Ermenetica. Il sapere umanistico come esercizio di responsabilità - Hermenethics. Humanistic Knowledge as an Exercise in Responsibility

Armando Bisogno Hermenethics Humanistic Knowledge as an Exercise in Responsibility This text is distributed by Armando Bisogno under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. You are free to share, reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate, publicly display, perform and recite, modify, remix, transform the material and build upon it for other works by any means and format, only for non-commercial purposes. The licensor cannot revoke these rights as long as you comply with the license terms under the following conditions: •Attribution: you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made. •ShareAlike: if you remix, transform the material or build upon it, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original material. •No additional restrictions: you may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally impose restrictions on others regarding what the license permits them to do. A version deposited on Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17734848 is available at this address: https://zenodo.org/records/17734848 For information: [email protected] This text was translated using Claude Sonnet 4.5 Preface This book was born as an open reflection on two themes that are particularly important to me. On the one hand, the feeling that the Humanities have learned to describe themselves with great methodological finesse but still struggle to clarify the dimension of responsibility that inhabits every interpretive gesture. On the other hand, the mirror impression that the world in which we live—saturated with voices, content, narratives—has an urgent need for humanistic perspectives capable of orienting, contextualizing, providing perspective, but finds it increasingly difficult to recognize their role. The following pages try to hold these two tensions together, taking seriously an intuition that runs through much contemporary reflection: there is no such thing as innocent interpretation. The act of reading, commenting, explaining, disseminating a text or an image is never a purely technical operation but a gesture that involves our history, our choices, our loyalties. It is from here that I propose the neologism that gives the title to this volume: hermenethics, a posture that inextricably intertwines hermeneutics and ethics, interpretation and responsibility. The first chapter, Human(ist)s. What are the Humanities?, starts from a definition by Helen Small and attempts to reread it from within, bringing out the most radical implications of three elements that are only apparently obvious: the study of meaning-making practices, documentary rigor, the centrality of individual response and subjectivity. From here two intertwined needs emerge: a hermenethics of research, which concerns our inner work as scholars before sources, and a hermenethics of communication, which concerns the way we meet our audiences in a profoundly changed information ecosystem. Chapters 2 and 3 describe precisely this ecosystem. In Against Don Abbondio. The End of a Model, I try to reconstruct the twentieth-century paradigm of knowledge gatekeepers: few legitimate places, few authorized subjects, a predominantly vertical flow of knowledge. Manzoni's character becomes the figure of a power that uses its own expertise to govern rather than to explain. Chapter 3, The Risks of DIY. Post-gatekeeping Culture, shifts the gaze to the opposite condition: the infosphere in which the right to expression has been generalized, access barriers have been lowered, and anyone can intervene in the construction of shared knowledge. It is a passage that is emancipatory in many respects, but brings with it new fragilities: the illusion of competence without study, the difficulty of distinguishing authority from visibility, the temptation to reduce knowledge to well-packaged opinion. Chapter 4, Anachronism, tries to tie these two planes together: the transformation of the communication system and the selfperception of the Humanities. Here the main risk is not disciplinary irrelevance, but temporal gap: continuing to behave as if we inhabited a world of few gatekeepers when the real world is now populated by millions of micro-authors; defending an idea of neutrality that no one recognizes anymore as a criterion of seriousness; talking about the present without fully accepting that the present has modified the very conditions of our word. Anachronism, in this perspective, is not an error of dating, but a distance between our practices and the time in which we live. The second part of the text enters the concrete places where this hermenethical posture can be translated into operational choices. A New Editorial Model. The Humanities and Open Access (chapter 5) addresses the node of the circulation of research results. If humanistic knowledge is, by its nature, a public practice of meaning, it is difficult to justify editorial models that limit access to it, fragment it into expensive products, entrust its dissemination to often opaque market logics. Opening results, documenting processes, making data reusable is not only a technical or economic issue, but a choice of coherence between what we say and the way we live our work. Chapter 6, Ex cathedra. Teaching as a Place of Encounter, shifts attention to the classroom. Here hermenethics becomes a grammar of relationship: the lesson is no longer imagined as a unidirectional flow of stabilized contents but as a three-way relationship between the source, the consciousness that interrogates it, and the stories of those who listen. A series of consequences derive from this: making visible—without exhibiting them—the choices that guided our interpretation; recognizing students as co-interpreters and not as passive receivers; transforming the difference of lived experiences into a resource, not into background noise. The classroom thus becomes an elective space of hermenethical responsibility, in which knowledge is constructed through the encounter between subjectivities. In On Stage. Public Humanities (chapter 7), the same posture moves outside the university, into territories, festivals, libraries, companies, digital platforms. Here the discourse becomes deliberately operational: starting from the framework of public engagement, the chapter proposes a series of concrete commitments—from proactivity to permanent alliances, from language care to the renunciation of consolatory metrics— to think of initiatives that are not simple exercises in visibility, but real moments of exchange with different communities. Also in this case, the risk to avoid is anachronism: replicating, outside the classrooms, an ex cathedra lesson disguised as a public event. Chapter 8, Free, full, and responsible time. Humanities and AI, finally confronts one of the most demanding interlocutors of our time: artificial intelligence. Starting from the idea of human beings as Symbolic Species and from the appearance, alongside us, of a new symbolic species capable of generating texts, images, sounds, the chapter proposes a reversal of perspective: not defending creativity as the last untouchable bastion but recognizing that what distinguishes us is not the sole capacity to produce artifacts, but the way we metabolize them, weave them into lived experience, take responsibility for the narratives they construct. AI does not erase humanistic work, it makes it more explicit: it frees time from manual labor and obliges us to specify better the for me that inhabits every interpretation. The (Temporary) Conclusions do not provide a program, but try to hold all these passages together within a simple image: the Humanities as care of humanity's family album, past and present. An album that we cannot simply catalog, but that we are called to reorganize, comment on, exhibit, discuss together with others. Hermenethics is not a closed project: it is a work in progress, because I myself continue to expand the field, to interrogate these themes, to test them. To write and rewrite the text, to experiment with mixed success. And because I would like it to become a space for discussion. For this reason I share the document on which I am continuing to work; it is in progress, open to comments, criticisms, contributions from those who wish to engage with it: https://bit.ly/Hermenethics_OnlyOffice The current edition of the text is also available in PDF on the Zenodo platform for those who prefer to read it in a more traditional way: https://bit.ly/Ermenetica_Zenodo 1. Human(ist)s. What are the Humanities? What are the Humanities? How can we define their nature, catalog, and field of action before asking ourselves how they should dialogue with our times? As is easy to imagine, definitions of what the Humanities are are numerous and very different from each other. Among the many syntheses in studies dedicated to this subject (Bod 2013; Frodeman 2017; Ekström 2022; Raffnsøe 2024), a particularly effective proposal is discussed in The Value of Humanities, a text published in 2013 by Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature (the chair held by Tolkien for 15 years from 1945 to 1959) at Oxford: The Humanities study the meaning-making practices of human culture, past and present, focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation, primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity I will try to divide Small's definition into three parts and ‘retranslate’ the text, after clarifying what I believe are the internal steps of her reasoning. 1. The Humanities study 2. the meaning-making practices of human culture, past and present 3. focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation, primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity a) The Humanities study. The opening verb (‘the Humanities study’) helps me make a first reflection of great importance: what is the relationship between the Humanities and what, in common perception, is called ‘humanistic’? In a general sense, we might think of as ‘humanistic’ that which tells the story of humanity, in the dual meaning this term can assume: if by ‘humanity’ we mean the set of human beings of every era, everything that tells us what they have done and are doing today is humanistic; if by ‘humanity’ we mean what makes us human, that is, that something which distinguishes us from other living beings, everything that helps us understand what that ‘something’ is, is humanistic. In the first sense, I can affirm that even tailoring gives form to human thoughts and emotions, as do cooking or video games; in the second sense, I can say that all three of these activities are exclusively human, that is, they characterize us. However, we are not accustomed to considering a garment, a dish, or a videogame ‘humanistic’ and, above all, the skills that produce them. This is because, over time, we have identified certain fields that we consider humanistic by definition and have labeled them as such: art, archaeology, philosophy, music, etc. Each of these fields has seen the birth, in different forms, times, and ways, of disciplines that have studied them: precisely, the Humanities. This is why Helen Small immediately specifies that the Humanities ‘study’, because they are formalized, institutionalized knowledge, codified in their themes, programs, tools and working objects. If, therefore, ‘humanistic’ is everything that tells us something about humanity, understood as a set of individuals and as an ‘essence’, the Humanities are the disciplines that study some of these stories in a scholarly and academic form, that is, institutionalized. b) The meaning-making practices of human culture, past and present. In the second part of the definition, Helen Small reflects on what the Humanities study, namely “the meaning-making practices of human culture, past and present”. In this formula, attention is directed toward the ways in which human beings produce signs. What does this mean? A photograph, the remains of a building, an inscription, a text, an audio recording: these objects are the products, the effects of human activities and, as such, are carriers of meaning; they bear witness to the intellectual, existential, emotional, cultural processes of those who created them. For example, writing a novel is humanistic - an act deliberately conceived by its author to communicate their inner world to readers; but an inhabited settlement discovered through archaeological excavation is equally the object of humanistic knowledge: even though it was not produced to ‘say’ something to posterity but simply to be lived in, it is nevertheless a testimony to how they lived, what materials they used, what idea of space, wealth, or beauty they possessed, and so on. The Humanities, therefore, study the entire set of actions through which human beings narrate themselves, consciously (the novel) or unconsciously (the dwelling). These ‘meaning-making practices’ are the ways through which humans, in the past as today, give visible form to what they think, believe, or feel, transforming their being in the world into a network of interpretable signs. I therefore retranslate the first two parts of Helen Small's definition: The Humanities are institutionalized disciplines that study the practices, past or present, through which human beings produce signs of themselves. c) Focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation, primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity. In the third and final part of her definition, Helen Small states that the Humanities offer “interpretation and critical evaluation, primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity”. Let's try to understand the importance of the connection between the study of documents (interpretation and critical evaluation) and the subjective component (subjectivity and individual response). I'll begin with the first part. The Humanities have adopted, especially in the last seventy years, a