Contents Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Nicola Abbagnano was born on 15 July 1901 in the city of Salerno in southern Italy and died in Milan on 9 September 1990. Shortly after he received his degree (the Laurea) in 1922 from the University of Naples, he started his long public career as a philosopher with publication of his first book Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero (The Irrational Sources of Thought, 1923). From his memoir, Ricordi di un filosofo (The Recollections of a Philosopher, 1990), which marked his career's close, we learn that the book was originally entitled Le sorgenti vitali del pensiero (The Vital Sources of Thought). His mentor at the University of Naples, Antonio Aliotta, insisted on the change-one that Abbagnano believed, then and thereafter, to be misleading and overly dramatic. While the book has a Nietzschean cast, Abbagnano at no time in his long career surrendered to a sophisticated Nietzschean account of reason or a crude version of irrationalism.
True, while his thought is committed to reason as the measure of human existence, it is antirationalistic when we understand reason according to an eighteenth-century Enlightenment conception or a nineteeth - and early twentieth-century romantic version. The Enlightenment conception of reason is such that the world's necessary order is reason's necessary order. The romantic version is rooted in, or is a function of, passion or unreason. Abbagnano's defense of reason, the human measure, yields to neither seduction.
The human measure is finite and fallible, but not without its success. Science, mathematics, philosophy, and history are examples of that limited success. Religion is the recognition of this finitude through the mode of faith and hope. Absurdity and despair are no more redolent of humanity than are omniscience and optimism. The human measure is what measures human beings (in the sense of characterizing us) and what human beings use to measure other things. The human measure resists false disjunctions between theory and practice. Instead, without diluting either, it happily combines in the existing individual person what Aristotle calls theoria (speculative reason) and phronesis (practical reason).
From Aliotta, Abbagnano accepted an empiricist direction and an interest in science that were not especially congenial to the idealist establishment in Italian philosophy at the start of this century and beyond. Aliotta had argued, against Idealism, the impossibility of resolving all reality within reason and against one version of realism that regards reason as reality's mere passive reflection. Abbagnano agreed, so that from his student days under Aliotta to his own maturity, reason has had a modest and moderate character, being no world sovereign or abject servant. In this respect, Abbagnano is Existentialist and Postmodernist: the first in his recognition of the finitude and mortality of human existence with human reason as part of that finitude; the second in his rejection of the Enlightenment's mythologized reason.
He does not subscribe to Postmodernism's voluntarism wherein an unfettered and freewheeling will, replacing omnipotent reason, creates or constructs, socially or otherwise, the world and its parts. The difference between the sexes is an example of something thought (or better, willed) to be constructed. Such an absolutism is as foreign to Abbagnano's thought as would be a biogenetic absolutism.
While Abbagnano argues that the human measure is finite, he is no epistemological or moral I relativist. Knowledge exists, opinion exists. He defends the difference and the distinction. And terrorism, among other things, like lying, treachery, and cruelty is bad, wrong. From beginning to end, L'uomo progetto 2000 (The Human Project: The Year 2000) makes these matters evident.
Now about his life and his writings. Abbagnano was the Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Turin from his appointment in 1936 to his retirement in 1976. He had stopped c1assroom teaching in 1971. His production of philosophical literature before, during, and after that period was enormous, but not so overwhelming that we cannot divide it into three distinct c1asses.
In the first c1ass are the books that result from careful and arduous scholarship, culminating in the Storia della filosofia (History of Philosophy, 1946-1950) and the Dizionario di filosofia (Dictionary of Philosophy, 1961). The monograph Guglielmo di Ockham (William of Ockham, 1931) also belongs in this category. The Storia covers the entire range of Western philosophy with no progressivist bias. It does not skip over medieval philosophy as if it were a benighted lapse from authentic philosophical inquiry-a kind of unworthy interlude between ancient Greek and Modern European thought. It does not regard ancient philosophy as "unscientific" and recent philosophy as "scientific." It does not assume the earlier periods of philosophy as exhausted in their contribution or importance to the current one. Jacques Derrida does not replace or exhaust Plato. John Dewey does not supplant Thomas Aquinas.
