Di Simone Bandini

 

Man travels towards what is not known, which has yet to happen, struggling between action and destiny.

There are two types of justice for man himself: one type linked to nature – which follows the laws of necessity – the other linked to the spirit and which accords with the laws of freedom, with his incorruptible principles.

 

 

Fullness, fulfilment, happiness, are nothing but the agreement of these two types of justice: agreement that occurs within man (in the soul and in thought) and outside (in the material world and actions).

The man who possesses integrity and vision spontaneously blends his dual condition of man-nature and man-soul. This is a man who exercises his will in the world through the ‘principle of freedom’; a man who makes his way, space and proceeds beyond his condition as man-nature and acting with it through the ‘principle of possibility’ – which we can define as “the freedom of the spirit applied to matter and its laws”.

And it is precisely the strength and manifestation of the body itself that transfers to man-nature the possibilities and the necessary vigour to proceed beyond his material condition, tempering himself in the metamorphoses and transfigurations and increasingly exaltations and sufferings that lead him to fulfilment and to the transformation into the man-soul.

Happiness, a condition more divine than earthly, belongs to these absolute creatures, being nothing but the most complete and perfect agreement between man-nature and man-soul projected in and out, in the inner and outer world, in perfect communion with the other than itself – which occurs through the constitutive and ultimate principle of the universe: love.

There are also two principles of ‘beauty’, of what is beautiful as well as being ‘right’. Also in this case, the one is linked to man-nature which culminates in participation in causality and natural mechanisms and which causes ‘pleasure’ in the satisfaction of appetites; the other linked to the man-soul that concerns man’s fidelity and belonging to his individual and collective existential root (inclinations such as sensitivity, courage, honesty, strength, loyalty or in full characteristics such as culture, language or race) that produce a purely assertive pleasure, related to the pure manifestation / affirmation of one’s vital condition, individual quality, expressing one’s orientation and position in the world.

Beauty and justice, therefore, are man’s destiny: they are thus linked in the necessary agreement between man-nature and man-soul. The man-soul ensures that man-nature does not fall into the degradation of mere natural appetites and into the mechanism of mere necessity. The man-nature watches against so that the man-soul does not de-naturize in absolute freedom to decree its decay, in the impossibility of acting in a real and effective way in the material world, exercising at the same time what is ‘right’ and what is ‘beautiful’.

Wishful thinking, the greatest cause of unhappiness, is the symbol of the disagreement between one world and the other – between necessity and freedom, man-nature and man-soul.