Il rischio del senso. Esperienza scientifica e mito della sicurezza (The risk of meaning. Scientific experience and the myth of safety)

This article analyzes, from the point of view of history of ideas, the difference between two couples of related concepts: risk/danger and risk/security. Danger is the menace of an undetermined and objective damage, which often arises from a natural and unintentional situation. Risk is the menace of a damage which is always linked to a human decision and to the calculation of advantages and disadvantages. My hypothesis will be that the human capacity for symbolic thinking was born, during the anthropologically early stages of mankind's existence, as a means to manage the angst which ensued from the abandonment of a safeguarded original environment. Symbolic thinking turned angst into a mythically-ordered fear, performing an operation that can be considered akin to that rational calculation which, in a more recent time, has given birth to the idea of risk. The adventure of mankind can be described as a piecemeal transposition of dangers in risks, a process which has abruptly accelerated during the Modern Age. But in the “second modernity”, also called the “risk society”, the polarity between risk and security causes the establishment and ever-growing extension of the “principle of security”, the mythical illusion that risk can be utterly eliminated. Given the key-role played by science in the symbolic frame of contemporary “risk society”, I will examine what it means for scientific knowledge to be based on experience – with all this implies about fortuity, prevision, as well as risk and danger. Being based on experience, scientific knowledge is intrinsically open to risk and danger. Nevertheless, in the modern technological society the generalization of the concept of risk (and of the related myth of security) calls for the return of a symbolic function of the concept of danger, and this not only when it comes to the intellectual problem of understanding references, but also and more poignantly in the wider endeavour of searching for a meaning. In its final part, the article will focus on the difference between references and meaning, suggesting that both the scientific researcher and the therapist should confront what I call the risk of meaning.