The metaphysical aspect of the object in modernity.

Abstract

“In the real world, the sense of an object is not a concept that can be grasped by pure intellect: it is the object as it reveals itself to us in the global relationship that we entertain with and that is action, emotion, feeling ...”.[1] In this manner, in an article published in Les Temps Modernes of April 1946, Simone de Beauvoir underlined the importance of the metaphysical aspect concerning the conception of the object in modernity. In fact, the added value of the object, a sort of fourth dimension partially unrelated to its physical nature, takes shape in the most impalpable and less explicit aspects, linked to the individual’s experiences, to his cultural baggage, to the social reality he is a part of and in which he plays his personality. The same material and immaterial traits of local cultures, attributable to the identity of a territory, lend themselves to being the object of a project that is configured not only as an expression of a re-reading, in a contemporary sense, of what has constituted over the centuries excellence but that also becomes a story of this identity. The recovery of the past is therefore not a nostalgic return to reassuring forms nor a refuge for the fear of an imminent process of virtualization, but the will to transmit and maintain those threads that bind us to our traditions.