Words and Words

Emanuele Severino's recent essay and Giuseppe Pontiggia's perceptive review of it (Corriere 19/9/92) represent something new on the Italian philosophical scene. It seems to me that Severino's critique in “Oltre il linguaggio” reveals the crisis in hermeneutics (a discipline first systematically described by Dilthey) as proposed to us in its present form by Gadamer and Ricoeur (following Husserl and Heidegger). Basically, it would seem that all these authors tend to offer us a ‘reading’ of life as if it were a one-dimensional literary ‘text’. Leaving aside the greater degree of stratification present in hermeneutical theory, my impression is that Chomsky and Eco, among others, show the same tendency.

Here, on the other hand, both Severino and Pontiggia point out the real overlap existing between clear thought and the feelings aroused in the reader by a text, be it literary or philosophical. It is even suggested that ‘thinking’ opposes and hinders the feelings a text propagates. We should explain that by ‘feeling’ is meant an obscure, profound conviction in the reader, involving a complete and total adhesion to the text. In other words, we are told that intellectual thought conceals, cancels and destroys every hidden truth, which may be that basic feeling emerging from the very depths of our being.