Joshua
Brazee
Book
Review
Rocco
Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger.
The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 2014), 408 pp. ISBN: 9780226186139
1>
Professor Rubini’s book traces the confrontation between modern Italian
philosophy and Italian Renaissance humanism. Modern Italian philosophy began to
disregard humanism as shameful because of its perceived emphasis on the
individual, and this sense of shame dominated Italian Renaissance studies until
the mid-20th century when the scholars and philosophers Ernesto
Grassi, Eugenio Garin, and Paul Oskar Kristeller reinvigorated humanism as a
philosophy, largely through the lens of German existentialism. Yet, despite the
affinities between humanism and existentialism, the 20th century
German anti-Cartesians, according to Rubini, ignored Renaissance humanism.
This, he argues, is a sad irony given that Descartes explicitly defined his
intellectual project against humanism. These anti-Cartesians missed an
opportunity to argue for their insights as, in fact, “a pre- or early ‘modern’
ambition” (5).
2>
Italian Renaissance humanism was shameful for the Italians for two reasons. The
first, because, according to Bertrando Spaventa (1817-83), the Italians lost ownership of their own
legacy. Instead of growing and being cultivated in Italy, humanism found a new
fatherland in Germany. Secondly, the Italians believed the Renaissance
individualism praised by Burckhardt to have been a political and philosophical
failure, leading to the chaos that dominated the Italian states until their
unification in 1860-61. Rubini begins his narrative with the work of Vincenzo
Cuoco (1770-1823), whose Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution
(1801), and Plato in Italy (1804-06) attempted to combat French
rationalism by returning to the political and historical realism of Machiavelli
and Vico. Even in the absence of a strong philosophical tradition in Italy,
Cuoco was trying to develop an Italian way of thinking. This, of course, is
humanism. Others, like Spaventa, looked outside the borders
of Italy to see where Italian thinking had found a new fatherland. He names
“Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel” as the “true disciples of Bruno,
of Vanini, of Campanella, of Vico and other illustrious thinkers” (63). The
Italian shame could be overcome, according to Spaventa and others, by showing
how Italian Renaissance humanism had in fact blossomed into a powerful
philosophical tradition elsewhere.
3>
Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) responds to the rise of positivism in Italy by affirming humanism
as “prepar[ing] the freedom of spirit of modern times” (99). At the end of the
19th century and throughout the twentieth century, Italian
philosophers, historians, and critics attempted to breathe new life into our
understanding of humanism by positioning it as a counter-movement to the
positivism, rationalism, and empiricism that dominated contemporary
philosophical discussion. Like Gentile, though despite obvious and important
political disagreements, Eugenio Garin (1909-2004) and Ernesto Grassi (1902-1991) argued for a renewed
understanding both of Italian Renaissance humanism as well as for a radically
different take on contemporary philosophy and the scientific and technological
world views that came to dominate. The chapters on these two 20th
century Italian critics and philosophers, as well as a chapter on Paul Oskar
Kristeller (1905-1999) are the cornerstones of the book, in large part because of the
importance of these three figures, especially Kristeller, in informing
contemporary work on humanism.
4>
Grassi, a student and friend of Heidegger’s, through his writing and editorial
work, had begun to set the stage for a reinterpretation of humanism as
philosophy. Grassi used Heidegger’s insights about the nature of the poetic
word to counter Heidegger’s claim that humanism is just another chapter in the
long history of western metaphysics. Grassi argued that the humanists had in
fact anticipated some of Heidegger’s insights, and that Heidegger, himself not
a strong student of humanism, missed these insights completely. Eugenio Garin
agreed with Grassi, and his own work elaborated on these insights. Garin’s Italian
Humanism provided a philologically accurate description of quattrocento
humanism, one that, according to Rubini, acts almost a counter-manifesto to
Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism.” Moreover, Garin took Hans Baron’s insights
about civic humanism and turned them into an existentialism. He saw in civic
humanism a reconciliation of the personal, the social, and the holy worlds, a
reconciliation after which contemporary philosophy was then again striving
(284).
