nietzsche argued that the antidote to “the professor” is the “unhistorical” and “super-historical,” i.e., man must become his own master again by knowing himself. The Greeks were exemplary in this respect. For them, the journey into self-knowledge begins at its origins when man looks afresh at his true necessities and learns once again to organize the chaos around him. No wonder Nietzsche has been re-discovered.
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Scientific Truth as Grounded in Faith—Part II
A rock bottom belief of modern science is that the visible and the tangible have primacy, i.e., are more real over the invisible and the intangible. This is a premise never openly stated but pervading the scientific world which seeks the quantifiable, what can be materially observed while questioning the very existence of the invisible and the intangible. Invariably, it ends up with a purely casual interpretation of human existence devoid of the concept of human freedom... To the medieval mind this view of reality would have appeared quite squalid...
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Scientific Truth as Grounded in Faith—Part 1
If Thomas Aquinas has taught us anything, it is the notion that faith is the very mode of rationality adopted by reason in its fidelity to what it seeks to understand. This is to say that faith and not “clear and distinct ideas” is the most basic form of knowledge in which rational inquiry may be grounded. Vico too never tires of reminding us that before there can be a reflective philosophical knowledge, there is an informal kind of knowledge directly grounded in experience and the senses and formed through the adaptation of the mind to the nature of things.
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The Immanence of Providence’s Action within Man’s History
Without religion no primitive social world is even conceivable. The only way out of wanton savagery on the way toward one’s humanity is religion underpinned by fear.
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Mytho-Poetic Wisdom as Origins of Self-Knowledge—Part 2
Myth is a very concrete image of the world expressing in very rudimentary fashion the ethico-religious experience of primitive man; an experience rooted in fear and wonder and which is always at the origins of religion. For Vico, myth rather than logical thinking is the first form through which truth reveals itself.
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Mytho-Poetic Wisdom as Origins of Self-knowledge—Part 1
Vico insists throughout his opus that in order for Man to understand himself and avoid the danger of scientific objectification, he needs to attempt a re-creation of the origins of humanity. This is achievable in as much as it was Man himself who created his own origins, and therefore he can return to them. By doing so he can hope to understand the destiny and meaning of his striving in space and time, which is to say, in history. In the beginning there is the end.
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The Nexus between Language and Vico’s Historicism—Part 2
Man’s relationship to language and history cannot be one of ‘using’ them but rather, one of ‘participating’ in them. In the presentation of contemporary histories, the reader rarely gets an invitation to participate actively in language as another man standing within a world made by language...A whole semester may be spent on literary analysis while the text itself will go unread and thus the student rarely discerns that a great literary work is truly an historical experience in the sense that understanding stands in a specific place in time and space.
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The Nexus between Language and Vico’s Historicism—Part 1
The very possibility of Vico’s science is related to the existence of universals of human nature reflected in linguistic universals formed by the human mind. There is a diachronic and a synchronic unity in language which is based on the unity of human nature. The failure to correlate spoken and written language produces in turn the failure to understand the origins of language.
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The Encounter with History as Extension of the Self—Part 2
It does indeed take about half of one’s lifetime before one becomes aware that our existential condition is, to say it with Heidegger, of “being thrown into the world.” Youth, misguidedly perceiving itself as immortal is rather slow in perceiving this condition.
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The Encounter with History as Extension of the Self—Part 1
For Vico, self-experience does not come by way of introspection, but rather by meeting others and their worlds, i.e., by way of history.
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Vico’s Hermeneutical “understanding” of our Humanity—Part 3
Vico’s most important hermeneutical insight is that human beings cannot be explained objectively, they can only be “understood.”
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A Revolutionary New View of History and Humanity—Part 2
Properly speaking, Vico is the grandfather of modern hermeneutics even if little or no credit is accorded to him in courses on mythology or history of religions.
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A Revolutionary New View of History and Humanity—Part 1
Vico’s New Science (1725) is a watershed to modern historicism. He was however too far ahead of his contemporaries to have any direct impact on them. They had already embarked on a Cartesian paradigm of reality which now pervades modern culture. We modern men can hear Vico’s wake up bell much more clearly in the wake of what rampant rationalism has wrought on us.
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"Man Is His Own History" leads to Self-knowledge -- Part III
To briefly summarize Vico’s theory of knowledge we can say that history becomes science when Man orders and understands his deeds according to those eternal notions that Man finds in himself. The truth of history does not consist in mere facts produced by men, but also in the possibility that men have to recover the facts of history to the structure of their mind and to the eternal order that God reveals to the mind of men.
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"Man Is His Own History" leads to self-knowledge--Part II
Vico is the precursor of Martin Buber's basic insight that it is only in the world of I-Thou that true reality is to be found. The world of I-it is there to be analyzed, categorized, organized but it is not the total world.
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“Man is his own History” leads to self-knowledge—Part 1
I am not suggesting that the concept of history is a special privilege of Western Man. Non Westerns too have a history. However, it is only in 18th century Europe that Man becomes aware of the far reaching implications of that fact. While Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Muslims had chronicles and archives, they were not intellectually conscious of the astonishing fact peculiar to Western Man...
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The Journey Continues
The Enlightenment remains to be enlightened about itself. When it finally does it will come to the realization that if reason is made into a god of sort, then, far from taking us beyond ourselves it can degrade and dehumanize us; make us rationalists rationalizing what ought never be rationalized. Most of the Nazis who planned and rationalized the Holocaust in less than two hours and executed it in less than four years sported a Ph.D. after their name. That is modern nihilism at its worst.
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The Journey Begins
After a preparatory preamble on Providence and the historical consciousness, I’d like to begin the journey into Vico’s mind with a metaphor from my own intellectual life-experience: that of a long journey on a train and the reflections it engendered.
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Man’s Freedom/God’s Providence: The Origins of the Historical Consciousness
The idea of freedom is peculiar to the West. For the Western imagination this idea is nothing short of the underpinning for the historical consciousness. In fact, the consciousness of Man being his own history is one of the most striking characteristics of the Western world. It allows the self to turn back upon itself and judge itself ethically. This is possible because that same self conceives of itself as created in God’s own image and therefore essentially free, for this is a God that is free and creates freely. I dare say that there lies the theological genius of the West.
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An Invitation to the Hermeneutics of the Self
Like the ancients of antiquity, Vico insists that without self-knowledge there is no acquisition of wisdom. His was the question of the ancients re-discovered by the high medieval and Renaissance humanists: what does it mean to be human; how does one live humanly? And the question is addressed to each one of us.
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The Idea of Providence within Vico’s Poetic Science of Humanity
This is the crux of the problematic of providence vis-à-vis man’s freedom. Is providence wholly immanent within man’s social life? And if so, how is man free? On the other hand if providence is transcendent, how exactly does it operate in human history? Isn’t the very attempt to define God, even if only symbolically, an attempt at reducing his transcendence to the purely human?
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The Uniqueness of Giambattista Vico’s Poetic Philosophy
There are two dangerous extremes in modern Western philosophy: that of mythos without logos leading to a false transcendence and ushering in the Nietzschean charismatic Man; and that of logos without mythos leading to pure rationalism and ushering in technocratic Man. In between those dangerous extremes there is Vico’s poetic philosophy, humanistic, holistic and able to harmonize the two extremes.
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