Yvonne Dauer in conversation with Professor Giovanni Maio, philosopher and physician.
When loss, serious illness or even the difficulties of ageing touch life, joy, trust and hope often seem far away. Professor Giovanni Maio argues for a view of life in which acceptance and hope are not signs of weakness, but ways of recognizing the preciousness of the individual precisely in dependence on others.
At first glance, acceptance can sound like resignation: giving up the fight, refusing to act. Maio rejects this. Every person needs hope in order to act, but hope is possible only when we are willing to let the future remain open. To accept is not to be fatalistic; it is to remain capable of action without forcing the future to deliver one particular result.
Asked about suicide and assisted dying, Maio emphasizes that he is not trying to prescribe how suffering people should behave. What concerns him is society's reaction. If we normalize suicide as a plausible response to illness, we risk adopting the sufferer's negative valuation of their own life. Instead, we must ask what produced the wish to die: fear of being a burden, social devaluation of frailty, and the idea that a good life requires independence from others.
For Maio, acceptance cannot be learned alone. It requires a society that mirrors the value of fragile life. Against cultural currents that measure people by perfection, productivity and independence, he calls for a culture of dependence: needing others is not a catastrophe but a normal condition of human life.
The interview turns to ageing, dementia and autonomy. Human dignity, Maio says, lies not in perfection but in the uniqueness of each person. An older person does not need to remain youthful in order to be valuable. Autonomy does not mean being able to do everything one wants; it means finding a good relationship to the unavoidable limits of life.
Dementia shows how quickly we reduce people to deficits. Maio insists that people with dementia remain unique persons full of memories and experiences, even when those memories are hidden. Contact may need to happen through touch, music, dance, scent, the tenderness of a glance and other embodied forms of communication.
Hope, in this understanding, is not a last straw but a beginning. It is the affirmation that tomorrow can still have meaning, even when the future is fragile and not guaranteed. Hope sees reality clearly, including its vulnerability, but still perceives a task of shaping life - a task that can only be carried together with other people.
