The Possible Present , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Ugo Perone ,
traduit par Brian Schroeder , Silvia Benso

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97 pages

English

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The Possible Present unfolds from within a freely reinterpreted hermeneutic perspective and provides an original theoretical proposal on the topic of time. In dialogue especially with the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger, but resorting also to suggestions coming from a theological background (Barth and Bonhoeffer), the work proposes a personal and original theory of time centered on a conception of the present that does not reduce temporality to a succession of mere instants. When one claims that time is ungraspable, one refers neither to the past (which is rather irretrievable) nor to the future (which is rather uncertain) but to the present. The present in which we are is in fact what fades from our hands without break. The present is a decisive threshold for finite existence. It is the threshold where past and future meet and can give birth to a livable horizon of meaning. Dilating the present and giving it a meaningful chance to be is a task for philosophy. It is the attempt of giving time to time and also giving it shape, place, and space. To succeed at this task while rediscovering the sources of a narrative way of thinking that in truth it has never abandoned, philosophy must go back and turn time into the primary object of discourse, like in stories, which are precisely the attempt at disposing the temporal flow of events according to a meaning. Perone argues that in time, however, what passes is not simply decline, but rather something irreducible, an exteriority that must be said.
Introduction by Silvia Benso

Preface

1. Dramaturgy of Thought

Warning for the Non-Philosopher
The Ice Sheet
Time under the Microscope
Finite Time
Present and Presence

2. The Present as Threshold

The Present Is Not Presence, but Divide, Condition of Temporality
The Features of the Threshold
Spatiality of the Threshold: Outside/Inside
Temporality of the Threshold: Past/Future
After Modernity: The Rediscovery of the Present
Complexity and Consistency of the Present

3. Ethics of the Present

Education as Accumulation of Present
The Present of the Institution
For an Ethics of the Present
Beyond Virtues: The Reasons of Tenderness

4. Tale without Author

The Tale of Philosophy
Tales and Distensio Temporis
Tale without Author
The Ontological Proof: Existence That
Has Always Already Been There

5. The Tale of the I

The Tale of the I
The I as a Me
The Vicissitudes of the I
The Coordinates of the I’s Journey

6. The Tale of Finitude

The Tale of Finitude
Finite Existence
Infinite Existence
Praise of Lingering

7. The Great Tale of Time

The Tale as Diction of the Present
The Beyond as the Already-Been, that is: Naiveté in Front of Us
Before the End and After the Beginning: Philosophy
Praise of Philosophy

8. Hermeneutics of the Positive

Almost a Conclusion
Positivity of Philosophy
Praise of Dangerous Meditation

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

Philosophie de la religion

Philosophy

Philosophy of religion

Epistémologie

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 octobre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438437477
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1598€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A volume in the SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors

The Possible Present
Ugo Perone
Translated by Silvia Benso With Brian Schroeder With an Introduction by Silvia Benso

