Ovi Symposium

Part II: 5 December 2013 - 5 June 2014

On the Nature of Art within Modernity & the Envisioning of a New Humanism

Participants: Dr Alessandra Abis, Dr Maria Buccolo, Dr Lawrence Nannery, Dr Ernesto Paolozzi, Dr Emanuel Paparella, Mr Edwin Rywalt and Dr Michael Vena

Ovi Symposium II 1 An Ovi Magazine Books Publication C 2017 Ovi Project Publication - All material is copyright of the Ovi magazine & the writer

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2 Ovi Symposium II Ovi Symposium: On the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism

Thirteen Bi-weekly Sessions: Part II: 5 December 2013 - 5 June 2014

Ovi Symposium II 3 An Ovi Magazine Books Publication C 2017 Ovi Project Publication - All material is copyright of the Ovi magazine & the writer

Ovi books are available in Ovi magazine pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately.

For details, contact: [email protected]

4 Ovi Symposium II Ovi Symposium: On the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism

Participants: Dr Alessandra Abis, Dr Maria Buccolo, Dr Lawrence Nannery, Dr Ernesto Paolozzi, Dr Emanuel Paparella, Mr Edwin Rywalt and Dr Michael Vena

Ovi Symposium II 5 6 Ovi Symposium II Ovi Symposium: On the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism

Thirteen Bi-weekly Sessions: 5 December 2013 - 5 June 2014

Overall View of the Table of Content

Introduction by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella……… p. 9

Meeting Fourteen...... p. 19 Meeting Fifteen...... p. 39 Meeting Sixteen………………………………………………...... p. 60 Meeting Seventeen....………………………………………...... p. 105 Meeting Eighteen……………………………………...... p. 150 Meeting Nineteen …………………………...... p. 186 Meeting Twentyeth……………………………………...... p. 214 Meeting Twenty-first.……………………...... p. 239 Meeting Twenty-second..……………………...... p. 282 Meeting Twenty-third....………………………………………………...... p. 318 Meeting Twenty-fourth...…………………………...... p. 334 Meeting Twenty-fifth……………………...... p. 346 Meeting Twenth-sixth…………………...... p. 359 Meeting Twenty-seventh...... p. 373

Ovi Symposium II 7 8 Ovi Symposium II Introduction for Volume 2 by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella The Ovi Symposium has now been in existence for a total of three years and six months. The first six months (June to December 2013) were published as Volume 1 of the e-book by the same title of Ovi Symposium. The next six months, volume 2, covering 13 bi-monthly meetings (from 5 December 2013 to 5 June 2014) now see the light of day and are in your hands. At the risk of turning this introduction into an exercise in self-congratulations within a mutual admiration society (I’d rather leave that judgment to the readership) I’d like to sincerely thank Thanos Kalamidas, the editor in chief of the magazine, for his constant encouragement for this intellectual enterprise named Ovi Symposium, and for his labor of love in editing and publishing this volume 2 of its e-book. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues who directly contributed to the various presentations and interventions in the above mentioned time-span. They are in alphabetical order by last name: Dr. Alessandra Abis, Dr. Maria Buccolo, Dr. Lawrence Nannery, Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi, Dr. Emanuel Paparella, Mr. Edwin Rywalt, Dr. Michael Vena. Without their invaluable cooperation and suggestions, the project would not have continued to flourish as a collegial universal international conversation. It made my role as coordinator so much more pleasur- able and worthwhile. Some two years after the appearance of volume 1, perhaps it’s time to reassess the success of our efforts and renew a vision of our dialogic journey. In the first place we’d like to stress once again that our initial impetus was the idea of a convivial friendly dialogue (a symposium, as the ancient Greeks called it) on important relevant ideas of our times in the context of Vico’s and Croce’s aesthetics which in effect is also modern aesthetics. From that general theme would then flow other sub-themes presented and discussed on a by-monthly and then later on a monthly basis. The head logos, so to speak, of the Symposium remains “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a new Humanism.” As the reader will surely observe, we have remained faithful to that initial vision not only in its content but even in its form. The project is ongoing and we continue to improve and perfect it. Our dialogue has remained colloquial, convivial, informative, always respectful of others’ opinions and of free speech, reverential toward truth and reason, relevant to our times, devoid of excessive academic jargon so as to remain comprehensible throughout. Thus, as our editor in chief informs us, it has managed to appeal to the vast majority of the Ovi readership; those who are not specialized scholars in the fields we touch upon. We hope it has also become an ongoing dialogue or conversation which, come to think of it, could be the very definition of philosophy: a conversation throughout the ages. Undoubtedly we have a vision to share and a story to tell, the story of Humanism; but, as Plato observed, no story can be told if no one is listening. We are not sleeping on our laurels either. Greater, more ambitious intellectual horizons and goals lie ahead. The envisioning of greater visions and goals is also in the Greek and Renaissance tradition of the Symposium carried on in the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the court of Urbino in the Renaissance. We, with our readers, look forward to the publication of the next volumes and the continuation of our intellectual enterprise offered pro bono for intangible reward such as the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Therefore our motto remains ad majorem. Emanuel L. Paparella Ph.D. February 2017

Ovi Symposium II 9 List of all the Scholars who have contributed and participated in the Sympoium in its First Year (in alphabetical order)

Alessandra Abis is a graduate of the Department of Foreign and Clas- sical Languages and Literatures at the University of Bari. She, with her husband Arcangelo, founded the Adriani Teatro in 1992 in Italy. She has performed in Greek-Latin plays, among others: “Voyage in the Greek World” (Andromaca), “Miles Gloriosus” (Plauto), “The Last Temptation of Socrates (from Plato’s Ione Minor). Also from the Commedia dell’Arte: “Harlequin Doctor Flyer,” and “Without Makeup” (Chechov), “Four Portraits of Mothers,” Lady Madness (Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly).

Maria Buccolo teaches theater at the University of Roma Tre in Rome, Italy. She is a graduate of the University of Bari and has participated in various projects aiming at establishing cultural bridges among nations and people, one of which is the Project for the Integration of Immigrants via the theater “Leonardo da Vinci Transfert Multilaterale dell’Innovazi- one” with the participation of four EU nations: France, Italy. Belgium and Rοmania).

Lawrence Nannery has studied at Boston College, Columbia University and at The New School for Social Research where he obtained his Ph.D. He founded The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal and authored The Esoteric Composition of Kafka’s Corpus. Devising Nihilistic Literature, 2 vols. Mellen Press.

10 Ovi Symposium II Ernesto Paolozzi teaches history of contemporary philosophy at the Uni- versity Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples. A Croce scholar and an expert on historicism, he has written widely and published several books, especially on aesthetics and liberalism vis a vis science. His book Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom was printed as an e-book in Ovi magazine in June 2013.

Emanuel Paparella has a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism with a dissertation on Giambattista Vico from Yale University. He currently teaches philosophy at Barry University and Broward College in Florida, USA. One of his books is titled Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of G. Vico, Mellen Press. His latest e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers was printed in Ovi magazine in June 2013.

Edwin Rywalt is a computer specialist living in Pennsylvania with his family. He is a talented and accomplished pianist with a college education from Columbia University and a life---long scholarly interest in the nexus between science, technology, and the liberal arts. Beginning in May 2014 he will be offering pro bono services to the Ovi Symposium with typo correction editing and other useful suggestions aiming at improving the overall format of the twice a month section of Ovi magazine. Perhaps in the future, if his commitments allow it, he may decide to join the Symposium’s ongoing dialogue.

Michael Vena is a former professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University. He has a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism (with a dissertation on Leon Battista Alberti) from Yale University. He has published a book on Italian theater titled Italian Grotesque Theater (2001). Recently he has published an English collection of modern Italian plays by well known playwrights such as Pirandello, Fabbri and De Filippo.

Ovi Symposium II 11 12 Ovi Symposium II Detailed View of the Table of Content for each Meeting

Meeting 14: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella……..p.20 Section 1: “Reflections on Gorky on the Power of Art.” A presentation by Lawrence Nannery………………………...... p.23 Section 2: “Classicism and Romanticsim.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce………….....p.28 Section 3: A comment by Emanuel L. Paparella on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation……………………………………...... p.31 Section 4: “On Modern and Post-Modern Art. Art for Art’s Sake? Jagede and Appiah’s Afrocentric Art vis a vis ‘Universal’ Western Art.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…....p.32 Section 5: A comment by Ernesto Paolozzi on Emanuel L. Paparella’s presentation…...... p.38

Meeting 15: Introductory Notes by the symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…….p.40 Section 1: “The Nexus between Language and Historicism in Vico’s Philosophy vis a vis Modern Hermeneutics.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella……...... p.42 Section 2: “Aesthetics as Linguistics and Art as language” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce……...... p.51 Section 3: A comment by Emanuel L. Paparella on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation…...... p.56 Section 4: An announcement of Ernesto Paolozzi’s latest essay on Croce’s thought recently published in The Philosophical Bulletin of the University of Calabria (Vol. XXVIII, 2013), an issue dedicated to the commemoration of Croce’s philosophy, soon to appear in its English translation in the Ovi Symposium...... p.57

Ovi Symposium II 13 Meeting 16: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella………p.61 Section 1: “Scientific Reality vis a vis the Complementarity of Vico’s Historicism.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…………………………………..p.63 Section 2: “Benedetto Croce and the Re-evaluation of the Complexity of Science.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his essay published in Bollettino Filosofico (n. XXVIII, 2013) of the University of Calabria...…………...... p.67 Section 3: Paparella’s Observations on Paolozzi’s presentation, followed from by a comment from Paolozzi…………………………………………..p.88 Section 4: Paolozzi’s thought-provoking Aphorisms on Freedom with a brief discussion between Paparella and Paolozzi by way of an initial exploration of the thorny philosophical issue truth/freedom……...………p.92 Section 5: “On Heidegger’s Essay ‘The Origin of a Work of Art.’” A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery, followed by a comment from Paparella and a response by Nannery………………...... p.94

Meeting 17: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella……..p.106 Section 1: Art in the World of Technology: Martin Heidegger.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica (Events in Aesthetics, chapter V), Naples, 1989………...... p.107 Section 2: “Jurgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Exploring Martin Heidegger’s Nazi Past within the duality Theory/Practice in Philosophy.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella………...... p.118 Section 3: Observations and Comments by Paparella on Paolozzi’s Presentation by way of a Dialogue and Exchange of ideas………...... p.131 Section 4: A Warm Welcome to Dr. Michael Vena………………...... p.134 Section 5: Kafka’s Kehre by Lawrence Nannery………...... p.135

Meeting 18: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella……..p.151 Section 1: “Theatrical Arts at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.” A presentation by Michael Vena from the introduction to his book Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century (2013)…………………...... p.154 Section 2: Annotated List of Three Recently Published Books, in English, on Italian Theater…………………………...... p.158 Section 3: “Diego Fabbri’s Theater as the Trial of Western Civilization.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…...... p.162 Section 4: “Aporias of Italian Aesthetics after Croce.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (part one) as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica……...... p.166 14 Ovi Symposium II Section 5: By way of a dialogue with Paolozzi on the theme of his presentation: The concluding chapter from Paparella’s Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers: “The Nature of Art as a Problematic of Aesthetics”………...... p.174 Section 6: A comment by Paolozzi on Paparella’s previous presentation on Heidegger and Habermas with a brief response by Paparella………....p.184

Meeting 19: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella……...p.187 Section 1: “The Problem of the Two Cultures and how to Bridge them: a Revisiting.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella………………….p.188 Section 2: “Aporias of Italian aesthetics after Croce: Autonomy and Universality of Art: the Arts and their genres.” Second concluding part of a presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica……...... p.195 Section 3: “Enrico Cavacchioli and the Meta-theater.” A presentation by Michael Vena by way of an essay from his book Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century (2013)………………………………………..p.203 Section 4: A response by Paparella to Vena’s presentation on Enrico Cavacchioli……...... p.212 Section 5: A warm welcome from the Ovi Symposium’s team to Dr. Alessandra Abis as a new member………………...... p.213

Meeting 20: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…….p.215 Section 1: “An Invitation to the Hermeneutics of the Self via Vico’s New Science and Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…...... p.216 Section 2: “Introduction and Survey of the History of the Adriani Teatro.” A presentation by Alessandra Abis with a brief introduction by Emanuel L. Paparella………...... p.226 Section 3: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis.” An introduction to a future presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica………………………………………...... p.235 Section 4: “Michael Vena on Luigi Chiarelli: a review by Professor Frank Nuessel of Michael Vena’s pedagogical book on Luigi Chiarelli’s play La maschera e il volto’” (The Mask and the Face)…………...... p.236 Section 5: A warm welcome from the Ovi Symposium to Maria Buccolo…….....p.238

Meeting 21: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…..p.241

Ovi Symposium II 15 Section 1: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis: part one.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’ Estetica (chapter 6)………………………………………………...... p.243 Section 2: “Does the Center Hold? And is the Enlightenment still to Enlighten itself? Philosophical Reflections on the Spiritual Identity of Europe apropo of the Crisis in the Ukraine.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella……...... p.252 Section 3: “Is Vico Hegel’s Predecessor? ‘An unknown page from Hegel’s last few months of life.’” An imaginary conversation with Hegel by Benedetto Croce”...... p.262 Section 4: “Profile of a Great Italian Playwright: Luigi Chiarelli.” A presentation by Michael Vena…………………...... p.276

Meeting 22: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella….p.284 Section 1: A comment by Ernesto Paolozzi on Emanuel L. Paparella’s previous presentation on the roots of Europe “Does the Center Hold”?, followed by a follow-up reply by Paparella…………...... p.285 Section 2: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis: part two and conclusion.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica (chapter 6)……………………...... p.287 Section 3: “The Three Brothers”: Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism in Italy and the EU-Envisioning a New Humanism?” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella……...... p.299 Section 4: An interview to Ernesto Paolozzi on Benedetto Croce’s Influence on Italian culture as it appeared in the online journal “La Voce di New York” on March 15, 2014…………………………...... p.307 Section 5: Two brief comments by Emanuel L. Paparella on two excerpted statements from Ernesto Paolozzi’s interview……………………….p.311 Section 6: “One Theater for Peace: A theatrical methodology to develop an education for peace.” A presentation by Alessandra Abis of the Teatro Adriani………...... p.313

Meeting 23: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…p.319 Section 1: a brief follow-up dialogue on the previous presentations by Ernesto Paolozzi and Emanuel L. Paparella on the nature of liberty and the nexus between Italian unification and emigration……...... p.320 Section 2: “The European Union’s Constitution: the Cart before the Horse?” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…………………………….p.323 Section 3: “Games and Theater to Foment Change in Work Places: TEJACO –The Innovative Multilateral European Project Leonardo da Vinci.” A presentation by Maria Buccolo (translated from the Italian by Emanuel L. Paparella)……...... p.329

16 Ovi Symposium II Meeting 24: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…...... p.335 Section 1: “Europe and Southern Italy.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi taken from an article which appeared in La Repubblica on May 10, 2009………...... p.337 Section 2: “The Janus-Face of Western Civilization: Will it Resurrect from the Ashes?” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella……………………….p.339

Meeting 25: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…….p.347 Section 1: “A Profile of the Comedic Playwright Gaetano di Mayo.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi………...... p.348 Section 2: Playwright Vaclav Havel’s Conspiracy of Hope vis a vis the EU’s Cultural Identity and the Ongoing Political Crisis in the Ukraine.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella………………...... p.352

Meeting 26: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…….p.360 Section 1: “Christopher Dawson and the Making of Europe.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…………...... p.363 Section 2: “Erwin Chargaff and Benedetto Croce.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi……………………………...... p.368 Section 3: A brief comment by Edwin Rywalt on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation as regards the awarding of Nobel prizes………………………………...p.371 Section 4: A Relevant Excerpt from Robert W. Weisberg’s Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention and the Arts (2006)……...... p.372

Meeting 27: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella…….p.374 Section 1: Automaton-Soul: A Philosophical Colloquium between two eminent Italian philosophers: Maurizio Ferraris and Ernesto Paolozzi from the philosophical journal Cerchio e Freccia, translated into English by Emanuel L. Paparella…………………...... p.377 Section 2: A Brief Commentary by Paparella on Ferraris and Paolozzi’s Colloquium: “Soul-Automaton”……………...... p.386 Section 3: Envisioning a New Humanism beyond the Dichotomy Science/ Humanism. A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella…...... p.388 Section 4: Aesthetics as Digital Reproduction From the Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, Chapter 14 By Emanuel L. Paparella...... p.391

Ovi Symposium II 17 18 Ovi Symposium II Chapter 14 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” 5 December 2013 Table of Content for the 14th Meeting of the Symposium Introductory Note by the symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella Section 1: “Reflections on Gorky on the Power of Art.” A presentation by Lawrence Nannery. Section 2: “Classicism and Romanticsim.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce. Section 3: A comment by Emanuel L. Paparella on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation. Section 4: “On Modern and Post-Modern Art. Art for Art’s Sake? Jagede and Appiah’s Afrocentric Art vis a vis ‘Universal’ Western Art.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 5: A comment by Ernesto Paolozzi on Emanuel L. Paparella’s presentation.

Ovi Symposium II 19 Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator This 14th session of the symposium focuses on dichotomies in aesthetics: romantic/classical, primitive/ modern, universal/particular. More specifically Ernesto Paolozzi deals with the first of the three, Lawrence Nannery deals with the second, and Emanuel L. Paparella deals with the third. Consciously or unconsciously, the context remains Vichian-Crocean. Indeed, both Vico and Croce were concerned with the role of imagination within rationality and the power of aesthetics to transcend and free us from the inherent difficulties of the human condition. Historically such concerns span two centuries (18th century for Vico and 20th century for Croce) and render their philosophy unique and very relevant to our modern concerns. Alas, in the era of Cartesian rationalism little attention was given to Vico’s thought in the 18th century and even less, in the era of logical positivism, to that of Croce in the 20th century after his death. In section one Nannery proposes that all forms of art are “play,” explores the psychology of art, unique to us humans, a plausible reason why imagination has fallen out of use in the 20th century, and Paul Radin’s “blaze of reality” of primitive man vis a vis the psychological reality of modern man. In section two Paolozzi explores a thorny aesthetic issue already broached and partially discussed in the previous session: namely the philosophical-aesthetic issue, as introduced in the symposium by the same Paolozzi via his Ovi e-book on Benedetto Croce’s thought, as to whether or not art can be categorized into genres and epochs (for example ancient, gothic, renaissance, baroque, romantic, modern, post-modern, etc.) or should all genuine art be unified under the heading of classical; that is to say, is art always classical in itself when, no matter when or where it is produced, it adheres to the ancient Greek concept of Beauty as a form (Plato) together with the more modern concept of the sublime within Beauty (Kant); does the poetical unify all great art as both Vico and Croce tend to assert? In other words, is all genuine art ipso facto classical and beautiful and poetical as long as it is imbued by arête (excellence) and sublimity and remains interrelated with the transcendental forms, the Good and the True? Paolozzi dwells on this crucial point while exploring the all-encompassing Crocean definition of what constitutes the classical in art. This intriguing discussion continues with a comment by Paparella (section three). Paolozzi in turn follows-up with a pertinent comment of his own (section five) on Paparella’s presentation (section four) dealing with the universality of Western Art vis a vis the purported particularity of African Art. Kant, and Croce too, would undoubtedly add that art’s beauty is a universal idea and that one knows intuitively when what is declared to be art is mere art-craft or pseudo art. Hume however, as we have already examined in a previous session, would insist that beauty is subjective, it dwells in the eye of the beholder or the perceiver; it is moreover a matter of taste or “buon gusto,” to say it in Italian, and since as humans we are all endowed not only with reason but with the same general decent feelings and good taste, which either attract us to what it is beautiful or induces revulsion toward what is ugly, we generally end up agreeing on what constitutes a genuine work of art. But things are not that simple as Hume would like to contend. As we have seen in the previous session, there are in fact disagreements, even vehement ones, on whether or not, for example, a urinal or an artist’s excrements exposed in a museum, or a crucifix immersed in urine, are to be considered works of art simply because they are in a famous museum or because the artist and/or museum’s curator have declared them so, or indeed, if the Dada movement’s anti-art stance and the wanton provocative destruction of what is

20 Ovi Symposium II beautiful constitutes art in any way, shape or form, not to speak of the disparagement with which both Hume and even Kant, in their more unguarded moments have at times portrayed non-European African races while all along championing universal ideas. There are even disagreements within a purely Eurocentric aesthetics on whether the Baroque is a beautiful form of art, or a hideous exaggeration. Try as one may, one will find precious few post-Renaissance baroque pieces of architecture in non-Catholic northern European countries; and this remains an intriguing historical fact even if we grant that there is such thing as good baroque and bad baroque. Obviously the baroque in those countries is associated with a particular (Catholic) culture. The same holds for the Gothic which Voltaire considered barbaric hence the name gothic which he coined as a way of disparaging that particular form of art. In Italy, for example there are very few Gothic cathedrals, most of them are Romanesque, the Milan Duomo being a notable exception. So much for the universalism of Eurocentric art! Be that as it may, historically, in the Western world, art has consistently been identified as Eurocentric and the attitude toward art produced in other parts of the world has remained condescendingly paternalistic, even contemptuous. To explore this problematic of the universality of art judged by particular Western philosophical standards and criteria, Paparella examines, in section three, the particular views on aesthetics of three African-Amer- ican authors, artists and philosophers; namely Dade Jegede, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and V.Y. Midimbe. The three artists and scholars, all professors at prestigious universities, can be designated as African-Amer- icans in the strictly literal sense of that term: while they reside and work in the US, a country of which they are citizens, they were born in Africa; the first one in Nigeria, the second in Ghana and the third in the Con- go. The US born, more generally designated African-American novelist and author James Baldwin, and the Sudanese Yambo Ouologuem are also briefly mentioned in the presentation. Altogether these African-Americans aesthetic theorists and artists present us with a compelling argument, namely that the so called universality and consequent purported superiority of Western Eurocentric Art is a canard that rationalizes a traditional imperialistic cultural hubris and misguidedly proclaims that only the Western artist, beginning with the Romantic, so romanticized by Hegel’s theory of art, is a self-conscious creator. Paolozzi has pointed out in section two of this session that Croce would not concur with such a misguided Romantic position, especially in regard to what he considers a fallacious dichotomy between classical and romantic art. Neither would Vico who at times has misguidedly been proclaimed a proto-romantic. In his pointed comment on Paparella’s presentation Paolozzi suggests that Croce’s brilliant resolution of the conundrum romantic/classical is by way of a paradox: authentic poetry is both concrete-historical and universal, at the same time; the two do not exclude each other. Here, once again, the echo of both Vico and Croce is unmistakable. Ultimately the readers will have to decide for themselves if those African-American artists and philosophers, as examined in section four, are proposing a Humian relativistic kind of aesthetics, in effect robbing art of its potential for symbolism and transcendence, or are they simply advocating the abandonment of a single European standard purporting to be universal and applicable to all art, which on closer inspection turns out to be biased and favoring one’s own Western views, views at times supported by rather dubious and hypocritical economic motives, if not covert racial prejudice. As hinted above, even a Kant and a Hume were not immune to it.

Ovi Symposium II 21 Nevertheless, under the light of reason, we ought to be able to at least agree that the two phenomena are in this case mutually exclusive and we confuse them at the risk of discrediting and ultimately forgetting the very essence of Beauty, for a civilization that no longer recognizes the nexus between Beauty, Truth and Good- ness is on its way to becoming eventually a doomed civilization inexorably journeying toward its extinction. Here too the three Vichian cycles of the gods, of the heroes and of men is illuminative.

22 Ovi Symposium II 1 Reflections on Gorky on the Power of Art A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) (Excerpt from The Autobiography of Maxim Gorky, Volume One, “My Childhood”, Chapter Three) articularly vivid are my memories of …holiday evenings … [when] curly-headed, rumpled Uncle Jake brought in his guitar, while grandma set out snacks to have with tea, and vodka in a square bottle, Pdecorated around the bottom with a wreath of red glass flowers expertly molded around the base. In his gay, holiday getup, Tsigan was the life of the party. Old Gregory sidled in, peering out of his colored spectacles; also Eugenia, the housemaid, her face raw and pimply, her pudgy torso round as a jug, her cunning eyes twinkling and her reedy voice piping. Among the guests was the hairy deacon from the Uspensky church. The rest had damp and slimy shapes in my memory, like fishes and eels. They guzzled and swilled and panted and children got treats of wine glasses filled with syrup, all of which incited an odd and rather feverish gaiety. As he bent amorously over his guitar, tuning it, Uncle Jake shouted, always the same, identical phrase, “Come on, get started!” With a toss of his head he curled still more caressingly around the guitar, his neck elongating like that of a goose. A dreamy expression came upon his pouched, self-indulgent face; his shifty, sullen eyes were veiled in an oily film. Lightly fingering the strings, he plucked scattered chords which had the effect of involuntarily lifting him to his feet. Jake’s music compelled absolute silence. It cascaded down like a torrent from a distant spring, lapping at the heart and penetrating it with a mysterious unease. Under its spell melancholy overcame us all, and the oldest there felt as helpless as children. In the perfect stillness everybody sat

Ovi Symposium II 23 steeped in reverie. Uncle Mike’s Sascha, sitting beside Uncle Jake, acted bewitched, his eyes glued to the guitar, his mouth wide open and drooling. And the rest of us sat as if turned into snowmen, or as if waiting for someone to come and break the spell. The only sound to be heard, besides the music, was the purr of the samovar in which tea was brewing, a not inharmonious sound. A light from the kitchen reached the darkness outside through two small windows, on which passersby sometimes tapped. On the table two slender tallow candles brandished their lights like yellow spears. Gradually Uncle Jake’s body stiffened and his teeth clenched, and he seemed to have gone off into a trance- like sleep; but his hands moved as if they had a separate life of their own. The curled fingers of his right hand fluttered over the strings like agitated birds, while his left hand swooped up and down the neck of the instrument. Nearly always, when he had some drink in him, he sang a certain interminable song, in an unpleasant, hissing voice, as if forcing it through his teeth. In the song he compared himself to a hound, howling over his weariness and the dreariness of the world, with its creeping nuns, its chattering crows, the monotonously chirping crickets, the crawling beetles, and beggars stealing … from each other. Weariness and dreariness were the refrain words that ran through it. The song wrung my heart and when the singer got to the part where the beggars robbed each other I would break into an outburst of uncontrollable grief. ********* This observation, very important in Russia, is very interesting of course, but what does it show? It shows that there is such a thing as imagination that distinguishes man from all other species. (The word “imagination” seems to have fallen out of use in 20th century aesthetics altogether, possibly on account of a hostility towards Aristotle, on the grounds that there must not be a psychology that divides operations of the mind into faculties.) If what Gorky tells us is useful, then what I am about to say is more useful still, and generalizes what is going on in the psychology of art as a whole. Entry into this realm was provided me long ago in a book by a leading anthropologist, Paul Radin, who published a book in 1927 entitled Primitive Man as Philosopher. In there he argues that primitive man, in contradiction to civilized man, or modern man, “lives in a blaze of reality.” The phrase is most fecund, and is strongly related to Gorky’s observations above. For the two are much closer in meaning than one would probably expect. Primitive man is naïve; modern man is psychological. But neither is clearly superior to the other in all things. And both have the capacity to create whole worlds.

24 Ovi Symposium II Paul Radin (1883-1959)

Paul Radin’s book published in 1927 The book has an introduction by John Dewey But the phrase in a way seems to distinguish modern from primitive man, as though the primitive would seem to be naïve, and the modern man literal, a person which, to use a phrase from the 19th century English literature, Mr. Gradgrind, who iterates many times that “ a stick is a stick and a stone is a stone.” Though many would like the division between modern and primitive to be total, such a clear distinction is not war- ranted. I will say why. The primitive man is neither superior to, nor inferior to, modern man. To begin with, primitive man is truly human and has potentially all the powers of mind that modern man possesses. For example, there is the phenomenon of imitation. Imitation is possibly the first validation of the fact that things are never inert; they live in the minds of people who have minds of a human kind. Thus, one can cause a sensation among one’s fellows by imitating another member of the primitive tribe in order just to show that it can be done, and also, something like the magical effect that Uncle Jake’s music on the hearers of his voice and his

Ovi Symposium II 25 guitar. The possibilities are endless. Uncle Jake could have led the audience into a realm of satire, using the same instruments and voice, but showing something that could turn the meaning of the session to be the opposite what a literal reading of the performance entailed. For example, children as a group are excellent mimes, and are well known critics of their siblings and parents through the use of double entendre, to just use the closest example that comes to hand. In the end, the capacities of humans are almost infinite in variety, and mastery of any aspect of play, especially in the field of words, which are said one way, but meant to be taken in another, shows that humans are in a different realm from animals and other, lower species of living things. (It is for this reason that mankind has a history, and many different histories, while animals all live in immediate proximity to the natural dic- tates of their kind.) Indeed, Gorky’s uncle Jake imitates animals, meaning to find the different “languages,” and amusing his audience thereby. Perhaps Gorky intended to talk about Uncle Jake in this way precisely to predicate that he was perhaps closer to animals of all kinds than he was to humanity. But I think not. For country folk do know the animals that they come into contact with on a daily basis, and it would come to mind when one is trying to impress an audience, for want, perhaps, of something “higher.” In fact, art is basically a member of the genus “play” in the first instance. In fact, all forms of art are examples of “play.” There are many arts, perhaps three dozen, and they are all examples of human freedom. That is to say, the possibilities for expression are infinite, just as so many different things can happen in history, another realm that is forbidden to the animal kingdom. So, the phrase “living in a blaze of reality” does not mean that everything that is believed to be true is true, but something different. It means that all men, primitive and modern and everything between are all potentially creative, critical, and reproductive. Let me illustrate this statement by citing a simple story. Take Chekhov, the greatest of all short story writers, in my opinion. In his story entitled “Misery” he produces for us an old man named Iona, who drives a drozh- ky, or one horse cab, in Russia. During the course of one day, a snowy day, he encounters several different people and groups of people. In each case, he takes the opportunity to tell the riders that he had a son, who has recently died. But he never gets further than that. He never gets to evince his son to others, who it turns out are not interested to hear what he has to say. No one is listening. No one asks him anything. No one takes any notice of what he says to them. No one cares. At each encounter the same thing. No one is listening.

Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky in 1900

26 Ovi Symposium II His son has been dead for almost one whole week, and yet he has not been able to get anyone to listen about the fact. The fact is not noticed, not in the world in a sense, and he wants to speak of his son properly, the way people should speak about the death of a young man. He also has a daughter in the country, and he wants to talk about her too. He needs someone to sympathize with his loss, and to feel sorry for his son’s death. Driving back to the stables, several instances of other cabs with passengers pass him by. Indeed, they hail him and his horse, but then, when he broaches the subject of his son’s death, they just speed up and go further away. They are not interested. (Parenthetically, Giuseppe Verdi, who spent the later months of 1861 in Saint Petersburg overseeing the production of his opera, La Forza del Destino, noted with disgust that cab drivers in Saint Petersburg were required to wait for their patrons outside their cabins, and consequently froze to death every winter in great numbers.) “He can not think about his son when he is alone … To talk about him with someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is insufferable anguish …” And so, when they reach the stables, he begins to speak to the mare, who is munching grass. He tells her about his son, who was “a real cabman … He ought to have lived.” He falls silent, then tells the horse that if she had had a little colt, and all at once the little colt went and died, she would be sorry, wouldn’t she? The little mare continues to munch on her fodder, and listens, and breathes on the cabby’s hands. This enables him to release his feelings: “Iona is carried away and tells her all about it.” Though the situation is tenuous in the sense that there is no clear path, and no clear resolution of this most difficult moment, Iona will have to realize that even though no one cares about him or his son, at least the dumb beast he uses to make a living can be thought to be sympathetic. This story is very short, and yet shows a limit. The blaze of reality contains such things as this, and few things can be thought so horrid that at the same time excite no sympathy in anyone he meets that day. Yet the little mare is given the role of a substitute for an audience that would care about the son who has recently die. Such is the need for some kind of redemption, no matter how liminal the case may seem to some. It is important to take the generalizations about the human enterprise on this earth in the spirit of Radin’s “blaze of reality” reference. So many things are real to man; many of them may appeal to only one man, who imagines that it would be wonderful to talk about his son because women are sympathetic, and they are allowed to shed tears in public, and Iona apparently cannot do the same. He imagines that the tears of women might be a relief in that such tears might be taken as a ceremony, an acknowledgement of his suffering. For every instance of joy in reality there is an instance of sorrow. For those who suffer great losses or those who are wearing away without receiving any attention or kindness the blaze of reality is harsh indeed. But the human pageant is not a joyride, though there may be joy. And it is not just sorrow, though there always seem to be sorrows. It is the response of others to one’s plight that might bring many-cornered possibilities into play, but the resolution of this drama is never secure, never a given.

Ovi Symposium II 27 2 Classicism and Romanticism A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (As translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce) he distinction that Croce made between Classicism and Romanticism, in order to proclaim that genuine art is always classical, is well known. TOne could hazard the statement that Croce, having been accused so many times of being a romantic was in the end seduced by classicism. After all, wasn’t Croce a sworn enemy of empirical distinctions or convenient distinction such as that between Romanticism and Classicism? Ultimately, the philosopher wished to distinguish two mental and psychological attitudes with which he felt he could trace back some historical speculative positions. As Croce puts it: “The principal problematic of our times, namely that aesthetics must be dominant, can be traced to art’s crisis and in the judgment of art produced by the era of Romanticism. We are not distancing away from previous eras where the crisis surfaces such as antiquity’s Hellenistic art and literature in the last years of the Roman Empire, and in modern times art and baroque poetry which followed those of the Re- naissance. But in the Romantic era the crisis, in its motivations and characteristics, was quite different in its grandiosity, compared to naïve and sentimental poetry, Classical and Romantic art thus dividing indivisible art into two wholly different arts, even taking sides with the latter as the one which conforms to modern times which see in art the primacy of passion and feelings and imagination. On one hand this was justified as a reaction to rationalistic, French style, literature, which is sometimes satiric sometimes frivolous, destitute in feelings and imagination, and of any deep poetical sense…” (Aesthetica in nuce, 1935, p. 27). Thus we see that Croce holds on to the general theoretical distinction between life’s functions which will not allow a separation of the unity of aesthetic activity. Which is to say that in this context the classicism of poetry is for Croce its universalism which has little to do with Classicism as an historical period or a distinct poetic. As Croce puts it: “The fundamental problem of aesthetics, is the restoration and the defense of Classicism against Romanticism” which is to say of the epistemological character of human feelings and sentiments not to be confused with pure passion. Again, as Croce himself puts it: “this is something that Goethe understood very well, for he was at the same time a poet of passion and of serenity and as such a classical poet.” (Ibidem, p. 29).

28 Ovi Symposium II

Johann Wofgang’s von Goethe (1749-1832)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Croce’s complaint is obviously against the years of cultural exaggerations when his book Aesthetica in nuce is published with the purpose of fighting the irrationalities and the activism of fascism. Classicism, which is not historical temporal Classicism which is school and imitation, is integral part of the nature of art, which is not ethical action but it cannot separate itself from ethics as long as by that term we do not intend a compilation of norms and doctrines but the most profound sense of conscience’s psychological unity.

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) An Italian decadent poet sympathizing with Fascism

Ovi Symposium II 29 Therefore, classicism, cosmic approach, universality of art are all synonymous and a moment in Crocean thought, albeit, as we have seen, a problematic phase of it. It remains however an elevated moment since the philosopher was reaffirming the dominant force of the individual conscience during a rear historical moment of great psychological and moral confusion.

Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom by Ernesto Paolozzi. An Ovi e-book (2012) available for free downloading from the Ovi bookshop

30 Ovi Symposium II 3 A Comment by Emanuel L. Paparella on Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation Thank you Ernesto for shedding light on the dichotomy classical/romantic within aestheticism. Confusion in the matter abounds and not only in regard to Croce’s thought but Vico’s too, and not only in the US where empiricism and logical positivism still reign supreme, but in countries with a proud humanistic liberal arts tradition such as Italy too. I have heard comments to the effect that Vico is not a proto-romantic philosopher of history a la Hegel, but a classical Platonic philosopher. To utter such a cavalier affirmation is in my opinion equivalent to a subsuming operation and to having misunderstood the whole opus of Vico, and pari passu that of Croce too, and ultimately rob their philosophy of its uniqueness, a uniqueness which imbues them with historicism as well as the concepts of fantasia and the poetical. Nowhere in their writings one finds Vico or Croce claiming to be romantics or proto-romantics or neo-Platonists, for that matter. Indeed, once the dichotomy of classical/romantic is established, as a straw man of sorts, one ends up making Vico and Croce either romantic idealists or classical rationalists, thus subsuming their philosophy to that of Plato or Strauss (a rather common philosophical operation here in America) and invariably distorting their thought and originality. This misguided operation represents a great disservice to both Neapolitan philosophers, for indeed neither Vico nor Croce were proto-romantics, neither were they strict Platonists. While respecting Plato’s universal transcendent forms, neither of them were relativist or romantic; they could not be romantics since they held on to the philosophy of history which conceives the concrete-particular, the poetical and the imaginative as essential to their thought. Neither of them ever relinquished the notion that the rational and the imaginative (fantasia) could be harmonized and held together; for not to do so is to risk ending up with rationalizing what one ought never rationalize, as you have lucidly explained in your writings on Croce. If I understand it correctly, Croce’s famous rebuke of Heidegger’s intemperate xenophobic nationalism in tandem with his “hearing the Voice of Being” in Hitler which led him to become a Nazi for a short while, ran along those lines. Unfortunately, not much credit has been granted to either Vico or Croce for being the first great Western philosophers to introduce into contemporary rationalist thought the needed notion of “originative thinking” and of the paradox that is the particular-universal. Those notions may be held as contradictory by those who espouse Cartesian dualisms and dichotomies but they are essential for positing a paradox within the poetical. To ignore that paradox is to embark on a slow but steady process of decline and dehumanization. In part, such is also Levinas’ contention in his ethics. Consequently, to make those two Neapolitan philosophical giants merely proto-romantics or anti-romantics or anti-positivists is in effect to distort the complexity and harmony of their thought and deprive them of the unique characteristics of their philosophy by subsuming it under that of other philosophers.

Ovi Symposium II 31 4 Modern and Post-Modern Art: Art for Art’s Sake? Jegede and Appiah’s Afrocentric Art vis a vis “Universal” Western Art

A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella “African art has been maligned in the writings of Western scholars who have failed to understand its source and origin… In private collections, African artworks become transfixed on the mantelpiece in wooden cubi- cles, bathed in a caressing interplay of lights, but with very little or no reference—suggested or amplified—to their contextual use of significance. Although we derive pleasure in appreciating these objects ex-situ, there is the danger of their being unduly romanticized. It is a danger that can be avoided if we would allow the arts to lead us into renewing our contact with Africa, and into a greater and more intimate appreciation of the cultures and the peoples of the continent. It is within this context that collection of traditional African art in private, public or academic holdings derives stronger legitimacy… The arts can be used to disprove racial innuendos and to re-direct the black man and woman towards the realization of positive self-affirmation. They can be used not only as indices of aesthetic cognition, but equally as important tools in stemming the marginalization of the blacks’ contributions to world civilization.” —Dele Jegede (“Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology”) “…the place to look for hope is not just to the postcolonial novel—which has struggled to achieve the insights of Ouologuem or Midimbe—but to all-consuming vision of this less-anxious creativity. It matters little who it was made for; what we should learn from is the imagination that produced it. Man with a Bicycle is produced by someone who does not care that the bicycle is the white man’s invention—it is not there to be Other or the Yoruba Self; it is there because someone cared for its solidity; it is there because it will take us further than our feet will take us; it is there because machines are now as African as novelists—and as fabricated as the kingdom of Nakem.” —Kwame Anthony Appiah (from In my Father’s House) t is a well known fact that Picasso was greatly influenced by the encounter with masks and other art objects from Africa. In turn, via Picasso, modern art at the turn of the 20th century became abstract. Nevertheless, IWestern attitudes toward African art have remained ethnocentric and patronizing. Dele Jegede, a Nigerian artist and scholar (born in 1945), analyzes such an attitude in his essay “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology.” His main line of criticism is the failure in the Western response to African art to understand the significance that art has within the cultures that produce it. That kind of failure which is due mostly to the failure to take seriously the Vichian-Crocean historicist perspective of reality, in turn promotes demeaning attitudes toward African art in general.

32 Ovi Symposium II

A Traditional African Mask Jegede sees in the term primitivism, to characterize African art, a form of Eurocentrism. It may have been coined as a mere aesthetic category, but the underlying suggestion is that those works of art lack the ex- quisite refinement of Western art. This is suggested by the very mode of displaying African art in museums with no particular reference to their cultural roles within African societies. This decontextualized display is antithetical to the ways in which Africans themselves experience and appreciate art. For Jegede, art is not a cultural universal, but derives its particular meaning within the particular cultures of Africa. The practice of placing African art objects in a museum case to be disinterestedly contemplated is, for Jegede, a Eurocentric practice which leads to the labeling of “primitive.” It is that kind of decontextualization that robs the work of its most significant properties, those conferred by its role in specific cultural practices. For example, a mask is not simply an object whose form is to be appreciated; rather it is an effigy with specific ceremonial functions. As we have seen already in the Ovi symposium, Adorno, a Western philosopher, also emphasizes the importance of the role art objects play within social practices, and in that sense he is Vichian and Crocean as well as Marxian, but this represents the exception rather than the rule in Western aesthetics. Jegede uses the term Afrocentric to characterize his approach to African works of Art. It is an intellectual stance that places Africa at the center of one’s worldview and is, of course, a reaction to the Western tendency to view everything in relation to Western Culture, taken as the norm and the criteria for judgment. This stance can of course be critiqued in turn with this question: Has Jegege himself fallen prey to the unfortunate Eurocentric tendency to uncritically apply the label “art” to African artifacts? Is his alternative to an art “for art’s sake,” for an art “for life’s sake” (which so enthralled Picasso) superior to the views advanced in the West?

Ovi Symposium II 33

The Sudanese Novelist Yambo Ouologuem (1940- )

The Western Philosopher Theodore Adorno (1903-1969)

V.Y. Mudimbe is the author of The Idea of Africa (1988), The Invention of Africa (1988), The Re-invention of Africa (2013) and several other works. He teaches at Duke University

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Dale Jegede (1945--) a Nigerian-American who teaches Art History at Miami University Be that is it may, it is well known that Derrida’s most rigorous criticism of the philosophy of art in the West is the fact that, beginning with Plato, it has focused primarily on the Western tradition. The Ghanian Kwame Anthony Appiah takes a hard look at such a phenomenon in his book, In my Father’s House. Very much like Jegede, he is concerned with the way the Western artworld views African art. Appiah begins his critique by examining the process by which pieces were chosen for the 1987 exhibit, Perspective Angles on African Art. He wrote an influential essay in 2010 titled “Is the Post in Postmodern the Post in Postcolonial?” In it he shows that the items selected were included not just for aesthetic reasons but for economic reasons as well. For Appiah, this means that the artworld in the West far from operating on purely aesthetic principles makes judgments on art based on market considerations too. This is the dirty little secret of Western art with its pretensions of universalism and art for art’s sake. Art is considered another commodity on which to make money even when lip-service is paid to beauty and aesthetic considerations. It is what Picasso called art for decorating one’s living room, dead and divorced from life.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954-) Ghanian-American who currently teaches philosophy at Princeton University Appiah focuses on one particular work in the show, a sculpture titled Yoruba Man with a Bicycle, which the African-American novelist and critic James Baldwin also noted precisely because it was not an example of primitivism, the kind of African art which usually attracts Western attention. This piece is neo-traditional, produced for sale on the international art market. Appiah interprets the work within the context of postmodernism which rejects any claim to exclusivity and universality.

Ovi Symposium II 35 Modernists had previously argued for universal criteria to judge whether something is a work of art. Objects that failed to meet those criteria are not works of art, no matter the culture in which they originate. In part, African art was discovered through the modernist assessment that it possesses the sort of “significant form” found in Western modernist works, say in the works of a Picasso. But paradoxically this is exactly what the post-modernist rejects. It rejects the assumed existence of universal criteria.

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) The foremost Post-modern Deconstructionist Philosopher

36 Ovi Symposium II The post-modern theorist coins terms derived from Derrida’s deconstructionist’s school; terms such as “Eu- rocentric,” “phallocentric,” “logocentric,” etc, and with them he challenges the modernist to defend claims to standards untouched by history and culture. Undoubtedly, Appiah sides with the post-modernists. He challenges the modernist tradition by undermining the important concept of opposition between self and other. He does this by analyzing Yoruba Man with a Bicycle. Here we cannot see the work as simply the product of a radically different mentality and culture. This is due to its hybrid character: the presence of the bicycle in the work which makes it a pastiche of African and Western elements. But for the artist, both the traditional aspects of his culture and those he appropriates from the West are simply vehicles for his creativity. In the artist’s imagination Africa and the West are not others to each other. So, Appiah’s reflections on this sculpture imply that in our efforts to understand what art is, we ought to abandon the search for one universal and single standard for the qualification of works of art. It is important to note that Appiah is not advocating full-scale relativism that would rob art of its transcendent values which reside in its inherent symbolism, as some cultural philistines we have examined in the previous meeting of the Ovi symposium (such as Piero Manzoni or the Dada movement) would advocate. What Appiah is critiquing is the presumption and the hubris that only the Western artist, beginning with the Romantics, so romanticized by Hegel’s theory of art, is a self-conscious creator. In the first section Paolozzi’s makes us aware that Croce for one rejects this Hegelian idealist conception of art. Appiah too challenges the view that art gives us access to a genuine privileged otherness; for indeed all of us have something in common with everybody else: our common humanity. Given that at least our humanity, if nothing else, is demonstrably universal, the final crucial questions that we propose as a challenge awaiting an answer are these: for Western Civilization to survive do we perhaps need to journey back to the future? More specifically, is Italian Humanism the Garden of Eden we misguidedly abandoned some time ago and to which we now desperately need to find our way back in our peregri- nations? As T.S. Eliot inimitably renders it in The Waste Land, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

Ovi Symposium II 37 5 A comment by Ernesto Paolozzi on Emanuel L. Paparella’s presentation (translated from Italian): Paparella’s reflection on the possibility of understanding and judging the poetical generated by other people and other civilizations which are far from us, such as the African, brings us right back, in my opinion, to a consideration regarding the very essence of the poetic. To fully understand a work of art, it is imperative that we attempt to place ourselves in the spiritual conditions of those who have created it, or in the epoch or the place in which it was created if the author happens to be unknown. In other places, following Croce, I have attempted to explain this to myself thus: were I to think that Fran- cesco Petrarca or Giotto were born in 1970 I would be undoubtedly be embarrassed and perhaps even disappointed by their art which would at the very least appear rather naïve. It is therefore fundamental to historicize art. But if we leave it there with mere historicity, we would not easily be able to explain how is it possible for a reader of the year 2000 to understand and appreciate works written more than two thousand years ago or, as in the case of African poetry, to understand a poetry conceived in social and psychological conditions which are so different from ours. Given that fortunately we are able to appreciate both ancient poetry and that of other cultures, we have to try to explain this phenomenon to ourselves. Philosophy must not simply point out the absurdity of what happens, as those philosophers who seek an easy fame tend to do, but must try to grasp the meaning of what happens. Iit so happens that we understand the poetical. Not always, but often enough. That is so, I believe, because the poetical is an eternal category of life, like thought, like our utilitarian instincts, or our ethical dimension. Therefore, Petrarca’s poetry while certainly being more naïve than that of Montale, and undoubtedly influenced by the culture and the politics of its particular time, has also elements which are universal and founded, as Paparella reminds us, on our common humanity from which derive universal feelings such as that of suffering, or nostalgia for times gone by, and so on. Therefore, authentic poetry is always historic but at the same time it is universal. One can suffer for a particular religious crisis, or for a political battle, but one suffers and exults as everybody else suffers and exults. Poetry represents and expresses particular joys and particular sufferings which are universalized at the very moment when it makes them knowable to all of us. Thus we are able to exult and suffer with the whole of humanity, in Europe as well as in Africa, in America as well as in China.

Botticelli’s Primavera (1482) A famous painting synthesizing the universal and the particular-historical and illustrating Dante’s Earthly Paradise on top of Mount Purgatory

38 Ovi Symposium II Chapter 15 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Fifteennth Meeting: 19 December 2013

Indirect Participants within Time, Space and Perennial Philosophy’s Great Conversation (in the order mentioned and illustrated): Titus Lucretius, Giambattista Vico, Renè Descartes, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Ernesto Grassi, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Buber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benedetto Croce, Ferdinand de Saussurre, Friedrich Humboldt, R.G. Collingwood, Edward Sapir. Table of Content of the 15th meeting Sub-theme of 15th Session: The Nexus between Language and Art Preamble: by the symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella Section 1: “The Nexus between Language and Historicism in Vico’s Philosophy vis a vis Modern Herme- neutics.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Section 2: “Aesthetics as Linguistics and Art as language” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce. Section 3: A comment by Emanuel L. Paparella on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation. Section 4: An announcement of Ernesto Paolozzi’s latest essay on Croce’s thought recently published in The Philosophical Bulletin of the University of Calabria (Vol. XXVIII, 2013), an issue dedicated to the commemoration of Croce’s philosophy, soon to appear in its English translation in the Ovi Symposium.

Ovi Symposium II 39 Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator As indicated above in the table of content the thematic of this 15th session of the Ovi Symposium is “The Nexus between Language and Art.” This theme, already broached in the previous session, is further explored, deepened and elucidated. Vico as well as Croce, who had a great affinity for Vico’s thought and was in fact largely inspired by it, considered language the horizon encompassing the expression of the poetical in all genuine works of art. They also held that when the poetical is missing so is genuine art. It’s worth pointing out that these Ovi symposium discussions on aesthetics take place via written language which is a symbolic system of communication, and are carried on not only among its direct participants but also among some of the innumerable philosophers of past ages who for more than two millennia have had pride of place in the pantheon of the Western philosophical patrimony. Indeed, the reason why philosophy remains a fascinating subject is that it transcends a compilation of dry boring school notes or sterile theories devoid of practice to be studied and reviewed for a college exam; it is rather a fascinating, vibrant, passionate and extremely interesting conversation spanning some 25 centuries, beginning in ancient Greece five centuries B.C. That “great conversation” will undoubtedly remain an on-going one as long as man remains a rational being capable of reflection and with the ability to imagine and to carry out an intrepid and adventurous journey of self-discovery. For example, in this issue of the Ovi symposium, in order for us to explore Vico and Croce’s philosophical linguistics and their relationship to art we have mentioned, in order of appearance, Titus Lucretius, René Descartes, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Ernesto Grassi, Hans-George Gadamer, Martin Buber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussurre, Wilhelm von Humboldt, R.G. Collingwood, Edward Sapir, Alan Sica. They are all in some way indirect participants in the conversation on the nexus between language and art, and as such they too are part of the Ovi symposium, not to speak of the conversation between Vico and Croce themselves, two Southern Italian philosophers that although two centuries apart, are inextricably linked by their common ideas and philosophical vision. We can therefore surmise that this symposium which is by now a few months old, currently can list hundreds of indirect participants as well as hundreds of readers. One hopes that those same readers may eventually be motivated to join the “great conversation” in some fashion or other. It would be a distortion to consider the symposium an exclusive elitist club for philosophy experts only. It would in fact be a distortion of what philosophy is all about. Come to think of it, the invitation has actually been tendered some 24 centuries ago since Socrates’ open-ended conversations in Athens’ agora and Plato’s writing of the dialogues, which are also conversations; in fact our modern technological means of communication, not to speak of our concept of free unfettered speech, make it even more feasible nowadays for any interested individual to accept that invitation personally thus becoming part of the ongoing perennial “great conversation.” I dare say that such is the Ovi symposium’s all encompassing educational vision.

40 Ovi Symposium II It should also be pointed out that the function of the preamble by the symposium’s coordinator is not only that of announcing the theme of the conversation for that particular session but it is also conceived as a guide for the readers to navigate the intricate threads of the issues examined within the larger all- encom- passing framework of aesthetics. More specifically on this session, at the outset, in section one, Paparella offers a notion of Vico’s understanding of language vis a vis art and symbols (spanning three centuries: from the 18th century’s Vichian opposition to Cartesian rationalism culminating into 21st century hermeneutics) which in turn creates the human world, a world of symbols, interpretations (hermeneutics) and meanings, a world made by man, tied to both history and art; the only world he can fully hope to understand because he himself made it. Given this session’s focus on linguistics, this time around the order of appearance of the presentations was construed around a thematic criterion rather than a purely historical chronological one. That explains why Paparella’s presentation is placed in section one disregarding also the previous alphabetical order by contributor’s last names. It belongs there because it returns to the very primordial springs of hermeneutics (all the way back to Lucretius in fact) to be logically followed in section two by Ernesto Paolozzi’s report on Croce’s understanding of aesthetics as linguistics, and vice-versa art as language, an understanding which itself builds and expands on Vico’s insight on the nexus between language and the poetical as integral part of the intelligible rational world of man. In section three Paparella proffers a pertinent comment on Paolozzi’s lucid presentation stressing the inex- tricable nexus between Vico and Croce’s thought on the crucial issue of the poetical in art. The reader must surely be aware by now that the symposium eschews lists based on a purely chronological historical order for their own sake; for such an operation runs the danger of becoming mere boring academic pedantry. What is urgently needed, rather, is a summoning of the human imagination (Vico’s fantasia) as integral part of the rational and what it means to be human, for it is imagination that allows us to discern the holistic and the universal within a particular historical process. Finally, in section four we have an announcement of a forthcoming Ovi symposium presentation by Ernes- to Paolozzi by way of an essay which has already been published in Italian in the issue of Philosophical Bulletin (Vol. XXVIII, 2013) of the University of Calabria, an issue dedicated in its entirety to the memory of Croce. We have reproduced here the entire list of contributors and the title of their contributions. Paolozzi’s essay will appear in the near future in the Symposium in its English translation; its title is “Benedetto Croce and the Re-evaluation of the Complexity of Science.” It is indeed encouraging to notice that whole issues of academic journals’ are being dedicated to the commemoration of Croce’s thought; undoubtedly this is a good omen and bodes well for a vibrant renewal of Croce’s vision and thought in the 21st century.

Ovi Symposium II 41 1 The Nexus between Language and Historicism in Vico’s Philosophy vis a vis Modern Hermeneutics A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Titus Lucretius (99 B.C.-55 B.C.) An epicurean Roman poet who wrote De Rerum Natura

Giambattista Vico (1688-1744)

Original cover of Vico’s New Science (3rd edition) as it appeared in Naples in 1744 The study of language is the starting point of Vico’s historicism. For Vico, language is humanity’s primordial 42 Ovi Symposium II historicization. In fact, Vico’s professed academic discipline was neither history nor philosophy but rhetoric, i.e., the study of language in its creative aspects and as a literary phenomenon. Vico rejects the Cartesian paradigm for the apprehension of reality. The reason is that, in stressing rationalism, it fails to criticize itself in order to return to the springs of reason. Thus rationalism is unable to acknowledge that fantasia, which is to say, imagination, intuition and other non-rational factors play an important role in the creation of the human world. Vico asserts that it is language, rather than “clear and distinct ideas,” that provides the most important documentation for the epistemological relationship between man and his world. This relationship of the mind with the external world is imaginative, sensuous and even emotional. It is there, within language that one may hope to discover the genesis (dubbed by Vico nascimento) of institutions and human development. Vico informs us that most of his literary career has been devoted to pondering and researching how primitive man thought and spoke. From these reflections Vico derived his “poetic logic” defined as the master key of his New Science. That key is “…the fact that the early gentile people, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters” (SN, 34). He is able to recreate this primordial poetic phase of language by focusing on its dynamic, rather than its mere functional communicative aspects where the connection between signifier (form) and signified (content) remains an arbitrary one. For Vico verum factum convertuntur, i.e., content and form are convertible. As Edward Said explains it: “Vico…associates intelligence with a kind of escape-and-rescue operation, by which the mind gathers and holds on to something that does not fall under the senses, even though that ‘something’ could not come into being without the body and sense experience (From “Vico and the Discipline of Bodies and Texts” in Modern Language Notes, 1976, p.823).

Renè Descartes (1596-1650) For us modern men, the recapturing of this mode of thinking is problematic and lies in the fact that for us a mediating reason necessarily alters it. Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura, intimates a pre-logical phase of language; a language originating naturally, within feelings. Vico however goes further and postulates three eras: the era of the gods, the era of the heroes, and the era of men (SN, 31). To these three eras (which may be phenomenological and epistemological as well as chronological) he assigns three specific phases of language: (1) a mute phase characterized by body or sign language, (2) a spoken phase characterized by

Ovi Symposium II 43 heroic emblems, similes, comparisons, images, metaphors, (3) a human language characterized by words agreed upon by the people (SN, 32). In the first two eras the language is expressive and poetic; here acts and objects have a natural relation to the ideas they are meant to signify.

Edward Said (1935-2003) In 1974 he published Beginning: Intention and Method with a whole chapter dedicated to Vico The primitive men who made these poetic signs were poets (in Greek the word “to create” is poein). Behind the linguistic sign there is a real image. In fact, at its very origins the sign and the image are one. This is not easy for us to imagine because our linguistic signs do not, as a rule, evoke an image. We abstract things and their qualities out of existence and create notions to which the linguistic sign then attributes existence. But at the origins of language, the image signifies and is assumed to signify universally what it is: the “poetic universal” objectifies a section of experience into permanent significance. This still obtains for us in art where the singularity of the object “signifies,” i.e., it has autonomous value by itself but it is also universal. But even here we need to return to cave painting to better understand how the bull is not a mere representation, or for that matter, and aesthetic thing of beauty, or an abstract essence, rather it is a sign, a gestalt, a presence of the life force incarnated in the bull. Here, much better than in our modern art, one can perceive the dynamic power and vitality of life in act, something that is not accessible to reflection and analysis. We should however keep in mind that Vico is not excluding rational induction from the creation of language. The three phases of language are three aspects of human nature which converge in producing language as activity and form. Here the unity of human nature establishes the universality of language. As Vico puts it: “From these three languages is formed the mental dictionary by which to interpret properly all the various articulate languages” (SN, 35). This is similar to Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, almost a genetic endowment of Man.

44 Ovi Symposium II Noam Chomsky (1928- ) considered with Saussurre and Wittgenstein one of the founders of modern linguistics Indeed, the very possibility of Vico’s science is related to the existence of universals of human nature reflected in linguistic universals formed by the human mind. There is a diachronic and a synchronic unity in language which is based on the unity of human nature. The failure to correlate spoken and written language produces in turn the failure to understand the origins of language. Regarding this matter Vico says that “the difficulty as to the manner of their origins was created by the scholars themselves, all of whom regarded the origin of letters as a separate question from that of the origin of languages, whereas the two were by nature conjoined…scholars failed to understand how the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs (SN 428). In other words, Vico is saying that spoken and written languages are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Vico is searching within the linguistic sign for clues to that kind of creativity reflecting, almost unconsciously, the lived experience of things. The three moments in which this happens are: (1) the silent, (2) the sacerdotal heroic, (3) the conventional. In the first phase man, still without a spoken language, confronts the world which he experiences and within which he is submerged almost as integral part of nature. Here there is no dualism, no awareness of the mind that knows as distinct from the surrounding world. The particular event, lived or experienced, is expressed through gestures subsequently rendered graphically as a hieroglyph. In contemporary linguistics this is called “topical recognition” of an experience for the purpose of representation. In the second phase, i.e., the heroic, a particular content of consciousness relates to sense data by becoming their symbol and signifying them. Here there is still a necessary natural connection between signifier and signified which becomes arbitrary with the sign of the third stage where the necessity is merely historical. Within the Vichian linguistic scheme, this is the most genuinely creative stage: the sacerdotal-heroic. Here language is poetry. The theological poets see the sky and the earth as majestic animated realities

Ovi Symposium II 45 and personify every natural phenomenon. Every cosmic reality is captured in images. In Vico’s own words: “This is the way in which the theological poets apprehended Jove, Cybele or Berecynthia, and Neptune, for example, and, at first mutely pointing, explained them as substances of the sky, the earth, and the sea which they imagined to be animated divinities and were therefore true to their senses in believing them to be gods” (SN, 402). An inverse process obtains in the more properly heroic language. Here the particular individuation of a figure (for example, Achilles) precedes the signified (the strength of heroes). The signifier is the myth or the allegory, as for instance the legend of the hero (Achilles); the signified is the logos or the meaning; the idea of valor or strength proper to heroes. This idea Vico calls an “imaginative universal,” or the expression of a truth. The two, the myth and the logos can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Like form and content, they are inseparable. The two phases preceding conventional language are mental processes through which intuitive knowledge finds its form. A form of knowledge this which has been contemptuously neglected within Western Cartesian rationalism. By the time we get to the third stage, that of conventional language, we find reflected there, in a shortened form, the universal processes of the divine and heroic phases of language. To say it in Vico’s own words: “In this way the nations formed the poetic language, composed of divine and heroic characters, later expressed in vulgar speech, and finally written in vulgar characters. It was born entirely of poverty of language and need of expression. This is proved by the first lights of poetic style, which are vivid representations, images, similes, comparisons, metaphors, circumlocutions, phrases explaining things by their natural properties, descriptions gathered from their minuter or their more sensible effects, and, finally, emphatic and even superfluous adjuncts” (SN, 456). Many of the elements of the conventional language (the third stage) can be traced back to that poetical or creative moment when the nexus between the sign and the thing is still necessary. Finally, we must emphasize here that in his attempt to discover through language the documents of primordial human history, Vico’s conception of rhetoric is not one of rhetoric as a purely literary instrument, but rather one of rhetoric as a poetics informing the different forms of the linguistic act and consequently the different forms of human participation to things in time. These forms are primary creations, not artifacts of oratory. In fact, Vico associates his three stages of language with three major rhetorical figures of speech: the silent divine stage is associated with metonymy; the heroic with synecdoche; the conventional with metaphor. Irony emerges last as the product of pure reasoning and cannot therefore be a pure form of that imaginative creativity from which issued the other three tropes. The most important of these is metaphor. It is the most important tool for the development of poetic language. It is, in fact, the tool with which “the first poets attributed to bodies the being of inanimate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them. Thus every metaphor so formed is a fable in brief” (SN, 304). This is consonant with the Vichian principle that the original creativity of man is based primarily on the senses, passions and imagination rather than on reason. Ernesto Grassi (in his Rhetoric and Philosophy, The Pennsylvania University Press, 1980) says that “No theory, no abstract philosophy is the origin of the human world, and every time that man loses contact with the original needs and the questions that arise of them, he falls into the barbarism of ratio” (p.25). Indeed that describes our technocratic Cartesian civilization. The

46 Ovi Symposium II origins of human history are to be found not so much in the discovery of primitive technology (tools, fire making, etc.) but in that mytho-poetic clearing of the primeval forest for the preparation of a human habitat. Metaphorically, that is one of the acts of Hercules. Every genuine metaphor is Herculean work. And it is this Herculean act, according to Vico and Heidegger, that needs to be re-created in order to rediscover human origins.

Ernesto Grassi (1902-1991) What are the hermeneutical implications of Vico’s linguistic speculation? Vico is the first linguist to point out that language is performatory in nature, i.e., at its most fundamental level it is intrinsically related to what it signifies. The specifically historical way in which he understands this performatory function of language is seen in this fundamental principle of the New Science: “The nature of institutions is nothing but their coming into being (nascimento) at certain times and in certain guises” (SN, 147). For Vico the nature of things is the verum or the content; the guise or mode of being is the certum or the form. And of course, one of the first things that comes into being in a special mode at a particular time is language.

Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition by Ernesto Grassi (1980) In his De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, Vico points out that in primordial times there is a kind of incarna- tion of a particular language to a particular people. Here too a principle of complementarity obtains: minds are fashioned by languages just as languages are fashioned by minds. The two poles (language/mind) are inseparable. It is absurd to think that there are “clear and distinct ideas” standing behind language which

Ovi Symposium II 47 then language strains to express adequately, as Descartes thought. Rather, historical reality arises with the language that testifies to it. In turn that particular language has a “natural” or intrinsic relation to the historical reality. That is what the term “Latin people” intimates. The process remains complementary.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)

Truth and Method (1974) is Gadamer’s magnum opus Vico is usually accorded little credit for the above described hermeneutics: the idea that understanding comes through language, that is, through the form of a literary or philosophical or even scientific work. One of the notable exceptions to this neglect is Hans-Georg Gadamer who in many ways introduces hermeneutics to the modern philosophical world building on Vico (see his book Truth and Method) explaining that the form pointing to a subject matter (the content) is already in itself an initial interpretation of the subject matter. Therefore, in order to understand the nature of language, one does not try to penetrate to the thought which

48 Ovi Symposium II Descartes assumed standing behind language. Rather, as Martin Buber aptly puts it: “The encounter with any of man’s works, especially those done through language, remains intrinsically historical.” The link of language to history is “poetic wisdom” proper, transcending the dichotomy subject/object.

Martin Buber (1878-1965) Author of I-Thou (1923) The other modern linguistic philosopher who saw the flaw of traditional Western philosopher is Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). In his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical On the other hand, Car- tesian objectivity ends up reducing a “work” to a mere “object.” With such an operation, the language event cannot possibly seize and transform the reader. Being preoccupied with analysis, one will invariably neglect to listen to what is being spoken in the words and, most importantly, what is being left unsaid. In short, the work will not speak. How can it, since it has been reduced to an object, an it preventing any kind of I-Thou relationship with the reader. In the above mentioned Investigations, not unlike Vico and Croce, he provided new relevant insights into the relation between world, thought and language. Ultimately all these philosophers, beginning with Vico, all the way down to Gadamer and Wittgenstein make us more aware that meaning can only arise in relationship. A wrong relationship will produce a distorted message. In order to have a proper relationship Man has to discern that since understanding is by its very nature linguistic, language is equally as primordial as understanding. Only through language can a world arise for Man. This world is a shared world only in as much as we share understanding through language. With the passage of time this shared understanding (of history in and through language) may of course change. That in effect means that the hermeneutical experience is a language event. Consequently the encounter with the being of a work of art or a text cannot be Cartesian, i.e., static and ideational outside of time. It is rather a truth that happens and emerges, always eluding efforts to reduce it to concepts and objectivity, to those alluring “clear and distinct ideas.”

Ovi Symposium II 49 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Indeed, the being that happens in language is not the product of a reflective activity of the mind. Man’s relationship to language and history cannot be one of “using” them but rather, one of “participating” in them. This is also an Heideggerian theme which might have appeared original with Heidegger but not to the likes of Croce who knew Vico inside-out. Nevertheless, In the presentation of contemporary histories, the readers rarely get an invitation to participate actively in language as another man standing within a world made by language. What they end up getting nowadays, especially from academic experts, is literary and “distinct” explanations of events looked upon as objects. A whole semester may be spent on literary analysis while the text itself will go unread and thus the student rarely discerns that a great literary work is truly an historical experience in the sense that understanding stands in a specific place in time and space.

Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1993, Mellen Press): revised Ph.D. dissertation as written for his doctorate in 1981 at Yale University by Emanuel L. Paparella

50 Ovi Symposium II 2 Aesthetics as Linguistics and Art as Language A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) If art is intuition, and if intuition is always expression, then art is language. This conclusion to which Croce arrives and to which he returns in all his conclusions, beginning with his book titled Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, is of utmost importance, even if not always easily understood. As Croce puts it: “Aesthetics as science of expression has been studied by me under every aspect. Nevertheless, it still behooves me to justify its sub-title of General Linguistic which I have added to its title and propose and clarify the thesis that the science of art and that of language, i.e., Aesthetics and Linguistics, as true sciences, are not two distinct sciences but only one science (Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistic generale, p. 161, 1902). In the first place we ought to attempt an understanding of what constitutes language for Croce, otherwise his theoretical stance remains incomprehensible. In this instance, language does not refer to the language of literary people, or the language of institutions, or the language of a people, nor the codified language of grammars and dictionaries. Language is not to be understood as the great linguist Saussure defined as langue (that is to say, the organic and structural whole of a particular language) but what he defined as parole, or creative language. In fact Croce asserts that “the philosophy of language is not a philosophical grammar, but is beyond all grammars and does not render philosophical grammatical classes, rather it ignores them, and when it meets them, it destroys them; which is to say, that the philosophy of language is one and the same as the philosophy of the poetical and the artistic, with the science of intuition-expression, and with aesthetics…” (Croce, Aesthetica in nuce, 1935, p 26).

Ovi Symposium II 51 Croce’s Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistics (2008) originally published by Croce in Italian in 1902 with later revisions and expansions

Ferdinand de Saussurre (1857-1913) The father of modern linguistics and Semiotics

52 Ovi Symposium II This book covers Saussurre’s lectures from 1907 to 1911 It has had a lasting impact on the intellectual life of the 20th century Having established that much it becomes almost superfluous to remember that language should be understood as any form of expression, even the most simple gesture of a primitive man, since with such a gesture he expresses a particular gesture of his particular individual reality. Expressivity, which is always creative and imaginative even when it is very elementary, is constituent of a common element of every artistic expression, of every language, of painting, of sculpture, from geometry to cinematographic expression, and so on. This is what Croce derives from ancient philosophic tradition, from Vico to Humboldt, which intersects modern linguistic as thematized by Sapir.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)

Ovi Symposium II 53 Edward Sapir (1884-1939) An American Anthropologist and Linguist

Sapir’s Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921) A fundamental aspect of Crocean thought is that there is no expressive aspect of human life which is not in some way tied to art. In order for philosophy and science to express themselves they must individuate themselves. Even the most abstract and universal logical reasoning must be expressed, must find words, signs, particular symbols. As Croce puts it: “The concept has the character of expressivity, which is to say it is a descriptive work and as such it must be expressed or spoken; it is not a dumb act of the spirit, as a practical action would be in itself. To put to a first test the effective possession of a concept we can use an experiment which I have advised on another occasion: invite anyone who claims to possess it to express it with words or other means of expression (graphic symbols or similar things). If the interlocutor refuses to do so claiming that his concept is so deep that words cannot translate it, one can be sure that either he is deluding himself that he is in possession of a concept and in reality he possesses only nebulous phantasms

54 Ovi Symposium II or pieces of ideas, which is to say that such a deep concept is only vaguely grasped or at most it has begun to be formed but in reality he has no possession of it” (Logica come scienza del concetto puro, 1905, p. 26). A philosophical or scientific idea (even the coldest or driest), when it is well expressed (that is to say, if has scientific or philosophical validity) has its own style, as Croce asserts or as all those who distinguish the style of Galileo or Newton, of Aristotle or Hegel, well know. Croce’s Aesthetics concludes with those words: “These observations ought to be enough to demonstrate that all scientific problems are the same as those of aesthetics, and the mistakes and the truth of one are the same as those of the other. The reason that linguistics and aesthetics seem two different sciences is due to the fact that with the first one we think of grammar, or a mixture of philosophy and grammar, or an arbitrary mnemonic outline, not a rational science or a pure philosophy of speech. Grammar, or what is certain in the grammatical, generates prejudice in the mind, given that the reality of speech consists of isolated words that can be combined, and not in living speeches, in expressive organisms which are rationally indivisible. Linguists and glottologists with philosophical talent who have best deepened the issues of linguistics, are in the condition of a workers in a tunnel (to use an abuse but effective image): at a certain point they need to be able to hear the voice of their fellow workers, i.e., the philosophers of Aethetics, which have begun on the other side, a certain grade of scientific elaboration, linguistics, in as much as it is philosophy, it must join with aesthetics; a joining that in fact leaves no residues” (Estetica, 1935, p. 71). Thus ends one of the most celebrated philosophy books of the 20th century, a book that is loved and hated, discussed or despised, a book which has influenced generations upon generations of scholars, not only within philosophy, but perhaps even more in literary, musical, artistic criticism. A book which reveals tracts of extreme modernity, as well as some residue of 19th century philosophy. But throughout its theme, one can always detect the preoccupation of conferring to art an autonomous value which is due to it within the intricate journey of life. Which is the equivalent of declaring art’s absolute freedom.

Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom By Professor Ernesto Paolozzi. An Ovi e-book posted in 2013 3

Ovi Symposium II 55 A comment by Emanuel L. Paparella on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation Thank you you again Ernesto for this informative and lucid excursus on the nexus between language and the poetical in Croce’s thought. It better brings to the fore, in my opinion, the astonishing affinity between Croce’s and Vico’s thought on the issue of the poetical within language and imagination as integral part of the rational. That this is so is fully confirmed by the fact that, as you well know, the first propagandist and disseminator of Vico’s thought in Italy was none other than Croce himself. As you know, in 1910, in his mid-forties, Croce wrote a book on Vico titled La filosofia di Giambattista Vico which was promptly translated into English by R.G. Collingwood in 1913 and has since reappeared in a modern edition in America in 2002 (Alan Sica, professor at Pennsylvania University, being its editor and in- troducer). In the preface to the book as translated by Collingwood (who believed that the historian’s picture of the poet is always an imaginary picture), Croce laments the unfortunate neglect of Vico in Italy, a fate that he himself would suffer after his death in 1952, and writes this revealing, almost prophetic passage: “I hope, in fact, that the present work will rekindle rather than quench the discussion of Vico’s philosophy: since in him we have, as Goethe calls him, the Altvater whom a nation is happy to possess, and to him we must hark back for a time in order to imbue our modern philosophy with an Italian feeling….” Indeed, there are still two such not fully appreciated Altvaters in Italy nowadays. What is urgently needed is to hark back to both Vico and Croce and through them rediscover the living springs of a neglected humanistic tradition.

This book on Vico by Benedetto Croce appeared in 1910 It was subsequently translated into English by R.G. Collingwood in 1913 The above edition by Alan Sica appeared some 100 years later in 2002

Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943)

56 Ovi Symposium II 4 Coordinator’s Introductory note to Ernesto Paolozzi’s latest publication in The Philosophical Bulletin of the University of Calabria (Vol. XXVIII, 2013) dedicated to Croce’s memory under the theme of “Croce between Past and Future.” The Ovi Symposium is delighted to announce the publication of Ernesto Paolozzi’s latest essay on Croce in The Philosophical Bulletin of the University of Calabria. This important essay on Croce vis a vis science and positivism will soon be translated and published in the Symposium. That whole issues of academic philosophical journals are now dedicated to the memory of Benedetto Croce is a very encouraging sign of the successful revival of Croce’s thought in the 21st century which is the lofty aim of Paolozzi’s scholarly efforts. To Professor Paolozzi and the other distinguished international collaborators mentioned in the bulletin (see below) goes much of the credit for this sterling intellectual success. Ad majorem. For the moment we’ll merely identify the titles of all the essay as found in summary of The Philosophical Bulletin with Paolozzi’s essay emphasized; we have also included a few words on the identity of the journal. We trust that this announcement will give the readers a preliminary idea of the vastness of the horizon of Croce’s thought. The specific title of Paolozzi’s essay is “Benedetto Croce and the Re-evaluation of Sci- ence’s Complexity.” Stay tuned for its translation and publishing in English in the next symposium’s session. ************ The Philosophical Bulletin is a philosophical magazine subject to peer review, founded in 1978 at the De- partment of Philosophy, the University of Calabria, now the Department of Humanities. It provides a forum for theoretical and historiographical Italian and foreign scholars engaged in the most important questions of philosophical research. Over the years, The Philosophical Bulletin has paid, and pays great attention to the emerging themes of contemporary philosophical debate, publishing essays that explore a number of thematic areas, such as ontology and epistemology, ethics and social sciences, aesthetic and religious thought, phenomenology and hermeneutics, neo-idealism, German and Italian philosophy, Kantianism and Marxism, the history of modern scientific thought and contemporary philosophy of language, semiotics, culture and language of cinema and entertainment.

Cover of the Bollettino Filosofico (a journal of the University of Calabria) Vol 28 (2013): Croce between past and future

Ovi Symposium II 57 Sommario degli articoli (IN ORDINE ALFABETICO): Premessa Pio Colonnello Croce e il Cristianesimo Paolo Bonetti Galvano della Volpe e l’estetica di Benedetto Croce Romeo Bufalo Oltre l’idealismo. Lo storicismo in forma negativa Giuseppe Cacciatore «Leggere Dante “da solo a solo”». Note in margine a La poesia di Dante. Giuseppe Cantillo Croce e la post-modernità Salvatore Cingari Croce e la storia tra arte e scienza Daniela Coli Per una rilettura di Croce tra passato e presente. Croce e la crisi del secondo dopoguerra. Pio Colonnello Benedetto Croce, la Germania, e Thomas Mann a partire dalle “Pagine sulla guerra” (1919) Domenico Conte Croce e la rivoluzione Girolamo Cotroneo Filosofia, religione, storia: la trinità crociana Maria Della Volpe Croce e la filosofia della complessità Giuseppe Gembillo Filosofia dell’economia e scienza dell’economia. Intorno ad alcune pagine crociane di “Filosofia della pratica” Giuseppe Giordano Su Croce, Bergson e Pirandello. A proposito della fenomenologia del comico Giovanni Invitto

58 Ovi Symposium II Per una logica delle scienze della cultura: Croce e Cassirer Fabrizio Lomonaco Lo statuto logico delle scienze storiche della cultura. Weber, Rickert e il “primo” Croce Edoardo Massimilla Croce. Oltre la “Metafisica della mente”. La filosofia come “storicismo assoluto” Aniello Montano Croce, Historian-Philosopher: Is History Autobiography? Myra E. Moss Benedetto Croce e la rivalutazione della complessità della scienza Ernesto Paolozzi La disputa sul Barocco e altri motivi crociani in Benjamin Rosalia Peluso Recent Crocean Encounters Outside Italy David Roberts Croce e Machiavelli. Forme e percorsi di una continuità Emilia Scarcella Tra passato e presente Aldo Trione L’esistenza nel pensiero di Croce Renata Viti Cavaliere

Ovi Symposium II 59 Chapter 16 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Sixteenth Meeting: 2 January 2014

Table of Content for the 16th Session of the Ovi Symposium Main Sub-theme of the 16th Session: Philosophy vis a vis Positivism and Science. Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order mentioned and illustrated in this session): Vico, Pollard, Descartes, Croce, Bergson, Blondel, Boutroux, Gembillo, Cassirer, Gadamer, Sorel, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Droysen, Wildeband, Collingwood, Witt- genstein, Russell, Schiller, Whitehead, Newton, Galileo, Mach, Avenarius, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Kuhn, Popper, Derrida, Prigogine, Morin, Marx, Hegel, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Fourier, Darwin, Poincarè, Hume, Kant, Lorenz, Plato, Aristotle, Strauss, Aquinas, Montesquieu, Augustine, Dante, Pico, Sophocles, Van Gogh, Habermas. Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator. Section 1: “Scientific Reality vis a vis the Complementarity of Vico’s Historicism.” A presentation by Eman- uel L. Paparella. Section 2: “Benedetto Croce and the Re-evaluation of the Complexity of Science.” A presentation by Ernes- to Paolozzi as translated from his essay published in Bollettino Filosofico (n. XXVIII, 2013)of the University of Calabria, an issue dedicated to the commemoration of Croce’s thought. Section 3: Paparella’s Observations on Paolozzi’s presentation, followed by a comment from Paolozzi. Section 4: Paolozzi’s thought-provoking Aphorisms on Freedom with a brief discussion between Paparella and Paolozzi by way of an initial exploration of the thorny philosophical issue truth/freedom. Section 5: “On Heidegger’s Essay ‘The Origin of a Work of Art.’” A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery, followed by a comment from Paparella and a response by Nannery.

60 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator The theme for this 16th session of the Ovi Symposium is “Philosophy vis a vis Positivism and Science.” This is a rather complex and thorny subject already discussed at some length in a previous conversation on the problematic of language and art and of the “two cultures,” and the feasibility of bridging them. Here we further clarify and deepen this theme with an initial presentation by Paparella on Vico’s stance vis a vis Descartes’ scientific rationalistic approach to knowledge. Vico does not reject science per se; after all, his opus is titled The New Science. He simply pushes back to the advancement of a type of scientific mind-set (dubbed “reductionistic scientism” by Paolozzi) wishing to substitute science for metaphysics, the instrumental utilitarian “how” and “what” of science for the “why” and the search for truth and meaning of philosophy, thus losing sight of the fact that positivism itself is the creation of a new metaphysics devoid however of the very elements that make us humans: feelings, imagination, intuition, the poetical, the arts and the humanities in general. That is in fact what happened a century or so later with the advent of positivism and extreme ideologies of science out to obliterate metaphysics and parading as progress and “enlightenment.” In section two Paolozzi takes over the baton by way of an insightful essay, already published in Italian in the Bollettino Filosofico of the University of Calabria (n. XXVIII, 2013: an issue dedicated in its entirety to a celebration of Croce’s thought), and now translated into English for this particular session of the Ovi symposium. Paolozzi’s essay clarifies the misunderstanding that ensued after Croce began to push back to positivism’s attempt to displace philosophy with science, quite similar to the misunderstanding that ensued after Vico pushed back to the extreme rationalism of Descartes. In reality, the two Neapolitan philosophers were not inveighing against science per se which deserves its proper function and place in the intelligible world, after all science too is a product of Greek philosophy and arose in the West before it arose in Asia, rather they were defending the liberal arts (of which philosophy is integral and essential part) and humanistic modes of thought forcefully asserting that to attack them, as positivism attempts to do with the pretext that it is attacking religious obscurantism and superstition while conveniently forgetting that the Renaissance was made possible in part by the rediscovery of the ancient manuscripts in monasteries, is in effect to embark on a process of dehumanization, what Vico calls “the barbarism of the intellect.” Few today, only seventy years away from the crimes against humanity of the Nazi era, can dispute that the two Neapolitan philosophers, as the culmination of all that is best in Italian Humanism, and were a prophetic Cassandra-like warning voice. Section three contains a series of observations and comments by Paparella on Paolozzi’s presentation followed by a response by the same Paolozzi always conducted within the framework of a convivial symposium-like dialogue. Section four presents us with some powerful and thought-provoking aphorisms by Paolozzi on the value of freedom and the nexus between theory and praxis. Another interesting discussion then follows with Papa- rella’s invitation to explore the nexus between freedom and truth. Paolozzi replies acknowledging that the issue is intricate and needs further rigorous and thorough analysis, clarification and inquiry in subsequent sessions. Such a discussion would pick up the challenge of those who’d like to hermetically seal theory from

Ovi Symposium II 61 praxis. What’s included initially in this session on this matter can thus be construed as an introduction and a preview to the next session of the symposium (the 17th session due out on the 16th of Janurary 2014)). In section five Larry Nannery takes over the baton to give a preliminary excursus on the issue of truth and freedom by dwelling on Heidegger’s famous essay, The Origins of the Work of Art, already broached by Paparella in another session and included in his Ovi-e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philos- ophers (2013), which explores the idea that art is a revelation of truth. What is intriguing in this presentation is that once again, as with Croce, there are unmistakable Vichian echoes (especially the one of “originative thinking”) in Heidegger’s acute analysis, as Paparella points out in some pertinent observations that follow the presentation. The essay in fact is a pertinent introduction to the next theme which as mentioned will be on truth and freedom vis a vis theory and practice. This session is undoubtedly one of the best that the Ovi Symposium has managed to put together. The encounters’ discussions seem to get better and better; it appears in fact that perfectibility applies well to our project which is already demonstrating what can happen when friends sit down around a table with good will and conviviality and honestly and passionately discuss a philosophical issue with as little academic experts’ lingo as possible and always remaining respectful of each other’s views and of free speech. At a symposium’s conversations, in fact, rhetorical sparks may fly at times and anything can happen around the discussion table. Perhaps the greatest surprise is that in the contentious times we live in, we may at times come to the realization that the conversation because it has remained cordial and friendly has yielded new insights and has brought us a bit closer to the unveiling of the truth.

62 Ovi Symposium II 1 Scientific Reality vis a vis the Complementarity of Vico’s Historicism A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella “The concrete without the universal becomes trivial. The universal without the concrete becomes irrelevant” —Alfred N. Whitehead Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude. --Friedrich Nietzsche

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) Author of The New Science Within Vico’s historicism verum/factum, life/thought, form/content, subjective/objective are distinguishable but not separable. They are complementary to each other. Vico was acutely aware that to treat real concrete moments of Man’s history as mere moments of something higher is not to take them very seriously. Indeed, this was Hegel’s flaw: By absorbing the concrete historical situation into a higher theoretical scheme, he in effect distorted the reality of their contingency. It is a dangerous thing to separate theory form praxis as some modern philosophers have indeed done thus never regretting some of their more misguided practical actions. Somehow they felt that their theories absolved them of their unwise praxis. Beginning with Kierkegaard, the existentialists also pointed out that by viewing contingent situations as “moments” of something else is to have them cease being themselves. This is also the flaw of scientists and logical positivists who consider the mytho-poetic mentality of primitive man as a mere “moment” of a superior reflexive-rational-scientific mentality. In so doing they lose sight of mytho-poetic mentality itself. Vico’s insight is that there is more than one pole to an historical event. One can claim that there is a providential pole, a higher scheme, a telos, and yet insist that the nearest I can come to understanding this providential reality is by careful attention to the concrete circumstances of the past or present. Which is to say that in Vico’s thought the particular and the universal are also complementary poles.

Ovi Symposium II 63 William G. Pollard (1911-1969) who wrote various books on the relation of science and religion Vico’s problematic consisted in reconciling the concrete events of history with the universal and providential when the universal happens to be a concatenation of concrete instances exhibiting a providential design. He clearly saw the Hegelian pitfall: to know things one must see them in relation, but if I stress the relation more than the thing itself I will end up trivializing it and losing sight of its uniqueness. He perceived that to undermine either pole of reality (i.e., pole n. 1: the unique concrete particular event; pole n. 2: the relationships of such an event) is to repeat what he termed “the conceit of scholars” and thereby lose contact with reality. Vico had great respect for both poles and was unwilling to abandon either. He did not see them as mutually exclusive and he refused to reduce the phenomena to a mere rational theoretical scheme a la Descartes. He insists that both complementary poles are made manifest in concreto.

René Descartes (1596-1649) What is astonishing nowadays is that science itself has discovered that reality operates on two complementary poles. I am referring to the findings of quantum mechanics as they apply to the nature of light. In his book, Change and Providence, William Pollard points out that quantum mechanics has introduced into

64 Ovi Symposium II physics not merely a different description of the structure of the external world but also a radical modification in the relationship between the real world and our knowledge of the world. This modification patterns the modifications proposed by Vico’s historicism making man both creature and creator of history. In Vico’s time, however, the rampant rationalistic Cartesian approach did not permit such a reorientation as described by Pollard in modern times. We know today that quantum mechanics rests on Heisenberg’s in- termediary principle of complementarity from which derives in turn Bohr’s principle of complementarity. The latter applies to an essential characteristic of the way physical systems are described in quantum mechanics which prior to its discovery could only be regarded as paradoxical or contradictory. A case in point is the behavior of light and electrons. The more precise the information about such behavior became the more paradoxical became the problem of its assimilation into a coherent picture of the atomic world. Bohr’s principle of complementarity asserts that light and electrons will have wave and particle properties as complementary aspects of a single reality. This paradox, which seems to be inherent in the very structure of matter, cannot be resolved by further scientific work but must be looked upon as reflecting an essential characteristic of reality, associated with the uncertainty principle, as a result of which physical systems present themselves to our observation in complementary aspects. Let us now transpose this scientific discovery of the principle of complementarity to historical reality. Indeed Niels Bohr himself thought that the problem of complementarity went beyond the situation in atomic physics and was a fundamental characteristic of the human mind in search of comprehension. One of his favorite maxims was that “there are two types of truths: trivial truths whose opposites are plainly absurd, and profound truths which can be recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.” It was part of the human condition to seek to embrace profound truths, such as the opposing demands of justice and love. Bohr’s suggestion is obvious: the apprehension of reality is possible only in complementary terms. That this is still not fully accepted is due to the pervasive influence of the classical Newtonian mechanics as a model for ultimate achievement in scientific explanations. Nevertheless it is beginning to be recognized in both psychology and biology that, despite Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, Man’s body is as much a product of his mind, as his mind is a product of his body thus rendering moot the question of whether or not Man is essentially mind or body. The Vichian paradigm apprehends reality in terms of both/and. For Vico Man is both a creature and a creator of history. From a formal rational standpoint this appears as a logical paradox, yet both opposites are profound complementary truths which can be distinguished but not separated. The solution to such a paradox lies in a reorientation of our thinking about the relationship between human knowledge and understanding, that is to say, the way the human mind operates in search of comprehension, on one hand, and the reality which we seek to know on the other. Having made this reorientation we will understand how in a Vichian sense it is possible that in the very nature of things the reality light can present itself to our apprehension as both wave and particle; or for that matter, how the reality Man can be both mind and body, both creature and creator of history. The corollary to this seeming paradox is the paradox of human decisions which presents itself to our apprehension as both freedom and providence in complementary relationship, which leads to the seeming contradiction of

Ovi Symposium II 65 immanence and transcendence in Vico’s concept of providence. Transcendence/Immanence in such a concept are not mutually exclusive either but are complementary to each other, both poles to be held together in tension. idem for universal/particular. What I have always found intriguing in Vico is the fact that he did not call his magnum opus a new humanism but a new science. Like Croce later on, he accepts science as a useful pragmatic tool but at the same time he does not reject humanistic modes of thought, hence his proposal of a “new science.” I’d like to suggest that this “new science” was at least 300 years ahead of the modes of thinking of the current assorted Heideggerians, Derridarian deconstructionists, existentialists, nihilists, and Straussians, all battling each other and sure that only they have the key to reality. Croce certainly had to deal with some of them, especially the positivists, to even begin to enunciate and disseminate his philosophy of aesthetics in an attempt to find a dialectical middle ground between the two extremes of deconstructionism and Strauss- ianism. More on this issue further down in this session (in the incipient dialogue with Paolozzi in section 4). But had Vico been accorded a more attentive reading there would not be such typically modern conundrums to resolve. Three modern eminent philosophers who fully understood the implications of Vico’s thought and the implications of its disregard were Croce who wrote a whole book on Vico to explain his thought, Cassir- er (known for his symbolic philosophy) and Gadamer (known for his philosophy of hermeneutics). Others unfortunately ignored Vico’s, or perhaps did not know it at all, and alas, they have perhaps unknowingly ended-up re-inventing the wheel.

