13The Reception of Burke’s Aesthetic Ideas in Italy: Translations as Thresholds of Interpretation
A discussion of the Italian reception of eighteenth-century English-language authors cannot ignore the question of the use and spread of English itself in Italy. Arturo Graf’s early assessment of the ‘Anglomania’ of the Italian eighteenth century as a consequence or form of ‘Gallomania’ (Graf 1911, 13) still appears convincing. The Italian infatuation for everything English followed the spread of French, which acted as a mediator between English and Italian languages and cultures for a long time. The case of the Italian reception of Edmund Burke’s aesthetic ideas is no exception to this rule.1 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (hereafter Enquiry)2 was translated into Italian for the first time in 1804 by two different writers, forty and fifty years respectively after the French (1764) and German (1773) translations had been published. It would nevertheless be wrong to consider that year as the beginning of the spread of Burke’s aesthetic thought in Italy. As the translator of the 1804 Macerata edition, Carlo Ercolani, states, the work was most certainly known and discussed in Italian intellectual circles before its translation:
The work … has no need of praise. It possesses an exceedingly singular merit and reputation not only in England but in Italy as well, among those who savour it in the original language, so that it is truly a wonder that as far as I know it has as yet not been translated.3
The admirers of the Enquiry in the original version Ercolani refers to, however, must have been a small elite indeed. The personal story of the Macerata translator is emblematic in this regard. An intellectual from a midsize town which boasted a university, a well-established Academy (the Catenati) and a fairly dynamic cultural life, Ercolani was forced to move to Florence in 1793 to learn English. In addition to Giuseppe Baretti (who knew Burke personally) and Ugo Foscolo,4 Ippolito Pindemonte and Antonio Canova were among the rarae aves who were able to savour Burke’s work in the original: they could read English although they did not venture to write – let alone speak – the language. The same can be said of Melchiorre Cesarotti, the famous translator of Ossian, who preferred to use French in his letters to his British correspondents (Cesarotti 1800–13, vols 35–40; Mattioda 2004). Another famous case is connected with Milan: while the city was one of the most important centres for the spread of British empiricism in Italy, the Milanese Alessandro Verri felt the need to hire a translator when he travelled in England.
Given such premises it is not easy to establish a likely date for the beginnings of the ‘singular reputation’ referred to by Ercolani. The search for the presence of the Enquiry in Italian periodicals during the long forty year period between the 1757 edition and the first Italian translations of 1804 brought no results. It seems that the work simply went unnoticed, even though some illustrious scholars are certain this was not the case. For example, Preti (1945, 10, 17) and Bigi (1960, 1089), following Schlaser (1872, 1: 327–28), assume a direct influence of Burke on Giuseppe Spalletti, who was even described by Preti as the Italian Burke. A Vatican librarian by profession, Spalletti was the author of Saggio sopra la bellezza (1765) [Essay on Beauty] in which the role played by amor proprio (amour propre or self-regard) in the creation of beauty has been thought to have been inspired by Burke. Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue (2002, 109) doubts that the Enquiry went unnoticed among Italian Enlightenment thinkers and, on the basis of this conviction, presumes it had a direct influence on the original developments of Pietro Verri’s sensism, which can be found in particular in Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (1773–1781) [A Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain].5 Elsewhere, the same author (Morpurgo-Tagliabue 1980, 183) perceives a sadistic note of Burkean origin in A Silvia, an ode written in 1761 by Giuseppe Parini, a poet active in Milan, where the influence of Condillac’s sensism was very strong, as was the case in the rest of Northern Italy.
The first reference to the Enquiry in an Italian work occurs much later than the 1760s, and is found in Dissertazione intorno al sublime [A Dissertation on the Sublime] by Girolamo Prandi, published in 1793. This, as stated in its introduction, is a work of a pedagogical nature, conceived and written for the education of the children of the archduke Ferdinand of Austria and the archduchess Maria Beatrice d’Este by Prandi, while he was preparing the translation of Lezioni di belle lettere by ‘ch.mo signor Blair’ with the same intent. That work was hugely popular in Italy at the end of the 1700s and seems to have been the determining factor in diffusing throughout Italian culture the most destabilizing of Burke’s aesthetic ideas: his concept of the sublime.
The Author of Filosofica ricerca intorno l’origine delle nostre idee sul sublime, e sul bello (from which Mr. Blair drew various clever and original thoughts regarding this matter) proposes a theory of his own. That is he wants terror to be the only source of the Sublime, and for no other object to have such a nature, except that which gives rise to notions of travail, and peril.6
Beginning with Prandi, the most important writers on aesthetics in Italy during the 1800s simply repeat Hugh Blair’s criticism of Burke’s idea of the sublime. Benedetto Croce (1909/1922, 353) does not even consider these writers to be true philosophers, but simply tellers of philosophical anecdotes. Among those that he mentions as his unworthy predecessors there is not one who takes the part of Burke on the sensitive question of the sublime. Marquis Luigi Malaspina di Sannazzaro simply ignores Burke in his works (Malaspina 1791; 1796), whereas the simple disagreements voiced by Ermes Visconti (1979), Gratiliano Bonacci (1837, 50) and Giambattista Talia (1827–28, 1:195–96) turn into scathing censure by Leopoldo Cicognara (1808, 151–87), Melchiorre Delfico (1818, 91, 127) and Niccolò Tommaseo (1857, 15–30). Ideological prejudices nurtured against the author of the Reflections on the Revolution in France play a fundamental part in many, if not all, of these assessments.7
Now, the fact that Prandi referred to the Enquiry in 1793 does not exclude the possibility that the reception of Burke’s aesthetic ideas might have occurred a few decades earlier. In addition to the narrow local byways, many ideas travelled through the country along at least two wider ‘foreign’ routes: the French and the German route. The former is certainly the principal one due to the diffusion of French-language periodicals throughout the various Italian states in the second half of the 1700s. From Rome to Turin, Milan, Florence, Modena, Naples and Palermo, Italian intellectuals had the Journal Britannique at their disposal, and could thus read the lengthy review of the first edition of the Enquiry which was published in the May–August issue in 1757. And if they happened to miss that, they might still notice the announcement concerning the Enquiry that appeared in the ‘Nouvelles littéraires’ rubric in the May 1758 edition of the Journal des Sçavans, which was much more widely distributed than the Journal Britannique. A review of the French translation of the Enquiry by Des François was available in the Journal des Sçavans in May 1767 although the Italian reader would have already learned of its existence from the review which appeared in the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe (30 May 1765). This periodical was not only read throughout Italy, but it even gave rise to works in response to its articles, as illustrated by the cases of Bernardo Galiani, the brother of the more famous Ferdinando (D’Angelo 1992, 8–9), and Giambattista Piranesi (1765), a figure whose affinity with Burke has been detected by a substantial number of scholars (see Barilli 1983).
The German route is not less important, even though its impact was felt later. It will suffice to note here that the complete works of Moses Mendelssohn (1800), containing his observations on Burke, were translated into Italian by Francesco Pizzetti, a professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Parma, just a few years before the Enquiry. In addition to Mendelssohn, Lessing, Sulzer, Winckelmann and the most important German philosophers were also read and pondered at that time by a figure much better known than Pizzetti, with whom he also corresponded: Father Francesco Soave (1743–1806), a Somascan priest from Lugano. Soave was an extraordinary cultural mediator in Italy, not only of the German sphere but also, and above all, of the English.8 His critical editions of John Locke (1775) and Hugh Blair (1801–2) were particularly famous. It was he who beat Prandi and Ercolani to the punch by publishing the translations of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in 1801, and it was through his work of mediation that the German reception of the Enquiry entered Italian cultural circles.
