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Aldo Giorgio Gargani's Wittgenstein1
Forms of Life, Forms of Freedom
Piergiorgio Donatelli
1. Wittgenstein. Musica, parola, gesto is the book that Aldo Giorgio Gargani left us before he died. It contains some of his most characteristic themes, among them the reading of Wittgenstein from which he drew a way of considering intellectual activities as expression of practices and forms of life, together with the implications that he derived from this, which concern our cognitive activities as well as the spheres of the ethical and the aesthetic. Space is also given to his various interests and his intellectual and human sympathy for both intelligence and sentiment, viewed as creative and inventive spheres in which we discover new aspects of human beings (in the sciences and in the work of the artistic imagination, as in humanistic studies: Gargani is free from any facile juxtaposition between the science of the mind and that of nature).
In various earlier texts Gargani had already elaborated these ideas, but he gave them a rich and original formulation above all in a little book that is a philosophical masterpiece, Il sapere senza fondamenti, published in 1975. Here he develops the view according to which the theoretical models through which we organize our experience are themselves an expression of the practical lives of human beings; thus reworking what was a crucial theme of the great cultural change taking place between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - the shift of emphasis from attention to the subject and the subject's sphere of activity (the post-Cartesian modern philosophical tradition) towards attention to the broader natural and socio-historic background in which individuals move.2 His central idea is that the live sources of our conceptual schemes have been concealed; and he asks "what was the matrix of mental and intellectual habits [...] that brought about the concealment - under the surfaces of objects, things, and substances - of the decisions, the behaviours and the customs of an entire form of human life?"3
In that book, Gargani puts forward at least two major points. On the one hand he wants to show that the quest to provide a foundation for human intellectual activity is illusory and that foundational moves are mere ceremonials with which to preserve the irrevocability...