The Empathic Movement: Empathy, Essence and Experience 1527538575, 9781527538573

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The Empathic Movement

The Empathic Movement: Empathy, Essence and Experience Edited by

Menotti Lerro

The Empathic Movement: Empathy, Essence and Experience Edited by Menotti Lerro This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Menotti Lerro and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-3857-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3857-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... ix Menotti Lerro and Luigi Leuzzi Premise .................................................................................................... xiii Francesco D’Episcopo Synergies. The Eleatic School, the Medical School, the Empathic School: the cultural triangle of the territory of Salerno, from Parmenides to Lerro. Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 1 Empathism: A Literary-Artistic-Philosophical and Cultural Movement, born in Italy in 2020 Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia - Menotti Lerro, Reasons for a New Manifesto on the Arts - Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia, The Pyramid and the Cultural Triangle of Ancient Cilento - Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia, New Manifesto on the Arts - Menotti Lerro, A myth unveiled: Unus and his Brothers Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 13 The Empathic School: Between Empathy and Empathism Luigi Leuzzi - Definition, Menotti Lerro and Luigi Leuzzi. - Proposals for the development of the Empathic School Movement. - Luigi Leuzzi, “Temporality and creativity.” Fundamentals of an empathy-oriented teaching - Luigi Leuzzi, For an empathic practice for the humanistic, technical and artistic disciplines - Luigi Leuzzi, Empathism and the Eleatic School - Luigi Leuzzi, Empathism in the Salerno Medical School - Luigi Leuzzi, Empathism: empathy in the caring relationship - Luigi Leuzzi, Empathism in intersubjective psychopathology - Luigi Leuzzi, Conclusions - Bibliography

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Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 33 Empathy in the Medical School of Salerno Giuseppe Lauriello - Bibliography Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 51 An Anthropological Cultural Contribution in Terms of Empathy Luigi Leuzzi - Intersubjective identity - Remaining as an opportunity for an evolutionary identity for the territory of Cilento - Proposals for an observation of the Cilento area by a de-rural flâneur - The symbolic importance of the “Cultural Pyramid” between poetry and aphorisms in identity trajectories - Empathism and empathy in art - Aesthetics and empathy in art - Sacred architecture of the megalithism in Cilento, an occasion for an intentional empathic act in the understanding of its mystery - Empathism as an opportunity for a practical, intuitive, and identificatory understanding of a megalithic monument - Conclusions - Bibliography Appendix 1 ............................................................................................... 75 The Way of Light Francesco D’Episcopo Appendix 2 ............................................................................................... 79 The Symbolic Importance of the “Cultural Pyramid of Cilento” conceived by Menotti Lerro between Poetry and Aphorisms in Love Trajectories Luigi Leuzzi Appendix 3 ............................................................................................... 81 Synaesthesia and Empathy in the Total Artist Luigi Leuzzi Appendix 4 ............................................................................................... 83 Conclusions Menotti Lerro

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Appendix 5 ............................................................................................... 89 Movement Proposals Empathic Masters—Adherents ................................................................. 91 Contributors .............................................................................................. 93

INTRODUCTION MENOTTI LERRO AND LUIGI LEUZZI The pandemic season seems to be approaching its sunset, leaving behind countless victims, including the dead and people wounded in body and soul, perhaps forever forced to observe the signs and memory of an epochal tragedy. The sidereal distance people have had to adapt to, in consideration of sanitary measures implemented as due precautions and prophylaxis, such as the use of medical devices like masks, have led to a loss of expression and abolished the smiles and outbursts of socialization, leaving an experience of smoothed emotions that will be difficult to process for those who remain. The season of distancing has left inside each of us lesions of the soul that will be difficult to heal and, at the same time, an awareness of a lack of being that somehow represents the need to restore in society an empathic attitude and a civilization of mutual recognition. The recognition is already particularly difficult, especially in the Western world, due to the hypertrophy of the ego and the pressure to attain a valuable and sectoral excellence. This excellence implies too often (if not always) the oppression of the other person to be able to aspire to the few places of power and prestige that apparently can lead to the coveted happiness—utopia—albeit unconsciously, that every human being aspires to, because it refers to the perfection of nature and the person that they lost or never had. With regard to this new timid post-pandemic scenario, it is clear that the first mass reaction has been to implement some attempts at reparation, especially of interpersonal relationships, which, however, remained mostly on the surface almost as elements of an unlikely alchemy of virtual life consumed especially in social networks and mostly transited into unlikely algorithms of coexistence.

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It is a delegation, almost, of the lack of the encounter at the point codified by communication tools that are governed by artificial intelligence and communication techniques marked by an inevitable emotional distance. The human ability to quickly forget the past, eventually idealizing it somehow, makes it seem that only now, after the pandemic, has an unknown difficulty emerged in recovering an authentic encounter with the other person by the self. This malaise, to tell the truth, already afflicted humanity, but it has, without doubt, been exacerbated in the two years of lockdowns that we have crossed. It has even segregated many persons in the loneliness of their homes without the “least” comfort of a second person, therefore, making us perceive as even more problematic our notion of the self, which, as Charles Taylor has clarified, is inextricably connected to the understanding of our condition and moral action. This opportunity for distance has however highlighted that the unique use of information technologies, and in psychology related trials of cognitive techniques, have met the needs of a parched humanity that is less and less inclined to the search for beauty and goodness through the exemplarity of poetry and all the arts. For centuries, these arts excellently “saved” humanity from brutalization, providing lights to be kept in the avenues of the ego to prevent us coming across what Joseph Conrad brilliantly defined as the heart of darkness that obscures “the god of human nature,” to quote Horace, “the god we have within us.” Meanwhile, however, the distance and the lack of empathic correspondence have barricaded themselves behind misunderstandings and mistrust that even pertain to a security drive. And therefore it is evident that these circumstances constitute unavoidable reasons for founding an empathic movement, Empathism, as an intentional act that invests all the arts and orientates again towards a way of being together, in common disciplinary attitudes, since the encounter with the other by himself not only modulates in an empathetic attitude, but refracts the symbols and ethical values that pertain to a communitas that is capable of exchanging authentic gifts, made of warmth and the joy of sharing. Therefore, the authors of this movement find themselves issuing a choral invitation to unite the arts and the world, recognizing in this unity a primary saving good.

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Everything arises, as it always happens, from the visionary nature that poetry determines, with the certainty of its function so that humans can pursue that right to happiness we have mentioned. And behold, looking into the deep structures of the fragmentary present time, a fragile dream appeared, of atavistic origin, materialized in a community civilization founded on Megalithism, in which an ancestral religion held together in some way the various individual souls in proximity and founded a res lego that constituted the anima mundi and, at the same time, otherness. Thus, it is an empathic microcosm recognized in a macrocosm based on an axis mundi that persisted until the end of the last century and survived in part to the present day in the sub-region of Cilento and in neighboring territories through festivals and Marian extra-urban cults that still now welcome the symbols and ethical values of transhumance and agropastoral traditions. Many villages, scattered between Cilento, Lucania, and Bruzio, are cemented by an ancient solidarity and coexisting community. In other words, they offer the opportunity to experiment and encourage the birth of an empathetic and deeply human attitude found in the origins of this ancient land. Hence the choice of Monte Stella [lit., Mount Star] (where there is an important megalithic complex symbolically recognized by us as the place of the first ancient empathic gods), as it is a mountain capable of still radiating and feeding its children and, symbolically, the world. This led to the request to the various municipalities of Cilento. The values proposed in the New Manifesto on the Arts try, in their own way, to innovate without denying tradition and to keep in mind the lessons on modern (or experimental) and postmodernist art of Sir Ernst Gombrich, and authors such as Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Foucault. However, they try to go beyond certain nuances of these incomparable teachings, through the indirect, direct, and universal language of poetry and the arts in general. In a suddenly changed world and society that already appeared particularly complex in the pre-pandemic era, as it is well illustrated by Paolo Macry in The Contemporary Society, at the end of the twentieth century, Cilento community members recognized themselves. They agreed to join in a symbolic Cultural Pyramid of internal dialogue that opens to the other person, starting from the place, from its precise geographical position in space (which is one of the fundamental questions analyzed by Jacques

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Derrida in his essay Margins), transforming the territory in the microcosmic epicenter that transits into a macrocosm where we can find a new reason for common life based on authentic being in the empathic sharing of artistic and literary attitudes based on ethical and community values. In other words, this volume highlights how empathy is an intentional act that, starting from the original foundation of the communitas, is invested in the humanistic and artistic sciences, orienting them towards an overcoming of the distance from the other by the self and remedying an inescapable emotional awkwardness that is typical of our time and that we could rubricate like alexithymia. This is an expression not only of societal malaise but also of the outcome of a vision of society based exclusively on egocentrism. The return to empathy corresponds to a lack of being that we must give an answer to, that is not only surface, but that, through an ethical and aesthetic reflection, can re-find not only the artistic and literary disciplines but also all the relational attitudes, allowing the discovery of an intersubjective world that surpasses cliched related social networks. In other words, the authors, retracing and deepening the cardinal principles of the New Manifesto on the Arts and, therefore, of the Empathic Movement, born in Italy in 2020, believe that we must not find—to say it like this—only a smile to sweeten an attitude of fashion, but also recognize its coexisting roots in the mystery of its origins. The historically rural Cilento area, now transformed through an innovative pyramid of cultural excellence, led to the birth of Empathism. The area welcomed the movement’s regenerative and reparative human vocations in an ancestral context where the ancient suggestions of the pagan-Christian syncretism of the high-seas civilization still today suggest a way of participating in one or more collectivities, which are held together by a res lego capable of bringing together the otherwise unrelated parts of an ancestral society based on ethical, aesthetic, and valor sharing.

PREMISE FRANCESCO D’EPISCOPO Synergies The Eleatic School, the Medical School, the Empathic School: the cultural triangle of the territory of Salerno, from Parmenides to Lerro It now seems that the decisive and concrete moment has come to join and to coordinate, rather than to divide and separate, as today, in most cases, they are proposals, prospects, and creative and critical drives, linked to specific territorial realities, places, and characters, that have marked, and continue to mark, the story of an overall and joint relaunch of their most authentic and authoritative motivations. We are the sons of Parmenides, born at Elea (Velia, then Ascea). The extraordinary example he set as a philosopher, poet, and doctor can and must establish the basis for a movement that unites the arts and confirms the fundamental principle of feeling by thinking and by thinking to feel on which Giambattista Vico lay the foundations of his “new” science. Our proposal (started by the leader and founder of Empathism, Menotti Lerro, who, as in his creative work, shows himself always to be a worthy heir to the great predecessors) is to re-found this movement, linking it to another prestigious movement, the Southern School of Salerno, which, during the Middle Ages, along with Montpellier, a French city that our Italian city is twinned with, represents an indispensable beacon of interdisciplinary culture, where the same medicine claimed a space—not autonomous, but shared with other disciplines—aimed at healing the soul as well as the body. All this, to which much more could be added, in modern and contemporary times had to converge and flow into the great sea of “empathy.” This is a gift that in life is reserved for all those who—endowed with a culture to share with others and, above all, a marked sensitivity to

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grasp common elements, and precisely those people who can share—tend to experience the processes of collaboration and of aesthetic, ethical, and operational conjunction. In this sense, the school is intimately and intensely connected with life, and not so much and not only institutionalized and regularly practiced life, but life that is invented, putting it in close relation to the triple, cultural, hereby-indicated direction.

CHAPTER 1 EMPATHISM: A LITERARY-ARTISTIC-PHILOSOPHICAL AND CULTURAL MOVEMENT, BORN IN ITALY IN 2020 MENOTTI LERRO AND ANTONELLO PELLICCIA Reasons for a New Manifesto on the Arts Our millennium is entering its third decade, and it is time to build together a vision of the world in the name of beauty and harmony. Interdisciplinarity and the idea of the “Total Artist” (a single person or a combination of contributions by people engaged in different cultural fields) proposed in the New Manifesto on the Arts are proposed as a basis to grab the “fragmentary truths” of this historical period that, never more than now, needs the figure of the artist as a guide. From 2019, the Contemporary Centre of the Arts is acting to this end, bringing many innovative artistic and cultural initiatives of great importance to the national territory and Cilento, animated by a fundamental common feeling for empathy and feeling close to each other as human beings and as artists. For this reason, the Contemporary Centre of the Arts has established the School of Empathy, which exemplifies the educational and formative purposes that distinguish it. From the triangle of the ancient area of Cilento (Vallo della Lucania, Omignano, Salento), new impulses will be released for the development of the arts and culture through the emotions. Menotti Lerro

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The pyramid and the cultural triangle of ancient Cilento

A cultural triangle encloses the magic of a territory, its genius loci, rich in myth, history, and traditions, the place of union between humanity and nature: Omignano, Village of Aphorisms; Salento, Village of Poetry; and Vallo della Lucania, Location of the Contemporary Centre of the Arts, which is the guardian of the artistic-literary values unveiled in the New Manifesto. This triangle fits ideally into the proportion and harmony of a quadrilateral that has a pyramidal apex on Monte Stella, whose gateway is

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Omignano, while its nodes are Paestum, Salento, Velia, and Palinuro. The projection of light from the star on the basic plan of Cilento coincides with the “Centre of the Arts.” The ancient pyramid reveals a pulsating soul. Menotti Lerro Antonello Pelliccia

New Manifesto on the Arts I have decided to join forces with those dear friends of mine who are anchored by artistic roots, albeit different from mine, because, in the end, I understand that art is only seemingly divisible. In fact, if we accept such a point of view, almost all of us, and I first of all, are—in so many words—incomplete artists, mostly capable of developing and deepening a single aspect of what perhaps the art would require (in truth, it has never asked anyone anything and only gives to those who know to ask . . .). At any rate, on second thought, it happens almost the same with all things: do we not use, for example, too little of the body and mind compared with how much we should and could? And, perhaps, objectively, is our knowledge not limited about every doctrine and the world? If I think of a doctor, I realize that he will only know one branch of medicine well. It is not by chance that he will tend to specialize in that particular direction. Furthermore, will he not always remain a capable doctor, if out of necessity, he deepens other aspects of his discipline? Therefore, I think, real artists follow similar criteria: they are an artist because they possess the fundamental characteristics to be one—sensitivity, intelligence, creativity, curiosity, innate or acquired technical tools, talent, and so on. But they will soon decide, for one reason or another, to devote themselves to a peculiar aspect of ingenious human activity, which finally will increase wisdom by beauty or beauty by wisdom, leading to them identifying themselves with the role of a novelist, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, and so on. I came to these conclusions when I realized that all the arts belong to me more or less equally, or, at least, I felt that I belong to them equally. More than twenty years ago, I approached the principles that lead humans to seek

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the exact word for poetry and prose; but now I realize that I can perceive the other aesthetic expressions that the world proposes and that I have learned to recognize deeper and deeper. I feel the music pulsating in my chest like a broken beat and I confess that I have to keep away specifically from musical instruments, because it would be sufficient a spark to make me devote myself to the keyboard (or to another instrument), permanently, and, putting it bluntly, it would subtract from my writing. In truth, time is already too limited even for this sole art that crept furtively into my flesh, leaving there its deadly mark, when the air of the woods was yet to weigh on the shadows that crowd my dreams. Therefore, I am aware of the temporal limit that makes difficult the idea of trying to learn something else to the level that I would like—so as to be able to express myself, rendering honor and glory to the art, without disaster, as, in this new millennium, humans seem to have often decided to do. At the moment, all this suggests to me that I should let it go, so that I am not kidnapped, except by curiosity about what I do not have, avoiding mixing the cards, and, in this case, at the risk of not being able to tell, in the future, in the highest and most effective way, what I care about. However, I confess that the temptation is strong and if my life had not been the life of a wanderer, forced to work three times more than many others who I could define as being more fortunate concerning material goods, then, perhaps, I would give free vent to the development of new impulses. I think I could also express myself better than I do in letters using brushes and chisels (just like when I was a child, in our carpentry, to which I always return): I realize this when the soft madness assails me and if I see colors, a canvas, or scattered chips, so that already in my mind a thousand overlapping shades bloom, capable of giving voice to the immensity of a clear inner mirror. I tremble if I see someone dancing or singing or designing an object— because design is an art, though many people say just the contrary—and a thrill assails me in front of a photographer or a director who sees everything differently from how other people deceive themselves to see. I just close my eyes and realize that, in myself, there would be sublime visions to be transposed on the scene, if only I learned to operate a camera, to create an

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effect, to light a candle with a ciack, or to make a swing move without a push. I confess I perceive an unbridgeable void before the arts that I did not learn and I do not promise that one day I shall not find myself wearing “cloaks” that are different from the ones I am now wearing. But, even if I will never do it, just as reason suggests to me, I know that the Artist is the person who knows he or she can wear all such cloaks with dignity—those colorful cloaks that we usually wrap ourselves in to escape the sun, which would like to dissolve us in a single color or in the cold, which would turn us into statues for a sea museum without salt. He or she would be called a “Total Artist,” or an “Artist” with a capital A; in other words, he is someone who is capable of describing the picture using every single musical note. For example, rather than writing about the torment of this evening, I would like to play it in a cathedral or paint it on a wall in a desert, although I never learnt to knead a color or to spread the paint or to blend it and dilute it. At the end, while my window almost succumbs to the hail of January, I would like to give breath to all the instruments of creation to express the sweetness and pain that I have inside—and maybe they would not be enough to tell you all. At the moment, I nearly faint for the emotion in confessing it to myself: I need every art to be able to vibrate as I should like, to say as I would like, to represent it as I feel and see. The poet (that is a synecdoche, in this case) being sufficient for himself, has not yet probably understood what is necessary. The greatest painters I met were debating in verses, playing violins, and dancing in the street, so the great musicians hid their paintings and sculptures; one could speak also about the novelist who became dedicated to a virgin stone in order to discover the burning eyes for love that had escaped from the worn out cards. Thinking about it again, all this happened frequently years ago—when I already had the fortune to be welcomed by authentic masters, although I had not realized it yet far away from the wisdom of the person who showed the route. But, today, having some white hair, everything is suddenly, terribly, and wonderfully semi-clear. On one side, this condition excites me, and on the other it throws me into a strong feeling of discouragement. The discouragement comes from thinking that one life cannot be sufficient to

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learn all that I would like, and I cannot breathe because I feel like a prisoner of my temporal limits or of the vastness of the field. I return to the figure of the doctor I have boldly borrowed: I often wondered, in past times, how a doctor could choose his specialization, radically abandoning the other areas of the body. Now I know: it is a painful choice, which is perhaps necessary for excellence, before joining forces with other fields . . . And if this also applies to art, then, it will be this union that gives us the Total Artist we are looking for! This thought consoles me a lot: to choose a specialization means to create sectoral eminences, allowing us to give the best of ourselves to other people, considering the lack of time; and nothing will prevent us from giving this to the world, although we are not satisfied with all our personal impulses that, perhaps, in art, unlike in other spheres, still have a reason to be. However, we have to add that, in truth, even in the same artistic branch, we feel different needs: it is not by chance that we frequently remain within the literary environment, we write poetry, then theater, essays, aphorisms, and so on. I wonder, in return, why we do not specialize, then, in only one subgenre, thereby following the same logic of the limits that the mournful woman with her prompt scythe imposes or in the practical concerns of specialization. In the latter case, we let ourselves go: we follow the instinct and the impulses that lead us now in verse, now in prose: yellow, black, or pink prose. Perhaps, this happens because, in the cases mentioned, one has less time to devote oneself to learning different things that only a short jump requires: in these circumstances, one move one’s attention to subjects that have a common etymology. What a thorny issue! The war between my own hands. In fact, the enthusiasm arises from the awareness that every journey has a coveted destination, but the path that leads only there may be equally precious. Some people who reach a destination without travel, following a recommendation, will find themselves suddenly in a place in which they do not know how to remain; they will not understand how precious it would have been to have had to move every stone in order to find the way that leads to the top, arriving there without suffering the dizziness that

