There is a very long history, older than philosophy and even writing, that we should listen to again today if we want to talk seriously about humanism and liberalism.
It is the story of the Sign.

In the Palaeolithic era, whenHomo sapiens sapiens draws a figure in the cave, he is not ‘decorating’ a wall: he is inaugurating a form of knowledge.
Cave painting, precisely in its apparent realist immediacy (hunting scenes, animals in motion, superimpositions), is already a grammar of polarity: near and far, visible and invisible, hidden and obvious. The drawn animal is, by definition, an absent: it is no longer there, but returns in the inner vision; and the cave itself, a space of shadow crossed by light, makes the pictorial gesture an operation of magical ‘revelation’, an unveiling that preserves what escapes.

In the Neolithic period, when man changes his economy, mental landscape and relationship to time, polarity dilates: earthly and heavenly, cycle and duration, horizontal and vertical.
The advent of agriculture shows that the sky rules the earth, and at the same time this becomes a new art form: the architecture of menhirs and dolmens, all the way to Stonehenge.

But not only that: at the same time, a metaphysical spark flares up.
What appears immutable on high also seems never to die, and to the question of the origin of mortality on earth, which is so varied and mutable, the answer is found in the simple fact of the beginning: what begins must end, while only what never began never ends.

This is the concept of the celestial straight line in relation to the earthly segment of life, and philosophers begin to search for thearché, from water to air to fire, i.e. that immutable and varied element, immanent or transcendent, which transmits the eternal life of heaven to the finite life of earth.

Here we can understand why the Greek Logos was not born as mere ‘reasoning’, but as an adult form of the same original tension: the mind learns to think the poles together without annulling them, to hold together the near and the far, the obvious and the hidden, the immanent and the beyond.

And it is no coincidence that the Greek language cherishes this idea of knowing as an articulate process, not as a magic flash.
This is shown in an almost didactic way by οἶδα, ‘I know’, which derives from the root of εἴδω/ἰδεῖν (εἶδον): it is a perfect with a resultative value, that is, a present based on an accomplished seeing; ‘I know’ because ‘I have seen’, because what I have seen remains as an effect in the mind.

One could imagine the prehistoric origin of the Greek Logos in the famous sequence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The primate throws a bone into the air after realising that this object can become a weapon: matter is transformed into power, and Kubrick, with a dazzling cut, transforms the bone into a spaceship, as if to suggest that a decisive part of technical progress stems from violence.
Yet Greek thought is already more complex than this parable. In Heraclitus, war is indeed principle and driving force, but the end remains harmony, the coincidence of contraries. And before that, in the civilisation of the σύμβολον, the ‘symbol’ is not a mental ornament: it is a rite of friendship and pact.
A single object – a tile, a ring, an engraved fragment – is broken in two, so that each holds one half; the bond is proved when the two parts come together again. If the Kubrickian bone inaugurates technique as domination, the σύμβολον redeems it: the bone is no longer brandished to strike, but broken and shared in order to recognise itself.

Medieval culture therefore inserts the immanent and transcendentarché and finally the Aristotelian Immovable Engine, to Whom everything tends, but to Whom everything is indifferent, – in the sense that It has no need of anything or anyone, – into the idea of a Judeo-Christian God who is Love.
In theology, especially in the great scholasticism of the 13th century, the unity of the real is thought through the transcendentals of being. If verum and bonum are formally recognised as convertible withens, pulchrum emerges as their luminous manifestation: not an aesthetic ornament, but the way in which being is made visible and desirable. In this sense, the medieval triad Bonum-Verum-Pulchrum does not replace the ancient tension between Pathos, Logos and Eidos, but recomposes it in a Christian vision of the unity of the real, in which truth, good and beauty coincide without blurring.

The Renaissance, at least for a moment, attempted to give visible form to this unity of the ancient and the Judeo-Christian by starting out again not from God, but from man: universal knowledge, harmony of ways, faith that knowledge is not a civil war between faculties.
At the beginning of the 16th century, the clearest programme lies in three frescoes that are not just masterpieces, but manifestos: The Dispute of the Sacrament, Parnassus, the School of Athens. They were commissioned by Julius II, the pope who wanted Raphael in the Vatican Rooms and who imagined the Stanza della Segnatura as a theatre for the great faculties of the spirit (theology, poetry, philosophy, law). There, Europe tries to say: Faith, Art and Philosophy are not enemies; they are three paths that, if they do not communicate, become hysterical.

