Art, Aesthetics, Politics

＂＂My weakness and shyness were what pushed me into philosophy. I was perfectly aware of this and said it even then. In aesthetics I felt a sense of satisfaction for the first time. I immediately felt stronger, more secure in my judgments, more independent. I no longer depended on the approval of Mother and my friends - I depended on philosophy. I wanted to continue. More and more I became aware of philosophy’s typical method - this taking a word and putting it in quotation marks: ’thought,’ ’concept,’ ’art,’ etc. And I discovered I had a certain skill in ’untangling things,’ clearing up misunderstandings, and getting to the bottom of word games. This is where I got the habit that gets on Silvia’s nerves so much of asking, whenever we get into a discussion - of thought, for example: ’what do you mean by thought?’ And it is also what made me aware of the vanity, the arbitrariness of this word - a facade, as you say, that hides what lies behind it.＂ - Eugenio Colorni, Letter to Ursula Hirschman＂