Phenomenology in Italy Authors, Schools and Traditions Contributions to Phenomenology

Contributions to Phenomenology 106

Federica Buongiorno Vincenzo Costa Roberta Lanfredini Editors Phenomenology in Italy Authors, Schools and Traditions Contributions to Phenomenology

In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

Volume 106

Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolfh Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, Florida, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811 Federica Buongiorno • Vincenzo Costa Roberta Lanfredini Editors

Phenomenology in Italy Authors, Schools and Traditions Editors Federica Buongiorno Vincenzo Costa TU Dresden Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche Dresden University of Technology Università degli Studi del Molise Dresden, Sachsen, Germany Campobasso, Italy

Roberta Lanfredini Dipartimento di Filosofia Università degli Studi di Firenze Firenze, Italy

ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-030-25396-7 ISBN 978-3-030-25397-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4

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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface

Faced with the daunting task of adequately explaining the theoretical reasons behind a philosophical (and editorial) project, at times it is possible to borrow words from poetry. In a letter dated 3 May 1818 and addressed to John Hamilton Reynolds, John Keats voices some thoughts that prove most helpful: “For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.” It seems to us that the process described by Keats closely corresponds to the overall direction (or intention, or—if we like—“spirit”) distinguishing the complex history of the Italian reception and interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology. As is widely known, this history can be traced back to the first studies produced by Antonio Banfi in the 1920s. It continues with the rediscovery and revitalisation carried out by Enzo Paci and his school in the 1960s, down to the present day—which is marked by the endurance and broadening of an interest in Phenomenology that, in all its various and shifting forms, seems more alive and fruitful than ever before in Italy. Certain episodes in this history are revealing of the particular connection established between Italian philosophical culture and Phenomenology: Banfi’s early appreciation of the relevance of Phenomenology as a means to redefine the relation between philosophy and science; the first ever translation into a foreign language of The Crisis of European Sciences, with the Italian version produced by Enzo Paci in 1961; the attempt to combine Phenomenology and Marxist theory; and the discovery of the logical and pre-categorial problem and its relation to the theme of history. These are but some examples of the (at times pioneering) acuity with which Italian scholars have received, understood and redeveloped Husserlian philosophy. They have been able to “feel them to the full” by retracing “the same steps as the Author” (to quote Keats)—no mean achievement, given that they had to engage with an essentially new philosophical program whose foundational texts only gradually became available in translation. Not only that, but they have also met the—more or less explicit and conscious—goal of developing a genuinely “Italian Phenomenology.” While the features of this Italian philosophy are quite evident in the case of Paci and of his interpretative suggestions, certain convergences can also be found in the

v vi Preface different and variously formulated readings offered by the other philosophers discussed here as the chief representatives of the main phenomenological “schools” or “traditions” that took root in Italy. It is enough to recall their names to outline a geographical and thematic map comprising some of the most prominent representatives of twentieth-century Italian culture and philosophy: Antonio Banfi, Sofia Vanni Rovighi, Giulio Preti, Enzo Paci, Dino Formaggio, Giuseppe Semerari, Enzo Melandri, Paolo Bozzi, Carlo Sini, Giovanni Piana and Paolo Parrini—thinkers who, to this day, embody key moments in Italian cultural history, which has significantly drawn upon Husserlian Phenomenology. It is precisely this context that we have sought to reconstruct in the present volume, without making any claim to exhaustiveness or wishing to impose a predetermined overall view: by inviting the pupils and scholars closest to the above-mentioned interpreters, we have sought to lend a voice to the differences and convergences emerging from the readings offered by the various authors. The outcome, in our view, is a volume which does not merely provide a historical reconstruction or theoretical assessment, but rather constitutes a genuine phenomenological exercise: through a double process of interpretation, the reading of Husserlian thought becomes all the more rich and critically insightful, the more it is nourished by the results progressively achieved by the multifaceted and essentially unbroken tradition of Italian Phenomenology. We have endeavoured, therefore, to ascertain what Husserl has given or suggested to Italian philosophers. But, at the same time, we have also sought to evaluate and highlight what these philosophers have given or suggested to Husserlian philosophy as such, by influencing it to the point of making it something their own, something part of a specific historical reality and cultural climate that, in a way, was more suited to the reception and redevelopment of phenomenological thought than other European cultural traditions. In order to appreciate the vitality of phenomenological studies even in contemporary Italy, we must (re)start from the—recent or remote—past we have here attempted to reconstruct. Our heartfelt thanks, then, go out to the authors who through their essays have contributed to the success of this project.

Dresden, Sachsen, Germany Federica Buongiorno Firenze, Italy Roberta Lanfredini Campobasso, Italy Vincenzo Costa Contents

Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations �� 1 Federica Buongiorno Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian Philosophy �� 15 Luca Maria Scarantino Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi �� 27 Angela Ales Bello Preti and Husserl �� 43 Roberto Gronda A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl �� 57 Amedeo Vigorelli Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio �� 71 Elio Franzini With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari �� 85 Ferruccio De Natale The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri �� 97 Stefano Besoli The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi �� 123 Roberta Lanfredini

vii viii Contents

Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance �� 137 Federico Leoni Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience �� 149 Roberto Miraglia Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy �� 161 Andrea Pace Giannotta About the Editors

Federica Buongiorno is a post-doctoral researcher and a Habilitation candidate at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Technology of Dresden (Germany), where she collaborates with the chair of Philosophy of Technology. She earned a PhD from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2013, which was followed by post-doc scholarships from several Italian and German institutions. She is the Editor-in-chief of the international philosophy journal Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age, Co-editor of the “Umweg” series (Inschibboleth Edizioni), and an Editor of the philosophy journals Lo Sguardo and Philosophy Study. Her main research areas are Husserlian Phenomenology and its heritage (with a special eye to the Italian tradition), the philosophy of technology, and digital culture. She authored the monographs La linea del tempo. Coscienza, percezione, memoria tra Bergson e Husserl (new ed. Rome 2018), Intuizione e riflessione nella fenomenologia di Edmund Husserl (Rome 2017), and Logica delle forme sensibili. Sul precategoriale nel primo Husserl (Rome 2014).

Vincenzo Costa teaches Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Molise. He has long been exploring the Phenomenological tradition and has approached the notion of phenomenology as an analysis of experience and of the correlation between sub- jectiveness and the world as a system of references between different meanings. His most recent works include: Fenomenologia dell’intersoggettività. Empatia, società, cultura (Rome 2010), Fenomenologia dell’educazione e della formazione (Brescia 2015), Teorie della follia e del disturbo psichico (Brescia 2017), and Psicologia fenomenologica (Brescia 2018).

Roberta Lanfredini teaches Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Florence. Her research focuses on phenomenology, the philosophy of knowledge, and material ontology, with a special focus on qualitative ontology. She is currently working on the notion of living matter and on the possible phenomenological and ontological developments of the paradigm of the embodied mind. She is the author of Epistemology of the Inert and Epistemology of the Living (with G. Longo, 2016), Anti-psychologism and Neutrality: the Radical Empiricism of Husserl and James (2017), and Matter, Representation and Motion in the Phenomenology of the Mind (2017).

ix Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations

Federica Buongiorno

Abstract One peculiar way of embarking on the study of a particular philosophy is to critically examine how it has been translated into other languages. In this essay I do not wish to enter into an exercise in translation theory: rather, by setting out from my concrete work as a translator, I will try to reconstruct certain aspects of the process of translating Husserl in Italy (which is, partly, also the history of his reception in this country), in order to determine what this can tell to us about Husserlian philosophy. I will proceed by key points, concentrating on some of the decisive moments of the translation and reception of Husserlian thought in Italy, with particular reference to two complementary aspects of this reception: the subject of history on the one hand, and the problem of logic on the other.

One peculiar way of embarking on the study of a particular philosophy is to critically examine how it has been translated into other languages. There are multiple advantages (and complications) offered by such an approach; while the simple reading of a classic in translation already constitutes a more indirect access than the reading of the original, to dwell on a translation as such implies consideration of a twofold work: that of the philosopher who has been translated on the one hand, and that of the translator on the other. I do not intend, in this essay, to enter into a reflection on the relations between these two works, i.e. into an exercise in translation theory. Rather, by setting out from my concrete work as a translator, I will try to reconstruct certain aspects of the process of translating Husserl in Italy (which is, partly, also the history of his reception in this country), in order to determine what this can tell to us about Husserlian philosophy. In the pursuit of this aim, I will not follow a linear and consecutive development, reconstructing the history of the Italian translations of Husserl, and I will not pretend to examine such translations in their entirety—a venture that would far exceed the limits of this essay. I will rather proceed by key points, concentrating on some of the decisive moments of the translation and reception of Husserlian thought in Italy, with particular reference to two

F. Buongiorno (*) TU Dresden, Dresden University of Technology Dresden, Sachsen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_1 2 F. Buongiorno complementary aspects of this reception—whose origin is to be located in the 1960s, namely in the reading of Husserl first offered by Enzo Paci, which afterwards branched out (in the sense of its complication and diversification) through the work of interpreters near to him, who were interested in the subject of history on the one hand, and in the problem of logic on the other. It is inevitable that we begin, in this reconstruction, with Enzo Paci’s “Avvertenza” (Disclaimer) to the translation of Crisis of European Sciences realised by Enrico Filippini, published in Milan in 1961 by Il Saggiatore. “The present Italian translation of the last and crucial of Husserl’s works,” wrote Paci, “is the first translation of the Crisis to appear in the world which follows the edition which we owe to Walter Biemel, published in 1954 as Volume VI of the Husserliana, directed by Father Hermann Leo Van Breda.”1 This observation says a lot about the way in which phenomenology was received and interpreted in the Italian context at the beginning of the 1960s, which is to say, when Husserlian studies—first arising in the 1920s through the instigation of the first research undertaken by Antonio Banfi—began decidedly to flourish in Italy, thanks also to the ever more systematic work of translation of the original texts. Paci himself recognises this: “the translation of Crisis,” he observes, “is published at a decisive moment for the rebirth of Husserlian studies in Italy.”2 The impact that the Crisis had in Italy and the programmatic use that was made of it by Paci and his “school” constituted in many ways a peculiarity of the Italian reception, which was unequalled—at least so far as its intentions go—in the rest of Europe; it was, in essence, the most emphasised Husserlian work among those translated up to then.3 Paci carries out a series of instructive reflections both on the level of the work of translation and on the level of its reception and interpretation: in the first case, com- mending Enrico Filippini for his extremely important and at the same time complex and demanding work, he writes that “to translate Husserl one must thoroughly know his thought, and not let the complex and multifaceted texture of the precise yet fluent phenomenological language slip one’s grasp (…),”4 by supporting a principle of substantial loyalty to the Husserlian terminology and phraseology, which would constitute—even in the case of the irksome Appendices (Beilagen) to the text, ini- tially not intended for publication—the highest merit of Filippini’s work. “A certain spareness, certain propositions that seem unfinished, and that make one anticipate a

1 Paci, Enzo. 1961. Avvertenza. In: Husserl, Edmund. 2002. La crisi delle scienze europee e la fenomenologia trascendentale (trans: Filippini, E.). Milan: Il Saggiatore. 1. (All translations of Italian texts are my own). 2 Ibid. 3 The first Husserlian work translated into Italian was the first two volumes of the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, translated in 1950 by Giulio Alliney (ed. Enrico Filippini) for Einaudi (Turin 1950). The translation of Philosophy as Rigorous Science (ed. Filippo Costa) followed in 1958 (Turin: Paravia). 4 Paci, Avvertenza. In: Husserl, La crisi delle scienze europee e la fenomenologia trascendentale, 1. Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations 3 development which in the end never comes, are what they are, and the translator was neither able nor permitted to intervene in the name of the presumed improvement of the text, as that would have been a betrayal.”5 To use Walter Benjamin’s words, “The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.”6 This observation is not at all trivial, if one considers that this was the beginning of the translation activity of the phenomenological texts in Italy: it was necessary in the first place, then, to establish a style and a vocabulary of Husserlian translation that would inevitably constitute a precedent (a sort of “canon”) for the successive works of translation.7 With this, Enzo Paci broke trail for “that generation of students (…) who had translated Husserl and Merlau-Ponty in the years in which those philosophers were discovered in Italy;”8 that is, a genuine cultural operation in which the activity of translation was functional to a precise interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. Thus we come to the question of reception and interpretation: The Crisis of European Science, it has been said, was inserted into the framework of a unified cultural programme. Francesco Saverio Trincia rightly observes in his Guida alla lettura della “Crisi delle scienze europee” di Husserl (Guidelines to Reading Husserl’s “Crisis of European Sciences”): It was precisely in our country that the Crisis had a genuine turn of “fortune,” meaning with this word not only the generic discussion of a transposed text within the cultural debate of reference, but most of all its systematic use in the framework of a coherent programme and a philosophical movement, which aspired to consciously address the Italian culture of the period. In this sense, it is useful to distinguish between what was a more or less common- place reception of the Husserlian work, progressively translated into the most important European languages, and its “fortune,” which appears in all respects an especially Italian peculiarity.9 As is known, this was a matter of applying the late Husserl as a function to a specific intellectual tradition of thought which was, in those years, decisive in the Italian historical context, namely Marxist theory, in the attempt to found a “phenomenological Marxism” based on the Husserlian notion of historical teleology. In 1960, just a year before the publication of the Italian translation of Crisis, a text edited by Enzo Paci himself was published, entitled Omaggio a Husserl (Tribute to Husserl10), which brought together a series of contributions for the centenary of the German philosopher’s birth, written by important philosophers and interpreters—

5 Ibid. 6 Benjamin, Walter. 2000. The Task of the Translator. In: The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 75–83. London: Routledge. 75. 7 It is undoubtedly also for this reason that the 1961 Filippini translation has resisted revision to this day, as well as any updates in the light of the vast number of subsequent translations. 8 Boella, Laura. 2007. Traduttori per caso. aut aut 334:7–20. Here 14. 9 Trincia, Francesco Saverio. 2012. Fortuna dell’opera. In: Guida alla lettura della “Crisi delle scienze europee” di Husserl. 186–207. Rome-Bari: Laterza. 10 Paci, Enzo (ed.). 1960. Omaggio a Husserl. Milan: il Saggiatore. 4 F. Buongiorno such as Enzo Melandri, Guido D. Neri, Giuseppe Semerari, Franco Bosio, Franco Voltaggio, Mario Sancipriano, and Renzo Raggiunti—who, indeed, tried to centre their reflection on the historical theme and to corroborate Paci’s thesis, according to which: When the first two parts of the work were published in Philosophia magazine in Belgrade, in 1936, it was still possible to believe that the historical interest in Husserl was marginal and secondary. Now the complete text of the Krisis demonstrates precisely the contrary: the theme of history is an essential one. It is not an “added” theme, but a theme that necessarily inheres in phenomenology, and without which phenomenology could not have been what it has been, and could not be what it is.11 Paci further defined his own interpretation here, advancing the hypothesis that phenomenology consented “a possible and free critical revision of the entirety of Hegelian philosophy, and, in particular, of the problem of dialectic (…). It has been clear from the start that intentionality implies the problem of dialectic, which is to say the most challenging problem of modern thought.”12 The ventures of the early 1960s (the translation of the Crisis and the volume Omaggio a Husserl) sealed a period of systematic revival of phenomenological studies in Italy, whose fundamental stages were the Gallarate symposium of 1955 (with its proceedings, La fenomenologia, published in 1956), the two issues of the Archivio di filosofia (Archive of Philosophy) on Il compito della fenomenologia (The Task of Phenomenology, 1956) and on Tempo e intenzionalità (Time and Intentionality, 1960), and G. Pedroli’s monograph dedicated to La fenomenologia di Husserl (Husserl’s Phenomenology) published in 1958. The immediate historical functionality of the Pacian interpretation of the late Husserl is rendered yet more evident in the “Preface” to the third Italian edition of the Crisis, written in the fateful year of 1968, in which Paci makes the radical affirmation that “the history of Italian philosophy will be divided into two parts. The first part will include the works written before the translation of the Crisis, the second those written afterwards”.13 This Pacian prophecy did not come to pass to the epochal extent he had hoped by recognising in the combination of Marxism and phenomenology a new revolutionary potential which would enable “a radical transformation that will positively establish a society in which no man will be exploited, and which will intentionally establish a new dialectic of infinite perfection.”14 As

11 Paci, Avvertenza. In: Husserl, La crisi delle scienze europee e la fenomenologia trascendentale, 2. Certain variations are present in the contributions offered in Omaggio a Husserl by the various authors involved: in particular, one can observe a tendency to make the problem of history emerge from a critical reflection on Husserlian logic, on account of how that logic has been structured since the first phase of Husserl’s thought. For a further consideration of this aspect, I take the lib- erty of referring to my essay: Buongiorno, Federica. 2011. Husserl in Italia (1955–1967). Il Cannocchiale 1:77–116. 12 Paci, Enzo. 1960. Nota introduttiva. In: Omaggio a Husserl, 5. 13 Paci, Enzo. 1968. Prefazione alla terza edizione italiana. In: Husserl, La crisi delle scienze europee e la fenomenologia trascendentale, 7. 14 Ibid., 9. Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations 5

Trincia observed, “the great experience of the movements of 1968 explains the sin- cere enthusiasm shown by Paci, and his projecting a politico-social ideal onto a future of revolutionary social reform.” Nonetheless, “the emphasis here adopted by Paci conflicts with the effective oblivion—until the 1980s—of The Crisis of the European Sciences and its presence in the cultural debate in Italy,” to the point that one might ask oneself “if the Pacian interpretation of Husserlian philosophy has not been, in its radicality, a factor restricting the echo that the ‘humanistic’ message of the Crisis hurls against its disenchanted reader.”15 1968 was, on the other hand, the year of the publication of the first Italian translation of Logical Investigations, edited by Giovanni Piana.16 In just 4 years the three principal logical works of Husserl were translated into Italian: in 1965, Experience and Judgement was published in Filippo Costa’s translation, followed in 1966 by Formal and Transcendental Logic, edited by Davide Guido Neri. Thus an in-depth overview was offered of the vast topic of the “logical” Husserl and of the relations between the logical sphere and the phenomenological investigation proper. Although the Investigations have predominately taken on, in the course of their reception, the sense of a trenchant critique of psychologism and of the reduction of logic to the principles of psychology (even that experimental psychology introduced in a systematic way by Franz Brentano, Husserl’s Viennese teacher), their importance far exceeds the disciplinary question and concerns the very self-comprehension of phenomenology as a critique of consciousness. As I have attempted to show elsewhere, and as has been recognised by important studies in this field,17 the Investigations

15 Trincia, Fortuna dell’opera. In: Guida alla lettura della “Crisi delle scienze europee” di Husserl. 186–207. 16 Husserl, Edmund. 1968. Ricerche logiche, ed. G. Piana. Milan: il Saggiatore. 17 I have dwelt on this subject, which is to say on the possibility of a more “continuist” reading of Husserlian thought in the light of the presence, already in the Logical Investigations, of a pre-categorial problem, in the re-elaboration of my doctoral thesis (Buongiorno, Federica. 2014. Logica delle forme sensibili. Sul precategoriale nel primo Husserl. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura). In particular, I have availed myself of the observations already made by important scholars of Husserl: Costa, Vincenzo. 1999. L’estetica trascendentale fenomenologica. Sensibilità e razional- ità nella filosofia di Edmund Husserl. Milan: Vita e Pensiero; De Palma, Vittorio. 2003. Forma categoriale e struttura dell’esperienza. Paradigmi 21:159–165; Lohmar, Dieter. 1998. Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken. Hume, Kant und Husserl über vorprädikative Erfahrung und prädikative Erkenntnis. Dordrecht: Kluwer; Lanfredini, Roberta (ed.). 2006. A priori materiale. Uno studio fenomenologico. Milan: Guerini e Associati. The study of the monographs dedicated to Husserlian logic by certain Italian interpreters proved crucial; these interpreters contributed to the aforementioned “rebirth” of Husserlian studies in Italy, initiated by Enzo Paci, and they—in surprising advance of the times—have grasped and investigated, within Husserl’s logic, the “question of the precategorial,” with various allusions and nuances, and with particular reference to the Investigations and to Formal and Transcendental Logic, bringing to light the difficulties posed by this to Phenomenology as a whole (see Bosio, Franco. 1966. Fondazione della logica in Husserl, Milan: Lampugnani Nigri Editore; Melandri, Enzo. 1960. Logica e esperienza in Husserl. Bologna: il Mulino; Raggiunti, Renzo. 1967. Husserl. Dalla logica alla fenomenologia. Florence: Le Monnier; Sancipriano, Mario. 1962. Il logos di Husserl. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo; Voltaggio, Franco. 1965. Fondamenti della logica di Husserl. Milan: Edizioni di Comunità). 6 F. Buongiorno cannot be reduced, at least in certain significant points (I am thinking in particular of the Fifth and the Sixth Investigation), to their traditional characterisation as “pre- phenomenological” work. Rather, they present —if only in embryonic form and between the lines, so to speak—what appears to me to be the decisive problem of phenomenology as a philosophical proposition and as a new, radical theory (and critique) of consciousness, namely: the problem of the pre-categorial, and of its relations with the formations of higher logic. This problem is essentially equivalent to that of the relations between phenomenology and logic, as Giovanni Piana emphasises in his “Introduction” to the Italian edition of Investigations. We read at its opening: The work of Husserl in the field of the problems of logic, which finds a first and noteworthy expression in his Logical Investigations, proves difficult to evaluate even now, above all if one attempts to consider it in the light of contemporary logic in its entirety. This uncertainty is visible both on the part of Husserlian interpreters, and on the part of the specialist in logic.18 The uncertainty in question has deep theoretical roots: whereas the Prolegomena address a radical critique to psychologism, positing the bases for a “pure” logic in the mathematical sense of the term, the six Investigations do not seem to be designed to develop and construct any such “mathematising” logic; rather, they constitute an exercise in genuine phenomenological analysis.19 The question which inevitably follows concerns, therefore, both the structural passage from the critique of psychologism carried out in the Prolegomena to the Investigations themselves, and the very relationship between phenomenological research and logical theory: the inquiry conducted in the six Investigations tend “to break the circle of strictly logical interests, to the point of attempting an elaboration, which has already been relatively accomplished, of intentional acts in general, as happens in the Fifth Investigation”.20 From here arises the accusation—levelled at Husserl—that he even fell into psychologism, in spite of the critical preliminary reflections contained in the Prolegomena. Although Husserl many times denied this accusation, justly noting its incoherence,21 there remains the problem of the impossibility of accessing the execution of the logical problem delineated in the Prolegomena (namely, the

18 Piana, Giovanni. 1968. Introduzione. In: Husserl, Ricerche logiche, xi. 19 Piana observes that “through the studies of logicians whose background—as in the case of Husserl himself—lies in arithmetical and geometrical studies rather than in German Romantic philosophy, the idea emerges of logic as a mathematical discipline (…). That this idea of the math- ematicalness of logic ought to be connected to a critique of the psychologistic tendency was not immediately obvious (…).” Ibid., xiv. This is the reason for the Husserlian interest in Leibniz and, above all, for the logical doctrine of Bernard Bolzano in the Wissenschaftslehre of 1837—whose rediscovery, as is known, Husserl is explicitly credited with in the Entwurf einer “Vorrede” zu den “Logischen Untersuchungen” of 1913, published in 1939 in Tijdschrift voor Philosophie (1:106– 133 and 2:319–333). Here 129, note. 20 Piana, Introduzione. In: Husserl, Ricerche logiche, xviii. 21 Suffice it to mention his words in the Preface to the Sixth Investigation (1920) and in the Entwurf of 1913. Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations 7 realisation of a theory of the possible forms that is configured as an authentic “pure” logic), unless one preliminarily passes through phenomenology. A further question derives from this: in what relation do phenomenology and logic stand to one another? Does formal logic lead one to phenomenology, in the sense that it must in reality precede it—which is to say, does formal logic emerge in its insufficiency only in the light of the phenomenological approach? For while on the one hand logic for Husserl—contra Brentano and, in this respect, pro Kant—does not need to be based on psychology, on the other hand it (if only as a formal logic) does not seem capable of that self-sufficiency and perfect completeness attributed to it by Kant in the First Critique. This is not a trivial problem. If we examine the aforementioned monographs of that Italian scholar who, following Enzo Paci, thematised the problem of history in the late Husserl beginning with the theme of logic (in monographs—it should be noted—written before the Italian translation of the Logical Investigations, with the exception of the Raggiunti text, and even before the publication of the Italian edition of Formal and Transcendental Logic, which dates to 1966), we observe a full awareness of the difficulties and even of the aporias deriving from the complex relation which Husserl instituted between phenomenology and logic—a relation that, wishing to avoid the classic foundational dynamic, sets before the phenomenologist the great challenge of the “order” or the “framework” (Einordnung, to use the Husserlian term) of logic within phenomenology. As Piana justly observes, Husserl himself was not entirely conscious of this complexity in the Logical Investigations: in order to untangle the knot of this problem, “what proves crucial is the idea of the justification of the arithmetical and geometrical construction through the concepts of theory and of the form of theory—a justification, that is, which is based on the distinction of formal levels and thus on the passage to the higher formal level.”22 However, “this point of view is not adequately developed in the Logical Investigations and neither, ultimately, in Formal and Transcendental Logic (…).”23 To find an initial systematic discussion of this specific theme and an authentic awareness of its various problematic aspects, we will have to wait till some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, namely 1906–07, when Husserl held a cycle of lectures on Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, whose publication in Husserliana occurred however long after (in 1985) the period of time under consideration (namely the 1960s). To complete the picture, it is necessary to jump to 1966, the year of the publication of the Italian edition of Formal and Transcendental Logic, in the translation by Guido Davide Neri and with a “Preface” by Enzo Paci. The latter text is of particular importance, since it illustrates the connection between Husserlian logical elaboration and the problems inherent in the Crisis. It could be said that, in Paci’s view, the question of the relations between formal logic and transcendental logic reproduces (or anticipates) the problem of the relation between positive science and philosophy. Paci first warns the reader that

22 Piana, Introduzione. In: Husserl, Ricerche logiche, xxiii. 23 Ibid. 8 F. Buongiorno

“it has often been observed by scholars that Husserl’s fundamental interest always lays in logic (…)” and that “this thesis has its element of truth, but cannot be pushed to the point of isolating the problems of logic from those of general phenomenology, which includes, precisely in relation to logic, the analysis of the experience and of the subjective constitution (…).”24 He then adds: In Formal and Transcendental Logic, the foundation of logic is presented even as an analysis of the historical formation of logic itself: from this point of view the genesis of logic must be reactivated and reconstituted. This task is joined to that of unifying the sciences beginning from their “roots” (…). This awareness must reactivate the sense and the function of the sciences: the theme of Formal and Transcendental Logic, from this point of view, is above all the awareness of the logic.25 This quotation is important for two reasons: in the first place, it affirms the continuity between the investigations conducted by Husserl in Formal and Transcendental Logic and the considerations on the “self-oblivion” of positive science, conducted in The Crisis of European Sciences. In the need for a transcendental foundation of formal logic Paci identifies the inadequacy of the latter, with its merely objective character, to constitute itself as a “guide to critical self-awareness” for the positive sciences—an inadequacy emphasised by Husserl himself, but which here is expressed with particular awareness (and we thus arrive at the second reason for the importance of the aforementioned step) of the necessity to critically bind formal logic (in the Kantian sense of the term as a “self-sufficient” and “self-satis- fied” discipline)—to transcendental logic in the Husserlian sense: “(…) formal logic is not sufficient,” writes Paci, quoting Husserl, “because ‘it is unable to satisfy the idea of an authentic doctrine of science and so to rise to the status of a norm for all the sciences’ (…). To formal logic must then follow transcendental logic, which is to say the study of the subjective aspect of logic, which is ever connected to the critique of the psychologism.”26 Paci does not fail to connect the question of the transcendental to the precategorial (or ante-predicative) problem (which was central in Experience and Judgement, whose translation had appeared just a year before, in 1965, it too accompanied by an “Introduction” by Paci27): Without doubt, all of Husserl’s effort is oriented toward overcoming the division between the material and the formal, between experience and judgement, between original modality and logical structure. Authentic evidence is the pregnant evidence of experience: the common thread which should be chosen is precisely the genesis of the judgement from experience (…). It is thus that one arrives at precategorial or ante-predicative evidence.28

24 Paci, Enzo. 1966. Prefazione. In: Husserl, Edmund. 1966. Logica formale e trascendentale: saggio di critica della ragione logica (trans: Neri, G.D.). Rome-Bari: Laterza. (Republished in 2009, Udine: Mimesis). 9–10. 25 Ibid., 10. 26 Ibid. 27 Husserl, Edmund. 1965. Esperienza e giudizio: ricerche sulla genealogia della logica (trans: Costa, F.). Introduction by E. Paci. Milan: Silva (republished in 2007, Milan: Bompiani). 28 Paci, Prefazione. In: Husserl, Logica formale e trascendentale, 11. Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations 9

(Formal) logic, the transcendental theme and the historical dimension, are, in the eyes of Paci, elements of the same theoretical web that, far from delineating a contradiction between the “various Husserls” or various souls of phenomenology, passes throughout Husserlian thought by determining its continuity.29 We are therefore brought back to the problematic order identified by Piana in relation to the Logical Investigations, namely the theme of the relations between logic and phenomenology, between the objective domain and transcendental sphere. As I have anticipated, this problem was already systematically addressed in volume XXIV of the Husserliana, containing the lectures on the introduction to logic and the theory of knowledge of 1906/07.30 The case of HUA/XXIV is particularly significant and complex for the author of the present essay, for the simple reason that she personally produced its Italian translation, which has been published earlier in 2019. Naturally, multiple and complex relative factors enter into play here, on the one hand in the concrete work of translation of and engagement with the original text, and, on the other, with my personal understanding of the Husserlian discourse. In the very act of addressing myself to this challenging translation —by now many years ago—of a volume of the Husserliana, I bore in mind Klaus Held’s admonition with regard to the methodology of scientific translation, expressed in an interview dating back to 2000: My experience collaborating with colleagues from the most various linguistic realms has taught me that it can be, if not fatal, certainly hindering to the productive reception of the thought of a philosopher in a specific linguistic culture, as well as the source of endless misunderstandings which are in themselves avoidable, when translations are carried out separately, and the translators do not communicate with each other and do not mutually take one another into consideration. Instead of a single Japanese Heidegger, we then encounter half a dozen!31 Fortunately the foremost Husserl translator active in Italy today, Vincenzo Costa, has followed the process of my translation, which also availed itself early on of Stefano Besoli’s advice. While my work certainly took comfort and greater security from this, the experience of having to make translation choices remained quite unavoidable and in some ways overwhelming: the translation of a classic poses to the translator, on the one hand, the challenge of finding, if not “inventing,” the “right

29 It is well known how strong the inclination was, already in Husserl’s time, to read the different “turns” of his thought in a markedly critical and discontinuist way: it suffices to recall, as I have already done, the misunderstandings to which the Fifth and, above all, the Sixth Logical Investigation were subjected by virtue—as Husserl himself complained—of their phenomenological character; or the “transcendental turn” of Ideas I in 1913, which was greeted with great disap- pointment by Husserl’s most direct pupils, who saw in this a betrayal of the programme presented in the Logical Investigations, or even a subjectivistic mystification of phenomenology. 30 Husserl, Edmund. 2008. Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge. Lectures 1906/07 (trans: Hill, C.O.). Dordrecht: Springer. 31 Marini, A., Rizzoli, L. (ed.). 2000. Intervista a Klaus Held sulla traduzione di Husserl e Heidegger. Magazzino di filosofia2:5–17. Here 7. 10 F. Buongiorno word” by which to render the original term and, on the other hand, in many cases requires her to engage with already consolidated choices that can hardly be changed.32 We must therefore remain faithful on many levels and, at the same time, be unfaithful on as many more, to find our own voice, capable of rendering the original text—a recognisable voice, but one which accords with the Husserlian tone. It being neither possible nor useful to enter here into the complex three-way relationship which arose between myself as the translator, myself as a scholar, and Husserl’s words, I will limit myself to recalling two translation issues, which will bring us back to the problem posed by Piana in his “Introduction” to the Italian edition of the Logical Investigations. I am referring to the pair of terms Formenlehre and Kunstlehre. The Introduzione alla logica e alla teoria della conoscenza (this being the title of the Italian translation) truly constitutes the first place in which Husserl makes explicit the stratified articulation of logic and of its relation to phenomenology, as is evident already in the structure given to the text by the German editor (Ulrich Melle): the first part is dedicated to “The Idea of Pure Logic as a Formal Theory of Science,” the second to “Noetics, Theory of Knowledge, and Phenomenology,” and the last part to “The Forms of Objectification.” Indeed, the sense of the lectures consists precisely in the clarification of the fact that pure logic, even when correctly understood in Bolzano’s sense of Wissenschaftslehre, which is to say of morphology (Formenlehre), of the theory of the forms of theory, remains essentially a technology (Kunstlehre) of science, which is to say a regulatory discipline “applied” for a specific purpose (logically correct thinking). The two terms— Kunstlehre and Formenlehre—delineate, in the chosen rendering in Italian, a reference as much to Logical Investigations as to Formal and Transcendental Logic. To underline, on the one hand, the continuity between Husserlian reasoning and the analyses in the Logical Investigations, I have chosen to maintain for Kunstlehre the rendering adopted by Giovanni Piana ever since the translation of the Prolegomena: he translates the term with “technology” (‘tecnologia’) already in § 3 on “The controversial questions,” and renders the title of the fundamental § 11 of Chapter I (dedicated to “Logic as a normative discipline and as a technology”) as “Logic or the doctrine of science as a normative discipline and as a technology [Kunstlehre].”33 Piana’s choice (which followed moreover the French translation (‘technologie’) by H. Élie, A. L. Kelkel and R. Schérer [1949–1963]) is widely justified by the will to introduce Husserl’s reflections into the contemporary debate on

32 I note in passing that the experience of translating a classic represented a very instructive test for me, as compared with translating a living author, totally unpublished in Italy, as was the case with my translation of the contemporary German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In this case, every translation choice has only itself as a point of reference and is therefore constantly decisive, because it creates a referential “canon” for the author in the language of the translation. In other words, this is a work involving very different difficulties and problems, which are almost “demiur- gic,” and which—so to speak—create not only the translated work but, in some way, the author himself (within the context of reception). The image, consistency and referentiality of the author (especially if one is not dealing with a classic) arise—for the community of the Italian readers— through the translation, and so the “first” translation acquires an almost revelatory character. 33 Husserl, Ricerche logiche, Chapter I, § 11 and 44. Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations 11 logic and on its characterisation, in which the diatribe on the relations with psychology entailed a comparison with the decisive position expressed by Kant. The term, however, can also be translated—and has been translated—differently: as Susi Ferrarello has observed, an alternative translation is “technical discipline”, (‘discip- lina tecnica’) one preferred by Paola Basso and Paolo Spinicci in their translation of the lectures on ethics of 1914, and followed, for understandable reasons of continuity, also by Nicola Zippel and Francesco S. Trincia in the successive translation of the ethical lectures of 1920/24.34 If pure logic is, in its preliminary degree, a “morphology,” it is such insofar as it is a technology of science (or of knowledge): in translating the term Formenlehre I have opted to render it as “morphology” (‘morfologia’) (even if Husserl sometimes uses the equivalent term Morphologie, albeit in a much more generic sense), to underline the continuity between the Husserlian discourse and the articulation presented in Formal and Transcendental Logic. As is known, Husserl here distinguishes three degrees of pure logic: the “pure morphology” (Formenlehre) of judgements, or rather the “pure logical grammar;” the “logic of consequences;” and the “logic of truth.” In § 13b he writes: “This pure morphology of judgements is the logical- formal discipline in itself first, which is already in embryo in the ancient analytics, without however reaching its own actualisation”.35 In his lecture of 1906/07, Husserl writes: The lower [level] concerns the meaning forms belonging a priori to the essence of meaning or, which is not an essential limitation, of the proposition, without taking into account truth and falsehood. Prior to the purely apophantic theory of laws is a theory of forms [Formenlehre], a simple anatomy and morphology [Morphologie] of propositions (…). We shall also call this morphology pure grammar, or consider it to be in pure grammar, because it lays down something a priori, therefore, necessarily common to all languages in contrast to the variety of empirical differences of the different languages, to differences with regard to current vocabulary, but also grammatical forms and rules.36 There is therefore continuity with the reflections conducted in Formal and Transcendental Logic, and it is at the same time clear from this brief excursus that HUA/XXIV constitutes for all intents and purposes a deepening of that “idea,” as Piana observes, “of a justification of the arithmetical and geometrical constructions through the concepts of theory and of form of theory—a justification, that is, which is based on the distinction of formal levels and thus on the passage to the higher formal level.”37

34 See Ferrarello, Susi. 2010. Edmund Husserl. Il pensiero etico e l’idea di scienza, Padua: Libreria Universitaria. 21, note 46. I recall incidentally that the translation of “technical discipline” links the Husserlian discourse, rather than to Kant, to the precedent of Franz Brentano and the reflection he conducted in Psicologia dal punto di vista empirico (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), where the term is translated by Liliana Albertazzi precisely with “technical discipline.” 35 Husserl, Logica formale e trascendentale, 67. 36 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, 69. 37 Piana, Introduzione. In: Husserl, Ricerche logiche, xxiii. 12 F. Buongiorno

It is also evident from the lectures, in surprising anticipations of the problem at the centre of Formal and Transcendental Logic, that so stratified a logic can render itself heuristic (which is to say, it can produce knowledge, and not limit itself to dictating formal conditions) through the passage to the noetic, or in other words to the explication of logical acts—a passage that decidedly opens the door, already in 1906/07, to a theory of phenomenological knowledge. It is no coincidence that Husserl already here introduces the tool of phenomenological reduction in an exemplary way in § 35d, on “The phenomenological reduction as the bracketing out (Ausschaltung) of any empirical apperception and all belief in transcendence.”38 Two tendencies or, less radically, two “emphases” in the reception of Husserlian phenomenology, as this was constituted starting from a study of the translations, would appear to have emerged in Italy: one emphasis placed on the question of logic, and one on the theme of history. Once again, it is the relation between the “early” and the “late” Husserl that is at play here: we have seen how Enzo Paci identified a continuity between the two poles in the logical works. In this unitary framework the themes at the centre of Carthesian Meditations also recur; the Meditations were translated for the first time already in 1960 by Filippo Costa. Once again, the bond is made explicit by Paci, for example in a passage of his “Preface” to Formal and Transcendental Logic: “The transcendental, subjective and intersubjective, not to speak of modal, foundation is necessary for the elaboration of formal logic itself. Logic and the ‘theory of knowledge’ cannot be disjoined.”39 Indeed, as Renato Cristin observes in the new edition (1989, most recent ed. 2009) of the Meditations, “phenomenology is here ‘situated’, is coordinated to the historical-existential flux: the question is ‘if and how the act of phenomenology refers to historicity’.”40 Cristin’s interpretation agrees with Paci’s, and completes it: “the problems of transcendental logic spill into and are then re-elaborated in the Meditations as possible developments of logic within the questions of personality and of the subject, knowledge and experience, following a path that leads to something like a ‘logic of intersubjectivity’”.41 It is perhaps this expression of Cristin’s that best condenses the specificity of the Italian interpretation of phenomenology, at least in that phase when—during the 1960s—the principal Husserlian works were translated, within a substantially uni-

38 Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, § 35d. 206ff. 39 Paci, Prefazione. In: Husserl, Logica formale e trascendentale, 10. 40 Cristin, Renato. 2009. Presentazione. In: Husserl, Edmund. Meditazioni cartesiane. Con l’aggiunta dei discorsi parigini. Milan: Bompiani. (First edition: 1960). xiv. (Cristin quotes Husserl from 140ff. of the text). In reality, this theme is central above all to the VI Cartesian Meditation, which Eugen Fink developed in his Habilitation thesis in the footsteps of—and in perfect agreement with—Husserl (whose intention was to include it in the German edition of the Meditations). See Fink, Eugen. 1988. VI. Cartesianische Meditation. Teil I: Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre; Teil II: Ergänzungsband, ed. H. Ebeling, G. van Kerckhoven. Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff; Italian translation (2009): Sesta meditazione cartesiana. L’idea di una dottrina trascendentale del metodo. Parte I, ed. A. Marini. Milan: Franco Angeli. 41 R. Cristin, Presentazione. In: Husserl, Meditazioni cartesiane, xiv. Husserl’s Phenomenology Through His Italian Translations 13 tary cultural project. The very first logical elaboration of Husserl, which very much showed the effects of his training as a mathematician and of his initial experience in the psychological school of Brentano, is understood as a theoretical preparation to the unfolding of the mature phenomenology—an inevitable and necessary preparation, because only by confronting and re-elaborating the theme of logic was it possible to find, within that theme, a pre-categorial dimension, which opened the way to the discovery of the territory of Lebenswelt. It is certainly possible to discuss the limits of such a reading, which tends to conceive the entire Husserlian elaboration as aiming at the “humanistic” and “historical” project of the Crisis—a functionalisa- tion already rejected, in his time, by Giulio Preti (as Roberto Gronda recalls in his essay in this volume), who defined the Husserlian reflections on the crisis of European humanity as “a philosopher’s follies,” which derive from an inversion of the correct relations between life and philosophy, from the belief that the crisis of humanity depends on the crisis of philosophy and not vice versa. It is however doubtless, in my modest opinion, that Husserl’s work is marked by a continuity, whose guiding thread, amidst oscillations and second thoughts, is to be seen in sil- houette precisely in the development of the logical theme: rather than deriving from the critique of psychologism, phenomenology emerges as an inevitable theoretical consequence (or a premise?) of the critique of traditional formal logic, whose antipsychologistic critique is on the other hand nothing but a chapter, decisive as it may be. It is an unquestionable merit of Husserl’s Italian interpreters (and translators) to have grasped this guiding thread early on, in the second phase of phenomenological studies in Italy, begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through the initiative of Enzo Paci, and following the first phase inaugurated by Antonio Banfi’s research in the 1920s. There would be a great deal to say and to investigate regarding what might be defined as the “third phase” of Italian phenomenological studies. This extends up to the present day and is characterised by the progressive translation of the numerous volumes of Husserliana through the work of a variety of translators and interpreters, and thus by the extension and, as it were, by the fragmentation of phenomenological research, which is no longer marked by that programmatic unity of intentions pursued by Paci and by his “school”—a unity which on the other hand, as has been seen, was a product of its historical time. The more numerous and diver- sified the theoretical interests, interpretative approaches and authors involved are, the more difficult it is to initiate a systematic reflection on this “third phase”—not to speak of the difficulties deriving from the lack of an adequate temporal distance allowing one to rebuild, ex post facto, the possible convergences and points of contact. For this reason, an investigation of this type cannot help but be postponed to some near point in the future, together with a systematic evaluation not only of what Husserl has meant for Italian philosophical culture as a whole, but also (and above all) of what the Italian interpretation of Husserl has represented—theoretically and historically—for Husserl’s phenomenology itself. 14 F. Buongiorno

Federica Buongiorno is a post-doctoral researcher and a Habilitation candidate at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Technology of Dresden (Germany), where she collaborates with the chair of Philosophy of Technology. She earned a PhD from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2013, which was followed by post-doc scholarships from several Italian and German institutions. She is the Editor-in-chief of the international philosophy journal Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age, Co-editor of the “Umweg” series (Inschibboleth Edizioni), and an Editor of the philosophy journals Lo Sguardo and Philosophy Study. Her main research areas are Husserlian Phenomenology and its heritage (with a special eye to the Italian tradition), the philosophy of technology, and digital culture. She authored the monographs La linea del tempo. Coscienza, percezione, memoria tra Bergson e Husserl (new ed. Rome 2018), Intuizione e riflessione nella fenomenologia di Edmund Husserl (Rome 2017), and Logica delle forme sensibili. Sul precategoriale nel primo Husserl (Rome 2014). Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian Philosophy

Luca Maria Scarantino

Abstract This paper deals with the early entrance of phenomenology in Italy (1923–1926). It focuses on the work of Antonio Banfi, from his early essays devoted to Husserl’s work to the release of his main work, the Principi di una teoria della ragione. It emphasizes the essential role of Husserl’s philosophy in the evolution of Italian thought. It pays special attention to the relevance of phenomenology for the development of a transcendental philosophy in Italy. Finally, it suggests that Banfi’s philosophy sets key conceptual tools for thinking of philosophy as a cross-cultural endeavor. In 1923, the Rivista di Filosofia published two short essays on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Both authored by Antonio Banfi, these essays marked the beginning of a new era in Italian philosophy: it was through them that phenomenology made its first appearance ever in Italy.1 In the early 1920s, Antonio Banfi—then a 37-year-old scholar—was surveying the Western philosophical landscape. In his lifelong endeavor to get to the roots of the “crisis of culture and civilization,”2 the encounter with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl would prove to be pivotal—not only for his own philosophical growth, but also for the further evolution of Italian thought. The twofold effect of such encounter was highlighted in a series of what has now become classic studies

1 Banfi, Antonio. 1923. La tendenza logistica nella filosofia tedesca contemporanea e le “Ricerche logiche” di Edmund Husserl. Rivista di filosofia 14:115–133; Banfi, Antonio. 1923. La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl e l’autonomia ideale della sfera teoretica. Rivista di filosofia 14:208–224. Previous occasional references to Husserl can be traced back to Francesco De Sarlo, Gaetano Capone Braga, and Guido De Ruggiero, see: Mocchi, Mauro. 1990. Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia. Il dibattito sulla fenomenologia: 1923–1940. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 11–14. 2 Banfi never deflected from this interest: even in the early 1940s, he chose to inaugurate his journal Studi filosofici (1940–1949) by a review article titled “Situazione della filosofia contemporanea”. The importance of crisis in his work has been underlined by Neri, Guido Davide. 1988. Crisi e costruzione della storia: gli sviluppi del pensiero di Antonio Banfi. Naples: Bibliopolis; Paci, Enzo. 1958. Vita e ragione in Antonio Banfi. aut aut 43–44:56–66; Scarantino, Luca Maria. 2007. Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.

L. M. Scarantino (*) IULM, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 15 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_2 16 L. M. Scarantino of this segment of history, including works of Paci,3 Papi,4 Sini,5 Neri,6 and Salemi.7 This paper aligns itself with these works. It focuses on the seminal stage of Banfi’s reading of phenomenology, from the early essays of 1923 to the release of his main work, the Principi di una teoria della ragione [PTR] in 19268; it emphasizes the critical role played by Husserl’s philosophy in the development of Banfi’s own thought; and it pays special attention to the relevance of his philosophy for current theoretical and cultural concerns. Phenomenology shaped Banfi’s “transcendental rationalism” in at least two con- current ways. First, it was grafted onto a pre-existing neo-Kantian framework. By conceiving the object and the subject of knowledge as functional poles of cognition instead of as two metaphysical hypostases, Banfi had already parted ways with ontological realism. Within this epistemic or relational functionalism, phenomenology is credited with “conceiving theoreticity in such a way that every and any form of objectivity is comprehended and solved in a transcendental way, according to the structural, immanent law of pure consciousness.”9 Second, and this is possibly a key aspect of Banfi’s philosophy that has received the least scholarly attention, he established a structural link between phenomenology and the “pragmatic philosophies.” In his view, they share the same transcendental approach and provide similar frames of reference for a dialogic, anti-dogmatic, and antiauthoritarian structure of the epistemic world. Through this complex thread with other philosophical approaches, the introduction of phenomenology marked a sharp discontinuity within Italian philosophy. Banfi was fully aware of its innovative potential. His ideas were immediately perceived by the new generations of intellectuals as a revolutionary departure from the traditional idealistic way of doing philosophy: they were simply more in keeping with the then growing urgency to address the historical crisis of European civilization. As a result, his intellectual legacy permeated diverse facets of Italian culture from the 1930s on—from arts and architecture to literary and film critique, from social and political thoughts back to its roots in the philosophical realm.10 His

3 Paci, Vita e ragione in Antonio Banfi; Paci, Enzo. 1969. Antonio Banfi vivente. In: Antonio Banfi e il pensiero contemporaneo. Atti del Convegno di studi banfiani (Reggio Emilia, 13–14 maggio 1967) 34–45. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 4 Papi, Fulvio. 1961. Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi. Florence: Parenti. 5 Sini, Carlo. 1965. La fenomenologia in Italia. Lo sviluppo storico. Revue internationale de philosophie 71–72 (1–2):125–139. 6 Neri, Guido Davide. 1969. Riflessione pragmatica e riflessione teoretica in Banfi. In: Antonio Banfi e il pensiero contemporaneo, 18–33. 7 Salemi, Roselina. 1976. Antonio Banfi, the First Italian Interpreter of Phenomenology. In:The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana ix, ed. Anna-Teresa Timienecka, 441–459. Dordrecht: Reidel. 8 Banfi, Antonio. 1926. Principi di una teoria della ragione [PTR]. Turin: Paravia. 9 Ibid., 570. 10 For the wide extent of Banfi’s influence on Italian culture, with particular focus on the journal Corrente, see Scarantino, Luca Maria. 2004. Giulio Preti (Pavia 1911–Djerba 1972): A Critical Rationalist. Diogenes 202:141–147; Scarantino, Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale. Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian… 17

transcendental rationalism gave rise to a set of conceptual tools that became extraordinarily relevant for core philosophical concerns of his time as they are for contemporary philosophy. While Banfi is credited here with launching its theoretical and historical scheme, it needs to be acknowledged that it was actually his known disciple Giulio Preti who later developed and brought the scheme to its ultimate philosophical consequences. It was Preti who successfully and completely integrated phenomenology with pragmatism, secured a dimension of radical historicity into Banfi’s transcendental rationalism, and, through the elaboration of a “historical and objective transcendentalism,” embedded the formal value of truth into immediate or pure experience. To Preti we owe an extremely sophisticated epistemic construction of the moral world, one that escapes both a dogmatic universalism of metaphysical reason and the risks of cultural relativism: we may see in such construction a theoretical bedrock of “interculturality.” Its original epistemic framework can be traced to Banfi’s transcendental rationalism, for it contained the conditions for a relational and anti-dogmatic theory of knowledge, one that is open to a plurality of cultural forms, of conceptual systems, and of spiritual traditions. From their very onset, the two essays published in 1923 suggest a theoretical progression between Kant’s critical philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology. In the first essay, Banfi’s discourse revolves around the anti-psychologism of the Logical Investigations (“Husserl establishes in a radical way the independence of the logical order from the psychological”);11 in the second, he shifted his focus to the theme of intentionality. In particular, he underscores two aspects of the intentionality of the acts of consciousness: the relational nature of the poles of cognition (subject/object), and their immanence in the same acts of consciousness. It is indeed the combination of these two elements that makes it possible for Husserl to overcome “the dogmatism inherent in critical philosophy.”12 This departure from Kantianism—which, despite its limitations, represents “the most radical classic attempt”13 to overcome the contradictions of metaphysics—unveils phenomenology as a modern formulation of the nature of knowledge. Banfi sees Husserl’s philosophy as a true philosophy of crisis. In his view, Husserl’s theory of intentionality disrupts through the épochè the metaphysical correlation between perception and representation: the ontological necessity of this correlation becomes a historical one, while the object of knowledge, losing its transcendence, becomes “a correlate of the essence of consciousness; it does not cling, in and for itself, to that particular determination; and it admits a variety of determinations (…) depending on the intentional acts directed to it.”14 That Banfi was able to perceive the historical and cultural implications of phenomenology at this early stage was already emphasized by Enzo Paci, Fulvio Papi

11 Banfi, La tendenza logistica, 127. 12 Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 211. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 213. 18 L. M. Scarantino and Roselina Salemi.15 What should be highlighted now is the fact that, according to Banfi, the emphasis on the historical nature of knowledge gives phenomenology the distinctive character of an overall epistemology for an open and anti-dogmatic philosophy: phenomenology is at the opposite end of the spectrum of dogmatic thought: the latter is focused on the object, on transcendence, and particularly on the existing reality, in which we also exist; phenomenological intuition, on the contrary, withholds this natural movement of thought, it neutralizes the thesis of natural objectivity and of the existence of the world—not to question its very existence, but so that existence is no longer conceived as an essential feature of thought, or, more precisely, so that the possibility of judgments based on existence is ruled out.16 Phenomenology is thus “inherently critical knowledge.”17 It “has no end in any particular objectivity; on the contrary it always resolves them according to their universal meanings and relations.”18 Phenomenology aims at “resolving in ideal terms the antithesis of subject and object, so that the particular forms of this antithesis can no longer be held as absolutely valid.”19 These considerations are developed into a more comprehensive analysis in the second part of the Principi di una teoria della ragione. The leitmotiv of the PTR is summarized in the conclusion of the volume. Here, rationality is described as (…) the sphere of pure theoretical autonomy: it has a transcendental, not a dogmatic ground; it does not attempt to underlay experience with an absolute being, but strives to raise it to an autonomous systematic organization, according to laws whose validity does not depend on a particular position of experience itself. (…) the pure rational system is therefore the order where the validity and the endless motility of spirit are recognized in the spirit’s pure and ideal instances and also in its being part of a wider web of transcendental relations, and to the entanglement of its facets into complex phenomenological layers, whence it derives its vital fecundity.20 The system of rationality therefore “is not the order of an absolute being of experience, but rather the law of its endless vitality—a law that ceaselessly overcomes itself, for the principle of reason is essentially a principle of transcendental autonomy.”21 Phenomenology has made possible this open organization of knowledge—the sistematica aperta del sapere in Banfi’s terms. In the section of the PTR devoted to

15 Paci remarked that Banfi focused on phenomenology to portray how “praxis and historicity were brought together;” in Paci’s view, such a reading was “almost miraculous” in 1926, as it was only validated by the publication of Ideen II in 1952. (Paci, Antonio Banfi vivente, 40). Salemi developed a similar argument in terms of Banfi “forerunning” later developments of Husserl’s philosophy. (See Salemi, Antonio Banfi, the First Italian Interpreter of Phenomenology, 448ff.). See also Papi, Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi. 16 Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 213. 17 Ibid., 215. 18 Ibid., 223. 19 Ibid., 224. 20 PTR, 579–580. 21 Ibid., 580. Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian… 19

“Husserl’s pure phenomenology,” Banfi describes it as “the firmest attempt in today’s philosophy to bring about a transcendental rationalism and a pure, anti- dogmatic, transcendental organization of thought.”22 Husserl has properly “expunged all psychological and empirical elements from logic,” as he had explained in the first of the two essays published in 1923: the “speculative, evident, and apodictic constituent of the laws of logic cannot rely on psychology, which, as an empirical science, can only provide a posteriori laws.”23 On the contrary, Banfi sees as consistent with a transcendental theory of knowledge, and even as something that gives shape to it, the fact that for phenomenology “eidetic autonomy is not a datum of knowledge, but rather an instance of a rational order whose level experience ought to be elevated to, in order to purify itself from the partial perspective of each particular standpoint.”24 To bring this about, “this eidetic and ontological instance should not be organized according to rational objectivity, but rather according to the transcendental synthesis through which subject and object relate to each other in the sphere of pure consciousness.”25 In other words, in consonance with critical philosophy, phenomenology stipulates how particular experiences and individual standpoints can be brought onto a wider sphere of intersubjectivity, i.e. of rationality; but, unlike the critical tradition, it succeeds in maintaining the transcendental, non-metaphysical nature of such rational concepts by replacing rational objectivity with a relational or functional correlation of the cognitive functions. Precisely in this peculiar way of moving from particular experience onto a shared eidetic sphere lies the anti-dogmatic power of Husserl’s philosophy. As evident in the 1923 studies, then in the PTR, in phenomenology the object “is always and essentially set in a relation to the subject.” A transcendental functionalism of tre- mendous conceptual and historical reach is thus introduced: (…) in Husserl, the relation between the sphere of the intelligible and the synthesis of consciousness is no longer grounded in a metaphysical act in which the former would degrade into the latter; their relation is rather a product of rational organization, as intelligible purity always relates to the universal form of the synthesis of consciousness. Here, Leibniz’s ontological rationalism and Kant’s transcendentalism come together.26 Still, we are confronted with an even more meaningful statement: “what is originally given in intuition should be taken as what is given, but also within the boundaries through which it is given—and, as we shall see, never as an absolute given of

22 Ibid., 557. 23 Ibid. (See Banfi, La tendenza logistica, 125). Even more pertinent would be the following clause: “Even if the laws of logic were just normative interpretations of psychological regularities, such that these would justify them, they would be valid for psychological facts only; while they indeed refer to facts that go beyond psychological processes, to spheres of objectivity whose validity does not depend on psychology.” PTR, 558. 24 Ibid., 561. “It is fair to say that Husserl’s main concern is to provide a universal theoretical organization that not only brings together the complex diversity of experience, but also gathers the various directions of knowledge under a consistent, rational meaning.” Ibid., 669. 25 Ibid., 569. 26 Ibid., 563. 20 L. M. Scarantino existence.”27 Such is indeed “for Husserl, the principle of all principles.”28 Intuition is always synthetic: its content is not an immediate, simple perception of “elementary” and ontologically irreducible data, but rather the unitary synthesis of a set of perceptions, each of which is in itself a synthetic unity. This is the conceptual cornerstone where pragmatism and phenomenology converge. Pragmatic experience is pervaded by meaning. Intuitive perception, sensory or otherwise, carries in itself the principles of its own significance: the gestalt syntheses that form our pure, pragmatic experience have an autonomous legality, an objectivity, that is at the same time a perceptive a priori and a conceptual a posteriori. Their content changes according to historical and cultural conditions: The tower that I see across my window, the thick ivy on the wall, the faraway houses in the plain, or the man laboring the field under the sun: they all establish a correlation with my mind according to diverse features and meanings, each of which refers to a particular intuitive fulfillment. Each of these concrete perceptions, though, is also an ideal synthesis of such fulfillments: it gathers and articulates them theoretically, and it organizes them following an order that adumbrates an ideal relatedness, in which their partial dimension is solved and their concreteness appears as a mere expression of relative relations, according to universal laws. (…) Intuitive “stuff” is therefore pervaded by a theoretical exigency, which explains its unity and through which the various intuitive fulfillments are organized.29 That the intuitions of experience are clusters of meanings—in other words, that they carry in themselves the conditions of their own understandability—is the revolutionary idea that underpins the pragmatic conception of the apriori. It entered Banfi’s philosophy through phenomenology and eventually became one of its theoretical pillars. Banfi was fully aware of this convergence. In a footnote of the Principi, he remarks that pragmatism “might well join the transcendental and phenomenological movements,”30 and he adds that despite the relevance of pragmatism for trascenden- talism, “the place it deserves within contemporary thought is yet to be fully recognized.”31 As a matter of fact, Banfi was already on the cusp between two traditions. By affirming the epistemic autonomy of perceptive contentsvis-à-vis the psychological process of their acquisition, he was saying that the syntheses of intuition do not depend on a psychophysical functionality, but rather that they follow other laws—of evolutionary, historical, and cultural nature. Husserl’s anti-psychologism

27 Ibid., 562. 28 Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 212. 29 Ibid., 52. 30 PTR, 231. 31 Ibid. We find again the same assessment at the end of the PTR. Banfi states that “the method of pragmatism” sheds light onto “the practical and pragmatic instances of every conceptual objectivity, as well as of every philosophical synthesis provided by intuition,” and adds that this task “is not only fully justified, but it shall also be developed in a universal direction, in order to overcome the abstract conceptual realism, a fallacy that empiricism shares with dogmatic rationalism.” Ibid., 583. See also Banfi, Antonio. 1925. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung. Rivista di Filosofia 16:73–81 (74)—where “transcendental idealism, rationalism, and empiricism come together” in Husserl’s philosophy. Enzo Paci remarked that Banfi’s philosophy could be seen as a “pragmatic transcendentalism of reason.” Paci, Vita e ragione in Antonio Banfi, 63. Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian… 21 here becomes one with the historicity of the formal structures of knowledge put forward by pragmatism. The meanings of perception—such as the immediate recognition of a tower, a group of houses, or a peasant—are a product of our historical and cultural heritage: they are embedded in our collective sets of meanings, in our logical schemes, and in our language in a way that generates the forms of our perception and yields our immediate perceptive syntheses. Banfi’s radical immanentism thus emerges in all clarity. The conditions of understandability of immediate experience—whether we call it pure, intuitive, or pragmatic experience—are embedded in experience itself. Our Erlebnisse, the forms of our immediate perception, include the conceptual structures through which objec- tivities are constituted. They enter the cognitive process along with intuition: “perception is the product of a web of intuitive elements, related according to an order that is not affected by the presence of those elements, and in which perception finds its ideal objectivity.”32 Synthetic a priori is embedded in pragmatic experience and enters the mind along with perception. In the act of knowledge, intuitive determination and rational universalization cannot be disentangled. Not unlike the poles of knowledge, their distinction is always and exclusively a functional one: (…) since the cognitive synthesis expresses the transposition of the partial relations between subject and object onto the order of their pure and universal correlation (…), each time that a datum is elevated to this cognitive synthesis, it is also posed for this complex system of relations; it is related to other data; its value no longer depends on its immediate intuited- ness, but on its universal, endless theoretical relation with the whole set of intuitions. This instance of knowledge, in which a content is organized according to a universal order and in which intuition finds a unity over a plurality of layers (a unity that is never brought to an end, but is ceaselessly regenerated)—this instance is precisely the instance of rationality.33 Banfi shows how phenomenology provides the overall scheme to this transcendental resolution of pragmatic experience. He repeatedly emphasizes that critical and gestalt philosophies are integrated and freed from any dogmatic remains thanks to Husserl’s intuition of essences, as these cognitive essences are no longer conceived as mere objects of knowledge but as unities that are already conceptually constructed.34 The plurality of intuitive perceptions is subsumed under a meaningful universality that is always open to further transformations:

32 PTR, 99–100. See also: ibid., 566 and ibid., 567, where phenomenology is described as the science “of the synthetic and transcendental structure of reality.” 33 Ibid., 63–64. It may be observed that quotations from the PTR leap from the final pages of the volume to earlier parts of it. This may require some explanation: the first part of the increase size of PTR presents Banfi’s own philosophical tenets, while the second half provides a thorough historical survey of the theories of reason in modern philosophy. It is only through the interplay of these two parts that we can isolate and observe the role that phenomenology played in the formation of Banfi’s transcendentalism. 34 See Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 211—where he states that neo-Kantian philosophy has indeed purified the transcendental standpoint, but at the same time stresses that the need for a sphere of thought freed from the dogmatism of reality “is merely postulated here: hence (…) its tendency to change its nature of thought as concrete philosophical knowledge into a fundamental and radical being of thought.” These themes are present everywhere in the PTR. 22 L. M. Scarantino

The synthesis that [phenomenology] sets as a systematic principle of knowledge does not erase the diversity and complexity of experience: it overcomes their absolute givenness without erasing the relational validity of their particularity; it does not deduct them from an abstract concept, but resolves them into its living systematic organization.35 We have already seen that this phenomenological scheme is overtly identified with transcendental rationalism.36 It brings together, and to some extent sheds new light on, ideas that belong to a plurality of philosophical positions, ranging from critical philosophy to the neo-Kantian schools, to pragmatism. Banfi seems to see in these approaches an affinity that brings them together into the family of “transcendental philosophies.” This is also why he closely follows the international debate, in which these philosophies were brought into engagement. In particular, he examines the evolution of the Husserlian movement with meticulous attention. He carefully reports on the complexity of positions that were appearing within the “phenomenological school.” The PTR includes a multitude of remarks on the works of various representatives of this movement: among them Gerda Walther, Hedwig Conrad- Martius, Jean Hering, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, and Dietrich Mahnke. In the Rivista di filosofia, Banfi reviewed in detail the debates and researches published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung;37 further analyses appeared in various journals over the years.38 Then, in 1946, he joined the editorial board of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.39 Indeed, the encounter with phenomenology became for Banfi “truly and above all, the acquisition of a spiritual family.”40 It set once and for all the conceptual scheme of Italian transcendentalism41; and it inaugurated a peculiar philosophical style, further to be continued by his disciples, aiming at finding some sort of theoretical affinity among apparently divergent philosophical schools, in order to reconstruct a theoretically consistent picture of contemporary philosophy. In this process, though, Banfi also discusses what he considers as potential shortcomings in Husserl’s work, suggesting possible transformations, revisions, or integrations.

