Ovi Symposium

Part I: 6 June - 21 November 2013

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

Participants: Dr Alessandra Abis, Dr Maria Buccolo, Ms Abigail George, Mr Nikos Laios, Dr Lawrence Nannery, Dr Ernesto Paolozzi, Dr Emanuel Paparella, Mr Edwin Rywalt and Dr Michael Vena An Ovi Magazine Books Publication C 2014 Ovi Project Publication - All material is copyright of Ovi magazine & the writer

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book. Ovi Symposium: On the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism

Thirteen Bi-weekly Sessions: 6 June - 21 November 2013 An Ovi Magazine Books Publication C 2015 Ovi Project Publication - All material is copyright of 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]

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

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

Thirteen Bi-weekly Sessions: 6 June - 21 November 2013

Overall View of the Table of Content

Introductory Note by the Ovi Editor Thanos Kalamidas………………………… p. 9

Meeting One: “On the Origins of the Ovi Symposium and its Envisioned Goals. An Introduction by its coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella ...... p. 23 Meeting Two ...... p. 33 Meeting Three…………………………………………………...... p. 51 Meeting Four…………………………………………………...... p. 71 Meeting Five…………………………………………...... p. 89 Meeting Six…………………………………...... p. 113 Meeting Seven……………………………………...... p. 129 Meeting Eight……………………………...... p. 145 Meeting Nine…………………………………...... p. 165 Meeting Ten……………………………………………………………...... p. 191 Meeting Eleven……………………………………...... p. 233 Meeting Twelve……………………………...... p. 259 Meeting Thirteen………………………...... p. 283

Introductory Note

Organizing an online symposium that happens beyond linear time is a huge and challenging project. What you see every second Thursday in Ovi magazine is just a glimpse of what really happens in the background. Most of us have lived the experience of a symposium and it was all concluded in a few days with the exchange of opinions and ideas - occasional disagreements - on certain subjects. Now imagine a symposium where time is not an issue. Time is an important element in those symposiums because limits the evolution of those opinions, ideas and disagreement. A symposium where this exchange can expand in time, or better ignore time. Then the exchange becomes an alive and breathing entity that evaluates with its participants. This is what made the Ovi Symposium unique and it was the first time happening in an online magazine. Somehow Ovi magazine made history. And it all happened thanks to Dr Emmanuel Paparella. Establishing the fundamentals of a symposium with philosophical roots, finding the subthemes that would provoke and invite participants and readers and then putting them all together in a virtual room - the pages of Ovi magazine – is a huge and extremely demanding work and it all happened thanks - again - to Dr Emanuel Paparella. In linear time the Ovi Symposium is in its 54th meeting, more than two years exchange of thoughts, ideas and opinions. And it continues strong beyond time. This is the first book of the Ovi Symposium. The first in a series of book that will cover the whole project. It covers the first thirteen meetings and includes subthemes like poetry, cinema, architecture, aesthetics, democracy, contemporary world. All of them under the title: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” Dr Emanuel Paparella made this conversation possible. A big thank you, is also in order to the participants of the Ovi Symposium: Dr Alessandra Abis, Dr Maria Buccolo, Ms Abigail George, Mr Nikos Laios, Dr Law- rence Nannery, Dr Ernesto Paolozzi, Dr Emanuel Paparella, Mr Edwin Rywalt and Dr Michael Vena. Thanos Kalamidas Ovi Chief Editor 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).

Abigail George is a South African activist for human rights, a feminist, writer and poet. She has received writing grants from the National Arts Council, Centre for the Book, and ECPACC (Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council). She is not purely devoted to poetry but to pursuing writing fulltime. She has written two volumes of poetry, and her latest book is titled Winter in Johannesburg. Storytelling for her has always been a phenomenal way of communicating and making a connection with other people. All About My Mother (a collection of short stories) was published by Ovi magazine in July 2012. Nikos Laios is a poet, artist, lover of philosophy and student of the human condition, currently writing poetry and producing art; he is also a sculptor, a photographer, widely read in the humanities. He hails from the highlands of Epirus in Greece; greatly influenced by the poetic traditions which have been passed down from his poet ancestor on his maternal side from the island of Cephalonia. He currently resides in North Sydney Australia, is an autodidact and a passionate ‘renaissance’ man, has always been a practical philosopher, throwing himself into the hard questions that life has to offer in search of elusive gems of wisdom.

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.

Ernesto Paolozzi teaches history of contemporary philosophy at the University 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 Bene- detto 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 play- wrights such as Pirandello, Fabbri and De Filippo.

Detailed View of the Table of Content for each Meeting

Meeting 1: “On the Origins of the Ovi Symposium and its Envisioned Goals. An Introduction By its coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella ...... p. 24 Section 1: “Envisioning a New Humanism for the Bridging of Cultures.” By Emanuel L. Paparella…...... p. 27 Section 2: “Art as a Form of Knowledge.” By Ernesto Paolozzi...... p. 30

Meeting 2: Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 34 Section 1: Comments by Lawrence Nannery on Ernesto Paolozzi’s First Presentation………...... p. 35 Section 2: Response by Ernesto Paolozzi...... p. 36 Section 3: “The Rise and Decline of Music.” By Lawrence Nannery...... p. 37 Section 4: Comments on Lawrence Nannery’s Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 40 Section 5: “Art as a form of Knowledge—Part 2.” By Ernesto Paolozzi...... p. 42 Section 6: Symposium’s Notes by its coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 44 Section 7: “Historicism-Humanism in Vico and Croce.” By Emanuel L. Paparella p. 45 Section 8: Supplement…………………………………………………………………p. 49 Meeting 3: Section 1: “The Death of Music,” a presentation by Lawrence Nannery...... p. 52 Section 2: A comment on Lawrence Nannery’s presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi p. 55 Section 3: A comment on L. Nannery’s presentation by E. Paparella...... p. 56 Section 4: A reply to Emanuel Paparella’s observations on Dante and Benigni by Ernesto Paolozzi...... p. 59 Section 5: “The Autonomy of Art,” a presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi...... p. 60 Section 6: Comments on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation by Emanuel Paparella p. 62 Section 7: “Vico as Precursor of Modern Historicism and Hermeneutics,” a presentation by Emanuel Paparella...... p. 64 Section 8: Comments on Emanuel Paparella’s Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi p. 69

Meeting 4: Section 1: “Thoughts on Modern Painting and Sculpture,” a presentation by Dr. Nannery...... p. 72 Section 2: “On the Universality of Art,” a presentation by Dr. Paolozzi...... p. 77 Section 3: Comments by Dr. Paparella on Drs. Nannery and Paolozzi’s presentations...... p.79 Section 4: A reply by Dr. Paolozzi to Dr. Paparella’s comments...... p. 80 Section 5: “On Modern Nihilism: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Utopia, Extinction—Part 1” a presentation by Dr. Paparella...... p. 82 Section 6: An Observation from Dr. Paparella on Drs. Nannery and Paolozzi’s 3rd meeting’s presentations...... p. 88 Meeting 5: Section 1: “Thoughts on Architecture,” a presentation by Dr. Nannery...... p. 90 Section 2: Sundry comments by Dr. Paparella on Dr. Nannery’s presentation on architecture...... p. 94 Section 3: “Art and Morality,” a presentation by Dr. Paolozzi...... p. 99 Section 4: A letter by Max Horkheimer to Croce’s widow upon the passing of the great philosopher, with comments by Drs. Paolozzi and Paparella...... p. 101 Section 5: “On Modern Nihilism: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Utopia, Extinction”-- Part 2 and conclusion, a presentation by Dr. Paparella...... p. 105

Meeting 6: Section 1: “Cinema: The Complete Art Form,” a presentation by Dr. Lawrence Nannery...... p. 106 Section 2: An addendum to the topic of Cinema as a form of art by way of a chapter from Dr. Paparella’s Ovi e-Book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers: “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Art as Auratic: the Nexus between Modern Art and Technology” (chapter 10)...... p. 118 Section 3: “The Indivisibility and Infinity of Art: Abnormal Activity of Aesthetics,” a presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce...... p. 120 Section 4: “Vico and the Modern Idea of History, part 1,” a presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 122 Section 5: A note on Vico’s Frontispiece to The New Science by the symposium’s coordinator...... p. 125 Section 6: “ Art and Technology,” by way of a response from Dr. Paolozzi to Drs. Nannery and Paparella’s Treatment of Art and Technology, from a chapter in his book L’estetica di Croce...... p. 127 Meeting 7:

Section 1: A Response to Dr. Nannery’s Presentation on “Cinema as a Work of Art” by Dr. Paolozzi...... p. 130 Section 2: A presentation by Dr. Paolozzi on “Literary Genres” as translated from his book “L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce”...... p. 133 Section 3: A presentation by Dr. Paparella on “Vico and the Modern Idea of History—part 2”...... p. 135 Section 4: A Brief Addendum and invitation by Dr. Paparella to a discussion on Theodor Adorno’s concept of art...... p. 141

Meeting 8:

Section 1: A Presentation by Dr. Paolozzi: “Art and technology” as translated from his book “L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce”...... p. 146 Section 2: A follow-up Exploration by Dr. Paparella: “Vico’s aesthetics vis a vis Modern Education: toward a New Humanism?...... p. 150 Section 3: An addendum by Dr. Paparella from his e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers: “Robin George Collingwood’s Aesthetic Theory of Art as Vichian Fantasia”...... p. 157 Section 4: A brief Comparison between R.G. Collingwood and Hans Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics...... p. 160 Section 5: In Memoriam: on the passing of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney...... p. 162 Meeting 9: Section 1: A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery: “Picasso’s Guernica as a model”...... p. 166 Section 2: The Tension between Art and Politics: an Art Historian’s Perspective on Picasso’s Guernica. An addendum by way of dialogue from an interview with art historian Patricia Failing...... p. 169 Section 3: A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi: “On Translations” as translated from his book L’Estetica di Croce...... p. 171 Section 4: A Presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella: “The Definition and Nature of Art as a Problematic of Aesthetics” from the concluding chapter of the Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers...... p. 174 Section 5: Table of Content of Dr. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Wester Philosophers...... p. 180 Section 6: “A Call to a New Humanism for the Renewal of Western Culture” A note from the coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 184 Meeting 10: Section 1: A Presentation from Dr Lawrence Nannery: “How to Read a Poem”...p. 192 Section 2: “Martin Heidegger’s Perspective on Art as Truth.” From Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, by way of a commentary on Dr. Lawrence Nannery’s Presentation...... p. 200 Section 3: A Presentation from Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce: “Taste and Interpretation”.....p. 202 Section 4: “David Hume’s Perspective on Taste and Aesthetics.” From Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers by way of a commentary on Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation...... p. 204 Section 5: Nelson Goodman’s Perspective on Art as Symbolical. From Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, by way of summation...... p. 206 Section 6: A Presentation from Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella: “A Revisiting of Emmanuel Levinas’ Challenge to Western Ethics. A New Humanism for the Renewal of Western Culture”...... p. 208 Section 7: A selected annotated presentation of Levinas’ major books translated into English...... p. 217 Meeting 11: Section 1: “What Brueghel has to Show Us” A Presentation by Dr. L. Nannery on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Brueghel...... p. 224 Section 2: “The History of the Arts.” An Ovi Symposium Presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce...... p. 229 Section 3: A response to Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella by way of sundry Musings on Nietzsche’s View of “Art as Redemption” (from his Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers)...... p. 233 Section 4: Review of Professor Ernesto Paolozzi’s Ovi e-book Croce: the Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom, by Antonella Rossini in the Italian Philosophy Journal Libro Aperto (XXXIV, n. 74, September 2013)...... p. 234 Section 5: “A Bridge between two Cultures for the Renewal of Western Civilization.” An Ovi Symposium Presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 237 Meeting 12: Section 1: “Croce as an historian of Aestheticism”: A Presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce...... p. 260 Section 2: “The Museum Girolamo Devanna in Bitonto. A New Jewel in Italy’s Artistic Patrimony.” An addendum by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 264 Section 3: “A Vichian Journey into the Hermeneutics of Self-knowledge.” A presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 273

Meeting 13: Introductory Notes by the Symposium Coordinator...... p. 284 Section 1:“Francesco De Sanctis. Between Romanticism and Positivism.” A Portrait by Ernesto Paolozzi as freely translated from chapter 2 of his 1989 book Vicende dell’Estetica: tra Vecchio e Nuovo Positivismo [Events of Aesthetics: between the Old and the New Positivism]...p. 286 Section 2: “Is Beauty a Classical Concept, and if so, should it be Revived in the 21st Century?” A presentation by way of a challenge to Modern Aesthetics by Emanuel L. Paparella...... p. 299 Section 3: Visual samples of Three Sublime Expressions of Beauty: one Ancient Greek in sculpture (the Venus of Melos), one French Medieval in architecture (the Cathedral of Reims), and one Italian Renaissance in painting (Botticelli’s Birth of Venus).....p. 306

Chapter 1 First Introductory Meeting 6 June 2013

Table of Contents for the Symposium’s First Meeting

“On the Origins of the Ovi Symposium and its Envisioned Goals” : An Introductory Note by its Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella”

Section one: “Envisioning a New Humanism for the Bridging of Cultures.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Section two: “Art as a Form of Knowledge.” A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi 1 On the Origins of the Ovi Symposium and its Envisioned Goals An Introductory Note by its coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella aving been charged with the coordination of this philosophical conversation, it may be proper to introduce its origins to the readers. To narrate origins is not only to situate a particular cultural phenomenon within the historical process but also to envision where it may be coming from and where it may be headed. Come to think of it, the whole millenarian Western philosophical canon, Hbeginning with Socrates all the way to Heidegger and Derrida can be considered a conversation in the tradition of the symposium or of the Platonic dialogues. In our particular case, its origins can be traced to a seminal brief dialogue conducted in the pages of the magazine on April 17, 2013 between three of the conversation’s original participants titled “A Brief Dialogue between Dr. Nannery, Paparella and Paolozzi on Low and High Culture in Italian Literature and Philosophy vis a vis Benedetto Croce, Alessandro Manzoni and Antonio Gramsci” (open the following link for perusal: http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/9901). It occurred to me that we could well continue that initial convivial conversation, after selecting a more encompassing topic from the field of aesthetics. I initially mentioned this idea to Thanos Kalamidas for his editorial approval and, as usual, he not only accepted it enthusiastically but encouraged me to proceed with its coordination and facilitation. We came up with the above topic and here we are, ready to begin. Each of us will contribute an initial presentation within the framework of the above theme to clarify his/her particular concerns which hopefully will inspire the subsequent dialogue. In effect this was the equivalent of the ancient Greek idea of a symposium. We did not wish to reinvent the wheel but simply contribute some novel relevant ideas, some perspective and interpretations to the ongoing Great Conversation that is philosophy in the context of modern life and aesthetics. Any sub-theme could be suggested, placed on the table at any time and discussed. The all encompassing field of aesthetics was found most suitable as a general theme which we placed on its heading almost as a logos: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism.” The proposal of a symposium was enthusiastically accepted and approved by Ovi’s editor in chief Thanos Kalamidas, a champion of anything Greek and/or philosophical, and so with his approval and encourage- ment it was officially born and launched on the 6th of June 2013. Since then it has been posted at regular intervals every two weeks for a total, so far of one year and 27 by-weekly sessions and some 100 or so presentations. We have explored and passionately discussed various existential sub-themes often accompanied by acute comments, observations and follow-ups, always within the framework of the announced main theme. As the word “conversation” powerfully suggests, without going too far afield in the Rortian metaphysical interpretation of the word, our dialogue will be colloquial throughout, keeping academic technical jargon at a minimum, to be utilized when absolutely necessary. It will also be informative and convivial; in other words it will be what the ancient Greeks called a Symposium. It is hoped that such a milieu will go a long way in appealing to the vast majority of readers and in demonstrating two of its essential features: 1) that a conversation, especially a philosophical one, can be spirited and robust while remaining civil and cordial throughout if it respects and does not abuse free speech (one thinks of the great disagreements between Plato and Aristotle who nevertheless remained friends and loyal to each other), 2) that humanistic philosophical concerns are not only topical and relevant to the brave new world in which we live and have our being but are absolutely necessary to ensure our cultural, even physical survival. In perusing the list of presentations by six different contributors it is quite apparent that this intellectual venture has been true to its promise and continues to perfect itself. By its own intrinsic nature it will never have a Twitter following of 16 million, a la Kim Kardashian, but it will have integrity in its quest for the true, the good and the beautiful and whatever it puts its hand to will be done well and with integrity. Readers are also encouraged to join in some way this “great conversation” to which any symposium is by its nature grounded. We shall supply a list of all the great authors mentioned at each meeting to make the readers more aware of this ongoing great conversation. Thus we, the direct participants, will be further reassured that the story we are telling and discussing inter nos on modernity, art and philosophy is also being heard and followed by like-minded readers, for as Plato pointed out a long time ago, no story can be told if no one is listening. A considerable span of philosophical ground has already been traveled but we will not sleep on our laurels for the journey has barely begun. Even more exciting intellectual horizons are envisioned for the year ahead. After this preliminary introduction, let the conversation begin in that humanistic spirit of the symposium in the Greek agora or of that of Castiglione at the Renaissance Court of the Duke of Urbino Federico da Mon- tefeltro where Greco-Roman civilization saw the beginning of its rebirth, the Renaissance, and proverbial symposia held sway.

Envisioning a New Humanism for the Bridging of Cultures A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

As an opening statement to the Ovi proposed conversation on the nature of Art and the Envisioning of a new Humanism, I’d like to return to an issue already broached previously: the debate on the two cultures as initiated by C.P. Snow in the mid 1950s with his book The Two Cultures. For indeed to speak of the arts and the humanities is to speak of culture, high or low as one wishes to interpret a particular culture. It was pointed out there that indeed the debate is an ongoing one: it is the debate between scientism/logical positivism vs. the humanities/liberal arts. It was suggested that a bridge between those two cultures remains to be imagined and Da Vinci’s “bridge to everywhere” as constructed in Norway was proposed as the perfect archetype to support a possible theoretical synthesis of those two estranged cultures (open link http://www. ovimagazine.com/art/9613). Surely it has not escaped notice that this ongoing tension between the two cultures is also present in the very pages of our magazine. Whenever a serious discussion on culture has been proposed there have been presented two opposite views: one merely scientific, economic, political purporting to be the more modern and dominant view; the other, pushing back, the humanistic, artistic, philosophical, often characterized as obscurantist and retrograde. At times the reciprocal contempt one for the other shows through with intemperate and even ad hominem statements. Therefore, to clear the underbrush, I’d like to trace for the readers the very origins of this cultural problem which if truth be told is older than C.P. Snows book on The Two Cultures. It goes back to an idea which was prevalent in the 19th century: to a smug certainty on the part of positivists and scientists who thought themselves as being on the edge of progress, the idea that science and progress were synonymous. An idea this which can be traced all the way back to the 18th century Enlightenment. Two cultural heroes who pushed back forcefully on this pernicious idea suggesting a return to considerations of culture, beauty, art and all that might re-humanize us as human beings and save us from a vulgar materiality by a modernity parading as inevitable progress, were also two cultural geniuses of that century: Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. There is little doubt that by the middle of the 19th century an unfortunate divorce had taken place between philosophers, especially aestheticians in the tradition of Hegel and later Croce, and scientists in general. In my opinion this dichotomy can even be seen in the context of the larger Marxian Tolstonian conundrum of High and Low Culture, culture for the masses and culture for the elites. A cultural duality this that would have been inconceivable to a Da Vinci. The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz put it this way during a lecture in Heidelberg in 1862: “Hegel’s system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy… Hegel…launched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially against Isaac Newton. The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were insane.” Be that as it may, the Aesthetic movement within the Romantic movement of the 19th century held firmly that a mechanistic science and a positivist philosophy was incapable of seeing anything clearly and truthfully. This was a recognition that science’s understanding of nature is incomplete and that we become more aware of our essential nature through the arts; that having found our essential nature we may then proceed to envision the kind of world that best suits it, and that we are much more likely to find an underlying, fundamental noumenal reality in the great productions of art, art being by its very nature symbolical and pointing to unseen realities. In a way one can conceive of this movement of mid-19th century as a rebellion against the Enlightenment’s idea of inevitable progress which claims that what arrives at the end of a process is always the best of all possible worlds. This determinism can even be detected in Hegel process philosophy and was so detected by the father of existentialism Soren Kierkegaard. Perhaps a good example to illustrate those tensions is a speech that the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley gave at the founding of the University of Birmingham which opened with a curriculum which excluded the classics, and the reply to that speech by Matthew Arnold, considered one of the founders of the aesthetic movement. In that speech Huxley raises a question that continues to animate discussions on higher education, and the question is this: Should a young man prepare for his career by studying natural science or “two dead languages”? The languages he was referring to were Greek and Latin and the answer he was seeking is quite obvious. He added that Greek and Latin might be proper if one intended to review books, but the rest of the world was the domain of science. In that speech Huxley characterizes Matthew Arnold as a “Levite of culture” carrying a remote irrelevant past into an age overtaken by scientific advances. The biased insinuation against to the Judeo Christian ethos in general is unmistakable. Arnold’s reply was not long in coming. He simply asks how is human nature to be understood? Can it be understood by merely digging scientifically into its remote biological past? He quotes Darwin statement that our ancestors must have been a hairy quadruped, with pointed ears and a tail, “arboreal in nature,” what later comes to be called “the naked Ape.” Arnold continues: assume it to be so, and yet there is something in that quadruped that “inclined him to Greek.” There must have been, because Greek is what he actually became. Consider, Arnold goes on, what we achieve when we look inside ourselves and know that we are not complete, that the unexamined life is not worth living, when we are driven to perfect ourselves in works of art and in the words of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Indeed the whole point of classical study, like the whole point of the Aesthetic movement of mid 19th century was not to prepare for the life of a book reviewer but to prepare for the life a rational human being endowed with a spirit and an intellect. The whole point of culture, Arnold continues, is “to make a rational being ever more rational” and to achieve “sweetness and light.” What is one to make of this “sweetness and light” in the age of atomic and thermonuclear weaponry, vicious stock transactions, jihad movements, and the NFL? Well, we have seen some of the answers proclaimed in our magazine by those who have a diametrical opposite view from that of Arnold; those who wish to debunk history and tradition and a classical education as such, to reduce religion to the useful and the economic, and wish to muzzle those who defend them and lament their disappearance in modern education. Three other champions of the aesthetic movement were John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde and the essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire who suggested that the birth of America was the death of art and that technology would “Americanize us all.” At first blush that may seem a knee-jerk anti-American statement so in vogue nowadays, but properly understood, it is only a defense of the liberal arts and the humanities. After all Arnold had been in America as a guest of the White House and he admired the fact that America had largely solved the social problem, at least so he saw it and believed, but he did not find the solution of the social problem interesting enough because even America had not yet solved “the human problem.” He kept insisting that what makes any nation interesting is its capacity to inspire awe which is accomplished chiefly through the creation of beauty, not mere accumulation of wealth and power. Croce could not have said it any better. Indeed the aesthetes of the 19th century were not simply proclaiming the indisputable value of art but of its creative power. They insisted that our characters are shaped by our practices and perceptions, and that as these became more mechanical and tied to vulgarizing features of the modern world we are thereby transformed in something less than what we were meant to be. The antidote to vulgarity and inanity is and remains art, the humanities, the liberal arts which allow us to create what science cannot predict in advance and discover the values and meaning of life. The question What exactly is Art arises here. The ultimate dilemma in attempting to define Art is this: if everything has the potential to be theorized as art then a definition of the essence of art becomes elusive and perhaps even impossible; if everything is art, then nothing is art. I have dealt with this dilemma in the concluding essay of the book on aesthetic theories just out in Ovi. On the other hand, one may also claim that, like life, art is continually changing and therefore it is impossible to define it once and for all, or that while it changes it does not get any better or any worse for that matter. But if that is the case what are the criteria and who are the judges by which public funds are to be allocated to competing artists? Is it all a matter of political influence and power? Indeed, like life art seems to remain an enigma feeding on a mystery, a mirror of sort which helps us to take a look at our own face on the way to self-knowledge. That is what fascinates us by its sheer presence from the very beginning of human kind’s cultural identity and civilization, in fact it seems to be a sine qua non, like language and religion, of any kind of definition of civilization and what makes us human. When art is dead we will be well on our way to our own extinction. 2

Art as a Form of Knowledge

A Presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi “Knowledge has two forms: it can be intuitive or logical knowledge; knowledge for imagination or knowledge for the intellect; knowledge of the particular or knowledge of the universal; knowledge of things and their relationships: in short it can produce images or concepts.” his opening of Croce’s Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale [Aes- thetics as science of expression and general linguistic] places us smack in the middle of the philosophical conversation. Art, as intuitive knowledge of the particular represents, within Croce’s philosophical system, the very origins of human knowledge. It is on the foundation of such a concept Tthat Croce builds his entire philosophy. It is important to notice at the outset how peculiar and important is such a Crocean approach to aesthetics. Indeed, if we do not grasp initially that art is for Croce an essential element of knowledge, we run the risk of falling into misunderstandings, as has happened and continues to happen. There is no doubt that the philosophical tradition to which Croce goes back to support his theoretical approach to art is an illustrious and ancient one. The closest references, as admitted by the same Croce, are Baumgarten and, above all, Giambattista Vico. But even the aesthetics of Baumgarten refers back in some way to the intuitions of Leibnitz who, within the rationalistic school of thought, opened a breach for intuitive knowledge. Similarly, it cannot be denied that even in Plato, even if the intention remains that of devaluing, one can individuate the concept of mimesis, a concept of art as knowledge. A conception this that, as is well known, one can detect also in the philosophical systems of Shelling (intellectual intuition) and of Hegel (sensible apparition of the idea), even if in those systems there is no clear distinction between aesthetic knowledge and philosophical knowledge. All this does not take anything away from the fact that the emphasis Croce places on the cognitive value or art is such that even if his thought cannot be considered in this aspect wholly original, nevertheless it opens new horizons which remain to be explored. When we think of art we of course think of the great complex masterpieces of music, painting, cinema, theater, the poems one learned in school, the great novels read for cultural enrichment or sheer enjoyment and it becomes difficult to think of Shiller’s Hymn to Joy, put to music by Beethoven, or of Michelangelo’s Pietà, or Joyce’s Ulysses, as a work of knowledge. The concept of art as a form of knowledge may appear even more paradoxical if one keeps in mind that with such a term we generally think of the idea of a sensible knowledge or purely intellectual, logico-formal. But this is not so if we are aiming primarily at overcoming a psychological condition more than a philosophical one. Croce’s aesthetics is not a mere brilliant extrinsic enumeration of art’s characteristics but a search which fully locates artistic activity in the context of a rigorous philosophical discourse. In fact in the very first pages of Croce’s the most important writing, Logic as science of the pure concept, he declares that the relationship between intuition (art) and philosophy is indissoluble. There he writes that “Behind logical activity there are the assumptions of representations or intuitions. If man represented nothing he would be unable to think… What is important however is to keep well in mind that logical activity or thought arises from representations, intuitions, and sensations through which the human spirit elaborates in theoretical form the process of the real.” This is a complex passage which may mislead the reader. Philosophers who have written many years ago must be read with extreme caution. Perhaps they ought to be translated in contemporary usage of the words they utilize barring the problem that often enough more ambiguity is the result. But the conundrum here is this: if art is a form of knowledge, what does it know and what is the tool it uses? Yes, it knows the world in its particulars and answers without equivocation, but such knowledge remains a knowledge springing from feelings via intuition upon which is based all knowledge. Which is to say, art is intuition. This carries a strong dose of romanticism which could not but result in equivocations. This is so because the general concept of intuition carries with it a strong Romantic connotation generating many equivocations. The very concept of intuition calls to mind a conception of life as anti-rationalist with its connotation on the semantic level of irrationalistic and sentimentalist tones. On the historical level we may remember the great philosophers of the 19th century (it would be enough to think of Shelling) or of the great Romantic artists and decadentists to become aware that parallels and analogies were inevitable, at time authorized by the same Croce. And yet Croce’s position is different and can be characterized as equidistant: it is neither Romantic nor anti-Romantic. His speculative effort is focused on defining logically a state of being of knowledge. In his first Aesthetics in which we do not perceive yet his definition of knowledge as lyrical intuition, Croce via a Socratic method, which he used frequently, attempt to establish first what intuition is not, and therefore he proposes it as pure cognitive function, that is to say, autonomous function. It is a form of knowledge but it is not knowledge via the intellect. Croce writes there that “The first point to be established is that intuitive knowledge has no need of masters or to be sponsored by anybody; it does not need to borrow others’ eyes because it has its own eyes and they are quite valid. Undoubtedly concepts can be identified mixed with many intuitions but in many others there is no sign of this mixing which proves that it is not necessary to mix the two. The impression of a moon light as depicted by a painter, the landscape of a town delineated by a cartographer, a musical motif, gentle or energetic, the words of a spirited poetry, or those with which we ask, order or complain in ordinary life, can all be intuitive facts with no shadow of intellectual references.” Note from the translator Dr. Paparella: This initial opening position of Dr. Paolozzi to be continued in the next installment of the Ovi Conversation on “The Nature of Art and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” is one of the essays from his 2002 book titled L’estetica di Benedetto Croce [Croce’s Aesthetics].

Chapter 2

“A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” (Second Meeting: 21 June 2013)

Table of Contents for the Symposium’s 3rd Meeting Introductory Notes by the Symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella Session 1: Comments by Lawrence Nannery on Ernesto Paolozzi’s First Presentation Session 2: Response by Ernesto Paolozzi Session 3: “The Rise and Decline of Music.” A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery Session 4: Comments on Lawrence Nannery’s Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Session 5: “Art as a Form of Knowledge—Part 2” A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi Session 6: “Historicism-Humanism in Vico and Croce.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella by way of a response to Ernesto Paolozzi first presentation. Session 7: Supplement Indirect Participants to the Great Conversation across the Ages: Rossini, Bach, Vico, Croce, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Bruno, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Verdi, Grieg, Tchaikosvsky, Liszt, Chopin, Paderevski, Wagner, Nietzsche, Mahler, Croce, Kant, Verdi, Schoenhouer, De Sanctis, Aristotle, Ariosto, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Gramsci, Dante, Berlin, Hegel, Tessi- tore, Roberts, Descartes, Huxley, Arnold, Burke, Heidegger, Gadamer, Welleck, Derrida, Plato, Foucault, Rorty, Berkeley. Symposium’s Notes by its Coordinator Emanuel Paparella “All real living is meeting” --Martin Buber The above is the initial presentation of Larry Nannery and second and last part of Ernesto Paolozzi’s initial presentation in the Ovi Symposium as translated from his essay titled “Art as a Form of Knowledge: Intuition, Expression, Unity of Form and Content” as it originally appeared in his 2002 book Croce’s Aesthetics. I will translate from Italian Ernesto Paolozzi’s contributions. As is well known, In ancient Greece, the symposium (Greek συμπόσιον symposion, from συμπίνειν sym- pinein, “to drink together”) was a drinking party. Literary philosophical works that describe or take place at a symposium include two Socratic dialogues, Plato’s Symposium and Xenophon’s Symposium, as well as a number of Greek poems such as the elegies of Theognis of Megara. For a better visualization see the depiction of a symposium at the end of this second section of the Ovi Symposium, a fresco found in a tomb in Magna Graecia near Naples only forty years or so ago. This virtual Ovi Symposium, whose first meeting was on 6 June 2013, as approved and encouraged by the Ovi’s editor Thanos Kalamidas, was originally envisioned and construed as one of Ovi’s regular features. As such it will appear regularly in Ovi every other Thursday. The various and varied presentations, and/or responses, and/or comments will be formatted, listed by sections and forwarded verbatim to the magazine’s editor as per alphabetical order of the contributors’ last names (i.e., Nannery, Paolozzi, Paparella). Meta- phorically the symposium’s table in Ovi is envisioned as a round table with plenty of good intellectual wine passed around. As a coordinator I will format, translate and write occasional notes and/or comments on the symposium itself; however, to ensure enthusiasm and spontaneity, I will refrain from revisions, editing, additions, delet- ing, censoring of any kind on my colleagues’ interventions, comments and presentations. My function will be strictly that of a facilitator who coordinates, translates and forwards the various interventions. Moreover, honoring the well established populist democratic Ovi tradition, there will be no prioritizing, no application of stringent rigorous ideological or academic criteria, not even a strict obligation to submit a contribution every two weeks; for at a party what ought to prevail is not the drudgery and tiring routine of the daily grind and work but spontaneity, conviviality and the sheer joy and enjoyment of a conversation among friends. I can reassure the readers that the three symposium participants (all with an extensive background and expertise in philosophy, the humanities and the liberal arts to which they are committed) are well endowed and prepared for approaching this conversation not only with competence but also with great enthusiasm and an overall commitment to Ovi magazine in general and the Symposium in particular whose thrust, goal and overarching vision is the imagining and the theorizing of a new humanism within modernity. 1

Comments by Lawrence Nannery on Ernesto Paolozzi’s First Presentation

(as presented by Ernesto Paolozzi on the first Meeting of 6 June 2013)

Ernesto makes the claim that art is immediately intuited by all humans as human artifact, and therefore the specifica differentia of the human species. This shocked me, and I thought about for hours. My reaction was: why did I not think of that first???

Frankly, the claim is very interesting and bold. I reached back into my own life, and found that I had always been affected by art, from the end of Rossini’s piece that we children called “The Lone Ranger song,” which would play just as my mother called me to dinner every night, and to my 2-year old daughter’s standing transfixed before any piece of Bach and calling it “the pretty music.”

But the move of taking the issue as settled. That is it tells us that it does not behoove us to argue about the generation of the art object, that we should try to read things backwards: i.e., the qualities found in the work should be able to tell us what the author intended to put there for us to see or hear or both.

This suspends the desire to psychologize the intention of the author. Lord knows, there have been a whole industry in the 20th century devoted to the psychology of art. What a waste! Nothing was found. And what was lost was so much more. For example, the joy of the encounter with a great artist, whoever he or she might be, and the lingering sensation of traveling in a better or at least more consequential world than others who do not encounter the arts.

In sum, I congratulate Ernesto for an insight I had been long looking for, which is a pass to go directly to the artwork without having to stop and worry that you need it explained before you can look and enjoy. 2 Response by Ernesto Paolozzi In the first place I must say that the frank and deep observations of Larry Nannery make me happy. There is an ongoing fierce battle on my part and that of others to defend the authenticity of art and the freedom of artists. With the particular sensibility of the artist as well as that of the philosopher Nannery captures the most genuine aspect of Crocean and Vichian aesthetics. We could quote Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce (reader of Vico and Croce) of the Portrait, and so many other artists and philosophers. Indeed art is born with man in the guise of freedom. Art does not imitate and as such depends on nothing but itself. Its creation is an act of freedom. The musical sensibility of Nannery shows us how true this is when he tells us about his childhood experience mesmerized by Rossini, not a trivial author. I have known many historians of music who lacked a musical sensibility! Which is not to say that art has nothing to do with life in all its infinite expressions. Art feeds on feelings, passions, thoughts, faith in ethics as well as in politics. But it transforms these subjects and renders them autonomous and absolutely free vis a vis those same subjects (an ethical content becomes art and does not remain as ethics). I am afraid that school in general and the University have gone backward in part because they seem to have lost the authentic sense of the poetic and the artistic. Just think of how many unfortunate students are compelled to perform useless studies on the psychology of art (as Nannery reminds us), on linguistic analysis, reminiscent of the studies of the old pedants at the end of the 19th century. Linguistic structuralism is in fact a new appearance of the old rhetoric and has literally sucked the blood out of the poetical discour- aging young people to read poetry. Even film is now subjected to technical analysis as ends in themselves when they ought to be only a means for the proper understanding of art. What I am attempting to do is to interpret Vico’s and Croce’s aesthetics as a liberation of art, a liberation from abstract regulations which, as Giordano Bruno used to quip, are useful to pseudo artists to mimic the poetry of others. I’d like to express a heartfelt thank you to professor Paparella, professor Nannery and Ovi’s director for having granted me this opportunity. 3 The Rise and Decline of Music Lawrence Nannery’s Initial Presentation to the Symposium n considering what to address in the wide body of the cultural life of Europe in the modern era, I thought I should make some claims that I have long held about music. I choose music because it is the profound- est of the arts, the art that affects us most deeply because it is the most beautiful and most moving of all the arts, especially for the two centuries that cover 1700 to 1900. This would include the music of J.S. IBach; Handel; Haydn; Mozart; Beethoven; and Schubert, and also a collection of at least a half dozen later composers such as Brahms, Verdi, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, and the most beautiful singing (the Opera) of all time. These high arts were Eurocentric, but reached all the way to the Urals and included the Americas in the Western Hemisphere, and followed immigrants to all the continents of the globe. Earlier music, grouped together as “Baroque,” had many good points, but in some ways was hostage to a lack of tonality, both in voices and in instruments. And Bach’s “Saint John’s Passion” and the “Saint Matthew Passion” both of which are remarkable works, highly religious and serious. But the tonality of the voice that leads these great works lacks beauty in the light of later developments, and there are deficiencies in rhythm and pacing, when compared to the music of later periods. Luckily for Europe, there were three centuries of musical development, the progression in that period was always in an increase in expressiveness, which came to be thought of as the only value of music by some. But it was a pardonable error, since chromatic values could be found in Bach’s work in counterpoint, an amazing achievement. Music in the middle of the 19th century included works by Brahms and Grieg, as well as piano geniuses such as Liszt and Chopin; and violin masters such as Paderewski]; and of course the sweep of bel canto, which is among the most beautiful music ever known, and which has dominated the stages of all the European capitals even up to today, though its heyday ended just after World War I. During this long period all the orchestras, choruses, and stage business grew larger and larger. But the problem was signaled even in that, since a certain lack of delicacy crept in and the large works and casts became, in the last quarter of the century, more and more difficult to manage successfully — in short, the forms of music had grown top heavy. There was a reason why music met a crisis towards the end of the nineteenth century. I ascribe the soften- ing and decline of the standards of “classical music” to the genius of Opera, Richard Wagner. His arrogance and self-centeredness, his cheap nationalism and his decision to go another way in opera, into what he called “the Gesamtkunstwerk” viz., a work of art that included all the arts together in one work. Even the construction of a special place to have the music played at Bayreuth was a overblown nationalistic revolt against French opera. As an amateur in music I refuse to delve into a study the technical details of the construction of great pieces here. My reasoning proceeds from my ears. I can tell what is good or bad, genuine or false, pleasing or far-fetched by simply listening. But listening many times to most of Wagner’s oeuvre, I found that there are two major faults with all of his music. The first is the background of the music, the mythical element, echt Deutsch that bears a grudge. Wagner thought himself a master of all the elements of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but I feel that he did not have real mastery over all the elements. The mythic background is very weak, and cannot carry the music because it is childish. The gods depicted in the Ring Cycle are paltry and extremely ugly demons, without a living connection to any nation, not even Germany. Worse, so flatulent were the libretti that even a child would not believe in any of it. And yet, here in Bayreuth, one could see, for nearly a century, these absurd, laughable creatures bouncing around on the stage, causing mirth among those witnessing the songs that were really talking, the awful dancing of the Valkyries, rather too obese to have any erotic or military effect upon any knowledgeable audience, who generally attended to show their Germanic pride. The second great deficiency is the matter of staging and pace. It was oh so slow! How the haute bourgeois could manage to sit through it astounds me. It also was lacking in action — remember, Opera is a drama that it sung. In the Die Walküre, the second opera in the Ring des Nibelungen, which premiered in 1870, the main female character is smitten by a spell cast upon her, and remains on stage for no less than a half hour, just lying there, not participating, while the god and a handmaiden discuss, for all that time, how and why the Rheingold was stolen and what that meant. Alberich, a dragon who lives at the bottom of the Rhine, has told the audience the first part of the story, in the previous opera, Das Rheingold, which premiered in 1876. The audiences were certainly poorly served by the author. Longeurs of such magnitude should be avoided at all cost. The initial opening of Das Rheingold contains the worst mistake in timing I have ever experienced. The opening overture lasts about 45 minutes, during which the audience is treated to a curtain and nothing more. Wagner hated action on the stage. He demanded far too much of his audiences. Worse, there a mortal sin was committed against the voice in the whole of the Ring Cycle. Instead of bel canto, used to such emotional effect in Italian Opera, the words of the characters In Wagner’s works are not only not soaring and beautiful, they are below the level of ordinary speech as it tries to replace song with what can only be called croaking noises and screeching shouts. Why is this believed to be singing by anybody? The sounds are positively wretched imitations of animal noises, to put a fine point to it. Only power is demanded in these works. The titanic strength of the voices, both male and female, are unworthy because they are only strong and nothing else; emotions expressed have a total lack of depth and subtlety. One is tempted to say the word “unworthy of the art form” itself. Friedrich Nietzsche was the first and the greatest supporter of Wagner in his earlier period. He became a very able supporter of Wagner, and was in love with Wagner’s wife. Nietzsche composed many songs himself, and promoted Wagner in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872. In addition, during the same period, he published a long consideration of Wagner, entitled “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” as part of his Untimely Meditations. But later, with Wagner writing Parzifal, which is given over to a simpering, clearly insincere version of Chris- tianity, Nietzsche became Wagner’s first and greatest critic. He could just as well have parted with Wagner over The Ring of the Niebelungen. From 1870 onwards Nietzsche penned many private reservations over Wagner’s personality and works, but he did not publish anything in that vein until he produced The Case of Wagner. In that work he called Wagner many things, but the first was that of “an actor,” by which he meant a phony, and other remarks that showed that these works were showy, but deep down, insubstantial. Most important, he charged Wagner with being decadent, and this stung Wagner, who cut off relations with Ni- etzsche. With a genius like Nietzsche behind me, I do not fear criticisms of my criticisms. In terms of the singing, Wagner made very poor choices. Strength of voice seems to be Wagner’s only concern. Neither beauty nor sonority nor adornment of the voices is essayed. In place of beauty Wagner wanted strengths that could knock down doors, based perhaps on his notion of myth, but more probably it was indulged in just in order to criticize the love of beauty of the singing in other countries. It seems to me that Wagner was determined to make slaves of his audiences, and to demand everything of them, even their memories of beautiful song, excising their judgment altogether, confirming their slavery in a defense that consisted of mere technicalities that are not “in tune with” one another. In the event, this was the beginning of the end for opera, because beauty was ignored, the imagination of the composer was false to life and, more generally, stultifying in the extreme. This set the tone for music for nearly two generations. Gustav Mahler was heavily influenced by Wagner, and he also is revered to this day, but his works, monstrous in size, have weak structures, and even less joy. Music in the two decades that crossed the boundaries of the old and new centuries were overripe, in my opinion, and lack discipline. Such overblown music was challenged early in the new century, even before the music, which was generally at a low level, spinning their wheels so to speak, but in the first decade of the 20th century the academic world began to dictate that music that was musical was passé, and that it should be reconstructed along minimalist and purely formal lines, which is to say, purified of emotion, and therefore of meaning. This meant unambiguously that classical music had died. I shall discuss this in my next contribution on this subject. 4

Comments on Lawrence Nannery’s Initial Presentation by Emanuel Paparella The above by Lawrence Nannery is an intriguing take on classical music’s stand within modernity. To speak of the decline of music is ipso facto to scrutinize the whole aesthetic patrimony of Western civilization not to speak of the idolized figure of Richard Wagner, the idol and epitome of German Romantic music. But then, as Nannery puts it, he is not alone in that criticism, a genius such as Friedrich Nietzsche, at first a friend and collaborator with Wagner, turned out to be a severe critic of Wagner’s music, and this beyond Wagner’s obvious character flaws and his anti-Semitism. The question arises, where would a Croce place Wagner’s music in the modern aesthetic canon? Would he, like Kant make a radical distinction between aesthetics and ethical judgments? There are unmistakable echoes of Wagner’s nemesis in Nannery’s essay, I mean of course Giuseppe Verdi who was born the very same year Wagner was born (1813). How is one to explain that four of Verdi’s operas (Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata) are among the twenty most popular operas in North America while none of Wagner’s operas are on that list? What about the emphasis on myth we detect in Wagner’s operas contrasted to the emphasis on history in Verdi’s (consider Nabucco)? Is this a difference in mere national cultures (the Renaissance cultural background of Verdi, his Catholicism rooted in the Roman Em- pire, contrasted to the Enlightenment/Romantic/Reformation cultural background of Wagner rooted in the mythology of the people who brought down Rome) or is there also a deep philosophical divergence which has much to do with Vichian-Crocean aesthetics? Are we talking about two parallel musical universes or was there mutual influence as one can easily detect in Verdi’s Aida? How to explain the fact that Verdi called Tristan und Isolde “one of the greatest creations of the human spirit”? What about Wagner proposal of “the total artwork encompassing music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, stagecraft which in some way opera has always been? Why did Wagner call his libretti poems and philosophical tales beyond mere human passions, a la Verdi? What about his concept of pure music as an expression of metaphysical will (Schopenhauer influence is unmistakable here)? What about his strange idea that the orchestra’s role is equal to that of the singers via leitmotifs announcing characters, places and plots? That is to say pure music as illuminating the progress of the drama which to some extend Verdi does too in his Shakespearean operas Rigoletto, Othello and Falstaff. These are various conundrums and perplexities which will surely be further discussed and clarified in the next meetings of the symposium. I look forward to the promised sequel to this interesting essay on the status of music within modernity and to the dialogue it will undoubtedly generate. 5 Art as a Form of Knowledge Ernesto Paolozzi’s Initial Presentation to the Symposium: part 2 ranted that intuition is autonomous (and with such an affirmation Croce signals a benchmark of his philosophy: that which will become his theory of distinctions), and granted that it does not need the concept to know the world, nevertheless it is not mere perception. Croce puts it this way: “There is no doubt that perception is intuition: the perceptions of the room in which I am writing, Gof the inkwell and the paper that I have before me, of the pen which I utilize which if it functions it means it exists, of the objects which I touch instrumentally, those are all intuitions. But equally so is the image which comes into my head momentarily, of a me who writes in another room, in another city with a different pen, inkwell and paper. Which means that the distinction between reality and non-reality is extraneous and secondary to the character of intuition. Let us imagine a human spirit who intuits for the first time. It would appear that it cannot intuit anything but an effective reality, that is to say, it can only have intuitions about what is real. But given that knowledge is based on the distinction between real and unreal images, and that such a distinction does not exist at the beginning, then those intuitions will therefore not be intuitions of the real or the unreal, will not be perceptions but pure intuitions. Where everything is real, nothing is real. A vague and approximate idea of this naïve state can be the child with its difficulty in distinguishing the real from the fictitious, history from fable; for the child they are one and the same. Intuition is the undifferentiated per- ceptionof the real and of the simple image of what is possible. Within intuition we do not place ourselves as empirical beings against external reality, but we simply objectify our impressions, whatever they might be.” Therefore for Croce intuition is a form of autonomous knowledge, which cannot be confused or synthesized to other forms of knowledge or with other forms of knowledge or other assumed ways of knowing; at best it can be in relationship with them. Let us say we’d like to describe a place where we shall meet, it would be useless to employ conceptual definitions or scientific descriptions; we need to describe that place in all its particularity: a garden with knotted trees, tall bushes, few flowers, and so on. That is only way to know such a place. One may ask why intuition is placed in relationship with art and how can one place on the same level the banal description of a garden with great works of art. Croce’s reply may appear paradoxical but it is clear and precise: there is no categorical distinction between high and low art, so to say. If there is any difference, it is only quantitative; even it appears paradoxical and a bit forced. It may appear that art, sublime art, can be insulted by comparing it to our simple everyday intuitions. But were we to turn up-side-down our viewpoint, it could be true instead that such a procedure tends to humanize great art, it being, together with all the other expressive forms, a function, a fundamental activity of humankind. As we shall see, it guarantees the possibility of the understanding of art. This Crocean affirmation should not surprise us, since it cannot be denied that all men are capable of expressing concepts or formulate syllogisms or produce judgments without denying specificity to philosophers, mathematicians and historians. Just a thought remains thought, art remains art, be they the thought or the art of ordinary men or great philosophers and great artists. Thus considered Crocean aesthetics cannot be considered Romantic. Croce expresses this very clearly thus: “Frankly we have not identified intuitive or expressive knowledge with the aesthetic or artistic fact, assuming works of art to be examples of intuitive knowledge and attributing to the one the characteristics of the other, or vice versa.” We could not understand fully this concept of intuition if one does not first clarify its relationship with expression. This may be difficult to grasp in Croce’s thought but it remains absolutely fundamental and relevant. Croce makes a distinction between expression and communication. While communication is an extrinsic empirical non necessary act, expression is intuition. What we know can also be expressed. If one knows a particular situation, one can express it at least to oneself: were that not to be the case, one could not know what one knows. The extrinsic communication of our knowledge, on the other hand, can happen or not happen, can be adequate or not, but that does not mean that what we think or intuit is not always expressed, that is to say, it does not have a form. As Croce puts it: “Every true intuition or representation is also and always expression…Intuitive activity intuits as well as it expresses. If this sounds paradoxical it is because we assign to the word ‘expression’ a very restrictive meaning thinking only of expression that are called verbal. But there are also non-verbal expressions, such as those of lines, colors, tones, and our affirmation includes them too.” A fundamental corollary is the concept of the unity of form and content. It is a signal characteristic of modern aesthetics and it pervades the thought of Francesco De Sanctis as Croce himself reminds us. As position which, after its cautionary warnings, is a throwback to the Ancient Aristotelian philosophy. There is seems to be nothing simpler than distinguishing the form from the content of a work of art. On one side we have the form to choose freely (sonnets, songs, free verse, etc.), on the other side we have the content to be expressed by the forms (sadness or joy, pain or pleasure, and so on). But why is it that a certain contents go best with certain forms? Why is it that in every great work form and content assume an aspect of indissoluble originality and unity? Rigorously and logically speaking there is no content that does not have a form, just as there is no form that is not the form of a content. Irony as expressed from Ariosto in the Orlando Furioso is not the same as Cervante’s Don Quijote , nor is it the same as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The pain of Leopardi who desperately remembers Silvia, is not the same metaphysically speaking, as the one he expresses for the destiny of the whole of humankind in his Canto per un pastore errante per l’Asia. Styles and forms are purely exterior if we take them as separate from their poetical context which they mold and in which they have their existence. We could here discuss the issue presented also by Antonio Gramsci regarding canto X of Dante’s Inferno, whether or not, from a Crocean viewpoint, we can speak of a social, moral, political, economic aspect which influences artists and consequently the expressive forms. This is probably true, ma it is equally true that those social, economic, moral contents become particular and original within the individual works of art; to wit the fact that there exist other tragedies, other poems written by persons of the same historical era, the same days, even the same hours which are profoundly different, just as every individual act that is accomplished is always different and original. In a particular act there is no diversity between content and form just as it does not exist our life on one side and us that live it on the other, given that we are our life and our life is us. That having been said, it may be worth remembering that the two positions of contenutists and formalists are not necessarily in contradiction to each other since, after affirming the unity of form and content, it would not be illicit to utilize great works of poetry as a moral, political, philosophic document of a particular era. Even a liberal historicism such as Isaiah Berlin’s has often affirmed that to understand the meaning of an era it is better to have recourse to a works of art than to the writing of sociologists and political scientists. Aesthetic critique, which is to say the critique of the single works of art is the true proper critique of art. Which does not exclude that other kinds of critique are not possible among which that of historical character which is fundamental. What is important is not to confuse them and not to place them one against the other. Not for nothing in both Croce and Gramsci one discovers both types of critiques, and it is not coincidental that in Francesco De Sanctis one may discern the greatest synthesis of aesthetic critiqueand of civil-political history. 6 Historicism-Humanism in Vico and Croce Emanuel Paparella’s Second Presentation to the Symposium By Way of a Response to Ernesto’s Paolozzi’s First Presentation n 1989 I submitted a Ph.D. dissertation to the Yale Graduate School titled “The Paradox of Transcen- dence and Immanence in Vico’s Concept of Providence.” In 1993 the same dissertation was turned into a book titled Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Mellen Press, N.Y.). Croce is mentioned Ithere no less than 15 times. In both publications while mentioning the affinities between the two Italian thinkers and their humanistic background, I made reference to what at the time I purported to be Croce’s idealist deformation of Vico, to what I considered a tendency to subsume Vico under Hegel’s philosophy of history characterized by the assumption that conceptual thought is always superior to any other kind of thought. I argued then, and I was not the only one who so argued, that such a way of adapting or subsuming Vico leads to ignoring or missing some of the unique insights Vico had to offer, specifically in his concept of Providence which is able to encompass both the immanent and the transcendent in history. Twenty years or so later, after a long intellectual journey, I have arrived at a slightly different interpretation and this is so in part due to Ernesto Paolozzi’s masterful elucidation of Croce’s philosophy which we have recently read in Ovi’s pages. He is currently bravely attempting nothing less than the revival of the neglected memory and of the philosophy and figure of Benedetto Croce in Italy and abroad. There is no doubt in my mind that given his genuine enthusiasm and perseverance he will eventually succeed in this worthy task. About a year ago Ernesto Paolozzi, who has become a good friend of mine since then, and my friend and fellow Yale alumnus Massimo Verdicchio, from the University of Alberta, cordially invited me to contribute to a memorial eulogy on Croce in the philosophical Italian journal Libro Aperto (see issue XXXIII n. 2/2012, April-June, pp. 186-190). I gladly accepted the invitation, initially thinking of offering to the journal the contrast Vico-Croce utilized in my dissertation at Yale University. In the process of doing so I arrived at a slightly revised interpretation of Croce’s philosophy which, were I to resubmit it today, I would include as an adden- da to my dissertation. In the light of what Ernesto Paolozzi has already presented to us in the initial stages of the Ovi Sympo- sium, I’d like to share this reassessment with its readers.While not changing my mind on Vico’s concept of providence whose immanent and transcendent aspects have to be kept in tension with each other for its proper understanding and for the correct interpretation of Vico’s philosophy, I have largely modified my take on Croce’s historicism and hermeneutics of which he and Vico can rightly claim to be ground breaking pio- neers. What initially stimulated this revision and led me to eventually accept Professor Paolozzi invitation to contribute to Croce’s eulogy on the fiftieth anniversary of Croce’s passing were two seminal works on historicism which appeared in the early 90s: namely the elucidations of the meaning of historicism of Fulvio Tessitore in Italy (see his Introduzione allo storicismo, 1991), and that of David D. Roberts’ concomitant work in the USA (see his Nothing but History, 1993). To be sure, one can go back all the way to Immanuel Kant for similar assertions on the end of metaphysics, but Kant and German idealism have long been debated, if never wholly accepted, in Anglo-American thought. The historicism of Benedetto Croce, on the other hand, has had only a limited impact, although Croce’s aesthetics, even if not well understood, has had a wide readership since the early decades of the 20th century. This was also the decade when Croce was popularizing Vico in Italy. In any case, the historical sense in its philosophically mature form somehow never struck deep roots in Anglo-American intellectual soil. I, for example, had to wait till graduate school to even hear the name of Vico and Croce mentioned extensively in surveys of the history of philosophy. I suppose such an incomprehension of the historical consciousness can be traced all the way back to Vico’s anti-Cartesian complaint and Hume and the anti-rationalist school of empiricism and the debate on the two cultures between Huxley and Arnold mentioned in my first presentation, and of course Croce anti-positivistic stance. What remains curious however is that now historicism in a post-modernist anti-metaphysical form is being embraced with a vengeance. Writers of generally radical temperament are making highly selective use of anti-metaphysical, historicist elements of thought to discredit social and intellectual structures they disapprove of. The pre-historicist rationalistic mind, as Vico has well explained in his corsi and ricorsi, simply does not see the possibility of an actual union between universality and particularity. Universality, it assumes, has to be separate from history, from that which is forever changing. That explains why even the giants of ancient Greek philosophy were never really enamored of history and the historical process. But the historicism of Burke and subsequently of Vico and Croce and various later German thinkers, such as Heidegger and Gadamer, opens up another perspective. Moral goodness can indeed be seen as a universal quality that an infinite number of different actions may have. But moral universality, while remaining universal, also enters human experience in historically particular form, as specific actions advancing good; it arrives with the third cycle of Vico’s three cycles of history. The transcendent reveals itself in history by becoming selectively immanent in it. The “concrete universal” was a refutation both of the abstract, a-historical transcendent of old and of any cult of the particular as self-sustaining. Even when marred by excessive intellectualism and other flaws, as in Hegel, this historicism disproved enlightenment rationalism and universalism. The extreme reaction to this reconstitution of philosophy as a synthesis of the universal and the particular was positivism and its worship of science in the 19th century. Early in the 20th century when Benedetto Croce revived and strengthened historicism the positivist trend was dominant. There was in America and England an aversion to anything looking like German idealistic philosophy. Only Croce’s aesthetics became widely discussed and admired and even that was not completely understood. I am now convinced that had Croce’s thought as a whole been generally absorbed, many of the targets against which postmodernism has taken aim would not exist or would look very different. In fact, a thorough reading of Croce’s more philosophical opus would reveal that Crocean historicism anticipated many of the concerns of postmodernism, without falling prey to its glaring weaknesses. Which are those weaknesses? Well, for one, there is the fact that postmodernism carries earlier opposition to rational, moral or aesthetical rigidity to extremes, even absurd extremes. It is not misguided in contending that human existence is full of transitory structures and norms, some arbitrary and oppressive, but postmodernism also forbids the possibility of structures of a different kind. Postmodernism is viscerally opposed to the notion of an enduring higher purpose or what Vico calls providence. It wants all order to be ultimately contingent and arbitrary. Also, a great weakness of postmodernism is that it cannot fathom that life might be indistinguishably both changeable and unchangeable, contingent and non-contingent, coherent and inco- herent. That life might have an enduring purpose, but one that manifests itself differently as individuals and circumstances are different, seems a contradiction in terms to postmodernism. Deconstructionists make much of the point that no two persons can read the same text in the same way, as if this notion were some kind of original and recent discovery. In actuality it has long been regarded as self-evident by philosophical historicism. What postmodernists do not know, and would prefer not to hear, is that the uniqueness of personal experience and perspective does not exclude the possibility of shared humanity and meaning. Missing from postmodernism is the possibility of synthesis, of the mutual implication of universality and particularity, the idea that if man makes history, the opposite is also true, history makes man. Here is the very crux of modern philosophy, but postmodernism is barely aware of its existence. Emphasis on the contingency and flux of history distorts human experience unless balanced by attention to equally present order and continuity. What postmodernism needs is not the order and continuity of a-historical foun- dationalist metaphysics, but that of value-centered historicism, “value” standing for the qualities that give moral, intellectual and imaginative form to man’s historical existence. Understanding unity and diversity together—not as separate, reified entities, but in their relationship of mutual implication—yields the concept of historical universality, that is to say universality in particular form. That such an idea should elicit incomprehension and incredulity betrays a debilitating defect in Western philosophy. This puzzling neglect of Croce’s humanism was also pointed out to me at Yale University by the great literary critic Renè Welleck as I have reminisced in the introduction to Professor Paolozzi’s Ovi e-book on Croce. In that book as published in Ovi recently Ernesto Paolozzi surveys the thee seminal works of Croce: Aes- thetic (1902), Logic (1905) and Philosophy of the Practical (1908). These three books provide the philosophical context for all of Croce’s other writing. They develop his philosophy of the forms, or categories, of the human spirit—imagination, thought, and practical action—and their relationships. There is no doubt that Croce was far ahead of Derrida and others when, in his 1902 Aesthetic, he set forth a radically anti-positivist view of the world, based on imaginative language, language being inherently poetic and creative. He based this view on Vico’s concept of poetic philosophy apparent in the first historical cycle of the gods and the second of the heroes. And here we are back, willy nilly, to the conundrum of the two cultures which ultimately cannot be avoided. Indeed, for Vico and Croce the work of philosophy is never done. It cannot be “foundational” in the sense that it is able to separate itself from history and achieve final, incontestable insight. And yet, some philosophical insights, though they must be expressed within the limitations of time and place, are not merely provisional and ad hoc. There is much that is Platonic in both philosophers despite appearances. Good philosophy tries to capture the enduring traits of human existence, not as something existing apart from history but as giving form to particularity. In so far as philosophy is successful, it both possesses and does not possess lasting truth. Though always falling far short of definitive, comprehensive Truth, what it humbly and gropingly knows, it does know. That knowledge is not negated by the fact that it is at the same time tentative in the sense that particular formulations of what is known can be forever improved, extended, and applied. Life goes on, and it continually offers new material for examination. Philosophizing, then, is not an elitist dwelling with the gods on Mount Olympus looking down one’s nose on the oi polloi happy with what is considered low culture who can be satisfied with the pie in the sky of religion, but a condition of both knowing and not knowing the truth about our own existence, which is another way of saying that the philosophical mind is dialectical, oriented by what it knows but bothered by what it does not yet know, or cannot yet express with conceptual clarity. The genuine philosopher is always striving to remove obstacles to a fuller understanding. Professor Paolozzi has demonstrated to us that Croce distinguishes between philosophical and pragmatic thought, that science exemplifies the latter, that he is an epistemological pragmatist in so far as some thought-processes, those serving practical utility, are concerned, but he is not a pragmatist in his view of what he considers philosophical rationality which is able to discern the pragmatic nature of science. In so doing Croce’s thought observes something about the enduring forms of man’s historical existence: pragmatic rationality—one of the “categories” of human activity without which there would be no human consciousness. Philosophical examination of human experience tries faithfully to record what is actually there. Unlike pragmatic thought, it does not simplify the experiential evidence or take such short-cuts or liberties with the facts as is compatible with achieving a particular practical objective. Philosophical rationality is not aimed at achieving practical purposes. It is an attempt to know—faithfully to know as much as it can about life in all its complexity—to improve our cognitive, conceptual hold on what persists in the midst of change and particularity. Ultimately, for Vico and Croce history and philosophy become one and the same. The philosopher studies history in order better to understand himself and his own time. Thus “all history is contemporary history.” Philosophical rationality seeks understanding about human life, expressed with the greatest possible conceptual clarity, but it is not trying to jump to some extra-historical vantage believed to be protected from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence on Mount Olympus. Philosophy does not pursue abstraction, metaphysical or otherwise, but seeks conceptually to articulate the categories of man’s actual, historical life. These forms are indistinguishable from their particular content, and they interact in every moment of life. They are an endless circle of related but distinguishable forms of the spirit. In Vico’s and Croce’s claim to have discerned a permanent structure of human consciousness, there is, no implication that philosophy, or history for that matter, might now be coming to an end. Neither do Vico and Croce in their affirmation of enduring meaning appeal to an extra-historical order. The insight is this: History, whether as an intellectual discipline or as the arena of human action, derives its coherence from the ongoing interaction of universality and particularity. Postmodernists would have us think that only now, after the likes of Derrida, Foucault and Rorty have spoken, is it possible to view the world without illusion, that transcendence, universality, and higher purpose and meaning can no longer be given any credence; and ironically, all of this is proclaimed while laying claim to extraordinary intellectual openness. They generally assume that in the end contingency, incoherence and meaninglessness are the whole of life, but mankind over the generations emphatically disagrees. Vico calls that disagreement “the common sense” of the people. The postmodernist habit of simply ignoring or dismissing what humanity has long believed suggests just the very kind of willfulness that postmodernists like so much to condemn in others. If one looks carefully at the cover for my Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers as chosen and created by its editor Thanos Kalamidas one may at first be puzzled in discerning on that cover not a great work of art as made by man but an aesthetically pleasing natural phenomenon, a work of nature, if you will. That is to say that nature too can present us with sublime aesthetically pleasing phenomena that put our artistic masterpieces to shame. But the paradox is this: without a perceiver who apprehends and graphically presents to us such beauty there would not be any beautiful works of nature either: to be is to be perceived, as Berkeley has well taught us. So Man or God creating and apprehending beauty is still a needed component of the aesthetic experience. But there is more to this conundrum, for while it is true that man makes history and language and great works of art, it is equally true that history and language and great works of art (including the natural ones as presented by nature) make man, as Vico and Croce have indeed very well taught us. Indeed, there is a historicist approach that is compatible with the notion of trans-historical order and probably even with the notion of transcendence. The whole of nature may be a metaphor for what is hidden. Were that not so I would not have revised my interpretation of Croce vis a vis Vico. Professor Paolozzi has shown us, and for that he is to be commended, that while it is true that Croce put emphasis on the immanent, he never jettisoned the transcendent. Thus I for one concur with him that for all those reasons, it is about time that Croce, like Vico, be rediscovered, interpreted correctly and appreciated in his own right. It is about time that both thinkers be granted their due in the history of philosophy, as the quintessentially Neapolitan philosophical geniuses that they are. Footnote: For a more thorough treatment of the aesthetic theories of Vico and Croce the reader may wish to consult the 2 recent Ovi e-books (open link http://www.ovimagazine.com/cat/56). One by Ernesto Paolozzi’s titled Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom. The other, as mentioned, by Emanuel Paparella titled The Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, especially chapter 3 titled “Vico: Aesthetics as Beauty,” p. 17, and chapter 22 titled “Conclusion: Art as a Problematic of Aesthetics,” p. 77. 7 Supplement The illustrations above are frescos from the walls of a tomb from Magna Graecia (Paestum, near Naples, Italy) depicting a Greek symposium. The Tomb was found by Mario Napoli in June of 1968, near the city of Paestum, not too far from Naples (Na Polis, or “new city” for the ancient Greeks). The artistic significance of this particular tomb is that it contains the only example of Greek wall painting from the Orientalizing, Archa- ic, or Classical period to survive in its entirety. The tomb was created around 470 B.C. in the Greek city of Poseidon (later in Roman times known as Paestum).

