Roberto Mucciarini

METAFISICA

NECESSARIA

(Necessary metaphysics)

Illumanesimo in Dialogue with:

Massimo Cacciari, Giorgio Agamben,

Quentin Meillassoux, and Markus Gabriel

Extended Abstract

Illumanesimo — from the fusion of Umanesimo (Humanism) and Illuminismo (Enlightenment): Metafisica necessaria opens the comparative phase of the corpus of the eponymous philosophy.

1. The Strategic Function of the Work within the Illumanesimo Corpus

Metafisica necessaria represents the sixth volume of the Illumanesimo corpus and performs a unique and strategic function within the philosophical project of Illumanesimo. Unlike the five preceding volumes — L’Illumanesimo (general synthesis), Esperienze (ontological anthropology), La Realtà (metaphysical foundations), Il senso di ogni vita (existential philosophy), CEFA — Proposta di indagine (methodological bridge toward scientific investigation) — this work does not systematically develop new doctrinal content, but creates a rigorous philosophical dialogue between Illumanesimo and some of the foremost representatives of contemporary philosophy, thereby contributing fully to the development of the Illumanist cultural proposal.

The objective is twofold: on the one hand, to show how a new metaphysical proposal can engage on equal terms with the most sophisticated forms of academic thought, addressing the central problems of contemporary philosophy; on the other, to test whether the Illumanist conceptual architecture can stand up to comparison with philosophically sophisticated interlocutors, engaging with contemporary thought without dissolving into generalities or taking refuge in dogmatism.

Illumanesimo, as a philosophy born outside traditional academic institutions, requires a testing ground that demonstrates its theoretical soundness and its essential connection to cultural life.

2. The Interlocutors and the Structure of the Dialogue

The work unfolds as an in-depth dialogue with four contemporary philosophers, each representing an original and distinct perspective on metaphysics: Massimo Cacciari (the principal and most extensive dialogue), Giorgio Agamben, Quentin Meillassoux, and Markus Gabriel.

2.1. Massimo Cacciari: Concrete Metaphysics. Cacciari represents the ideal interlocutor for the principal dialogue. Over the last twenty years he has undertaken a philosophical rehabilitation of metaphysics after decades of marginalization, showing that it is possible to do metaphysics without falling into the dogmatisms of the past. With works such as Della cosa ultima (2004), Labirinto filosofico (2014), and Metafisica concreta (2023), he has rescued metaphysical inquiry from both positivist dismissal and dogmatic appropriation, restoring theoretical legitimacy to questions that positivism had dismissed as meaningless. The two philosophies share: the rejection of reductionist materialism; the rejection of faith-based dogmatism; the search for a metaphysical “third way”; the recognition of movement as a central category; attention to the irreducible singularity of each being; and an impersonal conception of the Absolute. Yet they diverge radically on crucial points: the nature of the individual Spirit (present in Illumanesimo, absent in Cacciari); the possibility of progressive evolutionary knowledge; the relationship between the possible and the impossible; and the role of incarnation.

2.2. Giorgio Agamben: Potentiality, Inoperativity, and Form-of-Life. Agamben, through his two-decade Homo sacer project, has proposed a renewal of metaphysics through categories such as potentiality-not-to, inoperativity, and form-of-life. The dialogue concentrates on three conceptual nodes: the nature of potentiality, the meaning of inoperativity, and the conception of form-of-life. A fundamental philosophical divergence with existential implications emerges: is being constitutively suspended in an indeterminate openness (Agamben), or dynamically oriented toward self-realization (Illumanesimo)?

2.3. Quentin Meillassoux: Speculative Materialism. Meillassoux, with his radical critique of post-Kantian correlationism, poses a philosophical challenge of the opposite kind. His attempt to think the absolute independently of the correlation between thought and being, his defense of the radical contingency of natural laws, and his claim that reality in itself can be known beyond all subjective mediation make it possible to specify the ontological status of the Illumanist Spirit and the possibility of conceiving together the absolute material dimension of reality and the individual spiritual dimension of the CEFA.

2.4. Markus Gabriel: The New Ontological Realism. Gabriel, with his theory of fields of sense and his thesis that “the world does not exist” while infinite fields of sense exist in which things appear, offers an alternative both to correlationism and to reductionist materialism. The dialogue raises questions concerning the multiplicity of individual Spirits and their relation to the different levels of reality: how does the infinite multiplicity of CEFA entities relate to the multiplicity of fields of sense?

3. The Fundamental Themes of the Dialogue with Cacciari

The dialogue with Cacciari unfolds through eleven fundamental themes, each of which is examined both from the Cacciarian perspective and from the Illumanist one, with an analysis of points of convergence and divergence.

