The Other Renaissance

Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger

Rocco Rubini

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226186139
• eBook ISBN: 9780226186276
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Italian History

A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In The Other Renaissance, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward decidedly antihumanist sentiments.
           
Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole.

CHAPTER ONE

Philosophy and Revolution: Italian Vichianism and the ‘Renaissance Shame’

Our revolution was a passive revolution, whose only chance of success rested in winning the people’s interest to its cause. Yet the views of the patriots did not coincide with those of the people: they had different ideas, different customs, and even two different languages.

—Vincenzo Cuoco, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione di Napoli (1801)

In the midst of darkness, I could make out two lights in the distance, and I felt enamored. I had the pleasurable feeling that they were one and the same sun. They appeared as two, because they were the same sun on two different points of the horizon. To unlock the metaphor: Italian Renaissance philosophy and German philosophy.

—Bertrando Spaventa, Logica e metafisica (1867)

We see two Italys before us—one old and the other new. There is the Italy of the ages, which is our glory but which is also our sad legacy, heavy on our shoulders and a burden to our spirits. It is a legacy that, we must candidly admit, is a disgrace from which we would be free—for which we must make amends. That great Italy of the ages, that has so large a place in the history of the world, that is recognized and studied and investigated by all civilized people, is the Italy whose history is not a particular history, but an epoch in universal history: the Renaissance.

—Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa è il fascismo? (1925)

INTRODUCTION

If Italy, to use Metternich’s incisive words, was nothing more than a mere “geographical expression” until its unification into a nation-state in 1860–61, the fault, agreed a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian philosophers, was with the Renaissance man. This was the same Renaissance man, of course, whose ‘individualism’ Jacob Burckhardt had just recently been gushing over in his 1860 masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. By the time Burckhardt ‘invented’ the Renaissance, Italians had already pinpointed the self-absorption, vainglory, and narcissism of their modern forefathers as the principal cause of Italy’s political fractiousness and centuries-long subjugation to foreign rule, drawing here more on personal experience than on systematic historiographical research. In other words, from an idiosyncratic Italian perspective Burckhardt’s creation of the modern historiographical conception of the Renaissance serendipitously coincided with the end of it as a historical period in the country that he had conclusively identified as its birthplace.

Certainly, 1860 may seem awfully late to serve as an end date for the Renaissance, and yet the problem that the Renaissance posed for Italians would endure politically (the annexation of Rome occurred in 1870) and, most important, spiritually for many more decades. Between the founding of a unifying constitutional monarchy and the rise and demise of fascism, Italian thinkers searched for a national philosophy with which to fill the empty and brittle vessel of post-Renaissance political infrastructure. The fragility of that vessel was due in no small part to the fact that Italians had lagged behind historical events in a parallel and correlative effort to emancipate themselves from their Renaissance prototype. It is thus to this psychological projection—to the relation that the modern Italian intellectual entertained with himself as a Renaissance man, to his internalization of the ‘Renaissance’ as an existential category—that one needs to attend in order to grasp the etiological myth I call the ‘Italians’ Renaissance,’ the very myth that, in turn, informed the ambition for an Italian national philosophy.

The emotional bond between modern Italians and their Renaissance is already implicit in the notion of the Risorgimento, a word that usually refers to the nineteenth-century movement for Italian unification, but that throughout the nineteenth century was also Italians’ preferred term for the cultural flourishing that signaled their precocious entry into modernity—even after Jules Michelet and Burckhardt, respectively, had introduced and made current the word Renaissance.¹ On close inspection the notions of ‘rebirth’ and ‘resurgence,’ though related, are not identical. Eventually, at the turn of the twentieth century, Italians would also adopt the Italianized word Rinascimento, perhaps out of inertia. And yet the event points to a distinction, one that reflects the significant effort that Italians put into distancing themselves from their stilted modern origins, into rebounding or ‘resurging’ from the decline the Renaissance had ushered in in Italy. In the highly competitive atmosphere that characterized the European struggle for cultural ascendancy, the very idea that other countries might have reaped the fruits of a seed of modernity planted in Italy—whether it was via religious reform or centralized government efficiency—remained a central national embarrassment. This context helps us understand the sense of ‘shame’ that in Italy accompanied the Renaissance as a “mobilizer of patriotic action,” or, to put it another way (more in keeping with the equally intellectual enterprise that was the Risorgimento), it was the Renaissance that ‘shamed’ Italian thinkers into conceiving a personal philosophy.² Moreover, since this feeling of shame would persist until the end of World War II, the ‘Renaissance’ functions as a perennial touchstone by which to measure the evolution of the Italian national self, diachronically, as the history of a collective “anxious ego” (as it was recently described) prone to producing “an extremely refined discourse about the anxiety of [Italian national culture’s] own existence.”³

