Report Roman correspondence
Of Giovanni Tortelli
The events of the student protest that from the squares of Paris to those of half of Europe gave rise to "May '68" took the form of a true cultural revolution, and as such they were warned. The '68 movement had all the characteristics of the cultural revolution: spontaneity, the surprise effect, the grassroots initiative and the transversality of the demands.
Which were not political except very indirectly. They were indeed bearers of a new deontological and teleological order to replace a system in which the individual's way of thinking, the organization of the family and social institutions were still based on the principles of a hierarchy and natural law authority, principles that came definitively, if not quite suddenly, delegitimized.
Of course. No delegitimizing force - least of all the 1968 protest - could have had success against archetypes of natural law as implicit in man and rooted in his lifestyle and faith as the family., institutions and the entire social order including the Church, if we had not already taken action against them at the time with strokes of Jacobinism first and then of modernism.
Beyond that, also the great European literature of the early twentieth century with Proust, Joyce, Musil and Kafka in the lead had carried out its task of demolishing the pillars of society very well, especially in his foundations of the family and paternal authority, reevaluating at the same time the role of the woman-wife but only to make her become the antagonist of the husband-father.
It is not for nothing that the youth revolt of '68 was the revolt of children against their fathers and, more generally, against anyone who personified a magisterial authority, even more so against the authority of the Church and the values that it symbolized. So the movement of '68 cannot be denied, who fully inherited this culture, the underlying character of revolt against "natural justice", that is, against that order of values valid for everyone because it comes from God as eternal law of which Saint Augustine speaks and which Saint Thomas places at the summit of the cosmos (Sudden. Ia-IIae q. 93 a. 1 arg.3).
Whoever "really" inspired the protest of May '68 understood the importance that scholastic-Thomist thought, and more generally metaphysical, it still represented in the way of being of the individual and of Western society. Therefore every principle was attacked, Everything is fine arché, and we preferred to think that things, the men, were simply a "trace", a trace that erased every origin and allowed only an earthly horizon.
The direct filiation of '68 must be ascribed to those Marxist philosophical circles in which Sartre and his followers moved. new philosophers of the French school, come M. Foucault, L. Althusser, J. Derrida; and to the «Professors» of the Frankfurt School, i.e. Th. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, W. Benjamin, E. Fromm and especially H. Marcuse. Circles in which an elite Marxism was professed, academic and salon worker always careful not to be contaminated by workers' movements and struggles.
The often colorful slogans with which students challenged the system («Consume more, you will live less"; «Let's storm the sky»; «It is forbidden to prohibit»), they almost always recalled the original thoughts of the masters, especially of Sartre and Marcuse, soon assumed to be true charismatic leaders of the movement.
Despite the fact that the sociological discourse of the "Frankfurters" had a very strong impact on the student world due to its anti-capitalist scope and "autonomous Marxist path" to be developed and implemented within the countries of industrial capitalism, it seems more relevant to me to dwell on the contours of that "neo-humanist" thought brought forward primarily by Sartre and further taken to the extreme by his followers because it had a more profound impact, and I would say irremediably, in thought and therefore in the society that began from '68 onwards.
The evident fragility of Sartre's neo-humanist theses would not be able to explain the enormous success they had not only among the young university students of '68 but as a turning point in social customs if one did not take into account that they were experienced by the students of the time as a doctrine made almost mystical by the direct commitment of the teachers on the political scene. Sartre, but then also Foucault, e Althusser, and Derrida, they were the astute inventors of those figures of committed philosophers who brought their ideas to success in the squares and barricades of Paris also with their direct action.
The weakness of the new thought - despite the fact that Sartre had dedicated it to the fundamental text of his doctrine, Being and nothingness, almost seven hundred pages – it explains itself with a few examples. The new Sartrean statute envisaged a man with weak reason no longer able to grasp the essence of himself and things, a decapitated man of every otherworldly dimension because he turned only to the "what is" of matter, a man alien to himself, to others and the surrounding world. The terms of comparison with which every knowledge system, however new and original, must always deal with the awareness of oneself and others, of things, of the world.
Ora, it is known that for Sartre the world has no rational justification, it is as it is, it is purposeless, it exists because it exists, it is "nothing". While conscience - which should have awareness of itself and offer that of others and the rest of the world - is not able to make the knowing subject grasp the nature (being) of things: nature remains a dark thing, veiled, approximate and which in any case escapes reason together with the thing itself and, above all, together with the truth. This is nothingness.
What does the knowledge of man then boil down to for Sartre?? To the sole knowledge of "what is of matter": if the world – says Sartre – is nothingness, and man's consciousness is "non-being" because it is not capable of self-perception, to perceive itself as conscience, then I can know «only» the things with which I interact, but I cannot know or conceive "everything", much less conceptual realities like God, the soul, creation, divine because ordered.
Faced with the nullifying power of conscience, Sartre does not recognize any value in morality, nor to ethics: since I too am a worthless thing among the other worthless things in the world, and therefore everything is nothing, if I too want to escape my nothingness I have to give myself a meaning, «plan me». There are no support points. And it is also a project towards my fellow man: only insofar as another individual is "designally" chosen, you come into contact with him: it is the confirmed death of every emotional and loving dynamic, it is another death of man's nature.
In this desolation man can only choose, indeed he is condemned to choose so as not to be just one thing and therefore to feel free, even if all this costs him an anguish that is recognized by Sartre himself.
As you can see, it is a fragile anthropology, On the contrary, amoral, negative e deadly, which leaves the individual as master of himself towards himself and towards others, eliminating all responsibility in favor of action, which can also be indiscriminate, as it was in the following years of lead.
However, when Sartre spoke of "total freedom" or "freedom to choose" and linked full freedom to full freedom of choice, he was taken as an oracle by the students in the square; so too did Foucault when he spoke of the traditional "death of man".; and Lacan when he moved metaphysical man «from the place that the humanistic tradition had assigned to him»; and Derrida when he spoke of a «change in humanism» with a view to «dissolving the darkness of humanistic metaphysics». Everyone was taken even more seriously when they played the role of committed philosophersthey now professed themselves Leninists, now Maoists, ora Trotskyist, the edge of the castle. Devastating furies against the old "bourgeois and confessional" system.
It was from here, from this non-being of consciousness, from this freedom-planning-conflict-irresponsibility of man, principles fully accepted by those students of the time, that we set out on the path of revising the principles of morality and manipulating ethics, and then rush first towards the law on divorce and then towards that on abortion.
Unfortunately the effects of '68 are not over yet, man has managed to go even further than abortion and has also established increasingly higher vital levels for old people and newborns to be admitted or eliminated from the right to live. Dark times in which reason is obscured and man - "free" as someone who has rejected God can be - has preferred to entrust his destiny to obscure scientific protocols.
