It is very simple to consider one's point of view - one's existence - as the centre of the world, reality acquires the absolute certainty of "being" and in this very subtle process the mind elaborates everything as an absolute and subjective truth.
I believe that everyone, at least once in their life, has posed the dilemma of the representation of it and that they have wondered: What is truth? Quid est veritas?1 is pronounced by Pontius Pilate during his interrogation of Jesus. In this passage Pilate asks Jesus to confirm his declaration to "bear witness to the truth". After that, Pilate proclaimed to the masses that he did not find any guilt in Jesus.
It is not easy to give an answer to the question, especially because of the endless number of interpretations.
Seeking its meaning, one often comes across references from religious texts, or in the worst cases in political debates, for example: in the last elections in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the extreme right candidate, won the elections and in his first speech as elected president, recited an evangelical prayer, promised that he will respect the constitution and democratic values. Finally he gave a speech quoting textual words: "The Brazilian people have understood the truth. And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free", citing a verse from the Bible. This suggests that his government will be in the image and likeness of the formula that allowed him to win the elections: he will divide people, he will be a liar, racist and full of prejudices, social and sexual2. This is just a tiny example of how truth is represented, a weapon in favor of those who exploit its power, which can be destructive to humanity, as already happened in the famous crusades or concentration camps. "Truth is far more powerful than any weapon of mass destruction," Gandhi said. By its multiplication it adapts to the infinite purposes of individuals, to their selfishness, to their falsifications. The punishment of a forgery is foreseen as a principle, but less and less feasible in practice. It would require ever more complex investigations and collaborations: therefore slow, often impossible.

A very interesting method of research that I wanted to include comes from photography. Photographic research, in the short and long term, is based on the perpetual acquisition of images; in this case the photographer, as a researcher, in order to give an understandable language to his work, needs images that completely represent what is happening before him, so it is very important to take as many photographs as possible, from different angles and perspectives. In the editing of the work you are accustomed to discard a large amount of images, the selection is essential to delineate the narrative of the project. So I decided to use the same method in the research that follows. There are far too many examples and details that represent the truth, that you would end up falling victim to limbo. The "gap" leads to rephrasing the questions we ask ourselves, that is, to arrive at a question with far fewer answers than the first one.

What is not the truth? It is not truth what I am now, like what I was yesterday. Maybe in the future I will discover a small part of it, and it will die with me. No one will ever know the truth about me, my thoughts, feelings, emotions and dreams, they too will die with me and most likely I will not have the honor of knowing the whole existence of it. 

By that I mean that whatever element is not part of my reality cannot be part of my truth, in this present. But, for example, let's say that one day someone tells me that the representation of the world as we know it is a lie, that we are not part of a universe, that the earth is not in the shape of a sphere and that man comes from Mars, and so on. I would say that all this information can only be possible when I myself do not make sure that it is. But we actually know that news becomes a truth, most of the time, especially for the social majority that preaches it; here is the construction of false beliefs and social stereotypes. In fact, each of us has a growth process based on truths, composed of norms, customs and languages, and the more our society has a complex structure the more complex it is to determine the construction of one's point of view. We know that culture is a concept that evolves in time, we can say that the truth of man goes hand in hand with his culture. 

A possible conception of truth could be contained in the so-called pseudo Aristotelian units of 16th century humanism, made up of units: of Place, that is, to take place in a single place, where the characters acted or recounted the events that had taken place; of Time, the most common interpretation of this rule was that the action had to take place in a single day from dawn to dusk; of Action, the drama had to include a single action, thus excluding secondary plots or subsequent developments of the same event. But here we are not talking about theatre, even if life itself is a constant representation of identity, otherness, and we rely on these concepts appropriating them as a torch in this deep cave of ignorance.
Nothing will be truer than it was before, than it will be after, in a constant and repetitive cycle of the sole concept of truth, but not of its representation.

If the word truth acquires meanings and interpretations that change according to the subjective use of time, place and action, giving an answer to this question makes us perceive that actually none of us has very clear definition in practical terms of it. This is the starting point of my work, an in-depth research on what social representation is, and in special subjective cases, of the many communicative elements that lead us to the representation of truth. 