methodological paradigm linked to the cultural revolution that affected knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century and which shifted research interest from the objectivity of results to that of methods. While at the beginning of the twentieth century only certain areas of research, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and, perhaps, psychology, were considered sciences, today we speak freely of economic science, political science, philology, history, linguistics as sciences and so on. In other words, every field of research is now accepted as a possible branch of scientific knowledge, provided it adheres to certain standards of rigor (Agazzi 2018, p. 26). This passage is crucial. Agazzi observes that over the last century, various fields of knowledge have gradually become sciences by adhering to “certain standards of rigor”. To be recognized as scientific knowledge, it is no longer necessary to produce objectively true results, but to apply rigorous methods that allow the scholarly community to verify the reliability of what we claim. The Humanities have therefore equipped themselves with a vast toolbox of methods and tools: paleography, philology, codicology, epigraphy, archaeology, linguistics, stylistic analysis, and many others. These are the technical skills that allow us to scientifically work with the objects we study. If I want to work on a medieval manuscript, for example, I must be able to date it, identify the scribal hand, understand the abbreviations used, reconstruct any lacunae in the text, compare it with other manuscript witnesses of the same work, and place it in its historical-cultural context. All of this requires specific methodological rigor. These tools allow us to bridge, at least partially, the gap in skills that separates us from the worlds of knowledge in which those testimonies were born: they were written in languages different from ours, in different political contexts, with different cultural purposes, with other social values, with other reference libraries, in eras distant from us, etc. Studying the first paragraph of the first book of Augustine's Confessions, for example, means highlighting that, in five lines, there are at least seven quotations, direct or indirect, to passages of Scripture, references that were probably immediately clear to a reader contemporary with Augustine and which instead need to be highlighted for today's reader, who is less familiar with the Bible. I believe it is in this skill that resides the critical evaluation of which Small speaks as a characteristic feature of humanistic research work. We are capable of creating ‘augmented source-objects’ of equipping the testimonies we study with a support apparatus, with all the surrounding information necessary to best understand their origin, form, internal references, cultural and historical placement, and so on. In carrying out this operation we have the duty of impartiality, that is, the task of limiting our personal evaluations as much as possible to offer the most accurate representation possible of the documents at our disposal. We have therefore reconstructed our augmented source-objects, equipped with additional information that allows us to best situate them. Small suggests that this activity takes place “primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity”. What does this mean? Why does Small connect a methodology that tends toward impersonal objectivity with an individual response? As stated, the interpretation phase that starts from a critical evaluation of documents is the indispensable starting point of every humanistic study. Whether I am the scholar who gives shape for the first time to that augmented source-object (for example if I work on a first critical edition of a previously unpublished text) or exploit the work of others (to continue with the same example as before, analyzing a text that someone has already returned to the scientific community in critical edition), at the foundation of my research there is always rigorous documentation. The question is what the next step should or can be. Small's insistence on the individual, subjective aspect suggests to me that she wanted, at this point, to issue a warning for those who, like us, deal with humanistic research. Very often, in fact, those who work in the field of Humanities, after having rigorously reconstructed the source-objects (or being able to count on source-objects already reconstructed by others), believe it is possible, by studying them, to trace back to the thought-object that produced them; that is, having a correct critical edition of Augustine's works allows us, after reading them all, to understand what inspiration, what motives, what Augustinian reflections truly produced them. This reverse engineering operation that claims to trace back from effects to cause responds to a ‘temptation’ that we all know very well. Each of us knows that our psychic, emotional, intellectual experience is often magmatic, continuously takes and changes direction, expands and restricts its perspectives, assumes positions that it then contradicts. When the time comes to share this interior flow with the outside world (speaking, writing, drawing, playing, etc.) we find ourselves having to constrain this very fluid experience into exterior forms, with the awareness that we are inevitably giving up part of the information that is in our soul and that cannot be rendered perfectly. My thought lives, evolves, goes into contradiction, rethinks, rewrites; the book I published, the letter I sent, the painting I made do not. The signs with which we give form to our thought therefore always represent it partially; they do not coincide with the set of psychic, emotional, intellectual, biographical experience behind a complex reflection but are a reduction of it into signs. This is why it continually happens to us, when we produce a text, to think, an instant after having closed and shared it, that we could have written it better, with more details, assuming another point of view, deepening one element to help but to control. The exchange crystallizes the abuse of expertise as an instrument of power: Don Abbondio - "Do you know how many impediments there are?" Renzo - "What am I supposed to know about impediments?" Don Abbondio - “Error, conditio, votum, cognatio, crimen, cultus disparitas, vis, ordo, ligamen, honestas, si sis affinis,...” Don Abbondio began, counting on his fingertips. Renzo - "Are you making fun of me?" the young man interrupted. "What am I supposed to do with your latinorum?" Don Abbondio - "Well, if you don't know these things, have patience, and rely on those who do know them." Don Abbondio rattles off authentic canonical impediments to marriage in Latin - real juridical elements from ecclesiastical law of the period - but he does so not out of a genuine concern for legal propriety, rather to intimidate and mislead Renzo. Simply put, Don Abbondio weaponizes his expertise as an instrument of control, counting on the fact that only he, at the top of the knowledge hierarchy, possesses this specialized language and that his listener cannot argue back but must submit and accept. The untranslatable term latinorum - Renzo's exasperated invention to mock the priest's obscure Latin jargon - has become in Italian culture a byword for the abuse of technical language to exclude and dominate rather than to clarify and serve. Manzoni's scene captures perfectly how hierarchical gatekeeping, when corrupted, transforms specialized knowledge from a tool of enlightenment into an instrument of oppression It is precisely against this toxic deformation of the gatekeeping model that European culture of the last fifty years of the twentieth century moved, in the attempt (sometimes definitively generically ‘postmodernist’) to cancel every aspiration to a ‘Platonic’ totality, to a truth that is not available to everyone but to the few who, grasping it, govern others. The need thus arises for “an experience of a rupture or crisis” linked to “apocalyptic discourses (...) on the end of art, the end of philosophy, of history, of the social, of the political, etc” (Chiurazzi 2002, pp. 3-4). In that perspective, the idea that a superior reason can be a universal norm to which to orient the behaviors or interpretations of individuals, who can no longer be asked to renounce their particular identity in the name of a more general and (hierarchically) ordered synthesis, fades away. Declaring dead God, theology, metaphysics, philosophy, ideologies, abstract and absolute ideas and, more generally, every all-encompassing and categorizing ‘container’, every ideal ‘form’ on whose altar to sacrifice particular inclinations, twentieth-century reflection wanted to sanction the conclusion of the centuries-old Western attitude of delegating to a higher normative level the destinies of individuals, of thinking that supreme concepts were the domain of the few destined to command. A paradoxical effect was thus produced in our societies. All the hierarchical structures of the past (school, university, party, family, church, etc.), although harshly criticized by twentieth-century thought, have remained fully functional, with absolutely non-secondary roles, in the (in)formative panorama; however, they are experiencing the greatest crisis in their history precisely because they have been emptied of meaning from within by decades of deconstruction of their own founding principles. School lessons, university lectures, editorial initiatives, major print and media information, political parties, scientific research: formally, everything still works according to the same hierarchical logic of recent centuries, in which those who reach the apex manage the flows. What has been called into question, however, is the absolute and non-debatable value of the contents that such agencies transmit and which appear less credible than in the past not because they have become inherently weaker but because of the fierce criticism of the hierarchical and selective structure that has always made them unassailable. It is not the (in)formative agencies that have lost skills, it is users who no longer believe in their value; and, in a hierarchical system, the breaking of this pact of trust is enough for everything to collapse. In what sense? If I need to have my car repaired, I turn to a specialist, that is, to a mechanic who, after looking at it, informs me of what the problem is and how it should be solved. I, who do not have the slightest notion of how a car works, must simply trust his words because I do not have the tools and notions to determine whether his diagnosis is right or not. The mechanic is therefore my gatekeeper: he has the expertise and transmits it to me and I can do nothing but receive and accept it because I do not have the expertise to verify its validity; between us there is an inevitable hierarchical relationship. This device - which we apply daily and continuously - rests on an act of trust: not everyone knows everything and therefore, very often, it is necessary to rely on others. If in the past I had the habit of trusting my mechanic calmly and then instead, at a certain point, I begin to no longer trust him or, worse, the entire category of mechanics, I will have serious difficulties in getting the car repaired or if, in the end, I yield to the diagnosis of one of them, because I need the car, I will do so while continuing to think badly of them (that they did unnecessary work, that they extorted more money from me than would actually have been needed, and so on). My mechanic is always the same: what he knew how to do yesterday he also knows how to do today, just as the distance between what he knows and what I do not know is always the same; it is I who broke that pact of trust and, therefore, put that relationship device in crisis. This is, in our time, the fracture between the classic agencies of vertical gatekeeping (worn down by the now eroded trust in the very concept of hierarchy as a device that in itself brings value to processes) and contemporaneity, which still inhabits them but increasingly perceives them as decayed cathedrals of ancient elitist and authoritarian coercions. And it is in this interstice, in this detachment that the Web inserted itself, with formidable power. 