Frontispiece to Giambattista Vico’s The New Science

66 Ovi Symposium II 2 Benedetto Croce and the Re-evaluation of Science’s Complexity A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi

Benedetto Croce (1866 -1952) Introductory Note: this essay originally appeared in Italian in the academic journal of the University of Ca- labria Bollettino Filosofico (Vol. XXVIII, 2013), an issue of the journal dedicated to the commemoration of Croce’s thought. It has been translated by Emanuel L. Paparella. Abstract of the article: For too many years people have believed that Croce’s thought was antagonistic to science. A more careful reading of Croce’s texts shows that while his philosophy was against Newton’s traditional science claiming to surpass philosophical and humanistic studies in general, Croce’s criticism coincides with that of the most important epistemologists and scientists of the 20th century. Only In this sense we can talk of Croce’s re-evaluation of science and consider his philosophy a foundation of the philosophy of complexity. In reality, Croce’s critique is against what within scientific thought presents itself as a-historical and abstract. He, to the contrary, accepts concreteness as historicity, as an essential element of knowledge: from Heisenberg to Maturana, from Prigogine to Morin.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) The issue of the relationship between science and philosophy is central to the history of philosophy, at least since Galileo’s attempt to come up with a scientific method devoid of any irrational residue. We could

Ovi Symposium II 67 exemplify this matter by pointing out that throughout the intricate journey of history, dominant cultures have alternatively privileged either the scientific mind-set or the philosophical attitude and almost all philosophers have dreamt of identifying the point of connection between the two.

Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) Benedetto Croce straddles two centuries: the 19th and the 20th century, an era at times designated as positivistic, within an historical period when philosophy had lost its credibility, so to speak, metaphysics was disparaged, intuitionism and spiritually condemned outright. Although the young scholar was influenced by such a cultural climate, to the point of planning the publication of a book dedicated to the history of science (a book that never saw the light of day), in a more mature age he proudly proclaimed that he never was a positivist: he will admit to committing many mistakes in his life, some so grievous as to still feel the shame, but never that of adhering to Positivism.

Emile Boutroux (1845-1921) Wrote on the implications for science in Kantian philosophy Such a declaration would suffice, and there are dozens of pages of rigorous philosophical, historical, aesthetic critique which confirm it, to appraise the cultural environment of the beginning of the 20th century. Croce had to pay a high price for his stand in the controversy. Even today, after a whole century has gone by, there is a persistent notion of a Croce as the sworn enemy of science, when in effect he was merely the enemy of scientism, which is to say, of the illegitimate attempt to extend, if not impose, the empirical-rationalistic method to all other spheres of culture, to the whole of life, in fact. As Giuseppe Gambillo has well demonstrated in his essay Benedetto Croce filosofo della comeplessità, the reductionistic dimension, as was said later within epistemology, of the culture of that era was placed on the table as a characteristic of the cultural crisis of the times.

68 Ovi Symposium II Giuseppe Gembillo (1949- ) who has written several books on Croce and the philosophy of science

Giuseppe Gembillo’s Complessità e Storicismo (2006)

Gembillo’s Benedetto Croce: Filosofo della Complessità (2006)

Giuseppe Gembillo’s From Einstein to Mandelbrot: The Philosophy of Contemporary Scientists

Ovi Symposium II 69 In reality anti-positivism was never a particularly original position at that time. The philosophy of that era was born under the sign of what we could define as the reaction to positivism, or perhaps better put, the liberation from positivism. In France one can detect the positions of Bergson, Blondel, Boutroux and of the great friend of Croce Georges Sorel, just to mention the most notable. In Germany one notices the historicist movement, commonly named Historismus in Latin; the complex thought of Husserl and soon after that of Heidegger which break once and for all with the positivistic tradition, a break already effectuated by Nietzsche’s poetic philosophy who did not follow the trend of the times. The ones who come to the fore are the Humboldt, the Schleiermacher, the Dilthey, the Droysen, the Windelband, the neo-Kantian types of philosophers.

Georges Sorel (1847-1922) a philosopher who wrote about the power of myth on our lives Husserl’s essay, The crisis of European sciences, is a real manifesto of anti-positivism, and not only on the philosophical level but on the ethical too, a live testimony of a new spiritual condition. It’s a new attitude and a new mentality which pervades even Anglo-Saxon culture, even if it remains rooted in classical epistemology within whose horizon one can find radical idealistic positions together with clear revisions of scientism which is after all what pragmatism does. And this is valid even without taking into account the happy ambiguity of a Wittgenstein in whose opus one finds logic together with mysticism and the eclectic position of a Russell; an acute thinker this who in his long journey has at times defended one position and at times another with equal argumentative efficacy; and we could mention so many others, such as the great logician Whitehead who in his maturity embarked on a philosophical journey which balanced historicism and a return to metaphysics. But the most evident sign of the break that was happening can be found in an inversion that can be found within the sciences themselves. The break is effectuated by mathematicians, scientists, epistemologists and it is not only with positivism but even with classical empiricism, with Newton’s physics which was considered the queen and the model of all concrete sciences. The meditations of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius were crucial with that philosophical movement defined as empiric-critique.

70 Ovi Symposium II Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) father of phenomenology and mentor to Martin Heidegger On the other hand, we have a new direction given to Physics from great scientists such as Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, which challenges the very foundations of the scientific tradition, to the point that we can declare, without falling into a paradox, that at the very moment when Einstein and Planck announce their respective theories, they take away, or better, they annul, despite themselves, the very foundations of classical Physics. A tendency this which will not pause at the beginning of the new century but will remain alive and will definitely affirm itself at the end of the 20th century with the analysis of Kuhn, partly with Popper and his followers, but above all with Prigogine, Morin and many others, and this despite the temporary re-birth of positivism accomplished by the Vienna Circle and the so called logical positivism.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) who wrote Being and Time in 1927 The red thread that crosses all those diverse experiences rendering them homogeneous, at least under a critical aspect, is the idea that sciences and mathematic are not necessarily ontologically true: they are not true in the philosophical sense of that word, that is to say, they do not correspond to any objective ontological reality. Those sciences can be found to be efficient, can be considered conventional, instrumental and complex, even intuitive, but they are negated the possibility of arriving at truth, even if common sense dic- tates that they appear certain, because, to say it with Heidegger they are exact. Indeed, they are exact, not

Ovi Symposium II 71 true. Perhaps even more than the philosophers, as we explore the elemental particles and the expansion of the universe, scientist have accepted the idea that one cannot confront so called Nature without taking into account the multiplicity of events, the complexity of thought, temporality as a fundamental component of history and nature itself. These new acquisitions and different mind-set have benefited not only epistemology and philosophical research in general, but have been the basis of the innumerable successes of science in every sector and application, from medicine, to chemistry, to technology in general. In this new cultural milieu, the original positivistic project was no longer credible, that is to say the attempt to extend to the sciences of the spirit the methodology of the sciences of nature: sociology was no longer social physics. Even Marxism, which, if we can so express ourselves, had played the coquette with science, tends to privilege its Hegelian historicist-dialectical aspect while showing respect for scientific progress in itself and also fiercely fighting positivism, understood as the ideological disguise for the affirmation of the middle class. Something similar, in the sense that history at times tends to repeat itself, is happening today, as we begin a third millennium, in the sense that ecological movements are “fighting” the technological mentality, understood and condemned as functional to economic domination of the upper classes of the rich countries vis a vis poor countries.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)

72 Ovi Symposium II In any case, it is futile to pause once again on particular aspects of what was a mind-set and an ethical attitude of an era. In this sense Croce was a son of his times. And the spirit of those times was in fact, as we have suggested, anti-positivistic and anti-scientific in all its manifestations, poetry, literature, art in all its expressions, imbued by a sort of neo-romanticism, activism or decadentism, as was defined reductively the entire cultural tendency. To stay with Italy, all we need to remember is D’Annunzio’s influence, or the desecrating Marinetti and, with him, of the futurists of the whole of Europe, so that if at times there was an exaltation of the sciences, it was an exaltation born under the sign of a robust romantic vision of reality that took its distance from the eminent mediocrity of positivistic philology.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) The real originality of Croce’s philosophy consists in a thorough reconsideration of the relationship between science and philosophy. Gembillo, in the above mentioned book Croce as Philosopher of Complexity writes that “Croce’s logic represents the first place of encounter of the critique of classical science as expressed and represented, in an independent mode, between two attitudes that are quite different: the scientific one which from Fourier and Darwin leads to Poincarè and Mach; the other is philosophical which goes above all through Vico and Hegel. What the two have in common is what can be defined as a process of individuation and historicity of Nature.”

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

Ovi Symposium II 73 Therefore, if we like to understand rigorously Croce’s thought, the logic of Croce, his polemical fundamental target were not the sciences, and above all, considering his thought in relation to that of other philosophers and scholars at the beginning of the 20th century, we need to acknowledge its extreme balance. His critique was not intended as a denigrating of the value of science but rather an attentive consideration of their role and their place within the logic of philosophy. An important documentation for this, it seems to me, is this clear passage from the introduction to the fifth edition of Croce’s Logic: “What philosophy tries to keep at a distance from itself in science is not what is truthful and worth knowing from the real historical elements of science, but only from its schematic form into which these elements are compressed, mutilated and altered; and therefore philosophy attempts a rejoining with what is alive, concrete, progressive in the so called sciences. And if something needs to be destroyed, it is abstract anti-historical philosophy; and in this regard, as long as abstract philosophy presents itself as the true philosophy, this Logic ought to the contrary be considered not so much a rejection of science but a rejection of philosophy” (Benedetto Croce, Logica come scienza del concetto puro, p. 8, 1917). As we have seen, the sciences, as the very etymology of the word would suggest, are considered, within a long philosophical tradition, and even more so by common sense, a form of knowledge. We have shown up to now how Croce, accompanied by a good number of the major philosophers and scientists of his time, had a good reason for his critique of the idea that the scientific method was the best cognitive method. But the question that needs to be asked is if the sciences really know something, that is to say, if they really are an instrument of knowledge.

Johan Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) Throughout his writings Croce seems to deny it. Empirical science, founded on the experimental method cannot give us a knowledge that is certain. In the final analysis, the Crocean rationale is not that distant from that of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who terminated the philosophical movement to which he himself belonged. The empirical founds its cognitive validity on the principle of cause-effect, on the idea of the uniformity of nature, on the certitude about natural laws inferred by induction. But, between cause and effect there is no logical nexus, only a psychological one based on customary habitual events. That the sun will come up every morning is a prevision founded on the fact that up to now it has been so. There is no logical proof why this natural phenomenon ought to repeat itself at infinitum, nature is not uniform and unmovable and, therefore, it is difficult to impose on it certain and constant laws.

74 Ovi Symposium II Wilhelm Wildeband (1848-1915) A great scholar of the history of philosophy Croce declares that empirical scientific methodology is purely descriptive, it has no ability to grasp the essence of things. In fact, even granting that science begins with concrete data, even historical, it arbitrarily abstracts concepts and laws which then become tautological, so that, as he writes in his Logic, the biological law of the wolf turns out to be the wolf itself. Or it is the wolf in its general description, never the way one meets it in its reality, given that in our experience we only meet individual exemplars, never the wolf in its generality.

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) who wrote The Idea of History and translated into English Croce’s The Philosophy of G. Vico (1913) In this sense science operates via pseudo-concepts or logical make-believes. But mathematical sciences which seem able to avoid the criticism leveled against empirical sciences and Physics as queen of those sciences cannot avoid the same criticism that they do not grasp the concreteness of reality. They are in fact analytic like geometry, or assiomatic like some mathematical principals. Their abstract discursive character they do not conserve, rather they cancel reality and all its live and pulsating aspects. The cognitive judgment, on the other hand, consists exactly in a synthesis of the universal and the individual. Even if we were to think of mathematics as founded on intuitive elements, as some philosophers have suggested, it would not be the same as intuition as knowledge of the particular, but rather of a sort of vision which resembles

Ovi Symposium II 75 the Platonic idea whose etymology derives from the verb to see, to grasp an idea. Thus we would open another discussion on the essence of mathematic. But the kind of mathematic to which Croce refers is the one understood in its traditional sense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) And yet, especially to common sense, the sciences appear as true; fundamentally because of the exactitude which characterizes them and because they are in daily life, efficient, operative, useful and practical. But, as we shall see this is what Croce tries to show: the sciences are not mere errors, a disguise of truth, pure make-believe, more or less clever linguistic games, as the most popular philosophies of the 20th century have held. They mislead when they claim that they can substitute philosophy and history. By themselves they are neither errors or deceptions. They carry on their own necessary function: they belong to the world of utility and their progress can only be celebrated as the progress of human kind. According to Croce the sciences are to be located in the world of praxis not in that of theory. This is not to claim that they are action from their beginning, but because they are a tool (Popper will speak of instrumentalism as a specific speculative function held by the greatest scientists of the 20th century) and, in as much as they are tools, they are neither true nor false, neither are they good or bad: they can only be useful or useless, efficient or inefficient. Consequently, moral judgment or even political judgment which can be legitimately be proffered on the sciences, does not concern the sciences in themselves but only the use made of them, that is to say of sciences in their relationship with other human activities.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

76 Ovi Symposium II Nature: Naturalistic method and historical method: But the most original and fecund of Croce’s originality on the issue of scientific knowledge, and therefore most pregnant with consequences and possible innovations concerns the idea of nature. Croce wants to overcome once and for all, as he does throughout his system, the dualism between spirit and nature which has tormented the entire journey of the history of philosophy and sciences. A problem this which is even more acute within idealistic philosophies, exactly because they did not have the duty of resolving it once they had absorbed nature within spirit, the natural object in the spiritual subject. This is a central question in Kantian thought, especially the late Kant of the Critique of Judgment, a work in which via the teleological judgment, nature conceived as an entity that is separate from the subject which investigates it, is in some way recomposed and brought back to a unitary principle. Even less is the problem is resolved in Hegelian and Schillerian thought, which under their point of view looks rather a step backward vis a vis the philosopher of the Critiques, in as much as nature is not described and understood empirically as in classical sciences, and neither it is understood philosophically, since it is pervaded by the metaphysical and romantic vision of such a philosophy.

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) Croce assumes a quite different view-point. He asserts that nature too has its history in his History as Thought and as Action, a history which is not written by man. We could ask Croce how do we know that nature has its own history, if it is impossible for man to know it? It is probable that Croce has spoken metaphorically, alluding to what is common knowledge, that is to say, that what we call nature is subject and change, condemned to a submersion into temporality, so that the famous affirmation that even a hair of grass has its own history does not appear paradoxical.

Alfred N. Whitehead (1861-1947)

Ovi Symposium II 77 In some way, nature writes its own history: leaves its imprints. To give some simple examples: in societies constructed by bees and ants, in the experiences that animals pass on, in the modification of those experiences which every naturalist, scientist or environmentalist could easily describe and could also give witness that what appears to us as an objective, static, immovable and uniform fact within nature, is always endowed with the character of and irreducible particularity which possesses its own particular story: the history of a forest which is not exactly the same as the story of another forest, the particularity of a rock which is not the same as that of any other, the originality of a marine environment which is never exactly the same and has no equals in no other parts of the world. We all know that any cat, or a dog, or a horse has its own distinguishing character, its own personality, which, just as in man, is not only a material characteristic but also an historical characteristic given that they are their own history.

Isaac Newton (1643-1727) What we can therefore perceive about nature is its temporality, not historicity in its proper sense, for to grasp historicity one has to also grasp its ethical and political aspect, that is to say, the human aspect. If at times it appears to us that nature too has these categories, that is because it is us who impose them on it, or better, because nature becomes part of our history, participates in our projects. Therefore, if nature has its own history, how can one even think of being able to grasp it immutable essence on which to build definitive scientific theories?

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Environmentalism, ecologism, which today have a fundamental importance, have taught us, among other things, that the environment in which we live is fundamental part of our history and that our history can not even be fathomed without the environment and if we wished to bring to its proper consequences this just concept we need to eliminate the convenient empirical, linguistic distinction between environment and society, nature and history, because in reality they are two dialectical aspects of the only concrete reality which is life.

78 Ovi Symposium II Ernst Mach (1838-1916) The great progress that Croce accomplishes even in respect to the classical distinction proposed by Dilthey between sciences of nature and sciences of the spirit depends on the diversity of the objects being investigated. Dilthey held the sciences of the spirit are to be distinguished from the sciences of nature since the former belong to the changing world as historicity, the latter to the unchanging world of nature. Thus Dilthey opposed the decadent positivism which by way of social physics had attempted to reduce the method of the sciences of the spirit to that of the natural sciences.

Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) But as mentioned, this position which was certainly more acute than the positivistic one, did not solve the problem since it was affected from a realistic residue of probable Kantian origin, the Kant who who, as hinted already, had modified his own position attempting to overcome such a residue by the formulation of a judgment which could penetrate the irreducible barrier of the numenon, considered a problem more than a really existent phenomenon.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) The Functions of the Mind

Ovi Symposium II 79 Croce’s striking position brings back the whole issue to a question of interpretation. Within such a perspective, many equivocation can be put to rest and some problems can be resolved. For indeed we are able to investigate the world of historicity, of the flowing changes, of absolute originality with a method which naturalizes that live and changing reality in the sense that it abstracts and immobilizes to construct laws that are useful but not necessarily universal, instrumental but not necessarily true. We in fact separate history into epochs (ancient world, medieval world, modern world, contemporary world) and we further sub-divide it into periods (end of the Roman Empire, beginning of Restoration, completion of the Risorgimento, and so on), or we make distinctions between social classes, juridical and political systems. Similarly, to say it with a few words, when we operate in the world of art we formulate genres, poetics, styles and so on, not to mention the analysis of language and its expressions were we abstract from live reality to speak of grammar, rhetoric, TV languages, film language, painting language, musical language, architectural language, the sky is the limit. Even in philosophy we carry on with arbitrary but useful distinctions and separations: logic, metaphysics, gnoseology, philosophy of practice, of law, of ethics, of language, of art and so on.

Max Planck (1858-1947) Croce is very explicit on this point. Even the most creative and innovative work of art is subject to its practical considerations and is in some way subject to the naturalistic method. And we brand that work “art” because its artistic aspect is predominant, the intentionality of the same work has a tendency toward artistic creation or simply because we are in the process of analyzing the artistic aspect of the work. So, even in a work of art there are present historical and naturalistic elements, given that all distinctions are logical, not realistic. Croce is less clear on the scientific work. For example, in hisLogic he hints at the fact that even science has historical elements (and therefore of truth) and is founded on true judgments not only pseudo-judgments, but he never completely clarifies this position. On further reflection it seems plausible that what was said for the work of art is also valid for the work of science and in fact for all human artifacts be they be big or small. When we analyze a scientific theory we notice in it, as already debated at length by the epistemological current issuing from Popper’s philosophy or Morin’s epistemology, epistemological elements, historical elements, at times even metaphysical elements, and preponderantly empirical elements of pure calculation, which is typical of the method defined as naturalistic or scientific.

80 Ovi Symposium II We therefore need to distinguish, and this is fundamental, between concrete works and the functions which create theories and are foundational to the same unified concrete works: the function which is abstracting and the function of truth as we could call the Crocean categories of praxis and theory. We could even consider that a modern contemporary reconsideration of the Hegelian distinction between abstract intellect and concrete reason becomes plausible, as long as, from our perspective, that such fundamental distinction does not lead us back to a hierarchy of values, functions and categories.

Niels Bohr (1885-1962) Within this perspective it is advisable to operate, especially within an epistemological horizon, another distinction: the one between scientific “discovery” (in reality we are not dealing with a “discovery” but with a construction of truth), and scientific “theory.” For the former it is legitimate to speak of a judgment on truth, the latter beginning with scientific discovery, elaborates elements which serve to generalize an individual case reducing the multiplicity of the real to some of its component: abstract formulas and deterministic laws. When one observes and analyzes a determinate scientific theory, it always looks, under certain aspects as if it were submerged in non-cognitive elements. This is the reason why scientific theories engage in competition with each other and are historically disposable after a while. Were we to overcome the cognitive elements that they contain we’d have to admit that in reality they were false, given that one cannot hold two truths. We’d get to the paradox, to which in fact have arrived many epistemologists who are non Popperians, according to whom the history of science is not a history of the general progress of science, but rather it is the general progress of knowledge, a surpassing of theories accepted for various reasons by the scientific and the civil society. If we, on the other hand, hold on to the distinction between cognitive elements and elements extraneous to cognition which are present in every single historical theory, we will soon notice that what falls, what is surpassed is not the elements of truth but those elements that Croce would have defined as allotric, the metaphysical, psychological, social, even political elements from which even the most purist of scientists can free himself. So, a “true” scientific theory merely creates conditions for research, thus generating new errors, it puts into place the conditions for the appearance of new “truths” within that constant search which is integral part of our life. Our hope is that we have contributed to at least clarify a thorny and difficult issue.

Ovi Symposium II 81 Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) Reductionism and moral indifference In conclusion, we must firmly emphasize the point that every form of scientifics or scientism, be it mechanistic or deterministic, or as it is common to say today with an appropriate term, a scientific reductionism, inevitably leads to moral skepticism, to a sort of indifference which, sooner or later will also invade the political sphere. It cannot be denied that often, scientific progress and the epistemological research which was tied to it have anchored themselves to liberal-democratic or socialist-democratic ethical-political movements; this is even the case of the Enlightenment first and positivism afterward. These are historical phenomena that by themselves do not place on the table the fundamental philosophical-logical question by which a conception of life founded on the idea that there is a reality which is unchanging and unalterable, a material mechanical substratum whose laws need to be “discovered” (to discover means to take away the veil from that which is already constituted and perfect in itself) taking away the very possibility of modification. If a condition cannot be modifies because it responds to scientific laws, be they physical or mathematical why would we, Don Quixote like, commit ourselves to modifying them? Who would ever dare to incriminate a stone that fell from a balcony and killed a passerby? A stone cannot violate its own nature, its scientific objective, certain experimented law which is that of gravity or a tendency to fall down from the top. But we can accuse a man who through negligence let the stone fall, because that man has responsibility, freedom of choice, capacity to reflect and to decide. Man responds to a law that is not mechanical, deterministic, natural, but spiritual and creative. He can evaluate if that stone he keeps on his balcony represents a threat to the safety of his neighbor. If then, to change the metaphor, one retains that the laws of nature and those that govern society are objective laws, true and immutable, why would we need ethical and political action, with the duty to modify them when they reveal themselves inimical to freedom, to justice and the general welfare of men and women?

82 Ovi Symposium II Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) Author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1971) where he coined the concept of “paradigm shifts” Many totalitarian ideologies search for their legitimacy in the assumed scientific objectivity of natural laws. We have endure the tragedy of racial hatred founded on the so called scientific proofs of the idea of race. Even progressive socialism, the criminal code of the beginning of the 20th century, even if within a positivistic horizon fell into this typical tragic error or reductionism: to lead moral concepts to natural necessity, humiliate freedom confining it to abstract laws.

Karl Popper (1902-1994 Known for his scientific “theory of falsification”

Ovi Symposium II 83 Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003)

Edgar Morin (1921- ) It is quite evident then that scientific reductionism, even when it appears democratic, is in its essence a totalitarian attitude. This does not mean that progress in technology, intimately tied to the growth of scientific knowledge, is not in itself connected also to moral and civil progress of society. Nobody can deny, for example, that the production and dissemination of antibiotics can be considered a great progress, and that in some way has advantaged the most poor and the most destitute of social environments. This ought to be evident and explains why history needs to be respected, since it teaches that progressive and revolutionary movements are often accompanied by a faith in science’s progress.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

84 Ovi Symposium II Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) Were we to return to the Enlightenment and even Positivism, we can explain why the emphasis on science which was typical of those eras. In that particular historical moment, especially that of the Enlightenment, the progress of sciences was a sign of the struggle against obscurantism, one of the many forms of emancipation of philosophy vis a vis the Church, from the various superstitions which impeded the free growth of human-kind. What we are implying is that at such a time, more than the triumph of science, we have a triumph of ideology of science, what the scientific mind-set signified. Thus the exaltation of science was conjugated with the ethico-political exaltation of freedom, of equality, of justice, of democracy. An exaltation this which at times would contradict itself by becoming a faith, a non critical faith in science which replaced the place of the authority of the ancient and medieval world from whose throne it had been removed.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) Founder of Futurism

Ovi Symposium II 85 Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) It is not by chance that the epochs of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, produced literary persons and philosophers who tended to promote the idea of a real religion of science, and it is not by chance either that even in those epochs the most critical spirits, the most alert progressives, took their distance from openly fanatical tendencies which ultimately were not so much different from religious fanaticism which they meant to oppose.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Henri Poincarè (1854-1912)

David Hume (1711-1776)

86 Ovi Symposium II Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) Having untied the knot of this possible equivocation, the idea that a blind belief in the possibilities of science, in its progress and, above all, in that ideology which is scientific reductionism, contains within itself the terrible germs of totalitarianism, ought not to result scandalous. The rigorous defense of science’s utility must be accompanied by an equally rigorous defense of the distinction of the sciences from other human activities, first among those philosophical critique. It is in that distinction that we find the essence of the theoretical defense of liberty.

Ovi Symposium II 87 3 Paparella’s Observations on Paolozzi’s Presentation followed by a Comment from Paolozzi Thank you Ernesto for placing on the symposium’s table such a masterful Crocean clarifications on this thorny subject of the nexus philosophy/science. In the first place they confirm for me how inextricably in- tertwined are the speculations of Vico and Croce around the core concept of the historical imagination. It seems to me that this concept is perhaps the best defense possible against the attempt of Positivism and the scientific mind-set, still alive and well within post-modernity, still aiming at the demise of metaphysics. Your essay is a reminder to us that science originated in the West, in ancient Greece to be precise, the same Greece whose cultural presence was established in Southern Italy 8 centuries B.C., before the arrival of the Romans, thus laying the early foundations for Graeco-Roman civilization. The fact that philosophy too originated in the same extended place and at the same time (Pytagoras lived a good part of his life in Magna Graecia) is no sheer coincidence. Aristotle after all was both a philosopher and a biologist. There was no strict dualism for the ancients between science and philosophy and not even between philosophy and art as Aristotle’s Poetics more than confirms, just as for a man like Leonardo da Vinci in the Italian Renaissance there was no dualism between science and art. It was well understood that they had a common origin and were originally in harmony with each other. Indeed life abounds and is most vibrant and fruitful at the boundaries of fields of knowledge and disciplines as they interact with each other. It seems to me that if we are to speak of a faith tied to philosophy and science in ancient Greece it is the faith in human reason’s capacity to grasp truth, a faith not provable sci- entifically and empirically but without which neither philosophy nor science would have even begun, to be distinguished of course from an irrational faith based on superstition. Aquinas, the greatest of the Church doctors, certainly makes such an important distinction on which he builds his Summa. The other side of that same coin is undoubtedly a faith in a fanatical ideology substituting religion and appealing to reductive scientism or positivism, as you aptly point out toward the end of your presentation. In any case, I believe we are in substantial agreement that it was that kind of faith in reason’s ability to arrive at truth that allowed science and philosophy to arise and prosper in the West some 24centuries ago. In the second place, that statement that men cannot write the history of nature since they are not its originator and therefore will never know it with 100% certitude, brought me immediately back to the Vichian axiom that men can never know with absolute certitude what they themselves have not made while they may have confidence in knowing what they themselves have created such as works of art or human culture in general. So, while man makes history, it is also true that history makes man, that is to say, man is his own history. In this sense there is no apparent disagreement between the two great Southern Italian philosophers. The disagreement, if indeed one can even be discerned, is more properly concerning the Vichian concept of Providence which Vico considers an essential paradox of his philosophy of history holding at the same time and in tension both the transcendent pole and the immanent pole of the concept, while Croce seems to emphasize the immanent pole, practically ignoring, without however rejecting it altogether, the pole of transcendence; this is similar in some way to Kant’s distinction between the phenomenon and the numenon. Finally, it bears mentioning here that your presentation has inevitably placed once again a thorny problem on the symposium’s table for our attentive consideration. I refer to the problem of freedom vs. determinism,

88 Ovi Symposium II absolutism vs. relativism in post-modern philosophy, perhaps best exemplified by Eistein’s famous question: does God play dice with the universe? I too believe, as you do, that Vico and Croce are nowadays the best guides to a bridge and a resolution to this conundrum of modernity. I for one am convinced that it will never be resolved unilaterally by the two extremes of current philosophy: the deconstructionists on the extreme left (championed by Derrida) and the Straussians on the extreme right (championed by Leo Strauss). Let me place on the table for discussion a still tentative but feasible way out of this post modern conundrum. Here in America, and to a lesser extent in Europe too where it originated, in the third quarter of the 20th century, a severe critique of modernity was leveled by Leo Strauss and his cohorts who later became the right-wing neo-cons of American politics, at the University of Chicago. He had a notion, as original as it was misguided in my opinion, that modernity was a reaction against Thomas Aquinas’ distortion of Aristotelian philosophy and therefore a true return to the ancients has to be preceded by a disengagement from their Thomistic misreading. This is held as a veritable article of faith in conservative Straussian circles and to de- viate from it is to be branded a heretic. Strauss argued that the great advantage of the political philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, is that while they thought that the good was objective and absolute, the more proximate rule of action was relative to what was actually praised and blamed in a given political context. Both Plato and Aristotle, according to Strauss, avoided the Scylla of “absolutism” and the Charybdis of “relativism” by holding a view which one may express as follows: There is a universally valid hierarchy of ends, but there are no universally valid rules of action.

Leo Strauss (1899-1973)

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Ovi Symposium II 89 St. Thomas’s teaching on natural law, Strauss then argues, misses this mean and falls prey to the “Scylla of absolutism.” Because St. Thomas sees the natural law as promulgated in every heart through conscience it is universally binding, and there is thus no room for a discrepancy between what is good absolutely and what is good relative to a particular civil society. Moreover, Strauss argues, the Thomistic teaching on natural law orders all things to a final end which transcends earthly life, and is thus a properlytheological account of law. The fundamental precepts of this law are thus the same always and everywhere and can brook no exception. Strauss thinks that this moral absolutism is inhuman as it leaves too little room for the role of prudence and the situatedness of human life in contingent political circumstances.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1273) Another Neapolitan philosopher Obviously the transcendence pole of Providence has been eliminated here and some modern scholars see the same flaw in Croce’s deemphasizing of Vico’s concept of Providence where the immanent is retained and the transcendent is simply tolerated. Like Strauss they see modernity as an understandable reaction against this overly theological moral legalism, a reaction however which falls prey to the Charybdis of relativism.

Charles Louis de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

90 Ovi Symposium II A work like Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws is misunderstood if one disregards the fact that it is directed against the Thomistic view of natural right. Montesquieu tried to recover for statesmanship a latitude which had been considerably restricted by the Thomistic teaching. Modernity’s wish to avoid the Straussian charge of absolutism leads it to exaggerate the variability of morality. Now, while it is quite correct to think the natural law is not an extrinsic imposition on humanity and it is indeed human reason itself that determines the fitting means to the end of human life, to then suddenly jump to arguing that there is no universally valid, set pattern, of moral rules, is tantamount to an enormous equivocation on the word “determine.” The fact remains that human reason does not “determine” the natural law in the sense of “making it up,” but in the sense of “recollecting” the eternal law and the Wisdom of the Creator who made nature and therefore knows it thoroughly and in whom all things are harmoniously ordered. This would go a long way in explaining the centrality of Vico’s concept of Providence (both immanent and transcendent at the same time) in his opus magnum The New Science (1725). That concept is not extraneous or superfluous to a science of imagination; to the contrary, it is essential. Comment by Paolozzi to Paparella’s observations (translated from Italian): Paparella’s reflection on the affinity of Croce to Vico’s conception of history and nature seems to me particularly relevant. We can know what we ourselves make, which is history in all its forms. Nature too, to a certain extent can be known, given that in reality we also historicize nature. We impose on her natural laws, not vice-versa. We humanize her and then attribute to her, in a Vichian or Kantian key, ends and purposes. So, Vico and Croce’s thought, as acutely observed by Paparella, meet each other. There is another passage which is also very relevant. Without faith in the ability to know and to reason we would not even begin to reason and to know. This act of faith, consciously or unconsciously, pervades all our life, It even pervades our actions: we would not act had we not faith that our action could be efficacious and could be successful. Emanuel, you are quite right in pointing out that this kind of faith has nothing to do with religious, scientific, philosophical or political fanaticism. Indeed, fanaticism goes together with a form of faith which is ultimately irrational and prejudiced even when it presents itself as rational.

Ovi Symposium II 91 4 Paolozzi’s Thought-provoking Aphorisms on Freedom With a discussion between Paparella and Paolozzi by way of an initial exploration of the thorny philosophical issue of truth/freedom - Between ideals and reality there ought not be any opposition since reality is nothing without ideality and ideals are sterile without reality. Such is the dialectical horizon of freedom, its very concrete possibility. - There are no absolute principles, except the principle of freedom which by its own intrinsic nature does not admit absolutes. - Liberalism is always an interpretation of reality through the principle of freedom. It is also an assumption of responsibility vis a vis reality. - The principle of freedom guides the action of the liberal among the infinite phenomenology of possible choices. In this sense, what locates the liberty of the individual, an individual which as an individual is a social and communitarian being, at the beginning and at the end of his project is a concretely operating utopia. - To the question “what is freedom” one could answer jokingly, ma it would not be a foolish joke, that everybody knows what it is. - There is no formula for freedom. Those who think they know it are fundamentally illiberal, or are troubled by the uncertainty of life. - Existentialism is the philosophy of those who are happy for being unhappy. Existence is tragic because it is free, and therefore uncertain. But we seem to be unable to live a different kind of life than ours, except for one which is beyond the earthly. It means that we have no choice but live within freedom. - Vico holds that there are mishaps which become opportunities. Unfortunately there are also opportunities which become mishaps. Freedom consists in the eternal conflict between mishaps and opportunities. A liberal always tries to change mishaps into opportunities. - Liberalism is always to be put in motion. It is to be located within history and reality and brought up to date. In this sense, liberalism is always a liberal method. It is not a technique, or only a technique. It is not a method in the sense of institutional engineering. It is not even a comfortable lying on the spontaneous developments of the economy. Freedom, in fact, is unable to find an authority that is extraneous to the individuals who realize it concretely. Liberalism is always an interpretation of reality through the principle of liberty. - Uncertainty is on the psychological level the equivalent of freedom on the philosophical-ethical-political level. To learn to live in uncertainty is to learn to live in freedom.

A Response from Paparella as an incipient dialogue on the issue of man’s freedom Indeed the above powerful aphorisms have provoked some reflections which I’d like to share. They brought me back to my Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University in 1981, to what can be considered a slight divergence between Vico and Croce’s thought, despite their general affinity. It has to do with the concept of Providence in Vico that has both an immanent and a transcendent pole, not mutually exclusive and not violating man’s

92 Ovi Symposium II freedom. Croce seems to consider the pole of transcendence superfluous to the phenomenon of history. He emphasizes the immanent. Thus, within an immanent concept of Providence man’s freedom, which as Kant has also demonstrated, cannot be proven empirically, assumes the place of the highest value of man, which indeed it is, as long as transcendence is excluded or bracketed. Logically, to eliminate the pole of immanence would also falsify Vico’s concept of Providence so that one ends up with a Deus ex machina which intervenes in history at crucial time thus violating man’s freedom. But this is not so for Augustine, Aquinas or Vico. For them freedom is only the penultimate value of man on this earth; the ultimate value, or the final destination of man’s journey if you will, transcends even freedom by asking the question “freedom for what?,” which of course is a much deeper conception of freedom than freedom “from” (or the idea that to be free is to be liberated from enslaving habits and other limitations). That ultimate goal of man’s journey on earth is not here on any of earth’s utopias within time and space but is to be found in Dante’s Paradiso, in that transcendent world dubbed by Augustine “The City of God,” which in effect means that for Augustine, Aquinas and Dante freedom is not the ultimate value in and by itself with no end in sight but rather it is constituted by obedience to truth with a final telos or destination. To be free for these three Christian thinkers is to affirm the truth of being. Men do not create truth, they discover it. Truth does not arise after the exercise of freedom, but rather it is discovered within the very act of freedom itself; and it is the truth that makes men free not vice-versa freedom that allows truth to appear. Freedom of inquiry can only be exercised within a context in which the question of truth arises within the question of freedom and not after it. So, staying with the polarity, or the complementarity if you will, immanence/transcendence in Vico’s concept of Providence, it seems to me that this much can be affirmed: together with the polarity between existence and essence in the structure of being, a similar polarity is seen in the three transcendentals of being: the polarity between form and splendor in the beautiful, the polarity between obedience and freedom in the good; and the polarity between subject and object in the true. Plato as well as Augustine, Pico della Mirandola and Vico were surely on to something when they saw the Good, the Beautiful and the True as beyond time and space. A follow-up response and a pertinent suggestion from Paolozzi Thank you Emanuel for your acute interpretations. This is a fundamental and intricate theme. I suggest that we continue this dialogue in the subsequent meetings of the symposium. This is an issue that remains unclear and uncertain, rather difficult in fact, yet indispensable. I will anticipate here that I’d like to discuss the theme of transcendence and freedom via the analysis of the nexus between thought and action: one transcends the other and vice-versa. This is the theme of the telos and the end of freedom which you have brilliantly staged. It attempts to answer this question: can freedom have a purpose and an end outside itself? I suppose it all depends on how we understand freedom. But let us not burn the themes of the dialogue ahead of time. Let us reserve them for subsequent meetings.

Ovi Symposium II 93 5 On Heidegger’s Essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”

A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery

Martin Heidegger (1889-1974) It is well-known that Heidegger is a difficult author, but a few words of introduction may forestall some elements of frustration. They may be allayed if one understands his intentions. His intentions are based upon his dissatisfactions with “the tradition of Western Philosophy,” which he deemed basically misleading. He thus started his own philosophy with new terminologies. I will mention a few of these sets of terminologies in this article. He does not even espouse the wisdom of Greek philosophy, since the great luminaries of that time and place also made the same types of mistakes as the late medieval and modern philosophies in Europe. However, he believes he has succeeded in intuiting the intentions of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and reworks the Greek vocabularies used therein to enlighten the reader of his intentions. Better than that no man could be expected to do. His reasoning was led by a dissatisfaction with the abstract nature of European philosophy through all its history — particularly metaphysics — and this was based upon his realization that he wanted a concrete vocabulary, as he states over and over in his first famous work, Sein und Zeit.

Translation of Sein und Zeit (1962) which originally appeared in German in 1927

94 Ovi Symposium II Now let us turn to the text of “The Origins of the Work of Art”. The lecture by that name was given three times in three different venues, and each time it got longer. Heidegger was a man who did not let up on himself or his readers. The first word is “origin”, and Heidegger immediately defines it as something “that from which and by which something is what it is and as it is. … The origin of something is the source of its essence.” He then notes that works of art have authors, but the relation between the artist (of any kind) and the artwork is not psychological, as modern writers naively assume. In fact, he claims that the artist and the work are reciprocally related, and both stand under the influence of art itself. This reasoning is circular, of course, but no alternative, as for example a cataloging of all the major artworks together could reveal what art is in itself. A definition of art is not possible to give; hence the circularity. (Though it seems to always be about paintings, this essay is about all types of art, as the examples he provides of works of architecture and statuary.) Readers of this line of reasoning cavil at the circularity, especially because modern readers have been taught ad nauseam that art works are the product of the psychology of the artist who creates them. Instead, Heidegger has a historical claim in mind, and it can be justified by the many different periods in which any art undergoes through different ages, which shows that there can be no definition of art itself. And all works of art have a “thingly character.” Even the most enthusiastic love of art cannot gainsay this fact. Next, Heidegger examines the relation between “Thing and Work.” In fact, almost all things, including God, is a thing, including Kant’s thing-in-itself,” though it is not common to call persons or living beings such as animals “things” as though they were mere objects. Heidegger surveys what things are called things. Generally they are what many call “mere things.” And the acknowledgment that things are composed of a central entity at the core (hypokeimenon) and other parts which accompany the core, (symbebekota). But, historically, the meaning of these parts of things were translated into Latin: hypokeimenon became subjectum; symbebekos became accidens; and hypostasis became substantia, and in this way the original Greek insight into things was lost. He claims that with this change “the rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.” Consequently the way we ask, “what is a thing?” has not been uncovered because the grammar used to ask this has not “the structure of the thing itself.” Only if the question of what is the thing happened to possess the right structure of such isomorphism could it draw near to understanding the essence of the thing. The current use of the word “thing” can refer to any being whatever, not to things alone. He goes on to say that moods tell a person more about things than the wrong questions do. Since the question raised is so indefinite, we should put aside all our prejudices and strictly concentrate upon the thing itself. We know things through our physical nature, an object of any kind and its accompanying qualities. “Things” are derived from the experience of the meaning of the Greek word aistheton, i.e., the perceptible. All such perceptions are singular, not general. Heidegger rejects this way of proceeding, because merely enumerating all the things that are called “thing”, to attain a comprehensive view of the matter, or examining every part of every “thing” is bound to fail. Either way is impossible, because the thing vanishes under such dissolving scrutinies. The next attempt at definition makes use of hylemorphism, where there is no matter without form, and when those are both present one has reality, an eidos.

Ovi Symposium II 95 Why did we not begin here, in this, Aristotle’s comfortable position? Why did we go through a longer process? Heidegger answers: because he distrusts this hylemorphism. It is noteworthy to notice that hylemorphism is the basis of virtually all art theory and aesthetics. He asks: “Where does the matter-form structure have its origin — in the thingly character of the thing or in the workly character of the art work?” Things that occur in nature are to be distinguished from works that come from the hand of man. This is still hylemorphism, but the latter types of objects, objects made by human hands for human purposes, are given the title of “equipment” (Zeug). Man himself, in making objects of use participates in the propagation of objects that are useful. And, Heidegger notes, “equipment takes an intermediate place between the mere thing and work.” Though Heidegger admits that the form – matter paradigm of the thing has been central to much of philosophical thinking for millennia, he rejects Aristotle’s use of the word thing in the traditional sense, and his reason for this rejection of a definition of a thing as either a bearer of traits, or as the unity of a manifold of sensations (Kant’s formula), or as formed matter is this: all three orientations impinge illicitly upon the thingly character of the thing; the equipmental character of equipment; and the workly character of the work. So, it seems we have only engaged in a negative study so far. The most difficult of the three is the first: the thingly character of the thing. He states: “The unpretentious thing evades thought most stubbornly.” The thing seems unapproachable because it is usually accessed by means of the central function of the equipment. The puzzle is most difficult and invites us to stop thinking. But Heidegger was not one to ever do a thing like that. Instead he decides to speak of equipment by examining a well-known painting by Van Gogh that depicts a pair of peasant shoes. This is the most famous section of the article, and shows great sensitivity on the part of the author. First, he mentions that shoes are useful in different ways, which dictate the different kinds of shoes that are made and used. An obvious point. But then he asks: “what about this usefulness itself?” Van Gogh provides no guide as to the actual usage of these particular shoes. But if we examine the painting carefully, we find that the shape and type of the shoes must have been peasant shoes, shoes that serve the owner in the fields, i.e., shoes of a peasant. He imagines a peasant woman wearing these shoes in the fields, and makes many likely experiences the woman who would have worn these shoes in very poetical language, reminiscent of the singularity of all sensations from her experiences in life that in sum make up her life. Heidegger sums up this part of the article by saying: “This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman.” This introduces two new terms into the discussion, and the most important elements of his conclusion of the question about the origin. Next, Heidegger goes further into the question of the equipment that enables things that serve the actors’ purposes in life and work. He writes: “the equipmental being of the equipment consists indeed of its usefulness. But this usefulness itself rests in the abundance of an essential Being of the equipment. We call it reliability.” This “repose of equipment resting within itself” enables the twin origins of her life to come together and, earth and world together, effect normal reliability in her experience. This experience can not be communicated to the reader except by the experience of confronting the painting itself. He concludes: “In the work of art the truth of beings has set itself to work. “To set” means here “to bring to stand.” Some particular being, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its Being. The Being of beings comes into the steadiness of its shining. The essence of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work…”

96 Ovi Symposium II Now the argument starts to become quite difficult; now it shifts in ways an ordinary thinker would not think of. There is a puzzle about the thing. The concepts that guide the reader in this region of thought are not helpful because, historically, the understanding of the thing in its essence is not from the essence of the thing, but is the essence of equipment. This shakes the whole analysis up to this point in the article. After some paragraphs, Heidegger finds that “the thingly feature in the work should not be denied; but if it belongs admittedly to the work-being of the work, it must be conceived by way of the work’s workly nature. If this is so, then the road toward the determination of the thingly reality of the work leads not from thing to work but from work to thing.” Later he says “Art is truth setting itself to work.” So now, the stage is set on this extensive journey that includes two more steps, first a consideration of the work and truth; second, it refers to World and Earth.

Sophocles’ Antigone, a tragedy written in 441 BC Work and truth carry the burden of history. It is not possible to experience the truth of art of ages that have long since perished. Art historians write many disquisitions on works from ages past, but they do not encounter the artwork. This astonishing claim rocks the boat, especially for persons like myself who cherish much of the known productions from several dead cultures. Only artworks of near contemporary prove- nance can really be breathed in, made real, transform us. He mentions the Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection and Sophocles’ Antigone as examples. Also the temple in Paestum and the Bamberg cathedral. Heidegger concludes: “where does a work belong? The work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself.”

Sophocles (496-406 B.C.)

Ovi Symposium II 97 Bamberg Cathedral (13th century Romanesque Architecture) Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes fulfills the function of art as truth, for in the work there is a happening of truth at work. And this has nothing to do with representationalism. Heidegger selects as an example a Greek temple. The statue of the god is present in it, which confers a status of holiness on it. The temple “gathers around itself the entire scene of the institution of place and time,” and much else besides: “It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation.”

One of the Aigina sculptures mentioned in Heidegger’s essay on art (500 B.C.) The course of history is repetitious; things of all kinds, including animals and humans and cities and states of all descriptions rise and then fall, in a seeming circular necessity. The ancient Greeks called these processes physis. Heidegger calls it earth. He tells us: “Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises. … In the things that arise, earth occurs essentially as the sheltering agent.

Van Gogh’s Shoes of a Peasant Woman

98 Ovi Symposium II The temple that has risen transforms the landscape, providing something new in the world, because it gathers men to itself for rituals, interactions of citizens, and possibly can dictate a way of life to the population, based upon the ideals and character of the god it contains. All work-beings engage in world-building. It is never without its correlative, given the name of world. The opposition between world and earth is strife, striving. In this way a new kind of life can be introduced into life, for, in strife, each of these two are carried away, beyond themselves. Such competition gives an edge to the taste of life, and allows for great works to be undertaken and completed.

Greek Temple to Minerva at Paestum, near Naples (460 BC) “World” in this scheme is the active principle and “earth” is the defensive sheltering and concealing. The work of these two “origins” of life and work and art, are complementary and neither can overcome the other. All that can be asseverated about these operational forces in our experience is that “the world worlds” and “the earth earths.” Further than this we cannot penetrate or control. In other words, they reflect the finitude of the human condition under another description. From the point of view of the human artist, the work is generated out of the strife that governs the worlding of the world and the earthing of the earth. In such a work of art, truth is revealed. But what is truth? Heidegger goes back, as he often does, to the ancient Greeks and finds there the word for truth, aletheia, which means, literally “not forgetting.” In German the word is “Entbergung”, in English it is “unconcealedness” — both equivalent because they name the same process. This is most revealing in every sense. Heidegger is thus a proponent of the view that every truth is a revelation! It may not be a strictly religious opinion, but it does indeed feel vaguely religious. Here is what can be said about these two hidden forces of World and Earth. “The world is the self-operating openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. … The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.” The opposition of world and earth is strife, and neither can ever destroy the other. The work is said to “repose” in the midst of this strife, since the work of constructing any work of art is filled

Ovi Symposium II 99 with indeterminacies that require energy to overcome resistances to a new thing being brought into existence. As he sums it up: “the work that rests in itself thus has its essence in the intimacy of strife.” And now, having brought forth unconcealedness as truth, he wants to say how this happens. “In the midst of beings as a whole an open space occurs. There is a lighting. … the open center is before beings and therefore not surrounded by beings; rather the lighting center itself encircles all that is, as does the nothing, which we scarcely know.” What does all this mean? It means that for every lighting and clarity, there is also concealment. The teaching once again, as at the beginning of his career, is human finitude. And, harder to understand, concealment and disclosure interpenetrate one another. In other words, falsehood exists, even in truth, in the forms of refusal to reveal themselves or dissembling. And the lighting is not a thing, but wavers and sometimes disappears. The situation is unclear, and the reason is that truth is itself wavering, and has nothing to do with propositional matters of fact. “At bottom,” he orates, “the ordinary is not ordinary.” The difficult part for philosophy is that truth is never purely true and nothing else. Even the truth contains untruths in the concealments it keeps or in dissembling, which, in the first instance, would stem from the weakness of our minds to understand. Again, this is more about the finitude of human beings than it is about ill-will. We have not yet realized that the terms World and Earth are not unblemished with error, and so falsehood and deception have places in the decision for truth, and decisions are always accompanied by a lack of ability to secure truth unblemished. Setting to work is what beings do, and in this sense of human beings, the lighting that reveals the being of all the many things there are in the world — all these and many more are finite as well as human beings. The work-being of the work, in the case of art, is one of the ways in which truth happens. The mysterious lighting lights up all beings. When we encounter a work such as Van Gogh’s painting, a shining of truth is effectuated, and this shining in the work is beauty, which, amazingly, is one way in which truth essentially occurs, and is beauty. But, we must always remember that works are things made, and in this case, a work of art is made by a creator. The artist is the creator, in the midst of all these limitations and forces of finitude. His job is to create a work that is unique, and which organizes the era that will come in the future, as all artworks do. Thus again, everything that is lit up is historical. “As a world opens itself, it submits to a historical the question of victory and defeat, blessing and curse, master and slavery.” The artist must produce a work if he is to be called an artist. One does not need to be a genius to be a creator. In fact, works that have been produced but the creator is unknown are more purely works of art. The equipment, which has no destiny like the work, which is not useful at all, and does not remain, like equipment, commonplace. Perhaps Heidegger means

100 Ovi Symposium II by this that uniquely brilliant works fail to carry a social message, in regulating what is thought of as valid in the larger, historical arena. Works are powerful in that they attract attention, because, as the product of a human artist, it is surprising that it exists at all. The work is extraordinary; it transports us out of the ordinary. As he concludes, “art is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth.” In a sense art arises from nothing. Heidegger returns to formulations of his earliest book, Sein und Zeit, and shows in his new vocabulary that being thrown into a open space between World and Earth, and opening a place in which the lighting of beings happens, is truth. Truth is always partial, composed of truth and falsehood, and, more important, all art is essentially poetry. This is because the place where art breaks out into an open place, whose openness is anything but usual, is most creative and gives meaning to a culture. It has nothing to do with objects that obey causal laws. The working of the work lies in a change, coming from out of the work, of aletheia, and this means Being, i.e., Sein, which confers meanings on human experience. Heidegger believes that all the arts, in so far as they bear truth, is poetry. He states: “the linguistic work, poetry in the narrower sense, has a privileged position in the domain of he arts.” Language, he tells us, “by naming things for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance.” Only language projects and affirms the existence of things, by naming them. And projective saying is poetry; it is the saying of the aletheia of beings. It permits the saying of the unsayable and brings it into a world. At the end of this difficult article, Heidegger tells us: “The origin of the work of art — that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers, which is to say of a people’s historical existence, is art. This is so because art is in its essence an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.” As a last addition, I wish to tell the reader that what Heidegger has to say depends in some measure in his profundity, his originality and his poetical practice that astound the reader and win him over. There are two places in his article where this magic is most pronounced. First, in his lyrical tone while he demonstrates that we know our world through the simplest of sounds, and not in combinations of events. Second, the same is true of the description he gives of the peasant woman whom he believes is the wearer of the shoes painted by Van Gogh, which in the end, in showing her routines in life, show that the essence of equipment is reliability. Both of these texts evince the magical property of existence for the human being, and validate for Heidegger his teaching of the ontological difference, that is, Being with a capital B. In the final analysis, we are confronted by a kind of wizardry that does work on the imagination, but also calls into question materialist thinking. His thinking is not religious, but it seems to fit the definition of the magical.

Ovi Symposium II 101 Observations by Paparella on Nannery’s presentation Thank you Larry for this lucid and brilliant excursus and the clarifications of Heidegger’s complex thought on the nature of art. Indeed, when I taught a course on aesthetics at Barry University some time ago and re-read the essay in question, I remember being immediately struck by two themes that run through it: the first one, contained in the very title of the essay, is that of “originative thinking” and the second was that of historicity and the necessary relationship between truth and history in Heidegger’s philosophy. I found those themes quite similar to what Vico had written in The New Science way back in 1725 about Poetic Wisdom. When Heidegger writes in his essay that “Art is historical, and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art happens as poetry. Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning... This is so because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical” he is, consciously or unconsciously, whether he knows it or not, harking back to Vico. Consider now this passage from The New Science: “The nature of things [natura di cose] is nothing but their coming into being [nascimento di esse] at certain times and in certain guises” (S.N. 147). The above passage from Vico’s New Science clearly demonstrates that Vico was on to something about modern metaphysics’ forgetfulness of its own origins well 200 years before the modern deconstructionists and existentialists and nihilists began dealing with such a subject, simply because he considered the whole of his “science” a science of origins. But nobody was paying any attention; they were too busy developing Descartes’ extreme rationalism. Had more attention been paid to Vico, modern philosophy would like quite different nowadays. Be that as it may, as a science of origins Vico’s basic operating principle is that of a return to the archè, the basic governing root of the matter under investigation. In other words, the birth or origin of the subject of investigation is thus central: one must descend, as it were, to the origins, to make sense of any aspect of human making. Now, while it is true that Vico has finally been recognized in post-modern times as the father of historicism, or at the very least its precursor, little credit is accorded to him as the precursor of originative thinking. I don’t believe that in the entire opus of Heidegger Vico is mentioned once although Cassirer and Gadam- er as contemporaries of Heidegger do frankly and openly acknowledge their debt to Vico as precursor of deconstructionism, symbolic forms, hermeneutics and historicism. I don’t know what Heidegger actually thought of Vico and Croce, if anything at all, but I dare say that for anybody to consider them thinkers from the backwaters of Europe (i.e., Southern Italy) not to be compared to a Hegel or a Heidegger, is a huge mis- judgment from which they may well need to be disabused. This is partly one of the aims of this symposium where Vico and Croce have been presented from the beginning as first rate Western philosophers at a par with a Plato or a Kant or a Heidegger. In any case, we certainly do not wish in this symposium to dally in envious comparison or grade our philosophers, and even less grade each other. Frankly, my puzzlement is simply this: could it be that Heidegger in regard to originative thinking reinvented the wheel in some way? One has to wonder. I have been wondering in fact since I took a seminar on Heidegger in my college days (1966) and dared submit a controversial paper to the eminent professor teaching the seminar. In that paper I suggested that theory and practice cannot be so neatly and hermetically sealed off from each other when teaching the philosophy of an influential thinker such as Heidegger, and that in fact to compartmentalize those two aspects of a philosopher’s life

102 Ovi Symposium II is to insure that truth will never be revealed. In response the eminent professor promptly assigned a C- to the paper, suggesting in the accompanying comments that I had understood little if anything of Heidegger anti-metaphysical deconstructionism, that as Heidegger himself repeatedly reminded us “there is no philosophy of Heidegger,” there is only the question of Being in the Western philosophical tradition and that in fact the theory of a philosopher has to be kept well separated from his actions and practices; one could not judge one from the other. Some fifty years later I am still pondering those comments, and alas, I remain puzzled. So I thought to myself: what better place to clarify the issue than to resurrect it some fifty years later in a convivial symposium of friends and colleagues not out to judge or grade each other or champion their pet philosophers but vitally committed to the solution of this intricate difficult issue? I propose in fact that we begin to do so in the next theme of the symposium’s 17th session (January 16, 2014) which will be dedicated to a well focused and rigorous philosophical analysis of “the nexus between theory and practice vis a vis truth.” What the contemporary and influential German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has to say about this issue in his book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity may well serve us as a starting point for the session (see below).

Jurgen Habermas (1929-- )

Ovi Symposium II 103 Reply by Nannery to Paparella’s observations I long ago realized that only certain countries’ laureates are allowed to control debates in philosophy. How else explain the prominence of British thought in the 20th century? There is not even a simulacrum of a thought in the whole crowd! England, France and Germany dominate in the modern European arena, and it is not fair, since there are plenty of good philosophers in other nations. It is unfair to Italy for no other reason than Germans have dominated the narrative in Italy. There is no good explanation for it that I have ever found. For example, perhaps my favorite author in philosophy is Ortega y Gasset, who was called by Camus, the greatest of Europeans. My own preferences run to ancient Greek philosophy and against Scholasticism, which I had to learn at Boston College; and against modern philosophy in all English speaking countries due to “Analysis”. About other philosophies I do not know much, but I am always ready to look into things. As you may sense, I am more into literature than I am into philosophy, because the vast majority of philosophers have no real talent. I do honor Vico and have mentioned him to many people. He had a great imagination, and resurrected what had been forgotten by everyone until he came along. So, I am in league with you, but have some other things to say about other thinkers of note.

104 Ovi Symposium II Chapter 17 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Seventeenth Meeting: 16 January 2014

Table of Content for the 17th Session of the Ovi Symposium Main Sub-theme of the 17th Session: Truth/Freedom vis a vis Theory/Practice within Modernity: Is Philosophy an Existential rather than a Purely Theoretical Practice? Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance in the conversation): Croce, Zola, Dostoevsky, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre, Parmenides, Holderlin, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Vattimo, Habermas, Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss, Farias, Fage, Ellul, Remy, Fabbri, Levinas, Husserl, Marx, Adorno, Gadamer, Cassirer, Plato, Schelling, Horkheimer, Hegel, Judt, Aquinas, Augustine, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Gramsci, Gentile, Dante, Pascal, Vico. Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator Section 1: “Art in the World of Technology: Martin Heidegger.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica (Events in Aesthetics, chapter V), Naples, 1989. Section 2: “Jurgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: ExploringMartin Heidegger’s Nazi Past within the duality Theory/Practice in Philosophy.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 3: Observations and Comments by Paparella on Paolozzi’s Presentation by way of a Dialogue and an Ex- change of Ideas. Section 4: Announcement and Welcome of Professor Vena as a fourth permanent contributor to the Ovi Symposyum. Section 5: “Kafka’s Kehre.” A presentation by Lawrence Nannery.

Ovi Symposium II 105 Introductory note by the Symposium’s Coordinator The sub-theme of this session of the Ovi Symposium is “Truth/Freedom vis a vis Theory/Practice: is Philosophy an Existential rather than a Purely Theoretical Practice?” This a theme already broached briefly in the previous session which we now examine more thoroughly. The significant philosophical figure around which the conversation revolves is Heidegger, his conception of art vis a vis truth and his stand on theory and practice, politics and ethics in philosophy as exemplified in his life; a follow-up to the previous analysis by Nannery and Paparella in previous meetings of the symposium. Some twenty five years ago Ernesto Paolozzi published a whole chapter on Heidegger in his bookVicende della Tecnica (Chapter 5). We have translated it and are presenting it in English in the Symposium in the context of the sub-theme we are currently exploring. That explains why Paolozzi’s presentation has been placed at the beginning (section two) of this particular session, to function as both a follow-up and an introduction. Paparella follows-up on the sub-theme in section three focusing on Heidegger’s Nazi past as seen through the eyes of Heidegger’s fellow-German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Paparella’s exploration revolves around Habermas’ book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, which gathers a series of twelve lectures, one of them (the fifth in the book) is exclusively on Heidegger and explores philosophically the intriguing phenomenon of Heidegger’s never publicly regretted and never repented Nazi past within the issue of theory/practice, truth/art. In section four we have a response by Paparella on Paolozzi’s treatment of Heidegger vis a vis Croce and Vico. In section 6 of this Symposium’s session the reader is treated to a presentation by Lawrence Nannery by way of a contribution, never published before, to Kafka studies. Lawrence Nannery is the author of a book on Kafka entitled The Esoteric Composition of Kafka’s Corpus: Devising a Nihilistic Literature (Two volumes, the Mellen Press, 2006).

106 Ovi Symposium II 1 Art in the World of Technology: Martin Heidegger A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica--1989)

Particularly interesting for our discourse is without any doubt the work of Martin Heidegger, a work which spans the first and the second crisis of Positivism. The major work of Heidegger (even if for our research it is less relevant than others) goes back to 1927. It is contemporary to the rebirth of neo-positivism which whose foundation was the Vienna Circle. His last essays, particularly The Origin of the Work of Art, The Era of the World’s Image, Journeying toward Language, Why the Poets?, which are the ones we will keep in mind span the years 1930 to 1960. Those are the years when neo-positivism reappears, slowly, to become a widespread mind-set, a life-style. The years when political passions for global confrontations and the existentialist reaction to the bad excuses of philosophers of science produce what has been branded as the probably the last ideological philosophical clash of our century. Later on philosophical positivism will be its own victim to be overcome by the total indifference of an homologated society, and the utilitarianism of a cynical society, within which man runs the risk of losing the very idea of value, even before those values as historically understood. Heidegger is the kind of philosopher, who probably better than any other and with a pregnant language and analysis, predicted, even when he exasperated the tones, the outcomes of our era. Therefore his aesthetic considerations are of great interest to us (considerations that as we shall see are relatively original), but above all we are interested in his interpretation of our history, of our destiny, as Heidegger himself would say, and the role within this search he assigns to art and aesthetics. The debate that Heidegger carried on with positivistic philosophy and then with classical philosophy in general, according to a sort of gradual and conscious anti-historical classification of values, was at any rate always a debate conducted vis a vis with his times and of future times as it formed in his imagination. Heidegger’s critique, often emptied of its highest meanings, at times cut off from its metaphysical foundations, at other times diluted into social and political criticism, has given fruits conspiring to the creation of a widespread view of the world.

Ovi Symposium II 107 Existentialism as a whole had placed on the table for a radical discussion the very nature of philosophy and the nature of its research, placing in the foreground the finitude of man and the inconsistency of being face to face with nothingness, taking in consideration everything that such a dramatic consciousness of the human condition implies as regards a wider and more inclusive conception of the world. Existentialism has been in part and continues to be anti-positivism at its best, the opposite attitude not only in its deep theoretical convictions which identify it, but also, and above all for its political and moral attitude which it assumed. The positivist and the existentialist place themselves before the world in a radically different manner. If the poet of the former is Zola, the poet of the latter is Fjodor Dostoyevsky. Yet, in other aspects they belong to the same world: the world of reaction to classical philosophy. In existentialism hope does not self-destroy. Within the “philosophical faith” of a Jaspers and his courageous political positions, within Marcel’s religiousness or in the political commitment of Sartre, man’s finitude, the nothingness of being are redeemed according to an incoherent, as well as noble, opening of new credit for the moral conscience of man.

Emile Zola (1840-1902) Father of Naturalism in Literature Martin Heidegger, as a more rigorous philosopher, escapes this radical temptation but in his own way leaves the door open for the road to hope. For this reason it is appropriate to emphasize Heidegger’s work, even if Jaspers’ thought presents us with aspects which are absolutely interesting. But can we agree with a philosopher even when we do not share his premises and his conclusions? Is there such a thing as truth on one side and the reasons for truth on the other? The conclusions of an issue may be different from its premises, or are they the same thing? Is there such a thing as a synthesis that is not the synthesis of an analysis, and an analysis which is not the analysis of a synthesis?

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) The greatest of the Literary Existentialists

108 Ovi Symposium II It is in fact possible to separate truth from the reasons for truth, if in the contradictions we are able to discover the speculative space to fill with one’s own cultural and human experience. Are Heidegger’s conclusions coherent with his premises? How much has willfulness forced the facts. The same Heidegger, within a phase of his philosophical journey, gives permission to travel different paths if it is true, as in fact it is, that he wished to travel on “interrupted journeys”, if he wished to conclude determining a series of indeterminations, declaring that the question is more important than the answer. Given that to ask something in a serious way means to possess very clear ideas regarding what one is searching for, and that what is questioned is already partly known (the accused who is interrogated is, logically, known to he who interrogates), in Heidegger’s pages there are indeed answers and they are straight- forward. Only the rhetoric of supposed followers or the forcing by “pluralistic” interpreters who do not wish to rock the boat, are able to present Heidegger as an “inconclusive” philosopher, thus being grossly unfair to him. If in fact one travels on Heidegger’s paths, one always gets to the same destination, whether it is desired or not.

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

Man in the Modern Age by Karl Jaspers (1933)

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The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1990) The pages where Heidegger explains, even if not systematically, a particular conception of art, a genuine aesthetics, are particularly interesting. There are others where he analyzes in a lucid mode some aspects of our modern era, he confers to art a positive role, almost a way to save ourselves from the crisis brought about by positivism and scientism, in as much as those phenomena are the last expression of the crisis of Western thought.

Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) who converted to Catholicism in 1929 The whole Heideggerian philosophy, beyond the intrinsic importance of some meditations (such as those we find in the existential analysis of Being and Time, his best known work) is certainly the controversy, implicit or explicit, with the banalities of contemporary philosophy. Just think of his conception of truth as “aleteia” understood as an “unveiling” of being, as not hiding of that which precedes being, or the existence of being or being in its proper sense. Having posited an ontological distinction between original being and empirical contingent being, Heidegger proposes an ontology of phenomenological origin beyond Kant’s or Husserl’s lesson which declares a fundamental difference between aleteia and exactitude within which is enclosed the great difference which exists between a type of thought which really thinks about the world, and a thought which thinks only in abstract forms, typical of sciences of nature or the so called human sciences.

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) The most influential of Modern Existentialist Philosophers

110 Ovi Symposium II There has been talk of, the same Heidegger has spoken about, of the change of direction of his thought, and undoubtedly there was a change and has been interpreted in various ways, either in the sense of bringing back Heideggerian philosophy in the corner of the spiritualisms or neo-romanticisms, or in the sense, probably closer to the truth, of bringing it back to modern historicism. But beyond a continuity which is merely theoretic in Heidegger’s thought, there is no doubt that the refusal of modernity dominated by the “enlightenment” scientific mind-set, technology and the metaphysical assumption of such conception of the world, remains always present and in fact is accentuate in the last writings of Heidegger.

Gianni Vattimo (1936--) who introduced the concept of a post-modern “weak thought” In his essay “The era of the image of the world,” which exemplary when compared to other writings for the unity of its inspiration and the coherence of its discourse, Heidegger elaborates a lucid and in some aspects ruthless portrayal of the era in which we live which could be conceived as a meeting place for all the critiques of the world of technology found in various authors which are so dissimilar from each other as is the case with the so called School of Frankfurt. As Heidegger writes in Interrupted paths: “One of the essential manifestations of the modern world is modern science. Another manifestation, equally important, is mechanical technology. But let’s not fall in the fallacy of understanding this phenomenon as the application to praxis of the modern mathematical science of nature. Mechanical technology is itself an autonomous transformation of praxis, which implies in the first place the employment of the mathematical science of nature. Mechani- cal technology is the first fruit of the essence of modern technology, which is in unison with the essence of modern metaphysics.” But, Heidegger ask, which is the conception of being (which is to say of metaphysics and “philosophy”) which is at the basis of the essence of science and, with it, of the general conception of the world? The investigation and the research must be conducted according to a simple opening, questioning a “region of Being,” to attempt to understand being itself as long as it can be understood. Heidegger conducts a very interesting analysis (the pages where mathematics is characterized as anticipation of reality, according to one of its possible etymologies) focusing on “specialization” and specialists and the damage that they cause as a necessity and not a simple axiom of modern science (already compared to Greek science), on its mere pragmatic aspects, on the crisis of the universities as mere institutions for specialization, to then get to the fundamental moment, where one glimpses at the essence of the modern world and our era. And in fact, according to Heidegger, the entire trajectory of Western philosophy is responsible (responsible only in the sense that it was destined to happen) for the modern conception of science. Metaphysics (and this is one of the leitmotifs of his philosophy) gets further and further away from the search for being, as it

Ovi Symposium II 111 was still being proposed by Parmanides, to become interested in entity, thus transforming itself into ontic ontology. It manifests itself completely with Descartes and reveals its essence. As Heidegger puts it: “To know for research means that entity must give an account of the how and the when of its availability for representation. Research renders a judgment on entity, either calculating ahead of time its future course or completing its past. The former is posited within nature (gestelt), the latter within history. Nature and history become objects of an explicative representation which counts on nature and answers to history. Only that which becomes object (Gegenstand) is (ist), an entity.Science becomes research when the being of entity is changed within objectivity. This objectification of entity is accomplished by representation, in putting in front (vor-stellen) which aims at representing every entity in such a way so that calculating man can be comfortable (sicher), that is to say, certain (gewiss) about entity. Science as research is constituted only if truth has been transformed in certainty of representation. Within Descartes’ metaphysics, entity, for the first time is defined as objectivity of representation and truth as certainty of the same representation.” Maniputaling one of his dubious etymological plays (this one mentioned here is among the least gratuitous) Heidegger emphasizes the difference between the Greek use of the term subject (upoxemerov) and the Latin use (subjectum). Then with a brief but forceful analysis of Cartesian philosophy, he clarifies the sense of his idea of the image of the world: “When the world becomes image, art in its totality is assumed to be that by which man orients himself, and therefore that which he wants to develop before him (vor-stellen) by which to represent himself. An image of the world, in its essential sense, means therefore not a configuration of the world, but the world conceived as an image. Entity in its totality is therefore is seen in such a way that it becomes merely entity in as much as it is posited by man who represents and produces (her-stellen). The arising of something as the image of the world is equivalent to an essential decision regarding entity overall. The being of entity is searched for and found in the being represented by entity.” But what are the effects of this entification of being, of the becoming of subject-man imposing his “categories” to a world rendered abstract and dumb in its false objectivity in which humanism places it, understood as hyper-subjectivity, so to speak, of man? Heidegger writes that: “The characteristic narrative of the Modern World, by which the world becomes image and man subjectum, throws significant light on the fundamental trajectory of modern history, which at first sight looks absurd. The more definitely the world is conquered and therefore rendered disposable to man, so much the more the object reveals itself objective and the subjectum imposes itself subjectively and forcefully, and so much more resolutely the conception of the world and the theory of the world are transformed in an anthropological doctrine of man.” Anthropological humanism takes its distances the man of being, and what triumphs is “Americanism,” the quantifiable, what is the vast infinitude or the infinitesimally small of atomic physics, while what is most important escapes man. Heidegger concludes his reflection with a quote from Holderlin: “To know what is not calculable, which is to say, to preserve it in its truth, is only possible for man only after a creative questioning and the forms sustained by the strength of a pure reflection. Such a reflection transfers the man of the future from the being to which he belongs to the entity where he remains alienated. Holderlin knew something about this. His poetry which is titled Au die Deutschen ends thus: “A brief course does our life have;/we may see and count the number of our years/But can a human eye see/ the years of a people?/And even if the soul were to elevate itself nostalgically/beyond its time,/you’d be roaming sadly on a deserted beach/with your dear ones without knowing them.

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It is not easy to understand fully the purposely ambiguous thought of Heidegger. His is a very original and in some way fantastic reconstruction of the history of philosophy, a sort of philosophy of history up-side- down wherein progress consists in returning to Parmenides by bypassing the rest of the history of philosophy; nevertheless it remains significant for the understanding of the philosophic sensibility of Heidegger. He quotes Holderlin paying particular attention to this poet. Why is that? Because in the era of the world’s image, of the emptying of the divine, of the flight of the gods from the world, in the era of poverty, poetry which is thinking poetry, may allow man to rejoin being, to overcome the darkness of midnight in which he has fallen as if in an abyss.

Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) Not without some rhetoric and artifice Heidegger writes this in his essay Why the poets?: “The sacred can only appear within the wider circle of salvation. Those kind of poets who are willing to risk, are those who having become aware of the lack of salvation, of perdition, still journey on toward the search for the Sacred. It is their song beyond the earth that saves them. Their song is a celebration of the integrity of the sphere of being. The negation of salvation as non-salvation yields the signs of salvation. Salvation evokes the Sacred. The Sacred unites with the Divine, the Divine gets on closer to God. Those who risk the most are those who, lacking salvation, become aware of our being without protection. They bring to mortals the sign of the gods who have fled in the darkness of the night of the world. The ones who risk the most in as much as they are singers of salvation, are “poets in the era of poverty.”

Ovi Symposium II 113 In other essays in which thinking poetry, to which the same Heidegger makes himself available, has a tendency to be more an expression of thought than poetry and reveals the philosopher’s aesthetics. In the essay The Origins of the Work of Art, where he analyzes a famous painting by Van Gogh, he focuses on the shoes of the farmer there represented distinguishing the practical use of things (entities) as mere instruments, asking what exactly come to light in a work of art: “What does it mean? What is at work in a work of art? Van Gogh reveals what is instrumental, the shoes is (ist) the truth. This entity presents itself in the hiding (Unverbongenheit) of its being. The not being hidden of the entity is what the Greeks called aleteia. We say “truth,” and do not reflect sufficiently on such a word. If what is realized is the revelation of the entity in what it is and how it is, in the work of art the event of truth (Geschehen) is at work. In the work of art the truth of the entity has put itself to work. To posit here means: to bring to stay. Thanks to the work of art, an entity, a pair of shoes, is under the light of its being. The being of the entity arrives at the stability of its appearance. Therefore the essence of art consists then in that putting to work of the truth of the entity.” But one cannot confuse this Heideggerian position with a new proposal of forms of aesthetic realism (nothing could be farther from his mind-set) or a return, for that matter, to forms of Romanticism. Surely, as Heide- gger himself writes, Pascalian suggestions, intellectual intuition, from Holderlin and Schelling, and of course Nietzsche. But his narration is different. The crux of the question can be found in that word event (pregnant with meaning), on which the reflection of the last Heidegger will focus.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Being comes through the event and only in the event (in which it reveals itself) it becomes possible to meet being. An event in which being only happens, cannot but manifest itself in language. Language is the house of being, given that everything happens within language. Only when a thing is called forth or named can it come into existence. Outside of being named there is no being. Here again, we cannot confuse the evaluation of language as an ordinary object of our experience, in as much as our own experience takes place within language, with similar theories originating in neo-positivism. As Heidegger himself puts it: “To experience language is quite different from gathering notions on language. The disciplines which will furnish us with those notions are science of language, linguistics, philology of var-

114 Ovi Symposium II ious languages, psychology and philosophy of language; they are continually expanding and propagating themselves to the point that it becomes impossible to control the field. Scientific and philosophic linguistics, has been aiming, for some time now, always in a more decisive way, to construct what goes by the name of “metalanguage.” Logically, scientific philosophy which aims at constructing a meta-language identifies itself as a meta-linguistics which is in fact the metaphysic of the total technical transformation of every language in a mere interplanetary instrument of information. Meta-language, Sputnik, meta-linguistics and missile’s technique are one and the same.”

Vincent Van Gogh’s Shoes of a Farmer (1886) In fact, to experience language, is to put oneself in the presence of the original Enunciation. “Original Enun- ciation” (sagen) writes Heidegger, “means: to point to, to make appear, to display to the one’s sight a whole world risking-hiding-freeing.”

Hans-George Gadamer (1900-2002)

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Ovi Symposium II 115 In the essay The Journey toward Language written in 1959, Heidegger says with a prose that become more and more complex: “The Ereignis, seen as the constitutive showing of the original Enunciation, cannot be objectified, neither as a fact nor as an event: it can only be experienced from inside that original Enunciation as a giver. There is nothing outside the Ereignis to which the Ereignis can be brought back and by which it can be explained. The Ereignis is not the result (Ergebnis) of something else: to the contrary, it is the Giving (die Er-gebnis). Only its generous giving can allow something like that “es gibt” which is still necessary for being, to arrive at, as being which is present, to what it properly belongs to it.”

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) Language (which could be death which constitutes a supreme human experience), poetry, the truth of being, are therefore the issues which assail the thought of the last Heidegger and which will trace the philosophical experience of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gianni Vattimo, resulting in a philosophical current which, even if via a sort of secularization of Heidegger’s thought, is representative of the last blow to the positivistic mind- set. The so called hermeneutical circle, which is fundamental to Heidegger’s reflections on language, the concept of the linguistic event, seem to re-propose, albeit from a different vantage point, the discourse on modern historicism, especially of the Crocean kind. For Croce too language, which is always art in itself, is the house of being, and for Croce too the truth of art is eternal in as much as eternal it presents itself historically as the grasping of an event of life (history). For Croce, the interpretation (hermeneutic) on everything that has been said is true, it is the manifestation of the possibility of understanding the world. Undoubtedly, Heidegger’s thought is not without contradictions. It appears focused on one theme and often enough more envisioning than conclusive, what has become among some of his disciples a mere rhetorical exercise. But what matters for our discourse is the rigorous confrontation with his times and the road it suggests. Poetry can lead man out of the abyss. Of course. But there is more. The entrenched metaphysical search of Heidegger logically prevents him from thinking about plurality and to understand his adversaries’ reasons, to think of politics and ethics as diversity. So he falls into a sort of ethical indifference which locates him outside the tradition of the great Western philosophers. Indeed, a return to art, to the value of poetry, to the impossibility of reducing man to a mere instrument, is to be hoped for and it probably can be realized. Ma it will be realized only within a new humanism (which Heidegger refuses) which puts man back to the center of the world as an ethical entity, whose political behavior proceeds as an ideal, even as an utopia, under the banner of freedom, realizable within the limitations of the human condition.

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) The reflection on Art or aesthetics remains under many aspects the crucible (and a condition) for the will of redemption of modern man, given that the reflection on art (by the very nature of art) places at the very center of its concerns a value which is disinterested and humanly committed.

Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom by Ernesto Paolozzi (in Ovi bookstore, June 2013)

Ovi Symposium II 117 2 Jurgen Habermas’ Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Exploring Martin Heidegger’s Nazi Past within the duality Theory/Practice

A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Jurgen Habermas (1929-- )

In his 1985 book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Jurgen Habermas wrote that Heidegger’s lack of explicit criticism against Nazism is due to his unempowering turn (Kehre) towards Being as time and history: “he detaches his actions and statements altogether from himself as an empirical person and attributes them to a fate for which one cannot be held responsible.” From the Wikipedia Encyclopedia In the previous Symposium’s conversation, I narrated a personal anecdote. Please bear with me if I narrate it once again within this more appropriate context. Way back in 1966, almost half a century ago, during my college days, I attended a seminar on Martin Heide- gger. At the time, the revelations about Heidegger’s Nazi past and the plethora of books on the subject had not surfaced yet; I am referring to books such Emmanuel Faye’s The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, or Victor Farias’ Heidegger and Nazism (1989); or Stephen Remy’s The Heidelberg Myth: the Nazification and Denazification of a German University (2003), or Georg E. Aylesworth’s The Heidegger-Jaspers Cor- respondence (1990). So in the absence of such rigorous unmistakable documentation, my submission of a paper on Heidegger’s Nazi past within the issue of Theory/Practice, Existentialism/Rationalism, carried the risk of being interpreted as an arrogant challenge to the professor’s expertise on Heidegger’s thought, and in fact it was immediately interpreted as such.

118 Ovi Symposium II In that paper I dared suggest that theory and practice cannot be so neatly and hermetically sealed off from each other when teaching the philosophy of an influential thinker such as Heidegger, that ethics and epistemology have been conjoined since Socrates’ time and that in fact to compartmentalize those two aspects of any philosopher’s life is to insure that truth (aleteia) will never reveal itself. In response the professor promptly affixed a C- to the paper, suggesting in the accompanying comments that I had understood precious little of Heidegger’s anti-metaphysical deconstruction, that as Heidegger himself repeatedly had reminded us “there is no philosophy of Heidegger,” there is only the question of Being in the Western philosophical tradition and that in fact the praxis of a philosopher has to be bracketed from his theory; one could not measure one by the other. Some fifty years later I am still pondering those comments, wondering if existentially truth can indeed be conceived theoretically divorced from the praxis of the one uttering it, and alas, I remain puzzled. I am hoping that the observations and elucidations of my colleagues and friends in this symposium will be helpful in reaching less tentative conclusions on this thorny and controversial issue.

Heidegger and Nazism by Victor Farias (1987) Why do I retell this anecdote? It is not to make a sardonic point about the less than edifying foibles of an academia that pullulates with big egos and prima donnas; rather the point is that serendipitously, some forty years later, I came across the above mentioned books as well as Jurgen Habermas’ series of lectures on modernity published as a book by the title The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (see book-cover illustration above) wherein a whole lecture (chapter VI) is dedicated to Heidegger’s philosophy (“The Un- dermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics in Martin Heidegger,” p. 131-160). What I found uncanny in this particular intellectual encounter with Habermas is how his initial reaction to Heidegger’s thought paralleled mine: an initial enthusiastic albeit uncritical acceptance of his ideas (which led me to take a whole seminar on his philosophy), followed by a great disillusionment and break on finding out the un-repented never regretted commitment of Heidegger to the Nazi party. Such a commitment, mind you, did not last only for the year or so when he was rector of the University of Freiburg dismissing Jewish professors; he actually paid dues to the party for twelve years, from 1933 when he joined the party till the end of the war in 1945 and after the war he never expressed any regrets or acknowledged any mistakes. Rather, he used the academic influence of his former student Hanna Arendt (who had to run to Paris to escape the Nazi as a Jew and then came to the US) in an attempt to rehabilitate his post-world war reputation on the cheap, without having to apologize for anything.

Ovi Symposium II 119 Habermas sees in Heidegger’s attitude of refusal to express any regrets for his former Nazi affiliation as an ethical problematic within modern Western philosophy; Husserl had entertained the same critical stance toward the Western philosophical rationalistic tradition, better expressed later in Emmanuel Levinas’ thought. I have already contributed a lenghty presentation on Levinas (open link: http://ovimagazine.com/art/10441); here I’d like to explore the critical stance of Habermas’ skeptical judgment on Heidegger’s philosophy, a skepticism which comes to a head in his life in the mid-fifties and culminates thirty years later with the publication in 1985 of his above mentioned book on modernity, the technological consumerist society, and what he sees as the connection to the Holocaust.

Victor Farias (1940- ) The crux of the issue is basically this: is philosophy an existential concern demanding that ethics be never severed from its theoretical concerns in ontology, logic and epistemology? Vico could have been chosen to answer this question, but of course Vico could not have known the full implications of Cartesian rationalism culminating with an Holocaust the way a Habermas (a fellow German to Heidegger) or a Levinas could do by hindsight. So out of the many books on Heidegger’s Nazi past and the relationship of politics to philosophy I have chosen to explore Habermas’ existential insights into the issue as expressed in his chapter on Heidegger in the above mentioned book.

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy by Emmanuel Faye By 1956 Habermas had joined the famous School of Criticism in Frankfurter as an assistant to Adorno. This school, composed mostly of Jewish intellectuals, had a political component that had as its aim the cleansing of Germany of all pre-World-War II nationalist ideals and values. To a man they became European (EU) citizens advocating a Republic that would have nothing to do with the former national traditions that led

120 Ovi Symposium II directly to the Holocaust. They inserted themselves in a universal Weltanschauung which was inexorably moving beyond rabid nationalism with a universal international global direction rooted in solidarity. Spinoza and Levinas were two of their exemplary intellectual heroes. Habermas, under the direction of Adorno, eventually became the most influential social philosopher in contemporary Germany.

Tony Judt (1948-2010)

The Burden of Responsibility (2007) by Tony Judt where a heroic commitment by 3 intellectuals to personal integrity is explored Habermas was at the time (1956) in his mid-twenties and he had already assumed an attitude of dismay and outrage toward the fact that many of his German co-nationals had not taken seriously enough the crimes that had been committed in the Nazi era between 1932 and 1945 and in fact had never repented of them. What seemed to appall him most was the postwar behavior of Heidegger. This indignation eventually triggered a rupture with him after the initial youthful enthusiasm in his teens during the late forties. By the mid-fifties however, Habermas had come to the conclusion that the foundations of the New Federal Repub- lic were a mere restoration of former social arrangements divorced from Nazism but continuing as before, rather than a genuine new beginning that he had hoped for. It should be noted that this disillusionment took place in Italy too where the new, so called, Christian Democratic party was on its way to restore the old corrupt order to the utter disappointment of many intellectuals on the left of the political spectrum. As a result Antonio Gramsci came to the fore in philosophy while Croce was all but forgotten and even discredited. But that’s another story already competently dealt by Paolozzi. Habermas becomes skeptical of modernity understood only as economic progressivism and ideological anti-Communism. We should take notice that his Ph.D. dissertation of 400 pages submitted in 1954 had been on none other than the historical philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. At that time Habermas still considers himself a disciple of Heidegger and approves of his philosophy affirming that: “the question of Being is the basis of Western thought since Plato, the essence depravity that has culminated in modern technology.”

Ovi Symposium II 121 For Habermas Heidegger was the intellectual giant who had unmasked the pretensions of science. Haber- mas writes that “Only Heidegger topples the metaphysical belief in the permanence of a given essence, and he shows that the foundation of the self-empowering and securing subject in scientific certainty is a flight to the apparent certainty of ultimately unbinding truths.” Even more significantly Habermas agrees with Heidegger that art is the realm where true experience occurs, not to speak of his approval of Heidegger’s challenge to the whole philosophical and academic establishment.

The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University, 1933-1957 (2003) by Steven P. Remy Habermas thought that by renouncing transcendental values and seeking orientation in the static forms of art, Heidegger had arrived at existentialist answers in his work. This was a misguided notion, for the answer was not the art object itself, but the work of the artist as an answer to a destiny or “the voice behind the curtain” (the voice of Being) to which each individual is called. Habermas was not clear yet on what exactly this call and its significance were. For the moment Heidegger, the radical thinker of new beginnings, remained his hero. By 1953 however, Habermas has discovered Heidegger’s never repented Nazi past. He becomes progressively disillusioned with him and begins to realize that his philosophy appears to be unconcerned with the existential concerns of the present time. For example, he is indignant and takes issue with Heidegger for re-publishing his pre war 1935 lecture on metaphysics with no new preface and without withdrawing the assertion about “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.” So, by the mid-fifties Habermas had embarked on a radical new direction and announces a radical rupture with what he considers a corrupt past including Heidegger and his stand on National Socialism. He in effect returns to Schelling’s insight that the intellect is the cause of evil. Why is this so? Because the intellect is situated between the soul, linked to God, and the senses rooted in nature. The intellect has to exist in harmony with the other human elements to obtain an ordered relationship to God and Nature. Feelings, the poetical, imagination are integral part of being human. Here there are unmistakable echoes of Vico who had expressed this view of extreme rationalism one hundred years before Schelling in his New Science where he talks of “the barbarism of the intellect.” Be that as it may, Schelling avers that in works of art the impersonal soul is expressed because the intellect has submitted itself to the impersonal force that “effaces all human subjectivity.” To the contrary, when the intellect does not submit to the soul, the world becomes an instrumental resource for its capricious desires. So, Schelling argues, evil is pure, autonomous intellect. For Habermas this insight is the key to the understanding of the

122 Ovi Symposium II past and present cultural catastrophes in the West. This is ultimately to say that the modernity and the Ho- locaust are linked in a causal nexus. As Habermas himself powerfully puts it: “Today we have, in an age of philosophically garbed ideologies and hygienic mass murders, experienced the truth of this idea many times and painfully; we have been taught violently that the most shameless insults against humanity do not emanate from immediate impulses, but come far more from the final workings, and are the products of, thoroughly neutral and perfectly calculated organizations.” Powerful words which, as I understand them, mean to say that we would have been better off if some people who abused and misused the knowledge they acquired in school, had they never gone to school. Knowledge may not be ipso facto virtue, despite Socrates. As far as Habermas is concerned the Schelling of the 19th century has a message for the modern 20th century German Federal Republic wherein we moderns are alerted to the dangers of natural sciences and humanities that ignore the integrity of the subject they study. Which ultimately means that existentially speaking, theory and practice in a philosopher are not separable. And so we are back full circle to my own puny but perhaps relevant personal anecdote mentioned at the outset of this essay and the question re- surfaces: was the eminent professor, by keeping hermetically separate theory and practice in Heidegger, teaching a Heidegger, that far from being an existentialist, as some scholars claim, is a Cartesian rationalist separating the intellect from everything that keeps us human? If that is the case, Vico had already identified this problem in 1725 in his New Science as Croce, Gadamer and Cassirer have fully acknowledged. It is perhaps noteworthy to mention here that this return to Schelling was seen by Habermas as a sort of religious conversion, a radical doubt leading to a new moral consciousness wherein the subject submits itself to the higher. In describing such an experience Habermas uses terms such as “turnaround” and “rebirth.” In an essay titled “Karl Jaspers uber Schelling,” of January 14, 1956 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Haber- mas declares that “Schelling teaches, as the first step in ‘the free kingdom of the intellect,’ is the philosophy not of knowing, but explicitly of not knowing, and the renunciation of the self-wilfulness of the instrumental and forming intellect. At the same time he teaches that the free decision is not a self-determination or an insurance, but a self-sacrifice, a self-unlocking and an opening to a claim that is never concrete.”

Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) Habermas is here saying that Schelling’s message is the salvation not only of Germany but of modernity in general. Here too there are unmistakable Vico echoes. Vico too had proclaimed in his New Science (1725)

Ovi Symposium II 123 that an intellect devoid of imagination is the equivalent to the barbarism of the intellect, a formula for extreme rationalism and logic and logistics and ultimate de-humanization in the objectification of human beings; that one needs to move beyond the fixed categories of reason so as to become receptive to the call of conscience and ethical behavior and conflict and be prepared for existential choices. For Habermas Fascism was the “empirically provided proof that reform plans that revolve around status, inheritance, power, and community, whether sanctioned by a god, Being, or nature, necessarily result in totalitarian practice in the social conditions of the 20th century.” He said that in 1956 and has not deviated from it since as it can be verified by a glimpse at the above mentioned book of important lectures he has given since. He is convinced that the problem after the war was that the likes of influential thinkers such as Heidegger had failed to reflect on their beloved “German tradition.” The real causes of fascism were not technology per se or the efficient ordering of all structures of society as analyzed by Jacques Ellul in hisThe Technological Society , but the irrational myth of social integration devoid of genuine reason aiming at the control of technology like nature; which is to say, the myth of reason as absolute domination. By the mid-fifties Habermas had read and reflected on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, in fact he joined the School of Frankfurt. This made it possible for him to execute a radical break with nationalism and fascism without an equally radical break with the German cultural tradition. Consequently he was able to save his own personal cultural identity; in other words he was able to salvage the universalistic dimensions of German enlightenment while attempting to purge such a culture of its reactionary and fascist leanings. All this came to a head in Habermas’ famous radio lecture of 1961 titled “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers.” Lately, besides the myth of German legacies, Habermas has explored the myth of mass consumer culture and the danger it poses to a resurgence of fascism as a response to its worship. Habermas claims that it foments the cultural impoverishment of human beings, hence the urgency of democratizing the production and consumption of art and culture. Existentially, this means that we humans have to decide whether or not to accept consumerism or reject it. Here memory becomes important, especially the remembering of the Holocaust not just as a commemoration (what Tony Judt has branded “misremembering”) but as a lesson on modernity which remains to be learned

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)

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The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul (1967) Steven B. Smith in a review of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy by Emmanuel Faye has this to say of the reception Heidegger received in America at the very time I was taking a seminar on Heidegger at St. Francis College, New York: “Heidegger’s reception in America would not have been possible without the assistance of his student and former lover Hannah Arendt. Over a decade ago, Arendt’s youthful tryst with Heidegger was detailed in a book by Elzbieta Ettinger. It was during a visit to Germany in 1950 that Arendt and Heidegger reunited for the first time since their love affair a quarter-century before, and the project of rehabilitation began. Her book on the Eichmann trial, infamously subtitled “The Banality of Evil,” showed the enduring influence of Heidegger’s concepts of “everydayness” and “banality” on her thinking. The full-fledged rehabilitation of Heidegger in America can be precisely dated to her shameful article “Heidegger at Eighty,” originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1971. Here she confronted the question of Heidegger’s politics but explained his affiliation with National Socialism as the product of “thoughtlessness”—as if he had stumbled into Nazism almost in a moment of absent-mindedness. To be fair, Arendt was not alone in bringing Heidegger’s importance to the attention of an American audience. Leo Strauss had also been a student of Heidegger in the 1920s and spoke of his lectures with a sort of reverence. In comparison to Heidegger, he told the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, Strauss’s early hero Max Weber appeared an “orphan child.” Strauss did not entertain any of the illusions about Heidegger maintained by Arendt. Heidegger, he wrote, was to philosophy what Hitler was to politics. His “radical historicism” and neglect of the “permanent problems” made his submission to the events of 1933 all but inevitable. Nev- ertheless, this did not stop Strauss from boldly asserting that Heidegger was “truly important” and “the only great thinker of our time” (emphasis added). Strauss’s use of terms like “the crisis of modernity,” the growth of nihilism, the return to the Greeks, and “spiritual warfare”; his methodological privileging of founding moments; and other features of his thought were deeply implicated in Heidegger’s philosophy. If Faye is even partially correct that Heidegger’s concepts cannot be understood apart from their Nazi usages, this should prove a troubling conclusion for those like myself who have looked to Strauss precisely as an antidote to Heideggerianism.” A Post-script exploring Thomas Aquinas’s conception of truth and being: I’d like to conclude with a postscript of sort: an extended excerpt from the introduction to Habermas’ book on modernity by Thomas McCarthy followed by an addendum on Thomas Aquinas’ concept of Being vis a vis Truth. “At the heart of Habermas’ disagreement with Heidegger and his followers is the putative ‘ontological difference’ between Being and beings, between world-view structures and what appears within these

Ovi Symposium II 125 worlds…Meaning cannot be separated from validity; and it is precisely the orientation of actors to validity claims that makes learning processes possible…Because Heidegger ignores the reciprocal connection between propositional truth and truth as disclosure and reduces the former to the latter, his ‘overcoming of metaphysics’amounts in the end to a ‘temporalized super-foundationalism…Once the impossibility of a Pla- tonic conception of logos is acknowledged and the omnipresence of the rhetorical dimensions of language is recognized, so the argument goes, philosophical discourse can no longer be (mis)conceived as logical rather than literary, literal rather than figurative—in short it can no longer be conceived as philosophical in any emphatic sense of the term…In sum, then, Habermas agrees with the radical critics of enlightenment that the paradigms of consciousness is exhausted. Like them, he views reason as inescapably situated, as concretized in history, society, body, and language. Unlike them however, he holds that the defects of the Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenement.” What is on trial is ultimately the whole of Western culture the way a Diego Fabbri put the civilization on trial in his famous play “Jesus on Trial” (see: http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2422). Which is to say pretty much the same thing I have been reiterating for some seven years now in the pages of Ovi magazine: the En- lightenment has still to enlighten itself. Many scholars have said the same thing about the Enlightenment within Modernity, even German scholars such as Karl Jaspers who saw Heidegger’s life as a Faustian story and wrote a whole book on modernity titled Man in the Modern Age. In any case, we are back full circle to Vico’s critique of reason devoid of fantasia and the synthesis he envisioned between theory and practice. As Vico put it: man may only know fully what he himself has made; man makes history which is undeniably true; equally true is that history makes man. This is also postulated by Croce who was the chief Vico champion in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. Two Neapolitans these separated by two centuries which I could have chosen as powerful critics of the duality theory/practice in modern Western rationalism but I decided to let a German perform that task, given the unfortunate tendency to consider anything coming from Southern Italy as the backwaters of Europe, a sort of low culture not to be taken too seriously. It is to be hoped that such a fallacious attitude will eventually change as Vico and Croce are better recognized and given their due credits for the first rate philosophical geniuses they were. Finally, let’s take a quick look at what another Neapolitan philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, had to say on the issue of Being vis a vis truth, theory and practice in philosophy. I have already broached the subject in our last conversation but I’d like to briefly pick up the thread here hoping for a future fruitful dialogue on the issue. I for one think that Strauss had it wrong on both Aquinas and Vico.

Diego Fabbri (1936-1980)

126 Ovi Symposium II The powerful aphorisms presented by Ernesto Paolozzi in the last symposium meeting have provoked some reflections of my own which I’d like to share once again. These reflections directly impinge on the concept of truth and the duality theory/practice that we have been exploring above. They brought me back to my Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University in 1981, to what can be considered a slight divergence between Vico and Croce despite the general affinity of their thought. It has to do with the concept of Providence in Vico that has both an immanent and a transcendent pole, not mutually exclusive and not violating man’s freedom either. Croce seems to consider the pole of transcendence superfluous, or at least bracketable, to the phenomenon of history. He likes to emphasize the immanent pole of the concept of Providence. Thus, within an immanent concept of Providence man’s freedom, which as Kant has also demonstrated, cannot be proven empirically, assumes the place of the highest value of man, which indeed it is, as long as transcendence remains bracketed.

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) together in a photo of 1964 at Heidelberg

Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), the most influential of the books of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory

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Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) A Neapolitan Scholastic Philosopher of the Middle Ages Logically, to eliminate the pole of immanence would also equally falsify Vico’s concept of Providence so that one ends up with a Deus ex machina which intervenes in history at crucial time thus violating man’s freedom and free will. But this is not so for Augustine, Aquinas, or Vico for that matter. For them freedom is only the penultimate value of man on this earth; the ultimate value, or the final destination of man’s journey if you will, transcends even freedom by asking the question “freedom for what?,” which of course is a much deeper conception of freedom than freedom “from” (or the idea that to be free is to be liberated from enslaving habits and other limitations). This is not dissimilar from the questions: what is the point of it all; what is the purpose or the logos of the universe; why is there something rather than nothing at all? Heidegger begins his Being and Time with those questions but the questions on Being had already been put by Aquinas and, as a Catholic, he ought to have known that much.

Summa Theologica (1265-74) of Thomas Aquinas A 13th century Neapolitan philosopher and Doctor of the Church That ultimate goal of man’s journey on earth is not here on any of earth’s utopias within time and space but is to be found in Dante’s Paradiso, in that transcendent world dubbed by Augustine “The City of God,” which in effect means that for Augustine, Aquinas and Dante freedom is not the ultimate value in and by itself with no beginning, no purpose and no end in sight but rather it is constituted by obedience to truth with a final telos or final destination.

128 Ovi Symposium II

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) An 18th century Neapolitan Philosopher

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) A 20th century Neapolitan Philosopher So we have an alternative method for arriving at truth of being which differs substantially by the one proposed by Heidegger. What these three Christian thinkers seem to be saying is that to be free is to affirm the truth of being. Men do not create truth, they discover it. Aletheia or the unveiling of truth is to be found in Aquinas’ Summa but Aquinas never claims to be its originator speaking within the language event . Truth does not arise after the exercise of freedom, but rather it is discovered within the very act of freedom itself; and it is the truth that makes men free not vice-versa, as Marxists and others still contend nowadays; it is freedom that allows truth to appear. Freedom of inquiry can only be exercised within a context in which the question of truth arises within the question of freedom and not after it. Vico was substantially in agreement with Aquinas on this point.

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Dante by Botticelli (1265-1321) Sublime Poet and author of The Divine Comedy

St Augustine (364-430) A doctor of the Church of the 5th century So, staying with the polarity, or the complementarity if you will, immanence/transcendence in Vico’s concept of Providence, it seems to me that this much can be affirmed: together with the polarity between existence and essence in the structure of Being, a similar polarity is seen in the three transcendentals of being: the polarity between form and splendor in the beautiful, the polarity between obedience and freedom in the good; and the polarity between subject and object in the true. Plato as well as Augustine, Pico della Mirandola and Vico were surely on to something when they saw the Good, the Beautiful and the True as transcendent and beyond time and space.

Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers by Emanuel L. Paparella (Ovi Bookstore, June 2013)

130 Ovi Symposium II 3 Observations and Comments by Paparella on Paolozzi’s Presentation by way of a Dialogue and Exchange of ideas Thank you Ernesto for a lucid treatment of Heidegger’s thought vis a vis modern concerns which is indeed one of the sub-theme of this meeting of the Symposium following Lawrence’s presentation of Heidegger’s thought in the last meeting where it was announced that the following meeting (the 17th) would be dedicated to a well focused and rigorous philosophical analysis of “the nexus between theory and practice vis a vis truth.” We may not arrive at any definite conclusions but a spirited dialogue on this sub-theme has begun and no doubt it will be an ongoing and more interesting one in the new year. Within this dialogic spirit, I’d like to pause on two excerpts from your presentation which I found particularly relevant and intriguing and perhaps worthy of a follow-up, also offer some sundry comments. The particular excerpts of your chapter on Heidegger as translated from Italian I refer to are these: “…Heidegger’s aesthetic considerations are of great interest to us (considerations that as we shall see are relatively original)…The so called hermeneutical circle, which is fundamental to Heidegger’s reflections on language, the concept of the linguistic event, seem to re-propose, albeit from a different vantage point, the discourse on modern historicism, especially of the Crocean kind. For Croce too language, which is always art in itself, is the house of being, and for Croce too the truth of art is eternal in as much as eternal it presents itself historically as the grasping of an event of life (history). For Croce, the interpretation (hermeneutic) on everything that has been said is true, it is the manifestation of the possibility of understanding the world.” In the first place let me say that I am in full agreement with what you say above about Croce vis a vis Heide- gger’s historicism, especially with that “considerations that as we shall see are relatively original” which I interpret to mean that they are not totally original as Heidegger and his cohorts would have us believe. Or am I wrong in that interpretation? That having been said, I’d like to propose one further insight, if I may. When in Heidegger’s discourse I hear philosophical concepts such as “originative thinking,” “return to origins via etymology,” “the language event,” “interpretation as hermeneutics,” “critique of Cartesian rationalism,” “being and entity,”” the certum and the verum,” “language as the house of Being” “the poetical as wisdom,” “the eternity of art,” “historicism,” “the historical imagination,” “the science of imagination,” “new humanism,” “aletheia or unveiling of truth,” “being and nothingness,” I do not hear gibberish as some of Heidegger’s critics have misguidedly and unfairly suggested without fully grasping the full import of his thought, rather I hear echoes of Croce’s philosophy of aesthetics, as you quite correctly point out, but I also hear Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Cassirer’s symbolic philosophy, and even more relevantly, I hear another more distant voice also clearly heard by Croce Gadamer and Cassirer, the powerful voice of Vico. As I have been attempting to demonstrate in my previous presentations, Vico too made language and its origins, language understood as one of the artistic and symbolical creation of man, the very core and cen- terpiece of his speculation in The New Science. He too, without calling it such proposed a new humanism based on hermeneutics and a proper understanding of Being and poetic wisdom as found first and foremost in Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Italian humanism, i.e., the understanding of being vis a vis truth. He too was way ahead of Schelling when he talked about “the barbarism of the intellect” as ultimate cause of ethical evil, inveighing against Cartesian rationalism; he too spoke about the “certum” and the “verum” and as such he may be considered the precursor of anti-positivism. Am I mistaken in also thinking that both Croce and

Ovi Symposium II 131 yourself would be in agreement here, as would Gadamer and Cassirer also, who both frankly and openly acknowledged in writing their gratitude and debt to Vico? This is not so with Heidegger. One discovers precious little even in the form of acknowledgment, of Vico or Croce’s thought in Heidegger’s philosophical writings. The question therefore naturally arises: did Heide- gger even know of the existence of a Vico and a Croce as a Cassirer or a Gadamer or an Harkheimer and even a Marx certainly did, and if he did why did he ignore them? If it was a purposeful neglect, then all the more the charge of “relative” originality stands. If it was not purposeful and Heidegger was truly ignorant of those two Southern Italian philosophers (three actually if we include Thomas Aquinas which would be strange indeed for someone raised in the Catholic tradition), perhaps considered outside the mainstream in the backwater of Europe, (something that many scholars of philosophy who continue to inanely ask “can anything good come out of Naples?” need to be disabused still today…) then Heidegger in some way has reinvented the wheel, taken the wrong path and fallen into the trap of the divorce of ethics from philosophy and therefore forgotten the Socratic origins of Western philosophy; in that sense his would be less a rattling of the foundations of Western philosophy and more of a regression to a time when scientific cosmology and philosophy were one and the same (ancient positivism?) and ethics was far from prominent within the considerations of ancient metaphysics, that is to say, the times of Parmenides? Alas, I have never received a satisfactory answer to this question. In any case, I’d like to suggest here that things would have been quite different had Vico been accorded an attentive hear in the 18th century. We would not find ourselves in between the extremes of Derridari- an deconsctructionism and Straussian anti-Thomism, ultimately atheistic rationalism. I think Croce would agree on that insight too notwithstanding his liberal anti-clericalism. I suppose, given the rather boorish way Heidegger dealt with the work of his mentor Husserl, his friend and colleague Karl Jaspers and his former student Hannah Arendt (see my recent article on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in Ovi at http://www. ovimagazine.com/art/10527), we ought not be too surprised at how he dealt with (or perhaps ignored) Vico and Croce. But perhaps there was also a personal reason for those neglects. Croce had dared call Heideg- ger’s commitment to National Socialism, as well as Mussolini’s Fascism, what they truly were. Here we are back to the inflated egos of academia parading as objective truth which can make a Heidegger exclaim “there is no such thing as Heidegger’s philosophy,” that is to say, there is only the truth and the truth as it unveils and reveals itself takes no sides and I am its ambassador, and therefore as pointed out by Habermas it was fate which induced Heidegger to join and support the Nazi party for twelve whole years, the length of its existence; the subject is neutralized and taken out of the ethical equation revealed by an event such as the Holocaust. No need for any apologies or regrets. As you know Croce for one never bought this pernicious line of reasoning and was openly critical of Heidegger’s lectures at the time (one of them given in Rome under the tutelage of Mussolini’s fascism).

132 Ovi Symposium II In a correspondence between Croce and Karl Vossler of 1933 (September 9) Croce has this to say about Heidegger’s enthusiastic activism in the Nazi party leading to the dismissal of Jewish professors at the University of Freiburg under his direct rectorship: “Today all of a sudden, one falls into the abyss of the falsest historicism, which negates history, which is crudely and materialistically conceived as the assertion of ethnocentrism and racism, celebrating the glory of wolves and foxes, lions and jackals, lacking in genuine humanity…Thus one offers oneself to political service. This is without a doubt a prostitution of philosophy… Finally I have read Heidegger’s speech through. It is at once stupid and obsequious. I am not surprised about the success that his philosophy will have for a while: the empty and general pronouncement is always successful. But it produces nothing… he deprives philosophy of its honor…” [emphasis mine]. Of course Croce could not possibly have been surprised since he had seen the likes of Gentile, D’Annunzio, Marinetti prostituting philosophy and their personal integrity and existential lives to the ideological demands of Mussolini’s fascism but here Croce is unmistakably referring to none other than Martin Heidegger’s prostitution to Nazism and it is definitely not academic envy that motivates his critique for Croce, in fact, was never part of any academic inner circle. Admittedly, the above critique of Heidegger may appear to some as mere ramblings or gibberish arising out of envious comparisons and the ancient love-hate relationship between the Germans and the Italians, grossly unfair to Heidegger’s theoretical thought, never mind his praxis, cavalierly implying that he may be a bit overrated as a philosophical genius, but let me suggest that such would be a rather superficial interpretation. In fact they are the reflections of a mind in search of less ambiguous answers since the writing of a paper on Heidegger in 1966 at St. Francis College in which a very simple question was sincerely asked: “is philosophy a theoretical or an existential enterprise?” and was never thoroughly answered.. Indeed Ernesto, as Heidegger himself would surely concur, sometimes in philosophy the questions turn out to be more important than the answers; and the unveiling of truth may occur only centuries later within time and space, if ever. Be that as it may, while I remain grateful to you Ernesto (and Larry too) for supplying some temporary but acute answers in the light of Vico and Croce’s historicism Heidegger’s philosophy remains for me a rather disconcerting and ultimately not so original philosophy. I think we agree on this, but let the dialogue go on. The journey within time and space may not be man’s ultimate destination but within the limitations of time and space it may well turn out to be just as important as the destination, while Plato’s Republic may be destined to remain a utopia, a mere ideal to be found nowhere in this world, as Plato himself would probably acknowledge.

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A Warm Welcome to Dr. Michael Vena The reader may have noticed a new contributor’s photo and biography posted above. We’d like to welcome Professor Michael Vena to the Ovi Symposium. Professor Vena has taught Italian language and literature at Southern Connecticut State University for some forty years. He is now a former professor emeritus of such an institution. He has a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism from Yale University, has published widely in the field of Humanism and especially in Italian theater. For some thirty years of his career he was the general director of the Urbino Italian studies abroad at SCSU. After his retirement he has dedicated his considerable talents as a humanist to the translation and publication of scores of texts of Italian plays by well known playwrights such as Pirandello, Cavacchioli, Fabbri, De Filippo. We are lucky to have him at Ovi, we look forward to his enthusiastic participation and warmly welcome him aboard the Ovi Symposium. At the next meeting of the symposium he will present to us the general goals of his translation and dissemination program in Italian theater and then move on to the a more thorough presentations of famous individual Italian playwrights as found in his books, all within the framework of aesthetics. ******************** The Ovi Team also welcomes Dr. Michael Vena to our family looking forward for a creative cooperation.

134 Ovi Symposium II 5 Kafka’s Kehre by Lawrence Nannery

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) We all know our Kafka. He has been popular through several generations, and that is perhaps surprising considering the negativity of his works. On the other hand, very few know or understand the late stories. They have seldom been taken seriously, and — I assert — never decoded. Since 1970 they have been virtually ignored. In this paper I will attempt to remedy this state of affairs. It is not difficult to mention or even to describe the characteristics of Kafka’s stories and novels in his early and middle periods. I will mention a few of them. There is an anarchy in that motives are never clear; there is an anarchy in that space and time relations roam and disappear; there is fear because many things — especially common things — suddenly rise up and evince threatening attitudes. No reason is given for why this happens, and there is uncertainty as to what to do about this. And all the while, the powers that control things do not control them, or deny that anything is amiss. In The Metamorphosis, for example, the hero is turned into a cockroach or some similar vermin. No one knows why. No one can imagine why. He is isolated and gradually dwindles down to almost nothing, glad to die because he is useless to himself and unloved by his family or anyone else, as is only to be expected. It’s a mystery, but life is like that. In the end, everyone, including the protagonist, denies it is a tragedy.

Ovi Symposium II 135 Altogether, I believe it fair to say that the ultimate powers behind things in the stories and novels are an- archic and malevolent, as is the case in many primitive religions, and perhaps in Taoism, but unlike those belief systems, in Kafka’s fictions there is no way of controlling these forces, no one to go to for protection from them, no way to assuage them. Dread and terror result. But the late Kafka is different. We find in a late chapter ofThe Castle a turning point. This chapter was not published until the late 1970s, and has not received the attention it deserves.[i] K. has been called to meet with one of the Herrn, “gentlemen,” one Erlacher, and waits upon him at the Her- rn Hotel, but the man does not appear for a long time. When he does appear he informs K. about something he, K. had already known, and goes on his way. K. spends some of his time at the hotel trying to get Frieda, who will be restored to her job as barmaid on the morrow, and who has run off with one of K.’s assistants, to return to him because he loves her. But she refuses. Thus far Chapter 20. K., left to his own devices, and full of curiosity, wanders about in the basement, where the Herrn keep their village offices. He is dead tired, and he enters a room in order to lie down and sleep, but he happens upon one Bürgel, a doll-faced figure of a man, who explains the workings of the Castle to him, though K. falls asleep in the course of this long recitation. Coming up out of the basement he is accosted by the proprietor and his wife, who roundly chastise him for breaking the rule that no person may encroach upon the space reserved for the Herrn, and sent upstairs. K. then returns to the restaurant, where, after he wakes from a long sleep he is treated to a monologue by Pepi, the bargirl who had replaced Frieda as the barmaid, and who is very jealous of her. This monologue is a true tour de force, for it is a compendium of rambling observations by a young woman who naively thinks herself quite intelligent and up on the latest styles of clothes, but who is quite the opposite of these. Her social failures make her seethe with envy and paranoia, coupled with a free-ranging imagination that shows her deeply pent-up longings for a lover, and, in relation to other girls in her situation, for a triumph. Finding K. sleeping in the barroom, Pepi sits down next to him and unburdens herself. She confesses that when he first came to the village she had fantasized about him as a knight in shining armor, and that they might run away and be together forever. Otherwise she would never get out of her situation, her hated situation as a chambermaid and would like to burn the Inn down! What follows are disconnected, self-contradictory maunderings filled with resentment against her rival. Pepi’s mind reveals itself to be untethered. With a little more luck, or a little more understanding from K., she believes that she could have won it all, but now she will have to go back to being a chambermaid because Frieda is taking her old position of barmaid back. Pepi invites K. to stay with her and her roommates for the winter, in what amounts to a cubbyhole in the basement. K.’s response is to tell Pepi that she has a wild imagination. Her perspective has remained that of chamber- maids, who come to know what they know by spying through keyholes. Though she may have in this case caught a glimmer of truth, but “from tiny details … often draw grand but false conclusions about the whole thing.”[ii] As someone older he endeavors to bring her down from the clouds and urges her to jettison her anger and delusions since they are based upon her vested feelings but do not reflect the factual situation. Though Pepi protests that he was as deceived as she, he answers affirmatively:

136 Ovi Symposium II … it is as if both of us as had struggled too hard, too noisily, too childishly, too naively to obtain something that can easily be and imperceptibly gained through, say, Frieda’s tranquility and … reserve, and [we] had done so through weeping, scratching, and tugging, just as a child tugs at a tablecloth but doesn’t gain anything and only tears down the whole shebang [die ganze Pracht] and puts it out of his reach forever …[iii] Thus, K. has reaches the same point that Kafka expressed in The Blue Octavo Notebooks, in Aphorism Three: there are but two vices: impatience and indolence. But perhaps the expulsion from paradise was due to impatience alone.[iv] This is a note not seen in Kafka’s fiction before. Wisdom seems now to Kafka to consist in acceptance of the world, for the individual cannot beat it, being only an insignificant part of the whole himself. What salvation there is seems to mean something like weathering a storm, and coming through with something he denominates “the Indestructible,” a subject that will resumed later in this paper. Deception Deception is the primary result of man’s finitude. It is very prominent in all the works of Kafka, and it has many levels of meanings. It is ever-present, and there is no use in casuistically trying to enumerate its various modalities. Aphorism One had already announced that deception is a constituent of the world itself; it is not amenable to epistemology. Following Nietzsche, Kafka believe that truth is a woman, i.e., coy, not wanting to give herself away. Hence deception is always a problem, never completely absent, and perhaps can be a tool for playing practical jokes. Here are a few quotations from the Blue Octavo Notebooks to ponder. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it must be a lie. Can you know anything but deception [Betrug]? If ever deception were eliminated you would have to look away or you will be turned into a pillar of salt. Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else. In a world of lies the lie is not removed from the world by means of its opposite, but only by a world of truth.[v] The world of truth seems to be what Kafka found in his clairvoyant states, some of them related to his work, his writing. Here is a diary entry that says as much, dated September 25, 1917: “I can still have passing satisfaction from works like ‘A Country Doctor,’ provided I can still write such things at all (improbable). But happiness only if I can raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.”[vi] This was apparently Kafka’s own experience of “the Indestructible,” the subject of the next section. In the works of Kafka, this tendency of the world that foists its betrayal [Betrug] upon us is the source of most of the horror and the humor we experience in reading his stories and novels. But there is another level, one in which Kafka himself admits that he is a mendacious fellow; that he has the desire to deceive the reader, to cover up the evil of the world and make them swallow it. In a letter to Felice Bauer of late September, 1917, he admits his desire to deceive the whole world, “which I wish to deceive, moreover, though without practicing any actual deception.”[vii] What does this mean exactly? We may never know, because many references of a personal nature probably suffuse all his works, and only the author

Ovi Symposium II 137 and one or two others could catch the reference. But Kafka wants to deceive even that one other! Even more, he probably derived pleasure from the anticipation of the deception. We can decode a few cases of these practical jokes. A good case in point is supplied by Max Brod, his literary executor and lifelong friend. In the long autobiographical piece entitled “Investigations of a Dog” there appears a neighbor dog, about whom much is said, most of it decidedly unkind. It is obviously Max Brod, but Brod, the editor of this piece who first published it, did not notice! Last, and most important, but more importantly, most astounding, is the case of a quote in “Investigations of a Dog,” that has gone unnoticed. … goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears to be something monstrous. For I want to compel all dogs to assemble together, I want the bones to crack under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life that they love, while all by myself alone, I lap up the marrow… not merely of a bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a picture. The marrow that I speak of is no food, on the contrary it is poison [Gift].[viii] This passage was crossed out in Kafka’s holograph, presumably because it was too close to the bone, and Kafka thought others might decode it. When Brod came to edit the piece after Kafka’s death, he saw nothing objectionable or shocking in it, and published the passage as though it had not been deleted. One cannot find it in the Critical Edition, because Kafka had eliminated it. But earlier it had already been printed, and translated.[ix] This is a convoluted practical joke. What is the point of it all? The upshot is one most consequential for the history of Kafka criticism. Kafka intended to deceive without lying. His most successful deception is on the subject of guilt, about which more articles and books have been written than any other subject in Kafka’s oeuvre. The of all this is, almost every book or essay written upon the subject of Joseph K.’s guilt in The Trial is completely and utterly wrong, and wrongheaded. So slick was Kafka at deception that he caused several generations of well-educated and attentive readers to completely misread the most important novel of the century! For it is impossible to think that Joseph K. is guilty. Impossible because no charge was ever made. Impossible because no process was ever undergone of discovery, accusation, plea, testimonies, witnesses, and argument, or even of a decision. Lacking every single aspect of a legal proceeding, how could he possibly be guilty of anything in the eyes of the law? He could not. The innocence is hinted at even in the aphorism cited above: we are sinful, irrespective of guilt. Kafka was able to convey to the reader of The Trial in subtle ways the sinfulness of Joseph K., a rather paltry specimen of sinfulness, and the critics, because they were not suspicious enough, fell for the trick. In the mass of works on this subject the vast majority of critics, great and small, opine with false absurd reasoning that of course Joseph K. deserves to die. An amazing performance, and most mendacious, from a moral point of view. It seems to me a prediction of totalitarianism. One can only wonder how many other booby traps are contained in the corpus, most of which surely will never come to light. The Indestructible There is an open sort of coherence in the late stories of Kafka. It is even possible that The Castle was abandoned because Kafka sensed he would die soon, and desired to leave a model of a new, proto-existentialist

138 Ovi Symposium II type of novel, one that is a ruin. When he died, he left a considerable pile of stories, some quite long, in the care of his mistress Dora Dymant. She was amazingly irresponsible, never allowing Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, to see a reported twenty notebooks that Kafka had written in. The Nazi accession to power in 1933, almost nine years after Kafka’s death, found her the wife of a member of the Central Committee of the Communist party, and all the papers in their house were confiscated. Though some friends tried to rescue the manuscripts Kafka had left with her, the thing was impossible. Only a few of the pieces he wrote, feverishly, one imagines, in his last two years, have come down to us. There is a similarity among them, and much wisdom, due to the idea that guides and unites them, namely, something Kafka called “the Indestructible.”[x] In Kafka’s view this is what can redeem our lives in a world of frustrations and lies. We come upon this concept directly only in the Blue Octavo Notebooks. There are but a few statements about it. Believing means liberating the indestructible elements within oneself, or, more accurately, liberating yourself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being. Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god. Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element within oneself and not striving towards it. The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings. Before setting foot in the Holy of Holies you must take off your shoes, yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your nakedness and everything that hides beneath that, and then the core of the core, then the remainder [das Uebrige] and then the residue [den Rest] and then even the glimmer of the undying fire. Only the fire itself is absorbed by the Holy of Holies and lets itself be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other. “Know thyself” does not mean “Observe thyself.” “Observe thyself” is what the serpent says. It means: “Make yourself master of your actions.” But you are so already, you are the master of your actions. So that saying means: “Misjudge yourself! Destroy yourself!” which is something evil ― and only if one bends down very far indeed does one also hear the good in it, which is, “In order to make of yourself what you are.”[xi] That is about all Kafka ever wrote directly about this enigmatic thing he called the Indestructible. Brod, in his biography of his friend, makes much of this notion, but understands it as something Tolstoy or Ghandhi would say, not Kafka. Of the quotations above, the last seems to be directed to himself, forcing himself to identify completely with his own artistic creativity, in the context of work and all the other distractions of life. If that is so it shows that he believed writing to be evil, “a service to the devil,” as he said in a letter to Brod.[xii] The other quotations have remained enigmatic to the public, and of course to Brod. But it is the Indestruc- tible that is the key to the late stories.

Ovi Symposium II 139 Why didn’t Kafka complete The Castle? The sequence of events of January, 1922 explains why. According to the entries in his diary for January 16, 1922, he had suffered “something like a breakdown” in his health the week before. He could see that he had not long to live. He notes that his body is weak but his mind is as strong and as fecund as ever, perhaps more so. He interprets his racing mind as an attack “from above,” but, equally, it seems just as likely to be “an assault on the last earthly frontier … launched from below [by] mankind.” He continues: All such writing is an assault on the frontiers; if Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are intimations of this. Though of course it would require genius of an unimaginable kind to strike root again in the old centuries anew and not spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth.[xiii] What this means, clearly, is that the pieces he will now write, if he has the strength, will be an attempt to revise Rabbinic Judaism, if not all Judaism, by writing stories that will teach men how to live in a new way, not in the way of the Talmud, for which he had much contempt. So now he set to work, laboring sedulously, demonically. But he was in failing health, and he did not in fact live long. The few stories of this last period that have survived have a great deal to tell mankind about how to live, but the nature of the stories veils most of the references and meanings, just as the original secret unorthodox writings, the Kabbalah, veiled religious and moral teachings in stories. And so, we conclude that these late stories are meant to deceive and defeat ignorant and inattentive readers, to beat them away because the message, already adumbrated in K.’s answer to Pepi, will be able to be absorbed only by worthy ones. These late works are populated by characters who are exactly what they are and nothing else, and go with their obsessions all the way to the end. Their obsessions are their versions of the Indestructible, but all are wrong. They are all quite different from one another, but in their obsessions they ruin themselves. In this they are easily distinguished from his earlier stories and from the novels, all of which are marked very clearly by a clear absence of cause and effect, alienation, sudden changes, grotesqueries, and deception and confusion. What follows is a very short discussion of these pieces, bringing out their main points. Investigations of a Dog He saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail and destroy defenseless man. … All his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings. — Milena Jesenska [xiv] This long story is a life history of Kafka himself, as he tried to understand what the forces that control our lives are like, failing in the process due to the incoherence of the powers themselves, and the finite capa- bilities of the investigator. It is an intellectual and spiritual history, but a deceptive one, so that it can not be decoded, except generically. More to the point, it also serves as a guide to the interpretations of the rest of the late stories. Given the disorderly nature of the spirit world, this “confession” could not have the shape of pseudo-Dionysios’ “Heavenly Hierarchies.” A complete exposition of the Investigations would take more space to explain than the piece itself. What follows is schematic.

140 Ovi Symposium II The dog, a very social but intellectual fellow, finds that the riddle of dog-life must rest upon finding out where Nahrung, “nurture” comes from. This word is very important for the late Kafka, and always means “spiritual sustenance.” He is trying to construct a science of food. He tries out various simple inductions, on a variety of spiritual phenomena, but finds that they never are adequate to explain them. For example, food, i.e., nurture falling from above as well as below, confuses him and he cannot figure out how that can be. He also finds that the rituals engaged in for food do not seem to be efficacious, despite the fact that they are commonly believed to be so. For example, chanting to the heavens, to the demons in the sky, combined with urinating on the ground to make it fertile, which all dogs believe in, is denominated “song” [Gesang], but still does not account for the phenomena of food. The other dogs have never understood him, they are too pragmatic to understand, and so near the end of his life he ceases his investigations. At one point he had tried to prove that the food has a mind of its own, and is drawn to dogs. He claims that “the way goes through fasting.” If dogs refused to eat, the food would come down from above and knock at their very teeth. But the experiment that he devises to prove this fails, owing to his own weakness as a dog, who cannot be ascetic in the face of food. He has to admit his failure to solve “the riddle of the universe,” one might say, but he was never going to get to the bottom of things, and we the readers should be able to supply the reason: viz., the demons, who are “the powers that be,” are pure chaos, and scientific or even orderly thought about them will always fail. There are no hierarchies in heaven or anywhere else. But, along the way, he lets drop hints about his motivations. These all have an ecstatic character. For example, as a young dog he came upon seven musical dogs, who danced upon a stage with musical accompaniment. This was the transformative experience of his life, but he cannot explain it. The music accompanying the dancing dogs did not come from within them. Certainly the words Musik and Melodie resonate strongly, conferring meaning and purpose and life force to those dogs who are receptive.[xv] We might conclude from the dog’s transformation that these artful things put him in touch with the Indestructible for the first time. The Indestructible allowed him to dissolve in the general, to give up his will, and to lose his impatience, impatience that blocks all progress to comprehension and happiness. There is more. In blaming his ancestors for falling away from the originary primitive condition of dogs where they were not alienated from the life forces in the world, he maintains that “the Word” and “the voice from the forest” must be reclaimed. There is much criticism of Judaism in the work. Many of the practices have lost touch with the originary impulse that created the original system of belief. The dog spoofs Jewish dietary regulations and prohibitions at length. It seems to be most unhappy with the lack of feeling in the race and with the exoskeleton of ritual. Most of the text must go unanalyzed here, but there is little doubt about the most important lesson, which Kafka seems to have believed; viz., that relaxing will open things up. The dog has learned one lesson: to give up his Faustian quests, and abide in the spiritual maelstrom that is “the canine condition.” The lesson to be learned from the Pepi episode was that one should not be impatient,[xvi] that one should wait for all the most important things to come to you, and take joy in them, and sit back and enjoy life. One can only get in close touch with the Indestructible by foreswearing all striving. One should have the courage to expect the unexpected. One should simply wait: There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will come to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe [wenden sich: unwind] before you.[xvii]

Ovi Symposium II 141 The theme of the late stories is the wastefulness and fecklessness of trying too hard. All of them exhibit obsessive characters, who live truncated lives and refuse to change because this striving after some sort of identity or perfection are mistaken for the Indestructible. They all take themselves too seriously, and, thereby, they lose the world, proving once again that men live in delusion, and therefore in desperation. A Hunger Artist This story is the most perfect baroque piece of literature in the 20th century. Not only is the absurdly elongated subject of the story a mannerist grotesque, the style is that of a narrow, first-person point of view, suspended only after the hunger artist is dead. It begins with a triumphant session of the hunger artist’s craft, in which a whole village shows up and enjoys what he and only he can do ― which is nothing. (What seems counterfactual and absurd to readers is actually a fact, thus doubly confounding them.)[xviii] But, as in all of Kafka’s novels, a degenerative process quickly sets in. The problem is that of deception. Though watchers are appointed to make sure that he does not cheat during the long night hours, they are derelict, and this makes skepticism mount. The experts, who are all butchers, think him honest, but the general public does not believe that the hunger artist actually fasts as long as he seems to. This arouses in him the greatest feelings of resentment. How sincere the hunger artist is! His trade is his life but he is himself his only perfect observer. He knows that he could fast infinitely, but no one else knows, or believes in his virtue. He is in the hands of an impresario who doesn’t know or care about the truth of the matter either, and who sets his limit at forty days, a Biblical period, one that the audiences can relate to. Unlike the audiences, the hunger artist takes his nonactivity not as mere display, but as an end in itself. The descriptions of the performances are delicious grotesqueries, and most disagreeable to the star of the show. So he lived for many years … in apparent glory, honored by the world, yet in spite of that troubled in spirit, all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously. With what should one comfort him? What was left for him to wish for?[xix] There is something that he is in need of, but the hunger artist is deluded in believing that the way to what he needs goes through fasting. He thinks that if he tries harder, he will be appreciated for what he truly is. Since no one can sense his need, no one can help him. Times change. Tastes change. By and by, the hunger artist’s craft gradually loses favor with the public. In order to find work, he hires himself out to a large circus. He wants to demonstrate to the world that he could fast without limit. He sits in a cage near the wild animals on a causeway, where he is nearly completely forgotten. He gradually comes to understand that no one pays him any attention, and, since no one will stop him, in resentment he redoubles his efforts to set world records. He is angry that everyone believes him to be cheating, and that drives him on. He sets world records; no one notices. He craves fame; no one notices. In the process of doing nothing perfectly, he disappears under the straw in his cage. After some days the circus supervisor notices that the hunger artist’s cage seems to be empty. He engages workers to clean the cage out. They poke into the pile with sticks, and there appears from underneath the hunger artist himself. He asks the overseer to forgive him. The overseer does so. He tells that he wanted people to admire his fasting. The overseer assents to this as well. But he is startled by the thin man’s response:

142 Ovi Symposium II “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well, then, we don’t admire it, said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist. … “And why can’t you help it?” … “Because I couldn’t find the food [Nahrung] I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” These were his last words.[xx] I interpret this final statement to mean that the hunger artist could not findNahrung for his soul, and substituted fasting for it. But no one present can understand this, and so he dies. The hunger artist is thrown into the same hole where they bury the straw. A panther is substituted for him in the cage, and the crowds come and admire the self-possessed animal in the freedom with which he exhibits his great powers and beauty. The panther does not strive. He is identical with what he is, and therefore happy. The Indestructible open to men demands that one not strive for it. The hunger artist never learned that lesson. He wanted to prove himself, and that is the real reason why he could never achieve union with the spiritual power he sought to be at one with. “The Word” that would transform the entire world, is also called “Music,” “Melodie,” in the Investigations, and “the voice from the forest”: none of these yield to earnest desire and hard work. First Sorrow This very odd story is about another early-Picasso harlequin, a trapeze artist who decides he cannot bear to touch the ground. He has gradually removed himself from the ground and removed his abode to the position above the high wire acts in the circus tent. Many people are enlisted to help provision him there. He thinks it quite nice, quite healthy to abide there. In warm weather he gets plenty of fresh air and sunlight, even though he has to admit that the arrangement does limit his social life. Even so, he gets to chat with other acrobats who visit from time to time, and with workmen when they are working on the roof. In this droll condition he is content to abide. But as a circus performer he must travel a lot, and he hates that. He prefers to be put in the luggage racks, which in those days were made of criss-crossing strands of rope, where he can dangle as though he were in a hammock when the troupe arrives at the next city on the tour. He stays in it in preference to checking into a hotel. He cannot stand to have the ground under his feet. Besides, it saves on hotel bills. As time passes, this becomes the routine: the trapeze artist in the baggage rack, swinging to and fro with the motions of the train, his manager seated below. One day, he tells his manager from up on his perch that from now on he must have two trapezes, not one. The manager agrees, and opines that it actually makes good business sense as well. But this enrages the artist, who wants it done because it comes from his arbitrary will, and not for any other reason. His caprice must taken, not as something reasonable, but as an absolute command. He falls into crying copious tears, and, upon being questioned, says, “Only one bar in my hands ― how can I go on like that!”[xxi] Again the manager agrees with him, and eventually the trapeze artist is reassured, but there appears a wrinkle on his forehead, and that is the first sorrow. The Burrow In another striver, in perfect contrast to the trapeze artist, we find the very embodiment of the modern “work ethic.” The story is a very long and mysterious tale entitled “Der Bau,” i.e., “The Construct,” translated into English as “The Burrow,” since it is constructed by hollowing out. This burrow is so perfectly ordered that it is perfect anarchy. The story amounts to a critique of modern life, its Faustian spirit and its inadequate ideas of freedom and evil, its nervous need for work even if work is no

Ovi Symposium II 143 more than being busy for its own sake. It is also, in my opinion, a critique of the life of the businessman, among whom must be counted Kafka’s own father. The story is too long for summary, but much can be said of value about it. It begins with a paraphrase from the Old Testament, in which the animal-narrator claims that he has completed his burrow and finds that it is well-done [wohlgelungen]. But immediately he falls into a pit of vulnerability, and declares, “Anything might happen!” [xxii] He ruminates about all his enemies, both above and below, any one of which might bring about his instant death. He loves his burrow, and he describes it in detail. It is for him (or her?) a second self, a perfect example of “objectification,” Gegenständlichkeit. We gather that he or she is a large, lone, carnivorous creature for whom work and worry are the only things that exist. He lives underground, and has constructed the burrow at great cost in pain and trouble, literally Blut und Boden [ blood and soil], and has a central room [Burgplatz] stored with the bodies of the creatures he has killed. He loves this room as though it were himself, and he goes so far as to apostrophize it. This is his life. He is always busy, rearranging everything in many ways, always with an eye on safety. Food is easy to find, since his home is very large and little creatures often find themselves in there by accident and he just eats them up. He is large and capable as a hunter, something like a gigantic shrew. He has an escape hatch which is camouflaged from the outside, and he lovingly describes that for us too. But his paranoia never rests, and his gnawing insecurity from unseen enemies, who may or may not really exist, is the source of his abstract fear. This fear causes him to make a foray to the surface to see if certain noises stem from large animals on the surface who may have divined his entrance. But he does not see anything that confirm or disprove his fears. He even wishes he could somehow watch over himself as he sleeps, for that is when one is most vulnerable. After a few days above ground he can see that no large animals are aware of the existence of his burrow, and so he descends, with his catch of many dead bodies, in the process of which he is perfectly at risk, since he has no friends or confederates, and in the descent he destroys the camouflages he had built. Our terrier is intelligent as well as courageous. He is aware that he works away to spend his nervous energy as much as for any other reason, and he realizes that his activities to ensure security sometimes endanger it even more. A stupid and senseless life; an unhappy life; a life whose every fulfillment is no real, lasting fulfillment. All his life is spent in constructing security, but he grows more and more afraid of the hostility of the world and “the specters of the night” who are out to get him. Although he revels in the wealth of food that his work provides, there comes an event that brings him ruin. Upon his sloppy reentry to the burrow from above ground, our doughty hero falls asleep. He awakens later to the noise of a sibilant sound [Zischen], which is low and constant, and has no clear source. It drives him wild with fear. The animal grows progressively more anxious, assuming that the hissing must issue from some enemy who will devour him. He goes in search of the source of it, and in the process destroys a large part of his Bau. He goes from anxious to crazed by anxiety, but the issue of the search remains indefinite. The single final page of the story was lost by his lover Dora Dymant, who reported to Brod that in fact it contained the death of the animal in the mouth of some other creature. Such an ending would be is just like Kafka, who thus would spoof the Bible again by having the author report

144 Ovi Symposium II his own death, as the Jews believed that Moses was able to do at the close of the Torah. A neat trick, but impossible. But, in the end, from a substantive point-of-view, “Der Bau” is a depiction of a miserable life, a miserable way of life, and a counsel of despair. And also, in the end, the reader never discovers the source of the hissing. Like the trapeze artist, the animal of the Bau does not like it on the surface of the earth. He feels too vulnerable there, and constructs his fortress at the greatest expense of spirit and labor, only to find that there is no security anywhere. How afraid he is, how hard-working, and how easily he fails! We get a better grip on the nature of modernity when we come to see that the beast is the very type of modern man. A Little Woman This is a story of four pages that has hardly ever been commented upon. All that commentators say is that Kafka claimed that it was based upon a petite co-resident of a rooming house in Berlin where he lived with Dora Dymant without benefit of clergy. This is typical of much of inept Kafka criticism, which confuses interpretation with advertence to biographical references, ignoring the fact that no fiction derives its meaning from factual details alone. However, in the light of our basic thesis this particular story does make sense. The narrator of this short tale is a man who lives in the same building as some small woman who hates him to the nth degree. There seems to be no reason whatever for her stance, and she will not talk about it. The narrator, who is not insightful in any sense, thought of trying to change, and perhaps in that way reduce her hatred. He claims to be a respectable man with a good reputation, but admits that since he was not able to change her attitude by ignoring her hatred, he has grown weary and has given up trying to change her by changing himself. Over the years nothing has changed. The two are locked in a struggle to the death. Third parties know all about this, but apparently do not take sides. The little woman has a demonic hatred that is so strong that it makes her physically sick. There seems to be no cause except a vicious willfulness. The narrator’s mu- lishness is only one small step more reasonable. Nothing has ever improved or changed over many years. Hell is the other person, just as Sartre would aver. Kafka is teaching us that half the human race locks itself into such small-bore hostilities, with no rationale or one lost to memory, the costs of which are absurdly high, and always demeaning. Josephine the Songstress, or, the Mouse Folk This interesting story is Kafka’s l’envoi. The piece is often thought to defy interpretation, but insofar as it addresses questions we have raised, it is partially understandable. On his deathbed Kafka told visitors that the reason he gave it a uniquely double title was that the piece should be understood as a “balance.” Perhaps “teeter-totter” would convey the point better. For artists and others who play similar roles in society exist only in relation to their publics, and it is this ever-shifting relationship that is the true subject of the story. The point-of-view of the narration shifts from a narrator who is more than half-uncomprehending to another that reports on Josephine’s point-of view, but also deficiently. [xxiii]

Ovi Symposium II 145 The narrator is an anonymous member of the mouse Volk. Josephine is the singer of the Volk. Gesang, song as revelation, can cure the folk, a folk with many cares and under constant threat of imminent death. The narrator insists that the mice are a practical people, uninterested in things such as Musik. Josephine’s singing is nothing out of the ordinary. It is no more than a whistling or piping, Pfeifen. But all mice can pipe. Why then does Josephine command such attention? To the narrator it is a question of nearness; that is, the manner in which the demonic works in men. Only when you hear her pipe in her presence does she have a profound effect on you. Many of the comments of the narrator are wrong or wrongheaded, and many are immediately withdrawn after they are expressed. This is a kind of balance within the balance. But, what is established for us is that neither side fully appreciates the other: a pragmatic people always underestimate what is not pragmatic, and artists always exaggerate their own importance. Whereas the Volk love her as a father loves a beautiful daughter and protect her, she thinks the reverse, i.e., that it is she who protects the Volk. Josephine is given over to her own importance in the life of the folk, and resents being loved as a daughter or because she is beautiful. She wants to be loved for her talent and her service to the community, which is very great. She even goes on strike, refusing to hit her high notes, and later claims that she should be awarded a pension for injuring one of her legs in her professional capacity. Josephine always gives herself to her Gesang. When she gets going her little breast throbs like the breast of the savior hunter dog in Investigations. Her songs reduce the folk to silence. They are under her spell. She is their mirror; she enunciates their own lives to them. They even breathe with bashfulness, so serious is her art to them. This is Kafka’s final word on the question of ultimate meaning. Her song has a sort of daimonic power over the folk, a saving power. It lifts them into a solidarity that is also a personal revelation to each individual member. Their own pragmatic busyness [Munterkeit] that takes up most of their lives is left behind, and they get to dwell for a moment in another, purer place, the pure place Kafka felt transported to as he plied his art. This makes them happy, and they honor Josephine for her public service. From her perspective the success of her performances depends upon the “protection of the good spirits” [nur dem Schutze guter Geister überantwartet] during a performance. In the end, in the very end, there is no notion of immortality in Kafka’s set of beliefs, and the story ends with an acceptance that the ecstatic moment is all, and fame, even for the rescuers of mankind, the artists, are fleeting and of little account. Though man is a striver, and has spiritual needs lower forms of life do not have, he is finite, and even fame dies just as mice and men do. A spiritual creature in a material world, he is born homeless and is, like the Hunter Gracchus, never able to find rest in this world or in the hereafter. This is not Faustian, since no one is about to conquer the world, but Existentialist, in that alienation is never able to be completely overcome. How fruitful, then, to close with another “parable” that was found in Kafka’s notebooks after his death. Legend tries to explain the unexplainable; as it comes out of a substratum of truth it must end in the unexplainable. About Prometheus there are four legends. According to the first he was held fast in the Caucasus because he had betrayed the gods to mankind, and they sent eagles, who fed on his ever-renewed liver.

146 Ovi Symposium II According to the second, Prometheus, driven by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third his treachery was in the course of millennia forgotten, forgotten by the gods, by the eagles, by himself. According to the fourth everyone grew tired of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles. The wound closed wearily. The unexplainable mass of rock remained.[xxiv]

ENDNOTES [i] This is a confusing question. Brod had gathered several more chapters and parts of chapters into what he published as chapter 18; but the Critical Edition, which follows the holograph, restores the original design, and the place I refer to here begins with Chapter 21 in all later editions. [ii] Castle, p. 307; Romane, S. 971. Although in a philosophic vein this may sound like Leibniz’s reasoning in his Theodicy, that would be reaching. All adults speak in this way to the young from time to time. [iii] Castle, p. 309; Romane, S. 974. Translation mine. [iv] BON, p. 87; KKA – NSFII, Sn. 32-33. 5 BON, pp. 35, 94 (Aphorism #80); p.97 (Aphorism # 106); p.31; and p. 42. KKA – NSFII, Sn. 130; 139; 2; and 82. [vi] Diaries, pp. 386 – 387; KKA – T, S. 838. [vii] Ibid., p. 387; 838. [viii] CS, p. 291. [ix] Cf. Paul Raabe, hrsg,, Franz Kakfa. Sämtliche Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990, S. 334 with Erz., S. 426. CS has been cited in note 8. [x] Brod, in several works on Kafka that he wrote over the years, including a biography, has an interpretation of the Indestructible that reflects his own humanistic and Enlightenment views, which he lards with many references to his own interpretation of Judaism. This is not what Kafka was about. [xi] BON, pp. 27, 29, 33, 93, 39, and 20; KKA – NSFII, Sn. 55, 58, 65, 128, 76-77, and 42. [xii] Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1978 [1958]), pp. 332 – 335. Letter to Brod of July 5, 1922. Hereafter, Letters; Franz Kafka, Briefe, 1902 – 1924, hrsg. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980 [1958]), Sn. 382 – 387. [xiii] Diaries, p. 399, entry of January 16, 1922; KKA – T, Sn. 877 – 878. [xiv] Milena Jesenská, from a radio address in honor of her lover, Kafka, shortly after his death. The only text that contains the entire speech in English is found in Margarete Buber-Neumann, Milena, translated

Ovi Symposium II 147 by Ralph Mannheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), pp. 72 – 73. [xv] See, e.g., Gerhard Neumann, “Kafka und die Musik,” in W. Kittler und G. Neumann, hrsgr., Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr (Freiburg in Breisgau: Rombach, 1990), Sn. 391 – 398. [xvi] Aphorism Two, BON, pp. 15, 87; KKA – NSFII, S. 32, begins: “All human errors are impatience …” [xvii] Aphorism 109*. BON, pp.54, 98; KKA – NSFII, Sn. 103,140. [xviii] There actually were hunger artists in the real world. See Breon Mitchell, “Kafka and the Hunger Artist,” in Alan Udoff, ed., Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance. Centenary Readings (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 236 – 255. [xix] CS, p. 272; Erz., S. 397. [xx] CS, p. 277; Erz., S. 403. [xxi] CS, p. 446; Erz., S. 387. [xxii] CS, pp. 325 – 26; Erz., S. 465 – 66. [xxiii] Unfortunately, the great Wilhelm Emrich in his work Franz Kafka. A Critical Study of his Writings, originally published in 1954, the most influential work on all of Kafka for decades, claimed that the point of view of the narrator was objective, and the work an attack upon the world-historical pretensions of artists. His point about the narrator is incorrect, not only because he contradicts himself again and again, but it also because it contradicts Kafka’s remark about the “balance,” which is obviously true. [xxiv] CS, p. 432; BON, p. 36; KKA- NSFII, S. 70.

LIST OF WORKS CITED Works by Kafka in German Kritische Ausgabe in der Fassung der Handschrift. Various editors. Frankfort am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1982 – 1993. Cited as KKA. Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente. Heft II. Hrsg. Jost Schillemeit. 1992. Cited as KKA – NSFII. Tagebücher. Hrsger. Hans-Gerd Kach, Michael Müller, und Malcolm Pasley. 1990. Cited as KKA – T. Franz Kafka. Briefe 1902 - 1924. Hrsg. Max Brod. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980. Franz Kafka. Die Erzählungen. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996. [Text as in KKA]. Franz Kafka. Die Romane. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997. [Text as in KKA]. Franz Kafka. Sämtliche Erzählungen. Hrsg. Paul Raabe. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990.

Works by Kafka in English Franz Kafka. The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne

148 Ovi Symposium II Wilkins. Cambridge MA: Exact Change, 1991. Cited as BON. Franz Kafka. The Castle. Translated with a Preface by Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books, Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971 [1946]. Cited as CS. Franz Kafka. Diaries. Edited by Max Brod. New York: Schocken Books, 1976 [1948] Franz Kafka. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977. [This book translates the German edition edited by Brod cited above.] Cites as Briefe. Other Works Cited Buber-Neumann, Margarete. Milena. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. Emrich, Wilhelm. Franz Kafka. A Critical Study of his Writings. Translated by Sheema Zeben Buehne. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1984 [1968]. Mitchell, Breon. “Kafka and the Hunger Artist,” in Alan Udoff, ed., Franz Kafka and the Contemporary Per- formance. Centenary Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Neumann, Gerhard. “Kafka und die Musik,” in W. Kittner and G. Neumann, hrsgr., Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr. Freiburg in Breisgau: Rombach, 1990), Sn. 391 – 398.

Ovi Symposium II 149 Chapter 18

Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Eighteenth Meeting: 16 January 2014

Table of Content for the 18th Session of the Ovi Symposium

Main Sub-theme: “The Theater as a Bridge between Theory and Practice in Aesthetics”

150 Ovi Symposium II Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance in this session): Levinas, Aristotle, Chiarelli, Antonelli, Cavacchioli, Pirandello, D’annunzio, Duse, Wells, Barzini, Ibsen, Zacconi, Sammartano, Langa, Boutet, Garavaglia, Bracco, Antona-Traversi, Bonelli, Moselli, Martini, Prago, Lopez, Niccodemi, Klopp, Larkin, Bessanese, Mariani, Licastro, Fontanella, Antonucci, Farrel, Pupa, Van Watson, Scuderi, Mitchell, Maraini, Bontempelli, Rossi di San Secondo, Abba, Talli, Nietzsche, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Ruzante, Aretino, Goldoni, Gozzi, Metastasio, Cecchi, Di Maria, Alfieri, De Filippo, Svevo, Pasolini, Fabbri, Fo, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Brecht, Plato, Augustine, Pascal, Kierkeg- aard, Kafka, Rilke, Berdyaev, Manzoni, Gide, Blondel, Riviere, Peguy, Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac, Le Roy, Gilson, Maritain, Mounier, Silone, Sansone, Sapegno, Gramsci, Lukacs, Sartre, De Sanctis, Husserl, Freud, Marx, Artaud, Rossellini, Visconti, Bergman, Popper, Greene, Plebe, Anceschi, Banfi, Croce, Tolstoy, Derri- da, Collingwood, Barthes, Piper, Goodman, Benjamin, Danto, Korsmeyer, Bordieu, Jegede, Appiah, Davis, Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Habermas, Hegel, Walton. Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator Section 1: “Theatrical Arts at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.” A presentation by Michael Vena from the introduction to his book Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century (2013). Section 2: Annotated List of Four Recently Published Books, in English, on Italian Theater Section 3: “Diego Fabbri’s Theater as the Trial of Western Civilization.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 4: “Aporias of Italian Aesthetics after Croce.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (part one) as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica. Section 5: By way of a dialogue with Paolozzi on the theme of his presentation: The concluding chapter from Paparella’s Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers: “The Nature ofArt as a Problematic of Aesthetics” Section 6: A comment by Paolozzi on Paparella’s previous presentation on Heidegger and Habermas with a brief response by Paparella.

Ovi Symposium II 151 Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator In the last session the Ovi team and family announced and welcomed aboard Dr. Michael Vena as a regular contributor to the Ovi symposium. Vena debuts in section one of this 18th meeting with a presentation of the introduction to his latest book on Italian theater consisting of 14 essay, three of them his own, by various eminent scholars of the modern Italian theater (see section two for a list of titles and authors). As he himself has written, this decades-long project is not a mere academic endeavor; it is rather a work in progress to share his passion for the theater. It is also an intellectual exploration of the problematic of the dialectical nexus life/theater, theater/life. Take notice that although the focus and sub-theme in this meeting is on the Italian theater, a section of Italian culture which unfortunately has remained uncultivated in the Anglo-Saxon cultural world, the general framework of the symposium remains that of aesthetics which can indeed be traced back to Aristotle’s Poetics as philosophy of theater, as the same Vena reminds us. A further sub-theme continues to be that of truth/freedom vis a vis theory/practice in modern theories of aesthetics responding to the question “Is philosophy a theoretical rather than an existential practice?” The theater could well be considered a sort of bridge between theory and practice as indeed Aristotle teaches us. This vital theme is further explored by Paolozzi via a comment in section five which deals with a topic introduced in the last two meetings of the symposium in the process of analyzing Heidegger’s philosophy and Habermas’ reaction to it, a theme which will undoubtedly continue to be explored in future sessions. In section two the reader is presented with an extensively annotated list of five recently published books on Italian theater for English readers. Two of those books are by Michael Vena: Italian Grotesque Theater 2001, and Italian Playwrights of the Twentieth Century (2013) followed by a table of content listing the 14 essays’ authors’ essay and their academic affiliation. The third book is by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa titled A History of Italian Theater (2006), and the fourth and fifth are by Professor Salvatore Di Maria of the University of Tennessee and titled Tragedy in the Italian Renaissance (2002), and The Poetics of Imitation in the Italian Theater of the Renaissance (2013). These five books should go a long way in familiarizing non-experts who don’t read Italian with the astounding production of modern Italian Theater that has thrived since the Renaissance.

152 Ovi Symposium II In section three Paparella offers a brief but focused portrait of one of the most famous of modern Italian playwright: Diego Fabbri who in the sixties and seventies was as well known as Luigi Pirandello but has now fallen into an undeserved obscurity. This is a very unfortunate situation and the cultural reasons that gave rise to it after World War II is masterfully recounted by Ernesto Paolozzi in section four. Indeed, Fabbri’s opus (especially his play Jesus on Trial which has been translated and included in one of Vena’s books and is briefly examined in the presentation) remains very relevant to modern concerns and can be interpreted as a sort of trial of the whole of Western Civilization, not too dissimilar from the trial of Western thought and ethical norms conducted by Emmanuel Levinas in his philosophy. Paparella’s presentation which has previously been published in the magazine is titled “Diego Fabbri’s Theater as the Trial of Western Civilization.” In section four Ernesto Paolozzi presents us with an enlightening excursus on the issue of the definition of art as part one from the appendix to his book Vicende dell’Estetica titled “Aporie dell’Estetica Italiana dopo Croce.” The second part is to be presented in the next session. Here Paolozzi explores the cultural climate of Italy after the fall of fascism and attempts to supply some valid philosophical answers as to why the influence of Croce and other notable authors grew suddenly weaker after World War II while at the same time exploring the vexing issue of the definition of art. In section five, by way of a dialogue and exchange of ideas within Paolozzi’s presentation on the theme of the definition of art in aesthetics, Paparella once again places on the symposium’s table the last chapter of his Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers (2013) which deals with an identical theme. Finally in section six, the dialogue on the conundrum theory/praxis within general philosophy and particularly on Heidegger’s philosophy and Habermas’ reflections on it continues with a comment by Paolozzi on Papa- rella’s last presentation on Heidegger-Habermas followed by a brief response from Paparella.

Ovi Symposium II 153 1 Theatrical Arts at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century A Presentation by Michael Vena (from the introduction to his recent book Italian Playwrights of the 20th Century) Preface by Michael Vena: I’d like to take the opportunity of my debut, so to speak, at the Ovi Magazine Symposium to thank both my good friend and colleague Emanuel L. Paparella and the editor in chief of the magazine Thanos Kalamidas for their cordial invitation to join the distinguished panel of contributors to the Ovi symposium. I have been reading with great interest and much enjoying the Ovi symposium lately. Being now part of its team, I trust my presentations, aiming at the sharing of my decades-long project of translation and popularization of major Italian playwrights, will in some measure enhance the readers’ interest in this field of aesthetics. Reflections on the theater and life go all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics in Western culture. Mine will be a modest contribution but I look forward to a flourishing collaboration and a productive dialogue in the field of aesthetics and particularly on the modern Italian theater about which, beyond academic considerations, I remain passionate.

In an introduction to his book The Italians, Luigi Barzini quotes Orson Wells as having observed that Italy is a nation blessed with actors, sixty million of them, “in fact, they are almost all good; there are only a few bad ones, and they are all on the stage and in the films.” The author goes in detail regarding their mimic, gestures, use of hands to emphasize, clarify or suggest what is spoken or what is not prudent to express in words. Sooner or later, the world around would become well aware of Italians’ long tradition and love for the theater that goes way back to Etruscan theater over the entire peninsula, even in small towns and islands: from a religious as well as secular medieval period, plays staged in renaissance and baroque grandeur, lessons in comedy, pastoral and epic drama; commedia dell’arte melodrama, indeed the splendors nineteenth century opera. Such traditions, enjoyed by most Europeans over the course of time, induced at the turn of the new century a number of countries to invest in local theaters as stable centers of learning, with the ap- pointments of a stage director and related personnel. While the Italian theatrical establishment could not rely at first on government support, nonetheless great actors and actresses thrived locally (from public squares to local churches) and on world stages, keeping faith with a reputation acquired from their accomplishments as the ones from commedia dell’arte and in opera productions.

154 Ovi Symposium II Ancient Etruscan Theater in Volterra, Tuscany, Italy At the dawn of the twentieth century, a notable of such success is Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) whose powerful voice both in popular and classical repertoire transformed musicals (Cavelleria Rusticana), bourgeois theater (La moglie ideale), and European culture (Ibsen’s theatrical repertoire, and other European productions) into immortal masterpieces. Duse would travel far and wide to perform, wetting the public’s appetite for artistic beauty that had been partly inspired by admiration for her companion, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the write who sparked a renewal of interest in modern stage both in Italy and Europe. Duse’s male counterpart was often Ermete Zacconi (1857-1948), a charismatic actor who attracted young generations both as an actor and as stage director. As theoretician and polemicist, Zacconi defended the proposed role of director for the modern stage, a position that was limited to acting but related to responsibilities for the entire performance. It should also be noted that both Duse and Zacconi spent much of their professional lives as part of a traveling troupe, like those sixteenth century members of the commedia dell’arte and unlike many of their European counterparts who had become salaried actors in residence for a performing company, Duse eventually died in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, ending a long and Remarkable career that had taken her all over Italy, to much of Latin America and throughout the United States. Both Duse and Zacconi left a legacy for younger generations in the field of theory, acting, and all the sundry aspects of stagecraft.

Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) In Italy the dream for a “Teatro Stabile” would be delayed for several years, yet such decision did not mean that actors and other professionals would give up on the idea of a permanent performing centers where actors could be trained and stage directors would not have to improvise. Soon permanent theaters (Teatro Stabile) and small theaters (Piccolo Teatro) would become realities in many Italian cities starting with Rome, (not to mention the many theaters and amphitheaters sparse throughout the peninsula, still functional and going back some twenty-seven centuries). A first attempt had been made in 1898 by a critic, Domenico Lan- za (1858-1949), to form a “teatro d’arte” (Classic Theater) in Turin. It was short-lived. A more serious effort was then made in Rome by another art critic, Edoardo Bouted (1856-1915).

Ovi Symposium II 155

Ermete Zacconi (1857-1948) He managed to obtain support for the now venerable Teatro Argentina from the local administration at City Hall, who first had to be convinced by notable city elders and intellectuals to organize such a sought-after “Stabile Romana.” The new company proposed Ferruccio Garavaglia (1868-1912) for a leading role and later as coordinator for an elite group who would seek to lure back actors in their role as interpreters of an artistic repertoire, now staged however, with modern approaches. This new company lasted for about fifteen years up to 1913, having introduced a number of foreign authors along with new works by local and well established playwrights (such as D’Annunzio, Bracco, Antona-Traversi), and several of the most talented newcomers (Benelli, Moselli, Martini, et al.).

Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 Although the “Stabile Romana” terminated its programs in 1913, soon real progress was made at the or- ganizational level of the theatrical enterprise in Italy by leaders like Marco Praga, Sabatino Lopez, Dario Niccodemi, three well known and respected playwrights who became instrumental in the reorganization of the Italian Society of Authors. They followed through with a proposal advanced by its former president Marco Praga, that the authors join with the Actors’ Guild and the Theater Directors’ Association to form a single unit.

156 Ovi Symposium II

Italian Playwright Dario Fo (1926-2013) Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997

Improv theater or Commedia dell’Arte in Italy The newly formed Copyright Office, known as Società Italiana Autori Editori (SIAE), became a central unifying force in dealing with the various and sundry aspects of artistic performance; in resolving typical economic and professional conflicts between actor, director, and author; or by attending to problems of registration, protection, grants of copyright, remittance, and so on… Such streamlining of the theatrical enterprise as a whole coincided with, and certainly enhanced, that “magic” moment in Italian theater that produced several of the best playwrights of the early twentieth century, great actresses and actors such as Eleonora Duse, and Marta Abba, directors like Ermere Zacconi and Virgilio Talli, as well as Luigi Pirandello, the latter being already well known as a novelist as well as for his theoretical treatise On Humor, and was just getting ready to start an extensive production of theatrical masterpieces.

Interior of La Scala Opera House in Milan

Ovi Symposium II 157 2 Annotated Notes on Three Recently Published Books in English on the Italian Theater

Italian Grotesque Theater by Michael Vena (2001) This is the first book in English to explore Italian “grotesque” theater in the twentieth century. Chiarelli’s “The Mask and the Face” Antonelli’s “A Man Confronts Himself”, and Cavacchioli’s “The Bird of Paradise” have been widely staged in Europe and the Americas by prominent directors, including Pirandello. These playwrights exercised a pivotal role in stage renewal, forged links with the most avant-garde contemporary thinking, and, some of them at least, set the pace for what became, much later, “theater of the absurd.” The Theatre of the Grotesque, a dramatic movement in Italy from 1916 until 1930, grew directly out of Pi- randello’s concept of “umorismo,” the painful laugh accompanying the tragic sense of bewilderment at the incongruities and cruelties of life. Growing first of all from a reaction against positivism and its theatrical counterpart, naturalism, the Theatre of the Grotesque was also an extension of the Crepuscular movement in poetry. Three syndromes which enter grotesque plays in various combinations are aptly expressed in the titles of three of the grotesques: for the marionette syndrome, Rosso di San Secondo’s “Oh Marionettes, What Passion!”; for the mirror syndrome, Luigi Antonelli’s “The Man Who Met Himself”; and for the multiple reality syndrome, Luigi Pirandello’s “Right You Are (If You Think You Are).” These Pirandellian syndromes have continued and have been enriched in the absurdist and existentialist drama which followed the Theatre of the Grotesque.

Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century:

158 Ovi Symposium II A Companion Text edited and introduced by Michael Vena (2013) The above presentation in section one by Michael Vena already furnishes the reader with an idea of what this book deals with. To further enhance that idea we post the table of content of the book with the titles of its 14 essays by various scholars of Italian theater, their names and their academic affiliation: 1. Life as Theater: Gabriele D’Annunzio by Charles Klopp (Professor of Italian and Director of Graduate Studies at the Ohio State University) 2. The Pleasure of Being Booed: Futurist Performances from 1910-33 by Erin Larkin (Assistant Profes- sor of Italian at Southern Connecticut State University) 3. Mad Reflections in Early Pirandellian Dramaby Flora Bessanese (Professor of Italian at the University of Massachusetts-Boston) 4. Six Characters in Search of an Author: An Interpretive Key by Umberto Mariani (Professor Emeritus of Italian at Rutger University) 5. Luigi Antonelli’s Theater: A Grotesque in “Fantastic Humor” by Michael Vena (Professor Emeritus of Italian at Southern Connecticut State University) 6. P.M. Rosso di San Secondo’s Major Plays by Emanuele Licastro (Professor of Italian at the State Uni- versity of New York at Buffalo) 7. Enrico Cavacchioli and Metatheater by Michael Vena 8. The Theater of Massimo Bontempelli by Luigi Fontanella (Professor of Italian at the State University of New York, Stony Brook) 9. Ugo Betti’s Major Plays by Emanuele Licastro 10. The Major Theater of Diego Fabbri by Umberto Mariani 11. Guide to the Plays of Eduardo De Filippo by Giovanni Antonucci (Professor of History of Theater at the University of Rome) 12. Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Theater of the Word by William Van Watson (Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona) 13. Dario Fo’s Ancient Roots and Epic Performances by Antonio Scuderi (Professor of Italian at Truman State University, Missouri) 14. Scrittura Feminile: Writing the Female Plays of Dacia Maraini by Tony Mitchell (Senior Lecturer in cultural studies and popular music at the University of Technology, Sidney, Australia)

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A History of Italian Theater (2006) by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa With the aim of providing a comprehensive history of Italian drama from its origins to the time of its publication in 2006, this book treats theatre in its widest sense, discussing the impact of all the elements and figures integral to the collaborative process of theatre-making. The impact of designers, actors, directors and impresarios as well as of playwrights is subjected to critical scrutiny, while individual chapters examine the changes in technology and shifts in the cultural climate which have influenced theatre. No other approach would be acceptable for Italian theatre, where from the days of commedia dell’arte, the central figure has often been the actor rather than the playwright. The important writers, such as Carlo Goldoni and Luigi Pirandello, receive detailed critical treatment, as do the ‘great actors’ of nineteenth-century theatre or the directors of our own time, but the focus is always on the bigger picture.

The Poetics of Imitation in the Italian Theater of the Renaissance (2013) by Salvatore Di Maria The theatre of the Italian Renaissance was directly inspired by the classical stage of Greece and Rome, and many have argued that the former imitated the latter without developing a new theatre tradition. In this book, Salvatore DiMaria investigates aspects of innovation that made Italian Renaissance stage a modern, original theatre in its own right. He provides important evidence for creative imitation at work by comparing sources and imitations – incuding Machiavelli’s Mandragola and Clizia, Cecchi’s Assiuolo, Groto’s Emilia, and Dolce’s Marianna – and highlighting source elements that these playwrights chose to adopt, modify, or omit entirely.

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The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance (2002) by Salvatore Di Maria

Professor Salvatore Di Maria Di Maria delves into how playwrights not only brought inventive new dramaturgical methods to the genre, but also incorporated significant aspects of the morals and aesthetic preferences familiar to contemporary spectators into their works. By proposing the theatre of the Italian Renaissance as a poetic window into the living realities of sixteenth-century Italy, he provides a fresh approach to reading the works of this period.

Ovi Symposium II 161 3 Diego Fabbri’s Theater as “The Trial of Western Civilization”

A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Abstract: Diego Fabbri’s existential theater, passionately committed to the exploration of the human condition and the spirit of the age, is all but forgotten nowadays. That is unfortunate, for the theatrical production of Diego Fabbri (especially his summa: “Jesus on Trial”) is still vitally relevant to post-modern Man’s self-knowledge, and the rediscovery of the cultural identity of Western civilization.

Diego Fabbri (1911-1980) As part of Dr. Vena’s translation project, a few years ago I translated from the Italian into English a play by Diego Fabbri titled Processo a Gesù [Jesus on Trial]. This is perhaps his best known work, originally performed in Milan on March 2, 1955. It might be hard to believe it, but in the 50s and 60s Fabbri became better known than Pirandello, not only in Italy but also abroad. At that time his above mentioned play was performed in Germany, Sweden, Austria, the USA, France, England, Spain, Australia, even Japan; it was eventually made into a movie in Spain. Despite this early popularity Fabbri seems to have been all but forgotten. That is too bad, for he is even more relevant now to the predicaments of Western Civilization than he was fifty years ago.

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Between Two Thieves by Warner Le Roy Adapted from Fabbri’s Processo a Gesù Fabbri is one of those rare dramatists who, like Pirandello, is concerned with philosophical-ethical issues relating to the existential human condition. Some of his other plays are The Seducer, The Liar, Inquisition and Portrait of an Unknown. The mere titles of these plays hint at Fabbri’s existential concerns. He was the kind of author who in Italian goes under the name of “impegnato” [committed].

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) The classical authors who greatly influenced Fabbri, as he himself revealed in his book of essays titled Christian Ambiguity (1954), are Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Plato, St. Augustine, Pascal, Ki- erkegaard, Kafka, Rilke, Berdiaev, Manzoni, as well as the contemporary French authors he was reading at the time the play made its debut: Andre Gide, Maurice Blondel, Jacques Riviere, Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Julien Green, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier. Enough to persuade anybody that Fabbri is not an esoteric elitist intellectual, (of either classical or modern tradition); on the contrary, he speaks the language of everyman and is concerned with the problems of everyman.

Diego Fabbri’s Play The Trial of Jesus, first staged in Milan in 1955

Ovi Symposium II 163 The protagonists of his drama are mostly ordinary people who struggle with the great issues, “prosecuting charges,” indictments, and ultimate problems of the human condition and destiny as lived today by post-modern Man who the more he distances himself from God, the more he feels Her/His absence, the more he searches for Her/Him through the labyrinthine byways of the spirit. In this respect, Jesus on Trial can be considered Fabbri’s Summa. And what is this play all about? It is really a modern trial, an in absentia trial of Jesus and to a certain extent of the ancient Jewish people by modern Jews. Paradoxically, as the trial progresses, we come to realize that it is in reality the trial of a decadent technological rationalistic civilization against itself; that is to say, the trial of a civilization that has lost the ability to hope in the future and to conceive salvation and redemption of any kind, a civilization stuck in the horizontal (the immanent) and devoid of the vertical (the transcendent) and unable to conceive the two together dialectically as “both-and,” often given to apocalyptic scenarios of its own future destiny. To be sure, the play had that powerful effect on me personally as I translated it. Behind this bleak assessment by Fabbri of the modern social phenomenon, there is Charles Péguy, an author who influenced Fabbri more than any other, and who had written that “Christianity is a life lived together so that we may save ourselves together.” After reading the play one realizes that indeed while Pirandello is Fabbri’s artistic inspiration, Charles Péguy is Fabbri’s spiritual inspiration for the conception of an authentic Christian society: a society that finds its “raison d’etre” in communion and solidarity and is thus alone able to free Man from that deep solitude of spirit described by Vico as “the barbarism of the intellect” and afflicting post-modern Man in the third rationalistic cycle of Vico’s ideal eternal history.

Charles Péguy (1873-1914), a great influence on Fabbri As far as dramatic techniques are concerned Pirandello is undoubtedly present, behind the curtain, so to speak. He is there for the fundamental emotions and conflicts which are explored, for the conception of dialogue as a search for identity and truth, and for the stage returned to its original classical function of authentic place of drama, almost another protagonist. It was in fact this Pirandellian inspiration and conception of the drama as advertised by Fabbri that led to the rediscovery of Pirandello in Italy and abroad.

Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

164 Ovi Symposium II Fabbri’s theater flows naturally into film. In the 60s and 70s he wrote manuscripts for the RAI Television which includes, among others, novels by Silone’s among which Il Segreto di Luca, Greene’s The End of the Affair, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov and The Devils. However, Fabbri is no Dostoevsky, he remains uniquely himself hard to subsume under any other director. If one were to search for a kindred spirit to Fabbri among modern film directors, it would not be Fellini ofSatyricon , but Bergman of The Seventh Seal.

A powerfully dramatic scene from The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman (1957)

Poster for the movie version of Processo a Gesù (1974)

Ovi Symposium II 165 4 Aporias of Italian Aesthetics after Croce—Part I A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi Note: This essay here translated into English by Emanuel L. Paparella was originally published in the journal Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia of the University of Naples, vol. XXVI, year XIV; later it appeared in Paolozzi’s book Vicende dell’Estetica (1989). If we survey the textbooks of the history of Italian literature which appeared between the years 1965 and 1975, we can capture with some kind of precision the cultural climate of those years, perhaps even better than by reading volumes and essays dedicated to single authors or specific problems. This is so because summaries, even when they retain the ideological and philosophical orientation of their authors, tend to present themselves as a popularizing organ of the official culture which, in the case of the then Italy, could be better measured with the ruler of quantity than that of quality. Similarly, those of us who’d like to get a general idea of what happened to Italian aesthetics and the literary criticism after World War II, could easily satisfy their curiosity by reading the chapter dedicated to Croce by Mario Sansone in his successful History of Italian Literature where he writes that “Generally speaking Croce lifted the whole of Italian culture to the highest European level, inserted in it with a vigilant intellectualism which knew no pause or tiredness, all the international phenomena which were most alive at the time, not only accepting it but also placing it under a rigorous critical test: thus creating a work which not only elevated culturally but also in an ethical and civil mode.”

Storia della Letteratura Italiana by Mario Sansone (1900-1998) However, concluding the same essay Sansone notes that Croce’s influence which had lasted a good sixty years, weakens after World War II when “new problems and new cultural paths arose.” The judgment of another historian of literature, Natalino Sapegno, is even more severe and explicit. In his Compendio di storia della letteratura of 1972 he writes that “Today, against the admirable heritage of Croce, in certain aspects sterile and even dangerous, and even more against the banal formulism of the orthodox Croceans, there is a tendency to go back to the thread of our romantic critic-literary tradition anchored in the example of De Sanctis. Not by chance, in the recent past all of the more astute critics with a strong personality, be it in the field of militant criticism or in the academic field, we have all operated, more or less, outside of the field of orthodox Croceanism, even when we have felt in various ways the influence of Croce.”

166 Ovi Symposium II But exactly what were the new problems and the new destinations which were evident at the end of the 50s? And who were “the most astute critics with a strong personality” who refused Crocean orthodoxy? The summaries don’t reveal the answer to this question.

Natalino Sapegno (1901-1990) And yet we must answer such a question if we wish to understand the real import of certain movements and the theoretical resistance of competitive doctrines; in short if we wish to see clearly to fill in a legitimate if rather sterile historical curiosity, but above all so that we can operate and construct a small contribution to to the current cultural debate. So, what was the road that Italian culture had begun to travel upon after the fall of Fascism? Those who identify the return of Marxism as one of the characteristic signs of those years, would not be wrong: the discovery of Gramsci and Lukacs; the renewed popularity of Lenin, Tockij and Sta- lin, whose concepts were utilized even in the field of aesthetics, were fundamental elements of the cultural debate of that time. But those who on the other hand see those signs in the return to the enlightenment and positivism would not be wrong either: psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, structuralism, return or come to the fore for the first time intriguing even the mass of the people. Neither would be wrong those who retain irrationalism, especially decadent irrationalism the only valid aesthetics to affix to that historical period: phenomenological existentialism and Christian existentialism (with the exception of the committed existentialism of Sartrian orientation) were mixed to the most varied avanguard poetics, while Satre, as mentioned, favored Marxism.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Marxist author of Letteratura e Vita Nazionale

Ovi Symposium II 167 So, next to Lukacs there is Husserl, next to Freud there is Marx, Brecht was also distinguished but more often than not he was placed next to Artaud; the realism of Rossellini was mixed with the decadentism of Visconti, while the existentialism of Bergman was contrasted with the hyper-realism of protest movies of the leftist avanguard. While the neo-positivist philosopher of the Vienna Circle aroused interest, there were also those of the Frankfurt school; and if in the figurative arts expressionism or dada triumphed, there were those who vaunted and promulgated the paintings of socialist realism.

Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) Anybody can fill pages and pages of those oppositions or false oppositions. And the result of such work would be that of finding oneself confronting an historical period extremely contradictory and agitated, as never before, hard to define even with a vast and vague brush. It would be so were it not for that contradic- toriness and agitation defining the times we are discussing.

Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) In fact, they were years of revolt and rebellion against the whole European cultural tradition. It contrasted after all with all the triumphant of the first half of the century and guaranteed its success; and that probably explains why so many absurd hybridisms were created in those years. Obviously what happened in politics

168 Ovi Symposium II was reflected in what happened in culture and vice-versa. Once Fascism fell, it seemed that with it the other institutions, customs and laws of the preceding era needed to fall also. But as it often happens and as attentive men had predicted we did not return to the old world, neither did we completely detach ourselves from it; instead, at least on the political level the old liberal institutions resurrected to a new life reinvigorated by a new vital lymph. We could say that in those years and precisely from the end of the 70s an analogous process is happening at the cultural level: the long blizzard of rebellion having exhausted itself, the discussion returns to concrete problems, to clear and definitive philosophical problems. Paradoxically, in our opinion, it was in those years of republican democracy Italian politics (and we are conscious here of pronouncing a judgment that may appear paradoxical or at any rate painful) found itself ahead of the culture, and beyond contingent crisis, the inspirational foundational criteria of our democracy, which are after all the principles which inspire the most progressive nations, only now have caught up with the official Italian culture.

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) If this, as we believe, is the total movement of Italian culture and civilization even in the field of aesthetics the issue can be taken on in analogous terms and even with all the limitations such an operation requires, we can hazard and theorize a periodization which could result useful for those who study this period. In the 50s we have assisted to the crisis of Crocean aesthetics, a crisis which in some way resulted as fertile ground because in those years even if the tendency was that of leaving Croce behind, his theories were placed on the table for discussion so that even his adversaries were contaminated by them. In the 60s till the middle of the 70s, with rare exceptions, Croce’s criticism became open hostility or ostentatious indifference. From 75 to the end of the 80s we notice a general re-thinking so that those phenomena which traversed the whole of Italian culture, are now balkanized in small “schools” and many ask themselves if there is a necessity of re-evaluating concepts and schemas, judgments and behavior.

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Ovi Symposium II 169 In this brief essay we have attempted to fill with concrete analysis, even if not in a wholly thorough mode, the empty generalizations we have examined. Hence we have deepened some themes we consider relevant, particularly relevant in the years we have examined and still today challenging the scholars of aesthetics and others too.

Croce whose influence began to decline after World War II If the cultural climate between 1950 to 1970 has been understood, it ought not be difficult to understand why among the fundamental problems, rather the problem of all problems, that of the legitimacy of aesthetics has taken on great importance. Overall this thematic is only a particular case of the general crisis of philosophy in the first twenty years after the war and by now, in our opinion partly overcome. It is not easy to capture the sense of an era, neither is it guaranteed that this sense or “essence” as some like to refer to it, can be is comprehensible. However, it is a fact that some delineations can be written and upheld by an objective documentation in as much as that is possible in human affairs. There is no doubt, in fact, that from the empiricist point of view, contemporary aesthetics is insufficient to explain art, given that even the concept of art must be verifiable explained and upheld by experience. Quite often, following a line of reasoning which confuses art as content, that is to say the changing nature and the original creativity of every single artistic creation, with the form or in other words with the concept which such changing nature and creativity want to understand and explain; often the possibility of arriving at a precise theory which could rigorously define the poetical, thus relegating aesthetics at the outskirts of metaphysics the modern of language, grown up under the shadow of the Vienna Circle abhorred, not misguidedly but with an excessive zeal, what did not correspond to the concrete individuality of the single and diverse thinkers which they rigorously criticized.

