Alessandro Bertirotti

Translation by Roberta Bertirotti

How many times we have heard: "But, is it possible that man has no conscience"?

And we told that too. By this locution we want to specify something clearly perceived by everyone, even if it seems difficult to exactly define what to have conscience means. Generally, we don't know a lot about this mind faculty: we don't have any idea where it is in our brain placed, how it neurologically operates and why it seems not to have nothing to do with our actions during our everyday life. And yet, inside the culture with ethnological interesting too, the conscience always remains an unsolved question on which we look into, following some keys to reading, starting from the philosophy to the cognitive sciences.

Even if we know not much about this faculty so important for the development of our species, we're sure that it finds expression by a nearly numberless series of actions starting from an exact line of conduct. The conscience reveals itself disguised as a meaning attribution, that's to say of sense, to events and situations happening inside ourselves and outside, inside the phenomena's world, or rather inside the happening things. The attempt to find in our life the things and intentions meaning, it answers to a primitive and fundamental exigency of every human being: the desire to be in the world acting in it.

In other words, by the conscience we become part into things happening to us and to other people, and we can affirm that we live instead of let live ourselves. It almost means to decide a difference between to live planning our life and to let live without knowing to which direction we are moving and if we are able to reach a destination.

This relation, between our life and the act of attaching a series of significance to it, thanks to them we are able to justify - that's to say to understand both our actions and other people ones - it has been on the basis of the western scientific research and of the oriental philosophy. The identity sentiment forming, which is that mental situation where we are sure we are made in a certain and specific manner - and thanks to it we become different from others - it comes from the conscience, or rather thank to the meanings that we find to justify our actions and desires, and actions and desires that we think they are belonging to other persons. According to this constant, continuous and historical process connecting our interior world and the other persons' one, even if this last it initially appears us as exterior, an idea of harmony develops, that is a desired situation where different human inwardness can come into a touch going beyond the diversities which are revealed in their own appearing by the cultural and somatic outward appearances.

For instance, we can try to think how many times we retrace our steps when we realise that a person, when we go round with her, she is not absolutely in the way we thought she was. It's so important this fact that the popular wisdom, much more efficacious and acting than every world Academy and university professor, invented the saying: "The cowl does not make the monk" (nowadays, in fact, we believe that it is the contrary, but this is another argument that we'll discuss during another session...) This maxim real demonstrates how the exterior can deceive in comparison with the interior, with the invisible of a person, and that only by a frequenting with time the person's mind is able to harmonize with the other person's one. When she can do it!

The movement approaching the individual mind to another one, or to oneself, is defined soul. We don't have to forget that this term comes from the root "animated", that's to say equipped with movement, with desire and so with project towards the future, the space and therefore towards the time.

The western science, characterized by the consciousness to pursue this internal and external harmony, as for the eastern philosophy, had to invent a method, or rather a route to go over, talking in its etymological origin, to reach the aim.

What is the last aim of every science and every human research?

The research of the mystic union with everything, sometimes named nothing too, when we try to knowingly deny this consciousness too, trying to define ourselves as our existence's masters. Indeed, to believe to have the control of oneself or the others' life, it isn't only a source of inexpressible pain when our impotence manifests itself in all its discouraging vastness, that's to say always, but it drives us to wars and overpowering stuffing the history. And still, the humanity working for the eternity, as my dear friend Vittorio Vanni says, never learns anything from the history and the mistakes are repeated, as for the achievements of research, which decided to cover the two only possible directions: to go through the top or through the down, immediately sensing that one or the other way were the sides of the same medal. In fact, for Latin people, the term altus means both high and deep.

We have been witness in the past - and we are now in the present - of a science history that (so) searches the human presence meaning in the world and in the cosmos, and that investigates the infinitely little discovering in this way the molecules, the atoms and, philosophically speaking, the qualia.

But we must consider that the infinitely little has got around itself a space that is infinitely big! And this second discover it is the most important that an individual does, after of before, apart from his schooling level or number of books read during his life. And when we discover this truth, we become adults. We go into the life, we commit our existence to the Cosmos's imponderable, while our daily actions largely stay under own will's nomination, even if there are some significant exceptions towards this last concept. Here's that our observer starts to discover some things, with a certain pain, as Caterina Caselli said in her famous song: "(...) the truth hearts you, I know (...)". The Nature, Master and Measure of everything, isn't afraid of the truth, like us; it preserves inside its fractals the harmonic presence between the macrocosm and the microcosm.

In the western culture history there has been two important periods where we tried to reach this harmony: the Italian Renaissance and the German Classicism. Following the Johann Wolfgang Goethe's idea, the synthesis between the human will and the human might, which are connected to desire and instincts, is realised in the nature. The fusion of will and might should be a thing to which the humanity should aim such as it is a goal or a starting point.

The German poet (28^th August 1749 - 22^nd March 1832) believes that the nature, which is the every human beings' purpose, is real our physical place, and metaphysical together, where we go beyond the alienation of the culture, the trouble of living in a condition where every freedom is only the place where to chose is possible, as Jean Paul Sartre would say.

Werther becomes immediately aware of that when he sees Carlotta dancing "with all her heart, all her body in a harmony so easy, so free", and he understands in that sublime moment, when we face the gravitational strength where everybody is erect but tied to the earth, that we soar to the air of the sky.

Every man, mysteriously unique and similar to other human beings (it's sufficient to visit the compared anatomy section at the Museo della Specola of Florence in order to be dismayed in front of similar truth), if he holds fast to his reasoning and to his thirst for knowledge, he expresses his geniality and he becomes his universe's Prometeo.

The poet is a neuroscientist ante litteram, because he solves an important question, or rather the feeling formation of the personal identity. Without an internal research, without a personal Prometeo but living in the social work, in the sharing of possible elective affinities, there isn't any society's culture development, and no individual cultural development. The society is a system of alliances, in accordance with the accepted meaning of the term, and these alliances, the most lasting ones, even if they are almost always economic (because they foresee a reach donor constantly returning poor the receiving), they can stimulate a real development of the humanity, only if they sink into the abyss of a common destiny. We'll never have an open society, as Karl Raimund Popper would say, without a creation of an open humanity.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe will abandon these ideas during his adult age, when he realises that revolutions replace a pyramid by another one, much more structured and then stronger, as my dear friend Carlo Luigi Ciapetti would say.

Of course, the contradiction and the fight are ingredients of this life and they furnish the harmonic basis to it, because inside them it real falls the mystery of the human living: we cannot resolve the contrasts that on the contrary make fertilize the evolution. A homogeneous world, where the parts composing it are among them nearly the same, it is not only undoubtedly boring, but it is cognitively motionless. It is lacking in musical accords, because the sounds are all the same. How can I put in tune the sounds that are all the same? I cannot, because they haven't their ontological individuality, cause they are identical. But I can build a harmony only if every sound has its singular frequency, and the final result is like an unique harmonizing amalgam. And we are not talking about the timbre that produces the same frequency which is sensitively perceived as different if the same sound is made by a harp or a contrabassoon.

That's why Johann Wolfgang Goethe is the monument to the resistance and to the human tenacity, because the everyone's Promoteo lives inside them, and he is able to brave the Cosmos going ahead to meet it. Where can exist an existential situation where this happens, or rather where is the dialectic between the resilience and the constant creation? First of all, in our brain and in our nervous system generated by it, I mean inside our mind, which is inclined to constantly accept the challenges, both internal and external to our life, because the research of Harmony doesn't annul the extremes, but it preserves the tension towards an apparent aesthetics.