The title of this essay is paraphrased from Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo”, because I believe that narcissism, that I tried to outline in the examples as well the Canadian author made using the marketing politics, is rooted in western philosophical background insofar situating the fundament of reality in a absolute order and/or absolutizing the mind, it mortifies the becoming. The challenge against the becoming is the one of men against nature and death, I am convinced that the homogenization highlighted by the Canadian author, is the result of this game.

1. 1
NO LOGOS
MAURIZIO PARISI
You more shiver
pronouncing this
sentence than I
listening it
Friar Giordano Bruno
from Nola

2. 2
1. No Logos
On the 27 September 2012, Renata Polverini, President of Region Lazio, one of
the majors of the I talian Republic, signed in Rome, a let ter to ant icipate her
resignat ion, after days of hesitat ion. Grotesque feast s, paid with public money
financed for the correct working of the advisory councils and for the correct
relat ion between elector and elected, the case. And not for case, resignat ions
signed despite the punctual and pressing at tempt s of dissuasion from the previous
I talian President , to whom the roman syndicalist was bound, secularly know as
Silvio Berlusconi.
Not for case because, as it is worldwide known, the lat ter has been brought
to t rial for as much resounding quest ions, the Bunga Bunga night s. They were more
or less passionate ballet s, where guest s wore bizarre masks, such as the one of the
judge I lda Boccassini and that were executed with the discourses of the polit ical
opponent s, as the U.S.A president Barack Obama, as background. Tribal feast s,
where beaut iful girls, some of them under age, simulated oral intercourse with the
statue of the god Priapo, the god known for his enormous penis, that was not
accepted on the mount Olympus because he could not contain his sexual
inst inct s and that obligated the nymph Lot is to sacrifice who, rather than giving in
to his insane desires, preferred to throw herself in the waters of a river, suddenly
scat tered by lotus petals.
And not for case, also because the Bunga Bunga night s were curiously similar
to the roman part ies, not only for their indecency, but also for their main theme:
the glorious Greek culture. That one in which the President of Region Lazio was
involved was ent it led Olympus and included a presentat ion video also: Priapo
excluded, from imagines emerge that there were among the others Zeus, Eros,
Minos, Aphrodite, Medusa, masks which concealed councillors and advisors of
each administ rat ive level and party, public and private managers, ent repreneurs,
magnates, princes and princesses. Over one thousand guest s, all paid by I talians.
Finally, late at night and at the limit of alcoholic graduat ion reached, for the
posterity memory, the masks whose pictures were published on newspapers beside

3. the president Polverini appeared, those with the pig faces, that began to grope
the girls…
The invest igat ions also reported about other feast s, including details that is
undignified to enumerate in sat iric key too. They can be found in the websites,
magazines and televisions which have built their success on gossip, many of these
notably belonging to the same Berlusconi. But what have these discourses in
common with philosophy?
I believe that the great disease of the western culture is narcissism, on which I
will return, and I taly is the best example because is the only count ry where the
cultural indust ry of Horkheimer and Adorno, surpassed the funct ional dimension to
the capitalism, arriving to lead the State direct ly. Cultural indust ry that today is
made of big private groups that , using an overdose of gossip for example,
promote a collect ive imaginary detached from real life, especially from the
problems of the poor people. An imaginary where all that could crit icize the reality
of the leisure class is reduced to a joke, causing the loss, before of the polit ic
dimension, of the awareness about the mysteries in the universe and inside us. An
imaginary that st imulates inst inct s and limit s human empathy, causing an infant ile
regression that impedes to think over the immediate consumpt ion. All this just to
increase the product ivity and the sales or, as it happens in the Bel Paese, to win
the elect ions.
Moreover, in the roman feast s, those people also mocked desperate workers
that had lost their job, in disdain of other people suffering. But the disdain of our
neighbors suffering does not concern only the leisure class about whom Thorstein
Veblen spoke. As the Prince of Salina predicted in Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa’s novel “I l Gat t opardo”: “We were t he Leopards, t he Lions; t hose
who'll take our place will be lit t le jackals, hyenas; and t he whole lot of us,
Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on t hinking ourselves t he salt of t he
eart h”.
