Le scritture dei filosofi - Un’introduzione - Lo stile è il filosofo

The Count of Buffon stated that ‘style is the man’. What this monographic issue of «Thaumàzein» intends to demonstrate is that ‘style is the philosopher’. The manner in which a thinker expounds his theory is one with the content of it. So, is philosophy a literature? On closer inspection, the history of philosophy can be read as a long quest in this sense: from Plato, who harnesses his artistic vein in the form of Socratic dialogues, to Lucretius, who chooses to contain his ideas in a poem, to Seneca, who pours them out in letters, to Marcus Aurelius, who makes a conversation with his own soul; and again, from Campanella and Bacon, who narrate utopia following the example of the Platonic myth of Atlantis, to Galileo, the greatest Italian prose writer of his century; from Descartes and his mathematical method, to Hegel and his academic rival Schopenhauer. Freud forbade himself from reading Nietzsche so as not to be overly influenced by him, while Bergson was the philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wittgenstein is the ultimate censor of language, while Eco uses his massmediological knowledge to give birth to philosophical novels. Of course, all this does not imply that great philosophers are great writers, but only that their style, even when seemingly obscure and arduous, is mostly appropriate to their conception, as the cases of Vico and Kant demonstrate.