Tag Archives: Roberto Saviano

'Most people admire him; he was able to do what we all should do, and which we don’t, for many different reasons.'

The Life of Roberto Saviano: Ethics as the Science of Movement

In Naples, in the early 2000s, lives Roberto Saviano. He lives in a part of the city called Quartieri Spagnoli, considered to be a dodgy neighbourhood. One day, he decides to look out of his window and understand what is going on down there in the streets: to pick up a pen, and write what he sees, thinks, discovers, knows.
Let’s stop right here for a minute. I have just described a number of actions, some of which are physical and some of which are mental. However, they are all still actions insofar as they involve movement. I wanted to flag that up, later you will understand why, now, we can go on with the story.

Little by little, what Roberto is writing becomes a book entitled Gomorrah. The book is an analysis of the ‘Camorra’ (one of the several different flavours in which the Italian Mafia can come). It is 2006, Gomorrah is published and unexpectedly sells a huge number of copies. As I am sure you will understand, denouncing the Camorra is not the safest thing one can do. However, Roberto also goes a step further. One day, he travels to Casal di Principe (a town near Naples, which, back then at least, was basically ruled by the Camorra, and where it is an unwritten law not to mention the name of the Boss in public), he steps on a stage, he talks about the Camorra and the Bosses of the town, and, most importantly, he says the following: “Francesco Schiavone, the Zagarias, Antonio Iovine [the Bosses]: go away! You don’t belong here! Stop being part of this place! We will kick you out, you are nothing!”.
Let’s stop again for a minute. Like before, I just made another list of actions, a list of concrete movements. Keep this in mind.

Back to the story: those words change Roberto’s life once and for all. Someone in the Camorra probably decides that Roberto has to die. We don’t know exactly how that worked or if anyone ever said that, but it is obvious: Roberto is risking his life. That day, for the first time, he is assigned a security escort. “How long is this gonna last sir?” asks Roberto to one of the guards. “Nah, it is not a big deal…a few days maybe,” he answers. It is now 2016: 10 years have passed. Roberto Saviano has been under protection for 10 years now (October 2006 – October 2016). That is roughly 3650 days in which he couldn’t do anything (unless it was planned at least two days in advance), in which he couldn’t have fixed schedules, in which he couldn’t see anyone too often (in order to prevent that person from becoming a target). Since October 2006, the world, for him, has basically been a big and colourful jail cell.

This brings me to the key point I want to make here: Ethics, as Italian philosopher Leonardo Caffo (p.20-23) suggests, is the science of movement.

Let’s start from the following assumption: everyone knows that what Roberto did was good. Most people admire him; he was able to do what we all should do, and which we don’t, for many different reasons. In such cases, therefore, if we all already know what the right thing to do is, it would seem pointless for Ethics to be dedicated to further studying what the right thing to do is. This is because it suffices that we feel it; we have, at least, strong faith in strong intuitions about it.

So, what are the questions that Ethics should ask and try to answer? Now is when we go back to movement. Although we know that Roberto did the right thing when he looked up out of the window, picked up the pen, wrote what he saw, went to Casal di Principe, stepped on the stage, denounced the Camorra – there is still something we really don’t know and is thus worth investigating: why did he do it? Why do human beings (sometimes) do the right thing?

Hopefully, you should now see what I mean when I say that ethics is the science of movement: Ethics should study what it is that makes us literally move towards what is good (or what is wrong depending on how things go). What energy pushed Roberto to do what he did? Another way of putting this is that Ethics does not study what constitutes a good act, Ethics studies what the conditions are for the possibility of a good act to be possible in the first place. (These are, as Caffo notes, the same conditions that allow me to ask these questions now and allow you to reason on these issues as you read.)

In this sense, instead of a prescriptive science, Ethics becomes an aesthetic contemplation of human action (movement). As Aesthetics studies the way in which we perceive things, Ethics studies the way in which we do them. In Ethics, and in the contemplation its enquiry constitutes, we can find wonder and, as little as we might eventually understand of those conditions of possibility I mentioned above, at least we can understand that they do exist.

Through this sense of wonder, we can, however, surely understand one thing: that for all the evil there is in the world (where ‘evil’ is understood not as a malign entity, but as chaos, as opposed to order), for some reason we cope with it and we manage not to kill (or push, or insult, etc.) each other every morning when we meet on the bus to work. Conceiving of Ethics as a science of movement makes us appreciate that we are part of a group that has worked out a complex normativity that makes life (both as survival and as an effort to flourish) possible. In his second book, Zero Zero Zero, Roberto quotes the Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova, whose words draw attention to how actions like those of Roberto are possible because life is only possible if we are together. Our actions only make sense as long as we are part of a group; there is no such thing as an action which ends in ourselves.

GRASS by Blaga Dimitrova:

I’m not afraid

they’ll stamp me flat.

Grass stamped flat

soon becomes a path.

Like Dimitrova’s unafraid speaker, even if one day Roberto were killed, he and humankind will have won already.

About the author

Giuseppe VicinanzaGiuseppe Vicinanza was born in Milan in 1996. After having lived for 19 years in the same house in the same city, he moved to England to study at the University of Exeter. While his high school studies followed the ‘scientific’ track of the Italian school system, he’s now a second year student in Philosophy and Politics. In his free time he plays  football and works as a waiter.

Fancy reading more? Giuseppe recommends moving in the direction of:

If you speak Italian, then pick up Caffo’s book and read his article, ‘Etica’.

Read Saviano’s investigation into the Camorra or watch the trailer for the award winning film adaptation.

Check out Maurizio Ferraris’s brief history of ‘new realist’ philosophy.

 

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