3.1 Metaphysics in Motion.

For Cacciari, movement is not something that happens to things, but the very mode in which things exist. Every being lives on a perpetual journey between the passage of time and the desire to escape its destructive grip. Movement becomes “unfinished actuality,” where incompleteness is not a defect but part of its essential nature. Illumanesimo shares this centrality of movement but offers a further determination: movement is directed toward the evolution of Spirit through the experience of material reality.

3.2 Beings and the Singularity of Being.

If every being is singular and unique, what are the limits of its knowledge? Cacciari answers that constitutive limits exist: self-transparency is impossible, knowledge of other beings remains partial, the Whole cannot be exhaustively comprehended. Illumanesimo introduces what remains implicit in Cacciari: the underlying reason. Why does each being exist in the tension between the determinable and the indeterminable? It is Spirit that requires this tension in order to evolve.

3.3 The Possible and the Impossible.

For Cacciari, the impossible is the ultimate horizon toward which every being tends without ever reaching it — that which exceeds every determination. Illumanesimo offers a clarification: possibility is not abstract or indeterminate, but an oriented possibility, inscribed in the potential structure of the CEFA. Not everything is equally possible at every moment: there are stages to be traversed in sequence.

3.4 Wonder as the Fire of the Soul.

Cacciari identifies in thaumázein — wonder — the shared origin of philosophy and science. For Illumanesimo, wonder is a trace of Spirit recognizing opportunities for evolutionary knowledge in material experience.

3.5 Negative Theology and the Nature of the Divine.

Cacciari practices a rigorous negative theology: the divine is neither a supreme being nor a creator who intervenes, but the ultimate horizon that exceeds every categorization. Illumanesimo shares the critique of ontotheology but proposes a conception of the divine as an absolute structure that manifests itself through universal principles (equilibrium, freedom, justice, truth) operating within reality.

3.6 Language, Truth, and Knowledge.

For Cacciari, analogy is “the infinite approximation of language to the in-itself of the thing”: a perpetual movement of approximation without definitive arrival. Illumanesimo integrates this perspective with symbolization as the process through which material experiences are transformed into permanent spiritual knowledge.

3.7 Freedom and Necessity.

Cacciari proposes a Spinozian libertas ut necessitas: freedom as adequate understanding of the necessary nexus. For Illumanesimo, freedom is not arbitrariness, but conscious choice within a field of possibilities structured by the existential program elaborated by the CEFA — Campo Energetico di Forze Autocoscienti, Energy Field of Self-Aware Forces — before incarnation.

3.8 The Negative and Tragic Consciousness.

Cacciari preserves conflict, the unreconciled, and the impossible as constitutive dimensions of existence. Illumanesimo acknowledges the negative but places it within an evolutionary perspective: the imperfection of the world becomes a guarantee of experiential richness, offering Spirit opportunities to face unexpected events.

3.9 Art and Creativity.

For Cacciari, art is the eminent figure of spiritual labor, an autonomous activity that does not serve but signifies, does not execute but institutes. Illumanesimo roots aesthetic experience at the heart of incarnation, seeing in art an intense form of qualitative knowledge of material reality — creativity as incarnate knowledge of matter.

3.10 Technology and Rationalization.

Both philosophies recognize the crisis of humanism in the face of advancing technoscientific rationality. Cacciari sees the necessity of cultural practices that keep alive the connection between cognition and life. Illumanesimo adds the necessity of a new epistemological paradigm that recognizes consciousness as the primary datum, and Spirit as an autonomous ontological reality.

3.11 Katechon and Political Theology.

The katechon — the power that restrains — is for Cacciari the key to an entire political theology. Illumanesimo introduces a divergent perspective: the individual Spirit incarnates bearing an existential program of its own, one that is not primarily social or political. The capacity to control developments remains relatively weak at the individual level, thereby creating a risk of institutional degeneration.

4. Theoretical Outcomes of the Dialogue

From the dialogue a fundamental truth emerges: where Cacciari stops at the threshold between the observable and the unobservable, regarding this tension as irresolvable, Illumanesimo proposes that this threshold can be crossed — to offer not closed certainties but directions of meaning, not definitive systems but evolutionary orientations.

Cacciari offers a metaphysics of aporia — open, honest, rigorous. Illumanesimo proposes a metaphysics of evolutionary knowledge: not systematic closure, but orientation; not a definitive answer, but a direction of meaning. The enigma of being remains, but it is not empty: it is a permanent invitation to exploration, a call addressed to every individual Spirit to discover itself through the concrete experience of reality.

The fundamental convergence between Cacciari and Illumanesimo resides in the rejection of both materialistic reductionism and religious dogmatism. Both seek a “third way” that maintains philosophical rigor and openness to the metaphysical. The fundamental divergence concerns the endpoint: aporia as a permanent condition (Cacciari) or as a stimulus to evolution (Illumanesimo).

