Man Does Not Know His Own Formula
21 Minutes - Julián Carrón closed the morning session at "21 Minutes", an Italian television program that brings together voices from science, culture, and business for dialogue, testimony, and storytelling. He spoke in the segment titled "New Paradigm." This year's edition explored humanity's responsibility in shaping the society of the future—particularly through the lenses of sustainability and education.
Julián Carrón: Good morning, everyone. First of all, thank you to Patrizio for this invitation. As he mentioned, it arose from a misunderstanding—a misunderstanding I eventually accepted precisely because it included a proposal: to share with you the journey of awareness I have undertaken to learn how to live. If anything I say proves useful to any of you, then sharing this moment will have been worth it.
There is no effective summary of the urgency that brings us here today—especially after everything we have heard about the state of the world—than these words by Dostoevsky: “The essential thing we need is for man to become conscious of himself.”
But why is “becoming aware” the crucial task today? Because we are faced with such complexity in life, at all levels, that we are witnessing a collapse of self-evident truths. The evidence that was once shared by all is no longer shared; consequently, we can no longer agree on even the most basic things. It seems almost a contradiction: how can something that seems so obvious collapse?
An observation made years ago by Cardinal Ratzinger helped me understand this. He described the attempt made throughout history to find a point of unity and shared understanding following the religious wars. During the Enlightenment, attempts were made to shield the essential values of life from contradiction—that is, from debate—and to seek an evidence for these values that would render them independent of the many divisions and uncertainties of various philosophies and religious confessions. In this way, they hoped to secure the foundations of coexistence and, more generally, the foundations of humanity. At that time, it seemed possible, as the great fundamental beliefs created by Christianity largely endured and seemed undeniable: the value of the person, the value of freedom, the value of work—many of the things we know.
What was the outcome of this attempt? The search for such reassuring certainty, one that could remain uncontested beyond all differences, failed. The proof is the attempt at a new paradigm, and that is why we all feel the urgency of a new awareness.
But this awareness does not work like material progress (as we saw earlier this morning). First, we must note that cumulative progress is only possible in the material or scientific fields (as with Newton): one cannot go back on an acquisition that is already definitive. However, in the realm of moral awareness, there is no possible accumulation, for the simple reason that human freedom is always new and must always, again and again, make its own decisions. These decisions are never simply made for us by others—by those who came before us or those around us—because in that case, we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every man, every generation, is a new beginning.
Paradoxically, our current situation has not erased the search for this meaning, this paradigm for living. On the contrary, as documented by an authoritative observer of our time, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in the contemporary landscape many people—and here we have a clear example—find themselves in a situation of great loneliness. A profound question arises in their hearts: “What do I really believe in? What is the center of my life? On what do I want to spend my life?” Many people find it very difficult to answer these questions. This new situation has generated an identity crisis in our age. Today, in a context completely different from that of past eras, the human religious experience takes the form of a common search: the emergence of people who are searching, “seekers of meaning,” whom he calls seekers.
I have always been struck by a phrase from Don Luigi Giussani: one of the key points of clarity in thinking is that problems are not solved by addressing them directly, but by deepening our understanding of the nature of the subject addressing them. Self-awareness. The fact that man is this crossroads—without which no structure can stand and no real change can take place—is a sign of our greatness and of an ultimate, irrevocable freedom that no circumstance can eliminate. Not even living in a concentration camp, as Viktor Frankl testifies: everything can be taken away from man except one thing—the ultimate human freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. If, after what we have seen of these “paradisiacal cities,” there were no freedom, there would truly be cause for concern.
I, too, have experienced the challenge of walking a path of awareness within this complexity. From an early age, I had a strong sense of mystery. As I always say, just because a seed is small does not mean it is less real. That sense of mystery was like an intuition, a spark I followed that set me on a search for something to fill my life. The first resource I had at my disposal to begin this search was my humanity. I gradually realized that what saved my life was my loyalty to this humanity I felt vibrating within me. Throughout my life, I have never given up on this search that my “humanity” pushed me toward, a search I think many of you may feel within yourselves.
So, I set out on the path to understand: “Who am I?” Along the way, I found many companions, but one particularly significant traveling companion was a French scholar, Henri de Lubac, who was crucial in helping me begin to understand the experience I felt vibrating within me. He retraces the history of mankind, from ancient times, to understand its mysterious nature. Greek thought saw the ultimate goal of man as a destination achievable through his natural faculties alone. Yet, it was not uncommon for even the ancients to find themselves desiring beyond their limits. This attempt to overstep limits (what we call hubris) was considered dangerous, a folly; thus, it was argued that one had to resign oneself to the limits of nature: “Finibus naturae contentus”—“content within the limits of nature,” as your Cicero said.
One was to be satisfied with what one could achieve, thereby reducing the concept of nature to its limits, neglecting the endless desire that constitutes us and invites us to seek beyond. De Lubac describes this ancient wisdom as follows: “We know how to resign ourselves to avoid disappointment, contenting ourselves with adhering with our whole being to things as they are. We cultivate our little garden.”
But this is ultimately the danger of every age, including our own: to settle. To lose desire, the taste for the infinite, the longing for something greater than oneself. Today, banality is a form of defense, a way of not feeling too much and not letting oneself be wounded by reality. But in doing so, man—each one of us—becomes opaque and satisfied with the superficial.
However, this attempt did not succeed in the past, nor does it succeed in the present. This is why De Lubac adds: “The temptation of something else, of the divine, always reappears,” without us being able to explain it, because nothing can truly diminish human nature. The paradox that constitutes us—a finite nature that yearns for something infinite—was brilliantly identified, once again, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “The ant knows the formula of the anthill, the bee that of its hive, but man does not know his own formula.” Unlike all other living beings, which have the resources to achieve their own ends, man is such a mystery to himself that he cannot know his own formula. The sooner we become aware of this, the better it will be for everyone.
