Un sentimento oscuro. Le radici emozionali e neurali dell’odio tra estetica e psicologia

What is hate? This is a question that still awaits a comprehensive answer. There are those who consider hatred as something productive, while always maintaining an irreducible relationship with destructive behavior. Hate has a specific, subjective profile, but it produces its effects on a horizon ranging from the individual to a multitude, feeding as much on words as on actions. In the twentieth century and the third millennium, then, it is as if we have witnessed an acceleration of the processes through which hatred produces its destructive effects, in some respects conditioning, in both direct and indirect ways, the social contexts in which it emerges (or is intentionally nurtured). In this paper, I analyze this issue from a philosophical point of view, also recalling some theses elaborated in the field of psychology, with the aim of bringing out the complexity of this feeling and its insuperable ambiguity.