THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN ITALY
It is not surprising that German philosophy found an adoptive country
in Italy. Most of the speculative notions of Kant were formulated
fourteen years before Kant was born in Vico’s _De Antiquissima Italorum
Sapientia_, and Hegel’s most original conception, forty-five years
before Stuttgart had the honour of producing him, was acted upon in the
_Scienza Nova_. Even if Vico had never been realised in his totality,
people in Italy knew more or less that such ideas as those of the
German philosophers were in the air and found them easier in Kant than
in Vico since the former had brought them to systematic cogency. Vico,
independent of any knowledge of Leibniz’s theories, had come to share
several of his ideas merely because they faced the same problems and
both had practical and synthetic speculative minds. Also Vico with
his hostility for rationalism, his sympathy for empiricism and his
criticism of both found himself very nearly in what was to be Kant’s
position. His preparation, which was more legal and historical and
archæological than Kant’s, closed the way to a clear and precise view;
but it was superior in one sense inasmuch as that preparation provided
him with a richer, a fuller view of reality, thus allowing him to
foreshadow Hegel as well as Kant.
The greatest man who reacted against Rationalism and Empiricism in
politics as factors of a sterilising Utilitarianism, reducing man to
the most abject egoism, Mazzini, is an intuitive genius like Rousseau
and like him a son of the eighteenth century, rising above his
generation. But whilst the one showed little or no sense of history the
other saw it as it really is, animated by ideas and created by the will
of men. One writer had had a very great influence on the great Genoese,
who never knew even as much as his name, Vincenzo Cuoco. He was what
might be called a writer of political pedagogy, as the problems he
faced are always practical and usually political. The education
of which he was an ardent apostle was the civic education of the
inhabitants of Italy; and like all men whose aim is practical he sets
his ideal in life and not in science. He is the pedagogue of the first
dawn of Italy’s national consciousness at the time of Napoleon. Born
in 1770 in the Molise he died in Naples in 1823. Among the Neapolitan
Jacobins he stood as an exception in the lack of enthusiasm with which
he viewed the French Revolution. He had assimilated all the ideas of
the French writers, but he was a student of all social, political and
economical problems; so that it is no wonder that he should have come,
through the influence of F. M. Pagano, to respect Vico and look askance
at the new systems. His fundamental principle was that human reality is
historical reality, that is to say the reality which is not, but for
ever becomes, and goes on becoming and developing not through extrinsic
causes, but through its own activity, intrinsic and autonomous; that
such activity transcends the single activities and their historical
determination; its source is identified by him as Divine Providence.
Such was the principle from which moved all Vico’s philosophy, and
though Cuoco could not even suspect the speculative value of it, he
realised it practically, and it was to him a luminous beacon, more than
sufficient to enable him to take his bearings in the political world
and make out the right way to rid Italy of her troubles.
Thus he could not be satisfied with a French Constitution because Vico
had taught that “governments must be drawn in conformity with the
nature of the men who are to be governed....” The French Revolution
seemed to him drawn for ideal men who did not exist. According to
him a constitution must conform to the nature of the people and be
produced by the people, through the few men who are fit to interpret
its historical will and realise its particular requirements. Although
Mussolini may not have read Cuoco’s articles it is greatly to his
praise that he should so perfectly conform to the ideas of this
first follower of Vico. Not that this fact is considered here as a
coincidence—if Mussolini is the genius of Italy which he is hailed
to be, it is but natural that he should realise in its practical
application a theory which is so perfectly Italian. A constitution
cannot be “good for every nation.” If it is supposed to be, it means
it is good for nobody. Besides it must not be drawn like an abstract
theory established once for all according to a philosophical notion of
what is supposed to be the nature of man, and as such eternal; it is
bound to be always temporary and historically determined, according to
the vices and qualities, according to the ways and the history of the
people.