Bertold Brecht (1898-1956)

170 Ovi Symposium II But the central theorem of contemporary neo-empiricism finds itself in a crisis, and not only under the bar- rage of philosophers with a different viewpoint, but because of an internal crisis, given that scholars such as Popper have caught their insufficient theoretical weakness. In very general terms we have asked if the proposition “every judgment must be verified” is not itself a judgment which cannot be verified which in effect contradicts itself and the whole empiricist mind-set. We have already discussed the confusion between art as creation and philosophical judgment on art; but on the other hand in the field of aesthetics if we exclude Armando Plebe’s book Aesthetics on Trial, we cannot say that neo-empiricism has exercised much influence on Italian scholars. Without any doubt sociologism, psycologism, neo-marxism and structuralism have had more success; they can certainly be inserted in the vast horizon of empiricism, even when they don’t directly invoke it, or, as in the case of Marxism, they condemn it. For our discussion is in any case necessary to remember that what all those movements have in common is an anti-philosophical vocation and therefore as such anti-aesthetics. Both Marxism and psychoanalysis deny the possibility of a philosophical aesthetics since they also deny the autonomy of art and make it “relative” placing it in a mechanical relationship with “causes” which are extraneous to art such as the economy and the subconscious. Sociology and structuralism operate independent from any philosophical evaluation of the concept of art and from any critical judgment on taste. The former, similar to Marxism, utilizing art merely as an historical document, the latter elaborating linguistic analysis and constructing assumed empirical laws on language with a method which is similar to that of psychoanalysis. And in the end from an aesthetic point of view there is nothing to grasp. It is up to philosophy in general to establish the validity of such methods. The problem arises with those scholars who, in order to justify their historical-political approach feel that they need to deny the possibility of an aesthetics which identifies art as an autonomous expression of the life of man. But even those movements, whose theoretical weaknesses are rather obvious, after a few years of great popularity have lost their initial energy and seem to have left little if any signs within contemporary Italian culture. We are here interested in analyzing above all the position of those who have meant to criticize not so much philosophical aesthetics but a certain “idea” of philosophical aesthetics, to then come face to face with the same difficulties, albeit not in such evident manner, encountered by the empiricists. These various thinkers, by their own admission, do not deny the possibility of aesthetics, but they do deny the possibility that any aesthetic theory could present itself as absolute and definitive. In fact they do not deny that one can define art, but they do deny that such a definition could be valid once and for all for any artistic form. They conjecture that an aesthetics could be valid for a certain epoch, another could be valid for a definite group of artistic works, or that the duty of philosophers of aesthetics is exclusively that of searching for the relations which may eventually exist within what we could define the art-world in general: works of art, poetics, aesthetics, and so on. So let’s take a look via the analysis of a few excerpts from Luciano Anceschi who happens to be the most famous of the defenders of this line of thought, to grasp the very essence of this position and the aporias which exist in it. For our author, the protests which some artists and some philosophers carry out against philosophical aesthetics are justified because they move against essentialist aesthetics, which are supposedly responsible for a certain kind of oppression of art’s freedom in as much as they assume a “pragmatic turn” which ends

Ovi Symposium II 171 up imposing laws and rules to the spontaneous creativity of artists. These protests, according to Anceschi, would lose their justification if they turned to a new and correct mode of conceiving philosophical aesthetics. Poetics as well as essentialist aesthetics, even if with different emphasis and different intentions, tend to give a definitive and absolute answer to the question: “What is art?” An essentialist answer cannot satisfy the concrete and varied artistic experience. How can we possibly arrive at a philosophical that even if it remains such does not appear with the character of definiteness and devoid of pragmatic turns? Anceschi’s answer is that it is possible by utilizing the notions of integration and of the horizon of understanding which are like the skeleton of the phenomenological world as outlined in Banfi’s interpretation and that of his school. In a page where Anceschi proposed his own solution (found in his essay titled For a philosophical aesthetics of art) we read this: “So the fundamental question ‘What is art?’ can in the end be translated in this other question which excludes all essentialist answers: ‘According to what law can the life of art (works, precepts, ideals) be coordinated so that in being understood it does not undergo reductions of any kind? So to the question what we need to substitute the question how; and this is the phenomenological as we have understood it in this discussion… In any case, the fundamental sense of the problem remains this: that all the horizons of choice (be they partial or dogmatic) aspire, by their own internal tensions, to an integration within a horizon of understanding that connects them, places them in relation with each other, and can capture the general and common sense. Therefore the method will not be so much that of a system which means structures as much as that of the system which signifies itself through the structures.” Therefore Anceschi wishes to identify within the vast field of art (art works, precepts, aesthetics, etc.) laws of integration, which is to say, common moments that pertain to those varied experiences, common moments even in a dialectic sense as could be the opposition autonomy-heteronomy of art. Obviously the exigencies of Anceschi must be fully accepted, were it not that his methodological set-up reveals certain aporias at the end of it all. Surely one can accept the attempt of preventing that the research on a work of art put limits on the concrete living of an artistic creation. But how can we find interrelations and common moments without having a pre-comprehension, so to speak, of what needs to be placed in relation? Is it possible to assert that there are objectively speaking some relations without there being also a subjective element which postulates and gathers them?

Luciano Anceschi (1911-1995) In conclusion we could say that the how always presupposes the what. Which criterion should we adopt in choosing various practical and theoretical phenomena which we must then insert in our horizon of comprehension or integrative law? The risk, in reality inevitable, is that of falling in empiricism once again and through it into skepticism. We can then accept as artistic creation any foolishness that jumps to mind to any group of literati or painters. Will we have to accept within one’s horizon any lucubration that arises in the

172 Ovi Symposium II mind of beginners immature philosophers? Or should accept with a spirit less Cartesian and too historicist, everything that the authority of humanity hands on to us as art as philosophy of art? Those questions arise spontaneously, just as the discomfort of Anceschi for those essentialist aesthetics is also comprehensible, for within the history of art they often have limited or have been a stumbling block to the life of art and its expression. But to go back to the essence of the Anceschi proposals, to be able to describe the various connections which may cross them, and that surely cross the various artistic movements among the various theories of art, it is necessary to have a notion of what is art. All other attempts are destined to failure and lately we have had the empirical proof (which in reality means historical proof) of what we are talking about. In fact, the dissemination of problematic similar to those raised by Anceschi and a superficial application of certain philosophical theories, have given birth in the artistic field to effects that are astonishing and which must be taken in consideration in the development of our discussion. We notice a poorly understood anti-dogmatic and anti-definitional spirit, the turning into a myth of the so called open system, the trivialization of certain aesthetic theories, which have undoubtedly contributed to aberrations such as that of the Venice Biannual Art Show where a mentally challenged man has been presented as a work of art. But to return to our problem, we could ask, without irony or utilitarianism, what would be the usefulness of such a way of proceeding? Aside from giving us a very useful description on the historical level, as in fact Anceschi descriptions of single authors or group of authors or the various artistic movements or the various theories of art, are; what else can we use of such a method? Here, to say it with the same Anceschi we need to decide in regard to philosophy. Philosophy arises from life and returns to life as one of its indispensable moments. And if we reflect about this, here we are with Anceschi discussing a thematic which the same authors has placed on the table: the implicit pragmatic turn of which the so called essentialist aesthetic theories are imbued with. Now, if this turn is implicit as the same Anceschi holds, and if it differentiates itself from the gathering of precepts in the sense, to say it with Croce, it orientates without determining, it is integral part of philosophy. It is not possible to operate a critique, a choice without a criterion and a definition. Even those who proclaim that they do not possess them, has them nevertheless and probably in a confused mode. If Anceschi had not considered valid the criterion of having to conduct an integrative research project on various poetics, on the aesthetics and so on, would he have operated in that sense? If many artists had not been convinced of the criterion that there is no criterion to define art, would they have operated, for better or for worst, the way they have operated? End of Part I (part two will be published in the next session)

Ovi Symposium II 173 5 By Way of a Dialogue with Paolozzi on his Presentation:

The Concluding Chapter from Paparella’s Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers: “The Nature of Art as a Problematic of Aesthetics”

Ovi e-book: Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers

Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom An Ovi e-book by Ernesto Paolozzi (2013) Introductory Note: In response to Paolozzi’s brilliant presentation on the definition of Art as a problematic of aesthetics, a theme he has been exploring all along within Crocean aesthetics in the symposium and in his Ovi e-book on Croce (Benedetto Croce: the Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom), and particularly in regard to the conundrum mentioned at the very end of his presentation (the paradox of establishing a criterion that proclaims that there are no criteria to define what art is), and by way of an ongoing dialogue within the symposium, I’d like to place on the table once more the concluding chapter of my Ovi e-book on Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers. The chapter dovetails Paolozzi’s presentation in as much as it attempts to show that the problem of the definition of art is a problem that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle and remains an ongoing one. If anything it has only become more acute in contemporary times with the apparent rejection of Beauty as integral part of any concept of art.

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Plato (427-347 BC) who began the reflections on the philosophy of art By now the reader who has followed the sundry views and definitions of art by various philosophers and art experts as here presented is perhaps more aware of the eclectic, head-spinning nature of those views and may be wondering which are their guiding threads. As already pointed out, those postings are basically slightly revised classroom lectures on a course on aesthetics which I teach regularly at Barry University in Miami. I decided to take advantage of one of the technological wonders of our times (the on-line course) and share them with others. Perhaps it is now time to spell out some of those threads as a guide the reader and/or student. The first introductory item I usually place on the class discussion table is the indisputable historical fact that, beginning with Plato, and for more than two millennia, there has been in the West a dialectical philosophical dialogue on the nature of art. The dialogue is indeed spirited and ongoing. It begins with Plato’s discussion of the forms but continues with the implications of the digital revolution, as we have already amply seen. The simple all encompassing question “What is the nature and the definition of Art” is accompanied throughout history by corollary questions such as: “Is art synonymous with beauty or does it encompass the ugly and the abhorrent also?” or “Is a literal definition even possible?” or “What makes something a work of art?” or “Do the artist’s intentions make it art?” or “Does the so called artworld make it art?” or “Are judgments about Art objective or are they simply a matter of taste?” or “Is one artistic or aesthetic judgment as good as another?” or closer to our times, this thorny question: “Is contemporary art still art or is it a mere instrument of ideological provocation and propaganda?” Some of those questions are in conflict with each other because they derive from different assumptions. Moreover, the range of those questions is philosophically wide and deep and first rate Western philosophers have tried their mettle and attempted to answer them. Just to mention a few whose point of view we have already briefly explored in Ovi: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud, Collingwood, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Weitz, Goodman, Danto, Dickie, Beardsley, Walton, Barthes, Piper, Derrida, Korsmeyer, Bordieu, Jegede, Appiah, Davis, they have all taken up the challenge of defining (or perhaps refusing to define) art. The dialogue and debate are far from over, although to their credit it can safely be said that rarely have they spilled over into the personal, for indeed to characterize an argumentum ad hominem as philosophy is nothing less than an oxymoron. The debate, at least at that level of intellectual competency, has always been enlightening and inspiring and much can be learned from it as long as we keep an open mind.

Ovi Symposium II 175 Let us first take a brief look at some of those conflicting views. The assertion that the intention of the artist is a crucial element in determining that something is a work of art stands in conflict with the assertion that it is the artworld that determines who is an artist in the first place, and what is a work of art. Indeed, this authoritative and institutional approach of the art-world seems to be more inclusive than its rival theories since it includes the viewers who also determine how the work is received; it does not depend on mere qualities intrinsic to the work. Also, the assertion that judgments about works of art are simply a matter of taste (Hume) stands in conflict with the assertion that those judgments are objective and based on universal reason (Kant). The case of Impressionism, as indeed all great schools of painting, would suggest that judgments about art cannot be a mere matter of individual taste or preference, in the eye of the beholder as the saying goes, especially if that eye is defective and cannot distinguish colors. Not many would agree today with the viewers who in 1880 claimed, erroneously by hindsight, that a Monet landscape was poorly executed and therefore not a genuine work of art. The assertion that one aesthetic judgment is as good as any other stands in conflict with the assertion that some individuals are much better qualified than others to make judgments about art. It is worth mentioning here that the term “aesthetics,” since the times of Immanuel Kant, who coined it in the 18th century, has been used as synonymous for “philosophy of art.” It derives from the Greek word aisthanesthai which means to perceive; practically synonymous with “sensory.” This indicates that philosophers of that time saw our experience of beauty, be it natural or artistic, as primarily a sensory matter. Since then aesthetics has become the accepted characterization of the philosophical study of art. Later, Hegel restricted it to artistic works made by man, thus eliminating natural beauty, also, for Hegel, aesthetics is no longer exclusively concerned with beauty per se. That of course begs the question: what exactly are aesthetic properties? That is an important consideration since philosophers such as Heidegger, Danto and Goodman, as we have already considered, all agree that art objects have properties that are not present in other things, albeit they don’t all agree as to what those properties are. Which begs the question: don’t we need to agree first that something is a work of art before we attribute such artistic properties to it, or can we attribute those properties to anything at all as long as we choose to view it as art? If I am able to admire the simplicity of my computer’s keyboard, does that make it a work of art independent of its utility as a means of communication? In other words, which is the cart and which is the horse here? And that brings us to the most thorny issue of all: Is contemporary art still art? Its critics have called it “the rule of surprise novelty and provocation,” having little to do with genuine art. It would be enough to read the fierce controversies in newspapers over public funding of art, to realize why some hostile critics believe that Mapplethorpe’s confrontational photography, Karen Finley performance art, or Nigerian painter Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary, seem to them to have lost touch with the values realized in earlier art. Heidegger for one, as we have also seen, in his The Origin of the Work of Art reveals an aspiration that art should return to what he considers its authentic mission: the revelation of the historical world that

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Aristotle (384-322) author of The Poetics the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory produced it. On the other hand there are other philosophers, such as Danto, Piper, Korsmeyer, who challenge the very idea of art with a mission and see in contemporary art possibilities for novel expression. So, the dialogue goes on and it is good that it does. It would appear that art is integral part of man’s historical journey and consequently it changes as the journey takes different routes and the destination of that journey becomes clearer. After all, the jury on the whole of man’s history is still out and so is the jury on the whole of man’s artistic production through time and space.

Arthur Danto (1924-2013) Having explored some of the conflicting views of art and its definition, we are left with this challenge: How are we to understand art? How are we to interpret the great success of a contemporary play such as Art by Yasmina Reza which raises those very questions? Could it be that ordinary people are just as concerned with the issue as the enlightened intelligentsia? Of course painting and the visual arts in general remain paradigmatic of the quintessential art form. Schopenhauer would not agree, he thought music had that role, but he is the exception not the rule. Yet, the privileging of an art form over another could also be seen as a bias affecting the general applicability of any theory of art presented.

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) If we survey the various philosophers mentioned above we will discover that it is possible to reduce their answers to the question What is the nature of art? to three basic groups: the first group, the most prevalent to be sure, do attempt a definition of art. This is the approach taken by the first philosopher to be interested in art, Plato, who defines it as imitation. This search for a clear definition continues throughout the centuries, even among those who rejected Plato’s definition. Especially with the advent of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, a style influenced by mathematical logic, the project seems to have become of specifying necessary conditions for the application of the concept “art.” It is felt by these philosophers that for the term to be meaningful, there must be criteria by which to tell what is and what is not a work of art. In surveying and assessing the validity of those definitions of art one has to keep well in mind the distinction between what is classificatory and the evaluative sense of the term “art.” Most attempts are classificatory, that is to say, they try to distinguish what is art from what is not. For example, the imitation theory of Plato proposes that only those things that are imitations of “the real world” are works of art. A white canvas on a wall would be excluded from the class of artwork for it imitates nothing.

Sometimes art is not used in this descriptive way, but rather in an evaluating manner, as when we judge that the white canvas on a wall is not art because it isn’t something a knowledgeable art lover should take very seriously, which of course leaves no room for judging a second rate or inferior work of art. Let us take one purported definition, that of art as a communication of emotion between the creator and the audience. Any object, be it a painting, a poem, a symphony, would fail to be art if it failed to achieve that kind of communication. Here too, the possibility of art being done badly is precluded, but in philosophy too the possibility of doing bad philosophy remains open for philosophy to remain philosophy. The tendency is to think about art objects in abstraction from anything else, as analytical philosophy tends to do, but even a white canvas can be art only because it is situated in a complex set of relationships. Other elements include the artist as creator of the work as well as the audience experiencing it, plus the conventions governing the art form and art as a whole, modes of artistic training, etc. Here philosophers differ as to which elements are crucial. As we have seen, some, such as Collingwood, focus on the artist even excluding the work itself. Even more counter-intuitively the French literary theorist Roland Barthes thinks of the audience as the real site of artistic meaning. Others, such as Martin Heidegger, view the whole complex of relationships as crucial. So when one wishes to define the nature of art, one must decide for oneself which relationship is most important or you must conclude with Heidegger that the whole should be the object of the definition rather than any of its aspects.

178 Ovi Symposium II The second approach to the central question of the philosophy of art, what makes something a work of art?, is skepticism about the very possibility of a definition. This is how the skeptic argues: art is itself a phenomenon which by its very nature defeats all attempts to define it. Given that originality is a central value, at least in contemporary art, the artist (be he a painter, or composer, or writer) is constantly trying to break the boundaries of what is considered art. Certainly Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain did so. Duchamp took a mass produced urinal, signed it with the name “R. Mutt,” gave it the title Fountain, and then submitted it for exhi- bition. Now, if the mere act of naming, signing, and displaying a mass-produced urinal could result in a work of art, how can we specify in advance what sorts of things can be so defined? After all, isn’t art precisely the sort of phenomenon that breaks conventions and challenges the previous convictions about what are is? And if that is so, doesn’t its very nature dictate the impossibility of definition? These doubts about the possibility to define art were raised in the later part of the 20th century. Within the British analytic tradition we have Morris Weitz which we have also explored; while within the continental European tradition we have Jacques Derrida. To be sure, while they have radically different conceptions of what is the function of philosophy, they nevertheless agree that the philosophical tradition was mistaken in assuming that the appropriate goal for the philosophy of art was defining art’s nature. They both, in their own way, see art as defying the theorist’s ability to conceptualize it.

Morris Weitz (1916-1981) This approach to the definition of art is an instance of the broader strategy of anti-essentialism, a philosophic position going all the way back to Aristotle proposing that a variety of different particulars can all be referred to by the same word, or fall under the same concept—only if there is a common essence or nature that they all share. For example, the reason each of us can be called a person is that there is an essence to personhood which we all possess. Entities lacking the essence, such as stones and sticks are not persons. While sometimes the boundary may not be very clear (computers with rational properties, or extra intelligent animals like dolphins, for example), most of the times it is possible to distinguish between things that do and things that do not possess this essence. This will to define art’s nature is an instance of essentialism. It assumes that art has an essence that can be identified theoretically. Finding this essence allows us to determine whether any given object is or is not art. But it is exactly this essentialism that has come under fire in the 20th century. What is at issue is the adequacy of the Aristotelian account of how our conceptual schemes, or our language, work. It is no longer taken as logical that recourse to essences is necessary to explain our ability to refer to a class of objects by a common term. The bases of the traditional account of essences has been exposed as inadequate. For example, the Aristotelian adage that man is a rational animal, privileges rationality which according to

Ovi Symposium II 179 the same Aristotle men possess in abundance and women conspicuously lack, while ignoring imagination, intuition, emotions, characteristics in which women excel. In other words, this search for essences may hide unacknowledged political agendas which identify certain characteristics as essential to a given type, and stigmatize other characteristics as defects. Descartes did something like that with his debunking of fairy tales and literary works of imagination which he considered suitable for children but not worthy of people with a full fledged rationality, a rationality robbed or intuition, imagination and feelings. The 19th century partially corrected that blind spot with Rousseau’s famous slogan “I feel, therefore I am,” but Vico had already pointed out the fallacy in the previous century (1730) in his magnum opus The New Science. In a similar way, when it comes to defining art, attempts at a definition have been used both to legitimize certain types of art and denigrate others. For example, Clive Bell’s “significant form” champions post-impressionist painting and excludes the naturalistic world. African artists such as Jegede and Appiah whom we have also examined, point out the bias of Eurocentric art based on abstract principles of universality against Afrocentric art based on the particularity of individual cultures. The issue is far from resolved. In the absence of necessary and sufficient conditions which the essentialist project privileges, how should we understand the functioning of general terms such as “art”? If anything and everything can be art, then logically, nothing is art.

Clive Bell (1881-1964) The third approach to a definition of art is the contextual approach as championed by the thought of Hegel. He treated art as a form of philosophical, and ultimately timeless, truth, but he also characterizes it as a series of stages of development realized in different historically and culturally specific contexts. Vico had already postulated three cyclical developments of history (corsi and ricorsi: a spiral moving forward toward an ultimate telos or goal) in the 18th century, but he was largely ignored. Subsequent philosophers, although not as confident as Hegel in the ultimate progression of art toward Truth (a sort of inevitable progress or manifest destiny), nevertheless took from him the idea that the nature of art could be understood properly only as expression of those contexts. Rather than trying to develop a single abstract definition of art these modern theorists (such as Walter Benjamin, Douglas Davis) have focused on art’s changing social role; they don’t treat art as a unitary phenomenon, but, without dismissing the possibility of a definition, they emphasize the socially conditioned transformations in its nature.

180 Ovi Symposium II Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) There are various reasons why these philosophers, many of them influenced by Karl Marx’s philosophy, are not interested in defining art. They think that those definitions are too abstract and arrive at too high a level of generality. As far as they are concerned, it is more important to understand the actual or concrete functioning of art in particular historical and social contexts than it is to devise a definition that will apply to all contexts. They are suspicious of the universalizing totalizing tendencies of Western philosophy. They follow Marx’s claims about the nature of society and operate within a framework that treats economic and material issues as basic. For them all that is generally called “culture,” including art, is part of the superstructure. They are convinced that the developments of the material base are decisive in the understanding cultural changes in the superstructure. Consequently, to understand art it is important to take note of the changes in the general material structure of society. For example, fundamental changes in the social organization of production and exchange associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie, is as important as understanding changes in the mode of artistic production.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Ovi Symposium II 181 As Marx quips in the first volume of Das Kapital, to illustrate this point, Don Quixote suffered for not realiz- ing that knight errantry was incompatible with all economic structures; this explains why photographically reproduced art and the development of computer-related graphics’ technology interest these philosophers. Indeed, from their point of view, the very nature of art is fundamentally altered by such material or technological developments. With the development of technologies of reproductions—first the photograph and the copying machine, now the computer, it appears that art objects, or at least replicas of them can be endlessly disseminated. Instead of having to travel to Paris to see the Mona Lisa, we can now call up and infinite number of images of the original while sitting at my terminal. We can even “enhance” those images at our heart’s content. Indeed, for all those theorists that operate in this third paradigm, the focus now shifts to this crucial question “How do such developments in the mode of artistic production and dissemination affect art’s very being?” There is wide agreement that these developments are important and decisive, not so on the nature of their effects.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) Another fundamental issue for those theorists within the third paradigm is the role that art plays in society. There is a general consensus for the view, which dates back to Kant, that art as requiring our disinterested contemplation, that is to say, an awareness untainted by specific interests, desires, or concerns is simply inadequate to the understanding of the function of art. The question, then shifts to art’s relation to social structures, be they economic, gender, racial or sexual. On the one hand, the arts are often seen as challenging prevailing social norms. The artist is conceived as a rebel who stands apart from society to condemn it. Think of Manet’s Lunch on the grass. Here art celebrates the potential of the human species and condemns society for suppressing it. As Habermas has aptly put it: “Art satisfies an emancipatory interest, the desire to be free of unnecessary and oppressive social constraints.” But on the other hand, it is hard to ignore the role that some art, especially popular art, plays in society. Adorno’s phrase “the Culture Industry” indicates how art has been assimilated into the same structures that dominate the production of material goods. We can all recall films that more than genuine works of art, are cultural products that serve to strengthen or solidify the status quo and potentially oppressive social relationships. They may be executed artistically and be aesthetically pleasing, but they are also propaganda. “Triumph of the Will” is a case in point. Philosophers concerned with those social functions of art will continue to ask whether the arts in our time function to challenge or support these relationships. They will undoubtedly continue to investigate how changes in the production and dissemination of artworks affect their meaning.

182 Ovi Symposium II Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) The above begs this question: Has art’s cultural authority been undermined by technological and social development? How does art function to support the dominant social order? Has the culture industry succeeded in bypassing and even cashing in on gestures of artistic transgression? Or does art continue to play a socially and culturally subversive role? Philosophers have puzzled over art as long as philosophy has existed. The development of the arts of the 20th century, especially in painting, have only deepened the puzzlement. Originally, it seemed evident that art generally strove to accurately represent what it depicted. That theory was left behind once in the late 19th century and 20th century of schools of painting that eschewed accuracy of representation. It is enough to think of post-impressionist painters such as Van Gogh and Munch whose paintings seem more concerned with depicting the artist’s anguish than representing anything. With the advent of abstract and conceptual art, all the traditional approaches to understanding art were discarded. These historical development explain why the 20th century has provided such rich and lively discussions in the philosophy of art. As Collingwood points out, art as we understand it was not distinguished from its earlier meaning of an activity requiring specialized skills. Hence, not until the 19th century did the philosophy of art come into its own as a distinct philosophic discipline. But even 19th century reflections on art do not reveal the intensity of puzzlement and perplexity that clearly marks 20th century discussions. The artwork displayed in museums of contemporary art bear only a faint resemblance to the works in museums dedicated to the art of earlier ages. To return to the play Art, mentioned above the three protagonists of that play almost dissolve their friendship because of a deep disagreement over the nature of art. Indeed, the French take their artistic allegiances very seriously. Most of us do not go that far, nevertheless we do share the same perplexities and anxieties about contemporary works of art. Not for nothing our post-modern world has been called “the age of anxiety.” The ongoing dialogue among philosophers on the nature of art may not put to rest those perplexities and anxieties of ours but it may help us in two ways: not to reinvent the wheel, and to better understand the arts’ troubling presence in our contemporary world, for without true understanding no true judgment is possible either.

Ovi Symposium II 183 6 A Comment by Paolozzi on Paparella’s previous presentation on “Heidegger and Habermas” Paparella’s acute reflections on Heidegger’s philosophy and its nexus with his acceptance of Nazism, require a further clarification and a new speculative commitment. I too, like Paparella have returned to reflect on the work of the German philosopher after the writing on art and technology which I published many years ago. I too am of the opinion that Heidegger’s thought is much less original than supposed by an academic fashion in vogue in the last twenty years or so and by now pretty much exhausted. In his aesthetics he reminds us, as I have attempted to demonstrate, positions already well known: not only those of Croce, but even those of Vico and so many other authors in the past. However, within the context of the attempt to overcome a certain barbarism provoked by positivistic aesthetics, Heidegger came across as a great ally. This is the sense of my essay, not by chance placed in the framework of a research on positivism and anti-positivism. For example, today Chomsky sustains that within philosophy, as within culture in general, everything is resolvable in language understood as expression. I am pleased that the popular linguist affirms what to me appears as a truth. It matters little that Croce had already shown it in 1900, beginning with the very title of his first important work: Aesthetics as science of expression and general linguistics. As mentioned, it matters little even if it is our duty to remember it. I also find myself in agreement with Paparella on the issue of the shameful acceptance of Nazism on the part of the German philosopher, toward which we have all been a bit too forgiving. But beyond the political commitment, there remains a deep philosophical problem, as Habermas seems to remind us, and on which Paparella re-opens the discussion. Raffaello Franchini, a great philosopher, but unfortunately not well known, even after having examined impartially Heidegger’s work stressing its historical turn of the later phase would observe with logical rigor that Heidegger’s philosophy being a deterministic philosophy, “destined” so to speak, cannot admit freedom. Not admitting freedom it ultimately can be characterized as a philosophy of moral indifference. That would explain why, beyond personal opportunism, a substantial, tragic coherence exists between philosophical speculation and political praxis. But in this context, Heidegger’s metaphysics of Being is an old one, and it too is not so original. It is substantially false, given that the destiny of Being does not exist until after the facts have happened. First there is the freedom of our thought and of our will; a thought and a will that in our judgment determine being but only after it has “become destiny.” It is ours and therefore free, conditioned and free at the same time as anybody who has absorbed dialectical thought well understand; as that kind of thought which can be and not be, that can be liberty as well ad determinism which can only exist and be understood in the nexus with each other. The concept of Providence (and here Paparella can enlighten us) cannot be confused with that of destiny. Christian providence admits freedom, in its own way. In God’s grand design man is created free, responsible for his own actions. That explains why Croce, in an essay of 1934 published in the journal Critica eulogized the theologian Karl Barth who opposed Nazism while Heidegger was enunciating his academic inaugural lecture as rector of the University of Freiburg which consisted of nothing less than a substantial adhesion to Nazism, in the process dishonoring philosophy.

184 Ovi Symposium II A Response by Paparella Thank you Ernesto for those lucid comments and observations which are quite helpful in further clarifying my own thoughts and views on this thorny subject of Heidegger’s theory divorced from his praxis. They indeed dovetail the severe comments of Croce on Heidegger in his letter to Karl Vossler of 1933 where he frankly speaks not only of dishonoring, but of prostituting philosophy. I love what you write in your presentation above about philosophy: “philosophy arises from life and returns to life as one of its indispensable moments,” meaning, if I understand that acute comment correctly, that philosophy is and must remain an existential concern not separable from life, and in turn for life to be rational and human it needs to concern itself not only with the realm of the intelligible and the rational but with its imaginative, intuitional, ethical dimensions, to determine how we, as human beings, ought to conduct ourselves in the polis. I only wish that I had been offered those same wise illuminating elucidations when I was first exposed to Heidegger’s philosophy at St. Francis College (a Catholic College) in the mid 60s when I dared, perhaps imprudently, propose the conundrum theory/praxis to the seminar’s professor. Unfortunately the answers I was given then came close to an evasion of the issue and even some pique (expressed in the poor grade administered) at the fact that a mere student had mustered the gumption to challenge the professor’s position on Heidegger’s stance vis a vis Nazism. For those who have lived most of their lives within the august halls of academia, there are indeed no great surprises here, but then, were we ourselves to give a seminar on Heidegger nowadays we certainly would not hold the same misguided view as that professor at an American Catholic College in the 60s who, perhaps under the then pervading influence of Straussianism, thought that we can validly separate theory from praxis, life from thought in Heidegger’s philosophy, when in point of fact Vico and Croce have well taught us that while man makes history, equally true is that history makes man and eventually history renders its inexorable verdict on man’s ethical stance vis a vis his times and the moral law.

Ovi Symposium II 185 Chapter 19 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” Nineteenth Meeting: 13 February 2014

Table of Content for the 19th Session of the Ovi Symposium Main Sub-theme: “The Arts’ Genres within Modern Aesthetics” Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance in this session): Nietzsche, Gross, Levitt, Snow, Pound, Yeats, Lewis, Heidegger, Leavis, Shakespeare, Trilling, Brockman, Obama, Aristotle, Copernicus, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Kant, Orwell, Kierkegaard, Ar- nold, Huxley, Eliot, Gramsci, Anceschi, Vico, Kant, De Sanctis, Croce, Della Volpe, Banfi, Formaggio, Manzoni, De Saussurre, Vossler, Spitzer, D’Annunzio, Assunto, Vattimo, Trione, Stella, Fanizza, Ragghanti, Zevi, Russo, Fubi- ni, De Mauro, Gentile, De Ruggero, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, Popper, Cavacchioli, Marinetti, Marinari, D’Amico, Chiarelli, Antonelli, San Secondo, Freud, Pirandello, Cantoni-Gilbertini, Sartre, Schumann, Craig, Mitschke, Ricci, Goddard, Esslin, Bruno, Tilgher, Angelini, Tessari, Goddard, Abis. Section 1: “The Problem of the Two Cultures and how to Bridge them: a Revisiting.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Section 2: “Aporias of Italian aesthetics after Croce: Autonomy and Universality of Art: the Arts and their genres.” Second concluding part of a presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica. Section 3: “Enrico Cavacchioli and the Meta-theater.” A presentation by Michael Vena by way of an essay from his book Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century (2013). Section 4: A response by Paparella to Vena’s presentation on Enrico Cavacchioli. Section 5: A warm welcome from the Ovi Symposium’s team to Dr. Alessandra Abis as a new member.

186 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Note by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel Paparella In this 19th session of the Ovi symposium we continue the general exploration of the issue of aesthetics within modernity or in a more focused mode the previously introduced problematic of the two cultures (i.e., the scientific and the liberal arts cultures) and how to bridge them. In section one Paparella announces the issue of aesthetics vis a vis science and modernity by revisiting the problem of the two cultures which goes back to the 19th century’s debates between T.H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold: the former defending scientism and positivism and the latter defending the Liberal Arts and Humanities, then resurrected by C. P. Snow in mid-twentieth century in his by now famous book The Two Cultures. Ultimately, the question that the symposium as a whole is grappling with is this: is a new humanism necessary and possible within modernity? In section two Paolozzi continues his presentation on aesthetics in post war Italy after Croce’s aesthetic grappling with the issue of the universality and the autonomy of the various artistic genres. He asserts that indeed Croce’s aesthetics is more relevant than ever in our confused and confusing modern and post-modern era. He does this by re-tracing the roots and the origins of several modern trends in the philosophy of aesthetics. In section three Vena puts together a portrait of one of the modern Italian playwrights, Enrico Cavacchioli, whose aesthetics he has examined and analyzed in his book Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century (2013), via an essay titled “Enrico Cavacchioli and Meta-theater.” After a previous general introduction, this time around, he presents to us a very interesting Sicilian playwright, a contemporary of the fellow Sicilian and Nobel winner Pirandello. Unlike Pirandello Cavacchioli is not well known outside of Italy but as Vena shows us, he certainly deserves to be better understood and appreciated. What is very interesting in Vena’s presentation is his underlying assumption that the theater functions as the bridge between lofty abstract theories of aesthetics and quotidian practical daily life; a powerful idea this already present in Aristotle’s Poetics and to a certain extent in Boccaccio’s Decameron: that is to say, the idea of the story within a story, of life as a frame for art and vice versa so that at times life ends up imitating art as in that great filmIl Postino ending with the death of both its protagonist (Mario Ruoppolo) and its interpreter (Massimo Troisi). In section four Paparella comments on Vena’s interesting presentation on Enrico Cavacchioli. Finally in section five the symposium announces and welcomes a new member to its team: Dr. Alessandra Abis, an expert in ancient Greek-Latin theater and Commedia dell’Arte who has performed in various Greek, Latin and Italian plays. She will be contributing her expertise in these fields of theater to the Ovi symposium. We are happy to have her considerable talent and commitment to our program and welcome her on board looking forward to a productive and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Ovi Symposium II 187 1 The Problem of the Two Cultures: How to Bridge them—A Revisiting

A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

It is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling it. Science is totally dependent upon philosophical opinions for all of its goals and methods, though it easily forgets it. --Friedrich Nietzsche If one peruses the history of philosophy in the West, it will not take very long before one realizes that there is from its beginnings an irrationalism that regularly manifests itself in anti-scientific biases of one sort or another. Certain varieties of 19th century romanticism fit here. One discerns it immediately in the writings of Nietzsche, perhaps the best known philosopher to first point out the Dionysian and the Apollonian in ancient Greek culture. There is nowadays a widespread suspicion of the achievements of science coming close to an outright rejection of the idea of factual truth. This applies to academic circles too; to radical movements and “theories” such as cultural constructivism, deconstruction, radical feminism, and various other politically correct anti-empirical ists and isms. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt have already ably analyzed this thorny issue in their book in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. They show that this new hostility to science is part of a more general hostility to Western values and institutions, an anti-Enlightenment hostility that “mocks the idea that … a civilization is capable of progressing from ignorance to insight.”

And then of course there is The Two Cultures of C.P. Snow. Few literary phrases have had as enduring an afterlife as “the two cultures,” (1959) coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. More than 50 years ago Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

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The deeper point of “The Two Cultures” is not that we have two cultures, that is quite obvious. It is that science, above all, will keep us prosperous and secure; culture is merely frosting on the cake. Scientists, he argues, are morally “the soundest group of intellectuals we have,” while literary ethics remain suspect. Liter- ary culture has “temporary periods” of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the fascist proclivities of Pound and Yeats and Wyndham Lewis and Heidegger, and asks, “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?” Obviously, the table is being turned around here. Snow’s essay provoked an ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis — who called Snow “intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be” — and a more measured one from Lionel Trill- ing, who nonetheless thought Snow had produced “a book which is mistaken in a very large way indeed.” Snow’s cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the “possibility of rational discourse.” For the past two decades, John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their generation.” So why did Snow think the supposed gulf between the two cultures was such a problem? Be- cause, he argues in the latter half of his essay, it leads many capable minds to ignore science as a vocation, which prevents us from solving the world’s “main issue,” the wealth gap caused by industrialization, which threatens global stability.

Some of this sounds familiar; for decades we have regarded science as crucial to global competitiveness, an idea invoked as recently as in Barack Obama’s second presidential campaign. But in other ways “The Two Cultures” remains irretrievably a cold war document. This is, I think, why Snow’s diagnosis remains popular while his remedy is ignored. We have spent recent decades convincing ourselves that technological

Ovi Symposium II 189 progress occurs in unpredictable entrepreneurial floods, allowing us to surf the waves of creative destruction. Yet “The Two Cultures” actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world — for the better, and it will happen naturally, without human guiding hand. The Industrial Revolution, he writes, occurred “without anyone,” including intellectuals, “noticing what was happening.” But at the same time, he argues that 20th-century progress was being stymied by the indifference of poets and novelists. That’s why he wrote “The Two Cultures.”

C.P. Snow (1905-1980) and his mimesis F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) Leavis was at the time the most creative and influential literary critic since MatthewArnold This question is the aspect of The Two Cultures that speaks most directly to us today. Your answer — and many different ones are possible — probably determines how widely and deeply you think we need to spread scientific knowledge. Do we need to produce more scientists and engineers to fight climate change? How should they be deployed? Do we need broader public understanding of the issue to support governmental action? Or do we need something else? The Two Cultures initially asserts the moral distinctiveness of scientists, but ends with a plea for enlisting science to halt the spread of Communism. In this sense it is a Cold War document. Nevertheless some scholars have pointed out that contrasting scientific and humanistic knowledge is a repetition of the Methodenstreit of 1890 German universities. In the social sciences it is also commonly proposed as the quarrel of positivism versus interpretivism. Snow takes the philosophical position of scientism in conflating the complex fields of knowledge of the humanities. As soon as it appeared, the brief work became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1961, the book was already in its seventh printing. I personally read it while I was in college in 1965. Its fame got an addi- tional boost in 1962 when the critic F. R. Leavis published his attack on The Two Cultures in The Spectator. Leavis derided what he considered the “embarrassing vulgarity of style,” his “complete ignorance” of history, literature, the history of civilization, and the human significance of the Industrial Revolution. He can’t be said to know what a novel is, so continues Leavis, he is “utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.” The extreme reaction was partly a response to Snow’s own extremity. But the questions raised by The Two Cultures—and by Leavis’ criticisms remain. There is little doubt that since Galileo and beyond the gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals has grown wider as science has become ever more specialized and complex and seems unbridgeable. The more pressing issue concerns the fate of culture in a world increasingly determined by science and technology. Leavis described C. P. Snow as a “portent” revealing modern society’s tendency to trivialize culture by reducing it to a form of diversion or entertainment. For him, it was not surprising that The Two Cultures so captured the public imagination: it did so precisely because it pandered to the debased notion of culture championed by established taste. As we look around it is hard

190 Ovi Symposium II not to notice a civilization and its culture bent on cultural suicide: the triumph of pop culture, the glorification of mindless sensationalism, the attack on the very idea of permanent cultural achievement—in the West. All this in tandem with unprecedented material wealth and profound cultural and intellectual degradation. C. P. Snow may be the canary in the mine. He is a symptom of something deeply troubling. The tone of The Two Cultures is intriguing in itself. It swings between the anecdotal and the apocalyptic. In some “afterthoughts” on the two-cultures controversy that he published in Encounter in 1960, Snow refers to his lecture as a “call to action.” But what is the problem? And what actions does Snow recommend given the gulf of mutual incomprehension of which he talks? On one page the problem is reforming the schools so that “English and American children get a reasonable education.” A bit later the problem is mobilizing Western resources to industrialize India, Africa and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and the Middle East, in order to forestall widespread starvation, revolution, and anarchy. The Soviet Union, as far as Snow is concerned. It all appears as a terrible muddle. It would be nice if “literary intellectuals” knew more science, the gulf as described by Snow seems unbridgeable. Snow uses “literary intellectual” interchangeably with “traditional culture.” This fusion yields the observation that there is “an unscientific,” even an “anti-scientific” flavor to “the whole ‘traditional’ culture.” What can this mean? Aristotle, Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Kant: are there any more “traditional” representatives of “the whole ‘traditional culture’”? At the beginning of his lecture, Snow affects a generous even-handedness in his attitude toward scientists and literary intellectuals. There’s a bit of criticism for both. But this show of even-handedness soon evap- orates. The “culture” of science, Snow tells us, “contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than the literary persons’ arguments.” Literary intellectuals are “natural Luddites”; scientists “have the future in their bones.” This is a formulation that Snow likes enough to repeat: “If the scientists have the future in their bones,” he writes, “then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” To clinch his argument that literary intellectuals (“the traditional culture”) “wish the future did not exist,” Snow holds up … George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four—as if that harrowing admonitory tale could have been written by anyone who did not have a passionate concern for the future! Snow is especially impatient with the politics of “the traditional culture.” He indicts “nine-tenths” of the great literary figures of the early twentieth century (1914–1950) as politically suspect. Scientists, too, appreciate the tragic nature of human life—that each of us “dies alone.” But they are wise enough to distinguish between the “individual condition and the social condition” of man. As Leavis notes, the second law of thermodynamics is a piece of specialized knowledge, useful or irrelevant depending on the job to be done; the works of Shakespeare provide a window into the soul of humanity: to read them is tantamount to acquiring self-knowledge. Snow seems oblivious to this distinction as are most professors selling capitalism and entrepreneurship nowadays. A similar confusion is at work in Snow’s effort to neutralize individuality by assimilating it to the project of “social hope.” But what is the “social hope” that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the inescapable tragic existential condition, the angst of choosing one’s destiny of each individual as pointed out by a Kierkegaard? Where, if not in individuals, is what is hoped for … to be located? This is for Leavis the central philistinism and, the deeply anti-cultural bias, of Snow’s position. For him, a society’s material standard of living provides the ultimate, really the only, criterion of “the good life”; science is the means of raising the standard of living, ergo science is the final arbiter of value. Culture— literary, artistic culture—is merely frosting on the cake. It provides us with no moral challenge or insight, because the only

Ovi Symposium II 191 serious questions are how to keep increasing and effectively distributing the world’s wealth, and these are not questions culture is competent to address. “The upshot” of Snow’s argument, Leavis writes, “is that if you insist on the need for any other kind of concern, entailing forethought, action and provision, about the human future—any other kind of misgiving—than that which talks in terms of productivity, material standards of living, hygienic and technological progress, then you are a Luddite.” The progress of science may be inexorable but Leavis is not prepared to accept that science represents a moral resource or that there is such a thing as a culture of science. Science may tells us how best to do things we have already decided to do, not why we should do them. Its province is the province of means not ends. That is its glory and its limitation. In this sense the statement by Albert Einstein makes perfect sense: our age is characterized by perfection of means and scarcity of goals. One word that is missing from Snow’s essay the editors of The Spectator note in an unsigned editorial, is “philosophy”—“that effort to impart moral direction that was found in the best nineteenth-century English writers.” Chief among them Matthew Arnold whose Rede lecture delivered in 1882—the same as Snow’s lecture, and titled “Literature and Science”—was itself a kind of “two cultures” argument. But his point was essentially the opposite of Snow’s. Written in response to T. H. Huxley’s insistence that literature should and inevitably would be supplanted by science, Arnold argued that, “so long as human nature is what it is,” culture would continue to provide mankind with its fulcrum of moral understanding.”

The Poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): a Champion of the Liberal Arts Arnold, like Leavis is concerned with “the cultural consequences of the technological revolution.” He too argues passionately against the trivialization of culture, against “a superficial humanism” that is “mainly decorative.” And both looked to culture to provide a way of relating the “results of modern science” to “our need for conduct, our need for beauty.” This is the crux: that culture is in some deep sense inseparable from conduct—from that unscientific but ineluctable question, “How should I live my life?” Leavis’ point was the same. It is exactly the upheavals precipitated by the march of science and technology that has rendered culture—the arts and humanities—both more precarious and more precious. So the preservation of culture as a guide to “conduct” is now more crucial than ever. For Arnold, if mankind was to confront the moral challenges of modern science “in full intelligent possession of its humanity” and maintain “a basic living def- erence towards that to which, opening as it does into the unknown and itself immeasurable, we know we belong,” then the realm of culture had to be protected from the reductive forces of a crude scientific rationalism.

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T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), friend of Charles Darwin whose scientific concerns were Physiology, Paleontology, Geology, and Natural History The temptation to reduce culture to a reservoir of titillating pastimes is all but irresistible nowadays. Rock music, “performance art,” television, video games (not to mention drugs, violence, and mindless sex): since Descartes we are everywhere encouraged to think of ourselves as complicated machines for consuming sensations—the more, and more exotic, the better. Culture is no longer an invitation to confront our humanity but a series of opportunities to impoverish it through diversion. We are, as Eliot put it in Four Quartets, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” C. P. Snow and his entrepreneurial cohorts represents the smil- ing, jovial face of this predicament. Critics like Arnold and Leavis offer us the beginnings of an alternative. Let those who have ears, let them hear.

Ovi Symposium II 193 2 Aporias of Italian Aesthetics after Croce: Autonomy and Universality of Art: the Arts and their genres—Part two A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi

Having cleared this fundamental and preliminary point, we need to point out that beyond a general critique against philosophic aesthetics, all the concepts of modern aesthetics, which had laboriously arrived at some kind of order and coherence through the works of Vico, Kant, De Sanctis and Croce were debated and in not a few cases refuted. We do not wish to enter the labyrinthine paths of the small or big particular issues caused by a critical reading of those great philosophers, that of Croce in particular, but we’d like to attempt an outline of a philosophical design which is still visible today within the vast panorama of Italian culture. The two in depth concepts which no longer seem to satisfy the exigencies of modern philosophy and criticism are that of the autonomy of art and the other, in so many ways connected to the first, is that of the universality of artistic activity. While Luciano Anceschi, following the methodology described in part one of this essay, discovers a law, which was both historic and philosophic and typical of modern contemporary era, the law of autonomy and heteronomy of art and their constant interacting, on the Marxist side the issue of “content” was vigorously reinstated; which is to say, of the nexus between art and society and the dependency of the former to the latter. Not only the autonomy but the universality of art was placed on the table again since, as it is obvious, what depends from something that is not itself is neither autonomous nor universal, and because, to the contrary, if an activity happens to be universal, it is also distinct and autonomous from all other, and vice-versa.

194 Ovi Symposium II Luigi Pareyson (1918-1991)

Problemi dell’Estetica di Luigy Pareyson (from his University lectures of 1945). The companion volume II is titled “Storia” Antonio Gramsci, in his Quaderni del carcere [notebooks written in jail], which came to the Italian public’s attention after the war by those who did not intend to obliterate the whole European philosophical tradition, one could trace back the origins which even if in a confused way could heal the dissidence between the Crocean exigency to distinguish art from the other categories of history, and the other opposite exigency to “immerse,” as they used to say, art into history. And in fact, in his notes which were never fully reviewed and systematized, Gramsci repeatedly returns to the problem of art’s originality, opposing, in a famous page, the creativity of the great artist, whatever his ideological stance, to the mediocrity of the little authors. But the dissidence could not be healed because it was struggle that was not just practical but deeply philosophical. To distinguish what is art from what is not art, does not mean, within the rigorous Crocean terms, to separate art from history, but to understand the particular function it exercises within history. Therefore either Gramsci had to say what Croceans already well knew, that art even if autonomous, and as art to be judged only by the criterion of beauty, can also be utilized as expressive source of a particular era; or it ended up with the vulgar materialistic determinism which many Italian intellectuals could not adhere to.

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Gramsci’s Quaderni dal Carcere (1926) At the same time, the problem is not solved by the different way of posing the problem given by another Marxist scholar, Galvano Della Volpe, who in his Critica del gusto [The Critique of Taste] of 1960 attempted to distinguish art from thought and from praxis, even if he considered the distinction semantic, or full of logic. How the two could be reconciled, Della Volpe does not tell us, since one does not resolve the aporia by affirming that art is specifically a particular technical language through which one expressed the only logical category, which in turn is the expression of the pathos of a particular historical epoch. In fact, what is the exigency which urges man to technically diversify an expressive mode, if such an exigency did not go back at its roots in a profound motive of autonomous existence? Obviously the specification of artistic language as distinct from philosophical language (a language which in reality does not exist in as much as philosophy always expresses itself through artistic language) is due to a substantial diversity and it is useless to qualify this diversity with different names.

Galvano della Volpe (1895-1968)

196 Ovi Symposium II Thus, both in the phenomenological and the Marxist field ultimate concepts of modern existence remain within a general environment of hostility for philosophy as a whole, and therefore for aesthetics too. Struc- turalists, sociologists and psychoanalysts, utilizing art for their own purposes, would subject her to a kind of cutting which for those who maintained the death of art became a macabre necroscopy by which the organism is subdivided into parts and little parts all separated and placed in naphthalene. This attack to philosophical aesthetics, to the autonomy and the universality of art together with the new scientific vogue, made it possible that in the years between 1965 and 1975 the theories of genres and of the distinction among the arts would return to prominence; theories these that seemed to have been relegated to the far away past of philosophy. To paraphrase a well known Dostoyevskyan motto, if there is no aesthetics, then all is permitted. If it is permitted to break-up verses into phonemes, or to discover in some metaphors the evident sign of a the Oedi- pus complex, which is to say, to evaluate a work of art exclusively on the basis of the quality of its public, in the manner of an operator of an ideologized market; then the re-proposing of the theories of genres, or the subdivision of the arts, could not possibly give scandal.

Critica del gusto (1960) And so from many quarters came accusation against classical aesthetics of not having taken into account the richness and the concreteness of the world of art, of having undervalued the precise techniques which apply to the different genres or the different artistic languages, all in the name of the unity of artistic expression and language. While on one hand there was a request to abandon the principle of the categorical distinction, on the hand a plethora of distinctions were claimed and not always those who so claimed were different persons. As things stood, if the phenomenologists of the school of Banfi, Anceschi and Formaggio, all tending to the description of artistic phenomena, in an attempt to find among them some historical or philosophical ties, could reconsider the genres as one of the many aspects of the “world of art. A della Volpe, after denying to art an authentic categorical autonomy, having reduced it to just another genre (a genre of thought), could also re-confirm the theory of the genres. In his essay of 1960 titled Laocoonte 60, which he inserted in the already mentioned Critica del gusto, he could, among other things, have recourse to the test of the incon- trovertibility of the genres (for example the sculptural is not translatable in the pictorial, and vice versa), as if this was a demonstration of their logical validity, and not simply a statement of fact which takes nothing away from the empiricism and the “relativity” of genres. Once more, as in many other fields of knowledge, the particular and specific sense of some philosophical theories which became popular at the turn of the 20th century were no longer understood. Just as the evaluation of the function of sciences and abstract

Ovi Symposium II 197 concepts in general, was confused for “devaluation” of the sciences, the position by which it was attempted to take away aesthetic values to the genres (for example, that of evaluating the beauty of I Promessi sposi according to its adhesion or non adhesion to the genre of historical novel) was considered on the whole a devaluation of the use of genres, a use that indeed is wholly legitimate in the empirical-pragmatic field. A similar discourse can be conducted on the problems that arise from the function that technology exercises on art and the distinctions of the various arts, all problems which ultimately can be reduced to one: in fact the distinction of art in various arts (music, painting, poetry, etc.) is the same as that of technology, given that such a distinction can only be founded on the identification of the various technologies which preside at the formation of each single art. The question has been raised: how is it possible that an artist could be painter or musician without acquiring a particular pictorial or musical technique, or, with greater respect for the complexity of the problem, if in the concrete realization of a work of art, a formation to which one arrives after a laborious process, one needs to utilize a technique or various techniques, especially if to this term we allow a very general significance. Confer in this respect the problematic essay by L. Pareyson, The Artistic Process in Problems of Aesthetics (1973) or more generally the whole aesthetic production of the scholar. Simplifying to the extreme, there are those who have ironically asked if a painter can paint without a brush and a canvas, or if an architect can construct anything without stones. But in this case also, rather than critiquing a specific theoretical position, what was being critiqued was its ghost, given that nobody criticized the utility of technology and the specificity of the various artistic languages (the Arts), but the improper use in rendering an aesthetic judgment of those instruments. Technology cannot by itself constitute the artistic phenomenon, and it needs to be absorbed by art; otherwise it remains a product of ingenuity but not of artistic activity. It would be enough to repeat the banal but convincing example of two individuals who are both endowed with the same technical capacity, are not both equally artists. Which of course does not take away the fact that from the beginning of the twentieth century, on both the issue of the genres and that of technology and the Arts, there has been further progress or at the very least clarifications of great interest. So today we can say that the function of the genre is not that assigned by Croce at the beginning, that is to say that of uniting, cataloguing and placing in groups works of art with clear resemblances for mnemonic or didactic purposes. The genre can indeed be useful to the critic for an orientation without determining his judgment, allowing for an evaluation which is more sure and meditated of the single work of art being examined. Confer the interpretation and analysis of the concept of genre in Croce done by Mario Fubini in his book Critica e Poesia (1956). Even for technology, now that the debate on anti-positivism at the turn of the 20th century has subsided or at least changed, it is necessary to recognize that it is not simply useful to communicate artistic creation already beautiful and complete even before it was exposed exteriorly on a canvas, in a bloc of marble, or on the stage of a theater. Technology can also be interpreted, and the same Croce in later years so understood it, as the result of all that historical tradition which cannot be ignored. Styles, poetics, precepts,

198 Ovi Symposium II Critica e Poesia of Mario Fubini (1956) cultural traditions, the influence of great artists, are all elements which which come together in the creation of a new artistic creation, consciously or unconsciously. A critic who takes seriously his work cannot ignore them but at the same time he ought no overvalue them, since, and this is the essential point, aesthetic judgment may take advantage of other judgments on the technical or historical level but it cannot identify with them. If this were not so, we would arrive at the paradox (about which for some reason or other not many think about) so that those who do not know well the entire history of literature and the various artistic techniques, could not understand and enjoy poetry. This is obviously false and it is contradicted even by common experience.

Mario Fubini (1900-1977) Be that as it may, in our opinion technique also fulfills another function. If one considers the concrete artistic creation one has to admit that technique conditions such a creation: in some way it guides it. On the other hand the contrary is also true. The artist chooses a Particular technique because he believes that he thus fulfills his intuition and his sentimental world. If an artist chooses to express himself through the typical dialogic form of the theater, one cannot say that it was a casual choice, rather it was guided by an interior vision of reality, by a particular mode of experiencing and express life. Hence, it is the creative force that bends technique to its will, but on the other hand it also contaminates itself. The poetical image, in some way, in its creation is conditioned by that series of extraneous factors which it has determined. However, the fact that technique does not possess a substantial value is also proven by the fact that “techniques” create

Ovi Symposium II 199 themselves capriciously. As it is by now clear, between technique and art there is strict nexus wherein the parts can only be distinguished under analysis, since in the concrete artistic creation they are indissolubly tied to each other in a synthesis that is even more than dialectical. The same Croce while in one of his essays radically denied to technique any relationship to artistic creation, would then write that “it means that an artist never conceives his work from in a vacuum, rather he conceives it in its fullness, with determinate conditions and assumptions, among which one finds (at least in those works of a certain complexity) economic necessities which are his and of the society in which he lives and where the work is created which become his. The work of the artist is not and cannot be prevented by those assumptions, since between matter and form there is no contradiction.” A bit later Croce would assert even more clearly that “The poet imagines with the presupposition of the words of his people, knowing the predispositions of his environment, and similarly the architect imagines with certain given stones, with a given land, a given space and the exigencies of life.” The same reasoning can be applied to the various arts whose expressive means conform to or modify the artist’s inspiration.

I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) of Alessandro Manzoni (1827) This having been said, we need to confirm that in its essence, the debate conducted against all the attempts to repress the freedom of art (because to negate its autonomy, or subjugate it to technique or genres, poetics or precepts means exactly that) is indeed a debate which even today has not lost its value, nor will perhaps ever lose it, if it be true that Giordano Bruno in his fight against “rules” when he spoke of art could say that those rules “are useful to those who have more of a propensity to imitate than to create.” Success and decline of the human sciences: When we try to conclude this brief review of the most important problems arising out of the modern debate on aesthetics, one has to admit that the clash is between two visions of the world: one tied to classical philosophy, the other to a renewed positivism which has assumed characteristics of particular ideological forms. And even if our era has been crossed by forms of irrationality more or less obvious, we must admit that the two opposite positions, the empirical-rationalistic positivism on one side, and the metaphysical irrationalism on the other, have found a common polemical target within modern philosophy. But there is no doubt that the greater success has been achieved by the neo-positivistic world, if it be true as in fact it is, that in the 60s and the 70s there have come to the fore disciplines such a psychoanalysis of art, the sociology of art and linguistic structuralism.

200 Ovi Symposium II Even in this case confusion of terminology has often prevailed over the substance of the issue. The tem- pestuous diffusion of all the so called human sciences; the massive importation of French structuralism, provoked a natural reaction by those who did not discover in those sciences rigorous and well founded presuppositions; but it also provoked the reaction of those beginners who saw in philosophy the greatest obstacle to the diffusion of the new methods and the new ideas.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) But let us return to our specific problem. A constructive dialogue had in fact been established between Croce and those scholars who came from the experience of the critique of style, first and foremost among them Vossler and Spitzer, while those who followed structuralism were of the opinion that they needed to cut all ties with historicism aesthetics. At first the discovery of Ferdinand de Saussurre motivated a few (such as T. De Mauro who wrote Introduzione alla semantica in 1980) to confront his linguistic proposals with the classical one of Italian aesthetics, later on the discussion became more radical privileging the least historicist aspects found in the “father’s” of structuralism. Instead of attempting a solution to the problem of the nexus between creative language (langage o parole in structuralist jargon) in which each element is conditioned and only within it communication and expression is possible, the problem was simply abandoned and what was privileged was the second term of the nexus. Consequently, literary criticism was conceived as a descriptive analysis of components and the various linguistic forms which were present in an artistic text, and thus the attack on the judgment about value (that is, the aesthetic judgment) began provoking a deep detachment of the young from the poetical, not to mention the crisis of the same structuralism. The exercise of criticism begins to look like a very complicated game whose utility was hard to discern, and live poetry became a corpse which had to be dissected; all of which could not arouse any interest in the general public. Those who had a philosophical sense asked themselves how a structuralist could possibly identify a work of art if not by judging it as artistic, which is to say, by pronouncing, even if implicitly, a judgment of value. Then there was the abuse of a chatty language which looked complicated but was ultimately banal, the dilettante mode of many who followed structuralism as a fashion of sort and not because of its theories; the attempt to amalgamate Marxism, psychoanalysis and structural linguistic, ended up with a profound and general uneasiness which soon enough became a fierce debate and later in sheer indifference. Today, after the ideological diatribes, there is an attempt to recover what was most valid in the structuralist movement both in the philosophical and the linguistic field, picking cautiously certain concepts without taking firm positions.

Ovi Symposium II 201 The same discourse can be made for sociology and psychology, were it not necessary to remember that those disciplines never found favor with the major Italian philosophers and even the European ones. Not only Croce, Gentile and De Ruggero had considerable difficulties vis a vis with Freudian psychoanalysis, but also philosophers from different schools such as Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre and the positivist Popper who considered psychoanalysis unscientific in as much as it could not be subjected to the criterion of falsification. In our opinion one cannot even speak of an interrupted dialogue, but of a dialogue that never began. In any case, even here, we ought to avoid false debates. Beyond the specific or even philosophical value that one wished to credit those disciplines with, it is certain that the psychologist or the sociologist can use art as an historical document (haven’t the great historians after all, not operated thus from time immemorial?), and the psychoanalyst uses it to prove some of his theories. But it is equally true that all of this has nothing to do with aesthetic and literary criticism. Beyond the discussion of the truth of sociology and psychoanalysis (in our opinion there is a practical utility of some sociological investigations, and there is also therapeutic utility in part of modern psychoanalysis), what needs to be condemned is pan-sociologism and pan-psychologism, just as we ought to condemn pan-philosophism. Whenever the sociologist or the psychoanalyst, instead of merely a specific social situation or a particular psychological condition, pretend to place as foundational the social “factor” or the psychic “factor” to all other human actions, they end up in a form of philosophical determinism, which can be refuted not only at a philosophical level, but has almost always been proven false even at an empirical level. This deterministic and relativistic metaphysical aspect of these doctrines needs to be rejected. To exemplify, one thing is to search the motives why in some places or in certain societies, Dannunzinism could spread so easily, another thing is to explain the poetry of D’Annunzio on the basis of social and economic structures which are assumed to have generated and determined it. In this sense determinism leads to relativism (the work of art is relative to the historical condition in which it was born) and metaphysics and, even if it is a “materialistic” metaphysics, given that it assumes a first cause which generates all other human manifestations. Admittedly we have here broadly outlined the road which was followed by Italian aesthetics after W.W. II and still ongoing. We need not mention that the Italian cultural panorama is far richer than any single personality which in the field of philosophical aesthetics (it would be enough to mention Rosario Assunto, Gianni Vattimo, Aldo Trione, Vittorio Stella, Franco Fanizza) or that of criticism (Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Bruno Zevi, Luigi Russo), have offered and continue to give notable contributions. Croce’s school, which today is being revalued under various opinions, has for many years produced valuable studies, especially in militant criticism and literary historiography. However this consideration remains: generally speaking, even studies of aesthetics have felt the general milieu of a theoretical and ideal disorientation. The dictatorship of banality and of the idees recues, which still pervades cultural awards is rendered even more grievous, arrogant and uneasy, which does not mean invincible, from the tyranny of the industry of culture.

202 Ovi Symposium II 3

Enrico Cavacchioli and the Meta-theater A Presentation by Michael Vena (By way of an Essay from his book Italian Playwrights of the Twentieth Century)

Professor Michael Vena

Enrico Cavacchioli (1885-1954)

L’Uccello del Paradiso of Enrico Cavacchioli (1918) Enrico Cavacchioli was born in 1885 at Pozzallo in the province of Ragusa, Sicily. Information about his personal and family life has been scarce. It is known however that Cavacchioli received his early education in Sicily and had had written a number of lyrics by the time his family moved to Milan in 1905, where he continued his studies and managed to become acquainted with avant-guard literary circles and the world of journalism. During the 1906-1907 period Cavacchioli joined the futurist movement and, under the auspices

Ovi Symposium II 203 of that group published two collections of poetry. But his involvement with theater wouldn’t be long delayed. As early as 1909 a three-act play, I Corsari (the Buccaneers) and a second one act play were staged, while he signed along with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others the Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights (1909), as it firs appeared in Le Figaro of Paris. These activities mark the beginning of a long association with various literary journals and newspapers by way of articles and interviews as a drama critic.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) Founder of Futurism Cavacchioli moved gradually to his theatrical activity. While the first of his texts for the stage goes back to 1909, only during the war period did he bring his full attention and energy to the theater. La Campana d’ar- gento (Silver Bell, 1914), his first significant play, gave an unexpected boost to the theater of the grotesque. Staged in 1914, this comedy came as a surprise to all those expecting a futurist synthesis; it carries instead the emblematic subtitle of “sentimental grotesque” and is based on one of the classic themes of the “triangle of adultery.” The plot centers around Luca Zardo, a distinguished scientist on his way to important medical discoveries, his wile Anna and her cousin Francis. Anna and Francis were lovers in their youth and a son, Baby, was born from that relationship. Suspicious of the two lovers, Luca denies Francis a serum to cure his tuberculosis. Francis, in shock, reveals that the boy is not Luca’s child before he drops dead on the floor. Luca forces his wife out of the house and keeps the child, with no questions asked. The play’s novelty is that Cavacchioli seeks to introduce on stage a spokesman for the author in the character of Flori. Admittedly, Flori is hardly developed as a character, remaining a projection of the ego of the author while the rest of the cast is the object of that ego. Flori’s role in the action of the play is indicated within the text itself: “…My role?...I never sleep…I am everywhere…with the sould of a metteur en scene. And I aways find myself where I shouldn’t be.” (Act 1, Mariani, 90). Cavacchioli outlines through Flori the grotesque poetics of man’s alienation: as a start Flori says that: “In life we are all characters outside of our own role. When a farce is recited we assume the role tragedy, and vice versa. If you want to be convinced of this, go to the theater. There you have a proof. You’ll come out of it disgusted but convinced.” (Act 1, Marinari, 91) The introduction of raisonneurs on the scene signals a new beginning for the theater, and their specific role opposing what is generally taken for granted is meant to generate a revolutionary effect leading to an awakening or consciousness desired by the author. Flori in fact operates outside the “triangle” and disappears the moment the play fall back on the old adultery trio. This drama, labeled by some critics as a failed attempt at grotesque, must be seen instead as a transitional work containing “in nuce” the ingredients for a meta-theater to be further developed in future plays and leading to existential situations codified much later as theater of the absurd.

204 Ovi Symposium II The Bird of Paradise continues the important first cycle of grotesque drama and poetics. This particular work, written as a “confession in three acts” in 1918 is widely regarded as the most important play by Ca- vacchioli. It deals with a theme of anguish and frustration over the mechanical nature of its characters or a tragically farcical theater where the split between life and art is dramatized by a symbolic intruder referred to as Him, who places all the others on trial. Eventually Him concedes his failure to introduce them to the magic world of art and to give from and purpose to the existence of such characters who are thus reduced, by his assessment, to the condition of human puppets. To register his disapproval he withdraws into a world of his own, and for Him the performance is over, while the characters carr on the play at the existential level only to confirm their interpretation or preconceived notions of what it’s supposed to be. As the curtain rises, we view the studio of an artist, Giovanni Ardeo, and hear his wife, Anna Corelli, who has abandoned the household to romantically search for a new lover, leaving behind even her daughter Donatella. Complications begins with Anna’s love affair with a younger man, Mimotte, as her suffering becomes intolerable with the arrival of her daughter and Mimotte intimates his love for young Donatella. At this point Cavacchioli drops among his characters the symbolic intruder to direct the action of the play. Him manipulates the characters like a puppeteer the strings of the action. In fact, the playwright stresses Him’s importance in a prefatory note to the first act: “This stage setting revolves around Him.”

Italian Playwrights from the Twentieth Century Edited by Michael Vena (2013) Him moves from the premise that truth is multifaceted, that is, subjective, pluralistic, and infused with a Pi- randellian relativism. Yet, in spite of his questioning, none of the characters seem to resolve their existential woes as they remain firmly set in their unresolved conflicts, andHim can justifiably conclude: “The story has come to an end. It’s necessary to change subject because catastrophe is near and the knot is untied.” (Act 3, 47) This mocking, ironic comment has led at least some critics to theorize on the passive, mechanical nature of the characters, but at the same time it starts to formulate the poetics of Cavacchioli that people are mere puppets incapable of true and deep feelings, creatures with lost ideals and, worse yet, unable to create new ones. The playwright aims now for a new direction by way of Quella che t’assomiglia (The Lady Who Resembles You, 1919), a play that carries the seeds of an absurdist split personality, along with a typically Pirandellian mirror reflection. Outside of the love triangle (Gabriella, Gabriele and Leonardo), there is a manipulator named The Mechanic, who seeks to get the other characters to see themselves “reflected” in their own world. The intrigue presents a wife who becomes unfaithful after her husband enlists as a volunteer during

Ovi Symposium II 205 WWI; but the moment he is blinded, she has a conversion and henceforth remains loyal to him: good for her because Leonardo, the lover and a fortune-teller, is an adventurous illusionist. Yet the key player and mas- termind will be the Mechanic, who stands for the expediency of existence with his “two wheels in place of his eyes,” that make him look more device of levers (and small mechanical parts) than like a man. In contrast with Him (from The Bird of Paradise) who seeks to give a “soul” or consciousness to his living characters, the Mechanic—more cynically—creates real ‘puppets’ opposite each character, and so he introduces Leon- ardo’s Puppet, Gabriella’s Puppet, Gabriele’s Shadow and Narcissus, “to whom he insisted on giving some words instead of a soul,” in response to the action of the play. The latest quote indicates what little faith the author lends to the words of a puppet. Of course ‘words’ become inadequate whenever language is reduced to conventional forms of expression, and in setting where the individual feels anxious to communicate but is incapable of doing so. Thus, Cavacchioli remains consistent with the major discovery of his theater by his conclusion that characters are frequently reduced to puppets, masks, mannequins that embody different personalities—a practice carried over in may performances of the grotesque theater, between the second and third decades of the twentieth century. No surprises then if Teatro dei fantocci (“Puppets’ Theater”) was the title of a well known book written about these playwrights by their contemporary theater critic and historian, Silvio d’Amico, who certainly knew the importance of Chiarelli, Antonelli, Rosso di San Secondo and Cavacchioli, as well as Pirandello’s early works and treatise On Humor. Cavacchioli continues his experimenting in theater in La danza del ventre (Belly Dancing, 1921). There is a married woman, Pupa, estranged from her husband, and a duo sharing the role of the lover Nadir-Arlecchi- no. Pupa stands out as attractive and interested, her name in fact equals Dolly as a proper noun, and as a common noun it is linked to the popular medieval tradition of the Sicilian puppet theater—teatro dei pupi’, which Cavacchioli and other playwrights of the grotesque movement carry into their own productions, with the benefit of present tips from Freud, and psycho-analysis. Here Pupa stands for the provocative woman determined to have her way with the opposite sex. The play takes place in a ballroom within a jet-set society. Pupa lives fully as a liberated woman as she meets a dancer name Nadir, a charming uninhibited Oriental described as a follows: “Dancing is his life. Music is an infinite kingdom where he moves like a king. He stirs tempests of desire.” (Act 1, 104). This mysterious man mesmerizes Pupa, but her repeated advances induce him to confess that in his homeland he was a eunuch in the sultan’s harem. As Nadir calls on his servant to satisfy her wish, a division of the self is thus actualized.: Nadir is the spirit, Arlecchino the flesh. Now Pupa seeks Arlecchino as lover and attempts to transform him from a mask into a real man by changing his multicolored costume into coattails, just as Nadir explain that creatures like him cannot live without poetry (that is, without a sentimental life) andhe would die without it. (Act 3, 139). Having said so, Nadir, wrapped in “the golden green of his mantle” (stage directions, Act 3), begins his belly dancing and, following a few steps, drops dead on the floor as if in a poetic expression of emptiness and frustration. But Arlecchino runs to help: Master! Master! It’s me, your devoted servant Arlecchino (Act 3, p. 141). But Arlecchino is consistent in his original role as an old mask: indeed his words echo Nadir’s: “Don’t go away Pupa! Don’t go away… Can you hear? He is still calling you through my desolate voice.” But Pupa is no longer interested and disappears quickly as if “swallowed by the doorway” (stage directions, Act 3, 141). The unusual ending suggests that the duo Nadir/Arlecchino have become ‘real protagonists’ in the play. Ca- vacchioli introduces through this pair the ideal and the instinctual, a very significant variation from previous

206 Ovi Symposium II works, as we get here a splitting of the ‘figure’ of the lover, Arlecchino, who symbolizes the body without the spirit, cannot make it without Nadir (the spirit) who would charge him with will and energy. On the other hand, Nadir originally operated under a mask of his making, which he strips off for re-entry to his native Orient and potential heaven. This type of subversion suggests how hopelessly pessimistic Cavacchioli has become about human nature in a world populated by split personalities and divided loyalties, and other sorts of conflicts that prelude to absurd experiences started in life and dramatized on stage: in Silver Bells and Belly Dancing characters drop dead on the floor in a gesture of emptiness and renunciation, recalling acts of self-immolation as in a dance macabre from a medieval Europe.

Arlecchino Costume and mask from Commedia dell’Arte Pierrot impiegato del lotto (Pierrot, the Lottery Clerk, 1925) characterized as a “grotesque fantasy,” follows the dramatic pattern and theme of Belly Dancing but with a different twist and end result. Pierrot is introduced as a lottery agent who helps his clients win by relying on numbers from the occult sciences; but the wins are so frequent that revenue officer sent to inspect the agency recommends that the agent be removed. Indeed as he prepares to quit, Pierrot makes the acquaintance of Russian princess with the suggestive name of Luba, along with her husband, Wladimir, and her lover, Rigoli, who had come to meet the talented occultist. Upon leaving, Pierrot is invited by Luba to her hotel where she seeks to turn him (as in the parallel case involving Pupa) from a night mask into a “man” by instigating Rigoli’s murder. The ensuing duel is resolved in an equally grotesque fashion: by ridiculing Rigoli, Pierrot earns the invitation to a night of love where he discovers the rule of her “dream shop”: but in so doing Pierrot shakes up the love triangle as a second lover. Pierrot becomes thus counter-productive as he turns into one of the last puppet variations in the cycle of Cavacchioli’s plays. Such puppets stand as a metaphor for the modern individual when all else is stripped away, a metaphor that defines the concern of theater, and of Cavacchioli in particular about the nature of the contemporary man. Puppets become the embodiment of the consciously created self, who allow different layers of manipulation, of one’s own masks and those of others. Going beyond Cavacchioli, Osvaldo Can- toni-Gilbertini re-affirms the metaphor in an even bolder play by the very title of Fantoccio (Puppet) where a man will engage two followers, a puppet as projection of his good self and a moor reflecting his bad side, with the aim of opening up one’s subconscious buried beneath reality. In such regard, Adriano Tilgher’s comments are even more telling about the period; he has this to say about Him as an example of ‘epic’ characters: “[…] with Him the author insisted on representing the Bubconscious, the Superconscious, the subliminal ego, the deep ego […], various names indicating […] the part of our self that escapes the mirror of our consciousness […]” (from “Il teatro del grottesco,” Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1923).

Ovi Symposium II 207 Costume of Pierrot from the Commedia dell’Arte

Adriano Tilgher (1887-1941) A recurrent peculiarity of Cavacchioli’s artistic activity is his criticism of middle-class mentality. He portrays people pursuing false ideals, and how in the end they fall victim to their own masks and inner prejudice. Grotesque playwrights tackled such problems both in a fanstastic mode (Antonelli) and in an ironic vein. One can reconnect to the latter vein Cavacchioli’s rebellions, crazy puppets, sometime driven by a puppeteer/manipulator who descends among them to lead each one through their woes and conflicts. Practically the plays introduced bear witness to a meta-theatrical function the author fulfills by dealing with questions of theater that also reflects on ways of life. More importantly, the dates of such productions tell us that Cavacchioli was at the forefront of such developments. The puppeteer generally is in conflict with the characters, and this conflict holds the tension and the interest of the spectator. In the works discussed here we come across one character appearing as a superman, yet his abstract and mechanical nature turns him into a marionette: Him, Flori, The Mechanic, Nadir, Arlecchino, Pierrot, Pinoc- chio. Not by coincidence some of the titles given by Cavacchioli (and others) to such works suggest (polemically) mechanical devices which translate into over-simplifications if not distortions: puppets, masks, mannequins, tools, even a Pinocchio in love being still a piece of pine—a whole series of cases which prompt Cavacchioli to believe that people just keep on simulating, on acting out their parts, until he concludes: “I have tried to give a soul (consciousness) to all these puppets (characters)” (Act 3, 47), and he stops right there.

Pinocchio: a puppet without a soul?

208 Ovi Symposium II As for the setting and other technical aspects of these plays, new stage design and scenery based on visual imagery (bright lights, hidden lights, color and mirror effects), are common stock of this period, carried over from the futurist synthetic theater. Also, the choice of enclosed spaces continues to be popular (a private study, a sensuous bedroom, an intimate den)—a pattern that will be continued by the existentialist theater of “closed doors” (e.g., J.P. Sartre’s drama Huis clos)—and of other unlikely places hosting chance or temporary encounters (lottery booth, hotel vestibule, etc.). The action itself of the old love triangle is broken up and purposely mismatched as the plot unfolds to reflect Cavacchioli’s view of man as a superficial entity, with theater reflecting that desolation in the spectacle and all the visual perceptions of showbiz, where the actor is last seen as a marionette who disappears into dark and total silence. (for more detail on this aspect of theater see Franca Angelini, Il teatro italiano del Novecento, 1978, or Roberto Tessari, Teatro italiano del Novecento, 1996). Cavacchioli’s contribution to theater is to be found in at least two or three major areas: the first is the role of the so called raisonneur or puppeteer who generally embodies ideals of the author but often lose control over the strings of the action and thus becomes powerless. In the second area, Cavacchioli introduces puppets animated as ‘alter ego’ to specific characters; while this may not be new in the theatrical world (think of the Sicilian and other European traditions both ancient and modern), here we have instances of

Giorgio Pullini (1928- ) actors who bring to bear their “alter ego” on the face of the puppet, a phenomenon that tells a lot about human nature: Cavacchioli rejuvenates in modern times an old puppet tradition and fashions it into a new theatrical and literary mode that reflects concerns of his time. Puppet theater, originally apropos for children, has since diversified greatly within the twentieth century through performing laboratories of “bread and puppet”, thanks to leaders like Peter Schumann, Gordon Craig, Michael Metschke, Mario Ricci, with theater taken as ‘play’ as well as ‘ritual’. These schools have captivated vast new audiences and introduced

Pullini’s Teatro Italiano tra due secoli: 1850-1950 (1958)

Ovi Symposium II 209 spectacular productions like Sesame Street, Anenue Q, etc. Indeed, the raisonner, the puppet, the character with a split personality bring together peculiar topics Cavacchioli elaborates in his production. His later plays produce characters who dissolve themselves in mysterious practices, typical of the theater of the absurd that Cavacchioli practiced from the second decade of the century to the mid-twenties, clearly before the nineteen sixties indicated by Martin Esslin as the beginning of a theater of the absurd.

Il Teatro del Novecento: From Pirandello to Fo of Franca Angelini (1978) To conclude, Cavacchioli’s production ought to be viewed within the context of an unrepeatable era enjoyed by Italian theater (1908-30), when some of the most significant plays of the twentieth century were brought on stage, with the involvement of a remarkable number of great actors, actresses, and directors. Along with other innovative playwrights of the group as Chiarelli, Antonelli, Rosso, Pirandello and Bontempelli, Cavacchioli lived through a profound intellectual revolution that marked the second and third decade of the twentieth century. In such regard, their theater reflects the polemics as well as philosophical positions taken by a number of intellectuals who gave character and direction to that brief but highly significant movement known as grottesco (“grotesque”), wherein the passions and tragedies of life are

Teatro italiano del Novecento: Phenomena e Strutture of Roberto Tessari (1996) mechanically simplified and shockingly distorted. It’s a theater that incorporates positivistic disenchantment, social criticism, and an unusual concept of ethics that deny traditional values and lean toward a relativistic philosophy. These playwrights mock what they see as a miserable mode of existence and indeed leave their

210 Ovi Symposium II protagonists in the midst of unresolved conflicts. Cavacchioli follow suit and introduces on stage a practice that will be much later be identified with the theater of the absurd, by creating characters with a split personality or mind and spirit, immersed in an aura that often is turned into acts of self immolation, as in Silver Bell (1914) and Belly Dancing (1921). Even the last play discussed in this essay, Pierrot, The Lottery Clerk (1925) may well have been carried into Jean-Luc Goddard’s film that deals with a crazy 1965 character called Pierrot le fou, in a period indicated by Martin Esslin as starting point for the theater of the absurd. Given the nature and content of Cavacchioli’s plays and of Pirandello’s treatise On Humor as well as his early novel The late Mattia Pascal and other productions, it becomes clear that a theater of the absurd was well in the making way before the date indicated by Martin Esslin. Also, it’s known that Cavacchioli was not a stranger in France regarding theatrical matter: he was, according to F.T. Marinetti, the first signer of the futurist manifesto of 1909, which was published in Le Figaro of Paris, and obviously an integral part of that group of innovative playwrights from the futurist and grotesque movement known in France at the time as “La Nouvelle École Italianne.”

Ovi Symposium II 211 4 A Response by Paparella to Vena’s Presentation on Enrico Cavacchioli: Thank you Mike for this enlightening introduction to the Grotesque theater of Enrico Cavacchioli. Upon reading your essay I was made acutely aware that the theater can provide to us not only the proverbial Aristotelian catharsis but also a bridge between the quotidian of practical life and a rarefied aesthetic theory. Your presentation allows us to understand that the theater (which could encompass the genre of Opera and Ballet under the umbrella of “performing arts” or “performed narration”) is the closest one can get to life itself; it can even manage to have life imitate art, while theory by itself often comes across as abstract and even sterile. Your insight seems to be that only the theater can truly bridge the abyss between the theoretical and the practical, the universal and the particular. If I am not mistaken we can hear echoes here not only of Aristotle’s poetics but also of Vico and Croce’s aesthetics derived from the poetical. Both Neapolitan philosophers would probably agree that by its own nature a play worthy of that name must be endowed with a vision of life that is poetical for it is via the poetical that it becomes able to transform even the banal, the ugly and the perverse into a thing of awe and beauty. To be sure Art in general performs that kind of alchemy, but, as you point out, especially the theater. I for one am grateful for your strenuous endeavors to make the Italian theater better know around the world, for without knowledge of the Italian theater one will understand precious little of the Italian Re- naissance or of the history of Italian Opera or even of the outstanding achievement represented by modern Italian cinema. Thank you Mike for your brilliant elucidation on this issue and always ad majorem.

212 Ovi Symposium II 5

A warm welcome to Dr. Alessandra Abis: The Director of the magazine Thanos Kalamidas and we of the team of the Ovi Symposium would like to warmly welcome Dr. Alessandra Abis as a new member of the same. She is a graduate of the department of Foreign and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Bari. In 1992 with her husband Arcan- gelo she founded the Adriani Teatro in Bitonto, Italy. In future sessions of the symposium she will describe to us the vision and the mission of such a theater in both Italy and the USA where she and her husband now reside and work. She too conceives of the theater as a sort of bridge between the technological scientific positivistic culture of America and the more humanistic culture of Italy. She has been active in the building of those needed bridges of understanding and has performed in Greek-Latin plays in Madrid and Seville (1998-1999); among various others, the following can be enumerated: “Voyage in the Greek World” (An- dromaca), “Miles Gloriosus” (Plauto), “The Last Temptation of Socrates (from Plato’s Ione Minor). Also from the Commedia dell’Arte: “Harlequin Doctor Flyer,” “Harlequin, the Dentist,” “Without Makeup (Chechov), “Four Portraits of Mothers” and “Lady Madness” (from Erasmus’ “In Praise of Folly”). We welcome her initial generous commitment to the Symposium and look forward to her future contributions on such fascinating field as the ancient Greek and Roman theater.

Ovi Symposium II 213 Chapter 20 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” Twentyeth Meeting: 27 February 2014

Table of Content for the 20th Session of the Ovi Symposium Main Sub-theme: “The theater as an exploration of our humanity.” Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Vico, Gadamer, Heidegger, Dilthey, Betti, Hirsch, Habermas, Apel, Ricoeur, Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Vattimo, Rorty, Derrida, Sartre, Dante, Adriani, Khalo, Clytemnestra, Traetta, Aristophanes, Socrates, Benigni, Biancolelli, Plauto, Chaplin, Lewis, Zelle, Han, Duse, Garbo, Callas, Monroe, Circe, Wesker, Chiarelli, Welland, D’Annunzio, Verga, Nuessel, Da Vinci, Mongili, Tonon, Napolitano. Introductory Note by the Symposium’s Coordinator Section 1: “An Invitation to the Hermeneutics of the Self via Vico’s New Science and Gadamer’s Truth and Meth- od.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Section 2: “Introduction and Survey of the History of the Adriani Teatro.” A presentation by Alessandra Abis with a brief introduction by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 3: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis.” An introduction to a future presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica. Section 4: “Michael Vena on Luigi Chiarelli: a review by Professor Frank Nuessel of Michael Vena’s pedagogical book on Luigi Chiarelli’s play La maschera e il volto’” (The Mask and the Face). Section 5: A warm welcome from the Ovi Symposium to Maria Buccolo as a regular Ovi Symposium contributor.

214 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator

In this session we continue the conversation on the theater as a bridge between life and art, theory and praxis and the more general theme of the theater as an exploration of our humanity and a journey into the self. In section one Paparella introduces those aesthetics’ themes via Vichian hermeneutics of the journey into the self. In section two Alessandra Abis, already introduced to the Ovi readership in the previous meeting of the Ovi Symposium, debuts with a narration of the history of the theater company she and her husband Arcangelo Adriani founded some twenty two years ago in Italy (1992), namely the Adriani Teatro. She narrates for us its particular vision, its goals, its mission. The Adriani Teatro presently operates in the US, where Alessandra and her husband currently reside and work, but it remains international as a transatlantic cultural bridge of sort between the EU and the US. She too, not unlike Michael Vena conceives of the theater as a bridge between cultures and a journey into the self. In section three, in tandem with section one’s theme of philosophical hermeneutics, we introduce briefly the next presentation of Ernesto Paolozzi titled The Return of Positivism and its Crisis, as translated from chapter 6 of his book Vicende dell’Estetica. This is to merely wet the reader’s intellectual appetite with an antipasto morsel, so to speak. The full course meal or presentation, and any added comments and conversation, will be published in the next session of the symposium. So, stay tuned. In section four, within the parameters of the theme of the theater as a pedagogical tool, we are presented with two reviews of one of Vena’s edited books on one of Luigi Chiarelli’s plays, namely La maschera e il volto, a book which albeit published in the mid seventies is still in use in the US in many colleges teaching Italian language and culture. In section five we extend a warm welcome to Dr. Maria Buccolo currently teaching theater at the University of Rome while briefly introducing her to the Symposium’s readership. In the near future she will be collabo- rating with Dr. Abis by way of an inter-Atlantic cooperation between two continents and two cultures, writing essays for the Ovi Symposium that focus on the function of the theater in education and the bridging of cultures.

Ovi Symposium II 215 1 An Invitation to the Hermeneutics of the Self Via Vico’s New Science and Gadamer’s Truth and Method A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Giambattista Vico (1668-1743) Vico’s New Science has often been identified as “a science of humanity.” As such it leads its readers to an exploration of what it means to be human, that is to say, to a journey into the self. Vico considered self-knowledge essential for the road to wisdom, even more so than knowledge of mathematics, metaphysics, and natural science. He conceived of wisdom in classical terms, as the summation of an authentic holistic life, able to harmonize the material, the intellectual and the spiritual components of one’s humanity. A life, in other words, that is neither one of Dionysian excess nor one of mere Apollonian clarity; one that while accepting and integrating man’s imaginative and rational spheres, remains at all times capable of transcending both; hence the importance of his paradoxical concept of providence which in his philosophy is both immanent within human history but also transcendent. A Vichian intellectual journey requires, at a minimum, a willingness to dialogue with Vico and then among ourselves and then with the rest of the world. What makes the dialogue possible is the common humanity we share and we bring to the conversation. As I attempt to be a guide of sort into Vico’s complex thought I need to be the first one to bring my own humanity and life experience to the hermeneutical process which a Vico reading inevitably engender, or my invitation to a journey into the hermeneutics of the self will be moot. During graduate studies at various institutions of higher learning (New York University, Middlebury College, The University of Perugia, Yale University), I came in contact with various theories of literature. A new one seems to appear on the academic scene every five or six years. It has even been suggested that “theory” stands for “politics” in reified academic circles. One of the most popular nowadays is that of Hermeneutics which originates with Hans-Georg Gadamer, an eminent Vico scholar at the University of Heidelberg whose magnum opus is Truth and Method (1960). It is a theory of interpretation claiming that in the reading of literature the reader’s own self-understanding necessarily comes into play. In other words, either a particular text addresses me, the reader, as a person, or there is no encounter with it. Far from being mere conceptual knowledge, literature is, properly speaking, life experience. Gadamer calls it the event of understanding and establishes the so called “critical circle” of history, aesthetics, language giving proper credit to both Vico and Croce for their seminal ideas on philosophical hermeneutics.

216 Ovi Symposium II To be sure, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s project is strongly influenced by Heidegger, but in his masterpiece Truth and Method his starting point is undoubtedly provided by Vico and Dilthey’s hermeneutical inquiry on the methodology of the human sciences. While taking anew the dialogue with the human sciences and the open question of their claim to truth, Gadamer calls into question Dilthey’s premise according to which the experience of truth in the humanities depends on method. In seeking a methodological foundation that alone could guarantee their scientific or objective status, Dilthey sought to keep the humanities to the model of the exact sciences and would thus have forfeited the specificity of the humanities, where the involvement of the interpreter whose understanding is constitutive of the experience of meaning: the texts that we interpret are texts that say something to us and that are always understood in some way out of our questions and “prejudices.” The implication of the interpreter in the “event” of meaning, as Gadamer likes to put it, can only be deemed detrimental from the model of objectivity heralded by the natural sciences. Instead of this outdated notion of objectivity, the human sciences would do well to understand their contribution to knowledge out of the somewhat forgotten tradition of humanism and the importance it bestowed upon the notion of Bildung (formation and education). The humanities do not seek to master an object that stands at a distance (as with the exact sciences), but their aim is rather to develop and form the human spirit. The truth one experiences in the encounter with major texts and history is one that transforms us, taking us up in the event of meaning itself.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) Gadamer finds the most revealing model for this type of understanding in the experience of art since we are always involved by the presentation of an art work, which Gadamer understands as the revelation of the truth or the essence of something, so that a play reveals something about the meaning of existence, just as a portrait reveals the true essence of someone. Yet it is a truth-experience in which we partake in that it can only unfold through a process of interpretation. For Gadamer hermeneutics is to be understood, first and foremost, out of the arts we call the “arts of interpretation” or the “performative arts”: just as a piece of music must be interpreted by the violinist (that is, never arbitrarily, but with a leeway that has to be filled by the virtuosity of interpretation), a drama by the actors or the ballet by the dancers, a book must be interpreted through the process of reading and a picture must be contemplated by the eye of the beholder. It is only in this presentation of a meaning to someone, a performance which is always an interpretation, that meaning comes to be realized. One notices here that “interpretation” refers both to the interpretation of a work of art by the performers and to the “spectators” who attend the performance and must also “interpret” the piece.