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accompanies the climb, and with awareness of having acquired the map that is necessary for the almost inevitable descent. Therefore, you must not be voracious, but enjoy the dish using all the senses, perhaps discovering new ones in the process. The arts that we know are the food that makes us gluttons, of which we sometimes taste small bites that in every palate generate explosions . . . No, I shall not be voracious and as I do not allow childish despair, I do not taste it due to lustfulness. I shall have to be patient and settle for that part of the world I can see. And I will practice patience if I need to return to those same places: I learn to look at them and find in them other mythical details. This is the saving magic of the art that allows us to “satisfy” every palate even just with our favorite dish, the one we chose or the one that occurred by chance and that we have learned to love and, above all, never want to give up. These are partial, vaguely consoling answers. I feel small and powerless before my gigantic urges that inevitably push me towards other shores. But it is still the willingness to be content, all the same, to continue the journey knowing that, at any rate, the intermediate stage is a place in which to stay and, although still, to be able to go on digging, wandering everywhere, creating, dreaming . . . Moreover, the same universe can never be known in full, although we would like, and we do not feel prostrate faced with such an unbridgeable lack. We must abandon any conviction about how to grasp the unambiguous and objective truths of a vision. Every truth contains fragments that are not possible to grasp, because they are always observed from subjective points of view and, therefore, are unique and unrepeatable since space and time will inevitably be different for anyone wishing to repeat the experience. There is also a reflection on the type of art that is developing in our society, considering the changes to communication and new artistic proposals that are often extravagant and tend to level down. If we accept, as I have heard said by many around me—and not only by members of youthful artistic movements—that everything can be “poetry” (critical judgment of absolute beauty, which is applicable to every single art), then “poetry” risks being downgraded. Poetry would no longer be the same subject of study as it was in past centuries, but would become a set of suggestions and effects that are, in truth, fruits far from what the god of the

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artists demands, as it is said in the rigorous gospel that inspired people have transmitted to us over the centuries. And then, would the poetry we want and need really be so unwise? Perhaps, once again, we should start from the classics instead of giving credit to new fashions that tend to impose their vision of art; sometimes these are the children of extemporary intuitions that do not have solid bases, and, at other times, they are the child of the arrogance of those who wish to rule by birthright. People thought the new millennium would bring wealth and peace. It has proved to be very problematic: we are living through a tremendous historical period in terms of communication (I avoid going into other fields, where the drama would be considerable . . .). Social networks—the real revolution of which will not be to have arrived but to be got rid of—are the masters and they gave voice to those who had little or, more usually, nothing to say, in return, silencing the wisest men and those richest in spirit, inhibited by the general chaos. Our societies appear in too many aspects neo-medieval, as evidenced by the immeasurable army of those who, while having the good fortune to have a fairly stable job, fail or barely manage to sustain themselves economically to the end of the month (this is to say that our states are self-styled and not really civilian). One should enter every field; but here we clearly limit ourselves to debating poetry, as we are aware that, after all, artists have to strive to locate the path. But, therefore, what is poetry, now understood as a literary text in verse, so that it is possible to propose it for our contemporary scenario? Fundamentally, I said, it would start again from the classics, once again and always. In every art, those who try to innovate forget tradition, creating a mostly ephemeral revolution that is often less innovative than the one lived by artists in previous centuries. However, artists who have absorbed their forebears’ teaching try to improve aesthetic products either to distort them or to create new ones, knowing that people in previous times were in truth better able to innovate than those who proclaimed the need for a tabula rasa (for example, thinking of the Futurist movement and comparing it with the early twentieth century imagist movement). There is, in fact, no innovation without knowledge and the continuous struggle that every proposal requires to subvert an institution. The lyrics in verse—but this applies to all the arts—must be compared with the modern

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phenomena of globalization that has made available to everyone a wider knowledge of places, traditions, and languages . . . All this must be considered. The new poem will easily feed from the texts of others because of the immediate possibility of “possession” today. For example, let’s think of Eugenio Montale and how he was influenced, probably not in innocent good faith, by the concept of “impersonality” or the technique of “the objective correlative” by T. S. Eliot. Montale knew that Eliot’s innovative compositions were fresh off the press and up for translation, so Professor Mario Praz enthusiastically showed them to him, sitting at the Giubbe Rosse literary café in Florence, just when he came back from one of his numerous trips to the island of Albioni. It is impossible to “hide” the work nowadays, to let it be sufficiently decanted to show it, as one’s own, to the eyes of the world; therefore, it is right to acknowledge and transform all this into a general advantage, or disadvantage. Poetry written in our present time is full of influences (other than simple anxiety) that never happened in the past. Above all it is full of casts of new elements just printed by the artists who sometimes live on the other side of the globe and who, maybe, do not know our language and cannot imagine who will instantly appropriate those verses, disguising them as their own. But it is all right. Be aware of this, and have the courage to say that this is happening! But let’s discuss basic needs. Poetry needs a fabric of experience as well as imagination and feeling; but above all, it requires study. We cannot stand, at any rate, poets who have nothing to say and even less to teach but who continue to pour onto paper insufficiently linguistically reworked fantasies that are often taken from sterile daily experience without any artistic value—that is to say, without those primary requirements that poetry and art all together underlie. Especially, poetry needs a well-cultivated talent from intense study that is able to exalt it. There is no art that comes from nothing or, better yet, there is no art or talent that you do not take advantage of through preparatory exercises and constant study. I also propose a reflection on a question that arose with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan: it would be “easy” and ungenerous to say that it was not a happy choice, although I confess I did not share the view of the committee. However, perhaps we

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should take note that the most likely reason for the attribution of such recognition to a lyricist is to be sought in the modesty of contemporary poetic production. But let’s leave aside these considerations and look again. Antonello Pelliccia, who with me conceived this interdisciplinary journey among the arts, adds in the next paragraphs the following consideration to indicate the clear path that the Contemporary Centre of Arts wants to trace and also to clarify the reasons that have animated him. * * * Starting from a reflection on Wittgenstein’s statements on the “representative theory of language” (the pictogram-graphic conception of language), I opened a new process of my thought, of my idea of contemporary art in its complex articulation and relapse in the world and in society. I think it is appropriate to clarify my position as an artist and as a man just as responsible subjects, aware of the changes in tastes, fashions, and expressive languages. Art has always influenced the social climate, identifying, suggesting, and anticipating possible solutions to the problems of living and living together. My research focuses on the definition of a new artistic interrelationship, with particular attention to sustainability and visual culture, as a reference and connection with the theses by Wittgenstein on the interpretation of the aesthetic result, maturing the refusal towards the formalistic reading of the work of art and leading me, finally, to the election of a multi-disciplinary approach as an essential methodology of reading art history. In recent years, the interest of the new vision of practitioners and visual cultures have focused on a reflection of and an observation on doing—in other words, individuating in the artist the role of a director but also of a mediator among the various arts through the artist’s work, contextualizing the historical and cultural background of the epoch. It is a journey through the labyrinth of new media, theatre, performance, landscape design, poetic reading, video, cinema, music, multimedia installation, and related arts; an attempt and temptation to get out from ordinary frames; a direct confrontation between the artist and the visitor, in search of freedom; the concept of opposing, overlapping, and inviting a response and the responsibility to keep alive the memory of the world; an investigation of the new potential

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of mass communication, internet technologies and new forms of interaction, connections with photography and the world of design, as well as the relative socio-economic repercussions. I believe that the role of the artist in social reality today is to empower artists towards researching the definition of their place in civil, cultural, and intellectual society, so as to trigger networks of co-development related to solidarity between artists and productive interaction not only between artists but also with other types of professionals that can encroach on many areas, from the introduction of cutting-edge lifestyles to the organization of events, from art galleries to artisan laboratories. * * * What my fraternal friend expresses seems to me to integrate my thoughts and I think it will make me feel less lonely, on pilgrimage among the labyrinthine paths of art and days. But here I am getting to the conclusion of this discussion. I thank all those respected artists and far-sighted people who have joined this new project. Today, my friends, I come with you to the Contemporary Art Centre of Vallo della Lucania. Perhaps, this place will clarify my ideas better and, above all, it will tell me, I hope, who I am and how I want to express myself or, maybe, it will just make me crazy with the desire to play with what I do not know and my wishes, just like a child who craves cotton candy or a balloon. Finally, forgive me for the longing and for this bold philosophizing. Maybe, I will tell you better later on, when the matter may be clearer to me so that I will be able to argue otherwise. Meanwhile, to conclude, it will be the task of the Contemporary Centre of the Arts to attempt to discover where the Total Artist hides himself. Menotti Lerro Antonello Pelliccia

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A myth unveiled: Unus and his Brothers Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete. —Plato’s Symposium

In the beginning was Unus, born from Zeus the supreme and a mortal woman. Statuesque in body, adorned with majestic, mutating paintings, he stood in the sunshine of each day. His soul was music, his words verses; he glided amongst men, if not danced. A demigod! His spirit was like milk: absolute happiness. Without looking for carnal deeds, by himself he was fulfilled. But—as always throughout eternity—the joys of one are thorns for another. Although wonderful to see, he was soon detested by his halfbrothers clad in immortal armour, who were ready for revenge for the suffering of Era, their mother, who yielded to the sinister betrayals of the royal libertine with his subtle devices. Thus, incited by her, they chose to dismember—into slices the number of which can be counted on the fingers of one hand—the unwary righteous Unus. Violently torn apart in a vineyard, his remains were thrown into the noble waters of the Alento river, in whose waters each fibre decomposed into an essence of Dance, Poetry, Music, Sculpture, and Painting, ready to be reincarnated and divided in selected creatures of the world. The Almighty, touched by his pierced beloved, once more ordered the androgynous figure of Eros to bring about “Peace and love in each reunification of the Arts” by holding high those who have art inside themselves and recreate the misplaced unity of the first Total Artist who, in the darkest of days, was wickedly pulled apart by the envious gods. Through a dream as clear as a mirror, Father Zeus to the modern poet shows the light of Unus without shade, revealing his horror and, being there, disavowing the Son of Abraham who had banished him from mankind. Thus far, the Arts look to each other, like pulsating and betrayed blood. Menotti Lerro

CHAPTER 2 THE EMPATHIC SCHOOL: BETWEEN EMPATHY AND EMPATHISM LUIGI LEUZZI Definition The Empathic School is a literary, artistic, philosophical, and cultural movement, born in Italy in 2020 within the new cultural triangle of ancient Cilento, which has its epicenter in Omignano, the Village of Aphorisms; Salento, the Village of Poetry; and Vallo della Lucania, the seat of the Contemporary Centre of the Arts. The school starts from the values and ideas expressed in the New Manifesto on the Arts, putting the empathic relation at the center of its interests and, therefore, the person as an ontic and ontological constitution (intersubjective). As a result, every creative and didactic experiment cannot ignore a process of identification in another person, different from the self, from the cultural world, and from the contemporary as an occasion to study and share knowledge and stories of inner life, of the epiphanies of the present time, and of past historical moments. The horizon of this direction implies a vocation for the territory and a civil promotion of society, articulated by individual and community growth, according to ethical and valuable finalities mediated by an aesthetic dimension: that of art. Menotti Lerro Luigi Leuzzi

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Paragraph 1 Proposals for the development of the Empathic School movement Empathy is the ability to empathize with others, from the self, in order to seize the intrapsyche. If this attitude is transcended in a sympathetic approach we run the risk of merging with the subject-object of our knowledge and we would be unable to re-enter ourselves to differentiate ourselves, recognizing the otherness of the interlocutor. On every path of the knowledge of the self, of the other, and of the world in which we coexist, we cannot give up the binomial I–you of Buberanian1 ancestry that, on one hand, evokes an ethical and valuable vocation of being there, especially in the extreme experience of otherness, and, on the other hand, leads to the narrative dimension of the “we.” We are a conversation as well, Friedrich Hölderlin says. Man inhabits language, Martin Heidegger would say. Therefore, these last two apodictic attestations of intersubjectivity can direct us towards an attempt to understand how an empathic school is thematized. Especially for the function of the implicit teaching in the term, we propose a Socratic and maieutic approach that excludes a reassuring exchair position, developing through a continuous questioning until, in a series of references, we can reach the central question that gives meaning to our teaching: whom are we looking for in the other person and in the world and, moreover, in whom do we identify ourselves? I would like to propose some heuristic notes, at the same time, creating problems for a possible use of empathy in the practice of a cultural foundation. If I want to know in depth the world in which I live, it will be necessary for me to identify myself in the self-world, that is to say, to find myself again, or rather to suspend judgment for a moment and catch the eidetic evidence without referring to preconceived categories and to ideologies that can collude with a reductionist and objectifying attitude. This means living the Husserlian epoch by theming, from time to time, historical periods, lifestyles, customs, and artistic or cultural events in full authenticity, as if the person who is the subject of knowledge is, in turn, the object of pre-categorial experience in the world he knows, as in the surface 1

Cf. M. Buber, Il Principio Dialogico (Turin: San Paolo, 2000).

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of creation, where we are caught by the gaze of God just at the moment we try to know him. Thus, the unknown breaks into our reassuring dwelling of the ex abrupto consciousness to initiate it into the wonder of an unexpected transformation, which brings about a new world. It is precisely starting from the premises of a hermeneutic-empathic circle whereby an interpretation is given so that it is modulated necessarily by the experience of identification with the other; we impose, in the foundation of an empathic school, the adherence to some essential, programmatic lines. We shall deepen the various thematic areas assigned to each one by competences with an approach that is not only doctrinal but also interpretative and comparative, in order to grasp the type of cultural and anthropological direction for a territory that is otherwise closed in an idio-cosmos. If we grasp the anima mundi of our territory, it is probable that we can also perceive its discomfort; consequently, a purely rhetorical or notional attitude runs the risk of disregarding those factors of transformation that prove to be indispensable for a real development of our ethno-cultural environment.

Paragraph 2 “Temporality and creativity”: fundamentals of an empathy-oriented teaching No-Time is the endless dialogue among the Artists. —Menotti Lerro

If empathy directs the dialogical interactions of those who aspire to a school inspired by intrapsychic grasping of the other, it is permissible to ask a meaningful question concerning which temporality can welcome this disposition of the soul. Undoubtedly, we shall have to deal with the enigmatic figure of a shared present that is capable of wiping out narcissistic foreclosures to constitute an original intersubjective time in which the past goes back to welcome the next and future event, the occasional moment of the meeting with the other.

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This is “the time of grace,” as Aldo Masullo would say; that is, it is the time to tell of the mystery that flows from the fleeting moment when on the horizon of the direction to which one is accustomed, otherness comes and gradually unfolds in proximity. This epiphany of the other is the original moment of the artist’s creation that gives shape to what becomes a work of art and an autonomous and phantasmatic presence. The artist always moves inside a magical-mysterious register in which he inscribes his creation, which by definition is always cosmogonic. It is a new world that meets the world of the others; at the same time, it becomes the gravitational centre of a new universe. The artist’s time aligns with an original moment in which all the previous experiences are offset to be synchronized in a unique moment, beat, pulsation. The past and the future are synthesized in a single present that becomes immanent; eschatological time transcends into a cyclic and timeless condition. Thus, the moment is transformed into an eternal representation of the mystery of an instant that initiates daily time, and thus narration becomes history. Of course, these reflections on temporality have some implications: it is obvious that if we relate empathically to the territory, for a moment, we would suspend all our prejudicial attitudes linked to our subjectivities and with a sensitive intuition we would grasp contemporaneity, crossing our world, discerning the subject that is waiting to be understood and welcomed. Our time will no longer belong to us, if it ever did, as it is synchronized with the motions of the anima mundi; we will catch its imago and, lost, we will descend into the world to grasp the enigma that inhabits our mystery: the otherness of our origins in the cosmos, as a wonder of artistic creation.

Paragraph 3 For an empathic practice for the humanistic, technical, and artistic disciplines Once empathy is defined as an intrapsychic grasp of the other and introduced as a vector of an attribution of meaning—the “hermeneuticempathic circle,” that is to say the modulation of the knowledge of the other through dialogical interaction—a coexisting declination of the various

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attitudes and disciplines will appear appropriate, identifying talent and training the various teachers and students of the Empathic School. As regards poetry and fiction, compared with an abstract and categorial verticality, a vivid and dimensional horizontality and a co-donation of meaning will be preferred, which is why poetic or literary texts are interpreted and at the same time offered as another dialectic and interlocutory term, according to the sense of Paul Ricoeur. The theatrical vocation is to represent the living world and inner history through staging; it is thus a candidate to constitute an epiphany in their meeting and often performs a function of catharsis of the most hidden emotions of each actor or spectator. Cultural anthropology will have to transcend the invariant structures of Lévi Strauss and pursue the originality and the exemplariness of intersubjectivity, as it is constituted in the horizon of sense, occasioned by the emotional landscape of the anima mundi. In an empathetic approach, music will know how to combine an Apollonian rationality with a Dionysian instinct and will have no hesitation in bringing out the meeting in an otherwise inaccessible archetypal and mysterious universe. In some visual arts and dance, the enjoyment of the common world appears immediate, while, particularly in painting, color choices and dashed figurative lines can sometimes conceal an idiom that precludes intersubjectivity. In cinema, sometimes, a dreamlike quality of film mediation gazes at length into an inner world, but it cannot separate the other from the self, as in dance itself the inter-corporeality is essential, and even the most primitive emotions find an expression; but there isn’t an authentic, choreutic movement if you ignore the other, even if the other is an imaginary, fantastical person. Concerning architecture, every stylistic module, withered only in private and bourgeois references, will be rethought in a declined vision, for opposition to openness and welcome. Instead of the “ivory towers” in which they tighten narcissistic preclusions, we wish for a transit from reserved domains to shared spaces so that an attempt at mediation can be allocated to public places, agora, forums, or better, Renaissance squares that host

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works and community initiatives of ethical and moral value for the community. Thus, the shared world (mit-welt) is characterized by the space that, in an inspired architecture, can be translated into an intersubjective vision and a co-construction work. In conclusion, remaining always in metaphor, we will have to strip ourselves of individualism to welcome the other to us in an authentic way, implementing an emotional and affective path that is typical of the “paideia,” where the teacher and the learner make up an affective dyad. Only by renouncing reassuring private positions we can welcome the other to us and experience a world whereby we can transcend into intersubjectivity and empathy.

Paragraph 4 Empathism and the Eleatic School Empathism is an intentional act deriving from empathy but it deviates from it, in part, because it becomes a programmatic attitude, as in the case of a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement that tends to be thematized in words and images or aesthetic configurations, without ever ignoring a comparative and intersubjective relationship, as far as it meets the other from the self. If it is true that it shares, along with a hermeneutic-empathic perspective, the effort to understand the mood and emotions of others, it is also true that it extends to the outside world to grasp its climax and the anima mundi; for this, it requires syntonic participation in the otherness and in the bewilderment that this action involves when the confrontation term is impersonal. Sometimes it meets an absolute, transcendent subjectivity, and it must cross the opacity of the field of knowledge, oscillating between an objective reductionism and a self-referential interpretation, trying to meet a middle point between being together and maintaining the difference. It is natural to ask whether in this harmonious and chronic sin of intellect and soul, in order to orient ourselves in terms of an unavoidable confrontation with otherness, we cannot use the perspective of Martin Heidegger, who comes to the institute insisting on an inevitable oscillation between the two poles of a noetic path that inhabits the difference between disorientation

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(Hunheimlichkeit) and bewilderment (Heimatlosigkeit). While in the first case a change of perspective allows us to experience the usual places like the other and further people, arriving to be in full light in the Lichtung (glade of the being) just as it retracts, in the second case, we remain entangled in overshadowing and loss. Thus, we introduce the reader to the aletheia by Parmenides, to this reference of light and darkness that allows, starting from one hypothesis, to move towards a path of knowledge that is parallel to the doxa and, therefore, to a changing opinion that would otherwise insist only on sensory experience. We need to combine the senses that found empirical knowledge with an intuition that transcends its contingency and leads to the roundabout truth, because, if it is true that the “being is,” at the same time it isn’t possible that the “being is not.” The thought of Parmenides has always been considered as the firm head of an ontic foundation of thought and dialectical terms of any philosophical speculation. Nevertheless, some historians of classical philosophy, including Peter Kingsley and M. Laura Gemelli Marciano, proposed an empathetic approach to the philosopher, the founder of the Eleatic school, correlating his speculative attitude to a cultural and anthropological matrix of the Greek language of Minor Asia, as he was accustomed to divination and incubation according to Shamanic and Dionysian propensities, as Giorgio Colli2 made clear. Parmenides, defined by Plato as a venerable and terrible philosopher, was an adept of a chthonic cult of Apollo of whom he was a priest; therefore, he was also a pholarcos or guardian of the cave where the mystery cults were realized and proposed the esoteric ritual experiences of death and rebirth. The mysticism underlying these religious offices urged faithful people to experience a simulation of death reaching a state of dreamlike trance, defined as a “lucid sleep” in which they fantastically retraced the significant events of their history of inner life and through the guidance of an officiating priest could, thus, decide a resolution for conflicts or existential dilemmas— a real cure of the psyche or soul in a classical sense. An Apollo with chthonic characteristics would have joined an esoteric mystery with Persephone to acquire his thaumaturgic properties that would have been transmitted to his son Asclepius.

2

Cf. Giorgio Colli, I filosofi sovrumani (Milan: Adelphi, 2009).