35 PTR, 570. 36 Ibid., 571. 37 See Banfi, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung. Rivista di Filosofia 16; Banfi, Antonio. 1926. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung. Rivista di Filosofia 17:175–179. 38 Banfi, Antonio. Filosofia fenomenologica. La Cultura 10:463–472; Banfi, Antonio. 1939. Edmund Husserl. Civiltà moderna 11:52–63; Banfi, Antonio. 1939. La fenomenologia e il compito del pensiero contemporaneo. Revue internationale de philosophie 1 (2):326–341. 39 See Salemi, Antonio Banfi, the First Italian Interpreter of Phenomenology, 459. 40 Banfi, Antonio. 1967. Tre maestri. In: Umanità. Pagine autobiografiche raccordate da Daria Banfi Malaguzzi. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Franco. 122–123. 41 See Banfi, Edmund Husserl, 52. Husserl “rediscovered the idea of reason, he affirmed its absolute validity as a rule of philosophy and of knowledge altogether, translated it into an open, systematic organization of experience, and lived and shed light on the spiritual meaning and value of such new wisdom.” An analysis of Banfi’s essays “Edmund Husserl” and “La fenomenologia e il compito del pensiero contemporaneo” can be found in Mocchi, Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia, 81ff. Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian… 23

Banfi’s main critique is directed at Husserl’s intuition. Due to its wide-ranging scope, in his view it fails to distinguish the specificity of the rational moment in relation to sensory data: “we must remark that the concept of intuition seems to refer to a functionality that presents both sensory data and rational essence alike as given to consciousness; as such, it seems unfit to express the specificity of the rational instance.”42 This criticism is supplemented by a focus on Husserl’s notion of consciousness: this appears to Banfi as overly schematic and as an unsuitable locus to bring together the plurality of eidetic positions. His writing suggests that Husserl identifies “the systematic and rational autonomy of the eidetic sphere” with the “sphere of pure consciousness”43 in a way that leads phenomenology to a dilemma: a return to psychologism or a rigid and schematic conception of rationality. The same criticism was formulated in the second study of 1923: here, the concept if intuition “brings into phenomenology not only an anomalous feature of strong psychological nature, but also a principle that conceals the relation between individual particularity and essence, so that the interplay of the various eidetic spheres in phenomenology and in the essence of pure consciousness is no longer intelligible as a unity.”44 In short, to Banfi, Husserl’s phenomenology clearly points to a critical issue in the theory of knowledge, i.e. the autonomy of the eidetic sphere in relation to the sphere of existence; it functionally constructs the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity through which the eidetic is organized; but it fails to articulate the intrinsic plurality of eidetic resolutions in a systematic universality. Correspondingly, the principal shortcoming of phenomenology appears to Banfi to be its incapacity to move from a non-dogmatic resolution of the plurality of experience to its “universal theoretical organization.”45 According to Fulvio Papi,46 this is where the theoretical encounter between Banfi and Husserl ends. Indeed, it does seem that the first stage of transcendentalism has been completed. The key to overcome Banfi’s dilemma will be provided by Giulio Preti, his foremost disciple, in a way that would give a pragmatic turn to transcendental rationalism. Preti underlined that noetic intentionality is always related to a social and historically situated subject—one that, to borrow Michael Baxandall’s phrase, is embedded in a “period eye.” He showed that Banfi’s graft of phenomenology onto a critical tradition must necessarily lead to a plurality of formal universalities

42 PTR, 571. 43 Ibid., 573. 44 Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 222. 45 PTR, 575. “(…) here lies the main value of phenomenology: the object, whether real or ideal, is split to reveal the richness and the universality of its content, while the ideal nature of the synthesis that establishes it stems from the intentional orientation of the subject. Even the most abstract concepts observe this law, since their givenness as concepts is related to a position of the subject. And yet, is this enough to attain a universal, theoretical organization of experience? Is it not just a way to overcome the dogmatic position of the intuitive particularities of a given subjectivity?” PTR, 575. A similar criticism appears again in 1939: see Mocchi, Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia, 90; Neri, Guido Davide. 1959. Nota su Banfi, Husserl e il concetto di intuizione. aut aut 9:373–377. 46 See Papi, Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi, 105. 24 L. M. Scarantino of knowledge; that there is no “eidetic sphere” altogether, but a plurality of such spheres that actually coexist in the concrete historical time; and that a radical plural- ism should be applied not only to the set of regional ontologies, but to the sphere of formal ontologies as well. Building on Banfi’s scheme in his attempt to overcome its inherent dilemma and thereby taking it to its ultimate philosophical consequences, Preti shows that rational discourse is never “radical.” On the contrary, it always deals with sets of actual data, or with data that are foreshadowed by the intentional horizon of actual data. Not only: it also deals with signs, which refer to their references in an indirect, mediated, multi-situational, and conventional way. They therefore presuppose an actual worldly horizon, and an intersubjective community in which the discourse is actually developed.47 Banfi was not inclined to take the same step. For him, the historicity of knowledge is still bound to the Hegelian shape of a phenomenology of the forms of knowledge. As a transcendental philosophy, phenomenology remains therefore unable to produce an overarching, universal system of reason: while the concern for a pure, systematic rationality, expunged of dogmatic errors, finds a paramount scheme in phenomenology, it nonetheless cannot find in there an ultimate and universal solution, but only a partial validity of theoretical attitudes. This is because the sphere of pure theoretical synthesis is assimilated to the structure of consciousness, while the latter is but a phenomenological instance of the former.48 Reassessed by Preti through a deeper understanding of the pragmatic tradition, the “structure of consciousness” which Banfi saw as the weak point of Husserl’s theory clears the space for a conception of rationality embedded in a peculiar form of historicity of the ‘Lebenswelt’, or historicity of pragmatic experience. The formal validity of knowledge is thus moored to the concrete historical circumstances in which the systems of knowledge take shape, with their constitutive intentionalities, their criteria of validity, their logic, and their cultural structures.49 Preti projects formal objectivity—Banfi’s “eidetic sphere”—onto the history of culturalevolution,

47 Preti, Giulio. 1962. Il linguaggio della filosofia. In: Preti, Giulio. 1976. Saggi filosofici. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 471. The following remark shall not be overlooked: “Our regional ontologies, our frameworks of the cultural world, will be set within the limits of a historical culture, of actually used or concretely available languages. They will be set, in other terms, in the sphere of the relative. But we must be very careful here. Once the concept of ‘absolute’ has lost its sense, so does the correlative concept of ‘relative’.” Ibid., 473–474. See also: Preti, Giulio. 2003. In principio era la carne… (1963–1964). Rivista di storia della filosofia 58:103–143 (135)—where Preti suggests that the model of “encounter” and mutual “contamination” of the sciences can be applied to formal systems of transcendental ideas, i. e. for cultures, as well. 48 PTR, 576. 49 This is how Preti successfully transforms the ontological necessity of the validity of representation into a historical necessity. The historicity of culture corresponds to “a particular orientation of culture, to a specific function, or to a set of specific functions, that a particular culture assigns to knowledge.” Preti, Giulio. 1976. Criticità e linguaggio perfetto. In: Saggi filosofici, 120. About the departure of Preti’s philosophy from Banfi, in whose rationalism he saw by the late 1940s the flaw of dissolving “each particular synthesis in the infinity of the idea,” see in particular Scarantino, Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale, 160–161. Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian… 25 to show that the forms of our immediate experience change with such ongoing evolution. This is why he will consider pragmatism as a “much deeper and more authentic historicism than many speculative, spiritualistic or rationalistic forms of historicism.”50 Seen from today’s point of view, his elaboration of Banfi’s philosophy sets key conceptual tools for thinking of philosophy as a cross-cultural endeavor, and for empowering philosophy with the epistemic capacity of dismantling argu- mentative, cultural, and interpersonal barriers. Antonio Banfi “is a tireless scholar” and “has a good knowledge of German philosophy from Kant to today,” writes Michele Federico Sciacca in his Filosofia italiana nel secolo xx.51 Surprisingly enough, he adds that this competence, on which Banfi has “profitably built to address some theoretical problems” and which “allowed him to bring some recent theories into Italy”, also “harmed him” inasmuch as to some extent “it cut him off from the cultural climate of Italy.”52 Sciacca’s opinion might reflect some internal dynamics of Italian philosophy during his time. From a contemporary point of view, however, and in the wider context of debates today, things seem a bit different. By bringing phenomenology into a transcendental and increasingly pragmatic scheme, Banfi paved the way for a philosophical movement of extraordinary relevance for some of our current concerns in philosophy. Rather than an isolated minority, it might be time to give proper recognition to Banfi and the movement he inspired as an undeniable mainstream in Italian philosophy. The extraordinary philosophical depth of his transcendental rationalism invites us to reinterpret the history of Italian philosophy in the last century as a critical, phenomenological, pragmatic, and empirical continuity. While it has attained its peak in Giulio Preti’s work, it is fair to repeat that it permeated a large part of the philosophical, artistic, and literary culture of Italy thanks to the scholarly and academic efforts deployed by Antonio Banfi.53 “Pure phenomenology,” Banfi writes in the PTR, “has no end in a reality, be it an empirical or a metaphysical one: it is rather a theoretical stance in which any sort of objectivity is encompassed and resolved in a transcendental sense, according to the structural law inherent in pure consciousness.”54 Banfi might well have pushed the boundaries of what a rigorous textual reading of Husserl would allow; and some of his interpretations may even appear theoretically forced. Yet he pursued and initiated a revolutionary philosophical program in which his construal of Husserl’s work

50 Preti, Giulio. 1976. Dewey e la filosofia della scienza. In: Saggi filosofici, 88. 51 Sciacca, Michele Federico. 1997. La filosofia italiana nel secolo xx, ed. N. Incardona. Palermo: Epos. 254. 52 Ibid. 53 Mario Dal Pra was one of the first who designated this development under the label of Banfi’s “critical rationalism,” which alike Luciano Anceschi he traced back to the PTR. See Dal Pra, Mario. 1985. Il razionalismo critico. In: La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi31–92. Bari: Laterza. 3; Anceschi, Luciano. 1978. L’insegnamento di Antonio Banfi. Belfagor 33:335–342 (335). A detailed analysis can be found in the first part of Scarantino,Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale. 54 PTR, 570. 26 L. M. Scarantino plays a critical role. His philosophical work displays an uncommon sensitivity for the deep motives underlying the crisis of European civilization and a foresight of its ultimate cause, the loss of centrality of Western thought in the context of the new contemporary order. Rethinking his own “philosophical standpoint” at the end of the 1940s, Banfi recalled that the crises of contemporary thought led him to consider “the problem of a systematic organization of knowledge,” a concern that he shared with many philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century: Yet, the most consistent attempt to find a solution, the most self-aware of its cultural value, was in my view represented by Husserl’s phenomenology—as a discovery of a steady and smooth rule of reason, ranging within the field of experience with no limit whatsoever.55 In this far-reaching philosophical vision, we should place Banfi’s conception of phenomenology in the broader context of his search for a “spiritual family.” For all the limitations we can find in his philosophy, he provided the immensely powerful idea of a “transcendental revolution” able to strike at the very foundation of Western reason and transform them into new forms of human, interpersonal, and cross- cultural interaction.

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Acknowledgements I am particularly grateful to Paolo Parrini and Roberta Lanfredini for having read and commented on an initial version of this essay, to Supakwadee Amatayakul for having patiently assisted me in preparing its English version, and to Federica Buongiorno for her persis- tent editorial tolerance.

Luca Bertolaso Scarantino (PhD, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) is the author of numerous articles and volumes on the history of twentieth-century Italian philosophical culture (Giulio Preti, Antonio Banfi, Federico Enriques, the journal Corrente). Setting out from Giulio Preti’s work, he has gradually turned to an analysis of persuasive structures in contemporary public speeches, with a special focus on the emotional nature of the truth and on certain moral structures such as violence, conformism, and resentment. Since 2012 he has been teaching Philosophy and Politics of Culture at the IULM University of Milan. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Beijing University, a research scholar at the Japanese Society for the Advancement of Science, and a distinguished visiting professor at the Indian Council for Philosophical Research. He is the President of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies and the Editor-in- chief of the international Humanities journal Diogenes. Since 2016 he has been the chairman of the executive committee for the 24th World Congress of Philosophy (Beijing 2018).

55 Banfi, Antonio. 1950. Prospettiva filosofica. In: Banfi, Antonio. 1996.La ricerca della realtà. 699–721. Bologna: Il Mulino. 703. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi

Angela Ales Bello

Abstract Sofia Vanni Rovighi was one of the first Italian thinkers to introduce Husserl’s phenomenology into Italy. Though her philosophical approach was linked up with the medieval philosophy and with Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics, she deeply appreciated Husserl’s analyses in the field of gnoseology. She discovered the medieval root of intentionality, considering Husserlian phenomenology as the contemporary inheritance of this notion. Notwithstanding some objections which she raised against Husserl regarding metaphysical questions, she truly undertook to understand the theoretical value of his phenomenology.

Among the first Italian philosophers who engaged with early German phenomenology one finds the notable Sofia Vanni Rovighi. Her interest in phenomenology dates back to the 1930s—a period in which Husserl was still alive and his disciples, including Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Eugen Fink, were active researchers. She encountered phenomenology as it was being developed; hence, her testimony may be viewed as both credible and significant. By the time Vanni Rovighi came into contact with phenomenology, she already had solid knowledge of both historical and theoretical philosophy, which is certainly evident in her investigations of then current waves of thinking. Her research can be characterized as being marked by an extraordinary openness, which allowed her to examine the work of various philosophers without prejudice, ultimately displaying her great intellectual honesty. One could rightly say that she sympathized with Husserl’s great rallying call, “To the things themselves!” For Vanni Rovighi, the “thing” to be investigated was Husserlian philosophy itself. Vanni Rovighi’s attitude toward philosophy was similar to that of her contemporary Edith Stein, for both philosophers explored other ways of thinking. Indeed, Stein can be seen as providing us with a key to understanding why Vanni Rovighi paid great attention to another philosopher: this attitude can be defined as “feminine.” Stein describes the feminine as being primarily present, but not exclusively so, in women. Both the masculine and the feminine are present in all human beings,

A. Ales Bello (*) Pontifical Lateran University, Rome, Italy

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 27 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_3 28 A. Ales Bello according to Stein’s reading of the human being.1 Vanni Rovighi, as a woman and a historian of philosophy, was able to mine others’ philosophical texts in order to reconstruct the speculative path of each philosopher she studied. Furthermore, both philosophers shared a great acuity and capacity for making evident what is essential in a philosophical idea. Vanni Rovighi’s appreciation of the history of ideas helps explain her openness to phenomenology. No doubt, she is an example of Italian philosophers’ interest in German philosophy in general. One can also think here of the impact of German Idealism, especially in central and southern Italy, on philosophers like Croce and Gentile. The interest in German philosophy can also be seen in thinkers like Bertrando Spaventa in Naples and Enzo Paci, whose work at the University of Milan was influenced by phenomenology. Vanni Rovighi taught at the Catholic University of Milan. She had a deep interest in the history of philosophy, and in particular in medieval philosophy, which was either metaphysics-focused or Aristotelian-Thomist focused, as we shall later see. Her specific focus on philosophy, however, in no way hindered her broader interest in the history of philosophy as a whole, which is evidenced by her three volumes dedicated to the history of philosophy.2 She was open to different forms of thought, even ones that seemed far removed from her own position. Vanni Rovighi often referred to phenomenology, especially Husserl’s, in her writings, without forgetting his disciples. She grasped the significance of Husserl for contemporary philosophy, and this is why she often cited his work. She even dedicated a book to Husserl in 1939, one year after his death: the work focused on Husserl’s thought, from his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy (1936). Her careful and engaged reading of the phenomenologist yields an intellectually honest reconstruction of his thought, which she critically evaluates, not in a polemical manner, but with great acuity and precision. Her faithful and rigorous reading of Husserl reminds one of Stein’s careful interpretation of him. Vanni Rovighi’s book, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl (The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl), presents the salient aspects of the philosopher’s phenomenology. She does not evaluate every single aspect of Husserl’s thought; rather, she explores the most significant problematic parts of the phenomenologist’s project, including his antipsychologistic polemic, intentionality, eidetic intuition, the epoché, the relation between the consciousness of being and his idealism. We shall return to these aspects to demonstrate Vanni Rovighi’s unique interpretation. In the “Introduction” to her book, she clearly expresses the particularity of Husserl’s thought, which she immediately compares with that of his followers. But these are only followers up to a certain point because, in her view, they interpret phenomenology differently than Husserl, in that they distance themselves from

1 Stein, Edith. 2012. Woman (trans: Oben, F.M.). Washington, DC: ICS Publications. 2 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia. 1980. Storia della Filosofia Contemporanea dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri. Brescia: La Scuola. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 29 many of their “teacher’s” key insights. She outlines Husserl’s position by explaining what it is not: his living student Eugen Fink,3 his old collaborator Adolf Reinach, his colleague and rival Max Scheler, and even his presumed heir, Martin Heidegger, all failed to remain faithful to his method. According to Vanni Rovighi, Fink’s definition of “the emergence of the world in transcendental constitution” as “the true theme of phenomenology”4 neglects Husserl’s trajectory and, therefore, cannot be justified. Scheler’s reduction of phenomenology to the study of essences in order to discover their lawfulness does not capture the complexity of Husserlian analysis. For example, his “material” ethics, which is founded on the notion of value as essence, expresses Scheler’s personal viewpoint. Also, Heidegger’s identification of the Sache with the being of the thing remains far from Husserl’s own position: “Here, Heidegger’s own ontology begins, and it no longer applies to the phenomenology of Husserl.”5 Vanni Rovighi’s work attempts to grasp the core of Husserl’s phenomenology. First, she underscores that among the particular characteristics of his phenomenology one encounters the need to begin from below, von unten, and not from above, von oben. One must start with general principles. She focuses her attention on how Husserl arrives at his theoretical positions, which she declares “is what, in my view, is most interesting about Husserl’s philosophy.”6 One must follow his analytic process in order to understand him, as opposed to simply focusing on the results obtained by his method. A separate book would be required to grasp the full implications of Vanni Rovighi’s intense reading of Husserl, which seeks to capture his method of analysis. In this article, I will therefore limit myself to an outline of her analysis of Husserl’s thought. Vanni Rovighi’s presentation of Husserl’s thought is excellent and she opens her book by drawing a clear distinction between the psychology of Brentano and the phenomenology of Husserl, while reminding her readers of the influence of the former on the latter. The first chapter, divided into two parts, is dedicated to a careful reconstruction of Brentano’s position, ultimately explaining what Husserl accepted or rejected in his teacher’s thought. Through Brentano, we see the mathematician Husserl becoming drawn to philosophy and psychology, which in contemporary terms would be called humanistic or qualitative psychology. This kind of psychology lies in stark opposition to the psychophysical psychology developed by Wundt in 1874, which became officially recognized as an independent field of study called experimental psychology.7 Husserl’s acceptance of Brentano’s psychology conditions Husserl’s views on psychologism. Vanni Rovighi examines Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, reading

3 Fink, Eugen. 1934. Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik. Berlin: Pan Bücherei. 4 Ibid., 54. 5 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia. 1939. La filosofia di Edmund Husserl. Milan: Vita e pensiero. 5. 6 Ibid., 3. 7 Wundt, Wilhelm. 1874. Gründzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: W. Engelmann. 30 A. Ales Bello it in parallel with his early works, and she concludes that, despite the lack of a theory of the subject, one finds in the text a psychological justification for “number” rooted in collective union (kollektive Verbindung). She shows how Husserl later distanced himself from psychology by focusing on logic, especially Bolzano’s theory. Husserl’s aversion to psychologism displays “a central motive of phenomenology that would ultimately leads Husserl to the basic foundations of logic: the irreducibility of ideal relations, which ultimately express necessary connections between contents, the relations of fact, repetition, succession, and coexistence.”8 According to Vanni Rovighi, this logical turn establishes a link between logic and ideal relations, which contrasts with Brentano’s position in which every judgement is also an existential judgement. And though Husserl distinguishes himself from Brentano, the two thinkers argue for the value of intentionality. Let us turn to a discussion of intentionality, as Vanni Rovighi takes this up not only in her book on Husserl, but also in other essays written a few years later.

1 Intentionality

Almost 20 years passed between the publication of Vanni Rovighi’s work on Husserl and the appearance of her 1958 article in the Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, “La teoria dell’intenzionalità nella filosofia di Husserl” (The Theory of Intentionality in Husserl’s Philosophy). One could rightly ask if the focus of this essay was of a passing interest, as it was originally delivered as a paper to the Lombardy branch of the Italian Philosophical Society on January 29, 1958. Vanni Rovighi, however, often returned to the theme of intentionality. In 1960, she contributed to a volume titled Omaggio a Husserl (Homage to Husserl) with her essay “Una fonte remota della teoria husserliana dell’intenzionlaità”9 (A Remote Source of Husserl’s Theory of Intentionality), which was republished in Studi di Filosofia medievale in 1978.10 Vanni Rovighi demonstrates Husserl’s reliance on Brentano’s thought, but she also shows how the latter differs from the former. For Brentano intentionality is framed within psychic facts, whereas for Husserl intentionality passes through phenomenological reduction and “is a fact of consciousness and the consciousness of something.”11 We find the foregoing affirmation in the fourth chapter of her book, titled “L’intenzionalità della coscienza” (The Intentionality of Consciousness). The introduction of the notion of intentional consciousness in Husserl, according to Vanni Rovighi, stems, in part, from Natorp’s polemic, which identified the consciousness of the tone with the tone itself—a distinction that allows one to distinguish

8 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 56. 9 Paci, Enzo (ed.). 1960. Omaggio a Husserl. Milan: Il Saggiatore. 10 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia. 1978. Studi di filosofia medievale, II. Secoli XII e XIV. 282–298. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. 11 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 68. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 31 consciousness from its objects. The essence of the intentionality of consciousness consists in one being able to hold oneself before an object: that nature of consciousness exhausts itself in this “presentation.”12 This claim is further clarified by the distinction between noesis and noema taken up in the first volume of Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy.13 The noema serves as a medium between consciousness and the existent. Husserl does not directly link them as Brentano does. Vanni Rovighi observes that the end of the cognitive act is not the existing things: Husserl was capable of reconciling intentionality with ideal objects; hence, the reconciliation of the Brentanian theory with that of Bolzano becomes possible. In Ideas I, Husserl maintains that sensations or psychic facts are the material (hyle) to which intentionality gives form. Vanni Rovighi interprets an important section of Husserl’s text as follows: What transforms materials into intentional facts of consciousness (lived experiences) and what carries in their being enacted the specific element of intentionality is what gives to the term consciousness its specific meaning. This is why consciousness refers eo ipso to something about which one is conscious.14 She claims that intentionality is the noesis and that the “[l]ife of consciousness possesses, therefore, a hyletic, material aspect and a noetic one.”15 It is interesting to note here that Vanni Rovighi translates lived experiences as “facts of consciousness” in her essay “La teoria dell’intenzionalità nella filosofia di Husserl”. More specifically, in her examination of Husserl’sFifth Logical Investigation she remarks that she will “loosely translate the title of the Fifth Investigation as ‘Intentionality of Consciousness and Its Contents’ because of the difficulty of translating Erlebnisse or ‘lived experiences’.”16 She remarks, and justly so, on the difficulty of translating this term into Italian, but I maintain that the indistinguishability between (the) consciousness (of a fact) and Erlebnisse creates an equivocation that invalidates the understanding of what Husserl wanted to communicate. Only Enrico Filippini attempted a translation of the term as “lived experience” (vissuto), a translation which is still used today. In Italian, one can use the expression vissuto to describe what “is lived by me” and this lends a certain uniqueness to the meaning of the term, even though it may not perfectly capture its full

12 Ibid., 74. 13 Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (trans: Kersten, F.). The Hague: Springer. 14 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 77. 15 Ibid., 77. 16 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia. 1958. La teoria dell’intenzionalità nella fenomenologia di Husserl. Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 197. In note 3, Vanni Rovighi rightly comments on the difficulty of translating the German term Erlebnis or ‘lived experience’ into Italian. The same difficulty was also noted by G. Alliney in the first Italian translation of the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. He left the term in the German original. 32 A. Ales Bello sense.17 The broadening of the meaning of the term consciousness to include its contents does not allow us to capture the deeper sense of the concept developed by Edith Stein. She views consciousness not as a box that contains lived experiences, but as “an interior light that accompanies them.”18 Though Vanni Rovighi does not always maintain the distinction between lived experiences and consciousness, she does translate lived experiences as “facts of consciousness” (fatti di coscienza), which, in some cases, may be understood as lived experiences accompanied by consciousness. However, she perfectly captures the distinction between noema and the real thing, a distinction that many of Husserl’s students did not grasp: for example, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, who maintained that Husserl ran the risk of reducing existence to the noema. Vanni Rovighi’s most interesting insight concerning Husserlian intentionality can be found in her aforementioned study, “A Remote Source of Husserl’s Theory of Intentionality.” The essay opens with an important consideration on Husserl’s use of the term “theory.” Not merely a matter of philology, Husserl’s use of the term strikes Vanni Rovighi as being original in the history of philosophy. Intentionality “can only be called theory in a theoretical sense,” she writes. Etymologically, the term means taking a look at how things stand, a lingering over things in order to bring to light how they stand at the basis of all discourse, which Husserl calls phenomena. Theory is not simply an inference or hypothesis; rather, theory can be understood by the expression “phenomenology of intentionality.”19 Vanni Rovighi asks where Brentano, who influenced Husserl, obtained the concept of intentionality. Undoubtedly, one finds the concept at work within Scholastic thought, but she claims that Aristotle was important for understanding the origin of the concept. One even finds the concept in Augustine of Hippo. Vanni Rovighi focuses her analysis on a thirteenth-century Franciscan thinker, Petrus Aureolus, who had an insight similar to that of Husserl. She does not claim that Husserl drew directly upon Aureolus, but she sees the medieval thinker as developing a phenomenology avant la lettre. In her 1924 article “Was ist Phänomenologie?” (What is Phenomenology?), Stein situates Husserlian phenomenology within a Neo-Platonic- Augustinian-Franciscan framework, though she does not cite any specific philosophers from these schools.20

17 We see the same problem in the Spanish translation of the term Erlebnis by Ortega y Gasset, who employs the word vivencia. In Portuguese, we find the word vivência. 18 Stein, Edith. 2004. Einführung in die Philosophie. In: Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, ed. C. M. Wulf. Freiburg: Herder. 106. 19 Vanni Rovighi, Una fonte remota della teoria dell’intenzionalità. In: Omaggio a Husserl, 49–65 (republished in 1978 in Studi di filosofia medievale. Here 10). 20 This article originally appeared in Wissenschaft/Volksbildung, a supplement to Neuen pfälzischen Landeszeitung 5, 15 May 1924. In 1991 it was republished in Theologie und Philosophie 66:570– 573. Now it may be found in: Stein, Edith. 1924. Was ist Phänomenologie?. In: Stein, Edith. 2014. “Freiheit und Gnade” und weitere Beiträge zu Phänomenologie und Ontologie (1917–1937). Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, ed. B. Beckmann-Zöller, H. R. Sepp. Freiburg: Herder. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 33

Though Vanni Rovighi’s focus is historical, she is also interested in the theoretical aspect of Husserl’s work. Against the neo-idealism prevalent in her day, she affirms that one can exit from thought, as the texts of Husserl and Aureolus show. Both philosophers begin by asking “What is thought?”—though they come to different conclusions. Husserl outlines his views against empiricism and psychologism, whereas Aureolus examines the notion of intelligere, which is found in God, angels, and human beings. Aureolus adopts a non-inferential framework of reasoning whose results “for some, cannot be philosophy, though it seems to me that such arguments lie at the basis of all philosophy, if one takes philosophy to mean a form of knowing as opposed to an arbitrary choice.”21 While explaining Husserl and Aureolus’ positions on human cognition, she shows the same insight. I do not simply have an “image of things,” but what is known is within me intentionally and the object is always other to me; it is within me as an ideal entity. This is nothing other than Husserl’s noema and Petrus Aureolus’ ens rationalis (rational entity). With this description, do we not lapse into subjectivism or phenomenalism? Vanni Rovighi believes this is not the case. What the two philosophers share, though they are from different epochs, is the ideal objectivity of the meaning obtained, for Husserl, through eidetic reduction—and this, in my opinion, defines Husserl’s idealism—and, for Aureolus, through the esse apparens (the appearing being). Both philosophers “have their foundation in a real, existing entity.”22 Aureolus does not only affirm that knowing is a quality of the subject and, therefore, a way of being, but also—moving beyond Duns Scotus—that the specificity of knowing lies in the fact that it intentionally contains the presence of an other and, hence, implies a relation. “It is therefore an activity that does not posit any product; rather, it connotes or refers to an object.”23 The metaphysical problem of the ontological nature of the object of knowledge is not in question here, nor is that of the knowing subject; rather, the mode of understanding the cognitive process becomes preliminary for solving metaphysical problems. Hence, it is propaedeutic. We have to distinguish the gnoseological question form the metaphysical one, and the gnoseological question becomes introductory and necessary. Vanni Rovighi captures the authentic meaning of Husserl’s project, for she understands his notion of constitution: “He describes how the world appears in stages to consciousness, and the descriptions of Ideas II remain ‘neutral’ with respect to the idealism of Ideas I and to the idealism of his Göttingen students.”24 The difference between the volumes of the Ideas as well the presence of idealism in Ideas I is determined, in my opinion, by the relation Husserl seems to establish, according to Vanni Rovighi, between consciousness and being. She claims that the primacy of consciousness over being proposed by Husserl is not viable because the

21 Vanni Rovighi, Una fonte remota della teoria dell’intenzionalità, 287. 22 Ibid., 296. 23 Ibid., 297. 24 Ibid., 298. 34 A. Ales Bello primacy itself pertains to being and not to consciousness. I shall note here that the primacy Husserl attributes to subjectivity in Ideas I is the primacy of a quoad nos (what concerns us) and is not in se or an “in itself,” as demonstrated by the distinction between the absolute of consciousness (quoad nos) and the absolute understood as God (in se).25 Husserl’s precise distinction was missed by both Vanni Rovighi and Stein. The former accepts Husserl’s gnoseological position, but she does not consider the metaphysical implications of his thought.26

2 Idealism or Realism?

In the light of her metaphysical position, according to which being precedes consciousness, Vanni Rovighi considers certain passages of Husserl’s Ideas I and Formal and Transcendental Logic27 in order to demonstrate Husserl’s idealistic position, according to which one can never exit from consciousness, for the real is conditioned by it. She observes that even the epoché “does not negate the world of the natural attitude; it does not doubt the world’s existence; rather, the epoché brack- ets the world, only to find it as originating in absolute consciousness.”28 Vanni Rovighi cites the famous passage from section 49 of Ideas I in which Husserl defines consciousness as absolute being while also affirming that there exists an abyss of meaning between consciousness and being: “Here, a being that presents itself only in aspects (sich abschaltendes) is never absolutely given; it is contingent and relative. There is a necessary and absolute being that cannot be given through aspects and appearances.”29 But Vanni Rovighi does not reveal what specific kind of being Husserl is referring to, namely the being of things and not absolute being, that being which is captured through its adumbrations (sich abschaltendes) and which Husserl justly considers contingent and relative. The text selected by Vanni Rovighi ought to be integrated with the passage I cited above concerning the two meanings of the absolute. Perhaps her objection could be understood as referring to the necessity of the subject, to its non-contingency, which Husserl maintains: for, from a metaphysical point of view, if the things of the

25 Husserl writes, “(…) here, it is interesting to note that this divine Being would be transcendent, not only with respect to the world but definitely also with respect to ‘absolute’ consciousness. Hence, this being would be ‘absolute’ in a completely different sense than the absolute of consciousness; it would be a completely different transcendent being than what is meant by the transcendence of the world.” Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, 134. See also Ales Bello, Angela. 2009. The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations (trans: Calcagno, A.). Dordrecht: Springer. 25–28. 26 For a wider discussion of the metaphysical implications, see Ales Bello, Angela. 2015. The Sense of Things: Toward a Phenomenological Realism (trans: Calcagno, A.). Dordrecht: Springer. 71–76. 27 Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic (trans: Cairns, D.). The Hague: Springer. 28 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 153. 29 Ibid. (Vanni Rovighi’s translation of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I, 122). Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 35

physical world are contingent, so too is the subject—a point that Vanni Rovighi is mindful of as she continues to read Husserl. One observes in Husserl’s texts that the philosopher is operating at the gnoseological level, as Vanni Rovighi maintains, and he cannot therefore be read within a metaphysical framework that he is not dealing with. Furthermore, we know that Husserl questions the validity of the conclusions reached in Ideas I, which he defines as Cartesian in the Crisis of European Sciences, a text that Vanni Rovighi was familiar with. As we know, Husserl declared some of the conclusions of Ideas I to be inadequate, but not for the reasons proposed by Vanni Rovighi. Husserl maintained that Ideas I “did not sufficiently demonstrate how phenomenology was to serve as the science of a foundation, a completely new and decisive science that would ground any kind of philosophy.”30 Foundation, here, does not have a metaphysical sense; rather, it is the starting point of knowledge that brings forward evidence. Vanni Rovighi’s intellectual honesty nevertheless pushes her to further investigation. She closely examines Husserl’s arguments for the possibility of existing “outside” consciousness. She draws upon an insight from Fink’s 1934 Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik, in which the central problem of philosophy is identified as the origin of the world. Hence, for Vanni Rovighi, Husserl may be read as declaring that consciousness transcends the world. She correctly understands that the first modality is related to the plurality of consciousnesses. According to her, while it is true that we cannot exit from consciousness and that this cannot be denied by any realist, it is also true that there exists a difference between saying that something is given to thought or that something is put forward or posited by thought. This claim is key for understanding Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Vanni Rovighi accepts that Husserl has not adopted the second claim. In fact, she maintains that Husserl sacrifices the coherence of saying that something is posited or put forward in thought, by affirming that “internal perception does not create its objects; rather, it finds them. These objects are states of consciousness and they are given not as a bundle of phenomena, but as inhering in a personal consciousness.”31 The question of others is fundamental. I believe that by overcoming the objection of solipsism, which Husserl himself raises, it is possible to avoid the risk of idealism. We can turn to Husserl’s own writings on the issue. Particularly relevant here are the 1925 Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis and even the 1908 lectures Thing and Space, neither of which Vanni Rovighi cites.32 In her article on intentionality, written some 20 years after her book on Husserl, Vanni Rovighi profoundly re-examines her investigation of the cognitive process expounded by Husserl. He considers the sphere of sensation in consciousness, in particular, what

30 Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (trans: Carr, D.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. § 43. 31 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 156. 32 I have examined this question in my book, The Sense of Things: Toward a Phenomenological Realism. 36 A. Ales Bello he calls the hyletic sphere. She affirms that, for Husserl, “the object as such is never constituted as real by the subject.”33 Deepening her analysis of this claim, I maintain, would have led her to what I call the “transcendental realism” of Husserl, provided that she had retained the distinction between idealism and realism. I believe that various analyses of Husserl’s texts on this question have proven to be false because they absolutize either the subjective or objective moment of knowledge, ultimately opposing them to one another. On the contrary, there is a deep correlation between the two that arises from their original indistinguishability, as evidenced by Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Vanni Rovighi returns to the theme of idealism-realism by attaching it to the question of intentionality taken up in one of her last texts, “Rileggendo alcuni testi husserliani sull’intenzionalità” (Rereading Some Husserlian Texts on Intentionality), which was published in a Festschrift dedicated to Gustavo Bontadini.34 This late reading of Husserl is more critical that her 1930 one. She differentiates more strongly between gnoseology and metaphysics, affirming that Husserl’s analysis of knowledge does not resolve the dispute between idealism and realism, though the terms are ambiguous. Intentionality alone does not allow one to advance a realist solution because the consistency of the intended object is not determined. Vanni Rovighi, Husserl’s critic, turns to the notion of Erlebnis, which she now translates more accurately than on previous occasions as an “intentional act.” Nevertheless, she reads the term as a way of living the aforementioned act; hence, lived experience becomes a purely psychic entity that admits no universality, as Husserl understands it, following the operation of phenomenological-transcendental reduction.

3 Immanence or Transcendence?

Turning once again to Vanni Rovighi’s 1939 book on Husserl, one notes that her analyses of intersubjectivity can offer a solution to the problem of Husserlian solipsism. Intersubjectivity acts as a new foundation, understood as being in itself, which I maintain we can call Husserl’s “path of reduction through intersubjectivity” and which stands next to other paths of reduction taken by the German philosopher. At first glance, it seems as though Husserl is still searching for absolutes: first, there is consciousness with its lived experiences and then one finds the plurality of consciousnesses. But these must be read as starting points. Even in the case of the plurality of consciousnesses, Husserl is seeking to establish what a foundation could mean. Vanni Rovighi asks, “(…) Could the universe of monads be the ultimate

33 Vanni Rovighi, La teoria dell’intenzionalità nella fenomenologia di Edmund Husserl, 203. 34 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia. 1975. Rileggendo alcuni testi husserliani sull’intenzionalità. In: Studi di filosofia in onore di Gustavo Bontadini, vol. 2. 269–279. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 37 foundation of reality?” And she responds, “Evidently, not.”35 Husserl certainly would have agreed with her answer. Drawing upon Fink’s aforementioned book, Vanni Rovighi returns to the discussion of the relation between the immanent absolute, be it that of consciousness or the plurality of consciousnesses, and the transcendent absolute. She remarks: “Husserl wishes to exclude that the transcendence of God be grasped as the transcendence of the world.”36 Here, one catches the possibility of an agreement with the realist position and one sees what I call the intersubjective pathway taken by Husserl: In the absolute current of consciousness (…) there must be other ways of manifesting transcendence that are not the same as the constitution of things (…) and they must be intuitive manifestations to which theoretical thought can adapt, that can reasonably follow, such that they make intelligible the universal acting of the supposed theological principle. It is evident that this divine acting cannot be understood as a causal action, understood in the natu- ralist sense of causality.37 For Vanni Rovighi, it appears as if Husserl had excluded the objective path, the only path she considers to be valid. She views Husserl as showing “(…) a repug- nance, which is common among modern philosophers, for demonstrating God’s existence through nature; rather, Husserl demonstrates how one can ascend to God through one’s own interiority.”38 It should be remarked here that the philosophical itineraries followed by Augustine and Anselm may be considered metaphysical pathways to a transcendent God. Furthermore, Husserl does not exclude the pathway opened up by the teleology found in nature, as evidenced in Section 58 of Ideas I, which resembles the fifth way of Thomas Aquinas and which bears the imprint of Aristotle. Hence, God cannot be assumed to be simply presupposed and not demonstrated by Husserl, as Vanni Rovighi claims, even if Husserl’s goal was not to “demonstrate” the existence of God against the “fool” (insipiens); rather, he wanted to prove the necessity of thought’s capacity to attain a justifying principle.

4 Logical Foundation

Vanni Rovighi is struck by Husserl’s affirmation of the rationality of the real. She reads together the Logical Investigations and Formal and Transcendental Logic, ultimately claiming that there is a continuity between these works. She appreciates Husserl’s notion of regional ontologies based on logical reductions to essence, which allows Husserl to develop a formal ontology. She reads Husserl as

35 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 159. 36 Ibid., 161. 37 Ibid., 162. 38 Ibid. 38 A. Ales Bello

distinguishing between ontology and logic. Formal logic examines forms of predi- cation and establishes axioms, but it does not tell us from where these axioms acquire value and whether they are true, a pure coherent game, or conditions of all possible truths. Only phenomenology “by returning to the sources of intuition in pure transcendental consciousness”39 resolves these problems.40 But might the appeal to a transcendental subjectivity not mean a return to psychologism? Vanni Rovighi rejects the possibility of Husserl incurring such a risk: “With the discovery of transcendental consciousness one can consider logical objects to be constituted by consciousness without reducing them to factual reality.”41 She sees the phenomenologist as following traditional metaphysics, for logical truth is obtainable only insofar as there is an ontological truth. The difference between metaphysics and logic, in her opinion, consists in the determination of thought: In metaphysics, thought that constitutes the intelligibility of being is transcendent, but it is doubtful that this is the case for Husserl. Tracing Vanni Rovighi’s understanding of Husserl, one finds both light and darkness. If we distinguish the act of knowing from its ideal content (i.e., noesis and noema), Husserl advances further than Brentano, especially in confirming the capacity of human beings to intuit essences. “[It] does not seem, however, that Husserl saw clearly that knowing by universalizing does not mean that one is able to know directly the specific essence of things.”42 Vanni Rovighi offers a provocative example, which does not focus on the insufficiency of the metaphysical position, but concentrates on the knowledge of nature that requires long discussions only verifiable by scientific induction. She makes a stunning observation: “Husserl’s disciples did not realize this, for they hoped to construct an a priori science of nature alongside the experimental sciences.”43 Vanni Rovighi could have referred to the various studies of Conrad-Martius, who maintained the insufficiency of purely experimental means of comprehending nature, proposing a new philosophy of nature that draws upon philosophers much loved by Vanni Rovighi like Aristotle, whose notions of dynamis, energeia, and entelechia may be viewed as grasping the essence of nature itself. It seems strange that Vanni Rovighi did not recognize this same effort in Edith Stein, who, though she had a weaker understanding of the physical and biological sciences than Conrad- Martius, did not abandon the study of nature to researchers who tended to dismiss philosophy and who reduced nature to a series of empiricist, positivistic principles. Vanni Rovighi’s last observation concerns the epoché, which is filtered through the interpretation Eugen Fink puts forward in his article “Was will die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls?”44 She compares Husserl’s project to Plato’s,

39 See section 147 of Husserl’s Ideas I. 40 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 164. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 165. 43 Ibid., 166. 44 This text can be found in Die Tatwelt (1934) 10:15–32. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 39 especially the latter’s myth of the cave. The same critique of the indeterminacy of essences which Vanni Rovighi offers with regard to Plato applies to Husserl, for she notes that Plato’s myth “(…) cannot teach us how the world is made of true things.”45 Our eyes are incapable of contemplating the ideas from outside the cave. We can only recognize the “adumbrated” character of the sensible world. Aristotle versus Plato? Is Husserl’s world a world of shadows like Plato’s? We cannot exit the cave, according to Vanni Rovighi, because exiting it means taking on a superhuman point of view. I have pondered the aforementioned question of knowledge long and hard and I have always thought of the comparison between Husserl’s epoché and the myth of the cave.46 I maintain that the person who exits the cave remains human insofar as an operation occurs in him or her similar to that described by Heraclitus when he draws the distinction between those who are sleeping and those who are conscious or awake. One could be awake, but here being awake means assuming a philosophical attitude, thereby indicating the possibility of a world of essences without the pretext of assuming the position of transcendent thought. Edith Stein, who also follows the same itinerary in Finite and Eternal Being and who follows Augustine’s insights, describes this invisible sphere as consisting of essentialities, essence, and the quid that concretizes itself in things. Furthermore, Vanni Rovighi’s charge against Husserl of privileging essences without specifying problems that arise with them in relation to the world may be rethought: I would argue that it can be challenged through a reading of Husserl’s above-mentioned writings on space and things, passive synthesis, and other texts, including those on intersubjectivity and the problem of borders or limits (for example, Husserl’s texts on sleep and wakefulness—understood in the physical sense— and life and death).47 The philosopher need not to describe things in great detail, for this task belongs to other sciences, but s/he must provide an interpretative key that makes it possible to grasp the sense of things. This does not mean we can dismiss the value of Vanni Rovighi’s analysis of Husserl, especially given that her own reading of Husserl contains moments of light and darkness. She shows a great appreciation for the gnoseology of Husserlian phenomenology and logic, which is made evident despite Husserl’s own lack of attention to metaphysical questions. For Vanni Rovighi, however, Husserl’s original sin lies in his following too closely the Platonic-Augustinian tradition of philosophy.

45 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 167. 46 See Ales Bello, The Sense of Things, chapter I. 47 See Husserl, Edmund. 2006. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911 (trans: Farin, I., Hart, J.G.). Dordrecht: Springer. 40 A. Ales Bello

5 Phenomenology and Thomism

Vanni Rovighi’s adherence to the Aristotelico-Thomist school of thought manifests itself in her commentary on a key article by Husserl’s most faithful disciple, Edith Stein. The article, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas” (Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquin), was published in the Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70 Geburtstag gewid- met.48 Vanni Rovighi directly refers to the Festschrift in her review, which also mentions Martin Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes, Roman Ingarden’s Bemerkungen zum Problem “Idealismus-Realismus” and Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Farben: Ein Kapitel aus der Realontologie. One could argue that she comments on Edith Stein’s contribution because of Stein’s explicit focus on Thomas Aquinas and Husserl, who were also important thinkers for Vanni Rovighi. Stein elucidates the close connection between the two philosophers, but she also makes explicit key differences between them, as Vanni Rovighi notes. Stein undertook a study of Thomas Aquinas and Christian philosophy after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Vanni Rovighi’s examination of Stein’s essay makes it clear that there are differences between the two women philosophers, especially in their respective interpretations of Aquinas. Vanni Rovighi agrees with Stein on the convergence of the thought of both Husserl and Aquinas, especially as regards the question of the role and nature of philosophy, which is seen as founded on human reason. Vanni Rovighi provides a succinct analysis of Stein’s argument. She notes how Stein questions the limits of reason, which for Husserl is unlimited, whereas for Thomas Aquinas this is not the case. Aquinas maintains that human reason is limited by divine reason, which Husserl does not admit. For Stein, divine reason is necessary in order to make a complete and viable metaphysics possible. Vanni Rovighi also observes that there is a second difference between Husserl and Thomas Aquinas in Stein’s article, namely, the “egocentric” vision of Husserl, which contrasts with Aquinas’ “theocentric” view. Stein also notes that the origin and center of philosophical research is the subject for Husserl and God for Aquinas. According to Stein, Husserl’s intuition of essences, understood as a primary and important step in the analysis, makes her teacher’s position viable and in accordance with Thomas Aquinas, even though the latter maintained that essences are grasped through abstraction. Both thinkers seek universal, justified knowledge about the world, but whereas Husserl looks to the immanence of consciousness as his starting point and end, Aquinas looks to faith. Vanni Rovighi’s main objection to Stein’s interpretation revolves around the relation between faith and reason in Thomas Aquinas. She sees Stein as running the risk of reducing Aquinas’ position to one of fideism. Two critiques emerge: “(…)[I]

48 Published originally as a dialogue between Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Stein, Edith. 1929. Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino. Versuch einer Gegenüberstellung. In: “Freiheit und Gnade” und weitere Beiträge zu Phänomenologie und Ontologie. Husserl, Beyond Husserl: Phenomenology According to Sofia Vanni Rovighi 41 f metaphysics was constructed on the foundation of faith, it would be perfectly useless to philosophize, for faith alone tells us much more than pure, natural reason.”49 Furthermore, in declaring Aquinas’ philosophy to be theocentric, “(…) it seems as if she holds it necessary that we begin with God to pursue philosophical research on a theocentric metaphysics.”50 Vanni Rovighi observes: “Stein’s position contradicts her own earlier affirmation that all knowledge begins in sense perception and that one can only attain knowledge of God through knowledge of created things.”51 Vanni Rovighi clarifies her objection by underscoring the fact that Stein does not distinguish logical truth from ontological truth. The former requires the adequation of the intellect to the thing, whereas the latter requires the adequation of the thing to the divine intellect. Vanni Rovighi urges Stein not to fabricate a Thomas ad usum Delphini, that is an expurgated Aquinas or an Aquinas interpreted for her own specific ends. Vanni Rovighi’s critique is harsh, yet on point. It should be remarked that in her later work Finite and Eternal Being52 Stein—not as a reaction to Vanni Rovighi’s criticism, as she probably never read the latter’s review—theorizes the possibility of a Christian philosophy illumined by faith, yet not beginning with faith: she shares Aquinas’ inferential move from “my” existence to God, thereby distinguishing the philosophical path from the theological one. These 1930s criticisms aside, Vanni Rovighi was one of the first philosophers to introduce Edith Stein’s thought into Italy. She asked her student, Carla Bettinelli, to study Stein’s works and to prepare an anthology of her work, which was published as Vie della conoscenza di Dio (Ways to Know God) and which featured certain texts by Stein, including her article on the work of Pseudo Dionysius.53 In her “Preface” to Bettinelli’s work, Vanni Rovighi declares that the aforementioned work of Stein is her most important one because it does not offer a rigorous proof for the existence of God, of the sort provided by Saint Thomas; rather, it researches “(…) the hidden God (Deus absconditus) about which Isaiah spoke, the God that manifests Himself in all created things, but which also escapes us in His infinite transcendence.”54 Vanni Rovighi’s reading of Husserl, which I have only partially examined here, along with her commentary on Stein and her assessment of phenomenological thinkers, shows her importance for our understanding of phenomenology in Italy. Her analysis was objective, serious, timely, even though it was certainly influenced

49 Review of Sofia Vanni Rovighi (1930) in Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica6 (22):491–494. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Stein, Edith. 2002. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (trans: Reinhardt, K.F.). Washington, DC: ICS Publications. 53 Stein, Edith. 1946. Ways to Know God. The “Symbolic Theology” of Dionysius the Areopagite and its Factual Presuppositions (trans: Allers, R.). The Tomist 9. Italian edition: Stein, Edith. 1982. Vie della conoscenza di Dio e altri scritti (trans: Bettinelli, C.). Introduction by Sofia Vanni Rovighi. Padua: Edizioni Messaggero. 54 Stein, Vie della conoscenza di Dio, 6. 42 A. Ales Bello by her own philosophical views. This does not mean, however, that she used her own views to obscure the project of phenomenology. Though we may not be in complete agreement with Vanni Rovighi’s interpretations, one cannot deny her respect for the philosophers she examined. Indeed, this respect and careful attention are what characterize Vanni Rovighi’s analysis. Her careful study of thinkers is similar to Edith Stein’s close and attentive reading of various philosophers. It should also be remarked here that Vanni Rovighi accepted certain basic assumptions of Husserlian phenomenology, especially with respect to the theme of gnoseology, and this acceptance on Vanni Rovighi’s part allows us to see the influence which Husserl had on her thinking. She concludes her work on Husserl by noting his fascinating influence on her, which (…) consists in his humanity, in his decision to proceed not by following ardent constructions, but through patient analyses, in his deciphering various adumbrations without appeal- ing first to myths, even powerful ones, that had not been tested by scientific theory and that did not reveal the world of things themselves.55 In the end, it seems that Husserl found in Vanni Rovighi, especially in her work La filosofia di Edmund Husserl (The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl), an interpreter that truly undertook to understand his theoretical work. And, as we know, this is something truly rare.