3. A New World In the first phase of its evolution, at least until 2004, the Web did not deviate from the structure of other classic media and therefore perfectly conformed to their logic of hierarchical gatekeeping. The need to purchase (at not modest prices) space on online servers, the presence of few visual editors and the consequent need to learn at least the rudiments of HTML or scripting languages forced those who wanted to use this new medium either to equip themselves autonomously with non-trivial skills or to turn to communication professionals, which greatly restricted the number of potential creators of Web pages. The Internet therefore represented a place for disseminating information certainly more democratic than those that preceded it, but still substantially anchored to the already analyzed 'classic' logics of gatekeeping: (1) few subjects had the technological tools and economic means suitable for creating sites that, due to lack of interaction, remained substantially showcases, that is, channels of (3) unidirectional communication. This does not mean that, compared to classic media, the Web did not bring with it significant changes: the fluidity of the Web allowed (2) to de-localize the process even more than television and radio had already done, also adding an asynchrony of content fruition, accessible at any time. Classical gatekeeping Web gatekeeping hierarchical hierarchical localized de-localized and asynchronous unidirectional unidirectional The second phase of Web evolution instead much more significantly modified these aspects. The birth of the first chats (such as IRC) and forums allowed the creation of user groups that, with minimal economic and technological investment, interacted freely and horizontally. This ever-increasing push toward content sharing, and the evolution of software tools, led to the birth (around 2004) of Web pages that did not limit themselves to providing information but with which users could interact. The server/client logic led in those years to sites ‘reconfiguring’ themselves in real time according to user choices, who could select, for example, which information from a database to display, which filters to apply to a search, etc. This Web 2.0 thus marked a decisive change; if it was still necessary, to produce content on the Internet, to possess computer skills (for example, to manage a blog, a CMS or a wiki) still the prerogative of (1) few, the dynamism of Web site content was now a definitively acquired fact and, at the same time, in addition to the possibility of (2) de-localized and asynchronous fruition, greater (3) horizontality of communication between agents was also guaranteed. The real revolution, however, is of the last decade, and is linked to two factors: the enormous spread of social networks, which are always presented as free and with a very simplified content production interface, and the use of portable devices that have enormously expanded the process of de-localization of content production and fruition. Users are now able to create content for free and without prior skills, thus outside of (1) hierarchical logics but in a perspective of widespread production. These ‘light’ contents - that is, created without economic investment and without any technical skill - not only, thanks to new devices, are available (2) everywhere and always, but become a place of (3) interaction (sometimes in real time) between those who produce them and those who receive them. Compared to the model of didactic, communicative, political and social gatekeeping that has characterized for centuries the very idea of Western society, the model of the Web and, particularly, that of social networks therefore represents a true revolution. Of that world, in fact, the digital universe completely deconstructs the (1) communicative hierarchy, which disappears and places any user in possession of a device and a connection to the Web in the position of communicating their ideas that can be accessed (2) anywhere and anytime and (3) ‘interacted with’, that is, transmitted and introduced into the flow of common discussion. Classical gatekeeping Web gatekeeping Social gatekeeping hierarchical hierarchical distributed localized de-localized and asynchronous de-localized and asynchronous unidirectional unidirectional interactive The advent of the Web (particularly in its social declination and in its user-friendly form that has extremely simplified access and content creation on blogs, websites, etc.) has therefore filled that interstice created, at the end of the twentieth century, ‘behind the backs’ of classic (in)formative agents, breaking, in the space of very few years, the centuries-old monopoly of that compact sphere that had united training, information and education in sharing an identical vertical and power model, completely reshuffling the roles assigned to different actors and creating a new world, which today lives in parallel with the classic one. 3. The Risks of DIY. Post-Gatekeeping Culture What effects has the birth of this new gatekeeping model—distributed, de-localized, asynchronous and interactive—produced in the processes of transmission and dissemination of knowledge? In the days immediately following the death of Pope Francis, his page on the Italian version of Wikipedia was visited by almost 600,000 users. Among the editors who over the years have contributed to creating it, the names of three particularly active users stand out: Leopold, PasqualeIndulgenza and Enricowk. None of their user pages indicate names, surnames or biographical data: on the first one's page we find only two coats of arms of the Holy Roman Empire; on the second one's there is a brief biography in which he declares his interest in geographical documentation and in Saint Paschal Baylon; on the third one's there is only a generic declaration of interest in Wikipedia's values. If we instead try to consult the page dedicated to Francis on another online encyclopedia, that of the popes on the Treccani website, we find that the author of the entry is Massimo Faggioli; a brief Google search informs us that Massimo Faggioli is an Italian historian and theologian, specialized in the history of Christianity and the Second Vatican Council. He is a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia, USA); he is the author of numerous essays and collaborates with international publications such as La Croix International,Commonweal and Il Regno. What does this difference tell us? In the mechanisms of public opinion construction there are no longer, as stated, only the media that adopt a hierarchical gatekeeping system but also social networks and the entire ‘horizontalist’ universe of communication. It is therefore possible to affirm that the weakening of the strength of the great ideological monopolies, of the metanarratives that characterized the life of gatekeepers and communities, has been accompanied by the affirmation of new metanarratives, now community-based and shared. One of those that, on the Web, has achieved the greatest success in recent decades is undoubtedly Wikipedia, the free and collaborative encyclopedia created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and which has become, today, the most read content site in the world. Beyond its cultural and scientific value, Wikipedia was born above all as the product of a certain way of interpreting the potential introduced, in the management of interpersonal relationships and knowledge production, by the Web. On Wikipedia's official page titled 'What Wikipedia is not', we read an effective definition of what Wikipedia wants to be and what it rejects: Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. The amount of information on Wikipedia is practically unlimited, but Wikipedia does not aim to contain all knowledge. What to exclude is determined by an online community of volunteers known as Wikipedians who are committed to building a high-quality encyclopedia. Wikipedia does not present itself as a simple editorial product but as a true 'community experience': on one hand, it is an editorial and cultural product; on the other, it is a social organism. The product generates the organism (because one becomes a Wikipedian by joining to build Wikipedia, and because Wikipedia was born first and then the Wikipedians) but, in turn, it is the organism that gives life to the product (because without Wikipedians Wikipedia would die). This dual dimension (encyclopedic editorial product and user community) is certainly central to understanding the logics and dynamics of a reality that explicitly wants to offer a cultural service but also disseminate an 'ethical model.' In its guise as an 'editorial product,' the digital dimension makes Wikipedia in some ways the ideal model of what an encyclopedia should be: a set of entries capable of virtually embracing all knowledge, without the limits of space, updatability or dissemination usually imposed by paper support. Precisely the potentially infinite nature of Wikipedia's content makes a criterion necessary by virtue of which it is possible to establish what should (and can) enter among the entries it hosts. In this perspective, Wikipedia's contents are placed in a middle zone, between two extremes, both rejected by the first of the 'five pillars,' the general rules developed by Wales and placed at the foundation of users' coexistence on Wikipedia and the methods of production and revision of entries. The text of the first pillar has a particularly complex formulation: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia: it combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, or a collection of source documents, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are. The text is characterized by a structure that is mostly negative. Wikipedia is described only at the beginning and briefly for what it is, namely a place to combine information from other publications; immediately after, however, the description indicates what it is not. The list of things that 'are not' Wikipedia sets boundaries, a perimeter of existence that amounts to a definition by negation: if everything outside those boundaries is not Wikipedia, Wikipedia is everything contained within those boundaries. An encyclopedia can in fact be neither too much nor too little. And therefore, on one hand, a Wikipedia entry cannot simply be a simple dictionary definition; the very nature of an encyclopedia is to provide a minimum of analytical information on the topic in question. On the other hand, Wikipedia cannot include personal opinions or interpretations, but only information supported by external sources from the scientific community and therefore tendentially neutral. This second element is of essential importance to understand the nature of Wikipedia's contents and, above all, what is the model of knowledge sharing inaugurated by this platform, as illustrated in the subparagraph Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought of the page What Wikipedia is not: Primary (original) research, such as proposing theories and solutions, original ideas, defining terms, coining new words, etc., is not allowed. Instead, Wikipedia only accepts secondary research, that is, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation already published by reliable sources on the topic. This means that Wikipedia articles must be based on existing reliable published sources. Moreover, "verifiability" on Wikipedia means that people reading and editing the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source. Wikipedia does not publish original thoughts: it is not a place to publish one's own opinions, experiences, arguments, or conclusions, and not merely the editor's opinion. It is therefore possible to include on Wikipedia a particular theory or interpretation on a topic only if the results of the research that led to that acquisition have been previously published—according to the criteria of classic scientific publishing. This means that Wikipedia is strongly anchored, at least ideally, to the logics of official, mostly academic scientific knowledge, and to its function as a qualified and reliable gatekeeper. It is therefore not possible, for any editor, to express personal opinions on the topics that are the subject of entries; the only task of editors—as illustrated even better in the other pillars—is to select the most reliable sources and synthesize them. Wikipedia is thus outlined as an editorial product that due to its digital nature could be virtually infinite but which does not coincide with a catalog of everything that exists (“Wikipedia is not a directory of everything in the universe that exists or has existed”); it is in fact restricted to the set of those theories that the scientific community - or, in general, sources identifiable as ‘official’ - has already declared valid. For this reason, Wikipedia - as the rest of the ‘What Wikipedia is not’ page further illustrates - while being a showcase and not a producer of content, cannot have any ‘commercial’ implications with which to publicize personal opinions (soapbox), products (advertising platform) or publications (vanity press); it is therefore not a blog or a stage on which to ‘sell’ oneself, one's ideas or one's products. Wikipedia is a tool that intends to collect, organize and disseminate reliable information. Such information - as the second pillar states - must offer readers as comprehensive a picture as possible of the different positions expressed by sources on the matter. This principle, described as Neutral Point of View (NPOV), necessarily follows from what was outlined in the first pillar: an encyclopedia that reports only information drawn from verified and non-original external sources requires that all significant views that have been “published by reliable sources on a topic” be illustrated (representing) always and proportionally. This means that an editor must consider all points of view that are supportable (that is, based on sources), presenting them to the reader in proportion to their weight. An opinion in fact has, according to Wikipedia's standards, more or less ‘weight’ depending on how many sources support it. There are thus majority and minority viewpoints and the classification of an opinion in the first or second set is given only by the quantity of scientific or institutional sources (Wikipedia does not consider as majority opinions that seem ‘universally shared’ by everyone: “the relative prominence of each viewpoint among Wikipedia editors or the general public is not relevant and should not be considered”) that support one or the other. The weight of the number of these opinions places them, for Wikipedia, in a hierarchy: all (or almost all) must be indicated, but they should not be described as equal. Stating for example “According to Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust was a program of extermination of the Jewish people in Germany, but David Irving disputes this analysis” (this is the specific example that Wikipedia proposes) means reporting the two opinions in a distorted way, because the second is, in the scientific literature on the subject, clearly minority compared to the first, while in this formulation they seem to be equivalent in terms of relevance. This is therefore the balancing that an editor must apply: not discard minority opinions (unless they are evidently, that is, documentably false), but clarify their role and weight, in a neutral style, in the range of theories that the scientific community has expressed on that topic. A work of reference is therefore necessary, that is, of 'placement' of sources in a hierarchical order that considers their prestige and reliability. For this reason, neutrality should not