Letture. La verità della finzione

[Autom. eng. transl.] Human experience, the exclusive way of existence of women and men, never coincides with simple life, but is the result of the intertwining of signs, dreams, symbols, ghosts, fears, regrets, expectations, imaginations, hopes, illusions, intentions, feelings of guilt ... that accompany like a shadow every moment of living. Talking about this tangled and dense plot, and its eccentric logic that also governs the deepest experience, is a reckless undertaking. And yet there is a segment of human expression that does not shy away from the task of responding to this irrepressible need for meaning. It is great literature, which lends its voice to tell some truth about that distinctive human trait often absent in scientific discourse, perhaps also because it cannot be totally reduced to them. And he does so by using his most refined instrument: fiction, a unique and peculiar way of speaking about the secret of the human being, of bringing out and safeguarding the testimonies relating to what is essential in the human. The philosopher Silvano Petrosino approaches this mode of expression, dedicating the essays collected here to the works of great authors, from Céline to Conrad, from Manzoni to Kafka, from Joyce to Yourcernar and others, without being distracted by the din that accompanies the proclamations of artificial intelligence and the discoveries of neuroscience, and by the chatter that comes from the social world, but continuing to listen to that literary word that insists on testifying to the irreducible appeal of questions already launched by Nietzsche: what have we really experienced? Who are we in reality?