PROBLEMATICISM. — In general, the term “problematica” (problematic) has been used to denote any “critical philosophy” or any method that seeks to begin philosophizing with an examination of its own “possibility” (theory of knowledge, phenomenology). In antiquity, an example of this is Aristotle’s “Book of Aporiae” (Met., III), and in our own day, the philosophy of N. Hartmann (cf. Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 3rd ed., Berlin 1938).
In contrast, problematicism has a precise sense in the work of U. Spirito. In the tension between realism and idealism that runs through the development of modern thought, the most glaring contradiction has revealed itself: the culmination of anti-intellectualism becomes the culmination of intellectualism (q.v.), when, for example, idealistic historicism makes the very subject an object of contemplation, closing itself in a vicious circle. Thus, criticism (q.v.), with the failure of modern idealism (q.v.), comes to assert itself as problematicism, according to which the only thing that exists from the outset is the problem itself, whose legitimacy lies in the ineradicable aspiration to attain the scientific ideal, and whose consistency lies in the situation in which problematicism finds itself, inasmuch as, while seeking to escape, it does not yet realize that it has definitively escaped. In this way, problematicism reaches the depths of criticism and evades the challenge of skepticism (q.v.) without positioning itself as dogmatism (q.v.) of either the object (q.v.) or the subject (U. Spirito, Il problematicismo, Florence 1948, pp. 45 ff.). Only the believer, through the “leap” of faith, could “resolve” and close the problem of truth, since the believer attains in the Revelation given by God to the faithful a content and a criterion that transcend finitude (op. cit., pp. 82 ff.). The position of problematicism does not seem far removed from what Heidegger calls the “opening in being,” to the primordial instance of questioning, prior to any entity and any synthesis (matter and form, essence and existence, object and subject), the very being, the light that illuminates the scene in which the entity emerges. In this sense, problematicism can assume an original positivity without being a system.