One has to ask oneself: how do we represent reality? The process of our cultural evolution, of our customs, of our norms, but above all of our language, has clearly distanced us from contact with our spiritual self, preaching truths, pre-packaged ways of life, such as religions and philosophies that govern societies in the same way as the greatest emperors in history.
We are the process and result of a maneuver of power over force. We have become slaves, not only of a truth made up of lies, but above all of ourselves who elect it as unique and absolute, so much so as to strengthen its power and throw mud on the truths of others.
And now, now that we are in a time of absolute historical importance, determining the fate of a planet, ours, I believe that as never happened before, we should begin to worry about our behavior, as representatives chosen from a natural selection to preserve this Earth. But we are still at the top of our game, fighting the truths, fighting religions by preaching falsehoods about others, or slaughtering ourselves for fake profits, just to make our pockets grow with paper, to which we have globally entrusted a higher value than our lives. We fight methodologies, customs, languages, food and diversity from all points of view. We are the final product of what the world leaders have probably planned: we grow, consume and enrich that portion of time, of people who control the rest of the planet.

We are lost, we are lost, we are lost

And still nothing, will stop, nothing pauses

We have ambitions and friendships and courtships to think of

Divorces to drink off the thought of

The money, the money, the oil

The planet is shaking and spoiled

And life is a plaything

A garment to soil

The toil, the toil

I can't see an ending at all

Only the end

How is this something to cherish?

When the tribesmen are dead in their deserts

To make room for alien structures

Develop, develop

And kill what you find if it threatens you

No trace of love in the hunt for the bigger buck

Here in the land where nobody gives a fuck

It is 4:18 a.m. on any night in any street in London. We are in the belly of the decadent Western Empire; the millennium is the third, the most vulgar era, the work still. In the street the dark night is cut only by the cold light of the lamps, by the rustle of the dead leaves; an empty can rolls away as slow as the winter. Seven different people, in seven different houses they can't sleep, their mistakes count. They ask themselves what life is and what will become of them. Through their insomnia they are the protagonists of Kate's verses, of her generation, of mine: sedated, drunk, dedicated, distracted, obsessed with pornography and advertising, daughters of the same lust. Individual lives are emptied of their meaning, rendered futile and insignificant. A new pair of shoes is more important news than the massacres in the Middle East; the most interesting gossip of the entertainment world than the political scandals. Nobody gives a shit about the others, Esther the nurse repeats herself, the only concern of all seems to be that the traffic flows. For the rest you have to earn and then spend the money of overtime on alcohol and drugs to forget that you are not living the life you would like to live. Individualism is pushed to the point that the only possible victory is the defeat of others.

Choose designer underwear in the vain hope of giving a life-giving boost to a deceased relationship. Choose bags, heels, cashmere and silk shoes, so you'll feel what they're selling as happiness. Choose an iPhone made in China by a woman who threw herself out the window, put it in the pocket of a fresh jacket of a slave factory in Southeast Asia. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand other ways to vomit your bile against people you've never met. Choose to update your profile, tell the world what you ate for breakfast, hope someone somewhere gives a shit. Choose to look for old flames and wish you luck in not being as unsightly as they are. Choose to write a live blog from the first saw to the last breath, human interaction reduced to nothing more than data. Choose 10 unknown things about the celebrities who made plastic. Choose to shine on abortion. Choose jokes about rape, screwing up, porn for revenge and an endless wave of depressing misogyny. Choose that September 11 never happened, and if ever were the Jews. Choose a zero hour contract, a two hour home-work trip, and choose the same for your children but worse, and maybe tell yourself that it was better if they weren't born, and then lie back and suffocate the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in some fucking kitchen. Choose the unrealized hopes, wishing you had acted differently. Choose never to learn from your mistakes, choose to observe the story that repeats, choose to reconcile slowly with what you can get, instead of what you have always hoped for, settle for less and do good to bad luck. Choose disappointment, choose to lose loved ones, when they disappear from sight a piece of you dies with them, until you see that one day in the future one by one all will have disappeared and nothing will remain of you, neither alive nor dead. Choose the future, Veronika. Choose life.

