THE SClENTIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL MANIFESTO OF THE ITALIAN NEO HUMANISTS

Analysis and diagnosis. The conflict between the two modernities: abstrac rationality and humanistic rationality.

We receive and develop the Appeal for humanistic research from the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies), with the consciousness that humanity is going through one of the most dangerous periods of its historical existence. This is perceptible especially at an existential level, in the suffering of contemporary men and women, increasingly deprived of their constituent individuality as Persons, that is as rational and moral subjects.

The closing century will perhaps be remembered as the century of transition between the old world and the new one which will open in the third millenium, a century which has known great revolutions, long periods of totalitarianism and of genocides and which, in the lapse extending from the first World War to the fall of the Berlin wall, has been marked by the human dream of erecting the City of man on the ruins of the City of God irreparably devastated by the cultural subversion caused by the advance of this first form taken on by modernity. 

Our century will also be remembered both for being the century of technological modernization, and for the bad use man has made of science, that is as the century in which the project of devising and proposing rational certainties substituting for the certainties provided by religious faith, has reached its maximum level of realization.

However, the closing century has also provided us with both lay achievements which have created areas of emancipation (in the female world, for example, or in the job marchet) and achievements in social rights which will be able to play a fundamental role in the establishment of values which were totally unknown until the last century (such as social freedom and cooperation), while still considering new alienations and new acts of violence to be corrected and fought in the near future. 

Paradoxically, alongside achievements with respect to social rights the beginning of the new millenium seems to announce a worsening of the evils, nominally known, but unprecedented in the dimensions with which they appear to prognosis. The old anomy worsens because of the deep division between Being and Value, brought about by the overwhelming technological advancement, by demographic development and by an economic reality the structure of which is completely out of control not only on the part of the common citizen but even on the part of government structures. Alienation shows a subject lost in the desert of virtual “reality”. The Ioss of single identities (both individual and social) risks, for the first time in history, becoming irreversible. In a few years, an additional two billion human beings, as consuming subjects, will enter the alienation of the market. The wisest tell us that world economy must be restructured and made transparent but also that it will be necessary to produce “more resources without destroying the natural equilibrium”, because, should the ecological breaking point of the mannature system be reached, there would be a multiplication of wars, terrorism and occult powers. However, fiew worry about the mental afflictionrelated suffering of the existential solitude which will kill, increasingly, the poor citizen of the world, literally confined among unrealizable hopes and wishes, among hedonistic models arrogantly pursuing power and wealth, among the ambiguous and unreliable proposals of the powerful and the management of his/her miserable daily life becoming more and more ephemeral and empty; and he/she will experience this terrible impotence by alienating him/herself without realizing it and destroying him/herself while waiting for an unrealizable hope.

There is a painful perception of irreversibility which makes every reflection dolorous, and there is an urgent question: what is happening to this planet’s inhabitants?

Loss of identity, alienation, socio-economic inequities and collusion today have turned into a real tragedy, affecting a large part of humanity struck by depression, alcoholism, drug-addiction, sexual disorders, neuroses and suicides constantly increasing all over the world.

We are lured into a trap which seems more and more without a way out: the world’s head bites its own tail, but we must hope for an effort of pride bringing about a revolution of conscience and a gathering round the movements of denunciation and proposal. Observering the great majority of people we have the sharp perception of the sense of uselessness and of the repetitiveness of gestures around which the family and the social duty are built: if this is the case, there is confirmed the terrifying diagnosis of the loss of self (and, therefore the loss of that identity which makes the body the subject of a rational and moral life, that is the qualification as a Person) this loss running the risk of becoming an irreversible constant if critical consciousness will not be restored about the great issues of social and individual life.

Therapy. Reconnecting knowledge in view of Man

2 - That is why, having monopolized cultural and social interests, science must now re-establish principles and paradigms in order to reconstruct, for men and women, the neo-humanistic route lost as a tribute to the rigor of the experimental method, `which is plausible in the approach to the

physical reality but not to the whole of knowledge and is not the only method through which truth can be known.

A neo-humanistic vision of science, therefore, appears as the only resource in the rising third millenium, to reconstruct the unity of culture in order to face the planet’s emergencies at an economic and ecological level and to arrest the phenomenon of human irreversibility by which this planet’s inhabitants seem increasingly to be affected: in the next millenium the need will increasingly be felt of a reconciliation of the division between the two cultures, or else we must also prophesy the death of inner existence, that is the end of the gap between the Person and the Nature.