A further vehicle of diffusion was the British community residing and/or travelling in Italy. For example, Burke corresponded directly with Sir William Hamilton, who served as a diplomat in Naples from 1764 to 1800. In the Neapolitan area, Vincenzo Cuoco found Burke a fundamental source of inspiration. But perhaps even more important than Hamilton was the presence of the Irish painter James Barry: Barry was in Italy from 1766 to 1771 thanks to the interest and generosity of Burke, and claimed to know the Enquiry off by heart. Their letters indicate that Burke had sources of information in Rome, probably in the entourage of Cardinal Albani. Despite the supremacy of anti-Burkean figures such as Winckelmann and Mengs, and the absence of any mention in the two most important periodicals in the field, the Giornale delle belle arti [Journal of the Fine Arts] and Memorie per le Belle Arti [Memories for the Fine Arts], it seems unlikely that Roman fine art circles did not know of Burke’s work before 1804. For all these reasons, to state that Burke was uninfluential with regard to the aesthetic theories emerging in Italy between the mid-1760s and the early 1790s, as does D’Angelo (1992, 42–43), contradicting Preti (1945) and Bigi (1960), appears just as hazardous as affirming the opposite.
Annus Mirabilis 1804: The Central Italian edition
There are five Italian translations of Burke’s Enquiry. The most recent is of special interest: published in 1985 and revised in 1998, it reached its tenth edition in 2012, and is now canonical in Italy. The very title of this translation, Inchiesta sul Bello e il Sublime, signals a clear departure from the more traditional and literal Ricerca filosofica sull’origine delle nostre idee del sublime e del bello to which the other four translations adhere with minimal variations. These four translations form two pairs: one pair from the nineteenth century and the other from the twentieth century. Both nineteenth-century translations appeared in 1804 and were unabridged. The twentieth-century translations also appeared in more or less the same year: an abridged version was published in 1944 and an unabridged version in 1945. Both pairs thus belong to periods of transition: the complete upheaval of the old regime brought about by the Napoleonic wars in the first case, and the end of World War II in the second.
The authors of the two 1804 translations belonged to opposite cultural worlds and shared only a vague passion for foreign languages. The literary cleric Carlo Ercolani, a humanist well versed in the classics and a talented violoncellist, was a man of unusual abilities in the decadent Papal province; by contrast the Veronese count Gian Giuseppe Marogna, a passionate enthusiast of science and economics, was a noble from the advanced Lombard-Venetian region. In the same period but from different perspectives, they decided that the time had finally come to undertake the task of translating a work for the benefit of society, as Marogna states in his ‘Prefazione del Traduttore’ (Marogna 1804, vi). Both intended their work to benefit communities beyond their own, or rather, what remained of them following the French invasion. For the first time in centuries, the undefined entity that Ercolani called Italy, and which Metternich dismissed as a geographical expression, was starting to take on its present form and thus felt the need to provide itself with a vernacular translation of one of the most innovative works of eighteenth-century pre-Kantian aesthetics, which already existed in all other major European languages. Thus the Italian version of the Enquiry had a twofold nature although it appeared in the early nineteenth century; it contained many features characteristic of the preceding century, and it seems apt to categorize it as a product of the ‘long eighteenth century’. In the first place, the 1804 translations clearly precede the famous polemic between Classicists and Romantics which raged after the publication of the Italian version of Madame de Staël’s De l’esprit des traductions in the January 1816 issue of the journal Biblioteca Italiana [Italian Library], conventionally to be the official birth date of Italian Romanticism. Secondly, the translations were the works of eclectic intellectuals who managed to unite extremely different interests. Of the three twentieth-century translations, only the abridged version was edited by its translator. The fact that the functions of the translator and the writer of the preface are distinct in the texts closer to us in time is highly significant as it reveals a specialization of knowledge barely noticeable in the early 1800s. Yet whether it is the product of the translator or not, the paratextual apparatus of the Enquiry is of great importance from a hermeneutic point of view, especially the introductory texts. Whether they are announced as a ‘Preface’, a ‘Warning’, an ‘Introduction’ or a ‘Presentation’, the texts which have the function of introducing Burke’s work to Italian readers define its meaning and orientate its interpretation.
Let us consider the edition published in central Italy, a copy of which was owned by Giacomo Leopardi, the great poet of L’Infinito. The solitary hill and the hedge so dear to the young Romantic from Recanati were just around twenty kilometres from Macerata and thus it was natural for the Ercolani edition to find a place on the shelves of the substantial library of Leopardi’s father, Count Monaldo. Compared with the Milanese edition, the Ercolani version bears the name of the translator in the frontispiece. It is in his ‘Avvertimento del traduttore a chi legge’ that Ercolani underlines the fact that politics and philosophy were the distinguishing marks of Edmund Burke both at home and abroad. Burke is presented to the Italian public as one the most illustrious orators of the eighteenth century, famous for his speech to the people of Bristol, who jibbed at electing him as their representative, and for the famous trial of Warren Hastings. No mention is made of Burke’s speeches and writings against the French Revolution, which, unlike the Enquiry, had promptly been translated into Italian. On the one hand, the omission can be explained as expedient: at the time of publication, the city of Macerata had been removed from Papal rule, and was the capital of the Department of Musone in the Italian Republic, and in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Kingdom of Italy in 1805. On the other hand, a more personal explanation can be offered. The French Revolution and invasion had so upset the tranquil environment of this provincial priest that he experienced a nervous breakdown. In order to recover, Ercolani withdrew to the family villa in the countryside and found comfort in his beloved books – above all foreign ones. The work of translation was therapeutic: during his convalescence, Ercolani prepared a verse translation of L’homme des champs, ou les Géorgiques françaises by Jacques Delille which was published in Venice in 1805. He only published one other work by an English author, the verse translation of Thomas Parnell’s biblical Songs (Macerata, 1812), but among the twenty-two manuscript volumes left to the library of his city were many refined translations, mostly in verse, from even more famous authors like Milton, Pope and Byron.
Among Ercolani’s manuscripts there is a translation of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; Ercolani was about to publish his translation when an abridged version of the same work appeared, translated by Francesco Soave. Ercolani complains about this in the final note to his ‘Warning’ to the Enquiry: he identifies his ideal readers as men of letters and artists, who would find the text very rewarding ‘after the recent publication of the only too well-known translation from the English of the incomparable work by Dr. Blair’.9 The phrase ‘only too well-known’, referring to the rival translation, sounds ironic: his own, one reads in the note, would have been more complete and thus better. Ercolani also hints at its possible publication in the future. Clearly, the connection between the Enquiry and Blair’s Lectures was automatic at this point. It is less clear whether Ercolani had learned that in the case of his translation of Burke he would also be outdone in the timing, but that on this occasion he nevertheless decided not to withdraw. It may be that with regard to Blair’s confutation in the third Lecture of the aspect of terror in Burke’s idea of the sublime, Ercolani himself tends more towards the moderate vision of the former than the radical solution of the latter. The use of the adjective ‘incomparable’ would thus also relativize Burke’s work, which would become a sort of younger son on whom the translator pours his love to compensate for the loss of his favourite. For Ercolani’s stance is by no means one of total support for Burke’s theory:
The matter is of itself intricate and obscure. It concerns inner feelings, of which each person is his own judge. I have thus abstained from adding … any observation contradicting the Author, leaving the field open to each person to object and feel as he wishes.10
Nevertheless, it is intelligent of Ercolani to avoid falling into the neo-classical trap. He tells his readers they ought not to wonder that Burke locates beauty within some sensory qualities of the body, completely different from proportion or other conventional principles, given that the subject of his research is relative beauty. Burke’s merit as a philosopher was thus seen to lie in the way he lifted the veil which covered the first principles of our pleasurable sensations. His theory of the sublime and beautiful was ingenious and profound, and accounted for their properties, characteristics, ends and causes.
Ercolani’s translation proves by far the more readable version when compared to Marogna’s. It will suffice to read any passage of the Enquiry in parallel to realize the difference between the two works. Count Marogna was an amateur translator, while Ercolani was a master of the art of translation into Italian from three languages: Latin, English and French. While it would be difficult to define him as a poet, Ercolani nevertheless translates into Italian verse with great skill. His choice of key words and expressions are more apt than Marogna’s, and often anticipates the renditions of subsequent translations (see Appendix for Italian variations). But ultimately, the fluidity of his prose constitutes his greatest merit. Let us take the example of the opening to the Enquiry, pt.V: iii.