Angela Ales Bello is Emeritus Professor of the History of Contemporary Philosophy at the Pontifical Lateran University. The former Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of São Paulo and Campinas in Brazil. She is the President of the Rome-based Centro Italiano di Ricerche Fenomenologiche (Italian Centre for Phenomenological Research), of the International Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, and of the Italian Edith Stein Society. She is also the Head of the international research group on “Edith Stein and Contemporary Philosophy” at the Pontifical Lateran University. Her recent publications include: Il senso delle cose. Per un realismo fenomenologico (Rome 2013); Il senso del sacro. Dall’arcaicità alla desacralizzazione (Rome 2014); Il senso dell’umano. Fenomenologia Psicologia, Psicopatologia (Rome 2016); Tutta colpa di Eva. Antropologia e religione dal femminismo alla gender theory (Rome 2017).

55 Vanni Rovighi, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, 167. Preti and Husserl

Roberto Gronda

Abstract Husserl is one of the authors who most influenced Preti’s thought. Starting from his early texts, Husserl represents a constant and, most importantly, a dynamic presence in Preti’s work. Indeed, Husserlian philosophy, along with the transcendental philosophy to which it ultimately belongs, constitutes the theoretical core of the rationalistic themes that are central to Preti’s philosophy. The aim of the present essay is to investigate the various forms and ways in which Husserl’s philosophy exerted an influence on Preti’s thought: firstly as essential to the definition of what Preti called “the principle of immanence;” then, in combination with insights drawn from pragmatism and logical empiricism, as functional in developing his Neo-Enlightenment proposal; finally, in his last works, as central to rethinking of the theoretical outcomes reached over the course of the previous decade.

Giulio Preti’s philosophical career was an extremely original one, both for Italy and for the international context—and perhaps even more for the latter than for the former. Like his teacher Antonio Banfi, whose rational criticism he further developed, Preti had the merit of formulating a philosophical proposal both theoretically sound and historically aware, that is to say aware of its historical place and contemporary relevance. Within this general framework, Husserl is one of the authors who most influenced Preti’s thought. Indeed, one may go so far as to argue that Husserl was Preti’s ‘favourite’ author. A quick look at Preti’s life is enough to realise the intensity and duration of such influence: Preti devoted to Husserl’s philosophy his bachelor thesis Sul significato storico di Husserl (On the Historical Significance of Husserl), which he discussed with Guido Villa at Pavia in 1933, as well as the first articles he published in the mid-1930s. Husserl’s thought continued to play a central role in Preti’s last writings and in the last courses he held at the University of Florence—let us think here of the last chapter of Retorica e logica (Rhetoric and Logic, 1968). Husserl, therefore, represents a constant and, most importantly, a dynamic presence for Preti. Certainly, some recurrent elements may be identified in Preti’s reception of Husserlian thought: first of all, those texts which he deemed crucial and

R. Gronda (*) University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 43 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_4 44 R. Gronda reassessed on multiple occasions, namely Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Formal and Transcendental Logic, and Cartesian Meditations; from a theoretical point of view, the idea of the purity of logic, the concept of fulfillment (Erfüllung), and the distinction between expression and meaning that lies at the basis of the theory of signs formulated by Husserl in his First Logical Investigation. However, building upon this fundamental subtext, increasingly different theoretical configurations emerge, most of which reflect the broader conceptual context in which they are inserted, so as to make them interact with elements from heterogeneous philosophical traditions that cannot always easily be combined to form a coherent picture. Given the limited space available, it is impossible here to illustrate the full range of Husserlian themes shaping Preti’s thought. In many cases Preti draws upon insights or theses of Husserl to solve specific technical problems in his argumenta- tion. I will therefore be focusing on a few structural elements, so to speak, which will be analyzed in relation to the overall tendencies in Preti’s thought, without making any attempt to force them into a systematic and coherent picture. On the basis of what has become an established periodization, Preti’s philosophical career can be divided into three stages: a first stage, which includes all his early writings down to Idealismo e positivismo (Idealism and Positivism), and which still closely reflects Banfi’s teaching; a second stage which coincides with the 1950s and represents the period of greatest proximity to the Italian Neo-enlightenment movement; and, finally, a third stage characterised by a rethinking of the theoretical outcomes reached over the course of the previous decade. It goes without saying that it is not a matter of identifying rifts in Preti’s thought, since there are none to be found; rather, what we have is a varying emphasis—Parrini has rightly spoken in terms of a “measuring out”1—on the empiricist and rationalist themes structuring Preti’s reflection. Husserlian philosophy, along with the transcendental philosophy to which it ultimately belongs, constitutes the theoretical core of these rationalistic themes. Hence, reconstructing the ways in which Preti drew upon Husserl’s thought is far from being a secondary matter.

1 The Principle of Immanence and the Theory of Conceptual Symbols

When it comes to Preti’s first works, the main problem is to identify a theoretical perspective by which to coherently structure the various philosophical questions that are progressively brought to the fore. Preti clearly realised the wide range of alternatives on offer in contemporary philosophy: displaying an attitude that was to become a hallmark of his reflection, from the very beginning Preti attempted to identify a core shared by different philosophical traditions that might provide a solid foundation for the development of a constructive philosophy.

1 Parrini, Paolo. 2004. Filosofia e scienza nell’Italia del Novecento. Figure, correnti, battaglie. Milan: Guerini. 169ff. (All translations of Italian texts are my own). Preti and Husserl 45

Preti identified this shared core with the principle of immanence. He realized that to affirm the transcendence of the object—intuitively, a philosophical translation of the common sense idea that the known object is independent of the knowing subject and hence cannot be reduced to the latter—does not at all support a metaphysically realist conception of knowledge, according to which the latter takes place when the representations of a self-enclosed and autonomous subject conform to an equally self-enclosed and autonomous object. The reason for this is simple, and it is something Preti did not fail to emphasise in other works over the course of his life: a realist conception of this sort paves the way for scepticism, and, in doing so, it makes knowledge constitutively impossible, insofar as there can be no possible criterion to evaluate the correctness of the alleged adaequatio. In fact—and here Banfi’s role as an intermediary is clear—subject and object must be conceived not as things, but rather as functions of knowledge: the idea of knowing—Preti writes— lies in the subject-object correlation, understood as a “synthesis that is always present in every phenomenological moment of concrete knowledge, yet is never in act as a pure ideal synthesis.”2 In this programmatic footnote, one of the most important passages of Fenomenologia del valore (The Phenomenology of Value), Preti asserted his adherence to the “methodologist” and anti-metaphysical interpretation of Kant and Hegel—a tradition that had been inaugurated by Cohen and had reached its culmination with Banfi. Although no mention is made of Husserl in that passage, the influence of Husserlian themes is evident and strong.3 Besides, in the footnote in question Preti referred to his own essay “Difesa del principio di immanenza” (Defense of the Principle of Immanence, 1936), where—taking inspiration from a paper delivered by Carmelo Ottaviano at the 9th Italian National Philosophy Conference in 1934—he had proposed an interpretation of the principle of immanence that directly drew upon Husserlian phenomenology. On this occasion Preti observed that there are two senses according to which one can speak of the transcendence and immanence of an object. In a first sense, transcendence can be understood as the existence of an exmanente object—and this way of conceiving it lies at the origin of dogmatism and scepticism, and as such is irrefutable. But there is also another sense in which the concept of transcendence can legitimately be used, and

2 Preti, Giulio. 1942. Fenomenologia del valore. Milan: Principato. 20 footnote. 3 In another passage from the same work, for example, we read that “it is only by virtue of this assumed alterity [between the two distinct poles of self-consciousness] that the subject is not only a transcendental subject (universality of experience) and the object only the content (particularity and stream of experience), but rather that the subject is also a particular objectivity which realizes its universality within a world that sets some limits for it.” Immediately afterwards, the same concept is formulated in distinctly Husserlian terms: within the subject-object correlation, Preti goes on to explain, “noesis and noema are correlative concepts, which do not subsist outside of this correlation.” Preti, Fenomenologia del valore, 80. The possibility of translating such notions from one language into the other shows a deep convergence of perspectives. On this point, see also what Preti was to write some 20-odd years later in: Preti, Giulio. 1958. Il mio punto di vista empiristico. In: Preti, Giulio. 1976. Saggi filosofici. Vol. 1: Empirismo logico, epistemologia e logica. 475–495. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. 478. 46 R. Gronda this is the way in which Husserl conceives of it: transcendence in this case refers to the fact that an object is never completely given in a single experience but points to a further degree of completeness, through a chain of references. In this sense, transcendence becomes a form of immanence: to be more precise, the way in which objectivity is constituted in experience. Through the Husserlian theory of the constitution of the object, the principle of immanence became a concept that was no longer merely directive but also explicitly operative, insofar as it enabled the formulation of specific answers to specific theoretical problems. The need thus emerged for further determinations and clarifica- tions. Besides, Preti had already investigated the meaning of the immanentist position in two essays, “Filosofia e saggezza nel pensiero husserliano” (Philosophy and Wisdom in Husserlian Thought, 1934) and “I fondamenti della logica formale pura nella ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ di B. Bolzano e nelle ‘Logische Untersuchungen’ di E. Husserl” (The Foundations of Pure Formal Logic in B. Bolzano’s ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ and in E. Husserl’s ‘Logische Untersuchungen’, 1935). In the first essay, Preti addressed the question of the relation between wisdom and science, which is to say between the sphere preserving the individual dimension and an approach that “seeks to amount to science, rigorous science.” Preti identified the way of solving this tension precisely in the phenomenological method and in that process of ascent to the pure theory of absolute evidence which he significantly referred to as the Husserlian “Itinerarium mentis in Deum,” accomplished “by means of the purest rationality.”4 Preti abided by the methodological conception which Husserl had formulated in his Cartesian Meditations and, in particular, the idea that “the experience of the empirical monad is connected to a ‘horizon’,” whereby “no experience is ever perfectly intuitive, but rather always features elements that are present only symbolically, as pure ‘intentions’, tasks which consciousness must fulfill, so as to then find itself facing new intentional horizons, and so on without end.” Preti observed that this process of ascent—which “follows the dialectic immanent to the structures of transcendental experience”—leads, via increasingly less limited points of view, to the Absolute Monad which is “potentially immanent” in all empirical monads.5 In this respect, Preti concluded, phenomenology—understood as the infinite process of realization of absolute evidence (where the expression “infinite process” evokes Banfi’s critical rationalism)—constitutes the general framework within which all metaphysics, which by nature are relative and partial, acquire meaning: “alongside phenomenology, therefore, we can place plausible metaphysics, which take account of all the discoveries of phenomenology;” in such a way, “we will obtain an (…) increasingly true metaphysic” and “wisdom will gradually turn into a scientific metaphysic.”6

4 Preti, Giulio. 1934. Filosofia e saggezza nel pensiero husserliano. In:Saggi filosofici. Vol.. 1 3–9 (8). 5 Ibid., 5. On Preti’s use of Husserl’s monadology as a means to distance himself from Banfi’s interpretation of Husserl, see: Mocchi, Mauro. 1990. Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia. Il dibattito sulla fenomenologia: 1923–1940. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 110ff. 6 Preti, Filosofia e saggezza nel pensiero husserliano, 9. Preti and Husserl 47

Even more interesting is the second essay, “I fondamenti della logica formale pura nella ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ di B. Bolzano e nelle ‘Logische Untersuchungen’ di E. Husserl,” in which Preti discussed the nature of logic as the self-consciousness of reason. Preti here formulated for the first time a thesis to which he was to remain faithful throughout his life, namely the thesis of the anti-psychologistic character of logical truths and of the intrinsic importance of the concept of proposition for any attempt to correctly define the task and nature of logic. In Husserl’s footsteps, Preti rejected two interpretations of logic as unsatisfactory. One was the idea that logic describes human psychological processes; the other, the thesis according to which logical laws define structures of a metaphysical-ideal nature.7 Once again, the principle of immanence and the dual conception of consciousness is what makes it possible to correctly formulate the problem. Only if one bears the correlation between noesis and noema in mind, does the mode of validity of propositions cease to appear problematic—as though propositions were to fill a specific place in the hierarchy of being—and acquires methodological significance: logic is that discipline which studies the noema as pure noema.8 This ideal unity—Preti noted—is the content of an expression: “every signification is a unity of objective correlates of infinite acts (…) of signification, the content of many different expressions.”9 In such a way, logic acquired a fully independent status, as the investigation of the signifying function of expressions. These topics are addressed in the most sophisticated and clearest way in Idealismo e positivismo. The aim of the book is to demonstrate that “a self-coherent form of idealism necessarily spills over into positivism,” while at the same time “a coherent form of positivism necessarily spills into idealism.”10 To put it in other words, between the two there is no difference, because they are “two methods within a single philosophy,” integral rationalism.11 In keeping with what he had already argued in “Filosofia e saggezza nel pensiero husserliano,” Preti maintains that the most coherent form of this positivism which spills into idealism is precisely Husserlian phenomenology, where the fundamental principle of positivism is defined in these far from neutral terms: “that thought must be the conceptual translation of what is contained in experience.”12 Experience here is conceived not as a private fact or as a flow of sensations and feelings, but as “something which becomes enriched in itself, becomes coordinated, allows itself to be produced and foreseen.”

7 Preti, Giulio. 1935. I fondamenti della logica formale pura nella “Wissenschaftslehre” di B. Bolzano e nelle “Logische Untersuchungen” di E. Husserl. In: Saggi filosofici. Vol.. 1 10–31 (14). 8 For a reconstruction of these aspects of Preti’s thought, I will refer to: Ferrari, Massimo. 2014. Il giovane Preti lettore di Bolzano. In: Sulla filosofia teoretica di Giulio Preti. In occasione del centenario, ed. Luca Scarantino, 119–134. Milan: Mimesis. 9 Preti, I fondamenti della logica formale pura, 31. 10 Preti, Giulio. 1943. Idealismo e positivismo. Milan: Bompiani. 11. 11 Ibid., 5–6. 12 Ibid., 29. 48 R. Gronda

In other words, experience is conceived of in terms of its capacity of constituting objectivity within itself and hence of being transposed onto the level of thought.13 Within this context, Preti contended that Husserl’s main contribution to the definition of a new form of positivism was the “symbolical” conception of form: “if we wish to avoid falling into Socratic-Platonist dualism—Preti writes—we must see ‘form’ not as something opposed to ‘content’, but as something which represents or symbolises things.”14 In some dense pages later on in the book, Preti further explores this conception—“one of the most profound and substantial by the master from Freiburg”—by developing a theory of the symbol as an element which pre- establishes its object.15 It is worth quoting this passage in full: According to Husserl, “truth” is the fulfillment (Erfüllung) of the conceptual symbol with its content, the immediate presence of a certain content to an “intentional direction” given by the conceptual symbol. This doctrine (…) represents an essential corrective to the nominalism which all positivist philosophy tends towards, and at the same time preserves the primary requirement of positivism itself. The conceptual symbol is a symbol and not a res—nor does it directly designate a res; a name, definition or non-contradictory axiom is not enough to craft a reality—yet, at the same time, the symbol is more than a flatus vocis, as it refers to a reality, which is to say an experience; it has a sense, which is more than a meaning; rather, it represents a law governing the development of immediate experience, a “presentiment,” if I may put it so, of those contents which lived experience does not show, yet refers to. The concrete here is not the flow of lived experience, but lived experience translated and conveyed as “sense” via conceptual symbols, which are connected according to laws that coincide with the laws governing the development of experience.16 The conceptual symbol, therefore, pre-establishes the object insofar as it represents a law governing the development of experience, and defines those contents that, while not currently present, are potentially active within it.17 Thought, then, is not a copy of experience, but a rational articulation of it which, as such, possesses an irreducible degree of independence. Hence, within a positivist and strictly empiricist framework, it is possible to affirm one level at which philosophical reflection is valid. Let us consider this point more closely. First of all, Preti emphasises that his intentionalistic nominalism does not lapse into a restricted conception of the principle of verification—according to which propositions, to be meaningful, must “bear upon” experiential data—because it is a critical rationalism that aims to analyse the “effectual and objective structures of thought.” As such, it does not aim to

13 Ibid., 30–31. 14 Ibid., 29. 15 Ibid., 66. 16 Ibid., 67. 17 Preti further developed this insight over the following years, seeking to provide a methodological clarification of the neo-empiricist principle of verification by juxtaposing the sense-meaning conceptual pair with the Husserlian one of Erfüllung-Bedeutung. For a compelling and exhaustive reconstruction of this extremely relevant point, I refer to Parrini, Filosofia e scienza nell’Italia del Novecento, 181ff. Preti and Husserl 49 put forward any “metaphysical hypothesis on the ‘nature’ of thinking.”18 Preti had already essentially made this point in his article on Bolzano and Husserl. But in order to explain how an analysis of this sort is possible, a further step was required. Here Preti combined the Husserlian theory of fulfilling with his own theory of the “cascade.” According to the latter, there are different levels of knowledge and reflection, each of which refers to a lower level, without necessarily “bearing upon” experiential facts.19 Given that the signifying act, which is to say the symbol, is not at all “inadequate for experience” (this being a fair criticism of the empiricist notion of concepts), but rather empty, it does not require experience in order to be fulfilled— for the emptiness of the act of signification is not the emptiness of a mould. This independence of thought, which springs from the fact that every signifying act has its own structure, implies that each symbol establishes the conditions for its own verification: a proposition “is an active creation, choice and production of experiential facts: it chooses and produces within experience those states of affairs which behave as its structure requires, i.e. which can be translated into the structures of ‘signifying acts’.”20 In such a way, philosophical discourse creatively chooses what contents to be “fulfilled” by, establishing itself at the highest degree of reflection and adopting as its object the structures of the most general signifying acts, which it calls categories. This de facto rules out any reduction of philosophical discourse to previous levels in the cultural processing of experience. What has been argued so far shows that Idealismo e positivismo is marked by a constant and in-depth engagement with Husserl’s thought. But in these pages we also witness a first attempt on Preti’s part to criticise certain aspects of Husserlian thought and distance himself from them. In particular, Preti draws attention to three problematic questions connected to the nature of the phenomenological method. I will briefly outline them, as they crop up again as polemical targets at other stages in Preti’s career. First of all, Preti rejects the idea of the existence of immediate data, which he regards as a positivistic residue in Husserl’s philosophy: “Husserl made a naive hypostasis of the method,” Preti observes, and “believed that there truly exist immediate data, a presenting itself of the thing ‘in flesh and blood’ (leibhaft), and that this presenting itself amounts to the revelation of a level of ‘true reality’.”21 Secondly, Preti underlines that Husserl—unlike Hilbert and those of his school— failed to realise that primitive propositions are not data grasped through an act of intuition, but rather conventions which are established on the basis of their capacity to engender no contradiction in the system and of their epistemic virtues (simplicity, productiveness, etc.)22 Finally—and this is arguably the most interesting aspect— Preti distances himself from Husserl (and Banfi) in the way he conceives of the

18 Preti, Idealismo e positivismo, 71. 19 Ibid., 51. 20 Ibid., 73. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Ibid., 22–23. For a more in-depth investigation of the significance of these two criticisms that Preti directs at Husserl in Idealismo e positivismo, see Peruzzi, Alberto. 2014. L’idealpositività. In: Sulla filosofia teoretica di Giulio Preti. In occasione del centenario, ed. Luca Scarantino, 89–117. 50 R. Gronda method of philosophising. Preti notes that in philosophy, as in science, there are two different and equally important levels of verification: logical discourse and experience. By contrast, the Husserlian method of intuition of the essences favours the latter over the former, to which it assigns a purely auxiliary role. However, an intuition is only valid when it “is expressed (…) in a discourse (a chain or series of propositions) in which only the intuition itself acquires an objective validity.” Preti expresses this concept in distinctly Husserlian terms: “if intuition is the content, the noema, then discourse is the form, the noesis, which is to say that exteriority by which the noema becomes objective.” For this reason, precisely because “conceptual thought (…) is not the self-consciousness of experience, its mere form, but its translation on a heterogeneous level,” philosophy always defines itself as an analysis of discourse and never as mere eidetic intuition.23

2 Husserl the Neo-enlightenment Philosopher

The neo-Enlightenment phase of Preti’s thought essentially coincides with the works he produced in the years between immediate aftermath of the War and the late 1950s. It revolves around the need to build a public and democratic culture, centred on the idea of social contract and on the principle that no human being should be subjected to norms and values other than those which he himself has chosen and established as his guiding principles.24 This holds true in the political and moral domain as much as in the epistemological one: the eyes of the mind— which Diogenes lacked, according to Plato’s criticism—are actually a way of introducing a metaphysic that is not founded on what all men are capable of seeing, i.e. the world perceived by the five senses. This is not to say, of course, that we must stop at what the senses tell us—the need to rationally resolve experience remains a fundamental concern of Preti’s thought. However, the categories by which experience is resolved and in terms of which objectivity comes to be established must be understood in a conventionalist way—in accordance with the methodological indication which Preti had formulated in Idealismo e positivismo some 15 years earlier. The categories are postulates, human products that change over time; and yet they exercise a transcendental function. For this reason, in the 1950s Preti further developed his criticism of the Husserlian idea of the intuition of the essence and of the descriptive paradigm it entails. This point is very clearly expressed in an important article which Preti published in 1957, the same year as Praxis ed empirismo (Praxis and Empiricism), and which bears the title “L’ontologia della regione ‘natura’ nella fisica newtoniana” (The Ontology of the Region ‘Nature’ in Newtonian Physics):

23 Preti, Idealismo e positivismo, 94. 24 Preti, Giulio. 1957. Praxis ed empirismo. Turin: Einaudi. 25. Preti and Husserl 51

(…) it is possible to further develop the transcendentalist conception of regional ontologies without preserving the range of metaphysical notions which appear to be connected to Kant and Husserl’s transcendentalism (…). It is possible, and in our view necessary, to abandon all references to consciousness: there is no need to assume that those a priori structures or forms that are used to build the conceptual framework of reason, and which constitute the form of being of that region (…), are structures and forms intrinsic to “consciousness,” be it psychological consciousness, or a phenomenological act, or Bewusstsein überhaupt.25 The method suggested by Preti in order to preserve the transcendental character of categories is to stop envisaging them as fixed forms, “independent of all human becoming, of all historical experiences, and hence as immutable, or indeed universal and necessary.” The concepts of essence and of the intuition of the essence must therefore be dropped: “according to Husserl the essence is a quid that gives itself intuitively, immediately, to consciousness, following the suspension of the existential aspects of what is empirical.” This, Preti observes, “remains something fixed, given and ‘a priori’, according to a sense that the various currents of contemporary thought are no longer willing to admit.”26 It is a matter of distinguishing between the a priori and the transcendental, rejecting the former so as to better grasp the constructive function of the latter, by virtue of the new theoretical awareness engendered by the latest experiences in contemporary thought—and what Preti has in mind here is not just Hilbert’s approach to axiomatics but also Dewey’s pragmatist operationalism.27 What we are left with, then, is simply the notion of category, or meaning, as a “web of notions by reference to which experiences become meaningful,” within a complex structure of references that pre-establish the object.28 By highlighting the constructive role of the transcendental and underlining its independence from the notion of a priori, Preti was only providing a general outline of a philosophical programme. As already noted, Preti had essentially achieved this result—albeit in a less conscious and refined way—in Idealismo e positivismo. In order to prove truly convincing, this programme needed to be integrated with a specific analysis of the articulation of the transcendental dimension on the level of the languages by which experience is thought and resolved. This topic is the focus of many of the essays which Preti wrote in the 1950s, most notably “Due orientamenti nell’epistemologia” (Two Orientations in Epistemology, 1950), “Linguaggio comune e linguaggi scientifici” (Common Language and Scientific Languages, 1953), and “Il problema della L-verità nella semantica carnapiana” (The Problem of L-Truth in Carnapian Semantics, 1955). Once again, as we shall see, the goal in question was pursued through the medium of Husserlian philosophy.

25 Preti, Giulio. 1957. L’ontologia della regione “natura” nella fisica newtoniana. In: Saggi filosofici. Vol. 1. 413–435 (414–415). 26 Ibid., 416. 27 For an interpretation of the role played by the pragmatist concept of meaning in Preti’s philosophy, I will refer to Gronda, Roberto. 2013. Filosofie della praxis. Preti e Dewey. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale. 28 Preti, L’ontologia della regione “natura” nella fisica newtoniana, 415. 52 R. Gronda

In the above essays, however—and especially in the first two—what is primarily discussed is a very technical issue, namely the status of L-truths. In Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (1939)—a text which Preti had translated into Italian for Paravia in 1956—and in Introduction to Semantics (1942), Carnap had sought to develop a general semantics. In order to do so, he had distinguished between three types of truth within an interpreted syntactic system: C-truths, i.e. propositions which are true merely in virtue of the axioms and inference rules of the system; L-truths, i.e. propositions whose truth depends on the semantic rules of the system, as in the case of the definitions of the terms which appear in S; and, finally, F-truths, i.e. propositions which are not meaningless yet are neither L-true nor L-false, and hence can be called factual. Now, by contrast to much of the later literature, Preti criticises Carnap’s distinction between C-truth and L-truth not in order to deny its soundness, but rather in an attempt to better clarify it. The example of L-truth provided by Carnap strikes Preti as utterly inadequate: “‘Australia is large’ or ‘Australia is not large’—he observes— may be derived through the logical inference rules of the system; but in this sense it is a C-truth, of the p ∨~p sort.”29 L-truths, therefore, must have a different structure and exercise a different function, which consists in building axiomatic systems— Preti, like practically all philosophers of science of his day, adopted a syntactic conception of theories—that combine propositions in such a way that C-truth can be assigned to all the F-truths of science. Genuine examples of L-truths are rather provided by the scientific laws that structure specific fields of experience. Unlike empirical generalisations, which can be either confirmed or disproved by experience, scientific laws are “completely conventional, like all axioms;” as such, they are purely tautological. Yet, unlike C-truths, they constitute implicit definitions which allow us to interpret facts and to establish coordination definitions which make it possible to translate the formal parts of the language of the axiomatic system into empirical protocols.30 The causal principle, for example, is precisely an L-truth of this sort. Likewise, Newton’s first two laws are L-truths insofar as they define force, as is Ohm’s Law insofar as it defines elec- trical resistance. When understood in such terms, L-truths can be seen to translate into a semantic language the Kantian notion of synthetic a priori, and to clarify the nature and function exercised by the transcendental within an axiomatic system. But Preti’s interpretation of this key theoretical problem is even more ambitious. According to Preti, the theoretical significance of Carnap’s plan to develop a general semantics falls31— and can better be grasped—within the context of the Husserlian project of defining the conditions of scientificity in general. No doubt, Preti is well aware of the

29 Preti, Giulio. 1953. Linguaggio comune e linguaggi scientifici. In: Saggi Filosofici. Vol. 1. 127– 220 (194). 30 Ibid., 208. 31 See e.g. what Preti writes with regard to a possible Husserlian integration of Carnap’s syntactical analysis, in view of its ‘semanticisation’: Preti, Giulio. 1955. Il problema della L-verità nella semantica carnapiana. In: Saggi filosofici. Vol. 1. 337–376 (357). Preti and Husserl 53

differences between the two approaches. Nevertheless, he believes that they reflect a shared aspiration, which finds its most rigorous formulation in Husserl’s work. Like Carnap, Husserl maintains that the object of logic is discourse and that the task which the latter must fulfill is to develop a unitary theory of science: logic thus ultimately constitutes a formal general ontology.32 Preti writes: “Carnap’s aim is precisely to build a general semantics which represents an explication of the topic ‘conditions for scientificity in general’, which is to say one that accomplishes Husserl’s program in the domain of formal logic: formal logic here becomes transcendental, establishing the conditions for the rationality of a semantic system (and hence of scientific discourse) in general.” Even more radically, according to Preti this suggests “that logical meaning is syntactically determined, and that semantics is nothing but the transcendentalist interpretation of syntax, which is to say the analysis-construction of the conditions of interpretability of syntactic system in general.”33 Preti regarded this interpretation as a coherent development of the distinction between pure morphology (syntax) and the logic of consequence (semantics) laid out by Husserl in Formal and Transcendental Logic. It allows Preti to combine, on the level of semantic analysis, the Husserlian requirement of the transcendental with the conventionalist and constructivist approach proper to the epistemology of logical empiricism. The truth content of Husserlian philosophy was thus freed from the metaphysical mortgages which weighed upon it, in Preti’s eyes, and acquired the form of a concrete line of research on the structure of scientific languages that contributed—if only in an indirect and mediated way—to the development of the neo- Enlightenment project of building a democratic culture.

3 The Life-world and the Theory of Value

As interpreters have not failed to note, the 1960s were a period in which Preti reassessed the theoretical results he had reached in the previous decade. Partly, this work of self-correction and fine-tuning was due to an attempt to overcome some of the shortcomings in his Neo-enlightenment approach. Just to give one example, Preti’s assessment of Dewey’s thought changed considerably, along with his understanding of the relations between genesis and validity—in the last decade of his life Preti stressed the irreducibility of the latter to the former, and the importance of

32 Ibid., 341–342. One must bear in mind, however, the significant point emphasised by Preti in “L’ontologia della regione ‘natura’.” He writes: “A very important difference that stems from this is that for us ontology is invariably formal to some degree. It always consists either of tautologies, or of L-truths, or of enunciations containing variables. Instead, Husserl had clearly distinguished between formal ontology (…) and regional, ‘material ontologies’ founded on the intuition of ‘material’ essences. For us, the difference only consists in the degree of formalism.” Preti, L’ontologia della regione “natura” nella fisica newtoniana, 414–415. 33 Preti, Il problema della L-verità nella semantica carnapiana, 376. 54 R. Gronda preserving a structural or phenomenological analysis alongside a pragmatic one. Partly, however, the changes which Preti’s thought underwent were due to external events, so to speak: in particular, to his new readings and to the philosophical stimuli they provided. This also applies to Preti’s interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. In those years, Italian culture was deeply influenced by Il Saggiatore’s publication of a translation of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, with a foreword by Enzo Paci. The text in question—which proved of considerable importance for other phenomenological interpretations put forward in Italy—was highly criticised by Preti, who published a review of it under the title of “‘La crisi delle scienze europee’ di Husserl” in Paese Sera Libri in 1961. Preti believed that in this book Husserl had once again encumbered himself with “heavy metaphysical mortgages.” He rejected Husserl’s diagnosis of the crisis of the sciences and the consequence which, in his view, the German philosopher inferred from it, namely the idea that transcendental phenomenology constitutes “the destiny of European philosophy,” by which “European mankind is saved from its crisis.” Preti wrote that these were “a philosopher’s follies,” deriving from an inversion of the correct relations between life and philosophy, from a belief that the crisis of humanity derives from that of philosophy, rather than the other way round.34 Preti, therefore, clearly distanced himself from Husserl. However, it would be wrong to conclude that there were no other reasons for this clear break: it would have been unlike Preti to stop at such a general and superficial level of analysis. And indeed, there was more to his criticism, starting from the rejection of the Husserlian notion of the ante-predicative, which Preti conceived as an ineffable and constitutively private dimension of experience (no doubt, a rather simplistic reading).35 There was also Preti’s conviction that Husserl’s metaphysical mortgages had a negative influence on the phenomenological method. To be more precise, Preti believed that Husserl had not completed his phenomenological clarification of the structures of intentionality because of a “realistic presupposition.” In an article published shortly after that review and significantly entitled “Il linguaggio della filosofia” (The Language of Philosophy), Preti observed that contemporary philosophy had ultimately replaced the objectivist reifications of modern philosophy with other reifications, of a subjectivist nature: “the relation between the pure ego, or cogito, and its cogitata, is essentially identical to that

34 Preti, Giulio. 1961. “La crisi delle scienze europee” di Husserl. In: Saggi filosofici. Vol. 1. 449– 453 (452). 35 It must be said that in parallel to this no doubt one-sided reading, Preti was willing to acknowledge the importance of the concept of lifeworld, to the point that he employed it to refer to what, in the previous years, he had referred to by the term praxis, namely the concrete historical and social world in which human beings live and operate. At the same time, the concept of lifeworld or primary experience was strongly distinguished from the notion of basic experience, understood as a theoretical concept whose legitimate field of application is the epistemological discourse. On these issues in French phenomenology—in particular that of Merleau-Ponty—see Lanfredini, Roberta. 2014. Fenomenologia della carne in Giulio Preti. In: Sulla filosofia teoretica di Giulio Preti. In occasione del centenario, ed. Luca Scarantino, 71–87. Preti and Husserl 55 between ‘matter in itself’ and its phenomena.”36 This fallacy, which Preti attributed to both Descartes and Kant, was also committed by Husserl, even though the latter’s rigorous method would have had the conceptual resources to frame the problem in different terms. Preti observes: “in the light of the phenomenological method, its ‘Cartesianism’ appears untenable”—and this not just because “in the history of the development of Husserlian thought the phenomenological ἐποχἡ came before the transcendental one.” The point is that the two are in conflict: once the former occurs, the latter proves impossible. Therefore, the procedure that Husserl adopts in Cartesian Meditations, where the transcendental epoché is applied before the phenomenological one, is untenable. If the phenomenological epoché occurs, the natural orientation is suspended, and with it all references to a reality confronted with the act of knowing. Yet this also undermines all foundations for scepticism, and hence “the privileged apodicticity of the cogito ergo sum.” Not only that: “the esse of the cogito is itself ‘reduced’ to an intentional esse, a noematic objective whose ontological claims must be made the object of ἐποχἡ,” after which all that remains is its “(phenomenologically) pure, and in a sense abstract (ideal), analytical structure,” consisting in the noesis-noema opposition.37 And in order to describe such processes of constitution, the phenomenologist must employ the very language which she ought to constitute—and this is in principle impossible. To put it in other words, instead of conceiving the ego as the form of scientific language—according to the neo-Kantian idea of transcendental subjectivity as a web of categories—Husserl turned it into what Preti calls a “self-category” or “self- meaning,” thereby failing to provide a phenomenological clarification of it. The moment in which one drops these hypostatisations and restores what in Preti’s view is the heuristic value of Husserlian phenomenology, it becomes possible to identify the only legitimate field of application of philosophical inquiry, namely the analysis of the discourses in which objectivity is constituted: “Knowledge is a fact,” Preti writes, and the task of philosophy is to analyse it by bringing out its structures. However, knowledge is discourse, so if we abandon the subject-object dualism, “the intentional tension between noesis and noema (…) emerges as the tension between sign and meaning”. Hence, the problem of knowledge becomes a semantic problem: “the traditional question ‘what can we know?’ turns into a different one: ‘what can we say?’”38 The same applies to the other discourses structuring the intersubjective world— in particular moral discourse. And this is the last point I wish to briefly focus on. It is an important point because it allows us to appreciate how Preti’s attempt to distance himself from certain positions of Husserl’s—as a consequence of a strong linguistic turn, clearly illustrated by his frequent references to Ruytinx’s definition of philosophy as a meta-reflection on a constantly shifting level—did not at all pre- vent him from employing Husserlian concepts and analyses for specific purposes.

36 Preti, Giulio. 1962. Il linguaggio della filosofia. In: Saggi filosofici. Vol. 1. 455–474 (459–460). 37 Ibid., 461. 38 Ibid., 462. 56 R. Gronda

Indeed, Preti always gets back to Husserl when he has to deal with questions concerning the structure of concepts, and hence of “theoreticity.” Take Retorica e logica. In this text, Preti draws upon some observations on noetic-noematic structures in the sphere of will that Husserl puts forward in sections 93–95 of Ideas I in order to clarify the nature of evaluative predicates and, through them, the relation between scientific and humanistic culture. In those sections Husserl had highlighted how, in the higher spheres of consciousness, “a number of noeses are built up on one another in the unity of a concrete mental process and (…) accordingly, the noematic correlates are likewise founded.”39 Through a sophisticated argument that in many respects is still relevant today, Preti further investigates Husserl’s analysis, illustrating the foundational relation—one might even speak here of a genuine case of moral grounding—between the descriptive component and the evaluative one of value-predicates. The latter are second-order predicates, in the sense that they do not ‘bear upon’ objects but upon other predicates, namely non- evaluative predicates: “the object-endowed-with-value,” Preti observes, “is a second-order νόημα, or rather a founded νόημα,” given that “value-quality inheres in the object-endowed-with-value insofar as a given quality inheres in the object sempliciter.”40 The point which Preti emphasises is that the founding νόημα is always cognitive, and therefore susceptible of being the object of true or false propositions. For this reason, the rationality of the scientific method—understood as an opening to “sen- sate esperienze”—can set some constraints in terms of the moral values which a community is justified in accepting. The various levels in the building of objectivity discussed by Husserl—the idea that facts, as hyletic matter, are always shaped by the conceptual web that operates as an intentional form—are thus arranged in a dynamic and critical way which makes it possible to envisage the relation between theoretical and axiological culture in normative terms. Once again, Husserlian concepts are transposed into a highly original and mediated theoretical framework, acquiring a meaning that is irreducible to the starting material. However, behind the creative nature of this translation work one catches a glimpse of Husserl’s enduring and varied influence on Preti’s thought.

Roberto Gronda is currently a researcher in the Philosophy of Science at Pisa University. After graduating from the University of Turin, he earned a PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa with a thesis on Dewey’s early philosophy. His research aims to establish a renewed pragmatist philosophy of science. He has also explored the history of American Pragmatism and of its relations with Italian philosophy. He is the author of the volume Filosofie della Praxis. Preti e Dewey, published by Edizioni della Normale (Pisa 2013).

39 Husserl, Edmund. 1999. The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 92. 40 Preti, Giulio. 1968. Retorica e logica. Turin: Einaudi. 219. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl

Amedeo Vigorelli

Abstract The purpose of the following paper is to present, within an essentially theoretical perspective, the “return to Husserl” carried out by Enzo Paci in the often sluggish context of the Italian philosophy of the second half of the twentieth- century; in particular, the paper will have as its main reference the book Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl (1960). The modalities of Paci’s new approach to phenomenology will be highlighted in connection, on the one hand, to the contact he sought to establish with Husserl’s early pupils and, on the other, to a careful and original rereading of his texts (including unpublished ones). Fundamental to this recovery operation will be the concepts of “phenomenological reduction,” “intersubjectivity” and “needs.” Finally, we will see how Paci’s recovery of Husserl is linked to those of other important personalities: Freud and Marx above all.

Enzo Paci’s leading role in twentieth-century Italian philosophy is a historiographically ascertained fact nowadays.1 However, his position in the European and world context is a topic that has received scant attention. The mid-1950s was a time in which the fervid spirit of the post-fascist “philosophical restoration” seemed to have abated and in which the most eminent figures in the country’s moral and civil renewal reverted to an academic and ideological style of thinking—as a consequence of their “professional” practice of philosophy. In these years, when the long season of existentialism was about to sound its “swan song,”2 Paci felt the need for a “new beginning.” In particular, when his vocation for diaristic and autobiographical writing (embryonically present since his juvenile years3) found prominent expression in

1 Ferrari, Massimo. 2016. Mezzo secolo di filosofia italiana. Dal secondo dopoguerra al nuovo millennio. Bologna: il Mulino. 76–83; 133–148; 155–157 and passim. 2 Ibid., 142. 3 See Vigorelli, Amedeo. 1987. L’esistenzialismo positivo di Enzo Paci. Una biografa intellettuale (1929–1950). Milan: Franco Angeli.

A. Vigorelli (*) University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 57 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_5 58 A. Vigorelli the pages of the 1961 Diario fenomenologico, he welcomed the “return to Husserl” as a hasty attempt to “influence Italian culture and philosophy through phenomenology.”4 Moreover, during his teaching at the University of Pavia—in an effort to recover his youthful ethical and theoretical experience5—Paci embraced a position of clear openness to the international debate: aut aut, the periodical that he founded in 1951, was the most evident example of this vocation. For people engaged in this kind of work, like Paci’s many students, this meant being in an environment that was not prejudiced or hostile towards scientific thought, but, at the same time, was not passively compliant with or subordinate to it either. This situation enabled a reaction to the anti-philosophical skepticism of the period, which threatened to develop into a form of neurosis that would drain the Italian cultural milieu of the 1950s.6 It would be possible to reconstruct this important event in its philosophical and ideological implications from a historiographical point of view.7 However, in the following pages, I will be exploring the subject from a theoretical perspective, by taking into consideration Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, the work of Paci’s which was the main focus of this phenomenological rebirth. Philosophy starts from astonishment, it is the awakening of a long dormant intuition, it is the revelation of a brain-teaser, a Rätsel, there where we thought there was something obvious. In phenomenology, this coincides with the discovery of the intentionality of consciousness: “consciousness both contains and does not contain” all things in itself.8 Regarding the clarification of the subtle difference between psychic reality and conscious intentional content, Paci refers to Sofia Vanni Rovighi, from whom the above-quoted formula was borrowed.9 What we are dealing with

4 Ferrari, Mezzo secolo di filosofia italiana, 136. On Enzo Paci’s diaristic practices, see Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2016. Filosofia como ejercicio. La práctica del diario personal en Enzo Paci (trans: Daturi, D.E.). Eikasia Revista de Filosofía 69:45–60. Italian version: Filosofia come esercizio. La pratica diaristica di Enzo Paci. Ibid.: 61–74. 5 See Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2007. Enzo Paci: le due stagioni dell’impegno. In: Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2007. La nostra inquietudine. Martinetti, Banfi, Rebora, Cantoni, Paci, De Martino, Rensi, Untersteiner, Dal Pra, Segre, Capitini. 115–140. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. 6 Neri, Guido Davide. 2003. La fenomenologia. In: Neri, Guido Davide. 2003. Il sensibile, la storia, l’arte. Scritti 1957–2001. Verona: ombre corte. 172. 7 Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2002. La fenomenologia husserliana nell’opera di Enzo Paci. magazzinodifi- losofia 5:169–195; Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2006. Solitudine e comunità. In: Omaggio a Paci, II, ed. E. Renzi, G. Scaramuzza, 135–151. Milan: CUEM; Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2007. Marx dopo Husserl: Paci e il fantasma del materialismo. In: La nostra inquietudine. Martinetti, Banfi, Rebora, Cantoni, Paci, De Martino, Rensi, Untersteiner, Dal Pra, Segre, Capitini. 157–171; Vigorelli, Amedeo. 2012. Fenomenologia e storia. A partire da Patočka: l’itinerario filosofico di Guido Davide Neri. Leússein Rivista di Studi Umanistici V (11):141–146. 8 Paci, Enzo. 1960. Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl. Rome-Bari: Laterza. 50. The second chapter of this book (“Il significato dell’intenzionalità”)—the source of the quotation—had already been published as an indipendent article (entitled “Il significato dello spirito”) in: Paci, Enzo. 1959. Il signifcato dello spirito. aut aut 54:345–372. 9 “Come parte della natura, come ente della natura, la coscienza (…) ha le sue rappresentazioni, i suoi giudizi, i suoi sentimenti, ma non contiene in sé prati, alberi, animali, divinità, ecc., e in certo senso, invece, cioè per quell’aspetto che chiameremo intenzionale, la coscienza contiene in sé tutte queste cose”. Vanni Rovighi, Sofia. 1958. La teoria dell’intenzionalità nella filosofia di Husserl. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl 59 here is the difference between cogito and cogitatum, which does not necessarily require the presence of the ambiguous intermediate entity provided by “representation;” rather, it is a direct and intuitive reference to the object, “unreal compared to physical reality, which is considered real.” This is the difference between “tree” and “my consciousness,” which are both placed in rerum natura, and the “meaning” or the “ideal essence” of the tree, as the “pole” of “universal correlation” between noesi and noema. The tree is “in my monad, in which consciousness is linked to feeling, to the Leib’s ante-predicative Belief.” From this state of latency, in which the whole “perception” of the tree is the “passive synthesis” or the “association” of the infinite petit perceptions of the individual monad, there finally appears the appropriate vision of the intentional eidos, in the “reflection” of consciousness on itself: “I see the tree that I felt before without awareness: I awake or, rather, I reflect.” Therefore, I discover that “in the Real, in the empirical, was hidden the inexhaust- ibility of the essence and of the ideal that are the truth and the significance of the empirical.”10 Paci feels an “existential” urgency to come up with a second reading of Husserl’s texts,11 which is guided by the willingness to overcome prejudices connected to a lazy and stereotypical reading of phenomenology. This type of reading is said to be linked to the dualism of Leben and Geist, “facticity” and “essence,” “historicity” and “ideality.” In order to overcome these prejudices, Paci rejects the tendency to draw artificial distinctions between the “chronological” phases into which Husserl’s philosophy is usually divided, in particular with the distinction between the two stages of a “first” and a “second” Husserl: The first Husserl, the one of Logische Untersuchungen and Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, would be a “logical” Husserl, as remote from experience, from the Lifeworld, and from history as possible. Ideen I would provide confirmation, in an “eidetic” sense, of the first Husserl, the Platonic one. The second Husserl, whose thought expresses itself in the most mature form in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, would be Husserl as a philosopher of experience, of the Lebenswelt, of history.12 In this particular period of Paci’s life and thought, we can identify two separate attitudes. On one hand, Paci claims to be getting back in touch with the exponents of the early—phenomenologically and existentialistically oriented—Husserlian exegetical tradition, of which he himself had been an (apparently) “marginal”

Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica III. 200–201. 10 Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 51–52. 11 “Sento di dover ricominciare, di aver sbagliato, di non aver perseguito con chiarezza, con tenacia, con profondità, quello che cercavo. È vero: in ogni fatto, in ogni cosa isolata, si rivelano legami con tutte le cose, con tutti gli altri fatti. Nel tempo, nel tempo della natura e della storia.” (Pavia, 14th March 1956). Paci, Enzo. 1961. Diario fenomenologico. Milan: Bompiani. 11. 12 “Il primo Husserl, l’Husserl delle Logische Untersuchungen e di Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, sarebbe un Husserl logico, quanto mai lontano dall’esperienza, dal mondo della vita, dalla storia. Ideen I sarebbe la conferma in senso ‘eidetico’ del primo Husserl, l’Husserl platonico. Il secondo Husserl, di cui il pensiero si esprime nella forma più matura in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, sarebbe l’Husserl filosofo dell’esperienza, della Lebenswelt, della storia.” Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 9. 60 A. Vigorelli

representative, owing to the peripheral position of Italian philosophy in the 1930s as compared to French and German philosophy; thus, in the Diario fenomenologico, we find the names of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, in a position of a direct implication.13 On the other hand, we find a characteristic “humility” in Paci, which takes the form of a willingness to resume a dialogue with the father of phenomenology that had long been interrupted (perhaps only apparently so); a dialogue that would bear the hallmarks of a borrowing from the philological work of Husserl’s most recent pupils: Van Breda,14 Fink, Landgrebe, Biemel, Farber and Brand (precisely and accurately cited in Diario fenomenologico); with the aim to group the students that will constitute—after Banfi’s dead15—his “school,” emblematically characterized, by analogy to Husserl’s one, by dispersion and scattering. Paci owes to Eugen Fink his understanding of the concept of “world” laid out in Husserl’s matureworks (Cartesianische Meditationen and Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften) and hence too his view of the Husserl-Heidegger relationship, a view radically different from his juvenile interpretation based on the notion of “existential ontology.”16 Equally important is Paci’s reading of the volume Phänomenologie und Metaphysik, written by Ludwig Landgrebe in 1949, from which he gains the hermeneutical key for a critical interpretation of the Husserl- Dilthey relationship—a topic he had actually already been inspired to explore, some time before, by Georg Misch’s Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie, which Paci had introduced as an object of historiographical study within the so-called “scuola di Milano.”17 Another influence can be found in Gerd Brand’s book Welt,

13 See Paci, Diario fenomenologico, 46, 75, 96–98, 101–103, 108–109, 110, 113–115. 14 “Conferenze di Padre Van Breda: a Milano il 6 e il 7 a Pavia. Difficoltà di comprendere nel suo giusto senso il problema dell’intenzionalità. Van Breda dice che fino alla fine della sua vita Husserl si è rifiutato di interpretare la fenomenologia come una metafisica. Forse è una metafisica, ma non dell’ens qua ens, bensì dell’ens qua verum. La formula mi piace, ma senza l’ens. Cioè penso che in Husserl l’essere si risolve nell’orizzonte intenzionale della verità e perciò che la fenomenologia non può essere considerata né una metafisica né un’ontologia nel senso tradizionale di questi due termini. Il problema mi sembra quello del rapporto tra tempo e orizzonte di verità del tempo”. Ibid., 44. Luigi Rognoni had a voice recording of the lecture delivered by Van Breda in Pavia. He told me of the shocking effect on Paci of an incident that occurred, on that occasion, before the ark of St. Augustine, in the church of S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro (Pavia). Van Breda, who suffered from epilepsy, fell unconscious after a slight attack (perhaps caused by exhaustion after the long journey, or due to the strong feelings that the place had stirred within him). Paci was really shocked, interpreting the episode as a revelation of the “demonic” forces (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) that he had been obsessed with in his youth. 15 In Diario fenomenologico are emblematically recorded two dates related to someone’s death: 22th July 1957 (Banfi) and 4th May 1961 (Merleau-Ponty). See ibid., 36 and 114. 16 See the reference to Paci, Enzo. 1939. Princìpi di una filosofia dell’essere. Modena: Guanda. Quoted in: Paci, Diario fenomenologico, 26. See, furthermore, an interesting interpretation of Paci’s Princìpi di una filosofia dell’essere in: Mancini, Sandro. 2005. L’orizzonte del senso. Verità e mondo in Bloch, Merleau-Ponty, Paci. Milan: Mimesis. 247–276. 17 In regard to this see Marini, Alfredo. 1984. Alle origini della filosofia contemporanea: Wilhelm Dilthey. Florence: La Nuova Italia. See also Sacconaghi, Rocco. 2013. “Ideen I” in Italy and Enzo Paci and the Milan school. In: Husserl’s Ideen, ed. L. Embree, T. Nenon, T., 161–176. Dordrecht: Springer. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl 61

Ich und Zeit, promptly translated and printed in the Bompiani book series “Idee Nuove,” directed by Paci himself.18 This last reading indeed offered Paci an incen- tive to travel to Leuven in order to study the unpublished Husserlian manuscripts about the analysis of temporality under the guidance of Leo van Breda and Rudolf Boehm. The concept of “reduction” is the focus of Paci’s rereading of Husserl. Prior to this interpretation, he did not fully realise how anti-idealistic and anti-metaphysics this concept was. Paci writes: “Reduction is not a philosophical theory, but (…) it is an exercise, a doing.”19 Moreover, he is particularly affected by the final quote of the Cartesianische Meditationen.20 He interprets this quote as a conscious reference to the expression Weltvernichtung used in §49 of Ideen I, still subject to an idealistic or existentialist interpretation.21 Finally, the exercise of reduction is not a method, but rather a task, an ethical duty, which must be practiced regardless of the unavoidable temporary “pauses,” which can obscure the meaning of the intentional life, which must be recaptured immer wieder. Therefore, the concepts of “time” and “relation” should replace the idealistic concept of Self: What precedes, gives only some indications about the value which Husserl assigns to the concepts of time and relationship. Husserl’s work is entirely dominated by these two themes. Time as “Urform der welterfahrenden Leben” is not only the topic of the unpublished manuscripts on this particular subject, but was an already decisive theme in 1904- 1905 and, a few years later, in 1910. The relationship (I-The other, I-You and intentionality) is always linked, in Husserl, not just to space, but to time, since the past is the first form of “other from me” that is in me. Phenomenology is the practice of restarting, in the dimension of time, according to the truth and intentionality. It is in this Stimmung that we must resume, immer wieder, the Husserlian return to the Cogito.22

18 Brand, Gerd. 1955. Welt, Ich und Zeit. The Hague: M. Nijhof. Italian edition: Brand, Gerd. 1960. Mondo io e tempo nei manoscritti inediti di Husserl. Introduzione di E. Paci. Milan: Bompiani. 19 Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 57. 20 “Positive Wissenschaft ist Wissenschaft in der Weltverlorenheit. Man muss erst die Welt durch epoché verlieren um sie in universaler Selbstbesinnung wiederzugewinnen.” Husserl, Edmund. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. 183. Italian Edition: Husserl, Edmund. 1970. Meditazioni cartesiane. Milan: Bompiani. 175. 21 “Il mondo anteriore alla riduzione si risolve nel mondo della coscienza—e all’infuori di questo, è nulla: ‘darüber hinaus aber ein Nichts ist’. Vien fatto di pensare che, anche per lo stile, da questa proposizione di Husserl derivi Was ist Metaphysik? di Heidegger. Come si sa per Heidegger c’è un modo di essere del non essere e cioè del nulla e questo modo di essere è l’esistenza come angoscia. L’angoscia conseguirebbe in Heidegger alla Weltvernichtung del paragrafo 49 di Ideen I. Se, come si è interpretato, il paragrafo 49 fosse la testimonianza più probante dell’idealismo di Husserl, e se l’angoscia è al centro dell’esistenzialismo, ne deriverebbe una interessante implicazione tra idealismo ed esistenzialismo.” Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 19. In the following I will dispute this hypothetical conclusion. 22 “Ciò che precede dà soltanto delle indicazioni per il valore che hanno per Husserl il tempo e la relazione. L’opera di Husserl è tutta dominata da questi due temi. Il tempo come ‘Urform der Welterfahrenden Leben’ non è soltanto il tema dei manoscritti inediti sull’argomento ma è un tema già decisivo nel 1904–1905 e, pochi anni più tardi, nel 1910. La relazione (io-altro, io-tu, e inten- zionalità) è sempre legata, in Husserl, oltre che allo spazio, al tempo, in quanto il passato è la prima forma dell’altro da me che è in me. La fenomenologia è l’esercizio del ricominciare, nel tempo, secondo la verità, l’intenzionalità. È in questa Stimmung che si deve riprendere, immer wieder, 62 A. Vigorelli

The Ego, achieved by reduction, is not the solipsistic self of idealism, it is a focal point of relations, internal and external. Towards the inner: an apodeictic self- explanatory core (Kern), enclosed within darker potential horizons open to infinite revelations.23 Towards the exterior: an “intermonadic social relation” of the Ego, directly gained through the temporary current of living together (Miteinanderleben).24 Husserl does not neglect the “solipsistic plan” of Cogito, but he moves beyond it following a historic immanent-transcendent telos: When we say presence we must think about temporality, about the task of bringing the past to life: with historiography and not just with memory. Historiography is the transformation of a document lost in the world, of a forgotten presence—in Weltverlorenheit—that is mean- inglessly fetishized, into a document that speaks, makes sense and therefore acquires an indicative value in the present for the future, and, ultimately, an intentionality for intermo- nadicity, for the Miteinanderleben (which has a physical, human and animal horizon), within the horizon of societas, within cosmic relationality.25 The doubling of subjectivity into an egological pole on one hand and a rich and articulate (phenomenologically describable) objective Seinsphäre, on the other, suggests to Paci a comparison with the concept of “absolute immanence” employed by Giovanni Gentile (who Paci regards as a philosopher of European stature), but taken here in a unilateral “logical” sense. Harking back to a typically idealistic (and Husserlian) terminology, Paci stresses the impossibility of relating the “disinter- ested spectator” of the phenomenological-trascendental epoché to the logical dimension of Gentile’s pure act: the Husserlian “doubled Self” is, for Paci, “life, Erlebnisstrom and Zeitform des Erlebnisstroms.” Gentile’s self-consciousness is, instead, a “dogmatic” presupposition, unable to achieve a regulative and methodical use of transcendental principles. Indeed, according to Paci, from the transcendental perspective reached by reduction we can (paradoxically) view Gentile’s philosophy as a sort of “naturalism:” Self-consciousness, according to the Cartesian attitude, as well as the Gentilian one, does not open an infinite sphere of study. In the position held by Gentile [attualismo], it does nothing but pose, as an act, the world of facts as these are in the preconceived world: they are merely said to be created (…) by the act. Therefore, the transcendental sphere is not studied and no phenomenology is possible. All the tools of Gentilian dialectics [della dialettica attualistica] only serve to justify the world in any case, as it is before epoché, according to the “naturalistic” attitude. Although this may seem strange to an Italian

l’esercizio husserliano del ritorno al Cogito”. Ibid., 60. 23 Ibid., 72ff. 24 Ibid., 58. 25 “Quando si dice presenza si deve pensare alla temporalità, al compito di render vivo il passato: con la storiografia e non solo con il ricordo. La storiografia è la trasformazione di un documento perduto nel mondo, di una presenza obliata—nella Weltverlorenheit—e feticizzata, senza senso, in un documento che parla, che ha senso ed acquista quindi un valore indicativo nel presente per l’avvenire, e, infine, un’intenzionalità per l’intermonadicità, per la Miteinanderleben (che ha un orizzonte fisico, umano e animale), nell’orizzonte della societas, nella relazionalità cosmica”. Ibid., 59–60. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl 63

philosopher from the point of view of phenomenology, Gentilian philosophy [attualismo] is nothing but naturalism.26 Starting from this, full awareness of the foundational role played by temporal “irreversibility” directs Paci’s work towards an unknown field of thought: a phenomenology of eros and needs, brought to the very limits of (unfounded and naturalistic) scientific disciplines like biology, psychology and economics.27 Nevertheless, we have to note here, at the same time, a clear split between Paci and some potential developments of European phenomenological thought, also influenced by Fink, Heidegger and Husserl: for example, the “a-subjective” philosophy of Jan Patočka, with whom Paci tried to keep in touch directly, even travelling to Prague.28 The prolonged reflections of the Czech philosopher on the phenomenological topic of the “natural world,” in connection with the Lebenswelt one (as presented in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften), led him in a completely opposite direction compared to the one expressed in the Cartesianische Meditationen or in the analysis of the ‘constitution’ of Ideen II.29 Conversely, the “transcendental” dimension and the theme of constitution remain crucial for Paci, from Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl (1961) to Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica (1973). Time is “present in the noetic moment, in the very depths of the Cogito, because time is what enables the constitution of the Ego.”30 Noematic “transcendence,” in its hyletic equivalent, originates from this level of “immanence:” “the law of time is akin to materiality and its hyletic contents, which are variously hidden” by the intentionality of consciousness. Actually, Paci goes as far as to say: “The infinite hyle lies in the Ego, therefore it is in the Ego itself that

