Il tragico e la dialettica del nichilismo in Alberto Caracciolo 

The essay firstly deals with the conception of the tragic outlined by Alberto Caracciolo (1918-1990) in an early discussion with the pertaining work by Karl Jaspers. Caracciolo connects this issue with the central problem of philosophy and religion condensed in the radical question: «why is being rather than not-being?». In his later writings he develops his reflection on the topic by privileging the notion of nihilism along with a fundamental distinction between “nothing” as absolute absence of value and meaning and “religious Nothingness” as the enigmatic origin of any perception of value or not-value, sense or non-sense. Nothingness now becomes the proper term for Transcendence in contrast with the ontological Evel expressed as malum mundi or peccatum mundi. The paper displays the internal link between this malum and the “nothing” as structural source of any negativity in order to clarify the tragic predicament of existential faith in response to the “imperative of eternity and accomplished sense” within the dialectic of nihilism.