Astonishment, so you write in your Kierkegaard, indicates the profoundest insight into the relationship between dialectics, myth,

and image. It might be tempting for me to invoke this passage. But instead I will propose to emend it (...). I believe it should say that astonishment is an outstanding object of such an insight. Walter Benjamin, in a letter to Theodor Adorno: Paris, 9 December 1938 (trans. Harry Zohn) Pino Blasone

Stupor Mundi The Pathos of Philosophers

1 Iris, as depicted on an ancient Greek vase and as interpreted by the French sculptor Aguste Rodin in ca. 1895; Muse Rodin, Paris Philosophy, as a Rainbow In Latin, mainly the expression Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World) was a conventional attribute, used in order to commend exceptional military and political personalities: in particular, the emperors Julius Caesar in the antiquity and Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in the Middle Ages. Here, we prefer to intend it in the wider and higher sense
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of a wonderment in front of the world, such as the early Greek philosophers had to perceive, according to the later Plato and Aristotle. In his dialogue Theaetetus, the former makes his teacher Socrates say that wonder is the feeling pthos of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris is the child of Thaumas (155d; trans. Benjamin Jowett). The latter part of this quotation is an etymological play on words, referred to the myth of the goddess Iris as a personification of the rainbow and messenger of the gods to human beings. In Hesiods Theogony, she was told to be daughter to the sea deity Thaumas: a Titan, whose name ought to have meant the wondrous one. In his treatise on Metaphysics referring to the earliest philosophers, Aristotle will specify that it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders) (982b; trans. William D. Ross). Aristotles annotation about ignorance is an allusion to the Socratic maxim I know that I do not know. It is to notice too, in Aristotles opinion not only cosmology and mythology, science and humanities together, are worthy of being associated with wonderment, but even more obvious details which might be susceptible to raise any question: t prcheira tn atpn. And, in Aristotles work, the words standing for wonderment are t thaumzein. Already Plato had put in the mouth of Socrates the same substantivized verb, what might be translated as the being filled with wonder. Yet, in Greek, thaumzein is an active verb. It denotes an activity of the conscience as a reaction to an inmost pathos, which may be provoked or communicated by a surrounding or overhanging reality. If we well listen to the poetical allegory associated by Socrates, that is a sort of divine message and recurrent rainbow, even after the storms of our existences. Not seldom such a thuma wonder, or marvel is renewed by an experienced trauma or can rise in the worst conditions of life. The image of the rainbow is a quite obvious hopeful metaphor, we can find in different cultures along space and time. In the Old Testament, book of Genesis, it symbolizes a reconciliation between men and God past the deluge. In modern literatures, The Rainbow is titled a novel by the English writer David H. Lawrence, issued during the First World War,
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where that symbol works as a memento naturae in the troubles of an artificial civilization. Not by chance, it appears again in the exordium of Niji ikutabi, Rainbows, narrated by the Japanese Nobel prize in literature Yasunari Kawabata soon after the Second World War. Particularly in the novel by Kawabata, a train emerges from a tunnel at sunset. The protagonist is a young passenger. What unexpected she sees through the window of her compartment is a rainbow, arching over a hazy lake. The land she admires is a late winter rainbow country. Seated before her, a young father holds a girl a few months old. And a debated query between them is whether a so little baby may be able to discern the rainbow, there in the outside landscape. Most probably, not at all, the man replies, while his daughter smiles to the unknown woman, Yet I will remind her of it anyway, when she will get older. Reliably, we might try a parallelism with the Buddhistic contemporary thought of Nishida Kitar. Some pages further on though, we read of the then fresh and wasting effects of the atomic bombs on the towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only now we can realize or better focus on a meaning level more, at the beginning of the narrative. What could appear an idyllic scene, turns into a tacit invitation to reflect on and beyond a modernity at twilight. And what could resemble a timeless wonderment grows the scandal of a recent history.

