A few days ago I discovered, by chance, a feature of my new smart phone (a Samsung S7 edge) that I had missed. The integrated camera makes it possible, once you take a picture, not just the usual changes to light, exposure and shadows.
to try to answer we interviewed Adriano Pessina, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Faculty of Education at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan and Director Bioethics of the University Centre. The professor. He has recently come out with his latest book: “The ego dissatisfied – Between Prometheus and God,” which has a very interesting chapter six, entitled, even if on purpose, “Dissatisfaction is not to be otherwise”
short film “A social life” premiered at the Canberra International Short Film Festival and the Lady Filmmakers Festival
Professor Pessina today we have a lot, we would like everything. Yet the self is – as the title of his latest book – dissatisfied. What happened to us?
content comes from the Latin “satis facere” to do enough, but now we seem to never do enough, always be indebted to a possible improvement, not to be all ‘height of the demands that we come from a society of performance and efficiency.
also with more radical questions, which bring into question the very meaning of subjectivity and its relationships.
but above all that nothing should be final. And we consume also our relationships, our identity and eventually even others can become a “waste.” And at the bottom of the self-definition consumer it is progressive precisely because it is not conservative: his work of destruction is considered meritorious because it stimulates the production. But above all we are nihilists when we no longer recognize no truth that is not “disposable”, that is not the “product” of our desires: we are nihilists when we do not know “keep” relationships, cherish suffering, grow roots, when we delude ourselves that everything has a price.
it has to do also the fact that by now be dropped in a technical environment has changed the relationship of men with each other and with themselves?
We underestimate this fact and that is that the environments condition the existence of man and change its habits. If you ask someone if they believe that it is different to live in the African desert or living among the Antarctic ice surely you will answer yes. When it invites us to reflect on how the technological environment is changing our sensory perceptions, our habits, our relationships, immediately it raises a kind of defensiveness: it is feared that one can speak badly of technology, suspicious of “machines” … and all of these are considered blasphemous! Yes, the technology environment we are changing and the more we realize it the more we will be able to govern these changes.
increasingly at hand bodily mutations, rather than thumb and smartphones, unite new cosmetic surgery practices and full fitness. The ego is also unhappy unhappy body?
The body is the place where you focus the question of dissatisfaction because there is no physical performance, intellectual, relational that has not to do with the body. There ‘s biological experimentation, drug, which does not pass through the body. Those who now take drugs to overcome the examinations, or relies on doping to win races, transforms himself into a mini-experimental laboratory, functional to some of the company and market needs.
All of biotechnology human generation tend to make the body a means to adapt to human projects. And we can not ignore that there is a vast market of biological material, egg, sperm, the physiological performance, as in the case of so-called surrogate motherhood, which are of the most varied service “dissatisfaction”. We can say that the body has become a means of the technique and not vice versa. From embryonic life until old age, his and others’ body is now riding in which to experience the ego technical effectiveness dissatisfied.
This dissatisfaction, to be appeased, then makes flourishing a large amount of fashions, more or less fleeting, taking the true characteristics and their religions or ideologies. I think of veganism, all’animalismo, environmentalism … But to fully lives also voted to fitness, from running to cycling through yoga. How do you explain this according to her, in the words of a famous singer, “certify each root glare on the surface”?
In some ways these “fads”, religious or ideological, as you say, is the breach in which overlooks deeper dissatisfaction, who can not answer the technology as such. We could say, to use another piece of song, they are a sign of the search for a “permanent center of gravity”. When everything is expendable, it becomes essential to preserve something, but you do, often, holding on to what seems to correspond to a personal desire “recognized” (or perhaps even “created”), however the welfare society.
In his book deals with the scope of social networks and the network. As a Facebook profile is built today to join the life of the owner and how much is the daily life to having to stretch the idealization online?
“solitudes crowded” technological man telling another profoundly human need, that of the recognition of others. Everyone gets to know through a mirror and the novelty today is the fact that this mirror can be modified at will so that everyone does not see himself, but what he wants others to see to get the rewards, that is what I like to others. This is another symptom of dissatisfaction and a confirmation that the technology is not a means, a tool, but a real environment that “lives” of their own rules that everyone using it increases.
Some technology implementations, no doubt made with careful market research, also lead to changes showy in the uses and customs. But if once it came to appliances today we are faced with something very different. An account that is the change that may have led the refrigerator is in the costumes that feeding and consumption. A major innovation of modernity rather is the front camera of the cell, in order to take the famous “selfies”. so something for himself totally useless. Still see people constantly engaged to photograph today is normal. A phenomenon that gives the idea of being in front of an anthropological change. So it is? And if yes, what changes are we talking about?
One might reflect at length on the new forms of narcissism induced by smartphone technology: technology brings out the human aspects we did not know and that we should learn how to evaluate because maybe it’s not always good to emerge. Undoubtedly the technology of communications change our experience, but I’d rather talk about historical changes, rather than changes in cultural and social anthropology: I would speak of anthropological changes in relation to biotechnology, which are a different phenomenon. However just be outside of the scope of technologies to realize how the human in us has other resources and unsuspected depths than we have discovered and cultivated in company performance.
the Social Network, as the name suggests, at least originally served to connect people, to socialize people. The result is substantially the opposite. Yet the Milan Expo shows (with the success of the two squares, Piazza Gae Aulenti and XIV May) shows that there is still hunger for true sociability. How can resist social pressure to this human and as human nature can be transformed and modified?
Sociability can not be defined by mere aggregation of individuals. We live in a mass society in two meanings: one that is manifested in large gatherings, where thousands of people will gather, attracted by a single event, in one place, such as a stadium or a square and that, instead, aggregates millions of people individually, at home, in front of a TV, for example, to watch the game or watch a political debate.
Put together thousands of people lined up to see Expo does not mean creating any sociality.
the “hunger for sociality” is more present in FB that these two forms of aggregation, because at least FB trying “one more” to which pleasure and with whom to get in touch: is it a substitute for sociality, as was the ‘barley coffee. The real sociability involves personal relationships capable of space, time sharing, ideas requires forms of solidarity and friendship where you do not you do not get your hopes to be leaders just because you are spectators. Our nature is much more “plastic” than we think, but I fear that it is not “elastic” and that eventually may break if subjected to too many twists.
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