Behind the hyper-efficiency of modern society, the disdain of pain can
emerge in a more deviant way, in form of indifference. Also physicians, whose
funct ion would have to st imulate more empathy, have given life to even more
ignominious happenings. In the following pages are reported some passages of a
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4. phone call between two doctors of Santa Rita clinic. Clinic that became famous in
I t aly as t he “horror clinic” because of the useless surgery operat ions that took
place there as the only object ive to obtain reimbursement from Nat ional Health
Service. Phone call intercepted together with many others in the 2008 (real names
are omit ted).
SPECIALIST 1: “That is, did you fish from Olt repò Pavese?”
SPECIALIST 2: “But I fished from everywhere, from Lodi, where I operated on
t he breast s, t hen I begun fishing t he lungs, from Olt repò Pavese, from Pavia, from
Milan, because however all of my pat ient s in inst it ute have been following me up
t o now…t oday t hree of t hem came to Pavia, pat ient s t hat came t here to be
checked, t hey went on calling me and telling me t hey had come to see me and
t hey could pay my fee… what I want to say is t hat I had already had several
people who asked to be nursed just because t hey had heard about me, t he way I
t reated people, my being available at any t ime. St ill now, believe me or not , I
examined around 35-40 people in t he 15 days for free.
SPECIALIST 1: “Yes, yes”.
SPECIALIST 2: “People t hat call me, come here, show me t he radiographies.
This evening t he mot her of t hat Down’s syndrome pat ient came, she poor
woman… but you remember SPECIALIST 3 who was a professor, how many fucking
operat ions did he use to do? He sucked everyt hing himself , he asked t hose four
nerds to come, wit h t he story t hat he was a universit y professor, and t hey drove
him back and for, and at t he end he cashed t he DRG.
SPECIALIST 1: “Uhm”
SPECIALIST 2: “No? How do you pay? By gross 5000 Euro t hat are t hen 4000,
and of t hose 4000 what do you take? 2000 for you and 1000 for t he ot her two? But
for 1000 t he ot her two spit us in our face, t hat is, t hey don’t come t o do t he shift ,
do you understand?
SPECIALIST 1: “Of course”
SPECIALIST 2: “But yes, numbers are t hose! That is, or you make 15 lungs or
ot herwise you can’t pay a t eam, and t o make 15 lungs…gosh!…and no…I say,
t hen if you are lucky in a mont h 4 mult iple t raumas can arrive and, I don’t know, 10
4

5. costal fractures, but what do you do? Will you operate 10 costal fract ures because
you don’t have pat ient s?”
The vict ims’ names are instead real, as Antonio, a high risk pat ient , who died
during the operat ion for a heart lacerat ion, as he did not bear the lung operat ion
for a tumor of which there was not t race in the clinic documentat ion. At the clinic
Santa Rita all sort of things occurred. They removed breast because of simple
cyst s, they cured bronchial pneumonias and tuberculosis removing the lungs, they
arrived to implant a right anterior t ibial tendon in the place of that left patellar only
because t he pat ient was “under knives”, t hat is he was in the operat ing room.
A “lung under knives” is a person t hat t rust s his doct or and when he closes his
eyes for the anesthesia he prays to reopen them and, on the other side, a
physician cannot be unable to understand it , therefore how is it possible to explain
then all this cruelty?
The modern system can be defined as t he realizat ion of t he “Homo
Oeconomicus” preached by t he neoclassical economics, namely the paradigm
that reconst ruct s the human behavior using geomet rical-mathemat ical
inst rument s and moving from the assumpt ion that human being possess the
calculus skills of a computer and can be in relat ion to the world in acquisit ive way
only.
