Word of the week: 'Spirito / 2' (by Massimo Sebastiani)

For

, author of

, a song from a few years ago, the spirit is a party, a dance, a joy that manages to emerge from the dark.

It is not all his own work, because the song and its title are clearly inspired by

, the song by

which talks about receiving the spirit in the dark and that this can happen just by dancing.

As we said in concluding the first part of this journey in the word spirit, the least we can say is that it is elusive.

This is demonstrated by the many expressions in which the word is used - and among these we did not mention last time the one that perhaps best represents it: free spirit, to indicate someone who goes where he wants, who does not have a marked path, which seems guided only by himself or rather by an inner force and energy that governs him.

But this is also demonstrated by the fact that it is difficult to find or at least to place.

Indeed, where is the spirit?

What is team spirit, team spirit?

And how is it obtained?

How is it built?

It seems that the spirit, like the nature of which

speaks , loves to hide.

The spirit oscillates between two extremes that derive precisely from the origin of the term, which as we have seen is breath.

And it will be

, in the

, who will be responsible for introducing them both to us.

“How do you know it exists not knowing what it is?

- asks the Enlightenment, materialist and atheist Leopardi - How can you affirm or deny anything about the qualities of what you do not even conceive and you hardly know if it is possible? ".

But there is another spirit, explains Leopardi - who wrote about it in 1823 after reading

, the author of the

- and it is "what we call spirit in characters, in manners, in motions and acts, in words, mottos, speeches in actions in writings and styles': this spirit, says Leopardi, is what we like because" it is life, arouses lively sensations ".

So much so that the spirit, he says, "is also called vivacity".

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In short, other than ghost or vision: those that Kant thinks about when he has to subject the spiritist theories (here is another derivation of the word spirit) of

to a ruthless criticism to which he will dedicate the pamphlet "The dreams of a visionary" to demolish their ideas (visionary is actually the translation of the German

, he who sees spirits).

Perhaps the spirit is in some depth, is hidden - as in the jokes

told us about and which are linked to the unconscious, to something we want to keep hidden from consciousness - or it is in the middle, among something else and for this reason it is also difficult to define, to grasp conceptually: it took a

after that of

which lasted two months in

, to perfect the

and the

Even in this particular and apparently precarious position - which could really be defined third in every sense - the spirit is anything but a ghost or perhaps an ethereal thing: it is life, energy, it allows the realization of extraordinary and mysterious things.

abandons himself to this spirit

when in 1985 he decides to record an album,

in fact, in which he does not just play the piano, but believing that he is crossed by an inspiration that he cannot transmit to anyone, he realizes the disc. alone playing a variety of instruments, from guitar to tabla, from flute to percussion.

The mystery (of the spirit) remains such only until someone explains it.

He is the elephant in our room, the one we had not mentioned so far, the man who made the spirit the heart of all his thoughts:

He spoke of it above all in two books considered masterpieces of philosophical production: the

, whose original title was

, and then in

.

he speaks of the spirit as the most concrete thing that can be imagined: politics, institutions, relationships.

In a word: the manifestations of the history of humanity itself, including individual, personal, subjective ones.

Because the spirit is precisely a path, an experience and also the landing of this experience, the concrete manifestations that reveal it, whether they are a nucleus, such as the family, or a state, or a work of art or laws. man-made.

Even when they are painful, as in one of the most famous verses of

which speaks of the '

', that is poor in the depths, or as those just whispered, hinted at, evoked in a

song in which the keyword is'

'even if the title is

.