Chapter 3 “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism (Third Meeting: 4 July 2013)

Table of Contents for Symposium’s Chapter 3 Section 1: “The Death of Music,” a presentation by Lawrence Nannery Section 2: A comment on Lawrence Nannery’s presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi Section 3: A comment on Lawrence Nannery’s presentation by Emanuel Paparella Section 4: A reply to Emanuel Paparella’s observations on Dante and Benigni by Ernesto Paolozzi Section 5: “The Autonomy of Art,” a presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi Section 6: Comments on Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation by Emanuel Paparella Section 7: “Vico as Precursor of Modern Historicism and Hermeneutics,” a presentation by Emanuel Paparella Section 8: Comments on Emanuel Paparella’s Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi 1 The Death of Music A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery 4th of July 2013 y previous article dealt with the phenomenon of the decline of classical music. Now it is time to acknowledge the death of music in the West. I am following in the footsteps of Nietzsche once again in saying what is not generally acknowl- Medged. In his first major work,The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche gave a very influential view of the sources of Greek tragedy, arguably the greatest artform ever to grace the culture of Western Europe. But it only lasted for a certain period of time; it withered on the vine and eventually disappeared. In Section 11 of the treatise Nietzsche turned his attention to the question of its decline and disappearance. He states: “Greek tragedy … died by suicide … died tragically.” And the culprit was the tragic artist Eurip- ides. For it was Euripides the intellectual, not the tragedian, who enclosed his tragedies with the sickness of what might be called the bourgeois spirit, one that disbelieved in the gods of the tradition, and accused the gods of being immoral, no better than men. Earlier tragedies revealed but did not judge the gods, out of fear. But the intellectual Euripides did not believe in the gods, and consequently had no such fear. He thus has reduced the conflict onstage to a contest of mere opinions. And at the same time a new form of comedy emerged, and even they were somewhat less interesting than Old Comedy, of which no complete work has come down to us. A similar sin against an artform was committed in the early 20th century by a series of musical theoreticians. In the early 1920’s, for no clear reason, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg felt that it would be an interesting improvement in music to restrict new productions to what he called the “twelve-tone technique.” This involved a rejection of music played in the key of a dominant note, which for several reasons had been the basis of harmony in the composition of high music. Even before Schoenberg’s innovations there had been some movement in the same direction. Stravinsky, Scriabin and Bartok had written and performed pieces of a similar nature since the year 1908. But the later claim for tonal neutrality advanced by Schoenberg and some others — Webern for example — is more famous. This innovation widened the frame of what notes could be used, and also laid down a most important rule that all 12 tones of the chromatic scale be played, in any order, before any note could be repeated. This guaranteed the death of melody, which is what almost all people consider to be music itself. The movement toward atonality in music, it must be admitted, is something very different. One can with training “read the music” more easily than one can understand it. But, no matter, these movements of that period made headway nonetheless. Astonishingly, melody became a dirty word in many music academies, and condemned as ‘finished,” or as not serious. So, gradually, the graduates of these academies composed in the spirit of modernity, and believed that they were liberating music from the rules that had confined it to endless repetition until Schoenberg had challenged the need for a dominant note. Since under the new regime any note could follow any other note, with the restriction that no note could be used a second time until all the 12 notes of the chromatic scale had been used — as an exercise in democracy, I suppose — but the works that obeyed this rule made not sense to the ear of the concertgoers. The public hated the music and stayed away in droves. Nevertheless, the academics persisted in their stance, and students were not allowed to compose in the traditional way open to them, it seems. It became a common opinion that atonal music was superior to 19th century composers such as Tchaikovsky, who was condemned for making music that was too sweet, and objectionable, since his music was thought to be too emotional and sentimental. If anyone like myself brought forward the criticisms of the new music, those in the know, those trained in the new prejudices of the music schools, showed great disdain for such positions, and superciliously explained that these criticisms stemmed from ignorance. But, in my opinion, the people were right and the academics were wrong. The academics were refuted by the public, and they have never gathered dominant support in the concert halls. One must conclude that the academicians forfeited the social nature of art, and that in itself was enough of a refutation. The deeper question is, why did this new kind of music never really succeed? To me this is quite obvious. One merely has to do what is required of any member of an audience: viz., just listen to the music! All the arts are sensuous, suited to our bodily nature, our emotional nature. Mathematics is not, nor is an ideology about any art that is mindlessly strict and astringent, as the use of atonality or the 12-tone scale is. There is one area in which this modern music has had some success. That is in the area of the harsh sounds that arouse feelings of fear and of an unsettled character. In this atonal music, the weird, the angry, threat, and the frightful predominate. So therefore screeching noises are good for dissonance; low and lowly sounds are good for suggesting threat; and are very commonly used as background music in horror movies, or scenes filled with tension. Also, the aleatory was thought to be tonic by the academicians, and so light sounds, such as short flitting noises that composers think the audience will take for lightness, fail miserably. All that comes to the hearer by means of a string of unconnected sounds that are meant to convey free movement, but such flitting fairies of sound make no sense — such sounds cannot “build” and cannot be resolved. In sum, what promised to be a widening of the available tools for music —devices intended to set a new standard for a wider topography of sound — failed totally. The devices actually functioned as policemen, forbidding any violation of the new orthodoxy. Requiescat in pacem. A litmus test, in my view, of the failure of this modern attitude towards music is validated by the complete inability to set choral music to these tasks. The human voice will always be the final arbiter of what music can do with sounds. Negativity has always had a place in all the arts, especially when the intention of the artist is to portray negative emotions in his work. And here tragic opera is most relevant. In tragic opera, just as in ancient Greek tragedy, the negativity is raised up to another level, to the most delicious level of emotion in the hearers. “Tragic joy” is experienced when the opera is successful, just as it was on the stage in ancient Greece. But if there is nothing else in a musical score but negative intentions, then the work can never achieve more than a marginal status. And so this came to pass decades ago. In the end, these developments seem to add up to the conclusion that our culture has already experienced the death of music as an artform. What has succeeded it in the concert hall from about 1970 until today has been a combination of strict adherence to a regimen of major pieces by the greatest orchestras playing the greatest works of the greatest composers, rarely if ever reaching into 20th century music, on the one hand, or a combination of the above with some music that pleases a knowing audience with music of highly-rated Broadway show tunes, which are often good enough for many listeners. And that is all. Something similar happened in Greek tragedy after the time of Euripides, but except for the bawdy comedy of Aristophanes none of it survives. 2 A Comment on Lawrence Nannery’s Presentation By Ernesto Paolozzi Ha pienamente ragione Larry Nannery. Le avanguardie sono diventate troppo presto ammuffita accademia. Nella musica, nella poesia nella pittura. E’ uno dei più grandi equivoci della storia: ci si proclama rivoluzionari, sperimentalisti, avanguardisti e per cento anni si governa università, accademie musicali, musei di arte moderna. Eppure si rimane rivoluzionari, sperimentalisti, avanguardisti. Per dirla con Ennio Flaiano, grande scrittore, sceneggiatore di Fellini: gli avanguardisti vogliono fare la rivoluzione scortati dalla polizia. Così il pubblico si allontana sempre più dalla falsa arte senza riuscire a capire dove ritrovare l’arte. Lancio una provocazione: per ritrovare la musica “alta” contemporanea si deve ricercare fra le colonne sonore dei film. Ennio Morricone... chi sa? Translation: Larry Nannery is quite right. The avanguard movement has soon become stuffy academy. This applies to music, poetry, painting. It represents one of the greatest equivocations of history: they declared themselves revolutionaries, experimentalists, avanguardists, and for one hundred years or so have governed the universities, the musical academies, the museums of modern art. And yet they are stuck in being revolutionaries, experimentalists and avanguardists. To say it with Ennio Flaiano, a great writer and the scriptwriter for Fellini: the avanguardists wish to make a revolution escorted by the police. Thus the public distances itself more and more from a false kind of art without being able to understand where to find an authentic one. I’d like to put out there a provocative statement: to rediscover contemporary “high” music once again one may have to look for it among the film scores for movies. Ennio Morricone…perhaps? 3 A Comment on Lawrence Nannery’s Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Larry Nannery’s critique of modern music seems to lead to a very interesting premise about modernity, namely that within an historical-hermeneutic approach not everything that arrives at the end of an era or a process is necessarily the best; that is to say, progress is not inevitable, deterministic, and unstoppable. Af- ter all, modern music, and some would also add modern art in general and the sad demise of the humanities in our schools and academies, may well reflect the Hegelian spirit of the times we live in and have our being, times wherein the decline and extinction of civilization and even that of humankind as a species, may be an ongoing process as we speak. Are we dealing with a Hegel turned up-side-down? With a negative kind of unstoppable regress parading as progress? Was Kierkegaard right in pointing out the Achilles’ heel in the dialectical theory of Hegel, its determinism? One wonders. I was particularly struck by this statement in your essay, Larry: “But, in my opinion, the people were right and the academics were wrong. The academics were refuted by the public, and they have never gathered dominant support in the concert halls. One must conclude that the academicians forfeited the social nature of art, and that in itself was enough of a refutation.” I concur here too but then I can well imagine one or two elitist supercilious academics, those who go around parading their love of truth at the expense of even friendship and civilized behavior, coming back with a rebuttal such as this: since when have the ignorant “oi polloi” been the arbiter of what is artistic and of cultural value and what is only artifice and craft? Here the reflections on aesthetics of a Vico or a Kant or a Croce or a Paolozzi could prove most valuable. Allow me to illustrate the above comments with a recent pertinent event. A book has recently been published in Italy in the form of an essay by a professor of Latin and Italian Literature (Prof. Amato Maria Bernabei) titled “O Dante o Benigni.” [Either Dante or Benigni]. I have not read the book yet but I have viewed an interview he gave to a journalist on the essay in question and available to all on u-tube. The interview is conducted in front of the Coliseum and one notices precious few people in the background. Contrast that scene, if you will, with that of Benigni reciting the Divine Comedy in front of Santa Croce in Florence with the square full of thousand upon thousands of people listening attentively. Basically the professor alleges that Benigni who recites Dante in the agora so to speak, is an impostor and a betrayer of Dante. Now, I tend to go along with his critique as far as the exegesis and the hermeneutics of the text is concerned, but I am less sure about the aspects of popularization and recitation of the Divine Comedy as carried on by the same Benigni, dubbed a Florentine clown by Prof. Bernabei. After all, Dante as a humanist could have written the Commedia in Latin with the educated people attending universities as the target audience. He decided to write it in the “volgare illustre,” a dialectical corruption of Latin, the language of the people of Tuscany, in effect giving a literature to such language and permitting thereby the forging of a cultural identity. In some way the same was preannounced by St. Francis of Assisi when he wrote the first Italian poem (the Canticle of Creatures) in Italian a hundred years before Dante. What seems to have happened subsequently is that the academicians took possession of Dante’s great masterpiece and reduced it to something precious to be read and commented by precious few in academia. That is to say, Dante was hijacked by the academics. Then in the same academia, beginning with the 19th century one begins to hear arguments by the logical positivists for disposing of Dante and indeed the whole field of the humanities altogether in order to give due privilege and priority to the sciences So we end up with the spectacle of endowed chairs of Dante studies at Harvard and Yale where Dantists of all persuasions pompously instruct a handful of graduate students aspiring to the same chair. Vico called such spectacle “la boria dei dotti” or the arrogance of the learned. When one attends one of those classes (as I have indeed) one may learn much from those luminaries but at the same time one may be confronted by another sad spectacle, that of the professor who will spend three or four two hour classes on the exegesis and interpretation of one single verse of Dante’s opus, never occurring to him to take the trouble to simply read aloud a whole canto in order to give students a taste for the sheer beauty of the poem. Meanwhile the people have been starving for Dante as revealed by the fact that whole public squares will fill up whenever Benigni recites Dante. So here too, as mentioned by Nannery the academics have been refuted by the people. It is at that point that one begins to suspect that professional pique and resentment may be behind the lofty essay of the above mentioned professor. How dare a clown from Florence usurp his domain? One asks: could this be what’s at work behind Bernabei’s essay? I am not sure, but perhaps you Ernesto, who is closer geographically to this event may be in a position to supply some answers here. One intriguing phenomenon of the u-tube video worth mentioning here is this: while Benigni’s recitations as also presented on u-tube are attended by hundreds of thousands of people listening attentively to Benigni’s recitation, in the professor’s u-tube video one notices no people listening, the professor is talking to the camera or to a virtual audience perhaps, he is not connecting to anybody and in fact seems to have difficulty even in maintaining eye contact with the interviewing journalist. He seems eager to return to the august halls of academia to dispense his precious pearls of wisdom to precious few selected students. I think that such a scene speaks for itself and needs no comments. 4

A Reply to Emanuel Paparella’s observations on Dante and Benigni By Ernesto Paolozzi Si, in Italia le performance di Benigni su Dante hanno infastidito molti professori. E’ normale, direi, che na- sca una gelosia in questi casi. Dante è distrutto dalla scuola e dall’Università. Siamo tornati al filologismo e al nozionismo degli inizi del Novecento. Se i professori leggessero e spiegassero Dante sul modello della letture di Francesco De Sanctis e dello stesso Croce, non ci sarebbe bisogno di Benigni. Poiché si fermano al lavoro preliminare (e indispensabile) di comprensione del testo senza far rivivere la poesia, le letture di Benigni diventano salutari, utilissime per avvicinare lettori, anche giovani, al grande poeta. Benigni, poi, non è solo un attore comico. E’ uomo colto e, soprattutto, sensibile e appassionato. Questo per dire che non deve essere confuso con la cosiddetta cultura bassa che è dannosa come quella accademica. Si può essere colti e popolari. I “grandi” sono quasi sempre alti e popolari. Da Omero a Shakespeare a Mozart… Translation: Indeed, Benigni’s performances on Dante have piqued many professors in Italy. I would consider it almost normal that events such as these would give rise to resentment. Dante has already been massacred in the schools and the universities. We have gone back to a pedantic philologistic approach of the beginning of the 20th century. If university professors were to read and explain Dante taking as their model the readings of Francesco De Sanctis and Croce, we would not have a need for Benigni. But since they begin and then stop at the preliminary (and indispensable) work of the text’s exegesis without bothering to revive its poetry, the readings of Benigni become necessary and very useful to provide the readers, even young readers, with an initial idea of the great poet. Moreover, Benigni is not only a comic actor. He is also a man of culture who is sensible and passionate. All this to say that we ought not to confuse his performances with the so called “low culture” which are as undesirable as pedantic academic ones. One can be cultured and popular at the same time. The great geniuses of art are almost always within high culture and popular too; beginning with Homer to Shakespeare and Mozart… 5 The Autonomy of Art A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (Translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce)

he other big question, connected to the first one, and in some way encompassing the entire Crocean problematic is that of the autonomy of art. Just as the idea of aesthetics had difficulties in establishing itself as an autonomous philosophical science, similarly the idea of the autonomy of art is a modern and fragile acquisition. We cannot discern one single great philosopher who, in the Tlast two centuries, has not felt and at times openly theorized the autonomy of artistic expression, beginning with Baumgarten all the way to Kant, from Boudelaire to Flaubert and to Poe. Vice-versa, even when art has been distinguished from other human activities and at times located above them, it has been substantially reabsorbed within them, sometimes by philosophy, sometimes by ethics and even from hedonism. What was found useful was to confer on it an autonomous logical status. Within Croce’s aesthetics this vexata quaestio was addressed from an exquisite theoretical viewpoint, conferring on art the categorical value of an irrepressible form of knowledge. As Croce writes: “because to dispute the independence or the dependence of art’s autonomy and heteronomy means in effect to search if art is or is not and if it exists exactly what it is. This is an activity which depends on another activity and is substantially that other activity and retains for itself a merely putative or conventional existence: that is to say, art which depends on ethics, on pleasure or on philosophy is after all ethics, pleasure and philosophy and not art.” So, if art does not possess autonomy, why do we call it art? If two objects, a pen and a pencil have different names that’s because they are distinct; all the more so that is valid for a rigorously distinct philosophical distinction such as the one Croce utilizes to designate the various functions through which the practical and theoretical activity of man exhibits itself. On the other hand, to establish diversity and autonomy also means to establish relationships. The pen of our example has its individuality (given by its effectual givennss) because there are pencils and other objects. In a hypothetical world of pens only, there would not be any difference but only an absurd totality or unity. What is different implies a relationship. Now, if we pass over the world of empirical evidence to that of philosophical determinations, the issue becomes even more challenging. Distinction implies relationship but also opposition, or vice-versa. Art affirms with its autonomy that there are facts and events which are not art. In other words, every affirmation is also a negation. So, the affirmation of the autonomy of art also implies the necessity to explain relationships and oppositions which justify its diversity. As Croce puts it: “Independence is a relational concept, and under this concept what is absolutely independent is the Absolute itself, or the absolute relationship: every particular form and concepts is both dependent and independent at the same time.” However, to establish the autonomy, i.e., the independence of any spiritual form, it is necessary to trace its specific function which confers to it its necessity. Again, as Croce writes: “A form’s independence assumes the matter by which it expresses itself, as we have already seen in following the development of the origins of art as an intuitive perception of a sentimental or passionate subject. … But, in as much as the recognized independence forbids that we think of an activity as subsumed to the activity of another activity, the depen- dency must be such as to guarantee its independence.” It is here that we find the fundamental reasoning of the entire Crocean philosophical journey. It is by implication related to Hegelian dialectic and in fact the entire philosophical tradition. As Croce writes: “Thus considering the issue in its generality, there seems to be no other way to think of independence and dependence as regards the various spiritual activities than that of conceiving them in their relationship of condition and conditioned, in which the conditioned overcomes the conditioned presupposing it, and then in turn becoming the condition, giving rise to a new conditioned and constituting a series of developments.” Of course the development of which Croce speaks does not suppose a first unconditioned or uncaused but, as the same philosopher states it, the circularity of every form which is at the same time both condition and conditioned. To be able to understand this difficult Crocean position one must go back to his philosophical system, to the long and hard deepening of dialectic in relation to logic and distinctions. We have to keep in mind that in between the first Aesthetics and the Breviario, from which I have quoted above the philosopher has written the Logic as a science of the pure concept as well as his Essay on Hegel. But to return to our fundamental issue, the artist is not some kind of special man who lives outside the world, devoid of any relationship. Artistic inspiration is always born from a practical need, utilitarian or ethical as the case may be. One wants to know something; one wants to express a particular interior world or a particular feeling; one wants to express a particular human condition of humankind, a social condition, or political condition or psychological condition. From this desire, this movement of conscience is born a second movement which is aesthetic knowledge and expression. This is an indissoluble circle which holds together praxis and art within a unity of distinctions. But of course relationships do not end there. The aesthetic moment exists in a nexus with the philosophical moment since, as we have seen, this second movement is related to the first. As Croce sees it, one cannot conceive an universal philosophical knowledge without basing it on the particular. Knowledge is therefore the a priori synthesis between particular and universal, that is to say, a judgment whose form is the coming together of the universal predicate with the individual subject. In order to explain this we have placed the moment of praxis at the outset of the movement of knowledge. But, as it is obvious, given the circularity of consciousness, it cannot be a first and in fact one cannot wish for anything before one knows it. Consequently, if we put aside the idea that art is constituted only by great art and go back to conceiving of intuition as the normal function through which man knows the world in its individual aspects, we will grasp that a cognitive function needs to be distinct from other functions but that at the same time it cannot but utilize all other functions (and in turn serve them). Were we to look at one single artistic masterpiece, The Betrothed, for example one cannot but admit that it is a complex work, that can be individuated by its complexity into which flow all the categories or functions of the spirit as we now say in modern parlance. Manzoni must have desired to write such a novel, and not only this, but this desire must have resisted time year after year. He had to reflect and meditate on how to write it; had to plan an outline of the work; worked on a plot, outlined the protagonists. There are parts in the novel that are not poetical, wherein we can detect the writer’s ideology, his liberal Catholicism. All we need to do is think of the figure of Borromeo, the meaning attributed to pestilence, the recourse to the concept of Providence and the final edifying conclusion of the novel. All of this does not mean that art (intuition) is not the fundamental and connotative element of the work, that is to say, the great ability of Manzoni to penetrate (to be able to know in depth) the most hidden human sentiments through those masterful portraits of don Abbondio, don Rodrigo, Renzo, Lucia, Agnese, fra’ Cristo- foro, Perpetua, il Griso, don Ferrante and so on. And here we have arrived at the issue of the autonomy and the heteronomy of art as perpetual interconnection of problems, since art is a the same time autonomous and heteronymous. As we shall see better later on regarding literary criticism and hermeneutics, it is obvious that an aesthetic judgment, a judgment that wishes to be aesthetic must be exclusively aesthetic. Judgment must remain autonomous, distinct, independent just as the category to which it refers is also independent, autonomous and distinct. Not to judge thus means to fall into moralism, philosophism, utilitarianism. It would be the same as to deny aesthetic value to I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) because one discerns there a different religious sentiment. Which does not mean, as we have already seen, that one cannot consider I Promessi Sposi an historical document of a different nature that can be utilized for the most varied researches. 6 Comments on Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Indeed, while the assumption by some scholars is that Kant’s Critique of Judgment (since the 18th century holding a central place in the German aesthetic tradition), is the most thorough and authoritative elucidation of the autonomy of art, Ernesto Paolozzi has put forward for our attention and consideration a very persua- sive argument that it is Croce who best explains the paradox of rationality affirming that aesthetic judgments yield cognitive truth while at the same time they are autonomous and do not presuppose a concern with the object’s purpose, utility, or even its actual existence. Following this insight, I wonder if we ought not complement Croce’s brilliant aesthetic theory with its emphasis on the autonomy of art with that of Theodor Adorno. Paolozzi himself has hinted at the juxtaposition by mentioning Antonio Gramsci in reference to form and content in the first half of his presentation at the symposium’s first meeting. In fact, Adorno too, as a Marxist within the Frankfurt School of thought, asserts that the autonomy of art resides not so much in specific aesthetic judgments of the subject but in the work of art and its production. It seems to me crucial to be cognizant of the fact that by subtly shifting the focus from aesthetic judgments to art production, Adorno is proposing something quite similar to what Vico and Croce’s aesthetic theories assume in asserting that man may only fully know what he himself has made culturally in the way of language or art or history (a Vichian insight this of which Marx for one was well aware, to the point of mentioning Vico by name in his writings). Indeed, this Vichian insight common to Croce, Adorno and Marx vies with Kant’s Critique of Judgment regarding the autonomy of art. Adorno, not unlike Vico, Croce, Tolstoy, Marx, conceives of art as the reservoir for human freedom and the promoter of the liberation of the underprivileged and exploited from oppressive social forces and from the crass cultural economic devastations of the 20th century. This commendable ethical ideal, seems at first sight to contradict the autonomy of art from ethics, given that it can be easily be construed as the foundation of a political ideology (Communism, for example). Adorno’s philosophical strategy in this regard seems to be that of advocating a new type of art which transcends the dichotomy light/serious, high/low, tragic/comedic, utilitarian/ autonomous and finding its ideal example in the theater of Samuel Becket. Indeed as the ancient Greeks intuited the transcendental Forms, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are intertwined Admittedly the above comments are a rather succinct and generalized overview of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. The interested reader, who may not have time to read the original source, may glean a more extensive explanation from chapter nine of the recent Ovi e-book on Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philos- ophers). In any case, I’d like to place on the symposium’s table this modest proposal: Adorno’s insights on aesthetics perhaps deserve to be pondered as part of our overall ongoing conversation dealing directly with that perpetually challenging question “what is art?,” analyzing art’s place within the cultural existential crisis of modernity and ultimately attempting to envision a new humanism for a new millennium. 7 Vico as Precursor of Modern Historicism and Hermeneutics A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

ithin contemporary philosophical circles, especially in academic departments of philosophy, one often comes across a misguided attempt to deny to Vico the very essence and uniqueness of his philosophy, namely the generally accepted fact that he is the grandfather and indeed the fountainhead of modern philosophical historicism and hermeneutics, the original discoverer of Wthe significance of myth, the imagination (fantasia), and the poetical as integral parts of rational speculation. Within those circles, imagination, positivistically conceived as an undeveloped and primitive mode of reasoning, but to the contrary always privileged in Vico’s philosophy, is customarily subsumed under pure rationality, logic and abstractions which are construed as the supreme achievement of human cognition. This is what Vico, from within his anti-Cartesian stance, would characterize as “the arrogance of scholars.” In more modern parlance it goes under the name of logical positivism, a movement that Croce for one and all bona fide humanists have had to contend with at the turn of the 20th century and beyond as we have hinted in our last conversation. This subsuming and distortion of Vico’s philosophy is further promoted by that of a minority group within American academic circles; I refer to the Straussian School of thought. Theirs is a hubristic and ambitious project. Rather than stand on Vico’s and Croce’s giant shoulders, they’d rather subsume Vico and Croce to their neo-Platonism as interpreted by Leo Strauss, thus subverting both Vico’s and Croce’s historicism. To realize how misguided and fallacious this effort is, it would suffice to simply consider what eminent Vico scholars have been saying on these two great Neapolitan 18th and 20th century philosophers in the last one hundred years or so, beginning with Croce, all the way to the present. A list of great thinkers and artists engaged by Vico’s ideas would have to include at a minimum intellectual giants such as Condorcet, Herder, Hegel, Comte, Yeats, Coleridge, Arnold, Collingwood, and last but not least, James Joyce. But to return to our argument, as already mentioned above, Gianbattista Vico (1668-1774), amply warned us against “the arrogance of scholars”. He specifically wrote that “scholars interpret ancient cultures on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated and magnificent times”. Exhibiting from the outset of his speculation a probing interest in comparative mythology, Vico claimed that myth, ritual, and law were coherent within each society, that each society must be made sense of within its own culture and time. In other words, the way things turned out determines both our initial interest and our interpretation of the course of historical development and one cannot help but bring to bear modern interests, that is, one’s own interests and perspectives. A clear picture of Giambattista Vico’s intellectual context is therefore vital to understanding his work. He greatly admired Bacon. He was contemporary with Newton, Voltaire, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Addison, Locke, all of whom had been influenced to some degree by Descartes. Vico’s warning against the ‘conceit of scholars” exhibits his sense of self-consciousness as an historian; that is to say, Vico was conscious that assumptions determine how history is written. He is nothing less than the father of modern Philosophy of History. Leon Pompa’s description of the nature of historical assumption is that the search for solutions to historical problems requires philosophical ideas about knowledge and the human condition. Assumptions are foundational, as Jeremy Bentham’s definition illustrated that which is used to prove everything else, cannot itself be proven; a chain of proofs must have their commencement somewhere. Vico also declares that assumptions flow through a corpus of work as blood flows through a body: “In order to give form to the materials herein- before set in order in the Chronological Table, we now propose the following axioms, both philosophical and philological, including a few reasonable and proper postulates and some clarified definitions. And just as the blood does in our animate bodies, so will these elements course through our Science and animate it in all its reasoning about the common nature of nations.” (Section II, as translated by Fish and Bergin). It is precisely the matter of assumptions which delineates Vico’s departure from the Cartesian mainstream. Vico’s deconstruction of Cartesian epistemology began from the inside. Cartesian thought privileged a priori-deductive knowing, and a posteriori-empirical knowing, and by implication marginalized other forms of knowledge, including theological knowing which a Thomas Aquinas surely includes in his Summa. Des- cartes’ epistemology is predicated on the assumption of atomized, rational human identity. That is to say, he assumed that humanity consisted of separate persons, and that each person was a rational entity separate from society and from the rest of the universe. This assumption is regarded as illusory in some Eastern thought-systems, but it is foundational to Descartes and the empirical tradition. It was such to Hobbes, Locke. Rousseau, Paine. However Vico and later Croce’s thought stand firmly against a reductionist construction of humanity. Bruce Mazlish goes as far as attributing Vico’s development of a critique of Descartes, to annoyance and professional pique. Certainly the threat was real enough as we have seen in our first conversation. The man- tle of academic honor and prestige was being torn at the time from the humanities, and was provocatively flaunted by the new Cartesian disciplines. Paul Avis comments that Vico perceived that the Cartesian spirit and its influence on Catholic historical scholarship was a “kiss of death.” I would add that such a kiss was not too dissimilar from the Straussian School’s influence on Catholic philosophical education in America in the 60s and the 70s. Vico and Croce could have been its antidote, but alas, they were all but marginalized at the time via the subsuming operation above mentioned. In any case, Vico’s core critique of Descartes first appeared in 1710, in his The Ancient Wisdom of the Ital- ians. In it we discern the epistemological doctrine verum factum convertantur (roughly, you can only know what you’ve made). The doctrine divided all knowledge into the a priori and the a posteriori. A priori knowledge was the deductive knowledge of logic and reason, and was irrefutable and exhaustively knowable only because it was a figment; it was a creation of the mind of humans. One such knowing is Mathematics. Of course we might know the a priori exhaustively; we made it, after all. This acknowledgement of its origin and limitation robbed a priori knowledge of any necessary privileging over other knowledges which were also man-made. Vico’s verum doctrine is an obvious precursor of the pragmatism of William James whose dictum was that the true is that which works. The real relevancy of Vico’s verum factum convertantur was in its consequence for a posteriori knowing. For if humans could only truly know what humans had made, then humans could not truly or exhaustively know what they had not made. It followed that only God could know truly and exhaustively what God had made, i.e., nature. This kicks empirical knowing and the idea of the law of nature off its pedestal. Vico in fact thought Robert Boyle’s experimental physics, “barbarous”. Vico matched and in some way mirrored Descartes’ hubris. Consider these mirrored passages: Descartes: “even if God had created several worlds, there would have been none where these (Descartes’ laws) were not observed. Vico: “the decisive sort of proof in our science is therefore this: that once these orders were established by divine Providence, the course of the affairs of the nations had to be, must now be and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were produced from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case.” This is Vico’s “new epistemology”, a sort of knowing that participants in an activity claim to possess as against mere observers, rooted in the capacity for insight and reconstruction; a human could never know what it was like to be a frog or a pea, but a human could know what it was like to be tired, or ambitious, or to seek revenge. Vico’s “New Science” was all about the privileging of this kind of knowledge. He considered historical knowing as superior; above mathematics and the empirical sciences. Vico did not claim originality; he located this “consciousness of the certain” in the discipline of philology, not excluding “all the grammarians, historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the deeds of peoples.” (Fish and Bergin, 63). The question arises: what was Vico’s conception of humanity as such? In the first place it rejects Descartes’ reductionist model which abstracts humans from their social and legal context; something that was always foreign to the tradition of Renaissance Humanism. Vico’s insistence that humans ought to be conceived socially had a long pedigree. The likes of Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, and Leon Battista Alberti held to it and promoted it. So it can validly be asserted that before there was a Matthew Arnold in the 19th century to champion the humanities and liberal arts against a creeping “barbarism of the intellect” there was Vico, and later there was Croce. Precious few knew this simple fact till the beginning of the 20th century when Croce, who had great affinities with Vico, restored his memory and revealed his relevancy for modern concerns. Alas, Croce himself was eventually marginalized after his death in 1952. Vico acknowledges traditional Catholic pessimism about human nature, with its Adamitic imagery, a “fallen and weak” nature. Men, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief gain (Fish and Bergin, p. 91); but, just as importantly, he also attacks the conception of humanity which posits natural law, a fixed human nature from which timeless formulae about right behavior, ownership, punishment, relationships, trade, government and a host of other things derive. These systems had been developed by thinkers such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Selden, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Bayle. In 1724, Vico sought unsuccessfully for a sponsor to publish his attack. Lack of a sponsor forced him to cut his work by three-fourths; the result was the Scienza Nuova. (Fish and Bergin’s translation of Autobiography, 11). Paul Avis feels that Vico was influenced towards his doctrine of humanity by Pico della Mirandola, who had asserted that: “man alone has no determining nature beyond his own freedom. Confined by no unchanging essence of humanity, he creates himself by his deeds” (Avis Foundations, 138). Vico, on the other hand expressed it thus: “In the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines an eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question; that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men.” (Fish and Bergin, 96) And thus: “that which did all this was mind, for men did it with intelligence; it was not fate, for they did it with choice; not chance, for the results of their so acting are perpetually the same” (Cited in Pompa, 24). This kind of historicism is uniquely Vichian. It constructs a pattern into the past which is not explained solely in terms of aggregate individual choice. Vico’s explanation of humanity differs radically from those stories which explain similarities in societies cut off from each other by a story of common origins. He explains similarities by positing a providential operation which operates through human choice, through human institutions and arrangements (Pompa, 97). This hidden providential law, - this divinity which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will -, Vico explains as a cosmic purposive tendency. This idea is also discernible in the thinking of Herder, of Schelling, of Hegel, of Adam Smith and Marx, differently expressed as “invisible hand”, “cunning of reason”, “unintended consequences”, even as “History”. (Berlin, 75; Mazlish, 447). As Vico himself puts it: “Men mean to gratify their bestial lusts and abandon their offspring and they inau- gurate the chastity of marriage from which families arise.” And: “Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths. Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness. This axiom proves that there is divine providence. (Fish and Bergin, 62). Leon Pompa points out that this is a version of the argument for the existence of God from design. If there is an impetus for humanity’s good other than individual human choice, even if it operates through individual human choice, then there is a divine providence. (Pompa, 57). This providential operation has similar results in disparate and separate cultures: “Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.” This axiom, also found in Jung as “the collective unconscious” is a great principle which establishes the “common sense” of the human race. And: “All nations...keep these three human customs; all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead...we have taken these three eternal and universal customs as the first three principles of this science” (Fish and Bergin, 97, 8). Thus Vico introduced into Christian thinking a cyclical conception of time. He posited that each civilization might advance through three stages, and then regress to the first stage. Here too, Vico does not claim originality; he credits the ancient Egyptians. (Ibid, 69). The first stage is one of primitive culture: “And here it is worth reflecting how men in the feral state, fierce and untamed as they were, came to pass from their bestial liberty into human society...and to keep them in it the stern restraints of frightful religions were necessary” (Ibid., 196). The second stage was one of heroes, a feudal stage where the most powerful govern. The third stage was the mature age of men; moderate monarchical or republican government and reasonable access to justice for all. Vico identifies two cycles in the past; one ending in the fall of Rome, and another growing from its ashes, beginning in the barbaric middle ages, but now in the eighteenth century, in its last phase. This doctrine of cycles, corsi e ricorsi, is also conceivable as a spiral. Societies which collapse need not revert totally to primitive savagery. In his Pratica della Scienza nuova, Vico suggested that: “wise men and princes of the commonwealths will be able, through good institutions, laws, and examples, to recall the peoples to their acme or perfect state.” But civilizations might be halted in mid-career by conquest or some other disaster, as in the case of Car- thage, for example. This spiral schema enables prediction. It is one of Vico’s boasts that he had been able to “fill in” the gaps where records were wanting. Thus Vico is notable for having validated the study of myths , ancient poetry, and other art forms. Vico treated mythology as a language to be learned. He thought that metaphor was a fundamental category of human rationality and he reasoned that poetry emerged before prose in primitive societies (Ibid., p. 159). Vico privileged myth as a first-class form of imaginative knowing, useful to interrogate and thus imaginatively enter the thinking of the past. If historicism and hermeneutics teach us anything, it is that we are all influenced by our human and intellectual context. Acknowledging that simple creaturely existential reality helps us avoid the emphasis on ideas that seems most useful by hindsight. Vico would be the first to admit that he was also limited by his own human and intellectual context which was Cartesian through and through. The Straussian school of thought likes to point out that philosophy per se demands a transcendence of context. I would submit that a good place to begin an imaginative journey of transcendence is Vico’s and Croce’s historicist philosophy which does not make the mistake of embracing the universal while forgetting to ground itself in the particular. Addendum: I attach, in chronological order, a selected list of books by eminent Vico scholars of the 20th century from which the above quotes have been taken. They can be considered the best secondary sources for reliable Vico scholarship. The pioneer is first and foremost Benedetto Croce with his book The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 1913, followed by Fish and Bergin, translators of Vico’s New Science (1948), who together with Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Phillip Verene did much to introduce Vico to the Anglo-Saxon academic world, Robert Caponigri’s Time and Idea: The Theory of History of Giambattista Vico (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), Bruce Mazlish’s The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), Leon Pompa’s Vico: a Study of the ‘New Science’ (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1975), Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder:Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), F.M.Barnard’s “Natural Growth and Purposive Development: Vico and Herder’, in History and Theory (1979), Donald Phillip Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination (1981), Paul Avis’ Foun- dations of Modern Historical Thought: From Machiavelli to Vico (London: Croom Helm, 1986), Leon Pom- pa’s Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Keith Jenkins’ Rethinking History (London: Routledge,1991). Those are the best secondary sources in English which will give the reader a comprehensive view of Vico’s place within historicism and hermeneutics. 8 Comments on Emanuel Paparella’s Presentation By Ernesto Paolozzi Italian version: Non vi è dubbio, credo, che Vico, come dimostra Paparella, sia un precursore del moderno storicismo umanistico e del pensiero ermeneutico. Nella Francia, generalmente ostile al pensiero dialettico e storicista, un famoso sociologo diventato filosofo, Edgar Morin con il quale sono da qualche anno amico, ha sostenuto che Vico, autore de La scienza nuova, sia il primo filosofo della complessità. La scienza nuova sarebbe appunto quella posizione anticartesiana che considera la storia, l’arte e la conoscenza come ricostruzione e creazione della realtà, come elementi indivisibili, come elementi necessari per comprendere la complessità della vita. E’ un punto di vista interessante che si può collocare accanto ai pensatori, Benedetto Croce innanzitutto, ricordati da Emanuel Paparella, che hanno riproposto il pensiero vichiano. Purtroppo, come ricorda sempre Paparella, negli anni Sessanta e Settanta Croce fu combattuto soprattutto per motivi politici: dai comunisti che cominciavano a conquistare le Università e la stampa e dai fascisti che non erano del tutto scomparsi. Si erano travestiti, per così dire, ma non scomparsi. Però a livello di cultura alta l’interpretazione crociana di Vico rimaneva viva e si approfondiva. Penso all’opera di Raffaello Franchini ad esempio. Mi sembra giusto ricordarlo. Qualche anno prima erano comparse due opere che vanno ricordate. Le quattro stagioni dello storicismo di Manlio Ciardo e Il tramonto della logica antica di Alfredo Parente. Ciardo, morto in povertà, tracciava un percorso che va da Vico a Kant, da Hegel a Croce per mostrare come si fa strada il pensiero critico dialettico e, dunque, umanistico e storicista per abbandonare quella che Parente definisce logica antica, ossia la logica puramente analitica, astratta. Franchini mostrerà come già in Aristotele (filosofo caro a Paparella) le due anime della logica coesistono. Quella dell’Organon e quella della fronesis , del giudizio senza contare le pagine sui contrari e i contraddittori e, naturalmente quelle sulla potenza e l’atto pagine decisamente dialettiche come già Hgel aveva compreso. Il principio vichiano secondo il quale possiamo conoscere solo ciò che abbiamo fatto rimane uno dei mo- menti più alti del pensiero di tutti i tempi. Avete mai provato a spiegare ad un amico un percorso per raggiun- gere una città o un paese? Quante incomprensioni e, certe volte irritazione. Sembra non capire mai. E’ solo che voi avete già percorso quella strada, lui, poveretto, può solo “pensarla” in astratto. Soccorre, talvolta, l’arte, l’intuizione: un’immagine (un palazzo rosso, una casa decadente etc.) e ci si ritrova in sintonia. Mi scuso per l’esempio banale, ma dà un’ idea di ciò che vogliamo sostenere. Translation: I don’t think there is any doubt that, as Paparella claims, Vico is the precursor of modern historicism and hermeneutics. In France, generally hostile to historicist and dialectical thought, there is a famous sociologist who turned to philosophy, a friend of mine, Edgar Morin, who asserts that Giambattista Vico, the author of The New Science is the first philosopher of complexity. The New Science would indeed be that anti-Cartesian philosophical position which considers art, history and knowledge in general as a reconstruction and indeed creation of reality, as interconnected indivisible elements necessary to grasp the complexity of life. It is appropriate to remember him here. This is an interesting viewpoint which can be traced back to certain thinkers, Benedetto Croce first and foremost, as Paparella reminds us, who have proposed to our consideration the thought of Vico. Unfortunately, as the same Paparella points out, Croce’s thought was attacked for political motives: first by the Communists who had begun to invade the media and the university and then by the fascists who had not completely disappeared. They had just changed their appearance. However at the level of high and deep culture the Crocean interpretation of Vico was alive and well. I am thinking here of Raffaello Franchini’s work which is worth mentioning. A few years before had appeared two works which are also worth remembering: The Four Seasons of Historicism by Manlio Ciardo and The Sunset of Logic by Alfredo Parente. Ciardo, who died in penury, traced a journey which goes from Vico to Kant, from Hegel to Croce to show how critical dialectical thought travels and how it is humanistic and historicist, antithetical to what Parente defines as the ancient logic, which is to say a logic that is purely analytical and abstract. Franchini for one will show how already in Aristotle (a philosopher highly valued by the same Paparella) the two souls of logic coexist and are friendly to each other: that of the Organon and that of the fronesis on judgment, not to mention the pages on the contraries and contradictories, and of course the ones on potentiality and act, all pages those which are undoubtedly dialectical, as Hegel for one had well understood. The Vichian idea that we can fully know only what we ourselves have made remains one of the highlights of philosophy for all times. Have you ever attempted to give directions to a friend on how to get to a particular city or town? Many misunderstandings will ensue; at times even irritation. That’s because you have already been on that journey while he can only envision it in the abstract. At times what is needed, is art, intuition, a simple image (a red building, a decadent house) and then the mutual understanding is restored. Please excuse this rather banal example but it provides an idea of what we are attempting to put across in this symposium. Chapter 4 “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism” (Fourth Meeting: 18 July 2013)

