The anxieties of our time

In the words of Spinoza, we live in the age of 'sad passions' . The reference is not to grief or weeping, but to impotence, disintegration and lack of meaning: widespread feelings, mirroring a profound and substantially different crisis from those that the West has been able to overcome throughout its long history. A crisis that touches the very foundations of our civilisation and that became evident the moment we realised that progress and material well-being did not automatically also generate happiness. At that moment, the future, which we had always looked upon with optimism, as a promise, changed its face and began to appear as a threat in our eyes. And if the future is missing, or if it presents itself as worse than the present, why strive? Why hope? Why seek meaning? Umberto Galimberti, one of the most appreciated contemporary philosophers, plunges into the restlessness of our time, reaching where technoscience can never arrive: to give a name to our unhappiness, to free our flight towards the future.