It becomes who you are, Nietzsche writes, but how can you get to be something through becoming? The question is not easy to resolve, but in principle it is believed that the subjective construction of the ego depends, on the one hand, on the innate attitudes, on the natural predispositions of the individual and, on the other, on the surrounding events that occur and over which he has no control. Yet between these two positions it is necessary to consider another element that can make the difference: the choice. In this sense the choice is not only decisive but also necessary, since its opposite is impossible by logic. In deciding not to choose between various options, I have already made a choice, which is, by the way, the most extreme. In fact, most of the time, the non-choice results in the possibility of leaving to others the decision that belongs to us or, worse still, of leaving to chance the events that we are able to control. What is perhaps more serious is the attitude of de-responsibility with which the person who does not choose feels invested and who, in doing so, becomes instead directly responsible for everything that happens or does not happen. Every human being has been given a great virtue: the ability to choose. Those who do not use it, turn it into a curse and others will choose for them. The choice made once, influences in a more or less permanent way all those that follow, continuously outlining the structuring of the personality. 

In sociology, the notion of basic personality is a kind of bridge between society and the individual, between the universal and the particular. Identifying the basic personality that characterises a social formation should, in short, allow us to interpret individual behaviour as a product of certain cultural models that generate conformity, expectations and ways of communicating. At the same time, however, the existential uniqueness of every human being would be maintained.  A variant of this approach is represented by the personality of status, which constitutes the dominant basic personality in different groups of age, sex, socio-economic status and can, therefore, make us investigate aspects of the so-called complex societies (in which, unlike the primitive communities, it is very difficult to identify basic personalities that tend to belong to the whole community). An enormously important contribution to the definition of the notion comes from the studies dedicated by the Frankfurt School to the consent to the dictatorial political regimes. In this context, for example, E. Fromm associated the patriarchal education of the traditional German family with the development of an authoritarian and sadomasochistic personality, easy prey to Nazi suggestions. 

Certainties, I think, are the biggest obstacle we can ever find in the path of life, but above all I think that deconstructing them is the highest podium that an individual can reach. In today's world we believe in some absolute certainties, we live in the time of the internet, hashtags, links, images, short posts and meme: these are the information bits that build our idea of the world.

Today the truth more than ever is not certain, our knowledge is characterized by the digital use of information in a constant way and second after second, like sponges, we absorb them. Previously, the news that we had considered true after years has been questioned, proving the actual falsehood, but with little success. The parable of photography sums up the fate of the mass media. The invention was hailed as the advent of objective information. Yet the historical reconstruction shows that the most famous photos are often the result of makers. Painters already offered the public decisive images of history: but, before painting a battle, they asked themselves who had won it. Instead, field photographs should reproduce reality. Yet, historical reconstruction shows that the new technique, born to help the truth, can slip into the service of propaganda, allying itself to the false. To say that photography cannot lie is simply to underline the numerous frauds that are committed in its name1. Lack of truth is a concern in every age, but it becomes central to messages for all. Access to the truth becomes increasingly easier: the mass, however, does not choose reality, as it finally could, but the most enjoyable images, regardless of that: the disappearance of the old religious and political illusions, in the face of the advance of humanistic and scientific thought did not provoke - as had been foreseen - massive definitions towards the real. On the contrary, the new era of incredulity consolidated the dependence on images. The credit that it was no longer possible to give to realities in the form of images was now given to realities in the form of images, illusions. Photography today has a strong relevance, it is more and more within our lives; I think it is legitimate to ask: Which images are true? Many of the "photographic icons" have to do with wars, or at least with immense catastrophes. To define this subject we have to distinguish between forms of communication: written communication, which uses concepts, and visual communication, which uses images. It is difficult to say when the images were used for the first time, and when we started to use concepts, putting together sounds that indicated something concrete. Considering the archaeological finds, especially in stone, the images could be much older. They have the advantage of being universal, like the human eye. Concepts, on the other hand, take different forms with the use of different languages. A gradual differentiation, which has been a source of wealth, but also of extreme complexity, difficulty in translation and, above all, of incomprehension. Or at least not equivalence. 