It is necessary, therefore, to take up the burden of the real needs, especially those of the inner world without which men and women feel like empty shells, impotent and depressed. The neo-humanistic approach, implicit in the paradigm constituting the existence of Being by principle, originates from the observation that man is the only living thing dominating nature and emancipating from it, although only when he expresses subjective forms of creativity and freedom, otherwise he is dominated by corporeal reality, by society and by the needs induced by others for profit.

3 - The neo-humanistic re-establishment as a further goal of science and of philosophy itself as well as of a culture aimed at man's good and not at profit exasperatingly seen as an end in itself, will have to take into account the following premises:

a) - Re-establishing the concept of subjectivity as an indispensable force to re-appropriate the alienated consciousness and of the critical use of thougt and inner freedom; b) - Inner freedom must mean the right to one's mature moral conscience.

The mature moral conscience originates from the recognition that it represents a reality establishing the Person and not an epiphenomenon of the body. It is moral conscience which constitutes public ethic and real democracy.

c) - It is necessary to call men and women to civil commitment, to the debate about values and to subsequent change aimed at personal growth and at the revolution of conscience, in compliance with the rules and with the public loyalties and when these are identifiable.

4 - Considering the great speed at which some disciplines evolve which are now able to perform changes and even genetic alterations, it is necessary for science, because of the exceptional power that it holds, to question itself on the problem of siding with science, planning common goals to re-devise dis-alienation plans aimed at the care of man and of the socio-economic structures which are historically ill, adapting the needs of objectivity to those of individual subjectivity.

This implies, in detail, the change of stile in the relationship between medicine and the sick person; the humanistic commitment of town planning sciences with respect to life in the great metropolises; renewed functions of sociology, psycology and philosophy which, in order to set men free from alienation with respect to a reality which is increasingly altered and virtual, and, therefore, increasingly falsifying, must fill the voids of time brought about by technology; mass media must be led to re-examine the negative models which they propose throngh television; the new ethics of the third millenium will have to make young people understand that the wild search for money is destructive and deforming and it does not represent the only human value.

Furthermore: school must be increasingly formative with respect to personality growth and to the fastening processes of identity and not only informative; the job market is increasingly in need of humanizing increments in order to take the worker away from the technological chain making him more and more insignificant as a Person; bureaucracy and justice must appear less impersonal in order to get close to the citizen again, philosophy must give signs of public activity by suggesting concrete guidelines for growth and the understanding of life and death; national assemblies must take up the burden of the planet's ecology which is more and more at risk and become autonomous with respect to the laws of profit of the great economic conglomerates which do not have as a goal the survival of man and of nature.

Philosophy and science carry the burden of this historical and cultural change entirely on their shoulders, and since they are responsible for the future reconciliation between inner needs and social reality, they must act also upon politics so that ideas become concrete acts of public life. Philosophy, by natural disposition, must be the companion of science to all effects and purposes, setting itself the task of becoming medicine of the soul and care of existence, healing medication for the contemporary tragedy affecting millions of human beings left at a loss by the actual collapse of myths and dogmas, by reiterated declarations of God’s death, by the unstoppable spread of public corruption and violence, by unemployment which will increasingly affect young people being, therefore, easy pray to either utopias and illusions or to cheap promises.

5 - It appears more and more urgent to stimulate awareness first of all in the representatives of the world of culture, so that all agree that at the outset of the third millenium an ecology of both Nature and man must be considered a priority, man being seen in his specific character of critical subject interacting with the world. To this purpose it will also become necessary to re-establish the meaning of moral and ethical values, almost always perceived and defined in a rhetorical way to the point of operative incomprehensibility in the real game of life.

The re-discovery of values with an intense moral and ethical significance (for example justice, honesty, loyalty, friendship, civil cooperation, tolerance altruism, social commitment, etcetera) detached from the rhetoric of abstract or mystical definitions in a contest in which social disparities are attenuated and world economy differently re-structured, constitues a strong culture and a non-ephemeral pillar in order to re-establish the psychological identity and the social character of the lost and alienated subjects who leave the century waiting for changes and hopes which are entitled to turn into certainties.

There is at present, as a matter of fact, a sharp division between the theoretical contents of Values and their being perceived as behavioral and ethical needs really shared and convincingly experienced. Therefore we share and reiterate the conclusion of the afore-mentioned Appeal of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies), i.e. that “it is necessary to boost and support humanistic research everywhere and in every possible way, starting from school. But it must be done immediately, before the universal sense of the human being is lost completely and before the perception of the spirit and of its needs dissolves”.

(Written by Corrado Piancastelli with the collaboration and the contribution of Giacomo Gava, Raffaele Prodomo and Ludovico Martello).