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The (Re)Generation of Italian Thought: The Interwar Period

Rocco Rubini

in The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger

This chapter addresses the demise of Giovanni Gentile’s scholarly and philosophical influence during the interwar period. It recounts how Gentile’s stance and agenda came under attack, from the ... More

This chapter addresses the demise of Giovanni Gentile’s scholarly and philosophical influence during the interwar period. It recounts how Gentile’s stance and agenda came under attack, from the Catholic quarter, where his archenemy, Agostino Gemelli, sponsored a Neothomism and thus a renewed medievalism, countering the modern mainstream, and also from within, as some of his former students, in line with European concerns, vociferously called for the “problematization” of Gentile’s actual idealism and the philosophical task tout-court. At the same time, this chapter examines the concerted, indeed, collaborative efforts of a younger generation of existentialists who, relying on smuggled French and German sources, succeeded in definitely overcoming, in critical assimilation, the “hegemony” of Italian idealism. Notable among the latter group of young thinkers given to the “deprovincialization” of Italian philosophy are Enrico Castelli (1900-1977), who, inspired by Maurice Blondel, sponsored a Catholic existentialism and, more influentially, Nicola Abbagnano (1901-1990), who, through a newly discovered Heidegger, came to conceive of a distinctively Italian existentialism that would be “positive,” “constructive,” and “civic” as opposed to defeatist and solipsistic. The chapter makes the case that only with this philosophical background in mind can some of the most influential interpretive paradigms in postwar Renaissance scholarship be fully grasped.Less

Fascism: The State as Religion

in Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History

This chapter focuses on Giovanni Gentile's philosophical idealism and his treatment of political issues. Gentile related modern political philosophy to the political doctrines of Giuseppe Mazzini, ... More

This chapter focuses on Giovanni Gentile's philosophical idealism and his treatment of political issues. Gentile related modern political philosophy to the political doctrines of Giuseppe Mazzini, whose religion he saw as being at the very heart of Mazzini's thought, and was quick to defend its presence. He also argued that Mazzini was a precursor of fascism, which was the culmination of the efforts of the major political leaders of the Risorgimento.Less

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

Rocco Rubini

in The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger

This chapter narrates the emergence of a self-consciously construed Italian philosophical tradition from the time of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century political and cultural unification ... More

This chapter narrates the emergence of a self-consciously construed Italian philosophical tradition from the time of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century political and cultural unification movement, to the early twentieth century. Among the protagonists of this transgenerational conversation are: Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823), who was the first to turn to the philosophy of Giambattista Vico programmatically in reaction to the French Revolution; Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1852), the champion of Italy’s intellectual and cultural “primato” (or preeminence) and of a renewed political Guelphism; Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883) and Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883), who together introduced and “naturalized” Hegel in Italy; and their self-avowed heirs, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), the sponsors and guardians of the so-called idealist “hegemony.” Through a parallel investigation of these thinkers’ work, this chapter shows Italian philosophy to be a Vichianism, that is, an enduring application of Vico’s humanism as it sustains the Italian modern or Risorgimento intellectual’s self-defining confrontation with his Renaissance prototype. Indeed, this chapter argues that Italian intellectual identity (or lack thereof) was founded on a Renaissance “shame,” the Renaissance moment, with its enduring political failures, being the specter that Italy must chase out in order to achieve the “modernity” it heralded but never itself enjoyed.Less

Holding It Together: Eugenio Garin

Rocco Rubini

in The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger

This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), who, alongside Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, is considered one of the foremost Renaissance scholars of ... More

This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), who, alongside Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, is considered one of the foremost Renaissance scholars of his generation. It tells the story of Garin’s irenic efforts to reconcile the rift in the Italian academy between Gentile’s brand of idealism (philosophy) and the Italian positivistic school (philology) during the Fascist ventennio. As Garin himself suggested, his early scholarship can be read as an exercise in “honest dissimulation,” aspiring, that is, to a covert critique, political and intellectual, of interwar Italy. This trend is visible in Garin’s scholarship in his groundbreaking works on Pico (1937) and the British Enlightenment (1941), and, most famously, in his interpretation of the Renaissance in Italian Humanism (1947), a work originally commissioned by Ernesto Grassi to support the “existential humanism” he was promoting in Germany with the approval (or so he thought) of Heidegger. In this chapter, moreover, Garin’s career provides the context for defining Hans Baron’s interpretation of Quattrocento humanism as a “civic” movement and for reconnecting estranged but strikingly similar philosophers like Gentile and Ernst Cassirer, as well as for understanding the postwar interest in Antonio Gramsci, of whom Garin was an early and enthusiastic reader.Less

A Philosopher’s Humanism: Paul Oskar Kristeller

Rocco Rubini

in The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger

This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999), the doyen of Renaissance studies in postwar American academia. It details Kristeller’s relationship to ... More

This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999), the doyen of Renaissance studies in postwar American academia. It details Kristeller’s relationship to his Italian mentor, Giovanni Gentile, and to rival academics during his exile in Italy in the 1930s, as well as his indebtedness to his German mentors and peers. These included Hans Baron, whose epistolary dialogue with Kristeller helped interest the latter in the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino; Martin Heidegger, who influenced his appreciation for existential concerns; and, especially, Heinrich Rickert, whose brand of Neokantianism was instrumental, the chapter shows, in shaping Kristeller’s influential view of Renaissance humanism as “rhetoric” rather than “philosophy.” The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debate concerning the scientific value of the Geisteswissenschaften provides an additional context for Kristeller’s scholarship: this dispute pitted Rickert against the German historicist tradition that runs from Johann Gustav Droysen to Wilhelm Dilthey, and was favored by Eugenio Garin. With this context in mind, the chapter invites a new understanding of the fundamental disagreement between Garin and Kristeller that defined Renaissance studies; it also aims to transcend that disagreement by revealing that the two scholars were united in making Renaissance scholarship a philosophical discourse in its own right.Less

“Timeless and Spaceless”?—Yeats’s Search for Models of Interpretation in Post–Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and Art History, and the Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol,” “The Soul in Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients”

Matthew Gibson

in W. B. Yeats's A Vision: Explications and Contexts

This two-part essay employs A Vision’s consistent division between time and space to observe how W. B. Yeats’s reading of philosophy from 1925 onwards shaped his understanding of the ontological ... More

This two-part essay employs A Vision’s consistent division between time and space to observe how W. B. Yeats’s reading of philosophy from 1925 onwards shaped his understanding of the ontological basis of the Principles and of the Thirteenth Cone’s achronic nature, and to demonstrate the importance of early anthropology and “civilisation theory” for understanding the different phases of the wheel at its macroscopic level. Beginning with Yeats’s use of Giovanni Gentile and George Berkeley articulate the soul’s growth and perception, the first part then discusses the role of J. W. Dunne and J. M. E. McTaggart in helping Yeats to articulate the Thirteenth Cone as a set of individual, ever-simultaneous “selves.” The second part observes the contributions by the likes of Strzygowski, Schneider, Petrie, and Spengler to Yeats’s depiction of the 26,000-year Magnus Annus, demonstrating that the division between time and space, as aspects of subjective and objective-minded civilisations respectively, is also important at a historical level.Less