5. Methodological Innovations

The abductive method. The work makes explicit the methodological stance that underpins the framework of Illumanesimo: neither apodictic deduction from unassailable axioms nor empirical induction in the strict sense, but abduction understood as inference to the best explanation. Following the path opened by Charles S. Peirce, abduction is a rational movement that, faced with phenomena demanding clarification, proposes a hypothesis capable of rendering them intelligible in a coherent, profound, and parsimonious way.

The dialogical structure. The method of philosophical dialogue does not aim to demonstrate the “superiority” of one philosophy over another, but to establish an authentic dialogue in which both voices can be heard on their own terms. Each chapter follows the same methodology: presentation of the interlocutor’s thought, integration of the Illumanist perspective, analysis of convergences and divergences, and comparative synthesis.

Theoretical validation. Validation is achieved not through the victory of one conception over another but through the dialogue itself, which becomes an instrument of validation: if Illumanesimo withstands the encounter with thinkers of the stature of Cacciari, Agamben, Meillassoux, and Gabriel, it shows that it is not a naive or superficial system, but a theoretically solid proposal, capable of engaging with the finest expressions of contemporary thought.

6. Positioning within the Contemporary Philosophical Debate

The work is situated within the context of the contemporary metaphysical renewal, alongside process philosophy, speculative materialism, the new ontological realism, and biopolitics with its critique of sovereignty.

Cacciari’s principal achievement lies in having rehabilitated the very concept of metaphysics after decades in which it had been philosophically discredited. He has brought this crucial theme back to the center of contemporary philosophical discussion, withdrawing it both from positivist dismissal and from dogmatic appropriation. Agamben has taught us to think radically about the relationship between life and power. Meillassoux has reopened the question of the absolute with arguments that compel a rethinking of established categories. Gabriel has demonstrated that philosophical realism can be reborn without falling back into the naiveties of the past.

The dialogue with these thinkers has provided Illumanesimo with an invaluable opportunity for conceptual refinement, an occasion to test its own theses, and a source of theoretical growth through the challenge that every genuine philosophical interlocutor poses to our certainties.

7. Perspectives within the Illumanesimo Cultural Project

Metafisica necessaria inaugurates a new phase of the Illumanist project: the comparative phase, in which Illumanist principles are brought into dialogue with the most significant contemporary philosophers working in metaphysics. The work opens doors to the academic and cultural world: the recognition that Illumanesimo can dialogue with thinkers of this stature legitimizes its participation in contemporary philosophical debates.

Illumanesimo presents itself not as a definitive philosophy but as an open-ended work in progress. The eight published volumes constitute the foundation of a theoretical edifice destined to grow through dialogue, criticism, and integration with other fields of knowledge. The dialogue with contemporary philosophers is not a mere ornament but a constitutive opportunity: only through close engagement with the most refined thought of our time can Illumanesimo become an opportunity for deeper inquiry.

The work expresses the hope that this philosophical openness may extend to the scientific debate as well, fostering the dialogue among fields of knowledge that a truly concrete and necessary metaphysics requires in order to address the great questions of human existence.

8. Conclusions

Metafisica necessaria demonstrates that it is possible today to propose a metaphysics capable of dialogue with the finest expressions of contemporary thought while maintaining its own theoretical originality and internal coherence. The very title of the work expresses a thesis: metaphysics is not a relic of the past to be overcome, but a present necessity that must be reactivated.

The value of philosophy does not lie in choosing one position as definitive truth, but in forging ever new ideas so as to create opportunities to seek ever new fields of sense, to question reality ever more deeply, and to keep alive the dialogue that prevents us from settling into premature certainties.

It is precisely in this dialogue between Cacciarian aporia and Illumanist purposiveness that space emerges for a truly necessary metaphysics: a philosophy that maintains the rigor of perpetual questioning without renouncing the possibility of progressive answers, that recognizes the excess of being without denying the capacity of Spirit to know it through its movement within lived experience, transforming every apparent limit into a door onto new horizons of understanding.

Keywords: Illumanesimo; metaphysics; philosophical dialogue; Massimo Cacciari; Giorgio Agamben; Quentin Meillassoux; Markus Gabriel; CEFA; movement; singularity; the possible and the impossible; negative theology; freedom and necessity; katechon; art and creativity; third way; aporia; spiritual evolution.

Complete references to the volumes of the corpus are available on the Books page

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International license (CC BY 4.0).

Extended abstract also archived on Zenodo —

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17943603

Translation Note. The English translation has been produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools and subsequently revised. In the event of any discrepancy, the original Italian text constitutes the sole authentic reference and shall prevail.