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It is interesting to highlight how in the archaeological excavations of Velia (Elea), near the source named after the nymph Hyele, a Hellenistic thermal complex was discovered probably intended for hydrotherapy; on this site, a monumental fountain, aligned towards a system of descending terraces, would support the hypothesis that there was in the adjacent agora a sanctuary dedicated to the divine healer. Therefore, this cultic complex was destined for the incubation of mysteries and divination. Followers took generous doses of hellebore to enter a state of apparent death that allowed them access to the chthonic world of Persephone. In this realm, they could approach the contemplation of the round truth in which the self is lost, and could thus identify in the selfworld, reaching a new awareness of their own existence. In close analogy, in the Orphic rites they passed from death to another condition according to the expected pattern of rebirth so that the shadows of the deceased plunged into the river Lethe, thereby forgetting the past. Next, they drank from the fountain of Mnemosyne to acquire another identity by reaching another level of awareness. In the Proem of On Nature, Parmenides is led by the Heliads, daughters of the Sun, on a towed cart pulled by white mares in accordance with the symbolism of Plato, which is an expression of thymos and of the drives. In this disposition of the soul, he approaches the dwelling of the Goddess of the Night, Persephone or Goddess Cilens (if one takes into account the genius loci and the hypothesis by Vincenzo Aversano, who leads the coronimo of Cilento to the Etruscan deity mentioned in the bronze liver preserved in the museum of Piacenza and destined, in ancient times, to the divination of haruspices). The historian of philosophy Gemelli Marciano proposes a hyper-sensory and synaesthetic version of the episode described by Parmenides: through the phonemes of the hexameters of the Proem, for the reader, he presents the sounds emitted by the joints of the chariot and the hinges of the door that leads to the dwelling of Persephone-Cilens; similarly, the same hisses are able to evoke the syrinx who is dear to Apollo, employed during the Syrigmos, the celebrations that were held in Delphi to celebrate the defeat of Python by the divine Citharist. The same wheels of the cart, pulled by the white mares, imitated the junx, or magic circle, in order to induce in the reader a state of altered consciousness close to an oneiric trance.

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The hypothesis of a cult of Apollo Oulios in Velia is supported by the recurrence of the name Ouilis among the Eleatic doctors in medicine; furthermore, in regard to archaeological documentation, we can highlight the discovery in Insula II of a head in marble of the divine healer and a statue of Aesculapius, albeit from a later period (1st century AD) and of modest proportions, which can be traced back to the private cult. A sanctuary of Asclepius is identified by scholars in the so-called agora, as we have said previously, where even now we can observe the remains of terraces with arcades, fountains, pools, and water channels that are functional to hydrotherapy. The epigraphic and historical documentation establishes with certainty that an embassy from Cos, one of the most important centers of the Greek Medicine of Insular Anatolia, went to Velia to share the recognition of festivals instituted in honor of Asclepius. Among the various philosophers of classical antiquity dedicated to the treatment of diseases, Giovanni Da Procida in Placita highlights Parmenides as an assertor of the importance of combining reason with the experience of medical practice. The philosopher is cited by Greek and Arab authors as a thinker dedicated to the explanation of the phenomena of nature and, therefore, a doctor-philosopher whose example would have favored the passage of naturalistic observation in medical practice from Velia to Salerno. It is no wonder that in the Middle Ages they preferred to overshadow the application of his art in the explanation of nature and in medicine, preferring the philosopher to the scientist because the latter was considered more authoritative. Both the Greeks of the classical age and the Romans of the period of Julius to Claudio—including John Alexandrian, Constantine the African, and Usaybin’h, the last of whom was among the founders of the medical school of Salerno—however, knew that the multifaceted figure of the philosopher-doctor Parmenides couldn’t be separated from the naturalist observer. Eleatic thought maintains a mysterious foundation. According to the philosopher Antonio Capizzi, it is likely that an esoteric premise is to be found in the Neolithic myth of the god Grano, who in winter time was sown in the darkness of the womb of the earth and, sprouted in spring, ascended to the empyrean.

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There is, in other words, an antinomic correspondence of light and of the night represented by the god Thinia and the goddess Cilens, the two divinities of the Etruscan pantheon. The aletheia in such a perspective is proposed as a method of knowledge of the truth, which summarizes cosmogonic thought and insists on a syzygy. In conclusion, Cilento represents the otherness Parmenides confronted, exploring the anima mundi in his unveiling mystery through an empathic, inevitable movement that led him to understand the ontic constitution of the millennial civilization that fertilizes the chora of Velia, an umbratile receptacle, where the idea becomes real and becomes a glimmer of light that illuminates the literary, artistic, and philosophical movement called “empathy.”

Paragraph 5 Empathism in the Medical School of Salerno In an empathic perspective, every attempt to understand a humanistic vocation in medical practice is proposed, sometimes, as an interesting but improbable artifice, especially if one takes into account the vision of the current cure. Medicine no longer turns to the person in a holistic vision, but to an anatomical body (Körper), as Husserl would say, and then, scotomizing the lived-body (Leib), tacitly excludes its inner world and any intentionality in which its existence is declined. Temporality and spatiality, in which people thematize their being in the world together with others, as well as with the unavoidable reference to personal meanings, are not understood. The body becomes a faulty machine that must be repaired or, in part, even replaced so that the symbolic values remain disregarded when, in a sectoral and multi-specialized way, the doctor underlines the particular more than the organismic whole. At one time, while questioning the causes of the disease and the treatment, the clinic insisted on a dimension of reciprocity that was crossed by the fascination of the other, meeting the self, in the cross of glances— the glance of the inquiring doctor and the other, the lost glance of the patient. What occurred was the dialogical interweaving of voice, posture, and physiognomy in an inter-bodily knowledge, before semeiotics, between the

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doctor and, close by, the patient; subsequently, they increasingly improved diagnostic and laboratory tools and so, sometimes, they acted without a physical examination and they did not touch or auscultate the patient’s anxious body at an intimate distance. In recent years, the clinic itself has been replaced by the medicine of evidence. Starting from statistical data and from the results of meta-analysis they show a codified practice for each condition of medical interest in compliance with rules of behavior that are blameless according to the choice of the doctor; above all, they do not allow any claims from Google-oriented patients. At the slightest crack in the relationship or, rather, in the event of any adverse outcome, they do not excuse the error and require the accuracy of a cybernetic program to decide upon various decisions and therapeutic steps of the Hippocratic professional, who is one actor in a relationship based on help. This premise will help us to understand some of the unexpected correspondences of empathy in the Medical School of Salerno’s practice— a ubi consistam for a similar approach to the empathic relationship. In the Middle Ages a subtle balance between empiricism and a naturalistic approach meant that the vision of medical practitioners escaped most often to a merely rational knowledge, which declined into an unavoidable mathesis in which, using for terms of comparison Cartesian assumptions, the res cogitans prevailed over the res extensa. Taking into account the predominantly Hippocratic foundation of Western medicine, in which they have inscribed the knowledge of the medical school of Salerno, we cannot be separated from the impact that the teacher of Cos’s theory of moods could exercise on the doctor–patient relationship. The essential elements of humoral balance, although variously amalgamated, typify people’s temperaments (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm) and, in addition to being a cause of disease, accentuate some personological expressions. It is clear that to wonder about these individual facets, an interpersonal dimension is necessary, as it is a propensity to dialogue through which to give sense to character and naturalistic investigation. A holistic view of the cure was implied, since the doctor from this perspective could not consider that the individual components of the object

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of investigation could be scotomized and simply reassembled in an original identity that was different from the simple addition of its components. In other words, the preference was for the extraordinary and the transcendence of the individual at the expense of the segmentation and fragmentation of the person. It was not a coincidence, therefore, that, in the curriculum of the studies of the medical school of Salerno, the Swabian emperor Frederick II— known for his scholarly scientific and naturalistic attitude and as a keen observer of his time—imposed by statute a three-year period of philosophical studies in medicine to be followed by four years of empirical studies. It is almost as if this choice was a priority for the education of the student in a speculative vision of science for the student to successively dedicate himself to the praxis. A reflective attitude was the guarantee for a necessary and ancestral symmetry for the medical profession in order to inscribe itself in the harmony of the cosmos and of its categorical regions. At the centre of the universe there was the man (it is not by chance that Frederick II had the task of verifying the cognitive development and growth of infants in the absence of linguistic interactions with their mother or nanny and, therefore, whether significant human contacts had an adverse outcome) and the urgency of the dyadic relationship at the base of life and human beings. Independently from the bequest of the Ouliades of Velia, the medical school of Salerno was based on Greek Alexandrine premises transmitted by the Arabs, Jews, and Byzantines around the year 1000, when the port of the Civitas Hippocratica found itself together with the Eleatics at the centre of cultural and economic exchanges with the East, following the beginning of the Crusades in the Holy Land. It is not by chance that “hospitable houses” arose on the model of Muslim ones to cope with the necessary care of the many wounded people returning from the war. This circumstance occasioned the development of surgical techniques with the conscious use of ligatures for blood vessels in case of hemorrhage or amputations of limbs alternatively to cauterization. From the Arabs, people learned the principles of curative pharmaceuticals that were present in nature, “the essentials,” and recorded their naturalistic

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knowledge through writing and dissemination beyond the borders of the Principality of Salerno of the regimen sanitatis. First of all, attention was paid to healthy principles and life styles that overshadowed a vision of a joyful and not obscurantist life. Obviously, the Hippocratic principles of a holistic medicine were welcomed and, more modernly, they aimed at the prevention of diseases rather than resigning themselves to a list of diseases and their care. In conclusion, we shall remember the intuition of one of the first medical women in Europe in the Middle Ages, Trotula De Ruggiero, who introduced the first outpatient clinics, individualizing, of course, the relationship with those who were in need of care, declining aid reports in an inter-objective manner and in a manner likely supported by intentional empathism.

Paragraph 6 Empathism: empathy in the caring relationship If empathism is an intentional act and empathy is a natural act of identification with the other by the self, it appears obvious that the caring relationship offers itself as a significant area of comparison and intersection between these two terms. In this perspective, the therapist and the patient meet each other in an intersubjective dimension that tends to be equal, although, most often it remains asymmetrical despite the premises. The first actor in the relationship (the therapist) invested with an exclusive knowledge and duty of care that proposes him, unwillingly, as the holder of “supposed subject knowledge”; while the other (the patient) is mainly the object of investigation and application in the practice of knowledge who, at the same time, requires attention to his needs, thus, placing himself in an antithetical position according to the antinomic up/down couple. It appears evident that, despite the initial premise of an empathic and equal intentionality, both the actors in the therapeutic relationship place themselves at a certain distance and maintain a difference in role and position notwithstanding the stated or implicit willingness to cancel the

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differences in the exchange of experiences and emotional states in a coexistential declination that is free from any pre-established knowledge. Mario Trevi, introducing the theme of the dual interpretation in psychotherapy, argued that the therapist’s interpretation has to be commensurate with the explication of the experiences by the patient. In the phenomenological and existential environment it is stated that the experiences of both should be inscribed in the register of the hermeneuticempathic circuit; this is why the attribution of meaning to the experience of the other by the technician in the relationship cannot ignore sharing his own lived experience with the subject of the care. Recently, in neuropsychology, emphasis has been placed on the innate and reflected matrix of empathy, especially thanks to the discovery by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigallia of neurons as a mirror, suggesting that newborns learn emotions from the physiognomy of the mother. However, we cannot disregard in psychotherapy an advanced degree of empathic interactions oriented by the reference of meanings of the inner world of the encountered person in the so-called therapeutic relationship. Whether it is true that the personality profile of each individual depends on a genetically assigned temperament and the type of attachment by which the first significant experiences of relationship are realized, for instance, according to an avoidant and insecure style that is planned or not, it is also true that anyone will reach their limit, but that they can transcend it, in principle, taking into account an existential and psychopathological and commensurate gradient when confronted not only with the climate of life but also with the severity of the clinic. In other words, we shall take into account an alloplastic adaptation to external events and it is as autoplastic for the internal elements of disease as it is for the individual, to have the ability to implement a resilience that leverages its personological resources. Currently, in psychotherapy, a marked logo-centrism prevails that coerces the affective modulations of the relationship. If, on one hand, we share with Lacan the inscription of the unconscious in the language, on the other hand, we take with suspicion the emphasis placed on an approach that is only cognitive. If the thoughts are accompanied by emotions, it is true that the techniques inspired by this model always become more fragmentary and fragmenting because they scotomize the individual by an indivisible

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definition and put him at a sidereal distance reducing him to a mere opportunity to verify objective theories, without revealing his mystery and the grace of otherness. Anyway, a hermeneutic approach is expected, interpreting the text of the narration of the other as dialogical because there isn’t any duality without contributing one’s own ethical and valuable questioning for the appeal that the other from the self realizes in our existence. The face of the other is the face of Christ, Emanuel Levinas would say, and his demand for sense and responsibility towards the other cannot remain unaffected. After examining the characteristics of empathism and empathy in the care relationship, we must investigate the aims of psychotherapy and the specificity of its contribution to the treatment of mental distress. According to a psychopathological intersubjective gradient we can identify a support and a clarification that are oriented towards the supportive-expressive model by Kernberg to access a more transferable and counter-transferable mode, more marked and intense the closer one is to neurosis. While in the case of a psychotic patient with a discontinued reality test, it will be appropriate to introduce a co-existential mode of relationship of accompanying. In this case it is necessary to approach the other by oneself no longer as a socius but as an alienus, and to leverage the common categories of meaning, especially existential ones, that we find in phenomenology, that is to say, temporality, spatiality, and being there. Referring to the anthropological proportion proposed by Binswanger, first of all, we must prefer, if possible, a horizontality that can balance a verticality that limits contacts and intersubjective occasions. Temporality can be declined to the past as a retention and it will be irremovable as in the melancholic condition, or it may be fibrillating as in a manic or obsessive phobic anxious person. In the case of the schizophrenic person, there will be elements of both the past and the present as in the original chaos, where the significant references of being are lost. As far as spatiality permits, this will be sidereal in the schizophrenic person, or too invasive or intrusive, since the limits of the I-world will fade while in the case of the paranoiac person, the space will insist on insurmountable barriers for the presence of the other by the self as a

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persecutor; for while it is concerned with the phobic-obsessive person, it will be a spatiality fraught with obstacles and dangers, full of acute angles instead of chamfered angles. In a completely different direction, the space will be experienced by the manic person as being easily crossed with a license of contact that sees him free to transcend boundaries, or an unimaginable intimacy for other normally encoded interlocutors in social semblances. These are just a few examples of one approach to the other, declined according to a phenomenological and humanistic vision of care that will integrate an empathic approach to the other by the self, softening a manner of goodwill, comparing him with the living flesh of the care treatment process.

Paragraph 7 Empathism in intersubjective psychopathology Empathy runs through the various epistemologies that underlie intersubjective psychopathology and transcends them in a therapeutic practice that is embodied in the epiphany of the encounter. In other words, the logocentrism of a purely theoretical vision of treatment becomes flesh in the factual reality of the clinic and it takes substance in inter-corporeality. Anthropocentrism and its underlying symbolism are a measure and guarantee of a dialogical dimension that directs the doctor in charge of the care towards an empathism that welcomes the existential challenge of a caring relationship that is effective as a narrative. Excluding any hypostasis of the identification in the other from the self we avoid freezing subject– object care at a sidereal distance and in a suspended time that otherwise is embedded in the unnatural completeness of being concluded, so well represented by Empedocles’ sphairos and by the round truth of Parmenides’ esychia (aletheia). The therapist understands psychopathological phenomena as being inserted in an interpersonal field; the myth of the “isolated mind” that is sufficient to itself cannot be contemplated in this perspective—there is no history or narration if you do not include the other by the self in your coexistential register.

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In the clinical field, subjective experiences are constitutive elements of the interaction of experiential worlds marked by the “We.” In the interpersonal relationship, the patient offers himself to be identified in the therapist according to his receptivity and ability to represent the emotional experience of the other by the self. This is why there is no knowledge of other subjectivity except in a relationship of reciprocity. The therapist understands psychopathological phenomena as inserted in an interpersonal field that includes him, so that the individual appears as the result of mutual interactions. He is involved in the phenomena he investigates and intends to cure. The encounter with the patient and, similarly, with the schizophrenic, ought to be anchored in a sense of belonging and shared emotional experiences despite the split of the ego or its disintegration while the patient is the protagonist of a situation at the limit of the human. Thus, we can rule out investing each of us as individuals, groups, and societies, especially in the epochal stages of transition towards other visions or aberrant perspectives of a common life. The therapist, faced with the loss or absence of a deficient existence, cannot offer him- or herself as a part of the patient’s ruined world. Instead, he or she accepts its language made of symbols that are flattened in concretism to become transactional subject–object, allowing the reappropriation of the person that is separated and alienated by passing from one autistic condition (idio-cosmos) to another that is participant (mit-welt). The therapist reassembles the schizophrenic fracture of the self by reporting the patient to the whole person and, at the same time, declining the duality of the ego-you in the inseparability of the ego-world. Therefore, the real breakthrough in therapy is given by the reciprocity that removes the being from the anodyne condition of the “yes” and prevents the bewilderment of being thrown into the world through one’s own planning; at the end, the same condition is a true journey into existence with the insane person. Only in this way we can put out freedom, so that the self does not prevail over the you, and the ego is not fragmented and alienated in the various statistical-nosographical models that are worthy of entomological knowledge. The existence and history of the individual integrate the bios and the psyche, while mental disorders, though they are declassified as neurosis,

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psychosis, schizophrenia, and delusions, are represented according to a psychopathological gradient that cannot be separated from the structure of the experiences lived in the spiritual and psychic dimension of the shared world.

Conclusions Empathy is the fil rouge of a philosophical and existential path aimed at the redemption of those humanistic, artistic, literary, and therapeutic tendencies focused on the relationship. On a lot of occasions in present society, we catch a sideral separation by the operative subject in the various activities that are properly centered on the person so that the individual appears to be evaporated and perhaps disembodied, or the hostage of stereotypes and easy adjectives that make him almost evanescent, inaccessible to references of worldliness. A mathesis of manner has relegated the man to the condition of a cypher, a replaceable code with depersonalizing algorithms. Therefore, it seems appropriate to reflect on the condition of a person who, in the abyss of the loss and disorientation of an original duality in its anthropological meaning, recognizes his own limit and transcends it through continuous and creative, regenerative planning, in contrast, focused on the meeting of the other by the self. Every reductionism must be rethought in favor of a hermeneutics of the mystery and the grace of being there. Finitude will constitute the opportunity to find ourselves in the face of the other and question ourselves about the common condition of homo viator. We are all traveling, never denying common belonging to the human community with its own limits and aspirations to overcome in a future condition. Perhaps this is the richness of the human being in the world (Mit welt) and wandering (Unheimlichkeit), knowing the freedom of being there, while the other escapes in his irreducibility.

Bibliography • Benedetti, Gaetano, La Psicoterapia come sfida esistenziale, Raffaello Cortina, Milan, 1997. • Binswanger, Ludwig, Per un’antropologia fenomenologica: Saggi e conferenze psichiatriche, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2007.

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• Bolognini, Stefano, Discorso di apertura al Congresso IPA, Buenos Aires, 2017. • Buber, Martin, Il principio dialogico ed altri saggi, S. Paolo, Turin, 2011. • Callieri, Bruno, Corpo, esistenze, mondi, EUR, Rome, 2007. • Callieri, Bruno, Lineamenti di psicopatologia fenomenologica, Guida, Naples, 1999. • Capizzi, Antonio, “Quattro ipotesi eleatiche,” in La Scuola Eleatica, Macchiaroli, Naples, 1988. • Colli, Giorgio, I filosofi sovrumani, Adelphi, Milan, 2009. • Corbìn, Henry, L’immaginazione creatrice, Laterza, Bari, 2005. • Costa, Vincenzo, and L. Cesana, La fenomenologia della cura medica, Scholé, Brescia, 2019. • Costa, Vincenzo, Psicologia fenomenologica: Forme dell’esperienza e struttura della mente, Morcelliana, Brescia, 2018. • Fanzellu. Silvana, Federico II, specchio del mondo, Tau, Todi 2016. • Gadamer, Hans Georg, Verità e metodo, Bompiani, Milan, 2000. • Gemelli, Marciano Maria Laura, et al., Parmenide: suoni, immagini, esperienza, Eleatica, Ascea, 2007. • Heidegger, Martin, La poesia di Höderlin, Adelphi, Milan, 1988. • Hillman, J., Codice dell’anima, Adelphi, Milan, 2009. • Kernberg, Otto, Disturbi gravi della personalità, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1987. • Kimura, Bin, Tra. Per una fenomenologia dell’incontro, Il Pozzo di Giacobbe, Aragona, 2013. • Kingsley, Peter, Nei Luoghi oscuri della saggezza, Tropea, Milan, 2001. • Lerro, Menotti, and Luigi Leuzzi, La Scuola Empatica, Ladolfi, Borgomanero, 2020. • Leuzzi, Luigi, Mitoarcheologia di un territorio: Il Cilento e la Lucania Occidentale, Centro di Promozione Culturale del Cilento, Acciaroli, 2021. • Leuzzi, Luigi, Architettura sacra del megalitismo nel Cilento, Centro di Promozione Culturale del Cilento, Acciaroli, 2019. • Leuzzi, Luigi, Mitoarcheologia del Cilento e della Lucania Occidentale, Centro di Promozione Culturale del Cilento, Acciaroli, 2021. • Leuzzi, Luigi, Il megalitismo del Cilento e della Lucania Occidentale, Centro di Promozione Culturale del Cilento, Acciaroli 2023.

