Federico
La Sala was born in Contursi Terme near Salerno in 1948 and has taught
philosophy and education for over three decades at the Istituto Magistrale
“Gaetana Agnesi” in Milan, where he continues to provide an indispensable
source of enlightenment to his students and colleagues. La Sala’s thought,
which is deeply rooted in the Italian phenomenological tradition initiated by
Enzo Paci [1911-1976], reveals itself to be strikingly original. In addition to
the present trilogy, La Sala has published a series of insightful articles in
some of Italy’s most distinguished journals including Alfabeta,
Aquinas, Belfagor and La
critica sociologica.
In
the first part of the trilogy, La
mente accogliente,
La Sala sides with Parmenides and Nietzsche in holding that “nothing else
exists or will exist outside of being”. In other words, the cosmos becomes the
indestructible and untranscendable field of contention within which, and for
which, an endless line of contenders of every kind and from every era have
confronted and will continue to confront one another in the vain attempt to end
the conflict once and for all by pronouncing the final word on this whole, which
is metaphysics. Thus, La Sala holds that his newly introduced accommodating
epistemology has as its objective precisely the same “female” reality which
“has always inexorably nourished and dashed the inextinguishable will to
define and
at the same time the
paradisiacal dream of every metaphysician according to which philosophy can
approach the formula of science, the fulfilled objective that is able to lay
down the name of the love of knowledge in order to be true knowledge, and shows
the true path of research, namely that of persuasion” (pages 125-126).
Parmenides
is again at the centre of La Sala’s reflections in Della
terra, il brillante colore,
a work whose title is rich in reminiscences of Giordano Bruno. Here a cycle of
twelve frescoes depicting the Sybils’ announcing of the birth of Christianity
to the pagan world is interpreted in terms of a late Renaissance revival of the
Parmenidean “Poema”. In Della
terra,
as elsewhere in his trilogy, La Sala’s aim is to highlight the fact that
without the female component any religion, especially Christianity, is
unthinkable.
Finally,
in l’Enigma della sfinge, La Sala puts forward a manifesto on having
“the courage to use one’s own intelligence today in order to become free men
and women, sovereign male and female citizens, and not male or female
entrepreneurs or exploiters of the labour and energy of others” (page 7).
The
three books of La Sala’s
trilogy together
offer a chiastic ontology “marked by a relation illuminated by know-how and
potential for love, human and political, of oneself, of the male and of the
female” (ibid.,
page 7) and
therefore a “chiastic path to knowledge”. This ontology takes a form akin to
a historical materialism “liberated from its blindness and capable not only of
effecting an anamnesis of genesis and resolving the Greek miracle by passing
through money”, but also, and especially, “of dreaming in a better way what
so many generations have dreamt and what we too continue to dream” (ibid.,
page 12). Above
all, La Sala invites us to consider the ontological step that is present in the
nascent adventure of human life, that is the birth of a child, where “we pass
from the inside to the outside and from the sensible (material-mother) to the
intelligible (equally physical, material-paternal)” (ibid.,
page 16).
La
Sala notes the confusion and strife that have always stood out on the Western
anthropological horizon, which has never gone any further than the cosmos
conceived by the ancient Greeks, where “woman and femininity and child and
infancy alike have never had the right to citizenship and have always been
domesticated and confined within the bounds of weakness and minority” (ibid.,
page 18). The very
exclusion of femininity and infancy from the language of philosophy and politics
is what has caused us to forget that “outside everything there is no
nothingness (at the most, the will to deny being), but life and the path of
life: we come from life, we are born into life and we die in life. It is life
which comprehends and illuminates the world, not the contrary” (ibid.,
page 22).
La
Sala poses the following choice which admits of no solutions: either we remain
within the ancient project of moderation and the modern project of freedom or
else we proceed with our eyes open and our feet on the ground along the same
path of research opened up by Rousseau when he elaborated on a social contract
that says: “Act in such a way that your desire does not turn out to be
antagonistic to that of someone else, in order that it does not end up by
rebounding back upon you” (ibid.,
page 34).
It
should be noted that this
kind of human
ontology which La Sala has resolved to reconstruct is not new. Dante, as La Sala
observes (ibid.,
page 62),
identified the conceptual nucleus in the following nine words: “God, heaven,
love, sea, earth, is, lives, dies, loves” (De vulgari eloquentia, I,
8). Nevertheless, the originality of La Sala’s contribution is evident in his
reflection on the possibilities and limits of a philosophical anthropology
capable of expressing itself on themes that define the twenty-first century and,
I think, particularly on issues connected with life, the family and citizenship.
One only has to observe how fruitful his approach is when one adopts it as the
basis of a discussion, for example on the subjects of freedom in human
reproduction, cloning, abortion, in loco and distance adoption, civil
liberties and children’s rights.
La
Sala’s books are not learned books (unlike many books on so-called philosophy
of sex and love that are currently being taught on courses at many US
universities). Rather, they are books that spring from serious intellectual
effort (in the vein of Max Weber) and from a labour that aims at making an
impact on the political life of a nation.
Riccardo Pozzo has been professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Verona since 2002. He was previously associate professor of German philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and is currently writing a book on the theory of subjectivity from the Renaissance to Kant.
Note: This review was first published on February 23 2004 by JUST Book Reviews.
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