The principal failure of this view is psychological before that economic. Basing
an ent ire economic theory on profit maximizat ion means not only disowning that
human rat ionality is limited, but also that man is not a computer because he is an
emot ional being. In modern societ ies, commercialism has colonized the collect ive
imaginary and mechanized social relat ions, that have become deprived of
empathy and dimensioned in funct ion of their ut ility. The system works as bet ter as
more aggressiveness st imulates and the other exist s as a compet itor only, but
economic relat ions are human relat ions too and, beyond any wrong predict ion, it
happens that when compet it iveness, which is so much praised on the manuals,
passes from the economics facult ies to banks and finally to society, becomes hate
and fear.
When philosophers talk about distorted effect s of technic, they should not
omit that techno-science is guided by capitalism. Techno-science can be
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6. dehumanizing because endowed of the power of modifying the human
anthropologic statute. These are quest ions that will present ever more in future and
that are already present ing, nevertheless humanity has to be searched, before
that in the technology, in the relat ion with technical personnel and nowadays this
humanity lacks because that part icular technique that is capitalism has leaded
also physicians to became first of all specialist s in making money.
Moreover today this system, from a point of view merely economic, is also in
crisis. Unt il some decades ago, the western product ion was increasing and the
system seemed directed toward the full employment . But the globalizat ion caused
the fall of the majority of technical barriers and the compet it ion of many count ries,
that were market before, has determined the fall of the profits in western firms.
Nonetheless, the therapy chosen by polit ics was to cont inue to privat ize despite
the dogma of efficiency had been cont radicted by the necessity of the public
intervent ion to save the big banks from planetary financial bubbles.
I think that also in an efficient global market , without the redist ribut ive
funct ion, a quote of inefficiency is necessary to maintain the profit and the
unemployment tends to increase with the growth of technology, but it is more
important to remark before that unlimited growth collides with the limitat ion of the
environment . Nuclear Disasters as Fukushima are sadly emblemat ic because on a
hand they highlight how the power of nature remains superior to whichever
technology and on the other how nature is our original home. Among those
enormous forces, it is nest led a fragile ecosystem of which we are expression of,
also if we realize it only when we are obliged to evacuate the contaminated
zones to avoid genet ic mutat ions.
I am convinced that the western product ivity crisis derives above all from lack
of cooperat ion because the wild compet it iveness has made difficult the sharing of
economic object ives too, and more in deep I believe that before that in
product ivity, the crisis lies in the lack of creat ivity of western culture, that can
become lack of innovat ion also.
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7. 7
2. Logos No
The t it le of this essay is paraphrased from Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo”,
because I believe that narcissism, that I t ried to out line in the examples as well the
Canadian author made using the market ing polit ics, is rooted in western
philosophical background insofar situat ing the fundament of reality in a absolute
order and/or absolut izing the mind, it mort ifies the becoming. The challenge
against the becoming is the one of men against nature and death, I am
convinced that the homogenizat ion highlighted by the Canadian author, is the
result of this game.
This clearly emerges if we compare the western philosophical t radit ion with
the eastern one. While for the eastern t radit ion all is interconnected and the form
does not exist if not in relat ion with the other forms, western thought reduces
complexity through ideal categories and assumes that these categories
correspond to nature. While eastern philosophy eliminates the dichotomy subject -
object , the western thought contains on an idea of domain on nature and in this
way it created modern science founded on the ut ility of the paradigms and on
technology.
Also when western philosophy direct s the look toward inside, it unhooks the
thought from the body, that is again from nature, because it does not recognize to
sensat ions an act ive role in the format ion of the thought . On the cont rary, eastern
philosophy consider knowing based on a preconscious intuit ion, integrally rooted
in body and does not deprive of content , but rather the furrow from which all
content s grow.
With eastern philosophy, we do not mean generically the eastern thought ,
with it s richness of aspect s, but precisely a Japanese philosophical school. Indeed,
even if the expression eastern philosophy is not always accepted in Europe, those
thinkers associated under the name of Kyoto School of Philosophy, proposed to

8. make philosophy in the western sense of the term, although combined with
eastern culture and mainly with Buddhism.