Concomitant with the recent 150^th anniversary celebration of Italy’s unification, Risorgimento studies have witnessed a renaissance of their own. A ‘cultural turn’ has led scholars to start thinking about patriotism not just as an ideology, given and ready-made, but as a discursive practice.⁴ In the process, they have recouped from the pre- and postunification histories found in heretofore marginalized literary genres an understanding of the Risorgimento that is no longer strictly political.⁵ This approach has had the effect of widening, perhaps infinitely, what has been called the “Risorgimento canon,” a canon that is in any case best approached noncanonically, with greater emphasis on contributions by the young and other minorities—by those who experienced Italy’s resurgence, not just those who brought the event to fruition.⁶ Such an approach benefits our understanding of an epoch in which, its practical achievements notwithstanding, traditions were “invented” and communities “imagined” (as the prevailing scholarship on nationalism might phrase it).⁷

There were in fact many patriotic discourses in Italy in the nineteenth century, and it is to be lamented that the philosophical one continues to be neglected given that it was arguably the most finely tuned, certainly the most self-aware. By failing to take into account, for example, the work of Vincenzo Gioberti, arguably the Risorgimento’s most representative philosopher, and Giovanni Gentile, the self-avowed philosopher of fascism, Risorgimento scholarship loses the opportunity to learn from how they intersect, as does the equally flourishing field of Anglo-American fascist studies. It is not that Gioberti and Gentile have been completely overlooked, but rather that the philosophical core of their varied intellectual enterprises has not been thoroughly explored and their careers understood as end terms, as providing the coordinates of a distinct, if not self-enclosed, philosophical patriotism that developed in the span they represent. This neglect owes something, perhaps, to the fact that Italy is unlike other countries in that the ‘philosopher’ does not cut a figure who clearly defines himself, professionally, apart from the larger group of intellectuals (writers, artists, political militants, etc.) whose works currently serve as scholarly sources.⁸ Indeed, we could characterize the ‘Italian’ philosophy that began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century as a kind of dare, a way to show that philosophy belonged to Italy as well. At the same time, the challenge was to make sure that philosophy in Italy would not be strictly academic. Aspirations for a civic philosophy were part and parcel of the mission to recover from the Renaissance. If genuine patriotism was not prevalent in the early modern period, then that was again the fault of the Quattrocento humanist, an intellectual figure prone to institutional intellectual segregation.

The predicament of the Risorgimento man may be reexperienced by present-day readers if asked to name a modern Italian ‘philosopher,’ in the sense in which that word is applied to Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, or Hegel, for example. Cheating a little, the mind might turn to pre-Cartesian thinkers such as Pico, Ficino, Bruno, and Campanella, none of whom, however, seems to meet the degree of philosophical rigor and influence required for eponymity (Pichianism, Ficinianism, etc.). Faced with later periods, one would be even more at a loss unless one could turn, as Italian patriots did, to that odd figure, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). A peculiar thinker, Vico failed to win over science-enthralled Naples with his humanist inquiry, but precisely because of this (admittedly often exaggerated) egregious neglect, he lived on, a figure perpetually to be rediscovered and, as Goethe prognosticated during a trip to Italy in 1787, to be elevated into the Altvater of a not yet existing nation. Benedetto Croce, glossing Goethe, described Vico as a touchstone, providing an occasion “to hark back for a time in order to imbue modern philosophy with an Italian feeling [italianità], however cosmopolitan it may be in thought.”⁹ Perhaps Croce did not need to remind his compatriots that Vico was Italian when, in 1911, he leveraged his reputation and put his favorite thinker on the international map. By then, Vico had long and consistently resided in the consciousness of Italian thinkers, and, collectively, their brand of thought had already grown into a distinctive Vichianism.¹⁰

The Vico who held sway among early patriots, however, was less the author of the New Science (1744), which investigated the common origins of nations and was somewhat abstruse even for an Italian readership, than the author of works such as On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), in which Vico, analyzing the ancient Latin language, first delineated an etymological equation between verum and factum, an equation on which he construed the catchphrase of his new line of inquiry: “The True is the Made” (verum ipsum factum).¹¹ Vico self-consciously opposed his formulation to Descartes’s own (cogito ergo sum), in order to ground man’s knowledge in man-made products, that is, history, and to curb, in the process, the Cartesian philosopher’s tendency to dawdle in the laws attending to the physical, natural, God-begotten realm. It is well known that Vico often structured his philosophy as a more or less overt confrontation with Descartes, yet, perhaps because he elaborated on some of the anti-French sentiments already present in Petrarch and Machiavelli, his philosophy soon acquired an identitarian if not a nationalist aura—or at least this is what his Risorgimento followers made of it.