Table of Contents for the Symposium’s 4th Meeting Section 1: “Thoughts on Modern Painting and Sculpture,” a presentation by Dr. Nannery Section 2: “On the Universality of Art,” a presentation by Dr. Paolozzi Section 3: Comments by Dr. Paparella on Drs. Nannery and Paolozzi’s presentations Section 4: A reply by Dr. Paolozzi to Dr. Paparella’s comments Section 5: “On Modern Nihilism: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Utopia, Extinction—Part 1” a presentation by Dr. Paparella Section 6: An Observation from Dr. Paparella on Drs. Nannery and Paolozzi’s 3rd meeting’s presentations 1 Thoughts on Modern Painting and Sculpture A Presentation by Dr. Lawrence Nannery he subjects of modern painting and sculpture are very exciting and important, no doubt, but also they entail an eventual decline that caught up with them. First, let me give my thoughts about painting, which pioneered the changes that so deeply trans- Tformed the definition of art from 1905 until today. Picasso was the most important figure in the great change. A boy genius if there ever was one, his father, who was himself a painter, came to him and surrendered his painting materials to him when he was merely 14 years of age. There followed many decades of work, feverish at all times, as he traveled through his pink and blue periods and on to many other variations. But it was only when he teamed up with Braque in the early 1900’s that the two together broke through to another level of creativity. Together they discovered that realism, the governing assumption of all European painting for several centuries, could be discarded and painting set free to do whatever the artist wanted to do, and still be a valid work of art. The two set out on a journey that was intensely cerebral, intensely creative, that astonished the art world, and set the tone for the entire art world in Europe for almost seven decades. Along that way, painting went through many “isms,” but through all of them the basic premise was that painting may be as arbitrary as the painter wished, but it still could be a valid painting. This shifted the emphasis of interpretation from the finished work of art to the intention of the artist. The trouble was that the only way to find out the latter was to scrutinize the former, and most people had no experience, or even care, to put themselves under an obligation of trying to figure out what these weird and seemingly meaningless paintings could tell one about what the painter wanted to convey. There were two basic reactions to this strange performance. One was to eschew these works altogether, and to deride this step as “nonsense” or worse. For example, the Venetian biennales held during the rule of Mussolini from 1922 through 1944 completely ignored the new painting, settling for drawings and paintings that mimicked in the safe confines that characterized artworks from the second half of the 19th century. Over time, however, another reaction grew. Based on the recommendations of some few art critics the very rich, who always wanted to be au courrent, started dabbling in purchases of these indecipherable works. By the 1920’s modern art had drawn the young painters into the vortex of the market. Such purchases were seen as not only an affirmation of good taste, but also good financial investments. It was a win-win. What happened over the first five decades of the th20 century in Europe and, in part, the Americas, was a response to the artworks of foreign cultures, be they African, or Far Eastern, or the work of peoples denom- inated as “primitives”. With so much variation, the sky of painting seemed limitless. In fact it was limitless, as the quick succession of “schools” of painters testifies. One can list many: Cubism; Expressionism; Sur- realism; Vorticism; Futurism; Abstract Art; Action Painting, and on and on. But with such amazing bountifulness, there was always pressure on the artist to be original. This placed a heavy psychological burden on the lone artist, and psychological disorders were on that account very common among them. In any event, bye and bye, the educated public was fascinated by men (almost exclusively men) who risked so much, no matter how loutish they might be. This step into artistic freedom had caused an explosion of creativity, and within a decade there was a large body of work in the new departures from the rules of drawing and painting and sculpting. This was not the same fate as had occurred in music because all these movements produced valid works of art, but after a long period perhaps it did suffer from exhaustion too. The fecundity of the 20th century art and sculpture can be shown in the mere enumeration of the famous names that are included in that cohort. Equally it is exhibited in the mere mention of the many movements these new freedoms generated. During the good decades many artists of note composed paintings, drawings, and sculptures almost indif- ferently. Picasso was the most fecund. Interested in every pictorial form, it seems that only the cinema escaped his lust for showing his powers. Whatever demons moved his spirit, the results were commonly shattering and elemental. His works affected everyone, even the most evil. His painting “Guernica,” which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is the best known work of the century, and justly so. Pi- casso’s eminence is indicated by the fact that he resided primarily in France during its occupation by the Nazis. But they never molested him because, I believe, they never dared to. All the movements that sprang up, from cubism to futurism to surrealism to abstract art and many others besides bespoke a vigor which prided itself on the impulse to create and let the critics be damned. But such vigor had its costs, namely that it was easy to run out of gas under such a regime, one that placed all the weight of creation on a lone individual, and also placed a second weight of needing to be unique, or the product of a new, very small “movement.” So, it was often necessary to distinguish oneself from the other artists, but in the course of time it became harder and harder to do so. All art forms seem bound to become less vigorous as time goes by, and by the 1930’s there were many bad painting produced. Even Picasso produced a few well-known clunkers. With the shift into abstraction, in the late 1940’s, modernism was relocated to New York. Mondrian had relocated there during World War II, and was a frequent guest of Peggy Guggenheim’s penthouse. His remarkable beautiful designs are masterworks of decoration, powerful as Jackson Pollack’s abstractions that bring us to a state of exhaustion from the power that exude from his works. But the result is more similar to the works of Mondrian than people think. His self-destructive personality did not preclude a new, late phase of his powers in works that are even more interesting than the earlier periods of his development. These works are not well-known, but they exude a calm and comforting imagination. Imagine that! And imagination is the key to understanding the downfall of modern painting. In my opinion, the problem first appeared in the “collage,” a form that is usually associated with the name of Picasso. It is no more than an arrangement of flat objects, for example the page of a newspaper, or linen, put on a surface and then affixed to it with any substance that will act as a glue. The point was the totally arbitrary nature of the relation among the elements so arranged. This left the viewing public in the position of having to, once more, interpret the “work of art” all by themselves. The artist would claim that he did not have to, leaving that job to the viewers entirely. If pressed further, he would bristle with anger. The general public was once again at a position of nullity, since the objects d’art presented no clue as to what their reaction was supposed to be. On the other hand, critics found a great abundance of things to say about the meaning of seemingly “meaningless” objects. The critics had a fiduciary interest in convincing those who ready to be convinced. But for the most part, distrust grew between those supposedly in the know and the general public. Abstract art began in the 1940’s and flourished in the 1950’s in New York. The New York School was quite enhanced by these developments. Their enthusiasm brimmed over, now that there could be no rules of any kind to the art of painting. It felt like liberation to the creators, no matter what the critics might or might not say. Its center, (not epicenter) was the Greenwich Village section of New York, and the freedom now exercised by them gave them all the illusion of total power. In addition, two great critics came to the fore at that time; Harlold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Greenberg defended this new trend, and called all these novel works of abstraction “gestures.” That was a very intelligent thing to come up with, but it entailed a serious limitation: viz., that such gestures could only arouse generic emotions and nothing more. Added to that was the money angle. New York was literate and rich. The rich folk in town vied with one another to have painters at their parties, where the average painter managed to be either dumbstruck at the questions they were being asked, answering many queries with the assertion that he just did what he did, and had no more to say. The sharpie critic, which does not include either of the two great critics, would always have a great deal to say, and there is no way of deciding whether his monologues were simply made up on the spot, or a put on. The artist, left alone with a member of the public would, as often as not, become offensive against his interlocutor, or even do something outrageous. At these soirees many six-figure checks were written and many paintings changed hands, allowing the rich folk to preen in their living rooms about the booty they had wrested from the author himself, some poor guy who had lived in a garret for a dozen years now was blessed with a country estate somewhere near on a fashionable beach or well into the verdant hills of success. Though modern art was a success in these ways through the 1950’s and 1960’s, it was a surface phenomenon, forming and delighting only the cognoscenti, whether real or fake. In the end, the fates of modern music and modern painting were the same, with the only difference being that the paintings were in fact quite successful, and some few were and remain brilliant, whereas the music was too cerebral to be recognized as art at all. The fall of abstract art dates from 1970, when the last and most desperate form of modern art was invented; it called itself Minimalism. Minimalism was so true to the task of non-disclosure that it really is foolish to call it art at all. Paintings may look like a piece of graph paper; dolls bought in a little shop, and then shopped around as a work of art; and, notably, every creation by one Andy Warhol — all these and more fit into the category of non-art masquer- ading as art. Minimalism cut the head off modern art because it proved that the latter was indeed dead. I should like to turn now to modern sculpture. For centuries sculpture had usually been reserved for positioning in a larger setting, in other words as an element of architecture. But modern sculpture was different. The artistic community in these generations did not want their works to be mere adornment. They wanted their pieces to stand alone, and many painters began to create sculptures. In fact, some sculptures are very much like painting. Henry Moore, for example, thought of his works as arrangements of masses. He always stayed within the parameters of seeming organic masses, and tricked out interesting relations among them that could almost be called abstract art or even a collage. Calder does much the same, but looks for motion, and so he invented “mobiles,” which came to be associated with his name. The point was to be as free as painting. And so, once again, there was an explosion of creativity in the field. Although I admire many sculptures as brilliant and evocative of the most inner resources of the artist and of the viewer as well, I will mention only three directly in what follows. Brancusi produced exceptionally beautiful objects, entirely appropriate to their theme and meaning, even though not a copy of the objects referred to at all. Giacometti, on the other hand, depicted only narrow over-thin figures who resemble victims of the fires of war, which had not happened yet. And Picasso did everything and anything and always seemed to succeed. As later critics attested, what spurred the sculptors to such original works were the same wonderful appro- priations as had occurred a little earlier in painting. The world was full of art, and the 20th century was able to go out and find these objects at bring them home, or at least photograph them, valuing and validating the artistic enterprises of many lands and cultures. The only limit was abstract sculpture, which, it must be admitted, can only function as decoration. In the end, sculpture and painting during this period had downfalls that can only be called “ridiculous.” In the 1970’s, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I immediately saw the downfall of the entire medium when the sensation of that time was Claes Oldenburg, whose giant hamburger was all the rage. It is so perfect a representation of an American hamburger that its existence can have only one purpose, and that is to defy interpretation. (A few years before, Susan Sontag had written a book of essays, the main essay being entitled “Against Interpretation.”) This defiance of interpretation was a reaction that might have been motivated by the blather that art critics had been guilty of for decades and decades. The hamburger had the added advantage of not being made out of dung or materials dipped in menstrual fluids. But the need to defy interpretation was a defensive move by Oldenburg, who perhaps would die of shame if any critic actually examined the nullity that was behind the piece. This is also sometimes the case in the field of painting. Witness the recent issue of the influential magazine, The New Yorker, which in its July 1, 2013 issue features a long article on a painter, Ed Ruscha, who is very prominent amid the Hollywood crowd in Los Angeles. Beginning in the mid-1960’s, Ruscha painted many different materials poured out on to a picture which he captioned with the object depicted. The article continues: “[This] led to a three-year series of immensely skillful trompe-d’oeil word- pictures … . He also did paintings of bowling balls, olives, marbles, amphetamine pills… “ [excerpt from page 53]. While this sounds exactly like what Oldenburg had done, the author of the article, Calvin Tompkins having missed the point entirely, is ecstatic about everything about Ruscha. Having taken words from other artists’ works, he made the word, for example, “Ooff!”, a word from a copy of a comic book, literally reproduced, but used all alone by Ruscha with a single color background, the point of defying interpretation is rather obvious, but the naïve critic tires to make something out of nothing, talking about the man’s life, and car trips with him that led to nothing, filling up space with these uninteresting things until he just tires out. The reader would be crazy to take it any other way. It would have the benefit of leaving to the reader the ability of not getting fooled. Whether Western civilization has used up all avenues to real art, art that moves people, noble arts, is not known, but if the arts are all dead, then so is mankind. A famous man once wrote, “only a god can save us now.” It seems true. 2 On the Universality of Art A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (Translated form his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce) he issue of the universality of art can be discussed from two different viewpoints which are directly or indirectly related to Crocean thought. Some deny the very concept of universality, and then there are those who sustain that Croce contradicts himself when he affirms that art is a universal form of Tknowledge. As far as the first viewpoint is concerned, we are dealing with a general philosophical issue which can go all the way back to the polemical Socratic dialogues with the sophists. As far as we are concerned, I retain indispensable to think of this concept in other than universal terms. Specifically, the fact itself that we distinguish art as a separate category affirms its universality since one cannot generate a universal from a universal, it can only be generated by itself. Either we consider art universal, or under the name art we empirically and arbitrarily gather a series of objects and events which we consider more or less similar. Let’s us consider therefore the apparent contradictions of Crocean thought. If aesthetic thought is alogical, if it is to be distinguished from philosophy, how can it be universal if universality is something attributable to thought? I art knows the particular, how can it be universal? To these objections we can add others of a psychological nature. To discuss the beauty of a poem may seem futile given that we would immediately intuit that we cannot find a serious point of common agreement as is the case for mathematical and logical issues. These kind of valid objections are the same as those which occur within the problematic of taste (whether it is objective or subjective), and more generally, the problematic of interpretation. In fact, the universality of art guarantees the objectivity (at least hypothetically) of taste and interpretation, or as the same Croce writes, the re-evocation of the poetical. We need to be aware here that the entire conceptual fabric of Crocean aesthetic is held together by a very tight net of logical connections. There are moreover valid objections of an historical or social nature which can find their foundation in Croce’s historicism, a theoretical aspirations to oppose his theories. For example, a Chinese, because of a different historical and linguistic environment, will have difficulty to understand Ungaretti’s or Montale’s poetry, just as a Westerner will have difficulty in understanding oriental arts. Therefore art appears incommunicable and therefore not universal, given that communicability is the sine qua non of universality. In reality, in Croce’s thought, art is a Kantian foundational reality, the possibility of transcendent knowledge of the particular. This identification of aesthetic with language, that is to say with expressivity, means that art is a common function and therefore it is universal, integral part of every man’s humanity. Thus we have arrived at the second aspect of the issue which explains better even the first one. We have arrived at the theoretical Crocean problematic of the cosmic aspect of art. In his Il carattere dell’espressione artistica [The Character of Artistic Expression] Croce had asserted that “to confer to a sentimental content an artistic form is to endow it at the same time with imprint of totality or the aspiration to the cosmic…every genuine artistic representation is itself and the universe, the universe in a particular form, and the particular form as the universe. In every poet’s enunciation, in every creature of his imagination there is the whole of human destiny, all its hope, its illusions, its pains and its joys, the greatness and the poverty of humanity, the entire drama of the real which evolves and grows by itself expressing suffering and joy (p. 122). The above is the modern transformation of the Aristotelian catharsis from a purely moral position to an epistemological one. It is the Leopardian distinction between lived feeling (practical, for Croce) and the contemplated feeling (theoretical): “my feelings of joy are different from the narration of it to a group of friends. This is what Croce writes about in his Aesthetica in nuce: “Within this distinction between contemplated feelings or poetry vis a vis acted out or suffered feelings there is the virtue attributable to art as liberator and calming of feelings (catharsis); and the condemnation of those works or part of those artworks where the immediate feeling burst forth or gives vent. Moreover, from this distinction one can derive the other character,…its infinity juxtaposed to the finitude of feelings or immediate passion: this being branded as the universal or cosmic character of poetry.” From all this we can deduce that art is communicable and, at least in part, we can overcome the mystery of its incommunicability. A physical pain or a sentimental depression cannot be communicated in themselves ma only as representations, known, intuited, made universal by art which, without recurring to the concept, renders the particular universal. To sum up, there are at least three fundamental meanings that we can confer to the Crocean position: art is universal because it is a transcendental activity, something which is substantially inherent to all men and not only in an empirical mode, because it renders objective subjective and individual intuitions via representation, because in every single representation one becomes conscious of the entire drama of the universe sub specie intuitionis. This last point is undoubtedly the most complex and has not appeared clear to all critics. At first sight it appears that the philosopher wishes to say that in every particular act of the spirit one can detect the entire human history, the entire process of consciousness, the entire drama of the universe in its etymological sense, that is to say, in the sense of the contrast which can be comic, ironic, sad, tragic, indifferent. This explains why each one of us can recreate and feel as one’s own the tragedy of the lucid and astonished perplexity of Hamlet which paralyzes action. Undoubtedly this thinking of Croce is an arduous and complex one, reminiscent, to remain within our own century, of the Bergson of the concrete duration, the Proust of involuntary memory, the Joyce of the stream of consciousness, of the epiphany. A complex position to be further deepened. 3

Comments by Paparella on Nannery and Paolozzi’s Presentations (fourth meeting) These two insightful presentations by Nannery and Paolozzi on the nature of modern art, whether or not it is genuine art or is the jury still out on it, and on the universality of art will undoubtedly keep me and other readers musing on those issues for a long while. I may have more detailed comments or observations on them at the next meeting of our ongoing conversation. For the moment, I’d like to briefly dwell on some conundrums on the very nature of art which I included in the very last chapter of my Ovi e-book (Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers) titled “The Nature of Art as a problematic of Aesthetics” which seem relevant to those two presentations and to which I was brought back as I read them. ( see http://www.ovimagazine.com/cat/56) I trust in fact that in the future dialogues of our symposium’s meetings we will have an opportunity to exchange some views on the above mentioned topics. In that chapter I mention that “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 (p.65)….Both Lawrence Nannery and Ernesto Paolozzi have already broached these conundrums following on Croce’s aestethics. 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 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.” (pp.66-67) 4. A Reply by Paolozzi to Paparella’s Comments Italian version: Provo a dare qualche risposta alle tue difficilissime domande senza presumere, naturalmente, di risolverle in tutto e per tutto. Il brutto, l’aberrante può essere bello? Certo. Così come il bello può essere brutto! Se intendiamo l’arte come una forma della conoscenza dell’individuale, la rappresentazione di uno stato d’animo, di una emo- zione come dicono gli attori che non vogliono sembrare moralisti o politici, se l’arte è questo si può rappresentare il bello in modo brutto e il brutto in modo bello. Quanti personaggi di film o romanzi, belli buoni etc risultano freddi, irreali, inefficaci? Un esempio classico è dato da Dante. L’inferno è aberrante ma spesso è rappresentato in modo così artistico da essere bello. Qualche volta, invece, solo qualche volta, il Paradiso appare brutto perché rappresentato male, moralisticamente, insomma in modo non artistico. Ciò spiega anche l’autonomia dell’arte. L’altra grande questione è quella che potremmo definire della storicità dell’arte in rapporto all’universalità dell’arte. Non vi è dubbio che il gusto cambia con le epoche e, dunque, anche il giudizio critico. Se ci limitas- simo a questa constatazione cadremmo in una sorta di scetticismo estetico. In realtà ciò che è universale è la categoria, per così dire, non il contenuto della categoria. Noi identifichiamo un’opera come opera d’arte (utilizzo un metodo socratico-crociano) perché non è moralità, non è economicità, non è politicità, non è filosofia. Un’opera d’arte in questo senso è universale, ma ciò non significa che il giudizio sul valore di un’opera non sia storico. Un’opera d’arte per il suo contenuto, ma anche per lo stile e le tecniche, esprime sempre il sentimento e il pensiero di un’epoca. Può essere anche utilizzata come documento storico per meglio inten- dere un’epoca. Ciò, per quello che si è detto prima, non contraddice la sua universalità nel senso dell’arte come universale rappresentazione, come conoscenza. Penso che Heidegger volesse dire questo: un tempio greco apre a noi una possibilità di conoscenza dell’essere autentico della sua epoca. In questo senso è vicino a Vico e a Croce. Nella sua storicità, il tempio, propone un’ orizzonte universale di comprensione. L’arte cosiddetta moderna. Penso che nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi non sia arte in senso proprio. Come il futurismo italiano. E’ provocazione ma una provocazione ripetuta mille volte è una tragica stupidità, è il massimo del conformismo. Talvolta è l’ espressione di una insofferenza , di un malessere e, in questo caso talvolta raggiunge l’arte. Ma, penso ne parleremo in seguito, io non credo ai generi letterari e artistici come metro per valutare l’arte. Esiste il barocco bello e il barocco artificioso e brutto. Dipende dalla singola opera. Così, tutto sommato, penso dell’arte moderna. Dipende dall’opera singola. Tutto il resto è politica culturale e, in seguito, pura moda. La discussione si fa sempre più interessante perché autentica, non “accademica” e senza pregiudizi. English translation: I will attempt to answer Paparella’s thorny questions without the presumption of answering them all exhaustively. Can the ugly and the aberrant be beautiful? Of course, just as the beautiful can be ugly. If we understand art as a form of the knowledge of the individual, as the representation of an attitude, of an emotion, as those artists who do not wish to appear moralizing or political, say, then we can represent the beautiful in an ugly mode, and the ugly in a beautiful mode. Think of how many characters from novels or films are cold, unre- alistic and vacuous. Dante gives us a classic example. Hell is ugly but often in Dante it is represented so artistically that it looks beautiful. On the other hand, at times, but rarely so, Paradise looks ugly because it is badly portrayed, in a moralistic tone, that is to say, not artistically. That explains the autonomy of art. The other crucial issue is that of the historicity of art vis a vis its universality. There is little doubt that taste changes with the times and that therefore the critical judgment also changes. If we limit ourselves to just this phenomenon, we would soon get stuck into a sort of skeptical aestheticism. In reality what is universal is the category, so to say, not the content of the category. We identify something as a work of art because (using a Socratic-Crocean methodology) it is not morality, it is not economics, it is not politics, it is not philosophy. In that sense a work of art is universal, which does not mean that the judgment on its value is not historical. In its style and its techniques is always expressive of the thought and the feelings of a particular time. In fact it can be used as an historical document to better understand an epoch. That means, as we have already asserted, that it does not contradict its universality in the sense of art as universal representation and as knowledge. I think this is what Heidegger was trying to put across: a Greek temple opens up for us the possibility of the knowledge of the authentic being of its epoch. In that sense he is quite close to Vico and Croce. In its very historicity the temple is opening up for us a universal horizon of comprehension. As far as modern art is concerned, I think that in the vast majority of cases it is not properly speaking art just as Italian Futurism is not art. It is rather provocation, but provocation repeated a thousand times becomes a tragic banality, the apotheosis of conformism. Sometimes it is the representation of an intolerance toward restraints, or of a sickness, and in that case it can be considered art. But we’ll have an opportunity to talk about this in the future. I personally do not believe in literary or artistic genres by which to evaluate art. There is a beautiful baroque and an ugly baroque. It all depends on the particular artwork. The rest is cultural politics and mere trend of the times. This discussion is becoming increasingly interesting because it authentic, that is to say, not “academic” and devoid of prejudgments. 5

On Modern Nihilism: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Utopia, Extinction Part 1 A Presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella “…so far will machinery have Americanized us, so far will Progress have atrophied in us all that which is spiritual, that no dream of the Utopians, however bloody…will be comparable to the results.” --Charles Pierre Baudelaire A year or so ago Lawrence Nannery forwarded me a very interesting book titled The Cambridge Compan- ion to Heidegger (Cambridge University Press 1993) and edited by Charles Guignon. It is a compilation of 13 essays by some of the most eminent Heidegger scholars in Anglo-Saxon culture, among whom John Caputo, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus. Especially relevant to the issue at hand and a partial inspiration for the theme of this presentation is Dreyfus’ essay titled “Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology and politics.” In any case, I am grateful to Larry for bringing that book to my attention. It clarified in my mind a philosophical conundrum that had vexed me for several years. Worth remembering here that Nannery himself made a very interesting contribution to solving the puzzle that is Heidegger’s life for Ovi magazine in the guise of an essay-review titled “Heidegger without Tears” (see http:// www.ovimagazine.com/art/8162). To explain the conundrum we need to go back to my college years in the mid-60s when I attended a whole semester’s seminar on Heidegger’s philosophy. I remember a spirited discussion ensuing between students and professor on the question of whether or not there was a nexus between Heidegger’s philosophy (his theory) and his existential life and conduct (his praxis) in the light of his misguided joining the Nazi party in the 30s. I should mention that the college I attended is a private Catholic college. I keep wondering though if the professor in question, forty-five years later, has changed his mind on the neat dichotomy he used to make in that seminar between the philosophy and the life of Heidegger, who after all has been declared by some history of philosophy experts, Dreyfus being one of them, as none other than the most eminent existentialist philosopher of modernity taking his original inspiration from none other than the father of existentialist philosophy Soren Kierkegaard. After reading attentively Dreyfus’ essay I asked myself this question: pursuant to such an exhaustive ren- dition of Heidegger’s philosophy and its nexus with his life, how could one summarize in a few words the overall tenor of Heidegger’s metaphysical scheme, even granting that it may ultimately turn out to be an anti-metaphysical one? I arrived at a rather tentative conclusion: Heidegger, when all is said and done, is ultimately concerned with the problematic of the effects of technology on modernity. It is quite certain that after Heidegger, to a pervasive scheme of Cartesian thought which begins in the 17th century there has been added the more current nihilistic philosophy of “the will to power” whose precursors are Schopenhau- er, Nietzsche and Hegel. As we have seen in the previous presentation, in the 19th century Vico and Croce were all but ignored by the wider academic community of Western philosophy. In any case, Heidegger’s claim is that this modern adoption of “the will to power” was practically inevitable after the oblivion of Being in our modern times. The above preamble begs for a definition of modernity. The reader has surely noticed that our symposium’s heading is “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism.” It is incumbent on us therefore, if we are to conform with the philosophical wisdom of the Socratic method, to clarify our terms at the outset, before proceeding with our conversation on art and modernity. This task, not unlike the definition of art itself, is of course easier said than done. If we look up the simple Webster’s dictionary definition of the word “modern” we find this:the quality of being current or of the present. An example is given: “a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village.” These very brief banal and rather superficial definitions and example reducing modernity to the economic aspects of life will obviously not do within a broadly cultural philosophical context. If we look up Wikipedia Encyclopedia however, the term “modern” does not immediately become any clearer. There the term is traced all the way back to the 5th century AD. and we read this: the term “modern” (Latin modernus from modo, “just now”) dates from the 5th century, originally distinguishing the Christian era from the Pagan era.” But then sidestepping this original ancient usage modernity is thus further defined: “a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance.” It appears that, according to this particular definition modernity begins with the Renaissance, with a fusion of Graeco-Roman culture with Christian culture. To further increase our confusion, the above explanations and definitions of modernity are soon followed by this intriguing statement: “yet the word entered general usage only in the 17th-century quarrel of the An- cients and the Moderns—debating: ‘Is Modern culture superior to Classical (Græco–Roman) culture?’—a literary and artistic quarrel within the Academie francaise in the early 1690s.” This brings us back to the very origins of two cultures already dealt at some length in our first meeting. Indeed, this last definition may be more comprehensive because here we can glean a more universal understanding of “modernity” as denoting the renunciation of the past, favoring a new beginning, and perhaps a re-interpretation of historical origins, no matter the particular age when it occurs. It could in fact pass for a definition of progress. Charles Pierre Baudelaire is credited with coining the term “modernity” (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience. Here art is brought into play as capturing the fleeting moments of everyday experience. This is close to our concerns with art and history as clearly elucidated via Croce’s philosophy by Ernesto Paolozzi. This question logically arises here: historically speaking does modernity begin with the arrival of Christianity (1st century), or the Renaissance (15 century, the era of the rebirth of Graeco-Roman culture synthesized to Christianity, Western imperialism and the invention of the printing press), or with the post-Renaissance (17th century, the arrival of science via Galileo and the establishing of two rival cultures, the scientific and the humanistic), or with the Enlightenment (18th century, the age of reason), or with Romanticism (19th century), or more properly with the 20th century and the arrival of a fully developed technological scientific culture? Hard to tell. Some historians, in an attempt to dispel the confusion have subdivided modernity into three distinct periods eliminating ancient times and beginning with the Renaissance: 1) Early modernity: 1500–1789 (or 1453–1789 in traditional historiography) 2) Classical modernity: 1789–1900 (corresponding to the long 19th century, 1789–1914 witnessing the invention of the newspaper, telegraph and other forms of mass media and producing a great shift into modernization in the name of industrial capitalism). 3) Late modernity: 1914–to present, sometimes broken down into classical modernity and post- modernity (1990-). In this last phase, modernist arts and individual creativity marks the beginning of a new modernist age as it combats oppressive politics and economics. So we can safely assume that while modernity relates conceptually to the modern era and to modernism, it forms a distinct philosophical concept. What I find most intriguing in this cursory research in the varied definitions of modernity is the tendency by some contemporary cultural anthropologists to focus almost exclusively on the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism. This is indeed in keeping with the age we live in, obsessively preoccupied with economic-political considerations and how they relate to the wielding of political power. Some of these cultural anthropologists however include a reference to tendencies in the intellectual part of the culture, particularly the movements intertwined with secularization and post-industrial life, such as Marxism, existentialism, and the formal establishment of the social sciences. I believe that Heidegger’s most pressing concerns were in tandem with this latter sense of the term modernity, its attendant technological know-how and its effects on cultural life in general. Vico, and later on Croce had already intuited where we would end up with a Cartesian approach to reality. But let’s begin with some indications of how this generalized Heideggerian scheme of “the will to power” functions in modern social life. Let us take a look at the modern capitalist entrepreneur, sometimes referred to as a businessman, or a CEO, or a captain of industry; or a financial investor, or an investment banker. He is usually at the helm of industrial or financial enterprises which are ultimately in the business of acquiring wealth and power, money and profits, all signs within a Calvinist Puritan ethos of success and progress and indeed personal worthiness and salvation, even if salvation has by now been transformed from a theological to a worldly secular concept. Sometimes this type is also found in academia where he will retire to peddle books on an uncompromising laissez faire economy which reduces and subsumes even cultural life to what is considered “inevitable unstoppable economic progress,” a progress that in order not to fail has to continually increase a nation’s GNP. Let’s be more precise and focus our attention on a particular well-known modern entrepreneur-businessman, one who has aspired recently to the US presidency of the US: Mitt Romney. Actually the only president in American history who was also a businessman was Herbert Hoover who presided over the beginning of the most disastrous of economic recessions and depressions in America. But let us stay with Romney. He was so sure he would be elected president that he had already prepared an elaborate scheme (which cost millions of dollars of campaign funds) to transform the White House Office into a paradigmatic CEO office. The country would become the macrocosm of a giant corporation. We may in fact think of Mit Romney as a paradigmatic figure of this type of modern human being creating paradigmatic economic events. This “new man” hardly strikes us as the incarnation of Nietzsche’s Superman with his will to power, a la Napoleon. Everything about him suggests rather a cautious and conservative temperament, steady and reliable. After all steadiness and reliability are good for venture business and market trends to mitigate what may be perceived as unpredictable and risky within a market capitalism. He does not in fact fit very well the role he is supposed to play in the overall Nietzschean metaphysical scheme, or the Hegelian scheme of World-spirit for that matter. He is not even the legendary rubber or oil baron of old. If anything, he will exhibit all the qualities of the unassuming modern bourgeoisie man. He may even be a devout churchgoer if not exactly a man of faith, given that faith has now given way to “religious affiliation” conferring social respectability, if not exactly theological salvation. This entrepreneurial corporate executive may not even possess a personal philosophy, at least one of which he is conscious of, beyond his class and status. Should one ask him what he considers his life-project and work, he may well answer that he thinks of himself as a servant of the public at large, a philanthropist or a benefactor of humankind creating and spreading wealth, never mind that this wealth usually manages to merely trickle down to the disadvantaged and its distribution is not justly envisioned. In fact, it may never have entered our businessman’s mind to consider himself as a subject seeking domination over an object or over nature. He would consider it a travesty and a slander to boot to portray him as any sort of embodiment of the Nietzschean will to power. But let us observe more closely our businessman at work. Let us imagine that he is charged with opening a new venture in his company chain of plants, be it in cars, or cosmetics, or computers. Nothing philosophical will enter his mind. He will restrict himself to the merely practical or objective matters at hand. Strangely enough this restriction to the mere practical is a level of abstraction which men of other epochs did not possess. It is a level achieved over many centuries which ultimately comes to be taken for granted. Our entrepreneur businessman will diligently calculate men and materials as so many units to be added, sub- tracted, balanced against each other. Men are considered work-force to be manipulated and objectified like other business factors. Products are broken down into categories and then rebuilt into a persona in order to compete on the market: the persona of bananas, the persona of olive oil, etc. There is nothing here of the Machiavellian and the conspiratorial. He proceeds in a natural objective mode of managing a problem whose overt aim is the fulfilling of desires (advertised as needs but often only wants) while the covert aim remains that of profits and power. As a good CEO He breaks the problem up into compartmentalized areas of specialization: the financial, the engineering, the transportation of raw materials, the marketing, the investing, etc. Nature enters his scheme only as a place selected for optimizing production and profits, for its closeness to raw materials, transportation, markets. Sometimes nature will have to be modified and changed forever. So he proceeds to do that wholly unconcerned with environmental consequences. To mention an example of this environmental disregard, Mitt Romney, in his recent presidential campaign, exhibited a complete unconcern with the rising level of the sea. He transformed into a not so funny joke a concern previously expressed by his political rival President Barack Obama declaring that while his rival would stop the rising level of the sea, he would provide jobs for his electors. Obviously what was more important to him and his minions was that his wife should own two Cadillacs and that everybody else should have a job and possess at least one car, never mind that they would be driving it under water once the low lands of the world, such as Florida, were submerged by the rising sea. Unconcerned about environmental issues, our brave new entrepreneur of our brave new world will go on with his schemes and ventures and practical planning complete with detailed cost and benefits’ analysis. To sell the products, shopping centers will appear, roads to get there will be built. Progress and the momentum of technology, that is to say “modernity,” is indeed truly unstoppable. It is like the train we saw apotheosized in the introduction to the London Olympics a year or so ago. It represents “progress” and it is unstoppable. The products of one place will enter the market of another place to be calculated in relation to other products from other regions or other countries. This is often called the “globalization” process, also unstoppable and a sign of progress and entrepreneurial success. This is indeed a commonplace phenomenon in industrial life but the crucial question is this: are we able to grasp it as a whole before falling back on the usual clichés against the evils of capitalism and technology and the exploitation of the workers? For in point of fact it is not the greedy entrepreneurial capitalist or the faceless corporation which is imposing its will on us. It is the corporation which is doing our will, for we the consumers want more and more of its products. And here we arrive at the conundrum of technology. Man besides being the Aristotelian rational animal is also the problematic animal. It is to be expected that an essential part of his current existence, his technology should also be problematic, despite its great advantages. Here Heidegger’s analysis becomes relevant. For indeed we now need all the resources of technical organization to simply maintain alive the current population of our planet. It is a fact often forgotten by luddites naively promoting the abolition of the machine as such, that in the US in a less than one century we have been able to raise 50% of our people to a standard once enjoyed by only 1%, not to speak of the matter of human rights and individual liberty. Those in fact do not enter Heidegger’s scenario of history. His view seems to be neutral or theoretically indifferent to them which may partly explain his brief association with a rabid nationalism such as Nazism, a move on his part vehemently condemned by Benedetto Croce at the time. In any case Heidegger knows full well that Marxism just as much as capitalism, are the essential offspring of the technical era and can only be understood within that modern context. [To be continued in the next meeting of the Ovi Symposium on August 1, 2013] 6 An Observation from Paparella on Nannery and Paolozzi’s 3rd Meeting Presentations I’d like to briefly return to the insightful presentations of Nannery and Paolozzi at our third Ovi symposium meeting of July 4, 2013 in the light of Heidegger’s conception of the work of art as elucidated by Hubert L. Dreyfus in the above mentioned book in the essay “Nihilism, art, technology, and politics.” There Dreyfus informs us that it is Heidegger’s assertion that a work of art is anything that fulfills an interpretative function which he calls “truth setting itself to work.” He further tells us that the Greek temple is presented by Heide- gger as an example in the sense that “the temple held up to the Greeks what was important and so let there be meaningful differences such victory and disgrace, disaster and blessing…that gave direction and meaning to their lives…Heidegger would say that the understanding of what it is to be changes each time a culture gets a new artwork.” (p. 297). My perplexity is this: does this understanding of “what it is to be” change also when the medium of an artwork, such as music or painting or sculpture is degraded or destroyed? Could Heidegger be talking about paradigm shifts in culture, that is to say, paradigmatic human events producing a shared understanding in a whole culture? Moreover, could a shared understanding become a shared misunderstanding and a shared retrogression once a culture begins to decline and eventually dies? And if so what is the role of philosophy then and how does art remain autonomous from it? Vico tells us that man can only fully know what he himself makes but if what he makes (art and philosophy) are in decline can they still remain autonomous but friendly to each other? Can philosophical aesthetics judge art and vice versa? Was Croce’s aware of the Heideggerian insight on the role of an artwork and if so how, if at all, does it differ from his own aesthetic theory on the role of an artwork within historical epochs in shaping the very destiny of a civilization or culture? I suppose what I am driving at is this: can a decadent culture or civilization ever be able to judge the achievements of past epochs? Vice-versa, can the full understanding of the achievements of past epochs restore the wholeness of a presently decaying civilization? Chapter 5

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

(Fifth Meeting: 1 August 2013)

Table of Content for the Fifth Meeting of the Ovi Symposium Section 1: “Thoughts on Architecture,” a presentation by Dr. Nannery’ Section 2: Sundry comments by Dr. Paparella on Dr. Nannery’s presentation on architecture Section 3: “Art and Morality,” a presentation by Dr. Paolozzi Section 4: A letter by Max Horkheimer to Croce’s widow upon the passing of the great philosopher, with comments by Drs. Paolozzi and Paparella Section 5: “On Modern Nihilism: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Utopia, Extinction” Part 2 A presentation by Dr. Paparella 1 Thoughts on Architecture A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery I. n this essay I shall talk about the kingly art of architecture, the art form that either houses the other arts, among other functions, and which displays in public a people’s proud accomplishments for all to see. Let me supply a few examples. What is signified by the Pyramids of Egypt? Power and stability are Idisplayed. After four or five thousand years they remain, largely intact. One might also say that they embody slavery, but this is probably only partially true. We now know that most of the engineers and workers who built these structures were well rewarded, and generally lived a good life. But still the pyramids were built with a religious purpose. The continuity of Egypt was predicated on the belief in the preservation of the Pharaoh’s body, and that was equal, in the eyes of the Egyptians, to the belief in the race itself. Counter to this, and not long after the appearance of Egypt’s power, the civilizations of Mesopotamia region. There one finds a different display of power: the processional way. These carvings on long avenues of rock were meant to impress one and all with the power of the rulers of such polities. One of these processional ways resides for the most part in a museum in Berlin, and it must be said that the workmanship of these objects are truly beautiful, and do impress the viewer. Other examples that are commonly cited as architecture as displays of power are many, and I will merely mention a few. In the High Middle Ages in Europe, castles were constructed for kings and noblemen, reflecting the vulnerability of life in those centuries. (Much the same characterized the larger works found in China and in Japan during the same period.) Somewhat coterminous with the castles were the Christian cathedrals, especially those of the High Middle Age, which, although treated as beautiful objects by many today, are actually repositories of ugly construction (gargoyles, for example), and absurdly childish beliefs in such things as relics and often the dead bodies of so-called saints. We should add the step-pyramids of Mexico, a widespread phenomenon that combined blood sacrifices with astronomy, with the mistaken belief that the Sun lacked energy and the shedding and drinking of human blood was the only thing that could restore the potency of the Sun. In sum, these efforts expressing beliefs and practices of that age were well expressed in stone in these latter two expressions of the spiritual needs and the beliefs of their time. In the modern age the physical sciences played a role in architecture. By 1850, European architecture proclaimed to one and all a new age, an age of progress, and the triumph of a confident and secular society. Its symbol is rightfully the Eiffel Tower, which, when built for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1870 (originally called the World Trade Center), was the tallest man-made structure in the world, and was only eclipsed by the Woolworth Building in the early 1900’s that today still stands close to the Financial Center on the island of Manhattan. This striving for verticality also represented power, but not power that emanates from a gun, but money. An interesting feature of what came to be called “skyscrapers”, not known to the general public is the effort to “quote” architectural features of other, classical forms of architecture, but these features had to be at least 30 stories above ground to see it on another building. This “quoting”, which did not survive the 1950’s, was designed by the captains of industry that owned these structures to impress other captains of industry and no one else. Almost all of these “quotes” are still there. Once again, power. But also an erudition that is likely faux. There is a family resemblance between modern architecture and modern painting in that they are based upon ideas and strategies from anyone and anywhere. This engenders a universal claim, and so the great skyscrapers that have dominated the skylines of most large cities today are enormously high, perhaps too high. It is important to note that what was called “The International School” after 1925 or so, is not like the soaring monsters that dominate the imagination, but are associated with the name of Philip Johnson, who practiced the opposite style of building relatively small, singular houses that are quite “pretty,” not an expression of power at all. In addition, in this style ornament is eschewed at all costs, since ornament was considered “sin.” One last point. These soaring buildings that might be taken to defy gravity, but few of them are beautiful. Also, despite what was said above about the phenomenon of the “quotings” referred to above, they can be read only by the very few, since they are too high to be seen by most people who work in those buildings, never mind people on the street. This leads to another point: by bulking the large office towers in certain areas (usually due to the type of rock that lies underground to support them), perspective is destroyed. One can only see a few buildings, and in partial views. The workers and bosses in these buildings are able to see a few stories of a few buildings, and therefore for them, magnificence is lacking. II. Another facet of this most universal of all the arts is that in planning there is a tendency to go from a building to a city, and so architecture tends then to become a totalist enterprise. For example, the Greeks tended to geometric figures in planning, which is therefore most pleasing. It is told that a whole city built in Greece was a circular entity. Unfortunately, the city, Heliopolis, “the city of the Sun,” has not survived to the point that we know exactly what it was like to live there. But the trend is obvious: for the Greeks, regular geometric shapes were always pleasing to contemplate, and therefore they drew the inference that a city as a circle would have to be a high accomplishment. The Romans, having achieved total power, imitated the Greek conception in broad outline, and most important, built landmark buildings in marble. They apparently avoided painting over the surfaces, which set the tone for such later cities as Washington, D.C. In the same vein, in times of disorder, even in the ancient world, walls were considered necessary to repel barbarians. Forefending possible barbarians at the gates, walls were a universal feature for every city’s population. Even today, walls that protected Rome from invasion dating to the fourth century B.C. can still be seen at the very doors of the main train station in Rome. Nothing concrete is known about them, but the main train station dates to the wartime period of the 1940’s, and it was situated to advertise the walls, which are very old indeed, because it shows the resilience and the prudence of Rome’s rulers. The Middle Ages were indelibly times of disorder, and just about every town in Europe during a thousand years had walls. People would not want to live in a city without walls, since barbarians roamed indefinitely, and life was very cheap. In the largest towns there were walls as well. Paris, for example, had city walls up until the late 19th century. Several street names even today carry the names of nearby gates in those walls. The walls were definitively torn down in the 1840’s, possibly because of the knowledge that they provided no defense against modern artillery. There are still some remnants of the actual wall still standing, but these are quite minor exceptions. More important, the destruction of the walls provided Haussmann with the opportunity to rebuild Paris. Haussmann tore down the walls and put in their place the “grand boulevards” which bordered the new luxury apartments of the nouveau riche of the city. III. There is a similarity between what I have stated in an earlier contribution about the universal sources of painting and here, in the field of architecture. In the modern age, inspiration may come from anywhere, and many ambitious architects have sought to use novel ideas taken from foreign practices and ideas that appeal to people in regions far away from the architect’s own origins. Two good examples of such borrowing would be the “processional ways” of entrances to the Louvre and also certain much-visited public buildings in Washington, D.C. Although these avenues, which are underground, were made for pragmatic reasons, viz., the intrusion of vehicles in huge parking lots, still, the artistic effect is very good. They are not displays of power, but of good taste. But, though there is nothing initially with this attitude, it may in the end cause neighborhoods under construction for burgeoning populations to be somewhat bewildered by the odd appearance of the buildings they are encouraged to live in. This often causes a backlash, where either no one at all wants to live in the new “development” or only the poor, who suffer from dilapidated conditions in their homes, will be forced to take what they can get. We see this in what is known as “public housing” in many cities in the USA, and “council housing” in Great Britain. Perforce, this was the situation in Germany and the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Though the buildings are indeed well built, people do not want to live in them, primarily because only the poor are eligible to live in them, and the residents suffer from a further derogation in social status whenever it becomes known that they reside “in the projects.” It is a stigma that is unfair in the main, but it does show that good housing for the poor, and good service in keeping the buildings in relatively good working order not only does not solve the status problems of the poor, but can, ironically, make them worse. Architects often slip unwittingly into city planning in the name of building a large development, which often entails the destruction of much old housing units. Again, even if the original plans are quite beautiful, practical considerations often cause the good intentions of the planners to fall far short of results that will please those who are destined to live within the confines of the development, not to mention the community of architects. It is useful to know that the same motions of mind and technique, when the development is for the rich, seldom entail any such negative elements. The case is, that those who can afford to buy into these condominia and cooperatives believe that they have earned a better life on that basis alone.

IV. Architecture as Art and as a Necessity

Architecture is as large and present in human space and time as anything else. Here is a short list of a few places that are expressed in architecture.

1. Religious Buildings 2. Art Museums 3. Educational Buildings 4. Government Buildings 5. Hospital Buildings 6. Family Homes 7. Warehouses 8. Prisons 9. Sport Stadiums 10 Tunnels 11. Public Memorials By now I suppose that the reader can understand what I am driving at. My claim is that almost everything is housed, and by one definition architecture provides the housing of certain people or objects. If the housing is an act of necessity then it may not be considered an important function. But, if the housing exists in order to tell the world or a smaller community the meaning of certain very important things that are the silent expressions of the sense of the community itself, then it is an artistic presentation. A litmus test as to whether a work by architects is to be taken as an artistic piece of work, or at least a significant work, depends upon whether the creators have done their work motivated by the desire or need to make a statement about the human condition or the virtues of a community. [1] See, for example, Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Fourth Edition.

Model of the Roman Forum 2

Sundry Comments by Paparella on Nannery’s Presentation on Architecture Larry, thank you for this fascinating excursus into the world of architecture. I learned much from it. Partic- ularly interesting to me is the distinction made between architecture as a show of power and architecture as symbolical of what is meaningful and relevant to a whole people. Here we are back to Heidegger’s conception of the Greek temple as a paradigm of ancient Greek culture and of art in general as an historical document of sort revealing the truth of a particular culture. Within such a paradigm we may perhaps include the Gothic cathedral of the late medieval period as both a symbol of the Catholic Church at the height of its political and moral influence and power, just before the Reformation and the Renaissance, and of the transcendence of God as symbolized by the prodigious height of such a cathedral with its pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and stained glasses. It is an intriguing fact for me that in the West much more wealth was spent on the gothic cathedrals of the 12th century than was spent for the space programs of the 20th century. Here we find an interesting nexus between art, economics and faith. The cathedrals seem to defy purely economic utilitarian considerations. Every time I visit one of those architectural masterpieces I am overwhelmed by their sheer beauty and majesty and the intimation of a transcendent reality that such beauty engenders. I am thinking here of the Rheims cathedral (see picture below), just to mention one of a plethora of such structures. I am also thinking of the gothic style of some of the oldest universities in the world, in one of which I studied in for four years (Yale University) when pursuing my doctorate in the 70s. One entered its library of four million books as if one entered a gothic cathedral with reverence and awe (see picture below). There are two interpretations possible upon viewing the Yale Sterling library: one can view the majesty of the architecture as intimating that knowledge is power or one may interpret the beauty as an idea related to truth and goodness and leading to wisdom. One’s philosophy of education may well dictate which choice one opts for. In any case, I think it is a misnomer to call those architectural structures “gothic” (some even double the insult by dubbing the Yale architecture “pseudo gothic,”) as if to imply that they are primitive and barbaric. Voltaire and his anti-religious “enlightened” modern cohorts are partly responsible for such a misnomer, if there ever was one. To my mind gothic cathedrals and architectural structures are among the most beautiful and priceless works of art ever devised by man’s genius, appealing to emotions based either in faith or civic pride and giving the lie to those who insist that the medieval epoch was primitive and retrograde when compared to modernity. Of course in judging those architectural structures one has to distinguish their religious-moral value from their artistic value, as Croce and Ernesto and yourself have well pointed out. Perhaps we three contributors to this symposium, not to speak of Christopher Dawson of The Making of Europe fame, can agree on this much, that despite Voltaire or Marx’s stance or any other stance inimical to religion and Christianity or the Catholic Church (the last acceptable bias in a politically correct society) the gothic cathedrals will forever remain inestimable autonomous works of art in themselves, independent of their importance to faith or the historical testimony they lend to the so called God intoxicated century of faith (the 12th). One more brief observation: there is an American Vico scholar worth mentioning to the Ovi readers who may have something to add to what you have just presented. For decades now he has been delving with the nexus between architecture and the poetic philosophy of Giambattista Vico. I am referring to Professor Donald Kunze of Pennsylvania State University who first studied architecture at N. C. State University (B.A in Architecture) received his Ph.D. in cultural geography in 1983 and subsequently taught architecture studio and theory at Pen State. I highly recommend his book dealing with the philosophy of place of Vico titled Thought and Place:The Imagination and Memory of Eternal Places in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico and examining the operation of metaphoric imagination and memory in landscape, architecture, and art. Also worth perusing is his co-edited book Commonplaces with John Pickles and David Black, plus his Four Concepts of Virtuality to Reconstruct the Civic in Architecture, as well as his Architecture Post Mortem:The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death, edited with Professor C. David Bertolini (Louisiana State University), and Simone Brott (Queensland University of Technology, Australia) a volume which was part of the Ashgate Series of Studies in Architecture. It surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. Some of the reviews to be found on line have this to say on such a book: “as the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an ‘Alamo’ of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death.” I would just add that particularly interesting in this regard is the introduction by Donald Kunze “The Way Things Are,” Todd McGowan’s essay “The Psychic Constitution of Space,” and David Bertolini’s essay “Ethics and Architecture” dealing with the thorny issue of art and morality (the theme treaded in today’s meeting by Ernesto Paolozzi).

The Rheims’ Gothic Cathedral

Yale University’s Gothic architecture The Yale University Sterling Memorial Library

The inside Gothic Nave of the Yale University Sterling Memorial Library: The largest academic library in the United States housing some four million volumes

Exterior Gothic Front of Yale University Sterling Memorial Library

Inside Gothic style of the Yale University Sterling Memorial Library 3 Art and Morality A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (Translated form his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce) Croce writes that “a third negation, which is accomplished via the theory of art as intuition, is that of conceiving art as a moral act …An artistic image may indeed portray an act that is morally approvable or disapprovable, however the image itself, qua image, is neither morally approvable or disapprovable. Not only there is no criminal code which can condemn an image to death or to jail, but no moral judgment by a rational being can make it his object: it would be like judging as immoral Dante’s Francesca or moral Shakespeare’s Cor- delia…as to judge a square moral and a triangle immoral. (Breviario di estetica, in Nuovi saggi di estetica, pp. 13-14). It is this particular aspect of Croce’s aesthetics which has with greatest probability and more than any other given rise to controversies. In fact the moralistic conception of art is well represented in the history of aesthetics, is pervasive in the most varied philosophical conceptions and is close to that common sense which tends to judge reality in a moralistic key. As the same Croce reminds us, it is this position which, while at times criticized by the critics, has as its supporters eminent representatives such as Parini, Alfieri, Manzoni, Mazzini (even if the last one often contradicts it) and it also had the important function of contradicting another misguided theory, that of the identification of art with purely hedonistic pleasure. As Croce puts it: “The moralistic theory of art is also represented in the history of aesthetic theories, and it never died even if today it is discredited; discredited not only for its inherent lack of merit, but also in part because of the current lack of morality within some modern tendencies, which render easy, albeit psychologically uncomfortable, a refusal which ought to be made only for logical reasons as we do here. This moralistic doctrine is derived from the goal given to art of guiding to what is good, to inspire the rejection of evil, to correct and improve social customs and the request submitted to artists to contribute to the civil education of the masses, to the strengthening of the national militaristic spirit of a people, to the spreading of ideals of industrious and modest life, and so on. All things which art cannot accomplish, just as geometry cannot accomplish, which despite this inability does not lose its respectability, and there is no reason why art should lose it. (Ibidem, p. 14). This, up to now, is the clearest and least controversial part of the Crocean theory, given that it cannot be denied that art is distinct from morality as it is from philosophy, since were it not so, it would no longer be art but philosophy or morality. The complications ensue as soon as Croce attempts, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, to understand the terms of the nexus between art and the other forms of human activity, ethics in particular. The problem is dealt with in Croce’s more mature essays after establishing that at best morality can be subject matter for art, and then attempting to show that art has its own intrinsic morality and that at the basis of art one can only posit the moral personality. As Croce puts it: “Therefore the foundation of every poetry, is human personality, and since human personality culminates in human morality, the foundation of every poem is moral consciousness. It is understood that with this we are not affirming that the artist has to be a deep thinker and critic, not that he needs to be an exemplary or even an heroic man; but he does need to have that participation in the world of thought and action which allows him to live by his own direct experience or in sympathy with that of others, the full human drama.” With those words, Croce is reemphasizing that we ought not look into contends for the morality of art, but rather in the success of the artistic expression. In fact, just as it is true that artists who “close themselves to human emotions and the anxiety of thought, end up as sterile, at best they succeed by imitation or by a disconnected impressionism” it is also true that on the other hand, it is not necessary “to possess a moral personality to be a poet and an artist.” Further exemplifying, what is immoral in art is present when the artistic expression is modified for ends that are not aesthetic, to get publicity, to divulge a political or philosophical idea or, as it now does not appear paradoxical, to transmit a moral message. This new position of Croce has given rise to a great span of very interesting interpretations. Certainly the emphasis on moral strength intrinsic to poetry, as we have seen, was controversial vis a vis the ruling Dan- nunzianism, just as the renewed critique against didacticism was controversial vis a vis fascism. On a purely philosophical plane, these reflections in the field of aesthetics ought to be located within the mature phase of Croce’s thought where ethics seems to lose its categorical character of a category among other categories (since there is no such thing as a work of art that is only ethical; works of art are either aesthetic or logical or useful and ethics pervades them all) in order to assume a wider meaning of categorical mode.

