Nuccio Ordine wrote in European, which is a phrase that was said a few times about Javier Marías and that could have been applied to many other writers of his generation. His European, of course, is not a language, but a way of dealing with knowledge and beauty with an attitude of fascination that is somewhat ironic and joking, based on cosmopolitanism and faith in progress and understanding. Ordine wrote academic investigations that deep down seemed like intrigue novels and denunciation essays that in the end became warm narratives about the history of the humanities and morality. Ordine, who just a month ago received the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, has died on his land, in Calabria, at the age of 64.
When that decision became known, the Italian professor remembered George Steiner and Umberto Eco, former winners of the same award, his teachers in his formative years and European-language writers like him. Their names are two references to understand in what sense Nuccio Ordine was a philosopher, what he did philosophy for: to defend the complexities and refinements of a culture built over the centuries, of which we never know if it has entered a phase of self-destruction or if it is like a reed that is defeated by the wind but always resists.
The utility of the useless, Ordine’s best-known book (Libros del Acantilado, 2014), is a synthesis of that image of its author. The Uselessness of the Useless, to begin with, was addressed to a European reader, partly jaded and pessimistic, since the essay was published in the midst of endless years of trauma after the 2008 crisis, but also capable of recognizing cultural baggage. common called humanities. The book, in short, tried to claim knowledge of the humanities as the only tool capable of turning students into good citizens. In the end, that book-manifesto purpose fell short of explaining The Uselessness of the Useless, which was a history of humanistic knowledge that would pave the way for later books such as Infinity in a Reed, an analysis of the flatly pragmatic course that it was taking. education in Europe, and a moral essay on the commodification of human experience.
Men are not islands, Ordine’s last book published in Spain (Also in Libros del Acantilado), insisted on that moral dimension. Ordine, a man who was a poor child and who made his social ascent through effort and education, defended in his pages the nucleus of left-wing thought in his generation: he spoke of a less individualistic way of life, more generous towards the us, less technophile and more based on reflection and a deep understanding of reality… Only, to get to that point, he denied many of the ideas that we associate with left-wing parties today: the obsession with identity, sentimentality in education, the industry of happiness as a right and not as a fight…
Ordine’s attention to the school as the measure of all the successes and failures of European society was a biographical affair. It has been told a thousand times that the author was born in a small and remote town, where access to education was not taken for granted as in any other place. For Ordine, arriving at high school was an epiphanic moment. For this reason, his books and his interviews were full of calls to attention against the cheapening of education, against all the tendency to treat teachers as third-rate professionals and to put a silly idea of ??children’s happiness before the world. knowledge.
That is what being European should consist of, writing in European, without this implying a rigid or elitist idea of ??excellence. “I have just been in Colombia and I have visited the University of Magdalena,” Ordine explained to EL MUNDO when he received the Princess Award. from Asturias. “They have 25,000 students who can study for free and they do an enormous job. I teach at Harvard, I am very happy with the excellence with which one educates at Harvard. But the value of the work of these types of universities may have more value than Harvard’s.”
In Ordine’s work there were also amusements, walks through the back streets of history, apparently whimsical but full of meaning, in the end. Three crowns for a king, for example, started from an anecdote to become a plot that explained the intellectual history of the 16th century in Europe. Actually, Three Crowns for a King is the book that best connects Ordine with Eco and with his idealized image of Europe.
The news of Ordine’s death was confirmed by the mayor of Consenza, the city where he was a teacher, who expressed his sadness at the disappearance of “one of the most cultured figures, in the broadest sense of the term, that Calabria and all of the country have been able to include in its recent history”.
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