Burke: Mr. Locke has somewhere observed, with his usual sagacity, that most general words, those belonging to virtue and vice, good and evil especially, are taught before the particular modes of action to which they belong are presented to the mind; and with them, the love of the one, and the abhorrence of the other; for the minds of children are so ductile, that a nurse, or any person about a child, by seeming pleased or displeased with anything, or even any word, may give the disposition of the child a similar turn. (Burke, 1958, 165) |
Ercolani: Locke con la sua solita sagacità ha osservato che le parole generali, quelle specialmente che appartengono alla virtù e al vizio, al bene e al male, vengono insegnate prima di presentare allo spirito i particolari modi d’agire, ai quali le suddette parole appartengono, e con esse viene ispirato l’amore dell’uno e l’aborrimento dell’altro. Imperciocché gli animi de’ fanciulli sono così flessibili che una nutrice, o un educatore col mostrare di compiacersi o di disgustarsi di una cosa, o anche di una parola, può dare alla disposizione del fanciullo un simil tenore. (Burke, 1804a, 203) |
Marogna: Osserva in qualche luogo Mr. Locke colla solita sua sagacità, molte parole generali, spezialmente quelle appartenenti alla virtù, al vizio, al bene, al male venire insegnate prima, che i modi particolari dell’azione, cui spettano, sieno presentati alla mente, ed insieme l’amore dell’uno e l’abborrimento dell’altro; poiché le menti de’ fanciulli sono sì duttili, che una nutrice, e chiunque sta loro attorno, il far mostra, che una cosa od anche una parola lor piaccia, o di-spiac-cia basta a condurre il fanciullo in egual disposizione. (Burke, 1804b, 172) |
Ercolani’s hypotaxis flows more smoothly than that of Marogna: from the beginning, the rhythm of Marogna’s sentence trips over the implicit objective infinitive ‘venire insegnate’, referring to ‘parole generali’, which functions as the object of a verb (‘osserva’), normally followed in Italian by a noun (‘osservare qualcuno o qualcosa’) or a verb phrase like ‘osservare qualcuno fare qualcosa’. It is quite unusual to say that ‘qualcuno osserva qualcosa venire fatta da qualcun altro’. In such cases it would be preferable to render the implicit infinite with a verb in the finite mode: ‘qualcuno osserva che qualcosa viene fatta da qualcun altro’. This is precisely the solution adopted by Ercolani, who in fact has ‘Locke’ = subject; ‘ha osservato’ = predicate; ‘che le parole generali vengono insegnate’ = explicit object proposition, with the verb ‘insegnare’ in the present passive indicative. Something similar occurs with the phrase ‘by seeming pleased or displeased’, which breaks up the cause-effect clause ‘so ductile that …’, referring to the ‘minds of children’, but at the same time binds the second phrase together thanks to the word ‘similar’, which refers to the attitude of adults. Marogna’s ‘il far mostra’ is left hanging and completely disconnected from the subject with which it agrees only vaguely since it is in the infinitive mode, whereas Ercolani’s ‘col mostrare di compiacersi’ is immediately clear.
Annus Mirabilis 1804: The North Italian edition
Nevertheless, the passage analysed above does reveal a singular merit in Marogna’s translation compared to Ercolani’s clearly more fluid one. This concerns the translator’s lay status, which emerges in the translation of the word ‘mind’ as ‘mente’. The abbot Ercolani almost always prefers to translate ‘mind’ as ‘spirito’, ‘animo’ or similar expressions; he keeps to the original, but adds a spiritual nuance which is entirely lacking in Marogna’s version. In the ‘Prefazione’, Marogna makes a point of being literal, well aware that he runs the risk of appearing eccentric in the use of certain expressions traced to the original in order not to weaken thought that he felt was naturally metaphorical. The distinctive feature of his work lies, however, in the significance with which he endows Burke’s research as an important scientific undertaking. Burke’s merit lies in having broken away from the analytic method followed by his predecessors in order to define precisely the beautiful and the sublime. Commendably, Burke takes the way of synthesis. Marogna laments the lack of an overall view of artists, writers and philosophers in their treatment of the sublime and the beautiful. Burke alone attempted to direct the ideas of the beautiful and the sublime back to their unique principles. Indeed, Marogna makes an analogy between the method adopted by Burke and the research carried out by chemists; in both cases, the unexpected is accepted and capable of generating new discoveries.
Marogna does not take an explicit stand on whether Burke’s Enquiry is successful, but at least two negative opinions weigh heavily on him. One is the usual comment made about Burke’s sublime by Blair. The other comes from an acquaintance of Marogna, the renowned neo-classical theorist Count Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara from Ferrara. It should be noted that Count Marogna’s name appears neither in the frontispiece nor at the end of his ‘Translator’s Preface’, nor in any other place in his translation. In fact, the information relating to his identity as the translator of the Enquiry is to be found in Cicognara’s third Ragionamento on the beautiful: in making the first of his many objections to the Enquiry, Cicognara refers to ‘Sig. Marogna, his [Burke’s] most diligent translator, and my gentle and respectable friend’.11 By 1804, Cicognara was a well-known political personality in the Napoleonic government in Italy. His most important work, Del bello: ragionamenti (1808) [Reflections on Beauty], despite being published after Burke’s Ricerca, had long been in the making, and we can be sure that Burke’s aesthetics were a subject of discussion with his friend Marogna long before the Italian translation of Burke was published. Even his most sympathetic commentators have to admit that the Jacobin Cicognara made political use of the aesthetic dispute. His defence of the principles of imitation, ideal beauty, proportion and harmony in the name of artistic production proves quite unconvincing from the theoretical point of view, as was well understood by two scholars with very different mind-sets such as Benedetto Croce (1909/22, 353) and Mario Praz (2003, 136). Cicognara’s argument sounds like a tiresome repetition of ideas derived from Winckelmann, Goethe, Dubos, Batteux and other philosophers whom he cites but does not fully understand. Systematically conceived in opposition to Burke’s ‘reactionary’ aesthetics, Cicognara’s work can sound more like ideology in parts than art criticism.
Marogna was right, therefore, when he warned his readers that the objections of Cicognara and other like-minded critics by no means undermined the foundations of Burke’s theory, as they limited themselves to questioning certain of his principles by producing counter-examples. Borrowing language from the logicians, the translator defined such confutations as simple instances, and claimed that Burke would have demolished them easily had he had occasion to do so, as he had done so in the past. In responding to Cicognara’s objections, Marogna avoids the slippery ground of politics with the modesty of one who, not being an expert in the field, uses the ‘neutral’ tool of good reasoning, and recommends the same to those critics desiring to dismiss hastily the author he had translated. Nevertheless, the other work for which Marogna is well known, Sul governo delle arti (1792) [On the Government or Management of Guilds], echoes Burke’s thoughts on political economy.
As soon as it was published, Marogna’s translation was hailed by the philosopher Vincenzo Cuoco (1804) as an expression of moderate liberal thought. Having fled the Bourbon repression of 1799, the Neapolitan critic found refuge in Milan, where on 14 September 1804, in the pages of the Giornale italiano [Italian Journal], he praised the pithiness of Marogna’s language which was precise and Italian, avoiding the affected style of academic writing, and was the greatest merit of his work. While he maintained reservations about the terrifying nature of the sublime and the question of linguistic anti-representationalism, Cuoco admired the capacity of Burke’s work to engage the reader in sustained thought: ‘full of fine observations, new and clever views, even though it [the book] may not persuade you, [it] instructs you, because whether you wish to believe it or contradict it, it always obliges you to reason’.12 In short, Italy had found a new classic to place alongside Aristotle, Cicero, Condillac, du Marsais, Beccaria and Sulzer; a manual worthy to be put into the hands of Italian youth instead of the stale boarding-school handbooks of rhetoric.
