Felicità, politica, sapere - Massimo Cacciari

Santa Lucia Hall, University of Bologna, May 25, 2017. The "La permanente del Classico" Study Center at the Alma Mater Studiorum, founded and directed by Professor Ivano Dionigi, offers the University and the city a series of classical readings and lectures that interrogate the present through the great texts of Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian antiquity. This year's series is titled "Happiness": "On the name, everyone agrees," said Aristotle; on the matter, however, humanity has never ceased to question and disagree, in an attempt to answer the most ancient and radical question: tìs àristos bìos, "what is the best, ideal, happiest life?" Augustine tells us (The City of God, 19, 1, 1) that in antiquity, as many as 288 doctrines (ducentae octoginta et octo sectae) grappled with the question "what makes man happy" (quid efficiat hominem beatum). The answers were varied: some placed happiness in career (philòtimos bios), some in glory (philòdoxos bios), some in pleasure (philèdonos bios), some in riches (philochrèmatos bios), some in politics (politikòs bios), some in knowledge (philòsophos bios). Happiness is an absolute word that we are ashamed even to pronounce in reference to our existence. The very words used to define it are vague: the Latin felix, meaning someone or something "successful, prosperous," and therefore also "fruitful, fertile," is insufficient; Ambiguous fortunatus, a neutral word, "in the grip of favorable or unfavorable fortune," does not correspond to the Greek eutychès, which has only a positive meaning, "overcome by good fortune"; improper laetus, "happy," translated from the original meaning of "fat, fertilizer." We must resign ourselves to beatus, which actually refers—as in the evangelical Beatitudes—to an interior, spiritual, and ethical dimension; and which also suffers from the inadequacy of the Italian calque "beato," a word that refers to a semantic field now sequestered by ecclesiastical language, which adopted it in the canonization process. The Greek equivalent of beatus, rather than makàrios, properly speaking of the immortal gods, was eudàimon, meaning that happy is he who is assisted by "a good demon." We could say that while makariotes is proper to the gods, eudaimonia is proper to men. Language itself, then, seems unequal and uncertain when faced with this absolute concept: almost as if we perceived happiness more as an aspiration than a possession, more as an absence than a presence, more as an idea than a thing. Should we agree with Nietzsche, who declared: "Happiness has no face, but shoulders: that's why we see it when it's gone"?