Patriots could latch on to some of Vico’s particular concerns, such as the so-called ‘genius of language,’ which he addressed in 1708, in the last of a long series of programmatic academic orations:

While we Italians praise our orators for fluency, lucidity, and eloquence, the French praise theirs for reasoning truly. Whenever the French wish to designate the mental faculty by which we rapidly, aptly, and felicitously couple things which stand apart, they call it esprit, and are inclined to view as a naïve, simple trick what we consider as forceful power of combination; their minds, characterized by exceeding penetration, do not excel in synthetic power, but in piercing subtlety of reasoning. Consequently, if there is any truth in this statement, which is the theme of a famous debate, “genius is a product of language, not language of genius,” we must recognize that the French are the only people who, thanks to the subtlety of their language, were able to invent the new philosophical criticism which seems so thoroughly intellectualistic, and analytical geometry, by which the subject matter of mathematics is, as far as possible, stripped of all concrete, figural elements, and reduced to pure rationality.¹²

Contributing here to a long-lasting quarrel between French and Italian intellectuals, Vico reverses the notion that national character precedes language, put forth by Dominique Bouhours in an attempt to argue for the universality of modern French.¹³ To each their language, Vico rebuts, and thus their genius, of which a plurality exists, each with its place in the intellectual realm. From this perspective, Vico gladly conceded the “dull” and “inert” things that are “abstract ideas” to the French, but proudly claimed “comparative,” “metaphorical,” “emotional” talent for the Italians. These were the qualities that made the Italian mind one of the “keenest,” a mind that put Italians in the forefront, if not of the sciences, then certainly of the arts.

Vico, or so went the scholarly myth (and to indulge in myth was, and is, instrumental to partake of the Vichian moment), had no clear and distinct ideas to offer, nor a well-polished methodology, yet his opposition to rationalist epistemology did not stop at sterile invective—an accusation often leveled at his Renaissance predecessors, from Petrarch to Valla and Poliziano, and their opposition to medieval school philosophy. However, he developed enough of a positive contribution to inspire a philosophical attitude worthy of being acted upon and the outlines of a research program or ‘history’ that, if Italians would get around to writing it, would allow them to recover an intellectual identity heretofore lost. The history that Vico inspired touched on the distinctions between reason and ingenuity, “critical” and “topical philosophy”—in other words, the perennial quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy that Vico saw himself and Descartes, perhaps, embodying for modern times. Taking this cue, his followers raised it into a national race between France and Italy in the aftermath of the French Revolution. This was the emotional atmosphere, throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, of Italian Vichianism, making it a ‘rhetoric of alterity,’ a philosophy ‘announced’ (but rarely elaborated) in subsequent inaugural academic addresses, just as Vico himself had done, by several generations of Italians who were intent on talking themselves, literally, into intellectual difference.

Vico, it has been insightfully argued, could not serve as an exemplar, nor did he wish to. Rather, he emerged as an “idiosyncratic authority.” His brand of inquiry or humanism is a practice that “must be internalized, personalized,” “becoming material for another practice, another memoir.” The humanism he inspired will survive, if it survives, in “iteration,” that is, in tradition-making, rather than in “emulation.”¹⁴ These stipulations are necessary because scholars who look to Italian intellectual history for the stuff that philosophy is usually made of (stringency, cogency, etc.) will, in large part, be disappointed in their expectations. Scholars will not be disappointed, however, if they are open to a theory of collective authorship, to an agenda that, despite the varying contributions of its representatives, endures and is pursued in ongoing conversation. This conversation is what makes up the community of Italian philosophers, one that was ‘imagined,’ yes, but in the Vichian sense of wanting to possess the inside perspective on that which it wanted to know, in this case, its very own tradition—and this, too, was ‘invented,’ but in the Vichian or etymological sense of ‘recovered’ and ‘recollected’ for the sake of introspection and self-understanding.

The substantial chapter that follows relies on an understanding of the Renaissance to sketch the self-contained trajectory of a self-avowed ‘Italian’ philosophy that extends from Vico to Antonio Gramsci. These two are the best-known of Italian thinkers, perhaps; they are also two thinkers whose popularity, outside Italy, has obscured the (Vichian) tradition that connects them, to the detriment of our understanding of Vico and Gramsci themselves. We see a connection in terms of Italian intellectual identity, for example, when Gramsci, writing from prison to his sister-in law, Tania Schucht, in 1927 announces that he will dedicate himself to “a study of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: How We Came to Be Such As We Are and Not Otherwise
• 1. Philosophy and Revolution: Italian Vichianism and the ‘Renaissance Shame’
• 2. The (Re)Generation of Italian Thought: The Interwar Period
• 3. Averting the End of Tradition: Ernesto Grassi
• 4. Holding It Together: Eugenio Garin
• 5. A Philosopher’s Humanism: Paul Oskar Kristeller
• Conclusion: Humanism before Cartesianism (despite Heidegger)
• Notes
• Index