The impact of the first Italian translations of the Enquiry was extraordinary. In what is considered to be the manifesto of Italian Romanticism, the Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (1816) [Half-serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son] by Giovanni Berchet, Burke features as one of the writers to whom the new poets of Italy must turn for inspiration. Using the pseudonym of Grisostomo, Berchet recommends ‘quitting the books of Blair, Villa and their friends’ and in their place opening those of Vico, Burke, Lessing, Bouterweck, Schiller, Beccaria, Madame de Staël, Schlegel and, not least, the Platone in Italia [Plato in Italy] by Burke’s reviewer, Vincenzo Cuoco.13 When read with ‘true avidity’, Burke and Lessing in particular promise ‘glimpses’ worthy of Saint Augustine’s Città di Dio (City of God).14
1944: The neo-idealist edition
Once the Romantic era had come to an end, the greatest exponent of Italian neo-idealism took exception to the status conferred on Burke by Cuoco and Berchet. Benedetto Croce’s treatment of English authors in Estetica [1902] is uncompromising. These ‘scribblers on Aesthetic or rather on things in general which sometimes accidentally include aesthetic facts’ did not deserve to be called philosophers. Hogarth and Burke vied with the French Batteux to see who could ‘string together a more insubstantial mass of contradictions’. Burke in particular ‘wavers between the principle of imitation and other heterogeneous or imaginary principles in his book’. If it was absolutely necessary to call it a classic, the Enquiry was of the type that arrives at no conclusion (Croce 1909/1922, 258–60). More than thirty years later, this judgement had barely been mitigated. Croce (1934) did acknowledge, however, that Burke had established the fact that aesthetic pleasure was disinterested. He also acknowledged that Burke’s influence on Kant was significant; whatever was ‘not critically developed or empirically juxtaposed’ (Croce 1934, 247) in the third Critique was the responsibility of none other than Burke.
The person who took on the task of rescuing Burke and the entire philosophical tradition of British empiricism from the ‘philosophical barbarism’ to which official Italian culture had relegated it was the rather eccentric philosopher, and the friend and correspondent of W. B. Yeats, Mario Manlio Rossi.15 It is to him that we owe a milestone in the history of Italian philosophy: L’estetica dell’empirismo inglese (1944) [The Aesthetics of English Empiricism]. Conceived in two volumes, the work opens with a long and well-structured ‘Introduzione’ (1: 3–99) followed by an anthology of texts with introductory and explanatory notes. Rossi translates the Enquiry’s introduction on taste almost entirely, and he includes the titles of all sections of the five parts, translating only what he considers indispensable for an overall understanding. The result is an abridged version of the Enquiry of almost a hundred pages (2: 599–697). It is to be recommended because it is both the first twentieth-century translation and because it is the only Italian translation to be carried out by a philosopher. This is not the only merit of Rossi’s endeavour, however. Paolo D’Angelo (2007, 275) maintains that Rossi distances himself from Croce’s canon even while following his methodology. In fact, Rossi chooses Giovanni Gentile as his main point of reference for theory within the neo-idealist current. Against Croce, he cites the arguments of Filosofia dell’arte (1931) [The Philosophy of Art], the only systematic work by Gentile to be dedicated to aesthetics. This move is not to be underestimated; nor can the difference between Croce and Gentile be reduced to a mere dispute over terminology (that is, whether a branch of philosophy ought to be called aesthetics or philosophy of art). Indeed, it is in light of this opposition that it is possible to understand the full significance of Rossi’s work, which aims to fill a historiographical void within neo-idealism. That is to say, it attempts to restore value to a denigrated tradition of thought and to acknowledge its fundamental historical role as a true matrix of modern aesthetics.
Despite this, Rossi continues to write the word ‘aesthetics’ with a lower case a when it collocates with empiricism. Moreover, he paradoxically undermines the book he is writing when he says that, according to the rigour of logic, that particular aesthetic philosophy does not exist. Indeed, from the teleological standpoint in which the neo-idealist is placed, the phenomenon is interesting only to the extent that it is preparatory to the ‘true’ philosophical aesthetics which follows. However, contrary to Croce, Rossi is interested in salvaging one aspect which he considers essential to British philosophical speculation: the understanding of the problem of aesthetics as a problem of things. Rossi agrees with the empiricists when they argue that aesthetics cannot be disassociated from phenomena, and thus directly attacks Croce’s concept of intuition-expression. ‘For the philosopher of art’, claims Rossi, ‘“the visible world does exist”. Or rather, only the visible world exists’.16 If it is not possible to retranslate – to lead philosophical theory back into the artistic phenomenon – then it is not possible to speak of true artistic doctrine. By constantly claiming their right to existence, things serve as a healthy warning for the philosopher of the spirit, and it is not by chance that Rossi expresses the need to bring theory back to the phenomenon thereby limiting idealist philosophy keeping one’s feet firmly on the ground.
According to Rossi, the incontestable proof of the importance of British philosophical speculation in the aesthetic field is the fact that all those with something new to say on the question have had to begin by considering it. Despite all their shortcomings (method, approach, atomism, hedonism etc.), the English before others had freed themselves from the double servitude to humanistic aesthetics (classic or classicist) on the one hand, and art and literary criticism on the other. Within this context, the place of honour is reserved for Burke. His is the ‘aesthetics typical of empiricism’;17 the only one to reveal a mentality that is expounded systematically in the effort to reduce the categories which have emerged almost incidentally in the preceding analytical phase. The exemplifications relate to the reduction of Addison’s triad – beautiful, new or uncommon and great – into the beautiful/sublime opposition, and the systemization of Addison’s various ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ into the binomial pleasure/delight relation, the latter term renamed by Rossi as ‘piacere di ripercussione’ (pleasure of repercussion) due to its derivation from pain. It is precisely the question of pleasure which proves to be both Burke’s agony and his ecstasy. His desire to avoid associationism led him almost unconsciously to base every form of collateral pleasure on sympathy and thereby pave the way for the aesthetics of Einfühlung. Yet it is precisely delight which is the ‘punto di turbamento’ (troubling point) in Burke’s theoretical construction; here, he is not courageous enough. Although the sublime is antithetical to the pleasure of beauty, he does not take this argument to the logical conclusion of deriving it from pain and fear. The residual hedonism which, in Rossi’s eyes, still plagues Burke’s system is the legacy of the empirical tradition supremely incarnated by Hume. On the one hand, it is dissatisfaction with Hume’s relativistic solution to the problem of taste that drives Burke’s aesthetic thought, and means he immediately makes the instance of universality an issue; on the other, the persistence of the hedonistic element in the sublime prevents him from soaring freely towards modern aesthetics. Hume is the ghost that haunts Burke’s research and makes him a threshold figure, straddling the old and new.
The final note struck by Rossi emphasizes the heuristic value of Burke’s investigation. Strictly following the canons of scientific research allows him to make the real discovery of empiricist aesthetics: that is, to go beyond the principle of mimesis. This was the natural result of an aesthetics genuinely inspired by the principles of modern science and thus intolerant of any recourse to metaphysics in order to explain beauty. Rossi understands better than many contemporary critics how referring to a general and remote principle of transcendence (providence) proves to be a pleonastic rhetorical expedient, and totally useless for deciding specific cases. The beautiful might be beautiful because God ordained all things, but the means for producing such pleasure must be natural, or rather physiological, and thus possible to explain rationally.
