On Philosophy

I wanted to start this post with the bombastic statement: “Philosophy has always been my vocation”. But I couldn’t, because I immediately realized that it will be hardly intelligible without explaining what I mean by ‘philosophy’. My experience so far is that there are some people who seem to have a high esteem for this word and attach to it some elevated cultural and intellectual value; others, instead, regard it with suspicion and diffidence, as something abstruse, unnecessarily complicated and, in any case, of scarse practical use. Where do you, my dear reader, stand between these two options?

What I personally mean by ‘philosophy’ is the ability (or curse!) at turning what seems obvious into a question, by making what is seemingly uninteresting into a mystery, a puzzle, something to dig deep in. The purpose of this change of perspective is not necessarily to find an answer but ultimately to explore its implications, to move further, to keep moving. Even if one arrives temporarily at something that looks like an answer, if that is a good one, it will turn again into a new puzzle, and the exploration will continue. The domain of this definition is further restricted to those aspects of reality, life, experience that (in some sense) are general or fundamental. Genuine philosophical investigation is not (at least initially) prompted by solving or fixing very narrow, specific, practical issues. Should I buy chocolate? A dietologist would ask you to provide an overview of your lifestyle and calculate your daily calories intake. A philosopher would ask: what does this ‘should’ mean, or where does it come from?

I guess I had some inclination towards philosophy already when I was a little kid (6-9 years old), although at the time I couldn’t even know what it was. But I do remember that I was bullied by my classmates for this and they used to mock me by calling me ‘philosopher’. When I started high school, I would have wanted to study theoretical physics at the university. Then, the third year of high school, when I was 15, we began (history of) philosophy. During one of the first lessons, my high school teacher, Daniela Benvenuti, explained Parmenides and the fact that the issue of ‘non-being’ was ‘still open today’ (how can we even talk about it? And if we cannot talk about non-being, how can Parmenides establish that Being is not non-being?). What? How could such a problem be still open? I remember I went home with the idea that I would quickly solve it. I don’t think I did, but at the time I thought I had an answer. That was the official beginning of my engagement with philosophy.

When I started studying philosophy at the university, my interests remained largely oriented towards metaphysical problems and eventually got absorbed for some time (18 years now!) by Spinoza. However, it was there that I started learning ‘how’ to do philosophy. One thing is to pose a question, another one is to go about it in a somewhat effective way. Especially during my post-doc period, where my financial situation was extremely dependent on publications, networking and grant applications, I put an enormous amount of effort in really mastering the ‘techniques’ that can be used in academic philosophy (or in some of its various areas). This training was at times quite hard and often frustrating. I had to leave behind my ‘naïve’ way of going about problems and writing about them. I needed to put my thoughts and intuitions into other shapes, which eventually could be more effective for communicating them and placing them within a broader conversation (as I had to acknowledge that nobody does philosophy alone).

The beginning of what I might (unwillingly) call my ‘spiritual’ path started in 2018 with a sudden shift of focus. Up to that moment, I have been interested mostly in aspects of reality as I faced it. But then, it became fundamental to interrogate myself, the one who was facing those aspects. In philosophical jargon, I drifted from ‘realism’ (the reality in front of me, as it appears, is my starting point) to ‘idealism’ (my subjective consciousness and how it shapes my experience is my starting point). This shift was another very difficult and traumatic moment, a crisis perhaps more radical than the hardship of simply learning new techniques. I felt they weren’t enough. As I was getting deep with more embodied and non-discursive approaches (meditation, yoga), I started thinking that I was leaving philosophy behind. It was all so different from anything I have been doing before! But on the long period, signs emerged of a deeper underpinning continuity. These signs are well reflected in the Dhammavicaya Trilogy (The Tragedy of the Self, Introduction to Friendliness, and Spinoza’s Yoga). Especially the first and the third title show quite clearly (albeit perhaps in a too verbose way) the grafting of my philosophical interests with contemplative practices.

This was a difficult period because I was often drawn to a dualistic view in which my engagement with totally different approaches was easy to interpret as a rejection of anything I did before. Until, last year, I started deepening contact improvisation. Unlike Buddhism, yoga or any other system, contact improvisation does not come with a built-in set of beliefs that it tries to enforce or confirm. As a post-structuralist form, it does not start from any pre-given truth, but simply offers a space where certain kinds of questions can be explored and investigated from an embodied perspective. Besides, contact improvisation remains a form of dance, and dance per se is not necessarily philosophical. Some of the questions addressed in contact, though, concern how we enter in relation with others, how do we know what we do, how do we cope with our patterns, how do we face uncertainty in a positive and life-affirming way. These are all philosophical questions.

