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"Giorgio Colli, philosopher" (translated by Benedetta Grasso)
(off screen - phone call)
"What should I put? You don't like definitions."
"How about..."philosopher"?"
"Yes, philosopher"
"Well then, there you go. Giorgio Colli: philosopher"
A sense of detachment from one's own work leaves a mark on the work itself.
Think how the Tuscan landscape becomes embedded with the Mysterious in Renaissance paintings:
beyond it the life of the author is hidden,
references and connections escape us,
that Mystery embodies the will to "hide",
is enriched with something deeper.
The background fades even more looking at what has survived from Ancient Greece.
This is what triggers a certain Ambiguity, Lightness, Incoherence, the aversion to finding a finalistic purpose in those works, poems, statues, temples,thoughts.
This is what triggers a certain Ambiguity,
Lightness, Incoherence,
the aversion to finding a finalistic purpose in those works, poems, statues, temples,thoughts.
The same sense of detachment that originated them is the source of their Ambiguity.
Eventually it's inevitable to ask ourselves if the Life we are living is actually our own or doesn't really belong to us.
When will we ever be able to not depend on external forces that will always manage to overwhelm us and drag us down the stream?
Is it possible not to be affected by what happens around us?
Is there a way to go beyond the misty fog of our habits and scattered thoughts?
To overcome the chaotic noise of our daily life that prevents us from recognizing ourselves and understand who we are?
How do we get to shed some light on the radiating strength of our inner selves?
How to translate that into a state of mind that we can truly call our own?
This is the house of Giorgio Colli. Philosopher.
Someone who has managed to give feasible, tangible meaning to a quest for knowledge
that first and foremost he has applied to his everyday life, distancing it from the inconstant winds of change.
Those who get close to him are forced to leave their vague
and indeterminate uncertainties behind.
The previous methods they relied on suddenly seem evasive
and they turn into a calm acceptance of reality as it is, with all its illusions and artifices.
[Giorgio Colli's family discusses watching a home-video. Informal talk]
Nagging questions resurface after being swept under the rug in an unforgiving silence.
Now this dramatic silence is broken at its essential core.
All the doubts one has tried to avoid are finally faced and taken to the extreme, dealing with the consequences.
All the questions are no longer sitting still, prompting other questions,
but they arrive to the "Olympic essentiality" of an answer.
Now we are entering a changing mobile reality that leads us to a new state of mind.
The sudden movement is so powerful that wins over the singular experience.
Now we are in a dimension that crashes the insurmountable hardship of pre-constructed acquired barriers,
dissolves old and new inhibitions,
finally takes us to acquire our own certainties, pervades and transforms our existence.
Giorgio Colli grows up in Turin, a torn city in between two wars,
that has lost its previous freedom.
He looks up to Cavour as a prominent fellow citizen not only for his importance in Europe as a statesman
but for his way of life - so carefree that he has even gambled his fortune at the Paris Stock Exchange -
for his restlessness refusing to live life passively and for his ability to take risks he has channeled in his political career.
Turin is a good fit for him.
It's the city that right after World War I has renewed its core values
and has then turned a failed political revolution in a new wave of cultural and individual blossoming.
Central to his life it's his father, a journalistic entrepreneur,
who when the Fascist regime revokes the freedom of press steps away
only to come back when the times are more favorable after the Liberation and a democratic government.
The academic education Colli has as a young man will indulge his carefree spirit,
free from preconceived notions and prejudices
His high-school Liceo D'Azeglio coincidentally becomes a nurturing environment for many future intellectuals
whose first anti-conformist interests are mainly political.
Professors like Augusto Monti will describe this school as a factory of anti-Fascists,
absorbing the air, the soil the environment of Turin and the entire Piedmont region.
That being said, his first intellectual attempts in high-school don't translate into good results,
almost underlining a feeling of disconnect with the institutions that will accompany him into his more official studies later on.
But that ends with his third year.
It's in the last years of high-school that Colli discovers Nietzsche for the first time.
Between 1888 and 1889 Nietzsche had grew accustomed to a sort of aristocratic life-style (in Turin)
and on December 16th 1888 Nietzsche will write to his friend Peter Gast:
"In the SubAlpine Gallery that I can see when I walk out of my room,
there is the most beautiful and elegant atmosphere I have ever encountered
and every night they play Il Barbiere di Siviglia masterfully.