Not always such a cathartic or propaedeutic wonderment has to happen after, it may spring up during or even before dramatic circumstances. With all the more reason, then, it may assume a consolatory or even a premonitory value. A thoughtful example about are the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum, died in the extermination camp at Auschwitz in 1943. Nor necessarily we have to deal with a cosmic or a fabulous astonishment. It may well be so, in front of the ordinary things of everyday life, with regard to their and to our own subsistence. In his 1714 tract Principles of Nature and Grace Based on Reason, the German philosopher and scientist Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was wondering: Why is there something rather than nothing? After all, nothing is simpler and easier than something. Also, given that things have to exist, we must be able to give a reason why they have to exist as they are and not otherwise ( 7; trans. Jonathan Bennett). Other German thinkers, Schelling and especially Heidegger, will comment that this is the purest kind of wonderment, since it nearly concerns the Being in itself, apart from the beings we are taking into consideration. Leibnizs former question is conventionally thought to be a metaphysical basis of modern philosophy, as well as the renewing source of an emotional wonder. Indeed what Martin Heidegger forgot, or was not interested in probing, is the latter question suggested in Leibnizs passage: Why have the things to exist as they are, and not otherwise?. Apparently at least, a lot of things should remain as they are. These are the great majority, in a cosmic range and in relation to human times. Their fine equilibrium did not stop amazing philosophers, from Pythagoras to Kant. In The Human Place in the Cosmos, Max Scheler has added: In general, why does a world exist, why and how does it happen that I am? (Warum ist berhaupt Welt, warum und wieso bin ich berhaupt?); what implies, why is each of us himself, rather than none or any other? Outside or inside ourselves, there are a few things we are supplied with the rare chance to change. Somewhere in the universe, there is a spot of limited free will we are used to call Earth. If we consider it well, such is the real wonder of wonders we ought to be able to give a reason of. The frequent accident, that we are unable to change those things in a better but in the worst way, is a proportional scandal. Furthermore, this contradicts Leibnizs hyperbole, that ours is the best of possible worlds.

2 The Muses Urania, Polymnia and Melpomene, on the Sarcophagus of the Muses; Muse du Louvre, Paris Philosophy, as a Pensive Muse With an excursion into the history of art, let us consider the so called Sarcophagus of the Muses, an ancient Roman one dating from the first half of the 2 nd century A.D. and today in the Museum of the Louvre at Paris. On the front of it a marble relief represents the nine standing Muses. Some of them are portrayed in a typical pensive attitude, with one hand put on a temple or under the chin. The elbow of this arm rests on a small column, on a raised and bended knee or on a rock support. In particular, these goddesses are Urania, the Muse of astronomy; Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy; Polymnia, originally a Muse of the sacred hymns and later of the pantomime. On a minor side of the same artwork, there is another relief with Socrates sitting in front of an unidentified Muse. One hand of the philosopher is stretched out in an arguing gesture. She is listening to him in a pensive and silent attitude, with a veil over her head, one hand on her breast and its elbow resting on a short pillar. From an iconographic point of view, this latest figure is an evident synthesis of Urania, Polymnia and Melpomene, as if the sculptor or his learned customer wanted to mean that a cosmic wonderment, a sacred inspiration and a tragic danger are all confluent into the philosophical reflection and activity, at least according to a Socratic-Platonic tradition. Let us begin by searching for literary references, about the tasks assigned to Urania by an
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allegorizing mythology, and her possible connection with philosophy. In Platos dialogue Phaedrus, actually both Urania and Calliopes, Muse of epic, are candidates to the role of philosophical Muses (259d). Yet it is in the Platonic dialogue Symposium that the character of the physician Eryximachus distinguishes a positive Muse, Urania, capable to inspire heavenly affections, from a lesser one, Polymnia, who would indulge in a too earthly popularization (187d-e). Although mostly in Platos dialogues Socrates is the main interlocutor, doubtless this aristocratic argumentation sounds more Platonic than Socratic. Often, artists go their own way. They do not care too much for intellectualistic exaggerations or idealistic impositions, even when they themselves allegorize, what is a bit like to philosophize by images. In the late Hellenistic age, the humble Polymnia or Polyhymnia, the one of many hymns, whose attributions were less defined than those of her sisters began to become really popular as a musing