Plato and Aristotle, detail from Raphael’s School of Athens 4 A Letter from Max Horkheimer to Croce’s Widow upon the Passing of the Great Philosopher Coordinator’s comment: I have Ernesto Paolozzi’s expressed permission to translate and include in this fifth meeting of the Ovi symposium the following letter by Max Horkheimer forwarded by him and dating back to the passing of Benedetto Croce in 1952. It is a heartfelt condolence letter but it is much more than that; it is also a glowing eulogy for the disappearance of one of the greatest philosophers of all times, and the reasons why his passing represented at the time a real loss for the philosophical community and for Western culture in general. Ernesto insightful comment accompanying such a letter and as also translated by me is the following: “No- tice please how the letter grasps the full sense of the autonomy of art, of the originality of modern historicism vis a vis Hegel…and so many other things, all admirably condensed in a brief letter.” To such a statement I would simply add that the real intellectual tragedy, unbeknown to Horkheimer at the time, ensued only later when for decades Croce was all but ignored and forgotten in philosophical academic and non-academic circles. In the light of my last symposium’s presentation, the reader ought to also take notice that Heidegger, who was still alive at the time, is alluded to via an explicit mention of fascism and the fascist mind-set to which Croce had always been a “manifest enemy.” Also noteworthy, Horkheimer’s last paragraph of the letter which, despite the post-mortem unfortunate neglect of Croce, remains even today a sort of prophecy on his philosophy; namely that, despite the vicissitudes and uncertainties of history, it will long endure based on its own merits and be transmitted to posterity as one of the most insightful philosophy of aesthetics ever imagined. Gentile signora, A nome della facoltà di Filosofia dell’Università Johann Wolfang Goethe, che ha conferito allo scomparso la laurea honoris causa, Le vorrei esprimere le nostre sincere e profondamente sentite condoglianze. Siamo del tutto consapevoli della gravità di questa perdita: Benedetto Croce è veramente insostituibile. Non è esagerato affermare che egli appartiene ai pochi che, dopo un’epoca in cui la filosofia, il pensiero sulla verità come sul tutto, ha minacciato di scomparire tra le scienze positive, ne hanno restituito la dignità. Che egli abbia fatto questo nel contesto della grande tradizione tedesca, la cui eredità oggi, dopo il crollo dell’antispirito fascista, è diventata doppiamente attuale, ce lo rende particolarmente vicino. Egli, tuttavia, non appartiene agli epigoni che intendevano ristabilire una metafisica ormai superata, ma ha recuperato la tradizione della filosofia speculativa a partire dall’esperienza concreta della sua propria situazione. Proprio questo,infatti, lo ha condotto ad Hegel, in uno spirito in cui premeva,nel sistema dell’idealismo obiettivo, ciò che è vivo e non ciò che è morto. Tale forza di Croce nel portare avanti la tradizione del pensiero specula- tivo senza cedere al pericolo dell’accademismo né del romanticismo, può essere paragonata solamente a quella di Henri Bergson. A differenza di questo, però, egli non si è fermato ad un principio metafisico astratto e generico, ma si è addentrato, sforzando fino in fondo il concetto, nelle strutture profonde delle idee. Ciò gli ha permesso una cosa che era preclusa proprio ai pensatori idealisti del suo tempo, di affrontare la problematica della società reale, di non limitarsi a riconoscere il nesso tra questioni sociali attuali e cosid- dette questioni filosofiche fondamentali, ma di esprimere tale conoscenza attraverso la propria esistenza. Sbagliamo ben poco se sosteniamo che fu, non ultima,la forza della sua visione teorica che gli rese possibi- le respingere senza incertezze tutte le tentazioni rivolte a lui da un pensiero vincolato all’autorità e confor- mista, che sarebbero potute diventare pericolose per ogni altra persona della sua estrazione e posizione. E noi crediamo che da ciò abbia anche origine la straordinaria autorità oggettiva che promanò da lui, nemico di ogni infondata pretesa autoritaria, e che impedì allo stesso Mussolini di eliminare il nemico manifesto del sistema fascista. Non solo per questo, e non solo nella cerchia dell’ambiente scientifico, tuttavia, percepiamo così doloro- samente il fatto che egli ci abbia lasciato. Ciò che egli ha compiuto nel campo dell’estetica riguarda ogni uomo che sia ancora padrone dell’esperienza spirituale e che non si consegni ciecamente al meccanismo dell’industria culturale. Egli, che proveniva dalla critica letteraria,è stato forse, dai tempi di Hegel, il primo filosofo importante che abbia avuto contemporaneamente un rapporto vivace, spontaneo ed originario con l’arte, riflettendo in piena responsabilità teorica sulla questione dell’arte. La sua visione fondamentale, secondo cui l’opera d’arte non può essere misurata in base al suo concetto di genere, senza che vada perduta la basilare questione relativa alla verità o alla falsità dell’opera stessa, ha avuto una forza liberatrice che si perpetua tuttora nell’esperienza artisti cadi innumerevoli persone, che non sanno nemmeno che tale contri- buto teorico, l’emancipazione dell’estetica dal pensiero classificatorio, si deve a Croce. Anche se noi ora, gentile Signora, le diciamo che il ricordo di colui che ci ha lasciati, in veneranda età e dopo una ricchissima vita, rimarrà sempre presente, tale promessa da sola non eguaglia comunque la verità del fatto che il valore della filosofia di Croce si spiegherà e vivrà per propria forza esclusiva, indipendentemente dal grande personaggio che ebbe la fortuna di concepire quella filosofia. Forse in ciò Lei potrà trovare un po’ di consolazione. Translation: Dear Mrs. Croce, In the name of the school of Philosophy of the University Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which has conferred to the late Benedetto Croce the doctorate honoris causa, we’d like to express our sincere and deep sympa- thies. We are very conscious of the enormity of this loss: there is only one and there are no substitutes for Bene- detto Croce. It is no exaggeration to assert that he belongs to those few philosophers who, after an epoch when philosophy, thinking on truth and everything else, has run the danger of disappearing among the positivistic sciences, have restored its dignity to it. The fact he was able to do this within the context of the great German tradition whose heredity today, after the demise of an anti-spiritual fascism, is doubly relevant and renders him particularly dear to us. Nevertheless, he does not belong to the epigones which intended to re-establish a passé metaphysics, but to those who have recuperated the tradition of speculative philosophy beginning the concrete experience of one’s own existential situation. It is this, in fact, which has led us to Hegel, in a spirit which emphasized, in the spirit of objective idealism, what is alive rather than what is dead. This great accomplishment of Croce, that of carrying forward the tradition of speculative thought without giving in to the temptation of academic foibles or romanticism, can only be compared to that of Bergson. However, as distinct from the latter, that of Croce did not stop at an abstract and generic metaphysical principle, but went beyond pushing the envelope to the utmost within the deep structures of ideas. This allowed him to do something that was beyond reach of the idealist thinkers of his time, to confront the real social problematic of his times, without limiting oneself to the identification of the nexus between current social issues and the so called fundamental philosophical issues, thus expressing this knowledge arrived at via one’s own existence. We are confident that we do not err when we assert that it was the strength of his theoretical vision which allowed him to refute without any hesitation all the temptations which aimed at him from the kind of conformist thought tied to authority, which could have become dangerous for any other person in his position and in his abreaction. We are convinced that from this strength originates an extraordinary objective authority which he exuded which stopped the same Mussolini from eliminating the manifest enemy of the fascist system. And we perceive the sad fact that he is no longer with us not only within the context of the scientific scholarly environment. What he accomplished in the field of aesthetics has relevancy for every man who is still in charge of his own spiritual experience and does not blindly surrender to the mechanism of cultural production. He, who came from literary criticism, has been, perhaps from Hegel’s times, the first important philosopher who has possessed both a spirited, spontaneous original connection with art, reflecting as he did, with full theoretical, on the issue of art. His fundamental vision according to which a work of art cannot be measured on the basis of its concept of genre, without losing the basic issue of truth or falsehood of the work itself, has given us a liberating force which is still felt today in the experience of artists and innumerable people who do not even know yet that such a theoretical contribution, i.e., the emancipation of aesthetics from the classifying thought, is mainly due to Croce. Dear kind lady, even if we now tell you that the memory of he who left us, at such venerable age and after a full and rich life, will remain forever alive within us, nevertheless this promise by itself is not the equivalent the truth of the fact that the value of Croce’s philosophy will continue to grow and live by its own intrinsic merits, independent from the great person who had the fortune of conceiving that philosophy. Perhaps in that thought you may be able to find a modicum of consolation. 5

On Modern Nihilism: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Utopia, Extinction: part 2

A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

“We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment.” --Professor Norbert Wiener Who is master, who is servant in the previously described technical framework? Hard to tell. Heidegger has recourse to the German word Gestell. The verb stellen has a special resonance in philosophy since Kant. As far as Kant is concerned, there is no difference in the idea of a thing as merely possible and the idea of the same thing as actually existing. Fifty possible dollars is the same amount as fifty real dollars. The difference is to be found not in the concept itself but in the judgment of existence by which we posit the second. The reality of the thing, as far as judgment is concerned, derives from the act of the will that establishes it as real. Obviously that simple word Gestell possesses a link with the philosophy of the will. The framework is the expression of man’s will to power when it comes to coping with nature, it is ourselves in our collective life, and yet it seems to elude our will, it seems to live a life of its own. It would indeed be ridiculous to declare that one is against technology. To do that is to be against ourselves in our present existence. We are now completely dependent on technology. Our means of communication are increasingly shaped by it. Technology dictates the horizon within which our human future needs to be planned. It is indeed our mode of Being in our distinct historical epoch. Will we eventually see around it and grasp another mode of Being? Which is to hint at this question: Will there be a new humanism? The task of philosophy is neither the rejection nor the affirmation of technology, but rather an attempt to see where technical and technological thinking, with no other principle but itself, will ultimately lead us. Most importantly, the task of philosophy is to determine whether or not a countervailing mode of thought may be urgently called for. There is no doubt that as Heidegger clearly perceived, technology poses problems that did not exist before and have to be solved rather urgently. This, as Bill Gates likes to point out, impels us to continue to perfect our technology. If each steps creates and imbalance we are compelled to take another step toward a more perfect and comprehensive technology which will rectify the imbalance. This is obviously a drive toward totality which seems to be inherent in technology. In some way we are compelled to aim at utopia or be condemned to witness Western civilization collapse upon itself, a victim of the technological problems it has failed to solve. The question naturally arises: Is our choice then between utopia and extinction? A few months ago (on 2 February 2013) an article by Christos Mouzeviris appeared in Ovi magazine titled “Defending European Values and Culture.” In it one finds this statement: “We invest and subsidize almost everything in Europe, why can’t we treat our art as a commodity as well?” That is a statement which is probably shared by many in Western civilization on both sides of the Atlantic ocean and is well worth pondering, for indeed the way one interprets it determines whether or not the right diagnosis and prognosis will be proposed for what presently ails Western Civilization. If that statement wishes to indicate a desire to imitate or parrot the American culture industry in order to defend and promote a European one, it would mean that the real sickness has not been diagnosed properly and the prognosis will be misguided as well. Marx for one would certainly reject reducing art to a mere commodity and propaganda for one’s pet culture. What is needed is an authentic alternative, not a parroting. So, we are back to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, or the kind of culture clash that is still ongoing in both Europe and America. Here is the same mortal sickness seen under different perspectives and viewpoints. We can go back all the way to 1861 and Charles Baudelaire “Le Fleur du Mal” and discover there the term “Americanization” a designation for which he is given credit together with the idea of “modernity” where he proclaims that “technology shall Americanize us all.” How did he mean it? There, I suggest, is the correct diagnosis, in the identification of what is alleged to be modern to what is progressive as the particular malady of the modern condition. This is best seen when Baudelaire writes that “…so far will machinery have Americanized us, so far will Progress have atrophied in us all that is spiritual, that no dream of the Utopians, however bloody…will be comparable to the results.” A bit closer to our times, in the 20th century (in 1929) Bertolt Brecht refers in a poem to America’s films, records, and “chewing gum” and ironically notes that “Americans seem destined to rule the world by help- ing it to progress. Back to “inevitable progress” and misguidedly considering what is the latest as the most modern and the most desirable and the most progressive. Paradoxically, Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist party, actually lamented the “anti-Americanism of the European petty bourgeois” and wondered in his writings if Henry Ford’s methods might be turned to socialist ends. Even closer to our times and certainly more shocking for those who wish to blame all that ails Europe on its Christian heritage while advocating its demise, we have Pope John Paul II who in a speech to the EU Parliament in 1988 had this to say on the perceived decadence of EU culture: “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 .” As I said, different perspectives lead to different diagnosis; and different diagnosis lead to different prognosis. The businessman Bill Gates, being a bit more reflexive and socially conscious than the businessman Mitt Romney, who is merely interested in the accumulation of wealth to be stored in Swiss bank accounts or in Caiman Islands or the grabbing of political power, remains confident in the achievement of eventual utopia. But let us not forget that the word utopia as coined by Thomas More literally means “nowhere” in ancient Greek.” Gates, as most of us, wants to avoid oblivion but this implies more than mere survival. As the existentialists Kierkegaard and Heidegger point out, we’d like to have some meaning and significance in our lives, for while life becomes ever more mechanically perfect, we do not wish to be surprised by the fact that utopia and oblivion may coincide after all. Utopia could mean rupture with our past and the oblivion of its inheritance, particularly in the arts. For it is the rub of imperfection which brings out the particular and the individual. One cannot write a story of two people who were perfectly happy together. That kind of private utopia would spell the monotony of oblivion and eventual extinction. Once mankind has been condemned to utopia, which some have called “the end of history,” it would have to re-create a religion of some kind to restore meaning to its existence. We are now in the midst of an energy crisis which represents a serious challenge to human kind. But as serious as such a challenge is, we still need to answer the question of whether or not the drive to totality is integral part of modern technology. Which is to say, we may need to ask the question Are we still able to stop and if so when and where do we stop the so called inevitable “march of progress” reduced to the successful selling of shampoo and sushi? As we have already seen, humanists of the 19th century (the likes of Matthew Arnold) complained about an oppressive deterministic modern technology suffocating the humanities. That kind of technology now seems primitive to us. As Norbert Wiener observed in the 1940s “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment.” Again, where does it stop and what is the danger of dehumanization? Behaviorist like Skinners are logical in this respect: they doubt the a new material Jerusalem can be built as long as one carries the old Adam within oneself. That is to say, human beings need to be re-engineered too. What is needed is a technology of human behavior, a science by the name of behaviorism. One needs to attack the problem at its roots: at the level of the human genes. Genetic engineering with its recombination of DNA may indeed be the final solution. After all the pursuit of knowledge is always fraught with danger, or why did God provide us with intelligence if we are not allowed to intervene in the process of life? This line of reasoning begins to feel rather similar to the conundrum in the garden of Eden with its forbidden tree of life. Closer to our times it is reminiscent of the theory of the super-race and the eugenic experiments of the Nazis. So, what does Heidegger mean when he declares that “the essence of technology is danger”? Does he have in mind the Gulf oil spill of a few years ago? Not really. The danger he has in mind is far more serious and menacing; it is that of totalizing technology which lifts humankind to a level where it has to confront problems with which scientific or technical thinking is not prepared to cope. Let us assume for a moment that we have arrived at complete competence in genetic manipulation. What will we then do with this power? What kind of life will we foster? What human traits will we seek to engender? Can technique by itself determine a philosophy? And if not where shall we get the wisdom to use this power wisely? It would appear that such a wisdom may have to come from another kind of thinking, one at which a technical civilization may have become wholly incompetent, if for no other reason than trough lack of practice. Finally, a few concluding remarks on the ongoing dehumanization of man in the light of the detailed analysis we have conducted on the modern businessman and his unshakable trust in science and technology to solve all his existential problems. Socrates 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 a more profound 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 the self?” Those are questions acutely felt by those perceptive modern men who feel themselves “thrown into existence,” as Heidegger puts it, in a world largely devoid of meaning, condemned to play certain roles within certain social structures oriented toward consumerism, production, success, and material affluence. Ques- tions that Thoreau already attempted to address way back in 1847 with his reflections on Walden Pond. Closer to us, Jacques Ellul explores extensively the modern phenomenon of what he dubs a value-free technological “efficient ordering” which pervades all aspects of modern life since Descartes (see his The Betrayal of the West and The Technological Society, 1964). Previous to Jacques 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. As already argued, we live in two cultural worlds which hardly 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 dialectical class conflicts that is. Alas, 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” 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 of centripetal concentration. In his famous Pensee 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 Freud- ianism 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, perhaps the other face of the coin of Nietzsche’s “Overman,” not to be confused with the rather silly “Superman” of the comics, 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 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/she the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition or that of the philosophers, of Plato’s or Descartes or Spinoza) 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 washes 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; that is to say, a new humanism. 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 by the entrepreneurs of this world. It is that picture that this symposium is attempting to recreate. 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” identified within the brain, when this “trans-human” world has come to pass, then indeed the sickness may be terminal. For when the I is lost, one cannot even grieve over its loss. And Ki- erkegaard who is the father of existentialist philosophy 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, 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. Here one wishes that Heidegger had applied his own insights to his own life thus providing us with a better more existential example. Not for nothing Croce chided him when he misguidedly joined the Nazi party and thought he had heard the voice of Being in Hitler. Tony Judt coined the word “misremembering” by which he meant that we commemorate the Holocaust once a year via museums and monuments and a conference or two and then we go our merry way oblivious of the lessons of such a momentous event. For 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 genuine reconciliation requires remembrance, acceptance, the asking of forgiveness, the granting of forgiveness, repentance, reparation. When these are missing reconciliation becomes a mockery. It becomes oblivion and self-forgetfulness, even extinction. As Dante, Vico and Croce have been trying to teach us for centuries now, to be human is to be forced to ask about one’s self and one’s history, 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.

Detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens

Chapter 6 “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

(Sixth Meeting: 13 August 2013)

Table of Contents for the 6th Meeting of the Ovy Symposium Section1: “Cinema: The Complete Art Form,” a presentation by Dr. Lawrence Nannery Section2: An addendum to the topic of Cinema as a form of art by way of a chapter from Dr. Paparella’s Ovi e-Book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers: “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Art as Auratic: the Nexus between Modern Art and Technology” (chapter 10). Section3: “The Indivisibility and Infinity of Art: Abnormal Activity of Aesthetics,” a presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce. Section4: “Vico and the Modern Idea of History, part 1,” a presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella. Section5: A note on Vico’s Frontispiece to The New Science by the symposium’s coordinator. Section6: “ Art and Technology,” by way of a response from Dr. Paolozzi to Drs. Nannery and Paparella’s Treatment of Art and Technology, from a chapter in his book L’estetica di Croce. 1 Cinema: The Complete Art Form A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery believe that the cinema has always been the “Complete Art Work” sought by every high civilization since the Greek democracy under Pericles. In German, the term is Gesamtkunstwerk, used by Wagner to describe his operas. For they had myth, I dance, song, music and drama rolled into one. So, however poor Wagner may have been at writing libretti, however uninteresting the songs were, and however hokey his mythology may have been, the concept of a work of art that uses every available resource in one work has been the ideal, but one seldom achieved. My thesis in this essay is show that the cinema, created in 1896 by the Lumiere brothers, has for many decades achieved what Wagner claimed for his operas. Following in the footsteps of Rudolph Arnheim, I want to put forward some rudiments of such an argument. I shall do so, not by examining in detail the history of cinema, about which there are so many good books already, but by taking all the elements of the arts, and showing how the cinema successfully uses all of them, often using them to better effect than the art form in which they were first used. These elements are: (1) language, sung or spoken; (2) spatial depth; (3) action, either in motion or in emotions in dramatic sequences; (4) time and space in infinite variety as settings for action; (5) emotional meanings at every level, and in depth and nuance; (6) background music, which colors the tone of the actions and emotions; and (7) intimacy of speech, such as an aside to the audience, a whisper, or an internal monologue. There are many others as well, such as mise en scene. If I can show these elements to be present in most movies, then I shall have made my case that it is the most liberal, most inclusive of all the arts in all history, and has an added, powerful effect on its audience as a matter of course, and requires less “suspension of disbelief” than any of the others. The large size of the screen is primarily responsible for this effect, because a wince of surprise or anguish is more powerful when it is 20 feet high and 20 feet wide than those of lesser dimensions. Writing in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Arnheim noted that most mistakes in criticism of the formal nature of film are made on account of a false analogy with painting and stage dramas. After all, these two are also have been thought of as purely visual media. But even if film were silent and without musical accompaniment this analogy would still be misleading, for immediately before the viewers’ eyes is action, and the unreality of the screen is felt much more deeply than almost any play’s. Those who made this analogy to painting could not be about action. Thus the cinema is not like paintings, and is much more unreal than any other art. It seems that those who admired belle époque painting, which emphasized similitude, was the reason for this poor judgment. Later styles of painting favored the flatness of the medium, thus making the unreality of painting evident, which should have put a dent in this prejudice. Let us not forget photography, which also depicts physical objects in the real world, with different laws from painting. In any event, film is very distinct from both painting and photography. But that is not the essential difference between film and painting or photography. If a filmmaker were to take an unmoving shot of a still object over a period of time, and during this time nothing moved, the result would be liminal, and arguably not a film. The late Norman McLaren, from Canada, made many short films in which he used only sequences of photographs of inanimate objects that were slightly repositioned again and again, and at each point a photo was taken, and, by stringing them together in a sequence a resemblance to motion was achieved. But these efforts never achieved any widespread acceptance because it is not filmic, for film depicts motion, not the elements of motion, physical or emotional or both. This is the reason why films go by the names of Kino, Ciné, and Moving Picture. Let us take a look at depth as an element in the cinema. Depth is never missing in cinema, not even when auteurs decide to give their images a flat texture. This gives an initial advantage to realism, since all real objects in our common visual experience are three-dimensional. The “unreality” of cinema consists in the fact that a two-dimensional medium gives us at all times the illusion of three-dimensionality. It does seem paradoxical to some that depth should be supplied by a medium that is a strip of film not more than a few millimeters thick. But that is the magical thing: most 20th century art forms violate the dogma of literalism that dominated in the arts in the 19th century. But it was never true that the medium must be of the same nature as the things depicted. What does the word “laugh” in a novel have to do with actual laughter in real life? Art depicts, and “representation” means “presenting again.” This fact frees the artist up to use any technique he chooses to achieve any effect he chooses. A fortiori, non-representational art forms were always free of this error, necessarily so. In the arts we are always free, whether we know it or not. Those who prefer the stage to the cinema often argue that it is “more real” than the latter. This is a naïve assertion because it assumes that “natural” things should be depicted by “natural” techniques. But there is no such thing as a technique that is natural. And, more, what is experienced in watching a film completely belies this confidence in “naturalism”. From a logical point of view, it does seem that this cannot be so, because the reality is three-dimensional and the medium is not. After all, the Paris Opera House has the deepest stage set of any theater, I believe, even to this day. Yet the set designs fool no one in the audience. We must conclude that they are not actually designed to deceive, but only to make the audience suspend disbelief. A recent article of The New York Review of Books (May 10, 2012 ed.) takes note of a statement of Alfred Jarry in 1896: “I am absolutely convinced that a descriptive placard has far more ‘suggestive’ power than any stage scenery. No scenery, no array of walkers-on could really evoke ‘the Polish Army marching across the Ukraine’.” Indeed, just at that year of the birth of cinema it was perfectly correct to say this, since the stage can never do more than suggest large things, or things in depth, because the stage is not a fully realistic medium, despite the fact that the actors and the sets are themselves three-dimensional. The players in a stage play are three-dimensional, but they are not the characters they play, and the sets, similarly, are not the background objects they depict, but are there merely to suggest those objects, whatever they may be depictions of. So, we are forced to conclude that even the stage is not a fully realistic medium, any more than the cinema. If that is so, then why posit a difference between the two media? I answer: the difference lies in the degree of deception; in cinema it is complete. Here is a good example. What is the basis of the ability of the cinema to convey depth and the objects in those depths more definitively than any pseudo-realistic element of the stage? The superiority of film over stage lies in the fact that the illusion put forward in film is total. In film there is no depth, and yet depth is the phenomenon that the viewer is subject to, and totally confirmed instinctively by the brain and the eye. How is this possible? It was an accidental discovery, which is the most primitive level of technical discovery, according to Ortega y Gasset. Ortega would have said that the discovery was of necessity accidental. Iron- ic that! The cinema has an advantage in being able to dissemble movement in depth, using films of preshot materials to give the audience of a conversation, let’s say, taking place in an automobile, or, say, an army on the march. These kinds of shots are much more effective in giving the illusion of depth and motion than any stagecraft. Add longshots of large expanses of territory, and the picture in nearly complete. As Arnheim tells us, technical studies show that this effect is the result of stereoscopic recordings plus the slightly flatter and less stereoscopic nature of the human cornea. So, the magic of it is accidental. So be it. In sum, film is so versatile that it can be the most or the least realistic of all media. It can do whatever it chooses to do with depth, and with all the other elements of cinema as well. Kino gives the illusion of reality much more convincingly than either painting or the theater. That is the magic of the medium. The exterior and interior of a movie house

35 mm movie projector Poster Picture for Oscar Winning Cinema Paradiso 2 Note for section 2 of the 6th meeting of the Ovi Symposium from its coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella: By way of a pertinent addendum, comment and point of discussion on Larry Nannery’s insightful presentation on cinema as a form of art, I’d like to share a chapter from one of my Ovi e-book (chapter 10): Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers published in June 2013 and found in Ovi’s virtual bookstore. It introduces the readers to Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic theory on technology and art.

Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Art as Auratic: the Nexus between Modern Art and Technology (From chapter 10 of Paparella’s Ovi e-book: Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers) “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” --Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) t is hard to envision a philosopher of art that has reflected more deeply than Walter Benjamin (1892- 1940) on how the revolutionary changes in modern art have affected our understanding of art itself. Ben- jamin was a genial German Marxist philosopher and literary critic. For him the key to the understanding Iof modern art was modern technology, particularly photography and film. In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin theorizes the artwork’s loss of aura and how this loss alters the function of art in society. Concomitantly, Benjamin is concerned with the nexus between art and politics. One has to keep in mind that he was writing as Hitler came to power, the times of what Vico dubs “the barbarism of the intellect,” the times of “book burnings” (1933); also that he was a Jew. For his own mental and psychological survival, Benjamin had to keep alive within himself the hope that art somehow could be used in the struggle against Nazism. Benjamin’s concern in art is less that of providing a working definition of art than in understanding how the function of art has changed under capitalism and its cutting-edge technological innovations. He is particularly interested in understanding how “mechanical reproduction,” that is to say, the ability to copy works of art via purely technical means changes art’s social function. In this regard, the development of photography and film is of primary importance. Photography has the ability to reproduce an unlimited number of accurate copies, and film is that art form based on photography which makes it seem to reproduce the world in time as well as in space. The above preamble takes us to Benjamin’s main thesis. Basically it is this: the reproducibility of the artworks has caused their aura to decline. Why does Benjamin use the term aura? Because he is attempting to capture the reverence that earlier societies, often within religious contexts, had for works of art. To establish this claim Benjamin has recourse to an analogy between the structure of art object and commodities and goods produced for the market. He reminds us that in the first volume ofDas Kapital, Karl Marx had distinguished between the ability of a commodity to satisfy a human need (its use value) and its value on the market place (its exchange value), arguing that exchange value had come to predominate under capitalism. Analogously, Benjamin first distinguished the cult value of the artwork (its place within a cult as a unique object often hidden from view) from its exhibition value (its worth as an object accessible to all). Technological reproduction, he argues, makes the cult value of art recede in favor of its exhibition value. For Benjamin, this simply means that many of the ways philosophers have characterized art are no longer valid. For example, it is no longer possible to regard art as autonomous, art for art’s sake, a realm in which specific social interests have no part, as Kant and others had previously asserted thus creating a dichotomy between the aesthetic and the ethical. So, for Benjamin the burning question is whether or not art can have a positive political function, not excluding that of people joining a revolution against fascism. He remarks that fascists such as Hitler, Mussolini, Marinetti (the Italian originator of Futurism in art) had aesthetized politics with their mass demonstrations and rallies, to wit the movie Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl, starring none other than Adolph Hitler. Benjamin therefore proposes as antidote to this propagandistic mind-set, that art be politicized as a weapon in the struggle for social justice. As in Marx, there is a dialectic of sort working in Benjamin’s conception of art: in assessing the impact of technology on art, he sees the reproducibility of art in modern societies as destructive of its aura; but on the other hand the loss of aura makes possible a use of art that was previously unthinkable: art promoting a socialist revolution. The question than arises: is this nothing but the other side of the same coin? And what in fact happens to art in general, and particularly in the former Soviet Union, when art is so conceived (as propaganda for some form of social scheme)?

Walter Benjamin 3 The Indivisibility and Infinity of Art and the Above Normative Activity of Aesthetics A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (Translated from his book Croce’s Aesthetics by Emanuel L. Paparella) ike every human function Art is inexhaustible. According to Croce, it is evident that we cannot put limitations on artistic acts, just as we cannot exhaust by a determinate number of categories moral or useful acts. We can affirm that either metaphorically or as a controversial statement, art is dead, that there is no morality any longer, that values have vanished. These are expressions that have no Lreal philosophical meaning: every man in a way always performs moral actions, aesthetic actions and so on. Every man acts and thinks. Croce’s aesthetics as we have seen in the previous presentations, from a mere theoretical point of view, wished to define some general reference points, without intending (because it could not) define concretely the boundaries within which the aesthetic experience can be limited. We can assert that art is form of knowledge, a state of being of the cognitive intention, without being able to establish which are the infinite, cognitive acts of knowledge which can be realized through art. In this sense we can also assert that Croce’s aesthetics is formal, which is to say, it is not normative, but neither is it formalistic: Croce’s aesthetic in fact does not privilege style or form at the expense of content. This does not mean that the formality of aesthetics or of philosophy in general has no nexus with praxis which influences philosophy and vice versa, as the same Croce, going back to the Vichian, Hegelian, in some aspects Marxist tradition, clarified, especially in his book of 1938 revealingly titledHistory as Thought and as Action. We would go too far afield were we to pause to examine the very deep connections between theory and praxis. Here we will limit ourselves to examining the indirect aspect through which a philosophical theory, in our case aesthetics, determines a different orientation and behavior in those who get inspiration from such a philosophy and from which he/she is conditioned. To deny, for example, that art is a philosophy in nuce, tending to the education of human kind, is the equivalent of denying aesthetic value to those didactic works which can have other values but not aesthetic ones. In such a sense even the most formalistic philosophy is normative. Were it not so, even the pure formality of philosophy would end up in the useless. But what no philosophy can determine a priori, according to Croce, is which work can be considered didactic, which is to say aesthetic or not aesthetic, since that judgment belongs to the critics, or to the readers who operate at all times within concrete particular conditions determined by the taste of the times and individual predispositions. For all those reasons, from the general principles of Croce’s aesthetics derive a series of corollaries which address concretely the life of art and which with the passage of time have become the genuine matter of investigation for writers and critics. Particular motives have increasingly become the fundamental motive, leaving in the background the central theoretical issues. The very same activity of literary critic of Croce and his frequent returning to specific themes have led scholars and critics to focus on various questions, more than on the essence of Crocean thought. If art, as it is evident, is infinite and indivisible as a category or specific function, is equally evident that we could discuss particular problematic and issues which issue from the concrete life of works of art.

San Carlo Opera House in Naples Italy 4 Vico and the Modern Idea of History: Part I A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella t is intriguing to consider that within modern times (from Galileo and Bacon onward) the idea of global history was born in the European philosophical mind at the same time when European imperialism was at its culmination supported by science and technology as the definitive modern answer to all social, political and economic problems. Specifically, historicism is born with the publication of Giambattista Vico’s INew Science (1725) in the 18th century. Until then history was not considered universal but tribal and not worthy even to be called a science since it was not concerned with universal problems. The ancient Greek certainly did not consider it a pathway to truth, neither did Descartes. But by the 18th century, the so called age of enlightenment, the whole world could be envisioned as one stage wherein a single global drama could be played out. It was almost natural that Europe would arrive at the idea of universal history and see itself at the very center of its processes. Natural too that it should have put its meaning and interpretation in terms of Western Civi- lization. In fact, had there not been those early Greek thinkers who initiated philosophy as we know it, there would not be any science, not technology and no atomic bombs either; which is to say, without its origins in ancient Greece there would not have been no modern culmination of science and technology either. Vico has taught us that to understand the nature of any cultural historical phenomenon one must study its origins. To even begin to grasp the advent of our modern technical civilization and the entrepreneur’s mind- set we ought not begin with the scientific mind-set of the 17th century but with its origins, as Vico has well taught us, and situate the emergence of the new modern science within the larger background of Western history. We need to begin at the beginning of thought among the early Greek. When we focus on such origins we notice the strange fact that no such eruption of thought occurred in the ancient Oriental world. While it is true that the Chinese were (and still are) a highly intelligent people, that there is no indication that they were in any way at a lower intellectual level than the Greeks, they did not produce science, not even the beginning of science. There is little indication that, left on its own, they would have arrived at science. The contrary can be asserted: that the harmonious and well balanced patterns of Chinese civilization were against the reckless and dangerous adventure of the mind what we in the west call reason. While it is true that with Galileo the earth is no longer the center of the universe we have to keep in mind the bigger picture: that Greek science maintained that there an immediate bond between ourselves and nature. The motto for this nexus was Sozein ta Phainomena (to preserve things as they show themselves to be) which simply meant that the Greek scientist would preserve the nexus between natural objects and our direct perception of them. The question arises: why did philosophy which prepares the way for modern science originate among the Greeks? Why did it take place there? Why did it take place at all? To begin to answer this question we have to grasp the fact that human creation is not deterministic, human acts are unpredictable; that a new vision can go beyond any existing previous framework. That is to say, the outburst of light in ancient Greece need not have happened at all. The birth of philosophy cannot be reckoned as the effect of a cause. The birth of philosophy, its origins, so important to determine its essence for Vico, is the point at which Being comes into its own and claims mortal minds. There is no more split between subject and object, between thought and Being. As Parmenides first perceived, they belong together in unity. Being is the whole, the All calling to thought. There is intellectual awe at the thought that the human mind is capable of raising itself above all that is, that it is, that it exists. Hence the famous question: why is there something rather than nothing?, a question which begins Heide- gger’s Being and Time. A century and a half after Parmenides Aristotle brings to completion the great age of Greek philosophy. This century and a half from Parmenides to Aristotle is the most revolutionary and speedy acceleration of all of history. This may seem preposterous to us moderns but consider this: the period opens with Parmenides’ vision of Being as an intelligible whole within which human thought is to find its elements. It is like the sun at sunrise: its light is still perceived as one of the things of the phenomena. It closes with Aristotle mapping out various and distinct realms of beings mapped out into the territories of different disciplines, not changed that much since then: logic, mathematics as a deductive system, physics or natural science, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, economics. Science is born, albeit to be intelligible to itself it has to cling to the maternal apron strings of philosophy. Now we are at high noon; the light of the sun pervades everything and yet, just because it is so pervasive it is no longer consciously perceived; it is just there taken for granted and needs to be rediscovered and disclosed again For Aristotle to be is to be an individual entity of some kind, to exist is to be an individual instance of a species. So when the Greeks created philosophy proper they ceased to be aware of the light of Being itself in which they saw what they saw. The history of Being for Western thought begins therefore with the forgetting of Being. But the schematized world of Aristotle still has an inner unity which we moderns have lost without even being aware of it. That unity is the Greek sense of Physis which we translate as nature. Stones, plants, animals, stars, and planets still belong to the one cosmos within which man lives and has its being as a natural being. The cosmic alienation, the nihilism of us moderns, had not yet entered the Greek spirit. Modern science has been around for some three hundred years now. However we ought not forget that it is built upon the foundations of Greek science. Without Euclid and Archimedes, Newton would have been impossible. Yet most of us would agree that our science is not exactly that of the Greeks, or why would we call it “modern science”? More often than not we couple it with technology. In his Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead brilliantly deals with this conundrum. There he upsets one of the taken for granted assumptions of conventional history which seems to take for granted that the modern period begins when men turn from the faith of the Middle Ages to a reliance on reason culminating with the age of Enlightenment (18th century). What is overlooked is that the Middle Ages were characterized by the sweeping rationalism of the scholastics (among whom Thomas Aquinas) and in reality the modern period begins with a revolt against such a rationalism and a turning to the stubborn empirical facts of experience. It is that, according to Whitehead that is at the origins of the modern era. Whitehead focuses on Galileo who insisted on mechanics established mathematically as the most important aspect of the new modern science. Indeed it became the central part of physics all the way to the end of the 19th century. Astonishingly, Galileo rather than stick with the empirical “irreducible and stubborn facts” sets up a concept which cannot be validated by actual facts. He postulates that a body in motion will continue to be in motion ad infinitum on a frictionless plane. The empirical fact is that our experience has never presented us with a perfectly frictionless surface nor with a plane which is infinite in extension. No matter, as far as Galileo is concerned. This concept of inertia is needed for his theory. Whitehead points out that medieval rationalism has not for a moment surrendered to the brute facts. It is the other way around: it posits conditions contrary to facts and then paradoxically it measures those facts in the light of those contrafactual conditions. Reason becomes “legislative of experience.” Kant perceived this as the real revolution of the new science to eventually become the revolution within philosophy. As Bacon had intimated, the advancement of knowledge necessitated that we should stop following nature passively; rather we should question nature and force it to give us answers. The Critique of Pure Reason, is less an attempt to set up a system of idealistic philosophy and more an attempt to grasp the meaning of this new science and its consequences for human understanding. So, Galileo is much more than an event in the history of ideas. We have come a long way since then and paradoxically rather than becoming masters of nature, the age of extinction is upon us. What has happened is a transformation of human reason which in turns transforms all subsequent human history. This change is pervasive reaching into religion, art and culture in general. In politics man is envisioned as a lord and master of nature transforming his social existence. So there is an essential bond between science and technology. Technology embodies physically what science has already accomplished in thought when science sets up its own conditions as a measure of nature. [to be continued at the next meeting of the Ovi symposium]. 5 Note on Vico’s Frontspiece to The New Science by the Symposium’s coordinator Paparella

Frontispiece of Vico’s New Science (1730) Parmenides (left) and Heraclitus depicting Homer, Philosophy and Providence Detail from Raphael’s School of Athens In his book, The New Science, Vico uses the frontispiece as the work’s ‘mythic stage’ (see image above). That image becomes the ‘mute speech’ of the first humans, able to prophecy in the style of mi-dire, half- speech. The image itself shows the three-fold matheme structure that characterizes the work to follow. Jove and the altar, symbols of institutions derived from the first religions, and finally the ‘mercantile’ bases of modernity. The ‘a’ element is the invisible helmet of Hermes, indicated by the blind Homer; this gesture is the enunciating act of The New Science, the effect that becomes the cause of an ‘obverted’ reading, where the reader takes the place of the author. Vico included it at the very last minute before publication of the second edition (1730) as a hieroglyph of the truth of his work. The reader should notice the strange position of the globe. It suggests that physical nature is only half of reality, and not even the most significant half. The eye of God can be discerned in the upper left-hand corner. The woman on the right is an allegory of metaphysics contemplating God’s providence. She stands on the celestial globe, i.e., the physical world supported by the altar on one side only. On the left we see a statue of Homer, the theological poet, representing the oldest wisdom of the world. A ray of divine providence connects the eye of God with the heart of the lady metaphysics; a second ray connects her with Homer, i.e., with the civil world of the Gentiles, thus bypassing the physical world of nature. As Vico himself explains it: “…metaphysics contemplates God above the order of natural things, She contemplates in God the world of human minds in order to show his providence in the world of human spirits, which is the civil world of nations.” The reason why the globe is supported by the altar on one side only is that “the philosophers, contemplating divine providence only through the natural order, have shown only a part of it…They have not yet contemplated his providence in respect of that part of it which is most proper to men whose nature has the principal property: that of being social.”

Portrait of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) He taught rhetoric at the University of Naples

Original Cover for the Third Edition of Vico’s Scienza Nuova as Printed in Naples in 1744 7 Art and Technology: Paolozzi’s response and comments to Nannery and Paparella’s Presentations by way of a Discussion on the Subject (as translated from his book L’Estetica di Croce by Emanuel L. Paparella) From what we have discussed up to now, it ought to be obvious that in Croce’s aesthetics there is a rejection of any theory which attempts to distinguish or judge art on the basis of purely technical notions. Indeed, the problem is not that of choosing between art’s spontaneity and the technique of artistic expressions but that of understanding their complex relationship. It would be enough to think of the paradoxes we would meet were we to become radical supporters of one or the other theses. It is impossible to think of an artistic expression which does not follow some specific technical procedures, just as one cannot identify technique with art since to be able to use a camera does not mean that one is a great movie director. In Croce’s opinion technology fulfills merely a communicative function which was independent of the true and original artistic creation. For example, the divisions of the arts (sculpture, painting, music, etc.) based on empirical or physical principles gives no insight into the essential nature of art which is the aesthetic result of the work. One can know all about the technique of music making and yet not be able to produce significant compositions. However, technique does have a function. In his Breviario Croce reasserts that the artist, as every man, is a complex man and is therefore a practical man as well as a poet, and “as such he finds ways not to have his spiritual work disappear in oblivion, and to make possible for himself and for others, the reproduction of his images.” (Breviario di estetica, p. 38). Nonetheless in his Aesthetic in nuce of 1928 in the chapter on “Espressione e comunicazione” Croce writes that “technique is generally a cognition or a variety of cognitions arranged and disposed to guide practical action and, in the case of art, is the practical action that forms objects and instruments for the remembrance and the communication of works of art.” (Estetica in nuce, p. 18). It is only with his La poesia of 1936 that the philosopher, even without modifying the essence of his concept amplifies the practical horizon within which technique fulfills its precious function. In a note titled La tecnica nel significato di tradizione storica [technique within the significance of historical tradition] writes that “it is impossibile for us to free ourselves from technique, neither it is possible with technique to ‘remake oneself virgin and primitives,’ something that happens with every inspiration or creation, and is one of the two necessary moments of the same act.” (La poesia, pp. 338-339). Under this point of view one can speak of a reevaluation of technique in as much as it represents the historical result of a process. And it is perhaps necessary to add that, in reality, poetical imagination, intuition, never come about apart from technique, given that the painter “thinks” in a pictorial mode, the music composer in a musical mode, the comedian in a theatrical mode. So, while we have to admit that technique does not make art, we need to also accept the idea that artistic creation always happens in concrete within a certain historical condition. The comedian as well as the drama director always imagines a specific concrete situation, not an abstraction, and always in reference to the expressive mode which is most apt for its sensibilities. Which does not mean that the comedian is unable to construct his work without a stage and actors in flesh and blood, or that an artist cannot be mistaken in using a technical instrument and yet has intuited, imagined, created, or however one wants to put it, his artistic expression. Theater people know how to distinguish between talent and artistic ability. It is in this distinction, which is dictated from experience, if not from common sense, that we may find the fundamental Crocean position. Finally, we need to deal with the question of technical innovation. In this case too innovation can be original and important, worthy to represent a new historical initiative (the introduction of perspective in painting), but it cannot justify artistic experience by itself which can happen or not happen despite the particular new technique that has been employed. On the other hand technical innovation, especially when it is revolutionary, for example the use of photography, of the cinema and finally of the computer, reveals in the final analysis the perishable nature of those same techniques which are in fact only means of expression. However, after all that we have discussed, given that between means and end there is a dialectical relationship and not merely extrinsic, in many cases it happens that the choice of a new technique becomes in itself an aesthetic choice, the fruit of artistic creation and not only of ingenuity. Those who defend the reality of technology then risks of becoming prisoner of a sort of aesthetic conservatism masked as progressivism; of defending, in other words, a tradition, even if great and important, vis a vis the new creativity. To be able to distinguish then between ingenuity and imagination, between talent and art, is not a function of aesthetics, to which belongs the duty of indicating the general horizon of thought, but it is a function of the critic, of the public, who judge and choose, always in an absolutely novel and free way.

Photograph of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) Chapter 7 “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

(Seventh Meeting: 27 August 2013)

Table of Content for the Ovi Symposium’s 7th Meeting

Section 1: A Response to Dr. Nannery’s Presentation on “Cinema as a Work of Art” by Dr. Paolozzi Section 2: A presentation by Dr. Paolozzi on “Literary Genres” as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce Section 3: A presentation by Dr. Paparella on “Vico and the Modern Idea of History—part 2” Section 4: A Brief Addendum and invitation by Dr. Paparella to a discussion on Theodor Adorno’s concept of art. 1 A Response by Ernesto Paolozzi to Larry Nannery’s Past Presentation on Cinema as a Work of Art

L’intervento di Nannery sul cinema è illuminante. Nel passato volevo proporre una riflessione sull’arte del nostro secolo (il Novecento), il cinema intitolandola: “l’opera senza autore.” Poi non sono riuscito ad appro- fondire la questione molto complessa. Ciò che scrive acutamente Nannery mi fa pensare che qualcosa di vero in quella mia prima intuizione c’era. Certo, il regista in qualche modo è il centro psicologico e pratico attorno al quale ruota l’opera complessa descritta da Nannery. Ma a me sembra che il film viva, ad un certo punto di vita propria. Un’opera di tutti e di nessuno. Riflettendo meglio, questo concetto si potrebbe estende- re all’intera estetica: ogni opera finisce con l’essere indipendente dall’autore e diventa un’opera del mondo che l’accoglie o la rinnega. In questo senso si può anche superare la questione posta da Benjamin della perdita dell’aura. Ogni opera, anche quella riprodotta, può rappresentare un orizzonte di senso, uno stato d’animo. Non è una soluzione, come dimostra Paparella, tornare ad un’arte politico-pedagogica: sarebbe solo uno snaturamento della poesia. Tornando al punto iniziale, mio zio Gaetano di Maio, noto scrittore di teatro, diceva delle commedie: “Sulla scrivania sono dell’autore, alle prove del regista, in teatro degli attori e del pubblico”.

Translation in English by Emanuel Paparella: Nannery’s contribution on cinema is quite insightful. Some time ago I had envisioned a reflection on cinema as the art of our century (the 20th) to be titled “the work of art without author.” However, I was not able to deepen the issue which happens to be quite complex. What Nannery writes about so perceptively makes me think that there was something valid in such an intuition of mine. Undoubtedly, the director in some way remains the psychological and practical fulcrum around which rotates the complex work, as well described by Nannery. However, it seems to me that at a certain point the film begins to live its own life. It becomes a work which belongs to everybody and nobody, at the same time. Upon reflection, it could be asserted that this concept may be extended to the entire aesthetic opus: every artwork ends up being independent of the author and becomes part of a world which either accepts it or rejects it. Thus we can even transcend the issue posited by Benjamin on the loss of aura. Every artwork, even the reproduced work, can become an horizon of senses or of the emotions. As Paparella points out, it would be no solution to return to an art that is political-pedagogical; that would only be a distortion of the poetical. To return to the initial point, my uncle Gaetano di Maio, a famous play-writer had this to say about comedies: “At the desk they belong to the author, at the rehearsals they belong to the director, at the theater they belong to the actors and the public.”

Celebrated Neapolitan dramatist Gaetano di Maio (1927-1991), uncle of Professor Paolozzi

“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”

Lysistrata and the other striking women of Lysistrata as a 2002 Spanish film comedy Atthens (sculpture dating back to 350 B.C.)

“Make love, not war.” Lysistrata as performed at the Seattle Intiman Theater in 2002 2 On Literary Genres A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (Translated from his book: L’estetica di Croce)

As a brief synthesis we can affirm that Croce denies the possibility of formulating aesthetic judgments based on the literary genres since he considers them abstractions vis a vis the concrete artistic products which are constituted by the particular works of art. As Croce puts it: “This mistakes begins with the deduction of the expression from the concept and in attempting to find the laws of this substitution in what has been substituted, when the difference between the first and the second step is not perceived thus ending up asserting that one is on the first step when in reality one is on the second. This mistake can be dubbed the theorizing of artistic and literary genres.” (Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistic generale, 1902, p. 41). This mistake on which Croce focuses is not irrelevant and has often contributed to the destruction of the moral life of artists and poets who, unable to place their works into the boxes of the popular categories at the time, painfully felt the delusion of the incomprehension of their epoch. Again Croce puts it best: “From the theorizing of literary genres we arrive at those false paradigm of judgment and critique which, confronted with a work of art, instead of determining if it is expressive…one asks if it is in conformity to the laws of the epic poem, of that of tragedy; to the laws of historical painting of that of the landscape. Indeed artists have faked obedience and have feigned to accept those laws of the genre, but have always ignored them. Every work of art has violated the established genre, thus causing confusion in the ideas of the critics who in turn have felt compelled to widen the definition of a genre until, that is, this enlarged definition becomes too narrow with the appearance of other works of art, always followed naturally by new scandals, new muddlings and new enlargements.” (ibid. p. 44).

Thus this second look at the genres, is a liberating theory on artistic activity such as the attempt to confer to artists and their activities full expressive autonomy. It remains to be determined what are the practical limits of this constant enlargement of the genres, something that Croce has never denied. The genres, which from a logical standpoint are abstract concepts, belonging to the Hegelian Verstand, fulfill the important function, as Croce writes in his Logica referring to this type of formalization (some authors use the word form in this sense rather than the Kantian or Crocean sense) “to reawake or call to attendance many representations.” They fulfill therefore the necessary function of orientation for both action and knowledge. In fact the historian as well as the scientist have necessarily to use abstractions. This clarification can be useful for banishing other equivocations, such as that of gravitates around the conceptions of the sciences understood as part of practical activity and not for the knowledge of man’s identity. In fact those abstractions and generalizations rather than the particular scientific theories contain aspects of truth, of historical knowledge just as on the other side of the coin one can individuate within concrete works of history abstractions and generalizations. So, keeping in mind the particular products (i.e., the concrete theories) and not the categorizing activity which ideally presides over them, the only distinction possible is one of quantity and not of quality as would be the case within a rigorously philosophical argument. This clarification frees us, in my opinion, from many equivocations and helps us to better understand the terms of the issue of genres.

The Argentinean poet Borges, after quoting a passage from Croce declares that: “I would add a personal observation: literary genres depend less from texts than from the way those texts are read. The aesthetic fact requires a conjunction of reader and text which only then exists. It is absurd to assume that a book is much more than a book. It begins to exist only when a reader opens it. Then the aesthetic phenomenon manifests itself resembling the very moment when the book was conceived.” (Oral, 1981, pp. 48-50). That having been said, we perhaps need to reflect on the fact that literary genres fulfill a mission which is greater than that of mere content holders. Mario Fubini has clarified this issue with great competence; therefore let me end this piece with his words: “Those generic definitions are useful to us even when we grasp their inadequacy. It is enough to think about political history where we survey feudal States, absolute States, liberal States: think of the local little history, if we may call it that, which we ourselves make with our judgments and the things we talk about, pervaded by similar classifications and definitions…so that for every judgment we came face to face with a new reality, but the judgment we must render has of course been preceded by innumerable other judgments which are useful for orientation, so much easier to do in as much as we have gathered the multitudinous conclusions reordering them in classifications which in our memory fulfill the function of symbols of the most complex historical reality.”(Critica e poesia, 1966, p. 140).

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) 3 Vico and the Modern Idea of History part 2 A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

ico insists throughout his opus that in order for Man to understand himself and avoid the danger of scientific objectification, he needs to attempt a re-creation of the origins of humanity. This is possible in as much as it was Man himself who created his own origins, and therefore he can return to them. In the beginning there is the end. Thus he can hope to understand the destiny and meaning Vof his striving in space and time, which is to say, within history. This kind of hermeneutical operation is possible but cannot be carried out by means of scientific archeological tools but by an act of the imagination, that most human of faculties which Vico calls fantasia. It is through imagination that Man may recreate mytho-poetic mentality. While the modes of thought of primitive Man were different from ours, the mind which created them is the same. Imagination may be impoverished in rational Man of the third Vichian historical cycle but it remains one of those modes of perceiving reality and remaining human. It is a sine qua non for the discovery of his human nature. Let us briefly explore how Vico explains the process. Vico points out that primitive Man could not have been a creature of the intellect. He was steeped in the senses and the imagination. This gave his language, religion and other institutions a peculiar character, which is to say that the character of primitive Man’s institutions reflected the character of his mind, especially those pertaining to language. He identified three stages of human development: (1) the poetic or divine age: the age of the gods wherein imagination is strongest and reasoning is weakest. The mind of this era ascribes to physical things the being of substances animated by gods. (2) The heroic age: the age when heroes believed themselves to be of divine origin. This is the mind that creates Homer’s or Dante’s heroes. (3) The age of men: the age when reason and intellect reign supreme. This is the mind that produces the age of Enlightenment, so called. To these stages of development accrue thee different kinds of natural law: (1) divine laws, dictated by the gods, (2) heroic laws, dictated by the strength of the heroes but curbed by religion, (3) human laws, dictated by developed and autonomous reason. The human mind not being static develops slowly over time and Vico, in the light of those three stages of natural law, says that it is a mistake (dubbed by him as boria dei dotti or “the arrogance of scholars”) to claim as universal features of all societies a law based on fully developed reason belonging to the third stage of development. This conceptual mistake is the result of a mistaken assumption, namely that the ideas and institutions of all historical ages are the product of a human mind whose character is fixed. The mistake explains in turn the inability on the part of philosophers and historians, who are the product of the third rational age of men, to recreate and understand fully mytho-poetic mentality, a sine qua non for the recreation of origins.

While this kind of misconception abounds in academia, it can also be easily found in popular culture. Let us take an example from the film medium. The movie Quest for Fire was inspired by the book The Naked Ape. Both book and movie purport to show primitive man’s first tentative steps toward his own humanity and toward civilized life. However, I would submit, that far from getting a recreation of origins, the reader and viewer is served with an image of primitive man as seen through a Cartesian paradigm. Both narrator and director bring to the recreation of primitive mentality all their rationalistic premises and assumptions. The most egregious and erroneous is the assumption that primitive man’s mind functions as a sort of lower underdeveloped rational mind. Corollary to this assumption is the one which holds that man’s origins can best be understood rationally, for the vantage point of the third cycle of history, that of full-fledged rationality.

That this is so is apparent from the very outset of the movie. Nowhere are the gods, issuing from primitive man’s fertile imagination, to be seen or heard. As Vico has pointed out, without a recreation of early man’s religious impulse, without the fear and the wonder inherent in this primordial religion, no beginning of man’s humanity and of his civilization can be recreated. And in fact, nowhere in the book and the movie is an act of “piety” to be discerned. I mean acts such as the burial of the dead, ritual dancing, marriage and sacrifice to the gods, cave painting. What we are treated to instead is strife and violence, indiscriminate mating and a thinly veiled competition for primitive technology, fire. The message is clear: the fit and the winners deserve to survive. This is not the primitive mind-set but pure social Darwinism. All this is presented, mind you, despite the latest archeological findings of eminent archeologists, such as Leaky, suggesting that there might have been much more cooperation among early men than has been surmised; that what in fact assured their survival was less competition for natural resources and more of a common concern for the common good of the tribe and that religion was essential for conceiving the common good. And that explains why the book and the movie lack social phenomena such as ritual dancing and singing, initiation, the telling of fables or myths by which primitive man attempts to create order out of the surrounding natural flux continually assaulting his senses. What gets most glaringly ignored is the most important institution of early man, namely language. Language is understood rationalistically as a mere utilitarian means of communication and an instrument of social control. What is accorded a privileged position is the incessant anxious search for fire and the constant struggle with other men that such a search and possession entails. The premise seems to be that the tribe who controls fire wins the technological competition and earns the privilege of carrying on the evolutionary process. The unfit simply perish. Within a Vichian paradigm, this is an obvious distortion. It is nothing less than a portrayal of modern rational man fighting for oil in Kuwait, and measuring his humanity and civilization by mere economic standards. This rationalistic premise even assumes the character of a dangerous myth devoid of its logos when it takes on racial overtones. At the conclusion of the movie we are treated to the contemplation of the “naked ape,” the blue eyed, successful conqueror of the primeval forest (the Anglo Saxon?) washing himself under a water fall while his dark swarthy, less successful colleagues (the minorities) grove in filth in a cave. Paradoxically the ancient Romans also thought of the Anglo Saxon as a dirty primitive man who did not know how to wash himself. But whether ancient or modern, this is practically a Madison Avenue advertisement: technological control of resources (fire) and hygienic living (water and soap for one’s body) leads to “enlightenment” and civilization. Indeed the ape is naked in more ways than one. The nakedness is primarily one of spirit and intellect. That kind of impoverishment leads right back to the cave, albeit one endowed with a cellular phone and a fax.

Vico, on the other hand, defines primitive man’s mode of thinking as “poetic wisdom” and considers it nothing less than the master key to the understanding of his thought. As already seen, in the first two stages of development, imagination prevails over reason, and myth (the image) prevails over logos, i.e., the rationally explained meaning of those myths. In those two first stages, imaginative universals are preeminent over any, if indeed there are any, intelligible universals derived from abstract thought. To understand the imaginative universal one has to begin with myth which for Vico is the primordial spiritual movement of primitive man, the mediator between nature and spirit, between what is useful and what is moral, between natural necessity and law. Vico is the first thinker to be aware that indeed myth is truth that incarnates itself in images, a symbol of truth, as it were. Myth is a very concrete image of the world expressing in very rudimentary fashion the ethico-religious experience of primitive man; an experience rooted in fear and wonder and which is always at the origins of religion. For Vico, myth rather than logical thinking is the first form through which truth reveals itself. In other words, myth is the primordial historicization of the eternal and mytho-poetic mentality is always related to religion even when it appears in adversary relationship to it. It is the first indication of the passage from the bestial to the rational, but even more importantly, it is the veil of transcendence hiding under the particular and the finite—the concrete historical moment of Being. Based on this speculation on myth Vico can confidently assert that the first science to be mastered in recap- turing human origins is the interpretation of myths (SN, 51). Myth is primitive man’s answer to questions he cannot answer conceptually but which demand a prompt answer on which may hang the very future of civilization, even the very meaning of life. It is the instrument of imagination for making sense of the surrounding world and gives it some kind of shape and meaning. The first of these meanings is identifi- able for Vico in thundering Jupiter, father of the gods. This is a god that provokes fear, an emotion on which, as pointed out by Lucretius, primitive religion is based. But this fear is positive: it orders the bodily activity of primitive man and is the foundation of human thought and human society. To understand human origins, it is necessary to somehow recapture that primordial fear. As the Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene has well rendered it: “Any genuine beginning in thought requires the power of fantasia to produce true speech. The reflective mind is not the support of itself, any more than reflective society is the support of itself, but develops and always has beneath its activity the imaginative forms of early life.” (Vico’s Science of Imagination, p.18). This is the crisis of any beginning placated by the expression of the myth, a sort of faith in the myth. Great poets like Dante are able to re-create this fear of beginnings as they begin their work. Because of that first myth of thundering Jupiter Vico could confidently declare that primitive man’s life is “poetic.” He could moreover declare that the most difficult and yet most necessary task of the reflective mind of modern man is that of pondering the origins of human existence, but not in an abstract way but concretely, paying attention to particulars, and then showing how providence unfolds its plan. Vico is also the first thinker to point to a development in man’s spiritual life: at the beginning man is all sense, then he is fantasia, and finally he is intellect. To those three stages correspond the three forms of language: sign, images, concepts. Thus the “poets,” as myth makers turn out to be the first historians of primitive humanity. The universal incarnated itself in the image and becomes a fantastic universal which presents itself as a “poetic character.” Hence, properly understood, the gods and the heroes of antiquity represent aspects of life and moments of history. Here are a few representative examples: Hercules: the founding of the institution of the family through the twelve enterprises needed to safeguard it. Medusa: the victory of Man over the primeval forest. Venus: sacred and profane love. Mercury: commerce. Neptune: navigation. Cibele: the earth’s fertility. Flora: springtime. Pomona: autumn, and so on down a list of thirty thousand gods enumerated by Varro, ushering from the fertile imagination of primitive man who, spurred by emotions of fear or wonder, created a separate divinity for just about every natural phenomenon he observed. Here it bears repeating that Vico is also the first to point out that Homer could not exist as anactu- al individual poet: the Iliad and the Odyssey have different poetic styles. Homer is a poetic character to be interpreted as an image of primitive man who was a “poet” and made history by nar- rating it in the imaginative language and mode consonant with the particular era in which he lived. As Vico himself renders it: “The mother of wonder is ignorance of reasons and scarcity of abstraction.”