The prices are a bit high for what you get..." .
But it's in Turin a city he defines as "the only place where I am possible",
where two weeks later he will enter that downward spiral from which he will never come back.
[Paolo Boringhieri] "Giorgio Colli was very "Torinese", deeply rooted in Piedmont,
in terms of his personality and even family traditions,
but I wouldn't say his research and work is linked to these landscapes, to a place like this.
I met him when I was in high-school and he was finishing his college education and
I was very indecisive while he, on the other hand,
stood out as someone who even back then knew his path and and had already come up with some of his most profound ideas,
creating an obvious juxtaposition.
We didn't talk about our future plans,
we talked about the world around us, the reality of the last years of Fascism, the oppressive atmosphere.
He already knew what he was, a philosopher, an explorer of Truth, he didn't aspire to be anything else.
In college Giorgio Colli meets a fiery independent spirit, a man named Piero Martinetti,
a professor who has been removed from his teaching position (because of Fascism).
This encounter brings out a more sociable side of Giorgio Colli, often more introverted as he's generally portrayed later on by mainstream culture.
In 1939 he graduates with professor Gioele Solari presenting a thesis on Plato's Politics
that is picked up and read with interest by none less than Croce (Benedetto Croce, philosopher)
who even writes a review on the work of this unknown twenty-something kid who wasn't even his student nor will ever be.
Colli spends some time in England on a journey - interrupted by the beginning of the war -
that only increases his thirst for knowledge and leads to the completion of his first major work:
Man's ultimate purpose is Wisdom. Wisdom is attained through a community and for the community. (quote by Colli, trad Benedetta Grasso)
[Giulio Einaudi]: Well...in Turin he was in school with some of my friends. He was Felice Balbo's classmate.
And I believe it was actually Felice Balbo...in the 40s...if I'm not mistaken,
who introduced him to the world of publishing (to this publishing house) and asked him to collaborate on some translations.
And what's interesting is that the first assignment he got from us was to translate Hildebrand's Plato.
So our relationship goes back far, it was around 1943 when he worked on it and he turned it in, in time, even in advance because he was very precise with timing and scheduling.
And he turned it in before September 8th so the pages had to sit here in the office for some months during the German occupation.
It was fascinating how close he got to other prominent figures at Einaudi like Cesare Pavese or Felice Balbo who didn't have an academic background,
even if they were educated and serious when, for example, they were editing.
After winning a national state-selection that results in a job offer as a High-school History and Philosophy teacher in 1942 he's assigned a position in Lucca.
It's his debut as an educator.
Around this young professor from Turin a small circle of followers, of disciples, starts to gather:
it's an encounter that seems enhanced by an unusual intensity.
Thus begins and takes shape an idea of a comprehensive formative education like the Greek paideia,
in order to all live this difference he establishes between an ancient and a modern way of life.
Some of the protagonists of this life-changing experience meet again (years later) in Lucca
[Anna Maria Colli-wife]: Tell the Sugar story, the one about the chocolate he used for his afternoon snacks!
Or the one about the time you would lend us your bicycle to carry our two pillows and our suitcases?
When we would go from a room to the other, from a house to the other, with two pillows and a giant suitcase?
And we would put this stuff on your bicycle and then Giorgio would push the bicycle by hand and I would cling to those suitcases because they were the ones from our honey-moon.
It was the fall...around those years from 42 until 49...
[Woman]: Well aside from family stories, when we were at the university right after Fascism our choices were few (in Philosophy):
we could either study Croce or Communism and it was in this context that my encounter with Giorgio came about;
he offered a different point of view he would give us a sense of direction, a different way of looking at things.
[Wife]: Giorgio really wanted to communicate to others this pressing need for Life, in a deep way, this daily intensity so that every day was like an entire life.
[Mazzino Montinari]: this encounter during my youth was decisive for me.
There was something...in him. There is this ability to justify the existence of the Other and to push the Other to embrace this "otherness" to the extreme.
I remember clearly that when I started to get involved in politics he told me:
"If you're gonna be a politician you have to commit to it to the extreme, you can't stop halfway through. You have to be a politician with all of yourself"
In 1944 Mazzino Montinari, who was only 16 years old and was already part of the Resistance,
made it possible for Colli to escape to Switzerland through Valtellina.