Scholars of communication such as Marshall McLuhan, George Steiner, Marc Fumaroli, note that throughout the world, and since past centuries, the image tends to prevail over the word. Words are complex, too complex, they can't concentrate a story in a short sentence. It goes without saying that, in some way, they cannot be trusted; the word "narrative" in English is called fiction, or fake. 

The extreme ease of shooting and reproducing images has endless benefits. The demanding, expensive and limited ability to portray loved ones with a painting has been replaced by endless photos, which we keep on our smartphones and can take anywhere. 

The photo can be profound truth. But also betrayal of the truth, in turn concentrated in an inimitable way. The highest moment of documentation may correspond to the deepest of lies: in these cases "photographs are used to lie" even when they are true1. 

The photographic image has made it normal to instantly see things happening on the other side of the globe. But the elimination of geographical distance does not erase the distance between seeing and knowing.

In many ways, all the means of communication could be included in this discourse. But the photo more than others: because it summarizes both the truth and its betrayal in a single evocation. In doing so, he places himself in the center as in the square does the statue, which according to McLuhan is his close relative.

Of course, there are also films and documentaries. But, in the end, when too many images follow one another quickly, each one tends to erase the previous one from memory. 

The unique and fixed image, symbolically strong, stands higher than the moving one. In other words: certain photographs - not by chance called iconic - transcend current events and come closer to religion than can be the case with cinema. In these cases, their simple existence is even more important than the fact that they are contemplated. 

For millennia, at the center of the Christian church there was an image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary: after all, in certain religious buildings, today, on the altar there is not a painting but a photo of a famous painting. 

The invention of the photo gave hope for an advent of historical objectivity. It was imagined that it could become the continuer not only of painting but of the whole memory, in its objective whole3. God's eye was no longer in heaven, as in the ancient paintings: it went down to the field to document the truth and drive out the false. 

Mysonists believe that they are charged by God to protect him, while in reality they defend their own mental fragility. But in the collective unconscious, modern or secularized, a symmetrical counter-face of religious need persists: even the apostles of the new media - apparently lay people - were in search of absolute "truth", of a value that would fill the psychic space left vacant by faith. They were looking for something stable: indirectly, therefore, they in turn remained "conservative" and pro-religious. 

A heroic and missionary style will undermine the photo-documentation more than other modern techno-arts, making its path fascinating, but thus shattering its currents and in many cases the very life of those who represented them. 

I think that the missing piece in this moment of humanity is precisely that of deconstruction, and I believe that the secret of development is based on this. Unfortunately, it is an epoch-making undertaking, given that we should deconstruct 200,000 thousand years of human history. Because, if these human advances have been so far, that is, those that are leading humanity to its extinction and that of so many other forms of life, we must ask ourselves: what have we done wrong in the historical process? Are we wasting something that should have been inherited and used differently? Sir Colin Renfrew, a professor at Cambridge, wrote: "Many of us were convinced that the pyramids of Egypt were the oldest stone monuments in the world and that the first temples had been erected by man in the Near East, in the fertile Mesopotamian region. It was also believed that there, in the cradle of the most ancient civilization, metallurgy had been invented and that, subsequently, the technologies for working copper and bronze, monumental architecture and others, had been acquired by the most backward populations, and then spread to much of Europe and the rest of the ancient world. It was therefore a huge surprise. When it was realised that all this construction was wrong. The megalithic charge tombs of Western Europe are now considered older than the pyramids. It also seems that in England, Stonehenge was completed and the rich local Bronze Age was well established, before the Mycenaean civilization began in Greece. In fact, Stonehenge, an extraordinary and enigmatic structure, can rightly be considered the oldest astronomical observatory in the world. And so every assumption of the traditional vision of prehistory is contradicted. The English scholar concludes: "The new dates reveal how much we have underestimated those creative 'barbarians' of prehistoric Europe, who, in reality, erected stone monuments, melted copper, created solar observatories and did other ingenious things, without any help from the eastern Mediterranean.
We think we can use metaphors such as: "We have made great strides in the history of mankind". And if these steps, instead, had been those of a turtle, of an ant, or better still, of a parasite, would we have had to question all forms of thought? If we had done this, probably, we would not be here now to continue to produce rubbish, to destroy a world that we should leave even better for future generations, for animals, for new species, for nature. So why are we choosing the path of chemistry, oil, atomic energy, when we could already choose today, renewable energy, environmental protection? Because the only tangible truth at the moment is that no one cares about nature, species, animals, renewables, future generations, let alone what will be tomorrow, because today, now, in this age, we have become ourselves a product consumed by consumerism. 

