Challenging Asymmetry: Spaventa’s ‘circularity’ of European thought

This nationalist swing in cultural debates of the nineteenth century was particularly marked in the South, where, especially after the revolutionary turmoil in 1820–1, institutional arrangements set forth by the Bourbon monarchy had strongly undermined the penetration of European ideas into the Kingdom.⁴³ Already in 1820, King Ferdinand returned to Latin as the language of education, substantially increased import taxes on foreign books, and issued a list of prohibited texts. Libraries in the Kingdom were subject to regular inspections carried out by a special commission and, in most cases, witnessed significant portions of their collections, most notably German philosophy books or treatises on the Enlightenment, being taken away. At the end of June 1821, the King symbolically marked the rejection of late eighteenth-century French philosophy by publicly burning books by Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert. After the Revolution of 1848, the Bourbon monarchy renewed its efforts to maintain control over the Kingdom via the creation of a loyal and efficient bureaucracy, the reorganization of the army and the refusal to engage with European politics and ideas, encouraging instead an unconditioned allegiance to Neapolitan culture and tradition, as was often lamented by local chroniclers.⁴⁴

At the same time, the South also represented the cradle of a truly progressive philosophy, namely one that fully blurred the lines between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, one that completely subverted notions of primacy and asymmetries, and finally depicted Italy as a philosophical centre of European modernity. While, in fact, the neo-Guelph Giobertian solution was acquiring traction in public debates and intellectual circles, a group of Southern intellectuals, brought together by passionate support for the cause of unification, a common revolutionary fervour and a particular fondness for German idealism, emerged as the forerunner of an intellectual revolution aimed at establishing the cultural unity that was seen as the most salient characteristic of modern European nations, especially Germany. Among these intellectuals, Bertrando Spaventa quickly affirmed himself as the figurehead of the new worldview. Born in the Abruzzo town of Bomba in 1817, Bertrando moved to Naples at an early age and, together with his brother Silvio, wrote for the periodical Il Nazionale, a left-leaning newspaper that served as a voice for the radical Neapolitan youth. After the failure of 1848, Spaventa, unlike his brother who was sentenced to prison, was exiled to Turin, where his journalistic activity remained devoted to the popularization of Hegel’s philosophy as a paradigm for the cultural unification of Italy, a means for the promotion of secular politics and, broadly speaking, a guiding light for the future of Europe.⁴⁵ It was between 1858 and 1860, however, with his lectures at the universities of Modena and Bologna, that Bertrando’s philosophical vision was fully realized as the theory of circularity of European thought, later published in the volume La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni colla filosofia europea.

A dart of criticism directed against Gioberti’s neo-Guelph cultural nationalism, Spaventa’s best-known work dismantled the popular view that Italian philosophy was fundamentally detached from modern European thought.⁴⁶ In this sense, the blind exaltation of the country’s past tradition was condemned as a deplorable solution and a means of shielding oneself from the ideas of present-day Europe. Italian philosophy, according to Spaventa, did not end with the Renaissance; rather, it ‘went on to develop in freer lands and among freer intellects’.⁴⁷ Consequently, engagement with contemporary European ideas was seen as synonymous with the discovery of a new chapter in the life of Italian philosophy, namely one that took place abroad: ‘seeking Italian philosophical thought in its new fatherland does not entail a servile imitation of German nationality. Rather, it constitutes a recovery of something that belonged to us, of something that, under different guises, has become part of a universal spirit, the essential condition of our civilization, as well as all other people’s. It is not our philosophers of the last two centuries, but Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel who are the true disciples of Bruno, of Vanini, of Campanella, of Vico and other illustrious authors’.⁴⁸

Spaventa proposed a very elastic definition of philosophy that was not bound to specific national traditions, but emerged as a global phenomenon, stemming from intergenerational, transnational exchanges. Already during Roman times, it was possible to speak of the transnational nature of philosophy’s vocabulary: drawing extensively upon Vico’s definition of Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, Spaventa suggested that many terms were characterized by a philosophical meaning that was too great to have evolved out of the popular use of the terms themselves. Consequently, he concluded, they must have been borrowed from foreign populations, particularly the Etruscans and Ionians, as already hinted by Cuoco roughly half a century earlier, in his commentaries on Vico. Transnational intellectual exchanges were even more evident from the Renaissance onwards and their effect was said to be extremely visible in the present: ‘Modern philosophy’, Spaventa claimed, ‘is not the work of a single nation, but of all’. Those that appeared to be ‘national philosophies’ were, instead, ‘nothing more than stations through which thought, in its immortal course, passes. Modern philosophy, therefore, is neither exclusively English, nor French, nor Italian, nor German, but European.’⁴⁹