Muse. That happened especially thanks to a masterpiece by the sculptor Philiscus of Rhodes. Nowadays, the original of this statue is unfortunately lost. Several copies from the Roman age give us a sufficient idea of its exceptional value. In the relief of the sarcophagus at the Louvre the figure of Polymnia, with her hand under her chin and her elbow resting on a rock, is an imitation of that model. So it is a statue of her, in the Capitoline Museums-Centrale Montemartini at Rome, almost an example of an archaeological kind of wonder we cannot probe here as much as we wish. The girlish deity is clad in a mantle, excluded her head but included the closed hand supporting her chin. She stopped singing and is quietly gazing at us. Actually, the most enigmatic detail is the gaze of her wide open eyes. It looks like contemplating something we cannot well discern, beyond us as wonderers and every possible object of wonderment. Is this Stupor Mundi the Platonic World of Ideas, or rather anything far closer to us? Is the capability of wondering a gift of the mysterious Muse? Does that capability stand out beyond, or before, the Freudian principle of pleasure? So many questions Polymnia can still suggest to a philosophical mind. In the history of painting, she can be also compared with famous Renaissance female portraits, as that supposed to be of the unlucky philosopher Hypatia in The School of Athens by Raphael, Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci or The Annunciate of Palermo by Antonello da Messina. Yet no other gaze was ever so virtuously reproduced in stone. More than of philosophers, to verify this subjective impression is an art critics task. Iris, Urania or Polymnia, Socrates Muse or else his dimn, who is an inner genius
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in the Socratic narration assumed various names. Nonetheless, the unnamed Muse represented together with him on the sarcophagus at the Louvre has a veil over her head, which was a mournful emblem. It might well allude to the tragic lot of imprisonment and death of the Athenian philosopher, such as described in Platos dialogue Phaedo. In The World as Will and Representation, the 19th century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer gives this pessimistic and generalizing interpretation about: Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as . Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing (II 41; trans. E. F. J. Payne). The Greek expression or thantou melt, which we find in the Phaedo as , literally means preparation for death, but in a pregnant way we can also translate it as meditation on death. Incidentally, according to an archaic version of the myth of the Muses, they were not nine but three. One of them was Melete, a Muse of the exercise of the poetical remembrance and meditation. Anyhow, it is not casual if a canonical Muse of philosophy did not exist. Above all and not wrongly, philosophizing was regarded as a rational research rather than a literary or fine art. Its motivations are so various, its background pathos is so complex, that the Muse of philosophers could be but an eclectic figure, such as invented by the unknown artist of the Sarcophagus with Muses at the Louvre. Specifically, his is a Socratic Muse. The circumstance that she was carved on a sarcophagus well explains her mourning, consolatory looks, and a tacit reference to the Phaedo. Nevertheless, Schopenhauers existential interpretation influenced the reflections of Heidegger, Jan Patoka and Jacques Derrida. In his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History written in 1975, Patoka, also dubbed The Czech Socrates for his moral force in the dramatic events of his life, probes into both motivational extremes of philosophy: wonderment in front of the world, meditation about death. When this results from an unnatural, systematic violence, then more easily the latter component turns into scandal. Likely, no century as the 20th offered so relevant occasions.

3 Socrates and his Muse, marble bas-relief on the Sarcophagus of the Muses; Muse du Louvre, Paris Philosophy, as a Fair Lady It is true, in another Platos dialogue, The Republic, we can read of a Muse of Philosophy, which should be the only true Muse (499d and 548b). Frankly, this applicant for a one Muse office is a so exclusive political reason, a conservative utopian deprived of any other passion but also pathos, that hardly she would be voted in a public assembly. Moreover, in the practice of politics, Plato was a notorious failure. Nonetheless that true Muse appeared again, as a Neo-Platonic Lady Philosophy, in a very serious and tragic historical circumstance: the imprisonment of the late Roman thinker and politician A. M. T. Severinus Boethius, which ended with his execution at Pavia, northern Italy, in 525 A.D. In prison he wrote the work in prose and verse Consolation of Philosophy, where he imagines to be visited by the traditional Muses before, by a female personification of philosophy later. Only this woman succeeds in consoling him for his condition. She looks so wondrous that the description of her is worthy of being reported, just a bit, in the original Latin language.

