Mauro Ventola
Being a clearing for the future
“In this immeasurable darkness, be the power,” Rilke wrote. He was referring to that darkness that Martin Heidegger had referred to as the midnight of the world, the condition of our time. To be the power was to get to the heart of the matter: how to be, in the night, an ‘aurora’? There is an idea whose time has come, which lies at a precise point in the 20th century (in the philosophy of existence) and which must be released by returning to it with a second focus: the existence of each individual is a ‘clearing for a future’. The human being is an opening in which himself, others and life appear. This opening is a function of the possibility – or future – from which it comes. Thus transformation in the ontophenomenological sense is to be a clearing for that future that we cherish and, as guardians of that possibility, to be responsible for its preservation and expression in the world. In the midnight of the world, the dawn is to be a clearing for the future.