From the standpoint of translation, Rossi’s version proves to be reader-oriented rather than text-oriented. Semantically exact, he does however strip the text of parts he does not consider essential for an overall understanding, which are often the parts which would have proved most problematic for the translator. Let us look at this sample passage by way of example:
Il sig. Locke con la sua abituale sagacia ha osservato in qualche luogo che quasi tutte le parole generali, specialmente quelle che si riferiscono al vizio e alla virtù, al bene ed al male, vengono insegnate prima che si siano presentati alla mente gli speciali modi d’agire ai quali si riferiscono, e con esse, viene insegnato amore per l’uno e aborrimento per l’altro, perché la mente dei fanciulli è così duttile che una balia, o un’altra delle persone che si occupano dei fanciulli può imprimere al carattere del fanciullo un’impronta di tal fatta. (2:686–87)
Compared to the nineteenth-century translations, what leaps out is the absence of the principal difficulty which exists in the original English: the phrase ‘by seeming pleased or displeased with anything, or even any word’, which Rossi simply skips. The vocabulary is updated to mid twentieth-century Italian. An example of this is the decision to translate ‘nurse’ as ‘balia’ (nanny) rather than ‘nutrice’ (wet nurse) and render ‘the disposition of the child’ as the ‘carattere del fanciullo’, in place of the ‘disposizione del fanciullo’ employed by Ercolani and Marogna. Rossi’s sentence breaks are similar to those of Ercolani, but the former does not interrupt Burke’s long sentence at ‘altro’ while the latter chooses to do so in order to enhance readability and comprehension.
1945: The anti-idealist edition
That L’estetica dell’empirismo inglese was an epoch-making work is affirmed by one of the most important philosophers who fought in the front line against Italian neo-idealism, Luciano Anceschi, who acknowledges that Rossi was a pioneer. His judgement is all the more significant when it is considered that Anceschi had good reason to advance similar claims for himself. Some ten years before Rossi’s book, in fact, he had published a work that was equally important, Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte (1936) [The Autonomy and the Heteronomy of Art], which in questioning the neo-idealist dogma of the purity of aesthetics took its cue precisely from the field of English philosophy. The impact of the book on Italian culture was exceptional, as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1956) testifies when he states that Anceschi’s first work was much more influential for his generation than Croce’s Aesthetics. The first author cited by Anceschi in his book is none other than Edmund Burke, spearheading a tradition of thought which demonstrated that the autonomy of art was not a discovery of recent aesthetics. Many years after that work, Anceschi (1972, 16–25) was not only paying a debt of recognition to Rossi, but he went so far as to consider his subsequent studies on empiricism as a kind of compensation for a promise not kept: he had been asked by his mentor, Antonio Banfi, to write a review of Rossi’s book when it first appeared for the journal Studi filosofici [Philosophical Studies], but had not managed to do so; the space allowed for the review was insufficient to deal with the set of questions raised by Rossi which deserved more in-depth treatment. Having paid homage to Rossi for focusing attention on a field that was little studied in Italy, Anceschi did not, however, neglect to underline an error in his method. Rossi had denied the existence of empiricist aesthetics because he sought something in his authors which was not to be found. He had read them as an anticipation of a climax rather than within their context, and excluded from his studies the field of poetics, to which Anceschi accorded full legitimacy as a form of theoretical reflection on art. Ultimately, Rossi had written a very useful work, but one which was outdated.
The need to dispel the staleness of Italian philosophy was, after all, the distinguishing feature of the Milanese milieu in which Anceschi had been trained. It was in this context that the new unabridged translation of the Enquiry, introduced by Adelchi Baratono, took shape and saw publication in 1945. Ricerca filosofica sull’origine delle nostre idee del sublime e del bello is the seventh volume in the ‘Estetica’ series published by Alessandro Minuziano and directed by Banfi who, in 1936, had diagnosed the affliction of Italian philosophy as ‘the melancholic ailment of provincials in the 1800s … anaemia’.18 In 1947, Banfi himself published Vita dell’arte [The Life of Art] in the same series, an overall appraisal of his long-standing reflection on aesthetic themes. Both by disposition and education, Banfi made a point of keeping in touch with the main currents of European thought, and opened the series to the work of another non-conformist philosopher: Adelchi Baratono. Banfi’s ‘critical rationalism’ and Baratono’s ‘sensist occasionalism’ – to use the textbook expressions – are two rare cases of serious philosophical thought in Italy on aesthetic questions which were completely extraneous to the framework of neo-idealism. Along with the other volume in the series edited by Baratono, Henri Focillon’s Vie des formes, the new Italian edition of the Enquiry symbolically celebrated the encounter between the two main anti-idealist currents of Italian aesthetic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century.
Baratono’s originality lies in his close reading of Kant. As early as 1927, with Il pensiero come attività estetica [Thought as an Aesthetic Activity], Baratono had focused on the connection between the gnoseological problem and the aesthetic problem and considered the first and third Critiques as texts to be read in parallel, but his interpretation is quite different from those of Gentile or Mario Manlio Rossi. For Baratono, the central paragraphs of the ‘Introduction’ to the third Critique are fundamental with respect to the first section, the ‘Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement’. Kantian aesthetics are understood only as the resolution of a more general gnoseological problem: the problem of cognitive determinative judgements. It is not sufficient to bring the multifarious reality with which these judgements are concerned back to the transcendental laws of the intellect, namely, the categories of space and time, as Kant does in the Critique of Pure Reason. In order to be organized, the multiplicity of these particular judgements must answer to a formal finality which is entirely aesthetic: the only guarantee that nature in its infinite variety will agree with our need for rational order lies in the sense of satisfaction which always accompanies the sensible accord between experience and knowledge. The most important consequence of this interpretation is that the aesthetic nature of the judgement does not create a new value, but rather dwells within the judgement of knowledge itself. This overturns the paradigm, thus requiring a revision of the difference between determinative and reflective judgements.
The influence of Kant’s innovative interpretation on the new generations of Italian philosophers is generally considered quite limited (D’Angelo 2007, 141–47). However, due consideration has not been given to the fact that the Italian edition of the Enquiry edited by Baratono was the canonical text in Italy until the mid-1980s, and that the principal aspects of Baratono’s thought in the introduction can be traced to those found in his major work, Il mondo sensibile (1934) [Sensible World]. In this sense, it would not be far-fetched to suppose that one of the most important interpretations of the Enquiry in Italy up to the present day (Emilio Garroni 1992) is at least in part indebted to Baratono’s reading, not to mention Garroni’s own studies on Kant.
The beginning of Baratono’s introduction (1945, 7–8) illustrates that in Italy philosophy and politics are never separate fields. Baratono immediately does away with the peculiar idea that Burke is not a child of the Enlightenment. Far from being a reactionary, Burke fully participates in the attempt to found the highest of human values on factual knowledge of our needs and feelings rather than on faith, authority, revelation or any other non-demonstrable and a priori principle. For Baratono, Burke represents English liberalism: no less traditionalistic than the Tories and essentially aristocratic when facing the excesses of the Terror. Nevertheless, this is not the most important sphere for Baratono. During Italy’s post-war period of material and cultural reconstruction, the Burke worth reading is the author of the Enquiry. Baratono’s aim is to reclaim the work following its devaluation by the idealist criticism which had condemned Burke for seeking the beautiful and the sublime, and aesthetic pleasure and pain, in the sensible form of things rather than in the spirituality of intuition gushing forth only from the creative imagination. In fact, the beautiful is also intuitive for Burke, but in terms of the immediate relation of subject and object: in terms of the apprehension (‘apprensione’) of the object according to its presence, or sensible form. And here the similarities between Burke and Baratono are truly remarkable: in Mondo sensibile, Baratono declares that the beautiful is neither in the subject nor in the object but in the encounter of both, in the Kantian sense of their accord in sensibility. For this reason, he can but appreciate the effort Burke makes to demonstrate that ‘beauty can be objectively defined as the “positive” quality of objects, as a value (because it is appreciated subjectively with feeling) “existing” (present) in the forms that act upon the soul by means of the senses’.19
Garroni takes a similar line, but is far more cautious on this point. When he comments on the opening to the fourth part of the Enquiry, he observes keenly that the so-called positive qualities are to be interpreted as ‘conditions in certain cases (perhaps) necessary, and usually only facilitating, of beauty’.20 The fifty-year interval between the two interpretations is all too evident. Garroni has absorbed Croce and Gentile; in his reading of Burke he applies not only Kant but Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as well. While Baratono perceives a basic agreement between Burke and Hume on the question of taste, based on a methodological criterion, Garroni emphasizes the difference between the two. In his view, an aprioristic instance prevails in Burke when, in the introduction on taste, he claims to believe in the human capacity to distinguish ‘to the very last’ (Enquiry, 14) between natural and acquired inclinations. The judgement of taste thus reveals the general character of the human way of experiencing things in the sense that Garroni gives to Wittgenstein’s durchschauen, the looking-through phenomena, which is not directed at phenomena as such but at the possibility of the phenomena (§ 90). With regard to the problem of the sublime, while Garroni tends to minimize the differences between Burke and Kant, Baratono – who, as we shall see, anticipates an aspect of Giuseppe Sertoli’s interpretation – maintains that the two philosophers ‘belong to two different circles of ideas, which intersect only for one segment, but are oriented in opposite directions’.21 Kant holds that the pleasure of the sublime depends on reason gaining the upper hand, managing to dominate horror and translate fear into contemplation. In Burke’s view, on the contrary, it is precisely the painful content which transforms a sensible quality or form, which would otherwise be aesthetically ugly, into the sublime.