26 “L’autocoscienza, nell’atteggiamento cartesiano, come, del resto, in quello gentiliano, non apre una sfera infinita di studio. Nell’attualismo non fa che porre, in quanto atto, il mondo dei fatti, tali e quali figurano nel mondo precostituito: si dice soltanto che sono creati (…) dall’atto. Non si studia quindi la sfera trascendentale ed una fenomenologia non è possibile. Tutto l’armamento della dialettica attualistica non serve che a giustificare il mondo in ogni caso, così com’è prima dell’epoché, nell’atteggiamento ‘naturalistico’. Per quanto ciò possa sembrare strano ad un filosofo italiano dal punto di vista della fenomenologia l’attualismo non è che naturalismo.” Ibid., 79–80. 27 The project remained only a sketch. However, we find a most valuable and interesting general draft in Paci’s last book (Paci, Enzo. 1973. Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica. Milan: Bompiani). See, especially, the following chapters: II, 1 (Vico, lo strutturalismo e l’enciclopedia fenomenologica delle scienze); III, 4 (Per una interpretazione della natura materiale in Husserl); IV, 3 (Antropologia strutturale e fenomenologia); IV, 6 (Psicanalisi e fenomenologia); IV, 7 (Keynes, la fondazione dell’economia e l’enciclopedia fenomenologica); IV, 9 (La presa di coscienza della biologia in Cassirer); V, 4 (La struttura della scienza); V, 5 (Il signifcato di verità della scienza); V, 7 (Informazione e significato). 28 See Vigorelli, Fenomenologia e storia. A partire da Patočka. 29 See Patočka, Jan. 2003. Il mondo naturale e la fenomenologia. Milan: Mimesis; Patočka, Jan. 2007. Phénoménologie asubjective et existence. Milan: Mimesis; Patočka, Jan. 2009. Che cos’è la fenomenologia? Movimento, mondo, corpo. Verona: Edizioni Fondazione Centro Studi Campostrini. 30 Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 82. 64 A. Vigorelli the form of time stands as the form of matter.”31 Paci, who was very familiar with pre-Socraic philosophy,32 here applies to the “law of time” the material and cosmic dialectic of peras and apeiron33—as a connection between Zeitlichkeit and Zeitigung, between the finite sequences of individual temporal durations and the infinite of subjective temporalization. “Consciousness reveals its meaning and its teleological sight to temporality.” Consciousness “is the shape of time because it is also consciousness in time.” Phenomenological philosophy, as a “rigorous science, is the persistence of the world of essences, within an always renewed horizon, in the telos of consciousness and history, with relative regional ontologies.”34 Consciousness “is not detached Bewusstsein, because it is Bewusstseinsleben, it is the Ego relating to itself, which experiences a relation evoking the past in order to move towards the future, according to the truths of essences, along with the renewal of the essential, which retains the truth of the past because it experiences the truth as telos.”35 We “do not consider the Cogito as mathematical axiom, but rather as the transcendent foundation of life.” The “world, reduction, and constitution are the real general and essential structures, the dialectical moments founding the transcendental experience.”36 However, it is clear that “the transcendent structure discovered so far does not correspond to the psychic structure of psychology as science.”37 These concise sentences give us an idea of the personal style of Paci’s thought and contain a whole research programme, which clearly goes beyond the possibilities of a personal work awaiting further development. The construction of “intersubjectivity” is the topic that Paci was most concerned with. From this point of view, we can consider Fifth Meditation as the Husserlian text which most left a mark on Paci’s personal reflection. Paci was constantly in dialogue with Sartre, admiring his original autobiographical work (Le mots38), and sharing the conclusions of Questions de methode about the relationship between existentialism and Marxism. However, he criticized the naturalistic psychology and the “existentialist psychoanalysis” presented in L’être et le néant as the phenomenological integration of Freudian naturalism. If “what, deep inside, unites monads is their physiological and somatic life, a life that is rooted in sexuality, in nurturing, in sleeping;”39 if individual and determined temporalities are all equal in their “infinite

31 Ibid., 85. 32 See Paci, Enzo. 1957. Storia del pensiero presocratico. Turin: ERI. A book particularly esteemed, among the other, by Mario Untersteiner. 33 Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 83–85. 34 This analysis was taken up again in the texts of 1960s, brought together in the third part of the above-mentioned volume Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 159–316. 35 Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 93–94. 36 Ibid., 94. 37 Ibid., 86. 38 We have a letter written by Paci to Sartre, in which the Italian phenomenologist expresses a sin- cere and unconventional appreciation of the book that had earned Sartre the Nobel Prize (which, however, he had recklessly rejected). 39 Ibid., 174. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl 65 operating presence,”40 in the Urzeit immanent to the Ego’s deep life; if “infinite temporality (static and mobile) is entirely present in each ecstasy,” as the flores- cence of a plant that draws sustenance from the same organic “explosion,”41 or as the gradual emergence of an island archipelago supported by a “submerged continent;”42 then, it must be possible to rethink the topic of intersubjective and dual Paarung as something constitutive of the genetic process of “identification.”43 The sexual act “presupposes the intermonadic relationship, which is immersed in a profound ‘primordiality’, in a genetic physiological past, in a ‘submerged continent’ anterior to the self’s act of identification.”44 The intentional telos of “procreation” is not the alienating “possession” of the other consciousness, which resolve itself in the “sado-masochistic situation described by Sartre.”45 The intentional fulfillment of the sexual act “does not give rise to identity but to detachment.”46 The intersubjective life, as an impulse to creation, does not isolate itself in the solipsistic closure of the two consciousnesses, but it continues in the child’s life and in the new intermonadic community that he/she realizes with his/her mother: “the maternal is neither mine nor of the other monad, it is of all monads and of the whole intermonadic community.”47 The “symbolic” significance of the sex act is to reopen, by “another” temporal ékstasis, the closed book of my passed intentional life. Since it is not possible to “relive” “the inner of the procreation” by experiencing it, I can recapture it as telos and as an opening up to a “new humanity,” to a birth which is at the same time a “rebirth.”48 The topic of solipsism, taken up by Husserl in the Fifth Meditation, must not be misunderstood in the idealistic sense (if we wish to stress its idealism, we should consider it an “idealism of significance,” instead of an ontological idealism). While the Alter is an “inner determination inseparable from the Ego,” the stumbling block of solipsism can be easily overcome, if it is interpreted as the theme of the living in itself as something which owns extraneousness without reducing it to “property,”49 from an alternative perspective to (the still too “Hegelian”) one of Sartre’s pour Autrui. Set on these intersubjective bases, ‘intentional’ psychology can renew the “naturalism” of scientific psychology as a strategic link between life’s sciences: “the human being is not a naturalistic anthropological reality, but rather the constitution of the sense of human history.”50 The Husserlian problem of

40 Ibid., 172. 41 Ibid., 173. 42 Ibid., 205. 43 See ibid., the whole § 17 (La fondazione genetica e la comunità intermonadica), 139–147. 44 Ibid., 249. Paci discusses here the Husserlian manuscript E III 5, entitled “Universal Teleology” (dated September 1933), published in the Appendix (ibid., 256–269). 45 Ibid., 251. 46 Ibid., 250. 47 Ibid., 252. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 134. 50 Ibid., 152. 66 A. Vigorelli

“constitution” can have a continuation only in the direction of a “phenomenology of the eros and of needs,”51 based on mutual Einfühlung: Einfühlung is not a reasoning, a thought, but a feeling and, one might say, a feeling rooted in a hidden and acting [fungente] common feeling, in shared perception, in an implicit coexistence. Each Selbst can feel the other Selbst because it lives, like the other Selbst, in a shared world, offering shared sustenance, and in a shared, infinite welterfahrende Leben: a life of sex, of nourishment, of dreams, of dozing off, of the dormant, pre-individual and living natura naturans.52 This personal phenomenological “style” expresses a particular point of view, constantly reaffirmed by Paci, namely a warning about the “non-obviousness” of materialism: “what do we mean by matter, and, ultimately, what is ‘Materialism’? Even if it might not seem so, this is probably one of the deepest and most difficult questions in philosophy: materialism is far from ‘obvious’.”53 In a text written for his academic lectures and partly included in Funzione delle scienze e signifcato dell’uomo, Paci repeats that “phenomenology is not a Weltanschauung,”54 whereas, on the contrary, idealism and materialism might be regarded as philosophical constructions. Phenomenology is rather the “paradoxical” result of the reduction— closely related to the external world and to the other’s Ego—that it is performed on a Leib “first-hand:” “the world is not something that stands in contrast to the subject, as a matter of principle. I am fully within the world, and the world is fully within me. A subject that is not in the world, the pre-categorial world, is an artificial construction, a philosophical ‘construction’, as it is presented in a Weltanschauung. The world that is in me and I myself are non-deductible.” Indeed, in this “insistence on the topic of materialism and on the fact that the material world has always been given, just as the world and I are given before every operation, it is possible to identify one of the hallmarks of the Italian interpretation of phenomenology.”55 Matter does not at all correspond to the nature of the “physicalistic thing,”56 but rather coincides with the material inertia that I experience as the ‘law’ of my intermonadic Leib and that of every other person:

51 See Paci, Enzo. 1961. Per una fenomenologia dell’eros. Nuovi Argomenti 51–52:52–76. English edition: Paci, Enzo. 1972. A Phenomenology of Eros. In: Facets of Eros, ed. J.F. Smith, E. Eng, 1–22. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Reprinted in aut aut (1986), 214–215:3–20. See also Paci, Enzo. 1963. Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo. Milan: Il Saggiatore (in which the author, in the end, embraces a Marxian position; for a partial overview see Paci, E., Rovatti, P.A., Tomassini R., and Veca, S. 1971. Per una fenomenologia del bisogno. aut aut 123–124:117–138). 52 “La Einfühlung non è un ragionamento, un pensiero, ma un sentire e, vorremmo quasi dire, un sentire che affonda in un nascosto e fungente sentire comune, in un consentire, in un coesistere implicito. Ogni Selbst può sentire l’altro Selbst perché vive, come l’altro Selbst, in un comune mondo, in un comune nutrirsi del mondo e in una comune infinita welterfahrende Leben: la vita del sesso, del nutrimento, del sogno, dell’assopimento, della dormiente, preindividuale e vivente natura naturans”. Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 174. 53 Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo, 189. 54 Paci, Enzo. 1963. I problemi dell’economia e la fenomenologia. Milan: La Goliardica. 65. 55 Ibid., 68–69. 56 Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 233. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl 67

The world in me and I myself are rooted in inactivity: I experience this in my body, in every effort of my muscles, in my having to adapt to matter and, in a sense, to reduce myself to matter in order to work on matter. Labour, technology and automatism are experiences that I have on my own. Material inactivity is constitutive of my body. It is the deepest sense of passive corporeality: it is not only the biological structure of my bones, but even their chemical and, one might say, mineral structure. It is in my breath, in oxidation, in nourishment, in wakefulness, in rest. It is in the resistance of the things around me, in my dependence upon the environment, in the most basic necessities that life requires in order to live and to survive.57 In this way of carrying out the shared Lebenswelt, the proper sense of lived intentionality changes substantially: I need to breathe: air is an element I depend on from birth. It is something that I experience, it seems, as non-mine. Yet it is also something that I experience as mine, on my own, personally within my subjectivity. Intentionality presents itself here as a “dependence upon something” which reveals my subjectivity to myself as the “need for something” that influ- ences life. This passive intentionality, experienced in first person, is inherent to my revealing myself to myself as subjectivity. From this point of view, the subject “becomes aware” of himself the very moment in which he discovers he is dependent on something, the very moment in which the world he has in himself appears in a dialectical concentration. The world experiences itself within me, because I am in the first person and I am this first person that possesses the world which lives within it. But this world which is active within me reveals myself to me as passivity and so reveals my subjectivity as a continuous internalisa- tion of the conditioned and of the exterior that lives as a need within me.58 In this sense, we can interpret the new way of thinking that marked the beginning of a “phenomenology of eros and needs” as a sign of the return to Marx and Freud strongly pursued by Paci in his 1960s works. For example, in an essay tellingly entitled Il ritorno a Freud, Paci mentions Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Lacan and their different hermeneutical positions, in order to demonstrate the urgency of a

57 “Io e il mondo che ho in me siamo radicati nell’inerzia: la sperimento nel mio corpo, in ogni sforzo dei miei muscoli, nel mio dovermi adeguare alla materia e, in un certo senso, ridurmi a materia per lavorare la materia. Lavoro, tecnica, automatismo, sono esperienze che faccio in proprio. L’inerzia materiale è costitutiva del mio corpo. È il senso più profondo della corporeità passiva: non è soltanto la struttura biologica ma quella chimica e, quasi, si potrebbe dire, minerale, delle mie ossa. È nel mio respiro, nell’ossidazione, nel nutrimento, nella veglia, nel sonno. È nella resistenza delle cose che mi circondano, nella mia dipendenza dall’ambiente, nelle necessità più elementari di cui la vita ha bisogno per vivere e per sopravvivere.” Paci, I problemi dell’economia e la fenomenologia, 69–70. 58 “Ho bisogno di respirare: l’aria è un elemento dal quale dipendo fin dalla nascita. È qualcosa che sperimento, sembra, come non mio. Eppure è anche qualcosa che sperimento come mio, che sperimento in proprio, nella mia soggettività in prima persona. L’intenzionalità si presenta qui come ‘dipendenza da’ nella quale si rivela a me stesso la mia soggettività come ‘bisogno di qualcosa’ che condiziona la vita. Questa intenzionalità passiva, sperimentata in prima persona, è inerente al rive- larmi a me stesso come soggettività. Da questo punto di vista il soggetto ‘prende coscienza’ di sé nel momento stesso nel quale si scopre dipendente, nel momento nel quale il mondo che ha in sé appare in una concentrazione dialettica. Il mondo vive se stesso in me in quanto io sono in prima persona e io sono questa prima persona che ha il mondo che vive in sé. Ma questo mondo che in me è attivo mi rivela a me stesso come passività e quindi discopre la mia soggettività come conti- nua interiorizzazione del condizionato e dell’esterno che, proprio in me, vive come bisogno”. Ibid. 68 A. Vigorelli

psychoanalytical “reconsideration.”59 But this rethinking of psychoanalysis was made possible by an acknowledgment of its failure in terms of its “claim to present itself as a natural science” and in its attempt to isolate itself from the broader context of philosophy and culture. Prejudice against the phenomenological epoché is a consequence of the ingenuity of natural science, which purports “to know what consciousness is,” while neglecting to carry out the “necessary” pre-categorical investigation “to understand what is meant by unconscious.”60 Even when this is correctly understood as the “symbolic,” we must not omit the intersubjective, intentional, dialectical consideration of the problem of language; nor must we forget the not “purely formal structure” of language, and its biological or, better, somatic roots: “The unconscious has its language as corporeality and its world have their language, in the sense that even a body that moves in relation to others, speaks through its moving.”61 After the reduction, the unconscious “must be linked to this somatic essence and to all its motivations; it is precisely on the basis of somatic and environmental evidence that I discover the precategorical structures by which the word is structured as a consequence of its originating from a precategorical intersubjective organization and is not separable from this structure as an independent field of language.”62 Lacan has rightly separated “desire” from “needs,” tracing its symbolic-linguistic origin and the decisive role of the “name of the father” (as signi- fier) in the process of structuring the Ego. The phenomenological indication of the relationship (and not merely merging or confusing) with the mother should not be overlooked: Apperception, emerging from the genesis and childhood’s constitution of the object, presupposes the Urstiftung and an even more original relationship between the child and the “other:” for the psychology of childhood, this other could be the mother. Detachment from the mother will lead man to perceive an Alter ego in representation, if nostalgia for the mother is transformed into an intentional nucleus, that is in a nucleus open to what is new, to the future, to a telos (…). Actually, the original foundation—we could say the “maternal” one (as Husserl himself does in the unpublished text E III 5)—is always present in ourselves and always alive. The Urstiftung is always active.63 Behind covers and protections, Freud has discovered “a man who is not mature yet, and who has yet to fulfill himself as a man.” But what has been revealed in this

59 See Paci, Enzo. 1967. Il ritorno a Freud. aut aut 98:62–67. Reprinted in Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 379–388. 60 Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 382. 61 Ibid., 388. 62 Ibid. 63 “L’appercezione, emergendo dalla genesi, dalla costituzione infantile dell’oggetto, presuppone l’Urstiftung e un rapporto ancor più originario tra l’infante e l’‘altro’: questo altro per la psicologia dell’infanzia potrebbe essere la madre. Il distacco dalla madre farà sì che l’uomo possa sentire un Alter ego nella rappresentazione se la nostalgia per la madre si trasforma in un nucleo intenzionale e cioè in un nucleo aperto al nuovo, all’avvenire, al telos (…). In realtà l’originaria fondazione, potremmo dire ‘materna’, (lo stesso Husserl lo dice nell’inedito E III 5) è sempre presente in noi e sempre viva. L’Urstiftung è sempre attiva.” Paci, Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl, 144. A New Phenomenological Beginning: A Dialogue Between Enzo Paci and Husserl 69 way is, rather, “the animal” and its “savagery.” This happens because psychoanalysis, when mistaken for a naturalistic science, comes across the paradox of matching desire, the primary and elementary form of intentionality, with the mechanism of nature, with the entropy and with the insuperability of the struggle for species selection.64 Vice versa, when it recovers and actualizes in its conversational practice— which must not be reduced to a “repetitive technique,” but must rather establish, in the doctor-patient relationship, an “intersubjective relationship” that should avoid fetishism and idolatry”65—it enables an individual to “talk about the unconscious without being its prisoner, by putting himself at the origin of an intentional ‘transformation’ which points to the infinite telos of the truth. The game of transference and countertransference between analyst and patient concretely realizes the intersubjective Paarung,” in which the acknowledgment that “the pain of the other is also my pain,”66 becomes the precondition for a process of liberation. The interpretation of dreams is not limited to the mechanical application of symbolic meanings, but actualizes itself in the Einfühlung between the analyst and the person analyzed, whereby both create and imagine “the past and the future”67 with all the possible phenomenological variations. Given that, dream is the fulfillment of a desire, it is such a fulfillment only as a dream: “if it is admitted as an apparent gratification, we discover the phenomenology of desire, the undeniable but positive gap between the physical need and the need for the truth.”68 “Phenomenological practice”—which is synonymous, in this case, with psychoanalytic practice—is “the transformation of a dream into significance of truth.”69 What we have are a few concise indications that are certainly dialectically oriented, as confirmed by the parallel essay devoted to Marx and to the topic of the foundation of economic policy.70 The return to Marx, like the one to Freud, is justified in relation to the plan to develop a “new Encyclopaedia” of phenomenology, a heir to the Enlightenment’s encyclopaedia, but also to the historicist and Hegelian ones. This new Encyclopaedia is “strongly critical and revealing,” compared to the “Encyclopaedia of Unified Science” of Neopositivism, while also being the ideal successor of the “implicit Marxian encyclopaedia.”71 This is the case because even the Marxian concept of “economic structure,” in its dialectical interrelations with the “superstructure,” requires a subjective constitution. If the Lebenswelt is understood not as the theoretical Hegelian System der Bedürfnisse—that has internalized and adopted Adam Smith’s naturalistic

64 Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 385. 65 Ibid., 383–384. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 386. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 See Paci, Enzo. 1970. Due temi fenomenologici: I. Fenomenologia e dialettica. II. La fenomenologia e la fondazione dell’economia politica. aut aut 116:7–37. Reprinted in Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 428–455. 71 Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 256. 70 A. Vigorelli definition of economic policy72—but as a concrete vital-teleological structure, in which the operations corresponding to the Marxian concept of “material reactions between human beings and nature” must be established on the basis of the “intentionality of needs,” this opens a totally new research field, which could also lead to a rewriting of Marx’s Capital. “Structure” and “superstructure,” the dialectic of productive forces and social relations of production, as the static “unmoved mover” of social transformation, must be rethought through new categorical principles, based on the notions of “practice” and “need,” purified in a phenomenological sense. This might offer the possibility of understanding the original significance of Marx’s “scientific” and also “critical” demand: Paci states that “historical- economical-dialectical experience is the root of all sciences and, more generally, of all the superstructures indicated by Marxism.”73 Through phenomenology we must renew the Marxian critique of the “capitalistic use” of technology, based on the assumption that “if science is not founded on the Lebenswelt, it becomes the first great force of exploitation and alienation.”74 These were truly original insights, which nonetheless did not find widespread acceptance in the Italian philosophical milieu; besides, they followed in the wake of the global philosophy of those years: from Sartre to Marcuse, from Heller to Kosík, from Bloch to the group of young philosophers gathered around the Yugoslav periodical Praxis, the American Telos, and (for a certain period) the Milanese aut aut, founded and led by Paci, who for- mally remained its Editor-in-chief until his death (1976).

Amedeo Vigorelli teaches Moral Philosophy at the “Piero Martinetti” Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan. He is a pupil of Enzo Paci, whose biography he has authored (L’esistenzialismo positivo di Enzo Paci, Milan 1987). Over the years, he has extended his research to the Phenomenological tradition of the University of Milan (La nostra inquietudine. Martinetti, Banfi, Rebora, Cantoni, Paci, De Martino, Rensi, Untersteiner, Dal Pra, Segre, Capitini, Milan 2007), focusing in particular on the figure of Piero Martinetti (Piero Martinetti. La metafisica civile di un filosofo dimenticato. Con un’appendice di documenti inediti, Milan 1998). He has examined the topic of moral feelings (Il riso e il pianto. Introduzione a Schopenhauer, Milan 1998; Il disgusto del tempo. La noia come tonalità affettiva, Milan 2009), within the framework of a broader interest in twentieth-century philosophical anthropology (L’animale eccentrico. Dall’antropologia filosofica all’etica comunitaria, Milan 2003).

72 See Vigorelli, Amedeo. 1973. La nozione di bisogno da Hegel a Marx: fondazione naturalistica e fenomenologica dell’economia. aut aut 134:60–78. 73 Paci, Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica, 256. 74 Ibid., 446. Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio

Elio Franzini

Abstract The essay investigates Dino Formaggio’s phenomenological perspective starting from its roots in the twentieth-century Italian philosophy, namely the “School of Milan,” which had emerged in the 1930s around the prominent figure of Antonio Banfi. The School was a melting pot of ideas that cut across—and often introduced into Italy—the main trends in contemporary philosophy, from neo- Kantism to Phenomenology, from Existentialism to Logical Positivism. Although Formaggio received his education through Antonio Banfi’s eclectic teaching and was very close to Remo Cantoni, Enzo Paci, Vittorio Sereni and especially Giulio Preti, he stood out from all these thinkers: focus of the proposed analysis is Formaggio’s original contribution to the Italian phenomenology, with special regard to his research in the field of aesthetics.

Dino Formaggio’s career was a peculiar one. Its roots lie in a particular philosophical current within twentieth-century Italian philosophy, namely the “School of Milan,” which had emerged in the 1930s around the prominent figure of Antonio Banfi. Many fanciful stories about this school have sprung up, and it might be worth briefly investigating them from a historical perspective. All legends aside, Banfi’s school was never an active circle of friends; rather, it was a venue for debate in which, alongside deep and lasting friendships and lively, fruitful discussions, personal and philosophical enmities arose that shaped the development of Italian academia, often for decades. As clearly argued by Fulvio Papi, the Milanese school that emerged around the philosophical personality of Banfi was a melting pot of ideas that cut across—and often introduced into Italy— the main trends in contemporary philosophy, from neo-Kantism to Phenomenology, from Existentialism to Logical Positivism. However, strictly speaking, “if by school we mean the repetition—albeit on a broad scale—of certain underlying themes, then there was no school; and, besides, Banfi wanted everyone to find their own

E. Franzini (*) The University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 71 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_6 72 E. Franzini approach to philosophy and rejected the scholastic transmission of notions as a sort of university performance.”1 Therefore, precisely in order to clear the misunderstanding engendered by many intellectual histories that seek to pigeon-hole everything, Formaggio—and this is my premiss—cannot simply be assigned to what is ultimately a later invention, the so-called “School of Milan” (which involved a wide array of different figures, with few shared points of reference). Formaggio no doubt received his education through Antonio Banfi’s eclectic teaching. He was very close to Remo Cantoni, Enzo Paci, Vittorio Sereni and especially Giulio Preti, whom he regarded as the brightest mind of his generation. Yet in terms of his education and personal life experiences Formaggio stood out from all these thinkers—who had disliked one another since their youth, sometimes finding in Formaggio the only source of unity and dialogue within the School. Formaggio was not a son of the Milanese upper class, but came from the impoverished suburbs. He often recalled, even in autobiographical accounts, the hunger he had experienced and the factory he had worked in from the age of 14. He took evening classes and gained his A-levels in just 1 year, by sitting an exam on all the subjects taught in the 5 years of secondary school. He then enrolled in the Philosophy course at Milan University, which had been founded only 10 years earlier and was located in Corso Roma. Here he met Antonio Banfi and graduated at the young age of 24, in 1938. This takes us to the first stage in a long and complex Phenomenological career. Formaggio’s BA thesis, consisting in an analysis of artistic techniques, was published as Fenomenologia della tecnica artistica after the difficult years of the War and of partisan struggle. This work is unmatched by any text written by Formaggio’s fellow students or published in the field of aesthetics in the first half of the century. A virulently anti-Croce approach and a critical focus on Gentile went hand in hand with an analysis—no doubt influenced by Banfi—of the movements (including scientific movements) in contemporary French aesthetics. Formaggio was concerned with metaphysics, but also with psychology, psychophysiology, and the theoretical outcomes of the post-Bergsonian studies on the world of the arts. However, all this was set within a “Phenomenological” framework, whereby Formaggio combined— as he was to do throughout his career—the two historical meanings of the term Phenomenology, as the Hegelian synthesis of an idea that becomes perceivable and as the introduction of the methodology of Husserl’s thought, which seeks to grasp the essential element in processes and concepts, yet without ever losing its genetic and projectual connection with a doctrine of experience. The outcome is a strikingly innovative work, which on the one hand remains a crucial handbook for any artist and, on the other, shows philosophers the significance of a methodology within which Phenomenology amounts to the capacity to interpret the meaning of the potentiality of artistic planning in depth. A remarkable dialectical force is to be found in this text, in all likelihood deriving from Hegel and seeking to combine the spiritual significance of art with the

1 Papi, Fulvio. 1990. Vita e filosofia. La scuola di Milano: Banfi, Cantoni, Paci, Preti. Milan: Guerini. 16. (All translations from the Italian are my own). Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio 73 intuitive and projectual power of experience. While Formaggio’s pupils took different paths, I believe that their “hallmark”—and what also allows us today to identify some of his pupils and to assign them to the same branch of academia—is that they do not regard aesthetics as something separate from philosophy, but rather as a specific way of combining regional Phenomenological ontologies, while clearly bearing their differences in terms of meaning and structure in mind. All this, beyond any form of “orthodoxy:” something Formaggio was not too fond of and did not expect. Formaggio, therefore, was dismissive of the tendency to combine the term “aesthetics” with strange genitives, conceptual adjectives or—as is common practice nowadays—often useless prefixes. He regarded these as attempt to carry aesthetics outside of itself—just where, nobody knows, if now towards oversimple and naive pre-established paradigms. Formaggio stressed that aesthetics is a general theory of sense-perception and of experience, which can take the form of a specific analysis of artworks and of processes connected with the forms and genesis of art. Both these aspects can find a foundation capable of establishing a fruitful dialogue between the projectuality of experience and that of art in the descriptivism of a kind of Phenomenology freed from some of its dogmas. As is evident from Arte, a 1979 volume that was later repeatedly revised and expanded, Formaggio also sought to deeply examine the origin and ideal meaning of the major artistic movements that have given our civilization its symbolic forms, as well as of the texts that have interpreted them within the history of human thought: examining artistic phenomena as diverse as the paintings in prehistoric caves and conceptual art movements, Formaggio was able to bring out the meaning of things. This “emergence” coincided with an ability to cover extensive terrain, to establish a dialogue between intellectual and artistic movements, and to avoid remaining trapped within trite paradigms endlessly repeated in the pursuit of “originality.” Formaggio received his education in a non-dogmatic context in which Italian philosophy was seeking to move beyond the limits of neo-Idealism and, after the War, to progressively open itself up to the major experiences in European philosophy. However, as already mentioned, we also find certain contrasts that help define Formaggio’s thought. In this case too Banfi played a prominent and almost maieutic role. As Papi writes, philosophy was an “aporetic field” for Banfi: “the very condition of philosophy is contradictory because, to use a metaphor, it is like a surface which shows the same drawing on both sides, but where the surfaces of the draw- ings never coincide.”2 This compelling image effectively illustrates not just Banfi’s thought, but also the disagreement that emerged over the years between the two leading “aesthetic” representatives of his school, Luciano Anceschi and Dino Formaggio. While their theoretical plans were probably not all that different, they were no doubt drawn on opposite sides of the same sheet, and hence could never coincide. It is not easy to say what disagreement means in philosophy. Compared to a quarrel—Lyotard noted—a disagreement (différend) is “a case conflict, between (at

2 Ibid., 24. 74 E. Franzini least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.”3 In the case of Anceschi and Formaggio, this impossibility is associated with two identical “rules of judgment”—Banfi’s legacy and the interpretation of Phenomenology—which nonetheless cannot be applied “equitably.” The topics addressed and language used appear similar, yet their verbal expression and the meaning they can acquire differ. The game of showing the differences between the two discourses can be played at length, but it would be a boring one if it did not have an unquestionable assumption as its starting point, namely that difference springs from similarity, which nonetheless leaves a “rift” open. It is here that disagreement, whatever its origin, proved enduring and at times harsh. I cannot explore the various forms that this disagreement took over time. However, it is important to note that it revolved around a specific reading not just of Banfi, but of Phenomenological aesthetics as a whole. The whole issue is clearly (and somewhat bitterly) outlined in a short note written as an introduction to Fenomenologia e scienze dell’uomo, and significantly entitled “Fenomenologia e no.”4 Formaggio was inspired to write this text by some pages by Anceschi published in Il Verri but also—and especially—by the publication of Carlo Gentili’s book Nuova Fenomenologia critica in 1981 (and especially by the subtitle of this volume).5 After outlining the great traditions of German and French Phenomenological aesthetics, from Fink to Ingarden, and from Merleau-Ponty to Dufrenne, Formaggio writes that major intellectual movements are always accompanied by certain phenomena of unjustified appropriation of the term, where everyone can discern the huge effort to soar aloft made by some busybody or other seeking to affirm his theoretical nobility or, in the best of cases, something which does not concern any philosophical form of knowledge, but which rather—if it must be defined—appears to have much to do with the first and lowest degree of common knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that, according to Spinoza, encompasses both knowledge “per experientiam vagam” and knowledge “ex auditu,” of which—as is widely known—every earnest intellect is to cleanse itself.6 These words—which are clear enough in themselves, and unquestionably aggres- sive in tone—are reinforced, and better defined, in the following lines. Here Formaggio states that these alleged “Phenomenologies” are “phenomena of critical pseudo-science that make for neither culture nor history,” and that the study of Husserl must never be undertaken “for some parasitic purpose or for the sake of turning it into our own private property.”7

3 Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (trans: Van Den Abbeele, G.). Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. 9. 4 Formaggio, Dino. 1982. Premessa: fenomenologia e no. In: Fenomenologia e scienze dell’uomo. Quaderni del Seminario di Filosofia delle Scienze dell’uomo diretto da D. Formaggio. No. 2. Padua: Clesp. 5 Gentili, Carlo. 1981. Nuova fenomenologia critica. Metodi e problemi dell’estetica fenomenologica italiana. Turin: Paravia. 6 Formaggio, Fenomenologia e no, 4. 7 Ibid. Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio 75

What all this means is that Formaggio’s primary concern is the definition of aesthetics, and especially of the thematic fields associated with it. This effort to define aesthetics centres on a fundamental concept, which he calls the idea of artistry. Dino Formaggio’s emphasis on this idea shows that throughout his life he explored the theme of the “status” of aesthetics, which is to say that he envisaged philosophy as a sort of meta-reflection, which has the world, things and bodies as its referents. Within this framework, a constant effort is made to consider how Phenomenology and aesthetics can be combined, which is to say how the Phenomenological method can be applied to the traditional horizons of aesthetics, thereby applying if not the letter of Banfi’s teaching, certainly its spirit. The inspiration from Banfi that Formaggio wishes to preserve is betrayed when it is reduced to a critical and poetic methodology, which does not view aesthetics as the emergence and development of a general theory of art. The pragmatic context of criticism and poetics “concerns a reflection that would be destined to remain blind, were it deprived of the dialectic that hangs over it as a science.”8 It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish between aesthetics as a generic critical exercise focusing on a work and aesthetics as a general theoretical science of art, which is what Banfi endorsed, promising to clear “one of the greatest misunderstandings typically occur- ring not so much in philosophical studies, as among certain strata of literary culture (possibly of the avant-garde sort).”9 Indeed, “the interdisciplinarity of Aesthetics, which is so typical of contemporary culture, consists not in the confusing of discourses and methods but, on the contrary, in the clear delimitation of one’s own method and field.”10 The appeal to greater “concreteness” in aesthetic studies is something naive and limited, as aesthetics—in its genuine, concrete form—is to be found not in any particular content but rather “in the degree of methodological for- malisation and hence in the philosophical awareness and theoretical rigour that it is capable of establishing, as an independent plane compared to criticism.”11 According to Formaggio, it is necessary therefore to stress the presence of Husserl within Banfi’s philosophy. In his view, the Phenomenological method “is never a contemplative awareness of an ideal life order, but rather an active and unceasing or never resolved awareness of the dynamic inner structure of experience and life.”12 Besides, its meaning is that of a concrete idea that structures a field of experience, while safeguarding its mobility: “hence the flowing forth of the idea of experience, of a dynamic and open rationality from the very life of concrete reality, hence the philosophy of art.”13

8 Formaggio, Dino. 1983. La morte dell’arte e l’estetica. Bologna: Il Mulino. However, the essay “Banfi e gli sviluppi dell’Estetica come scienza filosofica” dates from 1968. 9 Ibid., 234–235. 10 Ibid., 235. 11 Ibid., 236. 12 Formaggio, Dino. 1962. Studi di estetica. Milan: Renon. 67. The essay is entitled Fondamenti e sviluppi dell’Estetica di Antonio Banfi and combines a 1958 text, published in aut-aut with Formaggio’s introduction to Banfi’s Filosofia dell’arte, published the same year. 13 Ibid. 76 E. Franzini

Banfi’s whole discourse, therefore, tends towards the “theoretical acknowledgement of a strictly scientific-philosophical level of Aesthetics:” a level that must be increasingly freed from “misunderstandings regarding methods and tasks that have nothing to do with it, since they pertain to reflections that, through appropriate techniques, already criticism and poetics coherently carry out on their own level.”14 Banfi thus points to a possible path for aesthetics (which Formaggio always spells with a capital A), a path seeking to move beyond “essentialistic, normativistic and more generally pragmatising” positions, including those “dissolved into empiricism or confused with criticism owing to a poorly understood concreteness.”15 It seems as though Formaggio sought to highlight a specific aspect of his teacher, his “probing the darkness of experience:” what Fulvio Papi, in his lucid overview, described as the unifying element in Banfi’s thought.16 According to Banfi—and it is words such as these that are likely to engender different interpretations—only a “clear-cut and radical theoretical approach,” guided by non-dogmatic reason, can ensure “sensibility and love towards the fresh richness of experience, towards its wide range of meanings and articulations.”17 Banfi combines different elements: we find a theory of reason, “which is the theory of those conditions ensuring a non- dogmatic use of reason, its openness to life;” but we also have “aesthetics as the theory of the liberation of aesthetic knowledge,” “a need for rationalism that seems to be fulfilled by aesthetic knowledge—which therefore is not merely something that reason justifies and understands, but rather is itself actualised reason in a way.”18 In Idea di artisticità, which includes considerations that were later taken up and further expanded in La morte dell’arte e l’estetica, Formaggio on the one hand reveals his direct indebtedness to Banfi, since the idea of artistry builds upon Banfi’s idea of aesthetics, not without some criticism; but, on the other hand, he tends to move away from this ideas by asserting his intellectual independence. Formaggio emphasises that the first aspect of the idea of artistry is that it stands as the idea of a “field,” so to speak: an idea that is not superimposed on things, but rather derives from them. Formaggio writes: “the ideal law of the artistic universe can only endlessly construct itself through the epistemological and operative structures of actualised artistic experience and through the various levels of reflection.”19 The transcendental level of this idea is therefore “experiential” and connected to the “formation” of the world of art. Stemming from this is the notion—expressed with Phenomenological vocabulary and awareness—that the idea of artistry is a form of “intentionalisation” which seeks not to explain or define art, but rather to grasp the laws governing its intrinsic development, by approaching it through a descriptive attitude capable of grasping its concrete essence.

14 Formaggio, La morte dell’arte e l’estetica, 240. 15 Ibid. 16 Papi, Vita e filosofia. La scuola di Milano, 21. 17 Banfi, Antonio. 1961. I problemi di un’estetica filosofica, ed. L. Anceschi. Milan-Florence: Parenti. 87. 18 Scaramuzza, Gabriele. 1981. Sapere estetico e arte. Padua: Clesp. 142. 19 Formaggio, Dino. 1962. L’idea di artisticità. Milan: Ceschina. 304. Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio 77

Formaggio’s claims, however, reflect the Hegelian tradition even more than the Phenomenological one. Ultimately, it is here that the essential difference between Formaggio and his teacher lies, namely in his transition from aesthetics to artistry. The use which the Kantian and Simmelian Banfi made of Hegel was “rhetorical,” so to speak, insofar as Kant constituted the essential point of reference. In Formaggio’s interpretation of Banfi’s “idea of aesthetics,” Hegel embodies an idea of philosophy that cannot overlook dialectic and its powerful drive, but which at the same time being is capable of combining the spiritual meaning of art with the intuitive and projectual power of experience. It is on this level, and with this awareness, that Formaggio comes across Phenomenological discourse, through a Phenomenology which he himself describes as non-dogmatic and which follows a trajectory first traced by Merleau-Ponty. In other words, Formaggio favours a “genetic” reading of Phenomenology, without ever turning it into a trivial description of events or the practising of a personalistic metaphysics. Formaggio makes use of a notion that finds no prominent place in Banfi’s thought, namely the notion of “body,” which derives from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. However, instead of being associated with Being, or with a strong ontological perspective, as in French philosophy, this notion is used to grasp the “dialecticising” of corporeal praxis, which takes the form of a “body at work” to be described in its concrete practices—those truly reflecting the shared space of its world. As is widely known, there exist many “heresies” within the Phenomenological tradition. However, it would be wrong to identify the most significant one with Heidegger’s thought. The original “heresy” is that of those thinkers—and there are quite a few—who do not appreciate the Idealism allegedly present in the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, published in 1913, and hence stress the divergence between this text and Logical Investigations, which dates from 1900–01. On the strictly philosophical level, this “heresy”—as is often the case—is due to a misinterpretation (there is no “idealistic” I in Husserl, even though the terminology he adopts does not always work) and to chance (the first volume of Ideas was meant to be followed by at least another one, which instead for various reasons was only posthumously published). Nevertheless, the “heresy” in question had a devastating effect, since it brought to light two different views of Phenomenology: the view of those who see it as a “method” and the view of those who instead accept its constructive value, appreciat- ing the fact that epistemological horizons must be found in order to apply the intentional method outlined in the Logical Investigations, where the active role played by the subject cannot be overlooked. Heidegger and—with far less patience—some of Husserl’s own early pupils chose the first path, which they developed within the framework of a static ontology, variously formulated. By contrast, the French took a different direction. It would be a serious mistake to assume that Merleau-Ponty accused Husserl of “Idealism:” he was too refined a philosopher, and one too well-acquainted with the unpublished manuscripts that were to make up the second volume of Ideas, to slip into such trivi- ality. Husserl’s assumption—which was no doubt influenced by the Heideggerian “climate,” while remaining independent of it in its method and praxis—is that the 78 E. Franzini subject cannot be abstract, pure, and so on, insofar as he always finds himself “in a mundane situation,” in the world, within a shared spatio-temporal horizon. Along this path, it is precisely Husserl whom Merleau-Ponty draws upon, along with the notion of Leib, of living body, which is central to the second volume of Ideas. This notion—described through a constant engagement with scientific aspects primarily connected with psychology and psychophysiology—leads, already in the final section of Phenomenology of Perception, to ontological outcomes remote from Husserl’s perspective (even in terms of the language used to express them). However, I should stress once more that Merleau-Ponty’s descriptive premises lead to a notion of corporeality that would be inconceivable without a deep understanding of Husserl’s writings. While following the same path, Dino Formaggio rejects the transition from the body to Being (or what Dufrenne calls the “Natura naturans,” or creative nature): a transition that is indeed “useless” within the framework of a descriptive context, where a perspective that still holds even without arguing that the flesh of the body and that of the world are one and the same flesh seems unduly “original.” The desire to identify the “Truth”—and herein lies, perhaps, the one notion that brings together the representatives of what has come to be known as the “School of Milan”—is quite understandable, yet it is driven either by more or less concealed teleological ambitions or by psychological, and hence individual, factors. As such, it is a requirement that can be ignored in a theoretical context. According to Formaggio, the body is not a “scientific” or even “theoretical” entity, notwithstanding all the distinctions and nuances developed by Merleau- Ponty; rather, it is a “body at work,” which must be described in its concrete practices, in the phenomenology of its experience, in those practices that truly reflect the shared space of its world. Formaggio adopted this position right from his BA thesis, which served as a basis for Fenomenologia della tecnica artistica. This is a remarkable work, first of all because of its historical methodology: it shows—to those readers capable of reading it correctly—that “practising Phenomenology” is not a theoretical matter, an attempt to come up with “explanations,” but rather a capacity to “describe phenomena,” even though the starting point is represented by authors remote from the Phenomenological tradition. But it is also a remarkable volume because the body it describes is a body that operates on the level of an art which is neither the product of genius nor of rhetorical motifs, but rather a “technique,” which is to say a capacity to interpret space, to shape possible worlds. Formaggio’s body is a body that, in art, in line with certain suggestions made by Baudrillard, does not kill art itself out of iconoclastic fanaticism, by banishing all images and the imagination; rather, it concretely shapes the potential of an imagination that, at the same time, also coincides with perception and memory.20 Formaggio observes that art has never amounted to the fruitless exercising of an “idle approach to values:” on the contrary, art has always been “a lofty exercise in life, in shared living; and, as such, a risk and project.” The body which Formaggio

20 See Formaggio, Dino. 1991. Problemi di estetica. Palermo: Aesthetica edizioni. Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio 79 presents and describes, then, is a projectual body; and in this sense it changes with its space. The body—every body—is destined to die, which is to say to “free a space:” the body’s significance, which amounts to a constant challenging of death, lies in its capacity to establish itself as a project that constantly refills spaces in the world, which leaves “things,” and which interprets the density it inhabits through targeted actions. Here “life is lived as an original and perceptible creative thought, while thought becomes a risky proof of one’s presence, almost a living testimony to one’s own embodiment.”21 In this respect, the body—the technical, artistic, projectual body capable of interpreting its space-time through objects—is inseparable from work, from that “hum- bleness of the finite”22 which it has all too often neglected, and which translates into a concrete theory of corporeality. This is not an inverted mysticism, less still a phys- iologistic outcome; rather, it is a communicative horizon. Consider, for instance, the pages which Formaggio devotes to Piero della Francesca and the problem of perspective: no doubt, he notes, this is a “scientific” matter, yet it is not the only possible way to create the illusion of three-dimensionality—only the most “Euclidean.” Therefore, the important thing, which distinguishes perspective from the illusionis- tic paintings of Pompeii so despised by Florensky, is the fact that this scientific dimension springs from rhythm, from the “rhythm of the body in movement:” “its theorisation marks the theorisation of the forward movement of man (and of his vision),” thereby coinciding “with the highest exaltation of man, who enters the world as a natural body.”23 By interpreting Novalis’ maxim that “the three dimensions are the result of the reduction of infinite dimensions,” Formaggio realises that in itself perspective constitutes a “reduction:” an “operation of simplification and selection” that “rests on the coordinates of a Euclidean space so as to find an elementary reduction of these dimensions, to crystallise them and geometrically polish them, thereby stopping the ungraspable qualitative flight of things for good and lending scientific order to it according to numbers and relations.”24 The work of the body is what allows us, in art, to overcome this crystallisation, and to set it within that dimension in which art can develop its diachronic planning. The path leading from the medieval approach to perspective consists not in the abstract teleological development outlined by Panofsky, where symbolic forms lack any body or experience, but rather in the awareness of a work that alters the very parameters for defining art, i.e. in the struggle of painting “to lift itself out of the field of the mechanical arts to which it had been confined for centuries and to rise to the dignified status of an art or liberal science.”25 This ideal is particularly evident in Piero della Francesca’s work, where perspective not only tends to lose all empirical

21 Formaggio, La morte dell’arte e l’estetica, 290. 22 Ibid., 289. 23 Formaggio, Dino. 1962. L’esteticità tra scienza e vita nella prospettiva di Piero della Francesca. In: Studi di estetica, 154. 24 Ibid., 155. 25 Ibid., 159. 80 E. Franzini features—of the sort it still retains in Alberti—but turns into a cultural ideal whereby “man discovers himself and establishes himself as the immobile axis of the whole system of the representation of the world.”26 However, Formaggio adds, these crucial scientific and cultural achievements notwithstanding, there is more to perspective than this. Perspective is also a model for the organic interpretation of spatiality, which seeks to set all details within the framework of a seamless universe. This is not an “idealist” interpretation of the world but rather the context of a reduction of psycho-physiological space to geometric space—an attempt to restore the underlying reality of the world, which comes with “the experience of an absence:” “the absence of that existential time-soul that moves and dramatises the individual as a possibility and project, as angst and as absurd action.”27 It is this projectual possibility that, albeit in a paradoxical and negative way, even Piero’s geometrical and objective perspective allows us to experience. It shows how the work that art undertakes on space through constant attempts to depict it has been carried further by progressively attempting to destroy—as has been the case over the past two centuries—its perfect three-dimensional structure, yet without erasing its symbolic power. The latter preserves its “unity”—which translates precisely into the constitutive variety of symbols—through this possibility of artistic planning, which finds its mobile mover in corporeal experience. Hence, even Piero’s cosmic realism is not a transcendental principle, but rather a way of interpreting the “natural and human [unity] of the cosmos, of the universe, and of its laws.” Here the mode of being of human figures is their “staying, their vertical weight, the inexorable gravitation that binds each real body to all other bodies down to the centre of the Earth.”28 No doubt, for Piero the cosmos is a universal and homogeneous spaces, governed by mathematical rules. Yet this space—as will later be the case for Newton, to some extent—is governed by a mysterious nature and the perfection which one pursues coincides with the desire to possess reality through thought and, especially, through a technique, through work. The possibility for planning, therefore, lies in understanding how symbols, via art, emerge through an exploration of what lies between the folds of reality, the search for a field in which what we call art and what we call science can be equally rooted: for Piero, as much as for Klee or Valéry, “the artist is he who returns to creation and carries it forward, exploring the paths towards a possible reality.”29 Piero avoids reducing perspective to an optical-geometric device, but uses it as a way to interpret space by turning it into a field of experience and view of the world. The projectual and genetic spirit goes in the same direction. Klee “knows that the world is not a world of given things and predetermined arrangements, but one marked by their dynamic existence, by their ongoing perceptual coming into being.”30

26 Ibid., 161. 27 Ibid., 170. 28 Ibid., 171. 29 Formaggio, Dino. 1962. La genesi dei mondi possibili in Paul Klee. In: Studi di estetica, 229. 30 Ibid., 230. Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio 81

Certain artists, therefore, are connected not by a historical or theoretical link but by a shared symbolic project, based on the technical desire to establish art as an interpretation of a shared space-time. Already with Piero art “moves beyond the equilibrium of the mathematical perfection it has attained and becomes infected by psychological elements and by experimental naturalistic research.”31 For this reason, as Florensky was to explain, perspective does not merely coincide with the optical effects of the Pompeian frescoes, but carries within itself the possibility of its own reversal: it is a “technique” which constantly reveals its own inner tension, “simultaneously an exploration and violation of divine nature.”32 This technique becomes the possibility for artistic planning, whose “arrow” is “let fly by the body.”33 Ultimately, the body coincides with the very logic of the possibility of planning that art expresses through its symbolic power. The body first of all means a capacity to orient oneself in space-time and, within this work, to orient its representation, to ensure knowledge of it and its progressive manipulation through technique, work, and praxis. There is always a risk of slipping into a “rhetoric of corporeality.” For this reason, it is a matter of realising that art is never an abstract project, but rather a process that has its limits, given by the material we use and our own corporeal make-up and physiology, as well as by the cultural contexts in which we live. Within such limits, however, the question of the “representation of the world” is not a self- referential game, but a way of illustrating possible ways to acquire knowledge of the world, which develop—on various levels—our capacity to manipulate the world, i.e. to derive certain qualities and to understand the living fabric through which our very lives unfold. “Representation” can amount to creating a distance; yet the framework through which we gaze at the world is also a medium for it, an attempt to define our understanding, and to develop it as projects. Artistic projectual interpretation is therefore the hallmark of an interpretation in which the body—following Merleau-Ponty—carries its own spatio-temporality to the very limits, crossing the very boundaries of the visible. This process-project by which artistic awareness is realised, through different figures and moments in history, unfolds as work, with all the contradictions and aporias that work entails34: for it seems to constitute a “liberation” of work which rejects its alienating aspects, conceiving praxis not as repetitive and mechanical calculation or manipulation, but as “a free, inventive and liberating fullness of knowledge and practice.”35 Clearly, these words reflect the influence of the early Marx, while also recalling certain passages from Marcuse and Baudrillard: as such, they may be traced back to an “outdated” period in Western philosophy. On the other hand, the whole argument—given that Formaggio always rejects its reductive “ideologisation”—can also be confined to a pre-categorical level, by attempting to understand the genesis

31 Formaggio, Dino. 1981. Arte. Milan: Mondadori. 54. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid, 93. 34 See ibid., 140ff. 35 Ibid., 149–150. 82 E. Franzini of a dimension which is prior to any ideological construction and constitutes a mode of representation, a means to interpret the space around us. While it cannot be established as a paradigm for work, art remains a means to understand how a body in action, which takes the form of a praxis, can bring about the transformation of a world which brings out its qualities, while revealing itself through such praxis as a perceptual, mnemonic and imaginative dimension. As already noted, in art work coincides with technique. This is work in the full sense of the term, with all the antinomies—including social ones—to be found in everyday life. It presents itself as qualitative change and hence reveals the potentialities connected both with the world of artworks and with the bodies that create and receive them. Through its stratification of meanings, the act of artistic planning becomes an inter-subjective act. Insofar as it implies choices that no doubt concern the production of objects, it is always part of a broader social praxis. It must therefore be envisaged—as Piero, but also Klee did—apart from its “Sunday attire,” insofar as it “belongs not to the day of rest, but to the concrete struggle of working days.”36 This kind of work, therefore, is meant to coincide with “communication”—not necessarily of the verbal sort—and centres on the body: “the act of conveying meaning is the culmination of the praxes of all the intuitive structures based on perception, memory and the imagination which the body experiences in the world from which it emerges, not its watering-down into discursive formulas.”37 Formaggio notes that artistic intelligence, which makes it possible to pass through the history of artworks without being overwhelmed by it, is generated within the metis of the body—that hermetic, interpretative and productive artfulness which the word signi- fied in Classical Greece. The conclusion is that there cannot be any theory of art without a Phenomenological theory of the body. And this, not merely because it is the body which “produces” art, but rather because the work which the body undertakes in art combines all those aporias which, while enabling a “phenomenology” of it—i.e. a description of its aspects, layers, qualitative variations, material obstacles, and linear, imagined or inverted perspectives—nonetheless prevents any “explanation,” any one perspective, any definition that can be reduced to a linear logic. The logic of the intuitive corporeal praxis that is at work in art is a different logic, that of metis, which encompasses trajectories filled with contradictions and aporias, which it seeks to solve through an artfulness that takes the form of a concrete possibility, a project, a work. We should not forget, therefore, that the body is charged with interpretative and symbolic possibilities because it is itself a symbol, i.e. a reality torn by a rift that cannot be bridged, where reference springs from ever-renewed meaning. The body is synonymous with deficiency, fragility, hunger, desire, death, and finiteness. But it is also synonymous with transformation, metamorphosis, creation, and planning. The body “is aware of its finiteness, of its destiny of death from the very first day; but it also knows that this awareness, this potential it has to become a sower of

36 Ibid., 160. 37 Ibid., 174. Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Dino Formaggio 83 marks and symbols to be scattered by the handful in the world in order to live, this casting itself beyond everything, these marks and artworks are the only kind of immortality open to it.”38 Art reminds us that all this is not a chance outcome, or the result of some kind of mysticism, but rather a trajectory of Phenomenology, which reveals the symbolic project concealed in its very rifts. This project lies in the contradictory work of a corporeality that is more social than individual, and where what is at play is not a supreme ontological entity but rather the shared level of intuitive sensibility at the crossroads between corporeal time and the time of the world. The artistic representation of space has developed its techniques over time, and has done so from a perspective that is not founded on a single logic, but which finds in this work of the body—which through technique becomes a project—the very meaning of artistic technique as the Phenomenological explicitation of the possible relations in the relationship between praxis and nature: “here we are dealing with possibility and planning, which is to say the possible traces that emerge in the midst of and around real things, and the planning that delves into it, bringing about material and symbolic transformations.”39 In order to complete the circle opened at the beginning, this exigency to link praxis and nature cannot be reduced to the “vagueness of forms of literary Humanism” that translate into poetics and rhetoric: standing “in direct contrast” with them is a Phenomenological practice conceived “as an analysis of the intentional lived experience of awareness in aesthetic, corporeal and pre-reflective structures, as these emerge from the world of life.”40 According to Formaggio, the “logos of the aesthetic world,” as described by Husserl in Formal and Transcendental Logic, entails the constitutive logic of corporeality—the precondition for any form of praxis and planning. In Formaggio’s view, the Phenomenological tradition clearly reflects this view. Ingarden consciously avoids examining the specific features of individual literary works or authors; rather, he seeks to outline the concrete essence of a literary work in general. Merleau-Ponty himself, when writing about Cézanne, seeks to shatter the Cartesian paradigm and to reach a conceptual and pre-categorical definition— not to trace the trajectory of an artistic career. From Formaggio’s perspective, even though—in line with French Phenomenology—any reference to the transcendental I is rejected, the description does not concern specific descriptive levels, the pursuit of an idea capable of “founding,” through interpretation, the situational meaning of things; rather, it pursues a transcendental foundation of aesthetics, its logos, the meaning of a pre-categorical perspective whose preconditions must be sought again and again.