In this brief exposition of what were Vincenzo Cuoco’s most important
ideas on politics, we meet constantly with sentences that might be met
from the pen or on the lips of Mussolini. Censure can do little to
reform the moral and political life of man. Feasts and premiums are
better means; and it is more likely that governments will improve the
country by pulling the people to the good rather than by pushing them
away from the bad. This is pure Fascism. The government must not act
as a brake, but rather as a propeller or a helm. Public virtue must be
nursed, not by diminishing the avidity of the lower classes, but by
showing them the way to satisfy it. _The love of work_ is the one means
of regenerating the lower classes. A good government must, therefore,
destroy the callings that are unproductive; and to accomplish this
the best way is to make it impossible for people to get as much money
out of them as out of the productive callings. “Work,” writes Cuoco,
just as a Fascist minister might, “will make us independent of the
nations upon which we depend.” The Love of Man for his country must
spring from self respect; and this, indeed, is as far as one could go
more than a hundred years ago towards the identification of state and
citizen, which is the basis of Fascism, and has been formulated in
its speculative form by Giovanni Gentile in 1916. If a nation was to
be created out of the patchwork Italy presented on the map it could
only be through the education of the people, for the unification could
only be attained by awakening national consciousness in the single
consciences. Cuoco called this the formation of an Italian public
spirit.
When this follower of Vico in 1802 reached Milan, capital of the
Cisalpine Republic, Melzi realised his value and entrusted him with
the foundation and direction of the first _Giornale d’Italia_. Four
articles written in 1804 are probably those read and meditated upon by
Mazzini and are of such a quality that they could be written to-day.
To the men who did not see the point in so much zeal for the formation
of public spirit he answers by a most coherent demonstration that
political reality is spiritual reality. The spiritual building up of
the citizen is the real conquest of political autonomy. To achieve
such a task it was necessary to foster the love of agriculture, and of
the militia—compare Mussolini—and to replace self-love and personal
vanity with the love of the country and national pride. The “City” to
Cuoco is not one thing and the citizens another, the prosperity of the
former depends on the moral and practical efficiency of the latter.
He was full of contempt for the dreamers who thought that everything
may be expected from the laws. But the men who roused him to real
passion were those who argued that the Army, the navy, commerce,
were cares that should be left to the great nations, to England and
France for instance. To this he objected that those countries had been
small, smaller than the Italian states, and had grown through the
steadiness and efficiency of their national will. Such efficiency and
steadiness of national will he called “public spirit.” The regions
whose inhabitants did not think of being or becoming a great country,
would never be nations. For the small states there was one law; either
to become great or perish. It may be timely to observe that this
dependence of a country’s greatness on the conscience and the will of
its citizens was asserted by Mussolini when he was still the head of
the Socialist party in Forli in 1911.
Again in 1804, reviewing in his _Giornale d’Italia_ a philosophical
work, Cuoco expresses the desire to see philosophy flourishing in
Italy, for the development of speculative thought was in close
relation with the political state of society, and it was important
that a nation should not be theoretically sterile. “It is a long time
since we received it,” he writes, “first from France with the works
of Descartes, then from England with those of Locke. The periods of
political greatness of each nation always coincide with those of its
philosophical greatness. The first strength is Mind; weak is the arm of
those who lack it or think they do.” Doubtless this is pointing the way
to Gentile’s affirmation of the impossibility of having the theoretical
and practical activities of mind separate from each other just as the
last quotation was pointing to Mussolini’s policy of “heroicising” the
people of his country through giving them an heroic will and a national
conscience.
No wonder that Mazzini should have realised what Rousseau could never
see. The ethical nature of what goes under the name of “Nation” is a
Mazzinian concept. When Hegel speculatively proclaimed this it had been
already intuitively conceived, artistically expressed and religiously
observed by the men to whom Mazzini’s ardent faith was like an electric
current. The Mazzinian articles of faith were few, and had never been
theoretically worked out. This helped their adoption by people who
would never have grasped the import of a huge system. Whilst Rosmini
and Gioberti were read by the few, Mazzini was on the lips and throbbed
in the hearts of the many, so that the war he waged against materialism
and individualism was effective. His mystic feeling spreads in young
hearts as easily now as it did then. Lads take to sacrifice far more
easily than men of a more mature age and Mazzini’s declarations all
proclaimed self-sacrifice, self-effacement, even his idea of liberty.
At the very time in which the Anglo-French idea of political reality
was introduced in Italy, to rouse the country once more into life with
the magic word liberty, this young man, a poet, an inspired prophet,
was ready with a new meaning for that word. According to Mazzini the
individual is merely the representation we have of our own self when
we look at it as one amongst many and see it limited to the short
span of time between the birth and the death of its body, whereas the
self which can conceive of liberty, and therefore realise it, is the
self everyone of us feels when in the silent recess of Mind we have
a right to claim, a feeling to express, an intuition to cast into
sound or colour, and a faith through which we link ourselves to the
political, family, artistic and religious reality that has given us the
consciousness of such right or aroused in us such family, artistic, or
religious sense. To him political liberty could only mean for Italians
the liberty of shaking off foreign rule and creating the nation. It was
not and could not be the liberty to attend one’s private affairs as
one wished, for this last meaning of the word had been elaborated in
his country through Humanism and the Renaissance, and it was not only
obsolete, but was the cause of Italy’s corruption and decay.