Vico’s thought has ethico-religious dimensions. The Vichian particular moves the imagination and is aesthetically beautiful, but it does more than that, for “poetic wisdom” is a movement of the divine (the transcendent) descending into the human and conversely, of the human (the immanent) reaching for the divine. These two complementary poles, human free will and divine providential order, appear contradictory and mutually exclusive to the reflective mind. They are however paradoxically related and inseparable. The particular of primitive mytho-poetic mind and the universal of abstracting “pure” mind capable of reflecting upon itself may be distinguished but may not be separated: they remain complementary to each other.

Croce erred in trying to downplay one pole (the transcendent) in favor of the other (the immanent). The Vi- chian mind-set, on the contrary, has little in common with a Cartesian mode of thinking. This is so because it is so immersed in life and history that its clarifying processes coincide with the clarification of life and history. That kind of clarification is never as neat as abstract thought but it is certainly less sterile. What Vico is saying is basically this: the coming wisdom of the philosophers is already implied non-rationally in the “poetic wisdom” of primitive man. When Man begins to think humanly, he has already given birth to a rudimentary kind of metaphysics. As Ernesto Grassi has pointed out in his Rhetoric as Philosophy: the Humanist Tradition, within the human mind the cognition of things precedes judgment about them; hence a topic necessarily precedes critique. The faculty of topics makes the mind ingenious and ingenium is the source of the creative activity of topics; it is the ability to see and make connections between disparate and even contradictory notions. In other words, ingenium is a “grasping” rather than a deductive property. In as much as primitive mytho-poetic mind possesses ingenium, it has an unconscious metaphysics which becomes conscious later through reflection. The historical process, however, admits of no fractures between one moment and the next. Man is continually moving between two complementary poles such as passion/virtue; barbarism/civilization; spontaneity/reflection; and intuition/reason. This complementation seems to be built in the very structure of reality. Later Heidegger, like Vico, will reach the conclusion that “…multiplicity of meaning is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought…” (What is called thinking). This complementation and multiplicity is especially present in Vico’s concept of providence. One caveat is in order. Throughout the New Science Vico remains aware that ethical action cannot be founded on purely imaginative truth but more properly on reflected truths (SN, 1106). Vico, after all, has not called his work a myth but a science. In order to alleviate the primordial fear, early man had a psychological need to grasp a global vision of reality through the myth and thus evaluate choices. However, the contradictions remained largely unresolved, and that is fine at the first stage of development. However, when it happens at a later stage, problems arise. When, within a fanatical organization such as the Nazi party, myth wants to guarantee its own irrefutability, it proceeds to suppress the logos, i.e., the content or rational meaning within it. Wagner’s German myths certainly were used in such a mode by the Nazis with some help from an equally misconceived Nietzschean philosophy emphasizing “the will to power.” Guido De Ruggero in his Da Vico a Kant best explains the relationship of myth to reason in Vico by pointing out that within the “imaginative universal: the aesthetic element is expressed by the adjective (imaginative), while the intellectual rational element is expressed by the noun(universal). The proper function of imagination, therefore, remains that of a limiting adjective and neither adjective nor noun can be absolutized; they are complementary to each other. Another way of explaining the relationship myth/reason is to think of the relationship form/content. Without content, form is meaningless. The form is myth, the content reason. An adjective is meaningless by itself when it is deprived of the noun it modifies. Similarly, mythic assertions self-destroy when they are separated from logos. On the other hand, the proper function of myth is never that of reducing the unknown and mysterious to rational clarity, rather it is that of integrating the unknown and the known together in a living whole wherein the limitations of the external self may be transcended. To use a metaphor adopted by Unamuno somewhere, myth is like a mountain on the small island of rationality and scientific knowledge, the more we climb the mountain the more vast the expansion of the sea of what is still unknown will appear to the climber. So the search for the true meaning of myth becomes for Vico one of the essential tasks of literary interpretation. In that sense Vico is the grandfather of modern hermeneutics in vogue in today’s literary and philosophical circles.

Neapolitan Philosopher Giambattista Vico Author of The New Science (1725) 4

A brief Addendum by Emanuel L. Paparella on Theodor Adorno’s Concept of Art

Introductory note: considering that this symposium is dedicated to the exploration of a new humanism via aesthetics, we would be remissive if we did not at the very least briefly mention Theodor Adorno as one of the foremost modern exponent of art as a liberating experience. In this regard Adorno was largely in agreement with Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic theory. Thus I am adding to this meeting of the symposium a brief excerpt on Adorno from my Ovi e-book: Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers. “The art that moves ahead into the unknown, the only art now possible, is neither lighthearted nor serious; the third possibility, however, is cloaked in obscurity, as though embedded in a void the figures of which are traced by advanced works of art.” --Theodor Adorno (in “Is Art Lighthearted?”)

As is well known, Theodore Adorno (1903-1969) was a member of the prestigious Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist philosophers which included Max Horkheimer, whom we have already met via the letter to Croce’s widow highlighting Croce’s philosophical merits, and Herbert Marcuse. All three were very concerned with the concept of liberation from oppressive social forces. Echoing Marx, they believed that capitalism is not a mere economic system largely based on the exploitation of the workers, but also a social and cultural system that usurps human freedom. Nowhere did Adorno elaborate this view more vehemently than in his wide ranging and subtle philosophy of art. This philosophy of art proclaims that art is one of the few domains where the human being is able to attain “something like freedom in the midst of un-freedom.” In other words, art can bring to consciousness the aspiration for freedom even in those societies which systematically deny it. It takes place in the midst of totalitarian regimes, of both the right and the left, governed by an inflexible political ideology, in its very jails and chambers of torture. What Adorno emphasizes is art’s presentation of the contradiction between the possibility of reconciliation, that is to say, transcendence of conflict, and the society in which such reconciliation is not only absent but unattainable. He gives as an example (in section three of his brilliant essay “Is Art Lighthearted?”) the music of Mozart. When we listen to Mozart’s music we are not simply aware of its sublime harmonies or, as Adorno would put it, of its presentation of reconciliation, but we also compare this awareness with the social cacophonous blasphemous world in which we live, a world in which the bully rules by rhetorical or even physical intimidation and arrogance, wherein there isn’t even an attempt at the common good and the meeting of the needs of all. What art does is to let us see both what is possible and how far that possibility is at present. Adorno is extremely conscious of the fact that art is not immune to the influence of the capitalist market economy, what he calls “the culture industry” which, in his opinion, subverts the liberatory possibilities of art in favor of entertainments aiming at merely assuaging the exhaustion of those who labor under capitalist exploitation. This is a far cry from Aristotle’s “art as catharsis” or Freud’s “art as sublimation” or Vico’s “art as transcendence.” It is the kind of perverted art which in no way honors the aspiration for freedom and reconciliation of the human heart. It portrays un-freedom as inevitable and determined, even desirable in a deterministic view of reality governed by an immanentistic science allowing no transcendence beyond the empirical and the material. Gone are in that kind of world the intimations of immortality and transcendence found in the poetry of a Coleridge or Wordsworth. In the above mentioned essay Adorno structures the discussion of art through the opposition seriousness/ lightheartedness. Because art arouses pleasure it is connected to the concept of the lighthearted. It is as if its very presence is a reproach to the seriousness and reality of the existential situation of man. It is almost a hint of something that transcends that situation. And yet, Adorno insists, paradoxically, art is also serious in as much as it attempts to represent the contradiction between reality and the desire for freedom. Art, in other words, has to be serious and lighthearted at the same time; it must embody both features to remain genuine art. This is the accusation that Adorno hurls against “the culture industry,” its failure to maintain seriousness. Under the domination of the culture industry the message of art becomes: enjoy and acquiesce, everything is art, all you need to do is to declare it so. Art has a value and that value is measured with money.

For Adorno, the need to challenge the culture industry’s domination of art is made all the more urgent and pressing by the Holocaust which threatens to make genuine art and its commitment to the incorporation of lightheartedness, a profanity of sort. How could one tolerate jesting on the graves of those millions of innocent victims? So Adorno calls for a new type of art one that transcends the lighthearted/serious dichotomy. He finds that kind of art exemplifies in the theater of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s plays mark a form of art beyond the duality tragedy/comedy, thus allowing art to survive the cultural crassness, philistinism and devastations of the 20th century.

A leading post-script on Adorno’s cultural challenge by way of a query from Emanuel L. Paparella: Reacting to Adorno’s powerful cultural challenge to envision a new art still cloaked in obscurity, an art that synthesizes and transcends the dichotomy lighthearted/serious, comedy/tragedy, low/high culture, the question naturally arises: should such a vision encompass the synthesis of scientific and humanistic-liberal arts cultures, a bridge, so to speak, to a new third culture or a new humanism? Unless we decide to let the new works of art speak for themselves, I surmise that such a daring enterprise would have to include an in-depth philosophical examination of our rapidly evolving times as exemplified in the extraordinary cultural phenomena (largely condemned by an elite academic establishment in love with a status quo paraded as “tradition”) of a Roberto Benigni reciting Dante’s Commedia, and of an Andrè Rieu popularizing classical music in the EU’s squares to the enthusiastic applause of culturally starved masses, the very same people who remain at risk of being bamboozled by the modern charlatan-entrepreneur advertising as necessities of life, under the guise of a popular green-culture, cosmetics, essential oils, and baked potatoes galore.

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

Chapter 8 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

(Eighth Meeting: 12 September 2013)

Table of Contents for the 8th Meeting of the Ovi Symposium Section 1: A Presentation by Dr. Paolozzi: “Art and technology” as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce. Section 2: A follow-up Exploration by Dr. Paparella: “Vico’s aesthetics vis a vis Modern Education: toward a New Humanism?” Section 3: An addendum by Dr. Paparella from his e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers: “Robin George Collingwood’s Aesthetic Theory of Art as Vichian Fantasia.” Section 4: A brief Comparison between R.G. Collingwood and Hans Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Section 5: In Memoriam: on the passing of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. 1 Art and Technology A presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (as translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce) Following the reasoning that we have presented so far, it becomes evident that in Croce’s aesthetics there is a rejection of any theory which attempts to distinguish or judge art based on purely technical notions. Indeed, the problem is not one of choosing between the spontaneity of art and the technique of artistic expressions, but rather that of understanding the complexity of their relationship to each other. It would be enough to the paradoxes that would surface if one were to attempt to be sustained in a radical mode by one or the other only. One cannot conceive an artistic expression which does not follow specific technical trajectories, just as one cannot identify technique with art. To be able to use a film camera does not mean that one is a great film director. Croce was of the opinion that technique had a purely comunicative function, foreign to the true original artistic creation. For example, the neat division of the arts (sculpture, painting, music, etc.) based on purely empirical or physical principles does not yeld the essential nature of art which depends on the aesthetic result of the work. One can know the technique of music and yet one may be unable to produce significant musical compositions. Technique however does have its own function. In his Breviario Croce insists, in fact that the artist, like every man is a complicated being, and therefore he is both poet and practical man “and as such he suggests the means so that his spiritual work is not dissipated and lost and the reproduction of his images becomes easy.” Moreover, in his Aesthetica in nuce (1928) Croce writes that “technique is generally speaking a complex of cognitions tending toward practical action, and in the case of art, it is the practical action which forges objects and instruments for the recollection and the communication of works of art.” Only with the publication of La Poesia (1936) does the philosopher, without modifying his in depth concept, amplifies the practical horizon within which technique fulfills its precious function. In a marginal note titled “Technique within the understanding of historical tradition” he writes that “Therefore, to free oneself from technique, that is to say, within the meaning we assigned to it, is impossible; not is it possible with mere technique to ‘make oneself virgin and primitive,’ something which happens with every inspiration or creation, which constitutes one of the two indivisible acts of the same act.” Within this point of view one can speak of a reevaluation of technique in as much as it represents the historical result of a process. Perhaps it should be also mentioned that in reality poetic imagination and intuition cannot be achieved without technique since the painter thinks pictorially, the music composer thinks musically and the playwriter teathrically. Just as we need to admit that technique by itself does not result in art, we must also accept the idea that artistic creation always happens conretely within a particular historic condition. The playwriter, as well as a movie director, imagine within a particular concrete situation, not in the abstract, and always in reference to the expressive means which is more in accordance with his sensibility. Which of course does not mean that without a stage and without actors in flesh and blood the playwriter cannot construct his work of art, or that an artist while erring in chosing the appropriate technique, neverthless can intuit, imagine, fantasize, create the work of art. Men involved with the theater know how to distinguish between talent and artistic prowess. It is in such a distinction, dictated by experience, if not by common sense, that one can find the fundamental position of the Crocean distinction. Finally, there is the issue of thecnical innovation. In this case too, innovation can be original and important, worthy to represent an important historical development (for example, the introduction of perspective in painting). However, all by itself it is not enough to justify artistic experience which can happen or not happen, despite the new technique. On the other hand, technical innovation, especially when it is revolutionary, for example the use of photographs, of the cinema and finally of the computer, shows ultimately the fallacy of technique in itself which remains a mode of expression. But, as we have already said, because between the means and the end there is a dialectic relationship and not merely and extrinsic one, it often happens that the choosing of a new technique is also an aesthetic choice, deriving from artistic creativity and not only of ingenuity. Those who defend the category of technique risks becoming trapped in a sort of aesthetic conservatism parading as progressivism; of defending, in other words, a tradition, as important and majestic as it may be, vis a vis the new creativity. To then distinguish, concretely, between ingenuity and imagination, or between talent and art, is not a duty of aesthetics, which merely indicates the general horizon of thought, but it is the duty of the critic and of the public who judge and choose each individual work in an absolutely new way and absolutely free.

“Mechanized City from the Shadows” (1920) A futurist painting by Fortunato Depero

L’estetica di Benedetto Croce by Ernesto Paolozzi Book published in Naples on January 1, 2002

Ovi e-book on Croce by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated by Dr. Massimo Verdicchio

Ovi e-book on Aesthetic Theories by Emanuel L. Paparella

Modern Format of Vico’s New Science Penguin Classics; 3rd edition (2000) 2 Vico’s Aesthetics vis a vis Modern Education: toward a New Humanism? An Exploration by Emanuel L. Paparella ollowing Paolozzi’s insightful presentation clarifying the dialectic between Croce’s aesthetics and technique, I’d like to follow-up on his pertinent reflections on the dialectical nexus between poetic man and practical man, universal art and particular technique, and Fthe communication of works of arts, by a brief exploration of Giambattista Vico’s aesthetics in his New Science. We should not lose sight that this astounding work begins with an image, a frontispiece which Vico placed there as an aid to the reader so that he/she could recollect, at a glance, the whole opus. It in fact informs the whole of Vico’s poetic philosophy. Indeed, the art of memory and recalling is fundamental for a proper understanding of Vico’s thought, one that is free of distortions, misrepresentations, mis- reading or subsuming. Within this image, very familiar to those who know anything about Vico, one soon notices that the universe within time and space has been divided into three observed and clearly perceived phenomena: the divine, the human, and the natural world. Observed by whom? By Providence represented as an all seeing eye, but most importantly by man who needs poetic wisdom (represented by Homer receiving the light of providence as reflected by metaphysics). Without these Man cannot ascend to Truth. That image holds all those elements together. Hence the first important observation of Vico’s thought is that it represents a philosophy of recol- lective universals generating philosophical understanding not from rational categories but from the image. In other words, imagination becomes a new method, rather than mere subject matter for philosophical thought. A corollary to this observation is that were we to use the rationalistic method (that of the category) to understand Vico, we would ipso facto distort him and misunderstand him. Another way of putting it is this: Vico’s thought can only be understood from the inside. The human mind has to apply the same methodology that Vico uses to arrive at an understanding of itself. In his oration on “The Heroic Mind” (1732) Vico tells us that the heroic mind is the basis of a true education and in seeking the sublime has as its goal human wisdom oriented toward the common good of the human race. Not too dissimilar it would appear from Plato’s Re- public. However, in his address of 1737 to the Academia degli Oziosi (The Academy of the Men of Leisure) Vico has recourse to Socrates as exemplary of someone who could reason about all parts of knowledge, human and divine. What Vico deplores in modern education is the loss of the perspective of the whole. He always insists that the flower of wisdom is the grasping of the whole through the particular and the specific. What Vico is suggesting is that the reader of his work needs to be heroic too but in doing so he ought not consider The New Science something esoteric, reserved to a select few initiates into the mysteries, but rather exoteric in the sense that the human mind has certain common traits and can therefore narrate to itself The New Science and arrive at the same conclusions as Vico did; that is, discern within itself the ideal eternal history narrated by Vico and thus experience the same divine pleasure. For after all the story is the story of humankind (“storia” in Italian means both story and history) and Vico, as Virgil with Dante, is a mere guide for the reader to attain the “dilettoso monte.” What are the ideas to which Vico guides the reader? Basically they are wisdom, heroism, tragedy, barbarism (of both sense and intellect), memory, providence, imagination, ingenuity. All ideas which the Western philosophical tradition considers superseded. And yet these ideas contain principles which are basic to the shaping of any modern humanistic thought. The greatest danger to those who would correctly interpret Vico is that of placing his thought at the service of a position that is not his own by pigeon-holing him into a particular school of thought or a discipline. One such is the philosophy of history, another is cultural anthropology. Croce, for example, while attempting to promote Vico’s ideas has been accused of seeing Vico as a precursor of Hegel. I think that Paolozzi has already clarified that conundrum but unfortunately the accusation remains standing in several philosophical quarters. Indeed Vico’s ship has been sailed under many banners: idealism, Catholicism, Marxism, historicism, modern methodologies galore, contemporary epistemology, emphasizing Vico as an influence, a mere precursor of more thorough philosophies. Thus Vico is robbed of his own originality. In his Autobiography Vico speaks of his hope to be an influential thinker but inVici vindiciae he warns of the distortions of his thought already afoot (in the Acta Eruditorum where his book was reviewed). Later he writes to Abbè Esperti (1726) lament- ing that the reception of his book was like that of an infant still born, then musing that indeed a book that displeases so many people cannot possibly have universal applause especially in a world dominated by the “chance” of Epicurus and the “necessity” of Descartes. Both are still alive and well in Europe. And how could Vico expect otherwise? His ideas were considered not modern enough, passé, anachronistic. His conception of “verum factum convertuntur” could be traced back to St. Augustine’s doctrine that God creates by knowing or to Aquinas’ statement that “ens et verum convertuntur” (truth and reality are convertible), or the Renaissance Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, or the experimental method of Galileo (see Rodolfo Mondolfo’s Il verum factum prima di Vico (Naples, Guida, 1969). To go from these antecedents to the principle of history made by humans, man who is his own history, was not an easy nut to crack within the prevalent Cartesian philosophical approach of the times. He was considered an anachronistic throw-back to the ancients, “the owl of Minerva of Renaissance humanistic culture” as Karl-Otto Apel defines Vico in his Die idée der Sparche in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico echoing Ernesto Grassi’s Macht des Bildes (Power of the Image. Cologne: 1970, p.194), where Grassi connects Vico’s thought to certain humanists: Salutati, Landino, Pico, Valla, Poliziano. But these men are usually regarded as mere literati and accorded little if any philosophical study. Since Thomas Bergin’s translation of The New Science into English (1948, Cornell University), it has come to be regarded as a tool to confront the fragmentation of contemporary thought. But once again his ideas have been connected to seminal thinkers in semiotic, phenomenology, structuralism, genetic psychology, myth analysis, literary criticism, linguistics, and so on. In other words, there seems to be a post-modern concern to seek the foundations of knowledge through Vico’s thought. And here indeed Vico has been most helpful. In grasping what Vico calls “the barbarism of the intellect” as symptomatic of the deep solitude of spirit and will of modern man [“la somma solitudine d’animo e di voleri”] which Vico associates with the end of the third era of the ideal eternal history, the era of men where pure reason reigns uncontested; a sort of decadence when men “finally go mad and waste their substance” (N.S., 241 and 1106). This is what Vico defines as reflective thought devoid of what he calls “sapienza poetica.”(poetic wisdom). This is a thought that has forgotten its connection with the imagination of the whole, a loss of the human image of itself; the inability of the thinker to reflect its own wholeness into the products of his own thought. This barbarism of thought is a kind of human experience deprived of a cultural guide or center, without a perspective on the human mind. As Elio Gianturco used to comment in his magisterial lectures on Vico at New York University (1970): we live in a Cartesian world dominated by procedures, efficient ordering and technological know- how as fix-all for whatever ails us. From what we have said above, it would appear that using Vico’s thought to seek the foundations of social humanistic knowledge fits quite well with Vico’s own concerns as stated in his orations: to connect knowledge with wisdom, heroism and eloquence. We should remember that Vico was for most of his academic career an Assistant Professor of Eloquence at the University of Naples. This is all well and good, but there is a caveat of which Vico himself warns us about; namely that the human mind has a propensity to reduce what is unfamiliar and distant to what is familiar and at hand. And Vico goes pretty far back into the origins of the human world. In other words, the propensity is to merge the meaning of Vico’s ideas to those developed more fully by later thinkers. Donald Phillip Verene calls this propensity “Vico’s Achilles’ heel” thus identifying the facility with which Vico’s thought has been transformed into viewpoints that are not his. This is astonishing indeed when one thinks that Vico himself takes pains in his oration De Antiquissima Italorum sapientia to declare that he belongs to no school of thought as such. So the crucial question is this: How should the reader approach Vico? The simple answer is this: on his own merits, as the unique thinker he was and the originator of a new original orientation for philosophical thought. The originality of his philosophy consists in placing the image over the concept. For a tradition conceiving of its origins as Aristotle’s rationality this sounds topsy-turvy; for indeed “reason” continues to dominate it together with scientific thought. But let the reader pay attention to the title of Vico’s work: it is not a “New Phi- losophy” but a “New Science.” So Vico is far from abandoning reason and science as such. He is proposing a novantiqua or a new humanism. In any case the tradition begins with the Platonic quarrel with poetic images (which some have misguidedly resurrected as the quarrel between ancients and moderns); although it must also be said that Plato’s language remains ambiguous because it uses the poetical and the mythological and images galore when it best suits it. In fairness to Plato one ought to keep in mind that he made a distinction between “good poetry” (that which spoke of the gods and the heroes) and “bad poetry,” everything else. Aristotle reinforces the rationalistic tradition by defining man a rational animal; that definition gives no clue that integral to reason, even at its most developed stage, are feelings and emotions from which it originally sprang. But in reality, despite Croce’s brave attempt at integration through Hegel, Vico stands outside the Western philosophical tradition. Cassirer who like Croce had a great affinity for Vico, also attempted an integration by distinguishing the philosophy of spirit (Geist) and the philosophy of life (Leben). This is a distinction that may prove useful for understanding Vico’s position vis-à-vis modern philosophy without subsuming him under the ancient philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. However, the fundamental model of the symbol in Cassirer remains cognitive. It is a brave attempt to extend a cognitive model of thought to other form of experience: language, art, history, myth. Something that Plato would not have approved. Cassirer gives due credit to Vico by calling him “the true discoverer of the myth” [der eigentliche Entdecker des Mythos in Erkenntmisproblem inder Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuern Zeit, 1973, IV, p. 300], as translated in The Problem of Knowledge by Wil- liam H. Hoglam and Charles W. Hendel, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950, p. 296), but he remains different from Vico because he discovers the myth through the rational concept and in so doing he has to necessarily identify Vico with the philosophy of Geist. How so? In the sense that Cassirer sees philosophical idealism moving from Leibniz to Kant and Klaus Held within the philosophy of Geist all the way to his own conception of symbols (see his Introduction to The Symbolic Forms). He sees the role of the imagination in the outline of Kant’s Critique of Judgment as an important aspect of his thought. And indeed Kant has a great interest in the bond between intuition and the concept and the existence of the “unreflective judgment” (reflektierende Urteilshkraft) and organic form pointing in the direction of a concrete philosophy of all areas of human culture. Cassirer also appreciates Hegel’s effects within the philosophy of the concept as something abstracted from experience in order to create by means of the speculative proposition [speculative Satz] a new sense of the concept as “concrete universal” [begriff] within the Western tradition of reason. He transforms reason from simple understanding [Verstand] into reason as the inner form of experience [Verneuft] in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer himself point out that their transformation ends up as the reduction of the idea to the simple form of logic in Hegel’s Science of Logic. On the other side of the spectrum of the Western philosophical tradition there is the philosophy of Leben, of life and existence and even the irrational which Cassirer sees as a reaction to Geist, an attempt to come to terms with the immediate. It is most apparent in the thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Scheler and Heide- gger. Here one waits for the appearance of Being. Spirit (Geist) is seen not as a transformation of life but as alienation, an inauthentic relationship to Being. So, Western Philosophy presents us with a disjoint: either we pursue philosophical understanding in terms of the principles of evidence, the concept, the syllogism, the argument; or we think directly from the situation of life, we “transvaluate values” as Nietzsche suggests, or wait for Being, as Heidegger advices. Vico offers an alternative to both traditions because his thought begins outside this disjoint. It begins neither with Geist nor with Leben but with fantasia as an original and independent power of the human mind. Here images are manifestations of an original power of spirit which gives fundamental form to mind and life. Vico calls these images “universali fantastici” but they are not concepts in poetic cloaks as rationalists tend to assert. The image is not understood in relation to the concept but on its own terms. By building his philosophy on fantasia Vico creates a position outside Western philosophy as traditionally understood. His is the kind of thought that teaches the art of memory and recovery. Unfortunately philosophers of memory have enjoyed no respectful standing in the general histories of philosophy. They are seen as literary, rhetorical, not philosophical in nature because they are not conceptual. What is not conceptual is simply denied philosophical standing. Within this rationalism imagination is at best conceived as the handmaiden of the concept, an element of the mind subject to investigation by a theory of knowledge (standing between perception and concept) or perhaps viewed as part of a theory of aesthetics. Within the latter imagination is seen as apart from the concerns of theory of knowledge; the image is free only apart from the concept seen as supreme achievement of reason fully developed [“ragione tutta spiegata,” as Vico calls it]. In other words, imagination is considered a mere subject matter, never a mode of philosophical thought; at best the image and the metaphor become devices to illustrate conceptual philosophical meanings. Plato is exemplary here. In his dialogues, the image remains outside the form of philosophical thought to be used only when conceptual reasoning rises toward what he considers a view of the whole, or it is used as a simple instrument of communication to liven up the thought. Vico to the contrary insists that philosophy, astronomy, economics, morality, politics, history, even logic can be poetic (see book II of The New Science). Paradoxically, without imagination, a view of the whole cannot be reached. See the image of the charioteer and the two winged horses in the Phaedrus and then read book X of the Republic where the rational idea is separated from the wisdom of Homer (a figure most prominently displayed in Vico’s frontispiece above shown). This contemptuous cavalier attitude toward the image considered inferior to the idea, has dogged Western philosophy for twenty four centuries. Vico proves that indeed there is no such thing as an individual called Homer: he is the representation of the oral poetical tradition of the Greeks and in that sense, despite Plato’s esoteric opinion, Homer remains the exoteric “educator of Hellas.” In conclusion, I would like to propose that Vico’s philosophy offers a fresh new starting point. It is not a question of siding with the poetic wisdom of Homer against the rational wisdom of Plato, but of in- terpreting wisdom (and therefore reason too) in a new way as “sapienza poetica,” (poetical wisdom). It is a sort of synthesis, a novantiqua; a blending of the two to arrive at a new understanding of both image and idea. That is what Vico shows the reader: he works his way back to the world of original thought (the myth) since for him “verum factum convertuntur,” the true and the made are convertible and Man can return to origins via what he himself has made: history, institutions, languages, artifacts, etc., in fact he can do that more surely than with science observing a nature that he has not made. Through his discovery of the imaginative universal, of fantasia as a way of thinking and acting, Vico finds a new origin for philosophical thought. Heidegger calls it “originative thinking,” without however giving much credit to Vico for this insight, but then he did the same disservice to Kierkegaard’s powerful critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history. In any case, it is Vico who with his conception of fantasia creates a novantiqua outside of the above mentioned disjoint between Geist and Leben and the ancient Platonic disjoint between idea and image. Vico is definitely not Hegel. I suggest that Vico in the 21st century ought to be accorded a fair hearing on his own merits as a Herculean hero of philosophy. His message is urgently needed for a reassessment of the cultural identity of Western civilization in general and of the European Union in particular.

Ovi e-book by Emanuel L. Paparella Published in July 2012 3

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943)

-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) Foreword to the addendum by the symposium’s coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella: Two modern philosophers who were greatly inspired by Vico and Croce’s philosophy of aesthetics are Collingwood and Gadamer. We will survey briefly the great affinity of these two 20th century philosophers (one British and the other German who lived to be 102 years old) to the two Neapolitan philosophers, one 18th century and the other 20th century’s, that we have been discussing and elucidating in the symposium, by citing an excerpt from my Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers (June 2013). The focus in this 8th meeting of the symposium will be on Collingwood, reserving a lengthier more thorough treatment of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics for a future addendum. Robin George Collingwood’s Theory of Art as Vichian Fantasia An Addendum by Emanuel L. Paparella (excerpted from his Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers) “The business of this book [The Principles of Art] is to answer the question: What is art? A question of this kind has to be answered in two stages. First we must make sure that the key word (in this case ‘art’) is a word which we know how to apply where it ought to be applied and refuse where it ought to be refused. It would not be much use beginning to argue about the correct definition of a general term whose instances we could not recognize when we saw them. Our first business, then, is to bring ourselves into a position in which we can say with confidence ‘this and this are art; that and that are not art’…. Secondly, we must proceed to a definition of the term ‘art’. This comes second, and not first, because no one can even try to define a term until he has settled in his own mind a definite usage of it: no one can define a term in common use until he satisfied himself that his personal usage of it harmonizes with the common usage. Definition necessarily means defining one thing in terms of something else; therefore, in order to define any given thing, one must have in one’s head not only a clear idea of the thing to be defined, but an equally clear idea of all the other things by reference to which one defines it. People often go wrong over this. They think that in order to construct a definition or (what is the same thing) a ‘theory’ of something, it is enough to have a clear idea of that one thing. That is absurd. Having a clear idea of the thing enables them to recognize it when they see it, just as having a clear idea of a certain house enables them to recognize it when they are there; but defining the thing is like explaining where the house is or pointing out its position on the map; you must know its relations to other things as well, and if your ideas of these other things are vague, your definition will be worthless…. …We disimagine, if I may use the word, a great deal which actually we see and hear. The street noises at a concert, the noises made by our breathing and shuffling neighbors, and even some of the noises made by the performers, are thus shut out of the picture unless by their loudness or in some other way they are too obtrusive to be ignored. At the theater, we are strangely able to ignore the silhouettes of the people sitting in front of us, and a good many things that happen on the stage. Looking at a picture, we do not notice the shadows that fall on it or, unless it is excessive, the light reflected from its varnish. All this is commonplace. And the conclusion has already been stated by Shakespeare’s Theseus ‘the best in this kind [‘works of art’, as things actually perceived by the senses—R.G.C.] are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’ The music to which we listen is not the heard sound, but that sound as amended in various ways by the listener’s imagination, and so with the other arts. But this does not go nearly far enough. Reflection will show that the imagination with which we listen to music is something more, and more complex, than any inward ear; the imagination with which we look at paintings is something more than ‘the mind’s eye’….” --Robin George Collingwood (from The Principles of Art,1938) R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was a multitalented intellectual: both an archeologist and a philosophy professor at Oxford University. Besides his influential The Principles of Art, (1938) he is best known for his philosophy of history. What is less known is that both his aesthetics and his philosophy of history were influenced to a large extent by the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico whom Collingwood greatly admired and even translated into English, especially by Vico’s concept of “fantasia” (imagination) which encompasses both the aesthetic sensibility and the history of man. He was also greatly influenced by Croce’s theory of aesthetics and in some way built on it, as even a cursory reading of the two philosophers will attest to and as Paolozzi has brilliantly elucidated for us in regard to Croce. That having been said, what distinguishes Collingwood’s theory of art are two claims, that: 1) the work of art is a purely imaginary object which exists only and truly in the artist’s mind, and 2) that the work of art is an expression of the artist’s emotion. Let’s look at those two extraordinary claims. That works of art are imaginary entities seems to go against common sense and even the evidence of the senses; after all museums are full of works of art in various media, some of them are in our streets as monuments, architecture, sculptures, songs, films, etc. How can anyone claim that these are not the works of art? Collingwood would urge us to consider a symphony. Unless we attend a live performance at the concert hall we need a medium to listen to the symphony. That medium could be a radio, a TV, a CD, but we would not say that the work is identical with the sounds we hear via those media, for the work of art that is a symphony transcends any specific performances (even that of the concert hall) which might be given. This also applies to works of literature such as novels. I may have a copy of Crime and Punishment on my book shelves, but the novel is not my individual copy of it. This begs the question: How are we to understand the essence or the being of a work of art? Collingwood suggests as an answer that the work exists in the artist’s mind as an imaginary object and it is therefore not identical with any of its physical manifestations in which it incarnates itself, so to speak. As necessary as those manifestations are for its perception, they remain the means the artist employs to get others to experience the work. Let us not forget that Beethoven was completely deaf when he composed his ninth symphony; which means that the symphony was mainly in his mind and there was no need for him to hear it physically before putting final notes on paper or picking up the baton and conducting an orchestra. The work is in the artist’s imagination, albeit he needs physical manifestations to make it present to the audience’s imagination as well. As Paolozzi has explained the ideal of the work of art has to find practical means by which it can be communicated and transmitted to posterity or it will be lost forever. This in effect means that while communication is not a defining feature of the artwork, it is incidental to it, nevertheless it cannot be dispensed with. Obviously this is a radical deviation from Tolstoy’s theory of art as mere communication. The above leads to another question: why is communication incidental to the work of art? In Collingwood’s view, this is because artistic creation is essentially a process of self-acknowledgment. Back to the ancient Socratic injunction: Know thyself. Or as Vico aptly puts it: man makes history, but equally true is that history makes man; i.e., man gets to know himself via history. Yes, emotion is important to the creation of a work of art, as Tolstoy also thought, but Collingwood account of what emotion is quite different from Tolstoy’s. It is basically a Vichian account rooted in the poetics of fantasia. Often we are not sure which emotion grips us. We may be aware of feeling something, but we need to go through a process, which most of the times is linguistic, allowing us to understand what that emotion is. Animals too have powerful emotions, but they lack the language by which they can explain them to themselves. Which is to say, if I am in a car accident, I may be initially aware of being in a state of emotional turmoil, but it is only with the expression of my emotion (swearing at the other driver who may have caused the incident for example) that I become fully aware that I am angry. The linguistic outburst is needed to discover what I feel. In Collingwood’s opinion artists proceed in a similar fashion. Becoming aware that they are in the grip of an emotion, they give form to it via the work of art they create. So what is the difference between my venting of emotions by swearing at the other driver who caused the accident and the artist? To be sure, cultural philistines of many persuasions see no difference: everything that man makes is art, they proclaim; we are all artists in as much as we make things; which in effect means that nothing is art. Collingwood would answer that the difference is that artists explore carefully the particularity of their emotion, taking pain to understand it as a particular specific instance it is. In other words, artists are more interested than most of us in deciphering their emotions. This emphasis on emotions may tempt us to characterize Collingwood’s theory as a proto-Romantic one, but as hinted above, it goes further back to Vico’s description of emotions as being primary in the forging of man’s cultural world, at least at its origins; to his description that language itself came about via powerful emotions and that in point of fact before man could speak he sang impelled by powerful emotions. Perhaps it is now clearer why Collingwood does not believe that physical entities or events, which we usually identify as works of art, are really the works of art or, as he puts, “art proper.” That is not to deny that those physical manifestations are crucial for the audience’s experience of art. But, as far as Collingwood is concerned, the primary goal of art is not communication per se but rather, it is a process by means of which the artist expresses his own emotions to himself. The communication of that emotion to others is secondary. Finally, Collingwood, not unlike Heidegger, differentiates artistic creation proper from other forms of making or producing things. The difference lies in the role of individuality. Crafts and mass production aim at making things that fit a general description and are useful (a sofa, a suit, a pair of shoes, a pencil), the artist aims at creating an individual thing, this very novel or poem, and no other. Collingwood insists, throughout his book, on the unique character of the artworld and in fact seems to imply that when that uniqueness is blurred, then we may be dealing not with art but with pseudo-art. Some modern and post-modern art appears to be pseudo-art. 4 A Brief Comparison between Collingwood and Gadamer’s Hermeneutics Collingwood’s defense of the autonomy of action explanations and his identification of the historical sciences with a search for meaning has sometimes been compared with the project of philosophical hermeneutics pursued by Hans Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method. Gadamer himself acknowledged Collingwood’s influence in his introduction to the German edition of Collingwood’sAn Autobiography. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics constitutes an attack on psychologism because it refuses to identify meaning with autho- rial intentions. The meaning of a text, far from being just what’s intended by the author, emerges through the process of interpretation. The interpreter brings to this process the fore-conceptions or fore-judgments of his Zeitgeist. In the process of interpretation, these fore-conceptions are tested to see whether they can yield a coherent explanation. If they fail to do so, the interpreter must revise his or her understanding of the text accordingly. Although understanding a text is not a matter of merely imposing one’s prejudgments upon it, meaning is ultimately rethought in a new way as the Zeitgeist of the interpreter changes. Gadamer’s anti-psychologism thus leads him to the view that the meaning of the text is not only rediscovered by each generation of interpreters; it changes with each generation of interpreters. Collingwood’s philosophy of history shares with Gadamer the view that meaning (in Collingwood’s case the meaning of an action rather than a text) is not to be identified with inner psychological processes. An action’s meaning is to be found in a publicly re-enactable syllogism. It is because meaning is not a hidden psychological entity that it is inter-subjectively accessible. But although Collingwood, like Gadamer, es- chews a psychologistic account of meaning, he does not endorse the quasi-skeptical conclusion according to which the meaning of a text is different for each generation of interpreters. For Collingwood there is such a thing as seeing the world from the agent’s point of view. Taking the agent’s point of view does not mean entering the agent’s mind by some quasi-miraculous telepathic process; it requires rather that we temporar- ily suspend our own epistemic and motivational premises in order to understand the inferential processes that guide agents with radically different beliefs. Failing to take the agent’s epistemic and motivational premises on board leads the historian to write bad historical narratives, the narratives Collingwood refers to as scissors-and-paste histories. Thus, whilst Collingwood’s philosophy of history, like Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, rejects psychologism, Collingwood, unlike Gadamer, is not skeptical about the possibility of reaching inter-generational agreement about the meaning of past actions via Vichian fantasia. Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946)

Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) 5

RIP Seamus Heaney In Memoriam: On the Passing of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1995), poet, translator, lecturer, playwright has alternatively been called “one of the greatest, if not the greatest poet of our age” and “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” He died unexpectedly in a Dublin hospital on 30 August 2013. His last words texted to his wife a few seconds before his passing were “Do not be afraid.” He is a truly irreplaceable loss for contemporary humanities and Liberal Arts. While mourning his passing, we’d like to celebrate his extraordinary lyric poetry by presenting the Ovi readership with one of his most famous poems on being a writer and a poet: “Digging”. Digging

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

The 12th and final poetry collection of Seamus Heaney (2010)

Chapter 9 Ovi Symposium “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Nineth Meeting: 26 September 2013

Table of Content for the 9th Meeting of the Ovi Symposium Section 1: A Presentation from Dr. Lawrence Nannery: “Picasso’s Guernica as a model.” Section 2: The Tension between Art and Politics: an Art Historian’s Perspective on Picasso’s Guernica. An addendum by way of dialogue from an interview with art historian Patricia Failing Section 3: A Presentation from Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi: “On Translations” as translated from his book L’Estetica di Croce. Section 4: A Presentation from Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella: “The Definition and Nature of Art as a Problematic of Aesthetics” from the concluding chapter of the Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers. Section 5: Table of Content of Dr. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Wester Philoso- phers Section 6: “ A Call to a New Humanism for the Renewal of Western Culture” by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella 1 Picasso’s Guernica as a Model

A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery icasso’s Guernica was the greatest painting of the 20th century, and remains unexampled. This means that almost all of modern painting in the West is unworthy. It is a hard saying that modern art (i.e., painting) is unworthy, but Guernica shows that it is. Imme- Pdiately after the completion of this great work, all the other painters had to run for cover, in effect denying it its due place. No one ever cared to copy it and therefore 20th century painting ran along paths of irrelevance. A good example of this is the school of Surrealism, which takes dreams as the source of art, but disables itself by buying into Freud as the genius behind the truth in painting. Freud was a one-dimensional thinker if there ever was one, everything being reduced to sexual motives, confusing sex with pornography. This shortcut cut off the possibility of getting at the truth of art, since Freud’s ideas all contradict each other. The high priest of dreamtime had no business in reality. Picasso threw himself into this work, all-important to him, so rightly gauged. He was relevant to the age, which was evil, and he created a gigantic painting that is an indictment of the human race itself. For that reason alone it will stand against all other painting in the 20th century, not to mention the even more irrelevant 21st century. While Picasso stood up and told the truth, everyone else stood around wondering what the word “truth” means. When one views Guernica for the first time, one feels the passion and the weightiness of it. Even more, its form is adequate to its content; the black and white strips the painting of color, which by itself shows the inadequacy of art to help. And not only art, but sympathy, rage, and fellow feeling. It is immediate, over- bearingly huge, and goes directly to the only emotion it intends to arouse: anger and indignation. Picasso was accused of propaganda, but nothing could be further from the truth, for the reason that the Spanish military broadcast over the radio every single day during that time its desire to kill everything, men women and children, and the dogs and pigs and buildings. At the same time, the head of the German Air Force in Spain gave a speech from behind his desk, on film, claiming credit for killing the most Communists by indiscriminate bombing with pride. People who would believe the idea that Picasso was a mere propagandist are not worthy of art, and perhaps not even of society. Since the time of Guernica’s composition art has suffered mightily. We have witnessed: Art as decoration; Art as fun; Art as irony; Art as technique; Art as graphic design; Art as a game; Art as madness; Art as a put on; Art as advertising; Art as a way of becoming famous; Art as propaganda; and, most important Art as an investment for the rich. It is a sobering thought, but these tendencies have eaten up art. The art market is a whirligig, with everyone guessing what will sell for many times its price. Such an unworthy game is beneath contempt, and beneath comment. The only proper response to this great work of art is the one I had, despite myself. Having heard about the painting and having read about it in magazines, I took myself to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1963, since I was at that time residing at Columbia University. I had to ask directions to the painting, after having wandered about for an hour or so, and was directed to a certain stair- way as the best path to the great work. As soon as I got to the landing, the painting, which took up more than the entire view from outside the room, lured me. I put my head down so as not to look directly at it until I could see it whole. What happened was one of the great events of my life: I was flung backwards despite myself, all the way into the entrance way and beyond, coming within inches of falling down the staircase. I hold this to be the only adequate reaction to that great work. The effects would never leave me – God blessed me in this way. For this is the only real way to be affected by art: as a revelation; as an attempt to set the world aright; as the meaning of life; and as a refutation of all forms of mere sophistications.

Picasso’s Guernica 2 The Tension between Art and Politics: by way of dialogue: an Art Historian’s Perspective on Picasso’s Guernica:

Excerpts from an interview with art historian Patricia Failing (professor of Art History at the University of Washington and author of Best Loved Art from American Museums)

Brief comments by the Symposium coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella: Upon reading Larry Nannery’s presentation on Picasso’s Guernica, I was immediately brought back to the debate between Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz on the nature of poetry vis a vis politics. This is a thorny problem of aesthetics in some way illustrated in that wonderful Italian movie Il Postino starring the late Neapolitan actor Massimo Troisi; a movie that properly interpreted is about the nature of poetry and art. The problematic seems to be this: when is the line crossed between art and politics? Should there be a line to begin with? Can art become political propaganda and if so, is it still art? Should it be disseminated as such? Should the two be kept separate and distinct, especially if we concur with Croce’s assertion that art is by its own nature free of all fetters and constraints including that of ethics, as Ernesto Paolozzi has also amply elucidate in his Ovi e-book and in this very symposium? It then occurred to me that here in the US there is an expert in the field of Art History who has been teaching, thinking and writing on the issue for decades now. I refer to Professor Patricia Failing who teaches Art History at the University of Washington. I wish to quote verbatim and without any comment, some of her musings on the conundrum of the relationship of art to politics. I trust that this particular perspective of a professional art historian, together with that of Paolozzi, Nannery and my own will stimulate further reflection and discussion, not only among us at the Ovi symposium but also among the magazine editors and its readers. For indeed free speech and the search for the truth is what Ovi magazine in general and the Ovi symposium are all about. “One reason Guernica is considered a treasure in terms of art history is that it seemed to provide a bridge between what were considered by some to be antithetical poles: the idea of making an effective political statement and an effective artistic statement at the same time. And this is certainly one of the achievements of the Guernica project, that it was a third space between those two antithetical poles. A lot of artists, who looked up to Picasso as the exemplar of Modernist practice in painting, were interested very much in being Modernists on the one hand, and still very concerned about larger political events and the larger political arena in which they could act as artists. You can find many attempts to bring these two concerns together into the same body of work, to be really expressive and exploratory in formal terms and still be able to make a very heartfelt political statement. And to find that the great master of Modern- ism was able to accomplish this goal somehow - the mere fact that this kind of resolution might be possible - is what had such an enormous effect on artists in the twentieth century. Guernica betrays the stereotype of the Modern as the incredibly new and the incredibly, let’s say, divorced from tradition, from academic practice. Because it’s a painting that you don’t necessarily associate with Modernism, and yet it makes an extremely important and extremely evocative Modernist statement at the same time. It did something that an academic painter would have loved to do, which is to take a very traditional theme and make it modern and make it relevant to a new time and a new audience and a new sensibility. That’s a pretty big accomplishment.

There was, of course, a great deal of argument about whether or not it was really as effective a political statement as it could have been if it had been more accessible, if it had been more traditional. And also whether it was really the strongest artistic statement it could have been if it weren’t so tied up with a specific political agenda. When the painting was on tour around the world, there was a great deal of interest on the part of Communist Party members and Communist intellectuals about whether or not this painting would be able to communicate with anybody of the proletarian or worker class. And so you find that there was a lot of testimony collected over the years from people of the working class who saw Guernica. And they responded to it very powerfully, found that they were really just awestruck by this particular painting. It did seem to have an effect on people who you wouldn’t think very likely to react in a positive way to this kind of elitist painting. The controversy about whether or not this particular painting could really be an effective political tool never leaves the painting. Picasso himself later on said that painting is not for decorating apartments; it has a much broader social importance. And I think partly the tour was about finding confirmation of that belief.” (From an Interview to Professor Patricia Failing of the University of Washington on Art and Politics). 3 On Translations A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (as translated from his e-book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce) As is well known, Croce denies that it is possible to execute a perfect translation of a literary text, and of other kind of texts. It is obvious that such a position is in certain aspects nothing but a necessary corollary of the already demonstrated unity between form and content. In fact, to translate a literary work means in effect to transfer a determined content into a new language, a new form. This is indeed an impossible operation as anyone who has attempted to translate any poet or even a poet who wrote in ancient language in a more modern version. It is not easy to contradict such an experience. It can happen that the translation is beautiful, or as they say, successful, ma it is never adequate to the text that has been translated. This having been said, it is also true, that there may be particular cases wherein, at least from a psychological point, or as we could affirm, an empirical point of view, the general concept rigorously expressed will not find a uniform application. It would be simpler, for example, to translate from languages that have a certain affinity, from French to Italian rather than from German or Russian. Moreover, it appears to be easier to reproduce the atmosphere of universal works, even in verses, such as a Shakespeare drama, rather than that of a brief lyric poem by Ungaretti or Di Giacomo. Many other examples are possible, but finally it should be noted that it is paradoxical that the aesthetic pleasure we experience in reading or seeing a representation of Oedipus Rex is all due to the merit of its translator, as excellent as he may be as such, and not to the genius of the great Greek poet. As is also known, they are all issues of an empirical nature which could be presented ad infinitum. In any case, the problem remains: why did Croce declare impossible a perfect translation while admitting the possibility of a re-evocation the poetic in the original as he puts it, understood in its most intimate expressive meaning. It seems to us that, even without an appeal to Croce’s statement, that it is exactly the logical possibility of re-evocation (distinct from a critical judgment or the specific ever-changing conditions within which the interpreter finds himself) that allows for a translation, which, if executed according to its re-evocation, always preserves something of the original, even it meets problems of a practical nature which remain insurmountable. There is a Crocean paragraph in La Poesia, written almost half a century later than l’Estetica which supports our thesis. After having mentioned the utility of literary translations, some bad others faithful, seems to be attenuating his first radical position on translations. He focuses on those translations which can be branded as poetical, and writes that they “…moving from the re-creation of the original poetry, other sentiments can be added, as residing in those who receive it, which, because of a different historical condition or a different individual personality, are different and give rise to the translation which is the poetical being transferred from an ancient into a new soul.” Therefore, the aesthetic translation, assumes a re-creation or a re-evocation of the poetic which one intends to translate, to then detach oneself from it because of personal or historic conditions which inevitably condition the activity of the translator. But given that translation assumes a re-evocation, the work of art cannot be completely lost when it is translated. This position needs to be deepened and perhaps the same Croce should have better clarified the issue.

Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic published by Croce in 1902 and translated in English in 2008

The Poetical and the non Poetical published in 1923 by Croce’s publisher Giuseppe Laterza of Bari Italy

Benedetto Croce:The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom by Ernesto Paolozzi published as an Ovi e-book in June 2013 and available for free in the Ovi bookstore 4 The Definition and Nature of Art as a Problematic of Aesthetics A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella (from the last concluding chapter of the Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers)

Note: by way of a dialogue on the crucial themes of the nexus of art and aesthetics, the freedom of art from ethics, the tension between art and politics, the harmony between the Good, the True and the Beautiful, as discussed so far in the Ovi symposium, I’d like to present for this meeting, in a slightly revised form, the last chapter of my e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers as it appeared in the Ovi bookstore in June 2013. For those readers interested in perusing the book, the table of contents appears after the presentation. 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 are derived from different assumptions. Larry Nannery, followed by comments from Art Historian Patricia Failing, has presented us today with an example of such conundrums via Picasso’s Guernica. Indeed, the range of those questions is philosophically wide and deep and great Western philosophers have taken up the challenge of defining (or perhaps refusing to define) art. 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. This authoritative and institutional approach of the artworld 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. Moreover, 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 within human history, thus eliminating natural beauty. 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, 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, the question: 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, 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 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, redolent of political propaganda, 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 epic journey is still out and so is the jury on the whole of man’s artistic production through time and space. 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. Dante might think that the privilege belongs to poetry. 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. If we survey the various Western philosophers interested in aesthetics 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. 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 one 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 in another meeting, some, such as Collingwood, focus on the artist even excluding the work itself. Even more counter-intuitively the French literary theorist Roland Bar- thes 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. 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 exhibition. 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 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. 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 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 of 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 in his magnum opus The New Science (1725), not to speak of Croce’s speculation on the subject as elucidated by Ernesto Paolozzi. 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 point out the bias of Eurocentric art based on abstract principles of universality against Afrocentric art based on the particularity of individual cultures. Indeed, 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. 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. There are various reasons why these philosophers, many of them influenced by Karl Marx’s philosophy, Adorno and Benjamin jump to mind, 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. 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 our 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. 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 cele- brates 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” by Leni Riefenstahl is a case in point; it is considered the archetype of propaganda films depicting the apotheosis of the yearly Nazi meetings and all the more effective because it is aesthetically pleasing. 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. All of 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 developments 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, such as the ones we are currently having in the Ovi symposium. 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. Indeed, 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 as Kant has well taught us in his Critique of Judgment, without understanding no true judgment is possible either.

Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) lays the foundations for modern aesthetics

A reprint of the Library of Liberal Arts edition of 1965. Croce’s Guide to Aesthetics presents one of the clearest and strongest defenses of the intuitive nature of art in Western philosophical thought (originally published in 1913) L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce (2002) by Ernesto Paolozzi

Aesthetics Theories of Great Western Philosophers Ovi e-book by Emanuel L. Paparella published in June 2013 and available for free in the Ovi Bookshop 5

Table of Content of Dr Emanuel Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers Preface -p. 3

Plato and Aristotle : Aesthetic as “Representation” and “Poetics” -p. 8

Vico: Aesthetic as Fantasia -p.10

Kant: Aesthetic as Beauty -p. 12

Schopenhauer: Aesthetic as Revelation -p. 15

Nietzsche: Aesthetic as Redemption -p. 17

Hegel: Aesthetic as Ideal and Historical -p. 19

Croce: Aesthetic as Intuition -p. 22

Adorno: Aesthetic as Lighthearted and Liberatory -p. 26

Benjamin: Aesthetic as Auratic -p. 29

Barthes: Aesthetic as Text -p. 31

Weitz and Derrida: Aesthetic as Indefinable and Deconstructable -p. 34

Heidegger: Aesthetic as Truth -p. 38

Davis: Aesthetic as Digital Reproduction -p. 41

Collingwood: Aesthetic as Expression -p. 45

Goodman: Aesthetic as Symbolical -p. 48

Walton: Aesthetic as Make-Believe -p. 50

Beardsley: Aesthetic as Production -p. 53

Freud: Aesthetic as Symptom of the Unconscious -p. 56

Dewey: Aesthetic as Experience -p. 59

Hume: Aesthetic as Relativism -p. 62

Conclusion: Art as a Problematic of Aesthetic -p. 65

William Blake’s God Creating the Universe 6 A Call to a New Humanism for the Renewal of Western Culture A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella n his 1924 book on The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Edwin Arthur Burtt wrote this perceptive passage: “An adequate cosmology will only begin to be written when an adequate philosophy of mind has appeared, and such a philosophy of mind must provide full satisfaction both for the motives of the behaviorists who wish to make mind material for experimental manipulation and exact measure- Iment, and for the motives of idealists who wish to see the startling difference between a universe without mind and a universe organized into a living and sensitive unity through mind properly accounted for. I hope some readers of these pages will catch glimmerings of how this seemingly impossible reconciliation is to be brought about. For myself I must admit that, as yet, it is beyond me” (p. 324). We are now in the 21st century but despite Whitehead’s process philosophy and cosmology, and Sagan’s and Hawking scientific cosmological schemes the above mentioned reconciliation has yet to fully appear. To be sure there are some encouraging signs on the horizon. I am thinking here of scientists at the cutting edge of quantum physics already lying the foundations for a new revolutionary cosmology. See The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar (1990) and The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot (1991). I would like to suggest that the bridge between the extremes of scientism and idealism may well prove to be Vico’s philosophy of history, correctly understood. As we have already intimated, for Vico the historical course of civilizations within a providential order is that “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance” (SN 241). Thereafter, when a society at the last stage of development in its “barbarism of reflection” fails to heal itself by taking responsibility for its history, the Vichian ricorso takes place, i.e., the return to primitivism and barbarism which restores simplicity, religion and poetic wisdom (SN, 1106). It is that ricorso which saves Man by preserving his humanity. Here we need to return to Vico’s concept of Providence, the centerpiece of his speculation. Anselm and Aquinas have taught us that God is the prototype of the thinker in as much as he creates being by thinking it. Vico too, as we have seen, points out that thinking and making are one and the same for God. Therefore, in as much as God has granted his own Logos to both being and the organs of knowledge, “created being” is “thought being” that bears traces of the divine intellect. Vico patterns this convertibility of thinking and making to man’s artifacts and shows that Man is capable of truly knowing only what he himself has made. He will never comprehend fully either nature or its Maker, at least here within time and space. And here lies the root of contemporary Man’s cultural malaise: in the presumptuous conviction that the human mind can and in fact will in the future encompass God’s mind. At that point Man will be a god of sorts. As we have pointed out above, Vico describes thus the last stage of deterioration of a whole civilization: “And finally they go mad.” What brings about the madness is the delusion of being a god which is nothing else but the worshipping of one’s cleverness and its derivations; what the Bible calls idolatry. This is the real original sin: the stubborn refusal to be a creature and the arrogant attempt to become a god. This is the secret wish of Adam surfacing in Hawking who boldly declares that “then we shall know the mind of God.” In other words, then we shall narcissistically worship ourselves as the creators of the eighth day of creation. Surveying ancient history we see a Roman Empire at the summit of its splendor and organizational genius, when unaided human power could go no further, producing a Caligula, perhaps the most representative of the Roman emperors and a civilization on the brink of its own self-destruction gone mad with the worship of its own achievements. Rome becomes a goddess too. Caligula proudly leads the Roman army to the shores of Northern Gaul and commands his generals to collect shells on the beach for him. A god need not give justifications for his whims. Closer to us, we still have on German soil an American army wonderfully equipped with all kinds of techno- logically sophisticated weapons (smart bombs, computer guided tomahawk missiles, stealth bombers, and so on). They are there as part of Nato to protect the Western Europeans (now known as the EU) against a Soviet Union no longer in existence. The Germans on the other hand not too long ago were still paying the salaries of the Russian soldiers still on former East German soil. Nobody envisaged or expected the new threat to the West which arrived on 9/11. This confusion is typical of a civilization which in its technological hubris has perfected the means and neglected the goals. A civilization that by idolatrous self-adoration of its own cleverness ends up discarding the living God. As Carl Sagan puts it at the end of the introduction to Hawking’s A Brief History of Time(1988): “Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do” (p. x). This is the Cartesian mind-set at work: first God is made the underpinning of one theory of knowledge. Eventually He is discarded as superfluous. For indeed, in our consumer-produced society, having nothing to produce is the equivalent of being superfluous. Once God has been made superfluous, then anything is possible and allowed. As Dostoyevsky points out in hisThe Brothers Karamo- zov, if there is no God authority itself loses it legitimacy. Then the world will be governed by Machiavellian “virtù” and “fortuna” with man asserting himself in the world as amoral energy. Inevitably the “will to power” will tend to replace the “will to truth.” The gulags and the lagers become not only thinkable but possible. This is the “sickness unto death,” a “self-forgetfulness” of one’s nature, the final dehumanization of Man. This is the dead-end on which Man is presently embarked in a closed world utterly immanent and deprived of any transcendent principle. When Man in his freedom wills such a world God respects that freedom and simply leaves it alone. He becomes the absent God. As J. Ellul renders it: “The silence of God entails the disappearance of the very meaning of western history. The paradox that is the West exists no longer…The West is dying because it has won over God” (The Betrayal of the West). Those are powerful words. Perhaps more than any other contemporary thinker, Ellul has pointed out that we are the heir of Cartesian world, both in theory and in practice. That is the logic behind a dehumanized world emphasizing technological progress at the expense of Man’s humanity. Ellul calls it the world of “efficient ordering” implying the transformation of all the spheres of human activity, be they productive, political, and even psychological, into systems of order arrived at through technology. All spheres of life are ultimately converted into procedures and structures. Humanistic thought rooted in imagination and intuition is simply excluded from this kind of efficient ordering (See J. Ellul’s The Technological Society, 1964). What lies behind this modern phenomenon is the Cartesian scientific mind-set. Way back in the seventeenth century, the Cartesian mind-set envisioned the machine as a tool to systematically order human experience through a rationalistic division and conversion into procedures of all the processes of the human world. Vico intuited that in that kind of technological world little room is left for works of humanistic imagination (e.g., literature, the arts, history, philosophy, ethics); i.e. the very modes of thought and sentiment through which Man may attempt to understand himself. It is this inability to associate humanistic thought with truth that lies at the root of contemporary technocratic mentality and its sheer inability to provide a unifying vision of the whole of human knowledge. As Gilkey has pointed out, in that kind of world human beings become the servants rather than the masters of the very organizations they have created. The worth of an individual will not be conceived as intrinsic to his humanity any longer but as related to his contribution to an effective, efficient part of a social scheme. Any sort of transcendence over the social system, any inwardness and creativity are not only not appreciated but more often than not they are discouraged. The individual is seen as a mere cog in the system: a producing and consuming machine devoid of any inwardness. Robocop will be seen as a better law enforce- ment agent than a human being who has fears and emotions and more liable to make a mistake. What is highly ironic is that this cultural disaster and impoverishment has come to pass in the “Christian” West which has always valued, at least in principle, the transcendent dignity of the individual. After all, the inalienable rights enshrined in the US Constitution were not invented by Thomas Jefferson one fine day. They were already intrinsic part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Christianity has always conceived them as rights that inhere to the reality of the human spirit; what used to be called soul but is today called “software.” One cannot be too far from the truth in asserting that this degeneration of the concept of human spirit is directly related to our civilization’s present state of dehumanization. Indeed, to live by bread alone, for one’s belly, is to have sold one’s soul for a bowl of lentils, and ultimately to die spiritually. Spiritual destitution lies at the root of our external problems such as the ecological devastation wrought on nature and threatening to swallow both nature and civilization. The prophetic warnings of 1984 and Brave New World ring even truer today. We live in a world preoccupied with economic issues and oblivious of social justice, integrity and compassion. As the world gets more efficiently orderly, it seems to become less free, less dynamic and innovative, even less affluent, at least for the majority given the widening gap between rich and poor. Presidents talk of a “gentler kinder nations” and “compassionate conservatism” but the sad reality is the sense of being at the threshold of a new Dark Age, when the “barbarians of the intellect” are already inside the citadel of civilization as we know it. So the pressing question seems to be this: how could a culture issuing from a dynamic, creative civilization extolling Man’s dignity and grandeur such as the Italian Renaissance have stooped so low? How did we end with “thought police” inside the very citadel of thought and free speech? The answer cannot be given by science. Only speculative philosophy or theology can attempt one. Gilkey has already intimated one when he declared that “technology by itself, or technical-manipulative reason when made the exclusive form of reason and of creativity possesses a built-in element that leads to its own destruction and eventual destruction of all it manipulates.” Now, if our very cleverness has brought us to this impasse, what hope is there left? I would suggest that in order to recover hope, humanity needs to recover its sense of a transcendent power beyond reason (which is not to say irrational, far from it), able to temper this built-in evil which seems to be present in what we, who live in an “enlightened” culture, presently consider normal and even good. There is undoubtedly a vast gulf in our present civilization between that for which and toward which man is oriented and the wretched reality in which he finds himself.Dante, as well as the Bible, call this gulf “sin.” This reality can hardly be understood in a society where sin and guilt are either excused as neurosis or exorcised by one’s analyst. Indeed, modern man finds himself at the crossroads. He needs to make a choice between a dangerous delusion of being capable of his own redemption and salvation, that a few more technological wonders will do the trick, or to live in the apathy of a “quiet desperation,” or to muster the courage for a genuine concern for the meaning of his humanity. Only that concern can arrest the process of dehumanization. But in order to make this crucial choice he needs a concept of what it means to be human and how nature, history and humanity are part of a larger spiritual whole. In theological circles this goes by the name of “creation spiritu- ality.” In more traditional and simpler words, Man must know himself. We like to envision Jonathan Edwards and the Calvinists as men obsessed by the concept of original sin but a proper understanding of original sin would make Man conscious of the fact that he cannot justify and redeem himself through technology. But then, how does Man express this unity with nature in the light of the modern post-Kantian consciousness of human freedom and the autonomy of the human conscience? The German theologian Bonhoffer pointed out that modern scientific man has done away even with a working hypothesis of God because he is convinced that everything works just as well without Him. This seems to be modern man’s dilemma, how to avoid, on one hand, the pitfall of subjugation to nature, and on the other hand, that of abusing nature for his own “superior” goals. To overcome this dilemma man must be confident of being capable of transcending nature without destroying it. At this juncture of mankind’s journey the rediscovery of Vico appears to me providential. It may be one of the best alternatives available within Western culture between two extremes: Cartesian technocratic man on one hand, and Nietzschean charismatic man on the other. As we have seen, Vico’s truth—while aiming for the transcendent— remains at all times open to existence and its contradictions. His historicism may be evolutionary but it is never deterministic as a Fontanelle’s or a Nietzsche’s. Vico insists throughout his speculation that the historian must not anticipate but rather interpret reality. He must always begin with the certum in order to understand the verum. After Croce’s discovery and popularization of Vico in Italy in the 20th century, modern scholars began to understand, although confusedly at first, that (1) Vico is indeed very modern in his insistence on a pragmatic approach to thinking; in his insight that thought must be incarnate in life and experience and specifically the nature of history; (2) a mode of thinking that jettisons outright from the flux of reality the pole of the particular and concrete with its inherent contradictions, is a mere game of intellect and cannot possibly constitute thinking; (3) Vico’s merit is that of salvaging the particular from an abstract rationalism without falling into the trap, very common among positivists, of a purely materialistic dimension of reality; (4) Vico’s “ideal eternal history” is not idealistic; it is rather the conclusion of a long speculative process beginning with experience and the particular and always returning to origins; a far cry from Descartes’ scientism setting up the deductive demonstrations of geometry as the only criteria of certitude and reducing philosophical speculation to mere calculation, and the whole of experience to the observation of mere physical materialistic phenomena. As an antidote for rampant Cartesian rationalism, Vico, way back in 1725, proposed his New Science. He correctly perceived that the whole of reality operates on two paradoxically related and complementary poles; for example, particular/universal, form/content, transcendence/immanence, free will/providence, barbarism/ civilization, objective/subjective, passion/virtue, intuition/reason, spontaneity/reflection, matter/spirit, body/ soul, poetic wisdom/reflective wisdom, tradition/progress, life/thought, and so on. This complementarity issues not from a rationalistic pseudo-unity of intellectual categories but rather from an organic unity derived from the phenomenon at its very origins. Unfortunately, Vico was not accorded an attentive hearing in the 18th century. In philosophy textbooks he is usually relegated to a footnote, if even mentioned. Even in today’s courses on myth, language and history, academics at best accord Vico a passing nod or a tip of the hat. In his autobiography, Vico mentions that his own colleagues would cross the street so they would not have to acknowledge and/or discuss the publication of his book. Indeed, academics are a strange lot. Paul Ricoeur, who has offered us some brilliant insights into the relationship between history and language, in his Time and Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1985) dedicates the whole of chapter 10 to the hermeneutics of historical consciousness but does not bother to as much as to mention its progenitor. Vico is found in a footnote (n. 33, p. 310), in passing, within the context of Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse, and Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives. Moreover, a brilliant philosopher of science such as E.A. Burtt, already mentioned above, former professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and Cornell University, investigates in depth the scientific thinking of Coperni- cus, Galileo and Newton in his classical The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1924), points out the fallacies of modern scientific thinking, repeatedly mentions precursors from the Italian Renaissance who greatly influenced the development of scientific thinking (Tartaglia, Bruno, Campanella, Leonardo, Fi- cinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Patrizzi, Torricelli), and utterly ignores Vico’s New Science. Indeed, academics have never been overly kind to Vico’s scholarly fortunes. Various reasons have been proffered for this sad neglect, among which the fact that Vico was not a systematic thinker and could not therefore be easily pi- geonholed. This intriguing phenomenon of Vico’s neglect in academic circles, which begins when he was still teaching at the University of Naples (where he never rose beyond the rank of Assistant Professor), and continues even today remains to be examined and studied carefully. Be that as it may, the cultural malaise took its tragic course in the 18th and 19th century, till Nietzsche proposes the abandonment of rationalism on rational grounds, pronounces God dead and the Enlightenment dead with Him, and in order to revitalize a sick civilization proposes the creation of immanent values as discoverable at the very core of human nature. Nietzsche correctly perceives that these values spring from a primordial religious impulse in Man. The cultural disaster seems to occur when the pole of transcendence is abandoned and the will to power replaces the classical Platonic-Aristotelian will to truth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in modern academia where truth is piously professed but power is cavalierly practiced. The disaster need not have occurred had Vico’s alternative been given a more serious and attentive consideration. Today, Vico is much better known than in his own century, however, he continues to be subsumed under idealism or romanticism and even under the Nietzschean rediscovery of the sacred. That is a mistake and a disservice to Vico’s thought. Vico’s signal contribution and importance consists in the fact that he is still today the most valid alternative between Cartesian rationalism ushering in technocratic man ready to efficiently order the world, and Nietzschean anti-rationalism ushering in charismatic overman devoid of transcendence and ready to transvaluate values and impose them on a world locked in a deterministic eternal return. Let me end with an intriguing comment made recently by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennet on the dichotomy science/humanities which remains to be bridged by a third humanistic culture in between the two antagonistic ones of science on one side and that of the liberal arts on the other still opposing each other: “It’s a two way-street. When scientists decide to ‘settle’ the hard questions of ethics and meaning, for instance, they usually manage to make fools of themselves, for a simple reason: They are smart but ignorant. The reason philosophers spend so much of their time and energy raking over the history of the field is that the history of philosophy consists, in large measure, of very tempting mistakes, and the only way to avoid making them again and again is to study how the great thinkers of the past got snared by them. Scientists who think their up-to-date scientific knowledge renders them immune to the illusions that lured Aristotle and Hume and Kant and the others into such difficulties are in for a rude awakening.” Plenty of food for thought in that brief statement! Perhaps we in the Symposium ought to pause there and revisit the problem of C.P. Snow’s two cultures. In any case, it seems to me that the final question of this essay ought to be this: Will our over-rationalistic culture finally opt to change its current paradigm of reality and recover humanistic imaginative poetic modes of thinking as exemplified by the poetic philosophy of Vico or, more recently, by the philosophical ethical challenge of a Levinas? For, at this juncture of our historical journey, our very humanity may be at the crossroads and Vico may be the guide we desperately need in order to choose wisely and continue the journey on the right road to its final destination. Dante needed a wise guide to begin his arduous imaginative inner journey to his salvation. Can we afford to do any less?

Frontispiece of G. Vico’s New Science (1725)

Chapter 10 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Tenth Meeting: 10 October 2013

Table of Content for the 10th Meeting of the Ovi Symposium Section 1: A Presentation from Dr Lawrence Nannery: “How to Read a Poem.” Section 2: “Martin Heidegger’s Perspective on Art as Truth.” From Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, by way of a commentary on Dr. Lawrence Nannery’s Presentation. Section 3: A Presentation from Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce: “Taste and Interpretation” Section 4: “David Hume’s Perspective on Taste and Aesthetics.” From Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers by way of a commentary on Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation. Section 5: Nelson Goodman’s Perspective on Art as Symbolical. From Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers, by way of summation. Section 6: A Presentation from Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella: “A Revisiting of Emmanuel Levinas’ Challenge to Western Ethics. A New Humanism for the Renewal of Western Culture” Section 7: A selected annotated presentation of Levinas’ major books translated into English 1 How to Read a Poem A Presentation by Lawrence Nannery Poetry has been a very powerful thing throughout history. The ritual dramas of all primitive peoples seem to have been recited and sung and acted out. Later, the belief systems of ancient civilizations were memorized by priestly classes and by students in whatever educational institutions there were: the “way of life” was taught in oral poetic forms. In the Western tradition, we see that poets who claimed to be blood relatives of the great genius Homer (whoever he was) memorized his great long poems and held contests to see who could recite the verses perfectly. They also acted out in some measure the poem being recited, thus crossing the line into drama, though at first, each performance was restricted to one orator and a chorus. So far as we know, the format of recitation existed from the 6th century B.C. onwards, and were overseen by judges, who all had memorized the text, or, later, had authoritative written copies of it. There are many examples of poetry mobilizing a whole culture to take the shape that it does, or validating one that already existed, as in the cases of the Indian Mahabharata and the great poem of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. But in our era the case is quite different. In the modern age, poetry has taken on a merely personal meaning. And this justifies the following opinion of Martin Heidegger’s, where he states that: “poetically man dwells… .” In my opinion, this means that only humans live poetically, and that means that all important things; all sacred things; all unexpected things; and everything that man experiences that other species do not; are in the realm of poetry, by which he means, among other things, the realm of the magical and the sacred. This is a very potent claim, but I believe it to be true. Given the state of poetry today, this seems a gross overstatement, but it is truly defensible if one considers that all forms of song are forms of poetry. It is easy to see this. It seems that every young man who is smitten with a young woman is likely to burst into song. There is the existence of “standards” in modern popular music, viz., tunes that are popular down through generations. They subsist over time because they strike a note of sentiment and music that appeal widely to the general population. So, there is no generic difference between what song is and does and what poetry is and does. But in today’s world the songs are restricted to those with tender emotions. Thus they do not possess the same power or range as the culture-forming ancient and medieval poetries. A narrowing has taken place. Even though epic and long narrative poems were written all the way through the 19th century, the 20th century has seen little of this. And, though it was common enough in earlier decades to find people who made a living by reciting poems, nowadays the rule is that the author has first claim on the performance of his work. In this process, the flowery delivery common in the 19th century has declined. So, it is fair to claim that poetry now belongs to the poet, and that fact reinforces the notion that poems are taken to be personal above all else. This is a great burden to bear for the poet, because few people are as good at reading as they are at writing. Added to that, the ability to deliver written words to an audience in a striking way is rare; I would go so far as to say that it is far rarer than the ability to write good poems, so the public is often disserved by how poetry is read aloud in the current day. It is also important to say that, in a general way, all the elements that have been thought for centuries to make up poetic diction have fallen into disuse, and plain speech substituted. Rhyme, meter, metaphor, simile, alliteration, assonance, clear diction, emphasizing particular words, and the rhythm of the diction are just of some the things that have been cast away, so far as I have found in the many poetry readings I have attended. Of course, one could blame it all on the Protestant Reformation of centuries ago, in which plain speaking was considered an element of morality, but that seems too far a reach for me. I would prefer to say that poetry has exhausted itself in the English-speaking countries. Therefore in my mind there is an impasse: I cannot find out why what is so central to the essence of humanity would be left to die on the vine. Cast in this vein I have decided after long thought that the only curative would be to do what the freed- men in the United States did at the end of the reign of Black slavery, when they were freed from bondage, namely, they put down their shovels where they were, and went to work to sustain themselves. I have decided to do the same, and that is the basis of the recommendations I will make on the subject of “how to read a poem.” * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The first thing is: practice reading the poem. This seems so obvious, especially if you are the author of it, that it need not be said. But I can attest, as an active consumer of poetry readings over many years, that this is not the practice today. I first became acquainted with this tendency when, as a college student, I attended a reading by a New York poet. His diction was so poor and mumbly that another member of the audience asked him a question after the reading was over whether his delivery was due to some speech defect or some special lesson he was endeavoring to give us, but the poet himself was unfazed, and responded that, no, he always spoke that way. The questioner had been kind, but the poet was truthful, and supplied a good reason for everyone to run away when word got out that he “read” his own poems. The second thing is to read the poem by recognizing that all poems have rhythm, and in fact probably have several different rhythms as one progresses through the body of the poem. So, some sections may be somber and slow, some playful and fast, and some merely matter-of-fact. If the reader, and a fortiori, the poet himself, is not alive to this fact, then he should pursue another profession. Reading aloud his or her poems is not his or her thing. Third, rhyme has more or less been dead in poetry circles for a couple of generations now, at least in the English-speaking world, and perhaps for good reason, viz., which is that rhyme wore itself out. While Shakespeare could write an entire play in rhyming couplets, we do not any longer consider it central to poetic diction. Still, I am an advocate of serendipitous rhymes, i.e., those that occur midstream, out of the blue. Such examples seem to wear well. Rhyme is also a wonderful teaching instrument when young children are hear it and begin to play with it. Fourth, playfulness is very uncommon in poetry nowadays, as John Calvin would have decreed, but wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if poets were funny once in a while? What passes for humor today in poetry circles passes me by completely. These bits of humor are anything but risible. Singsong sentenc- es should be welcome from time to time, even nonsense rhymes, just to put a smile on the faces of the audience. Fifth, and perhaps most violated, is the idea that the end of a line means something more than just a signal that one should ignore it. In fact, I take it that there must be a slight pause at the end of each line in order to emphasize the shape of the text. Nowadays, this is apparently unknown. If there were rhyme in the poem, end-rhyme that is, with whatever rhyme scheme one wants to conjure, the rhythm will be under the rule of the rhyme. And that naturally entails that a pause, however short, is necessary to emphasize the relation between the words that rhyme. Recently I have seen quatrains that have been broken up in the middle of a sentence as though there were nothing to the quatrain, and the reasoning is that this is legitimate because it is new, and it relieves through variation. Well, it is new, but it is decidedly not a quatrain any more. The end of every line demands a very short pause; the end of a quatrain a somewhat longer pause; and, if the poem is broken up into sections, a pause longer again is needed. Why? Because otherwise the hearers cannot get the sense of the work, and it loses its right to be called a poem. Sixth, metaphor and simile are of the essence of poetry, and should never be entirely lacking in what is called a poem. They are not always brilliant, but even common speech contains many comparisons, so therefore a poem lacking any element of poetic diction cannot be considered a true poem. Last, there is meter. Meter exists in all speech, but the meters of poetry have a lot in common with music. They are always present in any poem. The reader should use this to his or her advantage, and emphasize the meter, even allow a sing-song phrase or two to escape your lips, in order to demonstrate that poetry is the most important of the arts, and that is because it goes to the essence of things, and right to our hearts, and makes us dwell, sometimes, in grace. Three Basic Rules There are three rules of reading out loud that should govern all the other rules. They are: (1) The shape of a stanza should be, among other things, a guide to how it should be recited; (2) The rhythms and speed and intonations of the delivery of the words and phrases confer an overflow of meaning to the hearer. I call this “lilt.” Without lilt, you do not have a poem; and (3) the speed and diction should be appropriate to the emotions intended to be conveyed. Also to be considered are the timbre and beauty of the voice intoning the poem. It should help in many instances, but, if the truth be told, sometimes the content of the poem requires a suppression of this quality. On the other hand, it is often important to sometimes infect the reading with playfulness of expression, but other times this is inappropriate. From all these considerations, one should divine that there is never a general rule that governs all poems, and one must have the ability to divine when to be playful and when to be serious in order to bring out the deeper meaning of the poem. The only negative lesson to draw from these consideration is that, if a reader reads every poem the same exact way, he or she is not worthy to be a reader. The same holds for readers who lend no emotion to the audience when he/she reads aloud. I have just used the word “aloud.” The reason I did so is that I have followed the practice of handing out printed copies of the poems I am going to read or recite. I have found that our culture is so bound by the written word that, in general, members of the general public, who usually have not heard poems —particular poems — read before, need to follow along to get the full force of what the poet/reciter is doing unless they have this crutch. For many, without this crutch the performance might be no more than a whirl of words. Perhaps it may sound self-centered of me, but in what follows I shall give examples from my own poems to illustrate how one should read a poem. This is the case because we, the entire realm of the “developed world,” have not been part of an oral tradition for a long time. Some few poets, usually well-known, will sing some of their verses. If they have good voices, this is appropriate, for what is poetry but song? If Homer could do it certainly we should not be embarrassed to imitate him. To come to the head of the matter, the rule is: the emotion to be conveyed must determine the way the voice is used. The pace, rhythm, and intonation of the voice should combine to make the words come alive. This is more or less a definition of what I have called “lilt.” If a reading has no lilt, it is not good poetry. The range of emotions that are addressed in poetry is technically infinite, but let us illustrate a few of these possibilities. More would be tedious. The first type of mood is one of wonderment. To bring it to the reader’s attention and feeling I render some lines from an unpublished poem of mine entitled: “Subjunctives for my Daughter and Son.” Jouncing, bouncing, revolving in unencumbered song, From the enveloping velvet of a deep summer’s night, Flush with the incessant cadence of linnets Exhaling their excess of life To that shining midnight in winter, Where we brush rime from our crystallized eyebrows — And the wind in the trees, a hushed suspiration — And the cathedral of trees, black planks, bending over us — As we stand in wonder under an astonished moon, Concussed by the beauty of the glowing earth, Staring at the sight of the new-fallen snow lying plain Upon the fields, throwing light up to the clouds, White, in breathless silence, divinely bright On this deep and holy night. The second mood is despair. For this I choose to use some lines from a long poem of mine entitled “Vin- cent’s Journey.” Humiliated, irrelevant to the world. He took a Decision with a capital “d”. Fearing God’s nasty cachinnations, he rushed into His Being towards Death, ran behind a dunghill And shot himself nowhere in particular, making his own way Back into the Ground. In that last letter his last words were: “Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered on account of it, but that’s all right…” The third mood is the halcyon. Here is a poem of mine entitled “Sensations, Memories.” The wind in the shade The damp of the cellars Those mornings in summer. The air light, light as the brightness Of the Sun, rising in fullness, The fullness of being Concentrated, clearer, whiter and hotter. It could, at midday, bore a hole in the air, Even quieten the rush of rolling waves Down at the beach. But before that, in shortening shadows, Like gnats we had zigzag vigor and play. Time slid by like the easy laughter In the faces of our open-mouthed dogs. A fourth mood is that of rockin’ and arollin’. I choose lines from a very long poem, unpublished, entitled “Ars Poetica. What Writing is Like, Section XVI.” He taught me the words: Flowing words, fouling words, liquid words, lilting words, Cursive words, cursing words, grunting words, grudging words, Implicit, explicit words, inexplicable words, Dashing words, crashing words, angry, destructive, boom-bashing words, Racing, razing, fazing words, tracing, hazing, grazing words, Words that strut, shift gear, refuse to do what they are told, in other words, Proud words! He said: “Tell the words lest the world forget itself.” Words that fly off and take on a life of their own, Words that wrestle you to the ground, Words that roll in the dust, in joy or in agony. Words that rave, and starve, and crave. Words that are the object of desire, Words that lift us off the floor in admiration, Infectious words, vexatious words, and words that are drunk and wise, Jackhammer words, rat-a-tat words, words that break down doors, And words that will lie in bed with you, and rub your tummy-bun. Fifth, I wish to use some characterization to describe a person, who happened to be my mother. Here are the first lines from a poem entitled: “In Sunshine or in Shadow. One Hundred Lines for my Mother.” Solipsistic self-centered catastrophist! Vain self-dramatizer! There you are, in front of the mirror, powdering and powdering, layer upon layer, Zizzing ditties between your teeth like a kazoo, Retelling stories to your understanding self about your admirable self, Always the cynosure. There you stand: the perfect mother for a poet! Sixth, and last, here is short poem that exhibits serendipity, entitled “Ambush Charm.” This street scene, its peacefulness suddenly pressing on your eyes This fond summer air that caresses your skin, heavy, seeming rose on every side This black night bestriding, granting everything to you in buxom abundance — This stillness, awaiting amenable sounds These rich presents have been waiting for you all along. To the extent that a poet or reader can extend to the full length of the meaning and import of a good poem, and so long as he restrains himself from trying to overdo, there is much reason to believe that he can have much the same effect on the hearers as those of old, the Homeridai, who, when resurrected, will have a great impact upon any attentive listener. 2 Martin Heidegger’s Perspective on Art as Truth By way of a Commentary on Larry Nannery’s Presentation on Poetry

(from Emanuel Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers) Preamble by Emanuel L. Paparella The above very interesting presentation on the reading of poetry by Larry Nannery contains a short allusion to Martin Heidegger’s idea that only humans experience the poetical and the sacred. This Heideggerrian allusion is redolent of Vico’s poetic philosophy which precedes it by two hundred years. In any case, I’d like to follow up Nannery’s presentation with a look at Heidegger’s conception of Art as truth, as expressed in the Ovi e-book Aethetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers. “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. Art as founding, is essentially historical. This means not only that art has a history in the external sense that in the course of time it, too, appears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away and offers changing aspects of historiology. Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history…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 by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth come into being, that is, becomes historical.” --Martin Heidegger (“The Origin of the Work of Art”) Heidegger (1889-1976) remains one of the most influential of continental philosophers, despite his tarnished reputation due to a brief flirting with the Nazi party. He begins his analysis of art with this question: What is the origin of the work of art? What is being asked becomes clear once one understands Heidegger’s answer: “art is the origin of the work of art.” To understand this puzzling answer which sounds like a mere tautology one has to keep in mind that Heidegger has a holistic view of art. That is to say, every aspect of that complex phenomenon known as art is equally crucial to the understanding of what art is. Those aspects are fourfold: 1) the art object itself, 2) the artist (or in Heidegger’s terminology the “creator”), 3) the audience or viewer (or “preserver”), and 4) the work (in the sense of effect) of art. Heidegger never mentions any specific theory of art, nevertheless he is implicitly critical of any theoretical account that privileges one or the other of art’s four components as the essential one. So, for Heidegger the work of art, itself an ambiguous term which refers both the art object and to its effects, can be understood with reference to its role in that complex phenomenon. Once this holism of Heidegger is grasped, it becomes easier to analyze his more specific claims. The most important of those claims is the assertion that art reveals the truth of Being. From time immemorial philosophers have linked art and truth, but Heidegger’s unique conception of truth as the disclosure of Being is essential for understanding his view of art. Heidegger begins his complex analysis by first asking what distinguishes an artwork from other types of things, especially from what he calls “equipment.” An item of equipment such as a pencil or a hammer, undoubtedly plays a role in the various purposive projects which we undertake such as writing, building, etc. Superficially, equipment and artwork may appear similar. Both are created items of form and matter. A statue is a piece of marble on which a sculptor has impressed a form. A pencil is composed of wood and graphite, joined to make a useful object of writing. Heidegger agues that such a superficial view ignores the essential nature of the artwork: its ability to reveal truth. This begs the question: how does an artwork reveal truth? By getting us to see objects outside their customary settings, revealing the broader contexts within which they exist. Heidegger provides some examples; three of them are the painting Shoes by Vincent van Gogh, an ancient Greek temple, and a poem about a Roman fountain. Although the “worlds” disclosed by each of these works are different from one another, they make available to their viewers the specific worlds, the historical cultures in which they were produced. As such, each work is an example of the essential nature of the artwork.

Throughout his analysis Heidegger uses terms such as “world,” “earth,” and “strife” to explain the rise and fall of human cultures. The easiest to understand is “world,” since we all use in much the same way as Heidegger when we talk of the world of the student, or the world of the writer, or the world of the villain. “Earth” is more difficult to grasp and interpret but it is basically the material underpinning on which culture erect their worlds. And finally “strife” refers to the essential conflict between world and earth; while it is true that cultures create worlds, it is also true that earth is not a mere passive element in the relationship. Earth fights with world eventually bringing culture down and allowing for historical development. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger discusses the function of art but also the nature of art object, the role of the artist as well as the role of the audience. This conforms to his basic holistic approach to art. Heidegger distinguishes artworks from equipment by asserting that artworks proclaim their creation as part of their content. Although the usefulness of items of equipment distracts us from the fact that they are produced, works of art by their nature proclaim their status as creations.

What is striking about Heidegger’s holism is that it views both “creators” (the artists) and “preservers” (the audience) as essential for the constitution of a work of art, that is to say, essential to art as a whole. This resembles Barthes’ view that if there is no audience there is no meaning to a work of art. The material objects in themselves with no audiences are mere relics of former times. Obviously this cognitive conception of art as revealing the truth of Being is in stark contrast with both Plato and Kant’s conceptions which make a dichotomy between aesthetics and ethics but it remains a signal view pointing to a more complete and holistic view of the nature of art.

Photo of Martin Heidegger at his Black Forest Retreat in 1962, ten years before his death 3 Taste and Interpretation A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi (as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce) If art is subjective and creative, how can it be interpreted and evoked in an objective mode? Is there such a thing as objectivity, and if not, how is it possible to understand art? In his Estetica, with a procedure and style still redolent of positivism, Croce writes that “Having gone through the entire aesthetic and extrinsic procedure and having fixed art in a definite physical material, having produced a beautiful expression, the question arises, how does one go about judging it? Art critics will egre- giously answer in unison that one needs to reproduce it within oneself. Let us attempt to understand well this fact and, consequently, let us offer an outline. Individual A is looking for an expression of an impression which he feels present but has not yet expressed. Here we see him attempting it with various words and phrases which will render what he is looking for, which he knows to be existent but which he does not yet possess. He tries combination m but he rejects it as not appropriate, not expressive enough, lacking something, ugly: then he tries the combination n, with the same result. The expression remains elusive. After various other attempts, wherein he will at times get closer, and at times get farther away from the target to which it aims suddenly he forms the sought after expression…Another individual which we’ll call B must now judge the expression, and determine if it is beautiful or ugly; he must place himself in A’s viewpoint and recreate the creative process with the help of the physical sign.” According to this first Crocean position, art is therefore revocable, even if it is not easy to do so. But as we have already examined, the problem of interpretation has taken a good part of Croce’s thought, even when not explicitly so. Initially Croce clearly asserts that translations, theatrical representations and even the recitation of a poem lead, after all, to the creation of new and original works, even when they derive for their inspiration from the original text. We have postulated a clear difference with the revocation, in its strict sense, of poetry. Engendering some perplexity Croce will later assert that musical interpretation is similar to the revocation of the poetical while art critics assert that the philosopher could have assimilated the reading of musical scores to theatrical representations or to translations, that is to say to an interpretation which remains a surplus vis a vis the text. This Crocean perspective gets modified with the publication of the volume La Poesia, and as we have seen, where even the possibility of translations seems plausible to him even when they retain the general theoretical viewpoint. That volume of 1936 mitigates many judgments of the philosopher in an attempt to understand the very complex life of art in all its manifestations. It must nevertheless be noted that even in these particular aspects of his philosophy one detects the fundamental problem of every philosophy, that of the relationship between the subject and object, the universal and the particular, truth and interpretation of truth. There is no doubt that in Croce’s thought, especially in its aesthetics, the moment of subjectivity, understood in a transcendental mode, is held firmly in place, because it appears obvious that every interpretation qua interpretation is always subjective. One could affirm, using the usual idiom of contemporary philosophers, that life itself is a hermeneutic, and interpretation, that those few pages we are now writing are nothing less than what is for us, explicitly or implicitly, is the representation of life. The question arises: can one conceive of an interpretation that is not the interpretation of something? That is to say, is it possible to have a cogitans without a cogitatum? Is it possible to conceive of intentionality, to return to Husserl and medieval philosophy, without intentionality having in mind a content? Certainly not, unless we wish to fall back in what Kant called, referring to Berkeley, a delirious idealism, or conversely to place on the table again, as it happened with Kant, the problematic issue of objectivism having recourse to hypothetical things in themselves. The oscillations between the Scylla of subjectivism and the Carrdi of objectivism can be detected, in my opinion, even in the Crocean historicism, which attempts valiantly, to keep steady its synthesis without privileging one or the other pole. It would appear that for Croce art is revocable while critical judgment remain shifting. A final clarification. We need to keep in mind that when we assert that the revocation or the interpretation is possible, one is affirming it in a purely formal mode, according to the identification, as we have already seen, of the categorization of art as irrepressible and universal function of man.

Book on Croce by Ernesto Paolozzi (2000) 4 David Hume’s Perspective on Taste and Aesthetics By Way of a Commentary on Dr. Paolozzi Presentation (from Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers) “The great variety of taste, as well as of opinion, which prevail in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation. Men of the most confined knowledge are able to remark a difference of taste in the narrow circle of their acquaintance, even where the persons have been educated under the same government, and have early imbibed the same prejudices. But those who can enlarge their views to contemplate distant nations and remote ages, are still more surprised at the great inconsistence and contrariety. We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension: but soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. And the highest arrogance and self-conceit is at last startled, on observing an equal assurance on all sides, and scruples, amidst such a contest of sentiment, to pronounce positively in its own favor….For a like reason, we are more pleased, in the course of our reading, with pictures and characters, that resemble objects which are found in our own age or country, than with those which describe a different set of customs. It is not without some effort, that we reconcile ourselves to the simplicity of ancient manners, and behold princesses carrying water from the spring, and kings and heroes dressing their own victuals. We may allow in general, that the representation of such manners is no fault in the author, nor deformity in the piece; but we are not so sensibly touched with them. For this reason, comedy is not easily transferred from one age or nation to another. A Frenchman or Englishman is not pleased with the Andria of Terence, or Clitia of Machiavelli; where the lady, upon whom all the play turns, never appears to the spectators, but is always kept behind the scenes, suitably to the reserved humor of the ancient Greeks and modern Italians. A man of learning and reflection can make allowances for these peculiarities of manners; but a common audience can never divest themselves so far of their usual ideas and sentiments, as to relish pictures which in no wise resemble them.” --David Hume (“On the Standard of Taste”) ume’s famous peroration on the standards of taste, in contrast and competition to that of Kant, is perhaps even more relevant today than it was in the 18th century. For we live today in relativistic times which declare that any opinion is as good as any other, that we are all individually entitled to our own opinions as to what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is true and what is false, what His ethical and what is unethical. The expression that encapsulates this attitude is “It’s all in the eyes of the beholder.” This rather philistine attitude toward all works of art is almost as prevalent as that which declares that what is most recent historically is always better and more progressive than what is past or ancient, the so called theory of “inevitable progress.” And of course the ancient Romans had a slogan: De gustibus non disputandum,” [one does not argue on taste] which the modern cultural philistine readily incorporates as confirmation of his relativistic prejudice. Who are you to tell me that spaghetti should not be cooked “al dente”?, to each his own, and so it goes. Does culinary taste have an aesthetic component as the movie “Babet’s Feast” would suggest? Let’s see how Hume approaches this conundrum. David Hume (1711-1776) is well known as an eminent Scottish philosopher of the school of British empiricism. When it came to art Hume was less concerned with finding a suitable definition of art based on empirical evidence, than in the exploration the question of whether there are objective standards for assessing the validity of works of art. He presents the reader with an antinomy: two ideas with a claim on truth but mutually irreconcilable. On one hand, most people believe that they can easily make a critical judgment on the quality of a particular work of art. Confronted with the Mona Lisa by Da Vinci and a merely pleasing Norman Rockwell illustration most people would have no problem in judging the former is objectively speaking better than the latter. This forces to acknowledge objective standards for critical judgments about art. But there is another side to the antinomy: the consideration of what exactly grounds those judgments. Hume asserts that it is nothing but taste, or to use his own language, whether a work of art affects the “sentiments.” Hume believes that there is a “natural equality of taste,” that is to say, one’s tastes are one’s own and not subject to corrections by others. So, a critical judgment is nothing more than the expression of an idiosyn- cratic reaction to a work of art. It follows logically that there can be no objective standard of judgment, a view that contradicts the earlier conclusion that there must be one. How does Hume resolve the dilemma? Simply by asserting that as a matter of brute empirical fact, our human nature is so constituted that certain features of works of art just happen to please all human beings. In other words, there is a universal human susceptibility to certain qualities and therefore it follows that there is also a universal agreement that some works of art are more beautiful than others and consequently objectively better. But aesthetic disagreements persist despite their grounding in a supposedly uniform human nature. Hume is here forced to invoke factors found in the psychological make-up of individuals, or in shared cultural preferences. They interfere with a person’s natural ability to appreciate the beauty of a meritorious work of art. They are a sort of natural biases and prejudices. Only those with “a strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice” are capable of discerning the qualities that make a work of art good.” So it’s all in the eye of the beholder but those afflicted by myopia or blindness will not be able to judge. The contradiction is not really resolved despite the fact that it all sounds logical enough; for, if only some with a good education and experience are qualified to judge, what about those who also have the universal capacity to judge? Well, Hume seems to be saying, they have the potential but not the ability. They may be cultural philistines and not even know it. If it all sounds slightly elitist, a rationalistic game of smoke and mirrors, it probably is. It is left to Kant to reveal it as such. Perhaps relativism is not such a great path to objective truth.

David Hume (1711-1776), best known for his philosophical empiricism and relativism 5 Nelson Goodman’s Perspective on Art as Symbolical

(From Emanuel L. Paparella’s Ovi E-book Aesthetic Theories of of Great Western Philosophers, by way of summation) “If attempts to answer the question “What is art?” characteristically end in frustration and confusion, perhaps—as so often in philosophy—the question is the wrong one. A reconception of the problem, together with application of some results of a study of the theory of symbols, may help to clarify such moot matters as the role of symbolism in art and the status as art of the ‘found object’ and so-called ‘conceptual art’…. We think first of such works as Bosch’s “Garden of Delight” or Goya’s “Caprichos” or the Unicorn tapes- tries or Dali’s drooping watches, and then perhaps of religious paintings, the more mystical the better. What is remarkable here is less the association of the symbolic with the esoteric or unearthly than the classification of works as symbolic upon the basis of their having symbols as their subject matter—that is, upon the basis of their depicting rather than of being symbols. This leaves as non-symbolic art not only works that depict nothing but also portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes where the subjects are rendered in a straightforward way without arcane allusions and do not themselves stand as symbols….A salient feature of symbolization, I have urged, is that it may come and go. An object may symbolize different things at different times, and nothing at other times. An inert or purely utilitarian object may come to function as art, and a work of art may come to function as an inert or purely utilitarian object. Perhaps, rather than art being long and life short, both are transient.” --Nelson Goodman (“When Is Art?”) elson Goodman (1906-1998) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University. His wide ranging books included the field of aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. His famous Languages of Art (1968) remains today an important study of art as a form Nof symbolic communication. In his provocative essay “When Is Art?” Goodman argues that the central question in the philosophy of art is not what makes an object a work of art, but when an object becomes a work of art. His point is that an object is a work of art not in virtue of some special property it possesses, but rather of how it is employed; that is to say, a work’s status is attributable to the uses to which it is put. Goodman vehemently disagrees with the formalists who distinguish properties intrinsic to a work from those which are not arguing that only the intrinsic properties are aesthetically relevant. The formalists also argue that the symbolical properties of a work of art (such as that of being representational of a real object) are irrelevant to its aesthetic merit. The accuracy of the representation of reality has no claim to value as art. Against this view Goodman holds that all works of art have symbolic properties relevant to their status as artworks.

The core of Goodman’s argument is that exemplification is a common symbolic property. The work of art exemplifies a property when it not only possesses that property but also makes a kind of selective reference to that property. A Picasso painting may be non-representational, but it exemplifies the property of being geometrical which it possesses in virtue of its obvious geometrical shapes. So, in Goodman’s view, a work expresses any property it exemplifies, but only metaphorically; a musical work, for example, may exemplify joy, but it cannot literally be joyous. In effect this means that even paintings declared to be nonrepresentational or purely formal symbolize. This is so because they, like the samples you find in a fabric store, exemplify some of their properties.They do this in certain contexts but not something that sets them apart from other types of objects in the world, for indeed exemplification is something that ordinary things can share with artworks. For an object to be a work of art, it must function as a symbol, something it can do in some contexts but not in others. As Goodman points out, a Rembrandt may be a work of art in a museum but not if used to replace a broken window. That is why the question is not what but when is art. Goodman supplies a tentative answer to this question: An object is an art object when it has five characteristics: 1) both syn- tactic and 2) semantic density, 3) relative repleteness, 4) exemplification (a symbol’s serving as a sample of a property it possesses), and 5) multiple and complex reference (a symbol’s performing a variety of referential functions). In conclusion, for Goodman, works of art do not constitute a special class of objects, although they do have certain types of properties that single them out; rather, they are objects to be ap- proached in a unique way. 6 A Revisiting of Emmanuel Levinas’ Challenge to Western Ethics: A call to a ‘New Humanism’ for the Renewal of Western Culture A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella Introductory Remarks: In the light of one of the main goals of this symposium (the exploration of a new humanism for the renewal of Western culture) and the attacks on Western Civilization and democracy itself coming from the groups such as the Italian Lega, Golden Dawn, The True Finns, the True Dutch, The Tea Party, and so on, I’d like to revisit the very issue explored when I began my contributions to Ovi magazine some eight years ago: i.e., the analysis of the powerful challenge of Emmanuel Levinas to the whole of the Western-European ethical tradition. It seems even more relevant today than it was eight years ago. We have in fact reached a very sorry historical threshold, on both sides of the Atlantic, when moral arguments on the just war are deemed naïve and misguided vis a vis sophisticated Machiavellian “real politik” or hard economic considerations. All this going on while hundreds of shipwrecked Africans die off the coast of Lampedusa. Indeed, a sad “misremembering” (as Tony Judt would put it) may have occurred when the lesson of Cham- berlain appeasing the German bully in 1938 seems to have been all but lost on the new generations of Westerners while at the same time we hypocritically continue to celebrate and commemorate the triumphs of democracy and freedom over tyranny. It’s all redolent of narcissism and even selfishness transmuted into virtue. Ayn Rand described it best as “The Virtue of Selfishness.” Aristotle must be turning in his grave. The ancient Greeks would be astounded at the hermetic boundaries we have managed to build between the Beautiful, the Good and the True, between positivistic science and humanistic liberal arts. Indeed, to commemorate the Holocaust every year with conferences, books, monuments, museums, but then fail to heed its important practical moral lessons, is ultimately to dishonor the meaning of the event and utterly miss its ethical message. The creation of a viable new humanism as a call to a renewal of Western culture requires something more authentic than a cheap sophistical rhetorical narration. I’d like to propose in this meeting of the symposium another attentive reading of the article on Levinas which, as I remember, was enthusiastically received when it first appeared in Ovi some eight years ago. The proposal is accompanied by a fervent hope that, while it can be easily predicted that the ethically deaf and blind will continue to ignore the moral issue and stick to Machiavellian politics, power considerations and economics, or perhaps, even more trivially, to soccer games on Sunday, those who have sound moral eyes and ears, will heed Levinas’ timely message for an urgent call to a new modern Humanism, a humanism capable of harmoniously bridging the two estranged culture of positivistic scientism and liberal arts’ humanism.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) “I am quite sure that the European crisis has its roots in a mistaken rationalism” --Edmund Husserl, University of Prague, (1935) odern Western Civilization presents us with a Janus-like face: On one side Renaissance Hu- manism which begins in Italy in the 14th century with Petrarch, on the other side Enlightenment Rationalism which begins in France in the 17th century with Descartes. MAfter Descartes, there is a dangerous tendency to separate the two cultural phenomena and consider Humanism either anachronistic, or superseded. The inevitable result has been sheer confusion in the area of cultural identity; consequently, at this critical juncture of the new polity called European Union, there is talk of a “democratic deficit,” that democracy that is integral part of esternW Civilization. We are in urgent need of cultural guides to show us how to better harmonize the two above mentioned phenomena. One such guide is Emmanuel Lévinas’ humanistic philosophy. In as much as it challenges the Western rationalistic philosophical tradition, it is extremely important for the emergence of a renewed European cultural identity. It explores in depth the threats to the authentic cultural identity of Europe, how modalities of thinking powerfully affect other ideas and shape a whole cultural milieu, sometimes with less than desirable consequences. A few background biographical details may be useful to better understand Lévinas. He was born in Lithua- nia in 1902. In 1923 he moves to Strasbourg to study under Husserl and writes a doctoral dissertation on his philosophy. There, he also comes in contact with Heidegger’s philosophy. The dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology gets published in France in 1930 and reveals that, even at this early stage, Lévinas is beginning to take his distance from Heidegger. He enlisted in the French army, was captured in 1940 and spent the remaining five years of the war in two prisoner-of-war camps. Upon being liberated he returns to Lithuania and finds-out that his parents and siblings had been killed by the Nazis, while his wife, whom he had left behind in Paris, had survived thanks to the help of French nuns who hid her. He became a teacher and administrator in an institute for Jewish education in Paris (l’alliance Uneversel Juif); there he begins to study traditional Jewish texts under the directorship of the Talmudic sage Mordechai Shoshani to whom Elie Wiesel (who also studied with him) devotes a chapter in Legends of Our Time. In 1961 Lévinas defends the first of his two major philosophical works (Totality and Infinity) before the philosophy faculty of the Sorbonne becoming a professor of philosophy. His second major work bears the title of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Those are the basic events that dramatically change Lèvinas’ thinking. Prior to World War II he had merely criticized elements of 20th century Western thought; afterward he begins to attack the whole European philosophical tradition, especially its culmination in Heidegger’s thought, for what he considers its indifference to the ethical and its “totalizing of the other.” He begins to indict western philosophers in general for an uncrit- ical reliance on vast concepts, such as Hegel’s “Spirit,” or Heidegger’s “Being,” which assimilate countless individuals to rational processes, thus negating their individuality. To be sure Kierkegaard had also criticized this Hegelian tendency, countering it with his existentialist philosophy. Those who understood his critique only too well, promptly proceeded to relegate his thought to the theological within a false dichotomy (shown absurd by Thomas Aquinas way back in the 13th century) of philosophy/theology, thus insuring that Kierkegaard would never be as influential as a Hegel or a Heidegger. In any case, Lévinas too argues that this taken-for-granted totalizing mode of doing philosophy in the West denies the face-to-face reality in which we—philosophers included—interact with persons different from ourselves. He argues that this “face-to-face” realm is not the same thing as the realm of abstract concepts. It possesses its own texture which is primarily an ethical one. In this domain we are challenged by “the otherness of the other person.” It is this “otherness,” which is an integral characteristic of human life, but the Western philosophical tradition has overlooked and even negated it, thus contributing to the dehumanization of Man. Lévinas’ life and thinking were deeply affected by the trauma of the Nazi genocide, better known as the Holocaust. But what is unique about his thinking is that it refuses to make those monstrous events its core subject matter. For, as Derrida, who admired Lévinas’ philosophy, aptly expressed it once: the danger of naming our monstrosities is that they become our pets. As we speak, it seems that the gassing of children has become an acceptable monstrosity, another pet of our super-sophisticated civilization. Lévinas’ writings provide no extensive discussion of the Holocaust itself; therefore, the assumption, on the part of those who were thinking and writing on it, has often been that Lévinas could not be considered a valid source of philosophical insight into this dark period of human history. But that is an erroneous assumption, just as invalid as the assumption that he unreservedly admired Heidegger’s philosophy because he happened to have translated it into French. As a matter of fact, Lévinas’ thinking is a reaction to the Holocaust by the mere fact that it asks the crucial question: What does it mean to be a human being? Were one to encapsulate the whole of Lévinas’ philosophy in two succinct words, they would be “being human.” This philosophy insists throughout that an extreme, unbalanced rationality devoid of imagination, feelings, senses and spirit, unconcerned with the ethical dimensions of life, is the equivalent to a refusal to be human, to allowing oneself to become a monster. A little personal anecdote may be illustrative here: many years ago while in college I took a seminar on Heidegger with a professor who was a staunch admirer of Heidegger’s philosophy. The students were made to read Being and Time on which the professor in question would offer in class brilliant comments and interpretations. Not once during the entire duration of the seminar was it ever mentioned that Heidegger, for a short while, had joined the Nazi party and had heard echoes of “the voice of Being” in the speeches of Hitler; somehow that particular existential detail was not considered essential by the professor for any valid appraisal of the ponderous rational scheme of Being and Time. I wrote a paper where this existential fact was mentioned and reflected upon. The professor assigned a C- accompanied by comments wherein I was chided for straying from the concerns of Heidegger’s philosophy which had nothing to do with his private life and beliefs. In hindsight, that academic event of my life proved to be my first serious existential encounter with modern Western rationalism and its dichotomy intellect/life. It eventually led me to discover Vico and Lévinas and subsequently write a Ph.D. dissertation on Vico at Yale University (1989), as well as a book on Vico (1993) and a book on the EU cultural identity mentioned below (2005). Those concerns are still ongoing Be that as it may, Lévinas’ attack on what he considers negative elements of the Western philosophical tradition begins with analyses of the philosophical roots from which sprout the extreme individualism of modern times, and the reaction to it, extreme nationalism. Not unlike Vico in the 18th century, he individuates such a root in the Cartesian ego, an autonomous center of consciousness which in modern philosophy has assumed the function of a paradigm for thinking about human beings. Lévinas does not deny this world-constituting ego, rather he leads it to the discovery of an ethical core within itself; which is to say, he uncovers another root growing within the first root which he calls the “self.” The conundrum seems to be this: if it is true that the ego does the conceptual work of philosophy by announcing what there really is in the world, how can this ego then acknowledge the essentially ethical “self” which lives within itself? Somehow a bridge has to be found between this limitless power and freedom of the independent intellect, and the particular concrete ethical obligations to another person. For, this ethical self, unlike the ego, finds itself caught up with the welfare of the other prior to a conscious, rational decision, in a recognition, even when unwilled, of his/her humanity. Indeed this ethical capacity seems to come from another place than our rational powers of analysis evi- denced within the Cartesian ego. Even if we grant that such an ego is adequate in identifying the truths of philosophy, it somehow remains unable to acknowledge a domain where there is no choosing of the connection with the other; in fact the other way around may apply: the other chooses me, one is “already responsible” for the other prior to any rational analysis. And here is the philosophical paradox: Lévinas’ task becomes that of using rationality to take the Cartesian ego beyond rationality, somewhat similar to what Vico does with his concepts of fantasia, which for him precedes rational reason, and the concept of Providence who guides human events and is both immanent within history but also transcendent. Which is to say, the rational ego has to be brought to recognize a sort of enigmatic “ethical” truth which Lévinas calls “pre-originary,” i.e., arising outside, prior to the usual time-line of the reflective ego. In attempting this operation, Lévinas will proffer statements such as: ethics is “older” than philosophy, it is “first philosophy,” on the scene before the arrival of rational philosophical thinking; something ingrained in human nature. Within purely classical categories, that may be equivalent to the Socratic preoccupation with dying well by living a life of integrity and devotion to truth, as exemplified in Plato’sApology . It is this ancient voice of goodness, which even Vico’s pre-historical “bestioni” possess to a degree, a voice often overlooked by rationalist philosophers, but powerfully present in Talmudic texts, that Lévinas finds strangely silent in the modern Western philosophical tradition. In mytho-poetic language, it’s as if Lévinas were to come face-to-face with the goddess Europa, as she is being abducted by a bull (Zeus in disguise), to journey to another shore, there to assume a different persona, and he were to ask her, “Europa quo vadis?” after warning her to remember her original identity: “nosce te ipsum”; which is to say, go back to the future and know yourself holistically: know your Greco-Roman origins, yes, but also the Biblical tradition (the foundation for Christianity), the Christian heritage, the Human- istic synthesis of Graeco-Roman and Christian civilizations, Celtic and Germanic cultures with their ideas of freedom, the universalizing Enlightenment rooted in the democratic-scientific tradition born in ancient Greece, the Islamic influences. Voltaire and Descartes yes, but Vico and Novalis too are part of your identity. Your unity will be a chimera if it is only a unity of banks and soccer games neglectful of its spiritual elements. Undoubtedly this hermeneutics, or re-interpretation of the Cartesian ego, placing at its core an non-refusable responsibility for the other without granting the ego any time to think it over and choose, so to speak, challenges some of the most basic assumptions of modern, and in some way classical, rationalistic philosophy. Not since the times of Mamonides in the 13th century had a Jew dared such a fundamental challenge from within the Western philosophical tradition. It is the challenge of Paul to Greek culture revisited. For indeed Lévinas is saying nothing short of this: the knowing ego does not exhaust what it means to be human. Some have called his philosophy one of “ethical subjectivity,” as a way of dismissing it as the raving of a lunatic, just as the ancient Greeks dismissed Paul in the agora. For the serious reader, however, it is rather a re-definition of subjectivity face to face with a totalizing kind of Cartesian reflection. While Lévinas does not write directly about the Holocaust, other thinkers, who influenced Lévinas, were nevertheless reflecting upon the philosophical implications of this dark event of human history. One such was Berel Lang who wrote an essay titled “Genocide and Kant’s Enlightenment,” which appeared in his Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In this essay Lang uncovers certain lines of affinity between some classical aspects of Enlightenment thought, and the Nazi genocide. His conclusion is that there are two important aspects of the Enlightenment that formed the intellectual heritage, which needed to be in place, for genocide to occur in the heart of civilized Europe: namely, the universalization of rational ideals, and the redefinition of the individual human being in terms of its possessing or not such a universal rationality. The genocide, Lang argues, was aimed at those groups who stuck to their own ancient pre-Enlightenment sources of particularistic identity, considered “irrational.” Hence the racial laws and racial exclusion were expression of ingrained Enlightenment prejudices. Which is to say, the Enlightenment sheds light on everything except itself; it remains to be enlightened. This powerful essay leads many cultural anthropologists comparing civilizations, to begin to wonder: which, in the final analysis, is more obscurantist: religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, or a so called “enlightened” era throwing out the window the baby with the bathwater and arrogantly refusing any suggestion that it ought to enlighten itself, and not with its own light?

