Seneca and Faust compared to reflect on the West

It is not an easy thing to physically place Seneca and Faust in the same place. The former, Roman philosopher, playwright and public man, 'ruler of that moral universe that has flourished for two and a half millennia in the minds of wise men throughout the world'. A legendary figure, the other, the heart of stories and musical works, who passed from the 16th-century sketch in verse by Marlowe to consecration through Goethe's drama at the beginning of the 19th century. They face each other in Andrea Carandini's book - Seneca and Faust. Dialogues on morality between origins and decadence, Rubbettino, pp. 340 - to discuss antiquity and modernity, moved by the imagination of a passionate mind whose body finds rest, when the deed is done, among florid acanthus trees under a semi-circular vault of the Palatine ("look at a sky that now turns black, throwing silvery thunderbolts, and now lights up, pierced by golden rays"). What other place, if not that, would be more like the famous archaeologist? In his books, Carandini has always melted scientific rigour into a fresh narrative of the history and daily life of Rome. Now, however, it is different. Now he needed to venture into impervious, and perhaps more existentially pressing, terrain. The crisis of contemporary man between tale, essay and confession.

"A shadow of history like me conversing with such a distant figure of artistic fortune? It will not be easy to understand each other, defying time so brazenly'. Seneca does not hide. He embodies the moral rationality of classical antiquity, the belief in reason, measure and individual virtue. Faust on the other hand expresses in toto the modern man, restless, eager for power and knowledge, but also marked by a spiritual emptiness, the child of disenchantment and ambition. The confrontation between the two is offered as an ideal narrative device to reflect on what has been lost in the passage between epochs, and on how much of distant thought can still speak to today. The ancient elaborated a knowledge of the limit, founded on an idea of cosmic harmony, while the modern preferred indefinite expansion, acceleration, and experimentation with the new. Seneca, accompanied throughout his life by great power and immense wealth, certainly knew the lure of vices at close quarters. Yet his life was constantly oriented towards the pursuit of wisdom, a goal (perhaps!) achieved in his retirement years as witnessed by his Letters to Lucilius. The choice of Faust as Seneca's modern counterpart proves crucial as it (self)reveals how the heart of the problem is the nature of human desire and its relationship to technology, knowledge and transcendence. Carandini's Faust is a complex, tragic being, a symbol of the West that has lost the boundary between creation and destruction.

In any case, clear in the pages is the denunciation of the essentially 'amoral' character of contemporary technical-scientific progress, in terms of a material advancement that is not matched by inner growth and, indeed, often moves in the opposite direction. "Technique must execute everything endlessly - like the most perverse appetite - never having to answer for its own functioning. It must produce means that tirelessly surpass itself, reducing life to hammering and nagging updates of its apparatus'. The criticism entrusted by proxy to Faust's words extends to a sort of anaesthesia of collective taste: almost no one seems to be able to notice beauty any more, to absorb it, to be overwhelmed by it. Hence "immense masses visit monuments that do not contain them and whose significance they ignore, looking exclusively at the device that photographs: click, done even the Colosseum! Those traces of the past to whose preservation (and valorisation) Carandini has devoted much energy, as president of the Higher Council for Cultural Heritage and the Fund for the Italian Environment for almost ten years.

The book is ultimately an act of cultural and moral resistance: an attempt to restore meaning to a world reduced to splinter constellations. In which 'tranquillity has become frenzy and contacts between people last for moments, from a voice, to a text message, to a smiling face'. Archaeology, far from being a distant discipline, becomes a tool for interrogating current events. The past not as a nostalgic refuge but a laboratory of discovery. The excavation also reveals the pitfall in current politics infused with populism, according to which the aim becomes to flatter people not for their benefit but to benefit those in power. "The tyrant, already incorporated in a man, is consubstantial now to technology, which in its obligatory omnipotence wants only itself, subordinating the rest to its own excess". I wonder if Faust was thinking of a flesh-and-blood epigone across the ocean two centuries later.