38 Ibid., 228. 39 Formaggio, Dino. 1978. Fenomenologia della tecnica artistica. Parma: Pratiche. 299. 40 Formaggio, Fenomenologia e no, 5–6. 84 E. Franzini

Elio Franzini is Professor of Aesthetics at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Milan and Dean of the same university. After studying under Giovanni Piana and Dino Formaggio, he followed the tradition of the School of Milan by focusing his research on phenomenology. He has explored some of its historical and theoretical connections, with special reference to the topics of the construction of art, symbols, and images. Alongside his interest in the phenomenology of affec- tivity, he has undertaken various studies on the historical development of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, which is when the term was first coined. He has sought to illustrate how eighteenth-century aesthetic research emerged in a cultural context shaped both by the rhetoric of the period and by the philosophical, artistic and anthropological disputes that raged in the age of Enlightenment. His most recent volumes include: Non sparate sull’umanista. La sfida della valu- tazione (Milan 2014) and Filosofia della crisi (Milan 2015). With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari

Ferruccio De Natale

Abstract The following pages aim to focus on the impact that the reception of Husserlian Phenomenology had in the 1950s and 1960s of the twentieth century on the anti-idealistic thought of Giuseppe Semerari (1922–1996). Toward this end, I recall the meaning of “Relationism” (particularly as an alternative to Historicism and to the present/past idealistic relationship in the post-WWII Italian culture), which Semerari realized through his special attention to the problems of science and to the “dialogue” with thinkers of the past. This naturally includes the reading of Husserl’s Krisis and the second volume of his Ideen, as well as the materialistic interpretation of the Husserlian critique of Naturalism, Scientism, Historicism and of every perspective that does not settle knowledge in the Lebenswelt and in the Ich kann system of relations. Precisely in those years, Semerari’s agreement with the positions expressed by Enzo Paci and his Milan School seemed a given, bringing about a necessary encounter between Phenomenology and Marxism, up to their mutual integration. Finally, I also indicate the distance standing between Paci himself and the thesis of Semerari: there is no “mingling” between Phenomenology and Marxist Materialism, but rather an “objective convergence” in the common aim of struggle against the alienation of human subjectivity, as produced in the processes of constitution of every form of objectivity, whether it be ideal or material.

1 The “Dialogue” with Husserl and the Encounter with Paci in the Perspective of Philosophical Relationalism

At the beginning of his report to the Conference of Studies on the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari, which was held in Bari in 2003, Carlo Sini expressed himself in the following way: “Enzo Paci (…) often recalled that Italian Phenomenology had

F. De Natale (*) University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 85 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_7 86 F. De Natale two main centres: one, obviously, in Milan and the second, thanks to the work of Giuseppe Semerari, in Bari.”1 Paci’s assertion, debatable as far as the diffusion of Phenomenology in Italy is concerned, which is certainly not reducible to two study centres alone,2 has the merit of immediately leading to the heart of a preliminary problem—one which is essential to the theme of the relationship between Giuseppe Semerari and Husserl’s Phenomenology, which I wish to outline here. It is well known that the Semerarian interpretation of Phenomenology is “tied” to that of Enzo Paci, but from this recognition many questions arise: In what “sense” does this connection exist? If Semerari approached the study of Husserl through collaboration and friendship with Paci, what was the cultural and philosophical context in which this double encounter—with Paci and Husserl—took place? What were the theoretical reasons or theoretical perspectives of both philosophers? And, once again, does Husserl’s Semerarian interpretation resume and ‘repeat’ the one outlined by Paci, or does it differ from it? While commemorating Paci at the University of Milan in December 1976, Semerari described his association with his friend, who had passed away a few months earlier, in this way: (…) Twenty-five years of continuous friendship and broad solidarity of intellectual interests, (…) sixteen years of collaboration and co-responsibility in a body of precise philosophical, cultural and even political commitment and, since 1951, the periodical aut-aut (…).3 Therefore, the “relationship” between Semerari and Paci was established and developed around the periodical aut-aut, well before a properly phenomenological interest intensified in the two thinkers: these were the years in which the second volume of Ideen as well as Die Krisis were published in “Husserliana,”4—the two texts by Husserl that, perhaps more than others, would contribute to the rebirth of phenomenological studies in Italy. However, Italian philosophy is committed to dealing with Neo-Idealism, with the emergence of Marxism in its various forms, with the themes of science in the season of ‘Philosophical Neo-Illuminism’5 and with Existentialism, in its many configurations.

1 Sini, Carlo. 2007. La fenomenologia come scienza nuova. In La malinconia di Hume. Sul pensiero di Giuseppe Semerari, ed. F. Fistetti, F. Semerari. Milan: Guerini. 35. (My translation. I would like to thank Valentina Patruno, PhD, for her help in translating the text). 2 See De Natale, Ferruccio. 2013. Sulla fenomenologia in Italia nell’ultimo trentennio del Novecento. VerificheXLII (4):69–105. 3 Semerari, Giuseppe. 1977. L’opera e il pensiero di Enzo Paci. Rivista critica di storia della filoso- fiaXXXII (1). 78. (My translation). 4 The reference is to “Husserliana. Edmund Husserls Gesammelte Werke.” The Hague: M. Nijoff, hereafter referred to by the abbreviation “Hua,” followed by the number of the volume, the possible tome and the year of publication. 5 On this period of Italian philosophy see: Semerari, Giuseppe. 1968. Il neoilluminismo filosofico italiano. Belfagor 23:168–182. Reprinted in: Semerari, Giuseppe. 1969. Esperienze del pensiero moderno. 272–293. Urbino: Argalìa; De Natale, Ferruccio. 1980. Il nesso scienza/ragione/sogget- With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari 87

The first essay by Semerari on Phenomenology appears in 1959 in aut-aut,6 followed one year later by his contribution to the collective volume edited by Paci on the occasion of the centenary of Husserl’s birth.7 Consequently, it is legitimate to point out that when Semerari wrote on Husserl and on Phenomenology in a work under Paci’s name, published in the periodical founded and directed by Paci himself, he had already matured (a) well-defined historiographical interests and also—indeed, I would say, above all—(b) precise theoretical leanings. As regards the first aspect, the editions of the Spinozian and Schellingian texts edited by Semerari belong to the solid ground of philosophical historiography: from the Spinozian Breve Trattato su Dio, l’uomo e la sua felicità (1952. Florence: Sansoni) to the Schellingian Lettere filosofiche su dommatismo e criticismo (1958. Florence: Sansoni, 1958), his interest in historiographic research became definite. This would continue with the Schellinghian Sistema dell’idealismo trascendentale (1965. Bari: Laterza), and once again with Schelling’s Ricerche filosofiche sull’essenza della libertà umana (1974. Rome-Bari: Laterza). The volumes on Spinoza in 1952 and 1968 and those on Schelling in 1958 and 19718 belong to the same “field:” they are, moreover, “featured” in numerous essays and “minor” writings, which constitute an extremely rigorous and detailed interpretative cultural heritage. Commencing from this historiographic praxis—leaving aside the developments “alongside” it, or, much less, “against” it—there was a development within the Semerarian reflection: namely, a connection with the philosophers of the past. This is not a mere reference to the albeit indispensable philological reconstruction of texts, nor to the meticulous discussion of the different critical interpretations that have occurred over the centuries. It is not a mere rearrangement of the authors and texts within their times, but a “dialogue” with them, with the solutions they proposed to the dilemmas that reap- pear in the their contemporary “rereadings.” A reading that captures the permanence of problems not “beyond,” but “through” the limitations and aporias of the philosophers, re-interpreted as a function of the present and its problems; comparisons between philosophers whose documented relations with one another are few, or perhaps none at all, but who have reciprocal connections due to the affinity of the

tività nella cultura filosofica italiana degli anni Cinquanta. In: La scienza come problema. Dai modelli teorici alla produzione di tecnologie: una ricerca interdisciplinare, ed. G. Semerari, 43–64. Bari: De Donato. 6 Semerari, Giuseppe. 1959. L’introduzione alle “Meditazioni cartesiane”. aut-aut 54:393–412. 7 Semerari, Giuseppe. 1960. La Filosofia come scienza rigorosa e la critica fenomenologica del dogmatismo. In: Omaggio a Husserl, ed. E. Paci, 121–161. Milan: Mondadori. 8 We refer to Semerari, Giuseppe. 1952. I problemi dello spinozismo. Trani: Vecchi; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1968. B. Spinoza. In: Grande Antologia Filosofica. Vol. XIII. Milan: Marzorati; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1958. Interpretazione di Schelling. Naples: Libreria Scientifica; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1971. Introduzione a Schelling. Rome-Bari: Laterza. 88 F. De Natale problems they considered, or the analogy of their needs, even if they resolved these in contrasting ways. A “theoretical” approach to the interpretation of the philosophers of the past, a Historische Besinnung, which is certainly consonant with the Husserl of the Beilagen XXIV and XXV, up to the Krisis, and which will remain a constant in Semerarian thought.9 Semerari arrives at this conception of the impossibility of exhausting the present/ past relationship in philosophy in historiographical terms alone while elaborating the detachment of this relationship both from the stereotypes of Neo-Idealistic Historiography and from every form of Historicism; in this, he is faithful to the “lesson” of his Master in the University of Rome, Pantaleo Carabellese.10 It is certainly no coincidence that his first article in aut-aut was entitled “La conoscenza storica,” and that it offers a well-defined theoretical orientation: after Vico and Idealistic Historicism, it is evident that the problem of historical knowledge remains a dead-end, so long as it is admitted that: (a) the subject of history is the Absolute, (b) history is the realization of a sovereign uniqueness, (c) the measure of history is not time, but the supratemporal—and so long as it is not accepted that: (a) history does not make sense apart from the problem of the completed man, (b) man is a process, that is to say, an order of relationships, and (c) the rule of the process is to be found in time.11 Already in the mid-1950s, the theoretical perspective of Semerari was certainly one of a radical Humanism, which sees man, in his finitude, as the centre of temporal relationships—therefore: historically, culturally, and socially determined. It is within this well-established “philosophical relationism”12 that Semerari met Paci (who was in those years the author of a text with an eloquent title: Dall’esistenzialismo al relazionismo13).

9 See Semerari, Giuseppe. 1989. Il problema della storiografia filosofica. In:Skepsis. Studi husserliani, ed. F. De Natale, G. Semerari, 143–172. Bari: Dedalo. 10 See Semerari, Giuseppe. 1953. Storia e storicismo. Saggio sul problema della storia nella filosofia di P. Carabellese. Trani: Vecchi (Second edition, expanded and with a different title: Storicismo e ontologismo critico (1960). Manduria-Bari-Perugia: Lacaita) and Semerari, Giuseppe. 1982. La sabbia e la roccia. L’ontologia critica di P. Carabellese. Bari: Dedalo. 11 Semerari, Giuseppe. 1955. La conoscenza storica. aut-aut 30:477–488 (nowadays in: Semerari, Giuseppe. 2014. Responsabilità e comunità umana. Ricerche etiche. Collana “Opere di Giuseppe Semerari”, ed. F. Semerari, vol. IV. 97–108. Milan: Guerini e Associati. 99. My translation). 12 See Semerari, Giuseppe. 1961. La filosofia come relazione. Sapri: Edizioni del Centro Librario, nowadays in: “Opere di Giuseppe Semerari” (2009). Vol. II, ed. F. De Natale. Milan: Guerini e Associati. On the maintenance of the theme of the relationship in Semerari, it suffices to refer back to: Semerari, Giuseppe. 1997. “Epistemologia delle relazioni”. In: Fenomenologia delle relazioni, ed. G. Semerari. Bari: Palomar, a republication of the text of a conference held at the International Conference on Neurology: “An Integrative Approach to the Autonomic Nervous System. Workshop in memory of Hans-Peter Koepchen” (Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of Bari, July 10, 1995). 13 See Paci, Enzo. 1957. Dall’esistenzialismo al relazionismo. Messina-Florence: D’Anna. Again in 1986, in his report to the Milan Convention 10 years after Paci’s death, Semerari affirmed that: “Of the culture of our Century the distinguishing, the dominant feature, is the principle of relationship in its opposition to the principle of substance;” and Paci’s theoretical project fits into this With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari 89

In this respect, there can be no mistaking the title of the Appendix that Semerari wrote to the third edition of Paci’s book, La Filosofia contemporanea:14 “Il relazionismo e la rinascita della fenomenologia in Italia” (Relationism and the rebirth of Phenomenology in Italy). Therefore, it is on this basis that the partnership between the two philosophers began and developed, and it is, once again and, above all, on this basis that Semerari deepened his study of Husserl, without ever totally adhering to the Husserlian perspective, but finding in Phenomenology powerful proof of a Relationism in struggle against the dogmatism of substance.

2 The Antidogmatism of Phenomenology and its “Materialistic Direction”

In order to understand at once the intention that guides Husserl’s Semerarian reading, the essay which appeared in aut-aut in 1970 (in a monographic number edited by Semerari) is remarkably indicative. In it we read: In my opinion it seems appropriate to enumerate those motifs and thematic contents from Husserl’s production, in whose light Phenomenology can legitimately be seen as an alternative to a resigned and defeatist Humanism, a unitary stance taken in consequence of the function of man as an original (and transcendental) producer of the meanings of the world to which he belongs.15 The project within which Phenomenology was interpreted is very clear: the struggle against a “defeatist humanism” that surrenders to what Husserl himself had already indicated in 1911 in Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft as the “prejudice of the fact” and the “magism of the object,” that surrenders to that naturalistic attitude according to which the objects that surround me are there, “magically” endowed with the meanings that I find myself using in my relationships with them and with myself and others. The lesson that comes from Husserl’s entire course of thought, from the first pre- phenomenological steps in the Philosophie der Arithmetik of 1891, is the stress on revealing the subjective processes through which the meaning of each objectivity is

struggle against the principle of substance. See Semerari, Giuseppe. 1991. Il relazionismo di Enzo Paci e il dibattito nella filosofia italiana degli ultimi anni Trenta. In: Vita e verità. Interpretazione del pensiero di Enzo Paci, ed. S. Zecchi, 15–50. Milan: Bompiani. 18. (Later in: Semerari, Giuseppe. 1988. Novecento filosofico italiano. 231–268. Naples: Guida. 234). 14 See Paci, Enzo. 19613. La filosofia contemporanea. Milan: Garzanti. 263ff. It should be noted that this Appendix was removed in the 1973 edition, as indicated by Paci in his Avvertenza (p. 5), when he also states that “when [the book] first came out [his thought] was under the influence of an anti-substantialist philosophy that insisted on human relationships and relationships in general.” (My translation). 15 Semerari, Giuseppe. 1970. L’alternativa fenomenologica. aut-aut 119–120:100–121 (101); later in: Semerari, Giuseppe. 1973. Filosofia e potere. Bari: Dedalo. 122–123. (My translation). 90 F. De Natale constituted, the material as well as the logical-ideal—stress that is never, in Semerari’s reading, merely theoretical and gnoseological, but rather is profoundly ethical, because it leads to the theme of the individual and collective responsibility which the subject has towards their own constructions. This is an anti-naturalistic critique that: (…) in Phenomenology, coincides with the search for evidence by which every objectivity can be verified and ceases to have value as an uncontrolled extraneousness; so that, to the extent that validation and control are successful, the irrationality of the immediately natural datum is transformed into the rationality of a process of conscience, the intentions of which are firmly possessed.16 Rationality, control understood as a verification which is evident in each of its steps, constitutes the end of the critique of the natural attitude which is brought by Phenomenology. Therefore, phenomenological Humanism, inasmuch as it is a struggle for the explication of those human relationships which lie at the foundation of the meaning of every objectivity, has nothing to do with “(…) the old Humanism, fundamentally coinciding with a literary and rhetorical, anti- or non-scientific attitude (…).”17 Furthermore, Phenomenology, for Semerari: (…) is nothing other than scientific knowledge problematized on the level of rigorousness, on the level for which, with science, man (…) sees himself so compromised with objectivity (…) that, on one hand, the world for him is constituted in the terms and with the characteristics of the experience he makes of it and, on the other, he is himself, he is what he is only to the extent that he does not separate himself from the objective contents of his experiences or from the operations through which such experiences are had, nor, finally, from the ways in which the procedures are carried out.18 It will never be a question of the “rejectio” of science and technology, but rather of the “task” of bringing scientific reason back to one’s existential matrices, to that complex of relationships that man ‘is’, and which cannot even be completely expressed in that form of relationship specific to science/technique. The absolutization of scientific reason—of the methodology of science, its language, its organization—whether or not it is linked to the exaltation of its results and its effects, produces a loss in the richness of the multiplicity of the possible relationships that man “is.”19 Therefore, from the Semerarian viewpoint

16 Ibid., 102 (1973: 123). (My translation). 17 Ibid., 111 (1973: 134). (My translation.) 18 Ibid., 104 (1973: 126). (My translation.) 19 In the Editorial which opens the first issue of the Journal of Philosophical Critique Paradigmi (1983), founded and directed by Semerari, the philosophy/science relationship is described as an alternative to “(…) not infrequent isolationist tendencies leading philosophy, today, to close itself in the abstractness of a subject separate from and impervious to the sciences, and the sciences to lock themselves into a similar abstraction of specialisms, functionalisms and technicali- ties freeing the specialized skills, functions and techniques from the common and determined historical-social horizon, which is the only place where they become intelligible and significant.” Paradigmi I (1). 3. With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari 91

Phenomenology confirms the perspective of a man who is the centre of indissoluble relationships with himself, the natural world and other men: man is a process inserted in a complex of intertwined procedural relationships that philosophy has the function and the task of not letting ossify, by reconstructing its subjective genesis and giving back to man his own responsibility. In this same direction, Phenomenology is characterized, therefore, as man’s struggle for reason, or struggle against any form of alienation, loss of self and of one’s own responsibility. It seems to me very suggestive how, in the same pages, Semerari emphasizes the possibility that, in that present moment of 1970, Phenomenology might have served as an effective antidote to the various forms of “anti-Humanism” and to the declara- tions of the “death of man” by several sources.20 The reference is to the Marxism of the Althusserian school and to the criticism of the “philosophical” and non-scientific Marxism of the early Marx: Semerari certainly does not reconstruct that debate here, but it seems useful to underline the “angle” of the Semerarian interpretation. It is not a matter of reading Husserl to reconstruct the texts, but rather of grasping, in a manner of speaking, “weapons,” arguments that make it possible to do battle in the present. This perspective, this present/past relationship, this Semerarian reading of Husserl seems to me to be clarified in an incontrovertible way by the conclusive statements of the 1970 article, when we read that the phenomenological alternative (…) does not aspire to defend or save man from things and the world, but rather to transform and guarantee his relationship with things and the world in such a way that he does not forget himself and his specific function of signification. Having a phenomenological attitude (…) does not mean professing one of the many scholastic directions of philosophy; rather it means behaving, on the one hand, in the sense of the progressive emancipation of man from those different forms of internal and external servitude of which he can be a prisoner or to which he can be exposed; and, on the other hand, of the ever deeper understanding of the relativity to man of the real or ideal order of things (…).21 Reading Husserl, grasping the import of his philosophical battle for the undoing of the subjective operations underlying the constitution of the meaning of every objectivity, translates into availing oneself of Husserlian analysis to configure an “attitude” which turns into practice, fighting for emancipation of the subject from every kind of reification of his intentional activity. At this point, it is clearly necessary to make a comparison with historical materialism, with Marx: two years after the aut-aut issue just mentioned, Semerari was in charge of a second monographic book entitled Dialettica della natura e materialismo, in which a dense essay appeared, the final pages of which were dedicated to proving the “(…) materialistic conversion that took place within Husserlian Phenomenology.”22

20 Semerari, L’alternativa fenomenologica, 101 (1973: 122). 21 Ibid., 121 (1973: 144–145). (My translation). 22 See Semerari, Giuseppe. 1972. Materialismo e scienza naturale. aut-aut 129–130:104–137 (135). Later in: Filosofia e potere 83–118 (116). (My italics and translation). 92 F. De Natale

This is a clear reference to the positions matured by Paci in his book Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo, the third edition of which was published in 1970, and which, as is known, ended with a long section entitled “Fenomenologia e marxismo”.23 But before dwelling on a dialogue between these interlocutors, it seems essential to ask the question: to which Husserl did Semerari refer? It is necessary to ask ourselves, in other words, on which of Husserl’s texts did his reading focus, on which Husserlian theoretical nuclei was his interpretation based? It is clear from his works that while Semerari obviously knows the entire published production of Husserl quite well, and is attentive to “Husserlian” publications, the texts on which he most frequently focuses are the second volume of Ideen and Krisis. In the first, he grasps the theme of Ich kann and of the “reciprocal Ego- Ourselves-World inherence” as elements that deconstruct every substantialistic image of the Ego and bring it back to its concrete processual relationship with the world. In the second, he prefers the theme of Lebenswelt24 and the critique of science that forgets its pre-categorical origins and closes itself within formalism. Hence the Husserlian reference to the obscure basis of inclinations and disposi- tions that “comes before” all behaviour (Hua, IV: 276–279); the Ego “as an ‘I can’ system” (Hua, IV: 252–253); the rootedness of consciousness in its “hyletic base” (Hua, IV: 153ff.); the correlation of cognitive objectivity with the intersection and multiplication of intersubjective experiences (Hua, IV: 171); and, once again, the notification of “de facto men” as the result of the sciences aimed exclusively at ascertaining/accepting matters of fact (Hua, VI: 3–4); the very concept of a crisis of the sciences, that is a crisis of philosophy and crisis of humanity, and the role that Husserl points out to the philosopher as an official of humanity—all these points constitute, simply to offer some examples, themes to which Semerari returns constantly in his phenomenological reflections starting in the 1960s up to his last writings in the 1990s.25 The second volume of Ideen and Krisis contains two cornerstones of a process that leads Husserl, in the Semerarian interpretation, to a refoundation of the transcendental: the conditions for the possibility of knowledge do not rest on abstract categorical apparatus, but on the real structure of the subject Leib-haftig, in flesh

23 See Paci, Enzo. 1963–19703. Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo. Milan: Il Saggiatore. 305–466. 24 See Semerari, Giuseppe. 1995. Lebenswelt. In; Phänomenologie in Italien, ed. R. Cristin, 169– 190. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 25 See, among other writings, Semerari, Giuseppe. 1961. Scienza nuova e ragione. Milan: Silva; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1965. La lotta per la scienza. Milan: Silva; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1982. Scienze di fatti, uomini di fatto. In: Insecuritas. Tecniche e paradigmi della salvezza, ed. G. Semerari, 129–165. Milan: Spirali; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1991. Auto-responsabilità. L’idea dell’uomo in Husserl. In: Razionalità fenomenologica e destino della filosofia, ed. A. Masullo, C. Senofonte, 125–139. Genova: Marietti; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1995. Considerazioni sulla rifondazione fenomenologica del trascendentale: Idee II, §§ 33–22-28, 59, 61. In: La cosa stessa. Seminari fenomenologici, ed. G. Semerari, 273–295. Bari: Dedalo; Semerari, Giuseppe. 1995. L’idea di persona nella fenomenologia di Husserl. Paradigmi 37:5–22. With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari 93 and blood, constitutively intersubjective and, therefore, historical-social. The transcendental “as a tangible a priori” is underlined to the highest degree in the Lebenswelt, the “life-world,” which Semerari interprets as the world of material needs, of social-historical relations, from which science originates and in which science must rediscover its meaning and its direction, so as to avoid constructing itself as a structure of self-serving objectivity, which, by obliterating its roots “(…) rises up in a world of itself (autonomous and universal!) which claims to have worth in and of itself, (…) concealing the world-of-life with its ideal coverings and its symbolic clothes.”26 In this perspective, Phenomenology, at the level of the Husserl of Ideen and later texts, is never the repudiation or denial of science, but a) requires a relationship with the human sciences—from psychology to psychoanalysis to sociology in their various forms—because they constitute the tools for a tangible analysis of the tangible subject, and b) recovers and defends the authentically rational and human project of the sciences, demystifying its formalistic and neo-positivistic reifications. At the height of the writings of the last 20 years of Husserlian production, Semerari holds that Phenomenology describes the possibility of the necessity for a “new science,” one which gives back to man the full responsibility of his ideal constructions and his own actions. Evidently, the entire course of Husserlian thought is interpreted in the light of this critical-theoretical need, which is realized in the works of his Fribourg phase: it is with Ideen that “(…) a conversion is made toward the fundamental principle of transcendentalism, with the assumption of the transcendental Ego, so that the experiences of consciousness (…) are concentrated and coagulated in the Ego.”27 Consequently, the Husserl period of the Logische Untersuchungen of 1900–1901 (Hua, XIX, 1, 1984 and XIX/2, 1984), of the critical theory of knowledge, of the elucidation of the last categories of scientific dissertation, is interpreted by Semerari as being yet full of Conscientialism and Idealism.28 In addition: one of the main “merits” of Husserlian Phenomenology, if I may put it this way, is that its paradigmatic “value” is identified precisely in the fulfilment of this path from Conscientialism in the direction of Materialism: in fact, its “materialistic conversion” testifies to the inadequacy of any reflection on science, on man, on reason that does not materialize in the materialistic, historical and social dimension. Phenomenology qualifies, therefore, as a critique of substantialist dogmatism and as a “self-criticism of bourgeois reason,” according to a typical lexicon of the 1960s and 1970s.

26 Semerari, Materialismo e scienza naturale, 135–136 (1973: 117). (My translation). 27 Semerari, Considerazioni sulla rifondazione fenomenologica del trascendentale, 283. (My translation). 28 See Semerari, Materialismo e scienza naturale, 129 (1973: 110). 94 F. De Natale

3 With Husserl and with Marx for a “Philosophizing from Below”

Valerio Verra, with his usual critical refinement and invaluable accuracy, identifies in Semerari, precisely in “(…) his insistence on the critical function of Phenomenology with respect to the problem of science (…)” the possibility of “(…) a correct correlation between Phenomenology and Marxism.”29 In fact, for Semerari, according to Verra: it is not a matter of giving a phenomenological interpretation of Marxism or Marxian Phenomenology (…) nor a question of the “foreshadowing” of Phenomenology by Marxism, nor of the “overcoming” of Marxism by Phenomenology; instead it is a matter of bringing them both back to the theoretical-existential situation of contemporary man with respect to which “Phenomenology and Marxism react in a similar way and, fundamentally, concord.”30 In other words, it is not a question of “unifying” Phenomenology and Marxism in the project of a phenmarx or marxphen, id est in the constitution of a new theoretical-practical conception of understanding and transformation of the existent, as it seems in Enzo Paci’s latest writings:31 and here there is a maximum of theoretical distance between the two Masters regarding the relationship between Phenomenology and historical-dialectical Materialism. Rather, it is a matter of finding in Phenomenology and in Marxism those theoretical elements, those forms of Criticism that can give back to the man of the present his responsibility as a subject among subjects, demystifying the manners that tend to deny the corporeal, social, historical dimension of man, incorporating it within schemes that realize its abstract inner workings in mechanisms that present themselves with the approval of an unalterable objectivity and necessity. Neither Phenomenology nor Marxism are absolute safe-conducts in this battle to affirm the effective and constant capacity for the auto-normativity of the subject, which is the core of Semerarian reflection: in Husserl, indeed, there is no shortage of “consciential residuals” even in the Ideen and in Krisis,32 and in Marxism there is always the possibility of sheltering oneself in a philosophy of defending institution- alized power in its bureaucratic apparatus, as a means for mortifying the individual.33

29 Verra, Valerio. 1985. Esistenzialismo, fenomenologia, ermeneutica, nichilismo. In: La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra ad oggi, ed. A. Bausola, G. Bedeschi, M. Dal Pra, E. Garin, M. Pera, and V. Verra. Roma-Bari: Laterza. 402. (My translation). 30 Ibid., 403. (My translation). 31 See Paci, Enzo. 1974. Fenomenologia e dialettica. Milan: Feltrinelli. It is only a bibliographical reference concerning an extended bibliography. 32 See, purely by the way of example, Semerari, Giuseppe. 1986. Il Cogito mancato. La critica di Husserl a Hume. Paradigmi 12:457–488, where the radical Humean Empiricism is preferred to the Husserlian theme of the Cogito. 33 See Semerari, Giuseppe. Il marxismo “aperto” nelle democrazie popolari e Burocrazia, tecnocra- zia e libertà. In: Filosofia e potere149–198. With Husserl “Beyond” Husserl: Phenomenology in the Thought of Giuseppe Semerari 95

It is easy, however, to establish that it is precisely in those writings of Semerari in which the presence of Phenomenology and Marxism is strongest that not only do Marx and Husserl recur, but also Dewey and Hume and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and even Erikson and Fromm and Goldstein and Kelsen and Mannheim and Malinowski and Jung and Perelman and Whitehead and Wittgenstein, thus testify- ing to an irreducible plurality of referents and cultural horizons included in the perspective of a common struggle against any form of dogmatism, reification, or loss of subjectivity. This is what Semerari specified in 1979 to counter the disapproval that came from authoritative Italian scholars of a Marxist orientation: (…) my problem was not (and is not) that of making a mixture of Marxism and Phenomenology, much less that of ‘translating’ Husserl into materialistic language and the language of that sui generis Materialism that is Marxism (…). In my opinion, all that matters is the objective convergence of Marxism and Phenomenology in relation to the situation of the age (…). It is the common struggle against the various forms of fetishism (economic/social/political/scientific) (…). It is the common necessity to radicalise the foundation of objectivity (…) so that the constituent human subjectivity does not become alien and does not remain permanently lost in the already constituted.34 In this way, Marx can be an “antidote” to the conscientialistic residues of Husserl, and Husserl can be efficient in highlighting the problem of subjectivity in Marx: but all that matters is the understanding of the present and its mechanisms of objectification and alienation, which require a philosophical battle for the auto-normativity of the subject, both as an individual and as a community. Therefore, with Husserl and Marx, many other thinkers from the present and the past can “converge,” can be juxtaposed, frequented, and studied so as to support this battle, which is also the delineation of a way of conceiving and practicing philosophical work, the model of “philosophizing from below,” which Semerari describes as follows: Philosophizing from below means making an empirical assumption in which man in his historically determined materiality is the principle of philosophy, and philosophy is expressed as research supported by falsifiable hypotheses (…) and coincides with the description and design of multiple transactional relationships between man and the world (…) which are maintained in a permanent state of demand, reflecting the problematic structure of both the empirically observable man and his transactional relationships with the world.35 The Semerarian reading of Husserlian Phenomenology is that of a theoretical philosopher, not of a historian of philosophy. And theoretical philosophy, for Semerari—as for many other Italian theoreticians of his generation—is what Norberto Bobbio called “militant philosophy,” a philosophy that fights, in the present for the future: that which, after all, Husserl himself included in the expression of the philosopher as a “functionary of all mankind.”

34 Semerari, Giuseppe. 1979. Civiltà dei mezzi, civiltà dei fini. Per un razionalismo filosofico-politico. Verona: Bertani. 12. (My translation). 35 Semerari, Filosofia e potere, 10–11. (My translation). 96 F. De Natale

To read again today the interpretation that Semerari has given of Phenomenology means not only, perhaps, to rediscover the hidden and/or lost (in time) theoretical potentialities of Husserl, but also to revive and rethink the meaning, the conflicts, the triumphs and the defeats that Italian philosophy experienced in the second half of the last century. It seems to me that the words of his friend Fulvio Papi can better finalize my considerations: In an era in which the preservation of tradition (something that may be similar to the invaluable copying of texts) or rendering philosophy as a spectacle often prevails, the experience of Semerari indicates (…) the positive possibility of a philosophical discourse that is, simultaneously, within its tradition and within the invention of its meaning and its way of being in contemporaneity.36

Ferruccio De Natale is Professor of Philosophical Hermeneutics at the Aldo Moro University of Bari. A pupil of Giuseppe Semerari, he served as an editor and member of the editorial board of the journal Paradigm under the direction of Giuseppe Semerari (1982/1996) and Franco Bianco (1996/2004). He is a member of the scientific committees for the journal Verifiche, the online journals Logoi.ph and Comunicazione Filosofica, and several book series (Guida, Mimesis). He has authored over 80 academic publications, including the volumes: Il problema fenomenologico della scienza in Husserl. Da “Idee II” alla “Crisi” (Turin 1976); La fenomenologia e i due irrazional- ismi (Bari 1981); Skepsis. Studi husserliani (with G. Semerari; Bari 1989); Esistenza, Filosofia, Angoscia (Bari 1995); Tra ethos ed oikos. Studi su Husserl, Heidegger e Jonas (Bari 2001); Tra linguaggi e silenzi (Bari 2004); L’estraneo e il comune (Bari 2007); La presenza del passato (Naples 2012); and Il primato del dialogo (Milan 2016).

36 Papi, Fulvio. 2008. Per Semerari. In: La certezza incerta. Scritti su Giuseppe Semerari con due inediti dell’autore, ed. F. Semerari. Milan: Guerini e Associati. 14. (My translation). The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri

Stefano Besoli

Abstract This essay examines the philosophical path of Enzo Melandri with regard to the writings dedicated to the phenomenology of Husserl and to some themes related to Brentano’s School, Meinong’s Theory of Objects and Theory of Gestalt Qualities. In particular, I have analyzed the Melandrian interpretation of the Husserlian transcendental phenomenology with reference to the definition of the relationship between logic and experience, and the development of some linguistic themes related to the notions of meaning and expression.

After deepening his understanding, in the period of his formation in Bologna, of the terrain of the philosophy of history and the interweaving of hermeneutics and Lebensphilosophie, Melandri’s encounter with Husserl’s thought takes place essentially in the sign of the relationalistic imprint of phenomenology, impressed upon it by Enzo Paci in the late 1950s. In this context, the need became clear to overcome the level of ethical and gnoseological aporias that permeated the problems of existentialism, in order to devote attention to the recovery of a rationality no longer contaminated by dogmatic accents and naturalistic features. In the perspective disclosed by this rational commitment, Melandri succeeded in highlighting, before anyone else, how phenomenology could represent the very foundation of logic and how a phenomenology of experience, correctly understood, could give rise to a sort of radical empirical method, devoid of naturalistic implications and distortions of a psychological nature, so as to be conducted in a descriptive style of analysis, not prejudiced by any ideology. In tune with Paci’s reflections, according to which one could trace the origin of all of existentialism1 to Husserl’s Vorlesungen concerning the “phenomenology of internal time-consciousness” (1904–1905), thus lending support to the thesis that phenomenology already implicitly contained its thematic structure, Melandri also abandoned the irrationalistic developments of

1 Melandri, Enzo. 1960. Logica e esperienza in Husserl. Bologna: il Mulino. 133.

S. Besoli (*) University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 97 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_8 98 S. Besoli existentialism and, at the same time, of a certain historicism, to testify how an accurate analysis of phenomenology could have aspired, along the lines traced by Paci, to a critical revision of the whole of Hegelian philosophy and, in particular, of the crucial problem of dialectics. This change of direction, expressed with extreme radicality, was inscribed within that rebirth of interest in phenomenology which stands as the second great vague of Husserlian studies in the context of the Italian philosophical tradition, after the one that had taken place, starting in the 1920s, under the aegis of Antonio Banfi. Almost at the centenary of Husserl’s birth, a renewed impulse for phenomenological research is thus linked to the publication of Husserl’s unpublished works and the launch of the editorial initiative aimed at gathering together the entirety of the Husserlian production.2 The Husserl-Renaissance, which translated the acquisition of the unpublished Husserlian works into a phase of studies commensurate with the task of restoring the authentic sense of phenomenology, contributed primarily to refuting the idea that the phenomenological movement, in its progressive diaspora, had exhausted itself because it had basically constituted only a preparatory stage for existentialism. In fact, it was precisely a certain decline of that philosophical current, accompanied in those years by a weakening of neo-positivist culture, that legitimated a veritable reversal of perspective, since Husserl could no longer be understood as a simple precursor of Heidegger, since it was, if anything, existentialism—and primarily Being and Time as its most important work—that constituted a narrower horizon and in many regards an involuntary development of the boundless breadth that Husserl’s thought was gradually revealing. Moreover, regardless of the continuity between phenomenology and existentialism, it was increasingly evident that the latter was not a sign of a necessary development from a more naive position to a more mature or more advanced one, since many of the problematic aspects of existentialism appeared more and more as interpretative options of some of the main phenomenological premises. Thus it emerged, with considerable perspicuity, that the Husserlian phenomenology had not limited itself to ideally preceding existentialism, but that in reality it had paradoxically already surpassed and revised it when it had raised to the level of an object of reflection the profound motivations, for the most part largely unconscious, which underlie the most obvious beliefs of daily life,

2 The reception of the unpublished Husserlian works was accompanied, in the phenomenological culture of those years, by two particularly significant works, which have exercised—above all in Italy—a decisive role in guiding the interpretation, enabling it to grasp the effective significance of the Husserlian phenomenological discourse. These are the volumes of: Brand, Gerd. 1955. Welt, Ich und Zeit. Nach unveröffentlichten Manuskripten Edmund Husserls. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Italian translation: Brand, Gerd. 1960. Mondo, io e tempo nei manoscritti inediti di Husserl (trans: Filippini, E.). Introduction by E. Paci. Milan: Bompiani (a portion of this work can be found in an English translation in: Joseph Kockelman. 1967. Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation. New York, NY: Doubleday). See also Diemer, Alwin. 1956. Edmund Husserl. Versuch einer systematischen Darstellung seiner Phänomenologie. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 99 a crisis which must be provoked by a methodical suspension of judgment, which represents the inaugural act of phenomenology and the “entryway” for an immense intentional analysis of transcendental experience.3 Once the meaning had been fully grasped, the presupposition of a phenomenological foundation of knowledge proved inescapable, so that it appeared difficult to renounce the critical function of phenomenology in the context of cultural situations threatened by crude resurgences, by a priori ways of thinking, unwittingly metaphysical or intentionally ideological, when not outright mystical. Compared to such manifestations, phenomenology then proposed itself as something more than a simple antidote or symptomatic therapy: as a concrete alternative of thought. Beyond the more strictly conjunctural features, the reading of Husserlian philosophy that Melandri has provided us since his early work is marked by the radical nature of the theoretical commitment and the unprecedented character of the contents that he highlights. First of all, the interpretation that Melandri favors is distinguished by the aim of being “philological,” but at the same time making reference to the Husserlian texts as “that-through-which” it tries to think of the “things themselves” at which Husserl aimed: the object of interpretation is here one with the nucleus of the problems which requires an “objective or in any case extratextual reference.”4 Melandri’s exegesis does not therefore prescind from the texts, but makes them instruments of an issues-based clarification that goes beyond them, giving them a sense that they do not at first seem to merit, so as to make the texts say what comes entirely from them, although not immediately recognizable as such. But apart from this aspect of a more general theorization, Melandri’s orientation is clear: it holds to the phenomenological principle (of an Aristotelian form), according to which the object is preordained to the method, since the inverse rationalistic- idealistic conception cannot be accepted that identifies in the method that which allows one a priori to realize every objectual determination. Knowing what a thing is cannot mean ignoring the fact of knowing that it is, so Melandri shows—despite what many still claim—that the Husserlian concept of science has strong empirical origins, since the peculiarity of the object is what dictates the ways in which it can be known. The methodical principles are therefore prescribed by the essence inherent to the possible experience of objects in their categorial peculiarity, so that it is the method that must be placed in function of the research, matched by a scientific rigor that cannot be absolutized in terms of an aprioristic methodology, infallible and of universal validity. On this level, and with reference to the specifically phenomenological theme, Melandri draws the further conclusion that we must avoid the “prejudice of the exemplariness of mathematics and of formal logic” which is persistently employed throughout modern philosophy, since these “eidetic-‘formal’” sciences cannot advance a foundational primacy and a claim to transcendental prior-

3 Melandri, Enzo. 1966. Esistenzialismo. In: Filosofia (vol. XIV of Enciclopedia Feltrinelli Fischer), ed. Enzo Paci, 38–53. Milano: Feltrinelli. 39ff. 4 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, XI. 100 S. Besoli ity over a “‘material’ eidetic science” like phenomenology.5 The exactness of certain sciences, in fact, does not befit the rigor employed in phenomenological research, which has always to do with essentially indeterminate phenomena (chias- mas, adumbrations, horizons, indirect or potential modes of givenness), by principle irreducible to a measure of greater conclusiveness and finality, but connatural to the phenomenological research that always moves from the datum to regress, in the genealogical sense, to its “preliminary constitutive conditions.”6 Precisely the fact of its being an eidetic-material science causes Melandri to glimpse in Husserlian phenomenology, even in its constitutive inaccuracy, the possibility of fulfilling the function of prote philosofia, i.e., effecting the difficult welding—a sort of “dialectic union of opposites”—between the formal model of mathematics and the concrete exemplarity of psychology. The outcome of this enterprise would lead to a definitive clarification of the “sense of the relationship between the formal and the transcendental,” which derives from considering “formal logic as based on transcendental logic” and “phenomenological logic” as a “logic of experience.”7 The novelty of the interpretative line advanced by Melandri also consisted in contrasting what seemed until then to be a consolidated acquisition, namely that the Husserlian reflection, starting from positions of metaphysical neutrality or even of veiled realism, had in fact re-entered—following the fine-tuning of the reduction systems—the framework of the classical idealistic-transcendental tradition. With regard to this almost univocal tendency, which marked the idealistic turning point of Husserlian phenomenology, Melandri—illustrating the authentic meaning of the sources of Husserl’s thought and, consequently, the elements of his formation—has convincingly shown the continuity of Husserl’s inspiration, as well as the unity and coherence of his method of investigation, countering those forms of undue dispos- session with which the number of phenomenologies and possible stages of Husserlian philosophy had proliferated, identifying the presence, almost one for each of Husserl’s books, of a different author: the current of thought passed, with a certain ease, from a “pre-phenomenological” Husserl, Brentanian and psychologistic, to a Platonic, logical and anti-empiricist Husserl; “from a phenomenological- transcendental and Kantian Husserl, to a metaphysical, Cartesian and idealistic Husserl, etc.”8 Far from wanting to make the intrinsic complexity of Husserl’s thought coincide with a kaleidoscopic succession of irreconcilable positions, Melandri aims at effecting a profound revision that was already supposed to have been carried out with the studies on the so-called “genealogy of logic,” i.e., with reference to Erfahrung und Urteil (1939), a work published the year after Husserl’s death, but which dates back to a lecture course held in 1919–1920 and manuscripts

5 Ibid., 148 (but see also 84ff.). 6 Ibid., 149. 7 Ibid., 5 and 85. See Melandri, Enzo. 1960. I paradossi dell’infinito nell’orizzonte fenomenologico. In: Omaggio a Husserl, ed. Enzo Paci, 83–120. Milan: il Saggiatore. 91. 8 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 5 (cit. adapted). The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 101 of 1910–1914. The writings on the “crisis,” too, could serve as a new lymph to interpret more deeply the Husserlian texts already known and to a large extent still sacrificed to a schematic vision. This required, for example, helping readers grasp how the emergence of the theme of history in the last period of Husserlian production did not represent the point of arrival of an occasional parabola of thought, but imposed a completely different picture of Husserlian phenomenology with respect to the conventionally accepted one, since the problem of historicity represented an intrinsic motif of Husserlian thought and the necessary continuation of intentional analysis in the spectrum of the entire philosophical problem. The recovery of a historical dimension, if not an explicit philosophy of history, refers to the historically conditioned character of every truth9 and to the fact that phenomenology itself does not escape the historical level of tradition. Having problematized, through the theme of functioning intentionality, the critical history of ideas, the temporal and genetic and constitutive articulation of consciousness and the terrain of an intersubjectivity that renounces the reference to the presumed Husserlian transcendental solipsism does not push Melandri to repropose a banally historicist image of phenomenology, or to preserve the—mostly atemporal—melodic character that can be transcribed into a multiplicity of almost infinite registers, but allows the relaunching of the unity of its initial theme and the equally unitary development of the motifs which draw inspiration from it, in which the ego and history find themselves fused in a relationship of reciprocity that takes the form of an infinite project. In emphasizing that Husserl did not yet have a real historical sensitivity or vocation,10 when he evoked the cultural project of a humanity conceived as a substratum of a teleological reason sheltered from any relativism, Melandri was aiming to establish a “rereading of the ‘first’ Husserl while taking into account the ‘last,’” in order to “show its continuity” and show the “connection that phenomenologically subsists between logic and experience.”11 For Melandri it was, in fact, a matter of making evident the relationship between the ideality of logical forms and the reality of existence, between the apparent static nature of the former and the actual temporality of experience, since only by having an adequate dialectic correlation between these terms would it have been possible to account for those polarizations (historicism and anti-historicism, method and metaphysics, formalism and psychology) that otherwise would have prevented a unified vision of the Husserlian Denkweg. Following Eugen Fink’s indications, Melandri grasps in the historical development of Husserlian phenomenology the effect of a tendency to make more and more clear the features of a “radical reform of philosophy” which, in the deployment of the reasons that from the beginning assure its unity, assumes the features of the “history of the radicalization of a problem.”12 But along with establishing the intrinsic unity of the Husserlian project, Melandri aims to explode, with extreme originality, the

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 229ff. 11 Ibid., 16. 12 Ibid., 17. 102 S. Besoli natural conviction that phenomenology constitutes a “way of thinking fundamentally opposed to empiricism,”13 to the point of recognizing in it a properly empirical matrix. Referring to the words expressed by Husserl in Formale und transzendentale Logik (§ 97), Melandri also believes that referring to everything that is conceivable for an ego in its conscientious life does not involve a Cartesian approach, since “it is useless to philosophize from above regarding this.”14 In the monograph of 1960, Melandri develops his own reflections on the logic of experience, seeking above all to remove some difficulties that have constantly prevented a correct understanding of Husserl’s design. If the technical term “phenomenology” has often been burdened by implications and ambiguities of various kinds, such as those that indicate it as the correlative pole of the term “ontology” in the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition, in the context of Husserl’s phenomenology, too, meaning must be freed from two somewhat complementary and symmetrical misunderstandings. On the one hand, phenomenology should not be thought of in the manner of an introspective psychology, although its field has much to do with that of psychology: and this is because there is a valid ban on it adopting any naturalistic attitude, that is to say taking factual data for granted, no matter how accredited it is. At the same time, neither is phenomenology identifiable as a transcendental philosophy of Kantian or Neo-Kantian ancestry, as it puts them in reverse, so to speak. The transcendental philosophy of classical origin admits, as plausible, the regressive method of going back from the datum to what makes it possible, articulating reality in rationalistic terms, or bringing it back to the conditions of its knowability. On the other hand, the character of the phenomenological foundation requires that the conditioning moment be directly emphasized, so that the “reference to transcendental conditions must be founded—in an aesthetic and not apagogical sense—on the evident intuition of the same possibilitating conditions, understood as ‘objectivi- ties’ of a superior level than those of the conditioning terms.”15 The nucleus of the criticism that Husserlian phenomenology addresses to popular transcendentalism is expressed by Melandri in finding that “the certainty that can be obtained with a regressive reasoning from the fact to the (supposed) conditions that make it possible (…) can never overcome the empirical certainty of the fact from which we start.”16 The Husserlian critique of the Kantian transcendental which, due to the self- criticism conducted by Kant starting from the Kritik der Urteilskraft, had been diluted to an “analogical principle of organizing experience,” finds for Melandri its most effective expression in phenomenological objectivistic intuitionism that, choosing to proceed von unten her, identifies the aporetic character of the Cartesian cogito, indicating how “the I of reflection” must always be able to lead back, with-

13 Ibid., 3. 14 Melandri, I paradossi dell’infinito nell’orizzonte fenomenologico, 83, exergue. 15 Ibid., 110. But see also 104ff. 16 Melandri, Enzo. 1968 (2004–20122). La linea e il circolo. Studio logico-filosofico sull’analogia. Macerata: Quodlibet. 64ff. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 103 out any residue, to the I of the “experiencing consciousness,”17 since it is experience, as a realm of original evidences, that constitutes the source of legitimation of every reality. In contrasting the sense of the phenomenological a priori with the Kantian a priori, Melandri then shows how phenomenology postulates a direct experience of the transcendental itself, identifying the condition that ensures the only way to access an authentic a priori synthesis, otherwise exposed to a relativization of an anthropological character into which even Kant had fallen.18 While for Kant the possibility of experience is guaranteed by the fact that the functions of the intellect confer a necessary form upon the sensuous contents which are themselves amorphous, Husserl recognizes that on the level of experience there are already necessary connections that do not refer to the synthetic activity of the subject of categorial forms, since they are based on the same content-determinations of experiential materials. In this phenomenological redefinition of the notion of a priori, which is thus invested with an undeniable material connotation, on the one hand the idea falters that the sphere of thought represents something closed in itself, as does on the other hand the conviction—the result of prejudices and resistance—that experience is qualified to contain only the contents and not at the same time the ways of their autonomous and structured organization. Not only does the datum not need to be interpreted in the light of characteristics that do not belong to it, since it is able to display for itself the way to grasp the meaning of its manifestation, but the very categories—which Husserl also calls “regional concepts” or “concepts of type”— do not stem from an improbable deduction that starts from a merely postulated system of thought, but are found and apprehended, step by step, in an intuitive way. In this sense, by effecting a reversal of the foundational paradigm of every rationalistic demand, Melandri recognizes that Husserl completely undermines the stability of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, based on the uniqueness of the forms of intuition which are responsible for the phenomenal individuation and on a logical organ that guarantees the reliability of the discursive and synthetic operations, coun- terposing to the Kantian logical-transcendental a priori a material a priori, characterized by the fact that there are necessary links intrinsic to the nature of the objects. Melandri thus traces a path that goes from experience to judgment, recognizing that phenomenology must always precede and establish logic, to the extent that the latter’s independence can only be understood in a relative sense, since the very consideration of what is formal cannot neglect the “achieving conditioning” which is proper to its “constitution.”19 In fact, the autonomy of logic, obtained through the elimination of the worldly traits that are in principle extraneous to it, risks being as such devoid of meaning and therefore having to undergo a sort of metanoia. Even a “pure apophanticism” must recognize the conditions of its own possibility in the

17 Ibid. 18 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 60 and 109ff. 19 Ibid., 44. 104 S. Besoli

“descriptive analysis of the acts of thought which form the logical discourse,”20 whereby a “merely formal logic,” independent of experience, incurs the limits of any acritical dogmatism, which Husserl would designate as naively pre- philosophical. To consider impassable the empirical horizon of every logical accomplishment means that the logic of thought cannot renounce its inherentness to the world and therefore can only be founded in the logic of experience, grasping the essential structuring of the experience itself, which does not stand on principles projected from above as heteronomous conditions of its mere thinkability. Even before, then, the Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (1966) appeared in Husserliana, Melandri had already identified as problematic the concept of a pure logic devoid of a “correlation with its subjective sense,”21 i.e., of a logic that, to be included in the inseity typical of every truth of reason, without doubt had to be reintegrated into the original experiential dimension. Hence the most significant merit that Melandri ascribes to Husserl is that he was the first to “explicitly pose the problem of the assertory character of the apodictic itself.”22 This highlighting, which reveals how at the basis of every logical formalization there is an adequate clarification of the gnoseological order, determines for Melandri the transcendental sense of the phenomenological foundation of knowledge, which consists in “going back from the thought to the given, from the intended to the intentional, from the noumenal to the phenomenon [... for which] the sense of the analytic, of the apophantic and of the formal is to be found in the aesthetic, in the actual and in the ante-predicative.”23 Unlike Brentano’ work method, however, Melandri notes that Husserl does not try to reduce the apodictic directly to the assertory, but aspires to “find a homogenizing correlation” between these terms. The mediation must in principle be able to take place in both directions, and only by ensuring “an aesthetic basis for the analytic” or “by founding logic empirically” can we grasp the “evidential character of the essences” and admit that the same “apprehension of intellectual objects”—as in the presence of an intellectual intuition endowed with a “concrete foundation”—enjoys a “genuine intuitive moment.”24 In reconstructing the identity of phenomenology, Melandri compares it with certain rather conventional ways of understanding it, determined by a lectio facilior of some Husserlian texts (with particular reference to the Prolegomena zur reinen Logik and Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft). In this regard, Melandri gets rid of the idea that the defense of the autonomy of logic, of its ideality and of the claimed separation from any form of empirical contamination must necessarily translate into the speculative demand for formal purity that is an end in itself, nourishing the common opinion that phenomenology—by virtue of Husserl’s original mathematical vocation—was essentially motivated against all forms of empiricism and by an

20 Ibid., 45. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid, 52. 23 Ibid., 46. 24 Ibid., 52 (cit. adapted). The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 105 equally radical opposition to historicism en philosophe. At the same time, in its meaning as transcendental philosophy, phenomenology should certainly have been part of that tradition of thought, in which the Platonic motif was combined with an absolutist conception of logic. However, even if this slightly too superficial reading was also generated in part by Husserl, in his attempt to restore the somewhat compromised rights of formal ontology, for Melandri there is no doubt that the so-called Husserlian essentialism must not be understood in the sense of a complete lack of relationships, or as a form of Platonic hypostatization or of the restoration of an absolute realism. In this sense, even the analogical developments of the Melandrian phenomenological-experiential investigation will confirm that “the progress of knowledge depends on the possibility of tracing a difference that at first appears qualitative and absolute back to one that is instead relational and relative.”25 In other words, what appears to be a radical critique of empiricism as a historically determined form of thought, is only a distancing from an entire cartel of gnoseological positions which, in their inadequate attempts to found logic on an empirical or hypothetical-deductive base, had inevitably led to relativistic consequences of a skeptical nature. Melandri’s position is that phenomenology represents a critique of a “badly understood” empiricism, so to speak, that is, one set up against a naturalistic background. As a consequence, even Husserl’s criticism of psychology did not mean that logic could do without psychology altogether, and consequently should renounce it as a medium to discuss logic itself, but was directed to the more extreme forms of misunderstanding that tended to conceive of logical laws as natural forms of thought, obtainable through an empirical-inductive generalization. Moreover, Husserl could not, according to Melandri, definitively remove the terrain of psychology from the phenomenological horizon, thus ignoring the interest inherited from Brentano, whose ideal of philosophy—like that of much of Austrian philosophy—traveled well outside the beaten paths of Kantian transcendentalism and German idealism. Husserl’s negation of psychologism was therefore to be conceived, for Melandri, as a critique of a confusedly psychological orientation, i.e., one incapable of genuinely understanding its own subject. From this perspective it is understood why Husserl’s antispsychologism does not lead to in a dogmatic logicism à la Frege, but pursues the attempt to identify, between the extremes of objectivism and psychologism, a sort of third way, which does not, however, translate into an equivocally compromising solution.26 In this sense it is evident to what extent it is possible to speak of Husserlian Platonism,27 since Husserl’s intent had never been to “carry out an almost chemical separation of living thought,” such as to render its components totally unrelated, and to make it subject to the aporias of dualism. In keeping with some of Paci’s indications on the meaning to be attributed to Platonism in Husserl,

25 Melandri, La linea e il circolo, 792. 26 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 10ff. and 28ff. 27 See ibid., 30ff. and 42ff. 106 S. Besoli

Melandri explains in exemplary fashion how in the distinction between the logical moment and the psychological moment, between the ideal object and real content, between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content of knowledge one must not neglect the relational meaning that negates every kind of chorismos. On the other hand, the original problem faced by Husserl has always been that of the relationship between one’s current experience, which is subjectively psychological, and the reality itself captured in it, for which it was necessary to explicitly discuss the correlative approach, which in the field of phenomenology manifests an authentic primacy. To follow up on this, Melandri refers to a “special ‘dialectic of distincts’,” in which intentionality assumes the role of the “principle of homogenization of the distincts”28 themselves. Since from the beginning phenomenological logic is founded on correlations, it is easy to understand why the second volume of the Logische Untersuchungen—largely devoted to the eidetic analysis of the lived experiences through which we experience every type of objectivity—could not constitute a “palynodia” of the Prolegomena,29 or even a relapse into psychologism, but should be understood as a type of phenomenological research aimed at the reap- propriation of subjectivity in a non-naturalistic key, already allowing a glimpse of a transcendental phenomenology that leads to reflect on the nature of “acts constitutive of objectivity.”30 The interpretation Melandri offers of this nucleus of phenomenological problems clarifies, in a wholly original way, how the Husserlian rejection of psychologism concerns only the naturalistic meaning of this phenomenon, but does not involve that defined as “actualistic.” This latter meaning, following the “doctrine of the immediate datum” advanced by Wolfgang Metzger, postulates considering the logical laws in their “immanent motivation of lived experiences,”31 establishing that no concept can be accepted without being able to show the “empirical genesis for abstraction from sensible intuitions.”32 Freeing psychology and the actualistic evidence from any naturalistic covering, from intellectualism and, more generally, from the way of laying out the problems in psychological terms, would mean revealing its “immanent motivation,” that is, the “secret nostalgia” of being translated into a phenomenology free of speculative assumptions.33 Because of this program to be implemented, Melandri maintains that, far from constituting a radical critique of empiricism, phenomenology authoritatively presents itself as the most authentic form of “radical empiricism,”34 i.e., that position of Jamesian inspiration