Ovi Symposium II 217 The difference between the two forms of interpretation is less important for Gadamer than the fact that the experience of meaning, and the truth experience it brings out, essentially requires the productive implication of the interpreter. The same holds for the interpretation of a text or a historical event, even in the scientific context of the human sciences. The point is that interpretation is not the simple recreation of a meaning that always remains the same and can be methodically verified, nor, for that matter, the subjective, and potentially relativistic, bestowing of meaning upon an objective reality (because the reality to be understood can only be reached through a renewed attempt of understanding). In other words, to claim that interpretation is relativistic on the grounds that it implies the subjectivity of the interpreter is to miss the point of what the humanities and the experience of meaning are all about. The objectivistic model of the exact sciences is ill-equipped to do justice to this experience of meaning. Distance, methodical verification, and independence from the observer, Gadamer concludes, are not the sole conditions of knowledge. When we understand, we do not only follow a methodical procedure but we are “taken up” as the art experience illustrates, by the meaning that “seizes” us, as it were. The instrumental sounding idea of procedure is somewhat suspect for Gadamer, for understanding is more of an event than a procedure. “Understanding and Event” is indeed one of the original titles Gadamer thought about for his major work, before settling on “Truth and Method,” which underlines the very same point that truth is not only a matter of method and can never be entirely detached from our concerns. But these concerns come to us from a tradition and a history that are more often than not opaque to consciousness. Every understanding stands in the stream of an “effective history,” in which the horizons of the past and the present coalesce. Understanding thus entails a “fusion of horizons” between the past and the present, that is, between the interpreter, with all the history silently at work in his understanding, and his or her object. This fusion is not to be viewed as an autonomous operation of subjectivity but as an event of tradition in the course of which a meaning from the past is somehow applied to the present. This leads Truth and Method to suggest that the best model for the humanities was perhaps offered by disciplines that had been traditionally preoccupied with the questions of interpretation such as juridical and theological hermeneutics, insofar as the meaning that is to be understood in these fields is one that has to be applied to a given situation. In the same way a judge has to creatively apply a text of law to a particular case and a preacher has to apply a text of Scripture to the situation of his or her congregation, every act of understanding involves an effort of “application” of what is understood to the present. Gadamer does not mean by this that one first has to understand a meaning, of a text or a historical event and then apply it to a given situation by bestowing new “relevance” upon it. His idea is rather that every understanding is at its root an application of meaning, where our experience and background are brought to bear. This “application” is, by no means, a conscious procedure. It always happens in the course of understanding to the extent that interpretation brings into play the situation and “prejudices” of the interpreter that are less “his” or “hers” than the ones carved by the effective history in which we all stand. Gadamer expands on this idea by comparing understanding to a process of translation. “I understand something” means that I can translate it into my own words, thus applying it to my situation. Any meaning I can relate to is one that is translated into a meaning I can articulate. It is not only important to underline the obvious fact that translation always implies an act of interpretation (a translator is also called in English an interpreter) but even more to stress that this interpretation is by no means arbitrary: it is bound by the meaning it seeks to render, but it can only do so by translating it into a language where it can speak anew.

218 Ovi Symposium II What occurs in the process of translation is thus a fusion of horizons between the foreign meaning and its interpretation-translation in a new language, horizon, and situation, where the meaning resonates. Truth and Method draws on this insight to highlight the fundamentally linguistic nature of understanding. Understanding is always an act of developing something into words, and I only understand to the extent that I seek (and find) words to express this understanding. Understanding is not a process that could be separated from its linguistic unfolding: to think, to understand, is to seek words for that which strives to be understood. There is a crucial fusion between the process of interpretation and its linguistic formulation. It will not be the only fusion of horizons that will interest Gadamer in his hermeneutics of language. His thesis goes even further: not only is the process of interpreting (interpretare) linguistically oriented, what it seeks to understand (the interpretandum) is also language. Language also determines the object of understanding itself. In the end there occurs a fusion between the “process” of understanding and its “object” in the sense that no object can be separated from the attempt to understand it. Gadamer’s famous phrase to express this fusion between the object and the process of understanding itself is: “Being that can be understood is language.” This simple, yet enigmatic dictum can be read in two quite different directions: it can mean that every experience of Being is mediated by language, and thus by a historical and cultural horizon (negatively put: “there is no experience of Being without an historical understanding or language”). This would seem to draw Gadamer into the “relativistic camp.” It is striking to note, however, that Gadamer always resisted this merely relativistic appropriation of his thought. This has been overlooked by postmodern readers of Gadamer, but in his dictum “Being that can be understood is language,” the stress can also be put on Being itself. What Gadamer hopes to say by this is that the effort of understanding is in a way ordained to the language of the things themselves. A difficult and unpalatable notion for postmodernism, to be sure, but one that is essential to Gadamer’s hermeneutics: language is not only the subjective, say, contingent translation of meaning, it is also the event by which Being itself comes to light. Our language is not only “our” language, it is also the language of Being itself, the way in which Being presents itself in our understanding. This is why, when one speaks and interprets, one cannot say everything one fancies. One is bound by something like the language of the thing. What is this language? Difficult to say since we can only approach it through our language, and the language of tradition, but it is nevertheless the instance that resists too unilateral or too violent readings of this Being. It is this language of Being that I seek to understand, and to the extent that understanding succeeds, a fusion of horizons has happened, a fusion between Being and understanding, an event I do not master, but in which I partake.

E.D. Hirsch (1928- )

Ovi Symposium II 219

Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch (1987) The history of hermeneutics after Gadamer can be read as a history of the debates provoked by Truth and Method. Some of the first responses to Gadamer were sparked by the methodological notion of hermeneutics that prevailed in the tradition of Vico and Dilthey. After all, it had been the dominant conception of hermeneutics until Gadamer (with the sole, albeit very peculiar, exception of Heidegger’s “hermeneutics of existence” that had left behind the older hermeneutic tradition which had been concerned with text interpretation and the human sciences. Since Gadamer, in spite of his Heideggerian roots, took his starting point in Vico and Dilthey’s inquiry on the truth claim of the humanities, he was often seen and criticized from this tradition. Emilio Betti, the Italian jurist who had published a voluminous General Theory of Interpretation (in Italian) in 1955, which was intended as a methodical foundation of the humanities in the Dilthey tradition, vigorously criticized Gadamer’s seeming rejection of the methodological paradigm. If Gadamer’s own “method” for the humanities consisted in saying that one just has to follow one’s own prejudices, it had to be condemned as a perversion of the very idea of hermeneutics. Betti, who was followed in this regard by E. D. Hirsch in America, opposed the relativistic idea that interpretation always entails an essential element of application to the present. Surely, texts do acquire different meanings or relevance in the course of their reception, but one has to distinguish the actuality or significance thus garnered from the original meaning of the texts, that is, the meaning of the text in the mind of its author (mens auctoris), which remains the focus of hermeneutics.

Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Coming from the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas hailed, for his part, this element of application in understanding, claiming that knowledge is always guided by some interests. This hermeneutical insight, he believed, could help free the social sciences, spearheaded by psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology, from an all too objectivistic understanding of knowledge and science. Hermeneutics teaches us that our un-

220 Ovi Symposium II derstanding and practices are always motivated and linguistically articulated. It is Gadamer’s too strong reliance on tradition and the importance of authority in understanding that Habermas opposed. He faulted it for being “conservative”; but Habermas’ lasting point, that language can also transcend its own limits, followed an idea that he discovered in Gadamer but turned against him. When Gadamer said that our experience of the world was linguistic, he also stressed, for Habermas, that it is open to self-correction, that is, that it could, to some extent, overcome its own limitations by seeking better expressions or dissolving its own rigidity and was thus open to any meaning that could be understood. Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel drew from this self-transcendence of language the important notion of a linguistic or communicative rationality, which is laden with universalistic assumptions that can form the basis of an ethical theory.

Emilio Betti (1890-1968) Paul Ricoeur tried to build a bridge—a most hermeneutical task and virtue in itself—between Habermas and Gadamer, by claiming both authors had stressed different but complementary elements in the tension that is inherent to understanding: whereas Gadamer underlined the belongingness of the interpreter to his object and his tradition, Habermas took heed of the reflective distance toward it. Understanding, viewed as application, does not only have to appropriate naively its subject matter, it can stand at a critical distance from it—a distance that is already given by the fact that the interpretandum is an objectified text. This notion of a hermeneutics that seeks to decipher objectivities came mainly from Vico and Dilthey, but Ricoeur used it in a productive manner in his decisive confrontations with psychoanalysis (Freud) and structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss). He linked them to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that is most useful in that it can help us get rid of superstition and false understanding. But such a hermeneutics can only be conducted in the hope of a better and more critical understanding of understanding. A “hermeneutics of trust” thus remains the ultimate focus of his work: the meaning we seek to understand is one that helps us better understand our world and ourselves. We interpret because we are open to the truths that can be gained from the objectivations of meaning in the grand myths, texts, and narratives of mankind, in which the temporal and tragic aspects of our human condition are expressed. Ricoeur drew far-reaching ethical conclusions from this hermeneutics of trust that has learned from the school of suspicion.

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005)

Ovi Symposium II 221 Betti, Hirsch, Habermas (and, to a certain extent, Ricoeur) all faulted Gadamer and hermeneutics for being too “relativistic” (i.e., too reliant on tradition). Postmodernism went, to some degree, in an opposite direction: it welcomed Gadamer’s alleged “relativism” but only believed it did not go far enough. Gadamer would have been somewhat inconsequential in not acknowledging fully the relativistic consequences of his hermeneutics. To understand this shift in the hermeneutical debates, it is important to observe that authors such as Heidegger (especially the later Heidegger) and Nietzsche play a paramount role for post-modernist thinkers. One thinks, in this regard, of the Nietzsche who said that there are no facts, only interpretations, or of the Heidegger who claimed that our understanding was framed by the history of Being. The postmodern- ists lumped this Nietzschean-Heideggerian outlook together with Gadamer’s seeming critique of scientific objectivity, his stress on the prejudices of interpretation, and his insistence on the linguistic nature of understanding. Stressing these elements, hermeneutics, they believed, jettisoned the idea of an objective truth. There is no such thing given the interpretatory and linguistic nature of our experience. This lead Gianni Vat- timo to “nihilistic” consequences and Richard Rorty to a renewed form of pragmatism: some interpretations are more useful or amenable than others, but none can per se be claimed to be “closer” to the Truth. In the name of tolerance and mutual understanding, one has to accept the plurality of interpretations; it is only the notion that there is only one valid one that is harmful.

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) Jacques Derrida can also be seen in the “postmodern” tradition, since he too depends heavily on the later Heidegger and Nietzsche, stresses the linguistic nature of our experience, and also urges a “deconstructive” attitude toward the tradition of metaphysics that governs our thinking, an attitude that Paul Ricoeur would classify in the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” But his deconstruction does not directly take the direction of the pragmatist tradition of Rorty or the nihilism of Vattimo. Despite the Heideggerian origins of his notion of deconstruction and his pan-linguisticism, Derrida does not identify himself with the tradition of hermeneutics. His “deconstruction” is indeed distrustful of any form of hermeneutics: every understanding, he contends, would involve or hide a form of “appropriation” of the other and its otherness. In his discussion with Gadamer in 1981, he challenged Gadamer’s rather commonplace assumption that understanding implies the goodwill to understand the other. What about this will? asked Derrida. Is it not chained to the will to dominate that is emblematic of our metaphysical and Western philosophical tradition? Hence Derrida’s mistrust of the hermeneutical drive to understand the other and of the hermeneutic claim to universality. Gadamer was touched by this criticism to the extent that he claimed that understanding implied some form of application, which can indeed be read as a form of appropriation. This is perhaps the reason why, in his later writings, he more readily underlined the open nature of the hermeneutical experience. “The soul of hermeneutics,” he then said, “is that the other can be right.”

222 Ovi Symposium II Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Gianni Vattimo (1936- )

Beyond Interpretation by Gianni Vattimo (1997) Given this background, one can readily see that for Vico and Gadamer, a literature which is incapable of relating to me standing in the present with an historical horizon, is pretty much a dead literature. I may of course play academic games of literary pathology with it, dissect the cadaver and maybe even re-construct it again; but those games will not bring the text to life. On the other hand, if a text is capable of producing a dynamic personal meaning, the reader’s self-knowledge will inevitably be enhanced. When we say text we ought not just think of words on paper or literature proper, or spoken language which remains pre-eminent, but of any aesthetic manifestation of the human spirit understood as a language of sort, what Vico calls the poetic: music, theater, painting, sculpture, architecture, history, etc.

Ovi Symposium II 223

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)

Philosophical Hermeneutics By Hans Georg Gadamer (1977) With self-knowledge acquired via history understood as a narration of man’s journey, (in Italian the word for history and story are one and the same) one may more confidently project a future. Such was my own personal experience, a sort of epiphany, when I first read Vico’sScienza Nuova some forty years ago. There is much more to this theory, but what a beginner into the hermeneutics of the self needs to grasp initially is that meaning and meaningfulness are contextual in nature. The interpretation of any of man’s artifacts, especially linguistic artifacts, always stands in the situation in which the interpreter himself stands. Meaning is immanent within the very texture of life and is a perception with a nexus which is priori to the subject/ object separation in thought.

Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico By Emanuel L. Paparella (1993: Mellen Press)

224 Ovi Symposium II In the absence of a dialogue with literary texts, much of what passes for literary humanistic studies in our academies ends up assuming a dehumanizing mode. By objectifying the work of literature one fails to bring one’s own humanity to the conversation and the hermeneutical circle cannot be closed. Literature becomes mere conceptual knowledge with which to make a living and build an academic career. Some of these aca- demics go around proclaiming that literature is superior to philosophy but in effect they have objectified and rationalized literature too, reduced it to mere knowledge understood as power. Dostoyevsky’s literature may have much more of the existential philosophy than say a Sartre but that can only be true if we are able to grasp the hermeneutical function of literature. Objective knowledge needs to be brought back to the sphere of life and human experience from which it originally sprung. Had Dante wished to write his Commedia for the exclusive monopoly of scholars and university professors, he would in the first place have written it in Latin which he was perfectly capable of doing. Similarly, Vico did not write his New Science for the mere furtherance of his academic career at the University of Naples (where indeed he remained largely unappreciated), but rather “per insegnar il volgo a virtuosamente operare,” i.e., “to teach ordinary people how to live well.” This ethical mission is at the core of the New Science, deeply interested in human origins and identity. Like the ancients of antiquity, Vico insists that without self-knowledge there is no acquisition of wisdom. His was the question of the ancients as re-discovered by the high medieval and Renaissance humanists: what does it mean to be human; how does one live humanly? Vico, as the ultimate Italian Humanist, endeavors to answer those ethical questions. For the moment let me simply mention that, from my own standpoint in space and time, and given the predicaments of our technological rationalistic civilization which threatens to swallow up our freedom and our very humanity, the post-modern world, I remain as convinced as I was thirty three years ago that Vico’s concerns are more relevant and urgent than ever. It is indeed crucial that the average non-academic layman who is well informed on the cultural currents and cross-currents of our time, become better acquainted with Vico’s speculation. Those who wish to undertake this Vichian journey into self-knowledge need to be warned that Vico and Gadamer resist oversimplification. They need to be pondered and taken in slowly. They are a hard nut to crack but once cracked the rewards are plentiful; a personal epiphany of sort may ensue. For this to happen beginners in hermeneutics have to bring their own humanity to the historical horizon, for as Vico has well taught us man is his own history. If we venture on this journey across disciplinary boundaries the results may indeed astonish us; for it is at the edge of boundaries that life and knowledge meet most fruitfully.

Ovi Symposium II 225 2 An Introduction and Survey of the History of “Adriani Teatro” A Presentation by Alessandra Abis Brief Introduction to the presentation by the Symposium’s Coordinator: What follows is a brief survey of the history, the vision, the mission and purposes, together with the illustrations of actual performances of the Adriani Teatro, by way of a brief narration by Alessandra Abis of her twenty year plus accomplishments in the theater in collaboration with her husband Arcangelo Adriani, particularly their explorations in the ancient Greek and Roman Theater and the Commedia dell’Arte and their indefatigable inter-Atlantic building of bridges of understanding between continents and cultures. Undoubtedly, their future contributions to the Ovi symposium will inspire those readers who already know and love the classical theater, and foment the interest and curiosity of those who wish to further deepen their knowledge of the theater as a universal form of art.

ADRIANI TEATRO is a theatre company born in Italy in 1992 by the artistic and drama director Arcangelo Adriani and the actress and choreographer Alessandra Abis. While organizing events which promote arts, the company focuses on being an international pole of attraction and an answer to anyone charmed by the world of stage. Arcangelo and Alessandra, together with other professionals of the company, specialize in Ancient Greek and Roman comic Theatre and Italian Comedy of The Arts. They utilize their expertise on traditional theatre to look for new forms of theatre. They consider the stage an empty space. They believe that an artist can fill it with his own personality. The mask instrument can help the artist discover new aspects of his own personality, in order to always present new forms on stage. Adriani Teatro’s mission is to communicate this instrument to anyone interested in understanding more about theatre. This line of thought gives them the opportunity to utilize any kind of space for their performances, because any site can be a stage.

Dr. Arcangelo Adriani, co-founder of Adriani Teatro

226 Ovi Symposium II Mata Hari, Frida Khalo, Anne Frank, Clytemnestra: women who defied death. Indeed life. The stories of some women come to us to tell us their wish dream to be part in the history, starting from the mirage of immortality and passing trough different trails. These women want show us that the desire of every human been “to live beyond death” involves very high compromises, pains, lies and losses.

Some actresses through the art of monologue go back over the same past of these women. They attempt to arrive at the meeting with the character to shake hands with her. Or, maybe like in a mirror, to meet themselves. The Adriani Teatro has directed and organized many cultural events such as “The Theatrical Sea- son of Bitonto Community Center”, the prose review “Theatre & Stars”, the “Medieval Fair of Saint Leo” in the historical centre of the city of Bitonto, the “Great Opening of Umberto I, alias Tommaso Traetta, Theatre”, Bitonto Community Theatre of XIX century, the National Festival of Philosophy on Stage “Philosophizing”, the International Festival of Women on Stage “Talking Mirrors” and finally the National Festival of School.

“Talking Mirrors” is an International Festival produced by Adriani Teatro with the Artistic Direction of Ar- cangelo Adriani. This cultural event wants to be a voyage to the discovery of female’s sensibility through theatre, focusing the real or presumed life of immortals and mysterious women of Human History. The Festival was born in 2005 in Apulia – Italy and was collected a great success with the audience and critics. Many prestigious performances have been presented in four editions of this cultural event. Most of them were original and international female productions.

“Philosophizing” is a Festival of Philosophy on Stage produced by Adriani Teatro with the Artistic Direction of Arcangelo Adriani. The Festival, was born in 2006 in Italy. The cultural event wants to be a reflection on some philosophical issues related to questions of ethics and coexistence in a community and urban space. Through the bare logic of words and its development in a speech, this festival aims to involve audience by

Ovi Symposium II 227 stimulating a discussion through comparison with authors, texts and artists involved in theatrical performances. The project includes “The Learning Dialogues,” a series of classes, lectures and meetings on some philosophical issues related to theatrical action and some aspects of ancient and modern thought. Some experts, using dialogue form, stimulate audience to create ethical awareness about active participation and about citizenship and dialogue education.

“School Theater”:: Theatrical activities in the school have a positive educational and social value and represent an extraordinary opportunity for youngsters to cultural and human growth. Stage@School is a competition for schools of any grade selected in all over the country. The Festival aims to train young theater audiences, offering the chance to meet each other and exchange cultural experiences. All schools in competition can also share a great opportunity for an artistic experimentation. Theater for school and school for theater and community. From 2004 to 2008 there were five editions of this cultural event. The Festival happened in the nineteenth-century Community Theatre “T. Traetta” of the city of Bitonto with an extraordinary contribution of 12,500 spectators. A qualified jury composed of actors, directors, teachers experts in theatre and critics have provided prizes money for Euro 13.000 and various art awards. The cultural event gave an opportunity to participate to 82 schools from all of the country, involving more than 3,000 students and teachers. During the festival there were 87 performances including comedies, fairy-tales, tragedies, musicals and dance show. “Productions”: ADRIANI TEATRO performs in any kind of space and situation. They like to produce performances strictly pertinent to what is the occasion, choosing the theme of the play, of the monologue or of the event (eg. Harlequin’s improvisations, Aristophane’s and Plauto’s comedies, Socrates’s philosophical questions, Anna Frank’s storytelling). This type of work helps them feel, every single time, the theatrical text as new and allows them to make it “alive” on stage. Or in any empty space.

“Socrates’s Apology”: Once I went to the theatre to see the Academy Award actor Roberto Benigni. He ended his performance surprisingly, by acting the final part of Socrates Apology. The italian actor and direc-

228 Ovi Symposium II tor, well –known for his being so ironic and revolutionary, said in that occasion that he thinks to Socrates as the greatest maestro in human history, together with Jesus Christ. In the beginning the comparison seemed to me blasphemous, but then I began to think about that. Actually Socrates and Jesus were both prosecuted for their speeches and their words because they said deep truths about human life. Their words were more powerful than weapons: words can strike fear. Both Jesus and Socrates were convicted and killed for the same reason. With death they could not speak anymore. Their voices were supposed to be quiet forever. Moreover Socrates can be associated with Jesus because both of them chose to die instead of being silent for the rest of their life. They could save themselves. But they didn’t. Their choice was an act of revolution. Socrates had to sacrifice his own life in order to let his philosophy changing the world. His death was the Example, necessary to change . Something had to happen in his own life in order to let something happens in the world’s life. Apology is Socrates last performance. Time to take off the mask and tell the Truth. So I thought to a blasphemous comparison: like Socrates the actor goes on stage.The audience is the judge of the actor’s destiny. And of Socrates life, of course. Are you ready to be part of the jury? The piece Harlequin The Flying Doctor, by the author & director Arcangelo Adriani, was born as a development of a scenario about sixteenth century by Domenico Biancolelli, one of the most famous Harlequin in the world of theatre, mix with the Moliere’s comedy of the same French name “Arlequin le Medicin Volant”. Actors play the text on a scenario with a fixed text and some points in which they act “all’improvviso”, (this is one of the most important characteristic of Comedy of the Arts). They create a sketch on the moment, depending on humor and reactions of the audience. The performance contains the most famous North Italian Masks or fixed types of Comedy of the Arts: the two young lovers Ottavio and Isabella, the miser old man Pantalone, the clever servant or first zanni Trivellino, and the naive servant or second zanni Harlequin. As in Plauto’s comedies, in this piece the protagonist is a servant, Harlequin, (in the Braggart Soldier of Plauto the protagonist was the servant Palestrione) who most times somebody makes a full, but sometimes he makes a fool of somebody. This character is different from the Plauto’s servant because he doesn’t plot to make fun of somebody, but the joke originates suddenly, and it is necessary only to eliminate an obstacle, with many comic results. Therefore Harlequin seems to anticipate the comic characters of the last century as Charlie Chaplin and of the contemporary theatre as Jerry Lewis. Every performance of Comedy of the Art is different because it really depends on the relationship between masks and audience. Usually the results for both are astonishing.

“What about Mati Hari: “Among thousands of daisies, is a beautiful orchid”. This is the first verse of a naïve poem a girlfriend wrote for Margaretha Zelle, a normal Dutch little girl. Years after Margaretha will blossom under the name of Mata Hari, which in JAVANESE means “The eye of Dawn”. The DIVINE. Why Mata Hari? Why did I choose

Ovi Symposium II 229 Mata Hari instead of any innocent heroine who sacrificed her life for the Country? Because the role of the Divine – from Eleonora Duse to Greta Garbo, from Maria Callas to Marilyn Monroe, has always seemed to be uncomfortable yet charming, negative yet enviable, trouble some yet mysterious. What is the secret to be born or to become Divine? Perhaps all these women from Circe on through the centuries, have handed down the secret recipe to one another of a potion that would enable them to shine like stars allowing them to charm the world. Or maybe, they became immortal at the price of compromises, sacrifices, slanders and great isolation. What lies the truth? The story of Mata Hari is EMBLEMATIC because she was sentenced as guilty, being the charge based exclusively on her moral conduct. They considered crimes Mata Hari’s love affairs with Army officers and politicians of that time. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to believe in Mata Hari’s innocence: she was the Indian dancer who conquered Paris and Europe unveiling her nude body with cimbali music. She also became the lover of some of the most important men, responsible for the destiny of First World War. It is absolutely difficult, actually impossible, to believe that she wasn’t a spy, because she had always cleverly lied about her origins and her art of dancing. And yet if one day I had the chance to meet her, in a meadow or on a stage, I would never ask her about the secret potion or the truth about her spy story. Because I already know she would answer: “I am not guilty”. And I would believe her because I’m sure that on that morning of October 15th 1917, at dawn, in front of twelve armed soldiers, there was not the Di- vine Mata Hari, but only a pure white innocent woman named Margaretha, which in English means “daisy”.

“Miles Gloriosus” We chose Miles Gloriosus, among twenty-one comedies of Plauto’s production, because this play is one of the most comic (the second scene of action II is brilliant: the old man Periplectòmeno makes a live television report of what the servant Palestrione mimes on stage), and one of the most complete for its human characters; actually it contains all the fixed types or masks of the fabula palliata: the braggart soldier , the clever servant, the parasite, the naive old man , the stupid and rough servant , the young man in love , the cook, the false virgo, the meretrix and her servant, and at last, the puer or little servant, and the lorario or slave driver. Alessandra Abis reproduced masks in polychrome latex representing the fixed types of Plauto’s comedy. The masks are reproductions of IV century B.C. Lipari’s terrecotte (Sicily). They represent, in their kind, the richest existing collection in the world of types of Nea Greek Comedy from which Plauto got the idea (sees the Pollux’s catalogue of comic masks of II century A.C. in Pollux, Onomasticòn IV, 143-145). These masks allowed us to work as presumably ancients actors: a few actors for more roles, with immediate change of mask and costume. In antiquity only men could act on stage. Masks helped us to cancel the actor’s identity and to point out the comic type played by the actor. Using masks men and women can act in different male

230 Ovi Symposium II and female roles. The translation of the text tries to maintain, from Latin to English all the vivacity of Plauto’s language without vulgarities. Everything brings to a comedy full of rhythm making the audience laugh and have fun without knowing the reason.

“Curcullo” “Curculio” was composed and represented from Tito Maccio Plauto between the 193 and 191 B.C. The title of the comedy (whose action is in Epidauro) is given from the name of the protagonist, parasite Cur- culio, which in Latin means a worm rodent of wheat. Even if it is a short comedy, Curculio contains many of fixed human types of the fabula palliata: the young man in love with the honest virgo who is slave of a lenox, the drunk old woman thirsty of wine, the clever servant, the parasite ready for anything, the old man lenòx, the braggart soldier. In this play you can find also all conventionaltòpoi of Greek comedy: the theme of deception (false letter and disguise), the arbitration, the final recognition and wedding. Curculio, on the other hand, introduces some spectacular elements of great importance: the famous serenade to the latches made from the young lover Fèdromo in front of the house of his lover, the arrival from Caria of the parasite Curculio with his comic report and at last, the monologue of the choràgus or props, greatest example of metatheatre in Plauto. Alessandra Abis reproduced masks in polychrome latex representing the fixed types of Plauto’s comedy. The masks are reproductions of IV Cen. B.C. Lipari’s terrecotte (Sicily). They represent, in their kind, the richest existing collection in the world of types of Nea Greek Comedy from which Plauto got the idea (ref.: Pollux’s catalogue of comic mask of II century A.C. in Pollux, Onomasticòn IV, 143-145). These masks allowed us to work as presumably ancients actors: a few actors for more roles, with immediate change of mask and costume. In the antiquity only men could act on stage. Masks helped us to cancel the actor’s identity and to point out the comic type played by the actor. Using masks men and women can act in different masculine and feminine roles.

Ovi Symposium II 231 “Hide & Seek: The Diary of Anna Frank” Anna is thirteen years old and she receives a diary as a birthday gift. Anna writes about her passions: movie stars, world tree of royal families, mythology. Anna rambles a lot, she likes history and hates algebra. Many friend and boring admires are about her, but she hasn’t “her bosom buddy”, because in the end – she writes - youth is more lonely than old age”. Anna thinks that she is lucky because she has a secret hideout where she can grow and play. It is a place in which she can discover life through small things narrow spaces. In her secret hideout Anna falls in love, she disguises herself, she dances alone in front of the mirror, she writes fairy-tales and, above all, she dreams. She dreams to become a famous journalist or writer: “will I be able to write something of great success?”. Anna is an adolescent who will reach her dream during an extraordinary moment of History, in which it was impossible to be youth and to have ideals. She writes: “On this age it is very difficult to have ideals. Dreams and beautiful expectations born and in a moment they are already destroyed […] by cruel truth. It is very strange I didn’t forget all my dreams because they seem absurd and pipe dreams. But I hold them tight, regardless, because I still believe to the intimate goodness of human beings”. Anna Frank is a Jewish child who will become one woman. One young woman who will become immortal dying in the lager of Bergen-Belsen on February 1945. But who is the real Anna? In the last page of her diary she writes about herself: “My spirit is like if it was divided in two parts. […]when I am with others the good Anne always lies ridden, when I’m alone she prevails on me.” The actress tries to stay alone with the real Anne. She tries to give life to our secrete desire: to be Anne just for a while. In this way we can understand how she does it, how she believed in the goodness of human being, how she loved life so strongly, even if the world was taking all away. Anne Frank thought “all will make right; this hardness of heart will end and quiet and peace will come back in our world”.

“My Frida”: Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon or, simply, Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera wrote about her: “Frida is the first woman in the history of the art to have explored women’s themes with absolute and inexorable frankness”. Never until then a woman was able to painting with so desperate poetry. Never until then was a woman perceive a so much strong desire to belong to a earth, the Ancient Mexico, to belong to a man, Diego Rivera his “fount-flower”. In Frida pain and art create an inseparable binomial. Leaving from her body “not sick”, but “broken” (because of a violent accident), Frida, meets painting with great anxiety. This encounter will be a communications medium between the artist and her own life, helping her to overcome her torments. Frida has the capacity for consider the consciousness of them self as a beauty, that is always on the move, in circle. “we are all in one and we conduct ourselves towards ourselves through million of human beings …… nobody is separate, nobody fights for himself…. All is in one …… anguish and pain, pleasure and dead are not more than a process in order to live” Frida’s life and work are not full of tragedy . The darkness of her pain, physically unbearable, is the background of

232 Ovi Symposium II a wall that is illuminated of the wonderful light of its biological power. She fights for her life, she fights to not commit suicide, she fights to love herself and passes one life to watch herself to the mirror and to paint herself.Tortured from reliance on love, Frida is not a feminist heroin. Frida ….. as a baby ….. as a mother who feeds…. as a daughter never been born…. as a Tehuana Divinity….. as a Mexican …..….as an European …… as a woman who discovers herself ….. in the mean while she is fragility and myth.

“4 Mothers 4” “4 Mothers 4” is a one woman play of English contemporary theatre, by Arnold Wesker’s “Four Portraits of Mothers” (1982). The actress Alessandra Abis plays four different feminine characters who are involved in a very difficult role: the “attempt” to be mothers. They tell us their stories story with four short monologues: Deborah, woman as mother earth, 35 years.

Naomi, as mother who never was, 70 years.

Miriam, woman as failed mother, 45 years. Ruth, woman as unmarried mother, 39 yearsThese characters inevitably ask us some questions: How can you be a “perfect” mother? What does it mean the word “mother”? A pièce that inquires on woman’s universe, on familiar dynamics, on multiple parts of a woman, often not recognized. Common places and old habits are melted in the live present of every woman. All is changed in women’s life, but all remains as it was. Yesterday like today and perhaps for eternity, always they have to do domestic and familiar jobs. The mother is only one: even if they are different for some aspects, today like one hundred years ago, mothers are ready to make everything all day and in the evening they are exhausted. But today there is more: what they make seems to turn out useless and not recognized from society. Therefore mothers must try to resolve their problems alone… “…therefore it has been all along… ” “….a world of men terrified from women…” “… a house that nobody wants to leave never …” “…sons! You’ll never win with them! …” “… I need you …..” Forever and ever.

Ovi Symposium II 233 “Lady Madness” A game. A joke. An admirable comedy. This is life of every man on earth. As an actor, every man plays his role sailing endlessly among struggles, traps, defeats, illnesses, pains, destinations to reach. From a human being’s birth to death there is an unquestioned queen who dominates with her rules-no rules in the big game of life: she is Lady Madness. A great Divine. An immortal lady, brilliant, egocentric, spontaneous, and honest. A lady who can’t say lies. She charms us, she conquers us little mortals who make a mistake, trying always to control her. What a game would be so amusing, fascinating and wonderful without so a good friend? When I was younger and I had very often the presumption to feel so “different” from others. I felt enable to face up the difficult path I chose by myself. In these difficult moments I convinced myself to be crazy. I remember that my mother (more crazy than me only for the reason that she gave me birth) answers me this way: “What does it matter if you think to be crazy because you feel so different”? I read a plaque in front of a mental hospital’s gate which said a great truth: “MOST ARE OUTSIDE”. All crazy, therefore: outside from lines, outside from outlines, outside from rules, in order to meet our timeless friend: Lady Madness. Will you be brave enough to face up her and to listen anything she has to say us? I beg your pardon if I dived in my first direction, but I invite you to remember that I’m crazy and above all I am a woman.

“Socrates’ Last Temptation” Will the art of rhapsode be the art of military generals? Socrates discusses with Ion the question of whether the rhapsode, a professional performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession.

234 Ovi Symposium II 3 The Return of Positivism and its Crisis

An Introduction to a Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi It is almost useless to remember that every periodization is relative, devoid of real correspondences with the epochs one analyzes. In order for them to be enunciated, for if they are not enunciated one cannot even speak of history, it is necessary to choose a point of view considered the most faithful to reality but that remains above all meaningful within the totality of the interpretation one wishes to offer to the reader. Keeping this in mind we will hold on to the principle which we have held and enunciated up to now; that of essentially paying particular attention to the mass dissemination and propagation of the theories and the doctrines which we are examining. As it is rather obvious, the dissemination and propagation of ideas and opinions, always come after the original springs of inspiration from which they derive, and they are not necessarily connected with each other, as it may seem from the outlines utilized in summaries, anthologies and scholastic essays. In between these creative fountainheads and the performance of those new ideas there is the entire journey of human history, with its political and social struggles, its scientific discoveries, its affective and moral passions, its economic rivalries, within a tangled articulated complex of factors which cannot be untied except through arbitrary and convenient choices. Therefore a point of view is always partial, and for various reasons: because it refers to the history of culture, to philosophy and aesthetics in particular. But we can assume that, even via particular points of view, we can arrive at useful albeit generalized interpretations. This is an assumption which, paradoxically, is founded on a fundamental theoretical act of humility: the consciousness that one cannot discuss anything from a purely general viewpoint, because when one thinks about it carefully, this same preposition “general viewpoint” is contradictory. A particular perspective is never general, but always particular, and there is nobody, except for God, that can look at the world not from a particular but from an absolute position. (To be continued in the next session of the Symposium).

Ovi Symposium II 235 4 Michael Vena’s Pedagogicai Book on Luigi Chiarelli’s Play “La maschera e il volto”: a review

Luigi Chiarelli’s La maschera e il volto edited by Michael Vena (1975) Editor Vena, Professor of Italian at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, has already established a solid record of publication on the Italian grotesque theater which makes him an ideal scholar to prepare a pedagogical edition of Chiarelli’s play written in this literary tradition. The present publication has a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, “... it is intended to expose the student to the practice of spoken and written language, through vocabulary building and manageable sentenced structures commonly used by Italians” (vii). On the other hand, this well-known literary work with its intellectual stimulation and its satiric format, is the first Italian grotesque play to be edited in English. While always recognized as an important playwright in his time, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in Chiarelli’s dramatic works in recent times. Born at Trani (Bari) on July 7, 1880, Chiarelli received his secondary education in Rome. The untimely death of his father, however, precluded university studies. His interest in writing and literature began early (1895) and continued until his death in Rome on December 20, 1947. Vena states, correctly, that “Chiarelli was an innovator and he knew it”. In fact, the author breaks with the conventional bourgeois dramatic models of the nineteenth-century, which had become stale with the exception, of course, of the very special works of D’Annunzio and Verga.

236 Ovi Symposium II Considered to be his masterpiece, Chiarelli’s three-act play La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face) was written in the summer of 1913. This drama is a brilliant satire of the prevailing attitudes toward marital infidelity in which the husband feigns his spouse’s death to avenge his honor. There- after, a bizarre series of fantastic and ironic misadventures ensues. In many ways, there is an obvious affinity between Chiarelli’s dramatic art and that of his better known compatriot Luigi Pirandello.

Vena argues convincingly that this play is a brilliant example of the grotesque movement in theater. The editor describes this movement as “... a genre of theatre wherein the passions and tragedies of life are mechanically simplified and shockingly distorted. The grotesque incorporates positivistic disenchantment, social criticism, and an unusual concept of ethics which denies traditional values and leans toward a relativistic philosophy”. Professor Vena utilizes a familiar and pedagogically sound format for his edition of Chiarelli’s play with footnotes and right marginal notes for the English translation of unfamiliar words for the target intermediate-level Italian student. This edited volume contains the three-act play proper, a series of exercises, and a vocabulary section. Vena has produced an excellent and didactically effective edition of this theatrical piece. Moreover, it is a dramatic work that will interest contemporary students because of its irony, its philosophical underpinnings, and its iconoclastic and avant-garde content. Instructors will appreciate Vena’s deft but unobtrusive scholarly intervention through his notes and selectively appropriate use of marginal glosses in the text. Likewise, the exercises, which cover each of the three acts of the play, cover its content, and they are sufficiently varied and engaging to maintain student interest. Finally, the activities are formulated so that students who do them properly will demonstrate their comprehension and mastery of the text. This edited volume would be an excellent choice for an entertaining way to develop reading skills at the intermediate level of the Italian curriculum.

Frank Nuessel, University of Louisville

Ovi Symposium II 237 5 A Warm Welcome from the Ovi Symposium to Professor Maria Buccolo We’d like to take this opportunity to formally welcome Professor Maria Buccolo as a regular contributor to the Ovi symposium. She is the sixth scholar to join the Symposium since its birth some eight months ago. She will endeavor to furnish us with a more thorough understanding of the nature and definition of the theater while bringing to the table some innovative and challenging ideas on the theater conceived as a pedagogical tool and a bridge between the scientific and the humanistic worlds for the achievement of peace and the building of a new humanism; all in collaboration with Alessandra Abis who has also joined the Symposium recently. We look forward to a very fruitful collaboration. Under Professor Buccolo’s photo we have included, for the readers’ information, a brief bio derived from a list of accomplishments within the theater, too long to mention in its entirety here. We are honored to have her join the symposium’s conversations as a colleague and a co-worker and we enthusiastically welcome her aboard. To say it with Federico Fellini: “E la nave va.” Professor Maria Buccolo teaches and researches theater at the University of “Roma Tre” in Rome. She is a graduate of the University of Bari and has participated in various projects aiming at establishing cultural bridges among nations and people among which the Project for the Integration of Immigrants via the theater “Leonardo da Vinci Transfert Multilaterale dell’Innovazione” as organized at the University of Florence and to which have participated four nations of the EU: France, Italy. Belgium, and Rumania. She has done research on the methodology of the entrepreneurial theater. She has collaborated with Theatre a la Carte of Paris for its dissemination at the International level. She is also editor of the publication “Una scena tra l’altra” as well as researcher for the interdisciplinary project of Unesco for human development aiming at a culture of peace, also a project of the University of Florence. She is a member of the Interna- tional Association of Drama/Theater/Education, also author of the books La formazione va in scena (La Terza, 2008), L’educazione emotiva nell’infanzia (Franco Angeli, 2013), Teatro e Formazione with S. Mon- gili and E. Tonon (Franco Angeli 2012), Manuale per Form-attori con S. Mongili and E. Napolitano (Dino Audino, 2013).

238 Ovi Symposium II Chapter 21 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-first Meeting: 13 March 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Mach, Poggi, Popper, Hume, Croce, Russell, Frege, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Abbagnano, Sartre, De Saussure, Heidegger, Lacan, Althusser, Piaget, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Althuss- er, Della Volpe, Lukacs, Labriola, Gramsci, Adorno, Hokehaimer, Marcuse, Lenin, Marx, Freud, Hanser, Gombeich, Jung, Adler, Klein, Arnheimer, Collingwood, Vattimo, Ayer, Munro, Langer, Fubini, Benjamin, Jay, Husserl, Brecht, Artaud, Spitzer, Troeltsch, Dawson, Derrida, Descartes, Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Petocha, Havel, Kierkegaard, Habermas, Augustine, Feuerbach, Benjamin, Held, Valery, John-Paul II, He- gel, Marheineke, Gans, Hinning, Hoths, Michelet, Kant, Ormazol, Ahriman, Galileo, Vico, Herder, Hamaren, Goethe, Campanella, Thaulow, Chiarelli, Marinetti, Mann, Pirandello, D’Annunzio, Verga, Shakespeare, Chopin, Rosso di San Sepolcro, Antonelli, Cavacchioli, Goldoni, Morselli, Talli, Bondanella, Conaway, Ra- gusa, Plautus, Mauriac, Zorilla, Gasner.

Ovi Symposium II 239 Table of Content for the 21st Session of the Ovi Symposium Main Sub-themes of the 21st Session: The philosophical implications of Neo-positivism for The Spiritual Identity of Europe Introductory Note by the Symposium’s Coordinator Section 1: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis: part one.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica (chapter 6). Section 2: “Does the Center Hold? And is the Enlightenment still to Enlighten itself? Philosophical Reflec- tions on the Spiritual Identity of Europe apropo of the Crisis in the Ukraine.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 3: “Is Vico Hegel’s Predecessor? ‘An unknown page from Hegel’s last few months of life.’” An imaginary conversation with Hegel by Benedetto Croce.” Section 4: “Profile of a Great Italian Playwright: Luigi Chiarelli.” A presentation by Michael Vena.

240 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Note by the Symposium’s Coordinator For the 21st session of the Ovi Symposium we have placed on the table four intriguing presentations. The first one is on neo-positivism in the 20th century by Ernesto Paolozzi. Part two will be posted in the next 22nd session. In this presentation, which has been translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica, Paolozzi gives us an historical philosophical overview of the return of positivism or neo-positivism in philosophy beginning with Ernst Mach in the 19th century all the way to John Dewey, Popper and Kuhn in the 20th century. Paolozzi surveys some of the confusing philosophical movements of that era vis a vis neo-positivism explaining to us its assumptions and historical roots, and clarifies for us why neo-positivism (or scientism), no matter how one judges it, is an essential part of the modern era and without its analysis one may fail to identify any cultural malaise latent in it. As usual Paolozzi’s analysis and critique goes straight the root of the problem while dispelling much confusion on the subject. The second presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella is in tandem with Paolozzi’s analysis of neo-positivism in as much as it examines the Enlightenment as an inspiring element for Europe’s modern and post-modern culture and identifies certain problems, as first intuited and identified by Husserl and Levinas, within the cultural-philosophical-spiritual identity of the new polity called the European Union; in effect those are the problems of extreme rationalism ultimately ending up in positivism which begin with Decartes and pervade much of modern philosophy. The very title of the presentation presents us with two crucial questions: 1) does the center hold? and 2) is the Enlightenment still to enlighten itself? Paparella attempts an answer to those questions and suggests that to simply emphasize democracy, economics, or politics in describing Europe’s cultural identity, as important as those are for any polity, remains a grossly inadequate assessment. We need to go back to the spiritual roots which make Europe a unique continent and culture; that is to say, we need to stop conceiving of Europe as a mere mega-polity competing with other big mega-nations or con- federacies such as Russia, China, India, the US and think of it as an ongoing idea still under development and on a journey whose outcome remains unclear. The myth of Europa is suggestive in this regard. This intellectual operation can only be done by a return to origins in a Vichian imaginative mode. It is to be hoped that this presentation on Europe’s spiritual identity will also clarify some common confusions on the unique idea that is the European Union; confusions that become apparent every time there is a political crisis in

Ovi Symposium II 241 Europe, the latest being the one in the Ukraine vis a vis Russia and democracy. There we have a culture, that of Russia that is, which considers itself “pure” and not tainted by decadent Western cultural phenomena deluding itself that it is defending its purity from the encroachments of NATO and the West in general. Of course it remains a misguided analysis but we in the West ignore it at our own peril. The third presentation is an engaging one and is from none other than from Croce redivivus, so to speak, who in 1948 wrote an essay on Hegel by way of an imaginary conversation between himself (under the pseudonym of Sanseverino) and the great philosopher of history Hegel. Croce titled it “An unknown page for the last months of Hegel’s life” and it is presented here in its entirety in its English version by Donald Phillip Verene. It remains a rather obscure essay but important to begin to understand the nexus between Vico, Hegel and Croce. At the end of such an essay Vico is explicitly invoked by name and is introduced to Hegel as someone with whom he would find much affinity, followed then by an inquiry: whether or not Vico could be considered Hegel’s precursor as regards the dialectical method, the reconciliation of opposites, the paradox of Providence, geist as the final telos. Here a thorny question arises: is freedom the ultimate universal telos of life or is it a penultimate one? A question that Hegel leaves unanswered as indeed he must, given that he did not know Vico’s philosophy as well as Hans Georg Gadamer, who unlike Heidegger frankly acknowledged Vico as his precursor and as the trail blazer of modern hermeneutics. Finally, in the fourth presentation Michael Vena presents a profile and an outline of the works of one of the most important Italian playwright of the 20th century: Luigi Chiarelli, someone at a par with Pirandello but almost forgotten today. He examines in depth some of his plays, especially La Maschera e il Volto and situates them within the framework of Italian Grotesque theater of which Vena is an expert, thus continuing our ongoing exploration of the theater as an expression of our humanity and the needed aesthetic bridge between life and art.

242 Ovi Symposium II 1 The Return of Positivism and its Crisis: Part I A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (from his book Vicende dell’Estetica)

Ernst Mach (1838-1916) who inspired the Vienna Circle of 1929 and its manifesto: The Scientific Conception of the World

The Science of Mechanics by Ernst Mach It is almost superfluous to remember that every periodization is relative, devoid of real correspondences with the epochs one analyzes. In order for them to be enunciated, for if they are not enunciated one cannot even speak of history, it is necessary to choose a point of view considered the most faithful to reality but that remains above all meaningful within the totality of the interpretation one wishes to offer to the reader.

Ovi Symposium II 243 Keeping this in mind we will hold on to the principle which we have held and enunciated up to now; that of essentially paying particular attention to the mass dissemination and propagation of the theories and the doctrines which we are examining. As it is rather obvious, the dissemination and propagation of ideas and opinions, always come after the original springs of inspiration from which they derive, and they are not necessarily connected with each other, as it may seem from the outlines utilized in summaries, anthologies and scholastic essays. In between these creative fountainheads and the performance of those new ideas there is the entire journey of human history, with its political and social struggles, its scientific discoveries, its affective and moral passions, its economic rivalries, within a tangled articulated complex of factors which cannot be untied except through arbitrary and convenient choices. Therefore a point of view is always partial, and for various reasons: because it refers to the history of culture, to philosophy and aesthetics in particular. But we can assume that, even via particular points of view, we can arrive at useful albeit generalized interpretations. This is an assumption which, paradoxically, is founded on a fundamental theoretical act of humility: the consciousness that one cannot discuss anything from a purely general viewpoint, because when one thinks about it carefully, this same preposition “general viewpoint” is contradictory. A particular perspective is never general, but always particular, and there is nobody, except for God, that can look at the world not from a particular but from an absolute position. Returning to our problem, we can assert that the 60s are the years that signal the return of the positivistic mind-set, those which follow the tragic World War II, the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the crumbling of two of three great dictatorships (Nazism and Fascism) which tormented the 30s and the 40s, the reconstruction of Europe, the definitive consecration of America as a global super-power, the birth of the bi-polarity USA-USSR, the emergence of China and the convoluted and contradictory development of the countries belonging to the so called Third World. It goes without saying that on a purely philosophical level we need to date the “event” of many years. Usually, the rebirth of positivism to which the adjective logical is usually affixed can be identified with the foundation of the “Vienna Circle” in 1929, and the redaction of the programmatic manifest The Scientific Conception of the World. Stefano Poggi is probably right who in his well balanced book Introduction to Positivism (1985) goes back to the foundation of the “Ernst Mach Circle” to the beginning of the 1920s (the direct antecedent of the Vienna Circle, to the complex thought of Mach), the rebirth of positivism. But in this case too, within philosophy, it is not possible hypothesize too rigid descendances. Poggi write in this respect that “It is certainly true that the ways which go from the years of the “rebirth” of positivism to those in which the work program of those scientists and philosophers—who in reality were not interested in arriving at a monolithic vision of the world—are not linear and cannot be traced back as if they were a normal develop- mental, almost automatic, process. And it must be emphasized that it is exactly in the development of such a process, it takes form—later articulated in the work program branded neo-logical positivism—a research project which was inimical to the convergence of the psychological and the logical point of view. Obviously this implies the recognition of the massively problematic nature of one of the most critical motives of the original conception of Mach, to the objectively insufficient and in fact equivocal and strongly conditioned by logical debate at the end of the century” (p. 205-206).

244 Ovi Symposium II

Stefano Poggi who authored Introduction to Positivism (1985) This is all the more true if one remembers that the elements which contributed to the crisis of the old and the new positivism can be traced back in Mach just as after the experience of the “Vienna Circle”, it can be traced back to Popper and his followers who also had a positivistic predisposition. These crises often enough took place within the schools themselves, as it had already happened for British Em- piricism which found within the genial reflections of Hume its most relevant and radical critique. As is well known, Hume’s philosophy, was the spring board for the overcoming, and to some extent for the deepening of the empiricist themes conforming to the new 19th century philosophy. Similarly, at the beginning of the new century was it not Croce who utilized the Machian critique to construct his theory of the pragmatism of the sciences? And were not the post-Popperians of the 70s to place in a crisis, accentuating exactly Mach’s instrumentalism, with an aggressive argumentation which was even greater than the first anti-positivistic reaction, the scientific epistemology of the last thirty years of the 20th century? We cannot now get into the concrete theoretical discussion on the specific philosophical doctrines of the new positivism, neither can we pretend to have exhausted, on the historical plane, the research of the origins. It would be both useless and pedantic for our research. Which does not means that we ought to deprive ourselves of searching for a unifying motive present in various schools of thought which, although containing the germs of the dissolution of neo-positivism, nevertheless contributed to the diffusion of a reappearing scientific mind-set. Even American pragmatism, for example, represents an antecedent to positivism, even if in some aspects it is also its negation. On the other hand, it is not always possible to clearly distinguish between schools of thought and individual philosophers. How can we classify the complex and at times confusing activity of Bertrand Russel, the work of Frege or Whitehead? What weight should we assign to Wittgenstein, the philosopher of positivism par excellance, but also one of those who contributed to the creation of a crisis within itself thus greatly modifying his own system of thought?

Ludwing Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Ovi Symposium II 245 But what ought to give us pause for reflection is the creation of “koinè”, of a Weltanschauung which pervades all fields of knowledge, even if philosophical thoughts per se continues to produce theories which are opposite to neo-positivism. Those new philosophers of science, secure in their new found verificationist creed (verificationism being the criterion, in truth not very original, by which they thought they could draw a line and determine the border between science and metaphysics), tended to interpret the world and, consequently to continue the criticism of interpretations of those who thought differently, reading it, so to speak via the analysis of language. Thus language, the new absolute container of facts and human life, is the protagonist of this new philosophy.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) In any case, neo-positivism and the so called “analytical” schools which originate with it, needs to be distinguished from classical positivism. This new mind-set does not include, and it will never include, the original enthusiasm for the progress of the sciences and the certainty that what they give us are absolute truths. There is a calculation at play of the probability of the veracity of sciences and of the same philosophical research and it becomes the focus of the new doctrines. The most famous of the neo-positivists after Wittgenstein, Carnap, writes a well thought out synthesis thus: “In one respect the two disciplines are similar; in the sense that they both are concerned with logical relations among enunciated, one (deductive theory) of the necessary implication, and the other (inductive theory) of the measurement of confirmation, interpreted as a numerical measurement of a partial implication. Nevertheless, staying with the usual exception of the word “inference” which indicates a passage of enunciated established by other enunciated, or the acquisition of a new assertion from given assertions, only the deduction appears to be enumerable among the inferences…The success of a inductive process, rather than consisting of the establishment of a corresponding assertion, includes as essential part the value which is obtained for its confirmation… Therefore, inductive inference, as distinct from deductive inference, is resolved not by the acquisition of an assertion, but in the determination of its confirmation measurement.”

Jean Piaget (1901-1980)

246 Ovi Symposium II So we see that neo-positivistic philosophy is founded on an empiricism with formalistic implications and logistics which will issue in a true scholasticism of formal logic.

Rudolph Carnap (1891-1970) Who wrote Logical Foundations of Probability in 1950 But the true and deep sense of the new positivism, with all the upside and the limitations which accompany positions which are too stark, was the attempt, via logical analysis of language and hypothetical-probabilis- tic empiricism to ferret out any form of overt or covert metaphysics. In this sense the triumph of the “facts” was proclaimed once again, even if the nature of those facts was different, against the assumed fairy tales of speculative philosophy. Here the famous essay of 1932 of Carnap titled The Overcoming of metaphisics through the logical analysis of language is instructive in as much as in it a confusion is detected between metaphysics and philosophy as a whole.

A.J. Ayer (1910-1989), a Founder of Logical Positivism The fundamental limit of such a position and vision of the world, which is in itself a metaphysics, (whose nature was denounced and individuated by many defenders of the same “school” such as Ayer) consisted in having destroyed philosophical problems without resolving them. It became fashionable to quote a sentence in the Tractatus of Wittgenstein which went like this: “On what we cannot speak we need to stay silent.” On what one needed to stay silent, if one surveys the analysis of the neo-positivists, is ethics, art, religion, history, or in other words, all which could not be inserted within the limitations of the linguistic analysis, all that interests men and not only scholars. In this aspect the new positivism was radically different from the first. It was devoid of the thrust, the efficacy of ethics and politics which the first one possessed. In this regard Nicola Abbagnano speaks of the first positivism as a sort of Romanticism of sciences to point out a certain naivite as well as its limits, but also its strength which invariably accompanies the great movements of opinion. The second one is more astute and it is certainly more rigorous, and perhaps less invasive, but it remains the expression of a shabby era which has lost many enthusiasms. Nazism, Stalinism, atomic explosions had left their mark. The critique of meta-

Ovi Symposium II 247 physics carried on even by non positivists philosophers like Heidegger and Croce, the German historicists, Sartre and many others had also left an imprint.

Ferdinand De Saussure (1857-1913) While in the philosophical field the contrast and the clash among various philosophies left no winners or los- ers, and while there was a withdraw from the real dialectic of life to the academic halls giving rise to mere academic wars, the real challenge and discussion, the fight for the domination of a pragmatic operative culture, was resolved at least for a period of time in the absolute victory of the positivistic mind-set. For a few years, in an obsessive mode, sociology, anthropology and psychoanalysis did in fact replace even philosophy.

Jacques La Can (1901-1981) In France, where this scenario unfolds, even the engagè existentialism of Sartre cannot keep up. While it is true that some philosophers of a certain reputation as speculative philosophers continue to operate and even the theology of the Catholic world carries on, the field is nevertheless dominated by Structuralism. This current of thought and opinion assumed the character of cultural fashion and represents one of the most typical examples of modern homologation driven by mass-media, cultural industry and academic schools. Ambiguous and agitated men, at the border between “literary scandal” and the current fashion, such as the psychologist-structuralist Jacques Lacan, obtained success by inserting themselves within the inane triumph of the structuralist movement which indeed exhibited some felt exigencies and found its “authors” in those antecedents which while not representing a significant moment in the history of thought, did surely contribute to the general culture. Hence De Saussure and the Russian formalists, and for some aspects, the gestaltists, were the “masters” of a Piaget (who dominates in the psychological-pedagogical), Althusser (who attempted the creation of a Marxist structuralism), Levi-Strauss (who essentially remained an anthropologist), Foucault (author of imaginative but not always rigorous historic-structural reconstructions), Lacan and many other scholars of various countries.

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Structuralism spread mostly in the field of linguistic and consequently in aesthetics. We can find antecedents in the so called stylistic critique of scholars as important as Vossler and Spitzer, however the general set-up of the new mind-set, and the particular researches, at times conducted with a truly excessive pedantry, represent the typical model of the recurring scientific mentality.

Antonio Labriola (1843-1904)

Karl Vossler (1872-1949) Author of The Spirit of Language in Civilization The metaphysical research of totalizing structures which determine history (with the consequent death of man, of subjectivity, of creativity, and therefore of freedom) implied on the level of specific researches, the possibility of cutting up history, art, life, to find, and often to invent nexuses among those parts that justified them as belonging to a totality which however could not fall into the infamous trap of the Hegelian method. But in reality Hegelian dialectic represented exactly the overcoming of the naïve structuralist exigency, the pretense of being able to fool the world while declaring its independence and determining its goals while

Ovi Symposium II 249 understanding it as determinate. In historicism we have the birth of the so called school of Annales headed by the great historian Marc Bloch which defended a quantifiable abstract kind of history and which damaged the middle instructions of French students, as it has been widely recognized.

Marc Bloch (1886-1944) In the field of literary and artistic criticism, the pretension of understanding poetry and language as constituent parts of ample structures which contained within them mini-structuralist elements, logically led to the denial of the value of a work of art, the very function of criticism and the poetic which then became a mere exercise devoid of any meaning. Man was depersonalized on the ethical as well as the intellectual level, subjectivity was humiliated to the point that the personal ethical and political commitment of individual scholars appeared as a happy contradiction.

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) The positivistic mind-set was also reflected in this pivotal aspect, which represented a parenthesis in a more vast mode of feeling life in years of conflicts and contradictions. The contradictions soon exploded in the political and the cultural field. There was the year of the contestation (1968), so to speak, which mixes the cards and not only in France. Together with the triumph of human sciences, of sociology and of psychoanalysis, the myth of the imagination to Power takes over, of absolute creativity and of historicity as a fundamental element of man. Those are the years when neo-Marxism reaches the apex of its success, becomes a common language, penetrates the consciousness of millions of people, hegemonies the press, the mass media, and the university.

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) The clash between neo-positivism and anti-positivism takes place exactly within the great Marxist political challenge. Granted that Lenin had insinuated himself in the discussion with his volume Materialism and empiricist critique, and that in Italy, Antonio Labriola and then Gramsci had contributed to the abolition of the myth of scientism, nevertheless in the 60s the same Marxists to accuse neo-positivistic epistemology of being the ideological cover, the very structure of Capitalistic power, the vehicle by which the domination of man on man is carried out, via s subtle technique of an occult persuasion. But even if within the school itself (as Lenin proves) Marxism had attempted a dialogue with the sciences, a fierce debate ensues between historicist neo-Hegelian Marxists and thinkers who sought to found Marxism on a new assumed progress reached by epistemology. One thinks of Louis Althusser in France and Galvano Della Volpe in Italy. But even thought the most conscious Marxism remained tied to thinkers such as Lukacs and Bloch (and in Italy to Labriola and Gramsci), even the contesting current presented itself as an antagonist of the ruling scientism. (End of part I; to be concluded as part II in the next session of the Ovi Symposium).

Ovi Symposium II 251 2 Does the Center Hold? And is the Enlightenment still to Enlighten itself?

Philosophical Reflections on the Spiritual Identity of Europe Apropo of the Ukrainian Crisis

A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity… --William Butler Yeats The historian Ernst Troeltsch once declared in one of his volumes that Europe had ceased to be Christian in the 18th century. Of course such a statement referred not to individuals but to the cultural identity of Eu- rope as a whole. Some post-modern thinkers such as Christopher Dawson not only would agree with that statement but would also point out that indeed the 18th century is the watershed separating Christendom, so called, or the old Europe, and the new modern Europe. This New Europe, after World War II has finally transformed itself in the European Union and is based on purely neutral, that is to say, non-ideological, economic, scientific, positivistic educational foundations. As Ernesto Paolozzi has well shown above, positivism and materialism’s residues remain strong in modern European culture. So the question aroses: are those foundations reliable and solid or is there something missing? Are the spiritual components of those foundations missing? And if so, is their absence a confirmation that a more perfect union transcending nationalism will forever elude the European Union? I have written three books on this thorny theme. Sometimes I feel that I am addressing the deaf or I am talking to a wall. In this presentation I will once again attempt to offer a brief distillation and summary of my answers to such a question. The answer seems all the more important to me in the light of the latest crisis in Europe hinting at a return of the iron curtain and of the cold war.

252 Ovi Symposium II Some post-modern philosophers such as Derrida echoing Heidegger attribute the problem of modernity to a mistake made at the beginning of Western culture, to Plato’s metaphysics in particular. This assumes an initial continuity between modern rationalism and the principles of reason as formulated by the ancient Greeks which is now severed. Others draw a distinction between the original principles of rationality and their modern interpretation. They trace the root of that distinction, with its dramatic political implications, to the modern turn toward the human subject as the only source of truth and its consequent pragmatism. This turn was initiated, to be precise, by Renè Descartes, widely considered the father of modern Western philosophy. What post-modern thinkers seem to reject is not only Enlightenment rationalism, but also the original Greek form of rationality. For them rationality is little more than behavioral attitudes, a sort of incessant self-correction and perfectibility patterned after the experimentalism and self-correction of science. This is considered progress within positivism and neo-positivism, as Paolozzi has correctly pointed out in the above essay. In fact, it is branded as a deterministic inevitable progress: the latest and newest is always the best. Allegedly, it does away with disastrous and destructive universalist totalizing ideologies, the grand scheme of things a la Hegel, the grand narrations, often at war with each other. The argument is this: it is better to be more modest in one’s goals and humbly attend to immediate social and economic needs. Welcome Epicurus and Lucretius, the relativism of the Pragmatists and the positivists, away with Plato’s grandiose Forms. What is conveniently side-stepped are some fundamental issues at which we shall look a bit more closely. Indeed, the ineluctable fact is that Europeans no longer agree on spiritual values; those values that, despite political conflicts, were in place prior to the Enlightenment and even prior to Christianity. It took the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (who in turn greatly influenced Havel) to dare propose, in the middle of the 20th century, a return to an idea that used to be characteristic of the European tradition since the Greeks but in the 20th century is seen as a scandal and an anomaly: the care of the soul by way of a great respect for truth and the intellectual life, holistically conceived.

Jan Patocka (1907-1977) Author of Plato and Europe Plato had claimed that it is through that life that we, as human beings endowed with a soul, partake of the life of the Ideas and share the life of the gods themselves. Later, Christians adopt this notion but change its direction. For Christians, teoria, or contemplation, remains the fundamental principle of any viable culture. Bereft of it, a civilization is left with nothing but a sort of aimless and blind praxis leading to its eventual destruction. Christopher Dawson for one explored and clarified this idea in his famousThe Making of Europe.

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Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) Author of The Making of Europe So, the next question is this: can such a principle based on the primacy of teoria, the soul and the spirit, as advocated by Plato play a role in the spiritual unification of Europe? Which is to say, must the commitment to reason abandon a sort of rationalistic universalism in order to embrace an opposite an anti-rationalist particularism? To deepen a bit more: is not abstract rationalism and its irrationalistic reaction responsible for much of the ominous nihilism which Nietzsche, for one, claimed hovers over Europe like a menacing specter? Has it not, in fact, corrupted the very principle of reason that, up to the Enlightenment, had constituted Europe’s spiritual identity? Has it not turned wisdom against itself?

A New Europe in Search of its Soul by Emanuel L. Paparella (2005) Prior to World War II, the philosopher who most acutely perceived the spiritual crisis that rationalism has caused in Europe was Edmund Husserl. In a famous lecture delivered in Prague on the very eve of one of the darkest chapters of modern European history, he said this: “I too am quite sure that the European crisis has its roots in a mistaken rationalism. That, however, must not be interpreted as meaning that rationality as such is an evil or that in the totality of human existence it is of minor importance. The rationality of which alone we are speaking is rationality in that noble genuine sense, the Greek sense, that became an ideal in the classical period of Greek philosophy.” All we need to do is give a cursory look at Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology to be convinced that Hus- serl regarded modern objectivism as the quintessential expression of this rationalism. It reduces the world, which for the Greeks was a spiritual structure, into an object, and reason into an instrument for manipulating matter.

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Edmund Husserl (1856-1938) One may ask, how then did Husserl view the spiritual identity of Europe? He advocated that the particular must be fully reintegrated with the universal, an idea that Kierkegaard too had proposed. Husserl says that “Clearly the title Europe designates the unity of a spiritual life and creative activity--no matter how inimical the European nations may be toward each other, still they have a special inner affinity of spirit that per- meates all of them and transcends their national differences…There is an innate entelechy that thoroughly controls the changes in the European image and directs it toward an ideal image of life and of being. The spirited telos (goal) of the European in which is included the particular telos of separate nations and individual persons, has an infinity; it is an infinite idea toward which in secret the collective spiritual becoming, so to speak, strives.”

Europe beyond the Euro (2012) by Emanuel L. Paparella An Ovi e-book available for free at the Ovi Bookshop But the question persists: is it possible at this point in its history to revive the spiritual idea of Europe? An idea that, despite its violent historical conflicts still ongoing in Bosnia and the Ukraine, not to speak of the renewed right leaning nationalist separatist movements, has kept its people united within an unrestricted diversity? Food for thought, to be duly digested by those of us who, like Husserl, are perceptive enough to sense the spiritual crisis he was talking about.

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Europa: An Idea and a Journey (2012) By Emanuel L. Paparella In his Philosophical Discourse on Modernity Jurgen Habermas attributes the failure of the Enlightenment to the intrusion of foreign elements which derailed its original program of full human emancipation. He finds nothing wrong with the project itself, aside from the fact that it was prematurely abandoned for a romantic return to some form of pseudo-religion, such as the worship of nature in the 19th century, the era of Roman- ticism. Undoubtedly there is something unfinished about the Enlightenment, but contrary to what Habermas believes, it is not the execution of the project that failed to reach a conclusion but the concept itself. Many question nowadays the very principle of rationality that directed Enlightenment thought. This may sound paradoxical, for indeed it is the adoption of reason by the Greeks and the subsequent synthesis with Christi- anity as achieved by Augustine and Aquinas that distinguishes European culture from all others and defines its spiritual identity.

Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) To be sure, the real culprit was not reason or rationality but rationalism, which was unknown to the Greeks. Rationalism is a modern invention inaugurated by Descartes and consisting in a separation of the particular from the universal and assigning supremacy to the universal while misguidedly assuming that a rationality constituted by the human mind could function as the same comprehensive principle that it had been for the Greeks. To the contrary, a rationality of purely subjective origin produces mere abstract, empty concepts in theory and pursues limited human objectives in practice, mostly narrowly focused upon economic and political concerns. Einstein had it on target: ours is an era characterized by perfection of means and confusion of goals.

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St. Augustine (354-430) who laid the foundation of a synthesis of Greek culture and Christianity Indeed, in developed societies where economic concerns have become all-important and dominant, the protection of sub-national identities and minority groups are at risk. One place where any obstacle to economic development has been successfully eliminated is the United States, usually mentioned as a model of federalism encompassing many nationalities. Many EU politicians advocate nowadays a United States of Europe. That may sound progressive, but it remains a chimera given that the nationalistic and regional identities are still very strong in Europe; nor is it necessarily desirable.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) It would be a mistake for the EU to imitate the US and attempt a repetition of a mega-nation which would translate into a super-power bent on power and the forcible exportation of democracy (an oxymoron if there ever was one). The crisis in Ukraine is indicative of this mistake. What Putin and the Russian mind-set fears most is a mega-nation right next to Russia bend on expansion of its territory. The better route for Europe is to deepen in spirituality rather than expand in territory. Not to do so has a price, that price will be further erosion of Europe’s original spiritual unifying principles, the very roots of its cultural identity, and the embracing of a bland mixture of varied cultures leveled to their least common denominator. Soccer games heralded as a unifying principle may indeed be emblematic of that mistake. What some Europeans fail to grasp is that what keeps so many ethnic nationalities and groups together in the US is a constitution which guarantees certain basic rights transcending nationality and even the very power of the State in as much as they are conceived as universal and inalienable even when they are breached in practice. Those enshrined ideals make “a pluribus unum” possible, as indeed the dollar bill proclaims.

Ovi Symposium II 257 As the conflicts in the Balkans which inaugurated the 21st century in Europe have shown only too well, it will prove quite difficult for Europeans with different languages reflecting diverse cultures to create a United States of Europe, but it would also be misguided if they do attempt it. As it is, all the worst features of Amer- ican popular culture have been imitated, even by those who are anti-Americans, while the best is largely unknown or ignored. This is a phenomenon which has always intrigued me whenever I travel to Europe. It can even be observed in the pages of Ovi magazine dedicated to the EU. That is not to deny that one of the major achievements of the European Union has been the preventing of a major destructive conflict on the continent at the level of a world war for the last sixty years or so. However, to count on mere political-economic motives to completely free Europe from its past destructive legacies may be a miscalculation. Calling oneself a “Newropean” will not do the trick either. It would suffice to take a hard look at the xenophobia that has raised its ugly head and pervades the EU nowadays, especially its most affluent countries. Superficially it seems directed at immigrants coming from outside Europe, the so called “extra-communitarians,” but often the real target is a neighboring country perceived as opportunistic or a parasite on the body politic called the EU. What seems to be lacking within this economic, political, educational coordination that is the EU is a deeper kind of integration based on an inclusive spiritual idea. How is this to be achieved in a secular democratic society pledged to protect the rights of all its citizens and their diversity? A nostalgic return to the Greek-Christian synthesis and the Christendom of medieval times (at times imposed politically) will certainly not do and is not even desirable. That was a synthesis meant for Europeans Christians (many of them forced to get baptized by their kings who found it politically convenient to switch from paganism to Christianity), not for non-Christians, not to speak of the non-Europeans which are now counted into the millions in Europe. In any case, it is undeniable that at present no spiritual foundation for a genuine unification exists. The present proposed Constitution which nobody even calls constitution any longer but a compact, mentions a fuzzy kind of spiritual heritage almost as an after-thought. Many Europeans don’t seem to be too concerned about such an absence, if indeed they even perceive it. And yet, some kind of new synthesis is needed. Unfortunately, it will not even be envisioned, never mind implemented, unless Europeans, begin a serious reflection and a debate on the original idea to which Europe owes it cultural unity and identity. That carries the risk of being perceived as an old European, maybe even an anti-modern and anti-progressive, rather than a “Newropean,” but I would suggest that without that original idea, which precedes Christianity itself, a crucial novantiqua synthesis will not be perceived either and Europeans will be sadly condemned to repeat their history. What is this European original foundational spiritual idea that precedes even Christianity? Simply this: a commitment to teoria, the theoretical life which in its Greek etymology means the contemplative or reflective life in all its various aspects: the philosophical, the scientific, the aesthetic; in short the primacy of a holistic life of contemplation. All this sounds strange to modern and post-modern ears accustomed to hear praxis and a purely pragmatic utilitarian notion of rationality emphasized over and above theory. Marx, for one, expressed such a mind-set in the 11th of the Theses on Feuerbach with this catch-all slogan: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is to change it.” Indeed, but to start with praxis is to put the cart before the horse. Unfortunately, postmodern theories, in an attempt to reject an extreme kind of rationalism, have also rejected the primacy of reason understood holistically and tied to the imaginative, which had ruled Western

258 Ovi Symposium II thought since the Greeks. Precisely the belief in that primacy, together with a common faith that could envision the transcendent, had been one of the spiritual foundations of Europe. It was that kind of devaluation and departure from foundational traditions that Husserl was decrying before World War II. Here the question naturally arises: is it still possible to revive the ideals behind Europe’s spiritual identity? If this requires returning to a common Christian faith and to a pre-modern concept of reason, it will prove practically impossible. Science, as the positivists have taught us, demands a more differentiated notion of reason than the one inherent in ancient and medieval thought. As for the common Christian faith that forged such a strong bond among Europe’s peoples, many Europeans have lost it, if they ever had it, and most recent immigrants, many of them Muslims never had it to begin with. This is not to forget that Moslem civilization in Spain during the Middle Ages was more developed and advanced than a Western civilization devastated by the Barbarians. Does the above reflection intimate perhaps that Europe must be satisfied with a merely political, technical, scientific, and economic integration? Such a spiritually “neutral” union does indeed appear to be “enlightened” in as much as it avoids the unfortunate religious-cultural conflicts of the past. Furthermore, many Europeans today think that social and cultural differences obstruct or slow down the process of economic growth and social progress. For the new barbarians, those whom Vico calls “the barbarians of the intellect,” the selling of cars or pizzas is more important for the market than cultural concerns or even ideological concerns. Why, then, don’t all Europeans adopt English as the common language for science, business, and technology, leaving French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages to private life? Again, this may sound strange to post-modern ears, but if the European Union were reduced to a means for smoothing out political and economic transactions among its member states, not only would the individual states, not to speak of regions, gradually lose their identity, they would also be doomed to play a very subordinate role on the world stage in the future. Even today, only a half century after the United States has economically and politically come to dominate the world, its powerful media and commercial enterprises have deeply affected the languages, the communications, and the cultural patterns of Europe. The effect is most visible in the smaller nations. Thus in the Low Countries the language of the news media has become infected with American idioms, bookstores are filled with American publications or translations thereof, television and cinema compete for the most recent American shows or films—all this at the expense of linguistic purity and respect for indigenous literature. The result is a general decline of native creativity. What is even more perplexing is that what is being imitated is not the best of American culture (which is there if one takes the trouble to look for it) but the worst and the mediocre. Be that as it may, whoever controls the economy of another country is likely to control its culture as well, as Benjamin, Adorno and Marx have well taught us. This is one of the main fears of Putin and the Russian mind-set, and it is not without foundation. Building a strong economy of one’s own, as Europe is doing at present, is a necessary step to resisting such domination. But that alone may not be sufficient. If the Euro- pean Union were to be reduced to a mere economic union, its leveling effect on European culture would in the end be comparable to the one the United States has begun to exercise. We are all Americans because we all drink Coca Cola; and we are all Europeans because we all go to soccer games on Sunday! To the contrary, Europe’s political and economic unification must be accompanied by a strong awareness of a distinctive cultural and spiritual identity. This is the reason why the dispute over Europe’s Christian heritage is so important. In writing the preamble to the EU constitution, the most significant element in the European

Ovi Symposium II 259 tradition is erased at the peril of building on political sand, as Kurt Held reminded us in his essay on Europe titled The Origins of Europe with the Greek Discovery of the World,” with the following words: “A European community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond. It would be built upon sand.” Powerful words. Is anybody listening?

Kurt Held (1897-1959) The American techno-economic model of a political union is not suitable for Europe, especially of a Europe which has forgotten its spiritual roots and in the past has substituted them with destructive political ideologies of the right and of the left. Being a new country, with immigrants from various traditions, the United States had no choice but to build politically on a spiritually and culturally neutral foundation, but the separation of Church and State is deceiving to most analysts. Its spiritual roots remained strong and were in fact a unifying principle as the slogan on its currency “In God we Trust” would suggest. Even today, more Christians attend Church on Sunday in the US than in the EU. This base enabled the United States to integrate the economy and the social institutions of its states into a strong and coherent unity that resulted in the most economically and politically powerful nation in history. But the glue that held the uniform structure together were the ideals of the Enlightenment (ultimately based on a Judeo-Christian ethos) as enshrined in its Constitution. There is a lesson there for Europe to be pondered carefully before embracing anti-Americanism or, even worse, a slavish imitation of all the worst features of American culture while ignoring what can admired. Contemporary Europeans have preserved their diverse languages, customs, and histories, even at the regional level, and that points to an appreciation for tradition and heritage which is indispensable for a strong cultural identity. But, to reiterate, Europe needs a strong spiritual reintegration as well as a political-economic one. That requires that it assimilate essential parts of its spiritual heritage: the Greek sense of order and measure, the Roman respect for law, the biblical and Christian care for the other person, the humanitas of Renaissance humanism, the ideals of political equality and individual rights of the Enlightenment. The values left by each of these episodes of Western culture are not as transient as the cultures in which they matured. They belong permanently to Europe’s spiritual patrimony and ought to remain constitutive of its unity. None can be imposed in a democratic society. Yet none may be neglected either, the theoretical no more than the practical, the spiritual no less than the aesthetic. In recent times Europeans, discouraged by the self-made disasters of two world wars, have been too easily inclined to turn their backs on the past, to dismiss it as no longer usable, and to move toward a different future declaring themselves “Newropeans” with a new modern identity. In the years after World War II, the model of that future was America. In recent years, Europeans have become more conscious of their specific identity and are beginning to intuit that such an identity resides in the past; it stems from a unique past, created by the hundreds of millions of men and women who for three millennia have lived on “that little cape on

260 Ovi Symposium II the continent of Asia” (Paul Valery) between the North Sea and the Mediterranean, between Ireland’s west coast and the Ural Mountains. It has given Europeans, in all their variety, a distinct communal face. This new awareness of cultural identity makes Europeans view the entire continent and its many islands, not only their country of origin, as a common homeland with common purposes. This unity of spirit in a rich variety of expressions must be remembered in forging the new European unity and ought to be mentioned in the EU’s constitution. It ought to be remembered also by North Americans whose roots are indeed partly Europeans; in that sense they too are also Westerners and inheritor of Western civilization, albeit accepting and integrating other experiences such as the African, the Native American, the Latin-American, the Asian.

Pope John-Paul II (1920-2005) Heidegger, in decrying the illusion of the technological neo-positivistic fix-all exclaimed that “not even a god can save us now,” which in the final analysis is a cynical cry of despair devoid of any ethical concerns. I am not so pessimistic and deterministic. I believe that a recovery of the true patrimony of Europe is still possible. I for one opt for the warning of a former Pope (Paul John Paul II) who in a speech at the EU Parliament on October 11, 1988 in Strasburg, warned Europeans that: “If the religious and Christian substratum of this continent is marginalized in its role as inspiration of ethical and social efficacy, we would be negating not only the past heritage of Europe but a future worthy of European Man—and by that I mean every European Man, be he a believer or a non believer.” I can surmise the astonishment of the “Newropeans” and assorted secular “brilliants” of neo-positivistic “faith” at such a quote and imagine them exclaiming: Really? To which I’d simply answer “Yes, really!” and then just add the proverbial injunction: let those who have ears, let them hear.

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Is Vico Hegel’s Predecessor? “An Imaginary Unknown Page from Hegel’s Last Months of Life”

by Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) This translation of this little-known piece by Croce appeared in The Personalist 45 (1964). It is the imaginative fulfillment of two impossible wishes, stemming from the Hegelian basis of Croce’s idealism: (1) to gain from Hegel directly an assessment of the essence of his philosophy; and (2) to gain Hegel’s approval of Vico as his predecessor. Croce’s first important essay on Hegel, What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (1907; English trans. 1915) remains an excellent source for the study of Hegel’s metaphysics, showing that the Hegelian dialectic is based on the contrariety of opposites, not on contradiction. Croce’s The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1911; English trans. 1913) remains a valuable study of Vico’s thought, despite its failure to recognize the originality and mportance of the “imaginative universal.” ...Who is Francesco Sanseverino, Hegel’s young Neapolitan visitor? He is first of all Croce… In 1948, Croce wrote an essay on Hegel in dialogue form called “An Unknown Page from the Last Months of Hegel’s Life.” This dialogue represents his most mature thoughts on the Hegelian philosophy. In a footnote added to a later edition of this essay Croce asks the reader: “Is it necessary to warn you that this ‘unknown page from the last months of Hegel’s life’ is a product of my imagination, a bit of whimsy that came to my mind one sleepless night, and which I wrote down in the morning?’” The content, however, is not just whimsy, for as Croce states, “I have taken the material from my familiarity with Hegel’s thought and from my frequent internal dialogues with Hegel.” Even the setting of the dialogue “is not altogether without historical foundation, for traces of a fruitful and critical attitude toward the Hegelian philosophy are truly to be found in the nineteenth-century Neapolitan culture, and if not in 1830, at least about the middle of the century.” Croce closes the footnote with the observation that “Criticism, as well as the power to state a new truth, which are always indivisible, have, in the present case of Hegel, a particular importance, because they have the power to determine the general direction of philosophy in our time, that is, the road which it must necessarily and logically follow, and which, moreover, it has in fact already begun to travel.” --Donald Phillip Verene

262 Ovi Symposium II

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) “Who is it?” said Professor Hegel, raising his head from the large writing desk and from the papers in which he was immersed. The servant, who had just answered the knocking at the front door, was entering Hegel’s study. “A foreign gentleman who would like to speak to you, and wishes to know if you will receive him. He has written his name here.” The professor read: “Francesco Sanseverino of Naples,” and he suddenly remembered the young Neapolitan who had come to pay him a visit in Berlin about seven years ago, in the spring of 1824, furnished with a letter of presentation from an Austrian general and diplomat who had been in Italy at the time. This young man had become acquainted with Germany in 1812–1813 as an officer in one of the Neapolitan regiments which participated in the Napoleonic expedition in Russia, and later in the factional wars which followed in German territory; and, intelligent and studious as he was, he had tasted the quality, vigor, and originality of the intellectual life of that country, and had been attracted to it. When he returned to Naples he continued to procure and read German books and to nourish his desire to revisit Ger- many in order to become better acquainted with its new culture and its new philosophy. And when, in 1819, he had the chance to go to Berlin for the second time, he was able to witness the ascent of the Hegelian star, and to hear the impressive inaugural speech which Hegel had given the year before to introduce his university lectures (wherein the German people were designated as the “elect of God in philosophy”), and he observed how after the war of liberation the impetus toward greatness and philosophical superiority had united with the impetus toward faith in the new power of the Prussian state. In 1824, when he embarked on his journey, he had already completed a careful reading and had seriously studied all the books published by Hegel: the Phenomenology, the large Logic, the small Encyclopedia, and finally the Philosophy of Right, and he had even obtained some of the essays published here and there in magazines; but he was still in a period of learning and of turning over in his mind what he had learned, more eager still to listen than to speak. He paid a visit of respect to Hegel, in which he made known his admiration and the labor that he was dedicating to the Master’s works and that he hoped to fi nd himself through them. Hegel was pleased with the simplicity and sincerity of his words, and also with the Neapolitan irony by which he looked at himself objectively, with an understanding that does not exclude a smile. Sanseverino listened to Hegel’s lectures at the university, and met and talked with some of the greatest Hegelian scholars of the time such as Marheineke, Gans, Henning, Hotho, Michelet—the Master’s faithful disciples; but not even with them did he engage in discussion. He told Hegel of his intention to come back and visit with him within a year and was kindly encouraged to do so.

Ovi Symposium II 263 Back in Naples he resumed his study and meditation, and he was able to tread the Encyclopedia, published in 1827, which had been greatly amplified and enriched, and he resigned himself to his inability to obtain the course of lectures which the students were later to publish, although they were undoubtedly very useful for the development they presented, especially that of the history of philosophy and aesthetics, and for which the books written by Hegel provided in nuce the principles and essential outline. He finally returned toward the end of the summer in 1831, and found that the Master had recently arrived from the countryside, where he had taken his family in order to avoid the main part of the cholera epidemic which had spread to Germa- ny. He was courteously received by Hegel, who was a well-mannered man, free of that roughness of which Germans sometimes vainly boast. After he had told Hegel about his work during the intervening years (he avoided, however, any mention of his participation in the Neapolitan constitutional revolution of 1820–1821, knowing how Hegel thought in politics, and how these revolutions and convulsions were judged by him as due to an “inferiority of the Latin people”), the Master asked to what conclusions his studies had led him. This brought Sanseverino to the point of his visit and the topic that he wanted to discuss. Sanseverino asked first of all for permission to give a more detailed account of the reasons why he greatly admired Hegel’s philosophy, or rather, the very attitude of his philosophy, which seems to have originated in mental needs far richer and more modern than those of even such a revolutionary as Kant. “Kant,” he said, “was oriented toward the physico-mathematical sciences as the true and proper field of human knowledge, and he had also been a direct cultivator of these. But he neglected and almost ignored the history of mankind, and even had but a it and miss knowledge of the history of philosophy itself. He was not very sensitive to poetry: his poets were Horace and Pope. He had no experience of the other arts, with the exception perhaps of music, which he judged the ‘indiscreet art,’ because it makes itself heard even when one does not wish to hear it. By a miracle of critical acumen, by gathering the observations of those who were beginning to discuss the nature of taste, he came to recognize in a negative but profound way some aspect of beauty; but he did not identify this with art, and he understood art as a game combining intellect and imagination, which was a conception not too far removed from the traditional one of art as an imaginative embellishment of a didactic content. “The lack of a historical sense weakened his theory of politics; the lack of a poetic sense weakened his religious conceptions; his own ethics were austere, but also abstract and not very human. He was a revolutionary who preserved a culture almost entirely of the eighteenth century; he was a romantic in his a priori synthesis, in his conception of the beautiful, in his postulation of the practical, while his education had been classical and intellectualist. “But your philosophy,” the Neapolitan interlocutor concluded, “is an entirely different matter: it is not oriented toward physics and mathematics, but toward poetry, of which it is a complement, toward religion, which it clarifies, and toward history, which gives it concreteness and actuality. With this kind of interest it answers more than any other to the nature of philosophy, and to the moral needs of the modern era. “And then,” he added, “there is something else in the physiognomy of your philosophy that pleases me. Despite its severity and sometimes didactic aridity, I can perceive a man who has felt passionately, a man who has loved and has lived. Could Kant ever have written those words of the Philosophy of Right that defi ne and dignify the conjugal state, in which the natural instinct loses its importance and above it is formed a spiritual and substantial bond, indissoluble, and superior to the accidents of our passions and desires? “I will not repeat how the old bachelor Kant defined matrimony, which for him was a contract. Nor would a Kant ever have become as enchanted as you in admiring the penitent Magdalen, as portrayed by Italian

264 Ovi Symposium II painters, in such a way as to show indulgence toward Magdalen and to interpret kindly her sentiments and her life, because (and one would say on this point even you were conquered by the seductions of the sinner) with her beauty, with her overflow of feeling, she could not help but to love nobly and profoundly, and one could say that her error, her beautiful and touching error was her excess of sorrow and penitence. “And what disdain and scorn toward the ascetics who pursue their own moral perfection, toward those scrupulous ones who torment themselves in their eagerness for that perfection! ‘What does the world care,’ she says to them, ‘about your belabored and studied perfection,which, after all, is a rather egotistical and vain pursuit? What does the world care since it wants and expects constructive works? You have sinned: well, don’t think too much about it and redeem yourself through works.’ “Beneath the philosopher I like to fi nd a man who loses his patience now and then and who has a sense of humor. For example, when you thought about Newton (understood as standing for the mechanical conception of reality) and his discovery caused by an apple falling on his head, you jokingly observed that the apple had always been an evil omen for mankind: it was responsible, through Eve’s sin, for man’s expulsion from his earthly paradise; and also, through the judgment of Paris, for the Trojan War, and now for Newto- nian physics. Another example of your humor is when you told your worthy colleague Schleiermacher, who restricted religion to a ‘feeling of dependence,’ that on these terms ‘the best Christian would be a dog.’” Hegel smiled at these quotations from his satirical remarks, and particularly those which recalled to memory events of his life, his loves, the natural son whom he had brought into the world, and even the moments of jealousy which he occasionally caused his young wife, whom he loved and venerated, by his excessive attention to beautiful singers. “After having declared my sympathy, if I may say so, with your philosophy, with the physiognomy of your philosophy, it is now for me to determine the great truths that you have introduced into philosophy, the great truths which, even though they could be misunderstood, denied, or abused (and in your present adversaries one can already see the signs of such reluctance and rebellion), no one will ever be able to destroy them, because they will always spring up again from their roots. But for this too I need your permission. I cannot state these truths as you state them, using the same words in the same order, with the presuppositions, consequences, and references that these truths introduce. If I had to state them in this way it would be better for me to remain silent. The poetry of a poet I can, rather I must, read by transfusing and immersing myself into his words, sounds, and rhythms, thus joining my soul to his, actively participating with him only in those things in which he reveals himself as a poet. But a philosophical sentence must be received by thought, that is, one thought received by another thought, the latter receiving it by embracing and enveloping it, and only through critical elaboration can it be comprehended.” “Indeed,” Hegel observed, “I have become rather impatient with the frequent repetition of my formulas. Some time ago a Hungarian used to follow me around, and in order to prove to me that he knew my philosophy, he memorized page after page of my books, and he used to recite them to me; and I, in order to get rid of him, had to tell him that this was heroic and admirable, but that it showed little speculative talent. Even our dear Mr. Cousin does not give me much comfort, for he is very interested in my philosophy but refuses in advance to understand it as something above and beyond him. ‘Ah, how difficult this all is!’ he would exclaim, pressing his hands to his head, whenever any of my pupils would offer an explanation to one of his questions. And he was impatiently awaiting, as he told me in one of his letters, the publication of the new Encyclopedia in order ‘to grasp something,’ and ‘to adjust to his size some shreds of my great thoughts.’

