Illumanesimo

What is Illumanesimo?

 

This is the first question anyone asks upon encountering this neologism.

​

The short answer: Illumanesimo is both a universal philosophy and an existential proposal — a third way between materialism and faith-based spirituality, one that places the individual at its center: their consciousness, and the meaning of their experience.

​

The term was coined in Italian, from the fusion of two words: Umanesimo (Humanism) and Illuminismo (Enlightenment). The name carries its own program: a humanism illuminated by reason. The choice to keep it unchanged in every language binds it forever to this founding function.

​

A philosophy and an existential proposal

As a universal philosophy, Illumanesimo offers an innovative reading of concepts such as God, universal Reality, and the Spirit — which in Illumanesimo takes on a new name: CEFA, Campo Energetico di Forze Autocoscienti (Energy Field of Self-Conscious Forces).

​

As an existential proposal, it rests on a reading of a society facing persistent and increasingly visible difficulties, where the need for change concerning the great questions of existence can no longer be postponed. This need is still expressed in confused forms, within the void left by the fall of old values and cultural reference points — reference points that prove ever more inadequate in a modernity so different from the past. The need for new goals and new horizons emerges with urgency.

​

A void to be filled

Illumanesimo intends to help fill that void: an inner void for a growing number of individuals, and at the same time a social void.

​

As is natural, and as history shows, the first signs of the need for change appear chaotically, through attempts to dismantle what remains of the old philosophical, cultural, and social frameworks. This role is played — unknowingly, yet inevitably — above all by the young who, driven by a natural instinct for renewal, bring that urgency to the forefront: and precisely for this reason, they risk becoming its first victims within a context that resists change.

​

Our time, however, offers an almost unique opportunity: change is no longer a choice — it is already under way, though concentrated mainly in technology and science. It can become the springboard for cultural change as well.

​

A favorable condition

Acknowledging this condition of change already in motion, 

Illumanesimo proposes — constructively, not destructively — to move beyond the limits of the previous paradigms, while recovering what is positive in both Humanism and the Enlightenment.

​

From the former, it recovers the core principles of Humanism, extending them to the concept of human experience as a primary individual need and right, prior to any ideological or organizational allegiance. To this it joins the rational inquiry and intellectual rigor proper to the Enlightenment.

​

This means neither a tendency toward anarchy nor a will to abolish the indispensable rules that every society must give itself in order to function. The intent is to make those rules instruments in the hands of the individual — and not the reverse: a reclaiming of subjectivity, freeing each person from the role of a mere socioeconomic object.

This liberation, unfolding over the long spans proper to every cultural maturation, opens a further perspective: the transformation of change into a new cultural structure.

​

To go further: the page Illumanesimo presents the philosophy as a whole; the English abstracts of the eight volumes of the corpus offer a complete overview of the philosophical project.