Living Thought

The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy

Roberto Esposito, Zakiya Hanafi

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804786485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives.

For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life (rather than closed up in the introspective pursuits of traditional continental philosophy) and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today.

Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life.

Fourth Chapter

Thought in Action

Philosophy and Resistance

1. The distinguishing feature of Italian thought in the first half of the twentieth century can be described as its complete historicization. What I mean by this is not only the acute awareness on the part of its chief exponents that their philosophy, like all others, is historically determined; but also the tendency—whether tacit or proclaimed—to make itself history. Or, to use a more resonant expression, to make itself “thought in action [pensiero in atto]”—understood in both senses of activity and actuality. Although one senses the influence of Hegel at the root of this attitude, it cannot be reduced to the German’s formula of “its own time apprehended in thoughts”—which still expresses a cognitive type of relationship between separate elements. What we have here is something much more intrinsic, something that thrusts the philosophical work into the very heart of the real, even to the point of identifying with it. Of course, this process (or plan, at least) of mundanizing philosophy—the rejection of all dualism in favor of an immanence viewed as more and more absolute—implies a profound discontinuity with its traditionally speculative form, a rupture that was explicitly asserted by the philosophers of the period. To make itself world, to acquire worldly power, philosophical knowledge must somehow escape outside itself, it must incorporate its other—what is commonly considered to be “unphilosophical.” In breaking with a traditionally intellectualist conception, twentieth-century Italian thought at the same time reconnected to the deeply formed features of its own genealogy. This was not only because it brought to fulfillment the practical or civil vocation that had characterized it from its beginnings. But also because it provided a radical answer to the question, posed dramatically during the previous period, regarding the unbridgeable gap between “science and life”—the excess manifested by life in the face of all attempts to understand it conceptually. The solution that was now put forward lay in flipping the lens through which the problem had been examined until then: instead of pointlessly attempting to force life into the formal parameters of philosophy, why not give philosophy the concrete characteristics of life? In order to be able to tap into a vital substratum that is refractory to the conceptual dimension, a thought that seeks to be worthy of its time must immerse itself in it, transforming itself into “living thought.” But to make this possible—this is the last and most drastic step in this reasoning process—it must intersect with politics; or to be more precise, it must rediscover its inherent “politicalness.” Only in this way, through practical action in the world, can philosophy truly revitalize itself, identifying itself in a historicity that is one with the inexhaustible movement of life.

As we know, the thinkers who took this assumption to its most extreme consequences, committing their entire lifetimes and even the circumstances of their deaths to its fulfillment, were Giovanni Gentile and Antonio Gramsci. Standing on opposing sides of a single barricade, they dramatically shared the project of making philosophical practice a potent historical force intended to change the world. Even without subscribing to the most extreme hypothesis (backed by arguments not devoid of plausibility) that their work is what fueled the creation, on the one hand, of fascism, and on the other, of the peculiar phenomenon that was Italian communism, the historical-political significance of their thought cannot be underestimated. To be sure, it is difficult to come up with two contemporaries in the philosophical landscape of the world who were as decisive in the conceptual development, and institution, of political regimes with such epochal significance. Still, while Gentile and Gramsci, in the forms we shall examine, represent the apex of this tendency, the third great thinker of this period, Benedetto Croce, was not extraneous to it. In spite of the claim he never tired of making regarding the gap between thought and action, he was rightly perceived as the extraparliamentary leader of the opposition to fascism. This fact is highly symptomatic of a drive toward politics that went beyond individual choices. Even his fierce resistance to what struck him as an unacceptable politicization of philosophy took on an inevitably political significance during this phase. Although expressed negatively—in the form of a withdrawal or a distinction—it was an integral part of the same process that simultaneously brought into play history and philosophy, power and life, decision and existence. That is why, despite their differences and even wide divergences, their thought must be analyzed together—in the tension that holds them in the same horizon of meaning.¹

Beyond their irreducible personal and political conflicts, what connects them into a single trajectory, one that is totally unique on the European scene, as we have said, is the perception of a profound change in the role and purpose of philosophy. From this point of view, but without arriving at the same conclusions—indeed, taking a conspicuous distance from them—Croce was just as clear as Gentile and Gramsci in grasping the irreversibility of the transformation that was taking place. Contrary to those who continued to interpret philosophy as abstract knowledge separate from reality, he maintained that it had to be integrated into reality, to be put back into contact with the dilemmas and conflicts of life, and brought back to the clarity of ordinary language. This is why—contrary to what “pure philosophers” believe, not to mention those engulfed in academic disputes and quarrels—“new philosophical thought, or its germs, are often to be found in books not written by professional philosophers and not extrinsically systematic: for ethics, in books by ascetics and members of the clergy; for politics, in books by historians; for aesthetics, in those by art critics, and so on.”² One glance at the Italian philosophical tradition whose genealogy we have reconstructed—from Machiavelli to de Sanctis, passing through Cuoco and Leopardi—makes it easy to understand whom Croce is referring to. What he means is that while philosophy stands in a reciprocal relationship with the other discourses of modern knowledge, it is also continually cut through and changed by them, in the sense that philosophy shares the same interests and objects, even though it places them in a different conceptual topology. The material of philosophy is not another philosophy, in a self-referential attitude that closes in on itself, but rather, precisely what is not philosophy because it coincides with life itself in its continuous and unpredictable development: since “philosophy has always originated out of the motion of life,”³ it “can solve only those problems presented by life.”⁴ For this reason, once we have given up on any pretentions to solve the big metaphysical problems, we can only turn to “a historical and immanent philosophy, which draws its material from all the most varied impressions of life and from all intuitions and reflections upon life.”⁵ In these texts—but many more of them can be cited—the process of the historicization of thought we referred to at the start of this chapter reaches its apex. Philosophy is always historically determined in its questions and answers, which are obviously partial and provisional, but when it tends toward infinity it coincides with history. Not in the extremist sense, theorized by Gentile, which would have it constituted by history, but in the sense that philosophy arises out of history and returns to it as its sole horizon of relevance.