Ovi Symposium II 265 Even my students disappoint me with their excessive fidelity, which has a tendency to make static that which I feel in me as dynamic, and I am afraid of a slavish dependency whereby faith in the teacher predominates, for with this comes the partiality and fanaticism of a school. “I also wish, and have so far waited in vain, to see my thought return to me via the mediation of another mind that understands and comprehends; that is, as you said, that critically understands and translates into other words. Therefore I am listening with great interest to hear from you in your own words what those great truths of mine are.” “First of all, you have put an end to the absurd theory of philosophical concepts, separated from facts, thinkable in themselves apart from facts; you have also put an end to the no less absurd theory of facts established in themselves without concepts. The concept, which is the concrete universal, or Idea, as it may be called, is the unity of the universal and the individual, and therefore is judgment in action. Thus, the new concept of the philosophical concept has its origin in the Kantian a priori synthesis; but it is to your credit that you have lifted this out of the physico-mathematical sciences for which Kant had at first constructed it, and have recognized it as the law of knowing (or better still, one should say, of the spirit) in all its forms; and you have seen that the true judgment is not merely a classification or empirical proposition, but is a judgment of categories, that is, a judgment of value.” “Now, given the concept of the concrete universal, the distinction between the ‘truth of reason’ and the ‘truth of fact’ vanishes, each being a truth of reason and a truth of fact at the same time; and, as a consequence of the greatest importance, not only does the separation between history and philosophy vanish, but also the distinction between them. Every historical proposition contains a philosophical affirmation, and every philosophical proposition contains a historical affirmation. History is redeemed from the contempt in which it has been held for centuries as a mere report of facts, and philosophy is redeemed from the vacuity and uselessness of which it has been and still is accused. But this implicit identification, which is of the greatest importance to the mental life, this healing of a generally admitted and acknowledged scission, is accompanied by a separation—which is the second great truth and of no less importance—a separation of two mental forms which were badly fitted together and molded on one another, and whose unity has always been attempted, that is, of philosophy and science.” “The concepts of science—as you have observed—are a product of the intellect, not of reason, are arbitrary and not necessary, and obey not philosophical but practical needs. With this, philosophy acquires its full autonomy in regard to science, and science in regard to philosophy: the problem of the one is not that of the other. The third great truth is the definitive resolution of the dualism of positive and negative, of good and evil, of light and dark, of Ormazd and Ahriman, thanks to the demonstration that the negative is not opposed to but within the positive, that evil is not opposed to the good, that non-being is not opposed to being but is in being, so that true being is becoming. The negative moment is not reality in itself, but reality caught in its becoming, in the effort of the separation and overcoming of one form and the reaching of another, when the form which must be overcome and which resists or tries to escape overcoming presents itself for this very reason as negative and as evil, as error, ugliness, and death.” “From this dialectic comes the important aphorism that ‘what is real is rational and what is rational is real,’ that is, the sacred and divine (because willed by God) character of the past and of history, on which we build and from which we progress, but of which no part can be denied or condemned without denying or condemning and destroying the whole texture of history and reality. but the undisputable truth of that aphorism sometimes seems to vacillate in the person who feels the actual and terrifying presence of the evil he

266 Ovi Symposium II is fighting against; for this reason it is necessary to add that the duality of the rational and the real, which is abolished by historical thought, is posited, re-established, and firmly held by the practical and moral conscience, through which it defines its own terms (Sein and Sollen), and which is not theoretical but practical and moral action. This should reassure all those who are afraid that the moral conscience will disappear from the world, that evil will be equated with good, and that the brutality of fact will be substituted for judgment and moral action.” “In your interpretation,” said Hegel, “I recognize my own thought; but there is also something more, something that I have not put there, and which, it seems to me, I cannot put there, like the identification of philosophy with historiography, the practical character of the natural sciences, and the different relation of the rational to the real in historical reality and in practical and moral action; and above all there is much less of what I have brought together as essential to my system.” “It is for this reason,” replied Sanseverino, “that I felt it necessary to declare at the beginning that your thought, such as I would have stated it if I had to summarize it, was only such as I could expound as true or verified after passing it through my mind, and consequently it includes inferences which you did not make and excludes other inferences and developments which you did make, but which I am unable to accept as true. Would you be so kind as to make allowance for one of my statements by removing from it every shade of arrogance, and by taking it only in the sense that even a genius, besides being divine, is also human, which brings out the splendor of the divine?” “When I pass from your great and fertile principles to their actual application in your system, it seems to me that a malign force has frequently intervened, preventing these principles from reaching their logical consequences, and forcing you to accept that which was intrinsically extraneous and contradictory to them, and worse still, applying the dialectic to that which it does not fi t, and, worst of all, rendering the dialectic superficial and mechanical by forcing it to be used in this way. Now, I cannot say how this has happened, because if truth justifies itself and affirms its own reasons, then error cannot point to its origin as non-truth because with that it would reveal itself as an error, and would deny itself, and the critic, or the author turned critic of his own thought, can well define what a given error consists of, but never exactly how it arrived with him in the world. On this point only more or less abstract and psychological conjectures are possible, unless one is willing to be satisfied with a generic statement, like the one that every error originates in following an impulse different from pure thought, an impulse different in kind but basically always, in one way or another, utilitarian.” “If I said, for example, that you have given birth to error by letting yourself be dominated by traditional religious conceptions, or by the traditional doctrines, divisions, and methods of the schools, then I certainly would have indicated a connection between those errors and those conceptions and doctrines, but I would not have explained the inexplicable, for how is it possible that your powerful genius, which as rebelled against and destroyed so many time-honored convictions and preconceptions, could have remained subject to them in other cases, that is, why could it not have proceeded with the great work of refutation? Indeed, it is impossible to assign a ‘why’ to that which has not taken place; and an error is in the final analysis an assumed but unactualized concept, which is not thinkable, and therefore has not taken place.” “Well,” Hegel said, “let’s put aside the question of the ‘why’ which even I do not believe can be defined, and which perhaps does not even exist, and tell me all about the part of my system which you find unaccept-

Ovi Symposium II 267 able. Also, make a point by point indictment against me, and I will willingly listen, for it will be a great relief from the insipid criticism which is directed against me in the magazines and journals, and from the frequent praise and agreement which surrounds me. I see clearly that you are not one of those haughty opponents, of whom there are plenty, who bore me with their useless and vain contradictions. But you have a thoughtful and meditative mind, in which contradictions are born in inquiry, and are part of the inquiry itself.” “And I,” replied the Neapolitan, “will take advantage of your generosity and license, for it allows me to present a sort of indictment, as you call it, which, because of its boldness, is a form favorable to the preciseness of critical formulations, and which is as agreeable to me as it should be to you, since you have no time to waste: boldness, after all, in this case is a literary form and not an indication of lack of respect. To start with, I would like to ask what has given you the right to conceive and work out a ‘philosophy of nature’? This really surprises me for you had already exposed the fact that the science of nature is a construction of Verstand, of abstract intellect which proceeds via conventions and arbitrary divisions of the indivisible, and from that you reached the necessary although not explicitly expressed conclusion that Nature as something external has no other reality outside of this natural science, with which it entirely coincides; that is, it is no longer per- missible to speak of Nature either as a form or degree of reality, or as ‘the other in itself,’ opposed to spirit, for the mystery of nature has already been exposed by you, thanks to a simple logical analysis.” “Well, notwithstanding that, and in spite of that, you have continued to acknowledge the reality of nature, and a super-science or philosophy of it, the ‘philosophy of nature,’ by which you have in fact revived antiquated Aristotelianism and the semi-mythological natural philosophy of the Renaissance, because of which and against which Galileo had erected a physico-mathematical and experimental science, whereas you have taken the antiquated philosophy of nature from the hands of your young friend Schelling, elaborated it, and made it your own; and you have not been afraid of this gift which was handed to you by that lively and agile genius, though you recognized the weakness and speculative inferiority of his thought in relation to yours. It would not have been so bad if this philosophy of nature had joined itself to your system, beyond and above the science of nature, without being bound to it in any way, as an allegory or fantasy to be either accepted or rejected. But you have placed it in a relation of continuity with the science of nature, whose concepts ‘would pave the way’ and would prepare for the final work of philosophy. Philosophy cannot accept those concepts since they are arbitrary and conventional, either as its forerunners or as its helpers, and thus philosophy must get rid of them at the beginning, because they don’t belong to it, not even as construction material.” “And in addition to this practical negation of the logical theory of the natural sciences, which is one of the most important principles established by you—a redeeming principle—you have also formed in another field a philosophical discipline which is the negation of the unity of philosophy and history: the ‘philosophy of history.’ If philosophy and history become identical in the unity of the concrete universal, then one cannot conceive of a philosophy that treats history philosophically, a history which is already in itself and for itself philosophical; and you, because of that philosophy, have lost the intimate unity of philosophy and history. Contributing to this is the little esteem in which you have always held historians as unthinking narrators of facts; but a more sensitive examination would have shown you that whenever history and not chronicles is in question, thought intervenes to interpret, qualify, and spiritualize the narration; and far better, deeper, and richer is that narration insofar that the work of thought is better, deeper, and richer, so that there is no way of breaking the unique and continuous process and of indicating the point at which the work of philosophy which was really present from the beginning, could be inserted.”

268 Ovi Symposium II “Indeed, in this respect there should not be anything else to do except to make a pedagogical recommen- dation: that is, for the historians to develop, correct, and deepen the philosophy which is implicitly adopted and to dismiss their fear of philosophizing, and for the philosophers to cast off their disdain and ignorance of historical things and to attend to a philosophy better than that which they held in the past and which they still hold, a philosophy which is much more pertinent to a knowledge of man and history.” “The ‘philosophy of history’ can be found in the Hebrew prophets and in Christian theology, and, after having disappeared almost completely in the historiography of the Renaissance (though it was kept alive in the theology of the Christian universities), it reappeared in the Neo-Kantian philosophy, and it has found in you an authoritative supporter, although it is neither philosophy nor history but an oscillation which equally injures both the philosophical moment and the historiographical one. Even though you have been highly praised for your new and original interpretations of the great philosophers, proving that you are a genius of equal caliber, for you have raised the history of philosophy above purely erudite history and above those who are partially pledged to engage in the defense of a single school or of a neutral and eclectic philosophizing—even though you have done this, the method of the philosophy of history introduces into the history of philosophy the predeterminate design of a unique problem which philosophy would undertake to explore to its beginning, would continue to explore more deeply in the course of time, and would fi nish by resolving it, and with this close its own history.” “The same or analogous thing happened in the history of art and religion. They were all placed, thanks to that philosophical treatment of super-history, in Procrustean beds, and all were eager to get rid of these restraints and to take a freer course—a course all the more truly philosophical the less one introduces into it a repetitious and arbitrary philosophy, an artificial and preconceived design.” Hegel attentively followed this accusation, especially what was said about the disturbing element which had introduced itself into his very popular lectures on the history of philosophy, art, religion, and the state; but he did not say a word.” Sanseverino continued: “I also did not understand why you ever wanted to preserve the tri-partition which was common to the German schools of the eighteenth century, and which has had a long history, going back to the ancient times of the Stoics, of logic and metaphysics on the first level, and philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit on the second level. After we have banished the philosophy of nature, for the reasons I have given, and compared the logic and the philosophy of spirit with one another, it is difficult to see why the fi rst does not completely jump over into the second and dissolve itself in it. A philosophy of spirit in which the logical spirit does not have its whole development can hardly last. On the other hand, the logic that you have presented is itself already partially a philosophy of spirit, because it embraces the cognitive spirit, the practical spirit, and the absolute or dialectic spirit, which is the backbone of philosophy, and it also embraces the anti-dialectic, dividing, and abstracting function of the intellect, which is the father of science.” “From this one can see that your categories are understood at least in part as forms of spiritual activity, although others of these categories are omitted, and in other parts the categories follow one another as a catalogue of concepts to be clarified. I abstain from entering into details concerning your theories of right, politics, art, religion, and absolute spirit; but it seems certain to me that the Logic, placed at the head of the system, occupies the same place as it did in the old school systems, functioning as an organ whose purpose it is to build the system, whereas a philosophy such as the philosophy of spirit cannot be constructed if it does not at the same time construct the whole, that is, the full concept of the spirit. But that which mainly comes before me in this system as contrary to the above established great logical principles is not only its

Ovi Symposium II 269 divisions and the place given to the various doctrines, but also and above all the end to which your system is directed and the method which you use.” “It corresponds completely to a history of the world and its creation, or rather to God before the creation of the world, who has at His disposal all the categories necessary for the creation of the world, and at last He decides to create it by getting out of Himself, by transforming Himself into something else, by making Himself nature, and then from nature, which is animated by His divine breath, He re-emerges in man, in the consciousness and spirit of man, and little by little he becomes subjective or cognitive spirit, and from this is transformed, converting Himself into objective or practical spirit, and creates the world of right, of morality, economics, politics, history, and from history He finally returns to Himself as absolute spirit, at fi rst through the two progressive but insufficient attempts of art and religion, and then as pure Idea, being completely satisfied and happy with Himself.” “Such is the picture of your philosophy, which is the picture of the cosmos, and a history with a given theme and a predetermined end, so that all the steps which are completed in it are a concatenation of solutions which become less and less imperfect, but which are imperfect nevertheless, except the final one which marks the end of the world and the entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. But how does it happen that a thought, which by means of the concept of the concrete universal had liberated man from the phantasm of nature and made of it a voluntary construction, voluntary but evidently not arbitrary because it turns out to be useful for certain ends, and in compensation you have given it the endless field of history, with its perpet- ual becoming and the infinite creation of always new forms—how does it happen that this thought relapses into a conception of transcendental religiosity, in such a way that I have already heard from the students who surround you, and with whom I had a chance to talk, of a renewed theism and a renewed and clarified Christian theology?” The Master had listened to this criticism without batting an eye; but Sanseverino, even though he was hurrying at the end, added this corollary: “And what about the method” he said, “the method which should have been the dialectic one, and which you employed under the name of dialectic in the construction of your system, is it not perhaps the destruction of the dialectic itself, that is, if a great truth could ever be destroyed once the mind had grasped and formulated it? “Not even you, Master, could destroy the force which you have set free from the dark cave in which it was shut; by now the force is in the world and no one will ever be able to drive out, cancel, or weaken it, not even its own liberator, at whose disposal it has never really been, and even without him it will continue by means of its own vigor and right to dominate, correct, and judge, searching and finding others who will perform these services which it seems that you, after having rendered one of the greatest and most memorable services, no longer wish to give it. Either you do not want to see it, or you cannot; but such is the fate of man, of the superior man who comes into the world with a mission to perform, who knows that the work of thought, the human work, goes on to infinity, and he must resign himself to the fact that the lamp of life will pass to other hands.” “A great Neapolitan philosopher, whom you have probably not yet read or been able to study, although in these last few years his major work has been translated into German, a genius whom you could recognize not only as your precursor but also as someone who satisfies some needs that were overlooked by you, and who, although Catholic by profession, is much more free from the ties of ancient religious beliefs—I am speaking of Giambattista Vico—who after he had written and rewritten his masterpiece several times, stopped, and felt that he had completed his task in the world, and in two lines of one of his sonnets he

270 Ovi Symposium II touched on this event of his personal history: From this trembling hand falls my pen, And the treasury of my thoughts has been closed.”

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) “But, to return to the dialectic, how did it originate, and what did it later become? It began as an attempt to sweep away the dualism of positive and negative, of truth and error, of life, and death, of good and evil, and the terms it used for this were the forms, the categories, the values of the spirit, the true, the beautiful, the useful, and their contraries; and because of this the act itself was a distinction between these forms and a transfer of one into the other, a becoming, through the purgatory or hell of nothing, or as one might call it, the negative potency—impotency of being, in such a way that man at every instant conquers the good, the beautiful, the practical, the true, and at every instant risks losing them, unless he acquires another new one, as it is imposed upon him by his own spiritual nature. But this categorial character and this intrinsic distinction in the dialectic have been obliterated by you in the course of the construction of the system, in which, by means of an arbitrary dialectic and a mere formula, you have dialecticized that which cannot be made dialectical, that is, the empirical concepts and the collective historical processes; this is the result of the historical-theological design that you have accepted and have attempted to carry out.” “The reflective man will never be able, before the display of that wearisome history of continual delusions, to utter the cry of Faust to the fleeting moment: Stay, you are beautiful; and he will always find himself before an act which does not give this moment of satisfaction and repose because it never becomes united within itself, contradiction remains intrinsic to it, and intrinsic also is the anxiety to get outside it. Indeed, in this vision good and evil break out of their confines: the good which is not changes into the evil which always is, except in the final and definitive instant, where we find the further inconvenience that that which no longer is is the world itself—the world in which we live and with which the philosopher must acquaint us, encouraging us to live in it with dignity.” Hegel did not interrupt Sanseverino, and he remained attentive but silent. He felt that it would be a sign of little courtesy or intelligence to engage in a dispute with a man who had meditated over his books, and who had confidently come to pour into his soul and mind the conclusions of many years of labor, which deserved to be rethought by him before making them the object of contradiction and dispute, or even of major or minor assent; nor, on the other hand, did his interlocutor expect an answer, aware as he was that when confronted by objections of this kind a serious mind cannot surrender, but only rethink them at the right time and place, and wait to see if they will give new stimulus or open new ways to his own thought in its original course.” Therefore he listened and kept silent; and instead of engaging in philosophical discourse, he stood up, fa-

Ovi Symposium II 271 miliarly put his arm under the interlocutor’s arm, and led him over to a window of his studio. His house was a small one on the arm of the Spree at Kupfergraben, close to the city but far from its noises; and he pointed across to the castle of Monbijou, which could be seen ahead, with its gardens and the recently begun buildings of the huge museums. And, at the break in the conversation, Hegel asked simply and affectionately what Sanseverino was planning to do upon his return to Naples. “I plan to continue to be your scrupulous, grateful, and devoted disciple, who will never forget how much he has learned from you, and how by you he has been led to higher altitudes of thought, freed from doubts and tormenting struggles, and made a despiser of that vulgar and superficial philosophy to which most people adhere. The task that I will set myself will be to outline a systemization which, in my opinion, follows logically from your great speculative truths but which is not that which the surrounding society and the German tradition have induced you to make: not a theological one but a secular one; not complicated and heavy but simple and agile.” “If the unity of philosophy and history can be inferred from the concept of the concrete universal—an inference which you refused to make and still do not want to admit, but which is necessary—then that which truly occupies and fills in the entire field of knowledge is history; furthermore, it conforms to a human need, which is not to know ideas in themselves but facts, i.e., concrete reality, to which the knowledge of ideas is indispensable but instrumental. And if this is the way things are, what form will philosophy take? None other than a logic of history, that is, a clarification of the concepts by means of which historical interpretation is carried out. And this logic or methodology is a thing of no little value, because it is neither more nor less than an entire philosophy of spirit; it is a philosophy which cannot be exhausted by any book because it is in a continual process of growth, and because history, with its movement causing new problems for thought, creates a never-ending process.” “Philosophy is never definitive, and systems are not static but always in process, and it is better if we call them provisional systemizations, intervals where one can catch one’s breath whenever it is possible to do so, as at the end of a period of completed meaning. None of the problems which have presented themselves as problems to philosophy remains excluded by this philosophy of spirit, which welcomes them all and re- solves them by reducing them to problems of the spirit, in whose sphere solely, if they have a meaning, they are solvable. Therefore, the professor of philosophy should not be afraid that the methodological conception of philosophy is an impoverishment of philosophy, because, on the contrary, it is an enrichment, and it wants lively minds which, to speak truly, we do not usually fi nd in those professors who amuse themselves with ancient, inconclusive, and sterile problems. And in this philosophy of spirit it will be necessary to reconstruct the theory of art and aesthetics by removing from it what remains of ancient rhetoric and poetics and of recent psychologism, and by understanding the aesthetic principle in its originality by purifying and preserving it from contamination, whether panlogistic or hedonistic.” “It will be necessary at the same time to found a philosophy of vitality, or of utility, as one may call it, by unifying that which is dispersed in the various theories of politics, economics, motivation, etc. It will be necessary to formulate a theory of historiography, including a criticism and history of this theory; and I leave out other desiderata that I have in mind.” “Naples, with the minds that gather there from the provinces of southern Italy, is a city in a certain way dis- posed to these studies; it has given to Italy almost all its philosophers worthy of the name, and it is always open to sublime speculation, yet not without a certain sense of realism which recalls the concrete and his-

272 Ovi Symposium II torical. Herder, Hamann, and even Goethe were aware of and sensed the philosophical strength of Naples. And now, with the new young king, one can breathe; hope and faith are reborn; ‘private studies,’ as they are called, which are schools of university level outside of the university, multiply rapidly, and they are due to the free choice of those eager to learn; foreign books circulate, and serious magazines are published by well-prepared writers—so I am not disappointed to have to return down there. Even your philosophy is beginning to be known, but alas, just in a way I wish it would not be: as a sort of rationalized religion, whose cultivators already assume an air of priestly intonation, and they will attempt to form a church. This is a danger which it will be necessary to counteract.” Thus conversing they finished the day, and their hearts felt as close as their minds, for the opposition of ideas sometimes creates a sort of nearness and brotherhood. Hegel, when Sanseverino was leaving, said to him with a certain moving affection that he was counting on another visit of his to Berlin in the not too distant future. But in the days that followed he always had in mind that conversation, attempting to re-examine his own theories in the light of the objections that had been raised by the Neapolitan gentleman. He tried to defend them to himself and was retaken by doubts which had occurred to him at other times, but never with the same force as they now had. Hegel had conceived a philosophy which had given a foundation to the universe and closed history; his system completed, ordered, and fulfilled a millennium of philosophical work; it recognized the contribution that every other system had made and reconstructed them all in a powerful final act of correction and synthesis. And, after this, the history of man reached its completion by reconnecting the beginning to the end, and it was not possible to see from where a new stimulus or material for work could come. But this, which would seem to be a colossal presumption, was the consequence of the design adopted by a philosophy modeled on the traditional religious account of the Creation, of the laborious course of the world, and of its resolution in the world beyond. Because of this its author was free from that self-glorification, that expectation of present applause and future triumph, and from that fanaticism which animated Tommaso Campanella, the foreteller of the City of the Sun and the perfection that the world would reach before chaos could turn everything into one.

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) Author of The City of the Sun: a Poetical Dialogue (1602) The philosophical sovereignty which Hegel had exercised over the last decade of his life, and which still retained its full vigor, did not intoxicate him. Nor must it be believed that he was satisfied and secure with his own work; his son Charles heard him exclaim: “What God has damned me to be a philosopher?” His wife said that often in the midst of his work she used to hear him muttering: “I cannot get my hands out of it!” It seems to me that it is just as Thaulow has written, that Hegel perhaps thought that philosophy began with

Ovi Symposium II 273 him, but not that it ended with him. That objection, so neat and sharp, which had been raised and discussed by a visitor who had come from far away but who had nevertheless become very close, was fi xed in his mind: the guiding thought is extremely ingenious, but the system, instead of strengthening the value of it, contaminates, weakens, and compromises it. On the other hand, his mental life had been consolidated by long study in this rich system; and even though he accepted the criticism that was now coming to him, not from an adversary but from a disinterested, open-minded, unbiased and diligent reader and disciple, the task, if it really occurred to him, of retracing the road that he had traveled for more than forty years of hard work, and of changing his course and arriving at a point different from that which he had believed to have been the terminal one, and on which he had woven and extended the great canvas of his teaching, which by this time had become an aspect of the political mission of Prussia—such a task would have overwhelmed him and almost frightened him. Because from where could he have drawn the energy necessary for such a demand, that energy which is not of pure thought but a concentration of all the forces of a human being, even of the physiological ones, of his emotions, enthusiasm, dedication, sacrifice, as if nothing else in the world existed, or rather all is dedicated to the end to be reached, and only thus can he physically life and breathe? This he had experienced in the past, especially during the great mental crisis upon emerging from youth, as a hellish anguish and a divine joy, and when he composed the Phenomenology (he put the manuscript of it under his arm while the echoes of the cannons of Jena were still reverberating) he felt himself voluptuously consumed by that work of pain and love. But from where would this energy now flow back into his veins? And would not this flowing-back be a miracle, a miracle of such a nature that if it did happen it would be against nature and almost incestuous? A feeling of humility and renunciation rose in his heart, and he thought that the work that he had completed, with its truth and its error, had not been willed by him but by inspiration and necessity, by the best he had in himself, although inscribed and circumscribed by human weaknesses. It was well that it should remain in the world in this form, in the historical moment at which the world had arrived, as a teaching but also as an experiment and admonition, both on account of what it brought to it that was positive and perennial and on account of what itput before it that was negative, contradictory, insufficient, to be undone, to be straightened, to be placed in a different way—the material for anew work—for a new work to be created, and by a new man. A feeling came to him, which had at the same time something heroic and paternal about it, similar to that of Hector who, looking with pride on his young son, thought that people would say: The father was not this strong. He even surprised himself sometimes by reciting the lines of old Giambattista Vico, which he had learned from his Neapolitan friend, about the treasury of thought which had been widely opened for him all these years and was now closed, and it would have to be reopened for others; and together with humility, which demanded dimitte, a tranquil conscience arose in him that he had been a servus Domini, and at the altar of God he had deposited the work that He had commanded him to do and had allowed him to accom- plish within the limits set by Him. Yes, all this was true, and the conclusion just. But when it is pointed out to a man of thought that there is an error in his thought in which he rested as though it were the truth, or if he suspects that there is an error, how could the prick of remorse be laid asleep in him, and how could he live with that error without investigation, correction, or confutation? How could one expect him to remain cold and indifferent toward that which had been the goal of his life and toward which he felt the moral responsibility to care for and protect its uncon- taminated purity?

274 Ovi Symposium II Not being able to turn his mind away from this piercing inquietude, Hegel completely renewed his faith in his life’s work, which was the bread that he had broken for the enthusiastic listeners in the hall of the Berlin University. He was still rather rich in mental vigor; indeed, that same year, having been shaken by the rumor of the revolutionary events in France, he had written (in conformity with his political faith, and with the robust spirit of a conservative suspicious of the homes à principes who had risen against the hommes d’état), a long essay against the English Reform Bill. He continued to enrich himself with the lessons of new developments, for he would not have been able to accept the counsel of wisdom and to stop at what he had already done supposing he had lost the certitude of the truth that he had once acquired and held. This was his state of mind when the cholera, which had started to withdraw from Berlin, suddenly returned and in all its fury took away in a few hours Hegel himself, the greatest philosopher of his time, on November 14, 1831. When Hegel’s faithful and affectionate students began to publish, in addition to the works he had written, a dozen volumes of his lectures, they emphasized the form of the system, in the way that it had been organized and particularized in academic teaching, yet at that time the origin of the system remained little or not at all known. The history of the laborious formation of his thought had to wait until a century later when it was reconstructed from the unpublished papers of his youth. And only about a century later was the critique which the Neapolitan scholar had presented to Hegel in the above-reported conversation renewed; then Hegel the philosopher was contrasted with Hegel the architect of a system, the Hegel alive, as it was said, and the He- gel dead. This crisis no longer confined itself to the Neapolitan circle, where Hegel had been much studied in the nineteenth century and where he had faithful followers even in the era of positivism, but it also spread to the rest of Italy; and in Italy the philosophical thought of Hegel has since renewed its vigorous action in a systemization completely different from that which pleased him, and consequences have been drawn from it that he did not wish to draw, and theories that he had accepted from his predecessors which could not be maintained had to be completely rebuilt from top to bottom. Even the name of the system itself had to be changed, because “absolute idealism” was no longer suitable and failed to grasp the fundamental features, for which reason a new name, proper to it, automatically suggested itself—that of “absolute historicism.” However that may be, Hegel now belongs to us; that this is not enough for us is the obvious effect of his belonging to us and of the possession of him which we have, for the possession of a thought is valuable only insofar as it prepares for a new life and new thought.

Ovi Symposium II 275 4 Profile of a Great Italian Playwright: Luigi Chiarelli (1880-1947) A Presentation by Michael Vena

Luigi Chiarelli (1880-1947) Luigi Chiarelli’s contribution to modern theatre was acknowledged in his day by many authoritative witnesses including Thomas Mann, Filippo T. Marinetti, Antonio Gramsci, while Luigi Pirandello not only supported the concepts of the grotesque but extended them in the multi-faceted variations of his own production. Chi- arelli’s plays were translated into many languages and performed on the stages of Europe and the Americas almost as quickly as in Italy. In 1921, while riding the crest of popularity, the playwright quipped humorously, with a great deal of subtle ironic foresight, that: “é giunta una grande notizia da Londra. Un illustre cercatore ha scoperto in quella meravigliosa testa di Omero che al British Museum il manoscritto di una commedia sconosciuta di Willy Shakespeare. La commedia s’intitola La maschera e il volto. L’azione si svolge sul lago di Como. Si tratta di un marito che ... AhimŽ! Adesso tutto si spiega. [Great news has come from London. A distinguished researcher has discovered in that wonderful head of Homer which is at the British Museum the manuscript of an unknown comedy by Willy Shakespeare. It’s entitled The Mask and the Face. The action takes place on Lake Como. It deals with a husband who ... Alas! Now everything unfolds]. The upshot of this statement has a double significance now. In the first place Chiarelli remains indeed an author to be discovered; his works deserve more critical attention in Italy and also in the English-speaking world. There are very few entries under his name in our major American and English encyclopedias. Sec- ondly, in the passage above, Chiarelli seems to imply a rapport in dramatic primacy between his own age and the Renaissance tradition, superbly exemplified by Shakespeare but also by commedia dell’arte and pastoral drama down to the origins of melodrama. Chiarelli was an innovator and he knew it. One might call him the contrary voice of his age; yet his lively intelligence and sharp artistic sensitivity mellowed the polemics in which he engaged, whether he was dealing with his grotesque portrayal of reality, his conception of the eternity of myth, or his anti-existentialism. Thomas Mann was not off the mark when he stated that the theatre of succeeding generations would follow the patterns set by two great playwrights: Chiarelli and Pirandello. As a progressive voice of the new theatre, here is how Chiarelli characterized the genesis of his little masterpiece at the beginning of the grotesque movement: “La maschera e il volto nacque da una posizione critica oltre che filosofica e polemica ... critica

276 Ovi Symposium II perchè sovvertiva tutte le regole della vecchia tecnica teatrale, infrangendo i logori schemi imperanti sui quali si modella la letteratura drammatica europea.” [The Mask and the Face was born of a critical as well as philosophical and polemical position . . . critical because it was subversive of all the rules of the old theatrical practice, shattering the prevailing threadbare norms on which European dramatic literature is based.]

Program Picture for The Mask and the Face The author breaks away from the stale models of nineteenth-century bourgeois situations which, except for the very special works of D’Annunzio and Verga, had conditioned or even plagued the theatre-going public for decades. Chiarelli is concerned with ideas and problems of a philosophical nature; but what strikes us most is the originalitv of his approach: from his a priori distortion of reality to his demonstratio per absurdum of his theses. The Mask and the Face is generally considered Chiarelli’s masterpiece. It is an ironical comedy in three acts, written during the summer of 1913 in the manner of the modern Italian grotesque. Chiarelli satirizes here the conventional attitude toward marital infidelity and the differences between what we preach and what we actually do. The plot centers around the dilemma of a betrayed husband who, to avenge his honor, pretends he has killed his wife.

Program’s Cover for The Mask and the Face Count Paolo Grazia and wife Savina, typical members of upper middle-class Italian society, are having a reception in their villa on Lake Como. While the group is engaged in a discussion on the subject of infidelity, Paolo states that if he were betrayed by his wife he would kill her, because a “husband who forgives is subject to ridicule” and “for such a husband there is nothing left but suicide.” That same evening he discovers that his beautiful wife Savina is indeed betraying him. His natural impulse would be to forgive her, but he dismisses such a solution for it would belie his public pronouncements. He therefore compels

Ovi Symposium II 277 her to leave Italy in secret and to live abroad under an assumed name, while he tells everyone that he has thrown the adulteress in the lake. Paolo is taken into custody, but later is acquitted thanks to a glowing defense presented by Luciano, a lascivious lawyer who happens to be Savina’s lover. Paolo is welcomed home with public honors by his friends and the authorities; as a result of this sorry spectacle which society has imposed on him, he is overcome by disgust and repulsion as he realizes the absurdity of “killing” for the opinion of others. “Is there nothing serious in this world? They turn the most agonizing tragedy into farce!... Clowns! ... And it is for those people that I ... Clowns!”

Original edition of La maschera e il volto (1913) But Paolo pays still another price for his fictitious murder. One day, the corpse of a woman is recovered from the lake. Everybody identifies it mistakenly as Savina’s. Paolo feels obliged to concur in their opinion. Consequently, the corpse is brought to his house and a lavish funeral is arranged. In the intervening time, the real Savina returns and Paolo begins to feel the true nature of their love, as the image of death gives meaning and value to their lives. His impending catharsis signifies also the triumph of the philosophy of Cirillo, the most positive character in the play, who from the beginning has questioned the validity of conventional attitudes. Unfortunately, some guests attending the funeral surprise Savina in the house. Her appearance -- there -- is, for them, no laughing matter, nor is it a good joke in the eyes of the law. Marco, a magistrate, points out to Paolo that this time he faces a prison term for simulation of a crime and falsification of documents. To avoid that, Paolo and Savina must run away -- as outlaws -- toward an authentic freedom. They make their furtive departure while burial services begin with Chopin’s funeral march.

Choosing the mask for the day

278 Ovi Symposium II Clearly, Chiarelli’s social concerns and moral angst become an emblem of his theatrical self-reflexiveness; and the theater, as the place for simulations,improvisation and conflict, offers the obvious artistic setting to exemplify such concerns. So, in dramatic form, he makes his attack on empty social conventions. His polemic, verging at times on tragic farce, is skillfully tinged with humor, fraught with paradox, and full of surprises. It lends itself to a rich development, typical of the post-war drama of the twenties. In fact, the play is considered one of the first successful attempts to rejuvenate Italian and European theatre and to free it from the trammels of the customary “triangle” (husband, wife, lover) situations inherited from the nineteenth century. An important aspect of the polemic presented by Chiarelli is the contrast between form and reality. Form here is not used in a Crocean sense, but rather as signifying an outward appearance, a stereotype, a mask. Chiarelli operates therefore in an intellectual sphere closely related to Pirandello’s. But The Mask is less pessimistic than most of Pirandello’s plays: Chiarelli’s conclusion seems to imply that a tolerant acceptance of life can be won though an understanding of its contradictions. Chiarelli would be prone to follow this logic: other people can’t really judge us for what we are; they tend to judge us by isolated instances or specific acts. They impose a mask on us which we cannot strip off, either because that is the way they can best deal with us or because our principles prevent us from showing our true faces when it might be dangerous to do so. Thus we become a form. If form, then, is the only reality which counts for others, we might just as well create our own form and impose it on others as a mask that would allow us to follow our inner feelings in the most free and emancipated ways.

Michael Vena’s pedagogical text La maschera e il volto The necessity of pretending is justified as a means, not as an end. (In addition, by now the theories of the subconscious are also telling us that we hardly determine the nature of our own souls). Undoubtedly, The Mask and the Face is a product of that deep intellectual crisis and moral disorientation which marked the years preceding and immediately following the First World War. In this respect, the drama gives character and direction to a brief but significant movement called grotesque. By this term we refer to a genre of theatre wherein the passions and tragedies of life are mechanically simplified and shockingly distorted. The grotesque incorporates positivistic disenchantment, social criticism, and an unusual concept of ethics

Ovi Symposium II 279 which denies traditional values and leans toward a relativistic philosophy. Authors adhering to it scorn such a miserable mode of existence. They expose contradictions, absurdities, vanity, hypocrisy, but generally leave their protagonists in the midst of unresolved conflicts. In such a situation, in this seeming confusion, life itself becomes a laughing-stock to them or tragically hopeless. This view of the world is made manifest in the works of Rosso di San Secondo (Puppets of Passion), Luigi Antonelli (The Man Who Encountered His Self), Enrico Cavacchioli (The Bird of Paradise), who, along with some aspects of Pirandello’s literary personality, represent the main authors of the grotesque. As for The Mask and the Face, we notice some positive developments which change the lot of the protagonists and show what power love can have as a catalytic agent in the elimination of the conflict between form and reality, between the mask and the face. Other Works by Chiarelli The remainder of Chiarelli’s literary production can be categorized mainly along the lines of the grotesque. La scala di seta (The Silken Stairs, 1917) presents the contrast between two men: a decent one doomed to failure and an unrepentant ballet dancer named Desire’. Desire’ enjoys the life of pleasure and success, allegorically portrayed as a silken stairway that leads to the height of fame. By means of outrageous extortions, he becomes a minister in the government, while his honest and capable opponent is forced into humiliation. Ironically, he begins to display his temper in a seemingly uncompromising situation; he becomes an object of ridicule by insulting, in as speech, a cheering crowd, and then breaking into a wild waltz. In Chimere (Chimeras, 1919) Claudio and Maria cherish a dream to be a devoted lover and a pure soul, respectively. They slowly descend to the most debasing concessions, thus disclosing the thoroughly superficial nature of their ideals. Morte degli amanti (Death of the Lovers, 1919) is a parody of conventionalism of two melodramatic lovers who dream up headlines newspapers will use to extol their relationship, after they have consummated in suicide their romantic existence. Luckily, they will be saved by the woman’s husband. Fuochi d’artificio (Fireworks, 1922) deals with an old theme in a modern fashion. It depicts the plight of a destitute man, Gerardo, whom everyone believes to be very wealthy. His reputation for non existent wealth is skillfully fabricated by his secretary Scaramanzia. This play was widely acclaimed. It completes the cycle of Chiarelli’s grotesque. However, his creative efforts are not limited to the grotesque. As early as 1917, he produced La portantina, a political satire, and Le lacrime e le stelle (1918), a morality play of the war years. Subsequently, we have Jolly (1928) , Un uomo da rifare (1931), Carne bianca (1934), Cerchio magico (1937), Pulcinella (1939), Enrico Vlll (1940) , in addition to various one-act plays and a substantial number of short stories, which from 1932 appeared in La Stampa and were later collected in two volumes, La mano di Venere (1935) and La figlia dell’aria (1939). We also have Enea come oggi (1938) and Ninon (1940), representing a type of drama Chiarelli characterized as mythical. Finally, toward the very end of his life, he gave us Essere which is in marked contrast to his previous plays. Essere is an allegorical drama (performed posthumously in 1953) in which the author reveals his need for faith in a supreme being. Biographical Note Luigi Chiarelli was born at Trani in the province of Bari on July 7, 1880. He received his secondary education at the Liceo Viconti in Rome, but the early death of his father prevented him from attending a university. Nevertheless , he soon became well known in literary circles, and contributed verse as well as prose to periodicals such as L’Alfiere and La Patria. His first attempts as a playwright also belong to this period

280 Ovi Symposium II (1895-1910). In 1911 Chiarelli joined the Milanese newspaper Il secolo as a reporter. It was in Milan that he became acquainted with the most important theatre groups in Italy. The following year he succeeded in having two one-act plays performed , Una notte d’amore and Er Gendarme, the latter in Roman dialect. Later, he went on to Turin to direct the review Armi e Politica (1914). With the outbreak of World War l , although he was drafted , Chiarelli was allowed to continue his literary activities and his work as a journalist. But recognition was yet to come. Not before May 29, 1916 , did Chiarelli establish his position as a dramatic writer; that night a theatre company from Rome , the Compagnia Drammatica di Roma, staged his The Mask and the Face at the Teatro Argentina. The play was an immediate success throughout Italy, and soon after in America and Europe. That same summer the renowned actor Virgilio Talli insisted upon another production at the Teatro Olimpia in Milan, and assumed its direction. This was the first of several successful cooperative ventures between the famous actor and Chiarelli. By the end of 1918 Chiarelli had founded the troupe Ars Italica, and entrusted its artistic direction to Talli; Goldoni’s La Locandiera and Morselli’s Glauco were staged. In 1921 Chiarelli organized another company, Comoedia, which presented The Merry Wives of Windsor. Two years later while continuing his activity as playwright he also joined the Corriere Italiano as a drama critic. He was instrumental in proposing the establishment of a state theatre at the First National Congress of the Theatre (1924). As president of the Playwrights Union (Sindacato autori drammatici) Chiarelli exerted a great deal of influence within and outside Italy; indeed his commitment to the theatre continued until the last years of his life. Aside from his plays Chiarelli also wrote short stories and essays, and translated a number of works from Latin, English, French, Spanish, including Plautus’ Aulularia and Menaechmi, Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mauriac’s Asmod, and Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio. He regularly reviewed films for the Roman daily Il Tempo. Chiarelli also enjoyed some success as a painter. He died in Rome on December 20, 1947. This introduction appeared in the Connecticut Review, vol. 7. no. 2, 1974. For Chiarelli and the ‘grotteschi’ see also the Dictionary of Italian Literature edited by Peter Bondanella and Julia Conaway, Greenwood Press , Westport, 1979, and the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, N.Y. , 1980 (article by Olga Ragusa). Under “Italy”, see The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama, John Gasner, ed.,1969, and the Oxford Companion to the Theater,1951, pp. 407-8. For a copy of the original text edited by Michael Vena, contact Editions Soleil publishing, Toronto, Canada, 2002. Order Desk: 1-800-261-0833.

Ovi Symposium II 281 Chapter 22 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-second Meeting: 27 March 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Toqueveille, John-Paul II, Croce, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Sartre, Marx, Lenin, Gombrich, Freud, Hauser, Jung, Adler, Kkein, Lacan, Anrheim, Rembrandt, Woheim, Dewey, Richard, Collingwood, Vattimo, Eco, Munro, Langer, Wittengestein, Fubini, Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, Mann, Jay, Luckacs, Husserl, Brecht, Artaud, Rossellini, Visconti, Bergman, Popper, Hume, Perelman, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Vico, degli An- gioli, Verga, Shakespeare, Moravia, Lampedusa, Sorrentino, Bruno, Cuoco, De Sanctis, Giannone, Filang- ieri, Tasso, Marino, Basile, Di Giacomo, Bossi, Dazeglio, Adriani, Freire, Dewey, Gandhi, Montessori, King.

282 Ovi Symposium II Table of Content for the 22th Session of the Ovi Symposium Main Sub-themes of the 22st Session: The cultural implications of Neo-positivism and the vision of Croce for a new Humanism after World War II Introductory Note by the Symposium’s Coordinator Section 1: A comment by Ernesto Paolozzi on Emanuel L. Paparella’s previous presentation on the roots of Europe “Does the Center Hold”?, followed by a follow-up reply by Paparella Section 2: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis: part two and conclusion.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica (chapter 6) Section 3: “’The Three Brothers’: Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism in Italy and the EU—Envisioning a New Humanism?” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Section 4: An interview to Ernesto Paolozzi on Benedetto Croce’s Influence on Italian culture as it appeared in the online journal “La Voce di New York” on March 15, 2014

Section 5: Two brief comments by Emanuel L. Paparella on two excerpted statements from Ernesto Paolozzi’s interview

Section 6: “One Theater for Peace: A theatrical methodology to develop an education for peace.” A presentation by Alessandra Abis of the Teatro Adriani.

Ovi Symposium II 283 Introductory Note by the Symposium’s Coordinator In this 22nd session of the Ovi Symposium Ernesto Paolozzi offers us a perceptive commentary in section one on the previous presentation (in session 21st) by Emanuel L. Paparella on the spiritual roots of Europe titled “Does the Center Hold?.” Paolozzi then continues his brilliant analysis of the crisis of neo-positivism in the 19th and 20 century in section two. What is particularly relevant to our search for a New Humanism are the exploration of the crisis within the movement itself which came to a head with the critique of Popper and Kuhn. Paolozzi analyzes the assumption of the positivistic mind-set and the cultural aberrations and general impoverishment to which it gave rise. Particularly relevant are his last two paragraphs where he mentions Giambattista Vico’s nexus between poetry and enlightenment philosophy “in so many aspect resembling that of neo-positivism” concluding that “probably the royal road to pursue remains that of Vico, the reference point for those who wish to abandon the kingdom of abstractions to recover what is alive in things.” Powerful warning indeed! Emanuel L. Paparella follows up on the analysis by revisiting a movie that came out in 1981 and caused a stir in Italy and around the world. The title of the movie is Tre Fratelli [Three Brothers]. It is the story of three brothers who live in different parts of Italy and come together for their mother’s funeral in a region of Southern Italy. They have different temperaments, different life-projects and belong to different ideological persuasions and different parties: the liberal party, the Christian Democratic party and the Communist party still today the three most popular and influential parties in the country. Paparella interprets the movie as being the ideological-political narrative of several European countries assuming that neo-positivism has been superseded by a sort of neutral objective utilitarian instrumental science but in reality remains in the cultural sub-conscious of many of those countries and their people and needs to be explored and even exorcised if we are ever to find out what it really means to be a European. As Paolozzi insightfully declares in his presentation on neo-positivism: “these are the years of cybernetics, and computer science, years in which together with sexual liberation, understood as a creative revolutionary act of transgression, love and eros are reduced to scientific facts; the years in which science and ideology live side by side, without being aware of each other.” Paparella transfers the symbolism of the film’s three brothers to three renowned men who had a profound influence on Italian society: Croce (the liberal secularist), De Gasperi (the Christian Democrat), Gramsci (the founder of the Italian Communist party), attempting to answer this crucial question: is the forging of a new humanism possible beginning with a recognition of the common humanistic roots of the three brothers, that is to say the recognition of a common origin or a common mother called Humanism? The question is addressed not only to Italy, the country where Humanism originated, but to the whole European Union. In section four we present a very interesting interview to Ernesto Paolozzi as it appeared a few weeks ago (March 15, 2014) in an online journal published in New York La Voce di New York. It explores various aspects of the popularity and the subsequent neglect of Croce’s philosophy in the 20th century. In section five, by way of a dialogue, Paparella delivers two brief comments on two of Paolozzi’s statements from his interview on Croce to “La Voce di New York.” Finally, in section six we have Alessandra Abis who continues our exploration of the meaning and the uses of the theater with an insightful presentation on how the Teatro Adriani proposes to use theater for education for peace. This presentation is sure to stimulate a robust dialogue in the symposium on whether or not culture can ever be neutral and devoid of any ideology or philosophical content. Stay tuned.

284 Ovi Symposium II 1 A Comment by Ernesto Paolozzi on Emanuel L. Paparella’s presentation in session 21st on the spiritual roots of Europe: “Does the Center Hold?” The topic treated by Paparella in his presentation Does the Center Hold seems to me extremely current. In fact, for us Europeans it is very current. Enlightenment, historicism, Christianity are the essential moments for the construction of a thought and a politics which are not merely administration of what exists. I am in agreement with Lino: rationality is not only the rationality of the Enlightenment. There is another rationality which includes that of the Enlightenment but attempts to also understand what is different, imagination, for example, the individual reasons of those who do not accept the values of a pure geometric or syllogistic or mathematical reasoning. With the Enlightenment as Kant noted, man comes out of his juvenile years and becomes an adult. All this is true if we wish to reward the critical daring of reason which does not accept prejudgments and superstitions, which refuses to accept without any critical judgment political and religious authority. Ma this man who is now an adult, not a child any longer, is it now capable of understanding the fears and the doubts of children, of the weak, of the others? If he is incapable of doing that, then he is not truly an adult, at best he is a conceited person. The Enlightenment which is born as an instrument of freedom has often been transformed in the totalitarianism of an abstract thinking, or in political totalitarianism. And this is why historicism, dialectical thinking arrived as an overcoming and a complement of that movement of opinion which was the Enlightenment in the final analysis. In rejecting an abstract and calculating kind of reasoning, the scholastic residue of the century of the enlightenment, historicism reevaluates history, feelings and poetry. Concrete reasoning was the one which was able to grasp the tragic necessity of the negative and at the same time understand the necessary function of what appears to be different from reason. Past history was no longer considered a heap of trivialities to be judged by calculating reason. It was revalued for what it is, a process within which good and evil confront each other, sometimes the former prevailing, sometimes the latter. To reevaluate the process of history also means the ability to grasp what is positive in the past and the ability to understand the motives which generated insignificant or great events which cannot be deleted with the stroke of a pen. Within this perspective I believe it was a mistake for Europe to erase from its foundational Constitution its christian roots. Paparella is correct, the United States of America which are a liberal secular democracy were not averse to their religious roots. Europe’s roots are even deeper. While it is true that my continent has known the religious wars and the tribunals of the Inquisition, that does not justify the renunciation to its history which on many levels is founded on Christianity, aside from the religious dimension that each of us may or may not have. As is well known, Tocqueville, in analyzing American democracy, held that procedural political system, frag- ile in its very essence, could only be sustained by a strong religious sense; a sentiment which constituted an ethical value system, which could not but be, so to speak, put on the table from sudden and at times irrational choices. A system protected from the tyranny of the majority. For a democracy to be liberal and not totalitarian has to be founded on common values, on freedom and the religious sense. Frankly I cannot say if this line of reasoning is still valid today. It remains interesting, however, and it would

Ovi Symposium II 285 be worthwhile to return to a reflection on the reasons which motivated the author of Democracy in America to connect democracy with freedom and religion. Paparella’s reflection spurs us to rethink critically the very foundations of the birth of a United Europe. That would be an opportunity for the whole political world which a mediocre political class is suffocating. The economic crisis has not helped things and has made them worse, but perhaps there is a new critical consciousness on the horizon which, sooner or later, will bring back new passions. ******************************************* A follow-up reply from Paparella Thank you Ernesto for your comments. In effect we are in agreement that one of the negative aspects of the pervading materialistic positivism of our times may well have been the forgetting on the part of the EU of its spiritual heritage with its ethical implications. I also concur that such an heritage is not merely religious (Ju- deo-Christian) but also covers Greco-Roman culture, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the sciences, all sorted out philosophically via metaphysics and aesthetics; which is to say the whole ball of wax. To ignore any of those important aspects is in the final analysis to lose one’s genuine cultural identity and allow the enemies of the West to declare it a decadent civilization. That is what Putin has been selling lately and there are some in the US who agree with him. It goes without saying that nobody in his right mind will advocate today a return to medieval Christendom. Neither is it a call to a slavish imitation of pragmatic progressivistic American culture in all its good and bad aspects. To the contrary, as John-Paul II aptly put it in his address to the European parliament, as quoted in my presentation, it is a question of acknowledging those roots so that Europe may know itself and be more confident that it has other things to attend to and export besides markets and commercial goods. One of the cultural aspects that deserves better understanding and appreciation is undoubtedly the philosophy of aesthetics of Benedetto Croce of which you are a foremost representative. Thank you for that too.

286 Ovi Symposium II 2 The Return of Positivism and its Crisis: Part II A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (from his book Vicende dell’Estetica)

The School of Frankfurt between World War I and II Those years of global strife were, of course, the result of a long historical process and a new mind-set which had slowly but firmly expanded in every cultural environment; beginning with the new anti-realist film, to the avant-garde theater and poetics, from psychoanalysis of sociological and irrational mode, to narration. Economic science was placed in doubt as such, considered a bourgeoisie class type of science. There was an attempt to introduce within scientific concepts and empirical research historicist and even political elements. It was not only the use of technology which was considered “bourgeoisie”, but the very environment of scientific research, at the roots of its empirical and logical foundations were doubted. The so called school Frankfurt marked, in many respects, the crown jewel of the new movement of opinion. Adorno, Horkkeimer, Marcuse, who had been persecuted by Nazism and had taken refuge in America, in coming in contact with the growing military world power, elaborated theories which immediately spread. Herbert Marcuse in particular, a philosopher which is today rather obscure, reached a fame comparable to that of Sartre, to the point that his name was on many students’ lips all around the world together with that of Marx and Lenin.

Horkheimer and Adorno from a convention of the School of Frankfurt

Ovi Symposium II 287 His most famous books, Eros and Civilization (1955), and One Dimensional Man (1964) became a sort of revolutionary catechism. The ancient celebrated American virtues, the exaltation of scientific reason, became the negative aspect of a mass society within which man was overcome by a kind of reasoning which was predominantly instrumental imbued by technology, to succumb to a common denominator of conformism, exactly the one dimensional man. This was dubbed a negative utopia by those within the Frankfurt Schools with its goal that of unmasking an assumed civilization, more than imagine a new one. We ought not assume that in those years, as at the beginning of the century, we had a renewed “bankruptcy of the sciences,” as was the case for the first positivism. To the contrary, perhaps as never before scientism and anti-scientism cohabitated in those years. These are the years of cybernetics, and computer sciences, years in which together with sexual liberation, understood as a creative revolutionary act of transgression, love and eros are reduced to scientific facts; the years in which science and ideology live side by side, without being aware of each other. French Structuralism, about which we have hinted, inserts itself, when one thinks of it, exactly in this general climate and it is not coincidental that, as has been observed, on the ashes of historicist historopgraphy, at times a bit arrogant, which flourished in the 60s, reemerges the so called historiography of the Annales, which within its brief resurrection pursues the myth of scientific objectivity, something that cannot even be traced back to its founding fathers before World War II.

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) So, positivism and anti-positivism live together. For the numerous opportunists of culture, there is nothing more profitable than condensing in a dictionary of banality all the common inanities in one or the other.

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964)

288 Ovi Symposium II In those years, the crisis of aesthetics, as is obvious and natural, appears evident. In fact, every time philosophy is discussed and debated, it is exactly the philosophy of art, or to use the new jargon “philosophical aesthetics” which is looked at. Among the possible philosophies it was the closest to metaphysics. Nor should we confuse the renewed interest, in some sectors unique and preeminent, for the philosophy of language which liberally utilizes art, given that such a novel philosophy had nothing to do with the Crocean identification between art and language; rather, as we have observed, it conceived the analysis of language as an instrument of scientific-philosophical critique or as a new philosophical set-up, returning to the old and naïve concept of mathesis universalis. (See A. Hauser’s La storia sociale dell’arte, 1964, U. Eco’s Segno [Sign], 1973, which has a long bibliography on studies in semiotics.)

Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1966) Those are the years in which the study of art flows into three different sectors, semiotics, sociology of art and psychology of art.

Umberto Eco (1932- ) Even though it is true that those three directions seems to lead to totally different conclusions, opposed to each other, they do have a common vision of the world which constitutes the basis of those three different attitudes. There is little doubt that the semiotic approach to art leads to a research which is merely formal or purely stylistic, within which the play of forms and the search of the logical or grammatical nexus is predominant above all other historical, sentimental and psychological considerations which might interest the critic or the reader. In the case of psychology and sociology of art, the interests are quite different: historical-social

Ovi Symposium II 289 for the latter and therapeutics for the former. Once one has accepted the common viewpoint clearly designated by positivism, the differences in each discipline, as it always happens, can be hyped to the point that they become insurmountable obstacles. And this is true within at the core of semiotic, or sociology of art, or the psychology of art. A scholar who is balanced and well mannered, shrewd even if objectionable such as E. Gombrich, offers us an example, among the which that are truly deserving of attention, of an internal criticism at the heart of sociology and psychology of art, via two critical notes: one to the intuitive feelings of psychoanalytical aesthetics found in Sigmund Freud, and the other to the proverbial Social History of Art of Hauser. Both semiotics and psychology of art had a notable success for a few years, but in the final analysis they remained within an academic milieu, propagating themselves as a mere fashion within the various places of modern culture, soon encountering a crisis. Freud’s theories became objects of pedantic interpretations or were absorbed within the banal language of everyday. Various schools and psychoanalysises flourished referring to various scholars such as Jung, Adler, Klein, until in Lacan’s France we arrive at studies which were completely incomprehensible. There were however some interesting and serious researches. The return to gestalt, to the psychology of form, even within the confusion between science and metaphysics, produces some valid studies. But for this to happen, the crisis had to come to its head within the neo-positivistic school itself.

Rudolph Arnheim (1904-2007) In 1953, in a very clear and enjoyable essay (Toward a Psychology of Art, 1968) Arnheim displayed a rigorous criticism of Freudianism, ironizing on Freudian psycho-sexuality which could well be “psychoculinary.” Why could not someone express oneself thus: “They psychosexual treatment of artistic symbols has prevented us from doing justice to a more adequate analysis, which we could define as the spychoculinary type. This theory asserts, briefly, asserts that we ought to explain artistic symbols according to the interest of the artist for his food. The precarious financial conditions under which many artists are forced to live, clearly express themselves in the preference for dead nature which is discoverable in every epoch. Landscape painting point to vegetarian tendencies, while the frequent representation of animals and of the nude human body, reveals a lack of proteins. The fundamental theme of the concave receptacle, a vase, a chalice, a soup dish, together with the knife, the spoon and the fork which are actively inserted, symbolize unmistakably the visual

290 Ovi Symposium II arts, especially architecture with its cubical or cylindrical contents inhabited by the figures modeled in the form of a spoon, of human being. The predilection of Rembrandt for foods such as baked beans and yellow mustard is not proved by documents, but intuitively beyond all reasonable doubt.”

Toward a Psychology of Art by Rudolph Arnheim (1968) A wider dissemination was enjoyed by the sociology of art due to their sociological, historical and political implications and the intertwining of its themes with a certain Marxist aesthetics which could not but be a sociology of art. Obviously a Marxist aesthetic rigorously theoretic could not even be imagined given that when one negates the autonomy of art, one negates ipso facto the very object of aesthetics. In any case, what unified these different takes on art, and what needs to be brought out to the light of day, is the refusal, conscious or unconscious, of the autonomy of art and consequently of philosophical aesthetics as well as the will to interpret works of art by scientific criteria. But these cultural phenomena exhausted themselves, if for no other reason that the emotive push understood as the sense of the new which sustained it, became weaker vis a vis the revealing of the essence of our technological era in all its purity. Since the goal, to say it in a few words, was the goal of hedonistic utility, it was logical that it would put in crisis all metaphysics, even those which originated with science. On this utilitarian level, sociology and psychology of art are not more or less useful than any philosophical aesthetics. Every attempt to lower to instrumentality any aspect of human life leads to the instrumentalization of oneself, and therefore to one’s death. Therefore every attempt to combine within oneself scientific or pseudoscientif- ic aspects so as to avoid the specific question of one’s nature and one’s essence (even if they are individuated historical essences according to the Hegelian concrete universal) leads to failure. It would be enough to think of the pompous pages, which today appear naïve, of Wollheim, which in a small book published in 1968 (Introduction to Aesthetics) attempts to cancel out the whole history of the philosophy of art. In it he writes: “’What is Art?. Art is the summation of all the works of art. What is a work of art? A work of art is a poetic composition, a painting, a musical score, a sculpture, a novel… What is a poetical composition? A painting, a musical score, a sculpture, a novel?... A poetical component is…, a painting is…, a musical score is…, a sculpture is…, a novel is…’ It is not difficult to admit it would be sufficient to fill in the blanks which appear at the end of the above statement to obtain the solution to one of the most elusive problems of traditional culture: the one relating to the nature of art. We are assuming of course that the dialogue as above articulated has a certain validity. Let us for the moment assume such a validity without discussing it.

Ovi Symposium II 291 But one can rebut that even if we were able to fill the blanks, we would still not obtain the answer to the problem of art, at least not in the mode it has been set-up till now. The problem has always require a unitary solution, that is to say an answer by the form: ‘art is…’ when all we can expect is, at best, is a plurality of answers, as many as there are artistic genres that we have initially distinguished. If then we wish to oppose the fact it is always possible to extract unity from a multiplicity of answers which we have prospected above, uniting them all in a grandiose disjunctive proposition, we would then lose the substance of the preceding re- but. In fact the tradition problem surely intended, even if not explicitly, to exclude whatever solution had such a level of complexity: the “unitary” adjective indicates that was desired was not an answer of the form ‘art is (and one gives the definition of a poetical composition), or (and one gives the definition of a painting, or…’. But why should we admit, as we are now doing, that if we think of art as something we can give an account of in terms of different genres of art, that is to say of different arts, one must consequently abandon the hope of arriving at a conception of art which is not strictly speaking complex. That is not necessary if one does not leave behind the possibility that the single particular answers (the answers to the questions ‘what is a poetical composition? a painting? etc) can, once obtained” exhibit a quid communis, which can have important dimensions, a consequence of the fact the different genres of art have many properties in common. Were it so we would not be compelled to recur to a mere disjunctive proposition or at least we would not be restricted by it, but in what the single answers coincide we would find a sufficient foundation for the formulation of a traditional solution, even if late were it to emerge that we cannot go very far with such a foundation, in as much as beyond a certain point, the single arts are irreducibly different. That is to say, this last fact would demonstrate that the tradition problem cannot be completely solved, not that it is not correct to pose it.” This way of thinking represents a typical example which may be sufficient to give a sense of the epoch. Of course neo-positivism in its strictest sense had its own genuine aesthetics, in its totality operating within Anglo-American culture. With the exception of John Dewey’s aesthetics, whose complexity, as we have said, deserves a separate analysis and which provoked many debates for being at the border between pragmatism and idealism, American aesthetics was wholly positivistic. From Richard’s aesthetics up to the most recent reflections, has always been around in the labyrinths of the various positivistic schools, even if it possessed as it still does in the United States, a certain success derived from Croce’s aesthetics which was propagated thanks to the work of Collingwood. Gianni Vattimo, delineates with great clarity in a short essay (The Aesthetic Problem, 1976) the development of aesthetics in America. While discussing Thomas Munro he writes: “In his monumental work on The Arts and their Interrelation, published in 1949, he proposes a scientific approach to the world of art, in order to make it a repository of values which one ought to understand and use for the spiritual education of humankind. To propose an scientific aesthetics says Munro does not mean to reduce the analysis of art to quantitative researches on the aesthetic reactions, of the types tried in the last century by scholars of a positivist origin; aesthetics is a science in the same way that historical or social sciences are; it does not try to establish Newtonian laws, but attempts to study its object with a spirit of objectivity and without bias.” As one can easily deduce, Munro’s thought reflects, with extreme precision and clarity, the new mind-set which could be defined as neo-positivistic, by which a certain positivistic rigidity is abandoned without however leaving behind an idea of the world incapable of grasping, after all, what there is beyond the abstractions of the intellect.

292 Ovi Symposium II Richard Wollheim (1923-2003) Aesthetics cannot avoid the deterministic influence of the new philosophy of language. The philosophy of art will be confused with the new linguistic analysis. It is enough to think of the new semantic aesthetics of Su- san Langer, which had a certain popularity at the time (see her Philosophy in a New Key, 1947), since then vanished. The author, beginning with Wittgenstein’s considerations, according to which scientific language is essentially a system of symbols which correspond to the simple atomistic facts, attempts to overcome the positivistic thesis which tend to exclude art and the world of emotions and sentimentality, from the world of knowledge. Art too can be construed as a totality of symbolic forms, as a comprehensive totality which possesses its own laws and its own logic. As E. Fubini writes on the matter in an essay written in 1973 (Mu- sic and language in Contemporary Aesthetics): “There is in man a vast sphere which cannot be expressed via a mechanism of language, but necessitates a symbolic system with a different function: in the human world there are many fundamental facts which cannot be expressed by syntactical-grammatical rules of language. Art, for example, is one of the means of symbolical representation, and Langer proposes to study the technology by which this type of symbolism survives. Her goal is to demonstrate that art does not belong to this hypothetical ineffable world, intuitive and private and incommunicable, but is a symbolical expression, endowed with its own logic, even if profoundly different from discursive language, and it has characteristics which can be perfectly analyzed.” But as it always happens in this type of research, it proves impossible to define what exactly is this logic proper to art, this knowability which, even if it is not the knowability of philosophy or of the sciences, is not the type of knowledge theorized by intuitive aesthetics. Art, in fact, does not does not say anything, does not externalize sentiments and emotions, but, according to Langer, reveals and expresses (according to a language which has echoes of the forgotten Croce) and fulfills an a-logic function. Therefore Enrico Fubini’s insight is valid if, after having analyzed the aesthetic of the American scholar especially as regards music, he concludes that: “Ultimately, Langer’s aesthetics swings between the two classic poles and antagonistic by which art is considered either as an object closed within itself, constituted by immanent laws which sus- tain the structure internally, or as language, an instrument of communication.” Langer, therefore is offering a new interpretative key which, Fubine concludes “in reality, reveals itself to be rather traditional with its instruments closed within outlines and taken for granted by contemporary aesthetics.”

Ovi Symposium II 293 Richard Wollheim Introduction to Aesthetics (1973) The crisis of positivistic aesthetics is in many aspects is an internal crisis. In its own country or origins, in America it has not produced many relevant theoretical fruits, and therefore in this great country there are ongoing attempts at unification and synthesis, more or less well thought-out, among various cultural experiences, through a transversal reading of analytical philosophies, of Husserlian phenomenology, of Heidegger and Gadamer’s thought and even the Italian historicism. It has produced little fruits above all in the ground which remains the test of any aesthetics, which is to say, on the ground of militant criticism. Indeed the entire positivistic ethics’ system was subjected in the 60s to a crisis of operation, revealing itself incapable to speak to man, to the anxieties of his personality. The same art, becoming more scientific and technological, as if trying to conform to the criteria with which it was being judged, dehumanized itself, losing the connection with man’s life. Computerized art, the cold merely stylistic researches, the pedantic analysis of texts’ fragments, the arbitrary reconstructions of artistic personalities, biography reduced to psychic analysis if not medical, were all elements which conspired in the impoverishment of the world of art and render the elaborations of the critics and the aestheticians (even when transformed in scientific and seemingly neutral language) mere rhetorical exercises. Already, Walter Benjamin, in his very famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Repro- duction of 1936, had individuated the problem without clarifying exhaustively the terms involved (for example, he underlined the positive aspect of technology in bringing art closer to the people). But as cultural industry grew quantitatively, the problem too became more visible, thus provoking a real cultural battle. The critique of the industrialization of art spread rapidly among University students, in cultural gatherings, in popular magazines, until it became a common idea, becoming itself a victim of cultural industry. In reality it was not simply a willingness on the part of capitalism to exploit art, but it was a question of finding oneself in some aspects in a new dimension with more powerful instruments, via the epoch’s mind-set and literary reproductions of literary fashion which they represented. The figure that stands out among those who critiqued the epoch of cultural industry is that of Theodore Ador- no. The very expression “cultural industry” was coined by him in 1947 in a volume authored with Horkeimer titled The Dialectic of the Enlightenment. It became the center of Adorno’s speculation on aesthetics not always easy to understand. On him came together the contemporary musical experience of which he was an expert, the lesson of Martin Heidegger, the Marxist experience, the friendiship and collaboration with Thomas Mann, the belonging to a “school,” that of Frankfurt which gave rise to the so called critical theory,

294 Ovi Symposium II the tragic experience of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews (is it still possible to do art after Auschwitz, asked Adorno), the experience of exile in the United States which put him in direct contact with the heart, so to speak, with the most blatant cultural industry.

Theodore Adorno (1903-1969) In a conference of 1963 titled Summary of the Cultural Industry, Adorno recapitulates his fundamental principles. It is worthwhile to quote a long passage to render the tone: “Cultural industry, in as much as it is an element of the dominant mentality remains important. It would be naïve to ignore its influence because of skepticism toward its implications. But this warning is ambiguous. It puts in evidence its social importance and irritating questions are ignored, or at the very least are eliminated from so called sociology of communication. They irritate regarding quality, truth and falsehood at the aesthetic level, of what is being communicated. The critic is reprimanded for hiding behind an arrogant esoterism. But what should be pointed out above all is the double meaning, which is stealthy introduced regarding the concept of importance. The function of anything, even if it concerns the life of innumerable individuals, is no guarantee of its quality. The confusion of the aesthetic with its communicative expressions does not place art as a social fact in a fair position vis a vis the supposed arrogance of the artists; to the contrary, often enough it serves to the sustenance of something evil exactly in its social consequences. The importance of cultural industry in the psychic economy of the masses does not absolve one—nor does it dispense a science which considers itself pragmatic—from reflecting on its objective legitimacy, in its identity; if anything it requires it. To take it seriously as its incontestable importance requires, means to take it seriously in a critical sense, not to give in to its manipulations.” In conclusion of his essay which summarizes his ideas Adorno suddenly writes that: “The global effect of the cultural industry is that of an anti-enlightenment, as Horkheimer and myself have called the progressive domination of nature with the help of technology, and becomes a betrayal of the masses, a means of subjugate consciences, an impediment to the affirmation of autonomous individuals, capable of judging and deciding responsibly.” Thus the criticism of Adorno and that of the whole School of Frankfurt represented, so to speak, the organization and categorization of a way of thinking which brought together thinkers and artists of divergent inspi- rations. Martin Jay who writes on Adorno says that: “In terms that echoed both Nietzsche and Weber as well as Marx they explored (Adorno and Horkheimer) the unexpectedly nefarious effects of rationality understood in its instrumental subjective aspects and producing the current crisis. The kind of reason which was more substantial and synthetic which German idealism had denominated Vernunft (intellect or understanding) had been—borrowing from a book which Horkheimer had written in those years—eclipsed. In as much

Ovi Symposium II 295 as rationality had attempted to liberate man from mythical thinking, it was reborn tied to its development.” As we have said, at the end of the 60s, within the confusing protesting climate which ran throughout the whole world (not excluding the apparently stable Eastern world), all global thrusts came together in a confused and general global protest. Even Adorno, who had contributed to it, became its victim, and in 1969 he was publicly criticized by three girls who humiliated him during a lesson with the support of the whole class. A few months later Adorno died. On the other hand, one can trace the deeply confused terms in the same theory of the Frankfurt School which characterized the whole era and is still alive today, our era, so undecipherable, even if easily identifi- able within a wide and general context. Those who identify within Marxism one of the characteristics of those years would not be off the mark, neither would be wrong those who individuate the sense of the era to a return to the Enlightenment or even irrationalism, the only genuine ticket to affix at that particular historical moment: phenomenological existentialism, Christian existentialism got mixed up with the most varied avanguard poetics; while the existentialist Sartre, as already noted, banded about Marxism. Next to Lukacs, therefore, we find Husserl, next to Freud, Marx; Bretch was contrasted badly with Artaud. the realism of Rossellini was mixed with the decadentism of Visconti; while the existentialism of Bergman was contrasted with the imperialism of films of social protest of the avant-gardes on the left. While dada or expressionism triumphed there were those who proposed socialist realism. They were indeed years of revolution, of an incoherent rebellion against the whole cultural tradition of Europe. Anything which opposed the triumphant values of the first half of the century was successful, and that explains perhaps the reason for so many absurd hybrid phenomena that can be observed in those years. What happened in politics was mirrored in the cultural field, and vice versa. The crisis of reason, the crisis of art as technique, did not stop neo-positivism from surviving even if now it was not within the masses but within the university, especially American universities, and in milieu that were journalistic or academic. Meanwhile in the purely philosophical field the crisis was coming to a head within the movement itself, beginning with the 50s till it exploded in the 70s.

Karl Popper (1902-1994)

296 Ovi Symposium II In this regard, the most significant philosophical figure is that of Karl Popper, who, as we have mentioned, leveled within the Frankfurt School itself a rigorous critique of neo-positivistic theories. He intuited the inad- equacy and the falsehood of the basic principle on which the men of the Circle of Vienna relied so much: the principle of verification or verificationism. In his most important but also most complex theoretical book, The Logic of Scientific Research, one can read some very insightful pages on the principle of induction by which the impossibility from a purely logical standpoint, to found the epistemological validity of the sciences on induction, and therefore ultimately found the verifiability of scientific theories. In effect, he was reformu- lating the fundamental intuition of David Hume, the first philosopher, who, in a definitive manner, put into doubt the veracity of science. Naturally Popper, via the principle of verification which he theorized, tended to repropose the possibility of scientific research on another level, introducing historicist elements and, in many respect idealistic or at leas neo-Kantian. He in fact held on to the supremacy of the scientific hypothesis (that to be such needs to be falsifiable in theory) vis a vis traditional research founded on mere experimentation. But although Popper did remain a philosopher inspired by neo-positivism, he certainly was responsible for turning up-side-down the positivistic point of view from inside that same school. On the other hand, other scholars of a similar cultural orientation took their distance from neo-poistivism, as the experience of Chaim Perelman, significant under several aspects, shows who put on the table the issue of the moral function of the so called philosophy of “facts” in as much as it objectively negates the individual’s responsibility denying any value judgment and only admitting factual and descriptive judgments. Perelman attempted to resurrect rhetoric as a form of interpretation of the real placed in between formalistic logic and dialectical logic. His theory of argumentation, which aims at studying discursive techniques apt to induce or to augment the adhesion of the mind to a proposed thesis presented for their assent, even if struc- turally and logically weak, represents an original attempt nevertheless to overcome the impasse in which the neo-positivists had fallen. But to stay with schools, the decisive break with the neo-positivist school was performed by Thomas Kuhn, who held that a definite scientific discovery, for example that within biological chemistry, is only effectuated within a wider scientific vision of the world. No single discovery could put into doubt (neither the “normal” scientists tend to do it) the general “paradigm” to whose construction contribute various motives which are not only of scientific nature. (See Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Kuhn’s theory, as one can easily understand, goes beyond the Popperian theories and pushes the envelope toward an historical relativism which negates any cognitive validity to the sciences and to man in general. The descending parable of neo-positivism will find its final destination at the so called “methodological anarchism of Feyerabend, who in a volume which had some success, Against Method, ended up holding irrational thesis beginning with a very violent criticism vis a vis the traditional scientific method as well as the post-Popperian one. This crisis of neo-positivism and of aesthetics tied to it has not resulted, so to speak, a consequent reaction in the world of art as it had happened at the beginning of the century. The inheritance of this episode is one of poverty which has produced a sort of general disinterest for the world of art and aesthetics. The myth of rationality, of a mathematical rationality, considered a la Enlightenment, the unit of measure of all things, could not but have provoked a general loss of orientation, a moral indifference, a loss of good taste. Who, after having read the cold critique of the structuralists, of the empty abstract theories of empiricist aesthetics, and having observed the alienation of the young from the study of poetry, will not be astonished

Ovi Symposium II 297 and be confirmed in their own ideas by reading some reflections which Giambattista Vico offered to the poet Gherardo degli Angioli regarding the nexus between poetry and enlightenment philosophy in so many aspect so similar to neo-positivism. Vico (as can be read in his Autobiography) says that: “ You have come to times that have become too astute in analytical methods, too rigid by the severity of the criteria, and to a philosophy that professes to deaden all of the soul’s faculties paying attention only to the material and the bodily, above all times with an inability to imagine considered today the mother of all human mistakes; you have come to times that has dried up whatever is generous in the best poetry, unable to explain it, making a rule the judgment of the senses and kills what is alive in things, in habits, in affections, what is imaginable and strongly felt.” Probably, the road that Vico is indicating is still today the royal road that we need to travel on, the reference point for anybody who wishes to abandon the kingdom of abstractions to recover what is “most alive in things.”

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)

298 Ovi Symposium II 3

“The Three Brothers”: Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism in Italy and the EU—Envisioning a New Humanism? A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella “I do not conceive Socialist policy as tied to any particular theory, but to a faith. The more Socialist theories claim to be “scientific” the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent.The distinction between theories and values is not sufficiently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.” --Ignazio Silone (from The God that Failed)

In 1981 an intriguing film directed by Francesco Rosi came out of Italy titled “Tre Fratelli’ [Three Brothers]. It is the simple story of three brothers who are summoned by their father upon the death of their mother from a farmhouse in Southern Italy. One brother Raffaele is a judge living in Rome who is presiding over a terrorism case and is in fear for his life. Another son, Rocco lives in Naples, is religious and works as a counselor at a correctional institute for teenage boys. The third son, Nicola, lives in Turin and is a factory worker involved in a labor dispute and experiencing marital difficulties.

At first sight the movie seems to be about the grieving process on the loss of one’s mother and how each brother experiences his own suffering in his own particular way colored by the predicament each finds himself in and the reverie of the past and what may come in the future: Raffaele imagines his death, Rocco dreams of lifting the youth of Naples out of violence, drugs, and corruption, Nicola pictures embracing his estranged wife. Meanwhile, the old man and his young granddaughter explore the rhythms of the farm and grieve together while in the final scene of the film we see the three brothers, the lost second generation between grandfather and granddaughter, carrying their mother’s coffin to the cemetery. I’d like to submit a rather unconventional interpretation which, to my knowledge, has never been proffered in any of the movie’s reviews. I hold that the film is less existentially psychological and/or sociological and more political-cultural and based on the history and culture of Italy. My interpretation is basically this: the mother can be interpreted as an allegorical figure for Mother Italy, the three brothers are allegorical figures representing the three historical movements that have traditionally been in constant conflict in Italy: Cathol- icism (Rocco), Liberalism (Raffaele) and Socialism (Nicola). They are all interrelated with common cultural roots and can be placed within the context of Italian Humanism, of a new modern humanism, new values on which to build a culture and a moribund civilization, beyond soccer games and common currency as

Ovi Symposium II 299 the above quote by Silone powerfully intimates. I also suggest that there may be some insights in this film’s interpretation on the predicament in which the European Union finds itself in at the moment; a predicament partly brought about by its misguided jettisoning of religion and faith from its cultural foundations. To validate my interpretation we need to delve a bit extensively into some historical and ongoing developments of Italian culture. We also need to take a close look at three giants of modern Italian culture and politics: Alcide De Gasperi (who has been extensively examined in two previous articles in Ovi), Benedetto Croce (extensively dealt in Ovi by Ernesto Paolozzi), and Antonio Gramsci, a socialist and the founder of the Italian Communist Party of whom we have spoken in previous symposium’s sessions. Let’s begin our exploration by profiling the three men briefly. Alcide De Gasperi (1881-1954) was an Italian statesman and politician and founder of the Christian Dem- ocratic Party. From 1945 to 1953 he was the prime minister of eight successive coalition governments. His eight-year term in office remains a landmark of political longevity for a leader in modern Italian politics. A conservative Catholic, he was one of the founding fathers of the European Union, along with the Frenchman Robert Schuman and the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Alcide De Gasperi (1881-1954) Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), the son of an aristocratic Neapolitan family, was a great philosopher and historian of culture who became a living embodiment of liberal culture during the first half of the 20th century. Believing “history is the history of liberty,” he opposed all totalitarianisms. During the Mussolini period he withdrew from public life and, though never silenced, lived on the margins of political toleration. After World War II he was felt to be the greatest living symbol of the old liberal Italy and was as such both honored and disregarded. It has taken the likes of Ernesto Paolozzi to resurrect his memory and make us aware of how important he remains to understand anything about Italian and European culture.

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952)

300 Ovi Symposium II Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is considered the founder of the Italian Communist Party was the son of a poor Sardinian family, ultimately of Albanian extraction. After coming to Turin he became one of the first outstanding leaders of the Italian Communist party. Arrested by Mussolini in 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison, except for the few days he survived, diseased and physically broken, after his release in 1937. His greatest work was done in prison and became known only when it was published after World War II. Gramsci’s work has been widely popular among Italian intellectuals since the late 1940s.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) These three men differed sharply from each other and yet they have had a tremendous influence on modern Italian society and its philosophical perspectives. In some way they are the sons of mother Italy. They are the three brothers of Rosi’s movie. All three of them were greatly concerned with the ethical and political normative order of Italian society. To De Gasperi an Italy divorced from its religious Christian ethic was equivalent to putting the cart before the horse. To Croce the historical realization of liberty was the highest good; to Gramsci it was the dialectic of socialist liberation. Those are different visions but they are cemented by a common Italian humanistic culture which precedes the Renaissance and continues after it culminating in The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Each of these men in his own way finally found himself alone. Each, though concerned with power, had to renounce power during the fascist era (1922-1942), to reject his society as it was, and to refuse to collabo- rate with it. They joined that long line of Italians, saints and heroes, who refused the demands of the powers of their day. Benedetto Croce began his well-known book History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, with a chapter entitled “The Religion of Liberty.” After describing various features of liberalism as it came to be expressed in the early nineteenth century, he writes: “Now he who gathers together and considers all these characteristics of the liberal ideal does not hesitate to call it what it was: a ‘religion.’ He calls it so, of course, because he looks for what is essential and intrinsic in every religion, which always lies in the concept of reality and an ethics that conforms to this concept.... Nothing more was needed to give them a religious character, since personifications, myths, legends, dogmas, rites, propitiations, expiations, priestly classes, pontifical robes, and the like do not belong to the intrinsic, and are taken out from particular religions and set up as require- ments for every religion with ill effect.” It is clear that Croce wishes to broaden the definition of religion beyond the traditionally religious elements he heaps together in the last sentence and that point to Catholicism. In his second chapter, “Opposing Reli-

Ovi Symposium II 301 gious Faiths,” he discusses Catholicism and socialism as competitors to liberalism, and in his last chapter he discusses a more recent religion he calls activism, which includes, among other things, fascism, though that word is not mentioned. Antonio Gramsci criticized Croce’s History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century for beginning in 1815 and his History of Italy for beginning in 1871, that is, just after but not including the French Revolution in the one book or the Risorgimento in the other. He thus excluded “the moment of struggle; the moment in which the conflicting forces are formed, are assembled and take up their positions; the moment in which one ethical-political system dissolves and another is formed by fire and steel; the moment in which one system of social relations disintegrates and falls and another arises and asserts itself.” Gramsci’s view of “religions” is instructive because it emphasizes the element of struggle, of process, of politics. His conception of religion modulates from the Crocean to something more recognizably Marxist: Gramsci sees two major functions of such “religions.” Of particular importance to Gramsci is a religion or ideology that can provide a “national-popular collective will” such as he saw in Protestantism in the Reformation or Jacobinism in the French Revolution. For him the particular problem of Italy arose from the fact that the Renaissance was not in this respect the equivalent of the Reformation nor was the Risorgimento the equivalent of the French Revolution. It thus remained the task of Marxism (“The Philosophy of praxis corresponds to the nexus Protestant Reformation plus French Revolution”) to awaken the national-popular collective will so long dormant in Italy. Because the papacy, with its ineradicably political implications, has been for centuries an Italian institution, it has therefore, and again until quite recently, been impossible to challenge the Catholic political system without challenging Catholi- cism as a religion. It is for that reason, especially in Italy, that liberalism, socialism, and activism have had to be civil religions religio-political organisms, in competition with the Catholic civil religion. One of Gramsci’s central theoretical problems is the conditions under which an “organic” intelligentsia is formed, that is, one closely tied to a social group or class, which expresses its inner needs and aspirations, rather than, as has usually been the case in Italy, one that remains isolated from effective social involvement. Gramsci treats Machiavelli as a Reformer in secular guise, a “precocious Jacobin,” with a vision of a people armed, a national Italy, and Gramsci used the figure of Machiavelli’s Prince to express the unifying and leading function of the modern Communist party. Gramsci does not mention that in the Discourses Machiavelli expresses an admiration for the religion of the ancient Romans, a truly “civil religion” relative to which he found Christianity largely impotent politically. Nonetheless Machiavelli’s Discourses were undoubtedly one of the sources for that political faith that Gramsci so admired under the name of Jacobinism. Croce contrasted the “democracy of the eighteenth century as mechanical, intellectualist, and abstractly egalitarian, whereas the “liberalism” of the early nineteenth century was personal, idealistic, and historically organic. For Croce, Cavour is the great liberal hero of the Risorgimento, the man with a sense of organic continuity, of history, of the necessity of the monarchy while Mazzini is a mechanical democrat whose views would have ruptured the natural growth of Italian society and who justly failed. It was a sort of failure of the Hegelian dialectic. Gramsci sees the victory of Cavour and the moderates as a “passive revolution,” a victory of the ruling classes that the moderates organically and effectively represented but a defeat for the mass of people. In reality both Croce and Gramsci failed to fully appreciate the fact that Mazzini, even if his vision did not prevail, remains the greatest Italian liberal and popular prophet of the nineteenth century. For Mazzini

302 Ovi Symposium II the conception of the Risorgimento, the struggle for Italian unification, completely overcomes the political through the spiritual. Not only is all Machiavellian “ragion di stato” radically rejected, but politics is integrally subordinated to ethics; and ethics is nothing but the application of religious faith. So Mazzini can be considered a precursor of sort of the Christian Democratic Party. He takes up the Italian religious problem, with a view toward a radical solution. The Mazzinian revolution does not reside in a political rearrangement nor in insurrection which is a mere temporary instrument; rather his revolution resides in this inner religious transformation. He speaks explicitly of a new faith, which goes not only beyond the old Christian confessions he now considers impotent, but also beyond the skeptical and materialist non-belief of the eighteenth century. What remains necessary is otherworldly faith, which for Mazzini is faith in God, who manifests himself to humanity through successive revelations; one day, all humanity will be called up to God just as individuals ascend to him in their successive lives. Until such time as social unity is established, ecclesiastical and political authority must remain as independent of each other as possible. But once the new society has really been constituted, there will be no more reason for the separation of Church and state, or of political and religious institutions. Ethics will conform to faith, and will be realized in politics; so, too, the state shall be the Church and the Church shall be the state. Here we clearly see the nexus between liberalism and Catholicism. In the end, of course, the Risorgimento did not lead to such a grand national regeneration. It was a revolution “from above,” a passive revolution” leaving the Italian masses largely untouched. The same Cavour would concur with Dazeglio’s famous sardonic statement that “now that we have made Italy we need to make the Italians,” which could be applied to the current EU. Moreover, Cavour’s formula of “a free church in a free state” was not only entirely unaccept- able to the Vatican, it woefully underestimated the religious transformation that would have been necessary to create the free people for whom the free church and free state could have had real meaning. Which is ultimately to say that Cavour’s vision remained the special property of a ruling elite and was not really translated into a national culture. Even when liberalism became so widespread among the educated classes, as it did by the end of the nineteenth century, that it was almost taken for granted, it was by no means securely institutionalized among the masses, as the rise of socialist, Catholic and fascist parties uncertainly or not at all committed to democratic institutions would subsequently show. Gramsci in fact, fairly or unfairly, criticizes Croce’s seeming elitist distinction of religion for the masses but philosophy for the educated elite. The question arises here and it arose in Paolozzi’s interview below: is Liberalism as an articulate movement an elitist intellectualistic movement even today? But while the question is legitimate it cannot be denied that since Croce both the Catholic and socialist subculture have felt the powerful influence of liberalism and have in some measure been transformed by it. Finally we come to socialism. After the unification in 1871 the intense moral idealism of Mazzini was gradually replaced by the rise of positivism as the dominant philosophy as Paolozzi has shown above -- Herbert Spencer was everywhere read and quoted. The unification of the country provided the basis for a gradually accelerating industrial growth, particularly in the north but this sign of positivistic “progress” seemed to be creating as many problems as it solved. It is these circumstances that make understandable the emergence of socialism as a major force in Italy. According to Croce the work of Karl Marx, “who created the new religion of the masses’ in the same sense in which Paul of Tarsus created Christianity” was at first known only sec-

Ovi Symposium II 303 ond or third hand. But when Antonio Labriola discovered Marx’s writing and popularized his theories Herbert Spencer whom everyone had read and quoted as the highest authority, was no longer quoted or read, and was allowed to fall into complete oblivion. The same fate awaited Croce after his death in 1954. Besides having a strong appeal for many of Italy’s educated youth, among whom Croce himself was numbered for a while, Marxian socialism early met success among the industrial workers, especially in the urban north. The Italian Socialist party gradually began to build up not only a network of institutions -- labor unions, mutual aid societies, and cultural organizations -- but a distinct subculture After the First World War we enter the Fascist era, what Croce calls the religion of activism defining it as a “morbid romanticism,” a parody or perversion of liberalism, a sickness of liberty. Here we can include Italian Futurism focused around the “morbidly romantic” figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio in tandem with Marinetti and even Pirandello. But one thing that differentiated all the activists, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, and Mussolini, from a left-wing socialist like Gramsci and a conservative liberal like Croce was their glorification of war and more particularly their violent interventionism in the First World War. That war, traumatic for so many nations, was a major disaster for Italy. It seriously disrupted the economy and set off an inflation that was serious for wage earners and all but fatal for small property owners and produced a class of ultra-rich war profiteers. It gravely overloaded the political system with serious problems at a time when it had not fully assimilated the consequences of universal male suffrage voted in 1912. One of the new political elements was the emergence of a Catholic party, the Popular party, for the first time since the unification of the country. The 1919 elections showed the two great popular parties were the Catholics and the Socialists; the Liberals, who had ruled Italy for half a century, were a declining political force. Fascism never gained what Gramsci called ideological hegemony and never had an ideology at anything like the level of articulation and sophistication of the Catholics, liberals, or socialists. Fascism in the immediate postwar period was a highly personal movement, an eclectic mixture of whatever Mussolini found that worked. Composed of veterans, former socialists and anarchists, and enraged bourgeois youth eager to fight the socialists as a substitute for the war they were too young for, fascism focused around the leader role Mussolini copied largely from. In free elections Fascism never approached the vote of the Catholics and socialists. Once in power it represented another substitute religion of sort (not unlike Bolshevism) claiming the whole man prescribing what he must admire and what it has to condemn even in art and literature and even its rites and ceremonies. As long as it remained theoretical, Mussolini tolerated the figure of Benedetto Croce, who continued to write and publish all through the Fascist years. But in tolerating it Mussolini largely neutralized that opposition. It was the socialists who took the brunt of Fascism. Gramsci himself, by that time the leader of the Italian Communist party, was arrested in 1926 after his parliamentary immunity was violated and died in 1937 after years of bad food and maltreatment in a Fascist prison. For both Communists and Liberals, Mussolini’s securest basis of popular support came from his religious policy and derived from the Catholic Church. There is no reason to believe Mussolini ever had anything but contempt for the church in his own personal life. The church successfully resisted Mussolini’s efforts, soon after the Concordat, to destroy its lay organization Catholic Action. After the racial laws of 1938 and especially after the German occupation, the church became increasingly alienated from the regime, and the role of many of the clergy in the resistance was a heroic one.