The idea of empirical and transcendental self, implicit in this
conception of liberty, came to produce the second article of faith
in the Mazzinian doctrine. If man were to try creating a new natural
kingdom and add it to the animal, vegetable and mineral offered to us
by Nature, his attempt would be a vain endeavour. But political reality
does not belong to the world of Nature but to the world of Mind, in
which man is a Creator, and where nothing is really impossible to him
that believeth. This most Christian view of the point frees the nation
from natural contingencies and frees the citizens besides from the
lazy excuse that man must accept the political and economic position
of his country as determined by Nature. Thereby it forbids any idea of
its being static. No one can find at his birth his nation ready-made
for him; everyone must work to the best of his moral, intellectual,
and bodily power to create it; since the moment the citizens cease to
work at this, their political task, the country starts ceasing to be
a nation and becomes a region whilst the citizens become inhabitants.
The nation is not a geographical unit, it is not even history
empirically understood, but it is history as far as history is process,
development, programme, mission and sacrifice; in a word, human life.
In Mazzini’s insistency on the point one detects the desire to react
against the negative side of the mentality which has been traced as a
consequence of Humanism. The Italians had identified themselves with
ancient Rome, and this had brought them to think of their national
glory and history as a ready-made affair. In their country they saw
the Temple of the past, and exploited their ruins morally as well
as financially. Whilst the other countries of the western world had
been fighting and labouring, for the conquest of their political
and financial status, Italy had sat on her past glories and proudly
wrapping herself in Cicero’s or Cæsar’s toga had taken tips from the
whole world. Mazzini had grasped enough of Vico’s notion of man as
creator of the historical world to bring to the fore, in the average
man’s mind, the idea that was the import of all the historical
philosophy of Italy and, therefore, the positive side of his country’s
historical mentality.
Neither Cuoco nor Mazzini were philosophers, their task was, so to
speak, to realise philosophy, to introduce other people’s theories
into life, and this they did uncommonly well both of them, although
Mazzini played in the Risorgimento so eminent a part that his gigantic
historical figure overshadows that of Cuoco. But Cuoco, through his
_Giornale d’Italia_ and his subsequent writings had the greatest
influence on the best poets and writers of the period, to begin with
on Foscolo and Manzoni. For the first time since Savonarola’s days
intellectual life in Italy beheld a spontaneous revival of Catholic
thinking, and this, strong enough since it counted men as great as
Gioberti, Rosmini and Manzoni, was not due to the initiative of
the Church. It was spontaneous, intellectually so, and Vico may be
considered as its forerunner. What was paramount was perhaps the moral
system of Rosmini. He started out to fight Kant’s moral system as unfit
for use on account of the subjective ground of the Kantian imperative,
and meaning to fight it he developed it and found new ground for it.
The moral, pedagogic and even pedantic spirit which spread in the
intellectual classes of Italy during the last century has indeed a
good deal in common with the moral movement which had accompanied in
Germany the development of a national conscience. We have in both cases
a reaction against the foreign ways of the aristocracy—but with a great
difference since in Italy the aristocracy had very little of the feudal
character and was so open to intellectual life that it responded to
the call sooner and better than any other class—preluding a reaction
against the atomistic political life of the country. To pass from
Rosmini and Gioberti to Croce and Gentile, the thinkers who herald the
coming of Italy as a modern nation, as much was needed as to pass
from Leibniz, living in the days in which German intellectual life and
national conscience could be at best the object of a mystical worship,
to Kant’s time, when Europe realised that there were actually such
things as German metaphysics and a German nation.
In both cases the philosophy has to be, and is, synthetic, for in
both cases the exigency that opens life with the pungency of need,
of deficiency, of negativeness, is the thirst for national assertion
and foreign recognition. Obviously in both cases also it is the
assimilation of foreign contributions that has enabled the scholars to
realise the negative position of their respective countries.
