10.13135/2036-542X/8061
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8061
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Alessandro Carrera
Trópos
The Restless Mind of Italian Humanism: On Massimo Cacciari’s La mente inquieta
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
12
Monografica
2019-12-01
2023-08-16
2019-12-01
2023-08-16
23-29
1
Alessandro Carrera
2019/12/01
10.13135/2036-542X/8061
23
Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston, Houston, USA
2036-542X
1
29
The Restless Mind of Italian Humanism: On Massimo Cacciari’s La mente inquieta
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/8061/6777
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                                                                                 trópos – ISBN 978-88-255-2800-8
                                                          DOI 10.4399/97888255280083 – pag. 23-29 (dicembre 2019)




                     The Restless Mind of Italian Humanism:
                     On Massimo Cacciari’s La mente inquieta
                                                                      A C*




   Abstract
   Massimo Cacciari’s La mente inquieta [The Restless Mind], first published in  as
   an introduction to Umanisti italiani. Pensiero e destino [Italian Humanists: Thought
   and Fate], is now being reprinted as a separate book with some additions. Cacciari’s
   intention is to emancipate fifteenth–century humanism from the Heideggerian and
   post–Heideggerian assumption that it was not real philosophy and nothing more
   than philology and erudition, marred by an anthropocentric, essentialistic ideology
   about what “man” is or is supposed to be. Cacciari’s argument is that philology
   “is” philosophy; it was so from Valla to Vico, and from Leopardi to Nietzsche. By
   re–reading Valla, Alberti, Ficino, and Pico in this light, Cacciari deemphasizes the
   anthropocentric reading of humanism and brings to light its internal tension, its
   fundamental “insecurity.” There is a tragic component in humanism. It struggles,
   on the one hand, to harmonize the classical tradition and the Christian heritage
   and, on the other, to come to terms with the impossibility of harmonizing the city
   at both the philosophical and the political level. A “tragic” and unfulfilled longing
   for “peace” runs through the humanistic debate of the fifteenth–century up to
   Savonarola’s failed attempt to a radical reform of faith and politics.
   Keywords: Alberti, Fortuna, humanism, Pico, possibility, virtuality.

    For a long time, and certainly after the political unification of Italy,
fifteenth–century Italian writers, philosophers, and intellectuals did not
enjoy a good reputation in their own country. At the height of the Risorgi-
mento and immediately afterwards, when the imperative was to portray
Italian culture as “one” and always striving toward the geographical and
political unity to come (to show, in other words, that Italy had always ex-
isted and its cultural continuity had never faltered), the cultural figures
of the Quattrocento seemed to fail the task of representing Italy, and their
reputation in the newborn kingdom was not very high. Regardless of the
high opinion that Hegel expressed toward Italian humanism in his lessons
on the history of philosophy (an endorsement that, alone, should have had
the Italian Hegelians think twice about the matter), the humanists were
     ∗
       Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston, Houston, USA.
acarrera@uh.edu.


                                                                                                             
      Alessandro Carrera


hastily grouped under the rubrics of grammarians, rhetoricians, philologists
at best, or just minor literati (it was a century without poetry, it was said).
Being categorized in every field except philosophy definitely did not help
their reputation in an environment where philosophy was endowed with
an idealist supremacy.
    As Rocco Rubini has noted in his highly documented The Other Renais-
sance, hardly anyone wanted to be related to historical figures who had not
shown national feelings and who, seemingly sheltered in their disciplines,
even seemed content of the intellectual segregation in which they lived.
Moreover, what lineage had they left? There were Pico della Mirandola and
Marsilio Ficino, but where were their followers, where was their school
to be found? Likewise, one could ask where the followers of Tommaso
Campanella or Giordano Bruno were. In the history of Italian philosophy,
one had to wait until Giambattista Vico came along for a Vichian genealogy
to be acknowledged. And even in that case, it took time.
    If the first “Vichian” of European repute was Jules Michelet (thanks,
however, to Vincenzo Cuoco and Francesco Salfi), the first “Brunian” was
Schelling with his dialogue Bruno (). For a revival of Bruno on the
Italian soil, we must wait for Bertrando Spaventa. Bruno, however, has
only a distant relationship with humanism, and he is removed from the
Renaissance too.
    A recent re–assessment of the difficult legacy of Quattrocento human-
ism comes from Massimo Cacciari’s La mente inquieta [The Restless Mind].
Originally written for the seminal anthology Umanisti italiani, published in
, Cacciari’s introductory essay has now been revised, augmented, and
published as an independent book.
    Cacciari is not afraid to look back at the now worn–out Quattrocento
diatribe that started after World War II. Against Oskar Kristeller’s nega-
tive judgement (according to which the Italian fifteenth century did not
produce a philosophy, not even according to the most generous standards),
Eugenio Garin and Cesare Vasoli attempted a serious re–evaluation. This
was certainly done in the name of historicist continuity, but also with a
deep appreciation for the original contributions of thought in an age that,
to many, seemed to have spent all its strength (but what strength it was!) in
painting and architecture, leaving nothing to speculation.


    . Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism Between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, ), –.
    . Luca Oliva has recently traced Bruno’s reception in Italy in L’ontologia della materia. Giordano
Bruno tra Otto e Novecento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, ).
    . Massimo Cacciari, La mente inquieta. Saggio sull’umanesimo (Turin: Einaudi, ).
    . Raphael Ebgi, ed., Umanisti italiani. Pensiero e destino (Turin: Einaudi, ).
                                       The Restless Mind of Italian Humanism   


    Is this dispute not buried now under the weight of mere historiography?
Cacciari wants to show that this is not the case. And if he takes the side of
Garin and Vasoli, it is certainly not in the name of rediscovered historicism,
but rather to clear away any doubts. The humanism of the fifteenth century
is not “waiting” to be re–evaluated, because its importance cannot even be
doubted. The goal is neither to return to a generic Germanic Humanismus
nor to reactivate the old controversy between Sartre’s humanisme and Hei-
degger’s seemingly definitive criticism (a controversy that in fact precedes
the Kristeller–Garin–Vasoli disagreement). Rather, the point is to show that
all that grammar and rhetoric that kept the literati of that distant century
busy was meant to give the foundation to a new ontology of language. At
the same time, the matter is to highlight the necessity that such ontology
be grounded in the actual practice of philology and, if we can use a modern
term, of general linguistics.
    The basis of this new ontology (it does not matter that it was never
systematized) consists in the awareness that language is irreducible to any
easy theory that reduces to a mere instrument at the service of the human
will. Cacciari proposes therefore to read the Quattrocento humanists against
the rhetoric of humanism, as philosophers of language, not in spite of their
philological concerns but precisely because of them, and as thinkers who
have faced the unfathomable essence of language with the same “restless
mind” of Seneca (mobilis et inquieta homini mens data est) and perhaps, we
add, with the same inquietum cor nostrum of Augustine. Pushing Cacciari’s
suggestion even further, we could say that philological humanism was the
deconstructionism of the fifteenth century and, at the same time, it was
much more. On the one hand, Lorenzo Valla’s linguistic analysis showed
how the medieval ontology was marred by an insufficient understanding
of grammar (in the Middle Ages, they were inclined to forget that “being,”
“ens,” is first and foremost a participle). On the other hand, Valla’s work,
together with others’, highlighted how language strives towards the Truth
that is nonetheless independent from the empirical language in which
Truth itself is embodied. Like Spirit, Truth acts where it wants, in the
language and in the historical epochs it wants. This freeing of Truth from a
privileged language (from the language of Revelation, that is) made possible
the grafting of classicism onto Christianity, which was the heart of the
humanistic enterprise.
    We must therefore re–read the classics with new eyes, from Dante’s De
Vulgari Eloquentia (for everything begins with Dante’ “linguistic turn”) to
Petrarch and then up to Savonarola, which is to say the point of catastrophe
of the entire humanistic project. Cacciari’s thesis is in fact that humanism is
in its essence a tragic philosophy. Covering the distance that separates Athens
from Jerusalem in view of a cosmic renewal (renovatio) was an infinite task
    Alessandro Carrera


