VARISCO, Bernardino. – Spiritualist philosopher, born in Chiari (Brescia) on 20 April 1850 and died there on 21 October 1933.
His fame began with the philosophy prize of the Lincei (1900), which in 1905 took him from teaching in secondary schools to the chair of philosophy at the University of Rome, which he held until 1925.
A stern and solitary thinker, V. developed his thought with rigorous continuity, moving from an initial phase inspired by positivism to a critical philosophy that ultimately sought to clarify itself as Christian spiritualism within the fundamental principles of modern thought. The originality of V.’s intellectual evolution lies partly in his dissatisfaction with the positions he successively occupied and the consequent critical exigency he elaborated to transcend them (positivism, idealism), and partly in the persistence and deepening of certain fundamental concerns (the plurality of subjects, personal survival, the foundation of moral consciousness, the personality of God) which he sought to bring to full critical awareness. The theoretical core of this tension increasingly clarified itself around the relationship between the two planes of consciousness which he designated as “lived thought” and “logical thought.” Lived thought is constituted by the activity of individual subjects in which logical thought is empirically manifested: the empirical character of lived thought is given by the entire complex of functions involved in the elaboration of experience, from elementary sensations to the most complex perceptual syntheses, which condition the appearance of logical thought to varying degrees depending on the diversity of objects. The principal factors operating in lived thought, according to V., are feeling, interest, education, culture, and language; the most deeply experienced element of lived thought is “feeling,” and here the evident influence of Rosmini is apparent. The other factors, and above all interest and language, condition the “transcendence” of thought itself, which therefore presents itself as an “act.” “Logical thought” is universal and necessary thought, which, according to V., can only derive from a consciousness that is “numerically one”: that is, while the “matter” (lived thought) may be attributed to individual subjects, this is not the case with the “form” as an essential constitutive element. V. clarifies: man, insofar as his thought has the character of necessary universality, is no longer this or that individual subject (empirical), but is subject to a single and fundamental activity, Spirit or Activity (with a capital letter).
V.’s final thought is entirely directed toward identifying this Spirit or universal Activity with the personal God of Christianity (especially in the posthumous work *From Man to God*). Since thought activity is impossible without communication among individual subjects, but this cannot be guaranteed by the subjects themselves because they “forget” (doctrines of the subconscious), God does not forget because the divine consciousness is creative and therefore always and entirely present. Thus, when we say, “man forgets,” we indicate the passage from consciousness to the subconsciousness of the individual; when we say, “man remembers,” we mean that he reappears in the divine consciousness in which he was always actually present with all his determinations. In conclusion: every individual, as creator of experience, is subject to an intrinsic necessity not reducible to his empirical unity; therefore he is not the creator of his own experience, which must be a self-sufficient Thought, the creator and subject of total human experience. Such a Thought, which has no need of anything else and of which all else is in need, must be fully conscious, and this proves that consciousness and knowledge are ultimately one and the same (cf. *From Man to God*, pp. 276 ff.).
Absolute Thought is God, because it cannot be resolved into the totality of human thought, which, as such, lacks unity and therefore universality and value. From this V. believed he had arrived at a critical foundation of Christian theism. For if it is true that human thought implies, i.e., presupposes, divine thought, it does not, however, identify with it, but is rather a real formation of it; that is, human thought is partly the work of the individual (lived thought), and partly refers to Total Thought (logical thought). But then, V. concludes, it is not admissible that man derives his thought from God alone, and thus the creative transcendence of God is demonstrated, because the consciousness of the Creator is not resolved into the consciousness of individuals, just as neither of these is resolved into the other.