Remo Bodei

Remo Bodei at the Trento Economics Festival in 2018

Remo Bodei (1938 - 2019) was an Italian philosopher and university professor.

Quotes

• Each of us lives other lives in our imagination, fueled by literature and the media. Through them, we attempt to remedy the limitations of our own existence.
  • Corriere della sera, 16 January 2009

• Goodness is beautiful insofar as it is governed by the right measure, by overall balance, by the middle ground established by the exact laws of virtue, which is “harmony.”
  • Le forme del bello, il Mulino, Bologna, 2017. ISBN 9788815337498

• Death is never trivial: it is solemnity, it is mystery.
  • Corriere della sera, 26 January 2010

• Despite recurring announcements, it is [...] certain that philosophy, like art, is by no means “dead.” On the contrary, it is revived every season because it corresponds to needs for meaning that are continually—and often unconsciously—reformulated. Philosophy seeks answers to these questions, whether silent or explicit, by measuring and exploring the drift, conformation, and faults of those symbolic continents on which our common thinking and feeling rest.
  • La filosofia del Novecento, Donzelli, Roma, 1997, p. 188

• Every work of art carves out its own unique time and space.
  • Corriere della sera, 2 June 2008

• It can be said that the joy of thinking consists in crossing ever more distant boundaries, in moving away from initial assumptions in such a way that—once the journey is over, looking back—one can measure the extent of the distance traveled.
  • Limite, Il Mulino, 2016, p. 65

Sì al dialogo fra Chiesa e non credenti, no a interventi a gamba tesa sulla politica italiana

Claudia Mura, Tiscali.it, 28 October 2011

• Each of us is born without knowledge or will, at a specific time and place, with a body inherited from our parents, and we struggle hard to reach, in forced stages, an understanding of the world into which we have fallen. The risk is that, in the end, everyone forms their own opinions without comparing them.
• We are in a position to know very little, and with our vast ignorance, we all need to seek the truth, which cannot be reduced to mere opinion, especially today when there is a worrying return to illiteracy and a infantilization of the public for which the media, especially television, are responsible, as they tend to simplify every message.
• I don't like the fact that you try to drive a wedge between atheists and agnostics.
• Read the differences because only then can we discuss, otherwise it's just unctuous and ceremonial.

Paesaggi Sublimi. Gli uomini davanti alla natura selvaggia

Remo Bodei, Paesaggi Sublimi. Gli uomini davanti alla natura selvaggia, Bompiani, 2008. ISBN 9788845261381

Incipit

In the spring of 53 BC, the Roman general Crassus, who was leading an expedition against the Parthians, was tricked by a traitor into pushing his seven legions into a desert area. This is Plutarch's account: "Abgarus persuaded Crassus to leave the river and led him across the plains, along a route that was easy and comfortable at first, but then became arduous when deep sands and plains without trees or water appeared, with no end in sight. So not only did thirst and the difficulty of the march weaken the troops, but they were also discouraged by the desolate appearance of the landscape, where there was not a plant, not a stream, not the prominence of a sloping mountain, not a blade of sprouting grass; instead, a rolling sea of desert dunes and nothing else surrounded the army." This desert, boundless and indistinct, disorienting and threatening, frightens the soldiers, who are, moreover, mocked by their false guide: "But you think you are traveling through Campania! You seek its uninterrupted succession of springs, shady groves, baths, and inns! Don't you remember crossing the borders between the Arabs and the Assyrians?"

Explicit

The sublime therefore seems to have the ability to resurface in ever-changing guises. To paraphrase the English painter and poet William Blake, rather than a well containing a limited amount of water, it is comparable to a fountain that continuously “overflows” with ever-fresh water. Its flow may vary, but it still represents a sustenance for our need not to surrender to the flatness of feeling, desiring, and thinking. From this point of view, the sublime is nothing more than that excess of meaning, that invisible ultraviolet toward which we move every time we try to lean out, transforming ourselves, toward the extreme and unexplored boundaries of our experience.