Fenomenologie della carta stampata. Friedrich Nietzsche e i giornali

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the maze of Nietzschean hermeneutics, Nietzsche's reflection on the modern press deserves to be valued. From the published works, from the Nachlass and from the correspondence, a heated diatribe against the newspapers comes to light; journalism never leaves Nietzsche's polemical aims, representing in his eyes a real philosophical-cultural problem. He proves to be a careful observer of the influence of newspapers on the society of his time: his gaze oscillates between theoretical considerations about the relationship between culture and journalism and more concrete observations on the influence of newspapers on the lives of his contemporaries. A long battle, therefore, for an entire life, unfortunately sedimented in a quantitatively limited material and full of personal grudges: everything Nietzsche has left us on the world of newspapers is scattered in short passages, with an almost always exaggerated tone. However, there is a single moment in Nietzsche's life in which his criticism of journalism does not remain limited to ironic and contemptuous invectives, thrown as angrily as fragmentedly against the print media. It is the Basile period, during which the young Nietzsche's blows to the press find a common denominator, gathering around the Bildung problem: newspapers and journalists become the tangible sign of a much wider crisis that concerns the Bildung tout court. The press reflects a culture that Nietzsche, in fact, does not delay in calling with contempt "Zeitungscultur" (Nachlass, 1873, 29 [22]), a term coined ad hoc to demonstrate how everything that is "newspaper" holds the entire cultural system of the modern era is really in check. In the Basler Vorträge Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten, Nietzsche puts the press on trial. The newspapers are investigated as the main culprits of the "Pseudo-Bildung" and the "Bildungsbarbarei" and journalism is the culmination of the true cultural direction of the modern era, its most institutional form of vulgarization (Vortrag I). It even represents the landing point of the betrayal of culture itself and the hypocritical inversion of values typical of modernity: "die schmählichsten Anzeichen der Unkultur, die plebejische Öffentlichkeit der sogenannten" Kulturinteressen "in Journal und Zeitung wird angepriesen als das Fundament einer ganz neuen allerhöchsten reifsten Bildungsform "(Vortrag III). Fleeting brushstrokes from which the image of a Nietzsche seems to emerge well aware that the experience of modernity often comes together in full with the experience of newspapers. From a posthumous fragment of the years 1875-1876, it even comes to the fore as "press" was one of the themes for those new Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen which, according to the original project never completed, Nietzsche should have added to the four already in circulation. Perhaps at that moment he lacked the time, or he preferred to devote himself to something else. The fact is that, even if you never get to know what he wanted to write in this pamphlet ever made, you can be sure of one thing: Nietzsche carefully observes the daily life of modern men, reflecting on the role of the press and newspapers in extremely sensitive way. Its inactivity gives us back a lively "phenomenological cross-section" of a fundamental aspect of modernity, which is still extremely current and problematic today.