By Simone Bandini
Less communication, more truth.
“The true world attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous, – he lives in it, he is it.”
F. Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer” (1888)
It is necessary to question the content of truth conveyed by our language.
Why do I say this?
Because, if, as we have already pointed out, it is language that defines us in a perspective of identity and individuation, it must be consistent with its profound essence, that is, the core of truth of the subjectivity it expresses.
Otherwise, it risks being an absolutely useless, empty exercise, which, beyond the manifestation of primary instances (I am hungry, I am sleepy, I want to make love), ends its task in a self-referential way, without producing any real comparison, exchange and ‘growth’ between intelligent beings.
But how did language manage to sublimate itself into ‘communication’, this now irremediably academic concept that has translated the question to a transcendent level? A discipline that has focused on the aesthetic ways and quirks of saying and representing, gradually losing sight of the ‘truth’, the urgency and adherence to reality of what wants to be manifested, expressed.
A language that has lost its function – which should be, on the contrary, a conscious and authentic projection of one’s self, the will to do, undertake and evolve in a ‘virile’ and constructive way.
Instead, we want to return to this traditional sense of language – whose expressions are verifiable and measurable in the self, where coherence is a universal law and there is no longer a distance between the emanation of thought and cogent action, words spoken and facts of validation.
In this murky modernity, it could be said that words and ‘signs’ are codifying and not de-coding a thought, an intuition, a state of mind, since they have become significant in themselves, new semiotic entities that have forgotten their source and now live on an autonomous, robotic essence. Language has rebelled against its masters. Language has become an end in itself – conquering a new ontological, independent and evolutionary status, as if it were, to use a perspective that is unfortunately so much in vogue, a great autonomous, artificial intelligence, someone other than itself.
Why is this? How did we get here?
The decline of Western civilization – which belongs to a precise philosophy of history – is inextricably linked to the contemplative interiorization of the self. A process guided by Christianity in the magmatic course of two millennia – which has distanced thought from action, justice from this world and placed in the next – which has assigned beauty to poetry, literature and especially art, distancing it from truth, deeds, myth and pagan epics. In a word, from a necessary validation, from a completion, albeit metaphorical and ritual, in reality.
A disintegrating process that we could summarize as the ‘aestheticization of reality’: beauty moves away from facts, from action, to become a possible narrative. Beauty is no longer incarnated, it is sublimated and loses its content of truth.
A path that culminated in capitalism, with the de-ontological commercial outcomes of commodification, with the most sinister materialism that disqualifies man and reduces him to chains, confined to the realm of utility, slave to mere causal mechanisms.
What can we do today?
The impression, a bit tragic and if you want even comical, is that the container (the person) is already hopelessly empty.
At Valley Life, we encourage a traditional language that goes back to basics – that is a manifestation of being. In these pages thoughts are shown and stories are read, images can be traced back to faces. The tension of the story is functional to identity, therefore to reality. A language that does not live a life of its own but that possesses the strength and involvement of those who represent and express: adherent, faithful to actuality.
Not a form of ‘communication’, never a cultural fashion.
Recommended listening: “Incoscienti giovani”, Achille Lauro