The jailed philosopher, a victim of intolerance like Socrates, thus relates on his vision: Haec dum me cum tacitus ipse reputarem querimoniamque lacrimabilem stili officio signarem astitisse mihi supra uerticem uisa est mulier reuerendi admodum uultus, oculis ardentibus et ultra commumem hominum ualentiam perspicacibus (While I was silent, rethinking those things and ready to weep and complain by my pen, a lady seemed to me to have appeared over my head. Her face was worthy of great reverence. The sight of her burning eyes seemed to be able to see farther than whatever is granted to human faculties; De philosophiae consolatione, I 2). This is not a simple personification, but a sort of transfiguration, almost an allegory of the divine wisdom. Soon her presence overshadows the attending Muses. She herself drives them away from the virtual dialogic space. They are even compared with deceitful sirens or cheap bitches: meretriculae. In other words, neither literature nor fine arts can really matter in so dramatic moments of life, especially in the imminence of an untimely death. Indeed an ambiguous paradox or a rhetorical fiction is that what Boethius himself is writing is not so much a philosophical tract, as rather a literary work. His inspiring Muse is not only eclectic and composite, but also a changeable one. This time too, iconography does not seem to support us too much. We have a few miniatures as illustrations in medieval codices of the Consolation of Philosophy. Yet in the 17th century, the Italian artist Mattia Preti painted a canvas titled Boethius and the Philosophy (private collection; circa 1680). The scene is set in Boethius cell. While the scarce seductive Muses are going to disappear in a dark background, shaded in the manner of Caravaggio, the sick philosopher is seated on his bed. In front of him, Lady Philosophy is portrayed as a sensual woman, clothed in transparent veils and with a regal sceptre in one hand. The other hand is stretched out toward her interlocutor. With respect to the scene sculptured on the above sarcophagus at the Louvre, here the figurative scheme is inverted. The allegorical woman is arguing, whereas the thinker is silent. Between the quiet Socratic Muse and this eloquent lady there is a difference, like between pathos and logos. Her sensuality is an evident addition of the Baroque painter. It is a mischievous, artistic licence. Actually, in Boethius narrative such a queenly Philosophy evokes a religious faith even more than philosophy itself. The Muses may well represent the pagan or profane culture, whereas Lady Philosophy, not yet a servant to theology as in the full Middle Ages, nevertheless recalls a recent hegemonic Christian spirituality. What she symbolizes is a
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divine Logos or Sophia, rather than a merely rational one. After all, already in the SocraticPlatonic formulation of philosophical wonderment a sacred element was transparent. About this type of wonder, likely the sharpest modern essay is Iconostasis by the Russian thinker and theologian Pavel A. Florenskij, published in 1922. There, he treats this theme in a phenomenological way, referring to sacred art from a Byzantine to an Orthodox production. Essentially, his perception of a philosophical-religious wonderment is that of an iconic sense of wonder, communicated or favoured by that deep symbolist art. We can dare comment, the Boethian archetypal image of Lady Philosophy nearly worked as a kind of Byzantine icon. A modern example of philosophical wonderment, almost a mystical bewilderment instead of a scientific curiosity, can be found in the writings of Esther Etty Hillesum, above mentioned. The Dutch-Jewish writer and thinker was a victim of the anti-semitic Nazi persecution, just like Florenskij (or Florensky) fell a victim to a Stalinist anti-religious purge. In a diary page written during her internment at the Westerbork concentration camp, on 18 August 1943, we read a disconcerting witness: Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth, my eyes raised towards Your heaven, tears run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude. Here, Your is clearly referred to God. What an image of divinity was that, of the young Etty? No doubt, she sounds somewhat Socratic and also Augustinian even more than Jungian, according to her psychological education when she writes, on 17 September 1942: I rest in myself. And this myself, the most profound and richest part of me in which I rest, I call God (trans. Arnold J. Pomerans). Evidently, hers was not a specific religion, but a wider religiosity. However what matters here is that, well planted on earth, Ettys Stupor Mundi occurred not only in sight of the sky but even of mundane details, and in the worst conditions. So much, that we are tempted to wonder whether those things were transfigured by her imagination or rather she was able to catch their essentials. Is it nothing else but a dynamic wonder, this diffuse essence? Moreover, the more her surrounding reality grew hard, the more her unselfish self was cast outward. Her behaviour was inscribed in a hopeful horizon, with no fatalistic resignation but a militant spirit, resistant against a dominant evil. In a letter dated 3 July 1943, this is Ettys claim: ...it is, like some elementary force the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world. Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and
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goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves. We may suffer, but we must not succumb. And if we should survive unhurt in body and soul, but above all in soul, without bitterness and without hatred, then we shall have a right to a say after the war. Maybe I am an ambitious woman: I would like to have just a tiny little bit of a say.