304 Ovi Symposium II The only thing that can explain how the church clung to this strange alliance for so long is the history of bitterness of the first seventy years of the Kingdom of Italy and the fact that the church was at last coming into its own, legally recognized as a central institution of society instead of existing in some limbo of marginal toleration. After the Second World War once again there was the threat of revolution, this time from the armed partisans and workers in the north. This time around the discontent of the mass of people came under the leadership of a reborn Catholic party, the Christian Democrats. The 1948 elections were the high water mark of this upsurge, the greatest electoral party victory in modern Italian history. Never having had a Reformation or a revolution, the formal religions and ideologies continued to float on the surface of Italian society appealing to a mobile educated elite but not permeating much of the substructure except in certain areas of the country where Catholic piety or socialist fervor were genuine popular phenomena (for example, the Veneto for the Catholics and Romagna-Emilia for the socialists). The electoral triumph of Christian Democracy within the institutional framework of the liberal state created a new situation. The very logic of the early cold war forced the church into a defense of liberalism and democracy to a degree unprecedented since the French Revolution. The liberal state, instead of being the church’s persecutor, was now its defender and so had to be evaluated differently. Particularly now that liberalism was not a major independent political force or contender for rule its values could be accepted as the legitimate norms of the state and given religious approval. There emerged a fusion of religious and political values, as the very term Christian Democracy suggests, which led almost to a clerical democratic state. Only under John XXIII the tight hold union of party, church, and state began to be broken on the initiative not of the Christian Democratic party but of the church. It would be based on the symbols of the Risorgimento but it would include the celebration of democratic values to which at several crucial points Catholics had also contributed. The basic implications of the changes are a greater freedom of the church from party and state on the one hand and a wider range of political options for Catholics than support of the Christian Democratic party, options that include support of more vigorously reformist or radical parties of the left. The Italian church in the last fifty years has come a long way out of the wilderness. If the Catholics have, in the last half century, gradually moved back into the centers of power, the same cannot be said of the socialists, who have never held effective power in Italy. Indeed, the history of socialism in Italy is a history of persecution from the very beginning, a persecution that reached catastrophic proportions in 1921 and 1922 and the long night that followed. Since the war socialists have been harassed rather than persecuted, but only in the last few years has a large socialist group, the left-wing Italian Socialist party attained a share of political power, and that certainly not the lion’s share. There has been no aggiornamento within the Italian Communist party, no equivalent to Vatican II. This is due in part to an embattled necessary defensiveness. Nevertheless the Italian Communist party (CPI) has a tradition of flexibility, humanism, and appeal to intellectuals that is perhaps unique in the Western world. It is the tradition of Gramsci which even the former Soviet Union found strange and incomprehensible. This does not by any means mean the CPI is clearly committed to liberal democratic values; it only means in the right circumstances it might be open to that question.

Ovi Symposium II 305 So the main problem on the left remains the Italian Communist party, the largest excluded group in modern Italian history. The eventual entry of the Communists into some share of governmental power, unthinkable only a few years ago, has come to be widely discussed. Such an eventuality would create the possibility for the transformation of Communist values in a way parallel to what has happened to the Catholics. But if such a transformation is to be something other than a sellout that will just produce a new mass alienated party to the left of the Communists, it will have to be accompanied by at least the beginning of the solution to some of Italy’s basic social problems. In other words the only way to democratize the socialists is to socialize the democracy. How difficult that will be is already evident from the fruits of the several efforts at establishing a center-left government. But in spite of some grounds for optimism, no observer of Italian society today could call it a happy one. Whatever their differences, the greatest of modern Italian novelists, beginning with Manzoni, all the way to Verga, Moravia, Silone, Lampedusa -- share a fundamental pessimism about the human capacity to alter social institutions. All of them opt instead for a certain dignity and integrity in the individual human soul. Croce, who led at several points an active political life, remains an inspirational example of modest but real institutional successes of modern Italy. Italian history states with stunning clarity the central issues of the sociology of human existence: the very partial institutionalization of morality, the role of the moral hero and the immoral hero, and the problem of when to take power and when to renounce power. And so we are back to the three brothers grieving for their mother. Sometimes the ideology has to die for the dream or the vision to be resurrected. Will a new humanistic Italy resurrect from its grave? An Italy which has been all along ill suited to the straitjacket of modern nationalism, an Italy accustomed to universal phenomena such as the Roman Empire, Christianity, Catholicism, Humanism and the Renaissance. Hard to say, but hope springs eternal. Silone’s quote at the outset of this essay is indicative of what he calls “the conspiracy of hope.” In that essay titled “Emergency Exit” Silone tells us that he left the Communist party because of the corruption he saw in the Soviet Union but he does not consider socialism an ideology but a faith, a faith in the aspiration of the human spirit to justice which goes back to Plato’s Republic and the Acts of the Apostles and the Franciscans owning everything in common and loving each other. Indeed, solidarity, justice and peace are also three brothers who will have to come together not only to bury her but to commit themselves to honoring her memory by exemplary lives.

306 Ovi Symposium II 4 An Interview to Professor Ernesto Paolozzi regarding Croce’s Influence on Italian and European Culture (as it appeared, in Italian, in the Italian-American online journal “La Voce di New York” on March 15, 2014)

Interlocutor: Ernesto Paolozzi, Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University Institute Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli, Italy Question from “La Voce di New York”: Last year, the magazine Foreign Affairs has included only two Italian thinkers in the group of men of ideas of the twentieth century: Croce and Gentile. Professor Paolozzi can you remind us of the importance of Croce as part of the Italian and European liberal thought? And above all, the role of Croce as part of the Constituent Assembly and the first phase of the Italian Republic? Answer by Ernesto Paolozzi: The liberalism of Croce has many points of contact with classical liberalism but it is also different in many ways it remains a novelty not yet fully understood. More than a liberal philosopher I would call Benedetto Croce a philosopher of freedom. His liberalism is meta-political. I tried to define it a liberalism methodological liberalism (see Ernesto Paolozzi’s Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom published by the bookshop of the website ovimagazine.com. The Neapolitan philosopher believes that freedom is the fundamental category of history. Of course freedom is not built in a vacuum but in the eternal struggle with its devaluation. History is not the history of freedom in a trivially optimistic sense. Rather it is the history of the struggle for freedom. This clarification is necessary not to confuse Croce with a simplistic inspirational thinker. Freedom does not win or lose permanently. It identifies, in this sense, with the good, with ethics, with the ongoing struggle of the positive against the negative. Freedom is exercised even against ourselves, in that tragic struggle that we all live of the clash between negative instincts and the moral conscience. I would hazard to say that Croce’s ethics is Kant’s ethics set in motion, that is to say historicized. If all this is true, it would explain why Croce tries to avoid the identification of liberalism with some particular economic or political doctrine. We may consider the free market as necessary to freedom but we must not consider the free market, but we cannot say that freedom is equivalent to the free market. We may believe

Ovi Symposium II 307 that the declaration of human rights is an essential reference point, but we cannot give up thinking that thpse rights are not natural but historical, constantly changing. The charming liberal theory that power must limit power (power sharing) forces us to reflect on what are the real powers present on the table. Only the Parliament, the Government, the judiciary? The economic, the informational, the religious? Within this perspective we may define Croce a liberal in the American sense. But his historicism can also bring him close to the communitarian philosophers. I think that Croce’s position is a very original one yet to be understood in its full import. Still, it remains true that freedom is not tied to any particular doctrine. Freedom existed before liberalism, capitalism, the natural law. Man is born free and always fights to assert his freedom, then it becomes socialist, liberal, democrat, conservative Catholic, Muslim, and so on. At the Constitutional Assembly Croce defended the secular state without taking anti-religious positions. Croce rebuilt the Liberal Party and took part in the Government of National Unity. He refused the presidency considering himself too old. But his was above all a moral influence. He played an objective role as guaran- tor with the Americans and the British who placed absolute trust in him. Unfortunately, the political struggle, especially that conducted by the Communists forced Italian culture, tied to big mass parties, isolated Croce. This was a great damage whose consequences Italy is still paying. Croce was also an outstanding scholar of art. His Aesthetics (1900) is still being studied and developed. Yet the concept of art in Croce is considered elitist. Do you agree with this statement. What is art for Croce? The question of elitism stems from a misinterpretation due to the fact that Croce uses the term “pure” to qualify art as intuition. Those who read Croce’s texts superficially, or know his thought by secondary sources or reading only the definitions of school books, feel that the philosopher asserted a claim like “art for art’s sake.” For Croce, however, the term “pure” meant that art is a function of an autonomous life, in relation with the whole of life but with its own unique (distinct) function. In short, art is not morality, politics, thought. Art represents life in its various particular aspects. A man is moral or immoral, a landscape is beautiful or ugly, political action can be good or bad. That’s why art can be beautiful even when it represents and ugly landscape and on the other hand it can be ugly (that is to say not art) when representing a beautiful landscape. Art, therefore, cannot be identified with sermons, speeches, political harangues, and it does not necessarily have to chase success (making money, narcissism), and in that sense it is pure. But it is nourished, as we have said, by all the aspects of life.

308 Ovi Symposium II Art is for Croce a form of knowledge, namely, knowledge of the particular, while philosophy is knowledge of the universal. Without art it is not possible to universalize knowledge. Here we must not think only of great art, Dante, Caravaggio, just as thought is not only that of Aristotle or Plato. We are all artists and philosophers because we all intuit and think. This is far from elitism. In some of my writings I have tried to simplify; I apologize if the example is too simple, but it can be useful for the understanding. If I need to meet a person whom I do not know, and I underline the word know, any philosophical or scientific description will be of little help. What needs to be conveyed to me is not whether or not the person has a soul, or is a biped know I stress, I’m not going to help no scientific or philosophical description: has the soul, is a mammal bipeds but whether or not he/she is tall, thin, blonde, with a nose that is a little ‘big ...” In other words, I can only know that person through the individual representation of its physiognomy. In this individual representation there is the typical universality of art (we are all able to understand the representation of the These concepts are not easy, but once understood they remain basic. How many pointless arguments about works of art and their “content,” on their moral or political which they are purported to transmit to us.message that should be transmitted. It happened even with Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty. Especially in Italy. Croce and history. An extraordinary adventure that starts with Vico. The evolution of European history seems to have confirmed the theoretical framework of Croce. Is Europe really the land of the free?

Croce’s historicism overturns the traditional idea of history. Croce’s famous phrase, “Every history, if it is true is contemporary history”, shows how the philosopher thinks that within historical thinking one cannot find eternal laws which determine its development. Croce critiques those philosophies of history that on the political level can lead to the justification of totalitarian regimes. The philosopher also shows us how it is not possible to give primacy to the economy, to religion, to thought itself, and so on. There is no absolute principle that mechanically influences the whole of man’s life. It is we who beginning with our present situation with our needs and our interests, our ideals attempt to understand the development of history and once understood it we attempt to modify it. Here is the tile of one of the last books written by Croce: History as thought and as action. Even from this perspective, we can conceive Croce’s idea of history as a philosophy of freedom. In this context Croce (he was also a great historian) traces the history of Europe of the nineteenth century, the century in which the Enlightenment affirms itself even as a national conception as historicism. Think of the ‘48, the Italian Risorgimento, the consolidation of democratic institutions in all free countries. During Fascism, with the volume on Europe of 1932, Croce hopes and almost prophetically foresees a united Eu- rope under the banner of freedom and democracy. What then happened. In this sense makes Europe the homeland of freedom. Of course, the Italian philosopher knew well that the United States of America were the largest democracy in the world and also the home of freedom. He believed America and Europe deeply united under the sign of the religion of freedom. We come now to Croce and his relationship to Naples. A symbiosis or a disguised self-exile to better focus on the evolution of liberalism in Europe? Cross had a very close relationship with Naples. He wrote its history, researched its artistic and literary creativity. Always objective: never overdoing it or denying the defects. He could not feel his condition was

Ovi Symposium II 309 one of exile. He chose to live in Naples because the city was a great world capital of culture of which the philosopher felt part. The city of Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Vincenzo Cuoco, Francesco De Sanc- tis, Pietro Giannone, Filangieri of the Enlightenment and the Revolution of ‘99. Not to mention, on the artistic side, Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, Giambattista Basile and many others. The city that created the comic opera, gave birth to the great season of the song (think of the greatness of Salvatore Di Giacomo), a theatrical tradition still very much alive today. I think this is the underlying reason that led Croce to love his adopted city beyond private motives which we do not know. From Naples led his struggle for freedom even during the years of dictatorship as well as well as one could in those days, keeping up a correspondence, even if with difficulty, with the greatest scholars of the free world. What was the position of Croce on the South and Unity of Italy? Croce thought the Italian Risorgimento and the resulting unit of Italy, one of the greatest masterpieces of political history. He admired Cavour, his liberalism and its concreteness. The man who, unlike Mazzini and Garibaldi was able to hold together the ideal and the real. The many controversial episodes of the Risorgi- mento could not obscure the overall trend of history. Piedmont and Lombardy, Campania and Sicily, Florence and Rome, Genoa and Venice, despite their diversity found themselves having to win their freedom from foreign rule, political freedoms, economic freedoms. In other words they had to catch up to history if one can say so. With a thousand limits and many difficulties. Thus, even the South of Italy, uniting itself to the rest of Italy, while paying a heavy price, acquired a relative freedom, opened, albeit tentatively, to democracy. This does not mean that we should ignore the dark episodes, the excessive centralization of the early years of unitary governments, the shabbiness that accompanies every turns of history, every revolution or war. Croce did not have a rhetorical attitude (completely foreign to his personality) in respect to the Risorgimento: he defended its essence, so to speak, its ethical- political dimension, as he liked to say. As in the last analysis did the best part of the Neapolitan and southern bourgeoisie culture, which also fought for the unity of the country and paid a high price in blood and suffering.

310 Ovi Symposium II 5 Two brief comments by Emanuel L. Paparella by way of a dialogue on two excerpted statements from Ernesto Paolozzi’s interview” Thank you Ernesto for the clear insights in your piece on neo-positivism and the interview on Croce for La Voce di New York. I particularly liked that mention of Vico at the end of your essay as the master key to unraveling the confusion brought about by a materialistically oriented positivism. By way of a dialogue and discussion in our own symposium I’d like to briefly comment on two excerpted statements from your interview in “La Voce di New York” on a topic with which I have been concerned since my youth and remains dear to my heart: the causes of Italian emigration. The statements (in bold) are the following: 1. “Freedom existed before…natural law…Man is born free and fights to assert his freedom.” Those two statements come across, to my mind at any rate, as slightly ambiguous and contradictory, perhaps worth pausing upon. It not sufficiently clear to me whether freedom is part of natural law, something man is born with, a constitutive part of his human nature, or is it man that creates his own freedom throughout history? Another way of framing the issue is the following question: is freedom absolute as a value in itself to be discovered or is it relative to the conditions of the polis in which he lives? In other words Is freedom dependent on what in the US Constitution are mentioned and declared as “inalienable rights” that accrue to human nature and that no State can confer or take away? If that be the case, then man must not only fight for his freedom but also discover it, via history and aesthetics no doubt; discover that indeed he is born free (if not exactly innocent) and his inalienable rights are integral part of his human nature and his life on earth, it is not a government or a bloody revolution that confer those rights on him like the rights which accrue to citizenship. A revolution may indeed be needed but only to bring those inalienable rights to the forefront and to convince a tyrannical State that it cannot abrogate them with impunity. I am wondering if I am on track with this line of thought.

Ovi Symposium II 311 2. You allude to it Ernesto but it may be worthwhile to expand on it with more explicit details, in the context of “the high price in blood and suffering,” by Southern Italians to which you correctly refer; that in fact for the sake of unification millions of Southern Italians had to undergo the painful experience of a reluctant emigration (90% of all those who emigrated to the US between 1860 and 1910 were from the South). We need to keep in mind that mass emigration only took place after the unification of the country. Not many people know that some 50% of Southern Italian immigrants returned to Italy after some time in America, proving that their emigration was all but voluntary. My grandfather is one of those. They had to emigrate to the Americas or Australia because economic conditions in Southern Italy not only did not improve with unification but if anything they got worse. One can imagine the real suffering of an emigrant that goes from a beautiful landscape such as that of the gulf of Naples to living in an apartment next to an elevated train in New York or Chicago. Which reminds me of the proverbial almost prophetic statement of Tancredi, the nephew of the Prince of Salina in the novel by Lampedusa Il Gattopardo (1970, now part of the canon of Italian Literature) on the eve of unification: “We must change everything so that nothing changes.” I find it highly ironic that while the impetus for the unification came from the north (Piedmont, Lombardia and Veneto), it is in the North that nowadays we have phenomena such as Umberto Bossi’s Lega party who would like to set up a fictitious Republica Padana politically separate from the rest of Italy; or we may be treated to the sad spectacle at a soccer game of the shouted insults by a northern Italian EU parliamentarian who under the influence of beer (in vino veritas?) shouted “here come the Neapolitans (read Southern Italians), even the dogs are running away from the stench.” In the light of those troubling phenomena, perhaps we can further discuss this intriguing historical conundrum of a unification which paradoxically ended up creating not one but two countries. Was the cart put before the horse?; was Dazeglio right in exclaiming that “now that we have made Italy, we need to make the Italians”? It seems to me that if that is true for Italy, is it may also be true for the EU.

312 Ovi Symposium II 6 ONE Theatre for Peace: A theatrical methodology to develop an education of peace

A Presentation by Alessandra Abis “I have had a dream…” (W. Shakespeare) “I have a dream……” (M. L. King) The 21th century is an epoch different to any other in human history. The problems we are facing are global in nature. They include climate change, ever decreasing biodiver- sity, full use of fresh water on the planet and underpinning all these – overpopulation. Without peace we will be unable to achieve the levels of cooperation, inclusiveness and social equity required to begin solving these challenges, which, if unsolved, empower the international institutions to regulate them according to their rules.

Figure 1 The importance of peace to humanity’s survival in the 21th century is undeniable. For this reason we feel that it is necessary to bring to your attention the study of the mechanisms of the conflict and to improve the research of efficient solutions to reach global peace. When Adriani Teatro moved to the United States the idea to use theatrical training to build and improve peace became even stronger. USA is the nations with the highest percentage of ethnic diversity in the world. In 2012, 79,6% of the population in the United States was white (of which 15,8% Hispanic or South American), 12,9% black or African American, 4,6% Asiatic, and only 1% native American.[1]

Ovi Symposium II 313 A diverse environment like that of United States shows the need to spread a common knowledge with the aim to promote peace, seriously undermined by the conflictive coexistence of different cultural and religious backgrounds. On the other side, we observed that the diversity of religions and cultures and the non-primacy of any of them, promotes a sense of intellectual freedom in the choice of new forms of communication and solution of the problem of peace. Our conviction, as educational professionals through theatre for about 20 years [2], is that education is the most powerful instrument to communicate and enhance the knowledge of peace. This belief finds strength in Mahatma Gandhi words: “If we want to reach peace in the world, if we want to make war to war, we have to start from children”.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948) In March 2009, during the 35th session of the General Conference, UNESCO voted unanimously to establish the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. It has been formally established in New Delhi in July 2012 thanks to a joint initiative of UNESCO and the Government of India.The Mahatma Gandhi Institute aims to help governments to transform education systems, building networks and partnerships by connecting national and regional experts and institutions, and harnessing UN- ESCO’s dynamic networks of University Chairs, Associated Schools and National Commissions. “Education is essential to bringing shared values to life and to gaining the skills required in the new millennium: how to coexist peacefully, live sustainably, work collaboratively, think critically and develop creative solutions. Yet these principles and skills are not given nearly enough priority in teaching and learning today. We need a profound transformation in how we learn and what we learn.”[3] A deep transformation of education is necessary to reach this goal. John Dewey says: “Every form of Ed- ucation goes through experience”. The American philosopher strongly believed in a new kind of education based on experience and in a new role of the educator: “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”[4]

John Dewey (1859 - 1952)

314 Ovi Symposium II The role of the adult in the educational process needs to change from the one who impose information to the student, to the one who assists the student in the process of discovering new competences. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher father of the Theatre of the Oppressed, speaks about the “banking education”, addressing to a traditional education in which the student is like a blank bank account that needs to be filled by the teacher using pre-existent information.

Paulo Freire (1921 - 1997) In our project of education of peace we would like to conjugate the use of a theatrical methodology with the intrinsic meaning of what “education” means, as perfectly said by Maria Montessori in 1932: “Education is, by definition, a pacific action and only in peace it can give the highest fruits of intelligence, sociality, and love. Education is the most powerful weapon of Peace and peace is the best condition in which education can work. If family, school or society put the child in conditions of conflict, of competition or of submission to a dominant adult, it will be denied his right to express himself and consequently he will hide himself and defend his real nature”. Basically this is the seed of war, sacrifice and defiance, because the instinct of a child is not conflict but peace and free obedience.[5]

Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952) With all these premises Adriani Teatro’s idea of using theatre to promote the education of peace aims not to an artistic product, where professional actors perform a show about peace and war. We intend to use theatre as theatrical animation, meaning a training, based on a sequence of exercises (or games, as we like to call them) usually used to teach dynamics of the stage to actors, to bring our students in a place different from their everyday environment. In this space that we call “theatre”, it is possible to find freedom from pre-existing backgrounds and to re-discover the principles of peace, brotherhood and oneness. The project of using theatrical training with a group of individuals who need and want to investigate the mechanisms of conflict and who want to learn how to substitute them with peaceful strategies has been shared with Auroras Voice, a no profit organization of Delray Beach FL., whose aim is to continue the work of Mahatma Gandhi and M. L. King. The organization, directed by Pablo Del Real, signed an agreement with UNESCO Chair of Peace and Human Development of University of Florence. The connection with Auroras

Ovi Symposium II 315 Voice gave us the idea to connect the theatrical training with the six principles of nonviolence set by Dr. King. The use of such a powerful structure gives us the chance to simplify the practical experience of the participants to our experiment. We will try to highlight everyday violent programming developed in our contemporary societies and, through the practical experience of the training, we will try to re-program these beliefs according to the six nonviolent principles of Dr. King.

Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968) In this occasion, using the kind hospitality of the OVI Symposium, Adriani Teatro is casting a hook for all those who recognize themselves in what we have enunciated here and would like to challenge themselves, their students or the cultural groups in which they are involved to go beyond any social, religious and philosophical belief and try the experience to find themselves in a neutral space where no “cultural background“ is allowed. In that space that we call Theatre we will try to “play” together in order to experience what the world most needs now more than ever: PEACE.

High School C. Sylos - Bitonto Italy [1] www.respublicaspqr.forumcommunity.net – Studi Antropologici – La composizione etnica degli Stati Uniti d’America. “Around 40,7 millions are African Americans including black Hispanic. Around 198 millions are white not Hispanic divided in this way: 50,7 millions come from Germany,36,5 from United Kingdom, 36,5 from Ireland, 17,8 from Italy, 11,8 from France (including Canadian),10 millions from Poland, 5 millions from Netherlands, 4,6 millions from Norway, 4,4 from Sweden,, 3 millions from Russia, 1,5 millions from Hungary,1,5 millions from Denmark, 1,4 millions from Greece and the same from Armenia and Portugal. Almost 15 millions of people come from Asiatic countries, above all Philippines (4 millions), China (3,5 millions), India (2,7 millions), Vietnam ( 1,6 millions) Korea (1,5 millions) and Japan ( 1,2 millions). Native Americans are nearly 4,5 millions of people”.

316 Ovi Symposium II [2] www.adrianiteatro.com or www.adrianiteatro.net [3] www.unesco.org, Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development Mahatma Gandhi, New Deli, India. Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO. [4] Cfr. J. Dewey, Esperienza e Educazione, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1984, pp.13-17. [5] Dr. M. Montessori, Peace and Education, 1971, The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras, India.

Ovi Symposium II 317 Chapter 23 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-third Meeting: 10 April 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Caravaggio, Leonardo, di Lampedusa, D’Azeglio, Machiavelli, Ford, Manzoni, Peter Paul & Mary, Shuman, Galkenende, Eidenauer, Churchill, Shuman, Monet, D’Estaing, Berlusconi, Santayana, Marx, Pius IX, di Lampedusa, Mussolini, Caesar, Petain, Hitler, Bossi, Dante, Manzoni, Beethoven, Napo- leon, Garibaldi, Ferdinand II, Dawson, Victor Emanuel II, Barroso, Buttiglione, Prodi, Iris, Marcus Aurelius, John Paul II, Michelangelo, Innocent X, Boal, Freire, Mongili, Tonon, Orefice, Napolitano.

Table of Contents for the 23rd Session of the Ovi Symposium Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator Section 1: a brief follow-up dialogue on the previous presentations by Ernesto Paolozzi and Emanuel L. Paparella on the nature of liberty and the nexus between Italian unification and emigration. Section 2: “The European Union’s Constitution: the Cart before the Horse?” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 3: “Games and Theater to Foment Change in Work Places: TEJACO –The Innovative Multilateral European Project Leonardo da Vinci.” A presentation by Maria Buccolo (translated from the Italian by Eman- uel L. Paparella).

318 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator In section one of this 23rd meeting of the Ovi symposium Paolozzi and Paparella renew their ongoing dialogue on the themes of the nature of liberty and the nexus between Italian unification and Italian emigration. In section two Paparella follows up on the previously made comparison between the unification of Italy and the unification of Europe identifying the cultural problematic which needs to be analyzed and avoided for a successful integration of the various national cultures of Europe. He insists that without a clear cultural identity and an enlightened policy for the integration of its immigrants, who are not originally Europeans, the polity called European Union will run the real danger of building its future on sand as various prophetic voices have already alerted us to. In section three Maria Buccolo makes her debut in the Ovi Symposium with a presentation of a very interesting multinational European project based on the pedagogy of the theater, the TEJACO European intercultur- al project, which was initiated at the University of Florence and of which she is part. The project was inspired by the theater of the oppressed of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire. The purpose of the project is to facilitate an inter-cultural dialogue and the integration of immigrants to the EU in the very places where they work. Perhaps it is such innovations which are necessary to recover in the first place the forgotten cultural identity of Europe and avoid the mistake of constructing a polity devoid of a strong cultural identity, a theme further discussed by Paparella in section two; and secondly, to avoid the mistake made in the US by the likes of Henry Ford who would stage plays in his automobile factories (“The Melting Pot” being one of them) where the message to the immigrants working came through loud and clear: that unless they rejected their original culture and language they would never be successful in a modern progressive America dedicated to industrial production and consumption. That was a great cultural mistake rejecting multiculturalism in the name of profits and the bottom line and resulting in an artificial superficial integration via a forced assimilation and abetted by a sort of cultural imperialism mitigated only by an imaginative Constitution which proclaimed common ideals but deluding itself that what is the most modern and the most progressive is always the best and worthy of imitation. There is much to ponder and discuss in Buccolo’s presentation. Two pertinent questions worth exploring, were such a discussion to ensue among participants and/or readers, are the following: “can cultural instruments ever be neutral or completely objective? And, should multiculturalism include the cultures from which immigrants originate while aiming at integration to the host culture?

Ovi Symposium II 319 1 A transatlantic convivial follow-up dialogue between Paolozzi and Paparella on the issue of freedom, Italian Unification, and emigration Paolozzi: To clarify the issue placed on the table by Paparella on the natural and historic foundation of freedom, I need to point out that in the interview to La Voce di New York I was addressing by implication, and not frontally, those who maintain the superiority of equality vis a vis freedom. Therefore, I was saying that man is born free, then he becomes democratic, or socialist or something else. Generally speaking, I think that, like art for example, liberty more than a natural law can be defined as a category of the spirit. We are all born artists, then within history each of us creates different forms of art, Caravaggio is as much an artist as is Leonardo, albeit they are different kinds of artists. I think we can say the same for art. Humanity eternally builds its own historical freedom. Sometimes it fights to establish a constitution, other times to abolish it. It is possible to manage a very good constitution dictatorially. A country such as England which does not have a written constitution may enjoy a high level of liberty which cannot be fully expressed but, fortunately, it cannot be completely erased either. Here we arrive at the issue of judgment and responsibility. We cannot establish a priori which is the better State. One judges as one goes along and thus each of usi s responsible for his judgment and his actions. Perhaps we can agree on this consideration, we can refer to the Gospel which maintains that God made man free. In that sense I think that freedom is a natural law. Rights are always historical, liberty is eternal, just as eternal as its necessary opposite. Liberty is the eternal overcoming of illiberality within the unpredictable development of history. On the second issue, I will say that I was not referring to the drama of emigration which took place in Italy after its unification. Rather I had in mind the sufferings which the populations of southern Italy had to undergo during the Second World War and the subsequent setting up of a new State which was too rigid and quite often deaf to the problems of those lands. And this without mentioning the loss of prestige of a city such as Naples which still today pretends to be, but it is not, a European and a world capital. But history was not frozen, as it happened after the American civil war. At the end of it all, the better Neapol- itans, the better southern Italians, preferred a new liberal road to the policy of power for power’s sake of the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. There was no choice. Without unification Italy would never have become a great nation as it is, after all is said and done. The same problem can be discerned nowadays regarding the unification of Europe. Either Europe inte- grates itself (in a different mode from the way it was achieved in Italy or Germany a century and a half ago) or the small countries which comprise the continent become irrelevant in a globalized world. This would be too bad for the entire Western civilization, as Paparella maintains by implication in his reflections on the Christian patrimony of Europe. Italy has gone through some difficult times with the advent of the Lega Nord, a movement which is after all a racist movement, and which fortunately is coming to an end. It was successful especially among the most ignorant segments of the population of the provinces of the north (much less in cities such as Turin, Genoa, Milan, Venice), as it has occurred at the same time as the neo fascism of France, going on as we speak.

320 Ovi Symposium II In Southern Italy, as a reaction some neo-Bourbon resurgences have occurred, but they too are exhausting themselves. These tendencies can be discovered even in the sport of soccer, and this I hate to admit because I love soccer and even played it as a young man. But this sport has contributed to generate hatred between Italians; a problem this that politicians and historian undervalue because it does not fit in their neat academic paradigms, but the issue remains, as indeed it remains in many places in the world, as the issue of regional fealties and the competition between regions and cities. However, it looks that on the political level it is in an evident retrogression. What we have to gamble upon is in the ability of remaining Italians, Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans while remembering that we are all human beings, with the same joys and the same sufferings. We are all participants in the same symposium just as we are doing, as best as we can, via the magazine Ovi. Paparella: Thank you Ernesto for the clarification. Indeed we concur on the notion that man is born free and endowed with the Crocean category of the spirit called liberty. That is practically equivalent to what the founding fathers of the US meant by “inalienable rights” mentioned in the American constitution. It’s a different name but the concept is pretty much the same; that is to say, man is born with those rights, they accrue to his human nature, and no state can confer them or in principle can arbitrarily take them away. It is true that the notion of inalienable rights was not known to the Greeks or the Romans who had high concepts of liberty but not that of inalienable rights as constitutive parts of human nature. They were discovered later on as embedded in the Judeo-Christian notion of brotherhood under a common Father. Which of course makes it all the more hypocritical that those rights, after being enshrined in a Constitution, were then egregiously denied to a good portion of the US population declared not fully human; an issue that was only resolved some eighty years later with a bloody civil war which would have been unnecessary had those inalienable rights for all citizens been honored from the beginning. Finally, to continue our conversation on Italian emigration, if I understand Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s message in Il Gattopardo correctly, when Tancredi says cynically to his uncle Don Fabrizio Prince of Salina that “We need to change everything so that nothing changes” he is predicting that in the final analysis what will occur with the unification of the country is a changing of a king, the Bourbons will be substituted with another king from up north from the house of Savoy, albeit the latter will be a constitutional one, but that basically two Italys will persist: one poor in the south and one rich from the north, at least at the economic level, and the aristocrats while taking their honorable seat at the table of a different king will hardly change anything of a system of economic inequality based on class privilege. Mazzini’s dream of a democratic Italian Republic friendly to the cultural heritage of Italy never came to pass and had to wait 85 years to be re-proposed. In fact, economically speaking in 1860 things got worse for Southern Italians who, after the unification, were compelled by those same bad economic conditions to emigrate by the millions; which is to say, distributive justice, which ought to have strengthen a unified community or country, was sorely neglected. Instead, what was paid attention to was the slavish imitation of a rabid nationalism focused on real politik. My own grandfather had to emigrate to America at the turn of the 20th century but eventually returned to Italy after twenty years or so, which means he did not do so willingly; 50% of the Italian immigrants to America in fact returned to Italy. Of course one can rebut that the reaction of Don Fabrizio and his nephew to Italian unification was quite predictable; the tendencies of the class to which they belonged had never been very democratic and libertarians but rather elitist and excluvist, and Lampedusa no doubt inherited many of those anti-liberal attitudes, but on the other hand there is an element of stubborn, ironic cynical realism (some

Ovi Symposium II 321 would say Machiavellianism) in the attitudes of the aristocrats of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as revealed in Il Gattopardo which were confirmed later on by irrefutable historical facts. One begins to wonder if the nationalism and unification envisioned by a Machiavelli were indeed the right dress for Italy even if mixed with a tinge of Roman universalism. D’Azeglio may have had it in on target when he said that “now that we have made Italy we need to make the Italians,” and here too we seem to agree that it is fervently to be hoped that the same mistake is not repeated by the political entity called European Union, for as Marx quipped those who do not know their history or cultural identity are bound to repeat it. You mention Ernesto the regional conflicts but I am afraid that regional rivalries are only a reflection of national rivalries in Europe which despite appearances are still alive in Europe. Reflecting on that one cannot but conclude that perhaps Italy was all along ill-suited to what turned out to be the straight-jacket of nationalism and an authoritarian central government, often leading to xenophobia and even racism, since in its historical experience its spiritual roots were much less restrictive and more universal: those of Catholicism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance; all universal experiences which were shared with the rest of the continent. Perhaps the silver lining in all this is that it is exactly those spiritual roots that uniquely qualify Italy to guide and inspire the EU out of a latent nationalism and resurgent fascism, and this despite Mussolini and the Lega Nord. The question arises perhaps better expressed in Latin: EU, nosce te ipsum? As Manzoni aptly put it poetically, placing in doubt the vaunted glory of a Europe tinged with imperial Napoleonic nationalism parading as pan-Europeanism: “Ai posteri l’ardua sentenza [the answer belongs to posterity], or, as the more contemporary song by Peter Paul and Mary renders it: “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind.” It remains to be seen in which direction will blow the political winds of the political venture called EU.

322 Ovi Symposium II 2 The European Union’s Constitution: The Cart before the Horse? A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella “I never feel so European as when I am in a cathedral” (Robert Shuman) While the signing of the EU Constitution in Rome in 2004 was hailed as a “new beginning” by the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Galkenende, who at the time presided over the EU Council, there were, and there still are, ominous disturbing signs that by ignoring the “old beginnings” the cart was placed before the horse once again, as had already happened with Italian unification. On Friday, October 29th 2004, twenty-five heads of state comprising the then European Union put their signatures to the proposed EU constitution in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, Italy. Other signatories were three candidate states: Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey. Two of them have since entered the Union. The Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Galkenende hailed the event as “a new beginning.”

The signing of the EU Constitution in Rome on October 29, 2004 To be sure, the “old” beginning hark back almost half a century to 1957 when the Treaty of Rome was signed in the very same August Room where the EU Constitution was signed. That treaty established a permanent alliance among six founding European nations. Those were the days of De Gaulle, De Gasperi, Eidenau- er, Churchill, Shuman, Monet: the visionary founding fathers of a United Europe. One has to wonder why inexplicably, one hardly ever hears of them anymore. It’s as if they had been relegated to the generation of the old Europeans of the “old beginnings,” a sort of passè generation superseded by the generation of “new beginnings,” born after 1950. The drafting of this important document by the Constitutional Convention, headed by Gisgard D’Estaing, began in 2001 and took two years of debates, negotiations and compromises, not to mention fierce disagreements of various kinds, the most notorious perhaps revolving around the issue of the mentioning of Christianity or whether or not the document ought to have any reference to a deity, something present in some 90% of constitutions around the world. The focus was particularly on whether or not to include a reference to Christianity, which many knowledgeable Europeans, even the atheists among them, consider not only a sine qua non for understanding the European cultural identity, but the cement needed to hold together disparate countries with disparate languages and mores.

Ovi Symposium II 323 As it happened, the acrimonies continued till the last minute before the planned signing. The secularist liberal politicians would not compromise on this issue reasoning that a strict separation of Church and State had to be honored thus insuring “laicitè,” or secularism. This, in turn, insures that each individual’s civil rights, including the right to worship and practice the religion of his/her choice, or not to practice any religion at all, are honored. Paradoxically, they were asking that people be anti-clerical to protect Christianity from itself. The specter of the Inquisition and past religious wars was duly resurrected, never mind the more glaring failed experiment of the Soviet Union, a State without religion, underpinned by a political ideology called Marxism with all the trappings of a secular ideological fundamentalism, not to speak of Nazism. In any case, this fierce opposition to the reference to Christianity in the EU Constitution effectively derailed its planned signing on 13 December 2003. It seemed that Iris, the goddess of discord had made her appearance on Mount Olympus on such a day throwing her famed apple on the banquet table. This was an embarrassment for the presidency of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi at the EU Council of Nations. The Irish presidency which followed also failed to produce a signing. The Dutch presidency succeeded however. It managed to settle the issue of proportional voting and insure that the signing took place in Rome, exactly forty seven years after the beginning of the new entity called the European Union. Thus the concluding ceremony of the Constitutional convention in Rome resembled its beginning in Brus- sels, when the mythical Europa was invoked by Gisgard D’Estaing. Indeed, Santayana was on target when he said that people change their gods but hardly their way of worshipping them. So the event begs the question: was it a genuine success or a Pyrrhic victory of sort? Let’s analyze those still fresh events in the light of the past events of Italian unification. There is a forgotten lesson there that I believe will return to haunt the European Union; for while Marx might have been wrong on many aspects of his social philosophy, he was right in one particular aspect: those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it, even if, as Santayana also reminds us, the second time it may come about more as a farce than as a tragedy. In 1870 Rome was snatched away from Pope Pius IX and became the capital of a united Italy. A latecomer to the community of European nations, since 1861 it had proclaimed itself a liberal constitutional monarchy under Victor Emanuel II. The architects of this new polity were Count Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. This was indeed a new Rome with a fresh “new beginning” epitomized in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famed novel Il Gattopardo. It was not the first Rome of the ancient Roman Empire, or the Medieval Holy Roman Empire aping it; nor the second one of the Renaissance King Popes who governed the whole of central Italy, the so called Papal State, but the third Rome: the capital of a new liberal secular nation intent on claiming its rightful place among the nations of Europe, colonialism and all.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

324 Ovi Symposium II Sixty short years later, the king of Italy was proclaimed Emperor of Italy, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya by none other than the strong man of Italy, Benito Mussolini, holding the bridles of power as a sort of omnipotent Roman consul who, to better obfuscate and mystify matters, had resurrected the Machiavellian myth of the direct genetic line of the Italian people to the Romans. Mussolini strutted about on the world’s stage calling the Mediterranean “mare nostro.” The reality is that 90% or more of the genes in present day Italians are not Roman. In present day Italians there are genes that belong to Arabs, Normans, Longobards, Visigoths, Fenicians, Greeks, French, Austrians, Spaniards, Celts, you name it and they are there. So the national anthem which proclaims that “Italy has woken up and dunned on her head the helmet of Scipio,” to finally evict the invading foreigners as Scipio had done with Hannibal, rather than a Machiavellian political reality is a caricature, a sort of “the impossible dream” of simple-minded racist nationalists and imperialists: the Petains, and the Mussolinis and the Hitlers and the Bossis and their descendants. This was so because the foreigners now lived inside the very genes of the people who had invaded Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. The pure Roman race as well as the pure Aryan race were chimeras pure and simple, an historical fraud perpetrated on the people; for Italians were now one of the most bastardized races of Europe, and all the better for it. But despite the bastardization, people somehow managed to live together in harmony because they could be inspired by certain ideals rooted in universal experiences such as the Roman Empire and the Catholic (the word means universal) Church. Dante’s De Monarchia reflects that reality and proposes it as an ideal. The ideal came crashing down in 1861 when the little Italy was founded, and I think it was Croce who pronounced that statement. This new modern nation was now bent on aping the nationalistic imperialism of the other nations wanting to pass for pan-Europeanism, and donning the tight jacket of a secular centralized nationalism contemptuous of regional differences, an experience to which Italy was never well-accustomed. Alessandro Manzoni, the devout Catholic and the greatest literary figure of the 19th century, had fervently hoped, with Beethoven, that Napoleon would restore those larger trans-national, cosmopolitan, European universal values, but they were both to be greatly disappointed. What was still at work, despite the proclaimed universal ideals of the French Revolution, was good old nationalism coupled with good old imperialism; a greater France masked as Pan Europeanism. Manzoni, however, despite his great reservations about Na- poleon, saw no contradiction between being a good Catholic and being a good liberal and accepted a seat in the newly minted Italian Senate of the new nation. But he was the exception which few followed; for, to make matters worse, the Pope had retreated to the Vatican palaces as a sort of prisoner excommunicating all those who supported what he considered a usurping national secular State. So in the Pope’s eyes, the pious Manzoni was also a bad Catholic. Paradoxically, it was Mussolini who some sixty years later, while conquering Ethiopia a la Caesar, ignoring the protests of a feckless League of Nations, came to an accom- modation with the Church by making the Vatican an independent State. The anti-clericalism of many liberal Italians was not diminished however and persists even today. It is an ancient grudge apparent in Rome more than other Italian cities and partly explains the strength of the Communist party in Italy.

Ovi Symposium II 325 Signing of the Lateran Concordat between the Church and Mussolini in 1929 By the 1930s, with the establishment of Vatican City, one could have said “all is well that ends well” as far as relations between Church and State were concerned. The Italian State was legitimized in the eyes of the Church and Italians could once again be patriotic and good Catholics at the same time. But the demarcation between the secular and the sacred were still blurry. The Italian Constitution continued to declare Italy a Catholic country till recently when that proclamation was abrogated. Religion was taught once a week in public schools. More- over, the proclamation of freedom of religion would have to wait for the Vatican II Council thirty some years later. Indeed, there was a snake in this heavenly garden called the New Liberal Italy. It was hinted at by the the nephew of the Prince of Salina in the above mentioned novel while he was still fighting for Garibaldi and his dream of unifiation, when he tells his uncle: “We need to change everything so that it all remains the same.” What did he mean by that enigmatic statement? Simply that what would happen in Sicily and most of South- ern Italy, as far as ordinary people were concerned, is that one King (Ferdinand II of the Bourbon) would be substituted with another (Victor Emmanuel II of the Savoy), and things would return to normal. As it happened, things worsened. Rather than bringing unity and harmony and some kind of social justice to Southern Italy, Italian unification exacerbated the socio-political plight of Southern Italy; the industrial North was privileged at the expense of the agricultural South, giving rise to banditry for a while, so that by the turn of the 20th century millions of Southern Italians were forced to emigrate to the Americas or to Australia. It is not an accident that 90% of Italian-Americans have grandparents who emigrated from Southern Italy. It was d’Azeglio, an Italian patriot, who put it best with his famous dictum: “Now that we have made Italy, we need to make the Italians,” which is to say, the cart had misguidedly been put before the horse. Italy had been designed and built, and now the people were asked to simply accept the design of a few elitist politicians who thought that they knew better than them. Most of the one thousand patriots, the so called Red Shirts, who liberated Sicily in 1859 were university students, intellectuals and professionals, the elites of their society; this was hardly what one might call a populist movement. The people were merely asked to vote on the annexation. So Tancredi might after all have had a point with his cynical statement: we must change everything so that nothing will change. As it happened, what was constructed after the unification was a “little bourgeoisie Italy” composed of merchants bent on accumulating wealth, blissfully neglectful of the universal ideals of both the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, of Humanism and the Renaissance, not to speak of cultural patrimony, values and cultural identity. They felt little allegiance toward the new Northern King (who did not visit Southern Italy till 1900 prompting the famous Neapolitan song “Come back to Sorrento” a thinly veiled allusion to his neglect of the South). And so the unity of Commerce and a Central Italian Bank, without the consent of the governed, did not hold water for very long, and the experiment with democracy ended abruptly sixty short

326 Ovi Symposium II years after unification with the advent of Fascism and the strongman Mussolini. After the Second World War Italy was proclaimed a Republic and became one of the original founders of the European Union. But what are the insights to be derived from this brief and schematic overview of the history of Italian unification—insights which may prove useful to the present day architect of European unification? The first insight could be this: a cultural identity of disparate people with disparate mores and even disparate languages (which reflect their culture and therefore are to be jealously preserved) cannot be imposed from the top down by elitist leaders, philosopher-kings with esoteric ideas. It has to come from the bottom up, democratically. Before drafting a Constitution one needs to listen carefully to the people and determine which are the universal common values that can function as a sort of cultural cement of their political union. Then one needs to obtain their consent. Not to do so and proceed with the formation of a united Europe without determining what does it mean to be a European is to put the cart before the horse. Shuman and his generation, not to mention Christopher Dawson’s The Making of Europe, were very aware of the necessity of a common cultural patrimony; that the cement for a unified Europe needs to be cultural, not racial, not nationalistic even if it be that of a hyper-nation. It needs to recognize cultural heritages such democracy, science, Greco-Roman civilization, Germanic concepts of freedom, Christianity (which when authentic is always universal and trans-cultural), the synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization and Christianity which is Chris- tian Humanism and the Renaissance. A Central Bank and the promise of prosperity, or Machiavellian concepts of real-politik, or universal soccer games on Sunday simply will not do. Even a common language could not prevent a civil war in the US. That civil war proves that it is dangerous to put ideals in a Constitution which are not meant to be honored. The people will not stand for it forever, for as Lincoln put it: one can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but one cannot fool all the people all the time. Were one to glance at the very first article of the EU Constitution one would read these words: “Inspired by the will of its citizens and the European States, to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the Europe- an Union...” So the second insight to be derived from the mistakes of Italian unification is this: that unless those first words of the EU Constitution are really meant and honored in the future, then that common future will be built on sand and one is perpetrating a great fraud on one’s people. One notices in that first article that the will of its citizens is declared the original inspiration; the will of the people takes precedence, as it ought in any democracy worthy of its name, over the will of its elitist aristocratic leaders, and the will of its member States. Assuming that the people have already been listened to, the member States need to let people ratify the polity that they have created in their name. A Constitution is not a treaty among States but a social compact among the people.Those people have a past as well as a future and that past needs to be known and respected before forging a viable future. A car without a rear-view mirror may eventually end up in a ravine. The French, the Dutch and the Irish, voted down the Constitution in a referendum. To switch metaphor again: to make Europe first and the Europeans later, is to put the cart before the horse. That cart and its horse may too end up in a ravine. The twenty-five head of states present in Rome pledged to ratify the Constitution within two years; eleven of the twenty five pledged a referendum among their people, which is all well and good, but there are ominous signs that those may be empty promises. There is talk now of bypassing referendums and leave the ratification to the individual states’ congresses. Even more ominously the very word Constitution has been dropped and the old one Treaty has been resurrected. The racist and fascistic Italian Lega for one seems to be balking at the idea of a referendum. Silvio Berlusconi,

Ovi Symposium II 327 the then PM now back in power went on record saying that “We shall commit ourselves to ensuring that Italy ratifies the new treaty without delay.” What is ominous in those words is that Berlusconi refers to the Constitution as “a treaty among States.” But a Constitution is more than a legally binding treaty to insure prosperity, greater commerce and movement of goods among nations. It is also a document that ought to inspire the people to create a greater more meaningful union aiming not at goods but at the Good, the Beautiful, the True. It takes more than a bank to inspire people. Romano Prodi, the ex PM who then presided over the EU Commission, reveals that he has a better notion than a Berlusconi of what a constitution is all about when he declared that “The new Constitu- tion goes beyond existing treaties. It has an innovative content of the social rights…and new social clauses.” Indeed, to ignore the will of the people will mean that the cynical politicians will have to deal with the wrath of the people later on. The people in their rage may bring down the whole structure called European Union, once they realize that it is being constructed without their consent. Finally, let us take a brief imaginary look at the symbolism and the semiotic signs present at the very signing of the Constitution on 29 October 2004. In the first place one ought to note the silence of the people. That is a powerful sign in itself. There were neither demonstrations, nor festivities among the people at this august event; an event overshadowed by the Borroso/Buttiglione crisis in the EU Parliament. Could it be that Iris, the goddess of discord was there, invisible perhaps, but there nonetheless to continue the mischief she initiated on December 13th 2003? There were other disturbing signs. Those who are familiar with Rome know that piazza Campidoglio was the ancient citadel, the core of Imperial Rome, the first Rome that is. There is an equestrian statue in the middle of the piazza portraying the anomaly of a philosopher-Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. But the architecture of the buildings surrounding the square belongs to the second Rome, the Renaissance Rome of the Popes. The square was in fact designed by none other than Michelangelo. The heads of states must have passed silently by that statue of Marcus Aurelius and then climbed the scalone Michelangelo in order to enter the great hall Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, another throw back to ancient Rome. But here too, that “sala” is more Renaissance then ancient. Another irony: the Constitution, which makes no reference to Christianity, was actually signed under the prominent bronze statue of a Pope in full regalia and wearing his tiara (see photo above). And who pray was this Pope? None other than Innocent X, the last Pope of the Catholic counter-reformation. He is the one who wrote a bull of condemnation against the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 which, after thirty years of religious wars, declared the end of the so called “Sacred Roman Empire” and authorized religious freedom in Europe. Pope John-Paul II who had declared religious freedom as part of the Church Constitution in the 20th century was not as much as consulted or even mentioned at the ceremony; as if he lived on another planet some- where. And for obvious reasons: he is the one who had been insisting that Christianity be acknowledged in the EU Constitution as one of the pillars of Western Civilization while honoring and keeping separation of Church and State and religious freedom. He was ignored just as his warning at the European parliament in 1988 was ignored, and the EU Constitution was signed in his face, so to speak, under the auspices of the goddess Europa and the goddess Iris (perhaps represented by Buttiglione, the rejected minister of Barro- so’s EU Commission) and the vigilant watch of a reactionary Pope who condemned religious freedom in the 17th century. Dante must be turning in his grave in Ravenna at the sight of those strange ironies of history.

328 Ovi Symposium II 3 Games and Theater to Foment Change in EU Work Places: TEJACO –The Innovative Multilateral European Project Leonardo da Vinci A Presentation by Maria Buccolo (translated by E. Paparella) The theater is not just an event, it is a life-style. We are all actors: To be a citizen is not to live in a society but to change it --Augusto Boal

Maria Buccolo with a masked actor of Commedia dell’Arte The principal goal of the Project Tejaco is that of favoring the professional integration of immigrants to the EU in the places they work. The practical aim of the project is that of transferring and adopting the know how of theatrical pedagogy to companies to enhance the integration of immigrants and a inter-cultural dialogue. From a scientific view-point the Project Tejaco is based on the Doctoral dissertation of Dr. Maria Buccolo, a member of the University of Florence, and on projects effected by other partners such as the International Festival of the entrepreneurial theater as created by Beatrice Boquien of the CNAM of Nantes, of the text which she wrote on that theme, and the formative experience of CENEGO and the institute of Rumanian Education. The contributions of the various partners within the Project Tejaco have alllowed the raising of consciousness of various organizations for the use of theater methodologies and games within a company to confront their problems. These are the principle objectives of the project: --to experiment, adapt and evaluate the different results of the projects of theater and games as applied to specific cultures of the project and as regards the cretivity of the practices of formation which has been eriched from the geographical and historical perspective of the different methods of different countries: for that reason Italy was choses as the place for Theater-in-action, and the masks of the Comedy of Art, for France the forum theater, for Belgium the table games and for Romania the games of stalls. --to transfer those methods to enterprises, especially those places where there are problems of the Integra- tion of immigrants.

Ovi Symposium II 329 --to support the approval of the results of the preceding projects and of the experimentations for the ones who do the forming, more particularly the members of the Young Chamber of Commerce of the partner states who work within corporations and who have to confront the problems of integration and lack of manpower. --to give value to the experiences of each country and construct an inter-cultural offer of theater pedagogy of theater and game pedagogy. In the last analysis, the project Tejaco wants to show how at the European level, in each country, the methodology of the theater and of games has different characteristics ties to the socio-cultural matrix and how they represent a challenge to create a dialogue among the different subjects of a corporation or factory.

The laboratory of “Competences of communication and valorization of the diversities within companies,” which was realized at the headquarters of the Industrial Model of Venice on the 12th and the 13th of March 2009, was an experiment conducted in Italy within the Project Tejaco for the transfer o the methodology of the forum theater. The Veneto region was chosen since, from the researches which were conducted it was the first region in Italy to have a great number of immigrant workers in companies of various sectors of the economy. We were dealing with a journey of exploration of the communication within companies with one of its principal objective the reflection on the diversity (culture, gender, age, etc.) present within the companies’ reality within a period of theatrical formation and the realization of segments within the methodology of the forum theater (TF). The TF had its origins toward the end of the 70s with the so called theater of the oppressed imagined by the Brasilian actor Augusto Boal, who went back to the pedagogical thought of Paulo Freire, and held that the oppressed could imagine and experiment his own emancipation thanks to the theater and that the viewers could also become actors thanks to the Forum. Development of the laboratory phase: --The foundational phase has allowed the creation of the climate of the group and the expressive activa- tion of the participants (trust, intimacy and collaboration). --The relational phase wherein were realized some games of knowing each other, break-down, contact, improvisation and narration of one’s life story. -- The creational phase wherein scenes were created and the theatrical creative process was put in motion. During this phase there were exploration for the creation of improvised scenes, organized thematically in different categories, emotions, situations, real roles, imagined roles.

330 Ovi Symposium II --The representational phase wherein what was produced during the formative period is staged. --The sharing phase wherein the entire formative stage of the day was reexamined from the participants, and the subjective experiences were staged and the positive and negative aspects emphasized. During the first phase the formative training was begun via individual and team oriented theatrical exercises in order to develop the communication competences and the group dynamism of a particular company, as well as arriving to an important reflection on the valorization of present diversities of the companies examined. The proposed games were at fundamentally the characteristics of the TF, which is to say cooperation, equality, solidarity and were useful simply to play, without falling in judgments of values, nor in competitive forms or commitments beyond the respect for the rules dictated by the play. The use of those games had as its principal objective the construction the group as an audience, that is to say as a group of persons within which the word is not only listened to, but also understood within a definite space of trust and solidarity. A second objective has involved the obtaining of integration on the part of the researchers and form-actors who were proposing the game from inside the group with which they were cooperating. Thus it was useful to the participants to experience the relationship of the group which was always agreeable, free, respectful, kind, since there was nothing to demonstrate, nothing to win, aside from the individual and collective pleasure in the play. All of this has led to the participants to the training to a real corporeal and emotive de-mechanization, to a de-ritualization of the relations within the group. After the initial formative training, the facilitators of the same led the group to the drawing of the play with the improvised dialogue and consequently the representation of small theatrical representations. They were related to the problematic of small representations related to diversity management and destined to being worked and analyzed through the forum within the context of a study of change. The scenes which were represented had a transitory and hypothetical characteristic in as much as they deal with a testing the possibility of solutions proposed by the public. This flexibility has allowed to the participants of confronting the challenge of change on one side of the coin and the resistance to change on the other side, between protagonist and antagonist, oppressor and oppressed. The three scenes which were constructed represent a conflict of at least one protagonist against the antagonist, looking at the conflict not as violence ma as opposition of two forces which contradict each other, antithetical in other words. The precise place where the action was developed were indicated together with the role of each actor. Those were essential for understanding well the scene being represented. Those situations were not simply denunciations or findings, but open dynamics toward a will to change, of alternative direction, of modification of things. It always dealt with situations which in offering a vision of the world which was not agreeable because it stressed obstacles to change, were transformed, thus opening itself up to the analysis of the forum which attempted to answer questions such as “How to do this for?” Thus titled were given to the scenes which allowed to be precisely describe the point of view of what was staged or to insert a bit of humor within a serious problem. Thus the three following situation were stated, each representing a situation which needed to be transformed: 1. The new arrival—What to do so as not to exclude oneself.

Ovi Symposium II 331 2. That awful boss—What to do to have my rights respected. 3. My idea—What to do to let one’s talents emerge.

Each group had the possibility of reflecting autonomously on the theme of diversity, to chose and construct a story, to individuate the roles to assign to the various components, identifying precisely the kinds of conflicts to be staged. The scenes thus constructed did not represent true theatrical representations in as much as they had to simply represent a situation of conflict in as clear and precise manner as possible, hence they did not ne- cessitate a particular setting. The scenes were so constructed so that the viewers were tempted to intervene, to mobilize themselves, to sympathize, imagining how things could be changed, thus arriving at the possibility of changing oneself and one’s point of view. The spectators were in fact invited to participate personally to effectuate an alternative change. Once on the stage, each spectator-actor came in contact with his/her proposal of change and could experience how it developed and what could be the consequences. Finally, those interventions were always filmed and resumed by the director to establish their consequences, always looking for a consensus even among the spectators which had not intervened. This questioning of the spectators on possible alternatives was necessary to understand if further consequences were considered possible, probable and desirable. The Results of the Project TEJACO: “the best practices of the play and theater formation in a place of work The contributions of the various partners of the Project Tejaco have allowed for the discovery of a theater presentation and the awareness of organization to the utilizing of methodologies of the theater and of games in a company in order to resolve various problems. Thus we’d like to remember that the project has attempted to: --Experiment, adapt and evaluate the different results of the theater and game projects to the specific cultures of the partner countries. --To transfer these innovative methods to various enterprises, especially where there are problems of integration of immigrants. --To support the approval of the results of previous projects and the experimentations of formation scenes, in particular the members of the young Chamber of Commerce of partner countries who work in compagnie and are challenged with problems of integration and lack of Manpower.

332 Ovi Symposium II --To appreciate the experience of each country and construct an inter-cultural offering of theater pedagogy. In the final analysis the Project Tejaco wishes to demonstrate that at a European level the methodology of the theater and of the playing of games in each country represents different characteristic tied to the socio-cultural matrix of each country, and how they represent a challenge to create a dialogue among the different groups of a company.

Thanks to the opportunities offered by this project we hope to be able to reach after two years of experimentation the goals that we have set for ourselves: to recognize the methodology of the “Enterprise of the theater as a “good practice” of company’s formation at the European level exactly because of the pedagogical contribution it offers. Within multicultural societies which become ever more complex, the theater formation must therefore acquire the inter-cultural competencies which allow us to live together, despite our differences. The four principles for a quality formation, as defined by the report of the International Commission on Education for the XXI century are: “to be able to be,” “to know,” “to be able to do,” and “to be able to live together” and those principles can be applied successfully since they are the basis of the development of cultural diversity.” *************************************************** Bibliografy Buccolo M., La formazione va in scena : ”La progettazione dei processi formativi attraverso la metodologia del teatro d’impresa”, Ed. G. Laterza, Bari 2008 Buccolo M., Mongili S., Tonon E., Teatro e Formazione. Teorie e pratiche di Pedagogia Teatrale nei contesti formativi, Franco Angeli, Milano 2012. Buccolo M. Orefice P. (a cura di),Il Teatro e la Ricerca Azione Partecipativa per lo sviluppo dei saperi della diversità nei contesti aziendali. Il Progetto Europeo TEJACO - Il Teatro e il gioco per favorire il cambiamento nelle organizzazioni, CD&V Editore, www.cdev.it, 2012. Buccolo M., Mongili S., Napolitano S., Manuale per Form-attori. Strumenti pratici per-formare nelle organizzazioni, Dino Audino Editore, Roma 2013 .

Ovi Symposium II 333 Chapter 24 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-fourth Meeting: 24 April 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Kalamidas, Verdi, Paul, Chesterton, Croce, Machiavelli, Vico, Descartes, Petrarch, Buber, Kant, Hegel, Fromm, Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, Ellul, Kessler, Fukuyama, Derrida, Gore, Socrates.

Table of Contents for the 24th Session of the Ovi Symposium Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Section 1: “Europe and Southern Italy.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi taken from an article which appeared in La Repubblica on May 10, 2009. Section 2: “The Janus-Face of Western Civilization: Will it Resurrect from the Ashes?” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

334 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator In the first section of this 24th meeting of the Ovi symposium, now one year old, Paolozzi and Paparella continue their exchanges on the unification of Italy and the European Union vis a vis the South. A perceptive reflection on the issue by Paolozzi is presented as it appeared in La Repubblica on May 10, 2009. I an substantially in agreement with what Paolozzi discusses in the piece and can personally vouch for the truth and relevancy is what he discusses, for I often travel to Italy’s Southern region of Puglia where I was born and where I still have many relatives. I have witnessed the social phenomena caused by past and present Italian governments described by Paolozzi. Indeed, those who wish to pass as our paternalistic benefactors are those we need to be most watchful of. Thanos Kalamidas has also editorialized regarding the relationship within the EU of the North vis a vis the South, Greece in particular. Indeed, the EU founding fathers’ vision had precious little to do with Machia- vellian power games, and much more to do with genuine solidarity. Alas, that seems to be sorely lacking from the present bureaucratic EU led by myopic visionless politicians whose only concern seems to be the economy, and that is why its preaching to the reawakened Russian bear sounds rather hollow, and it will continue to sound hollow till one’s wallet is put where one’s purported ideals are. Falstaff sings at the end of the famous Verdi opera “tutti buffati e gabbati,” all made fun of and fooled too,” as Paolozzi also aptly expresses it, albeit in different words, regarding the problematic relationship of South and Northern Italy, purported to be one indivisible country in solidarity among all of its regions. What obtains within Western Civilization nowadays is a global mind-set of myopic inept politicians in bed with bureaucrats, bankers and entrepreneurs incapable of envisioning anything further than their pragmatic nose, never mind idealistic visions or utopias for the future; not to speak of the fact that the so called economic “Italian miracle” of the 60s was constructed in part on the back of a cheap labor force migrating from Southern Italy to its Northern industrial centers.

Ovi Symposium II 335 In the second section of this meeting Emanuel L. Paparella continues the analysis of Western Civilization, and the European Union in particular, via the symbol of the Janus face: a civilization that looks backward and forward at the same time, which has humanistic and rationalistic (enlightenment) roots, which has de- clined and resurrected several times before via aesthetics, and that, most importantly, seems to have as its main paradigm that of its main religion (Christianity): that of death and resurrection. That may explain to puzzled readers the quote from G.K. Chesterton at the beginning of the presentation, about the eruption of Easter in springtime upon the world at large but more specifically upon Western civilization. Unless Euro- peans are able to envision their identity within the process of Christianization that began with the travels of Paul to the gentiles in the first century AD, they will also lose sight of their true identity, not only as believers but even as non-believers. Paparella does not consider this process of cultural identity, which now appears dead, deterministic even if it can be proven progressive: man remains free to bring the process to its telos or final purpose or desist from doing so. In any case, he continues to warn that to start on the wrong track of the process of cultural identity means to put the cart before the horse. Before Italy or Europe is formed one has to clearly know what it means to be an Italian or a European and why do they wish to form a more perfect union and continue to stay together. The whole symbolism of heaven and hell hints at the fact that man remains free to generate heaven or hell even here on earth within time and space, as man has in fact repeatedly done throughout history which is one of his creations: it’s up to him to choose freely which universe he wants to inhabit by examining the natural law. Natural law, allowing man the freedom to express himself freely not only does not restrict freedom but enhances it, as Paolozzi has elucidated in his Ovi book Croce and the Philosophy of Freedom. In short, a resurrection of sort is still viable with the proviso that we keep well in mind that Good Friday always precedes Easter Sunday.

336 Ovi Symposium II 1 Europe and Southern Italy A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (By way of an article that appeared in La Repubblica on 10 May 2009 as translated into English by Emanuel L. Paparella)

The European Union as presently Constituted But it is true that Southern Italy has always been on welfare? That we, Neapolitans, Campanians, Calabre- ses, are all lazy and wasteful, and represent the ball and chain dragged by the foot of the country impeding its development? It ‘s not true, it is simply not true in these terms. That Southern Italy has major problems since the time of the unification of Italy is true. It ‘also true that we needed, and we still need, an extraordinary intervention. But it is equally true that the policies of national governments, and especially the most recent ones, have always tended to be biased in favor of the Central-North part of the country. An extraordinary intervention such as the famous “Cassa per il Mezzogiorno” (Aid Funds for Southern Italy) were supposed to be a supplement of the Italian State to the existing European funds. More often than not they were a substituted for such expenditures. It’s as if I suddenly began to complain that one of my two sons is always asking me more money than the other to then become aware that my wife does not provide for the alimentation of this son who has to provide food for himself. I apologize for the banality of this example but nowadays it is better to be very clear on certain issues. This does not mean, of course, to deny that in the South there are waste, patronage and, above all, a ruling class, which is on the whole, weak. But not to the extent of legitimizing and justifying the shortcomings and, sometimes, the abuses of the national governments.

Ovi Symposium II 337 For nearly twenty years now, from both the left and the right, has existed an hermetically sealed single thought, basically one of propaganda and TV and radio broadcasting, through which such a situation, which is concrete and real, has been hushed up, if not ridiculed at some point, with the result of having damaged the South even in psychological terms, I would say, in the very dignity of the individual. We have almost believed it, in fact, being duped twice. I do not want to imagine the laughter that this has created among the Legha party and their friends in government. It ‘important, therefore, that the Democratic Party has finally decided to reverse course and go back, firmly, to place anew on the table the issue of the South in its real and concrete terms.

The Flag of the European Union In the future it is to be hoped that data can be provided that is rigorous and reliable. Be that as it may, just reading the current daily news, we can understand how our country’s reality is warped. I do not want to re- sort to talking about the data that the Fiscal Police has discovered that the greatest evasion of taxes in the construction sector occurs in Lombardia with Lazio taking second place. Wouldn’t most people have bet on Campania? Instead I wish to remember how the cuts in education, in order to contain public expenditure, have been executed especially in the South and, particularly, in Naples and Campania. Moreover, in the White Paper presented by the government on the welfare of the state, have reappeared, albeit disguised, the data on salaries which are the lowest in the South. To justify this the lower cost of living is often cited, forgetting all the other difficulties that a worker from the South has to meet daily, starting with that of finding a second job to make ends meet, often in single-earner families on which the likely prospect of the eventual unemployment of their children is a serious menace. Let this be a warning, so that besides being taken for lazy slackers we are also not taken for outright fools. While the extraordinary intervention or lack of it is in fact visible and clear, the ordinary ones are often tricky and imperceptible. When, at the end of the seventies, for example, it was decided to eliminate the so-called gasoline vouchers for tourists, the measure looked completely neutral, but it hit the South nonetheless because, of course, German tourists stopped on the Adriatic coast no longer attempting to reach our Southern shores. This was explained to me, for I was a boy at the time, by an old and well-known Southern Italian Neapolitan.

338 Ovi Symposium II 2 The Janus-Face of Western Civilization: Will it Resurrect from the Ashes? A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn… Easter, which is the spiritual New Year, should be a time for the understanding of new thoughts and the making of new things. The representatives of the rising generation can give us any number of negative reasons for not observing certain forms or traditions. They do not seem to see that it is their business as artists to create forms. They will not realize that it is their business as builders to found traditions. If the old conventions have really come to an end, the others have to do something much more difficult; they have to come to a beginning. I doubt if they have any clear idea about how to come to a beginning. They do not understand that positive creations are founded on positive creeds.” –G.K. Chesterton What is urgently needed in the debate on the future of Western Civilization is the substitution of old Machi- avellian paradigms, based on “real politick” considerations, with new imaginative ones based on humanistic considerations. Unless we manage that substitution we shall end up pouring new wine in old putrid wine- skins. One of the cultural guides for discovering such paradigms and creating a novantiqua Europe, the cradle of Western Civilization, Greece in particular, is Giambattista Vico.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)

Ovi Symposium II 339 Were one to read carefully the more thoughtful contributions to the debate on the future of Europe, one would have to come to the conclusion that, culturally speaking, Europe has a Janus-face, almost schizo- phrenic: one side is rationalistic beginning with Descartes and ushering in the Enlightenment, and the other is humanistic beginning with Petrarch and attempting to synthesize antiquity (the old) and modernity (the new) and proposing a Europe that is “novantiqua.” In my opinion, the foremost proponent of this novantiqua Europe is the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), a philosopher of European and global stature, author of The New Science (1725), and considered by many scholars as the culmination of Italian Humanism. Such a work leads the readers to a deeper notion of Europe’s cultural identity, and may even motivate them to adopt him as a cultural guide (its “Leitkultur”) for the New Europe still in the making.

Renè Descartes (1596-1650) If we survey the Italian tradition of Humanism, we will soon discover that it was fundamentally concerned with the question of the primacy of the poetic word and metaphor. For this tradition, the metaphorical image is not a “reproduction of reality.” In the image, “another” reality is expressed which can only appear under the veil of the senses. This is the new human reality of Humanism. It is the sensory “veil,” as the Humanists say, that we make use of in metaphor and which in no way is a hindrance, but rather a necessary and appropriate instrument for the realization of man’s existential act of “being-there,” or what Heidegger calls Dasein.

Francesco Petrarca, Father of Humanism (1304-1374)

340 Ovi Symposium II In other words, the metaphor is that which cannot be derived by mere logical inference and cannot be expressed through rational language. It expresses that which is beyond the grasp of rational logic: the particular and the concrete. Man is his own history and he makes history through cultural artifacts: language (which is primary), art, and political and religious institutions. Paradoxically, Vico never gave up the opposite pole of the Universal which he calls Providence. He holds them together in a complementary mode. He also holds together the transcendent and the immanent within his concept of Providence, something lost on some idealists who have attempted to subsume Vico under Hegelian philosophy. The point here being that Vico is far from the dichotomy made by Descartes between purely rational and humanistic modes of thinking with his famous “Cogito ergo sum.” He understands that to divorce mythos from logos is a very risky cultural operation leading to charismatic men (the Nazi type in love with the myths of the super-race) or technological man (man as a machine, the “Terminator” type in love with push-button technological solutions).

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Vico’s problem is fundamentally that of origins, the “archai” of historicity of the human world. A discovery in which he uncovers the indicative semantic principles that are at the basis of the “humanization” of nature. We can only attain a “humanization” and “historicization” of nature by giving meaning to the phenomena that our sensory tools offer to us and with regard to the realization of human existence. As Vico himself elegantly puts it: “And the order of human ideas is to observe the similarities of things, first to express oneself and later for purposes of proof.” (The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Bergin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948, par. 498). Ingenium is for Vico “the capacity to unite things that are separated.” (De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, an oration of Vico, in Opere di G. Vico, ed. Fausto Nicolini, Naples: Ric- ciardi, 1953, p. 2956).

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Ovi Symposium II 341 In accordance with Vico’s position, we are dealing with two Europes and two philosophical traditions seen at variance with each other. If this is so, it makes eminent sense that traditional logic, as well as the a priori thinking of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel, and formal logic (including formalistic structuralism), are all forced to deny to the Humanist tradition any kind of philosophical relevance and to put aside the problem of imagination and ingenium as metaphysically inessential, since they have no place for these questions in their general scheme of things branded as rationalism and mistaken as the non plus ultra of reason itself.

Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Most modern and post-modern humanists with a holistic view of what constitutes reason assert however, is that it is Vico, with his theory of the topical, ingenious and imaginative form of thought, who truly makes clear what the philosophical meaning of the Humanist tradition is. He remains essential for a recovery of that tradition; for indeed when man arrives at the third cycle of history (that of pure reason) there is a real danger of falling into what Vico calls the “barbarism of the intellect,” into a rationality devoid of the poetical, an imaginative that makes the trains run on time with no concern for their destination, that plans a Holocaust in two hours, executes it in two years, and then logically rationalizes the monstrosity with an ideology.

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) This phenomenon is well illustrated in the novels of Dostoevsky (The Possessed being the most exemplary), or the commentary of Martin Buber on the same, or Erick Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, or Jacques Ellul’s The Decline of the West. On the particular issue of topics in Vico, an essay that immediately jumps to mind is Edward Kessler’s “Vico’s Attempt Towards a Humanistic Foundation of Science”; also see chapter six pp. 67-77 of my book on Vico titled Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Mellen Press, New York, 1993).

342 Ovi Symposium II Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of G. Vico (1993) By Emanuel L. Paparella There is however another consideration regarding the Janus-face of Western Civilization and it is this: History in the West has always had a Janus face: that of Utopia and that of Ideology which are often seen as contrary to each other; in reality they can be harmonized despite Fukuyama’s “end of history” pronouncements. The fact is that the concept of Utopia cannot even be theorized unless its contrary is also considered: a sense of dissatisfaction with the present realistic condition and a longing for a future more just world which is presently envisioned as utopian. As any doctor worth his salt will inform us, a prognosis proves impossible without a previous diagnosis of what needs attention and healing. Any utopia implies a sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. So the question arises: in the light of the present ominous economic and cultural crisis that one can observe on both sides of the Atlantic in Western Civilization and the prevalent sense of general dissatisfaction, what are the erroneous assumptions that have landed us in a serious crisis? On the surface it appears as a mere financial crisis, but I submit that such is merely a symptom of a deeper cancer eroding the very core of Western civilization and caused by an inability to imagine a radically different social paradigm. Let’s briefly look at some of those pernicious assumptions: The first is that spending must be drastically cut if budgets are to be balanced. The second is that the West’s liberal economies must always compete with the emerging economies of developing countries, and this can happen only by reducing labor costs. Lately we have witnessed the sorry spectacle of European financial ministers in China begging for credit loans. In any case, this can only mean that in order to become competitive the life of the worker in the West must be impoverished and perhaps brought to the level of that of the Chinese laborer. Nobody has ever explained why the only criterion for evaluating wealth must be financial in nature, nor is there much imagination discernible to conceive a different criterion. The third assumption is that while the worker’s productivity must be increased salaries must be reduced. This produces the effect of over-production. The fourth assumption is that the age of retirement must be raised, as there will be too many young people and too few old people in the future. But the rationale here is faulty. The productivity of the average worker in the West has increased at least fivefold over the past fifty years, so when the time comes, fewer young people actually will be able to feed more old people. But in reality, raising the retirement age is a trick for reducing labor costs. Corporations nowadays would rather pay a poor, old worker a salary than a deserved pension, and leave the young to find their own way, accepting any kind of occupation, whether precarious or simply underpaid. This is what is actually happening as we speak and it explains the protests by the young in every major city of the West.

Ovi Symposium II 343 None of the myopic visionless unimaginative politicians of today dares to challenge these false assumptions. Those who protest against these disastrous measures are accused of being unable to comprehend the task at hand: to advance the very deregulation that produced the present collapse. If lower taxation on high incomes led to a fall in demand they say, let’s lower high-income taxation. If hyper-exploitation resulted in the production of unsold and useless cars, let’s intensify car production. One must wonder if those who think this way have all their screws in their head. It is not even logical, never mind idealist or utopian. On both sides of the Atlantic the myth is proposed that the people are in charge of their destiny since they live in a democracy. But this democracy proves to be rather fictitious and governed by autocratic organisms called central banks, federal reserve, or financial institutions, not to speak of the entrepreneurs and corporations financing political campaigns to extract an unfair political influence. The Chinese have actually done us a service by exploding the myth of the connection between democracy and the market economy: the so called “free markets.” Their economy is now growing at 10%; the West at 3% at best. We now go to China with thin cup in hand to beg for credit. How pathetic indeed. While the US Federal Reserve was established to stabilize the value of currency and maximize employment, the primary goal of the ECB charter is to fight inflation. This goal has become irrational, as deflation is the overwhelming trend. Citizens can do nothing to influence the politics of the ECB, as the Bank does not respond to political authority, and this is why European citizens have been conscious of the meaningless- ness of European elections. In the future, these same citizens may well come to view the EU as their enemy. The discourse of modernity, of romantic Sturm und Drang, of the Faustian drive to immortality, the endless thirst for economic growth and profit, the denial of organic limits has always buttressed the myth of West- ern Civilization’s sense of superiority. That is how empires and colonies were rationalized, as a civilizing mission of sort, the white man’s burden, almost a duty. Indeed, the romantic cult of youth which begins with Goethe’s Faust, is the cultural source of idealistic nationalism. In late modernity, this depiction became an essential feature of advertising. But contrary to Fascist discourse, late modern advertising does not abuse old age, but denies it, claiming that every old person can be young if he or she would simply accept to partake in the consumerist feast. The Fascism that triumphed in Italy after 1922 first had a cultural component which was dubbed Futurism. It idolized energy and youth. One of the iconic fascist songs was “giovinezza” or youth. Berlusconi brought back this sheer arrogance, but the actors of the present comedy are old men who require face lifts and Viagra to inhabit a self-created image of energy and potency. The former was based on the youthful virtues of strength, energy, and pride, the latter employs the mature virtues of technique, deception, and finance. What we desperately need at this crucial point of Western history is a new paradigm for social life, a new conception of prosperity and happiness understood in the ancient Greek sense of “eudemonia.” As Derrida warned us in the 90s, as he reflected on what the New Europe meant for the West and for the world, we are fast reaching a point of exhaustion; energy is flowing away from Western Civilization relentlessly and the decline may be on the horizon unless a return to origins is envisioned. Actually the West was first advised of exhaustion in 1972, when the Club of Rome commissioned the book The Limits to Growth. For the first time, we became aware that the physical resources of the planet are not boundless; and we now have seven billion persons inhabiting the earth. Some months after the publication of the report, the Western world experienced the first oil shortage following the Yom Kippur war in 1973.

344 Ovi Symposium II Since then, we are expected to be conscious of the fact that energy is leaving the physical body of the Earth. But there are ignorant politicians who refuse to accept those scientific conclusions; they consider them not convenient for the national interest, or as Al Gore puts it, an “inconvenient truth.” If science proclaims otherwise, so much the worse for science. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the collapse of the dot-com economy led to the pauperization of both physical and intellectual workers, while the financial meltdown of September 2008 initiated a process of pauperization of the overall society. Millions of young well educated people are now unemployed. But the worst may still be coming. In the coming years one third of the population in the West—the baby boom generation born after World War II, when the fulfillment of the modern promise of peace, democracy, and well-being was apparently at hand—will reach old age. The new generation now entering the labor market does not possess the memory of this past civilization, nor the political force to defend their existence from the predatory economy. The age of senility is upon us, and it may introduce a generalized form of dementia: a disastrous loss of historical memory coupled with xenophobia. But one can also envision a different scenario wherein this process of senility may open the way to a cultural revolution based on the force of exhaustion, of facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom—the wisdom of those who have seen a great deal without forgetting, who look at each thing as if for the first time. The wisdom of an old Socrates who taught us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Neither is the unexamined civilization. Civilizations too, like people, die the way they live. This is the lesson that we may hope the West may learn if it musters the courage and the vision to come out from the capitalist obsession with accumulation, property, banks and greed. A radical contemplative attitude toward the meaning of life, individual and collective, would dispel the ethos of relentless productivity. The mother of all the bubbles, the bubble of work, would finally deflate. Indeed, we have been working too much over the past three or four centuries, and outrageously too much over the last thirty years. What demons are we trying to dispel? The Spaniards ought to have learned a lesson from the Tainos Indians of Puerto Rico who worked only four hours a day and then Marx would not have had to write his utopia of a worker’s paradise. The current economic recession may be a blessing in disguise and mark the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and slavish dependence on work. But that will not happen if the West is afraid to decline, if it fails to grasp that to decline is not necessarily to die, it may well mean a rebirth from the ashes or a renaissance. Indeed, if there is something unique to Western Civilization it is its various renaissances. Ultimately that would mean that we might be able to recover the imagination to return to our origins. And here lies the paradox: Greece is the place where the West began. It remains the place where the West must return to recover its origins and cultural identity, or on the other hand, it could be the place where it commits suicide and dies with no possibility of rebirth. The choice is ours, for indeed the existential dread and angst at the freedom we are endowed with in choosing our destiny is what keeps us human. Paradoxically, even to refuse to choose is in the final analysis a choice.

Ovi Symposium II 345 Chapter 25 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-fifth Meeting: 8 May 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Rywalt, Petito, Scarpetta, De Filippo, Stella, Parodi, Troisi, Vico, De Sanctis, Croce, Dante, Pirandello, Moliere, Taranto, Veglia, Conte, Guarino, De Martino, Maggio, Di Costanzo, Fiore, Filip- pelli, Nazzario, Klima, Kafka, Masaryk, Bernano, Protagoras, Gerould, Husserl, Patocka, Heraclitus, Silone, Descartes, Dostoyevsky, Jung, Marx, Lincoln, Buber, Plato.

Table of Contents for the 25th Session of the Ovi Symposium Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator Section 1: “A Profile of the Comedic Playwright Gaetano di Mayo.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi Section 2: Playwright Vaclav Havel’s Conspiracy of Hope vis a vis the EU’s Cultural Identity and the Ongo- ing Political Crisis in the Ukraine.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

346 Ovi Symposium II Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella In this 25th meeting of the Ovi Symposium we return to the theme of the theater as cultural expression and social efficacy and fine art as an expression of man’s freedom by examining the profile of two playwrights: Gaeta- no Di Maio and Vaclav Havel. The former is presented by Ernesto Paolozzi, the latter by Emanuel L. Paparella. Di Maio is a Neapolitan playwright who is well known in Italy for his comedies, but, as Paolozzi elaborates, he remains to be discovered as a man of letters and as a poet. Paolozzi knows the playwright well not only on a scholarly level but also on a personal level given that Di Maio happens to be his uncle on his mother’s side, a family of actors and directors and playwrights. Paolozzi’s masterful presentation provides a lucid idea of the invaluable contributions to the theater of this genial artist as well as to humanistic Italian culture. Paolozzi includes some bibliographical notes, including his own writings on the playwright, to motivate us to read more and obtain a better understanding of Di Maio’s genius. In section two we return to the crucial theme of the cultural identity of the European Union via the work of the Czech playwright. This remains a relevant issue in the context of the present and ongoing Ukrainian crisis with its ominous echoes of the Cold War and the repeated references by Vladimir Putin to a “new Russia.” Havel’s work is widely recognized as that of a genuine cultural hero of the new post World War II Europe vis a vis Soviet domination and oppression. We analyze and outline it here within such a context and framework. After all, this is a man formed within the crucible of the Cold War who, despite being an Eastern European man, or perhaps because of it, never doubted or ignored the vision and ideals of the EU’s founding fathers; something that unfortunately has not been emulated in the Western part of the EU which seems more preoccupied with banks, economic and political power-games than with cultural identity and cultural ideals. Havel’s humanistic visionary philosophy of civilization is very much needed in the present EU for it asserts that culture represents a powerful antidote to the cynical real-politick Machiavellian poison pervading much of the continent nowadays, one contrasting a Machiavellian view, that of Putin, with another Machiavellian view, that of the present crop of visionless and cynical EU politicians and bureaucrats. The misguided and unimaginative solutions being proposed in the Western bloc nowadays on how to meet Russia’s challenge to the Ukraine’s sovereignty, and on both sides of the Atlantic pond to be sure, run the gamut from a passive, a la Chamberlain, toleration of a fait accompli in Crimea, in effect an appeasement policy of a super bully parading as liberator on the international stage, reminiscent of the anti-democratic authoritarian super-bullies of the past century, to a call for the resumption of the Cold War. It is within those two extremes that lies the cool sane voice of Havel. He is no longer with us, but I dare say that his voice will nevertheless continue to resonate for centuries in Europe and elsewhere in the world, for it is nothing less than the voice of reason and sanity. Last but not least, I’d like to mention and welcome to the Symposium my good friend Edwin Rywalt whose short profile appears with the others in this session. We attended to the same high school (St. Francis in Low- ell, Mass.) for two years some fifty six years ago. He has generously offered his pro bono services to the Ovi symposium and from now on, behind the curtain so to speak, he has offered to check each session’s file and correct any typographical mistakes and/or stilted idiomatic expressions that it may contain. I and all the other Symposium’s contributors would like to express our sincere gratitude for this valuable and needed collaboration. We remain hopeful that in the future he will also join the symposium’s dialogue and contribute his views on one of his life-long interests: the nexus between science and the liberal arts.

Ovi Symposium II 347 1 A Profile of the Comedic Playwright Gaetano Di Maio A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi

Gaetano Di Mayo (1927-1991) The theatrical opus of Gaetano Di Maio can be located within the theatrical tradition of the comic theater spanning Petito and Scarpetta, Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo, a theater this which presents to the spectator, as it often happens with those playwrights, facets which are social, humane and existential. Di Maio was born in Naples on the 18th of August in 1927 where he also died at 63 on the 26 of March 1991. Son of an artist he nevertheless did not get involved with the theater till his father Oscar’s death which happened suddenly in 1948. His grandfather, Crescenzo, was, together with Federico Stella, one of the animators as both author and entrepreneur of the great theater San Ferdinando of Naples and was active in the raging literary debates at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, on the nature of dramatic, realistic and in some way political theater. His sons, Gaspar and Oscar, were versatile and prolific authors and we owe mainly to them the beginning of the so called “Neapolitical scenery,” which was at the time a type of popular genre which had not yet degenerated into a plebeian forms which manifested themselves in the years after World War II. The mother of Gaetano, Margherita Parodi, was an actress who descends from an ancient theater family, her sisters Maria (more versed in dramatic recitation) and Olimpia (well known to the public for her interpretation of Massimo Troisi’s mother in the filmScusate il Ritardo (Excuse the Delay), and even today descen- dents of that family are busy in the theater, as for instance Maria’s son who has assumed as artistic name Oscar Di Maio.

348 Ovi Symposium II The young Gaetano had no intention of following in his father’s footsteps. He was timid and introverted, two of his constant characteristics; the other being that he tended toward literary and philosophical studies. However, after the sudden death of his father in the dark years after the war he saw the very existence of his father’s theater company in danger and consequently the economic life of his family and so many actors tied to it. Di Maio was compelled to substitute for his father as author, while the mother, Margherita, and the sister, Maria, took over the difficult entrepreneurship’s duties. From then on, Di Maio produced dozens of comedies and scenes for his own and other theatrical companies, obtaining a growing success without interrupting his studies which led him to reading Vico, De Sanctis and Croce, the great German philosophy, the entire canon of Italian literature from Dante to Pirandello, the most notable European and global philosophers of the 19th and 20th century. There is ample evidence of those studies in his unpublished manuscripts as well as in the memory of then young scholars who constituted his genuine preferred companionship. In the sixties, in 1962 to be precise, he met Nino Taranto who was at the time at the apex of success and wrote for this famous actor the comedy Avendo Potendo Pagando,(Having, Being Able and Paying) which was acclaimed in the whole of Italy. Also for Taranto, Di Maio composed Michele Sette Spiriti (Michael of the Seven Spirits) a series of one act performances for the RAI (the Italian national TV), from which emerges more and more clearly the synthetic ability of the author, his expressive energy, his genius in inventing situations and delineating protagonists.

“Teatro Grande” in Ancient Pompei In 1983 Gaetano Di Maio staged in this ancient amphitheater an adaptation, in Neapolitan dialect, of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (first performed in 411 BC at the Dioniso Theater in Athens). Di Maio titled it “O Sciopero de Mugliere” Subsequently, for close to ten years, Di Maio returned to his old work, being unwilling to leave his city in order to frequent those theatrical environments which were in fashion at the time. That choice was not dictated by ideological criteria, rather it was arrived at by a natural propensity for solitude and the dislike for worldly life and the internal fights natural to the theatrical environment. And that was not all, his avocation to philosophical and literary studies returned, and these could not be harmonized with a commitment that went beyond the writings of plays in the strict sense. So at the beginning of the seventies, stimulated by Nino Veglia and Luisa Conte, traditional actors who had moved from skits to the theatrical company of Taranto, and Eduardo De Filippo, he began to write for the theatrical company Stabile of the Sannazaro theater in Naples, an ancient and glorious theater which had decayed and then was renovated by Nino Veglia; the same theater in which Scarpetta had represented his A Santarella (The Little Saint) with great success.