28 Ibid., 30ff. 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 27. 31 Ibid., 33ff. 32 Ibid., 35. 33 Ibid., 34. 34 Ibid., 72 and 247. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 107 in which one is consciously oriented to overcome the distinction between truth of reason and truth of fact,35 just like the opposition between subject and object.36 The reference to experience, as a constant reference and absolute criterion, must free it from any naturalistic covering, not limiting it to a mere atomistic connotation or to a sensistic associationism. The anti-naturalistic approach of phenomenology, which Melandri grasps in his critique of the falsification of original experience, is therefore rooted in an empiricism freed from metaphysical infrastructures. Along these coordinates, the reading that Melandri offers of the path of Husserlian reflection manages to show that for it the attempt to base logic on psychology no longer represents an illegitimate transgression, provided that the radical nature of such a commitment is such as to transform psychology—which for Husserl constitutes the “place of decisions”—into a transcendentally complete phenomenology. In this framework, phenomenology places itself well beyond the degree of reflection implemented by Brentanian descriptive psychology, since the purpose of the phenomenological description is not to grasp what actually happens in the subject, but to detect the essential traits and invariant structures of each individual experience.37 At the same time, in opposing the prevalence of the idealistic interpretations of Husserlian thought, Melandri brings the roots of phenomenology back into the empiricist tradition, in which Hume had appeared as the true “precursor” of phenomenology, to the point that in the same Husserlian reference to the transcendental, “the idea of a kopernikanische Wendung, as it is proposed in the ‘phenomenological reduction’, bears more of a Humean than a Kantian imprint,”38 since even Husserl— though not wanting to bend to the distortions of sensorial psychology—pursues with his phenomenological-transcendental method the old intentions of empirical philosophy, analyzing the meaning of the structures that operate, on the subjective side, in matters of constitutive genesis.39 In his valuable reconstruction of the period of Husserl’s philosophy often improp- erly defined as pre-phenomenological, Melandri indicates how already in the Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) Husserl transgresses the limits of Brentanian empirical psychology, not only through the qualitative distinction between meaning and phenomenon, in order to delineate a different sense of the notion of intentionality, but also through a peculiar deepening that overcomes the classifying character of Brentano’s psychognosis, introducing “‘organicistic’ categories” instead of the prevailing “atomistic” ones.40 This widening of perspective has served to obviate the

35 Melandri, La linea e il circolo, 572ff. 36 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 31. 37 See Melandri, Enzo. 1989. Sul concetto di descrizione nella psicologia fenomenologica. Intersezioni IX (1–2): 285–303. 38 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 109. 39 Melandri states that the main purpose of his book is “to show the profound empirical sense of phenomenology.” Ibid., 75. 40 See ibid., 21ff. 108 S. Besoli associationist elementarism, disclosing the synthetic dimension that Brentano found difficult to conceive and which instead enabled Husserl to face decisively what for Melandri represents the “most important problem of phenomenology,” from which “its very existence depends:”41 namely the eidetic intuition, the evident seeing of essences. Melandri aims at “defending the intuitionism of ‘natural’ thought” against the artificiality of the symbolistic process42 and sees in the analysis concerning the origin of the concept of cardinal numbers and the notion of multiplicity the way that leads to discovering the presence of “figural, quasi-qualitative” or gestaltic moments that—in the different modes of the eidos, the Wesen and the Typus—will mark the deepening of the Husserlian reflections from Philosophie der Arithmetik to Erfahrung und Urteil. From the empirical point of view, the origin of the concept of number is explained through a dual operation: negation or abstraction, in which we are not concerned with the particularities or individual differences of the single elements, and the conjunction through which these discrete and homogeneous units are reconnected in the “superior conceptual unity of the number.”43 Each multiplicity is thus made up of the elements of which it is composed and of the collective relationship that brings them together into a whole. The difficulty which this empirical conception incurs is that this relation must necessarily be conceived as external to the elements themselves, so that as the number brings us back to the act of number- ing, in the case of the notion of multiplicity we refer to the “psychological act of association,” which represents something extrinsic with respect to the elements connected to each other, with the unsatisfactory result that the foundation of the concept of multiplicity should be sought in the “subjective sphere of the association of ideas.”44 However, on closer inspection, more structural schemas insinuated themselves into mathematics, in the most abstruse symbolic operations, proving the presence in them of a “(metaphorical) type of concreteness” or of a “semi-intuitive pregnancy,” which let one glimpse how these figural moments were the bearers of a “special intellectual intuition.”45 With extreme clarity, Melandri judges that the phenomenologically more mature outcome of the reflection on arithmetic conducted by Husserl consists of the “implicit recognition that there are never ‘mere sums’,” even if this is not to be understood from the strictly logical or psychological point of view.46 The disruptive discovery of the figural moments mars the initial Husserlian program, diverting phenomenology along a whole new speculative path. The discovery of non-independent parts of a whole, distinguished by a relational character, which are describable and can be grasped qualitatively in a quasi-intuitive manner, decreed the collapse of associationism, in which no structural aspects related to the collective

41 Ibid., 48. 42 Ibid., 25. 43 Ibid., 19. 44 Ibid., 20. 45 Melandri, I paradossi dell’infinito nell’orizzonte fenomenologico, 98. 46 Ibid. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 109 relationship appeared, since only the individual elements could be properly called data. The discovery of figurative moments therefore legitimizes the theoretical scope of an intellectual intuition literally banished by Kant. Apart from the field of arithmetic, in the immediate, “momentary apprehension” of unlimited sets, this multiplicity is not captured by progressively adding together the undifferentiated units, but is grasped suddenly, in a single glance, intuiting the global quality of a whole that transcends, in gestaltic form, the elements that constitute it, without however subsisting separately from them. The presence of a third constitutive factor of multiplicity, of a figural moment that qualifies the sensitive apprehension of phenomena allows Husserl to show how, for phenomenology, under this perspective, there are no absolute phenomenal givenness, fictionally posited in their atomic or unrelated nature, that is, as really independent singularities, but only configurations endowed with a pregnant structure. In this regard, Melandri illustrates, with undeniable mastery, how Husserl arrived almost unconsciously, through a different route than the experimental path traveled by von Ehrenfels47—though likewise exploiting the observations already made by Mach in his Beiträge zur Analyze der Empfindungen (1886) and by Stumpf in the second volume of Tonpsychologie (1890)—at the realization of how, beyond the rigid empirical assumptions, connective relationships are founded in a unitary whole, whose character is no longer merely symbolic, but, as was said, “semi-intuited,” because of the way in which the relationships tend toward congruence in their figural aspect. The function and the operational scope of the Gestaltqualitäten led Melandri to establish definitively the difference between the type of structuring that phenomenology claims that occurs in experience and the type attributed to it instead by both empiricism and Kantian transcendentalism. Indeed, sensuous material does not receive order and form from an intellectual intervention, but organizes itself in the unity of syntheses that have a content-foundation, that is, in the course of passive syntheses within the material itself. Consequently, the figural moment has a “synthetic effect” already implicit in a figural perception,48 in which the tension between content and object begins to take shape, which will lead Husserl to distance himself from typical Brentanian empiricism. Within a comparison linked to the Kantian “analogies of experience,” Melandri notes that the configuration of sensuous data is not only due to an intellectual matrix, since there is also a “form of sensation” inherent in its intensive variations. In other words, the objectivation of experience does not take place, as in Kant, through the functions of the intellect, that is, through the categorial conditions that insert the sensible datum into a judgment of experience,

47 See Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 24ff; Melandri, I paradossi dell’infinito nell’orizzonte fenomenologico, 97 and 113; Melandri, Enzo. 1980. Alla ricerca dell’oggetto ine- sistente. In: Meinong, Alexius. 1980. Gli oggetti di ordine superiore in rapporto alla percezione interna—Ch. von Ehrenfels, Le qualità figurali. 11–29. Faenza: Faenza editrice; Melandri, Enzo (with the pseudonym of “Anonymous Salzburger”). 1979. Sulle proprietà percettivamente vuote ovvero prive di qualità figurali. In: Melandri, Enzo. 1984. Sette variazioni in tema di psicologia e scienze sociali. 179–249. Bologna: Pitagora editrice. 48 Melandri, Sulle proprietà percettivamente vuote ovvero prive di qualità figurali, 181ff. 110 S. Besoli rather it is necessary to acknowledge that sensation also provides the “context of its relationship with other data.” This contextual dimension, to which the forms of sensation belong—which for Kant would represent a contradictio in adiecto akin to that in the phenomenological notion of transcendental experience—is responsible for the orderly arrangement of the data, which manifests the way in which “matter becomes a subject and is imposed on the intellect. Matter is the opposite pole of the intellect: but it is less passive and much more intelligent than Kant supposed.”49 In this capacity, matter is not abstraction, but is a living substratum, which actually acts as a matrix or as the principle of form, to the extent that—as Husserl himself recognizes—sensibility manifests “its intellectual rules of concordance and discor- dance” just like a “stratum of hidden reason.” It is in the grafting that the question of the Wesensschau makes its way, effecting a logical generalization of the figural moment, making explicit how hidden within this lies a problem of transcendental aesthetics that is a prelude to a necessary reformulation of the schematism, no longer conceived in a Kantian key. The Husserlian discovery that such sensuous forms are intuited and not merely thought or the result of an intellectual construction highlights the structural pregnancy of a certain intuitive relief. The theoretical development of this problem translates directly into the process of eidetic intuition, and therefore into the realization of an eidetic empiricism, which however does not place Husserlian phenomenology on the level of the well-known phenomenological realism, since the principle of correlativity between intentionality and object, between the eidetic structures of intentional objects and those of lived experiences in which they acquire the quality of givenness, was taken up in a rather static fashion. Conversely, the descriptive moment of the essence, of the eidos, by virtue of the figural moment that makes it intuitively given, is the expression or, if one wills, the precipitate, of an accomplishing dynamic that has its own mark in the Wesen. With considerable depth, Melandri emphasizes how the Wesen is an operational concept, by which “the essence is not a static representation, but a dynamic complex of relationships. It could be defined as the accomplishment by which the empirical datum is thought of as an object sub- specie universalis, that is, subsumed in the concept.”50 By holding firmly to the threads that link intentionality and the transcendental, Melandri recognizes in the intentional analysis the method of expressing the performativity implicit in all knowledge or every form of experience. However, since this accomplishing function is mostly anonymous, passive and unconscious, it is necessary to draw out its content, that is, to explain the sense of the transcendental in its hidden performativity. Starting from here, the Wesen, too, can be understood as a “transcendental thread for every phenomenological analysis of experience,” without denying that this process has in the eidos the “descriptive moment of the essence, the quasi-objectivity of its dynamic and functioning relational structure.”51 Therefore, the intentional

49 Melandri, La linea e il circolo, 589. 50 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 57. 51 Ibid., 58. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 111 analysis has the task of thematizing the generally latent constitutive processes of the transcendental order, which only the reduction brings out as not-yet-experienced preuppositions of the natural attitude, that is, of our own experience, recognizing them fully in their transcendental status. As a real organon of phenomenology, the method of eidetic intuition consists of three moments (formalization, variation and discovery of a semi-intuitive unit, such as to pass through the series of variations introduced as “invariant structures” or “necessary forms”).52 By formalizing abstractly, the immanent universal is freed from what is given empirically, making the individual a sort of apeiron, while with the variation a transformation of every real object takes place in an infinite multiplicity of possible objects. Finally, the series of forms originated by free variation is discovered through an intrinsic structural unity that translates into intuitive evidence the homogenizing and schematic properties of this figurative moment. The eidos is therefore the figurative rendering of a state of affairs, but such as to include the rule of formation of the variations obtained, that is, being in this sense its “teleological matrix.”53 As such, the eidos is therefore the unity of possibilities that belong together to a certain circle of individual phenomena. For this reason, the phenomenological vision does not represent a naive form of experience, but an experience that is directed to experience, and which makes the experiential rule the object of an experience qualifiable as transcendental. The intuition of essence therefore does not provide an absolute necessity, but grasps a form of generality of the data, obtainable from its distinctive traits. On this basis, the phenomenological a priori shows the traits of an aesthetic evidence, which makes visible in reality the meanings that remain mostly hidden in the naive natural attitude. This means that for Melandri not only “are ideas seen,”54 but with this the doctrine of the schematism begins to acquire more definite contours and lose many of its Kantian features. With the topic of intuitive apprehension and of multiplicity and the discovery of figural moments there emerges in Melandrian terms the peculiarity of the phenomenological aesthetic, which makes constant reference to a halo of indeterminacy, represented in exemplary fashion by the notion of infinite. Regarding this concept, Melandri has developed a very incisive reflection to deal with the aporetic tenor of the interpretations that have always clashed regarding the nature of that which is infinite and its debated givenness. At the center of this question of the transcendental aesthetic lies the urgency to ask what “given” means and what is the extension of the concept of givenness and its relative modes, since the field of transcendental phenomenology—which Melandri defines also as the “phenomenology of phenomenology”—does not regard the object as such, but its modes of givenness.55 The transcendental declension of phenomenology is not the result of a sudden conversion, but is systematically connected to the sense of a set of problems delineated by

52 Ibid., 56. 53 Ibid., 57. 54 Ibid., 54. 55 See ibid., 68. 112 S. Besoli

Husserl since 1898. The concept of givenness manifests an intrinsic reference to the subjective source of experience, according to which all aesthetically oriented research in the phenomenological sense regards the mode in which the datum manifests itself to subjectivity. In this sense, for phenomenology the prevailing interest focuses on the diverse “modalizations of the original datum” and on its “differential connotations,”56 such that it becomes decisive for phenomenology to find the categories that carry out the task of describing the indirect or potential modes of givenness. On this level, the fact that there is no “sensible intuition of an infinite set” is not to be imputed to the finiteness of our intellect or to other compassionate anthropological considerations, but is something that is imposed even upon a much more gifted intellect, since it regards the mode of givenness or of being of such an entity.57 In the organistic structure of experience phenomenologically understood, every finite datum is as if enveloped by an infinite horizon, so that it is necessary to make a study of that which is “obscurely implicit in every givenness.”58 This manner of proceeding allows one to show the bearing of a true revolution, according to which the fact that infinity is only potential does not invalidate its being in this modality. Instead of loading infinity with yet another paradox, Melandri’s phenomenological- experiential analysis leads us to recognize that we cannot claim that the infinity is given in the same manner of actuality as that which is finite, since one cannot ascribe to mere imperfection “the indeterminacy of certain modes of givenness,” with the risk of tracing arbitrarily this “essential peculiarity” back to a mode of being (or of being given) that does not concern it, thus committing the most classic of categorial transgressions.59 In addition to placing himself in continuity with the Aristotelian reflection regarding the concept of science and the primacy of the object, Melandri highlights how Husserl—once more following Aristotle and distancing himself from Brentano’s teaching60—opts for the principle of the “essential equivocity of being”, precisely because it does not have just a single mode of givenness and even the categorial, and that is, being of an ideal nature, can be legitimately given, even in a sense that is ontically different from the real being.61 Inasmuch as being is relative to its mode of givenness, it is always spoken of in many ways with reference to subjectivity, on account of which in the transcendental reflection of phenomenology there is no naturalistic limit and intentionality—as the “central idea of every problem of

56 Ibid. 57 See Melandri, I paradossi dell’infinito nell’orizzonte fenomenologico, 98. 58 Ibid. 59 See ibid., 101. 60 See Melandri, Enzo. 1987. The “Analogia Entis” according to Franz Brentano. A Speculative- Grammatical Analysis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Topoi VI(1):51–58; Melandri, Enzo. 1989. Intuitive Identity vs. Abstract (or Attributive Identity). Topoi suppl. 4 (The Object and its Identity). Dordrecht: Kluwer. 65–84. 61 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 64ff. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 113

reduction or constitution”—is designated to function as the “universal principle of analogia entis.”62 The naturalism which phenomenology fights is characterized, for Melandri, by absolutizing the worldly reality with a single concept of being, erasing the multidimensional character of experience that deprives of significance the problem of admitting a notion of absolute or even only paradigmatic evidence, since the very notion of experience coexists with modalities which, by “essential law,” entail “a kind of inadequate evidence,” as when one goes beyond “the horizon of actual givenness.”63 The constitutive equivocity, so to speak, of the sense of being, does not therefore admit privileged entities or exemplary forms of givenness, but rather is the condition—in correspondence with various modes of givenness and relative types of evidence—to sanction the presence of a plurality of “coordinated transcendental aesthetics,”64 compared to the univocal Kantian solution universally anchored to the limits of human reason and to the objects of a circumscribed experience. In the Melandrian interpretation, transcendental phenomenology does not therefore constitute a philosophy of subjectivity of a fundamentally solipsistic mould, nor does it represent a transcendentalism that incorporates reality within consciousness, dissolving it in the weft of its flow, also because already at ground zero the same association of hyletic data takes on a clear intentional character, allowing us to glimpse how they are not at all related on the basis of a completely fortuitous schema and how the temporal horizon, in its unity, organizes the data according to a latent and passive intentionality. For Melandri, Husserlian phenomenology thus exhibits a profound distance from common idealism, precisely because it recognizes multiple “senses of reality,” of which the main one—following the indications of the Psychologie of the Gestaltist Metzger65—is that of the “encountered” (das Angetroffene), which not only maintains an essential relationship with time and, more precisely, with the temporality of presence, but has to do with a structuring of sensations and perception which precedes any explicit categorial activity. In addition, the sense of reality is liable to an “alternation” or “inversion of perspective” that defines the so-called “ontological chiasma,”66 that is, language’s entrance on the scene as the conduit of all contact between thought and being, inasmuch as it is the bearer of an ontological commitment that outlines the universe of discourse in every instance. The outcome towards which the Melandrian elaboration tends, is to make of the principle of analogy the key to homogenizing the relations between logic and experience, so that phenomenology seems to necessarily flow into dialectic.67 At the bottom of the analogical unity that limits the risks of complete equivocity, without falling into the univocist solution, lies the intuitive significance of thefigural

62 Ibid., 71. 63 Melandri, I paradossi dell’infinito nell’orizzonte fenomenologico, 104. 64 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 65. 65 Melandri, Sulle proprietà percettivamente vuote ovvero prive di qualità figurali, 235ff. 66 See Melandri, La linea e il circolo, 349ff. See also Melandri, Enzo. 1974. L’analogia, la pro- porzione, la simmetria. Milan: Isedi. 48ff. 67 See Melandri, La linea e il circolo, 594, but also 111. 114 S. Besoli structure through which Melandri corrects the layout of the Kantian schematism, clarifying how in its phenomenological declension one finds the implementation of that radical empiricism that allows the “associative whole (…) to show all the richness of its accomplishments.”68 The critical renewal of the schematism is a task that Paci himself deemed particularly relevant to the fate of his own phenomenological relationism, but Melandri seems to dig even deeper when he specifies the function that the schematism must carry out in the context of the phenomenological set of problems. In fact, the schematism is not just a kind of hidden art of the imagination that unites the subject, with its respective language, to a morphology of nature capable of conditioning the entirety of categorial activities, but is the index of the root that unites the aesthetic element and the logical element, the a posteriori and the a priori. With this it is not a matter of abolishing the distinction between sensibility and intellect, but of making sure that these sources do not remain discrete or juxtaposed in an extrinsic way, giving importance to the nexus that makes them homogeneous and that allows one to give an effective seat to the synthetic a priori. With the discovery of the emergence, from the aesthetic dimension, of a structural moment of the logical order, transcendental aesthetics changes functions, assuming the task of “presenting as a theme the performativity of sensation”69 and of making explicit the passive syntheses from which the superordinate intellectual performances arise. Thus, the “mediating function” of the schema suddenly turns out to be “reversible,” or “transitive in both senses,” so that the schema is no longer—as in Kant’s trun- cated version—the “formal condition of sensibility” that allows one to think the data through the applicability of the categories, but is, in parallel, also the “material condition of thinkability,” thus restoring to phenomenological gnoseology its progression from below.70 In deepening the identity of the figural moment we thus come to grasp how the inherence between analytics and aesthetics rediscovers its symmetry, in the sign of that correlative schema that emerges through reflection from experience itself, establishing its most structural property. With the failure of the myth of sensation and of matter as something lacking relations and forms, through the figural pregnancy Melandri presents as a theme the hidden activity that unmasks the “false antithetical dualism of the empirical and the transcendental,”71 making it clear that Husserlian phenomenology has not simply implemented a conjunction between the arguments of the Cartesian cogito and the motives of Kantian transcendentalism. With Husserl, transcendental analysis in fact changes register and, in the exemplary case of the figural moment, shows how the synthesis between the sensitive and the intelligible crystallizes in an invariant structure. This allows Melandri to reaffirm that Kant had not overcome Hume at all, as among other things he had not even grasped the latter’s “problem.” This finding implies that, in a phenomenological key, the a priori synthesis “must be be broken down into an eidetic

68 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 72. 69 Ibid., 131. 70 See ibid., 53ff. 71 Ibid., 188. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 115 intuition, it must allow itself be seen and founded aesthetically.”72 Realizing this ambitious program meant putting oneself back in Hume’s footsteps, overcoming at the same time the limit of a mere empirical sensibility through the reference to the structural character of sensation that makes visible how the “qualitative leap subsisting between impressions and ideas no longer constitutes a scandal for reason.”73 Although in its initial phase Enzo Melandri’s work dealt entirely with Husserl’s thought and the theoretical-foundational implications of phenomenology, for a long time these interests seemed to fade or at least remain hidden. After a long period dedicated to the study of the theme of analogy, as an instrument of mediation and the principle of symmetry that regulates the relationship between logic and dialectic, the impulse for phenomenological studies resurfaced, in a series of studies in different directions. Among these we highlight the investigations that deepen the themes of the so-called School of Brentano, with particular regard for the question of evidence in its most widely used sense,74 for that of the “non-existent object” of strict Meinongian observance75 and, more generally, for the research on time, the flow of time and its duration conducted by the experimental psychologists of the Graz School, in the context of which—with the help of a more rigorous empiricism and a new type of experimentation—a detailed stratigraphy was made of the process of objectivation of empirical knowledge, aimed at showing the existence of a “figural moment” that was distinct or in any case not easily explicable starting from the sensory continuum.76 Against the prevalence of associationist psychology, and in particular against the atomistic assumption and the presumed passivity of the sensations,77 the gestaltic orientation developed just before Brentano’s psychological conceptions identified, in figural relief, “immaterial form which lends itself to being recognized in itself with a sudden perceptual detachment from its material.”78 The Melandrian theoretical investment concerning “object-theory” proposed to continue to reflect on the contrast between two diametric assumptions about the problem of knowledge: on the one hand, an ontological foundation of the Erkenntnistheorie which proceeds from the “bottom up;” on the other, the idea of a functional synthesis from the “top down” that reduces the object to its topic. Melandri saw in the contrast between ontological objectivity and categorial objectivation the realization of the gap between a renewed ontology, which contemplates “objects of a higher order” founded on other pre-existing ones, and a transcendental

72 Ibid., 248. 73 Ibid., 131. 74 See Melandri, Enzo. 1988. Emozione, sentimento e conoscenza dal punto di vista fenomenologico. Topoi suppl. 2 (La scuola di Brentano). Dordrecht: Kluwer. 93–116. 75 See Melandri, Sette variazioni in tema di psicologia e scienze sociali. 76 On the more properly phenomenological aspects of the theme of temporality, see Melandri, Enzo. 1991. Tempo e temporalità nell’orizzonte fenomenologico. Discipline filosofiche I, 2:255– 288—which is also the last essay published by the author. 77 See Melandri, Sette variazioni in tema di psicologia e scienze sociali. 78 Melandri, Enzo. 1990. Le “Ricerche logiche” di Husserl. Introduzione e commento alla Prima ricerca. Bologna: il Mulino. 31. 116 S. Besoli philosophy that explains objectivity by way of a superordinate synthetic function, reducing its givenness rationally. This way of radicalizing the ontological foundation, which Melandri pursues on the basis of Brentano and Meinong, leads to the conclusion that ontology should not be rationally preconstituted. In other words, contrary to the transcendental point of view, it is not a question of objectifying the phenomenon by inserting it into a rational order, nor of making it fit into the categorial interweaving of a higher intellectual function that reduces the empirical data through modifications that make it homogeneous to the intellect. In this sense, an “ontology” that truly wishes to be called “fundamental” must not invent new categories, since these only formalize, from the outside, the same relationship of extrin- sicalness to being. Together with these more openly phenomenological interests, which Melandri tended to index under the title of “phenomenology of objectivity,” one must also include the works addressing the method of the social sciences, the universe of discourse designated as “pragmatology” and the analysis of the relationship between understanding, truth and meaning in sectors of knowledge not inclined to naturalism79—critical studies that on the whole belong to a sort of broad-spectrum phenomenological exercise or applied phenomenology. A “zurück zu Husserl” is instead recorded in the last of Melandri’s monographs, which emerged as a commentary on the First of the six Logical Researches, that is, that which studies the relationship between thought and language and the phenomenological clarification of the nature of meaning. Regardless of the link with this Husserlian research, Melandri’s volume does not merely provide a simple commentary to it, but proposes a synopsis of the theses that qualify the idea of pure logic advanced in the Prolegomena, exploiting the formula of the “four authors” (Bolzano, Lotze, Frege and Brentano) to analyze the milieu in which phenomenology has been formed and from which Husserl has drawn significant insights. Before entering into the merits of a question of the linguistic order, Melandri examines how Husserl—to steer his logical radicalism clear of the shoals of relativism and Fregean absolut- ism—renounces thematizing the topic of logic through language or the normative order of morals, but to that end makes use of psychological subject matter, neglecting the aspect of formalization, and therefore the establishment of a close relationship between calculation and meaning, even though Husserl was aware that the concept of logic inheres in that of the language which expresses it, that is, those linguistic expressions that form a phenomenological unity with concrete psychic experiences (in their functions of having a “meaning-intention” and of “meaning-fulfillment”). The outlook of Melandri’s investigation leads first to the question of whether there is a linguistic philosophy in Husserl. For many philosophers (Descartes, Berkeley or Kant, among others) it is licit to assume that they do not have a philosophy of language, not even implicitly, since such authors seem to presume an identity

79 See Melandri, Sette variazioni in tema di psicologia e scienze sociali. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 117 between thought and linguistic expression, which perhaps in fact is never perfect but which—given certain conditions—can be brought to the point of a complete understanding. Where thought and expression are all one or could become such with some expedient, a problem of language does not seem to arise. This problem can only emerge if the opacity of the medium, which is language itself, becomes a matter of discussion, and this depends in turn on the assumption of the transparency of expression proving unreliable in principle and not just occasionally. The suspect that language mediates, though in an overdetermined way, is widespread in modern and contemporary philosophy to the point of being translated into the opposite thesis, concerning the opacity of the medium—both linguistic and consciential. In Husserl’s case, he does not, in principle, follow the assumption of the transparency of consciousness to itself, since the continuous removal of the “unconscious accomplishing complexes” that “limit the integrating function of total awareness makes of phenomenology a sort of transcendental ‘psychoanalysis’ (…) able to resolve the conflict between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ so that the complete acceptance of one’s natural conditioning does not result in moral abdication.”80 In Husserlian phenomenology there is therefore an unconscious, though not of a Freudian nature, on account of which the lack of transparency of consciousness to itself, or of self-consciousness, implies a lack of transparency of thought and of meaning-intention in the forms of linguistic expression. But apart from that, the fact that phenomenology or pure logic do not require as a condition of their being, according to Husserl, the apodicticity of an appropriately formalized language, does not mean that the absence of a philosophy of language of the demonstrative type—it matters not whether it be formalistic or constructivist—is opposed to the presence in Husserl of cues that allude, more or less implicitly, to a certain linguistic theory. In his investigation, Melandri recalls that for Husserl himself it is essential, in order to speak of logic, to start from linguistic considerations, since it is only through the linguistic medium that one can speak of the whole propositional meaning, as well as that of the single word. One difficulty, however, looms in the fact that, from a theoretical point of view, Husserl advocates a “logic of the concept,” which would contrast with the reference to the primacy of the “propositional semantics.” In this regard, however, a mediation is offered by the notion of “semantic category,” through which the problem of the different ways of signifying perfomed by the various parts of the speech is addressed.81 By reviewing the genesis of meaning, which resides in a “semiological dimension” prior to any presupposed logic, Melandri stresses that meaning is already multivalent in itself, which is equivalent to saying that the “meaning of ‘meaning’ is spoken in many ways and not all of them equivalent.”82 The most primitive sense of the notion of meaning is that of designa- tion or, more specifically, of denotation, but it is not difficult to grasp how it is already debated in a sort of semantic circle. In regressing to its semiological origin,

80 Melandri, Logica e esperienza in Husserl, 158. 81 Melandri, Le “Ricerche logiche” di Husserl, 147ff. 82 Ibid., 156ff. 118 S. Besoli

Husserl recalls the fact that every sign (Zeichen) is a sign of something, stands for something, even if we cannot say that every sign has a meaning, that is, a sense that expresses itself through it. Hence the Husserlian need to restrict the question to the two extreme cases, namely to expressions (Ausdrücke), as signs endowed with meaning, and to signals or indices (Anzeichen) as signs that—despite not having a meaning—denote by virtue of an external reference.83 At this level, too, where the signification is not a kind of being a sign, while inversely being a sign—even just as an indicator (or signal)—already constitutes a kind of signification, Melandri stresses that for Husserl communicative speech is not in question, that is, the greater or lesser yield of the communication itself. On the other hand, Husserl’s conception of expression highlights the autonomy of meaning with respect to any kind of reference, both external and internal (that is to say as a self-referential reference). After all, for Husserl expressions have a meaning-function even in the isolated psychic life, where they are no longer valid as signs or indicators of the existence of psychic acts, since they are experienced by us at the same instant in which words are used in phonological discourse. In other words, the expression is a formulation of any kind with which even a solitary self objectifies a certain meaning through a combination or arrangement of meaningful signs which represent a simple signature. For Husserl, the essence of the meaning of an expression is not identified, therefore, with its informative function, and therefore—as Melandri specifically points out—there are no “communicative implications” in a “logical theory of expression” which stoops to admit the relevance of “solipsism” with regard to the “explication of meaning.”84 Moreover, the intent of Husserl’s phenomenological semiotics is manifest in its linearity: it is a question of making a clarification about logic by regressing to psychic acts in which the ideal meanings they distinguish are given. In this, among other things, a sort of chiasma manifests itself that qualifies phenomenology with respect to common sense realism, since for phenomenology it is the intentional acts—as psychic experiences endowed with their own noetic sense— that are considered real, while the objects that are given in them as identified are considered ideal, given their remaining identical in meaning. Husserl thus effects a dissociation between the “pure meaning of the expression” and any kind of reference that renders the “communicative discourse” expressive.85 Through this abstraction, Husserl adheres, logically, solely to the study of assertive statements, within which context the meaning is configured—in its invariance or ideal unity—as something pure, subtracted from the variations of communication due to the latter’s approximate nature, which establishes the possibility of giving rise to an ideally identical intention. For Husserl, therefore, meaning is the invariant moment that animates the consciousness of those who pronounce or hear a specific expression, and that regardless of the functions that it can perform in a dialogical or monological context, as well as that series of references that anchor the

83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 164ff. 85 Ibid., 166. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 119

communicative discourse to an eminently expressive plane. With this separation from the communicative aspects of language and the otherness that it manifests in relation to the object and its perception, the sphere of meaning reveals a merely cognitive nature—typical of assertory language—which largely coincides with that of thought, of notion and of empty intention, so that signifying and thinking can be said, from the phenomenological point of view, to be completely equivalent terms. Thus, just as in thought we turn to objects, even if in a way that is still empty or not intuitive, so the same thing happens in the sphere of meaning, since it is only by virtue of it that we can refer to an object, which we can intend: that is to say, it is only through the meaning that it happens that we are able to conceive an object as something definite. The irrelevance of the communicative contribution to the conclusions that Husserl draws on the status of logic refers to the link between the foundation of logic and the development of a pure grammar of meaning, the features of which Husserl traces in the Fourth logical research, but above all attests that the different forms of meaning, and therefore of thought, represent the subjective and psychological foundation of logic itself, but without this approach—as repeatedly highlighted by Melandri—risking compromising the character of objectivity that it lays claim to with absolute rigor. Nonetheless, even on the level of exegetical activity Melandri was used to thinking “with his head high,” so he aspired to insinuate himself into some indecisions that Husserl himself manifests when addressing “shifting expressions” in relation to the ideal unity of meaning. In the hypothesis that Melandri tries to develop, it is a question of deepening, in an aporetic key and in contrast with the solipsistic or monological solution that Husserl seems to favor, whether the communicative aspect is essential to defining the problem of meaning (even if restricted to its gnoseological valence), and whether it is essential at the same time to widening the scope of an ideally pure logic, which is held to be endowed with a directly assertive language. In carrying out the First research, Husserl seems almost to chance fortu- itously upon a theme that has no relevance for the so-called logical language, but which is central to linguistic communication: the problem of the fluctuation of the meaning of words and of the ideality that instead belongs to the unity of meaning. As a vehicle for expressions, words can have an objective meaning, as in the case of names endowed with a “rigid” reference, so to speak, but there are also parts of speech that have an oscillating meaning in relation to the context of reference, which can be internal or external to the speech itself. In the face of “objective expressions par excellence” there are also “occasional expressions” whose meaning depends on the circumstances, or on the communicative situation in which the illo- cutionary act takes place, but which may also depend on an elliptical, allusive or imprecise use. Exemplary, in this sense, are deictic terms, which ostensively present a reference to something else. Husserl recognizes, in this regard, that there are occasional expressions that can be rephrased as objective expressions, not questioning, therefore, the conviction regarding the ideality of meaning, but there are others— “essentially occasional” expressions—that do not allow a remedy for their 120 S. Besoli

plurivocity, i.e., limiting the expression to a single meaning.86 Essentially occasional expressions are those in which a conceptually unitary group of possible meanings is inherent, so that for such an expression it becomes essential to orient one’s actual meaning according to the occasion, the person speaking and the respective situation. In doing so, Husserl, despite himself, is “forced to reexamine the communicative function of language,”87 creating an evident friction between the “heuristic fiction” of the “solitary I” and the consequent solipsism and an “expanded objectivity of meaning,”88 which is not only an “instrument of objectivation of experience,”89 but also has communicative functions, assuming responsibility for the shifting meaning of essentially occasional expressions. In contrast with the univocity of logic, the opportunity arises to describe phenomenologically the field of a dialectic between thought and reality entrusted to language and its tasks of mediation. The path in which Melandri invests his energies therefore goes beyond, in an indisputably original way, the narrower objectives pursued by Husserl’s First logical research, in which the observations about the communicative function of language assume a peripheral and tangential quality, so to speak. Husserl seems in fact to limit himself to claiming that, only to the extent that it is able to carry out the primary representative function, can language then also fulfill the derivative function of a communicative nature. For his part, Melandri—referring primarily to Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie and to his linguistic theory concerning anaphora, as well as to the distinction made by Hjemslev between paradigm and syntagm90—inverts the perspective of the whole problem. Even a shifting term can arrive at having a fixed meaning that conclusively establishes its identity, but this can only take place according to a syntagmatic procedure, that is, in a process that expresses the total- izing outcome “of the whole succession of the base paradigms.”91 With the inclusion of the phenomenological problem of temporality in the dimension of the communicative act, Husserl, too, seems to grasp, behind a widening of the notion of meaning for shifting expressions, “the whole expressive potentiality of language,” the logic of which would be, deep down, only a partial language.92 However, in the program of First logical research the notion of syntagma—which will be consciously deepened in Formale und transzendentale Logik—still has the connotation of an “ines- sential variation of the most immovable paradigm.”93 Vice versa, in the perspective outlined by Melandri, “the meaning reaffirms its identity also in a syntagmatic context, in which it can under certain conditions be highlighted in a paradigmatic sense

86 Ibid., 213ff. 87 Ibid., 218. 88 Ibid., 221. 89 Ibid., 222. 90 Ibid., 219ff. 91 Ibid., 220. 92 Ibid., 221. 93 Ibid., 222. The Phenomenological Path of Enzo Melandri 121 and anticipated since it is an ideal unity.”94 Freeing language from every gnoseological limitation would result, according to Melandri’s in no way “inconclusive” assumptions, in bringing to completion a doctrine of the syntagmatic nature of meaning, in which such a syntagma can never be quieted and find “complete actu- alization” in the “corresponding paradigm.”95 On the other hand, the same reference to the “ideality” of meaning is the indicator of a weakening of the contrast between the “fluctuation of expression and the prefixed unity of meaning,”96 so to effect such a syntagmatic conversion would allow one to make explicit what is still held in a kind of latency, freeing Husserl’s image from a presumed adherence to Platonism and the risks of a solipsism that for some would be further burdened by transcendental requirements.

Stefano Besoli is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Communication of Bologna University. He has authored monographs on Lotze, Windelband, Husserl, and the phenomenology of knowledge, as well as numerous studies on the doctrine of truth and judgment, perception, and the relations between logic and psychology within the Phenomenological and neo-Kantian traditions. He is the Editor-in-chief of the journal Discipline filosofiche, of the series “Quaderni di Discipline filosofiche” (Quodlibet Studio), and of “Le forme dell’anima” (Quodlibet), a series devoted to classic works of contemporary philosophy. He is a member of the scientific committee of the journalsRivista di Storia della Filosofia, Phainomenon. Journal of Phenomenological Philosophy, Magazzino di Filosofia, and Phenomenology and Mind. He is a member of the “Hermann Cohen-Gesellschaft” (Zurich) and of the “Leibniz-Gesellschaft” (Hannover); he is affiliated with the Husserl Archives and the “Groupe de recherches sur les philosophies allemandes” (Paris, ENS), as well as the “Centro Italiano di Ricerche Fenomenologiche” (Italian Centre for Phenomenological Research, Rome). He is a member of “Sodalitas Leibnitiana” (Turin) and of the “Centro di Fenomenologia e Scienze della persona” (Centre for Phenomenology and Sciences of the Person) of Vita-Salute S. Raffaele University, Milan.

94 Ibid., 221. 95 Ibid., 223. 96 Ibid. The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi

Roberta Lanfredini

Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena: they themselves are the theory (Paolo Bozzi)

Abstract Paolo Bozzi, a pupil of Gaetano Kanizsa and Cesare Musatti, is the most important exponent of Italian experimental phenomenology. His theoretical perspective, influenced by theGestaltpsychologie , Mach’s empiriocriticism, Peirce and James’ pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy, is based on two fundamental theses. The first is related to the non-privative character of the perception: the phenomenon (Erscheinung) enjoys a full effectuality which can in no way be reduced, as a long philosophical tradition would have it, to an obscure and deceptive dimension. The second is related to the non-conceptual character of perception, according to which perception as such has its own structure and dignity. The reference framework is that of empirical realism, shared by Husserl’s phenomenology and the Kantian tradition, enriched by a sophisticated ontology of the observable able to mediate theoretical instance and experimental apparatus.

1 Introduction

Paolo Bozzi (Gorizia 1930–Bolzano 2003), a pupil of Gaetano Kanizsa and Cesare Musatti, contributed to developing the tradition of Gestaltpsychologie (in particular, that of Alexius Meinong’s Graz school and, in Italy, of Vittorio Benussi) and the middle-European phenomenological tradition. These two traditions are interpreted by Paolo Bozzi in an experimental direction, from a standpoint inspired by the so- called Berlin school, that of Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, but also by Ernst Mach, Charles Peirce, Carl Stumpf, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

R. Lanfredini (*) University of Florence, Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

It was Bozzi himself who called his perspective an “experimental phenomenology.” The experiment, which according to Piana can seem like an apparatus within the broader apparatus of science, “a sort of trick inside a bigger trick,”1 is presented instead as a way of establishing a contact with experience, so as to try it out and put it to the test. In this sense, even simple observing is also experimentation in that it is a “gaze which rummages through the real the way a botanist does,” an interrogation in which there is present that “immediate joy in seeing and understanding” of which Einstein spoke with reference to Mach. “In experimentation,” Piana goes on, “there is invention and imagination, planning and construction, wonder and passion; above all, there is the observational tension by means of which we must sometimes take note of what we have always seen and of which we have never taken note.” In this sense, all of Bozzi’s work can be read as a constant clarification of what it means to perceive and observe something.

2 The “Fabric” of Observation

Hence we may at once dismiss an easily foreseen but futile objection, “that by our admitting the ideality of space and of time the whole sensible world would be transformed into pure appearance.” After all philosophical insight into the nature of sensuous cognition was spoiled by making the sensibility merely a confused mode of representation, according to which we still know things as they are, but without being able to reduce everything in this our representation to a clear consciousness (…). Insomuch as I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this—that it represents in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves.2 This well-known passage from Kant’s Prolegomena contains two theses which later run together into the phenomenology of Husserl and can be seen as the theoretical starting point for Paolo Bozzi’s experimental research.3 We will denominate the first thesis that of the non-privative character of the phenomenon. According to this thesis, the notion of phenomenon cannot be intended by that of seeming (Schein), understood as an illusory appearance; something which, simply by being an appearance, sets itself against reality. The phenomenon (Erscheinung), or manifestation, enjoys a full effectuality and positivity which can

1 Piana, Giovanni. 1990. Contribution to the book Fisica ingenua by Paolo Bozzi (available at: http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/piana/). Accessed 20 March 2018. 2 Kant, Immanuel. 1977. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. 31–33. 3 It was, moreover, Bozzi who acknowledged that Kant’s work is “punctuated by the finest phenomenological analyses.” Bozzi, Paolo. 1991. Dal noumeno cervello ai fenomeni o dai fenomeni al noumeno cervello. In: Il problema mente-corpo. Proceedings of the Conference organised for the awarding of the Cortina Prize–Ulisse 1991, 39–57. Padua, 19–20 April 1991; also in: Bozzi, Paolo. 2007. Un mondo sotto osservazione. Scritti sul realismo. Milan: Mimesis. The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi 125 in no way be reduced, as a long philosophical tradition would have it, to an obscure and deceptive dimension, a mere shadow of the effective reality of things. We will call the second thesis that of the non-conceptual of character of perception. It is the responsibility of experience to take note of what is manifested exactly as it is manifested, and it is misleading to read the relationship between phenomenon and concept, or being appearing and thinking, in terms of a difference between obscurity and clarity. This relationship can in fact be correctly interpreted as a difference of function and destination, rather than of origin. This means acknowledging that perception as such has its own structure and dignity; and also, as common-sense ontology and physics have attempted to show many years after Kant,4 its own stability, autonomy, and non-emendability.5 These characteristics allow perception to become the object of a discipline in its own right, one which we will be able to denominate naïve physics or, if we prefer, phenomenological physics. The autonomy of observation with respect to the conceptual dimension in Bozzi arises from a profound contrast with the empirio-criticism of Ernst Mach, one of the writers who most influenced him. The strong nucleus of Mach’s thought presupposes two components in the constitution of facts: a) the observables in the pure state (elements, sensations) and b) the conceptual integrations which are applied to such immediately given material. In the traditional paradigm of scientific discourse, the two components are always co-present and inseparable (the “facts,” among which are the previously mentioned bodies—bodies as physics thinks of them). In psychological and epistemological discourse, the two components are kept distinct, and theoretical attention is directed with particular care to the first of these, which—as such, and freed from conceptual integrations—becomes the object of scientific analysis.6 Mach’s idea, according to which experience grows through progressive adaptation of ideas to facts,7 was taken on by Bozzi without reservation. Indeed, for Bozzi as for Mach (and Husserl), there exist pure observables (colors, sounds, spaces, times) which are evident, stable, independent, not conditioned by theoretical instances, categories, conceptual schemes, or antecedent hypotheses. In dealing with the conceptual integration exercised on sensation, Bozzi takes Mach as his starting point, speaking of an adaptation of representations to facts without ever taking the inverse case into consideration: that is, “a transformation of the sensations or elements or structures observable under the action of more or less well organized

4 See also, for example: Smith, Barry. 1995. The structures of the common-sense world. Acta Philosophica Fennica 58:290–317 and in relation to: Bozzi, Paolo. 1990. Fisica Ingenua. Studi di psicologia della percezione. Milan: Garzanti; Bozzi, Paolo. 1993. Experimenta in visu. Ricerche sulla percezione. Milan: Guerini. 5 Ferraris, Maurizio. 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Rome-Bari: Laterza. 6 Bozzi, Paolo. 1990. Mach e i fatti. Nuova civiltà delle macchine VIII. 1 (29):49–54; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 31. 7 Mach, Ernst. 2017. Conoscenza ed errore. Milan: Mimesis. On this point see also the “Introduction” by P. Parrini, in particular 29ff. 126 R. Lanfredini representations or conceptual integrations.”8 Therefore, theory does not act on the observables. The reason resides in the fact that, contrary to what is maintained by theorists of the theory-laden character of observation, the plane of the observable is not amorphous and undifferentiated but has an autonomous and quite stable structure. No one can be deceived about the blue of the sky, even when the mind experiences physicalist perplexities: this total, homogeneously colored field has (it might almost be said) an unparalleled dependability.9

3 Stability and Sufficient Differentiation

The purity of the datum should not be confused with simplicity. Bozzi’s conception of the observable datum reflects, in all likelihood unconsciously, the conception in Husserl’s phenomenology which is the eidetic reduction applied to “sensible material.” The proposition which Husserl develops on the basis of his critique of the empiricist conception of abstraction is in fact founded on the observation that in order to speak of a datum, or of a similarity between data, it is necessary to presuppose an underlying ideating process.10 For Husserl, what is phenomenologically relevant is not the fact, understood as hic et nunc, but the datum understood as the field of an individual’s eidetic variation. Without being subjected to eidetic reduction, phenomenologically understood as unification of the possibility of its variations, the datum could not be discriminated, and hence understood. Bozzi’s experimental stance fully endorses the Husserlian hypothesis by which the phenomenon is marked by boundaries which Husserl calls eidetic and which become “operationally fixable:” that is, determinable. Determination, which corresponds to the phenomenological idea of eidetic boundary (that is, the boundary which, once passed, allows a sensible note or quality to be transformed into a distinct note or quality), is here attributable to the differential threshold. The meaning of the term “sensation” oscillates between two poles: on one side the “visible minimum,” on the other, the homogeneous sample. A sensation of red can be understood as a small point of that color among the other minuscule and variously colored points (…) and a sample, in the sense in which we speak of a “sample of fabric;” a portion of simple sensations which can be explored as a homogeneous surface. The “stimulus” of psychophysics is thought of as a continuum of operationally fixable values (intensity of a light, purity of a

8 Bozzi, Mach e i fatti, 35. 9 Bozzi, Paolo. 1992. Alexius Meinong: attualità ed errori fecondi di una distinzione fra ordine inferiore e ordine superiore degli oggetti. Rivista di Psicologia LXXVII (1):35–48; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 126. 10 It is important, nevertheless, to emphasize that this does not mean adhering either to a metaphysical hypostasis of essence, as a result of which the species enjoys a real existence outside of thought, or to a psychological hypostasis of essence, as a result of which the species enjoys a real existence in thought. For a distancing from both these positions, see Husserl’s Logical Investigations (in particular the Second Investigation). The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi 127

color, pitch of a sound, force of a pressure) and placed in a one-to-one relationship with its sensation which does not vary with its variation within a certain range of values, but appears to undergo a transformation as soon as it operationally passes beyond that range.11 The experimental translation of eidetic reduction consists therefore in the conjunction of the principle of stability and that of sufficient differentiation. These are the principles which allow us to say that “a color, seen under certain defined variations of lighting, does not vary perceptually”12 or to identify “a musical texture rich in timbres but perceptually homogeneous”13 as a “fourth harmonic.” Stability and sufficient differentiation guarantee the identity and homogeneity of a perception, exactly as the eidetic reduction does in Husserl. Beyond the differential thresholds are located the absolute thresholds, understood as the extreme boundary of sensibility, “beyond which sensory experience no longer takes place, but only possibilities of the subtlest physical measurement, and where the subliminal psychic perhaps exists.”14 In this case too, Bozzi proposes an experimental translation of Husserl’s regional ontology: the absolute threshold can in fact be seen as corresponding to what is extra-regional; that is, to what is no longer immediately perceptible. The difference between differential and absolute thresholds permits a phenomenological reading of the relationship between the perceived (or intuited) thing and the thing as understood by physics. For Bozzi, as for Mach and Husserl, the physical corresponds to that which is not perceptual, insofar as it is devoid of intuitive content. The thing of physics is a borderline case, not a hidden cause, inaccessible in itself, of that which is perceived. Once again it is Husserl who provides, although not explicitly, the theoretical frame for Bozzi’s experimental practice. Indeed, for Husserl the identity of the object depends on the motivational link between original appearance and successive appearances: in this sense, that which is at present given, motivates the further appearances of the thing, from those that are sensible (the unseen side of the thing) to those that are more abstract and conceptual, sanctioning a synthesis or integration among the appearances. Experienceableness never means a mere logical possibility, but rather a possibility motivated in the concatenations of experience. The concatenation itself is, through and through, one of “motivation,” always taking into itself new motivations and recasting those already formed.15

11 Bozzi, Mach e i fatti, 28–29. 12 Ibid., 34. 13 Ibid., 35. 14 Ibid., 29. 15 Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (trans: Kersten, F.). The Hague: M. Nijhoff. 106–107. In this context, it therefore seems legitimate to counterpoise the genetic-motivational nexus against the causal nexus: “in a countersensical manner one thus con- nects by causality things pertaining to the senses and physical things as determined by physics.” Ibid., 122. 128 R. Lanfredini

4 The Stimulus Error

The sharp critique which Bozzi directs at psychophysics precisely retraces the Husserlian distinction between causality and motivation. The principal thesis of psychophysics, the so-called constancy hypothesis, by which “sensations are a function of stimuli, and therefore no variation of the stimuli means no variation of the sensation; equal sensations for equal stimuli”16 has, as it is easy to intuit, innu- merable potential falsifiers, a “population of monsters” which need to be kept at bay by resorting to ad hoc hypotheses. We need only think of all those cases of “illusion” in which the properties of the perceived are not in the least attributable to the properties of the stimuli. The Gestaltists’ downright obsession with the so-called “stimulus error”17 stands as a warning, or more precisely as a command: not to con- fuse our knowledge of the physical conditions of sensory experience with sensory experience itself. This command is manifested, in Bozzi, in a general reluctance towards the notion of stimulus. To this should be added a certain irritation with the word “stimulus,” which today I encounter at every turn, associated as it is with medical advice like “try to eat as soon as you feel the stimulus,” or “this linctus suppresses the stimuli of the cough, not the causes:” or with certain ponderous pedagogical injunctions such as “he needs to be stimulated to do something, to write, etc.;” and this irritation becomes intolerance when a colleague (…) says something like, “when the cat sees the stimuli” or “the subject, as soon as he sees the stimulus.”18 In this connection, Bozzi’s drastic solution is to believe (contrary to many Gestaltists, including Kanizsa)19 that “the stimulus error (…) consists entirely in the fact of believing that stimuli exist.”20 The deflationary stance towards the traditional notion of a stimulus and the hypothesis of a science of the observables founded on autonomous epistemological bases has two theoretical consequences, one critical and the other constructive. Let’s begin with the first. It resides in the obsolescence, starting with the “stimulus error” itself, of any theoretical hypothesis which operates an inference indebted to manifestation, or to the observable, to what would be its hidden cause. Hence, Bozzi’s experimental phenomenology has in its sights both the causal theories of perception and the hypothesis, of a reductionist—or rather, eliminativist—stamp, which considers the cerebral mechanisms an unavoidable condition, or basis for attribution, of

16 Bozzi, Mach e i fatti, 29. 17 See also the following observation by Köhler reported by Bozzi: “In psychology we have often been warned against the stimulus error, i.e. against the danger of confusing our knowledge about the physical conditions of sensory experience with the experience as such”. Bozzi, Paolo. 1998. Considerazioni eccentriche sull’errore dello stimolo. Giornale italiano di psicologia XXV:239– 252; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 177. 18 Bozzi, Considerazioni eccentriche sull’errore dello stimolo, 177–178. 19 Who, as Bozzi himself recalled, urged us against committing the stimulus error less in the sense of believing that stimuli do not exist, than in the sense of not confusing “perceptual aspects” with “aspects of the perceptual situation.” 20 Ibid., 184. The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi 129 effective perception. In the face of these theories, which manifest an obvious physicalist prejudice, Bozzi’s position is easily identifiable as a form of radical anti-reduc- tionism. The example suggested by Bozzi is that of the S-D schema. This is a sketch which ideally places on the left all that belongs in the sphere of the physical, arising from stimuli (electromagnetic waves, sound waves, etc.), and on the right the world of phenomena. This general schema “takes its origin from the experience of seeing something in front of us and not from the experience of looking at something ourselves.”21 And yet, as Wittgenstein asserts, “nothing in the visual field permits us to conclude that it is seen by an eye.”22 Furthermore—and this is the main objection which Bozzi has to any causal theory of perception (and to the constancy hypothesis)— “we could, entirely theoretically and without contradiction, imagine two observers endowed with perceptual modes identical in every respect (...), but nevertheless endowed with different underlying mechanisms.”23 The result is the negation of the view of the brain as noumenon, an underlying entity which would determine the world of the phenomena in a necessary way, reducing them to the status of mere epiphenomena, or even illusions on a level with phlogiston and witches.24 Which is to be then? Either the brain is treated as one phenomenon among others, in which case the causal theory falls into crisis; or the brain is considered as a noumenon, but in this case the intelligibility of the relationship between it and the phenomena turns out to be indecipherable. For Bozzi (as for any phenomenologist) the brain is simply one phenomenon among others. Not a noumenon-brain, therefore, but a phenomenon-brain. It is obvious that this complicated piece of material which we call the brain is one phenomenon among others: that is—leaving aside the finer details—it is a piece of observable material like the mechanism of a clock, the fruit of a plant, or any physical system, whether simple or complex (…). But this brain, visible at all the levels of magnification made possible by the instruments available to man, is silent on the subject of its relationship to the phenomena. The observation of the brain phenomenon does not lead to that world of phenomenon which we propose to consider as the product of its activity: the hypothesized relationship between these and it remains absolutely in the indeterminate and unattainable.25 The only certain datum, against the causal theory of perception and in favour of phenomenological description, is the priority and unavoidability “of the immediately observable qualitative event, in flesh and blood.”26 However thin the interface becomes between the qualia and what Kant in his Opus Postumum calls the

21 Ibid. 22 For Bozzi’s reception of Wittgenstein, see Bozzi, Paolo. 1998. Vedere come. Commenti ai §§1– 29 delle “Osservazioni sulla Filosofia della psicologia” di Wittgenstein. Milan: Guerini. 23 Ibid. p. 147. This argument is very like that of the inversion of the qualia proposed by Ned Block in: Block, Ned. 1978. Troubles with Functionalism. In: Perception and Cognition. Issues in the Foundations of Psychology, ed. C. Savage, 261–325. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. 24 On this point, see Churchland, Paul M. 1981. Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. The Journal of Philosophy 78(2):67–90 and Churchland, Paul M. 1985. Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States. The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):8–28. 25 Bozzi, Dal noumeno cervello aifenomeni o dai fenomeni al noumeno cervello, 148. 26 Ibid., 150. 130 R. Lanfredini

“Erscheinung einer Erscheinung,” understood as an ideal transcription of the phenomena in the light of the conceptual unification of experience (for example, a field of force in physics), in passing from one to the other there will always remain that “pause of silence”27 between what is directly and immediately manifest and what is manifest, but only indirectly. The problem of the “qualia,” or perhaps the pseudo-problem of the “qualia” and of their unimaginable genesis, nevertheless signals that something is not working. And the fault lies in the fact that one does not start from there to arrive here, but starts from here to arrive there.28 For Bozzi, the question of how the color red can be generated by an electro- chemical process, or sound by a processing of information in the neuronal circuits is an authentic “false step,”29 because of the simple fact that there will never be a way to scrutinize the “generating” itself, to fill that “pause of silence” which inter- poses between the immediate and the mediated. The true step—that is, the method- ologically correct step—is not projecting the quantitative into the qualitative, but the reverse, “since in reality every move in our game is always a projection of the qualitative into the quantitative.”30 However, we have also hinted at a constructive consequence of the Bozzian theory of the relationship between observable and stimulus. This consists in an opera- tionist interpretation of the notion of stimulus: that is, its configuring as an “operationally reconstructed fact.”31 This is an idea which Bozzi picks up explicitly from Bridgman and it allows him to make a further step in the explanation of that motivational nexus which, according to Husserl, subsists between what is given in an immediate and direct way and what is given only in a mediated and indirect way: that is, between phenomenon and the thing of physics. The reading which Bozzi gives of motivation is operational in type, and it is this reading which allows us to tone down the deflationist thesis in relation to the stimulus, and to speak not just of a “stimulus error” but of an “error of the logical image of a stimulus,”32 to indicate that perhaps it is not so much the abolition of the notion of a stimulus that must be effected, as its correct interpretation. As an example, take the famous Müller-Lyer illusion. The two segments, which offer themselves to perception as unequivocally different in length, turn out to be equal when measured. We cannot open a door in the phenomenal to see things as they really are, and we cannot surprise things in the act of making themselves illusory in comparison to some hypothetical state.33

27 Ibid., 151. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 150. 32 Bozzi, Considerazioni eccentriche sull’errore dello stimolo, 181. 33 Ibid., 186. The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi 131