We will not find in the Storia such banalities as "We must understand these philosophers in terms of their own times," or "We cannot ignore medieval philosophy if we wish to understand modern philosophy." We would find the sensible view that "We must understand these philosophers in their own terms."
Earlier philosophers were relevant to times other than their own. Their merit did not lie in being ciphers for another time. Abbagnano speaks of the philosophers in his Storia as "voices," that is, voices in a conversation about the basic human questions-a conversation in which listeners can and do take part, first, as ordinary human beings, and some more technically, as professional philosophers.
In 1991 and 1994 respectively, Abbagnano's former students produced and published the fourth volume, divided into two parts and devoted to the more recent voices of the last thirty years.
The Dizionario di filosofia is another masterpiece of scholarship. Its articles on "knowledge," "being," "time," "possibility," "science," and "language" are small treatises unto themselves, brimming with historical and logical distinctions. A comparable American venture into this sort of scholarship, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, calls the Dizionario "one of the outstanding dictionaries of philosophy of our time," which, in its citations, "refers as readily to the latest numbers of American journals as to the works of Plato.'" A revised and updated paperback reprint of the Dizionario appeared in 1993. In 1998, Giovanni Fornero edited the most recent version with amplification of old entries and addition of new. For the task Fornero assembled forty-five contributors. Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo were among the best known in America.
This class of Abbagnano's philosophic production also includes his work as the editor of the Storia delle scienze (History of the Sciences, 1962), an expression of his interest in the history and methodology of the sciences.
The second category of Abbagnano's writings consists of those devoted to the central issues of his theoretical philosophy: possibility, necessity, existence and freedom. In these writings Abbagnano formulates his original version of Existentialism in contradistinction to those of Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, and Marcel. In these writings he works as a professional and technical philosopher, not primarily as a scholar, as in the first category of his writings, nor as a high popularizer, as in the third category.
Abbagnano started to develop those issues, his distinctions and his arguments in Il principio della metafisica (The Principle of Metaphysics, 1935), and expounded their mature form in La struttura dell'esistenza (The Structure of Existence, 1939), Filosofia, religione, scienza (Philosophy, Religion, Science, 1947), Esistenzialismo positivo (Positive Existentialism, 1948), and Possibilità e libertà (Possibility and Freedom, 1956). This last a collection of papers written for various occasions between 1949 and 1955.The mature phase of his technical philosophizing continued with publication of another collection of essays entitled Problemi di sociologia (Problems of Sociology, 1959) and in a paper called "Condizioni, dimensioni, e razionalità delle scelte" ("Conditions, Dimensions, and Rationality of Choices") which was first published in the "Rivista di filosofa" ("Review of Philosophy") in 1965 and then added as an appendix to one of his "popular" books, Fra il tutto e il nulla (Between All and Nothing, 1973). During this period of intense labor and productivity (1948 - 1970), he was also co-editor with Norberto Bobbio of the aforementioned journal, the "Rivista di filosofia".
The third category of Abbagnano's writings includes those that we can call "popular" with reference to their readers, subject matter, and style. The French call this kind of writing "haute vulgarisation." The readers are literate people who may not be technically proficient in philosophy, the sciences, or literary criticism. Most would have received the kind of liberal education that the bachelor's degree once represented, or would be the kind of civilized working people who want to read and discuss books, or politics, religion, sex, sports.
The subject matter of these popular book includes and transcends the foregoing list of things: essays on the latest developments in the physical and behavioral sciences, on law, morality, technology, computers, myth, language, art, and theater, even on Plato, the Sophists, and the paradoxes of logic.
This third category's writing style bespeaks a simplicity and clarity of thought that results from a lifetime of exploring, understanding, and explaining difficult matters. It contains no obfuscation of thought, intended or unintended. In these writings, as in his others, Abbagnano exemplifies what Thomas Aquinas regarded as the highest level of human life: communication of contemplation.