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• Natella, Pasquale, and Pietro Ebner, Annali della Scuola Medica Salernitana, Salerno 2005. • Pasca, Maria, La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Storia, immagini, manoscritti dall’XI al XII secolo, Electa, Naples, 1988. • Ricoeur, Paul, Il Conflitto delle Interpretazioni, Jaca Book, Milan, 2020. • Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and C. Sinigallia, Specchi nel Cervello, Raffaello Cortina, Milan, 2019. • Storolow Robert, La prospettiva intersoggettiva, “Ricerca Psicoanalitica,” 1996, Anno VII, n.1–2. • Torrente, Chiara, Abitare lo spaesamento: Lo spazio della unheimlicheit nel pensiero di Martin Heidegger, Tesi di dottorato in Filosofia, Università di Palermo, 2005. • Trevi, Mario, Per uno Junghismo critico: Interpretatio duplex, Giovanni Fioriti, Roma, 2000. • Vecchio, Luigi, Filosofi e Medici, Quaderni del Parco Archeologico di Velia, 2, Naus 2005.

CHAPTER 3 EMPATHY IN THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF SALERNO GIUSEPPE LAURIELLO Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the feelings and reactions of others, identifying oneself with them and comparing them with one’s own lived experiences. In interpersonal relationships, empathy shouldn’t be considered only as a simple understanding of the status of the other, but rather as a capacity for cognitive penetration into the intimacy of one’s reactions.1 For instance, it is sufficient to remember that during psychotherapy, and even more than in psychoanalytic treatment, empathy is very important in the psychotherapist–patient relationship. The doctor, inspired by the ethical and humanistic values of his profession, is or should be empathic by definition, through his compassion and sharing the anguish and suffering of his patient, performing the complete exercise of his duty, and then, having witnessed these substantial experiences, owning them. If we turn to the past, an empathic doctor of medicine par excellence is the romantic family doctor in the medicine of the nineteenth century, at least as he was featured by contemporary writers such as Fucini, Balzac, Flaubert, and Pèrez Galdòs. This medical doctor always identified himself with the affliction of his patients, and the sick person constituted for him the incessant motive for his efforts and his moral responsibility—“a sick person who has never been abandoned, affectively, by his doctor of medicine, because he has become a creature of his intuitive fantasy.”2 We find it in 1

Cf. P. Albiero, G. Matricardi, Che cosa è l’empatia (Rome: Carocci, 2006); E. Stein, Il problema dell’empatia (Rome: Studium, 2012). 2 M. Guérin, Il medico di famiglia e il suo paziente (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1996).

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the noble words of the French physiologist Bournaud, who, with the introduction of the artificial pneumothorax in the treatment of pulmonary consumption, exclaimed with heartfelt sentiment and anguished participation, but also with pride: Having witnessed for years the rapid and inexorable destruction of a lung in a beautiful girl, in a clever man, in a family mother, that the most rigid sanatory care fails to influence, faced with a tenacious fever, that, day after day, consumes the life of the sick person, and not knowing how to prescribe other than antipyretic pills accompanied by words of hope, having done this hard job for years and, suddenly, you find yourself in possession of a method that allows to undertake the fight with real chances of success, it is a satisfaction that goes beyond the professional feeling and this invests the pride of feeling a man.3

The most remote hints of empathic situations in medicine are found in Hippocrates. The Hippocratic physician has a high ethical conception of the medical profession, condensed in the oath. This doctor represents the perfect figure of the health professional: a good observer, he is educated and human, precise and calm, his words are measured, he is thoughtful, the master of his passions, but, above all, he is capable of penetrating the sufferings of his sick patient, having had so many experiences in the course of his activity, having owned them, as a vicar forane doctor of medicine. In this regard, we wish to recall the beautiful expressions of Seneca that perfectly qualify the framework of affective empathy in the figure of the family doctor of medicine: Why do I owe the doctor of medicine something more and why do I still remain in debt even after paying him? Because as a doctor of medicine he becomes a friend and we are not obliged to him for his professional performance, but for his benevolent and affectionate disposition towards us. If the doctor of medicine doesn’t do anything, unless to feel my pulse and prescribe what I must do or avoid, I do not owe him anything, because he doesn’t see a friend in me, but a customer. On the contrary, I am his debtor, because what he sold me is worth more than I paid for: he worried

3

R. Bournaud, Etat actuel du traitement de la tubercolose poulmonaire, VII Congrès National de la Tuberculose, Bordeaux, 1931.

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about me more than it was necessary for his professional activity, he was anxious for me, he affectionately looked after me, he ran through difficult times, he was moved by my groans . . .4

The school of Salerno is one of the most relevant examples of the scientific spirit in the Middle Ages, a medium between the limpid thought of classical medicine and the modern age, the first centre of teaching in the Western world in the pre-university epoch. The merit of this institution is that it has set the course for so many accepted and undisputed compositions, lines of thought and approaches, which have been accepted and discussed, and they have become a rule for our research about health, our sanitary organization, our professional behavior, and our civilization. This magisterium never died but poured out onto future generations a heritage of which, today, we are proud custodians and from which we still draw, with devout respect. The backbone of its medicine is nothing but the secular perfection of the Benedictine monastery, having adopted its principles and purposes. In turn, this is based on the application of charity and comes from the realization of the second evangelic commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” a precept that is subject to many interpretations, including that of understanding and interpenetration of the discomfort and need of others—an identification facilitated by having lived similar experiences. The precept, addressed to the doctor of medicine and taking up the words of Seneca, is a solicitation not to consider the patient as a customer but, maintaining the high ethical value of his profession, to participate in the patient’s suffering, to sustain him, taking charge of his affliction, to experience his suffering. Two short, mutilated treaties of the school that are assignable to the twelfth to thirteenth centuries are De adventu medici ad aegrotum (On the arrival of the doctor of medicine at the sick person) and De instructione medici (Instructions for the doctor of medicine), a summa of medical deontology and methodology. These texts reported certain recommendations of the clear Hippocratic method, addressed by the Magister to the neophyte doctor, visiting a patient at home. They are works of logical and sound clinical common sense that are not without interest and are enlightening, 4

Seneca, De Beneficiis, VI, 16, 1–3.

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especially in comparison with the modern doctor of medicine perhaps too frantically engaged with difficult scientific issues, looking for disturbing questions for diagnostic and increasingly sophisticated therapeutic interventions. These two short treaties set objectives that are certainly not ambitious but have an immediate utility, and they are almost a vademecum of easy consultation for the frequent occurrence during professional practice, such as a medical visit to a patient’s home. The treatises are ultimately a code of conduct, which not only have the function of prescribing procedural rules to be followed in the relationship with the patient but also are intended to offer valid suggestions to win the belief and confidence of the patient and his family members. Together they create a handbook of prudence and foresight that often surprises for its modernity: a simple and easy exposure of judicious advice, aimed at not only achieving professional success but also creating a real empathic situation without offending the principles of ethics. And this is how it begins: “when you, the doctor, will be called to the sick man’s bed, help him in the name of the Lord, and be near him just like the Angel for Tobias, who was infirm in his body and in his mind.”5 The reference is to the biblical book of Tobias, where the archangel Raffaele, acting as his guide and defender, accompanies Tobias to the Media looking for the drug to cure her father’s blindness. The Magister, in recalling the episode, wishes to emphasize that the archangel was able to understand the moods of Tobias, before he manifested them vocally, so the young doctor of medicine will have to guess the psychological condition of his patient in order to be connected with him. The same thing can be inferred from two other successive suggestions: “On entering, ask the person who announces you how long the sick man has been suffering. Because, when you are next to him, you do not seem to ignore all his conditions.” “Introducing yourself to the patient, do not show a superior attitude, but respond with equal humility to the greeting of those who stand for you and sit down, telling them by a sign to sit down too.”6

5 6

Collectio Salernitana, II, 72–80. Ibid. V, 333–350.

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These would seem two suggestions of elementary obviousness; however, on the contrary, in daily practice they are not always realizable due to the recurrent arrogant presumption of the doctor, who by subjecting the patient influences the accuracy and completeness of the visit. Instead, by adopting the sobriety of the recommended behavior, he might establish an immediate relationship of confidence and attractiveness. The first piece of advice is a simple and prudent act that affects the patient’s psyche, because the doctor, introducing himself before him, being already informed of his state of health, prepares the patient to react favorably towards the person and towards his semiological maneuvers. The second one emphasizes the behavior to follow in the sick person’s home: serious, but not severe, affable, but not intrusive, caring and participant, but not hypocritical. It is a gesture that surely facilitates that favorable climate that is necessary to better enhance the performance of the doctor and his image as an interpreter of the art of health in order to create a situation of empathy between the two subjects. Conversely, a presumptuous and pedantic attitude that creates instinctive reactions of repulsion and annoys the interlocutor is absolutely proscribed. A further piece of advice: “While you sip a drink, between one word and another one, express your appreciation for the amenity of the place and your compliments on the layout of the house where you are and, as well as, for the liberality of the family.” It is clear that in this suggestion there is an identification with the patient’s expectations, a subtle and wise psychological attention to access to his thoughts and emotions. Three further examples of empathy follow, which is not only a hard, therapeutic procedure but also an expression of intuitive introspection of the doctor in the state of mind of the sick, convalescent person on the occasion of the usual courtesy visits: Let the peers be present with whom they entertain usual relations. If they are kids, let them call the children, in their presence, and maintain with them the usual relations and let them play together in a circle or in another way. If they are military or noble persons let the speeches fall on the dangerous dogs and on the horses.

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Let the old men invite the old man and talk with him. So that if the old men saw a strong young man who has a high stature, and he is tall and agile, they would torment themselves a lot inside of them.7

Also in these cases it is evident that the doctor must carefully assess the propensity of the patient, even if the latter does not catch it, and realize how the presence of peers or persons of the same rank can be of benefit, and how inappropriate could be the presence of strangers. And it is still clear how these instructions come from a Magister familiar with life experiences who can penetrate into the psyche and state of mind of the sick person. The same school gives the following profile of this master: “Elderly, wise, composed, authoritative, prudent, reliable, worthy of reverence and love, a man of the highest science and light of the whole medicine”; a “Master who entrusts all his competence and maturity to the growth of the student, but a student that can be: attentive, humble, docile, willing to let the mists of ignorance get clear, accepting the purity of science.” Here, there are just a few more instructions, revealing wisdom and witty empathy: Before visiting him, ask him if he confessed to the priest and, if he did not, whether he would do it or promise to do it. He has to ask him before visiting him otherwise he might despair of his own health, believing that you have not hope to heal him. I warn you about a single thing: don’t look at his wife or his daughter or his handmaid lustfully and don’t let yourself be seduced by female beauty. This action would discredit the Doctor and medicine itself, the sick person would become wary and you would lose the divine help. If you behave yourself well, you will get the favor of all the people and everyone will burst in your praise. Having come to the conclusion, and having observed my precepts, it’s time to apply for a license. Try to win the confidence of the one who is close to the sick person by speaking to him familiarly, because the sick person has dealt with him about your remuneration.8

7 8

Ibid. Ibid.

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These are statements that need no further comment. However, from the continuation of these instructions it is possible to deduce what the requirements of a trustworthy doctor are. First of all, it is necessary to assure availability, as a matter of urgency, to any request for assistance and rescue that comes from a sick person. It is a peculiar aspect of the profession, which goes beyond any ideological, religious, or ethnic origin, and it only responds to need. Second: it is necessary to have the propensity to listen and pay attention to all that the sick person has to externalize with the patience that the interview requires, and to realize the patient’s pressing need to give vent to suppressed anxieties. This listening must be completed bearing in mind the psychological depth of the subject to be treated and with a study of the context where the sick person lives; it cannot and must not be independent from the deontological, psychological, and ethical involvement the doctor is connected with. Third: it is necessary to acquire confidence, which is a conquest of the doctor of medicine. It is given not only by esteem on the level of scientific knowledge but also by the relationship of confidence that he manages to establish with the infirm person. But above all the doctor must know how to optimize his approach with the patient through that mental openness from which sensitivity, understanding, and solidarity in front of human suffering derive—qualities permeated in the activity and image of the health operator, who is capable of establishing a human dialogue from human to human with his patient, where the former learns the story that his sick person tells him and knows that it is not just a page of clinical details but an episode of a life, full of tension, and often a request for participation in solidarity, as well as of rescue. Because medicine is satisfied not only by scientific and clinical deepening but also by psychological and sociological deepening, it operates in an environmental and socio-cultural area where such implications are significant and sometimes substantial. Such considerations would remain a mere intellectual exercise if they were not compared with what is happening in the present. The training of professionals is not always carried out to this end, because the preparation of the doctor appears deprived of that intellectual background that should

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support him in the performance of his offices, which only pre-university studies with a humanistic orientation can assure. The clinical doctor of the past, who trusted his method of objective and systematic observation in a sober and positive relationship with his patient, and had a high capacity for the use of his five senses and his penetrating, psychological intuition, has been replaced by the technological doctor of medicine who is a super specialist and mechanic, endowed with elevated, technical skills, and capable of biological mathematization, but is lacking in global, unitary, critical, and—why not—spiritual education. This cybernetic physician, technician, and detached doctor who arouses satisfaction for his immense and impenetrable knowledge, for his greed for adventure on the threshold of life, appears fragile in the human relationship, unprepared in the joint contact, without that humanitas that should characterize his relational and professional life, perched in his emotional indifference, in his burnout—in other words, unable to create a situation of empathy. And it is such a level of detachment, of “emotional exhaustion,” that permeates the doctor–patient relationship, especially in large hospitals and in the futuristic health centers where they have felt the need, due to pressure from legislators—those who analyze and manage social correlations as well as the claims of people—to introduce into medicine the term “humanize,” in a science and profession whereby “humanization” should represent the quintessence, the reason for being. The failure of medicine as a human science, in the nobler value of the term, and of the doctor of medicine as an imago patris of the patient has been caused by diagnostic and therapeutic protocols as well as guidelines. They are a way undoubtedly of simplifying the longevity of professional activity that is increasingly bureaucratized and subjected to external needs that are not ethical, of which the “protocol” is the paradigm, forgetting the ultimate finality of medicine and treating the sick person as a sensitive being, as a person with his own specific, exclusive dignity. The “protocol” is a procedure that produces a medical intervention that is even more “mechanical” and anti-empathic, because it considers the person as an “organic machine” regardless of his personal history, affectivity, system of relationships and reactions, and imagination. This machine person, accustomed to the norms established by the physio-

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pathological sciences on a statistical model, becomes an “organic machine,” leading the psychiatrist Erica Poli to exclaim, while researching a motivation: “why have many doctors given up the understanding of their patients in their complexity, instead of treating them as a mechanic considers the pipe of a radiator?” At any rate, health is focused not only on physical well-being but also on the psychological balance of the person and, since its final objective is the preservation of life in its prosperity and in its harmony, it represents a supreme value that precedes the others, which are also fundamental, such as freedom, justice, employment, the environment, and economic wellness. However, this model is also the failure of the doctor as an individual for the actual loss of his own interpretative, decision-making, intuitive autonomy; he has become the slave of the language and behaviors of the techno-sciences and of the rigid anatomy-physio pathological norms that are derived from a mathematic abstraction, based on samples. How different the Magister of Salerno is from his contemporary colleagues! Human contact with the sick person is certainly not a secondary aspect of the complex doctor–patient relationship; yet so many times today doctors seem to have lost a standardized recall of ancient principles, strengthened by a careful, lasting observation of the sick person. First of all, the doctor is aware of the unity of the human organism in front of the disease and he acts, in a certain sense, with a physio-pathological mentality, convinced to act on altered functions by well identified mechanisms more than on definite, unhealthy frameworks. But, above all, this doctor appears as a profound scrutinizer of the human soul and, therefore, of the behavior of his patient, studying his life in relation to the world around him, as well as the functions, ideas, and senses and the mechanisms in the physical-biological environment where the patient lives. He can maintain an intense and fruitful interpersonal relationship and, although he has not a specific, psychotherapeutic preparation, he succeeds in performing his function effectively, exploiting emotional reactivity with appropriate means and removing, although in a rudimentary way, the procession of vegetative and somatic symptoms that exalt and dramatize the disease. He manages to achieve positive results acting on emotional imbalances and functional disorders and, while he has no other technology

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but his authority and persuasion capability, he takes full advantage of them with the weight of his personality, proximity, and support. Other examples of clear empathy are found in the writings of Trotula, the famous female doctor of medicine of the Medical School of Salerno; this woman was very seductive and mysterious—the most relevant woman among the mulieres of Salerno—and her identity has been greatly discussed; but she was very firmly present in the tradition of Salerno. We do not know enough about her life, but we are aware of the celebration of her name, supported by contemporary doctors in medicine and by repeated citations. But of course, this kind of almost magistracy—as she was defined— made her the only one who gave voice to women in the desert of the despotic and masculinist Middle Ages; she was the only woman to talk about female suffering lived by real women in the silence and marginalization of a deaf society. A well-known treatise on the sicknesses of women has been attributed to her, De mulierum passionibus, De ornatu mulierum, a concise monograph of cosmetic content, considered by some as an appendix to De passionibus, by others as a standalone essay, and by others still as a treatise, De secretis mulierum. Her first two writings on women’s illnesses and their cosmetics are ample and exceptional examples of the empathy nourished by the author on the members of her sex—empathy expressed by the firm patronage of their right to health, good appearance, and aesthetics: Women are naturally weaker than men and more subject to diseases. Therefore, because of their frailty, for decency or embarrassment they dare not reveal their anguish to their doctor, especially for those diseases that concern their intimacy. Such misfortune, which should be the subject of compassion and especially the influence of a woman that inflames my heart, has urged me to offer a clear explanation of their diseases in order to provide for their health. 9

In the De passionibus and in De secretis the unusual theme of revirgination is treated. Today, revirgination consists of a simple and short surgical operation called Hymenoraffia or hymenoplasty, consisting of surgical suturing with two catgut stitches of the thorn hymen at the time of 9

Trotula, De Mulierum Passionibus.

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defloration: a low-risk but high-cost surgery, conducted under local anesthesia. At the time of Trotula, the hymen was not known and revirgination consisted of causing after the sexual relations of the first night false bleeding from the vulva, obtained by various methods. Today, among Westerners, the loss of virginity is no longer considered so great a shame as to provoke a sensation of loss of honor of a family, because times have profoundly changed and the perception of immorality has been much weakened, if not annulled. Hymen reconstruction is, however, an act of unpleasant unlawfulness and in open contrast with the ethical principles on which medicine was founded as a clear violation of the Hippocratic oath, which was so aimed at the exaltation of the respect for the human person. In the Middle Ages, the discourse was quite different. Virginity was a primary requirement even if it wasn’t written in the marriage contract—a conditio sine qua non dictated by the rigidity of the customs. Most of the time, these were combined marriages, where the master father preserved the right to impose his will on wedding decisions and the virginity of the girl was part of the dowry. Prevarication by the paternal family was exercised especially by the high classes and well-to-do families, where marriage was considered a kind of alliance between strong families, with the aim of increasing their own political and economic power inside the community. The intention to have children, in this case, was completely marginal and, even more, the intention of the woman was strictly subjected to fatherly will. And here, as we will see later on, Trotula intervenes, to defend women, in this case, as victims of their naivety and foolishness, giving themselves for love, trusting in the sworn promise. Trotula, perfectly identified herself in their anguish, in their torment, and penetrated in their disturbing future. While acknowledging the unlawfulness of the act, Trotula puts herself forward to save them from ignominy and humiliation: “Nisi propter honestam causam liceret, nullam de ea mentionem faceremus”10 (if it was not for an honest reason, we shouldn’t pronounce any word). And in that feudal age to save a maiden from the pillory or from the cloister in a 10

Ibid., De Virginitate restituenda sophistice.

