Predrag Finci, Philosophical stories
WRITTEN BY: Emilija Vučićević
Here I narrate, I turn ideas into stories, I weave essays, in them I tell different stories, long and short, some happy, some difficult, light and serious, some simple, some complex, often unrelated, as one comes to me, one catches up with the other, as it happens in the conversations of friends who are bound by common topics and interests, and everyone wants to say their own, everyone is in a hurry to tell their story, one story catches up with the other.
Predrag Finci philosophizes by writing and writes by philosophizing, and – he does not intend to stop. In his latest book, Philosophical Stories , confessional-reflective, sentimental, didactic, essayistic and narrative texts are arranged in a series, thematically framed in eight units, which suggest a discourse on universal themes, a discourse About : essays and stories , truth and perfection , biographies of philosophers , philosophies of practice , the stage and destiny , searching for one's own , and About dark events .
Most often starting from an everyday event, or – more precisely – memories of events and people, Finci's stories slide from the anecdotal to the instructive, recounting, teaching and reminding us of the ideas of a number of philosophers of the Western European canon: from Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Heraclitus, to Spinoza, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hume and Weber. Among the well-known names, he introduces philosopher-taxi drivers, as well as more narratively complete heroes and heroines, such as Ilija, Spasoje Ćuluzan, Aunt Sara, Stana, Haris Skeptik, shoemaker Koča, Mat and others. Apart from the context of canonical, academic but also everyday philosophy, Finci's autofictional (and openly – autobiographical) narrative instance is also established as a writer's. Namely, the writer-philosopher always got good grades in written assignments , wrote film reviews, and secretly wrote poems , which are also, on several occasions, intertwined with narrative passages. Finci positions himself as his own critic and receptor of his work , but also as the hero of other people's stories (Jergović, Džamonja, Drndić, Mehmedinović and others wrote about him). Philosophical stories are, therefore, a book about everything, but most often: about Fincius.
The alternation of didactic, introspective fragments and anecdotal, aphoristic narrative episodes maintains the dynamics, whereby Finci's language – regardless of the complexity of the subject matter he tackles – is the language of everyday life, communicative, considerate and cautious, close to the speech of traditional oral storytellers. Like the language, the narrative techniques are mostly classical, non-experimental, except in the case of the seventh story of the first cycle ( which tells in one breath about an arrested woman, and includes several people who know the writer ). In this sense, Philosophical Stories opens up for anyone who wants to go through a small history of philosophy through the prism of the author, or to get to know the author through the window of the history of European thought.
Apart from being a philosopher, the narrator also speaks as a pensioner, openly and unsentimentally facing old age. Along these lines, one can also feel the distance towards the (youngest) generation, the new generations , and the young devotees of electronic toys . Finci laments the disappearance of the dominance and authority (authority) of reasonable arguments in the conversation of equals , and the absence of that Authority that will prove and confirm the certainty of a truth . Although it seems that Philosophical Stories does not communicate with a young audience, it is possible that this is precisely where – in the call for polemics – the potential for critical reception of Finci's new book lies.