For Baratono, Burke owes his modernity and originality to the great discovery of the sublime. His theory of art is more profound than the many others which have been attempted. In short, art is the artifice which gives form to moral content: it actuates the spirit in form. When it has to deal with the ugly in nature – pain, terror, death and all the stimuli which are in themselves ugly and ‘riluttanti’ (Baratono 1945, 36) (averse) to form – art nevertheless imposes a formal structure which is pleasing in itself and makes the ugly beautiful and transforms pain into pleasure. It is in this way that the sublime best unveils the paradoxical function of art, which bends the ugly into form. The clearest demonstration of Burke’s theory of art is the anti-representationalist theory of verbal language which is developed in the last part, but which, according to Baratono, has been completely overlooked by aestheticians and glottologists. Unfortunately, Baratono deals with this in a hurried manner; his comments are somewhat obscure and lack the necessary examples. It is not clear how the poetic word, however brief and unpleasant, manages to produce the beauty of the pain and love it expresses. The fact is that Baratono is here more aphoristic than argumentative.
The translation itself is the effort of two translators identified only by their initials: E. C. and R. B. The most likely hypothesis is that they were two of Banfi’s pupils, as was the case with many volumes in the series, or scholars who moved within the Milanese philosopher’s circle.22 A comparative analysis of the key words (see Appendix) indicates the most significant variations with respect to the preceding Italian translations in the rendering of the following terms: ‘grief’ (pt.I: v), ‘self-preservation’ (pt.I: vi), ‘distresses’ (pt.1: xiv), ‘fitness’ (pt.3: vii), ‘delight’ (pt.4: vi), ‘variation’ (pt.4: xxiii) and ‘general words’ (pt.5: iii). To translate ‘grief’ with ‘angoscia’ is extremely questionable because of its Freudian connotations in Italian. Within the context described by Burke, Marogna’s choice proves most apt (‘cordoglio’ expresses the pain of mourning in Italian, which goes well with the ‘totally lost’ object to which Burke refers (Enquiry, 37), but the word sounds a little old-fashioned nowadays). ‘Afflizione’ (Miglietta) renders the feeling of loss that is connected with ‘grief’ well, but ‘tristezza’ (Ercolani) and ‘dispiacere’ (Rossi) seem too general in meaning.
Unfortunately, the most updated edition trips up miserably over the translation of ‘self-preservation’. The term ‘autopreservazione’ is an awkward Anglicism, like present-day duplicates such as ‘ho realizzato’ (for ‘I realized’). It comes as no surprise, then, that the translator is implicitly rejected by Sertoli himself, who often prefers to speak of ‘autoconservazione’ in his critical essays (Sertoli 1986, 67–70). The anonymous translators of the Baratono edition choose to be more innovative than the preceding translators who all opted for ‘propria conservazione’ (in Rossi’s case even ‘propria’ is omitted), as they prefer the more literal ‘preservazione di se stessi’. Rendering ‘distresses’ with ‘disgrazie’, as do the anonymous translators, is an improvement over ‘calamità’ (Marogna), ‘infortunj’ (Ercolani) and ‘dolori’ (Rossi). In the case of ‘fitness’, which leads Rossi (1944, 2:647) to explain in a footnote his decision to translate the word with ‘idoneità a uno scopo’ (new in comparison with the ‘attitudine’ and ‘proprietà’ used in the 1800s), E. C. and R. B. favour the improbable ‘convenienza’, unoriginally adopted by Miglietta. Without doubt, the term presents a difficulty for translation, especially considering its inevitable association with the Kantian concept of finality. Yet in current Italian, the word ‘convenienza’ tends to make one think more of bargain shopping than philosophical issues. On the other hand, it is courageous of the anonymous translators to translate a very complex term like ‘delight’ with ‘godimento’, in comparison with the more coherent and literal strategy adopted by the others in using ‘diletto’. However, on a closer consideration of the immediate context (Enquiry, pt.IV: vi), the word does not in fact seem out of place. One would expect to find it in Rossi, given his criticism of Burke’s reluctance to bring the argument on pleasure and pain to its logical conclusion, and it may be that the two anonymous translators had this in mind when they decided to push the text further than its author could. Miglietta is not so daring; he retreats to the more neutral ‘diletto’ in an edition that was nevertheless opened by Sertoli with a clear reference to Freud (see the next section). In Italian, the word ‘godimento’ has obvious sexual connotations. The need for a new translation of ‘variation’ in two sections in the Enquiry (pt.III: xv and pt.IV: xxiii) is questionable, since the Italian ‘varietà’ adopted for the second renders the English ‘variety’ quite well. Finally, ‘generiche’, when referring to words, may seem more reader-orientated but fails to allude to the Italian translation of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book III: ch.iii) which established the use of the expression ‘termini generali’.
It ought to be said here that the 1945 translation was not always inferior to Miglietta new translation (1985). In addition to the examples seen above, the following excerpt, taken from section 5.3 of the Enquiry, should serve the purpose:
Burke There are many, who love virtue, and who detest vice, and this not from hypocrisy or affectation, who notwithstanding very frequently act ill and wickedly in particulars without the least remorse; because these particular occasions never came into view, when the passions on the side of virtue were so warmly affected by certain words heated originally by the breath of others. (Burke 1958, 165–66) |
E. C.-R. B. Vi sono molti che amano la virtù e detestano il vizio non per ipocrisia o affettazione, che tuttavia in casi particolari molto spesso agiscono male e da persone malvage, senza alcun rimorso, perché queste particolari occasioni non arrivano mai ad essere messe in vista, quando le passioni dal lato della virtù siano così fortemente colpite da certe parole infiammate originalmente con l’alito di altre. (Burke 1945, 284) |
Miglietta Vi sono molti che amano la virtù e detestano il vizio non per ipocrisia o affettazione, e che tuttavia in casi particolari assai spesso agiscono male e da persone malvage, senza alcun rimorso, perché queste particolari occasioni non si presentarono mai alla vista, quando le passioni inerenti alla virtù furono in loro fortemente colpite da certe parole infiammate pronunciate nel calore di altre occasioni. (Burke 1985, 169) |
The explanation for the short circuit that occurs between culture and nature, ‘notions’ and ‘actions’, is quite clear in the original, but much less so in the translations. The ‘others’ to whom Burke refers at the end of the passage are people, not words (‘parole’) (E. C.-R. B.) nor occasions (‘occasioni’) (Miglietta). It follows that E. C. and R. B. connect ‘alito’ (breath) to words, while Miglietta decides to translate ‘breath’ in the phrase ‘pronunciate nel calore’, completely losing ‘originally’ which is subsumed in ‘altre occasioni’. In comparison, Ercolani’s 1804 translation is a model of clarity, still valid for the contemporary Italian reader:
Vi sono molti che amano la virtù e che detestano il vizio non per ipocrisia o affettazione, e ciò nonostante spessissimo agiscono male nelle particolari occorrenze senza il minimo rimorso; perché queste particolari occorrenze non si presentarono mai, quando le passioni riguardanti la virtù si risvegliarono in essi sì ardentemente per via di certe parole riscaldate in origine dal fiato altrui. (Burke 1804a, 203–04)
The sad conclusion to this comparative study of Italian translations of the Enquiry is that no serious critical edition exists of a work that is – to say the least – important not only for the history of aesthetics but for Western philosophical thought as a whole. Surely the time has come to provide Italian readers with a fully annotated critical edition of Burke’s Enquiry as a parallel text.
