Man as an argumentative style in the lesson on the “right to happiness”

The title of this collection of popular conferences by Emanuele Samek Lodovici (A happy life, Conversations with seven unpublished works, Edizioni Ares, 214 pp., 18 euros) is happily spot on. Not because recipes for a happy life are found in this essay, it would be an affront to Samek’s intelligence, genius, liveliness. He wasn’t the type for Baedeker or instructions for use. His life was happy, even though it was prematurely interrupted at the age of 38, in 1981, when he had just won the chair of moral philosophy, because it was useful. I lost a professor from whom I learned a lot and could still learn a lot, and a friend. Italian philosophy is a protagonist not destined for Arbasinian parable “promised young revered master, usual asshole”. Speaking of asshole, among the pages of this book you will find one dedicated to foul language. “He shouldn’t be rejected for reasons that I consider moralistic (bad words), but because he represents the world through few signs: there are few sexual organs. The semantic possibilities of the same will be at most twenty-five. Now, a person, a young person who has only twenty-five chances to know the world is missing out on the world. Those who do not have words do not have things, if we want to snatch the world from a person, it is enough to snatch from him the words with which he understands that world ”. With some exceptions, “profanity should be used when it is differentiated and personalized […], on average every twenty days to have the possibility of throwing an insult that is different from another of twenty days before”. When I asked him for the thesis on Dostoevsky it must have been the twentieth day: “Casotto, do you really think you can say something new about Dostoevsky? Why don’t you do it on Chesterton?” “But he’s an English humorist, a mystery writer…” I retort. “Yes, but as far as philosophy is concerned here (and with her hand he made a circle that embraced the entire philosophy faculty of Turin) here he fucks everyone’s ass”. And Chesterton was.