What is man’s reason made of? Giussani’s ever-present question

There are different ways to connote the nature and the task of philosophy, or rather of “philosophical work”, which is not only the activity of those who deal with it professionally, but is that commitment of each human being, to seek, to decipher, to recognize the meaning of oneself and of things, of nature and of history. Which does not mean at all that we are all a bit of philosophers, but rather that “philosophy” is the name, elaborated from a very long history, to indicate one of the distinctive characteristics of our being in the world, worthy of our humanity. More precisely, a constitutive dimension – most often not thematized, but no less decisive for this – of our experience, as beings endowed with conscience and freedom. Well, there are different ways to outline this commitment to grasping the sense of reality, just as the styles in which philosophy is practiced are different, but perhaps what connects and crosses them all we could call a passion for reason.

By using this name we refer to two things together (and here the important thing is precisely their being together): reason as our ability to know reality, the ability to grasp the world, and reason as the adequate or ultimate sense of the world. The different styles and various perspectives of philosophical thought depend on how these two poles are or are not together. But from the beginning, and still for us today, this is the decisive philosophical problem that accompanies and determines from top to bottom (even if tacitly) our existence. How can our reason truly realize itself, that is, arrive at grasping the reason for reality? And vice versa, how can the meaning of the world become evident, that is, establish itself and verify itself in our human experience?

These questions reawakened in me, and with them the taste for philosophical work, by reading a substantial volume that Rizzoli recently sent to the bookstore, edited by Carmine Di Martino, which collects more than twenty contributions (Italian and foreign). under the title Living reason and with a subtitle that will perhaps arouse surprise and curiosity: “Essays on the philosophical thought of Luigi Giussani”. In fact, 2022 marked the centenary of the birth of Fr Giussani, a protagonist of the first magnitude not only in the life of the Church but also in the affairs of secular culture. Giussani is known to most for having given life to the experience of Communion and Liberation, the ecclesial movement born in Milan but now spread throughout the world, and is considered by many, even non-Catholics, to be one of the greatest educators of our time. But this book, which follows another on his theological thought, released last year, is a very interesting opportunity not only to highlight a lesser-known aspect of the figure of Giussani, but to verify that we too, today, how this man’s “charisma”, that is, his proposal for a Christian experience as fascinating as it is “reasonable”, constitutes an invitation for everyone to question the fabric of our reason, that is, on its questions of meaning. Whether it is, as we often understand it, a mere calculation tool, that is, little or much a project of power of the subject who reduces the world to his own categories, then ending up subjecting it according to the schemes of dominant prejudices; or if it is a different ability, perhaps the greatest and most performing of our abilities, that is, that of becoming aware of being, of experiencing in us something that is other than us, of offering reality a space of manifestation in which it can you tell us its meaning.

The different voices that make up this book, from the most established philosophers and scholars to the youngest researchers (the names can be discovered directly by scrolling the index) in fact contribute to delineate, from different thematic perspectives and often through explicit comparisons with the philosophical tradition – from Tommaso from Aquino to Husserl, from Newman to von Balthasar, from Heidegger to Marion to name just a few – experience as the place where reality becomes transparent to reason. It is about that meeting place and “correspondence” (to put it in Thomistic terms) of reality and of our ego, without the first being only naively presupposed, without connection with the life of men, but also without the ego reducing the ontological grandeur of things and events to itself and its subjective reactions. Paradoxically, reality emerges in its objective sense, in its truth, precisely thanks to the fact that we ourselves have a “native” structure, an “elementary experience” that provides us with the criteria for judging everything, as corresponding or not to the constitutive needs of our self.

In this “heart” of experience, the sense of reality is not a doctrinal explanation, but an ever new existential discovery (because each of us must do the “work” of meaning): an encounter between the voice of things and the expectation of reason. To limit ourselves to a single, emblematic passage taken from his most philosophically significant book (The Religious Sense), Giussani writes as follows: “Experience itself in its totality leads to an authentic understanding of the term reason or rationality. […] Thus reality emerges in experience and rationality illuminates its factors. To say ‘rational’ is to affirm the transparency of human experience, its consistency and depth; rationality is the critical transparency, that is, which occurs according to a totalizing gaze, of our human experience”. This totality is not an ideological project, but an uneasy striving to take into account all the factors at play in experience, including those factors we come to perceive but can never produce or reduce to our constructions.. From everyday things of which we have sensible experience, up to the ultimate origin of reality, like a donation that we experience analogically starting from the data we perceive: every time the great adventure of reason restarts and develops. Even Christ, God made man, according to Giussani wanted to submit, so to speak, to this verification of experience. Even the mystery of the incarnation, and also our adherence to it through faith, carries within itself and vibrates with a rationality in which the self and the ultimate meaning of the world discover that they are “kin”.