VARISCO, BERNARDINO. - Spiritualist philosopher, b. at Chiari (Brescia) on 20 April 1850 and d. there on 21 Oct. 1933.
His fame began with the Lincei prize for philosophy (1900), which in 1905 brought him from teaching in the lower schools to the chair of philosophy at the University of Rome, which he held until 1925.
An austere and solitary thinker, V. developed his own thought with rigorous continuity, passing from an initial phase of positivist inspiration to a critical philosophy that finally strove to clarify itself as a Christian spiritualism within the fundamental principles of modern thought. The originality of V.'s evolution lies on the one hand in his dissatisfaction with the position he was traversing at any given time and the consequent critical demand that he elaborated in order to overcome it (positivism, idealism), and on the other in the persistence and deepening of certain fundamental concerns (the plurality of subjects, personal survival, the grounding of the moral conscience, the personality of God) which he intended to bring to full critical awareness. The theoretical core of this tension became increasingly clear around the relationship between the two levels of consciousness that he designated as "lived thought" and "logical thought." Lived thought is given by the activity of individual subjects in which logical thought manifests itself empirically: the empirical character of lived thought is given by the whole complex of functions that elaborate experience, from elementary sensations up to the most complicated perceptual syntheses, which condition the appearance of logical thought to varying degrees according to the diversity of the subjects. The principal factors operating in lived thought are, for V., feeling, interest, education, culture, and language: the most lived element of lived thought is "feeling," and here the evident influence of Rosmini is revealed in V. The other factors, and above all interest and language, condition the "transcendence" of thought itself, which therefore presents itself as a "doing." "Logical thought" is universal and necessary thought which, according to V., can derive only from a consciousness that is "numerically unique": that is, if the "matter" (lived thought) can be attributed to individual subjects, such is not the case with the "form" as an essential constitutive element. V. specifies: man, insofar as his thought has the character of necessary universality, is no longer that particular individual (empirical) subject, but is subject to a unique and fundamental activity, the Spirit or the Activity with a capital letter.
V.'s final thought is wholly directed toward the identification of this universal Spirit or Activity with the personal God of Christianity (especially in the posthumous From Man to God). For there can be no activity of thought without communication among individual subjects; but this cannot be guaranteed by individuals because they "forget" (doctrines of the subconscious): God, on the other hand, does not forget because the divine consciousness is creative and therefore has everything and always present. Therefore when we say "man forgets" we indicate the passage from consciousness to the subconscious of the individual: when we say "man remembers" it means that he reappears in the divine consciousness in which he was always actually present with all his determinations. In conclusion: every individual, insofar as he is the 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 the subject of total human experience. Such a Thought, which has no need of anything else and of which everything else has need, must be fully conscious, and this proves that consciousness and knowledge are ultimately unum et idem (cf. From Man to God, p. 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. Hence V. thought he had arrived at a critical grounding of Christian theism. Indeed, if it is true that man's thought implies, that is, presupposes, divine thought, it does not however identify itself with it, but is rather a real formation of it; that is, human thinking is in part the work of the individual (lived thought), in part refers back to Total Thought (logical thought). But then, V. concludes, it is not admissible that man derives from God only his thought, and thus the creative transcendence of God remains demonstrated, because the consciousness of the Creator is not resolved into the consciousness of individuals, just as conversely each of these is not resolved into that one.