We can explain production of these popular works partly by Abbagnano's belief, as recorded in his memoir, Ricordi di un filosofo (Recollections of a Philosopher) that philosophy ought to improve the quality of people's lives. Here Abbagnano echoes one of Plato's most famous lines, found in the Apology when Socrates attempts to justify the philosophic life before his Athenian judges by saying that the "life without inquiry is not a life worth living for a human being." Plato defines human life in terms of the life of inquiry that can occur after a society has achieved the necessities (food, shelter, reproduction) and life's amusements. (We can best illustrate life's amusements by the activities involved in sports).
The specifically human life, the life of science, art, and morality, is the stuff that makes philosophy. Philosophy is the free discussion of those beliefs and modes of action most people adopt through religion. As St. Anselm puts it in his memorable dictum "Fides quaerens intellectum" (Faith seeking understanding), theology is the philosophical discussion of religion. For Plato and Abbagnano the act of philosophizing specifically expresses the human mode of existence in contrast to the mode of other living beings. That some, including philosophers, deny this does not make it false, if only because their denials are part of a philosophic argument to the contrary carried out in the leisure achieved through surpassing needs and amusements.
The books that constitute this third category are: Per o contro l'uomo (For or Against Humanity, 1968), a collection of newspaper articles written between 1964 and 1967 for "La Stampa", the newspaper of the city of Turin; Fra il tutto e il nulla, a subsequent set of articles written between 1968 and 1972 for the same newspaper; Questa pazza filosofia (This Crazy Philosophy, 1979), a meta-philosophical essay to which he attached chapters on science, religion, morality, art, daily life, and a conclusion with the engaging title "L'io prigionero" ("The Self as Prisoner"); L'uomo progetto 2000, published in 1980, an interview conducted by the journalist Giuseppe Grieco in which Abbagnano expounds the human future as dependent on the human existential measure; La saggezza della vita (The Wisdom of Life, 1985), a collection of articles which appeared in the weekly magazine "Gente" during the early eighties and which became a "best seller" in Italy; La saggezza della filosofia (The Wisdom of Philosophy, 1987) a discussion of mostly twentieth-century philosophers (including such psychologist-philosophers as Freud and Fromm), the impact of their doctrines on the traditional conception of human nature in terms of reason and freedom; and finally, Ricordi di un filosofo (Recollections of a Philosopher, 1990), a memoir.
This last of Abbagnano's books begins with his early years in Salerno and Naples and tells of his debates over Existentialism with Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. It continues with recollections of persons and events inc1uding the dictator, Mussolini, the novelist Cesare Pavese, the First and Second World Wars, teaching at Turin, his three marriages (his first and second wives died). It culminates with his living and working peacefully and happily in Milan with his third wife, Gigliola, who continues diligently bringing to completion and publication the remaining pieces of his scholarship and writing.
The central theme of Abbagnano's philosophy sustains all these popular writings, whatever the topic: the interrelationships among the concepts of existence, possibility, and freedom as regards human finitude.
The book L'uomo progetto 2000, whose translation follows this Introduction, is a popular work implicitly embodying that interrelationship, not a work of prophecy or futurism. Abbagnano is much too aware of the limits of human projection and imagination. His analysis of the concept of possibility is not a hymn to its positive and optimistic side. A possibility, to be such, includes a negative and pessimistic side. Keeping both sides of a possibility in view is to retain its logical integrity and authenticity. One would never catch Abbagnano saying, "Everything is possible," for he knows that saying so is a contradiction, transforming the concept of possibility into its contradictories-necessity or impossibility. If everything were possible, the negative side of possibilities would be eliminated by the logical operation of the universal "everything". Furthermore, if everything were possible, then nothing would be impossible, not possible, or necessary. What a sad logical state would possibilities be in then.
The meaning of the term "possibility" depends in part on the contrast with its opposites. If its opposites do not exist, then, possibility would not exist. The failure of a possibility must be present along with its success. If one or the other chances to happen, still, after its realization, its contrary could also have occurred. The finitude of possibilities is logicaIly connected to the freedom of their occurrence and the finitude of the human measure.