[Alessandro Fersen]: We met sharing a scarce meal at the Castle of Trevano, near Lugano in 1943.
It was during the war, I was a war refugee like Giorgio.
I had been moved around 15 labor camps scattered around Switzerland
and I got to the 16th which was an "educational" camp;
it was a bit of an improvement, we were starting to get better.
We could take a breath since we were hired as teachers.
The irony is that Giorgio taught History and I taught Philosophy, since that was my background;
I considered myself a philosopher.
I couldn't even imagine I'd end up in theatre, that passion developed after the war.
I remember during the long nights in Trevano
we started this endless philosophical debate eating boiled potatoes (there wasn't anything else)
that we dipped in salt,
and we kept talking and eating until it was very late, philosophizing.
I brought up Eraclito and strangely enough, back then,
Giorgio, as far as I remember, was supporting Parmenides' theories.
He believed in a static eternal reality (essere), of which we could only see appearances,
a non-moving entity, in complete juxtaposition with the ever-changing stream of things,
which was how we interpreted Eraclito's teaching back then.
This was the opposite of what we can gather from his later works
(Nascita della Filosofia, introduction to "i sapienti")
and especially in his last one* which will reveal more...
In 1948 the book "Physis kryptesthai philei" showcases his brilliant connection with Ancient Greek thought.
The title comes from a quote by Eraclito and it means: Nature (as inner nature) likes to hide.
[Quote] Beautiful and unconditional is the love for Truth.
It takes us far and it's hard to get to the end of the path,
but the way back is much harder...
when we want to share this Truth.
Showing Truth naked as she is it's less beautiful,
because she troubles us passionately.
All the Truth seekers have suffered from this disease as old as Time.
Revealing the Truth of men
- that since the origin of the world were able to hide it, resisting insanity -
is a sacrilege that becomes our own punishment.
Because Truth is an inebriated frenzied laceration, disarmed,
unable to present and justify herself.
This impious act is also purifying, cathartic.
The future seems clear.
One cannot help but protect the Truth, hide her again.
In the end that's how we'll protect ourselves.
Truth is deeply intangible and not even the words we write will hurt her.
Truth is never compromised.
All that it's said about her can be false and delusional.
Giorgio Colli spends his days in Florence in this house in Settignano in 1949.
He is now working as a professor of History of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Pisa.
The Florentine hill of Settignano and Fiesole
seem to fit his vocational attitude which is not entirely ascetic yet requires a complete concentration in his activity
with ambitious and daring cultural enterprises which he silently accomplishes.
One after the other, the two pillars of Western logic are tackled, from Aristotle to Kant,
as he directs the philosophical collection at Einaudi.
When he writes The Encyclopedia of Classic Authors with Boringhieri
he makes us discover and re-evaluate the essential foundations of Western and Eastern wisdom.
With Adelphi he steps onto the world stage with the first International critical edition of Nietzsche
and publishes his own most recent original works
that stand out as novelties of thought
and for their clear style, culminating in a titanic endeavor: La Sapienza Greca (Greek Wisdom)
The intensity he infuses in his work goes alongside with the same intensity he lives by.
He's far removed from that kind of teacher, of wise-man,
without enthusiasm for life lost in his foggy mind-wanderings that separate him from the world.
His idea, instead, of a "close detachment"
it's what makes even more essential the need of a direct encounter, what he called jokingly "vissutezza" (a life worth living).
He organizes his life according to two different ideals:
a certain rigorous severity for his research
and an equally intense intimacy through his exciting friendships in Florence, Pisa and on his short trips, he usually took for work.
These human connections, filled with humor and lightness
- especially when linked to the world of Film and theatre -
infused with meaning even a simple meeting in the crowded streets or in a cafe or a restaurant.
[Mauro Misul]: Thinking of the things we did together makes you realize that they shaped a way of life, that we grew into;
something that inspired us back then and later.
The only danger in those years was a kind of logic or academic presumption or even in terms of methods.
In this spirit we can think of the Ancient Greeks with quotes such as the one from the 4th Pitica (ode):
"You learn to become what you are."
This kind of wisdom is still valid and fundamental.