Today neurosciences get close to this prospect ive. The knowing-becoming by
act ion-intuit ion, that Nishida Kitaro, the precursor of the Japanese philosophical
school, talks about , seems supported by a group of scient ist s afferent to Parma
University. I talian scient ist s affirm to have ident ify the place of empathy in the mirror
neurons, situated in the cerebral areas connected to movement , since these
neurons are act ivated not only when we are execut ing an act ion, but also when
we observe another execut ing the same act ion.
However, the use of the term empathy in this essay first ly moves from the
Greek word sympat heia, that philosophers such as Adam Smith and David Hume
used a long t ime before the development of neurosciences and even before used
by ancient philosophers to indicate the interconnect ion that animates the
universe.
Empathy is not only the capacity to share sent iment s. I t has a cognit ive
funct ion because gives us the possibility to experience the opposites. In the
intuit ion that arise by the dialect ic between sensat ions and empathy, sensat ions
acquire object ivity which generates the awareness, that precedes and makes
possible the thought . This mediator funct ion corresponds to what Adam Smith
called sympathy, but it is equivalent to the pure and simple capacity to put us in
the other. As Nishida said, understanding means that the knowing and the known
are one in the awareness.
Our capacity to make the good, derives from the fact that human nature is
not made of aggressive inst inct s only. On the cont rary, the success of human kind
is due to the development of sociality more than any other species. Indeed
empathy possess an original affect ive content , as Hume sustained using the term
sympathy in a more appropriate way. This determines the development of the
dialect ic between aggressiveness and empathy, and this dialect ic const itutes the
space of our freedom. Morality is not generated by abst ract precept s, but as
distancing from aggressive inst inct s through social inst inct s.
What we call representat ion already operates at the level of will, as empathy
that is st ill will, and this awareness derives from our sociality. This seems to me the
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9. emot ional background in which the mind embodied, whose George Lakoff speaks
in t he book “Met aphors We Live By”, produces it s meanings. Per se, the reasoning
pertains to memory and whatever language is learned and historically
determined, as the great psychologist Lev Vygot skij, in his work ”Thought and
Language”, suggested and as today researches about capacity of babies to
imitate facial expression or about the capacity of many animals to use simple
symbols to communicate, test ifies. Certainly, no animal has such an awareness to
invent complex languages, but it was observed that some primates can learn
human languages, as sign language, and ut ilize them in absence of st imulat ion
also, as they were thinking.
But what is more important to the goal of this work is that removing the
becoming, it is impossible to develop a thought really crit ical because it is not
radically put in discussion oneself too. The western t radit ion created modern
science but the price to pay to think oneself free and to reduce complexity is that
man ceases to perceive himself as part of nature, inside something that is bigger
than him and that comprehend pain and suffering as element s of his essence. This
determines the loss of the philosophical dimension and lead to anthropocent rism
and narcissism, from that it follows a dogmat ic thinking, incapable to face the
change.
Also monotheisms inherit the same approach and the same problems of
western philosophy. Assuming that a t ranscendent order exist s and t ransforming it
in the place of salvat ion, where the individual soul cont inues in eternal,
monotheisms furnish a sense and a repair from anguish. Nevertheless, if death does
not have a own significance, not even the life has a own sacredness and there is
no reason to love it in it s different iat ion. In part icular, if it is not the corporeality to
associate us, there is no reason per se to prove compassion for the suffering of the
other men. In this way, man creates a morality separate to reality, that avoids
together anguish, the reflect ion about the mysteries of the life, limit ing the natural
empathy and often becoming a personal morality that finish to just ify the worse
inst inct s, as we can see in the religious wars that persist from thousands of years.
Rarely, in I talian cultural debate, the theme of the death is deepened
beyond a commingling with Catholicism. And yet , the death is the antagonist of
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10. modern scient ism, since the becoming is the prospect ive in what it is possible
discuss about what it remains to nature after the power of techno-science and
also if science could said something about to die as natural event , nothing it can
as existent ial experience.
