For Don Vincenzo Majuripriest, professor of philosophy at the San Tommaso Theological Institute of Messina and ass of Dante, “friendship is the hermeneutic key of existence, a way of being in the world”. It is not the first time that he writes but he wanted to reiterate him strongly in his latest book, “The friend: the custodian of your soul“, In which it proposes a reflection on what has always been considered a universal feeling, starting from the conceptualization of two philosophers: the overcoming of the”Philia“Proposed by Aristotle and the most humanized perspective ofAmor Amicitiae by Tommaso d’Aquino.
Don Majuri, who presented his latest publication to the academic community of San Tommasowonders if and what weight can friend in today’s society, “computer and telematic, characterized by factors that can encourage insulation, but also enriched by many technological tools that cancel distances and facilitate encounters”. Hence the double proposal to consider the friend a “custos animae” in the relationship between the ego and the you and the same friendship as the model to be inspired by in all personal, family and political interhuman relationships. To discuss Majuri’s work, the unime of philosophy teacher Giovanna Costanzo and the director of the theological faculty of San Tommaso Don Gianni Russowhich analyzing the contents of the volume spoke of the evolution of this important feeling, increasingly “virtualized and quantified”, referring to the socialization of interpersonal bonds. A real social and cultural transformation if you think, explains Russo, that In Greek classicism, friendship represented the highest form of civil concord and justicethe aim of the same political action.
The author’s attempt is to set this feeling within the contemporary world considering it, according to Costanzo, “a virtue, a benevolent arrangement applied in the private and public daily dimensions”. For the teacher therefore, “The secret of the good is hidden within friendship: It is such when corresponds to the recognition that each of us has the other in terms of reciprocity and intersubjectivity “.