Since I’m a teenager, I always wrote a lot (much, much more than what I published!). 2024 was an exceptional year, since I wrote only 1 new item, my grant proposal for a new ERC Consolidator project on the topic of intuition (how can we use Spinoza to provide a new framework to bring together embodied and mental dimensions of intuitions?). 2024 was the only year in my life when I danced almost constantly (considering that I never danced before September 2023), and for the last six months, I was doing just contact. At the time, I was myself thinking that I was again slipping away from philosophy, but looking back now with some distance, reading again my research proposal, I can see that I was interiorizing a new method of philosophizing. Many things drove me to contact, from the naïve fancy of finding a romantic relationship to the need of a warm and inclusive community, from the sheer adrenaline of acrobatics to its dance-performative dimension. However, one year later, of all these aspects, the only one that still survives is much simpler and concerns questions like: what does it mean to listen to another? How can we work together in a situation of uncertainty? How do we negotiate the uncertainty with our old patterns and habits? How can we remain authentic? All the rest is gone, or faded on the background. The philosophical components remains.

In Christian mysticism there is a tradition that distinguishes three conversions, each one possibly preceded by a moment of crisis. The first conversion is when one first encounters God and turns away from their old life and starts a new one. Here, the crisis is the usually connected with the life-condition in which the individual find themselves and the problems they face therein. In the Gospel this is usually identified with the moment when one or the other disciples are called by Jesus to follow him. It is not always clear that they were in deep existential crisis, but some of them (like Matthew) were public sinners, other might had issues on their job (Pieter, Andrew). The result of the first conversion is an encounter with God that is deep enough to provoke a significant change in one’s life. The second conversion happens when one starts engaging seriously with the new perspective opened by the first conversion and ‘learns’ how to live within it, progressively leaving behind the old way of living. In the Gospel, Pieter’s betray is often pointed out as the beginning of his second conversion, which culminates when the Resurrected Jesus asks him again for three times if Pieter loves him, and then invites Pieter to follow him. The result of the second conversion is a stable, permanent relationship with God. The third conversion occurs when all that one has done to establish this solid relationship is somewhat removed and it becomes necessary to find new means to make that relationship grow more and ripe. In the Gospel, this is associated with the Ascension, when Jesus withdraws his physical presence from the disciples. They find themselves full of fear, and remain rather underwater; until, on Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit transforms their way of living their relationship with Jesus, the fear is gone, they go out, proclaim the Resurrection and convert people.

Not everybody in the Christian tradition experiences all the three conversions. Some do not even experience the first. The third conversion, in particular, has been associated by Saint John of the Cross to what he called ‘the Dark Night of the Soul’, or in other cases is called ‘aridity’ or even ‘desert’. This has nothing to do with losing interest or ardor for faith, but rather with the fact of no longer being able to relate to God in the same way one was used before (e.g. no longer visions, special feelings, whatever used to provide moments of great intimacy and connection). The point of the third conversion is to provoke a further maturation, which in a sense frees the individual from their attachment to (and reliance on) what used to help them in their relationship with God, allowing them to grow deeper in that relationship while also becoming more autonomous and ‘adult’ (like the disciples that no longer need to have Jesus physically present among them in order to have the courage to announce the Gospel to others). That’s why the three conversions have been compared (by Aquinas among others) to the three stages of life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Putting all the pieces together, it seems to me that this scheme of the three conversions could also be applied to my relation to philosophy. My first conversion was in high-school. It came from a period of crisis: much in my life was uncertain and under pression, philosophy was also a way for me to try to find some sort of sense in the mess I was going through. At the same time, the only kind of philosophy I could bear was very ‘realist’: focusing on Being and abstract ontological structures, universally present but in a sense zooming out, away from myself. I couldn’t afford anything exposing myself in a too personal way. My second conversion unfolded through my career proper. The crisis that prompted it was my breaking up with music and all my dreams about becoming a pianist, and rather needing to find a job in academia. To get paid for doing philosophy, I needed to get serious about what I was doing and deliver what the market wanted me to deliver. I became a ‘professional’ philosopher. But over the years, this had the cost of cutting me even more strongly away from my original existential urge. Philosophy became an academic game. I was relatively good at it, but playing that game was not the real motivation that called me to it. After some time, I started getting tired of it. The third conversion thus began when I could no longer postpone the need of bringing some order in my own life and looking earnestly at myself. For years, I was under the impression that I had no longer anything to do with philosophy, except fulfilling my tasks at the university to earn my salary (and from time to time I was even fantasizing about other possible ways of living without having to do even that!). But what I can see now is that I was indeed facing the limitations of my previous way of getting in touch with philosophy, the limitations of the academic skills I had acquired and the need of expanding also in other directions. In retrospect, I can now see that contact improvisation gave me something I could use to integrate what I already had, with a very different embodied approach, which at the same time allowed me to process better all that I needed to process about myself.