The Kyoto school of philosophy was defined as philosophy of nothing. Thinking
the nothing is not deprived of consequences because it allows human being to
acquire awareness that he is nothing than a shadow in the becoming and to
reconciles with the death. But as out lined before, since human nature is
ambivalent , it opens both the way of empathy and of inst inct s. In the simple
intellectual ant icipat ion of the death, the dichotomy subject -object is not
eliminated even if caught in the becoming. To this way, man put himself in
cont rast to the force of nature and inst inct s result exalted.
On the cont rary, Tanabe Hajime, the second great exponent of the Kyoto
school, affirms that to accept the death means recognize the impotence of the
force own, impotence of philosophy does not incur ant inomies included. To
subject to the force other through the pract ice-faith-testimony in the nothing. Unt il
the death-resurrect ion of se, that accept ing the nothing, is lead to the great
negat ion-yet great compassion, that permit s to eliminate narcissism and to open
towards the neighbor love.
Nonetheless, the pain for the communal sort to be nothing per se cannot
involve our ent ire life, while from idealizat ion of the nothing ensues a
t ranscendence without content , that ends to support st ill less than the idea of a
creator the crit ics of Parmenides, that argues that things do not come from
nothing and do not move into nothing.
The eastern philosophers, some of whom were disciples of Heidegger,
idealized the nothing because founded the dialect ic of nature bringing to
ext reme consequences the personal dimension. Nevertheless, from the eastern
prospect ive remains an object ion to Parmenides idealism, because the fact that
things do not come from nothing and do not move into nothing does not exclude
that they get t ransformed. I f a creator is negated, being cannot be conceived as
immobile since, to explain the becoming, it has to contain the negat ion in it self.
10

11. The dialect ic could be cont inued. Indeed understanding Tanabe force other
not as nothing but as the nature it self, it is possible to graft in this posit ion a general
theory of movement , as Friedrich Engels in his uncomplet ed work” Dialect ics of
Nat ure” t ried to make. The conflict s are everywhere: the bigger galaxy at t ract s
and absorbs the smaller ones and in the meant ime the black-holes both galaxies
at t ract and absorb. The solar energy allows the photosynthesis of vegetables, that
are nut riment for prey animals, that are eaten by predators, while human technic
dest roy the ecosystem in which both preys and predators live. Without the
movement Engels spoke about , it is impossible explain even life, because also the
philosophers that negate the movement are the product of the energy that
allowed that some mat ter was concent rated around a membrane to exist as
universe in the universe.
Nonetheless, Engels mathemat ized the dialect ic and thought it as a scient ific
method, not considering that , in an infinite universe, the theory of movement
returns to the immobile being of Parmenides if it is not brought to the ext reme
consequences. Philosophically, I f it is assumed that nature operates dialect ically,
then each term in cont raposit ion will be in it s turn object of a cont raposit ion, unt il
the opposites confound themselves in a cont radictory ident ity, that is the medium
of the dialect ic. The fundament of universe is the universe that dialect ically auto-determine
it self, becoming creat ive, so creat ive to create a creat ive being as
human. We can define it as energy or spirit of nature or, like Giordano Bruno
stated, anima mundi, soul of the world.
Maybe, never before as in modern liquid society it is necessary a sense. But if
techno-science cannot put in discussion it self, how this task can be conducted by
a philosophy st ill t ied to the low of non-cont radict ion, that const itutes the base of
modern science and that is a knowledge funct ional to the manipulat ion of the
world and adequate to the brevity of life, but does not to ambit ions that would
have to animate philosophy? As Giacomo Leopardi wrote, also if cruel nature is
the mother. The absence of a t ranscendent sense, does not signify that things do
not have sense, because the sense is inherent to the nature it self. Only if man will
accept himself as bound to the nature, together with all the worlds that form the
infinite universe, we can hope in a sincere responsibility to the others. Empathy can
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12. spread only if men acquired the awareness that “I and other” are one in the spirit
of nature, because they are expression of the same energy that const itutes the
universe. On the opposite, I f human awareness will serves the only purpose to
increase the will of power of the techno-capitalism, human beings will regress to
primordial inst inct s and will not die the philosophy of the spirit only, but the spirit
it self.
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