Spaventa identified Italy during the Renaissance as the birthplace of modern ideas, paying particular attention to the ongoing rejection of Scholastic philosophy via the rehabilitation of inquiries on nature and subjectivity. He then illustrated how these innovations ought to be seen as conducive to the encounter of local and foreign philosophies: Giordano Bruno’s definition of Nature as Deus in rebus was said to have anticipated Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, the manifesto of modern immanentism; Tommaso Campanella’s emphasis on sensitivity and experience as the basis of all knowledge was described as the forerunner of empiricism and Cartesian rationalism. As the mature reflections of Spinoza and Descartes revealed the magnitude of the dichotomy between sense perception and intellect, man was still perceived exclusively as an effect, that is, as a product of God’s creation. It was exactly the critique of this mono-directional account of causality, operated via Locke’s empiricism in England and Gottfried Leibniz’s Monadology in Germany, that sought to elaborate an account of man as cause, namely as the free maker of himself. While these ideas originally appeared abroad, it was only in Italy, Spaventa continued, that the tension between man as effect and man as cause was resolved. The philosopher credited for this innovation was Giambattista Vico, who blurred the definitions of the two categories by amalgamating them in a wider notion of progress, seen as the World Spirit’s perpetual process of self-negotiation. ‘Vico denies any parallel’, Spaventa writes; ‘nature is the phenomenon and the basis of Spirit, the premise that Spirit makes for itself, in order to be true unity. True unity, the true One, true development: development of itself; from itself, via itself, to itself: that is, completely itself’.⁵⁰

Vico’s innovation paved the way for the elaboration of a new metaphysics, accounting for perpetual progress and self-negotiation, rather than immediate causation. In a particularly poignant section of his book, Spaventa claimed that ‘Vico anticipates the problem of knowledge, demanding a new metaphysics anchored to human ideas; he is sensitive to the idea of Spirit, hence creating philosophy of history. Vico is the true precursor of Germany’.⁵¹ This is exactly where, according to the author, the diaspora of Italian philosophy was most dramatically observable: after Vico, it was only in other European countries, particularly in Germany, that a meaningful intellectual life had been taking place. Immanuel Kant was to be credited for the elevation of the themes problematized by Vico into a transcendental psychologism, resolving the problem of knowledge and its intelligibility with the intuition of its synthetic unity.⁵² Later on, Spaventa continued, the presence of the same problem could be observed in Fichte’s Selbstbewußtsein, the transcendental realism of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and, more importantly, Hegel’s idealism, positing the ultimate question as to how Spirit realizes itself in history and in man’s experience of it. According to Spaventa, it was exactly in the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance that the debates animating the nineteenth-century European intellectual landscape would deepen their roots: La filosofia italiana illustrated a well-defined trajectory linking Bruno and Campanella with present-day German thought, brought together by the persistent search for unity in history.

The stage was now set for the final thrust of Spaventa’s argument. To restore its status of pre-eminence among the nations of Europe, Italy had to rediscover its own philosophy in its mature, cosmopolitan form: as the country’s tradition had ‘developed in the motion of German intellects’, it was necessary, for the thinkers of the peninsula, not to engage with foreign authors ‘in the same way as goods are imported’, but via the recognition of their shared intellectual genealogy.⁵³ This process, according to the author, was already well underway. Both the Italian and the German traditions were said to have deep roots in debates initially appearing during the Italian Renaissance and, consequently, they were both concerned with the same questions. As proof of this, Spaventa drew a parallel between Pasquale Galluppi and Immanuel Kant: both had ‘inherited’ a concern for the problem of knowledge from Vico. As a result, thanks to his empiricist philosophical inclination, Galluppi was said to be ‘unknowingly Kantian’.⁵⁴ Similarly, Antonio Rosmini, notoriously critical of foreign ideas, was nonetheless said to have theorized a notion of ‘primitive synthesis of reason and perception’ mirroring Kant’s notion of ‘transcendental imagination’, mediating between sense and intellect.⁵⁵ Another interesting comparison was between Hegel and Gioberti: just as the German idealist had moved beyond his predecessors by positing the absolute self-awareness of Reason as a token of the infinite possibility of knowledge, Gioberti had overcome the limits of Galluppi and Rosmini by theorizing an ‘Absolute Mind’, decreeing the infinite potentiality of knowledge via the dialectic of its creative force. To paraphrase Spaventa’s verdict on Galluppi, Gioberti was seen as ‘unknowingly Hegelian’, much closer to German idealism than he was ready to admit himself. It was only thanks to the recognition of the similarities between the Italian and German philosophical landscapes, Spaventa argued, that the peninsula could achieve the cultural unity observable in other European countries, thus creating ‘a historical Italy, having its worthy place in the common life of modern nations’.⁵⁶