Dialectics and distinction

Benedetto Croce said that the price of civilization is to maintain "continuous vigilance" against barbarism. As never before in history, barbarism - that broken mirror that reflects the shattered shards of ethics - seems to have deciphered the traditional ethical-political codes of surveillance, control and security, established by civilization. And, code in hand, not only has it been outsmarting them, but it has managed to camouflage itself until it cunningly penetrates their entrails to destroy it step by step, just as cancer cells are inserted into organic tissue until it tumorizes it. Now it's just a matter of time. Western society, prey to the glories of its abstract understanding, is on the trail of its recurrent "statistical and methodological investigations", guessing, to see if among figures they can detect the way to restore the keys, and with their eyes cast on the corner of the impotence of a humanism of props, fictitious and alien to the glories of Bocaccio, it is proposed, "ultimately", to resort to negotiation or dialogue, as things are done between civilized people, to see if could agree on some "firm" and "realistic" agreement that, as in other times, stops or puts an end to the growing voracity of the legitimate heirs of the empire of the nomads. It is no longer a "threat": they are here and in Ecuador, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Spain, and nobody seems to notice.

 

 Benedetto Croce was one of the two great Italian thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. The other was Giovanni Gentile, with whom Croce discussed in depth the dialectical and historical logos, and particularly the concept of opposition. Hegel, according to Croce, had the merit of discovering that the opposition is the soul of reality, and that the spirit is both the opposition and the unity of the opposite terms. The problem is that, in his opinion, he ended up extending his conception of opposition even to what he is not opposed to, confusing it with what is different. The beautiful is opposed to the ugly in aesthetics, the true to the false in logic, the useful to the useless in economics, good to evil in ethics. But there is no opposition, for example, between beauty and falsehood, because one and the other have a different status of reality and correspond to different degrees of the life of the spirit. Theoretical activity cannot be confused with practice, nor can the concrete with the abstract, or the particular with the universal.

 

 A concrete universal is a cultural and historical construct. It is the result of the practical and theoretical activity of the spirit, and it is far from being an abstraction, because the abstract is not - as has been made to believe - neither the lofty or ethereal nor the complicated and profound, but, rather, the partial. and incomplete. For this very reason, for Croce there is no possibility of opposition between a particular abstract degree and a concrete universal degree, as, for example, between utility and ethics. The useful is an act of satisfaction of a desire based on immediate needs. For what is useful to become ethical, it is decisive that it ceases to be abstractly and arbitrarily useful and reaches a higher level of concreteness that allows it to transform mere desire into free will, in other words, into awareness of necessity, into law. Only in this way, through effort and cultural training, can a certain being make the qualitative leap from barbarism to civilization. Between the one and the other there is, therefore, no dialectical opposition but rather a relation of different terms. There is no opposition between them but distinction, because their logic does not contain parity.

 

Will a politician moderately aware of his public priesthood, with a certain cultural and professional training, with ethical-political values ​​that are tendentially modern -including a taste for baseball- and with a minimum awareness of the importance of commitment to the word, will he be able to sit down dialogue with a barbarian -a gangster who intends to intoxicate the minds of as many Westerners as possible with narcotics until they implode- and agree with him on the terms of a negotiation -as itinerant salesmen of household appliances unhappily say- of a type 'win win'? “The barbarian is astonished when he hears that the square of the hypotenuse must be equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs. He believes that it could also be otherwise. He is afraid of the intellect and sticks to intuition,” says Hegel. Croce would add that the barbarian's intuition is of the same nature as that of abstract utilitarian desire, never of the concrete universal of ethics. Was Valentinian III able to sit down and negotiate a "win-win" agreement with Attila, "the scourge of God", a paradigm of cruelty, destruction and rapine? If the moral codes of the eventual interlocutors are not only different but incompatible, if what for one turns out to be an aberration for the other turns out to be good and natural, if honor is interpreted as dishonor, submission as peace, rationing as abundance and manipulation as truth, will it be possible to establish a relationship of dialectical opposition between the two? For barbarism, being ignorant means being strong. In Eurasia and EastAsia, says Orwell, the deepest-rooted feeling is that of the worship of death and the disappearance of the self.

 

 In reality, there is no dialectic of the different. One can only speak of dialectics when there are two opposite terms, such as the north pole and the south pole, right and left, father and son, because what makes the existence of one of the terms possible, what determines it, is its other. Is it possible for the north pole to exist without the south pole? And, in the hypothetical case that it came to exist, would it be polo with respect to what? In such a way that the only thing that gives meaning and meaning to each pole is not found in it but in its correlative opposite term. For this reason, once again, it is worth asking if, for example, the Al Capone of El Furrial or the offspring of a terrorist and kidnapper by trade could come to form the opposite, correlative, dialectical term of some respectable politician, since , in spite of the suspicions that the vile intrigues may instill, they exist.

 

 The problem continues to be that of the present incompatibility between the different ones. And, by virtue of the distinction, it is worth thinking seriously, beyond the statistical graphs, about the risks to the security of today's Western civilization, in the face of the growing narco-terrorist threat. It will not be by following the recipes of prescriptive psychology or sociology that the solution will be obtained. Gangrene is not cured with eau de cologne. Machiavelli is more relevant today than ever.