Problematicism

PROBLEMATICISM. - "Problematicism" generally denotes every "critical philosophy," that is, every method that intends to begin philosophizing with an examination of its own "possibility" (critique of knowledge, phenomenology); in antiquity an example of p. is Aristotle's "Book of Aporias" (Met., III), and in our own day the philosophy of N. Hartmann (cf. Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 3rd ed., Berlin 1938).

P., however, has a precise meaning in the work of U. Spirito. In the tension between realism and idealism that runs through the development of all modern thought, the most flagrant contradiction has been revealed, inasmuch as the culminating point of anti-intellectualism turns into the culminating point of intellectualism (v.), when, for example, idealist historicism makes the subject itself an object of contemplation, closing itself in a vicious circle. Thus criticism (v.), with the failure of modern idealism (v.), comes to assert itself as p., according to which the only thing that is established from the very beginning is the problem itself, whose legitimacy lies in the irrepressible aspiration to attain the scientific ideal and whose consistency lies in the situation in which p. places itself, inasmuch as, even while trying to emerge from it, it does not yet perceive that it has definitively emerged from it. Thus p. touches the bottom of criticism and escapes the claim of skepticism (v.) without positing itself as dogmatism (v.) either of the object (v.) or of the subject (U. Spirito, Il p., Florence 1948, p. 45 ff.). Only the believer, through the "leap" of his faith, could "resolve" and close the problem of truth, because the believer draws from the Revelation made by God to believers a content and a criterion that transcends finitude (op. cit., p. 82 ff.). The position of p. does not seem far from what Heidegger calls the "openness in being," from the primordial claim to ask, before the entity and before every synthesis (matter and form, essence and existence, object and subject), what being itself is, the light that illuminates the scene in which the entity emerges. In this sense p. can assume an original positivity without being a system.

Cornelio Fabro