Berel Lang is currently a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University.

Two of his books are: Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (1990) and Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (2000) All this speculation conjures up that terrible face to face encounter of Dante with the poet Bertrand De Born in a cave in hell doing “light to himself” with its own decapitated head. There we have reason eating its own tail; internal logical thinking assuming the grammar of lunacy. I dare say that such a question has not been satisfactorily answered yet. In that question lies the challenge of Lévinas’ philosophy: in its displacing of the centrality of Cartesian thinking within modernity, in order to re-center it around ethics: the face-to-face encounter with another human being which is always hopeful unless it occurs in hell.

Inferno 28: 118: Dante and Virgil meet the poet Bertrand de Born in hell doing light unto himself

Rosenweig’s essay Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections in a Dark Time is found in the above book published by Temple University Press in 1986 Which is to say, the challenge is to Western philosophy’s totalizing pretense, beginning with Plato, that it can gather everything up in one synchronic whole. In more scientific terms we may speak of the search of the holy grail called “unifying theory.” It is that challenge that irritates control freaks, thought policemen, rationalists and mysologists galore. It goes a long way in explaining their attempt to relegate Lévinas’ philosophy to the sphere of the merely mystical. Finally, let us briefly examine how Lévinas develops this fundamental challenge to Western rationalism. He names both the texts of Jewish tradition and philosophical discourse “the said,” while calling the living activity of interpretative struggle (its hermeneutics) with the texts, and the self which suffers for the other, “the saying.” The said always tries to capture the saying, which may partly explain the ancient grudge of Plato towards poets (see Plato’s Republic, book X, on Homer). In any case, it is the saying which launches the said and puts it into circulation. The saying echoes outside of space and time destabilizing the comfortable, rationally secure positions rationalists take up in the said, in conceptual truths (thought to be universal and eternal), in a secure totalizing kind of knowledge. Yet it is this very destabilizing process that injects the ethical out- ward-directness into the said. Lévinas will often contrasts the saying’s vulnerable openness to the other (which he calls “being ex-posed) with the said’s relative security (which he calls “exposition”). He asserts moreover, that there is a rich unexplored relationship between the way we are “ex-posed” in ethics, and the life “exposition” we use to analyze and order the world. Indeed, this is a new, essentially Jewish, philosophical reflection which places into question the claim to totalizing completeness, by an appeal to the priority of ethics. It insists that any person that confronts me, needs to be placed outside the totalizing categories seeking to reduce her/him to an aspect of a rational system. Basically, what Lévinas is doing is relocating our dangerous ability to deny others their legitimate sphere of difference; an ability which is capable of destroying our own humanity. This is nothing short than the core struggle for the achievement of moral humanity which was also the root ethical aim of Vico’s New Science. Like Vico, Lévinas shows us the way to keep the benefits of universal Enlightenment ethics while avoiding its perils. For, his ethics is not based on a totalizing sort of universalism, but on the particular concrete needs and demands of each unique individual, every “other’ that I meet within time and space. Every time I meet the other, she/he constitutes an ethical challenge to my self, a challenge as to who I am as a human being. This kind of philosophy is a challenge to each one of us to go beyond nostalgic returns to Greek classicism, as important at those may be, in our understanding of Western Civilization; to establish intellectual-background-assumptions which are different from those of the Enlightenment; to search for urgently needed new cultural paradigms, new ways of thinking appealing to the priority of ethics and the importance of the particular as a category of thought, a place in thought wherein genocide and hatred of the other becomes inconceivable; in short to prepare new wineskins for the new wine which is a “Novantiqua Western Civiliza- tion,” the search, in other words for its very soul.

Leonardo perceived no unbridgeable duality between science and art

A New Europe in Search of its Soul: Essays on the European Union’s Cultural Identity and the Transatlantic Dialogue published by Emanuel L. Paparella in 2005, the year he joined the Ovi Team

7 A Selected Annotated Presentation of Levinas’ Major Books Translated into English

On Escape: De l’evasion (Cultural Memory in the Present) published in 1935, On Escape represents Emmanuel Levinas’ first attempt to break with the ontological obsession of the Western tradition

Existence and Existents was written mostly during Levinas’s imprisonment in World War II, and provides the first sketch of his mature thought

A sequel to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, this work is generally considered Levinas’s most important contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of metaphysical discourse

Emmanuel Levinas was a major voice in twentieth century European thought. Beginning his intellectual career in the 1920s, he developed an original and comprehensive post rationalist ethics of social responsibility and obligation

In this book Levinas brings together the phenomenology of Husserl, the fundamental ontology of Heidegger, and the Bible. The best introduction to his work

This book was translated and published in English in 1990. Jean Paul Sartre hailed Levinas as the philosopher who introduced France to Husserl and Heidegger

This volume published in 1994 brings together an important collection of essays by Levinas, dating from between 1969 and 1980

Is it Righteous to be? (translated and published in 2001) has renewed the question of the ethical within Western Civilization with Levinas at its very center

The thirteen essays by Levinas collected in this volume in 1998 investigate the possibility that at the end of the twentieth century the word “God” can finally be understood in a meaningful way

In the Time of the Nations was published in 1994 The ‘nations’ of the title are the ‘seventy nations’ in the, Talmudic idiom, the whole of humanity surrounding Israel

In Humanism of the Other, translated and published in 2012, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one’s humanity through the humanity of others

Emmanuel Levinas placed ethics at the foundation of philosophy. During his life, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century, he witnessed devastating events that could not have been more demanding of that philosophical stance Chapter 11 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Eleventh Meeting: 24 October 2013

Table of Content for the 11th Meeting of the Symposium Section 1: What Brueghel has to Show Us” A Presentation by Dr. Larry Nannery on the Aesthetic Appreci- ation of Brueghel Section 2: “The History of the Arts.” An Ovi Symposium Presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce. Section 3: A response to Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi’s Presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella by way of sundry Musings on Nietzsche’s View of “Art as Redemption” (from his Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers). Section 4: Review of Professor Ernesto Paolozzi’s Ovi e-book Croce: the Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom, by Antonella Rossini in the Italian Philosophy Journal Libro Aperto (XXXIV, n. 74, Sep- tember 2013). Section 5: “A Bridge between two Cultures for the Renewal of Western Civilization.” An Ovi Symposium Presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella 1 What Brueghel has to Show Us: A Presentation by Larry Nannery on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Brueghel

Brueghel’s Self Portrait (1565)

The Hunters in the Snow (1565)

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558) he viewer of Brueghel’s drawings and paintings seems to have the same experience with each. If he had not destroyed many of his works on his deathbed the situation might be different, but we cannot know this, and we should proceed to evaluate what we have before us. TThe first thing the viewer experiences is the absence of a center in any of his works. This he usually achieved by always having several centers in his depictions. One is forced to “read” each work as though it were telling several stories. The eye is forced to roam over several centers, each similar to but independent of the others, and often projecting an ironic comment on something. This feature of roaming gives the work great vivacity, however drab or hellish the scene may be overall. Second, the human figures are drab, and always expressive of some basic human interest. The people often seem happy or jovial, but, just as often, they are evil or destructive. We have no examples of a virgin and child or of Christ the man of sorrows with his crown of thorns from Brueghel’s hand. In all, the human form is seldom alone or glorious in works from his hands. Third, adding to the roaming feature of our experience is the common factor of a deep background. Not only are these uniquely beautiful, with beautiful waters or mountains to view, even though not necessarily true to life. One might say that a child has no disadvantage vis a vis an adult in feeling a correct response to these works. The puzzle is, why would such a popular artist feel it necessary to destroy a substantial portion of his own work on his deathbed, when it would have been advantage to his young wife and children to have them as a source of income? I speculate that his determination to destroy these painting, which would have been the equals of his other works, was due to his ambivalence about the Protestant and Catholic factions of Christianity during his lifetime. Brueghel was at times a member of both factions, and his final position is not known. But we do know that he married the daughter of his instructor, van Cock, who was a Catholic, and Brueghel wife, whom he knew from her infancy was, like her father, a Catholic. Apparently, Breughal, knowing he was not long for this world, made her destroy many paintings because he feared for her safety, not to mention her well-being, after his death, which was soon to come. I include a poem of mine from long ago to explain: it had to do with the character of his character. BRUEGHEL, CENSOR

I Pieter Brueghel the Elder was the greatest painter in the history of the world.He brought to light dark and vibrant corners of the human pageant, and showed Us many secrets, good and bad, in the texture of the human heart. His paintings moil with little figures, common people, gross and sometimes ugly, Ensconced in nature, doing common and sometimes shameful things. These landscapes of the human way of life lack any center, or geometric shape. We find in him no pagan perspective, no pride or glory, no attempt to glorify the human figure: There is no happy nude, only naked people bundled in shapeless clothes. He refutes by way of his paintings his contemporaries, like the Master of Flemalle, Who had provided rude scenes from the life of the Savior, in clean luxurious clothes. Brueghal’s paintings are childlike depictions of a human race loved despite themselves. In the paintings is dancing life, God’s way of being with us. They make the viewer a child, they put him in his original condition, a child of God. II In his very prime Pieter Brueghel was struck down by a heart attack but lived on for another few days. He lay there on the big bed in the big house he had managed to purchase there in Brussels, giving his wife instructions to destroy half his work. Both sides in the religious wars were hypocrites, unChristian liars, A collection of cutthroats, whoremongers, perverts and moneygrubbers. Damn both their houses! As though our perfect Savior ever counseled Christian to murder Christian, As though exaggerated Pontiffs and sickly monks could ever be models for God’s Faithful! He had once been young, hot, had wanted to speak truth to power. He was against denominationalism of any kind. That was before he had a family.What a fool he had been! Now some questionable drawings and paintings would have to go. If he didn’t burn them, the authorities themselves would, and probably, then they would burn all the rest, and then his wife and his children as well. How he regretted now his early self-confidence! III Thanks Gott! I am dying but not so suddenly that all my sins will cry out behind me. Thanks Gott! I have time to make it come out right, correct my errors, put things in order. Burn them, Mayken, burn them as I direct. It will be better for you and the babies. You should never have married such a fool in the first place, my sweet! I regret my own virtues. I regret that I used my gifts for purposes the world cannot tolerate. I suppose that true Christianity can not be expressed in this world and go unpunished. What must I have been thinking! Such wild optimism! Burn them, burn them! Thanks be to God the public has not seen most of these things. Husband and wife formed a little quick team. She would fetch a painting, a drawing, and hold it up before him, And he would nod yes or no.The condemned ones went straight into the fire. It was slower work than he desired. He was in and out of consciousness, but the children were also helpful Oh, another attack! I doubt I have enough time left. That Martin Luther with shit on his ass. Those Italians with their catamites. Those cruel Spaniards, who didn’t hesitate to murder children, all in the name of the Lord. The world is full of these people. It is not altogether a bad thing to leave this world. Goodbye, Mayken, goodbye sweet children. Your father loves you very much. He has done what he could for you. Remember me. Be good to your mother. Remember that I am watching you from above. I am so regret- ful, so weary, that I did things I should not have. But I always tried to do my best for you, though perhaps I have failed. Children, I have one thing to say to you: love God always. Farewell, we shall meet again in Heaven some- day soon, For the world in its present condition cannot go on much longer now. IV A catalogue of the paintings that Brueghel instructed his wife to destroy from his deathbed Would include the following, and more besides. A scene in hell, much more hellish than Mad Meg, honoring all true Chris- tians. There is a Pope there, in all his pomp and his Court and his naked mistresses, Whose bodies have decayed and are rotting or blistered with the heat. Besides the Pope there is Martin Luther and some other reformers lying down In the fires of hell, seeming contented, though all about are torturing devils With their instruments of evil standing tall. A triptych depicting the mocking of Christ, with the Jewish priests and high priests Wearing the garb of the Church of Rome. His agony in the garden, His capture, accusation, flogging, carrying of the cross —All these in little circles around the edges, with an emphasis on the cruelty Of those who captured and persecuted him. The central panel is a simple crucifixion, but His naked body is so agonizedThat it was known to shock those who had viewed it. His body is emaciated, lacerated, a photo of pain. There was no eroticism in that body, nor any symbolism. A depiction of the Christ Child tumbling and cavorting in the shop of his carpenter father, Inside of which there is a picture within the picture, hanging on the wall: A hall of a sumptuous mansion in which the Princ- es of the Church enjoy a kingly repast. A battle scene, in which more are dead than alive. It had been said that some people could smell blood coming from it. It is not clear why this painting had to be burnt. Praying Hands, in imitation of Dürer. But these are dirty peasant hands. If these too earthly hands could be the very symbol of devotion, Why then perhaps God Almighty might be a graven image too. The execution of a Prince during the Peasant Wars, An execution by means of hanging from a tree. The strangled victim’s face and neck so clear, The hatred on the faces of the executioners so fierce and happy … Of course this would give offense. A miniature with his wife as the Madonna, with a child on her lap. She has the exact attitude of the Renais- sance beauties who played this role But she is no beauty. She is dressed very simply, perhaps poorly and the Christ Child has defecated on her: A Christ Child and a Mother Mary of the Earth — too much of this Earth. V Mayken herself, the hard-working beloved girl, worked with energy and economy. She had always obeyed her husband in all things, And wished often that he would just once obey her. She had always said that he should paint like her father, In order to make money, and stop moralizing all the time. Now he saw she was right, and that gave her satisfaction. She said of herself to herself: “I am the daughter of a famous craftsman-painter And the wife of a painter and genius. How come I can’t tell a good painting from a bad one?” In the middle of the hubbub and furious activity Pieter BrueghelSighed, as though catching his breath, and was gone in an instant. Thus passed away the true Christian, true artist, lover of this world Under the dispensation of God, and lover of God and His Appearances in this world from this earth. 2 The History of the Arts

An Ovi Symposium Presentation from Ernesto Paolozzi (as translated from his book L’estetica di Benedetto Croce) very young student has at some time or other glanced at a book on the history of literature, or of painting, or music. Every critic worth his salt has written or at least fantasized on the writing of a thorough history of a particular artistic form. There are debates on the validity of various histories. Some are privileged, others are discarded. There are distinctions made within their analysis sepa- Erating what is treated competently and what is not. Francesco De Sanctis, one of the greatest essayist and critic, is essentially noteworthy for his History of Italian Literature. Is it therefore possible to deny the possibility of conceiving a history of literature, of poetry, of sculpture, of cinema, the kind of disciplines to which every civilized country has dedicated chairs, institutes, journals and foundations. And yet Croce, the ideal disciple of De Sanctis, does promote this negation. But the doubt arises: does Croce, the philosopher of historicism, radically deny the very possibility of writing histories? Or rather, does he limit himself to warn us against certain particular historicist methodologies? In fact, when the philosopher asserts that he prefers the monographic methodology for aesthetic criticism (i.e., the search for the intrinsic values of individual artists and, above all, of the single works of art) he simply wanted to critique certain methodological prejudices which harmed what he considers the authentic historicity of art. The first among those prejudices is that of considering the history of artistic phenomena as a history of mere progress. As far as Croce is concerned, it is impossible to theorize progress in art understood as a development of inferior forms toward superior forms. This thesis is tenable in discussing the development of techniques, of genres, of styles, of poetics. One can maintain, for example, that the overcoming of the Atistotelic unities within the dramatic theater may represent a sort of progress. What cannot be maintained, however, is to maintain that between Aeschylus and Shakespeare there is an aesthetic progress. Pari passu one cannot affirm the same thing for scientific and philosophical production. As Popper teaches us, within a scientific environment, for example, a new theory includes and falsifies at the same time those that have preceded it, thus extending the field of veracity. In an analogous mode, one cannot but doubt the development of art as a causal connection of one work or a group of works with others according to a mechanistic or deterministic vision. It is indeed permissible to talk of Petrachism or Manzonianism, given that between schools and authors there are connections which create relationships of mutual exchanges and mutual conditioning. It is said that a painter or a movie director instructs. However, each work of art is an work unto itself, with its particular history, connected to the entire history of humankind and tied to a particular human event which is the human event of its author.

Francesco Petrarca (1305-1374) the father of Humanism at the origins of Italian Literature

Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) Author of the first modern Italian novel I Promessi Sposi based on a national prose language We can bring to bear many proofs: one that is particularly significant, just to mention one, is the issue of the relationship between history and art and the social problematic with which positivistic and Marxist critique are very much concerned. As Croce puts it: “Dante is not only a social document of Medieval times, or Shakepeare one of Elizabethan times; as documentaries they have there are others by bad poets or non poets which can supply more abundant information on those ages. It has been pointed out that thus the artistic-literary history becomes a series of unrelated essays and monographyes with no nexus existing between them; but clearly the nexus is the whole of human history of which poetic personalities are an integral and conspicuous part…, and exactly because they are part of it they cannot be submersed or hidden in such a history, that is to say, in the other parts of that history, but must be allowed to keep their poroper and original character.” (Aesthetics in Nuce, p. 31). This page from Croce is quite clear. We need to be aware that the philosopher is not denying that it is possible to interpret and above all utilize works of art, and opinion documents such as poetics and manifestos, for goals that go beyond those which are purely aesthetics. There are many fundamental pages in his books dedicated to cultural movements which are essential to understand the era in question. In La Poesia Croce looks back at his positions and attempts to better clarify them based on a criterion of equilibrium lacking in the polemical writing in the first phase of his writings. Regarding the aesthetic judgment as a history of poetry he writes that “One may surmise that identifying judgment with the history of poetry destroys history as such, breaking it up in a multiplicity individual histories placed side by side to each other, thus destroying the order of succession which is indispensable to historical thinking. Nevertheless, the judgment of poetry not only does not deny, but it does not even negate such order, which is reaffirmed and assumed in all its movements. How could we ever seriously understand and think about the Divine Comedy were we to locate it before the Ilyad, or Orlando Furioso before the Chanson de Roland? Every and each work is well interpreted and evoked only by locating it in its proper istorical setting in which all the preceding works and all the preceding history converge. (La Poesia, p. 120)

Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) The Renowned 19th century Italian Literary Critic

Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers Ovi e-book by Emanuel L. Paparella available for free from the Ovi bookshop 3 A Response to Ernesto Paolozzi’s presentation by Emanuel L Paparella by way of some musings on Nietzsche’s View of Art as Redemption (excerpted from his Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers)

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche (1872) This was his earliest book. Henry de Lubac considered it “a work of genius” “This is the new opposition: the Dionysian versus the Socratic, and the work of art that once was Greek tragedy was destroyed by it.” --Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy n the context on the brilliant elucidation above on the history of the arts by Ernesto Paolozzi I’d like to contribute briefly mention in this meeting of the symposium the view of Friedrich Nietzsche’s on art. Those musings are excerpted from my Ovi e-book Aesthetic Theories of the Great Western Philosophers. IEven the title of Nietzsche’s famous work on art from which the above quote is lifted reveals a nexus with Aristotle’s views on Greek Tragedy. As a great philosopher that he was, Nietzsche was aware that to build any kind of valid modern aesthetic theory one cannot simply ignore the ancients, that in fact it is imperative that origins be remembered and examined, something of which both Vico and Heidegger were also very much aware. Heidegger called it “originative thinking.” Nietzsche is less concerned with the question “What is art?” than with the question “Why art?” That is to say, rather than trying to understand what distinguishes art from other aspects of human culture, such as science, Nietzsche is primarily interested in why there is such a thing as art in the first place. Art seems to begin with the very origins of human history. He was concerned with its function in human life. Hence the importance of going back to origins and to the ancient Greeks in particular. Nietzsche’s answer to “Why art?” is based on his view, which he derives from Schopenhauer, that life is awful and tragic. It would be fatal to confront this truth directly. Thus, Nietzsche argues, art is a way to make life bearable, to go on despite the insight that it is not worth living, especially when it is examined in depth. In other words, art is the human response to the horrors of existence. Next Nietzsche makes a fundamental distinction between two types of art: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This echoes the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime elaborated in Kant and Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche’s view, Apollonian art creates a dream world, a sort of idealized realm that keeps at by the terrors of existence. He uses as an example Greek sculpture, which he sees as idealization of human life as another giant of philosophy, Hegel, also claims albeit with a very different assessment; but that’s material for another reflection. Nietzsche connects the Apollonian with the individuated world of appearances described by Kant and Schopenhauer in which the individual is very much at home and in control. In contrast to that, Dionysian art is art that intoxicates and dissolves individuality. Here too one is reminded of Schopenhauer’s ecstatic description of the effects of sublime art in The World as Will and Representation. Closer to our times, just think of the Woodstock concert in the sixties, where people were taken over by the music. What Nietzsche is saying is that art redeems life by getting us to reject our individuality so that we can become one with the forces governing the universe as a whole. But it gets a bit more complicated, for although Nietzsche distinguishes those two artistic tendencies toward the Apollonian and the Dionysian, he also argues that they are intimately related to each other and that they exist in dynamic tension with each other. In his The Birth of Tragedy he contents that the achievements of Apollonian art can only be understood as a conscious attempt to hold the Dionysian at bay, and vice versa. So, Nietzsche’s distinction ultimately transcends its origins in Greek tragedy. They come to denote larger cultural forces. Which are those cultural forces? Basically they are the forces that deny life and those that affirm it. Behind the Apollonian he uncovers life-denying forces; behind the Dionysian he uncovers life-affirming forces that unflinchingly contemplate life in all its terror. He sees Socrates himself as the icon of a tendency toward an extreme life-denying rationality in Western philosophy which cavalierly dispenses with the intuitional, the imaginative, the world of emotions and feelings, or what Pascal aptly describes as “the heart [which] has reasons which reason knows not. It is the world of the Nazis ideologues, men with a Ph.D. after their names, who rationally plan the Holocaust in less than two hours and then efficiently carry it out in three short years at the tune of eleven million innocent victims. It is by way of this dichotomy that Nietzsche is able to move a sweeping critique of the European Enlighten- ment, and not only its art, but in all its aspects, from science to morality. In other words, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, the Enlightenment has to still enlighten itself and the only hope for the West is a rebirth of the Dionysian. The question here arises: is that what the sixty’s generation was groping for? One has to wonder. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that after being ignored for a while, even dismissed as a proto-fascist (for which the views of his anti-Semitic sister who edited his work are largely responsible), Nietzsche is now considered one of the seminal thinkers of the 19th century; a philosopher who has considerably expanded our understanding of the complexities of the nature of art. 4 A Review of an Ovi E-book in the Philosophy Journal Libro Aperto Review of Ernesto Paolozzi’s Ovi e-book Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom (with an introduction by Emanuel L. Paparella). It was written by Antonella Rossini, professor of contemporary philosophy in Naples, Italy. It appeared last month in the prestigious philosophy journal Libro Aperto (year XXXIV, n. 74, September 2013).

Preface by Symposium coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella: What follows is a free but faithful translation from Italian into English of a review of Ernesto Paolozzi’s e-book on Croce as recently published in Ovi magazine in both English and Spanish translations. The review appeared in Libro Aperto and it is written by Antonella Rossini, a regular contributor to such a prestigious Italian philosophy journal which last year published a glowing tribute and com- memoration of Croce on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the philosopher’s death (n. 69, April-June 2012) to which participated by invitation several prominent Croce scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, among whom can be enumerated the same professor Rossini, Janos Kelemen, professor of philosophy at Elte University, Budapest, Hungary, Kuni- shi Kosuke, an expert in Italian literature from Kyoto university in Japan, as well as professors Paolozzi and Paparella.

XXXIV, n. 74, July-September 2013 issue of Libro Aperto wherein Ovi magazine’s publication of Ernesto Paolozzi’s e-books on Croce is reviewed and commented “Ovi magazine has published as an e-book the English and Spanish translations of Ernesto Paolozzi’s volume Benedetto Croce: the Logic of the Real and the Duty of Freedom. Aside from the intrinsic value of the book, with which Italians are already familiar, it offers an hermeneutical synthesis of the great philosopher’s thought which can be considered among the most important of the last few years. It is stimulating and particularly interesting to analyze the impact which this publication may eventually have on American culture which finds itself at the moment in an overall rethinking of the very foundations of philosophy. Within this perspective, we need to mention the illuminating and erudite introduction by Emanuel L. Paparel- la, a professor of philosophy and an expert in Aristotle and Vico who knows in depth both American culture and the fortunes of Croce’s thought in the Anglo-Saxon world. Paparella reviews the biases and the equivocation which in the 70s and 80s have done considerable damage to a complex and well founded reception of Croce’s thought. For example, the idea that the Neapolitan philosopher is nothing else but an imitator of Hegel’s historicism, an idealist, a mere metaphysical thinker and philosopher of history understood in its traditional sense. Even in the preceding years, beginning with its diffusion at the outset of the 20th century of Croce’s aesthetics, his thought was not always interpreted correctly. This was due either to bad translations or the prejudices of American culture tied to the Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition. However, it must be mentioned that the authority of the Neapolitan philosopher was always recognized and his popularity was augmented by his fierce opposition to fascism throughout the years of such a regime. What is particularly interesting is the new perspective within which Paparella presents Paolozzi’s volume and its particular interpretation of Croce’s thought. The American scholar emphasizes how American and Anglo-Saxon philosophy (anchored to empiricism and analytic rationalism) has undergone in the 80s a veritable identity crisis under the influence of hermeneutics, and more generally that of the post-modern. Paparella asks how is it possible not to grasp that Crocean philosophy with its Vichian approach in tandem with the neo-historicism envisioned by Croce, so different from Hegelian historicism, ought to have been considered as precursors of modern hermeneutics and post-modernism. Moreover, by accepting as valid Paolozzi’s interpretation, Paparella clarifies how the dialectic thought of Croce ought to have been, and it can still be considered a possible solution to the unresolved issue of modern hermeneutics, relativism or epistemological skepticism, to which post-modernity seemed to condemn philosophy once the disingenuous neo-positivistic realism of Anglo-Saxon culture had been abandoned. At the risk of over-simplification, we could assert that for both Paolozzi and Paparella, the toxic diatribe between subjectivists and objectivists, relativists and absolutists, can find a partial resolution in the recuper- ation of historicist dialectical thought, or critical dialectical thought, if you will, which suggests that history, just as life, in their eternal becoming develop in accordance to a fundamental opposition without which life itself could not exist. In a fundamental way this is the reform of dialectic accomplished by Croce in intuiting and then demonstrating how it results impossible to think of opposition without distinction, theory without praxis, or praxis without theory within that incessant nexus between experiences and events which is the concrete life of men. From all this issues a theory of freedom not tied to any particular political philosophy or a particular conception of a State. That does not mean that empirically speaking, from time to time one cannot discern a doctrine or a conception of the State which can be considered liberal, as long as it does not identify with freedom once and for all. What Paolozzi is proposing is a methodological liberalism as advocated by Croce, particularly relevant today when the grand historical narratives of the 19th century are in a crisis and society seems to have lost all political and moral reference points. The crucial difference between Crocean thought and the preceding historicism, that of Hegel and Marx, consists in not locating a final deterministic telos of history. For indeed, oppositions and contradictions are not only destructive, resolvable in a necessary synthesis, but, as far as Croce is concerned, they remain without a definitive immutable reality. Only in this sense one can assert that history is the story of freedom. Perhaps we ought to say that it is the story of the struggle for freedom. That’s where the modernity of Croce’s thought resides. Paparella hopes that such a thought via Paolozzi’s interpretation may eventually be accepted from American culture, which in the process of detaching itself from a sterile academic philosophy steeped in analytic philosophy is today deprived of the post-modern, of an authentically free philosophy which opens new horizons even in the political dimension when political philosophy is generally stagnating or even regressing.” Antonella Rossini

Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom E-book by Ernesto Paolozzi available for free at the Ovi bookshop 5 A Bridge between Two Cultures forthe Renewal of Western Civilization An Ovi Symposium 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 reads 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 dichotomy of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in ancient Greek culture.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) 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.”

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (1997) by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt

Another book by Gross, Levitt and Lewis published in 1997 Norman Levitt (1943-2009) And then of course there is The Two Worlds 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?”

The Two Cultures was originally published in 1959 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. Literary 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 asks, “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?” Obviously, the table is being turned around here.

C. P. Snow (1905-1980) straddling the two cultures 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 Trilling, 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.”

C.P. Snow and his mimesis F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) Leavis was at the time the most creative and influential literary critic since Matthew Arnold 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 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.” 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 additional boost in 1962 when the critic F. R. Leavis published his attack on The Two Cultures in The Spec- tator. 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.” Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Considered the father of modern science, he was the post-Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a vital role in the scientific revolution

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) A philosopher of science and the father of the scientific method The extreme reaction was partly a response to Snow’s own extremity. But the questions raised by The Two Cultures—and by Leavis’s criticism 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 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 unbreakable. 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 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): Champion of the Liberal Arts

T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), friend of Charles Darwin whose scientific concerns were Physiology, Paleontology, Geology, and Natural History 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’s 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 unmeasurable, we know we belong,” then the realm of culture had to be protected from the reductive forces of a crude scientific rationalism. 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. In November 1956, a month after C. P. Snow published his essay on The Two Cultures (already considered in a previous article), the American novelist and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov completed his short story “The Last Question” which centers on the pressing reality of universal entropy: endgame of the Second Law of Thermodynamic which can easily be interpreted to mean that the universe is doomed and is journeying toward its own final demise. In this story we are treated to this intriguing scenario: as humanity merges with the technology it has itself created and idolizes it, each generation asks this crucial question “How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?” only to receive the scientific answer, “There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer” Of course there is a more crucial question which is the one posed by Heidegger in his Being and Time as stated above: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but scientists who seem more interested in the how we keep the game going, do not show the same enthusiasm for the why the universe exists in the first place. But to continue with Asimov’s story, after mankind has disappeared, the sum mental potential of its mental processes lives on in AC, a supercomputer which continues to “think” while the stars crumble, planets cool, and space and time simply cease to exist. Eons have passed, and AC has finally discovered how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there is nobody to tell, mankind and the universe being long dead. No matter. “Let there be light!” AC says, “And there was light.” This is quite a story to reflect upon. What is Asimov trying to tell us as a scientist as he ponders on the future of the universe? Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) who wrote the short story The Last Question I think that the real message of the story is not that there are deterministic laws at work in the universe, nor that man is an insignificant late comer to the cosmic drama. No, the real message is that when scientists attempt to give final meaningful answers such as the meaning of the universe, they invariably prove that they are still in Plato’s famous cave, and what they allege to be light or the sun is really is a secondary man-made light, the fire in the cave, or science which supposedly has all the answers that philosophy has failed to deliver. What is most shocking in the Asimov story is that at the end AC begins to hubristically think of itself as a god of sorts and thinks that he can reinvent the wheel of creation. This is Nietzsche’s eternal return in a nihilistic universe without meaning and purpose. It is an exercise in self-deception to think that one can escape the box of scientism and logical positivism by using science and logical positivism as a research tool. One will remain stuck in that box, just at the chained slaves in Plato’s cave remain stuck in the cave looking at appearances and shadows projected on the wall by the light of fire (a secondary light) and assuming them to be reality, as long as they are unable to cut their chains and leave the cave and see the true light of the sun. I suppose another way to stage the problematic is this question: does human kind have an Archimedean le- ver by which to escape the constraints of time and space and determine where the universe came from and where it may ultimately be headed? Do those spiritual books, such as the Bible, that ask the right questions and hint at a plausible answer, to be deemed mere myths and fables, a crude unscientific uncivilized attempt to explain imaginatively what one cannot explain rationally and scientifically? I surmise that most atheists would answer with a yes without being able to satisfactorily explain how order can come out of chaos and how the universe can make and then destroy itself, never mind the why which remains a more important question than how in man’s search for meaning. On a more practical level, there are a plethora of long and impressive scientific papers, complete with hundreds of academic footnotes and bibliographical information which presume to give the “scientific” answer to certain political social problems. We have seen some of those in Ovi magazine, but I suppose we can go all the way back to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in this regard. These treatises encourage a rather skeptical attitude on just about any social phenomenon, especially religion considered retrograde and obscurantist, except for one: it own positivistic assumptions and methodology. Those are never challenged or looked at. To the question “What exactly does your science consists of?” the forthcoming answer is usually logical positivism, contemptuous of intuition, mythology, the poetical, the visionary, the interpretative (especially of history) and concerned with how to make human life materially more prosperous and comfortable; for in a materialistic universe by bread alone does man live. This shabby cultural phenomenon which has trivialized everything that a used to be called culture and has reduced us to consuming automatons, can be observed everywhere in and out of academia. We are indeed back to the two cultures of C.P. Snow and the warnings of Matthew Arnold. Recall if you will that Snow attempts to narrate the decadence of Britain as due to the fact that scientists and philosophers do not talk to each other. In his famous essay he compares Britain with Venice in its decadence: “Like us, the Venetians had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident… They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallized. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.” And here Snow while having a valid insight fails to properly formulate it, as Vico does with the history of the Romans. The insight is this: one cannot get out of the box of positivism by using positivism which is what he was doing as a scientist, albeit he also fancied himself a novelist which he was not; at best he was a mediocre novelist. What Snow needed to do but fails to do is to challenge the basic positivist scientific assumption he utilized in analyzing the two cultures. So, predictably he ends up with the wrong-headed solution which is fairly Ba- conian: knowledge is power and power controls the world and now let us proceed to identify who the villains who control the world might be. That is a world apart from the Socratic Aristotelian “knowledge is virtue.” It is however quite close to the social Darwinism of an Ayn Rand and her “virtue of selfishness.” II There is another work worth mentioning here which attempts to analyze the roots causes of so much in- equality and injustice in the world. It is The Money Masters – a 1996 documentary film produced by attorney Patrick S. J. Carmack and directed and narrated by William T. Still. It discusses the concepts of money, debt and taxes, and describes their development from biblical times onward. It covers the history of fraction- al-reserve banking, central banking, monetary policy, the bond market, and the Federal Reserve System in the United States. The film, which is widely available online, was followed by The Secret of Oz in 2009. These documentaries, not unlike C.P. Snow’s inquiry into the two cultures need to be viewed and pondered carefully since it too may lead to some fruitful dialogues and insights into the birth and decay of advanced powerful cultures which go astray and end up losing their very soul. But this obtains only as long as one’s interlocutor is willing to examine his/her research assumptions. We ought to read those works, if for no other reason than avoiding the danger of reinventing the wheel and then foolishingly proclaiming that we have made a great new discovery. We ought to be careful in choosing and formulating the themes of our cultural proposals lest they reveal not visions and dreams but prejudices and biases. In academia those questions are called “loaded questions,” they already have an answer in mind before the question is even asked. Which is all to say I suppose, that C.P. Snow’s and William Still’s inquiries while important as far as they go, unfortunately do not go far enough. If they really intended to carry on a fruitful dialogue with the second culture and perhaps create a third synthesis of science and liberal arts, a third culture so to speak, they would have needed to find the courage and the vision to boldly go beyond the analysis of mere economic-political phenomena such as bankers, bureaucracies, unions, media, industrial commercial entrepreneurship, mul- tinational corporations, “bully capitalism,” big business, environmental degradation, government control, federal reserve policy, bond market, opportunistic capitalism, central banking and so on, you name it, ad nauseam. They would have had to go beyond the mere proposal of reforms, as if everything else is otherwise ok with the global village in which we now live. They would have had to propose a dream and a vision within spiritual realities now considered retrograde and passé, beyond materialistic national xenophobic narratives; they would have had to propose what Silone calls “the conspiracy of hope” beyond mere ideologies. They would have had to challenge first and foremost the basic fallacious tenet that “economic growth” based on social Darwinism and ceaseless consumerism, or what we call savage capitalism, is always desirable and leads to individual and social happiness (understood in a materialistic sordid way rather than the Aristotelian eudemonia), always preferable to socialism or other forms of governance. So their works begin to sound as mere anti-communist propaganda for capitalism and entrepreneurship. Moreover, what they should have paused upon is the catastrophe of having two cultures replete with very intelligent people who have not found a creative positive way to talk to each other. We have witnessed the phenomenon in the very pages of this magazine. There is indeed a moral in such a tale which may well apply to all those who are out to reform the world and perhaps even change it, but then obtusely refuse to examine their supposedly “enlightened” assumptions which support their critique. Be that as it may, hope springs eternal and one may continue hoping for Silone’s conspiracy of hope. What did Socrates say? “The unexamined life is not worth living.” III In the third segment of this essay I’d like to focus briefly, on the desirability within modernity of envisioning a third culture: a cultural bridge, or a sort of theoretical ideal synthesis of the two estranged cultures. The origins of the term “science” go back to William Whewell, a philosopher and historian of science who used ‘science’ in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences of 1840, and is credited with establishing the term. I suppose one can even go further back to Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Bridge to Everywhere in Norway However, the term was not recorded as an idea till the early 1830s at the Association for the Advanced Science when it was proposed as an analogy to the term “artist.” Leonardo Da Vinci would have approved, given that he conceived of himself holistically as both an artist and a scientist and perceived no dichotomy between the two. And yet, the two cultures simply ignore and exclude what was originally the analogy to science-art. And there is the root cause of the divide identified in the 18th century by Giambattista Vico in his New Science as “the barbarism of the intellect,” something I have already discussed at length in the pages of Ovi magazine. It is significant to point out here that in the second edition ofThe Two Cultures, in 1963, Snow added a new essay titled “The Two Cultures: A Second Look.” In that essay he predicted that a new “Third Culture” would emerge and close the gap between literary intellectuals and scientists. Also important to take notice that he originally named his lecture “The Rich and the Poor” In his last public statement he makes clear that the larger global and economic issues remain central and urgent: “Peace. Food. No more people than the Earth can take. That is the cause.” As I have already pointed out in my previous articles one must wonder what Snow’s real agenda was after all. In point of fact he produced precious little in the way of a theoretical philosophical scheme with which to synthesize his two cultural worlds and bring about a third culture. So the question persists: is it desirable that artists working with computers and inspired by the exciting innovations and discoveries taking place in science, be also keenly interested in what the cultural critics and commentators from the humanities have to say on the meaning and impact these discoveries and innovations have on culture and society? Can the use of the computer be a point of reference, a sort of center, and if so can the center hold? Because our work and tools are in constant flux, we are forced to articulate the reasoning and meaning informing the art produced, which has traditionally been the role of art critics and historians. This, I would suggest, creates room for an active dialogue with both humanists and scientists. Thus we are placed in between these “Two Cultures,” which creates a triangle and promises to an emergence of a Third Culture. This may be a privileged but also a dangerous position, at least in this transitional stage. Therefore it is important to take a hard close look at the background and current status of the so called Two Cultures. But before we delve into the issue perhaps we should first answer the question: are there still today, the era of post-modern art and philosophy, individuals who resemble Da Vinci in the sense of not conceiving themselves within the dichotomy art/science? Actually there are such individuals, one that comes to mind is Paul Feyerabend who wrote an influential book titled Against Method (1975) which was translated into sixteen languages. In that book he argued that philosophy cannot provide a methodology and rationale for science since there is no rationale to begin with and to explain. Particularly irritating to scientists was his famous “anything goes” assertion which went like this: “All Methodologies have their limitations and the only ‘rule’ that survives is ‘anything goes.’” He also suggested in that book that assuming that science and art share a problem solving attitude, then the only significant difference between them would disappear and then we could speak of styles and preferences for the former, and progress for the latter. Indeed, much of epistemic relativism in philosophy is understood by the scientific community as violent attacks on science. And that is too bad.

Paul Fereyabend’s Book : Against Method (1975) What I find most fascinating and Da Vinci-like about Fereyabend is his complete embrace of paradox. Like Da Vinci he is another complex persona who as a teenager studied opera and astronomy simultaneously and envisioned himself working in both fields. Later he kept going back and forth between majoring in physics and philosophy, eventually settling on the latter. Fereyabend studied under Popper at the London School of Economics. He then moved to Berkeley, where he befriended Kuhn and strongly rejected science as being superior to other modes of knowledge and as a result he ended up being labeled an anti-scientist. Important to point out that one of the enterprises of Leonardo was that of the building complex bridges. It appears that in the Renaissance it was rather common for scientist-artists to also be architects and engineers. One thinks of Michelangelo who was also an architect. So unconsciously, if you will, the scientist-artists of the Renaissance were already busy building the triangular bridge of art, science and technology.

A New Europe in Search of its Soul by Emanuel L. Paparella (2005)

Paul Fereyabend Leonardo Da Vinci who did not discern a duality between science and art But I am afraid that there is still much work to be done in building this proposed bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Much cynicism and skepticism has to be overcome. For instance, John Brockman, editor of a book of essays entitled The Third Culture, negates Snow’s optimistic prediction that a day will come when literary intellectuals will communicate effectively with scientists. Instead he makes the claim that the contemporary scientists are the third culture and alludes that there is no need for trying to establish communication between scientists and literary intellectuals, who he calls the “middlemen.” Although the choice of people in his book is significant, the mere fact that it is comprised almost completely of Western white men, with the exception of Lynn Margolis with her essay “Gaia is a tough Bitch” makes it impossible to take his proposition seriously. But it does point to the continuing gap between the humanities and sciences and clearly shows that the bridge being constructed is still very fragile.

John Brockman (1941- ) A cultural impresario who runs the world’s smartest website bridging the two cultures and advocating both science and the arts

The Third Culture by John Brockman (1996)

Lynn Margolis Perhaps the source of the communication problem can be traced to the fact that most of the philosophers under attack in the scientific community do not work closely with scientists and that scientists are equally isolated from the movements of philosophical thought and contemporary artistic expression. As long as the work does not have a reason to be located in a few disciplines simultaneously, room for misunderstandings will be ample. The work of artists working with technology demands interaction with scholars from a wide variety of disciplines such as computer science, social studies, philosophy, cultural studies. Let me repeat once again the wise comment of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennet on the dichotomy science/ humanities which remains to be bridged by a third humanistic culture in between the two antagonistic ones of science on one side and that of the liberal arts on the other still opposing each other: I have already mentioned in a previous symposium meeting but it bears reiteration: “It’s a two way-street. When scientists decide to ‘settle’ the hard questions of ethics and meaning, for instance, they usually manage to make fools of themselves, for a simple reason: They are smart but ignorant. The reason philosophers spend so much of their time and energy raking over the history of the field is that the history of philosophy consists, in large measure, of very tempting mistakes, and the only way to avoid making them again and again is to study how the great thinkers of the past got snared by them. Scientists who think their up-to-date scientific knowledge renders them immune to the illusions that lured Aristotle and Hume and Kant and the others into such difficulties are in for a rude awakening.”

Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett The book argues for a scientific analysis of in order to predict the future of such a phenomenon The envisioned bridge is triangulated and made into a more stable structure with the work of artists who are utilizing new technologies and are in active dialogue with both sides. Artists using technology are uniquely positioned in the middle of the scientific and literary/philosophical communities, and we are allowed “poetic license,” which gives us the freedom to reinforce the delicate bridge and contribute to the creation of a new mutant third culture. By utilizing tools familiar to scientists and collaborating with the scientific community, we may be getting closer to an atmosphere of collaboration and mutual respect. This road, however, is not without dangers. It is a delicate mission to be in between disciplines that are themselves in a tenuous relationship. I experienced that existentially when, at Yale University, I decided to write an interdisciplinary Ph.D. dissertation encompassing philosophy and literature within Humanism and requiring the participation of two different academic departments. It was not an easy road. Perhaps the greatest danger is for artists to look to the literary, philosophical, and theoretical circles for interpretations of scientific data and then further reinterpret their versions without checking back with the scientists. Much postmodern writing borders on linguistic play with mathematics and scientific terminology that serves to alienate the scientific community, which has used precise methods to arrive at those theories. This is not to say that one should blindly accept all products of the scientific community, but simply to suggest that any working relationship needs to be based on mutual respect and dialogue. The other danger that faces those ‘in between’ working on creating ‘something else’ is the general attitude of theory being above practice, prevalent in both humanities and sciences. At this stage, it is in the practice of art that the freedom lies to make assertions that are beyond the rational and beyond necessary methodology of proving a thesis. Practice informed by theory, utilizing a methodology which makes it accessible to both worlds, is the key. Or, conversely, theory informed by practice. Here the pragmatism of a pierce or a William James could prove most useful. Currently, much of this bridge-building work takes place in universities in any case. Academia allows artists contact with scholars from many disciplines. In order to function and communicate effectively in this context, one is forced to learn the etiquette and language of various disciplines, as difficult as that may prove to be. The challenge, then, is to do this without losing the intuitive practice that taps into the silent, the unknown, the mysterious, the sublime and the poetical. One of the most important scientists who has commented on the similarities between artists’ and scientists’ creative process is physicist Werner Heisenberg (1958). He believed artists’ creativity arose out of the in- terplay between the spirit of the time and the individual. For McLuhan, artistic inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change: “It’s always been the artist who perceives that alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare ground for it. Back to the future.

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) is one of the most important figures in the development of quantum mechanics and its modern interpretation

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) who is famous for his aphorism “the medium is the message” Roger Penrose (1931- ) A mathematical physicist and philosopher who has contributed to general relativity and cosmology

John Horgan (1953- ) who asserts that science is at an end The work of philosophers trying to create the synthesis of a third culture is vitally dependent on an active dialogue with scientists and humanists while performing an important function of being bridge builders. And as any engineer knows, we have to know the territory on both sides and be very precise in how we negotiate the space ‘in between.’ Negotiating the gap between the canon of rationality and the fluid poetic is ultimately the goal of artists who work with communication technologies. Gell-Mann is the founder of the Santa Fe Institute where Kauffamn, Bak, Penrose, and others have worked on the possibility that there might be a still-undiscovered law of nature that explains why the universe has generated so much order in spite of the supposedly universal drift towards disorder decreed by the second law of thermodynamics. Are we getting closer to Asimov “final question” on thermodynamics? This something else as Gell-Mann refers to it would be located beyond the horizon of current science-something that can explain better the mystery of life and of human consciousness and of existence itself. To Gell-Mann this indicated a certain tendency towards obscurantism and mystification. One of the most profound goals of chaoplexity pursued by Kauffman, Per Bak, John Holland, and others is the elucidation of a new law, or set of principles, or unified theory, or something that will make it possible to predict the behavior of a variety of dissimilar complex systems. A closely related proposal is that the universe harbors a complexity-generating force that counteracts the second law of thermodynamics and creates galaxies, life, and even life intelligent enough to contemplate itself. How could one not then summon the ancient texts of the Vedas, Buddhism, and much of eastern mysticism? Although Gell-Mann was playing when he referred to the eightfold way and to Finnegan’s Wake, he did touch on that something else many disciplines are struggling to define. The discussion of whether we are reaching the ‘end of art’ is not limited to the field of art. Apparently this is an ongoing and lively discussion in the world of science as well. John Horgan, who spent years profiling major names in the world of science for Scientific American, asks this question inThe End of Science: Fac- ing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996). He lists a number of disciplines and questions major personalities in their fields about whether they are reaching their limits: philosophy, physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, scientific theology, and machine science. One could easily compile a list of disciplines in the humanities asking this same question, but the simple point Horgan misses is that every end constitutes a new beginning, and by stating a doubt that there will be anymore Einsteins or Bohrs in the future, he does not take into account the possible emergence of a group genius and endless mutations of disciplines that truly do result in something radically new.

The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1975) by John Horgan Reaching limits in science or any other discipline for that matter really means being on the threshold of the inevitable something else. Ultimately, bridging and synthesizing many worlds while composing “something else” becomes the art. Leonardo Da Vinci would have no problem with that process, for he possessed a mind that was always envisioning and carrying out the solution to problems considered impossible to solve, and conceiving new origins and new births.”Rinascimento” [Renaissance], after all, literally means “re-birth.” Another such re-birth is urgently needed. It will only begin when the Enlightenment begins to enlighten itself. Here below for the benefit of the inquisitive reader are two books challenging taken for granted assumptions and suggesting in greater detail various ways and means on how best to envision the above discussed bridging of the liberal arts and scientific cultures for the renewal and re-birth of Western Civilization, beyond the euro, power-politics, and economic concerns. One of those books is an Ovi e-book and can be down- loaded for free:

Europa: an Idea and a Journey: Essays on the Origins of the EU’s Cultural Identity and its Present Economic-Political Crisis (2012) by Emanuel L. Paparella

Europe beyond the Euro (2012) An Ovi e-book by Emanuel L. Paparella Chapter 12 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Twelveth Meeting: 7 November 2013

Table of Content for the 12th Meeting of the Symposium (7 November 2013) Section 1: “Croce as an historian of Aestheticism”: A Presentation by Dr. Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce. Section 2: “The Museum Girolamo Devanna in Bitonto. A New Jewel in Italy’s Artistic Patrimony.” An addendum by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 3: “A Vichian Journey into the Hermeneutics of Self-knowledge.” A presentation by Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella 1 Croce as an Historian of Aesthetics A Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi

(as translated from his book L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce) Given his historicism, even though it is a very peculiar and particular historicism, Croce could not ignore the issue of the history of aesthetics. Already we detect in his first Aesthetics a history who the same Croce subsequently judged too reductive and rigid, but nevertheless it had marked a fundamental moment within European culture.

Croce’s Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistics (2008) Originally published in Italian in 1902 with later revisions and expansions Croce returns to those authors and cultural movements which he had depicted, via various essays which were subsequently arranged in his A History of Aesthetics via Essays. Croce The Two Worldly Sciences: Aesthetics and Economy published in 1931 became quite famous. Inthat essay the philosopher held a thesis, which appeared paradoxical and certainly debatable, according to which the genuine philosophy of art was born in modern times, with the modern philosophy of the spirit and of the subject which detached itself from metaphysics, thus becoming worldly. The same process occurred, according to Croce, with economy. As Croce puts it: “The ongoing and increasing intensity of political economic and artistic achievements in the first centuries of the modern era, expressed itself theoretically with the formation of two novel modes of thought or two new disciplines: politics and economy (which here we consider within the substantial philosophical unity within which they are found) and the philosophy of art or Aesthetics. Those two sciences had been all but ignored by medieval philosophy which, within the pragmatic sphere knew only of morality, and resolved political and economic problem via morality when they presented themselves and could not be bypassed, while within the theoretical sphere logic predominated thus reducing poetry and art to mere means of signification and dissemination of sacred truths. But with the arrival of the Renaissance, we first detect a strong new science called science of the States or Politics, followed by the art of prudence, and more slowly, the science of economics, which incarnated itself in laws and regulations in the 18th century even if it did not present itself with a full philosophical self-awareness. Thus began the distinguishing of law from morality, and the investigation of the concepts of poetry, of figurative arts, of architecture, of music, attempting to find a common foundation and the intellectual faculty from which they all sprang. This research within the 18th century, it arrives at an initial conclusion when, having found the originality of this new principle, it constructed an autonomous science to which was appended the name of Aesthetics.” As mentioned, this thesis is debatable on many of its aspects, given that the same Croce asserts by implication in some of his writings, it cannot be denied that the ancient and medieval world had their own aesthetic and economic consciousness. In any case, it is an astonishing and original thesis. The enterprise of the historian of aesthetics carried out by Croce was pervaded by a will to find common foundations, to propose once again or rediscover theories that had been forgotten or undervalued and on the other hand to demolish traditional positions accepted without challenge by the scientific community which he considered erroneous or ineffectual. As is well known, Croce considers Vico his most authentic predecessor and De Sanctis his ideal master deemed by him the greatest Italian philosopher of art, undoubtedly superior to many professional philosophers, just as in the context of that other-worldly political philosophy he finds Niccolò Machiavelli superior by far. An analogous judgment is expressed by Croce for French culture. He individuates the poets Flaubert and Boudelaire, as the greatest art philosophers. He places Baumgarten in a central position within the history of aesthetic and analyzes with deep care Kant’s Critique of Judgment. He considers Hegel’s aesthetic confusing and over-intellectualized, and prefers the acute and brilliant reflections of Schleiermaker as a theoretician of pure visibility while evaluating the positivists as trivial and the idealists as empty, preferring to those the English Peter, the German Hanslick and the Dutch Lange.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) who wrote The New Science Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883): 19th century literary critic judged by Croce his ideal teacher

De Sanctis’ Storia della Letteratura Italiana (1871)

Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)

Machiavelli’s The Prince (1515) which began Political Science

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) which introduces the current term “aesthetics” 2 The Museum Girolamo De Vanna in Bitonto: A New Jewel in Italy’s Artistic Patrimony As an Addendum from Emanuel Paparella Introduction: considering that this symposium is dedicated to Aesthetics and the envisioning of a new Hu- manism, I’d like to revisit a jewel of a museum as originally explored in Ovi magazine on April 22, 2009. The contents of the museum, an art collection gathered over a period of fifty years, is a donation by Dr. Girolamo De Vanna (a cousin on my mother’s side) to the people of the city of Bitonto. Admission to the public is free. I go there every time I am in town. It is a cultural oasis, a place for the contemplation of beauty as if on the Aristotelian “isle of the blessed,” a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm of an Italian humanistic culture that could save us if we desisted from the obsessive preoccupation with mere pragmatic political and economic concerns. In this regard the lesson of Croce’s synthesis of aesthetics and economics as described above by Ernesto Paolozzi could prove quite instructive. Croce, like Da Vinci and Vico before him, can show us how within the unity of knowledge, it is not only possible but in fact desirable to build a bridge and render two seemingly antithetical disciplines harmonious and complementary to each other.