Il presente possibile di Ugo Perone © 2005, Alfredo Guida Editore, Napoli
Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Albany
© 2011 State University of New York All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perone, Ugo.
[Presente possibile. English]
The possible present / Ugo Perone ; translated by Silvia Benso with Brian Schroeder.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3745-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Time. 2. Philosophy. I. Title.
BD638.P4513 2011
115—dc22 2011003714
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
INTRODUCTION
Struggling with the Angel
Finitude, Time, and Metaphysical Sentiment
Ugo Perone is one of the most lively, productive, and original contemporary Italian philosophers. Born in Turin in 1945 and educated at the University of Turin under the guidance of Italy's greatest hermeneutician, Luigi Pareyson, Perone was schooled in the study of Secrétan, Schiller, Feuerbach, Benjamin, and Descartes in addition to other major philosophers (especially Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty) whose names constellate his numerous books. A continual engagement with theology, most notably that of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Bultmann, is also integral to Perone's philosophical research, which in recent years has extended to a consideration of poetry (especially Celan) and narrative as areas capable of crucial philosophical contributions. Following years spent in Germany (Munich, Freiburg, Berlin), since 1993 Perone has been Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Università del Piemonte Orientale in Vercelli.
Perone's philosophical activity has never been confined solely to the world of academia; he has always been an ambassador and promoter of culture and education within the wider public sphere. Founder and director of the prestigious Scuola d'Alta Formazione Filosofica (School of Higher Philosophical Education) in Turin, a postdoctoral institution that has seen the presence of famous philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Dieter Henrich, John Searle, Charles Larmore, Agnes Heller, Emanuele Severino, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Perone has also played a fundamental role in the cultural life of Turin and the surrounding region. During most of the 1990s Perone was involved in the administration of his hometown, Turin, as assessore alla cultura ; in 2001–2003 he was appointed clara fama director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin; and since 2008 he has been assessore alla cultura for the province of Turin. Through his conjoining of philosophy and politics, Perone strikes a splendid example of the public intellectual that seems to characterize more than anything else the Italian philosophical tradition ever since the Renaissance.
Perone is an original philosopher and an important thinker who in Italy and Germany enjoys a widespread and well-deserved reputation for his theoretical rigor, clarity, and force of argumentation, as well as for the timeliness, amplitude, and suggestiveness of his philosophical positions. An excursion through some major recurrent themes and categories characterizing his thinking will provide ample evidence for his fame.
The threshold —A widespread tendency among contemporary philosophers constitutes and understands philosophy in terms of a locus minimum of thought. That is, the metaphysical instances that had informed the Western way of thinking at least up to Nietzsche, but that still continue even in Heidegger, are fragmented to produce, although not exclusively, one of the following three options: (a) specialized branches of philosophy (such as the various forms of applied philosophy and applied ethics) in which the passion for the whole is put aside in favor of sectorialized fragments of it; (b) the value-free and ultimately empty debates of analytic philosophy's analysis of the consistency of concepts, claims, and theories that reduce the richness of existence and experience to a matter of internal coherence; or (c) the weakening of the philosophical horizon in the various hermeneutic positions up to its dissolution in Derrida's deconstruction and, although less so, in Gianni Vattimo's weak thought.
Unlike, although perhaps not against, all this, Perone understands philosophy as a locus maximum in which the truth, being, and the very meaning of the existence of the finite subject are at stake. His analysis is existential-phenomenological in its description of the fundamental structures of existence; his horizon is essentially hermeneutical in his constant referring to notions of sense, being, truth, and even the infinite; and his method is substantially dialectical (albeit of a peculiar dialectic, as we shall see) in his searching for the point capable of holding opposites together. Informed by and yet breaking with much recent thought, Perone advances a strong philosophy with equally strong metaphysical ambitions: what is at stake is being, and “against being, which is strong, we are allowed to be strong,” he writes ( Nonostante il soggetto [Despite the Subject], 108). The center of Perone's metaphysical ambitions, however, is no longer (because, after Nietzsche, it can no longer be) God, the absolute, or the infinite, but rather the finite subject that has lived in and upon itself the break that modernity has brought about, that is, the break inflicted by a process of secularization (Nietzsche's death of God) that cannot be denied or easily dismissed. In this sense, although with no explicit admission, Perone's thought complies with the invitation to “remain faithful to the earth” that Nietzsche's Zarathustra passionately advocates.
Perone's philosophy is thus very ambitious; his guiding strategy and his philosophical goal is to maintain the questions of modernity while also accepting the legacy of modernity (that is, the fact that we cannot return to modernity tout court ). Moreover, his project is ambitious because, in times of fragmentation and deconstruction, his thinking is aimed at designing a full-fledged philosophy, or even a metaphysics, and not simply a way or path of thinking (Heidegger's various Wege , Holzwege , and Unterwegs ). Perone's position has in fact the rigorous completeness not of a totalitarian system (to which he is for the most part opposed in his holding on to the fragment against all totalizations), but of a whole capable of keeping together opposite extremes according to the anti-Hegelian (which is also anti-Kierkegaardian) dialectics of the “ neither this nor that,” which is also, he maintains, a “ both this and that.” What ensues is a “dialectics of dangerous mediation,” as he refers to it in his two most recent books, The Possible Present and La verità del sentimento (The Truth of Sentiments). Perone's style constantly returns to the same topics—the finite, reality, existence—but from different standpoints in order to save the multidimensionality of finite experience by bringing it back to a horizon of sense that needs to be found but also created anew every time. The double negative (neither this nor that) of Perone's peculiar dialectics, which is also a double positive (both this and that), appears in his work as the image, which is also a conceptual category, of the “threshold.”
To the threshold of philosophy belong first of all the authors whom Perone engages in a sort of “lateral thinking” that calls such figures into question so as to rehabilitate and make central what, from the canonical perspective of the history of philosophy, has been less relevant in them: God in Feuerbach's atheistic thinking, existence in Anselm's ontological proof, the infinite in Descartes' cogito , interruption in Schiller's totality, secularization as a positive legacy in Bonhoeffer's theological thinking, redemption in the instantaneousness of Benjamin's Jetztzeit , the self or I as that to which to return after the horrors of a history that we cannot escape in Celan's poetry.
Mutated from Benjamin's Schwelle , in its spatial as well as temporal features, Perone's central category of the threshold indicates “not a line but a zone. At the same time, however, this zone that can be recognized only a posteriori, insofar as one has crossed it or has anticipated its crossing in the form of its imagination. Also, it cannot be inhabited but only crossed over. Finally, the one who perceives the threshold simultaneously dilates and deepens it” ( The Possible Present , 16). In other words, the threshold joins while differentiating and differentiates while joining the here of immanence and the there of the beyond or transcendence, the inside of the familial and the outside of alterity, the finite and the infinite, the before and the after, the origin and the end, the past and the future. Yet the threshold is neither this nor that, and therefore it is also this and that. It is what enables the passage, the move, the transformation, the overturning (again, a dialectical move) of the one into the other—not in the sense that the one becomes the other, but in the sense that every one always h