Ovi Symposium II 349 The theater company of Veglia and Luisa Conte began with the performance of classical texts deriving a mediocre success from it. Di Maio came to the fore in 1972 with La Fortuna ha Messo gli Occhiali (Fortune has Put on Glasses), a work which would be then picked up again with various modifications in the 88-89 season with the title of O Pittore 22 è Pazza (The Painter 22 is Mad). But the greatest, overwhelming almost, unexpected success came with M Priestame a Mugliereta (Lend Me Your Wife) liberally inspired from Carlo Guarino via the attentive and intelligent direction of Giuseppe De Martino, who form then on would become the favored director of Di Maio. This is a very comic comedy, rich in intrigue and sudden unexpected scenes which can be inserted in the best tradition of French and Neapolitan comedy. It was repeated for two hundred nights setting a financial record for those years. The very next year Di Maio presented a more complex comedy, less comical but in some aspects much more involved socially: Nu Paese nmize ‘e guaie (The Country in Trouble). It was later picked up with the title E’ Asciuto Pazzo ‘o Parrucchiano (The Pastor has Gone Crazy). In this second edition it received a success which was even greater and was well received by the critics. It came out in the 1989-90 season. In those years the middle class public of the Teatro Sannazaro had gotten used to productions that were less farsical . In this comedy Di Maio addresses the theme of sin (the miracles invented by the pastor) committed with good intentions within a framework of a satire against the closed hypocritical provincial life. In the same year via the theatrical company founded by young people of the Sannazaro theater Di Maio adapts Moliere’s Le Furberie di Scapino with the title of Le trovate di Minichello (The Inventions of Minichello). In 1991, the year of the disappearance of the comic playright, came out Ce Pensa Mamma, a thorough reworking of the text of 1982 Letizia Corallo con Madre a Carico (Letizia Corallo with her Mother as Depen- dent). This text is important for the complexity of its environment, and was represented by the great actress Rosalia Maggio, of the important theatrical family Maggio. The theater of Di Maio is now waiting for new interpreters and new directors. It is currently performing throughout Italy and among the best performances we can mention are those of the theatrical company of A. Maio of Messina which are recited in Sicilian dialect.

A 2014 Performance by the Theatrical Company I Figli delle Stelle of a play by Gaetano Di Maio: Il Morto sta bene in salute

350 Ovi Symposium II Up to now we have outlined the artistic journey of this great Neapolitan playwright. It remains necessary to begin an historical and critical valuation of his opus. Here I can only offer some initial reflexions. The writings of De Maio are strongly innovative even if they remain solidly tied to tradition. What gives his comedies the footprint and the rhythm of a musical production is, as he himself would remind us, the tight rhythm which the author confers on the text. Another fundamental moment was his ability to confer to his characters, even though within the frame work of situations and plots which are quintessentially comic, a human characteristic, a psychological complexity which are typical of comedy in the best sense of that word. His great knowledge of Neapolitan script allows him to pass from the comic to the serious, from the farcical to the thoughtful without ever overdoing it, harmoniously and naturally. A separate treatment would be needed for Di Maio the poet. He has left us unpublished poems of great literary value which were later published by the editor Palomar with a preface by Giuseppe Di Costanzo. These are verses which have little to do with his comic theater, strongly committed socially, dramatic and springing from a long and original literary habit and acquaintance with Italian and foreign literatures, with philosophy which he studied assiduously with great subtle understanding. Unless I am mistaken, the case of Di Maio could well be a real literary case which in many aspects remains to be discovered. Bibliographical Notes Except for a few comedies, the theater of Di Maio remains to be published, and therefore we do not have a critical edition of his work. Neither has a collection of the reviews of hundreds of his representations published in newspapers and magazines of Italy, appeared yet. Here we wish to remember the essays of Enrico Fiore, When Comedy Becomes Reflection, and Ernesto Paolozzi Tra Poesia e Talento: il Teatro di Gaetano Di Maio (Between Poetry and Talent: the Theater of Gae- tano Di Maio) which appeared in the magazine “North and South” of January 1996. In that same number appears the essay by Renato Filippelli The Sweet Melancholy of an Existentialist which is dedicated to the poet Di Maio. Moreover, regarding Di Maio poet, besides the already referenced long introduction to his verses of Gi- useppe Di Costanzo, the essay of G. Battista Nazzaro titled Gaetano di Maio in the volume “Dibattiro col Poeta” (A debate with the poet), Naples 1992.

Ovi Symposium II 351 2 Playwright Vaclav Havel’s Conspiracy of Hope vis a vis the EU’s Cultural Identity and the Ongoing Political Crisis in the Ukraine A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) Kafka’s hero is, above all a hero for our time, a godless age in which power endowed with a higher meaning has been replaced with a vacuous power of tradition and legal and bureaucratic norms, that is, by human institutions. Man, deprived of all means and all weapons in his effort to achieve freedom and order, has no hope other than the one provided by his inner space. --Ivan Klima, The Spirit of Prague “…planetary democracy here on Earth must be somehow linked with the Heaven above us, with the transcendent. … only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.” --Vaclav Havel, Democracy’s Forgotten Dimension With the possible exception of Franz Kafka, there is no modern Czech writer whose political philosophy, within the Western Humanistic tradition, is more inspirational than Václav Havel’s. Perhaps the best way to imagine him is as one of Kafka’s “heroes for our time,” a powerful voice calling us back home to our humanity and urging Europe to know its cultural soul. This is not to make Havel an esoteric thinker coming out of some Olympian cloud. He is, on the contrary, the last arrival of a long line of Czech visionaries and political philosophers who were formed within the crucible of the Cold War. Particularly important as Havel’s predecessor and greatly influencing his thinking is Tomas

352 Ovi Symposium II Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), a brilliant philosopher, member for 15 years of the Austrian-Hungarian Par- liament, and champion of an independent Czechoslovakia. In 1919 Masaryk became president of the first Czechoslovakian Republic, just as Havel became president of the post-cold war Czech Republic. Masaryk was in turn greatly influenced by Franz Bernano while studying in Vienna. Like Bernano, he was alarmed by the fact that within Western civilization, increased scientific sophistication did not result in any discernible moral progress. He also discerned that modern reason, detached from the world of good and evil, had regressed to a Protagorean clever sophistry detached from the ethical. Later on, Masaryk developed a friendship with Edmund Husserl. It was he who conveyed to Husserl a sense of the spiritual crisis of modern Europe. Husserl eventually published his famous The Crisis of European Science (1936) where he affirmed that in the Western World theoretical knowledge has somehow lost contact with living human experience, and that the morally ordered world of our pre-reflective lived experience is the life-world of humankind. All these ideas are perceivable in Havel’s own thinking. Another strong influence on Havel’s thinking is the philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977) who had studied with Husserl and then taught Havel. He was instrumental in publishing Charter 77, the statement of resistance to Soviet occupation and communist ideology for which both Patocka and Havel were jailed by the Communist authorities. It was Patocka who had brought Husserl to Prague as a guest lecturer when Husserl was expelled by the Nazis from Freiburg University. Patocka grouped his writings in a book titled Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. There, we find ample evidence that the subject which most captivated him was that of the human struggle.

Vaclav Havel making a point In the last essay of this book titled, Wars of the 20th century and the 20th century as War, Patocka writes a brilliant commentary on fragment 26 of Heraclitus, and interprets his polemos as “struggle, fight, war,” a kind of adversarial relationship with reality, a struggle against the world which ontologically can be compared to realities such as love, compassion, happiness, justice. In fact, for Patocka, polemos, had priority over the other realities. Thus, Patocka corrects Husserl’s assumption of an underlying harmony within reality. These “heretical essays” became a sort of manifesto to rally the Czech citizenry against the Soviet forces of occupation. They insist that when the ontological supports of hope fail, then personal responsibility must be evoked, in order to establish a community of solidarity. Out of this solidarity which Ignazio Silone used to brand as “the conspiracy of hope” arises what Patocka calls “the power of the powerless.”

Ovi Symposium II 353 Havel’s The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central Eastern Europe (1985) The legal basis of this solidarity was the 1977 Helsinki Agreement on human rights which affirms that human beings are obliged to discover and protect a valid moral foundation, and one ought not to expect that it be provided by the state or social forces alone. As Patocka himself explains: “There must be a self-evident, non-circumstantial ethic, and unconditional morality. A moral system does not exist to help society function but simply so that man can be human… it is morality which defines man.” This concept of human rights is redolent of the concept of “inalienable rights” which are self-evident, accrue to being human, and which no state can give or take away, as proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence.

Havel’s The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice (1997) What Masaryk, Patocka and Havel have in common is a recognition that as a result of a disharmony that began with Cartesian rationalism, European life and thought are in profound crisis. This of course echoes Hus- serl’s Crisis of European Sciences where the problems of modern philosophy are traced back to Descartes, the beginning of a crisis of self-alienation; something also noticed by Vico, but alas ignored, some two hundred years before in his New Science (1730). Husserl insists that this profound alienation and dysfunction could not be resolved unless normative status be attributed to Lebenswelt (life-world), the basis of ethical autonomy. Mechanistic science had unfortunately substituted the old awareness that human life belongs to an ordered moral universe. This idea is especially evident in Masaryk’s Suicide as a Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization. Nineteenth-century science has, in fact, usurped the authority previously accorded to

354 Ovi Symposium II faith and reason. Masaryk is convinced that it is crucial that humans return to a world of primary experience in order to be reconnected to a vital sense of good and evil. This is also the vital concern of Dostoyevsky’s existential novels.

Theatre Theory Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle to Zeami by Sowinka and Havel Havel is part of an ongoing Czech intellectual tradition which, in order to be able to “live in truth” has recourse to Husserl’s Lebenswelt to counter an oppressive Marxist ideology tending toward manipulative, rationalistic and mechanistic theoretical deductions. This is possible only by paying attention to “the flow of life.” Indeed, for Havel “time is a river into which one cannot step twice in the same place” (fragment 21 of Heraclitus). When Havel in his “Politics and Conscience” (1984) makes reference to Husserl’s distinction of the natural world from “the world of lived experience” by which to approach the spiritual framework of modern Western Civilization and the source of its crisis, he is by implication also invoking Vico’s distinction between the world of nature made by God, and the world of culture made by man. In any case, Havel’s brilliant insight is this: there is a fundamental distinction between the world that can be constructed out of an ideological viewpoint and the world rooted in a trustworthy lived-experience. Impersonal manipulative forces can be resisted only by the one true power we all possess: our own humanity. This is nothing less than Humanism at its very best. It all begs this question: Where does Havel locate the foundation for this humanity which he finds in the phe- nomenal experiential world? The answer can be glimpsed in a letter written in 1989, from prison, to his wife Olga: “Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate, or experience existentially in various ways something like a general ‘order of Being.’ The essence and order of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear.” (“Letters to Olga,” letter n. 76) Within this “order of Being,” the emphasis is not on sight, on clear and distinct Cartesian ideas, but on hearing, on the perception of the mysterious. In 1994, in a lecture at Stamford University Havel also makes reference to “unconscious experiences,” as well as “archetypes and archetypal visions.” This echoes Jung’s collective unconscious and the archetypes, or the idea of fundamental experiences shared by the entire

Ovi Symposium II 355 human race, found in all cultures, no matter how distant in space and time they may be from one another. Vaclev Havel’s plays are a great achievement on the world stage. He wrote plays that that are as accurate a record of Czech life in the mid-to late-twentieth-century as anything we’ve known in theater. From the first, he was interested not only in the “power of the powerlessness” but in the ways in which power works to shape both the individual and his legacy: the world twists us into unrecognizable shapes that our children, sadly, come to regard as the truth. The theatre was in his bones. By the time the Prague Spring hit in 1968 (the same year Joseph Papp produced Havel’s “The Memorandum” at the Public Theatre, thus exposing the dissident to a larger American audience), he had worked as an assistant director on a number of shows and had written a number of short plays about oppression. In pieces like “Audience,” and “Protest,” we learn that Vanek is a former screenwriter who, like Havel, works in a beer factory when the Communist regime takes over the “old” Czechoslovakia. In “A Private View,” a formerly middle-class couple learns to thrive in an atmosphere of suspicion, greed, and totalitarianism. One heard and admired so many things about him, not least his interest in popular music as it was played in a theatrical forum. He considered the audience and the artist as collaborators of a kind, each possessed of civilizing impulses that each could bring out in the other. Here is a quote in this regard: “I consider it im- mensely important that we concern ourselves with culture not just as one among many human activities, but in the broadest sense—the ‘culture of everything,’ the general level of public manners. By that I mean chiefly the kind of relations that exist among people, between the powerful and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the young and the elderly, adults and children, business people and customers, men and women, teachers and students, officers and soldiers, policemen and citizens, and so on.”

The Plays of Vaclav Havel What is unique to Havel is that, like Vico, he sees the history of the cosmos recorded in the inner workings of all human beings: the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Moreover, the history of the cosmos is project- ed into man’s own creations, it is the story of man, and it joins us together. Even after thousands of years, people of different epochs and cultures feel that somehow they are parts and partakers of the same Being, that they carry part of the infinity of such a Being. As Havel aptly puts it: “all cultures assume the existence of something that might be called the ‘Memory of Being,’ in which everything is constantly recorded.” Which means that the guarantees of human freedom are not found in systems of thought, or ideologies, or programs of action but in “man’s relationship to that which transcends him, without which he would not be, and

356 Ovi Symposium II of which he is integral part.” (In “Democracy’s Forgotten Dimension,” April 1995, pp. 3-10) One of the constant refrains in Havel’s political philosophy is that of the loss of respect, including self-respect, apparent in the modern and post-modern world: loss or respect for what Havel calls “the order of nature, the order of humanity, and for secular authority as well.” Gone is the sense of responsibility that inhab- itants of the same planet ought to have towards one another. Havel sees the causes of this loss of respect in the loss of a “transcendental anchor” which he considers the source of responsibility and self-respect. He pleads that “humankind must reconnect itself to “the mythologies and religions of all cultures.”Only thus they can engage in the common quest for the general good. What exactly is the general good? Havel’s answer is that a “global civilization” is already in the process of preparing a place for a “planetary democracy.” But this planetary democracy here on Earth must be somehow linked with the Heaven above us, with the transcendent. Havel is convinced that only in this setting “can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.” (ibid. p. 9). Havel does not assume that such an order has already arrived in Europe. On the contrary, his essay titled “The Hope for Europe” (The New York Re- view, June 20, 1996) stands as a provocative survey of Europe’s enormous influence on human civilization, but this influence is seen as ambiguous; it can be constructive but it can also be destructive. Let us examine more closely Havel’s views on ideology, European Civilization and the European Union. In an essay by the title of “Politics and the World Itself” published in 1992, Havel critiques the Cartesian-Marxist assumption, which is the general assumption of philosophical rationalists, that reality is governed by a finite number of universal laws whose interrelationship can be grasped by the human mind and anticipated in systematic for- mulae. He insists that there are no laws and no theories that can comprehensively direct or explain human life within the context of an ideological fix-all. Consequently, we need to abandon “the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be put into a computer with the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.” Moreover, as far as Havel is concerned, there is no “universal key to salvation.” We must recognize the pluralism of the world within an elementary sense of transcendental responsibility. This kind of responsibility is anchored in “archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and, not least, faith in the importance of particular measures.” In 1990 Havel addressed the U.S. Congress on the subject of democratic ideals and the rebirth of the human spirit where he reflected on the end of the bipolarity of the Cold War and the beginning of “an era of multi-polarity in which all of us, large and small, former slaves and former masters will be able to create what your great President Lincoln called ‘the family of men.’” He also declared that: “consciousness precedes being,” by which he simply means that the salvation of the human world lies in the human heart, the human power to reflect, and in human responsibility.” More specifically Havel proclaimed that: “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed—be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization—will be unavoidable.” (A joint session of the U.S. Congress. Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1990-1994, pp. 31-45). This echoes Martin Buber or C.P. Snow’s insight on the two worlds: the world of “I-it” of science concerned with manipulation and use of matter out there (what Descartes calls extension into space), and the world of “I-Thou,”

Ovi Symposium II 357 the world of the humanities and the poetic characterized by dialogue and ethical concerns. So, what is to be done? Havel answers not with another ideology, or a program, or a Platonic blueprint, but by simply reminding people that the way out of the crisis is dedication to responsibility: “Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success—responsibility to the order of being where all of our actions are indelibly recorded and where they will be properly judged.” In 1995 Havel gave a commencement address at Harvard University where he recognizes that the world has already entered a single technological civilization and in the spirit of Husserl, Masaryk and Patocka he sounded the alarm: there is also afoot a contrary movement which finds expression in dramatic revivals of ancient traditions, religions and cultures. In other words there is an attempt at the recovery of “archetypal spirituality,” a searching for “what transcends us, whether we mean the mystery of Being or a moral order that stands above us…Our respect for other people, for other nations, and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of Being, where it is judged.” What about Europe? In 1996 in his address at Aachen which he called “The Hope for Europe” (See The New York Review, June 20, 1996) Havel surveys and analyzes Europe’s enormous influence in world civilization but articulates some provocative thoughts: in the first place he asserts that this influence can be both constructive and destructive. The challenge is to discern the positive constructive influences on which to build. He identifies the best that Europe has to offer the world in “a place of shared values.” To talk of shared values is to talk about European spiritual and intellectual identity, the European soul, if you will. His sincere hope is that Europe, for the first time in its history “might establish itself on democratic principles as a whole entity.” There is a caveat: this will happen only if the values that underlie the European tradition are supported by a philosophically anchored sense of responsibility.More precisely: “The only meaningful task for the Europe of the next century is to be the best it can possibly be—that is, to revivify its best spiritual and intellectual traditions and thus help to create a new global pattern of coexistence.”(ibid.). This is a far cry from what one hears nowadays by way of contrasting one Machiavellian scheme with another one more useful to one’s continental interests. We see those proposals from time to time in the pages of Ovi magazine. In Havel’s “The Politics of Hope” one reads that “in my own life I am reaching for something that goes far beyond me and the horizon of the world that I know; in everything I do I touch eternity in a strange way.” With this grounding, politics becomes “the universal consultation on the reform of the affairs which render man human.” There is no doubt that in Havel we have today a rare strong voice of the post-Cold War “new Europe” advocating a sort of “conspiracy of hope.” A conspiracy this which insists that politics must be accorded a transcendental source and foundation or it will be building on sand. The new Europeans would do well to heed such a voice.

358 Ovi Symposium II Chapter 26 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-sixth Meeting: 22 May 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Mei del Testa, Rywalt, Voltaire, Franklin, Gianturco, Weisberg, Vico, Friedman, Hargittai, Descartes, Hegel, Augustine, Gibbons, Acton, Constantine, Einstein, Dante, Petrarch, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Francis of Assisi, Dominick, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Char- lemagne, Chesterton, Greene, Jones, Watson, Crick, Heraclitus, Gambillo, Machiavelli, Calvino, Croce, Leibnitz, Ortega y Gasset.

Table of Contents for the 26th Session of the Ovi Symposium Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator Section 1: “Christopher Dawson and the Making of Europe.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Section 2: “Erwin Chargaff and Benedetto Croce.” A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi Section 3: A brief comment by Edwin Rywalt on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation as regards the awarding of Nobel prizes Section 4: A Relevant Excerpt from Robert W. Weisberg’s Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Prob- lem Solving, Science, Invention and the Arts (2006)

Ovi Symposium II 359 Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella In this 26th session of the Ovi symposium we continue to explore two themes which are integral parts of our project of envisioning a new humanism. In section one Paparella returns once again to the issue of the cultural identity of the European Union as promoted by the historian Christopher Dawson, a great scholar who dedicated his life to the study of the interaction between religion and civilization, specifically that which occurred during Medieval Europe where he locates the very heart of modern Europe’s cultural identity. In section two we return to a conundrum previously explored in the symposium: why is it that some genial individuals are able to transcend over-specialization and reductionism while easily harmonizing science with the liberal arts? That is to say, they seem to conceive no dichotomy between the two? Ernesto Paolozzi delves into the intricacies of this conundrum of the distinction and the interaction between science and the humanities by reporting on a sixteen year correspondence between two modern geneticists and bio-chem- ists: the Italian Alberto Mei del Testa, and the Austrian Erwin Chargaff. The latter emigrated to America during World War II; subsequently taught molecular biology and biochemistry at Columbia University placing that institution at the cutting edge of biochemistry. He became an American citizen in 1940; taught at Columbia from 1935 till 1974 when upon his retirement from that institution he was awarded the President’s National Medal of Science. What is intriguing about this particular scholarly correspondence, as revealed to us by Paolozzi’s presentation, is that it does not remain at the mere scientific level, as one would expect in a correspondence between two scientists, rather it explores the vast field of aesthetics within a wide humanistic vision of life as elaborated by the philosopher Benedetto Croce, a cultural hero greatly esteemed and admired by both scientists. In fact, this correspondence is a tribute to Croce’s belief that the growth and development of science does not ipso facto diminish or exclude the growth of the humanities as most positivists tend to assert; in fact, the greatest scientists throughout human history have always appreciated and promoted the humanities as effective providers of meaning and purpose in man’s life; on the other hand, the vast majority of the great humanists have never conceived of science in conflict with the humanities and in principle have not been against science per se. Unfortunately, both Vico and Croce have been accused of being anti-science. That is a grossly misguided view largely promoted after World War II by some influential Marxists out to control cultural life in Italy, but it remains paradoxical, to say the least, given that Vico, identified by the Neapolitan Vico scholar Elio Gi- anturco as the culmination of Italian Humanism, could have titled his masterpiece The New Humanism, but he opts for The New Science, and that Chargaff, the original discoverer and pioneer of the DNA, as both Paolozzi and Rywalt inform us, defines Croce as “one of the greatest minds that the world has ever seen” comparing him to Leibniz for his consummate ability to integrate scientific discoveries into a wider human vision. That judgment can easily be validated by a perusal of Croce’s Logic (1909) which assigns equal validity to both scientific and philosophical knowledge conceiving them not as opposed but as complementary to each other. For Croce, it is not a question of a difference among disciplines but a difference between methodologies of knowledge. The confusion in this regard can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Croce, as elucidated by Paolozzi’s previous essay on “Croce and Positivism,” harshly criticizes Positivism for one of its false assumptions, namely that the naturalistic method is the only valid and progressive method fit for mo-

360 Ovi Symposium II dernity and post-modernity, thus misguidedly relegating metaphysics, not to speak of religion under attack since the enlightenment and Voltaire in particular, to the dust bin of history and the status of an historically retrogressive and by now superseded cycle of culture. In section three of this session we offer an insightful comment by Edwin Rywalt to Paolozzi’s presentation and specifically to the opening sentence on the awarding of Nobel Prizes, giving us a glimpse of some of the behind the curtain academic events going on at Columbia University during the 60s related to the controversy whirling around one of its most celebrated professors of bio-chemistry who had pioneered the research on the molecular structure of DNA vis a vis the final awarding of the Nobel Prize to Watson and Crick for its discovery, to the utter exclusion of its first pioneers, namely Erwin Chargaff from Columbia University and Rosalind Franklin from King’s College, London, the only scientists with a thorough training and expertise in chemistry per se. This probing comment by Rywalt is redolent, to my mind, of the Vichian insight that since both science and art are created by man, he may return to their origins with more certainty than with the deterministic laws that govern nature, which he certainly did not create. It also reminds us all that within time and space man remains a fallible being searching for his destiny and redemption and that human ambition and competition for prestige and recognition—whether in science or in the arts, and especially when the two are seen as antagonistic to each other-- more often than not prove to be stumbling blocks to the attainment of impartial truth. Here once again we stumble on aesthetics, a major concern of our symposium with which we will deal more extensively in the next meeting which will focus on Vico. Finally in section four, as a way of a preliminary exploration of the “mystery” mentioned by Rywalt at the end of his perceptive comment, we refer to what we consider a relevant book (2006) by Professor Robert Weisberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Pennsylvania who has systematically explored the interrelationship between innovation and problem solving in science, invention and the arts. This is an eye-opening enlightening book, a sine qua non for all those who are interested in the interrelationship between science and the arts. In this session we limit ourselves to quoting a relevant excerpt from the book as a way of urging interested readers to at least peruse it. At one point of the book after analyzing Picasso’s Guernica, Weisberg suggests that “no Picasso, no Guernica” and calls that subjective knowledge as in the arts; and then he adds that “had not been a Crick and a Watson “there would still be a DNA,” which he calls objective scientific knowledge to be discovered, but then he warns that it is not as simple as all that and concludes that “the creative process in the arts and sciences may be more similar than different” (emphasis mine). That startling anti-positivistic statement is what makes the book interesting and alerts us to the fact that to be anti-positivist does not mean to be anti-science. Indeed, the mode by which scientific discoveries are pursued, presented and perceived remains a creation of man while to be is to be perceived. This combined Vichian-Berkleyan insight that man creates history as well as science while perceiving them, thus substantiating his very existence seminally proposed here is perhaps something worth pursuing in future sessions as we continue to explore the intriguing nexus science/humanities. But aside from the above mentioned philosophical considerations on this matter, there is of course the equally intricate and intriguing issue of academic politics and how fame and influence, in and out of academia, is acquired or co-opted while often enough true excellence goes unrecognized and unrewarded; but that’s a wholly different issue to which I hope some of the symposium’s contributors may also wish to return. Meanwhile, if the inquisitive readers wish to explore this issue a bit more thoroughly, they may peruse two other excellent books: one by Professor Robert Marc Friedman titled The Politics of Excellence: Behind the

Ovi Symposium II 361 Nobel Prize in Science (2001), and the other by Professor Istvan Hargittai titled The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science and Scientists; see especially chapter 12 of the latter book titled “Who did not Win,” which identifies the most glamorous and lamentable oversights of the Nobel Prize Committee leaving the reader perplexed and wondering if those oversights are due to ignorance, negligence or sheer stupidity. People tend to confuse the three but they stand on their own. Be that as it may, both books provide us with a glimpse of how politics and personalities often trump science’s vaunted iron-clad objectivity resulting in much more subjective judgments about Nobel Prizes than we’d like to readily acknowledge. Nevertheless, on a more positive side, we are provided in these two books with the human face and human foibles of scientists and those who judge their merits. It turns out that they too are all too human and consequently dogged by fallibility and mistakes, but this reality in some way hu- manizes science since it is man that envisions science and presents science to his fellow humans; even more importantly, as Berkeley has well taught us, “to be is to be perceived” and without perception there is no existence either.

362 Ovi Symposium II 1 Christopher Dawson and The Making of Europe A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) In 1932 Christopher Dawson published a book titled The Making of Europe which had enormous success and established his reputation as a scholar of incredible range and erudition who could communicate with great clarity and elegance. He had previously written two other books: The Age of the Gods (1928), and Progress and Religion(1929) but The Making of Europe was unique. The book avoids the conventional burdensome footnotes, bibliographies and theoretical frameworks and reads like a romantic novel, hence its popularity. Indeed, 19th century Romanticism was a corrective to the previous century, the so called age of Enlightenment. It did this by questioning the rationalist conviction that the empirical physical sciences constituted the paradigm of all knowledge and thus reinstated Giambattista Vico’s revaluation of history against the Cartesian depreciation of it as mere gossip.

The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity

Ovi Symposium II 363 Vico had observed that the external world of nature is ultimately impenetrable, for the human mind can only attempt to manipulate it within the strict limits set by God who created it. The stream of history, on the other hand, is essentially the world that the human creative spirit has made, and therefore despite its recurring mysteries, it can come to be known by humans in an incomparably deeper sense. Dawson shared this revaluation of history as did Hegel when he declared history the highest form of knowledge: the self-realization of the absolute spirit in time. And what was the single idea, the keynote of Dawson’s thought as found in The Making of Europe? It was this: religion is the soul of a culture, and a society that has lost its spiritual roots is a dying society, however prosperous it may appear externally. The fate of our civilization was endangered not only by the fading of the vision of faith that originally formed it, namely Christianity, but the failure to integrate the world of reason and science with the world of the soul, which has lost the power to express itself through culture. In some way this is similar to Croce’s assertion that “we cannot but declare ourselves Christians” which was the actual title of one of his most seminal essays. It is also similar to Vaclav Havel’s speculation on the need for culture to transcend itself. In Dawson’s view this was the tragedy of modern man. Before writing his famous book, Dawson had read and pondered deeply the works of Augustine (The City of God) and Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). He was also influenced by Lord Acton’s World History, wherein Acton affirms that “religion is the key of history.” He slowly became aware of the continuity of history and of how the coming of Christianity had transformed the dying Roman Empire into a new world. He spent fourteen years of intensive study before writing his more than twenty books among which Enqui- ries into Religion and Culture (1934), Religion and Culture (1948), Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950), The Crisis of Western Education (1961), The Formation of Christendom (1961). All these books deal with the life of civilizations. The underlying idea in them is the interaction of religion with culture and subsequently with civilization. Religion is discovered to be the dynamic element in every culture—its life and soul. He discovered that worship, prayer, the rite of sacrifice, and the moral law were common to all religions and so the object of worship, and moreover, the destiny of the human race were conditioned not only by material progress but also by a divine purpose or providence working through history. Dawson also discovered that “the world religions have been the keystones of the world cultures, so that when they are removed the arch falls and the building is destroyed” (Progress and Religion, p. 140).

Enquiries into Religion and Culture (1934)

364 Ovi Symposium II As he surveys the two millennia of Christianity, Dawson noted four landmarks. The first one is the new element which defines the difference between the new faith and the primeval religions of Europe: this is the principle of a dynamic and creative spirit that inspires the whole of life. The Christian religion has a power of renewal that has accompanied it through the ages. The second landmark is the extraordinary development in the fourth century A.D., when Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. After centuries of living on the inherited capital of the Hellenistic culture, this fountainhead seemed to run dry. Yet the achievements of Greece and Rome were not rejected by this new faith. They were merely transformed. Classical learning and the Latin language became fused with the ideals of a Christian society that was founded not on wealth, tyranny and power but on freedom, progress, and social justice. Latin became “not only a perfect vehicle for the expression of thought but also an ark which carried the seed of Hellenic culture through the deluge of barbarism” (The Making of Europe, p. 49). The third great change of thought, according to Dawson, came about in the 16th century with the Renais- sance and the Reformation, which brought an end to medieval unity. The fourth came about after the industrial revolution in the 19th century and led to the 20th century. In one of his last books, The Crisis of Western Education, Dawson calls our own era the age of Frankenstein, “the hero who creates a mechanical monster and then found it had got out of control and threatened his own existence” (p. 189). He had in mind atomic warfare and he argued that if Western society were to gain control over these forces there would have to be a reintegration of faith and culture, and that there is an absolute limit to the progress that can be achieved by perfecting scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values. This is similar to Einstein’s assessment of our era as one characterized by perfection of means and confusion of goals. But let us go back to The Making of Europe which remains Dawson’s best-known book. In it he demonstrates that Christianity has been the spiritual force that created the unity of Western culture, indeed the commonwealth of Europe itself, from the chaotic world of myriad warring tribes. He shows in that book how the Dark Ages, the period between 400 and 1000 A.D., became a dawn that witnessed the conversion of the West, the foundation of Western civilization and the creation of Christian art and liturgy. And he then asked a crucial question: If such a transformation could happen in the age of the barbarians could it not be repeated now? Like the founding fathers of the EU, Dawson, after the Second World War, was already envisioning a new united Europe. But he soon realized that there was a problem which faced not only Europe but America too and all societies that consider themselves Western.

Ovi Symposium II 365 The problem was this: the disastrous separation of culture from its religious base, brought about by the modern “barbarians of the intellect” and assorted nihilists, was abetted by the modern educational system which considered the study of religion superfluous, and in fact aimed at its liquidation. The unity of thought, which had prevailed in European civilization over a thousand years, was shattered by excessive specialization which allowed the educated elites to see the tree and miss the forest; moreover science, philosophy and theology had long since split apart. Education, rather than being a preparation for life, had become purely utilitarian and vocational. Humanistic studies needed to be resurrected in all schools and not preserved, almost as a relic of the past, in places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities as a sort of frosting on the cake of education. This was urgent since the Trojan horse of the neo-barbarians had already entered the citadel of learning and was hard at work destroying it from the inside. Humanism as integrated with Catholicism was at the forefront of Dawson’s speculation. It was humanism which produced the medieval unity of the 13th century exemplifying Christian culture par excellence. For the flowering of art in every form reached its zenith in Europe between the 13the and 15th centuries with the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, the fresco painters of the Florentine school Giotto and Fra Angelico, and the sculptures of Michelangelo. It was also the age of saints and mystics, both men and women: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominick, St. Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, just to name a few.

Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950) It must be mentioned here that Dawson was not advocating a nostalgic return to the Middle Ages; neither was he commending the external apparatus of medievalism, nor Charlemagne’s so called Holy Roman Em- pire, but rather “a return to the forgotten world of spiritual reality” to which these centuries bear witness. He was not recommending an evasion of the present day cultural dilemmas. He was indeed an intellectual for whom ideas were important but many of his colleagues noticed a paradox in him: together with the remote facts of history, he knew of the latest current events in remote corners of the world, and understood and spoke several European languages. Indeed, he had the gift of seeing deeper and further than many of his contemporaries because he had the capacity to interpret the present in the light of the events of the past. As he put it: “The more we know of the past, the freer we are to choose the way we will go.”

366 Ovi Symposium II To conclude, it is misguided to think of Dawson as an anti-modern. Both he and Vico have been so branded. Rather, what he was advocating was a revival of spiritual values in a godless and nihilistic world. The reason he was assigned the first Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University was that he had the well earned reputation of being a very broad-minded scholar, able to contemplate opposite ideas and integrate them. He was, in short, a consummate humanist who understood the universal character of the Church in the sense that she belongs neither to East nor to West but stands as a mediator between the two. It was in fact his humanism which led him to convert to Catholicism as had also happened for G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene and David Jones. I hope that this brief sketch of a great and beautiful mind will motivate some readers to a deeper exploration of its genial ideas.

Ovi Symposium II 367 2

Erwin Chargaff and Benedetto Croce A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (Translated from the Italian by E.L. Paparella)

Erwin Chargaff (1905-2002)

When discussing the science of DNA, our first thoughts run to the famous scientists Watson and Crick, winners of the Nobel Price. But there are other scientists, perhaps less well known, who have contributed to the kind of research which has revolutionized our epoch and are worth remembering even by non specialists. Above all, Chargaff is worth mentioning for the complexity of his work, the affability of his character and for his ethical commitment which characteristically was sober but firm.

Heraclitean Fire by Erwin Chargaff (1978)

The biologist-philosopher Alberto Mei del Testa writes that “we owe to Erwin Chargaff the discovery of the exact composition of DNA, of its heterogeneity in living species and, on the other hand, of its constancy with-

368 Ovi Symposium II in the same species.” He is the founder of molecular biology who emigrated to America following the advent of Nazism in Austria. He was a shy and original man, estranged from academic life and opposed overall to the scientific conformism of his times. In the 80s the editor Garzanti published his book Heraclitean Fire; a book rich in philosophical reflections, literary observations, and ethico-political considerations.

The magazine “Complessità” (Complexity), directed by Giuseppe Gembillo, allows us to read a brief but intense correspondence between this great scientist and Mei del Testa, bringing together letters that span a period of time from 1986 to the year of Chargaff’s death in 2002. There are many precise references to classical and humanistic Italian culture, from Machiavelli to Italo Calvino. One notices a constant reference to the work of Benedetto Croce beginning with the very first letter where Chargaff demonstrates that he knows Croce’s thought on philosophy, the poetical, and the history of Europe. A bit later the scientist writes: “I know some books by Benedetto Croce but this particular one I do not have [he is referring to Theory and History of Historiography] and I am eager to read as soon as possible.”

The Nucleic Acids, Chemistry and Biology by Erwin Chargaff From the various notes on scientific arguments in those letters one can clearly deduce that Chargaff is constantly enlarging his knowledge of Croce. On the 3rd of December 1986 he writes: “many thanks for your letter of the 17th of November and the splendid gift of two of Croce’s books. I did not have them in my library and I have perused them with great interest, especially the volume on Poetry. It is surprising that a philosopher as rigorous as Croce can demonstrate so much depth in the understanding of what poetry is all about. You were quite right in directing me to the chapter where he explains why poems are untranslatable. I myself once wrote an essay on this very subject, but when it came to including it in my last book Zeugenschaft, the editor had a fit, to the point that I decided to eliminate the chapter.” Even more significant is what he writes in 1993: “I have already read the abstracts that you so cordially have forwarded me and found them very

Ovi Symposium II 369 interesting. Benedetto Croce is one of the greatest and most rare minds that the world has ever seen. Had he lived at the end of the 17th century he would have been another Leibnitz. In those letters one notices that Chargaff alternates between English and Italian while also announcing that he will publish almost all his new essays in German. Nevertheless the passion for Italian culture is unmistakable. Having almost reached the age of one hundred he writes to his Bolognese colleague in a clear if desultory Italian: “I have become a decrepit old man who writes little and sleeps a lot. Fortunately I am still able to read. You ask me what you can do for me? I remember that you had the kindness to gift me the first volume of The Novels and the stories of Calvino, who is one of my favorite authors. If that edition has been enlarged, I’d be grateful for the other volumes.” Ortega y Gasset, in the thirties, spoke of specialization as the barbarism of our times. Of course the Span- ish philosopher was an optimist. The barbarism in question was reintroduced with other more nefarious arguments. But as Chargaff teaches us, the necessity of reopening the hermetic iron doors of the cultural disciplines remains the chief duty of the contemporary intellectual and one of the best ways of defending man’s freedom and dignity.

370 Ovi Symposium II 3 A brief probing comment by Edwin Rywalt on Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation in regard to Nobel Prize awards: I guess Chargaff was working at Columbia when I was there. I didn’t know him, but I did know two scientists who probably did. I took a biology course there and the focus was on DNA. It was incredibly interesting. I was actually learning something new in science for a change. My entire outlook on life science was altered as a result of this course. I remember quite distinctly that my interest was piqued and I wandered into the Columbia bookstore to look at the books that were used in the more advanced biology courses and found that most of them were on the new area of DNA research. I hadn’t realized that Columbia was doing such broad fundamental work in this area. I also clearly remember looking at the ‘open’ lecture lists and seeing a large number of lectures on recombinant DNA, transfer RNA and related areas of research, and I realized how very complex this field was. Which brings me to the Watson/Crick Nobel

Edwin Rywalt Prize controversy. Rosalind Franklin’s work was a critical component in the discovery of the DNA structure: without her work Watson and Crick probably wouldn’t have succeeded in establishing the structure and wouldn’t have received the prize. Why was she not included? And now I see that Erwin Chargaff’s ‘rules’, which established the correct pairings of the four nucleobases in DNA, were incredible discoveries that led directly to Watson and Crick- and he was also left out of the award. It seems to me that the contributions of Rosalind Franklin and Chargaff (and several others) were at least as important as the contributions of Watson and Crick. Why the Nobel committee ignored their contributions is a mystery.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

Ovi Symposium II 371 4 A Relevant excerpt from Professor Robert W. Weisberg’s Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts (2006)

Professor Robert W. Weisberg

“This subjective/objective distinction is not as clear as it seems, however. Crick, for example, has stated that he believes that if he and Watson had not made their discovery others would have done it, probably within a few months of when they did (Olby, 1994). Crick has also asserted his belief that if he and Watson had not published their discovery, which presented the entire structure as a whole, the structure would have been revealed in bits and pieces. In Crick’s view, such a presentation of the structure would have had a less dramatic effect on other scientists, and the appearance of the structure would then have been less influential and important than it was. This is an interesting point, because, if correct, it indicates that the same “facts” can be presented in different ways, which can change the influence of a discovery. This leads one away from the simple notion that discovery deals simply with objective facts waiting for us to find them and present them to others. Carrying this line of reasoning further, if we look more carefully at the way we use the terms discover and create, and at some of the conclusions arising from the case studies just examined, we may conclude that the creative processes in the arts and sciences may be more similar than different.” (p. 54)

372 Ovi Symposium II Chapter 27 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twenty-sixth Meeting: 5 June 2014

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): da Montefeltro, Sant’Elia, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Pichoi, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, Vattimo, Gadamer, Kant, Freud, Stevenson, Obama, Pascal, Croce, Dylan, De Gregori, Piran- dello, Hegel, Vico, Leibniz, Vincino, Disney, Morin, Lumiere, Shakespeare, Eduardo, Augustine, Thoreau, Ellul, Marx, More, Christ, Thomas, Einstein, Pascal, Dante, Virgil, Whitehead, Goldstein, Lears, Jung, Solz- henitsyn, Marcuse, Nietzsche, Bloom, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wiezel, Davis, Benjamin, Michelangelo, Leonardo. Table of Contents for the 27th Session of the Ovi Symposium Introductory Note by the Symposium’s coordinator plus a selected list of Ovi articles on the treated themes. Section 1: “Automaton-Soul: a Philosophical Colloquium” between two eminent Italian philosophers: Mau- rizio Ferraris and Ernesto Paolozzi Section 2: A brief commentary by Paparella on Ferraris and Paolozzi’s colloquium: “Soul-Automaton” Section 3: “Envisioning a New Humanism beyond the Dichotomy Science/Humanities.” A presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Section 4: “Aesthetics as Digital Reproduction.” An addendum from chapter 14 of the Ovi E-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers“ by Emanuel L. Paparella

Ovi Symposium II 373 Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella In this 27th meeting of the Ovi Symposium we return to what is perhaps its main urgent and overarching theme: the envisioning of a new humanism for the new millennium. When in the 15th century the Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro was asked what he considered the most important thing in life he promptly answered: “to be human.” Of course that presupposes another crucial question: what does it mean to be human? That question goes back to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It is still debated today in symposia galore. But there is still another deeper question: what exactly is my Self? It is a question originally posed by St. Augustine dealing with our most essential spiritual identity, the identity of a being endowed with consciousness, conscious of his freedom and of not being a mere automaton or a mere computer, conscious that he has an existence in time and space, and that his journey through those existential dimensions of reality is necessarily historical. So, willy-nilly, we return to Vico’s historicism! Regarding the corollary issue soul/automaton or self/automaton, if you will, in section one we present a sterling example of a symposium or a friendly open-ended philosophical conversation: a colloquium on the issue between two brilliant philosophers in present day Italy: Ernesto Paolozzi, whom the readers already know quite well as one of the symposium participants, and the other, as a guest participant in this meeting, Maurizio Ferraris, a professor of philosophy at the University of Turin. He a pupil of Gianni Vattimo (whom I had as a professor in a course on Vico at Yale University in 1978); later worked with him and with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (of Truth and Method fame) on the theory of philosophical-literary-theological hermeneutics, and later set up the school of New Realism, presently directing the philosophical journal Rivista d’Estetica. This very stimulating and insightful colloquium, which in some way could be a template for our own colloquia in the Ovi symposium, translated in English by E.L. Paparella (who is alone directly responsible for translation and posting in English of the same colloquium), has previously appeared in Italian in the scholarly journal Cerchio e Freccia, directed by Edoardo Sant’Elia, as part of an ongoing rigorously structured project with a final deadline: eight issues over eight years (2010-2017), with twelve contributions in each volume. We trust it will stimulate further lively discussion and commentary in our own forum. Section two presents a brief comment by Emanuel Paparella, as coordinator, on the Paolozzi-Ferraris’ colloquium in the context of our own goals and agenda. A recent intriguing book, which reads like a novel on Plato making the rounds in the modern technological scientific world, is also briefly examined in the commentary. In section three, intended as a dialogue, in some way complementary to section one, we continue probing the thorny question: what makes us human? A question which revolves around the age old issue of man’s spiritual identity or of the spirit and the soul; what in philosophy, since Augustine, goes under the name of the Self. A question this dealing with the dualism spirit/matter.In my opinion, this special issue of the symposium on the soul and the self as distinguished from the automaton, and the mechanistic, the mind as distinguished from artificial intelligence, represents one of the most valiant attempts on the part of the forum’s participants to begin envisioning and constructing, at the beginning of a new millennium, an appropriate paradigm for a new humanism. We trust it will foment a productive dialogue. In section four we have deemed it relevant, within the context of art reproduced digitally by automatons or computers, to reproduce chapter 14 of the Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophy by

374 Ovi Symposium II Emanuel L. Paparella titled “Aesthetics as Digital Reproduction,” which can be found and is retrievable in the Ovi book-shop. Moreover, to encourage the ongoing dialogue, especially among inquisitive Ovi readers and contributors (i.e., the Ovi Team), we attach here a selected series of pieces as submitted to the magazine in the last seven years or so dealing with the issues of the Self and the duality science/humanism. Some readers may remember them, some may not even know that they exist, that they are retrievable from the Ovi archives via its search engine, by title or by author’s last name (Paparella). And the good news is that, wonder of wonders, it’s all free! You are welcome to peruse them. I cannot imagine a cheaper albeit valuable educational deal for those minds that are curious about the latest issues of our imperiled civilization and the nexus science/humanism. To facilitate the search we are listing the articles by title with an accessible link placed under each title. Enjoy! On the Self: “Reflections on Consciousness, Transcendence, Immanence and the Self” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/9014 “The Encounter with History as Extension of the Self” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/6730 “A Vichian Invitation to the Journey into the Self” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/6665 “A Humanistic Journey into the Self” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/6720 “The Nexus between History and the Self” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2363 On the Nexus between Science and Humanism “Envisioning a Bridge to a Third Culture” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/9613 “Dehumanization in the Light of Vico’s Philosophy” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/6844 “Complementarity within Vico’s Historicism vis a vis Science” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/6776 “A Guide to the Dialogue between Science and Religion” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/4423 “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Computer Science and Theology” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/4404 “A Third Window beyond Materialistic and Mechanistic Philosophies of Nature” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/4330 “A Reflection on Artificial Intelligence and Human Consciousness”

Ovi Symposium II 375 http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/4092 “The Latest on the Nexus between Science and Religion” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/4057 “Does the Internet Make us more Intelligent but less Human?” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/3271 “An Alternative to a Dehumanized Civilization” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2762 “The Principle of Complementarity in Bohr’s Quantum Mechanics and Vico’s Historicism” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2638 “The Truth of Scientific Knowledge grounded in Faith” http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2548 Lastly, an announcement on the symposium personnel: we regret to announce that from now on Dr. Ales- sandra Abis will not continue her contributions to the symposium due to other pressing commitments of a professional and personal nature. We are grateful for her temporary cooperation with the symposium and remain open to welcoming her as a guest contributor at any time in the future or as an individual contributor to the Ovi enterprise, if that proves more feasible for her. Thank you, Alessandra, and ad majorem.

376 Ovi Symposium II 1 Automaton-Soul: A Philosophical Colloquium between two eminent Italian philosophers: Maurizio Ferraris and Ernesto Paolozzi (from the philosophical journal Cerchio e Freccia, translated into English by Emanuel L. Paparella)

Maurizio Ferraris Ernesto Paolozzi I. Slander on Automatons Ferraris: Let us begin with a thesis on which we can all apparently agree: something like “the spirit vivifies, the letter kills.” I am convinced that even those who ignore these gospel verses assigns to spirit a higher value vis à vis letter; it is common to say: this is the text, this is the letter, agreed, but we are going beyond the letter toward the spirit. I have always been moved, and I’ll attempt to explain what is the nexus with our conversation on soul and automaton, a passage from Baudelaire in his “my unveiled heart” where he asserts that “The Jews: bibliographers and witnesses to redemption.” It is an example of horrifying anti-Sem- itism which is treated lightly by Benjamin when he quotes and comments on it, while Pichoi, the editor of Baudelaire in the Pleiades says that “This is a difficult passage to interpret, but we can eliminate any notion of anti-Semitism,” which to me appears as a beautiful form of double negation. In reality, these mental attitudes which place the letter on one side and the spirit on the other, reflect a clear alternative between the soul and the automaton: spirit is good, and it is soul; the letter is bad, and it is the automaton. We see this quite well in Plato’s Phaedrus where writing is condemned exactly because it is a sort of soul exteriorized and thus transformed into technical soul, an automaton. In fact, for Socrates the limitation of writing is that it says always the same thing; if placed under interrogation the text is unable to defend itself or attack; therefore what is good is inside. And this is the point: there is a condemnation of the external, of the technical, of the inert, in the name of something internal, of something vital, spiritual; but were we to discuss on the soul and explain this internal reality we’d have recourse to the external once more, to something inert, to scripture. In fact, when Plato needs to describe the soul he says that “the soul is like a book,” and here once more the technical is inside, not outside. Inexorably one begins to suspect that automaton is not a category but an insult: the automatons are the others, never oneself. Paolozzi: I too have thought about the Platonic soul and then about the complications of the Aristotelian soul which is something else again, and it is in fact, in certain aspects a gigantic automaton which ends up controlling the entire universe. But we also have to deal with the concerns of modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, in its attempts on one hand to eliminate the soul as a metaphysical idea, and on the other hand in its inability to say what exactly a soul is, if it is metaphysical or empirical. So let’s avoid the

Ovi Symposium II 377 cliché of the soul as something beautiful, while the automaton is bad and negative. Let’s keep in mind that in the history of culture there is also the idea that the automaton may be the triumphant antithesis of the soul. Think of Freud’s psychoanalysis where the soul is conceptualized with a purely mechanical function… Ferraris: Exactly, a psychology without a soul. Paolozzi: This is indeed another point to reflect upon. And although the reference is often abused I cannot resist citing here The Strange Adventure of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There you have the good soul and the bad soul: one is the mechanical one, the one that wins out, hence the automaton, evil in itself, while the beautiful soul remains anchored in what is good. But the true message here, beyond the contrast, is that in reality there is no such thing as a soul. In the final analysis, a soul is also an automaton just as an automaton is a soul, we are in a relationship of dialectical indistinguishable reciprocity. Ferraris: So we should not side neither with Jekyll nor with Hyde? Paolozzi: I think that this story is a dramatization of the condemnation of abstractions, not in the automaton; and that Stevenson had understood one thing clearly: if one searches for a separation of good from evil in an abstract mode, one will never succeed, because within reality we are as much automatons as we are souls, if by soul we understand freedom vis à vis mechanism. Ferraris: Fine, let’s then imagine that somebody comes to us to ask us: “How do you prove that you have a soul? Go ahead, prove it to me. What do you really know? How can you think that you have a soul? To say it in a different way: “How can you possibly think that you are free?” We have no evidence: for what we know, we could be hanging from a string, automatons like a roasting jack, just a bit more complex. Some would answer thus: “No, it seems to me that I possess spontaneous movements.” Indeed, but these spontaneous movements may be the effect of internal mechanisms or—according to the old argument according to which the most profound things within us are the things that they have taught us at elementary school—the product of precepts which we have learned automatically and that, being by now rooted in us, we imagine as constitutive of our intimacy. So we have a category which is not ontological—on one side there is the soul, and on the other the automaton—rather it is axiological: there is a good thing, which is the soul, and a bad thing, which is the automaton. In this sense, quite often to act like an automaton is considered a form of justification. “I did it without thinking”: who has never justified oneself thus? “I was only following orders”: another typical justification. If one were to reflect on how much of our life takes place in an automatic mode, one becomes aware of the continual repetitions, not excluding the spiritual sphere. Some say that a preacher can preach for an hour without thinking; I can practically guarantee that a professor too can talk for an hour without thinking. What difference is there between oneself and an automaton in such a moment, in the moment when one is teaching? Or in the moment when the actor is acting? That explains why actors have to transform themselves into automatons, given that they are acting out something that is prescribed. In fact, automatism is of obligation in some professional functions. Let’s take for example a call center, which is the most obvious. One calls, first one gets some automatic instructions: if you need this push button one, if you need something else push two, push three if, and so on; then if something unpredictable happens, the operator will intervene, as an anonymous figure who often does not know how to answer and is compelled to repeat the same thing. Here in effect we find ourselves in an automatic function. But it is not only men degraded by their occupation which act as automatons, even men in a church find themselves in a similar situation. Imagine a Mass: what is more automatic than that?

378 Ovi Symposium II Paolozzi: But it is in the nature of the ritual to instantiate identical gestures and similar formulas. Ferraris: I can well imagine an automaton recharged in some way, which celebrates a Mass and I am sure that the consecration would be considered valid as long as the words pronounced were appropriate. Paolozzi: So, especially in this circumstance the tunic makes the monk? Ferraris: Yes, as long as the words are appropriate, the consecration takes place. It is rather obvious that the most elevated artistic, spiritual, institutional functions can be performed through automatism. Do you see a difference between the orchestra director, the priest who celebrates Mass, or Obama who makes an inaugural speech to the congress of the United States? The director and the priest already have a written text: we cannot add anything there. As far as Obama is concerned, it has probably been written by a ghostwriter. And yet for all three of them this should be the culmination, the appearance of the spirit on the cosmic-historical stage… Paolozzi: I propose that we conclude this first section with Pascal, somebody who knew what he was talking about; as far as he was concerned, even religion, or better, faith, the supreme spiritual act, apparently the least automatic, often is conquered with habit and repetition, that is to say with an automatic act. Ferraris: He is the one who invented the calculator. II. Doubts on Identity Paolozzi: The problem is that identity does not actually exist, neither in the so called soul, nor in the automaton. It is a category which cannot be explained by itself: this is what I think is the problem. Ferraris: Are you then forcefully saying that identity is an illusion? Paolozzi: By itself, without its contrary, yes. While it is true that the soul should be the essence of identity, the problem is aggravated when one attempts to get it out of the body, when the Kantian “I think” must become a soul which goes to Heaven or to Hell: and this is not possible. Even Croce, who can be defined as the philosopher of absolute spiritualism when, in pages that few know well, speaks of in his Pragmatic Philosophy of the character of men—since character is a kind of soul—speaks about habits, “willed habits.” I myself commenting on this passage have written that “Be careful, because here Croce is almost talking about the soul, almost,” but obviously he is not talking about the soul. What is a habit, that for which we say that I have my own characteristic and he has a different one, and you another yet.” This characteristic is always individualistic a la Leibniz. So if by identity we mean this kind of super-individuality which we all have either under the aspect of soul or automaton, of a being that is automatic and spiritual at the same time, then yes, otherwise identity looks to me as something else, the usual abstraction. Ferraris: I find this reiteration of character significant, because characters are also the characters for printing, to stay with the issue of letter and spirit. That is to say, it is because of things that one is always equal to oneself, the motive for which the letter is despised in Plato: writing repeats itself continually. We too, when we are really ourselves, we repeat ourselves incessantly. This uniqueness, which in fact becomes our individual habit, makes our relatives and friends suppose, rightly or wrongly, that we have a soul, and perhaps makes us believe it too. This is the reason why people get angry when they go and listen to a concert by Bob Dylan or De Gregori, and the artists as artists get bored with repeating in the same way. The one hundred millionth time that you repeat Goodnight Little Flower you get exasperated and decide to sing it differently.

Ovi Symposium II 379 People don’t like you at that point, because they wanted to hear “just as it is,” and that “just as it is,” is exactly what they have heard on the radio or on the cd a million other times; that becomes the authentic, that represents the soul, the essence of the artist, while the variation is strident, and is perceived as incongruous… Paolozzi: So the waiting is tied to the mechanistic? Ferraris: And this is true for an infinity of occasions and functions. Before, I referred to the theatrical performance, to the religious rite, to the political discourse, all things that we suppose prescribed. Let’s now imagine going to hear the conference of a famous philosopher, and this famous philosopher says the exact contrary of what he has always said, and speaks differently from the way he has always spoken, he gives wholly different examples, and so on; once again, as with the singer, one is disappointed. But he tells you: “Excuse me, but I had a spiritual turn around thirty seconds ago and this is the result of that turn, you should appreciate what you just heard, what now represents my authentic originality.” Would such argument be convincing, would it encourage the disappointed listener. I don’t think so. Paolozzi: ultimately the aspect that seems most creative, less robotic, the artistic impulse, is the one that more than any other fixes you in an unrepeatable characteristic; which is after all Pirandello’s theme, among others. Ferraris: An existential theme and a necessarily linguistic one. Paolozzi: therefore we’ll not get out of this having recourse to the old Hegel and instituting a dialectical nexus between language and word, for which one does not exist before or after the other, which are born at a crossroad, as Vico would hold, or we’ll never get out of this problem. How does one come to a solution with language if not with language itself? The conventionality of language cannot but be posterior to its creativity. But where does the creativity come from? Did God put it there? Is it innate? Is this Plato’s idea? If regarding these problems we assume a viewpoint which belongs to metaphysics or to science, each within its exclusivity, there is no way out. Ferraris: Therefore you wish to transcend both categories? Paolozzi: They are born together and it makes no sense to separate them. Ferraris: In this regard I’d like to return to Vico whom you just quoted. He, the theoretician of the imaginative universals, at a certain point asks what is imagination and he answers: memory dilated and composed. We often reverse this idea: the authentic is what is unique, what happens only once; vice versa, the automatic is what continually repeats itself. But all the examples that we have looked till now seem to go in a different direction: the authentic is rather what repeats itself. After all, when we talk of “authentic flavors” we refer to flavors of a time past, that is to say, flavors which have repeated themselves an infinitude of times. Quite often, in the definition between authentic and inauthentic there seems to be only a distinction between two types of techniques: between what is made manually and what is made by machine; but they remain two type of techniques. In my opinion, the real question is this: once you have demonstrated that between soul and automaton there is no difference, why do you continue to consider the automaton negatively and the soul positively? I would not be happy to be surrounded by automatons, neither would I be happy to be one. I think that the answer to this has been given by Leibniz: we can imagine a spiritual automaton, as long as he is free. And what does it mean to be a spiritual automaton who is free? It means an automaton which is enor- mously complicated. We are automatons but are tremendously complicated automatons, more so than any

380 Ovi Symposium II other. That is why we have no respect for the roasting wheel: because it is an automaton with a very simple function. So I have the impression that freedom is something more than something to be demonstrated is rather something which we have to assume, to give sense to our life. Paolozzi: Freedom as an assumption? Ferraris: Yes, I prefer to assume that I am free, as I prefer to think that those around me are also free, for it allows me to employ a vocabulary of moral evaluation which would make no sense if such freedom did not exist. For this I have no proof, no useful empirical proof. III. The Automatism of the Quotidian Paolozzi: I think that we ought not demonize automatism in the quotidian. Such is life, it takes place between this continuous swing from banality to profundity, to originality. “Is it usually possible to be original without banality?” This is the question. What does it mean “today I passed a day unlike any other, finally”” That I went to the stadium? Or that I thought I wrote a very beautiful poem which I have in my drawer and am ashamed to show to anybody. What if for the rest of the day I eat, I sleep, and I cordially greet a friend with whom I go to the movie: is this necessarily banal? We tend to assume that quotidian life is often a concatenation of banalities but here probably we incur an ethical, even ethico-political transfer. We condemn or auto-condemn, with dubious moralism, the life of those who do not commit themselves to anything that is at least useful if not important for mankind, limiting himself to living with the necessary natural quotidian acts, which are perhaps or certainly automatic. Is he to be condemned for that? Ferraris: Life functions via cycles. It auto-understands itself through a cycle of digestive cycles, seasonal cycles, productive cycles, alimentary cycles. So it is quintessential repetition. When we talk of life we do not imagine it in its quotidian aspects; and yet I’d like to see a life which is not quotidian: were it so it would be a bit too thunderous. There is an abundance of literature of the beginning of the 20th century where one sees men of the cities moving like automatons, gray, resigned, substantially identical…The lens is never focused on the 18th century, when the same men in the country-side behaved like automatons, only a bit slower, subject to rhythms which were those of nature—to sow, to gather, and so on—requiring a similar repetitiveness. The difference therefore does not reside in the spontaneous and the automatic, but rather the difference is between a boorish automaton and a sophisticated automaton. We ought to attempt to understand why despite the omnipresence of automatism in our life, there are moments, and more frequently than one can imagine a priori, when originality seems to emerge, or in- ventiveness, or freedom, or choice…In any case these sensations and feelings, such as happiness, unhappiness, would not be explainable within a pure automatism, and it is also true that when we are depressed the automaton is much more visible. Paolozzi: I would reflect on this: which is one of the things which scares us most in life? Uncertainty: we do not like uncertainty. We are uncertain in a crisis, uncertain in love, uncertain even of our life. So, how does one get out of uncertainty? You become automatic and repetitive. Which means that the automatic is an essential part of our existence. As soon as we risk losing it we get scared. But obviously we are all conscious of the fact that in the final analysis we wish to live in uncertainty, because without it there would be no freedom and we could not do anything. If I already know everything that needs to be done, from today till the end of my life, I would immediately commit suicide. And I would do so because I am afraid of uncertainty, but also because I do not wish to be afraid of being afraid, which is the real angst.

Ovi Symposium II 381 Ferraris: talking of angst, I am reminded of a nice anecdote of Vincino. Christ tells a thief: tonight you will be with me in Paradise; yes, but then we go out. Understood? Obviously paradise would not be such without a way to escape it. What can be more unfortunate in fact than a complete repetitiveness? I remember that American film [Groundhog Day] wherein the protagonist is condemned to relive every day the same day from the very moment he wakes up; eventually he does not wish to go to bed any longer, for no reason, since he knew what to expect the next morning. There is even a Disney version, wherein Donald Duck’s nephews magically realize their dream that every day be Christmas. At the beginning it is great but then when they have to confront every day the same damned dinner, the same gifts which are no longer a surprise…then angst overcomes them, with no escape, they become very sad and angry. Paolozzi: With so many references to popular art, allow me to insert here a classical touch: perhaps we ought to reevaluate Plato when he says that the body is a cage for the soul. Ferraris: If we are talking of the body, there is something of which I must immediately inform you of: the alternative between soul and automaton is also the alternative between what is alive and what is dead. The soul is alive, the automaton is dead. But the point is: if we knew the hour of our death, if we knew its exact moment, what would happen to us? This is an hypothesis which becomes more and more concrete; on one hand biological life has become considerably longer, on the other hand, and at the same time, diagnostic instruments which are now available and are more advanced than even those of twenty years ago, make it possible that we live with death even longer than it was possible for our preceding generations. There are many people who know they have a tumor nowadays but keep on living. At one time to be diagnosed as positive meant to die, today it means to live, or live together with your death all your life. DNA studies will make it possible in the not too distant future to know what we will die from and when. What is this? It is the automaton who reveals himself, the dead inside the alive. Little science is needed to understand the mechanisms of the roasting wheel; but with much science and much technique one can understand the mechanisms of the spiritual free automaton that we are and reveal him always as an automaton. IV. Technology Ferraris: What is technology in itself? The answer toward which I tend is: “technology is the possibility of repeating something.” I hit something and then I hit it again: this is already a rudimentary form of technology. No technology can be developed in the absence of repetition. The repetitions then accumulate and build on each other and at the end we have an object as sophisticated as the one which is registering us, but which proceeds via repetition, and from which we expect that it is capable to repeat what we are saying. Paolozzi: Naturally I join you in the expectation and am confident of the instrument. This argument on technology reminds me of Edgar Morin, the thinker of complexity with whom I have dialogued. Complexity would envision expulsion from technology, rather technology is seen as the negative of complexity, because it is what simplifies. But is it possible to expel from the world’s reality linear logic, which in our case we can define as logical technology? This would be an operation contrary to complexity which to be that must assume linearity, that is to say, technology. Ferraris: Linear logic as a premise of complexity? Paolozzi: Not as a premise but as a necessary component of complexity, which cannot itself become re- ductionist, or it is no longer complex but a form of more sophisticated linearity. Therefore you need to enter

382 Ovi Symposium II all the way into this complexity and probably you need to enter into history. This has nothing to do with a banal sort of historicism: we need to wholly change the question and not from past history to today, rather by inserting ourselves into history, into past history. What today may appear complex will become simple tomorrow, or vice versa. Ferraris: I’d like to launch an hypothesis: each epoch has had its critics of technology, and those are the ones who criticize the new technology in the name of an older technology. This is normal: the saboteurs who wrecked machines in order to continue working with their manual instruments, which were themselves forms of technology, simply a preceding one. Paolozzi: Among other things, and I think it has clearly come across in this discussion, it is not true that only our epoch is the epoch of technology. I am beginning to have many doubts that even in this regard we can truly speak of epochs, I would object to the term itself. We invent the epoch, but in reality who has said that it exists? Is the world really divided in centuries and decades, the 19th century, the 20th century, the 60s, the 90s? Those are the usual abstractions, necessary to organize a book or organize a debate… Ferraris: I believe that every epoch, if we wish for the moment, to remain rooted to this form of periodization, has been represented as complex in comparison with another that preceded it and considered it simple; and that generally every generation is considered a not fully realized generation vis à vis the others which were perfect. But this is a perception one gets when one is within a flux. When things are fixed, simplified, recognizable, at that point we say: “the typical feudal situation.” Paolozzi: You say that to perceive oneself in the flux is difficult. Ferraris: It is something very complicated. Can one imagine a medieval man saying: “Here I am, a true perfect medieval man”? In the first place they did not know that they were medieval and that changes everything. Some, less well informed, still thought of themselves as ancient men, who in turn did not know that they were ancients. In my opinion, here too we encounter the same problem soul/automaton: we who are within the flux feel ourselves as soul; the others, who are already fixed, are the automatons. Which is not wrong, since we do not know how it all ends, don’t know how the mechanism concludes for us and, naturally we perceive ourselves as souls. Paolozzi: So, once again, automatons are the others. Ferraris: Especially those who preceded us; they are all automatons. Paolozzi: In fact, when a thing is dead it is already open to automatism, it has history as its sediment. But these are mechanisms that are necessary to life. If I am in the presence of a professor who is examining me, for me he is purely a presence, a fixed automaton. He is one who is a professor, and that’s all. That he may be happy or unhappy, that he may be a fan of Naples or Juventus, is of no interest to me. To stay with the last metaphor: in this circumstance, I am the flux and perceive myself becoming while the person who is before me must be automated, must be placed in a fixed context; for if I don’t do it, if I don’t make him and those around him into an automatons, there is no space either for a comparison. V. The Ghost Factory Ferraris: Technology per se produces ghosts. Spiritism is a modern phenomenon: it belongs to the era of the phonograph, the brothers Lumiere, and coincides with the invention of the movie. The ghost Is also an

Ovi Symposium II 383 automaton figure; it returns every evening and it more or less says the same things. The silent specter of Hamlet’s father appears three times on the stage; if it had appeared only once, we would not consider him a ghost but an hallucination: there is a difference. And let’s reflect on the quantity of ghosts that we are surrounded by. There was a time when what was left of the men who had preceded us was little more than fixed photos and perhaps some letters written. Today we have their voices, their faces, their gestures and gigantic archives which are themselves perishable, obviously, since one of the characteristics of technology is its continual need of renovation. This is valid for the zombie. It is a more material ghost, a bit more corpu- lent, there are pieces that that fall away, but in effect what is it? It is somebody who moves as an automaton. Therefore a zombie, a ghost, an automaton, belong to the same species. One could say: “Come on now, as evolved as we are nowadays, why should we believe in ghosts?” Of course we need to believe in them, we produce them incessantly. The future belongs to the ghosts since the future is a development of technology. Paolozzi: Indeed, the future belongs to the ghosts but let’s not forget that these automaton figures were present in the past too, and knew how to defend their interests. But staying with the 20th century, I am reminded of the black comedy of Eduardo. Those ghosts, with blurred borders between the real and the supernatural, shrewdness and superstition, are quite unstable. What is most funny of his comedies is the end when the names of all the protagonists appear with qualifications such as: useful soul, harmful soul, bad soul… Eduardo gives a ghostly flavor to his protagonists labeling them grotesquely with spiritual epithets, and vice versa, degrades the fantastic immersing it in a sordid reality of banal and insignificant interests. Doubt on the double nature of the figure that acts is fomented with wise equivocations which remain such at the end: have we viewed an ingenuous poetic tragedy or a big conscious deception? Indeed, the human being has always had a need to build for himself ghosts, using as needed the technology available at the time, the manufacture one or create one tied to imagination. Ferraris: Do you believe that there is another epoch so full of ghostly automatons as the one we live in? Paolozzi: If we wish to go beyond the realm of quantity, then the first answer would be the 17th century. Why such a century? Because the baroque is the invention of the machine, of the ghost, it is a mad mimesis of reality, both positively and negatively. Positive as far as fully expressing without limitations all the creative potential that is there; negative when the technology explodes, it becomes narcissistic and we begin to write shrewd insignificant concepts. Isn’t that the case today? We live in a baroque era, in its best aspects as well as in its worst apects. Jazz, in my opinion, is a baroque musical form. Ferraris: I am in agreement with that. What I remain skeptical about is the alleged characteristic of our time as encapsulated in this formula: “Contemporary society is grounded in communication.” I have always found this affirmation hilarious, in as much as it is twice false: the first falsehood is that I fail to imagine a society which is not based on communication: that is to say, did the Egyptians not communicate? They were always silent? Simply because we do not have adequate documentation and registration of their events, similar to ours, which is an excessive assumption, we imagine that they did not communicate. It is the typical arrogance of modern man. Paolozzi; Socrates spoke enough, even too much. Ferraris: And of that we have quite a bit of evidence. The other aspect is that today, in my opinion, even more important than communication is its registration. We seem to be unable to imagine any longer a society without memory of the actions which characterize it on a daily basis, which allow life to flow in a particular di-

384 Ovi Symposium II rection. This is due to the fact that the technology of the last thirty years or so has been the immense growth of instruments for registration of every kind. All our telephone calls are registered, we have documentation of all our e-mails, we have memory within our smart phones which are superior to what might have been the library of Alexandria in its heyday. Surely this is a variation, an unheard of potential in the inexhaustible production of automatisms. Paolozzi: The society of registration. I never declare definitive assertions since life itself is not definite, but perhaps the internet goes even beyond, it allows us to overcome the problem of the recovery of our regis- trations, since after you have launched in the cybernetic space, sooner or later somebody else will pick them up and the whole thing renovates itself. In a similar context, my e-mail runs the serious risk of becoming immortal and, given that the internet regurgitates with obsolete information, I do not envy future historians, who will have to deal with this enormous tangle of news. Ferraris: There is no doubt that automatons, perfected to the ultimate, possessing unlimited memory are disquieting. Some people, noble champions of the soul against the vile automaton, may say: “But, after all, memory is mere reproduction. The spirit is something else altogether.” But we who are not naïve, understand that the deterioration of the automaton implies relevant damage to the soul too.

Ovi Symposium II 385 2 A Brief Commentary by Paparella on Ferraris and Paolozzi’s Colloquium: “Soul-Automaton” When I first read this very interesting colloquium, I was brought back to Gilbert Ryle’s famous tongue in cheek dictum “the ghost in the machine”, as expressed in his well known volume The Concept of Mind (1949), wherein he describes the absurdity of all dualistic systems, such as Descartes’, wherein mental activity carries on in parallel to physical automatic action even though their means of interaction are largely unknown and merely speculative. Both Paolozzi and Ferraris are on target when they trace the initial problematic with Plato’s concept of the body as the prison house of the soul which later on, via Augustine, greatly influences Christian theology. So the soul begins to be conceived as something pure and positive and spiritual while the body is something material and negative and dirty. The corrective of Aquinas, who founds his theology on Aristotle, is needed but nevertheless that duality is still embraced by many Christians, Descartes being perhaps its most prominent promoter. This is especially so in the case of Christians with strong puritanical leanings: anything associated with the body is evil and negative, anything associated with the soul is good and positive. That is to say, let’s go ahead and burn the witches, and perhaps heretics to boot, in order to save their souls. A Jew would never make that kind of duality between matter and spirit. Spinoza, for example, conceived the soul and the body as one and indivisible. Obviously at the root of that position there was a whole Jewish tradition that is indeed the root of the tree of which Christianity is a branch, as Paul reminds us in Romans. When one contemplates Michelangelo’s Last Judgment at the end times in the Sistine Chapel, one soon realizes that Michelangelo pictorially points to the fallacy of duality by representing those coming out of their tombs neither as ghosts nor as angels or pure spirits. They emerge from their tombs as human beings, with their bodies, warts and all. Moreover we read in the Acts of the Apostles that when Christ appears to his followers in the cenacle after the resurrection he does do so as a ghost or as a hologram (albeit his spiritu- alized body was able to go through doors without opening them), nor as an angel devoid of body. He in fact suggests that doubting Thomas place his finger in his wounds. That action would have been futile had Christ appeared as a ghost. So, it appears that the genuine Christian belief, as rooted in the Jewish tradition. is that body and spirit while being distinguishable are indivisible. One begins to suspect that science, concerned with the empirical, mechanistic deterministic matter and the letter, and the humanities, concerned with a free spirit, the ultimate basis of our freedom, may also be one and indivisible. To separate them is to return to the above mentioned Platonic duality. Now, in order to arrive at those rather simple conclusions on the fallacy of the dualities mind/body, soul/ automaton, letter/spirit, science/humanism, one needs not have recourse to the learned semioticians of the post-modern epoch, those whom Vico would probably deem the “learned arrogant doctors” of today’s academia, those who have reduced even symbols and their spiritual importance to nothing more than material and mechanical signs, albeit linguistic signs, have embraced nihilism, have declared life meaningless and have derided Croce’s suggestion that “we cannot but be Christians”. To return to Plato, whom Alfred Whitehead considered crucial to the proper understanding of the canon of

386 Ovi Symposium II Western philosophy, to the point of considering it a footnote to Plato’s speculation, perhaps we should also reference here a recent intriguing book I am currently reading. It deals with the enduring relevancy of philosophy in the era of the computer, the internet, deterministic brain science, mindless technology, progress for its own sake. It is titled: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, and is authored by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. What makes the book so fascinating is that it reads like a novel wherein Plato is imagined making the rounds visiting Silicon Valley and Fox News among other places, answering the challenging question on how to raise the perfect child, which was also a crucial question in Athens 24 centuries ago, submitting to a neurosurgeon’s scanning of his brain, and then trying out the internet while commenting on the still needed interfacing of philosophy with science, especially when it comes to the exploration of free will and the meaning of human life and humankind’s destiny and how responsible each of us remains in its existential choices. In that sense, this journey of the great philosopher in the intricacies of the modern era, leads to the conclusion that not only is philosophy not obsolete, it is more necessary than ever, it is in fact a sine qua non for science, for indeed science cannot even begin, much less thrive, unless there is an a priori faith in the ability of the human mind and of human reason to reach the truth, as difficult as that may prove to be. A fascinating book indeed, very much relevant to the general theme “soul-automaton” discussed in this meeting or our symposium.

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (2014) By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Admittedly, the ideas seminally presented here in this particular commentary are not terribly original; neither are they the proverbial reinventing of the wheel; rather, they are meant to be mere temporary rumina- tions, stimulated by the above colloquium, that perhaps will appeal in some way to the quotidian and solid common sense of the kind of people who like Ovi magazine and read it daily. Be that as it may, it is to be sincerely hoped that those ideas will be further explored and discussed in the symposium’s future sessions. Meanwhile, a sincere thank you is due to Paolozzi and Ferraris for a very stimulating colloquium.

Ovi Symposium II 387 3 Envisioning a New Humanism beyond the Dichotomy Science/Humanism A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella The ancient Greeks warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living; that man needs to ask the question what does it mean to be human and only after adequately answering that question will he be able to devise a theory of “the good life.” But there is however a more profound and complex concept of the self. St. Augustine puts the riddle of the self this way: What is so much thine as thyself and what is so little thine as thyself? What Augustine is pointing out is this: underlying the question “Who am I” is a further question: “Is my I really mine?” Ultimately this is the question of freedom asking “How much in control am I of my self?” Those are questions acutely felt by perceptive modern men who feel themselves “thrown into existence” in a world largely devoid of meaning, condemned to play certain roles within certain social structures oriented toward consumerism, production, success and material affluence. Questions that Thoreau already attempted to address way back in 1847 with his reflections onWalden Pond. Closer to us, Jacques Ellul explores extensively the modern phenomenon of value-free technological “efficient ordering” which pervades all aspects of modern life since Descartes (see his The Betrayal of the West). Previous to Ellul, Marx had already identified this form of alienation in the individual’s role as object of exploitation. But this alienation transcends the mere economic sphere of one’s humanity and occurs in all types of societies. In fact, the greater the organization of a society—i.e., the interdependence of all its social phenomena and the determinism of its processes—the greater seems to be the alienation, anonymity and servitude of its individuals to processes and forces that hamper their creativity and identity. Indeed, this is the question of freedom. We live in two worlds which no longer understand and communicate with each other: the humanistic world and the scientific world. Those who live in the latter are quick to point out that technology has provided us with the means to subdue the earth and free the destitute and oppressed masses from brutalizing labor. That is however only partly true given that millions of people in the third world as I write this remain oppressed and exploited. Those people usually fail to observe how in the 20th century, after World War I, the very concept of Utopia present even in Marxist ideology practically disappeared. In the 19th century, when belief in the so called “inevitable” progress of science was prevalent, utopia was felt to be the very goal of history. Utopia meant a world without oppression and injustice, without hunger and class conflicts. Marx certainly envisioned it as the culmination of man’s history, after a few inevitable dialectic class conflicts that is. This vision is no longer with us. As Einstein pointed out in the 20th century, we are now mainly preoccupied with the means of the goal of utopia. In the process of perfecting those means, the goal, i.e., utopia itself, is lost sight of. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of education where means have long ago swallowed up goals and “educrats,” so called, have firmly established themselves as the well-paid managers of those means. It is no secret that bureaucracy now absorbs 60% or more of the money earmarked for education in the Western World. At this sorry stage of depersonalization, the pressing question is about our very humanity. Are we still capable of acting humanely? Is the self still home? If it is not, that may explain why so many individuals do not know what do with their leisure. They simply do not know what to do with their selves. Pascal for one provides the answer as to why so much of modern recreation assumes a mode of centrifugal dissipation rather than one

388 Ovi Symposium II of centripetal concentration. In his famous Pensèes he points out that the cause of our unhappiness can be identified in the fact that we cannot simply sit still in a room for more than a few minutes. Or as Dante illustrates it in his Commedia, to be alone is a terrifying experience if no self is encountered. It is in the loss of the self that much modern existential angst can be located. Once I have lost my self, I may knock at the door of my own home and find that nobody lives there any longer. To say it with Dante, “so bitter it is that death is little more.” At that point I may become unable to pursue the question of my own humanity. Dante for one needed Virgil’s guide to overcome the three beasts that obstructed the beginning of his journey into the self. And here we return to the theme of freedom and determinism. Contrary to what Freudianism may hold, humans are not mere bundles of impulses independent of time and place. Society is perfectly capable of adapting and molding these impulses and even perverting them in order to fit them into its principles of reality. All that needs to be done is to make people believe that their wants are their needs and that to be deprived of those wants is be victimized. Politicians seem to be very good at this sort of game. As Jackson Lears has aptly written in his No Place of Grace: “… A therapeutic world view…has become part of the continuing pattern of evasive banality in modern culture. Celebrating spurious harmony, the therapeutic outlook has further undermined personal moral responsibility and promoted ethics of self-fulfillment well attuned to the consumer ethos of 20th century capitalism.” Our incessant talk shows are mere symptoms of that kind of cancer eating at our Western civilization. When the disease has become pervasive, people begin to sincerely believe that to be human and to have self-esteem is to own a car equipped with a telephone with which to order pizza on the way home. Some have even installed make-believe phones with which to confer more self-esteem and self-importance on themselves. To drive while talking on the phone gives others the impression that momentous decisions are being executed. The gorilla with a telephone in his paw is of course merely funny. A much less amusing and sinister aspect of this pressure to adjust and conform are the propagandistic and ideological apparatuses that have distinguished the 20th century. People caught in those monstrosities can hardly be imagined as being endowed with a shred of autonomy or as striving after what Jung called “individuation.” In those types of societies, man has not only dehumanized himself but he is unable to cure himself. An outside force seems to be needed. It can only come from the few individuals in whom the image of authentic humanity is still kept alive and who have the courage to free that image by condemning and altering corrupting social structures. Solzhenitsyn jumps to mind. In the 60s we had in America a counterculture movement largely sponsored by college students and theorized by Herbert Marcuse in his book Eros and Civilization. He thought, as some misguided intellectuals still do, that a new humanity was on the horizon, ushered in by new technological developments which would keep oppressive work at a minimum while raising leisure and freedom to the maximum. The aggressive instincts identified by Freud as aroused by social repression, would simply wither away. So would Judeo-Christian morality, another vestige of social repression. This new man, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “overman” would be characterized by the fact that he would not have to merit life; he would simply enjoy it. Whatever aggressive instincts might be left in him would be sublimated through sports and the building of civilized communities that respected nature. Here we should pause to note that of the many hippy communes established in the 60s, few survived and those which did had some kind of religious foundation. In any case, this was perhaps the last naïve attempt at utopia on the part of modern technocratic man. It never came to pass. What did come to pass is best explained by Allan Bloom in his controversial The Closing of the American Mind where he provides an analysis of this “new

Ovi Symposium II 389 man.” Far from being tolerant and simply enjoying life in Utopia, the “new man” has by now entrenched himself in the University’s chambers of power (the same chambers at whose gates he was protesting in the 60s) and from there he now imposes “political correctness” on academia. All done, mind you, in the name of civilizing tolerance and equality. What in reality is at work is a sort of Nietzchean nihilism and relativism. As indeed Nietzsche correctly foresaw in the 19th century, once God is dead, one is left with little more than “the will to power,” or a reduction of persons to functions of emergent social conditions. Within such a community, neither God (be he the one of the Judeo-Christian tradition or Plato’s) nor man (as conceived by the Renaissance) is any longer the measure of all things. The measure is constituted almost exclusively by material and economic structures. In song and in dance this man will end up bragging of the fact that he is a “material man,” turning vices into virtues on his TV shows where everybody washed one’s dirty linens in public, where every opinion is as good as any other, where triviality and banality reign supreme and truth is prostituted to expediency and freedom is mistaken for license. This new humanity is constituted by economic structures conceived as a sort of demiurge fashioning it. But this demiurge named “market” far from being a panacea can easily become an instrument of repression and dehumanization when not tempered by justice. Few people, either with the capitalistic or the socialist camp, bother to seriously ask the question: How can we humanize these economic structures that leave so many people at the margins of prosperity? Even Nobel winners in economics and science do not seem to be able to formulate the question, never mind answering it. What seems to be desperately needed is an independent picture of humanity; i.e., an awareness of being a self. Without that picture even the need for a journey is not perceivable. As Kierkegaard best rendered it, man then remains in the despair of self-forgetfulness, in the “sickness unto death” of the well adjusted individual identifying with the values of his society, blissfully unaware that he has been reduced to a consuming automaton. When man cannot conceive of his own destiny any longer and begins to talk of soul as mere mind, and then of mind as mere “software,” then indeed the sickness may be terminal. For when the I is lost, one cannot even grieve over its loss. And Kierkegaard is not talking here of a mere psychological phenomenon. Rather he is talking about an existential despair, the angst of which a Thoreau or a Heidegger speak. This is a sort of sickness that is hardly noticeable in the workaday world where the afflicted are engaged in all sorts of productive activities geared to repress the anxiety, while remaining lost “in a dark wood” with not even the faintest desire to seek “the right way.” This is the life of quiet desperation. Tragically, in that self-forgetfulness and imperceptible loss of identity, modern man becomes less than primitive man; he becomes, in fact, less than a beast, a monstrosity. Elie Wiezel is right in affirming that the proper ethical implications of mankind’s Nazi past have hardly been drawn. For we remain unwilling to question our humanity and thus relive the terror of such a past. It is easier by far to lay flowers on the tomb of the Third Reich’s unknown soldier in an inauthentic gesture of reconciliation. But reconciliation requires remembrance, acceptance, the asking of forgiveness, the granting of forgiveness, repentance, reparation. When these are missing reconciliation becomes a mockery. It becomes self-forgetfulness. As Dante and Vico have been trying to teach us for centuries now, to be human is to be forced to ask about one’s self, to be compelled by the image toward which one is thrust and which emerges at the intersection of essence and existence, at the point of ethical tension between what is and what ought to be.

390 Ovi Symposium II 4 Aesthetics as Digital Reproduction (From the Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, Chapter 14) By Emanuel L. Paparella

“The work of art in the age of digital reproduction is physically and formally chameleon. There is no clear conceptual distinction now between original reproduction in virtually any medium based in film, electronics, or telecommunications. As for the fine arts, the distinction is eroding, if not finally collapsed. The fictions of “master” and “copy” are now so entwined with each other that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends. In one sense, Walter Benjamin’s proclamation of doom for the aura of originality, authored early in the century, is finally confirmed by these events. In another sense, the aura, supple and elastic, has stretched far beyond the boundaries of Benjamin’s prophecy into the rich realm of reproduction itself. Here in this realm, often mislabeled “virtual” (it is actually a realer reality, or RR), both originality and traditional truth (symbolized by the unadorned photographic “fact”) are being enhanced, not betrayed…we reach through the electronic field of ease that cushions us, like amniotic fluid, through the field that allows us to order, reform, and transmit almost any sound, idea, or word, toward what lies beyond, toward the transient and ineffable—a breath, for example, a pause in conversation, even the twisted grain of a Xe- roxed photograph or videotape. Here is where the aura resides—not in the thing itself but in the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise.” --Douglas Davis (“The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction”) Benjamin’s classic discussion on art revolved around the idea that technological processes, which allow art objects to be reproduced mechanically, would undermine art’s auratic nature. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction” (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995), the conceptual artist and educator Douglas Davis brings Benjamin’s astute analysis into the present, but he also criticizes Benjamin for failing to envision the liberating potential of modern technology. Basically, Davis’ thesis is that far from threatening the aura of art, virtual reality enhances it. This is so because, in Davis’ view, the dichotomy between an original and its mechanical copy has been replaced by a new relationship. While agreeing with Benjamin that the aura of the original decays through the possibility

Ovi Symposium II 391 of reproduction, Davis argues that, nevertheless, rapidly evolving digital techniques endow every copy with its own unique aura. Rather than destroying aura, digital technology replicates it ad infinitum. It allows each of us not merely to reproduce the original exactly but also to enhance it in accord with our individual preferences. For example, instead of one Mona Lisa and its plethora of identical reproductions, each one of us can alter it on screen as we see fit. The resulting products are not mere mechanical reproductions but have the vitality of original works.

We have all seen reproductions of the Mona Lisa with mustaches on, or a winking Mona Lisa, a la Sarah Palin. We have seen man as depicted in Michelangelo’s “creation of man” panel in the Sistine Chapel that instead of extending his middle finger horizontally to touch that of God, extends it upward vertically to express defiance and contempt. This is one enhancement very dear to assorted atheists and agnostics and juveniles of all persuasions. What remains to be asked, however, is this question: is this still Da Vinci or Michelangelo, or rather, is this an opportunistic manipulation of those famous artists to promote one’s own ideology or belief-system or twisted sense of humor? How exactly the aura, or the reverence if you will, surrounding the works of those two famous artists is enhanced by the millions of less than genial and irrev- erent and juvenile individuals out to merely attract attention to themselves with an abysmal ignorance of the history and theories of art? In this attempt to attract attention at any cost, isn’t the ultimate act of defiance that of destroying Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer, in a sort of performance-art act? That too has been attempted, albeit unsuccessfully. To fine tune the question further: aren’t those barbaric acts of vandalism and destruction a sure sign of cultural philistinism, rather than enhancement of Michelangelo and Leonardo?

Be that as it may, Davis does not seem to be too concerned with such questions but presses on with his critique of Walter Benjamin’s pessimistic assessment of a technological development that lie behind the claims of his theory of art. Davis speculates that while Benjamin saw only the possibility of increasing social control and regimentation, we ought to be considering the potential for educated elites to contest such control for liberating purposes. Here again the question needs to be asked: which liberating purposes and who decides which are liberating and which are enslaving purposes? To a vandal, the destruction of a statue by Michelangelo intimating eternal Beauty, which the vandal rejects and or does not understand, may be liberating indeed, even cathartic.

392 Ovi Symposium II In any case, there is no doubt that, willy-nilly, we find ourselves “plugged in” in many aspects of our lives and to refuse to be plugged in is the equivalent of becoming an anachronism. One runs the risk of being labeled “a medieval man” by ignoramuses that make no distinction between Medieval times and the Dark Ages. Indeed, the digital future of art cannot be ignored as one explores its nature and essence. It may be indeed worth considering with Davis that, rather than denying us the potential for creativity, the Internet and its ancillary technological innovations inaugurate the era of the post-original original; the idea, that is, that when each of us, independent of his/her innate talents, is free to bestow aura, the correlative concepts of the original and its mechanical reproduction will have to be consigned to the dustbin of history; for after all, Hegel teaches us that history is progressive and what arrives at the end is always the best of all possible world. But Hegel might have rethought his philosophy had he lived in the era of Nazism (only sixty years ago) where books were burned (1933) as a sort of art-event and performance, and eventually people too were burned. So, the crucial question that remains to be courageously confronted is this: Is what arrives at the end of an era necessarily the best? Another way to frame the question is this: Is progress inevitable or is there such a thing as regression at the end of an historical process; is enhancement always improvement in any field? That question, try as one may, cannot be answered by mere science or mere art without the aid of philosophy. Philosophy, in turn, will not be able to answer it either, if it conceives of itself as mere deterministic rationalism. Somehow a synthesis of rational reason, imagination, and history is urgently needed in the brave new world of technology in which we live and have our being.

END OF THE FIRST YEAR OF OVI SYMPOSIUM (June 2013-June 2014)

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394 Ovi Symposium II Ovi Symposium On the Nature of Art within Modernity & the Envisioning of a New Humanism Part II: Part II: 5 December 2013 - 5 June 2014

February 2017 Ovi magazine

Participants: Dr Alessandra Abis, Dr Maria Buccolo, Ms Abigail George, Dr Lawrence Nannery, Dr Ernesto Paolozzi, Dr Emanuel Paparella, Mr Edwin Rywalt and Dr Michael Vena

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Ovi Symposium II 395 Also in the Ovi magazine book shelves

Aesthetic Europe Theories beyond of Great the Euro Western by Dr. Philosophers Emanuel by Dr. Paparella Emanuel Paparella

The Aesthetics Benedetto of Benedet- Croce: to Croce by The Philosophy Prof. Ernesto of History and Paolozzi the Duty of Ovi Symposium Part I Freedom by Prof. Ernesto Paolozzi

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