4 Roman statues of Polymnia and Urania, respectively in the Centrale Montemartini at Rome and in the Museo Arqueolgico Nacional at Madrid, probable copies from Hellenistic originals by Philiscus of Rhodes; details Philosophy, as a Scientific Curiosity Urania was the Muse of astronomic science, an eminent part of what was called natural philosophy, even more than a deity inspiring heavenly affections as in Platos Symposium. Her name came from ourans, in Greek sky. Usually, she was represented with some instruments or objects then typical of her job, as dividers or a globe, alluding to a spheric conception of the universe, in which the centre was a round Earth or according to the Pythagoreans an undefined Cosmic Fire. Sometimes, one hand of her is put on a cheek in a thinking attitude, as for a small statue in the National Archaeological Museum at Madrid. Its features make us think of a possible copy from an original by Philiscus of Rhodes, as for the Polymnia of which above. Unfortunately, both hands are now missing. Only a few finger
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tips are discernible on her cheek. She is sitting and looking downward, as if her gaze is turned not at the sky but at earth, from the heaven where she liked to house. Her distance from human events is expressed in the glance of those eyes, carved in marble. In ancient times, astronomy was the less utilitarian of natural sciences. Particularly for the Pythagoreans though, its utility was that a presumed cosmic order and harmony such as to give rise to a magic-scientific wonderment in learned men had somehow to supply them with a wise input for their individual conducts and the rule of their societies. In part at least, Socrates and Plato were heirs of that old tradition. Yet, already at their times, there was an emergent gap between theory, natural philosophy included, and practical exigences or expectations of common people. This situation is reflected by a nice apologue, narrated in Platos Theaetetus (174a-b), where the earliest philosopher and scientist Thales is acting as an absent minded guy. While walking and studying the stars by gazing upward, he falls down into a well. Then, a witty and attractive Thracian servant maid rushes to the help of him and shows her smiling face at the mouth of the pit, objecting that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but those just in front of him and by his feet escaped his notice. We may even gossip, the main thing understood to have escaped his attention was the maid herself. Let us notice how the character of this girl may somewhat resemble the sculptured Urania in the Museum at Madrid. Yet not longer she looks down from heaven, but from earth itself, almost into the human psyche. She worked as a sort of less aristocratic and more popular Muse, when a Sophistic and later Socratic philosophy was going no longer to be oriented to a cosmic reference mark but rather to be centred on man. Consequently, at this moment it was announced that separation between sciences and humanities, which will be an increasing characteristic of modernity. In a long meanwhile though, there were the late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Let us read how the same anecdote was varied by the Christian apologist Tertullian, in his address To the Nations: While walking and with his gaze spacing throughout the sky, badly Thales of Miletus stumbled into a pit. Then he was harshly mocked by a certain Egyptian, who told him: despite nothing discerning on earth, do you esteem yourself capable of investigating the sky? Indeed this is a very figurative picture of philosophers, who indulge in vain purposes and a stupid curiosity on natural objects, whereas they had better apply their intelligences to their Creator and Governor (II 2). To be honest, as a character of this Aesopic fashioned fable we would prefer Platos
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witty and attractive (emmels kai charissa) Thracian maid to the Egyptian of Tertullian, so severe that he himself finally became a heretic. The different exoticism itself had a meaningful connotation, as a variation between nave lore and practical wisdom. Yet what important here is that, from the thinker and theologian Augustine of Hippo to the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, Tertullians motif of the curiositas will grow a negative argument against any possible scientific research or even geographic exploration. Every Stupor Mundi with a cognitive aim got sacrificed or subordinated to an exclusive and immediate Amor Dei. The scientific curiosity was condemned as sinful. During the European Renaissance, sciences will return to be cultivated and the Harmonia Mundi exerted a fascination again, for instance upon the German astronomer Friedrich Johannes Kepler, who jokingly but not by chance liked to say that he was a reincarnation of the ancient Greek