be confused with objectivity. Wikipedia's aim is not to describe something for what it is (what is) but for how it is described by sources (what people have said about it); it is therefore not necessary to try to be objective, but to report all useful opinions. Thanks to these rules, general but very characterizing, Wikipedia presents itself as a free and collaborative encyclopedia, that is, as a digital heir to the long encyclopedic tradition that has characterized the history of Western culture, and is characterized by the absence of editorial lines imposed from above or from outside, because each entry is the result of choral and collective work. Wikipedia is therefore openly and declaredly ‘other’ with respect to all the logics of hierarchical gatekeeping that have characterized for centuries the production of editorial content, that is, the selection of contributions and contributors by the editor or the person responsible for the editorial project. Wikipedia is ‘free’ in the sense that it allows everyone to contribute provided they submit to the criterion, illustrated in the pillars, that requires the use of scientifically reliable sources. But how is it possible to exercise such selection in a truly free way? In writing for example an entry on ‘Plato’ respecting Wikipedia's rules, the user will have to select and report, among the essays and monographs dedicated to the thought of the Athenian philosopher, the most representative and important theses (first pillar), without failing to account also for minority historiographical positions (second pillar); it will then be the task of the community of other users to verify that the entry thus written has the right and ‘balanced’ bibliographical references. It is therefore necessary to ask: according to what criterion, that is, on the basis of what expertise is the user able to choose reliable sources? In the same perspective, how will they be able to know, within the vast range of scientific publications on Plato, which are representative of the different hermeneutic currents, so as to guarantee the NPOV principle? And again, by virtue of what specific knowledge will the community be able to judge the choice and extension of the sources identified by the user? At the foundation of Wikipedia's freedom is the ideal of a self-controlling community. There is no ‘Mr. Treccani’ who, from above, as an editorial gatekeeper, commissions Prof. Faggioli to write an entry on Pope Francis; there are PasqualeIndulgenza and Leopold who, from below, spontaneously decide to do it. A community therefore in which no one has the possibility of asserting their scientific credentials and claiming an 'official' supremacy; all Wikipedians are equally subject, regardless of whether they are luminaries of the scientific community or simple enthusiasts, to the obligation of citing sources. This rule hides a potential contradiction, a ‘Wikipedia-shortcircuit’: if in fact the choice of which sources to cite is entrusted to the individual, would it not be necessary to be certain that those who choose them have the necessary expertise to identify the most appropriate ones? To respect the excellent intuition of NPOV, is it not necessary to have all the useful tools to know what the essential historiographical lines of a debate are? And does not the control that the community should exercise both of the quality of the sources and their extension to the entire debate suffer from the same fundamental defect, since the Wikipedians who should verify the validity of the cited sources are not required to exhibit any form of expertise to do so? Speaking of the Wikipedia-short-circuit does not aim to criticize Wales's creation, which is and remains not only a precious resource of knowledge but above all the greatest experiment in shared knowledge creation in human history. My interest is to highlight, through the example of Wikipedia, a condition that today affects our entire time: the healthy reaction to the many toxic distortions of the hierarchical model of the past has produced the awareness, in everyone, that it is a universal right to express one's opinions and, above all, to share them with a potentially infinite audience. In what way can the Humanities dialogue with this ‘universal right to expression’ that is imposing itself with ever greater force alongside the classic (in)formative agencies? 4. Anachronism In the last two chapters I have rapidly described the condition in which we live today with respect to the theme of content sharing: a world that has violently criticized all the classic (in)formative agencies and has placed as an absolute value the right of everyone to participate in the construction of an infosphere of news and knowledge. Let us try to unite the two themes, to reflect on why the very nature of the Humanities, as we have described it, imposes on them a particular attitude toward our era. At the end of the first chapter I used a neologism, hermenethics, to synthesize the need for our work as interpreters to always be accompanied by an assumption of responsibility, toward ourselves (so as not to disavow the role of our subjectivity) and toward others (to reaffirm our public role as mediators between the objects we study and those who read or listen to us). The sense of this dual responsibility emerges in my view even more now, after having analyzed, in chapters two and three, what the current condition of the world of knowledge transmission is. For centuries, the position of institutional gatekeepers of those who did humanistic research guaranteed authority: those who spoke from a university chair, those who published with an accredited publisher, those who wrote in a scientific journal enjoyed a 'presumption of expertise' that did not need to be continually reaffirmed because the strongest (in)formative agencies were, in practice, the only voices available to the public. That unidirectional world no longer exists; those same (in)formative agencies (universities, media, publishing, schools, etc.) that previously held an absolute monopoly are still an essential part of the life of our communities but are no longer the only protagonists; they are immersed in an ecosystem in which the voices competing for public attention are infinite and all speak with the same ease of access to means of dissemination. Despite this global and radical paradigm shift, the Humanities very often work, reason and live as if nothing had changed, as if the world were the same as fifty years ago. In many cases - not all - our forms of teaching, our conference practices, our editorial models, our relationship with territories and communities, our relationship with scientific and technological progress: everything seems, in most cases, stuck in the 1990s, as if in the meantime the world around us had not changed radically, especially in relation to knowledge. As I have tried to illustrate in chapters two and three, our time is characterized by two elements, which trigger each other: on one hand, the possibility granted to everyone to create content to share opinions on a potentially global scale; on the other, the ocean of sources available to users. The two processes, as stated, feed each other: more available sources means more topics and documents to comment on for users who have the possibility, with great ease and no filter, to produce content that, in turn, becomes new sources there be for an intermediation of the publishing house? Open access is that way. The history of open access is closely linked to the revolution, in terms of knowledge dissemination, given by new digital technologies and especially by the Web. One of the first and most significant examples of this vision was the arXiv project, launched in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg. This platform allowed physicists to share preprints of their research, greatly accelerating the dissemination of new discoveries. The formalization of Open Access as a global movement can be traced back to three fundamental declarations: •The Budapest Open Access Declaration (2002). This declaration marked the first time the term Open Access was officially used, defining two main strategies for its implementation: self-archiving (green OA) and OA journals (gold OA). It emphasized the importance of making scientific research freely available on the Internet, allowing anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or refer to the full text of documents. •The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003). It provided further details on OA, focusing on the publication model and emphasizing the importance of the license of use of publications, which should allow free and unrestricted use of content. •The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Cultural and Scientific Heritage (2003). It further expanded OA principles to include not only scientific literature but also cultural heritage, supporting open access to all research materials. Since the fundamental declarations, the OA landscape has seen rapid evolution and diversification. OA journals, in particular, have grown exponentially, with thousands of new titles being launched every year in a wide range of disciplines. These journals are now an essential component of the scientific communication system, with major publishers both traditional and specifically dedicated to OA providing platforms for publishing research without barriers. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of OA repositories, both institutional and thematic, that allow academics to deposit their works, making them accessible to a global audience. Not only that. On various platforms, even institutional ones, it is now possible to found journals and editorial series online at zero cost and which therefore do not need to ask any fee from authors to publish contributions. Why then does paid paper publishing still (r)exist? Many researchers - often the older ones - do not explore OA either because they simply do not know it or because ‘they have always done it that way’. In 2016 John Bohannon published in Science magazine an article with a very significant title: “Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone” (Bohannon 2016). There are today only two categories of scholars who claim not to use platforms like Sci-Hub or LibGen to obtain texts in digital format and downloadable for free: those who do not know it is possible to do so and those who lie. Often, however, researchers who use, even massively, these illegal platforms are the first to oppose a transition to ‘open’ publishing, fearing its imaginary risks. Beyond this inertia there is, however, a substantial political obstacle to the dissemination of OA. For many others, especially the younger ones who legitimately aspire to make a career, OA publications are ideologically appealing, because closer to their times of interaction with colleagues, but are not yet politically feasible; classic publishing houses in fact still host prestigious series and journals, often qualified in the various 'merit bands' that allow, in the various habilitation and evaluation processes, to have better scores. The paradox is therefore that younger researchers would have know-how and willingness to support OA but cannot choose it because their career would suffer; researchers who have already made a career and who, therefore, would have nothing to lose in investing in OA, are so tied to the old model - or know so little about the possibilities of the new one - that they essentially want to die with it. 3. Avant-Garde Humanities Let us take up the thread we have built in the previous paragraphs. We have clarified that ‘open science’ is not an ideological label, but an operational description of ‘good science’; we then saw that data has a high cost (people, equipment, processes) and that funding asymmetries feed opportunistic closure strategies; we finally described how the traditional editorial circuit often transfers value from the researcher to the publisher, slowing the circulation of results. Summarizing, we could say that those who do research today on one hand do not have the political power to decide that the starting conditions among the various research institutions are equal, particularly from a financial point of view; on the other, they have difficulty exiting a closed editorial model, partly out of inertia partly out of contractual weakness. Doing open research does not pay because sharing data means losing advantages in a competitive system that starts from unbalanced positions and because there are not yet open editorial venues that guarantee those who do research in their career progressions. Despite this condition of apparent powerlessness, it is necessary to reaffirm a no longer negotiable ‘ideological’ point: even if research management costs, from recruitment to management costs, are high, when scientific research is public, the results it achieves are public heritage, of those who have already paid for that research with their taxes that pay researchers' salaries and fund structures. The entire community is therefore in fact the 'client' of that research and its results and it is not lawful to make 'private' and non-accessible use of it. The sharing of datasets and, above all, the open and free sharing of results in open access format, cannot be an option in an investigation funded with public funds, not even when such opening seems to lead to the loss of an advantageous position in competitive terms. In public research, closing data to gain an advantage or not publishing in an accessible way is simply an abusive operation. ‘Opening’ science means returning the results of research to those who paid for it in advance and in trust. In this perspective, it is even more senseless that the Humanities are not open by default. Unlike other scientific sectors, which can also count on industrial partnerships or direct commercial interests (which partly justify ‘closures’ in data dissemination), humanistic research is predominantly if not exclusively supported with