It can be applied not just to the obvious Metaphysical studies such as Spinoza,
but to the Untimely Meditations by Nietzsche, the idea that if you're not yourself than everything loses meaning.
We all live without knowing what we do, think or desire,
which basically means we depend from the outside world
and to teach ourselves to stop this addiction it's a hard thing to achieve even for "professional philosophers".
[Giulio Einaudi]
[Giulio Einaudi]: I have to admit he did a lot for us, for Italian Culture and for the Publishing house Einaudi, starting this book series dedicated to Philosophy Classics.
His contribution was crucial
thanks to his most famous work translating the Aristotle's Organon that kept him busy for a few years.
So this is a man who worked for himself, for our culture without asking much as a reward,
it came to him spontaneously, naturally,
through his life-work which was monumental when it came to reliability and commitment.
[Prof. Dario Del Corno]: What Colli brought to the table
was the idea of having overcome the value and function of the Philology of Logics,
through a study of Logics from within - which culminated with the research on Plato's Politics
and in his works inspired by Aristotle
- by affirming the failure of Logics and Philology in solving the ultimate philosophical arguments.
It was in this passage from Philology to Philosophy the result the need to identify the singular data.
This is the Encyclopedia of Classic Authors curated by Colli.
But what does Classic mean for him? It's a starting point.
[Quote] : This is not an expository book.
It's not intended for those who read to take their mind of.
But neither for those who read to expand their knowledge.
It's meant for those who still have something to figure out
about their life and their approach to learning.
When we acknowledge that uncertainty within us,
the need to move the first steps, striving for a holding guide,
it's only then that Art, Science, Philosophy can give our life direction,
as long as they are embodied by a person that we both fearfully respect and admire.
It's by choosing a mentor, a teacher that we start to become something.
It's an act of humility that mitigates the youthful pride
and an act of trust in this sense of support that holds us up.
To live, for the most part, means to be in danger, on the edge.
This is what we read.
Truth and Nature are its teachings.
And if we are looking for what Philosophy is in Nietzsche's words,
or similarly Schopenhauer,
we can hear a very different voice from the one we heard in school.
It's way too harsh for a "voice" that
- as we've been told - should interpret the totality of Life.
And yet we know how Life can be harsh.
But if Philosophy supposedly comes from a universal take on Life,
if it's supposed to actually be similar to Life,
then Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are the last philosophers worthy of their name.
And it doesn't matter if in their revelations about the world these philosophers brought to surface a tragic vision,
they uncovered the horrific sub-layer beyond our existence,
escaping the curse of individual life and the intertwined threads of man's culture, religion, philosophy.
Out of the pain of this discovery a new possibility for action is awakened.
In preserving and strengthening the existence of culture.
This is the deepest meaning of their teachings.
And truly understanding these philosophers means acting upon their guidelines
so that the Untimeliness of their life, their detachment from humanity and the historical interests surrounding them
will not re-emerge in other solitary philosophers like them
but will provoke change that will resurrect culture as living life
and - without some form of civilization, even if small - mankind.
[Paolo Boringhieri]: When it comes to Giorgio Colli, it's obvious that as soon as I decided to start a Scientific book series in my publishing house,
I talked with my friends.
For him Science was not everything.
He was a philosopher and he considered Science as yet another way to understand the world.
That's how he curated a collection of Classics,
and he let them speak, filtering them though, through his voice.
And he immersed himself in this endeavor with all his passion and enthusiasm
and he allowed us to publish a considerable amount of books, around 90 in less than 10 years.
[Quote from Giorgio Colli, "Dopo Nietzsche", Adelphi, p. 196]
"Forbidden quotes"
Anyone who dares to interpret Nietzsche is a liar.
He will misuse his quotes making him say whatever he wants, rearranging the original words and sentences as he pleases.
In the treasure throve of this thinker there is every kind of metal.
Nietzsche has said everything and its exact opposite.
He's dishonest.
Using his quotes when talking about him just to add value to one's words playing on the feeling of awe that his texts inspire.
[ Quote from Nietzsche, tr. Project Gutenberg ] Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Lo, there is no above and no below! Throw thyself about,--outward, backward, thou light one!
Sing! Speak no more! --Are not all words made for the heavy? Do not all words lie to the light ones? Sing! speak no more!"--
But when the dance was over and the maidens had departed, he became sad.
