culture
NoonJune 29, 2022 – 10:59 am
In Giancristiano Desiderio’s book «Intellectual and affective life» and actuality of the great philosopher. Even in the era of digitalization
from Marco De Marco
We talk about aesthetics, indeed Aesthetics, with a capital letter, and at a certain point Giancristiano Desiderio he writes: “Croce’s criticism is almost more important today than yesterday”. For real? Isn’t it a bit risky, even for a Crusader of Crocianism what Desire is, to go this far, challenge the unpredictability of new trends and deny how difficult it is today to bring everything, or almost everything, back into the context of a general theory? Taken from the text, the answer is this: “After the fruitless end of stylistic criticism, formalism, linguistics and structuralism, (Croce’s) is neither more nor less than the work that critics have taken up again to understand what it is art, what is poetry, what is literature and how, on what inevitably bases of an aesthetic philosophy, one can exercise critical judgment ». The author, therefore, would also gladly renounce the “quasi” prudential inserted in the opening sentence of the reasoning, were it not that next November 20 will be seventy years after the philosopher’s death. Which exposes some risk, given that we are talking about a significant and among other things strongly accelerated time, in which many things have changed and many others are overwhelmingly occupying the scene, starting with the NFT, the “non fungible tokens”, and from digitization «which derealizes and disembodies the world», in the words of Byung-Chul Han. Therefore, it can only strike to have clear these approaches and to read about when, addressing young students, and speaking of poetry, Croce, at a certain point says that “everything changes in reality, except the very idea of reality”. Perhaps, one would think, one could still be sure of this. In any case, it is from here, from the very demanding assumption about the “contemporaneity” of Crocian aesthetics that Desiderio’s latest work, the third part of the “Intellectual and affective life of Benedetto Croce”, published by Ares, takes its place.
Between participation and nostalgia
The tone with which the book is written is explicitly shared, at times even nostalgic (“whoever writes these lines owns the second edition of the Aesthetics, the one that bears the date 1904 on the cover. Celestine color, now faded into an ice gray …) but this takes nothing away, once again, to the rigor of historical and theoretical reconstructions. For Croce, Desiderio recalls, art is «unreflected intuition of being» and it is not philosophy which, on the other hand, is «logical thinking»; the work is always individual, unique, and therefore irreducible in precoded genres, schemes and forms; and criticism must pay attention to the essence, not to the social effects, nor to the “scraps”, to the variants and errors of the authors. Could these theses not deeply shake public reflection? And could the character of those who spread them not fuel direct and incandescent polemics? Here, then, Croce that Kierkegaard defines as “philosophically disoriented”, because he confuses aesthetics with the comfort of life. Or, in a letter addressed to Luigi Russo, who later became one of the greatest Italian literary critics educated precisely with Croce’s texts, the name of Giovanni Gentile, once a friend and appreciated interlocutor, indicated as one who had never understood anything poetry, and that indeed he did not even know what it was. But here it is also an Antonio Labriola who a few days before his death reproaches Croce for his pure concepts which have little to do with what is empirically given, and which make him approach Aesthetics with the image of a “cemetery”. In short, Desiderio dares to add, like the famous definition, always Salvini, of Plato’s ideas seen as “dangling caciocavalli”.
The defence
Desiderio defends Croce, of course. But that’s not the real point. What matters is that he defends the entire political-philosophical “system” of it without ever hiding man’s susceptibility or certain significant “adaptations” of his, as when to those who told him he had written a “cold” aesthetic he replied, in a subsequent edition, introducing the concept of “lyrical” intuition. There is a trace of this – but perhaps it is an involuntary trace – also in Martone’s «Qui rido io». In the film, halfway between fiction and historical reconstruction, Don Benedetto appears twice: when Scarpetta goes to ask him for advice on the defensive line to be taken in the trial for plagiarism brought by D’Annunzio, and then during the trial itself. The first time, Croce suggests letting go, or admitting to having written an unfortunate work, because plagiarism is forbidden, while “making a mistake in a comedy is not a crime”. Scarpetta would have liked a different evaluation of his work by him, but patience: thanks and takes away the trouble. During the trial, however, he does not follow the advice. Indeed, he even part of D’Annunzio’s attack to the applause of the audience. And here is the second apparition of Croce. While Scarpetta defends himself by attacking, the philosopher appears anything but disappointed. A close-up even shows him pleased. Hence the question: how many Crosses are there? The question has sometimes also been posed in general terms. But the response of the Crocians has always been that of Giuseppe Galasso, quoted in the book: what counts is the classicism of Croce, “classic like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Hegel”.
29 June 2022 | 10:59
© Time.News