public funds. It is rare for a private company to invest in a critical edition of a medieval codex or in the digitization of a historical archive: the community as a whole, through taxes, is the main client of this type of investigation. From this it follows that the results of humanistic research, even more than is true for all the outcomes of academic investigations, cannot be privatized or fenced off: they already belong, by right, to the community that has financed them. The second characteristic concerns the very purpose of humanistic studies. Let us take up once again the definition we built starting from Helen Small's ideas. The Humanities do not have as their main objective the production of goods immediately spendable on the market, like technology; we are paid by citizens for a better understanding and interpretation of human practices: texts, images, documents, artifacts, testimonies. There is therefore no stringent economic reason that justifies the closure of data and results, as can instead happen in other fields in which patentability or transformation into commercial products plays a decisive role. Humanistic research is not designed to be sold but to be shared as cultural heritage, as an experience of knowledge (Nentwich & König, 2014). Precisely for this reason, the closure of data and publications in the Humanities has no possible economic justification. There is no intellectual property to protect in view of an immediate commercial return, nor an industrial interest that justifies confidentiality. On the contrary, closure becomes an obstacle: it slows the circulation of ideas, reduces the possibility of confrontation and prevents the scientific community (and wider society) from fully benefiting from the results achieved. While in other fields the tension between openness and market generates complex dilemmas, in the case of the Humanities this tension is much less relevant. Openness not only does not entail a loss of value, but indeed allows increasing the social, educational and cultural value of research. When publications and datasets are made available to everyone, the possibilities of reuse, interdisciplinary contamination, participation by communities outside academia increase. In summary, the Humanities have nothing to gain from closure, but have a great deal to gain from openness. Their vocation is not to produce sellable goods, but to build common goods, which sometimes generate, as an indirect effect, even profits. On the contrary, in the case of the Humanities the sharing of data and publications does not weaken the position of the individual researcher or group, but contributes to strengthening the entire system, multiplying the possibilities of confrontation and accelerating interpretive processes. Research always already paid for by the community that from closure cannot gain anything even in economic terms: the Humanities can only be 'open' because nothing justifies them in a different research sharing model. 4. Opening with Awareness If therefore it is necessary that the Humanities, precisely for the reasons mentioned (the public nature of their funds and their objects and the non-commerciability of their results), position themselves as trailblazers, in the world of academic research, of a convinced and complete adherence to the open model (Tennant, 2018; Suber, 2012), this openness cannot be naive or indiscriminate: it is necessary to recognize cases in which data and materials require particular caution, establish different degrees of openness, provide adequate infrastructures and cover necessary costs. Many ‘humanistic’ materials in fact contain sensitive or personal data: think of oral history sources, modern epistolaries, ethnographic interviews. In these cases access cannot be total and immediate. It is necessary to provide tools such as anonymization, temporary embargoes or forms of mediated access, which protect the subjects involved without giving up sharing. A second area concerns third-party rights and intellectual property. Images, museum reproductions, contemporary audiovisuals cannot always be freely distributed: openness then passes through careful work of rights clearing and the use of transparent licenses (Creative Commons above all) that clarify what can be done and under what conditions (Willinsky, 2006). Then there is the question of protecting cultural heritage. Making public the precise coordinates of a site or detailed data on sensitive finds can expose to the risk of looting and illegal trafficking. In these cases the open logic must be balanced with protection strategies: only partial sharing of information, access reserved to qualified scientific communities, descriptions at a level of detail compatible with the safeguarding of assets. Finally, the theme of cultural sovereignty should not be forgotten: in various fields of the Humanities - from anthropology to Heritage Studies - research produces or deals with materials from indigenous or minority communities. Here it is not enough to apply FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable): it is also necessary to integrate CARE principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics), which recognize the right of the communities themselves to decide in what form and under what conditions their data and testimonies can be shared (Carroll et al., 2020). These precautions help us always remember that ‘opening’ the Humanities is necessary but not free. Making data and publications accessible does not simply mean pressing a button and uploading files online: it is a process that involves structural and organizational costs (Borgman, 2015). For data, in particular, openness requires preliminary work of selection, cleaning and metadata creation. It is not enough to digitize a manuscript or transcribe an interview: it is necessary to adopt recognized standards (for example TEI-XML for texts, IIIF for images, Dublin Core for metadata), describe materials accurately, ensure interoperability with other archives. All this requires time, skills and dedicated personnel. At the same time, the conditions of reuse, negotiating with rights holders, the preparation of contracts or consent declarations are activities that impact the budget of a project. Finally, there are costs related to long-term preservation and access. Institutional repositories, disciplinary platforms, digital infrastructures that host datasets and publications are not 'natural' environments, that is, self-feeding and self-regulating: they must be maintained, updated, secured, equipped with backup and digital preservation systems. All this implies continuous investments in servers, software and professional figures with advanced technical skills. For these reasons, openness cannot be reduced to an abstract principle, proclaimed without taking into account its economic sustainability. If we really want the Humanities to adopt an open model, it is necessary that in project proposals, in the budgets of research institutions and in public funding policies specific expense items are provided for open: for metadata creation, for license management, for infrastructure maintenance, etc. These difficulties are precisely the context in which a hermenethical approach is useful, which gives our work as scholars and interpreters a value dimension and posture; which passes through an assumption of responsibility and therefore responds to a precise question: “am I doing everything possible - exploiting all the tools I have available today - so that the sharing of my research with my scientific community is increasingly effective?”. A first way in which it is possible, at relatively low costs, to respond positively to this question is to adopt a systematic policy of sharing information on datasets and research paths, even when it is not yet possible to fully open the data. If today I open the directory of any Italian university, it is rare that, next to the biographical information, the curriculum and the list of courses, I find clearly indicated what each teacher is currently working on: what project they are conducting, what materials they are collecting, at what point the work is, what results they expect. Yet, already just making this level of information visible—'who is doing what, with which objects and in which phase'—would constitute an elementary but powerful form of openness. Of each new acquisition of objects, documents, testimonies or the simple start and advancement of research one can give notice to the community, scientific and not, through public repositories, personal or collective social channels, institutional sites, project blogs, permanent or virtual exhibitions. Even where, for the reasons illustrated above, it is not yet possible to directly share data or materials, keeping and making public an updated "research diary"—an essential trace of what is being studied, with which sources and in which stages—is always lawful and allows the community to better understand the work in progress, to intercept possible synergies and to recognize, behind the final results, the plot of processes that made them possible. In this sense, openness does not only coincide with the release of the definitive dataset, but already begins with transparency on the research trajectories that are generating it. A second way, equally concrete and immediately practicable, to respond to the question of ‘taking charge’ of the effectiveness of sharing within my scientific community resides in the creation, by those who occupy leading positions in scientific communities, of entirely open journals and editorial series, free for readers and authors, and structured according to internationally recognized standards. Those who have already achieved academic stability and therefore no longer have to worry about career progression have in fact the privilege - and, in a certain sense, the responsibility - of being able to innovate without fear of personal repercussions. It is precisely these figures who can afford to found new, qualified editorial venues free from commercial constraints, making available to the community reliable publication spaces that can also be evaluated in habilitation processes. Technology makes this passage surprisingly simple today. With a very small budget and basic computer skills it is possible to create peer-reviewed journals hosted on institutional platforms, with transparent editorial management and open licenses; found open editorial series, capable of accommodating monographs, source editions, conference proceedings; distribute PDFs immediately and for free, with complete metadata, registered DOIs and indexing in the main academic search engines; offer paper copies via print on demand, at minimal costs, without markups and without economic gain for either authors or editors. This model allows a double advantage. On one hand, it frees the circulation of research from the limits imposed by commercial publishing, returning to scholars full ownership of their work. On the other, it makes open access publication attractive for those who are in a growth phase, because it does not force them to choose between openness of results and academic recognition: they can publish in fully open venues that, being founded and directed by authoritative figures, enjoy that disciplinary legitimation necessary to be evaluated as "strong" venues. In this way, open access stops being a luxury or an ideological choice and becomes a concrete, sustainable and shared infrastructure, built by those who have the power - and therefore the duty - to do it. In this perspective, the insistence on open access is not a ‘technologist’ whim nor a fashion linked to digital, but a concrete response to the anachronistic condition that weighs today on the Humanities. If we continue to produce research with public money and then lock it up in expensive series and in journals that are difficult to access, we are not simply 'a bit late' with respect to our time: we are contradicting the very nature of the knowledge we claim to practice. If, as I stated in the first chapter, the Humanities are an exercise in interpretive responsibility that moves in a world around that has broken the monopolies of communication and that asks every voice to legitimize itself in the relationship with its audiences, a closed editorial model is not only inefficient: it is the most evident symptom of that twentieth-century posture that we persist in defending while everything, around us, has changed. Opening research results - making them circulate freely, making them reusable, documenting in a transparent way the processes that generated them - means instead beginning to bridge this distance, bringing practices and principles back into alignment. It means recognizing that we are no longer the only ones speaking in public space, and that precisely for this reason we have the duty to make our work as readable, verifiable and shareable as possible. The Humanities stop being 'late-modern' not when they limit themselves to commenting on the present, but when they accept to become a laboratory of new forms of knowledge circulation, consistent with their interpretive vocation and with the world in which we actually live. 6. Ex Cathedra. Teaching as a Place of Encounter An essential ‘hermenethical’ challenge awaits us every morning in our classrooms. It is in some ways the simplest to undertake because it requires 'only' a change in our posture, a new mode of action in a context already prepared to host us. It is in this daily space that the first, concrete possibility of reorienting our way of being humanists manifests itself. The first step of every humanistic study is, as stated several times, a rigorous relationship with documentality, with sources that those who do research sometimes must personally reconstruct if they cannot use those already created by their predecessors. In this operation of reconstruction and analysis of these 'augmented source-objects,' it is indispensable, on the part of those who do research, an effort of depersonalization