"The sun hath been long set," said he at last,
"the meadow is damp, and from the forest cometh coolness. An unknown presence is about me, and gazeth thoughtfully.
What! Thou livest still, Zarathustra? Why? Wherefore? Whereby? Whither? Where? How? Is it not folly still to live?--
Ah, my friends; the evening is it which thus interrogateth in me.
Forgive me my sadness!
Evening hath come on: forgive me that evening hath come on!" Thus spoke Zarathustra.
When, however, Zarathustra had spoken these words,
the violence of his pain, and a sense of the nearness of his departure from his friends came over him, so that he wept aloud;
and no one knew how to console him. In the night, however, he went away alone and left his friends.
[ Luciano Foà ]
The publishing house Adelphi was founded in 1962 with a clear mission of creating this collection (Italian new critical edition of Nietzsche).
I was convinced that a publisher who's just starting off had to keep in mind the bigger picture aiming high
in order to make yourself known not only in your own country but even abroad.
[ Mazzino Montinari ] : When we approached this Italian edition
we didn't have the texts.
Giorgio's response was very clear:
if we don't have the texts we are going make them ourselves.
And I still remember my shock when he decided to approach the German edition and take it in our hands.
This happened around the Spring of 1961.
[ Luciano Foà ] : In a year we found a way to attach to this enterprise the Parisian publisher Gallimard and therefore to start the work needed for this edition.
A few years later we signed a deal with a German publisher De Gruyter in Berlin and even with a Japanese publisher.
[ Mazzino Montinari ] : One thing is fore sure.
Without Giorgio Colli this edition would have never seen the light of day.
[ Luciano Foà ] : Colli's collaboration at Adelphi, once we started with Nietzsche's edition gave us
also some important personal works by the author such "Filosofia dell'espressione", "Dopo Nietzsche" and "La Nascita della Filosofia".
The first of these books was published in 1969.
[ Quote from Giorgio Colli ] : The world is a mere illusion.
The world that appears before our eyes, what we touch and think is an illusion.
From the ancient Upanishad to Parmenides every significant theory has realized this.
This is self-evident.
Playfulness and Violence: in the interconnections between these two opposite "representative filters" we can see two contrasting elements.
One of the main aspects of this connection comes out in the way we perceive Memory,
because in registering persistently what happens, in preserving what has been, there is a tragic inescapable side,
Life's deepest residue, a harshness that leaves any Will aside and imposes herself beyond any individualism.
A constrictive and violent force.
The other aspect, instead, is the gratuitousness, the arbitrariness, the qualitative upgrade that renews the separation between something genuine
and its first sedimentation when we express a memory and the lightness and playfulness of its unpredictability.
In a phase of reflux the nature of these connections between these two representative filters becomes a modality.
Which is determined by a law which following the direction of that Violence is assigned to a certain representative relation that is usually called Necessity,
or when it follows the direction of that Playfulness is called Chance.
The power of Memory: our knowledge is just Memory, never an Authentic genuine entity.
Our feelings and even our sensorial experiences and everything that various philosophers have called Authentic immediate experience are just memories.
The entire thread of our conscience, what we consider that human experience of "knowing",
what we feel, show, want, do, our soul or a star, it's a simple chain of memories that intertwine to create the world of our illusions.
The child looking at the mirror - the Orphic texts tell this story.
Aephestus built a mirror for Dionysus and the god contemplating his image gave birth to Plurality.
The mirror isn't just an indication of the illusory nature of the world but its origin excludes any spur of Creation, of Will, of Action.
Everything is still.
Life and the depth of life are a god that contemplates himself in the mirror.
Outside the borders of Logos, Playfulness and Violence are inseparably intertwined and it's Dionysus' mirror
that reflects this magmatic material that lets the images of existence flow on its surface sustained by the alternated domain of Necessity and Chance.
[ Quote from G. Colli, "Dopo Nietzsche" ]
A walk back. The artist doesn't imitate anything, doesn't create anything, he pulls something back from the past.
We have had enough of this world of shapes, colors, people.
We are oppressed, jaded. Art doesn't look like anything in this world.
The artist reverts the course of Time discovering which Past gave birth to this Present, raising and making that Past resurface.
But this reversed time, this artistic time is not guided by Necessity.
