Abstract
Reviewed by: Michael Subialka, University of California, Davis, USA
The last decade has seen renewed interest in bringing Italian philosophers to the Anglophone public, with Benedetto Croce a key figure of interest. In 2007, Hiroko Fudemoto’s new translation, Breviary of Aesthetics: Four Lectures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), updated the 1965 translation by Patrick Romanell. Essays and selections have appeared in new volumes, such as Brian and Rebecca Copenhaver’s From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Rocco Rubini’s The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays, 1860–1968 (Ravenna: Longo, 2014). Massimo Verdicchio’s A Croce Reader, an anthology of 14 short translations prefaced by a substantial introductory essay, makes a notable contribution to this ongoing renewal. Informed by Croce’s approach to philosophy, Verdicchio’s volume uses its selection of texts to argue for revising our understanding of Croce’s thought and its relevance today.
A Croce Reader’s revisionist account of the philosopher responds to his own self-presentation. Croce collected his works into an anthology of essays, and Cecil Sprigge’s English translation of Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) has had a major impact on the Anglophone understanding of Croce ever since. But as Verdicchio puts it in his Introduction: The shortcomings and discrepancies at the heart of Croce’s Anthology make necessary a Croce reader that addresses these issues and sheds light on the other Croce that was not included in those pages and on the story of his philosophy that was never told. (p. xiii)
A Croce Reader is divided into five sections—on “Aesthetics,” “Philosophy,” “History,” “Literary Criticism,” and “The Baroque”—each preceded by a short critical preface. Verdicchio sees aesthetics as irreducibly central to Croce’s thought: “aesthetics can stand by itself, but logic or philosophy cannot stand without the aesthetic; there is poetry without prose, but not prose without poetry” (p. xiv). However, Verdicchio also argues that there is an unresolved discrepancy in Croce’s aesthetics that results from an unsatisfactory effort to distinguish artistic symbol (aesthetic intuition) from allegory (which Croce views as a confusion of aesthetic intuition with conceptual logic). The four selections Verdicchio includes in this section suggest that Croce was at some level aware of this discrepancy: while developing a view of aesthetic intuition that excludes allegory, allegory also lingers as a legacy from which poetry can never fully be free.
Croce’s approach to philosophy cannot be separated from his readings of earlier philosophers, especially Hegel and Vico (Gioberti and Jacobi, both included in Croce’s Anthology, are not mentioned here). Philosophy is thus a process of purification where earlier metaphors, myths, and products of imagination are separated from the philosophical concepts at their core: this is the procedure of distinguishing what is “dead” from what is “living” in the history of philosophy (p. xix). This leads to what Verdicchio characterizes as Croce’s “greatest insight,” which is that when reading philosophy we must be aware of how metaphorical inferences enter into and disrupt conceptual thought in a way that subverts it (p. 20). The three selections on “Philosophy” exemplify Croce’s drive to re-write the history of philosophy.
The section on “History” thus follows as a matter of course. Croce’s philosophy is defined by its “absolute historicism,” so it is fitting that this volume includes a selection on “The Concept of Philosophy as Absolute Historicism.” However, as Verdicchio points out, the role of history in Croce’s thought shifted over time—he first aligned it with art but then grouped it with philosophy (p. xxiv). Verdicchio’s selections focus on how that shift occurs, emphasizing that history (as opposed to “dead” chronicle) is necessarily tied to contemporary life and that philosophy without history is merely metaphysics, not living thought but dead systematization. Verdicchio’s selections thus highlight how Croce shifts absolute idealism toward absolute historicism (p. 40).
In the section on “Literary Criticism,” Verdicchio foregrounds Croce’s most important literary analyses in selections on Dante, Ariosto, and Pirandello. These illustrate Croce’s desire to separate poetry from allegory: he distinguishes poetry from the allegorical structure of Dante’s Commedia; he re-categorizes Ariosto’s irony as “harmony;” and he criticizes Pirandello’s conception of humor (umorismo), all in order to distinguish proper artistic production from allegorical attempts to stretch art toward conceptualization. Verdicchio argues that this selection enables us to see an “other” Croce that undermines the philosopher’s own self-presentation (p. xxx): these essays are united by an aversion to intermixing “allegory” and art, yet they also demonstrate how those categories are always actually intermixed.
While the final section on “The Baroque” is not separately addressed in Verdicchio’s “Introduction,” there is a long preface examining the one text translated under this heading. His remarks in that preface describe Croce’s approach to the Baroque as a demonstration of “the contradictions at the heart of [Croce’s] own philosophy” (p. 84). According to Verdicchio, Croce is attempting to confine the historical manifestation of allegory to the 17th century, as if he were projecting his own distaste for allegory while simultaneously revealing how allegory is dialectically united with art and thus cannot be contained.
Verdicchio’s aim with this volume is to offer an alternative vision of how Croce’s later work continues the elaboration of his thought in ways that can challenge, undermine, and complicate his earlier ideas. This is a vision of Croce not as someone establishing a firm, dogmatic system that separates and distinguishes with certainty, but rather as a thinker whose absolute historicism provides the grounds for its own critique. There are, of course, some places where one might quibble with specific aspects of the translation, such as the choice to follow previous translators in rendering ‘distinti’ as ‘distincts’—a choice that was already criticized in an early review of Ainslie’s translation just over a century ago (The Athenaeum, March 27, 1915, p. 286). But these choices, while possibly debatable, are also justifiable, and they do not limit the interest or success of the volume, which will be particularly useful for those Anglophone readers who have some familiarity with Croce and are eager for an alternative approach to challenge their assumptions about his philosophy. What emerges from Verdicchio’s reader is a less dogmatic, less fixed, and perhaps more vital (or at least more interesting) vision of Croce’s thought.