and neutrality to attempt to return historical and contextual data in the most honest way possible, following the tenuous thread that allows us to reconstruct traces of the past (Ginzburg, 2006). Once these source-objects have been rigorously reconstructed, our ‘debt’ of objectivity has reached the maximum result it could achieve in relation to documents of the past; as I have tried to illustrate in the first chapter and in the fourth chapter, it is in fact not possible, starting from source-objects, to go back to the thought-object that inspired them; it is not possible to confuse documentary reconstruction with interpretive projection (Contini, 1986). This means that every statement of ours that attempts to interpret the meaning of source-objects is not the account of a relationship between us and the authors and human beings of the past or their thought but between us and a document, in a process in which the source inevitably emancipates itself from its author and opens itself to new interpretations. In interpretation there is a subjectivity at stake but it is not that of the author dead for centuries; it is ours, of those who today read their documents. This is why every year hundreds of monographs on Plato's thought are published; not because we are still waiting for the right one, the one that explains to us completely ‘what Plato really thought’ but because no monograph will ever succeed and each of those studies is nothing other than the account of the encounter between the interpreter and Plato's texts. That there is a structural plurality of readings is, moreover, what reception philosophy has shown decisively. The humanistic world has, instead, poorly estimated the value of this richness of research products; it has mistaken a choral movement (each interpreter recounts their point of view on certain sources) for a linear process (the sum of studies allows and will allow approaching more and more the grasp of the thoughtobject). The object that most iconically and paradoxically represents this distortion of humanistic research is also the editorial product that most characterizes us and in whose realization we have all been, in different capacities, involved in our career: the textbook. What is, in fact, a textbook? It is the attempt to reconstruct, from the sum of documents at my disposal, the thought and inspiration of an author or the meaning of a series of events or the identity of a particular community; the idea that I can, today, arrive at grasping, thanks to the juxtaposition of the documents in my possession, the flow of thoughts of an author or the profound meaning of a historical moment for a community, then gradually expanding my analysis to arrive at collecting, under a single gaze, centuries of evolution of thought, culture, knowledge, events. This is how we write and publish textbooks, and this is how they enter our collective imagination in a paradoxical way: for everyone they represent the objective base level, that general competence that allows orientation with respect to authors and epochs, while they are, in reality, the most personal and subjective outcome that research can produce, behind which precise erudite choices are hidden, as the history of the footnote teaches us (Grafton, 1997). What indeed is more ‘individual’ than the sum of choices, evaluations, cuts and highlights that are necessary to give life to a textbook, to a text in which one or more scholars take an enormous corpus of documents and condense it into a single work of a few hundred pages? It is a paradox well known also to theorists of historical writing, who have shown how every form of narrative synthesis inevitably implies choices of structure and meaning (White, 1973). If we try to think about the textbooks we frequented as students, can we trace back to what were the cultural and intellectual orientations of their authors or do we still today cite them by surname ignoring what their stories and personal inclinations were? Overcoming the myth of an impossible reconstruction of thought-objects therefore means admitting to ourselves that the analysis of augmented source-objects is nothing other than an encounter between a document and my subjectivity, which opens us to a new relationship with teaching. There certainly exists a truth of documents, if by this expression we indicate the possibility of understanding their historical and contextual placement; but there exists a truth with documents, an operation of shared construction in which sources are co-protagonists together with the subjects who interrogate them. When I study a text alone, I offer that text my situated gaze: I bring it into my today and read it, inevitably, with categories and grammars of mine and of my time; I cannot deny my historical and cultural positioning, as a subject, because all knowledge is situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988). When I enter the classroom, in the same way I cannot deny the positioning, as subjects, of the individuals I have in front of me, bearers of opinions and sensibilities. If therefore interpretation is the place where an object and a subjectivity meet, teaching allows another subjectivity to enter this dance for two, which is composed of individuals but which also has a community identity; they are students but they are also ‘a class’, that is, an organism that lives on interactions that are constructed and sedimented before, during, after, with and despite what we say, forming a true ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) of which we are also part. To the duty we have toward the sources we analyze, that is, to return them ‘expanded’ in the most honest way possible, and to that which we must recognize in ourselves, that is, that of situated interpreters, a third must therefore be added, that toward the individuals and the community we have in front of us (Freire, 1970). Respecting this duty means recognizing first of all that the didactic relationship arises from the encounter between subjectivities and, second, ensuring that the didactic space is the place where these subjectivities can expose themselves reciprocally. It is in fact only in our availability as teachers to ensure that the classroom is that space. If the source asks us who read it to take responsibility for our choices, in the same way the classroom asks us to be 'read' as a set of subjects and not as a passive receptor of stabilized contents, recognizing that students are “active constructors of meaning” (Bruner, 1996). Having respect for our subjectivity as interpreters and teachers means making visible, without overloading them, the steps that have led us to a certain type of reading: the questions we have chosen to pose, our intellectual history, the alternatives we have discarded, the sensibilities that have guided us. It means showing that our reading is not the only possible one, but the outcome of a positioned encounter. This is not false modesty or relativism: it is methodological honesty. And it is this honesty that opens the space for students to recognize themselves also as positioned interpreters, capable of bringing their questions, their categories, their situated gaze to bear on the same sources. It is this encounter - not the document in itself - that generates knowledge, that gives life to the narrative that takes the form of a lesson. For this reason the interpretive posture is not a pedagogical addition, but the very heart of the Humanities, that capacity to “cultivate humanity” through narrative imagination (Nussbaum, 1997). This is why the classroom is not a place of transmission but our electoral terrain of ‘hermenethical responsibility’. Making emerge, in every didactic gesture of ours, that what is at stake is a three-way relationship among the source, the consciousness that interrogates it and the stories of those who listen means not only training more aware students, but also returning to the Humanities their original strength: that of offering the present a gaze capable of constructing complex and shared narratives. In this framework, the risk of anachronism I have evoked shows itself with particular evidence. We often continue to practice a teaching designed for a world in which the teacher's word descended from above toward a silent audience, as if the lesson were an act of unidirectional transmission and our classrooms were not inhabited by subjects already immersed, daily, in forms of participation and co-construction of knowledge. In our social and communicative context, insisting on a teaching that conceals the subjectivity of those who speak and deactivates that of those who listen means reiterating exactly that twentieth-century posture that has made the Humanities marginal in public space. Rethinking the classroom as a place of encounter between subjectivities is not, therefore, a simple methodological adjustment, but the didactic equivalent of the openness choices we should pursue in disseminating research results. Just as a closed editorial model betrays the public nature of the knowledge we produce, a closed teaching - that does not interrogate the stories, questions and competencies of those who listen - betrays the dialogical nature of our popularization. If we assume as a premise that our knowledge is useful for the community because it proposes a virtuous, ‘hermenethical’ model of narration, we cannot expect to have in front of us a community that has the same competencies as our students or, worse, our colleagues. It would be like expecting a five-year-old child, faced with the disappearance of a loved one, to have the tools to discuss with us the meaning of life and death, religious hypotheses, philosophical atheism and so on. This does not mean having a paternalistic attitude that judges in an insulting way the public of non-specialists, thinking they have the cognitive level of a child. I myself would be in the same situation, that of an ignorant child, faced with a scholar of physics or chemistry. If one assumes, therefore, interaction with the public as necessary, it is equally necessary to assume that the public is our point of reference: that ways, times, channels of our communication are designed to welcome and not to reject; that our effort, even before beginning to speak and/or write for the public is to study, even by experimenting, what are the communication codes and the specificities of the different channels we can use, trying to ensure that even just the logistical aspects of our activity (schedule, accessibility, location, online fruition, retrievability of content after appointments, etc.) are designed to meet the public's needs. 4) Territories. ‘Territory’ is probably one of the most (ab)used words in political debate, and not only. It is in fact invoked every time the speaker has the need to appear genuine, sincere, attentive to the real needs of people, linked to a history and traditions, not corrupted by central and by definition distant powers and so on. But, in reality, the territory is simply the perimeter within which it is possible for our action to take place meaningfully; it is the boundary of effectiveness of my activity. Wanting to be proactive in bringing our disciplines out of universities means understanding what or which are the territories we address. Unless one is or becomes 'large-scale popularizers,' characters who move large masses of public, our engagement is aimed at reduced if not sometimes minimal audiences (even when our territory becomes digital and we move on the Web). This is our natural dimension and, in some ways, this is good; it is in fact necessary that our public finds itself in a condition of direct, almost personal relationship with us, so as to be able to effectively communicate to them that what we are talking about concerns them, as individuals and as a community. ‘In exchange’ for our activity we ask our public an availability to follow us in the path we propose. We have the task, not easy, of getting this message across; we have the right, at the same time, to ask this disposition of mind from those who listen to us, watch us or read us. 5) From high to low. Ten years ago, in 2014, I attended a concert by the duo Tuck & Patti in a shopping mall. In that July ten years ago, as I watched them climb onto the small stage set up in the widest wing of the shopping mall, I asked myself why two artists of that caliber, who have performed at Montreux and Umbria Jazz, had accepted such an inadequate and ‘low’ location, given that they would not have had difficulty finding some club in the area ready to host their performance. After two hours of concert (exceptional) I learned from their professionalism that what matters is not where but how; that there are no contexts that do not ‘deserve’ to host music, art, literature or philosophy. There are no places or occasions in which knowledge should not be brought because talking about it there mortifies it. There are no 'high' and 'low' contexts that must be distinguished to avoid that, by bringing it to the latter, a competence is humiliated. Rather, there exist banal, kitsch, populist, crowd-pleasing or amateurish ways of doing popularization. But it is not rare to find them also in university classrooms. 