Abstract

n his last writings published after his death under the title "La fine del mondo", Ernesto de Martino described the cultural crisis of the Western civilization as the extreme risk of a loss of “presence”. This word meant for him the human effort of giving sense to nature and external reality through a general kind of "Kulturareit". The only human way to react to this criseswas for him the will for history. Starting from de Martino, the paper tries to reflect on contemporary implications of a new understanding of human task to reinvent the "presence".