(literally: a task that could not end), desperate in many ways and with full
awareness of the tragedy it faced. Humanism wished to be a philosophy of
Peace and Concord. Yet, already in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good
Government, painted less than twenty years after Dante’s death, Peace is
an isolated figure, languidly laying down on a couch with an olive branch
in her hand and nobody paying any attention to her. Humanistic peace
was, to be sure, a “philosophy” of peace, a “theory” of peace rather than a
political project; yet a philosophical peace between the classical heritage and
Christianity as well as a theological peace between Roman Catholicism and
the East–West Schism (not to mention the Western Schism of —)
was the necessary prelude to any politics of peace. Or, at least, that was the
hope.
    Such hope was put to the test during Savonarola’s years in Florence,
and it failed. Ficino’s change of heart — first a supporter of the terrible
Dominican and then his fiercest denier — gives us the measure of the bitter
disappointment experienced by intellectuals and common folk alike. The
legacy of the humanistic project was then collected by Machiavelli, certainly
no longer as a philosophy of Peace, and its tragic side was now in full view.
    But the tragedy of humanism did not emerge from the political–religious
failure in Florence; it predated it. Cacciari’s main argument is how inherently
tragic the philosophical anthropology of humanism already was — and
if it was not, it became so after the fall of Constantinople in . Leon
Battista Alberti’s trajectory from the solid optimism of Intercoenales and De
Familia to the desperate but lucid account of human affairs in Momus and
Theogenius is the case in point. From Alberti’s Theogenius to Machiavelli’s
Asino, human beings are incurabiles, and their restlessness, which is also the
source of their glory, cannot be “healed.” The worst that human beings can
do will have to take its place alongside the good that comes from them. The
contradiction is tragic yet essential for it cannot be overcome, and here is
where anthropology rises up to philosophy. The charge of anthropocentrism
always leveled against Italian humanism, having Pico as its favorite target,
must be not just lessened but dismissed altogether. If human beings stand
at the center of creation, halfway between beast and angel, then humans
are constantly torn apart, in a true Dantesque fashion, between the two
opposite natures, without the possibility to release the internal and external
tension. Human beings are “miraculous,” yet every miracle is terrifying in
its own way; and human beings are miraculous in their misery as well as in
their triumph.
    Where, however, the Quattrocento humanists reached their philosophical
peak was in their treatment of fortuna [fortune, luck, chance]. Cacciari
points out how in his Disputationes, Pico includes fortuna within his non–
systematic “system” by highlighting both sides of the issue: on the one
                                                     The Restless Mind of Italian Humanism             


hand, the world is not ruled by tyche, fatum, casus, fortuna. There is a Mind at
work, after all. On the other hand, sheltering human beings from fortuna is
just impossible. Pico’s aporia, roughly the same that Alberti had subjected
to an allegorical treatment in Momus, stretches back to the past and moves
forward to the future, from Dante to Machiavelli.
    It is not out of place, therefore, to expand on Cacciari’s acute analysis
of Pico’s and make an attempt to turn Fortuna (fortune, luck, chance)
into a category of “active nihilism” (Nietzsche’s terminology) that did not
bog down the Human Being — whatever the Human Being was and was
not — but, on the contrary, spurred the Italian Renaissance as much as
predestination spurred Protestant capitalism (and if Italian Renaissance
ultimately failed in the political arena, it was not for lack of Fortuna; planetary
forces were at play that overwhelmed any game of chances).
    Again, we must begin with Dante. In Inferno VII, –, Dante attempted
(in Boethius’ and Brunetto Latini’s wake) to recruit the ancient blind force
(fortuna imperatrix mundi, fortune, the empress of the world) as an assistant
to Divine Providence. Yet Virgil, who pronounces the speech honoring For-
tuna, does not sound entirely convinced, nor does Dante. The very notion
of Fortuna is uncomfortable within the boundaries of a divine plan. But
later on, as soon as fortune was de–theologized, it generated an astonishing
amount of active or productive nihilism by means of assessing the sum of
chance, risk, multiplicity, and unpredictability that a society needs in order
to thrive, fail, try again, succeed, or fail again.
    Fortune’s underlying assumption is that the essence and the agency of
the human being are undecided, oscillating, everything and nothing at the
same time, and that the world has not been judged yet. Dante broke the
ground by having a figure from classical antiquity openly praise fortune as
an angelic intelligence in an admittedly problematic Christian context. Oth-
ers followed in their own terms: Petrarch in De Remediis Utrusque Fortunae;
Boccaccio in Decameron, Day Two, where fortune is the thread that provides
an appearance of destiny, and mostly Alberti, whose treatment of fortune
paves the way to Pico’s Disputationes and Machiavelli’s Asino and The Prince.
In Alberti’s Theogenius, the question is, How can we defend ourselves from
unfair, mean fortune after we realize that “we” indeed are the first culprits
of our misfortunes — because of our ingrained restlessness, never satisfied

