Sulla permanenza del passato On the Permanence of the Past

Not even God can change what has already happened, writes Aristotle. Eppure resta che qualco￾sa è accaduto, writes Eugenio Montale. Contemporary philosophy, in its theoretical apicality, in order to affirm that everything is procedural fluidity, knows that it must also overcome that last remnant of eternity which is «definitively past» time. However, this overcoming remains a «bite» that is indigestible for non-philosophical contexts. Why? One part of the article in￾vestigates this inability to metabolise; the other addresses the speculative apicality mentioned above, analysing Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return of the identical and Giovanni Gentile’s actualistic conception of the past. Rereading one in the light of the other, the reflection reveals that both contain the double logical movement of the «fluidification» of time and its «recrystallisation»: the abstract, as such, not overcome (Gentile) and the form of being imprinted in becoming (Nietzsche) present themselves as conditions for fluidifying time in the identity of the willed and the willing, of the past and the passing. We can therefore conclude that it is this dual movement of fluidification-recrystallisation that makes the philosophical overcoming of the permanence of the past disorienting for non-philosophical contexts.