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monastery, a maiden who gave herself to a man only for reckless lightness, for excessive abandonment, could well be considered an honest motive. The work of Trotula is an example of deep empathy, of great interpenetration in the misfortune of a betrayed love. We also should say that our female doctor of medicine justifies the correctness of the act, asserting an incomprehensible, absurd, and extravagant difficulty regarding conception. In reality, it is likely that she followed an affective impulse to give advice to these unfortunate women, to free them from the certain and violent paternal or marital reaction. As it was not possible to write down the true reason—which would have officially and publicly pointed out the infringement and be forbidden and sanctioned—she adopted a naive explanation to suggest repairing without jolts. The ability to identify herself with the thoughts and moods of the women of her time is a little-remarked aspect in the draft of this masterful woman of Salerno, whose profile is cleared in the argumentations by De ornatu, to which it is worth giving a nod. The De ornatu mulierum is a text whereby Trotula, overturning the work of debasement carried out by Christianity in the long centuries of the high Middle Ages, performs a work of recovery and reopening of feminine connotations. In an epoch where women lived a position of absolute secondary importance, the ideas of this operator sound like a scandal for a society that condemns artificial beauty, impudence, and lust, and celebrates the beauty of the spirit, magnifying the modesty and mortification of the flesh. The sensitivity of Trotula, in defending the woman and her physicality, appears even more deserving if we consider that the actual, initial enfranchisement of the latter will be manifest only a few centuries later, in the Renaissance, and precisely with the renewal of culture and art, becoming a celebration of elegance and harmony. Another example of subtle empathy comes from the words used by the author in outlining hysteria, a morbid, typically feminine syndrome that in Trotula’s times was defined as a suffocation of the uterus or wandering uterus, in the belief that the uterus could err in the abdomen, oppressing the adjacent organs and causing pathological manifestations. The sensation of suffocation reported by a woman in a hysterical crisis in fact was believed to be caused by the uterus ascending to the top and

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pressing the diaphragm upwards. This conviction endured until the eighteenth century and was overturned only during the following century after the studies of Charcot, Breuer, Freud, and other contemporary neuropsychiatrists. These later theories, which linked hysteria to the repression of feminine desire and the libido, and were linked in turn to complex, neurovegetative, psychic, and endocrine phenomena, would cancel definitively the idea of the wandering uterus. Hysteria is now relegated to baseless psychoneurosis, without an anatomical basis. The syndrome has become extremely rare, in contrast to the past, when with sexuality rigidly repressed its frequency was very high. Its symptomatology is extremely varied, characterized by alterations reproducing real phenomena due to suggestion, but returning to perfect normality at the end of the crisis (see above, regarding choking, but also paralysis and hysteric contractures, convulsions, stiffness, and more, all with high theatricality). At the moment, traces of ancient beliefs persist in popular language, such as “having a sideways uterus.” The Medical School of Salerno, faithful to a loyal student of the sister of Cos, realizes, as its own, the entire doctrinal Hippocratic construction (not by chance Salerno is called the Hippocratic Civitas), connecting hysterical attacks with the thought of its alma mater. The pathophysiology of this complex, clinical manifestation is mentioned in a treatise of the Corpus Hippocraticum, the Nature of Women. In this text they maintained that the uterus is a wandering organ in the abdominal cavity, “a person in a person,” to use the expression of the philologist Robert Joly. In fact, the book states: If the uterus moves towards the liver, the woman becomes suddenly sultry, grits her teeth, her skin bruises. She suddenly suffers for these ailments, while she is in good health. This disease mainly affects old virgins and widows who are still young and already mothers remaining without a husband.11

And again: “When the uterus goes to hypochondriac persons, you have suffocation.” We also find considerable hints in the Timaeus of Plato, who, taking up Hippocratic thought, confirms: 11

Hippocrates, De mulieris natura.

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In women the uterus is like an animal eager to give birth to children; when it remains sterile for a long time, after the fertile season, it suffers hard pains, wandering everywhere inside the body, obstructing the air passages and preventing breathing, throwing the body itself into the most severe anxiety.12

As mentioned above, the Medical School of Salerno resumed and elaborated the concepts on hysteria enunciated by Greek medicine, of which it developed many treatments proposed by various masters. Trotula was one of them, and she describes it in her treatise on women’s diseases. In reading the text we find again among its lines the champion of the female sex. Her expressions, while preserving the tone of a scientific exposé, betray compassion, the empathy for women’s fragility, misfortune, and status of subjection to men, especially when confronted with an extremely delicate pathological situation, where repressed sexuality is at stake: When the uterus is suffocated, i.e., when it is pushed towards the top, there is an upset of the stomach upheaval and a loss of appetite for a pressing coldness of the heart. Sometimes, women are affected by a syncope and the wrist disappears or it isn’t almost felt. Sometimes, the woman is contracted, so much so that her head reaches her knees, and she loses her sight and the voice fails, the nose becomes distorted, the lips are contracted and she grinds the teeth and the chest is raised upwards beyond the norm.13

As it is easy to notice, in this passage we are faced with a hysterical crisis, perfectly narrated; but in the exposure of the clinical picture it is so tumultuous and it is not difficult to feel the suffering of the description, the drama of the suffering, the identification with the anguish experienced in those moments. “This happens to those women who do not use men, especially to widows who were accustomed to sexual intercourse and to virgins, when they reach the age of marriage and they are not able to make use of men.” The latter is a topic that was resumed and discussed in wide debates in the nineteenth century, a time when the morbid phenomenon spread in all its exceptional resonance because of the sobriety of social behavior, which required dignity and respectability. 12 13

Plato, Timaeus. Trotula, De Mulierum natura.

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But empathy is all the more felt also because the condition of these women is open to malicious murmuring, if not even to ridicule in a situation that is not wanted at any rate. At the time of Trotula, it was not uncommon for women to be reported as witches and subjected to brutal torments. The resulting therapy was marriage, regarded as a unique, real, and effective treatment to restore health and good reputation. A careful interpretation of the thought of the almost magistra (female teacher) of Salerno, conducted by reading the introductory notes of De passioni Trotula, De mulierum passionibus, I, 45., clearly shows her flanking, emotional participation, and empathy or, at least, her solidarity with the promotion of redemption from the state of vassalage in which women were in during her time. As already mentioned, Trotula, or the pupil who compiled the book under her guidance, wrote: “commiserating their misfortune,” I began having an interest with attention to diseases that very often harass the female sex. In the Latin passage “miseranda illarum calamitate,” there is not only a reference to the natural modesty that prevents women from revealing their own evil to the doctor, but also an acknowledgement of a condition of subjection to an unacceptable system of abuse of male power present in Lombard society, persisting in the subsequent Norman juridical order. To pass final judgment on the thought of this woman of Salerno, beyond the professional and strictly medical aspects: today, nine centuries of progress and continuous scientific evolution leads us to recognize surprisingly and pleasantly the presence in Trotula’s observations of a heartfelt message that is participating and sincere, informed by the reacquisition of the centrality of the woman in her request for health through the restoration of the attributes of her anatomical functions, the reevaluation of her physical appearance, and the enhancement of her relationships within the society in where she acts. For Trotula the woman must live her own femininity, she must have a fulfilling relationship with her body and, therefore, with her own emotions and feelings. An altered functioning of the female genital system or features disfigured by abnormalities or morbid states is a reason for loss of femininity, of a resource that identifies her, which makes her natural and attractive, harmonizing her relations with the man. Trotula penetrates into such instances through a claim we feel we must read between the lines. We

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perceive the attention, conviction, and pathos, because Trotula herself is a woman and as a woman she shares the moods and the emotions of those similar to her, she interprets them and takes them on, calling them back and fighting for a better world. The Middle Ages, with all their limitations and shadows, also included great moments of flowering, which are often recognized in the appearance of vigorous and enthralling characters who were able to score with their unique qualities the path of history. Trotula is one of these noble figures, whose work has prevented centuries from being sprinkled with the dust of oblivion. At a time when women were discriminated against, oppressed under the power of men, whether a father, husband, son, or next of kin, when they were forced into a life of discipline in the family or monastery, and deprived of the right to participate in public activities, in this obscurantist and feudal epoch, to discover that a female health worker of strong character claimed the dignity and prerogatives of women, demanding freedom, culture, and the right to be happy, penetrating into their secluded lives, is a piece of information of great emotion and of careful reflection. Animated by tenacity and faith in the rightness of the cause, Trotula was one of the forerunners of a long, difficult, secular fight, which saw its conclusion—almost—only in modern times. We want to conclude with a nice example of mutual empathy. We find it in part X of the Regimen Sanitatis edited by Sinno, concerning doctors of medicine, Chapter V, on the requirements that a doctor must have, which states: Be the doctor [who is] always benevolent and with clean dress. Let a splendid ring shine in his fingers. With a sharp robe you will be welcome, beautiful clothing will give you a lot of benefits. [With] sloppy dress, [the doctor is] a vile parcel—a poor doctor, a measly fee.14

Sinno comments: “The affability of the doctor is one of the requirements to be accepted by customers. Care in dressing makes him pleasing and respected.” The precept does not appear only as a given lesson with cold detachment from the teacher to the student, but it teaches how the doctor, 14

Regimen Sanitatis, edited by Andrea Sinno.

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dressed in rich and elegant clothing, can affect the patient, evidencing an empathic situation towards him and stimulating his positive attention—the so-called aesthetic sympathy that the German philosopher Vischer, in clarifying the concept of empathy, defines as the inexpressible feeling a person feels in front of a work of art: a comparison, perhaps, in this case, which is excessive but fitting.

Bibliography • Agrimi, Jacopo, and Chiara Crisciani, Medicina del corpo e medicina dell’anima. Note sul sapere medico fino al XIII secolo, Bibliopolis, Milan, 1978. • Albiero, Paolo, and Giada Matricardi, Che cosa è l’empatia, Carocci, Rome, 2006. • Austoni, Mario, La formazione del medico, Federazione Medica, XXXVI, 7, 619, 1983. • Beretta Anguissola, Alessandro, La formazione del medico in una città che cambia, Federazione Medica, XXXVI, 3, 11, 1983. • Bournaud, Roland, État actuel du traitement de la tubercolose, VII Congrès National de la Tuberculose, Bordeaux, 1931. • Casson, Ferdinand, Dignità della professione medica, Federazione Medica, XXXVII, 10, 936, 1984. • De Renzi, Salvatore, Storia documentata della Scuola medica salernitana, Nobile, Naples, 1857. • Le Fanu, James, Ascesa e declino della medicina moderna, Vita e Pensiero, Rome, 2005. • Greco Pietro, Trotula, la prima donna medico d’Europa, L’Asino d’Oro, Milan, 2022. • Green, Monica, Trotula, un compendio medievale di medicina delle donne, Edizione del Galluzzo, Florence, 2009. • Guérin, Monique, Il medico di famiglia e il suo paziente, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1996. • Illich, Ivan, Nemesi medica, l’espropriazione della salute, Red, Milan, 2013. • Joly, Robert, Niveau de science hippocratique, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1966.

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• Lauriello, Giuseppe, Istruzioni per il medico (De instructione medici), deontologia e metodologia medica da un manoscritto salernitano del XII secolo, Centro Studi e Documentazione della Scuola Medica Salernitana, Salerno, 1997. • Lauriello, Giuseppe, Monachesimo occidentale e Scuola Medica Salernitana, in “Discorsi sulla Scuola Medica Salernitana,” Laveglia, Salerno, 2005. • Premuda, Loris, Metodo e conoscenza da Ippocrate ai nostri giorni, CEDAM, Padova, 1971. • Stein, Edith, Il problema dell’empatia, Studium, Rome, 2012.

CHAPTER 4 AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CULTURAL CONTRIBUTION IN TERMS OF EMPATHY LUIGI LEUZZI Paragraph 1 Intersubjective identity Identity coincides with the awareness that an individual assumes in relation to the environment that welcomes him and therefore turns out to be what remains in the time of the individuum, oscillating between an anthropoietic and another extreme ecopoietic coexisting term. Therefore, the person is attested as a structure and a flux with a substantial identity and another relational one. In this last sense, he is a dividuum and, therefore, cannot be separated from the other by himself. On one hand, this is because he insists on an interpretation of the world in relation to the references of meanings through which he gives meaning to the experience of the lived world and therefore he is semiotic. On the other hand, it is because he is intersubjective, as while he is confronting the otherness he is not simply constituted as a subject that builds a bridge to another subjectivity but receives a meaning in a we-centric vortex that constitutes him just as he is comparing himself to the other person. In other words, the person insists on the sameness and on the “ipseity,” quoting Paul Ricouer; for this reason, just as he focuses on the continuity of being, he is exposed to a continuous reworking of the cohesion of the self in relation to the experience he makes of the world and of the otherness he substantiates. If prevalent, the identity contributes to a self-referential identification and exemplification, even as the person wearing it inhabits a world that constitutes a complex and branched reality that puts integration before separateness. Therefore, this is the thematic path that we shall try to cross in this anthropological-cultural

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contribution. In doing so, we will leverage the experience of a sub-region of Campania called Cilento, imagining an experiential path that exemplifies the scope of an intentional empathic act in reshaping an awareness of the individual in the anthropic context of belonging to introduce changes that are useful to win a condition of anthropological stalemate. Much we experienced and we have appointed countless heavenly entities since we are an interview and we can listen to each other.1

F. Hölderlin, writing poetry on poetry, indicates the open space, the “Lichtung,” and therefore the clearing of the being as the original place, the source, where only poets and heroes are allowed access in the presence of the “fugitives.” These are presented in the ether and in the abyss, then, in the likeness of Apollo and the Great Mother. These Celestials can be caught only with the deep gaze of an original Greekness. The athletic and required eye will be witty as it is Apollonian and heroic in terms of momentum (Achilles who is identified by the Great Mother, while he remains enthralled). In the source, the original word will have its origin in founding the language where the man dwells; then, in the dwelling place of being there. The being, or rather the essence according to Martin Heidegger, will transcend itself in existing or, better, in coexisting, as it is attested only in the encounter with otherness and the other by the self that constitutes the self in the dialogical and ethical horizon of the ego-you of Martin Buber. The face of the other person is the face of Christ, a naked, glabrous, vulnerable face, and we shall ask a question that we could not leave unrestrained, “Will you kill me?” This act of responsibility will be attested in an ethical dimension that is hardly alienable without resulting in the dehumanization of the meeting. The Cultural Pyramid proposed by Menotti Lerro is the result of a deep intuition of the need to refound and, better, find an original thought that can express the anima mundi of the area, now investigated and flattened by oblivion and lost in marginality, compared with the urbanized centers that for elevated social capital are more easily identifiable and better organized. It is not a mere conceptual geometry but 1

“Hymn of Peace,” by Friedrich Hölderlin.

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a cultural and identity configuration because at the virtual summits we shall find, quoting F. Hölderlin, the escaped persons on Monte Stella and especially the Goddess Cilens (goddess of the night equivalent of the Great Mother) and the god Thinia (the god of light), both of Etruscan origin. Starting from a brilliant intuition by Fabio Astone, and further integrated by the second term of the acronym by me, the undersigned, they give rise to the etymology of Cilento. Moreover, in my opinion, these numinous cosmogonic entities found Eleatic thought in the combination of light and darkness that is the basis of the thought of Parmenides—specifically, the conceptualization of aletheia, an ontic approach to the truth as an alternative to Doxa, and, therefore, to changing opinions. Here, a second virtual summit comes that is represented by Velia, land of iatromantis figures, philosophers, and ouliades, doctors, who were adepts of the cult of Apollo, and by Poseidon with the scent of its roses dedicated to Ceres, and the mystery of an interior world, alluded to by the diver, beyond the columns of Hercules. The anthropic territory where the artistic and literary project is articulated at the base of the Cultural Pyramid, so outlined, stems from the dialectical iterations between the various cultural references of the Cilento municipalities and the Contemporary Art Centre based at Vallo della Lucania. This design as well as the theoretical correspondence has then evolved into the movement called Empathism, now of national, if not international, resonance. However, for the phenomena of the demographic decline related to the dynamics of migration and depopulation of inland areas, we have to confront a social reality affected anthropologically by interpersonal distances related to Covid and logistical and institutional deficiencies. That is why we have approached the municipal authorities and the various sensitive institutions with their cultural contacts, the Pro Loco, in particular cultural foundations, to transform the marginality of our territory in an opportunity for growth and to claim a new centrality starting from the apodictic evidence of its ethno-anthropological identities. Attention was paid to the landscape emergencies and anthropic suggestions, which for each village gave orientation to a specific cultural and emotional vocation: for poetry at Salento, for aphorisms at Omignano, for love at Trentinara, for otium at Vatolla and at the Giambattista Vico Foundation, for toys and language (the first language) at Massicelle and Montano Antilia, for the landing of the sacred at Casalvelino, for a castle that becomes

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an agorà at Agropoli, for sixteenth-century incunabula at San Mauro Cilento, and for an imaginary opening to the creative and fairytale horizons of the murals at Piano Vetrale.

Paragraph 2 Remaining as an opportunity for an evolutionary identity for the territory of Cilento On several occasions, Vito Teti2 has focused on the discomfort that is experienced by anyone who decides to stay in the internal areas of the Apennines to maintain an antinomic balance between anchoring the body’s experience in native places and the diaspora of the mind to other destinations or expectations, ideals, or realities for their coexisting future. Most of the time, the “remaining persons” will face the shadows of the past in villages, rarefied in the community fabric now frayed, which especially in this era of Covid-19 contagion has much in common with the intersubjective distance of the urban or peri-urban, in the modalities of the encounter and coexistence. A glacial distance has a lot of current in social contexts in which the co-existential coordinates have been fragmented, revived in past times by the rhythms and common spaces of agro-pastoral activities in which once there was a choral feeling of belonging. Only festivals currently propose a veiled form of reactualizating the species on the surface because they are “non-places,” according to Marc Augè. During festivals, a vague signage with ephemeral references and billboards propose moments of aggregation, cemented once by common productive and community activities linked to the seasons of sowing and harvesting, of the transit of transhumance and of the exchanges oriented by the transversal, grids, and longitudinal sheep-tracks that marked the wrinkles of an anthropic landscape that is now fading away. Yet, about the civilization of the Apennines in which the territory of this investigation of my contribution consists, Giuseppe Lupo reiterated that just starting from Eboli where Christ stopped, another religion of the inlands was born that mediates ancestral values and invites you to look at the plain or the coast crowded by 2

Vito Teti, La Restanza (Turin: Einaudi, 2022).

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productive and tourist aggregations with a further and transcendent look. We could allude to a metaphysics of the time of the seasons and solstices related by the testimonies of a megalithism that has partly passed into the worship of the extra-urban Marian sanctuaries and the customs evoked by patronal festivals and re-enactments of a past time that must be cultivated in the fertile humus of those who remained and have the strength to attest to the policy-makers that this is no longer the time of celebrations but it is the moment of an epiphany of redemption and identity and belonging. There is no need for welfare or reliance on punctiform grants; young people, on the other hand, deserve infrastructure that allow them to compete with high social capital realities and at the same time to maintain the value of the diversity and peculiarities so that a Cilentano citizen or a Western Lucano citizen can be proud of being so. Many citizens of Cilento hope that the new generations can inhabit our territory and revive it with that vital élan that in past centuries freed our lands from carelessness and abandonment, despite the dark times of wars and Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Lombard, Saracen, Norman, Angevin and Aragonese, Spanish, French, and Savoyard invasions. After all, we are an ancient people, albeit with a dynamic identity, from the time of the Oscan language. Now we must aspire to a supra-regional recognition that can consider us not only as satellite constellations of a world with an advanced social capital. We all have to show that the Lucanians of Samnite lineage in historical times have not caused the disappearance of individuals of a progeny so tempered to the point of constituting the true backbone of the dissenting and strenuous resilience of an ancient world otherwise dedicated to the oblation of the prevarication of an anthropic silencing.

