The Truth
in the post-truth era
What is truth today? Is it still possible to distinguish what is true from what is false, at a time when reality seems to dissolve into its representation?
And if truth is just what works, what space is left for critical power? And who holds the power to say what is true? The new Misanese philosophy series, curated by Gustavo Cecchini, will tackle one of philosophy's oldest and most urgent themes, tracing a genealogy of truth that is also a map for navigating our present. It will be a philosophical and civic investigation that questions the crisis of democracy, the rhetoric of populism, the dominance of information and artificial intelligence. From 2nd October five unmissable events to challenge our most deeply rooted beliefs and show us how, in the society of persuasion and performance, truth is no longer created: it is produced, and in doing so, it is lost.
The festival opens, Friday 2 October, the female philosopher Nadia Urbinati with a reading titled: Truth and democracy? In our age, which makes individual freedom a public good, opinion measures our power as citizens. Democracy, in fact, rests upon opinion, which is a form of judgement not directly associable with truth, whilst still being reasonably viewable as a guarantee that the search for truth will always remain open, precisely because opinion lies in the realm of the possible, not of ascertained truth. But the fact that we are free to change our minds does not mean that all ideas are equivalent. It is in this context that the issue of fake news arises, which has become a fully fledged commercial as well as political enterprise. What self-defence strategies are there? An answer to this question may be to practise preventive scepticism and use the web to dig and find traces of truth and, consequently, of error. The freedom to hunt, one might say, is the freedom of those who are more concerned with the freedom to seek the truth than to possess it. Such a condition of possession, whilst suiting those who seek security, fatally risks weakening the very truth in which one believes, which, without the vigour of inspection and critique, risks becoming fossilised and turned into a dogma. The issue of our time could therefore be summarised as the utmost and free pursuit of truth, without any certainty of finding it and, above all, without the persuasion that, once found, it should be considered immutable, like a dogma itself.
In the second, Friday 9th October, appointment Marcello Veneziani who chose as the title of their lecture: The truth, difficult but necessary.
Rather than difficult, the truth is useless: it is not only arduous to know it, but it is not useful to know it, it is of no use; indeed, it is harmful to conform to it and to pretend to practise it. But the truth is necessary like the air we breathe and like the light that makes reality clear. No one owns it, or worse still, has a monopoly on it, because truth is greater than us and we are within it. Venetians he will make a journey into truth in an era that denies it, undertaken for the love of the real.
Friday 16 October the female philosopher Lucrezia Ercoli she will take to the stage at the Astra with a lectio entitled: I doubt therefore I am: against the peddlers of truth. In contemporary public debate, Matrix’s famous alternative between the blue pill and the red pill has become the reflection of a dangerous polarisation. We have grown accustomed to conceiving of truth as a dogmatic fork in the road or a multiple-choice quiz, dividing the world into factions blinded by their own certainties. This dynamic turns debate into a moral clash between factions, where the putative “truth” is commodified and monetised. Against this overdose of pre-packaged answers, philosophy steps in not to offer dogmas, but to reclaim the art of questioning. Truth is neither an objective datum to be possessed, nor a fact to be flaunted on digital platforms. It takes the shape of a continuous quest, a voyage on the open sea that embraces complexity. The aim is to rehabilitate the therapeutic value of doubt in order to dismantle radical oppositions, to return to grasping the nuances of reality. Dwelling in truth means rediscovering a clearing where light and shadow do not exclude one another, but converse.
Friday 23rd October it's on stage Vito Mancuso con – “How much truth can a man endure?” Accepting that our precious life and that of all our fellow human beings is destined to end coincides with accepting the truth: eradicating illusions, looking at things as they are. Well, Mancuso says, I think that truth — sincerity towards ourselves, towards nature and the course of things — helps us to live better, it makes us free. Through the truth we will be able to lead an existence worthy of our position in the cosmos; indeed, we will enjoy the fullness of freedom, which is a unique characteristic of ours.
Concluding the festival, Friday 30 October, Marco Guzzi, philosopher and writer with a lectio entitled: “The truth is always incarnate”.
Dice Marco Guzzi“I would like to reflect on the crisis of the metaphysical and scientific concept of truth, as a rational definition of being and of all things. This crisis, however, does not necessarily have to steer us towards absolute relativism or towards the destructive nihilism of techno- dadaist functionalism.".
We already possess another experience of truth, which always starts from our existential experience, from what hurts us, or sets us free. In other words, the truth reveals itself to us, it happens, embodying itself in our essential historical existence, and taking possession of us. This is also the final revelation that Christ brings into history: truth, precisely, becomes Incarnate, and it is only by gradually embodying its illuminating power that we can be in the truth, and that is to say, free ourselves and rejoice: the truth will set you free. Today, are we all ready to understand these truths in a completely new way and to relaunch them into history as a power for liberation and for challenging the system of lies and war?”
All meetings will be held at the Teatro Astra, starting at 21:00.
Free admission without booking.
Info: Town Library 0541-618484
Tel: 0541-615520
