From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800-1950

870 Pages·2012·8.908 MB·English

by  Brian Copenhaver, Rebecca Copenhaver (editors, translators)

FROM KANT TO CROCE
MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN ITALY, 1800−1950
THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY
General Editors
Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,
University of California at Los Angeles
Honorary Chairs
Honorable Dino De Poli
Mr Joseph Del Raso Esq.
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica
Advisory Board
Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa
Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago
FROM KANT TO CROCE
Modern Philosophy in Italy
1800–1950
Edited and translated with an introduction by
Brian Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2012
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9
Printed on acid-free paper
The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Copenhaver, Brian P.
From Kant to Croce : modern philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950 /
Brian P. Copenhaver, Rebecca Copenhaver.
(Lorenzo da Ponte Italian library series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9
1. Philosophy Italian – 19th century. 2. Philosophy, Italian – 20th century.
3. Philosophers – Italy – Biography. I. Copenhaver, Rebecca, 1971–
II. Title. III. Series: Lorenzo da Ponte Itallian library series
b3601.c66 2011 195 c2011-904229-0
This book is published under the aegis and with financial assistance of:
Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; the National Italian American Founda-
tion; Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale per la Promozione
e la Cooperazione Culturale; Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali,
Direzione Generale per i Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per
la promozione del libro e della lettura.
The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial
assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the
Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Part I: Introduction 1
1 A Strange History (Bobbio I) 3
2 Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I) 7
3 Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I) 11
4 Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II) 14
5 Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II) 24
6 The Mother Idea (Rosmini III) 27
7 Primacy (Gioberti I) 36
8 The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II) 40
9 A Natural Method (Mamiani) 45
10 Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa) 48
11 Facts and Laws (Villari) 53
12 Real and Ideal (De Sanctis) 60
13 Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington) 66
14 Matter and Idea (Labriola) 77
15 No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti) 86
16 A Revelation (Croce I) 90
17 History Under Art (Croce II) 92
18 What Is Distinct? (Croce III) 99
19 What Is Living? (Croce IV) 106
20 What Is Dead? (Croce V) 112
21 Materialism (Gentile I) 118
22 Idealism (Gentile II) 126
23 Actualism (Gentile III) 131
vi Contents
24 Manifestos (Croce and Gentile) 142
25 Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I) 147
26 The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI) 153
27 Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II) 159
28 Still a Strange History (Bobbio II) 163
Notes to Part I 173
Part II: Translations 191
1 Galluppi, Elements 193
2 Rosmini, A Sketch 245
3 Gioberti, Primacy 264
4 Gioberti, The Ideal Formula 278
5 Mamiani, Renewal 312
6 Spaventa, Italian Philosophy 343
7 Villari, Positive Philosophy 371
8 De Sanctis, Realism 401
9 De Sanctis, The Ideal 413
10 Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism I 418
11 Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism II 422
12 Fiorentino, Vico and Kant 429
13 Fiorentino, Positivism 447
14 Labriola, Materialism 463
15 Croce, The Concept of Art 484
16 Croce, Logic 515
17 Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel 533
18 Gentile, Praxis 642
19 Gentile, Idealism 665
20 Gentile, The Act of Thinking 683
21 Gentile, Actual Idealism 695
22 Manifesto I 706
23 Manifesto II 713
24 Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy 717
25 Croce, Liberty 753
26 Gramsci, Letters 762
References 779
Name Index 805
General Index 825
Preface and Acknowledgments
Because of what it is – the history of a modern nation’s philosophy for
more than a century – the story told in this book is important, and we
hope to have told it in an illuminating way, by providing two things: a
collection of (mostly) short pieces by leading philosophers of the period;
and an introduction to those texts that is also an episodic history of the
philosophy of the period. By limiting ourselves to a dozen or so figures of
the first magnitude, we have omitted others of like interest. A different
story and a richer one would include Acri, Berti, Cantu, De Meis … and
whole alphabets of voices that will be mainly silent here.
Other stories can be told about Italian philosophy in other periods. In
fact, some are already familiar to anglophone readers because many phi-
losophers who worked in Italy in ancient, medieval, and early modern
times – from Pythagoras to Vico – are prominent in the Anglo-American
canon of Western philosophy. But no such prominence or familiarity
attaches to most of the thinkers studied here, at least from an anglo-
phone perspective. Benedetto Croce, of course, is the great exception:
the end of his long life and career in 1952 marks one terminus of our
