The essential? It is a love of things that reveals their origin.

Costantino Esposito - The Meeting of Rimini is an annual international event in Rimini, Italy. It is a major cultural and educational event that attracts a diverse audience, including intellectuals, politicians, academics, and members of various religious and social groups.

The Rimini meeting is known for its intellectual rigor, cultural richness, and commitment to addressing significant questions about human existence, society, and faith.

The title of this year's Rimini meeting focuses on a quest like a keystone in the life of individuals and society: "If we do not seek the essential, what are we seeking?" But what is the essential? What is truly important for the individual and, together, for the whole world? What is inescapable in existence, as its condition and end? This question is far from common or obvious; indeed, one is almost reluctant or afraid to ask it of oneself and others. Given how easy it is, one can understand why to fall into a rhetorical emphasis on the basic (and often abstract) principles of life or launch into moral recommendations about what one should or should not do to be consistent with the supreme value of existence.

The question of what really matters in life has an almost curious resonance today, in an age when the essential criteria of life seem to have become frayed, faded, or misplaced. It is not that there is nothing essential anymore; on the contrary, for every situation, undertaking, or project, we can show an "essential" that refers from time to time to the individual goals we set for ourselves and how we achieve them. Every move we make, every action we take in the various spheres of personal and social life, revolves around its relative focus, and this is precisely the essential of that piece of reality or that moment of existence, which may also be different or contradictory with respect to other conditions or situations.

But something more radical is at stake here: to seek the essential is not only to recognize what determines the nature of a single thing or situation (whether it is the essence of economics or affective life, of politics or science, of physical nature or art), but also to seek the nexus that holds together and gives unity to all these things and situations, asking not only what is important in each of them, but what is most important in the whole and in the whole of our existence in the world.

Strange duality of the essential. In the great philosophical tradition, it originally refers to the essence, the nature or form that constitutes a thing in itself and by which we can "define" it (the classic example is the essence of man as an animal endowed with logos). However, the essential must also be recognized through the judgment and choices of a conscious subject who recognizes what is fundamental versus what is accidental, what must be preferred or relativized as more or less adequate to the path of life and self-realization.

In short, the essential is always ontological and, at the same time, historical; it depends on how things are and how we are called to shape them in time. Hence, the two extremes in which the essential has been interpreted in the history of thought are, on the one hand, as something "substantial," a fixed, unchanging identity. In this sense, the essence of a thing is determined once and for all in what it is, and that is all. On the other hand, the essence has been mobilized, dissolved in the pure becoming of things, thus understood as a destiny of perpetual change that can never be fixed in a stable identity.

The two sides are always implicated in each other. As Hegel had already observed, the term "essence" expresses precisely a movement, the dynamic of a thing's "coming into being," of its coming to itself. For this reason, the essence is something that can only be grasped by seeking it, and we can come to the essential insofar as we do not possess it once and for all as a definitive acquisition but rather set out on its trail, giving it the chance to reveal itself to us. We do not establish the essence of things, but our thinking needs to give itself.

I found a very interesting suggestion on how to search for the essential in Martin Heidegger. In his famous "Letter on Humanism" (1947), he says that human thinking is precisely the place where the essence of things happens because, in it, we can "hear" being. And being means loving things, preferring them, "giving them essence. This is the real power of Being, its "silent power": to make things be, to make them come to their essence, to make them possible, and to keep awakened in them a possibility that is broader and deeper than any single realization. What is essential is the manifestation of a hidden but very present origin of things.

A provenance that is never exhausted once and for all but continues to sustain the irreducible presence of what is in the world. To seek the essential is not to settle for what we have but to keep open the possibility of the real. What is essential is that the unpredictable can always happen to us.
Download. Edited and translated without review of the author. Published on IlFoglio.