The best example I have to illustrate this point is the core idea I have put in my research grant. We use to think about intuition as something that is very intimate and personal, something that I have suddenly in my mind. Contact improvisation suggested that intuitions are somehow forms of co-creation, which we experience as we interact effectively with others. This was itself an intuition, but then Spinoza came immediately in, as he could provide conceptual tools to articulate and explain this view, while the same intuition could help better understanding one of the most obscure points of Spinoza’s own philosophy (despite I don’t think he even practiced contact improvisation!).

This third conversion is still an ongoing process, but my perception is that my philosophical life might be at the end of its desert. Nothing of what has been done before is lost, but everything is enriched and integrated in something significantly broader and deeper. It might look a bit weird from the outside, but that’s irrelevant. Unlike almost everything else I have done in my life, I never really doubted about philosophy being something ‘fit’ for me, or me for it. At some point, I doubted whether it was doing me any good any longer, and sometimes I doubted whether I was doing anything that could please or be interesting for others, but I never doubted my own relation to it as such. Even now, the risk of having a reputation of being a bit ‘eccentric’ does not disturb me too much, as likewise fighting for academic power does not attract much of my interest. For me, essentially, it remains still all about the thing itself: how does it work? Does it work? Why does it work? Where does it lead me?

Talking about conversions, how does my Christian conversion fit this whole picture? My first conversion was quite impactful and clearly identifiable in the events of this past winter. Especially from Eastern and then through the summer, a subtler transformation took place in me, in which there was some sort of re-alignment of my whole life with Christian values. First in a rather rigid way, and progressively (with due external support) in a more gracious and harmonious way. The second turning point in this process was connected with the negotiation of my own past and the processing of all the still unprocessed baggage that I brought with me until this point. These might be the signs of a (relatively fast) second conversion. I felt strongly connected with the narration of the Exodus of the Hebrew out of Egypt, how they fled their life of slavery to live in the desert for forty years, without even knowing whether they would have reached the promised Land. So, I also fled for some time in a small private existential desert, without knowing whether I would ever get out of it, and I was often tempted by the nostalgia for the good old days of my slavery.

What I have in front of me is still unclear and uncertain. I confess that the situation gives me some fear and anxiety (with ups and downs). However, the crucial choice seems to be, first and foremost, between fostering the growth of my spiritual life either by taking a radical break from my past and starting something new, or rather by fully accepting the place I have been given in this life, with its lights and its shadows. In this domain, I know that my only trustworthy guide can be an attitude of authentic humbleness. In order to foster an authentic relation with another it is necessary to be open to listen what the other is really asking, detecting their invitation, rather than imposing one’s prefabricated preferences and agendas. And if this relation is a relation of love, then it should be oriented to do whatever is best for the thriving of the relation itself, rather than for my own comfort. The voice of egoism and vain glory always whispers that we need to do something great and pyrotechnical. Humbleness points out that the contrary is true. True love is not a firework, but the light of an enduring star.

The episode that comes to me here is that of Abraham, how he was ready to sacrifice even his only son, Isaac, without any questioning of God’s request, how his knife was stopped just before this dreadful act could happen, what a relief he might have felt as he was descending from the mountain, holding the hand of Isaac, as if he had come to a new life, as if he was born again. Sometimes, these days, I feel myself a bit like Abraham with the knife already raised and my current life lying on the altar (including philosophy and contact improvisation), ready to be slayed as a sacrifice. I didn’t hear God’s voice in the same spectacular way as Abraham did, but I did hear something of it nonetheless, through a very simple question that my spiritual director posed to me a week ago—a question that was also an observation. This does not settle anything yet, but gave me the idea, at least, to come back to contact and start teaching it again, for the time being, as part of my personal philosophical lab.