1985: The post-modernist edition
In order for the scorci (views) and orizzonti (horizons) glimpsed by Burke to truly open up for Italian aesthetics – a hope expressed by Baratono in his conclusion in 1945 – more than fifteen years had to pass. Two names are particularly important here: Lia Formigari and Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue. Although they belonged to different philosophical schools (Rome and Milan) as well as different generations of post-idealist philosophers, Formigari and Morpurgo-Tagliabue were independently working on the topic of taste at the same time.
Formigari’s earliest interest in Burke dates back to L’estetica del gusto nel Settecento inglese (1962) [The Aesthetics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England], in which she focuses on the work of Shaftesbury, who functions as a benchmark for later thinkers. Burke is discussed with particular reference to the sublime and the subjectivization of taste. Gauging the distance which separates Burke’s concept of the sublime from the metaphysical totality presupposed by Shaftesbury, Formigari (1962, 175–87) emphasizes the Lockean derivation of negative concepts (the infinite, emptiness etc.) which are sources of sublime emotions for Burke. Nonetheless, Formigari sees in Shaftesbury’s emphasis on the moral aspect of the aesthetic object, signs of the eventual overthrow of an entirely subjective account of the judgement of taste, as achieved by Burke’s in his theory of the sublime. In her brief final observations on the question of semantic indeterminacy, Formigari perceives a still greater revelation of the subversive power of the inverse relationship between clarity and aesthetic efficacy discovered by Burke. More recently, Burke has featured in Formigari’s history of linguistic theories (Formigari 2001), where she considers his aesthetic work alongside the English-language proto-pragmatists (Berkeley, Hume and Reid), thus defined for having succeeded in converting Locke’s representational semantics of ideas into a semantics of use. Burke finds himself in the company of the great Italian Illuminist Cesare Beccaria on the basis of an extraordinary affinity perceived by Formigari regarding linguistic anti-representationalism.
The Milanese anti-idealist influence is clearly felt in Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s early theoretical work (Il concetto dello stile, 1951 [The Concept of Style] ), where he posits Baratono’s idea of the sensibility or corporeity of the figure against Croce’s concept of intuition and Banfi’s acknowledgement of the poetics of artists against Croce’s devaluation of technique. This allows him to develop his own concept of style defined as a union of the two levels at which the artwork exists: the levels of form and content. But it is his later work which is of interest for our purposes. Indeed, Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s studies on the concept of taste, published in various academic journals in 1962, are some of his finest writings,23 in particular his essay on Burke (Morpurgo-Tagliabue 1962e). Morpurgo-Tagliabue comes to conclusions which are similar to those of Garroni thirty years earlier, but without the theoretical assistance of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which were not as yet available in Italian.24 Placing Kant’s ‘Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgement’ alongside Burke’s Enquiry (1.19), both philosophers (Garroni 1992, 155–56, 195ff. and Morpurgo-Tagliabue 2002, 192ff.) see, pro Burke and contra Hume, the judgement of taste as something which characterizes the general human way of experiencing.
Over and above this essay, however, it was the rediscovery of Demetrius in a book published in 1980, and the role which Morpurgo-Tagliabue assigned to Burke therein, which came to influence Giuseppe Sertoli, the English Studies scholar to whom we owe the ‘Presentazione’ of the most recent Italian edition of the Enquiry. This edition is itself emblematic of the blurring of pre-established boundaries between literature, philosophy and criticism which marked the last phase of Italian aesthetics after structuralism (D’Angelo 2007, 257). The Sertoli-Miglietta edition has had a strong impact on Italian culture, as is demonstrated by the almost unanimous adoption of the title devised by the editor and translator amongst the academic community. It is remarkable that no part of its paratextual apparatus, which includes Sertoli’s ‘Presentazione’ and Miglietta’s notes, sheds light on the choice of such a title.25 Apart from the reservations on the translation that are expressed above, the critical analysis in the ‘Presentazione’ merits consideration, and all the more so since Sertoli has re-confirmed its interpretative scheme on various occasions, and in some cases quite recently (2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2008).
The word ‘scheme’ is not used here in a casual way. One of the merits of Sertoli’s work is its ability to systematize a matter as complex as the sublime. His ‘Presentazione’ is in fact focused on the concept of the sublime to the detriment of the introduction on taste and the last part on verbal language. This focus is immediately apparent since the work is divided into two thematic blocks entitled ‘Pathos e natura: il sublime prima di Burke’ (Sertoli 1985, 9–21) and ‘Burke: Thanatos ed Eros’ (21–33). In the first section, the cultural context within which Burke’s thought matured is reconstructed; in the second, his post-modern relevance is discovered and exalted. Here, Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s role as an exegete of Demetrius is central for Sertoli. Morpurgo-Tagliabue (1980) perceives in Burke’s sublime a re-assumption of Demetrius’s δεινός (forceful), and in the success of the Enquiry a veritable vindication of περì έρμηνείας (On Style) over περì ὕψους (On the Sublime). In fact, according to Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Burke’s greatness consists in the way he brings together two ideas of Demetrius and Longinus in his concept of the sublime. Precisely because of this, Burke becomes the servant of neither – or rather, an author and not a simple erudite (Morpurgo-Tagliabue 1980, 170ff). In this cohabitation, Burke’s novelty lies in the sadomasochistic hue with which he tinges the pleasure in suffering which he derives from the meaning of φοβερός (terrifying) within Demetrius’s δεινός. In the same way, Sertoli develops, in an anti-Kantian sense, what in Morpurgo-Tagliabue is only an allusion to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Above all, he develops the suggestion of turning Parts I and IV of the Enquiry against the theory of the sublime in the third Critique. Morpurgo-Tagliabue exalted Burke’s role as the necessary antecedent to Kant’s reflection on the sublime: as the philosophical stimulus which permitted Kant to go far beyond Longinus and lift himself (according to the literal meaning of the German equivalent to ‘sublime’, i.e. das Erhabene) out of the fright that overcomes man in the space of self-awareness. For Sertoli, this dynamic amounts to an effective recovery of the subjectivity which is weakened by the human (all too human) tendency towards the dissolution of the Ego discovered by Burke. While Kant brings Addison’s journey to its humanistic conclusion, Burke begins the parable of the post-modern sublime which survives until Lyotard, touching Hegel, Schopenhauer and Freud along the way. Ultimately, Burke has meaning for Sertoli if – and only if – he is found after Kant in the themes most close to us, such as Eros, Death and the eclipse of the Ego (Sertoli 1985, 33).
Two criticisms of Sertoli’s interpretation concern his underestimation of the role of travel literature in the development of the main categories of eighteenth-century aesthetics, and his ahistoricity. Sertoli (1985, 23) states that Addison ignored the terrifying aspect of the sublime in nature, yet his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, and number 418 of the Spectator, demonstrate the opposite. Objections to the excessive stress laid by Sertoli on death and the loss of the subject came from Franco Restaino, an expert in British and American philosophical thought. Although important, Restaino (1987) complains, these themes are not present to such an extent, and with such a deconstructive effect as to make Burke’s thought appear as contemporary as Sertoli’s interpretation suggests. Measured with the yardstick of philosophical historiography, Sertoli’s interpretation appears to be a misreading, but within the context of post-modernism in which it is placed, it should be considered a happy misreading. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that in Italy the divide perceived in the studies of the Enquiry lies between literary critics and philosophers.26
Over the past three decades, studies of the mind in the cognitive sciences have given a new lease of life to the parts of the Enquiry neglected by Sertoli. The new vision of an embodied human mind interacting dynamically with the external environment, as well as the re-evaluation of the emotions in the formation of consciousness, have given new meaning to Burke’s words on the affective matrix of language. I have recently applied Garroni’s and Formigari’s studies to suggestions from cognitive linguistics in order to focus attention on Burke’s anti-representationalist theory (Niedda 2003). Revisited today, in light of the latest evidence furnished by neuroscience which seems to confirm the anticipatory property of feeling in the formation of meaning, Burke’s linguistic thought appears to be protected from the reductionist syndrome wittily re-christened by Raymond Tallis as ‘neuromania’ (Tallis 2011). This is due precisely to the social function of the emotions in the regulation of the semantic processes acknowledged by Burke (Niedda 2013).