Then comes the great, necessary and fruitful modern turn: the focus shifts from the classical τί ἐστι; “what is it?”, – the question of essence, – to “how does it work?”.
Galileo is one of the crystallising points: in The Assayer he separates what is measurable (figures, numbers, motions) from what is sensible effect, going so far as to affirm that smells, tastes and sounds ‘out of the living animal… [are] nothing but names’.(Galilei, The Assayer, chap. XLVIII, 1623).

This is not contempt for the human: it is a condition of possibility for modern science. Later, and this testifies to the complexity of modernity, Manzoni in the 19th century recalls that the light is not only that of the Enlightenment, and that the Christian interpretation not only illuminates God, but also man himself: ‘And the more one examines this religion, the more one sees that it is it that has revealed man to man‘ (in Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, ‘Al lettore’).

This formula – which echoes the Prologue of the Gospel of John (Jn 1:18) – would later be taken up by the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes (no. 22), where we read that “the mystery of man finds its true light only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word“: in this way, Paul VI will place it at the foundation of the Pastoral Constitution itself, and John Paul II will take it up again at the beginning of the encyclical Dives in misericordia (1980), reaffirming that “Christ, by revealing the mystery of the Father and of his love, also fully reveals man to man himself and manifests to him his highest vocation“.
It is an anthropological statement rather than an apologetic one: the human becomes self-readable only when it accepts that truth is not reducible to technique, nor ethics to propaganda value, nor beauty to entertainment.

The problem arises when the ‘how’ becomes the sole sovereign. Because the exclusiveness of the ‘how’ does not produce full science, but a technique that, if it does not dialogue with an idea of the end, tends to devour what it claims to serve.
Here the contemporary diagnosis ismerciless: Mauro Magatti speaks of a ‘techno-nihilist capitalism‘ in which freedom is experienced as an unlimited expansion of the possible, but is often overturned into dependence and inner disintegration; the technical system and the ‘mediatised aesthetic space‘ impose the triad connection-acceleration-translation, transforming experience, relationship and even identity into flux and data (Mauro Magatti, Mauro. Imaginary Freedom. Le illusioni del capitalismo tecno-nichilista. Milan: Feltrinelli 2009).

This is why what is needed today, politically and culturally, is a counter-move that is not reactionary: to recover a tension towards unity.
Not to sacrifice science (of which, paradoxically, there is often even a lack of true education: ‘history of science’ is taught, but rarely what it teaches is useful or harmful to man), but to give it back its breath: not just knowledge, but scientific thought. In other words: if from the ancient interweaving of Eidos-Logos-Pathos we have slid towards an impoverished triad of Image-Technique-Value, we must ask ourselves where the End has gone.
And the End is not an algorithm: it is man.

But ‘man’ is not a convenient slogan. It is unity of strength and vulnerability; it is individual and community; it is freedom and bond; it is law and responsibility. This is why a liberal humanism worthy of the name cannot be content with adding up separate fields (hard sciences, humanities, ethics, politics) like departments in a cultural supermarket.
It must learn the difficult art of distinguishing without separating and uniting without confusing: that is, return to a reason capable of trusting authentic information, but also recognising that reality is not only what is measured.
Reality is also the Other: its dignity, its pain, its promise. A reason, then, that is not less rigorous, but more complete: visionary and empathic at the same time.

After all, there is a lesson that comes to us from what we can call Homo Signans, even before History: the magic realism of the caves was already a symbol, because it held together presence and absence, here and elsewhere, memory and expectation. If modernity has constructed the power of the ‘how’, the task of Europe today – in schools, in laboratories, in universities, in public debate – is to reopen the space of the ‘what’ and the ‘for whom’.
Not to go back, but to move forward without going astray: because a civilisation that only knows how to function, sooner or later stops living.