5>
Although Garin and Kristeller began their careers as friends and intellectual
compatriots, their reconnection after the end of the war was short-lived.
Kristeller’s work on the Renaissance seemed, at least to Grassi, to be indebted
to the anti-humanism and Renaissance shame that he and Garin had been
combatting. Kristeller, on the other hand, did not believe that humanism had
much to offer that was philosophically original. Yet despite these differences,
Rubini maintains that Kristeller, like Grassi and Garin, contributed strongly
to the sense of humanism as a philosophy precisely because of how his
neo-Kantiansim informed his scholarship. That is, the philosophical nature of
the debate Garin and Kristeller were having about the essence of Italian
Renaissance humanism turned scholarship about the Renaissance “into a genuine
philosophical discourse” (307). According to Rubini, this is a “philosopher’s
humanism” which engages in precisely the kind of philosophical thinking that
Renaissance humanists would have wanted us to engage in.
6>
This is an excellent and important book, one that will prove indispensable to
the history of philosophy, dramatically changing our understanding of Italian
Renaissance humanism, its legacy, and its future. Working out of the tradition
of Grassi and Garin, Rubini’s narrative allows us to see past the limited and
often severely limiting judgments of modern critics and philosophers about
Renaissance humanism—a legacy of judgments reaching as far back as Descartes—to
again to discover what was philosophical about the movement, and what may still
be philosophical about it today. Writing in 1940, Grassi argues that modern
thinking begins only with Descartes if we believe that the problem of knowledge
takes priority. He writes, “If we dispute that priority, then the philosophy of
humanism and the Renaissance gains its new and central meaning and proves
itself to be a field full of historical and speculative problems.”[if
!supportFootnotes][1] Rubini’s book asks us to again take Grassi and
Garin’s insights about humanism as philosophy seriously.
7>
The book’s style also recommends itself. Although it deals with sometimes
weighty philosophical problems, its narrative agenda, telling the story of this
other Renaissance and its continual disappearance in modern criticism lends the
work a sometimes almost breezy readability. Of course, this too speaks to
Rubini’s philosophical as well as historiographical agendas. The other humanism
that Rubini reveals in his narrative grants a significance to history and
biography that philosophy after Descartes, in its emphasis on truth and
knowledge, denies. The story is a much a part of the philosophy, in that we
come to attend to the changing nature of human existence through its concern
with how its path informs its present, but also in how it allows us to see
certain possibilities for the future. For Rubini, those possibilities lie in an
explicit reengagement with Italian Renaissance humanism.
8>
I worry that while Rubini here has strongly suggested where we might take our
understanding of Renaissance humanism, he has broken off too prematurely.
What’s missing at the end of this book is something more programmatic, either a
reading of a Renaissance work that brings to bear his insights, or something
short of a manifesto. Of course, the book is already very long, so this may not
have seemed reasonable. But unless Rubini’s readers are already actively
engaged with the work of Garin or Grassi, then this book’s conclusions may not
lead to any immediate changes in the field. I hope that this doesn’t lead to a
loss of momentum for what might be some of the most interesting and challenging
insights in Renaissance studies in almost 30 years.
9>
Yet in any case, this is an important work. As our own moment wrestles with the
place of the professional humanities both in the university and in the world,
this book might provide some of the themes and motifs for new insights into the
necessity of our work, as well a renewed defense of the humanities.
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Note
[1] Grassi,
Ernesto. “Der Beginn des Modernen Denkens: von der Leidenschaft und der
Erfahrung des Ursprünglichen.” Geistige Überlieferung: ein Jahrbuch.
1.1940: 36-84: 37.
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Joshua
Brazee is a PhD Candidate
in the Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation
examines how Renaissance English poets understood the differences between their
work and the work of the burgeoning new sciences, as well as the rhetorical
strategies they used to maintain those distinctions in their poetic practice.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies in
Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
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