Riccardo Magini

This paper aims to approach Heidegger’s History of Being and see it in every condition and human situation present in the multicultural society of today. Culture, as an actus and potential of the Being, is considered in its intertwining nature as an intrinsic part of the “over the essence of humanity” to arrive “over its relation to Being” to replace the History that has a linear form of the “ecstatico-horizontal unity of temporality.” Culture includes in its nature the derivative extension of language by explaining the “essence of history” as part of it and Being into the “recollection” of the multi faces/parts of the nature of culture itself to recognise the “essence of Culture” as the language that develops and transforms the Being-in-the-world. Culture understood as a derivation from the past and not as a heritage of the past, similar to Heidegger’s History essence, became the ground of the “essence” of a society as inextricably entwined in progress with the essence of Being in the world by being “Culture of Being.”

Folk tales are a repository of cultural memory of a society that holds philosophy, morality, and wisdom through symbols and fantasy. In this way, folk tales play with language through imagination and fantasy to pursue popular wisdom, initiatory customs, mysteries, and traditions. In order to discover and enjoy folk wisdom, we need to go through the morphology and cross the history of magic folk tales. With this motivation, this essay tries to highlight the philosophical traces in folk literature as the repository of the memory of societies through the imagination (fantasia) of folk tales and myths. The power of imagination is considered across the theories of Vico and Kant, with the respective differences that characterize them. We point out that myths and folk culture are the most ancient forms of philosophical wisdom that appeared in ancient times and established legend and narration from which contemporary societies are built and which legitimized a social and political establishment. Myths and folk tales hold the popular truth of one society. They are philosophy through fantasy, and in this way, this article builds on Propp’s intention to develop his studies into philosophical research based on magic folk tales as a sequential step of a kind of archeo-philosophical study.