The beautiful title of this piece is not mine, but Luigi Cimmino's. Luigi used it some years ago for a critical note of his on Martha Nussbaum's book on the emotions (La mente appassionata, Quaderni di Teoria Sociale, no. 5, 2005, pp. 523-538). The matters at issue are absorbing. Our Western, rational culture has made its fortune by dissecting and dividing, breaking down subjects, nature and society into ever smaller and more controllable parts, for the sake of a knowledge that might make human intervention possible, above all of a technical-scientific kind. One of the most significant fractures, and one of those that most characterise it, is the one that places on one side reason, and everything that can be defined as rational; on the other, the emotions, and everything that can be defined as irrational. Mind and body; rationality and emotions; man and nature; and so on: the struggle for dominion and control sets on one side the forces of rationality, on the other those of irrationality. Thus it is that the passions are inevitably blind; our emotions are something to be controlled and managed; rational man must not lose his composure, but must stand impassive as lord of the world.

Things are changing: a significant part of the ideas that run through this beginning of the century is calling into question so simplistic a vision, in the name of interdisciplinarity and of a more holistic approach. Reason itself, by virtue of its own cognitive capacities, is becoming ever more aware of the fact that every division always carries with it something arbitrary and therefore not definitive. What truly matters is the whole, the dense web of relations and connections that constitutes the world we inhabit and our very own deepest essence. I hold this to be a decisive question, one that runs across all the disciplines, from medicine to biology, from chemistry to physics, not to mention the social and human sciences. And it is an eminently philosophical question, because at its root it concerns our way of relating to reality.

In my view, what makes Luigi a philosopher, even before a professor, is his capacity to see the whole of the questions: he is not a specialist but, precisely, a philosopher, in the authentic and classical sense of the term. He has dealt with many questions typical of philosophy (the concepts of time, of identity, of cause, of ethics, of rule, and so on), engaging with the giants of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, to name but a few), always guided by a gaze that, through analysis, is interested in synthesis, in recomposing the individual fragments, in reconstructing the relations, the connections that bind together the individual themes and the individual approaches. And always spurred by a curiosity that drives him to take an interest in history, in politics, in sociology, in anthropology and in psychoanalysis, to cite only a few of the fields with which he engages and with which he has always pushed me to engage. Besides being perhaps the greatest reader I know (Nabokov, McEwan and Landolfi are among his favourite authors) and a refined connoisseur of cinema.

Why the emotions, then? This is a theme that may appear marginal, but that in my view bears witness, at one and the same time, to the cultural challenge we all face today and to Luigi's intellectual curiosity. The question is important and ancient. It can be technically summed up in a simple question: what distinguishes a sensation from an emotion? What difference is there, just to give an example, between the pain I feel if I bang my knee against a corner (sensation) and the pain I feel at the loss of a dear one (emotion)? A plausible answer brings into play the relations between what I feel and what I think: an emotion can be seen as a sensation plus a belief. Emotion sets in motion the soul and thought, together! If I feel pain at the loss of a dear one, it is because I believe that person to be important to me: my belief regarding that person selects him or her from among the thousands of other people who are indifferent to me, who make less difference to me. The same holds, to give another example, for love: the sensation of loving someone is accompanied by the belief in the uniqueness of the beloved.

I quote a beautiful passage by Luigi, which articulates the idea at its best: “let us suppose that X – now mature, indeed on the threshold of old age – walks melancholically along the road beside the sea that he has travelled so many times since he was a child, and let us imagine that a gust of wind grazes his face ‘in a certain way’. But in what sense ‘in a certain way’? The sensations of wind on the face can be many, very similar and very different; so similar and different that not even the strange, almost schizoid game of trying to describe them in detail would manage to find its bearings. ‘In a certain way’ because that sensation has, so to speak, a ‘volume’ or ‘intensity’ or ‘pregnancy’ that the others, taken together, do not have, beyond the effect of producing a generic and vague pleasure. It is evidently a sensation which in this case is accompanied by an indeterminate emotional shaking or start, hence its specificity. The fact is that X cannot remember when and why he felt that emotion; properly speaking, he cannot even identify the emotion. It is not negative, the echo of a fear or a shame, yet its positivity is nonetheless uncertain: does it perhaps recall a kiss given or refused so many years ago? Or, further off still, games on the beach with friends, or a lost game of football? As has been said, the sensation is not in this case ‘mere bodily alteration’, but stands at the centre of an entire space that gives it meaning, surrounded by other things. Only, X does not remember what he had around him” (La sensazione delle emozioni, in SocietàMutamentoPolitica, no. 24, 2021, p. 45, italics mine). Does this ‘gust of wind’ not perhaps recall Proust's madeleine? “Call them, if you will, emotions”, yet, on reflection, far more is at stake than a ‘mere bodily alteration’, because we are faced with the way in which each of us constructs his own specific space in the world.

