Il Platone di Enzo Melandri

Enzo Melandri – one of the greatest exponents of phenomenology in Italy – saw ancient thought as the basis of the whole philosophical grammar of the West, whose subsequent developments he regarded as mere extensions and elaborations of it. In this context, Platonic idealism has pride of place because of its “amphibian” character: on the one hand it is linked to the isomorphism of classical logic, on the other it goes beyond it by formulating the principle of the “analogy of being”. Idea and matter, as well as intuition and discourse, are the terms of a dynamic ontology of reality in which there is no separation between knowledge and praxis. For Plato, knowing through ideas means to operatively unfold the plot of reality, in which the meaning of each thing is reflected, and reversed, in its complementary opposite. Against the background of the semantic intentionality of experience, object and method are thus the “enantiomorphic shapes” of a dialectical tension which is the first “absolute metaphor” of Western philosophy.