     . See Charles M. Radding, “Fortune and Her Wheel: The Meaning of a Medieval Symbol,”
Mediaevistik, , : –; F. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul,  vols., trans.
C.H. Rawski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Ciabattoni, “Decameron : Filomena’s
Rule between Fortune and Human Agency,” Annali d’Italianistica , : –; Marchesi, Boccaccio
on Fortune (De casibus virorum illustrium), in Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie
Smarr eds., Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, ), –.
      Alessandro Carrera


with the present things and always “hanging on varied expectations” (an
anticipation of Cassius’, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars?”).
    The link that connects fortune and active–productive nihilism is less
theoretical than practical. It is nonetheless philosophical, as it belongs to
practical reason and it is a matter of ethics. To be precise, it is an ethics
of the void that opens ahead of our steps every time we try to put the
perfect world of theory into practice. “In theory,” everything works fine. In
practice, fortune spins the wheel, reducing theory to nothing. Yet fortune is
not nothing; it is present, alive, and active everywhere. It shows, however,
the quantum of nothingness that is inherent to all human enterprises, the
bridge that human endeavors will never cross, lest they fall into the abyss
of absolute nihil.
    By making nothingness visible, fortune makes it a companion and a cor-
rective to human action, which is successful, when it so happens, precisely
by incorporating fortune’s unpredictability together with the nothingness
that comes with it. Otherwise (Cacciari’s observation), why would the Ro-
mans, tempered by their harsh discipline, build so many temples to the
goddess Fortuna? The expectation that we, humans, can change the entire
fabric of reality may be already nihilistic at its core. The destructiveness
inherent in human action cannot be reversed into an all–encompassing
productivity, which would be another nihilistic myth. This is where fortune
intervenes. Rather than just causing human agency to fail, fortune protects
the same agency from its own nihilism. For fortune is not chaos; on the
contrary, it gives chaos a shape and perhaps a destiny. It is the transcendental
limit of human action, the quintessential unpolitical force, and, most of all,
a katéchon that keeps human hybris at bay.
    In the brief introduction to La mente inquieta, Cacciari observes that
humanism is definitely less “modern” and therefore much deeper than con-
temporary “Italian Theory.” It is a brief observation, almost a punchline —
a jab, indeed — that deserves to be taken seriously and dealt with elsewhere.
A new reflection on humanism, however, can make us aware of the many
ways in which the cluster of philosophical production known as Italian
Theory can meet its internal deadlocks, which can be summarized — if I
may venture to say it — as an insufficient distinction between potentiality
and virtuality. The tragic nature of human beings does not put them in a
deadlock when it comes to action. It is not tragedy that leads to impotence;
what leads to impotence is the complacent contemplation of the endless
possibilities of possibility itself. In Purgatory XXX, –, when Beatrice

    . Sempre suspesi a varie espettazioni; see Leon Battista Alberti, Theogenius, in Opere Volgari,
ed. Cecil Grayson (Bari: Laterza, ), vol. II; Progetto Manuzio electronic edition, ; author’s
translation.
                                        The Restless Mind of Italian Humanism   


says that Dante was such, “virtually,” that any propensity in him would have
succeeded (questi fu tal ne la sua vita nova / virtüalmente, ch’ogne abito destro
/ fatto averebbe in lui mirabil prova), she is not saying that Dante as a young
man “had potential,” as if he were a student who could do better if he just
put more effort in it. She is saying that his virtues were all present, already
at work, when he decided to change his path.
    A reappraisal of virtuality (not “everything is possible,” but “everything is
already here,” in full display, and it is up to us to activate it, always knowing
that fortune — “she” is already here as well — may thwart our plans at any
moment) is the end of theory and the beginning of action — be it artistic,
ethical, or political.
