SENTIMENT
26-28 June 2024

SENTIMENT, Emotional Education – Philosophical Review

Feelings, affections, and emotions accompany our existence and influence our path towards more or less happy developments: Such is their impact on human existence that the humanities and social sciences, medicine, and even biology and chemistry of the body have been employed to grasp their meaning, nature, and dynamics. The four-day philosophical event in Misano, which engages a vast audience each year, is dedicated to the theme of emotional education.
From 26 to 28 June 2024 under the direction of Gustavo Cecchini Distinguished thinkers will engage in dialogue with the public on the necessity of emotional education, which is more crucial than ever today, in order to acquire the psychological sensitivity capable of distinguishing good from evil, love from hate, and engagement from indifference.

Opens Wednesday, June 26th, in the garden of the Municipal Library, philosopher Silvano Petrosino which declines one of the most important and enigmatic feelings: Friendship. What meaning do we give to the word »friend' today? What kind of experience does the term friendship describe? What are the traits that allow it to be recognised? Can one die from too much friendship? And can one die for a friend? These are just some of the questions that one of the most astute Italian philosophers on the world of feelings will address. Friendship as an act of gratuitousness, therefore, with which we are invested beyond any of our own initiative and decision.»

Thursday 27 June in Piazza Repubblica The philosophical “star” of the moment has arrived, Umberto Galimberti with a lesson titled: When life was guided by the heart: emotions and feelings in the age of technology. Umberto Galimberti, Italian philosopher, essayist, and psychoanalyst, will recount, in a captivating evening, how sentiment is not a natural gift, but one to be acquired and cultivated culturally. The ancients learned about sentiments through mythology. In the grand Olympus of Greek culture, we find the entire spectrum of human sentiments, a phenomenology of human feelings. In Olympus, the Greeks described passions, emotions, and sentiments – what Dante calls «human movements.» In our time, we can relearn them through literature, a privileged space where we learn pain, boredom, love, despair, passion, and romanticism. Today's «distance» from emotions, from linguistic complexity in favour of easy simplifications, coupled with an unrestrained use of technology, provokes a worrying and disorienting emotional confusion. Galimberti will speak of emotions and emotional resonance through a map of ideas, cultural references, and literary passages that awaken and move us in a time numbed by the digital. Galimberti is exceptionally accompanied by performer Raffaello Fusaro, who interprets with intensity and energy some literary passages capable of reminding us that emotions must always be re-learned.

Friday 28 June, still in Piazza Repubblica, Enzo Bianchi founder of the monastic and ecumenical Community of Bose, who will give the address Compassion. Empathy is not an attitude exercised from top to bottom, with superiority, like looking down on someone with condescension “taking pity on him,” nor is it a manifestation of weakness, but it means “to suffer with,” according to its Latin etymology.cum + I sufferThus, compassion has again come to mean a movement with which we go to where there is evil and share the sufferer's situation with them, participating in the other's suffering: touched by another's suffering, we always feel the pain as his, until feeling it with him like our. The pain of another becomes my pain. Compassion is not the solution to suffering, but it is the only sensible response that humanity can give in the face of evil. It means suffering because of another's suffering, accepting that the other person is also making me suffer with their suffering. And be careful: this feeling, this passion, which must first be embraced in interpersonal relationships, cannot be limited to that dimension, but must open a path on a social and even political level.

Nostalgia It will be the closing theme, Saturday 29 June in the Library gardens, with the philosopher Lucrezia Ercoli. Title of your talk: Lost Paradises. The Philosophy of Nostalgia. “The true paradises are the paradises we have lost” wrote Marcel Proust. Nostalgia is a feeling that has always accompanied us. But today, more than ever, the present seems opaque to us, the future uncertain and unpredictable: and we prefer to take refuge in the regret of a supposed golden age, in the memory of “how we were” before losing our illusions. Technology fuels this nostalgic epidemic. Our smartphone, instead of taking us into the future, has transformed into a time machine that, with a sepia-toned filter, tinges the present with melancholic longing. But it is a dangerous game, nostalgia can become an incurable disease. In this eternal return of the same, the space for thinking about the future and producing the new seems exhausted.

All meetings start at 21:15 – Info:

• Public Library 0541.61.84.84
• Tourist Office 0541.61.55.20