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Thirty-Three

HUMANISM AND

1. Giuseppe Ferrari In Giuseppe Ferrari, the most ardent spirit of the nineteenth century, the ea- gerness for liberation with the inheritance of Romagnosi that animated the men of doctrine and of action of 1789 found new life. Ferrari fought the battle for the renewal of , but with Carlo Cattaneo placed ahead of national in- dependence the problem of in , the problem of a social and po- litical reform that would found the new State on a mature reflection on itself. Ferrari, the philosopher, in the earlier time moved on grounds somewhat similar to those of Rosmini, whose tendencies he demonstrated to accept in Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, 1843). In the face of this writing, Cattaneo had the impression that Ferrari rejected the premises of Romagnosi, their common teacher. Gioberti, on the contrary, though a fierce adversary of Ferrari rejoiced when he saw verified his own anti-Rosminian affirmation. Ferrari had written about Rosmini, “His opinions are in disagreement with those of the sensists in appearance alone, not in ef- fect, because the poison of Sensism consists in disavowing that the spirit has the power of learning the that is independent from the spirit” (le sue opinioni discordano da quelle dei sensisti in apparenza, non in effetto. Imperocché il veleno del sensismo è riposto nel disdire allo spirito umano il potere di apprendere la realtà, indipendente da esso spirito). In the polemical dialogues, in the ideal formula, in talking about the pos- sible Ens, Gioberti foresaw the decadence of Rosminianism into , as it happened in Lockeanism, though “ sincerely believed in God.” Once admitted the distinction between and , the conclusion seemed inevitable to Gioberti that the of thought, the ideal being, must be posited as a subjective appearance. Ferrari, refusing the Rosminian meta- physics, felt authorized to exclaim that, though accepting the primality of the ideal being, he did not intend to give up , “Nous ne voulons pas sortir de la psychologie.” Being is certainly the basis of our thoughts; “it gen- erates, directs, and judges them; it is immense, eternal, necessary, and infinite, but it is an idea.” Our statement that being is, does not bring us out of thought, “Thought is the natural seat of being” (Il pensiero, ecco la sede naturale dell’essere). For this , as Gioberti anticipated, the fracture between real- 924 HISTORY OF ITALIAN ity and the human mind was accentuated, relegating thought irremediably outside reality, within an insurmountable incapacity of reaching the absolute and of constructing a . Ferrari, inspired by Rosmini, would find Locke and Hume, more than Kant, the Kant who, establishing a metaphysics of the transcendental, “wants to establish being where no-being is, wants the ‘I’ however uncertain, the ‘non-I’ however void, God however annihilated; and with God, he wants grace, salvation, paradise, and perhaps even the in- ferno.” From Kant, one must return truly to Locke and the Lockeans, liberators of the spirit from any theoretic and practical obstacle. Ferrari once narrated:

I never forget that fortunate morning when, with the book of in my hand, at the dawn of the sun I saw the dawn of the doubt that I held in my heart from infancy, and the effects sepa- rate themselves from the causes, and the sky detach itself from God without falling on my head (Io non mi dimenticherò mai di quel for- tunato mattino in cui, col libro di Davide Hume in mano, al sorgere del sole ho veduto sorgere il dubbio, che io tenevo in cuore fin dalla mia infanzia, e gli effetti separarsi dalle cause, e il cielo distaccarsi da Dio senza cadere sulla mia testa).

Ferrari took the doubt from Hume but only as a critical instrument, as the means to free himself from every theological and metaphysical :

The school of Locke accepted the doubt and found in it new forces to defeat the dogma for a long time unopposed of Christianity. This doubt became the liberator, it was the first principle of free examination and it wounded Christ in heaven, and we were falling necessarily on earth again, in the sphere of facts (La scuola di Locke accettava il dubbio e vi trovava nuove forze per disfare il dogma lungo tempo inoppugnabile della cristianità; e il dubbio era liberatore, era il primo principio del libero esame, e feriva Cristo in cielo e si ricadeva necessariamente sulla terra, nella sfera dei fatti).

The whole Filosofia della rivoluzione (Londra [Capolago], 1851), the mas- terwork of Ferrari, is animated by this need of concreteness and reality, against abstractness and metaphysics. It is not so much skepticism as much as exasperation of the antinomies of logical thought in order to find once more the purity of life in the immediate of the facts. Ferrari insistently returned to the problem of “the re-acquisition of facts” (riconquistare il fatto):

The question remains about how long we can rely on the fact when the motion of logic tries to distance us from it. It is urgent to know how I can believe what I see, what I hear, when the reasoning betrays me, confuses me, orders me to respect what I do not see, do not hear, what