Let us look more closely, analytically, at which features distinguish an emotion from a sensation. Following Luigi's reasoning, we can identify at least four aspects. 1. Emotions need time: a sensation may last an instant, but it is impossible to ‘love for an instant’. 2. With regard to emotions one can be mistaken: it makes sense to say ‘I thought I loved her’, but it makes no sense to say ‘I think I have a pain in my shoulder’. 3. In emotions, sensations are not separable from the general emotional state, nor are they separable from the beliefs to which they are bound, which may be true or false. I may discover that the person I love and esteem is an abject being, and this discovery may modify my emotional state toward that person, because my belief has changed. 4. The fact that emotions are sensations accompanied by beliefs explains why they are ‘states’ or ‘conditions’ and not actions. An emotional state justifies, for example, our decision to perform certain actions and not others. In general, we try to avoid actions that are bound up with negative emotional states.

All this outlines, in my view, a rich and fascinating general picture. Let me make a few further observations. For a sociologist such as I am, this justifies a sociological study of the emotions: beliefs, in fact, are for the most part collective; they are social products. Through them, society in some way shapes our emotions. What is at stake is the opening of a field of research that has become interesting, in international sociology, especially in the last decades of the past century, and that today is in ferment, because it produces ever new studies, capable of opening horizons that until yesterday were unthinkable. Consider, just to give an example, how the beliefs of Italians about love have changed in recent decades: one would only have to go and see how the theme has been treated in the songs of Sanremo, from Nilla Pizzi to Madame.

A holistic vision brings with it the idea that sensation and belief are integral parts and constitute an emotion only if perfectly fused. They can be separated only by the analytical gaze that wishes, for example, to reflect on the changes undergone by beliefs. Yet even such a gaze must always keep in mind the complex unity from which it has separated its object of study. To return to Luigi's passage, and taking up his own words, ‘the gust of wind’ “is the possible fragment of an entire emotional history (…). I may no longer remember most of that history, but this does not alter the fact that its quality, the volume of that sensation, retains, like a rarefied atmosphere, the density of the life in which it took shape” (ibid., p. 47, italics mine).

Emotions, all emotions, contribute to building the emotional histories of which our world is made. Within the infinite possibilities of experience, they select what is significant for us: that specific person is the object of my resentment, and that other one is deserving of my esteem, and so on. The boundaries of our emotions are the boundary of our world: the latter is defined and constructed on the basis of our capacity, or incapacity, to feel resentment and esteem. I cannot – and it is perhaps humanly impossible – suffer in the same way for the death of just any human being: the ‘volume’ and the ‘quality’ of my emotion vary according to the significance that the loss of a single, specific human life has for me. As Luigi writes, “an emotion cannot be commanded, so much so that ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ certainly does not amount to feeling sentiments voluntarily” (ibid., p. 46) toward someone.

To conclude: the theme of the emotions is a partial and secondary aspect within Luigi's philosophical work. The great questions he has been able to tackle are, as recalled above, the classical ones of philosophy, understood in the authentic sense of the term. He has faced them with courage, acumen and imagination, relying always and only on the force of arguments and never on the authority of the source. I always recall with admiration, and a certain delight, his account of a seminar in which the audience was left dumbfounded by his ‘effrontery’ in criticising Emanuele Severino, leaving him incapable of a convincing reply. As a non-philosopher, and starting from an apparently secondary theme, I have modestly tried to give the reader a sense of his research, of the way in which he has always sought to take questions head-on in their complexity. His entire philosophical work is truly the product of a ‘passionate mind’.

Ambrogio Santambrogio