The problem is that many people do not believe that something can happen until it has already happened. It is not stupidity or weakness, it is only human nature.

How do we know what we think we know? This seemingly simple question involves three spheres of thought on which the human mind has focused its attention for millennia. What we know is generally seen as the result of our exploration and understanding of the real world, of how things really are. 

Common sense, after all, suggests that this objective reality can be discovered. "How we know" is a far more difficult problem. To solve it, the mind has to come out of itself and, so to speak, observe itself at work; because at this point we no longer face facts that clearly exist independently of us in the external world, but mental processes whose nature is not at all explicit. If what we know depends on how we came to know it, our vision of reality is no longer a true image of what lies outside of us, but is inevitably determined by the mental processes through which we came to formulate a vision.

We must also consider that language is one of the most important of all human characteristics, it is the ability to communicate with others through it. Words are arbitrary symbols of objects, concepts, and every human language is composed of hundreds of thousands of terms whose meaning is socially shared. Without it there would be no culture, which by its definition is a shared and complex model of thoughts, emotions, knowledge and beliefs, which could not pass from one individual to another, or pass from one generation to another, if there was no means of the spoken word. 

And language is not only culture, but also and above all structures the reality that surrounds us. 

Some languages have words to designate objects and concepts that other languages do not have.

An example is that of the Aztecs, who had only one word to indicate snow, frost, ice and cold, and probably tended to consider all these things as if they were the same phenomenon. We have only one word to indicate snow, the Eskimos don't have any words that mean snow in general, but they have more than twenty for different types of snow: to indicate the snow on the ground, the falling snow, the snowstorm, etcetera. Their language pushes them to perceive these distinctions, while ours predisposes us to ignore them. The Koyas of southern India do not distinguish between snow, fog and dew, but their language leads them to distinguish seven types of bamboo, important distinctions for them, but which we would hardly notice.

Even the colour spectrum is selected in different ways from different languages. The human eye is able to operate between 7 and 10 million different colour discriminations, but all languages recognise only a small number of different colours. Almost all European languages recognise black, white and six basic colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. It must be said that many languages recognize only two colors: the Jale of New Guinea, for example, divide the color spectrum into the colors hui and ziza, which represented respectively the warm and cold colors of the spectrum. Others, such as Surinam's Arawak, Indian Toda and Ugandan Baganda, only recognise three colours. All these people see the same color spectrum, but divide it into different ways. 

Busatta (2014) points out that: "most unwritten languages do not have an abstract word for 'colour' and one does not normally ask 'what colour is it? [...] Instead one normally asks: 'His body, how is it?' or 'His body, how does it appear?', which can refer to any perceptible quality such as size or taste and structure of the sentence suggests that the interlocutor responds by making a comparison.

Societies that base their breeding on horses or dromedaries give priority to distinguishing the nuances of the hair of the animals bred, unlike other colours. Many populations continue to colour their bodies for various purposes, especially to indicate a particular social status, but our society also includes facial make-up (generally female but increasing among men), hair dyes, nail polish, tattoos and the art of body painting. Moreover, the colour of the skin itself is considered attractive, but also in this case the canons of beauty are dictated by culture. In fact, today in the West, tanned skin is indicative of a healthy complexion while the very pronounced paleness is a canon of beauty widespread among women from the Far East, who do not hesitate to whiten their skin and to preserve it white even with parasols and masks "sea" in addition to full suits.