I had this clear consciousness of my humanity, of the disproportion I carried within, and it was my own experience that gave it to me. But I had to have an encounter—the most significant of my life—with Luigi Giussani, to realize that my humanity, with its irrepressible needs for truth, beauty, justice, and happiness, was the criterion for judging any attempt I made to respond to it. It is an awareness that the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato expresses in an incomparable way: “They always reproached me,” he says, “for my need for the absolute. This need runs through my life like a riverbed; better still, like a nostalgia for something I would never achieve. I have never been able to appease my nostalgia, to tame it. For me, nostalgia is a longing that is never satisfied.” It is what we would have liked to be: our desire. It is so true that we cannot live it, that we might even believe it lies outside nature, were it not for the fact that every human being carries within them this hope of being, this feeling that we are missing something.
The nostalgia for this absolute is like an invisible, unknowable backdrop, but one against which we compare everything in life, everything we experience. This is the criterion of judgment. Barbara mentioned it earlier: the desire for happiness was the criterion by which she had to verify whether those cities could meet the needs we had inside. The longing for this absolute is the backdrop against which we compare everything. This is what led Giussani to say, regarding the encounter that changed my life: “The most important thing from an intellectual point of view that I say in all my teaching is when I invite people to compare everything with their own elementary experience, with this need for happiness, beauty, and justice that I have within me.”
That is, with life, with that complex of original structures and inclinations, with what the Bible calls the “heart.” Giussani was so aware of the importance of this criterion of evaluation for personal growth that he offered it to his students so that each one could verify the truth—or lack thereof—of what he himself proposed to them. Imagine a professor who puts this tool in the hands of his students from the very first lesson. He says: “I have always said: I am not here so that you may accept the ideas I tell you as your own, but to teach you a true method for judging the things I will tell you.”
I will always be grateful to Giussani for giving me the fundamental tool to critically evaluate everything I experience. Thanks to him, I began to get excited every time I saw this heart at work, this criterion of evaluation we have within us. Like everyone else, today we felt a jolt when faced with something we heard, because I couldn't manipulate it in any way; this assured me that the criterion was objective, infallible. I could misuse the criterion, but experience made me realize my mistake, because experience, as he says, never deceives. It is like buying the wrong size shoes just because they are on sale: the foot is the criterion, and the test is infallible. Thus, everything that happened to me began to serve me on a journey toward destiny, toward the truth. No one could fool me, not even myself. Everything—without excluding anything, the right things, the wrong things—highlighted the truth: Is it true or not? Is it right or not? Did the shoes fit or not?
But what is this ‘human,’ this longing for the absolute, this lack? Is it a condemnation from which we so often try to escape? Or is it a manufacturing defect in our nature? Nothing helps us understand the mystery of man better than catching him in the act of experience. Leopardi documents this for us, and I cannot talk about him without quoting him almost every time: “To be unable to be satisfied by any earthly thing, nor, so to speak, by the whole earth; to consider the inestimable vastness of space and the number and marvelous size of the worlds, and to find that everything is little and small compared to the capacity of our own soul. To imagine the number of worlds infinite, and the universe infinite, and to feel that our soul and desire are still greater.”
Patrizio: Thank you. Come, let's have a chat. We're running a little late, but thank you, thank you, thank you. You made a wonderful, inclusive, and selective point. It's something I always tell my students: living is a measure. And the greater the measure—that is, the more inclusive we can be—the more authentic life is. Provided, however, that we are able to be selective and therefore offer ourselves a choice. But you have raised a much more careful, much deeper point: how is it possible to choose if we have not achieved authentic contact with the most intimate and profound part of ourselves?
How can you put on your shoes if your foot doesn't possess self-awareness? It protests when you put on the wrong shoe! How can you understand why a child rebels when he feels that something unfair has been done to him? This is the detector we have inside us, so that no one can take us for a ride. And this is who we are.
Julián: For me, as I was saying, it was one of the great discoveries, because it gives us all the criteria we need to be aware of in order to judge anything that happens to us.
Patrizio: Yes, we are at the mercy of narratives. But... so many narratives. You raise a tremendous issue. Because today, from a neuro-psycho-pedagogical point of view, we know that "narrative" is the entire story we tell ourselves about things. We also know that this story changes over time, that we adjust it, adapt it because new experiences come along, new stimuli come along. But you made another point, which I thank you very much for making, because it is one of the main themes of my life: the orphan. This feeling of incompleteness, of need that stimulates the search. Why is this feeling, which can sometimes even become a sense of being lost, not a bad thing but a great good? What... you've already said it, so I'm asking you to repeat it, of course, but I'm doing so because I personally feel the need: why is it so important to embrace this “sense of being an orphan” and confront it? I can say...
Julián: What I wanted...
Patrizio: Almost every day...
Julián: That's what I wanted to explain in the point I wasn't able to make. That this is so decisive because it is the tool for discovering the answer.
Patrizio: Thank you.
Julián: How can one have that sense of lack? It's what one needs to find the loved one, to recognize them among many faces. “The face,” as Guccini says, “I do not exist when you are not there,” otherwise I am left with my own thoughts. The problem is: to whom can we say this in a lasting way? Not just at some point in life, but in a way that lasts forever? Because otherwise we would return to our thoughts—that is, to not coming out of ourselves—and then we would fall prey to all the narratives. The problem is whether we seek an experience of fullness so great that, living in this world we saw this morning, we can be free whatever the situation. Either this is a real experience, or the narrative will prevail.
Patrizio: You seduced me, and I let myself be seduced and loved!.”Thank you. Thank you very much.
The text has not been revised by the author.