The palazzo Sylos Calò (1529), home of the Galleria Devanna I have included, besides the samples interspersed in article itself, a few selected illustrations of paintings found in the museum via two links at the bottom, also part of the original publication in Ovi magazine. One is a u-tube presentation with a commentary, in Italian, by an art professor. The other is a selected display of some of the museum’s notable masterpieces. They render a more thorough visual idea of the impressive exterior architecture of the museum (going back to the Renaissance), its interior décor, as well as its hermeneutical arrangement within time and space. A veritable aesthetic feast for the eyes of an appreciative Ovi readership. Interior courtyard of the Palazzo Calò

Main entrance to the Galleria Devanna

Going up the stairs to the galleria’s 2nd floor On April 18, 2009, some four years ago, in the Italian region of Puglia, city of Bitonto, a few miles from Bari, a brand new museum opened its doors. It is named the Galleria Devanna. It bears the name of its donor, in Italy known as a “mecenate” (a patron of the arts), namely Girolamo Devanna, who donated his own personal art collection to the city. He stipulated that the museum is to be free to the public. Presently it is the only State Art’s museum in the whole region of Puglia; all the others being regional museums. It is also the second biggest private collection museum; the biggest one being located in Naples. A Sample of Notable Paintings as found in the Galleria Devanna

Giuseppe De Nittis (1846-1884) Trafalgar Square (1878)

Potrait of a monk by El Greco (1541-1614) from the Galleria Devanna Madonna by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)

Portrait of a nobleman by Diego Velasquez (1599-1660)

Painting by Artemesia Gentileschi (the first woman painter of the Renaissance:1593-1656)

Madonna and Infant by Artemesia Gentileschi

Painting of a sculpture by Andrea Appiani (1754-1817)

Painting of a shipwreck (1833) by Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) The museum is situated in the historic center of the town, a medieval town which is the largest medieval town in Puglia possessing a wonderful cathedral dating back to the 11th century. I had already had an opportunity in the past to admire this exquisite jewel of artistic collection in the very home of the donor, across from the cathedral, given that he happens to be my cousin on my mother’s side. But now, the collection has taken its proper place in a beautiful Renaissance palace with an arched courtyard (see photos above), the so-called palazzo Silos Calò which has been restored for the occasion by the Italian State. Portrait by Giuseppe De Nittis (1846-1844) There are a total of 229 paintings and 108 drawings, spanning 700 years, from 1300 to today. The museum consists of seven rooms (one for each century) full of masterpieces from famous painters on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Veronese, El Greco, Orazio e Artemisia Gentileschi, Titian, Criscuolo, Figino, Soens, Corona. Delacroix, De Nittis, Poussin, Beatrice Wood and Joseph Stella, and the list could go on and on. And who is Girolamo Devanna? Were I to describe him in a sentence I would say he is the most passionate collector of everything beautiful and ancient I have ever known. He was born in Argentina from Italian immigrant parents (his father is my mother’s brother) but was raised and educated in Italy. I have met him repeatedly in both Italy when I visit there, and America when he traveles here to visit American museums. He is presently a professor of American literature (his major at the University of Urbino) and humanities at the same University of Urbino, the same place where I have repeatedly taken my American students to study Italian language, literature and art. He began as a nine year old to collect ancient Roman and Greek coins which can still be found in the Puglia region, and then he started collecting works of art which became for him a veritable passion for everything that is beautiful. From American literature he passed on to the history of art and collecting works of art which became his life career. The donation represents fifty years of laborious collection, jealously cured and protected for half a century by Girolamo Devanna and his sister Rosaria in their residence across the 11th century Romanesque cathedral of Bitonto.

Portrait of a nobleman by Tiziano (around 1550) It bears mentioning here that Bitonto, as a Southern Italian town of barely sixty thousands inhabitants, while not being exactly at the crossroads of tourism nowadays (mentioned however by Boccaccio in his Decamer- one), is the home of a magnificent 11th century cathedral recently restored uncovering an older 8th century church and attracting discriminating visitors from all over the world (see photo below). Now it is also the home of a world-class museum that will surely be around centuries from now as a lasting testament to the humanistic spirit of Italy which, if properly grasped could become the needed cement to unify a Europe in search of its identity and soul. We are grateful for Girolamo Devanna’s magnanimous generosity of spirit which has increased our appreciation for the splendors of European humanism and the liberal arts.

Eleventh Century Romanesque Cathedral of Bitonto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9UTwgw3COI&feature=email http://www.bitontotv.it/cms/index.php?mact=Album,m5,default,1&m5albumid=33&m5re- turnid=63&page=63 3

A Vichian Journey into the Hermeneutics of Self-knowledge A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella n asking why is there is so much pessimism and despair in the air in our Western Civilization one arrives at the ineluctable conclusion that the root cause of such despair and nihilism may well be that we have forgotten the very meaning of “the pursuit of happiness” and the contemplation of beauty and the poetical and aesthetics as Aristotle understood them (basically as virtue).In our relativistic times we no Ilonger seem to have any notion of what the commonalities and the very essence of human nature may be, and what may possibly render such a nature happy, not in Walt Disney’s sense of “fun” and distraction and dissipation, but in Aristotle’s sense of “eudemonia,” the flourishing life, a holistic life that fulfills the potential of a nature that is human. The question arises: were Vico living nowadays how would he interpret what is presently going on within human history? Fortunately we have his philosophy of history and therefore we can hazard an answer. 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 concept of Providence in his philosophy. A Vichian intellectual journey requires, at a minimum, a willingness to dialogue with Vico and then among ourselves. What makes the dialogue possible is the common humanity we share and we bring to the conversation. As 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 will be moot. So, how did I personally come to this hermeneutical process? 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. A theory of which I am particularly fond is that of Hermeneutics: 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. A literature which is incapable of relating to me standing in the present with an historical horizon, is dead. 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. 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’s Scienza Nuova some forty years ago under the inspiring influence of recognized Vico scholars such as Gianturco, Mazzotta, Verene, Bergin, just to mention a few. There is much more to this theory, but what I initially wish to convey to the reader is this: meaning and mean- ingfulness 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 a priori to the subject/object separation in thought. 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. 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 virtuously.” 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 re-discovered by the high medieval and Renaissance humanists: what does it mean to be human; how does one live humanly? And the question is addressed to each one of his readers. 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 despairing civilization which threatens to swallow up our freedom and our very humanity, I remain as convinced as I was forty 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. To that end it may be best to eschew a too cumbersome academic form replete with technical jargon, footnotes and bibliographical over- kill, while adopting a simple colloquial style. This is not an apology for superficiality. On the contrary, Vico resists oversimplification. He needs to be pondered and taken in slowly. He is indeed a hard nut to crack but once cracked the rewards are plentiful and inestimable; a personal epiphany of sort may ensue. Therefore, initially I ask of the readers as we begin this journey section by section, four things: 1) to imaginatively supply their own erudition wherever mine falls short as we journey and explore with Vico various interrelated disciplines and fields of study; 2) some initial forbearance with what may remain obscure despite my efforts; 3) an initial open mind which reserves judgment for the end of the journey; 4) finally, to bring their own humanity to the historical horizon, for as Vico will reveal to any who reads him seriously and with open ears, 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. II Having glimpsed at a broad and general overview of Vico’s poetic philosophy, let us now focus on some of its most important aspects, first and foremost his idea of providence which, as the commentary on The New Science’s frontispiece hints at, informs the whole of Vico’s science of humanity. The reader should be alerted that we are not dealing here with the God of the theologians or the God of Abraham, Isac and Jacob, nor with the God of the philosophers (Decartes and Spinoza jump to mind) but a paradoxical idea of Providence which encompasses at the same time the immanent and the transcendent in man’s human historical experience. I dare say that even a non-believer or an atheist can profit from this idea. Under this idea reality will appear much less chaotic and confusing as indeed is the case within our present civilization where absurdity abounds and the war of all against all and final dissolution seems to have begun. In other words, Vico wished to demonstrate the presence of a reality, which he calls Providence, that is immanent within man’s history, operating primarily through man’s freedom, but also through social phenomena and institutions such as shame, honor, utility, authority, religion, family, and language.

Frontispiece to Vico’s New Science (1725) showing the eye of Providence in the upper left corner, Philosophy standing on the world on the altar, and Homer representing the poetic In his De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, he had already pointed out that God cannot be demonstrated a priori, but only through a posteriori effects. God’s action appears mingled with man’s actions—or better— hidden under man’s actions. This is the crux of the problematic of providence vis-à-vis man’s freedom. Is providence wholly immanent within man’s social life? And if so, how does man remain free? On the other hand if providence is transcendent, how exactly does it operate in human history within time and space? Isn’t the very attempt to define God, even if only symbolically, a reduction of his transcendence to the purely human? Vico’s begins to solve the conundrum of transcendence/immanence by pointing out that God created humans with minds which celebrate their nature in social intercourse. This social nature of the mind is evident by 1) common sense, 2) religion, 3) the heterogeny of ends. He defines common sense as a spontaneous agreement of a whole population on certain values and ideas instinctively felt to be essential to one’s nature. When these ideas arise spontaneously in separate societies one can discern a common ground of truth which precedes the erudite reflection of philosophers. This ordinary person’s common ground of truth is for Vico “the criterion taught to the nations by divine providence to define what is certain in the natural law of the gentes” (NS, 144). Moreover, the universal character of common sense together with its function of preservation of man’s social life is a sign of divine providence operating in their civil nature. It is because of these common notions of eternal truth that men are able to communicate with each other and celebrate their social nature. The second phenomenon is that of religion and its historical manifestations. In its origins it is a perturbing “fear of divinity” that shakes man’s conscience to its very foundations. Through a powerful imagination, primitive man saw in frightening natural phenomena, such as thunder, the signs of an all-seeing super-Mind. This was natural to them, since they spoke through signs. Thunder was but a sign of Jupiter. A religion grounded in primordial fear rather than love is a necessary consequence of original sin which corrupts human nature. Had there been no original corruption, religion would have been unnecessary; love would have sufficed. Re- ligion as fear is indeed another aspect of divine providence restraining man by fear and shame. It is indeed the fountainhead of natural law. Without religion, Vico points out, no primitive social world is even conceivable. In fact the only way out of wanton savagery on the way toward one’s full humanity is religion underpinned by fear. Vico precedes Christopher Dawson by some two hundred years in his insistence that any culture, even the most primitive, is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought. This is providence through religion, which is to say, the representation through a vivid imagination of a divine providence operating in human affairs. It is a means employed by God (i.e., the transcendent Providence) to bring man back to social intercourse after original sin. Vico writes that this idea of a divine providence originates in man’s conscience, but it is God who has originally placed a religious need within man’s spirit. It is thunder that makes it possible for the idea of divinity to reemerge from within man’s conscience. This idea, not the thunder itself, is the essential cause. The thunder may be indispensable but remains secondary. In other words, man is religious by nature, as Carl Jung will also find and theorize in his phenomenon of the collective unconscious. If man does not worship the living God, he will end up worshiping idols and ideologies galore, if nothing else his own cleverness or technological prowess. That stage is reached in the third historical cycle: that of full-fledged rationalism which detached from the poetical leads to eventual dehumanization. The third most intriguing and original Vichian theme is that of the “heterogony of ends,” a term coined by Wundt later on but aptly expressing Vico’s insight that within the particular deeds of man with their particular intentions one may discern another intention, another end which, while remaining immanent within those deeds, issues forth from a superior Mind, one who via such actions realizes the common good, i.e., the preservation of civic and social life. What is fascinating is that this end of the common good results even when men tend to destroy it with their bad intentions. The Biblical story of Joseph is exemplary here: Joseph’s brothers are intent on their selfish ends, but the end result is a greater awareness of an unavoidable interdependence. It is this second intention, immanent in man’s deeds and issuing in a different end from that intended, that Vico calls “providence.” Some idealists have explained this concept away by calling it “the irony of history,” but that explanation will not do unless one presupposes a superior Mind which operates in such a way as to incorporate within a wider canvas of general salvation those actions which by themselves tend to destroy man’s social life. Chaos generates chaos. Whenever order is present one needs to assume a Mind, what the ancient Greeks called Nous and Vico calls Providence. What Vico is basically saying is this: once man’s deeds are illuminated by the idea of providential divinity, they will concur, despite egotistical intentions and ends (the centrifugal tendencies of human nature due to original sin and abuse of one’s freedom) to keep man within social life according to his true nature (the centripetal tendency). For Vico this insight in itself is a sign revealing a transcendent Providence (See NS, 38, 132-133, 1108). However, this idea of providence functions as a purely natural level, almost a utilitarian mode, concerned with the preservation of the social structures of human nature, not at a theological level of grace, salvation and redemption, a level not unfamiliar to Vico as a practicing Catholic. The nexus between the immanent and the transcendent in this idea results in originative and paradoxical thinking which we’ll examine more extensively later on. In conclusion, this brief schematic exploration of Vico’s concept of providence will perhaps give readers a better grasp of its uniqueness within the Western philosophical tradition. They may better appreciate why Vico rejects chance (the Epicurean philosophy alive and well in the West), or fate (the Stoic philosophy), or purely naturalistic explanations of human events (Grotius’ philosophy), or for that matter, divine action as extraordinary miraculous interventions (Selden’s philosophy). Vico is, in fact, the first to point out that the notion of Divine Providence has functions in the civil and social world of man more than in the physical world of nature (see NS, 310-313, 318). Hence he can confidently declare that “in one of its principal aspects, this Science must therefore be a rational civil theology of divine providence…And it is in the contemplation of this infinite and eternal providence that our Science finds certain divine proofs by which it is confirmed and demonstrated” (NS, 342). III “But that was it—you never could think what things would be like if they weren’t just what and where they were. You never knew what was coming, either; and yet when it came, it seemed as if nothing else ever could have come. That was queer—you could do anything you liked until you’d done it, but when you had done it then you knew, of course, that you must always have had to --John Galsworthy Let us now further explore how this idea of Providence interacts with that of freedom. As most students of Western Civilization would readily acknowledge, the idea of freedom is peculiar to the West. Moreover, for the Western imagination this idea is nothing short of the underpinning for the historical consciousness. In fact, the consciousness of Man being his own history is one of the most striking characteristics of the Western world. It allows the self to turn back upon itself and judge itself ethically. This is possible because that same self conceives of itself as created in God’s own image and therefore essentially free, for this is a God that is free and creates freely. I dare say that therein lies the theological genius of the West but unfortunately it has been all but forgotten. Hence it is now possible to write a Constitution based on nothing but economic considerations leaving out the very idea of God, and idea which is the foundation of some 90% of the world’s constitutions. One such is the so called “Treaty of Lisbon” which passes for a constitution of sort for the European Union. Let me illustrate this with a personal anecdote. Several years ago in the mid-eighties, I taught Ethics and Comparative Religions in a private Episcopal School (St. Andrew’s of Boca Raton, Florida). At one point I ran into a theological controversy with the school’s chaplain who taught biology. The controversy centered on the issue of God’s freedom and whether or not God necessarily had to create the universe as we know it. He had delivered in chapel a wonderfully poetic narration of the creation event as described in Genesis. I praised his narration but took issue with one of its statements: “Then God felt lonely, so he created Man.” It seemed to me that such a statement invalidated the whole Judeo-Christian theological understanding of God and his creation. For if God needed to create out of loneliness, then He is deficient and determined and not free. And if God is not free, then the creatures he creates in his own image cannot possibly be free either. This is the dilemma that used to preoccupy Albert Einstein which led him to the famous statement: God does not play dice with the universe. Even God cannot declare that 2+2 is 3. But on the other hand without freedom, love, the greatest of Christian virtues, is also moot. It is the intertwining of love and freedom that makes for the grandeur of Dante’s Commedia; without them Western civilization cannot possibly be understood. Despite the Inquisition, the Crusades, the scandal of the Papal schisms and the corruption of the clergy, Christian theology has always understood in principle (by which principle it also condemns itself when it falls short) that genuine love always desires the increase rather than the diminishing or the control of others’ freedom. On the other hand, as Dostoyevsky has shown in his novels, without the freedom to hate and to refuse love, one cannot possibly love either God or one’s neighbor. It is in that freedom that lies the human drama of Dante’s Inferno, rather than an alleged sado-masochistic medieval propensity for asceticism, pain and misery, as the Enlightenment philosophers, among whom Voltaire, misguidedly surmised. Ultimately the chaplain and I concluded that a better description of what might have been going on prior to creation might be that God, far from being lonely, was already in good company in communion with his Son. Michelangelo depicts this on the wall of the Sistine chapel with a Christ that looks like a Greek Apollo. That Christ in fact scandalized many pious Christians but obviously He is not merely the historical Jesus of Palestine born or incarnated as a human being at a particular place, at a particular time, from a particular people. It was the overflowing of this reciprocal love between Father and Son (the Spirit) that prompts God to freely create the cosmos in order to freely share this love as Aquinas intimates in the Summa. In fact, the human community of which the primordial prototype is the family is conceivable only because there is already a transcendent paradigm of community, what Christian theology calls the Trinity. Therefore the goodness and abundance of life derive ultimately from love, and God in his act of creation far from being determined, remains utterly free and transcendent. The roots of this powerful Western idea go deeper than Christianity itself. They are found in Jewish theology of which Christian theology is an offshoot. The Jews, without philosophically articulating a theoretical understanding of the philosophy of history (we need to wait for Vico for that kind understanding), were the first people to fully grasp the importance of freedom for the whole created order and its development through time and space. We now take it for granted, but this idea of a free God who freely creates creatures who in turn freely determine their destiny, is a truly revolutionary idea. It presents us with a God who is radically different from all the other capricious anthropomorphic gods of Western or Oriental religions up to then. It is that idea that makes room for another revolutionary idea, that Man is his own history. This is not to deny that both the ancient Greeks and Romans contributed advanced ideas regarding intellectual and political freedom. However, their kind of freedom was grounded in political and social institutions rather than in the self. Rome, after a while, is not only an idea but a goddess through which the Romans, not unlike modern technocratic society, narcissistically and idolatrously worship their own achievements. On the other hand, the consciousness of freedom residing in a self related to its Creator is a uniquely Jewish phenomenon which enters the Western world via Christianity and eventually becomes the fountainhead of man’s historical consciousness. The reader may be wondering, what exactly is the definition of historical consciousness? Were I to con- dense the various definitions given by cultural anthropologists I would hazard this one: an attitude that holds that history is a paradigm, a myth, if you will, of perceiving and ordering Man’s reality. Now, this concise definition assumes a faith in the presence of meaningful purpose and order in a universe ever reaching for a greater realization of meaning. Without some rock bottom beliefs neither historical consciousness nor science itself is possible. The inner dynamic for this historical consciousness can be located in the biblical covenant between man and God, of which the most significant event is the giving and receiving of a promise with an ongoing and ever renewed expectation of its fulfillment. In other words, this relationship between Man and God is based on a promise and a trust in its fulfillment. This constituting of certain persons (e.g., the prophets), certain places (e.g., Jerusalem), and certain times (e.g., the Exodus event) as of eternal significance, intimately involves God in the historical process. It is intriguing that the very connotation for the word truth in Hebrew is “trust in the future,” practically a definition for faith itself. We are back to the conundrum of God’s providence and man’s freedom. We may well ask: if Man, created in the image of God, is free and responsible for his own history, how can he possibly remain such if God, at critical junctures, intervenes in human history? Are not man’s freedom and God’s providence mutually exclusive? It seems like a contradiction but in reality it is a paradox, at least in Vico’s philosophy of history. In his book Chance and Providence: God’s action in World Governed by Scientific Law (S. Scribner, N.Y., 1958), William G. Pollard suggests that the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers is exemplary of how God is involved in the historical process and how Man retains ultimate responsibility for that process. Pollard rightly points out that perhaps only a story or a myth is capable of fully integrating the two realities of Man’s freedom and God’s providence. This story begins with a deliberate evil deed committed by Joseph’s brothers: the selling of their brother Jo- seph into slavery. Joseph’s subsequent rebuke, “you meant evil against me,” is meant to suggest that they are utterly responsible for their foul action. Their guilt on the other hand is revealed in this statement by the brothers themselves: “It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for the evil we did to him.” Joseph however reassures them thus: “Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Pollard points out that this is the Judeo-Christian concept of destiny. Destiny is whatever is willed by God. God’s will is creation’s destiny. Or as C.S. Lewis renders it in his Preface to Paradise Lost, “Those who will not be God’s sons become his tools.” In fact, the moral lesson that Pollard wants us to derive from this biblical story is that through fortuitous chances and accidents, working through Joseph’s life-history, God’s providence emerges. The brothers meant evil, the outcome is good. Joseph’s words are instructive here: “Am I in the place of God?” Which is to say, in the light of the happy outcome of the story, Joseph far from seeking revenge can only be grateful for God’s providence at work in human events and turning to good what Man meant for evil.

The Encounter of Joseph with his Brothers

Chance and Providence by William Pollard (1958) From this simple but powerful story we gather that the biblical view of chance and accident is that they are integral part of the fabric of providence which operates in what Martin Buber has described as the world of I-Thou; a world where we find notions such as freedom, grace, destiny, judgment, redemption, repentance, forgiveness. Those notions are alien, even repugnant, to the world of I-it, the rationalistic Cartesian world of observable objects and events with which modern science is mainly concerned. The problem arises when the scientific mind-set attempts to reduce even history to the unfolding of deterministic impersonal laws within nature. This became inevitable once the Cartesian paradigm was in place in the seventeenth century. Within that paradigm nature itself is placed under the firm control of man’s rationality thus ending up with naturalism or economic and social determinism. That, I dare say, is what unfortunately the EU Constitution reflects.

I and Thou by Martin Buber (1923) What these rational historical theories seem to lack is a theme in history. They abysmally fail to suggest to the reader a sense of the grandeur and drama of history; that is to say the vision of history as narrative and drama with a beginning, a middle and an end, open to new choices and directions, with a plot that while remaining hidden hints at a forward movement and a sense of direction. Indeed, the very first line of Genesis intimates to the perceptive reader that this is definitely not a boring story. It is a story worthy of Michelangelo’s brush. God is both author and story teller as John intimates with his “In the beginning was the Word.” The universe is God’s poem. The name that the Judeo-Christian tradition gives to this drama is “Providence.” In as much as this drama remains open-ended, since chance and accident intermingle with the reliable and the predictable, it is different from science. Events and behavior cannot be controlled in history as in a lab- oratory. Oscar Handlin, for example, in his Chance and Destiny: Turning points in American History, draws attention to the fact that crucial military victories have been won or lost due to the sudden arrival of a storm. Something like that happened in the biblical Exodus event. This drama, unlike scientific experiments, is not repeatable except in Man’s imagination. Moreover, contrary to science, the human historical drama rests its confidence on the fact that not the most probable but the most improbable can be counted on happening. One caveat is in order here. A false dichotomy between science and religion has been promoted by some who are religiously inclined. It consists in conceiving of God’s providence in an over-spiritualistic or vitalis- tic mode, as a sort of deus ex machina, an added non-physical force within nature. When science cannot find this force, it proceeds to debunk the whole of man’s religious experience. This estrangement leaves both science and religion the poorer for it. But in reality the deus ex machina is not the biblical notion of providence. While not provable objectively, it is not an irrational, quasi magical extra-terrestrial force within nature. It is merely inaccessible to a detached, uninvolved, strictly objective Cartesian mode of apprehending reality, for it simply does not rest on the same presuppositions underpinning scientific knowledge.

Scientific knowledge is discovered knowledge. The same Greek word for truth (aletheia) means to discover. On the other hand, the providential drama of history is apprehendable by an historical consciousness which to the Jews meant revealed knowledge. This kind of knowledge is accessible only through a relationship, namely that of the covenant with the living God. A covenant is much like a marriage, and in fact the concept of Christian marriage derives from it as Solomon’s Song of Songs or Paul’s metaphor of the Church as Christ’s bride would suggest). The knowledge that a husband and wife have of each other is inaccessible outside the covenant, the commitment if you will, of the marriage bond. A so called “live-in” with no commitment will yield a different, inferior kind of knowledge, that which accrues to a corporation’s contract wherein unmet expectations leave the partners free to abrogate the whole contract. Within the covenant however, the Jews remain eternally the “chosen” people. This living God is like a jealous husband who cares for his creation by acting primarily in human history through the events and situations of his creation. This is an historical experience simply because an historical people, living in an historical place, at an historical juncture in time, entered into a covenant relationship with God. That experience yields real knowledge, albeit different from that obtained through science from observing and studying nature. This paradox of freedom and providence is essential to Vico’s speculation on history and providence as basis of historical consciousness cannot be grasped by the limited route of rational science. By its very nature science can deal only with what is apprehended in an objective mode by an observing, uninvolved subject. Chance has to be eliminated as much as possible to allow for the repetition of controlled experimental conditions. But even here there is a caveat. Modern quantum mechanics has strongly suggested to the modern Cartesian mind-set that perhaps the rationalistic object/subject dichotomy may prove a bit too simplistic for the apprehension of reality. That perhaps contrary to what Einstein presupposed God does indeed play dice with the universe after all, which is to say, there is no iron clad determinism and everything is possible. What we should come away with from those musings on the biblical notion of providence is that the Jews gave us a preliminary revolutionary way of making sense of reality, a myth if you will, whose logos or meaning is this: Reality is historical and is based on the seeming paradox of God’s and Man’s freedom in a complementary relationship. It is only with Vico, however, that this Western historical consciousness becomes fully self-conscious and systematic. Perhaps the reader has now begun to intuit the relevance of Vico’s philosophy for the proper in depth analysis of Western civilization’s current cultural predicament. Chapter 13 Ovi Symposium: “A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

Tirteenth Meeting: 21 November 2013

Table of Content for the 13th Meeting of the Symposium Section 1: “Francesco De Sanctis. Between Romanticism and Positivism.” A Portrait by Ernesto Paolozzi as freely translated from chapter 2 of his 1989 book Vicende dell’Estetica: tra Vecchio e Nuovo Positivis- mo [Events of Aesthetics: between the Old and the New Positivism]. Section 2: “Is Beauty a Classical Concept, and if so, should it be Revived in the 21st Century?” A presentation by way of a challenge to Modern Aesthetics by Emanuel L. Paparella. Section 3: Visual samples of Three Sublime Expressions of Beauty: one Ancient Greek in sculpture (the Venus of Melos), one French Medieval in architecture (the Cathedral of Reims), and one Italian Renais- sance in painting (Botticelli’s Birth of Venus). Introductory Notes by the Symposium Coordinator Beginning with this session of the Ovi Symposium, following the table of contents, the readers will notice a brief introductory note to the various issues tabled and discussed in each by-weekly session. This is to point out to readers the nexus between the various issues of aesthetics presented and thus help them to better orient themselves. The paradigm or the general theme of aesthetics, the context and the framework, as announced at the outset of the symposium, and as displayed regularly on its heading, will however remain constant. By its very nature a symposium is a spontaneous, cordial dialogue carried out around a convivial table of friends and colleagues for the exploration of challenging philosophical ideas. The number of participants and contributions may well vary from meeting to meeting. People come and go at the party as they please. There may not necessarily be the same number of contributions as the numbers of participants, for it is up to each contributor to voluntarily participate in the ongoing dialogue on a regular bi-weekly basis (every two weeks on Thursday and Friday) or less frequently as his time and commitments permit. There may also be an increase in the number of participants in the future. I suppose at any celebration, the more the better. The important thing is that it is a convivial dialogue, an exchange of ideas, and that it remains such. In any case, ours remains a pro bono work offered for the sheer love of the subject, as are indeed those of all other contributions at Ovi. Our avowed purpose is that of sharing our passionate philosophical interests with a wide readership. Within the symposium those interests are mostly concerned with the liberal arts, above and beyond concerns of a strictly political, economic, or scientific nature, as important as those may be. It is worth mentioning here that from the outset philosophy has enjoyed a very hospitable and convivial welcome at Ovi magazine; I’d dare say it has enjoyed pride of place. This is a magazine committed to the ideals of democratic free speech and a deep appreciation of the liberal arts, which in effect renders its cultural identity philosophical to its very core. This is due also to its editor’s love and commitment to the subject. Indeed, the birth of what is best in Western Civilization begins with the birth of philosophy some 25 centuries ago in ancient Greece. If such a civilization, as we know it, is to survive, it has to take care that genuine philosophy, understood even in its etymology as love of wisdom, is not distorted or subsumed to other less noble interests. In section one of this particular session of the Symposium, we are treated to an illuminating contribution by Dr. Paolozzi in the way of an excerpt from his book on aesthetics titled Vicende dell’Estetica (1989). In what constitutes a free translation of chapter two Paolozzi depicts a thoroughly erudite philosophical portrait of the great Neapolitan literary critic Francesco De Sanctis, a veritable genius who like Croce deserves to be better known outside of Italy and even in Italy itself I dare say, where he has at times been vilified and distorted by those who confuse ideology and political partisanship for philosophy. The background of the portrait is Positivism which misguidedly purports to be a philosophy in its own right. Indeed, De Sanctis, who exercised a great influence on Croce, was one of the first Italian critics to correctly identify the toxic flaws of Positivism and not only in Italian culture but the whole of the European ethos To this section we have added various portraits, within the vast pantheon of European literary and philosophical figures mentioned in Paolozzi’s presentation including one of his own master on the philosophy of Croce at the university of Naples: Raffaello Franchini. Paparella follows up on Paolozzi’s concerns in section two with a presentation meant to be a challenge to the modern avant-guard aesthetic sensibility, A unique Crocean idea, previously presented by Paolozzi in his Ovi book, is further explored and discussed; namely this: that all genuine Beauty from Plato’s aesthetics all the way to Kant, is to be conceived as classical, as an expression of sublimity and excellence (what the Greeks called arête). As a conclusion Paparella tables this crucial question: should the classical concept of Beauty, which seems to have been considerably distorted and altered within modernity (especially so by the Dada movement), be resurrected for the sake of more alive and relevant humanistic modes of thought? The question which awaits an answer or a discussion is then followed in the final third section by three illustrations conveying a visual expression of the splendor of Beauty, no doubt familiar to most readers: an ancient Greek one in the form of sculpture, a Medieval French one in the form of architecture, and a Renaissance Italian one in the form of painting. 1 Francesco De Sanctis: Between Romanticism and Positivism A Portrait by Ernesto Paolozzi (as translated from chapter two of his 1989 book Vicende dell’Estetica: tra Vecchio e Nuovo Positivismo)

Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) Francesco De Sanctis is the man who has lived, in the full sense of that word, the contradictions of the ep- ochal intellectual changes that ensue between Romanticism and Positivism. The great literary critic, not only for chronological determining factors (he was born in 1817 and died in 1883), traveled the entire phenomenology of an historical process which goes from the crisis of late Enlight- enment and the academy, through the vaunted Romantic innovation, up to the birth of Positivism, which he lived in a critical and unique way. In fact with De Sanctis, the foundations are laid for a resurgence of an anti-positivistic culture which began at the beginning of the new century. De Sanctis received an education at the Neapolitan school of the purist Marquis Basilio Puoti (1834-1835), to then abandon via a rigorous critique, from both purism and the whole Italian cultural tradition, and not just Italian, which had been in the process of restricting and torturing itself in the search of Renaissance poetics or in the narrow academic 18th century philology or an abstract Enlightenment.

Basilio Puoti (1782-1847) First master of De Sanctis He went through the great cultural political experience of the so called first Neapolitan school (1839-48), the direct participation to the insurrections of 1848 and the dramatic experience of jail for being a liberal oppo- nent of the Borbonic monarchy in Southern Italy which matured into a complex moral intellectual experience when he ended up in exile in Turin and Zurich. He was one of the first Italians to acquire a deep interest in Hegelian philosophy translating its great logic while in jail, finding himself in agreement with its conceptualistic aesthetics. But soon enough his robust critical sense, his capacity to live with great transparency and intelligence the problems of art, as concrete and real problems of real and ideal life, of sentimental and ethical life, led him to the abandonment of Hege- lian aesthetics without however forgetting the great lesson of the German philosopher which had been very influential in rejuvenating Italian culture and the spreading of a higher more profound concept of philosophy. For De Sanctis, cultural commitment always went together with political commitment, not only in the sense of a critique and commentary on political life (an attitude this that in so many intellectuals of any time at times assumes the characteristics of a pharisaic and abstract sort of ethics). He committed himself as an individual at various levels. He assumed the duties of Minister of Public Culture convened by Cavour in the very first government of a united Italy and then in subsequent years after the fall of the historic right (1876). He also assumed the duties of Advisor to Naples’s municipality and the province of Avellino. Just to remember a few events, he fought for the introduction of physical education in Italian schools. For him this issue went beyond a technical expedient or a hygienic exigency, but also a political and moral turn around in the effort of rejuvenating the old academic rhetoric which permeated the public educational curriculum. His progressivist mentality (he was a man of the year 48 on the center left, as he himself said, that is to say a moderate even if under the strong progressive impulse) together with his innate sense of the practical, led him to assume an attitude that was in favor of the pedagogic, in the best most pure sense of that word. Here one senses the influence of Vincenzo Cuoco, of the Italian Risorgimento and even Ro- manticism. In some aspects one can say that De Sanctis work in Italy resembles that of John Dewey in the United States (allowing for the great diversity of contents), who together with an effort of philosophical dissemination, influenced American culture, and not only American culture, toward political action (a sort of pragmatic liberalism) and an educational reform, as controversial as it may be. In any case there is no doubt that the great De Sanctis greatly influenced the political and educational commitments of the same Croce, who also assumed public political positions.

Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823) Historian of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799

John Dewey (1859-1930) Therefore, political passion, was a constant in his life. In 1867 he wrote to a friend: “My life has to pages. One is literary, the other is political, and I do not intend to tear neither of the two: they are like two duties of my personal history which will last till the end.” His masterpiece The History of Italian Literature which he wrote between 1870 and 1871, and remains a fundamental document of Italian and European historiography of the 19th century, is under many aspects a living synthesis of both the personality and the thought of Francesco De Sanctis. It portrays literature understood as a civil expression of the history of a nation, which may in some way announce certain forms of Marxist historiography (at least the most dignified) but it is quite different from this in the sense that its theory has nothing of the mechanical and the abstract; in it there is no theorizing of false concepts such as that of class warfare or social structures and over-structures. If anything it presents us with an ideal that is Enlightened and Romantic, made modern by the live force of inspiration and the style which remains simple and genuine. In fact, the personality of De Sanctis imposes itself beyond paradigms and ideologies. Every critical judgment, even the most controversial, remains original and astonishing. The reader detects in every page of the book the political and ethical commitment of the author without diminishing the clarity of the interpretations. De Sanctis, even if he was not a systematic professional philosopher, was evaluated by Croce and by his school as the greatest Italian philosopher of art that the 19th century possessed, one of the greatest in fact of the whole of Europe. Even if Croce’s assessment can be moderated and amplified in different directions, it remains substantially, after one examines the texts, a true one. Who continues to read nowadays the aesthetic reflections of Gioberti or Rosmini or the colleague and antagonist of De Sanctis during his stay in Zurich, Teodoro Vischer? Who continues to value the important interpretations of Mazzini and the various Italian patriots? De Sanctis’ Horizon is much wider: the ideals of his work live in him together with his particular sensibility vis a vis the world of art, which goes well beyond a mere historical moment.

Blessed Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855) An Italian Catholic priest and philosopher of the 19th century

Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1862) Italian Philosopher of the 19th century

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) Architect of Italian Unification He defined the modern European movement for popular democracy in a republican state

Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861) The First Prime Minister of Italy So De Sanctis is the aesthetician of the form in the modern sense of that concept. In his famous essay on Francesco Petrarca, which he had already outlines when he was in Zurich and then published in 1869, one can already clearly identify his critical position. It is antagonistic with Hegelian intellectualism, the empty Romantic sentimentality and the pedantry of a certain French criticism. He writes that “The great artist is the man who can win and tame and kill within himself the ideal, that is to say, he realizes it, producing a form within which one everything is satisfied and forgotten, so that when others ask him how it feels down there he will answer: --A certain idea, some thing, I don’t exactly know what, which is to say nothing: the form is there and the form is everything. The form is like the baby of our brain, and the problem of art is to know if that brain has a productive force, and if that baby is a living creature born alive. One can argue on the quality of the form, whether it is subtle or corpulent, beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral, on its concept and what there is which is real and what is ideal; the essential thing is that it be a form. That within art one cannot admit mediocrity is a profound concept, given that there is no such thing as the more or the less live, there is only the live and the dead; there is the poet and the non-poet, the impotent brain.” (From Saggi e scritti, vol. v, p. 36) So we see emerging with strength and freshness a new conception of aesthetics, in which De Sanctis finds more of Kant than of Hegel (the Hegel of course of the sensible apparition of the concept, not the whole Hegel), he finds Vico, but above all he finds a holistic vision which locates art among autonomous forms of experience, such as creativity so to speak, a concrete creativity not romantic ineffable. De Sanctis writes in a well known passage, which partially quotes Croce, that “If in the antechamber of art you wish to locate a statue, put there the form and in that contemplate and study, let the origins begin there. Before form one finds what was there before the creation: chaos. Undoubtedly chaos is a respectable thing, and its story is very interesting: science has not said the last word on this world which precedes the elements in ferment. Art too has its prior world, its own geology, born only yesterday and barely outlined, a science sui generis, which is neither criticism nor aesthetics. Aesthetics appears when the form appears within which that kind of world is immersed, fused, forgotten and lost. Form is nothing but itself, like the individual is himself; there is no theory which is so destructive of art as that continual filling of our ears with the beautiful as manifestation, dress, light, veil of the true or of the idea. The aesthetic world is not appearance but substance, it is itself the substance, what is alive; its criteria and its raison d’etre can be found only in this motto: --I am alive--, our senses allow us to identify what is alive and what is dead in nature. In the realm of art the sense of what is alive, real is not well developed, and it often happens that critics debate for a long time on a work of art as if it were alive when in reality it was born dead, and they call it beautiful, and find the ideal in raise it to the level of model! Let’s not argue about those who today are considered poets; but how much time has been wasted commenting on Vincenzo Monti’s Basvilliana? Could we not affirm that a truly artistic people are those who can measure the infinite distance between ingenuity and talent, creation form aggregation, and understands why the likes of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Ariosto are placed on such a high pedestal.” (Saggi e scritti, vol. V, p. 37) If this is De Sanctis’ vision, in what sense can we say that it represents the thinker that more than any other expresses, and in some way overcomes the obvious contradictions of Positivism? The last De Sanctis discovered realism and verismo and via its dissemination by Zola opened the doors of Italian culture to such a literary phenomenon and credo. But, has Raffaello Franchini has clearly demonstrated, what De Sanctis underwent was not a conversion ma a proof of his coherence, since he wished to confirm his own conception of the world through the experimenting with new ways. His intention is quite clear and unmistakable, given that in the same essay on Zola, De Sanctis attempts to return to an ancient and vast tradition, to the psychological and historical novel, to Manzoni and Flaubert, the opus of the French novelist. Verismo and Naturalism is the new school which reaffirms once again the genuine and enduring art, true art. As De Sanctis himself puts it: “The artist of this school is Zola. Although he opposed conventional tendencies and considering himself an innovator in art he nevertheless picks up the traditional ways and not only does not destroy but rather fulfills the psychological-historical novel, even more evident in his physiological novel. That pretended verismo was a degradation as all reactions are. Zola’s realism is a con- tinuation, a further development of the past, and therefore a past that is in the future, a progress. He filled a gap in the critical study of man adding to psychological and historical elements natural factors, an initial life from which derive the psychic factors whose collective action creates the historical milieu. As it happens to all innovators, he makes of this incipient life the basis and the environment of his whole universe and accustoms himself to observe everything with the eyes of a doctor. Hence the moderate exaggeration and a certain artificiality.” He continues: “There is no contrast between the real and the ideal, as the vast majority of the new thinkers of the second Positivistic school would like to believe. Many debate on the real and the ideal without arriving at any conclusion because they lack the correct concept of such terms. They think that realism is the opposite of idealism, and that the ideal is a mere play of the imagination, a superimposition on reality. Beginning with those false assumptions, the arguments will not arrive at any reasonable conclusion. That within man there are obvious signs of animal nature, nobody has ever doubted. To me it appears as big waste of energy on the part of Darwin the attempt to demonstrate to me the animal nature of the human organism. Such animal nature appears more clearly in the origins of people and in the first years of each individual. The human element which distinguished man appears later when appetites and desires are purified and becomes emotions and sentiments, perceptions and sensations are transformed into images, the instincts are elevated to the level of ideas.” (From Studio sopra Emilio Zola, p. 409, 411). Raffaello Franchini (1920-1990) A leading Croce follower who as professor of Philosophy at the University of Naples trained a whole generation of Croce scholars among whom Ernesto Paolozzi With his great ability to grasp the very essence of an era with the typical dignity of those who feel morally offended for having been confused with the vulgarity that what is fashionable imposes, De Sanctis authors two essays which can be considered a sort of testament on the issues of the critique of Hegelian idealism, the Romantic exaggerations, the emptiness of academic rhetoric, and clearly defines his position vis a vis realism. In the note which he added to the second edition of the critical essay on Petrarca (1883) we read this: “I think that the most fanatical opposition to the ideal do not have a clear idea of such a concept and thus end up cursing what they know not. They believe that the ideal is the contrary of the real, and that one excludes the other and that the life of one implies the death of the other. It is best that we understand each other at the outset, given that often enough the most distorted judgments are born from definitions which are not precise. The ideal is above all a multiplicity of ideas and principles which mankind has conquered in its long history, such as beauty, justice, truth, the family, the country, glory, heroism, virtue are constant objects of admiration and aspiration. These ideas represent the ongoing differentiation of man from the beast, and as we say today, the glorious evolution of man in the middle of what is alive. We call these ideas the ideals of mankind; they are like the light of a lighthouse which man keeps in sight as he represents, speculates, operates. Only those who identify with the beasts can laugh at those ideals, of ignore them, or even oppose them. This ideal is substantial. But there is also the ideal expression which is that representation of things according to their repercussion in the mind and with them the impressions and the sentiments which reside there. Undoubtedly the great artist forgets his ego in the apprehension of things, and the more he forgets the more those emerge alive and true as from a light which is one’s own light and yet it comes from the mind. When those representations are clear and robust they give witness to the powerful impressions they have produced, and the highest ideality of expression is achieved via this agreement between things and the artist. Those who for fear of offending reality give us things that are naked and raw are rendering things as they appear to an idiot devoid of the sentiment and the intelligence of nature. It is obvious that the ideal, in its substance as well as in its expression, is so much part of human nature, that to deny one to deny the other. This is fashionable nowadays. Today, in our search for the beast in man, we at times forget man.” (in Saggi Critici, vol. I, p. 40) In conclusion, there is no doubt that De Sanctis is the reference point for those who wish to understand the sense of an era, or of the Positivism at the end of the 19th century. De Sanctis, without having recourse to theoretical schemes, or to historical speculations within a vast horizon, via the example of his own activity, within the concrete moral political and cultural experience, shows us what is alive and what is dead within a great and confusing epoch of our history.

Homer (c 850 BC-c 701 BC) The first of the Great Western Poets

De Sanctis’ Storia della Letteratura Italiana (1871)

Francesco Petrarca: Father of European Humanism (1304-1374)

The poet Dante (1265-1321) Author of The Divine Comedy from a mural by Andrea del Castagno in the Uffizi Galleria

The Triumph of Death, or The Three Fates. Flemish Tapestry (ca. 1510–1520)

The three Fates: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who spin, draw out and cut the thread of life, represent Death in this tapestry, as they triumph over the fallen body of Chastity. This is the third subject in Petrarch’s poem “The Great Triumphs”. First, Love triumphs; then Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time and Time by Eternity.

The Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) Author of Orlando Furioso (1516)

The Italian Poet Vincenzo Monti (1754-1826)

Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) Author of the first historical novel I Promessi Sposi (1827)

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Author of Madame Bovary (1857)

Emile Zola (1840-1902), father of Naturalism in Literature

The Philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) who considered De Sanctis his greatest literary master 2 Is Beauty a Classical Concept and if so, should it be Revived in the 21st Century? A Presentation by way of a Challenge to Modern Aesthetics by Emanuel L. Paparella In previous sessions of the Ovi symposium Ernesto Paolozzi has tabled the idea that Croce considered all art classical and conceived of no duality between classicism and Romanticsim, that is to say, he thought of beauty as a classical concept, no matter the historical juncture. The same charge of proto-romanticism has been often leveled at Vico who, if anything, is the culmination of Italian Humanism, not a proto-Romantic. Like the ancient Greeks both Croce and Vico saw a distinction between ethics and aesthetics but not a dichotomy. For them the Good, the Beautiful and the True are ultimately harmoniously interconnected to each other. I’d like to follow-up with some brief but cogent reflections on the modern concept of beauty or the modern and post-modern aesthetic sensibility in the light of a prevalent nihilism. The question I’d like to explore is this: has beauty become a passé concept to be dispensed with within modern art? It is undeniable that the bizarre marriage of marvels and horrors that began in the 20th century and continues in the 21st , coupled with the fast development of science and art has had as its most apparent result the deemphasizing, if not exactly the obliteration, of the concept of Beauty. The shocking seems at times to replace the beautiful in our museums. And indeed the more one rummages through the legacy of modern art the more the horrors multiply and the more the concept of Beauty seems to fade away. Ironically this assertion may itself sound shocking to some readers, but if truth be told the final jury is still out on modern art, despite some of its widely acknowledged merits. A possible solution may be to consult the philosophers beginning with Plato, who introduces and analyzes the concept of Beauty and attempts to define art, all the way to Kant and Croce who popularize the very word “aesthetics” in philosophical speculation. Two such modern text, to be recommended to all students of art and aesthetics, is David Ross’s Art and its Significance (1984) and Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns’ Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (2009). Art and its Significance: an Anthology of Aesthetic Theory edited by David Ross (1984)

Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (2009) Edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns What I am suggesting is simply this: if we wish to at least clarify the issue, even without resolving it once and for all, we need to look back to the future. Looking forward, I am afraid, will only lead to more chambers of horrors and the attendant smell of perfumed garbage. Undoubtedly the 20th century has given us a cascade of innovations and technological gadgets in science and sociology, medicine and politics. We have gone from the horse drawn carriage to space travel and nuclear fusion in barely sixty years. The arts have kept pace, going from realism to impressionism, to dada and minimalism to post-modernism, just to mention a few trends. But can that be called genuine progress in art? What all these trends seem to have in common as an assumed philosophical infrastructure of sort, is a cynical all pervading relativism which has its origins in nihilism. In science we have physicists who believe that progress is deterministic and inevitable, therefore we ought to try everything that we are able to do and do so indiscriminately with little if any regard to ethics: if we can create atomic bombs that kill millions of civilians in a few seconds, we should go ahead and create them and then perhaps rationalize the enterprise as needed for the deterrence of enemies. In art, we have artists, so called, who think that just because they can, they should display a urinal in a gallery or paste feces on a canvas, often their own, and simply declare it art; or perhaps present us with an empty canvas to contemplate, a symbol of nihilism if there ever was one. One can of course retort that art does nothing more than reflect the times in which it lives, or perhaps announce the future. Indeed, our culture invariably reflects our values. Action defines history and history determines the present. As Vico has well taught us man is his own history, whether he realizes it or not. Those values born in the 20th century follow us now in the 21st century and we find ourselves deprived of the very concept of Beauty, a concept about which philosophers of all persuasions and schools have argued and debated for some two thousand plus years. Not only has nihilism been embraced in philosophy but the sar- donic relativism of the dada school has by now been fully embraced by collectors, museums, publications on art. The impact of nihilism and dada on Western civilization is undoubtedly pervasive, albeit corrosive. Another common feature of all those trends is that Beauty has no place in art, that art has no use and purpose. Indeed the very word “art” has been rendered meaningless; anything and any action and event can be branded and sold as art. I can jump in the fountain of Trevi, or place myself naked on one of the tombs in the Roman Pantheon (as was indeed done a few summers ago in Rome’s Pantheon) and declare those actions artistic events, one can even declare one’s own very self an artistic event a la Nero: I do what my instincts urge me to do and then declare those actions art, free from any punishment and reprisal; in fact, I declare those actions part of my identity: I am art therefore “I am,” to paraphrase Descartes’ famous statement on thinking and being. But the question arises: if anything is art, is anything art? As mentioned, the source of this cynical trend can be traced back to nihilism as expressed in Dada avant-garde conceptual art, so called. That’s where we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century. We continue with the empty intellectualism of the 20th century and its desperate need to shock and assault the sacred. But once the shocking becomes normal one needs a progressively higher dose of it to get the same or even diminishing results. It is indeed a vicious circle redolent of drug addiction. The consequences may vary, but the atmosphere around any addiction, however, remains one of decay and sadness devoid of freedom, quite normal, I suppose, within nihilism. We have seen symphonies with no music, just silence; we have seen empty rooms declared works of art as an ideal form of purity. We have seen sheets of the artist’s used toilet paper hanging from a wall, as a sort of purported testament to being alive, a signature or a sign of existence and being, not metaphors, not allegories, not images that can be recalled, explained or expressed, but simply being there. It has echoes of Heidegger’s philosophy, but is it really? We have seen Piero Manzoni presenting hard boiled eggs as a work of art which are then promptly swallowed within 70 minutes. And then there is the same Artist’s Shit as shown below displayed in a museum as a distinct work of art. Art digested and recycled? Ironically Piero Manzoni died at the age of 30 (1933-1963) due to a rupture of the liver from excessive consumption of rich food and drink. Poetic irony? A work of art in itself? One cannot but wonder. A Urinal in a San Francisco Museum Paradoxically, the customary defense for this travesty of art is that it is free, that it frees us from the constraints and hypocrisies of our societies. Often Croce or Romanticism is paraded in defense of such a position, but Professor Paolozzi has shown us that this is a veritable canard. I for one, and I think both Croce and Paolozzi would concur on this, would submit that the values we derive from a pernicious anti-art nihilistic ontology do not ultimately free us; on the contrary, they enslave and doom us. After Nietzsche’s madman has shouted “God is dead” the search for meaning and the sacred goes on even more desperately than ever as Emmanuel Levinas has persuasively argued. Similarly, after dada raped art, the search for Beauty goes on desperately simply because ugliness remains unacceptable and unappealing to the vast majority of viewers, and our museums of modern art are a witness to that; they remain mostly empty. That search, as Tolstoy also intimated, is integral part of human nature and remains a last ray of hope for mankind, especially in a dark despairing period of human history such as ours, the era of totalitarianism and political tyranny which in the 20th century has begotten two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulags and countless other political horrors. As one surveys Ross’s book on the significance of Art, one invariably comes to the conclusion that indeed it is easier to desecrate something of Beauty and produce mediocre works, literally “the shit of the artist,” than to create something of Beauty. To the contrary, Michelangelo laboriously sculpting his fifth Pietà a few days before his death and exclaiming “ancora imparo” [I’m still learning], may be the genuine path of art. The deranged man breaking it up with a hammer as a sign of avant-garde anti-art is at best a sort of lazy intellectualism signifying nothing, in reality a mere act of desecration and vandalism, an ignoble devaluation of Beauty misguidedly parading as art. True art does not tolerate mediocrity and all the power and influence in the world will not an artist make. One is here brought back to Nero, that deranged Roman emperor with insane views on art and what it means to be an artist. A psychopath or a narcissist an artist does not make; the clue is the atmosphere of death and despair that surrounds those types of humans. Their artistic production is redolent of what is dead rather than what is alive. At this point of our critique, the question arises: are those “artists” who display urinals and feces on canvas and used toiled paper in our museums and desecrate sacred symbols such as crucifixes, simply attempting to shock, or perhaps unmask people’s purported moral hypocrisy as it is claimed, or are they rather sub-consciously attempting to compensate for their temporary or permanent inability to create authentic Beauty? They say they are free and can deal with any phenomenon and that anything can become art, but are they aware that in as much as they have made their nihilistic trends an ideology in its own right, and a fetish of sort, paradoxically they have become slaves to such an ideology? Are they aware that such a trend may be the politically correct position now, but in as much as it is the popular trend it is also the status quo which will not last forever? How does this position of theirs engender freedom? One is perplexed by it all and one wonders.

“Immersion Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano (1987) Form separate from content? Blasphemy and desecration a la De Sade, or “what we think of Christ in modern times”?

Artist’s Shit (Merda d’artista) of Piero Manzoni (1961) This “work of art” displayed in museums consists of 90 tin cans filled with the artist’s feces, each 30 grams produced and tinned in May 1961 and measuring 4.8 x 6.5 cm. purporting to explore the relationship between art production and human production Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Breath (1969) Those sundry personal reflections on the meaning of art which indeed begin with Plato and continue with Kant and Croce, urging that before we throw the baby out with the dirty bath water we ought to know what the philosophers have speculated on the concept of Beauty throughout history, have been contested and will continue to be contested and even ridiculed by various brands of nihilists and positivists as superficial, simplistic, politically incorrect, naïve, romantic, idealistic, neo-classicist, conservative, mediocre, medieval, anti-modern, and so on. After all, we live in cynical realistic Machiavellian post-modern times, so the argument goes, and one has to get on with it or be left behind in the dustbin of history. How is one to respond if at all? Are we to consider the phenomenon of the destruction of Beauty parading as Art a mere irreverent provocation, which may all along be the subconscious motive of the artist? Should one pretend to be shocked? dismayed? outraged at this deliberate debunking of the very concept of Beauty within modern aesthetics? Without getting into the thorny issue of the judgment of the aesthetic value of the whole of modern art, an exploration which would take us too far afield and may require another voluminous tome a la Critique of Judgment, I have a more modest suggestion and it is this: for those who are truly seeking Beauty, classifications such as the above become quite meaningless. Those who have looked back to the future and have surveyed carefully the millenarian history of art know that just as there were mediocre works lacking Beauty before Dada, there have been excellent works of Beauty despite Dada. They know with Kant (See his Critique of Judgment) and Raphael and Michelangelo that the criteria for judging art are universal, not relativistic, that Beauty is the purpose of art, just as a building is the purpose of architecture; that Beauty can bridge the frightening cultural chasms of modern societies and ought in fact be treasured by every culture; that just as philosophy and science are useful to inform us about Truth, art is useful to inform us about Beauty and as such it will survive the cynicism and nihilism of our times at the risk of placing the future of our civilization in jeopardy. Those seekers also know with Plato and Aristotle that Beauty, Truth and Goodness are fundamental needs of a healthy human condition and culture, the very oxygen needed for its existence and survival, and that Beauty and ugliness may be complementary to each other, in the sense that one cannot be conceived without the other, but they will never be the same. Vulgarity and venality remain such, just as garbage remains such even when juxtaposed to perfume. The seekers of Beauty know that an empty relativism naively declaring that “it is all in the eyes of the beholder” will not lead to anything truly new and meaningful. The Greeks had already intuited some two thousand years ago that Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, were concepts harmoniously related to each other, universal and transcendent of particular societies, even Greek society; that they were and remain the sine qua non of any genuine civilization. That just as ethical actions need to be conceived as a duty and for their own sake, works of art must also be loved for their own sake and not for utilitarian purposes; for to treat art as a mere commodity to be manipulated by the vulgar entrepreneurs of this world out for profits, for whom everything is a commodity and even art has a price, is to ultimately trivialize and corrupt the very concept of Beauty. In conclusion the question naturally arises: Is it not high time to go back to the future and resurrect the concept of Beauty? As the great novelist Manzoni put it: “ai posteri l’ardua sentenza” [to posterity belongs the hard answer”]. 3 A Visual Sample of Three Sublime Classical Expressions of Beauty: one Ancient Greek in Sculpture, one French Medieval in Architecture, and one Italian Renaissance in Painting

The Venus of Melos at the Louvre Museum (100 B.C.)

Rose Window of Reim’s Cathedral (13 century A.D.)

West End of the Cathedral with Rose Window

Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1488) in Florence’s Uffizi Museum

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book. Ovi Symposium On the Nature of Art within Modernity & the Envisioning of a New Humanism Part I: 6 June - 21 November 2013

July 2015 Ovi magazine

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

Design: Thanos Kalamidas Also in the Ovi magazine book shelves

Benedetto Aesthetic Croce: Theories of The Philosophy Great Western of History and Philosophers the Duty of by Dr. Freedom Emanuel by Prof. Paparella Ernesto Paolozzi

Europe Life In beyond The Age Of the Euro Extinctions by Dr. by Emanuel David Paparella Sparenberg

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