The only way to circumvent the problem is to interpret such a “hypothetical real state” as a totality of operations (in this case, measurements34) on observables. This choice, according to which “the stimulus is a bad synopsis of good operations,”35 has the merit of maintaining the analysis within the realm of the observable, avoiding the hypostasis of mysterious entities located beyond that realm: “during the operation of measuring, we have never left the field of the directly perceived observables.”36 At the same time, it has the merit of give a legitimate meaning to notions such as “stimulus,” “unobservable,” “illusion,” “apparent” which, if they had not been interpreted in this way would remain simple “flatus vocis.”37

5 Empirical Realism

On a more general level, the critique which Bozzi directs against the notion of stimulus raises the question of objectivism and realism. The possible objections to the stimulus error still do not in fact succeed in solving one of the main problems raised by the concept of observable, and that is its privacy. Historically, the traditional distinction between observation and protocol (inter-observable, measurable, describable conduct) has been proposed to shore up the problem of the private character of observation, in an attempt to offer an objective counter-figure to what philosophers of mind call the thesis of privileged access, or the “first person” character of observation, summed up in the motto “no one can verify another person’s verification.”38 In this connection, let us consider two characters, we’ll call them Rino and Quirino, and imagine them discussing “their way of perceiving red on a blue background. Or a tonic chord after a diminished seventh.”39 The solipsist knows for certain that whatever they discuss, Rino will never verify the way a pair of colors or a group of sounds appear to Quirino, nor will Quirino verify the respective sensations felt by Rino, since by definition there is no private perceptual mode available to one or to the other.40 Against the thesis of the private character of observation (or of privileged access), which gives rise to most of the problems relating to the qualia, Bozzi proposes on the one hand the thesis of the non-ineffable, public, independent character from conceptualization (including the key thesis expressed by the protocols) of the given,

34 Bozzi opportunely adds, “neglecting any problem concerning the non-contraction or expansion of the ruler during transportation.” Ibid., 186. 35 Ibid., 184. 36 Ibid., 187. 37 Ibid. 38 Bozzi, Paolo. 1990. Su alcune aporie e alcuni paralogismi che stanno alla base delle correnti teorie psicologiche della percezione. In: Proceedings of the Conference: Nuovi problemi della logica e della filosofia della scienza, 49–54. Viareggio, 8–13 January 1990; also in: Un modo sotto osservazione, 43. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 132 R. Lanfredini and on the other hand the denial of the thesis of the objective and neutral character of the protocols. When we assert “I see a circle” we are speaking of something independent of assertions like “a place where all points are equidistant from a given point.” We have said that observation has a “solidity” and a structure, and understanding, and hence language, are founded on this, not vice versa. Perceptual events are not “ornaments solipsistically distributed through the private worlds of the observer and the experimenter at work.”41 On the contrary, “it is the micro-structure of the observed objects which takes possession of the word;”42 it is the observables which “attach” themselves to their labels. On the other hand, the protocols of the experimental subjects are by no means irrevocable. Contra Wittgenstein, the perceptual world, with its ascertainable peculiarities and its sample book of discernible, and in some ways indicable, components is a common, radically intersubjective domain, and constitutes a fixed point external to its observers; whereas the linguistic universes in which the observers move can at the start be very “private,” idiosyncratic.43 This proposition by Bozzi is an empirical (and not metaphysical44) realism which aims to overcome two types of a priori:45 the first is an intellectualistic model, according to which it is the higher subjective activities (memory, judgement, attention, etc.) which constitute the concrete observational situation; the second is a physiological model, according to which the activity of the organism’s nervous system must be given priority over what is observable. For Bozzi, both stances, which distance themselves from what is manifest, must be “de-activated.” Speaking of subjectivity in reference to observation can mean two things, both contained in the Berkeleyan expression “Esse est percipi.” According to the first and stronger of the two, the esse is contained in the percipi. According to the second, weaker interpretation, the esse is dependant on the percipi: objects and their properties essentially refer back to perceptions, but are not contained in them. Now the first of the two interpretations is absolutely refuted by Bozzi (“red,” he claims, “is not inside my mind”46), just as it had been explicitly refuted by Husserl, referring specifically to Berkeley.47 However, for Bozzi as for Husserl, refuting the first thesis does not mean also refuting the second. In fact, “the object must be viewed as it is, and it is as it seems. In phenomenological observation there is a perfect coincidence between ‘esse’ and ‘percipi’.”48

41 Bozzi, Paolo. 1991. Sulle descrizioni degli eventi percettivi sotto osservazione. Intersezioni XI (1):75–85; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 51. 42 Ibid., 54. 43 Ibid., 58. 44 Bozzi often uses the term “external” (see ibid., 58), but the same ambiguity that he himself attributes to Mach could be attributed to this usage. 45 The expression “a priori” is used explicitly by Bozzi, for example in: Bozzi, Paolo. 1991. Considerazioni inattuali fra io e non io. Rivista di psicologia LXXVI (1/2):19–33; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 68. 46 Bozzi, Paolo. 1991. Parlare di ciò che si vede. Versus. Quaderni di studi semantici 59/60:107– 119; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 87. 47 In this connection, see Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. 48 Bozzi, Paolo. 1991. Sull’epistemologia che sta alla base della teoria dei colori di Goethe. Rivista The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi 133

Objectivity-subjectivity (the imminent transcendence of which Husserl speaks), though it is inevitably linked to acts of perception, will not as a result lose any of its friction. On the contrary, it has the power to impose itself, thereby satisfying the requirement of the mythical ‘thing in itself’: “the observable world is by no means an appearance” and “all things are fully objective, visibly and palpably objective, independent of the solipsistic efforts of observers and attainable by anyone who observes them.”49 This is not subjectivism on Bozzi’s part, since the phenomena are by no means contained in acts of perception. But neither is it a metaphysical realism, since the phenomena are not independent of acts of perception. In this delicate balance between not being effectively contained (reel, in Husserl’s sense) and being dependent of the “percipi” resides the empirical realism of Bozzi. The phenomenological object therefore constitutes “a region of experience in itself,” not to be confused with the myth of the thing in itself or of a “beyond” (in this, Bozzi unreservedly adopts the Kantian position), but nevertheless without aligning himself with the myth of ineffability and privacy. Anyone who has practiced experimental work knows very well that events subjected to the observation of subjects are public: not just the square, the triangle, the greater than or nearer than, but also natural movement, passive movement, the red of a surface and of a volume, or even the red that is more cheerful than another less charged red.50 This objectivity is guaranteed by experience itself. For example, environmental changes or alterations in the means of perception do not condition the invariance of phenomenal properties. That is, the changes are not experienced as changes in the objects observed, but as changes in the visual field. In this sense, there is a legitimate distinction (also proposed by Gibson) between visual field (our optical point of view) and visual world. If we observe the scenery outside our window while the panes are streaked with rain, we do not usually have the impression the visible deformations produced by the water running down the panes are deformations of the things which compose the scenery. Not only this, but the field of present experience of the “external” world is phenomenologically broader than the totality of all showable things or things attainable by looking, hearing, etc., and “the space outside the environment delimited by walls is an equally directly ascertainable space.”51 Thus, “when we see a man pass behind a column, beyond the column there is not only that amount of space that is sufficient to let the man pass: there can be much more, and this is normally the case.” Similarly, “when we slip a newspaper into a coat pocket (…) no one in the world sees the paper gradually ceasing to exist as it enters the pocket: one sees the paper slipping inside, the hidden part being as real as the still visible part.”52 In other words, there exists a space which Bozzi calls amodal space—that is, beyond the limits of the ostensible—which is an integrating and essential part of the phenomenal world. This is a broader space than that occupied by the bodies that are di Psicologia LXXVI (1/2):81–89; also in: Un mondo sotto osservazione, 103. 49 Bozzi, Parlare di ciò che si vede, 90. 50 Bozzi, Sulle descrizioni di eventi percettivi sotto osservazione, 47. 51 Bozzi, Considerazioni inattuali sul rapporto fra io e non io, 78. 52 Ibid. 134 R. Lanfredini actually seen: “beyond the door there is in reality ascertainable space.”53 The proposal of an amodal space, beyond which would be located the ideal space understood as physical space, re-proposes in an experimental terminology the phenomenological distinction between actual and inactual experience. This distinction, like that between directly ascertainable and amodal space, confirms the public and “real” character (although not in a metaphysical sense) of the observable world. The objects of experience are not subjective. The distinction, inside experience, between visual field and visual world, like the distinction between modal and amodal space, confirms their being “presuppositions,”54 unlike the objects of physics, which are to all intents and purposes constructions resulting from experience. In this sense, and only in this sense, “the observable world is by no means an appearance.”55

6 Ontology of the Observable

Bozzi’s is a phenomenology of the “pure phenomenon”56 where the term “pure” stands not for the ineffable, but for the original, independent of conceptualization and judgment. Indeed, we have seen how the notion of phenomenon implies a constant unification or synthesis of oscillations and appearances. The phenomenon is, phenomenologically, an invariant in the variations. Conceiving of the phenomenon as invariance in the variations entails an adherence to a certain phenomenological ontology. Observable does not have a single definition. In fact, there are at least two interpretations of this notion that are compatible with the phenomenological standpoint. The first, introduced by Stumpf and Meinong and completed by Husserl, is a mereological interpretation of the observable. The second, introduced by Bergson and completed by Deleuze and Merleau- Ponty, is a continuist interpretation of the observable. For the former, experience is naturally divisible into parts; for the second, it is continuous and unfragmentable. The two approaches differ in the role which the notions of fixity, invariance, and independence play within phenomenological description: in the first case these are constitutive notions; in the second they are derived notions. The first approach gives rise to a phenomenological theory which we can call that of the mosaic, or of the tesserae; the second to a theory we can call one of force. In the first case, we are concerned with a world which is not at all identifiable with a flux of interconnected experiences or tied by ‘ubiquitous relations’, to use an expression by James, and still less with a world fluctuating through continuous gradients which never separate one occurrence from another, or are ever contracted into definite boundaries between one thing and another, as is the case in Bergson’s metaphysics—which means that this indistinct flow is sliced up into ‘facts’ according to need, and to the demands of pure pragmatism.57

53 Ibid., 80. 54 Ibid., 81. 55 Bozzi, Parlare di ciò che si vede, 90. 56 Bozzi, Sull’epistemologia che sta alla base della teoria dei colori di Goethe, 108. 57 Bozzi, Parlare di ciò che si vede, 91. The Experimental Phenomenology of Paolo Bozzi 135

For Bozzi, as for Husserl and for Stumpf before him, it is independence that is primary. The world, at the moment in which it is observed and even more in the moment in which it is spoken about, is inventable, and its base material is not fluid but composed of “little blocks of world variously assembled.”58 In contrast to the “romantic conception of reality” proposed by Bergson, according to which “perception would be made of fluctuating and elastic things, endowed with indefinable outlines and mutable in their contents,”59 the realm of the immediate, or of the observable, has statically conceived laws.60 “Therefore: the independence of the systems which occupy the world’s space in their varying ways is primitive, and the non-independence of numerous observables making part of a certain system is derived.”61 For Bozzi, the world is made of tesserae, and the tesserae can compose themselves into a mosaic. There are the tesserae, and there is the completed mosaic. There are the rules to be discovered for empirical and observational procedures of various types, which in a definite way connect the completed mosaic to the visible elements into which it can be decomposed. In some way, there is a relationship of “production” which starts with the elements and con- verges on the finished product. It seems obvious that the seeds and the tesserae are the “inferiora” and the organizations of elements are the “superiora” formed of relations which connect the “inferiora” to each other in various ways.62 The superseding of Meinong consists in the fact that the inferiora (the tesserae) can mutate at the moment in which they begin to be part of a system of relations: that is, of superiora (the mosaic). This allows Bozzi to supersede phenomenalist reduc- tionism, precisely in the name of those perceptological laws which point out the operational error63 which consists in reducing complex structures to the operations employed by the ingredients which compose them. Such complex structures are in fact “irreducible to the material points in play and their positional relationships.”64 For Bozzi, there is a further important distinction between what he calls “tractable” objects and “punctual” objects. The former introduce the time factor, more specifically “time in presence:” i.e. what Bergson would denominate real duration. Punctual objects, by contrast “fall in their entirety in the time of presence, and with all their characteristics, even when they are little more extended than the ‘tick’ produced by a pencil tapping a table top;”65 therefore they can be conceived of as frac- tions of the period of time into which they are inserted. But tractable objects are also, and above all, important because they reconsider, albeit in an indirect way, that ontology of the continuum which Bozzi, following

58 Ibid., 92. 59 Ibid. 60 In this sense, for Bozzi, psychophysics and Bergson’s perspective constitute two opposite and equally erroneous poles: “Exactly as classical physics neglects the phenomenology of immediate experience of the external world in order to put discontinuity (…) even where there is none, so Bergson neglects it in order to put continuity even where divisions are present.” Ibid., 207. 61 Bozzi, Alexius Meinong, 117. 62 Ibid., 119. 63 Ibid., 124. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 128. 136 R. Lanfredini

Meinong and Stumpf, aims to refute radically. In the case of tractable objects, like a melody for example, we in fact experience the “uncomfortable circumstance”66 in which the superiora are already present, even when the inferiora have not made their appearance. Just as a melody will not consist of the appearance of a note and the memory of the notes which preceded it, but of the fact that “the five or six notes which fill my musical listening at that moment are all equally present, and it is impossible to say which of them is more present than the others.”67 At the same time, it is undeniable that in a melody the notes come one after the other and “the meaning of the melody consists precisely in this: they are necessarily successive; that is, not co-present.”68 Bozzi’s gloomy conclusion is that “we must accept this paradox, or rather swal- low this contradiction.”69 Besides being an experimental phenomenologist, Bozzi was also a violinist. As a musician, he could not deny the ontological paradox which resides in every melody: that of making elements live together when they present themselves as simultaneously co-present and successive. In reality, the very definition of structure as something not reducible to the schema of inferiora-superiora,70 together with ascertaining that in some cases the superiora are already present when the inferiora still are not, as in melody, introduces the dimension of duration into Bozzi’s ontology of the observable. This very duration which is the principal object of Bergson’s continuist analysis.

66 Ibid., 129. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 126. Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance

Federico Leoni

Abstract Carlo Sini (1933) is one of the leading figures in contemporary Italian philosophy. He wrote his first texts on Hegel and Husserl, then he combined Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology with a series of Anglo- Saxon and American elements, above all Alfred N. Whitehead’s philosophy of nature and process, and Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics and cosmology. This gave birth to a very original reflection on a vast series of philosophical issues (such as signs, writing, the phenomenology of time, the body, the structure of subjectivation) and to an ambitious project of genealogical revision of the Western philosophical tradition and of its basic metaphysical problems (the mind-body dualism, the question of truth, the intertwining between man and technique, the challenge of politics, and the ethical task of philosophy itself).

1 In the Beginning

Let us begin from the beginning. Having published a number of articles, Carlo Sini made his intellectual debut with two books published simultaneously in 1965. One was devoted to Edmund Husserl, the other to Alfred N. Whitehead. They were entitled, respectively, Introduzione alla fenomenologia come scienza (An Introduction to Phenomenology as a Science) and Whitehead e la funzione della filosofia (Whitehead and the Function of Philosophy).1 The choice of these two authors is clear evidence of the influence of his teacher Enzo Paci, who had been at the center of a “phenomenological renaissance”—as he

1 Sini, Carlo. 1965. Introduzione alla fenomenologia come scienza. Milan: Lampugnani Nigri; Sini, Carlo. 1965. Whitehead e la funzione della filosofia. Padua: Marsilio.

F. Leoni (*) University of Verona, Verona, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 137 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_10 138 F. Leoni himself defined it2—whose impact on Italian philosophy and culture was to be profound and long lasting. Both Husserl and Whitehead were at the core of Paci’s teaching. More generally, they were part of an intellectual movement that found one of its expressions in the pages of the journal aut aut, founded by Paci in the early 1950s. But while Husserl was undoubtedly at the center of Paci’s interests, Whitehead was a constant, but marginal presence. This was also the case with Carlo Sini: Whitehead was an underground river in the landscape of his philosophy. And, as usual, this underground river explains many features of the visible orography. It is both curious and interesting, one might add, that something similar happened with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a friend and correspondent of Paci’s, invited by him to Milan in the late 50s for a lecture followed by a memorable evening. Decades later, Sini still recalled that evening as a great cultural event and also as a decisive personal encounter. What he found particularly striking was Merleau-Ponty’s in- depth knowledge of the entire Western philosophical tradition and his capacity to freely draw inspiration from it in his discussions of the most urgent philosophical problems. For Merleau-Ponty, both Husserl and Whitehead were very important philosophers. However, while Husserl was definitely a central presence, Whitehead had gained center stage only gradually. In retrospect, and especially in view of some of Merleau-Ponty’s later courses at the Collège de France, one wonders what would have happened if he had had enough time to fully develop his interest in Whitehead (shared perhaps by contemporary phenomenology).3

2 A Beginning Already Begun

To begin from the beginning, however, is not simply a way to recall Sini’s philosophical debut. It is also a way to enter in medias res. The book on Husserl begins by raising the question of the beginning in a thematic and systematic way. It is a somewhat Hegelian or Fichtian gesture. On the one hand, this gesture was related to Husserl’s well-documented vein of idealism. On the other, it was connected to Sini’s very first studies on the other great phenomenological tradition, that of Hegel.4 These studies had been carried out before his encounter with Paci, when he was still under the influence of Giovanni Emanuele Barié. Although almost completely forgotten today, Barié had been a very original interpreter of Italian idealism and of its Kantian and Fichtian overtones.5 An Introduction to Phenomenology as a Science opens with a discussion of the problem of the beginning, in particular that of a science aiming to be “rigorous” in

2 Paci, Enzo. 1961. Diario fenomenologico. Milan: Bompiani. 12. (Note, March 14, 1956). 3 See in particular Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (trans: Vallier, R.). Evanston, IL: Northern University Press. 4 See, among other texts, Sini, Carlo. 1961. Per una rilettura della fenonenologia hegeliana. aut aut 65:449–459. 5 Barié, Giovanni Emanuele. 1957. Il concetto trascendentale. Milan: Veronelli. Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance 139 the sense so dramatically emphasized by Husserl.6 This aspect is absent in both Paci and Merleau-Ponty. Paci concluded his intellectual journey with an unmistakably encyclopedic book, no doubt intended to place phenomenology at the center of a wide range of disciplines, from economics to anthropology, from psychoanalysis to cybernetics. His phenomenological encyclopedia, however, proceeded horizontally rather than vertically: it multiplied its points of contact with the many human sciences thriving in those years, and was much less inclined to identify the core or the cornerstone of its activity.7 And rather than an explicit and rigorously applied method, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology immediately took the form of a style, a sensitivity, a set of needs and a canonical spectrum of areas of investigation: the subject, the body, perception, expression, and language. How does one begin? Sini’s need for rigor is palpable in the pervasive anxiety with which this question resounds across the first pages of the “Introduction”. Let us quote some lines: “One could pretend not to take anything for granted and begin, as they say, from scratch.” This, however, “would not only be absurd, but also useless, because tradition would still be active within us.”8 “Let us assume, therefore, that we are right when we treat the problem of the beginning as the result of a communicative relationship with the other.” But “the question again leads to strange complications,” and “the suspicion arises that the question has been poorly formulated or even resists proper formulation.”9 Thus, “the proposed problem turns out to be so problematic as to leave us lost.”10 Quotes could be easily multiplied. We can experience first-hand all the consequences and ramifications of a gesture addressing the nature of the first gesture. One begins, to summarize the first ten paragraphs of the book, precisely with the realization that one has already begun. The question about the beginning is misleading, especially if the beginning is understood as an absolute one. Nothing ever starts from scratch. We are always busy with a variety of occupations, which in turn had their own beginning in many others. In order to discuss this problem, for example, one must be ready to embark on a number of activities such as wondering where to start from, talking to oneself, trying to clear the field from what has already begun and is already known, examining a series of familiar available options, and so on. On the other hand, all this can be done only by relying on our previous and already-begun experience, namely on an already-given world. Those who see all this, also see that the phenomenological project leads not to Socrates’ wisdom—“I know that I don’t know”—but to its opposite, “I don’t know that I know.”

6 See for instance Husserl, Edmund. 1987. Die Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, ed. T. Nenon, H.R. Sepp. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. 7 Paci, Enzo. 1973. Idee per un’enciclopedia fenomenologica. Milan: Bompiani. 8 Sini, Introduzione alla filosofia come scienza, 11. 9 Ibid., 14. 10 Ibid., 15. 140 F. Leoni

3 The Body of Bodies

The beginning, it appears, does not belong to the domain of decision, but to that of situation. One does not start from discontinuity, but from continuity, and in continuation. To begin is to prolong, modify, or re-direct an ongoing event. The starting point is a bundle of ongoing activities, and practicing phenomenology means illu- minating what is normally confined to the darkness of the unthought. More precisely, it means shedding light on all the operations continuously performed by a “subject” (Husserl’s term, still used by Sini at this stage). These operations carry with them, literally, the light in which such subject becomes visible to itself, while making a world visible. It also means, however, performing and re-directing all those operations in a different manner, folding them back onto themselves so that they illuminate their own movement instead of its results. In such a way, one can begin to perceive the operations themselves rather than their result. To shed light on what sheds light on the world—here is a first way to understand the word “phenomenology” as it is practiced in these pages. Sini’s assumption seems to be that the meaning of Husserl’s famous motto—“to go back to the things themselves”—is by no means to describe a certain phenomenon in the most faithful and impartial way. In a page of his Phenomenological Diary, Paci claimed to have learned something of this kind from Antonio Banfi. “Do you see that vase of flowers?” Banfi asked his young pupil Paci. “Try to say and describe what you really see.”11 But when he wrote his Introduction to Phenomenology as a Science, Sini had something completely different in mind. Perhaps because of his familiarity with Barié’s transcendentalism and with a kind of Fichtian-Hegelian idealism, Sini always emphasized the presence of “another Husserl”—radically Kantian rather than Humean—within Husserl himself. “To go back to the things themselves,” in this sense, meant for him going back to the “operations” (Leistungen is Husserl’s technical term) through which the things themselves are constituted. In other words, it meant going back to describing all the operations belonging to the domain of perception, memory, imagination, but also expressiveness, motility, bodily gestures, and the whole set of practices that a body constantly performs in order to inhabit a world. If the boundaries of this domain are extended, another kind of continuity emerges: one in which the body extends itself into many other bodies and things, so much that to isolate something as one’s own body becomes completely arbitrary and is evidence of an already-begun beginning. In these first paragraphs of the Introduction to Phenomenology as a Science, things and bodies gradually emerge as the transcendental field itself. The beginning lies in the fact that the body is lived by and in infinite other bodies, and that each operation shapes its circumstances and produces its objectifications while configured and objectified by and in infinite other operations. The transcendental domain coincides with this experience made of many implicit, competing, and conflicting experiences. Constitution, Husserl’s

11 Paci, Diario fenomenologico, 84 (noted on October 30, 1958). Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance 141

philosopher’s stone, is itself constituted, and is constituted by the infinity and the mysterious consistency of all things which are passively active, objectively subjective, and materially spiritual. No doubt, Whitehead’s Leibnizian cosmology is at work in the background. Not by chance, Paci’s last course on Leibniz and Husserl, held in the mid-sevienties,12 revolved around the idea that behind every phenomenological inquiry lay a monadological vocation. Every monad is a monad of monads. The idea is just sketched out here, but was to become central in Sini’s approach to phenomenology.

4 Sign and Distance

Between the 1970s and 1980s Sini gradually turned away from Husserl and Paci.13 More precisely, he turned away from Husserl’s subjectivism or conscientialism, namely from the idea that the meaning of experience and the objectivity of the world are formed within a transcendental dimension understood as a kind of inner workshop. Perhaps Sini’s Husserl had already broken out of the confined space of consciousness. Sini was already placing experience in the domain of things and explaining it through things, thereby interpreting its life through that sort of spectral intentionality or transcendentality of the non-intentional and the non-transcendental. He was certainly going in that direction, but at the same time the powerful pull exerted by the question of the beginning had kept the problem of constitution at the center of his interests. That problem, to put it differently, was one of a center understood as the center of all centers rather than as the periphery of all peripheries. In fact, Heidegger’s thought—alongside that of Charles S. Peirce, who had been at the core of Sini’s pioneering studies on American pragmatism since the late 1960s14—functioned as a bridge to this new approach. The alliance between Heidegger and Peirce was patiently cultivated over time. It was announced in Semiotics and philosophy, explored in Kinesis. An Essay In Interpretation, and sys- tematized in Beyond the Sign. Semiotics, Cosmology, Technology.15 This last book played a key function in Sini’s philosophical journey. In these pages, Heidegger’s Being and Time provided a way out of the closed space of consciousness, and helped Sini to concentrate on the problem of being-in-the-world, and, at an even deeper

12 See Paci, Enzo. 1978. Il problema della monadologia da Leibniz a Husserl. Milan: Unicopli. 13 See Sini, Carlo. 1991. La fenomenologia come esistenzialismo positivo in Enzo Paci. In: Vita e verità. Interpretazione del pensiero di Enzo Paci, ed. S. Zecchi. Milan: Bompiani. Esp. 148ff. 14 Sini, Carlo. 1972. Il pragmatismo americano. Bari: Laterza. 15 Sini, Carlo. 1978. Semiotica e filosofia. Bologna: Il Mulino; Sini, Carlo. 1981. Kinesis. Saggio di interpretazione. Milan: Spirali; Sini, Carlo. 1981. Passare il segno. Semiotica, cosmologia, tecnica. Milan: il Saggiatore. 142 F. Leoni level, to isolate in this phenomenon something like a strictly non-anthropocentric, radically Copernican moment.16 It is curious that, after reading Being and time, Husserl had voiced a deep concern for the anthropological drift—as he put it—of his brightest student.17 It is perhaps out of a similar concern that Sini placed the question of the sign, and of the deferred presence, at the core of Heidegger’s analytic of being-in-the-world. Precisely for this reason, once injected into Heidegger’s analytic, Peirce became a powerful “contrast agent” through which a semiological and almost structuralist Heidegger emerged, as opposed to the phenomenological and almost existentialist one. The existential analytic of Being and Time is well known. Being-in-the-world, Heidegger shows, means being part of a web of relations. It is from this perspective, that the analytic of existence becomes a pragmatic of experience. Being-in-the- world means being enmeshed in a set of material practices, and this is why no presence is ever a mere presence, but always the sign of another presence. The hammer means the nail, the nail means the painting, and so on. Everything is a sign, and even Dasein is a sign, a thing located among things connected to other things in multiple ways. But, Sini remarked, Heidegger “is convinced that by resorting to the concept of sign everything is easily solved;” he “mistakes common signs, which have been already established empirically, for the semiotic relationship.” On the contrary, “the essential problem is who or what establishes a sign as a sign,” “on what basis this can happen.”18 For Sini, Peirce is the great theorist of the event of the semiotic relationship. His semiotics somewhat complements Heidegger’s analytic, and allows us to isolate the question of the event of the sign rather than that of the sign as such. If a sign is “something that stands for something else,” according to the canonical medieval definition, there must be a secret mechanism that triggers that movement and allows something to stand for something else. Peirce called that mechanism the “Interpretant.” But Sini strongly emphasizes that, in Peirce, the interpretant is never a subject. To interpret is to have already interpreted, and the interpretant is nothing else than this “having already interpreted.” It is the phenomenological problem of the beginning, but translated into semiotic terms. Each present interpretation occurs on the basis of infinite past interpretations, which exert their pressure on it. More precisely, all present interpretations are rendered past by this actual re-use of all the preceding interpretations. Therefore, every single interpretation allows all interpretations to travel through itself, so to say, in view of an already-emerging future interpretation coinciding in its own way with all future interpretations and with the whole future. Indeed, the whole universe is the Interpretant. In every interpretation,

16 Not by chance, in these pages an in-depth analysis of Giordano Bruno’s anthropology and cosmology is accompanied by a discussion of Heidegger’s existential analytic. See Leoni, Federico. 2014. La memoria dell’infinito. In: Il pensiero in pratica. Percorsi e prospettive sulla filosofia di Carlo Sini, ed. F. Cambria. Milan: Jaca Book. 17 Husserl, Edmund. 1994. Randbemerkungen Husserls zu Heideggers “Sein und Zeit” und “Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik”. Husserl Studies 11:3–63. 18 Sini, Passare il segno, 25. Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance 143 the universe interprets itself at that very moment, thereby offering itself as its own source and its own destination, in a sort of immobile but metamorphic semiotic pulsation. As Peirce wrote and as Sini recalls, “every inference, every logic, must be connected with a philosophy of the universe.”19 This point is decisive. Semiosis is not a human faculty. It is not a performance of the subject, but rather an anonymous force, a cosmological event. This conclusion is reached through a close reading of Peirce’s text, and against Peirce’s semiological and ultimately anthropological interpretations—first of all Umberto Eco’s interpretation, conducted in parallel with Sini’s studies on American pragmatism and con- densed in his famous Theory of Semiotics in the mid-1970s.20 For Sini, this web of signs generates order in the arrangement of things and human beings; it creates meanings and correspondences by rotating on its own axis; each time, starting from its silent threshold, it provides a unique interpretation of all the infinite other interpretive thresholds. After all, the entire history of philosophy, together with all the extraordinarily diverse findings of human sciences, have done nothing other than naming that threshold, describing its nature and providing it with a meaning. Indeed, the human being to whom the human sciences have attributed the faculty of the semiotic game, as well as Being, to which Heidegger assigned the task of “sending” beings (thereby erasing itself in them), begin to appear as fetishes. That is, fetishes of the sign, or more precisely of the event of the sign—in other words, fetishes of the universe, which at every moment occurs at a distance from itself, in a sign or as a sign.

5 The Gesture, the Rhythm

By the mid-1980s, a whole phase of Sini’s work dedicated to preparing, clarifying, and developing the semiological-cosmological turn announced in Beyond the Sign had reached its conclusion. From that moment onward, phenomenology—and with it the notion of the body—returned to the foreground, both in the handouts of Sini’s courses and in the books he derived from them. One might mention the courses entitled Dal simbolo all’uomo (From Symbol to Man21), Il tempo e l’esperienza (Time and experience22), and La fenomenologia e la filosofia dell’esperienza (Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Experience23). At the end of the decade, we find these courses more or less profoundly reworked in two important books: Il

19 Sini, Passare il segno, 63. 20 See Eco, Umberto. 1975. Trattato di semiotica generale. Milan: Bompiani and Sini, Il pragmatismo americano. 21 Sini, Carlo. 1984. Dal simbolo all’uomo. Milan: Unicopli. 22 Sini, Carlo. 1985. Il tempo e l’esperienza. Milan: Unicopli. 23 Sini, Carlo, 1987. La fenomenologia e la filosofia dell’esperienza. Milan: Unicopli. 144 F. Leoni silenzio e la parola (Silence and the Word24) and, above all, I segni dell’anima. Saggio sull’immagine (Signs of the Soul. An Essay on Image25). At the beginning of the following decade, a text was published that in many ways closed and recapitu- lated the whole cycle: Il simbolo e l’uomo (Symbol and Man26). As can be seen from the title—Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Experience—phenomenology was now opposed or at least juxtaposed to the philosophy of experience. Phenomenology was no longer understood as “the” philosophy of experience. The philosophy of experience, developed after phenomenology, was seen as different from phenomenology. The Heideggerian and Peircean theme of the destruction of subjectivism and conscientialism continued to operate as a compass in Sini’s revival of the phenomenological problem of experience. The entire domain of corporeality which had been at the core of both Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, was re-interpreted and equated with the act of drawing signs and creating distances. This was the problem of the occurrence of the sign relation, which Beyond the Sign intended to fully explore, and whose ultimate essence not even Peirce—it now seemed clear—could grasp. Peirce’s cosmological semiotics had now become a kind of cosmological somatology. “What we want is to witness the tracing of the trace,” writes Sini in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Experience.27 This statement resembles Husserl’s battle cry: “let us go back to the things themselves.” This tracing of the trace is Sini’s “thing itself”. At this stage, Sini was long convinced that what Husserl had in fact returned to, was not the thing itself but the “functioning” operation of a transcendental, to use Husserl’s language. But as a term, “transcendental” perhaps could no longer work. After all, to say that it was functioning, to tear it away from all egology, and to sink it into a sphere of absolute “static-fluent” actuality—as Husserl did in the last years of his life28—meant putting the transcendental out of place, or completely revolu- tionizing its meaning. Precisely for this reason, in his investigations Sini had to look “outside:” on the one hand, through Heidegger and his analytic (which led from being-in-the-world to an ontology of barred being); on the other, via Peirce and his semiotics (which led to a phaneroscopy and, from there, to an inevitable cosmology of signs). Both had brought the question of signs to the foreground and suggested that the event of the sign contained the not-simply-semiotic secret of the sign. Could the sign be a fetish itself? From now on, the need to witness the tracing of the trace, to identify the operation that shapes and weaves together the fetish would generate two distinct lines of research. A first line of Sini’s research focused on the problem of the tracing of the trace as a question related to the phenomenology of gestures. This is precisely the

24 Sini, Carlo. 1989. Il silenzio e la parola. Genoa: Marietti. 25 Sini, Carlo. 1989. I segni dell’anima. Saggio sull’immagine. Rome-Bari: Laterza. 26 Sini, Carlo. 1991. Il simbolo e l’uomo. Milan: EGEA. 27 Sini, La fenomenologia e la filosofia dell’esperienza, 208. 28 Held, Klaus. 1966. Lebendige Gegenwart. Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des Transzendentalen Ich. Berlin: Springer. Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance 145 approach first outlined in Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Experience. Each body moves and feels itself, and thereby produces distance. Each distance allows something to appear in the distance, from where the moving and feeling body can finally perceive itself as something other than what is becoming other to itself, and can therefore move itself according to a certain intentionality. This intentionality comes to it from the outside and can therefore be interiorized, thereby appearing as its own intentionality. The vast, anonymous fabric of experience becomes—over there—a world of things for a conscience, and—down here—a consciousness which is consciousness of things. In Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Experience, Sini illustrates this double movement in relation to many aspects, that is in relation to many bodily gestures, as he puts it. The voice conjures up the world by arranging a world evoked and coagulated in the intensity of a sound and the answers it elicits. It is an objectless and subjectless voice—an absolute voice. But those who cry are reached back by that cry and reflected in the faint presence of the unstable intensity of that crying acting as a mirror to itself. The gaze does something similar, while capturing the world in a state of peculiar fixity; likewise, the gazing subject simultaneously finds himself/ herself gazed at, stared at and photographed by what he/she has focused on. Our hands grasp things, and our bodies draw a landscape as they walk: every time we encounter a world, we lose it in the peculiar distance and physiognomy of that encounter; and every time we lose it, we find it and we find ourselves in it, as the peculiar double of the figure that has been drawn. A second line of research interprets the problem of the tracing of the trace as a problem of the phenomenology of rhythm. While every gesture is the tracing of a trace, according to the many specific dynamics already mentioned, it is through a single framework that Sini clarifies the tracing of the trace. The trace is always rhythmically traced. Trace is rhythm. These are the theses outlined in the aforementioned course Time and Experience. Phenomenology must focus on this rhythm and become an investigation of the rhythmic patterns of tracing. However, rhythm is nothing but the rhythm of distance, and distance itself is nothing but its own distancing from itself, its own extension into an exterior or, better, as an exterior and an alterity, and its reclaiming itself from that exterior and from that alterity as a “bounce” and as a sign of itself. More generally, each rhythm draws itself and emerges as its own writing of space and time: it develops from itself as a topography and a chronology. In both cases it becomes visible but also disappears, it objectifies itself and renders itself readable but also vanishes and perishes. “What happens is always the same: the originating of the same directed towards the other, which is the other of the same, the semblance of the same—in a word, the sign.”29

29 Sini, Il tempo e l’esperienza, 144. On the relationship between rhythm and time in this key course, see the important remarks by Ronchi, Rocco. 2014. Un filosofo “minore”. In: Il pensiero in pratica, ed. F. Cambria, 93–101. 146 F. Leoni

6 God’s Writing

From here on, Sini constantly followed these two lines of research. On the one hand, he continued to practice a phenomenology of the timeless rhythm—a sort of Spinozan causa sui—that pulsates and splits in two, thereby receding from itself and then reintegrating its otherness into itself. Sini’s course on Spinoza, held a few years later and then published as a book, must be placed in this context.30 In Spinoza’s language, that pure rhythmic beat, that rhythmic event of a distance that remains in itself by receding from itself, is nothing but eternity, the point in which God as causa sui is blissfully absorbed into Himself and into an eternal and immanent process of self-causation. God consists of infinite modes, that is—in Sini’s language—of infinite and inexhaustible gestures, practices, transcripts, and objectifications, all of them being simultaneously vain and essential. Ultimately, the object of phenomenology is this blissful condition, one that belongs to every mode, namely to every rhythm: if there is one and only one foundation, and if the world coincides with its own event, then every existence, every mode is still one with the substance. It is only our imagination that breaks up the temporal and spatial continuum by saying “here” and “there,” “I am older, you are younger,” “I am the father, you are the son.”31 On the other hand, Sini practiced a minute phenomenology of each of the many modes in which rhythm—the ultimate substance—generates itself and inscribes itself into infinite other rhythms, captured and reproduced in infinite other bodies also rhythmically pulsating, or in infinite other media, each endowed with its own rhythm, inclination, and productivity. It is in this context that we should place the genealogical investigations that Sini began in the 1990s and carried on for about 20 years. In his Etica della scrittura (Ethics of Writing) and Filosofia e scrittura (Philosophy and Writing) for example,32 Sini argued that at some point, an extrav- agant and very influential people, the Greeks, started to objectify their voice through peculiar signs. Having inherited the alphabet from the Phoenicians, they began to see and conceptualize the world through the somewhat deforming mirror of writing. In such a way, language as a domain of manifestation was turned into an idealizing and atomizing grid of tiny symbols. Shaped by this mode of reading, the Greek gaze began to decipher the world on the basis of each sign’s immobile identity with itself, and to consider things according to the paradigm of the breakdown of complexity into simple elements, processed into a series of non-contradictory states. Things exist because they are evoked and inscribed into the ephemeral distance of a vocal gesture, as Sini had shown years before. But it is only because a revealing and truth- generating voice is embedded in a text that supersensible ideas and sensible objects,

30 Sini, Carlo. 1991. La verità pubblica e Spinoza. Milan: Cuem; repr. in: Sini, Carlo. 2005. Archivio Spinoza. La verità e la vita. Milan: Ghibli. 31 Ibid., 293. 32 Sini, Carlo. 1992. Etica della scrittura. Milan: il Saggiatore; Sini, Carlo. Filosofia e scrittura. 1994. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Carlo Sini: A Phenomenology of Distance 147 a “logical mind” (as he defines it) and a set of logically investigable objects begin to exist. Text becomes the apriori element in which every other body and every other encounter with the world is registered and transcribed. The alphabet is the transcendental of Western metaphysics and sciences, the condition of possibility of Plato and Galilei. It was a Husserlian gesture, although a deeply revisited and extraordinarily elaborated one. The famous Appendix III to the Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl’s last work and spiritual testament,33 at some point became a real pièce de résistance of Sini’s teaching. A whole series of courses and texts recognized in this work a radical but incomplete intuition waiting to be developed. Since the Greeks were peasants, Husserl showed, they drew the boundaries of their fields directly on the land and calculated the surfaces of their plots. Those ingenious land surveyors then began to transfer the same techniques and objects onto an additional medium, turning a plot into a rectangle drawn on a wax board, a portion of the world into a purely geometrical figure. What did all this mean? It meant that the idea, the pure image and meaning as what is self-identical were the result of the disengagement of certain objects from the practices through which they were constituted. They were the unin- tentional outcome of their re-contextualization within new practices and their transcription onto new media. The secret of ideality lay in this interplay of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, in this transition from one practice to its contiguous one, in this materialization of objects and subjects through the figure’s sliding from one medium to another—similar yet at the same time dissimilar—one. The ultimate transcendental was the Babelic, but somewhat ordered inclusion of each practice into all other practices, of each body into all other bodies, of each rhythm into all other rhythms. Whitehead had met Lévi-Strauss, The Concept of Nature had incorporated The Raw and Cooked, or vice versa. In the decade following Ethics of Writing, Sini developed his tenacious exploration of alphabetic writing as a single practice into a series of studies dedicated to many of the practices we encounter in the world and to the disciplines that place these practices at the center of their investigations. Metaphysics, psychology, ethol- ogy, anthropology, cosmology, and pedagogy became the subject first of courses and then of books. The result was an impressive speculative and editorial project entitled Encyclopaedia.34 With each discipline, it is a matter of inspecting the “threshold,” as Sini says, the peculiar style of writing, the conceptual structure, and the underlying pragmatics by virtue of which a certain figure of the world is produced, thereby generating a particular subject that inhabits the world according to

33 Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Der Ursprung der Geometrie. In: Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Among the many texts in which Sini goes back to the problem, see Sini, Carlo. 1997. Scrivere il fenomeno. Naples: Morano. 34 Sini, Carlo. 2004—. Figure dell’enciclopedia filosofica. 6 vols. Milan: Jaca Book. Repr. as Sini, Carlo. 2012. Transito verità. Figure dell’enciclopedia filosofica. In: Opere. Vol. 5, ed. F. Cambria. Milan: Jaca Book. In this ongoing series can be found many of the texts quoted here, with interesting introductions in the form of interviews with the author conducted by the editor. 148 F. Leoni the truth and consequences of that figure. As already noted, these transcriptions of the unique rhythm of a sort of “eternal life” are all equally vain and essential. Sini started using the expression “eternal life” in the Encyclopaedia, thereby integrating all the various layers of his intellectual journey: Spinoza’s eternity, Paci’s “life of truth,” Husserl’s functioning intentionality, and the Lebensphilosophie underlying Hegel’s idealism. Spinoza used the term ethics to describe the unity of this difference, or the being- different of this unity of substance and modes, of the life of the causa sui and its infinite (caused and therefore causing) transcriptions. SinceEthics of Writing, Sini has called “ethics” this same unity of difference, which in his work is a unity in the difference between, on the one hand, a vertical phenomenology of beatitude and rhythm, and, on the other, a horizontal phenomenology of the many chronologies in which such rhythm manifests itself, of the many topologies forming their stratifica- tions, and of the many truth-generating effects that such wandering continues to encounter and set in motion.35 A very recent text vividly captures this phenomenological-genealogical ethics with an evocative image: “The task of us philosophers, followers from the time of Thales of the god of machines and olive-presses, is still to recommend to our neigh- bors the lucid spell mentioned by Nietzsche: the ability to dream more clearly and truly, to say to oneself, while dreaming: ‘See, I’m dreaming’.” Faithful to his debut, and not without a touch of irony, Sini, now 85, has entitled this text Beginning.36

Federico Leoni teaches Philosophical Anthropology at the Humanities Department of Verona University, where he is the scientific coordinator of the Centro di ricerca per la filosofia e la psicoa- nalisi (“Research Centre for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis”). His recent publications include: Habeas corpus. Sei genealogie del corpo occidentale (Milan 2008); L’idiota e la lettera. Quattro saggi sul Flaubert di Sartre (Salerno 2013); Jacques Lacan, l’economia dell’assoluto (Salerno 2016).

35 For this conception of ethics see the conclusions in: Sini, Etica della scrittura, 215–216; Sini, Carlo. 1997. Teoria e pratica del foglio-mondo. Rome-Bari: Laterza. 224–229; and the first volume of Sini, Carlo. 2004. Enciclopedia: L’analogia della parola. Filosofia e metafisica. Milan: Jaca Book. 82–83. 36 Sini, Carlo. 2016. Inizio. Milan: Jaca Book. 57. Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience

Roberto Miraglia

Abstract This essay presents the main points of Giovanni Piana’s interpretation of phenomenology as a “doctrine of experience” aimed at conceptual clarification. It shows how genetic-constitutive analyses become crucial in this interpretation and therefore how phenomenology comes to be close to its empiricist ancestors (except for its anti-psychologism) and how far from authors like Heidegger and Merleau- Ponty. Moreover, the essay highlights that such a “doctrine of experience” deliber- ately assumes only the “analytic” parts of the tasks that Husserl assigned to philosophy, while refusing the ideological (i.e. the ethical-foundational) ones. Finally, some details are given of the applications of such a devoted-to-analysis- phenomenology to musical experience, one of the fields in which Giovanni Piana’s work has been more influential on the Italian philosophical culture.

“Phenomenology is doctrine of experience in an eminent sense,”1 Piana states at the start of a self-presentation essay of his philosophy. Shortly before that, he wrote: “With the words ‘experience’ and ‘structure’, the area of phenomenological inquiry is completely circumscribed.”2 For Piana, the object of phenomenology are therefore the structures that characterise experience and for this reason the author has at times called his position “phenomenological structuralism.”3 What then makes this “doctrine of experience” phenomenological, as understood in this sense, had already been clarified years before with deliberate concision in the introduction of Piana’s fundamental work: “What a phenomenological method is for us in relation to the

1 Piana, Giovanni. 1996. Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus. In: Phänomenologie in Italien, ed. R. Cristin, 113–119. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 114. (Author’s translation can be found at http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/piana/index.php). 2 Ibid. 3 In this sense, the term is clearly unrelated to structuralism understood as a cultural movement of the last century (see ibid., 113).

R. Miraglia (*) University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 149 F. Buongiorno et al. (eds.), Phenomenology in Italy, Contributions to Phenomenology 106, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_11 150 R. Miraglia theme of experience can really be expressed in just a few words: it is a method of characterising the acts of experience through the exhibition of differences in their structure.”4 According to Piana, what phenomenology must first do is trying to understand what perception, memory, imagination and thought5 are, as acts that place us in the presence of the world “in flesh and blood,” by stating that these acts have structures and by resorting to comparative description as a method to identify these structures. Already in these first characterisations, starting from these very linguistic choices, a cautious and careful attitude toward rigor is evident, as well as an attempt to avoid the risk of overloading the notion of the doctrine of experience to be proposed with general philosophical instances. The word “structure,” for example, is clearly the less cumbersome counterpart of the original Husserlian term “essence.” But it is not just a matter of encumbrance. According to Piana, the term is already able on its own—thanks to the moment of immanence suggested6—to attenuate, if not eliminate, the most ontological commitments of the eidetic theme: through its adoption as a translation of the German Wesen “countless old disputes over phenomenological Platonism would simply become meaningless.”7 Likewise, the term “exhibition” takes on the theme of “phenomenological evidence” with the clear intention of de-dramatizing it through the use of an everyday term. In the end, the characterisation of phenomenological methodology as a descriptive comparison is the way in which the slippery theme of “phenomenological reflection” as well as of the “intuition of essence” is presented by Piana. In particular, the comparative aspect aims to further accentuate the anti-psychological perspective of Husserlian philosophy and to preserve it as much as possible from one of its longstanding Achilles’ heels, namely the risk of bogging down analyses in the murky swamp of “internal sense-data.” Indeed, the “exhibition” is not the presentation of “qualitative data” of the “internal consciousness” considered in its isolation but of “differences” between structures: between the structure of perceptions and that of memory, between the structure of memory and that of images, and so on.8

4 Piana, Giovanni. 1979. Elementi di una dottrina dell’esperienza. Milan: Il Saggiatore. 10. (Author’s italics). 5 This division into four parts corresponds to the titles of the four chapters of his fundamental theoretical work (see Piana, Elementi di una dottrina dell’esperienza). 6 “The word ‘structure’ refers to the idea of a skeleton, of an internal system, of internal constitution, in short, to the idea of a characteristic form which, in my opinion, directly indicates the goal of phenomenological research”. Piana, Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus, 113. 7 Ibid. 8 Thus, at the beginning of the chapter on imagination in his fundamental work, before starting the analysis, Piana observes: “(…) with differentiating characteristics we do not mean certain qualities of imaginative content: if this were the case (…) the introspective method would still impose itself as the only means for such a description. For us, determining a characteristic means, instead, to determine a difference. To do this, no introspection is evidently necessary, no reflective act (…). How does an imaginative object behave with respect to an object of perception?” Piana, Elementi di una dottrina dell’esperienza, 109–110. Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience 151

Both the thematic limitation to structures and the methodical choice in favor of a comparative description are designed to keep the investigation carried out by the doctrine of experience distinct from that of empirical psychology. This essentially means that phenomenology does have a particular object of knowledge and therefore its own positivity—the structures of the acts of experience—and not simply different ways to deal with the analyses and conclusions of other disciplines. In this sense, within the framework of phenomenology, anti-psychology is by no means less significant than the descriptive method. In turn, this means that for Piana, an authentically phenomenological approach has other companions than those established by historiographically stereotyped combinations. Drawing attention to the structure means first emphasizing the true and primarily polemical sense of the phenomenological issues surrounding “essences.” This sense lies in the antipsychologistic attitude which characterizes phenomenological philosophy. It is not a super- fluous observation: philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Sartre have not grasped this point, and their phenomenological research ultimately assumes the form of reflections on the results of psychological-empirical research. It follows that the aforementioned philosophers have less in common with the phenomenological structuralism of philosophers such as Cassirer or Wittgenstein, who are certainly further from Husserl’s philosophy.9 The notion of phenomenology that emerges from these considerations has strict boundaries and is also, in some aspects, very technical. Its philosophical relevance emerges in Piana thanks to an equally rigorous selection conducted within the different tasks that Husserl assigns to philosophy throughout his life. The doctrine of experience is fundamental to conceptual clarification because it studies, so to speak, the geography of the land—the actual experience or Lebenswelt—to which the conceptual method of analysis that is characteristic of phenomenology has led us, i.e. genetic-constitutive analysis: If you want to clarify intricate and confusing representations and if you want to undo conceptual knots, then you must also know that there is an internal movement of concepts and it is necessary to repeat their path step by step. The constitutive issue therefore leads to the theme of experience. If there is a history of concepts, there is also a starting point to move from and if we are dealing with the realm of experience, perhaps we could say that we are dealing with experience in its more general form, with everyday life. Untying conceptual knots means describing the way the concepts are actually used in our daily life and how they are related to the world.10 Predictably, these theoretical choices have controversial relapses even with regard to certain historically significant aspects of Husserlian reflections. In this sense, the evaluation of the so-called epoché is emblematic. For Piana “phenomenological epoché—and in part Cartesian doubt—is only an artifice to introduce a research whose subject is the world as phenomenal field.”11 But if we consider the phenomenological epoché only within these parameters then we must dismantle

9 Piana, Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus, 113–114. 10 Ibid., 117. 11 Ibid., 116. 152 R. Miraglia every rationalistic-foundationalist implication. “Suspension of belief” is a philosophical device aimed not at identifying a ground of certainty from which to start a deductive restoration of our knowledge of the outer world, but simply at circum- scribing the field of genetic-descriptive analysis. For Piana, it is even more meaningless to follow Husserl along that path which, from this Cartesian starting point, led him to attribute a palingenetic valence to phenomenology that must take on the task of starting the process of resolving the “crisis.” In his words: “This instance will not be resolved, as in Descartes, with the formulation of a supreme principle: indeed, in Husserlian reinterpretation, bracketing can do nothing but present, in general, a variety of phenomenological-constitutive tasks.”12 The irreconcilability between properly understood Husserlian bracketing on the one hand, and instances of foundationalism on the other, leads to unresolved tension (and most likely unresolvable, according to Piana), which ends up depriving the idea of a peculiarly phenomenological philosophy of all perspicuity: The foundational instance thus affects the actual idea of phenomenology. With this theory of epoché, the Husserlian image of phenomenology takes shape. Its contours become increasingly more evanescent and eventually overlap the contours of general philosophy, as the site of the last justifications.13 In reality, the original conceptual genetic-constitutive clarification programme continues until Husserl’s final works, and according to Piana, re-emerges—exhibit- ing strong lines of continuity and a solid thematic and methodological identity— whenever concrete analyses are conducted. But this theoretical Husserl has increasingly been obscured over the years by the ideological Husserl14 who continued to introduce ethical-foundational issues in an increasingly dramatic way. Yet these issues are not adequately dealt with using tools that were originally developed for analytical phenomenology, nor are these tools rendered adequate by the increasingly dramatic tone.15 With this distancing from Husserl as foundationalist philosopher, Piana’s doctrine of experience instead reclaims the importance of classical empiricism, along

12 Piana, Elementi di una dottrina dell’esperienza, 12. 13 Ibid. (Author’s italics). 14 “In general, I believe that we must make a much deeper distinction than usual between theoretical and ideological aspects, and that proper identification of the ideological framework can only be achieved through a genuine understanding of the actual theoretical dimension. But I also believe that where there is an enrichment of meaning that the theoretical core of the problem cannot sus- tain, on this point, the ideological moment is introduced whose identification, is, in turn, essential for a deeper understanding.” Ibid. 15 These stances also imply the claim of a difference with respect to the philosophy of Enzo Paci: “The ethical dimension of the idea of phenomenology as a philosophy of subjectivity, which had already been raised by Husserl, becomes clearly prevalent in Paci. The proposal for a concrete analysis of experience was thus relegated to the background, and it is certainly possible to affirm that the idea of achieving a ‘doctrine of experience’ remains completely unrelated to Paci’s philosophical programme.” Piana, Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus, 115. Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience 153 with some aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, to phenomenology. Philosophical historiography is generally in agreement that empiricism is a forefather of Husserlian philosophy through the “Austrian philosophy” and Brentano’s theories. Yet on more than one occasion, Piana indicates that this parentage must be understood as a portion of the permanent genetic code that structurally characterizes the analytical system of phenomenology. Naturally, the claim of the existence of characteristic structures in the various areas of experience implies a significant discontinuity with respect to empiricism. Piana himself clearly highlights this, for instance,—as we will see shortly—in his philosophy of music. However, an interpretation of Husserl’s thought that stresses the central position of the genetic-constitutive moment cannot but recognize that this methodical moment has its justification in a mutatis mutandis resumption of the empiricist principle of the derivation of “ideas” from “impressions.”16 In the course of Husserl’s life, this parentage becomes less visible because of the overpowering introduction of ethical-foundational issues. However, from the Philosophy of Arithmetics up until his analysis of the “origin of geometry” in Crisis or works such as Experience and Judgement—in which empiricism even appears in the title—whenever Husserl does not present phenomenology or introduce it, but does phenomenology, his fundamentalist traits emerge, according to Piana.17 Regarding Wittgenstein, Piana dedicates an entire book to Tractatus which highlights his interest in many aspects of Wittgenstein’s work. As a brief sketch of his thought, it is essential to highlight a clear distancing from the more anti- phenomenological outcomes of the “logical language analysis.” Piana’s considerations when addressing Wittgenstein’s notions of object and his well-known “absolute simplicity” are emblematic in this sense. In Wittgenstein, simplicity acquires the consistency of a logical postulate which is introduced merely as a condition of the meaningfulness of language and is therefore guilty of the mortal phenomenological sin of being, in principle, something that cannot be exemplified.18 Rather, what is interesting to Piana—and this emerges in the final chapter of the book19—is the so-called “second Wittgenstein” and in particular (though not only) the pragmatic element present in the notion of language-games which takes linguis-

16 “It should also be noted that the theme of constitution, which is undoubtedly one of the richest motives of phenomenological thought, is in fact an empirical imprint.” Ibid., 112. 17 The claim of affinity with classical empiricism in Piana’s works is also a way to propose a conception of philosophy as a discipline not prone to oracular tones: “(…) and nevertheless noting the importance of the role that the empiricist tradition has always played for Husserl is also the mark of a theoretical point of view: adherence to a concept of philosophy, to an intellectual attitude, which is not enamoured of a flow of words, empty rhetoric, not even those truths that in an effort to be too ‘profound’ are often profoundly incomprehensible.” Ibid. 18 “The simplicity of which we speak will not be understood as assumption, nor as determination relative to a context that makes it intelligible. The simplicity proposed in Tractatus is a simplicity in itself. Therefore, apparently, an unsolvable puzzle.” Piana, Giovanni. 1973. Interpretazione del Tractatus di Wittgenstein. Milan: Il Saggiatore. 14–15. 19 It is the section significantly entitled “The transition to the point of view of the game” (see ibid., 147–198). 154 R. Miraglia tic analysis from the rarefied heights of regimented languages and brings it to the description of concrete subjective activity taking place in direct contact with the world of immediate experience. The entry of this Wittgenstein moment into the doctrine of experience allows Piana to enrich the model with which we represent the “way in which the concepts are actually used in our everyday language in our relationship with the world.”20 In short, the idea of a “language game” enriches the Husserlian notion of Lebenswelt. At the same time, the decision to integrate the exhibition of experiential structures with a “behavioural” description of the use of the words is useful to Piana’s doctrine of experience in order to consolidate the anti- introspectionist and anti-psychological elements that characterize his idea of phenomenology.21 An interpretation that assigns phenomenology the task of setting up a theoretical and methodological framework to actually do analyses should be evaluated on the basis of its outcomes. In an overview, and within the limitations of this publication, we can only provide an idea of Piana’s approach in the context in which his analyses have shown greater originality and influence on Italian culture, namely that of imaginative-expressive phenomena, particularly in music.22 In order to introduce the subject of imagination, it is first necessary to highlight one last feature of the general system of phenomenological structuralism. The notion of Lebenswelt—the realm in which “our everyday life relates to the world”— has no anti-scientific implications in Piana. On the contrary, it must be freed from the “simplistic and philosophically barren opposition between the conceptuality of science, which is assumed hostile to life and the very flow of life, in which human- kind is immersed.”23 In the end, it constitutes the realm to which we return when we conduct genetic- constitutive research dedicated to the clarification of scientific concepts.24 Nonetheless, for Piana, one could easily succumb to a symmetrical mistake, that of