story. The other terminus is the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804, near
the start of the nineteenth century. The story then moves from Germany,
and the competing idealisms invented there by Kant and Hegel, to Italy,
where Croce and Giovanni Gentile responded decades later with new
kinds of idealism. Gentile was assassinated before the Second World War
ended, Croce died a few years after the war, and with them ended the era
of Italian philosophy that is our topic.
We have chosen pieces from many genres: textbooks, technical treatis-
es, learned essays, chapters from monographs, political manifestos, talks
to learned societies, notes for university lectures, academic inaugural
viii Preface and Ackowledgments
addresses, philosophical letters, personal letters, unpublished medita-
tions, and unpublished drafts of philosophical studies. Except for one
– Croce’s post-mortem on part of Hegel’s philosophy – they are relatively
short, and when we could, we have kept them intact, without omitting
parts of them.
Again, when it was feasible, we have used first editions or other early
versions of works that sometimes had long afterlives – the point being
to tell the story as it happened at some particular moment. Croce and
Gentile, for example, because they attained eminence and kept it for
decades in highly charged political circumstances, often republished
and revised their early writings in situations that invited changes of word-
ing or content. In such cases, although the excellent new national edi-
tions usually (and correctly) reflect the latest state of the text during the
author’s lifetime, we have tried to look at the issues through evidence
less carefully sorted by the authors, hoping that it might be more faithful
to an original moment.
The originals of texts not yet available in critical editions are some-
times erratic in orthography, punctuation, typography, and other details,
and in translating them we have aimed for consistency rather than mir-
roring the state of any text exactly. In the same spirit, bibliographical
form has been lightly regularized in some notes composed by the origi-
nal authors. In most cases, however, notes to the translations are by the
editors. When this is not so – when notes or parts of notes are by the
authors – those parts will be identified by the symbol [a], whereas the
symbol [e] will identify parts of notes added by the editors. Where nei-
ther [a] nor [e] occurs in a note, the editors have written it. Where the
symbol [a] occurs, cross-references will refer to page numbers in the
original Italian text and may not correspond to the English translation.
Because our Introduction is substantial, we have tried to minimize edi-
torial notes; nonetheless, these vary in scope and purpose. In Galluppi’s
account of Kant, for example, which was formative not just for the direc-
tion of later Italian philosophy but also for its terminology, references
to Kant’s German are meant to illuminate Galluppi’s Italian (and hence
our translation), not to identify Galluppi’s source by chapter and verse.
On the other hand, although Croce does not usually bother with cita-
tions in his attack on Hegel, it is sometimes possible to locate the state-
ment by Hegel that Croce has in his sights, and doing so is often crucial
to understanding him – Croce, that is. We cite the same references in
the notes to the Introduction and in the notes to our translations. For
some works the references list multiple editions because more recent
Preface and Ackowledgments ix
authors, like Croce and Gentile, used versions of texts unknown to ear-
lier authors, like Gioberti and Rosmini. Even for the same author, styles
and motives of citation vary widely in the texts translated here, in part
because they differ so much in genre and format.
When we started this project about six years ago, one of us was working
on Thomas Reid, the other on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Because
Eugenio Garin’s classical study of Pico had been published in 1937,
and because Pico and Garin were both Italian philosophers, questions
emerged about the philosophical background in Italy for Garin’s early
views on Pico. And since Garin had formed his views during the venten-
nio, questions followed about the Fascists, Fascist culture, Gentile and so
on, and these led to more questions about earlier Italian philosophers –
Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa, and others – of whom Gentile was an acute
reader and about whom he wrote abundantly. Then it became clear that
in these earlier chapters of Italian philosophy Thomas Reid was remark-
ably influential. We studied Reid’s Italian influence in Copenhaver and
Copenhaver (2006), and in Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008) we
moved on to Croce. We have used both articles for our Introduction.
We thank Remo Bodei, Alexander Broadie, Antonio Capuano, Mas-
simo Ciavolella, Michele Ciliberto, Roberto Esposito, David Glidden,
Harvey Goldman, Emanuele Levi Mortera, Hans Lottenbach, Rosella
Pescatori, and Donald Verene, for their criticism and advice. And for the
inextinguishable fire of inspiration we thank Benedetto Croce, that great
ironist, who, in making the case that history must be brought under the
general concept of art, asked this question: ‘Truly, what psychological
novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy?’
Finally, we have dedicated this book to one mother, one wife, and the
same extraordinary person – Kathleen Copenhaver – who might not
answer Croce’s question as we might like it to be answered.
Brian Copenhaver
Rebecca Copenhaver