Dario Antiseri, doing philosophy to educate men

Dario Antiseri, one of Italy's best-known Italian intellectuals, was an incredibly generous man and those who, like me, had the good fortune to know him and work with him know that this character trait is inseparable from his intellectual biography. Antiseri did not found a new school of philosophy, nor was he interested in practising the methodology of the social sciences, the subject he taught for years at Luiss - Guido Carli, in the way it is done in mainstream academia. For him, philosophy was above all a non-specialist discipline that serves to educate men. He bent Popperian fallibilism, which he more than anyone else contributed to making known in Italia, to a formative function of the new generations that, in his opinion, should above all keep away from the idea that human reason can found absolute scientific or ethical truths. And if a certain critical distance from science in a staunchly believing Catholic thinker is not surprising, his extension of this position to ethics aroused surprise and sometimes dismay.

I have never understood, I confess, whether the relativism he professed had lost the spirit and fundamental letter of Popper's thought. Never had the Austrian philosopher professed to be such, and, in my opinion, for good reason. His defence of the 'open society' had little to do with the idea that no ethical position is inherently wrong because everything depends on context, a position into which, like it or not, all relativism is bound to fall. On the contrary, Popper believed that the defence of the open society from intolerants and dogmatists was a non-negotiable and, indeed, 'true' principle regardless of context. I think Antiseri also saw it this way, but this did not stop him from insisting that his position was not simply a form of pluralism (precisely because in ethics and politics we do not have absolute substantive truths, we must treat ourselves and build institutions that tolerate everything except the intolerant), but a convinced relativism. One of his most famous books was in fact Christian because relativist. Relativist because Christian to which a large part of the Catholic world reacted with some disquiet. But according to Antiseri, the essence of Christianity was precisely the abandonment of a vision in which reason could found a truth without the aid of faith. Kant, with his criticism, had stopped at the precipice. It is not enough to contain reason within its legitimate space to make room for faith. One must recognise the failure of reason as a faculty capable of founding primary truths and, at least as far as ethics and politics are concerned, arrive at these through faith. In summary: without faith, there is no tolerance, no morality, no justice.

I remember, now with a twinge of pain, fierce discussions with him on these issues when, as a young scholar, I would walk down the corridor of one of the Luiss offices where we both worked and take advantage, perhaps abuse, of his willingness to talk. But Dario Antiseri was like that. A profoundly good person, who practised philosophy as a discipline aimed at making men good. It is no coincidence that he was, as many know, co-author of one of the best-known and most popular history of philosophy textbooks for high schools. That he built a bridge not only between scientific and humanistic culture, but also between University and School, always eschewing specialism and self-referentiality. That he helped generations of young people even when they, like myself, were not his students. That for many of his publications, the point was not to practice philosophy to convince scholars, but to speak to ordinary people to make them better. He leaves us today a great teacher, but also a person, I repeat, of rare generosity who understood his life and intellectual work primarily as dedication to others. There can be few doubts about this way of understanding Christianity. We find echoes of this human and intellectual figure also in his latest work, The doubts of the wayfarer, where, appropriately questioned, Antiseri's old and new travelling companions, from Einstein to Popper, from Wittgenstein to Gadamer, from Pascal to Kierkegaard, confirm an idea of philosophy as question and research that, precisely because, at least in part, always frustrated, invite prayer.I

Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Catania