Other distinctions are found in the grammatical uses of the different languages. Many languages, European and non-European, require the speaker to indicate his social condition and that of the interlocutor. 

The language of the Navajo Indians has no real equivalent of our active verbs; in the thought of the Navajo people, rather than acting, passively participate in the actions that take place. This linguistic characteristic is perhaps in an extreme relationship with nature. Even more surprising for us is the language of the Hopi Indians, which does not recognize the categories of time and space. The language of the Hopi does not have the equivalent of the present, past and future times, but it organizes the universe according to the categories of "manifesto" (everything that is or has been perceived through the senses) and "manifests" (everything that is not physically perceptible). If it is difficult to understand this concept, it is because our language is poorly equipped to express it, just as hopi language encounters difficulties in expressing our concepts of time and space. 

All normal human beings are biologically capable of having similar perceptions and ways of reasoning (Lèvi-Strauss, 1962) What the hypothesis argues is that the language we speak predisposes us to give particular interpretations of reality. 

Language and culture are therefore in constant interaction: culture influences the structure and use of language, while language influences the cultural interpretations of reality.

Another important aspect concerns the Chinese people, who make an immense additional effort to learn, in addition to their writing system, also our phonetic alphabet. Unlike the twenty letters of the Western alphabets, each of their ideograms evokes figures, thus activating an imaginary thought. They are thousands of ideograms, and have no place on the computer keyboard, let alone on a smartphone. To live in the technological world they need to know both communication codes. But when they master both of them, their brains have an agility that translates into activity, so multifaceted as to be among the factors that are leading China to be the First country in the world.

I'm more and more surprised by how full of preconceptions we are, I'm referring to what we've learned to call "cultural appropriations", a curious concept according to which it's wrong for a so-called dominant culture to make its own food, music, clothes and other aspects of the cultures of what we once called the developing world. As a Neapolitan, I've heard a lot about it, from, "Naples is the most beautiful city in the world", to "pizza is Neapolitan, and only in Naples can you eat a real pizza". Looking a little further away, the traditions of Italy come out, especially about food, love and so on. When I went to live in Berlin I don't know how many times, of those times that I went back to Italy, I had to listen to comments like, "How can you live in Germany, the Germans are cold! But there are actually many cases of cultural preconceptions: recently, the Italian bicycle company Vittoria was criticized for using a word from Native Americans for a wheel model; a British chef was crucified for inventing a recipe inspired by Jamaican cuisine; a white poet had to apologize for using the slang of blacks in a poem. And then a student at Paloma College in the United States told the Washington Post: "They taught me that whites should not listen to rap because it's cultural appropriation and my black comrades might be offended. What does that mean? That in the future only Italians will be able to eat pasta and only British people will be able to speak English? These ideas show that people do not know how customs evolve. Rarely does an aspect of a culture arise where we think, it usually emerges from the fusion of elements from different places. Sushi, unlike what is believed, is actually not Japanese, something very similar was born in China, then was borrowed and reworked by the Japanese. The English language was born in England for only 20%, the remaining percentage of its 171,476 words comes from other languages. Dreadlocks were not invented in the West Indies, they were also worn by women represented on Greek vases three thousand years ago. But let's admit that there are elements of some cultures, which are not the result of crossings. Should we therefore forbid those who are not part of those cultures to make them? In the globalized world this seems not only impracticable, but above all wrong, the result of an obsession with ethnic identity. For separation rather than for integration and mutual understanding. 