From this point of view, those who see in Croceanism something that is not quite a philosophy are right—on condition that they recognize its philosophical importance. Otherwise, following the same line of reasoning, we would have to reject the philosophical import of Heidegger’s thesis on the “end of philosophy,” or Wittgenstein’s explicit adoption of ordinary language. What makes them closer to Croce, perhaps more than one might think—although without being able to compare his analytical framework and vocabulary to theirs, naturally—is the same search for a thought that is postmetaphysical and, thus, in some ways, also postphilosophical. But not antiphilosophical. In the case of the Italian thinker, this is attained by sharply reducing the technical portion (the amount of jargon, in other words) of his theoretical expression, which leads it to adhere so closely to its historical object that it ends up almost inside it. It is as if the philosophical shell surrounding the concreteness of a real problem were to be thinned down to the point of making itself transparent—thus giving the impression of being absorbed by it. But never entirely, because what philosophy conveys of the historical event—whatever that may be—is not the direct image, but rather, a reflected awareness: the knowledge, that is, of its specific place in the circularity of the spirit that, for Croce, is the general form of the historical process. Thus, legitimizing, he can argue that “the particular task of philosophy” does not fade away—it simply no longer lies “above and detached from science and life, but inside them, as a tool of science and life.”⁶ The seemingly simplistic definition of philosophy as “an abstract moment of historiography” or even as its “methodology” can be traced back to this task. Without the light of philosophy, if history were removed from the work of thought, it would be nothing but a bare sequence of events without meaning; in the same way that if thought were devoid of historical material, it would lose itself in the desert of abstraction. Although located outside all schemas deriving from a philosophy of history (consistently rejected by Croce in order to safeguard the role of individuals compared to general causes), just as his philosophy is essentially historical, similarly, his historiography—every historical work that he effectively wrote—is inherently philosophical. How could it be any other way, starting from the principle that all history, both past and present, is contemporary? To argue that the historian’s gaze, based on his or her real interest, enlivens any event by projecting it onto the moving screen of today is tantamount to regaining the horizon of actuality, from a different angle than the one taken by Gentile. Philosophy, history, and life are arranged on this horizon in an equilibrium that makes one the point of refraction of the other two. While philosophy can only draw from life through its own historicity, in the same way, but on another level, philosophy is what lends life an intensely historical character. Just as the categories of the spirit organize the historical sequence by distinguishing between its various moments, history transforms life from a messy jumble of conflicting impulses into a frame in which multiple threads are interwoven into a unified fabric.

2. And yet Croce was well aware that things are not quite so simple. He knew that the picture whose broad strokes he drew with unparalleled clarity was far from stable, and indeed was subject from the beginning to variations, pressures, and distortions destined to undermine its harmonious consistency. By studying the history of his notebooks, Gennaro Sasso has reconstructed the dramatic growth of this awareness in the philosopher’s mind.⁷ Something, from inside and outside the system, tends to loosen its joints and blur the distinctions—beginning with the one between thought and action that was crucial for keeping it intact. Specifically to prevent this potential dissolution—which would have inevitably led him down the path embarked upon by Gentile, both activistic and immobilizing at the same time—he had set up firm boundaries that strictly distinguished between the various faculties of the spirit, while joining them into a single, circular development: “For ‘Westerners’ or, more precisely, for healthy spirits,” cautioned the philosopher, “the strength of civilization still resides in its continual distinction and opposition between thought and action, which is the only way they can nurture each other.”⁸ His warning against the “improper mixture of theory and practice”—which would lead the actualists to the “mutual corruption of philosophical meaning and political meaning—was never stated more forcefully than in a polemical text directed at Gentile entitled “Against Too Much Political Philosophy.”⁹ It was one thing to recognize the full historicity of philosophy—against all the intellectualistic revivals of those who had failed to grasp the antimetaphysical turn taken by contemporary thought; but it was quite another to carry out an unmediated politicization that would reduce knowledge to the direct expression of power—of forces and vested interests incapable of rising to a universal level. Not that forces and interests are not part of history. There was nobody who had championed their reality, and even their productivity, more than Croce, who never forgot the teachings of Machiavelli. But only if they were contained within a specific sphere, that of the useful or the economic, and were certainly not coextensive with the entire movement of the spirit. Precisely in defense of this necessary division—aimed at distinguishing the part from the whole, but also the sphere of facts from that of values—he had refused to attribute a philosophical character to Marxism. In this case, too, his opinion clashed with those of both Gentile and Antonio Labriola.¹⁰ And yet it was precisely on this point—the autonomy of the category of utility, later expanded into the more controversial and problematic one of “vitality”¹¹—that he began to encounter growing difficulties. This element was exactly what pushed against the walls of his system, both internal and external, threatening to pull them down. Not only did this category show itself to be barely containable within the terms assigned to it, sooner or later it risked overflowing into adjace...