Pythagoras. Yet, notoriously, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei ran a risk of being executed for his theories. The dialectic contradiction between science and technics, with an ethic implication about what an use of scientific notions and discoveries, was still to come. Yet already in Dantes poetry a premonition of the early modernity is associated with a tragic pathos. Dantes Ulysses, in the 26 th canto of his Inferno, is a problematic hero much more than his Homeric epic and mythic prototype. In Ulysses account to the poet, particularly concerning the last navigation of his adventurous life, the experience of the world is an ardent desire in Italian, ardore which can never be really extinguished, not even by the fear of death. As exposed by the old captain to his fellow sailors, a problem is that such an experience must be extraordinary, because an ordinary end is unworthy for aware and bold beings. What a better chance, than an extreme challenge against the uncanny? His speech was so convincing, that they decided to follow him in the folle volo, the crazy flight which will lead them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to a fatal wreck in the ocean. Like Thales, Ulysses too was scanning the sky but above all the horizon, in order to sail over the seas. About two centuries after Dante, Christopher Columbus will try the same deed, this time with success. This delayed coincidence is a little wonder inside the modern wonderment, since Dantes invention sounds half a fabulation, half the personal sublimation of a collective plan and dream. In part at least, Ulysses ardour is a removed desire of the poet himself, which surfaces through his admiring reproof of a dangerous curiosity. In 1291 the Genoese Vivaldi brothers had attempted at a circumnavigation of Africa, from which they never came back.
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The Inferno was composed in the years 1304-09. If not yet of a humanistic and later scientific renaissance, the season of geographic explorations had already begun. Social and political circumstances, economical motivations, technical innovations were determinant in the first steps of what we define as progress. Yet this cannot be fully explained, without the role of a primordial wonder, in what the 20th century thinker Ernst Bloch has also called Experimentum Mundi. The difference between experience and experiment is a pregnant metaphor borrowed from experimental science, save that the experimentation of the world with its tries and errors, sometimes even horrors is largely a slow unconscious elaboration.

5 Mattia Preti, Boethius and the Philosophy, oil on canvas: Private Collection; ca. 1680 Philosophy, as Self-Wonderment In another book by Bloch, Traces, chapter on Wonder, we meet with the germinal concept of Self-Wonder, which will be variously developed or interpreted by the same German-Jewish philosopher and by Christian theologians as the German Jgen Moltmann and the Italian Ernesto Balducci. Such a wonderment or sometimes scandal happens when the homo absconditus or ineditus, preferred by Balducci, what is a hidden man anyway comes to light. In fact, what we believe to know is a homo editus, or historical man, with all
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his merits and faults. Yet a subconscious or unconscious dimension makes often this free mankind somewhat unexpected when acting out of the books of history. One day, we ourselves might be surprised to discover ourselves different from whom we remembered to be. Humanness itself makes men knowable by themselves with a deal of approximation, although this does not seem to depend simply on their instinctual background. It is very important, anyhow, that we preserve or recover our capability of self-wondering or being scandalized, so as to be ready to react at all contingencies of life or history. As to this latter at least, a Nietzschean attitude of Amor Fati did not reveal itself to work as a good solution. The problem is not merely ethical though. Our capability of wondering and selfwondering at once is a basic component of our potentiality of renewing ourselves and consequently of progressing, not without a deal of critical warning. Just to use here the title of the best known work of Bloch, that is the gist of our Principle of Hope, since pathos and reason may well agree in a future perspective (even if Blochs long flirting with a political ideology seems to contradict this convergence). On his side, the homo ineditus of Balducci is a man or a woman enabled to convert his wonderment or perturbation into a positive engagement, when some existential or historical circumstances make them aware of their own potentiality. Not even a religious transcendence can be really perceived as such, if not experienced and experimented inside immanence. Reliably, there are affinities between Balduccis mental attitude and the reflections in the Diaries of Etty Hillesum, included