It's strange, unpredictable, that Past comes from another Past but without clear continuity.
And the fake sense of life of our typical present existence can't be created by the artist.
It's the thread of Necessity that he rejects that creates it.
A fake detachment of the artistic existence it's a way of recollecting new representations which come together to form an individual.
Life is in the Past. Wise is the one who sheds a light in the darkness of the Past, indecipherable, elusive the nature of what has been.
If we look at the Past, if we try to bring it back, it will seem like we are losing Life.
If we look at Life we uncover the Past.
What has happened an instant or a thousand years ago is equally lost, in a happy gleeful shriek or in a cry of desperation, in that instant which already resonates, the immediacy of the authentic life is gone already, vanished forever.
But we still hang on to that Past, we don't want to lose it.
All of our conscious existence is nothing but an echo of that life.
The waves start to fade in shouts, in instances, yearnings, memories, fantasies, thoughts and in the stream of those repercussions new adjustments are made, the ripples propagate and fade.
If we look back even further to discover the source of the wave that constantly sweeps us up, we sink in the darkness of What Cannot Be Represented.
It's not good for us to leave aside the evanescent murmur of What Lives Now.
If we turn our back to the Past and we analyze what's in front of us to capture Life as it happens then every face, shape, texture or color, character of the Life that surrounds us seems to break in small fragments of Past.
The concrete nature of the present world it's a masked abstraction, elaborated a long time before us and from us.
Every tremor is a lie, every image an illusion.
The model of Integrity.
"The model of Integrity" Modern man is broken, fragmented.
What our collective society expects from what the individual thinks of himself is always different from what's authentic within himself, original.
He's nothing more than an ant that wants to leave behind a permanent trace amidst the appearances.
Its comet or snail's tray is shattered by the human world not by its hostility but simply by its strangeness, by its rules, its behaviors, its habits.
In the Collective the individual expression is not heard, doesn't shine through. The harmony of the ancient world is lost.
In the past two centuries any great figure that emerges has to accept a tragic existence,
unless he adapts to a weak and vile behavior to preserve himself (and the list could go on).
Nietzsche is an outstanding emblematic example of this destiny because in a world that crushes the individual,
Nietzsche was able to show us the individual free from the world's bindings.
This result was achieved in a time that prided itself - and today we do it even more - in showing a fragmented life, a failed individual.
Even if Nietzsche as a human being was crushed, it doesn't prove anything against him.
He left us a whole different image of Man in exchange and it's with this one that we have to measure up.
[ Luciano Foà ] : The highest peek of interest for Colli's thought was with the publication of La Sapienza Greca (Greek Wisdom),
a work composed by different books on which he focused for a long time
and he prepared through his studies on pre-Socratic philosophy and the classes he taught in Pisa on these philosophers.
[ Massimo Della Rosa ]
I remember one summer's evening when we were at Marina di Pisa,
I had just met Giorgio Colli and I was there with him and the other disciples.
That night I had quite a strange feeling that later on came back even stronger:
we "the disciples" were a bit like his fun toy.
He would tell us the things he wrote in his books, summing them up or making them more concise.
In the books you were using a certain regard, almost starting with a preamble because the readers are far removed, are heterogenous,
are unknown, you don't know them at a personal level.
We didn't need any preambles.
He managed to create this relationship with us, with this group without the preambles.
This is what I mean by "toy".
There were some of us, for example, who felt almost a biological need to put up theoretical or moral walls between them and him.
Those were in my opinion the weakest, the worst.
[ Angelo Tonelli ] : I would like to draw a comparison.
Like a Greek temple freezes the images in time - the images of a god's dream that appears to men -
in the same way Colli's Reason sets in stone, hard as diamond, a gaze cast upon the Immediate.
This is what Colli was for me.
I wouldn't add anything else about him as a person or as a teacher.
It seems to me like he would have been the one who liked to hide.
[ Alberta Tenerani ] : Giorgio Colli
It's hard for me to talk about him, because it's not easy to grasp and describe this extraordinary experience which was more than meeting a philosopher.
It was like meeting a Mentor that even affected the personal life of each one of us.
His encounter meant not only changing our attitude towards Life but also Life itself.
