VARISCO, BERNARDINO. — Spiritualist philosopher, born at Chiari (Brescia) on 20 April 1850 and died there on 21 October 1933.
His fame began with the Lincei philosophy prize (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 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 development lies, on the one hand, in his dissatisfaction with the position he was successively passing through 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 foundation of moral consciousness, the personality of God), which he intended to bring to full critical awareness. The theoretical nucleus of this tension became increasingly clear around the relationship between the two levels of consciousness which he designated as « lived thought » and « logical thought ». Lived thought is given by the activity of individual subjects in whom logical thought manifests itself empirically: the empirical character of lived thought is constituted by the entire complex of functions involved in the elaboration of experience, from elementary sensations to the most complicated perceptual syntheses, which condition the appearance of logical thought to varying degrees according to the diversity of the subjects. For V., the principal factors operating in lived thought are feeling, interest, education, culture, and language: the most lived element of lived thought is « feeling », and here Rosmini’s evident influence on V. becomes apparent. The other factors, and above all interest and language, condition the « transcendence » of thought itself, which consequently presents itself as a « doing ». « Logical thought » is universal and necessary thought which, according to V., can derive only from a « numerically unique » consciousness: that is, if the « matter » (lived thought) can be attributed to individual subjects, the same is not true of the « form » as an essential constitutive element. V. specifies: man, insofar as his thought possesses the character of necessary universality, is no longer that particular (empirical) individual subject, but is subject to a unique and fundamental activity, Spirit or Activity, with capital letters.
V.’s final thought is entirely directed toward identifying this universal Spirit or Activity with the personal God of Christianity (especially in the posthumous Dall'uomo a Dio). Since thought-activity is impossible without communication among individual subjects, and since this cannot be guaranteed by individuals because they « forget » (the doctrines of the subconscious), God, on the other hand, does not forget, because divine consciousness is creative and therefore has everything always present. Thus, when we say « man forgets », we indicate the passage from the consciousness to the subconscious of the individual; when we say « man remembers », this means that he reappears in the divine consciousness, in which he had always been actually present with all his determinations. In conclusion: every individual, insofar as he creates experience, is subject to an intrinsic « necessity » that cannot be reduced 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 Thought, which needs nothing else and of which everything else is in need, must be fully conscious, and this proves that consciousness and knowledge are ultimately unum et idem (cf. Dall'uomo a Dio, 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. Hence V. theism. Indeed, if it is true that human thought implies—that is, presupposes—divine thought, it is nevertheless not identical with it, but is rather a real formation of it; that is, human thinking is partly the work of the individual (lived thought), and partly refers back to Total Thought (logical thought). But then, V. concludes, it is not admissible that man derives only his thought from God, and thus God’s creative transcendence is demonstrated, because the consciousness of the Creator is not reducible to the consciousness of individuals, just as, conversely, none of these is reducible to II.