“This volume, entitled Humanisms, Posthumanisms and Neohumanisms, proposes a reflection articulated in different parts. Its first section,

Revisiting Early Humanism, presents contributions engaged in rethinking early humanism, its origins and developments, from the classical

tradition to Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The second section, Humanism in Perspective, studies how the notion of

humanism has been articulated in an historical perspective that comprises the beginning of European Colonialism in the “New World,” with

its epistemological paradigm shift and scientific revolution between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then the violent historical

events that took place in the twentieth century, including the Shoah. […]

II. Humanism in perspective

This section devotes special attention to the early modern philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Giordano Bruno, who, under the pressure of personal, cultural, and historical events, started pointing to the limits of the human position, a direction that distinguishes their humanism from the one developed by Florentine Neoplatonism that emphasized the infinite power of human intelligence and freedom. Also, this section of the volume studies how the question of Humanism has been articulated in crucial historical moments from the beginning of European colonialism to the Shoah, and it ends reflecting on the philosophical importance of Ernesto Grassi’s “postmodern” Humanism.

Nicola Bonazzi argues that in Leon Battista Alberti one can see how the rediscovered Pliny and Plutarch recovered for the Quattrocento a fully secular dimension that opened the road to a restless naturalism contrasting Ficino’s and Pico’s Neoplatonism. In Alberti, Machiavelli, and Bruno the emerging anthropocentrism is put into question to the point that Alberti, following Pliny and Plutarch, could speak of man’s inferiority compared to other animals. The classical tradition of Pliny and Plutarch is still vital in Bruno’s Italian Dialogues, manifesting itself in the great kabbalistic donkey’s emblem, capable of breaking the idealistic view of humanism already in decline through the re-evaluation of the ferine features of humanity. Bruno’s radical critique of Neoplatonic and classical humanism is also studied by Giuseppe Mazzotta who analyzes one of the Opere magiche, the Lampas Triginta Statuarum, and one of the Italian philosophical dialogues, the Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo. The two dialogues, quite overtly, explore and put into play two myths that are central to Bruno’s epistemology: the Pythagorean myth of the reincarnation of souls and the imagination’s deceptive and secret knowledge delivered by poetry. The relationship between the two myths is studied here from the perspective of Bruno’s Platonic and rhetorical speculations on memory. A new humanism emerges from these dialogues (and from this dialogue between literature and philosophy), one in which the individual remains beholden to the idea of will and power, and yet, unbeknownst to himself, remains forever caught in a process of self-invention and forgetfulness.

The world of Giordano Bruno is not the same that Florentine humanists of the Quattrocento had in mind. Bruno’s world had become the infinite world of transatlantic voyages and the infinite worlds of the Copernican revolution. Claudia Alvares argues that Columbus’s discovery of the New World disrupted the existing theological and legal European framework applied by Christianity to non-Christian societies. Confrontation with alterity in the Americas led to a redefinition of concepts such as “human-ness” and “civilisation,” as well as to an intense problematization of the grounds on which dominium — that is, the right to property and self-government — could be legitimately withheld from Amerindians, unfamiliar with law and authority. The fact that the condition of slavery was minutely discussed by Iberian theologians, philosophers, and lawyers meant that, even if only for political and economic reasons, there was a certain awareness of the ethical issues at stake. Other nations did not feel subsequently compelled to justify either their bid to colonize or their reliance on slavery, indicating a gradual naturalization of the link between skin color and slave status, which was to characterize seventeenth-century racial ideology in the capitalist-driven plantation colonies.

In the debates on the humanity of the Amerindians, humanists like Sepúlveda, on the basis of Aristotelian ideas about slavery, were on the side of the driving forces of European colonialism; other voices — in particular Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas — documented by Alvares (and Bori in the first section of this volume) were on the side of the unitas of mankind, even though their source was not directly Marsilio Ficino’s notion of humanitas, but rather the biblical idea of human being as imago Dei. A humanist critique of the ideology of colonialism and racism can be found in Giordano Bruno (Granada; Ricci; Ciliberto). This view helps understanding that in his radical critique of humanism the Nolan philosopher of the infinite worlds conceived in new terms the humanist category of unitas, pointing to what he considered the infinite primeval energy that generates all the animals including human beings. Abandoning the idea of a hierarchical universe Bruno created the conditions of a new philosophical idea of unitas, one in which all human beings without distinction may feel in harmony among themselves and all the animals in an infinite cosmos.,. The new dramatic historical events of colonization and the new scientific paradigm lead the humanist of the Cinquecento to recognize and admit a new notion of unitas inclusive of all possible differences and otherness. The unity proposed by the Nolan erases not only the primacy of the human soul but also the possibility of ontological and anthropological differences among human beings and between human beings and animals.

Moving from the beginning of European colonialism, the next two essays address the theories and practices of humanism in two major historical tragedies of the twentieth century, Stalin’s Gulag and the Shoah. Tom Dolack discusses the historical importance Francis Petrarch had for Osip Mandelstam who, in a 1923 essay called “Humanism and the Present,” juxtaposes humanism with the “wing of approaching night,” where people are viewed simply as cogs in the social machine. During the Stalinist era, Mandelstam turned to Petrarch as a representative of the humanism he adopted to oppose the Soviet system. His translations of Petrarch are an attempt to unearth and revive the values of a past tradition, and his method reflects that of the very humanist he is translating. Like the poets of the Renaissance, Mandelstam seeks to change his own culture through the imitation (or translation) of past texts, giving his source texts new life at the same time he creates his own. Peter Kuon studies the crisis of humanism after the Shoah. First he criticizes the category of the “Muselmann” as the the emblematic figure of “unsayability” of the human condition in the concentration camps. The idea of a “complete witnessing” of the Shoah in Levi’s I sommersi e i salvati is not meant to deny the possibility of concrete witnessing but to remind us of the limits of representation. What does then remain of man’s freedom of choice in those living and working conditions that force the “best ones” to bestiality? After the Shoah and after the camps — Kuon suggests — we have to renounce the idealistic and optimistic emphasis on man’s primacy and potentiality. The survivors’ accounts may help us define not the maximal, but the minimal standards of humanity. Finally, in the last essay of this section Rocco Rubini studies Grassi’s early career, where he finds the genesis of an original “humanism” that may be defined “Postmodern.” Neither Heidegger nor Vico plays a pre-eminent role in the emergence of Grassi’s first approach to humanism. In opposition to Werner Jaeger’s Neuhumanismus, Grassi in his early works identifies humanism with an open-ended kind of hermeneutics (as event) in which terms and definitions are never established a priori but are always a byproduct of the philosophical dialogue of which Socratic maieutics is an exemplary instance. This emphatically nontraditional approach to Plato places Grassi in a philosophical apprenticeship common to most postmodern philosophers, from Nietzsche to Derrida (through Heidegger and Gadamer). This philosophical hermeneutics became later the foundation of Grassi’s humanistic response to Heidegger’s antihumanism.”

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13 Massimo Lollini, Humanisms, Posthumanisms, and Neohumanisms: Introductory Essay

Contact information

Annali d'Italianistica

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3170 | annali@metalab.unc.edu

http://www.ibiblio.org/annali/2008/introduction_2008.pdf

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Academic year 2008/2009

rucris@alumni.uv.es

Universitat de València Press