Andrea Moro, Professor of General Linguistics at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS – Pavia and a frequent speaker at the Meeting, has sent us a contribution on the theme of the 2024 Meeting. As always, his insights are sharp and stimulating, allowing us to discover new perspectives on the "essential," often conceived as the opposite of the "overabundant," when perhaps things are not exactly so.

There is an apparent tension between two experiences we can have in life: on the one hand, the request or search for what is essential; on the other, the recognition of a situation of overabundance. This is only apparent because, in this brief note, I want to emphasize how this is not necessarily a contrast and, in fact, understanding the compatibility of these two experiences can help us better recognize what is given to us and provide more tools to recognize our condition and choose the best.

The essential seems at first glance easier to grasp. Imagine being asked to prepare for a trip with the recommendation to bring only the essentials. There are not many doubts: elegant jackets and shoes, books, and knickknacks are discarded, and only what might be useful is packed in the backpack. A typical move is also to ask those who have already experienced this how they behaved; no one likes to make unnecessary efforts. Therefore, in this case, the essential coincides with the minimum useful to achieve a given goal: a definition we might call "functional." The problem is that not all essentials are easily recognizable, especially if the goal is more complex. Let's think: if I were sure this was the last week of my life, what would be essential for me? In this case, the answer becomes very difficult, also because we did not give ourselves life, and therefore we did not choose its purpose. We can think of living it serenely or happily, but in any case, these are hopes that do not admit a functional choice except for partial momentary satisfaction, perhaps relief from pain if one is ill. In this extreme case, it seems to me that one can well intuit the intimate link between the "essential" and the "religious sense" and the questions that define it: "what is the exhaustive meaning of existence? what is the ultimate meaning of reality? what, in the end, is worth living for?" (Giussani L. "Il senso di Dio e l'uomo moderno" Rizzoli 1994: 7). But this awareness of the religious sense as the "ultimate essential" simultaneously assumes the character of a declaration of absolute freedom of the human person. Giussani explains it in a phrase that— for what it may be worth—radically changed my life just after the cited words: "The content of the religious sense coincides with these questions and with any answer (his italics) to these questions." (ibid). Any: this admission describes and identifies the center of human responsibility and freedom of choice. The essential in this perspective is ultimately the question about my origin and especially my destiny, and simultaneously the awareness of my freedom to choose how to interpret it. Now let's move on to overabundance.

Faced with the narrowness imposed by nature, life, the random circumstances in which we find ourselves, and from which the awareness of having to choose and reduce reality to the essential emerges, an opposite feeling seems to impose itself: the recognition of aspects of life dominated by overabundance. There are at least two experiential components that characterize overabundance, one necessary and one accessory, often conjoined: the awareness of having more available than can be used and the gratuitousness of what is given. It is precisely the gratuitousness that almost always accompanies overabundance because it detaches it from necessity. Indeed, we do not simply speak of "abundance" which could somehow also meet a concrete need, such as the sudden appearance of large quantities of food during a famine, but of "overabundance," that is, the presence of what we consider to exceed our needs, our requests, even our capacity for imagination: this overabundance precisely because it is apparently superfluous is not connected to our choice or the recognition of an essential and functional utility. Overabundant are the opportunities for encounters in life, provided they are accepted; overabundant is our curiosity to understand and love; overabundant are the pleasant sensations of a meal, a love relationship; overabundant ultimately is life itself, a reality that by definition exceeds our expectation, our merit, and is totally gratuitous.

The reflection I would like to propose is that essential and overabundant are not really opposed. Sure, most of the time they seem to contradict each other, but there are phenomena that show us how overabundance is the way nature grasps the essential, and it is worth illustrating at least one. An exemplary case is the spontaneous acquisition of natural language in children. It is now established that the acquisition of grammar with all its components, among which the central one of syntax, the true fingerprint of the human mind, though still largely mysterious, is conditioned or even the result of an expression of the neurobiological architecture of human beings that precedes any experience. In simple words, when we learned our mother tongue as children, we did not go entirely groping, randomly searching and composing sounds and meanings, but we applied to the stimuli a pre-formed grid somehow encoded in our genome that sieved them and allowed us to learn to compose new ones. A remarkable consequence, indeed a true scientific and cultural revolution, is that this guide does not condition boys and girls in learning a specific language: one can be born to parents who speak a particular language and spontaneously learn another, for example in the case of being adopted by a different linguistic community. This means that this biological guide that precedes every experience must contain grammatical instructions compatible with any language: those present, those past, and those that perhaps will never be spoken; from this set of languages, the so-called "impossible languages" are excluded, that is, languages that do not respect the rules valid for all the world's languages, metaphorically those outside the "boundaries of Babel" (Moro A. Impossible Languages MIT Press 2023). Children are born with a mind that I like to define as "stem cell-like" from a linguistic point of view: it can develop in any language. But a child does not speak all the languages of the world: he or she learns one or two or perhaps three in the strangest cases. After the years that nature grants for the maturation of synaptic contacts, unused grammars are "pruned": the one that remains or those that remain are fixed forever as mother tongues (interesting how the visceral term mother is used to characterize the intimate relationship with language).

At birth, therefore, we all find ourselves endowed with an evident overabundance of possible linguistic structures (and the same happens in many other cognitive domains), but this overabundance is not at all useless: it is the response selected by evolution to allow human beings to learn a language in a limited time. Explicitly stated, this overabundance thus expresses what is essential for the purpose of language acquisition. It is certainly interesting to note that this theory of learning "by forgetting," to use Jacques Mehler's words, proposed based on the vision of language proposed by Noam Chomsky (who spoke on these topics at the Rimini Meeting in 2015), was immediately recognized as valid also in biology: in particular, the idea that we are born with an overabundance of information to be able to quickly react to environmental stimuli introduced in the domain of immunology the so-called "selective theories" of antibody production and earned Niels Jerne the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1984 with a lecture significantly titled "A Generative Grammar for the Immune System" which cited Chomsky as the first reference.

Essential or overabundant? Nature is suggesting that the impressionistic and subjective metric with which we evaluate these two situations as opposite or incompatible can be totally misleading: it is not said that what is overabundant is not also essential. Moreover, it remains clear for both conditions the sensation of gratuitousness, of a mysterious gift to which we could not have contributed. The mystery looms large over these concepts, but reason certainly leads us to recognize that we cannot exclude that the essential is overabundant just as the overabundant can be essential at least as far as essential and overabundant confront us with the greatest mystery of the gratuitousness of our existence and the questions that press within us "whatever the answer may be."