[ Andrea Costa ]
for those who are able to simply consider that the nature of our world is an illusion,
kept together by a hidden force and that entities exist in a way which is beyond what it seems,
it's through Colli that there's a the possibility that considering this, one could go from a theoretical approach
or an abstract integrity which means nothing for our inner self,
to something that we immediately feel.
This is because in Colli's presence at his best this is what we experienced, the air we breathed.
And that doesn't meant we just rejected life as appearance, quite the opposite.
[ Valerio Meattini ] : What resonates in Colli's words
is the appreciation for the value and the multi-faceted aspects of Life.
If you follow through with them, you give more meaning to living life,
adjusting the focus through Nietzsche's lens to seek what's perfect,
the exuberance and the wholeness of what simply is, what Colli called "the gods".
[ Riccardo Di Giuseppe ] : Giorgio Colli has offered a way of Life that enhances the maximum power of Life itself.
Power is not the power of action because those who act are bound to entities outside of them.
Power means binding through actions someone else's actions.
In the realm of Action, Power's vicious circle is never-ending. Because those who act are in an infinite juxtaposition to those they affect.
But those who have this knowledge find everything within themselves.
Every action is indeed superfluous for the philosopher.
And only if you live Life pursuing Wisdom you achieve maximum Power.
It's by keeping this in mind, that one can approach his teachings.
Do you remember how he "criticized" Death?
An optimistic view of life is based on the refusal of the individual.
If the individual is not essential and seen as an illusion his death will be the same, Death in general.
Pain, Joy, Death express the Immediate
belong to Life.
[ Prof. Francesco Adorno ] : His major contribution has been researching and redefining - through his philological studies -
the terms and the authentic meaning of these terms at the time they were used,
demonstrating that every age has a different language and History,
which furthermore, according to Colli, starts from a moment of Decline right after the first Greek Philosophers,
a moment which he describes in his writing as madness, because authentic Wisdom cannot be anything other than madness since it's divine and not human.
When it becomes human, therefore History, clearly it can then become Logos or Word and its decline begins through Word.
This is what he was passionate about - and where we might diverge -
but it's this discrepancy of thought that makes me appreciate Colli even more, because in conflict you find the value of a man.
A book that doesn't challenge me it's not good enough for me, it produces new ways of thoughts within me, and change from who I was before.
[ Prof. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli ]:
I remember one of his quotes that I found intriguing because it reminded me
of a living American philosopher who said "all modern philosophy is nothing but Plato's commentary".
Colli anticipated this thought observing that philosophy simply unravels and develops Plato's thought.
And Plato's thought was the ultimate step for Colli in the formative journey of philosophy.
His foundation, his work on Greek Wisdom (Sapienza Greca) is extremely original.
He's the first that, I'd almost say, freed himself (although I don't want to be disrespectful to others who studied pre-Socratic philosophy like Diels)
but he was the first who identified the importance of Greek religious thought in connection with the brilliance of the philosophical thought.
[ Panajotis Kantzas ] : He managed to figure out how to bring back to life the Irrational, through his knowledge, his philosophy.
He was offering an idea of Cohesion instead of Division.
He didn't say that the Irrational side was just for all the drug-addicts, the madmen, the possessed
and the other side just for us, simple men of reason.
Within every individual there was a cohesive Nature, the union of Dionysus and Apollo.
The difference between the two is very little, one is inside the other.
[ Alessandro Fersen ] : I quote
I'm reading here this sentence in Dopo Nietzsche:
"this is the artist's journey, shaping new representation one after the other, following a reversed Time towards the Immediate"
It's almost shocking, because our theatre workshop follows this concept of looking back towards "ecstatic techniques",
close to the original (Ancient Greece), especially shamanic techniques with a mission of shamanic language for what theatre
will become and embedded with these shamanic qualities.
[ Quote from La Sapienza Greca (Greek Wisdom) ]
Why do we start our reasoning from Dionysus?
Through Dionysus Life manifests itself as Wisdom, never losing its pulsating life-force.
This is the secret.
In Ancient Greece a god is born out of an exalted gaze cast upon life, a slice of life that we try to freeze. This is simply Knowledge.
But Dionysus is born out of a gaze that wants to embrace Totality :
how can you capture Life in its entirety?
This is the presumption of our Knowledge.