Paragraph 3 Proposals for an observation of the Cilento area by a “de-rural” flâneur The anthropology of a globalized world no longer encounters ethno-cultural reserves. Inhabited places have become thinner, rarefied communities and those who remain are hybridized perhaps in the encounter with the shadows of the past while further disorientation is created by immigrants with a rhapsodic manner or simply by others who are different due to their habits

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and customs. As the world expands, cultures pass through the village of memory, as indicated by Lombardi Satriani, and they create a collective and community identity of transition to the new paradigm of a multiethnic society. In other words, the dialectic between the global and local is activated; traditional communities lose their boundaries and become permeable to other worlds and constitute themselves as spontaneous scans of a “global ecumene,” in the sense of Hannerz. At best, we are witnessing a “glocalization” whereby places, while they are opening up to the world, nevertheless retain their identity. In general, from the transmission of unique knowledge we pass to a sharing of multiple cultures. We prefer to opt for narration of an inner point of view, instead of exhaustive descriptions of the evolving world. The villages in Cilento, in close analogy with the other internal areas of Italy that remain, become ghettos of a “de-ruralized” periphery, where an interpersonal network is reconstituted. Moreover, this occurs in analogy to the urban filaments of the metropolis: places are constituted, functioning as relational and identity spaces that are not necessarily symbolized. The anthropologist sincerely interested in capturing the essence or anima mundi of this territory despite the fading or, at best, the transaction towards other anthropic correspondences is proposed as a curious observer, a flâneur that reveals a botanical curiosity as he is able to capture the atmosphere of community life in a surreal register and suspend his impressions in glass bubbles, as when a corner of a village is exemplified in souvenirs made of plastic wrapped by water and snow flakes and included in glass balls, in an artificial suspension. Then, this curious observer modifies them in an imaginative whirlwind enacted by his own will and relating to a vision of urban co-existent fragments and, in our case, of glocalized rural realities without an original vision. The mass media have created a virtual reality in which an ancient world has lost its narrative representation of everyday life; the latter is also transposed into a global mode that turns out to be the plot of urban filaments insinuated in a network or web of non-specific concretions of the rural periphery. In this way, life events become astounding because they are timeless or “non-places,” and an additional meaning is improperly attributed to them. The outcome of these anthropological transformations ends up being the exposure to phantasmic projections of “non-sense” and a lack of awareness, especially for future generations, lost in the lack of correspondence between the origin

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and destination of life. Despite the presence of historical references and persistent identities in the villages, an anonymous relationship prevails between people who adhere to a globalized world regulated by cybermodernity, who entertain each other while insisting on the solitude and fluidity of a virtual reality. The permanence of the past is replaced by a mobility, and it is difficult to maintain a historical-cultural identity that orients the communities to share the gift of the “communitas.” In the sense of Francesco Remotti, identity must be understood as the result of the encounter between structure (S) and flow (F); in this perspective, Cilento from its origins and even from prehistory has always been characterized by the continuous reworking of the socio-anthropological context. Until the late Roman Empire and, perhaps, up to the second Greek-Eastern Hellenization, it has revealed itself as a territory open to exchange and interaction among heterogeneous, ethnic cultural groups.3 Yet, in this subregion of Campania characterized by a sort of peninsula due to its geomorphic and orographic characteristics, a diachronic scan shows that its coast has received more frequent innovations than the inner land, which turned out to be more closed to osmosis. In Cilento an Isle, the writer has highlighted how the description of Trinacria, divided into “islands in an island” by Leonardo Sciascia, is well demonstrated by Cilento. Gerhard Rolphs has identified manifestations of a conservatism so that together with the Greek linguistic wrecks, Romans, Arabs, Longobards, Spaniards, etc. would have specified the presence in the district of Policastro even of an ethnic Italo-Gallic linguistics with the entry of three hundred immigrant workers at the behest of Roberto D’Angiò. The same etymology of Cilento, according to Fabio Astone and a subsequent interpretation of the writer, derives from Etruscan and from the syzygy Cilens–Thinia, respectively the Goddess of the Night and the God of the Day, as they are mentioned in the liver of Piacenza destined to the discipline of the auruspics and preserved in the local civic museum. Over the centuries, the coastal area was exposed to pirate raids until, because of Berber or Turkish invasions, they decided to stop the trade between the inner lands and the coast that had always been a vector of change and progress. Currently, the inland villages on the high and 3

So much so that it has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, precisely because it is a place of exchange of peoples and civilizations in an east– west direction.

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medium hills or distant from the sea are in conditions of decline, appearing uninhabited if not abandoned, so that in the mixture of fragments of buildings of recent construction, partly used and partly suspended for any use, they appear as “non-places.” Therefore, in understanding the dynamics of human impoverishment of the investigated territory, the scholar uses the same conceptual tools that characterize the anthropology of glo-calization. In conclusion, identity is what remains of an individual in time, of which a nucleus remains, but where the subject is in continuous change, despite being by definition not divisible (individuum), yet nevertheless declines as a dividuum. He is neither an atom of Athenian philosophy nor a Leibnizian monad nor varies only on the surface as conceived by Western society; but he is a divisible person, made of relationships not only in society but also in the world where he lives. This vision extends to the context in which the individual participates in a communitas made of relational subjects, obviously. Identity also expresses the need to maintain consistency, a cohesion and continuity in a complex society that must be exemplified, because being so constituted and branched it is difficult for the person to orient himself within it and therefore he is characterized by an attempt to homologate his identity. A “between us” that pushes for coexistence and separation should yield to integration and synergism. However, it is appropriate to have a symbolic register in which to inscribe these unitary but changing representations. One cannot refer only to the past in a nostalgic way, becoming entangled in a melancholic time stuck in timelessness. We need to live a present that insists on contemporaneity.

Paragraph 4 The symbolic importance of the Cultural Pyramid between poetry and aphorisms in identity trajectories In 2019 Menotti Lerro, a poet, writer, and literary critic, and Antonio Pelliccia and other teachers at the Brera Academy founded the Contemporary Centre of Arts with a physical seat in Milan and a legal seat at Vallo della Lucania. This cultural institution was represented by an icon: the Cultural Pyramid does not want to be just a configuration of the imagination, but defines in its concreteness the villages of Cilento and Lucania with

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anthropic propensities. The pyramid is an element of conjunction with a transcendent dimension, something that does not change while time passes and connects human transience with the perfection of four triangular figures, all the same, with the tip turned upwards to situate itself in an ideal place—a utopia that regenerates and gives strength. The terms of reference, or rather the summits of this image of desire, insist on the poetry recited at Salento, the aphorisms shared at Omignano, the tribute to the most authentic love at Trentinara, the evidence of Apollonian knowledge at PoseidonPaestum, and the unveiling of the cosmogonic thought of Parmenides in Velia at the castle of Agropoli transformed into an agora; and they insist too on the fairytale imagination of Piano Vetrale with its murals, and Roccadaspide, the village of defense with its Federician manor where a new headquarters has been established. In any case, this eidetic configuration is interrelated through its representatives with the various mayors and representatives of authoritative cultural institutions, such as the Giambattista Vico Foundation at Vatolla, to question the feeling of belonging and thus constitute in itinere the search for an inter-community identity. Meanwhile, the Contemporary Arts Centre of Vallo della Lucania has evolved into a literary-artistic and philosophical movement that, tired of the distance and coldness of rhetorical or fashion inferences, preferred the warmth of speech and the light of emotions in order to have its own way in the twilight of a civilization increasingly rarefied in gestures and mimicry—shadows now of a past that looms over the lack of desire, especially in the time of Covid. People no longer cross glances, while the cold images of a civilization geared to Facebook repeat tired, clichéd movements that last the length of a snapshot only to be suddenly replaced by a pose, a performance to impresses followers. And it is precisely in this time of loss and oblivion that we all rediscover empathy, not in the stereotype of a smile and emotion ready for the occasion, but as an authentic moment to be a witness for our neighbor of our sincere presence and of our common identity. Then this proximity was directed to art and its many manifestations, even to history, philosophy, and all those humanistic sciences that have been delivered up to the codes and norms of a glacial rationality made of algorithms and algebraic and geometric measurement of the world. In his Hymns of Peace, Friedrich Hölderlin suggested the foundation of an original identity that is constituted as an empathic attitude, for example:

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60 Much we experienced Countless celestials have named Since we are an interview and we can listen to each other.4

The poet is close to the escaped gods and invites us to the clearing of being lichtung, where we find the source of the word that founds the origins of language; at first gods and later poets and semi-divine heroes indicate the way for the opening and sacredness of the dwelling where man lives. The Cultural Pyramid insists on places where empathic attitudes are still evident, directed to listening and welcoming human and identity vocations. Each vertex points towards the ether, leveraging on the depths of the soul. Meanwhile, an ancestral, firstly Neolithic and then Eleatic thought arises from the contrast between light and night; first, it founds a cosmogonic vision and then it discloses the more inaccessible truths, despite the bewilderment of changing opinions. Meanwhile, the Contemporary Art Centre, thanks to Menotti Lerro and the other founders I am honored to belong to, suggests increasing empathy through a daily practice of art and literature that could subtract the current man from the pale gray world in which he is encouraged to disengage by the sharing of emotional and empathetic experiences in the name of cold reason that is measured in the world only with the algorithms of the Mathesis universalis. The International Poetry Prize in Cilento was recently established with the patronage of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of the Province of Salerno and this foundation is an indispensable opportunity to compete with urbanized cultural realities. Of particular relevance is the opportunity to represent symbolically the villages that remain in our territory and give them an eidetic representation that subtracts them from the irreversible destiny of non-places, rediscovering a centre in the margins that can survive globalization finding an unexpected negotiability and dialectic with the outside world, and especially the metropolis that, on the contrary, imposes unrealized rules with anthropic gradients of our territory.

4

Vol IV, p. 343, Friedrich Hölderlin.

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Paragraph 5 Empathism and empathy in art According to Edith Stein, the Cartesian cogito ergo sum would be the basis of the understanding of the other person; in this direction of meaning, it would not be necessary to perceive the experience of the other according to the bodily manifestation of our experiences and/or those of the other person. Max Scheler believes that in the encounter with the other there is a flow of undifferentiated experiences with respect to the I–you, in which the self and the other are indistinct and then they flow into we-centric, more stable vortices that progressively attract other elements of the flow until individuals are established; thus, we can attest to the priority of the We over the ego and of the community over individuality. We find ourselves in a unique whole entity, or rather in an expressive unit and the understanding of the other is realized, incarnating in the affective-emotional and sensemotor sphere. Therefore, the encounter with the other person takes place on the level of feeling—an embodied practice, not a thematic object of cognition as for Stein. In the dialectic between expressiveness and context to understand the other, first I must give importance to the world that I share with the other person; thus, there is no need for me to disappear into hermeneutic efforts to understand the expression of the face and movements of the other if the context in which he is inserted gives him an orientation function. Empathy is not only the discovery of the other but also an opportunity for a transformation of ourselves. Otherness bursts into the necessary distance that we place from our egocentrism to shed light on ourselves and thus to constitute identity as founded in a region of subjects that constitute themselves as they come into contact with each other by throwing bridges of intersubjectivity. The individual is a vortex that the self forms within the we-centric flow. The object acquires a human meaning and the subject identifies himself with it by transposing into it its emotional content with an emotional participation. The artist is the one who consciously or unknowingly evokes or uses empathy to allow the user of the work of art to have an embodied experience that transcends a merely comprehensive approach to transform it into a pure immersion or introjection in response to the identification in the aesthetic artifact, in order to reach an original and essential dimension that is free from preconceptions.

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Only later on, finally, does the person engaged in such a confrontation rationalize this event and, having access to an epicenter level, engage in a hermeneutic effort with the attribution of meanings that refer to the opening of horizons of sense that are shared, such as the world of the artist and the user of the work. It is believed by several scholars that a definition of this experience may be found in incarnated simulation starting from the theory of the neuron system—which asserts that certain cells of the central nervous system species of some motor and premotor areas are able to learn emotional experiences from the first interactions of the mother–child dyad. According to this hypothesis, the work of art is capable of evoking by mirroring the reflections that allow—beyond the figurative or abstract— expressed representations, to reactualize in the viewer of the work of art the same subjective and emotional path of the artist. Therefore, empathy has an essential importance for aesthetics, by which external movement cannot be separated from inner movement and the emotional mirror becomes the epicenter of a feeling of imitation that motivates a multidisciplinary approach in the effort of understanding the artistic experience. Empathy is irreplaceable for the creation of a subjective and intersubjective sense of aesthetic enjoyment as an act of understanding the intentions of the other person. In a successive moment, symbolic and semiotic interpretations of figurative or abstract representations of the work of art take over, offering the act of interpretation as a semantic means between the internal and external way of the artist and the user of the work of art. The term Einfuhlung (to feel inside) refers to emotional reactions induced by the observation of paintings and works of art in general. Through the activation of mirror neurons, a response to figurative or abstract representations is determined so that the observer in both cases has a feeling of bodily participation that reproduces the emotions and the implicit movements of the artist on the canvas, in the case of paintings. From the imitation of the movement one passes to the intuitive gesture of the author. Therefore, the incarnated simulation allows the understanding or repetition of the contents of the images, actions, emotions, and sensations that are detectable on the faces of the subjects painted or sculpted. In the case of representations that evoke strong reactions, the fear and the pain are reproduced by the brain in “simulation modality” with the same somatic states resulting from the expected sensations as if the spectator’s body was

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actually the protagonist. If the empathy responds to the logic of neuroscience suggested by the mirror neuron system, then in the experience of the work of art a reflected scheme is preferred without a reference to the transcendent meanings of the person. However, it is true that this explanation does not saturate the question of the meaning that evokes this eventuality and it does not dissolve the mystery of the ecstasy that on various occasions transforms the world of the user to change the vision of the world (Weltanschauung). In other words, we need a hermeneutic that considers empathic sharing as an intentional two-way act between the artist and the spectator, paying attention to implicit symbolism and its potential to transform the worlds encountered. Paragraph 6 Aesthetics and empathy in art In this sense, starting from the German idealism of Shelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin, aesthetics constitutes an attempt to decode the experience of the senses in relation to the work of art in order to transcend the doxa in a transcendent but shared truth. The sensation (aisthesis) does not constitute a conceptual representation (adequatio rei et intellectus) but rather an occasion of revelation and inner transformation for which the res extensa acts as a bridge towards the res cogitans just when one feels the auroral state of a revealed truth (aletheia). Therefore, any habitual interpretation should be avoided, leaving aside any philosophical theory and any tradition or spirit of the time, approaching the work of art with an immediate description clearing the mind of any prejudicial representation to grasp the vital élan of the author without other comparisons or stereotypes. Therefore, the fruition of the work must happen as a natural event without mediation from historical or iconographic apparatuses for its being constituted in its epiphany in the glade of being (lichtung) and thus revealing itself to be there. Obviously, we cannot ignore the relationship between the form and the substance where the res will be distributed in the space among the things that populate it and that are part of it, while they are offered in the world and, therefore, receive a specification and become distinct signs. Contemporary art uses common tools, suspended from their function by which they normally become the object of daily exchange or trade, and this

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new condition exposes them in their subjectivity and leaves the user the choice of a naked truth or the meaning to be attributed to the world that is opened on this occasion in the crossing. Thus, art and its works allow the passage from a hidden area like the earth to the world in the licthung (glade of being), where the fate of being there plays a role between the opening and closing and in the antinomic representation of the polèmos in which there is a need for symbolic representation. Once, the work of art was enveloped by an aura and placed in a place that was not accessible to most people: the Greek statuary of the classical age was given a cult function, while towards the end of the ancient age it was consecrated in Sancta Santorum churches. Over the centuries, statues and paintings have become the prerogative of patrician houses and were placed in squares during the Renaissance, where they were offered by the rulers to the public domain as carriers of ethical and civic values to emulate. In modern times, private or public spaces have become fluid while the techne has lost the semantic function of creativity and has anchored itself to the immediate supply that generates needs and feeds consumerism. The world is crowded with signs and references for the superfetation of works and reproductions of them, even if they are paintings or sculptures or architectural forms or post-industrial waste that is variously assembled, or it passes from stony material to cement or plastic in a changing metachromatism that has imposed an exponential multiplication of lines and orientations that for their multiplicity have lost their function as lighting and as a guide. Currently the task of the artist is even more difficult because in its contemporary form it must decline distinctive signs in an overcrowded world of objects, becoming flat works of art in the generalized consumerism in der ding—the thing—the object of a deadly enjoyment without the metaphysical aura of desire or of ethical or value thickening. And so, the artist must propose other worlds or other meanings even as Western countries insist on the multiform and multifaceted twilight of dusk. The manifold solutions radiate so much, and the world is so invested in them, that the signs become incomprehensible and every horizon of meaning is illuminated in an equivocal, dubious, transient way. Art is therefore an opening, a measure in compliance with a certain humanity and the work of art is an intentional act in the whole of a communitas that finally opens to

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“reality” with all the benefits and disadvantages that this representation implies. Paragraph 7 The sacred architecture of Megalithism in Cilento: an occasion for an intentional empathic act in the understanding of its mystery Anyone who approaches Cilento with genuine anthropological curiosity will notice an atavistic correspondence among the memory of the places, the megalithic complexes and the rituals or customs of ethno-cultural interest that are still preserved in its fascinating isolation.

Fig. 1.

On Monte Stella, called Cilento in the ‘Piano dei Grassi’, a megalithic complex called “the stone of the small mule” is a testimony to the Cult of the Great Mother. Until the middle of the last century, it was the subject of rites related to the pilgrimage to the Marian Sanctuary called Monte Stella

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from the tip in the area where it was located. To this end, women of childbearing age rubbed their bellies in the narrow corridor of the monument “dromos,” and if they became pregnant the conceived child would be called a “small mule”; that is to say, a “bastard” because it had been fertilized by rocks. Adolescents who crossed the narrow tunnel would call their children “of the stone,” to attest an initiatory path and rebirth from adolescence to a further integration in community life. Probably the monument symbolically represents a moment of transition from nomadic civilization in which not all persons were guaranteed sustenance, especially the most fragile ones, to a later sedentary and cereal phase in which women would have bound available adult men in a polygamous or monogamous bond to protect the most fragile elements of the community, almost constituting that network of emotions and cognitions that allows the programming of the future survival of a community with a close analogy to the function of the psyche which, in this sense, is defined in an inescapable way as female. The megalithic complex dates back to the Eneolithic Age and it is probably the expression of an Aegean-Anatolian civilization similar to that of Gaudio or Rinaldone—the latter attested to especially in the TuscanLazio area. It consists of a trilite or two orthostats surmounted by a tympanum, each with a fovea excavated on the apical seat. The right menhir is anthropomorphic and of female type and it has two udders at the top and a tau engraving in the lower register that defines the thighs and the hymen. A uterus door, in the sense of Enrich Newman, is also configured between the two lithic elements and the cover. The monument is oriented in a northwest/south-east direction; it collects the rays of the sun at the rising of the summer solstice in a fissure that crosses it in an east–west direction. On the Civitella near Moio, in the area in front of the chapel of the SS Annunziata, in the fortified hill of Phrourion—a military outpost of the ancient city of Velia-Elea—a lustral basin evokes an ancient ritual of ablution, initiation, and purification. Not far away an ovoid monolith emerges from the ground for at least 70 cm: at least six meters long and three meters wide, it has two longitudinal fissures, one of which prevails for the whole axis to constitute a “furrow of fecundity,” oriented in a north-west/south-east direction. On the occasion of the procession of the Crusader on 25 March, at the spring equinox, therefore, pilgrims bring chestnut crosses to bless with the cruciform

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appendices, as a symbol of the tree of life related to the Great Mother; in a not very remote time, people placed the crosses in the vineyards as a sign of good luck for the harvest. Not far away, a temple as an oikos has revealed a votive deposit with statuettes in figuline art with the effigy of the Greek deity Hera Argiva and perhaps a simulacrum of the Osco-Sabellian Goddess Mefite. Near the Cross of Rofrano on the sacred mount there is a pilgrimage station towards the sanctuary of the Mantle of the Madonna, an area of ethno-cultural interest. In the vicinity of a tabernacle erected for devotion by pilgrims with a reproduction in an aedicule (oikos) of an icon of the black Madonna of Mount Gelbison, there is a primitive altar where they put the cente (votive structures made up of candles and flowers) brought for devotion on the head by the faithful people. According to a pious legend, the monolith fashioned as an altar would have served to measure the mantle of the Madonna. In addition, children with stomach ache who complete an internal itinerary nine times (the number of the canonical months of gestation) in the pseudoadjacent dolmen will obtain pain relief thanks to the thaumaturgic power of the monument—probably a lithic astrological calendar, firstly invested with another original function in line with an imaginary symbolic fecundity related to a numinous female entity such as the Great Mother. On top of the Sanctuary of the Sacred Mount there is a natural menhir with an excavation of a fovea at the apex called the “footprint of the horse.” Pilgrims throw coins into the carved bowl as an auspicious sign. At one time, they threw them with the hope of being able to keep them in situ, and at least nine pebbles were necessary to propitiate a happy pregnancy; obviously, the protagonists of this ancestral rite of fertility were women of childbearing age eager to get pregnant. In the locality of Stravacco on the Gelbison sacred mount, from the Arabic “Mount of the Idol,” a menhir inclined and shaped like a hairpin at the apex appears as a “men en sol” [perforated] megalith type, as an incomplete astrological pointer to target the seasons. In the same adjacent area, a lithic calendar with a hypogeum chamber of incubation imposes itself for its majestic dimensions of at least three meters by four meters, revealing a similar function. If on one hand it shares with the previous stone a north-west/south-east orientation, on the other hand, it shows a cultural destination more clearly dedicated to the Great Mother.