the idea that a new edition of humanity has to start from inside before of outside each of us. Especially, this sounds true when she wrote, on 19 February 1942: The rottenness of others is in us, too. [...] I really see no other solution than to turn inward and to root our all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war. That we must look into ourselves and nowhere else. Evidently, what is to be sought and extirpated is the root of evil. This is the real impediment to the development of a positive self, in an individual as collective range. Ettys dramatic situation and some previous political revolutionary disillusions influenced her optimistic pessimism. Yet we can also interpret it as a reply to Leibnizs metaphysical question: Why have the things to exist as they are, and not otherwise?. If this is a bad one, no Leibnizian sufficient reason inside or outside ourselves can let certain things persist as they are. Instead, our perturbation or scandal is a sufficient
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one for changing them in better. Etty herself will comment: It is not Gods fault that things are as they are at present, but our own (trans. A. J. Pomerans). Let us spend a few words more about the perception of self-wonderment in Bloch, that is what most susceptible to give rise to an inner profound stupor (innerstes tiefstes Erstaunen: so, in The Spirit of Utopia). In the chapter Wonder of Traces, he recalls Platos statement that philosophy begins in wonder, and adds that the beginning could never quite be expelled from philosophy. At the same time, the literary form allows the author to hint at a disconcerting guess, that a tendency to self-wondering is latent in the things themselves. Nay, it is a seething final state within things. In other terms, a potential of wonderment might exist in the whole reality before of being communicated to human minds, working as a fermenting pulsion to translate the unconscious into conscience. Is wonder an universal pathos background? Is the Stupor Mundi a sort of dream of things? Of course, this is an affabulation. Yet, elsewhere in Blochs works, it is a fact an admiring attention to the small things of everyday life, interpreted as traces of a wider mystery. That is also his own answer to Leibnizs Grundfrage or basic question: Why is there something rather than nothing?. In The Dream of a Thing: From the Village to the Planetary Age by Balducci, the universal vision of Bloch is transfigured into a religious dimension, almost an updated Franciscan theodicy, where the objects of art and of thecnics participate in that wondering dynamism. The natural cosmic wonder of the Greek philosophers is replaced or accompanied by a planetary wonderment, as if they were different stages of the same evolution. This is true for the objects made, as well as for the ideas conceived by men. The Western civilization was a synthesis of different components, as the Heathen, the Hebraic and the Christian cultures. Today it is time to return to a confrontation with the Islamic one, but also with a worldview made in India, with a worldview made in China, with a worldview made in Japan... Without a capability of wonderment, of curiosity at least, such a confrontation could meet scarce possibilities of success. These missed opportunities for a further progress might turn into possibilities of a dangerous regress. At any rate, no self-wonderment may make a full sense if we are unable to wonder at the others and to appreciate them. If really the existences of things and of our selves are wonders, that of the other is the wonder of wonders. Once more to use Leibniznian terms here, this is a premise for which subjects and objects can be otherwise. As suggested by the title of another essay by Balducci, a topical form of the unedited
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man is The Planetary Man. Notoriously, the neologism planetarization has the same meaning of globalization. Yet it has not assumed an identical sense, since the relevant concept privileges the sphere of a mutual knowledge and common spirituality, against the reduction of the world to a mere mercantile system. If we well consider, a disposition of man to self-wondering, or to discover himself essentially the same but culturally so various at the same time, is not new at all. Already in the first stasimon of the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles (lines 332-72), it wears the auroral form of wondering at a human exceptionality on earth and in the cosmos: So many are the wondrous things, nothing more wondrous than man.... Indeed, here the Greek word for wondrous is not derived from thuma marvel as we have seen for Plato and Aristotle. It is deinn, which can mean terrible too. Such an ambiguity sounds monitory, beyond its specific tragic context. It is also true, mostly referred to some deities before, that adjective was now applied to mankind.