If we are alive we are inside a certain kind of Life,
but wanting to be inside all Life at once this is what Dionysus makes us aspire to, as the god who's the source of this wisdom.
Basically Dionysus is the god of contradictions, of all contradictions
- as we can see in all the myths and rituals about him or better yet of all that, expressed through words manifests itself as a contradiction.
Dionysus is the Impossible, the Absurd that proves its truth through his presence.
Dionysus is Life and Death, Joy and Sorrow, Ecstasy and Spasm, Kindness and Cruelty, Hunter and Prey, Bull and Lamb, Masculine and Feminine, Desire and Detachment, Playfulness and Violence
but all of this comes to us directly, Immediately, as if were hunters throwing ourselves with rage and at the same time a prey that bleeds and then dies;
all of this lived at the same time, without any sense of Before and After, filling completely each one of these opposite extremes.
And eventually this contradiction is something even more torn, incurable than the one that Greeks have experienced within themselves.
In contemplating Dionysus man cannot separate himself from his own self, like he does when he sees the other gods:
Dionysus is a god that dies.
Through his creation man was forced to give himself completely, and something more beyond himself.
Dionysus is not a man: he's an animal and a god,
expressing the two opposite possibilities man has within himself.
This is where we find the enigmatic source of Wisdom.
Our presumption of Knowledge that reveals itself in this eagerness of tasting all of Life and its effects,
this opposition so extreme and yet simultaneous hint to this indescribable experience of Totality.
Dionysus is therefore an unfathomable leap
a boundless pool of water, the stream of life that gushes out like a waterfall from a rock above other rocks,
with the elation of flying and the despair of the fall;
it's inexhaustible even if fragmented, it lives in every torn light texture of water against the sharp rocks on the bottom.
The appearance of the arrow of Wisdom brings also bleeding wounds.
This is how the cruel Apollo operates.
When bound to the close-mindedness of the Word, Wisdom appears as a challenge to the god.
What Apollo suggests is not a luminous Wisdom but a dark thread of words :
Wisdom it's hidden there.
But the man who leans forward with his hand has to unravel this mess, risking his life.
This is how Apollo affirms his power and scares those men who dare to know. He then incites them to fight with one another.
That thread of words forces men to compete, makes them anxious to stand out, and unleashes a contention where the loser is crashed.
This the enigma: in all its gravitas and seriousness.
Who doesn't solve this enigma is deceived.
Wise is the one doesn't let himself be deceived.
The purpose of the Enigma is to deceive, to kill through deceit:
this is what Eraclitus has taught us.
Ultimately who is Wise is a warrior who can defend himself.
[ Giorgio Colli ] : I believe that Nietzsche gave everyone hope to become a philosopher.
Nowadays you don't have to be part of a sect, a group of experts to be a philosopher.
Nowadays everyone can be a philosopher.
This is how Nietzsche set us free...
In this sense he's Dionysus' disciple, the Liberator.
[ Quote fron G. Colli ] Why were those wise philosophers (I Sapienti) considered fearsome by the ancient people?
Perhaps out of worship, perhaps because no one was able to understand the true purpose of their words, but today philosophers are lambs.
Even the philosopher is an actor, you grasp his concepts when the show is over, the scroll is completely rolled out.
Here's the puppeteer that puts all his puppets and toys away and picks up the tangled wires.
Is it a philosophical pathos that attracts us towards the Enigma?
Those who tend to interpret the world as an Enigma are moved by a rigorous and profound instinct, a violent one,
as if they were sensing that at the core of things there was a connecting wire,
and by discovering it one can can find a way out of the labyrinth of life and at the same time by a playful instinct craving unpredictable things,
by the frenzy of tearing up slowly but surely the veil of the unknown.
What is this cognitive presumption?
We live in a century of philosophical anarchy
and in this lability we are encouraged and drawn towards debauchery,
presumption is there waiting to conquer us and even Masks are not enough.
If we claim that all is but appearance we are pessimists, those who can't see the appearance are prone to lie.
The world is a feast of knowledge and nowadays, more than ever, in this Empedocle-like era everywhere the representation and visible semblance of life are celebrated in triumph.
And eventually there's Laughter...
yes but Laughter is only a facial spasm,
we roll the dice and they are still rolling
and when they stop they show something that
that is Not: a game.