After the unfortunate war of ’48–’49, Gioberti went into exile and
philosophy was overtaken according to Prof. G. de Ruggiero by an
invincible drowsiness. Drowsy, obscure, unconscious of their own
positions, are epithets which can be justly bestowed on the thinkers of
the time, for eclecticism prevails without the historical culture that
alone can make it fertile. And of the most eminent philosopher of the
time the best that can be said is that he did his best to lull to sleep
his countrymen’s newborn consciousness. Among the Positivists, inferior
followers of foreign tendencies, several remain first-rate historians,
thanks to a few sentences of Vico kept like the seeds in Noah’s
ark, and sufficient to prevent them from falling into a materialist
metaphysic which would have been a sterilising curse to the newborn
nation. Materialism was far more logical and coherent in France when
the historians simply excluded the ideologies which were left hovering
through the historical works—for instance, of as good an historian as
Villari; but this was not unconscious. After the efforts which they had
made to get rid of pseudo-idealistic metaphysic they did not want to
entangle themselves in another metaphysic, were it to be materialist.
On the other hand, they did not want, or were not able, to make theirs
the position of English positivists. Ardigo, for instance, although he
is the best Italian thinker that upheld Positivism, cannot be compared
to a Spencer or a Mill.
But speculative voices are never silenced, although they may be hushed,
and the spiritual exigencies which had produced Gioberti and Rosmini
were slowly working themselves out in other minds. Neo-Kantianism
gave birth in Italy to a series of historical studies in the field
of philosophy, so that it became impossible for any decent professor
to misrepresent the development of speculative thought as these two
great exponents of Italy’s mind had done. Whilst Neo-Kantians achieve
little theoretically, they do so much historically that one may say
that the works of such men as Fiorentino, Tocco, and others prepared
the ground for Spaventa and de Sanctis who in their turn have given
us Croce and Gentile. All read German, English and French, besides
Latin and Greek; so that we can say that the speculative theories of
the whole western world were studied in their schools; and that, like
the child who becomes self-conscious as he gradually realises the
worth and importance of the people surrounding him, Italy has grown to
speculative self-consciousness through the close study of universal
speculation and of the history of her national political life, national
art, national literature, national speculative theories, until her
historians came to the idea of history as the co-ordination of all the
different branches.
Bertrando Spaventa taught in the university of Napoli, and, a staunch
Hegelian, he criticised Hegel in the same creative way as Vico had
criticised Descartes and Locke. He developed and continued the
intuition which is at the basis of all Hegelian system as Hegel could
not have done, inasmuch as Spaventa realises Hegel’s logic in its
historical position, that is to say as the fulfilment of Descartes’
claim. Thinking means causing to the French mind, whilst to Hegel it is
not merely causing it is creating. But Gioberti had not only expressed
the Hegelian intuition; he had completed it; thinking is creating,
but to him proving also is creating. And Spaventa, rich with all the
history of speculative thought, realised Hegel’s logic and prepared it
to enter life, thanks to Gioberti’s contribution, although Gioberti
himself had been far from realising it. The speculative possibilities
of the Cartesian _Cogito_ are exploited to the full; whereas they
had been left aside by Hegel. Vico’s _factum et verum convertuntur_,
pragmatically understood by the Positivists, is here realised as a
process. But, as is the wont of Italian thinkers, the original part of
his intuition remains at an intuitive stage and has to wait for the
speculative genius of Gentile to work it out and modify it into the
_fieri et verum convertuntur_ which is the adequate expression of the
historical dialectic.
Hegel’s most original and fecund motive was thus nearing its
theoretical realisation at the hands of Spaventa, whilst Vico’s
conception of life was practically illustrated by Francesco de
Sanctis, whose important part in the shaping out of Italy’s present
mentality cannot be overstated. The process of dissolution of Hegel’s
and Vico’s theories was accomplished and the passage from dissolution
to re-elaboration was done by de Sanctis. In his _Storia della
letteratura Italiana_ the philosophy of mind receives more than a
perfect illustration, an æsthetic rendering that makes the most
abstruse notion of dialectic a tangible object of meditation to the
average reader. Æsthetic rendering is here used as excluding anything
like theoretic exposition; and such æsthetic quality is insured by the
great critic’s own gifts as an artist. His reading and philosophic
preparation are incredible, not to be gauged; they are, however,
assimilated by him very much in the way in which a great artist
assimilates his technique and intellectual experience.
