117 West. «This thing that we Westerners are terrible seems to me to be the thought of someone who never came out to see how diversity is treated in many Countries». Yet the West is the cradle of that humanism that today the philosopher believes must necessarily be overcome, with a view to global rethinking and real change of our species. «Mine is a factual hybridization. I am talking about a new biological species, not a cultural one. If our ecological niche should collapse, if our habitat should collapse, if our food supply should, we will either succumb or develop into another species, that is, we will go directly elsewhere, we won’t be neither Homo Sapiens nor any other kind of animal. And we will have to force ourselves to think outside all categories». Here, with an always calm voice, but also a growing urgency, Leonardo Caffo tells us about one of the most probable changes with regard to the climate crisis, namely the rising of the seas, which will lead to the loss of many coasts as of many coastal cities. «They will change their elements but the planet will have no problems, there will be new aquatic and not aerial species. Venice, which today is our home, one day will be our Atlantis, and the wonderful frescoes that we go and visit will become den for some fish that will go to musk around them. If we look at this thing from the non-cultural perspective of the human being, but from that of the complexity of the biosphere, everything will naturally recirculate» (to be honest, here Caffo says tutto si riciccia, approx. meaning everything pops back up, but my two-a-penny journalistic respectability led me to a more polite, and obviously less brilliant, periphrasis, ed.’s note). Here, if by chance we were still wondering what "radical thought" means, I think this was a good answer. The shock of the image of Venice and the (apparently contradictory, again) calmness with which we are invited to reconsider it, seems to me, on this Milanese afternoon, the exact measure of what we are talking about. «The philosophies that have come to terms with the crisis of anthropocentrism – adds Caffo, just to clarify even better these concepts – have been able to do nothing but ascertain the total irrelevance of Homo Sapiens, and try to make him live this kind of irrelevance». In Leonardo Caffo's books many issues have been treated, from the relationship with animals to the proliferation of vegan diets. And here too his comments are quite interesting: «I don’t like vegans; to me, veganism is a piece of a philosophical system of contingency’s thought. Obviously, faced with a world collapsing, I can only try to minimize my impact on the diversity and the pain of others. But if I was born in an African micro-community and a vegan would come, I would eat it. I wrote that a fisherman who procures and eats a fish on his island is much more vegan than the rich westerner who, in a resort of the same tropical island, absolutely asks for tofu, otherwise he refuses to eat. This thing has nothing to do with the content of the food, it deals with the attitude through which you offer yourself to reality. Decontextualized veganism, made only to show others how good you are, is yet another bourgeois bitch». Western and anti-Western, vegan arguing against vegans, critic of humanism but through the tools that this offers him; Leonardo Caffo, as the interview draws to a close, looks more and more like a living demonstration of applied dialectic first of all to himself, an attempted absolute lucidity, but, if you can accept the term, an anti-rhetorical thought too, and then, using two adjectives that the accidents of the world of communication have cloaked in a bad reputation (completely undeserved, to be honest), "weak" and "minor". And it is not just a fault of the modest times that we find ourselves living in, if today these two adjectives end up probably representing the best conditions we could hope to achieve: a weak awareness of our new way of being (and therefore very far from any ambition to neo-supermanhood) and a minor dimension of our being in the world (hence Caffo's idea of micro-communities and perspective reductions that guarantee the maintenance of possibilities of the perspective itself). (Allow me to open another parenthesis: as I review these sentences it comes to my mind even the thought of the equally radical architect Eyal Weizman about the crucial theme of the lesser evil. Consider it, should you happen). «The big question of philosophy – added Leonardo as a closed point – is always: how do I have a posture consequent on what I know, what I read, what I experience in a completely different world, which draws me from all on the other side, how do i stay there? And this is where the theme of micro-communities returns: they are not only this post-mortem scenario for Homo Sapiens, but it is an immediate thing. Within these contexts we can do the only thing that makes sense: we can plant a small seed of our energy, so as not to slip into disenchantment». A disenchantment, and in the interview we also talked about them, which led extraordinary minds such as those of Mark Fisher or David Foster Wallace to succumb and commit suicide; we talked about the genius of Roberto Bolaño and his loneliness, about Kafka, who basically has always summed ourselves up to perfection, but these, as they say, are other stories, and we'll tell them another time. «The point – says Caffo, with what seemed to me a kind of moral backlash (of a new moral, in this case too) – isn’t not struggling; the point is to struggle in order to understand that it made more sense not to. It is as if we humans had to go a much wider circle to understand that we are animals, and nothing more than that». It is clear that, even on a symbolic level, the circle has been closed, the interview is over and I should just turn off the tape recorder. But I cannot help thinking, as a father, that Leonardo has just become so, and that his daughter will have to live in this world, of which with apparent lightness we have however just drawn a portrait of at least enormous complexity. I tell him and we look at each other for a stronger moment, or so it seems to me. Then he replies through an image dealing with his desire, he confessed to me shortly before, to plan an exit strategy made of a completely different life, far from the cities. «I once wished that this girl, who is just born and will grow up, could attend the American schools, learn 15 languages and go to Harvard. But now I wonder why it should not be more important to live in nature and to attend a school in the country to walk in the middle of the street without fear, for example, of fine particles. I myself cannot be a victim of the model imposed on me, after all that I have written». One more thing: «Wittgenstein wrote that university made him sick, but then he really went to be a gardener: although they offered him a professorship, he experienced on his own body what change was. Today nobody, including you and me, really wants to be overwhelmed by the brunt of change. After all, It is so comfy to know that in two or three hours we will go home and there will be a sofa, there will be dinner... Mine represents also the philosophy of a personal failure, an exposé of the fact that I know that everything is wrong, but that I for one am swimming in here».
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