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At the foot of Mount Cervati in the Abetenella area there is an ornithomorphic megalith (configured in the form of a nocturnal raptor) with axes mainly oriented north-south and east-west, representing an emblematic stylization of the Great Mother. Its profile refers to the coquette goddess, or bird goddess, a deity venerated in the fifth millennium BC in Moldova and an ancestor of the goddess Athena. In the locality of the Palomba coast on the Alburni, at an altitude of 1125 meters, a rock sculpture stands out on a crown of chalk leaf, a rock sculpture representing an eidolon, that is, a divinized depiction of a hero in the guise of a warrior. The precarious state of conservation, especially of the face, due to the signs of a recent iconoclastic fury makes it difficult to date. The presence of a panoply of Osco-Sabellian type with a Samnite belt refers to an iconography linked to Mamerte, an Italic god protector of the war, although it isn’t possible to exclude other origins, if one insists on a comparison of the chiton with Celtic flat-riveted ring mail typical of Germanic armor. The genius loci suggests the hypothesis of a prefiguration of St. Michael, the archangel venerated in the contiguous S. Angelo a Fasanella through an image that refers to the Celtic god Mercurius-Wotanaz. A female arché regulated and normalized the events of the community life of Cilento since prehistoric times in numinous epiphanies that we shall at different points identify in Hera, Athena Poliade, Demeter, and Cybele, until the most recent Pagan-Christian syncretism that is attested in the worship of Our Lady of the Pomegranate. A female Numen will constitute the genius loci of the ancient lands of Cilento and Vallo del Diano and it assumes the features of Hera Argiva and contributes to the iconography of the Madonna del Cilento of Ponte Barizzo and in general to a community identity that survives in the cult of the Seven Sisters and their non-urban and urban sanctuaries of Cilento. A suggestive hypothesis would derive the etymology of Cilento from “Cilens,” goddess of the night in conjunction with Thinia, god of the day, both deities of the Etruscan Pantheon mentioned in the bronze liver of Piacenza dedicated to the discipline of the haruspices.

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Paragraph 8 Empathism as an opportunity for a practical, intuitive, and identificatory understanding of a megalithic monument Megalithism represents an architectural style and a vision of the life of a given society organized in cyclical time in which the lithic elements chase an immanent coexistence in a perfect balance between nature and culture. The absence of epigraphic evidence, given the proto historical dating of the underlying civilizations, does not allow a reliable assessment as expected for each historical period investigated from the classical age. Only an archaeo-metric or dendrochronological methodology is of support for comparison with other contemporary eras. In this perspective, the humanistic sciences appear irreplaceable for the understanding of the symbolic and cultural aspects in parallel with the phenomenological aspects, especially as regards the psycho-physical experience that some megalithic monuments are able to elicit in a current dimension, which is at the same time immanent. So it seems salient for the understanding of these architectural manifestations to undertake a symbolic and hermeneutic approach accompanied by the fruition of the work through immersion and identification in the introjected monument, as well as a comprehensive use of the phenomenological categories of spatiality and temporality. Of the investigated monuments, we will focus especially on the thematization of the megalithic complex called “the stone of the small mule.” The monument in the southern facade presents a numinous female entity in the orthostat on the right. A divinity, resplendent in its pregnant beauty, flaunts a pregnant belly, and at the top the thorax is enriched with two udders, each one in the form of a cup with a bowl excavation that fixes the axis mundi and connects the earth with a hyper-uranium sky (in other words Gaia and Uranus). This happened symbolically through the ancestral rites in which the flame developed from burnt animal fat and then was crammed according to the probable dictates of the ceremony that took place in this site. The belly is marked at the bottom near the genitals by a “Y” aligned to the right that reproduces the bifurcation of a branch and thus alludes to life and its mystery. The orthostat on the left has a swollen abdomen, which is exposed to the east in this direction, in order to receive the sun’s rays at dawn on the summer solstice. In the northern facade, a uterus door is delimited by the

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two orthostats and is surmounted by a projecting tympanum with a vulva exemplified by an isosceles triangle with lower vertex, and this architectural and symbolic element introduces the visitor in a dark corridor, to the mystery of birth, death and rebirth. Therefore, it represents the enigmatic figure of life and its destiny in the mercy of the Great Mother. A time of origins pervades the faithful people while the night contends with light from the space, and the round truth reveals itself on a monolithic ubi consistam— the immovable being that does not tolerate changing opinions nor the transience of the human condition. Alongside this wealth of signs and symbols is presented a megalithic monument intended to perform the mere astronomical function of a lithic calendar; thus, this destination is equipped with a lateral/lateral bordered-slit delimited by a monolith blade juxtaposed on the west side and by a corridor (dromos) that crosses it longitudinally towards the astronomical coordinates, respectively in the east/west and north/south directions. An interesting interpretation also arises from a comparison with the representation of two deities mentioned in the Disk of Festus of 1750 BC according to the interpretation of the Welsh Orwell. In face A, the divinity Aphaia is evoked with its radiant pregnant beauty that is recalled by the orthostat to the right of the southern facade and by the pregnant abdomen of the other orthostat. A chthonic aspect of the same deity—probably the representation of another deity such as the Goddess Astarte—refers to a dark side of the numen that oversees childbirth in close correlation with access to the uterus door of the northern facade. The two gods therefore represent day and night. Therefore, a symbolic reading is opportune concerning the two orthostats that are visible in the Southern facade of the monument. However, the megalithic complex generically performs a function of the lithic calendar that is anticipated and represented by a boulder in front of the southern facade with a split cross imprinted that corresponds to the astronomical orientations north, south, east, west. The so-called megalithic complex testifies to the transit of a society from nomadism to a permanent cereal condition. From the fortuitous collection of edible wild plants, the society thus reached a seasonal program of agropastoral activity. Attention is paid to the solstice conjunctures so that the harvest would not be at risk. It identifies a female body guarantor for the fertility of the areas: the Great Mother.

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Although the rock relief is inserted in a megalithic context that scholars mostly place in the Bronze Age (supported by the relevant archaeo-metric evidence related to the discovery of fragments of anthropomorphic cups and kettles that at that time act as a guide to determine the dating of the complex), the writer on several occasions has asserted that we have to take into account the sacrificial tank with the short drainage duct that is oriented to target the sun at the zenith during the summer solstice maintaining the south/north–west/east coordinates since it has a north/west–south/east orientation, slightly diverging from the direction of the limestone slab in which the Antece is carved. However, the anthropomorphic sculpture has iconographic characteristics to attribute the worn panoply with the Longobard characteristics for the tunic with a double fibula belt, the disk with umbo for the lance on the left, and the axe on the left with the spata sword in the sheath. The characteristics and essential style of the tunic and trousers refer without doubt to military costumes of the Lombard or GetoDacian period, especially if we take into account that Alburnus was a deity of the Carni Celts that the Roman consul Mario Emilio Scauro in 115 AD tried to assimilate in the Capitoline Pantheon after the victory against this population in Istria. It was a widespread belief among the Romans that, before reaching final victory against one’s enemies, it was necessary to win the favor of the God to protect the opposing people; for this purpose magical rituals were officiated to acquire the benevolence and the thaumaturgic properties removing them from the ethnic group one wanted to defeat (in this case the Carni Celts) to conclude the military maneuvers. In the GetoDacian pantheon the figure of a semi-divine hero, Zalmoides, psychopompus, stood out who chose among the souls of the warriors who died in battle the most valiant ones—that is to say those who would fight the final war against the Titans. A close analogy with the thaumaturgic properties of Mercurius Wotanaz is evident, attributing a symbolic value to the spear that, according to the myth, discerns among the posing fighters who is destined to win. Another hypothesis to recognize the numinous saliencies of the rock relief concerns the cult of Mars Gradivus that combines the characteristics of Ares and Heracles as a deity protecting the herds and the fortifications in the hills that are evoked here by the suggestive limestone emergencies of Costa Palomba.

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It is evident that in terms of understanding the iconography and ideography of the megalithic monuments it is appropriate to divest oneself of a classical aesthetic to integrate a comprehensive approach that is suitable for historical monuments with a hermeneutic approach that insists on the functions of the intuitive and identification practices of the observer. In other words, it will be necessary to get rid of the traditional historical and iconographic apparatuses in order to immerse oneself in the otherness of the work with an empathetic attitude that, while respecting the original parameters of the artifact, reactivates the real usability in an embodied simulation. Instead of limiting ourselves to the critical analysis of the monument only in relation to the structural and substantial data, it will be necessary to open up to a mythic-poietic representation and to orient ourselves towards a chronodesi, that is to say, a contemporary rendering of the experience lived in relation to the work’s function in the event that occurred.

Conclusion When Cosimo De Giorgi in 1881, on royal command, was commissioned to draw up a hydrogeological mapping of Cilento and Alburni Mounts, he revealed a cultural anthropological ante litteram vocation. He questioned the survival of a feeling of art in a territory orphaned of Eleatic culture. Velia, an ancient lighthouse of the civilization, left evidence of itself in an anthropic landscape where the feeling of art was reduced to a minimum. Vallo della Lucania had patrician buildings of two to three floors, unadorned outside; despite the tasteful furniture inside, they offered a disharmonious aesthetic context. When he asked the host who housed him why flowers were not grown in the garden, he was told that artichokes were preferred because of their trade value. Velia, the city of fugitives, according to Ungaretti, left an inner void to which an ethical and valuable as well as aesthetic response had to be given. It was necessary to give an answer to this lack of such feeling, moving on symbolic and archetypal correspondences, according to an empathic gradient that allowed one to find the testimonies that were capable of identifying the anima mundi.

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According to James Hillman, the anthropic landscape would re-update an imaginary dialogue with each individual who puts himself in an empathic attitude towards a loss of sense about a vocation or habitual anthropic custom, as in the case of the investigated territory. An effective metaphor is borrowed from Jung’s symbols about the transformation. If we place ourselves in an active listening state or reverie we catch emotionally vivid and current images that involve us and, interrupting the flow of time in an asynchronous way, modify our trajectories of life as long as we let ourselves be invested by them in a participatory and authentic way. Thus, the newly acquired horizons of sense will be transformed into anthropic itineraries with other perspectives of development and growth. By recomposing the contradictory aspects of our territory we shall revisit our Weltanschauung in an immanent time that in contemporary times reinforces our inconsistencies and missed opportunities in growth perspectives. In conclusion, the semantic and anthropic gradients that affect megalithism in Cilento and Lucania cannot be hidden. The ethno-cultural redundancies that accompany them allude to an initial time of civilizations that have permeated these places and testify to a language of the origins, probably the langue that gives back to each of us, as users, a matrix dimension, in which to refound our being in the ethical and valuable customs of a communitas, where the initial word and emotion still have a weight. To this end, our being in a place and in a given time becomes a promise and a hope in a society that, otherwise, would get lost in the distance. This is how the distance becomes proximity and the other, who is an alienus, becomes a socius.

Bibliography 1) Accardi, Davide, “Il mondo con gli occhi della cultura,” Frammenti (magazine), December 2020. 2) Augè, Marc, Non luoghi: Introduzione ad una antropologia della surmodernità, Eleuthera, Milan, 2009. 3) Bauman, Zygmunt, Globalizzazione e glocalizzazione, Armando editore, Rome, 2005. 4) Cartesio, Renato, Meditazioni Cartesiane edited by Luciano Urbani, Raffello Cortina, Milan, 2001.

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5) Cusinato, Guido, “Espressività, empatia, intersoggettività”, 18 October 2010. 6) D’Angelo, Paolo, Estetica, Raffaello Cortina, Milan, 2002. 7) Esposito, Roberto, Comunitas: Origine e destino della comunità, Einaudi, Turin, 1998. 8) Hannerz, Hulf, La diversità culturale, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2001. 9) Heidegger, Martin, L’origine dell’opera d’arte, Marinotti, Milan, 2001. 10) Leuzzi, Luigi, Cilento, un’isola, Centro di Promozione Culturale del Cilento, Acciaroli, 2017. 11) Leuzzi, Luigi, La Scuola Empatica: Tra Empatia ed Empatismo, “Riscontri” V. 2, Maggio-Agosto, Terebinto, Avellino, 2022. 12) Leuzzi, Luigi, in Cilento, Terra Matrigna. Emigrazione-spopolamentodiaspora dei giovani: Atti del Convegno, edited by Ezio Martuscelli, Amazon, Seattle, 2022. 13) Lombardi-Satriani, Luigi, and Meligrana, Mariano, Un villaggio della memoria, Gangemi editore, Rome, 1987. 14) Lupo, Giuseppe, in Civiltà Appennino: L’Italia in verticale tra identità e rappresentazioni, a cura della fondazione Appennino, Donzelli, Rome, 2020. 15) Nigro, Raffaele, in Civiltà Appennino: L’Italia in verticale tra identità e rappresentazioni, a cura della fondazione Appennino, Donzelli, Rome, 2020. 16) Nuvolati, Giampaolo, “Lo sguardo vagabondo,” Appunti e sedimentitaccuino, 2014. 17) Remotti, Francesco, Sull’identità, Raffaello Cortina, Milan, 2021. 18) Rizzolati, Giacomo, Sinigaglia Corrado, Specchi nel Cervello-come comprendiamo gli altri dall’interno, Cortina Raffaello, Milan, 2019. 19) Rolphs, Gerhard, Studi linguistici sulla Lucania e sul Cilento, Congedo editore, Lecce, 1989. 20) Spagnuolo, Giulio, “Tra scienza e arte: l’importanza dell’empatìa nell’esperienza estetica,” Arte Primo Piano, 5 January 2020. 21) Stein, Edith, Il problema dell’empatia, edited by Elio Costantini, Erika Schulze Costantini, Studium, Rome, 2012. 22) Teti, Vito, La Restanza, Einaudi, Turin, 2022.

APPENDIX 1 THE WAY OF LIGHT FRANCESCO D’EPISCOPO Well! I shall tell you about, and listen carefully to the discourse, the ways of the research that have to be thought: the one is concerned with the being, that “is,” and it is not possible that it is not, and this is the path of the Persuasion, (in fact, it follows the Truth), the other one relates to “it is not” and it is necessary that it is not, and I tell you that this is a completely inaccessible path: in fact, you could neither have cognition of what it is not (because it is not possible), nor you could express it. And the same is to think and to be. —Parmenides

The first element to highlight, in a discourse on empathy, is light: . . . when the virginal maidens were turning the steeds around, the daughters to the Sun, of the Night leaving the houses, to drive the chariot to the light, with their two hands from their face drawing aside their veils.1

Parmenides is the poet of light and the same would be true living in the south, in Elea and Velia, future Ascea, between the hill and the sea; this anthropological element, although it will be destined to become metaphorical, symbolic, must be considered biological and, if you want, chemical, and of extreme scope, because he becomes a cantor of the Sun, of our Sun, of the energy it gives to the earth, and in close relationship with human empathy as a direct consequence. 1

Parmenides, About Nature, by E. Bignone.

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According to a typical Parmenidean procedure, when light comes to identify itself with justice, a great leitmotif of his philosophy linked to the reality of being, it takes the semblance of a goddess, of which empathy deserves to be immediately highlighted. The goddess graciously received me; she shook my hand, kindly greeting, and she spoke to me with these words: Young man, you, as a companion of immortal, female drivers, with your fast cart, you came to this house of mine, Hey! An unfortunate fate, certainly, doesn’t guide you towards me, along this way that is so far from the mortal, used paths; but Religion and Justice: and, now, you have to learn all. Of the Truth you must learn the steadfast heart that doesn’t tremble, And the mortal opinions as well, whereby it isn’t a true belief; And it is a duty you also have to know, of such appearances as, for investigating everything, a judgment we have to give.2

Two elements immediately strike one: the confidentiality, even complicity, of the discourse of the goddess, but, above all, the reference to “a strong heart that doesn’t tremble” before the sublime power of the truth, the cornerstone of religion and justice, projecting the fallacious, human story in a divine dimension, which, however, in order to be reached and possessed, must necessarily go through the “semblances” on which the human being is called to make a judgment. The young man will know heaven and earth, “the pure blaze of the sun / the ardor that destroys everything” and “of the moon with its round eye, the errant events”; and again, “the milky path of the heaven, / and the supreme Olympus and the fiery power of the stars.” The didactic function of poetry is evident, based on a cosmology of being, which is “the same . . . as thinking,” of which Parmenides claims the absolute and unique essence, “. . . of every perfect part”; and thought must aim at this perfection, and be careful, not through a metaphysics of being in itself but through an existential path, whereby empathy plays a fundamental

2

Ibid.

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role in connecting thinking and feeling: “In fact, it is the same thing to think and to be,” because, as he will still say, “Being touches Being closely.” And the same path of truth is accomplished through persuasion, which necessarily requires mental and emotional participation, we should be tempted to say, and, once again, is existential, bringing closer, never getting away. People who cannot judge are like those who do not exist and to judge well, it is necessary that things that are far away through the mind become closer; in fact, you will not separate what is connected with what it is, nor will you completely separate its connection with all other entities, nor by constituting it in itself. The lesson from Parmenides is great and also of a revolutionary actuality, just like the lesson of philosophers touching the sublime. The concept of “connection” regulates the rhythm of Being, which is not so much and only the being of men but also the being of things themselves; that’s why Karl Popper has rightly ventured to assert that “the theory by Parmenides can be considered the first hypothetical-deductive theory of the world,” proclaiming him “the father of theoretical physics.” And we must not forget that Popper spoke of Einstein, referring to him as Parmenides, because they both claimed that the world was a closed universe, of a Parmenidean type—four-dimensional for Einstein, three dimensional for Parmenides—whose change was a human illusion or a very similar thing. In this sense, we could say that empathy is the highest form of Being, because it has the privilege of being fulfilled within this closed world, keeping “becoming” only for the Lord, as Emanuele Severino keenly observed. In the arguments of Parmenides, an empathetic tone is strikingly used against his hypothetical interlocutor, to prove, beyond a connection, the continuity of Being, which strictly joins its completeness: Therefore, everything is continuous: because what it is, it is all one with what it is. And that’s why it is all accomplished: because what it is, cannot be unaccomplished.3

3

Ibid.

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One final element is the concept, important in Parmenides, of necessity, which somehow dominates Being: “and it keeps it in the narrows of the limit that closes it all around; because it is necessary that the Being must not be unfinished.” And here they would open further and surprising epistemological horizons. In a temporary and suspended conclusion, Parmenidean empathy is closely linked to the relationship between mind and heart (an organ that is underestimated even by the most experienced criticism) and, by the possible, if not inevitable, connection between philosophy and poetry, that will hand over the witness to the heretical experience of Giambattista Vico, who for almost a decade, centuries later but only a short geographical distance from Elea, operated in the location of Vatolla, which was the source of his poetic philosophy and his philosophical poetry. To conclude here, everything shows that Being persists in its essence and what is not cannot have any claim, even a presumption of existence.

APPENDIX 2 THE SYMBOLIC IMPORTANCE OF THE CULTURAL PYRAMID OF CILENTO CONCEIVED BY MENOTTI LERRO BETWEEN POETRY AND APHORISMS IN LOVE TRAJECTORIES LUIGI LEUZZI The Cultural Pyramid of Cilento, designed by Menotti Lerro, is an element of a conjunction with a transcendent dimension—something that does not change while time flows and joins human transience with the perfection of four triangular figures, which are all equal, turning the tip upwards to occupy an ideal place, a utopia that regenerates and gives strength. Meanwhile, the Contemporary Arts Centre of Vallo della Lucania has evolved into a literary-artistic and philosophical movement that, tired of the distance and coldness of rhetorical or fashion inferences, preferred the warmth of speech and the light of emotions in order to have its own way in the twilight of a civilization increasingly rarefied in gestures and mimicry— shadows now of a past that looms over the lack of desire, especially in the time of Covid. People no longer cross glances, while the cold images of a civilization geared to Facebook repeat tired, clichéd movements that last the length of a snapshot only to be suddenly replaced by a pose, a performance to impress followers. And it is precisely in this time of loss and oblivion that we all rediscover empathy, not in the stereotype of a smile and emotion ready for the occasion, but as an authentic moment to be a witness for our neighbor of our sincere presence and of our common identity. Then this proximity was directed to art and its many manifestations, even to history, philosophy, and all those

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humanistic sciences that have been delivered up to the codes and norms of a glacial rationality made of algorithms and algebraic and geometric measurement of the world.