Another language common to all is silence, a form of communication that all living beings possess, to which I believe we must give a lot of attention. I was just a teenager, when I realized that I had an intimate need for silence; I spent a lot of time processing it and, above all, what use I could make of it; only when I learned to close out the world I could put myself in search of it. For those who love adventure, feeling astonishment is important. It's one of the purest forms of joy I know of. It's a wonderful feeling. I experience it everywhere, when I travel, read, meet people, feel my heart beating, see the sun rise. We are born with the gift of amazement, it is one of our most beautiful abilities. Jon Fosse says: It's a feeling that satisfies me. I'm amazed at how much I enjoy being amazed. Other times it happens that I am surprised not because I want to, but because I can't do without it. Silence contains in itself amazement, but also a kind of violence, a bit like the ocean or a boundless expanse of snow. And those who were not surprised by this violence were afraid of it. That's why many people fear silence and that music is everywhere and dominates everything. I think that the fear to which Fosse refers is the fear of getting to know each other better, or of not being able to do so. I feel like a coward every time I avoid looking inside myself.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the world disappears as soon as it enters it. I think that's exactly what happens in the communicative process of silence. It is more than an idea. It's a feeling. A projection. The silence around us can be full of meaning. I am convinced that everyone can find silence within themselves. It is always present, even when we are surrounded by noise. Closing the world out does not mean wanting to ignore what surrounds us, but the exact opposite: wanting to see it more clearly, maintain a direction and try to love life. Silence enriches with its own. It possesses this intrinsic, exclusive and precious quality. It is a key that allows us to access new ways of thinking. It is not an abandonment, it is not something spiritual, but a practical tool to enrich life. I am of the opinion that silence is the new luxury, and it is above all a free experience.

When you begin to study philosophy, you learn that nothing comes from nothing, ex nihilo nihil fit. This quotation is as true as it is ancient: the philosopher Parmenides maintained that it is impossible to speak of what does not exist, contradicting, to the delight of many, what he had just said. For thousands of years, people dedicated to solitary life, such as mountain monks, hermits, navigators, shepherds and explorers, have been convinced that the answer to the mysteries of existence lies in silence. Jesus and Buddha retreat into solitude to understand how they should have lived. Jesus in the desert, Buddha on the mountain and near the river. Jesus realized to God in silence. The river teaches Buddha to hear, to listen with a quiet heart, with an open mind waiting. A well-known anecdote of Hindu philosophy, which could be taken from Buddhism, has as its protagonist a student who asks his teacher if he can explain to him what Brahman, the soul of the world, is. The teacher remains silent. The pupil insists twice, and then three times, but receives no response from the master. In the end, the teacher speaks to him and says: "I am teaching you, but you do not follow me". The answer was obviously silence.

In Zen Buddhism it is important to question what you see, the visible world. The best known exercise, a koan, consists of sitting around without moving or saying anything and thinking about what is the sound produced by a single hand. To imagine such a beat is an impossible task, it means to meditate on what it means to move outside the logical and realistic thought.

The ancient philosophers Aristotle and Plato said that the knowledge of eternity and therefore of truth could not be expressed in words. Plato called it arrheton, which means "the inexpressible", Aristotle aneu logou, which means "without language", or without words. When words are no longer enough, it is possible for the two philosophers to understand the great truths directly. Not only the great truths but also the small ones. If we go the wrong way, we are forced to stop, to look at the navigator; we turn down the volume of the stereo system and ask the other passengers to be quiet so that we can concentrate. Gathering thoughts, finding the right path, is the only thing that counts in that moment. 

"On this, of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent" is the last sentence of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Tractatus was partly conceived in Skjolden, on the Lustrafjord, inside the Sognefjord. Nature, silence and distance from other human beings contributed to the formation of Wittgenstein and his philosophy. As he wrote in a letter to G.E.Moore: I can't imagine being able to work anywhere else as well as here. It is the quiet and, perhaps, the wonderful landscape; I mean, its quiet seriousness. 

In Tractatus, Wittgenstein points out that we can show things that we cannot express in words: "What can be shown cannot be said". Words draw boundaries. All those who have tried to write or speak about ethics and religion have a tendency to fight against language barriers. This struggle against everything that limits us is total and absolutely hopeless. 

By ethics he meant the true meaning of existence. Not even science can give a definition. Ethics, in so far as it springs from the urge to say something about the fundamental meaning of existence, about the absolute good, about absolute preciousness, cannot be science. What cannot be said must therefore be shown, thought out and heard. 

"Do not go out of yourself, return to yourself: the truth dwells in the interiority of man and if you find your mutable nature, you also transcend yourself.