Doubtless Michelangelo, moving to sketch the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel or the last panel of it, is carrying in himself the experience,
the artistic experience of eighteen centuries. Yet he must have
forgotten it all, at least as objective knowledge, to find it in
himself flesh of his flesh, marrow of his bones, soul of his soul;
so that he could move freely as an artist, in all the spontaneity
and, therefore, liberty of creation. The character of his work is
personal, so highly personal that it includes all the determinations
which single out Buonarroti as a man of that land, of that religion
and even of that particular moment of his religion, of that time, of
such and such temperament and inclination, and singles out the whole of
his production as belonging to that particular moment of the Italian
Renaissance. The greater is the artist’s personality, the better he
discharges his twofold function of microcosm and macrocosm of his
world. It is an illusion of the nineteenth century to believe that
personality in art makes for atomistic individualism. Just as it is an
absurd error of the people who judge Mussolini and Fascism to believe
that they have grown without roots. They would then be superposed
to history, superfluous, unnecessary; whereas the great artist and
the great politician belong to life, and in fact are historical life
working itself out to expression or political realisation.
The _Storia della letteratura Italiana_, like an immense relief,
unfurls the development of the life of Mind in Italy from the dawn
of the Italian mentality right up to the days of the critic. For de
Sanctis, Art is Mind individualising itself through the senses in the
transparency of intuition; Art in other words, is life reaching the
luminosity of form. This blending, this perfectly intimate welding of
reason and sense, of universal and particular is Art. It is, therefore,
individuality, not individuality taken as it is too often—as the
contrary of universality, but as its realisation in the particular.
For this relation of the universal and particular is constitutive of
art, which is, therefore, neither individual arbitrariness, nor the
mere reflection of life in the artist’s fancy, but life itself coming
through its own development to intuitive transparency. Life cannot be a
matter of which art would be the form; and religion, politics, science
as elements of life are not alien to art or indifferent to it. None of
this element can exist without art, and history leaves no doubt on the
point—each new religion, new political system, new scientific progress
is not to be parted from the artistic production of the time.
De Sanctis, like a medical student, follows step by step the corruption
of Italy, gradually growing with the decay of religious and political
consciousness, above all when Humanism, having reached its climax
in the works of Poliziano, stopped providing a sincere feeling to
the scholars who ceased to worship antiquity some fifty years after
him. De Sanctis was a man of the Risorgimento he had laboured and
suffered for the independence of his country, hoped and despaired of
the future greatness of his countrymen. He was aware that in spite of
Machiavelli, of Vico, of Alfieri, of Cuoco, of Mazzini, the greatest
number of his countrymen had, so to speak, no souls. Knowing as he did
that religion was the basis of all relation and the first cause of all
real social progress, seeing in it the keystone of man’s recognition
of the exterior world, he refrained in all his books from attacking
not only religion, but the Church as well; although he was a staunch
anti-clerical in politics until Rome was taken from the Pope. He drew
such a graph of the development of Italy’s mind that from Dante’s
onwards it shows all the forces of corruption preparing the series of
invasions that made of his countrymen’s shame a byword, and the forces
of reconstruction from Machiavelli onward. To the reading public he
presented it as a mirror, in the transparency of Art showing the whole
spiritual life of the people with its political consequences. He bade
them realise that corruption had been the cause of foreign rule and
tyranny, not foreign rule and tyranny the cause of corruption.
This was new indeed, too new for a generation which had achieved
the political independence of the country with the belief that bad
government and foreign rule were the cause of the people’s corruption.
No wonder, therefore, that de Sanctis’ masterpiece, published in 1871,
should have been practically laid aside for more than twenty-five years
awaiting Croce and Gentile to take it up. The public that responded to
their call when it came was exactly the one which de Sanctis would have
wished to reach. The boys took de Sanctis up, and what is more curious
they took him as their idea-provider; inasmuch as the big volumes,
which could not be included in the schools’ syllabus, were turned to in
the hour of need, when they had to write essays and found themselves
short of ideas. No method of popularising and assimilation could match
this, for the ideas thus borrowed by the young had to be exposed,
proved and illustrated. The school lads and university men who enlisted
as volunteers in the war, were mostly spiritual sons of de Sanctis, one
of them being Mussolini, who told the author that he was a worshipper
of that work. In the same way the idea of Croce and Gentile have spread
even among people unfit to realise their theoretical import. Never,
however, could they spread like those of de Sanctis, but he is so much
so completely their spiritual father that most of their speculative
notions can be found as intuitions in de Sanctis’ pages. There the boys
get so familiar with them that when they come to a Gentilian theory,
and the teacher takes the trouble to introduce to them the fundamental
intuition, they grasp it at once as a matter of course and wonder why
the teacher should think it so difficult to explain, for instance, the
intimate relation of thought and action, the necessity of religion and
the like.