20 Piana, Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus, 117. 21 Clearly, these choices imply a dissociation of phenomenological structuralism from Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Piana observes that the meaning of the empiricist tradition for phenomenology “(…) was generally neglected by Italian studies, especially in the most recent interpretations which show the general tendency to develop issues originating in phenomenology in such a way as to make them finally converge in a Heideggerian horizon, in compliance with a conformism which unfortunately is widespread not only in Italy.” Ibid., 116. 22 These topics do not by any means exhaust Piana’s interests. On the contrary, Piana is a versatile philosopher, able to devote in-depth research to issues ranging from the philosophy of mathematics to Greek music theory, or the philosophy of painting, etc. This wealth and variety of interests can be seen in his archive, which contains the texts of almost all works by Piana including several unpublished ones (available at http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/piana/). A complete bibliography of Piana’s works can be found at: http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/piana/index.php/bibliografia. 23 Piana, Die Idee eines phänomenologischen Strukturalismus, 115. 24 In this regard, the treatment of mathematical concepts is emblematic (in reference to Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic): see the fourth chapter of Piana, Elementi di una dottrina dell’esperienza, 183–198. Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience 155 reducing the analysis of experience to an epistemological issue, or—to use his words—to subordinate the doctrine of experience to the “doctrine of science.” Epistemological operations such as empirical observation (verifying, etc.) certainly imply the act of perception, yet the act of perception does not necessarily imply the fulfillment of epistemologically oriented acts.25 Perception does what every act of experience does: it puts us in the presence of objects “in flesh and blood.” In turn, these objects can, but should not be the subject of cognitive operations: they may very well be the subject of other subjective acts. Among the non-cognitive contexts with which the world of perception can inter- relate, are the imaginative-expressive contexts. The imagination carries out its action, not only placing itself in front of imaginary objects but also, according to Piana, imaginatively “enhancing” those related to perception—typically indicated by linguistic phenomena such as metaphors, as distinct from analogies. When the analogy “the sun is in the sky what eyes are on a face” gives way to the metaphor “the sun is the eye of the sky,” then (…) the pseudopredicative synthesis of imagination steps into the associative connection: the sun is the eye of the sky. Being transforms into Value. This transformation consists of a real intermingling among objects: the result of the synthesis is an entirely new kind of object, an iridescent object which is not what it really is because is it what it is. Neither sun nor eye—but sun and eye together, the one through the other.26 In cases like this, reality, according to the author, is in the grip of an “imaginative enhancement” which is based on a particular type of synthesis called “imaginative synthesis.”27 Piana submits this kind of synthesis to a particularly careful analysis. He must indeed defen12d a difficult thesis which we could call, for the sake of brevity, the thesis of objectivity of imaginative synthesis, or, perhaps, more cautiously, the thesis of the legitimacy of his anti-psychological interpretation. One might easily think that the association of ideas which underpin imaginative enhancement are purely subjective. It is not so for Piana. Perhaps the sun may not always be enhanced as the eye of the sky, but if it is enhanced in this way, then this happens (also) because the sun is the way it is and the eye is the way it is (or better because of the way they appear in front of us). These examples were chosen by the author to illustrate that not all content may be imaginatively enhanced in every way because at the base of each (successful) imaginative synthesis there are foundations in perceptual contents in the sense that phenomenology adopts the analysis of passive synthesis. In short, a careful analysis “(…) argues the need for a foothold of the same enhancing function [of imagination] in the concrete determination of things.”28 The transition that leads us to the subject of non-verbal arts, and music in particular, is as follows: for Piana, the enhancing function of imagination occurs not

25 “But if someone shows me a glass, points his finger at it and says, now you know!—in reality I don’t even know what should I know. Yet I see the glass.” Ibid., 16. 26 Ibid., 143. 27 See ibid., 137ff. 28 Ibid., 142. 156 R. Miraglia only at the level of language but also at the level of “the expressive potential of perceptual material.”29 The sun can be spoken of as the eye of the sky, but it can also in some way be seen as such. Similarly, using music as an example, we distinguish between high and low sounds. Yet these are metaphors because high sounds are not literally suspended above low sounds. But these metaphors, according to the author, refer to properties which: (1) are perceivable, not just mentionable, (2) cannot be reduced to perceptive property such as height or duration, and yet (3) are based on them (“objectivity” of imaginative synthesis). In short, and with inevitable simplification, for Piana, the notion of imaginative synthesis represents the anti- psychological alternative to Gibson’s affordances and to the tertiary qualities of Gestalt psychology. Piana’s philosophy of music30 stems fundamentally from transplanting these considerations regarding the expressiveness of perceptual materials within an original reworking of the Husserlian approach to language and in particular, of the type of connection that Husserl advances between the syntactic-linguistic dimension and the experiential one. When Piana’s book on music was published, the most debated issue at the musicological level was most likely the possibility of creating a unitary framework within which to understand both the crisis of traditional tonal music and the birth and exponential multiplication of new musical languages. Polarizing the debate in the interest of explanatory brevity, the syntax of tonal music was sometimes presented by its supporters as syntax par excellence, as it was founded on the nature of sound. In particular, the fundamental norm of the tonal system—the obligation to resolve dissonance (for dissonance to be followed by consonance)—was sometimes presented as an obligation imposed by the very nature of dissonance and consonance (primarily calling into question the “perceptual instability” of the first and the “stability” of the second). On the other hand, the claim to musical dignity of other musical languages often took the form of a theory that affirmed not only the impossibility of inferring artistic norms from the properties of sound materials, but even the irrelevance of any reference to the nature of sound in the justification of a musical language, if not the total dependence of the very perception of sound on cultural factors, including the habits forged by the dominant musical syntax each time. In the latter vein, the most successful theory, and perhaps even the most emblematic, was the semiological theory proposed by J.J. Nattiez. In fact, right from the start, the question of the nature of sound in this author’s works became irrelevant because the relevance of sounds is measured in their ability to assume the function of signs. Their “nature” is contained in merely supporting the function of referring to something other than itself. In turn, this function in Nattiez is guaranteed by the psychological mechanism of the association of ideas (between “sign” and “signi-

29 Ibid., 155. 30 The main work, but not the only one, dedicated to this topic is: Piana, Giovanni. 1991. Filosofia della musica. Milan: Guerini. Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience 157 fied”) based on habit. It is therefore evident that on this basis the problem of the multiplicity of musical languages and their philosophical justification rather than being solved is dissolved: every musical syntax is based on implicit or explicit rules of concatenation of the sounds that generate expectations in the competent (i.e. “accustomed”) listener regarding the sounds to which the sound heard from moment to moment refers as candidates to follow it through the progression of time. However if the only foundation of the syntactic reference is habit, then each musical language, to the extent that it generates new expectations, is fully legitimised against any other language, including that of tonal tradition. There are no characteristics of musically significant sound material other than the one that can be part of any kind of sound aggregates and can impose itself on the listener, generating certain expectations. In a cultural landscape dominated by polarities like these, phenomenological aesthetics certainly offered Piana a wealth of philosophical literature about music, from Schutz to Ingarden and Conrad, etc.31 Naturally, the analyses of these authors include the perceptual dimension of sounds and recognize it as a necessary condition of musicality. However, their attention is mainly focused on the search for the “phenomenological essence” of music, and even the essence of the “musical work,” and therefore at a level that is already fully musically-syntactic. Moreover, the choice of such “musical works” to be described and compared falls mostly within the repertoire ranging from late Baroque to Romanticism, and therefore within the tonal period. Given the selectivity of this base for the “abstraction of essences,” the identification of the “essential parts” of the musical art work therefore constantly runs the risk of absolutising a single musical syntax and a single idea of what a work is, generating either regulatory vetoes or classificatory outcomes which are difficult to justify. In the face of alternatives like these, Piana sees an excellent example of what phenomenology cannot accept from the empiricist tradition in Nattiez’s theory, that is, the negation of the structural moment of experience. Sound experience has a structure and perceptual sound materials have auditory and expressive-imaginative properties (being “deep,” “smooth,” etc.) that no contingent musical syntax can alter by activating associative mechanisms. There is, therefore, a layer of musical sense that is subtracted from cultural contingencies. It is not, however, that of the essence of the musical work as in the phenomenology of traditional music. Furthermore, precisely because it is entirely located at the level of material sound properties, this structural level is incapable of having normative implications in terms of musical syntax. According to Piana, just because a certain sound configuration has certain characteristics or certain expressive values, it does not follow that it should only be used in certain syntactic forms and not in others. On the other hand, the absence of normative implications does not mean syntactic or expressive irrelevance. On the

31 For more detailed information, see: Miraglia, Roberto. 2004. Fenomenologia della musica: una breve storia. In: Fenomenologia applicata: esempi di analisi descrittiva, ed. R. Lanfredini, 219– 233. Milan: Guerini. 158 R. Miraglia contrary, the perceptive and expressive properties of sound materials explain the musical result of syntactic choices and guarantee their (possible) effectiveness. Thus, in order to deny the fundamental tonal norm of the obligation to resolve dissonance into consonance, it is not necessary to state that there is no longer any qualitative difference between one and the other, as, for example, the composer Schoenberg did in his Theory of Harmony.32 Dissonances and consonances do not impose any rules on their own. But this does not mean that they cease to exhibit differences, and a sound sequence that does not follow the basic tonal norm will not have the same perceptive-expressive pattern of a Mozart piece. We can then pose the problem of why the composer aimed for the musical result obtained by freeing himself from the obligation of resolution. A question of rationality can therefore be raised which could not arise in theories admitting only the historical succession of closed incommensurable musical syntaxes combining sound phenomena which, in themselves, are considered as completely undifferentiated. According to Piana, accurate analysis of a piece of music cannot be limited to taking note of a syntax historically given in a certain time and place—as happens in Nattiez’s radical empiricism—but it must make sense by reconstructing on one hand the sonorous and expressive consistency of its musical result, and on the other the musical poetry from which it takes shape.33 Once again, the “doctrine of musical experience”—which is clearly the cornerstone of this conception—should be followed in its further analyses of concrete problems related to sound perception and its musical relevance. As this is impossible within the confines of this publication, I will close my contribution by touching upon an element that unites Piana’s reflection on art with the tradition of phenomenological aesthetics and in general with other approaches of philosophy of art and culture of the last century. This element is the anti-psychological approach to artistic and cultural phenomena in general. Works of art have an intrinsic status as meaningful objects as does, mutatis mutandis, a scientific theory. They should not be considered—as opposed to the latter—simply as generators of physical stimuli that cause contingent psychological effects in a cognitive apparatus like that of a human being. To a certain extent, in apparently “detailed” and technical problems such as the objectivity of imaginative synthesis or the relationships of independence between the “doctrine of experience” and the “doctrine of science,” the important issue is the status of artistic-cultural products at stake. One can, of course, discuss the success or failure of such an attempt, but Piana’s analyses have the virtue of getting to the root of the problem of “symbolic forms” and placing it in a context—that of a doctrine of experience—from which an effective phenomenological comparison is possible with other cultural products, like those which fulfill logical- epistemological purposes. Even before his original contributions, even before the

32 See Schoenberg, Arnold. 2010, Theory of Harmony. Berkeley, CA: UC Press. Piana’s considerations can be found in Piana, Filosofia della musica, 37–38. 33 It is difficult to sum up this set of theories using citations as we have attempted to do here, insofar as was possible. These specific topics are addressed by Piana in Filosofia della musica, 5–70 and 297–345. Giovanni Piana and the Doctrine of Experience 159 search for a rigorous foundation for well-known phenomenological theses, one of the fundamental contributions that Giovanni Piana’s reflection offers Italian phenomenology is that of bringing together a spectrum of questions ranging from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of art, continually seeking to converge them into a genetic-constitutive approach, and anchor them to the difficult, incon- spicuous work of refining descriptive analysis. Just one step ahead, this has at least indicated a possible way to keep the navigation of phenomenology away from that contraposition between humanism and science, which is one of the most treacher- ous reefs on which Italian culture can often run aground.

Roberto Miraglia teaches Philosophy of Social Sciences at the University of Milan-Bicocca. He has focused on Husserlian Phenomenology since his very first publication (Il senso e l’evidenza: un percorso attraverso il pensiero husserliano, Milan 1995), with particular reference to the philosophy of logic and of mathematics (see “Zero, uno e gli ‘altri’ numeri: Husserl e la tradizione empirista” (Iride, XV, 2003), “Genesi e chiarificazione concettuale in Husserl. Su alcune obiezioni contro l’indagine genetica della ‘Filosofia dell’aritmetica’ (Leitmotiv, 3, 2003), and “Dove iniz- iano gli a priori materiali. Schlick, Wittgestein e le radici di un equivoco” (in: A priori materiale. Uno studio fenomenologico, ed. R. Lanfredini. Milan: Guerini. 2006.). More recently, he has extended his research to the topic of counter-factual causality with the 2015 volume Introduzione alla teoria controfattuale della causalità (Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore). Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy

Andrea Pace Giannotta

Abstract In this work, I discuss the role of Husserl’s phenomenology in Paolo Parrini’s positive philosophy. In the first section, I highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti-foundationalist and anti- absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I point out some lines of development of the phenomenological form of empirical realism as revealed in Parrini’s reflection, through a comparison of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model and the tradition of neutral monism.

Paolo Parrini has developed a philosophical view that is based on the comparison between different schools of thought and on their integration into an original synthesis. Parrini follows his master Giulio Preti in bringing into dialogue, especially, Kantian philosophy, logical empiricism and Husserlian phenomenology. In this work, I shall highlight the role of phenomenology in some central aspects of Parrini’s philosophy, arguing that Parrini’s reading of phenomenology leads to a phenomenological form of empirical realism. In the first section, I shall highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti- foundationalist and anti-absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I shall stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I shall concentrate on some lines of development of the phenomenological empirical realism that is revealed by Parrini’s reflection, through a comparison of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model and the tradition of neutral monism.

A. Pace Giannotta (*) University of Florence, Florence, Italy

1 Positive Philosophy

The expression “positive philosophy” refers to the philosophical view that is developed by Parrini in Knowledge and Reality,1 Sapere ed interpretare2 (Knowing and Interpreting), Il valore della verità3 (The Value of Truth) and in various other essays. Parrini distinguishes between the terms “positivistic” and “positive.” The latter refers to a philosophical attitude that remains valid notwithstanding the crisis of the positivistic philosophies of the past and that consists in problematizing every alleged absolute knowledge. Positive philosophy is developed as an alternative to two opposite philosophical views that can be found in the history of philosophy and in recent epistemological debates: radical relativism and metaphysical realism. Within contemporary epistemology, radical relativism is the consequence of some views that are especially developed within the “new philosophy of science” and that take to the extreme the thesis of the “theory-ladenness of observation.” These views claim that changes in the theories through which we aim at reaching objective knowledge of reality, lead to a change of reality itself. Therefore, radical relativism is the thesis that there are as many truths and realities as there are theories and conceptual frameworks through which we refer to reality and that these truths and realities are reciprocally “incommensurable.” Parrini acknowledges some virtues of these non-absolutistic conceptions of knowledge. At the same time, he argues that if radical relativism is the claim that truth is relative, it is self-contradictory. On the other hand, if radical relativism is just the statement of a personal conviction that lays no claims of intersubjective validity, it is philosophically irrelevant. For this reason, we must set a limit on the extent of relativism, by distinguishing between relativity of truth (aletic relativism) and relativity of the attributions of truth (epistemic relativism). Parrini thus denies the relativity of truth, arguing for a form of epistemic relativism that conceives of truth as a regulative ideal that guides our epistemic efforts.4 At the same time, Parrini’s positive philosophy is developed in contrast to the opposite of radical relativism, i.e. metaphysical realism. This is the view in contemporary epistemology that seeks to overcome the critiques of metaphysics developed by Kant and by the logical empiricists. This trend in contemporary philosophy is fueled by Willard Van Orman Quine’s critique of the two dogmas of empiricism, which were at the basis of the reductionist version of the principle of verification. The crisis of logical empiricism has given up its place to a reprisal of metaphysics.

1 Parrini, Paolo. 1998. Knowledge and Reality. An Essay in Positive Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 2 Parrini, Paolo. 2002. Sapere e interpretare. Per una filosofia e un’oggettività senza fondamenti. Milan: Guerini. 3 Parrini, Paolo. 2011. Il valore della verità. Milan: Guerini. 4 See Parrini, Paolo. 2015. Il problema del realismo dal punto di vista del rapporto soggetto- oggetto. In: Realtà, verità, rappresentazione, ed. P.L. Lecis, V. Busacchi, and P. Salis, 21–51. Milan: Franco Angeli. 45. Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 163

Various forms of the renaissance of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy share the commitment to a view of knowledge as aimed at establishing a correspondence between ordo idearum and ordo rerum and therefore as aimed at “mirroring” an absolute reality “in itself.” However, Parrini argues that these foundationalist and absolutist conceptions of knowledge risk legitimising their opposite, i.e. scepticism. This is because metaphysical realism defines the concept of reality as absolutely transcendent with respect to the act of knowing. In this way, it struggles with the difficulty of pointing at criteria that allow us to verify the correspondence between our knowledge claims and a reality that is absolutely transcendent with respect to them. On this point, Parrini draws on Preti’s idea, that stressed the essential connection between radical scepticism and metaphysical realism: Until we remain stuck in an approach to the problem of knowledge that is conditioned by the “dogmatical” acceptance of a knowing subject that is opposed to the “existence of a real world that is independent from the act of knowing,” we cannot overcome the sceptical standpoint. It is this ontologically doomed approach that legitimates the sceptical standpoint (…). This is especially clear when we consider the scholastic formula veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus as the criterion of truth: our thinking does not contain any criterion for establishing the adaequatio because the criterion is outside, in the res. We must “catch” and “grasp” reality but we cannot ever know if “we caught a real thing or a shadow.” For this reason, metaphysical realism and scepticism must be conceived as “two faces of the same coin.”5 Following Preti, Parrini claims that the metaphysical realist “hands to the scep- tic, on a silver platter, a standard of evaluation (the accordance with absolute reality or reality in itself) that our knowing is not able to satisfy because of the way it is structured (epistemic relativism).”6 However, a crucial point distinguishes Parrini from Preti. By taking the principle of verification as the criterion of meaningfulness, Preti conceived of metaphysical realism as devoid of cognitive meaning. Parrini shares Preti’s attempt at defusing radical scepticism by eradicating the metaphysical realism that is at its basis. At the same time, he seeks to develop an improved critique of metaphysical realism that takes into account the crisis of the principle of verification. This analysis is at the heart of Parrini’s positive philosophy, which is based on three key concepts: moderate epistemic relativism, holistic empiricism, and empirical realism.

5 Parrini, Sapere e interpretare, 72. (My translation. The quotes are from: Preti, Giulio. 1974. Lo scetticismo e il problema della conoscenza. Rivista critica di storia della filosofia29:3–31, 123– 143, 243–263. Here 3, 7, 12—my translation). 6 Parrini, Il problema del realismo, 44. (My translation). According to Parrini, this applies also to those forms of metaphysical realism that adopt an attenuated version of correspondentism. 164 A. Pace Giannotta

1.1 Moderate Epistemic Relativism

Parrini develops an analysis of knowledge that takes into account the scientific revolutions that occurred between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This analysis leads Parrini to acknowledge the existence of various kinds of presuppositions of the cognitive process—linguistic, theoretical, methodological—which are not absolute since they can change in the course of scientific revolutions. Starting with his first book,7 Parrini develops a relativized and contextualized concept of the a priori and of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. Parrini develops this view by analysing the rejection of the synthetic a priori by logical empiricists. He highlights the fact that these authors vacillated between different views, before reaching a shared point of view, in line with H. Poincarè, on the linguistic and conventional nature of some general principles that connect the abstract plane of scientific theories with the concrete plane of empirical observation. These principles do not have an empirical content that can be directly verified as they are what makes possible the empirical testing of hypotheses and theories. The standard position of logical empiricists was to assimilate these principles as rules of coordination or correspondence interpreted as linguistic-like conventions. However, Parrini shows that in the 1920s H. Reichenbach proposed a different view, affirming the synthetic-theoretical nature of what he called “constitutive principles.” According to Reichenbach at that time, the general principles that associate theory with experience are synthetic a priori principles. At the same time, these principles are relative to a certain theory and can be revised during scientific revolutions. Reconnecting with Reichenbach’s and Pierre Duhem’s views, Parrini has thus argued since the 1970s that the constitutive principles are not mere linguistic conventions. On the contrary, they have a theoretical content and an indirect empirical import, being possible to test them in front of the “court of experience.” However, this empirical testing is holistic.8

1.1.1 Holistic Empiricism

The second key concept of Parrini’s positive philosophy is holistic empiricism. This is the thesis, taken from Pierre Duhem, according to which our theories go to the court of experience as a whole. In fact, in the light of new experimental results that

7 Parrini, Paolo. 1976. Linguaggio e teoria. Due saggi di analisi filosofica. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 8 Parrini’s view of the relativized a priori must be distinguished from Michael Friedman’s view. The latter was developed some decades later and draws on, with some hesitations, the neoempiri- cist thesis of the conventional and linguistic character of the “coordination principles.” On this point see Parrini, Paolo. 2017. Epistemologia e approccio sistemico. Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica 2:239–253 (248–249); Westphal, Kenneth R. 2017. Empiricism, Pragmatic Realism, and the A Priori in Mind and The World Order. In: Pragmatism in Transition, ed. P. Olen and C. Sachs, 169–198 (175). Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 165 clash with a given theory (for example Michelson and Morley’s experiment in relation to the aether theory, which is at the basis of Einstein’s special relativity) experience can declare that there is an implicit contradiction in a theoretical framework.9 Parrini thus argues that we must accept the well-known thesis of the empirical underdetermination of scientific theories (different logically conceivable theories are compatible with the same complex of empirical data) with the theoretical over- determination of experience. The latter thesis is explicitly stated by Reichenbach and is implicitly present already in Duhem and claims that experience can show, in a holistic manner, the incompatibility between certain empirical data and a specific theoretical system, without pointing at the specific parts of the theory that are responsible for the empirical inadequacy.10

1.1.2 Empirical Realism

The third key concept of Parrini’s positive philosophy, together with moderate epistemic relativism and holistic empiricism, is empirical realism. Parrini takes up the distinction already introduced by Kant and further developed by Rudolf Carnap, between two concepts of reality: empirical and metaphysical (or absolute, “in itself”). According to logical empiricists, in the light of the principle of verification conceived of as the criterion of meaningfulness, the notion of a metaphysical reality that is absolutely independent from cognitive acts is devoid of meaning. This is because, in principle, this notion cannot be empirically verified. We have seen that Preti drew on this view when criticizing metaphysical realism. On the contrary, Parrini argues that the notion of a metaphysical reality in itself is not meaningless and that it is somehow legitimated by the problem of knowledge11 and implicit in the way we ordinarily conceive of cognition, within what Husserl calls the natural attitude.12 For this reason, Parrini claims that the critique of the notion of an absolute reality must be developed on a different, meta-ontological level.13

9 Parrini, Paolo. 2006. A priori materiale e forme trascendentali della conoscenza. Alcuni interroga- tivi epistemologici. In: A priori materiale. Uno studio fenomenologico, ed. R. Lanfredini, 15–39. Milan: Guerini. 35. 10 For example, experience alone cannot tell us if within Newtonian physics (with its implicit pos- tulation of absolute space and time and the Euclidean structure of physical space) the “clash” with new experimental data is due to the physical or to the geometrical component. As we know, whereas Lorentz’s transformations adapt the laws of optics to the new data (thus preserving the absolute character of space and time), Einstein chooses to turn the constant value of the speed of light into a constitutive principle of the theory of special relativity (thus renouncing the absolute- ness of space and time). On these themes see especially: Parrini, Paolo. 2012. Fenomenologia e empirismo logico. In: Storia della fenomenologia, ed. A. Cimino, V. Costa, 81–110. Rome: Carocci; Parrini, Paolo. 2014. About the “Parting of the Ways.” Three Roads or Four? Philinq II, 2:141–159. 11 Parrini, Il problema del realismo, 33. 12 See ibid., 24. 13 Parrini, Paolo. 2015. Ontologia e epistemologia. In: Architettura della conoscenza e ontologia, ed. R. Lanfredini, 39–77. Milan: Mimesis. 70. 166 A. Pace Giannotta

By drawing on Carnap’s notion of explication, Parrini argues that a fundamental philosophical task is to elaborate or rationally reconstruct the concepts that we ordinarily make use of in an “unreflective” way. Parrini develops this analysis concerning the main epistemological notions: reality, objectivity, truth and knowledge. In the light of this analysis, he claims that, notwithstanding the fact that the notion of metaphysical reality is not meaningless, from the epistemological point of view it is concretely “inoperative.” This is because of the “impossibility of directly com- paring it with our beliefs.”14 That is, looking at our concrete cognitive practices, when we have to solve disputes and disagreements (for instance when two people disagree concerning the alignment of a painting attached to the wall, in an example made by Heidegger), the notion of metaphysical reality is of no use. This is because this notion of reality would be absolutely independent from cognitive practices such as the measurement through instruments (e.g. a spirit level) or the comparison between dream and wakefulness, veridical perception and hallucination. What we can concretely do in our cognitive practices, both ordinary and scientific, is to compare our epistemic claims to a reality that is given within experience and that can be thus known only on the basis of various epistemic presuppositions (linguistic, theoretical and methodological). This analysis leads Parrini to reject the notion of metaphysical reality, which always risks turning into scepticism, in order to develop an epistemological view that is centred on the notion of empirical reality. At the same time, Parrini also redefines the concepts of truth and objectivity, conceiving of them not in correspondentistic and representational terms but as empty regulative ideals. This means that the notions of truth and objectivity do not have an unchangeable content. They are ideals that guide our cognitive efforts towards syntheses of the empirical data that are more and more broad and inclusive. Drawing on a metaphor from Georg Simmel, Parrini likens the notions of truth and objectivity to “‘empty buckets’ which are filled at the river of history”15 and that receive their content from the best theories that we are able to develop at a given time. Parrini’s epistemological view is therefore anti-foundationalist and anti- absolutist, constituting a “third way”—or, better, a “narrow way”16—between radical relativism and metaphysical realism. This narrow way is aimed at safeguarding the objectivity of our epistemic claims without falling into the absolutization of the object of knowledge, which is always at risk of turning into radical scepticism. At the heart of this view there is an empiricist and a constructivist aspect. The empiricist aspect is contained in the negation of the synthetic a priori when understood in terms of necessary and universal validity. The constructivist aspect consists in acknowledging the crucial cognitive role of principles that are produced by human thinking.

14 Parrini, Il problema del realismo, 46. (My translation). 15 Parrini, Knowledge and Reality, 151. 16 See Lecis, Luigi. 2013. La via stretta tra realismo metafisico e relativismo radicale. In: A Plea for Balance in Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Paolo Parrini, ed. R. Lanfredini, A. Peruzzi, 253–268. Pisa: ETS. Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 167

2 The Phenomenological Way: Empirical Basis and Constitution

The above seen epistemological view is based on the possibility of empirically testing our theories, notwithstanding the fact that the theoretical constructions that account for experience can change over time. It is in relation to the possibility of empirically verifying our theories that Husserl’s phenomenology comes into play at the heart of Parrini’s epistemological thought. According to Parrini, Husserl’s phenomenology constitutes a “fourth way” that is different from the three ways that Friedman17 sees as separating and moving in different directions in twentieth- century philosophy: neokantianism, logical empiricism and Heideggerian hermeneutics.18 The “phenomenological way” allows us to address the issue of the empirical basis of knowledge in a specific manner.

2.1 Husserl and Kant: The Cognitive Role of Intuition

In order to show the specific features of the “phenomenological way” in Parrini’s thought, we can follow, as a guiding thread, the relationship between Husserl and Kant. Parrini highlights the continuity between the Kantian and the Husserlian conceptions of knowledge in terms of an intertwining of form and matter. This is in contrast with the downplaying of the material dimension of knowledge in some neo-Kantians (such as Paul Natorp) and in the logical empiricists (especially Moritz Schlick). To be precise, Parrini highlights the fact that in some reviews in the years 1910–1916 Schlick showed an appreciation of a central theme in Husserl’s phenomenology:19 the essential role of empirical-intuitive components in the process of knowing, as opposed to the downplaying of these elements in some neo- Kantians. According to Schlick, the latter insisted on the formal and conceptual dimension in Kant’s analysis of knowledge to the detriment of the material content. However, according to Kant, the material content has an essential role in accounting for the possibility of having knowledge of a particular object (as we know, for Kant concepts without intuitions are empty and the forms of our sensibility synthetically unify a given sensory manifold).

17 Friedman, Michael. 2000. A Parting of the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger. Chicago–La Salle: Open Court. 18 Friedman refers to the three “ways” that were represented by Ernst Cassirer, Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger at a famous meeting in Davos in 1929. On this theme see Parrini, Fenomenologia ed empirismo logico; Parrini, About the “Parting of the Ways”; Parrini, Paolo. 2017. A priori, Objectivity and Judgment. Crossing the Paths of Kantianism, Phenomenology and Neo- Empiricism: A Tribute to Giulio Preti. Diogenes 61(2):59–72. 19 Parrini, About the “Parting of the Ways”, 145ff. 168 A. Pace Giannotta

However, in the same years, Schlick strongly criticized the “philosophies of intuition” in authors such as Henry Bergson, Bertrand Russell (with the notion of “knowledge by acquaintance”) and Husserl. Concerning the latter, Schlick criticizes the theory of eidetic intuition (Wesensschau) and sets it up against the distinction between Kennen (immediate intuition, understood as a dyadic relation between subject and object) and Erkennen (knowledge, understood as a triadic relation between knower, known, and that through which the known is re-cognized). This distinction is aimed at denying the cognitive import of intuition, which according to Schlick pertains to the domain of life, which is distinct from knowledge. However, according to Parrini, Schlick’s view does not account for an element of the process of knowing that is essential in the neo-empiricist view, i.e. the empirical- observative dimension that is at the base of the cognitive edifice (and that is expressed by propositions whose problematic status is at the heart of the so-called “protocol-sentence debate”).20 The reference to the phenomenological theory of knowledge has a central role in Parrini’s view, which requires that experience provides us with a relatively neutral basis for empirically testing the theories, thus avoiding the drift towards radical relativism due to the strong version of the theory-ladenness thesis (vacuousness of empirical testing and incommensurability of scientific theories). Husserl’s phenomenology points out the possibility of accounting for the empirical basis of knowledge, by means of its acknowledgement of the essential role of intuition in the cognitive process.

2.2 Form and Matter

However, Parrini also highlights some problematic and open aspects of the phenomenological view concerning the relationship between form and matter. These problematic aspects lead us to find a tension between empiricism and constructivism in the phenomenological theory of knowledge.21 In order to highlight this tension, we must look in detail at the phenomenological analysis of intuition and, specifically, of perception. According to Husserl, the perceptual process involves the combination of two elements: intentional form (morphè) and sensory matter (hyle). The concrete perceptual act consists in the intentional “animation” of hyletic contents. However, in § 85 of Ideas I Husserl raises the problem of defining the precise relationship between these two aspects of experience, asking if we can accept “formless matters”

20 For the comparison between Husserl and Schlick on the theme of intuition see: Lanfredini, Roberta. 2002. Conoscibilità del contenuto: forma e intuizione in Schlick e Husserl. In: Forma e contenuto. Aspetti di teoria della conoscenza, della mente e della morale, ed. R. Lanfredini, 67–84. Milan: LED. 21 See Parrini, A priori, Objectivity and Judgment, 7. Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 169 and “stuffless forms.”22 In Ideas I, Husserl leaves this issue open, suggesting that the answer requires the “genetic” broadening of phenomenology, by investigating the temporal constitution of experiences. I stress the fact that this open question in phenomenology concerns the possibility of finding a material basis of knowledge that is devoid of any formal element. As we know, in the light of the transcendental arguments, Kant ruled out this possibility: we must exclude the possibility of “judgements of perception” that do not involve the intervention of categories (for example the category of substance in perceiving something that lasts over time or the category of cause in perceiving a temporal succession). In this way, Kant’s view is different from reductionist empiricism, which claims to find a pure dimension of experience that is not conditioned by subjective-formal presuppositions. At this point, we can ask about the position of Husserl’s phenomenology in the contrast between Kant’s view and reductionist empiricism. From the phenomenological standpoint, we can ask: is it possible to isolate a pure hyletic basis that is absolute, being not dependent on formal conditions (which after the crisis of Kantianism in the light of scientific revolutions could be considered as changeable with the change of conceptual frameworks)?

2.2.1 Phenomenology and Realism

The relationship between form and matter is an open issue in Husserl’s phenomenology and it crisscrosses the problem of realism. Some central phenomenological notions, such as eidetic intuition, material a priori and material ontology could be seen as implying an absolutistic conception of the object of knowledge and in particular of the object of perception and therefore of the “material thing” that appears in perception. This is what is claimed by the so-called “realist” interpretations of phenomenology. According to them, the motto “to the things themselves” refers to the possibility of phenomenologically describing material reality “in itself,” independently of the relationship with a knowing subject. However, Parrini criticizes these views, which end up to claim a naïve form of metaphysical realism. In particular, according to some phenomenological realists, material reality is endowed with objective properties that are not only physical-mathematical but also “qualitative”— in contrast with the “scientific” form of metaphysical realism, which conceives of the so-called “secondary” properties as merely subjective appearances.23

22 Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (trans: Kersten, F.). The Hague: M. Nijhoff. § 85. 23 An example of realist phenomenology is Barry Smith’s “qualitative ontology”: Smith, Barry. 1995. The Structures of the Common-Sense World. Acta Philosophica Fennica 58:298–317; Smith, Barry. 1999. The Truth and the Visual Field. In: Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. J. Petitot, F.J. Varela, B. Pachoud, and J.-M. Roy, 317–329. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. This view brings together Husserl’s phenomenology with James Gibson’s ecological theory of perception. The latter, in turn, implies a form of “direct” or “naïve” realism (see Gibson, James J. 1967. New Reasons for Realism. Synthese 170 A. Pace Giannotta

Parrini’s epistemological inquiry leads us to highlight the fact that the notion of reality that is involved in these realist interpretations of phenomenology is the concept of an absolute-metaphysical reality. These views conceive of knowledge as the mirroring of a transcendent reality that is pre-constituted with respect to the cognitive process that leads us to directly know it. However, following Preti’s teaching, Parrini highlights the fact that Husserl’s phenomenology brings into question the notion of an absolutely transcendent reality (metaphysical reality). This is because the phenomenological inquiry is developed as an “immanent” analysis of the cognitive process and therefore of the correlation between subject and object. In fact, according to Husserl the notion of metaphysical reality involves a “material countersense.”24 We must also notice that Husserl develops this critique to the notion of absolutely transcendent reality by referring to the process of “absolutizing Nature as conceived by physics,”25 within scientific realism—or, better, within the metaphysical version of scientifical realism.26 That is, within what Sellars called the “scientific image of the world.”27 In Husserl’s view, the scientific image is based on the abstraction of the so-called “primary properties” of the object of experience in order to isolate the component that can be mathematized and idealized. This is the operation through which we construe scientific objectivity and it is valid provided that we don’t take “for true being what is actually a method.”28 However, the “naïve” or “common sense” form of metaphysical realism could be conceived of as legitimised by phenomenological notions such as eidetic intuition and material a priori. At the same time, Husserl’s critique to the metaphysical hypostatization of the object of physical-mathematical knowledge can be extended to any claim of reaching knowledge of reality considered “in itself,” independently of its being constituted as the correlate of a series of cognitive processes. In fact, the phenomenological theory of

17(2):162–172; Gibson, James J. 1972. A Theory of Direct Visual Perception. In: The Psychology of Knowing, ed. J.R. Royce, W.W. Rozeboom. New York: Gordon & Breach). However, in contrast with Gibson’s direct realism, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology conceives of the object of perception as the correlate of a process of constitution. For this reason, the material thing is not an absolutely transcendent reality with respect to the cognitive process (on this point see: Zohk, Andrea. 2013. On the Reality of Percepts: Husserl and Gibson. Phenomenology and Mind 4:46– 53). On the contrary, Smith argues that by combining Husserl’s phenomenology with Gibson’s ecological theory it is possible to develop “a radically new, realist interpretation of Husserl’s ‘constitutive phenomenology’” (Smith, Truth and the Visual Field, 319) and “a new, naturalized interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology.” (Ibid., 317). 24 Husserl, Ideas I, 90. On this point and in relation to the crucial concept of motivational links see: Lanfredini, Roberta. 2004. Fenomeno e cosa in sè. Tre livelli di impossibilità fenomenologica. In: Fenomenologia applicata. Esempi di analisi descrittiva, ed. R. Lanfredini. Milan: Guerini. 25 Husserl, Ideas I, 101. 26 On the distinction between an empirical and a metaphysical version of scientific realism see: Parrini, Sapere e interpretare, 61. See also Parrini, Knowledge and Reality, 115ff. 27 See Sellars, Wilfrid. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In: Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. R. Colodny. 35–78. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 28 Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (trans: Carr, D.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 51. Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 171 knowledge claims the relative and not absolute transcendence of the object, which is constituted as the correlate of constitutive functions of subjectivity. Therefore, following Kant, Husserl seems to reject all forms of metaphysical realism, admitting the empirical and not metaphysical reality of the object of experience within a correlative analysis of knowledge.

2.2.2 Kant’s Concept of Truth

Parrini addresses the issue of realism in phenomenology by analysing some Heideggerian passages, where the author of Being and Time seems to argue for a phenomenologically based form of metaphysical realism. Parrini contrasts these passages with a specific interpretation of Kant’s concept of truth. Drawing on the above-seen example, Heidegger considers two people that turn towards a wall to verify the truth-value of the judgement according to which a painting is hanged crookedly. According to Heidegger, when I turn towards the wall I am not directed towards mental representations. On the contrary, I am directed towards the “thing itself” that, in this way, is directly known.29 However, Parrini argues against Heidegger that, notwithstanding the fact that we are directed towards the wall and the painting, the truth-value of our judgements concerning the alignment of the painting depends on their congruence with a set of principles that are at the basis of the constitution of cognitive objectivity. For instance, I must make use of measurements, which are based on a set of constitutive principles that are relatively a priori.30 Furthermore, I must compare and synthesize different experiences in order to verify that I am really perceiving the painting and I am not dreaming or having a hallucination. Parrini thus opposes a specific reading of the Kantian concept of truth to the naïve or direct realism that is expressed in the above seen Heideggerian passages.31 He does so by distinguishing between nominal definition and the criterion of the truth of the judgement. In giving the nominal definition, Kant draws on the traditional concept of truth as the agreement of a cognition with its object. However, the crucial point is to define the criterion through which we can evaluate the alleged truth of our judgements. According to Kant, in the case of empirical judgements this criterion consists in its agreement not only with material conditions (a given sensory manifold) but also with formal conditions. These formal conditions of truth consist in the conformity of the judgement with a series of operations through which we establish, for example, the difference between veridical perception and hallucination or between wakefulness and dream. In fact, according to Kant the difference between dream and wakefulness is not found in the material content of the

29 See Parrini, A priori, Objectivity and Judgment, 8. 30 Parrini, Paolo. 1994. On Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: Truth, Form, Matter. In: Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, ed. P. Parrini, 195–230. Dordrecht: Springer. 31 See ibid. 172 A. Pace Giannotta

representations (which can be identical in both cases). The difference is found in the agreement or not of these representations with the principles that rule correct judgement and that constitute, at the same time, the conditions of possibility of experience. Kant argues that knowing does not mean to faithfully mirror a pre-constituted reality but it means to unify a given sensory manifold through constitutive functions of subjectivity. This constructivist element in Kant’s view is in part present also in Husserl’s phenomenology. Also according to Husserl, in order to establish the truth of our cognitive claims and therefore their reference to empirical reality, we must insert the individual manifestation in the context of a series of experiences that are motivated and concordant to one another. The criterion of truth is found in the genetic-motivational connection between phenomena.32 This is the connection that breaks up in dreams and hallucination, where the experiential course turns out to be full of gaps and inconsistencies. Therefore, in Husserl’s view, the immediate presence of an hyletic datum (e.g. a sensation of red) is not sufficient for perceiving an object (e.g. a red cherry). Perceiving requires the intentional animation of hyletic contents within a coherent experiential course, through which the material thing is constituted as the unitary correlate of an experiential synthesis. This is a constructivist element, of a Kantian origin, in the phenomenological conception of the constitution as correlation subjective-objective, which leads us to claim the empirical and not metaphysical reality of the object that is transcendent to consciousness.

2.2.3 The Material A Priori

The issue of realism in phenomenology is strictly linked to the notion of material a priori. This notion seems to refer to the possibility of having a priori knowledge (i.e. universal and necessary knowledge) of the content or matter of knowing, which would be expressed through apodictic judgements. Parrini discusses the epistemological features of these judgements that, according to Husserl, would express the necessary connection between material contents of experience (e.g. the relationship of bilateral foundation between color and extension of a visual object, or between timbre and duration of a sound). According to Parrini, considering the synthetic (i.e. informative) character of these judgements and their a priori character (i.e. universal and necessary validity) leads us to ask if they clash with the same criticisms that have been raised against Kant’s concept of synthetic a priori in the light of scientific revolutions. According to Kant, the demonstration of the universal and necessary validity of synthetic a priori judgements is a normative and not factual matter. These judgements have a de jure and not de facto validity, which is demonstrated by the transcendental arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason. As is known, Kant’s transcendental turn consists in reaching the level of normativity in epistemology. The

32 Husserl, Ideas I, 89. See also: Lanfredini, Fenomeno e cosa in sè, 171; Lanfredini, Roberta. 2006. La nozione fenomenologica di dato. In: A priori materiale. Uno studio fenomenologico, ed. R. Lanfredini, 59–94 (91–93); Lanfredini, Roberta. 2012. Fenomenologia e epistemologia. In: Storia della fenomenologia, ed. A. Cimino, V. Costa, 395–416 (411–412). Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 173 normativity of synthetic a priori judgements comes from the fact that they express the conditions without which experience (be it “internal” or “external”) would not be possible (e.g. the perception of permanence over time or the temporal succession of phenomena). However, subsequent scientific developments have attacked Kant’s claim of having established conditions of possibility of experience that are given once for all and that are unchangeable. Is it the same concerning Husserl’s material a priori judgements? Should we acknowledge their revisability and therefore their non-apodicticity? A phenomenological answer to this objection can consist in claiming that, with this notion in mind, Husserl refers to the essential structure of sensory givenness (e.g. the essential connection between color and extension) and that this givenness does not require the intervention of concepts. On the contrary, it requires an intuitive unification.33 Therefore, being not pertaining to the conceptual level, the material a priori judgements are not subject to revisions induced by theoretical changes. However, Parrini observes that this line of argument leads us to an outcome that is different from Kant’s view, limiting us to the claim of a merely psychological-subjective validity and not a transcendental validity in the Kantian sense.34 This is because the material a priori judgements are not based on a transcendental deduction (which Kant conceives of in a juridical sense, being aimed at demonstrating the validity in principle of certain propositions and not their merely factual validity). For this reason, the material a priori judgements would express the structure of human sensibility, being essentially dependent on factual-contingent presuppositions. In this way, material a priori judgements would express a validity that is “a priori” only for beings that have certain factual features and not others.35 However, this conclusion goes against the realistic interpretations of phenomenological ontology, which aim at grasping the essential features of an absolutely transcendent reality (i.e. metaphysical reality). On the contrary, this conclusion leads us to acknowledge the factual basis of the constitution of experience and of the reality that is constituted as its correlate, thus leading us to a phenomenological concept of empirical reality, i.e. a phenomenological form of empirical realism.

3 Lines of Development of Phenomenology in the Light of Positive Philosophy

In this section, I shall point out some lines of development of the phenomenological form of empirical realism that emerges from Parrini’s positive philosophy.

33 See Lanfredini, La nozione fenomenologica di dato. 34 Parrini, A priori materiale e forme trascendentali della conoscenza, 37. 35 Parrini stresses the presence of this fluctuation between the factual-psychological level and the normative level also in Kant, in relation to the individuation of the forms of sensibility and in the way of framing the transcendental deduction of the categories. See Parrini, On Kant’s Theory of Knowledge. 174 A. Pace Giannotta

3.1 Genetic and Embodied Phenomenology

Parrini’s problematization of the notion of material a priori is compatible with a line of development of phenomenology that we can find, firstly, in Husserl himself and, secondly, in Merleau-Ponty. In fact, within the so-called “genetic” broadening of phenomenology, Husserl develops an embodied conception of consciousness that acknowledges the bodily grounding of consciousness and its worldly and intersubjective dimensions.36 In the context of this research, Husserl argues for the essential role of certain bodily structures and functions in the constitution of experience in its polarity subjective-objective. In fact, the phenomenological analysis of the living body (Leib) leads us to highlight the constitutive role of structures and functions that depend on the specific bodily constitution of a living being. These factual features are, at the same time, presuppositions of the constitution, therefore a priori, with a contingent status. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl introduces the concept of contingent a priori.37 The analyses of facticity in genetic phenomenology investigate how the intentional animation of sensory matter depends on the factual constitution of the living body. In this way, the perceptual abilities of a living being turn out to be dependent on its bodily features (its embodiment). These contingent a priori conditions concern both matter and form of perceptual experience, which turn out to depend on the factual constitution of an embodied consciousness.38 Therefore, the phenomenological analyses of corporeality develop in a pre- conceptual and embodied direction the concept of knowledge as constitution. From the standpoint of genetic phenomenology, the primary constitution of objectivity does not require the use of concepts (conceived of as linguistic-propositional entities). On the contrary, it requires certain forms of sensibility, conceived of as a priori presuppositions that are relative to the corporeal constitution of the living subject. This phenomenological analysis of the relative a priori status of bodily structures in the genesis of experience can be also found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Samantha Matherne39 argues that, with his analysis of the concept of body schema, Merleau- Ponty develops in a non-intellectualist way Kant’s doctrine of the schematism. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty redefines the notions of transcendental and a priori, seeing in them the expression of “formal features of our facticity, without which

36 For instance in: Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (trans: Steinbock, A.J.). Dordrecht: Springer; Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (trans: Rojcewicz, R., Schuwer, A.). Dordrecht: Kluwer; Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic (trans: Cairns, D.). The Hague: M. Nijhoff. 37 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 26. 38 On this point, see especially the analyses of the role of the living body in the process of constitution in Ideas II. 39 Matherne, Samantha. 2016. Kantian Themes in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 98(2):193–230. Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 175 there would be no experience.”40 This view is coherent with Husserl’s notion of the “contingent a priori,” claiming that the a priori forms depend on factual features of an embodied subjectivity.41 However, Parrini’s epistemological view leads us to make a clarification, especially in relation to the contemporary attempts at “naturalizing phenomenology.” In fact, the phenomenological analysis of facticity and corporeality must not be confused with an alleged naturalization of phenomenology. “Transcendental” phenomenology is, first of all, a critique of knowledge. Therefore, it is developed on an epistemological and not factual-psychological level. This means that the phenomenological analysis of facticity must be conceived as a development of the theory of knowledge that investigates the fundamental correlation between subject and object in the cognitive process. It is on the basis of this fundamental specification that we can investigate the factual presuppositions of the constitution, reaching a phenomenologically adequate conception of notions such as nature, body and living being.42 This is done within a correlative analysis, which looks at the co-constitution of subject and object in reciprocal dependence in the process of experience. Therefore, this inquiry must not be confused with the hypostatization of the region “nature” within certain attempts at “naturalizing” the mind and phenomenology, which end up conceiving of nature as a fundamental metaphysical dimension to which subjectivity could be traced back to.43

3.2 Phenomenology and the Network Model

The genetic and embodied direction of inquiry in phenomenology combines empiricism and constructivism in the analysis of knowledge. A significant epistemological implication of this line of inquiry is that the embodied a priori forms are pre- conceptual. These forms are conditions of possibility of conceptualization; however,

40 Ibid., 207. 41 This development of phenomenology in a genetic and embodied direction is also at the base of the “enactive” approach developed by Varela, F., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. On this point see Pace Giannotta, Andrea. 2017. Varela on the Pragmatic Dimension of Phenomenology. Constructivist Foundations 13(1):78–81. 42 For the development of the concept of empirical naturalism, which is based on the phenomenological form of empirical realism, as opposed to metaphysical naturalism, see Pace Giannotta, Andrea. 2018. Genetic Phenomenology and Empirical Naturalism. Teoria 38, 2. 43 Parrini stresses the distinction between the “epistemologic” and the “scientific-naturalistic” planes, in constrast with the attempts at “naturalizing epistemology.” According to Parrini, the prospective success of such a project, which is “doubtful” and “far from being realized,” would mean that “not only epistemology, conceived of as the analysis of the conditions of validity of our cognitive claims, but also ontology, conceived of in the terms of the problem of realism and anti- realism would disappear; only natural science would remain.” Parrini, Il problema del realismo, 49. (My translation). See also Parrini, Ontologia e epistemologia, 75. 176 A. Pace Giannotta they do not univocally predetermine conceptualization, since they do not force the experience into fixed conceptual frameworks that are set forever. In this way, it becomes possible to account for two aspects of knowledge that are central in twentieth-century epistemology: the theory-ladenness of observation and the revisability of theories and conceptual frameworks. We have seen that Parrini’s positive philosophy constitutes an alternative to the radical relativism that would follow on from the strong version of the theory- ladenness thesis. In order to do so, it must be possible to test different theories in order to choose the one that is more compatible with experimental results. According to Parrini, this possibility is guaranteed by the “network model” of knowledge that has been developed by Mary Hesse.44 The network model acknowledges at the same time the theory-ladenness of observation and the possibility of finding areas of empirical intersection between competing theories in order to test and compare them. This objective is obtained through a revision of the empiricist theory of concept-formation. Hesse’s “new empiricism” takes up from Quine the concept of an innate and prelinguistic “quality space,” which accounts for the innate power of the human mind to recognize similarities and differences between different situations by “weighing” the features that appear in experience differently and on the basis of tacit criteria.45 The “primary process of recognition of similarities and differences”46 is at the basis of the formation of scientific language and allows us to find areas of empirical intersection between different theories. These differences are revealed by the linguistic behaviour of speakers in front of a certain phenomenon. For example, we can refer to Michelson’s and Morley’s experiment: there is a phenomenon—the vision or not of an interference pattern through the interferometer—that is conceptualized differently within different theories (the aether theory or Einstein’s special relativity). However, we can say that the proponents of different theories share a common and basic phenomenal experience. I would like now to higlight some significant points of contact between Hesse’s network model and phenomenology. In fact, they both develop a sophisticated analysis of the empirical basis of knowledge. However, we have also seen that Husserl’s theory of eidetic intuition could be interpreted in absolutistic terms, within the realist interpretations of phenomenology. On the contrary, the genetic and embodied development of phenomenology investigates the bodily forms that are contingent a priori presuppositions of the constitution, thus limiting the alleged metaphysical implications of the doctrine of eidetic intuition. In accordance with the network model, this analysis leads us to claim the pre-conceptual nature of the empirical basis. The genetic-phenomenological analysis of the a priori forms of sensibility, conceived in bodily and pre-conceptual terms, accounts for the conditions of

44 Hesse, Mary. 1974. The Structure of Scientific Inference. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. See also Lanfredini, Roberta. 1988. Oggetti e paradigmi. Per una concezione interattiva della conoscenza scientifica. Rome: Theoria; Parrini, Knowledge and Reality, 74ff. 45 For the details of this analysis see Parrini, Knowledge and Reality, 74ff. 46 Hesse, The Structure of Scientific Inference, 13. Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini’s Positive Philosophy 177

possibility of those primary recognitions of similarities and differences that the network model founds at the basis of concept-formation. Quine conceived of the notion of “quality space” as the “minimal” innatist requirement of his empiricist view. This notion is taken up by Hesse’s network model and it is coherent with the phenomenological analysis of the qualitative structure of experience. However, this structure must not be conceived of as the structure of an alleged reality in itself (metaphysical realism). On the contrary, it must be understood in the light of the phenomenological empirical realism, which is developed as an analysis of the correlation and co- constitution of subject and object in reciprocal dependence.

3.2.1 Phenomenology and Neutral Monism

Parrini’s analysis of the concepts of reality and truth also allows us to better understand another possible development of embodied and genetic phenomenology. This inquiry goes to the core of the constitution of the life of consciousness in the stream of primal impressions (Urimpressionen). This inquiry can be further developed by conceiving the impressional core of experience as a fundamental “ontological” dimension that precedes the constitution of subject and object. This is because, by investigating the “genesis of constitution,”47 genetic phenomenology investigates the co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. In the light of this analysis, the process through which a certain object is constituted turns out to be the process through which the subjective pole of cognition is also constituted. In this way, the phenomenology of genesis turns out to be close to the view known as neutral monism. This is the view pioneered by philosophers such as Ernst Mach, William James and Bertrand Russell and that is nowadays the object of reas- sessment in various sectors of contemporary philosophy.48 However, in the light of its rational reconstruction of the concepts of reality, truth and objectivity, Parrini’s epistemological inquiry allows us to distinguish between different forms of neutral monism. In particular, we can distinguish Mach’s doctrine of the “neutral elements” from the subsequent development of neutral monism as a form of metaphysical realism in authors such as James and Russell. This interpretation of Mach’s view contrasts with Erik Bank’s interpretation, which stresses the continuity between Mach, James and Russell and conceives of Mach’s view as a philosophy of nature and as a metaphysics of neutral elements. According to this reading, Mach finds in the “elements” a fundamental metaphysical dimension that is pre-subjective and pre- objectual, by conceiving of the subject and the object as constructions from complexes of elements. However, Parrini49 stresses the fact that Mach conceived of

47 Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 644. 48 See Banks, Erik C. 2003. Ernst Mach’s World Elements. A Study in Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer; Stubenberg, Leopold. 2014. Neutral Monism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2014. 49 Parrini, Paolo. 2018. Ernst Mach and the Disenchantment of Metaphysics. In: Ernst Mach tra 178 A. Pace Giannotta this view as a scientific and not metaphysical hypothesis, which aims at investigating the relationship between two scientific disciplines: physics and psychology. Mach thus develops his “neutral monism” in the context of a sharp criticism to the absolutistic claims of metaphysics. For this reason, Parrini warns us against the temptation of making the metaphysical “leap” that consists in conceiving of the pre- subjective and pre-objectual dimension of experience as a “fundamental,” “absolute” or “ultimate” reality that is absolutely independent from contingent presuppositions of the cognitive process. In this way, Parrini’s reading of Mach’s philosophy points to the possibility of conceiving of neutral monism as a scientific-philosophical hypothesis that sets out a general and non-metaphysical conception of reality. This is in accordance, again, with the phenomenological empirical realism that is revealed by Parrini’s positive philosophy.50

Andrea Pace Giannotta obtained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Florence in 2016. Currently, he is a DAAD postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy II at the “Ruhr-Universität” Bochum. He is also a member of the Research Unit “QuaOntoTech” at the University of Florence. In 2018, he was awarded the Philosophy Essay Prize “Vittorio Sainati” (XIIth Edition). He works on topics at the intersection of phenomenology and philosophy of mind, especially concerning intentionality, phenomenal consciousness, and embodied cognition. Among his recent publications are the articles: “Epistemology and Ontology of Quality: An Introduction to the Enactive Approach to Qualitative Ontology” (2016), “Varela on the Pragmatic Dimension of Phenomenology” (2017), “Color Relationism and Enactive Ontology” (2018), and “Genetic Phenomenology and Empirical Naturalism” (forthcoming).

scienza e filosofia, ed. P. Gori, 33–52. Pisa: ETS. 50 In the light of this analysis we can also look at the phenomenological conception of scientific objectivity. Husserl’s criticism of the absolutization of Nature as the object of physics is in accordance with Parrini’s criticism to the metaphysical version of scientific realism, which would presuppose an absolutistic conception of reality. Husserl conceives of the object of natural-mathematical science as the object of a sort of second order constitution, which is based on the primary constitution of the material thing in ordinary experience. The latter, in turn, doesn’t give us access to an alleged metaphysical reality “in itself.” The phenomenological view of experience is therefore centred on the fundamental correlation and co-constitution of the two poles of the cognitive process. At the same time, it is compatible with the empirical and not metaphysical version of scientific realism, which acknowledges the empirical reality of the entities posited by natural science. See Parrini, Knowledge and Reality, 32 and 115ff.; Parrini, Sapere e interpretare, 61.