APPENDIX 3 SYNESTHESIA AND EMPATHY IN THE TOTAL ARTIST LUIGI LEUZZI “In the beginning was Unus, born from Zeus the supreme and a mortal woman. Statuesque in body, adorned with majestic paintings, he stood in the sunshine of each mutated day. His soul was music, his words verses; he glided amongst men, if not danced. A demigod!” He was soon envied by his half-brothers of immortal armor and ready for revenge . . . instigated by [Hera] . . . they decided to dismember . . . the unsuspecting Unus in the noble waters of Alento and to finish him, he who had already decomposed every fiber to be the essence of dance, poetry, music, sculpture, and painting. In the myth of Unus as revealed by Menotti Lerro, we can catch the regret found in the original place of art; at the same time, this evokes the return of the Total Artist. In Wagner’s essay “Art and Revolution” from 1849, the definition of the total artwork appears in the description of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the keystone of a knowledge of the totality that welcomes and owns the innovation of a sensitive intuition in art that embodies every truth in harmony between the whole and its parts as a synthesis of music, words, dance, painting, theatre, and sculpture. It is evident that the reference is to an epoch during the origins of civilization where man lived in the mystery of wholeness and drew art from the sources of truth in perfect balance between religion, science, and aesthetics. In other words, the artistic synthesis becomes the form and content of the myths of our origins and a representation of the mystery of life. Furthermore, it rediscovers the ritual and collective dimension of the human drama of contingency where art is to nature as nature is to man: simultaneously admirable, aesthetically proportioned, and functional to the needs of representation of the being in

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the world. The total work of art, in this sense, provides an answer to the individual anxieties and collective crushing of the contemporary world. It almost becomes a new religion in which a perfect balance is renewed among the symbols of the rebirth of a lost civilization and of a social conscience. Therefore, the emotional and synaesthetic synthesis becomes the interpenetration of the different disciplines in the creation of the project of the work of art. The architecture plans the mise en scène, painting becomes the landscape of life, drama becomes fulfillment, and the overcoming of individual and collective destiny. The poet becomes an actor and embodies the union of all artists; through this figure, he becomes words, dance, and music and, therefore, a willing representation of the shared world. Charles Baudelaire in his Correspondences develops the phenomenon of the association between two perceptions corresponding to different senses. Between a diacritic or, better, a rational experience and another that is kinesthetic and more emotional, the symbolism of the French poets marks the crossing of language into otherness. The artist will thus become a bridge and mediate between music and space at the edges of time and space. The work of art will combine the rhythm of feelings or moods with the body register of gestures and movements. The synaesthesia of French symbolism was transformed into German expressionism and renewed in Russian spiritualism, becoming tangible in the fruition of works by Matisse, Franz Marc, Vasilij Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso, and the musician Schoenberg. Finally, we will alight on the synaesthetic suggestions of modern design. The term synaesthesia means perceptions where syn stands for together and aisthanomai means I perceive; in art, it becomes an experiential language associated with fantasy. Artistic synaesthesia transcends the experience and becomes imaginary through a special form that becomes emotion and a shared symbolic language. The emotions are projected outwards. Artistic, aesthetic, and emotive factors show a strong creativity in which the five human-coupled senses reveal a rich sense of communion. Therefore, the word, the sound, and the color image transcend an unambiguously logocentric attitude and become emotion shared in a we-centric vortex.

APPENDIX 4 CONCLUSIONS MENOTTI LERRO The text—starting from The New Manifesto on the Arts, the innovative creations of the Contemporary Arts Centre and the rise of the Empathic Movement—is essentially centered on the original theoretical contribution of Luigi Leuzzi who, from the definition of empathy and empathism, deepens the furrow of a cultural anthropology of being there. The author welcomes the lack of reciprocity in the current era as an opportunity to thematize the phenomenological categories of coexistence in the relationship of care and in art. If empathy is a spontaneous movement of identification, empathism is an intentional act. Both aspects of the author’s research must respect the interpretation given by the subject-object of the relationship. Therefore, starting from this premise, the author deepens the implications of empathism in medicine and more specifically in intersubjective psychopathology and psychotherapy. Then, he applies an empathetic attitude in understanding the Eleatic School and the Medical School of Salerno. In Leuzzi’s opinion, there is no knowledge of the thought of an author without an attitude that is respectful of the cultural context of belonging where the Greek iatromantis philosopher or the medieval holistic physician founded their knowledge. Thus, he discovered Parmenides’ esoteric and mysterious Anatolian matrix of beliefs while the Medical School of Salerno exalted naturalistic and character observation skills. Therefore, the anthropological-cultural analysis affects today’s society in terms of relational and evolutionary identity as it occurs, for instance, in the transformations of rural civilization in the territory of Cilento where there is an original location of myth and the poetic word.

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Megalithism is the middle ground where the certainties of a modern archaeological science are diluted in front of the myth. Here the author is supported by his phenomenological and hermeneutic formation as a method and vision, a Weltanschauung, of an empathic and intersubjective knowledge. A final commentary is based in art that in turn requires an emotional and symbolic refoundation that is capable of corresponding to a lack of being that runs through the discomfort of our modern civilization. A dreamy and, in many ways, innovative volume comes to an end. It is the fruit of my “madness” and that of my companions, who for months have been debating with me and feasted, dreaming of being. I was happily enthusiastic about the work of my friends, in a very difficult personal period in which I found myself fatigued and unwilling to write. But I see that the Manifesto on the Arts blossoms happily, and develops deep reflections and new gemmations in the reader-scholar. And so I thank God for having had the strength to think and dream until the day before yesterday. Empathism was conceived in 2020, one hundred years after another great Italian movement, hermeticism. The latter came about after a bloody war and a concomitant pandemic, Spanish flu, which killed millions of people. Then, the poet found himself displaced, silenced before the horror of those millions of deaths. Meanwhile, the shadow of Fascism was hovering in the air and, therefore, the word could only be obscure, cryptic, ambiguous, and hermetic, yet it also aimed to sing about the pain and to protest against the oppressor. In this regard, remember the poignant poem by Eugenio Montale that, addressing the common man, urges him, almost begging him, not to “ask him for the word” except for “a few, twisted syllables which are dry just like a branch.” In short, the intellectual understands that he is not able to trace the way yet, or to give great answers to open dark worlds to the other and also to himself. At most, he can say now “what he is. What he doesn’t want to be.” And it’s easy to guess what he meant by seeing the unexpected horror that is still alive in his eyes. In 2020—following historical courses and recollections, Giambattista Vico would say—here is another pandemic, another war, another unspeakable silence that invades

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every street in the world, where you can hardly see some lonely funeral or a frightened silhouette equipped with a mask and sanitizing spray. At a distance of a century, the times were, among other things, ripe for a new movement; mind you, however, this time, it was not the very closures that we experienced that paralyzed us, but, on the contrary, the desire to regain lost freedom. The world understands what it has lost and, perhaps, almost regrets not having shaken enough hands when it still could, and not having come together for sufficient festive evenings with friends. And here the light emerges from the darkness of the repentant hypertrophic ego, which is ready again, as never before, for us, and also ready for the feeling of union, beauty, and hope. It is ready for the feeling that places the understanding of the other at the center, because the other is basically our image to seek, to love, and to understand in the mirror. The time was ripe for the Empathic Movement, which, in an area like Cilento, which has already known two great schools —the Eleatic and Medical schools—could only refer to such cultural giants and undertake a subtle dialogue. This is the ground for the birth of the Empathic School, thus closing a new cultural triangle that has been waiting for centuries to form. I remember that the inaugural cheer was raised at Vallo della Lucania, in the midst of the pandemic, in a secluded alley that is adjacent to the main square. There was no one on the street, so we made a toast, wishing for a better future for humankind. But soon many persons followed us. Thus, the first mountain villages were born with new cultural identities, finally of hope. “The village of poetry” (Salento, where, every year, the Cilento Poetry Prize is celebrated, this year, financed by the Ministry of Culture at the suggestion of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Salerno and Avellino), the “village of aphorisms” (Omignano, with so many sentences and unpublished truths donated to us by our empathic masters and classical masters, whose sources are always necessary to draw on in order to learn something that is relevant), and the villages “of love,” “of water,” “of orchids,” “of murals,” “of otium,” “of portals,” “of books,” and so many others—a total of twenty-five villages, placed at the foot of a beloved mountain, Monte Stella, with its impressive megaliths recognized by us as ancient, empathic Gods.

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And then, as mentioned, the many empathic masters (adherents of the movement) from all over Italy and many others from abroad: poets, philosophers, visual artists, musicians, dancers, and people of culture. All these places and people united for a common purpose: to change the territory of Cilento from being a rural area to being an area of cultural excellence and to make it the basis of a movement that has no geographical boundaries. And we too have, as a small center, a voice in the complicated and complex world of the arts—so let’s be guided once again by Parmenides and by the innovations of the Medical School of Salerno. Finally, let us be able to express all our unspoken poetry that is recognizable in every glimpse of the landscape, in every church, in every rock, river, sea, and tradition. A wind of pride immediately accompanied me, pushed me, and supported me, making me a different man and, maybe, a better man. Mayors, almost every week, wrote to me to sign with us a memorandum of understanding where they recognized the Cultural Pyramid of Cilento as the ideal symbol to join to be able to write together indelible pages of art and culture. On the walls, they wanted to put the pyramid drawn on fine ceramic tiles . . . and to put it in the squares, in the communes, on the facade of their museums, painstakingly built over time. I saw my Cilento changing day after day, I saw it grow, chasing the idea of this dreamer in the years of his maturity, so that with the emotional momentum of the puer and the reflexive firmness of the Senex, I have confidence in a better future and can write these concluding words. And then I reread the words of Francesco D’Episcopo, who opens this volume with apparent simplicity, reminding us of the importance of the union, happily recalling Parmenides who is the father of all our thoughts and opening the door to the dense chapters by Giuseppe Lauriello and Luigi Leuzzi that have traced new trajectories of meaning. And while Lauriello carefully traces the events of the Medical School of Salerno, researching its innovation in an empathic key, Leuzzi is just as rigorous, starting from the symbolic, fundamental value of the megaliths of Monte Stella and then analyzing, in depth, themes and reasons that can constitute and invigorate over time the Empathic Movement, often suggesting the path to follow, so that the movement can gain strength.

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Empathism welcomes a need, a lack to be themed as empathy. The distancing of the Covid era has anesthetized relationships and has stiffened them into a figure of otherness that we are only now coming out of; however, we have now identified the firm traits that have been acquired by our society in terms of the dehumanization of relationships. Most of the time, social networks have accustomed us to a civilization of instantaneity, where unrelated time alternates like a Facebook page. We are without history, which is inclined toward deadly enjoyment where desire appears to have vanished and the thing (der Ding) saturates, in a flash, all our pleasure like a cyber mother who does not require any commitment of reciprocity. If we can no longer see the other, only solipsism remains—well, empathism is just such an intentional act that counteracts this involution of being. This encourages us to meet the face of the other person and to create the barycenter of gravity of coexistence in the encounter with the other by the self. It is not a simple transposition of our intrapsychic experience to identify oneself with others; however, the opposite would mean being absent for a moment and welcoming the existence of the other with his own emotions, his authentic needs. This attitude obviously not only serves to crowd the artist’s atelier of shared or total works, but it is also a service and exercise for the communitas. If creative activity becomes an encounter with the other by the self, this creates the intersubjective premises for a society that neither freezes the relationships nor seals the aggregations of intent aimed at promoting the future of humanity. The war in Ukraine and other regions of the globe portrays the distant nightmares of a society that felt safe from violence and death. Until now, self-perpetuating enjoyment had created an apparent Eden of eternal satisfaction; however, now, Thanatos announces itself on the horizon of humanity, while Eros disappears from the stage of life. The threats of a nuclear apocalypse take us back to the dawn of civilization. So, what is the value of an ethical and valuable questioning of empathism in the work of art nowadays? A society that does not represent itself with an aesthetics of meeting runs the risk of colluding with the security drive that transforms us into armor, and its opposite when we do not establish bridges of intersubjectivity. As in a self-referential production machine, we pursue a consumerist technology

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that automates itself while it is busy manufacturing with the same speed and ease objects of enjoyment and death tools such as weapons of global destruction. Here the artist cannot ignore in his creative work an ethical and value commitment; instead, he must choose without a shadow of a doubt on which side to stand between life or death, peace or war, love or violence. On the other hand, empathism becomes a choice of field for which the proximity to the other constitutes a relational identity that is the basis of a feeling of belonging to an enlarged community that knows no differences and discrimination of race, sex, religion, or ideology.

APPENDIX 5 MOVEMENT PROPOSALS To combat the stagnation of hypertrophic contemporary individualism, the new current proposes: —A resumption of classical studies as the basis for a cultured art, to be innovated through awareness, invention, and study. —A rejection of the principle of the tabula rasa, stressing the importance of tradition, but trying to unmask any theoretical limits or applications. —The principles of the indivisibility and interdisciplinarity of the arts. —The search for the symbolic figure of the Total Artist (in this regard, see also the story about the new “Unus myth” written by Menotti Lerro). —The Total Artist is also understood as the fruit of an empathic sharing among artists. —Overcoming the Western scientific-specialized model and, therefore, the logical-rational approach. —The rejection of the principles of an “unambiguous vision” and, on the other hand, the principles of “point of view” and “fragmentation.” —The denunciation of the phenomenon of excessive influences among artists, to be extended to the immediacy of the technological means of communication. —Focusing on experience, imagination, feelings, talent, and study. —A figure of the most involved artist in civil society. —The development of emotional intelligence through the arts. —The development of arts and culture through emotions.

EMPATHIC MASTERS—ADHERENTS Menotti Lerro (creator and founder), Antonello Pelliccia (co-editor with M. Lerro of the New Manifesto on the Arts), Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2018), Enrico Testa, Dacia Maraini, Maria Teresa Chialant, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Remo Bodei, Alessandro Serpieri, Maurizio Cucchi, Diego de Silva, Milo De Angelis, Franco Mussida, Luigi Leuzzi, Umberto Curi, Mauro Afro Borella, Francesco D’Episcopo, Bernardo Lanzetti, Giuliano Ladolfi, Giampiero Neri, Mario Santagostini, Valerio Magrelli, Maria Rita Parsi, Omar Galliani, Alberto Bertoni, Elena Pontiggia, Vivian Lamarque, Franco Loi, Raffaele Nigro, Ezio Guaitamacchi, Renato Galbusera, Victor Lucena, Elio Pecora, Gino Finizio, Roberto Carifi, Domenico Giordano, Franco Arminio, Giancarlo Pontiggia, Francesco Massanova, Luigi Rossi, Maurizio Iacovazzo, Maria Jannelli, Tomasz Krezymon, Ottavio Rossani, Attilio Dursi, Wilma Leone, Edoardo Landi, Carlangelo Mauro, Alessandro Quasimodo, Nicola Femminella, Luigi Mogrovejo, Vincenzo Guarracino, Edoardo Boncinelli, Antonino Nese, Francesco Abbate, Stefano Pantaleoni, Diana Nese, Santa Aiello, Ermanno Paleari, Rosa Maria Vitola, Giusy Rinaldi, Osvaldo Marrocco, Oriana Rispoli, Valentina Sentsova, Giammaria Occhi, Patrizia Pozzi, Carlo Di Legge, Angelo Ghilardi, Antonio Rizzo, Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti, Vittorio Santoianni, Joanna Kubicz, Ezio Martuscelli, Nicola Ricci, Kuturi, Marco Colombo, Attilio Bencaster, Amnerys Bonvicini, Mario Gabriele Giordano, Anna Bianchi, Ettore Barra, Cesare Nardi, Salvatore Monaca, Carlo Andrei, Giancarlo Sammito, Giancarlo Turaccio, Vincenzo Di Gironimo, Massimo Bacigalupo, Tomaso Kemeny, Emilio Coco, Lorenzo Peluso, Roberto Guidetti, Gisella Gellini, Tonia Cartolano, Franco Maldonato, Tiziano Rossi, Rosa María Román Garrido, Giovanni Bonoldi, Angelo Ruta, Anna Di Brina, Lino Di Ventura, Goffredo Iannotti, Nello Teodori, Nicola Maria Vitola, Antonia Gravagnuolo, Anny Errico, Carmelo Strano, Aldo Castellano, Lidia Vianu, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Ana María Pinedo López, Elvio Annese, Laura Garavaglia, Marius Chelaru, Loredana Izzo, Prayag Tiwari, Davide Susanetti, Salvatore D’Alessandro, Oscar Pizzulli, Simone Fagioli, Alessandro Artini, Nicola Nicoletti, Santino Scarpa, Giuseppe Iannicelli, Renato Ongania, Daniela Di

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Bartolomeo, Vincenzo Pepe, Najwan Darwish, Mario Pirovano, Simona Di Gregorio, Renata Di Lascio, Giuseppe Gentile, Gian Mario Villalta, Elena Paruolo, Davide Rondoni, Elena Foccillo, Silvia Pacifico, Pierfranco Bruni, Ilian Rachov, Gaetano Ricco, Enza Di Sevo, Aldo Bianchini, Gabriella Sica, Vincenzo Missanelli, Francesco Magliocca, Teresa Della Corte, Renata Florimonte, Angela Nappi, Gaetana Natale, Paolo Maria Rocco, Mateen Ashraf, Carlo Chiumiento, Giuseppe Lauriello, Giuseppe Sica, Maria Grazia Petrizzo, Lucio Liguori, Silvana Paruolo, Enzo Cursaro, Angelo Casciello, Piero Chiaradia, Vincenzo Schettino, Mariagrazia Barone, Rosanna Lupi, Francesca Chiumiento, Cosimo Chiumiento, Francesca Rocciola, Maurizio de Giovanni, Michele Risi, Amedeo Colella, Fabrizio Scomparin, Erminia Pellecchia, Carmela Santarcangelo, Ester Andreola, Antonia Autuori, Ornella Pellegrino, Clotilde Baccari, Marilina Vitola, Stefano Trapanese, Luca Paragano, Maria Romano, Stefano Nasti, Ulisse Mariani, Rosanna Schiralli, Mariagrazia Mari, Martina Pontani, Maria Tommasa Granese, Renato Di Gregorio, Francesco Castiello, Katia Ballacchino, Giuseppe Coccurullo, Franco Alfieri, Raffaella Bonaudo.

CONTRIBUTORS Menotti Lerro Menotti Lerro is an Italian poet, writer, playwright, librettist, and academic. His work explores matters of social alienation and existentialism, the physicality and vulnerability of the body, the interpretation of memories, the meaning of objects, and the philosophical importance of human identity. In 2015, he published Donna Giovanna, l’ingannatrice di Salerno, an innovative feminine and bisexual version of the mythical figure of Don Juan, el Burlador de Sevilla, and in 2018 he wrote Il Dottor Faust, an original version of the character of Faust. He is also the author of a New Manifesto on the Arts and the founder of the Empathic Movement (Empathism arose in the south of Italy at the beginning of 2020). Giuseppe Lauriello Giuseppe Lauriello is Emeritus Chief Physician of Pneumology, a medical historian, and a humanist with different literary interests, including medicine in the ancient world. He has always paid particular attention to the history and teaching of the ancient Medical School of Salerno, deepening and disseminating its most significant aspects through unpublished translations of texts with corresponding commentaries and presenting essays and reports at conferences and congresses. Antonello Pelliccia Antonello Pelliccia is a multiform artist working in the fields of painting, architecture, and design, which he explores starting from a distinctly project approach. From a young age, under the guidance of his father, a painter, he devoted himself to studies on the phenomenology of color and perception, establishing as solid reference points the theoretical works of Josef Albers and Donald Judd. For many years he taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara where he had the opportunity to educate himself with Getullo Alviani, a master who together with his father had a decisive influence on his artistic career, knowing and dealing with various

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personalities, such as Bruno Munari, Victor Lucena, Luciano Fabro, and others. Luigi Leuzzi Luigi Leuzzi is a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist with an anthropophenomenological specialism, and an expert on intersubjective psychopathology. He taught at the didactic centre of Vallo della Lucania at the 1st Federician Ateneo of Naples on the nursing sciences degree course. He wrote several books on ethno-cultural identity and symbolic and archetypal correspondences. In 2019 he received the national Cilento Poetry prize; later, he participated with Menotti Lerro in the foundation of the literary and artistic Empathism Movement. He wrote a chapter in the volume Psychoanalysis and Television, edited by Massimo Recalcati. In 2022 he deepened the artistic, philosophical, and literary implications of the empathetic attitude in a chapter in Riscontri magazine (Feedback) n. 2 (May–August). Francesco D’Episcopo Francesco D’Episcopo has carried out teaching and scientific activities at the Salvatore Battaglia department of modern philology in the faculty of letters and philosophy at the Federico II University of Naples where he taught Italian literature, literary criticism, and comparative literature. He also taught Italian literature at the University of Molise and lives in Salerno.