6) Competencies at the center. As we said, leaving university classrooms means accepting to speak a less technical language and not being able to convey everything we know. Of 100% of our competencies we will perhaps be able to bring out 30%. This however does not authorize us to study only that 30% to feel ready. This happens—not infrequently—due to a not even very hidden form of arrogance: we are scholars speaking to laypeople and therefore, however little we may know about what we are talking about, we surely know more than those who listen to us, and it is enough in any case to study it even just half a day to be ready. The object of our popularization is always and only our competencies. It is only of those that it makes sense to speak. The rest is circus that only harms us and, above all, those who listen to us. 7) No metrics. As stated, the regulations relating to the third mission dwell a lot on how one can evaluate its outcomes and results, even quantitatively. But, beyond the length of the signature sheet we must present to report, how do we really measure the ‘success’ of an event or product designed for the public? Simply, it cannot be measured. And not because it does not interest us but because it is the very nature of that event or that product that prevents it. Telling does not mean teaching. Those who hear us speak or read us outside a university classroom do not do so to prepare to take an exam with us. They are not there, in that hall or on those pages to study. They are there to see us treat sources rigorously and return our interpretation. And our task is not to ensure that they go home knowing everything we know about Augustine's Confessions but to have 'forced' them, for a few minutes, to think about at least two things: first, how much verified information I must possess to be able to begin speaking about the Confessions; second, what it means to write an autobiography, recount a conversion, build a community, etc., that is, the themes that roughly - according to me! - the Confessions discuss. How much our public will listen to us or understand us, what each one has grasped, that is, taken and carried away, is impossible to measure, even just numerically: an event with a hundred distracted people who are just waiting for me to finish speaking to leave is still a moment of encounter (toxic for them but not for this reason not significant) with what we deal with? And a video that is viewed only by two users who however, from that moment on, live differently their experience with respect to what they saw is not an excellent result? Let us therefore imagine forms of 'accounting for meaning' rather than number; for example, anonymous questionnaires in which we ask participants to describe what the encounter communicated to them, if they liked it, if they would return, etc. 8) Permanent alliances. There are elective territories for our popularization. Our public is potentially everywhere but it is very tiring to imagine reaching it alone, each time starting from scratch. It is necessary to build stable, permanent alliances with those who already preside over those territories: schools, libraries, associations, festivals, parishes, cultural circles, news outlets, local institutions. Each of these places has its own reference community, with which it has already established a relationship of trust. Entering these networks means putting our competencies at the service of a fabric that precedes us and will survive us. An isolated meeting in a library, for example, risks being forgotten within a few days; but if that meeting becomes the first piece of an annual path, perhaps in collaboration with teachers, cultural operators or associations, or is part of an already consolidated calendar of meetings, then continuity is generated and opportunities for confrontation are multiplied. The Humanities thus become not an episodic firework but a recognized, expected presence, that grows together with the territory. 9) The world of companies. Humanistic knowledge does not always love confrontation with the world of companies. The mistrust is understandable: we fear that our work will be reduced to motivational slogan, to façade storytelling or to a tool of value marketing in which only the lexicon and aura of the humanistic are exploited, without really accepting its critical implications. And yet, companies are one of the places in which a significant part of people spend much of their daily lives: it is there that languages, organizational cultures, imaginaries of success, failure, merit are formed. If the Humanities really want to be 'public,' they cannot ignore these spaces. Being ‘open to the market’ does not therefore mean accepting any request, nor lending ourselves as cultural ornament to brand strategies. It means, rather, trying to bring into those contexts the critical capacity, historical depth, conceptual complexity that characterize our work. The necessary condition, in this dialogue, is a clear definition of the framework: establishing in advance which aspects of our knowledge are non-negotiable, which simplifications we are not willing to accept, which training objectives we intend to pursue. In other words, entering companies not to confirm, with more elegant lexicon, what they already think of themselves, but to open spaces of questioning, problematization, alternative imagination. If this condition is respected, confrontation with the productive world is not a surrender: it is one of the places where the Humanities can return to do what they know how to do best, that is, critically interrogate the forms of life we inhabit. 10) Giving and receiving.Going 'outside' does not only mean bringing something, but also returning with something. If we want the Humanities to truly become 'public,' we must abandon the unidirectional intervention model—we speak, the public listens— and think of every initiative as a space of exchange. A meeting is not only an occasion to narrate but also a device for gathering questions, for intercepting anxieties, for understanding what problems people bring with them when they enter a hall or connect to a live stream. In this sense, every Public Humanities experience is, at least in part, also research: on the forms of reception, on the public's expectations, on the way in which the categories we use (memory, identity, responsibility, justice...) are reinterpreted or rejected by those who listen to us. It is not about transforming every meeting into a structured sociological investigation, but about assuming the habit of building moments of return: final discussion spaces, brief anonymous questionnaires, informal impression gathering, proposals for topics for subsequent meetings. Everything that allows us to understand not only what we said, but what was actually heard. Bilateral dialogue also implies accepting that solicitations from the public are not always ‘pertinent’ from a strictly disciplinary point of view. An apparently lateral question, an objection based on partial readings or stereotypes, a risky connection with current events can result, from our gaze, imprecise or wrong; but the very fact that they emerge is the signal that there a space of thought has opened. It is up to us to decide whether to close it quickly, bringing the discussion back on the right tracks, or to inhabit it as an occasion to show how an argument is constructed, how sources are verified, how a misunderstanding is corrected without humiliating whoever formulated it. If we take this perspective seriously, the work of Public Humanities does not end when we stop speaking, but when we have listened. Listening to what comes back - questions, criticisms, resistances, enthusiasms - means letting our way of teaching, writing, doing research be in turn transformed by the encounter with the public. This is perhaps the most concrete sign of a 'public' commitment: not only bringing our discipline into the world, but letting the world have voice in the life of our discipline and pour into our interpretive act. In all these operational commitments returns, in filigree, the risk of anachronism that I described in previous chapters. For decades we have thought of the public as a somewhat larger extension of our classrooms: a place in which to bring, in simplified form, the same ex cathedra lesson, with the same codes, the same times, the same asymmetry between those who speak and those who listen. But the world we inhabit— that of widespread participation, user-generated content, online communities that discuss, select, criticize—is no longer compatible with a Humanities presence reduced to occasional lectures, episodic festivals or cultural columns that ennoble the schedule. Continuing to practice Public Humanities as a simple showcase, as a ceremonial extension of our academic practices, means reproducing outside the university the same twentieth-century model that inside the university has made us marginal. If, on the contrary, we take seriously the idea of hermenethical responsibility, then the exit into public space becomes the third necessary movement, after open research and teaching as a place of encounter. Open access returns to the community the results of our investigations; teaching puts subjectivities into play in the shared construction of meaning; Public Humanities allow that same community to re-enter, with its questions and practices, into our work. It is here that the accusation of anachronism can finally be reversed: no longer disciplines that speak about the world remaining at its margins, but knowledge that accepts being traversed by the world, bringing forth conflicts, memories, possibilities. It is not a simple addition to our institutional agenda: it is the condition for the Humanities to continue to exist as a living form of knowledge, up to the time in which we live. 8. A Free, Full and Responsible Time. Humanities and AI After having interrogated our ways of doing research, inhabiting the classroom and meeting the public, there remains one last territory in which the hermenethical posture is today radically put to the test: that of the relationship with artificial intelligence. It is here that the anachronism of the Humanities becomes most evident and, at the same time, most fruitful. Generative AIs are not a simple technological tool to integrate or to fear: they are a new symbolic environment in which we find ourselves operating, another subject capable of producing representations, a co-inhabitant of the narrative and cognitive ecosystem in which we work. If research asks us to open knowledge, if teaching invites us to recognize the presence of other subjectivities, and if Public Humanities push us to dialogue with territories, then confrontation with AI cannot be thought of as a separate chapter, but as a further movement of the same exercise of responsibility. Understanding what changes—and what cannot change—of humanistic interpretation in the age of machines that speak, write and combine symbols is today an integral part of our profession. 1. Trunks and Words In chapter eleven of his The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker recounts the extraordinary multifunctionality of elephants' trunks: a tool that serves to breathe, smell, lift, move, communicate. But - he adds - the trunk has not always existed, given that elephants' ancestors lacked it. It was not born from a project or an intention, but from an accumulation of random mutations, each slightly advantageous. No direction, no design: just a long sequence of variations, each functional enough to be passed down. Like the elephant's trunk, our language too is the fruit of a long series of random genetic mutations. Some of these modifications gave rise to new brain areas specialized in language production and comprehension; others lowered the position of the larynx, making possible the articulation of complex sounds. None of these transformations had an objective, but each—unpredictably—proved useful for communication. This is how, generation after generation, the cerebral and mechanical capacity to speak was built: not by design, but by selection. We did not choose it: we inherited it. Despite having arrived by chance (and after a very long evolution), language radically revolutionized our species, just as millions of years before the assumption of an upright position had done: it gave us the possibility of manipulating not objects but thoughts, of transmitting not only tools but representations of the world. Language allowed our ancestors to coordinate, to pass down experiences, to create shared cognitive maps. It was born as a biological adaptation, but immediately acted as a cultural enhancement: an internal technology that, once it appeared, exponentially multiplied the capacities of our species. Terrence W. Deacon, in The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, interprets this passage as the result of a co-evolution process between brain structures and symbolic capacity. On one hand, the enlargement and complexification of the human brain made possible the elaboration of abstract signs and languages; on the other, precisely the use of symbols retroacted on brain organization, selecting and enhancing those cognitive functions that today define our species. Using symbols, according to Deacon, human beings have not only developed tools to communicate: they have progressively built a cognitive infrastructure that has made them capable of thinking, remembering and imagining in a new way. Every sign traced on a wall, every word pronounced, every story invented has contributed to strengthening this symbolic architecture that defines us as a species. Precisely because we are a Symbolic Species, we have for centuries identified in the production of representations our highest domain of action and, at the same time, we have magnified the capacity of those individuals who excelled in this activity and whom we have called 'authors' precisely for their capacity to make grow (augere) our knowledge and our cultural awareness. It is here that the value we have always given to what is humanistic is born. For this reason, despite the world is already full of books and classics that no one will ever read, we continue to write and make our thoughts public. Luciano Floridi, in a reflection published on Medium in 2023, eliminates the obvious answers—money, fame, career—and arrives at the heart of the problem. Would we write even if we were the last human beings on Earth? His answer is yes. Because creating representations does not mean wanting to be read or seen at all costs but transforming thoughts into permanent artifacts. It is a ‘publishing’ that does not need 'public' to be accomplished; it is a complex process that, at the same time, is death and life, closure and opening. On one hand, writing is for Floridi accepting the “private mourning of one's thoughts, which have completed their journey and can now rest, finally detached from the mind that kept them alive”. There is therefore a liberating aspect in writing: “any Athena gives a terrible headache to her Zeus, no matter how small one's deities may be”. Thoughts, when they have finished their life cycle in our mind and are ready to be born, become unbearable, create a mental pressure that can be relieved only by externalizing them and, in some way, ‘burying’ them in our texts. Thoughts, like organisms once living and now dead, are thus deposited “in layers of words, paragraphs, sections, pages, volumes”. But this apparent burial is actually a generative act. Our thoughts, “distilled and deposited in a some-thing”, fixed in writing, certainly lose the vitality of when they were part of our psychic activity but are reborn in some ways to new life, becoming “external compost for other thoughts” - mine or of those who will read me, distant from me in space or time. Expelled because now too bulky, deposited in a text and consigned to a new metabolization, personal or of others: written thoughts thus become material that fertilizes new thoughts, in a continuous cycle of “genesis, expulsion and leverage”. Five thousand years ago we began programming civilization by writing laws, stories, knowledge. Every generation has deposited its instructions on stone, tablets, papyri, parchments, paper, bits. These texts sediment over time and become the 'culture broth' of subsequent generations: those who come after read, interpret, apply those rules and those stories, then transmitting them in turn through space and time. We do not use writing as just any technology; we are writing - we are organisms that continuously rework the textual traces of those who preceded us and of those who surround us, then producing others. We transform the humus of others' thoughts into new ideas that in turn, having become texts and traces, will be fertilizer for future generations. Building and disseminating representations is for us an identity activity, as individuals and as a species: as individuals, because it is our particular ‘rechewing’ of lived experience; as a species, because it is the continuous reaffirmation of what best identifies and characterizes us, of our maximum prerogative. 2. Creativity In a 2024 interview with Tuttolibri, the insert of italian newspaper La Stampa, László Krasznahorkai, recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, addresses various themes and, in the concluding part, focuses on the fate of literature. To the interviewer's question “what is the role of literature in this our time?” Krasznahorkai responds: “A beautiful farewell is the only thing that has the slightest bit of sense. Literature, which has existed in this form for a few thousand years, is now mature to disappear. A different world is about to arrive, a world of deceptions, tricks, illusions and manipulations that alter the perception of reality. What place could Dante ever have in such a world? And Homer, Kafka, Shakespeare?! And Beckett?! And Thomas Pynchon?! Or even just this little krasznahorkai with the unpronounceable name - written all lowercase in such a list. Let us therefore bid each other farewell properly, as we should”. In the previous paragraph we described why language has been so important in our evolutionary history and why each of us today still feels very strongly the desire to write, to express ourselves, to narrate. Doing so allows us to reaffirm to ourselves our uniqueness, a capacity to create symbolic representations that no other species possesses. As Krasznahorkai suggests, that prerogative that has distinguished us for millennia - that is, creating symbols - is no longer only ours. Unlike other technologies of the past, such as writing or photography, which had the purpose of supporting and enhancing our capacity to create representations, artificial intelligence can build them in our place. It does not limit itself to offering us tools to translate thought into images or words, but is itself capable of generating texts, images, sounds and autonomous narrative forms. It is almost a new Symbolic Species that has joined us in this skill, boasting however with respect to us a greater speed of production and, above all, an infinitely more extensive capacity to draw from a heritage of sources that it does not consult as we do serially (that is, one at a time) but in parallel, all together simultaneously. What does this imply in terms of production of representations? Most of us, today, would turn up our noses at a novel or a piece of music entirely written and produced by AI: we are too tied to the idea that behind every human production there is a subjective, magical and unrepeatable intuition. After all, when we read a book or listen to a song we are not only seeking the aesthetic pleasure of fruition but we also want to find and recognize, among those lines and in those notes, yet another testimony of what our species is capable of accomplishing. AI productions in these fields leave us cold because we sense that there our most distinctive symbolic prerogative inexorably becomes post-human. To defend ourselves from this ‘invasion’, to reaffirm that there is something that no machine can ever replicate, we take refuge in a final stronghold, which we consider impenetrable by machines, and which we usually call ‘creativity’ (or also ‘intuition’, ‘talent’, etc.). What do we mean when we use this word? In her 1990 book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Margaret Boden, professor of cognitive sciences and pioneer of artificial intelligence recently deceased, proposes a first definition: creativity is the capacity to produce ideas or artifacts that are new, surprising and valuable. This capacity, Boden writes, is natural in human beings. It happens to everyone to be amazed by an intuition that seems unexpected but sensible to us, or by an object we have built that appears different from any other. This is what Boden calls Personal Creativity (Pcreativity): personal creativity, that which belongs to each of us in our individual experience. Only in some cases does this invention become Historical Creativity (H-creativity), that is, historical creativity, capable of marking a before and after for all humanity. I take up, Italianizing it, an example that Boden proposes: if someone who has never read the Divine Comedy described in a letter their own life as a “selva oscura” in which they have lost the “diritta via”, they would certainly have accomplished a creative act for themselves - but not for the history of thought, where that image already exists. In other words, not every original intuition is revolutionary. All creativity is personal; only very little becomes historical because every creative act is thus born as a personal experience, but only in rare cases does it assume a historical scope. Yet, even this distinction is still not enough to explain what creativity really is. According to Boden, this personal or historical creativity manifests itself in three ways: as combination, as exploration and as transformation. The first is a new mixture of ideas that were already there. In this case, to grasp the meaning of this creation, those who listen to it or read it must know the elements at play and appreciate the unprecedented connection between them. Think of Star Wars: Lucas does not invent knights, swords or wise masters from scratch but fused archetypes of myth and fable in a narrative universe that seems new while being built on very ancient structures. It is precisely in this capacity to recombine the known in unexpected forms that the strength of combinatorial creativity reveals itself. Exploration instead implies the concept of shared conceptual spaces, that is, those perimeters of meaning in which each of us is born and grows: sedimented languages, culinary tastes, daily habits, etc. A kind of large map of one's time and one's society that each of us learns to know and master. Creativity as exploration starts precisely from the idea of a movement that explores unknown zones of the map; a driving off whose meaning is not in the destination: it can lead to discovering hidden villages or to finding nothing interesting because its value is not so much in what it finds but in the fact that, whatever it is, it will be a surprise. If combinatorial creativity puts together already existing elements and exploratory creativity moves within a given conceptual space (because it explores in the map, not outside the map), transformative creativity changes the space itself, redefining its rules, its boundaries, and what is thinkable in it. While the roads of the real world cannot be moved, the ‘mental maps’ that guide our thought can: they can be modified, expanded, even rewritten. In certain cases the transformation is slight but in the most significant cases the entire structure changes direction, as if one decided to divert a highway or build a new road system. This is the moment in which ideas are produced that, with respect to the previous thought system, were literally unthinkable. To give an example - which I believe Margaret Boden would share - we can imagine the three forms of creativity applied to a daily activity and apparently banal: organizing a vacation. Combinatorial creativity comes into play at the beginning, when, combining different information (guides, reviews, quotes, etc.) we give life to an original itinerary, not present on the most known circuits. Once we arrive on site, exploratory creativity comes into play when we realize that, beyond the places most frequented by tourists and that the hotel recommended we visit, there are almost invisible alleys and neighborhoods that we try to visit, without knowing what we will find. Transformative creativity, finally, manifests itself when we decide to rethink the very meaning of traveling: no longer leaving to see new things, but to live an experience capable of changing our way of understanding life. It happens, for example, if we choose to stay a month in the same place to learn its language, work with the inhabitants or contribute to a local project. At that moment we are no longer traveling within the standard idea of tourism: we are redesigning the very meaning of our concept of travel. The vacation example shows us how, for Boden, the three forms of creativity are not alternatives, but different degrees of the same movement. Since we do not know how to create from nothing, every creative act - even the most revolutionary - is always, basically, a form of combination; the difference concerns only the level at which the manipulation occurs: in the initial phase we mix already known elements, in exploration we push ourselves toward still little beaten zones of our cultural space, in transformation we arrive at modifying the map itself. But in all cases novelty is never born from the void: it is born from the way in which the mind reworks what it has inherited. It is precisely on this idea that Boden builds the comparison between human and artificial creativity: if creativity consists in manipulating symbols, rules and structures already given, then - at least in theory - a computer can also do it. An artificial intelligence system can combine, explore and, in a certain sense, even transform the symbolic spaces that are provided to it. It does not create ex nihilo, but ex data: it starts from what is delivered to it - texts, images, sounds, linguistic models - and recombines them according to statistical rules that amplify their connections. I started from the idea that ‘creativity’ is today a defensive word: we use it to reaffirm a prerogative that we consider exclusively human, something that artificial intelligence cannot reproduce. Let us instead try - thanks to Boden's reflections - to overturn the plane: let us assume not only that AI can also give life to a ‘combinatorial creative act’ - with often excellent stylistic and visual results - but above all that there is no need to defend ourselves. The existence, alongside us, of another symbolic species capable of creating high-level content does not make us competitors but co-inhabitants of an expanded cultural ecosystem. AI expands the field, does not restrict it: it is a resource that increases the possibilities of each of us, accelerating processes that our mind could perform but would take months to complete. It offers us new maps, indicates possible paths, shows us invisible connections. In short, it does what every good technology has always done: it enhances our capacity to imagine. Precisely for this reason, the real difference between our creativity and the artificial one does not reside in the result, which can be better, worse or even indistinguishable from what a machine creates. Our specificity is not a question of performance but of ‘existential metabolism’, of metamorphosis of lived experience: the data we manipulate are not for us simply data but are absorbed, transformed, incorporated into our personal history. They become part of our emotional orientation, they mix with what we remember, they bind to our expectations, our sorrows, our discoveries. Each of our ideas is the product of this slow, continuous ‘digestion’: a process through which concepts and memories decompose, contaminate each other, recombine and become nourishment for what we are and will be. We are interpreters not because we know how to put documents in order but because our identity never remains outside this analysis process. When we stop thinking of AI as a rival or, worse, as an enemy and recognize it as an ally within a shared creative ecosystem, the space finally opens to see clearly the opportunities of our time. AI accelerates processes but cannot decide what matters. It can generate a thousand variants but cannot say which resonate with my story. It can suggest combinations but cannot establish what, within those combinations, becomes part of me. 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