6 Ulysses of Sperlonga, late Hellenistic statue fragment: ca. 1st cent. B.C.; and marble head from an ancient bust of Thales, reliably an imaginary portrayal of the proto-philosopher An Extensive Bibliography Alighieri Dante, Inferno, bilingual edition, trans. Anthony Esolen, New York: Modern Library, 2005. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. William D. Ross, Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1924.
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Balducci Ernesto, Luomo planetario (The Planetary Man), Milan: Camunia, 1985; and S. Domenico di Fiesole, Florence: ECP, 1990. Balducci Ernesto, Il sogno di una cosa. Dal villaggio allet planetaria, (The Dream of a Thing: From the Village to the Planetary Age), Florence: Giunti, 2006. Bloch Ernst, The Form of the Unconstructable Question, in The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000 (from Die Gestalt der unkostruierbaren Frage, in Geist der Utopie; 1918, 1923 and 1964). Bloch Ernst, chapter on Wonder in Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006; pp. 169-171 (from Spuren; 1930, 1959 and 1969). Bloch Ernst, Experimentum Mundi: Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis (Experimentum Mundi: Question, Categories of Realization, Praxis), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975. Blumenberg Hans, Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie (The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Prehistory of Theory), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987. Boethius Severinus, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bottini Angelo (edited by), Musa pensosa. Limmagine dellintellettuale nellantichit, Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006. Deckard Michael Funk and Losonczi Peter (edited by), Philosophy Begins in Wonder: An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology, and Science, Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010. Derrida Jacques, Donner la mort: Lthique du don, eds. Jean-Michel Rabat and Michael Wetzel, Paris: Transition, 1992; translated as The Gift of Death by David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Fisher Philip, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Florensky Pavel, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev, Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1996. Florensky Pavel, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, trans. Wendy Salmond, London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Heidegger Martin, Wegmarken (1919-58), translated and edited as Pathmarks by William McNeill, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger Martin, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik (1935, published in 1953), translated as An Introduction to Metaphysics by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Heidegger Martin, Hlderlins Hymne Der Ister (1942), translated as Hlderlins Hymn The Ister by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Hersch Jeanne, Ltonnement philosophique. Une histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Hillesum Esther, Etty: the letters and diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik and translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Kawabata Yasunari, Niji ikutabi (Rainbows; 1951); translated into Italian with the title Arcobaleni by Lydia Origlia, Milan: Editori Associati, 1994.
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Kitar Nishida, Bashoteki ronri to shkyteki seikan (1945), translated as The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview by Michiko Yusa, in The Eastern Buddhist 19/2: 129 and 20/1: 81119, Kyoto, Japan: Otani University, 1986 and 1987. Latini Micaela, Il possibile e il marginale. Studio su Ernst Bloch (Possibility and Marginality: A Study on Ernst Bloch), Milan: Mimesis, 2005. Lawrence David, The Rainbow, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Leibniz Gottfried, New Essays on Human Understanding, translated and edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Leibniz Gottfried, Principes de la nature et de la grce fonds en raison. Principes de la philosophie, ou, Monadologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. Patoka Jan, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, edited by James Dodd and translated by Erazim Kohak, with an introduction by Paul Ricoeur, Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1996. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, edited and translated by Benjamin Jowett, 4 vols., Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1871 (revised in 1875, 5 vols.). Scheler Max, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928), translated as The Human Place in the Cosmos by Manfred Frings, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Schopenhauer Arthur, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1844), trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 2, New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Tertullian, Ad nationes (To the Nations), in the critical edition by Jan Willem Philip Borleffs, Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani: Ad nationes libri duo, Leiden: Brill, 1929.

7 A young Ernst Bloch and Etty Hillesum, photo-portrayed in 1937 by Bernard Meijlink: Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam; detail Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2010

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