European Teleologies

[Elissa]

Yesterday's editorial by novelist Roberto Pazzi explores recent tensions between Germany and Italy

Germans and Italians are made to love each other, but never to esteem each other. They are doomed  to attract each other without  mutual understanding. They fill the empty spaces in the others' mind. A military alliance between two such different peoples, apart from the representation of the two mad dictators in Chaplin's film, is unthinkable. The Germans are the people of Luther, Leibniz, Bach, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. Germany's psyche is tempted, as Thomas Mann warned us in "Doctor Faustus," by a Luciferine dream of the Absolute, an intoxicating dream in which the Self dissolves into the All.

Italy, however, cradle of Greek and Latin Mediterranean civilization, is still infused with the Euripidean assumption: character is man's destiny. Italians have always been incurable and marvelous individualists, resistant to any dream of the absolute, including the Christian one. Their Catholic faith is but a veil covering  the pagan cult of beauty, imagination, youth, glory, etc. We call it success, but really it's the need of an exceptional Self — a Greek hero like Ulysses or a saint like Augustine of Hippo — to distinguish oneself from the crowd.

His characterizations hold for my favorite wines too: individualistic Super Tuscans and expansive Mosel Reislings.

Do you agree or disagree:?:

Edited July 15, 2003 by lissome (log)

[Elissa]

Kant's Pure Reisling and Divine Disinterest

vs.

Caravaggio, Chianti and Cab

Edited July 15, 2003 by lissome (log)

[Fat Guy]

Italy and Germany get the Klapp.