The Enquiry’s keywords and phrases: Italian variations
Notes
1On the fortunes of Burke’s political thought in Italy see Zapperi (1965) and Lenci (2002); on the fortunes of his aesthetic thought in Italy and more broadly, see Candia (1975).
2All references are to Burke (1958).
3‘L’Opera … non abbisogna di elogj. Essa possiede un merito e una riputazione singolarissima non solo in Inghilterra, ma in Italia eziandio, presso coloro, i quali la gustano nel suo originale, che fa meraviglia come finora, per quanto io sappia, non sia mai stata tradotta’ (Ercolani 1804, v). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated (see bibliography).
4Foscolo’s only reference to the Enquiry is of a polemical nature and is to be found in Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces (1822).
5This supposition is not confirmed in recent studies on Verri (Capra 2002; Francioni 1999, 2004).
6‘L’Autore della Filosofica ricerca intorno l’origine delle nostre idee sul sublime, e sul bello (da cui trasse il sig. Blair varj ingegnosi ed originali pensieri relativi al presente argomento) propone una sua teoria. Vuol cioè, che il terrore sia l’unica fonte del Sublime, e che niuno oggetto abbia tal carattere, tranne quello che genera nozioni di travaglio, e di pericolo’ (Prandi 1793, xxvi).
7If Burke’s aesthetic theory was at least discussed by the so-called minor philosophers, it should be noted that those whom Croce (1909/22, 354) credits with the ‘revival of philosophical speculation’ in Italy, namely Pasquale Galluppi (1770–1846), Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855) and Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52), do not even cite Burke in their writings. According to Croce, the ‘true’ Italian philosophical minds of the nineteenth century concerned themselves only incidentally with aesthetics, thus leaving him an empty expanse of territory to colonize.
8On the influence of the German philosophical tradition on Soave, see Franzini (1995b, 149–56), Corzuol (2007) and Tancini (2010, 214–17). Soave’s importance and originality as an educator are also vouched for by such different Italian writers as Foscolo and Alessandro Manzoni, who had him as a teacher.
9‘… dopo essere ultimamente uscita alla luce la troppo nota traduzione dall’Inglese dell’Opera incomparabile del D. Blair’ (Ercolani 1804, vii).
10‘Il soggetto è per se stesso intricato e oscuro. Trattasi di sentimenti interni, di cui ognuno è libero giudice. Mi sono perciò astenuto di aggiungere … osservazione alcuna contraddittoria a quelle dell’Autore, lasciando il campo aperto a ciascuno di obiettare e di sentire a suo modo’ (vi–vii).
11‘… diligentissimo suo traduttore, e mio tenero e rispettabile amico’ (Cicognara 1808, 97).
12‘… pieno di osservazioni fini, di vedute nuove ed ingegnose [il libro] anche se non vi persuade v’istruisce, perché, o che vogliate credergli o che vogliate contraddirgli, vi obbliga sempre a ragionare’ (Cuoco 1804, unpaginated). Several scholars have identified interesting Burkean influences in Cuoco’s important work on the Neapolitan revolution (Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, [Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799] 1801).
13‘Questa è la precipua cagione per la quale ho determinato che tu smetta i libri del Blair, del Villa e de’ loro consorti … Allora avrai da me danaro per comperartene altri, come a dire del Vico, del Burke, del Lessing, del Bouterweck, del Beccaria, di Madama de Staël, dello Schlegel e d’altri che fin qui hanno pensate e scritte cose appartenenti alla Estetica: né il Platone in Italia del Consigliere Cuoco sarà l’ultimo dei doni ch’io ti farò’ (Berchet 1863, 213).
14‘… leggo con vera avidità le cose del Burke e del Lessing, come se fossero squarci della Città di Dio del mio sant’Agostino’ (Berchet 1863, 230).
15On Mario Manlio Rossi, see Rossi, L (1990), Torrini (2008), Mecacci and Quaranta (2009) and Fantaccini (2009).
16‘Per il filosofo dell’arte “il mondo visibile esiste”. Anzi, esiste solo il mondo visibile’ (Rossi 1944, 1:7).
17‘L’estetica tipica dell’empirismo’ is the title of the paragraph dedicated to Burke (Rossi 1944, 1:74–80).
18‘L’estetica italiana è malata del male melanconico dei provinciali dell’800. È malata di anemia’ (Banfi 1988, 340).
19‘… la bellezza sia oggettivamente definibile come qualità “positiva” degli oggetti, ovvero come un valore (perché apprezzato subiettivamente col sentimento) “esistente” (presente) nelle forme che agiscono su l’animo per mezzo dei sensi’ (27).
20‘qualità positive quali condizioni in certi casi (forse) necessarie, e di solito solo facilitanti, della bellezza’ (Garroni 1992, 162; author’s emphasis).
21‘il sublime burkiano e quello kantiano appartengono a due cerchi d’idee diversi, che s’intersecano soltanto per un segmento, ma sono oppostamente orientati’ (Baratono 1945, 32).
22An attempt can be made to decipher at least one set of the initials: E. C. may refer to Electra Cannata who edited (and translated, along with L. Pola) another work from English in the same series two years later: Vision and Design by Roger Fry. Unfortunately I have not been able to give a name to R. B.
23Only the essay on Hume was published in 1970.
24Garroni’s greater familiarity with the third Critique can be perceived clearly in the discussion on Burke.
25I like to think that Inchiesta is an undeclared dedication to Morpurgo-Tagliabue by way of its allusion to the work which made him internationally known, L’esthétique contemporaine. Une enquête (1960). In a more appropriate homage elsewhere, Sertoli has argued that the merit and relevance of Morpurgo-Tagliabue lies in the way he identified a path for contemporary aesthetics which moved beyond Romanticism, post-romanticism and idealism, and returned to the eighteenth century (Sertoli 2003, 18–19).
26The contributions of literary critics may in their turn be subdivided into works by scholars in Italian, German and English Studies. In addition to Costa (1968, 1978; 1994) and Mattioli (1984/1988; 1988), who were only marginally interested in Burke (like Raimondi 1985), Barilli (1986) and Gaetano (2002) dealt with the sublime in Leopardi, noting analogies with Burke’s theory. Yet while the former believed the Italian poet to be an unknowing follower of Burke, the latter, who made a study of the library of Count Monaldo, is more certain of Burke’s influence. Di Benedetto (2003) categorically excludes the possible influence of Burke on Vittorio Alfieri, which was found instead by Lenci (1999, 42–51; 2002) with regard to political theory. Among noteworthy work in German Studies is the essay by Giuliano Baioni (1996, 3–26), who contrasts Burke’s sublime with Goethe’s ‘mefistofelico’. Works within English Studies are more numerous: in addition to Sertoli, noteworthy examples are Capone (1976), Colaiacomo (1984), Fortunati (1986), Franci (1987), Bacigalupo (1990) and Niedda (2003). With regard to studies by scholars of philosophy, ignoring the old problem of the distinction between philosophy and the history of philosophy, a possible subdivision in Italian Studies could follow the classic divide between analytical and continental philosophy (see D’Agostini 1997, which refers to Cooper 1994): Formigari (2001), Restaino (1987, 1991) and Santucci (1983) would be among the former, and Garroni (1992), Franzini (1995a, 1995b), Rella (1997) and D’Angelo (1997) among the latter.